Fic: to go wherever dreaming goes [HP, H/D, 1/3, NC17.]
Lo, and there was fic. Initially there was a challenge for pornish_pixies that was due in September 2004, but I got blocked. And then I got really really unblocked. (It stands at roughly 19000 words.)

Thanks to marksykins for betaing this first bit, and nopejr, florahart, thermidor, ciceronianus and moonlight69 for the beta work and advice on the whole fic. This is the third draft; I had planned on sending it back to beta to check my revisions, but I looked it over and decided that I liked it, so nyah.

The challenge was: quiet000001 requested: Harry/Draco, university (college) AU, muggle or magic. undepressing ending.

Title is from Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, as is the summary. Also huge references to Robert Jordan (the concept of stilling), gay music, the city of Melbourne, and two sentences inspired (or cribbed) from Stephen King's Dark Tower sequence.

Summary: There is also love in the world.

Essentially, I was trying to write a fic that ashkitty or bookshop or circe_tigana or the more upbeat h/d people in fandom could enjoy. It does get dark and vaguely non-con in places, but I think there's enough of a payoff, textually speaking (If anyone tells me I am not a romantic now, I slap them. In a way neither of us will enjoy.)

DVD style commentary of the fic may occur this weekend, as it's probably the most rewritten/revised/considered thing I've ever written, and also possibly my best fic ever.



to go wherever dreaming goes: part the first

Time is like a face upon the water.

The moonlight shines in from on high, spilling across the cluttered desk that sits by the large window and moves on to illuminate the beige pile carpet (a remnant of interior decorating gone by) that covers the swathe of relatively empty floor that hangs like a dividing line between the two beds, coming up sharp against the closed door.

Night-time has cast everything in a washed out pall, muted shades of blue and grey that deepen from the brilliant white of the moonlight into the hungry shadows of the furthest reaches of the room. As the night wears on, the moonlight shifts, creeping further and further up the door as the moon crawls towards the horizon.

Anyone familiar with television or film would recognise the room for what it is: a typical, bog-standard dormitory, complete with en suite bathroom; even if one of the occupants doesn’t seem to recognise this. On one side of the room, posters adorn the walls. Magazines that cover everything from soft pornography to sports litter the carpet. Empty crisp packets and drink bottles lie underfoot. The faint smell of sweat and come lingers in the air, and it’s clear the laundry hamper hasn’t been emptied. All in all, this person seemed not to care about such things, with the simple, casual calm of someone who knows he’ll get around to them before the fungus grows.

That side of the room is empty. The other is not.

Amongst tangled sheets, two figures hide in the shadows, safe from the moonlight, arms wrapped around one another. The one lying against the mattress, propped up on pillows – the one whose bed it is, who kicked the rubbish under the bed and refused to hang his posters on the walls – is all pale skin, lightly muscled body and ashy brown hair, even if hints of what looked like silver showed at the roots. The other has black hair and skin that shows signs of dirt and scars that would never entirely be clean or healed, nestled on that pale chest with a casualness about his body that suggests both dirt and scarring have been there for a while.

In times gone by, other places, other worlds, other lives, they would have been recognised and feted, loved and hated and adored, but all that is no longer, and Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy must deal with the terrible burden of being themselves. It’s that burden that keeps Draco up at night, keeps him frayed and wanting into the day, made heavy with tiredness and indecision. Now, Draco stares down at the man in his arms with a blank expression, so intent he doesn’t seem capable of noticing how he shifts in his arms, and yet compensates automatically. Draco looks at Potter’s face as if tracing every detail to memory, as if he might vanish at any moment, as if he can’t be here.

He used to be Harry, once. Not anymore. This is easier, Draco thinks, reducing him to Potter, making this just the age old game of chase and play and contempt and betrayal, and he shouldn’t have expected anything better.

Potter wakes with a barely exhaled breath, moving from sleep to wakefulness in a matter of moments, a skill learned and learned well over the course of the War when slumber was a luxury only the dead could afford.

“What are you looking at?” he asks, nuzzling at Draco’s jaw, lazily tasting the pale skin of his neck, and Draco turns his head to allow Potter more, but his movements are perfunctory, automatic.

“You,” he murmurs so softly that he can barely be heard, but he knows know exactly what Potter can and can’t hear. “What else would I be looking at?”

Potter nudges Draco’s face back to him with his nose, and grins; teeth ever so white in the dark. “Never could get enough of me, could you?” he teases, and when Draco doesn’t respond with anything but a continued stare, Potter slides down that pale, lean body (so unscarred, so unlike his own, Draco thinks, how can he stand that others have not suffered as he has suffered) and takes Draco’s half-hard cock into his mouth.

This is a familiar pleasure and a familiar torment; he wasn’t completely aroused – how could he be, being in close proximity to Potter all the time? But he is getting hard now, due to the pressure of lips and tongue as Potter suckles on just the head of his cock at first, delicate and adoring in a way that Draco can’t bear. He jerks his head up at the ceiling so he doesn’t have to watch the expression in Potter’s face, so he doesn’t have to watch Potter doing this, Potter blowing him, so Potter can just be a warm, wet mouth and Draco is not undone by it.

Just a warm, wet mouth, and Draco feels every moment of it. Tongue sliding along the underside, cock moving in and out of that mouth, and even though he can’t see it, even though he denies every moment, shuts his eyes and squeezes them tight, writhes on the bed until hands have to pin his hips to the sheets and hold him in place; despite all his attempts at avoidance and escape he can still picture it, what it would be like, what it is and what it is not – and who is there, in front of him.

Draco balls his hand into a fist and jams it between his lips so he will not moan that name when he comes.

The room falls to quiet and moonlight again, and in a while, even Draco finds repose in sleep.

***

This is his time, the time of his apotheosis and subsequent failure; the time that haunts his dreams and that he sees in the flash every time he blinks. A year and a half in the past, it manages to fill his present with a pervasive doom that this is all his future will be.

He’s struggling, of course. Caught by the vise-like grip that holds his neck as if it were so much kindling and not anything greater; that jiggles him on cue when Potter marches into the Great Hall wand at the ready, and does not let go just because Harry Potter has stopped for one moment.

In defeat and despair Voldemort has learned caution, and he always was more than willing to sacrifice others to achieve his own ends. Draco’s heard stories, Draco isn’t stupid: but those stories take on a certain significance when it all comes down to this, and the only thing shielding Voldemort from the righteous fury of everyone’s favourite Boy is his poor body.

“I do hope you’re not planning on him being your last defender,” Potter says, as if he can afford to be nonchalant and cocky at a time like this. “I mean, he’s a bit of a nonce, really, and he’d probably rather do anything than spoil my pretty face. Right, Malfoy?”

“I’ll show you!” Draco snarls, and tries to lash out at him, but the imposing reptilian presence that hovers both behind him and in his soul simply shakes him again, and it’s a fair few seconds before Draco can see without blotches in front of his eyes.

“Foolish little boy,” Voldemort intones, and Draco can’t help but whimper at the cold, cruel tone of voice, and the way those fingers are beginning to dig into his neck. “You really think I need a defender such as this one? He is alive out of all my followers merely because he is the most craven, and because he has power over you.”

Voldemort explained rather impatiently beforehand that Draco, as a fellow former student, would be someone who Potter could essentially be unable to kill, but from the look in Potter’s eyes, Draco is not sure he’s any kind of protection.

“You’ve been listening to the wrong rumours,” Potter quips. “Still, the sorry state of Death Eater intelligence might lead one to see how that’s the only leg you’ve got to stand on.”

Draco resists the ludicrous impulse to giggle; it’s nerves, nerves and anxiety coupled with the fact that Voldemort has his other hand ghosting over Draco’s stomach, and whatever came back at the end of fourth year wasn’t very human and never intended to be. That hand is just as dry and scaly as the rest of him, and Draco can’t pretend he doesn’t almost feel that sibilant tongue quivering behind him when Voldemort speaks, or remember the gleaming of claws on the end of those hands. He’s seen Voldemort rend someone open from the crotch to the neck and play with their sodding intestines. He has so much more to lose here than Potter; he always did.

“Potter,” he hisses, and Potter actually looks at him, and Voldemort doesn’t shake him like a rag doll yet again. “Potter. Please.“

Potter’s face tightens at that, as if Draco’s asking far too much – as if survival is something he’s not deserving of, and his hand tightens on his wand as he aims it at Draco, and through him, the Dark Lord.

“You think you can kill him, boy? After all, you must, if you are to kill me.” Voldemort asks Potter, quiet and soft and dangerous and caresses Draco’s body with his claws so tenderly; and yet the fabric lies in shreds, revealing pink and pale skin across his belly and lower arm. Voldemort’s voice is raspy like he’s got the mother of all common colds, and it’s an appropriate metaphor for someone who might be considered disease made flesh. Draco briefly congratulates himself on it, and settles back to the task at hand, which from the looks of things is to die, and not especially peacefully; so he figures he deserves whatever congratulations he can take at this point.

“Potter!” Draco’s cry is full of indignation, that it could come to this, but when he sees the expression in Potter’s face he realises it sort of had to.

There is no going back, no stopping, no surrender. There never was, and even now, even now when the world lies at his back and all it costs is one little death, Harry Potter looks like a man who could not be refused.

The hand on Potter’s wand is perhaps a little shaky – at least, Draco flatters himself to think so – but the incantation that pours from Potter’s mouth is sure and without a break. The words wrap around his ears, settle in his hair, his skin, and a fine bolt of glimmering white light emerges from the top of his wand.

The world and the words slow and Draco can almost understand what Potter is saying, but not quite, and isn’t that appropriate? He’s about to die and he can’t understand him, never could, never would and when the bolt soars and arches and finds its target – skin coloured with ink and heat and old, old magic – Draco shrieks with pain so intense that he can’t recognise his own screams, and falls into white.

The last thing he can hear is Voldemort’s laughter and the world goes away.

***

When he wakes, it’s black. Fear returns to his gut and take up residence, like it never went away and probably hadn’t. He is comforted by the feel of it, the weight. The cold sweat he’s broken out in restores him to himself. It’s been so long since he wasn’t afraid he wouldn’t know what to do if he wasn’t, and fraying nerves and adrenaline rush are his friends now, not that he has any others.

The sheets are clammy against his skin, and he turns to and fro, desperate to orient himself, hoping that his lack of sight is just a lack of light but no matter where he turns he can’t see, he can’t see and after all he’s been through, after facing school and Potter and war and hatred and death, this is his fate – to be reduced to blindness, made a cripple, driven to penury and humiliation and dependence upon the world around him, when Draco tried and fought and damn near died to have that very world reduced to ash and rubble. Fear rises in his stomach, turns solid, approaches hysteria. He’s going to be sick, he knows it, and by telling himself he’ll make it true. His movements grow more frantic, jerky, and then there’s a hand on his arm and Draco stills automatically, reduced to touch and hearing and taste and smell.

“Stop,” says someone, and it’s Potter. Draco feels himself snarl. Of course it would be. “It’s alright. You’ll be fine in a few days.”

There are many arguments he could make, many witty ripostes, savage cutting blows. Draco knows this; he just can’t find any of them right now, and is forced to utilise a single, angry truth. “You did this to me.”

“I know.” A callused hand slides into his own; Draco grips it hard enough to hurt and lets himself sleep again.

***

When he wakes, he can see again. Certainly, his vision is a bit blurred and colours are slightly off, but he would recognise the figure standing over him any day of the week. He recognised him when he was blind, didn’t he? Give Draco some credit, he thinks, and wonders when he started thinking of himself in the third person. How utterly déclassé.

He glances up at Potter, who actually has the gall to look both vaguely concerned and vaguely disgusted at the same time, grunts because his captor (and Draco assumes he is under arrest, crimes against the state and sins against nature and all that) refuses to give him the time of day, and so Draco refuses to give him anything at all, including the satisfaction of his interest, and looks about himself.

He is stretched out on a camp bed, protected from the elements by a thick expanse of canvas: khaki, and not the cleanest in the world. A tent, then, and a haphazard one at that. Field hospital, Draco surmises, and absently wonders what happened to the other Death Eaters as he reaches to scratch at his chest. There’s a distinct tickling sensation, an itch, a feeling that something has been cut – but it’s something he can put aside, for the moment. He’s survived worse; war has made him tougher and defeat will make him sharper and he’ll give them all hell for both. He doesn’t care about the other Death Eaters – he did know most of them, after all, and that thoroughly unpleasant experience leads him to wish they were all dead – but information is power and Merlin knows he needs some power right about now.

Draco’s gaze continues to crawl about the tent: Potter coughs, pointedly, but Draco dismisses him because he wants to and because he can, finally and completely disregard the person who’s beaten him once, twice, thrice and forever. He thinks the tent must have been set up on the grounds of Hogwarts, but he’s not sure of that or much else and he needs clues. He’s so busy not looking at Potter that he spectacularly fails to see that Professor McGonagall is sitting just by the entrance to the tent, garbed all in black as is her wont, hands folded in her lap.

“Welcome back to the world of the living, Mister Malfoy,” she enunciates primly, as if she could do anything but. Prim and prudish and octogenarian, that is how Draco remembers her and that is how she is, as he casts a quick eye over her. Age has not wearied her, but the years have condemned. When he first saw her, she was old. She doesn’t seem any older now, but then he doubted she could get more faded and wrinkled and sagging, dried up piece of cunt that she is. She acknowledges the attention, but doesn’t do anything about it, and he feels a brief moment of visceral rage. This was the Deputy Headmistress he so loathed? This was a woman who claimed that being fair and balanced meant to discriminate against the Slytherins in the same way Snape did against the Gryffindors. This was a woman who helped lead the war effort, who took on running Hogwarts when Dumbledore fell, who proved canny and determined despite her age, who singularly failed to die despite Draco personally trying to kill her four times in three years. People on the other side seemed to have refusing to die like good little victims in common; it was, upon reflection, probably a reason why they won.

She knows all this, of course: knows that he tried to kill her, knows that he knows she knows, and doesn’t care one whit. It drains him, that he is so easily dismissed by these people, that he is seen simply an object lesson in ‘Why Slytherins Are Bad’ and ‘Also, Why We Won And You Did Not,’ not even held as a joke or source of pity-and-contempt. He’s too tired for anger, and it wouldn’t do any good – he’d just lose again, so he makes a brief scene out of flopping back against the sheets, discontent. Potter glares at him, but even that isn’t enough to give him any joy any more. There’s just khaki ceiling and khaki walls and a khaki life and khaki is quite frankly, so not his colour. The itch continues to build in his chest, tingle throughout his body, and pushes down the sheets, not caring that he’s naked, not caring that they might see. He runs fingers over skin that’s not even scarred anymore – the Healers did a lovely job, and how long has he been unconscious? Long enough for this to happen, long enough for his history to be smoothed away and erased, deliberately forgotten because they are compassionate and guilty, and Draco’s very existence is both crime and mortifying reminder of their own mistakes, their own inability to redeem him. But they made him look nice and pretty again, so he supposes they want him grateful. “What’s wrong with me?” he asks, barely able to keep from screaming, and he can see the look that Potter and McGonagall share. They know, they know and he hasn’t even got his wand. His fingers flex for it automatically, but it’s not there and he feels cut again.

“Where’s my wand?”

Potter answers. “It was destroyed in the feedback.” He doesn’t say ‘You’ll need to find a new one’. There’s something they’re not telling him and all three know it. Information might be power, and if so Draco is utterly impotent. He doesn’t like the idea.

“What’s wrong with me?” That flicker of a glance, again, and it drives him to greater rages, bellowing, and he throws his pillow at Potter, who sadly manages to duck in time. “Tell me!”

McGonagall speaks again, precise and calm, eye at the centre of Draco’s storm. “You have been stilled,” she says, and Draco looks at her, just looks, stunned before he remembers what the words mean and he starts screaming again, so loud and shrill and empty of all thought that he has to be sedated.

***

When he wakes, he’s still in the tent. Destined to be a useless, miserable, half mad wreck of a wizard, or a wizard that once was, Draco gazes up at the ceiling. It’s still khaki. How annoying.

“I suppose it’s irreversible,” he murmurs, and isn’t surprised when a familiar figure clad all in black rises from her seat to look at him with a calm expression.

“None of the remedies tried thus far on your fellow captives have worked. And considering some of the side-effects, we decided it might be best to stop trying.” McGonagall pauses as she moves forward, swish swish swish as her robes brush together. “There were already some we couldn’t save. The shock of the stilling was too much for them. There are historical precedents.” Her words are dry and dusty, just like her. The fates and lives of people she couldn’t be bothered caring about because they were wrong. “Some even committed suicide when they learned of their fates.” Her tone suggests he should be grateful he isn’t dead, and if he could, Draco would beat her around the head with sticks until she cried.

Stilling. Not something Draco would have learned in class, but then he always found the Malfoy family library far more interesting than anything Professor Binns spouted, in part because his father never liked him disturbing the old tomes and learning anything for himself. Stilling, noun. Dated from the more ancient days of witchcraft and wizardry, back in the times before wands, when everyone had to just chant loudly, concentrate and pray to whatever deities they liked that week in the hope it wouldn’t blow up in their face. To be stilled, verb. Before wands, magic was dangerous. People could overextend themselves. People could lack focus. Either could get you stilled; the victim of a catastrophic backlash of magic so intense that it burned the very ability out of you, leaving you a squib in all but name. Except squibs didn’t know what it was like in the first place, and there was always that sensation of a cut, something missing, what had been lost, never to be found again.

The intellectual in him is pleased at what he can recall and what he bothered to learn; the student in him blushes with pride. The academic wonders how the word originated, at the history and etymology and why stilling is stilling and not just burn out, and the wizard in him doesn’t care because the wizard in him is dead and Draco isn’t sure he’s anyone anymore.

“Go away,” he tells McGonagall blankly, and looks at the ceiling. There’s a rustle of canvas, and he doesn’t need to look to know she’s gone.

He sleeps, because he can.

***

When he wakes, she’s back, and close. Next to his bed, upright and stiff in her chair, because he’s never seen her relax, not ever. Draco doesn’t think she can. “Obviously,” she tells him, and it must be obvious if McGonagall – vicious, stubborn, self-righteous harridan that she is – can be bothered telling one hopeless little former Slytherin it is. “Obviously, there has been some discussion of your place in future.”

I’ll bet there has, Draco wants to snarl, but manages to forebear. Potter chooses that moment to enter, and he’s got oatmeal with him, a great steaming plate that’s all Draco’s been allowed to have for breakfast since he woke. He places it on the covers, right over Draco’s stomach and seems miffed when Draco doesn’t fall all over himself in thanks.

Gryffindors.

“You can choose to stay in the wizarding world,” McGonagall continues, arch and precise, “and the Ministry promises that it will do its best to...integrate you and find you a position to which your current capabilities will be well suited.”

Draco has a sudden image of himself as Filch in ten years time and barely suppresses a shudder. “Or?”

Potter smiles like a shark, and steps forward. “Or the Ministry will pay to relocate you in the Muggle world. Your choice of location, of course.”

Draco stares at him. Stares and stares and stares, because they’ve gone mad. Being useless is one thing, but being Muggle is worse. Except – Potter brought him breakfast. McGonagall is trying to play nice. There’s something they’re not telling him, he thinks, and says so.

The brief glance they share with one another is all the proof he needs, and he explodes again, arms whirling, and throws the bowl of oatmeal across the room. It lands with a muffled clatter against the tent wall, and sticks there for a second before it slides onto the ground with a slick sound, leaving a thick grey lumpy trail behind.

“I wish that had been your head,” Draco snarls at Potter, who doesn’t bother to pick it up. “Now, I know you both think I’m a thoroughly horrid sort who deserved to die like the rest of my unrepentantly foul and evil brethren, but last time I checked, claiming the moral high ground means you actually have to be moral.” He enunciates each and every word with a clear syllable of poison. “What aren’t you being honest about?”

It’s McGonagall who speaks, and thereby takes any fall, blame or excuse that Potter may have had. Typical. “It isn’t simply confined to those who wore the Mark.”

“...Makes sense,” Draco breathes, and the world becomes alive with new possibilities. “Voldemort always was a paranoid tyrannical old bastard. He used to boast about how his enemies would fall after he died.”

“We heard the same rumours,” Potter says, heavily, and looks almost guilty when Draco glances at him. “...I just thought he was being mad, as usual.”

Draco’s sniff makes it very clear what he thinks of that, and he leans forward in his bed, eyes gleaming. Information is knowledge is power and now is his opportunity to profit. “So, what was his counterstroke?”

“As far as we can ascertain, he used his connection with his followers - the Dark Mark - to tap into their magical potential, and in doing so, tap into the potential of every wizard in Great Britain. He corrupted it, somehow,” McGonagall says, clearly struggling to express herself in words that don’t quite work, “tainted it. We didn’t realise at first; we can’t actually feel any change to magic when we use it–”

“I can,” Potter bursts out, sullen and proud and bitter and it would be so like him to claim something no-one else can do. It would even be more like him, Draco reflects sourly, to be able to actually do it.

“At any rate,” McGonagall continues, brisk and professional as if she is not talking about the end of the world as they know it, not at all, “the effect of his counterstroke is increasing. At first it was localised simply to this area; incantations and charms going astray or simply not working, but in the past week we’ve lost twenty four wizards from here to Dover in a variety of accidents from splinching to being burned alive when the cooking charm they were using turned against them. Not using wands seems to reduce the level of unpredictability, but it’s still not entirely safe, and yet what can we do? We don’t know how to do anything else.”

They both want a decision, and Draco gets the feeling he won’t be left alone until he makes one, and the one they apparently want. “Well, then, there’s nothing left for me here,” he declares, and wished he had something else to throw. It is true, after all; they made sure of that, and if he’s perfectly honest, so did he. There are a lot of people who want him dead now, quite probably, and he can’t even protect himself. Escape may be his only option; that or crying like a girl and throwing himself upon the mercy of the Ministry, and the idea of relying on their competency doesn’t exactly fill him with warm fluffy assurances, but then warm fluffy assurances seem rather hard to come by at the moment. “I guess you’d better sign me up for a crash course in Muggle studies.”

Potter’s gleaming grin is back. “You’ll need someone to teach you. And a guide when you’re there. I volunteered.”

It’s possibly several minutes, hours or maybe even days before Draco can speak again. “You what?” Hardly pithy, but he is in acute shock.

McGonagall coughs. It’s clear she disapproves; then, she disapproves of everything. Draco would recommend she get laid, except that thought is utterly repulsive to anyone who’s ever got any in all of human history. Which technically isn’t Draco, although obviously he doesn’t like to share that around.

Potter and McGonagall share another little look – that level of subtlety would have meant they lasted all of about five minutes in Slytherin – before Potter mooches off, hands in his pockets like a surly teen. He even kicks the bed on his way out, springs creaking, and Draco bounces a bit in his wake.

“You’ll have to excuse him, Mister Malfoy. Part of Harry’s avoidance is that the war interrupted your schooling, and now that it is over, I simply wish all students who can to continue their study.”

The world as he knows it is over, McGonagall wants everyone back at school (whether it stills them or not) and apparently the only reason he has Potter as a nursemaid is because he doesn’t want to pick up a quill again. Draco bursts into laughter and loses himself in it until he aches.

***

Draco wakes in a cold sweat, surrounded by the dying memory of Voldemort’s laughter ringing in his ears, his voice, his skull, and he’s...not in a tent anymore. The room is old and musty, lined with wallpaper that’s falling off the walls in tatters and the imprints where paintings used to be. There are shadows that play across the walls, dark recesses he can barely see into, and all the windows are barred with heavy curtains of velvet and damask. The lamp on the ceiling is dim, and flickers on the odd occasion; it’s not exactly the most comforting environment to be in, and Draco hunches his body against it, curling deeper under the covers. The floor is an absolute disgrace and the ceiling’s not much better. The plaster is cracked, the gilt all but gone, and the ornamentation has seen better days. Probably better centuries.

He’s in a decent bed, or at least a vague attempt at one, and the sheets seem to be fairly good cotton, from the feel against his skin. He’s naked, so someone may have seen him when they moved him, and he glances down at himself, seeing the way the sheet falls and folds against his chest, over his hand. It’s only then he realises he doesn’t have the Dark Mark anymore, and raises his wrist to his face to stare at it in wonder.

This is what freedom must be like, he supposes, and what a great boon it is. No family, no friends, no solace, no power, no nothing, not even an idea of where he is–

“Welcome to the Most Ancient and Noble House of Black,” Potter speaks from out of the shadows, and Draco jumps. He recognises the name, of course, and decides it’s probably most unwise to make comments at this point, all things considered. He knows just what Sirius Black meant to one Harry James Potter.

“You’ve been watching me, Potter.”

“Thought it was about time I returned the favour,” Potter opines as he moves towards him, twirling something small and semitransparent in his fingers. “After all, you have been stalking me since I was eleven.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Draco snarls, and moves to push the sheets aside. Potter strides quickly to the bed, reaches out and grabs Draco’s wrist like a vise. Draco whines and whimpers and writhes, but he can’t break free, and there’s nothing handy to throw at him.

“I don’t consider it flattery,” Potter tells him in a low voice that brooks no argument, and his eyes are almost black in the low light. “I never did. Now, despite the fact I have no problems with you showing off your pencil dick to all and sundry, there are people downstairs who would find it offensive rather than actually laughable. There’s nothing here you can throw at me. Nothing you can use to hurt me. There are locks on the door. People know you’re here, but they don’t care. You’re my charge. Mine. I am going to teach you and instruct you and make sure you can take care of yourself, and then we’ll both be free to be whoever we want in a place that’s never heard of Harry Potter or Draco Malfoy, and doesn’t demand salvation that we can’t give them.”

“This is all about your ego, then,” Draco sneers, accusingly.

“No,” Potter breathes, and it’s almost sad, soft and tender and melancholy. “This is about me watching my friends fade away and knowing I can’t prevent it, this time. I’ve fought all my battles, Malfoy, and I haven’t got anything left to give. Except you.”

Draco opens his mouth to ask Potter why him, why is Draco his, what does it all mean, how can you be so damn confusing Mr I’m So Full Of Teenage Angst, but Potter holds up the thing he was twirling and forestalls him.

“This,” Potter informs him, “is a pen.”

Class has begun.

[Second part may be found here; third part may be found here.]