FIC: Things That Change, 24/26
Title: Things That Change [24/26]
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]
[Part 20][Part 21][Part 22][Part 23][Part 24]
1.
He should have let Potter do it.
Potter stood there in the doorway, his face a funeral mask. His eyes were hidden behind the reflected sheen in his lenses as he stepped forward, slowly walking across the carpet.
Draco had wanted to be alone. Lord knows in this house in the summers with all four children home, he can’t even brood in peace.
And then Potter was on him, forcing him to the bed with a knee between Draco’s legs, his hands pinned above his head as Potter tried to kiss him. Draco kicked back, wiggling and writhing and trying to get away, bashing his head to the side as Potter’s mouth met his skin in a flurry of teeth and saliva.
“Get off me!” he screamed, but Potter didn’t listen, he never did and he never does. He could feel Potter’s cock hard through his trousers. He almost wanted things to be normal in that moment, to arch back against Potter’s body, to rub his own cock into Potter’s hips, to moan Potter’s name like nothing had ever changed.
He let himself go.
And Potter noticed- he climbed off Draco and wrapped an arm around him, pulling him close. Draco wanted to flee, to stay, he didn’t know what he wanted as his body shuddered with the first few racking sobs.
He wasn’t supposed to cry. He didn’t intend for Potter to ever see him cry again.
He closes his eyes when he thinks of this, Potter seeing him cry, and he is always brought back over twenty years, to when Potter caught him in Moaning Myrtle’s loo, hunched over a sink and crying because he didn’t know what to do then, either. His family was in shambles and it was his fault.
And now it has come full circle, back to the same place.
He is never alone in the house, not now, not ever. It would be easier if Viola and Abraxas and Pyrrha were still at school- Draco doubts, even if James did see anything, that he would say much to Potter.
Potter never leaves him alone. After supper, when he’s silent and charming the dishes into the sink to be washed, Potter comes up behind him and puts a hand on his forearm.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
Draco grunts. “I’m fine.”
At night, when he’s in the bathroom, drowning himself in a hot, steamy shower, staring at his feet there is a knock on the door. Draco ignores it, pretending he can’t hear Potter’s voice over the spray of the water. He hates showers even more now, like he hates dressing and undressing, having to touch himself and know what his father knows now about him that his body isn’t all right. He almost can’t remember what it was like beforehand, when he could reach a hand behind his balls and feel nothing.
“Are you all right?” Potter asks when he finally emerges from the bathroom, his body too-warm and too-lethargic, his eyes drooping with sleep.
“I’m fine,” Draco says. He tightens the towel around his waist a little bit more.
He used to like Potter’s hols, to have Potter around more, to have Potter around more to shag at night when the children were in bed, a heavy net of charms around their bed for silence. Now, all he thinks is Go back to the bloody Ministry! Potter’s constant “All right?”s make his eye twitch and the lamps flutter behind him.
Potter keeps following him, asking, poking him in the middle of the night to see if he’s sleeping or not. He can’t sleep. Not very often, not when he closes his eyes and he sees the look on his father’s face, the curl in his lip as he stares at Draco in disgust as what he’s done to himself and the family name.
There is no family name, not any more, not officially. He knows his father knows this too, polluted with a half-blood’s blood and a half-blood’s name.
Potter only aggravates things.
“Stop asking me if I’m all right!” Draco snaps.
“All right,” Potter says, scowling. “I was only asking.”
“Well you always ask!”
“And you always say you’re fine!”
Draco rolls onto his side. His insides churn and roil. The roast for dinner doesn’t sit well in his belly and he mostly wants to go into the bathroom and stew, but he knows Potter will hover on the other side of the door until he emerges, so instead he lies here, glaring out toward the window.
“Since when did you care,” he mumbles into the pillow.
“Since always!” Potter says, his voice rising. He tries again, this time quieter, “I just…don’t know what to say to you a lot of the time. Sometimes it’s almost as though we’re…strangers.”
“We’re not married,” Draco says. He opens his mouth to add, And I don’t want to be, but Potter speaks before him.
“Well, maybe I would- I mean, marry you,” Potter says. He pauses long enough that Draco cranes his neck to look at Potter, to see if maybe he fell asleep and would stop bloody talking for once. Instead, Potter simply lies beside him and bites his lower lip. “I do love you,” he whispers.
Draco can’t bring himself to say anything in response.
2.
His conscience reminds him that he ought to feel guilty when he sees Potter pull out of the driveway in the car with their children, going to take Viola and Abraxas off to school once more. Pyrrha has left for her job with the Ministry a few hours beforehand and Draco is left by himself. He leans against the window frame, his arms folded over his chest as he watches them leave, down the drive, down the street, and then off to King’s Cross.
Mostly he feels a sense of relief at the brief moment he’ll have here alone: the house elf, Draco doesn’t care where it is or what it’s doing. It’s too old and batty to remember much, let alone to be likely to tell Potter that Draco is sneaking off again.
Mostly he feels a weighty pressure inside, the anxiety building within his chest, his stomach, and threatening to ooze out of his mouth along with the nauseating taste of bile. His wand feels slick in his hand; he clenches his fist around it and squeezes his eyes shut for an instant, then grabs the darkest, longest cloak he has and rushes out of the back door.
It isn’t hard to concentrate, to determine where he wants to go. He pictures the beautiful garden beds, like Pyrrha’s only many many more. He remembers the bright blue hydrangeas and carnation tulips in spring, reaching up for the brief moments of sun between bouts of rain. They were tall and stately, memories of his childhood before Hogwarts, when he was never home in time to see them again. He remembers the manicured lindens and the hedges, his mother walking with a basket of blooms, a smile on her face. He can remember his father strolling beside her sometimes, when he was home from the Ministry.
He remembers the white sheen of the façade, smooth as marble and twice as grand.
It isn’t hard to concentrate on the Manor, and it isn’t hard to Apparate either.
He opens his eyes and the weight inside plummets even farther, dragging his breath along with it. It has been years since he has been here last, but the years have piled on the neglect. The bright white columns are now dingy and grey, like the gloomy sky overhead. The ivy trellises are derelict and dying, everywhere on the grounds as he turns around, everywhere he can see the overgrown gardens, the too-long grass, the too-high hedges.
Skeletal, sickly trees reach out and encircle the Manor with their thin, grasping hands.
His breath feels short. He mourned for his family long ago, he mourned for his father and mother and now he mourns for the Manor, too.
Only not everything is dead, and he knows it well enough.
Draco is not Potter. He can sneak and slink around as well as any wizard, but as soon as he creaks open the great door, a ward sounds and his body is transfixed with a jinx, his limbs as stiff as the stone under his feet, his eyes flitting about as he searches for his father’s form.
The ward is sticky, an invisible spider’s web and he is the fly. His father’s footsteps click to his right, but he cannot turn his head until the flash of yellow-tinted wandlight releases him.
“I see you’ve come back,” his father says.
Draco stands, scrambling for some sense of dignity as he straightens his back and brushes his cloak off. “Yes,” he says when no other words come.
“You might be able to betray your breeding, Draco, but you can never betray your blood,” his father says. He holds up his cane, the shaft gleaming, the polished onyx catching the cavernous light of the entrance hall and concentrating it onto one small object, sucking it up, a vortex. His father nods his head, ever so slight, and Draco follows him.
Things have changed. Twenty-some years since his father was sent off and now Draco matches his father, stride for stride. His father raises an eyebrow. Draco might be rubbish at Legilimency, but he can read his father’s thoughts on his face.
“I’m not a woman,” he says. “I’m not like that and I’m not anyone’s wife, either.”
“The Daily Prophet would argue otherwise,” his father says. “Will they be fooled forever?”
Draco says nothing.
The halls haven’t changed, but they have aged. The timeless portraits are clouded with dust, the tapestries are thick with cobwebs. The only sense of life are the endless creaks and groans the deeper they walk through the hallways, the beautiful flying carpets tacked to the floor, now threadbare with tread in places.
His father must have paced these halls.
Or Aurors before him.
They walk past the study, which reeks of must and alcohol, filtering into the air around them. His father walks beyond, turning into a room Draco has rarely ever entered. There is no issue of privacy- no one else is around. There are even no faint rattling noises of house elves in the kitchen.
His father lives like a recluse, like he once did, alone and away. There are no piles of galleons in the room, stacked in corners or heaped up. There are simply walls, six of them, lined with dark wood cabinets, stocked to the brim with potions and pickled creatures encased in alcohol, behind cobalt, stewed in brine.
Draco shivers. The lone window open to the garden is blocked with growth of bushes, prickly roses and Deadly Sugarsuckle thorns, strangling ivies and mistletoe balls. The figure in the glass moves, creaking like the floorboards as his father turns to shut the door.
Draco licks his lips, pressing them together and trying to ignore the jars of floating fetuses and lizards and snake skins. If it wasn’t for the lack of any smell here, he would be back in Snape’s storerooms, sixteen and stealing polyjuice ingredients for Crabbe and Goyle.
“Tell me Draco,” his father says, sitting down in a large leather recliner, “why Harry Potter?”
Draco steps backward, blinking. “What?”
“Oh, come now. Clearly you’re not about to leave him and he hasn’t left you. You’re fond of him, aren’t you? Since the beginning? Since you were a teenager? You always did talk about him an awful lot to your mother and I. She suspected it was anger at him. Or was it something different?”
His eyes prickle at the mention of his mother. His father doesn’t smile.
“Why Potter?” he asks again, his voice cold.
Draco breathes, staring at the inlaid wood paneling of the floor, the patterns of diamonds and stars and cross-shapes, ivory and teak on honey-coloured oak. He lifts his head, willing himself to look his father in the eye. “There was nothing left. I was the only one, I-”
“So you deformed yourself to steal him, is that it?”
“No!” Draco shouts. Then he steadies himself, stepping back toward his father and looking down at him. “No- I wanted him to pay. I hated him so much.”
“And now things have changed,” his father finishes. “And have you, Draco? Have you changed at all, or are you still that scared boy, alone and afraid of the Ministry?”
“I’m not afraid of anything,” Draco insists. He balls his hands into fists, digging his fingernails into the palms. “I’m not, father.”
“Are you afraid of me?” His father’s lips twitch, curving into something resembling neither a smirk nor a smile. “Nearly forty and afraid?”
Draco wants to vomit. He wants to cry. He wants to back away and Apparate back home, as fast as he can. He wants to do something rash and pathetic like he always has, his father’s shadow, his father’s approval always looming over his shoulder.
“Aren’t you proud of me, father,” he starts to say, his voice shaking, but growing louder with each inch he moves closer, with each new word he forces from his tongue, “I kept the family alive. Isn’t that what you always said: the family always, always for the family?”
“You ruined yourself, Draco,” his father says.
“I saved myself,” he replies. “I saved our family.”
As he pushes past his father, striding out of the room, his heart pounding in his chest and his words echoing in his ears, Draco thinks that he sees his father start to smile.
3.
Seeing his father once more, on his terms, settles him a little. Draco looks at Potter and he doesn’t cringe. He looks at James and he doesn’t feel quite so guilty. His father doesn’t understand; he never had to start again. There was always a family for him.
Draco still doesn’t know what to think. He doesn’t feel as empty inside, but the ache remains, the fact that his father is disappointed lingers.
And would it have been any better if somehow I did end up marrying Pansy? Father never liked her much, either, he thinks. But at least Pansy was a girl and she would have had his children, she told him as much when he used to drape himself across her lap in school. She would play with his hair and mention babies or how her cousin was getting married and one day she wanted to have a dress like that, only much, much better.
He wonders what Pansy is doing now. He hasn’t seen her in twenty years, not since the night he ran off with Snape to Spinner’s End. Maybe she married Crabbe, or Goyle. He doesn’t even remember if Crabbe and Goyle are still alive or not. Those years of hiding, he would scour the newspapers he dragged out of rubbish bins in alleys, but for all they were worth to him then, for news, for information, he can’t remember any headlines, any deaths besides the one of his father’s.
And that was a lie.
If things aren’t slowly returning to normal, at least they are slowly starting to form some new sort of routine. Pyrrha is up every morning even earlier than Potter, and goes out in the evenings often enough with her boyfriend. Draco pretends he doesn’t exist, but the few occasions when he sees Dennis Creevey’s face, he rather wishes he still remember the wrist movement for the bat boogey hex.
Potter leaves James and him alone all day when he goes to the Ministry. Draco doesn’t tell Potter that they don’t stay home, and he doesn’t find out from James, either.
Draco refuses to play the recluse anymore. He helps James into his cloak and pulls out pairs of Potter’s trousers and t-shirts for himself, before charming a pair of Potter’s trainers to fit his feet. He might have lived around Muggles for far too long, but he still doesn’t understand them and he thinks long and hard about what Muggles wear before he tries it himself.
Sometimes they go to the park. Draco sits on a bench, as far away from any other Muggles as he can be. If one sits down near him, he stands up. If one walks too close to the swings where James plays, he insists James has to come home. Mostly, no one is around and he can watch James play in the grass, in the sand, on the swings and the pressing weight on his chest flutters off for the moment. He can forget about Muggles and magic and shame and his father and his horribly fucked up body for once, and just be.
Sometimes they go to the grocer’s, when Draco is feeling peckish. The house elf has disappeared again since last Friday, but there are no odd smells coming from the pantry, so Draco reckons the creature isn’t dead, unfortunately. He’s been craving chocolate cake for days and the spell he has to make it doesn’t turn out nearly as good as those cakes in boxes he’s seen the house elf make before.
He hates the grocer’s. He watches every Muggle there, feeling as though each one is staring right back at him, ready to scream and point and gather the faggots to try to roast him, like his father said that Muggles used to do during the Burning Times. He tucks his wand into the pocket of Potter’s jacket and squeezes James’ hand tight.
The place confuses him. Nothing is arranged how it ought to be, like in Diagon Alley. There are apples beside oranges, not pumpkins. There are pieces of chicken in cold sections, wrapped up in that film Muggles love to use for everything. There are cooked cakes with garish pink frosting. “Happy Birthday Tommy!” one says, but there are no cake boxes anywhere near these cakes.
He and James wander the aisles, growing ever more confused and suspicious. James tugs on his hand. Draco squeezes him tighter. “Don’t let the Muggles get you,” he whispers. But James tugs again, harder.
He looks down, following the point of James’ hand. On a shelf are rows of cakes in boxes: chocolate and vanilla, orange and rum. One with chips and ones with devils, Swedes and Dutch, too.
“Brilliant,” Draco murmurs. His insides tug and he bites back a gasp at the sharp pain. James blinks at him, his brow furrowing. Draco waves his hand. “How about this one?” he asks, holding up a box.
When he mixes the cake in a bowl back home, he makes sure to let James lick the spoon. James hands the spoon back to him, giving a tentative smile, covered in chocolate batter from chin to cheek. Draco waves the spoon, transfiguring it back into his wand, and smiles too.
There are things Potter doesn’t know about him. There are things Potter doesn’t need to know about him.
He wakes up one morning after a night of frenzied tossing and turning. His body was warm, too warm and every time Potter tapped his shoulder or murmured, “All you all right?” in his sleep haze Draco shrugged it off. Every time Potter reached a hopeful hand to touch Draco’s hip, he shrugged those off too.
“Fuck,” he mutters, seeing the dried blood between his legs.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. He was done with this a long time ago. Potter is at the Ministry, thank God. Draco reaches for his wand and scourgifies the spot on the sheets, the spots on his pajama trousers.
The cramping in his belly makes him groan. He wants to curl up and whimper, except he hears the sound of small footsteps in the hallway. James is awake and looking for him. And he hears more noises downstairs- the microwave, and a whistling kettle.
“It’s Saturday,” he grumbles, rubbing his eyes as he glances over to the calendar. Potter isn’t at the Ministry after all. He curses under his breath and rolls out of bed.
The winter chill hasn’t set in, nor has any crisp autumn air, but he pulls on a thick dark robe over his pajamas and creeps into the hallway. Draco tiptoes into Viola and Pyrrha’s bathroom, scowling at his reflection in the mirror, who clicks his tongue and says, “Again? What would you father say if he knew you were still having pe-”
“Shut it!” Draco snaps. He flings open the cupboard door, tossing out the makeup containers, half-used, flicking his wrist at the old toothbrushes and tiny vials of potions and perfumes and whatever else Pyrrha uses to doll herself up when she goes out. “Where are they?” he hisses, pushing aside a stack of towels onto the floor.
“Where are what?” Pyrrha asks.
Draco whips his head around. Pyrrha stands in front of him, rubbing her eyes. “What are you looking for, Daddy?”
Draco blinks, too. “Er…I thought I…heard Dobby in here.”
“Dobby’s downstairs with Dad,” she says, her words punctuated with a high-pitched shriek and a clang of pots, followed by Potter’s voice.
“Ah,” Draco says. Inside, he thinks, Shit. He rises and walks past Pyrrha, but she nudges his side.
“I keep them under my bed,” she whispers.
Draco isn’t sure who flushes more, himself or his daughter.
This, all of this, it has to stop.
4.
Draco has never really believed in Fate. He has never really taken divination with anything more than a passing shrug and a roll of his eyes, but maybe once, serendipity does strike.
“We’re going to the zoo today,” Pyrrha announces at breakfast. She’s on a day off, a Thursday oddly enough.
“Who is?” Draco asks, chewing on his Cheery-Os. He leans over and wipes the side of James’ mouth with a napkin.
“James and I- oh, and Dennis, too, he’s driving. Don’t you remember I told Dad I’d take James to the new reptile house?”
Draco doesn’t remember at all. It must have been months ago, when the rubbish with his father clouded everything. It still does, but now he can sit at the table with his oldest daughter and his youngest son and he can look them in the eye knowing that maybe, maybe his father doesn’t hate their blood as much as when he first found out.
Draco can only hope. He saw the smallest of smiles his father gave him. It was nothing and something all at once.
“Right,” he lies. “Why the reptile house? James isn’t a Parselmouth like his dad.”
Pyrrha shrugs. “He’s never really been to a zoo. We don’t know he isn’t.”
“If he was a Parselmouth, he would have done some other sort of magic by now,” Draco mumbles. He tries not to frown too much, but Pyrrha scrunches her brow and sighs, looking over at James.
Five years old and no signs of any magic. Draco doesn’t tell Pyrrha, but he’s starting to worry even more now. Surely even Longbottom had done some sort of magic by age five.
There hasn’t been a squib in the family since Great Uncle Flavius. He was special, though: some great great uncle had raped his sister and she gave birth to Uncle Flavius. It was bad magic to start with, too much close blood. A bad mix.
Draco can only hope that his blood, and Potter’s together wasn’t a bad mix. If his father knew…he would probably start laughing loud enough that the prisoners in Azkaban could hear.
He pushes the thought aside with the bubble of anxiety forming inside as he watches Pyrrha and James put their shoes and coats on. They wave to him as they leave, that cradlerobbing Muggleborn honking his car horn. He stands and watches them through the tiny glass window panes in the door, unmoving for the longest while until he’s certain the car doesn’t come back down the drive and Pyrrha come rushing inside, having forgotten something.
“Does Master need his coat?” the house elf croaks behind him.
Draco spins around, scowling. “What are you talking about?” He narrows his eyes at the coat the elf holds up, his arms shaking under the weight of the wool.
“Master only ever wears Muggle clothes when he sneaks outside, and Dobby thought-”
“Well just shut it, all right!” he snaps. “And don’t tell Potter!” he adds, slipping his coat on. For measure, he transfigures one of James’ wayward mittens into a low-brimmed hat. It might have been years since Potter erased his name from the records, he might have aged since anyone he knew last saw him, but his hair is too light, his face still too pointy and his eyes too pale. He could be recognized as a Malfoy a mile away.
For a Thursday afternoon in late October, it seems like nearly every witch has come out to Diagon Alley. It’s been a long time since Draco has been here last- how things have changed in his life since- and yet this place is timeless. The jack-o-lanterns grin, orange and round, from shop windows. The rafters of buildings are hung with cobwebs and charmed spiders that shiver when customers walk under them. Everything smells of owl down from Eeylops and sweet vanilla from Florean Fortescue’s. He can feel his mouth start to water at the cookie-smell of baking cones, and the vestigial spicy cinnamon and ginger of pies sold in stands, manned by homely matron witches from the Downs.
He darts between the crowds of women, all armed with baskets of goodies for their children and husbands. No one notices the tall man in the dark hat and coat wandering among them, making his way to Knockturn Alley.
His hands tremble, clammy and cold. He shoves them into his pocket and tries to breathe right, but the more dim archways he rushes under, the more his insides twist. He is taken back twenty years, scared and cowardly, running from the Ministry. Draco wants to stop and catch his breath, to ease the tightness in his throat for a moment, but he’s too afraid to stop. He's come too far now to go back empty-handed.
And then he lifts his head, choking when he sees the rickety sign announcing Appuleanis Family Apothecary above his head.
Once more he is the only one here. The shadows are longer in the dim room, the paneled wood reflecting a matte glow from a single hanging lamp, which smells of musky incense and rancid oil. His head brushes hanging plants from the ceiling, the leaves tangling in the edges of his hair. The branches tickle the back of his neck and it takes him a moment before he realizes the plants are still alive.
“Reducto!” he says, casting a spell.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a voice calls out. Something skitters across the floor behind the shop counter, shining eyes peering out at him. “My poor plants don’t like that,” the little man says, curling his fingers as his hanging plants curl slowly, dancing in the air.
Draco steps aside, his eyes moving from the man to the plants.
“I know what you want,” the man says, his bushy eyebrow rising. “How much do you want it for?”
“I just want-” Draco swallows, but the lump in his throat rises even higher, making it harder to speak, “I just want to be normal again.”
“Normal?” the man repeats. Then he starts to cackle, rubbing his fingers together.
“Look, do you have the potion, or not?” Draco sneers at him. “I’ll pay you whatever.”
The man rises slightly, standing on his toes as he gives Draco a long hard look. His eyes aren’t right, they do not have any pupils, black and encompassing like an animal’s, or a goblin’s. Then he pushes something across the glass counter, jumping up again and again to move a tiny bottle with his hand.
“Is that it?” Draco asks.
“Do you want it to be?” the man asks. He smiles and reveals a set of pointed teeth, rows upon rows like a shark’s.
Draco jumps back, his chest pounding. He glances down at the bottle, warm in his hand.
When he looks back up, the man is gone. And so is the shop, with the plants and the paneling, everything.
He stands in the middle of a narrow passageway.
“Out of the way!” a woman snarls, shoving him into a brick wall with her bony shoulder. He can hear a hag cackling beside him, and above, a flock of crows rises, cawing into the grey London sky as they disappear from sight.
He can smell the shop on his skin even hours later. The incense and the musk and the dust cloying to his body, reminders of a memory Draco isn’t even sure truly existed anymore. The bottle, though- he tucks it away in a drawer under his socks. The green glass glows like Potter’s eyes when he comes home from the Ministry, smiling at Draco.
“Have a good day?” he asks Potter, curling his lip up as Potter’s smile widens.
Potter makes him feel guilty. The potion is heavy in the back of his mind all evening. Potter catches his eye, too often. Or maybe he just didn’t notice beforehand, but the long looks Potter sends him across the table, the way his hand grazes Draco’s thigh as they watch the telly, it makes him shiver inside with both guilt and desire.
He hasn’t been this hard in months. Any advances Potter made were ignored, but now, Draco feels he owes Potter one last time, so he lets his own fingers curl into the side of Potter’s neck, a feigned stretch turning into a gesture more powerful.
Pyrrha goes to bed late, and by that time, Draco’s cock aches, hard under his robes. Potter walks upstairs, but not before turning around and giving Draco one long, last look that makes Draco shiver when Potter’s tongue darts out to touch the side of his mouth.
Neither of them say anything. They’re rubbish at it, Draco never knows what Potter wants to hear, he never knows what he wants Potter to say, but sometimes, the very rarest of moments, they understand each other once their eyes lock and Draco closes the door behind himself with a whispered locking charm and a rushed silencing spell.
He owes Potter this one last time, he thinks as Potter kisses his neck, his collar and pushes him down to the sheets. He hates the thought of debts and repayments and as Potter’s fingers undo his buttons, spreading his robes from his body, he lifts himself up and clutches Potter’s hips, digging his hands in and moaning into Potter’s mouth.
“God, yes,” he murmurs. Potter’s cock presses into his thigh, close to his own as his mouth moves lower down Draco’s belly. He moans again, then again as the hot lips touch his belly. He gasps when Potter licks a rim around his navel, darting inside between glances up to Draco’s face. Without his glasses, Potter’s eyes lose their intense focus, but their haze intensifies a thousand times over, the way Potter looks at him, unseeing, glimmering with lust that manifests in his mouth, his lips, the graze of his teeth across thin skin-
“Oh, God yes!” Draco groans, grasping Potter’s hair. He tries to bring Potter’s mouth back up to his own, abandoned and forlorn, but Potter won’t stop, he moves down, down across his hips and thighs, flicking his tongue across Draco’s cock. Draco whimpers, his thighs shaking, the tight coil in his belly straining to hold on as Potter’s hands hold him down, as Potter’s nose brushes his balls and he dips lower still.
For an instant, Draco can see his father’s face in the shadowed ceiling. He can see his father shake his head, and saying to him, “Just like a woman, is that what you are to him?”
Don’t, Potter, he tries to say.
Instead, he closes his eyes one last time and says, “More, Potter. Don’t stop!”
He comes, Potter’s tongue within him, Potter’s mouth around him, kissing his core as Draco clenches his thighs around Potter’s head, arching his back and arse off the bed, gripping the sheets and spreading his toes. He comes when Potter fucks him, one last time, twice, maybe three times, he can’t remember. His body speaks to Potter’s the way words never can. Their hands twining, their legs straining, their moans alternating between staggered, panting breathes as Potter leans down, buried inside him and Draco throws his head back, bringing Potter down to him with a kiss, tasting the heat of Potter’s mouth, tasting the bitterness of himself, his come, the salt of his sweat.
Draco lies replete, staring up at the ceiling, his father’s image gone for now. Potter is curled into his side, warm and slick with sweat and saliva, his arm splayed across Draco’s chest. He wants to pull away from Potter and Potter’s cock, flaccid against his skin, but instead he stays and gives Potter this one mercy.
Come morning, when Potter is gone, and Pyrrha at the Ministry, too, Draco listens for James. The telly sings downstairs and James moves about as Draco reaches into his drawer and pushes aside the pairs of white socks.
He uncorks the bottle and pours the contents down his throat, choking on the slick, sour oil as it slides down.
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]
[Part 20][Part 21][Part 22][Part 23][Part 24]
1.
He should have let Potter do it.
Potter stood there in the doorway, his face a funeral mask. His eyes were hidden behind the reflected sheen in his lenses as he stepped forward, slowly walking across the carpet.
Draco had wanted to be alone. Lord knows in this house in the summers with all four children home, he can’t even brood in peace.
And then Potter was on him, forcing him to the bed with a knee between Draco’s legs, his hands pinned above his head as Potter tried to kiss him. Draco kicked back, wiggling and writhing and trying to get away, bashing his head to the side as Potter’s mouth met his skin in a flurry of teeth and saliva.
“Get off me!” he screamed, but Potter didn’t listen, he never did and he never does. He could feel Potter’s cock hard through his trousers. He almost wanted things to be normal in that moment, to arch back against Potter’s body, to rub his own cock into Potter’s hips, to moan Potter’s name like nothing had ever changed.
He let himself go.
And Potter noticed- he climbed off Draco and wrapped an arm around him, pulling him close. Draco wanted to flee, to stay, he didn’t know what he wanted as his body shuddered with the first few racking sobs.
He wasn’t supposed to cry. He didn’t intend for Potter to ever see him cry again.
He closes his eyes when he thinks of this, Potter seeing him cry, and he is always brought back over twenty years, to when Potter caught him in Moaning Myrtle’s loo, hunched over a sink and crying because he didn’t know what to do then, either. His family was in shambles and it was his fault.
And now it has come full circle, back to the same place.
He is never alone in the house, not now, not ever. It would be easier if Viola and Abraxas and Pyrrha were still at school- Draco doubts, even if James did see anything, that he would say much to Potter.
Potter never leaves him alone. After supper, when he’s silent and charming the dishes into the sink to be washed, Potter comes up behind him and puts a hand on his forearm.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
Draco grunts. “I’m fine.”
At night, when he’s in the bathroom, drowning himself in a hot, steamy shower, staring at his feet there is a knock on the door. Draco ignores it, pretending he can’t hear Potter’s voice over the spray of the water. He hates showers even more now, like he hates dressing and undressing, having to touch himself and know what his father knows now about him that his body isn’t all right. He almost can’t remember what it was like beforehand, when he could reach a hand behind his balls and feel nothing.
“Are you all right?” Potter asks when he finally emerges from the bathroom, his body too-warm and too-lethargic, his eyes drooping with sleep.
“I’m fine,” Draco says. He tightens the towel around his waist a little bit more.
He used to like Potter’s hols, to have Potter around more, to have Potter around more to shag at night when the children were in bed, a heavy net of charms around their bed for silence. Now, all he thinks is Go back to the bloody Ministry! Potter’s constant “All right?”s make his eye twitch and the lamps flutter behind him.
Potter keeps following him, asking, poking him in the middle of the night to see if he’s sleeping or not. He can’t sleep. Not very often, not when he closes his eyes and he sees the look on his father’s face, the curl in his lip as he stares at Draco in disgust as what he’s done to himself and the family name.
There is no family name, not any more, not officially. He knows his father knows this too, polluted with a half-blood’s blood and a half-blood’s name.
Potter only aggravates things.
“Stop asking me if I’m all right!” Draco snaps.
“All right,” Potter says, scowling. “I was only asking.”
“Well you always ask!”
“And you always say you’re fine!”
Draco rolls onto his side. His insides churn and roil. The roast for dinner doesn’t sit well in his belly and he mostly wants to go into the bathroom and stew, but he knows Potter will hover on the other side of the door until he emerges, so instead he lies here, glaring out toward the window.
“Since when did you care,” he mumbles into the pillow.
“Since always!” Potter says, his voice rising. He tries again, this time quieter, “I just…don’t know what to say to you a lot of the time. Sometimes it’s almost as though we’re…strangers.”
“We’re not married,” Draco says. He opens his mouth to add, And I don’t want to be, but Potter speaks before him.
“Well, maybe I would- I mean, marry you,” Potter says. He pauses long enough that Draco cranes his neck to look at Potter, to see if maybe he fell asleep and would stop bloody talking for once. Instead, Potter simply lies beside him and bites his lower lip. “I do love you,” he whispers.
Draco can’t bring himself to say anything in response.
2.
His conscience reminds him that he ought to feel guilty when he sees Potter pull out of the driveway in the car with their children, going to take Viola and Abraxas off to school once more. Pyrrha has left for her job with the Ministry a few hours beforehand and Draco is left by himself. He leans against the window frame, his arms folded over his chest as he watches them leave, down the drive, down the street, and then off to King’s Cross.
Mostly he feels a sense of relief at the brief moment he’ll have here alone: the house elf, Draco doesn’t care where it is or what it’s doing. It’s too old and batty to remember much, let alone to be likely to tell Potter that Draco is sneaking off again.
Mostly he feels a weighty pressure inside, the anxiety building within his chest, his stomach, and threatening to ooze out of his mouth along with the nauseating taste of bile. His wand feels slick in his hand; he clenches his fist around it and squeezes his eyes shut for an instant, then grabs the darkest, longest cloak he has and rushes out of the back door.
It isn’t hard to concentrate, to determine where he wants to go. He pictures the beautiful garden beds, like Pyrrha’s only many many more. He remembers the bright blue hydrangeas and carnation tulips in spring, reaching up for the brief moments of sun between bouts of rain. They were tall and stately, memories of his childhood before Hogwarts, when he was never home in time to see them again. He remembers the manicured lindens and the hedges, his mother walking with a basket of blooms, a smile on her face. He can remember his father strolling beside her sometimes, when he was home from the Ministry.
He remembers the white sheen of the façade, smooth as marble and twice as grand.
It isn’t hard to concentrate on the Manor, and it isn’t hard to Apparate either.
He opens his eyes and the weight inside plummets even farther, dragging his breath along with it. It has been years since he has been here last, but the years have piled on the neglect. The bright white columns are now dingy and grey, like the gloomy sky overhead. The ivy trellises are derelict and dying, everywhere on the grounds as he turns around, everywhere he can see the overgrown gardens, the too-long grass, the too-high hedges.
Skeletal, sickly trees reach out and encircle the Manor with their thin, grasping hands.
His breath feels short. He mourned for his family long ago, he mourned for his father and mother and now he mourns for the Manor, too.
Only not everything is dead, and he knows it well enough.
Draco is not Potter. He can sneak and slink around as well as any wizard, but as soon as he creaks open the great door, a ward sounds and his body is transfixed with a jinx, his limbs as stiff as the stone under his feet, his eyes flitting about as he searches for his father’s form.
The ward is sticky, an invisible spider’s web and he is the fly. His father’s footsteps click to his right, but he cannot turn his head until the flash of yellow-tinted wandlight releases him.
“I see you’ve come back,” his father says.
Draco stands, scrambling for some sense of dignity as he straightens his back and brushes his cloak off. “Yes,” he says when no other words come.
“You might be able to betray your breeding, Draco, but you can never betray your blood,” his father says. He holds up his cane, the shaft gleaming, the polished onyx catching the cavernous light of the entrance hall and concentrating it onto one small object, sucking it up, a vortex. His father nods his head, ever so slight, and Draco follows him.
Things have changed. Twenty-some years since his father was sent off and now Draco matches his father, stride for stride. His father raises an eyebrow. Draco might be rubbish at Legilimency, but he can read his father’s thoughts on his face.
“I’m not a woman,” he says. “I’m not like that and I’m not anyone’s wife, either.”
“The Daily Prophet would argue otherwise,” his father says. “Will they be fooled forever?”
Draco says nothing.
The halls haven’t changed, but they have aged. The timeless portraits are clouded with dust, the tapestries are thick with cobwebs. The only sense of life are the endless creaks and groans the deeper they walk through the hallways, the beautiful flying carpets tacked to the floor, now threadbare with tread in places.
His father must have paced these halls.
Or Aurors before him.
They walk past the study, which reeks of must and alcohol, filtering into the air around them. His father walks beyond, turning into a room Draco has rarely ever entered. There is no issue of privacy- no one else is around. There are even no faint rattling noises of house elves in the kitchen.
His father lives like a recluse, like he once did, alone and away. There are no piles of galleons in the room, stacked in corners or heaped up. There are simply walls, six of them, lined with dark wood cabinets, stocked to the brim with potions and pickled creatures encased in alcohol, behind cobalt, stewed in brine.
Draco shivers. The lone window open to the garden is blocked with growth of bushes, prickly roses and Deadly Sugarsuckle thorns, strangling ivies and mistletoe balls. The figure in the glass moves, creaking like the floorboards as his father turns to shut the door.
Draco licks his lips, pressing them together and trying to ignore the jars of floating fetuses and lizards and snake skins. If it wasn’t for the lack of any smell here, he would be back in Snape’s storerooms, sixteen and stealing polyjuice ingredients for Crabbe and Goyle.
“Tell me Draco,” his father says, sitting down in a large leather recliner, “why Harry Potter?”
Draco steps backward, blinking. “What?”
“Oh, come now. Clearly you’re not about to leave him and he hasn’t left you. You’re fond of him, aren’t you? Since the beginning? Since you were a teenager? You always did talk about him an awful lot to your mother and I. She suspected it was anger at him. Or was it something different?”
His eyes prickle at the mention of his mother. His father doesn’t smile.
“Why Potter?” he asks again, his voice cold.
Draco breathes, staring at the inlaid wood paneling of the floor, the patterns of diamonds and stars and cross-shapes, ivory and teak on honey-coloured oak. He lifts his head, willing himself to look his father in the eye. “There was nothing left. I was the only one, I-”
“So you deformed yourself to steal him, is that it?”
“No!” Draco shouts. Then he steadies himself, stepping back toward his father and looking down at him. “No- I wanted him to pay. I hated him so much.”
“And now things have changed,” his father finishes. “And have you, Draco? Have you changed at all, or are you still that scared boy, alone and afraid of the Ministry?”
“I’m not afraid of anything,” Draco insists. He balls his hands into fists, digging his fingernails into the palms. “I’m not, father.”
“Are you afraid of me?” His father’s lips twitch, curving into something resembling neither a smirk nor a smile. “Nearly forty and afraid?”
Draco wants to vomit. He wants to cry. He wants to back away and Apparate back home, as fast as he can. He wants to do something rash and pathetic like he always has, his father’s shadow, his father’s approval always looming over his shoulder.
“Aren’t you proud of me, father,” he starts to say, his voice shaking, but growing louder with each inch he moves closer, with each new word he forces from his tongue, “I kept the family alive. Isn’t that what you always said: the family always, always for the family?”
“You ruined yourself, Draco,” his father says.
“I saved myself,” he replies. “I saved our family.”
As he pushes past his father, striding out of the room, his heart pounding in his chest and his words echoing in his ears, Draco thinks that he sees his father start to smile.
3.
Seeing his father once more, on his terms, settles him a little. Draco looks at Potter and he doesn’t cringe. He looks at James and he doesn’t feel quite so guilty. His father doesn’t understand; he never had to start again. There was always a family for him.
Draco still doesn’t know what to think. He doesn’t feel as empty inside, but the ache remains, the fact that his father is disappointed lingers.
And would it have been any better if somehow I did end up marrying Pansy? Father never liked her much, either, he thinks. But at least Pansy was a girl and she would have had his children, she told him as much when he used to drape himself across her lap in school. She would play with his hair and mention babies or how her cousin was getting married and one day she wanted to have a dress like that, only much, much better.
He wonders what Pansy is doing now. He hasn’t seen her in twenty years, not since the night he ran off with Snape to Spinner’s End. Maybe she married Crabbe, or Goyle. He doesn’t even remember if Crabbe and Goyle are still alive or not. Those years of hiding, he would scour the newspapers he dragged out of rubbish bins in alleys, but for all they were worth to him then, for news, for information, he can’t remember any headlines, any deaths besides the one of his father’s.
And that was a lie.
If things aren’t slowly returning to normal, at least they are slowly starting to form some new sort of routine. Pyrrha is up every morning even earlier than Potter, and goes out in the evenings often enough with her boyfriend. Draco pretends he doesn’t exist, but the few occasions when he sees Dennis Creevey’s face, he rather wishes he still remember the wrist movement for the bat boogey hex.
Potter leaves James and him alone all day when he goes to the Ministry. Draco doesn’t tell Potter that they don’t stay home, and he doesn’t find out from James, either.
Draco refuses to play the recluse anymore. He helps James into his cloak and pulls out pairs of Potter’s trousers and t-shirts for himself, before charming a pair of Potter’s trainers to fit his feet. He might have lived around Muggles for far too long, but he still doesn’t understand them and he thinks long and hard about what Muggles wear before he tries it himself.
Sometimes they go to the park. Draco sits on a bench, as far away from any other Muggles as he can be. If one sits down near him, he stands up. If one walks too close to the swings where James plays, he insists James has to come home. Mostly, no one is around and he can watch James play in the grass, in the sand, on the swings and the pressing weight on his chest flutters off for the moment. He can forget about Muggles and magic and shame and his father and his horribly fucked up body for once, and just be.
Sometimes they go to the grocer’s, when Draco is feeling peckish. The house elf has disappeared again since last Friday, but there are no odd smells coming from the pantry, so Draco reckons the creature isn’t dead, unfortunately. He’s been craving chocolate cake for days and the spell he has to make it doesn’t turn out nearly as good as those cakes in boxes he’s seen the house elf make before.
He hates the grocer’s. He watches every Muggle there, feeling as though each one is staring right back at him, ready to scream and point and gather the faggots to try to roast him, like his father said that Muggles used to do during the Burning Times. He tucks his wand into the pocket of Potter’s jacket and squeezes James’ hand tight.
The place confuses him. Nothing is arranged how it ought to be, like in Diagon Alley. There are apples beside oranges, not pumpkins. There are pieces of chicken in cold sections, wrapped up in that film Muggles love to use for everything. There are cooked cakes with garish pink frosting. “Happy Birthday Tommy!” one says, but there are no cake boxes anywhere near these cakes.
He and James wander the aisles, growing ever more confused and suspicious. James tugs on his hand. Draco squeezes him tighter. “Don’t let the Muggles get you,” he whispers. But James tugs again, harder.
He looks down, following the point of James’ hand. On a shelf are rows of cakes in boxes: chocolate and vanilla, orange and rum. One with chips and ones with devils, Swedes and Dutch, too.
“Brilliant,” Draco murmurs. His insides tug and he bites back a gasp at the sharp pain. James blinks at him, his brow furrowing. Draco waves his hand. “How about this one?” he asks, holding up a box.
When he mixes the cake in a bowl back home, he makes sure to let James lick the spoon. James hands the spoon back to him, giving a tentative smile, covered in chocolate batter from chin to cheek. Draco waves the spoon, transfiguring it back into his wand, and smiles too.
There are things Potter doesn’t know about him. There are things Potter doesn’t need to know about him.
He wakes up one morning after a night of frenzied tossing and turning. His body was warm, too warm and every time Potter tapped his shoulder or murmured, “All you all right?” in his sleep haze Draco shrugged it off. Every time Potter reached a hopeful hand to touch Draco’s hip, he shrugged those off too.
“Fuck,” he mutters, seeing the dried blood between his legs.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. He was done with this a long time ago. Potter is at the Ministry, thank God. Draco reaches for his wand and scourgifies the spot on the sheets, the spots on his pajama trousers.
The cramping in his belly makes him groan. He wants to curl up and whimper, except he hears the sound of small footsteps in the hallway. James is awake and looking for him. And he hears more noises downstairs- the microwave, and a whistling kettle.
“It’s Saturday,” he grumbles, rubbing his eyes as he glances over to the calendar. Potter isn’t at the Ministry after all. He curses under his breath and rolls out of bed.
The winter chill hasn’t set in, nor has any crisp autumn air, but he pulls on a thick dark robe over his pajamas and creeps into the hallway. Draco tiptoes into Viola and Pyrrha’s bathroom, scowling at his reflection in the mirror, who clicks his tongue and says, “Again? What would you father say if he knew you were still having pe-”
“Shut it!” Draco snaps. He flings open the cupboard door, tossing out the makeup containers, half-used, flicking his wrist at the old toothbrushes and tiny vials of potions and perfumes and whatever else Pyrrha uses to doll herself up when she goes out. “Where are they?” he hisses, pushing aside a stack of towels onto the floor.
“Where are what?” Pyrrha asks.
Draco whips his head around. Pyrrha stands in front of him, rubbing her eyes. “What are you looking for, Daddy?”
Draco blinks, too. “Er…I thought I…heard Dobby in here.”
“Dobby’s downstairs with Dad,” she says, her words punctuated with a high-pitched shriek and a clang of pots, followed by Potter’s voice.
“Ah,” Draco says. Inside, he thinks, Shit. He rises and walks past Pyrrha, but she nudges his side.
“I keep them under my bed,” she whispers.
Draco isn’t sure who flushes more, himself or his daughter.
This, all of this, it has to stop.
4.
Draco has never really believed in Fate. He has never really taken divination with anything more than a passing shrug and a roll of his eyes, but maybe once, serendipity does strike.
“We’re going to the zoo today,” Pyrrha announces at breakfast. She’s on a day off, a Thursday oddly enough.
“Who is?” Draco asks, chewing on his Cheery-Os. He leans over and wipes the side of James’ mouth with a napkin.
“James and I- oh, and Dennis, too, he’s driving. Don’t you remember I told Dad I’d take James to the new reptile house?”
Draco doesn’t remember at all. It must have been months ago, when the rubbish with his father clouded everything. It still does, but now he can sit at the table with his oldest daughter and his youngest son and he can look them in the eye knowing that maybe, maybe his father doesn’t hate their blood as much as when he first found out.
Draco can only hope. He saw the smallest of smiles his father gave him. It was nothing and something all at once.
“Right,” he lies. “Why the reptile house? James isn’t a Parselmouth like his dad.”
Pyrrha shrugs. “He’s never really been to a zoo. We don’t know he isn’t.”
“If he was a Parselmouth, he would have done some other sort of magic by now,” Draco mumbles. He tries not to frown too much, but Pyrrha scrunches her brow and sighs, looking over at James.
Five years old and no signs of any magic. Draco doesn’t tell Pyrrha, but he’s starting to worry even more now. Surely even Longbottom had done some sort of magic by age five.
There hasn’t been a squib in the family since Great Uncle Flavius. He was special, though: some great great uncle had raped his sister and she gave birth to Uncle Flavius. It was bad magic to start with, too much close blood. A bad mix.
Draco can only hope that his blood, and Potter’s together wasn’t a bad mix. If his father knew…he would probably start laughing loud enough that the prisoners in Azkaban could hear.
He pushes the thought aside with the bubble of anxiety forming inside as he watches Pyrrha and James put their shoes and coats on. They wave to him as they leave, that cradlerobbing Muggleborn honking his car horn. He stands and watches them through the tiny glass window panes in the door, unmoving for the longest while until he’s certain the car doesn’t come back down the drive and Pyrrha come rushing inside, having forgotten something.
“Does Master need his coat?” the house elf croaks behind him.
Draco spins around, scowling. “What are you talking about?” He narrows his eyes at the coat the elf holds up, his arms shaking under the weight of the wool.
“Master only ever wears Muggle clothes when he sneaks outside, and Dobby thought-”
“Well just shut it, all right!” he snaps. “And don’t tell Potter!” he adds, slipping his coat on. For measure, he transfigures one of James’ wayward mittens into a low-brimmed hat. It might have been years since Potter erased his name from the records, he might have aged since anyone he knew last saw him, but his hair is too light, his face still too pointy and his eyes too pale. He could be recognized as a Malfoy a mile away.
For a Thursday afternoon in late October, it seems like nearly every witch has come out to Diagon Alley. It’s been a long time since Draco has been here last- how things have changed in his life since- and yet this place is timeless. The jack-o-lanterns grin, orange and round, from shop windows. The rafters of buildings are hung with cobwebs and charmed spiders that shiver when customers walk under them. Everything smells of owl down from Eeylops and sweet vanilla from Florean Fortescue’s. He can feel his mouth start to water at the cookie-smell of baking cones, and the vestigial spicy cinnamon and ginger of pies sold in stands, manned by homely matron witches from the Downs.
He darts between the crowds of women, all armed with baskets of goodies for their children and husbands. No one notices the tall man in the dark hat and coat wandering among them, making his way to Knockturn Alley.
His hands tremble, clammy and cold. He shoves them into his pocket and tries to breathe right, but the more dim archways he rushes under, the more his insides twist. He is taken back twenty years, scared and cowardly, running from the Ministry. Draco wants to stop and catch his breath, to ease the tightness in his throat for a moment, but he’s too afraid to stop. He's come too far now to go back empty-handed.
And then he lifts his head, choking when he sees the rickety sign announcing Appuleanis Family Apothecary above his head.
Once more he is the only one here. The shadows are longer in the dim room, the paneled wood reflecting a matte glow from a single hanging lamp, which smells of musky incense and rancid oil. His head brushes hanging plants from the ceiling, the leaves tangling in the edges of his hair. The branches tickle the back of his neck and it takes him a moment before he realizes the plants are still alive.
“Reducto!” he says, casting a spell.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a voice calls out. Something skitters across the floor behind the shop counter, shining eyes peering out at him. “My poor plants don’t like that,” the little man says, curling his fingers as his hanging plants curl slowly, dancing in the air.
Draco steps aside, his eyes moving from the man to the plants.
“I know what you want,” the man says, his bushy eyebrow rising. “How much do you want it for?”
“I just want-” Draco swallows, but the lump in his throat rises even higher, making it harder to speak, “I just want to be normal again.”
“Normal?” the man repeats. Then he starts to cackle, rubbing his fingers together.
“Look, do you have the potion, or not?” Draco sneers at him. “I’ll pay you whatever.”
The man rises slightly, standing on his toes as he gives Draco a long hard look. His eyes aren’t right, they do not have any pupils, black and encompassing like an animal’s, or a goblin’s. Then he pushes something across the glass counter, jumping up again and again to move a tiny bottle with his hand.
“Is that it?” Draco asks.
“Do you want it to be?” the man asks. He smiles and reveals a set of pointed teeth, rows upon rows like a shark’s.
Draco jumps back, his chest pounding. He glances down at the bottle, warm in his hand.
When he looks back up, the man is gone. And so is the shop, with the plants and the paneling, everything.
He stands in the middle of a narrow passageway.
“Out of the way!” a woman snarls, shoving him into a brick wall with her bony shoulder. He can hear a hag cackling beside him, and above, a flock of crows rises, cawing into the grey London sky as they disappear from sight.
He can smell the shop on his skin even hours later. The incense and the musk and the dust cloying to his body, reminders of a memory Draco isn’t even sure truly existed anymore. The bottle, though- he tucks it away in a drawer under his socks. The green glass glows like Potter’s eyes when he comes home from the Ministry, smiling at Draco.
“Have a good day?” he asks Potter, curling his lip up as Potter’s smile widens.
Potter makes him feel guilty. The potion is heavy in the back of his mind all evening. Potter catches his eye, too often. Or maybe he just didn’t notice beforehand, but the long looks Potter sends him across the table, the way his hand grazes Draco’s thigh as they watch the telly, it makes him shiver inside with both guilt and desire.
He hasn’t been this hard in months. Any advances Potter made were ignored, but now, Draco feels he owes Potter one last time, so he lets his own fingers curl into the side of Potter’s neck, a feigned stretch turning into a gesture more powerful.
Pyrrha goes to bed late, and by that time, Draco’s cock aches, hard under his robes. Potter walks upstairs, but not before turning around and giving Draco one long, last look that makes Draco shiver when Potter’s tongue darts out to touch the side of his mouth.
Neither of them say anything. They’re rubbish at it, Draco never knows what Potter wants to hear, he never knows what he wants Potter to say, but sometimes, the very rarest of moments, they understand each other once their eyes lock and Draco closes the door behind himself with a whispered locking charm and a rushed silencing spell.
He owes Potter this one last time, he thinks as Potter kisses his neck, his collar and pushes him down to the sheets. He hates the thought of debts and repayments and as Potter’s fingers undo his buttons, spreading his robes from his body, he lifts himself up and clutches Potter’s hips, digging his hands in and moaning into Potter’s mouth.
“God, yes,” he murmurs. Potter’s cock presses into his thigh, close to his own as his mouth moves lower down Draco’s belly. He moans again, then again as the hot lips touch his belly. He gasps when Potter licks a rim around his navel, darting inside between glances up to Draco’s face. Without his glasses, Potter’s eyes lose their intense focus, but their haze intensifies a thousand times over, the way Potter looks at him, unseeing, glimmering with lust that manifests in his mouth, his lips, the graze of his teeth across thin skin-
“Oh, God yes!” Draco groans, grasping Potter’s hair. He tries to bring Potter’s mouth back up to his own, abandoned and forlorn, but Potter won’t stop, he moves down, down across his hips and thighs, flicking his tongue across Draco’s cock. Draco whimpers, his thighs shaking, the tight coil in his belly straining to hold on as Potter’s hands hold him down, as Potter’s nose brushes his balls and he dips lower still.
For an instant, Draco can see his father’s face in the shadowed ceiling. He can see his father shake his head, and saying to him, “Just like a woman, is that what you are to him?”
Don’t, Potter, he tries to say.
Instead, he closes his eyes one last time and says, “More, Potter. Don’t stop!”
He comes, Potter’s tongue within him, Potter’s mouth around him, kissing his core as Draco clenches his thighs around Potter’s head, arching his back and arse off the bed, gripping the sheets and spreading his toes. He comes when Potter fucks him, one last time, twice, maybe three times, he can’t remember. His body speaks to Potter’s the way words never can. Their hands twining, their legs straining, their moans alternating between staggered, panting breathes as Potter leans down, buried inside him and Draco throws his head back, bringing Potter down to him with a kiss, tasting the heat of Potter’s mouth, tasting the bitterness of himself, his come, the salt of his sweat.
Draco lies replete, staring up at the ceiling, his father’s image gone for now. Potter is curled into his side, warm and slick with sweat and saliva, his arm splayed across Draco’s chest. He wants to pull away from Potter and Potter’s cock, flaccid against his skin, but instead he stays and gives Potter this one mercy.
Come morning, when Potter is gone, and Pyrrha at the Ministry, too, Draco listens for James. The telly sings downstairs and James moves about as Draco reaches into his drawer and pushes aside the pairs of white socks.
He uncorks the bottle and pours the contents down his throat, choking on the slick, sour oil as it slides down.