I have been SO EXCITED ever since I saw this prompt that I will finally be able to rec some of the best podfics out there <3
The podfics I have chosen to include are in one way or another special to me in a way only audio media can be. Like that song you have heard on your first date and it’s now your song. Well, by this pattern I have „my podfic” of first commute to new workplace, this one autumn sunny walk with my dog, finding an absolute joy in a new hobby and finally being able to clean the dishes AFTER the meal rather than before it xd
There will be a few, so strap in and enjoy! All of them are Drarry of course 😁 Please make sure to check out other works by those creators, as they are literally all GOLDEN 🤍
Dad says
📚 by GallaPlacidia, 39k, not rated
🎧 by GallaPlacidia via the GallaPod, 3:50 h + bonus episode
Summary:
Eleven-year-old Scorpius starts writing to Harry. Harry starts to fall in love with Draco through his portrayal in his son's letters.
Featuring an extremely remorseful Draco living with muggles and working at a secondhand book shop, an isolated Harry, and a Scorpius who's dreading going to Hogwarts because he knows he'll be bullied there.
The Man Who Lived
📚 by sebastianL (felix_atticus), 254 k, E
🎧 by RattleandHum (@thirdeye1234), 24h (!)
Summary:
Draco breaks a cup, and one thing leads to another. A story of redemption, tattoos, dreams, mistakes, green eyes, long conversations, and copious amounts of coffee.
Set in New York twelve years after the war.
The Man Who Forgot
📚 by @slightweasel, 250 k, E
🎧 by @sweatersinthesummer, 21 h (!)
Summary:
After ten years of marriage, Harry forgets.
The more things change, the more Draco Malfoy is still up to something.
Way Down We Go
📚 by @xiaq, 109 k, T
🎧 by @cailynwrites, @etl-echo-audiobooks, 13h
Summary:
The war was over.
Or at least that’s what the papers said.
They’d been saying it, for months, as if people needed reminding.
Maybe they did.
***
In which Harry and Draco both run away from their pasts and conveniently choose to hide in the same tiny American town.
It's super.
Thank you for my favourite prompt so far @hprecfest team and HUGE shoutout to all the amazing podficcers out there <3 Thank you for taking your time and energy making these recordings so we can make all the new memories with your voices in our heads (and these voices we welcome 😅)
📚 The Bolthole by aideomai, Tepre and GallaPlacidia
Draco/Harry, 54k, E
Summary:
Harry is a hoarder, Draco is grief-stricken, and both are capable human adults who can definitely spend a month in a cottage in the Cotswolds together without ever talking about the time they slept together in eighth year. Yeah, no, totally.
Lil story time to kick things off so I can properly convey how excited I am to rec you this fic! Here goes: I was freshly after reading Tepre’s Grounds for Divorce (which made me want board first plane to Luxor) and aideomai’s Far From the Tree (the way I screamed when I realised the final twist) when @sitp-recs reblogged the post with @haxkattpress’s georgeous bind for The Bolthole. Coincidentally, I was also in my Gallapod era at the time (and what an era that was 😭) so just now please take a minute to imagine just how exactly the stars have aligned for my poor fangirling heart at the time when I realised there’s a podfic of The Bolthole narrated by no other than Galla herself, who has co-authored this story IT’S JUST THAT AO3 DOES NOT SAY THAT because Galla went and became a successful published writer. How rude of her :D
So that was more of an inspiration than a rec? But hey, is there a better rec than taking your time and money to create a piece for the text? 🤍
About the story
First things first for us non-native speakers of English:
In this fic Draco escapes London to Harry's cottage in Gloucestershire, where the authors invite us to spend 50k words with them. There is a Major Misunderstanding™ theme which is very enjoyable indeed and the prose is, of course, exquisite.
Still, this fic's best feature in my opinion is how it tells the story of heartbroken, guilt-ridden characters and how they slowly heal. Oh, the way this story has broken my heart into a hundred pieces, only to put it back again in the most delicious way!
Exibit A: Harry has never had the opportunity to actually own much possesions so once he can have his own things he gets so lost in owning stuff that it gets completly out of control. . Draco helps him to get it a bit less out of control and I love it for them. I symphasize with this character so much, because I myself am very attached to objects: I like how they remind me of things, I like how pretty they are and I like having them in my own version of order (which is far from the typical understanding of tidiness, or so my husband keeps telling me 😅).
Exibit B: Draco has lost an OC parental figure and isn’t coping very well. (Harry is not great company at the time either but he is some company and the change of scenery helps Draco manage his grief and I love it for them as well.) The way Harry’s mental state is painted by his house. The contrast of Draco’s need to organize his sourroundings for comfort while Harry needs them to stay just the way they are.
And don’t even get me started on the cupboard under the stairs. Which Harry has barricaded. So Draco just took a crowbar and a hammer and kicked the door open. Which is such a beautiful metaphor for what he actually does here: literally stripping down the walls Harry has created around himself and one box after another makes an order out of Harry’s life.
All the while the feelings between the boys boil, the tension grows. Just look at the emotions in the scene when Draco realizes what the cupboard symbolizes to Harry:
“It’s only a cupboard,” he said. “It can’t hurt you.”
Harry looked up at him, then. His eyes were blood-shot. He wasn’t upset, or angry: this one, Draco knew. This one was despair. He’d tried to board something up and the damn thing wouldn’t stay closed.
“Ah,” said Draco, delicately. He knew his own despair was self-indulgent, ridiculous, but somehow it seemed wrong to suggest that the same was true of Harry’s. He wasn’t like Ron and Hermione, he couldn’t call Harry out, his instincts were all wrong, and he couldn’t leave him alone, either. He’d never had the knack for that. He took two faltering steps forward and went to his knees before Harry.
“I see,” he said, and almost touched Harry—hands hovering. “One of those rare, malignant cupboards. The ones that can hurt you.”
Harry’s eyes dropped to the ground, such a small movement, and yet so desperately, so horribly hopeless that Draco was overwhelmed with the dizzying rush of wanting to soothe, to take away all bad things. He couldn’t help himself: he took Harry’s face in his hands.
“No, Harry,” he said. “You can’t be this sad. You’re supposed to be angry at me, not sad, this is not the right reaction at all.”
And Harry, with a bad failed attempt at a smile: “I’m trying.”
“Try harder ,” Draco said, and his hands were moving: over Harry’s face, his neck, restless. To his knees, squeezing him. “You see,” he said, and now his voice shook. “You see, if you keep on being so sad I won’t have any choice but to make violent love to you. It’s really the only option; I don’t make the rules.”
Spoiler: They do make violent love later on. It’s amazing. The intimacy between them and the power dynamics is just so ... I don't actually have words. I’m pretty sure I will remember this one particular scene for a long time (IYKYK😅). If you are into gentle D/s relationships, you are going to melt. Just like Draco did.
To sum up – an amazing read, a gorgeous listen, 12/10. I've put a few quotes under the cut for your heartbreak enjoyment.
Thank you for today @hprecfest and see you in the next one!
That night at the cottage, he found an old desk in the shed, and broke it to use the pieces to board up the cupboard under the stairs. He knew, while he was doing it, how mad he must seem—how mad he was. But the only thought he had was, it’s too small and nothing should be in a place so small. Not boxes, or pets, or food for the pets, or food at all, or anything alive. Not children. Especially not children.
Can someone get baby Harry from the cupboard please? 😭
“Sometimes you need a push,” Draco snapped, looking up. “Instead of a request.”
That’s what Draco says which I personally hate because I can’t stand other people enforcing their ideas on my order of things (my skin literally crawls as I write these words) but let’s face it – sometimes you do need a push. So then Draco reorganizes the cupboard (oh and almost dies) and it is a breaking point for Harry.
This is terrible,” said Draco into his mug.
“Yeah,” said Harry. “Wait. The tea?”
“No,” said Draco. He looked at Harry. “This. D’you want to, I don’t know, should we punch each other, or something? Make it more normal?”
Sure, punch your way out of trouble, Steve Rogers would be proud 😅
“We’ve hung out before without punching each other,” said Harry. “It was fine, we had a nice time.”
He meant the long, quiet nights in the eighth year common room, that last year in Hogwarts, with Hermione drowsing by the fire over a book and Ron teaching Draco chess—he was very bad at it—and Harry just sort of sitting with them, his whole head echoing with the resounding shock of peace. Sometimes when Ron went to the bathroom or to go make cocoa in the corner Neville had set up or to gently lift Hermione’s hair and sheepishly kiss the nape of her neck, Draco would wave Harry over to the chess board and say in a panicked whisper, “Fix it, Potter!” and Harry would inevitably give him bad advice. “Now you’ve done it,” Draco said, and once, “Well, at least he’s beating both of us now. At last, Harry and I are in the same boat.” It was the first time he’d ever called Harry by his first name.
The warmth of this scene!!
Wait, have I already mentioned that Draco has a crush on Ron in this fic? In a bit platonic way, but anyway, it’s super cute:
In eighth year, Draco had been horrified to discover that he had a crush on Ron Weasley. His solution had been to flirt outrageously so that no one would ever suspect him. It had worked remarkably well.
In Azkaban, Narcissa Malfoy gives Draco lessons in how to manipulate people into loving him. When Draco is released on the condition that he is bonded to Harry as his prisoner, he finally has a chance to put his newfound skills into practice.
Forced bonding, eighth year (eventually), a Draco driven slightly mad by grief, a furious, self-destructive Harry, a whole lot of angst and a proportionate amount of comfort.
Inspired by an excellent story called Unexpected Consequences by Lauren3210.
I was thinking long and hard about this one because since the discovery of AO3 it’s been one way street for me. So now, what fics I’ve read that are not on AO3 (of which I have exactly 89 pages opened on my phone)? And then it clicked – some I listened to! Then tried to read them only to find out they were taken down because author has published a real book no less. And so, one google later I was head over heels with the amazing universes and characters created by GallaPlacidia.
I had a hard time choosing my favourite baby of Galla's, but since Lessons in Grace and Decorum broke my h/c loving heart so beautfully, I’ve decided to gush about this one. Today, that is ;)
I mean, just look at the opening lines:
“I wish you had been a girl,” said Narcissa Malfoy.
Draco laughed. It was so cold in Azkaban. The number of dementors had been greatly reduced, but there were enough of them for Draco’s head to feel cloudy and light, as if he hadn’t slept in days.
Perhaps he hadn’t.
“That’s a new one,” he said. “Why?”
“We raised you to command respect. If you had been a girl, we would have raised you to be loved,” said his mother.
Which instantly made me think about Daisy’s words in The Great Gatsby:
"It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.'"
By which point I am trying so hard not to rant about toxic masculinity and gender norms.
This is one of the stories where the characters are both broken in sort of matching ways so one’s cracks are perfect for the other’s empty spaces. And as corny as it sounds, this is exactly what happens here – Harry desperately needs to love someone that would be just his to care for and Draco needs someone who would cherish him unconditionally.
Plus it has some quotes that have not left my head for months now, which you can see under the cut below <3
Thanks for today @hprecfest and see you tomorrow (hopefully) !
*Regarding the rating – I would say mind the tags if you’re in a vulnerable place but if you decide you’re up for it – you’re in for a brilliant h/c treat <3
They had compatible needs. Perhaps that was all friendship was. An emotional transaction.
“He wants to be friends,” said Draco, managing to keep his voice low despite his excitement.
But his mother didn’t look excited back.
“He likes how you make him feel,” she said. “It doesn’t mean he likes you.”
“No, I… I know that,” said Draco, although it hadn’t really occurred to him. It sounded so obvious
when she put it like that.
“I don’t love him,” said Harry, automatically.
“Oh, all right then,” sighed Hermione. “Wait until after the bond is broken to tell him that you think about him all the time, and want to hold his hand and stroke his pretty blonde hair and keep him safe for all eternity. Is that better?”
“A bit,” said Harry, sulkily. “Yeah.”
But he understood, now. He knew that part of the anger he felt when he looked at Malfoy was because he wanted to touch him so badly, but couldn’t.
