SCRATCHING THE SURFACE (R) BY IAMSHADOW
Title: Scratching The Surface
Author: iamshadow
Ship: Charlie/Draco
Word Count: 5,081
Rating: R
Warnings: DH compliant, but EWE. A little bit of blood. Frottage.
Summary: Ten years after Voldemort's defeat, a young man comes to Charlie seeking help.
A/N: Written for melmoe1 for weasley_fest '08.
Art by kath_ballantyne. Banner by jo_ron.
Original A/N: You listed your kinks as spanking, wanking, and banking (okay kidding about the banking) hurt/comfort, flangst, rimming, plot -really like plot, tattoo’s, hot-desperate sex, sexual tension. I hope I got enough of those in for your liking. The banking reference was completely unintentional. I laughed when I read back through your requests noticed you'd jokingly listed it.
<&>
Charlie was enjoying a quiet moment; reading the Prophet and sipping at a fresh cup of tea. Though the shop was open, his customers wouldn’t begin arriving until twilight deepened to true dark. His mother regularly complained that he never came to the Burrow for dinner any more, but now that old Gus had finally retired without a child of his own to take over, who else was there to open up? Charlie didn’t have an apprentice; he was barely out of training himself.
His mum didn’t like the location, either. The last time she’d grumbled about it, he’d laughed aloud.
“Where else would you put the shop? Nestled next to Madam Malkin’s, where all the little cherubs being fitted for their school robes could peer in the windows?” He smiled as he said it, trying to gentle his rejection of her worries. “It’s a tattoo parlour, Mum. It doesn’t belong on Diagon Alley.”
“But... but those people...” she protested.
“There are plenty of good folk living down Knockturn,” he said, firmly, his smile disappearing. “Gus’ family set up shop there four hundred years ago, and they’ve never been Dark Wizards. There are some bad sorts, but you get them everywhere. Just look at the trouble they had in the Ministry, a few years back.”
She had sniffed, unconvinced, but dropped the subject. She knew Charlie wouldn’t take any criticism of Gus, and that to continue would cause him to leave.
The shop wasn’t down in Knockturn proper, anyway, but tucked neatly around the corner, only half a dozen paces from Diagon itself. Its position wasn’t so much one of a business hidden because of its unlawful, unsavoury nature, but that of discretion. Customers could slip in and out, knowing that the little shop front was unremarkable enough to be overlooked by the casual observer, and close enough to Diagon Alley that its location would be seen as unfortunate, rather than necessarily being shady. Everyone knew that the real dirty dealings in Knockturn went on in the depths, after all, where the buildings leant so close to each other that sunlight never touched the cobblestones, not at the junction, where every day at least one child would venture in to slap the stones of the walls with their hand and dash back out, if only to brag to their mates that they had dared to set foot into that forbidden, dark corner of magical London.
The bamboo chimes over the entryway clacked together as the door swung open. It was a little earlier than Charlie had expected anyone. He swallowed his last mouthful with a large gulp, and swivelled round to face the newcomer. Not unusually for one of his clientele, the man was cloaked heavily, his face obscured by a deep hood. It would have seemed sinister to someone who hadn’t worked in Knockturn Alley for the last five years. After that, you knew the most dangerous people were the ones who didn’t bother trying to disguise themselves.
“I need you to get rid of something for me. I’ll pay,” the man began. The faint desperation in his voice belied his menacing appearance.
“No prison numbers, werewolf registration tags or other Ministry brandings removed,” Charlie said, his voice steely, his hand loosely curling around his wand underneath the counter. “No contraband, illegal potions, proscribed items or stolen goods accepted for payment, either. I run a legitimate business, here.”
“Nothing like that,” the man assured him hastily, “and I’ve got money. Lots of money. Please.”
The last word was forced out through gritted teeth. Charlie relaxed marginally. This wasn’t a man who was used to begging for anything. Just a poor little rich boy trying to hide a drunkenly-acquired bit of body art from his wife, most likely.
“I’ll need to see it,” Charlie said. The man hesitated, and Charlie mistook his reluctance for modesty. He spelled the front window of the shop opaque and locked the door. “If I can’t see it, I can’t give you an estimate,” he clarified. “You’re not going to shock me. Trust me.”
Rather than lifting his robes and dropping his pants as Charlie expected, the man slowly pushed up his right sleeve.
Charlie scooted round the counter on his little wheeled stool, and took the man’s arm firmly in his hands. The Dark Mark, faded and grey, but still very much visible, stood out like obscene graffiti against the man’s creamy, pale skin. The snake, which Charlie imagined would have writhed while Voldemort was alive, simply coiled and uncoiled sluggishly, as though it had been woken early from its winter brumation.
“How many people did you go to, before coming to me?” Charlie asked, already guessing the number would be high.
“Seven,” the man admitted. “I did my time,” he added, after a moment. “I want it gone. I hate it. It makes me feel sick just to look at it.”
A red, puffy line dotted with tiny blisters framed it, and when Charlie prodded the irritated area experimentally, the man hissed, and the tattooed snake flicked a lazy tongue out, as if to taste his fingertip.
“What happened to the person who did this?” he asked casually.
“His equipment melted. Burned his hands,” the man said shortly.
“Good,” Charlie said, unsympathetically. “We need fewer idiots out there. If he’d done a proper apprenticeship, like I did, rather than just setting up some unlicensed den, he would have known that curse marks like this are impossible to remove. He could have been killed. Hopefully, it taught him a lesson.”
“Curse? But it’s...” the man began.
“A curse,” Charlie said, looking straight up, under the hood, and meeting the grey eyes of Draco Malfoy for the first time. “Entered into voluntarily, but a curse, nonetheless; bound with blood and oaths of fealty. It’s nothing that a simple, modified Scourgify can remove. Even cutting off your arm wouldn’t free you from anything but the visible mark.” The snake looped again, its forked tongue tickling along the edges of the burn. Charlie wondered if Draco could feel it moving under his skin.
Draco pulled his arm out of Charlie’s hands and tugged his sleeve back down with a sharp, irritated motion. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve heard there’s a man in Paris who -”
“Petit Pétard?” Charlie asked, and when Draco froze, he knew he was correct. “I know him. He’s good, but he wouldn’t touch a Dark Mark if you paid him a million Galleons, even if he could do something. Robert Alderton, his son-in-law, was stripped of his wand and Kissed during the last year of the war. You’d be lucky if Pétard didn’t kill you on the spot. The French authorities wouldn’t trouble their heads about it, either. I understand they’re very lenient about crimes of retribution. They’d probably just buy him a drink.”
Draco looked utterly crestfallen, even a little sick.
“Forget about Pétard, and anyone who says they can remove it. The Mark is permanent, and anyone who tells you differently is delusional, or just trying to rob you.”
“You don’t know that,” Draco said, uncertainly.
“Yes, I do,” Charlie countered. “My brother was a Curse Breaker for nearly twenty years. We’ve talked about the Mark quite a few times. If you’d been forcibly branded, then, well, that’s different. The matter of consent is crucial. But you weren’t forced, were you?”
Draco hesitated, then shook his head, not meeting Charlie’s eyes.
“Nothing to be done about it, then,” Charlie said, bluntly. “Stop looking for backyard charlatans who promise you they can fix it. The next one might kill the both of you. I presume the burn around the Mark was the least of what you went through, when it protected itself?”
Draco didn’t answer, but Charlie knew the backlash must have been excruciating. Voldemort wouldn’t have designed the Mark to give only a gentle reprimand to those who tried to leave his service, or hide their allegiance.
Charlie expected Draco to protest more, to demand he do something, to insult his family, or make some cheap shot about Charlie’s leg, and how, these days, it ended in a stump six inches above where his ankle should have been. Instead, Draco just turned and walked to the door, his posture speaking volumes. He looked defeated. Only a few short years ago, Charlie would have revelled in it. Now, it just left a bad taste in his mouth.
“Wait,” he said, when Draco’s hand was already on the handle.
“Just let me out, Weasley,” Draco said, wearily, when he found the door still locked. “You’ve already told me it’s hopeless. Just let me go, and then you can gloat about it.”
“I said I couldn’t remove it. I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you.”
Draco turned slowly, his eyes wide and disbelieving.
“I can do a cover-up,” Charlie elaborated. “It won’t be perfect, because I can’t touch the Mark itself, but it should be good enough that people will have to get pretty close to pick it out from the wider design.”
“Why would you do that?” Draco asked, confusion warring in his face with a spark of hope.
Charlie smiled crookedly. “It’s not charity, Malfoy. It’ll be expensive, and I’ll need to see every Galleon before so much as a line gets drawn on that skin of yours.”
“Malfoys don’t take charity from anyone,” Draco spat, offended at the very suggestion, “and I can afford whatever you ask. The Ministry didn’t leave me a pauper. Are you honestly telling me you’re dirtying your Gryffindor hands like this for the money?”
“Hardly,” Charlie said, scooting back around to the other side of the counter, and pulling out some drafting paper, quills and ink. “It’s a challenge. I don’t tend to back away from them. And, like you said, you served your time. The war was years ago, and you were barely more than a kid. If it was a crime to be young and stupid, we’d all be locked away.” He flicked his wand at the latch, and it clicked open. “Come back on Thursday. I’ll have a design drawn up by then, and we can discuss payment.”
“You don’t just...” Draco made a stabbing gesture at his arm.
It was Charlie’s turn to look offended. “Not unless you want your arm to look like a child scribbled on it with Indelible Ink while you were sleeping. This is a unique project, not an off-the-wall basic design that every drunken lout wants on their bicep.” He gestured towards the sheets of samples, which depicted flowers, bloody swords, gnomes performing rude hand gestures, and obscenities and endearments spelt out in half a dozen different languages.
Draco actually gave a short laugh, and blinked, as though his own amusement had startled him. “Oh, I understand now. You’re an artist,” Draco said, with heavy sarcasm.
“You’d better bloody well believe it,” Charlie said, bending his head over the paper. “Thursday. We’ll go over the design together.”
“Right,” said Draco. The bamboo chimes clacked and rattled again as he left.
Charlie spelled the door shut again behind Draco, and flipped the sign to ‘closed’. He sketched and reworked and scrapped and began again well into the early hours of the morning, before limping out into the back room with his crutches and falling into a deep sleep on his narrow bed.
That night, the drunken louts had to go elsewhere to get their crude tattoos.
<&>
When Draco heard the estimated total, he exploded.
Charlie was unfazed. “You’re getting a discount.”
“A discount?” Draco spluttered. “Five hundred Galleons is a discount?”
“This is going to be a major project, with multiple sittings. In the time it takes to do this, I could ink thirty, forty other customers with basic designs,” Charlie explained. “Also, I’m not charging you for the consult fee with Bill, seeing as he’s my brother, and he didn’t charge me to ask.”
“Ask what?”
“Mainly, how to ink as close as possible to the Mark without blowing us both up, or whatever else that thing on your arm decides to throw at us,” Charlie said, simply. “And the best way, it seems, to avoid that is to balance it out.” He unrolled the sheet with his final design. Or, more correctly, designs.
Draco just stared for a good ten seconds. “These are for...” he began.
“Both arms,” Charlie said, nodding.
“But there’s no Dark Mark on my other arm,” Draco said, with confusion.
“Exactly. Balance,” Charlie said, as though tattooing Draco from wrist to mid-bicep on both arms was the most natural solution in the world to cover up the Mark on his forearm, which was roughly the size of his palm.
Draco looked at Charlie as if he were, indeed, a little crazy.
“Unless you want us both to be blown up, of course, in which case I can just stab this quill straight into your Mark right now, and get it over with,” Charlie added.
Draco signed his approval of Charlie’s designs, and brought a heavy leather pouch of Galleons with him when he arrived on Tuesday for the first sitting. He didn’t even try to haggle with Charlie again over the price.
<&>
Draco had tensed up and hissed with the pain when Charlie began the first ‘incision’, but now, twenty minutes in, Draco was lolling back in the chair, his eyes half-closed, his body’s own endorphins having kicked in and reduced him to a pliant state, only a fine sheen of sweat and the occasional gasp giving any indication of discomfort. Charlie had seen customers get into this kind of ‘zone’ before, and he was glad Draco was one of them. A project of this scale would have been slow and frustrating if he’d been one of those who flinched and squealed like a stuck pig with every movement of the quill.
He began a new line; the steel nib slicing into the skin, leaving a smooth, dark trail of ink mixed with tiny crimson beads of blood in its wake. Draco’s milky skin was flushed hot and pink from the assault, from the violation. It made the fine blonde hairs on his arms look completely colourless, like spun glass.
At length, Charlie sat back and looked at his work critically. It would do, and to be honest, despite the early hour, he felt exhausted. Better to stop now, than try to put in further detail and make an error.
Draco was a little disoriented, at first, when Charlie shook his shoulder gently and informed him they were done for the day. Surveying the picture on his arm, Draco seemed disappointed.
“I’ll colour it up, next sitting,” Charlie explained. “Usually, I’d do all the outlines first, but, thanks to the Mark, order is important. This has to be complete before we can move on, according to Bill.”
Draco nodded dumbly, listened carefully to the instructions Charlie gave for taking care of it, and left without a word. Charlie stumbled to bed and slept until nearly noon.
<&>
While he preferred the old-fashioned quill technique for outlines, Charlie recognised the convenience and accuracy of Muggle-inspired gadgets for colouring designs. What would have taken several days worth of time with a quill took under two hours with the modern, Charmed device, with its little array of needles and ink reservoirs.
The familiar face of a Green Man grinned, or rather, leered, up at him. The oak leaves that framed his features were so detailed and delicately veined, it appeared they’d been plucked from a tree and merged seamlessly with Draco’s skin. Charlie had deliberately chosen slightly darker colours than he would usually, knowing that he’d need to offset the Mark with something equally bold and striking. The green was so dark that in places it was almost black. The dark eyes seemed to glitter with malice, or with mischief, and he hadn’t even animated it yet.
“Malfoy,” Charlie said. When he didn’t get a response, he said, louder, “Draco!”, shaking the young man’s knee.
“Whuh?” Draco mumbled, groggily, his eyes flickering open.
Unbelievable, thought Charlie. He’d had people pass out before, but he couldn’t remember anyone actually falling asleep. “It’s done. I just have to animate it.”
“Oh. Right.” Draco peered down at the face, and his eyebrows rose high, suggesting he was impressed. Charlie offered him a little hand mirror, so that he could view it right-side-up without twisting his arm into a ridiculous position, and he took it eagerly. “It looks like it’s going to start talking,” he breathed, then shivered a little, as though the prospect was frightening.
“Well, it’s not going to talk, but it is going to move,” Charlie said, a little smug at having reduced a Malfoy to wide-eyed appreciation. He drew his wand. “Ready?”
Before he’d even finished the first few syllables of the incantation, Charlie knew that something had gone wrong, but he couldn’t stop. A half-spoken spell was more dangerous than a complete one, and with something so volatile, he had to continue, even as he felt his magic being siphoned out of him rapidly, in far-greater quantities than he’d ever experienced. As he said the final word, he heard Draco cry out, saw a sudden flash of light, and felt the floor rise up to hit him in the face.
<&>
“Don’t you dare die on me! I’m not going back there, do you hear? Not for the sake of a Weasley and some ugly face on my arm!”
Charlie felt himself being shaken. He could taste blood. He lifted one leaden hand to grab the arm of his assailant, and the man cried out.
“Shell Cottage,” Charlie murmured. “Bill. I need Bill.”
Charlie’s hand was wrenched away, and he heard hasty footsteps running towards the Floo. He decided he really was very tired, and that maybe he’d sleep a little longer. After all, it was a weekend, and his Arithmancy essay could wait. It wasn’t due until Wednesday, and Professor Vector liked him.
<&>
“You bloody idiot,” Charlie heard when he came to. “What part of ‘high chance it’ll suck your magic from you like a leech’ didn’t you understand?”
“Did it work?” Charlie asked, noting his voice sounded ridiculously frail.
“Of course it bloody worked,” Bill snapped, his tone a mixture of anger, frustration and fondness. “You come up with these mad schemes, and they always work. Naturally, you do get the repercussions of, say, losing a body part, or being unconscious for two days, but, hey! Who cares about that, right?”
“Does that tone work on your kids?” Charlie asked, wriggling a bit in an attempt to sit up.
“No,” Bill said, ruefully.
“Didn’t think so,” Charlie said. “You’re sounding more like Mum every day.”
“That’s brave for someone who’s done nothing but lie there since I dragged you back here day before last. I could take you over my knee, young man,” Bill threatened.
Charlie coughed and reached out for the glass of water next to him. “Not so young,” Charlie said, sipping slowly to wet his dry throat.
“I thought with me going into the administration side of things, and you taking up this, we were supposed to be getting into fewer life-or-death situations. You know, setting a nice stable example for the younger ones of what it means to be a mature man in his mid-to-late thirties.”
Charlie snorted. “Speak for yourself, Mr Banker, Father-Of-Three. How’s Draco?”
Bill raised an eyebrow, and Charlie realised with a little jolt that he’d used Malfoy’s first name without thinking. “Fine. Not a scratch on him, apart from the ones you put there on purpose. Started screaming through my Floo the other evening, saying you were hurt, blubbering about how he didn’t mean to, how he’d rather kill himself than go back to Azkaban. I came through, found you knocked out, and him all in a panic and looking nothing-if-not well-shagged.”
“What?” Charlie asked, utterly gobsmacked. “We’re not... we haven’t... He’s a customer, Bill.”
“Whatever you say,” Bill said, examining his nails. “Mum might have been happy with the ‘only interested in dragons’ line, years ago, but I remember what it was like when I visited the Reservation. I stopped counting the amount of offers I got. One or two of those men were particularly persistent, and even I can work out ‘brother’ and ‘threesome’ in Romanian if they get said often enough.”
Charlie flushed crimson, and was about to retort angrily, when Bill spoke over him, raising a placating hand.
“Relax; I think it was some kind of reaction to the spell overload. He’d come in his pants, and I saw the stain when I bent down to check you over. I don’t even know that he realised, or remembered. He was in a right state. Are you sure you’re not fucking him?”
“Yes,” Charlie bit out, through gritted teeth. “Are you leaving now?”
“If you’re able to get up and about by yourself, then yes,” Bill said, holding out Charlie’s crutches for him to take.
Charlie got up, if not with ease, then steadily enough to satisfy his brother. Bill waved goodbye, and told Charlie he owed him one, for keeping news of Charlie’s injury from their mum. Charlie groaned, but agreed, and resigned himself to the probability of having to babysit his very lively bilingual nieces and nephew in the near future.
Then, he sat down and wrote Draco a letter.
Next Tuesday, it said, come by at eight, and I’ll start work on the rest.
He didn’t sign it.
<&>
Draco appeared promptly at eight, slipped off his outer robes, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and sat in the chair. He didn’t automatically ask after Charlie’s health, or mention the dramatic events of their last sitting, but then, Charlie didn’t bring up those things either.
Charlie spent a while studying the Green Man tattoo. It remained utterly still for long moments, and yet it was undoubtedly animated. Just when it seemed it would be immobile forever, the eyes would blink, the mouth would twist into a wry smirk, or the leaves would flutter in a non-existent breeze.
“He pulls faces at me, sometimes,” Draco remarked suddenly, making Charlie jump. “It’s almost as though he can think, like a portrait.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. A lot of power went into making him,” Charlie admitted. “I was wiped out for a couple of days.”
“Me too,” Draco admitted. “After I... ah... went to bed, I slept for a long time. Mother thought I might have been ill.” Two pale pink spots of colour blossomed high on his cheeks.
Charlie cleared his throat, turned to pick up his tattooing quill, and that was that.
<&>
Now that the Green Man was done, the difference made to the sittings was blatant. Though Draco still got a very evident buzz from the tattooing, he didn’t seem drugged or fall asleep in the chair. Instead, he watched Charlie drawing the outlines for the rest of the design with a lazy kind of interest. Charlie himself no longer felt so exhausted after each sitting, and didn’t have to close up the shop and rest. A cup of tea and something to eat would revive him enough to keep serving customers.
Vines of ivy and holly leaves took form on Draco’s left arm, while hawthorn and yew appeared on the right; the foliage twisted into bands of Celtic knots around his wrists and biceps. The complex patterns made Draco almost dizzy when he looked at them, but Charlie drew unerringly, the muddle of lines as comprehensible to him as a map.
Charlie didn’t say anything when he noticed Draco got an erection every time he climbed into the chair, virtually at the moment Charlie’s quill bit into his skin.
Draco didn’t say anything when he noticed Charlie looking him up and down out of the corner of his eye, hungrily, and glancing away again, as though focussing on the work, not Draco himself, was an effort.
Greens and browns in a multitude of shades began creeping down Draco’s arms in steady stages; thick bands of colour that required hours of delicate work to execute. The forearms took the longest. Both of them were wound tight with the stress of inking so close to the Mark.
“That’s not passive, either,” Charlie remarked, one day, tapping the Green Man with a finger. “At least with the Mark, I have a rough idea what I’d be in for if I slipped. That thing... I haven’t a clue.”
The Green Man stuck a dark, mossy tongue out at him.
The sittings were short, but intense, lasting no longer than half an hour at a time. The colour still spread, slowly but gradually, like lichen, across Draco’s skin. Eventually, the last ring of ivy was done around the Green Man, and nothing was left but the thin band of hawthorn that encircled the Dark Mark itself. Charlie hesitated above it, the tattoo device in hand.
“You can do it,” he heard Draco say, softly. “Don’t wimp out on me now, Weasley.”
Charlie swallowed hard, and bent to the task. He felt his heart racing, the sweat trickling down his spine. His hands should have been trembling, but they were steady, so steady.
You could die, his brain whispered. You could twitch, or sneeze, or lose your grip on the device, and die right here.
It made him feel like laughing; like wild, mad chuckles would erupt from his mouth at any moment, like they did on occasion when he worked at the Reservation and came inches, fractions of inches, from death.
“You’re a modern-day berserker, Weasley,” a fellow handler had said to him, once. The man had shaken his head as he said it, as though he couldn’t decide whether to be impressed or appalled. “The rest of us are shitting ourselves with fear, and you’re swanning right in there, grinning your head off, as if you’re about to burst into song. You get off on the potential culmination of your own mortality.”
“I feel so alive!” he’d crowed from the stretcher, giddy from blood loss, pain and shock, as they had rushed him to the Healer. She’d been able to save his life, if not regrow his foot.
Charlie had been staring for quite some time at the arm in his grip, motionless, when Draco’s voice called him back to the present.
“So, you’ve finished it, then,” he said.
Charlie blinked. “I guess I have,” he said. The hawthorn, which almost but never quite touched the Dark Mark, was coloured completely, down to the last leaf. He set the colouring device aside and drew his wand.
Draco looked a little frightened, and his cheeks pinked. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Last time...”
“Last time was... unique,” Charlie reassured him. “This shouldn’t be much different to animating any normal tattoo.”
Draco nodded, and let out a breath of relief, though something like disappointment flickered in his eyes for a moment.
“Ready?” Charlie asked.
Draco nodded, and Charlie took Draco’s left arm, holding it out straight, then touched his wand to it and began the incantation.
Draco gasped. Charlie felt the pull on his magic; nothing like before, but still, a chunk more than he usually expended. The holly and ivy glowed as he spoke the final words, then dimmed back down.
“Wow,” Draco murmured.
“Yeah,” Charlie agreed.
Both bent over Draco’s arm, examining the newly animated pattern. Here, a stag with a full rack of antlers was visible through a gap in the weave. There, a ram with curled horns. A tiny rat climbed the branches, disturbing leaves as it went, ending up on the Green Man’s head. It rummaged about in his foliage until it reappeared holding an acorn. The Green Man frowned in irritation, pursing his lips and puffing upwards, as though attempting to shoo away his new inhabitant.
Draco and Charlie laughed aloud and looked up at the same moment, their eyes locking, their smiles genuine and warm. Charlie felt something hot pool in his belly, felt his heartbeat up its tempo.
“Next one, then?” Charlie asked, words suddenly seeming a little clumsy in his mouth.
“Yeah,” replied Draco, whose gaze seemed to keep flicking to Charlie’s lips a little more often than was normal. He held out his other arm. Charlie touched it with his wand, and began.
The drain this time was enough to make his head spin. As he tried to focus on enunciating clearly, he was vaguely aware that Draco was moaning, biting his lip to hold in the sound.
Almost done, he told himself firmly, as his concentration threatened to unravel. Almost... almost... there.
The hawthorn and yew flashed into brightness, but Charlie didn’t have time to look at the result before Draco was kissing him, and Charlie’s hands were in that white-blonde hair, pulling him closer. Charlie managed to slide off the wheeled stool onto the floor, and then Draco was on top of him, pressing down firmly, rocking his pelvis, thrusting against him. It didn’t seem to matter that they were both fully clothed. The end was approaching embarrassingly swiftly, regardless.
You get off on the potential culmination of your own mortality, the other handler had said. As Charlie thrust up hard against Draco, and came, he had to agree.
After all, shagging a Malfoy could only be perilous for his future wellbeing.
<&>
As they watched a bright-eyed raven preen and a Thestral duck in and out of the hawthorn framing the Dark Mark, Draco decided to mutter a half-hearted word of complaint about the bruises blossoming on his knees.
“We’ll not mention the ones on my arse, from some randy young sod throwing me on the floor, shall we?” Charlie drawled sarcastically.
“Do you have a shower in this place? I feel revolting,” Draco declared with disgust.
“Through the door behind the counter, and to your right,” Charlie answered. “Feel free to use it,” he called out belatedly. Draco was already gone.
Charlie was still lying there two minutes later, trying to summon the energy to move, when Bill Flooed in. Charlie supposed he had wanted to check that the final spells hadn’t backfired.
Bill cocked his head, listening to the running water, and smirked down at his dishevelled brother with a somewhat triumphant expression.
Charlie held up a single finger. “Not a word from you,” he ordered, knowing any attempt to salvage his dignity was an utterly hopeless cause.
Author: iamshadow
Ship: Charlie/Draco
Word Count: 5,081
Rating: R
Warnings: DH compliant, but EWE. A little bit of blood. Frottage.
Summary: Ten years after Voldemort's defeat, a young man comes to Charlie seeking help.
A/N: Written for melmoe1 for weasley_fest '08.
Art by kath_ballantyne. Banner by jo_ron.
Original A/N: You listed your kinks as spanking, wanking, and banking (okay kidding about the banking) hurt/comfort, flangst, rimming, plot -really like plot, tattoo’s, hot-desperate sex, sexual tension. I hope I got enough of those in for your liking. The banking reference was completely unintentional. I laughed when I read back through your requests noticed you'd jokingly listed it.
<&>
Charlie was enjoying a quiet moment; reading the Prophet and sipping at a fresh cup of tea. Though the shop was open, his customers wouldn’t begin arriving until twilight deepened to true dark. His mother regularly complained that he never came to the Burrow for dinner any more, but now that old Gus had finally retired without a child of his own to take over, who else was there to open up? Charlie didn’t have an apprentice; he was barely out of training himself.
His mum didn’t like the location, either. The last time she’d grumbled about it, he’d laughed aloud.
“Where else would you put the shop? Nestled next to Madam Malkin’s, where all the little cherubs being fitted for their school robes could peer in the windows?” He smiled as he said it, trying to gentle his rejection of her worries. “It’s a tattoo parlour, Mum. It doesn’t belong on Diagon Alley.”
“But... but those people...” she protested.
“There are plenty of good folk living down Knockturn,” he said, firmly, his smile disappearing. “Gus’ family set up shop there four hundred years ago, and they’ve never been Dark Wizards. There are some bad sorts, but you get them everywhere. Just look at the trouble they had in the Ministry, a few years back.”
She had sniffed, unconvinced, but dropped the subject. She knew Charlie wouldn’t take any criticism of Gus, and that to continue would cause him to leave.
The shop wasn’t down in Knockturn proper, anyway, but tucked neatly around the corner, only half a dozen paces from Diagon itself. Its position wasn’t so much one of a business hidden because of its unlawful, unsavoury nature, but that of discretion. Customers could slip in and out, knowing that the little shop front was unremarkable enough to be overlooked by the casual observer, and close enough to Diagon Alley that its location would be seen as unfortunate, rather than necessarily being shady. Everyone knew that the real dirty dealings in Knockturn went on in the depths, after all, where the buildings leant so close to each other that sunlight never touched the cobblestones, not at the junction, where every day at least one child would venture in to slap the stones of the walls with their hand and dash back out, if only to brag to their mates that they had dared to set foot into that forbidden, dark corner of magical London.
The bamboo chimes over the entryway clacked together as the door swung open. It was a little earlier than Charlie had expected anyone. He swallowed his last mouthful with a large gulp, and swivelled round to face the newcomer. Not unusually for one of his clientele, the man was cloaked heavily, his face obscured by a deep hood. It would have seemed sinister to someone who hadn’t worked in Knockturn Alley for the last five years. After that, you knew the most dangerous people were the ones who didn’t bother trying to disguise themselves.
“I need you to get rid of something for me. I’ll pay,” the man began. The faint desperation in his voice belied his menacing appearance.
“No prison numbers, werewolf registration tags or other Ministry brandings removed,” Charlie said, his voice steely, his hand loosely curling around his wand underneath the counter. “No contraband, illegal potions, proscribed items or stolen goods accepted for payment, either. I run a legitimate business, here.”
“Nothing like that,” the man assured him hastily, “and I’ve got money. Lots of money. Please.”
The last word was forced out through gritted teeth. Charlie relaxed marginally. This wasn’t a man who was used to begging for anything. Just a poor little rich boy trying to hide a drunkenly-acquired bit of body art from his wife, most likely.
“I’ll need to see it,” Charlie said. The man hesitated, and Charlie mistook his reluctance for modesty. He spelled the front window of the shop opaque and locked the door. “If I can’t see it, I can’t give you an estimate,” he clarified. “You’re not going to shock me. Trust me.”
Rather than lifting his robes and dropping his pants as Charlie expected, the man slowly pushed up his right sleeve.
Charlie scooted round the counter on his little wheeled stool, and took the man’s arm firmly in his hands. The Dark Mark, faded and grey, but still very much visible, stood out like obscene graffiti against the man’s creamy, pale skin. The snake, which Charlie imagined would have writhed while Voldemort was alive, simply coiled and uncoiled sluggishly, as though it had been woken early from its winter brumation.
“How many people did you go to, before coming to me?” Charlie asked, already guessing the number would be high.
“Seven,” the man admitted. “I did my time,” he added, after a moment. “I want it gone. I hate it. It makes me feel sick just to look at it.”
A red, puffy line dotted with tiny blisters framed it, and when Charlie prodded the irritated area experimentally, the man hissed, and the tattooed snake flicked a lazy tongue out, as if to taste his fingertip.
“What happened to the person who did this?” he asked casually.
“His equipment melted. Burned his hands,” the man said shortly.
“Good,” Charlie said, unsympathetically. “We need fewer idiots out there. If he’d done a proper apprenticeship, like I did, rather than just setting up some unlicensed den, he would have known that curse marks like this are impossible to remove. He could have been killed. Hopefully, it taught him a lesson.”
“Curse? But it’s...” the man began.
“A curse,” Charlie said, looking straight up, under the hood, and meeting the grey eyes of Draco Malfoy for the first time. “Entered into voluntarily, but a curse, nonetheless; bound with blood and oaths of fealty. It’s nothing that a simple, modified Scourgify can remove. Even cutting off your arm wouldn’t free you from anything but the visible mark.” The snake looped again, its forked tongue tickling along the edges of the burn. Charlie wondered if Draco could feel it moving under his skin.
Draco pulled his arm out of Charlie’s hands and tugged his sleeve back down with a sharp, irritated motion. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve heard there’s a man in Paris who -”
“Petit Pétard?” Charlie asked, and when Draco froze, he knew he was correct. “I know him. He’s good, but he wouldn’t touch a Dark Mark if you paid him a million Galleons, even if he could do something. Robert Alderton, his son-in-law, was stripped of his wand and Kissed during the last year of the war. You’d be lucky if Pétard didn’t kill you on the spot. The French authorities wouldn’t trouble their heads about it, either. I understand they’re very lenient about crimes of retribution. They’d probably just buy him a drink.”
Draco looked utterly crestfallen, even a little sick.
“Forget about Pétard, and anyone who says they can remove it. The Mark is permanent, and anyone who tells you differently is delusional, or just trying to rob you.”
“You don’t know that,” Draco said, uncertainly.
“Yes, I do,” Charlie countered. “My brother was a Curse Breaker for nearly twenty years. We’ve talked about the Mark quite a few times. If you’d been forcibly branded, then, well, that’s different. The matter of consent is crucial. But you weren’t forced, were you?”
Draco hesitated, then shook his head, not meeting Charlie’s eyes.
“Nothing to be done about it, then,” Charlie said, bluntly. “Stop looking for backyard charlatans who promise you they can fix it. The next one might kill the both of you. I presume the burn around the Mark was the least of what you went through, when it protected itself?”
Draco didn’t answer, but Charlie knew the backlash must have been excruciating. Voldemort wouldn’t have designed the Mark to give only a gentle reprimand to those who tried to leave his service, or hide their allegiance.
Charlie expected Draco to protest more, to demand he do something, to insult his family, or make some cheap shot about Charlie’s leg, and how, these days, it ended in a stump six inches above where his ankle should have been. Instead, Draco just turned and walked to the door, his posture speaking volumes. He looked defeated. Only a few short years ago, Charlie would have revelled in it. Now, it just left a bad taste in his mouth.
“Wait,” he said, when Draco’s hand was already on the handle.
“Just let me out, Weasley,” Draco said, wearily, when he found the door still locked. “You’ve already told me it’s hopeless. Just let me go, and then you can gloat about it.”
“I said I couldn’t remove it. I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you.”
Draco turned slowly, his eyes wide and disbelieving.
“I can do a cover-up,” Charlie elaborated. “It won’t be perfect, because I can’t touch the Mark itself, but it should be good enough that people will have to get pretty close to pick it out from the wider design.”
“Why would you do that?” Draco asked, confusion warring in his face with a spark of hope.
Charlie smiled crookedly. “It’s not charity, Malfoy. It’ll be expensive, and I’ll need to see every Galleon before so much as a line gets drawn on that skin of yours.”
“Malfoys don’t take charity from anyone,” Draco spat, offended at the very suggestion, “and I can afford whatever you ask. The Ministry didn’t leave me a pauper. Are you honestly telling me you’re dirtying your Gryffindor hands like this for the money?”
“Hardly,” Charlie said, scooting back around to the other side of the counter, and pulling out some drafting paper, quills and ink. “It’s a challenge. I don’t tend to back away from them. And, like you said, you served your time. The war was years ago, and you were barely more than a kid. If it was a crime to be young and stupid, we’d all be locked away.” He flicked his wand at the latch, and it clicked open. “Come back on Thursday. I’ll have a design drawn up by then, and we can discuss payment.”
“You don’t just...” Draco made a stabbing gesture at his arm.
It was Charlie’s turn to look offended. “Not unless you want your arm to look like a child scribbled on it with Indelible Ink while you were sleeping. This is a unique project, not an off-the-wall basic design that every drunken lout wants on their bicep.” He gestured towards the sheets of samples, which depicted flowers, bloody swords, gnomes performing rude hand gestures, and obscenities and endearments spelt out in half a dozen different languages.
Draco actually gave a short laugh, and blinked, as though his own amusement had startled him. “Oh, I understand now. You’re an artist,” Draco said, with heavy sarcasm.
“You’d better bloody well believe it,” Charlie said, bending his head over the paper. “Thursday. We’ll go over the design together.”
“Right,” said Draco. The bamboo chimes clacked and rattled again as he left.
Charlie spelled the door shut again behind Draco, and flipped the sign to ‘closed’. He sketched and reworked and scrapped and began again well into the early hours of the morning, before limping out into the back room with his crutches and falling into a deep sleep on his narrow bed.
That night, the drunken louts had to go elsewhere to get their crude tattoos.
<&>
When Draco heard the estimated total, he exploded.
Charlie was unfazed. “You’re getting a discount.”
“A discount?” Draco spluttered. “Five hundred Galleons is a discount?”
“This is going to be a major project, with multiple sittings. In the time it takes to do this, I could ink thirty, forty other customers with basic designs,” Charlie explained. “Also, I’m not charging you for the consult fee with Bill, seeing as he’s my brother, and he didn’t charge me to ask.”
“Ask what?”
“Mainly, how to ink as close as possible to the Mark without blowing us both up, or whatever else that thing on your arm decides to throw at us,” Charlie said, simply. “And the best way, it seems, to avoid that is to balance it out.” He unrolled the sheet with his final design. Or, more correctly, designs.
Draco just stared for a good ten seconds. “These are for...” he began.
“Both arms,” Charlie said, nodding.
“But there’s no Dark Mark on my other arm,” Draco said, with confusion.
“Exactly. Balance,” Charlie said, as though tattooing Draco from wrist to mid-bicep on both arms was the most natural solution in the world to cover up the Mark on his forearm, which was roughly the size of his palm.
Draco looked at Charlie as if he were, indeed, a little crazy.
“Unless you want us both to be blown up, of course, in which case I can just stab this quill straight into your Mark right now, and get it over with,” Charlie added.
Draco signed his approval of Charlie’s designs, and brought a heavy leather pouch of Galleons with him when he arrived on Tuesday for the first sitting. He didn’t even try to haggle with Charlie again over the price.
<&>
Draco had tensed up and hissed with the pain when Charlie began the first ‘incision’, but now, twenty minutes in, Draco was lolling back in the chair, his eyes half-closed, his body’s own endorphins having kicked in and reduced him to a pliant state, only a fine sheen of sweat and the occasional gasp giving any indication of discomfort. Charlie had seen customers get into this kind of ‘zone’ before, and he was glad Draco was one of them. A project of this scale would have been slow and frustrating if he’d been one of those who flinched and squealed like a stuck pig with every movement of the quill.
He began a new line; the steel nib slicing into the skin, leaving a smooth, dark trail of ink mixed with tiny crimson beads of blood in its wake. Draco’s milky skin was flushed hot and pink from the assault, from the violation. It made the fine blonde hairs on his arms look completely colourless, like spun glass.
At length, Charlie sat back and looked at his work critically. It would do, and to be honest, despite the early hour, he felt exhausted. Better to stop now, than try to put in further detail and make an error.
Draco was a little disoriented, at first, when Charlie shook his shoulder gently and informed him they were done for the day. Surveying the picture on his arm, Draco seemed disappointed.
“I’ll colour it up, next sitting,” Charlie explained. “Usually, I’d do all the outlines first, but, thanks to the Mark, order is important. This has to be complete before we can move on, according to Bill.”
Draco nodded dumbly, listened carefully to the instructions Charlie gave for taking care of it, and left without a word. Charlie stumbled to bed and slept until nearly noon.
<&>
While he preferred the old-fashioned quill technique for outlines, Charlie recognised the convenience and accuracy of Muggle-inspired gadgets for colouring designs. What would have taken several days worth of time with a quill took under two hours with the modern, Charmed device, with its little array of needles and ink reservoirs.
The familiar face of a Green Man grinned, or rather, leered, up at him. The oak leaves that framed his features were so detailed and delicately veined, it appeared they’d been plucked from a tree and merged seamlessly with Draco’s skin. Charlie had deliberately chosen slightly darker colours than he would usually, knowing that he’d need to offset the Mark with something equally bold and striking. The green was so dark that in places it was almost black. The dark eyes seemed to glitter with malice, or with mischief, and he hadn’t even animated it yet.
“Malfoy,” Charlie said. When he didn’t get a response, he said, louder, “Draco!”, shaking the young man’s knee.
“Whuh?” Draco mumbled, groggily, his eyes flickering open.
Unbelievable, thought Charlie. He’d had people pass out before, but he couldn’t remember anyone actually falling asleep. “It’s done. I just have to animate it.”
“Oh. Right.” Draco peered down at the face, and his eyebrows rose high, suggesting he was impressed. Charlie offered him a little hand mirror, so that he could view it right-side-up without twisting his arm into a ridiculous position, and he took it eagerly. “It looks like it’s going to start talking,” he breathed, then shivered a little, as though the prospect was frightening.
“Well, it’s not going to talk, but it is going to move,” Charlie said, a little smug at having reduced a Malfoy to wide-eyed appreciation. He drew his wand. “Ready?”
Before he’d even finished the first few syllables of the incantation, Charlie knew that something had gone wrong, but he couldn’t stop. A half-spoken spell was more dangerous than a complete one, and with something so volatile, he had to continue, even as he felt his magic being siphoned out of him rapidly, in far-greater quantities than he’d ever experienced. As he said the final word, he heard Draco cry out, saw a sudden flash of light, and felt the floor rise up to hit him in the face.
<&>
“Don’t you dare die on me! I’m not going back there, do you hear? Not for the sake of a Weasley and some ugly face on my arm!”
Charlie felt himself being shaken. He could taste blood. He lifted one leaden hand to grab the arm of his assailant, and the man cried out.
“Shell Cottage,” Charlie murmured. “Bill. I need Bill.”
Charlie’s hand was wrenched away, and he heard hasty footsteps running towards the Floo. He decided he really was very tired, and that maybe he’d sleep a little longer. After all, it was a weekend, and his Arithmancy essay could wait. It wasn’t due until Wednesday, and Professor Vector liked him.
<&>
“You bloody idiot,” Charlie heard when he came to. “What part of ‘high chance it’ll suck your magic from you like a leech’ didn’t you understand?”
“Did it work?” Charlie asked, noting his voice sounded ridiculously frail.
“Of course it bloody worked,” Bill snapped, his tone a mixture of anger, frustration and fondness. “You come up with these mad schemes, and they always work. Naturally, you do get the repercussions of, say, losing a body part, or being unconscious for two days, but, hey! Who cares about that, right?”
“Does that tone work on your kids?” Charlie asked, wriggling a bit in an attempt to sit up.
“No,” Bill said, ruefully.
“Didn’t think so,” Charlie said. “You’re sounding more like Mum every day.”
“That’s brave for someone who’s done nothing but lie there since I dragged you back here day before last. I could take you over my knee, young man,” Bill threatened.
Charlie coughed and reached out for the glass of water next to him. “Not so young,” Charlie said, sipping slowly to wet his dry throat.
“I thought with me going into the administration side of things, and you taking up this, we were supposed to be getting into fewer life-or-death situations. You know, setting a nice stable example for the younger ones of what it means to be a mature man in his mid-to-late thirties.”
Charlie snorted. “Speak for yourself, Mr Banker, Father-Of-Three. How’s Draco?”
Bill raised an eyebrow, and Charlie realised with a little jolt that he’d used Malfoy’s first name without thinking. “Fine. Not a scratch on him, apart from the ones you put there on purpose. Started screaming through my Floo the other evening, saying you were hurt, blubbering about how he didn’t mean to, how he’d rather kill himself than go back to Azkaban. I came through, found you knocked out, and him all in a panic and looking nothing-if-not well-shagged.”
“What?” Charlie asked, utterly gobsmacked. “We’re not... we haven’t... He’s a customer, Bill.”
“Whatever you say,” Bill said, examining his nails. “Mum might have been happy with the ‘only interested in dragons’ line, years ago, but I remember what it was like when I visited the Reservation. I stopped counting the amount of offers I got. One or two of those men were particularly persistent, and even I can work out ‘brother’ and ‘threesome’ in Romanian if they get said often enough.”
Charlie flushed crimson, and was about to retort angrily, when Bill spoke over him, raising a placating hand.
“Relax; I think it was some kind of reaction to the spell overload. He’d come in his pants, and I saw the stain when I bent down to check you over. I don’t even know that he realised, or remembered. He was in a right state. Are you sure you’re not fucking him?”
“Yes,” Charlie bit out, through gritted teeth. “Are you leaving now?”
“If you’re able to get up and about by yourself, then yes,” Bill said, holding out Charlie’s crutches for him to take.
Charlie got up, if not with ease, then steadily enough to satisfy his brother. Bill waved goodbye, and told Charlie he owed him one, for keeping news of Charlie’s injury from their mum. Charlie groaned, but agreed, and resigned himself to the probability of having to babysit his very lively bilingual nieces and nephew in the near future.
Then, he sat down and wrote Draco a letter.
Next Tuesday, it said, come by at eight, and I’ll start work on the rest.
He didn’t sign it.
<&>
Draco appeared promptly at eight, slipped off his outer robes, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and sat in the chair. He didn’t automatically ask after Charlie’s health, or mention the dramatic events of their last sitting, but then, Charlie didn’t bring up those things either.
Charlie spent a while studying the Green Man tattoo. It remained utterly still for long moments, and yet it was undoubtedly animated. Just when it seemed it would be immobile forever, the eyes would blink, the mouth would twist into a wry smirk, or the leaves would flutter in a non-existent breeze.
“He pulls faces at me, sometimes,” Draco remarked suddenly, making Charlie jump. “It’s almost as though he can think, like a portrait.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. A lot of power went into making him,” Charlie admitted. “I was wiped out for a couple of days.”
“Me too,” Draco admitted. “After I... ah... went to bed, I slept for a long time. Mother thought I might have been ill.” Two pale pink spots of colour blossomed high on his cheeks.
Charlie cleared his throat, turned to pick up his tattooing quill, and that was that.
<&>
Now that the Green Man was done, the difference made to the sittings was blatant. Though Draco still got a very evident buzz from the tattooing, he didn’t seem drugged or fall asleep in the chair. Instead, he watched Charlie drawing the outlines for the rest of the design with a lazy kind of interest. Charlie himself no longer felt so exhausted after each sitting, and didn’t have to close up the shop and rest. A cup of tea and something to eat would revive him enough to keep serving customers.
Vines of ivy and holly leaves took form on Draco’s left arm, while hawthorn and yew appeared on the right; the foliage twisted into bands of Celtic knots around his wrists and biceps. The complex patterns made Draco almost dizzy when he looked at them, but Charlie drew unerringly, the muddle of lines as comprehensible to him as a map.
Charlie didn’t say anything when he noticed Draco got an erection every time he climbed into the chair, virtually at the moment Charlie’s quill bit into his skin.
Draco didn’t say anything when he noticed Charlie looking him up and down out of the corner of his eye, hungrily, and glancing away again, as though focussing on the work, not Draco himself, was an effort.
Greens and browns in a multitude of shades began creeping down Draco’s arms in steady stages; thick bands of colour that required hours of delicate work to execute. The forearms took the longest. Both of them were wound tight with the stress of inking so close to the Mark.
“That’s not passive, either,” Charlie remarked, one day, tapping the Green Man with a finger. “At least with the Mark, I have a rough idea what I’d be in for if I slipped. That thing... I haven’t a clue.”
The Green Man stuck a dark, mossy tongue out at him.
The sittings were short, but intense, lasting no longer than half an hour at a time. The colour still spread, slowly but gradually, like lichen, across Draco’s skin. Eventually, the last ring of ivy was done around the Green Man, and nothing was left but the thin band of hawthorn that encircled the Dark Mark itself. Charlie hesitated above it, the tattoo device in hand.
“You can do it,” he heard Draco say, softly. “Don’t wimp out on me now, Weasley.”
Charlie swallowed hard, and bent to the task. He felt his heart racing, the sweat trickling down his spine. His hands should have been trembling, but they were steady, so steady.
You could die, his brain whispered. You could twitch, or sneeze, or lose your grip on the device, and die right here.
It made him feel like laughing; like wild, mad chuckles would erupt from his mouth at any moment, like they did on occasion when he worked at the Reservation and came inches, fractions of inches, from death.
“You’re a modern-day berserker, Weasley,” a fellow handler had said to him, once. The man had shaken his head as he said it, as though he couldn’t decide whether to be impressed or appalled. “The rest of us are shitting ourselves with fear, and you’re swanning right in there, grinning your head off, as if you’re about to burst into song. You get off on the potential culmination of your own mortality.”
“I feel so alive!” he’d crowed from the stretcher, giddy from blood loss, pain and shock, as they had rushed him to the Healer. She’d been able to save his life, if not regrow his foot.
Charlie had been staring for quite some time at the arm in his grip, motionless, when Draco’s voice called him back to the present.
“So, you’ve finished it, then,” he said.
Charlie blinked. “I guess I have,” he said. The hawthorn, which almost but never quite touched the Dark Mark, was coloured completely, down to the last leaf. He set the colouring device aside and drew his wand.
Draco looked a little frightened, and his cheeks pinked. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Last time...”
“Last time was... unique,” Charlie reassured him. “This shouldn’t be much different to animating any normal tattoo.”
Draco nodded, and let out a breath of relief, though something like disappointment flickered in his eyes for a moment.
“Ready?” Charlie asked.
Draco nodded, and Charlie took Draco’s left arm, holding it out straight, then touched his wand to it and began the incantation.
Draco gasped. Charlie felt the pull on his magic; nothing like before, but still, a chunk more than he usually expended. The holly and ivy glowed as he spoke the final words, then dimmed back down.
“Wow,” Draco murmured.
“Yeah,” Charlie agreed.
Both bent over Draco’s arm, examining the newly animated pattern. Here, a stag with a full rack of antlers was visible through a gap in the weave. There, a ram with curled horns. A tiny rat climbed the branches, disturbing leaves as it went, ending up on the Green Man’s head. It rummaged about in his foliage until it reappeared holding an acorn. The Green Man frowned in irritation, pursing his lips and puffing upwards, as though attempting to shoo away his new inhabitant.
Draco and Charlie laughed aloud and looked up at the same moment, their eyes locking, their smiles genuine and warm. Charlie felt something hot pool in his belly, felt his heartbeat up its tempo.
“Next one, then?” Charlie asked, words suddenly seeming a little clumsy in his mouth.
“Yeah,” replied Draco, whose gaze seemed to keep flicking to Charlie’s lips a little more often than was normal. He held out his other arm. Charlie touched it with his wand, and began.
The drain this time was enough to make his head spin. As he tried to focus on enunciating clearly, he was vaguely aware that Draco was moaning, biting his lip to hold in the sound.
Almost done, he told himself firmly, as his concentration threatened to unravel. Almost... almost... there.
The hawthorn and yew flashed into brightness, but Charlie didn’t have time to look at the result before Draco was kissing him, and Charlie’s hands were in that white-blonde hair, pulling him closer. Charlie managed to slide off the wheeled stool onto the floor, and then Draco was on top of him, pressing down firmly, rocking his pelvis, thrusting against him. It didn’t seem to matter that they were both fully clothed. The end was approaching embarrassingly swiftly, regardless.
You get off on the potential culmination of your own mortality, the other handler had said. As Charlie thrust up hard against Draco, and came, he had to agree.
After all, shagging a Malfoy could only be perilous for his future wellbeing.
<&>
As they watched a bright-eyed raven preen and a Thestral duck in and out of the hawthorn framing the Dark Mark, Draco decided to mutter a half-hearted word of complaint about the bruises blossoming on his knees.
“We’ll not mention the ones on my arse, from some randy young sod throwing me on the floor, shall we?” Charlie drawled sarcastically.
“Do you have a shower in this place? I feel revolting,” Draco declared with disgust.
“Through the door behind the counter, and to your right,” Charlie answered. “Feel free to use it,” he called out belatedly. Draco was already gone.
Charlie was still lying there two minutes later, trying to summon the energy to move, when Bill Flooed in. Charlie supposed he had wanted to check that the final spells hadn’t backfired.
Bill cocked his head, listening to the running water, and smirked down at his dishevelled brother with a somewhat triumphant expression.
Charlie held up a single finger. “Not a word from you,” he ordered, knowing any attempt to salvage his dignity was an utterly hopeless cause.