Chapter Text
I want to reconcile the violence in your heart
I want to recognise your beauty's not just a mask
Harry shivers, though the room is warm. He had thought perhaps the wood grain of the floor would be rough, but it’s smooth and soft on the soles of his bare feet, a spell that speaks of consideration. He wiggles his toes, wanting to shove his hands into the pockets of his jeans—which are all he’s wearing—before he makes himself relax his fingers, the small, ready muscles in his wrists.
He never considered that he might use any of his Defence training to calm himself in a BDSM dungeon, but… Here he is.
He’s barely had time to look around the room and catalogue his findings—the floggers hanging in a neat row along one wall, the benches, tables, harnesses, chests no doubt full of every toy he’s never heard of. A large padded X of a cross dominates one wall, lit like a piece in a museum. Harry shivers again. And then the door on the other side of the room opens.
He’s in shadow at first, though Harry knows who it is—would know even if he had not expressly requested him; he’s known this man for nearly twenty years of his life. All of his awareness shoots across the room like a spell, like an Accio or Apparition magic; he’s a little surprised he stays rooted to this one spot.
He has five buzzing seconds to wonder what will happen next, if, seeing Harry, the man will refuse to take him on as a client, will laugh, will leave the room—or the opposite: if he’ll stay and use Harry’s list of desires to instead torture at length and at will.
Neither occurs.
Instead, Draco Malfoy steps out of the shadows and into the ambient light, his gaze meets Harry’s, and he says, with confidence, without the need to raise his voice, “Kneel.”
One Week Earlier
“You want me to what?”
“Should only be a brief assignment. Two weeks tops. Not like Vauxhall,” says Robards.
“Vauxhall was six months of hell that nearly got me addicted to potions.”
“I said not like Vauxhall.”
Harry rolls his eyes, turns away, but it’s a small office even though it belongs to the head of the department, and he turns back. “What about me says BDSM club enthusiast to you?”
Robards blinks once. “Are you joking?”
“Whu— No?” But he can feel his face heating, and there’s a strange thrum in his chest that can’t possibly be his heart, can it?
“You took a Diffindo to the upper arm in the field, insisted on sewing it back up yourself without anesthetic when you were under that magic dampener and couldn't cast and all the Healers had their hands full. You then proceeded to re-join the mission with a needle and thread hanging from your flesh, apprehending three of the suspects in that fashion.”
“The needle wasn’t hanging—”
“You regularly take on the most dangerous cases that have often resulted in your injury, and then refused to go to hospital.”
“I wouldn’t say I refused—”
“You don’t seem to mind a bit of pain too terribly, Auror Potter,” Robards says, and this stops Harry from trying to reply again.
Doesn’t he, though? Doesn’t he mind pain?
Harry shakes his head to clear it. “Nevertheless, what is getting my arse spanked soundly going to do to help you close out this money laundering case? Aside from being a spectacular practical joke played at my expense perhaps, but I can’t see you enfeebling an investigation just for laughs. Dalton, maybe.”
“We know which room the cash is flowing through, and it’s directly behind both an ironclad Shield Charm, and…”
“Yes? And?”
“And the owner’s personal play room.”
“The owner. But that’s…” The air rushes from the room, or so it seems. “No. Oh hell no. Are you mad?”
“Five or six sessions—”
“—with Draco Malfoy—”
“Five or six sessions,” Robards half-shouts over him, “and you’ll have the magical signature we need to remotely drill through the Shield Charm and see what’s going on it there. No-one knows Shield Charms like you.”
“I’ll train someone else then!”
Robards just stares at him now for a long moment during which Harry finds himself beginning to sweat. “Are you refusing an assignment?”
Harry scoffs. “Maybe!”
“Are you?”
“You’re the one who just pointed out how many times I’ve willingly put myself in danger for this department. It certainly seems like I’ve earned the right to pass on this one thing… sir,” he adds.
Robards nods, leaning back in his chair. “If we go a different route to gain access to that room, it’s going to take another month and a half, maybe longer. I can’t have that.” He tilts his head, spears Harry with what Harry’s come to think of as the Dumbledore look… this calmly beseeching thing that Harry wishes didn’t work on him. It’s his own damage that allows it to in the first place. Robards has no qualms in deploying it that Harry can detect. Why would he? He knows it will get him what he wants.
“We can put him away, Harry,” Robards says, the proverbial last nail in the coffin.
Harry firms his lips. His breath is coming hard now, but he nods. Merlin, help him.
He nods.
Contacting the club is easy enough. The name—Say When—doesn’t automatically bring to mind who Harry’s going to need to be dealing with; it’s not as though he’s having to Owl Draco Malfoy’s 99 Lashings or something. The paperwork he receives back is professional, almost warm, meant to put a client at ease, Harry suspects, and is absent of anything that feels at all like Malfoy himself.
Harry reads the welcome then flips the page to some disclaimers asking for his agreement—consent that is given can always, at any time, be withdrawn and so forth. He goes over it twice thoroughly and then signs, flipping to the third page. It’s here that he finds instructions on filling out the rest, which will be a detailed list of what he wants out of his visits.
He sets it down on his coffee table, runs a hand through his hair. He gets up, walks to the kitchen, gets a tall glass of cold water, drinks it down. He pops his neck, looks at the papers lying on the table in the other room, returns. He sits on the edge of his sofa, joggers stretched around his spread thighs, hands folded and pressed to his mouth. His knee bobs.
“Fucking hell.”
He’s a Gryffindor. He’s brave or something.
He picks up the papers, turns to the next page.
Under a general heading of Impact Play there are multiple subheadings which include various things which one could wish to be impacted by, like, for instance, either a gloved or a bare hand. Circle one: Want, Will, Won’t.
Harry sets the papers down again, stands up and wanders out to his back garden. The frogs are just starting to sing to each other from the edge of the creek at the far side of his property to the small pond he maintains closer to the house.
He loves living here. The first few years after Voldemort, he’d chosen a cramped flat in the city. It had felt safer, more contained, less corners to peek around, less square-footage that might host untold horrors, like Hogwarts had, like his life had.
But then he’d remembered Sirius’s dream for the two of them: a house in the country, just them. Just the two of them and the peaceful quiet, the space to become more human, less hunted, less controlled.
Harry loves his house in the country, with the garden and the creek and the pond and the frogs. His Mind Healer had thought it a grand idea. It’s one of the few he’s been able to implement since the war, even though he’s put twelve years between it and himself. His Mind Healer applauds even his smallest steps. Harry rarely, if ever, joins her.
He takes a deep breath of evening air, sweet like hops or long, brown grasses in the rain.
Back inside, the papers await. He considers leaving them until tomorrow, but he’s afraid he wouldn’t be able to sleep knowing they’re out here, empty and waiting and full of mad potential.
He sits with them again, this time with a finger of whiskey at his reach. He thinks about filling them out with the idea of someone else—anyone else—in his head as the person who may do these things to him. But he discards that almost as quickly as he’s thought it, both because he’s never been one to be able to live in delusions, his own or anyone else’s. And also because… well, it would be lovely to think that the problem is that he’s repulsed by the idea of Malfoy doing all these things to him, attempting to satisfy Harry’s every kinky whim. And oh, if that were the case.
The problem is that it’s not. He’s not. Repulsed, that is. He is whatever the opposite of repulsed is. If he’s repulsed by anything, it’s by how not repulsed he is.
Harry picks up the forms again, the twelve pages of questions about his sexual, submissive, and pain proclivities, among other things, and he circles the first of what he is sure will be quite a lot more of the same.
He circles Want.
“Kneel,” Draco Malfoy says, and Harry, though his heart is thundering through his limbs, his blood pooling low in his belly, giving him a swollen cock, cannot bring himself to obey.
A crooked smirk affixes itself to Malfoy’s face. “If you’re having regrets, you’re free to leave. I haven’t bound you to a bench. Yet.”
The words strike like a touch to his bare skin and Harry inhales measuredly.
Malfoy starts walking towards him, no rush at all to his step. He puts his hands in his trouser pockets. Harry had wondered if he’d come in drenched in lycra or leather, but he looks like a Muggle with a fancy executive job or something. He looks good.
He stops a few feet from where Harry stands.
“It’s nice to see you, Harry. You look well.”
Harry’s about to reply that Malfoy does too when Malfoy shakes his head warningly. “I didn’t bid you to speak. Let me tell you how this is going to go.”
Harry swallows and Malfoy steps closer, close enough to touch him, but he doesn’t.
“You have two choices,” Malfoy says. “You can kneel or you can get the fuck out of my club. Nod if you understand.”
His gaze is hard, but Malfoy’s grey eyes aren’t cold like Harry had thought he remembered. They’re hot. They blaze. Harry nods.
“Good,” Malfoy says. “Then which is it?”
Harry steadies his breath, licks dry lips, and goes to his knees.
If Malfoy is surprised, he covers it quickly. His gaze moves from Harry’s face downward. Harry gulps as the attention shifts to his throat. His nipples tighten when Malfoy looks at them. As Malfoy continues to study him, Harry discreetly cuts his gaze to the back wall.
“Am I boring you?” Malfoy asks, and Harry’s eyes dart back to his face. “I asked you a question. You may answer it.”
“N—” Harry has to clear his throat. “No.”
“Did you fill out the forms blindfolded or did you actually mean the things you marked down as wanting?”
“I… Humiliation isn’t one of my kinks, Malfoy.”
“Sir.”
“What?”
“Until I bid otherwise, you’ll address me as sir.”
“Oh,” Harry says.
“Say it.”
Harry exhales, meets Malfoy’s eyes squarely. “Yes, sir.”
“Good,” says Malfoy. Then, “I’m not trying to humiliate you. Do you feel ashamed of the things you asked for on the form?”
“I’m not here for Mind Healing. Sir,” he makes himself add.
At this, one corner of Malfoy’s lips lifts. “I wouldn’t be too sure about that.”
Then Malfoy reaches out a gentle hand and strokes Harry’s hair off his forehead, pushing his fingers into it, petting over his scalp, trailing fingertips down the side of his face. He steps around Harry slowly, dragging his fingers beneath Harry’s chin, tickling his neck.
“Casual, intimate touch,” Malfoy says softly, wonderingly.
That one had been roughly ten pages in. Harry tries to stifle it and then shivers. Why is Malfoy starting ten pages in? This isn’t what Harry expected. It occurs to him rather suddenly that if Malfoy knows about something he marked as a ‘Want’ on page ten, then he knows all of it, has read all of it and, presumably, has it committed to memory.
Harry has an intense desire to flee Malfoy’s new knowledge of him.
Malfoy has come to a halt behind him now, standing in between Harry’s ankles. His hand pushes into Harry’s hair; he pulls resolutely but without causing pain, and Harry’s neck arches.
Malfoy bends until his breath, his lips, are right at Harry’s ear. “You have nothing to be ashamed of, Harry.”
Like the lick of a warm summer breeze. Like permission to exhale. And then, immediately following, a sick feeling deep in Harry’s chest.
But Malfoy doesn’t give him time to stew in it.
“Take your jeans down,” he says, and Harry’s cock gives a pathetic pull upward.
When Harry starts on the button, then the zip, Malfoy goes back to petting his hair. “Good,” he says. And when Harry calls on his courage and pushes his jeans to his knees, baring his arse and his cock and his thighs, Malfoy’s fingers touch the back and side of Harry’s neck once he straightens again, the pads of his fingertips, the backs of his knuckles, gently stroking him.
“How are your knees? Are you in pain?”
“No, sir.”
“Mm. Are you uncomfortable like that?”
Harry swallows. “A little, sir.”
“No more ‘sir’. You may leave off addressing me unless I tell you to, and then you’ll call me Draco. Do you understand?”
“Y-yes.”
“Good.”
Harry hears the swish of a wand and tenses, but it’s only a cushioning charm cast on the floor. As if in counterpoint, Malfoy then commands, “Bend over, rest your head on the ground,” and the hand on his neck now grasps and presses, following Harry down as he obeys. Harry lays his cheek on the cool floor, his hands flat, and his arse rises into the air with the new position.
He is so very exposed like this. And then Malfoy’s hand leaves him, and he feels not only exposed, but lonely. He bites his lip not to beg to have the warmth and comfort of that hand back again.
“The safeword you chose is Hufflepuff.” Harry thinks he hears, “Of all things” muttered beneath Malfoy’s breath as he moves off across the room. “Repeat it.”
“My safeword is Hufflepuff.” Now that he’s saying it aloud, it does feel kind of silly. Particularly with his jeans around his knees and his arse in the air.
“And you understand the Muggle stoplight system? Green, yellow, and red? Red is as good as Hufflepuff.”
“I understand.”
“I might take you to yellow on purpose,” Malfoy says, and Harry hears him now testing a flogger against a piece of furniture.
“Oh fuck.”
“I want to know where your limits are. Do not go past them. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” is out on a breath before Harry remembers his instructions.
There’s a smile in Malfoy’s voice when he says, closer again, “You get that one for free.” Then, “Are you ready, Harry?”
Harry makes brief fists against the ground. His cock is leaking a steady stream onto the floor. He’s never been this quickly and immediately aroused. He wants to arch his back so badly. He closes his eyes, just for a moment, and whispers, “Yes.”
Then he’s not sure if what he hears is a gasp or the whistle of air between the leather straps of the flogger as Malfoy raises it—before it comes crashing down, a ripple of fire against his flesh.
Malfoy then beats him senseless. Literally senseless. Harry can no more pay attention to the Shield Charm than anything else in the known universe, because everything zeroes down to the burning and stinging along his buttocks, thighs, and balls. Everything is Malfoy’s calm voice and his own shouts and whimpers.
Malfoy makes Harry yellow twice, and both times stops in order to praise him.
“That’s good, Harry. You’re doing so well.” His hand on Harry’s sweaty head, stroking the hair that’s fallen into his eyes.
Harry almost yellows the praise itself. It had been a ‘Will’ on his forms, not a ‘Want’. He’s still not sure why he didn’t circle a flatout ‘Won’t.’ He doesn’t feel worthy of praise. Not until he’s taken some Dark magic and still saved a life or three. Or a dozen. Sometimes not even then.
But he hasn’t the strength to fend Malfoy off. All he has in him is the laboured ability to gulp air from the room like he’s been drowning… to cry as the pain throbs through him.
And then with a “Ready?” that makes Harry’s cock so hard it hurts, Malfoy goes again.
Harry’s not sure how long it lasts, only that he’s existing in and out of a beautiful place that lets him not think for once, that allows… no, it makes him float on the height of sensation, out of control. Then, just when he thinks the pain is too much and he might yellow once more, Malfoy stops.
He puts down the flogger. “Ease onto your stomach. Slowly now. Let me help you.” And then he does. He lays Harry down on a floor that feels more like a bed, so soft. “Relax your muscles. I’m finished, Harry. The session’s over. Relax.”
Harry pillows his head on his arms and lets go. His cock, still raging hard beneath him, is his only discomfort.
“Draco?” he checks, the name itself like one last strike of leather against him.
But all Malfoy replies as he again moves about the room is, “Yes?”
“I’m…” Harry begins. “I didn’t… I haven’t, er… I thought maybe you’d—” He moves his hips from side to side a little, to get his point across. Merlin, is he really asking Draco Malfoy to give him his happy ending?
The soft laugh is somewhat unexpected. He can almost hear Draco shaking his head. “The fact that you thought that was the point…”
Then he comes and sits beside Harry’s prone body and applies the nicest smelling, most relieving salve Harry could have imagined being laid to his hurts. Malfoy, to Harry’s disappointment, has gloves on now, the kind Healers wear, as he smears ointment onto the backs of Harry’s thighs, over his arse, and then a little between Harry’s legs.
Harry’s neglected cock twitches, and he moans plaintively into the crook of his arm. It occurs to him that he should feel ashamed. But he doesn’t have the energy. Malfoy’s stripped him of the ability, temporarily.
Malfoy stands again, pulling the gloves off, and his shoes come into Harry’s slow-blinking view. “Stay put for ten minutes. I’ll set a timer. The salve will do a lot of healing in that time and soak in enough for you to dress. You’ll receive a parchment from Reception on your way out with instructions for your care this evening and over the next few days.” Then, upsettingly, “Do not masturbate in here.”
When Harry merely grunts, on his way to falling asleep, Malfoy nudges his arm with the toe of his shoe. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, Draco.”
“Good,” Draco says. “I’ll see you again in one week.”
Then, before Harry can complain, he’s gone.
A week! Harry’s supposed to have had at least three sessions under his belt by then. He was supposed to be well on his way to loosening the spell on the room beyond. He puts out feelers for it while lying on his now half-hard dick and realises the shield is tighter than tight. Still, he uses his ten minutes wisely, poking into corners with his magic, barely lifting a finger to do so, testing the spell.
When the timer goes off, he stands, groaning, gets dressed, and exits as told. He feels a little drunk and stumbles along the hall, catching himself with a hand on the wall. His hair must be a fright especially, but the receptionist keeps his face carefully clear of shock or judgment. Or maybe it’s not something he has to work at anymore. Harry collects his paperwork and a small bag with some supplies and, in a fog, makes his way home, not trusting himself to Apparate in the floaty state he finds himself in.
But make his way home, he does, and he brews a pot of tea before sort of half-lying on his sofa to take the weight off his backside a bit, though Malfoy was right that the salve did an extraordinary amount of healing work all on its own.
Harry unfolds the parchment to find Malfoy’s curlique writing:
Take a lukewarm bath or shower tonight. Reapply the salve to patted dry skin.
Harry hadn’t expected to feel a small thrill at being told what to do in his own home, but… He’s buzzing with it, his chest warm with new arousal.
Then:
I want you to go to bed naked. Put an extra softening charm on your sheets. Then wrap your hand around your cock and make yourself come, Harry. Come all over yourself, and think of me.
D.M.
Harry—half in that beautiful place still, where Draco’s ability to command him lingers—follows those instructions to the letter.
“The charm was constructed laterally but then pushed en bloc into the wall itself, which feels… I don’t know maybe several inches thick, concrete and then steel. I think the inner walls are also magically fortified. The Shield radiates out into the—” Harry only stumbles over the word for a moment, but it’s enough.” —the playroom by roughly ten centimetres. I haven’t detected a weak spot yet.”
Robards nods at him even as he’s writing notes in the margins of Harry’s report, the wood grouse quill’s feather trembling and twitching as he goes. “Is that all?”
Harry clears his throat. “I didn’t detect anything Dark from the room, sir.”
“Well, that may be the Shield’s doing, Potter. Still, this is an impressive gleen from your first… encounter.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“But a week is too long. Press to get in sooner, would you?”
“I—” Heat flares along his throat like bile. “I don’t think Malfoy will respond favourably to… desperation.”
Robards looks at him squarely now. “We have reason to believe he’ll respond favourably to you.”
Harry frowns. “What does that m—”
“That will be all. I expect an update in two days as well as your plan of action as to your next foray at the club. Dismissed.”
Harry stands, smooths his clothes down, and takes his leave.
When he walks through the bullpen, he’s so heavily Glamoured no-one so much as gives him a second glance. He used to work with these people—he’d befriended some of them—before he went undercover. He’s been a completely covert, nobody-below-Robards-even-knows operative for years now; his entire career is one long special assignment. He walks out of the building like he’s anyone and no-one at the same time.
Harry takes his lunch in a Muggle park and then Apparates home, sighing as he kicks his shoes off. He sets the hob to heating for tea while he changes to joggers and a t-shirt.
And then, because he doesn’t want to think about it any longer, he lets his tea grow cold on the side table and takes a kip on his sofa.
He wakes slowly, the light in his living room having dimmed. He stretches, his t-shirt riding up his stomach. He reaches down and cups his cock and balls; he’s half-hard. He groans, leisurely stroking himself through the cotton until he’s got a ludicrously large tent, then he pulls his joggers down and starts in earnest on his naked cock.
It’s laughable… that Malfoy instructed Harry to think of him. Malfoy is all Harry’s been able to think of for the last twenty-four hours. His bum is pleasantly sore, and as he begins thrusting into his fist, the friction of sofa leather against his skin is a delightful, decadent burn, bringing memories to the surface of his mind, mental images: the closeness of the floor, how he’d drooled on it, the confidence in Malfoy’s brutal lashes, the sound of his voice a reverberation in the room and over all the nerves on Harry’s excited body.
It had hurt… not to get fucked by him.
Harry comes on an almost miserable moan, his ejaculate striping his stomach, his knuckles, running down.
“Lick it,” Malfoy’s voice says in his mind, and Harry does, moaning again.
He feels wrung out, blissful and unhappy all at once. It’s confusing. This whole thing is confusing.
Robards is right. He needs to get in there sooner rather than later. Not because he wants whatever Malfoy—whatever Draco will do to him. But because the sooner he breaks this charm, the sooner this all ends. Draco will go away, and Harry can… Well, he can move on to his next assignment.
He can forget.
Harry is already kneeling this time when Draco enters the room.
Draco tsks at him. “Did I tell you to do that? Stand up.”
What is this feeling of disappointment, that his gesture has been rebuked? And on the heels of that, another twisted ache: bitterness… shame.
Draco walks toward him as Harry rises from his knees. He’s in dark trousers and a white shirt, open at the collar. He comes close. They’re of a similar height, nearly nose to nose.
“I told you one week. My scheduler said you were insistent.”
“Respectfully,” Harry clarifies.
“Well, I should hope so. Why should I see you right now rather than turn your still-smarting arse onto the street?”
He smells good, like warm cedar. Harry fights the desire to nuzzle the side of his neck and plead to be fucked this time.
“I don’t… have an answer. I…” Harry meets his gaze. “I’ll submit to whatever choice you make.”
“Mm,” Draco hums. He places his hands on Harry’s hips, and Harry inhales, his arousal spiking. “Since you’ve returned so soon, I suppose we’ll just have to concentrate on your front this time, won’t we?”
Harry’s nipples tighten. He feels wobbly, the anticipation eating him up. Draco tugs on the hem of Harry’s t-shirt. “Strip.” Then he strides across the room and pulls a pair of leather restraints attached to a chain from a beam in the ceiling.
Harry’s heart pounds against his ribs and he quickly undresses, cutting his gaze to the wall with the Shield Charm in the minute or so he has without Draco’s full attention on him.
He’s almost got a good read on the far corner, a dark little crevice with what feels like a worn gap, not even a millimetre in width, barely detectable… when Draco turns and says, “Come.”
Harry walks to him, and as he does, Draco begins rolling up his sleeves. Harry’s heavy dick sways between his legs, and Draco’s eyes travel down to it, move over his thighs, draw back up his abdomen, his chest, his face. Harry is suffused with a sweet pleasure at what feels like approval, admiration for his body. His cock twitches.
“Turn this way,” Draco says and then tenderly manhandles him into position. “Arms up, love.”
Harry gasps, hesitates.
Draco’s head tilts. “Terms of endearment,” he says. “Remind us both what you marked, Harry.”
“I… ‘Will’,” he says. “I marked ‘Will’.”
“Do you wish to amend your answer?”
Harry lifts his arms, waits for the shackles to come round his wrists. “Not… No, thank you.”
Draco’s hands slide up his stretched body, his sides, his armpits, over elbows and forearms. “Very well.” Draco’s breath comes in warm puffs against Harry’s face as the leather buckles into place, the inside of the cuffs soft, buttery and pliant, though the restraints are strong when he gives an experimental pull of them.
Draco’s eyebrow goes up. Then he says, “What’s your safeword.” It’s not a question so much as a reminder.
“Hufflepuff,” Harry replies, and before Draco turns away, Harry sees the amusement sweep over his face, a brightness, pink and lovely.
I made him happy.
The forbidden thought rises before Harry can quell it. Harry’s cock rises as well, and when Draco turns back, flogger in hand, his gaze drops to it, and his lips part.
“Impressive,” he says, and Harry feels himself blush. Pride swells through him, and then the inevitable sick feeling, the shame.
Draco comes close, tucks the flogger into his belt. He places his hands on Harry’s hips again. “That,” he says, looking into Harry’s eyes now. “We’re going to deal with that, darling. You wait and see.”
Then before Harry can even start to figure out what that means, Draco wraps his hand around Harry’s cock. Harry whines, automatically pulling at his restraints, his knees nearly buckling.
“So ready for me,” Draco muses, smiling softly as he pulls and strokes, watching Harry’s face transform with the touch. Then he stops, backs away. “‘Light nipple torture’,” he quotes, getting the flogger in hand again and flicking it at Harry’s chest, playfully at first, but then harder, sharper, targeted.
“Ffffuck.” The pain sears hot, peaking his nipples tight. Harry’s not sure if he wants to flinch away or lean into it.
“And you’d like a little on your dick too, wouldn’t you?” Draco snaps the flogger at his cock and balls, and it’s bloody heaven.
“Yes. Oh please.” How soon he’s been made to beg.
Draco keeps flicking between Harry’s legs as he speaks. “I don’t have to ask if you’ve been a good boy, do I? You’ve been so good, haven’t you? You’ve been too good, Harry.”
Pain. Not from the flogger. Pain on the inside of him, flashing through him.
“There it is,” Draco says, tucking the flogger into his belt again and coming close enough that his own clothed body brushes Harry’s. Those hands, that shouldn’t be a comfort, alight on Harry’s waist. Draco’s lips brush his jaw. “I’m going to flay that shame right out of you.”
Then, before the nasty, awful feeling of undeserving can take hold, Draco lifts his hands and his thumbs and fingers tighten on Harry’s nipples and twist.
“Ahhh!” Harry cries out, shaking. It’s almost a yellow, and he feels like such a baby for that. But he withstands it, and then Draco is bending his head down, licking one of Harry’s abused nipples, kissing it wetly, then switching to the other. The sudden intimacy of his mouth is electric. Harry thinks he might come.
“Draco,” he says breathlessly. “I’m… I’m…”
Draco’s hand comes around the base of his cock and squeezes. “No, you’re not,” he says easily. “Now behave and control yourself or I’ll put this gorgeous beast of yours in a cage.” He gives a little waggling shake of Harry’s cock.
Draco’s body heat recedes and Harry, eyes closed, sways toward him. The bonds keep him on the balls of his feet, unbalanced, and the feeling is one of dangling over the edge of himself with Draco being the steady place his body yearns for. Harry, being the one people tend to lean on and entrust with their lives, finds this sensation in particular, if not unsettling, foreign and disorienting.
Draco seems to intuit this, and he has the perfect way to root Harry back into his body: pain.
Flogger in hand again, Draco unfastens one more button on his shirt. “Ready?” he asks.
“Green,” Harry breathes. “Green, green, green.”
His nipples are stinging and throbbing by the time Draco moves on to flogging his thighs and his stomach and every so often his hard cock. Harry is leaking, trembling, his body a warm pink-ish red from the strokes of the lashes he’s taken. Draco starts concentrating on his dick, and this is the thing that gets Harry to finally cry.
“Yellow,” Harry grits out, though he doesn’t want to. He wants the pain to go on. But he’s afraid, even though he’s hard, that he might piss himself, might pass out from the pleasure.
“Good, Harry,” Draco says, moving close, dropping the flogger to the ground. His hands cup Harry’s face, thumbs brushing away the tears. “God, you’re so good. You take it so beautifully. You’re beautiful.”
“Yellow,” Harry can’t help but half-sob.
“Okay,” Draco says, kisses one of his cheeks, then the other. “Okay, baby. You’re fucking ugly.”
The laugh is out of Harry in a burst of unruly energy, the tension in him bleeding gleefully into breathless near-giggles. And though he knows it’s a tease—Draco is teasing him—knows it’s a joke, it helps. It helps so much… to not feel beautiful in Draco’s eyes. To not be forced to see himself that way.
Draco is smiling at him, like he’s proud. That can’t be right. He doesn’t know Harry. They don’t know each other. Why does it feel so real? It hurts, it feels so bloody real.
Then, looking at Harry’s wet face, his wet eyes, Draco goes to his knees before his cock. He takes Harry into his mouth.
Harry wants to control himself, he truly does. But he can’t. As Draco bobs his head between his legs, Harry meets him, thrusting into his face as best he can hanging from the ceiling and on his tiptoes. He makes fists, stretches his fingers wide, makes fists again. Draco’s mouth is hot and so wet, and the suction is perfect. Harry’s not going to last. But it’s when Draco slips his hands around and cups Harry’s abused bottom that it happens. The pain merges with the pleasure and both spill over. Harry comes in Draco’s mouth, not quite able to be worried about if he shouldn’t, if he should have been given permission first. Draco moans, keeps moving, swallows. And Harry cries out, gasping, his entire body alight and on fire such that he feels he must be glowing, like an ember.
When he’s finished, Draco draws back, slurps on the head a moment, to catch all of Harry’s come. Then he stands up, reaches to the restraints. “I’ve got you. Hold onto my shoulders. Easy.”
He takes Harry down slowly to the floor, which, once again, is soft and supple from whatever spell he’s used. Draco follows him down, lays him out, strokes Harry’s hair, then takes one wrist, then the other, massaging them, working his thumbs into the tendons, up Harry’s forearms. “How does that feel?”
“I feel… I don’t know.”
“That’s not helpful,” Draco says, stern but kind.
Without the words to describe anything, Harry settles on, “Good. I feel good.”
Draco nods. He casts a wandless Accio for the same salve he used before.
“What’s that made of?” Harry asks when Draco applies it to his thighs first.
“Shh. No questions.”
Harry sighs, letting his eyes fall closed as Draco cares for him, smearing the ointment onto his nipples, circling them with his middle fingers. Harry lets out a small gasp.
When he opens his eyes it’s to find Draco looking at him calmly, his hand splayed flat on Harry’s chest now., feeling the beating of his heart
“You… you sucked me off,” Harry says stupidly.
“Yes, well, there were approximately eight circles around ‘Want’ for that one.” Draco wears a little smirk.
Harry squeezes his eyes closed, covering them with his hand, and groans.
“Now, now,” Draco says. Harry feels him lean in close, lips near Harry’s ear. “You have nothing to be ashamed of, Harry.”
The same thing he said before. Exactly the same.
Too soon, Draco is standing. He unrolls his shirt sleeves, buttons his cuffs. “Ten minutes,” he says. “Then you may dress. Stop by Reception on the way out again.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me if I followed your instructions before?” Harry asks, feeling bold. His body is singing.
Draco looks down on him. “I don’t have to,” he says. “I know you did.” On his way out of the room, he adds, “See you in three days, Harry.”
Harry lies there on the soft, warm floor, nipples tingling, cock sated.
He turns his gaze to the wall, to the charm, and struggles to care.
“The problem is here, you see?” Hermione says, casting at the Shield Charm Ron put up around his pint which now sweats on the pub table. “It’s not about finding the opening. It’s that the charm will detect interference to its weak points and send power there. You’ll do nothing but alert the charm to its vulnerabilities.”
Harry, chin in hand, hair probably sticking up from all the times he’s run his fingers through it in frustration, says, “So you’re saying I’m fucked. There’s no way in.”
“She’s saying don’t attack the weak point,” Ron says. “She’s saying you have to hit it where it’s strongest, mate.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously,” his friends say in unison.
Harry growls. “Robards put me on this because I’m good with Shield Charms and here you two are schooling me in them.”
Hermione is too polite to look smug, but Ron smiles broadly. “Just because you’re the best in the DMLE doesn’t mean you’re the actual best.”
Harry reaches across the booth and shoves him, and Ron’s grin only gets wider before he disengages the charm to sip his beer.
“Then why aren’t you the Auror? Either of you?” Harry bemoans.
“Because it’s shit,” Ron replies easily.
Hermione nods. “He’s right. How many times have we begged you to leave that place, Harry? They do nothing but take advan—”
Harry suspects Ron’s just kicked her under the table because not only does she stop mid-word, but now they’re staring at each other and having a silent battle of wills. Hermione seems to take the loss, softening and giving a slight nod.
“We just think you’ve put enough energy into saving people,” she amends.
But the slow crawl of bitterness, of shame mixed with sadness and helplessness, has invaded Harry’s psyche nonetheless. He tries to wash it all down with his whiskey, but all it does is burn his throat, bringing prickly tears to his eyes.
It’s been two days since he saw Draco last. Tomorrow, he can go back again.
“Another round?” he asks.
Ron shakes his head. “Mum can only play with Rosie so long before she needs a break.”
“I thought the point was that she’s giving you two a break.”
“Our darling child,” Hermione says, standing and slinging her coat on, “is one part four-year-old, one part teenager, going on thirty-five, who can throw a tantrum like a toddler when she gets tired and cranky.”
“She’s exhausting,” Ron agrees.
But they share a look that is all love and adoration for their progeny regardless. They take turns kissing Harry on the cheek.
“Good luck with the charm,” Hermione says in parting, and Harry watches them go through the pub’s Floo one at a time. Ron gives a little wave as he swirls into the chimney.
Harry sighs, moving some of Ron’s condensation around on the whorls of the wood tabletop. He finishes his whiskey and then moves from the booth they shared to take a stool at the bar instead.
He’s two more whiskeys down and contemplating whether he wants a third (really his fourth) or if he’d rather go home to bed, when the Floo ignites again, and Harry turns reflexively. He then watches Draco Malfoy emerge from the plume of green smoke.
A shiver works its way over Harry’s body, his skin alight with sensation at the sight of him.
He watches Draco see him, the cascade of quiet emotions over his face: confusion, annoyance maybe, resignation. Draco makes his way over to the bar, to the empty seat next to Harry. He doesn’t sit, merely waving two fingers for the bartender who nods while pouring another drink at the other end of the bar.
“Why are you at my local, Potter?” Draco asks, clipped but not exactly mean.
“It’s not just your local now is it?” Harry replies.
“Do you live around here?” Draco asks, then before Harry can answer, to the barman, “I’ll have a vodka tonic, thank you.”
Harry doesn’t live around here. Here being a reasonably posh London neighbourhood, somewhere he can’t exactly afford on his salary. Shame assaults him anew when he thinks about how he left Grimmauld: untended, dark, cob-webbed, ghoul-still-in-the-attic. He’d left it to rot rather than renovate it, rather than turn it into something good. Harry hasn’t even been able to do that with himself much less a cantankerous, borderline evil old house. Still, he hates that he couldn’t manage to transform it, to make it a place Sirius would have been proud of him for.
He reminds himself Sirius would be proud of the home he’s made, even if it’s not the one he was given. Maybe Sirius would be prouder still. He always hated that place. He left it to Harry merely because, in the end, it was all that he had to give.
“I have friends in the area,” Harry settles on.
“Weasley and Granger then?” Draco says, pays the barman, sips his drink.
“I do have other friends.” Heat rises to Harry’s cheeks.
All Draco says is, “Of course.” Then, “I meant no offense. It’s commendable… the ability to retain friends for life.”
Harry hasn’t met his eyes this whole time, but now Draco waits him out, watching him; Harry can feel that attention, has become attuned to it, and the hair on the back of his neck rises. Harry looks up at him.
“Is this seat taken?” Draco asks.
“No, my friends… Ron and Hermione left,” Harry concedes.
He expects a bit of smugness, some taking the piss, despite the magnanimous pronouncement Draco just made, but Draco simply nods and takes the proffered seat. “What are you drinking?”
“Firewhisky.”
Draco signals to the bartender.
While he’s poured a new drink, Harry can only be aware of Draco next to him, aware of the body he reluctantly desires, the man that makes him want beyond reason. This is the alleged money-launderer who made the Shield Charm he’s tasked with cracking. He’s supposed to examine where it’s strongest. Draco himself is the charm’s strongest point, the power behind its unbeatable complexity. He’s also the man that has whipped Harry’s skin into throbbing red welts, who has made Harry feel deliciously owned, even protected, which is not something Harry has felt perhaps ever. It’s not something he thought he needed. He doesn’t want to need it.
That awful self-loathing creeps in and Harry takes a swig of his new drink. “So,” he says feeling a bit wild, a lot ridiculous, “what’s new in your life, Malfoy?”
Draco meets his gaze evenly and then says, “I don’t share details about my life with clients.”
Harry scoffs, his neck going hot with embarrassment. “We’ve known each other since we were eleven.”
“Yes,” Draco allows, bringing his glass to his lips. “And now you’re my client.”
Harry takes a breath to speak but then realises he can’t argue Draco’s logic and stops. Something near to his feeling of shame shows up, flares to life, and because he’s now four whiskeys in, he voices it. “Do you do with your other clients what you do with me?”
Draco’s lips purse a moment, before he says, “Of course.”
Harry’s stomach goes molten, his jaw stiff. He nods.
“Everyone is different,” Draco concedes, “but to some extent, yes. I do what they want, Harry.”
“Men and women?”
And now, when Harry darts his gaze to Draco’s face somewhat guiltily, there’s a small frown there. “Do you think that’s at all your business?”
“I…” Harry starts. “Probably not.” His cheeks are on fire now.
The moment extends, uncomfortable. Harry’s opening his mouth to apologise when he feels…
It’s just a light touch on the back of his arm, not even on his arm, on the fabric of his henley, and he looks to see Draco’s fingers having reached for him, not even caressing really. Harry falls into that tiny offering, that possible permission; he turns, stands, takes Draco by the back of the neck, moves in to kiss him.
Draco dodges his lips, pushes Harry back gently. He’s blinking, not meeting Harry’s eyes. He looks not only surprised but… conflicted.
“I’m sorry,” Harry says. “I thought… maybe we could… Could we…?”
"I'm off the clock, Potter,” Draco says. And when Harry just stands there, a stupid, rebuffed person, equal parts yearning and dismay, Draco adds, "I can't muddy the energy between us tomorrow by kissing you here tonight."
"Why not?” Harry asks. “I'll still kneel for you."
Draco’s eyes go a telling shade darker. His gaze falls to Harry’s lips and Harry licks them. Draco exhales audibly. Then the expression is gone; or rather, it changes.
“What would happen if I told you to kneel, right here, in the pub?”
Harry’s skin immediately flushes, his heart pounding. He looks out into the pub to see how many people are there, who would see him do it. Only eight or so. It’s a slow night. His mouth has gone dry. He looks back at Draco’s face, his skin now crawling with the idea. He doesn’t want to do this. It doesn’t feel right. But Draco is looking at him with a hard, implacable expression. Harry swallows, and with a sick feeling in his gut, he starts to lower himself down.
“Stop.” Draco’s voice is calm but brooks no argument.
Harry stands straight again, embarrassed. “Wh—?”
“No, Harry, this is the problem.”
“What? Why?” He hates how his voice sounds. Childish. Powerless.
Draco looks at him, looks deeply into him, like he does when they’re in a scene.
“Because you don’t have a humiliation kink,” he says. “I know that. You know I know that. Yet you were going to humiliate yourself anyway.”
Harry shakes his head, wanting to interject, but Draco stops him.
“A Dom who asks you to do something which they know will be upsetting to you is a bad one. That is a Dom you say no to and you say it with force. You walk away from that person and you don’t ever look back. Do you hear me, Harry?”
Harry is surprised to find angry tears swimming in his eyes. He hates it, hates this feeling. He wants to punch someone. He wants to break something. But the thing he hates isn’t outside himself, it’s inside. How do you break your own damage open? How do you kill it? With poison? Suffocation? Nothing Harry has ever done has worked on this feeling. Nothing but the man standing in front of him, who asks, more gently now, “Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” It’s out on a breath, lingering between them like the ignition of a spell.
Draco shivers. It’s slight. It’s nearly nothing. But Harry sees it.
Then Draco stands up, coming into Harry’s space. Their bodies brush as he leans in, lips so very close; they’re breathing the same breaths. It’s going to happen. Everything in Harry’s body responds to the promise of it—for five waiting, incendiary seconds—and then Draco backs away.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Harry,” he says. He leaves his half-finished drink on the table and then stalks through the room and out the door.
Harry has the idea around midnight, but then once he’d executed it, he can’t sleep.
The next day, he gets his morning paperwork finished but in a fog, fairly certain his final report on the Doyle case is rife with spelling errors. He grabs his gym bag after a light lunch and heads to the Muggle place in Whitechapel that he likes. He pushes his body through working with the weight machines, and then runs around the indoor track as it’s started to drizzle outside. He takes a long shower before he heads out, then stops by his favourite curry place for takeaway, almost unable to wait to scarf it down before he Apparates home.
Body loose from his workout and full from the food, all he has left to do is wait for his appointment time. He sets his wand to buzz him awake in time and then grabs a kip on the sofa.
Predictably, he wakes with an erection. He goes to wank on instinct but stops himself two lazy tugs in. He checks the time. Twenty minutes until he’s to arrive at Say When. He leaves his dick alone, the denial of satisfaction its own kind of pleasure.
He dresses in nice jeans and a button-down shirt, not at all thinking of how it would feel to be unbuttoned, unwrapped, by Draco, like a present.
Draco has been just to the left of his every thought all day, as though he’s standing to the side, watching Harry go through the motions of his life, knowing he’ll only truly come alive for Draco’s low voice in his ear telling him what to do, for Draco’s hands on him, hurting him, soothing him.
Harry remembers their conversation in the pub last night, Draco’s easy assertion that what he does with Harry is nothing special. Harry’s stomach knots at the memory, and before he leaves for the evening, he takes a long look at himself in the bathroom mirror.
This is a job. This is his work. It’s an assignment. He’d do well to remember that, rather than getting caught up in… this. His stupid feelings. His unruly longing for something he can’t have except briefly, piecemeal, his desire merely one side of a business transaction. He’ll give his body over, like he always does on a case, and what he’ll receive in exchange is the win, the bust, the accolades that ring hollow to his ears, that could never fill the emptiness in him, though he retains the hope that this time… this time will be different.
You have to hit it where it’s strongest.
Draco may be strong, he may command Harry to his every whim, but no-one… No-one is as powerful as Harry when he needs to be.
No-one.