Drarry One Shots

Spirit Obsession (Not Possession)

A/N Contains some very strong language. And two homophobic incidences.

Please forgive typos, grammatical and punctuation errors (despite one of the themes running through the story – I will never assume to be perfect myself)!

It's longer than usual but I didn't want to split it into two parts.

***

Draco Malfoy scowled as he sat at the year-eight table in the Great Hall of Hogwarts. He was currently sitting alone.

Well, Greg and Millie were sitting opposite him but they were a bit absorbed with each other as Millie decided she needed to handfeed her 'Little Cupcake' with tiny triangles of toast and strawberry jam so they didn't count as company. Draco refused to accept he was third-wheeling because that would suggest his presence was superfluous to requirements and that was never the case.

Therefore, he was sitting alone, or virtually as good as sitting alone. Mostly because it was 8.30am on a Saturday morning and the rest of the year eights were lazy sods. There were a few students from the other years around and a spattering of staff, including the oldest Weasley sibling who had been recruited to take over the ill-fated DADA professorial role but otherwise the Great Hall was blissfully quiet.

The reason for his scowl stared straight back at him from the front page of the Daily Prophet, which a Delivery Owl had just dropped into his barely-started bowl of steaming porridge and honey, ruining both the paper and his hearty hot breakfast that the freezing November morning called for.

With porridge pushed aside and with newspaper dried and scarcely retrieved from a papier-mâché disaster, Draco had unfurled the paper to be practically smacked in the face by the huge headline that took up the whole front page:

THE GAY WHO LIVED!!!! EXCLUSIVE TELL-ALL!!!! FROM ONE OF THE CHOSEN ONE'S EX-LOVERS!!!!
(More details of the sordid BOY-ON-BOY romp with the MASTER OF DEATH on page 3)

Because that 'news' obviously needed all those ridiculous pseudonyms and twelve exclamation marks. Rita Skeeter had surpassed herself, again, and clearly couldn't abide by the limits of extreme punctuation even if she were taken to court and sentenced by it.

And yes, it was a terrible pun but his lips still twitched slightly.

Aside from the excess conveyance of emphatic declaration, Draco was surprised, mostly because Potter clearly wasn't out. He wondered if Granger and the Weasley knew. No one else in the year seemed to know judging by the comments and teasing Potter got about his dating life, about the Weaslette even though the two had clearly split up yonks ago, and the general attempts of either seduction, or setting him up with their female friend/sister/cousin/mother (*insert connection as appropriate).

With the benefit of hindsight, Potter had never shown an inkling of interest in anyone who'd offered themselves on a plate to him. He always looked slightly sick.

Evidently that bitch Skeeter was pushing the poor sod right out of the closet and under a rainbow-bedecked Knight Bus after conducting a sleazy interview with some scumbag who'd decided to sell his story about how he and Potter had hooked up in a nightclub over the summer. On Potter's eighteenth birthday, no less. There was a grainy photograph of Potter at the Memorial Ceremony (*a most insensitive choice but there's no accounting for sensitivity in the Press these days). And said scumbag claimed to be the one who popped the Chosen One's gay cherry. He then proceeded to make all sorts of outrageous claims about how Potter was hung like a centaur and the article went into graphic detail about all sorts of depraved acts that the two had purportedly got up to in an all-night sex romp.