The Changing Lights by lazywonderland

chapter seven

The dull, throbbing pain in his bottom lip made it so that Draco couldn't pretend it hadn't happened.

He desperately wanted to, though. Despite the way it had felt in the moment - or perhaps because of that - he was utterly and completely distraught over that kiss. If it could even be called a kiss. For it had been a struggle, too. A fight. He'd seen the look on Potter's face afterwards, like even he hadn't been expecting it, and Draco was inclined to believe that might just be the case. None of that negated one very simple, terrifying fact, however: the instant Potter had pulled him close and smashed their mouths together - in a display that was so classic, bullheaded Potter it seemed almost to approach the limits of being cliché - Draco had responded. It had been as instinctive as throwing a punch, except instead of a bruised jaw Potter would now have a bruised mouth to match Draco's.

His stomach lurched. The scene wouldn't stop replaying in his head, and yet he couldn't seem to fully wrap his brain around the reality of it. Potter had kissed him. He had kissed Potter back. Potter. Boy bloody Wonder. Underneath the anger and the violence, it still had been a kiss, after all.

What would have happened, he wondered vaguely, if he hadn't left? Or worse - if he hadn't shoved Potter away? Might it have gone on even longer?

Wrapped up in his duvet with the curtains of his four-poster pulled shut around him, Draco shuddered. It wasn't revulsion, as he would have hoped, but cold, confused dread. For the first time since Conway's hex had forced him into an uncomfortable new body, he wasn't thinking about how hyperaware he was of the weight on his chest, or the strangeness of his center of gravity having shifted to his hips; he was instead frantically searching for a reason behind this apparent madness. For that was what it felt like, knowing Harry Potter had kissed him: utter madness. As though they'd slipped unwittingly into some distant dimension.

So far, he'd come up with only one theory: because Potter was apparently a Gryffindor right down to his toes, he'd taken a stance of nonviolence against Draco simply because he now looked like a girl. In light of that, there must have been some sort of build-up of tension. Draco imagined it as a sink filling with water each time Potter forced himself to refrain from tossing a punch in Draco's direction. Once the sink had filled up, where was there for the suppressed anger and emotion to go?

Into a terribly aggressive kiss, apparently.

Draco turned over and pulled the covers further up his body, burrowing his face into them and heaving a deep, world-weary sigh. As if things hadn't been complicated enough before. Leave it to Potter to take an impossible situation and turn it completely on its head.

And that wasn't even the worst of it. No, the part that left Draco feeling chilled right down to his bones was what he'd said just before Potter had done it. The reason he'd been trying to leave in the first place.

I don't deserve it.

"It" being Potter's forgiveness, of course.

What had possessed him to say it? No matter how long he spent thinking it over, Draco couldn't come up with an answer. Some part of him thought he didn't want an answer anyway. In fact, some part of him felt moments away from puking his guts out every time he played Potter's voice back in his head: "Maybe it's forgiveness."

A knock on his door pulled him out of his own head, and a temporal charm told him he'd been hiding out in his dorm for several hours now. He pushed aside his curtains and manually went to let Pansy in.

"You missed dinner," she said, walking past him into the room and holding out a heavy parchment envelope that was sealed with the Malfoy crest. Draco hated looking at it; the Ministry had seized most of his family's assets shortly after the war, leaving them with a manor that was nothing more than an enormous, empty corpse. A skeleton of what it had once been. The insignia seemed to mock their predicament. He could imagine his mother sitting in the bare bones of his father's once-grand office, writing to him with a Ministry official standing nearby. It made him sick to his stomach.