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All Desire in a Day	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 9359 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Two—Wanting and Wishing

            “Better be Slytherin!”

            Draco shook the words out of his ears and glanced around, orienting himself. He sat—or a younger version of himself sat; he reeled as he recognized the smallness of his hands, the absurd length of his arms—at the Slytherin table, leaning forwards, and staring at Harry Potter, who had just slipped the Sorting Hat off his head and looked at it with an expression of betrayal.

            This is a different past, Draco quickly whispered to himself, securing the words within his head. It would be terribly easy to forget he had come to watch and simply slip into this persona of himself; he could already feel this younger Draco’s rising pride and triumph, and his mouth opened in a whoop of joy he hadn’t intended to make. Watching Harry walk towards the table, his hands out as if to balance himself on invisible rails, Draco-as he-was winced. You are watching this through the eyes of a different self. Don’t forget. I think you would suffer if you forgot.

            Harry ignored the Slytherins standing up and cheering for him. He turned his head instead, and Draco followed his gaze to see that he was looking at Weasley. Weasley glared, then folded his arms and turned his back.

            I knew it, Draco thought, and his own smugness glided along a different track beneath his younger self’s jealousy. I knew Weasley would give him up if he was Sorted into a different House. I wish my Harry could see this. He would know how shallow Weasley’s friendship really is then.

            “Sit here, Potter!” Draco called out, and patted the bench next to him. “Harry.” He smiled, and waited for Harry to smile back. He’d always been nicer than Draco used to give him credit for when he hated him.

            But this Harry darted a scorching glare at him, and then sat down in a different place and watched the rest of the Sorting, his back stiff. Draco frowned at his back. Then he snorted and rolled his eyes at himself, mentally, since his younger self’s did nothing but blink resentfully.

            Oh. Right. I’m being ridiculous. It’s still not long enough after the train for him to forget about Weasley and what I said then. Well, he will after we’ve been in the same House for a while.

            And so, while the Draco of this past ate his food especially neatly and laughed especially loudly with his friends to show That Potter Boy what he was missing out on, Draco leaned back in the confines of a mind that felt like his own, only shrunken a few sizes, and waited. He would see Harry change soon enough.

*

            Except he didn’t.

            It was a few weeks later, or so Draco judged from the images that had glided past in front of his eyes, fast and smooth and indistinguishable. The spell would do that, he knew, hiding ordinary moments from him because they didn’t fulfill the wish he had asked for in the ritual, and showing him the important encounters, meetings, fights.

            Harry had settled into Slytherin House, or so it seemed. He spoke to Blaise and Theodore and Millicent with bare civility, and tolerated Pansy. He and the young Draco never seemed to speak without fighting, but even that, Draco thought, was an improvement over the first night. And he could feel how calm and quiet his younger self would grow when looking up and seeing Harry close at hand.

            They had left Potions class and were walking up the corridor when Harry suddenly shouted, “Ron, wait!”

            Draco felt the body he rode in glance up, and felt the jaw drop. Yes, there was Harry, his body almost flat to the floor as he ran towards Weasley, who for some reason had turned around at the end of the Gryffindor line and curled his lip with a dreadful disdain.

            Look at him as he really is, Potter, Draco would have liked to shout back. He hates you for your House. He’s the embodiment of everything that he argues Slytherin is: arrogant and prejudiced and blind.

            But Weasley stood waiting, and said nothing until Harry caught up with him. Then he lowered his voice—as if that could hide their conversation from the ears of countless curious Slytherins—and hissed, “How can I trust you, Potter, when you’re with them?”

            “I didn’t want to be,” Harry said, and although he couldn’t see them because Harry had his back turned, Draco knew his green eyes would be flashing with furious passion. “The Sorting Hat told me I could do well in Slytherin, I begged it to put me in Gryffindor, and it put me here anyway! The whole thing’s the stupid Hat’s fault. But no one in Slytherin treats me the right way, they’re not nice to me—they want something, or they sneer about my mum and think I can’t hear–”

            Draco’s younger self practically reeled back. For once, the action of his adopted body matched Draco’s mood. He had heard the whispers, sure, but he hadn’t put any special importance on them. Slytherin House had always talked about Mudbloods and speculated like that about anyone who appeared to be half-blood.

            And he hadn’t thought Harry would notice. He’d seemed oblivious of everything except Weasley and Granger and getting in trouble their first year—the real first year, the one Draco and Harry had lived. All Draco’s efforts to make Harry see his manners and his wealth and his superior knowledge had no effect.

            “Yeah, that’s the way Slytherins are,” Weasley said, but he was giving Harry a strange look. “You swear that you didn’t want to be in there?”

            Harry shook his head hard enough to make Draco hear a little snap in his neck. “No. Why would I? I want to have friends.” His voice broke a little on that last word, and Draco heard his younger self’s laughter a second later.

            No, you idiot, he wanted to scream. Haven’t you seen his baggy clothes yet, and the way he glares at everyone and waits for the moment they turn on him? He needs friends because he’s never had any!

            But his younger self didn’t listen. Draco had learned already that he couldn’t control what that body said and did. He was here as a passenger only, a witness—

            A witness, in this case, to the moment when this Draco destroyed his own chances of ever having Harry’s friendship.

            “You think Slytherins care about that sort of thing, Potter?” Draco called out, and took an artistic moment to flip the strap of his satchel from one shoulder to the other. “We’re stronger than that! Maybe you’re right, and the Hat Sorted you wrongly after all.”

            That’s not the way it works, Draco moaned to himself as he watched Harry’s face harden and his jaw set in the stubborn expression he knew all too well, when he tried to order his Harry to attend Christmas dinner at the Manor instead of the Burrow. The Hat doesn’t make mistakes, it’s not supposed to—

            “The Hat said I could do well in Slytherin,” Harry said, and his legs were stiff and he looked like he was a bulldog, chewing on the words. “Not that I would. And with overstuffed, idiotic wankers like you for Housemates, I won’t!”

            Draco would have bowed his head and closed his eyes if he had any physicality of his own. As it was, he could feel his younger self’s racing thoughts, his shock and his astonishment driving into his brain like spears. Until Harry had rejected his hand on the train, no one had ever spoken to him with defiance—his parents had other ways of working around him—and this was far beyond that.

            And, because Draco was Draco and he knew that he’d had, at that age, only one thought when someone hurt him, he tried to get revenge.

            “Idiotic, am I?” he said, and he wasn’t looking the way Draco was at Harry’s eyes, he didn’t know his expressions, he couldn’t see his hand balling into a fist down at his side. “Well, I know more than you do. More table manners, more Potions ingredients, more about living in a family with parents—”

            “What is going on here?”

            And Professor Snape swooped around the corner, his eyes going so rapidly from one group of participants in this little drama to the next that Draco was sure he saw everything, everything that mattered. Draco slumped down against what felt like the back of the other Draco’s skull. Surely, surely this would mean the end of the confrontation, and he would manage to soothe things back into alignment, would show Harry that Slytherin was where he was meant to be.

            Then he saw the way Snape’s eyes locked on Harry. He had been too busy shaking his head over the way his Housemates interacted with Harry to remember how Snape used to hate the other boy, but there it was, the shine not dulled by Harry’s placement in his House. If anything, Draco thought suddenly, it was worse, because now Snape couldn’t pretend that all Harry’s characteristics matched the stereotype he hated; he would be forced to admit they had some things in common.

            Malfoy—Draco had decided that he might as well call the other Draco by that name that Harry even now sneered—piped up, and Draco could picture the expression on his face without a mirror, earnest and steadfast. “Oh, Professor Snape, good, you’re here! Potter was just threatening me and saying that he’s not proud to be a Slytherin!”

            Don’t fall for it, Draco cried out silently. You know the games he plays, the games his father taught him to play, and you have to see that Harry really is a Slytherin. I know you have a fine brain, sir, look past those machinations and see…

            But Snape wasn’t going to see. He gave a smile that would have done a werewolf proud and said, “So, Mr. Potter thinks that he should belong in the House of the Brave and Noble instead of the Cunning and Ambitious, does he? Tell me, Potter, where you think you belong, keeping in mind that you must have had, though I am staggered to admit it, the cleverness to fool the Sorting Hat.”

            Harry looked up at him, and Draco saw the way his hands clenched. Snape would see that and think of it as aggressiveness, the trait he probably associated the most with James Potter and the others who had bullied him; Harry had confessed, in quiet tones, what he had seen in the Professor’s memories and Pensieve, and Draco had drawn the correct conclusions from what he hadn’t heard. He stared at Harry, and saw nothing he should, and he wouldn’t understand Harry’s reactions, which came from abusive relatives. As far as Draco knew, Harry’s uncle had never hit him, but that hardly mattered. He had shouted, and he had ridiculed Harry’s intelligence and magic and everything else about him, and it wouldn’t be hard for Harry to put Snape in the same category.

            “Well, Potter?” Snape shifted a step closer. “We’re all waiting.”

            “I think I belong where I choose,” Harry said, in such level tones that Draco wouldn’t have believed he was hearing them from a boy that young, except that he knew Harry. “I wanted to be in Gryffindor. The Hat put me in Slytherin instead. But everyone whispering around me tells me that I’m no good and my mum is no good and I’m a blood traitor. They don’t want me to belong with them.” His eyes cut towards Malfoy for a moment. “Why should I stay here? I want to go to Gryffindor. I want to be re-Sorted.”

            Draco would, this time, have been trembling if he had a body. They had handled it as badly as it could be handled, Malfoy and Snape and the rest of them. They had driven Harry into making a stand, instead of coaxing him around, and when Harry had told them himself that he trusted people who were nice to him, not sarcastic. They were going to lose him.

            Snape didn’t seem to have that fear, or perhaps for him it was more in the nature of a gift, not a fear. From the side, Draco saw Snape’s nostrils flare, and he looked down at the floor for a moment. Choosing his course of action? Considering the lay of the land carefully? Draco hoped so.

            No. Hiding a smile.

            “Re-Sortings, wherever you may have heard of them, are not performed, Mr. Potter,” Snape said at last. “The Hat’s decision is final. As for the Slytherin qualities it may have seen in you, we can only hope that they manifest themselves soon.” And he turned away from Harry, spinning on his heel, to look at Malfoy and his friends. “Are you hurt?”

            It never escalated to wands, Draco thought. You must see that, Severus! Behind the man’s oblivious back, he saw Weasley holding out his hand to Harry, his face solemn. Were his lips shaping the words “I was wrong about you”? They may have been. Draco would have given another scrap of his own flesh and blood for someone in Slytherin to say that to Harry.

            “Only a little hurt, Professor Snape,” Malfoy whimpered, and the other Slytherins around him began to nod and whine and claim minor injuries. None of them saw what Draco saw, the searing glance of contempt Harry directed at them, or the way he walked on in the company of the Gryffindors. No one cared. Draco could feel the satisfaction brooding at the front of Malfoy’s brain like a bird on a nest. Later, he might want the friendship of the Boy-Who-Lived again, but for now, all he cared about was that he had won the confrontation, and convinced the professor to believe him.

            I was so blind. How did I see anything at that age?

*

            Most of the rest of the year passed in bright, still images. Harry laughing with the Gryffindors, and sitting at the Gryffindor table as often as he could get away with. Harry playing Quidditch, showing he was good at it, but refusing to try out for the Slytherin team. In fact, Snape expressly forbade him to try out, and Harry scowled as long as Snape faced him. The minute Snape turned around, Harry’s frown dropped away, and he showed a secret smile.

            Well, we taught him one thing at least, Draco thought in despair. We taught him how to lie.

            Harry came into the common room with badly-hidden wounds more than once, but by that time, Malfoy had decided to ignore him as not worthy of a pure-blood’s friendship, and most of the other Slytherins followed suit. Blaise was the only one who talked to him, and Harry would just smile and say that he had been to see Madam Pomfrey.

            Quirrell, Draco was sure. And maybe Snape was fighting Quirrell, somewhere far away from the common room and the oblivious Malfoy’s notice. But he sure as hell didn’t care about making Harry part of his House on a daily basis.

            And then came the end of the year, with the Great Hall hung with Slytherin banners and filled with loud celebration. Draco ignored the battering of Malfoy’s immature emotions and blinked at Harry sitting at his own table, watching the Gryffindor one. He and Weasley and Granger had already exchanged more than one smile, but Draco didn’t know what it meant. Surely Gryffindor couldn’t win the House Cup this year, could they? Because the points Dumbledore gave to Harry for saving the Stone would be Slytherin points.

            And sure enough, Dumbledore stood up and made his speech. But when he reached Harry, or at least the point in the speech where Draco remembered Harry being honored, Harry gave a modest little cough and raised his hand. The Headmaster paused and inclined his head as though to an equal.

            Malfoy sneered. Draco again wished for hands to grip his throat and throttle him. Those signs were ones that he should have noticed; he should have realized it would be worthwhile to cultivate the friendship of someone the Headmaster had marked as a peer. But no, Malfoy just sat there and waited for the right moment to bang his cup again.

            “My contribution was just what I had to do,” Harry said. “What I was forced against my will to do, even. I didn’t display half the bravery and friendship that other people did.” Again he smiled at Weasley and Granger. “So I ask that you don’t reward me with the points, Headmaster. Give them to the people who deserve them.”

            Snape sat in his seat, frozen with rage. Draco would have liked to close his eyes—and no, Malfoy’s rapid blinking didn’t count. Well, this was the result of Snape driving Harry away and basically declaring that he didn’t care if the boy wanted to think of himself as a Gryffindor.

            Dumbledore stayed still, his eyes bright and quiet as they searched Harry’s face. “You’re sure, Mr. Potter?” he asked.

            Harry nodded firmly. “I am.”

            And Dumbledore turned with a smile and gave the points to Gryffindor, and the banners changed to red and gold, and Malfoy muttered furiously to himself and made threats against Harry, not under his breath. Harry sat there, serenely not caring. Of course he didn’t, Draco knew; he slept with charms and wards around his bed, thanks to an incident earlier in the year when his wounds had come from some of the older Slytherin students attacking the “dirty half-blood.”

            Well, at least one thing hadn’t changed when Harry was placed in Slytherin. He was still as stubborn as hell.

            The mists of the vision closed in around Draco.

*

            ChaosLady: Thank you!

            AlterEquis: Well, I didn’t! I don’t think you could really call this a cliffhanger, could you?

            icicle: For the moment, Draco doesn’t really know what price he’ll have to pay.

            SP777: You’ll have to wait and see, won’t you?

            And not really, although that might have influenced it. I’ve had this idea in my head for a very long time.

            tiggator: Well, thank you! Let’s hope that the story continues to intrigue you.
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All Desire in a Day