Daphne Greengrass glowered out her window, watching as her new next door neighbor tended to his garden. Gardening was an inoffensive activity most of the time, but Daphne grew progressively angrier the longer she watched him through the window.

It wasn’t the act of gardening itself that had her fuming, of course. What mattered to her was that the young man doing the gardening was the very reason she was stuck here in this bloody muggle neighborhood instead of with her friends. Really, what were the odds that hiding in the muggle world to lay low in the wake of Voldemort’s rise would make the Greengrasses next door neighbors with the infamous Boy-Who-Lived?!

Daphne had never had much of an opinion about Harry Potter, honestly. He didn’t appear to her to be quite the arrogant braggart that Draco always claimed he was, and she’d never really seen him seek attention the way Professor Snape taunted him for doing. But it wasn’t as if she’d had any real interaction with him to speak of. He was a Gryffindor, and the most notorious of all the Gryffindors at that. She and her family were not counted among You-Know-Who’s followers, but Daphne wasn’t dumb enough to have any association with the Boy-Who-Lived. The Greengrasses had carefully walked the lines of neutrality for decades, and she wouldn’t be the one to disrupt that.

But her parents believed that neutrality would soon not be an option for anyone. The Dark Lord had put significant pressure on Daphne’s father to begin supporting his cause openly before his fall. It was only her father’s skill in diplomacy and his potential value as a willing ally that had kept them from being actively targeted. Even then, Daphne’s parents told her they believed they would have been weeks from being forced to choose a side if not for the Dark Lord’s unexpected fall at the hands of a baby. But even Fudge had been forced to acknowledge You-Know-Who’s return after he was spotted in the Ministry of Magic building at the end of Daphne’s fifth year at Hogwarts, and Daphne’s father was willing to take no chances. Fearing that the Dark Lord would give him no opportunity to use his diplomatic skills this time around, Daphne’s father had promptly moved the entire family out of the only home they’d ever known and relocated to a muggle neighborhood in Little Whinging to hopefully avoid being caught in the crossfire of the coming war.

That was precisely why Daphne glared at Harry Potter so venomously through the window as he tended the garden next door. Being pulled out of her home and having to leave her friends behind had been a sacrifice, but Daphne had just about been able to stomach it since she understood her father’s concerns. Moving into #3 Privet Drive was meant to keep Daphne, her parents and her little sister safe and out of the way. Instead, they’d put themselves right next door to the one wizard in the world, with the possible exception of Dumbledore, that You-Know-Who most wanted to kill. If he happened to find some way to reach Harry Potter at #4 Privet Drive, the Dark Lord would surely burn the entire neighborhood to the ground without blinking just to eliminate his school-aged nemesis. The Greengrasses would be little more than collateral damage caught up in the battle between dark and light, a battle they’d tried so hard to stay out of. It was infuriating.

As far as she was aware, Daphne was the only one who’d realized they were living next door to the Boy-Who-Lived. Astoria had basically retreated into her room and her books to distract herself from the situation they were now in, so she’d never so much as glanced out the window. Harry wasn’t outside often, either. Daphne only ever saw him outdoors in the late morning and early afternoon, tending the garden and looking after the lawn. Her parents had gotten part-time muggle jobs in order to more effectively blend into their surroundings, so they were always gone earlier than Potter came outside, and got home long after he’d gone back in.

Doing as her father had taught her, Daphne subtly got information out of them about how large a problem it would be for them to pick up suddenly and move into a different neighborhood. Her father’s grimace told her just how difficult that would be. He’d answered that any need for a sudden move would bring a great risk to them. He’d had to pull significant strings to get #3 Privet Drive set up so they could use magic without setting off any alarms at the Ministry, and not even he had the political capital to do it all over again so quickly. Perhaps they could move if absolutely necessary, but the odds of drawing the attention of people they didn’t want to attract were too high for him to want to do it.

Thus, Daphne had kept the identity of their next-door neighbor to herself. Her parents were doing all they could to keep them safe and out of harm’s way, and thus far it seemed to be working. Daphne just had to hope that they could hold out until school resumed in the fall. But she wasn’t going to take anything to chance. She wasn’t going to burden her parents with the knowledge of their infamous neighbor, but she would confront Potter and demand that he not do anything to attract the wrong sort of attention to their otherwise boring muggle neighborhood.

After checking to make sure that the door to Astoria’s bedroom was still closed, as it always was, Daphne stepped out the back door of their house and walked with purpose towards #4 Privet Drive. It was time for her to do her part in keeping her family safe and as far from the war as they could be.

Potter was so lost in his gardening that he didn’t even look up when she got close to him, despite the fact that she was not attempting to quiet her footsteps. Daphne had to clear her throat to get his attention, at which point he flinched, and his head snapped up to look at her.

Every warning she’d had ready at the tip of her tongue died in her mouth when he looked at her. It was the first time she’d ever seen his face this close up. As far as she could remember, it was the first time he’d ever looked directly at her and her alone. But it wasn’t as if she froze because this was some love at first sight thing, or she was distracted by how handsome he was. He was handsome, but that wasn’t the point. She’d already known he was objectively attractive, and she’d never been someone to be moved by such things.

It was the pain she saw in Harry Potter’s green eyes that made her forget all about the angry speech she’d had prepared for him. This didn’t look like a man who was ready to cause trouble and go fight a Dark Lord. This pain spoke of someone who’d had his heart ripped out of his chest. The blank, broken gaze he gave her as he met her eyes reminded Daphne of two years earlier, when her best friend Tracey’s mum had died suddenly and without warning. Daphne’s heart had broken for her friend then, and she’d done her best to comfort Tracey and be a shoulder for her to cry on when they were able to get away from the rest of Slytherin House.

She wasn’t friends with Harry Potter. She’d never spoken two words to him. He represented danger to her family, the safety and the anonymity that they’d come to Privet Drive to find. Daphne shouldn’t have given a damn about whatever was going on in his personal life as long as it didn’t bleed over into hers and bring the Dark Lord’s focus here to Little Whinging. There was no reason why she shouldn’t follow through with her initial reason for coming over here and warn him not to do anything that would put her family at risk.

But seeing the pain in those eyes stopped her cold. She didn’t want to confront him. Even if she didn’t know him, she instinctively wanted to help ease that pain.

--

Daphne’s father would have been fascinated by the tale Daphne she was hearing. She knew that only a select few people knew the truth about what had really happened on that Halloween night so many years ago, and who had actually been responsible for betraying the Potters to You-Know-Who. If even her father, a man with many connections across various factions, believed that Sirius Black had been the traitor who killed Peter Pettigrew and committed mass murder, surely the truth was not known to many.

Now Daphne could be counted among that group, but she honestly wasn’t all that focused on the political side of all of this. She was thinking instead of how this made her friend feel.

When did Harry Potter become her friend? It was hard to pin down the precise moment when she’d stopped thinking about him as a potential danger to be watched and started thinking of him as someone she wanted to get to know better, but there was no questioning that he was her friend now. She’d tried to keep up the facade of being aloof the first few times they’d met, since there hadn’t been much reason for her to yell at him after he’d told her he wanted nothing more than to have an uneventful summer and would certainly not be looking for trouble. He’d also told her that Dumbledore had certain protections in place around Privet Drive that kept dark wizards out, which had been an enormous relief to hear.

With the reassurance that her family wasn’t going to be endangered by Harry Potter’s presence next door, and that it oddly might even be the safest place in the country for them to be at the moment, Daphne had let her guard down a bit around him. She still hadn’t been quick to open up much; life as a Greengrass as well as a Slytherin had taught her to guard her emotions closely. But she couldn’t help but soften around him slowly but surely each time they spoke, which was happening on almost a daily basis at this point.

She kept finding excuses to come over and talk with him every time that he went outside to tend to his aunt and uncle’s lawn, and she wouldn’t pretend that it was for her family’s sake at this point. She couldn’t even pretend as if she sought him out solely because she was bored cooped up in #3 Privet Drive, away from Tracey and the life she’d known until this summer. Even if she had been able to spend time with her best friend like every other summer since she’d started at Hogwarts, she knew that she still would have made time for Harry. Somehow, someway, she had become friends with the Boy-Who-Lived. And he’d just shared with her the full reason why she’d seen such pain in his eyes this summer. Sirius Black hadn’t been his parents’ betrayer. He had been Harry’s godfather, and he’d been killed the very same night that You-Know-Who’s return had been made public.

Maybe her father would have tried to figure out what this meant and if there was any way that he could use this knowledge to his advantage politically, but Daphne just thought about the Gryffindor who had somehow become her friend over the last several weeks.

“I’m sorry, Harry,” she said simply. What else was there to say? It wasn’t as if she could change what had happened or go back in time and tell him not to run to the Department of Mysteries in the first place. All she could do was try to be there to support him.

“Thanks.” He nodded slowly and took a deep breath, likely struggling to contain his emotions. He’d been somewhat guarded at first too, especially when he connected her name and face with the fact that she was a Slytherin. But once she’d made her revulsion for the likes of Malfoy and Parkinson clear and explained the choices her family had made and why they were living on Privet Drive in the first place, he’d started opening up to her quickly. Part of her was surprised at how easily she’d gained his trust, but his circumstances probably had a great deal to do with that. He desperately needed someone to talk to about his losses and his fears, and she just so happened to be the only person on Privet Drive who he could talk to about any of this. “I don’t know why I unloaded all of that on you. Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said. “I’m glad you did. And if you ever want to talk, about anything, I’m willing to listen.” She meant it. She probably should have kept a safe distance between herself and Harry Potter once she was sure her family was as safe as they could be, but she couldn’t bring herself to pull away.

“Okay.” Harry’s smile was lighter than she’d ever seen it. It looked as if a weight had been lifted off of his shoulders, a weight which had probably been there since the night his godfather died, if not even earlier. Looking at his smile, small but genuine, Daphne had a feeling he really would come to her if there was anything else he wanted to talk to her about. And if so, she would welcome it.

This was the opposite of staying out of the way and not forming any sort of attachment to either side of the war. Her father wouldn’t approve, she was sure. She also knew that she didn’t care. She’d been pulled out of the life she’d known, away from the select few friends she’d made and away from those who would label her family blood traitors for not supporting the Dark Lord. And in the seclusion found in this boring muggle neighborhood, she had formed an attachment to the Boy-Who-Lived himself. The logical side of Daphne, the side that had listened attentively to her father’s lessons and had seen the machinations of Slytherin House firsthand for the last five years, knew that this was not the least bit prudent.

But the Daphne who had really only made two or three close friends in her life couldn’t help wanting to be there to support this remarkable Gryffindor who currently had no one else to turn to.

--

Daphne had been dying to know what was up with Harry for the past week now. Just when they’d started getting closer, just when she had started opening up to him, he’d begun to pull away from her. She had admitted to him that there were exactly three people in the world outside of her own family who she trusted unequivocally, and she’d shared some of her goals post-Hogwarts that had to be kept secretive out of necessity if they were going to be possible to achieve. But right as she’d opened up, he’d closed off.

If he’d closed himself off a couple of weeks earlier, she probably would have let him. But Daphne hadn’t been willing to let him retreat now. She’d finally had enough of him finishing his lawn care and hurrying back into his aunt and uncle’s house, so today she’d grabbed his hand and refused to let go until he followed her into her house, up the stairs and into her room. Astoria’s door had still been closed, thankfully, so with a quick pair of locking and silencing charms on her own door, she’d given herself the privacy and time that she needed to demand to know why Harry was suddenly pulling away from her after being so willing to open up previously.

And now she understood. He’d sort of acknowledged the existence of a prophecy, and that while his new title of Chosen One made him want to gag, it wasn’t exactly inaccurate. But now she knew everything. He’d just recited the prophecy for her; the prophecy that had set the Dark Lord after him and his family to begin with.

“Neither can live while the other survives,” Daphne said, reciting a particular line from the prophecy. “So basically, either You-Know-Who kills you, or you kill him.”

“Right.” Harry nodded slowly, looking down at his hands that he held in his lap. He was sitting on her bed, while she’d pulled her chair out from her desk to place it between her bed and the door, just in case he tried to beat a hasty retreat as he’d been doing every time she tried to talk to him outside this week. “In the end, it comes down to me and him.”

“And the reason you’ve been pulling away from me is that you think I’ll be in danger if I get any closer to you.” Daphne didn’t phrase it as a question, but he nodded anyway.

“Yeah,” he mumbled, still staring down at his hands. “I dunno what’s going to happen this year, or after, now that everybody knows he’s back. But things are getting bad already, and they’re only gonna get worse from here. Voldemort obviously isn’t going to stop coming after me, and he won’t hesitate to hurt the people close to me to get to me.” He grimaced. “Sirius is proof enough of that. I might try to tell Hermione, Ron and the rest of the Weasleys to keep their distance if I thought they’d listen. But it’s not too late for you, Daphne. You’ve been there for me this summer, and it’s been great. You don’t even know how much I needed it. But you can pull away now. Dumbledore’s coming to get me tomorrow, so I probably won’t see you again until we’re back in school. You can go back to keeping your distance, and your family can try and avoid Voldemort’s notice. Nobody ever needs to know about this summer.”

Daphne understood his thinking. In a sense, he wasn’t wrong. If she pulled back here and pretended as if nothing had changed when she was back in Hogwarts, no one would ever know about her summer on Privet Drive getting closer to Harry Potter.

“That would be the smart thing to do, probably,” she acknowledged as she stood up from her chair. Harry nodded, still looking down at his hands. “I’m sure that’s what my father would advise me to do if he had any clue about any of this. We moved here to get away from the war, and getting closer to the Boy-Who-Lived is about as far in the opposite direction as I could go, short of getting a Dark Mark tattooed on my arm.” She walked across her room and stood right in front of him. “If I had any sense, I would send you on your way, let you go home and go right back to pretending you don’t exist when I see you again on September 1st.”

Harry finally looked up at her when she took his hands in hers and pulled them out of his lap, and then she made those eyes bulge behind his glasses by climbing onto the bed and planting her knees on either side of his legs. While looking into his eyes, she sat down, pressing her arse against his leg.

“Daphne, what is this?” he whispered.

“It’s me doing what I want to do, instead of what’s sensible,” she said. And then, before she could second-guess what she was doing, she put her hands on Harry’s cheeks, leaned in and mashed her lips against his.

The real reason that Harry pulling away had hurt her so much was that he wasn’t even just her friend anymore, or at least she didn’t want it to stop at that. In a period of time so brief that it stunned her, he had gone from someone she’d never spoken to, to a friend, and now to the boy she fancied. She’d never fancied anyone before, and it was only now that she understood why the girls around her always acted like such fools when they liked a boy. Kissing Harry Potter really was the last thing in the fucking world she should have been doing if she didn’t want to get pulled deeper into the looming war. But that didn’t stop her. Maybe it was the wrong thing to do, but kissing Harry felt so right.

It would have been crushing if he’d pulled away after all of this, but after a few seconds of shock, he started kissing her back. His lips moved awkwardly against hers, but it wasn’t like she was kissing him with any skill either. This was her first true kiss, and while he hadn’t outright said it, it was obvious that his ‘relationship’ with Cho Chang had never gone anywhere. Maybe they’d kissed once or twice, but Daphne was certain that she was already giving Harry the most passionate kiss of his life. She liked the thought.

Before long, her legs moved in and she was straddling his lap more seriously. Their kiss deepened, their passion making up for their mutual lack of experience or technique, and Daphne began to wiggle around in Harry’s lap. That was something she did mostly without conscious thought just because she felt restless and needed to move her body while they kissed, but it didn’t take long for her to feel the effects of her wiggling. Though Daphne had never felt it or seen it for herself, she knew enough to be able to identify the feeling of Harry’s penis getting hard and poking her arse as she sat in his lap.

This would have been another fine time for Daphne to be logical about this, but she was a fool in love. She did stop wiggling in Harry’s lap, but only so she could lift her hips, reach down between his legs and undo his trousers.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked her when she got his trousers undone and started to tug them down his hips. She noticed that he wiggled and rose his hips a bit to help her, so it was obvious that he wasn’t against it.

“I’m sure that it’s not smart at all for me to fool around with the Chosen One right before we go back to Hogwarts with the Dark Lord after your head.” Daphne got his trousers down around his ankles, and then it was his boxers that she started pulling down. “I’m also sure that I don’t care.” She stared at his bare erection for a few seconds before summoning her courage and wrapping her hand around it. “What about you, Harry? Do you want this?” He groaned as she squeezed his dick, but that wasn’t exactly what she was looking for, “If you want me to stop, just say so.”

“Bloody hell, don’t stop,” he groaned. Daphne laughed and stroked him a little bit faster and harder. She wasn’t unaware of her attractiveness, but she’d never allowed herself to get close enough to anyone for it to matter. But right now, she knew that Harry Potter wanted her, and that elated her. It made her want to push this even further.

“You don’t want me to stop?” she said innocently. “Not even if I do this?” Daphne wiggled down onto her knees between Harry’s legs, and then she pressed her lips against the tip of his cock.

“Don’t listen to me,” he said. “You do whatever the fuck you want down there, Daphne.”

“Wise decision, Potter.” She smiled up at him, tapped his head against her cheek a few times, and then began to lick it.

She should have felt more nervous as she committed to giving a blowjob for the first time in her life, but Daphne felt surprisingly confident. She could only assume that she was still riding high off of her decision to throw all of her lessons out the window and do what felt right to her, finding confidence in her recklessness.

It didn’t hurt that she’d also received plenty of tips on how to perform when the time came. Tracey had started dating right after the Yule Ball, and she’d been sure to regale Daphne with stories of her sex life—often in lurid detail. She hadn’t been all that enthused about listening to it at the time, but she was grateful for Tracey’s sex stories now that she had a chance to put them into action herself.

Tracey wasn’t kidding about how easy it was to make a guy react just by focusing on the head of the dick. Daphne didn’t know how well she’d be able to swallow Harry’s dick if she tried; he looked pretty damn big based on her limited exposure to and knowledge. But she didn’t need to, because just swirling her tongue all around his cockhead and planting her lips against it to smooch every bit of it had Harry moaning with ease.

Since that lesson of Tracey’s worked so well, Daphne tried hard to recall every other thing her best friend had mentioned about getting a guy off. While she worked on servicing the tip with her mouth, she took the rest of his cock between both hands and stroked it up and down. Since Harry’s moans got even louder when she added both hands to the mix, she kept on wanking him. It was nice that she could make him feel so good with her hands, because it took off any pressure about trying to bob her head and train herself how to swallow his length. Maybe that was something she could work on the next time, whether that was here, at Hogwarts or somewhere else entirely. Her life was going to be all but impossible to plan out and predict now that she’d taken this step with the Chosen One, but that was okay. She would have more chances to use her mouth on Harry, no matter how long she had to wait or where she had to do it.

For now, though, she just stuck to what she knew worked. She took Harry Potter into her bedroom, stroked his cock with both hands and swirled her tongue around his tip like it was a lollipop. Eventually she tried wrapping her lips around his head and suckling it, and he really seemed to love that.

She hadn’t known how she would like giving head, but she was really taking to it. The act itself wasn’t too bad, but what she got out of it was the satisfaction of knowing how much Harry was enjoying it. One of the most rewarding parts of this summer had been seeing Harry Potter’s green eyes go from lost in pain to bright with friendship and trust.

Now she got to admire what those striking eyes looked like when he was receiving pleasure, and it was captivating. She barely even wanted to blink, because she wanted to look up into Harry’s eyes from between his legs for as long as she could manage. There were other ways for her to know and appreciate how she was making him feel. She saw his hands clenching and pulling on her bedding, and she heard his groans of pleasure. But it was the pleasure on his face and in his eyes that she loved most of all.

Harry would probably never be able to understand just how much his eyes had changed her life, and his as well. She’d first marched over to confront him, intent on warning him what would happen if he did anything that put her family at risk while they had the misfortune of living next to him. But it was her first real look into his eyes that had changed everything. His pain had frozen her, and now his pleasure gave her life. Daphne couldn’t remember a time that she’d ever felt prouder of herself than she did now, suckling Harry’s cockhead and stroking him between her hands.

She was confident that the losses he’d suffered, the attention he’d drawn, the target that had been placed on him by the most feared dark wizard in generations and the heavy fate that awaited him were not on his mind right now. As she’d learned in great detail over this summer, Harry Potter bore more weight on his shoulders than any Hogwarts student should ever be expected to. But right now, he was just a young man experiencing the joy of having his dick sucked and stroked for the first time. Daphne loved that she was the one who got to help Harry forget his troubles and enjoy himself like this, just as she had been the one to support him in his grief this summer. This was a brand new form of support, but it was support all the same.

“Fuck!” Harry groaned. He stiffened suddenly, and his hands moved towards Daphne’s head. “Almost there!”

Daphne didn’t need to be told what came next, and she also didn’t need any time to think about how she wanted to respond. She simply kept her lips sealed around his cockhead and continued suckling and stroking him until Harry’s semen began to shoot into her mouth. She kept her eyes open and stared up at Harry while she swallowed it all, or at least tried to. Some of it spilled out of her mouth and ran down her chin, but Daphne didn’t bother trying to clean it up just yet. It was more important to her that she enjoy what she’d just brought about.

Harry looked dazed, blown away by what he’d just felt. The look in his eyes just after he’d finished cumming in her mouth was one more expression of emotion that Daphne could now commit to memory. He wasn’t even gone with Dumbledore yet, and she was already anticipating their next meeting. She couldn’t wait to look at those beautiful green eyes when they shared even more of themselves with each other.