Title: A Helping Hand, or A Hogwarts Bathroom Ballad

Author: AristideCauquemaire

Pairing: Scorpius Malfoy/Albus Severus Potter

Rating: M for grown-up language and sexual situations and themes.

Warnings: slash, kinda-sorta non-consensual situations (Now. For real.), original characters

/

Hey guys and gals! So glad that you're reading this again. Sorry for being late today.

Thanks to 'I'll die for you any night' for giving me a little fright on account of a well-chosen username (It said "I'll die for you any night now" in the subject of my notification mail and that reads like an eerily nonchalant sort of promise...) and following this story! (P.S.: Please don't die.) Same to maxou! Y'all are my favourite sort of stalkers :)

And thanks to my Weird Guest reviewer for your enthusiasm, and to Gahhh (lol) for confirming that I'm still quite good with cliffhangers (P.S.: Please don't die, either.). Also, DemonDragon8331, thanks for favving Ardor!

It's getting naughty. Everyone, make sure that the cat on your lap isn't reading along. Unless the cat is of age and into that sort of thing, then it's fine.

~Chapter 11~

/

It didn't even occur to him to flinch.

He thought Oh, and Your hand is so warm.

And he thought Yesterday I thought about this. But it was just a joke. I meant it as a joke.

He felt Albus' hip slightly pushing against his right buttock when he came closer.

He felt Albus' warm, warm hand as it grasped him surely, firmly, and started moving.

Oh, he thought again, and Fuck.

Somehow he knew that he couldn't move a muscle, or the spell would kick in and everything would be ruined.

He wanted to tell him to go a little slower, but he couldn't because then he might stop altogether and he absolutely didn't want that, and because he could hardly even remember how to breathe. His mouth was open but he couldn't recall how the sucking-in-air thing was done.

"I'm not, uh, hurting you, am I?" Albus suddenly asked. He barely needed to whisper. "You're, uh, you're really-" Stiff. "Uh, rigid. I mean, your whole body. Like, in pain." And then he stopped, let go and pulled his hand away.

That's when Scorpius actually felt pain, or a need so sharp that it was indistinguishable from pain. He gasped and sputtered, "No, no. Please, I'm- don't, uh." Don't stop. "You're- It's not hurting me." Understatement. "Keep- keep going." Please.

Albus breathed out slowly, then resumed his previous activity, a little slower now as if he wasn't quite convinced.

Scorpius had never been lost in a desert, lost and so thirsty that his tongue turned to a dry piece of leather that glued itself to his gums and the roof of his mouth. But he imagined the feeling of suddenly being rescued from that desert, standing in the shade of a palm tree and then being handed a tall glass of iced water must feel quite akin to this.

The relief was indescribable.

It was good. It was beyond good.

It was, in fact, about a thousand times better than he ever had made himself feel (even though he had always been quite satisfied with his own capabilities).

It was also churning the marrow in his bones with shame, but it still felt so good that his knees were going weak and his thighs were all shaky and seemed to become beaded with sweat under the coat. He braced himself harder against the wall and pushed his feet into the cold ground as if wedging himself in.

"Is, uh. Is it okay?"

Scorpius exhaled a slow, controlled breath. It still trembled audibly. "Yes," he merely managed to say. Underbloodystatement.

He had sped up just right. The pressure of his palm was just right, as was the curl of his fingers. An embarrassingly slick, fleshy sound, muffled by the layers of clothing, accompanied the the back-and-forth movement now. When Scorpius glanced down, he saw only Albus' arm vanishing between the folds of his cloak, and a bulge that moved about as if it were alive.

Strictly speaking, there was nothing naughty in this picture at all, yet it was the most obscene and startling and arousing thing Scorpius had ever seen. As his brain processed it, the coil tightened in his belly.

Not much longer. Not much longer at all. He screwed his eyes shut and focussed on the feeling.

It took hardly two minutes. His entire body seemed to constrict towards the middle, the muscles in his belly and in his thighs attempting to pull together as if they were trying to make a fist with one another. His stomach clenched, his belly button seemed to wander deeper and lower into his body as if pulled from inside, his lungs locked. Then, a spark as he teetered over the edge, and fire racing outwards rapidly, lighting every vein like a fuse.

And then, inevitably, the explosion.

"Oh, fuck," he breathed, stretching the 'u', and then proceeded to groan wordless noises for several long seconds even though he tried very hard to stay quiet.

He may or may not have passed out for a moment. When he came to, miraculously standing upright, with his hands, even sweatier and more slippery now, still against the wall, his forehead resting against the back of his right hand, and his pants wet and sticky against his skin, the relief continued to glow for several long, deep heartbeats. His blood thrummed with it. His breath seemed, for the first time in weeks, to go all the way down to the bottom of his lungs.

When the glow faded, all that was left was the embarrassment, and a deeply painful thought. So that's the noise of a friendship ending.

He screwed his eyes shut again, but for different reasons this time. What the hell just happened?

Behind him, Albus shuffled around. Then, a rip and rustle of paper, then the toilet seat going up with a soft thunk, and the flush. Another rip, and a touch against his arm which, ironically, did make him flinch.

Al was handing him a balled-up length of toilet paper. "Clean up?" he asked.

Scorpius nodded and took the ball of paper with numb fingers. Stupidly, he almost didn't dare to reach down into his pants. Not in front of somebody else. He turned away just a little and felt his cheeks heat up. Too late now. Way too late.

When the flushing was finished the second time, silence fell again.

"Let's go back to sleep now," Albus suggested, clearing his throat.

The s-word worked like a trigger. Suddenly, Scorpius was filled with exhaustion from head to toe. His eyelids went heavy, his sight blurry and his thoughts slowed down so much that his head couldn't hold them any more.

"Sleep," he mumbled as if in agreement and yawned.

"Let's go," Al said, and the next thing Scorpius knew, there was a pillow under and around his head, and downy sleep spreading out cosily inside of it, and a hammering noise everywhere that ruined the whole thing. He groaned and said, "Would someone please make this noise stop?" Or at least that's what he thought he said. What came out of his mouth was more like, "Loud. Aahhh."

Something soft and pillowy hit him half in the face. He raised his hands and slapped it away in delayed self-defence.

It turned out to be an actual pillow. He groaned.

"Get up. We're about to be late for Transfiguration."

This kick-started his frontal lobe and made him sit up and squint into the world by way of trial. He was in his bed, in a dorm that was rapidly emptying of fully clothed people to the soundtrack of his alarm clock in phase 4 (of 4 – the ultimate wake-up call, presumably loud and annoying enough to wake up the entire house Ravenclaw. Yes, Ravenclaw, up in the Ravenclaw Tower). Albus was hopping around on one leg trying to put on his trousers.

If Scorpius had ever seen Groundhog Day, he would have recognized this moment as the grand solution scene. Something had happened the way it had been supposed to, and thus the cycle had been broken.

But he had never seen Groundhog Day. What he had seen was McGonagall slapping tardy people with draconian detentions. So he hit his alarm until it quietened down, rolled out of bed feeling much like a drunk and tangled slinky and started to get dressed to the best of his abilities.

"We're way too late for breakfast. I'll go get some coffee for both of us from the kitchen. We'll meet at the classroom in six, alright?" Albus threw the strap of his book bag over his shoulder and was ready to go. Visibly tired, but ready to go.

"Alright," Scorpius said. The word came out muffled because he was stuck in his sweater at the time. Then, as he forced his head through the sweater's neck, he called, "Albus." Which was code for We need to talk about that thing that happened tonight. That thing when you... You, uh. Gave me a hand job. The very first one of his life, no less. The very best one of his life, incidentally. It was the best thing that had happened to him in weeks. Months. Despite currently being in a state of exhausted panic, he felt cured of something.

At the same time, there was the nagging doubt and confusion about the whole situation.

Albus understood and halted his hasty exit for a heartbeat. "We can talk about it later," he said. Which was code for But we don't have to. It's really not that complicated.

Scorpius, still dazed and tired, didn't get that last half, so he said, "Yeah, okay," which wasn't a code. It just meant 'Yeah, okay.'

Once Albus was out the door, Scorpius sank down onto the edge of his mattress for a minute and tried to wrap his head around the notion of getting a hand job from his best friend the night before and then still having him as a best friend the morning after – as if nothing at all had happened, and nothing had changed.

He was both immensely relieved and irritated by that state of affairs and he could not, for the life of him, say how this combination was even possible. Also, it was too early in the morning to puzzle it out, so he frowned at the laces as he tied his shoes as if they were responsible for this chaos.

Then he ran to class and practically didn't have time to think about any of it for the following three days.

/

~17 to 15 days left

Scorpius wouldn't have thought it possible to be so very busy unless one was the Minister of Magic oneself. Starting the moment he rushed out of the dungeon and arrived in McGonagall's classroom one measly minute too late, he barely had time to eat or sleep.

After a miserable lesson of Transfiguration – spent wedged between Parkinson and Pritchard this time because it was the only free seat left, yearning for that steaming cup of coffee he could witness growing cold on Albus' desk two rows over – he realised that he had left his Astronomy homework in the dorm. Retrieving it from there cost him several minutes, the very same several minutes he ended up too late for class. Professor Sinistra wasn't was as lenient as Professor McGonagall – who had "merely" slapped a two-feet essay about the basics of untransfiguration on him that was due on Friday – and went straight for detention, to be served the same evening after sundown. And finally, to top it all off, the following period of Care saw him being shat on by a crup. The time between finding a clean set of robes and the start of his detention with Sinistra was filled with a hasty meal, first and last one of its kind that day, and hunting for books on untransfiguration in the library while simultaneously dodging Sophie Cattermole.

He crept into bed around eleven. Everyone else – including Albus, judging by the snoring – was already fast asleep.

The following day started with another instance of almost sleeping in and continued with a Potions accident that no one could remember because such was the nature of the potion involved. Along with all of his classmates and Professor Smith, Scorpius found himself in the hospital wing with a hiccup that made green smoke come out of his nostrils.

The professor told them that the lesson would be repeated on Friday evening from seven to nine o'clock. Everyone was just thrilled.

In History, Scorpius fell asleep. This hadn't happened for a long time, and he maintained that it wasn't entirely his fault – Astronomy detention had taken forever the day before so that he had only got six hours of shut-eye, he had not had time for a proper meal or a real caffeine infusion, and Professor Binns' voice was a sedative on a good day. Normally, it wouldn't even have been so bad. The professor had gotten used to pupils nodding off in his class sometime during the three hundred years he'd been teaching here, so he tended to ignore them.

Scorpius, however, managed to bodily slide off his chair as he slept, plough into the heavy mahogany map stand that had been put down very near his desk, which toppled the contraption, which then shattered one of the windows. Which led to Scorpius' second detention (to be served later that day and spent with copying pages from his History textbook like a bloody second year student) and second punishment essay (on one of the two dozen goblin wars, Scorpius didn't even remember which one) that week, not to mention a full thirty point deduction from Slytherin house and several unfriendly side glances from his housemates during the following Divination lesson.

While the others were falling asleep in their beds, Scorpius sat in the all but deserted common room that Thursday night, finishing the untransfiguration essay and scribbling the goblin essay (using the notes Shrew had kindly lent him). After that, he wrote a letter to his father explaining what had happened – after all, Hogwarts would bill him for the broken window and tell him about his offspring not taking classes seriously. It was midnight when he was done and finally fell into bed. Around five in the morning, he woke again from a very vivid nightmare involving a howler, being disinherited, committing suicide and his ghost becoming Professor Binns' trainee teacher for all eternity as punishment. He tried to go back to sleep for two hours, and actually fell asleep – ten minutes before his alarm went off again.

Despite feeling completely whacked, Friday almost went well. Transfiguration and Runes went by without incident. In third period, however, Amanda killed their puffapod by drowning it ("Oops!"), which earned them both bad marks and a rather stern look from Professor Longbottom. Scorpius was more than a little mad at Amanda but didn't feel like confronting her because that would mean standing close to her, and that would mean more obnoxious touchy-feely-flirting from her, so he just seethed in silence, at a distance and watched her as she chatted up Michael Bowen.

Lastly, in Defence against the Dark Arts, Professor Finnegan decided to finish the week with a bang and confronted the class with the plans for the coming end-term exams to which he would now gradually hold individual preliminary tests, starting next Tuesday. The announcement shocked most everyone into round-eyed silence. After class, Mariella promptly called for an emergency study group meeting no one dared not to attend.

When the meeting was done, they trudged into the Potions classroom to repeat the lesson they had collectively forgotten the day before.

By half past ten that Friday evening, Scorpius curled up in bed, thoroughly exhausted. He thanked the merciful Morgane that they only had class on alternate Saturdays, and that tomorrow would not be one of those Saturdays.

Mid-prayer, it occurred to him that there would be Quidditch practice at eleven, though.

He opened his eyes a little and turned his head. Albus was a dark, lumpy shape in the bed next to his, softly illuminated by the light that emanated from under Prince's blanket as Prince was "inconspicuously" reading or writing something.

They hadn't talked after all. Scorpius frowned to himself. They hadn't talked about that, and they hadn't talked much in general. Al had been by his side like always, they had sat next to each other in most of the classes as usual, and sometimes during mealtimes, and during that emergency study group session.

Everything was normal. Everything was like it always had been.

Except that it wasn't. At least not for him. Not when he thought about it.

Scorpius closed his eyes and tried to come up with something to say. About that. Because he somehow felt that something needed to be said... about that.

Should he thank him? How? "Your effort has been a great success, Mr Potter," he heard himself say. "Ever since you put your, well, your hand on me, I've been practically immune to feminine wiles. I am deeply grateful." He suppressed a snort.

It was true, though. He remembered successfully dodging Kate Macmillan in that horrible Transfiguration class in Wednesday, being merely annoyed by Amanda on Thursday and actively ignoring Briony Parkinson in Runes on Friday. They were still interested in him with frightening and unnatural intensity, but the spell seemed to have been broken somehow for him.

Plus, he didn't have the dreams any more, and he hadn't had an issue with morning wood since the Tuesday night incident. His lack of sleep and energy was now solely due to a combination of overwork, detentions, irregular food intake and too much coffee – like a normal person.

Most importantly, though, ever since Tuesday night, his mind had been on other things for once. Things that weren't located between his legs, or on other people's chests. Since that day Mr Weasley had cursed him in the south wing study, he had been obsessing about that temporarily dysfunctional body part, and about girls' various body parts, without even fully noticing it. "It probably sounds corny," he thought at Al, "but your touch has healed my OCD."

Al mumbled something in his sleep and turned over. Scorpius couldn't even see whether he turned toward him or away from him.

He sighed and looked up at the ceiling, then closed his eyes, knowing that when he would wake up again, only two weeks would be left on that damned spell, and Rose would only be at Hogwarts for another two weeks. Two weeks would be all that stood between him and actual normality.

Except that that moment in that toilet stall would never un-happen.

/

/TBC (tomorrow)