Chapter Two: Unconfessed

Harry did a fantastic job of ignoring Draco the next day, which really was not unusual. This time, however, it was too pointed, strangely obvious, as he didn't even look in the general direction of Draco's end of the room.

Or, at least, that's what Draco thought. It was the grudging realization that he'd just never noticed Harry's utter lack of concern until now that kept him from making a scene; being ignored by someone who should acknowledge his presence drove Draco mad. He was doing a fine job of hiding it outwardly, but any motion felt exaggerated, too loud or dramatic as he slammed scrolls down on the desk, scratched his quill furiously over parchment, put too much force into each step so he was nearly stomping about the classroom.

Harry didn't notice, or if he did, he was discreet about it.

By the end of Potions alone, Draco was about ready to scream with rage, if anything to make the other boy look up.

This is insane, he thought. There's no reason to get this bent out of shape. Potter never paid attention to you in class. This thought incensed him even more, so he added, It was one of the rules; no acknowledging each other during school hours. It was the rule that had made the majority of their sixth year slip by so uneventfully. Draco had quit tormenting Harry Potter and his Gryffindor companions, and Harry was less vindictive on the nights when they met. It worked out beautifully for both of them—Harry spent less time curbing the anger of those around him, and Draco's outward decency was mistaken for maturity.

It was that 'maturity' that prevented him from lashing out at anything with a pulse now. He saw no sense in losing house points this close to the end of the year, anyway.

As soon as class was released for the day, Draco disappeared into the Slytherin dungeons and his dormitory, determined to sit somewhere undisturbed by the presence of anyone else to think through his anger. Bitterness and resentment flooded his mind for a moment with the memory of Harry telling him he should learn to control his emotions, that he'd only grow into a bitter old man if his immediate response to personal slights was revenge. He resented the memory because of who he associated it with; he was bitter because Harry had told him this when they'd spent an evening not fooling around but fighting.

Draco knew that fight was directly his fault, and he hated to admit it. Harry had been in the storage room, waiting for his arrival, and Draco had stormed in with his robes whirling and immediately began to inform Harry at a high volume—complete with colorful language—just how awful anyone Harry associated with really was.

If Draco had fumed like that to Crabbe and Goyle, they would've nodded and added their own stupid comments and allowed Draco to rage until he either calmed down or went to bed.

Harry, on the other hand, had no qualms with pointing out—in just as loud a voice with equally expressive words—how much of a prat Draco had been, even going so far as to say Draco had instigated it all and was only pissed now because it backfired. This had outraged him further, mostly because it was true.

Draco hated having his own errors put on display, even if there was only two people in the room.

It didn't even matter anymore that Harry yelled as much as he had that night. That whole day had been one Draco wanted to forget, one of those days he wanted to label “bad” and refuse to acknowledge as having happened for the rest of his life. He'd called Granger a mudblood and McGonagall had heard him. He'd ripped into Weasley for his shabby-looking everything and Weasley had promptly gone completely red and punched Draco in the gut. He'd dropped a vial of something noxious in the Potions lab, and the substitute (damn Snape for catching a cold on THAT day, of all days) had promptly docked house points and assigned him detention before he and all the other students could escape the room. Draco had spent the detention cleaning every possible surface he could reach to remove any remaining evidence of the foul stuff, whatever it was, and the substitute had only released him at eleven that night because she'd gotten sick of listening to him whine about it.

He'd had enough time to shower and change before rushing to meet Harry, thinking he could take it all out on him and everything would be better. He'd forgotten whose friends he had been messing with, or maybe just expected sympathy, however undeserved.

Draco had forgotten, most importantly, that Harry had no reason to be patient with him.

“What makes you think you didn't deserve any of that?” Harry had snapped at him, and Draco sucked in a breath to retaliate and stopped, unable to think of anything. “You ruined class, you attempted to publicly humiliate two different people for absolutely no reason, and you have the balls to come in here and go on like you're the victim? Who do you think you're fooling, Malfoy?”

“Don't start with me, Potter, I've had a miserable day and I don't have the patience to deal with your righteous crap!”

“Your day was lovely, compared to making Hermione upset over a stupid racial issue and throwing Ron into another bout of hating his family's financial situation. Are you really so self-centered that you don't realize the effect you have on other people, or does it just not matter to you?”

Draco felt something recoil internally, like a slap on the wrist only to the inside of his ribcage, and he fish-mouthed for a response. His grey eyes flashed in anger at being so cornered—this was not how things were supposed to work.

There was a long fight between him and Harry, and Draco could no longer remember what most of it was about, though a large part of it dragged up examples from years earlier of things that no longer mattered, shouldn't have mattered. Apparently, they did; that was the night Draco began to realize there was a world beyond himself, and this had been a deeply unsettling acknowledgement.

“You need to learn how to work through your anger instead of redirecting it,” Harry had told him bluntly, when they had both stopped howling. “Or one of these days, you'll be in a life or death situation and the only people around to save you will be the ones who will want to save you the least.”

Given the circumstances of their lifetime, Draco didn't doubt Harry knew what he was talking about. Everything had been feeling darker, more foreboding, since their fourth year—the year Voldemort had returned.

Family history with the Death Eaters or not, everyone was at risk.

“What do you propose, then, Potter?” Draco had spat, resisting this change in dynamics. “Anger management? Therapy?”

“Seeing how you'd probably push the therapist into anger management for all your tirades, no,” Harry responded waspishly. “You're going to have to work through it on your own.”

“Right,” sniped Draco, “Since I know exactly what to do.”

“Oh, shut up, Draco, no one knows exactly what to do. If you think that what you're about to say will make someone really pissed, then don't say it.” Harry paused, then added pointedly, “No matter how much you think they deserve it.”

After all that, they'd both felt too awkward and too exhausted from fighting to do much else but go to bed. Draco didn't send a request to meet again for a week after that, when the guilt had finally worn off from the last attempt. He didn't want to admit it yet, but he felt bad for bringing all the baggage into that evening's round of the game.

Some inner voice that sounded vaguely like Pansy Parkinson sniped, "If you bring that much baggage into something that's nothing more than sex, you'll never be able to get a stable relationship!”

Draco heard the real Pansy Parkinson laugh uproariously at he-didn't-care-what in the common room, and he had to resist the urge to grab a pillow from his bed, run out, and smother her with it. None of this was her fault, not even the inner voice that mimicked her so well, or so he tried to reassure himself; though she might've actually said something like that at some point.

He sighed in vexation, aware that admitting Pansy had nothing to do with any of this was a sign that Potter's words had taken some effect. A year ago, he would've promptly yanked the door open and told her to shut up.

Emotions swirled in his heart and mind. Draco sat down on his bed, took a deep breath, and began to sort out his thoughts.

*

It had taken more energy than he'd cared to expend to not snap at Draco that day during classes. Harry hadn't even wanted to see him at all, and it felt like Draco was going out of his way to make sure he was noticed.

He rationally told himself that it wouldn't have made any sense to tell him to knock it off; after five and a half years, everyone else had gotten used to Draco's foul temper, and while even Ron had to admit he'd gotten better at not taking it out on people, that said nothing for inanimate objects.

Harry knew from personal experience that Draco would still take out his aggressions on the living. He'd been on the receiving end of it more times in the last eight months than he'd ever thought he would do voluntarily. Those were the only occasions he'd been willing to accommodate for Draco.

It was just one of the rules—anger was fine, as long as there were no marks of evidence later. What they did was about stress relief, not having a punching bag.

Harry didn't even know what to call what they did. Or rather, what they'd been doing up until last night, he reminded himself. It's ended now. He felt his stomach clench at the thought, and tried not to remember that his stomach had done the same thing when he told Draco they needed to stop. That clenching feeling only brought back the way it had felt, trying to pull away from Draco's mouth, from his warm body in that cold room.

That had hurt more than he wanted to admit, a pain he never thought he'd feel after being with Draco.

He tried to tell himself it didn't matter what they called it, now, since it was over and they were the only two who knew it had happened at all. Harry referenced it as a game just so he didn't have to describe it in words any bigger than that. Draco had called it 'their little game' once, and 'game' had become their fallback word. It fit; it was a word that meant using terms like 'rules' to structure what was and wasn't okay was safe. They needed that structure, though now Harry wasn't sure why; it would've been less painful if they were allowed to hit each other once in a while. It might've taken some of the emotional edge off of what they did.

But then, they hadn't really predicted the emotions.

Maybe I wouldn't have wanted to stop it if we could've hit each other once in a while, he thought idly. Hard to get emotional with that sort of treatment.

He had thought over what their game was, analyzed it into the barest details so finely that Hermione would've been proud. What he came down to was that their game was unnatural and hurtful. It wasn't right to only acknowledge someone when you wanted to get off, and it wasn't right to do what they did without any emotional attachment. For so long, the 'emotional attachment' was based in anger and frustration, which was something they could both handle; when you're a teenager, there's always something to be angry about, even if it's just being up late to cater to someone else's sexual needs.

When he caught himself pretending Malfoy did any of what he was doing out of an actual, sincere concern for him, however, Harry knew something about their arrangement had gone horribly wrong.

The first time it had happened, Draco's head had been at his crotch, his mouth firmly wrapped around Harry's dick and bobbing back and forth at a leisurely pace. Harry had simply forced the thought out of his mind, twisted his fingers into the blond hair at the back of the other boy's head and forced him to move faster.

In that same night, however, bent over Draco's lithe form, Harry's hand running over the other boy's shaft and kissing him fiercely, he heard him moan, saw his white-blond hair brush against his flushed cheek and catch in the sweat on Draco's temple and he thought You're so beautiful. Harry hadn't even realized he'd been kissing with his eyes open, unconsciously watching him fall away into ecstacy. Moment's later, their kiss broken as Draco whimpered and began to thrust upward into Harry's hand, his stomach brushing Harry's still exposed cock, something Harry couldn't put into words rose and broke in him. As he watched and felt the blond writhe beneath him, he shot his load onto Draco's stomach.

The timing was perfect; Draco lost his own seed at the same moment, making an absolute mess of his abdomen. If he noticed how much sprog covered him, or had been at all aware of Harry orgasming twice, he never said anything.

The three days between then and the next time they met had been filled by Harry distractedly trying to understand why it was so important that either of them care for the other. That wasn't what the game was about. It was about getting off through means other than actual sex; neither of them wanted to give their virginity to the other. But their game didn't have any rules on emotions other than anger and frustration—they hadn't even considered affection an option, and Harry wasn't about to lay that one on the table for discussion.

Harry didn't even want to confess it had become a problem.

He'd spent three months trying to ignore it, thinking that if he did it would fade, just like that innocent crush he'd developed on Hermione in second year. That had disappeared, they had settled into the 'friends zone', and that was fine.

With Draco, however, that wasn't a possibility. There was no room to be friends, since they didn't acknowledge each other outside of the midnight hour—sometimes a little later—and the nature of the game was purely about satiating baser instincts. Noticing that Draco smirked with the other side of his mouth when he was turned on and feeling predatory, or that his hair did the most sex-godly thing Harry had never imagined when they were fooling around, or that Draco's fingers leaving red trails as they dragged down his back or over his rump was a most delightful turn on right along with that little noise he made in the back of his throat—none of these things were supposed to happen.

Harry sighed and flopped backwards onto his bed, not really focusing on anything, reassuring himself silently that ending their game was necessary. It had stopped being just about releasing sexual tension and mental stress.

Somehow, unimaginably, he had started caring about Draco, and that was too dangerous of a territory for him to want to be in.