#thistle-verse

The keys to your kingdom - meme fic rec

It wasn’t a lie, precisely, when he told Pansy that relationships didn’t alarm him. More a half-truth. Bodies and touching don’t alarm him, but the other stuff, the non-physical; well, he’s seen enough during the war and after, seen that humans are messy creatures when they blur their borders with other humans. Illogical, unpredictable. But then Harry Potter has always defied logic, hasn’t he? No touching needed.

“I can’t— I won’t— force my way into your life, Draco. I can’t fix things for you. It just doesn’t work like that.” Draco stares at him, and Potter reaches slowly and takes his arm, pulling his hand away from his body and turning it so that his wrist is held up between them. Potter pushes at his sleeve, pushes it up his forearm until it’s all wadded up around his elbow. When Draco looks down, the remnants of his Dark Mark are clear on his skin between them. It’s a pale gray, the outlines smudged. Some days he even forgets it’s there, for a while, until he flips on the light in the kitchen or dries himself off after a shower. Like a ghost, it haunts his arm. Draco tries to pull away, but Potter holds on tight to his hand. He traces over the mark with his index finger, gentle loops over and over, and the skin starts to tingle underneath his touch. It’s like Potter’s finger has a tiny flame, etching some strange magic into his skin. After a moment, Potter stops, and Draco can see the letters glowing there, right over top of the old mark. Human, it says. Draco blinks back a sudden rush of moisture in his eyes, and tries to get free again. Potter holds on for another long moment, his fingers wrapped around the bones of Draco’s wrist. “Get over yourself, Draco,” he says. “You aren’t the only person who went through a war.” He lets go now, and Draco is already growing cold where his touch had been. “Everyone—everyone— has a ghost in their garden.”

“It’s so strange to me,” Harry says. “All that power, but you can’t even live where you want to.” Draco shrugs. “That’s not how power works.” Harry is looking at him in a way Draco doesn’t understand—he is both here with Draco, warm and rumpled, and far away, somewhere Draco cannot follow. “And how does power work?” Draco opens his mouth, then closes it. On a bench beside his bed is a marble chess set. He reaches over and grabs a handful of the pieces. “The king is here.” He lays the king down on his chest. “And then the people”—two pawns nestle together on his belly—“are down here. The king owns the resources, so the power flows down.” Draco makes a sweeping motion down his torso. “But the king can’t make or tend all of it on his own, so the power flows upward, too. But then here”—Draco places a rook between the king piece and the pawns—“is me. I don’t have power. Power merely moves through me.” Harry traces a path with gentle fingertips from the king, lingers over the rook, and then continues down to the pawns. Draco’s skin goosebumps under his touch. “But you can direct it, in a way,” Harry whispers. “You can…shape things.” “Yes,” says Draco. They are speaking so softly now, as if telling secrets. Something feels delicate, nascent about the moment. Harry makes the circuit with his fingers a few more times, watching the chess pieces tremble on Draco’s skin. He leans down and kisses Draco’s chest, right above the king.

"Yes," Harry says, his voice so dark and low he barely recognizes it. "Yes, Draco, more." And Draco provides. Harry has known the forest, and now he knows Draco; Draco's hands on his body where Harry's blood rushes to meet him, Draco's mouth around his cock and Draco pressing into him hard, the slap of his skin against every flushed inch of Harry's. He looks at Draco and he touches Draco and he wants and wants and wants, and it feels so good to want him. This desire, ever-renewing, never quite fulfilled. Draco makes him miraculous over and over again. In the forest, Harry is done with his dying. But here, with Draco, Harry is more sure than ever that he is not done with his living.

“I didn’t want the hype to begin with, you know. You probably don’t believe that.” “No, I do,” Draco says, and realises it’s true. “I used to believe you loved all the attention, but that was jealousy, I think. I can tell you don’t, these days.” Potter’s head is bent down toward his drawn-up knees, the back of his neck illuminated by the light above the door behind them. He’s rubbing his thumb against the side of his index finger, as if the tobacco has left traces he is trying to erase.  “I think that’s all I’ll ever be, sometimes,” he says. “That I peaked at seventeen, on one very long night.” Draco watches the small, slender bone in Potter’s wrist jump, over and over, with the movement of his hand. He can observe all the minute details of Potter, the tiniest, everyday, extraordinary things, and never feel satisfied. Potter sounds so tired. “Work. Ginny— you know we broke up last year? Yeah, it was all over the damned papers. This house.” He throws a look over his shoulder, then turns back to the rather gloomy garden. “Sometimes it feels like the only thing I’ve done right is dying.” Draco sucks in an involuntary, unsteady breath. It’s hard to imagine, that Potter could see himself like that— in such a small sliver, so achingly distorted— but then maybe that’s the problem with being too close. It's hard to make out the whole of yourself. “I very much doubt that, Potter. I feel sure your friends and family would disagree, too,” he says after a moment. He stares down at the toes of his own boots. “Anyway, you didn’t exactly do the whole death thing right, did you? Here you sit, very much alive.”

It's summer in Poland and Malfoy is beside him. They'd been working opposite sides of the crowd and somehow drifted together again toward the back. Their mark isn't here, anyway. Harry could call this tail off now—or at least send Malfoy back, as there's clearly no need for both of them to waste the night here—but he doesn't. Malfoy has taken off the hat he'd been wearing in a concession to the heat coming off the crowd, and the glow of the fairy lights catches against the gold of his hair, his jaw a dark, angular outline like another piece of rubble. Harry decides that was when it started, even though he knows that beginnings don't actually happen that way—not all at once, not in self-contained moments rising up like monuments to mark before and after. There were a hundred moments before that one, each a seed and a nudge, a single wand flare in the night, indistinguishable until lined up into a pattern completed much later, and by chance. But Harry likes this way of marking the shift, and so: It begins with the tremble of air between them, disturbed into being by the heavy bass, so loud and insistent Harry can't distinguish it from his own heartbeat. With the way everything feels a little unreal, a little smudged at the edges. The press of strangers like an ocean around them, the bodies all moving together, rhythm and abandon, and something makes him wonder what Malfoy's skin would taste like, if Harry's mouth found its way to his neck, just below the hinge of that stone-steel-starlight jaw.

They wake up late the next morning—too late. The first thing Harry becomes aware of is Luna's hair draped across his shoulder, and then the unfortunate positioning of her elbow against his ribcage. He winces and rolls toward her a little, then realizes that the only thing covering his naked body is a thin hotel sheet down around his waist, and also that Malfoy is just as naked, and still in bed with him. He squints at them—he's not sure where his glasses have got to. Malfoy is very much awake, and very red-faced, staring at him across the pillows. Luna is sitting cross-ways between them, her head resting on Harry's stomach and her legs draped over Draco. She is eating croissants and dripping honey down onto the bed. "Oh, good morning, Harry," she says as he tries to pull the sheet up higher. "I brought breakfast. How was your evening with Draco?" "I—erm. Well." "Stimulating," Malfoy answers for him. Harry blinks, and then Luna shifts around until her face is grinning down at him.   "How lovely," she says. "I see the Nargles are gone, too. Here, Draco—have a croissant." Harry covers his face with an arm for a moment. He laughs. And then he eats a damn croissant.