Warning: Rated a PG-13, due to a Harry/Draco slash pairing. Please avoid this fic if you are not comfortable with the idea of a same sex romantic pairing.

Disclaimer: If the characters were mine they would be in a lot more pain. Alas, they're JKR's

A/N: Back after a long absence. Three more chapters to go and I'm finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Not much Draco in this chapter but trust me, you'll get more than enough of him in the next three. Thanks as always to my betas, Slytherlynx and Ayla Pascal and thanks to everyone who took the time to review the last chapter, your feedback means a lot to me.

The Untold Want

Chapter 11: The windows and the sky.

It would be unfair to consider Vincent Crabbe evil or stupid, though one could call him simple-minded without hurting anybody's feelings.

Vincent had his own definition of the world. The universe was clearly divided into the things he liked and the things he didn't like, with no middle ground. He didn't like things that were complicated, difficult to understand, things that made no sense. He also disliked everything that involved extreme pain, spinach, Professor McGonagall, formal dressing or things that just smelled bad.

The things he liked were… well, simple things. Pumpkin pie. Pumpkin juice. Falling asleep on the sofa, knees spread to the warmth of a blazing fireplace. Presents of any sort. The tingling feeling on his spine as the Christmas vacations approached. He liked his cat too, and tortured the poor thing to no end but always fed her sweets afterwards, so she would come back and he could pester her some more. He enjoyed Care of Magical Creatures, sharing Hagrid's enthusiasm for everything that had claws, fangs, scaled skin and could spit out fire or poison. He liked Unicorns also, they were pretty.

He liked Draco Malfoy too, of course, who was clever and well-dressed and perfect at everything. There was no question Draco didn't know the answer to, no spell he couldn't cast and always helped Vincent out with his Transfiguration essay, but Greg was his best friend in the world and nothing would ever change that.

Draco had been avoiding them the past weeks, Vincent couldn't understand what was wrong, but he constantly seemed to have some urgent matter to deal with. He and Greg had started to hang out with Blaise and Pansy, but Blaise liked to joke and laugh at their expense and Pansy's flowery perfume made him sneeze, so it wasn't half as fun with them as with Draco.

Vincent was well aware of the fact that they weren't allowed to bother Draco when he wanted to be alone, but he knew that if Draco was in danger, it was their duty to rush to his aid. So when he glanced out of the frosty window in the morning and saw Draco and Potter shouting at each other out in the snow, he realised something fishy was going on.

He called out at Greg and together they tumbled down the stairs, knocking down everything in sight – armours, portraits, first years – as they rushed outside. Draco had vanished by the time they got out of the gates, only Potter was still there, standing quietly in the snow with his face in his hands. That red-haired Gryffindor- the Weasley- had also come running from the other end of Hogwarts and was about to reach Potter but they had got to him first. Vincent let Greg take care of the Weasley while he grabbed Potter and drove his fist straight into that stupid face.

He broke Potter's nose and that was great, but not too great 'cause his knuckles ached as well and shards of Potter's broken glasses bit into Vincent's palm.

So far, so good. But what happened next Vincent never quite understood. It was a confusing moment, even more confusing than the time Blaise told him that the wrapping of chocolate frogs wasn't edible. He didn't understand why Draco, who had come running back to them, didn't seem pleased at all. Why he had shouted: 'What have you done, you imbeciles?' face twisted in rage. Why he waved his wand, just at the moment when Vincent had finally managed to knock Potter unconscious and said that strange spell.

Vincent fell backwards on the snow carpet, stiff-limbed, hands glued to his sides, ankles locked together. He blinked at the empty winter sky above, feeling sad and not understanding anything at all.

*

His head was swimming. He couldn't open his eyes. Harry was slowly becoming aware of himself and his surroundings. He was lying on a bed, suffocating under the covers which were pulled up to the tip of his nose, his neck tense from being awkwardly propped up with too many pillows. Each finger and toe was present and accounted for and each wriggled in command. His lips were smeared with the sticky sweetness of chocolate but at the back of his throat, the taste was sour.

It took him a few more minutes to realise that the echo of voices floating around him, slicing through the lukewarm comfort of sleep, belonged to two particular people. Draco and Ron. They were discussing something, but the meaning of their conversation escaped him, the words melting together into a steady hum. Draco had asked a question and Ron was replying, coldly but civilly.

But Harry couldn't open his eyes; not even when he felt cold fingers brushing his cheek, followed by a warm breath, moist against his jaw. There was a noisy squeak of bedsprings.

'Relax, Weasley, lie back down. I'm not going to hurt him.'

'You're not even sure of that yourself, Malfoy.'

A numbness heavy like lead was creeping over Harry's body. The only memory his mind retrieved while speeding towards oblivion was the image of Draco, with his chalk-white face, standing in the middle of all that winter. Harry had told him, 'I don't need you,' and Draco shouted back, 'You're lying to me!'

He didn't want to fall asleep again, he wanted to wake up, to stop Draco from leaving and tell him that he had been right. He had lied. He tried to open his eyes but saw only darkness, and soon tumbled down again into oblivion.

*

Harry slowly emerged from the white nest of bedclothes and rubbed the sleep from the corner of his eyes. The room was drenched in butter-gold sunshine; a warm ray of light fell across his back, stroking the skin. He could sense someone else's presence in the room with him, but couldn't make out who it was, for he was blurry-eyed and still drowsy from sleep. He reached out blindly at the direction of the bedside table and his hand closed around the rim of his glasses after a moment of fumbling.

It was Ron, with a blackened eye and a split lip, grinning at him from a bed at the other side of the infirmary.

'Ron?'

'Hey!' His smile got even wider, stretching from one corner of his mouth to the other. 'Awake at last. You've been out for almost the whole day. You look like hell, Harry.'

'You're not exactly a beauty yourself,' Harry mumbled, bringing a hand to his cheek. Under his fingertips, the skin felt swollen and pockmarked with scars.

"Ow."

'Madam Pomfrey says it's just a matter of time until the healing potion works. And Justin insists that bruises are a girl magnet anyway.'

'Justin? Where is he, is he okay?'

Ron started laughing. 'He left the infirmary a few hours ago. He's fine and he has a date with Hanna Abbot tonight.'

Harry hesitated for a moment before asking: 'Did Draco come here or was I dreaming?'

Ron nodded. 'He brought your glasses. He found them out in the snow.'

Harry took his glasses off and examined the lenses and the rim carefully, turning them around in his hands a few times. They looked almost brand-new, as if they had never been broken. But he could still remember the sound as they smashed against his face, chips of glass scraping his skin, drawing blood.

'Malfoy repaired them for you. He is at detention now, with Crabbe and Goyle. But he told me to tell you he will be at the Divination room tonight.' Ron murmured, a cloudy mood bottled behind his eyes. 'I promised I would, so I'm telling you,' he added stubbornly.

Harry leaned back against the pillows, wondering if he should thank Ron for the information, or if that would infuriate him even more. He was still contemplating when Ron finally lost his patience and burst out like a firecracker.

'You don't need to do this.'

'I don't need to do- I don't need what?'

'You don't have to go and talk to Malfoy. You don't owe him anything' Ron was leaning over the bed, his face flushed and eager. 'This is just stupid, Harry, you don't need him. You have me and Hermione too. We're your friends. She was here just a minute ago. She brought a whole pile of today's class notes and then she made me memorise three chapters of History of Magic.' He grimaced, raising his arms in mock indignation. 'She even made me read the footnotes. Lucky you, you were unconscious.'

'Did you ask her then?'

Ron paused and tilted his head to the side, looking at Harry quizzically. 'Asked her what?'

'If she wants to spend Christmas at the Burrow. You said you'd invite her this year.'

'Oh. Oh, that.' A blush crept over Ron's neck until it reached his cheeks, suffusing them with red, 'No. Not yet. But I will. Soon. When I get the chance,' he stammered. 'I hope she doesn't bring Crookshanks with her again, he always seems to get into trouble at the Burrow. Remember the last time, when Fred mistook him for a garden gnome and threw him over the fence?'

They both started laughing, louder and louder until they were breathless from it. Harry's ribs throbbed in pain and he broke into an uncontrollable fit of coughing. Ron slid from his bed and hopped across the room on his toes, wincing at the feel of cold tiles under his bare feet. Harry moved away to make space and Ron sat on a corner of his mattress, half-crawling under the covers.

'Look, Harry, why don't you come too? You shouldn't spend the vacations alone at Hogwarts. Dad said we'd be glad to have you any time, and mum bakes this great strawberry cake-'

'It's no good, Ron.'

Ron paused and glanced at him in confusion. 'What?'

'I know what you're trying to do, but it's no good. It's no good,' he repeated, pulling the covers up and turning to stare at the wall. A small spider was creeping across the wall and he watched it until it disappeared in a crack between two stones. The bed dipped under Ron's weight and Harry felt his hand on his shoulder, shaking him.

'Harry, what are you talking about?'

'Your mum and dad are great, and it's really nice of them to invite me too, but I don't belong there. You can't keep doing this, Ron. They are not my parents,' he said, matter-of-factly. 'My parents are dead.'

His words were greeted with complete silence, and he turned round, trying to see what effect they had.

'Is that why you're going to talk to Malfoy, after all?'

'Yes. No. I don't know really.' He remembered the way Draco had looked at him; eyes sooted with rage and something else, something that went beyond want. Something like need, like hunger. 'But I'm going anyway.'

'Oh, crap,' Ron said, completely deflated, and Harry had to fight against the laughter that was again bubbling up inside. 'Well, he helped us, I suppose. Crabbe and Goyle would have beaten us to a pulp if he hadn't petrified them. Not that he would have lifted a finger to help me alone... Oh, what in Merlin's name am I doing? Defending Malfoy? This is just a bad dream. I'm going to wake up soon. There will be a knock-'

The knock on the window came like a gunshot. A white owl was fluttering outside, an envelope hanging from her beak. She whacked the glass with her wings until the window burst open. Hedwig shot through the room like white lightning and crashed into Harry's lap haphazardly, immediately falling asleep.

'Hedwig? Ron, I sent her to Sirius!'

'Go on, then, open it!'

The letter was almost indecipherable, a messy scrawl of dots and jagged lines as if Sirius had been in a hurry while writing it.

Dear Harry,

There's a narrow winding path behind the Hogwarts Lake, leading to the west of the Forbidden Forest. I'll be there until dark. If you can't make it, then I'll send an owl with your Christmas present soon.

Snuffles

Ron, who had been reading over Harry's shoulder, jumped up and started pacing up and down the room.

'You have to rush, Harry, it's getting darker already! Here are your robes. Come on, be quick!'

'But what about Draco?' Harry mumbled, fighting with the sleeves of his pajamas. The room, that slowly filled with dusk was suddenly silent. The pause lengthened out, stretched around them like a river in which the question floated. What about him, really?

'Ron, can you go to the Divination-' Harry swallowed up the rest of his question after seeing Ron's expression. 'Well, I can send him a note.' He ripped off the edge of Sirius' letter and scribbled something quickly, staining his fingertips with ink.

Hedwig opened one yellow eye and glared at him when he waved the note over her beak but she took it obediently and fluttered out, almost bumping into the infirmary walls, still dazed from her previous trip.

'But how will I get out of the infirmary? Madam Pomfrey will want to escort me straight to the Gryffindor Tower.'

'Well, I have my wand,' Ron offered. 'We could try summoning your Invisibility Cloak.'

'Through all the corridors of Hogwarts? With my luck it will end up on Professor Snape's face.'

'What then?'

Harry glanced out of the window, then down at the sheets tangled around his legs. 'We're not very high up,' he murmured, twisting the white cloth around his index finger.

'Oh, no!' Ron stared at him in a mixture of apprehension and terror. 'This is a very bad idea.'

*

The cloth tore just at the last moment and Harry crashed on the frozen ground in a pile of limbs, glasses and sheets. He spat out a mouthful of grass and walked around a bit, to stamp some life back into his feet and make sure he hadn't broken any bones. His ankle had seen better days, and there were more scratches on his arms now than before but nothing too bad.

He glanced upwards and waved at Ron, who was watching him, chalk-white face framed by the window, a bit blurry behind the glass. Ron gave him a thumbs up and smiled shakily as Harry took off.

Late afternoon sunlight lay warm across the path, the sun was just slipping below the horizon, clouds unravelled and dissolved into a pinkish mist overhead. Harry walked on, whistling a few tuneless bars between his teeth. Blades of grass and twigs pushed through the thin layer of gritty snow; the tree roots were rising up, long thick fingers, clutching at the frozen earth around. The branches above swayed lightly, splashing him with dribbles of melted snow. Everything was quiet; the silence was only broken by the distant choruses of the frogs at the Hogwarts Lake.

There was a flash of motion on the bank of the road ahead, as Sirius' figure broke out from a clump of trees and moved forward. Harry ran the last metres to greet him, the snow crust breaking up under his feet.

Sirius was wearing Muggle clothes, dirty jeans and an old coat; his woollen sweater was rough against Harry's face as they clasped each other.

Sirius pulled away first. His hair was longer, falling coarse and straight around a colorless face with deep-sunken eyes. He looked exhausted. And he was staring at Harry as if he had sprouted horns.

'What the hell happened to you?'

'Wh-what?'

Sirius ran his thumb across Harry's cheek, tracing the outline of a scar, then touched a bruise over his eyebrow.

'Oh, that,' Harry sighed. 'I got into a fight with a couple of Slytherins.'

'A fight? Harry, you shouldn't get involved in this- did you win at least?'

Harry paused, thinking. 'No,' he admitted. 'But I'm not the one who got detention either.'

Sirius' stern expression didn't falter but a flicker of mirth danced in his eyes.

'Well, that's something then. And how you've grown these last months. You'll soon be taller than me.'

Harry was well aware of the fact that he needed a couple of decades and probably a couple of spells too to reach Sirius' height. Typical things grown-ups said. 'Now he'll ask me about school,' he thought.

'So are you studying hard for your O.W.Ls?'

'Day and night,' he grinned.

Sirius smiled and it made his cheekbones look even more hollow, nothing but fragile skin over bone.

They chatted on for some time, about classes and friends and about the problems Professor Snape was causing him.

'Any other problems, Harry?'

He started shaking his head but stopped in mid-gesture. He could ask Sirius for advice about Draco and everything. He could be trusted and he'd know what to deal with this.

'I can't stay any longer. I just wanted to make sure you're all right.'

'But-' the words stumbled inside his mouth, a sudden bite of despair gnawing at him. 'But you just came. I thought you'd stay at Hogwarts.' He could hear how the tone of his voice had risen, quavering at the last words.

'I know.' Sirius put his hand under Harry's hair, brushing it away from his forehead. 'But it's not safe. It's full moon tonight and Remus will be alone.'

'I understand,' Harry said in a dull voice, looking down, meaning nothing, tired.

He had already started walking back when he thought he heard Sirius calling out his name. But when he glanced over his shoulder he saw him far behind already, walking away on the narrow footpath as the dusk bled into night. The trees stood close together in the darkness, a solid wall of blue shadow that soon swallowed up his figure. Harry turned round and started running, running so fast it almost felt that he was flying, the rustle of the robes billowing around him like the sound of wings flapping.

The wind hissed over the frozen grass and howled in his ears but he just yelled back at it. He hadn't eaten anything the whole day; his stomach knotted in pain, and hunger and exhaustion soon robbed him of every trace of co-ordination. The ground flew quicker and quicker under his feet, until his legs couldn't keep up with the pace. He felt his knees giving way, got tangled in his robes and tumbled down on the hard, mossy ground.

Looking up, Harry realised he was only a few metres away from Hogwarts. There was a bright glitter where the moonlight struck windows or roof-slates; he saw the dark outline of the Gryffindor tower jabbing into the night sky. He stood up, scraping dirt from his palms and knees and slowing his pace to catch his breath, he approached the entrance. Warmth brushed his cheek as he opened the door a crack and quietly slid into the building.

The corridor was lighted with bright yellow candles, set in holders, and the sudden bright light filled his vision with whorls and blots of white. Harry shut the door behind him and leaned his forehead against it, palms splayed over the wood surface. He took a deep breath. It wasn't fair, needing people who didn't need you back.

The Divination Room. It was too late, not today. But something had happened; he could see it now, and he was finally beginning to understand.

Slowly, irrevocably, things were changing.

*

Draco was dreaming. In his dream, he was leaning over the top steps of a staircase without railing, a very high staircase which he had not climbed. He slipped and fell, spiralling into nothing, and woke up just as he hit the ground, limbs aching from the impact of the imaginary fall.

He blinked, trying to orientate himself. He had fallen asleep, slouched on the same chair where he had been sitting for hours, waiting. Everything looked different now. The night had crept into the Divination room; shadows danced over the ceiling, the candle on the table by his side had burned down and out. The window was a square of black sky, empty apart from a small, distant moon. Endless rows of porcelain cups and teapots shone pale on the long shelves. Complete silence everywhere, no echo of approaching footsteps. Nobody would come any more, it was too late.

But Weasley had sworn to tell Harry. 'You can always trust a Weasley's word' his father used to say, 'They are stupid enough to keep their promises.'

Draco looked down at his hands. His fingers, wrapped around a half-empty cup of tea for hours had gone completely numb. There was a bitter taste in his mouth, as if he had bitten into blackened wood. 'Harry,' he said to himself, voice shrunken to a whisper. 'Harry.' The tea had gone cold and Draco fiddled with the cup for a moment, thinking.

The next morning Sybil Trelawny mourned for hours over all her precious china.

To be continued