Archive of Our Own

“Potter’s not coming,” Draco announces, settling into the rickety wooden chair opposite Ron as if taking a seat on a throne.

“Eh?” Ron says, looking up from his chicken mayo sandwich. “Why not?”

Draco waves a hand. “Accident at work. Awful thing. Someone released a cage of pixies into the department.”

“What? Why would anyone do that?”

“No idea,” Draco says airily.

It’s been three years since Draco got the job as Head Auror Robards’s personal assistant; two years since he started following Harry, uninvited, to lunches with Ron and Hermione. By now, Ron is used to his presence, in the way one gets used to a ghoul groaning in the attic above one’s bedroom. It’s not something he’d necessarily choose, but there’s not much point complaining about it.

That doesn’t mean he’s happy with the idea of spending a lunch break alone with him. Harry’s usually there to respond to his snarky little jibes. Hermione’s usually there to get drawn into his nonsensical spiralling debates. Ron never has to interact with him all that much. It’s a simple life. Unburdened. Nice.

“But,” he says helplessly. “But Hermione’s not coming either. She’s at a conference.”

“Good heavens, what a coincidence,” Draco says, sounding supremely unmoved by the information. “Anyway, I want to talk to you.”

Despite very recently establishing their solitude at their usual table in the Dozy Horklump, Ron still has to check the other seats are empty. “Me?”

“Merlin help me. Yes, you, Weasley. See, I’ve been summoned for ward duty.”

Ron grimaces in sympathy. All first-born children of pure-blood families have to do it at some point—it’s a means of maintaining the wards around the biggest wizarding institutions: Diagon Alley, the Ministry, Hogwarts and St Mungo’s.

As far as Ron understands, it’s a shit time all round. There’s the couple of weeks of training, the few days of working in shifts with other pure-bloods to pour your magic into each location, then the inevitable weeks in St Mungo’s to recover from the strain. Bill did it a few years ago. It took him about six months to feel himself again.

“That’s bad luck,” he says. “Still, better to get it out of the way while you’re relatively young, eh? You’ll bounce back in no time.”

“Don’t be thick, I’m not actually going to do it,” Draco says. “I have things to do this summer. Places to be! Specifically: a glorious month alone at the Zabinis’ estate in the Sorrentine peninsula. Do you know how rare it is for Blaise to offer that up? If he sniffs out the slightest excuse to change his mind, he’ll take it back and I’ll never again get the chance to live my dream of swanning around an Italian villa, naked but for a silk robe, drinking cocktails and lounging about and generally living the life I feel I truly deserve.”

“Er,” Ron says. “Right. How’re you getting out of ward duty, then?”

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you. Look.” Draco pulls out a scroll, which he unfurls and props open with Ron’s Butterbeer. “See there. Article 7, section 24, sub-section 19a.”

Ron obediently looks at article 7, section 24, sub-section 19a. The writing is old-fashioned cursive, faded in several places. It looks like the sort of scroll that should be locked in a Ministry cabinet, not spread out on a cafe table with a bottle of Butterbeer steadily soaking a ring of condensation into it.

“This bit,” Draco says impatiently, tapping the parchment. “The list of exemptions from ward duty. The most pertinent of which is…?”

“Look, legal stuff is more Hermione’s department—”

“Homosexuality!” Draco gestures to himself with a flourish.

Ron blinks. “Eh? Why would that matter?”

“Oh, god knows,” Draco says cheerfully. “They’re probably worried my magic is inherently queer and will somehow encourage respectable wizards to stop producing heirs and start fucking twinks whenever they pop to Gringotts. Whatever. I don’t care why I’m being discriminated against. I’m just happy I am.”

“Well,” Ron says after a pause. “Congratulations on the homophobia. But if the reason you wanted to talk to me is because you want to come out to us—look, I have to tell you: we’ve known for a while.”

“What? Of course you— Fuck’s sake, Weasley, you’re worse than Potter. Look at the terms: To avoid any false applications, wizards applying for this exemption must provide multiple pictures of themselves receiving anal intercourse with a clearly visible face.”

“What the fuck.”

“I know! I can’t believe they’d make it so easy. So? What do you say?”

The weirdness of being alone with Draco had faded in comparison to the talk of ward duty and fond thoughts of how thoroughly Hermione will dismantle this law as soon as she hears about it. But now Draco has stopped pointing at the musty old scroll and is watching Ron expectantly, and Ron is thrown once again into deep, uncomfortable bewilderment.

“What do I say about…discrimination against the queer community?” he tries.

“No, we’re pro-discrimination in this case, keep up,” Draco says. “What do you say to fucking me while I take photographs? Obviously.”

There is a ringing silence wherein Ron tries and fails to convince himself he must have misheard.

“I’d make it worth your time, of course,” Draco says. “Thanks to my renowned skills of negotiation and political know-how, I’ve procured a ticket to the Dorkins Memorial Dinner next Friday. All the Cannons will be there, obviously, plus dozens of better players you’ll undoubtedly be less enticed by.”

Ron must be mishearing. “Did you say the Dorkins—?! Draco, those tickets were thousands of Galleons. They sold out months ago.”

“And you can have one,” Draco says, “if you just fuck me. What a bargain.”

Ron sits back, the wood of the chair digging into his shoulder blades. He can hardly believe he’s even considering it, but—

The Dorkins Memorial Dinner…the most important members of the Quidditch league gathered in one place to honour the Cannons manager who literally died of shock when the Cannons beat the Falcons back in ’99. Even Ginny hasn’t been able to get tickets, and she’s the Chaser for the Harpies. Even Harry hasn’t been able to get tickets, and he’s Harry bloody Potter.

And, look, okay, it wouldn’t be a huge hardship, would it? Draco’s not really Ron’s type—he generally likes people a bit softer, a bit less likely to poison his drinks—but sex is sex, isn’t it? No matter what, it’ll probably be at least a little bit enjoyable.

But then again: it’s Draco Malfoy.

“I dunno,” Ron says, staring unseeingly at the ring of condensation blooming over the corner of the scroll. “Look, why me? Maybe you should ask Harry.”

Draco lets out a beleaguered sigh. “I did. He refused. Said he doesn’t want anyone to see pictures of him with his cock out.”

“I thought only your face needs to be in the photo?”

“That’s what I told him! I suppose he thinks people might recognise his Chosen Nipples and sell the photos to the papers.”

“God. All right, let me think.”

All right, yes, he’d have to fuck Draco Malfoy. But on the other hand: the Dorkins Memorial Dinner. All of the Cannons in one room, Ron able to talk to them for hours. And hopefully some bloody good food, too, given the price of the tickets.

“There’s really nobody else you could ask?”

Draco’s pointy nose wrinkles. “Of course there are other people I could ask. I’m not so repugnant that there’s literally nobody with a cock that would be willing to stick it in me for the time it takes to snap a few photographs. But I’m asking you, Weasley. And so?”

Well. What is Ron supposed to say to that?

Several days later, he stumbles out of Draco’s fireplace and comes to an abrupt halt. He expected Draco’s house to look like Malfoy Manor: cavernous chambers bejewelled with statues and portraits and centuries-old furniture. Instead, he finds himself blinking at a colourful and cosy farmhouse living room. There’s a dusty pink sofa to the right, behind which is a wall of powder-blue shelves displaying books, photographs and knick-knacks. There’s a matching blue rug covering the worn flagstones on the floor and an ugly-looking houseplant in a jug on the side table. It’s all a bit fancier than the Burrow, obviously, but it’s—normal. Nice.

“Er, sorry,” Ron calls out. “Think I got the wrong fireplace.”

“Weasley? Is that you?”

To Ron’s genuine surprise, there’s the faint sound of socked feet on a stone floor and Draco pokes his head through the open doorway to the left. “Oh, hello,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting you for ages.”

Ron checks his watch. “Seven, you said.”

“I didn’t think you’d actually be on time.” Draco comes into the room proper and looks at Ron with a critical eye. Ron, who spent a full twenty minutes agonising over what to wear before realising he was being stupid and throwing on his usual jeans and a Harpies T-shirt, refuses to allow this scrutiny to intimidate him. “Well,” Draco says eventually. “I hope you scrub up a bit better for the Memorial Dinner, at least. Come on, then; bedroom’s this way.”

“You’re wearing a dressing gown,” Ron points out as he follows Draco through the living room doorway and up the creaky wooden stairs. “So I don’t know why you’re having a go at me.”

“Who says I’m having a go? We’ll both be in our birthday suits in about two minutes so it hardly matters. This one’s me, come in.”

The bedroom is decorated in the same rustic, friendly style as the rest of the house. Ron takes in the perfectly normal bed (thick headboard, navy sheets), the wooden desk in the corner of the room (heavily weathered, littered with parchment), and the window sunk into thick white walls (open on the latch, a tendril of ivy attempting entry).

“This is nice,” Ron says.

“There’s no need to sound so shocked about it.”

“I’m not! I just…” Ron trails off with a shrug. “You know.”

Draco opens his mouth, closes it again, then frowns at Ron for a solid thirty seconds. Ron endures it, growing steadily more uncomfortable. He’s about to throw his hands up and declare that this is a stupid idea, Dorkins Memorial Dinner be damned, when Draco announces, “This is ridiculous. I’m taking my clothes off.” He unties his dressing gown with a quick flick of his fingers and lets it drop to the floor, revealing a thin, pale, entirely naked body. “You too, come on.”

Draco’s right—Ron’s here to do a job; there’s hardly any point faffing about. With a shrug, he tugs his T-shirt over his head and unbuttons his jeans. It’s not like he’s shy; he grew up sharing a bathroom with eight other people, lived in a dormitory for six years, and he’s had his fair share of sex. Being naked around someone else is something he’s pretty comfortable with.

At least, he was comfortable with it until Draco looks him up and down and says, “Hmm. Well, we’ll have to get you going, won’t we?”

“Oi.” Ron covers his dick with both hands, his ears going hot. “You’re the one who has to look like he’s enjoying it.”

“I’m not anticipating that to be a problem.” Draco’s tone is aloof, but there’s a faint flush spreading over his chest that Ron finds himself staring at. How often does that happen, tucked away out of sight beneath Draco’s robes? “But without you enjoying it,” Draco continues—and Ron drags his gaze up to Draco’s face, which is as pale and unconcerned as ever—“we might have a problem with the equipment, so to speak. So, come on. What does it for you?”

Ron glances at Draco’s chest again. “Erm,” he says. “I like arses and tits, I suppose. I dunno. I like making people feel good. I like it when they’re into me.”

Draco tilts his head. “Well, I don’t have much in the way of tits, but I can work with the rest of that,” he says. And with no further warning, he steps forwards and pulls Ron by the neck into a kiss.

Draco’s mouth is soft, coaxing, not the sharp, biting thing Ron expected. Ron hums approvingly. “What about you?” he asks, in case Draco is feeling generous enough to give clear instructions. “What gets you going?”

“This does,” Draco says, then winds his arm fully around Ron’s neck and kisses him again, slow and deep and good.

Ron reminds himself that he’s allowed to be turned on by this, that getting turned on is the point, and lets himself relax into it. His mouth opens. His hands rise to Draco’s shoulders, the back of his head.

Draco presses closer. His tongue slides against Ron’s and Ron’s fingers automatically tighten, tugging on soft hair. Draco lets out a hot little breath and wraps his hand around Ron’s wrist. A warning, Ron thinks—but Draco uses his grip to move Ron’s hand down to Draco’s nipple.

“Here,” Draco breathes.

“Yeah?”

When they kiss again, Ron pinches.

Draco shudders. “Fuck, that feels good. Do it again.”

Ron does it again, twists it a bit, and Draco lets out a little moan. It becomes Ron’s new mission to see how many times he can make Draco make that noise.

By the time he’s got to six, the room feels ten degrees warmer and Ron’s head is going fuzzy. He’s about to try for seven when Draco grabs his wrist again.

“Too much?”

“No, just—” Draco guides Ron’s hand downwards until Ron finds himself wrapping his hand around Draco’s cock. “Feel that?”

Ron didn’t think he’d be doing anything more than providing a dick for Draco to put up his arse; the intimacy of Draco’s mouth on his and Draco’s cock in Ron’s hand is unexpected. But Ron’s not complaining. He strokes tentatively, learning the shape, the texture, the heat. “I feel it.”

Draco’s lips are soft against Ron’s ear. “You did that to me,” he murmurs. “I’m so hard for you.”

The world tilts dangerously—it takes Ron a second to realise it’s because he’s pushed them onto the bed, pressing Draco into chamomile-scented sheets.

“Fuck, yeah,” Draco’s jaw is hot against Ron’s lips. His dick is just as hot—hotter—fucking leisurely into Ron’s hand. “Fuck, yeah, like that. Feels so good.”

Ron kisses him, bites him, licks into his mouth. Draco’s hands are everywhere—sliding down Ron’s back, grabbing his arse, dragging over his sides. His thumb teases Ron’s pubic hair and Ron makes a low, encouraging noise, squeezing Draco’s cock in demonstration, until Draco gets the hint and touches him properly.

Ron groans in approval.

Then Draco chirps, “Lovely stuff! This’ll do nicely.”

Ron lifts his head from Draco’s neck and blinks down at him. Draco smiles back serenely. His mouth is pink, his lips swollen. They’re both still touching each other’s dicks.

“What?” Ron tries, when he remembers how to form words.

“You’ve got a lovely cock,” Draco says, slowly and clearly. “Looking forward to having it in me. Now back up a bit, I have to sort out the camera.”

Dazed, Ron sits back on his heels. Meanwhile, Draco reaches under the bed and pulls out a camera—a clunky silver thing about the size of a Bludger. He notices Ron watching and starts chattering away, explaining the film, the flash, Merlin knows what else. Ron’s not really listening. He can still feel the echo of Draco’s hands on him.

The point was to get turned on, he reminds himself. It’s okay that he enjoyed it.

“All ready!” Draco announces once he’s satisfied with his tinkering. “Right! Get in me!”

“Jesus.” There’s a bit of faffing around with preparation spells and positions, but all too soon Ron is kneeling between Draco’s spread legs, hesitating inches away from Draco’s glistening entrance. “We’re really doing this?”

“Hopefully soon,” Draco says pointedly.

If Ron’s hands weren’t preoccupied with holding his dick to press it against Draco’s hole, he’d raise them in surrender. “All right, sorry. Here we go, then. Tell me if you want me to slow down.”

Draco doesn’t ask him to slow down. In fact, Ron is still adjusting to the tightness, the heat, when Draco tilts his hips and says, “Oh, fuck yes. Fuck. Can you— Will you touch me, get me fully hard again? You don’t have to if you’d rather not. I just— I don’t want to drop this.” He raises the camera.

Ron doesn’t have to, but he wraps one hand around Draco’s cock nonetheless. It’s impossible not to thrust at the same time, so he does, inching in and out, small twitches of his hips. Behind the camera, Draco’s mouth is open—he draws a breath and Ron is sure he’s going to make some stupid little comment so he thrusts properly to head it off, pushing himself as deep as he can go. Instead of a sarcastic jibe, Draco lets out a sharp exhale.

“Do that again,” he says, eyes wide.

Ron does—pulls back all the way and slides in slowly, keeping time with the movement of his hand over Draco’s cock. Draco doesn’t tell him to stop. So he doesn’t.

Draco’s body reacts so well to being fucked, his cock thickening quickly in Ron’s fist, his thighs spreading, his skin blooming pink all the way down to his belly-button. On the next thrust, Ron fucks him harder, mostly to see what Draco will do. Draco arches and lets out a moan.

“Yes, like that, do that again—oh—”

Ron fucks him again, hard and deep. It would be so easy to lose himself in the heat, the slickness, the pressure. He wants to. But he’s here to do a job.

He lets himself thrust once, twice more, then stops. “All right,” he says, pleased with how normal he sounds. “Ready to take them?”

“Take—?”

“The photos.”

Draco blinks at the camera in his hands and visibly comes back to himself. “Of course, yes,” he says, suddenly sounding perfectly normal too. It’s almost funny, the two of them pretending like they’re having a regular conversation while Ron’s dick is deep in Draco’s arse. Ron can’t help but thrust again, just a little. He pretends it was an accident when Draco looks at him sharply.

“You’ll have to keep moving while I take the pictures,” Draco informs him, “so the photos move when they’re developed.”

“I can do that.”

“And you have to make it look good. Like we’re fucking properly.”

“A thorough buggering,” Ron confirms. “Understood.”

Draco stretches his arms up over his head, pointing the camera towards where Ron’s aching cock is buried inside him. “All right,” Draco says. “Let’s go.”

Ron doesn’t need telling twice. He grabs Draco by the hips and fucks him properly. It’s a sweet relief after the slowness, the stillness, and Ron’s head falls back as pleasure curls through him.

There’s a click, a flash—Ron looks up to see a purplish puff of smoke dissipating, layering the room with a faint smell of gunpowder and burnt coffee.

He keeps fucking Draco. The flush on Draco’s chest reveals a series of thin scars zig-zagging from his neck to his hip. Ron runs his fingers over the ridges of them on the way to Draco’s nipple, which he pinches. Draco swears and takes another picture.

Once the smoke has cleared, Ron slows the pace of his hips.

“What are you doing? Don’t stop.” There’s a hint of a whine in Draco’s voice.

“Should we switch positions? Give them a proper selection, make it look like we’ve done it more than once.”

Draco lowers the camera. “Oh. That’s not a bad idea, actually. Do you get cleverer in bed, Weasley?”

Ron suspects Draco gets stupider in bed, actually, and Ron is only cleverer by comparison, but he’s not about to say so.

They shove the duvet to the floor in a half-hearted attempt to change up their surroundings and Draco gets on his hands and knees. When it’s on show like this, he’s got a gorgeous arse, actually: small and pert, covered in a light, fine dusting of hair. Ron resists the urge to grab it, bite it, as he gets on his knees behind Draco and pushes back inside.

He fucks Draco slowly while Draco tries to find the best angle to take the pictures. Maybe they should have planned their scenes more thoroughly while they were still clothed, because Draco seems to be struggling. He holds himself up with one hand against the headboard and the camera above his head, pointing it down the length of his back. He holds it awkwardly to the side, bending his elbow at a funny angle to try and keep his arm from blocking the view. He tries to rest the camera on the headboard itself, fumbling for the button and nearly dropping the whole thing down the gap between the bed and the wall.

Meanwhile, Ron bites his lip and fights to keep the pace of his hips steady. The pleasure of fucking Draco is building: a simmering, swirling heat.

“I don’t—I don’t know if this position is working,” Draco says, strained. “I think they definitely need to see cock in hole.”

Ron grabs the camera from Draco, aims it downwards and watches his dick pumping in and out of Draco’s arse. “Say cheese, Malfoy,” he grits out. Draco looks over his shoulder, his face red. Ron snaps a picture.

With effort, he forces himself to stop fucking Draco once the gunpowder-coffee smell fades. But the pleasure doesn’t subside with the purple smoke; instead of pulling away, Draco rocks himself back onto Ron’s dick, his gorgeous little arse bouncing against Ron’s hips. Ron watches helplessly as his cock is swallowed over and over by Draco’s wet, pink hole.

He takes another picture.

Draco doesn’t stop.

“Fuck,” Ron bites out. “Fuck, that’s— Are we doing another position?”

“Nnh, yeah,” Draco says. Ron can’t tell if he’s answering Ron’s question or just enjoying himself until he continues, “Yeah, one more should be enough.”

Ron drops the camera onto the bed. Once his hands are free, he can’t help but grab Draco’s arse, squeezing, spreading him open. Draco moans, dropping to his elbows and arching his back.

“How—” Ron gasps, “How should we—?”

“Fuck. Fuck.” Draco does one last slow grind then, with a groan, eases himself off. It takes every bit of willpower Ron possesses not to tighten his grip on those skinny hips and pull him back.

“If we just…” Draco grabs his wand, gives it a jerky wave, and the navy bedsheets abruptly become a bright acid green.

Ron raises an eyebrow.

“Overshot it a bit,” Draco admits. He swaps his wand for the camera and lies down on his side, both arms outstretched in front of him to take the photos, one leg in the air. “All right, get back over here.”

Ron straddles Draco’s bottom leg and slides back inside. “God, you feel good,” he breathes unthinkingly. Draco’s top leg is hooked over Ron’s shoulder and Ron presses open-mouthed kisses into Draco’s calf, mostly to shut himself up. The flash of the camera goes off and Ron takes it as approval, as encouragement, so he keeps going, letting his teeth scrape over Draco’s skin, letting his movements grow sloppy, rough.

Draco makes a frustrated sound and Ron opens his eyes to see him fumbling with the camera, trying to balance it in one hand. “I want— I’m so hard.”

Ron doesn’t remember deciding to reach out, but the next thing he knows, Draco is groaning, pushing his cock into Ron’s fist. He is hard, his cock hot and red, leaking a clear string of pre-come onto the lime green sheets. A renewed surge of need urges Ron’s hips forwards. God, he’s getting close.

Draco doesn’t seem to mind Ron’s control starting to shatter. He looks about as lost Ron feels: his mouth open, his face as flushed as the rest of him. On one particularly rough thrust, he lets out a moan and clenches around Ron’s cock; Ron swears and automatically fucks him harder—and then there’s no going back. He’s pounding into Draco without restraint, unable to stop his hips from snapping forwards, unable to keep his grip gentle.

“Yes,” Draco is gasping, “yes, yes, right there, oh—” and Ron fucks him and fucks him, lost in how good it feels, in how Draco is arching, moaning, babbling. “Fuck, Ron, yes— Oh fuck, I think I’m gonna come—”

“Camera,” Ron grits out. Draco fumbles for the button and the flash goes off just as Draco cries out and clamps down around Ron’s cock, hot come shooting over Ron’s fist and painting pearlescent streaks over the lurid bedding.

Ron follows him helplessly over the edge with the flash of the camera lingering behind his eyelids and the smell of burnt coffee in his nose. He chases the fading rush of pleasure with unthinking kisses to the inside of Draco’s calf, still hooked over his shoulder.

Draco makes an odd noise and drops his leg.

Ron slips out of him. He opens his eyes.

They look at each other for a long moment. In the silence, a laugh builds, unbidden, in Ron’s throat.

“What?” Draco says, eyeing Ron’s twitching lips, and Ron can’t hold it back any longer: he releases a snicker into his fist. Draco tries valiantly to hold on to his indignation but it isn’t long before he cracks—then both of them are giggling, high off their orgasms, off how stupid this whole thing has been.

“Well,” Draco says, once they’ve recovered, “that could have gone worse, I suppose.”

“I’d say so.” Ron slaps Draco’s arse cheerfully, watching as it jiggles. “Where’s that ticket, then?”

“Merlin’s beard, we haven’t even been done two minutes. You know how to make a boy feel special, Weasley.”

Ron hesitates, but Draco’s already closing his eyes and stretching, clearly not actually bothered. “Envelope on the kitchen table.” He yawns. “I’m gonna luxuriate for a bit. You remember the way out?”

When Ron arrives home and tears open the envelope, he finds a pair of tickets, not the single one he expected.

He stares at them. Two tickets. One for him, one for…who? Should he invite Draco?

He dismisses the thought as soon as it occurs. Draco and Ron aren’t friends. Anyway, Draco’s probably already going, isn’t he, if he’s got tickets to throw around like this.

So Ron attends the Dorkins Memorial Dinner with Harry, who thankfully is too accustomed to last-minute invites to exclusive events to ask where the tickets came from. Draco isn’t there after all, but Ron doesn’t have time to miss him (not that he would). He’s sat next to Galvin Gudgeon for the dinner and gets insights into every match the Cannons have played in the last three years. He fetches Mary Talgarth a drink when he notices her glass is empty and she kisses him on the cheek. Keaton Flitney overhears him babbling excitedly about it to Harry and loudly warns everyone present that there’s a creepy super-fan in their midst.

It’s the best night of Ron’s life.

About a week later, an owl arrives at Ron’s flat.

There’s a problem. Come over this evening? I’ll be in from 6. D

Ron rolls his eyes at the single initial. The arrogance. As if Ron doesn’t know any other Ds. He knows loads, actually. Dean. Dennis Creevey. Delacour, comma, Fleur. Loads of them.

Of course, he knows exactly who the owl is from. But for Draco to assume that…

He feels a bit stupid about it, but he showers and puts on his second-best pair of jeans before setting off for Draco’s. When he steps out of the fireplace, Draco is sitting cross-legged on the squishy pink settee, cradling a heart-patterned mug of tea. A stack of photographs is on the seat next to him, face-down, and he’s wearing grey joggers and a white T-shirt. Ron tries to get himself to focus on the mug, on how incongruously silly it is for someone doubtlessly brought up sipping darjeeling from fine china, but his attention catches and sticks on the Muggle clothes. He can’t help but rake his eyes along Draco’s edges, recalling his shoulders, his hips, the clear thread of pre-come that dripped from his cock onto lime-green sheets.

“The pictures are shit,” Draco says as a greeting.

Ron forces his gaze upwards. “Eh?”

“You can’t see anything, just stupid pasty blurs.” He holds up a couple of the photos. Ron only gets a glimpse of flesh and movement before Draco tosses them to the floor. “I don’t have any more tickets to exclusive Quidditch events to offer,” he continues morosely. “Is there anything else you want? Something with which I might be able to tempt you into trying again?”

“Oh,” Ron says. “Erm.”

“A new broom? I could pull some strings, see if I can get my hands on the Nimbus that’s coming out next year.”

“Ah, I don’t really fly much these days, so…”

“All right, not a broom. What if I take you to my tailor, get you fitted, buy you a proper high-end set of robes?”

“What do I need fancy robes for? I work in a shop, Draco.”

“I’ll do something for the shop, then. I could connect you with an investor? Or—set up a meeting with you and Zonko’s, you could collaborate on a product release—”

“We already know the Zonko’s manager,” Ron says. “Bilton. He’s a good bloke.”

“Are there any crimes you’d like to commit?” Draco’s voice is beginning to take on an edge of hysteria. “I’ll distract the Aurors, keep Robards busy. I can’t promise longer than a few hours, but that’s probably enough. Unless you make it too elaborate— No, look, I’ll help you plan it. Two hours will be fine.”

Ron snorts. “Pride of the Auror department, you, aren’t you?”

“You’re the one driving me to crime instead of letting me blackmail my way into getting you a simple broomstick!”

“Blackmail is actually also a crime,” Ron points out.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise I was talking to a member of the Wizengamot!”

Ron isn’t sure whether or not to laugh. Draco is being ridiculous, as usual, but there’s something particularly pathetic in the set of his pointy shoulders, in the way he’s staring morosely at his half-drunk tea.

Is Ron going to regret this? He makes himself think about it.

But it’s not like he regretted the last time, is it?

And he’d be a bit of a dick, wouldn’t he, to have taken the tickets—tickets, plural!—when Draco didn’t even get what he wanted out of their deal.

And, honestly, Ron’s only human. He can’t deny that the thought of fucking Draco again has its own appeal.

“Look,” Ron says, “that Memorial Dinner the other week was brilliant.”

“Well, obviously,” Draco sniffs. “So I don’t know how I’m supposed to top it when you’re being so difficult.”

“My point,” Ron says loudly, “is that it’s probably worth more than one hour of my time.”

Draco looks up. Are his eyes actually watery, or is it a trick of the light? “What?”

“I’m saying I’ll do it again, Malfoy. You don’t need to bribe me with anything.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Draco beams and jumps to his feet. Ron blinks, struck with the distinct suspicion that he’s been played—but before he can dwell on it, Draco abandons his heart-patterned mug and saunters out of the room, chattering over his shoulder about apertures and lens focus and shutter speeds. Ron has no choice but to follow him.

“So it was definitely a hardware issue, not a problem with the way I developed the photos,” Draco continues, stepping into the bedroom and immediately flinging his T-shirt to the floor. “Ergo, this time we should start with you on the bottom holding the camera. Do you think you can hold it steady while I ride you?” His joggers and pants join his T-shirt in a haphazard pile. “Weasley. Can you do that?”

Ron looks up from Draco’s arse and nods quickly. “Yeah, absolutely,” he says. “I can do that.”

Draco’s answering smirk is slow and pleased. Ron wonders mournfully whether that smirk will be a bit of a turn-on forever, now.

Perhaps aware that Ron was only half-listening, Draco talks through the plan again while Ron strips and gets on the bed—it smells of chamomile again, but the sheets are now a soft grey. By the time Draco is climbing on top of him, holding the camera and still chattering away, memory and anticipation already have Ron half-hard.

“I took it to Dervish and Bangs,” Draco says, settling his arse on Ron’s thighs and leaning forwards to show Ron the camera, forearms propped against Ron’s chest like Ron is nothing more than a convenient bit of furniture, “and they spelled it to adjust automatically. So now all we have to do is press this button here, just like last time. Except this time it will actually work.”

“Eh?” Draco’s face is inches away. Should Ron kiss him? They only kissed last time to get Ron going, right at the beginning—and honestly, Draco must be able to feel that Ron doesn’t need the same encouragement this time. “If I just need to press one button, why did you spend the last ten minutes lecturing me about camera settings?”

“Because it’s interesting,” Draco says. He presses the camera into Ron’s hands. “Silver button, top right. Yes?”

“Yeah,” Ron says, but he’s not looking at the camera. He’s looking at Draco, at Draco’s sharp mouth. Will it taste like the tea he left half-drunk in the living room? Ron has spent enough involuntary lunch breaks with him to know how he takes it—milky, too sweet. Is Ron imagining that he can smell the sugar on Draco’s breath? Will it linger on his tongue, too?

As if responding to Ron’s speculation, said tongue appears, licking a maybe-sugary path over Draco’s lips—then, abruptly, Draco sits up. That pink flush is spreading over his chest again. Ron stares at it dumbly.

“I was going to blow you to get you going,” Draco says conversationally, grabbing Ron’s cock without any sort of preamble and giving it a few idle tugs, “but looks like I don’t need to.”

Ron refuses to be embarrassed about how his cock grows thicker and heavier in Draco’s hand at the thought. He’s supposed to get turned on, he reminds himself firmly. It’s the whole point.

“I mean, don’t let that stop you,” Ron says, forcing himself to sound like he doesn’t care either way.

Draco tilts his head as if deep in contemplation, stroking Ron’s cock with slow, firm pulls. “Hmm, no,” he says. “No, I think I’ll leave you with something to imagine.” He winks. Ron’s traitorous cock twitches.

Draco makes a gorgeous noise when Ron breaches him. He works himself down slowly: rising a little, sinking deeper. Ron clutches the camera and tries to keep his head. Silver button on the right, he tells himself. Keep still. Point and click. Easy peasy.

“God, I forgot how big you are. You get so deep.”

Keep still. Silver button. Point. Click.

The flush on Draco’s chest is crawling its way over his nipples, down his stomach, highlighting those strange jagged scars. His head falls backwards as he sinks deeper, deeper. Ron has never thought of Draco as attractive—quite the opposite—but he looks so beautiful like this that Ron unthinkingly raises the camera and snaps a picture.

Through a cloud of fading purple smoke, Draco lifts his head and frowns at Ron. “I doubt that’ll count,” he says. “I’m not even moving.”

Ron shrugs, though his ears are burning. “Can’t hurt, can it?”

Thankfully, Draco doesn’t seem to notice Ron’s slip. He snorts, tosses his head and says, “Honestly, if you want me to hurry up, just say so.”

Ron isn’t in any rush, actually, but before he can figure out how to say that without sounding like he’s enjoying this more than he should, Draco starts moving.

“Give me a few to warm up,” he says breathily, “then start taking them.”

It doesn’t take that much time at all for Draco to warm up. He drags his nails down his own chest, pinches his nipples—then it’s only a few tugs of his cock before he’s fucking his fist and rocking back onto Ron’s dick in a slow, maddening rhythm, closing his eyes and letting out soft appreciative noises. Ron waits another minute, waits until Draco looks like he’s forgotten who he’s with and what he’s doing, then raises the camera. It’s not easy to hold it steady while his hands are sweaty, while he’s desperately fighting the urge to move—but he manages it.

He takes pictures from several angles: a few from high up so the photo will capture the full length of Draco’s body as he rolls his hips. A few from chest height to show Draco’s hole stretched around Ron’s cock. An unthinking close-up of Draco’s face with his mouth open, eyebrows drawn upwards, looking absolutely blissful. A few more while barely paying attention to where he’s even aiming the bloody thing.

Once the smell of gunpowder and burnt coffee hangs heavy in the air, Ron makes himself speak. “Do you want to do another position? So we get a selection again?”

Draco blinks down at Ron hazily as if he really had forgotten Ron was there. “I— Yeah,” he says, his voice strained. “Yeah, that’s—oh—a good idea, we should— God, you feel so good though, I just wanna…” He moans and keeps rocking his hips, twisting his nipples, tugging on his cock.

“Draco,” Ron growls. He takes one more picture from eye-level, carefully puts the camera on the bedside table, then reaches for Draco—but once he’s got his hands on him, he can’t help but use his grip to hold Draco in place while he fucks upwards into that tight heat: once, hard.

Draco cries out. “Fuck, yes, do that again.”

Ron is trembling from how much he wants to obey, but he holds himself still. “The photos—”

“I know,” Draco says, “I know, we will, but that felt so good, do it again, please—”

Draco has barely finished speaking before Ron does it again—and again—and then Draco is grabbing the headboard to force himself back on Ron’s cock and they’re just fucking: roughly, thoughtlessly, their bodies in perfect rhythm.

The lingering scent of camera smoke and chamomile gives way to the sweet, tangy smell of sweat. It glistens on Draco’s neck; Ron wants to lick it up, wants to lick his way into Draco’s mouth like he should have done when Draco’s face was closer, when he could have taken his time. Because it’s impossible to take his time now: impossible to control himself at all. Draco is making those gorgeous noises and Ron grabs Draco’s arse and squeezes, needing him closer, needing something to hold on to while the rest of the world crumbles away.

They should stop. They need to stop. But Ron can’t help but chase the next thrust—and the next—and the next. Not when Draco is reacting so beautifully. Not when it feels so good to give in, to move, to let the pleasure take over and drive them closer and closer, higher and higher—

“Ron,” Draco whines. He doesn’t look like he’s forgotten who he’s with any more; he’s gazing down at Ron with his mouth open and his eyes wide, practically drinking him up while he’s touching himself, while he’s insistently pushing back against Ron’s every thrust.

“Yeah, you like it?” Ron hears himself ask, his voice barely recognisable. “You like getting fucked?”

Draco’s only response is a tight “Holy fucking shit—” and then he’s seizing up, his legs clamping around Ron’s hips, his come splashing over Ron’s stomach.

It’s so fucking hot that Ron can barely keep his eyes open against the pleasure of it, but he does his best to watch as Draco coaxes out the last waves of his orgasm. When he’s done, the vice of his thighs relaxing from Ron’s hips, he opens his eyes and looks down. Ron whimpers, still fucking Draco with jerky thrusts, his entire body tense, right on the edge. Draco drags his index finger through the spunk on Ron’s stomach and sucks it into his mouth, watching Ron with lazy, half-lidded eyes.

Draco was going to blow him, Ron remembers desperately—and it’s too much, too fucking much. He surrenders to it, groaning, forcing himself as deep as he can go, letting himself be swept away by deep, shuddering waves of climax.

It’s barely over before Draco is kissing him, his fingers in Ron’s hair, his mouth open and wet and hungry. Ron, still twitching through the aftershocks, kisses back unthinkingly. Draco’s mouth tastes like come, rich and sour, but the longer they kiss, the sweeter it becomes. The sugar from the tea, lingering after all.

The kiss keeps tension from creeping into Ron’s limbs as his brain slowly starts functioning again. It’s nicer than last time, this closeness in the aftermath. There’s no awkwardness at all. Just warmth. Contentment.

Ron has always thought of Draco as entirely self-centred, practically blind to the existence of other people and certainly not aware enough of their preferences to know how to manipulate them. But he’s clearly better at it than Ron has ever given him credit for.

“Hey,” Ron says softly to Draco, who is pressing languid kisses into Ron’s jaw. “We only did one position.”

Draco groans. “Fuck, it was so good, though. I love being on top.”

Ron bites his tongue to keep himself from wholeheartedly agreeing. “I took pictures from a few angles,” he says. “And I held it steady, like you said, so there should be at least a few good ones. Do you reckon it’ll be enough?”

Draco huffs into Ron’s neck and rolls off him, all sweaty skin and floppy limbs. “Pray tell, what is it you have against basking in the afterglow? Because I refuse to talk admin within ten minutes of coming. I won’t do it. Kindly fuck off.”

His arm is flung over his face so Ron can’t see his expression—just the faded impression of the Dark Mark.

“All right,” Ron says mildly. “I’ll leave you to bask, then.”

Resisting the brief, ridiculous urge to drop a kiss somewhere on Draco’s skin—god, that last slow snog really messed with his head—Ron gets up and gathers his clothes, intending to get dressed in the hallway so as not to further disturb Draco’s peace. At the door, clothes held in a crumpled bundle over his still-sensitive dick, he looks back to the bed. Draco has moved the arm from his face and is watching Ron, his nose scrunched up. Ron, not sure what to say, offers him a little wave goodbye. He doesn’t wait to see what Draco does in response.

He makes his way through the house, tugging on clothes as he goes. He’s doing up the button on his second-best pair of jeans when he gets to the living room and is confronted by the friendly furniture, that daft heart-patterned mug with Draco’s half-drunk tea, and the pile of photographs on the sofa cushion—plus the two on the floor that Draco tossed aside earlier.

With a glance over his shoulder to make sure the hallway behind him is still empty, Ron picks up the photos.

Draco was right—they are shit: blurry impressions of flesh and rhythmic motion. Ron rifles through them, squinting at flashes of white-blonde hair, pink-tinged skin, a freckled stomach.

There’s one photograph that has a pale stripe down the middle that might be Draco’s back, curving out at the bottom into the lush swell of his arse. Without letting himself think about it too much, Ron pockets it and puts the rest of the photos back where he found them.

And then life goes back to normal.

The shop is as busy as ever, keeping Ron occupied until late evening five days out of seven. He has Sunday dinner at the Burrow every other week. He goes on a few half-hearted dates that don’t lead anywhere. And he still has lunches at the Dozy Horklump with Harry and Hermione—Draco is there too, most of the time, though he’s back to pestering the others and largely ignoring Ron, which leaves Ron feeling a bit wrong-footed. And grateful, obviously; it’s not like he wants to be on the receiving end of Draco’s nonsense. They did each other a favour one time—two times, really—and that’s that. It’s nice that things are back to normal. It’s good.

It’s just—Draco is bigger now. He takes up more space in Ron’s head. Before, Ron sat through these lunches barely even aware that Draco was there; now, he can’t help but see him.

He sees the tail end of one of those faint jagged scars peeking out of the collar of Draco’s robes.

He sees that Draco never eats with them—always frowns at the menu board but only ever orders his cup of over-sugared tea.

He sees the way Draco taunts Harry and Hermione, riling them up, toying with them for a while then effortlessly smoothing things over in time for them to go back to work.

It’s annoying. It’s annoying that Ron has to notice this shit now. It’s annoying that Draco has gone right back to pretending Ron doesn’t exist. It’s annoying that Ron fell for Draco’s sly manipulation just as easily as Harry and Hermione do, every bloody lunchtime.

Ron is being annoyed by it all, glaring at that little white scar on the side of Draco’s neck, at the mouth he was going to put on Ron’s cock and didn’t, when Hermione mentions visiting her parents’ new cottage in Somerset.

“It’s in the middle of nowhere,” she says, brushing her fingers together to rid herself of invisible crumbs from her tuna mayo sandwich. “An absolute nightmare to get to by public transport. And obviously I’ve never been before, so I wouldn’t feel comfortable Apparating. I think I’ll have to take the car, but it’s almost a four-hour drive—what do you think? Is it mad to try to get there and back in one day?”

The question was directed at Harry, but it’s Draco who answers.

“A car?” he asks, his face lighting up. “Can I come?”

There’s an awkward pause.

“Er,” Harry says. “You want to visit Hermione’s parents with her?”

Draco looks between Harry and Hermione—even deigns to glance at Ron. “Well, not just me, obviously. You two will have to come too, to make sure everything is fine with The Car.” The capital letters are painfully audible.

“My parents are Muggles,” Hermione says. “You’re aware of that?”

“I love Muggles!” Draco says, with no trace of irony. “I’ve always loved Muggles!”

Harry opens his mouth, appears to realise any response would be a waste of time, and closes it again.

So that’s how Ron ends up sharing the back seat of a Vauxhall Corsa with Harry. Hermione’s driving—hands firmly at ten and two o’clock—and Draco is in the passenger seat, fiddling endlessly with the radio, the glove box, the window buttons. It starts raining about fifteen minutes after they join the M4 and the windscreen wipers make him exclaim so loudly that Ron’s ears ring until the next junction.

At the first stop, Ron and Harry stay in the car while Hermione shows Draco how to use a petrol pump. Ron listens to Harry complain about Robards while he watches the other two in the wing mirror. Draco’s wearing Muggle clothes again: dark jeans and a deep purple button-down shirt. The shape of him is so obvious in them. Too-thin shoulders. Long legs. Tight, grabbable arse.

Ron clears his throat. “I’ll drive for the next bit, I reckon,” he says, interrupting Harry. “Give Hermione a break.”

“Eh? Do you even have a driving licence?”

“Harry, I drove you from London to Scotland when we were twelve years old.”

“I think it’s a bit different when you’re driving on actual roads, mate.”

Ron scoffs and unbuckles his seatbelt. He just needs something to focus on for a while, that’s all. He’s been driving for over half of his life, when you think about it, and the motorway is one straight line. How hard can it be?

Forty-five minutes later, Ron pulls into a service station car park and all four of them emerge from the car on shaking legs. Hermione confiscates the keys and tells Ron, in no uncertain terms, that he is not allowed to take another shift at the wheel.

“It wasn’t that bad,” Ron tries.

Hermione narrows her eyes in a very specific way that suggests if they weren’t surrounded by Muggles, her wand would be pointed right between his eyes.

Harry slaps Ron on the shoulder. “I thought it was fun,” he says encouragingly. “Like playing Quidditch in a storm when you have no control over the broom. Exciting.”

“Thank you, Potter, but some of us prefer riding a broom when we’re not at active risk of being thrown off it,” Draco sniffs.

Ron thinks of the last time he saw Draco riding something. Draco meets his gaze and looks away quickly.

Is his chest flushed, hidden away under that purple shirt?

“Anyway,” Ron says loudly. “I’ll get the sandwiches in, yeah?”

The reminder of their location at least seems to please Draco, who grabs Hermione’s arm and interrogates her about the history of motorway service stations. Ron exhales and shoves his wallet at Harry.

“I don’t actually know how much Muggle money I have in there. Is it enough for lunch?”

Harry counts Ron’s change while they trail Hermione and Draco into the services. Ron really tries not to stare at Draco’s arse. It’s just—it’s right there. He’s only human.

“Remind me again how we’re friends with Malfoy these days?” Ron asks. “I feel like it’s your fault.”

“I didn’t do anything!” Harry says. “He just started following me! He’s my boss’s assistant; I could hardly hex him, could I? But you and Hermione could have, so technically I think it’s your fault. You’ve got twenty-three quid, by the way. Enough for a few meal deals, but don’t go wild.”

Ron accepts the wallet back without taking his eyes off Draco and Hermione. “It’s fucking weird, though, innit,” he says. “Imagine telling us ten years ago that one day we’d have Draco Malfoy tagging along to visit Hermione’s parents.”

Harry snorts. “You think this is weird? Wait ’til you hear what he asked me a few weeks ago.”

Ron straightens his shoulders and prepares his best innocent expression. “Oh?”

Apparently, Ron’s best innocent expression is not innocent enough, because when Harry has finished explaining Draco’s proposition and Ron says, “What! That’s crazy!”, Harry bursts out laughing.

“He asked you too, then?”

Ron hesitates, but what’s the point in lying? “He did, yeah.”

“He’s completely mad,” Harry says admiringly. “As if he thought either of us would actually go for it.”

Ron veers into WHSmith and examines the sandwich selection like it’s the most fascinating thing he’s ever seen.

“…Ron?”

“What do you reckon for Hermione? She likes tuna but we don’t want the car stinking of fish, do we?”

“Oh my god. You didn’t.”

“Prawn might be all right, though,” Ron says desperately. “She likes prawn, yeah?”

Harry grabs Ron by the shoulders and spins him around. “Ron Weasley, look me in the eyes and tell me you didn’t have sex with Draco Malfoy.”

Ron winces and says nothing at all.

Harry’s mouth falls so far open it’s almost funny. “Holy shit. Holy shit.”

“I know,” Ron says miserably.

“Fuck. Wow. How was it?”

It was good. It was hot. Ron can’t really stop thinking about it. “It was weird,” he says. “I dunno. Though the pictures came out rubbish the first time, he had to get the camera fixed—”

“The first time?” Harry yelps. A grey-haired woman who looks like an angry Madam Pomfrey tuts at them from further down the aisle. “Sorry,” Harry calls, raising a hand at her in apology. “Sorry, but”—he rounds on Ron again—“what do you mean, ‘the first time’? How many times did you do it?”

“Only twice.”

“Only twice! Have you heard yourself?”

“I felt bad! He got us those tickets to the Memorial Dinner the other week and he didn’t even get his stupid photos. Besides—it’s hardly torture, is it?”

Harry makes a skeptical face and picks a cheese and pickle sandwich off the shelf.

“Oh, come on,” Ron says, grabbing a chicken and a BLT along with the prawn and shuffling over to the drinks. “How come you didn’t do it? I always figured you and him would…”

“Would what?”

Ron shrugs, almost dislodging the sandwiches he has balanced in the crook of his elbow. “You know,” he says. “He bothers you at work all the time. He only hangs around us now because of you. You’ve always been a bit weird about each other.”

“Have not!”

Ron gives him a look.

“Even if that were true—which it isn’t!” Harry adds hotly, grabbing a random selection of drinks and ushering Ron towards the checkouts. “He wanted to take pictures, didn’t he? I’m not after a photo of my bollocks on the front page of the Prophet, personally. And anyway…” They pause in front of the sweets. Harry focuses a bit too intently on a bag of Jelly Babies.

Ron plucks the Jelly Babies from the shelf. “Anyway?” he prompts.

“Anyway, I’m…sort of seeing someone.”

“Eh? Since when?”

“Few weeks. Couple of months, maybe.” Harry has transferred his attention onto a bag of Sour Patch Kids. Ron grabs those too.

“Well, good for you,” he says. “About bloody time. Why are you being weird about it?”

Harry hesitates. Ron chucks the Jelly Babies at his head. Miraculously, Harry catches them even with his arms full of drinks bottles.

“Look,” Harry says, guiding them to the self-checkouts and doing whatever weird Muggle magic it is that makes them work. “Don’t hate me when I tell you who it is, all right?”

Ron tries to think who Harry could be seeing that would make Ron hate him. He freezes, the prawn sandwich burning in his hand. “Oh my god. You and Hermione?”

“What? No! Jesus, Ron!”

“Well, I don’t know!”

“Unexpected item in bagging area.”

There’s a brief interlude while the checkout machine makes a fuss about a bottle of apple juice and they have to call over a bored-looking teenager with badges pinned all the way down their WHSmith lanyard to fix it.

“Glad we don’t have these stupid things at Wheezes,” Ron says once they can carry on again.

“It’s your brother,” Harry blurts.

“At Wheezes? Yeah, his name is George. You all right?”

“No,” Harry says. “The person I’m seeing. It’s your brother.”

Ron stops dead, clutching the remaining sandwiches to his chest. “You’re joking. You’re having me on.”

Harry grimly takes the sandwiches and shows them to the machine.

“You’re not joking?”

“Please insert card or select payment type.”

“Which brother? Harry. Harry, which brother?”

“Jelly Babies?” comes a snooty voice from behind them. “Sour Patch Kids? Don’t tell me Muggles make food from children; I’ve literally only just stopped thinking of them as savages.”

“No, but they make food from animal bones and sugar,” Hermione sniffs, and Ron abandons his hopes of interrogating a confession out of Harry. He narrows his eyes, points a finger at Harry in a way he hopes conveys This isn’t over, you little shit, and follows the others back to the car.

Hermione’s lectures about confectionary and ethical farming practices take them all the way past Stonehenge. Draco—in the back with Harry—goes a bit quiet when he realises they’re in Wiltshire, but perks up again when Harry tucks into the sweets, cheerfully heedless of the last forty minutes of dire warnings.

“It’s lunchtime, though,” Ron says, peering at them in the mirror of the passenger seat visor. “You should both eat something proper. We’ve got sandwiches.”

“I’m not hungry,” Draco says through a mouthful of Jelly Baby. Harry wrestles the bag back from him and Draco yelps in outrage.

Ron twists in his seat to frown at them. “I got you a chicken one,” he tells Draco. “No mayo.”

Draco is straining against his seatbelt as he tries to simultaneously push Harry’s sniggering face to one side and drag the rest of him closer so he can reach the bag of sweets that Harry is holding aloft, but at that, he pauses. “What? How did you know I don’t like mayonnaise?”

Ron shrugs and turns back around. “You should eat something proper,” he says again. “Living off tea and sugar isn’t good for you.”

Out of a habit Ron thought he’d grown out of years ago, he finds himself glancing at Hermione for approval of his anti-sugar sentiments. Her gaze is fixed on the road, obviously, but her eyebrows are raised. It’s not quite the approving smile Ron expected.

“What?” he asks, while Draco wails that Harry’s hurting him and Harry snorts and tells him to shut up.

“Nothing,” Hermione says. “Nothing at all.”

They arrive at Hermione’s parents’ cottage just after two o’clock. Mr and Mrs Granger greet them warmly—and seem particularly enamoured with Draco, which just goes to show that despite the distinctly librarianesque disposition of the lot of them, lack of self-preservation instincts runs in the Granger family.

The Grangers beam as Draco—in a very posh and pure-blood way, which seems to work on Muggles nonetheless—effusively compliments features of the house that Ron would never have noticed in a million years, including the detail on the ceiling coving, the floor tiles in the foyer and the geographical direction of the living-room windows.

When he pauses for breath, Mrs Granger nudges Hermione and gives an approving nod. “Lovely manners on this one,” she says. Then, when she catches Ron frowning at her, adds, “Not that you didn’t have nice manners, of course!”

“Er,” Ron says, baffled by both the reassurance and the use of past tense. “Thank you?”

Hermione seems to understand, though. “Oh my god, Mum, no,” she says. “Draco is not my boyfriend.”

Draco, peering at the wood grain of the sideboard, straightens and casts a panicked look at Hermione. “Ah, no, I— Forgive me. I am deeply flattered that I would have your approval, but—no. I’m afraid I am exceedingly homosexual. Sorry.”

“Oh!” Mrs Granger’s gaze skitters to Harry, who is visibly struggling not to laugh, and back to Draco, who has taken a step backwards as if genuinely terrified of being thought of as straight. “Oh, I see!” She smiles in that indulgent way vaguely progressive parents have when encountering homosexuality at a safe distance from their family line. “How wonderful! Well, it’s lovely to have you here, boys. Do make yourselves at home.”

Draco insists on helping Mr Granger make the tea. The door to the kitchen hasn’t even swung closed behind them before Draco starts quizzing Mr Granger about the kitchen appliances.

“I was never as bad as that, was I?” Ron asks Harry and Hermione in an undertone. Both of them laugh. Neither of them denies it.

It shouldn’t still be a thing, really, but Ron has never stopped being surprised at how some words mean very different things to him than they do to other people. For example, when Ron calls something a cottage, he means a poky little hut with draughty windows and a patched-up roof. It turns out that what the Grangers call a cottage is a three-bedroom house with, apparently, delightfully detailed ceiling coving and exquisite floor tiles in the foyer.

Rather than a damp little corner with a couple of moth-eaten chairs, the living room of the Grangers’ cottage is light and airy, with smooth white walls and a grey rug covering the floor. There is a fireplace, but it’s a dinky Muggle one with a glass pane over the front. There are little tables dotted around—most of them have electric lamps on them, but one in the corner bears a bouquet of flowers that wafts a floral sweetness around the room. Ron has the distinct impression that if he touches anything, he’ll leave visible grubby fingerprints and he’ll be ushered out of the house by an irate house-elf—or whatever the Muggle equivalent of a house-elf is.

He brushes his jeans off and perches next to Hermione in the middle of the white sofa. Mrs Granger settles gracefully into one of the blue-and-white armchairs that bracket the settee, and Harry folds himself onto the floor, leaving the other armchair and the space on the sofa next to Ron empty.

Mrs Granger immediately begins asking Hermione a series of very thorough questions about her last few weeks. Hermione is still ranting about the conference she attended months ago when Draco and Mr Granger return from the kitchen laden with trays of tea and cheese and biscuits.

“Be careful of the little round red ones, Weasley,” Draco says importantly as he sets a tray of cheese onto the coffee table. “They’re called Baby Bells, and you have to make sure to take the red part off first. These aren’t made from babies, either, by the way. Muggles just…like to name food after children. Which I think is just charming!” he adds, glowing over at Mr Granger, who sinks into his armchair with the air of a man who has aged five years in the last ten minutes.

“He discovered Jelly Babies on the way over,” Hermione tells her parents. “And Sour Patch Kids. He was concerned.”

“To be fair, I thought Chocolate Frogs were real frogs at first,” Harry says. “But then again, I was eleven.”

Mrs Granger frowns. “Hermione tells us there’s not much education about dentistry in the magical world.”

“What’s dentistry?” Draco asks with genuine interest, installing himself on the sofa next to Ron.

Hermione winces.

After delivering their second lecture of the day about the perils of sugar, Mrs Granger resumes her interrogation of Hermione, then starts on the rest of them. With a thirst for knowledge that is uncannily familiar, she squeezes out a startling amount of information from Harry and moves onto Draco before they’ve finished the first round of tea. She asks how Draco and Harry met and coos indulgently when Draco tells her they went to school together.

“It’s always nice when you find someone you have that level of shared experience with, isn’t it?”

Ron grins and waits for Draco to protest in the way he did when Mrs Granger assumed he and Hermione were together. But Draco answers with a vague agreement, all polite manners and pure-blood charm. The grin fades from Ron’s face.

“Have you two always been close, then?”

At that, Harry and Hermione both let out a loud, derisive snort.

“Ah,” Draco says. “No; back in school, we…ran in different circles.”

“So that’s why you’ve never mentioned Draco, Hermione.”

“I have mentioned him,” Hermione says around a mouthful of cheese. “Remember me telling you about that horrible boy I slapped for being awful to Hagrid when I was about fourteen?”

“Yes,” Mrs Grangers says, clearly expecting there to be more to that story, like Draco is the one who broke up the fight or Draco also came to Hagrid’s defence because he is so noble and good. But Hermione waves her hand at Draco, a clear Ta-da!, and Mrs Granger blinks. “Oh,” she says. “Well—”

“I had a terribly tough childhood,” Draco says quickly. “You know how that sort of thing can present in neglected teenage boys.”

“You lived in a manor,” Harry says lazily, “and your parents gave you literally anything you wanted.”

“But did they give me love, Potter?”

“Yes,” Harry says. “In abundance.”

Mrs Granger opens her mouth, seems to realise that whatever relationship Harry and Draco have is beyond her comprehension, then pivots to Ron. “So!” she says brightly. “It’s so nice that you and Hermione are still friends.”

Ron glances at Hermione, who rolls her eyes and does not come to his rescue.

“Er, yes,” Ron says. “I mean, yeah, it’s nice. Love being friends with Hermione. One of my favourites.”

Mrs Granger raises her eyebrows. “Unless you’re…more than friends again?”

“No, Mum,” Hermione says. “I told you: I’m too busy to think about that sort of thing right now.”

“Ah. Shame.” Mrs Granger smiles sadly at Ron. “You have lovely teeth, you know, and you’re nice and tall. The Granger men tend to run on the shorter side; it would have been good to get a boost in the gene pool.”

“There’s always one of the others,” Draco says. “There are a lot of Weasleys.”

“Oh, that’s right! Wasn’t there one who was Head Boy while you were at school, Hermione? What’s he like?”

“Percy?” Ron says. “He’s a right cu— Er, I mean, he’s quite uptight.”

Harry, on his knees piling Ritz crackers onto his plate, snorts softly. Ron doesn’t really pay attention to it. Until he does.

“Harry,” he says. “Please. It’s not Percy. Tell me it’s not Percy.”

Harry grins and shoves two crackers into his mouth instead of replying.

“Harry. Don’t do this to me.”

“What?” Mrs Granger asks, smiling politely.

“Nothing,” Ron says, forcing an apologetic smile. “Sorry.”

In Ron’s peripheral vision, Hermione narrows her eyes.

“So, Ron,” Mrs Granger says. “You’re not too busy for relationships, are you? Are you seeing anyone at the moment?”

Several visions of pale skin and tight, fuckable arses flash to the forefront of Ron’s mind. He shoves them away impatiently. “Erm, no,” he says. “Not really.”

“Who was that girl you went out with last week?” Harry asks. “Emma?”

“Emily,” Ron says. “And she was the week before, actually—last week was Dylan.”

“Two dates in two weeks!” Mrs Granger says. She’s still smiling, but Ron’s Mum Radar has been finely honed; the note of disapproval in her voice is blindingly obvious. “It doesn’t sound like you’re giving them much of a chance. You’re not interested in settling down like your friends here?”

How is Ron supposed to say that he desperately wants to settle down, actually? That he’d love to find a person who could be his—that’s why he even bothers with the dates.

But when he was with Emily, who owned her own range of perfumes, all he could think about was chamomile-scented sheets and the smell of burnt coffee and gunpowder.

And though Dylan would have normally been Ron’s perfect bloke—he was a chef, come on—Ron spent their entire dinner together wondering whether Draco would eat any of the dishes on the fancy tasting menu.

It’s all so fucking stupid. Annoying. Ron will get over it soon.

“Ah, you know how it is,” he says, flinging an arm around Hermione’s shoulders. “I’ve already been with the best, so it’s difficult for anyone to measure up.”

Hermione scoffs and swats him until he lets go, but she looks pleased.

“Well,” Mrs Granger says, mollified. “I suppose I can’t argue with that. But you must have something new to tell me. We haven’t seen you for months!”

“Nah, I’m the same as ever. I just work in the shop, visit my mum, go for a pint every now and then. Boring stuff.”

“He’s underselling himself, of course,” Draco chimes in. “He’s picked up a new hobby recently! Isn’t that right, Ron?”

Ron shoots Draco a bewildered look. “I have?”

“Photography,” Draco tells Mrs Granger sweetly, and Ron’s ears heat up so fast he’s worried it might be an actual medical problem. “He’s got quite the eye for it, you know.”

Ron sputters out a protest and Harry starts choking on his fucking crackers and Hermione snaps, “Honestly, what are you all talking about?”

“He’s just still a bit shy about it, aren’t you, Weasley?” Draco says, all wide eyes and innocence. “Though you needn’t be; it’s very impressive work.” He touches Ron’s arm, his fingers lingering. On the other side of the coffee table, Harry is almost crying and honestly, Ron’s not far off himself.

“How about a tour of the rest of the house, Mrs Granger?” he says desperately. “Of the cottage, I mean.”

Mrs Granger, gracious host that she is, barely even blinks. “By all means! Hermione, help your dad tidy away the plates, love.”

“What? Mum! I want to look around too!”

“Best hurry up then! Boys, follow me. We’ll start upstairs.”

Thankfully, Draco stops being fucking insane and slips smoothly back into flattering the interior decoration and electrical appliances for the duration of the tour. Hermione joins them, grumpily, just as Mrs Granger is showing them the main bathroom—“main” because there’s an en suite in the master bedroom. In a cottage. Honestly.

By the time they’re standing in the back garden peering at the centimetre of the Bristol Channel visible on the horizon, Ron has calmed down enough that he no longer feels like he’s one degree away from bursting into flames like an expired phoenix.

Then on the way back inside, Draco grabs his shoulder.

“You go on dates?” he hisses in Ron’s ear. “When do you have the time? Don’t you have a very busy job?”

“I have Tuesdays and Fridays and every other Sunday off,” Ron says, shaking Draco off with a frown. “What’s it to you?”

“I didn’t know that,” Draco says. “I didn’t know you had—so much leisure time.”

“What, did you think I made a special exception to come round to yours?”

Draco scowls, which Ron takes as a yes. He snorts and, still stung by Draco’s attempt to embarrass him, says, “Sorry, Malfoy. Must be a blow to learn the world doesn’t actually revolve around you, eh.” He thumps Draco on the back and joins the others inside.

Draco is quiet on the drive home. Ron’s not the only one who notices: Harry teases him about being in shock from the realisation that Muggles are people after all. Hermione sniffs and tells him he’s having a sugar crash and it serves him right. Draco ignores Harry, holds up a half-hearted middle finger at the back of Hermione’s head and goes back to frowning out of the window.

They make it to Slough before he pipes up again, announcing that they should go to the pub when they get back to London “for a proper debrief.”

Harry groans. “I’m tired, Draco, I want to go home.”

“I obviously don’t expect you to know this, Potter, but the key to maintaining a decent relationship with one’s parents is adequate processing opportunity every time you see them. We need to talk about your feelings, Hermione. Preferably over alcohol.”

“I don’t need to talk about my feelings,” Hermione says, smoothly overtaking a battered old Mini hogging the middle lane. “Apart from that year they didn’t know I existed, my relationship with my parents has never caused me any kind of turmoil.”

Draco clicks his fingers. “See? That’s not a normal thing to say. There is more here. We must unpack it immediately.”

Nobody else is particularly enthusiastic about going to the pub, but somehow the pub is where they end up. Draco volunteers to get the first round in. His generosity is surprising until he tosses his head and says, “Weasley, you’re helping me. Come on.” Ron sighs and slopes after him to the bar.

They place their order and wait to be served. Ron’s shoulders slowly loosen—he’d been expecting an argument, not this stilted silence—but his relief is short-lived. So suddenly it’s as if he’s been prompted by something only he can hear, Draco turns to him and says, “Oh, that’s right! I’ve been meaning to tell you: the photos from last time—”

“Ah yes, my new photography hobby,” Ron says drily.

A sly grin breaks out on Draco’s face. Ron watches in idle fascination as Draco forces his expression back into woeful innocence. “Well, the thing is…the place I get the photos developed. They lost the second batch.”

“Eh? What do you mean, they lost them?”

“I mean the photographs got misplaced. They’re missing. Unaccounted for. Not able to be located.”

“They lost them at their office? Or the owl dropped them when you sent them over, or what?”

Draco shrugs.

“Draco, if the owl dropped them, any old fucker could pick up an envelope full of pictures of you with a cock up your arse.”

“The point is,” Draco says, waving away the possibility with an unconcerned flick of his hand, “we need to do it again.”

Ron closes his eyes to block out the sight of Draco blinking beseechingly up at him. The trouble is, behind his eyelids seems to be a Muggle porn film reminding him what Draco looks like when he’s getting fucked—loose limbs, flushed chest, open mouth. Ron snaps his eyes open hastily.

“Look,” he says. “Are you sure they’re lost? Can’t you wait a bit, see if they turn up?”

“I don’t have time to wait! The Ministry will be knocking on my door any day to force me into ward duty training. And I will not be swayed from my Italian dream, Weasley. I won’t!”

Ron pulls a face.

“Come on,” Draco wheedles. “Was it really so awful?”

The porn film in Ron’s head is playing during every blink—but Mrs Granger’s voice cooing over what a cute couple Harry and Draco make is echoing unpleasantly in his ears, too. “I dunno,” he says. “I suppose it wasn’t bad.”

“Not bad?” Draco repeats, appalled.

“All right, it was good,” Ron admits. “You were—good.”

Draco hums. “I thought you were good, too,” he says in a low voice, leaning close as if sharing a secret. “You fucked me so well. You made me come so hard.”

“Jesus.” The hint of tobacco smoke that hangs in the air of the pub is close enough to the burnt-coffee-gunpowder of Draco’s camera that it’s making Ron’s head spin. “All right, you don’t have to… Fine. We can do it again. Just one more time.”

There’s a flare of heat in Draco’s ice-cool eyes. He doesn’t even look at the barmaid when she serves their drinks. Ron fishes out some gold and by the time he’s putting away his change, Draco has grabbed two of the drinks and is halfway back to the table where Harry and Hermione are waiting. Ron spills a bit of Harry’s pint over his hand in his haste to catch up and arrives at the table just in time to hear Draco say, “Well, this has been a wonderful debrief, very productive, but Weasley and I are leaving now.”

“Eh?” Ron says, about to sit down.

Hermione and Harry look at each other. Harry grins and holds out his hand.

“All right,” Hermione says wearily, fishing out a Galleon and pressing it into Harry’s palm. “Have a nice evening, you two.”

“Cheers for the extra drinks,” Harry says, nodding at the pint that Ron was about to tuck into. “How much do I owe you?”

“Oh, this will do for now.” Draco plucks the coin from Harry’s open hand, not seeming to care that Ron was the one who paid. “We can sort the rest out later.”

They’re barely out of the pub door before Draco Apparates them to his bedroom. It’s the same as ever—wooden bed, messy desk, open window—and truthfully much cosier and cottagey than the Grangers’ new place. The bedsheets are navy again. How fucking weird is it that Ron has been here enough times to become familiar with Draco’s sheets? To feel more comfortable here than he has been all day?

The view of the bedsheets is blocked by Draco stepping close. His hands are warm at Ron’s waist, his thumbs slipping under Ron’s T-shirt to find skin.

It’s difficult to take a full breath. The inhale catches in Ron’s chest, stuck around something thick and heavy. “So,” he croaks. “Should we just—”

Draco kisses him.

Ron was prepared for another fight, but it’s worse: it’s gentle. Draco’s hands slide up Ron’s sides and his mouth is so slow, almost hesitant. Ron can’t help but shiver. He can’t fight the urge to lean into it. Can’t stop himself from cupping Draco’s face and coaxing his mouth open.

Draco doesn’t taste of sugar this time. He doesn’t taste of anything but warm, familiar person. A small noise escapes from the back of Ron’s throat.

Draco responds with a low hum. “I’ve been thinking about this for weeks,” he murmurs.

Ron pulls away. “Don’t do that. Don’t say things you don’t—”

Draco winds a hand into Ron’s hair and tugs him back. “But I want you to know.” He kisses Ron again. God, why is it so soft and slow, Ron can’t think. “You’ve been driving me crazy.”

“Shut up.”

And Draco does shut up, for a while. There’s nothing but heavy breaths and bitten-off noises while they kiss, while they pull at each other’s clothes and stumble unseeingly towards the bed. It’s only once the chill of chamomile-scented bedsheets registers against the heated skin of his back that Ron realises they’re both shirtless.

He glances down to check—and yes, a pink flush is painted across Draco’s chest. How would the warmth of it feel against Ron’s lips? His tongue?

“You got me a sandwich.”

Ron drags his gaze upwards. “I did what?”

“You got me a sandwich,” Draco repeats, “with no mayonnaise on it.”

Ron’s head is scrambled. He can’t figure out how much he’s supposed to be pretending to be unaffected by Draco’s proximity. “At the service station, you mean? So?”

“Why? Why did you do that?”

Look, Ron loves food, he really does—but why are they talking about it now? “Well,” he says, “I wasn’t going to feed myself and let the rest of you starve, was I?”

“But the mayonnaise. You specifically got me a sandwich with no mayonnaise. Why?”

Ron shifts, trying to relieve the pressure in his crotch. “I dunno. You never eat lunch with us. Mayo was the only thing I could think of that’s in basically everything at the Horklump. Why, did I get it wrong?”

“No, you were right, I hate mayonnaise. But why would you…”

Ron waits, but Draco continues to frown at him.

“I’m sorry about the sandwich?” Ron tries.

Draco lets out a frustrated huff. “You should be,” he says. Then he kisses Ron again. Ron’s hands finally find their way to Draco’s gorgeous denim-clad arse, and thoughts of sandwiches are Banished from his mind.

“Last time,” Draco breathes, reaching between them to fumble with the button of Ron’s jeans, “I didn’t suck your cock because I wanted you to imagine it afterwards. Did you?”

Ron did—every day. But he’s not about to admit that to Draco when he’s barely even admitted it to himself.

Luckily, Draco doesn’t seem to expect a reply.

“Because I did,” he continues, sliding his hand inside Ron’s pants. “I made myself come thinking about it. Every night.”

Ron is dimly aware that Draco is just saying shit to get him going, but unfortunately, it’s working; he can’t help but groan and push up into it as Draco kisses a path down Ron’s neck, his chest, his stomach. “But you don’t need to—” Draco pulls off Ron’s jeans and pants and settles between his bare thighs. He can’t possibly have missed that Ron doesn’t need much assistance to be performance-ready. “I’m already…”

“Aren’t you just.” Draco lowers his mouth. Ron holds his breath—but Draco drops a kiss to Ron’s stomach either side of his cock. The only thing that touches his dick is the feather-soft brush of Draco’s warm exhale.

“Did they do this to you?” Draco asks in a low voice. “Emily? And Dylan?” He lowers his mouth until his lips graze the swollen head of Ron’s cock when he talks. “Did you fuck them? Did they like it as much as I did?”

“Draco, for fuck’s sake.” Sweat beads at Ron’s temples. His cock is aching, hyper-sensitive to every tiny, barely-there brush of skin on skin. “Don’t mess around, I—”

Draco licks a long stripe up the underside of Ron’s cock. At the top, he flattens his tongue and opens his mouth to wrap his lips around the head.

And then he doesn’t.

Ron drops his head back against the pillow with a heartfelt groan.

“You never answered me,” Draco says. Ron can feel the words on the tip of his dick, echoing through his whole body. “Did you think about this? Did you think about my mouth on you?”

“I’m a good person,” Ron tells the wooden beams that span the ceiling. “I don’t deserve this.”

“Did you?”

Ron has never been more aware of the rhythm of someone else’s breathing as he is of Draco’s right now. It flutters over him: a soft, warm touch. Too little. Too much.

“Yeah,” he admits. “Yeah, I thought about it.”

“Did you think about it while you were with them? All those people you’ve been on dates with. Did you imagine it was me when they did this to you?”

It’s such a bold fucking question that Ron lifts his head to stare at Draco. Draco raises an eyebrow, unrepentant: Well?

Fuck it. Ron’s never had the constitution for this sort of game. “Yeah, I thought about you while I was with them,” he says honestly. “I did. Which is why I didn’t go home with any of them. It wouldn’t have been fair to do this with someone else while I couldn’t get you out of my stupid fucking head.”

The susurration of breath against Ron’s cock stops. There’s nothing for one beat, two, three. Then the nothingness is engulfed by searing heat and pressure.

Ron groans, long and low. Draco is obviously toying with him—but so what? Maybe it’s embarrassing how much Ron has fallen for his manipulation, how much Ron wants him, but Ron grew up with third-hand clothes and a demented ball of feathers for an owl: he can cope with a bit of embarrassment.

So he lets himself sink into it. Lets his hand wind itself into Draco’s hair, holding it back from his face. Lets himself look, burning the image of Draco sucking his cock into his brain so he can watch it behind his eyelids whenever he wants to.

“Draco,” he finds himself murmuring. Draco meets Ron’s gaze, mouth full, and he looks so fucking sinful that Ron reaches for the camera to capture it, but his hand comes up empty. Draco raises an eyebrow, but Ron’s too stupid from the dick-sucking to be able to turn hot, wanted photo into a proper sentence. He flexes his fingers in Draco’s hair. Draco’s eyes fall closed.

Ron was hard before Draco took him into his mouth, but now he’s rock fucking solid, straining against Draco’s wet, clever tongue, against the soft palate of his mouth. Draco maintains a steady, torturous pace, and Ron can feel the pleasure of it in the tips of his fingers and the pads of his toes.

He thrusts up a little, chasing more, and Draco makes a low, encouraging noise. God, he’s good at this. It’s so easy to pretend it’s real. Too easy.

With a bitten-off curse, Ron pulls Draco off him and drags him into a kiss. Draco meets it eagerly, his body melting against Ron’s.

“I liked that,” Draco breathes. “You turn me on so much.”

Ron’s about to tell him to shut up again, but Draco grabs his wrist and presses Ron’s palm against the crotch of Draco’s jeans. The hard line of his dick is undeniable—and before Ron’s brain has caught up, he has already yanked open the button, tugged down the zip and wrapped his hand around Draco’s cock.

Draco lets out a wet Oh: breathy, hot, almost shocked. It’s the shock that pierces the haze of want. Fuck, Ron almost forgot why he’s here. He pulls his hand back.

“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, I… I reckon we’re ready now, yeah? Should we get the rest of our kit off?”

Draco makes a strangled noise and drops his head forwards. His hair hides his expression—his hair, which is messy from where Ron scraped his fingers against Draco’s scalp while Draco sucked his cock.

“Draco?”

“Yeah.” A beat, and Draco straightens, flashing Ron a bright grin. “Aren’t you a diligent boy, keeping us on track. They do say that punctiliousness is a very sexy characteristic.”

“Do they?” asks Ron, who doesn’t know what punctiliousness means.

“They do not. Though apparently Potter thinks so.” While Ron frowns, suspecting he and Harry have both been insulted but not quite knowing how, Draco divests himself of his jeans and climbs back on top of Ron.

“I’m prepping myself the Muggle way,” he announces. “I think it’ll be fun. Thematically appropriate. Sensitive to all the Muggles we’ve met today.”

“Not sure they’d care about you using magic to—” But Draco has already Summoned a bottle of lube and is dribbling it onto one hand.

“Here.” He shoves the bottle at Ron and reaches backwards. Ron watches helplessly as Draco’s eyelashes flutter, as he bites his lip, as that flush flares over his sternum. His nipples are tight pink peaks. Ron can still feel the way Draco’s moan resonated against his mouth when Ron pinched them, that first time.

He reaches out without thinking and jerks his hand to the side just before he makes contact. Instead of Draco’s sensitive nipple, Ron’s fingers brush the scars that criss-cross his chest. He follows the path of one all the way up to his neck where it peeks out of his collar—where it has been taunting Ron for weeks.

“The Saviour of the Wizarding World gave me these scars, you know,” Draco says, the pleasure on his face twisting into a strange smirk. “The Boy Who Lived himself.”

Ron stills, Draco’s heartbeat thrumming against his fingertips. “What? You mean Harry?”

As soon as the question leaves his mouth, Ron knows he’s going to get a sarcastic quip in response—but Draco just lets out a breath of laughter. “Yeah. He found me crying in a bathroom and sliced me up. They don’t include that in his biographies, do they? Not that I’ve read them, of course.”

Maybe on another occasion Ron would make fun of Draco for the hasty amendment, but right now he’s too busy feeling sick.

He remembers it now.

Remembers Harry covered in blood, demanding to borrow Ron’s textbook so he could lie to Snape about the spell he used to carve Malfoy open.

It’s hard to process that the same blood that was splattered over Harry’s robes is in Draco right now, flushing his chest. Filling his cock.

“Do they hurt?” he hears himself ask.

“Aside from the pain of my subsequent instinctive dread of emotional vulnerability? Ha. No. Not any more.”

That wild, weird smirk still distorts Draco’s face, but Ron can’t bring himself to smile back. He grabs the back of Draco’s neck and pulls him down until neither of them can see the scars any more. Then he kisses him: hard, slow, deep.

Draco makes an odd noise, but this time Ron refuses to heed it. He maintains the kiss, holding Draco in place. After a few seconds, Draco shudders and loosens, letting out a soft moan.

Ron is so lost in it, so overwhelmed by the thick feeling in his chest, that it takes him a while to notice that Draco’s arm is still awkwardly angled behind his back, a gentle rhythm rocking them together. Draco’s still fucking himself. Still working himself open, his hitched breaths releasing his pleasure into Ron’s mouth.

Ron trails his fingers down Draco’s arm. “Let me,” he murmurs.

“No,” Draco says. “No, I want—” There’s a slippery confusion of fingers—then the tip of Ron’s cock meets hot tightness. He squeezes his eyes closed and presses his forehead against Draco’s as Draco sinks down.

Fuck, did it feel this good last time? It can’t have done. Ron wouldn’t have agreed to do this again if it felt like this every time. He would have known he wouldn’t have survived it.

He remembers this from the previous times though—Draco moving before Ron is ready for it, the slick heat intensifying too soon. It feels so good that Ron can’t help himself: he tips his head up and captures Draco’s mouth in another kiss. Draco shudders, grabs Ron’s face and rocks himself backwards onto Ron’s cock.

It’s like that for a while: Ron pulling Draco close with sweaty hands, swapping shaky breaths between sliding tongues, working together on the slow, regular thrust of Ron inside Draco. It occurs to Ron that he could come so easily like this: caught between Draco’s mouth and his arse. It’s a full-body onslaught of pleasure: ceaseless; inescapable.

Then he remembers.

The camera.

He tries to say something, but it comes out as a strained mess of vowels against Draco’s tongue. Draco licks it up, replying with breathy, encouraging noises, and the thought flits away for another minute, two. God, Ron could get lost in this for the rest of his life. He could do this forever.

“Nnh,” he says, fighting the pull of it. “Nnh— Draco, wait. The camera.”

Draco swears colourfully and buries his face in Ron’s neck. His forehead is so hot even against Ron’s sweaty skin.

“Draco?”

“One sec,” Draco mumbles.

Ron loosens his grip on Draco’s arsecheeks and rubs a tentative hand up Draco’s back. “Sorry,” he says, uselessly.

“No, no.” Draco straightens, sinking deeper onto Ron’s cock and rolling his hips almost spitefully. “You’re right, of course. Thank goodness you remembered. Accio camera!”

Ron expects it to leap up from the floor, temporarily forgotten under a pile of clothes, but it comes from much further away, audibly bumping into walls and knocking things off shelves as it hurtles down the hallway into the bedroom.

Draco’s hand shoots out to grab it, Seeker-fast, but he fumbles the catch; the clunky old thing would have pummelled Ron in the stomach if he weren’t already waiting for it, his hands thoughtlessly hovering either side of Draco’s.

Draco lets out a little laugh. “Whoops. I’m off my game. Bit distracted, you know.” He circles his hips in vindictive demonstration.

Ron grits his teeth and forces the groan to remain in his throat. “It’s all set up? With the spells and the film and everything?”

“Oh, probably,” Draco says. “Try it and see. Here, let me just—” And he looks Ron dead in the eye, plants his hands on Ron’s chest, and fucks himself on Ron’s cock, his mouth falling open like it’s the best thing he’s ever felt.

Raising the camera is almost impossible, but Ron does it. It takes him a few tries to find the button, a few more to press it successfully, but eventually the camera spits out a flash and a puff of purple smoke. Once he’s managed the first one, the next few are easier. He takes three more, holding the camera so, so steady. They have to get the photos right this time. They have to.

While Ron is concentrating, squinting through the little window to make sure Draco is properly in shot, Draco’s fingers wrap around his wrist and tug. With difficulty, Ron balances the camera in one hand and allows Draco to pull the other up to Draco’s lips. Still holding that heated eye contact, Draco sucks two of Ron’s fingers into his mouth. Ron helplessly takes another picture.

“We,” Ron tries, his hips thrusting without his permission. “We should do another position, yeah? Like the first time. So—fuck, you’re so—so we get a good selection.”

Draco slides Ron’s hand down his chest, leaving a glistening trail of saliva over his skin, his scars, and wraps it around his cock. “But you feel so good.” He holds Ron’s fist in place and fucks into it. “Oh. Ron. You feel so good.”

Ron tries to take another picture. The camera, awkwardly balanced, slips out of his hand onto the bed. Instead of trying to retrieve it, Ron digs the fingers of his free hand into the hot, hard muscle of Draco’s straining thigh. “Draco, please,” he forces out. “I can’t— Please.”

Draco whines, his movements faltering. Ron takes advantage of Draco’s loosened grip and tugs his hand away from Draco’s cock, grabbing his other thigh and squeezing, trying to stop them both moving against each other.

It works. Draco slows, then stops. His flushed chest is sweaty, heaving, glistening with a trail of Ron’s spit. Ron pushes his hips up once more then forces himself to be still. “Another position,” he says again. “To make sure.”

Draco nods and lifts himself up onto shaking knees. Ron’s cock slides out of him—fuck, it’s so wet and sensitive, so stupidly, stupidly hard.

“Move over, then.”

Ron’s so busy thinking about shoving his slick, aching cock right back into Draco that it takes him a second to understand. He shakes his head in an attempt to clear it and gets up out of the way.

“This one worked best first time, I think.” Draco flops onto his back and spreads his legs. Everything in Ron is urging him to get between them and fuck Draco, hard and fast and mindless. He makes himself take several deep, steadying breaths. They have to do this right.

A quick spell and the bedsheets flare from navy to Cannons orange. Draco doesn’t complain. Then again: he’s touching himself, gazing at Ron and biting his lip; maybe he hasn’t even noticed.

Ron chucks his wand away and reaches out to run his hand through Draco’s hair, moving it over to one side. There’s something about how hot and sweaty Draco’s scalp is that sends shivers down Ron’s spine. It’s so…unrefined. Crass. Miles and miles away from the polished pure-blood who complimented the Grangers’ floor tiles.

“What are you doing?”

Ron snatches his hand back. “Nothing. Just trying to make it look like a different day, that’s all.”

Draco hums and lolls his head to one side, exposing his neck. “You could mark me up a bit. A couple of love bites is probably the closest we’re going to get to a strategic change of clothing.”

It sounds like a good idea. It sounds like it will give Ron a break, let him regain his footing. But then he drapes himself over Draco and sucks at the salty juncture of his shoulder—then Draco lets out a harsh breath and wraps his legs around Ron—then Ron only needs to reach down with one hand to line himself up and he’s pushing back inside, biting marks into Draco’s fine skin while Draco grips Ron’s shoulders, digs a hand into his hair, moans.

Hips thrusting, pleasure rolling through him, Ron sucks a line of kisses up Draco’s neck to his mouth, then pulls back and fumbles for the camera. He takes a picture of Draco making heavy-lidded eye contact with the lens, his legs spread, his hand on his cock, Ron’s teeth marks defacing Harry’s scars.

“Fuck, you look obscene.” Ron takes a few more pictures, doing his best to hold the camera steady while maintaining the motion of his hips. “You look so fucking good, Draco.”

Draco arches his back with a strained little whimper. “I can’t— I’m not gonna last much longer. Will you fuck me properly while I come?”

Ron doesn’t need to be asked twice. Balancing the camera in one hand again, he grabs Draco’s hip and slams into him. Draco swears, clutching at Ron, pulling him down. The camera falls to the bed, forgotten, as Ron falls forwards to kiss him, messy and urgent.

“Ron,” Draco whines into Ron’s mouth. “Ron, I—”

“Yeah, I’ve got you.” Ron straightens, grabs the back of Draco’s thighs and pounds into him while Draco desperately works his cock. It’s such a gorgeous sight that the thought of the camera flickers into Ron’s mind again—but reaching for it would mean stopping, and that’s impossible, insane, unreasonable. So Ron keeps fucking, keeps chasing the desperate pounding pleasure, keeps fucking and fucking and fucking until Draco cries out and seizes, his thighs clenching around Ron’s hips and his hole clenching around Ron’s cock. Ron crashes over the edge after him, his thoughts splintering to the sight of Draco’s come shooting over his chest, landing alongside the love bites that Ron left, all but obscuring the mark of Harry’s curse.

Draco pulls Ron down by the neck before he’s even finished—Ron’s last shuddering breaths of it are gasped into Draco’s mouth. They kiss slowly through the comedown, Ron’s softening cock slowly thrusting in and out of Draco, making them both shudder, until, finally, it slips out.

Before Ron can pull away, Draco says, “Shh, no admin talk,” and kisses Ron again, keeping him close, keeping his legs wrapped tight around Ron’s arse. It’s dreamy, unreal, slow and soft and not at all like it should be—but it’s nice, so Ron drifts along with it in a daze, kissing and touching and making soft, unthinking noises against Draco’s tongue.

It ends when Draco arches up and Ron’s chest comes into contact with the cold spunk splattered all over Draco. He flinches back and grimaces down at the mess.

Draco huffs out a laugh. “What’s the matter? Never had someone else’s come smeared over your tits before?”

Ron thinks about it. “No.”

Something flashes across Draco’s face. He opens his mouth; closes it again without saying anything. Ron blinks, but before he can comment on the rarity of Draco’s self-censorship, Draco’s pulling him into another kiss and murmuring, “Shall we get you cleaned up before you go, then? Shower off all that dirty, dirty come?”

It’s only then that Ron realises he was expecting to be kicked out.

Though, now he thinks about it, Draco didn’t kick him out the previous two times, either.

“Sure,” he says, “why not?” Then, feeling stupid and reckless, he raises an eyebrow and adds, “Show me the way?”

Draco grins.

They stumble down the hallway to the bathroom like teenagers: laughing as they duck out of sight of the window on the landing; Draco running his hand through the last wet patch of come on his chest and trying to force it into Ron’s face. In his attempts to dodge Draco’s mucky hand, Ron nearly trips over a vase on the floor—he remembers too late the sound of the camera knocking things off shelves when Draco Summoned it—and Draco finds it much funnier than it should be. Ron tackles him in revenge.

By the time they reach the bathroom door, somehow they’re kissing again. Ron’s fingers are wrapped around Draco’s wrist to make sure he keeps the spunky hand away from Ron’s person, but Draco seems to have forgotten about it entirely, the laugh in his throat dissolved into soft, contented murmurs.

Ron, walking backwards, pushes the door open with his foot—and nearly jumps out of his skin when Draco yelps, yanking Ron back into the hallway and slamming the bathroom door closed again.

In the confusion, Ron gets a glimpse of dim red light and a row of—is that bunting?—hanging from the ceiling before Draco slams the door shut. Draco, too, has gone red, as if the strange light of the bathroom has infected his skin.

“What’s the matter?” Ron asks. “Did you see a spider?”

“A spi—?” Draco looks at Ron like he’s an idiot, then his face clears. “Oh. Yes! There was a big spider. A whole row of them. Very scary, we’ll have to wait to use the bathroom until they all die. Oh well! Nothing wrong with a good old-fashioned Scouring Charm!”

Ron is discomfited by the mention of a whole row of very big spiders, but he suspects Draco isn’t entirely telling the truth. “Why are you being weird?”

“I’m not being weird,” Draco insists. “You’re being weird. Why do you want to see inside my bathroom so badly? Pervert.”

Ron frowns and, before Draco can stop him, kicks the door open, holding his breath in case it really is spiders.

But it’s not spiders.

And it’s not bunting.

It’s photographs. Dozens of photographs, pegged to a string that zig-zags across the room at head height. Ron glances at Draco, but Draco seems to be having a quiet meltdown, his face flicking through expressions as if he can’t decide whether to bluff his way through whatever this is, or whether to collapse into a mortified heap at Ron’s feet.

“I don’t get it.” Ron reaches for one of the photographs, unpegs it—and then he does get it, a little bit.

Or wait, no, he still doesn’t get it at all.

It’s a photograph of Draco. Specifically, a photograph of Draco naked, straddling someone, very obviously fucking himself on their dick.

“Is this—? This is us, yeah? That’s me in the photo?”

“What? Of course it’s— Yes, it’s us.”

Ron nods and lets himself look properly. Draco looks good. He’s got his cock in his hand and is rolling his hips luxuriously, blinking his eyes open every few seconds to make heated eye contact with the camera. It’s a thousand times hotter than any dirty magazine or Muggle porn film that Ron has ever seen.

But it doesn’t make sense.

“Back in the pub,” Ron says, “you said the people who develop the photos had lost them.”

“Well,” Draco says, the word crawling out of him with audible effort, “it’s possible that I…adapted the truth somewhat.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” The Draco in the photograph is throwing his head back, picking up speed. Ron swallows.

“It means I… Look, I never sent them to anyone. I developed them here. It’s not that hard; you just have to dunk them in a potion and keep them away from light. Hence the ominous crimson glow, which isn’t a decor choice I favour, personally, though I suppose it probably appeals to you.”

“Okay,” Ron says, trying to parse the important part of Draco’s rambling. “But why did you say they’d got lost?”

Draco makes several posh, incoherent noises. Ron waits, watching the Draco in the photograph as he slows again, lifting his head, shaking his hair out of his eyes.

“Because,” the real Draco says eventually. “Because—oh, hell. Because I wanted to have sex with you again, you knobhead.”

The words take a second to register. The corners of Ron’s mouth pull helplessly upwards when they do.

“Okay,” he says, hoping he doesn’t seem too pleased. “But why didn’t you just say that?”

“Because!” Draco says.

Ron stops looking at the photograph and lets himself look at the Draco next to him. The real Draco has none of the seductiveness of the one in the photograph. His pointy nose is scrunched up, making his expression resemble that of a grumpy, rumpled rabbit. His shoulders are sharp points, drawn up to his ears. His arms are crossed defensively over his spunk-crusted chest.

He’s beautiful.

“Because what?” Ron presses.

“Because I needed a—a reason.”

“You didn’t have to make one up,” Ron says. He loses the fight against the muscles in his cheeks and lets the smile bloom over his face. “Look, I’ll show you: I want to have sex with you again, Draco, because you’re fit.”

Draco mumbles something. Ron ignores him.

“I want to have sex with you again, Draco,” he says, “because it was really fucking hot.”

“Well, of course it was, I’m not an amateur.”

“I want to have sex with you again, Draco, because I kind of like you.”

Draco’s gaze snaps to Ron’s. Ron’s grin falters at the shock on Draco’s face, but he fights to keep his voice neutral, his stance casual. “See?” he says. “Easy.”

“Well,” Draco says, “when you put it like that…” He steps closer to Ron, picking the photograph out of Ron’s fingers and studying it in a detached sort of way before pinning it back onto the string. “I want to have sex with you again, Ron, because you turn me on a stupid amount.”

Ron huffs a laugh. “There you go, that wasn’t so—”

“I want to have sex with you again, Ron,” Draco interrupts, “because the thought of you with someone else makes me want to melt them down and turn them into sugary Muggle sweets.”

In all the excitement, Ron almost forgot that they’re both naked. He remembers now—now that Draco is so close that Ron can feel the heat emanating from his bare skin.

“I want to have sex with you again, Ron,” Draco murmurs, “because I suppose…I kind of like you, too.”

The kiss, when it comes, is soft—the sort of soft that makes Ron’s brain disengage completely. He sinks into it, pulling Draco close, then one last coherent thought fights valiantly to the surface.

“Hang on,” he says. “Did you make up this whole thing? The ward duty? The law about the photographs?”

Draco looks at him as if Ron’s the crazy one. “Of course not,” he says. “I’ll send the photos to the Ministry first thing tomorrow. My Portkey to Naples is already booked; I leave next month.”

“Oh,” Ron says. “Next month. That’s pretty soon.”

“Yes,” Draco agrees, then pauses, tapping his finger against Ron’s shoulder. “Although,” he says. “Even though, as you know, I’m very committed to the spiritual experience of weeks of solitude in the Zabinis’ villa, I could always…adapt my plans. I don’t suppose the trip would be too hampered by the presence of another person.”

“Yeah?”

“And since you apparently have so much flexibility at work, I suppose…if you wanted to be said other person…”

The uncontrollable grin tugs at Ron’s mouth again.

“And,” Draco continues, warming to his theme, “if you come, since you can drive—supposedly—we could get a car! Gad about! Venture into Muggle realms unknown!”

“And that’s the only reason you’d want me along, yeah? So I can drive you around?”

“Well, I— I suppose I…” Draco sighs. “I want you to come to Italy with me, Ron,” he says, rolling his eyes but shifting closer, “because it would be—nice. To spend more time with you.”

Ron grins and kisses him. Draco allows it, but pulls away after a minute.

“Now you,” he says, pouting. “You have to do it too.”

Ron nods. “All right. I want to come to Italy with you, Draco, because I think you’re a lunatic who needs minding so you don’t start an international incident.”

“Oi, you made me do a proper one—!”

“And I want to come to Italy with you, Draco,” Ron says, pressing the words to the skin beneath Draco’s ear, “because it would be nice to spend more time with you too.”

A month in Italy is a far cry from Tuesdays and Fridays off, but Ron’s bags might as well already be packed. The shop will just have to cope without him.