“To the left,” Draco instructs, climbing the narrow wooden stairs behind Potter. “It’s unlocked.”
“You don’t lock your room?”
Draco shrugs. Old habits die hard, even after a gap year, and locking a dorm shared with four other people was about as practical as drinking from a sieve.
Late afternoon sunlight spills gently through the door. Potter steps inside, then stands blocking the way while he gapes around as if his own tiny bedroom further down the corridor doesn’t look exactly the same. The creaky hardwood floor, the slanted ceiling with the squat, west-facing window, the ponderous wardrobe fit to house a family of boggarts. Draco’s trunk is open, revealing an untidy assortment of unmentionables. A standing mirror squints back at them from the corner. The desk’s covered with books. Nothing at all out of the ordinary, except—
“Oooh, what’s that?” Potter says, finally moving out of the way.
“Potter, don’t!” But even if Potter registers the high pitch of alarm in the exclamation and takes it as anything but overwhelming mortification, it’s too late. His hands are already on the ridiculous, child-sized, purple plush dragon sat upon the chair.
A ridiculous, child-sized, purple plush dragon Draco has never seen before.
Several things happen all at once. Draco’s pulled forward as if gravity has changed direction. Potter, too. They crash into one another with a shocked oomph. The door slams shut. By the time Draco recovers enough to shriek, “What the fuck?!” there isn’t one child-sized, purple plush dragon in Potter’s hands. There are two—no, four—no, eight—bursting into existence all around them like grotesque, giant popcorn.
“Drop it!” Draco yelps, in unison with Potter’s astonished, “The Gemini curse!” He has dropped the original dragon, but it’s no good: they’re already surrounded and it’s impossible to avoid further contact.
“Don’t move!” Potter yells.
As if Draco could move even if he wanted to. They’re buried waist-deep. “We’re gonna die,” he moans, helpless against the rising panic. “Potter! We’re gonna die!”
“We’re not gonna die, Malfoy,” says Potter. As if to spite him, the pile of purple plush dragons belches another dozen or so copies, rising up to their elbows. It has pushed them flush against one another, knees to the chest. “Just stay still—no no no!” His hands clamp around Draco’s wrists against the desperate attempt to try swimming out of the death trap closing in around them. “Don’t move!”
“There’s no air, Potter,” Draco splutters, fighting to get a breath in. “We’re gonna choke! We’re gonna—”
“Draco!”
The unexpected use of his first name snaps Draco out of the spiral. His vision clears. And… oh. Potter’s really fucking close. Close enough for the moist gush of his breath to caress Draco’s chin. For the staccato of his heartbeat to knock against Draco’s ribs, in concert with his own galloping pulse. Potter’s eyes are wide, but unafraid, and Draco finds he can breathe again. He swallows and nods.
“First,” Potter says, holding Draco’s gaze, “We won’t run out of air. Whoever did this, forgot to close the window.”
Draco glances at it sideways and relief floods him. It’s not the first time some enterprising teenage vigilante planted a cursed object in his path, but none of the attempts so far have been this bizarre. Or this loaded with unsubtle symbolism. The wordplay on his name. The royal purple from the Malfoy coat of arms. Gemini’s his birthsign. Not to mention his reputation as the Dark Lord’s ‘boy toy’. Someone sure did their homework. It might even be funny if it weren’t fucking horrible.
Potter’s features soften as if he heard every one of Draco’s miserable thoughts. “Second,” he says, his voice oddly breathless for someone who just established a steady supply of fresh air, “they’ve stopped multiplying.” His gaze drops. It takes Draco a moment to understand that Potter’s looking at his mouth now. And is he… blushing? Warmth spreads through Draco like a stain. Experimentally, he licks his lips, and Potter’s thick, black lashes flutter. “As long as we, er. Don’t move and touch any, er. New ones. We should be okay,” he concludes, running out of breath entirely on the last leg of it.
“Okay,” Draco repeats like an ape, because all his mental faculties are required to process the sensation of… something… poking him where his thigh meets his hip. Something hard and blunt. Something that moves, and gets even harder, when he shifts in surprise. His mouth falls open as he stares, speechless, into Potter’s eyes.
They go blind with panic.
“No no no, don’t!” Draco moans as Potter tries to make room between them, which results in about half a dozen new purple dragons popping out of thin air and raising the level of the plush pile to their shoulders. “For fuck’s sake. Stop it!”
But Potter has that mulish look about him that Draco knows all too well. Reckoning that a couple more purple dragons are better than a hundred Potter will trigger with his struggling, Draco wriggles his wrists out of Potter’s grip—and takes hold of Potter’s hands.
“Potter,” he tries. “Harry!”
Potter freezes.
“Calm down! I don’t mind. Care, I mean! I don’t care!” Fuck. He didn’t think the heat in his face could possibly intensify, but it does. His cheeks are burning.
“I’m sorry,” Potter blurts out.
Draco laughs hysterically. “It’s fine! It could happen to anyone! It’s just… excitement, right? A perfectly reasonable, life-affirming reaction to—”
He shuts up as Potter’s eyes grow as round as his glasses. Because Draco has grown hard, too.
“Right,” Potter breathes. “Excitement.”
“Yeah,” Draco breathes right back. The air has grown thick and damp between their flushed faces. Somewhere in the unseen depths of the plush pile, Potter’s sweaty hands twitch tentatively in Draco’s clammy grip, and that, of all things, is what sends his stomach somersaulting. Later, he will be unable to recall what was going through his head when he leaned down: whether he’d seen something in Potter’s dazed expression, heard a change in the breakneck pace of his breathing, sensed some minute shift of his posture; or if it was a dreamlike impulse, grasping this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to slip by unchecked.
But lean down he does. A moment more frightening than death by plush dragons stretches over several thuds of Draco’s heart before Potter angles his face up in response. Their lips meet. And when Draco opens his mouth, Potter fills it with his tongue like he’s wanted nothing else since he was eleven.
The kiss wipes all thoughts from Draco’s mind; all sense of time. The world melts away in the wet warmth of it, the roar of his pulse, the pangs going up and down between his chest and gut. They press even closer. They rub together. The ache is so acute, the edge of it so sharp, Draco might come inside his pants.
“D’you think they’re still in there?” says a familiar voice, muffled by the door and the mountain of plush.
Startled, they part and share an uncomprehending look. A thin thread of spittle lingers between their mouths like the evidence of a crime.
“They can’t have Disapparated,” says another muffled, but unmistakable voice. “This is still Hogwarts.”
“This is still Hogwarts,” mimes the first voice pettily.
“I shouldn’t have agreed to this.”
Several new plush dragons come into being, so that the pile is now pressing halfway up the slanted ceiling—because Potter has propped himself up on his toes. To kiss Draco again? Oh. No, he’s just wiping the hanging, cold thread of spittle on Draco’s cheek. How coy. Possessed of a sudden, desperate determination, Draco catches Potter’s questing lower lip between his teeth, and holds it hostage until they are kissing again. Who knows when, or if, this will ever happen again. Better make the most of it.
“D’you think we should open the door?”
This time, they part with a bit more grace, lingering. Potter looks positively dizzy. Draco pecks his lips one more time, lest the message that he very much wants this to happen again, and soon, is somehow lost on Potter in his drunken-eyed state.
Then he clears his throat. “You realize we can hear you?” he says in a ringing voice.
The replies come at the same time.
“Are you alright?” Granger calls.
“Are you decent?” is Pansy’s version.
“Yes,” Draco replies. “You can end this idiocy now, fuck you very much.”
Some sort of scramble issues from the other side of the door, with muttered, “Let me do it,” and “I’ll do it, it was my idea,” and “But my charmwork,” and, “Let go of me, you insufferable little…”
The plush pile disappears with a whoosh of displaced air. Draco and Potter stagger apart. Potter’s got his wand out, and for a bewildered moment, Draco thinks he’ll get hexed on top of everything. But Potter’s aiming at the door. The lock clicks just as one of the girls or another makes to enter.
“They don’t get to gloat,” Potter says, voice deep and raspy. He puts his wand away, wipes his mouth, then feels Draco up and down with dark, thirsty eyes, ignoring the continued bickering outside. “Not before we’re done here, anyway.”
Draco blinks at him dumbly. “What do you mean?” Because, he might mean what they came here to do in the first place, which was making a Yuletide card for Andromeda and Teddy; Potter was to do the writing, and Draco, the drawing.
“I mean…” Potter’s jaw works silently a while. “Or we can just forget this ever happened, if that’s what you want.”
So, Draco’s gesture from a minute ago was lost on Potter after all. “Is that what you want?”
“No.”
“So,” says Draco, walking up to him. He runs his hand down Potter’s front, and lower. “You meant, when we’re done, here.”
Entirely forgotten, the original purple plush dragon lies on its side by the desk, the tilted view of the room in its subtly glowing eyes largely obscured by the lid of Draco’s trunk.
“Can’t you levitate it?” Pansy whines.
“They’ll see! They’re not idiots.”
“Yes, they are.”
“This is wrong,” Hermione groans, but her neck is craning sideways for a better perspective just the same.
“I know.” Pansy grins, vulpine. “Isn’t it fun?”