{35k | E} // A gift for @corvuscrowned as a part of H/D Erised 2021
Summary: Harry Potter thought he could outrun the burden of infamy by isolating himself in the Muggle world. Draco Malfoy hasn’t been seen or heard from since his trial. Will a top-secret Ministry project, a beautiful garden, and a little heat carry them both home?
Crow—when I started writing this story we had just met. Not to get overly-sentimental on main but I like to think our friendship grew and flourished just like Draco’s lovely garden in this fic. Writing for you was an infinite joy. I love you so much I’ll bury you alive 😤. Very big squeezes and ‘thank yous’ to @softlystarstruck for shepherding me through this story from the start, @nv-md for reassuring me when I lost the vision, and @apr1cots for the clutch beta. Finally—massive thanks to the @hd-erised mods for their incredible, attentive moderating. Your time and care is so impressive and made participating in this fest such a joy!
Summary:
Harry Potter intends to spend his eighth year at Hogwarts avoiding the endless stares, whispers, and nosy questions that never seem to leave him be. He wants nothing more than to hide in the quiet solitude of his dorm room, keep his head down, and wallow in his grief.
At least, that's his plan right up until the moment Draco Malfoy kick-flips his life upside down.
Excerpt:
As he warms up, Malfoy starts catching more air and his tricks become more complex. Eventually, he clambers up onto a particularly large fragment of wall and drops straight down onto a ramp that looks cobbled together from roof tiles and cross beams. Harry gasps softly when he accelerates up a matching ramp on the other side of the room and launches probably twelve feet into the air.
After twenty minutes or so, Malfoy strips off his hoodie and tosses it carelessly onto a pile of stones, leaving him in just an oversized black t-shirt. He skates hard—attempting trick after trick and landing most of them—until he’s panting and dripping sweat. His damp hair clings to his forehead and the nape of his neck, and Harry watches him dart out his tongue to catch a bead of perspiration that rolls onto his upper lip.
Harry thinks Malfoy might be about to pack it in—the lunch hour is practically over, anyway—because he weaves his way right in front of Harry’s perch and toward the door. Suddenly, one of the skateboard wheels catches on a tiny piece of debris, causing it to skid to a stop, and Malfoy sprawls out on the ground face-first. It takes every ounce of his—admittedly scant—self-control to keep Harry from throwing off the cloak and leaping to the ground.
Malfoy rolls onto his back, still sprawled out on the dusty ground, and hisses as he rolls his left wrist around in his right hand as though checking for a sprain. He looks injured, but to Harry’s surprise, he starts to laugh. Louder and more genuinely than Harry’s ever heard. His whole body shakes with it, and it’s hard to tell through all the sweat but Harry thinks he sees tears gathering in the corners of Malfoy’s eyes.
As though in slow motion, Malfoy reaches a hand down and gathers up the hem of his t-shirt. Harry feels his face flush hot as he watches the long, pale expanse of Malfoy’s torso gradually come into view as he hikes his shirt up to wipe the sweat from his face. He’s so skinny—his baggy clothes hide just how thin he really is—but firm muscle ripples underneath the skin of his stomach. Harry definitely doesn’t notice the sharp jut of his hip bones, or follow the thin trail of blond curls that starts at Malfoy’s navel and disappears into—
Bloody hell. The waistband of his green boxers that are bunched up over the top of his jeans. They’re covered in little snakes. Little snakes wearing little hats. There’s even one that looks like a tiny, scaly cowboy. Harry wonders briefly if he’s died and become a ghost without noticing because he can’t feel any of his limbs. His stomach feels weird—kind of tight and achy, but warm and tingly at the same time.
Read the rest on Ao3!
A very non-mini fic for the @drarrymicrofic winter Wheel of Drarry Exchange. @ronbinary: I hope you like this little plot bunny that got wildly out of control (mostly thanks to @softlystarstruck). I hope this fulfills all your 8th year, weird Draco, everyone is gay dreams!! Thanks also to @pixieliciousnippletassles and ActualSquid for the beta help!!
This is a thank you // graduation // holiday gift fic for the loveliest @softlystarstruck✨
Summary:
"The ancient and mysterious Patronus charm conjures a magical guardian, a projection of all your most positive feelings." - Miranda Goshawk
Draco Malfoy wants all of Harry Potter; the good, the bad, and everything in between. Can he be satisfied if he's only allowed the occasional, drunken hookup in the pub loo? Will Harry finally learn that he can't love someone else the way they deserve if he doesn't love himself first?
Excerpt:
As he’s done so many times before, Draco closes his eyes and lets his imagination take over. Harry is his and he is Harry’s, and they’re allowed this, allowed one another.
He imagines that these aren’t stolen, frenzied moments fueled by the strike of body against body, sparking a fire so fierce and hot that there’s no choice but to be consumed. Draco doesn’t think the dry, rattling husk of his loneliness could withstand that, if it were true. No, he thinks, these moments must be entirely outside of time—infinite spans warmed by a simmering heat building carefully between them—because after so long of this, so long of them, Draco is still standing.
He tangles his fingers in Harry’s hair, pulling hard enough to tilt Harry’s head backward. He swallows Harry’s little groan as he captures his mouth in another slow, heated kiss. Harry’s crackling energy has calmed to a smoldering hum, and he kisses back with his whole body—breathlessly, hips rolling and fingers seeking.
“Whatever you want,” Draco breathes, leaning into the pressure of Harry’s hands on his hips and his back, “it’s yours. It’s yours, Harry.”
Instead of dreaming up a prompt or plot all on my lonesome, I asked some folks who also love bee to share three things: 1) words that describe bee’s writing, 2) words that describe how reading bee’s stories makes them feel and 3) tropes, themes, or images that remind them of bee. I whittled these many words down into a short prompt list, and this story emerged!
Thank you @moonstruckwytch, @phoebe-delia, @hogwartsfirebolt, @ronbinary, @academicdisaster24, @fw00shy, @lou-isfake, and most of all @the-starryknight and @nv-md for the words & alpha, and @corvuscrowned for the words & beta ☺️
The hope for this story was not to emulate bee or copy their style, but to celebrate their essence. Thanks for being you, bee! If you want to share your bee words too, please do!
Read on Ao3
Keep reading for the prompt list (if you’re curious) and a lil picrew bonus 😊
The Boys:
Prompt List~
Trope(s):
⭐Hurt/Comfort
⭐Fluff
⭐Only one bed
⭐Mutual pining
Specific Images to Include:
⭐Sunlight filtering through sheer curtains
⭐Patronus
⭐Favorite characters in a place that feels like home
⭐Writing/libraries (it became a museum, my comfort zone)
⭐Harry/Draco saying “baby”
⭐Patronus Charm: This ancient and mysterious charm conjures a magical guardian, a projection of all your most positive feelings. The Patronus is a kind of positive force, a projection of the very things that the Dementor feeds upon — hope, happiness, the desire to survive
⭐Song: Be Your Boy by Medium Build
Do you only love me when I make you happy?
Would you love me if I moved back to the valley?
Would you still love me if I cut off all my hair?
Would you take care of me and buy me decent things to wear?
Do you think it's funny that we're never sober?
Do you wish we could've met when we were older?
Do you still think about the lovers that you've had?
Do either in your head?
Summary:
Draco's move home to Wiltshire after more than a decade is anything but easy. He's given up an illustrious career in journalism to pursue poetry, his mother's health is declining, and it seems that the War isn't quite as 'in the past' as Draco assumed. Luckily, he's found a supportive, if unconventional, community and a local bakery to haunt that sells the most divine macarons.
Too bad Harry Bloody Potter has to storm in and shake everything up, per usual.
Harry is content with his life. Really, he is. Sure, the life of an ex-professional athlete is a bit slow, but that's what he'd wanted when he retired from Quidditch to run his own bakery. Now, he gets to spend his days doing something that he loves in the company of his family and friends. He's fine to let one day bleed placidly into the next, until--
Draco Malfoy turns up at his bakery, causes a scene about his pastries, and is maybe, probably, definitely up to something.
This is a story about two people boldly chasing their happiness in spite of their fears, overcoming the chokehold of a difficult past, and learning how to communicate by whatever means necessary, be it rhymes or recipes.
This is my first fest fic ever, and I'm so grateful to @nv-md, @corvuscrowned, and @frenchmarshmalloww for letting me flail about it until it came together. I think Ali read ... three separate drafts, at least??
A super extra special thank you to @softlystarstruck, who wrote ORIGINAL POETRY (?!) for this fic and helped me find Draco's authorial voice. 💜💜
Finally--thank you, @hd-fan-fair mods for fielding SO MANY exceptional pieces and wrangling every last one of us. You're superstars.
Summary: Draco Malfoy is convinced that the key to his family’s redemption lies frozen at the top of Mt. Everest. Harry Potter is bound by love and fate to help him get there. Will they find what they’re looking for, or something much more valuable?
Excerpt:
Draco rubs his thumb reverently over his great-great-uncle’s signature, sending golden tendrils of magic rippling through the parchment fibers, and watches as the word trilobite wavers and transforms to the word yeti . His breath hitches, like it does every time, as his long-lost cousin’s name shifts from George Mallory to Georges Malfoy.
Phineas Black had indeed been the last person to witness Georges alive. Georges’ climbing partner, Andrew, hadn’t been seen or heard from again either. There had been numerous expeditions in the intervening years to recover their bodies from the slopes, and each one came back empty handed. It was like they had vanished into thin air—like ghosts who slipped gently into the ether on a whisper. Before the summit was officially overtaken and its mysteries revealed, many theorized that Georges and Andrew climbed too high , that they ascended from the earth and became part of the very sky itself.
Draco never believed that. He knows, like he knows the rhythm of his own heart and the rush of his own breath in his ears, that Georges is still out there.
And he’s going to be the one to finally bring him home.
Thanks and smooches to @moonstruckwytch for the beta!
I'm back on my Choose Your Own Adventure bs! This time with gorgeous art by @fantalf!! 2k (so far) G (so far)!! Big thanks to @crazybutgood and @corvuscrowned for the alpha/beta work!!
How does this work? I wrote the first episode entirely from their own brain, then Lory illustrated three possible scenes for the next installment. This is where you come in! Read the first episode and indicate your favorite of the three images in the comments. I will write the next episode around the scene that gets the most votes here and on Ao3. Rinse, and repeat, until the story comes to an end!
Summary: Years after the war finds Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger working side-by-side to rescue and rehabilitate retired race-thestrals. It's an avoidable inconvenience that The Chosen One has chosen to drop out of Auror training and move to the preserve to help them. It's just plain torture, though, that Draco has to stare at Potter's soulmark every day, a glowing reminder that his secret fantasies will never become reality.
Draco Malfoy has always been a morning person.
Even on his worst days, he rises with the sun. He feels protective of--and protected by--those still, silent moments before the rest of the world wakes. He knows, better than most, that time has no morality--the dead of night is not inherently evil, and midday is not good by default. The arrival of dawn does not erase sins committed in darkness, and the setting sun does not eclipse daylight’s good deeds.
That he knows this, believes it to his core, does not stop him from feeling just a little righteous, a little more virtuous, in the burgeoning light of early morning. There’s something about that time of day--clean and bright with overflowing potential, untold promises for a new day blinking awake in creeping shafts of sunlight--that grounds him. The capacity for virtue is boundless at dawn.
When he was little, he would rise before the sun, tip-toe quietly through the halls of the Manor, and slither through a crack in the kitchen’s back door into the cool, misty morning.
He relished the shock of the icy dew on his bare toes and ankles as he leapt about, waving a twig like a wand and imagining that the tendrils of swirling fog were traces of spells he cast across the warming fields of Wiltshire. He dueled spectres in the vapor rising from the damp grass, vanquished foes that lurked behind bushes and trees, and bowed before kings and queens grateful for his valiant service to their empires.
Inevitably, he would battle his way across the back field to the stables. The Malfoy family was renowned among Pureblood society for their champion racing thestrals. His father forbade him from going near the foals every spring, lest he spoil their carefully monitored diet with too many sugar cubes, or tempt fate with an unsupervised gallop through the woods. His father needn’t have bothered, however, since between the hours of eight and six o’clock the stables buzzed with activity--veterinarians weaving webs of glowing diagnostic spells, farriers nailing magically-enhanced shoes into filed-down hooves, trainers and jockeys putting each thestral through rigorous exercise regimens, stable hands mucking out stalls and levitating in fresh bales of hay. There was no room for him then.
But before eight o’clock, the stables belonged only to Draco. He would hike up the legs of his silk pajama pants and clamber through the small window in the tack room that no one seemed to remember to close.
His favorite thestral was called Vincet--He Will Conquer--but Draco’s five-year-old brain heard Vincent--They Will Conquer. He’d always assumed that included him--he and Vincent, together, on a quest to banish evil from the realm.
Draco loved Vincent for many reasons, not least because he was there the day that Vincent was born. The chaos of foaling season meant Draco could slip through the stables virtually undetected as the racing team staff, his father, and their wealthy patrons were otherwise preoccupied. He watched--wide eyed and slack jawed--from behind a mound of hay as the vet murmured charms and wove a magical barrier around the mare’s hind quarters, reaching out a gloved hand to ease the baby into the world with a wet-sucking splatter. Vincent looked right at him, with his fresh, milky eyes, as his spindly legs and wet-paper wings flapped and flailed about.
Every daybreak thereafter found Sir Draco tending diligently to his steed--his own mount--as the newborn colt found its wings and learned to fly. They grew together, both becoming taller and stronger, each praised and celebrated for their good breeding and superior talent.
The two years after Vincent’s birth are the happiest in Draco’s memory. His father noticed his particular attachment to the young thestral and, instead of shooing Draco away like always, used the opportunity to indoctrinate him into the family business. He was put in charge of Vincent’s care, and, as soon as enough time had passed, his early training.
They shared a special bond, Draco was sure of it. Vincent was always waiting for him, with his skeletal snout thrust over the gate of his stall, wide-open nostrils flaring as they searched for Draco’s scent in the air. Draco had never needed a lead when working with Vincent, the thestral followed him instinctively and never wandered. He was the only person who could mount Vincent without being playfully bucked off. They spent hours and hours in the sky above the Manor, Draco telling Vincent all about the imaginary little fiefdoms and friaries that comprised their kingdom.
Then, one day, Vincent was gone.
“But, dad, he’s my thestral--”
“No, Draco, he is my asset. He’s a prize stallion, a favorite to win the Triple Charm. I’ve allowed him to run wild with you for far too long; he needs to be broken in properly before his debut. Besides, we’ll make far more money from his covers than we ever would letting him languish here getting fat and old.”
“But--”
“No buts, Draco! We have all, you included, paid too high a price to let our vigilance falter. I shouldn’t have to remind you, my son, this is a business that we’re running, not your personal petting zoo. Don’t make me think twice about leaving you in charge of it all one day.”
So, Draco swallowed his heartbreak and devoted himself to the care and breeding of the Malfoy flock. He learned everything he could about the great Thoroughbred lines, memorized all the past champions and the names of their jockeys, accompanied his father on meetings with all the other breeders around Great Britain, and even began his certification as a race-thestral trainer. He was determined to know and dominate the industry from the inside out by his seventeenth birthday. To make his father proud.
The summer before his fifth year of school his father even sent him away to apprentice at the number one stable in all of Europe, famous for producing the most international champions in the world. Draco learned two very important lessons that summer, lessons that would change the way he viewed the world, his father, and himself.
First, he learned that the world of race-thestrals is saturated by violence and driven by greed. In his childhood naivete, he assumed his father and his colleagues loved thestrals the way he loved them, that they bred them and raced them because they are magnificent, clever beings whose quiet power is unmatched by any other magical creature. He only had to spend one evening tending to the wounds inflicted as punishment on a young, high spirited colt to realize the people running the industry don’t care for the animals, not at all. They only care about their profits.
Second, and most shocking, he learned that most people can’t see thestrals. It had never occurred to him to think otherwise, since every stable hand, every breeder and potential buyer, every jockey and trainer, even his mother and father, could all see them.
“How’d you get it, then?” one of the stable hands asked Draco one evening as they made the rounds, ensuring each tiny stall gate was closed and locked tight.
“Get what?”
“The sight--what happened, so you can see them?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Draco replied, dismissively, turning to leave the stable and the conversation. He had tried very hard not to make friends, intent on absorbing all he could to take home to his father.
“I mean,” the stable hand insisted, “who’d you see...you know…” he dragged his thumb lewdly across his throat, his tongue flopping out of his mouth around a wet, gagging noise.
Draco stared blankly, still uncomprehending.
“For me, it was me dad. Owed the family--” he gestured up toward the large mansion on the property “--loads of money. AKd him right ‘ere,” he pressed the pad of one finger right between Draco’s eyebrows. “Right in front of me and me mum. S’why I’m here, workin’ off the debt ‘n all. So, who was it for you? Dad? Mum? A cousin, maybe?”
“I’m afraid I - I don’t have any idea--” Draco began, deeply unsettled and intent on ending the strange encounter once and for all. He didn’t even finish his sentence before hurrying clumsily into the dark.
That night, after the rest of the house was asleep, he crept into the mansion’s library. Never in his life, not even in his first set of race-thestral training courses, had he ever actually picked up a book and read about them. He trusted what his father taught him, what his father’s trainers taught him. He trusted what he saw with his own two eyes, every day, in the Malfoy stables.
The only people who can see a thestral, are those who have witnessed--first hand--the death of another.
Only, Draco hadn’t seen anyone die. Had he? Wouldn’t he remember something like that?
He couldn’t recall--
Had no memory of--
“For Salazar’s sake, Draco,” his father hissed through the library’s Floo connection, angry at having been awoken in the small hours of the night, and angrier still at being pelted with stupid questions, “Don’t be such a child. How else were you to take over the family business? It’s common practice, all the old families do it on a child’s first birthday. It’s something to be proud of! You are special, Draco! You can see what others can’t! It’s part of your birthright as a Malfoy!”
He cried himself to sleep every night until he left Denmark.
*
Despite all the pain, terror, and tragedy that swallowed everything after that fateful summer, he can’t help but be grateful now that the family business went to shit as a result.
He’s doubly, triply, grateful that Hermione Granger accepted his apology and agreed to publicly support his initiative to lobby the Wizengamot to formally ban thestral racing.
He still isn’t over his profound shock that she left her cushy government position to help him build and run a rehabilitation facility for retired race-thestrals. He knows his work won’t bring Vincent back, but every new thestral brought to the preserve, every sweet old broodmare allowed to finally find some peace and quiet, every new foal welcomed to their flock is a testament to his best friend.
Draco Malfoy has always been a morning person.
And so, the golden light of this very early Spring morning finds him sprawled, legs akimbo, white linen shirt halfway unbuttoned, and suspenders loose around his hips, lounging on the floor of one of the birthing stalls. His sketchbook is open flat on his lap, and his fingers are black and powdery from the charcoal nub clasped gently between his thumb and forefinger.
A new baby was born during the night, and Draco hurried over as soon as the sun peeked over the ridge around the preserve to make a portrait.
“I think I’ll call you Pax,” he whispers as he sketches, delighted by the foal’s high-pitched chirps, “it means--”
“Peace,” a deep voice rumbles softly from his left. Harry lifts a hand to fist at his tired eyes and yawns deeply. He leans forward on his sweater-clad elbows, which rest atop the stall gate, to peer over at Draco’s sketchpad.
“Potter,” Draco says, aiming for casual and landing somewhere near nauseous. He snaps his sketchbook shut firmly, cursing silently at the smudged, black mess he’s sure to find when he reopens it later. A small price to pay to keep Harry from laying eyes on his other doodles, full of silly, round glasses, sharp, lightning-bolt shaped scars, and deeply-dimpled smiles.
Harry straightens and pushes a hand through his morning-messy curls, stifling another big yawn behind his palm. Draco’s heart clenches.
The day they had officially opened the preserve was the best day of Draco’s life. The day after they had officially opened the preserve--the day that Harry Potter had turned up, claiming to have quit his basically-new job with the Aurors to lend a hand--was the worst day of Draco’s life.
Because now, Draco’s mornings and evenings, his days and his nights, are full of Harry.
For @hp-fearfest's day 9 prompt: Mad Scientist. CW: Mentions of arson and immolation, Mention of Fiendfyre.
(Read on Ao3 | 539 words | T)
“Shay. Shay!”
Seamus drags his dry eyelids over his rough, heated eyeballs and turns away from the fire to find Dean standing in the sitting room doorway, half dressed. He’s holding two different colored ties up to his throat, switching them back and forth.
“Sorry, what?”
“Which one goes best? I’m horrible at matching colors. Blue or red?”
“Erm—red. Looks nice on your skin, love.”
Dean flushes and rolls his eyes, but loops the red silk around his neck. “We need to go in five, we can’t be late!” he calls as he walks back down the hallway toward their bedroom.
Seamus kneels on the hearthrug and pulls a crumpled piece of parchment from his pocket. He tosses it into the dying embers and watches as the edges curl in on themselves, falling to ash until there’s nothing left.
That’s one thing he loves about fire, out of many—the way it consumes and consumes, eating and swallowing until there’s nothing left. It purifies and cleanses, burning away imperfections and mistakes and reducing everything in its path down to its most elemental form.
He knows, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that magic is fire. Why else would spells erupt from a wizard’s wand in swirls of heat and light? Why else would his magical core burn inside of him, hot and roiling? Why else is Fiendfyre one of the most feared and respected curses in the magical world?
Magic is fire, and fire is magic. Pure, unadulterated magic.
He’s seen that magic at work so many times. He knows from his own experiments: to be kissed by fire is to be marked as sacred. To be consumed by flames is to be saved, wholly and completely.
He’s known it since before he could properly cast. His first burst of accidental magic set his mother’s prized roses on fire. They were dying, there was some disease they’d caught from another plant in their garden, and he only wanted to help. What could be more alive than fire? What could save each perfect, delicate petal more quickly than flames? He would burn out the disease and his mother would be so proud.
He had been wrong. She wasn’t proud, she was furious. He didn’t understand. But, then, the rosebush came back the next spring and it had three times as many blossoms and he knew. It was because of him, because of his fiery magic.
His theory had been tested and proven time and again, since.
First, leaves and twigs that popped and danced in the blue-white inner cone of a flame. Then, already-alive things that twitched and rejoiced, crying their gratitude for the chance to be so tenderly devoured. Each conflagration was a confirmation.
His explosive pyrotechnics even saved his friends during the Battle—sheltering them behind the smouldering ruins of stone and wood and metal, keeping them safe from the cold evil of Voldemort’s followers.
And then he’d witnessed Voldemort himself reduced to ashes by Harry Potter, the brightest and most blazing person he had ever met, whose magic warmed every single person around him.
Yes. He knows for sure that fire is a gift, to burn is to be loved.
[E | 9k | cw: light, consensual dom/sub]
Summary:
Up in the air, Draco can become anyone he wants to be, or cease to be anyone at all. When he puts on his flight attendant's uniform he's just one more smiling face in the crowd, a forgettable interlude in his passengers' day. Not a petrified boy, not a criminal, not a Wizard just trying to keep it together as best he can.
That is until a certain someone interrupts his flight patterns.
DEN to ORD -- Flight 5693
August 13th, ↑4:55pm -- ↓8:32pm
Flight Duration: 2hrs37
Draco doesn’t know how he got himself into this position.
Well, actually he does. He sort of splayed himself out flat—his left knee is hiked up onto the narrow shelf behind the toilet, his right hand is gripping the rim of the tiny metal washbasin, and his left hand is twisted behind him and clutched into the thick, curly hair of the man currently shagging him senseless in the airplane lavatory.
No, what he doesn’t understand is how he’s found himself in this position with Harry Fucking Potter.
An hour ago, he hadn't so much as thought that name in almost five years. All he was concerned about was making his connection in Chicago and whether or not the place that does the cinnamon pretzels in terminal 3 would still be open when he landed.
This is the second-to-last leg of a fourteen-day stretch. As much as he loves his job, he’s completely exhausted and ready for a week off. He’s been looking forward to Pansy’s birthday party for weeks—he can’t remember the last time he saw his roommate and best friend for longer than a few hours at a time.
This isn’t his first mid-flight hookup, not by a long shot. Flight attendants spend so much time together in confined spaces on the job; it’s bound to happen on occasion. That isn’t even accounting for the communal crash pads the airline provides for them between shifts. They’re often just glorified hotel rooms lined with bunk beds. Draco always feels like he’s back in the Slytherin common room, surrounded by horny teenagers with little regard for their roommates’ need for sleep.
This is, however, the first time he’s gotten off with a former childhood rival—in the air or otherwise.
Read the rest on Ao3
so, so many thanks to @softlystarstruck for the encouragement, @corvuscrowned for the beta, and @nv-md for the eggplant emoji 😂
