new: Promiscuous Behavior Unbecoming

This one's for glitterdemon, just for the hell of it. Also, because I badly wanted to just finish something, for once, hence this two day ficlet entry in The Mandy Moore Sectional I Love Sluts Challenge, a challenge I made up just for myself. Because I love Sluts, obviously. And now, the Bandit has made General Tsao's chicken, and I'm going to go eat it.



Promiscuous Behavior Unbecoming
by Helen

"Fifteen from Hufflepuff for loitering, fifty in total from Ravenclaw for dangerous contraband, and seventy-five from Gryffindor because Potter's a slut--"
"Malfoy--" Weasley says, but he doesn’t sound angry; he never sounds angry.
"Seventy five from Gryffindor for promiscuous behavior unbecoming a Hogwarts student," Draco amends.
"I think that's steep," Weasley says, drumming his quill against the desk.
"Six separate incidents in fourteen days," Draco says. "In all but one he was out of bounds, in all but two he was out after curfew, and--"

Weasley nods imperceptibly and Draco stops talking. Ava and Christopher, the year prior, held all prefect meetings – except the Friday after the final battle when no one had felt much like it, and they’d postponed to Monday - in the cozy parlor at the bottom of Hufflepuff tower, with tea and snacks, but Ron meets each prefect alone, twice a month, as if it is understood that their uneven numbers are less apparent in the office that once held two desks, shoved up against opposite walls, one of which has been quietly replaced with a shabby couch in Gryffindor colors. Ron doesn’t wear his head boy badge, but he wears Hermione’s, now and again, keeps it polished like new.

No one has tried to name a replacement for Head Girl.

Voldemort is dead beyond rising eight months since, and Lucius Malfoy with him, and Draco has long since been exonerated for his crimes, which, by the Christmas of sixth year, consisted primarily of hacking a divot of flesh twice the size of a snitch out of his forearm, stumbling blindly into Professor McGonagall’s office to say that they were planning something, and waking up in the hospital wing in time to have Snape tell him he was a damn fool.

“Points stand?” Draco says.
“yeah,” Weasley says. The first meeting, Draco had taken a justified twenty points off Gryffindor for public indecency, and Weasley knocked it to five, gave him a favoritism warning and cut the meeting short, but these days he usually nods and gets to the next agenda item. The second years have nightmares, the fifth year Ravenclaws have formed some kind of plagiarism ring, Mark Elkins is knocking around his girlfriend, the usual business. Draco doesn’t know how Weasley is with the other prefects, and he doesn’t ask.

In the Slytherin locker room and common room they say Potter’s a whore, and the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws call it 'troubled'. As far as Draco knows, the Gryffindors ignore it altogether, as much as it’s possible to ignore the fact that Potter is good for a fuck, anytime, and appears to be neither picky nor squeamish about his partners.

Potter doesn’t play Quidditch anymore, and Ginny Weasley lost her left arm above the elbow, Granger is dead, Gryffindor’s house points are in the toilet, constantly, Draco doesn’t think Weasley sleeps more than four hours a night, and has, more than once, seen him coming out of his office in the morning, tugging rumpled robes straight. He’s aware that it should give him more pleasure than it does.

“You should maybe talk to him,” Draco says, in October.
“Who?” Ron says.
“Potter,” Draco says, enunciating. “He’d listen to you.”
"No," Weasley says, after a moment. "He wouldn't.”
“but--“
“Are you--giving me advice?” Weasley says. Draco has noticed that Weasley has a habit of staring blankly, straight ahead, when he thinks no one is looking at him, but, for once he’s peering at Draco with something like curiosity in his thin face.
“No,” Draco says.

Pansy skives duties, and the two Ravenclaw prefects can be relied on to run study groups and keep the library silent, but nothing else. The Hufflepuffs are decent, but no one is afraid of anyone but Weasley.

*

"Do you know how many house points you've lost?" he says, in November, catching Harry at the tail end of the Hogsmeade weekend, his knees wet with slush, the man he was leaning up against shrugging, and moving off deeper into the alley.
"No,” Potter says, zipping and fastening his trousers, nonchalantly. His lips twitch. “I bet you do, though.”
"Never mind," Draco says. "Fifteen points, which I'm sure the rest of your house will appreciate."
"They owe me," Harry says, and flashes him a hard, ugly grin, before leaving him alone in the alley.

Draco remembers when he used to wish Potter would die, in as painful and humiliating a way as possible, and, later, when he used to be petrified that Potter might die, that his changing sides had been the death knell for Potter.

He had been relieved to discover that he wasn’t very important, in the scheme of things.

*

Draco barely knew his parents, but he knows they were very much in love, so much so that he was a strange intrusion in their lives, unwelcome and sullen and not quite right. He misses them in awful, strange waves that come down over him without warning.

Luna Lovegood does all the Gryffindor sweeps; Draco doesn’t think Ron’s been inside Gryffindor Tower since the term began.

Draco wears his sleeves rolled up, and everyone stares at the lumpen scar on his arm.
“There’s something you might have heard of,” Snape had sneered at him in the hospital wing, the blood from his arm etching a death’s head pattern on his bandage. “We call it magic, and it’s not bound to anything so superficial as your flesh.”
“Really,” he’d managed, before the pain had taken him. Potter would have managed a whole sentence, no doubt.

He wonders what it would be like to fuck Ginny Weasley, wonders what her arm looks like under her shirt, wonders what her tits look like. Ron stares at his scar just like everyone else does, which is a surprise; he can’t get used to Weasley looking at him at all. Ron turns over the first parchment and stares at it, and Draco lifts his own notes, ready to discuss the current ghost problem. There are too many of them, haunting the dormitories, turning showers to ice, leaving bleeding messages in mirrors.
“Guess that hurt,” Ron says, and makes a vague gesture towards his own arm.
“I took a potion beforehand,” Draco admits.

*

“Spring in the air up there?” an overly jovial shopkeeper asks him when he goes to buy new ink and quills.
“It’s January,” he says.
“I know what you young people get up to, though, with the war done, now, and You-Know-Who defeated--"
“Right,” Draco says, although the only person he knows is getting regularly laid is Potter, and whoever meets him up in the classrooms and hallways after curfew – which, by now, might be a sizeable percentage of Hogwarts, anyhow. He isn’t. Weasley isn’t.

“Quidditch this Saturday,” he says to Weasley, for something to say.
“Yeah, great," Weasley says flatly.
“There’s a scout, maybe, coming out,” Draco says. “I heard.”
“You’re good enough,” Weasley says, and almost smiles.
“I meant you,” Draco says. No one’s scored a goal on Weasley in two years. “I thought--“
“I don’t. That’s not what I want,” Weasley says.
“I didn’t know.”

Snape’s dead. McGonagall’s dead. Dumbledore’s dead. The school runs on a skeleton crew of teachers and seventh years precepting first and second year classes. Weasley has transfig and Draco took arithmancy; they offered Defense to Potter, but it’s Longbottom who teaches it.
“They wanted a Gryffindor,” Weasley said, early on, as though he thought Draco had any inclination to spent six hours a week discussing dark arts with eleven year olds. It’s difficult not to remember how much easier this might be with Granger to barge around officiously and do three times the work of anyone else, but Draco does the best he can.

He used to have nightmares about waking up a muggle, wake up terrified, twisted in his sheets, but lately he thinks it might not be so bad, if he never had to look at anyone he knew again.

*

Potter catches up with him after Slytherin trounces Gryffindor in Quidditch, again; no one can get the Quaffle past Weasley, but their seeker is a third year who comes up to Draco’s elbow, and there’s not a lot of victory in winning the fourth straight match, 160-30. When Potter shoves him back against the wall, his hand hooked in Draco’s collar, knuckles brushing bare skin, it reminds him so fiercely of what ought to be the natural order of things that he doesn’t protest, not when his head hits the wall, and not when Potter’s hand gentles, runs down his cheek, his chest.

"Tired of being a virgin yet?" he says, slips his hand beneath Draco’s jersey, along the skin of his waist, catches Draco’s unresisting hand and brings it to the front of his trousers, shapes his fingers around his cock. Potter’s bigger than he is, but oddly gentle, even when he bites Draco’s neck hard enough to draw blood, even when he slides his leg between Draco’s thighs, and Draco jerks helplessly against him.
“You think I don’t see you,” Potter says, after, smearing his hand almost thoughtfully across Draco’s game jersey. Draco says nothing.
“He’ll never look at you. He’ll never touch you,” Potter says. “He loves Hermione.”

*

Weasley catches him outside the Great Hall just before dinner.
"What did he do?" he says.
"Nothing. I don't know what you're--"
Weasley’s face is weary, and he’s standing closely enough to Draco to be able to talk without anyone overhearing, closely enough the Draco can smell that he’s freshly showered, his tie loose and careless around his neck.
"Did he hurt you?"
"Just a little slap and tickle," Draco says faintly. Weasley stares at him for a moment and then, to Draco’s astonishment, nods.
“All right.”
“I wasn’t,” Draco hesitates. “I wasn’t taking advantage or--“
Weasley laughs; it is not unlike Potter’s laugh, dry and strange. “I know,” he says.
“I didn’t want you to think--“
"If you're looking for my fucking permission to nail him, don't bother--"
"What? I don't--I don't want to do anything with him," Draco says. "I don't even like him. It’s you who should be--“
"Not my type," Weasley says, his voice brusque.
“Oh.”

The last stragglers pass them, rushing to dinner, and then it’s quiet in the corridor, empty. Weasley squints at him, and Draco wonders, not for the first time, if he needs glasses.
“You’ll miss dinner,” Draco says, but Ron leans down and catches his arm, just below his scar, closing his fingers across the skin on the inside of Draco’s wrist, the calloused edge of his thumb tracing slowly across his skin. They stand like that for an unconscionably long time. Draco takes a sharp breath, unable to think of anything to say, and finally Ron bends down quickly and presses a kiss against the corner of his mouth.
"Taking Potter's seconds, now?" Draco says, forcing a grin.
"I take what I get," Weasley says.