[Wednesday one-shots]: Articulation, H/D, R, 2/2
Part One.
Title: Articulation (2/2)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Warnings: Issues of disability, BDSM, angst, episodic, present tense
Rating: R
Wordcount: 2600
Summary: Harry being disabled might mean that Harry and Draco have to give up certain types of sex. It doesn’t mean the end of their relationship-at least as far as Draco is concerned.
Author’s Notes: This is another Wednesday one-shot written for phonixfeder, who asked for Harry and Draco being in a BDSM relationship with Harry as the sub and Draco as the Dom until Harry is disabled in a way that makes some of their sex impossible. It will have two parts, the second to be posted next week.
Thank you for all the reviews! I hope you enjoy this second part to the story.
Harry does a lot of lying in bed and thinking, over the next few days.
If anyone had told him three months ago that he would leave Draco to do that, he would have scoffed at them. He can think of a lot more interesting things to do in bed.
Then again, when he thought like that, he could walk. And feel things below the waist.
He lies still with sunlight and images chasing each other behind his eyes, and dominating them all is Draco’s face. Stricken and doubting, the way it’s been in the last months, or downcast in forced silence. There are so many things Draco would like to say, but Harry’s stopped him from saying them.
Even now, Harry doesn’t feel bad about that. There are certain things he couldn’t let Draco say.
It would be easy, he thinks, rolling over and feeling as though half his body is made of wood, to collapse into letting Draco take care of him. He wouldn’t try to get up by himself anymore; he would let Draco spell him into the floating chair and cast the spell that relieves Harry of the need to use the loo. He would let Draco stop giving lessons in Arithmancy, even, because he doesn’t need the money.
He’s offered to stay home and take care of Harry “the way he deserves.”
But it’s a temptation, and Harry knows he isn’t good at resisting those. He needs to think about what he wants, not what he’ll do if there’s no one around to stop him. Or to hurry him along in a direction he doesn’t want.
He moves through the day alone, with Kreacher only appearing occasionally, since he has to tend to the house Harry shares with Draco (or shared), too. Harry finds he can do a lot of things with spells. Life alone would probably be impossible if he was a Muggle, but a wizard can manage with magic.
When he successfully casts the charms that heat the water for a bath, the ones that command the floating chair to tip him so he slides into the bath, and the ones that Summon the towels to him, he begins to relax.
He might not want to live alone, but he could, if he had to.
That’s important information to know.
*
And he’s lonely without Draco.
That’s something Harry didn’t expect. The weeks he spent in St. Mungo’s, getting used to both pain and lack of it, hadn’t made him lonely. He would open his eyes and Draco would be there, or Ron and Hermione, or Mrs. Weasley, her face drawn with worry and stress. Harry assumed, then, that he would spend the rest of his life trying to come to terms with what had happened. That didn’t really leave room for loneliness. He would struggle, and struggle, and probably lose.
His mind has been filled with so much loss. He hasn’t thought in terms of triumph, only making the loss less costly.
And Draco isn’t perfect. It took them years to learn to trust and love each other, because of Harry’s pride and Draco’s arrogance-well, all right, Harry can probably call it pride now-and Harry’s unwillingness to lie back and let someone do something that could take advantage of him and Draco’s mule-hard stubbornness about everything.
If they lost it, they couldn’t get it back. That was something Harry assumed even when he shivered in pleasure at surrendering to Draco for the first time. It was precious and fragile.
Draco lay beside him one evening when they were done and he was tracing the course of a single drop of sweat down Harry’s back. He was murmuring nonsense comparisons between the feelings they shared and various kinds of gems.
“Pearls. They grow out of irritation.”
Harry smiled and turned his head. (He can still see and hear this so clearly, even when the ease of those movements is foreign to him, lying in bed as he is). “And in oysters.”
“So?” Draco rolled and let his hand spill along Harry’s shoulder, this time touching a weal. Harry sighed in pleasure. It wasn’t only the pain itself that excited him, but Draco’s delight in wielding the whip. Harry was used to hearing his breath catch long before the exertion would start to affect him. He loved someone who did precisely that for precisely that reason.
He’d found he liked pain, but more than that, he liked being with someone who enjoyed giving it to him.
“Emeralds,” Draco said next, in satisfaction. “Like your eyes.”
“That’s such a cliché comparison, though,” Harry muttered, this time closing his eyes so Draco couldn’t have the pleasure of looking into them the way he wanted when he was rhapsodizing on about their color. “I mean, why in the world do you want to talk about them like that? The witches who send me love letters use that comparison. The Daily Prophet uses it.”
“You’re right, anything Skeeter says is horrible.” Draco sounded a little wistful, though. He flicked a finger against Harry’s earlobe, and Harry jolted and opened his eyes. “Diamonds.”
“I can’t wait to hear this one. At least no one else thinks my eyes are transparent. Or blue,” Harry had to add, because he remembered the blue diamonds he’d helped get back in one of the smuggling cases he worked.
“I wasn’t talking about your eyes.”
“Thank Merlin.”
Draco shoved him hard enough to almost roll him off the bed. Harry dug his elbows into the sheets and resisted. “You ought to be flattered to have a Malfoy talking about your eyes at all.”
“As long as they’re not talking about clawing them out of my head and boiling them, sure.”
Draco snorted at him and went on, “What we have is like a diamond. Because it’s not going to shatter.”
Harry can remember, clear, so clear, the way he brought around his head and stared at Draco at that. “Really? You don’t think it could-anything could break it?”
Draco covered Harry’s hand with one of his and shook his head fiercely. All the teasing was gone from his voice. “No. I mean it. This is the strongest thing I’ve ever felt in my life, Harry. And the most precious. It needs to be guarded, like a diamond is. It could be stolen. But it won’t break.”
Lying in bed now, getting used to the way his memory seems to bring things back to him shining and glinting in ways it didn’t before, Harry slowly breathes in and out. It hasn’t broken.
Maybe it was stolen. But it’s not broken.
*
Harry speaks to Draco through the Floo once a day. They keep away from how much they miss each other, or Harry’s health, or his Auror job. Instead, Draco talks about his student Natalie, and tries for the seventieth or eightieth time to explain the intricacies of Arithmancy to Harry, who shakes his head.
“I never took the class at Hogwarts,” he tells Draco on the thirteenth day, lounging back in the floating chair that he’s turned so he can look out the largest window in the drawing room. “Maybe that’s what you need to do to comprehend it.”
Draco agrees, but absently. Harry glances around and finds that Draco’s eyes are fixed on him.
“Are you ready to discuss it yet?” Draco whispers.
Harry stares back, and says as calmly as he possibly can, “No.”
For a second, Draco slumps, and then he straightens up and shakes his head. “Never mind,” he says. “You should see the kinds of looks Weasley keeps giving me when he Floos in. As though I’m going to cry if something hits me wrong.” He snickers. “I could see him working himself up to giving me a pat on the shoulder yesterday, but he decided against it at the last minute. I’m glad. I can’t see any way that wouldn’t embarrass the both of us.”
Harry has a half-smile on his mouth that he knows Draco sees. But Draco goes right on blithely talking, and the moment passes, and soon they’re deep in a discussion of how likely Hermione’s political changes to the Ministry culture are to actually succeed.
That’s Draco, Harry thinks later, as he eats his way through a plate of scrambled eggs that Kreacher glared at him until he took. Always pushing the boundaries. I say I don’t want to talk about something, he finds a way to talk about it anyway.
But that’s part of what drew Harry to Draco in the first place, and how they got together. Their stubbornness. Their pride. They share it.
Do we still? Harry thinks, and glances down at his steadily less muscular legs to check.
He’s not sure they do. But maybe they can.
*
One thing Harry finds out is how much more he relies on magic now.
Spells to clean himself. Spells to brace himself. Spells, even, to rearrange his legs, when he’s lying under the covers and the angle isn’t good enough to let him use his hands to really move them.
Draco and the Healers have both said comforting things about how much stronger his arms would get, how he’d be able to lever himself out of bed or around corners or into the chair without the use of spells. But Harry isn’t there yet, so he uses the spells, and looks down at his legs, and gets used to the sight of them.
Gets used to not being able to walk. It’s hard, no one said it was easy, but at the same time, Harry has an advantage in that he’s had to get used to a lot of hard things in his life. Growing up with the Dursleys. Finding out magic existed. Finding out that he was a Horcrux. Living again when he had expected to die in the Forbidden Forest.
This isn’t pleasant. There’s no escape, in the sense that Harry knows he’ll never walk again. But at the same time, there’s a greater sense of escape than there was with the Dursleys or finding out he’s a Horcrux, because he knows that Draco is waiting for him. Ready to come back, if Harry wants. Ready to help him again.
Harry has to be able to live on his own. He has to be able to find some measure of independence, and do things so he won’t pity himself for the rest of his life. That’s what’s hardest, the pity, and the frustration when he tries to get out of bed with his feet flat on the floor and simply can’t do it.
But he’s had experiences of hard fights before, just like he has with getting used to things. He’s going to do this.
*
“Thank Merlin.”
Harry blinks. He came back to the house earlier in the day because he wanted to look around and think and see if he can use the floating chair here as well as he can at Grimmauld Place. There are fewer stairs here, but more corners, and sometimes it’s hard to get the floating chair around those.
When he realized it was getting near time for Draco to come back from his afternoon session with Natalie, Harry decided to stay. He thought Draco might be angry he was there-or not, and Harry trusted his reaction to tell him how to react.
But instead, Draco’s dropped the bag of food he held to the floor, and he comes forwards and traces his hands over Harry’s face again and again, his touch soft and reverent. He kneels on the floor in front of Harry, in fact, and looks up with a face so worshipful that Harry bits his lip.
Draco’s hands fall, but onto his ribs. He isn’t touching Harry’s legs, or hips, although that was the natural place for him to grip-before.
He’s touching Harry where he can feel it.
Harry reaches out and lets his fingers glide down the bridge of Draco’s nose. Draco accepts it without blinking, only looking back with wide, desperate, glistening eyes.
Harry has to look away and clear his throat a bit. He-he knew Draco wanted him back. Of course he did. But most of the time, Draco swats his hand away when Harry touches his nose. He claims that it makes him feel like an Abraxan, and that he never wants to feel that way.
That he’d want to accept it now, because it’s Harry…
“I want to come back home,” Harry says. “It’s been a month, and-that’s long enough.”
“I agree entirely.”
Draco rises to his feet in front of him, and Harry looks up. It doesn’t feel like Draco is looming over him. It feels like he’s looming against the demons, against the pain and the hardship that Harry’s had to struggle with. Harry reaches out, and blinks and blinks, and takes Draco’s hand.
Draco seizes him straight out of the floating chair and kisses him.
A month ago, he had trouble lifting Harry on his own, which is another part of the reason Harry practiced so hard with those spells. Now, he’s holding him and kissing him and-
Harry can still feel that.
*
Draco turns him on his stomach and spreads his legs for him. And while Harry can’t feel Draco’s hands on his ankles, and he can’t feel the way his legs would part against the sheets, still, he knows what’s happening because Draco tells him.
“The way you look with your knees in the air,” Draco says, and traces the edge of Harry’s bare shoulder with the maddening tickle of his fingers.
Every description below the waist is paired with a touch above it.
“I’m touching your arse now.” The flick of the collar on Harry’s robes, which Draco is holding bunched in one hand, and it’s just raspy enough to make Harry writhe.
“I can see your hole.” The sudden sink of Draco’s teeth into the same shoulder he touched a minute earlier, and Harry half-leaps again. This is the kind of play he and Draco have used before, but he didn’t expect it today…
“And I’m going to touch it now,” Draco says, and he slices his nails right down Harry’s spine, stopping just above the spot where Harry would lose all the sensation anyway.
Harry bows his head into his arms. It’s more even than the trust he shared with Draco before, trusting Draco to handle his body when it’s like this and tell him what he’s doing, so he won’t lose out on it.
“Your cock,” Draco says. His hand above the waist is pinching and squeezing Harry’s sides, and Harry sobs fearlessly, because yes, now, now he knows he can still feel pleasure.
“Your balls,” says Draco with the kind of fierce relish he’s always displayed in saying things like that. “I’m cupping them.” He scratches again with his other hand, down Harry’s ribs and in a trailing spiral into the soft skin.
“And your hole again,” Draco repeats, his voice gentle, while the collar of the robes falls along the back of Harry’s neck like a half-restraint.
Harry doesn’t think his cock can harden. In fact, he knows it can’t, because Draco would tell him if it was. Harry trusts and believes in that absolutely.
But he can writhe with the almost unbearable feeling of tickling on the edge of pain. He’s always loved having his ribs touched, once he got used to the feeling of Draco’s hands on him at all. His Auror training blares in his head, warning him about how dangerous it could be, how someone could stab a knife straight through his ribs and hit a lung or his heart…
How Draco could do it.
But Draco never does, even as he balances on the edge of hurting Harry in every other way, and it’s thick and rich and tingling in his mind, that trust, that advantage never seized, always held.
Draco orgasms across his back, aiming high enough for Harry to feel it. Harry sighs and shudders and goes on shuddering as Draco goes on touching him, whispering praises that are only half-heard, and all the more beautiful for it.
His skin is just on the edge of oversensitive, but never actually over it, the way he used to get when Draco touched his cock and balls after he came. This goes on and on. It could go on for hours.
From Draco’s tender smile, he plans for that.
And knowing Draco wants to do this, that there are other ways to go to bed and Draco embraces them, lets Harry make the final transition. He trusted Draco with his body before his accident. He trusts him with it now. Before the accident, he went in the reverse order, heart to body.
Now, with Harry’s body fragile and something he must trust others to take care of…
It’s a gift. The same gift in the reverse order.
And Harry flows along with it, half-closing his eyes, turning his head, letting Draco stroke every rib and flick every sensation out of him, trace the articulation of every joint and name it in a pleasured mumble, as he floats and soars and dips into the mingled mastery and surrender that characterizes them.
They will never be the same.
But they will be them.
The End.
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