分卷阅读23（1 / 2）

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?

And it’s when Potter comes in, stumbles on him sitting on his bed with a mess of opened letters scattered around him and cradling his wrist that he remembers what Potter had said: You can ask for help, you know.