A Saviour Uncaused (Harry Potter, Drarry)

The Protector's Kiss

Chapter 18

The Protector’s Kiss

Harry had fantasised about bunking class before, and it was most often for History of Magic during which he had to suffer Professor Binns’ soporific drone. But even though it was not him but Draco foregoing the lesson, the daring streak it required to do it was too much for Harry. The incredibly vivid expression of outrage and revenge on Hermione’s face in his mind caused a vicarious anxiety in him on Draco’s behalf.

“Granted knowing about Goblin wars isn’t a lot helpful for your working life but are you going to bunk the other lessons as well?”

“Why not?” Draco said as they settled at a workstation in the Slytherin common room. “My priorities have changed.”

“Explain,” Harry said as he threw his Invisibility Cloak onto the table. Having spent almost a fortnight dogging a Slytherin, he was long used to the nauseatingly fraternal emerald hue of the flames in the fireplace, the winding snake-shaped black rails of the staircase leading up to the dormitories and the green-tinged light in the common room due to the fact that the dungeons were located beneath the Black Lake. A few seconds ago he had shocked Draco by offering the password to the portrait before the Slytherin could.

“Why bother with school if I’m going to die?”

Harry sighed. “You’re not going to die because you’re going to listen to me for once and get under Dumbledore’s protection.”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore, my head is going to blow,” Draco moaned, bracing his brow against the palm of his hand and sighing.

“Fine,” said Harry, who had also had quite enough of death imagery.

A long spell of silence passed them. Having experienced these as well with Blaise, Harry was also used to the uncomfortable feeling of knowing he was an unwelcome intrusion to someone’s space, but the feeling was all the more intense with Draco; Harry was at the source of the matter.

“What I still don’t get,” Draco said without looking up from the same notes he had been reading beneath the beech tree, “and sounds like the most ludicrous and impossible thing ever, is your claim that we… started to like each other… in that way.”

“I’m with you; it still beats me.”

“Just—explain to me step by step how it happened? I mean—I mean, there’s just no way…”

“Well,” began Harry extremely uncomfortably; he had taken the developments between him and the Draco of the first timeline he had visited for granted. They had been gradual, natural and self-explanatory. “Basically it started out with you being amazed by me--”

“I doubt it,” interjected Draco in a rather defensive tone.

“It was a whole lot of factors, to be honest,” Harry continued with forced nonchalance. “Basically our… attraction…”

“Oh Merlin, you can stop there. Forget I asked,” Draco moaned, covering his head in his hands.

“Bloody hell, I’m going to finish the sentence whether you like it or not,” Harry snapped. He was annoyed that he had to defend his assertion that he and Draco had begun to feel an attraction for each other to the very person who had formed half of that bond. “Basically we had all the stuff to fall in love with each other from the very beginning!”

An expression of horror exploded on Draco’s face. “Potter!” he groaned pleadingly for him to stop.

“I mean think about it!” Harry plunged on. “Two boys, both from different worlds and on opposites sides of the battlefield, going at each other from the very first day they meet each other. Most people would say that’s simply sexual tension playing out.”

“Someone like a moist fangirl! That’s how girls think, Potter! Do you seriously think—I mean, we were eleven years old! How can any two people so young fall in love with each other? In days no less?”

Harry exhaled forcefully, irritated. “Fine then. Let me show you, shall I?” He extracted the Time-Turner from his pocket, at which point Draco’s bulging grey eyes moved to it.

“What? What are you doing?”

“Showing you you and me together.”

“Fucking Merlin, Potter, we don’t… you know…?”

Harry was biting his lower lip as he untangled the very fine gold chain linked to the hourglasses. “What?” he said distractedly before he looked up and his face flushed crimson. “No! I mean, no, we don’t – I was joking about that, by the way.”

Draco did not looked relieved much and quietly eyed the Time-Turner in Harry’s hands.

“This way,” said Harry, “I can kill two birds with one stone: I can show you what, you know, happens between us and how you get killed… Do you want to see it?”

Draco shook himself out of his stupor. “No,” he said. “Not really. It’s Blaise, right?”

“Yeah… but… So you do believe me?”

Draco’s face closed off. “Just hurry up and show me how we allegedly start to like each other ’cause Merlin knows I need the amusement right now.”

“You asked for it,” Harry chirped. “Okay, hang onto me… Argh, just stick at least one body part on me so that you don’t get left behind. You know, it’s amazing you’re trying to be so straight when you were the one who had his hand on my chest for no reason at all as I was trying to explain why you can’t make me out into a hero just because I faced Voldemort three times and survived.”

“I presume by ‘straight’ you mean normal. You can’t change normal; I haven’t heard of peopling turning gay. Not that I hear much of these things anyway, they’re very rare these gays. It just doesn’t make sense, Potter. I presume you were normal before--”

“I’d really appreciate it if you used the word ‘straight.’”

“I presume you had normalness when we met, as did I. So why all of a sudden we change? You can’t change the two... personalities.”

Harry had to fight hard to stop himself from correcting Draco about the erroneous labels he was using to describe homosexual people and their orientations – otherwise he would seem to know suspiciously too much about such matters. In fact, he did not know much beyond what he knew from the Muggle world. But the Wizarding world’s vocabulary for sexual identity issues was shockingly underdeveloped. Why would someone choose to be gay if he knew he would endure punishment from Dudley and his gang?

“Let’s just stop talking and let the truth speak for itself, all right?” Harry resolved.

“You mean your own truth,” Draco rebutted. “It was you who chose to go to that timeline and change it with your presence.”

“What difference does that make?”

“Well, your being in that alternate timeline changes things in it, doesn’t it? I presume you tried to convince me of the same thing you did today of joining Dumbledore, so I didn’t behave the way I would have had you not done so.”

“It didn’t matter what I said or did to you – you didn’t listen to me, it didn’t change anything – that’s why I’m here now.”

“Still, that me knows that you tried to convert me into a Lighter. He has that knowledge; he knows about you and what you tried to do, so he isn’t the same person, he can’t ever be.”

Harry grudgingly worked through the logic of Draco’s proposition and found it, irritatingly, sound.

“So because you changed that timeline very uniquely and you are the cause of its unique trajectory now and because it will never interfere with any other timeline, it’s your truth and yours only. It effectively only happened to you because you’ve stepped out of it.”

Harry chewed carefully on this next piece of argument. His cheeks were burning from getting tangled in the logical nuances. But after less time than his brain actually needed to complete its work, he bleated, “So? It doesn’t change anything.”

He flew through the memories of his first timeline for any indications of Draco’s I. Q. and, annoyingly, arrived at the high marks Draco claimed to achieve in his schoolwork. If Draco was so smart, why does he not save himself?

“Even so,” Harry countered after Draco raised his eyebrows, “the Draco that I found and can always find is, before I do anything, the same in every timeline, right?”

Draco thought for a second and appeared reluctant to respond. “That could be conceivably possible,” he conceded haughtily.

“It is,” Harry asserted, reinvigorated. “You have to branch out. Every different thing that Draco can do branches out from a point where there is no difference in all his possible future actions. Therefore,” Harry concluded with immense relish, tempted to hold an index up, “because you’re the same Draco in every timeline before I interfere in it, whatever way I influence you, you act the same way you would act in any timeline. Therefore Draco acts like any and all possible Dracos, including this one standing in front of me.”

“Can you refrain from abusing my name please?” Draco asked feebly.

“Therefore,” Harry stressed, punctuating the word as though to stab it into the chest of the other boy, “this Draco could ‘conceivably’ fall in love with me.”

Draco looked away quickly before he could present a flush. “You know, you should really warn people when you say un-normal things like that.”

“That’s not even a word – that’s just to—it’s for the sake of being vicious.”

“Can you just show me already? Stop talking and put up.”

“Be my guest,” Harry sang. “I think we have to do it like this: come closer. Maybe we should stand up.” They did so. Harry grabbed his Invisibility Cloak and hung it around his neck underneath the Time-Turner while Draco cautiously drew nearer towards him. The Gryffindor looped the fine gold chain around the other boy so that it hung around both their necks. “Okay,” Harry whispered, thinking hard as he stared at the three hourglasses. “What do you want to see first?”

“The first time there is even the tiniest hint of my liking you. I don’t need to see the you liking me part because we’ve already established you’re a faggot.”

“Oi! I was perfectly straight before you came along!” Harry protested.

Draco evidently could not help the chuckle that escaped him. He quickly coughed, cleared his throat and resumed a serious expression as he appraised what Harry was holding in his hands. Harry growled and turned back to the Time-Turner; he had to do the temporal calculations all over again in his head.

“Okay… um… let’s see… The first time there was any hint, yeah? Um… Oh! Got it! Oh my God, you’re gonna love this…”

A blond eyebrow shot up a pale forehead. “That was totally so something I could have heard a girl say.”

“That was totally so something I could have heard a faggot say,” Harry countered.

Draco’s jaw dropped but he was soundly silenced. Harry, immensely satisfied with his track record in wit so far, made the calculations quietly in his head, turning one hourglass after the other gingerly, biting his lower lip again, until suddenly there was a flash of light. Draco started into him as they rushed upwards towards a sky made of liquid sun. The inside of their eyelids burned so bright the light threatened to blind them with their eyes closed, but a second later it receded. Like a widening puddle the floor melted into existence, walls lengthened from the ceiling, a bed stretched itself into view and the armoire and escritoire redrew themselves whole. They had arrived in Draco’s room.

“Okay, we’re going to arrive in a few minutes,” Harry explained. “Get under here.” He took the Invisibility Cloak off his neck, spread it open and threw it on the both of them. He pulled them back towards the corner behind them so they could not interrupt the movements their doppelgangers would make in the room – at least as far as he could remember them.

“This is brilliant!” Draco praised quietly. “Wow, we’re going to see you and me going about in my room…”

“Yeah,” Harry answered.

Draco nodded as he looked around his room. “It feels kind of good not thinking about my task… even if I have to endure the likes of you.” His eyes roamed around the room until they landed on the bottle of cologne on the escritoire.

“You’re welcome,” Harry snorted. “Okay, shush: can you hear them? Here they come.”

The footfalls drew nearer until there was a click at the door. It swiveled open and admitted Draco wearing a beige long-sleeved Houdani rugby jersey, dark-blue Herringbone twill pants and black Karvela suede slip-ons. Harry followed him inside in the same dress as that of the Harry underneath the Invisibility Cloak: dark-green “H” jersey, frayed jeans and a pair of beaten trainers. The concealed Draco turned his head slightly to attempt a subtle once-over on Harry’s clothes; the Slytherin’s nostrils swelled. Harry flushed an ugly puce and rigidly faced the scene ahead.

“Nice posy you got here, Malfoy,” Harry praised, smiling around the room. He came near the two boys beneath the Invisibility Cloak as he moved past and dropped his Firebolt on beside Draco’s trunk next to the bedside table.

Draco sat in his chair and faced Harry, who had lowered himself on the emerald bed. “So,” said the Slytherin vaguely.