Cheers, Potter.

It's a Star Trek thing.

Draco's POV

It was unsurprising that Harry had reverted into blithering idiocy at my proposition and even though I expected that reaction, it didn't irritate me any less. I was seriously reconsidering the idea and would have taken it back had I not fancied the git for the best part of 4 years.

Though, as I stood staring at his mouth opening and closing in indecision, I couldn't help but notice his slight smile, the almost unnoticeable blush on his perfect, honey brown skin, his impossibly green eyes staring back, directly into my own.

"What about Thursday?" I said, smiling at the ground having lost my earlier confidence.

"That sounds great," He replied after a moment, with more self-assurance than I felt.

"Ah bugger," he said almost immediately after, "I can't, I'm babysitting Teddy."

"Lupin?" I asked. He nodded.

"Can I... Okay, this'll sound strange but can I come with you?" My false start and tension in my voice irked me, but Potter didn't seem to notice the immovable knot in my throat.

"He's your cousin, right?" he asked, ducking slightly to get me to look up at his face. He was looking at me with a question in his eyes; not pity or hate or any of the things I had come to expect from my classmates.

"Sort of, yes," I admitted.

"Sure, you can come," he answered, "as long as you don't try to steal him from me." He had a very real frown on his face and it was infuriatingly cute.

"I wouldn't dream of it, Potter."

"And no Butterbeer or Firewhisky or alcohol of any kind," he pointed a serious finger at me.

"Butterbeer is non-alcoholic, Potter." I said, removing his finger from my direct line of vision so as to avoid the urge to punch him.

"Fine then, you're coming to meet Teddy."

~Ж~

"You're babysitting?" Blaise had been practising knotting charms on the end of his bed but drew his attention from it to look at me incredulously, eyebrows almost reaching his hairline.

"No," I insisted, "Potter is babysitting," I was speaking from my spot next to the window that looked out into the Black Lake, "I'm a... spectator."

"Why do you even want to go?" he inquired but soon thought better of it, "Never mind, time with Potter is time well spent, right?"

"No," I hissed with more malice behind it than I intended, "Teddy is my family and I'm trying to cling to as much of that as I can."

My friend realised that he had no more ground to stand on and with an indignant mutter about me always pulling the "practically-an-orphan" card, returned to his knots.

I was glad that he'd stopped pitying me. I never meant to cause it in the first place but it happened nonetheless. The truth was that I did miss my family – definitely not the toxic purist element, but the having someone around part had had its merits. Now, with my father in Azkaban and my mother in France, I didn't have anyone. The occasional correspondence I had with my mother helped to ease the hurt of it and my new found and rekindled friendships had all but quashed that feeling of alone-ness.

All of a sudden I was hit, rather solidly in the head, by a projectile piece of parchment that when I looked around, didn't seem to have a source. I opened the balled up paper and read its contents:

'Come down to the Common Room and stop sulking

~Connie'

Immediately I wished I was just a smidge more alone. But I didn't mean it.

As I reached the bottom of the stairs, I saw Connie slouching on my armchair, legs thrown over the side.

"You'll ruin the upholstery." I complained and lifted her cleanly up and away from the pillow-y masterpiece as she protested, "And I wasn't sulking."

"Aren't you going home for Christmas?" the afore-mentioned dwindling family ties meant that I, too, would be remaining at Hogwarts for the remainder of the holiday.

She shrugged, "I'd rather not spend two weeks pretending to enjoy the company of my step-dad's family, thank you very much."

"You'd prefer instead to pretend to enjoy my company?" I said with not a humourless smile.

"Precisely," she'd perfected the ability to mock my accent, and then, in her Yorkshire drawl: "Nah, you're alright, mostly."

How had I ended up with this human in my life?

"Wait," I said, realising something, "how did you get that parchment into my dorm?"

"Oh!" she replied, excited and all too happy to relieve my confusion at how a first year had so easily mastered a transportation spell of an inanimate object to a place she had never been, "I've been reading up on charms and transfiguration, initially I was looking for a way to teleport a person–"

"You were what?!"

She waved a dismissive hand, "Oh calm down, it's not like I managed it. Anyway! I came across this enchanted thing called a vanishing cabinet." She paused to see if I still followed her frantic rambling.

"I am familiar..." I replied, trying to avoid remembering what exactly I had used such an item for.

"Well, I just studied the mechanics of it, and figured out the spells used to create it and boom."

"You did that so you could send me a note."

"No, weren't you listening? I was trying to transport a person and could only just manage the note." She rolled her eyes, "You know, for someone so smart, you aren't so great at the listening."

"We really need to revisit this whole 'person teleporting' thing."

Again, she dismissed me with a wave of her hand and mumbled an explanation that made no sense to me at all: "It's a Star Trek thing."