Fic: The Ivory Tower (HP, H/D, H/G, NC-17)
Title: The Ivory Tower (Chapter One)
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing(s): Harry/Draco, Harry/Ginny, Draco/other secondary characters
Rated: NC17
Warnings: Non-con, dub-con, pandering, slash, het, WIP
Notes: Inspired in part by the fairytale Rapunzel. This is a WIP. Second chapter should be done soon, though. Beta'd by judas_denied.
Chapter One
"Thy neck is as a tower of ivory..."
The Song of Solomon
A single drop of blood, red at the center and almost black around the outside where it has started to dry as the hours of the night slipped by. An inconsequential thing that, as Draco looks at it, he thinks it should mean something. It should hold some grand significance. Perhaps he should see that, take one look at that single red spot that slipped from his nose onto the cotton sheet as he lay sleeping, and have his courage restored to him. Take that spot and hold it to him like a talisman and try, once again, to flee.
Perhaps he should look at that spot of blood on the pristine white bedspread and see the lattice shadows that surround it, cast by sunlight filtering through where no human eyes can reach, and see it symbolic of his gilded prison.
Perhaps this and perhaps that. But he sees none of it. Or, more correctly, he sees it all and it holds no sway.
The simple truth of the matter is that it is just a spot of blood, laughably inconsequential when held up and compared to all the blood he has lost and shed in the last year. It is just a white cotton sheet, ridiculously high thread count imported from Egypt, and now it will have to be thrown out. It is only light and shadow cast through a window, and so what if that window, like all the others, is made specifically to hide him from the outside world? The lattice work is lovely and no one in all the world would call them prison bars.
Deep down, even though he knows the things they tell him, and that he now tells himself, are lies, he believes them. Because he's tired. He has run and he has tried, and now he is tired and has no more will to go on. Broken, some of them call it, always saying the word with a profound and disturbing undercurrent of pleasure. Triumph.
Yes, triumph. Because he is Draco Malfoy, the dragon in the ivory tower.
“Bleeding again?” the doctor demands when he enters the room. He comes every morning and Draco still doesn't know his name. He is quite sure he has never heard it.
The doctor grabs his face, calloused fingers biting into his pale gold skin just a little, pressure that would not bruise, and turns his head to the side and a little up, searching. “Broken nose, badly mended,” he mutters to himself. “Who did it?”
“I don't know, sir,” Draco says. This is not entirely true, he does know. He doesn't know the name, they never give him a name, but he could describe the person if he wanted. Likely the doctor knows this as well, but he doesn't press. He never does.
The doctor takes out his wand and fixes Draco's badly mended nose. A hum of magic in the air that Draco savors, even as the sting in the bone of his nose makes him wince. He looks forward to the doctor's morning visits for that alone. That little breath of magic on his skin that he gets nowhere else.
“There,” the doctor says with satisfaction as he tucks his wand away. “Feel better?”
Draco's lips twitch, a vague shadow of his former self shining through for a brief instant. Does he feel better? “Yes, sir,” he replies tonelessly.
The doctor frowns. Perhaps he has seen that touch of something in the look on Draco's face. That spark of amusement that could be seen as something more. Draco smiles back at him vaguely and does not think of it, for that way lies madness, he well knows.
The doctor's expression clears and he glances at the bed. Draco smiles again, this one as vapid and without meaning as his voice when he says “Yes, sir,” again and crosses to the bed without further urging. He does not fool himself that his little slip passed unnoticed. None of them ever do, and that has been a hard won lesson.
He lets his robe, red so dark that it makes his pale skin look like ivory lit somehow from within against its darkness, slide to the floor. Red for a whore, he thinks, his silver eyes vacant as he drops down on the bed and kneels there, face turned to the side resting on the pure white sheet. Pure except for a single spot further up the bed.
Red like blood, he thinks, and catches his breath as the doctor pushes two lubricated fingers inside him.
The doctor is not an old man, like one would expect from a person of his standing in such a profession. Neither is he young. Neither thing makes a bit of difference to Draco anymore. He has had them all, old, young, and every single age in between. The doctor is not cruel, and that is what matters to Draco. He is not cruel and for one moment every day, he brings with him the scent of magic. For that... for that, Draco takes a certain level of joy from these daily visits, even if these daily visits require him to pay for them with his body. It doesn't matter and it's a fair trade in his mind when his body is used daily by men less careful who give him less.
Draco makes barely a sound as the doctor touches him with his calloused hands, pants with his mouth next to Draco's ear, and fucks him standing there against the bed while Draco kneels on the mattress. He does gasp when the doctor comes, no pleasure in it so much as startlement, and twists his fingers in the sheet beneath him to brace himself as he jerks against Draco's back. Still, the doctor pushes him a little forward on the bed.
Draco blinks and stares out the lattice window as the doctor catches his breath and pulls out of him. He listens to him refastening his robes and finally gets up from the bed to go clean himself up.
When Draco comes out of the bathroom, his bed has been stripped, the linens replaced, and his first patron is waiting by the door.
Patron, he thinks, and his eyes spark with amusement as they settle on the man. 'Patron' implied an exchange of goods or services, which Draco never got from anyone but the doctor. He lay down and was fucked only to rise and be beaten and fucked again. Those who guarded the tower, those nameless powers that be that always dragged him back when he dared to wander, they very likely received payment, though. And so saw fit to call these men Draco's patrons, and he supposed that was fitting after all.
“What can I do for you?” Draco asks, his tone quiet and politely interested. He could give lasciviousness if he so desired. He could give that; be coy, be wanton, be whatever his patrons so desired.
He gives nothing.
The man is dark and slight of build. Gaunt and positively made of corded muscle. He looks at Draco with his black eyes, as distant and unwelcoming as the glint off a shard of obsidian, and Draco looks back impassively and waits.
He does not wait long and he is not that surprised when the man's hand darts out and snatches the back of his hair in his fist. So it is to be like that. So be it.
Draco is thrown down on the bed and he doesn't resist, though he is sure the man expects him too--wants him to. Even in this, he gives nothing. They wanted him broken, and so he has become what they want. After much futile struggle, many times escaping only to be dragged back again, he has become the passive, cowed thing they desired. If they no longer desire that, it is no fault of Draco's.
“Fight me,” the man growls at him, then bites Draco's shoulder as he shoves him up against the wall at the head of the bed and thrusts his cock inside him. No lubrication or preparation whatsoever and the man grunts. He has surprised himself with the unexpected discomfort of the movement and it makes him relax, if only a little.
Draco hisses a breath through his teeth and turns his head to look at him over his shoulder. He is not so unused to such treatment that it comes as any kind of surprise to him at all. Very calmly, he reaches over on the little crystal table by the bed and picks up a small lacquered pot. On the lid, there is a white rose blossom, and even as his patron jerks his hips and thrusts inside him again, through a spark of well known pain, he admires it.
“Here,” Draco says softly, and holds the pot over his shoulder for the man to take. “Use that, if it pleases you. It will make it not hurt.”
“You'd like that, wouldn't you?” the man says low in his ear.
He thrusts again, a strained sound in his throat, and Draco distantly recognizes the slide of his blood down the back of his thighs. Blood gets cold very fast when it hits the air.
“I would not like it or dislike it,” Draco says indifferently. “I say so only for your comfort, sir.”
The man snarls something in his ear and bites the side of Draco's neck, but he uses the lubricant.
Draco watches out the window as the dark man with the beetle black eyes fucks him, growling and cursing and biting him like a wild dog in rut. Outside, the sun has shifted. He can tell because of the way the shadows through the lattice move over the floor and the walls. The way the sky has taken on a brighter shine and lost the yellow glow of morning.
He comes back to himself just long enough to hear his patron demand he scream. Scream his name. Never mind that he doesn't know it.
His lips quirk once in amusement before he can stop it and a thought passes through his mind that is purely his own. His self peeking through his eyes and taking use of his ears for a moment and braying with laughter, lip curled in scorn, eyes flashing. You are the most boring fuck ever! No, I will not scream your name! Get off of me this instant!
Thankfully, his patron chooses that moment to have his orgasm and Draco manages to bite his tongue and not speak.
His next patron is squat and sandy-haired, streaks and blotches of peppered grey showing at his temples, freckles across his face that in themselves would not be disfiguring. He has a birth mark over one cheek and his gaze is sharp, but not cruel. Not hateful.
He asks for more participation on Draco's part, being less violent than his previous patron. And Draco, being the broken thing he is, obliges, though he takes no joy in it and knows that it shows.
A blowjob, sucking and licking his cock until the man is ready come, then withdrawing to the bed. He straddles the man's waist and rides him, because that is what he wants. With a sick weight in his stomach, Draco does what the man wants. What he is told, what he is for.
He despises patrons like this one more than those that shove him against walls and bite him. More than those that enter the room carrying a whip and bind his arms over his head and flay him, then fuck him with his blood sliding painfully between his back and their bellies. He hates these, these who like to pretend to themselves, and demand his cooperation in the illusion, that he is a willing, eager lover. That he has a choice, that he has anything at all. It makes them, those who know who he is and how he got there, feel less like rapists. It soothes their consciences.
It is a joke, a bad joke and he is the punch-line.
When he is finished, when his patron has taken his pleasure, he tries to touch Draco. Tries to hold him. Draco cocks his head a little in confusion, and allows it. He has no choice. He stares out the window while the man with the sandy hair and the birth mark on his cheek strokes his hair, and inside, Draco considers the strength of the wards on the alabaster lattice. They have been reinforced since the last time he dared to test them and they are stronger than ever. He thinks of how high up the ivory tower is, and how his rooms are on the very top. The highest point in a building that can not be seen by the unmagical eye. A room high enough from the ground that he can sometimes catch a glimpse of an aeroplane through the lattice and wonders how they know to avoid it. Spells again. Magic, it always comes down to magic.
He doesn't want to be thinking these things. Again, this way lays madness as he very well knows. But then a patron demands his participation, pets and fondles him and talks to him kindly, and he can't help it. It reminds him, in all its hateful mockery, of freedom.
When he is gone, Draco is allowed to bathe, and he does. Oh, he does. He scrubs his skin like he would grind the cells from his body right through muscle and blood down to the bone and beyond. He scrubs his skin until the bite marks on his shoulders and neck open in the hot perfumed water and stain it pink. Pink like his skin under the coarse, scrubbing sponge.
He is in there for an hour before he is called out. He gets out of the water and goes back into his bedroom where one of his guards has brought him food and a potion to rub into the bite marks. To heal them and disguise them so that they don't scar. There is magic in this too, but no smell of it in the air. It smells like merlap and aloe and something else more bitter.
“Eat quickly,” the guard says, watching him with eyes that see nothing. Much like a farmer's hand might look at a brood mare that he has been charged with guarding but does not own. “Hurry up, someone's waiting for you.”
Draco pauses with a piece of fruit against his lips and blinks. The men that guard him rarely speak to him. This must be someone very important indeed.
Draco eats the fruit, a strawberry, and sits down at the table, one hand clutching at the edge of his scarlet robe. It is an unconscious gesture more of comfort than concealment. The guard notices it and Draco does nothing to hide it from him. He will take it, insignificant as it is, back to his masters. Perhaps they will take that away from him too. A single gesture of imperfection to be blotted out and eradicated. Something, so very, very small a something, that is his and must be destroyed.
Hope, in any form, is such a dangerous thing. It grows.
Draco eats his meal; fruit, vegetables, some fish, a bit of milk. It is all the very best there is, and Draco can't remember the last time he tasted bread or sugar.
He smiles faintly and eats the last of his fish, then rises without speaking to or looking at his guard and goes to clean his teeth as his oh so important patron is let in.
Next>>
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing(s): Harry/Draco, Harry/Ginny, Draco/other secondary characters
Rated: NC17
Warnings: Non-con, dub-con, pandering, slash, het, WIP
Notes: Inspired in part by the fairytale Rapunzel. This is a WIP. Second chapter should be done soon, though. Beta'd by judas_denied.
Chapter One
"Thy neck is as a tower of ivory..."
The Song of Solomon
A single drop of blood, red at the center and almost black around the outside where it has started to dry as the hours of the night slipped by. An inconsequential thing that, as Draco looks at it, he thinks it should mean something. It should hold some grand significance. Perhaps he should see that, take one look at that single red spot that slipped from his nose onto the cotton sheet as he lay sleeping, and have his courage restored to him. Take that spot and hold it to him like a talisman and try, once again, to flee.
Perhaps he should look at that spot of blood on the pristine white bedspread and see the lattice shadows that surround it, cast by sunlight filtering through where no human eyes can reach, and see it symbolic of his gilded prison.
Perhaps this and perhaps that. But he sees none of it. Or, more correctly, he sees it all and it holds no sway.
The simple truth of the matter is that it is just a spot of blood, laughably inconsequential when held up and compared to all the blood he has lost and shed in the last year. It is just a white cotton sheet, ridiculously high thread count imported from Egypt, and now it will have to be thrown out. It is only light and shadow cast through a window, and so what if that window, like all the others, is made specifically to hide him from the outside world? The lattice work is lovely and no one in all the world would call them prison bars.
Deep down, even though he knows the things they tell him, and that he now tells himself, are lies, he believes them. Because he's tired. He has run and he has tried, and now he is tired and has no more will to go on. Broken, some of them call it, always saying the word with a profound and disturbing undercurrent of pleasure. Triumph.
Yes, triumph. Because he is Draco Malfoy, the dragon in the ivory tower.
“Bleeding again?” the doctor demands when he enters the room. He comes every morning and Draco still doesn't know his name. He is quite sure he has never heard it.
The doctor grabs his face, calloused fingers biting into his pale gold skin just a little, pressure that would not bruise, and turns his head to the side and a little up, searching. “Broken nose, badly mended,” he mutters to himself. “Who did it?”
“I don't know, sir,” Draco says. This is not entirely true, he does know. He doesn't know the name, they never give him a name, but he could describe the person if he wanted. Likely the doctor knows this as well, but he doesn't press. He never does.
The doctor takes out his wand and fixes Draco's badly mended nose. A hum of magic in the air that Draco savors, even as the sting in the bone of his nose makes him wince. He looks forward to the doctor's morning visits for that alone. That little breath of magic on his skin that he gets nowhere else.
“There,” the doctor says with satisfaction as he tucks his wand away. “Feel better?”
Draco's lips twitch, a vague shadow of his former self shining through for a brief instant. Does he feel better? “Yes, sir,” he replies tonelessly.
The doctor frowns. Perhaps he has seen that touch of something in the look on Draco's face. That spark of amusement that could be seen as something more. Draco smiles back at him vaguely and does not think of it, for that way lies madness, he well knows.
The doctor's expression clears and he glances at the bed. Draco smiles again, this one as vapid and without meaning as his voice when he says “Yes, sir,” again and crosses to the bed without further urging. He does not fool himself that his little slip passed unnoticed. None of them ever do, and that has been a hard won lesson.
He lets his robe, red so dark that it makes his pale skin look like ivory lit somehow from within against its darkness, slide to the floor. Red for a whore, he thinks, his silver eyes vacant as he drops down on the bed and kneels there, face turned to the side resting on the pure white sheet. Pure except for a single spot further up the bed.
Red like blood, he thinks, and catches his breath as the doctor pushes two lubricated fingers inside him.
The doctor is not an old man, like one would expect from a person of his standing in such a profession. Neither is he young. Neither thing makes a bit of difference to Draco anymore. He has had them all, old, young, and every single age in between. The doctor is not cruel, and that is what matters to Draco. He is not cruel and for one moment every day, he brings with him the scent of magic. For that... for that, Draco takes a certain level of joy from these daily visits, even if these daily visits require him to pay for them with his body. It doesn't matter and it's a fair trade in his mind when his body is used daily by men less careful who give him less.
Draco makes barely a sound as the doctor touches him with his calloused hands, pants with his mouth next to Draco's ear, and fucks him standing there against the bed while Draco kneels on the mattress. He does gasp when the doctor comes, no pleasure in it so much as startlement, and twists his fingers in the sheet beneath him to brace himself as he jerks against Draco's back. Still, the doctor pushes him a little forward on the bed.
Draco blinks and stares out the lattice window as the doctor catches his breath and pulls out of him. He listens to him refastening his robes and finally gets up from the bed to go clean himself up.
When Draco comes out of the bathroom, his bed has been stripped, the linens replaced, and his first patron is waiting by the door.
Patron, he thinks, and his eyes spark with amusement as they settle on the man. 'Patron' implied an exchange of goods or services, which Draco never got from anyone but the doctor. He lay down and was fucked only to rise and be beaten and fucked again. Those who guarded the tower, those nameless powers that be that always dragged him back when he dared to wander, they very likely received payment, though. And so saw fit to call these men Draco's patrons, and he supposed that was fitting after all.
“What can I do for you?” Draco asks, his tone quiet and politely interested. He could give lasciviousness if he so desired. He could give that; be coy, be wanton, be whatever his patrons so desired.
He gives nothing.
The man is dark and slight of build. Gaunt and positively made of corded muscle. He looks at Draco with his black eyes, as distant and unwelcoming as the glint off a shard of obsidian, and Draco looks back impassively and waits.
He does not wait long and he is not that surprised when the man's hand darts out and snatches the back of his hair in his fist. So it is to be like that. So be it.
Draco is thrown down on the bed and he doesn't resist, though he is sure the man expects him too--wants him to. Even in this, he gives nothing. They wanted him broken, and so he has become what they want. After much futile struggle, many times escaping only to be dragged back again, he has become the passive, cowed thing they desired. If they no longer desire that, it is no fault of Draco's.
“Fight me,” the man growls at him, then bites Draco's shoulder as he shoves him up against the wall at the head of the bed and thrusts his cock inside him. No lubrication or preparation whatsoever and the man grunts. He has surprised himself with the unexpected discomfort of the movement and it makes him relax, if only a little.
Draco hisses a breath through his teeth and turns his head to look at him over his shoulder. He is not so unused to such treatment that it comes as any kind of surprise to him at all. Very calmly, he reaches over on the little crystal table by the bed and picks up a small lacquered pot. On the lid, there is a white rose blossom, and even as his patron jerks his hips and thrusts inside him again, through a spark of well known pain, he admires it.
“Here,” Draco says softly, and holds the pot over his shoulder for the man to take. “Use that, if it pleases you. It will make it not hurt.”
“You'd like that, wouldn't you?” the man says low in his ear.
He thrusts again, a strained sound in his throat, and Draco distantly recognizes the slide of his blood down the back of his thighs. Blood gets cold very fast when it hits the air.
“I would not like it or dislike it,” Draco says indifferently. “I say so only for your comfort, sir.”
The man snarls something in his ear and bites the side of Draco's neck, but he uses the lubricant.
Draco watches out the window as the dark man with the beetle black eyes fucks him, growling and cursing and biting him like a wild dog in rut. Outside, the sun has shifted. He can tell because of the way the shadows through the lattice move over the floor and the walls. The way the sky has taken on a brighter shine and lost the yellow glow of morning.
He comes back to himself just long enough to hear his patron demand he scream. Scream his name. Never mind that he doesn't know it.
His lips quirk once in amusement before he can stop it and a thought passes through his mind that is purely his own. His self peeking through his eyes and taking use of his ears for a moment and braying with laughter, lip curled in scorn, eyes flashing. You are the most boring fuck ever! No, I will not scream your name! Get off of me this instant!
Thankfully, his patron chooses that moment to have his orgasm and Draco manages to bite his tongue and not speak.
His next patron is squat and sandy-haired, streaks and blotches of peppered grey showing at his temples, freckles across his face that in themselves would not be disfiguring. He has a birth mark over one cheek and his gaze is sharp, but not cruel. Not hateful.
He asks for more participation on Draco's part, being less violent than his previous patron. And Draco, being the broken thing he is, obliges, though he takes no joy in it and knows that it shows.
A blowjob, sucking and licking his cock until the man is ready come, then withdrawing to the bed. He straddles the man's waist and rides him, because that is what he wants. With a sick weight in his stomach, Draco does what the man wants. What he is told, what he is for.
He despises patrons like this one more than those that shove him against walls and bite him. More than those that enter the room carrying a whip and bind his arms over his head and flay him, then fuck him with his blood sliding painfully between his back and their bellies. He hates these, these who like to pretend to themselves, and demand his cooperation in the illusion, that he is a willing, eager lover. That he has a choice, that he has anything at all. It makes them, those who know who he is and how he got there, feel less like rapists. It soothes their consciences.
It is a joke, a bad joke and he is the punch-line.
When he is finished, when his patron has taken his pleasure, he tries to touch Draco. Tries to hold him. Draco cocks his head a little in confusion, and allows it. He has no choice. He stares out the window while the man with the sandy hair and the birth mark on his cheek strokes his hair, and inside, Draco considers the strength of the wards on the alabaster lattice. They have been reinforced since the last time he dared to test them and they are stronger than ever. He thinks of how high up the ivory tower is, and how his rooms are on the very top. The highest point in a building that can not be seen by the unmagical eye. A room high enough from the ground that he can sometimes catch a glimpse of an aeroplane through the lattice and wonders how they know to avoid it. Spells again. Magic, it always comes down to magic.
He doesn't want to be thinking these things. Again, this way lays madness as he very well knows. But then a patron demands his participation, pets and fondles him and talks to him kindly, and he can't help it. It reminds him, in all its hateful mockery, of freedom.
When he is gone, Draco is allowed to bathe, and he does. Oh, he does. He scrubs his skin like he would grind the cells from his body right through muscle and blood down to the bone and beyond. He scrubs his skin until the bite marks on his shoulders and neck open in the hot perfumed water and stain it pink. Pink like his skin under the coarse, scrubbing sponge.
He is in there for an hour before he is called out. He gets out of the water and goes back into his bedroom where one of his guards has brought him food and a potion to rub into the bite marks. To heal them and disguise them so that they don't scar. There is magic in this too, but no smell of it in the air. It smells like merlap and aloe and something else more bitter.
“Eat quickly,” the guard says, watching him with eyes that see nothing. Much like a farmer's hand might look at a brood mare that he has been charged with guarding but does not own. “Hurry up, someone's waiting for you.”
Draco pauses with a piece of fruit against his lips and blinks. The men that guard him rarely speak to him. This must be someone very important indeed.
Draco eats the fruit, a strawberry, and sits down at the table, one hand clutching at the edge of his scarlet robe. It is an unconscious gesture more of comfort than concealment. The guard notices it and Draco does nothing to hide it from him. He will take it, insignificant as it is, back to his masters. Perhaps they will take that away from him too. A single gesture of imperfection to be blotted out and eradicated. Something, so very, very small a something, that is his and must be destroyed.
Hope, in any form, is such a dangerous thing. It grows.
Draco eats his meal; fruit, vegetables, some fish, a bit of milk. It is all the very best there is, and Draco can't remember the last time he tasted bread or sugar.
He smiles faintly and eats the last of his fish, then rises without speaking to or looking at his guard and goes to clean his teeth as his oh so important patron is let in.
Next>>