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: You should seriously know this by now... *sigh* There's slash and certain situations that take place in bathrooms (not referring to that George Michael video clip) and original characters.

/

Hey y'all! Only four more chapters to go (including the one below). My little story is growing up so fast. *sniff*

Thanks to Weird Guest for reviewing! ("Don't bring Rose back... she's going to mess something up." Uhm. Every story needs a villain... and a catalyst... sorry...)

And thanks to you (yeah, you!) for reading this far! Ready for the next part?

~Chapter 14~

Rose's hair was messy and her cheeks and the tip of her nose were ruddy from the cold. She was wearing the protective parts of Quidditch gear over thick, woollen clothes. Several layers of them, apparently, which made her look somewhat like the Michelin man. Also, a pair of those mittens that connected with a cord through the sleeves and whose top parts could be peeled back to expose the fingertips, and pink earmuffs that clashed horribly with all the other shades of red. She was carrying her broom over her shoulder.

"Waiting for warm-up and the game," he said. His mouth was suddenly very dry. It had been an eternity since they had last spoken, and the last time they had spoken, she had ripped out his heart in one smooth motion. "I don't have to ask what you're up to, I guess." He nodded at her appearance.

She smiled. "Sometimes you just have to swing your butt on your broom and fly off for a while."

He nodded slowly, thinking 'Wow, that sounds... really theatrical and melodramatic', and didn't know what else to say to her. Anyway, she had been the one doing most of the talking those three months of (one-sided and admittedly false) bliss. He'd just been glad to listen.

"I'm going to miss that," she murmured as if to herself. It was only then that he remembered that she would be gone in six days. Apparently, she wouldn't get to take her broom with her.

"They'll have brooms in France, though," he said, mentally adding, "even though, judging by their national team's performance, they wouldn't know how to properly operate them if their collective lives depended on it."

"I know. Still, won't be the same." She shrugged one shoulder and sighed.

Scorpius knew that she wanted him to ask further questions. He didn't.

There was a short silence.

"So, uhm." Rose slipped the broom off her shoulder, scraping at an imaginary spot on the wood with a fingernail. "Scorpius, I..."

He looked up at her, keeping his face very neutral and refusing to help her get out whatever it was that she wanted to say.

She cleared her throat. "Look. About that... About us."

He exhaled and suddenly found that he really didn't want to talk about it, or even listen to her talk about it. It was part of a complicated past – a past that was well and truly past. Also, contemporary complications were more than enough for him already.

"It's okay," he said. "I know it was just about the Potions mark, really." And she had got an O in the midterms. If it had been entirely intentional tutoring, he would even have been proud.

Rose bit her lower lip in a way that he would have found knees-bucklingly endearing if only the past 37 days hadn't happened.

In fact, he found with some surprise, he still found it rather endearing. The lip-biting, and the freckles on her nose, and the way that one curl fell across her face like in a shampoo commercial, just unintentionally.

"Is that what Al told you?" she asked, looking at him with that slight head tilt that girls just used subconsciously to melt boys' brains and hearts.

"Uh. Well. Yeah." Scorpius blinked, then cleared his throat. "You mean he... Wasn't that the truth?" What am I even saying? he heard his thoughts echo in his skull. I know for a fact that it was the bloody truth.

"Yeah. Well, you know," Rose uttered cryptically. "I suppose it sort-of was, and sort-of wasn't."

He blinked again and frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Rose slumped a little, and even that seemed cute. "Oh, come on, Scorpius. If it had only been about Potions, I'd never have kept it going for three whole months."

You wouldn't? it zoomed through his head. Perhaps. How would I know? I obviously never knew you.

It took him a second to recover his speech. "S- So you're saying...," he prompted.

"I'm saying that if I hadn't liked you... you know, a little... I wouldn't have hung out all the time. Like, we did more than just Potions stuff. We talked. Like, about everything." She raised a suggestive eyebrow and he immediately remembered her leaning over to him really closely to conspiratorially tell him all about how embarrassing it had been to get her period in the middle of a Quidditch game. "You know I wouldn't have done that if it had just been, like, business for me."

"B-But," he stammered, searching for words. "But you told me, that day at the greenhouses... You said we weren't even friends, that I was only..." Acquaintance. He still couldn't get it out. "And you- Rose, you bloody shot me down."

He couldn't help the sharp, accusing tone in his voice, or the crack at the end when some of that old pain suddenly surged back up. It wasn't even about her any more, really. Just a reaction to the lingering pain from where the trust he had put in another person had been betrayed. Betrayed badly.

"I know I did," Rose said slowly. Her arms were crossed before her chest defensively, the gesture encumbered somewhat by all the clothes she had on. Her face was a picture of contrition. "Just..." She breathed. "Try to put yourself in my shoes for a moment. You had... such high expectations of me, Scorpius. Your feelings were, like, so solid and huge. I mean," her voice dropped. "You thought about sleeping with me. Having a child with me. That was overwhelming. And frightening. We're sixteen, for Morgane's sake."

Scorpius didn't bother to correct her on that second bit. He merely stared at her as his thoughts raced and tried to decode what was happening here.

"You know, I needed to- I felt that I really needed to bring you back down to earth or things might have just spun out of control so fast. So I probably was- much harsher and more insensitive than I should have been."

She bit her lip again and he wanted to tell her to stop doing that. It was distracting.

"That's not so say that I had-" She huffed. "Look, on a scale from one to ten, your feelings for me were somewhere at seven, I think. Correct me if I'm wrong." He didn't. She wasn't. (Well, maybe a seven and a half.) "At the greenhouses, I acted like mine were a zero-" (More like minus eight.) "-when in fact they were... something like ... a two. Or three."

Two. Or three. Two or three out of ten, when ten meant something like hunka-hunka-burning-love. To the Scorpius of 34 days ago, those odds wouldn't have seemed so bad.

"Oh," he stuttered when he realized that she was waiting for him to say something. "That's..."

She looked at him, pressing her lips together in a rueful little smile. "Yeah," she replied emphatically.

No one said anything for a bit.

"I hope you can see how a seven might seem overwhelming to a two," Rose added quietly, "especially with all the things that had happened, the oracle and the spell- and then it all happened so fast, within four days... I spent years getting my future going, and then this thing, and everything's just about to topple over. Just like that."

He nodded and made a long 'hmm'.

She combed her hair back again with her fingers, such as the earmuffs allowed it anyway, and still smiled that apologetic smile of hers.

"And now...?" he asked, suddenly very aware of her dimples. Those were killer dimples. Why hadn't he noticed them before?

"Now," she repeated and came half a step closer. "Well. Do you know that stupid old saying... 'Distance makes the heart grow fonder'?" Before he could ask another 'What does that mean?' she explained, tilting her head again and looking up in a dreamy kind of way, "I guess you could say that I'm a solid four now. Maybe even a five."

"Uhm, Rose," he began and got up slowly.

She came another step closer so that they were within each other's arm's reach. "Or six."

"Rose," he said again.

"Scorpius," she said, imitating his tone playfully, and reached up to touch his cheek.

His heart skipped two beats, but his blood was suddenly pumping through his veins at twice the normal pressure. Feelings from 34 days ago reared their heads, and as if they somehow hit the same frequency as the humming that inhabited his nether regions, they seemed bigger than ever before, making his insides pulse and oscillate.

Her eyes were hungry and he decided that he loved that look. He wished to be looked at like that as often as possible in the future.

But the feathery touch of her hand to his cheek, sliding along his jawline and to the back of his neck felt wrong.

Too feathery, actually. And her hand was so cold.

He tried to pull away, but the beam he had been sitting on was already pressing up against his calves and he couldn't go back any further.

"Scorpius," she murmured with a pleasant lilt in her voice.

"Scorpius?" Albus called, coming toward them with large strides from behind the other Slytherin stand.

"Al!" he shouted back, breath whooshing out of him and shoulders sagging in sudden relief.

Rose blinked, pulled her hand away and that look vanished. She staggered back two steps.

"Rose," Albus said, sounding surprised and... peeved? "Flying offroad again? So close to the game, too?"

"Yeah," Rose answered, weirdly also sounding surprised. "I just got back, so I'm totes on time." She looked from Scorpius to Albus and back. "Warm-up's coming up," she said, then peeled back her sleeve from her wrist to have a glance at her wristwatch. "You're both really early, though."

"Yes," Albus said, then looked at Scorpius. "Some pre-pre-game exercise."

Scorpius coughed and then quickly got very busy putting the broom maintenance kit back into the box.

"Well. I'll see you at the pre-match extravaganza, then," Rose said, shouldering her broom again. "We're so going to kick your butts."

"You keep telling yourself that, and then throw the coin with your right hand over your left shoulder, blow away the eyelash, and lastly look out for the shooting star, and maybe dreams will come true, coz," Albus replied airily.

Rose smirked at him, said, "See you on the pitch, Malfoy," and stalked off, nose in the air.

Albus watched her go for a long time.

Scorpius watched Albus, wondering if he was supposed to feel this... guilty. Guilty and faintly afraid, somehow. He couldn't tolerate these feelings for very long. His mouth started talking.

"She just told me that she was actually into me at the time," he heard himself say. When Albus turned his face toward him, he got back to his broom maintenance set, meticulously turning all the jars and bottles around so the labels faced upwards and rearranging the brushes and sponges. "A little, at least. Said she basically just panicked when the pregnancy thing came up and grossly overstated how she didn't like me at all."

Albus said nothing.

"I'm not sure how much of it was really her talking, though, and how much was just... destiny trying to push us together," he rambled on, thinking of but then deciding against mentioning how the spell her dad had put on her might have had the same sorts of effects on her. Like mental confusion and horniness.

"She seemed quite lucid and normal at the beginning there, but especially when she got all touchy-feely at the end, I got a bad kind of vibe from her so I, uhm, don't really know what to believe."

A nervous laugh bubbled up from his belly as if something was tickling him from the inside.

"Not that it really matters," he said, glancing up at his friend now. "I've been done with her for quite some time already. With her and...," he inhaled deeply and let the following words out in a quick rush, "and all the other girls, really."

He didn't know what kind of response he had hoped for, but he got exactly what he had expected.

Which was nothing much. An upward twitch of his eyebrows. A small sigh. A tiny nod that didn't necessarily mean 'yes' or 'I understand' but most likely something like 'I heard that you said something'.

"Because, you know, maybe it's not them," he added numbly, clicked the box in his lap shut absent-mindedly, shrugged. "Maybe it's destiny messing with them. Putting words in their mouths and making them do things. Or something about that Tactus spell. I'd never know, would I?"

"And that's the reason why you're swearing off girls in general," Albus stated, rather than asked, although there was a tiny upward inflection at the end.

Scorpius searched his face, trying to find a trace of that same uncertainty, the same curiosity there. Because he somehow felt that that uncertainty and the need to know would mean the world. Al looked away before he could find it, though.

So he sighed, huffed a laugh through his nose, and said, "No. No, that's not it. Not really."

The muscle in his jaw tensed. Maybe his look got darker, but he couldn't say for sure because he was still not looking at him but into the distance, thinking Merlin knew what.

Scorpius got up, threw the strap of his Quidditch bag over one shoulder, looped the strap of the kit around his wrist and lastly picked up his broom.

"Let's go," he said to Albus.

"Scorp..." He cleared his throat for more, but nothing else came and Scorpius was already walking toward the building at the far side of the pitch, leaving him to follow.

Changing was tense. So tense, in fact, that his shoulders were starting to ache. Shrugging out of his recently unbuttoned short, he rolled them once and craned his neck this side and that.

When he turned his head, he saw that Albus was standing behind him, watching him – his back, to be specific – instead of getting changed himself.

"What are you waiting for?" he asked, dry-mouthed. He suddenly wanted to get his Quidditch shirt on, and fast. A shiver ran up his spine.

Albus shook his head slightly. "You," he just said.

He almost laughed. Funny. I was waiting for you. For you to... say something. Do something. If he was quite honest, though, he'd been waiting for weeks now, and he was running out of hope.

"Time's getting short," Al murmured, glancing at the clock that was ticking away right above the door to the corridor. Muffled voices could be heard from the girls' changing room, too. Maybe Rose.

Scorpius slipped his shirt on.

"Scorpius," Albus said quietly. "Do you want it?" The question was asked in that simple and honest manner that made Scorpius so angry.

He felt himself seething.

What's it? he thought. He sneered inside. Your hand?

And why do you ask when you already know anyway?

And what about you?

Why are you so calm when I-

"Tell me." So quiet and polite.

"Yes," he said from between clenched teeth, and repeated, "Yes," to make sure he had heard.

Stepping into the bathroom, and then into the toilet stall on the far end of the row, he had the stupid urge to slam the door behind himself and lock Al out.

Instead of doing that, he turned and, instead of placing his hands on the tiles as always, pressed his back against the wall. An act of defiance.

A stupid act, he realized moments later, when Al, having flipped the knob to lock the stall, turned around to him and met his eyes.

The other one, he thought immediately. The other you.

Their toes were touching.

Albus' gaze was steady. His eyes were wide and brighter, greener than normal.

Or maybe they just seemed that way because they were so close.

So close.

Scorpius broke eye contact and tried to turn around, feeling very foolish and very warm.

Albus hand shot out and pushed against his shoulder. "No," he said decisively.

Scorpius felt the cold bite of the tiles against his shoulder blade, seeping through the thin fabric of his shirt. He felt Al's warm, warm hand slide down from his shoulder, across his chest, his stomach, to the belt of his trousers, yanking the strap out of the buckle so fiercely that Scorpius had to strain to not fall forward. Eventually, Scorpius lifted his hands and propped himself against Albus' body.

He could feel him breathe, the movement of his chest, even through cloak and shirt.

He could feel his breath hitch just like his own when Albus' right hand finally touched skin to skin.

Slowly. Firmly. Perfectly.

Before long, Scorpius was clinging to him to stay upright. Even pulling him a little closer. And Albus followed the pull, leaning toward him. Just a little.

For long minutes, there was no sound but Scorpius' breathing and the sound of Albus' hand, and in Scorpius' head there was the booming rush of blood, the drum of his heart crescendoing unstoppably, and the pleasure spiralled, spiralled – Scorpius gasped, then gasped his name, wanted to throw his head back but his eyes were caught by Albus' piercing look that held on to him just like his fingers did-

Albus said, "Yes."

/

His body thrummed in the afterglow, his fingers still clenched into Albus' clothes so tightly that they hurt. He could feel sweat beading in the small of his back, under his arms, between his legs, his still trembling thighs.

The world swam back into focus, materializing as Albus Potter's face.

There was a gleam in his green eyes, almost like a fever, and spots of colour on his cheekbones. His mouth was slightly open.

Scorpius peeled his fingers out of his clothes, thinking that it would snap Albus out of it, too, would make him lean back, turn away, wipe his hand and possibly his coat. Go back to regular Albus. Unconcerned best friend Albus.

But he didn't. Scorpius waited for long moments, watched his expression intently, noting the little details like the twitch of his nostrils, the slight sheen of sweat on his upper lip, and the way his eyes, still feverish, scanned his face.

As if on some invisible, inaudible cue, Albus suddenly started to move. He reached out with his left hand and touched his cheek. Let it rest there for just a heartbeat as if he were waiting for Scorpius to swat him away.

Scorpius didn't. He just stood there and stared, unbelieving.

His hand gently slid down to the side and further back until his palm was pressed against the back of his neck, fingers brushing against his hair.

Scorpius was transfixed and watched his face, watched his eyes. So close, closer than he ever remembered them being before. His stomach did weird things in his belly.

His gaze searched Scorpius face in turn but avoided eye contact, then dropped to his lips and slid away as if ashamed, but quickly returned as if magically bound to them.

Scorpius sucked his lower lip between his teeth uncertainly and saw Albus' eyes narrow a little.

Will you come closer? he almost asked, and, stupidly, What are you doing?

Albus hesitated. He had just seemed so very determined and unflinching – but now he hesitated. In almost seven years of knowing him, Scorpius didn't think he'd ever seen him hesitate before, not even once.

The other Albus didn't seem like the type to ever hesitate, either.

Scorpius swallowed on a dry throat when he suddenly understood. This isn't-

So, this person who was touching him right now, and moving ever closer, staring at his mouth, chipping away at the distance between their bodies centimetre by centimetre, was-

"Albus," he whispered, unsure what he wanted to say.

Albus' eyes flicked upward for a millisecond, then down again. The tips of his fingers whispered against his neck.

Yes, he thought.

That was when the bathroom door opened with a loud creak.

/

/TBC (tomorrow)

I really, really like cliffhangers, yo.