Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Wordless, Harry looked at him. It could have been a gentle gesture, this restoration of his glasses, but somehow, it wasn´t. The glasses were wet with rain anyway and slid halfway down his nose, which actually was a good thing, or he wouldn´t have been able to see at all. "I left you a letter," he began, stumbling over his words. "Didn't you read what I — "

"Shut up," interrupted Draco pleasantly, his grip tightening on Harryś shirt, and for a dizzy moment Harry was positive Draco was going to hit him, just grab him and bang his head into the wall, and his muscles tensed up hard. Draco grinned. "Scared, Potter?"

"Hit me," Harry said. "If you want to hit me, hit me. If it'll make you feel better — "

"I feel fine," Draco said. He looked down at his hand, where it rested against Harry's chest. "You always have to make such a big deal out of everything," he said, and then he did exactly the last thing Harry would ever have expected, and leaned across the small space that separated them, and kissed Harry on the mouth.

References:

"The kind of family that bought their own furniture" — Draco's family, of course, would never buy a piece of furniture, having inherited the stuff down through the generations. MP Alan Clark once famously said about fellow politician Michael Heseltine that he was a man so unaristocratic that he had "bought his own furniture"- the first time I came across a reference to this expression was in Textual Sphinx's lovely fic "To Sever the Lining From A Cloud," and it has stuck in my head since.

"I told you once you were wasting your time to barter your destiny for the friendship of a boy who would never like you." From DS6, Lucius talking to Draco: "You think I didn't see your face, back at the Mansion, when you looked at him, and at her, and her face when she looked at you both? Do you want to barter your destiny for the friendship of a boy who will never like you, and the favors of a girl who doesn't return your love? To ally yourself with people who will never regard you with anything more than suspicion and mistrust? They are not our kind of people, and they never will be. You will never belong with them." Yay for backstory continuity.

"To paraphrase Hamlet, Oedipus, Lear, and all those other guys" — Roger Zelazny, The Sign of the Unicorn.

Scrumdiddlyumptious bars: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.

Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

— Catullus

It was a hell of a kiss, too.

Not that it mattered much, in practice, although perhaps, Harry would think later, it mattered in some kind of principle. At the time he was mainly aware of shock, a jolting sort of shock that seemed to fling the breath right out of him and he was suddenly pressed back up against the wall and the wet stone ground hard into his back and he was shivering all over and he would have thought that being smashed up against a wall like this by Draco would have offered some kind of warmth but really, it didn't.

Really, it made him colder than he had imagined it was possible to be, as if not just his cloak but his skin had been stripped away, leaving him shaking there in the dark. He didn't know what to do with his hands: they banged, flat, against the wall behind him and the gritty rock scraped his skin. His knees were giving out; he could not stand up. Without Draco to hold him up he would never stand up again.

Somewhere in the back of his mind words were forming. He could do nothing to shape them or to hold them back although he knew that Draco would not hear them, was either beyond hearing them or had chosen not to listen, or there was something even more terribly wrong than that, something he was only beginning to guess at, but his mind raced ahead of his guesses and the silent cry came out without his being able to help it: Not this way, not this way -

Draco let him go and stepped back.

Harry took his hands away from the wall. They were bloody where they had scraped against the bricks. He looked down at them with a dull fascination and then at Draco. Draco was sucking his lower lip in a meditative manner and the rain dripped off his eyelashes and his mouth and he then grinned at Harry, unaffectedly. "Well, all right," he said. "If you don't want to play."

"Play?!" Harry's voice scraped out of his throat. "What the hell are you playing at?"

"So you don't want me to kiss you. What do you want?" Draco shoved a wet lock of hair behind his ear. "Help me out here. I'm creative, but nobody's that creative."

"W-what?" Harry struggled for words, lost them, inhaled another gasping breath, and realized. It was like being slapped in the face, repeatedly.

Each slap a different emotion. Realization. Shock. Anger. Disgust with himself, for being so stupid. Disappointment. "You're not Draco," he said.

The other boy cocked his blond head and smiled. "Of course I am."

"No," Harry said. His voice had hardened. He knew. If he hadn't been so shocked before, so desperate, he would have known immediately. And now that he did know he couldn't believe he'd ever been deceived, even for a moment — and he felt a sudden horrible pity for Ron, a pity mixed for the first time with understanding. To see what you wanted to see -

"No," Harry said again, more harshly. "You're not — "

"I am," said the boy, and laughed again that laugh that Harry hadn't liked.

"Well, I am until next morning, anyway. After that — "

"Shut up," Harry said. "And stop fucking smiling at me. Who are you?"

The boy frowned petulantly. "You're not allowed to ask me that." He raised his hand, and again the small spark of light lit in his palm. "You should know better." He sounded cross. "If you're going to be all weird like this, I'm going to go back inside."

A cold and venomous rage was beginning to spread through Harry's veins.

"Oh no," he said. "You aren't," and he flicked out the fingers of his right hand, whispering under his breath.

The light flew out of the boy's hand and sailed across the alley. Harry reached up and plucked it out of the air. It was a small glowing cube, about an inch across, with a wick of fiery light trapped inside it. The letters MC were marked across one side of it.

Harry glanced up at the boy, who was gaping at him in surprise. "Are these your initials?"

"N-no. Of course not. You just — how did you do that? Magic without a wand?"

"I'm a Magid," Harry said. "I thought everyone knew that."

A strange look came into the boy's eyes. He looked horrified and — afraid.

Harry saw it and hated it because even though he had no idea who he was actually talking to, those eyes were still Draco's eyes, and the face wearing that expression was still his friend's, and he felt as if someone had taken a Quidditch bat to his ribcage and was trying to batter their way through to his heart.

"A Magid?" the boy said in a half whisper. "But there are only a few — and they're registered — they never would have let you in if they knew that you — "

"Let me in where?" Harry demanded, furious. "Look, tell me what the hell is going on here or I'll break every bone in your body without touching you, I don't need a wand to hurt you, and I will if — "

"You're not," the boy said, still looking horrified. "You can't be."

"I can't be what?"

"Really him," the boy said.

"You know who I am," Harry said in a low voice. "You said my name.

Several times."

"But you can't be Harry Potter. He'd never come to a place like this."

"I didn't come here!" Harry shouted. "I told you! I was chased here! I told you, you stupid bastard! And you, poncing around, pretending to be Draco, not listening to a word I said, it would serve you goddamn right if they caught up with me and wrung your bloody lying neck!"