"If there's a next time, you have to mean it," - the words Harry had spoken so forcefully drifted round his head, but he lost all conviction in them the second the other boy so much as looked at him.

He fully cracked the first night of the next Quidditch practice, of course - there had been some kind of weird hot tension in the air all evening, and when Harry asked the blonde what to do with it he grinned and said "Just wait till it passes", though his eyes suggested something else entirely.

Harry felt a hot rush run through him.

"Is that what you want to do?" he asked, his heart rate picking up.

"Not really," Malfoy replied in the usual lazy drawl that Harry found so attractive.

It was growing dark and cold enough on the pitch that everyone else was heading very swiftly for the showers, but there was enough light still for Harry to make out Malfoy's defined features under his shock of wind-tangled blonde hair, and it had to be acknowledged that he looked very, very tempting.

His pretty silver eyes were so fixed on Harry's from under their long lashes that Harry began to feel literally sick with how badly he wanted to be near the other boy.

"Will you mean it?" he whispered, and felt his heart wrench ever so slightly when he got the answer he expected. Of course not.

"But I can still show you a good time," Malfoy offered, and what was Harry going to say to that - no? It seemed ridiculous. He didn't think the word was even in his vocabulary when it came to Malfoy.

He could ask me for literally anything and I'd give it to him, Harry thought to himself, his eyes only stinging slightly at the pain of the realisation. The clothes off my back, the food off my plate, all the money in my bank. He can have it.

He hated himself for giving in so fast once the pitch was empty though, and melting so easily into the kiss Malfoy offered him against the back of the changing room building.

But he didn't protest at the familiar biting roughness of the kiss, or at the pain of Malfoy's rings tangling through his hair, or even when Malfoy forced the Gryffindor jumper up over his head to make Harry shiver in the November air (keeping his own green jersey hypocritically down), though Harry knew that that was as much an act of Malfoy's cruelty as his desire.

As the term slipped away towards Christmas it became somewhat of a habit for the two boys to hook up after the bi-weekly Quidditch practices and Harry looked forward to those days more than any others, though they were always his saddest days, too.

"This doesn't mean anything, ok?" Malfoy would mutter, pushing Harry down onto his knees in the showers or round the shadowy back of the changing block.

Every time that line would crush Harry like a stone, but he always submitted.

"We don't have to do this," he whispered painfully on the third or fourth occasion, and Malfoy's expression became pleading.

"Please let me," he replied in a slightly broken voice, holding Harry's hips hard as if to make sure he stayed. "I want to so badly. Please."

"But I'm still nothing to you?"

A pause; solid and earth-shattering.

"I ... I can't have it any other way."

Harry despised himself for letting that one slide, though the desperation had admittedly added an interesting new dimension to the sex that evening.

Malfoy had called him Harry again after that - he normally only ever did that when they were fucking, so this was a novelty.

"I'm so sorry, Harry," he'd mumbled, hands fumbling hard to slip his joggers fully up over his hips again.

It was cold outside and Harry was shivering, even with the layers of clothing he hadn't bothered to remove so much as just pull out of the way for Malfoy. He wrapped his arms around his body in a weird sort of embrace to keep himself warm. There'd be no chance of Malfoy doing something like this for me, he thought resentfully, squeezing tighter for comfort.

"Why are you sorry?" he asked, wrinkling his nose in confusion as Malfoy paced He seemed quite distressed.

"I just am," Malfoy mumbled. "I'm so fucking sorry for everything."

Harry found himself blinking to get rid of those same stars in his eyes which were always there when he saw Malfoy so vulnerable, no matter how many times he looked.

"Malfoy-"

"I'm fucking sorry, Harry, alright?"

"You're messing with my head, Malfoy."

"I'm sorry."

But still he didn't stay.

Ron and Hermione struggled watching their best friend slip under such a tide of pain that winter, and each insisted on hating Malfoy more intensely than ever, despite Harry's feeble efforts to defend him.

"He's using you for sex, Harry," Hermione insisted, on a private walk to Hogsmeade (a well-meaning attempt to distract her best friend from the walking talking nightmare of Draco Malfoy).

Harry shook his head simply, and Hermione couldn't help but wonder at how incredibly young and naïve he seemed for sixteen.

"Next time he might mean it," he insisted, and that was enough to chip a sore little piece off Hermione's heart.

"He won't, Harry," she told him gently, her eyes brimming with sympathetic tears. "You have to leave him alone. I can't watch you fall apart over him any more."

"I literally wouldn't know how to do that even if I wanted to," was Harry's reply, which effectively ended the conversation for the time being.

But Hermione and Ron's cause for concern increased as the end of the term drew nearer and Harry began to be missing more often than he was around.

He'd been right about what he told Hermione - although the two still publicly hated each other, Harry couldn't leave Malfoy alone if his life depended on it, and it was apparently getting worse.

They began slipping out of classes early to hook up whenever Draco gave him what Harry described mentally as "the glance", missing meals and losing sleep over one another yet unable to do anything but cause the other pain when they weren't naked.

Malfoy's cruel words tore Harry calmly apart in public, piece by aching piece, but when no one else was there he put him right back together again as if nothing happened, his tongue licking honey into every wound he'd ever made.

And the hands that had caused so much injury to Harry in their lives became heaven-soft in secret; they stuck to Harry's sensitive skin like sugarcane.

The lips that twisted such terrible words around him in public found that behind closed doors they couldn't leave his open mouth alone, and the stomach that had churned with anger and hatred for years over Harry found that there was no place better in the world than to be pushed up against his back while he gasped.

Malfoy wanted Harry again and again and over again, seemingly never bored: in class, in the bathroom, on the pitch, by the lake, in his sleep, he wanted Harry everywhere at all times of the day, and Harry wanted him back more than he wanted to breathe.

Harry's suffering grew so bad by December that Hermione felt the need to intervene, and cornered Malfoy herself one day before he could sneak off after Harry to the bathrooms.

She'd long been contemplating the special way that the Slytherin looked at her best friend, as though it was nice to be the best thing the dark-haired boy had ever seen, rather than something pretty sad and awful.

"You have to stop hurting him, Malfoy," she told him, knowing the blonde knew who she was talking about immediately. "He really will break."

Malfoy blinked down at her in genuine confusion. "Can you point me to a time when i ever cared about that?" he asked. "I'm well aware of what I'm doing, and I don't wish to discuss it with Mudbloods."

Hermione was so desensitised to the word that she didn't even flinch. "You're a really nasty piece of work, Malfoy, you know that?" she asked.

He grinned brazenly. "Oh, I know. It's a fine art of mine."

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a/n: hope you enjoyed this chapter! sorry if you were expecting a faster redemption arc for draco lol hes still a prick nearly 20 chapters in

please vote and comment if you enjoyed as ever and stay safe this week!

~ paradisedraco