Drarry One Shots

Mistletoe and Mutterings

A/N A short one (for me). Based around a single idea of Harry... well, that would be a spoiler!

Draco's POV.

***

'Shit!' I hear someone complain from around the corner.

'Fuck!' comes a second response at nearly the same time.

'At least it's you...' the first voice sounds nonchalant, though I know, from recognising it, he probably isn't on the inside. He's just too Slytherin to let go of his pride and ever reveal any anxiety or doubts.

'Well, yeah...' the girl didn't exactly sound particularly disappointed. But they'd been cautiously flirting since the beginning of the year.

'Shall we...?' he says.

'I suppose...' she answers in a carefree way.

And then there's a charged silence.

I know what's happened before I even turn the corner. Only because there are a few immature round clusters of pale leaves and tendrils of sucker roots already spreading across the upper walls and ceiling into this lower corridor of the school.

I'm not sure why people think mistletoe is a good thing, let alone romantic. Well, I do know because Granger supplemented Professor Sprout's practical lesson on dealing with the plant by giving all the year eights a lecture on its cultural history a few evenings ago. To be fair, Granger was quite interesting, only because it's all connected to sex. Did you know that the ancient Greeks referred to Mistletoe as 'oak sperm'? Apparently, according to Granger, not just the Greeks but many Pagan cultures regard the white berries as symbols of male fertility and believe the seeds resemble semen. That kind of ruins the whole sentiment of the idea.

Either way, it doesn't really make it any better. Mistletoe is a parasitic plant. Hemiparasitic—if I remember Professor Sprout's terminology correctly. It attaches to a host and then sucks the water and nutrients out of its host to feed off it and survive.

And why do people think magical mistletoe is amazing when it's a thousand times worse? When it comes to a semi-sentient Magical Mistletoe, well, it sucks the magic out of its host... and the more magic there is, the more invasive the mistletoe becomes and the quicker the mistletoe grows and spreads, finding new magic to leech out of the walls, forever growing stronger as it suffocates the life out of whatever it attaches itself too.

Bad... very bad... especially when the host is seeped in centuries of ancient and powerful magic, filled with more magic than any other building in the Magical World.

The teachers are actually quite worried because no one seems to know how the plant has been introduced to Hogwarts and even us year eights have been tasked with joining them in trying to break the plant's invasion. If it carries on growing at this rate we're going to need machetes to get to our classrooms. The lower west part of the school is beginning to look like an overgrown jungle in places because the clusters have grown so big and so frequent. It's becoming overwhelming and a little frightening, especially as this is the darkest part of the castle and where the plants are spreading rapidly into the dungeons and towards the Slytherin common room.

I grimace as I peek around the corner and down the school corridor towards the Potions classroom. There's no fucking way I'm going to try and get down that corridor. Apart from anything, two people are still snogging passionately in the middle of the walkway and it would be fairly impossible to get past. Not without brushing up against several bunches of the fucking stuff and scattering berries everywhere.

Did I mention the berries are toxic? Toxic to humans. Very toxic to cats. Which isn't so good in an establishment when at least an eighth of the residents own cats. That's at least forty cats in living Hogwarts and probably a large number of feral cats too. McGonagall has put out a decree that all cats are to be kept in the east tower of the castle, away from the infestation. No decrees for the students, just the bloody cats but that's about typical for this school.