Fic: 'second star to the right, and straight on till morning' [HP, Draco/Neville, NC-17, 1/3]

And again, there was fic. This was written for the May installment of the pornish_pixies Fantasy Fest; however, it is roughly 10,000 words, so.

Many thanks to florahart, thermidor, and nopejr for providing criticism and beta work on the first three drafts of this, and marksykins for stepping in last minute when I absolutely was despairing over and hating the fic and helping with a few key issues. It's a far, far better fic as a result of those four people.

The challenge was: contrariwise requested "Neville/Draco. Draco's a pushy, snotty, talkative bottom and Neville's confused. Eventually-taking-charge!Neville melts my socks." I hope this comes close.

The fic was influenced by: Peter Pan (as given by the title), West Side Story, and a lot of very gay music, as demonstrated by the summary - for example, the Pet Shop Boys cover of "Somewhere" rules my socks (and should rule your socks, too. I also considered entitling it 'your own private idaho' at one stage, but 'love shack' would have been a little too much, I fear.)

Summary: You were always on my mind. (History is written by the victors.)



second star to the right, and straight on till morning: part one.

Neville walks the corridors with the heavy footfalls of a corpse, his eyes dull, expression blank. If Snape were to come across him and give him detention, Neville would not cower or question or evade; he would merely raise his face to the sight of that spiteful, horrid man and even Snape would be struck by the emptiness he saw there. Everywhere Neville goes, he sees the same dullness, the same lack of life. His housemates attempt to engage him in conversation, jokes, play, but each of their attempts has merely grated against a place in Neville that cannot, will not, be reached, and he knows it as well as they.

At the beginning of the school year, Harry attempted to say a few words, to reassure him that things would be better. Neville just looked at him and saw a young man weighed down by his own grief, and made his own attempt to smile. He didn’t think it was much good, but Harry acknowledged it and moved on, head unbowed and eyes dry. Neither of them has anything left for tears. Luna tried, and tried, and tried, bombarding him by turns with awkward silences and henpecked questions, until she burst into sobs that seemed both sad and comforting, wrapping slender arms around his tubby frame, and kissed him on the cheek.

That private moment seemed to mark a turning point in the sixth year of Neville Longbottom. It was as if she was saying goodbye, resigned to both his fate and hers. After that day, people avoided Neville. It wasn’t as if he had ever been popular, but the rumours had spread, and the story told of the end of fifth year and the grave battle that he had fought and survived. People pointed him out in the corridors, nodded when he passed him, asked him for advice. Neville tolerated it with a growing unease, uncertain in his response, fumbling for words. He did his best to help and not to hinder, but the conversation would always stray to his bravery, his determination, the glory he didn’t seek but nonetheless had, and Neville would politely excuse himself and leave before he broke out in a cold, uncomfortable sweat.

His housemates wanted to make him a hero; some others wanted to make him an enemy, and Neville felt like neither, so he shrugged and avoided and shut down until everyone passed by and left him alone, tucked within a cocoon of regret and futility. It felt better this way.

It was good to be unwanted and dismissed again. There were no promises sought that he could not keep, especially his own.

Now it is the sixth week of term, and Neville has taken to drifting through the corridors. Not the fifth, not the seventh, but the sixth. Enough time to get used to the pattern of school again, and enough time to realise it will not get any better: that this is all he is, and there is nothing more. Few of the prefects see him even when he’s out beyond curfew, and fewer still would bother to stop him; his red-rimmed, harsh gaze has grown more prominent of late, and he resembles some latter-day prophet.

He used to think things would be different, this year. He thought they had to be.

But that was then and this is now, and Neville Longbottom turns around some corridor far distant from Gryffindor Tower, almost walking into Draco Malfoy in the process. The Slytherin prefect is a haggard reminder of his old self; still sharp, still narrow, but reduced and worn as Neville is and wants to be. They stare at each other in a moment of stark shock, Malfoy all but rocking back on his heels, hand immediately clasping his wand like he perceives Neville to be a threat. Neville has never thought of himself as being a threat – amiable, yes, lame, certainly, roly-poly and non-threatening a given, but then he wasn’t the one turned into a slug at the end of last year. Draco Malfoy is a hollow man, and he knows it, and so does Neville, and Neville doesn’t care.

“Well,” Draco sneers half a second too late, eyes tightening, wand raised, “what have we here?”

Neville just blinks at him, and doesn’t bother responding. Malfoy isn’t worth the trouble, and he adjusts his footsteps to take him away, but Malfoy steps right into his path with a fluid grace that seems all the more in place because of his fear.

“I’m not letting you get away with breaching curfew,” Malfoy tells him loftily. “I wouldn’t be a good prefect if I did now, would I?”

Neville blinks again, and finds he actually wants to say something. It’s an odd sensation, and he has to lick his lips a few times and swallow; when he speaks his throat feels dry and rusty but it proves him true and carries him through. “You aren’t a good prefect,” he says, simply, the terrible blandness in his voice just emphasising his dismissal, and Malfoy blanches before pushing forward, wand hand shaking a little.

“You take that back!” he cries, and Neville doesn’t care.

“You’re not a good prefect,” he repeats, stepping forward.

“I’m warning you,” says Malfoy, but Neville has had enough warnings in his life.

“You’re petty, you’re nasty, you have no consideration for anyone but yourself and so no-one has any consideration for you,” he continues, one step after another, implacable, indefatigable, because he’s too tired and too empty and Malfoy might as well hex him into a coma; he’s come too far to be beaten. “You only succeed through fear and intimidation because nobody could ever like you.”

“How dare you,” breathes Malfoy, but it’s an empty threat and they both know it. Hobbled by fear and caged by defeat, he swings his arm just a second too late; Neville’s wand is already there and Malfoy’s wrist comes down on it with a clatter and a yelp. Their eyes meet again, and Neville almost expects Draco to burst into tears. “How dare you.”

“Go away,” Neville tells him, heart heavy, as he shuffles past him.

He gets a few yards down the corridor before the quick sound of footfalls alerts him to the prospect of another attack, but Neville doesn’t bother to turn around. Sure enough, Malfoy is too petty and too angry to do anything well considered, and launches himself at Neville’s back with a yowl. He scratches, digs his knees in, pulls hair. Neville smartly tucks his wand back in his robes so he doesn’t have to worry about it and reverses right into the wall with a sickening crunch, feeling Malfoy slide to the ground behind him.

When he turns around, Malfoy looks small, battered and insignificant, a trickle of blood flowing from a nostril that he absently pats at with an elegant cuff, leaving a smear of red on his upper lip that he flicks at with his tongue. “You helped them capture my father,” Draco tells him like he has some kind of power, like the threat implicit in his eyes, the hate, the anger, the utter loathing is something Neville is supposed to take seriously.

“I did,” Neville acknowledges, and raises his hand, bending down to crouch further towards Draco. He doesn’t stop when Malfoy flinches, turning his face away.

“Don’t hurt me,” he whines, terribly frightened, before the cold remnant of his rage resurfaces and he stares at Neville with cold eyes. “But then, I wouldn’t expect anything less from you Gryffindors.”

“Stop it,” Neville tells him irritably. He holds Malfoy’s chin in place with a firm grip, and dabs delicately at the blood with a hanky. Malfoy reminds him of one the warier predatory plants he’s nursed in the greenhouses, something exotic and tentative and out of place. Malfoy is all silver and fey; not pretty, too precise to be pretty, every line on his face definite and cutting like a knife, graven with displeasure and fear and contempt. Neville’s amazed Draco’s stayed still for so long, let alone not dug a boot in while Neville was helping him, but then true to form, something ugly displaces all that paleness and Draco spits right in his face with a grunt.

“Don’t touch me. You took my father away.” Then he turns his head back to face the wall, just as dismissive as Neville was of him. “I don’t need help from the likes of you.”

Straightening with bones that seem to creak and age years with the passing of each second, Neville wipes his face with the blood-stained handkerchief and tucks it back up his cuff. He thinks about how he would have felt if someone had taken his parents away. He thinks about what it might have been like to get to know them.

He doesn’t want to think about Malfoy and his parents; it makes him too human.

“…Why do you carry a handkerchief around anyway?” Malfoy asks him in a quiet voice as Neville turns away. He stills in the process of lifting his foot to make that first difficult step away.

“My Gran always taught me to clean up after myself,” Neville replies, just as calm and quiet and sad, because his Gran taught him to do that whether he needed it or not, and manages that step. The next is easier, and the one after easier still.

“They executed my father because you caught him,” Malfoy calls as Neville walks off, ever quicker, ever faster, shoulders slumped and head bowed, because Neville’s found that Malfoy is at his most dazzling when he’s broken.

That night, and each night after, he unfolds himself on the bed like a child’s toy, all stiff joints and laborious motion, and turns to look at the neatly folded handkerchief that rests on his bedside table. He doesn’t put it in the laundry for the house elves; he doesn’t want to.

One week after meeting Draco in the corridor, the Ministry finally confiscates Malfoy Manor as the spoils of crime. When the Aurors and Wizengamot officials arrive to take legal custody of the demesne of the Ancient and Authorative House of Malfoy a day later, they find Narcissa Malfoy strung up by her neck in the formal study.

It is the talk of the school; Draco stays in the Slytherin dorms for a week, does not attend classes, does not speak. Pansy Parkinson takes him food, and from her put upon moaning, Draco is not the easiest of victims to nurse.

Neville stares at the white square of cloth on his dresser and dreams of his parents.

*

“You’re good at that,” Draco tells him, almost simpering, and bows his head when Neville glances over at him. It is the ninth week of school, and Malfoy has started paying him attention. It is known to many that Neville spends the occasional evening in the greenhouses potting and fertilising and just generally gardening to his heart’s content. Plants are, after all, what they are, and nothing more. Savage and noble, each according to its nature, and in this nature they are constant and predictable. They will grow if Neville helps, and sometimes not, no matter how hard he tries, but Neville pays them all the love and attention and care he can, working with steady hands and aching back until his hands cramp and shudder with fistfuls of soil and he can work no more. It’s a good, honest thing to be doing, and when things need pruning, Neville steels himself and cuts away the dead wood with the care of a lover in mourning.

“Don’t be nice to me just because you want something,” he admonishes Draco carefully, and doesn’t need to look to see the way Draco glowers a little, lowering his gaze like it won’t be noticed, and brushes some stray hair from his forehead. He still looks emaciated, pinched, sickly; all thin wrists and skin too pale to be completely healthy, and his nightshirt hangs off him so he resembles a boy of ten more than sixteen, but he comes to the greenhouses whenever Neville is there – and, Neville thinks, sometimes when he is not.

“I wanted to ask you about my father.”

“You usually do.”

“You were there. I didn’t get to see him.”

It is the old conversation, one they have had and keep having and will probably have until the end of time. Draco picks at him steadily but not surely, occasionally rising into a sulk or rant or tantrum, or boring at Neville’s back with hollow eyes. Whether angry or sullen, he continues the interrogation, and Neville never gives him one bit of information; his hands keep packing soil at the base of the plant he’s working on, occasionally watering it from a small can, and Draco doesn’t leave.

“I’ll do whatever you want me to,” Draco tells him, soft and unrepentant at the same time, as if blaming Neville that he’s come to this and too shy to admit what this is.

Neville sets the can down gracelessly, and turns. This is different. He hasn’t felt anything different since the holidays. “Anything?” he asks, stretching the word out into each of its syllables.

“Anything,” Draco nods, solemn and certain, curling in on himself. Neville reminds himself that Draco’s a cheat, a bully and a liar, and Neville shouldn’t trust him for a second. He turns back to his watering.

“Please. He’s my father.” Draco looks like he’s going to snivel, shivering in the warm air of the greenhouse, and the moonlight that plays across his skin just emphasises the recent ravages of his life. He looks all the purer for it, refined into one human portrait of abject misery, and Neville thinks that this is the great spectre he and his have cowered from for years, that this is the seed of the family who ruined his – a pale, weak thing that can’t even articulate a word of thanks. A few weeks ago he would have found it pathetic; soon after, depressing. Now Draco is simply Draco; and he acts according to his nature and nothing more.

“What are you looking at?” Draco demands to know, arching back and sitting straighter on the bench on which he’s found repose, and Neville has the decency to contain a snort.

“You,” he breathes. Draco’s look of uncertainty brings a small sense of satisfaction. “Kiss me.” It’s not an unusual request; Neville has never been kissed yet, and he wants to – like all boys his age he is full of aching desire and an inability to express it. The most minor things will create visions in his head of full-breasted women and lean men; he can stare at the stone floor for hours and somehow still get an erection chafing against his underwear. Now he has the chance to do something about that, and it’s free and it’s easy, and it’s taking advantage, which feels more than a little wrong.

Neville frowns to himself, tongue resting against his upper lip, and Draco seems to take the frown as a grimace, scurrying back a little in worry and fear. “I beg your pardon?” he squawks, but it’s mostly muted, and he stares at Neville with wide, grey eyes.

“You said you’d do anything,” Neville reminds him. The words are heavy in his throat, but they’re true. Draco did say that; this isn’t Neville’s fault.

“I don’t even like boys,” scowls Draco, puffing up a little.

Neville just looks at him until Draco blushes under the weight of the lie. “I’ve seen the way you look at Harry.”

That scores a hit, a very palpable hit; Draco’s skin flushes further, his eyes widen and his mouth struggles to make words for a few long moments. The glow in Neville’s gut begins to grow; this is power, this is fear, and Draco is so very, very obvious in his vulnerabilities. “I…that was just a stupid boyhood crush,” admits Draco with a certain rueful rakishness, dragging those slender fingers through hair gone limp with abuse and lack of care, and tries to laugh it off. “I don’t like him anymore.”

“You don’t?”

Draco gives a brittle little laugh as he plays with his hair again. “He’s not exactly the nicest person in the world,” he muses, leaning a little closer, confiding in him. “He’s never been able to even tolerate me.” There’s a pause, and Draco sweeps his lower lip with his tongue in a slow, careful drag, looking up at Neville from under dainty eyelashes. “Not like you do, Longbottom.” It’s sweet, Draco’s attempts to be coy; almost complimentary, and Neville finds he can ignore the clumsiness - he's clumsy enough himself, and in no position to judge.

Their mouths meet clumsily somewhere between them; they bash their noses together gently at first, and Draco smiles a little at that, before Neville slides his thick, round fingers into that pale gossamer hair and guides their mouths together more properly. There’s a small exhalation of breath against his mouth that makes Neville want to giggle; he’s never done this before and neither has Draco probably, which makes him want to smile and cry at the same time. Draco is just a boy looking for a friend, and he doesn’t protest when Neville parts his lips gently with his tongue and slowly explores his mouth. Indeed, the Slytherin – the Malfoy – the son of the House of Black – seems to welcome it, curling an arm lazily around Neville’s waist to push up his shirt and drag delicate fingers over Neville’s belly. The exhalation of breath continues to tickle, turns into a whimper, a sigh, a gentle pleased ‘Mmm’ as Neville languidly strokes against his tongue, over his palate and his teeth. He smells as he looks; not sickly, but not well, hair full of shampoo and lemon and antiseptic as Neville breaks the kiss to bury his face in it, ruffling it gently. Draco mews underneath him. His skin tastes clean, almost metallic, with just a touch of lavender from soap and scrubbing, and when Neville finds his mouth again, he tastes as sharp as spring water and as nebulous as starshine. All the strength in the world is in this pale, pointed young man, who will break and break and break but not be bowed, and just to prove this, Neville yanks his head back with a certain savagery to mark Draco’s neck with teeth and tongue. “God, Longbottom,” Draco gasps out, clutching at him, whimpering, hauling Neville into his lap so they can rut against each other like animals and isn’t too long before all that dry humping causes Draco to moan and clutch and whimper and leave a wet spreading stain on the front of his trousers.

Neville stops and looks at him with a terrible anger, hand still clutching in Draco’s hair, observing the rising marks on that creamy flesh, the evidence in his crotch. He doesn’t want to say it. He has to. He’s a Longbottom, and they’ve lost too much for too long. “Your father cried when they caught him and led him out,” he says, with a cold calm conviction that doesn’t stop when Draco begins to shudder in his arms. “He ranted and raved and foamed at the mouth like a rabid dog,” he continues, as compassionate as he can be under the circumstances.

Draco buries his head in Neville’s neck and cries until he stops. When he looks up, he’s all puffy-eyed and stubborn, and Neville’s never seen a more beautiful sight. “They put him down like one.”

There is a long pause, and it takes Draco time to even recognise how he’s come in his pants. “That wasn’t my first time, you know,” he says, quite prissily, and Neville absently runs fingers along thin hair. “I’ve been with girls.”

“But you like boys,” Neville observes.

“I don’t like you, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Draco shoots back. “I actually have taste.”

“You came in your trousers, Draco,” Neville states, quite openly confused, because Draco is no idiot – and he’s not just a Malfoy anymore – but he’s certainly not making any kind of sense that Neville understands.

“That happens when you do what we did,” Draco claims airily, and looks down at himself. “I should go and clean up.” He looks over at Neville with an odd kind of hunger, and Neville, ever patient, begins to put the pieces together. “I hope you’re not going to make me get you off,” he continues, toss of his head, lips pursed.

Draco’s treating this whole thing like some kind of joke, and Neville doesn’t know whether he wants to smack him or hold him. There are some things which are still supposed to be sacred, and if Draco needs a lesson in the sort of good manners Neville has always been schooled in and never allowed to step over, he’ll get one.

“I’m going to make you…you know,” Neville fumbles for the words, and can’t help but blush as he stands on unsteady legs, wiping sweaty palms on the coarse fabric of his jumper.

“What?” Draco snaps, amused. “Kiss you again? Touch you up? Oh, the mighty and experienced Longbottom knows all the-”

“Knees, Malfoy,” Neville cuts him off simply, and stands on unsteady legs, hands already at his belt. Draco glances up at him, and doesn’t leave when Neville undoes his belt with a clink.

“I said knees,” Neville repeats, swallowing, because yes, this is power, and this is rage and this is fear and hurt and anger and exactly what he deserves. This is the boy who tormented him, and whose family stole his, and who laughed and bullied and – and – “Please, Draco.”

“Don’t hurt me,” Draco warns him, but submits, and doesn’t leave or protest when Neville threads his fingers that aren’t half as delicate or slender or capable as Draco’s into that head of hair, pushes down his slacks and boxers, and rubs the head of his cock against that sharp, displeased mouth to leave a glistening trail.

The wet breath of Draco’s mouth against the tip of his dick only makes him shudder and want more – so much more, all the more he can get, because this is real and this is happening, and he slides it into that mouth and between those lips with a slick sound as Draco half-heartedly attempts to suck at the same time. It takes them a while; all inexperience and spit, but they find a movement with Neville’s jerky hips and Draco’s bobbing head, and Neville digs his fingers a little deeper into that hair and murmurs out a bunch of nonsense words, empty endearments, platitudes, telling Draco how good he is, how sweet, how wet and hot and ‘oh’, and he does feel glorious around him, so that’s no lie. It’s not quite perfect; they don’t quite mesh, and Draco uses his teeth accidentally once or twice and Neville yelps and pulls in his hair – which Draco actually seems to like, releasing long shaky moans around Neville’s cock, and finally Neville loses it and holds the back of his head in place as he fucks that face, fucks that proud mouth, reduces him to tears and blubber and choking, makes those thin lips pout and stretch and bruise, and finally proves that Draco Malfoy is actually useful for something other than causing pain.

When he comes, he comes silently, grinding his teeth together rather than give Draco the satisfaction, and yet when he pulls out and kneels the hurt on Draco’s face is more than he can bear.

“I didn’t hurt you, did I?” Neville asks, and finds he actually cares.

“You didn’t,” Draco tells him, voice husky and throaty and thoroughly fucked, and it’s true: Malfoy is at his most powerful when he’s weak, when he’s just another victim to be broken a little bit more and bandaged up.

“Tell me if your father was worth that,” Neville manages to say, and turns back to his planting. Draco looks at him a while before sniffling, adjusting his now dirty clothes and ragged hair, and pads off on uncertain feet. Neville counts the seconds until he’s out of earshot of the greenhouse, and is violently ill over the garden beds.

He wonders if Bellatrix Lestrange felt like this, if all torturers feel like this, giddy and high and powerful and terrible, and pushes the thought away before he’s ill again. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen; Neville’s not sure if he was meant to care about Draco or not, but care he does, now.

[Part Two may be found here; Part Three may be found here.]