Drarry Oneshots (𝑪𝒐𝒎𝒑𝒍𝒆𝒕𝒆)

Inside Your Mind

Top!Harry

Bottom!Draco

Author: lazywonderland ( on ao3)

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i.

For as much outraged protesting as had initially met the announcement that the eighth-years would be sharing a common room, it had taken a relatively short time for it to begin feeling normal, and even less time for the benefits to start being felt by all. Namely, that they were free of the burden of underclassmen in their living space.

It was not unheard of to see inter-house mingling just a month after term began, nor was it only Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff doing so. Dean and Seamus were consistently seen hanging around Stephen Cornfoot of Ravenclaw, while, incredibly, and to the surprise of most, Daphne Greengrass and Tracey Davis had been seen getting chummy with Lavender Brown, Parvati Patil, and their little group of friends. Neville, meanwhile, had begun spending an awful lot of time around Hannah Abbott.

There were only two people who had chosen isolation for themselves, and they were Draco Malfoy and Gregory Goyle.

So far, Harry had heard Malfoy speak one time since they'd been back at school, and that had been a weird situation in itself where he'd quietly told Goyle to back off of someone who'd been harassing him.

It was not a new thing for Goyle to act as some sort of bodyguard for Malfoy — this had been the case as long as Harry had known them, along with Crabbe, who was now of course dead — but he couldn't remember there ever having been a time when Goyle acted without instruction of some kind.

Lately, however, Malfoy didn't start fights. In fact he rarely even looked at anybody — Goyle did that for him, hulking over most students menacingly, cracking his knuckles, daring anyone with enough nerve to try something.

The thing was that, as tentatively open as everyone seemed to be about trying to make amends with the Slytherins, the courtesy didn't seem to have been extended to Malfoy. This wasn't surprising perhaps, seeing as Malfoy had been one of the more high-profile trials over the summer, not least of all because of his age, his name, and the fact that he was the only Death Eater who'd escaped a life imprisonment in Azkaban.

Not that he hadn't served some time, because he had. Two months — the same as Hagrid had done, Harry remembered.

Also, he had the Dark Mark. And after an incident right at the beginning of term where some seventh-year Slytherin boys had held him down and torn back the sleeve of his robes to expose it, no one wanted much to do with him or his perennial mark of servitude.

That was apparently when Goyle had taken it upon himself to start overtly body-guarding Malfoy wherever he went. It was just as well, Harry sometimes thought — Malfoy had come back to Hogwarts looking exactly as would be expected of a seventeen-year-old who'd spent two months in Azkaban being guarded by Dementors: frightfully thin, with hollow cheeks and dark rings around his eyes, and within them not a discernible trace of the old malicious fire Harry remembered so well.

It had been satisfying for perhaps one whole minute to think of Malfoy cowering in a cell before the idea had begun to disturb Harry thoroughly, and seeing him this way only heightened that. It would have been so much more satisfying, he often thought, to be able to hate the old Malfoy, who didn't look like a single hex might finish him off.

Clearly most people didn't feel the same way, and it was really Malfoy's good fortune that nobody seemed to fancy getting in a tussle with Goyle or Harry suspected it would have come down to a lot more than vicious verbal taunts.