"Yes," Harry admitted.
"You're to let him, Harry. That means trying spells when he says, even if you fail at it."
"Even when I fail at it, you mean," Harry bitterly returned, rolling his face to the side. After a moment more, he sat up. "How am I supposed to catch up to everyone else, when my magic's in such a repressed state that I can't do first-year spells?"
"Practice those too. Try Occluding your mind first; that may help you reach into your dark powers. But above all, and I mean this quite seriously, Harry, be honest with Draco about how your own efforts feel to you. He has great intuitive talent for magic--"
"All that inbreeding," Harry put in.
"Perhaps so, but the talent is there. Will you do as I ask?"
"He has to be nice to Dudley," Harry proposed in exchange. "Really nice."
A voice sounded from behind them. "I've no intention of terrorizing your bereaved cousin," Draco announced, sounding sincere for once, instead of oozing with sarcasm and dark intent. "I have perfect manners when I want to use them. You'll see."
Harry turned, but at that distance, the other boy was just a blur.
"Severus, will you please excuse us?" Draco inquired, perhaps trying to demonstrate some of his perfect manners. "There's something I'd like to show Harry."
"Good night," Snape said, standing up. "No sleeping in tomorrow. You may not be going to classes, but you'll be on a Hogwarts schedule from now on." Reaching into his robes, he drew forth two vials and handed them to Harry. "You recognize these by now, I trust?"
Harry touched each in turn. "Yeah. Painless Sleep and Dreamless Sleep. Um, I thought maybe I could stop taking so much of them."
"As you wish," Snape agreed. "But keep them in case you have need. One swallow only," he warned. With that, he was striding off toward his own bedroom.
"Well, come on, Harry," Draco urged, laying a little bit of sarcastic stress on the name. Not too much, Harry realized. More like he was uncomfortable using it. "I want to see what you think of something." He disappeared back into their shared room.
When Harry followed him through, he was bemused to see that his own bed curtains, rug, and bed coverings had all been transfigured into beautiful, glowing shades of crimson and gold. Draco's side of the room hadn't changed.
"I don't get it," he murmured, looking around. "I mean, before, you wanted to rub my nose in the fact that I'm stuck down in Slytherin territory."
"No, I didn't," Draco returned, walking over to sit on his own bed, facing Harry, who sat down too, then, and stared across the narrow space separating them. "That wasn't it. I just thought..." He cleared his throat, and made a show of looking at the wall as though he found it of great interest. "I thought that if I did the whole room in my colors, you'd have to ask me to change them, see? And then that would be something I could do for you. Not much, of course, but I thought it would be a start. To show you that... I would do something for you, if you asked."
Harry blinked, considering all that. It seemed a very Slytherin way of going about things.
"But you never asked," Draco said, a note of complaint in his voice.
"You could have offered," Harry pointed out.
"Well, I might have, but by then I wasn't feeling too charitable, as I'd just figured out what that little exercise in correspondence was all about. Dear Dudley," he scoffed. "And people say I'm evil."
"I actually didn't think you would sit there and write it all out like that," Harry exclaimed. "I just wanted you to leave! Didn't I make that perfectly clear? And you wouldn't, so then I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone, you know. Let you know how awful you've been, how much you've hurt people, and get you to finally get out, too!" Harry paused, and then ventured, "Why didn't you leave as soon as the letter turned nasty?"
Draco put his hands on either side of his legs, and leaned forward a little. "Well, at first it was because I didn't want you complaining to Severus that I hadn't helped you after I'd said I would. And then, when you really started to let fly, I suppose I thought you must need to get it all off your chest, and it was better to get it over with, because then maybe you'd calm down and we could... ah, get past that."
"It's quite a bit to get past," Harry dryly remarked.
"Well, I got over five-plus years of you taunting and upstaging me, didn't I?"
"I don't know," Harry slowly said, careful not to deride Draco's loyalties even while he made it clear he didn't trust them. "Whatever you've done, you didn't do it out of love for me. You can't convince me that just because I got tortured you had this sudden change of heart. That doesn't make sense, and no offense, but that's not who you are. It's not even close."
Draco abruptly unbuttoned the cuffs on his gray shirt and pulled up his sleeves to show his bare, unmarked forearms. "This is who I am," he quietly asserted. "I'm my own man. I'm not his." And then, when Harry didn't react, he added, "Can you see from there? I'll come show you--"
"I can see you're not marked."
"But it doesn't make a difference to you," Draco bitterly realized. "Oh, that's irony for you. You trust Severus, who is, but not me, who isn't."
Harry just shrugged.
Draco shrugged too, after a moment, and added, "Anyway, about the colors. I thought I'd better just go ahead and change your side to Gryffindor. Otherwise, every time you came in the room you'd probably look at all the green and think dark thoughts about me."
"I didn't care very much about the colors one way or another," Harry admitted.
"So I'll change them back?" Draco asked, his voice lilting a bit.
"No," Harry laughed. "Leave it now."
"Hmm, might as well, as Severus warned me your friends are allowed to come down," Draco groaned in mock agony. Or maybe part of it was authentic. "I'd just hate for them to think I was mistreating you."
Harry set his potions down, and carefully said, "I suppose it would be asking too much for you to demonstrate your perfect manners when they come, too."
"Depends on them," Draco muttered. "I'm not the one always starting things."
That wasn't how Harry saw matters, but he let it go. "Well, there is something else you could do for me, if you would," he ventured, more to gauge Draco's reaction than for any other reason. "If you are going to go wash your hair, could you finite the lights in here, first? I'm really tired and I'd like to go to sleep, straight away."
Draco nodded, though he said, "You go wash up first, all right, and then I'll do the lights."
A few minutes later, after Draco had incanted spells to make the stone walls stop illuminating the room, Harry pulled his bed curtains closed and changed into his pajamas. He heard the sound of water running, and of all things, Draco singing in the shower. But then the world began to fade away, and Harry drifted into a sleep that was dreamless even though he hadn't taken any potion.
He clutched his mother's ring as he slept.
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Coming Soon in A Year Like None Other:
Chapter Thirty-Five: Reciprocal Magic
Comments very welcome,
Aspen in the Sunlight
Chapter 35: Reciprocal Magic
http://archive.skyehawke.com/story.php?no=5036&chapter=35
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A Year Like None Other