lomonaaeren (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lomonaaeren) wrote2012-01-17 05:15 pm
lomonaaeren) wrote2012-01-17 05:15 pm
Entry tags:
[one-shots]: Were It Not That I Have Bad Dreams, 1/2, NC-17, H/D
Title: Were It Not That I Have Bad Dreams
Pairing(s): Harry/Draco
Summary: Draco is in Azkaban. The new Azkaban, where solitary confinement means confinement with one's self.
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended.
Warning(s): D/s, prisoner!fic, heavy angst, collars, cages, dub-con, bondage, psychological trauma and torture, no happy ending.
Word Count: 17,500
Author's Notes: Written as a pinch-hit for the 2011 hd_holidays round, forscarletladyy, using her prompts of collars, cages, dub-con, D/s, and darkfic, as well suggestions for prisoner fic. I started out with a tiny scrap of an idea, but it was her prompts that nurtured it into life. Thanks to my betas, L. and K, and to groolover for Britpicking. The title comes from a Hamlet quote: "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space--were it not that I have bad dreams."
Were It Not That I Have Bad Dreams
Draco remembered coming to the island.
He remembered the hard buzzing that seemed to surround him when he was Apparated onto the low, foam-washed grey stone extending out into the sea, and he looked around, expecting the appearance of Dementors. He saw nothing. Nothing but grey. The fog, and the birds, and the sea, and the sky, all washed-out and half-glowing in the distance.
"Felt that, did you?" The guard behind him was a bulky Auror, not evil and not kind. He pushed Draco ahead with a hand in the middle of his back. "That's the ward. Responsible for your punishment."
Draco nearly stumbled. He hadn't eaten in two days, anticipating the completion of his trial and sentencing.
Three months, he told himself. It's only three months. I can make it through three months. Potter managed to persuade them down to that much. I can handle three months. I can--
He cut his thoughts off. Going mad was no part of the plan, and his family had tendencies in that direction he did not want to encourage. Azkaban didn't use Dementors; they used something else to guard their most dangerous prisoners now, something that involved wards and being locked inside one's own head. Draco could imagine worse punishments. He wouldn't find anyone here worthy of conversing with, anyway.
He looked around as they moved through the front door of the enormous granite block that housed the prison and down--and down, and down--corridors and stairs and weakly glimmering ramps. There was nothing to see that was any different from what he had seen so far. Granite, steel, wood, iron, stone. And darkness. As they moved down, black replaced the grey.
Down and down and down.
*
His cell lay under sea level, so that the smell and the damp and the roar seeped in. Draco didn't mind. None of his jailers were Slytherins, or they would have known about the dungeons' proximity to the lake.
One weakly glimmering torch shone outside the cell, providing guidance for the guards who came to bring him stale bread and dusty porridge and, now and then, a musty scrap of fruit to keep him from getting sick. There was water, always, dripping into a bucket with a steady song that they probably intended to bother him. Draco slept through it. There was a latrine, and a few lumpy blankets that cradled him against the stone. Now and then the guards blasted him with Cleaning Charms and Repairing Charms, to ensure they didn't have to let him take a shower or change his clothes.
And there was the buzzing.
Draco listened to it. Now and then, it was a distant, hard sound that cut through the noises of the sea. Other times, it seemed close but soft, as though a purring cat had crept into bed with him. On the third morning he was there--or perhaps it was not, but it was the third time he had bread--Draco asked the guard who brought him the food about it.
A woman with waxy skin and grey eyes and stony hair, she looked at him without interest and answered, "The ward. It needs time to get used to you before it goes to work, or you would have already felt it." She laid the tray down in front of him and stepped back, her wand pointed at his throat.
"The ward," Draco said, and licked a crumb off the back of his finger, closing his eyes for a moment at the taste of bread and skin. Then he opened his eyes and paid attention to the woman again. "I've heard about that before. When will it get used to me?"
The woman smiled for the first time. It didn't show any amusement that Draco could see, as though someone had made an impression on the skin of her face alone. "Questions of when are irrelevant," she answered, and waited until he was done, picked up the tray, and departed.
Draco lay back with his arms folded behind his head, and listened to the buzzing. The crash of the waves. The distant noises of people pacing back and forth, and now and then screaming or rustling or dying.
He had been at least some days here, he thought, and he hadn't gone mad or been hurt yet. He would see what the ward did when it affected him, but he didn't think it could be much worse than what he had endured so far.
Malfoy?
Draco bolted to his knees before he thought about it, turning his head in several directions. He knew that voice. Most recently, he'd listened to it plead at his trial for leniency, like the drops of water dripping into the bucket.
"Potter," he said, and then stopped. Why would Potter have come to Azkaban? The Ministry had forbidden Draco visitors. And Potter had better things to do, like getting on with being a hero.
He made himself lie back down. This could be the faint vestiges of madness creeping in, though he didn't know why, considering the prison hadn't hurt him as yet. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing until he thought he could reproduce the pattern on a piano.
Malfoy, Potter's voice whispered again, and fell silent.
*
Warmth. The sound of a fire as relentless and regular as the sound of the sea. Carpet beneath his feet, his bare feet. The elegant feeling of clean skin, scraped and washed fresh from a bath with a servant who knew what they were doing. Something light and flexible in his hands, travelling around them but not binding them, instead offering itself.
He opened his eyes.
He stood in a room with walls that extended so far to the sides he knew at once it could not be anywhere in the Manor; his father had thought large rooms like this vulgar and diminished them or shut them up. He turned in a slow circle, and found the fire behind him, spread along a hearth that two people could have lain head-to-foot in. It ate slick and gleaming logs of wood in the same way that the dawn ate stars, and golden light spilled out of it and along the carpet. The carpet had subdued shades in it, red and brown and gold, and they changed under Draco's eyes as he completed his circle.
He knew this must be a delusion, of course, because he remembered Azkaban and the prison cell. What he could not figure out was why the ward the guards spoke of with such anticipation would give him pleasure and warmth and satisfaction. Any softening of the Death Eaters' punishment wouldn't have met with the approval of the moving statues that surrounded him to keep him in his place.
Draco paused when he finished his slow turn, because he had realised for the first time that there was someone else in the room. The person knelt in front of him, facing away from Draco, head bowed and hands linked together behind his back. Draco took a step forwards and then paused as the flexible thing in his hands slithered out and fell to the floor with a semitoned thump.
A length of rope, and nothing else. No, Draco decided when he reached down to finger it, silken cord. He shook his head and stepped over it, approaching the figure with its back to him. He doubted he would need the rope to deal with someone who knelt there so submissively.
His steps halted for a moment, and his eyes closed. It was flashes of other memories that bled into his head now, nothing to do with the Manor except that the Manor had been where some of them happened.
Vague ideas of what would happen if he walked into a room and snapped a command and people leaped to obey because of who he was, not who his father was, or his blood. The idea of hair gripped between his hands, held there as someone swallowed around his cock, and the person not fighting him, not struggling, leaning into the hold because they needed it. Estimating the strength of someone like Blaise and the ways that he might be able to pin him down.
And the words Draco would say once he was pinned down, to make him want to stay there.
He shook his head, wiped his hands free of sweat on the palms of his knees, and stepped around the kneeling figure so he could make out the face.
The head drooped so much, shaggy black hair falling around the features, that he couldn't at first. Then Draco reached out and swept the fringe back, and the hair cleared enough to reveal a lightning bolt scar.
Draco leaped a step back before he thought about it, and then forced himself to stillness, feeling the urge to run still in him, loud and insistent as a startled rabbit's heart.
No. He had not dreamed of Potter like this. The ward was supposed to torment him with pictures of things he could never have, perhaps? But he had never thought of this, because he had always known Potter would never be attainable for anything more than a quick fist-fight. If the Death Eaters had captured Potter and decided to torture him, others with seniority to Draco would have had the task of breaking him.
But he's not broken, is he?
No, Draco thought, and reached out with one hand, though it halted well short of that bowed head and the scar that seemed to have eyes of its own, the way it stared at him. The word was breakable. The word was submitting, rather than submissive.
Draco clenched his hand into a fist and drew it back. He looked again at the silken rope lying on the floor, and then at the way Potter had clasped his hands behind him, with no one to make him do so. He would try the chain and the weight of his voice first, and see if that could make Potter stir in response to him.
"Potter."
The jolt he had felt himself when he saw the scar was nothing compared to the one that spasmed through Potter. He controlled it immediately, dipping his chin towards the carpet and, Draco thought, opening his eyes, although he could only tell that by the motion of the eyelashes as seen from above.
"Sir."
Draco shook his head. This time, it didn't come from the title Potter was using, simple and unstrained, so unlike the grudging respect Draco had heard him offer to Professor Snape when he absolutely had to. This time, it came from that title hanging in the air between them, between them, and the way that his throat was thick and his heart sang in his ears again. The urge to run was there, but Draco, having spent so many months in the Dark Lord's immediate presence, had learned the difference between the urge to run away from something and the urge to run towards it. This was the latter.
"What is going on?" he asked. He needed to address the press of the questions before the insistent press of his desire. He had to, or he thought he would go mad.
"Sir?" Potter's neck muscles tensed, but he didn't lift his head.
"How did we come to be here? Why are you kneeling? Why did I have a rope?" Once the questions began, they flowed like babble, but Draco felt no urge to bite his lip. After all, Potter showed no inclination to rise to his feet. He had accepted his position. He had admitted that Draco had the right to rule here.
"Sir," Potter said, and his muscles melted back into position, his head bowing, his hands working themselves into another loose knot. "More than likely it comes from the intensity of your last orgasm."
Draco laughed. Potter leaned towards the sound. Draco licked his lips before he could go on. "No. I know where I was. I was in Azkaban before I opened my eyes here. This is a dream, a fantasy induced by the ward."
"Yes, sir," Potter said. "If you say so."
"No," Draco said, reaching out and snagging his hand in Potter's hair before he thought about it. Potter came with him, letting his head be pulled, his mouth falling open in a silent gasp. Draco tried not to stagger because of what those glazed green eyes and the shining pink tongue between the bright teeth did to him; he did succeed in not letting it silence him. "I don't want to hear that. You're willing to go along with whatever I want, I get that, but I want to know why. What happened to get me here? Why does this dream seem so real, and what's its purpose? Why did they put that ward on Azkaban in the first place? Giving people what they want doesn't mean that they're always going to want to stay in their cells. I promise, no matter how much they give me of you on your knees, I'll always still want to go back to freedom."
"I don't know anything about that, sir," Potter said, and his eyes retained the glaze even though his voice sounded calm and sensible. Draco wondered for a mad moment if he'd had clients--owners--whatever they were--who liked to hear him discuss magical theory in that voice as he rode their cocks. "I don't know what you mean about Azkaban or wards. We have wards on our home, sir, but they're all of your doing, wards that you put there. The last thing I knew, you finished up with me and told me to kneel here with my eyes shut while you went into the bedroom to sleep. That's been several hours, sir," he added, and shifted his knees.
"I suppose you're getting tired?" Draco couldn't help the dip in his voice, or the dip in his stomach when Potter's eyelids dipped in response, fluttering helplessly over his eyes. "I suppose your knees hurt and you're be glad to stand up and find some relief for them?"
"Sir," Potter said, and leaned nearer and nearer, his eyes shut now, his mouth distractingly open. "Only if you want me to, sir."
"I don't want you to stand up," Draco said, and his breathing had accelerated, and when he tried to take his hand away from Potter's hair, he found that his fingers had curled deeper into it instead.
But that made his courage and his pride rise. So far, he hadn't been able to fight the evils of Azkaban; he had nothing to do but suffer and endure. But this was something active. He would show them that he didn't care what fantasies the ward induced in him, that even Potter seduced and willing was not enough of a temptation to make him stop being a Malfoy. He would outlast these three months and every gift they thought they could give him.
What are they going to do, make all of us eager to use Potter's arse?
"I wasn't asking for that, sir," Potter whispered, and his mouth gaped open, further open, and Draco was naked, and his skin was scraped and shining, and he could see a faint film of green from beneath Potter's drooping eyelids.
He did want this, and he hadn't enough of what he wanted during the war or the trials. He thrust forwards.
Potter didn't gag, didn't choke, when he took in Draco's cock. He accepted it instead, making a soft noise around it that was more luxurious than a moan. The heat inside his throat made Draco's eyes roll back. He thought about moving so that he was braced against a wall, but he needed nothing for that. It would be too like admitting weakness to whoever was observing his mind inside a Pensieve or with Legilimency--because there had to be someone, didn't there, or how would they be sure their precious ward was working?--and he would show them that he could stand up and take this.
As Potter was taking it, loving every second of it.
Draco shut his eyes and arched his hips forwards, and Potter sucked and sighed, and he moved to the side, and Potter followed him and sucked and licked, and Draco took a step back and Potter followed him, perfectly in time, perfectly in tune, all the while sucking and tapping with his tongue on the sensitive head of Draco's shaft.
Draco released all at once, taking pleasure in jamming his hips forwards and holding them there. He did force his eyes open against the weight of delight, intent on watching Potter as he swallowed.
He still didn't gag, and his eyes were fierce as he watched Draco back, as if he were the one in charge here, swallowing, taking, accepting, surrendering.
Draco moved closer to him after he finished, closer and closer. And Potter bowed down before him, bowed back before him, rolling onto his haunches and then his spine and shoulders without releasing Draco's cock from his mouth, glancing away and veiling his eyes as Draco stood over him.
If he had looked like this, even once, at school, bowed and made safe, domesticated and tame, Draco would have taken him. He would have followed him to the Quidditch showers, he would have sent a note that lured him to the Forbidden Forest, he would have stalked him better during fifth year and found out where he hid with his little group of followers who wanted to ignore Umbridge, but he would have found him. He would have had him.
The shattering experience was still with him as he reached down and dragged Potter's head up and off him. The angle of his neck had to be exquisitely uncomfortable, but Potter watched him, and his eyes were glazed again and his teeth were bright.
"Show me you swallowed it," Draco said softly, and Potter's mouth gaped.
Draco slid himself back in, rubbing his cock along Potter's gums and cheeks and palate, knowing Potter wouldn't dare let a tooth touch him. And Potter took it, open and worshipful and unguarded and open.
He took it, and Draco learned something better than joy.
*
Draco opened his eyes.
Grey around him. Sea-sounds. The distant shriek of birds as they quarrelled over fish or crumbs.
Draco clenched his hands into small fists and turned his head away from the walls, towards the centre of the cell. He watched the water dripping into the bucket and listened to it, until the temptation to call to Potter had faded.
He had to grudgingly admire the wizards who had built the ward. They had done it in a way that made you aware it was a fantasy--because it made it worse that way, Draco thought, or would for those who were not as strong as Draco--but it still shook him to be snatched away from the warmth and the comfort and back into his blank cell. The spray from the sea seemed wetter than before.
That must be the purpose, then. Not to drive prisoners mad, which Draco thought was unlikely if they were being put into new situations rather than old familiar memories that they might want to return to, but to make them so crave the comforts the fantasies could offer that they would do anything to escape from the cells.
Draco shook his head, and felt the lines carve themselves into his cheeks. They should still have chosen otherwise with him. He had no confession to make; what he was guilty of, the Wizengamot had already decided. His father was in prison, his mother free, and they couldn't change that, not when Potter had testified that she had saved his life in the Forest. Draco had no hope to hope for. He would stay here until his three months were past.
Back to endurance again, rather than the resistance, strong as lightning, that the fantasy had enabled him to feel.
Draco listened to the distant buzzing and settled down. His arms rested behind his head, on the lumpy blankets; his chin was turned up to the ceiling; his ears were tuned to the tumble of the waves outside. Every line of him was set still in resistance, and if it must be frozen and not moving for the moment, still it was there.
*
Another room this time, but one without the rich carpet and the enormous fire. It was a rather bare room, in fact. Draco studied the stone walls and the wooden door in front of him and frowned. Except for the lack of tables and cauldrons, he would have taken it for the Potions classroom at Hogwarts.
There was one table, as he saw when he turned around. The fantasies seemed to start with him facing the opposite way from what he desired.
Except that what he desired in this case was nothing in particular. Draco moved forwards and stared at the item lying there, shaking his head. It resembled a small whip, a strip of leather. He sighed. The fantasies the ward provided continued to be odd matches for his real mind, what the wizards who had made it assumed prisoners wanted rather than what they did. He had not needed anything more than his voice to subdue Potter in the last fantasy, after all.
Then he picked up the strip and turned it around.
And realised what it really was.
It bent under his touch, flexible but not enough so that one could effectively hit someone else with it. The ends had a neat loop and latch that would fit into each other and would, as far as Draco could find with tugging on them, prove extremely hard to pull off. Here and there, along the leather, subdued jewels shone. No diamonds, no sapphires, nothing that would shine bright. Only dark emeralds, tarnished jade, ember-like rubies. All small and exquisitely set.
Draco knew, even before the knock on the door, whose throat this collar was meant to fit. He turned around with it in his hands and said, "Come in."
The door swung open, and Potter stepped inside. One more different from the Potter of the last vision the ward had induced was hard to imagine. He wore Hit Wizard robes, and he looked as if he had never learned the meaning of peaceful kneeling. He had his wand drawn. He paused when he saw Draco, and said nothing, but his mouth slashed sideways into a sneer.
Draco smiled at him, and felt the same charging excitement in him. If he had ever gone into battle properly, he thought, rather than running away from the Astronomy Tower the night Dumbledore died being the closest he'd ever got to it, it would have felt like this. He knew what he was going to do, because it was useless asking the imaginary Potter questions he couldn't answer.
He was going to win.
"Ah, yes," Draco said, and turned the collar around in his hands, so that Potter's eyes were drawn to the flash of the jewels because he could not help himself. "So you do have the balls to walk into a room where I stand."
"I've done it before, Malfoy," Potter said, his voice so quiet that Draco could envision the memories of their previous encounters building up between them like the layers and layers of colours in the carpet of the first fantasy. "Walked in, and spat in your face, and walked away without any badge of your ownership on me." He looked at the collar, sneered, and looked aside. But Draco was watching, and this second sneer wasn't quite so perfect as the first, was less polished, looked less practised, was less in every way. "If you would remember what's happened instead of dreaming about what you want, you would know that it's going to happen again."
"You think the future always repeats the past?" Draco turned the collar over one more time and put it down on the table again, but kept his hand on it. "How strange. Most people I know go out of their way to prevent that from happening."
Potter remained still. But he didn't spit in Draco's face and he didn't walk out the door, either.
He was listening.
Draco turned his head away and paced to the far side of the room to hide his smile. He wondered for a moment what the place really was, but it didn't matter. The ward had erred this time. The imaginary room it had tried to construct was considerably less warm and welcoming than the first had been, and Draco would find no one willing to suck his cock here. "I wonder if you know," Draco told the stone walls, "how long we have been coming here."
"Er," Potter said, and his voice held the quality of someone who knows he's going to spoil things but doesn't know how. "Three months."
Draco sighed and shook his head, letting the clean wash of breath from his mouth overwhelm the taint of stupidity that Potter's careless words had left on the air. "Not that," he said. "Not to this room."
"What other definition of ‘here' is there, then?" Potter asked, and Draco could hear him shifting his weight.
Draco smiled, and held his silence until the shifting settled down again. "What I meant," he said, "is the road we've been on. Since the war. Since Hogwarts. Perhaps since the first time my father told me about you and I realised that someone like you existed in the world." He laid a hand on the wall in front of him and traced the places where the blocks joined, for something to touch. "How long has that road been aiming here, bringing us here, where we could do nothing about it?"
He heard Potter's stuttered, uneven breaths, filling up the whole of the room for a moment and then fading away. Draco nodded as if that was the answer to a question, though he knew Potter would have denied giving one.
"Forever, or as near to it as makes no matter," Draco said, and turned around so he could face Potter, because not looking at him no longer seemed like a good idea. "Because we are what we are, Potter, and that means we need this." He gestured between them, and then let his hand fall. "You could walk away from this if you really believed it was wrong."
"I do believe it's wrong." Potter had the sound of teeth in his voice.
Draco needed an eyebrow, a single one, no words.
"Not," Potter said, and rubbed a hand over his face, slowly, up and down, as though the slower he went, the more likely he would be to erase the things he was talking about. "But." He slowed and thought about it, his chest heaving in and out, his head bowing as though he had a weight on the crown of it. Draco waited, and thought for a moment about how tame Potter looked, in a different way than he had already kneeling and conquered in Draco's first fantasy.
"I don't think that it's wrong for someone else," Potter said at last, and his voice was charged enough to make Draco's groin ache with words that would have been ordinary and simple coming from someone else. "But it is for me. I'm a Hit Wizard. They depend on me to be loyal to the Ministry and the law above all. I can't owe allegiance to someone who could well be a criminal." His eyes came up, and they blazed away at Draco. They said, I hate you. They said, I believe what I'm saying.
They said, Convince me.
Draco took a single step away from the wall and shrugged with one shoulder. "Well, perhaps you're right," he said. "I need someone who can yield to me, and you can't. I never thought about it like that. I thought that you didn't want to surrender to a Slytherin, that you didn't want to show me that you could obey someone you used to hate, in case I got other…ideas." He slipped a finger under the collar and lifted it.
Potter was looking at the collar. Draco was sure he didn't even see Draco's own hand, though his stare in that direction seemed so intense.
"But it does seem a shame," Draco said, and he, too, looked at the collar. The way the jewels glimmered as he turned it back and forth. The way the buckle and ring shone with the faint glow of a charm that meant the one wearing the collar could never take it off. Draco looked up at Potter and smiled. "I had this made especially for you. Did you know that you can't remove it without help? I put it on, and it stays on. For the rest of your life, if that's the way I want to leave it. You would have to wear it to your precious job and to hospital and to prison if they arrested you for consorting with me."
Potter shut his eyes. He wasn't trembling, but Draco recognised the superfine control of his muscles that it took to keep him from doing that.
"A shame," Draco repeated, and took one step closer, and then another. Potter didn't open his eyes, and didn't run. Draco trailed the edge of the collar over Potter's throat. Potter's head jerked as if to follow it, then went still again. Draco unrolled the collar and held it out as though estimating the length. "To have to destroy something so beautiful, so finely made."
"Destroy." Potter's eyes flickered open, looking past him. They looked drugged. Draco reckoned that looking past him was all the effort they could make right now.
"Yes." Draco moved back a step and tapped the collar against the heel of his palm, and the eyes moved to him because they had to. "Because it was made for one person, and he won't be needing it. There's no reason to keep it. I certainly wouldn't want to see anyone else wearing it." He spoke a quiet spell, letting go of the collar with one hand to take up his wand, and then reached back. The spell was one Potter would know, he was certain. It made his grip strong enough to tear through a table; it would certainly more than destroy the stiff but small object in his grip.
Potter's spell slapped his hand aside, and a moment later, he said, "Finite," ending the charm Draco had given himself for strength.
Once again, it would have been a bad idea for Draco to say anything. He waited, staring at Potter, and Potter's tongue appeared, touching the middle of his lower lip and staying there as if he had forgotten the ability to go on. He stared at the collar.
Draco moved forwards. Potter took a step back. Draco kept following, because he knew the backing wouldn't go on forever. He pursued, and Potter yielded. Soon his back was against the door, and he lowered his head. His body shook, his teeth and eyes showing the pain of a wounded animal.
Draco took the last step forwards, and rested the buckle and loop of the collar against Potter's pulse.
And Potter tilted his head back at last, making his throat small, making it ready to receive the collar that Draco drew around it and then, gently, pulled tight. Gentle. There was no need for violence.
It was violence that glimmered in Potter's eyes and showed through the shaking in his hands as he reached up to touch the collar and the small jewels scattered along it, but it was tamed violence.
Leashed, Draco thought, and reached out to grip Potter's hair, to touch something more yielding still. Potter's eyes were green and wild as he stared at Draco, as Draco brought his head closer and his mouth up.
*
And he opened his eyes to grey.
Not green. It took Draco a moment to understand that. He lay on the blankets with the humming of the ward around him. And around him was grey, the sullen colour of the stone, with patches of dun and black where the prison was less finely-made.
Nothing as finely-made as the collar or Potter around, of course. Of course not.
Draco rolled slowly to his knees and spent a moment bowing his head and flexing his shoulders and arms. He recalled his mother telling him once that he should stretch before any hard activity, which might include studying for an exam. He couldn't remember which way she had said he should stretch, but that was all right. No Dementors in the new prison, so no one to steal his happy memories.
Only the ward.
Draco imagined the woman who had brought him the food, and others, watching from the shadows, and knew what they would think of him if he broke and whimpered because the ward had given him a few moments of comfort and then taken it away. He would not do something like that. He stretched his arms above his head, clasped his hands together, and then brought them down so they touched his stomach. Fifteen times he did that, his eyes half-closed and his count the only words echoing through his head.
Then he rolled his shoulders and continued to roll them until the tension from the vision had passed away. When he lay back again, he was breathing slowly and his heartbeat no longer filled his ears.
That it had was shameful.
I was right about the purpose of the ward, Draco decided. It is meant to give the prisoners comfort they'll break for. But not merely physical comfort. Dominating Potter was its own kind.
For a moment, he wondered why. He truly never had dreamed of doing that, that he remembered. Had he? Perhaps he had sometimes had dreams he couldn't remember--there was a period when he was fourteen that he could never remember what he dreamed of each night--but he had seen Potter the next morning with all the same hatred, which rather argued that images like that didn't lurk just under the surface of his thoughts.
If they were new…
Draco shrugged. Perhaps the ward had sensed that he would like to strike back at his enemies, but whoever had constructed it didn't want the prisoners thinking that way about Wizengamot members and the guards. So they would give him an acceptable substitute instead, or make him take one.
He rolled over and faced the bucket, rejecting the press against his mind and his ears. The ward would not win. He was still himself, and what he was endured. He would not let it diminish. He was not tame.
*
"So you had to do this to me before you could convince me that you'd won. Clever."
Draco lifted his head and glanced slowly around the room in front of him, surveying it. He had done that each time he came into a fantasy so far, and he didn't see why Potter should change the way he did things just because he was visible and speaking to Draco now. Not that Draco had looked at him yet, but the closeness of his voice said he must be visible.
Draco felt his stomach muscles clench, the way they sometimes did when he was anticipating the house-elves serving honeyed bread for dinner. He ignored it, and studied the room around him.
Not as luxurious as the first room, not as bare as the second. Draco smiled. He knew why. The ward was fucking with him, trying to make him think of these places as real, or find the middle ground that would enable it to destroy the true balance of Draco's mind. It would only be happy when he was crawling and whimpering and broken, never wanting to leave the prison where he had first come against his will.
Because that was another purpose to the ward that he could think of. Make someone unable to escape, and then the Wizengamot could claim with all sincerity when his term was up that they had tried to offer him freedom, but he had hugged his pillows and refused the door of his cell.
This time, Draco would remember. He had allowed himself to forget with the last vision; he had thought of Potter and the collar as real. This time, he would remember, and it would be an imprisonment on his terms, a vision without importance. He would move through it like a dream, able to break free at any time but indulging his own wishes for now.
"Malfoy?"
Draco nodded at the walls, panelled wood like the kind that he remembered seeing in some of the professors' offices at Hogwarts. There was a desk in the middle of the room, too, on thick green carpeting. He wondered for a moment if he was a professor in this fantasy, and then banished it. They didn't give him enough context, and he would not ask for it. This was the here, this was the now, and rendering certain things unknowable should help him to keep in mind that it was unreal.
He turned, to face Potter for the first time since he had arrived here.
And lost his breath.
Potter was sitting in a chair with cushions that looked thicker than the carpet, raised on a dais above the floor. He sat with his legs crossed over one another, and his arms folded, and his eyebrows raised. He must have spent minutes practising the sardonic expression on his face.
And around him, over him, above him, connecting to the top of the dais and so beneath him as well, was a cage.
Draco moved a step forwards. Then he stopped. He would lose control of his tongue soon, and no matter how he did it, whether via babbling or through simple hanging of it loose, he would provide material for Potter to laugh at. He shook his head lightly, twice, and then studied the bars again.
They were light, strong, and numerous. Draco thought he might be able to stand near the room's door and squint, and it would seem as though they weren't there at all. Potter couldn't pass a wand between them, much less a hand or arm. Perhaps a finger, but Draco recognised the material, the same material that--
Well, it was there. He had seen it before. Silver-reinforced steel. The bars wouldn't bend to a casual touch, and they were resistant to most accidental and wandless magic that someone could muster.
Of course, most people weren't Harry Potter, and Draco turned to study the door, which had already buzzed with a weight of magic that he knew wasn't normal.
Yes. Spells draped the door, visible as twirling, trailing silver and purple vines of energy. Draco recognised ones that would dampen the senses, loosen the muscles, cloud violent thoughts, and do half a dozen other things.
Potter was a prisoner here. Stopped. Stuck. Owned.
Tamed.
Draco looked back at him. Potter stared at him in silence. He didn't appear to have altered his posture since Draco had first looked at him, but the muscles in his thighs clenched and twisted for a moment, perhaps with the way that Draco was looking at him.
"Have you looked your fill yet?" Potter asked. "You ought to know what I look like. You were the one who put me in here." His voice descended to a hiss. "You're the only one who would dare."
"But not the only one who wants to," Draco said, plunging into the stream that moved around him, not needing reminders or hints or cues now any more than he had needed the cord in the first fantasy to bind and control Potter. "I'm the one who achieved it. The one who has something everyone else wants."
Potter looked as if he might actually try to attack the bars with his teeth. "I am not a thing."
"I never said you were," Draco said, and his voice lowered, and he was at the cage without remembering how he got there. Well, considering how light-headed he felt, how gently he was breathing, how much he wanted to touch the bars and the way that sparks seemed to leap when he did, that wouldn't be unusual. "The thing I have is the captivity. The privilege of seeing you like this."
Potter stared at him, mouth open, then shut it and blew air out through his nostrils hard enough to sound like a camel. "Yeah. You've never seen me sitting on a chair before, or on a chair on a platform. Because the Ministry doesn't have me do that every other week. You've had your bloody mad fun, Malfoy, let me go."
"You have no idea," Draco said quietly. Potter was trying to destroy the mood, he knew, but the mood wasn't his to destroy. "You have no idea how many of them see you soaring around, free, above them, yes, flying above them in a world that they can't conceive of. What wouldn't they give, they think, for your fame and your popularity and your ability to have anything you want by looking at it."
Potter's mouth curled up. "I can't have privacy by asking for it, can I?"
"And then they wonder what you would look like like this," Draco said. His voice was pulling him with it, and it seemed to pull a flush up Potter's cheeks, too, coiling around his throat and his jaw and ending up somewhere under his ears. "Before them, stripped of that power, vulnerable, unable to do anything except listen to them. Because they have the key to the cage, to the chain. Because they want to know what happens when you surrender."
"I don't," Potter said, his voice quieter after Draco's. Draco’s wasn't loud, but it filled the space. He knew it did. And from the way Potter ducked his head down, he knew it, too; he simply didn't want to admit it.
"You must, sometimes," Draco said. "When you sleep. When you put your wand down. When you're in the bath, the shower. When you're somewhere with people you trust. They want to see you then, without the power. Or they want to see what lies beneath the power. You could put it that way, too."
"I'm not weak."
Draco waited with a smile until Potter flushed again and listened to the way those words rang and died. "Of course not," Draco said. "Never, except here and now, when someone is making you relax and do something you don't want to do."
"You think this is relaxed? Malfoy, you narcissistic fucker--"
"You're not striding around," Draco said. "You're sitting in one place. You're not issuing commands, you're taking them."
He would have said more, but some of the words had got through at last, or so he saw from the way Potter's eyelids jerked up and his hands tightened in his lap. His breathing was thick, laborious, suddenly. He tried to look Draco in the eye, but he had to clench his jaw to do so.
"You don't really think that way," Potter said, and something was still caught in the back of his throat, try to clear it as he would. He ended up looking down at his hands, and then when he tried again, his eyes wouldn't rise higher than Draco's chest. Draco watched him and knew him, knew and understood his reactions, as much as if he had used Legilimency the way he had wanted to during sixth year.
"You're trying to make up something that you can use to excuse this childish revenge when the Ministry finds out what you've done," Potter continued, and his words were warming and charging ahead now, although he looked as if he had to struggle to find them. "You--you caged me here for a prank, and now you want me to fall for you, or--or something, and then you'll laugh at me and say it was all a prank, and I'm an idiot for doing it."
"If I wanted to make you fall for me," Draco said with simple truth, "I would have done something else, something that was less likely to piss you off from the beginning. This, I did for me. For myself, so I could know I was the only one watching you caged and captive and still for me."
Potter's eyes closed. His lashes swept along his cheeks, draping them in shadow. Draco clenched his teeth down to keep from a roar that would spoil the moment.
Potter's the one who's caged, but I'm the one who wants to roar. Funny, that.
He felt an emotion sliding through him, thick and languid and unfamiliar. The last time he had felt like that was before--
Well. Before the war. He couldn't remember exactly when, but he didn't matter. He stood there, enjoying the contrast of being the wild beast outside the cage while Potter sat there being calm and pretty and tame within it.
Potter swallowed and looked up. "How did you know?" he asked.
"How did I know that I wanted you tamed like this?" Draco gave him a leisurely smile and moved closer. "It wasn't hard to figure out, not once I started thinking about the way that I needed to--"
"No," Potter said. "How did you--" His hands were shaking. He paid them strict attention until he got them under control, not looking up even when Draco came a step nearer. "How did you know that I would like it, too?"
Draco didn't know that he could have held himself back then if his father had been in the room watching his every move. He stepped forwards, and the lock on the cage broke when he pushed it.
Potter didn't rise to his feet when Draco came into the cage. He sat with his hands clasped in front of him, eyes wide and frozen, and came alive when Draco gripped his neck and jerked him to his feet. But it was the kind of life that came from swirling his tongue around the inside of Draco's mouth as Draco thrust his in to kiss and conquer, and Draco could live with that.
He dragged Potter with him as he fumbled at his trousers, and then Potter's were open, too, and his cock was out, dangling and pale but not limp, and Draco gripped it and pulled and wrung a noise out of him that made Draco think Potter's wildness might be waking up, too.
Potter tried to reach back, to touch him, but Draco gripped his wrist until he pressed tendon to bone when Potter tried. This was to be his touching, and his alone.
The bars of the cage blurred around him as he bent Potter back for a kiss.
*
"Malfoy? They still want to make sure that we're not starving you."
Nauseated, Draco lifted his head and stared at the waxy woman who had just slammed a tray down outside the door to his cell. Bits of white string seemed to cling to his eyes. He reached up and rubbed his eyes roughly, and then lowered his hands and stared at them. Those hands had been on Potter's shoulders and cheeks and arse, a few moments ago. He would have sworn it.
"So the ward's getting to you, too." It would have been much too much to say that the waxy woman's voice had laughter in it, but there was a harder tone to it, like a bell struck off metal. "I see."
"You don't," Draco said, and then he bit his lip and wished he could reach up far enough with his teeth to bite his nose, to stop the harsh breaths that came in and out of it. He sat down and reached for the musty orange on the tray. The woman watched him peel it and eat it. Draco thought the sections of fruit he tore loose might have had some sweetness to them, once, long ago, before they came into this grey place, but he couldn't find it now, no matter how long he sucked at them.
"I see," she repeated, but her voice was all hard tone this time, and harder still when he glared at her. "I'm glad. How could we keep you for three months, or three years, or whatever the length of time the Wizengamot assigned you was, and know that you might do the same things when you left prison? The ward makes sure that you won't. You'll get out of here and you'll be model citizens."
Draco stared at her, but said nothing. This was free information, poured into his ears. Perhaps the ward didn't work the way the woman thought it did, but it was still valuable to know what might be passing through his enemies' minds.
Did they think that he would give everything up for a chance to fuck Potter, to have him under his power? Did they believe he would walk out of here and swear loyalty to Potter and the Ministry he no doubt worked for, all in hopes of one kiss, one brush of glancing fingers, one blowjob?
Draco sat rigid and still when the woman was gone. So far, he had not resisted the ward, just as he hadn't resisted the--
The memories scattered for a moment, then steadied themselves. The Dark Lord, when he had ordered Draco to torture people during the war. Yes, he hadn't done that. He had closed his mouth and cowered and gone along with things like the good little toy he was.
This time, he had as little choice as he had had there. It was a case of shut his mouth or die when he was under the Dark Lord's sway; in Azkaban, it was a case of yield to the ward or spend the rest of his life in prison. But at least he understood what it was meant to do now, and the fantasies it induced to do that.
Draco did have to smile, as he lay back down on the blankets. Had anyone told Potter that they were using him as a temptation to make the Death Eaters dream away their time? Perhaps Draco would find him when he left the prison, simply to tell him so.
Part Two.
Pairing(s): Harry/Draco
Summary: Draco is in Azkaban. The new Azkaban, where solitary confinement means confinement with one's self.
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended.
Warning(s): D/s, prisoner!fic, heavy angst, collars, cages, dub-con, bondage, psychological trauma and torture, no happy ending.
Word Count: 17,500
Author's Notes: Written as a pinch-hit for the 2011 hd_holidays round, for
scarletladyy, using her prompts of collars, cages, dub-con, D/s, and darkfic, as well suggestions for prisoner fic. I started out with a tiny scrap of an idea, but it was her prompts that nurtured it into life. Thanks to my betas, L. and K, and to groolover for Britpicking. The title comes from a Hamlet quote: "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space--were it not that I have bad dreams."Were It Not That I Have Bad Dreams
Draco remembered coming to the island.
He remembered the hard buzzing that seemed to surround him when he was Apparated onto the low, foam-washed grey stone extending out into the sea, and he looked around, expecting the appearance of Dementors. He saw nothing. Nothing but grey. The fog, and the birds, and the sea, and the sky, all washed-out and half-glowing in the distance.
"Felt that, did you?" The guard behind him was a bulky Auror, not evil and not kind. He pushed Draco ahead with a hand in the middle of his back. "That's the ward. Responsible for your punishment."
Draco nearly stumbled. He hadn't eaten in two days, anticipating the completion of his trial and sentencing.
Three months, he told himself. It's only three months. I can make it through three months. Potter managed to persuade them down to that much. I can handle three months. I can--
He cut his thoughts off. Going mad was no part of the plan, and his family had tendencies in that direction he did not want to encourage. Azkaban didn't use Dementors; they used something else to guard their most dangerous prisoners now, something that involved wards and being locked inside one's own head. Draco could imagine worse punishments. He wouldn't find anyone here worthy of conversing with, anyway.
He looked around as they moved through the front door of the enormous granite block that housed the prison and down--and down, and down--corridors and stairs and weakly glimmering ramps. There was nothing to see that was any different from what he had seen so far. Granite, steel, wood, iron, stone. And darkness. As they moved down, black replaced the grey.
Down and down and down.
*
His cell lay under sea level, so that the smell and the damp and the roar seeped in. Draco didn't mind. None of his jailers were Slytherins, or they would have known about the dungeons' proximity to the lake.
One weakly glimmering torch shone outside the cell, providing guidance for the guards who came to bring him stale bread and dusty porridge and, now and then, a musty scrap of fruit to keep him from getting sick. There was water, always, dripping into a bucket with a steady song that they probably intended to bother him. Draco slept through it. There was a latrine, and a few lumpy blankets that cradled him against the stone. Now and then the guards blasted him with Cleaning Charms and Repairing Charms, to ensure they didn't have to let him take a shower or change his clothes.
And there was the buzzing.
Draco listened to it. Now and then, it was a distant, hard sound that cut through the noises of the sea. Other times, it seemed close but soft, as though a purring cat had crept into bed with him. On the third morning he was there--or perhaps it was not, but it was the third time he had bread--Draco asked the guard who brought him the food about it.
A woman with waxy skin and grey eyes and stony hair, she looked at him without interest and answered, "The ward. It needs time to get used to you before it goes to work, or you would have already felt it." She laid the tray down in front of him and stepped back, her wand pointed at his throat.
"The ward," Draco said, and licked a crumb off the back of his finger, closing his eyes for a moment at the taste of bread and skin. Then he opened his eyes and paid attention to the woman again. "I've heard about that before. When will it get used to me?"
The woman smiled for the first time. It didn't show any amusement that Draco could see, as though someone had made an impression on the skin of her face alone. "Questions of when are irrelevant," she answered, and waited until he was done, picked up the tray, and departed.
Draco lay back with his arms folded behind his head, and listened to the buzzing. The crash of the waves. The distant noises of people pacing back and forth, and now and then screaming or rustling or dying.
He had been at least some days here, he thought, and he hadn't gone mad or been hurt yet. He would see what the ward did when it affected him, but he didn't think it could be much worse than what he had endured so far.
Malfoy?
Draco bolted to his knees before he thought about it, turning his head in several directions. He knew that voice. Most recently, he'd listened to it plead at his trial for leniency, like the drops of water dripping into the bucket.
"Potter," he said, and then stopped. Why would Potter have come to Azkaban? The Ministry had forbidden Draco visitors. And Potter had better things to do, like getting on with being a hero.
He made himself lie back down. This could be the faint vestiges of madness creeping in, though he didn't know why, considering the prison hadn't hurt him as yet. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing until he thought he could reproduce the pattern on a piano.
Malfoy, Potter's voice whispered again, and fell silent.
*
Warmth. The sound of a fire as relentless and regular as the sound of the sea. Carpet beneath his feet, his bare feet. The elegant feeling of clean skin, scraped and washed fresh from a bath with a servant who knew what they were doing. Something light and flexible in his hands, travelling around them but not binding them, instead offering itself.
He opened his eyes.
He stood in a room with walls that extended so far to the sides he knew at once it could not be anywhere in the Manor; his father had thought large rooms like this vulgar and diminished them or shut them up. He turned in a slow circle, and found the fire behind him, spread along a hearth that two people could have lain head-to-foot in. It ate slick and gleaming logs of wood in the same way that the dawn ate stars, and golden light spilled out of it and along the carpet. The carpet had subdued shades in it, red and brown and gold, and they changed under Draco's eyes as he completed his circle.
He knew this must be a delusion, of course, because he remembered Azkaban and the prison cell. What he could not figure out was why the ward the guards spoke of with such anticipation would give him pleasure and warmth and satisfaction. Any softening of the Death Eaters' punishment wouldn't have met with the approval of the moving statues that surrounded him to keep him in his place.
Draco paused when he finished his slow turn, because he had realised for the first time that there was someone else in the room. The person knelt in front of him, facing away from Draco, head bowed and hands linked together behind his back. Draco took a step forwards and then paused as the flexible thing in his hands slithered out and fell to the floor with a semitoned thump.
A length of rope, and nothing else. No, Draco decided when he reached down to finger it, silken cord. He shook his head and stepped over it, approaching the figure with its back to him. He doubted he would need the rope to deal with someone who knelt there so submissively.
His steps halted for a moment, and his eyes closed. It was flashes of other memories that bled into his head now, nothing to do with the Manor except that the Manor had been where some of them happened.
Vague ideas of what would happen if he walked into a room and snapped a command and people leaped to obey because of who he was, not who his father was, or his blood. The idea of hair gripped between his hands, held there as someone swallowed around his cock, and the person not fighting him, not struggling, leaning into the hold because they needed it. Estimating the strength of someone like Blaise and the ways that he might be able to pin him down.
And the words Draco would say once he was pinned down, to make him want to stay there.
He shook his head, wiped his hands free of sweat on the palms of his knees, and stepped around the kneeling figure so he could make out the face.
The head drooped so much, shaggy black hair falling around the features, that he couldn't at first. Then Draco reached out and swept the fringe back, and the hair cleared enough to reveal a lightning bolt scar.
Draco leaped a step back before he thought about it, and then forced himself to stillness, feeling the urge to run still in him, loud and insistent as a startled rabbit's heart.
No. He had not dreamed of Potter like this. The ward was supposed to torment him with pictures of things he could never have, perhaps? But he had never thought of this, because he had always known Potter would never be attainable for anything more than a quick fist-fight. If the Death Eaters had captured Potter and decided to torture him, others with seniority to Draco would have had the task of breaking him.
But he's not broken, is he?
No, Draco thought, and reached out with one hand, though it halted well short of that bowed head and the scar that seemed to have eyes of its own, the way it stared at him. The word was breakable. The word was submitting, rather than submissive.
Draco clenched his hand into a fist and drew it back. He looked again at the silken rope lying on the floor, and then at the way Potter had clasped his hands behind him, with no one to make him do so. He would try the chain and the weight of his voice first, and see if that could make Potter stir in response to him.
"Potter."
The jolt he had felt himself when he saw the scar was nothing compared to the one that spasmed through Potter. He controlled it immediately, dipping his chin towards the carpet and, Draco thought, opening his eyes, although he could only tell that by the motion of the eyelashes as seen from above.
"Sir."
Draco shook his head. This time, it didn't come from the title Potter was using, simple and unstrained, so unlike the grudging respect Draco had heard him offer to Professor Snape when he absolutely had to. This time, it came from that title hanging in the air between them, between them, and the way that his throat was thick and his heart sang in his ears again. The urge to run was there, but Draco, having spent so many months in the Dark Lord's immediate presence, had learned the difference between the urge to run away from something and the urge to run towards it. This was the latter.
"What is going on?" he asked. He needed to address the press of the questions before the insistent press of his desire. He had to, or he thought he would go mad.
"Sir?" Potter's neck muscles tensed, but he didn't lift his head.
"How did we come to be here? Why are you kneeling? Why did I have a rope?" Once the questions began, they flowed like babble, but Draco felt no urge to bite his lip. After all, Potter showed no inclination to rise to his feet. He had accepted his position. He had admitted that Draco had the right to rule here.
"Sir," Potter said, and his muscles melted back into position, his head bowing, his hands working themselves into another loose knot. "More than likely it comes from the intensity of your last orgasm."
Draco laughed. Potter leaned towards the sound. Draco licked his lips before he could go on. "No. I know where I was. I was in Azkaban before I opened my eyes here. This is a dream, a fantasy induced by the ward."
"Yes, sir," Potter said. "If you say so."
"No," Draco said, reaching out and snagging his hand in Potter's hair before he thought about it. Potter came with him, letting his head be pulled, his mouth falling open in a silent gasp. Draco tried not to stagger because of what those glazed green eyes and the shining pink tongue between the bright teeth did to him; he did succeed in not letting it silence him. "I don't want to hear that. You're willing to go along with whatever I want, I get that, but I want to know why. What happened to get me here? Why does this dream seem so real, and what's its purpose? Why did they put that ward on Azkaban in the first place? Giving people what they want doesn't mean that they're always going to want to stay in their cells. I promise, no matter how much they give me of you on your knees, I'll always still want to go back to freedom."
"I don't know anything about that, sir," Potter said, and his eyes retained the glaze even though his voice sounded calm and sensible. Draco wondered for a mad moment if he'd had clients--owners--whatever they were--who liked to hear him discuss magical theory in that voice as he rode their cocks. "I don't know what you mean about Azkaban or wards. We have wards on our home, sir, but they're all of your doing, wards that you put there. The last thing I knew, you finished up with me and told me to kneel here with my eyes shut while you went into the bedroom to sleep. That's been several hours, sir," he added, and shifted his knees.
"I suppose you're getting tired?" Draco couldn't help the dip in his voice, or the dip in his stomach when Potter's eyelids dipped in response, fluttering helplessly over his eyes. "I suppose your knees hurt and you're be glad to stand up and find some relief for them?"
"Sir," Potter said, and leaned nearer and nearer, his eyes shut now, his mouth distractingly open. "Only if you want me to, sir."
"I don't want you to stand up," Draco said, and his breathing had accelerated, and when he tried to take his hand away from Potter's hair, he found that his fingers had curled deeper into it instead.
But that made his courage and his pride rise. So far, he hadn't been able to fight the evils of Azkaban; he had nothing to do but suffer and endure. But this was something active. He would show them that he didn't care what fantasies the ward induced in him, that even Potter seduced and willing was not enough of a temptation to make him stop being a Malfoy. He would outlast these three months and every gift they thought they could give him.
What are they going to do, make all of us eager to use Potter's arse?
"I wasn't asking for that, sir," Potter whispered, and his mouth gaped open, further open, and Draco was naked, and his skin was scraped and shining, and he could see a faint film of green from beneath Potter's drooping eyelids.
He did want this, and he hadn't enough of what he wanted during the war or the trials. He thrust forwards.
Potter didn't gag, didn't choke, when he took in Draco's cock. He accepted it instead, making a soft noise around it that was more luxurious than a moan. The heat inside his throat made Draco's eyes roll back. He thought about moving so that he was braced against a wall, but he needed nothing for that. It would be too like admitting weakness to whoever was observing his mind inside a Pensieve or with Legilimency--because there had to be someone, didn't there, or how would they be sure their precious ward was working?--and he would show them that he could stand up and take this.
As Potter was taking it, loving every second of it.
Draco shut his eyes and arched his hips forwards, and Potter sucked and sighed, and he moved to the side, and Potter followed him and sucked and licked, and Draco took a step back and Potter followed him, perfectly in time, perfectly in tune, all the while sucking and tapping with his tongue on the sensitive head of Draco's shaft.
Draco released all at once, taking pleasure in jamming his hips forwards and holding them there. He did force his eyes open against the weight of delight, intent on watching Potter as he swallowed.
He still didn't gag, and his eyes were fierce as he watched Draco back, as if he were the one in charge here, swallowing, taking, accepting, surrendering.
Draco moved closer to him after he finished, closer and closer. And Potter bowed down before him, bowed back before him, rolling onto his haunches and then his spine and shoulders without releasing Draco's cock from his mouth, glancing away and veiling his eyes as Draco stood over him.
If he had looked like this, even once, at school, bowed and made safe, domesticated and tame, Draco would have taken him. He would have followed him to the Quidditch showers, he would have sent a note that lured him to the Forbidden Forest, he would have stalked him better during fifth year and found out where he hid with his little group of followers who wanted to ignore Umbridge, but he would have found him. He would have had him.
The shattering experience was still with him as he reached down and dragged Potter's head up and off him. The angle of his neck had to be exquisitely uncomfortable, but Potter watched him, and his eyes were glazed again and his teeth were bright.
"Show me you swallowed it," Draco said softly, and Potter's mouth gaped.
Draco slid himself back in, rubbing his cock along Potter's gums and cheeks and palate, knowing Potter wouldn't dare let a tooth touch him. And Potter took it, open and worshipful and unguarded and open.
He took it, and Draco learned something better than joy.
*
Draco opened his eyes.
Grey around him. Sea-sounds. The distant shriek of birds as they quarrelled over fish or crumbs.
Draco clenched his hands into small fists and turned his head away from the walls, towards the centre of the cell. He watched the water dripping into the bucket and listened to it, until the temptation to call to Potter had faded.
He had to grudgingly admire the wizards who had built the ward. They had done it in a way that made you aware it was a fantasy--because it made it worse that way, Draco thought, or would for those who were not as strong as Draco--but it still shook him to be snatched away from the warmth and the comfort and back into his blank cell. The spray from the sea seemed wetter than before.
That must be the purpose, then. Not to drive prisoners mad, which Draco thought was unlikely if they were being put into new situations rather than old familiar memories that they might want to return to, but to make them so crave the comforts the fantasies could offer that they would do anything to escape from the cells.
Draco shook his head, and felt the lines carve themselves into his cheeks. They should still have chosen otherwise with him. He had no confession to make; what he was guilty of, the Wizengamot had already decided. His father was in prison, his mother free, and they couldn't change that, not when Potter had testified that she had saved his life in the Forest. Draco had no hope to hope for. He would stay here until his three months were past.
Back to endurance again, rather than the resistance, strong as lightning, that the fantasy had enabled him to feel.
Draco listened to the distant buzzing and settled down. His arms rested behind his head, on the lumpy blankets; his chin was turned up to the ceiling; his ears were tuned to the tumble of the waves outside. Every line of him was set still in resistance, and if it must be frozen and not moving for the moment, still it was there.
*
Another room this time, but one without the rich carpet and the enormous fire. It was a rather bare room, in fact. Draco studied the stone walls and the wooden door in front of him and frowned. Except for the lack of tables and cauldrons, he would have taken it for the Potions classroom at Hogwarts.
There was one table, as he saw when he turned around. The fantasies seemed to start with him facing the opposite way from what he desired.
Except that what he desired in this case was nothing in particular. Draco moved forwards and stared at the item lying there, shaking his head. It resembled a small whip, a strip of leather. He sighed. The fantasies the ward provided continued to be odd matches for his real mind, what the wizards who had made it assumed prisoners wanted rather than what they did. He had not needed anything more than his voice to subdue Potter in the last fantasy, after all.
Then he picked up the strip and turned it around.
And realised what it really was.
It bent under his touch, flexible but not enough so that one could effectively hit someone else with it. The ends had a neat loop and latch that would fit into each other and would, as far as Draco could find with tugging on them, prove extremely hard to pull off. Here and there, along the leather, subdued jewels shone. No diamonds, no sapphires, nothing that would shine bright. Only dark emeralds, tarnished jade, ember-like rubies. All small and exquisitely set.
Draco knew, even before the knock on the door, whose throat this collar was meant to fit. He turned around with it in his hands and said, "Come in."
The door swung open, and Potter stepped inside. One more different from the Potter of the last vision the ward had induced was hard to imagine. He wore Hit Wizard robes, and he looked as if he had never learned the meaning of peaceful kneeling. He had his wand drawn. He paused when he saw Draco, and said nothing, but his mouth slashed sideways into a sneer.
Draco smiled at him, and felt the same charging excitement in him. If he had ever gone into battle properly, he thought, rather than running away from the Astronomy Tower the night Dumbledore died being the closest he'd ever got to it, it would have felt like this. He knew what he was going to do, because it was useless asking the imaginary Potter questions he couldn't answer.
He was going to win.
"Ah, yes," Draco said, and turned the collar around in his hands, so that Potter's eyes were drawn to the flash of the jewels because he could not help himself. "So you do have the balls to walk into a room where I stand."
"I've done it before, Malfoy," Potter said, his voice so quiet that Draco could envision the memories of their previous encounters building up between them like the layers and layers of colours in the carpet of the first fantasy. "Walked in, and spat in your face, and walked away without any badge of your ownership on me." He looked at the collar, sneered, and looked aside. But Draco was watching, and this second sneer wasn't quite so perfect as the first, was less polished, looked less practised, was less in every way. "If you would remember what's happened instead of dreaming about what you want, you would know that it's going to happen again."
"You think the future always repeats the past?" Draco turned the collar over one more time and put it down on the table again, but kept his hand on it. "How strange. Most people I know go out of their way to prevent that from happening."
Potter remained still. But he didn't spit in Draco's face and he didn't walk out the door, either.
He was listening.
Draco turned his head away and paced to the far side of the room to hide his smile. He wondered for a moment what the place really was, but it didn't matter. The ward had erred this time. The imaginary room it had tried to construct was considerably less warm and welcoming than the first had been, and Draco would find no one willing to suck his cock here. "I wonder if you know," Draco told the stone walls, "how long we have been coming here."
"Er," Potter said, and his voice held the quality of someone who knows he's going to spoil things but doesn't know how. "Three months."
Draco sighed and shook his head, letting the clean wash of breath from his mouth overwhelm the taint of stupidity that Potter's careless words had left on the air. "Not that," he said. "Not to this room."
"What other definition of ‘here' is there, then?" Potter asked, and Draco could hear him shifting his weight.
Draco smiled, and held his silence until the shifting settled down again. "What I meant," he said, "is the road we've been on. Since the war. Since Hogwarts. Perhaps since the first time my father told me about you and I realised that someone like you existed in the world." He laid a hand on the wall in front of him and traced the places where the blocks joined, for something to touch. "How long has that road been aiming here, bringing us here, where we could do nothing about it?"
He heard Potter's stuttered, uneven breaths, filling up the whole of the room for a moment and then fading away. Draco nodded as if that was the answer to a question, though he knew Potter would have denied giving one.
"Forever, or as near to it as makes no matter," Draco said, and turned around so he could face Potter, because not looking at him no longer seemed like a good idea. "Because we are what we are, Potter, and that means we need this." He gestured between them, and then let his hand fall. "You could walk away from this if you really believed it was wrong."
"I do believe it's wrong." Potter had the sound of teeth in his voice.
Draco needed an eyebrow, a single one, no words.
"Not," Potter said, and rubbed a hand over his face, slowly, up and down, as though the slower he went, the more likely he would be to erase the things he was talking about. "But." He slowed and thought about it, his chest heaving in and out, his head bowing as though he had a weight on the crown of it. Draco waited, and thought for a moment about how tame Potter looked, in a different way than he had already kneeling and conquered in Draco's first fantasy.
"I don't think that it's wrong for someone else," Potter said at last, and his voice was charged enough to make Draco's groin ache with words that would have been ordinary and simple coming from someone else. "But it is for me. I'm a Hit Wizard. They depend on me to be loyal to the Ministry and the law above all. I can't owe allegiance to someone who could well be a criminal." His eyes came up, and they blazed away at Draco. They said, I hate you. They said, I believe what I'm saying.
They said, Convince me.
Draco took a single step away from the wall and shrugged with one shoulder. "Well, perhaps you're right," he said. "I need someone who can yield to me, and you can't. I never thought about it like that. I thought that you didn't want to surrender to a Slytherin, that you didn't want to show me that you could obey someone you used to hate, in case I got other…ideas." He slipped a finger under the collar and lifted it.
Potter was looking at the collar. Draco was sure he didn't even see Draco's own hand, though his stare in that direction seemed so intense.
"But it does seem a shame," Draco said, and he, too, looked at the collar. The way the jewels glimmered as he turned it back and forth. The way the buckle and ring shone with the faint glow of a charm that meant the one wearing the collar could never take it off. Draco looked up at Potter and smiled. "I had this made especially for you. Did you know that you can't remove it without help? I put it on, and it stays on. For the rest of your life, if that's the way I want to leave it. You would have to wear it to your precious job and to hospital and to prison if they arrested you for consorting with me."
Potter shut his eyes. He wasn't trembling, but Draco recognised the superfine control of his muscles that it took to keep him from doing that.
"A shame," Draco repeated, and took one step closer, and then another. Potter didn't open his eyes, and didn't run. Draco trailed the edge of the collar over Potter's throat. Potter's head jerked as if to follow it, then went still again. Draco unrolled the collar and held it out as though estimating the length. "To have to destroy something so beautiful, so finely made."
"Destroy." Potter's eyes flickered open, looking past him. They looked drugged. Draco reckoned that looking past him was all the effort they could make right now.
"Yes." Draco moved back a step and tapped the collar against the heel of his palm, and the eyes moved to him because they had to. "Because it was made for one person, and he won't be needing it. There's no reason to keep it. I certainly wouldn't want to see anyone else wearing it." He spoke a quiet spell, letting go of the collar with one hand to take up his wand, and then reached back. The spell was one Potter would know, he was certain. It made his grip strong enough to tear through a table; it would certainly more than destroy the stiff but small object in his grip.
Potter's spell slapped his hand aside, and a moment later, he said, "Finite," ending the charm Draco had given himself for strength.
Once again, it would have been a bad idea for Draco to say anything. He waited, staring at Potter, and Potter's tongue appeared, touching the middle of his lower lip and staying there as if he had forgotten the ability to go on. He stared at the collar.
Draco moved forwards. Potter took a step back. Draco kept following, because he knew the backing wouldn't go on forever. He pursued, and Potter yielded. Soon his back was against the door, and he lowered his head. His body shook, his teeth and eyes showing the pain of a wounded animal.
Draco took the last step forwards, and rested the buckle and loop of the collar against Potter's pulse.
And Potter tilted his head back at last, making his throat small, making it ready to receive the collar that Draco drew around it and then, gently, pulled tight. Gentle. There was no need for violence.
It was violence that glimmered in Potter's eyes and showed through the shaking in his hands as he reached up to touch the collar and the small jewels scattered along it, but it was tamed violence.
Leashed, Draco thought, and reached out to grip Potter's hair, to touch something more yielding still. Potter's eyes were green and wild as he stared at Draco, as Draco brought his head closer and his mouth up.
*
And he opened his eyes to grey.
Not green. It took Draco a moment to understand that. He lay on the blankets with the humming of the ward around him. And around him was grey, the sullen colour of the stone, with patches of dun and black where the prison was less finely-made.
Nothing as finely-made as the collar or Potter around, of course. Of course not.
Draco rolled slowly to his knees and spent a moment bowing his head and flexing his shoulders and arms. He recalled his mother telling him once that he should stretch before any hard activity, which might include studying for an exam. He couldn't remember which way she had said he should stretch, but that was all right. No Dementors in the new prison, so no one to steal his happy memories.
Only the ward.
Draco imagined the woman who had brought him the food, and others, watching from the shadows, and knew what they would think of him if he broke and whimpered because the ward had given him a few moments of comfort and then taken it away. He would not do something like that. He stretched his arms above his head, clasped his hands together, and then brought them down so they touched his stomach. Fifteen times he did that, his eyes half-closed and his count the only words echoing through his head.
Then he rolled his shoulders and continued to roll them until the tension from the vision had passed away. When he lay back again, he was breathing slowly and his heartbeat no longer filled his ears.
That it had was shameful.
I was right about the purpose of the ward, Draco decided. It is meant to give the prisoners comfort they'll break for. But not merely physical comfort. Dominating Potter was its own kind.
For a moment, he wondered why. He truly never had dreamed of doing that, that he remembered. Had he? Perhaps he had sometimes had dreams he couldn't remember--there was a period when he was fourteen that he could never remember what he dreamed of each night--but he had seen Potter the next morning with all the same hatred, which rather argued that images like that didn't lurk just under the surface of his thoughts.
If they were new…
Draco shrugged. Perhaps the ward had sensed that he would like to strike back at his enemies, but whoever had constructed it didn't want the prisoners thinking that way about Wizengamot members and the guards. So they would give him an acceptable substitute instead, or make him take one.
He rolled over and faced the bucket, rejecting the press against his mind and his ears. The ward would not win. He was still himself, and what he was endured. He would not let it diminish. He was not tame.
*
"So you had to do this to me before you could convince me that you'd won. Clever."
Draco lifted his head and glanced slowly around the room in front of him, surveying it. He had done that each time he came into a fantasy so far, and he didn't see why Potter should change the way he did things just because he was visible and speaking to Draco now. Not that Draco had looked at him yet, but the closeness of his voice said he must be visible.
Draco felt his stomach muscles clench, the way they sometimes did when he was anticipating the house-elves serving honeyed bread for dinner. He ignored it, and studied the room around him.
Not as luxurious as the first room, not as bare as the second. Draco smiled. He knew why. The ward was fucking with him, trying to make him think of these places as real, or find the middle ground that would enable it to destroy the true balance of Draco's mind. It would only be happy when he was crawling and whimpering and broken, never wanting to leave the prison where he had first come against his will.
Because that was another purpose to the ward that he could think of. Make someone unable to escape, and then the Wizengamot could claim with all sincerity when his term was up that they had tried to offer him freedom, but he had hugged his pillows and refused the door of his cell.
This time, Draco would remember. He had allowed himself to forget with the last vision; he had thought of Potter and the collar as real. This time, he would remember, and it would be an imprisonment on his terms, a vision without importance. He would move through it like a dream, able to break free at any time but indulging his own wishes for now.
"Malfoy?"
Draco nodded at the walls, panelled wood like the kind that he remembered seeing in some of the professors' offices at Hogwarts. There was a desk in the middle of the room, too, on thick green carpeting. He wondered for a moment if he was a professor in this fantasy, and then banished it. They didn't give him enough context, and he would not ask for it. This was the here, this was the now, and rendering certain things unknowable should help him to keep in mind that it was unreal.
He turned, to face Potter for the first time since he had arrived here.
And lost his breath.
Potter was sitting in a chair with cushions that looked thicker than the carpet, raised on a dais above the floor. He sat with his legs crossed over one another, and his arms folded, and his eyebrows raised. He must have spent minutes practising the sardonic expression on his face.
And around him, over him, above him, connecting to the top of the dais and so beneath him as well, was a cage.
Draco moved a step forwards. Then he stopped. He would lose control of his tongue soon, and no matter how he did it, whether via babbling or through simple hanging of it loose, he would provide material for Potter to laugh at. He shook his head lightly, twice, and then studied the bars again.
They were light, strong, and numerous. Draco thought he might be able to stand near the room's door and squint, and it would seem as though they weren't there at all. Potter couldn't pass a wand between them, much less a hand or arm. Perhaps a finger, but Draco recognised the material, the same material that--
Well, it was there. He had seen it before. Silver-reinforced steel. The bars wouldn't bend to a casual touch, and they were resistant to most accidental and wandless magic that someone could muster.
Of course, most people weren't Harry Potter, and Draco turned to study the door, which had already buzzed with a weight of magic that he knew wasn't normal.
Yes. Spells draped the door, visible as twirling, trailing silver and purple vines of energy. Draco recognised ones that would dampen the senses, loosen the muscles, cloud violent thoughts, and do half a dozen other things.
Potter was a prisoner here. Stopped. Stuck. Owned.
Tamed.
Draco looked back at him. Potter stared at him in silence. He didn't appear to have altered his posture since Draco had first looked at him, but the muscles in his thighs clenched and twisted for a moment, perhaps with the way that Draco was looking at him.
"Have you looked your fill yet?" Potter asked. "You ought to know what I look like. You were the one who put me in here." His voice descended to a hiss. "You're the only one who would dare."
"But not the only one who wants to," Draco said, plunging into the stream that moved around him, not needing reminders or hints or cues now any more than he had needed the cord in the first fantasy to bind and control Potter. "I'm the one who achieved it. The one who has something everyone else wants."
Potter looked as if he might actually try to attack the bars with his teeth. "I am not a thing."
"I never said you were," Draco said, and his voice lowered, and he was at the cage without remembering how he got there. Well, considering how light-headed he felt, how gently he was breathing, how much he wanted to touch the bars and the way that sparks seemed to leap when he did, that wouldn't be unusual. "The thing I have is the captivity. The privilege of seeing you like this."
Potter stared at him, mouth open, then shut it and blew air out through his nostrils hard enough to sound like a camel. "Yeah. You've never seen me sitting on a chair before, or on a chair on a platform. Because the Ministry doesn't have me do that every other week. You've had your bloody mad fun, Malfoy, let me go."
"You have no idea," Draco said quietly. Potter was trying to destroy the mood, he knew, but the mood wasn't his to destroy. "You have no idea how many of them see you soaring around, free, above them, yes, flying above them in a world that they can't conceive of. What wouldn't they give, they think, for your fame and your popularity and your ability to have anything you want by looking at it."
Potter's mouth curled up. "I can't have privacy by asking for it, can I?"
"And then they wonder what you would look like like this," Draco said. His voice was pulling him with it, and it seemed to pull a flush up Potter's cheeks, too, coiling around his throat and his jaw and ending up somewhere under his ears. "Before them, stripped of that power, vulnerable, unable to do anything except listen to them. Because they have the key to the cage, to the chain. Because they want to know what happens when you surrender."
"I don't," Potter said, his voice quieter after Draco's. Draco’s wasn't loud, but it filled the space. He knew it did. And from the way Potter ducked his head down, he knew it, too; he simply didn't want to admit it.
"You must, sometimes," Draco said. "When you sleep. When you put your wand down. When you're in the bath, the shower. When you're somewhere with people you trust. They want to see you then, without the power. Or they want to see what lies beneath the power. You could put it that way, too."
"I'm not weak."
Draco waited with a smile until Potter flushed again and listened to the way those words rang and died. "Of course not," Draco said. "Never, except here and now, when someone is making you relax and do something you don't want to do."
"You think this is relaxed? Malfoy, you narcissistic fucker--"
"You're not striding around," Draco said. "You're sitting in one place. You're not issuing commands, you're taking them."
He would have said more, but some of the words had got through at last, or so he saw from the way Potter's eyelids jerked up and his hands tightened in his lap. His breathing was thick, laborious, suddenly. He tried to look Draco in the eye, but he had to clench his jaw to do so.
"You don't really think that way," Potter said, and something was still caught in the back of his throat, try to clear it as he would. He ended up looking down at his hands, and then when he tried again, his eyes wouldn't rise higher than Draco's chest. Draco watched him and knew him, knew and understood his reactions, as much as if he had used Legilimency the way he had wanted to during sixth year.
"You're trying to make up something that you can use to excuse this childish revenge when the Ministry finds out what you've done," Potter continued, and his words were warming and charging ahead now, although he looked as if he had to struggle to find them. "You--you caged me here for a prank, and now you want me to fall for you, or--or something, and then you'll laugh at me and say it was all a prank, and I'm an idiot for doing it."
"If I wanted to make you fall for me," Draco said with simple truth, "I would have done something else, something that was less likely to piss you off from the beginning. This, I did for me. For myself, so I could know I was the only one watching you caged and captive and still for me."
Potter's eyes closed. His lashes swept along his cheeks, draping them in shadow. Draco clenched his teeth down to keep from a roar that would spoil the moment.
Potter's the one who's caged, but I'm the one who wants to roar. Funny, that.
He felt an emotion sliding through him, thick and languid and unfamiliar. The last time he had felt like that was before--
Well. Before the war. He couldn't remember exactly when, but he didn't matter. He stood there, enjoying the contrast of being the wild beast outside the cage while Potter sat there being calm and pretty and tame within it.
Potter swallowed and looked up. "How did you know?" he asked.
"How did I know that I wanted you tamed like this?" Draco gave him a leisurely smile and moved closer. "It wasn't hard to figure out, not once I started thinking about the way that I needed to--"
"No," Potter said. "How did you--" His hands were shaking. He paid them strict attention until he got them under control, not looking up even when Draco came a step nearer. "How did you know that I would like it, too?"
Draco didn't know that he could have held himself back then if his father had been in the room watching his every move. He stepped forwards, and the lock on the cage broke when he pushed it.
Potter didn't rise to his feet when Draco came into the cage. He sat with his hands clasped in front of him, eyes wide and frozen, and came alive when Draco gripped his neck and jerked him to his feet. But it was the kind of life that came from swirling his tongue around the inside of Draco's mouth as Draco thrust his in to kiss and conquer, and Draco could live with that.
He dragged Potter with him as he fumbled at his trousers, and then Potter's were open, too, and his cock was out, dangling and pale but not limp, and Draco gripped it and pulled and wrung a noise out of him that made Draco think Potter's wildness might be waking up, too.
Potter tried to reach back, to touch him, but Draco gripped his wrist until he pressed tendon to bone when Potter tried. This was to be his touching, and his alone.
The bars of the cage blurred around him as he bent Potter back for a kiss.
*
"Malfoy? They still want to make sure that we're not starving you."
Nauseated, Draco lifted his head and stared at the waxy woman who had just slammed a tray down outside the door to his cell. Bits of white string seemed to cling to his eyes. He reached up and rubbed his eyes roughly, and then lowered his hands and stared at them. Those hands had been on Potter's shoulders and cheeks and arse, a few moments ago. He would have sworn it.
"So the ward's getting to you, too." It would have been much too much to say that the waxy woman's voice had laughter in it, but there was a harder tone to it, like a bell struck off metal. "I see."
"You don't," Draco said, and then he bit his lip and wished he could reach up far enough with his teeth to bite his nose, to stop the harsh breaths that came in and out of it. He sat down and reached for the musty orange on the tray. The woman watched him peel it and eat it. Draco thought the sections of fruit he tore loose might have had some sweetness to them, once, long ago, before they came into this grey place, but he couldn't find it now, no matter how long he sucked at them.
"I see," she repeated, but her voice was all hard tone this time, and harder still when he glared at her. "I'm glad. How could we keep you for three months, or three years, or whatever the length of time the Wizengamot assigned you was, and know that you might do the same things when you left prison? The ward makes sure that you won't. You'll get out of here and you'll be model citizens."
Draco stared at her, but said nothing. This was free information, poured into his ears. Perhaps the ward didn't work the way the woman thought it did, but it was still valuable to know what might be passing through his enemies' minds.
Did they think that he would give everything up for a chance to fuck Potter, to have him under his power? Did they believe he would walk out of here and swear loyalty to Potter and the Ministry he no doubt worked for, all in hopes of one kiss, one brush of glancing fingers, one blowjob?
Draco sat rigid and still when the woman was gone. So far, he had not resisted the ward, just as he hadn't resisted the--
The memories scattered for a moment, then steadied themselves. The Dark Lord, when he had ordered Draco to torture people during the war. Yes, he hadn't done that. He had closed his mouth and cowered and gone along with things like the good little toy he was.
This time, he had as little choice as he had had there. It was a case of shut his mouth or die when he was under the Dark Lord's sway; in Azkaban, it was a case of yield to the ward or spend the rest of his life in prison. But at least he understood what it was meant to do now, and the fantasies it induced to do that.
Draco did have to smile, as he lay back down on the blankets. Had anyone told Potter that they were using him as a temptation to make the Death Eaters dream away their time? Perhaps Draco would find him when he left the prison, simply to tell him so.
Part Two.