xiku6.cc 
Draco looks up from his textbook, and tilts his head at the sudden topic. He is lying down on his bed, his chest on the mattress, in only his regular uniform after having thrown his robes over the chair. His hair is tousled from rolling over on the bed so much, and Harry’s been trying not to look (or stare) at him.
“We’re not exactly well-liked, Potter. You know that best.”
Harry smiles wryly, recalling the utter dislike he used to have for anybody wearing green. Then, he recalls Draco in the Manor, Narcissa in the Forest, and Snape in the Shrieking Shack. “I also know best, now, that not everything is as simple as black and white.” He glances at Draco. “I’m still alive because of a lot of Slytherins, you know.”
One edge of Draco’s lips quirk up into a small smile, as if he’s still amused that Harry’s still glorifying them. “There needs to be a villain in a narrative. That’s what we’re here for,” he murmurs, eyes traveling to his clothed arm. “That’s how the balance works.”
Harry follows his eyes with his own and takes a deep breath. “The Sorting Hat wanted to put me in Slytherin.”
Immediately, Draco’s head shoot up. He’s staring at Harry in disbelief. “What?”
Harry grins at him. “I told him I didn’t want to be put here.”
“You can choose?”
“Well, it is our choices that make us who we are.”
“Don’t pretend to be wise, Potter. It’s unbecoming.”
Harry bursts into laughter.
Draco shakes his head. “I can’t imagine you as a Slytherin.”
“Really? We would have been roommates.”
“Yeah. We would have.”
“We might not have made it through first year. You were an insufferable git back then.”
“I…” Draco starts, and then pauses. He huffs. “Am I not anymore?”
And Harry hears the hidden question and smiles at him. “Less.”
Draco’s cheeks are pink. He stands up, takes his robes from the back of his chair, and unfolds it. “Try on my clothes.”
It’s a command, not a request, and Harry stands up eagerly. If he’s being honest with himself, he just likes the thought of them trying on each other’s clothes. He shrugs off his own robes, and puts on the offered one slowly.
It smells like Draco. Like hand cream and peppermint.
He swallows thickly, and looks up to comment that they’re a bit tight, but Draco is staring at him, stunned and speechless.
Harry feels his own face heating up.
“It looks…nice on you.”
“Be careful, Malfoy. I might just consider that a compliment.”
He’s flirting, he knows, but Draco seems to realize what he had just said and his cheeks go red and Harry can’t resist.
He grabs his own robes from the bed, crosses the room, pulls at Draco’s shoulder to turn him around, and can’t help the big smile that slides its way to his lips when Draco simply lets him.
“Try mine.”
Draco makes a face. “I absolutely can’t imagine myself in Gryffindor,” he says, but he’s raising his arms, letting Harry slip the sleeves onto them.
“Me neither.”
“I can’t imagine you in Slytherin, either.”
“Really? I’m pretty cunning.” And he’s turning Draco around again, completely aware that Draco can put the robes on his own, but he’s letting him, and so Harry takes what he’s being given.
“Cunning is the last word I’ll think to describe you with.”
Harry steps in close, as close as he dares, to clasp the robes together. He feels just a little bit guilty at his ulterior motives. “You have no idea, Malfoy.”
Finally, he steps back, peruses his handiwork, and chuckles. “Red doesn’t suit you at all.”
Draco gives him a distasteful look. “It’s a garish colour,” he says, walking towards his wardrobe mirror to look at himself. He scrunches his nose up, and then sighs. He glances back at Harry through the mirror, studies him again from head to toe, and murmurs thoughtfully. “Green suits you. It matches your eyes.”
Harry grins at him. “See? I would have been a great Slytherin.”
“You don’t belong here,” Draco replies, rolling his eyes. “You’re too nice. We have a reputation to uphold.”
“Hmm, that’s true. And Snape wouldn’t have known whether to dock House points from me or give me more.”
He watches Draco laugh, lets the warmth and happiness of the moment sink in, and lets that propel him into telling another story.
The story of Severus Snape.
Chapter 4
Draco doesn’t know when he stopped trying to get Potter to leave him alone.
He just realizes that he has one day during lunch when an unfamiliar owl drops an unsuspecting letter on his lap. It’s not his first time receiving hate mail, and so he’s not really surprised when he opens it and sees one line:
Leave Harry Potter alone.
What surprises him is his reaction, his conviction, as he thinks strongly to himself, No. I don’t want to.
He looks across the room, to the Gryffindor table, where Potter sits, laughing at whatever inane joke Weasley had said. He looks happy, surrounded by his friends, with no weight of any Dark Lord pressing down on his shoulders.
And then Potter looks up, catches his eye, and then sends him the most dazzling smile, and Draco thinks, with his heart dropping to his stomach and his fist crumpling the note, No. Don’t take this away from me.
It becomes frequent. Daily, even. Since coming to Hogwarts, he had already asked the Headmistress to ban the Howlers, but if people are sending him Owls under the guise of innocent, enveloped letters, then that would definitely be harder to stop.
Instead, Draco stops reading them in the Great Hall. He pockets them, like dirty secrets, and reads them at night, before Potter comes. It hurts, of course it does, and at first, he had read them with the goal of finding out who they were from, but in the end, he realizes that he had been reading them like an act of penitence.
But it’s during one night that he opens a letter with a hidden Stinging Hex, and the pain from the welt on his wrist makes him wonder, Why am I doing this again?
