Then Comes a Mist and a Weeping Rain (A Drarry Fanfic)

Chapter 8

It was a rainy day. The sun had hidden behind the clouds early in the morning and refused to come out ever since. It seemed it would sooner flee into the west than peek through the greyness and show its face.

The Hogwarts grounds were abandoned when Draco made his way to the broom shed. He had charmed his cloak, pulled on a pair of gloves and looked forward to cheating the rain and not let it get him wet. His own cloud floated above his head, looking small and insignificant compared to its siblings high in the sky. It hadn't rained once that day. Draco had been in such high spirits, he would have been shocked if it had.

From the moment Draco went down to have breakfast in the Great Hall, his classmates accosted him at random, demanding he made a Grumpy House badge for them. Draco wasn't sure if they merely wanted to cheer up Ernie, thought they were sufficiently irritable to belong to such a house, or simply didn't have anything better to do and laugh at. In the end, Draco decided they were simply charmed by Draco's Charmed badges. Most of them had been in the past.

They all had a good laugh when Daphne and Finnigan charmed the Tower's centaur and he refused to grant Granger passage before she answered his question ("How are you today?") with "I'm grumpy." She looked it, too, after she had argued with the centaur for good ten minutes.

The Gryffindor trio had missed most of the Grumpy House affair. They had been suspiciously absent during free periods and meals. Draco had only seen them in class. Potter glanced his way, but Granger and Weasley did not. Nonetheless, Draco wondered if they were busy discussing him, or rather the scene Weasley had stumbled on yesterday in the common room. The thought would have troubled Draco, but neither Granger nor Weasley had hexed him or glared in his general direction, so he hoped that meant they weren't planning his demise for daring to put his hands (and mouth) on Harry Potter.

Potter did seem to be in a sour mood, however. Draco needed to speak with him, but he wasn't sure how Granger and Weasley would react if he just came up to them and requested to speak to Potter alone. He ended up sending Potter an owl and asked him to meet Draco at the Quidditch pitch before supper.

Potter's Firebolt was still in the shed and Draco gloomily picked up his own broom. Then he looked up at the cloud, worried it would react to his distress, but it remained peaceful.

Draco needn't have worried at all: when he rose into the air and flew in the direction of the pitch, he spotted a lone figure sitting on the topmost bench in the southeast corner of the stands. Potter's dark head was unmistakable.

Draco looped around the pitch once and then bent low, gripping the handle tightly. He directed his broom towards Potter and then flew at him at top speed. He could see Potter grinning from afar. He didn't move or even twitch as Draco approached.

Draco took a sharp left turn at the last possible moment to avoid collision. He flew back a little and landed neatly next to Potter.

"You could have at least pretended to think I'd run you down," Draco said as he set his broom aside and sat down on the bench.

"I thought you wanted to pull me up and take me for a ride."

Draco snorted. He looked sideways at Potter, trying to determine Potter's mood without any luck. "Where's your broom?" he asked. "Did you walk up here?"

Potter shook his head. "I Apparated."

Draco stared. "You can't have!" he gasped. "That's impossible. How did you —"