Fic: Feel
Title: Feel
Author: akahannah
Rating: Somewhere between PG-13 and R
Warning: Death of a non-central character
Scenario: #2 Draco to Harry: I promise to sleep with you soon.
Summary: In which Draco reminisces and Harry helps him remember how to feel.
Author's Notes: Written for the second wave of the_eros_affair.
This is not the fic I set to write out for this scenario, but it's the one I was in the mood to write. Dedicated to my grandmother, who passed away on Monday. Fic ... it’s like therapy in a way.
As always, reviews and con-crit make Hannah a happy girl.
The first dead body I ever saw was Albus Dumbledore’s, but I try not to think about that.
The second was my father’s. One June morning, a few weeks after he’d decided to stop eating and drinking, he didn’t wake up.
Four years, he was locked in Azkaban. Four years without a trial, without hope, without anything but that tiny cell he measured in five paces by five paces until he stopped caring enough to move off his bed. If it was me, I doubt I’d have lasted half as long.
The Ministry called it ‘the remains’ in the letter they sent to my mother, hours after it had happened, blunt as you like. Your husband is dead, what do you want us to do with the remains? They offered to bury him outside the Azkaban fortress, but mother couldn’t bear the idea so we had them send him back to us, so that we could have him buried in the family plot in Devon, in the graveyard most of the wizarding families still use.
They always say that dead people look peaceful, like they’re asleep, like they’ve gone to a better place. Whoever they are, they’re talking shit. But father didn’t look peaceful at all when I lifted the lid off his coffin. He looked dead. He looked emaciated, older than his years, and so much smaller than I’d remembered.
“Oh Lucius." My mother's voice trembled as she spoke. She was standing beside me, touching his cheek with a shaking hand, and it struck me how little she seemed, just like him, and how frail.
I stared at him, at the closed, blank face that was supposed to look so much like mine, and felt nothing.
Fuck, what was wrong with me? There were only the two of us at the graveside, mother and I, and she was crying. I wasn’t. Couldn’t. The tears just weren’t there to fall, no matter how much I wanted them to.
The Ministry official rambled on, struggling to come up with something meaningful to say about Lucius Malfoy: Death Eater, murderer … loving husband and father. I couldn’t hear a word of what he was saying over mother’s sobbing and my own frantic thoughts that damned myself for obviously not caring enough to be upset. I was broken, that must be it.
At long last the official concluded, earth was heaped on top of the coffin and that was that. The official left, and mother turned to me, burying her face in my chest and crying all down the front of my robes. I stroked her hair, stared over the top of her head, my eyes dry and sore.
I suppose it was pure coincidence that led me to look where I did at the time, but I thought I saw a flash of something dark under a nearby cluster of trees and knew it couldn’t be a trick of the light. I kissed mother on the cheek, told her to go home and rest, and made my way over to the spot.
“Getting too tall for that invisibility cloak of yours,” I observed nonchalantly, leaning against a tree trunk and sliding down until I was sitting on the ground, which was warm and too-dry in the early summer heat. There was a shift of fabric, a strange shimmer in the air just to my left, and Harry Potter appeared.
“Draco,” he said. That was all. Just my name. Without waiting to be invited, he sat down against the same tree as me. We were practically shoulder to shoulder.
“Wouldn’t have expected to see you here.”
“No,” he said, looking rather awkward, probably at having been found out. “I’m not sure why I’m here. Just wanted to see you, I guess. To see how you are. It’s been a long time.”
And so it had.
Four years ago, my father was sent to Azkaban. Three years ago, I became a fugitive from the Ministry. And just under two years ago, Harry Potter found my hiding place. He burst in completely unexpected in the middle of the night while I was asleep in bed.
Nothing was ever the same after that.
“Malfoy?” he said, squinting at me in the wandlight.
“Potter?” I was still half asleep, thought this might be some kind of nightmare, because it couldn’t possibly be one of the other dreams I periodically had about him. It had been so long since I had seen someone other than Snape or Pettigrew that I was almost glad to see him, even though I knew that he was probably going to kill me or hex me into a million tiny pieces. And that I probably deserved it. “What are you doing here?”
“I got a tip-off,” he said, pointing the wand away from me and around the shabby, single room that had been my home for the past year. “I was told I might find something I wanted here.”
“Depends what you want, I suppose,” I said, my voice still rough with sleep, and you should have seen the way he looked at me. Suddenly I found myself wondering if maybe this was one of those dreams after all. “Going to take me prisoner, Potter?”
He shook his head, lowered his wand. “Snape comes here, doesn’t he? When?”
“As if I’m going to tell you that.”
Harry Potter smiled at me, actually smiled. I was in such a sorry, desperate state that it felt like the sun on my face. “I guess I’ll have to come back, then,” he said.
He did.
Why I didn’t tell Snape or Wormtail the hideout had been compromised, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe it was because I liked the idea of having a secret that was just mine, instead of having to wait for them to come and tell me things. Or maybe it was just because it was him. It was always him.
He came back again and again, usually appearing when I was asleep. I never was entirely sure that it wasn’t just a dream, some figment of my overactive imagination. Sometimes he would ask about Snape or the other Death Eaters, and very occasionally I had information to give him. Sometimes he would tell me how the war was going - who was still alive, who had disappeared.
“Why haven’t you turned me in to the Ministry?” I asked once.
He shrugged. “Maybe I like having someone to visit.”
“That’s no answer, Potter.”
“Well what do you want me to say? I should turn you in, I know that. But what would that actually achieve? Another person locked up in Azkaban without a trial, that’s all.”
“Sometimes I think I’d rather be anywhere but here,” I said.
“You could leave if you wanted, couldn’t you? What’s stopping you?”
“I’m scared,” I said quietly, as though if I said it low enough I could somehow better hide the fact that I was nothing but a coward.
He didn’t say anything for a moment, just reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. “We’re all scared, Draco.”
I hadn’t realised how close he was.
I wanted him to kiss me for a very long time before he actually did. I’d wanted it for months. Years, probably, if I’m being completely honest with myself. It really is possible to hate and love someone at the same time - believe me, I should know.
It was near the end of the war, though we didn’t know that yet, when he turned up later than usual one night, so late it was almost morning. He slumped onto the bed next to me, hands over his face. When I peeled them away I saw that the scar on his forehead was bleeding.
“Been doing this for hours,” he said, wiping at it with his fingers so that the blood smeared. “And my head hurts like a bastard. Voldemort is angry.” But despite the bleeding and the pain he was in, he was smiling fiercely, almost triumphantly. If I was Voldemort, I’d have been shitting myself right about then.
“Let me get something for that,” I said. I got out of bed, went over to the sink and dampened a cloth under the cold tap. When I came back, I knelt on the bed beside him and pressed it to his forehead, cleaning the blood away.
He tensed for a moment but soon relaxed and allowed me to do it. When I was finished and went to take my hand away, he reached up and put his own on top of it. “Draco …?” he whispered, but his eyes had already finished asking the question and the answer was yes.
“What took you so long?” I asked as he leaned towards me, but I never got a reply. Well, not in words, anyway. Next thing I knew, his mouth was on mine, his hands were sliding up the back of my pyjama top and across my back, and we were both shivering like crazy even though the room was warm.
I don’t know how long we stayed like that - minutes or hours, it didn’t really matter because it was never going to be enough time. I have no idea how it happened, but when I came to my senses we were lying down on the bed, the covers tangled around us.
“I should go,” he said, looking like it was the last thing he wanted to do. I saw that his scar had started to bleed again, but didn’t mention it. God, all we’d done was kiss, but it really felt like it had meant something, you know?
The moment he left, I knew he wasn’t going to bother coming back. I just knew this was it.
But I’d been wrong before.
The next night, he came in so quietly I didn’t wake until the bed dipped beside me, and a slightly cold arm wrapped around my chest.
“Hello,” I whispered, but he didn’t say anything. Instead he began kissing my neck, his lips hot against my skin, burning a trail right up to my earlobe, his hands stroking tiny circles on my back. I hadn’t realised my skin was so sensitive before, but every nerve ending was tingling, everything he did was making me gasp.
When he moved back a little, I rolled over to face him and noticed that he had already removed his glasses and his robes. “Are you … are you okay?” I said, between kisses. There was a fierce light in his eyes and a hard sort of intensity about him that I hadn’t seen before. It bothered me. Something else was on his mind.
“I’m fine,” he said, one hand trailing down my chest, down my stomach, and lower. “I’m more than fine.”
Yeah, I wanted him. Wanted him more than I’d ever wanted anything, and that’s saying something. I raised my hips as he slid my pyjama bottoms off, couldn’t help but reciprocate as he ground against me, achingly slowly. It was like being drunk, if it was possible to be intoxicated by another person.
We would have done it, I think, if I hadn’t opened my eyes just as we neared the point of no return. He had this look on his face, bordering on panic. “Harry, stop,” I said, reaching up to touch his face. “We don’t have to do this right now.”
Ever done something you know is the right thing to do, but regretted it anyway? Yeah. Tell me about it.
His arms buckled. He sort of collapsed on top of me, and his body wasn't heavy at all on mine. “I’m scared, Draco,” he said, his voice vibrating right in my ear, “that if we don’t do this now, we never will.”
“Of course we will,” I told him, while his face was pressed against the crook of my neck. “I promise. Once the war’s over. It won’t be in some horrible musty room. It’ll be someplace nice. And it’ll be brilliant, you’ll see.”
He stayed that night, all night, for the first time ever. I don’t think either of us got much sleep, because I know that for me at least, I had to keep reaching out to check that he was there. To check that this wasn’t just another dream.
At some point I must have fallen asleep. One minute he was there, and what seemed to be only seconds later he was gone. The bed next to me was already quite cold, as though he'd never been there.
Harry defeated Voldemort that day.
Twenty four hours later, he disappeared.
“It’s been a while,” Harry said, sitting next to me, looking more or less the same as he had the last time I saw him.
“It has. Almost a year.” Eleven months, twenty eight days and ten hours. Maybe I had been counting, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.
“I know. Too long.”
I stared out across the graveyard, avoiding looking at the fresh pile of earth nearby. “So where did you go?”
“Here and there,” he said quietly. “I lost my magic for a while -“ (so the rumours had been true, I thought, trying to figure out if that made me feel any better) “-and I was angry and messed up. I needed some time away from … well, everything.”
“And now?”
He smiled humourlessly. “Now I’m no more messed up than anyone else. And I have my magic back, mostly.”
I got to my feet and began walking away. “It’s been good seeing you,” I said over my shoulder, perhaps more coldly than I’d intended. “But I should head home. My mother needs me right now.”
He called my name, just once. I slowed my pace but didn’t stop, and he caught up with me quickly enough. “I never stopped thinking about you,” he said.
“You just vanished,” I told him. “Not one word. Not even a note to tell me you were all right. What was I supposed to do, just wait for you? When you’d never even promised me anything?”
“I know I should have been in touch,” he said quietly. “I know. But if you’ll let me, I’ll try and make it up to you.”
Even though I was angry with him, I couldn’t help it. I moved closer, scuffing the toe of my shoe against his, and he looked up at me with something like hope in his eyes. Maybe it was too much, too soon, but I allowed him to wrap his arms around me, leaned my forehead against his because I needed it right then. I guess we both did.
“I’d like to take you up on your promise sometime,” he said, and I noticed that we were both breathing in tandem, deep, shuddering breaths. “If you still want to, I mean.”
I closed my eyes, but I could still see his face in my mind’s eye because until that day it was all I’d had. “I don’t know. I just ... I don’t know anything right now.”
But I loved him. I knew that. Maybe it was enough.
Harry pulled me even closer, warm and solid and there. “I’m so sorry about your father, Draco,” he said, and held me as I cried.
~fin~
Author: akahannah
Rating: Somewhere between PG-13 and R
Warning: Death of a non-central character
Scenario: #2 Draco to Harry: I promise to sleep with you soon.
Summary: In which Draco reminisces and Harry helps him remember how to feel.
Author's Notes: Written for the second wave of the_eros_affair.
This is not the fic I set to write out for this scenario, but it's the one I was in the mood to write. Dedicated to my grandmother, who passed away on Monday. Fic ... it’s like therapy in a way.
As always, reviews and con-crit make Hannah a happy girl.
The first dead body I ever saw was Albus Dumbledore’s, but I try not to think about that.
The second was my father’s. One June morning, a few weeks after he’d decided to stop eating and drinking, he didn’t wake up.
Four years, he was locked in Azkaban. Four years without a trial, without hope, without anything but that tiny cell he measured in five paces by five paces until he stopped caring enough to move off his bed. If it was me, I doubt I’d have lasted half as long.
The Ministry called it ‘the remains’ in the letter they sent to my mother, hours after it had happened, blunt as you like. Your husband is dead, what do you want us to do with the remains? They offered to bury him outside the Azkaban fortress, but mother couldn’t bear the idea so we had them send him back to us, so that we could have him buried in the family plot in Devon, in the graveyard most of the wizarding families still use.
They always say that dead people look peaceful, like they’re asleep, like they’ve gone to a better place. Whoever they are, they’re talking shit. But father didn’t look peaceful at all when I lifted the lid off his coffin. He looked dead. He looked emaciated, older than his years, and so much smaller than I’d remembered.
“Oh Lucius." My mother's voice trembled as she spoke. She was standing beside me, touching his cheek with a shaking hand, and it struck me how little she seemed, just like him, and how frail.
I stared at him, at the closed, blank face that was supposed to look so much like mine, and felt nothing.
Fuck, what was wrong with me? There were only the two of us at the graveside, mother and I, and she was crying. I wasn’t. Couldn’t. The tears just weren’t there to fall, no matter how much I wanted them to.
The Ministry official rambled on, struggling to come up with something meaningful to say about Lucius Malfoy: Death Eater, murderer … loving husband and father. I couldn’t hear a word of what he was saying over mother’s sobbing and my own frantic thoughts that damned myself for obviously not caring enough to be upset. I was broken, that must be it.
At long last the official concluded, earth was heaped on top of the coffin and that was that. The official left, and mother turned to me, burying her face in my chest and crying all down the front of my robes. I stroked her hair, stared over the top of her head, my eyes dry and sore.
I suppose it was pure coincidence that led me to look where I did at the time, but I thought I saw a flash of something dark under a nearby cluster of trees and knew it couldn’t be a trick of the light. I kissed mother on the cheek, told her to go home and rest, and made my way over to the spot.
“Getting too tall for that invisibility cloak of yours,” I observed nonchalantly, leaning against a tree trunk and sliding down until I was sitting on the ground, which was warm and too-dry in the early summer heat. There was a shift of fabric, a strange shimmer in the air just to my left, and Harry Potter appeared.
“Draco,” he said. That was all. Just my name. Without waiting to be invited, he sat down against the same tree as me. We were practically shoulder to shoulder.
“Wouldn’t have expected to see you here.”
“No,” he said, looking rather awkward, probably at having been found out. “I’m not sure why I’m here. Just wanted to see you, I guess. To see how you are. It’s been a long time.”
And so it had.
Four years ago, my father was sent to Azkaban. Three years ago, I became a fugitive from the Ministry. And just under two years ago, Harry Potter found my hiding place. He burst in completely unexpected in the middle of the night while I was asleep in bed.
Nothing was ever the same after that.
“Malfoy?” he said, squinting at me in the wandlight.
“Potter?” I was still half asleep, thought this might be some kind of nightmare, because it couldn’t possibly be one of the other dreams I periodically had about him. It had been so long since I had seen someone other than Snape or Pettigrew that I was almost glad to see him, even though I knew that he was probably going to kill me or hex me into a million tiny pieces. And that I probably deserved it. “What are you doing here?”
“I got a tip-off,” he said, pointing the wand away from me and around the shabby, single room that had been my home for the past year. “I was told I might find something I wanted here.”
“Depends what you want, I suppose,” I said, my voice still rough with sleep, and you should have seen the way he looked at me. Suddenly I found myself wondering if maybe this was one of those dreams after all. “Going to take me prisoner, Potter?”
He shook his head, lowered his wand. “Snape comes here, doesn’t he? When?”
“As if I’m going to tell you that.”
Harry Potter smiled at me, actually smiled. I was in such a sorry, desperate state that it felt like the sun on my face. “I guess I’ll have to come back, then,” he said.
He did.
Why I didn’t tell Snape or Wormtail the hideout had been compromised, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe it was because I liked the idea of having a secret that was just mine, instead of having to wait for them to come and tell me things. Or maybe it was just because it was him. It was always him.
He came back again and again, usually appearing when I was asleep. I never was entirely sure that it wasn’t just a dream, some figment of my overactive imagination. Sometimes he would ask about Snape or the other Death Eaters, and very occasionally I had information to give him. Sometimes he would tell me how the war was going - who was still alive, who had disappeared.
“Why haven’t you turned me in to the Ministry?” I asked once.
He shrugged. “Maybe I like having someone to visit.”
“That’s no answer, Potter.”
“Well what do you want me to say? I should turn you in, I know that. But what would that actually achieve? Another person locked up in Azkaban without a trial, that’s all.”
“Sometimes I think I’d rather be anywhere but here,” I said.
“You could leave if you wanted, couldn’t you? What’s stopping you?”
“I’m scared,” I said quietly, as though if I said it low enough I could somehow better hide the fact that I was nothing but a coward.
He didn’t say anything for a moment, just reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. “We’re all scared, Draco.”
I hadn’t realised how close he was.
I wanted him to kiss me for a very long time before he actually did. I’d wanted it for months. Years, probably, if I’m being completely honest with myself. It really is possible to hate and love someone at the same time - believe me, I should know.
It was near the end of the war, though we didn’t know that yet, when he turned up later than usual one night, so late it was almost morning. He slumped onto the bed next to me, hands over his face. When I peeled them away I saw that the scar on his forehead was bleeding.
“Been doing this for hours,” he said, wiping at it with his fingers so that the blood smeared. “And my head hurts like a bastard. Voldemort is angry.” But despite the bleeding and the pain he was in, he was smiling fiercely, almost triumphantly. If I was Voldemort, I’d have been shitting myself right about then.
“Let me get something for that,” I said. I got out of bed, went over to the sink and dampened a cloth under the cold tap. When I came back, I knelt on the bed beside him and pressed it to his forehead, cleaning the blood away.
He tensed for a moment but soon relaxed and allowed me to do it. When I was finished and went to take my hand away, he reached up and put his own on top of it. “Draco …?” he whispered, but his eyes had already finished asking the question and the answer was yes.
“What took you so long?” I asked as he leaned towards me, but I never got a reply. Well, not in words, anyway. Next thing I knew, his mouth was on mine, his hands were sliding up the back of my pyjama top and across my back, and we were both shivering like crazy even though the room was warm.
I don’t know how long we stayed like that - minutes or hours, it didn’t really matter because it was never going to be enough time. I have no idea how it happened, but when I came to my senses we were lying down on the bed, the covers tangled around us.
“I should go,” he said, looking like it was the last thing he wanted to do. I saw that his scar had started to bleed again, but didn’t mention it. God, all we’d done was kiss, but it really felt like it had meant something, you know?
The moment he left, I knew he wasn’t going to bother coming back. I just knew this was it.
But I’d been wrong before.
The next night, he came in so quietly I didn’t wake until the bed dipped beside me, and a slightly cold arm wrapped around my chest.
“Hello,” I whispered, but he didn’t say anything. Instead he began kissing my neck, his lips hot against my skin, burning a trail right up to my earlobe, his hands stroking tiny circles on my back. I hadn’t realised my skin was so sensitive before, but every nerve ending was tingling, everything he did was making me gasp.
When he moved back a little, I rolled over to face him and noticed that he had already removed his glasses and his robes. “Are you … are you okay?” I said, between kisses. There was a fierce light in his eyes and a hard sort of intensity about him that I hadn’t seen before. It bothered me. Something else was on his mind.
“I’m fine,” he said, one hand trailing down my chest, down my stomach, and lower. “I’m more than fine.”
Yeah, I wanted him. Wanted him more than I’d ever wanted anything, and that’s saying something. I raised my hips as he slid my pyjama bottoms off, couldn’t help but reciprocate as he ground against me, achingly slowly. It was like being drunk, if it was possible to be intoxicated by another person.
We would have done it, I think, if I hadn’t opened my eyes just as we neared the point of no return. He had this look on his face, bordering on panic. “Harry, stop,” I said, reaching up to touch his face. “We don’t have to do this right now.”
Ever done something you know is the right thing to do, but regretted it anyway? Yeah. Tell me about it.
His arms buckled. He sort of collapsed on top of me, and his body wasn't heavy at all on mine. “I’m scared, Draco,” he said, his voice vibrating right in my ear, “that if we don’t do this now, we never will.”
“Of course we will,” I told him, while his face was pressed against the crook of my neck. “I promise. Once the war’s over. It won’t be in some horrible musty room. It’ll be someplace nice. And it’ll be brilliant, you’ll see.”
He stayed that night, all night, for the first time ever. I don’t think either of us got much sleep, because I know that for me at least, I had to keep reaching out to check that he was there. To check that this wasn’t just another dream.
At some point I must have fallen asleep. One minute he was there, and what seemed to be only seconds later he was gone. The bed next to me was already quite cold, as though he'd never been there.
Harry defeated Voldemort that day.
Twenty four hours later, he disappeared.
“It’s been a while,” Harry said, sitting next to me, looking more or less the same as he had the last time I saw him.
“It has. Almost a year.” Eleven months, twenty eight days and ten hours. Maybe I had been counting, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.
“I know. Too long.”
I stared out across the graveyard, avoiding looking at the fresh pile of earth nearby. “So where did you go?”
“Here and there,” he said quietly. “I lost my magic for a while -“ (so the rumours had been true, I thought, trying to figure out if that made me feel any better) “-and I was angry and messed up. I needed some time away from … well, everything.”
“And now?”
He smiled humourlessly. “Now I’m no more messed up than anyone else. And I have my magic back, mostly.”
I got to my feet and began walking away. “It’s been good seeing you,” I said over my shoulder, perhaps more coldly than I’d intended. “But I should head home. My mother needs me right now.”
He called my name, just once. I slowed my pace but didn’t stop, and he caught up with me quickly enough. “I never stopped thinking about you,” he said.
“You just vanished,” I told him. “Not one word. Not even a note to tell me you were all right. What was I supposed to do, just wait for you? When you’d never even promised me anything?”
“I know I should have been in touch,” he said quietly. “I know. But if you’ll let me, I’ll try and make it up to you.”
Even though I was angry with him, I couldn’t help it. I moved closer, scuffing the toe of my shoe against his, and he looked up at me with something like hope in his eyes. Maybe it was too much, too soon, but I allowed him to wrap his arms around me, leaned my forehead against his because I needed it right then. I guess we both did.
“I’d like to take you up on your promise sometime,” he said, and I noticed that we were both breathing in tandem, deep, shuddering breaths. “If you still want to, I mean.”
I closed my eyes, but I could still see his face in my mind’s eye because until that day it was all I’d had. “I don’t know. I just ... I don’t know anything right now.”
But I loved him. I knew that. Maybe it was enough.
Harry pulled me even closer, warm and solid and there. “I’m so sorry about your father, Draco,” he said, and held me as I cried.
~fin~