Title: Sing the Sun

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters; I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

Pairing: Harry/Draco

Warnings: Angst

Rating: PG-13

Wordcount: 3900

Summary: There is a dating service that sent Harry and Draco to meet each other at a restaurant called Sing the Sun. Neither Harry nor Draco will be using this service again. Probably.

Author's Notes: This is an Advent fic for susan5124, who asked for Harry and Draco being paired up for a blind date and both of them expecting the other person to be the same boy they were in Hogwarts.

Sing the Sun

"Potter."

"Malfoy." Harry knew his voice wasn't as flat and deep as Malfoy's. It should have been, but it wasn't. At least he thought his glare was just as good as the one meeting his.

They stood in silence—well, Malfoy sat there in silence, and Harry stood there in it—in the middle of the private room at the restaurant called Sing the Sun. The walls around them were white and gold, and bore huge windows made of thin, crystalline glass with ribbons of gold running through it. If Harry turned around, he knew he would see snowfields stretching into the distance, touched with slanting stretches of sunlight. Sing the Sun's current theme was a countdown to the winter solstice, with the amount of sunlight getting less and less as the world inched towards the longest night. Apparently other themes included whatever solstice or equinox was nearest.

Then Harry shook his head. Why was he standing there and thinking about that? It was stupid. For one thing, it wasn't like he was going to be here for long enough to watch the sun inch down even for this day before the solstice.

He turned for the door out of the private room, set like a slash in the wall between two of the windows.

"Running away, then?" Malfoy's voice had a laugh at the bottom of it. "Always knew you were a coward."

Harry stopped with one hand on the faceted crystal doorknob, his fingers wrapped so tightly around it that the facets cut into his skin. "And it just proves you haven't changed at all, Malfoy," he said, gaze locked on the view through the nearest pane of snow skittering in the wind, "if you can't recognize bravery when you see it."

"Slytherins have more common sense," Malfoy retorted. Harry saw him sloping towards Harry through his reflection in one of the windows, and turned his head fiercely away. Malfoy stopped, but his voice continued, which afforded Harry no relief. "Aren't you curious why Cupid's paired us at all?"

"I know why it paired us," said Harry, and opened the door. The din of sounds from the restaurant beyond was almost comforting. He knew Malfoy wouldn't pursue him out there. He wouldn't want anyone to witness this humiliating little confrontation. "Because we were stupid enough to say that we liked Quidditch without giving other important information about us. And that means the service decided we must be perfect for each other."

Malfoy reached past him and put his hand on the door, shutting it. Harry was so surprised he let him. Then he spun around again and glared.

"Listen," said Malfoy, his lips quirked as though he had eaten something bad, "I thought you would be the curious one here. You always wanted to know everything about me, didn't you?"

"I always wanted to know what evil you were up to," Harry countered. He was regretting that he hadn't filled in those lines on the Cupid's form that asked about his preferred House to be paired with and what color hair he liked. Then he could have made sure to exclude blond Slytherins. "That has nothing to do with being interested in you as a person."

Malfoy winced hard enough that Harry paused, a little sorry. But the next instant, Malfoy was smiling arrogantly again, and yes, his mouth was more of a slash in his skin than the door was in the wall. "I want to know why in the world the service sent you to me."

"It has to be Quidditch," Harry said, already angry at himself for prolonging the conversation. So some of his curiosity awoke again when he realized he and Malfoy could at least talk without immediately whipping out their wands. Of course, sometimes they had talked that way at Hogwarts, but it had always devolved into insults at the end. "What else could we have in common?"

Malfoy eyed him. "Why don't you tell me what else you put down on your form, and I'll tell you what I put on mine?"

Harry paused. He wouldn't have agreed to a "bargain" that involved him baring all his secrets in return for Malfoy giving him none, which he had been sure was what Malfoy would suggest, but perhaps this was possible.

Of course, there was the chance that Malfoy would lie his way through it and tell Harry nothing. But since Harry knew the terms of his own form, he would be able to detect those deceptions more easily than he would have otherwise.

"All right," he finally said, with some difficulty, and moved towards the wooden, gilded table in the center of the room. Malfoy came with him and stood on the opposite side, hands braced on the surface. Harry just stood with his in his pockets. "I mention something and you mention one thing in return?"

Malfoy nodded. His face was intense in a way Harry hadn't remembered. Well, that was okay. Harry wouldn't say his memories of Slytherins were always reliable. The point was that they were reliable most of the time, and if things had gone the way he'd expected, they wouldn't be standing here at all.

"Fine," Harry said. "I wrote down that I didn't care about the sex of my partner." He took a step forwards, and nodded when he felt the edge of the table against his stomach. The wood really did glow with a subtle warmth inside, the way the pamphlets about Sing the Sun said it did. "You?"

"I said that I cared more about other things, but I did put down a slight preference for men," Malfoy admitted.

Harry paused, then sighed. No way to tell if that was a lie, he supposed, since Cupid's could still have paired someone with a preference for the same sex and someone with none. This was going to be harder than he'd thought. "I also wrote down that I wanted someone who had a fine sense of humor."

"I may have phrased mine a little differently," said Malfoy. "As a fine sense of sarcasm. But I never thought lack of that was a problem, Potter. I felt it directed against me often enough."

Harry waited out the flare of anger that passed through him when Malfoy said that, then nodded shortly. "Right. And I said I wanted someone who was interested in Quidditch—"

"Doesn't count," Malfoy interrupted. "You already said that that must be what got us paired, so you already knew I put it on my form."

"Answer the bloody question, Malfoy." Harry growled the words, and backed a step away from the table, no longer worried that Malfoy might think he was scared. Of more importance was the fact that Harry didn't want to stand near someone so annoying.

"I put the same, but you knew that." Malfoy was rocking back and forth on his heels, his eyes so bright that Harry knew he was enjoying this. Of course he is. He enjoys idly tormenting people. "But do continue. This is fascinating."

"Well, I didn't say anything about an interest in pointy blond gits," Harry retorted, for what he hoped was the final time, and made for the door.

Merlin, he's infuriating.

But Draco drew his wand with controlled motions. He knew Potter would take an uncontrolled one as an invitation to a duel.

He cast a simple Locking Charm, and knew Potter had heard it take effect when he spun around, wand in hand, a second after the door had clicked.

Draco held up his empty palms. He had already placed his wand on the table, and he spoke with slow, simple, careful words. "I only wanted to finish the conversation."

Potter stared back at him. Draco had put nothing on his form for Cupid's about an interest in eyes, but perhaps he should have. Perhaps he would, if he trusted those incompetents with anything of importance after this. He had never realized before how much eyes stood out in a face for him, drawing his attention and influencing his opinion of someone's attractiveness.

"Let me list the other things I wrote," said Potter, his voice brittle. "And then you can tell me whether you really have them, or not." He hadn't lowered his own wand, and he chose to point it between Draco's eyes, which was off-putting.

Although not as much as it should have been. Among the traits Draco had listed as attracting him was daring. He had known that someone would have to be, at the very least, scornful of social convention to successfully take him as a lover, and he found gambits and gambles interesting to follow and pay attention to. A partner who could think of them was one who could ensure that Draco would never get bored.

True, he hadn't been thinking of risks that included walking into the Forbidden Forest unarmed to face the Dark Lord. But perhaps even that would be interesting if he let it.

"I put that I like brave people," said Potter. "Terribly sorry that that never matched up with anything on your form."

Draco smiled, and if part of the motivation behind his smile was his pleasure in seeing Potter confounded, not all of it was. "I did put that I liked daring, Potter. Not the same thing as bravery, but perhaps the person or the spell that decides matches at Cupid's thought it was."

"You don't like daring," said Potter, disbelieving. "You liked people who cheated and broke the rules, but that's not the same thing."

"And you were so rules-abiding at Hogwarts," murmured Draco, catching Potter's eye and holding it. He thought he might have been able to retrieve his wand, but he wasn't going to try it, not right now. "So very calm and concerned about getting authority to assess the risks before you took them."

Potter did have the grace to blush, but not to avoid the violent shake of his head that followed. "I know you and I can't possibly like the same things, Malfoy."

Draco spread his hands innocently. "And yet, here we are."

"It must be for some other reason," Potter said, and then pushed on. "I said I wanted someone who could talk to me without being distracted by my fame. There's no way that you could have put that, because you're not famous and you didn't know it was me the stupid service was going to match you with."

Draco let his smile widen, and Potter abruptly leaned forwards and examined Draco's face from as close as the table would let him come. "Unless you're the owner of Cupid's behind a false persona and knew it was me when you saw the form," he said. "Are you?"

Draco laughed. "I would have cheated, in that case, and matched myself with someone who respected me more." Smoothly, he took a step back and let Potter be the one craning his neck and seeking Draco for once. It reminded Draco of the way he had felt too often in Quidditch games. It was good to see Potter receive a taste of his own back. "But what I said was that I needed someone who could look behind my reputation. Someone who didn't believe everything they heard, or that they read in the Prophet. Someone who would look at me and attempt to see what was there."

Potter stared at him with his mouth open for a moment, which was the most satisfying thing Draco had seen in a long time. Then he shut his mouth and shook his head again. "But—but that must just mean that Cupid's couldn't come up with anyone else for us, or didn't know how to match us at all. So they just put together a couple of people who had requirements that seemed to match."

"If we were the only ones who even came close," Draco asked in a low voice, "what does that suggest to you?"

In truth, he thought as he watched Potter struggle with that, he wouldn't mourn if this proved too much for Potter, and Draco walked away with nothing but the notion that he had shocked the world's most priggish Gryffindor. But he was interested to see where it might go, interested in taking some risks of his own.

"But there must be other things we put on the form," Potter said at last. "You tell me something you wrote down, and I'll tell you if something matched it on mine."

Draco paused, then shrugged fluidly. True, that wasn't the way they had done it so far, but the way they had done it so far wasn't winning concessions from Potter. Maybe this would.

"I put down that the person I wanted had to like sex a lot," he said. "I've had my fill of people who didn't want sex unless we were already bound to each other in some sort of long, deep ceremony. You should have heard the whining that Daphne Greengrass did when I wanted to sleep with her after we'd been dating for seven months."

Potter started and flushed. Draco raised one hand and closed his eyes, doing his best to imitate Trelawney's deep misty tone when she started talking about something she "saw." "I see….I see a Potter who couldn't find a Gryffindor girl who didn't want marriage. Or I see a Potter who couldn't find what he wanted by dating Hufflepuffs."

"Damn you."

Draco opened his eyes and shook his head. "I know who you dated, Potter, but not what happened. I'm not fool enough to believe the Daily Prophet. I'm just predicting based on my dead boredom with that sort of person." He flashed Potter a smile and the words he had to speak, or risk making it not real. "It's working, isn't it?"

Potter waved a hand and wandered up and down the room as though he assumed the angle of the sun shining through the windows would change or something. Draco didn't know much about Sing the Sun, but he knew they didn't do that; their enchanted sun followed the movement of the real one. "I just—I didn't want to be that way. I wanted to be the usual bloke that they wanted. All waiting for marriage and all that."

Draco carefully tucked the notion away in his head. He doubted that the Hufflepuff blokes Potter had dated—perhaps due to issues with Gryffindor blokes being close friends—had all wanted to wait for marriage. But they had probably wanted to wait more dates than Potter had.

Which made him all the more interesting.

"Then tell me what you want." Draco pitched his voice low. He hadn't had much success with dates in general, but he'd had some success with that, if he was allowed to define success as darkened eyes and faster breath.

"I want," said Potter, and closed his eyes as if he was visualizing it better, "someone who will understand that not every moment together means something, but being in bed together means a lot, but it doesn't mean we have to spend every waking moment together, but I don't want them going to the paper." He looked Draco in the eye. "I want someone who understands the bloody boundary between public and private, and what I don't want them running around bragging about."

"Those are much the same things I want," Draco admitted.

"Much?" Potter looked wary, but he had also tried to stop walking out of the room. Draco thought he could have lifted the Locking Charm—at least, if he had done it nonverbally—and Potter would have stayed.

"Yes," Draco said, and drifted closer. "I don't have the same problem with people wanting to go to the papers after they've slept with me." He reached out a hand, which Potter watched with close attention, and put it gently on the wall beside Potter's head. "But I do have the same problem with people thinking that everything means something and we should exist in this haze of breathless romance, or nothing means anything and I would be as happy with stupid deceptions as a real relationship."

"That's a word I never thought I would hear come out of your mouth, Malfoy." Potter was blinking and paying more attention to Draco still.

"Because you thought I would never want something like that." It was the simplest explanation Draco could come up with, and it did make him wonder if this was wasted effort. Perhaps Potter was already set in his thoughts and his ways, and he would never accept that Draco could change.

"Because I never thought I would come close enough to you in an intimate context to hear you speak the word," Potter admitted, and Draco felt drunk to hear those words come out seriously, without mockery.

Potter's hand slid down and around Draco's waist. His eyes might still be hard, but he was interested. Draco knew that much.

"There's something else I required on my Cupid's form, something we haven't touched on yet," Potter muttered, and licked his lips in a way that was plainly cheating.

"Really." Draco kept an eye on him. This wasn't turning out badly, he didn't want it to, but it still seemed to exist from heartbeat to heartbeat in an uncertain world, and if he had to choose, he would make sure that he didn't come off badly from it.

"Yes," said Potter. "I said that I had to have someone who was a good kisser. That's important to me. And I think I'm a good judge, since so many of these 'grand romances' the reporters like to natter about got no further than my first kiss." He looked irritated, but Draco could smile at him when he knew that expression was directed at other people.

Then Potter's face changed again, and the expression on it was directed at Draco. "Are you one?"

That was a challenge, and Draco had not only never backed away from a challenge when it came to Potter, he had never wanted to. He slid a hand around the back of Potter's neck and leaned in until their lips almost brushed. When Potter's eyes were wide and didn't seem like they could widen any further, Draco kissed him.

It was exquisite. Draco knew the small fire he had lit between their mouths was growing, blooming, and that warmth spread through him and touched a portion of his heart he had guarded. That part beat harder, and dragged the rest of his heartbeat with it.

He leaned in until he could feel Potter's heart fluttering against his, too, and it dragged Draco's further and further on, faster and faster, until he shivered with excitement and felt Potter shivering, too.

Draco didn't slip his tongue into Potter's mouth, although he could have, easily. But he thought he should save something for the second kiss, and the others that would come after that. He stepped back and raised his eyebrows.

Then he wondered if he should have done that, because it might remind Potter of the past and lose Draco this moment, but apparently it wasn't. Potter's eyes were blinking, dazed, and he had lifted a hand to touch his lips, but it wasn't in rejection.

In fact, he was looking at Draco rather as if he would like to do it again.

And his hand was still on Draco's waist.

Draco inclined his head modestly. His blood was still beating almost as it had during that wild, motionless flight in Potter's arms, but he could speak without sounding as though he was struggling against a heart attack. "Is that acceptable?"

Harry had never had an experience like that before, without the person being afraid of him or expecting Harry to take care of everything like a real hero, and so he could give Malfoy an honest answer. "It was brilliant."

Malfoy looked at him like the sun shining through the windows outside. Harry could picture that light going down into darkness when they fought, the same way the sun would descend into the darkness after the solstice, and then coming back when they made up. He could see Malfoy sometimes fighting with him and sometimes tumbling with him directly into bed and sometimes having interesting conversations.

We'd have plenty to disagree over, at least, Harry thought, and moved his hand a little so that he could feel the firm muscle under his touch.

Malfoy gave him a deep, delighted smile, and Harry was sure that some of his intentions had been discerned. That didn't matter. Harry gave Malfoy a smile back and added, "Do we tell anyone about this?"

"I don't want to deal with rumors that have no basis in truth," Malfoy said thoughtfully. "Such as that someone else is dating you. So we tell most of the truth, and leave our privacy up to ourselves."

Harry nodded slowly. "I suppose that means we have to give some credit to Cupid's and its matching system after all."

Malfoy laughed aloud. "We can do that later. We can be fair later. Right now, we're in an expensive restaurant, and we can order whatever we want." He stepped away from Harry and walked over to the other side of the table, but this time, it was clear that he did it only to pull out his chair.

"Why whatever we want?" Harry asked, and moved to stand opposite Malfoy. "I didn't think the menu here was that varied."

Malfoy grinned at him. "We can do that because you're paying, and you have a combined two fortunes."

There was another moment when it could have tipped, and Harry would have walked out the door. He definitely would have before they'd had that conversation.

But he didn't want to, he was intrigued enough to stay, and that was enough, too, for him to laugh and say, "This time."

"Of course," said Malfoy, and peeked at him through his hair.

That was a trait Harry hadn't put down on his Cupid's form, because he hadn't known he wanted it. But he knew, now, that he did.

Whether he could find it in someone else, he didn't know. But he did know that, right now, he wasn't interested in trying.

"Yes, Draco," he said, and sat in the chair across from Malfoy.

If the way Draco's face lit up at his name was any indication, Harry would be saying it a lot.

And that wouldn't be at all a bad thing, especially given the speculative tone in Draco's voice when he murmured, "Harry," and the resulting flutter in both his heart and his blood.

The End.