Title: The Other Boy
Series: Harry Potter
Characters: Draco Malfoy, Blaise Zabini
Rating: PG-13 for sappy slashiness
Warnings: slight slash...nothing physical, unrequited love
Disclaimer: If I owned it, I wouldn't be writing FANFIC, now would I?

Love isn't a decision. It's a feeling. If we could decide who we loved, it would be much simpler, but much less magical.
--Trey Parker and Matt Stone

Draco Malfoy didn't know that someone had heard his little tirade in the boys' dormitory. He would never know that afterwards, a lone boy would run back to the dormitory, under the premise of forgetting his books, and fix the mirror that he had broken.

He wouldn't know that this other boy would lie down in his bed, just so that he could pretend that Draco Malfoy was there, lying beside him. He would never know that this boy would cry himself to sleep that morning and would sleep there, through almost all of his classes. Draco Malfoy would never know that when this boy awoke, he would quickly straighten his bedsheets and then sneak off to the Owlery, just so that he wouldn't be there when the other boys in his year returned at the end of their classes.

Draco Malfoy would never know that when he asked Blaise Zabini if he had touched his things while he was supposedly skipping his classes and the latter boy responded with a simple, "Why on Earth would I do that, Malfoy?" he was really thinking, 'Yes, yes I did touch your things, Draco...I do so whenever you're not looking."

He would never know that Blaise would lie awake in his bed until he could hear Draco's breathing finally even out, signaling his rest, to go to sleep. He would never know that when slumber finally did find Blaise, that his dreams would be about him.

Draco Malfoy would never know these things about Blaise, because boys were not meant to love other boys, at least, that was what Blaise's father had told him. Blaise never disobeyed his father. Draco would never know.

Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.
--Charles M. Schulz