Author's note: This chapter was supposed to go up Sunday, so I'm sorry for uploading a day late. I just graduated school recently and my days have been really busy with parties and goodbyes and job-searching, so I wasn't able to do the final editing until late last night. Next week, I promise to be on time.

As always, thank you to all of you for following the story and especially to those that took the time to leave reviews.

- Mymlen

Chapter 40

This time he was alone in the room. He had decided to go up there early, just to make sure it was free. He leaned on the edge of the armrest of the sofa and watched the door, waiting for Harry show up.

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When it was fifteen minutes past the time he had asked him to come, Draco started to think that he probably hadn't seen the message. He decided to give him at least an hour to notice it.

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Half an hour later, the door swung open and Harry barged in, out of breath and looking completely disoriented.

"Hi!" he said. "Sorry I'm late, I didn't see your note until now. How did you even get it into my pocket, I haven't seen you all day?"

Draco shrugged.

"Did you run all the way here?" he asked.

"Yeah. I was afraid I wouldn't catch you before you left."

Draco smirked.

"Must have been really desperate to see me, then."

Harry grinned.

"Shut up."

"Oh, so you didn't run, it was just that the stairs were a bit hard for you? Merlin, Harry, you're getting out of shape now that you're not chasing dark lords all the time, maybe I should write to some of my relatives-"

Harry kissed him. Draco was still halfway sitting and Potter had to lean down to reach him.

"I missed you," he said against Draco's lips.

A pleasant shiver surged through Draco's body.

"I missed you too."

Harry kissed him again and Draco slid his fingers into his hair, clenching his fist in it and kissed him back. Harry pushed himself closer, and then Draco felt his hand on his thigh and everything he knew he had to say was pushed from his mind, because this was new, and he hadn't admitted to himself exactly how much he wanted it or that it had any part in what he had meant when he told Harry he had missed him, but it did. He pressed himself against him and felt the hand move to his stomach, following its dip at Draco's sharp intake of breath. He pulled back to catch his breath. Harry pushed his fingers between Draco's shirt buttons and Draco had just leaned in for another kiss when someone cleared her throat.

Draco jerked his head back and Potter stepped away from him so fast he wasn't sure he didn't apparate.

Pansy stood in the doorway. The door was open to the corridor, her hand still on the handle, lost in the middle of movement and she was looking at the two of them with an expression like she had just eaten one of the more unpleasant types of every-flavour-beans.

Harry made a strangled noise. Pansy's eyes flashed in his direction, but only for a second. Then they were back on Draco, wide and confused, waiting for him to explain. And Draco couldn't gather his mind to think of something to say. His thoughts were all jammed with the awareness that he couldn't turn to look at Harry to see what his face was like, and that this would probably be the end of it and how they could have locked the door if they had just stopped to think for half a second.

"I uh… I was looking for you," said Pansy. "I thought you might be up here and… well, I didn't think anyone… that he would be here. Too."

Draco straightened his shirt, as if that did any good other than call attention to it.

"This is not-" he began, not quite looking at her.

"I'll just go," she said quickly. "I didn't mean to… interrupt."

"Pansy, wait-"

She stepped back out the door and closed it behind her. There was a fraction of a second where he thought of rushing after her, but if he left now, Harry might…

"We should have locked the door," said Harry quietly.

Draco turned around. Harry had jammed his hands into the pockets of his robes. There was a frantic look in his eyes, like he too was about to bolt out the door after Pansy, or as if he was hoping Draco would.

"Shit," he said.

"It's okay," said Draco.

His mouth was dry.

"It's not okay. Fuck. We should go after her-"

"I will. I'll talk to her."

Harry kicked an armchair.

"Fuck!"

"Harry, stop freaking out!"

Harry turned to him.

"You're good with memory charms," he said.

There was a beat of silence. Draco stiffened.

"What?" he said, feeling a chill spreading through him, feeling anger, fury, putting a thousand miles between them.

"You're good with memory charms-"

"I heard you. Are you seriously suggesting that I obliviate Pansy?"

Potter threw out his hands.

"We have to do something, right? She's going to tell someone, and then they will tell someone else. Everyone's going to find out."

"No they won't. I'll go talk to her. She's not going to tell."

"You don't know that."

Draco bristled.

"She is my friend, Potter!"

"I know-"

"And I am not going to erase her memories. Merlin, if it had been one of your people who came through that door, that thought wouldn't even have crossed your mind, you wouldn't even think of violating any of their minds like that. You might not like her, but you do not have the right to say shit like that."

Rage flared in Harry's eyes.

"I've been lying to my friends too! Do you think I like doing this behind their backs? Do you think I like that I have to sneak off and make up ridiculous excuses to see you? You have no idea what I'm risking, how angry they'll be-"

"Of course I do, I'm helping you keep this a secret, aren't I? Even though that was never the plan."

Harry sneered.

"Sorry, I hadn't realized this was still about you trying to fix your bloody reputation."

Draco had heard him take that tone with Snape in potions, with Umbridge in fifth year, the resigned sarcasm of Potter deciding to be nothing but stubborn and stupid and unreachable. It meant Draco would end up hitting him again.

"You are such an arsehole, Potter," he hissed.

"I'm back to being Potter now, am I?"

"It was never about my reputation."

"What was it about, then?"

"It was about you, you twat! It's always been about you."

"Don't act like this is what you wanted! If it were up to you, our names would be smeared all over the front page of the Prophet!"

"Is that really what you think of me? I do want this. I want it so badly, and I don't give a fuck about the secrecy. I never expected anything else. I know you would break this off with me in a heartbeat if one of them as much as looked at you funny."

For the first time, Harry looked taken a back.

"I wouldn't do that," he said.

Draco raised an eyebrow. He felt cold all the way through.

"Then what were you freaking out about?"

Harry opened his mouth to speak, but Draco cut him off:

"Just for get about it, Harry. It's all fine. I'll go talk to her. And if you still don't feel safe, you can obliviate her. Or you can wait and obliviate your own friends when they find out. Do whatever the fuck you want."

He reached for the door handle.

"Draco-" Harry began.

Draco slammed the door behind him.

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Pansy wasn't in the common room. He walked over to where Matthew Selwyn and a couple of other seventh years were laughing about something stupid. They stopped when they noticed him.

"Draco," said Matthew. "Everything alright?"

"Have you seen Pansy?" he asked, not even bothering to sound calm or trying to appear like he wasn't riled up.

He was boiling.

"I don't know," said Matthew, looking around at his friends.

"I think I saw her go up to the dormitories," said one of them.

"Why do you need her?" asked Matthew.

"None of your business."

Draco turned on his heel and headed for the stairs.

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He didn't bother knocking. He knew she was waiting for him anyway.

She stood by one of the windows with her arms crossed and her gaze turned to the landscape outside.

"We need to talk," he said.

She scoffed and turned to him with a thoroughly unimpressed look on her face.

"About what?"

"Oh, come on-"

"I'm sorry I walked in on you," she said. "I'm not going to tell anyone if that's what you're worried about. There. We're done talking."

"You're angry," he said.

She rolled her eyes at him.

"I'm not angry."

"Why? Is it because I didn't tell you?"

"No, it's not."

She turned away from him again as if the conversation was over. He didn't leave. Pansy had never figured out how to stay quiet, especially when she was angry.

"I'm just trying to figure out if I should have seen this coming," she said eventually. "I know Potter is a bit thick sometimes, but does he really not realise you're just using him?"

Draco felt an uncomfortable twist in his gut.

"I'm not," he said and it sounded too defensive even to his own ears.

Pansy shot him a long, bored stare.

"Draco, he's a hero and a Gryffindor, probably the most Gryffindor person in all of Hogwarts. You know what they're like. They don't think. They don't look at things and try to understand them, they just decide "this is good and this is bad", and then they rush in head first and try to kill the bad thing. And it's even better if they don't even have to decide it themselves, if someone else can decide it for them. That's why there are always Gryffindors all over the place in wars, because they just love to have someone pointing them to a battlefield saying "that is the evil thing you have to kill." You know Potter is like that, so you did your thing and made him trust you, and then you pointed to the bad thing and asked him to kill it for you."

"I didn't ask him to do anything for me, I asked him to help," he said and immediately wanted to bite his tongue off for letting her make this about Azkaban.

"What, because if he had said no you would have just tried to destroy it on your own?"

"Yes!"

"Oh, come on, Draco! Look, I'm not criticizing you, it was a very Slytherin thing to do, seeing what people need and using it to make them do what you want. You saw that Potter needed someone to tell him what to do so he could feel useful, and then you gave him a heroic quest to destroy the prison that just happens to be where your father is. I just think it's silly that you won't admit that's what you're doing."

He could feel the conversation spiralling out of control, but he was too angry to stop himself. Of course she would have the wrong idea about all of it. This was why they didn't want people to know, because Pansy was his friend and she still didn't believe that it could be anything other than a plot on Draco's part, she hadn't even for one second considered that he might genuinely like Harry or that it was possible that Harry liked him back. And now he wasn't even sure if Harry believed it either.

"It's strange," he said coldly. "I have this memory of you actually complaining about them making us out to be villains, and now here you are doing exactly the same thing."

"I'm just being honest!"

"You're being cynical for the sake of being cynical. Why can't you believe that I'm actually trying to do something good? Why is that so hard to imagine?"

"Oh, I'm not saying you're not trying."

"Fuck you."

"You're playing into their idea of what's good and bad! I know you're trying to do something right, but I just don't know why you think you have to pretend you're something you're not in order to do that."

"What is it you think I'm trying to be?"

"You're trying to be a Gryffindor! You're turning your back on your family and on your house just because-"

"See, now you're starting to sound like our parents."

"What's so bad about that?"

"They were Death Eaters!"

"Mine weren't, your mother wasn't. That's all their narrative again-"

"It doesn't have anything to do with narrative! I just want to do something right for once, something I don't have to be ashamed of and I want to be happy without apologizing for it. He likes me. He actually likes me and that's hard for me to believe too, but I want to hold on to that for as long as I possibly can!"

"That's not what this is about! I don't give a fuck that you have a boyfriend or a fuckbuddy or whatever he is to you, I just wish you weren't leaving me behind to keep him. I can't stop you, of course, but you can't expect me to just ignore it either."

Draco was dumbfounded.

"What does… it doesn't have anything to do with you," he said.

"You've been pushing me away all year."

"Not because of him."

"No, I know that! It's not about him, it's about – can't you see what it is you're doing?"

"No, I can't. Unless you're about to tell me I'm betraying my blood, which is-"

"You're betraying me! We were surviving. You said that, remember? And we had to be there for each other because no one else would. Our parents wouldn't, the teachers wouldn't, the Dark Lord wouldn't and neither would Potter's people. And I know we didn't think it was going to be like this, but wasn't that the whole fucking point, that even if the others couldn't, the rest of Slytherin, you and I we'd still have each other's backs?"

"We still do! I haven't betrayed you-"

"All you've done this year is denounce everything we did last year, all those things we had to do, you're apologizing and begging for their approval and trying to be one of them. And I'm not. I can't go around hating myself for it just because they tell me to, but I also can't defend myself if you're right there next to me condemning everything we did. They don't like me. I'm not nice, and some people can get away with that, fucking Potter senior got up to all sorts of shit when he was in school, but he got to grow up to be a man and a hero, and maybe you'll get to do that too, but I will be stuck. In twenty years I'm still going to be that pureblood bitch to all of them. So if you think you're not abandoning me by pretending you're not just as much of a Slytherin as I am, you're lying to yourself. And you know it's not as simple as they're making it out to be!"

For a moment he was at a loss for words. He wanted to pull out his wand and cast his patronus – that would prove how wrong she was about him. But she couldn't cast the spell herself, so maybe she wouldn't understand the significance of its shape. She wouldn't know that the snake meant that he hadn't turned his back on her or his name or his family, even after the Dark Lord had poisoned everything he thought he knew was right.

He had lost his father to him.

He had tried at first to use memories of Lucius to cast the spell, but it didn't work. They were tainted. He would never get him back and things could never be as they were, so they had to move on. Changing, adapting, it was necessary, it didn't mean he had lost sight of who he was. A snake didn't stop being a snake when it shed its skin.

But he didn't say anything. Pansy turned away from him to look out the window again. The anger seemed to have burned out of her and now she just looked sad.

"Your mom has been sending me letters, you know. Ever since we came back after Christmas. She asks me how you're doing, if you're okay, because you won't talk to her."

"I'm so sorry," he said quietly. "It's difficult with her at the moment. I'll write to her."

Pansy nodded.

"And I'm sorry for not looking out for you," he said. "I should have. And you're right, not about all of it but… I should have thought about that. I didn't see it, I honestly didn't. I never meant to abandon you. I'm not going to."

She nodded again, but didn't say anything. Her lips were pressed together and she had her arms crossed tightly across her chest. He could see her swallow hard.

"But I also… You're not right about all of it. I don't think it's as hopeless as you're making it sound, and I just think… I want to believe that we are allowed to be more than our houses. I'm a Slytherin, I still am and I'm not forgetting what that means now, I promise. But that shouldn't mean I can't be anything else."

She kept her stiff gaze turned away from him

"This was not how I wanted to have this conversation… I would have planned it better. Sorry."

"Don't apologize."

She ran a hand over her face. He watched her draw in a deep, shaky breath. Then she straightened up and looked up, a wry smile curling her lip.

"Potter," she said finally. "Really?"

Draco grimaced.

"Yeah."

She shook her head.

"That's just… the most ridiculous thing I ever heard."

"I know."

"I thought he hated you."

"He did."

"And now you're, what, snogging in secret in between classes? Having clandestine meetings at night?"

He scoffed.

"Not really. I don't know. We just had a fight. I don't know if we're together anymore, if that's even what we were."

"Oh come on, you've done nothing but fight him for the last seven years, and you still managed to get him into bed with you."

"I said some stupid things. And he was an idiot."

"What did you fight about?"

"I don't even know. Everything."

"Go talk to him tomorrow. You'll get it sorted out."

"Yeah, Maybe. But Pansy, please don't tell anyone about it, alright?"

She frowned.

"Did he ask you to tell me that?"

Draco shrugged.

"So he wants to keep it secret," she said.

"We both do. I don't want that kind of attention either."

"No of course not," she said, rolling her eyes. "I wasn't talking about the press."

"We're talking about everyone."

"You don't mind that I know."

"Of course not."

"So you know that I can keep it a secret, and I'm sure Potter believes his people would be able to keep quiet as well, yet neither of you have told anyone?"

"He doesn't want his friends to find out."

She raised an eyebrow.

"And that's alright with you?" she asked.

Draco shrugged.

"You know how they feel about me," he said.

"I know."

"And I just – I really like him. And if keeping it from them is what it takes for him to want to be with me, then I'm fine with that. I'm happy with things as they are."

"You don't look happy."

He sighed.

"Yeah, maybe I'm not so happy right now."

"You're being an idiot."

"I know."

"Promise me you won't let him hurt you. You don't deserve that no matter what his friends think of you. And he isn't worth it no matter how hot and famous he is."

Draco smiled meekly at that and Pansy did too. He reached for her and pulled her into a hug. Her arms tightened around him immediately, reflexively. He held onto her and breathed in the familiar scent of her hair, felt the rhythm of her chest rising and falling against his, and the calm and safety that her closeness promised.