The Changing Lights by lazywonderland

chapter ten

As an experiment, Draco chose a spot he and Potter had never used before. An unlikely spot - something that didn't make sense, even. Somewhere Potter couldn't just guess.

It had gotten cold in the last week, icy winds gusting across Hogwarts's sloping grounds and turning piles of leaves into tornadoes of colour. Draco had always liked autumn, especially at Hogwarts; he loved the smell of decaying leaves and baking pumpkin and hot apple cider that permeated the air no matter what part of the school one found oneself. The only thing he had never been all that fond of, however, was Halloween. Not the holiday itself - as a child he'd adored the chance for a celebration - but rather the solemnity that had always descended heavily over the manor around that time. His first year at Hogwarts, Draco had been privately ecstatic to be away from home and all the strange vibes his mother and father had always been buzzing with until November got under way.

Retrospectively, Draco knew that even eleven years after the fact, Halloween night had remained synonymous with the first fall of the Dark Lord in Lucius Malfoy's eyes.

Sitting on a bench out behind greenhouse two, kept warm by a bluebell flame, Draco thought about how he now had a brand-new association with the holiday. Perhaps he'd given Potter one, too.

Potter, who kept his word and found Draco behind the greenhouse not ten minutes after he'd sat down.

Potter, whose presence alone made Draco's cheeks flood with warmth and what was surely an obvious shade of pink.

He looked about as nervous as Draco was feeling himself, hands shoved into the pockets of his denims once he'd taken off his Invisibility Cloak and - of course - ruffled out his hair in what appeared to be a completely unconscious gesture.

Draco tried very hard not to find this endearing.

"Hey," Potter said, grinning with half his mouth as he sat down on the other side of the bench. "That's a bluebell flame, isn't it? Hermione used to make those all the time in the winter, when she and Ron and I would sneak around the castle."

"It's a standard third-year charm."

"Hermione was conjuring them up in first year," Potter informed him. Draco scowled. Absolutely bloody typical.

"How is it you found me, Potter?" Draco turned to him with a raised eyebrow, entirely serious about cracking this mystery wide open once and for all. "And I want a real answer. I'm beginning to think you stalk me under that Cloak twenty-four hours a day."

"That's why you came out here, isn't it?" Potter chuckled. Draco saw nothing funny about the situation. "At first I thought you might have gone mad, but then I realized you were probably just setting me up. You're nearly as clever as Hermione sometimes."

"Nearly?" Draco spluttered, frowning deeply. "Sometimes? You know, if I were you, Potter, and I had any intention at all of having my -"

Draco's sentence was cut short by Potter's mouth. He could feel the idiot smiling into it.

"I was only taking the piss, Malfoy," Potter said against his lips. There was a teasing lilt to his voice that simultaneously enraged Draco and made him feel like falling to his knees between Potter's legs all over again. "I'll show you how I keep finding you. You have to keep it a secret, though."

Draco pulled back - reeling from the kiss, though he was disinclined to let this fact show on his face - and gave Potter a searching look.

"Why? It isn't ... Dark Magic?"

Potter's eyebrows drew together. "Of course it isn't," he said a tad sharply. The metaphysical distance between the two of them - a distance they'd so recently begun to bridge - was momentarily thrown into sharp relief. Dark and Light. Good and Evil. Everything Potter stood for versus everything Draco had been coerced into trying to stand for and failed miserably.