A/N: Already so many lovely readers! I have a full list of thanks at the bottom of this chapter .

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Meanwhile, on the other side of the castle...

Draco lay in bed, having finally tired of Crabbe and Goyle's company. When he had left them, they had been working their way through a wizard's pornography magazine. Crabbe and Goyle had been sniggering over pictures of witches on vibrating broomsticks when Malfoy finally decided he'd had enough.

Ugh, those two, I'll never understand it… Draco thought to himself. Those women probably started out very beautiful, but then they had been covered in inch-thick make-up, greased up, plucked and shaved and waxed...

Draco sighed. Sure, he'd done his fair share of ogling pictures of naked women. One day, whilst looking for a certain book on transforming potions in the Malfoy library, he'd come across a portfolio of pictures that presumably belonged to his father. (They didn't belong to his mother, Draco was certain.)

Later, it occurred to him that the book had perhaps been planted there by his father. After all, he had been fifteen at the time, and had not yet been romantically involved with any girl, and his father seemed to have been getting suspicious about his sexual orientation. Once, walking past his parents' bedroom, he'd overhead snatches of a conversation: "...honestly, Lucius, there's no reason to assume Draco is any such thing! Perhaps there simply aren't any proper girls for him at Hogwarts, awash with Muggle slime as it is. Now, if we'd sent him to a sensible school like Durmstrang..."

At first, he had been very aroused by those pictures. (And very grateful for the Impervius charm that had been cast on the book's pages.) But as time went on, he started to feel... embarrassed, and a little guilty. The came to realise – the moaning women in the pictures were not at all like the girls of Hogwarts. The women in the photos were passive (...except for the one set of Dominatrix pictures. Yikes!...) – they accepted whatever the picture-men did to them. With their make-up, nail-polish, and oiled skin, they seemed plastic. What were those little dolls that Muggle girls liked to play with? The picture-woman were just...dolls. He knew that, underneath it all, was a woman who had friends and family and a personality and political views and favourite movies. And it frustrated him that those parts – their souls, their true passions, their personalities – were buried away behind the lens.

Once, when he'd had a few Butterbeers down in the dungeons with the other Slytherin seventh-years, he'd tried to explain all of these thoughts to Goyle. He'd got about a minute in before Goyle put down his glass and looked Draco straight in the eye and said, "Geez, Draco, you some kind of fag, or what?"

Draco had given up after that.

Another time, Draco had followed Crabbe, Goyle, and a few other Slytherins like Blaise Zabini, into a wizarding strip club hidden in Hogsmeade. Apparently the old, abandoned Muggle chess shop became a doorway to the club if you knew the right password (or so Crabbe had heard.)

The club was pretty seedy. The dim lighting did nothing to hide the scuffed and faded carpet and the careworn furniture. They bought a few drinks and sat down. Zabini was clearly unimpressed. "Honestly, Crabbe, couldn't you have recommended a better place? These girls look pretty sickly to me, kinda like zombies. I mean, look at their eyes – no expression at all. But then again, you might be into necrophilia, hey, Crabbe?"

Draco slipped away unnoticed while the rest of the Slytherins watched Crabbe and Zabini trade insults about each other's sexual preferences. Somehow, he doubted he'd be missed – most of the Slytherins were well on their way to being intoxicated, and were quite happy to be surrounded with almost-naked women.

He walked back to the castle, feeling very alone.

And now he lay in bed, turning over his confused thoughts again and again. He still hadn't been romantically involved with a girl. He didn't particularly fancy any of the girls in Slytherin. Sure, he had taken Pansy to the Yule Ball in fifth year, but that hadn't really been his choice – Draco and Pansy's mothers had arranged it, and it never developed into anything further beyond the Yule dance. (Draco shuddered at the memories – he'd looked very foolish in those dress robes.) And he'd never been able to get close to any of the girls in the other houses – for one thing, most of them avoided Slytherins like the plague, and for another thing, he had a lasting reputation for being an arrogant, self-centred prat.

And Draco had to admit that, for the first six years of his education at Hogwarts, he had been an arrogant, self-centred prat, up to his eyebrows in his adoration of the dark arts.

But over the summer, he'd come to question his idolisation of the Dark Lord. He could no longer brush off with sneering indifference the reports in the Daily Prophet of innocent deaths. Draco had always known his father had been a Death Eater, but he hadn't realised exactly what it had meant, not really.

And then, one day, he'd heard his father talking to McNair about the Death Eater torture of a muggle woman that had made the morning headlines.

And it hit him. Was Draco's father a torturer? A murderer? What had he been called upon to do in the name of the Dark Lord? Draco sometimes looked down on the happy-clappy quality of those who worked good magic, since they always seemed so poncy and self-righteous, and he had revered Dark Arts practitioners because they were so much, well, cooler.

But torture someone? End someone's life? Draco knew he couldn't.

And so he had gone back to school, glad of the distance between him and his father. Draco didn't want to think what would happen to him once school had finished – would he be forced to become a Death Eater? What would happen if he tried to refuse?

So, gradually, Draco began to distance himself from the Dark Arts.

This development also had one important corollary: it meant he didn't have to fight with Potter anymore.

He and Potter had always been at odds because Potter was so damn pure and good (almost maddeningly so) whilst Draco had been, irrevocably, a servant-in-training of the Dark Arts. But if Draco was no longer on the side of the Dark Arts...maybe he and Harry didn't have to fight anymore. Draco wasn't sure that he wanted to be Harry's friend – could that ever happen? And besides, Harry was such a self-righteous snot sometimes...

But perhaps Draco didn't have to put so much effort into hating Harry anymore.

But more than that, Draco had begun to feel that perhaps his father had been right to doubt Draco's heterosexuality.

It was an idea that Draco had been wrestling with for some time. He'd seen how much his other male housemates thought about girls, and it had struck him how rarely he thought, let alone fantasised, about members of the opposite sex.

And then…

Recently, there had been a group of wizards who had come to Hogwarts at Dumbledore's invitation to teach some Muggle martial arts. ("In case you ever need to practice wandless self defence!" Dumbledore had announced.)

Draco had signed up for one of their workshops, just out of curiosity. They were made to dress in a strange, white garment apparently called a gi – white trousers and a sort-of folding-over top that was held together with a belt.

Draco was then paired up with a seventh-year Ravenclaw boy (whose name was Derek) and they started going through the exercises that the instructor was showing them.

Draco soon found – to his own bewildered embarrassment – that he was enjoying the contact between himself and the other boy. He even caught himself eyeing up Derek's chest (for the shirt had come loose, affording a very nice view of the brunette boy's muscles.)

The class was over before Draco knew it, and his martial arts partner bid Draco farewell with a rather dazzling smile (which made Draco blush) and left Draco to ponder this strange new development.

And then that incident with Potter this morning! He had been standing in the corridor, searching for a quill in his bag, when Potter fell on him from out of nowhere! Draco didn't realise what on earth had happened until he was on the floor.

Harry had landed with his arms on either side of Draco, with one of his legs pressed between Draco's and one resting on the outside. His torso was pressed flush up against Draco's and their faces (and lips, thought Draco involuntarily) were only centimetres apart…Draco could feel Harry's breath on his mouth…

Draco angrily punched his pillow. Gods, he was really sexually frustrated if he was getting a thrill from a few seconds of body contact with his (former?) arch-enemy.

And yet he remembered Harry's eyes, how they had been so bright; how his hair had been dishevelled and his clothes slightly disarrayed. Even though he looked tired (a recent spate of exams had left all seventh years sleepless) and exceedingly confused, he had seemed so alive. He stood as tall as Draco, a little bit more well-built…

Aargh! What on Earth was happening? Just because he didn't want to hate Harry Potter any more, didn't mean he wanted to...

Draco couldn't even bring himself to think it. He rolled over and looked out the enchanted window (since they were down in the dungeons, real windows were out of the question), trying to concentrate hard – no, not hard! aargh! – on the very, very cold snow that it currently displayed.

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A/N: Lots and lots of thanks to Konflickted (your new fic is wonderful, and thanks for the e-mails!), suki53, and DarkLordOfUltimateChaos! Thanks for your wonderful reviews. And thanks to Dumbledude, Paramour Conspiracy, kawanale and diagonalta -- I will do my best to keep updating regularly!

And thanks to my wonderful beta and boyfriend, Sparrowhawk. I miss you already.