(no subject)
This is hackthis's birthday story. It's late. That's not usual, so she will have to grant me one year. This was written pretty much tailored to her in as much as could be managed. I still love you after all these years, Z. How we stuck it out is anyone's guess. Loyalty above all else, probably.
Betas by Femme, serialkarma, and thepouncer. New fandoms make me nervous.
Title from Gym Class Heroes because H thought it would be funny to use music that could be on the show as a joke on Z.
Spoilers for "Hi, Society"
I'm Pretty Much a Big Deal
The thing about Chuck is, he doesn't just think he's better than most people, he knows it. The Register socialites around him look down their Dutch noses at the hoi and whisper “I'm a Biddle” when offended by a perceived slight. Parvenus and New World poseurs.
Who was Cornelius Vanderbilt when you could trace your family back to Hermes Trimegistos?
Not that Chuck spends much time contemplating the overwrought bedtime stories his grandmother had hummed to him in his childhood. What use did Chuck Bass, Manhattanite, have for bibbity bobbity boo and centuries-long grudges? Chuck has enough of his own grudges, an A-Z of slights and betrayals that are all his own.
The public transportation depot at JFK is purposefully confusing-a stand-alone structure accessible only through walking outside along an uncovered path, followed by an elevator ride to a train platform, a ride on a circular-tracked train, and disembarking at either a bus stop or yet another train station. All of this is before one arrives at any sort of real public transportation. Along the ridiculous route, one probably becomes too frustrated to notice the significant loss of fellow passengers as they pop out of sight into various secondary stations set along the odyssey.
The trip to De Vries Hub, standing shoulder to shoulder with the working and middle class airline passengers, is as close to public transportation that Chuck gets-aside from a random taxi when he's too drunk to call for a car or when Nate dragged him into the subway for adventure. Luggage rocks against denim-clad knees, people gaze from the confusing map above the doors of the train to the confusing paper maps in their hands, and Chuck burns inside. He already took an ativan, but even with the self-medicating, he feels...he just feels and he wants to...something.
He wants to do something, and mostly that involves extreme forms of violence that would lead to a spectacular trial on CourtTV and the sort of fifteen minutes of fame he feels is solidly beneath his current status. Being in love feels cheap, flimsy, like the world is suddenly made of paper and he's going to put his foot right through the floor at any second. He feels out of control, and he's spent his entire life orchestrating the universe to revolve right around him.
He has just managed to reorganize his world so that he's pointless in it. It burns. It burns so fiercely, he might just consume his paper world.
So, instead, he takes the airtrain from JFK to Jamaica Station with his luggage miniaturized in the pocket of his D&G overcoat and watches as a family of Germans pass a Nalgene bottle of tea back and forth between them. He has no compunction about staring because manners are for people who can't buy themselves out of trouble. Not that it matters since no one pays him any attention. The feeling of being ignored, just another face in the crowd, it would be startling maybe if he wasn't on ativan. As it is, he feels like he's almost just another New Yorker coming home from a business trip or a vacation. Maybe from a funeral.
The train pulls into Jamaica Station, and Chuck holds back to minimize the amount of physical contact with the other passengers. He slides into the tail end of the throng as they bustle towards the turnstiles that will lead them to the subway and commuter rails. A quarter of the way down the corridor, he steps to the left sharply and shoves his way through the invisible barrier into De Vries Hub. His ears pop and he rotates his jaw several times to reassert normal pressure. A red-faced, bristle bearded fat man in a antiquated uniform something between a doorman and Prussian mercenary loudly declares “Tickets that way!” and points to the long line of ticket kiosks against the far wall. No matter how many times Chuck travels this way, he will never stop being annoyed that someone screams in his face in such an aggressive way for absolutely no reason. The word TICKETS hovers in the air above the ticket wickets strobing through the rainbow standing about ten feet high. Anyone who misses that really deserves to be stuck in this hell hole for the rest of their sorry lives.
He stomps across the mosaicked floor, trampling images of Hermes and flying horses, to get in line at the wicket marked HELIOPOLIS. At this time of year, the line is disastrously long due to destination holiday travelers and religious nutcases. Chuck sighs and wipes a hand over his face, ignoring the little old man in front of him who is trying to catch his eye.
“Going for the big festival?” The dude asks in a cheerful tone contrasted by his heavy Brooklyn accent.
“No.” He knows he shouldn't engage, but he's in a particularly self-destructive mood.
“Oh.” The old guy eyes him from under bushy white eyebrows. “Oh,” he repeats. “You're one of them.”
Chuck wants to laugh in the guy's face, a sharp HA HA HA FUCK YOU, but it's just too much effort. One Of Them. Totally capitalized in that guy's mind. The line moves. The guy buys his ticket. As a matter of fact, Chuck isn't. How could someone mistake him for British of all things?
“One ticket,” Chuck says to the startlingly gorgeous attendant.
“Uh, huh,” she says with the particular cadence and inflection of a latina from Queens, and Chuck leans his elbow on the wooden frame of the window.
“It could be two.” It's reflex to flirt, so he's not too pissed when the girl just rolls her dark eyes and smacks a wad of gum.
“Three hundred and sixteen US dollars, other currencies there.” She points a bright purple acrylic nail at white sparkly numbers floating in the air-exchange rates in euros, yin, kopecks, galleons, dinarii, drachma.
“Charge it to the Cassiopeia Melanos account.” He leans back and readjusts his sleeves so that his coat covers his shirt cuffs. He's all business now, tired of all of this, ready to get the fuck out of New York for a while.
The girl does something arcane with a short wand and a plaque. “Cassiopeia Melanos Hieronymus or Cassiopeia Cepheus Melanos?”
She doesn't bother to look up, and Chuck doesn't bother to keep the snarl out of his voice. “Cepheus.” Fucking plebes.
“Codeword?” She smacks her gum and looks up at him through her lashes.
“Titus Andronicus.”
A ticket materializes in Chuck's hand. “Have a pleasant trip,” the ticket girl intones with a little life as humanly possible. Chuck rolls his eyes.
People swarm around him as he strides away from the ticketing area to the disembarkation zone. Some look average enough in jeans and sweaters and heavy coats, others look like something out of an opera or period movie-turbans and gowns and entirely too much velvet. Chuck gets away with flirting with regular magical attire because he's “eccentric” and “edgy,” but the truth is, he really feels much more at home in canary silk than in white broadcloth. He's always thought it's one of the ways he takes after his mother. One of the less detrimental.
He breezes through the line, which is run much more efficiently than the ticketing, and steps up to the arched blackness that is the portal.
“Ticket,” says a hot black man in a tailored suit. The guy gives him the once over, and Chuck smiles back, slick, knowing.
He hands over his ticket and brushes his fingertips along the man's palm.
“Heliopolis?” The ticket agent's eyes go up. Chuck sighs inside. The British really have brought down the real estate values in the last couple decades.
“Sadly, yes.” Chuck's smile stays in place, and he winks before stepping onto the incised path to the portal arch. He really hates traveling like this, and not for the loss of dignity like so many people. Chuck hates losing consciousness, hates not knowing where his body is for however long the magical journey takes. He draws a huge breath, hands shaking slightly, and steps off the platform into nothingness.
*
Once upon a time, Heliopolis was an unplottable island somewhere in the Mediterranean inhabited by retirees, alchemists, and very old families. It was renowned for the snobbishness of its inhabitants and for its annual Saturnalia festivities. Then Grindlewald rose to power in Britain, causing an influx of refugees. Those refugees sponsored more of the same and so on and so on until the turn of the millennium when the British managed to blow themselves up in a grand fiasco Chuck's grandmother calls “not nearly bad enough.” Chuck's sketchy on the details, because, frankly, he doesn't give a goddamn about the English and their petty disputes over argyle socks or tea or whatever they would have to argue about.
What Chuck does care about is having to listen to his grandmother drone on and on about “those English” who now have a sizable village on the north shore of Heliopolis. He also cares whether his cousins are kicking around the island, because that could be just the distraction he's looking for.
Chuck comes to propped against a cool marble wall standing next to a blonde woman in a blood red sari who is still knocked out. The feeling of dislocation is intense, and adrenaline hits his bloodstream causing his mouth to go dry. He curls his hands into fists and breathes through his mouth to cut down the panic he's experiencing even through the benzo.
A man in a cream linen and silk suit and sandals steps towards Chuck with his palm out. “You'll be yourself presently,” he reports in a voice as creamy as his clothes-some kind of English accent, all the edges filed off. He was probably a doctor or a barrister back in England, but here he works at the portal station. Chuck straightens and tugs at the buttons of his coat to slough it off.
“I'm fine,” he says brusquely and steps around the attendant, already forgetting him as he wonders how long it will take...
“Master?”
Chuck glances down to see the elf at his feet, bowing low and tugging on the flimsy material it dons.
“Oh, good, I'm starving,” he says right as the elf waggles its ears and they pop from the station to the cool marble porch of his grandmother's villa.
“Your grandmother's not here.”
Chuck wheels around to find one of the Black cousins lounging on a settee with a porcelain cup perched on his black-clad knee. All the English are so dour, dressing like priests and puritans. Chuck really hates to think he's related to people who joined up to other people's causes like the lowest kind of lackeys and minions. They're so much better than that; Chuck is so so much better than that. His grandmother agrees with that assessment.
“You're Charles, correct?”
The thing about using such obvious power plays is that it gives your opponent everything they need to know about you right from the start. His cousin feels the need to put Chuck in his place, feels a need to tussle for dominance. This is Chuck's home turf. He doesn't need to prove anything, because his vesting is so secure he can afford to be magnanimous.
“Chuck. It's a little hard to believe you don't know my name since it's on the monstrosity that passes for something approaching a clock in the great hall.” He runs a hand over his head to smooth his hair down and gazes over Draco's shoulder out to the aquamarine sea where gulls dive.
Draco sits up abruptly and sets his tea cup aside.
“Force of habit.” It isn't an apology, just an explanation. Chuck lets his eyes settle back on his distant relative. Large grey eyes, disconcertingly blond hair pulled back in a ponytail at the nape of his neck with a bow (a bow!), black on black clothes that look like something out of a Tim Burton movie. Aristocratic and fragile looking the way so many of the old blood English tend to be. Draco stares back just as uncompromisingly. “You look more and more like the Heliolites as you get older.”
That's true enough, and also proves that Draco knows all too well who Chuck is. That's only natural since Chuck is the heir presumptive to the central fortune of the family. “Where's my grandmother?” Chuck pulls off his jacket and unbuttons the top button of his shirt, loosens his bow tie.
“Rome.”
Oh, so it's the endless war to get the Black property out of the hands of “the interloper.” Instantly, Chuck's disinterested. He turns on his heel and leaves Draco sitting in the salt-scented twilight framed by blue sky and bluer water.
*
The villa is the usual marble and frescoed palace that the Heliolites favor-massive rooms with high ceilings all constructed around an inner courtyard garden. Chuck thinks it's all pretty provincial. He hasn't ever understood the laments for fresh air and greenery of so many of the old-world types. Chuck's world is steel and glass and car exhaust. Cities are where power lives. Europe is quaint, but come on, it's over.
Chuck has his own suite in the villa, all veined marble and scarlet cloth. He doesn't hate it per se, but it's a little too...Alexander the Great. The bed's big enough to mope in elegantly, though, which he commences to immediately.
He can smell Blair when he concentrates hard enough, the sharp, green scent of her perfume, the spice of her conditioner. He hates her. The overwhelming violence of his hatred of her unsettles him, because he knows this is a flaw, a fatal weakness that can be exploited by even the most casual player. His impulse is to destroy her, but even at his most irrational, he knows that’s impossible. Girls like Blair, people like him and Blair, are bulletproof, because there's nothing money and a pedigree can't fix. Not murder, not malfeasance, not insider trading or drug addiction or infidelity. Their only rules are the ones their own society imposes-marrying right, remaining rich, protecting their own. Blair is untouchable-in all ways at this point-so Chuck has to be smart about this. He's not accustomed to being smart about anything except getting what he wants.
*
At some point Chuck must have drifted off to sleep, because he wakes up to candlelight. He has slept in his cuff links and the back of one's missing when he reflexively touches his sleeve to check it. These are only a gift from one of his father's girlfriends, an appeasement ploy that he had accepted by not attempting to seduce her himself. She really wasn't his type anyway-eastern European and carelessly gold-digging.
Chuck rolls out of the massive bed, set in the middle of the room and without headboard or footboard, and pads barefoot into the bathroom. The recessed tub begins to fill with water before he even unbuttons his shirt all the way. The scents of verbena and thyme flood through the room riding the steam from the bath. Something in Chuck relaxes, some part of him that misses magic when he lives amongst those bereft of it.
The bath could hold ten, nothing Chuck isn't used to, but the elf washing his hair and clucking at him reminds him of his nanny days, and that's not bad at all. All of Chuck's earliest nannies had been hand selected by his grandmother, and they painted his childhood with morality lessons where the bad guys were always the Christians or the Outsiders, lessons that Chuck easily manipulates into perfectly reasoned apologies for his “amoral” behavior. There is no higher moral arbiter than money and power, and people who believe there is are self-basting snacks for Chuck's schemes.
He sends the elves aways with a barked “GET OUT” when his memories spiral away from Prince-like musings to Blair. He thinks this is neediness, this tautness in his lower belly and hollowed out feeling. The fire is still there, but it's more like heartburn, like an autoimmune response where his anger is turning against himself. He made some pretty spectacular missteps with Nate and Blair. He doesn't know who he hates more, them or himself.
He's hard and angry and he has no outlet. There's no one to yell at or manipulate. There's no one to fuck. He's sober and teetering on too much self-awareness. The bath water sloshes over the edge of the marble lip as he surges up and towards the drying sheets. He perfunctorily dries himself and dresses himself in the clothes the elves have provided, doing most of the work with magic, buttons whipping together, cuff links flying out of the jewelery box sitting on the nightstand. His hair dries perfectly into place, but he combs his fingers through it anyway, out of habit.
The villa is eerie at night, all long shadows cast by witchlight and candles in the innermost rooms, silver and limned with danger in the outer rooms along the colonnade on one side and the garden on the other. Chuck pads barefoot but otherwise immaculate in a butter yellow linen suit with a red bow tie through the empty rooms and wonders where that Edward Gorey sketch of his cousin has gotten to. Chuck's not used to being alone. Even when the company's lacking, it's still company.
A bowing elf appears as he exits a library onto the porch. “Master Malfoy sups on southern lawn, master.”
Chuck doesn't wait for him to pop away, just turns to the left and slinks along the columns listening to the sound of the ocean in the distance, hands in his pockets and cool marble beneath his feet.
The southern lawn bleeds into the beach and near the end of the now-dark stretch of grass, Draco sits at one of the octagonal tables from the east wing in the middle of a bubble of candle light. So many candles hover in the air around him and the table that the tableau makes any kind of night vision nearly impossible. Chuck likes the effect. There's an empty chair opposite Draco. When Chuck's toes touch the bubble of light, he begins to hear music-rock music. Draco looks up at him and doesn't exactly smile, but he's not frowning either.
“I don't like to eat alone.”
Chuck pulls out the empty chair and surveys the spread of rice dishes and dolmas and lamb and so forth, the usual crap. Draco watches him with less of an antagonistic air than earlier.
“I wish grandmother would fucking get some elves who knew how to make bolognese or cucumber sandwiches.” Chuck reaches for a plate of rice that looks like it doesn't have fruit in it.
Draco inclines his head slightly. “I don't know what bolognese is, but I would do some fairly depraved acts for a cucumber sandwich.”
Chuck wonders what depraved is for Draco. He settles back in his seat with one hand on the table and watches Malfoy eat. Most of the stories Chuck's heard about the latest flare up in the UK sound invented, but Chuck knows that when witches and wizards decide to toss out the conventional understandings of limits that the situation can become heinous. They could also draw the attention of the outsiders, like happened with the Western Woes and the San Fransisco “earthquake” in '89.
The rice seems to only be saffron and animal bits. Draco watches Chuck eat in return.
“Were you in the war?” Why be subtle when you can be rude?
Draco's eyes narrow and his chin lifts. “Your grandmother didn't tell you about me?”
That is hauteur, and Chuck approves. It's a good look on Draco, realigning his shoulders and head, giving him a dramatic appearance. It looks pretty natural on him, too. “Noooooooo.” What she had said was that “unfortunate” relations might be lurking about and that Chuck should have sympathy for their misfortunes and learn a lesson in how a war is lost.
Draco blinks at him, narrows his eyes, and sighs long and low before crumpling back into a more natural posture. “Yes, I was in the war.”
What kind of answer is that? Chuck chews and scrapes his knife against his plate making a loud, grating screech. Draco doesn't wince but he does appear to roll his eyes. “Were you a combatant or just an innocent bystander?”
“I think you could classify me as both, not that it's any of your business.” He sets his fork tines down on his plate and props his elbow on the table to rest his chin in his hand. “I feel you're trying to bait me. I'll warn you now, I've spent my whole life being baited and rising to it, if you want to play with that fire, you might want to be certain you can win.”
For the first time in weeks, Chuck feels like himself. He laughs without guile and straightens his tie. “I knew there had to be something besides poetic direness or grandmother wouldn't have you staying with her. What did you do to pique her interest?”
“I'd assume it was switching sides, but that would only be a guess since she mainly lectures me on gardening.” Draco pauses and makes a sour face. “I've always loathed plants and herbology and dirt and so on.”
“She's getting a little senile.”
“Your mother was here last month.” Draco says it in a conversational tone, but Chuck's a master. That was a barb, and one that was calculated and heat-seeking. He can feel his face heat and his jaw clench. Just like that he's not enjoying this anymore. Draco sighs again and pulls his hair out of its ribbon, pushes back from the table slightly and cards his hands through the bright blond mess. “I can't exactly say I'm sorry, because I'm not, since I hardly know you and you seem like you can take care of yourself, but that was uncalled for on my part. Force of habit. I was trained to put other people in their places like that. Forgive me or don't, it's hardly important.”
Chuck can't help but be just a teeny bit intrigued by this dickhead. His grandmother only takes up with people she finds intriguing herself, and that usually means the morally ambiguous, the super intelligent, and the tragic. Chuck clicks through a reassessment of Draco Malfoy and slots him as tragic and morally ambiguous.
“Soooooooo,” Chuck says, pouring himself a glass of wine. “Grandmother left us here alone together on purpose then?”
“She did suspiciously leave right as your hand on the clock hit Heliopolis.” Draco sips his own wine and quirks an eyebrow.
Chuck can’t help laughing anymore than he can help being from the Noble and Most Ancient House of Melanos.
*
“I hear you Americans mix freely with muggles. Why on earth do you do that?” Draco looks ridiculously hot with his hair down, and Chuck thinks his life is looking up.
“Do I look like some kind of oracle? Just because that's how we do it.” Some questions are too taxing to bother with.
They’re sitting in the lower gardens near the trail to the sea on the special yard chairs that are a cross between divans and lawn chairs. Huge flowering bushes shake in the warm breezes that magically regulate the temperature of the estate grounds.
“You really don't care about what happened in the war, do you?” Draco sounds genuine, the rigid formality of his usual demeanor falling away as he pushes his hair behind one ear with an eyebrow up and his mouth pressed tightly together. Chuck knows where this is going. He cut his teeth on the walking wounded, usually, pretty socialites with absentee parents and trust funds big enough to get in serious trouble. People who come pre-abused are easy to scoop up and shake off afterwards. Draco's wounds clearly go deeper: the real kind of broken that can't be fixed by throwing cash at it and stints in therapy. This is the kind of broken that left Chuck motherless even though his mother wasn't dead. He's been looking it in the eyes since he was an infant.
Chuck sighs and breaks their stare off. “It's not that I don't care, it's that I can't do anything about it, so why get into it?”
Draco's fingers are cool enough against his face that he's startled slightly. The thumb and forefinger are calloused from wand-use because the English stick to that convention out of stubbornness and rigidity. Or that's what his dad says. Chuck turns into the kiss because he doesn't want to scare Draco away. He's not sure this is a great idea, and even considering turning this down just proves that Blair has fucked his head up. Draco's hair brushes his face, gets caught in his eyelashes so he's forced to close his eyes. The ocean seems closer with his eyes closed, right on top of them instead of yards away.
The kiss slides from fumbling and tentative to nasty when Chuck stops deluding himself about who he is and what he wants and just slides into Draco's lap. The material of the chair conforms to necessity and they're propped up with Chuck's legs framed and held secure without being confined. He twists his hands in Draco's hair and pulls his head back as he sucks his bottom lip into his mouth to bite. Draco has some kind of heavy ring on his right hand that glides hot up Chuck's spine under his shirt.
Sex is Chuck's natural element. He knows how to press his hips just right for everyone’s benefit. He knows how to tug and bite in order to make pain pleasurable. His fingernails are manicured, so he never scratches on accident.
Draco's pants have some weird V-patterned button flap. Later, Chuck will check that out to see if it's a pleasing design element, but now he uses the same charms on Draco's clothes as he does on his own when he dresses and undresses to get at enough skin to make this worth his time.
The vibrations coming from Draco's chest and throat don't really register at first as Chuck sprints towards his goal. It's only when he notices Draco's hand on his hip has stilled and the one on his face is just tracing along Chuck's hairline that he pulls back to see Draco smiling. It's not a bad look. Any other time, the sexy sprawl and debauched Miles Standish gear would probably be excellent jack off material, but right now Chuck's confronted with the truth that Draco's laughing at him in the middle of making out.
“Don't get agitated.” Draco holds on to him when Chuck reels back to shove off of him and stomp away. Draco's hand slides back into his hair and turns his face so that he can lean up and lick at Chuck's lower lip. His casual command of the situation sends Chuck's mind racing after Draco's age.
“I used to know another boy like you.” He sighs into an open-mouthed kiss and Chuck kisses back by reflex, moaning as Draco pulls his hair hard, hard enough to really hurt. “A boy with plots and plans, so in control.” He sounds depressed maybe, wistful maybe, Chuck doesn't care, because he also presses his hand into the back of Chuck's pants and presses them closer together.
“That boy's gone now, gone forever, be careful what you play with, Polaris.”
Chuck does shove away this time, because no one calls him that. No one but his mother, and even her only sparingly.
Draco's grip is a lot stronger than one would assume, and he holds on, tumbling them on their sides into a bed full of some sweet-smelling flowers. He holds on and manages to get his hands around Chuck's wrists, laughing all the while, laughing loud and with either real pleasure or insanity. Chuck's growing more angry by the second, the fury he's been banking at Blair and Nate rampaging through him, consuming him until he's snapping his teeth at Draco and struggling in earnest.
Without warning, Draco releases him and pulls himself to his feet with a whole fucking lot more dignity than Chuck thinks he could manage.
“You think you're angry now, but it will be worse when it turns inward. You'll learn that sort of anger, one with no outlet but yourself, is far worse.” He fades into the gloom of the garden as Chuck lays in the dirt, pebbles, and broken foliage panting, hard, but amazingly not all that angry.
He jerks himself off right there to images of Draco's jawline in the candle light and the remembered sound of his low laughter.
*
When Chuck wakes up sometime in the early afternoon, it's to the sounds of bustle and diligence in the house. He bathes and dresses and presses all his new bruises with a smirk. He feels almost like himself.
His grandmother is holding court in the bright sunshine of the violently colorful gardens, light refracting through the diamonds in her dark grey hair and blinding her companions. She smiles at him, with the edge she always reserves for those she doesn't bother to dissemble with, offering her cheek for him to kiss. Draco sits on a bench a little way off with a finger stuck in a book chatting with a middle-aged woman in a red, traditional Heliolite gown.
“I hear you and Draco are fast friends.” His grandmother gestures for him to sit in a vacant chair next to her. The other people at the table all surreptitiously fade away to stroll through the gardens or whatever the unimportant do when dismissed by their betters.
Chuck glances over at Draco.
“I don't think I'd put it that way, no.” Lying to her is always pointless. He sits and crosses his legs.
“I think you're misjudging that.” She sips her juice and places a hand over her eyes to look towards Draco. “He mentioned you by name, that's significant.”
Chuck suddenly wants out of this web and back into his own. He isn't good at playing the pawn. If there are strings to pull, he'd rather pull them, not get tugged around.
His grandmother turns her regard back to him. “So. You've found what you were looking for, then. I thought that might be the case when you met Sissy's boy. You two have so much in common, after all.”
Chuck thinks that maybe they did once, but it's not like Chuck's going to have to deal with the same trial by fire that Draco must have, so he doubts the results will be the same in the end. Chuck watches Draco across the garden and doesn't look away when Draco meets his eyes.
“I don't know about that, Grandmother.”
Her hand is cool and smooth on top of his when she clasps his fingers. The air feels thin, the clouds above their heads seem more insubstantial than usual.
“The point of family is to learn from each other's mistakes.”
Oh, it's one of those days. Chuck stifles a yawn.
*
One note: Melanos is Black in greek.