FIC: Things That Change, 19/?
Title: Things That Change [19/?]
Rating: NC17
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
Summary: After Hogwarts, everything changes.
Author's Notes: Thank you so much to my beta, B, without which I wouldn't have had the drive to finish this.
[Part 1][Part 2][Part 3][Part 4][Part 5][Part 6][Part 7][Part 8][Part 9][Part 10]
[Part 11][Part 12][Part 13][Part 14][Part 15][Part 16][Part 17][Part 18][Part 19]
1.
Potter develops a taste for insisting Draco go out with him.
Potter chooses the restaurants- all perfect for romantic dinners for two, candle-lit and slow strains of music, wine and hushed words. It eats him up inside a little the first few times, until he complains that he’s not a poof and he gets sick of the sneers and confused glances of the Muggles who think he and Potter are together like poofs.
I don’t take it up the arse, and I’m not camp and my wrist is most certainly not limp! he thinks.
He won’t admit he likes the change from the monotony of the meals of the house elf, of the headaches James gives him because he still barely speaks to Draco. He fills his days reading The Prophet in the morning, clipping articles about Potter and filing them into boxes. He writes short notes and sends packages of crisps and cakes and chocolates to Hogwarts, and he brews Potions in Potter’s rusty old cast-iron cauldron that he keeps in the cellar. It took nearly a week of abrasive charms and potion cleaners to remove the rust, but the sight of a bubbling mauve liquid is welcome to Draco’s eyes when he manages the cleaning at last.
As much as he loves the feel of velvet robes and silk linings, he loves it even more when Potter peels Muggle trousers off his hips and sees that Draco never wears any underpants with them. Potter licks his lips, just the bottom one, then he licks Draco’s hip, his cock, his balls, until he’s clinging to Potter’s hair, writhing and straining on the bedsheets, the backseat of Potter’s car sometimes, and coming with a moan.
And he loves it when Potter drives, his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road and Draco could mention something utterly foolish, like “By the way, Potter, I fucked Granger up the arse,” and he wouldn’t bat an eye or notice. Instead, Draco fingers the zip of Potter’s trousers more than once and reaches through Potter’s underpants, making him gasp and swerve and say, “Fuck!” but never “Don’t stop!”
Draco makes the dinners worth it. That, and the house elf seems to cook nothing but stew tasting of old trainers for two weeks straight. He looks forward to Pyrrha, Abraxas and Viola coming home for the summer. He grows too used to the silence and lingering quiescence of the house and the garden outside. He orders the house elf to plant more hydrangeas and irises, but the colour doesn’t make up for the lack of his children there to be seen among the blooms, especially Pyrrha.
Potter is home more now, now that the Ministry has dealt with the scandal at Azkaban. He resented Potter for the time he spent there, with other people, with Weasley. They sit in the evenings with James at their feet and watch the telly. Draco doesn’t really understand the box, even after all these years, but he doesn’t mind because Potter will stretch his arm out behind his shoulders and Draco will lean in. He likes Potter’s warm body, sitting next to him, in bed snoring next to him, on top of his body, thrusting hard when they fuck.
The days pass in a pleasant fuzz of domesticity. One day in late June, Potter drives to London to King’s Cross, leaving Draco alone with James. James sits on the window ledge, staring out as Potter’s car pulls out from the drive and disappears from sight.
“He’s gone to get your sisters and brothers,” Draco says.
James nods slowly.
Draco grins. “I’m not so bad, you know,” he says. “You could talk for me.”
James casts him a sidelong look from his dark eyes, before resuming his staring out behind the curtains at the roadway.
“Can’t say I don’t try,” Draco mutters.
2.
As much as he loves his children, Draco wonders if he’d really rather they stay at Hogwarts for the summer, too.
The second day home for the summer holidays, he’s sitting in the kitchen, mulling through a catalogue from Bitterswitch’s Boutique in Diagon Alley, trying to get ideas for a birthday present for Potter. He can’t have Potter best him with that enchanted underwear with the vibrating charm Potter gave him in June. Draco is almost afraid to wear the stuff- he winces when he thinks of how many times Potter made him come, just by whispering the activation word.
Abraxas walks into the kitchen behind him, pulling the loaf of bread off the counter and spreading jam over a good dozen slices. Draco flushes and flips the catalogue page quickly.
“Have enough food there?” he asks.
Abraxas glares over the rim of his glasses. “I was hungry.”
“You’re always hungry,” Draco says.
Abraxas grunts, and adds another slice of bread to the stack on his plate, before wandering off again.
The day would be fine, if it weren’t for the shouting Draco hears next. Viola screams something, and Abraxas yells back and then- BANG! One of the front windows shatters with a flash of mauve light and Viola starts screaming again.
Draco rushes out. “What the hell is going on?” he shouts.
Viola stands crying and red-faced in the middle of the living room, surrounded by glass shards, some on her shoulder, like sandy snow. Abraxas stands by the telly, his wand drawn, the tip still smoking.
“Oh, fuck,” Draco mutters, as the Ministry owl zooms through the empty window. It hoots at him as he unties the warning.
“You can tell your father about this when he gets home tonight,” Draco tells Abraxas.
“It was her fault!” Abraxas snaps. “She’s hogging the bloody telly and it was my turn to watch something!”
“I said you could when my film finished!” Viola shrieks. “Daddy- that’s not fair, it was almost done!” She starts to sob again, her cheeks streaked with tears as she runs upstairs, stomping all the way and slamming her door shut.
“I don’t think either of you will be watching the telly the rest of the day,” Draco snaps.
Abraxas opens his mouth to protest, but Draco ignores him, handing the Ministry Warning to his son. “We’d better not get another one. Potter says you had two a couple years ago.”
“It was-”
Draco tightens his lips and says in a low voice, “Maybe you should be more careful about letting the Ministry find out about things. You don’t want a record.”
“At least I have a record there,” Abraxas grumbles.
Draco freezes for the briefest of moments, his insides curling up heavily. He swallows and walks back into the kitchen slowly. He exhales deeply, and tries to force the feeling away, but the more he thinks of it, the more he knows Abraxas is right, and that is what hurts the most.
Potter doesn’t say much at supper. Draco hits Abraxas in the shin under the table, hard enough to make him say something after sitting silent until the last few bites of his chicken.
“Well, I had a few warnings, too,” Potter says.
“You’re defending him- can’t you- yell at them both for breaking the window?” Draco hisses.
“It doesn’t take anything to fix it,” Potter says, shrugging. After dinner, he puts a Confundus Shield Charm up in front of the house and draws his wand around the window. Draco folds his arms and scowls as the magic knits together a new glass pane, mostly because Potter knows how to do spells like this and Draco doesn’t. He left the window open and breezy to the residual London pollution until past dusk, and it takes Potter five minutes to fix it.
Damn you, Draco thinks.
Potter smiles at them when he finishes. “It’s just a transmogrification charm- nothing too difficult.”
“We learn those next year in school,” Pyrrha says.
Draco clenches his teeth and says nothing. I never finished my seventh year. He remembers spending it running with Snape, staying in musty cellars, the mildewed taste of too-stale bread floods back to his mouth. He starts to gag and rushes into the bathroom upstairs, leaning over the sink and heaving.
Aurors on his back, the Dark Lord in front of him- he remembers the bone-chilling cold that crept into his insides, killing him from the inside out in winter. He remembers Snape always yelling, hissing, Apparating to God-knows-where barn or forest, where the shadows loomed like Dementors, hovering so so close to him, the wind rushing in his ears, howling like the deafening silence of the Kiss-
“Malfoy?” Potter asks.
Draco looks up in the mirror. Potter leans against the doorframe, worry knitting his brows.
“Something wrong?” Potter asks.
He wipes his mouth. “It was nothing.”
“I had a thought at work today,” Potter says. “We ought to take a holiday, maybe.”
Draco closes his eyes as Potter starts to talk, but all he can hear is the whirlwind whistling through skeletal trees, the loneliness of his youth returning for a fleeting, horrible memory.
“Does that sound good?” Potter says at last.
“Whatever, Potter,” Draco says.
3.
“You can’t actually mean this?” he says as he holds up the swimming trunks Potter tossed onto the bed for him.
“You said it was fine,” Potter says.
“I- well, I didn’t agree to that!” Draco snaps. “I am not going out with you in public in some Muggle abomination like that and if someone sees-”
“You weren’t listening to a word I said when I suggested it,” Potter says, his mouth twitching at the sides. “Suck it up, Malfoy. It’s only for an afternoon. Besides, James is excited to come, and so are the other kids.”
He sucks in a breath and puffs up his chest and glowers as Potter packs a bag with swimming trunks for two, plus towels and sandwiches made by the house elf. Draco sits in the car as Potter drives, staring out the window at the passing homes and roadways and other Muggles, before giving way to wider fields as they drive south to the sea.
The day is one of the rare, halcyon ones, with cornflower blue sky, dotted with perfect, puffed clouds, floating by like lazy waves, rippling overhead. The rank smell of manure and exhaust changes into something thicker, something saltier the longer they drive, and soon the sound of gulls and terns and the faint rush of the sea come to Draco’s ear over the static of the Muggle radio Pyrrha insists they play.
Much to Draco’s horror, they aren’t the only ones at the beach. His stomach sinks as they trudge across sinking sand to find a small area not overrun with Muggles.
“They’re everywhere,” he hisses to Potter.
“Then no one will think anything of us,” Potter says, squinting through the bright sunlight. He sets up an umbrella with Abraxas’ help, and Viola spreads towels out for them. James plunks himself down in the sand next to Harry, and starts digging with his shovel, pouring it into a bucket.
“What are you making?” Draco asks him as he lies down on one of the towels. The sand is warm through the pile. He digs his toes into the sand, wiggling them.
James doesn’t answer.
“What are you making?” Potters asks.
“Sandcastle,” James mumbles.
Draco scowls. And then he scowls again once he notices Pyrrha. She pulls off her tshirt and ridiculously short Muggle shorts that show off far too much of her legs than Draco thinks to be proper, even though he can admit his daughter did inherit the right blood because she has his Mother’s long legs.
“What are you wearing?” he snaps, ripping the one towel from underneath Potter’s arse, holding it up to her. “What is that?”
“It’s a bikini,” she says. “Dad gave me the money to buy it last week.”
“It’s-” he stares at Potter for help, but Potter looks away, feigning ignorance, “It’s indecent!”
“I like this!” Pyrrha insists.
“And so does her boyfriend,” Abraxas mutters.
Draco feels his heart stop for a moment. “What?” he whispers.
Pyrrha flushes. “Shut it, Abraxas. You don’t know anything.”
“You were talking to him on the phone all day yesterday is what I know. And the day before that,” Abraxas says.
Viola nods.
Draco stares at them.
“We have sandwiches,” Potter announces. “And drinks. We ought to have them now because I’m starving.”
His appetite has left, however. Draco nibbles at a ham sandwich and eats one of the pieces of chocolate cake, but he can hardly do anything besides shake his head and want to use some sort of Impervious Charm against the Peeping Muggle Toms against his daughter because he sees the Muggles walking by, some muttering about the two blokes together, but what is more disconcerting is the leers Pyrrha has behind her back because all she has on are two tiny scraps of bright yellow fabric that show off the swell of her breasts and her hips.
Draco swallows. Just yesterday she was small and toddling around like James, and now she is seventeen, almost done Hogwarts and a woman and he wants to feed her a reverse aging potion because he hates it.
“It’s lovely here today,” Potter says to him, once Viola, Abraxas and Pyrrha have wandered out into the ocean, playing and splashing in the gentle waves.
“It’s horrible. And too hot,” Draco says. His voice sounds like a whine to his ears and he cringes.
“That’s because you’re used to the air conditioning,” Potter says. “I don’t think I’ve been to a beach in years. Not ever, really.”
“Pity,” Draco grumbles. “I’m going to be a lobster tomorrow. I’m burning through these trousers.”
Potter rolls onto his belly next to Draco. “Aren’t you hot in those? Go put on your swimming trunks.”
“No,” Draco says.
“I’d like to see them on you,” Potter says. His eyes dart to James, still building a sandcastle. He sets a bucket of sand on top a leaning mound and pulls it away, slow and meticulous, but the shape doesn’t hold. Potter sighs in Draco’s ear, smiling against his neck, “I’d like to see you in them- wet from the sea and such.”
It is Draco’s turn to flush, his face as warm as his toes. He changes into the swimming trunks, adjusting them to cover the phantom white lines across his lower belly, and struts out across the sand for Potter.
Potter grins.
The sun hangs low in the sky before they drive back home, casting a golden shadow across the indigo waters. Draco sits damp and uncomfortable as Potter drives back to their house, his hair dripping onto the back of his neck and the seat. The car smells of the shells Viola collected, junky clams and tossed-aside scallop halves, sweat and sand. It is a quiet return, of heavy sighs and hungry bellies.
The house elf has a roast beef waiting for them. Draco eats his before Abraxas has finished his first helping. His limbs ache- his calves from trekking across the sand, his arms and legs from chasing Potter in the water. I’m no teenaged boy anymore, he thinks as he wanders into the bedroom, where Potter has closed the door behind them.
“I’ve been waiting to do this all day,” Potter murmurs. He kisses Draco’s navel, peeling back the cold, slightly damp swimming trunks from Draco’s hips. “God,” he moans as the fabric catches.
Draco can feel himself hardening under Potter’s eyes, staring at him, dark and glassy like the sea, but even more green. He lifts his hips for Potter, who pulls the swimming trunks off the rest of his legs, then spoons against Draco, craning toward him, kissing his mouth and jaw with sloppy, lazy kisses, wet and warm.
Draco hooks his leg behind Potter’s and twists around to kiss him on the mouth, their tongues sliding together as Potter rolls on top of him.
“All day?” Draco asks when Potter pulls back.
“All day,” Potter assures him.
4.
He dreams of the sea.
It starts as midday, with the sun blazing overhead, so hot that Draco can feel the thin skin on his nose cracking. It starts to bleed, dripping down his chin, his lips, falling to the dark water and mixing. The sky darkens, too, until it is so dark that there is no horizon between sky and sea, only an endless watery wasteland.
It is silent, but Draco can see James on the shore, playing with his bucket in the sand. He looks up, his mouth opening, but no sound coming until, until Draco hears his father’s voice.
He chokes.
“Hello Draco,” his father says. He floats by Draco, the waves swelling and dipping, bobbing his body by Draco in the water. His father is white, and his hair tangles around him, just as white.
Father, he tries to say, but the fish stop him. He reaches for his father, to pull him from this watery grave, but they bite his ankles under the water, chewing on his bones until he can’t kick them away anymore. He jerks, trying to kick, but his legs don’t move far enough, like something block them.
The water thickens. His father floats toward shore, his bluish lips curling into a sneer as he drawls, “You disappoint me.”
He falls, but not into the water. Draco floats on top, his arms waving aimlessly about him as he searches for a lifeline, for someone to grab, for his father’s body, floating floating toward shore. Now the fish are loud. They crunch and chew and spit and gnaw and the white mass of his father, growing ever distant, dissipates like milk into a potion, the fragments spreading thin, the low words, “You disappoint me,” floating in the air as he floats into nothing.
“Father,” Abraxas spits. He stands beside James on the shore, his hand on James’ shoulder. His fingers curl around James’ small shoulder, then he throws something onto the pale sand.
Draco can smell the blood of James’ severed tongue above the salty water. He tries to scream, but no sound comes to his ears besides the faintest of moans.
Pyrrha’s yellow bikini has darkened to an eerie puce in the lack of light here. She walks along the water’s edge, her mouth forming the word “Daddy,” but Draco doesn’t understand when she says more things, her words are lost and she walks away, away from him and her brothers into the blackness blurring the edges. She turns her head once, and her eyes are blank caves, sockets devoid of life when she whispers his name and her features grow, the veins creeping like blue vines and she becomes Mother before she is lost into the night, wraith-like.
Viola lies on the beach. Don’t be dead, he begs, but her legs move, thrashing about in the sand, her knees knocking and her hands grabbing fistfuls of sand and throwing it over herself, her stomach, into the air. It falls into wide, unnatural snowflakes, as big as Draco’s palm.
He slides across the water, now ice and frozen solid under his back. He can’t grip anything, but he slidesslidesslides as the fish swim under the ice, tapping at the glassy surface beneath his back, calling him out with their bubbling words-
“Lumos!”
He wakes to see Potter hovering over him, his wand blinding bright.
Draco realizes he’s breathing hard, and his pulse races. He clutches his chest, willing himself to calm, but he can’t see anything in the bright wandlight except the white of his father’s decimated corpse. Now it floats across the darkened bedroom.
A sob rises in his throat. Potter reaches out and pulls him tight, a lifeline to hold on to as he says, “It was a nightmare.”
Rating: NC17
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
Summary: After Hogwarts, everything changes.
Author's Notes: Thank you so much to my beta, B, without which I wouldn't have had the drive to finish this.
[Part 1][Part 2][Part 3][Part 4][Part 5][Part 6][Part 7][Part 8][Part 9][Part 10]
[Part 11][Part 12][Part 13][Part 14][Part 15][Part 16][Part 17][Part 18][Part 19]
1.
Potter develops a taste for insisting Draco go out with him.
Potter chooses the restaurants- all perfect for romantic dinners for two, candle-lit and slow strains of music, wine and hushed words. It eats him up inside a little the first few times, until he complains that he’s not a poof and he gets sick of the sneers and confused glances of the Muggles who think he and Potter are together like poofs.
I don’t take it up the arse, and I’m not camp and my wrist is most certainly not limp! he thinks.
He won’t admit he likes the change from the monotony of the meals of the house elf, of the headaches James gives him because he still barely speaks to Draco. He fills his days reading The Prophet in the morning, clipping articles about Potter and filing them into boxes. He writes short notes and sends packages of crisps and cakes and chocolates to Hogwarts, and he brews Potions in Potter’s rusty old cast-iron cauldron that he keeps in the cellar. It took nearly a week of abrasive charms and potion cleaners to remove the rust, but the sight of a bubbling mauve liquid is welcome to Draco’s eyes when he manages the cleaning at last.
As much as he loves the feel of velvet robes and silk linings, he loves it even more when Potter peels Muggle trousers off his hips and sees that Draco never wears any underpants with them. Potter licks his lips, just the bottom one, then he licks Draco’s hip, his cock, his balls, until he’s clinging to Potter’s hair, writhing and straining on the bedsheets, the backseat of Potter’s car sometimes, and coming with a moan.
And he loves it when Potter drives, his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road and Draco could mention something utterly foolish, like “By the way, Potter, I fucked Granger up the arse,” and he wouldn’t bat an eye or notice. Instead, Draco fingers the zip of Potter’s trousers more than once and reaches through Potter’s underpants, making him gasp and swerve and say, “Fuck!” but never “Don’t stop!”
Draco makes the dinners worth it. That, and the house elf seems to cook nothing but stew tasting of old trainers for two weeks straight. He looks forward to Pyrrha, Abraxas and Viola coming home for the summer. He grows too used to the silence and lingering quiescence of the house and the garden outside. He orders the house elf to plant more hydrangeas and irises, but the colour doesn’t make up for the lack of his children there to be seen among the blooms, especially Pyrrha.
Potter is home more now, now that the Ministry has dealt with the scandal at Azkaban. He resented Potter for the time he spent there, with other people, with Weasley. They sit in the evenings with James at their feet and watch the telly. Draco doesn’t really understand the box, even after all these years, but he doesn’t mind because Potter will stretch his arm out behind his shoulders and Draco will lean in. He likes Potter’s warm body, sitting next to him, in bed snoring next to him, on top of his body, thrusting hard when they fuck.
The days pass in a pleasant fuzz of domesticity. One day in late June, Potter drives to London to King’s Cross, leaving Draco alone with James. James sits on the window ledge, staring out as Potter’s car pulls out from the drive and disappears from sight.
“He’s gone to get your sisters and brothers,” Draco says.
James nods slowly.
Draco grins. “I’m not so bad, you know,” he says. “You could talk for me.”
James casts him a sidelong look from his dark eyes, before resuming his staring out behind the curtains at the roadway.
“Can’t say I don’t try,” Draco mutters.
2.
As much as he loves his children, Draco wonders if he’d really rather they stay at Hogwarts for the summer, too.
The second day home for the summer holidays, he’s sitting in the kitchen, mulling through a catalogue from Bitterswitch’s Boutique in Diagon Alley, trying to get ideas for a birthday present for Potter. He can’t have Potter best him with that enchanted underwear with the vibrating charm Potter gave him in June. Draco is almost afraid to wear the stuff- he winces when he thinks of how many times Potter made him come, just by whispering the activation word.
Abraxas walks into the kitchen behind him, pulling the loaf of bread off the counter and spreading jam over a good dozen slices. Draco flushes and flips the catalogue page quickly.
“Have enough food there?” he asks.
Abraxas glares over the rim of his glasses. “I was hungry.”
“You’re always hungry,” Draco says.
Abraxas grunts, and adds another slice of bread to the stack on his plate, before wandering off again.
The day would be fine, if it weren’t for the shouting Draco hears next. Viola screams something, and Abraxas yells back and then- BANG! One of the front windows shatters with a flash of mauve light and Viola starts screaming again.
Draco rushes out. “What the hell is going on?” he shouts.
Viola stands crying and red-faced in the middle of the living room, surrounded by glass shards, some on her shoulder, like sandy snow. Abraxas stands by the telly, his wand drawn, the tip still smoking.
“Oh, fuck,” Draco mutters, as the Ministry owl zooms through the empty window. It hoots at him as he unties the warning.
“You can tell your father about this when he gets home tonight,” Draco tells Abraxas.
“It was her fault!” Abraxas snaps. “She’s hogging the bloody telly and it was my turn to watch something!”
“I said you could when my film finished!” Viola shrieks. “Daddy- that’s not fair, it was almost done!” She starts to sob again, her cheeks streaked with tears as she runs upstairs, stomping all the way and slamming her door shut.
“I don’t think either of you will be watching the telly the rest of the day,” Draco snaps.
Abraxas opens his mouth to protest, but Draco ignores him, handing the Ministry Warning to his son. “We’d better not get another one. Potter says you had two a couple years ago.”
“It was-”
Draco tightens his lips and says in a low voice, “Maybe you should be more careful about letting the Ministry find out about things. You don’t want a record.”
“At least I have a record there,” Abraxas grumbles.
Draco freezes for the briefest of moments, his insides curling up heavily. He swallows and walks back into the kitchen slowly. He exhales deeply, and tries to force the feeling away, but the more he thinks of it, the more he knows Abraxas is right, and that is what hurts the most.
Potter doesn’t say much at supper. Draco hits Abraxas in the shin under the table, hard enough to make him say something after sitting silent until the last few bites of his chicken.
“Well, I had a few warnings, too,” Potter says.
“You’re defending him- can’t you- yell at them both for breaking the window?” Draco hisses.
“It doesn’t take anything to fix it,” Potter says, shrugging. After dinner, he puts a Confundus Shield Charm up in front of the house and draws his wand around the window. Draco folds his arms and scowls as the magic knits together a new glass pane, mostly because Potter knows how to do spells like this and Draco doesn’t. He left the window open and breezy to the residual London pollution until past dusk, and it takes Potter five minutes to fix it.
Damn you, Draco thinks.
Potter smiles at them when he finishes. “It’s just a transmogrification charm- nothing too difficult.”
“We learn those next year in school,” Pyrrha says.
Draco clenches his teeth and says nothing. I never finished my seventh year. He remembers spending it running with Snape, staying in musty cellars, the mildewed taste of too-stale bread floods back to his mouth. He starts to gag and rushes into the bathroom upstairs, leaning over the sink and heaving.
Aurors on his back, the Dark Lord in front of him- he remembers the bone-chilling cold that crept into his insides, killing him from the inside out in winter. He remembers Snape always yelling, hissing, Apparating to God-knows-where barn or forest, where the shadows loomed like Dementors, hovering so so close to him, the wind rushing in his ears, howling like the deafening silence of the Kiss-
“Malfoy?” Potter asks.
Draco looks up in the mirror. Potter leans against the doorframe, worry knitting his brows.
“Something wrong?” Potter asks.
He wipes his mouth. “It was nothing.”
“I had a thought at work today,” Potter says. “We ought to take a holiday, maybe.”
Draco closes his eyes as Potter starts to talk, but all he can hear is the whirlwind whistling through skeletal trees, the loneliness of his youth returning for a fleeting, horrible memory.
“Does that sound good?” Potter says at last.
“Whatever, Potter,” Draco says.
3.
“You can’t actually mean this?” he says as he holds up the swimming trunks Potter tossed onto the bed for him.
“You said it was fine,” Potter says.
“I- well, I didn’t agree to that!” Draco snaps. “I am not going out with you in public in some Muggle abomination like that and if someone sees-”
“You weren’t listening to a word I said when I suggested it,” Potter says, his mouth twitching at the sides. “Suck it up, Malfoy. It’s only for an afternoon. Besides, James is excited to come, and so are the other kids.”
He sucks in a breath and puffs up his chest and glowers as Potter packs a bag with swimming trunks for two, plus towels and sandwiches made by the house elf. Draco sits in the car as Potter drives, staring out the window at the passing homes and roadways and other Muggles, before giving way to wider fields as they drive south to the sea.
The day is one of the rare, halcyon ones, with cornflower blue sky, dotted with perfect, puffed clouds, floating by like lazy waves, rippling overhead. The rank smell of manure and exhaust changes into something thicker, something saltier the longer they drive, and soon the sound of gulls and terns and the faint rush of the sea come to Draco’s ear over the static of the Muggle radio Pyrrha insists they play.
Much to Draco’s horror, they aren’t the only ones at the beach. His stomach sinks as they trudge across sinking sand to find a small area not overrun with Muggles.
“They’re everywhere,” he hisses to Potter.
“Then no one will think anything of us,” Potter says, squinting through the bright sunlight. He sets up an umbrella with Abraxas’ help, and Viola spreads towels out for them. James plunks himself down in the sand next to Harry, and starts digging with his shovel, pouring it into a bucket.
“What are you making?” Draco asks him as he lies down on one of the towels. The sand is warm through the pile. He digs his toes into the sand, wiggling them.
James doesn’t answer.
“What are you making?” Potters asks.
“Sandcastle,” James mumbles.
Draco scowls. And then he scowls again once he notices Pyrrha. She pulls off her tshirt and ridiculously short Muggle shorts that show off far too much of her legs than Draco thinks to be proper, even though he can admit his daughter did inherit the right blood because she has his Mother’s long legs.
“What are you wearing?” he snaps, ripping the one towel from underneath Potter’s arse, holding it up to her. “What is that?”
“It’s a bikini,” she says. “Dad gave me the money to buy it last week.”
“It’s-” he stares at Potter for help, but Potter looks away, feigning ignorance, “It’s indecent!”
“I like this!” Pyrrha insists.
“And so does her boyfriend,” Abraxas mutters.
Draco feels his heart stop for a moment. “What?” he whispers.
Pyrrha flushes. “Shut it, Abraxas. You don’t know anything.”
“You were talking to him on the phone all day yesterday is what I know. And the day before that,” Abraxas says.
Viola nods.
Draco stares at them.
“We have sandwiches,” Potter announces. “And drinks. We ought to have them now because I’m starving.”
His appetite has left, however. Draco nibbles at a ham sandwich and eats one of the pieces of chocolate cake, but he can hardly do anything besides shake his head and want to use some sort of Impervious Charm against the Peeping Muggle Toms against his daughter because he sees the Muggles walking by, some muttering about the two blokes together, but what is more disconcerting is the leers Pyrrha has behind her back because all she has on are two tiny scraps of bright yellow fabric that show off the swell of her breasts and her hips.
Draco swallows. Just yesterday she was small and toddling around like James, and now she is seventeen, almost done Hogwarts and a woman and he wants to feed her a reverse aging potion because he hates it.
“It’s lovely here today,” Potter says to him, once Viola, Abraxas and Pyrrha have wandered out into the ocean, playing and splashing in the gentle waves.
“It’s horrible. And too hot,” Draco says. His voice sounds like a whine to his ears and he cringes.
“That’s because you’re used to the air conditioning,” Potter says. “I don’t think I’ve been to a beach in years. Not ever, really.”
“Pity,” Draco grumbles. “I’m going to be a lobster tomorrow. I’m burning through these trousers.”
Potter rolls onto his belly next to Draco. “Aren’t you hot in those? Go put on your swimming trunks.”
“No,” Draco says.
“I’d like to see them on you,” Potter says. His eyes dart to James, still building a sandcastle. He sets a bucket of sand on top a leaning mound and pulls it away, slow and meticulous, but the shape doesn’t hold. Potter sighs in Draco’s ear, smiling against his neck, “I’d like to see you in them- wet from the sea and such.”
It is Draco’s turn to flush, his face as warm as his toes. He changes into the swimming trunks, adjusting them to cover the phantom white lines across his lower belly, and struts out across the sand for Potter.
Potter grins.
The sun hangs low in the sky before they drive back home, casting a golden shadow across the indigo waters. Draco sits damp and uncomfortable as Potter drives back to their house, his hair dripping onto the back of his neck and the seat. The car smells of the shells Viola collected, junky clams and tossed-aside scallop halves, sweat and sand. It is a quiet return, of heavy sighs and hungry bellies.
The house elf has a roast beef waiting for them. Draco eats his before Abraxas has finished his first helping. His limbs ache- his calves from trekking across the sand, his arms and legs from chasing Potter in the water. I’m no teenaged boy anymore, he thinks as he wanders into the bedroom, where Potter has closed the door behind them.
“I’ve been waiting to do this all day,” Potter murmurs. He kisses Draco’s navel, peeling back the cold, slightly damp swimming trunks from Draco’s hips. “God,” he moans as the fabric catches.
Draco can feel himself hardening under Potter’s eyes, staring at him, dark and glassy like the sea, but even more green. He lifts his hips for Potter, who pulls the swimming trunks off the rest of his legs, then spoons against Draco, craning toward him, kissing his mouth and jaw with sloppy, lazy kisses, wet and warm.
Draco hooks his leg behind Potter’s and twists around to kiss him on the mouth, their tongues sliding together as Potter rolls on top of him.
“All day?” Draco asks when Potter pulls back.
“All day,” Potter assures him.
4.
He dreams of the sea.
It starts as midday, with the sun blazing overhead, so hot that Draco can feel the thin skin on his nose cracking. It starts to bleed, dripping down his chin, his lips, falling to the dark water and mixing. The sky darkens, too, until it is so dark that there is no horizon between sky and sea, only an endless watery wasteland.
It is silent, but Draco can see James on the shore, playing with his bucket in the sand. He looks up, his mouth opening, but no sound coming until, until Draco hears his father’s voice.
He chokes.
“Hello Draco,” his father says. He floats by Draco, the waves swelling and dipping, bobbing his body by Draco in the water. His father is white, and his hair tangles around him, just as white.
Father, he tries to say, but the fish stop him. He reaches for his father, to pull him from this watery grave, but they bite his ankles under the water, chewing on his bones until he can’t kick them away anymore. He jerks, trying to kick, but his legs don’t move far enough, like something block them.
The water thickens. His father floats toward shore, his bluish lips curling into a sneer as he drawls, “You disappoint me.”
He falls, but not into the water. Draco floats on top, his arms waving aimlessly about him as he searches for a lifeline, for someone to grab, for his father’s body, floating floating toward shore. Now the fish are loud. They crunch and chew and spit and gnaw and the white mass of his father, growing ever distant, dissipates like milk into a potion, the fragments spreading thin, the low words, “You disappoint me,” floating in the air as he floats into nothing.
“Father,” Abraxas spits. He stands beside James on the shore, his hand on James’ shoulder. His fingers curl around James’ small shoulder, then he throws something onto the pale sand.
Draco can smell the blood of James’ severed tongue above the salty water. He tries to scream, but no sound comes to his ears besides the faintest of moans.
Pyrrha’s yellow bikini has darkened to an eerie puce in the lack of light here. She walks along the water’s edge, her mouth forming the word “Daddy,” but Draco doesn’t understand when she says more things, her words are lost and she walks away, away from him and her brothers into the blackness blurring the edges. She turns her head once, and her eyes are blank caves, sockets devoid of life when she whispers his name and her features grow, the veins creeping like blue vines and she becomes Mother before she is lost into the night, wraith-like.
Viola lies on the beach. Don’t be dead, he begs, but her legs move, thrashing about in the sand, her knees knocking and her hands grabbing fistfuls of sand and throwing it over herself, her stomach, into the air. It falls into wide, unnatural snowflakes, as big as Draco’s palm.
He slides across the water, now ice and frozen solid under his back. He can’t grip anything, but he slidesslidesslides as the fish swim under the ice, tapping at the glassy surface beneath his back, calling him out with their bubbling words-
“Lumos!”
He wakes to see Potter hovering over him, his wand blinding bright.
Draco realizes he’s breathing hard, and his pulse races. He clutches his chest, willing himself to calm, but he can’t see anything in the bright wandlight except the white of his father’s decimated corpse. Now it floats across the darkened bedroom.
A sob rises in his throat. Potter reaches out and pulls him tight, a lifeline to hold on to as he says, “It was a nightmare.”