lomonaaeren | Update on the state of the Lomonaaeren

Soldier’s Welcome: Still no idea how long this is going to be. I know where it ends, but not when.

Practicing Liars: I’m tentatively able to estimate this as a 30-35 chapter fic now. Maybe the defeat of Voldemort will take place over Christmas holidays instead of at the end of the school year. That seems likelier with the pacing so far.

“Bastardy/Opportunity”: STOP GROWING, FIC. It’s 12,000 words now, and it’s only going to get longer. I’ve been working on this during the third days (like today) when I’m not posting on the other two, and I assumed it would be near the end by now. It’s not.

This fic would be called Nova Cupiditas, Latin for “new desire.” The title is the incantation for the curse that some very disgruntled half-bloods and Muggleborns are using on pure-bloods after the war. Politics continues as usual, with all the usual irritating blood superiority shit. The half-bloods decide that there’s little that would be more humiliating to the most bigoted than to be hit with a curse that forces them to fall into mindless lust with people they consider beneath them. Someone arranges for Draco to be cursed to lust after Harry, assuming that it’s a fitting punishment considering their rivalry at school.

Nova Cupiditas is a nasty curse. It inspires only lust at first, but if that’s denied, the desire changes into a different kind of hunger, and starts making the victim eat himself alive—biting off bits of his fingernails, tearing at his skin, gouging his eyes out, and so on. On the other hand, if the victim and the person he’s forced to lust after have sex, a new cycle begins, and soon the desire is back and causing more pain. More sex simply prompts the renewal of the cycle at shorter and shorter intervals, until there’s no way the victim can be satisfied fast enough, at which point he’ll either start eating himself or rape the object of his lust. There is no way to reverse it, even by having the original caster remove it.

Harry is extremely pissed off that this has happened to Draco, because it’s a horrible thing to happen to anyone. He’s started a new career as a spell inventor that includes learning to see magic, and he decides to take Draco into his house where he can study him and hopefully find a way to see the curse, which no one has studied this way before, so he can then find a way to take it off. Meanwhile, he can stop the eating behavior if it starts, and he’s more than confident that he can defend himself against any attack. (He would have sex with Draco if only out of compassion, but he considers that Draco is unable to give real consent and so it would be a case of him raping Draco if he did).

So the race is on to protect Draco—from the curse, from the people who think the best solution is for Draco to die, and from Draco’s own attempts to ease the lust by persuading Harry that, yes, really, he can consent to sex.

A dark story, obviously.