Chapter Text
The breathing caught his attention.
Carefully controlled inhales and exhales behind the curtain, fluttering the velvet, standing apart from all the slow, lazy snores in the rest of the room. And Neville had absolutely no idea what came over him when he looked over his shoulder, checked Pomfrey wasn’t still there, and then pulled back the fabric with a thrillingly steady hand.
Draco Malfoy looked as if his body didn’t exist. As if he was simply made up of wool sheets and midnight shadows.
A pulse of fear lanced through Neville’s chest. His palm turned numb.
Malfoy could scream at him. Could hiss in his face. Could whip out his wand and kill Neville instantly in a puff of emerald smoke. Could ask Neville how his parents were doing since their meeting with Malfoy’s lovely Aunt. Demand to know how many empty gum wrappers Neville had saved up in a drawer.
(No, no. Malfoy didn’t know about that. Nobody did.)
Malfoy’s back was to him. Neville briefly wondered if maybe he was looking down at another pale blonde head, if he didn’t have anything to be worried about except mild embarrassment in front of a Hufflepuff, caught snooping. But then:
“I told you, I don’t need any more fucking calming draught,” Malfoy hissed.
Neville jumped, took a silent step backward. Stopped breathing. Malfoy’s voice had sounded like the river rocks by the lake when a storm was rolling in. Like thestral bones rattling, creaking together.
The wool blanket slipped down to reveal a bony shoulder, pale from the moonlight flooding in through the highest windows. Neville wondered if Malfoy had always been that pinprick thin. If his expensive robes made him look more filled out in class, in the halls.
Neville felt as if he could physically crush him with just the pressure of his hand, just the simple weight of his arm, and a shameful blush spread up his neck at the thought.
“Longbottom can’t stop stuffing his face for long enough to listen to the correct password,” Malfoy had announced to half the Great Hall back in third year. It was right after Neville had received his howler from his Gran over Black getting into the castle. Neville remembered sitting there in that silent moment after, waiting for Harry or Ron or someone to shout something equally nasty back at Malfoy. After all, Neville had banished a boggart, had survived another year of Professor Snape, had earned points for Gryffindor. And Malfoy was . . . Malfoy.
He’d waited, but nobody had. He remembered the feeling of all eyes on him as he stared down at his plate and put the next bite of food in his mouth.
A sudden ripple of goosebumps flushed up Malfoy’s neck.
Neville wondered why Malfoy was shirtless. Why his breathing, out of all the wheezing and coughs in the hospital wing, had caused Neville to pull back the curtain. Why Neville had even bloody done that in the first place when he was only here to get Pomfrey’s extra gauze for Sprout, since he was helping her plant midnight-blooming varieties for extra credit.
“Probably you were supposed to check in on someone there six months ago and you’ve only now remembered,” one of his classmates would say. “Maybe you forgot you were at school and not at home with your Gran in her fancy bed.” “Maybe you’re just too stupid to find the door back out to the hall.”
All of those were probably correct. How should Neville know if they weren’t.
A sharp sniff brought his eyes back down to the nape of Malfoy’s neck. His hair looked damp with sweat.
“I said go,” Malfoy said, but it came out like a wet choke.
The indignity of it all was suddenly so overwhelming that Neville almost apologized out loud.
(Someone had probably told him once that his voice was high and squeaky enough to sound like Madam Pomfrey’s anyway. Maybe Malfoy wouldn’t even notice.)
But he clenched his fist so he wouldn’t reach down and pull the blanket back up, swallowing Malfoy’s pale, naked shoulder with dark wool. Neville hated the sight of it—the bones so close to the surface of milky-blue skin—as if Malfoy’s exposed shoulder was suddenly the most shameful blotch on Slytherin House, stained red with ink like Snape’s handed back essays.
As if something like that should make Neville Longbottom, of the House of Gryffindor, clap and cheer.
But Draco Malfoy belonged in woven robes and expensive silks and fine stitching. It was an undeniable truth; truer than lumos bringing light. Truer than Neville Longbottom forgetting a password.
And Neville hated the fact that here, now, he was embarrassed. Embarrassed for someone else—someone else who had made him purposefully embarrassed nearly every day of his life since he was eleven.
And also, Malfoy could hex him through one of the hospital wing windows and hurl him into the lake and drown him. Could rip his skin apart and fill him with snakes. Could set Snape on him with a cauldron of bubbling potion that would burn Neville’s throat with liquid fire. Could tell the actual Dark Lord that Neville Longbottom was becoming an inconvenience, and at the snap of white fingers, Neville’s pulse would be snuffed.
Neville reminded himself that he was deathly afraid of Draco Malfoy. That he hated him.
He looked at the bare curve of Malfoy’s ear before closing the curtain.
--
It was Potter’s doing, apparently.
Neville overheard this in cloaked whispers of the common room, right after he tripped on a footstool that he suspected wasn’t in his way until Seamus’ foot ‘slipped’ near its base. Right after he felt his ears turn red, and he was suddenly unbearably conscious of the way his stomach moved under his shirt as he tried to laugh along with everyone else.
They were laughing with him, his Gran always reminded him, right after she reminded him that nobody ever used to laugh along with his father. That he never gave anyone a reason to in the first place.
It was Ron and Hermione near the stairs, whispering so loudly Neville wondered if they thought he truly couldn’t hear. That maybe Potter didn’t teach him how to use a spell to hear things correctly during all their DA meetings last year.
Neville caught enough: the prefect’s bathroom, and Myrtle, and so much blood, and Snape. Something about a Half-Blood Prince and a textbook. How Malfoy had been crying.
That stopped Neville’s foot on the second stair. He froze.
The words were completely incomprehensible. He’d seen Malfoy shed fake tears, of course. Trying to get Harry in trouble for this or that. Trying to get Hagrid sacked. But something about Hermione’s tone of voice, and the way Neville suddenly remembered that Malfoy had grey circles under his eyes last week in Transfiguration . . . And come to think of it, Neville couldn’t even remember the last time Malfoy had actually come to class, on time or at all . . .
“Neville.”
He turned. Ron was covering an odd expression on his mouth with one hand, while Hermione looked like she was about to tell a First Year an inconvenient life truth.
“Neville, have you gotten lost?”
Neville wondered if Hermione had thought he was lost when he was screaming curses at Death Eaters in the Hall of Prophecies, shoulder to shoulder with Harry Potter. Winning.
He swallowed. “No.”
Ron’s shoulders quivered. Hermione bit her lip.
“Only, you’ve just started to ascend the stairs to the girl’s dormitories, is all.”
She pointed, as if Neville needed help locating his feet, but he followed her hand and looked down at his own feet nonetheless.
A floral carpet runner cascaded down the worn stone steps, tinged with gold and pink. He shifted the worn toe of his boot, and heard his Gran’s voice in his head telling him to put a reparo on the damn thing, lest he look like he came from dirt and not the Longbottom Lineage.
(His father never would’ve worn scuffed shoes, apparently. His St. Mungo’s slippers now didn’t have any leather on them to get scuffed.)
“Blimey, Nev, were you trying to go up and see someone special?” Ron laughed.
Neville bit down the unprecedented urge to yell back, "What if I had?" Even he had enough self-preservation to know that he would not want to know Ron's response to that question.
(Not to mention the fact that the truth of Ron's question wouldn't have affected which staircase Neville took anyway, but that was an entirely separate issue which he would revisit precisely never. And which would probably never require any revisiting in the first place).
Half the common room was suddenly looking at them, homework and conversations forgotten. Harry was giving him a fondly exasperated expression from nearby the fireplace where he’d been expounding on Patronus magic.
Ginny was listening with rapt attention. Neville wondered if she ever chose to remember their brief kiss at the end of the Ball, or if it hurt her to think about.
Neville gripped the back of his neck and smiled the way he’d practiced in the mirror way back in second year: his “I’m such a doof, what would I do without the rest of you to help me?” smile.
“Old Snape must’ve frightened you more than usual today,” someone suggested.
Neville latched onto it. He couldn’t very well tell everyone that he went up the wrong flight of stairs in quarters he’s lived in for six years because he was trying to imagine what Draco Malfoy’s eyes would look like wet and rimmed with red. Because he was thinking of a pale shoulder with the bone piercing the skin.
“Must have,” he laughed. They were all grinning at him warmly. He was tonight’s enjoyable break from Charms homework and the middle of a War. He grinned with his lips closed so nobody would see his front teeth. “Silly me.”
Ron finally let his laugh out as Neville climbed the correct staircase. It echoed across the stone.
“Remember him in your Gran’s frilly hat!” someone called from the bottom.
Neville forgot to laugh.
--
This time, when he looked over his shoulder and pulled back the curtain, Neville had his wand at the ready.
He wasn’t sure what he was expecting to see on the other side. Lucius Malfoy in his white mask, flanked by milky orbs of prophecies, shooting curses which ripped through the organs of his screaming friends. The white hot sparks of the cruciatus flying once more towards his vulnerable ribs. Malfoy rearing with fangs like a snake, dripping red blood in smears on white bone, ready to strike.
Instead, he saw Malfoy asleep on his back. And scars.
They carved into his chest and stomach where the blanket was pulled down, huge long gashes of angry, healing white. They rippled as he breathed, like snakes across skin. Like ivory claws dragging through the snow, seeking throats.
Neville bit his tongue. The adrenaline pumping through his body felt more palpable than the moment he’d stepped up to Harry and volunteered to come along to the Ministry to steal the prophecy. Than when he climbed on the back of a thestral. Than when he saw Bellatrix Lestrange appear from the shadows, twirling her wand.
(Than the first time he thought his mum was trying to say his name. “Neh . . . neh . . .” she was muttering from her bed, her bony fingers twisting themselves raw in the white sheets. Later the nurse told him that she always moaned like that. It didn’t mean a specific word, dearie. Nothing to worry about.)
Malfoy’s ribs looked like a skeleton’s hands jutting up out of the white earth. Like silk stretched over ice. Neville stared, even as he tongue grew numb in his mouth. Even as the threat of discovery burned like fire at the back of his neck.
He stared, and he tried to imagine Severus Snape’s bare hands cradling Malfoy on the bathroom floor. The blood and leaking water running over his fingers and pristine robes. Tried to imagine long strands of black hair trailing across Draco’s face as he healed him, the way Hermione said Snape apparently did. Neville tried to imagine how anything as beautiful as the elegantly woven stitches across Draco’s chest could have come from Professor Snape’s hands. From his piercing black wand. From his tongue and lips.
Then Neville realized that he’d just called Malfoy “Draco” twice in his mind. Called the horrifying gashes across his bare skin beautiful.
He thought gum wrappers were beautiful, too. And the way a Belladonna drooped towards the earth right before it died.
His Gran must have been right. There had to be something wrong with him.
And there really had to be something wrong with him when Neville realized he was bending to sit down on the edge of the cot, careful not to pull the blanket too tight across Malfoy’s waist.
At least he was back to calling him Malfoy by default, now.
Malfoy didn’t even move, and a hot boldness rushed through Neville’s cheeks. This is how Harry Potter must have felt like when he sensed the Dark Lord through the grass, he thought. Trapped in the center of the maze.
Malfoy flinched in his sleep. Neville realized he could hurt him if he wanted. Could spit in his soft face.
“In first year,” Neville whispered, so softly he could barely hear himself, “you threw away my remembrall. It was right at the beginning of the year, in front of all my friends, and there was nothing I could do. You made a fool of me. And it stuck.”
Malfoy shifted on the thin sheets, and the spike of fear up Neville’s spine made him suddenly realize that it wasn’t the danger he was enjoying now at all. It wasn’t the thrill of potential discovery, or the secret knowledge of Malfoy at his mercy.
No, he just felt brave. He hadn’t realized he could feel brave in moments of his own choosing, when it wasn’t thrust into his face for him to bumblingly deal with and hope to survive.
Malfoy’s left forearm twisted, facing up towards the moonlight. Neville noticed for the first time that it was bandaged, elbow to wrist. He wondered why, until the barest slip of ink spilled out from a gap in the gauze, raised and angry pink lines framing branded black.
Neville didn’t need to look closer; he suddenly knew it was the neck of a snake.
Neville waited for his entire body to convulse, to heave with disgust, to radiate fury and revulsion and fear.
Instead, he found his pinky finger barely stroking the edges of the gauze. He wondered if Malfoy had covered the Mark himself, or if Pomfrey had found it and hidden it from her own eyes. He wondered if getting it had hurt. If Malfoy had bled. If he was brave enough to meet the Dark Lord’s thin eyes.
Neville looked around briefly, peeling back the curtain edge. Every other student asleep in the hospital wing had goodies or letters of some sort from friends piled next to their beds.
Nobody else had a curtain around them. Draco’s bedside table only carried a glass of old-looking water, dust-motes swirling on the top.
“My remembrall seems so far away now,” Neville whispered. “I don’t even remember where it is. You’d love to hear that, if you were awake.”
He watched a lock of white hair fall across Malfoy’s ear, and suddenly remembered catching Harry caressing a lock of Cho’s hair when Neville had been embarrassingly early for a DA meeting. They’d both apologized to him as if he’d be completely disgusted by witnessing any act of physical intimacy. As if he’d be utterly confused.
Neville found himself wondering who had ever caressed Dra—Malfoy’s hair. Pansy, maybe. Some other worthy Pureblood.
(He was a Pureblood, too. He forgot that most of the time.)
He licked his lips. “You used to make fun of my hair, you remember? And my weight. And my teeth.” He was quiet for a long minute. “I can’t remember the last time you made fun of me.”
The skin under Malfoy’s eyes was sunken and grey. Neville thought about what else he could possibly say, now that Malfoy, for all intents and purposes, was being forced to actually listen. He told himself to think, think, think, just like he always did. He wasn’t sure if it had ever helped.
Pomfrey could walk back in for her midnight rounds at any minute, and he felt time slipping away.
He thought about telling Malfoy how that Mark on his arm meant that Malfoy was actively hoping for the destruction of all the good in the world. How Neville had hated him for six years. Avoided him in the halls. Sprinted from him in his nightmares. How Malfoy was disgusting, rotten, a piece of shameful, Death Eater trash. How Neville hoped he and the rest of them all died incredibly painful deaths.
He thought about hurting him, humiliating him, marking him to let the entire world know that one time, on one night, Draco Malfoy had been at Neville Longbottom’s mercy.
Instead, he found himself picturing how easily Malfoy’s thin skin had been blown to bits by Harry’s wand. How the flesh had been blasted away to reveal plain muscle and blood. Whether any red droplets splashed onto Harry’s face.
“I met your dad,” Neville whispered. He unconsciously touched the place on his own ribs where the cruciatus had hit, where a black mark still lingered which he’d never told anyone else about.
Malfoy whimpered a bit in his sleep, and it made him sound like a little boy. He barely even had hair on his chest, or across his jaw.
Neville wondered if that whimper was what Malfoy had sounded like when he was crying, and he hated him more than he’d ever hated anyone else on the entire earth.
“Nobody’s ever met my dad,” Neville said.
(He wondered if Harry would murder him if he walked in and saw the two of them now. If he wouldn’t just see it as a practice round for killing the Dark Lord. Neville letting Malfoy go free because he didn’t have the wherewithal to ruin him when he had a precious chance. Didn’t have the guts.)
Blood rushed through him, and he reached out and touched the neck of the snake on Draco’s arm with his bare fingertip. Draco’s skin was warm.
He swallowed as silently as he could. “Nobody from school.”