Part 3

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Part Three

The lunches improve his job only fractionally. Instead of spending the majority of his time in the archives now, Malfoy seems to enjoy finding new and interesting and sometimes disgusting things for him to do, claiming that obviously, with all of Harry's bitching, he's finding the filing too difficult and needs something a bit more on his level. Harry just takes this all in stride, because he prefers almost anything to the archives, and also because Malfoy's much hotter than Ginny is when bossing him around.

He's turned the whole awkward, stupid attraction to Malfoy into sort of a routine: start out the morning drinking coffee at Station One with Ginny and Zacharias, watch Malfoy prowling along the floor snapping at Trainees that aren't entirely awake yet. Lob out a few innuendos and some stilted flirting as Malfoy gives him an assignment and ignores it all pointedly. Try for any excuse to get to watch rounds. Spend lunch alternately stabbing Luna Lovegood with a fork in his mind and trying to find some sort of hint of interest in Malfoy's barrage of insults and general grumpiness. Come in the next morning and repeat.

Hermione asks him one night, amidst color-coded lesson plans and self-packing, nearly prepared briefcases if he's interested in anybody at work. "Not really," he lies, knowing that admitting this sort of thing to her is just like sending Draco a first class, urgent Owl about it.

"Haven't you met anybody new?" Hermione wants to know, and he shrugs and she scowls. "Well, what about Zacharias? He's quite fit, though a bit of a prat, I suppose, but we've been trying to get him laid for quite a while now."

"You did not just try to pimp out Zacharias Smith. To me." Harry thinks that Malfoy would be proud of the Shock and Outrage he manages to convey in his voice.

Hermione just waves at him impatiently, letting loose with some of Smith's high points, and suddenly the last two weeks in August cannot go fast enough; he can't wait for Hermione to go back to work.

He's resigned himself quite well to his secret lust for Malfoy as time slips by, and his initial 200 hours are going by faster and faster in a haze of green children, mutant dust bunnies, and Watching Malfoy. He justifies it nicely by citing Malfoy's physical features that have improved with age: more muscle definition, a more confident walk, the eyes that suddenly seem much more bright and alert than years ago. He's reconciling Adult Malfoy with Kid Malfoy, who had been good-looking in his right, and decides it's mostly the progression that he finds desirable.

And if Malfoy is sometimes funny and endearing and rather cute when being a grump, well, that doesn't matter. Harry really just wants his body.

And then, of course, Malfoy has to ruin it all. Because that's what he does.

It starts out as a perfectly normal Monday morning—everyone looks slightly dead and is wandering around the ward, acting like they want to kill each other. Ginny, in particular, is in a bad mood, because she had accidently scheduled herself a double shift the night before and is going on very little sleep. Zacharias is pissed off because Malfoy had caught him napping in an empty room in the children's ward and reamed him out in front of a lounge full of giggling patients. And Malfoy is pissed off because he's always pissed off.

Harry is quietly yawning his way through redoing the Refilling charms on a bunch of water pitchers that the food staff had forgotten about over the weekend. Ginny is muttering to herself at her desk below him, and Malfoy is chastising a junior Healer for performing a Warming charm on a patient with a severe fever. Everyone stops when a loud, echoing voice suddenly floats through the ward.

"Paging Nurse Weasley to Emergency, Nurse Weasley to Emergency..." says the voice, and Harry jumps and looks up but can see no source.

"What was—" he starts, but Ginny has gone pale and is staring at Malfoy, who looks just as stricken.

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