19 Years (HP - Drarry)

Chapter 10: Candy-coated Lies

Friday, September 8, 2017

Harry grit his teeth as the hellions also know as the Weasley spawn finally, finally, filed out of his classroom, jostling and laughing and being generally insufferable. His eldest son was one of the worst of them. Harry shut the door behind them, slumping against it in relief. Thank fuck it was his last class of the day. Although... Harry groaned as he realized that their antics this afternoon guaranteed him yet another sleepless night dealing with the results of their pranks.

For the first time in his life, Harry found himself regretting some of his past escapades, and he whispered a quiet thanks to the professors who had kept him (mostly) safe despite his idiocies. He vowed to send McGonagall – Minerva, difficult as it was to think of her that way – a sinfully expensive gift that Christmas. She'd put up with Harry, his father (not to mention Sirius and Remus, whose memory Harry loved fiercely, while still admitting that being their professor would have been hell), and now his idiot son. He buried his face in his hands, let out a despairing groan, and slid down the door, landing with a quiet thump on the classroom floor, feeling, for the first time in his life, a real empathy for his youngest son. He'd never understood why Al was more comfortable with his books than his siblings and cousins. Now he thought he knew.

One week. He'd been a professor here for one fucking week and he was already ready to give up.

It would have been OK, he thought, if the kids had actually shown any interest in the subject he was trying to teach. But the only thing they seemed to care about was Harry Potter. No, he corrected himself, not even that. Because all that Chosen One shit he'd been at least a little prepared for. And half of Gryffindor knew him as an uncle-of-sorts anyway. No, the only thing on these kids' minds was the legendary feud between Harry Potter and his childhood nemesis and sworn enemy Draco Malfoy.

Harry felt the sudden urge to laugh, but what bubbled out of his throat was a strange half-laugh, half-sob. Draco sodding Malfoy. Would he ever be able to escape the prat? The very idea that it was Draco Malfoy who had been Harry's greatest enemy – not, you know, Voldemort – made him feel strangely empty inside. Because he hadn't thought of Malfoy as an enemy for a very long time. In fact, he admitted bitterly to himself, he wasn't sure he ever really had. He had almost looked forward to their boyhood spats. It was a form of stress relief – an "enemy" he could lash out at, when the real enemy proved out of his reach.

And now Malfoy wasn't talking to him. At all. And that was somehow worse than the verbal and physical sparring. Because he had always been absolutely certain that he mattered to Malfoy. He had felt like the most important thing in Malfoy's world. And now... now he felt like nothing at all.

Harry shook his head and forced himself onto his feet. He wasn't a teenager anymore – he needed to find somewhere a little softer to sit and think. Mope. He scowled, forced out a jagged laugh that felt like it left raw, bloody edges behind. The "great" Harry Potter, sitting on the dusty flagstones and moping over Draco sodding Malfoy. He slashed his wand through the air, with rather more force than was strictly necessary, indulging for a moment in the fantasy that it was his more troublesome students he was pointing it at, and not just the equipment that needed putting to rights.

That done, he turned with a swirl of robes that Snape would have envied, stalking off to the kitchens in search of a bottle of firewhisky. Perhaps he could skip out on dinner, have the house-elves send him a plate. He didn't think he could face Malfoy right now and make polite dinner conversation, when all he wanted was to tackle him to the ground. And if what he wished would follow that tackling was kissing and not punching, well, he just wouldn't share that last bit. With anyone. Ever.