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Part 1 
Draco slammed the door open and Neville almost dropped the pot he’d been re-soiling – not a great idea with venomous tentacula. He poked the shears warningly at a tendril that’d taken advantage of his wobble to attack his glove, then looked up to see Draco slam the door closed and throw himself back against it as if to bar it. The expression on his face indicated Dementors in the begonias at the very least.
“What’s wrong?!”
Before he entirely managed the question, Draco was interrupting in a desperate, almost-shriek, “I have to sneeze!”
Of all the things Neville’d been bracing himself for, that one was nowhere on the list. It took a moment to even register. He put the plant carefully down and latched the cage, taking the moments to study the lean form blocking the entrance to his workshop. The long, outstretched arms clutching at the door frame, the wide, wild grey eyes, and the pink flush evident against the so-pale skin, darkening on Draco’s nostrils even as he worked his nose urgently.
“Er. Yeah?” It was all he could think to say, even after taking a minute. Neville wondered if it was some sort of hex, and Draco was afraid he’d sneeze fire or something.
“I can’t!” Draco gasped, eyes getting wilder as they swept over the room. He seemed to be struggling, his hands tightening on the doorframe even as his whole body seemed desperate to have something to rub against his twitching nose. He gasped again, then looked as if he’d swallowed his tongue.
Neville started to feel the first stirring of real concern. Draco did have moments of strangeness since his torture at his father’s hands, but they weren’t usually like this. Vague and strained, not frantic, was the rule. “Uh, Draco. Are you feeling all right? If – Is your head hurting?”
“Sssh!” It was more of a hiss than anything, and his body twisted under the heavy winter robes, then he gasped out, “Can’t! Got – Ah! got to concen – ehhh! – concentrate!”
And he just stood there for several minutes, wriggling subtly from knees to nose and breathing carefully, until the flush slowly receded from his nostrils and he began to relax.
Then he dropped his arms, straightened his collar, and sauntered casually to the stool beside Neville’s work bench.
“So. What’s next on the agenda?”
With equal casualness, Neville studied his current specimen and remarked, “You telling me what the hell that was all about. You looked like you were about to have a seizure.”
“Ah. No. Nothing like that, nothing serious.” The normally cut-glass tones were even sharper than usual, only a step short of offensive formality. “You had an owl – will we be going out in the next couple of days after all? I’d a few things to take care of, myself, I was hoping there was time for.”
“Draco.”
“Neville.” Perfectly urbane.
“Fine.” Neville reached for a vial in one of the center racks. “I’ll just open this thistleberry-”
Draco was standing stiffly before he could catch himself, but he tried a recovery lounge against the wall and drawled, “You won’t.”
“I will.” Neville kept his tone light, honestly curious now, and a bit concerned, but being obvious about either would have Draco in the other wing before the echo faded. “All it did was make you sneeze until you needed a nap. You have ten seconds to spill. One-”
“If you open that with me this close to you, it probably will only take me ten seconds to spill.” It was said with a weird, edged amusement, but then Draco pulled a little moue Neville’d learned meant Draco found his own words gauche.
When that registered Neville blinked, and finally turned to look directly at him. “You got a leg over this morning. And what does the thistleberry have to do with it? Or do I even want to know?”
“I did, very pleasantly, thank you. And nothing. And no.”
That “nothing” was in a tone that meant anything but, and Neville couldn’t keep all his curiousity off his face. “So not the thistleberry, but – what, the sneezing?” Then he really blinked, and jerked his gaze back to his worktop, because Draco was flushing crimson from the collar up, the fair skin providing him no hope of camoflage. Something clicked in his head, and he asked carefully, entirely prepared for Draco to have Apparated out by the end of the question, “Does this have anything to do with those funny potion drops I’ve seen you taking before we – before. You obviously weren’t serious about them being for vitality, but you never said what they were for, and they seem to make you sniffle a bit, and they do smell a lot like Pepper Up.”
There wasn’t the shushpop of air displacement, and Neville looked sideways from under his eyelashes, wondering if he’d just drawn a telling-off, but he startled so hard when he saw Draco’s expression he tipped the cage over and suddenly had venomous tentacula creepers trying to wriggle under the wrist of his glove. It took him several minutes to deal with that without killing the plant, and he broke three vials and a petri dish in the process, and by the time he sat back with a huff of self-disgust he just propped his forehead on his hand, not even bothering to look around.
Draco had looked a little terrified, a little mortified, and entirely on his way to full withdrawal. Neville cursed his own clumsiness, not just with the plant. Stupid, to say anything that plainly when he had even an inkling it might really matter, he’d be lucky to catch the tale of Draco’s robe for days after this, the man would avoid him at -
“You – you guessed?”
all… costs… ?
He turned slowly and looked up, careful not to make eye contact, not to be too intrusive. Draco was still there, but backed into the wall almost the way he’d been up against the door, and though his expression had gone distant and cool, that voice was a poor attempt at the same over something very shaky. Neville stopped, and thought for a long moment, trying not to be so clumsy again. He’d just been talking off the top of his head before, and he tried to put together what Draco could’ve thought he meant, what he might’ve guessed.
The silence stretched, and he couldn’t make sense of it, and Draco’s body was relaxing, but that wasn’t a good thing, him backing away from sharing something personal into comfortable reserve. Then, a distant memory – a joke a young cousin had made. A dirty joke accidentally told within his grandmother’s sharp hearing. (What are you taking for it? Pepper!)
And Gran’s dry little scientific speech while Neville and Curtis burned away in sheer horror, (Must’ve had a Muggle doctor, poor woman, they have strange ideas,) and she’d set them to read the section on it in Rare Maladictions, Causes and Cures, saying it would stop them laughing over tales of people’s unfortunate illnesses, all the while the little dark eyes had sparked with the gleeful knowledge that neither boy was quite sure if she’d heard Curtis say the word “orgasm” in her house, and would never, ever, ask, not even to be let out of a study assignment about sex set by their grandmother.
“The Muggles call that Honeymoon Rhinitis, you know.” He managed a disinterested tone, feeling like a gambler bluffing big. If he was wrong, he wouldn’t be seeing Draco for dust for a while. “Wanting a leg over after you sneeze, I mean. Or, the other way ’round.”
Draco went absolutely still, but his voice was a quietly strangled. “Muggles? I. This. You know and it’s – it’s a Muggle disease?”
It actually let Neville relax, so he turned and kicked a stool toward him and smiled wryly. “It’s not a disease, Draco. Muggle or otherwise. I’ve heard of it, sort of. The basics. You sneeze, you get randy. You get randy, you sneeze. That’s it, isn’t it? Pretty simple.”
Draco gave a couple of shivers during that speech, and Neville looked away again, but he’d seen the shock at the words, and a wary surprise at Neville’s calm delivery.
Draco shook his head slowly and eased the stool over and himself down onto it, his back still against the wall. Eventually he said, quietly, still wary, “Not even close to that simple.”
Neville could almost feel the steam as Draco’s brain worked over suspicions, but he didn’t take offense. Having a go at him was the least most who’d known any secret of Draco’s had done to him. “No, I didn’t put this together until just now, and no, I’m not taking the mickey. I don’t know any more about it than what I said, either. I think I can find out, though. I mean, if you want me to, well, know – without you saying, I mean – Or, I could probably point you in the right direction to find out for yourself if you’d rather I didn’t.” Clumsy, damnit. This was new ground, and he was clumsy even in the settled bits.
Whatever Draco was thinking, he took a while at it, and Neville finally gave up on pretending to be hunched over his bench, stretched, and looked over at him. Draco was blinking slowly, not really looking back. His face was set in the old, habitual mask of haughty distance, but the thoughts – whatever they were this time – moving behind the grey eyes didn’t harden them.
When he finally looked up, he shook his head and smiled, just a trace. “You seem. Remarkably undisturbed by this… this. Are you really not -?” He pressed his lips together, considering the end of that sentence, then shook his head a bit harder and said, “Or is this pity?” as though the last word tasted bad in his mouth.
“I’m really not,” Neville said with a shrug. He saw his level, almost dismissive tone settle Draco’s hackles more effectively than anything yet. “No pity – that would be stupid. A bit curious, actually.”
Draco gave up all attempt at reserve in one go and frankly stared at him, his jaw dropping. “You’re what? Neville. Curious? You’re not- You aren’t- I mean, seriously- “
Neville waited.
Draco licked his lips, just a flicker of tongue as he dropped his chin and ran his hands up his forearms, not quite hugging himself. “No one knows about – that. No one. I’ve never heard of anyone- I thought I was the only wizard on earth- You say it’s – it’s so common among Muggles it has a name?”
Neville managed not to roll his eyes. Draco might’ve eventually decided to stand against wholesale slaughter of Muggles and Muggleborns, but he hadn’t had a lobotomy. A lifetime of upbringing as to self-identity meant he’d feel it as a deep fault in himself to have Muggle characteristics, and that kind of vulnerability couldn’t be answered by “and what’s wrong with being like Muggles?” He was bothered, not being an ass. And they were talking about something intensely private here, and Draco wasn’t running away. It just wasn’t the time for an equality speech.
“I don’t know how common it is, but I read about it in a book about rare conditions shared by Muggles and wizards – witches, too, actually. It was a long time ago. We might have a different name for it. I just remember that one. I do remember it said neither Muggle medicine nor our healers had a way to – disassociate the responses, though. What’s in your little potion drops?”
Draco jerked back, seeming to realize he was on the verge of goggling, pinking a little again, and studied his nails. “Er. I’ve no idea. When. Er. When I was- the summer when I was thirteen, Mum thought I had some kind of, well, hay fever.” He twitched a little and the flush spread up his neck as he said the words. “I didn’t know what the hell was going on. Witch in the village diddled with No Sneeze, Please until it – worked. Kind of worked. I buy them by the lot, have for years.”
Neville made a mental note to tease Draco, later, when this wasn’t news, about being that much of a randy devil at thirteen. “So what happened just now? You freaking out in the doorway?”
“I was not freaking out,” Draco frowned reflexively, but ran his hands up his arms again in the next moment, looking down. “And. Well. it stops the – the connected, kind. I mean, it stops me from- when I’m- In either direction.”
Neville tried to work that out, but didn’t have the heart to ask, with Draco looking like this was all killing him a little. He thought Draco meant it stopped him from sneezing when he got randy, or the reverse, but he wasn’t sure.
“It takes the edge off the whole thing in general, but it’s not an.. an anti-allergy whatever.” Watching him closely, Neville saw his nose flare slightly as he got the word out. “It’d make me sick, the witch said, taking something else like that with it.”
“Who is this witch? If she’s found something to break the link, she’s ahead of everyone else, I think. We’re low on good potion makers, you know.”
Draco blinked again, seeming thrown at a mention of the war and larger concerns in the middle of this. “Well, it doesn’t-” More pink spread across his jaw. “It doesn’t exactly break. Er. At all, actually.” He looked down at his nose as if it had offended him by refusing to bow to control. “It stops it happening, that’s all. It stops the- the-”
“Sneezing?” Neville offered as the stutter lengthened, thinking that bit obvious and wanting to move along.
Draco drew a sharp breath, and his nostrils flared again, a quick flickering as the pink touched there again as well. He clasped his hands tightly together in his lap, apparently really to keep them from wandering. His fingers twitched as his nose did. He swallowed, then said carefully, “Er. That. Yes. Not the wanting to. Just the doing.”
Neville winced, he hoped not too sympathetically. “That sounds unpleasant. Painful, even.”
Draco shook his head, still looking tense. “No. It just requires- restraint. I have to keep my mind right, or I get- sensitive.”
It was Neville’s turn to blink slowly, as he realized how many times a day – not to mention while they were touching each other – that this was on Draco’s mind. Had always been on Draco’s mind, and he’d had no idea at all. “This is why you got so riled when I kissed your nose that time. You nearly bit my head off- Draco?” Neville started when Draco actually groaned aloud.
“Good- ! By- ! Neville!” He clenched his fists together and glared, a little wild-eyed. Neville noticed his nose twitching again, nostrils trembling. “We can’t just- talk- about this. Like this. You can’t- By Salazar, you have no idea what you’re-” He breathed deeply and seemed to choke a little, and didn’t say anything else.
Neville gave him a second, and then smiled a little. “No. But I’d like to. I want to. We could go upstairs…”
“Ah… !hehhh…” Draco looked as if he were about to break his fingers, holding them together. The pink was gathering strongly in the fine, flickering nostrils. “Hek-! Huhh…” He swallowed hard, and seemed to be biting his tongue. He held very still for a moment, then gasped through his nose, shuddering, almost choking. He did it again, and swallowed again, then sat breathing carefully with his eyes closed for over a minute.
Neville hadn’t meant to tease him, hadn’t meant to cause that. He sat and watched worriedly, feeling helpless, and clumsy all over again. Draco had seemed more curious than upset by his asking about it all, but this. Draco couldn’t stand losing his composure, and if he thought Neville had just intentionally used a confidence to make him there was going to be an explosion.
But when Draco finally opened his eyes they were irritated and frustrated, but not angry. He swallowed calmly and licked his lips, then asked evenly, “Do you really want to know? Know about this? It would be helpful if there were no suggestion of our bedroom in your answer. But really? As – stupid, and- and psychwizard therapy session as it’ll doubtless be, you want to talk about this?”
Neville wasn’t sure if he should offer his hand or not, so he settled for sliding it along the table, into easy reach if Draco wanted it. “I don’t think it has to be that bad. But- well, whatever. I do. Very much. I mean, anything you’re willing to-” He sounded a bit pathetic to his own ears, too maudlin, so he cut himself off and said instead, “Anything that gets you this worked up, I want to know about.”
He found a little sly smile he’d been trying out, and Draco actually smirked back at him for an instant. “I do want to talk about it, in whatever way makes you least uncomfortable, but I’m wondering now if books wouldn’t be a better place to start with. It’d be simpler. You could tell me which bits are the same for you, and not have to explain everything.” And maybe that would help Draco to see he wasn’t so peculiarly singular about this.
Draco studied him for a moment, then glanced away and nodded. “You can-”
“I’ll get the information – discreetly – and leave whatever I come up with in your study.”
Draco nodded again, then finally gave him a real, if stiff, smile. “This has been a very odd few minutes. You’re either even more imperturbably ‘shire than I had imagined, or else this deep pathology has been a bit over-blown in my own mind.”
“More the latter,” Neville told him, smiling back. “And “pathology” isn’t the right word, technically. Unless I’m remembering entirely wrong, this had nothing to do with disease or psychowizardry. It talked about nerve impulses and brain chemistry.”
Draco stood up and picked idly at a bit of invisible lint on his robes. “Well. That’ll be interesting reading, then.” He moved behind Neville and casually rested both hands on his shoulders. His normal dryness was back in his voice when he continued, “As earth-shattering personal revelations go, that was decidedly anti-climatic. Thank you. What are you working on?” But his hands squeezed lightly, and didn’t let go.
“Venomous tentacula. It’s a poor second choice for about half a dozen anti-venom potions, but they’re even running short on it almost everywhere. I’ve been told this is the priority, so we shouldn’t be going anywhere for at least three days. The extraction isn’t difficult, but each potion needs the venom taken in a precise way at a precise time. What were you talking about, that you want to take care of?”
“Ah. Well, at the moment, a shower, I believe. Then I thought I’d see if I can’t find some spare things in this junk pile that we can use without my getting hexed into sludge.” The ancestral Malfoy house was filled with artefacts, but Draco taking anything imbued with dark magic, however useful, into the field really would get him petrified, at best, by his own side. He squeezed Neville’s shoulders again, then let his hands drop, shifting a bit as he drew back.
Neville hesitated, then asked tentatively, “Er. A cold shower?” It was hard to tell with the layered robes, but he thought he could tell after almost half a year.
“Yes.” Draco said it with dismissive humor, which was more than Neville had hoped for.
It made him brave enough to clear his throat and say, “Would you rather…? I mean, I certainly…”
“No.” Draco snapped that, then looked worried, and one of his hands crept back to Neville’s shoulder. “I mean, not no to you, if you want – Neville. This is-”
“Weird?”
Draco huffed a silent laugh, relaxing as Neville smiled. “I won’t argue.” He leaned and kissed Neville lightly, a quick brush of lips without any other contact. “I’ll see you before the meeting?”
Neville nodded, and Draco wandered away.
One day Neville thought he’d figure out how Draco never seemed to do more than wander, and still got so very much done. He suspected time turners had to be involved somewhere.
After the meeting – which was a polite way of describing an almost pointless strategy session that gave the local teams a chance to glare suspiciously at Draco – they floo-ed back to the manor and Draco immediately went up to bed, looking extremely self-possessed in the brittle way that made Neville’s teeth ache.
Draco had been over a year under extremely close supervision after he renounced his father’s side. It was reasonable, even Draco knew it was reasonable, one grand gesture and a harsh punishment because of it didn’t make him the new poster-boy for the Forces of Good, although after a week stuck in a roach-infested hotel under harsh wards watching Muggle television, Draco had pointed out that there was precedent enough for that.
Reasonable didn’t equate with easy, though. There had been something about Draco when he and Neville had first been paired off, something out the other side of despair or anger, that had faded with time, but wasn’t gone. It hadn’t ever gotten better, just less frequent, and it still showed up in those grey eyes at times, a touch of real winter, of a place where there were only death-promising storm clouds and any hope beyond merest survival was beyond consideration.
That year, only part of it spent as a team, had been well left to memory when they had finally been permitted to move away from the barracks where the youngest and the most inept were kept for training and use as cannon fodder. But gaining independent movement came at the price of having to re-prove themselves to every single member of their new company, most of whom could remember Draco dangling Cho by her robes as Umbridge and the Inquisitorial Squad broke down the wall on Dumbledore’s Army. He’d been on the inside of that wall himself, and the way those friends were looking at him now…
Neville sat at his workbench with his head in his hands for long enough to feel like a self-pitying berk about it, then tended to the more delicate of his plants and went to find the laptop Hermione had given him for Christmas two years before. He’d learned to use it, a bit, during those long months when it’d seemed he’d never be able to even hold a wand again. He’d forgotten all about it once he’d returned to duty, but his Gran had found it easily and sent it on that afternoon.
Hermione’s instructions were still tucked in the case, and they were easy enough to follow when his memory failed. A spell got him online, and he had to sit for a moment, resisting temptation, as the search engine opened. So much knowledge out there, about so many things. Botanical gardens and nurseries and so many possibilities the wizarding world had never explored, waiting for someone to take notice, to realize their value. Someday, he hoped to do some of that. When the War was over. When. When there was time.
For the moment, he at least had time to do something for Draco, even about something so inconsequential compared to everything else they dealt with every day. He remembered enough to find some medical reports, and downloaded the least technical of them. Then a number of letters, the least strange, from a support group – he made sure to note the address for that – a couple of testimonials, and a “Lovers’ Guide to Understanding Your H.R. Mate.” Then an accidental click led him to an entirely different sort of site, and after staring wide-eyed for a few minutes, he studied the “Terms” list, and chose the first thing that read “m/m NC-17″ that was under 20k.
Getting it all to print was a much more difficult task, until after he’d checked all the connections and settings on the tiny box for the dozenth time, he realized he hadn’t actually plugged in the printer. He got it started, then went to the third floor library that had books on healing and poisons – You had to admire, or something, Lucius Malfoys’ lack of discrimination between cause and cure – and spent an hour finding a book he’d remembered seeing, and two more that looked promising. When he returned to the computer, the tiny printer was still whirring away. He sifted the stack for the Lovers’ Guide and sat in a chair to wait.
It was written by a woman whose husband had what she called “Severe H.R.” She was very explicit about certain things, proving what even Neville knew – women always understand men much better than men liked to believe. She pointed out that men were, as a rule, absolutely obsessed with the bits of themselves that brought arousal, and that with H.R. a transference of attention to the other bit that caused arousal was only natural.
Neville had been struggling to read through a combination of uncertainty and embarrassment, but that settled his attention. If Draco was hearing “oral sex” when Neville said “kiss your nose” that was a useful – and necessary – thing to know. It all shifted in his mind from “exploring an odd but harmless quirk” to “Sex Ed 101, Especially Revised for Your Lover.”
The Lovers’ Guide author went on to talk about specific types of touchiness in H.R. men. She talked at length about the nose as an erogenous zone, the specific ways it could cause stimulation, and went on into ways she and her husband had learned to use that understanding in bed-play.
She pointed out that, because of all that, that her husband couldn’t stand to have his nose touched under certain circumstances, or to hear certain phrases used in certain circumstances. She compared it to a straight man’s reaction to a bum touch, if he liked it. Self-anger over something seen as an uncontrollable deviation from the norm. She mentioned things about colds Neville had never imagined, then went on to describe somewhat clinically the frustrated misery evoked by a hard cold or flu, and that non-reciprocal oral sex was the prescription.
When the printer cut off, Neville stood and stretched. He had wanted to know, and he couldn’t find any judgement for Draco in himself over the whole thing, but he felt more than a little odd. Both about the new information and apparent intensity of it all, and that he and Draco had been lovers for half a year and close for nearly a whole one without him noticing. Or Draco telling him.
He also wondered, as he put things away and started up for bed, how well he would be able to cope with it now that it was out. He didn’t know, really didn’t know, how he would respond to it all in practice, as it were, and he didn’t want to hurt Draco. Not just for Draco’s sake, either. If things went badly, Draco would smilingly lock the whole thing away, never to be mentioned again, and Neville would find himself locked outside those high walls over this large piece of Draco forever.
He left all but the Lovers’ Guide in the small study Draco had taken as his office, then washed up and slipped into bed. Draco was already snoring lightly, but moved by inches to wrap into his warmth. Neville stroked the fine, light hair without putting out his lamp, and when Draco settled again he went back to reading. It really was sex ed all over again, finding out all these new ways a body could respond, and it seemed like a good idea to take in as much as he could, even to overload, so that he knew as much as he could before his mind started processing it all in sleep.
The first thing that actually caught his imagination was something about sympathetic sneezing. First the author talked about the negatives, about how one person would sneeze, and it would be received by the HR person as though a public sex act had been performed.
If it aroused them, then, involuntarily, they would sneeze as well, and for them that was such an intensely personal act, shared with another person (even if the original sneezer had no idea), that often shame, guilt, and even worries about illicitness and infidelity might follow. Sneezing in public could feel like being a flasher. Sympathetic sneezing in public could feel like being an exhibitionist.
Draco had very little shame or guilt over anything that didn’t actually cause serious harm, so Neville wasn’t very concerned about those issues. The ideas for private sympathetic sneezing were interesting, though.
He fell asleep reading and thinking about that, and dreamed he had a cold. He kept wiping at the wet tip of the penis on his face, and Draco ended up in St. Mungos.
. 
On to Part 2
~ Let me know what you think?
