Chapter Seventeen of 'Deconversion'- Striking From Safety
Chapter Sixteen.
Title: Deconversion (17/about 25)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco, mentions of others
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, sex, angst, suicidal thoughts, issues of mental illness, Dark versions of both Draco and Harry. Ignores the epilogue.
Summary: They were right, those old wizards who thought Parseltongue was a Dark gift. As Harry begins his slide down, fighting desperately all the way, Draco is more than happy to take advantage of the Hero’s fall from the Light.
Author’s Note: I’m not yet sure how long this story will be, although between 20 and 25 chapters seems likely. Angst is likely to be heavy at times, and there will be lots of both Parseltongue and manipulation.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Seventeen-Striking From Safety
Harry winced as he bent down and touched his pelvis. He had changed back from the snake form not long after he’d rejoined Malfoy and Parkinson in the mirror room, and Malfoy had praised his capture of the artifact and Parkinson had flinched back from him as expected. And then Malfoy had torn open the Dark path again and brought them out of the Department. They had gained memories, paperwork, an artifact. Though the Unspeakables would move almost immediately to cover up the loss when they found out about it, they didn’t know yet. For the moment, Harry and his allies could rest.
But damn, Harry hadn’t realized how much crushing his legs out of shape into coils and then splitting them back would hurt. It was the next morning, and they still ached.
“An owl brought me the first threat!”
Harry started. He was bending down in front of the mirror in the bathroom attached to his suite, and Malfoy was standing behind him, waving the letter, his eyes bright and merry, seeming to ignore Harry’s nakedness.
“I knew the Unspeakables wouldn’t want to make a public fuss, but they can’t contain themselves, either,” Malfoy announced, flopping down on the couch that stood along the wall of the bathroom and pushing Harry’s clothes out of the way. “They’ll be sending letters like this to all the Dark wizards in Britain, implying subtly that they know it was them-although of course it won’t have been most of them-and trying to threaten them into giving the artifact up. I only received one by coincidence. They don’t know yet.” He gazed at the letter as if deciding whether or not to frame it. “What do you think? Should I let them know so soon, or make them wait and work for it?”
“Malfoy,” Harry said.
Malfoy glanced up at him, waiting, then sighed. “That’s just my name, and not an answer,” he pointed out patiently.
The white serpent, lounging on the tiles that were still warm from the splashing of Harry’s shower that morning, turned his head a little. Do you want me to bite him? I don’t think I should, and besides, I’m so comfortable here.
Don’t bother, Harry hissed back, then faced Malfoy again. “I’m not dressed yet,” he said.
Malfoy spent a minute more waiting, then placed the letter carefully on the counter and stood. “I know that,” he explained. “When I realized that you were still in the bathroom, I thought it would prove an advantage rather than otherwise.” He stepped up beside Harry and stroked his hand down Harry’s flank, lingering especially on the bone of his hip. “Of course, if you want me to go, I can go,” he added generously as Harry squeaked.
Harry closed his eyes and thought furiously. “No, I don’t want you to go,” he said at last.
“I hoped you wouldn’t,” Malfoy said, and went on stroking and waiting. The touches of his fingers on Harry’s skin sparked more response than the scales of a snake sliding there would have.
I like that, the white serpent announced, and slid out of the room with a languorous motion. If you’re going to mate, I don’t have to watch over you. I already know what it looks like, and it’s not that interesting.
Harry would have glared, but the way Malfoy was touching him was interesting, at last for him, and he couldn’t quite get the breath into his lungs. He panted, while Malfoy held him there with nothing more than the tips of his fingers resting lightly on Harry’s hip. When he opened his eyes, Malfoy watched him with sparking eyes and his tongue peeking gently out from between his lips.
“Well?” he asked.
Harry made a noise that sounded like a head hitting tile and reached for him.
*
This time, it was better, because Harry was naked.
That meant Draco could see all the bands of sliding, glowing scales under his skin, encircling his wrists and running in long strips up his arms to his shoulders. Beneath the skin, but so warm, so thick, so enticing. And when Draco bent and licked Harry’s wrist, he could taste a difference there from ordinary human skin, colder and rougher. Harry groaned and dragged Draco closer to kiss him.
Draco had to shut his eyes and spend a moment concentrating when his tongue slipped into Harry’s mouth, so that he wouldn’t spend himself then and there. Harry’s tongue was forked. Draco hadn’t felt that before. He gasped through the first moments, and then became aware that he was grinding himself against Harry’s leg and Harry could probably figure out the reason.
“You really do like it exotic,” Harry murmured, and pulled back from Draco’s mouth, staring at him. The scales lay around his neck like a collar. His hair writhed and danced and drifted, not becoming serpents, not becoming ordinary hair. His hands reached out and slid down Draco’s arms, and he didn’t think it was his imagination that Harry’s fingers had shortened, that the nails felt more like small glassy lumps than ragged ones.
“I like it,” Draco said. “I like you. I want you to fuck me.”
From the way Harry actually flew across the bathroom , banging into the side of the shower, you would have thought that Draco had asked to harvest his organs for use in potions. His mouth hung open, unattractive except in the way that it revealed more of that dark throat and split tongue and burgeoning fangs, and the venom sacs were bulging beneath his cheeks once more. Draco knew that meant Harry felt threatened, but he didn’t much care. In fact, it was a help, in some ways, to see Harry so unnerved. It aroused Draco, and kept him from feeling as though Harry was completely in control. Draco reached down and began to unbutton his trousers, gently, slowly, not taking his eyes off Harry’s face as he did.
“You’re mad,” Harry whispered, but his legs were shaking in a way that didn’t let him slide down, and he was hard. Draco let his gaze linger on Harry’s groin in appreciation for a long moment. His cock didn’t split or have scales or change form in any way to indicate his Parseltongue, but it was still a very nice one.
“Why?” Draco shrugged, and his trousers and pants both slid to the floor at once, a modification he’d perfected during the days when he was still dating Blaise, who was so impatient that he would tear Draco’s clothes otherwise. “You’re acting as though I had asked you to penetrate me with a snake.”
“I wouldn’t send any of my snakes into your filthy arse,” Harry hissed, and his tongue lashed out far enough that Draco could feel the impact of flecks of spittle on the bridge of his nose.
Draco wiped them away, and grinned at Harry. “Well, lucky for you that there’s a shower here.” And he stepped past Harry and turned it on, ignoring the way that the water splashed on his shirt. The house-elves could clean that, while Draco himself would have to use Reparo on any of the clothes that got torn.
“Mad,” Harry repeated hollowly, but he was having a lot of trouble looking away from Draco’s chest now. Draco looked down. He was pleased himself with the muscles there, and their definition, and the way they flowed down towards the lean hollow of his hips, but he suspected that Harry was fixated on the scars that lay in the very center.
Draco touched them and shrugged. “You used a Dark spell to make them,” he said. “That means I value them. And they should have been the first suggestion for me that you had the potential to become a Dark wizard. I wish I’d seen it at the time. You could have avoided wasting your life in the service of the Light, and I would have had a powerful protector and ally.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Harry said, and stood there, looking foolish, while Draco tossed the wet shirt on the floor and stepped more fully into the shower. A simple wish adjusted the temperature of the water and the pounding nature of the spray, so that it hit and relaxed the muscles near his spine that had been injured by some of his dodging and rolling in the Department of Mysteries last night.
“Come in, then,” he said to Harry, not opening his eyes to see if he would, while he stretched his legs out and jutted his hips forwards. Harry couldn’t miss the invitation, whether Draco spoke it in words or not. “And then come in me.” He turned his head, poised in the way that he knew made him look the most provocative, and waited.
*
Harry wanted to say that Malfoy could just go fuck himself, as far as he was concerned, and then walk out the door.
But the white serpent had left the room, and Harry was still naked, and Malfoy was waiting for him in the shoulder with his head turned and his hair tossed back in a way that made him glow. And Harry had become worse at resisting his temptations since he became a Dark wizard.
I’ll still have to make sure that I don’t yield to too many, he thought, as he stepped into the shower. He didn’t need Malfoy to tell him that doing that would mean wandering off the Dark paths in search of the laughter that gibbered to the side of them, and losing his sanity in the pursuit of small spells that didn’t matter as much as the greater advantages he could otherwise gain.
But he needed Malfoy to teach him what the back of his neck smelled like, and that he would moan when Harry slid his tongue down the bones of his spine, and that his hair smelled like his shampoo even when he hadn’t used any yet. Harry found himself sliding down, as though his legs had melted again, and kneeling behind Malfoy. As long as he had knees, he thought, he was safe.
Malfoy gazed back over his shoulder at him, eyes heated and glowing like ashes. He widened his legs again, and waited. This time, Harry wasn’t as sure what he wanted. He put his hands on Malfoy’s arse.
Malfoy let his head sag forwards, and hissed. Harry shivered. The hiss wasn’t quite a Parseltongue word, but close enough to arouse him.
He kept moving his hands in slow circles, digging his fingers into taut flesh here and there, and wondered what the hell to say, to do. He had never been one for casual sex. Partially, of course, because there were a lot of people out there who would use him if they could, and partially because-well, he just hadn’t. It wasn’t him.
But he once hadn’t been interested in Parseltongue, either. And he once had never thought he would want to have sex with Malfoy, or argue with his best friends about being with him.
He bent his head and let his tongue skim out, a fast, gentle lick over the very edges of Malfoy’s arse.
Malfoy tilted slowly backwards, his motion flowing like candlewax, and caught himself with splayed arms on the wall of the shower above Harry’s head. He was shivering, and moaning quietly, urgently. Harry thought he could taste the depth of throat Malfoy was calling those sounds from, and he shivered back, his tongue shooting out again before he could stop it. He resisted the urge to turn his head and graze his fangs down Malfoy’s arse only because he didn’t know what venom he had on them at the moment.
“Like that,” Malfoy said, and his voice had dropped, gone husky, upside-down, rich. “Like that. Oh, do it again. Please.”
Power burst through Harry as he knelt there, fastening his legs-which still existed as human limbs-to the floor of the shower. He stretched out his hands and flexed them again, and became aware that Malfoy was holding his breath. He dug his fingers in like claws and opened his mouth to give Malfoy a blast of hot breath.
He followed that with his tongue and, after thinking intensely about his poison for a moment, with his fangs. Malfoy moaned and shifted all the while, and spread his legs encouragingly, and bent back above Harry with a flexibility that he hadn’t known the little fucker had.
Not so little, Harry thought, lifting one hand through Malfoy’s legs from behind to check.
Malfoy trembled at his touch, and there was that power again, sparking deep, to the point that Harry could feel the jerk and flutter in the center of his chest. Harry wanted this to last forever. He backed away from Malfoy’s groin and returned to the tapping, teasing touches on his arse.
“Please,” Malfoy said again, and shifted his legs further apart. Then he flung himself up in a single smooth motion, and before Harry knew it, Malfoy was standing upright again, his elbows braced against the shower walls to hold him there, his hands shooting down so that his own fingers pried at, and opened, the crack in his arse. “Like this. Please.”
Harry half-closed his eyes, only to find that his eyelids had gone translucent and he could still see what Malfoy was doing. And that reminded him, again, that this was different, this wasn’t the world he had lived in for most of his life, and that he could do anything he liked, that Malfoy wanted him to do anything he liked.
He leaned forwards, and let his tongue out to play.
*
Draco had imagined that he knew what it would feel like to be with a Parselmouth. He had dreamed about that when he was studying them, even before he had rescued Harry from St. Mungo’s.
But he hadn’t known, and now he was butting up sharply against the limits of his knowledge and finding out the truth, with even more delight than that usually entailed. He discovered the scrape of small, stubby nails against his back, the huff of laughter and breath through a triangular jawline, the dangerous touch of muffled fangs.
The flick of a forked tongue.
He yielded.
He went liquid as Harry’s tongue stroked across his arse, as one corner of it found its way into a place that a human tongue could never have touched, as Harry’s fingers found their way in, and in, and in. His fingers hadn’t grown, Draco thought dreamily, unlike his tongue, so why did they seem longer than they had? But then he remembered some of the ways that Harry’s fingers had altered in the Department of Mysteries, and laughed aloud.
Harry stilled.
“That was encouragement,” Draco said breathily, and leaned forwards, bracing himself with one arm against the wall of the shower, because Harry seemed to have found his way to where Draco wanted him without more guidance than Draco had already offered. “Did you never feel it before?”
“Not like this.”
Distorted words, hissing sibilants, and Draco shuddered all the way up his spine. He stuck his arse out and wriggled it, and Harry finally understood what “encouragement” really meant. He paused, and Draco could feel him looking around.
“The shampoo should work,” Draco whispered, and kept his head bowed, enjoying the slick feeling of the water sliding down his skin, the slick feeling of the tongue licking in and out on his arse, the slick feeling of Harry’s fingers working their way into him once he really did work out that he was meant to do this.
The more he explored, the more on edge Draco felt, the way he did when he was walking a new Dark path. He learned more and more, but what he learned could kill him if he took a wrong step. It was not quite the same sensation, waiting for Harry to get over his hesitation, and explore further and deeper, but-
It might kill me if he hesitates much longer.
Then Harry groaned and licked along the edge of the spot where his fingers delved into Draco, and Draco cried out. Harry froze. Draco shook his head and hunched forwards, wriggling again.
He didn’t have the words to speak, not with his mouth full of water and saliva, but luckily, Harry seemed to have finally grasped that you didn’t need words to indicate a level of comfort with a certain idea. Draco heard him rise to his feet behind him. Then his hands fumbled over Draco’s shoulders, clumsy as the gripping forepaws of a dog.
Draco arched his back, waited until he could hear Harry’s raspy breathing even over the pounding noise of the water, and then thrust himself backwards.
He was lined up. Pleasure scalded him as he impaled himself, and Harry cried out hoarsely and said something in Parseltongue that Draco didn’t understand but which still made him shudder as if he was a snake being commanded.
“You need to move,” he told Harry, his head drooping forwards so that he could support himself at last just by the pressure of his forehead on the tile. “There’s nothing I want more.”
*
Harry still moved delicately at first. Because Malfoy might want this, might understand this, but Harry wasn’t sure he did. It was only a few minutes ago that Malfoy had come into the bathroom talking about the owl he’d received from the Unspeakables, only last night that they’d raided the Department of Mysteries. Surely those things couldn’t be part of the same world as this. Surely it was never wise to sleep with a business partner.
Be honest.
The white snake had stayed cordially outside the shower, but Harry still knew the voice in his mind was a reflection of what he would have said. Could he lie to himself? No, he really couldn’t. He knew as well as the snake did that this was something more than mere business.
Mere business didn’t have someone rescuing him from hospital, the way that Malfoy had. Mere business didn’t mean that Harry would risk new Dark paths merely on Malfoy’s say-so and come back with important artifacts and Unspeakable secrets.
Mere business didn’t feel this good.
That was the root of it, when Harry got to the root. He could surrender to pleasure, as he couldn’t to Darkness, as he couldn’t to Malfoy. He could lean in and throw his strength into the thrusts and give them what they both wanted, what they had been craving, though in Malfoy’s case it seemed to have been for years and in Harry’s case for a few days.
As he thrust, as he pushed, as Malfoy pushed back and they fucked, though, it went deeper than that. Harry’s mouth spilled open, and the poison spilled out, and the tension that had been in his muscles and deeper than that joined it.
So much pressure to be the perfect Auror, to never do anything wrong, to deny the Parseltongue when he had felt it growing in him. And how long had that been? Longer than he had confessed to Ron and Hermione. Longer than he had confessed to himself. Dreams full of snakes and days full of madness.
Malfoy had saved him from that.
Harry leaned in and whispered his thanks into Malfoy’s ear, although he didn’t know whether he whispered it in a language Malfoy could understand. From the way Malfoy reached back and gripped his hips, his fingers digging in and scratching thoughtful grooves, Harry didn’t think it mattered.
They continued, tumbling through pleasure, through strikes of it that fried the nerves at the base of Harry’s spine, that touched his body in ways that made it shiver and shake, that made his head tilt back when the moment at last arrived. Sex had never been like this. He couldn’t remember the last time he had let go when he came, his body falling, his soul spinning, his senses dissolving, because he trusted that someone would be there to catch him when he landed.
And then he gasped, and opened his eyes, and realized that Malfoy was still trembling and waiting in front of him. Harry opened his mouth to invent excuses and apologies, to tell him that he had never fucked someone like this before and he was sorry that he was no good at it-
Then he told himself that was stupid, and he reached down and gripped and stroked Malfoy, imagining his fingers shorter as he did so, so that it was more a blunt, smooth paw than a hand that held Malfoy.
Malfoy gulped in air, and shrieked. Somewhere in the middle of that sound, in the loud pleasure that filled the shower, Harry felt him come, too, but it was more the hearing that confirmed for him that Malfoy wanted this.
And it was okay if he wanted it, too.
He didn’t have the strength to keep holding Malfoy up, even if that was what they both wanted, and the way Malfoy had sustained himself heroically all through the sex seemed to have faded. They slumped and slid down the wall, and Harry’s head drooped on Malfoy’s shoulder, and he didn’t pull out and away because he didn’t want to.
Malfoy twisted his head back and kissed him. Harry kissed him, because he wanted to, and thought that he could get used to this, the gentle hand on his head, the fingers trailing along his jaw, the tapping on his lips so that Harry would open his mouth and Malfoy could touch Harry’s forked tongue with his own.
*
That had been the best sex of Draco’s life.
Of course, it wouldn’t stay that way, because he fully intended to have more sex with Harry soon that would surpass that as the sun surpassed the stars. But for now, he could lean back against Harry and hum, and feel the tongue touching his, and the fingers on him, and know that he had what he wanted.
And the water of the shower was still warm, too, and their minds were alike in drifting in languid contentment, along with their bodies. Draco shut his eyes and enjoyed a long moment of perfect ease.
Chapter Eighteen.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/474810.html. Comment wherever you like.