CHAPTER 2

Potter’s mouth twitches slightly at one side but he shrugs. “Nothing. It’s a good colour on you, though.”

Irritation raging through his veins, Draco clenches both fists at his side and inhales sharply with the effort of keeping the worst of his feelings—the humiliation, the frustration, the sense of being bested—inside and away from Potter.

“I know it was you, Potter.”

“I don’t think you do.”

“So it’s merely coincidence, you’re suggesting, that the very day after our... discussion about certain people’s bias in removing house-points, I take points—quite rightfully so—from a student from your House and I am immediately rewarded with this?” Draco snaps, indicating his eyebrows and then folding his arms, waiting for Potter’s response.

“It wasn’t me,” Potter says evenly.

“Oh, really?”

“Really.” Potter takes a better grip of his broomsticks and turns to leave. “Like I said, I have things to do.”

“I know it was you, Potter, and I’m not going to forget it,” Draco calls after him, infuriated.

He watches the retreating figure until it stops, halfway across the grass towards the castle, and turns.

“Hey, Malfoy?”

Draco sighs. “Yes?”

“You do take too many points from Gryffindor.”

________________________________________

By the time Draco makes it back to his rooms and locks the door behind him, his fury has simmered down to a more manageable level of prickly irritation, and he feels almost calm as he stands in front of his bathroom mirror and carefully strips every last trace of red from his eyebrows.

“That’s better,” he murmurs to his bedraggled reflection. He attempts to spell his hair back into place and sighs, letting it flop damply against his forehead as his own eyes stare morosely back at him. “That may have to be given up as a bad job.”

Tack-tack-tack, comes a familiar clicking sound from the corner of the bathroom. In spite of himself, Draco almost smiles as he turns to regard the oversized beetle that is currently trying to climb out of his basket of clean towels.

“I’m very tempted to let you struggle, Stanley,” Draco says, even as he strides over to the flailing creature and bends to pick it up. “I don’t know how many times we’ve been through this—you may be able to climb in but you cannot climb out.”

Tack-tack, clicks Stanley, pressing his six little feet against the front of Draco’s robes and waving his antennae in the air. His willow patterned shell, the result of a first-year’s botched attempt to turn a simple mint leaf beetle into a cup, glows beautifully in the low light of Draco’s quarters, and he appears to be in good spirits after a good nap in the towel basket.

Letting out a tiny, reluctant smile, Draco carries the beetle, now the size of a small cat, through to his living room, enjoying the familiar weight and the rhythm of contented soft clicking noises. It’s been almost four years since he rescued Stanley (or Stanley Seaton’s Screw-up, to give him his full title) from his human namesake and he has never regretted it. The daft beetle makes for surprisingly satisfying company, and Draco has lived with far more irritating habits than extreme clumsiness and a penchant for hiding mint leaves in unusual places.

“Here,” he says, setting the beetle down in an armchair and absently patting his shell. The temptation to sink into the other chair and light the fire pulls at him like the tendrils of a persuasive plant, but the sound of the bell echoing through the corridors beyond his little sanctuary puts paid to any such idea. He’s going to be late for his own class, and, more importantly, he has a counter-strike to plan.

Having made it just in time and set his students to work on some advanced cross-species spells, Draco picks up his quill and begins to scribble, aimlessly at first, noting down ideas and dismissing them, drawing little beetles and Potters down the sides of his parchment. Evil little Potters and ferocious, man-eating beetles. He does, however, count himself lucky that Stanley is not a carnivore, like many of the varieties of beetle used in school. He chose the mint leaf variety merely because it was, with its shiny green shell, a little more stylish, but these days he is grateful that gathering food for his pet only involves scavenging around the grounds for garden mint, rather than hunting for insects and grubs and such.

As for Potter... well. If pressed, he thinks he would admit to extreme pettiness and immaturity, but no-one is asking, so that’s fine. The unpleasantness of the past is far behind them—at least, he thinks it is. On the surface, it is—but it’s not as though they have ever discussed it, nor have they ever discussed the fact that they just do not get along. Because it suits Draco just fine. Gryffindor and Slytherin have always had a contentious time of it, and there isn’t much more Gryffindor than the head of Gryffindor. Draco doesn’t expect to get near the head of Slytherin position until Slughorn carks it, and probably not even then. Which is fine, because such a position can only mean more time with the students, more time with the other teachers, and many other things he’d rather not think about.

He’s a teacher. He’s a good teacher, he thinks; he knows how to impart knowledge, how to make it stick in young brains; he knows how to keep order and how to mete out discipline (though, he thinks, instinctively touching his eyebrow, he might just lay off taking house-points for a little while). It’s just people, if he’s honest. People are difficult and messy and he doesn’t much care for the way they look at him. Including Potter. Especially Potter.

So he schemes, because he has reasons. Not that anyone will ask what they are.

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