Jul 15, 2025
This makes me embarrassingly verklempt. Why am I like this?
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This makes me embarrassingly verklempt. Why am I like this?
Ultimate Word Tournament!
Round 4
verklempt
γαλῆν
verklempt (English, Yiddish) פֿאַרקלעמט [vɚˈklɛmt] [fɚˈklɛmt] Overcome with emotion, choked up.
γαλῆν (Greek, Typo Dialect) galên [ga.lɛ́͜ɛn] a weasel. Famously said by Hegelochus instead of "γαλήν" (calm sea), putting him out of a job and mocked by all to this day.
Verklempt Propaganda
OMG
Verklempt
//adjective//
Definition:
overcome with emotion.
Hi friends! In a WIP posting yesterday I mentioned feeling overwhelmed. I really just meant that I sometimes have trouble keeping up with tags, so I'm going to try tagging a random rotating subset of people instead of everyone I know every time, so that it feels more doable to reciprocate. That's all! Sorry for any alarm! (And feel free to tag or not tag me in anything, it's all fine, I truly am fine.)
I was really touched by people reaching out here and in server DMs to see if I was okay. I work in a public service profession where burnout is the norm. If I told my coworkers I felt overwhelmed, short of a really loud and unambiguous cry for help, I would get either "yeah me too" or fear that my work would be shifted to them. They are compassionate people, they are just, you know, overwhelmed. Scarcity breeds aggression.
Anyway, I am feeling really thankful to have fallen into an intentional community of thoughtful, generous people who reach out when they see need. I'm sure it also helps that this is all by choice, an opt-in thing from which you can step away when your cup isn't full. And maybe it's easier to offer kindness when you know it's not obligatory or expected. Just feeling happy to be here.
In conclusion, happy International Tea Day. Have a cup. ☕️
y'all i didn't even see when we hit 1,000 followers you rocketed right past it while i was offline but. we did it. and i am. i am so verklempt. i am so truly touched by this strange little place we have made together. in less than a month we have all gathered here together and i am truly in awe of this moment we're sharing. i don't understand it and i'm not sure i ever will but i am so happy and enjoying myself so much and am so grateful that you're all here with me!!!!
i'm so sleepy and excited and overwhelmed i don't even know what to say!!!! thank you and you're the best and i love you and i'm freaking out!!!!!!! i don't know how to be normal or what to say!!!!!! thank you!!!!!!!!
Written for @drarrymicrofic
Rated T: if you would like me to adjust the ratings please tell me! Certain elements inspired by Slow Hands by eleventy7 and Let Them Wash Off in the Rain by talithan
*
Draco laughs, and Harry laughs, too, arching his head back into the pillows. His face unfurls, strangely open without his glasses, strangely soft in the grey lights of early morning. Draco bends his head and kisses his bare, brown shoulder.
Quieting down from his laughter, Harry says, “I think I love you.”
*
Draco nestled himself in odd, little words after the war. Brumous. Matutine. They rested in their nooks and crevices, delineating idiosyncratic moments of their own in the world—grey and wintery. Just before dawn. Inglenook, the prickling in the fingertips on a cold, cold morning. Solivagnant. Petrichor.
Strange, yet special.
Small, yet irreplaceable.
*
It was a young night when they first tumbled, the dark suffused with the fruity sweetness and bitterness of liquor. Warm, rough sheets under his fingers. Smooth skin. Quiet gasps, bit-back and smothered into pillows. The slivers of headlight gliding across the ceiling, the crunch of tires against gravel. Soft noises wrung from the back of his throat, involuntary and inevitable.
He woke in a foreign room, distorted. His mouth tasted disgusting. He found Potter’s glasses on the bedside dresser, then a photograph of his friends, then a photograph of his parents—waltzing by a fountain, laughing and held tightly in each other’s arms.
*
“You know,” Harry said one day, “It’s a strange name. Draco.”
Defensively, “What’s strange with my name?”
“Not a lot of people call their kids that, do they?”
“You talk about a family that named their daughter Walburga.”
Harry laughed, conceding. He practiced Draco’s name in his mouth. Draco, he repeated, curling his tongue at the r and elongating the o. Draco. Draco. He murmured into his horribly-made mug of tea, deep in thought. Draco.
Draco pretended his heart did not jump at every iteration. The syllables softened themselves with each repetition into the little space in the kitchen until they did not seem incongruous at all, the combination of vowels and consonants settling above the stove, between the creeks of the cabinets.
*
He became sentimental after the war. He cried at the littlest things. When his photograph appeared on Harry’s bedside dresser; when Harry washed his mug and put it into his cabinet; when he first touched Harry’s scar. Harry laughed at him. Draco sobbed and told him to sod off, fingertips still at the rough veins of skin.
When Harry first called him by his first name. When he first called Harry by his, voice catching in his throat.
When he woke, one morning, Harry still sound asleep. His lashes thick and long; his cheeks tinged pink with sleep marks. His hair fell over his forehead, his eyes, unruly curls spilling over the pillow. Suddenly, overwhelmingly, Draco wanted to push Harry’s hair back—to card it over his head, to feel the delicate shape of his skull. To touch the soft, thin lids, to trace the lines of his face until he memorized it like topography, to watch him—still and sound, beautiful in the quietness of the morning. Time frozen in the matutine grey lights.
*
“Come.”
They kissed. No liquor; familiar routine. Familiar habit. Tumbled into the soft mattress. Grunted, breath stolen, body crushed under the weight of another. Slow and careful and reverent; Harry delicately holding his head as he gasped and nodded and arched into the bed. They learned the geography of each other’s bodies. Of the soft skin of the V where thighs joined torso, of the hollow of the throat; of the tender folds inside the elbow. Fingers running over the rise and dip of the spine, every tumble.
Draco shivered. Harry buried his sweaty face into his neck.
Falling asleep was easy. It was easy, too, to curl his limbs around the warmth of another body, a routine. A habit.
*
He took to bringing a little dictionary with him after the war. Random pages, foreign words; he marked them with ink and quill, with stained fingers. Selcouth. Verklempt. Harry bought him reading glasses and smiled at him when he thought Draco wasn’t looking. Draco pretended not to notice, yet noticed. Pretended not to care, yet cared. Pretended not to sing, yet his heart was already composing the song on the tip of his tongue—
First note, then the second.
First syllable, then the second.
He felt it now. If only he knew the name, if only he could send the fluttering into the air—
*
“I think I love you,” Harry says.
Draco opens his mouth, throat catching. Hundreds of words and he cannot piece together all that he wants to say, all that he means to say. He clutches Harry’s bare shoulder, fingers delicate.
“Harry,” he says—helpless, for it is the only thing he can say. Beautiful and lonely and messy and bright and I want to take care of you, let me take care of you—condensed into two syllables, condensed into his name. For how could he say it’s the quiet mornings we wake up to, it’s the warmth our bodies curl towards in the night. It’s the moments I watch you when you are not watching and falling into every nook and crevice of you—you, you, you. For how could Harry’s name mean anything other than love?
“Harry,” he says again—trembling on the second syllable. Reaching out to touch Harry’s jaw.
Harry turns and kisses the pads of his fingers. Draco sighs, shaky—presses his mouth to the warm skin of Harry’s shoulder, breathes in. Kisses up. Draco buries his hands into Harry’s hair, feels the delicate shape of his skull, and Harry rolls them over—the sheets rumpled between their legs, their mouths opening, the kiss deepening. He says it again and again. Harry, Harry, Harry. The song on the tip of his tongue, nestled between the warmth of their bodies, between the reverberating beats of their hearts.
Harry, he says again.
me: at long last! i have some time to watch something on my list
also me: too many options! life or death decision! watching buffy again!!