fic: One of Them for cyanidecoffee
Title: One of Them
Author: a_kindara
Giftee: cyanidecoffee
Rating: PG-13
Word Count(for fic): 2240
Characters/Pairing: Draco/Blaise
Warnings: none
Author/Artist's Notes: none
Summary: It’s flat, matter-of-fact, angry just the same. Blaise is startled to hear it coming out of his own mouth, because it’s the truth-exactly what’s coursing through his veins right now, exactly the statement that’s forming in his head.
“You’re one of them.”
It’s flat, matter-of-fact, angry just the same. Blaise is startled to hear it coming out of his own mouth, because it’s exactly what’s coursing through his veins right now, the ugly hatred of all those people who call themselves the Death Eaters, who make their way in the world by groveling and lying and bowing their heads to someone supposed to be great. Blaise has always despised people like that, whether they offer their cold-blooded willingness to kill for a taste of power or their beauty and charm to live the high life.
That’s referring to his mother, of course. He’s usually disgusted at her lifestyle, although he can definitely see its benefits, and he’s perfectly aware that his own comfortable living is due to her insatiable attraction to the rich and homicidal habits. Blaise thinks his father was the second or third, before his mother learned to be careful with these things. And it’s not like he has qualms with living off the money she obtains. Slytherin, after all-he’ll take the money when it’s good, no matter how much he detests its origin.
It’s not as if he’s ever said that to her. He rarely speaks his mind. That’s what makes it so strange when he sees the vaguely Satanic tattoo marring the white skin of Malfoy’s-Draco’s-no, Malfoy’s arm and immediately jerks away, letting the angry words spill out.
“You’re one of them.”
Malfoy flushes deep red, pulling his arm back against his pallid chest as if burnt. “You didn’t see that,” he snaps.
“Hell I didn’t,” says Blaise. “I should’ve known it-you’re one of them.”
“Shut up,” hisses the other boy, glancing around-as if they could be overheard here. Blaise takes it as an insult. As if he of people is incapable of finding a secure place in Hogwarts for a midnight rendezvous. Honestly, the Astronomy Tower-so cliché.
“No one’s going to hear us,” he drawls, mimicking Malfoy’s own speech. “They actually let you join them, then? They trust a sniveling weakling like you that much?”
Malfoy draws back as if slapped. “I’m not-”
“Yes, you are, and you know it,” Blaise snaps back. “We’re not talking about that.”
“What are you asking, then?” Malfoy sneers. “I should think I’ve already made it perfectly obvious by now that I am, indeed, a member the Dark Lord’s most privileged followers, and-”
“Like your dear Daddy,” says Blaise. “In Azkaban. And you-it’s killing you, isn’t it? Whatever he’s having you do. No, don’t try and hide it from me, I don’t know and I don’t care. I thought I’d imagined it, but you’re even skinnier than usual. Have you been sleeping?”
The red in Malfoy’s face, receded by now, returns in full force.
“Let me see it,” Blaise commands, his curiosity overcoming his revulsion. Malfoy doesn’t respond, but he doesn’t try to stop Blaise when he stands and reaches forward to pull his arm out straight, shivering a little when Blaise’s fingertips brush his chest.
It’s the same as the picture he saw in the Prophet over two years ago, but this isn’t made of green stars hovering in the air above a place he’s never been (Mother was never interested in Quidditch), it’s bold and black and burned into the flesh of a boy he’s known for years. Blaise hates to admit it, but it startles him.
“Why the hell did you agree to this?” he asks, dropping Draco’s arm as if it’s disgusting, an impression he very much wants to convey. “If you’re so desperate to keep that a secret?”
Malfoy doesn’t seem to have an answer. “I didn’t think,” he says at last.
“You rarely do.”
“No-didn’t think we’d, you know. Get this far.” He’s an even deeper red, if possible.
Blaise snorts. “Amateur.” To think he actually thought himself attracted to something so pathetic, so wormlike as that. To think . . .
One of them.
Straightening his robes with an elegant sneer, Blaise strides off down the corridor, leaving Malfoy to gather his clothes and find his way back to the Slytherin dorms of his own accord.
Despite his best efforts, he lies awake for a long time, and it isn’t even Goyle’s ceaseless snoring that keeps him up, but rather the fact that Malfoy doesn’t come in at all.
Blaise doesn’t fall asleep that night, and as hard as he tries, he can’t convince himself that Malfoy simply got lost on the way back, miserable oaf that he is.
---
Blaise is mortified to find that he needs to remind himself, repeatedly, that he despises Malfoy, that Malfoy is a Death Eater-one of them-and Blaise wants nothing to do with him. Worse yet, he has to remind himself that Malfoy is Malfoy and by no means Draco, and that still more importantly, he is not attractive in any way, shape, or form.
The last one might be a bit of a stretch, he concedes. Malfoy is somewhat attractive, no matter how much he might like to deny it. Even though the boy looks like he’s starving himself or something, even though the shadows under his eyes have grown so deep that he looks almost ghostly. Even though that might be a nervous twitch he’s developed, and he skips most of his classes and never comes to sleep in the dorm anymore.
Blaise is quite sure he’s noticed none of this.
When Malfoy disappears to the hospital wing and there are wild rumors about Potter and dark curses, though, Blaise does notice, and after a few days of impatient and irritable lack of any sort of action, he sneaks into the hospital wing one night.
As he expected, Draco is awake when he comes in, and struggles to sit up as soon as he sees him. Blaise stops a few feet from the bed, hands in his pockets. Draco’s-Malfoy’s face is crisscrossed with lines of scars that might or mightn’t form, and despite his frighteningly hollow cheeks, he wears the same trademark scowl.
“You let Potter do that to you?” asks Blaise.
Malfoy’s scowl deepens. “Shut up. And it isn’t bad-I could’ve been out of here two days ago, if that idiot Pomfrey weren’t fussing over me like an old mother hen.”
“Why so eager to leave?” Blaise asks, scuffing a foot disinterestedly on the floor. “Afraid someone will find You-Know-What?”
“No,” says Draco, looking away. “Well-yes, but . . .”
It’s strange how much one person’s weakness can level the playing field. Blaise finds himself incapable of a snide comment, instead asking simply, “What?”
“I’m falling behind,” says Draco, looking up, and Blaise can actually see tears shining in those deep hollows around his eyes. “I’m not going to make it, I don’t even know how-”
“What are you talking about?”
“My task,” Malfoy mutters. “The task he gave me.” And suddenly he’s crying, and Blaise finds himself utterly shocked, incapable of processing this information, because Malfoy is crying about that thing that’s made him so proud.
So afraid, whispers a corner of his mind. Starving himself. Never sleeping. Yes, he’s proud.
“He’s going to kill me,” gasps Malfoy between sobs, burying his head in his knees, looking away. “He’s going to kill me, and-and I can’t do anything, I don’t know how, I can’t-”
Blaise has never had to deal with a crying anyone before, much less a crying Draco Malfoy, so it’s as much a surprise to him as it is to Malfoy when he crosses the remaining space in a few swift steps and sits on the edge of the hospital bed, cupping Malfoy’s chin and tilting his face up to kiss away the tears.
He doesn’t even realize he’s murmuring “you’re not going to die” over and over until Draco’s head drops against his chest, tears soaking a wet patch into his shirt, and they both fall silent, Blaise burying his face in Draco’s hair.
---
Nothing happens.
Strictly speaking, that isn’t true. Things happen, insignificant things, ordinary things, things that are part of life as always. But nothing happens with Draco, or Malfoy, or whatever he is now. He and Blaise don’t speak, don’t look at each other, don’t even remember the night at the hospital wing if they can help it. Blaise watches him and tries to figure out what could possibly be going on, but all he can see is that Draco is descending further and further into terror, madness, whatever you call it when a boy becomes a man in the worst possible way. Hysteria, maybe. It works as well as anything.
He catches Draco one night in the common room as the end of the year is approaching. It’s late, and they’re alone. Draco heads straight for the exit without looking at Blaise.
“Going somewhere?”
Draco turns. “It’s none of your business,” he says, and the light in his eyes now is something entirely different, a fanaticism that genuinely spooks Blaise. He’s grinning in an insane sort of way that might be happiness and might be acknowledgment of his fate, Blaise can’t quite tell which.
“You’re killing yourself,” Blaise informs him, “and I’m making it my business.”
Draco raises his wand.
“Try anything and I’ll yell for the whole House to hear,” Blaise warns him.
Draco only laughs. The twitch of his wand is too quick for Blaise to block, and when he tries to yell something in return, there’s no sound-Malfoy’s silenced him. Swiftly, he raises his own wand, but again, Malfoy’s too quick. “Expelliarmus,” he says, almost carelessly, and Blaise’s wand goes flying from his hand. He’s helpless now; Malfoy can just deliver a quick Stupefy or a Petrificus totalus and he’ll be out of the way. He clenches his fists, furious at himself for being so easy to get past.
Draco watches him as if contemplating, tapping his wand idly against his palm. He doesn’t seem to feel the need to speak. Blaise should tackle him, really, but he knows it would be useless. Maybe if he offered sex. Somehow, he doubts that at this point Malfoy would be interested.
“Crucio,” says Draco, so softly and casually that it could almost be a comment rather than a spell, but the pain that lances through Blaise’s body is anything but casual. His mouth tears open in a soundless scream as he drops to the floor, clutching his legs, vision clouding. It hurts, hurts like hell and more-pain fills his senses, his consciousness, he’s not sure who he is anymore-nothing but pain.
And then it’s gone, just as suddenly as it was there, and he’s gasping for breath on the floor, not even able to muster the strength to reach out and try to grab him as Draco strolls idly by, a smirk playing across his mouth.
---
Afterward, there’s very little Blaise can find out for certain.
Dumbledore’s dead, and Draco is gone along with Professor Snape, and when Blaise asks around and digs for information deeper than he knew a person even could dig and eventually hears a rumor that maybe Draco was the one who was supposed to kill Dumbledore, but somehow he couldn’t do it and Snape did instead, and now who knows if You-Know-Who’s going to kill Draco for failing or not, and who knows what’s going on with Snape-a traitor! Snape! they all knew it, all along-and there’s so little hard fact that Blaise eventually just gives up.
He stays home with Mother the next year rather than going back to school, because Hogwarts is in shambles in any case and there’s little use in trying. He reads the papers, hears about the war from afar. There’s little mention of the Malfoys and none of Draco. Eventually, Blaise gives up on the war altogether, and he and Mother move to America in pursuit of some new conquest.
Harry Potter defeats the Dark Lord on July thirty-first, 1998, and the celebration rocks the entire Earth. Blaise leaves Mother to deal with this husband of hers and travels back to England, for no real reason he can discern. There’s more news daily-Death Eaters being taken to Azkaban, gruesome remains of missing persons being found. Blaise reads both accounts voraciously, and each day he’s torn between relief and anxiety when he sees no Draco Malfoy in either list.
It’s not as if it matters, now. His and Malfoy’s paths diverged long ago, in the Slytherin common room, with a Silencing Spell and a Cruciatus. He knows that.
And yet, he’s not very surprised at all when he opens his door one morning and finds on the step a singularly bloody, exhausted, and only half-conscious Draco Malfoy, blonde hair grown overlong and stained with his own blood, robes torn and dirty from travel and hiding.
And he’s not very surprised at himself when he unthinkingly raises his former classmate into the air with a twitch of his wand, sends him floating gently inside to settle on the couch, uses all the healing spells he knows.
Nor is he surprised to find the Dark Mark still burned boldly into Draco’s arm. It doesn’t matter, not now, with Voldemort dead and Potter triumphant. Not much that used to matter makes a difference these days.
Besides, by now, Blaise is pretty damn certain he can make sure that Draco Malfoy is never again someone anyone could call one of them.
Author: a_kindara
Giftee: cyanidecoffee
Rating: PG-13
Word Count(for fic): 2240
Characters/Pairing: Draco/Blaise
Warnings: none
Author/Artist's Notes: none
Summary: It’s flat, matter-of-fact, angry just the same. Blaise is startled to hear it coming out of his own mouth, because it’s the truth-exactly what’s coursing through his veins right now, exactly the statement that’s forming in his head.
“You’re one of them.”
It’s flat, matter-of-fact, angry just the same. Blaise is startled to hear it coming out of his own mouth, because it’s exactly what’s coursing through his veins right now, the ugly hatred of all those people who call themselves the Death Eaters, who make their way in the world by groveling and lying and bowing their heads to someone supposed to be great. Blaise has always despised people like that, whether they offer their cold-blooded willingness to kill for a taste of power or their beauty and charm to live the high life.
That’s referring to his mother, of course. He’s usually disgusted at her lifestyle, although he can definitely see its benefits, and he’s perfectly aware that his own comfortable living is due to her insatiable attraction to the rich and homicidal habits. Blaise thinks his father was the second or third, before his mother learned to be careful with these things. And it’s not like he has qualms with living off the money she obtains. Slytherin, after all-he’ll take the money when it’s good, no matter how much he detests its origin.
It’s not as if he’s ever said that to her. He rarely speaks his mind. That’s what makes it so strange when he sees the vaguely Satanic tattoo marring the white skin of Malfoy’s-Draco’s-no, Malfoy’s arm and immediately jerks away, letting the angry words spill out.
“You’re one of them.”
Malfoy flushes deep red, pulling his arm back against his pallid chest as if burnt. “You didn’t see that,” he snaps.
“Hell I didn’t,” says Blaise. “I should’ve known it-you’re one of them.”
“Shut up,” hisses the other boy, glancing around-as if they could be overheard here. Blaise takes it as an insult. As if he of people is incapable of finding a secure place in Hogwarts for a midnight rendezvous. Honestly, the Astronomy Tower-so cliché.
“No one’s going to hear us,” he drawls, mimicking Malfoy’s own speech. “They actually let you join them, then? They trust a sniveling weakling like you that much?”
Malfoy draws back as if slapped. “I’m not-”
“Yes, you are, and you know it,” Blaise snaps back. “We’re not talking about that.”
“What are you asking, then?” Malfoy sneers. “I should think I’ve already made it perfectly obvious by now that I am, indeed, a member the Dark Lord’s most privileged followers, and-”
“Like your dear Daddy,” says Blaise. “In Azkaban. And you-it’s killing you, isn’t it? Whatever he’s having you do. No, don’t try and hide it from me, I don’t know and I don’t care. I thought I’d imagined it, but you’re even skinnier than usual. Have you been sleeping?”
The red in Malfoy’s face, receded by now, returns in full force.
“Let me see it,” Blaise commands, his curiosity overcoming his revulsion. Malfoy doesn’t respond, but he doesn’t try to stop Blaise when he stands and reaches forward to pull his arm out straight, shivering a little when Blaise’s fingertips brush his chest.
It’s the same as the picture he saw in the Prophet over two years ago, but this isn’t made of green stars hovering in the air above a place he’s never been (Mother was never interested in Quidditch), it’s bold and black and burned into the flesh of a boy he’s known for years. Blaise hates to admit it, but it startles him.
“Why the hell did you agree to this?” he asks, dropping Draco’s arm as if it’s disgusting, an impression he very much wants to convey. “If you’re so desperate to keep that a secret?”
Malfoy doesn’t seem to have an answer. “I didn’t think,” he says at last.
“You rarely do.”
“No-didn’t think we’d, you know. Get this far.” He’s an even deeper red, if possible.
Blaise snorts. “Amateur.” To think he actually thought himself attracted to something so pathetic, so wormlike as that. To think . . .
One of them.
Straightening his robes with an elegant sneer, Blaise strides off down the corridor, leaving Malfoy to gather his clothes and find his way back to the Slytherin dorms of his own accord.
Despite his best efforts, he lies awake for a long time, and it isn’t even Goyle’s ceaseless snoring that keeps him up, but rather the fact that Malfoy doesn’t come in at all.
Blaise doesn’t fall asleep that night, and as hard as he tries, he can’t convince himself that Malfoy simply got lost on the way back, miserable oaf that he is.
---
Blaise is mortified to find that he needs to remind himself, repeatedly, that he despises Malfoy, that Malfoy is a Death Eater-one of them-and Blaise wants nothing to do with him. Worse yet, he has to remind himself that Malfoy is Malfoy and by no means Draco, and that still more importantly, he is not attractive in any way, shape, or form.
The last one might be a bit of a stretch, he concedes. Malfoy is somewhat attractive, no matter how much he might like to deny it. Even though the boy looks like he’s starving himself or something, even though the shadows under his eyes have grown so deep that he looks almost ghostly. Even though that might be a nervous twitch he’s developed, and he skips most of his classes and never comes to sleep in the dorm anymore.
Blaise is quite sure he’s noticed none of this.
When Malfoy disappears to the hospital wing and there are wild rumors about Potter and dark curses, though, Blaise does notice, and after a few days of impatient and irritable lack of any sort of action, he sneaks into the hospital wing one night.
As he expected, Draco is awake when he comes in, and struggles to sit up as soon as he sees him. Blaise stops a few feet from the bed, hands in his pockets. Draco’s-Malfoy’s face is crisscrossed with lines of scars that might or mightn’t form, and despite his frighteningly hollow cheeks, he wears the same trademark scowl.
“You let Potter do that to you?” asks Blaise.
Malfoy’s scowl deepens. “Shut up. And it isn’t bad-I could’ve been out of here two days ago, if that idiot Pomfrey weren’t fussing over me like an old mother hen.”
“Why so eager to leave?” Blaise asks, scuffing a foot disinterestedly on the floor. “Afraid someone will find You-Know-What?”
“No,” says Draco, looking away. “Well-yes, but . . .”
It’s strange how much one person’s weakness can level the playing field. Blaise finds himself incapable of a snide comment, instead asking simply, “What?”
“I’m falling behind,” says Draco, looking up, and Blaise can actually see tears shining in those deep hollows around his eyes. “I’m not going to make it, I don’t even know how-”
“What are you talking about?”
“My task,” Malfoy mutters. “The task he gave me.” And suddenly he’s crying, and Blaise finds himself utterly shocked, incapable of processing this information, because Malfoy is crying about that thing that’s made him so proud.
So afraid, whispers a corner of his mind. Starving himself. Never sleeping. Yes, he’s proud.
“He’s going to kill me,” gasps Malfoy between sobs, burying his head in his knees, looking away. “He’s going to kill me, and-and I can’t do anything, I don’t know how, I can’t-”
Blaise has never had to deal with a crying anyone before, much less a crying Draco Malfoy, so it’s as much a surprise to him as it is to Malfoy when he crosses the remaining space in a few swift steps and sits on the edge of the hospital bed, cupping Malfoy’s chin and tilting his face up to kiss away the tears.
He doesn’t even realize he’s murmuring “you’re not going to die” over and over until Draco’s head drops against his chest, tears soaking a wet patch into his shirt, and they both fall silent, Blaise burying his face in Draco’s hair.
---
Nothing happens.
Strictly speaking, that isn’t true. Things happen, insignificant things, ordinary things, things that are part of life as always. But nothing happens with Draco, or Malfoy, or whatever he is now. He and Blaise don’t speak, don’t look at each other, don’t even remember the night at the hospital wing if they can help it. Blaise watches him and tries to figure out what could possibly be going on, but all he can see is that Draco is descending further and further into terror, madness, whatever you call it when a boy becomes a man in the worst possible way. Hysteria, maybe. It works as well as anything.
He catches Draco one night in the common room as the end of the year is approaching. It’s late, and they’re alone. Draco heads straight for the exit without looking at Blaise.
“Going somewhere?”
Draco turns. “It’s none of your business,” he says, and the light in his eyes now is something entirely different, a fanaticism that genuinely spooks Blaise. He’s grinning in an insane sort of way that might be happiness and might be acknowledgment of his fate, Blaise can’t quite tell which.
“You’re killing yourself,” Blaise informs him, “and I’m making it my business.”
Draco raises his wand.
“Try anything and I’ll yell for the whole House to hear,” Blaise warns him.
Draco only laughs. The twitch of his wand is too quick for Blaise to block, and when he tries to yell something in return, there’s no sound-Malfoy’s silenced him. Swiftly, he raises his own wand, but again, Malfoy’s too quick. “Expelliarmus,” he says, almost carelessly, and Blaise’s wand goes flying from his hand. He’s helpless now; Malfoy can just deliver a quick Stupefy or a Petrificus totalus and he’ll be out of the way. He clenches his fists, furious at himself for being so easy to get past.
Draco watches him as if contemplating, tapping his wand idly against his palm. He doesn’t seem to feel the need to speak. Blaise should tackle him, really, but he knows it would be useless. Maybe if he offered sex. Somehow, he doubts that at this point Malfoy would be interested.
“Crucio,” says Draco, so softly and casually that it could almost be a comment rather than a spell, but the pain that lances through Blaise’s body is anything but casual. His mouth tears open in a soundless scream as he drops to the floor, clutching his legs, vision clouding. It hurts, hurts like hell and more-pain fills his senses, his consciousness, he’s not sure who he is anymore-nothing but pain.
And then it’s gone, just as suddenly as it was there, and he’s gasping for breath on the floor, not even able to muster the strength to reach out and try to grab him as Draco strolls idly by, a smirk playing across his mouth.
---
Afterward, there’s very little Blaise can find out for certain.
Dumbledore’s dead, and Draco is gone along with Professor Snape, and when Blaise asks around and digs for information deeper than he knew a person even could dig and eventually hears a rumor that maybe Draco was the one who was supposed to kill Dumbledore, but somehow he couldn’t do it and Snape did instead, and now who knows if You-Know-Who’s going to kill Draco for failing or not, and who knows what’s going on with Snape-a traitor! Snape! they all knew it, all along-and there’s so little hard fact that Blaise eventually just gives up.
He stays home with Mother the next year rather than going back to school, because Hogwarts is in shambles in any case and there’s little use in trying. He reads the papers, hears about the war from afar. There’s little mention of the Malfoys and none of Draco. Eventually, Blaise gives up on the war altogether, and he and Mother move to America in pursuit of some new conquest.
Harry Potter defeats the Dark Lord on July thirty-first, 1998, and the celebration rocks the entire Earth. Blaise leaves Mother to deal with this husband of hers and travels back to England, for no real reason he can discern. There’s more news daily-Death Eaters being taken to Azkaban, gruesome remains of missing persons being found. Blaise reads both accounts voraciously, and each day he’s torn between relief and anxiety when he sees no Draco Malfoy in either list.
It’s not as if it matters, now. His and Malfoy’s paths diverged long ago, in the Slytherin common room, with a Silencing Spell and a Cruciatus. He knows that.
And yet, he’s not very surprised at all when he opens his door one morning and finds on the step a singularly bloody, exhausted, and only half-conscious Draco Malfoy, blonde hair grown overlong and stained with his own blood, robes torn and dirty from travel and hiding.
And he’s not very surprised at himself when he unthinkingly raises his former classmate into the air with a twitch of his wand, sends him floating gently inside to settle on the couch, uses all the healing spells he knows.
Nor is he surprised to find the Dark Mark still burned boldly into Draco’s arm. It doesn’t matter, not now, with Voldemort dead and Potter triumphant. Not much that used to matter makes a difference these days.
Besides, by now, Blaise is pretty damn certain he can make sure that Draco Malfoy is never again someone anyone could call one of them.