InsaneJournal

Fic: Stop. Rewind.
Title: Stop. Rewind.
Author: nishizono
Characters: Draco/Harry
Rating: R
Disclaimer: They aren't mine.

Summary: This thing with Potter has been a lot like breaking up with someone you weren't actually seeing in the first place. And it's not like I don't know how the story is supposed to go, this boy-meets-boy comedy I'm stuck in: they meet, they talk, they fuck their way through the mattress and into the happily ever after. Well, not us.

Author's Notes: Thank you to ldybastet and ships_harry for reading this over.


It's backwards, the way it all happens.

Everything started to go wrong after we shagged, which is my way of saying that this thing with Potter has been a lot like breaking up with someone you weren't actually seeing in the first place. And it's not like I don't know how the story is supposed to go, this boy-meets-boy comedy I'm stuck in: they meet, they talk, they fuck their way through the mattress and into the happily ever after. Well, not us.

It started with my fingers on his cock, which was mostly accidental if you consider the two shots and three pints that led up to our little halfhearted tryst. I'd never thought about touching him except to hit him before that night, when he licked the foam from the rim of his glass and gave me a look through his lashes that told me he wanted to be exactly where he'd ended up: collapsed against the door of a bathroom stall, tugging at his own hair and whining my name. It was seedy as fuck, getting off together under the flickering fluorescent lights, but we both knew we'd stop if we took the time to go somewhere a little more private. And we needed an excuse, needed to be impatient and caught up in the moment. Needed something to cover our arses when what we were doing finally blew up in our faces. Which it did.

Before the mistake in the loo, though, there were drinks. And before drinks, there was a friendship that started before we could stop it. You see, Potter's job after the war was to constantly pester those of us who'd been on the losing side. So while he was traipsing through the manor every week or so, and I was following to make sure he didn't break anything, we fought and talked, and eventually started drinking together on the nights when Ginny was nagging for another kid and Astoria was complaining about having had one in the first place. So there was all of that-- the arguing, the talking, the drinking-- and then me in a pub bathroom with my hand down Harry Potter's pants.

What devastates me about the whole thing isn't that it happened in the first place, or how our friendship fell apart afterwards. Strange, I know. But no, what I find myself focusing on is the way Potter moves, and how he doesn't do it the way you think he should. He's still got the lanky awkwardness of a teenager, but with broader shoulders and a stronger jaw that doesn't seem to fit his face. It's all in his hips-- he arches his back and pushes them forward, and I'm as helpless as if his mouth were on my cock. Maybe even moreso. When you've got a man on his knees, he's got you by the balls, but there's something totally different about making him move under your hand. It should make you feel like you're the one in control, but it doesn't and you're not, because you're the one who can't stop watching. You've got your eyes on him, and that's what gives him power over you. The same way it's always been. Because watching Potter fuck is like watching him fly: you can't look away. And if we're being honest here, sometimes I think the only time either of us is beautiful is when we're in a freefall.

But the story of he and I, it doesn't start with fighting, lead to fucking, and end with bitter silence. Those are the easy parts. No, there's more to it than that, because two months after he came all over my hand in a dirty bathroom stall, he showed up at my door in the middle of the night.

"I need a place to stay tonight," he said.

So I opened the door.

Potter looked like he'd been crying, and neither of us bothered to pretend his knuckles weren't swollen. But he didn't ask for ice or healing charms, and I didn't offer.

I didn't need to show him where the guest rooms were, but I did anyway, and when we got to the second floor, I asked him, "Did you hit her?"

Maybe it was too late, or he was too tired, or we've just known each other too long for him to get fucked off at me for the stupid, childish insult. Whatever. I didn't care, because I knew exactly what he was about when he backed me up against the door and muttered, "Do you fuck her?"

I sucked him off that night, in the hallway on my knees with a hand down my own trousers. Potter tasted like sweaty anger and vodka, and I kept my eyes open in case someone came along. I didn't care about Astoria-- she lives her own life and I live mine-- but Scorpius was at that age where sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night was the worst kind of rebellion he could come up with. Potter didn't last long, and I wiped my mouth on his trousers while I wanked.

I came on the floor between his feet.

When I was finished, he cried.

"Everything-- it's all fucked up," Potter whispered a little later when he was curled up around me and his face was stuck to my shoulder with tears.

"It's not all fucked up." I sighed and patted his back. "It's just life."

I guess I should have known that wouldn't be the end of it. But I'd hoped we'd ignore each other after that, maybe go back to being what we were after the war, when we pretended not to know each other when we passed on the street. Unfortunately, Potter's job meant he was in my face at least one day out of every week, and since we seemed to be dead set on forgetting things like friendships, fucking, and crying, that left fighting.

There are some things that can never, just as a matter of course, mature with age.

"Why do you bother to keep this shit?" he spat at me one day.

We were standing in front of a display case in what used to be my father's study.

"Not like you've got anything to be proud of." Potter sneered. "What's it like, knowing the people you used to hate because they weren't purebloods are the ones in control?"

He has these moments, Potter, where he thinks he's being clever.

I leaned on my father's walking stick, which I don't need but carry anyway. I do it because people can't stand to look at me when I have it in my hands. I do it because I'm Lucius Malfoy's son and people hate to be reminded of that. I do it because I can.

"There's no such thing as control," I said. "There's just the illusion of control."

Potter sighed and rested his fingertips on the display case. The moisture from his skin left streaks on the glass, and I wanted to lick them away, clean them with my tongue while he watched. Wanted the taste of him again, to see if he'd want me the way I wanted him.

"I don't hate you because of who your parents are." I sneered. "I never hated you because you fly better than I do, or because you're everyone's darling, or because you got my father arrested, or because we were in different houses back at school."

Potter's eyes narrowed.

"I hate you," I hissed, "because you're you."

Three days and some four hours later, Potter was crying again. All I could think about were the tear stains he was leaving on my robes and whether or not he'd let me fuck him. Once upon a time, back when we were friends, I'd have rubbed his shoulders and poured him a drink. But we weren't friends; we'd already bollixed that up. So I sat there and let him sob against my thighs and got off a little on feeling his hot, gasping breaths through my robes.

"I don't know what I'm doing," he mumbled. "I'm thirty-seven years old and I have no fucking idea what I'm doing."

There was something genuinely miserable in his voice that made my leg jerk like waking up from a dream, the kind where you're falling and there's nothing there to catch you. And if there was something there, I was sure as fuck determined that it wasn't going to be Potter. So I pushed his head off my lap, and I let my own fall back to rest on the cushion behind me, and I mumbled, "Yeah, I know."

But the problem is, Potter never learned to leave things alone, and to be honest, neither did I. If we had, then our lives would have been different. Maybe. The point is, I knew he'd come looking for me after that night, that he'd find an excuse to come 'round to wherever I was and stay there until I stopped pretending not to notice. I don't think it mattered whether we fought, fucked, or talked. It was the proximity, that's what he wanted. To be in my peripheral vision as a silent way of saying, 'I see you and I know you see me.' So I wasn't surprised when he showed up to the pub. Just annoyed.

There's an almost sacred bond between broken men and alcohol. That's why, on any given afternoon between the hours of five and midnight, you can find so many of us at the local pub, nursing pints or tossing shots and trying to forget that the weight of our stupid, everyday drama is constantly on our shoulders. And because it's sacred to us, that little ritual, I couldn't bring myself to pick a fight when I saw him. Refused to interrupt everyone else's peace just because I couldn't find any of my own.

But I couldn't ignore the bastard either. He wouldn't have let me. So I gave up and let him see me seeing him, and hoped that would be enough. We sat, we stared. He looked away first, but I was too tired to care about trivial victories, so I sighed and read the sign above the bar-- over, and over, and over-- while I thought about Astoria and Scorpius and Harry fucking Potter, who just never seemed to go away. And because he has shit timing, especially for showing up where he's unwanted, he finally came over and slid into the seat across from mine.

"We're too fucking old for this, Potter." I sighed.

"Yeah," he muttered.

Twenty minutes of silence later, we were back in the bathroom together.

Again.

But this time, it was Potter on his knees. The door had barely closed, and he was mouthing my cock through my trousers. Frantic. I was hissing things, insults, but I didn't stop him from pulling my shirt open. His tongue-- his fingernails were on my nipples, and I hated him for making me want to kiss him. But I didn't, and that was important to me, like as long as his mouth didn't touch my mouth, it wasn't really happening. Just another hole, another quick blowjob in dingy bathroom, and sure as hell not Harry Potter down-- he was at my feet, licking precome from the head of my cock. Just another--

"Fuck--"

I was whimpering, spreading my legs, letting his knuckles bruise my thighs and his teeth scrape my skin. I wanted it, wanted him, couldn't fucking wait to pull my prick out of his mouth and come on his face. Just another insult, just another five minutes, just another thing I wanted and was damn well going to get. I always get what I want, always, and what I wanted was--

"--you," Potter growled. "Fuck you, fuck you for making me want this."

"Yeah." I gasped, twisted my fingers in his hair. I'd never been touched like that before. No one but Potter could be so tentative in his roughness or brutal in his neediness. But I didn't need it, didn't crave it. Didn't.

"Draco," Potter muttered, his pressed his face against my leg and his hands on my knees. My cock was still hard, slick with his saliva and rubbing against his ear because I just couldn't fucking care if he was miserable. We were both breaking, anyway. Already broken.

"Shh." Curled my fingers in his hair.

"Shh." Pulled him away from my hip.

"Come on, sweetheart." Guided him back to my prick.

Potter didn't protest. It was an apathetic surrender I couldn't bring myself to watch. But I felt it. Felt his jaw relax under my fingers when I rubbed his cheek, felt his hot, even breathing against my stomach. Heard him sigh, defeated, when I pulled my cock out of his mouth and did what I'd intended to do all along. He didn't open his eyes for it, didn't stick out his tongue or look up at me. Just knelt there, hair sticking to his forehead and glasses sliding down his nose.

When I handed him a handful of toilet tissue, he mumbled, "I think I'm in love with you."

"No." I clenched my fists and kicked the door of the stall open. "You're not."

And I was lying through my teeth, because the moment I got home, I did something I hadn't done since my father died. It wasn't anything like those paralyzing gasps that had doubled me over on the rug in the study and curled me around my father's walking stick. This was shallow. Sickening and hateful. Just like whatever I was doing with Potter, this thing I needed to stop but knew I couldn't.

Sometime between bruised fists and a shattered wineglass, Scorpius crept into the room. Slid onto my lap behind the big oak desk and whispered, "I love you, Daddy. Please don't cry."

So I stopped.

That should have been the end of it, a good-bye with what could have been a beginning of something else. But I went back there. Two weeks, every night, me in the same booth with the same glass in my hand and the same nausea roiling in my stomach every time the door opened. Potter never came.

So I conceded. Threw my hand down on the table and walked away. Didn't care who took a peek, or whether I might've won if I'd stayed in the game. I slouched home with my tail between my legs, bleeding my martyrdom all over the sidewalk with the sideways stagger of a bruised alcoholic. Let them talk, or speculate, or whatever it is they do after calling a ruined monarch's bluff. I tried to tell myself I didn't care, that it was just entertainment for people who never had a childhood.

Potter didn't see it that way.

Because there he was again one morning, at my door and in my home, like he'd been born to stand in the window-slanted sunlight, making my chest hurt and my stomach twist. Suffocating, that's what I'd call being near him. Standing in the front hall, looking at him looking at me. He does this thing where he stuffs his hands in his pockets right before he says something important. Almost like he knows how hard it is to breathe when he's there, and he thinks hiding his hands makes him look less like himself. More like someone safe.

"Hi," he said.

We didn't go to my bedroom, or the sitting room, or my father's study. We stood in the entryway and looked at each other. I felt like screaming.

"Scorpius told Albus you'd been crying," he mumbled.

I hadn't even known Scorpius had been talking to Albus at all, let alone confiding family secrets. Betrayed by my own son.

"How long are we going to keep doing this?" Potter sighed and leaned against the wall. Tired, worn down, just like me.

"Sorry Potter, but I'm not sure which 'this' you're talking about," I spat. "The one where we suck each other off then fight about it, or the one where you feel like you can come running to me with every little problem? Or maybe you mean the one where you get too caught up in the moment and--"

"Don't."

"Potter." I was miserable, exhausted, and I wanted to find Scorpius and carry him into the study the way I used to when he was a baby, wrap him up next to me and sleep for a little while. Pretend. Stare at my father's portrait and remember who I was, or at least what I'd always tried to be.

"Draco," Potter muttered. "Why are we doing this?"

I flinched when he touched me. But his hand stayed wrapped around my elbow, not trying to push or pull. Just there. Like the rest of him. I sneered and tossed my hair out of my eyes, and asked, "Do you ever go away?"

"No," he said.

And just like that, I stopped fighting. Let my fists uncurl and my head bow, and exhaled the breath that had been burning my lungs in a deep sigh. The Potter I'd known before, he would have tried to hug me, or said something awkward and irritating about being sorry. Maybe, if he was feeling particularly clever, he'd try to tell a joke and get the punchline wrong, and scowl at me for laughing at him instead of what he'd said. But he didn't this time, and I was choking on the loss of him.

"I think," I whispered, "I think I miss you."

Potter let out a long, heavy breath. Slid his hand down my arm to my wrist.

Stopped.

Threaded his fingers through mine and held on.