Rivaling Affections

Chapter 14

In the tiny flower covered cottage, nestled in the back of Harry's well-tended garden, three women plotted once again to try and steer the fates of their two favorite boys in the same direction. The tea was warm, the biscuits were a rich chocolate but the conversation was gloom ridden.

"We've really bollixed it up this time haven't we?" Minerva chastised herself and the other two women gathered in Andromeda's sitting room.

"I just don't know what went wrong. I mean, clearly we all know what went wrong, between the bungled up dinner and the fiasco afterward, but what I don't understand is why it's taking so much work in the first place to get these boy's to see what is directly in front of their noses," Narcissa huffed.

"It seems we've underestimated their tendency to lean toward blindness, perhaps they need something more... drastic to open their eyes?" Andromeda suggested.

"Something that will preferably not blow up in our faces this time," her sister warned.

"Fair enough, but what? These boy's are unpredictably daft when it comes to each other," Andromeda mused.

"Harry needs someone to take care of, someone to save. Perhaps we could do something that would trigger his innate savior complex and somehow indebt Draco to him," Minerva presented and the other women nodded thoughtfully.

"Grief usually brings people together," Andromeda offered. "I could always fake my death."

Minerva rolled her eyes and shook her head curtly. "No, there is no shortage of grief for either of them. That might just send one or both over the edge."

"Maybe just an illness then?" she suggested.

"But one of us falling ill wouldn't be enough," Narcissa noted with a wicked smile.

"Are you volunteering someone?" Andromeda asked, looking more and more curious.

"I think you know my meaning exactly," she replied, a fierce glint in her pale blue eyes and the three women began to cackle once more.

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Harry paced up and down the narrow expanse of his Hogwarts office in a funk. He'd been trying to balance work and living with a man he had immense feelings for and attempting to make things work.

He was failing miserably.

Last time he had made up his mind to place his feelings for Draco on a shelf he simply avoided the man. With both of them as professors in the same school and sleeping across the hall form one another made that difficult, especially when Minerva kept finding tasks for them that would throw him and Draco together. So instead of avoidance, he was trying to simply remind himself of all the reasons he had hated Draco as a child and all the reasons why he was a bad match.

That didn't work as well as he had hoped however, and by the end of the experiment he had reminded himself of more good than bad. If he tried to think about Draco's abhorrent use of the word 'mudblood' as a teenager, he was quickly reminded of the fact that as a professor, Draco gave detention to no less than a dozen students for using the word and made them write a three meter long parchment on why it was inappropriate and ignorant to speak that way.

With that idea going so poorly he decided to attempt to think of things about the Draco he knew now that made him all wrong for a relationship. All he could think of was the carefree smile that erupted on the man's face when they flew or watched a muggle film or the way he doted on Teddy.

At last he realized that it wasn't a matter of whether Draco was right, it was all up to what Draco thought about him as a potential match and clearly his colleague didn't see him in the same light. He just had to accept the fact and move on, perhaps find someone else to distract him until Draco moved out.