#Bill Maudlin

[graphicpolicy]

Exclusive Preview: Cartoonists Against Racism: The Secret Jewish War on Bigotry

Cartoonists Against Racism: The Secret Jewish War on Bigotry exclusive preview. Cartoonists Against Racism uncovers the secret campaign to create anti-racist comics and cartoons to flood America's newspapers, classrooms, and union halls #comics

[wildepotato]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: SCTV (Canada TV) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Floyd Robertson (SCTV), Earl Camembert, Earl's Family, Sammy Maudlin, Bobby Bittman, Guy Caballero, Bill Needle (SCTV), William B. Williams (SCTV), honey needle, Edith Prickley Additional Tags: Holidays, Ugly Holiday Sweaters, Hanukkah, Christmas, One Shot Summary:

Vignettes of holidays within the SCTV crew Title is based on John Denver and the Muppets a Christmas together

[mrmousetolliver]

Parting Glances (1986) directed by Bill Sherwood. Parting Glances is one of the first films to deal frankly and realistically with the subject of AIDS and is considered by many critics to be an important film in the history of Gay cinema.

The film was directed by first time director Bill Sherwood, who also edited and wrote the screenplay. It is also the first major roles for Steve Buscemi. Janet Maslin of the New York Times said "It is to both his and the film's credit that the anguish of AIDS is presented as part of a larger social fabric, understood in context, and never in a maudlin light." Bill Sherwood died in 1990 of complications from AIDS. In 2006, Outfest and the UCLA Film and Television Archive announced that the film would be the first to be restored as a part of the Outfest Legacy Project. The film is available for streaming on Tubi.

[disastermages]

Draped in Black and Dripping With Love Ch. 4

[read it on ao3]

Cold water streams down Lan Zhan’s shoulders as he sits at the bottom of the bathtub, his eyes focused on the rounded edge across from him, but not seeing it. Turning on the hot water had been impossible, the cold water helps him think as he replays Wei Ying’s confession in his mind. It doesn’t make sense. No matter how many times Lan Zhan tries his best to put the pieces together, he cannot make it make sense to himself.

The Yiling Patriarch is not wholly himself. Not according to Wei Ying.

The Patriarch that clings so closely to the shadows of this house is a fragment, something between an intelligent and a residual haunting, or perhaps something entirely different, and it’s the not knowing that makes Lan Zhan narrow his eyes at the edge of the tub. His knuckles turn white with how tightly he grips his own hands, his mouth pressing into a fine line. 

How long has Wei Ying been alone with the Patriarch? How long ago did he make contact with him? Lan Zhan doesn’t know and hadn’t been able to ask, he’d only been able to slowly swallow down the information that Wei Ying was willing to give him. But he was still keeping things, Lan Zhan knows it deep within his stomach. It was in the way Wei Ying spoke, the way he insisted that it was fine, the way he told Lan Zhan that he could handle it.

Putting his head back into the water, Lan Zhan squeezes his eyes shut, feeling as though he’s heard Wei Ying say that same thing many, many times before. There are still questions that he needs to ask, things that he’ll have to ever so carefully press Wei Ying on, through all his attempts at laughing Lan Zhan off and all his insistence that everything will be fine.

His eyebrows twitch together as cold water thumps against his eyes. The water flatly refuses to slide off the sides of his face as Lan Zhan had hoped it would, pooling in the shallow dips of his face until he’s got no choice but to raise his hands to wipe it away. The world goes dark for only a moment as his hands cover his eyes, but Lan Zhan can still hear the door creak open over the shower. He expects to hear Wei Ying’s voice. He expects to be teased about running up the water bill.

“Wei Ying?” Lan Zhan calls as he turns towards the shower curtain. He can just make out the silhouette of Wei Ying through the fabric, his eyelashes still wet and dripping as he gathers his arms around himself. It doesn’t matter that Wei Ying cannot see him through the curtain. The thought of Wei Ying seeing him naked stirs heat in some places of Lan Zhan and terrifies others. 

Wei Ying has said nothing, but his shadow stands at the sink, his arms performing mute actions. Wei Ying would’ve said something by now, even if he was feeling maudlin, even if all he wanted was to pick a fight. He would’ve said something to get under Lan Zhan’s skin, but instead, he keeps repeating the same actions over and over again without a word. It chills Lan Zhan far more than the water ever could.

Forcing himself to stand up, Lan Zhan feels the messy bun of his hair fall out of its binding and spill down his back, the end of it getting soaked all too quickly. He hadn’t had time to notice Wei Ying’s shadow coming closer until only the curtain remains between them, Wei Ying looking all the hazier for it. His hand still makes the curtain ripple, though, the folds of it swaying back and forth. It’s almost entrancing.

The water still roars, but Lan Zhan can feel his heart lodge in his throat. Does Wei Ying mean to pull the curtain open? Does he mean to see all of him, whether Lan Zhan is ready for him or not? What does it mean if that’s exactly what he means? What if Wei Ying is only playing around?

“Wei Ying, please,” Lan Zhan begs, his voice small. Please, what? What was he asking Wei Ying to do?

Despite himself, Lan Zhan thinks about the heat that Wei Ying would bring into the shower, about how the cold water wouldn’t matter a single bit. Lan Zhan can imagine the heaviness and the roughness of his hands as they would press against him. He can’t let himself think about whether or not Wei Ying would hold him like a lover should, or if it would be something quicker and dirtier. The cold water does little to quell the heat gathering underneath Lan Zhan’s skin, his mouth going dry and his lips parting soundlessly. 

His throat feels thick as he covers himself as best as he can with one hand and uses the other to nudge the curtain aside, his heart twisting in his chest. Every part of him feels full and guilty with hope, even his fingers shake as they move to reveal nothing waiting for him on the other side of the curtain. Even Wei Ying’s shadow is gone, leaving something heavy and raw to sit in Lan Zhan’s stomach.

The only evidence that someone had come into the bathroom with him is the way the door hangs wide open, cold air rushing forward just for the sake of making Lan Zhan shiver where he stands.

Lan Zhan knows that Wei Ying is fast. He knows that he could outrun almost anyone so long as he truly wanted to, but he still would have heard him running away. He would have seen Wei Ying’s elbow or the edge of his heel as he bolted from the room. He does not waste time in turning off the water, silence gathering around him as he lingers in the shower, water still streaming down his bottom and his legs from the length of his hair. Lan Zhan doesn’t bother to squeeze it out as he steps onto the tile.

The urge to call out to Wei Ying again sits on his tongue, heavy and bitter, as he dries himself quickly. His pajamas stick to his skin, but Lan Zhan forces himself into them, gathering his hair up and out of the way. He wishes he’d been able to bring himself to turn on the hot water now, maybe if he had, there would’ve been footprints to follow on the steamed tile. 

Cold air wraps around Lan Zhan as he steps out into the hallway, making him wrap his arms around himself in turn as he looks back and forth. The rooms had been reconstructed when the house had been turned into an inn, some of them cut in half to make space for more beds, and others had walls knocked down to make larger, more expensive suites. Neat little rows of doors stare blankly at Lan Zhan, making his imagination and his nerves run wild as he turns in the direction of the room he and Wei Ying had been sharing.

The lights buzz and flicker above him, but Lan Zhan has grown used to that, he hardly notices as he keeps close to the wall next to him. He tries to think about where he’d last seen Wei Ying, but the feeling of static electricity growing and growing around him makes it hard to think. His stomach clenches but Lan Zhan forces himself to move forward, his free hand pressed against his belly.

Wei Ying had been working on the mural. He’d been high up on a ladder that had a shelf for a can of paint. He’d only paid Lan Zhan the barest bit of mind as he left the room. He would still be working downstairs. He wouldn’t slip into bed until the narrow hours of the night. It was how he worked, Lan Zhan has learned that.

He doesn’t realize he’s panting until he sees his breath puff out in front of his lips, the static electricity has only grown, making the hair on his arms stand on end while goosebumps rise up. “Who’s here?” Lan Zhan calls softly, trying to keep his voice firm, but he’s unable to make himself speak louder. He shouldn’t be up here alone, he knows that now, not while this level of activity is happening around him.

Pressing his shoulder into the wall, Lan Zhan finally allows himself to be stopped, his stomach still spasming around nothing. He tries to think about what his uncle might’ve told him to do in this situation. The first step would’ve been to regulate himself, his breathing, his thoughts, his emotions, but that regulation slips away from Lan Zhan’s fingertips just as quickly as it comes. The next step would’ve been to rely on his partner, whoever that may be at the time, regardless of whether it’s his brother or someone less reliable, but Lan Zhan is alone, hopelessly alone while Wei Ying is downstairs, his hands busy and the whole of his concentration occupied. 

Lan Zhan finds himself grappling for the third step as lightbulbs burst on either side of him, thin glass landing on the floor until only the lightbulb above him is left, engulfing Lan Zhan in a weak pool of light. What would he do if this one burst? Light from the streetlamps wouldn’t reach this far back into the house, they only barely touched the outward facing rooms. 

Suddenly, it feels as though a crowd of people has surrounded him, voices weaving in and out of dialects and accents, whispers whirling around his head as Lan Zhan tries to pick out specific voices, voices to call out to, voices to ask questions to, but all of them are extinguished like candles as someone knocks into Lan Zhan, sending him sprawling to the very bottom of that pool of light as they pin his wrists to the floor, their weight pressing down on his hips to keep him down like a schoolyard bully.

When Lan Zhan’s eyes focus, Wei Ying is glaring down at him, a frown cutting his face cruelly. There’s still wet paint on his hands, it’s smearing into Lan Zhan’s skin. “Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan’s head aches where he’d made contact with the ground and his ears ring with the energy still swirling around them. He means to ask what Wei Ying is doing, to tell him to get off, but there’s something different in Wei Ying now, something that makes his eyes glow red and his hands feel so much stronger than they should be, even if Wei Ying works with them day after day. There will be bruises tomorrow, maybe even later tonight.

“Hanguang-jun,” Wei Ying’s voice sounds as if it’s been overlaid with itself, never mind that Wei Ying’s called him a title he doesn’t have, “can’t you mind your own business?” Somehow, Wei Ying’s grip tightens around his wrists again, bones threatening to creak beneath Lan Zhan’s skin. 

Uselessly, Lan Zhan’s legs kick out, trying to throw Wei Ying off, but that only turns his frown into a sneer, his teeth gnashed together as the scent of rot gathers around the two of them. It makes Lan Zhan want to gag, his eyes already watering as he struggles against Wei Ying’s hold on him.

“Wei Ying, you are not yourself.” That much was obvious, but realization only sinks in as the Yiling Patriarch leans forward, his weight shifting as he twists Wei Ying’s face into something monstrous.

If Lan Zhan could only free one of his hands, he could do something, he could use spiritual energy to knock the Yiling Patriarch off of him and maybe out of Wei Ying’s body, but he still can’t get a foothold on the floor. The glass makes a tinkling noise as Lan Zhan’s foot makes contact with it, a shard digs in, but he can’t make himself pay any mind to it.

The Patriarch is too close now, and the scent of decay is almost all consuming now, burning into Lan Zhan’s sinuses. “You might’ve fooled that other me, Hanguang-jun,” The Patriarch growls, his voice sounding nearly animal, “he might even feel something soft for you, but I see you for what you are.” Whether the Patriarch means to do it or not, he still releases one of Lan Zhan’s wrists to pound the floor next to his head, narrowly missing Lan Zhan’s ear as he glowers and glares.

“Get lost!” The Yiling Patriarch demands, turning Wei Ying’s eyes almost entirely that eerie, glowing red. “Get lost! Get lost! Don’t you get it?!” The Yiling Patriarch’s howling thunders in Lan Zhan’s ears, but he pushes past it as bile rises in his throat while he murmurs a spell. His unbound hand is sluggish and sore as it follows all the necessary movements to cast the spell and press it against Wei Ying’s chest.

The reaction isn’t immediate, something immediate would’ve hurt Wei Ying more than the Patriarch, but the build of Lan Zhan’s spiritual energy is powerful but gradual, pushing him further and further away until the Patriarch has no choice but to release Lan Zhan’s other wrist or let himself be burned and scorched. He still uses Wei Ying’s fingers to try and claw at Lan Zhan’s skin, his teeth still gnash, and he still repeats the same command over and over again, until Lan Zhan can finally pull himself out from underneath him. The shard of glass in his foot lodges itself deeper as Lan Zhan forces himself up to his feet and forward, towering over the Yiling Patriarch.

“Leave him.” Lan Zhan commands, intent and force behind his words as he finally sends a bolt of energy straight into Wei Ying’s chest. The Yiling Patriarch doesn’t have the chance to refuse or to argue, Lan Zhan watches the separation as it happens, though he knows that the Yiling Patriarch hasn’t even begun to let go of Wei Ying completely. It wouldn’t happen simply or painlessly, but relief still fills Lan Zhan’s chest as he watches Wei Ying go limp against the baluster, his eyes heavy and unfocused before they slide shut. 

All at once, Lan Zhan wants nothing more than to sink onto his knees and wrap Wei Ying in his arms, to pull him against his chest and keep him there, but he forces himself to settle for leaning over Wei Ying, his legs feeling like jelly as he tries not to fall on top of him. 

What could he tell him? Or would Wei Ying already know what the Yiling Patriarch meant to do?

The single remaining light and the lights from downstairs both try to spread around them, and Lan Zhan wishes they could, it would make it easier to tell if he’d hurt Wei Ying more than he meant to, but he has to settle for dropping down to his knees and pulling at the collar of Wei Ying’s shirt, his fingers clumsy as he tries to make out what he can in the dim light. 

There’s the telltale sign that Wei Ying had been hit by someone else’s spiritual energy, but the wound itself is little more than a scrape. Most of the energy had been directed at the spirit possessing him, rather than at Wei Ying himself. Lan Zhan had tried to shield him as best as he could. The Yiling Patriarch’s spirit would be damaged though, damaged enough that Lan Zhan knows he’s bought himself time, though he doesn’t know how much.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan calls him now, his hands finding Wei Ying’s cheeks. They aren’t as warm as they should be, the Yiling Patriarch had taken that from him as easily as breathing, “Wei Ying, wake up, you mustn’t sleep in the hallway.” It feels silly to insist, but Lan Zhan can’t help it, nor can he help the way his thumbs stroke over the swells of Wei Ying’s cheeks. They’re too close right now, and Lan Zhan knows it. When Wei Ying opens his eyes, the only thing he’ll be able to see is Lan Zhan’s face.

Wei Ying’s eyelids twitch and he murmurs something that Lan Zhan can’t understand, but he doesn’t wake. If Lan Zhan were a braver man, he might press his lips to Wei Ying’s forehead to share spiritual energy with him, unafraid of whatever consequences may come from it, but he knows that he’s a coward when all he can bring himself to do is grasp Wei Ying’s hands. He holds onto him as tightly as he dares before he begins feeding his energy into Wei Ying’s core. 

The Yiling Patriarch would have drained him completely if Lan Zhan had been even a bit slower, it only makes the knot of guilt worse as it sits in his chest. 

Licking his lips, Lan Zhan forces himself to look into Wei Ying’s face, the pinched expression beginning to fade. “Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan tries again, feeling silly for even going down this route, “if you do not wake up, you will be late to class. If you are late, my uncle will make you copy down the rules regarding punctuality and sleeping properly again.”

Lan Zhan had kept his voice calm, he’d even used the same cadence he used to have when they were students, but Wei Ying still wakes with a start, pushing Lan Zhan’s hands out of his own and hauling himself up so fast Lan Zhan is nearly thrown back, his eyes wide and wild. It takes a moment too long for Wei Ying to remember that they’re in their twenties, and if it weren’t for everything else, Lan Zhan might’ve been amused. 

“Lan Zhan! That wasn’t funny! I still have nightmares about-” Wei Ying starts off too loudly and Lan Zhan can’t stop himself from wincing as he tries to climb to his feet. He still has to lean against the baluster while Wei Ying takes in everything around them. “Lan Zhan, what happened? What’s going on?” There are more questions bubbling out of Wei Ying’s mouth, but before he can try to hide it, Wei Ying notices the blood still dribbling out of Lan Zhan’s foot, there’s a small trail of it left on the floor between them. 

“Lan Zhan!”

“It’s nothing.” Lan Zhan tries to say, but Wei Ying is already upon him, the difference between now and just a few moments ago is enough to make Lan Zhan’s head spin. He can’t forgive himself for wanting to push Wei Ying away from him, even though the scent of rot and decay has long since faded from his skin, leaving him smelling just as he always has. He does not allow himself to nudge Wei Ying away from him as Wei Ying wraps an arm around Lan Zhan’s middle. The two of them navigate their way back to the bathroom as carefully as they can, sneaking around the remains of light bulbs as if they were snakes poised to strike at them.

Try as he might, Lan Zhan cannot allow Wei Ying to pull the shard of glass out of his foot with the tweezers, nor can he allow Wei Ying to disinfect the wound. He does it all himself while Wei Ying watches and leans against the sink.

Tiredness still lurks at the corners of his eyes, and he makes no attempt to wash the paint off his hands, he only watches Lan Zhan as he works, a storm starting behind his eyes. “Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying starts, his voice soft but guarded, “you have to tell me what happened, please.”

Lan Zhan cannot make himself answer right away. He pretends to busy himself with the bandaid, acting as though he can’t get a grip on the wax paper, and then he makes a career of angling it perfectly, even if the cut has stopped bleeding by now.

The silence builds like steam around them, thicker but just as suffocating.

What could he tell Wei Ying? How could he even begin to answer his question?

“You did not tell me that the Yiling Patriarch was another part of yourself.” Lan Zhan chooses the words carefully, thinking back to everything that he’d managed to get out of Wei Ying about the Patriarch. Lan Zhan does not want to tell Wei Ying that the Yiling Patriarch used his body to attack him, but there isn’t a way around it, not that Lan Zhan can see. All Lan Zhan can do is recount what just happened and watch as Wei Ying’s hands twist tighter and tighter into his own shirt, the storm growing behind his eyes.

It’s painful to watch, but it would be worse to look away. Lan Zhan cannot bring himself to leave Wei Ying by himself. “The Yiling Patriarch seems to believe that I am Hanguang-jun.” Tempted as he is to reach out to Wei Ying physically, Lan Zhan can’t bring himself to put the thought to action. He doesn’t mention that the Yiling Patriarch accused Wei Ying of feeling softly towards him, it doesn’t feel right.

“He’s a distant ancestor of yours, though, right?” Wei Ying’s question isn’t accusatory, Lan Zhan doesn’t want to believe that it is, but the hard look in Wei Ying’s eyes makes it hard to believe that it’s anything but. Wordlessly, Lan Zhan inclines his head. His family still makes offerings to Hanguang-jun, even though his true name has long since been buried in family records, too old and delicate to be digitized and added to the database.

“Could the Yiling Patriarch be an ancestor of Wei Ying’s?” Lan Zhan speaks the question carefully, trying harder and harder to keep accusation out of his voice. They couldn’t start fighting with each other now, it might be exactly what the Yiling Patriarch is after.

“I don’t know.” Wei Ying says stiffly, shaking his head, “My mom was adopted and her records were sealed, Bao-popo never even tried to dig into them. Uncle Jiang never let me look at mine and Aunt Yu won’t let me have them now that he’s gone.” Lan Zhan’s heart squeezes in his chest as he watches Wei Ying drag a hand through his hair. Misery settles like a cloud over the both of them, starting at Wei Ying and seeping into Lan Zhan. It makes him want to scrunch his nose and sigh. It makes him want to climb back into the bathtub and lay down against the cold bottom of it until he can think of something.

“What now?” Wei Ying finally asks, his voice weak.

There’s a moment before Lan Zhan can even begin to answer him, his eyes glued to the tiles between them. He squeezes the fabric of his pajama pants between his fingers, the texture of them doing nothing to soothe him. “We should look into ways to separate the Patriarch from Wei Ying’s physical body first, then we can find out how to separate him from you entirely.” Lan Zhan isn’t sure if he’s avoiding the word “possessed” for his comfort or for Wei Ying’s.

The next time Lan Zhan dares to look up at him, Wei Ying is staring at him, as if Lan Zhan had just said something that disarmed him completely.

“You mean you aren’t leaving?” The surprise in Wei Ying’s voice shouldn’t hurt as much as it does, but Lan Zhan still feels the sting, even as he shakes his head slowly.

“I will not go unless Wei Ying asks me to.” Even if Wei Ying asked, even if he demanded it like a spoiled child, Lan Zhan cannot say that he would go now. He can’t imagine leaving Wei Ying by himself in a house like this, with a spirit like the Yiling Patriarch. He can’t imagine going back to how things were, with the two of them not speaking, with Wei Ying pretending as if Lan Zhan does not exist. 

“Do you mean it?” Wei Ying asks, taking half a step closer to Lan Zhan, his arms hanging limp at his sides.

“Mn. I will not leave Wei Ying’s side.” The words come easily, as easily as breathing for once. Lan Zhan made the mistake of leaving him once before, of allowing Wei Ying to slip through his fingers, he does not mean to make it again. 

As badly as he wants to look away from the flurry of emotions making their way through Wei Ying’s face, Lan Zhan forces himself to face all of them, his heart thudding in his chest.

Nothing could have prepared him for the way Wei Ying sinks onto the floor beside the bathtub, his forehead making contact with Lan Zhan’s leg. Without thinking, Lan Zhan puts a hand out to rest on his shoulder and finds that Wei Ying is shaking. 

Maybe, if things were different between them, if they were more than they are right now, Lan Zhan could have been prepared for the way Wei Ying’s arms come up and cling to both of his legs, his grip almost bruising again. 

Carefully and without a sound, Lan Zhan allows himself to card his fingers through Wei Ying’s hair, from the top of his head, to where it ends at his shoulders. He undoes the half ponytail Wei Ying had put up while he’d been working before he can stop himself, the hair tie sitting perfectly on his wrist.

Lan Zhan isn’t sure if they spend a few moments like that, or a few hours, all he knows is that when he stands to go to bed, Wei Ying rises with him and follows after, his body still close enough that Lan Zhan can feel his heat despite the fact that they’re careful not to touch. They still have to walk around bursts of broken glass, but Wei Ying murmurs about sweeping it up as soon as morning comes.

The bed, the bed they’d been sharing as long as Lan Zhan has been in this house, feels softer than it’s ever felt as they settle into it, Wei Ying still in the clothes he’d worn all day and Lan Zhan in his pajamas. It isn’t perfect, Lan Zhan is still tempted to scold Wei Ying as gently as he can for it, but he can’t bring himself to do it, not when Wei Ying makes a point of dragging the blankets up around the both of them, forfeiting more than half of his pillow to Lan Zhan as he cushions his own head on his bent arm.

Sleep is already beginning to drag him down as Lan Zhan realizes that he never apologized for the wound on Wei Ying’s chest, never mind how minor it was. Neither of them had even tried to clean it or put a bandage over it. Lan Zhan presses his apology into letting his knuckles brush against Wei Ying’s forearm, his tongue feeling too thick and heavy for speech. 

Lan Zhan’s knuckle is brushing against a splotch of paint that’s dried onto Wei Ying’s skin as sleep finally takes him, but it’s the nauseating smell of wet paint that drags him out of sleep hours later. He fears the worst, that the Yiling Patriarch, or the smaller spirits, had ruined yet another one of Wei Ying’s murals out of revenge or mischief, but the smell of the paint is too close, too fresh. Lan Zhan fumbles for his phone in the darkness of early morning.

The glow of his phone reveals paint splashed across Wei Ying’s side of the bed, staining the sheets and one of the pillow cases, but Lan Zhan has to turn on his flashlight to see the worst of it, his mouth falling open and his eyes growing wide. He can’t even find the words to apologize when Wei Ying puts a hand up to cover his eyes against the assault of Lan Zhan’s light. 

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying whines, his voice still thick with sleep as he rolls over, smearing more paint over the bed, “it’s too early.”

“Wei Ying, your hair.” Lan Zhan’s voice comes out as a whisper.

“What about it? Turn off the light,” Wei Ying demands, his voice taking a turn for the grumpier. When Lan Zhan doesn’t, Wei Ying drags himself up and lifts a hand to the back of his head. Confusion overtakes him as his hand comes away sticky and yellow. The glow of Lan Zhan’s flashlight does nothing to mask the mess as Wei Ying runs his hand through his hair again, coming away with a swirl of red this time, thicker and almost half dried.

Lan Zhan can do nothing as Wei Ying throws the blanket off and rushes to turn the overhead light on, exposing the full extent of the carnage.

The sheets are undoubtedly ruined, that had been obvious enough without the light, but it's the sight of Wei Ying’s hair that makes Lan Zhan want to gasp, his hand covering his mouth.

Lan Zhan would have rathered another mural be ruined than this, a ruined mural was more fixable than the way Wei Ying’s hair hangs heavy with drying paint.

Words refuse to come as Wei Ying leaves the room, all but running as he curses about the broken glass on the way to the bathroom.

Lan Zhan knows that it won’t wash out, he can feel it making him sick to his stomach.

[marislittlestories]

Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter

Mature | Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Spy Draco Malfoy, Draco Malfoy in the Muggle World, Hogwarts Eighth Year

6/10 - one, two, three, four, five - read on ao3

january 1999 - may 1999

1999 starts with snow. It falls, slow and lazy, from a dark, overcast sky and covers the ground outside in a thick layer. It’s not quite cold enough to keep it in pristine condition, so it melts into an icy sludge by mid-morning, but for a few hours before the sun rises, the world is quiet and still and blanketed in glittering white.

“C’mon, c’mon,” Ginny shakes him awake while it’s still dark out, “We’re going to have a snowball fight.”

Draco stares up at her from his makeshift bed, “What time is it?”

“Nevermind that. Get up.”

He can’t refuse her. He hurriedly throws on his warmest clothes, including, of course, his very own iconic Weasley sweater, presented to him by Molly when he arrived at the Burrow a couple days ago. It’s a beautiful burnt-orange that brings out the nearly-invisible flecks of blue in his steel grey eyes. The crooked D is black and a slightly different texture. It’s possibly one of his most prized possessions, right up there with the aviators that Claire gave him over the summer and the copy of Darke Arts & Their Masters that he recklessly nicked from Bellatrix when he was sixteen.

They join the group outside. Hermione, Ron, Charlie, Bill, Fleur, and Percy are all huddled together, teeth chattering in the cold, brisk air. There’s just a hint of sunrise on the horizon, turning the sky brilliant shades of gold and red and pink. The flecks of snow drifting in the air gather on Draco’s shoulders and hair and stick to his lashes.

He crowds as close to Ginny as he can, watching as Harry and George make their way out of the house over to where the rest of them are waiting. George hasn’t been himself, not since the battle, not since Fred. Draco had known this, from what Ginny’s said over the past few months, but it’s different seeing it for himself. It’s different experiencing the force of George’s listlessness firsthand, face blank, strings cut.

In the time that Draco’s been here, just over two days, Harry hasn’t left George’s side for more than a few minutes. They’re always together, sometimes chatting quietly, but more often just sitting in silence. It makes some unnameable emotion surge in Draco’s chest.

It’s not quite jealousy, not quite pride. This is the person I have given everything to, Draco thinks, and he deserves it, he keeps deserving it. It’s a feeling resigned to its own fate, a burgeoning satisfaction made sharp by its hopelessness, made hungry by his bottomless desire. It’s a longing, a knowing, a vision of a future that will never exist, one where he could have that kindness, that unwavering loyalty and care for himself.

He thinks that if he had it, he may never be lonely again.

It’s such a bittersweet, maudlin line of thought that he stops it there. The rest of the world comes back into focus, and he only has to glance in Ginny’s direction to see the look on her face, naked concern and sorrow.

“You okay?”

She shrugs, and glances over at George and Harry talking, heads bowed together.

“I know it’s different for him,” she whispers, “But I’m worried, you know? He smiles and laughs now, which is a hell of a lot better than a few months ago, but… There’s this heaviness, like I can see the grief around him, and it just never leaves, not like it does for the rest of us.”

Draco sees it too, “Yeah. You were like that, during the summer. It won’t be like that forever, it might just take him longer to shake it, that’s all.”

She sighs and leans back into him. He breathes in the scent of her shampoo, something tropical and summery, at odds with the wintry landscape surrounding them, and he’s overwhelmed again, by love and despair and hope, by a million other feelings he couldn’t describe if he was asked to.

The intensity, the way it ebbs and flows, whiting out his physical senses for a moment, it’s all become familiar to him. After so much deliberate numbing, there was bound to be a little pain, a little discomfort when it all came flooding back in. It feels like his shower later in the morning, stepping under the hot water after being out in the snow. It’s a thawing, too sudden to be entirely pleasant.

The next time it happens, he breathes through it. He closes his eyes and he lets everything crash down around him and he catalogs everything he feels, bad things first. It gets easier and easier.

***

Pansy pulls him into an empty compartment on the train, throwing a tight smile over her shoulder at the rest of his friends, catching him off guard. He’s always been the one to turn back, to grab hold, to stay. He’s lost everything he hasn’t sunk his teeth into, and there is no better example of that than Pansy.

He doesn’t know what to do other than stare at her from the other bench. First year, Pansy had shown up to Hogwarts pale and almost disturbingly composed for an eleven year old. Her signature burgundy manicure was just one item on a long list of what set her apart, what made her instantly seem more mature, more sophisticated, more in control.

Her nails are neon pink. She looks anxious, but underneath it she’s well-rested. She even has a bit of a tan.

“Do you remember, in fourth year,” she says in a small, quiet voice, “We were talking about the Durmstrang students? You said it was sad to look at them, so sad that you had to look away.”

Draco does remember, so clearly, like it was yesterday, “Yes.”

“That’s how I felt with you, you know? I couldn’t see you without seeing the sadness, the misery, so I just… closed my eyes. I’m so sorry, Draco, I don’t know how I’m ever going to make it up to you, but I want to try.”

“It’s not your fault,” he replies automatically, “I knew what I was doing. I pushed you away.”

Pansy shakes her head as frustrated tears gather in her eyes, “But I knew it too. I knew something else was happening, even if I didn’t have the details, and I let you do it. I let you go off on your own, and it wasn’t because it was what you wanted, or because I was hurt. It was just because I was a coward. I didn’t want to face it.”

It stops him. Whatever platitude he was going to offer her dies on his tongue, and he just stares at her in shock and pain. His hands have always been empty, reaching. His feet have always been soft and bruised. He’s never thought about why no one has reached back, why no one carried him across the rough earth. He’s never had anything but the deep, abiding feeling that the loneliness that has plagued him for as long as he can remember is somehow his fault.

“I-” he takes in a long, shuddering breath, “If it makes you feel better, I didn’t want to face it either. I didn’t face it, not really.”

She sweeps him up in her arms and he spends the rest of the journey crying without shame or guilt or worry. He cries and he knows that Pansy will hold him, that she will shield him from the world for a couple hours, and when he is done she will not look at him differently.

***

They all sit together in the Great Hall, all of Draco’s people. Except Ella, of course, who is two tables over with her massive, eclectic group of friends. Ginny fusses over his bloodshot eyes and the general air of exhaustion around him.

“We only just got back to school. How have you already had a crisis?”

Draco laughs, “It was good, alright? I made up with Pansy.”

“Oh, thank Merlin.”

“You have no idea how close she was to locking the two of you in a broom cupboard somewhere,” Dean says.

“Hey,” Pansy starts with an air of nonchalance that immediately sets Draco on edge, “Where’s boy wonder?”

Ron frowns, “Harry? Something came up at the Ministry.”

“Whatever you’re doing,” Draco mutters, “Stop it.”

“If we’re going to have a mushy, Hufflepuff friendship, you have to let me scheme. For balance.”

“I absolutely do not!”

“It’s just your love life,” she whispers.

“Oh, if that’s all.”

“It could be worse,” she says, “Would you rather me interfere with your career prospects?”

“Yes!”

“Come on, it’s not so bad. You’ve got an in now. Mutual friends.”

“What exactly do you want me to do? Ask Ron to be my wing man? Have Luna say something vague and disconcerting about the love of his life being right in front of him?”

“Hmm,” Pansy drums a pattern on the table with her fingers, “I’ll have to think on that one.”

Draco peers at her with suspicion and terror, “What does that mean?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

He’s going to, obviously, but he lets it go for now because the feast is starting and Ginny is trying a little too hard to listen in.

***

“This is a great start, Draco,” Professor Islington beams, “Really, really impressive.”

He blinks at her, frowning, “Seriously?”

The report is a mess of disjointed research and half-developed theories. The bulk of it is a sort of annotated bibliography, if an annotated bibliography was meant to be full of expletives and strings of question marks in place of intelligent commentary. He likes to think there’s some of that, too, but it’s dwarfed by the rest, a stream-of-consciousness dumping ground.

“Seriously! I know you probably wanted to have turned in something more polished, but nothing is ever polished when you’re in the middle of it. The ideas you have, though, and your grasp on the historical and theoretical… it’s all excellent. I did take the liberty of consulting with Professor Flitwick on some of the more complex Charm work, and he agrees. If he’s to be believed, you’re some sort of prodigy.”

Draco thinks of the way his hands shake every time he casts a spell, no matter how benign, “I wouldn’t take his word for it.”

“I think you’re onto something with runic enchantments and sentience. You’re not taking Ancient Runes this year, are you?”

He winces, “No, I know I’m rusty.”

She smiles, “Well, this is your project. I’m trusting you to make use of the resources available to you, and that includes asking for help if you need it, alright? I know an excellent professor of Ancient Runes who is currently on sabbatical and would be happy to consult.”

Draco thinks about it, and then he thinks about last term, how he let the project consume him.

“I think I have a better idea.”

He steals Harry’s spot at dinner that night, right by Hermione, “I have two questions for you, one of which I think I know the answer to.”

“What are they?” she asks, already laser-focused on him.

“Have you started on your capstone project? And because you’re Hermione, and you’ve definitely started, how attached are you?”

Ron tries to shush him, “We’re at dinner, mate, that’s an off-limits topic until we leave the Hall!”

Draco raises his eyebrows.

“Don’t get me started,” Hermione glares down at her plate.

“Is that a yes, and it’s not going well, or a no, I don’t know what to do and I’m freaking out about it?”

“The second, if you can believe it.”

Draco pumps his fist, “Sick. Listen, I have a proposition for you. My project is turning out to require pretty extensive Ancient Runes expertise, and I dropped that-”

“After fourth year, I know,” Hermione narrows her eyes at him, “This is the thing that essentially turned you into a phantom last year?”

“Well, yes, but-”

“I’m in,” she says firmly.

Ron groans, “I wish you’d never become friends.”

“I can keep an eye on him,” she says, “Make sure he doesn’t actually disappear into the ether.”

“Wow, thank you so much for the vote of confidence,” Draco mutters.

Dean, Luna, and Ginny sit down across from them. Pansy takes the seat next to Ginny. Out of their usual group, Harry arrives last, and after a second’s hesitation, he sits next to Draco, even though there’s enough space next to Ron for him. Sure, it would have meant that he was facing a random sixth year, but he could have done it.

Draco is hyper-aware of the sliver of bench between them, just a couple inches.

“No one has confidence in your ability to take care of yourself,” Ron says, prompting laughter from everyone else.

“I’m still alive, aren’t I? Anyways, I’ve gotten better! Haven’t I?”

Dean answers his imploring look with a shrug, “Sure, but when you’re at rock bottom, you can only really go up.”

***

On a Sunday morning in February, he plays his first full game of Quidditch in years. It’s the last phase of try-outs for the school team, all of the candidates that passed the initial rounds of skills tests playing together in a rotating cast. Draco plays with three different combinations of players; Ginny is in all of them, on his team for two and against him for one. She is a ruthless Chaser, and he wants, desperately, to play for her.

“Thank you,” she says breathlessly, pulling him into a hug on the pitch, “I know you weren’t the most enthusiastic-”

“I had fun. I’m glad I did it.”

She beams at him. They both make the team, starting line. Ella manages to slide in as a Seeker sub, and she nearly tackles him when they get the news.

“I did it, I did it!”

Draco hugs her close, “You did. I’m so proud of you, El.”

“Thank you,” she says quietly, almost shyly.

It’s such an unfamiliar tone that it takes Draco a few seconds to respond, “For what?”

“For training with me. I couldn’t have done it without you, you know.”

Draco smiles dopily at her, “Aw. You don’t need to thank me. What are big brothers for?”

She scoffs, “You forgot the annoying.”

“Sorry, what are annoying big brothers for?”

The endless slog of training, conditioning, practice once again punctuates his week, sets a rhythm to his life that he hadn’t realized was important. He feels better, more real, for it. He goes to bed every night with aching muscles, and yet he somehow has more energy than ever. That ravenous hunger that used to consume him, the need to win, never returns but there is something relieving about pushing his body to its limit.

Sometimes, he’ll feel it becoming something else, a convenient way to punish the weakest parts of himself. He’s better at catching these things before they happen now, and he pulls himself back from the edge every time. He takes an extra rest day. He piles his plate full at every meal. He even takes Dreamless Sleep when he has to, and he doesn’t feel guilty or out of control.

“Has it always been this simple?” he asks, mostly to himself, as they’re coming back from Quidditch practice one evening.

Ginny glances at him, “What?”

“I don’t know, existing?”

Ella rolls her eyes, shoving at his shoulder, “Why does everything have to be some great big tragedy with you? Sometimes things are easy.”

Except that hasn’t happened to him, not ever. Everything has been a constant battle, a fight to the death, a sacrifice and a trial by fire. Ella ruffles his hair and jogs to catch up to the rest of the team. He lingers on the path behind them, Ginny at his side, looking down at the soft moss beneath his feet.

It doesn’t hurt to love Ella or Marcie or his friends, not anymore, and if he took his shoes off right now, the earth would welcome him and cushion his step. Another piece, falling into place.

They walk on towards the castle.

***

The Gryffindor common room is nearly empty by the time he starts to pack his things up. He’d been working on the project with Hermione, but Ron had dragged her away from it nearly an hour ago and they’ve both gone up to bed. There are a few students that Draco doesn’t know scattered in various armchairs, but right around the fire, it’s just him and Harry.

Harry’s bent over a stack of parchment, a colorful array of plastic tubes lined up on the floor beside him. They’re some sort of Muggle writing utensil, and Harry seems to always have them when he’s studying. He’s pretty sure that Harry isn’t studying right now, mostly because he usually doesn’t look so upset when he studies anymore.

“What are you working on?”

Harry looks up at him from his place on the rug, green eyes tired and slightly unfocused, “Oh, it’s just Wizengamot shit. I fucking hate politics.”

Harry goes back to swiping color over the printed text. Draco thinks about slinging his bag over his shoulder and going to get some sleep, but he can’t quite make himself do it. The two of them are very similar, in some ways, and Draco knows what it looks like when someone is working themselves into a hole. He knows how hard it is to claw your way out of it, too.

“I could help,” Draco offers, cursing himself in his head.

He doesn’t need another puzzle to solve, but it’s Harry. It’s Harry, and he looks like he hasn’t slept well in weeks, and Draco knows he hasn’t been to any meals today. It’s Harry and Draco will never be able to look at him struggling with indifference.

Harry frowns, “What happened to fuck the world?”

“There’s a big difference between reading over a bit of legal code and recounting the worst years of my life for an audience. In detail.”

Harry ducks his head, ears turning red hot.

Draco sighs, “What I mean is, this is something I can do. If you want.”

He reaches out, palm facing upwards, and waits. Harry hesitates but eventually does hand the folder over to him.

“What is it?”

“As far I can tell,” Harry says wearily, “Garbage.”

Draco scans the text, noting the color-coded annotations in Harry’s atrocious handwriting. It’s impressive, despite being barely legible, and he’s right, too. A lot of the language is vague, superfluous. He’d have to consult existing law to be sure, but it doesn’t seem to do much of anything.

“And you said Robards is the one doing it?”

“Well, he’s not writing the bills, but he is letting them through and I can’t imagine this is anything but a coordinated effort.”

Draco nods, recalling the dinner with Hestia, months ago now. Robards may be an asshole, but he’s not an idiot. If he’s letting this gibberish through, and not actually coherent legislation, there’s got to be a reason outside of pure pettiness. Surely he doesn’t believe it would actually pass under close inspection.

“No, it has to be…” Draco thumbs between the last two pages again, “When are you going to the Ministry next?”

“Tomorrow. I have a free period in the afternoon, and I’m just going to skip my last class.”

Draco winces. He has a meeting with Professor Islington that evening, and a full slate of classes besides, but he’s been willing to die for this boy. Ditching is nothing.

“Yeah, alright. I’m coming with you.”

Harry bites his lip, “Are you sure? I don’t want to make you do something you’re not comfortable with…”

“Relax,” Draco smiles, “I’m the one who offered. I think I can get some information for you, and it won’t cost me anything but a little time. No big deal.”

Neither of them really believe that, but Harry doesn’t call his bluff. Draco tags along on his pre-approved Floo trip to the Ministry lobby, where he splits off from Harry and takes a lift up to the DMLE. Oliver Travers is sitting at his desk, tucked into a corner with a few other cubicles, scribbling something on a legal pad.

Draco raps his knuckles on the yellowed wooden divider, “Hey, Oliver.”

“Dray,” Oliver greets, face alight with something long-familiar to Draco, “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

He winces, “I need something.”

“Ah. So not my dazzling conversation?”

“I’m sorry I haven’t stopped by earlier, I went away for a while, after everything,” Draco says, apologetic, “And I’m sorry that the first time I’ve seen you in almost a year is to ask for a favor.”

Oliver waves a hand in the air, dismissive, “Oh, don’t worry about that. You know I’m always happy to help, and I know you’re good for it. You always are. I’m assuming you need information.”

“Yes. It’s about the Wizengamot.”

Oliver glances around at the sparsely populated room, “I can give you something, but I can’t do it here.”

“I understand. Up for a field trip?”

Oliver follows him back down to the offices that line the corridors off of the Wizengamot chambers, and he’s clearly surprised when they pass Hestia’s and take another turn. Draco doesn’t bother knocking, he simply strolls into Harry’s office. Under Oliver’s watchful, heated gaze, it’s much easier to settle back into the smooth confidence that he’d worn like armor, back when he’d frequented the Ministry during the war.

“Oliver, Harry,” Draco gestures lazily, “Harry, Oliver.”

Oliver tilts his head, “Potter.”

“Travers.”

“Right,” Draco says slowly, “So you two have met.”

Neither of them seem to be eager to elaborate, so Draco shakes his head and drops it. This is above his pay grade, not that he’s getting anything out of this at all, besides a headache.

“Anyways, I looked over some of the legislation that Robards let out of committee last week, and if he doesn’t have ulterior motives, I have serious questions about his competence. And reading comprehension.”

Oliver laughs, “I’ve missed you, Dray.”

“Dray?” Harry mouths, expression dripping with judgment.

Draco rolls his eyes, “Any insights?”

He looks at Harry, gaze narrowed, “I don’t think I have to say this, but just in case, you didn’t hear any of this from me. I don’t know what’s going on, but I have my suspicions.”

“And are these suspicions supported by any observations, or…?”

“Robards has been meeting with a lot of Wizengamot members, but it’s an… eclectic bunch, to say the least. Not natural allies.”

“He can’t be courting votes,” Harry says, “He wouldn’t risk it.”

Robards’s position in the Wizengamot is powerful, but precarious. He acts as a gatekeeper, deciding which bills to put to vote and which to let die in committee. He is not an elected member, and he is strictly forbidden from engaging in political maneuvering, so if he is trying to influence voting he could be removed from his post and be in danger of losing his job as head of the DMLE as well.

“No, definitely not,” Oliver confirms, “The people he’s meeting with… the legislation he’s letting through… it doesn’t really add up, not to that. He’s not talking to anyone persuadable. I think he’s probably being very careful about that.”

“So what do you think he’s doing? I assume you’re not going to actually give us names.”

Oliver shrugs, “I’d give them to you, if I didn’t know you’d just tell him as soon as I left.”

Draco grins, unapologetic.

“I’ve heard some other chatter- I can’t repeat it exactly- but it makes me think certain factions within the Wizengamot are trying to test you,” he nods at Harry, “There have been some whispers, I guess, that you’re just a figurehead, that there are a group of people behind you, in the shadows, and you simply take the votes they tell you to.”

Draco gets so angry that he actually starts to shake, “Are you serious?”

“I mean,” Harry shrugs, “That’s not the most incorrect thing someone has ever said about me.”

Draco snorts, “Oh, yeah, because that’s a high bar to clear. Fourth year alone-”

“I’m just saying, that is essentially what’s happening. Hestia and Hermione are a lot better at this than I am, and I do rely on their judgment most of the time.”

“Don’t pull that shit with me,” Draco says, still incensed, “I’m not some decrepit politician whose brain has been rotted by twenty years in the Wizengamot. You did not stumble into this.”

Harry blinks at him, shocked into silence for a moment. He recovers quickly, opening his mouth, presumably to argue his point.

“No. I’ve seen your fucking annotation system.”

“That’s the thing, though,” Harry gets animated, and a thrill runs down Draco’s spine, “I basically copied that from Hermione, too. I didn’t do any of this myself, not really.”

Draco is alive, on fire, “Care to translate that for me?”

Harry simply stares at him, confusion and discomfort battling across his face.

“I think you’re forgetting that I have firsthand knowledge about Hermione’s note taking,” Draco says, “She hates writing on a text, even when it’s a copy, and she has to write down every thought she has or she can’t make them line up properly. She takes a truly insane amount of notes, but she doesn’t annotate shit. And yeah, they’re color coded, but based on a completely different set of criteria than yours. So, if I had to take a guess, I’d say that at some point, maybe when you got into politics last summer, you asked her for help with a legal text, and she taught you her system, which you then adapted.”

Harry doesn’t exactly confirm that Draco is right, but he does stop arguing.

“So,” Draco turns back to Oliver, who is clearly holding back a laugh, “What exactly is the objective here?”

“You know, that’s one of my favorite things about you. You take everyone completely seriously, and you make them take themselves seriously too.”

Draco sighs, “Focus, please.”

“They’re trying to trip him up with nonsensical legislation,” Oliver says, “They’re going to grill him in session, if I had to guess.”

“The only real solution, then, is to read through it all with fine toothed comb,” Draco groans.

“Yeah.”

Draco rolls his shoulders, “Ugh, to work we go then. Thank you, Oliver, I owe you one.”

Oliver stands and walks towards the door, pausing with his hand on the doorknob and turning back to Draco with a smile, small but no less dazzling for it.

“I think I’ve decided what you owe me, actually,” Oliver says, “A date.”

Draco tilts his head, smiling up at Oliver in exasperation, “I-”

Oliver holds his hands up, “You can say no, but it’s just one night. Give me a chance to convince you I’m perfect for you?”

They stare at each other. Oliver is earnest, sincere, and he understands Draco, all of the ugliness and dark, gritty truth. He’s seen the world Draco exists in, he’s been a part of it, lived it too. He knows what it’s like to plant your feet in the shadows.

Besides, Draco’s never been on a date.

“You get two hours,” he concedes, “Next weekend.”

Oliver’s grin widens into something triumphant and heated, “I’ll make a reservation.”

He leaves then, and Draco checks the time. He could make it back to Hogwarts for his meeting with Professor Islington, if he left in the next few minutes.

“I have to get back to the castle,” he says, “How many do you have left to read through?”

Harry answers reluctantly, “Eight.”

“Give me one you’ve already done, and five that you haven’t.”

“I can’t ask you to-”

“You didn’t,” Draco replies firmly, leaving no room for debate, “I said I would help, and I’m going to.”

He takes the folders from Harry’s outstretched hand. It’s not the first time Draco has wanted to take a piece of Harry’s perpetual burden, and it’s not the first time he’s reached out to grab it, but it is the first time Harry has given it to him, willingly, knowingly. It’s important in a way Draco can’t articulate.

Before he can make a move to leave, Harry clears his throat.

“It was during the war,” Harry ducks his head, looking down at the file open in front of him.

“What?”

“For a while last year, it was just me and Hermione, and we had to do a lot of research for,” he pauses, “Anyways. I’m not really good at this shit, you know, but I wanted to help. That’s when I started taking notes like this.”

Draco can’t fight the smile blooming across his face, but he doesn’t have to let Harry see it. He turns towards the door.

“I’ll see you back at Hogwarts,” he says, and closes the door softly behind him.

***

Pansy shows up in his dorm to drag him to dinner that night. Professor Islington had probably picked up on how distracted he was, because she cut their meeting short, after talking through the seemingly contradictory accounts of the Room’s relationship to Gamp’s Law. Draco wishes he could test his theories in real time, but if he could, he’d never have started on this project in the first place.

“I thought you weren’t going to do politics,” Pansy says, eyeing the folders spread across Draco’s bed.

Pansy knows better than to think that this change of heart is motivated by friendship. Draco is not that selfless.

“Shut up,” he mutters, “You know why I’m doing this. We really don’t need to talk about it.”

Pansy folds her arms, “Draco, we’re going to talk about it. I’m not going to lecture you, you know that, but… are you sure this is a good idea? That you want to do it?”

“I want to help.”

“And you promise this isn’t a power grab?” she grins.

He laughs helplessly, “Promise. Maybe it’s not very Slytherin of me, but world domination has lost its appeal. Besides, you’d probably be a better overlord anyways.”

“You’d be terrible. So inefficient.”

After dinner, she follows him back to his room and sits with him on his worn-in cotton duvet, handing him one of the fizzy Japanese drinks she always seems to have on hand, the ones with the glass marble inside. He breaks the seal of it with a pop.

“You don’t have to help, you know,” he says.

She picks up a folder, “Yeah, yeah. Explain Harry’s serial killer code to me.”

Harry goes to the next session of the Wizengamot armed with a stack of legal code, all annotated using his meticulous system. Draco hadn’t outsourced the reading beyond Pansy. He doesn’t know why Harry didn’t ask Hermione for help, and that wasn’t something he wanted to push back on.

When Harry shows up to breakfast the next morning, the storm raging in his eyes and in the tightness around his mouth have both vanished. He looks, for the first time in weeks, well rested.

He smiles warmly, incandescently, at Draco, “Thank you.”

Draco tries to remember that smile, when he has to go through the mortifying process of telling Pansy he has a date.

“I’m sorry, when did this happen?” she asks, delighted, “Was he really that grateful for your help?”

He frowns, “What?”

“Y’know, with whatever bullshit the ghouls in the Wizengamot were pulling?”

It takes him a second to understand what she’s saying, and then he giggles nervously, “No, no, Pans. The date isn’t with Harry. And if it was, I’d be extremely offended that you thought it was payback for a favor.”

“Oh, excuse me, sorry I assumed that you’d be going on a date with the only person you’ve been interested in since you were fourteen. What are you doing going on dates with random blokes? How do you get yourself into these situations?”

Draco winces, “As payback for a favor?”

Pansy is shrieking with laughter as she jumps onto his bed, kneeing him in the ribs in the process.

“Oh, fuck, ow, Pansy!”

She helps him select an acceptable date outfit, one of the few nice sweaters he has left and a pair of jeans without holes in them, and he ties his hair up while she yells at him to leave it down.

“It’s so pretty now, why would you even grow it out if you were just going to put up all the time?”

He tightens his ponytail, “I didn’t really mean to grow it out, it just happened.”

“Well, you’re certainly not allowed to cut it now!”

“It’s my hair,” Draco says.

Pansy stares blankly at him, “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

“It’s not like I was planning on cutting it,” he mutters, “But I could, if I wanted to.”

“Uh huh.”

The date itself isn’t so bad. Oliver had made reservations at the Indian place in Hogsmeade, and he was perfectly polite. Charming, even. The conversation flows effortlessly, and Draco finds himself laughing more and more as the night progresses. They blow right through the mandated two hours and spend the rest of the evening wandering around the shops, not really buying anything. It’s really just an excuse to keep talking.

And then Oliver walks him part of the way back to the castle, all the way to the gate that is charmed to only let students and faculty pass through, and Draco remembers that it’s a date.

Oliver steps into Draco’s space, brushing a hand over the lapel of his peacoat, “So, how’d I do?”

“On?”

“Convincing you that we’re literal soulmates?”

Draco laughs breathily, “I’m sure you’re very persuasive, but…”

“Mh. Are you saying you need more information? Another date, perhaps?”

Oliver’s smile is soft, inviting. He wants Draco, and he knows what wanting Draco means, and he’s everything that a thirteen year old Draco imagined.

There is just one, glaring problem. Draco doesn’t want him.

“I don’t think another date is going to change anything,” Draco whispers, taking a small step backwards, “I had a great time, and you’ve been wonderful, I just…”

Oliver nods, ducking his head, “Right.”

He puts more distance between them, and Draco wants to broach it, wants to comfort someone that he’s come to see as a friend, but he knows that it would be counterproductive.

“I’m sorry.”

“Is this the part where you say it’s complicated?”

Draco can’t help but laugh, “It’s the part where I say it’s actually very simple. I’m in love with someone who doesn’t particularly care about me.”

“Ah. That is a situation I’m deeply familiar with,” Oliver says with a miserable twist of his mouth.

“I-”

“Oh, don’t worry, it’s become something of a pattern for me. You are not the first, and you certainly won’t be the last person to tell me that they like me, just not as much as I like them.”

“Would it be awful of me to ask that we still be friends?”

Oliver shakes his head, as if dispelling the rain cloud above it, “No. I suspect we’ll be great friends, once I’ve found someone else to fixate on.”

“Let me know how that goes.”

“I promise, you will hear all about it. As long as I can hear about whatever tragic little story you’ve written for yourself.”

It’s not an inaccurate description. They part as friends, and Draco completes the trek across the grounds and into the castle, a little after curfew but not enough for him to be genuinely worried about getting caught. He slips into the common room with no incident and sleeps easily.

***

Ginny shoves her way into place beside him at breakfast, “What’s this I hear about you going on a date?”

“Would you let me eat before you launch the interrogation?”

“Late night?” she smirks.

“I was barely even late for curfew.”

“It was longer than two hours, then,” Harry chimes in.

Draco glares at him, which he silently congratulates himself on, “Fuck off.”

“What?”

“I agreed to two hours.”

“And Harry knows this because…”

“He was there.”

“Oliver Travers,” Harry offers, “Personally, he seems a little sleazy. I suppose there’s no accounting for taste.”

Draco considers homicide, briefly, and then thinks about all the work he’s put in keeping Harry alive. It would be such a waste to kill him now.

“The guy at the DMLE?” Ron asks, leaning across the table.

“Yeah.”

“He’s not the worst looking person you could go on a date with,” Ron says, considering, “I know he didn’t go to Hogwarts, but still, very Slytherin. I can see it.”

Draco appreciates the support, however pointless it is.

“It doesn’t matter,” he groans, “There won’t be a second one.”

Ron nods like he knows something, “Bad kisser.”

“No, what the hell,” Draco buries his head in his arms, hoping that he’ll wake up in his bed and all of this will be a bizarre, terrible dream.

“If he’s a good kisser, why aren’t you going on another date with him?”

Draco elects to ignore the rush of speculation that spawns from that comment, and goes back to eating his breakfast. He’ll wait until it dies down, and then he’ll set the record straight.

There is an inevitable lull, and Draco clears his throat, “Okay, here’s what happened. Oliver helped me out with something, I agreed to go on a date with him in exchange. I knew it wasn’t going to go anywhere, and it didn’t. We had dinner and talked for a while, and then I turned him down when he asked about a second date.”

“Because he’s not the person you’re in love with,” Ginny says, like this is a fact everyone is aware of.

The entire group goes silent. Draco gapes at her.

“What? Claire literally announced it at my birthday party. This is not news.”

“Is that true? Are you in love with someone? Like, right now? Actively?” Dean asks.

Pansy bursts into wild peals of laughter, head thrown back and everything.

“I hate all of you,” Draco spits, and takes a croissant with him as he abandons the rest of his food and storms out of the Great Hall.

No one tries to come after him.

***

Ginny manages to catch him with his guard down after Quidditch practice later in the week, “Hey, can we talk?”

“I don’t know, do you want to tell another one of my darkest secrets to a captive audience?”

“Is it a secret if someone literally already told everyone in the audience?”

“Claire made one off-hand comment that no one but you seemed to take as indication of anything!”

“How was I supposed to know the rest of our friends are dumb?”

Draco snorts, “I’m not really mad, you know. I just don’t really want to talk about it.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Ginny fidgets, plays with the tips of her fingers and doesn’t speak. Draco certainly won’t be the one to break the silence.

“I just… I get it, okay?”

Draco looks at her, really looks at her, and he sees it. All the scattered puzzle pieces come together, the hints of it he saw on her birthday, everything he’s seen since…

“It’s both of them, right?”

He couldn’t imagine Ginny loving Dean or Luna in isolation, not seriously, not now.

Ginny nods.

“Well,” Draco says, considering, “I don’t want to rain on your misery parade, but we know Dean is at the very least attracted to you. Or he was at one point. And Luna is… she’s Luna. I think-”

He can’t finish the thought, because he knows how painful it is to dream, to imagine.

***

Occasionally, Hermione will indulge Draco’s sentimentality and they’ll work on their project at his old spot, across from the entrance to the Room. It’s a small comfort, to feel the gentle ebb of its magic, though it won’t appear. It means that it’s not gone, and even if they don’t manage to fix it themselves, their research may serve as the foundation for someone else to do it.

It will serve the students of Hogwarts again, eventually. Some other lonely child will stumble across it and it will become a refuge for them, just as it was for Draco.

“You call it the Room of Hidden Things?” Hermione asks absently.

“I know some people make the distinction between the static version of the Room and the Room in general, but I like the name. I think it works, given that it is hidden most of the time. Besides, that’s what I was introduced to it as.”

Hermione looks up, her focus intense and sharp, a blade pressing but not breaking the skin, “So someone showed it to you?”

“Not exactly. I found it on my own, but Dumbledore knew I was using it, and he called it the Room of Hidden Things.”

“Hm,” her face screws up into something annoyed, “I was under the impression that he didn’t know about the Room.”

“Why?”

“He never acknowledged it to any of us, even when it could have been useful.”

“Well, he always was supremely unhelpful.”

Hermione snorts, “That’s an understatement. I mean, do you know how much shit could have been avoided if he just told us point-blank that you and Snape were on our side? Or if he tried to actually prepare any of us for what he knew he was going to ask us to do?”

“I think it was probably a little different for me,” Draco says, “At least I knew what was happening most of the time, even if he refused to help.”

“Honestly the most frustrating part was not knowing what was going on with you.”

Draco laughs, incredulous, “What? Why?”

“Harry wouldn’t fucking shut up about it. He would oscillate wildly between thinking you had never done anything wrong in your life and being convinced that you were the next Dark Lord. This was like, a day to day kind of thing.”

“What the hell?”

“Yeah. I think it really freaked him out when you just suddenly stopped giving a shit about anything. In fifth year? Your grades dropped and you stopped antagonizing him and you sort of just floated through the halls, not really looking at anything. At first, he really thought you were in danger and we needed to help you, but… you know what fifth year was like. Dumbledore basically shut him out completely, and then Sirius died, and Harry stopped caring for a while too.”

“But-” Draco cuts himself off. He shouldn’t want to hear more, not when it will inevitably become fodder for anxiety and nightmares later, but he can’t help himself, “Was there something I did? That flipped the switch?”

Hermione, for all her intelligence, takes it at face value. Simple curiosity.

“No. He just got… angrier, I guess, more combative. He started going back and forth a lot, on everything. His moods changed so quickly. And then, one day, it stopped. He settled a little, and he started saying you were being coerced. That’s basically how it stayed until the war was over and we found out that you were a spy the whole time.”

Draco is relatively sure what day it was that changed things. He doesn’t want to think about it. He directs the conversation back to the project, back to the Room and the magic that binds it together.

“Maybe we’re overthinking this,” Draco says, “We can’t test the boundaries of the Room because we can’t get inside, but we can do some diagnostic spells from the outside.”

“If it’s still there.”

“It is,” Draco frowns, “Can’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“I don’t know, there’s like a hum? A frequency? A tone? Like a television that’s turned on but not playing anything.”

Hermione blinks, “Okay, we’re going to move past the fact that you’re familiar enough with TVs to use that comparison, because the implications of what you’re saying are… Draco, is it a feeling or a sound?”

“Feeling, but they’re not that different, you know? It’s all vibration.”

“Yeah, yeah, got it. Have you felt it before?”

Draco narrows his eyes at her, “Um, is that a trick question?”

“It’s really, really not. Does all magic have a vibration to it?”

“Yes?”

“Holy shit,” Hermione breathes, “That’s not, Draco, that’s not something everyone can feel, not even most people. It’s very rare to be able to sense magic that way, intuitively.”

“Alright?”

“I have to… I need to think about this,” Hermione mutters, already stuffing loose sheets of parchment into her book bag, “I’ll see you at dinner.”

***

The last of the snow melts away and dead things start to grow again. Draco’s life becomes full to bursting, some of it good and some of it bad, but none of it empty. He and Harry orbit around the same people, and they never quite touch. It’s manageable. In a quiet corner of his mind, there is something that wants more. It’s like a living thing, insatiable, and Draco keeps it on a leash. He restrains himself the same way that Harry does. He restrains himself in a way that is visible.

Dean sometimes still sends him concerned glances over dinner. Luna leaves little glass bottles full of things that Draco doesn’t recognize in his pockets. When questioned, she says they’re talismans for happiness or luck or on one occasion, a healthy sex life.

In some ways, he feels the least lonely he’s ever been. He feels less like a bruised flower petal, just waiting to be crushed beneath someone’s boot. He’ll be sitting at dinner, surrounded by his friends, and his mind won’t turn to war or death or venom at all.

In other ways, the chasm widens every day. The sadness that has been his constant companion his entire life might be slipping away, but it still feels like a loss, like a thing he needs to grieve. He’ll catch a glimpse of Harry, still too tentative, reserved, and it’ll pull him right out of whatever conversation he’s in. He feels like he’s in some alternate reality, a world apart from the rest of their friends, none of whom seem to notice how quiet Harry has gone.

He wonders if this is normal, to the rest of them, and it’s just the absence of hostility that Draco is seeing. Maybe this is how Harry has always been, when he doesn’t hate you.

But then Draco remembers that laugh, the rest of fourth year, Harry fighting and, on occasion, fighting back. He remembers the first in a collection of things he loved about Harry, the one he kept close to his chest, clutched in shaking hands; the obvious fear in Harry’s eyes, the way it didn’t change him at all.

They’re all walking back from another Hogsmeade trip, in the middle of March, and Draco keeps peeking over at Harry, too concerned to be careful.

“Hey,” Ginny says, bumping into his purposefully, “What’s been up with you lately?”

Draco shrugs. He’s still distracted, trying to figure out if Harry is tired or upset at something specific, something solvable, something Draco could fix for him.

“Is it because of the thing?”

“The thing?” he repeats, amused.

“The big embarrassing thing we happen to have in common?”

Draco loops their arms together and tugs her properly into his side. He supposes it is. As always, he’s let himself get swept up in the tide of Harry’s need and he’s forgotten that fighting the current is something he can do, should do. Logically, he knows it’s not entirely healthy to be so consumed by another person, especially one who will never reciprocate, but he doesn’t really know how to do anything else. He’s trying, and failing more often than not.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I know you said that you didn’t want to talk about it, but I’m here if you ever change your mind, you know that, right?”

“Of course,” Draco says emphatically, “Gin, you’re the best friend I think I’ve ever had. It’s not because I don’t think you’ll listen.”

She brightens, “Can I tell Pansy you said that?”

“Fuck, no, she’d actually murder me in my sleep. But, I don’t know, Pansy’s my oldest friend and there was a time when we were more similar, it’s just… you and me, we’re the same person. It was kind of scary how well I knew you without knowing you at all.”

“It was the same for me,” Ginny chokes out past building tears.

“Please don’t cry, then I’ll start crying.”

��Okay, okay,” she takes a few deep breaths, “Just to be clear, this isn’t me asking you to talk about it, but why don’t you want to?”

“It’s quite tragic. Doomed. I think I just don’t want it to take up so much space in my life anymore.”

Ginny tries, successfully, to trip him. He doesn’t fall, but he does stumble over his own feet, cursing.

“Fuck, you know I got clumsy, that’s not fair.”

Ginny doesn’t laugh at him, which is the first sign that she’s a little annoyed.

“Gin?”

“You’re being stupid, aren’t you?” she hisses, “Self-sabotaging.”

“Genuinely, no. I’m actually trying to do the opposite. Promise. I’m not just saying that it’s doomed because I don’t want to be happy. It’s… really, really not going to work out for me, seriously, and I let it be my whole world for a long time anyways. I’m trying to move on from something that’s hurt me, a lot, or at least get rid of the most painful parts.”

Ginny doesn’t look entirely satisfied with his response, but she doesn’t push for more, and the rest of their friends go along pretending that they didn’t hear any of the conversation.

***

Hermione drags him back to the seventh floor more and more frequently so she can pester him with questions about how the Room feels. They do some diagnostic spells, but with little luck. Hermione tells him, cagily, that she has reason to believe the Room is Unplottable, which seems like overkill to Draco, as Hogwarts itself is Unplottable. There’s a reason why students get hopelessly lost within it, and it’s not just the sheer size or the staircases. It is impossible to map the inner workings of the castle. In any case, the complex tangle of shielding and cloaking enchantments that go into making it Unplottable and invisible also make it impervious to most examination they’ve tried.

They can’t even confirm Draco’s pet theory, that the magic of the Room is anchored with runic enchantments engraved deep in the stone, the entire reason that he now has a research partner in Hermione.

He doesn’t need it, not quite in the same way he did when he first took on the project, but it’s still a place he felt safe, another thing he loved that has been ravaged by war. Maybe he can’t fix his relationship with his mother, or bleed the darkness from the Manor, or make Harry’s grief and guilt and pain disappear, but he knows this is something that can be repaired. He wants to be the one to do it.

***

The weather continues to get warmer, and Quidditch starts to take up more and more of his time. They’re the underdogs of the season, brand new to the league and fresh out of a war, but they fight through April and May, and they win more than they lose. As they approach the end of term, they’re ranked fourth, with a real shot at the final match.

Draco is proud of himself, but he’s prouder of Ella, whose mind is outpacing her body- for now. She may not be as fast on a broom as Draco quite yet, but she spends hours pouring over plays with Ginny and she’s better than anyone at corralling the players, bringing different styles and personalities together into one cohesive whole. She’s going to make an excellent Seeker, and an even better Captain one day.

The last match before graduation is grueling. It’s the only game they’ve played at home the entire season, and Castelobruxo gets an astronomical lead very quickly. They spend most of the game catching up, and Draco spends it distracting the other Seeker and waiting for the lead to narrow enough that catching the Snitch would actually win them the game.

They win by ten points, in the end. He hits the ground with a little too much momentum and practically rolls off his broom, snitch in hand.

Ginny tackles him into a sweaty hug, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

Draco laughs, “You were brilliant, Gin.”

“I think this is the happiest I’ve been in a long time.”

He catches sight of Luna and Dean behind them, hand in hand, wearing matching grins. He takes hold of Ginny’s shoulders, turns her around, and shoves her into their arms.

People are flooding the pitch, forcing Draco to fight through the crowd to get to Ella. She’s standing on the sidelines, smiling wide and beautiful. She does her best to deprive him of his hearing.

“You were so good! I can’t believe we made it to the finals!”

He tries to get some distance between his ear and her mouth, “Just think, next year that’ll be you.”

That seems to incapacitate her. She clings tightly to his hand as they start to look for Marcie. He isn’t afraid of losing her in the crowd. For a moment, he isn’t afraid of anything. The three of them, him and Ella and Marcie, collide and begin to jump around excitedly in a tangle of limbs. They’re laughing. Ella is crying a little.

He doesn’t know how to describe it. There’s a part of him that is deeply, deeply sad. He thinks maybe there always will be. It’s distant, though. There is so much more happiness in this moment, in most moments now, and it overwhelms the sadness. It drowns it out.

He heads off to shower and change, and then he meets them back at the path to Hogsmeade. Harry is there when he returns, chatting with Ella about how he thinks the match went. Marcie is standing beside them, looking bored. Her face lights up when she sees Draco.

“I have so much to tell you,” she’s smiling, but she says it very seriously.

He gestures for her to go ahead, and the four of them begin to make the trek to Hogsmeade. She regales him with the latest drama from her school. Lauren and the boy she likes- no, not Rowan’s ex-boyfriend, that was over weeks ago- went to the movies and he held her hand in the popcorn bucket.

Draco wrinkles his nose, “Wasn’t it greasy? That doesn’t seem very pleasant.”

“She said it was the best thing that has ever happened to her.”

He shrugs. Who is he to judge?

“And Becca got into a fight, like a real one, with punching and everything.”

“Becca? Sweet, sensitive Becca?”

Marcie nods furiously, “It was so cool. Not that hitting someone is cool, but it was a boy so.”

“Oh, that’s fine then.”

Andromeda and Teddy are waiting for them outside the restaurant, because Teddy is exercising his full lung capacity by shrieking very loudly. She hands him off to Draco as soon as they approach. He doesn’t mind a little crying.

He just bounces Teddy lightly on his hip, cooing in his ear, “It’s alright. It’s okay. You’re fine, aren’t you? Just a little upset. That’s okay.”

“You don’t mind, do you?” Andromeda asks, after she’s already passed him a burping towel and his teething beads.

Draco smiles at her, “Of course not. You can go in, if you want. If he doesn’t calm down in ten or fifteen minutes, we can take turns or something.”

She sighs in relief and kisses him on the cheek, “Thank you. My energy is not what it used to be. Are you sure you don’t mind?”

“I’m sure.”

Draco walks the length of the little alleyway beside the restaurant and talks softly to Teddy. He’s calmer after a few minutes, but everytime Draco stops walking or bouncing him, he starts crying again, so Marcie comes to grab his order and they get his food to-go. Harry offers to switch off with him, but Draco politely refuses.

“It’s alright,” he says, “I’m happy to take this shift.”

Harry doesn’t protest, but he does linger outside the restaurant for a moment too long, looking back at Draco with something that isn’t quite a smile.

Draco spends the evening outside with Teddy in the balmy night air, looking up at the stars and telling Teddy everything he can remember about Remus Lupin. He thinks about the summer with Marcie and the fall with Ella, how desperately he wanted to erase all of the bad things they’d seen, how futile the wanting is. There are some things that love just cannot fix.

But he can do this. He can listen to Marcie’s gossip and read the books she tells him about in her letters, he can do core workouts with Ella that border on insane and let her make fun of him, he can give them a family. He’s done his part to make the world a little kinder, a little more inhabitable for Ella and Marcie. He’s made sure that Teddy will not have to see the same horrors they did, the ones Draco did.

He just has to care. The rest of it, he doesn’t have to do alone.

***

Ginny flings herself onto the pitch next to him, panting.

“Fuck, that was the worst two hours of my life,” Draco gasps, “You’re actually sadistic, oh my God.”

“Baby.”

She’s been ramping up their practices in preparation for the final match of the season, which they’ll play against Durmstrang just after the end of term. If he’s honest, Draco doesn’t completely understand the fervor. It’s not like they really have a shot at winning, however miraculous their season has been so far.

“Stretch, shower, eat,” Ginny chants under her breath like a mantra, “Stretch, shower, eat.”

Still, it’s several minutes before they move at all. Draco goes through the motions of stretching his worn muscles, starting at the neck and working his way down his body, until he’s warm and malleable, until he feels as if he could be pulled apart like taffy. The hot shower almost puts him to sleep, and dinner afterwards actually does. He and Ginny doze off, ridiculously early, on the rug in the Gryffindor common room.

Draco has no dreams.

Ron wakes him a couple of hours later with an apologetic smile, “Things are about to get loud in here, if you want to go sleep in your dorm.”

He peers around the room, which is obviously being set up for an improvised party of some kind. A couple sixth years are pushing all of the furniture against the walls, and Neville is levitating a case of Firewhisky down the stairs and into the common room.

He blinks the sleep from his eyes, and finds that he’s no longer tired. Or, rather, that he’s reached a level of exhaustion that’s tipped over into restlessness. He could go back the dungeons, but chances are, he’ll have a hard time falling back asleep.

“No, I’m awake.”

“Do you want to stay then? It’s someone’s birthday, I think. Not too sure who.”

“Is that alright? If I stay?”

Ron is unimpressed, “Obviously. No one cares who’s here.”

It’s true, really. No one questions his presence, and once Ginny wakes up, he doesn’t feel out of place at all. She slings an arm around his shoulders, and they pass the next few hours getting steadily drunk and talking about absolutely nothing. He drinks away the ache in his muscles, and Ginny drinks away the thin veneer of sadness that she usually carries around.

“We’re never going to be together like this again, are we?” Ginny whispers in the dark, “After term ends.”

She’s already had offers from half of the professional teams in the United Kingdom, and though she hasn’t signed a contract yet, Draco knows she’s set on the Hollyhead Harpies. She’s just waiting on the final details, including what date she’ll have to report to training.

“No.”

“Sometimes I wish we could live in last summer forever, even though it was shit.”

Draco smiles, “Me too.”

But he knows that Ginny’s right. It’ll never be like that again, not really. He still has no idea what he’s going to do after Hogwarts, but he has this inescapable feeling that going back to Crawley Down would be like trying to fall back asleep and continue a dream that’s already over.

“I’m going to miss you,” Ginny sighs into his shoulder.

Eventually, he has to make the mad dash to the dungeons without getting caught. Curfew has become increasingly relaxed, but he’d still get in a lot of trouble for wandering around the castle in the middle of the night while obviously intoxicated. The riskiest stretch is the stairs. There’s nowhere to hide when you’re stuck on a moving staircase.

It’s on the stairs that he runs into Harry, who is presumably going up to the common room. Harry peers at him in the low light, takes a sniff, and recoils a bit.

“Draco,” he says, scandalized, “Are you drunk?”

“No,” Draco answers honestly. He’s a little tipsy, but definitely not drunk.

Harry sighs, “Why don’t I believe you?”

“Probably because I smell awful. That’s not my fault, though. Ginny spilled her firewhisky on me.”

Draco leans back against the railing of the stairs and waits for it to stop moving. It’s making him a little queasy. He’s always gotten motion sickness easily, unless he’s on a broom. He threw up on the train to Hogwarts his first year.

The stairs click into place, and Draco starts to descend. Harry follows him.

“Are you going to go back to following me around everywhere?”

He’s thinking about what Hermione said, about Harry changing his mind every day, and he’s wondering if Harry is still unsure. Not about whether or not Draco is a Death Eater, just… Hermione hadn’t understood him until recently. Maybe Harry doesn’t really know what to make of him either.

Harry reaches out to catch his elbow, “No. I’m just making sure you get back to your common room alright.”

“Oh. That’s very nice of you. You’re one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, you know.”

“I don’t know about that,” Harry says softly.

“You are. Even though you’re sad right now.”

Harry shifts to take more of Draco’s weight. The line of his body is warm and solid against Draco’s side, “I’m not sad.”

“It won’t last forever, promise. I thought I’d never be happy again but I am. It happens all the time.”

Harry doesn’t really respond, and the conversation is seemingly over. Draco can’t imagine ever getting sick of this. He knows it doesn’t mean anything- Harry is selfless, good, in a way that Draco is not- but it’s still nice. It feels like eating a warm dinner, sinking into a hot bath. His limbs are heavy, in a good way, and he knows that Harry has him. He’s not going to fall.

Harry doesn’t keep his word about taking Draco to the common room. Instead, he takes Draco all the way to his dorm and deposits him on his bed. Draco remembers the lightning bolt carved into the frame too late, but Harry doesn’t notice it. He’s too focused on taking Draco’s shoes off and Conjuring a glass. He casts an Augmenti, makes Draco drink it, then casts it again.

“That’s for the morning, alright?”

Draco nods. He doesn’t think he could speak, even if he knew what to say.

“Goodnight, Draco.”

***

Draco sits by the lake, staring out at the endless expanse of water. It’s not really endless, and he knows it, but his vision is no longer good enough to see the other side so he imagines that the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

Only him, and the rocky beach, and the water.

Distantly, he can hear footsteps behind him. Harry’s distinctive scent, sandalwood and cloves and vanilla, washes over him as Harry lowers himself to the ground beside Draco.

“I think I owe you an apology,” he says, and the words are so startling, so incomprehensible, that Draco jerks violently.

His heart is already racing, mind telling him this is a trap, “Pardon?”

Harry sighs and drifts back, laying down and looking up at the sky, “I didn’t know.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Potter.”

“I haven’t brought it up, because Hermione said you might not want an apology and I felt like I owed you that much, but Draco…” he sits up again. Draco won’t look at him, but he can sense Harry’s restless movement, “I can’t keep not talking about it.”

“Hermione was right.”

He’s going to be sick. He doesn’t want Harry to say sorry. He can’t actually think of anything worse. It’s one thing to know that he didn’t deserve the treatment, it’s another to have someone actually say it. To have Harry say it.

“For sixth year, at least-”

“Does it matter?”

He looks at Draco with a strange expression, somewhere between confused and frustrated, “Of course it does. I almost killed you.”

Draco shrugs, “Like you said, you didn’t know I wasn’t really a Death Eater.”

“Even if you weren’t just acting on Dumbledore’s orders, and you really were a Death Eater, I’d still regret doing it. And what I meant was, I didn’t know what the spell did, when I used it.”

“I’m not upset about it,” Draco says, “If that’s any consolation.”

“It’s not.”

There’s a long silence, and then Harry manages to find something worse to say.

“I saw them. The scars I left. Last night, when I took you back to your dorm, your shirt rode up. I saw them.”

“Please. You don’t need to do this.”

“Look at me?”

Draco does, because he can’t say no to Harry. Harry’s eyes are so, so green. Right now, they’re sad and tired and a little desperate. He has the sudden thought that maybe Harry needs to do this, the same way Draco needed to sweat out the pain of last summer.

“I’m sorry,” Harry says, and then waits for a while before he says anything else, “I wouldn’t have used it if I knew what it did. I already had serious doubts about how much you wanted to be doing what I thought you were doing, and when I found out that you had been on our side all along… it made perfect sense to me. I know that you were never the person I thought you were in the first place, and you certainly weren’t then.”

He takes a breath and breaks eye contact. Draco can feel hot tears building behind his eyes and he tries to hold them off, but he can’t.

“I know that crucio wouldn’t have hit. I know you didn’t mean it.”

Draco cries. He cries for a long time, and when he’s done, Harry is still there, still sitting beside him on the lake shore. He feels raw in the worst way. He doesn’t understand why Harry couldn’t have just left him alone, and for the very first time, he thinks he hates him. He hates Harry Potter.

So he tells him, “I hate you.”

“Would it be easier, if you did?” Harry asks, voice soft.

Draco laughs, and it’s wet and grating, but it’s genuine, “No, I don’t think it would. Couldn’t you have just listened to Hermione?”

“Eh, I think we’re at the point where there’s not much left we can do to hurt each other.”

If only that were true. Draco peeks over at Harry, and he’s surprised to find that Harry is looking at him too, with warmth and understanding and kindness. There’s always been something contradictory about Harry’s eyes, a steadiness at odds with how wild his body and his magic are. It feels dangerous, like a beast on a chain. His wand is out, just resting in his loose grip. Draco realizes, with a start, that it’s his. It’s the wand that Draco got at Ollivander’s when he was eleven, the wand that he handed to Harry during the final battle, the wand that killed Voldemort.

He shivers.

“I don’t know why I haven’t given it to you,” Harry says, rolling the wand between his hands, “It’s been eating at me, a little.”

And then he stills, face conflicted, and slowly extends it towards Draco.

Draco shakes his head, horrified, “I don’t want it.”

“But-”

“No.”

Harry laughs, but it’s an awful, painful thing, “I don’t understand.”

Draco can’t explain himself. He likes that the last thing he did with it, with the wand that had seen so much death and darkness, was hand it over. He likes that no matter what else happens, no matter where life takes them, there will always be a part of Draco there in the knobby wood, forever waiting to be called upon, ready to serve.

Though it’s not enough, not enough to quell the insistent demand for more, not enough to slake his thirst, it’s a small comfort.

“I don’t understand why I-” Harry pulls the words from inside himself, and it doesn’t sound easy, “I think it would have killed me, maybe, to give it back. I can’t… I haven’t used another wand, even though I feel guilty every time I pick it up, thinking of you without your wand. Mine broke, while we were on the run, and it was like losing a part of myself, and I knew I was making you feel that way, but I just couldn’t let it go.”

Draco lowers his head until it’s almost between his knees, “I gave it to you. You should keep it. I’m not sure if it would even respond to me now, and I had to get a new one before last term anyways.”

He could obsess over what it means. He could spend every waking moment thinking about Harry reaching for the wand when he needs something, about it becoming a part of him.

But he sees the waves coming, and he lets them crash over him, and then he lets them wash back out to sea. The unpredictable torrents of emotion haven’t stopped, but they don’t bowl him over anymore. He knows how to keep his footing. He knows how to keep himself from drowning.

There will always be a line that connects them, that tugs at Draco’s heart, but he’s stronger than the pull of it.

[project1939]

200 Films of 1952

Film number 199: The Stooge

Release date: Dec 31st, 1952 

Studio: Paramount 

Genre: comedy 

Director: Norman Taurog 

Producer: Hal B. Wallis 

Actors: Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Polly Bergen, Marion Marshall 

Plot Summary: Singer/comedian Bill struggles as a solo vaudevillian, but when his manager suggests adding a stooge named Ted to his act, they become a big hit. Ted is happy just to be a part of it all, but Bill’s growing ego refuses to give Ted any billing in the act. Bill’s wife and manager become increasingly horrified at his behavior. 

My Rating (out of five stars): ***¼  

The last Martin and Lewis film I saw was Sailor Beware, 189 films ago! (It was number 10 on my list.) I thought that was all I could take, given the fact that Jerry Lewis is an acquired taste for me. But I decided to watch one more film, because Martin and Lewis were simply everywhere in 1952. They were two of the biggest stars in the country- they had a television show, a radio show, and they released three films in just that year alone! Thankfully I liked The Stooge better than Sailor Beware- it portrayed the camaraderie and bond between the two more effectively and movingly. It made me understand why they were so famous and beloved. (some spoilers)

The Good: 

The chemistry and affection between the two was palpable in this. It was hard not to fall in love with them as a team. Dean Martin isn’t your typical cold and annoyed “straight man” in the act. He shows such warmth toward Lewis, it makes me a little verklempt!  

Dean Martin’s singing.

Both men are very natural on screen. They’re good actors with a kind of unaffected ease- to use the old phrase, “the camera loves them.” 

The film especially highlighted why each of them just wasn’t as good alone as they were when they were together. Even the scenes they were in separately lacked the same sparkle. That was exactly the point of the movie, which made the fact that they later split up even sadder. 

The final performance scene was nearly perfect. When Lewis snuggles into Martin, my heart melted, I’m not gonna lie. 

This film had more of an actual plot than Sailor Beware- it wasn’t just a string of gags loosely tied together.  

Aunt Bee! Frances Bavier played Lewis’ mom in this, eight years before her stint on The Andy Griffith Show. 

I wanna ride on an old train! Travel scenes in old movies where characters are in compartments like mini hotel rooms always seems so cool to me. Plus, I love the sound of trains going over the tracks. 

The Bad: 

Some of the schtick Lewis did was pretty predictable. The scenes that were basically just set ups for his gags were probably my least favorite part of the film. 

The first part was also too heavily weighted with these scenes. It felt like it got more balanced as things progressed. 

Bill’s character was not fleshed out enough. It was hard to understand both him and his choices, and the film spent virtually no time explaining or examining it. 

The first drunk scene with Bill just came out of nowhere. I don’t remember it ever even being mentioned that he liked to drink.  

Bill’s wife Mary got a bit annoying after a while- purely because of the way her character was written, not because of the actress. I liked Polly Bergen, but her character basically had a case of Classical Hollywood Good Wife Syndrome. It was a somewhat lighter case, though, because she was going to leave Bill before his change of heart- she wasn’t just a “suffering but loyal” wife. 

It maybe got a bit too maudlin at the very end. 

[et-cant-phone-home-no-signal]

TLOU Part 1 PC - Bill's Town

some of my favourite captures in the bill's town chapter!! lotta ellie content because i think she's fucking neat <3 bill has a surprisingly nice face and i want to post more of him and Joel is a maudlin man

We bless thee for thy peace, O God! Before Jehovah's Awful Throne. Like Jesus. Low in the grave He lay.

[teecupangel]

What if Bill sold Desmond's soul to a demon in exchange for making Desmond a better assassin when he was still a kid but he didn't clarify that Desmond would still stay with him so the demon took Desmond and just acts like he's his son or grandson and absolutely spoils Desmond and even makes him go to school to have a normal childhood (this is an AC x Welcome to demon school! Iruma-kun au)

I’m gonna be honest with you, nonny, I haven’t caught up with Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-Kun. I stopped watching it after Billy Kametz died (˃̣̣̥﹏˂̣̣̥). I know Stephen Fu would make a good Azz but, yeah, still haven’t gotten back to it so, for this ask, I will focus on the first few episodes of the anime but we’ll add a bit of AC spin to it.

So, we’ll set this up at the same age Iruma was when his soul was sold off and that means Desmond would be 14 years old, around the age when he had begun to not believe in the whole Templar thing. Bill probably assumed that the demon was going by the more commonly believed ‘rule’ where the soul written in a contract made with the devil will only be taken after death (ex: Faustus). Unfortunately for him, Sullivan used that loophole to take Desmond to the underworld as soon as Bill signs the contract.

Sullivan doesn’t tell this to Desmond though, nope. He didn’t necessarily lie. He just didn’t tell Desmond what Bill’s actual wish was. As far as Desmond knew, Bill sold his soul to a demon for an unknown wish and he actually believes that Bill thinks that he’s a lost cause and wished for a better soldier… a child that wouldn’t disappoint him.

Sullivan is, of course, kind and a bit embarrassing grandfatherly and Desmond doesn’t necessarily trust him but he knows he has no other choice but to be his grandson. He does warm up him (and Opera) soon enough because they’ve been kind to him and he doesn’t have to do any training at all.

In this idea, Sullivan and Opera gave him a few days to get his bearing first, especially since he was in a bit of a maudlin mood. Desmond does get used to his life as a member of Sullivan’s household and the strange food they serve. It helps that Desmond wasn’t a picky eater and, really, he was getting bored with having nothing to do.

So when Sullivan tells him that he got Desmond enrolled in a great demon school, Desmond just agreed to it because… well… he has nothing else to do anyway.

And… maybe, just maybe… he was interested in experiencing something that he had only heard about. ‘School’.

Unorganized Notes

Desmond’s first day in school pretty much happened the way it did for Iruma. Sullivan still makes him take over Azz in the introductory speech for first years and Desmond trusts Sullivan enough to recite the ‘no tripping’ spell. Once he knows what it does, Desmond actually recites it each day because it’s a useful spell and, as long as Desmond doesn’t mess up the pronunciation, he won’t die, right?

Desmond also dodges all of Azz’s fireball when Azz duels him and his inhuman dodging capabilities are because of his training as well as his latent Eagle Senses helping him ‘predict’ his opponents’ next moves which he only chalks up to gut feeling because he doesn’t know about Eagle Vision/Senses which has been heighten because this is what Bill had sold Desmond's soul for afterall. He does defeat Azz and earn Azz’s loyalty, much to his confusion.

Desmond knows how to say no and, really, he doesn’t mind saying no to requests but he still agrees to play with Clara because… well… he doesn’t remember when he last played games with someone. He knew he played with the other kids before back on the Farm but it had been so long ago, his memories had been covered by the neverending training he and the other kids were subjected to.

He knows that he’d die if anyone learns he was human and he had no qualms about lying to everyone. Honestly, he’d been trained to lie since he was a child and it was hard for him to blatantly lie but he was okay with being vague or saying misleading things instead so… he’d probably be okay.

Becoming part of the misfit class is still Sullivan’s idea and it’s more of “I think you’d be more relaxed in that class since they’ll take the spotlight from you” and Desmond agrees to it because… well, he sees no reason to disagree with Sullivan’s idea and, also, he was raised to be obedient to his superiors.

He still gets a lot of spotlight from the school newspaper though but Desmond just ignored that. 'As long as he doesn’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist' is his current motto with his growing popularity in school.

Back in the human world, Bill is trying to find a way to get Desmond back and he believes the POEs left behind those who came before us hold the key to bringing Desmond back.

Familiar and Ring:

So I’m putting the familiar and the ring in a different set of notes because we can go for the og route of Desmond unintentionally making Naberius his familiar and have him have the ring of gluttony BUT how about…

So there’s this setup in Familiar of Zero fanfics where Louise summons a different fictional character instead of Saito so we can use that setup during Desmond’s familiar summoning. Sure, he used Naberius’ summoning paper but he needed to summon his familiar using his blood.

Normally, human blood would simply heal demons but Desmond’s blood is different. He has higher than normal Isu genes in his blood.

Also, maybe Desmond doesn’t remember if there was a specific symbol he should have drawn in the parchment so he just went with the Assassin insignia (out of habit or maybe he’s actually getting homesicked?). Either way, the summoning goes awry.

Now, we can go for our ancestor of choice (or really, any AC character you want) for this one, someone that is wholly strange to everyone because only high-ranking demons know that humans exist. And Desmond’s familiar isn’t human, not really. No. According to the records, he had summoned a ghost of some kind.

Or an alternate idea: instead of choosing an ancestor, Desmond could summon a being shrouded in light that slipped into his shadows. Whenever he’s in danger or, really, whenever they feel like it, ghostly apparitions of three men would come to his aid or just talk to him. They don’t say what they are but they do name themselves as Altaïr, Ezio, and Ratonhnhaké:ton. And they act less like familiars and more like Desmond’s guardians and friends. (Also, they have a soft spot for Azz and Clara). His familiar is classified as ‘UNKNOWN’ and no matter what happens, the being shrouded in light never makes an appearance again.

Now, the ring. The ring is meant to be able to store energy that can make it possible for even a human to cast spells and, yeah, sure, we can keep that setup. But instead of a ring of Gluttony… it’s the prototype of the Ring of Eden.

Now, a normal Ring of Eden could only be used as some kind of shield but the prototype had multiple functions, including the absorption of energy that can later be used by the user. Desmond doesn’t know it but the reason why the mass-produced Rings of Eden do not have this function is because the prototype ring couldn’t absorb enough energy to be useable on the long run…

In the non-demon world.

No one knows where the Ring of Eden (known as the Ring of Gluttony) came from BUT it’s rumored first appearance is in the hand of King Solomon, the human who managed to form contracts with multiple demons (a legend).

In the demon world, with Sullivan’s energy as its main power source, the Ring of Eden can be used by Desmond to do magic but it was an automatic shield that activates every time Desmond is in danger or needs to be protected. The demons think it’s cool unknown magic.

The fact that Sullivan can ‘seal’ the Ring of Gluttony makes the three apparitions be wary of him since that ring is not of demon origin but Desmond doesn’t really share their concern since Sullivan seems to be looking out for him anyway.

[bill-needle]

Bill I know you’ve spoken before about how you’re not really close with your colleagues and how Sammy Maudlin is your complete opposite. Well, then I have to ask what made you want to be apart of ‘Maudlin’s Eleven’?

At first, I didn't. Maudlin forced my hand when he snagged Honey to play the burlesque dancer. I told him he wasn't gettin' her unless I played the character that was her husband. He said that was fine. So that was that.

Y'know, I don't get a lot of opportunities in my work to feel "cool". Usually I just get upset, which is basically the most uncool thing you can do. But being on that set, with that hair and that outfit... I felt like a different man. Not a better man, necessarily, but a man that I ended up happy to be for the length of filming. It was nice being able to show off a bit of my "song stylings" too.

All in all, I suppose I'm glad to have had the experience - it was certainly something new for me - but I'm not exactly keen on repeating it. Let's keep this a one-time thing, I think.

[thislovintime]

Performing in Houston on October 27, 1979; photo via RockinHouston dot com.

“The Great American Food and Beverage Company is an institution in [Santa Monica, Calif.]. […] A waiter in his ‘30s, older than the others, made his way to the podium, banjo in hand. He seemed strangely familiar in an unusual outfit whose suspenders gave him a whimsical air. He was very thin, with an angular, almost bony face and straight, mid-ear length dirty blond hair that was parted in the middle. That was all fine. But he also had a mustache and bags under his eyes that somehow didn’t seem quite right. […] Then came the memory of who he was. His name was Peter Tork, and more than a decade ago he was one of the four Monkees […]. And now Tork was a singing waiter. I assumed that few would recognize him — and that he’d probably rather not be recognized. So I decided to respect his privacy. But then, on the way out, he overheard me mention to someone that I was a writer visiting California to do some celebrity interviews, and he said to me, just a trace of bitterness in his voice, ‘Hey, how’d you like to do a story on a former great?’ Peter Tork now lives with his wife and two small children in Venice, Calif., […]. His home is a ramshackle duplex with badly chipped white paint on the outside and a gate that’s locked by a clothes hanger. Inside, the apartment has second-hand furniture with wobbly legs and sports bare wood floors of the kind it’s not fashionable to leave uncovered. An old sheepdog with a very doggy smell lies under an even older piano. In 1965, Peter Tork was washing dishes in Huntingon Beach, Calif., for $50 a week when he was recommend for the Monkees by a musician friend named Stephen Stills […|. ‘In those days we were both folksingers, and we were known as the two cats who looked alike,’ Tork said. ‘He turned me on to the situation.’ […] Today Peter Tork is 36. In his three years as a Monkee, he guesses he made a million dollars. Except for a trust he can’t touch until 1985, it’s all gone. ‘It just poured through,’ he recalled, without being at all maudlin. ‘It was like a tidal wave after a drought. The amount was so grotesque that I didn’t know what to do with it. I spent hundred-dollar bills like quarters.’ He calls himself a socialist now and says he’d be ‘philosophically and religiously prone to give that kind of money away anyway. But I dribbled it away.’ And that bothers him. ‘
I lived in Studio City in a big house that cost too much. I didn’t know how good I had it. I had no basis of comparison. I never got competent professional advice (from his producers, on how to invest his money). I’m bitter about that. They didn’t know how to handle a flash rather than someone who’d clawed his way to the top. Now I’ve been on the fringes. Now I know what it’s like to claw.’ Among other things, the fringes found him busted for alleged dope dealing. ‘It was ‘72. I was caught coming across the border from Mexico with some hash in my pocket,’ he said. ‘For a while, they thought they’d get me for a big smuggling rap. I ended up spending just three-and-a-half months in custody. I recommend it to all my good friends.’ After that experience, he worked for three years as a teacher. Then the school closed in the midst of a strange embezzlement scandal. So Tork decided to take another stab at show business. He has reactivated some old contacts and recently tried out at Paramount for comedy spots on ‘Happy Days,’ ‘Laverne and Shirley’ and ‘Mork and Mindy.’ ‘
I’m trying comedy because I know I’m glib, and I know I’m good at it,’ he said. ‘And I’m taking acting lessons. I’ll be glib one day in drama too. ‘Maybe first I can get a walk-on, then some solid comedic roles, then maybe in time a feature role in another series, then films, then maybe I can make enough to finance my music, which is really what I want to do,’ he said, the bounds of his quite sincere fantasy mushrooming in a minute. […] In the meantime, while he waits for a casting call, his show-business career still consists of The Great American Food and Beverage Company, where he has worked since last summer. ‘It’s something to do with my hands while I’m waiting,’ he said. ‘It’s a place where you’re allowed to sing, and everybody uses it to keep their chin up while waiting for their big break — like “The Gong Show” or something.’ A touch of bitterness there, again. ‘It’s just that the people don’t shut up (at the restaurant). I wish they would. You basically have to drown them out. But… it is a chance.’ With that, Peter Tork picked himself up to go to work. It was his turn to wash dishes.” - article by Steve Sonsky, The Miami Herald, February 18, 1979

“Well, what I thought was great was that [Peter] always seemed to be humble and very, very gracious in his actions and his attitude. He always treated everybody with respect. He stayed low-key until we would kick up with a group number and then he would join in. […] Everybody else has been joking about how he wasn’t Pete, he was Peter. You can tell a lot about a person when they do whatever they need to do for their family. And the only thing else that I would add is that the fact that he stayed so humble and so gracious after a lot of us had grown up with him as an icon means a lot.” - D J Barker, Tales of the Road Warriors, 2019 (x)

“I worked with Peter in the mid seventies. A kinder, gentler, gracious and giving human being you could never find. His sense of humor and positivity was a gift to all of those lucky enough to be around him. He loved his life, (in spite of it sometimes!)[.]” - D J Barker, Facebook, February 13, 2023 (x)

“There was a period where I was broke. And I called home, I said, ‘Send money.’ ‘No, sorry, kiddo, you’re on your own.’ So there was a restaurant, a two-restaurant chain, there were two restaurants — a short chain, a very small chain, two links — in L.A. called The Great American Food and Beverage Company. And the trick to this establishment was that you had to be a musician, you had to audition to work at this restaurant. And I really, really, really, really, really didn’t want to work there, but I really, really, really needed the money. Anyway, so I’m standing in the kitchen, it’s my first day, and I’m dressed in this ridiculous outfit, and a bunch of us are lined up. And the coked up manager was marching up and down in front of us like a drill sergeant. And as we’re standing there listening to this madman, the kitchen door swings open, and who should walk in but none other than Peter Tork from The Monkees. And I watch Peter Tork walk by me, take a time card and punch in the time clock and get in line right next to me. And my mouth dropped open. And it became evident at that point that he was working as a waiter at the restaurant. And this is Peter Tork from the fucking Monkees. This man was, you know, as big, if not bigger, than The Beatles in the U.S. at one point in his career. And I watched my whole life pass before my eyes.” - Matthew Wilder, Speaking of Music with Jason Faber

More about Peter's time at the Great American Food and Beverage Company in a second post.

[the73rdpostscript]

What's poano man?

OH MY FRIEND. PREPARE YOURSELF.

poano man is me misspelling Piano Man. Because I am writing fanfiction for the 1973 hit single Piano Man.

My friend sent me that old joke post about how the bar in Piano Man is a gay bar, and "Bill" seems unaware. But what if instead Bill knows what it is and he's twisted the bar into some maudlin dive bar to get a hit song out of it. He didn't even change the names! What a dick!

Anyway. John the bartender finds out about it, and is obviously pissed as fuck. So Bill has to sort through his internalized homophobia and classism so he can win John back and regain the community he didn't know he had.

It's caught in my brain like a fucking fish hook and I'm mad about it literally every day. I don't want to be writing fanfiction for a Billy Joel song. This was not on my 2024 bingo card.

Bill has the audacity to look shocked, sputtering, "You - you work there. Surely you know-" “What do I know?" John’s voice is venomous as he steps forward, inches away from Bill and the smell of that fucking whiskey. Flinching, Bill steps back. Like John is an actual threat to him. Like they haven't spilled secrets and beer together. Like he didn’t sleep on John’s couch last week - curled up under the blanket John's grandma made. John wants to throw up. “You're banned from Freuds," he says at last. "What?" "You're banned. Find somewhere else to play.”

(The bar is technically called Freud's Slip after they had to change it from Cigar Bar because it turns out without the homoerotic neon sign the owner had originally planned to put up, too many straight men kept coming in looking for a real cigar bar.)

[kritischetheologie]

ask meme: #1 pls!!!!!!!!

behind the scenes ask meme

1. What was the first fandom and/or pairing that you wrote fic for?

The way I want to lie like a lying liar and say it was F1, Sewis, because that was the first fandom and pairing I posted on ao3. Anyway it was Sherlock and the pairing was MorMor which was the extremely contrived ship of Moriarty with Sebastian Moran who appears in, I guess, the Conan Doyle books, but not in the show at all, who the fandom jumped on as a collective OC. which might be why I'm never bothered when characterization develops away from how the blorbos "really" "are."

(Other things I wrote before I started actually posting on ao3: a few scraps of seth cohen / blair waldorf OC Gossip Girl crossover fic, a stab at a chuck / jenny fic gossip girl where they fuck at dan and blair's wedding, some bill weasley / daphne greengrass drabbles, one extremely maudlin pansy/draco character study, and a snape / hermione bimbofication potion fic. drag me to all hell please.)

[natalievoncatte]

Updating Tomorrow: Nothing to Fear

Kara remained stock still, barely daring to breathe. With a quick flick of her eyes, she scanned the area with her x-ray vision. There were sixteen hostages besides James, including Snapper Carr, and Kara knew them all. By some dark miracle, Nia wasn't here. She must have been out on assignment or conducting an interview or perhaps had simply stepped out for some innocuous reason. It itched the back of Kara's mind, the timing.

No significant injuries. No bombs, no weapons other than what they carried. The Joker himself carried only a revolver under his coat and the switchblade he was tenderly stroking against James's cheek, as if giving him an expert shave. His mirthless eyes bored into Kara.

"What do you want, Joker?"

His voice bubbled with mirthless giggles. "My face on the one dollar bill."

James flinched as the blade drew a fine line across his cheek, tiny drops of blood bleeding along its length. Kara sucked in a breath.

"I wonder," said the Joker. "How much is Superman's Pal worth to Superman's Cousin? What's ol Jimmy's measure? Your editor? The new guy? Beth from accounting?"

"Let them go," said Kara. "They have no part in this."

"They were here," said the Joker.

"If it's me you want, I'm here."

"You really think I'm going to throw away my insurance policy?" said the Joker. "I know you're fast, but how fast? Faster than a speeding bullet, but what about ten? Twenty? Can you catch them all and stop me from putting a smile on his widdle face?"

For emphasis, the Joker clamped his free hand on James's chin and gave it a little shake. James kept his expression flat, neutral. He practically ordered her: Stop him, don't worry about me.

She didn't dare move.

"Are we going to stand here all night, or are you going to get to the point?"

"You talk a big game," said the Joker, "but you've got a lousy poker face, Supergirl. You've got a tell. Crinkle." He tapped the center of his forehead.

Kara schooled her face still, fighting the revulsion swirling in her stomach.

"I'll ask you again. What do you want?"

The Joker's rictus grin went slack, pulling his features in a clownish, maudlin frown. "Oh, you think this is about a ransom? Okay, fine. I want two billion dollars, a Rolls Royce Phantom II, two helicopters, and an egg salad club with a slice of tomato and bacon. Oh, wait, that's Harvey."

He giggled.

Kara took a step forward. "Don't test me, clown."

"Oh, you see, that's why I'm here," said the Joker. "This isn't about money, Supergirl. I'm not here to rob banks. I'm here for a deeper purpose. A favor to an august colleague, taken from us before his time. ROSCOE!"

One of the Joker's men stepped forward and began, badly, playing a violin.

"Poor Lex Luthor. Can you imagine the ignominy, the shame? After all the work he put into being such a perfect arch enemy, the big blue boy scout just dumps him and leaves. Now, I ask you, did Lexie-Poo deserve that? Imagine what must have gone through the poor guy's head. Not only did his rival fob him off on you, the distaff counterpart, you weren't even the one to finish him off! Lex Luthor, the Great Alexander of Our Time, the Man of Tomorrow, genius philanthropist playboy scientist and fully functioning homicidal artist, shot dead by a woman who got the drop on him. Lex, killed by a secretary."

Kara's blood ran cold, and the world tilted around her.

Did he mean Lena? How did he know that?

"Oh yes, I know," said the Joker. "Lex left me a bequest, to be laid at my feet in the event of his untimely passing. A great treasure, a bounty of secrets that are mine, and mine alone."

Kara swallowed, or tried to, and found her throat going dry.

"Say, how's Mom, by the way? Did she make it to your last Earth Birthday?"

---

Nothing to Fear will update tomorrow!

[goddesspharo]

✿ for the shortest distance between two points 

the shortest distance between two points

did anything major change when you started writing to when you finished?

So much! Originally, it was going to start with the fight between Rooster and Hangman was supposed to happen at some naval gala thing after the uranium mission and serve as a catalyst for a bigger conversation with Phoenix about how bad Hangman felt that she was never on his team because she could not, in fact, admit that they were in a relationship. At some point, Bob would give Jake a ride home, which would lead to Bob dispensing advice (like any wise son of the great sage Bill Pullman would). The problem is that I could never quite get that whole thing to flow the way I wanted it to (it was entirely too talky) so that initial idea ended up being something that shows up in a diluted form in bits and pieces throughout the final form of the fic. In a way, it’s a blessing that I couldn’t get it to work because it was entirely too maudlin. It was a lot more fun to write this and see how many Julia Roberts references I could cram in there instead. It is also a lot more interesting when the barriers to their relationship are not external factors like a comparison to Rooster but rather forces within themselves like how they’re both gigantic idiots. (Idiots in love and in denial! Let me write that another five hundred times!) This story was a lot goofier than what I originally kicked around my head, but it’s probably the TGM fic that I had the best time writing.

[ask me about fic!]

[lligkv]

I'm always on-guard against conservatism in my thought. I think of myself as left in my sympathies; I also know I'm at the age where youthful commitments morph, or break under the weight of compromise. Like the ones involved in life in the American professional-managerial middle class. Entry into a certain income bracket, the structure and demands of day-to-day life, the pieces of practical work, like the management of bills, that are necessary to stay afloat, and the many entertainments you can use to while away the hours you don't devote to a job—they all serve to narrow one's horizons; it's so easy to end up stranded in the cul-de-sac of your stupid individual existence. I also have some very rudimentary, instinctive associations I've carried with me since youth. Just as conservatism is bad—because retrograde, oppressive, contingent on baseline assumptions about the self-interest of human character to which I'm not willing to commit—"avant-garde" is good, because it challenges that conservatism. So it was interesting to come upon Dean Kissick's contribution to the feature "What Happened to the Avant-Garde?" in the latest issue of The Drift and think that, based on my last post, he'd probably put me in the arrière-garde—which favors what is past because it's a means to reject the present and future—while he locates the avant-garde in online communities at which I mostly look askance: "schizo-affect" Substacks, the work of Honor Levy, and other venues that seem to thrill to the possibilities that AI and machine learning technologies might hold for art and human subjectivity.

In these communities—products of an era of the Internet that's a little after the one I occupied, as a millennial closer to the middle than the end of that generation's span—"individual subjectivity," as Kissick puts it, "was forsaken in favor of pseudonymity, the impersonation of others, collective authorship, and collaborations with software." In isolation, I'm cool with each of these things except for the last one. Of course, there's no guarantee that any of them make for good art or lasting contributions to it—the title of Kissick's entry is "Senseless Babble," and he himself grants that "there's a fine line between nonsense doggerel and aesthetic innovation here, [as is] always the case with avant-gardes." And it's really too simplistic to say that the avant-garde generally is automatically good. Avant-gardes can be regressive; ours is pretty likely to be, as John Ganz wrote last year:

They pride themselves in being retrograde or blithely unaware along a number of axes, from declaring, as a last ditch Bohemian provocation, their fealty to conventional bourgeois values; their preoccupation with adolescence; appropriation of lower-brow or conservative religious themes; their affectation of not being the product of arts education but rather the native denizens of the dark underbelly of internet message boards; their deliberate cultivation of a sense of mental debility or confusion with results that less like Dadaist or Futurist experimentation and more just senseless chatter and maudlin ecstasy....

There's something akin to an accelerationist's empty zeal, too, in Kissick's piece, in claims like the one that the timeline has surpassed modernist poetry as a document of the collective unconscious and human subjectivity within it. A love for what is novel and ostensibly a challenge to what is simply because it's novel or a challenge. A love for form that disregards content. And a love that likely mistakes a mere turn of the wheel for something truly new and unprecedented. Turn the dial back ten or fifteen years and you'd find people saying much the same about alt-lit—though likely less effusively, jadedness and alexithymia being characteristic of that style and its partisans where volubility, profusion, and mania seem hallmarks of this one. We're saying something new, we thought then. And uneasy in the background hung the question: who knows if it's meaningful. (The answer, predictably: not very.) (But at least the question was there.)

Still, we're all here trying to articulate—to make something new, as in valuable, because it speaks to what only we can speak to.

But then there's Lisa Robertson in her novel The Baudelaire Fractal, which I just finished. The novel is another Künstlerroman, the story of an artist's formation, and over the course of her literary apprenticeship, the protagonist decides that, as she puts it, "I was no avant-gardist; I had no interest in abolishing grammar. Rather, I studied it, in a casual way..." Perhaps that's where my own allegiances lie—in working with the world as it is rather than abolishing it; exploring the possibilities it holds without tipping into what I think will degrade it, such as technologies like AI; most crucially, tempering the excitement of the new with some sense of what the new might be worth... Robertson's narrator, for her part, determines that her literary project will entail work with the sentence: "By what profound calculations," she wonders, "could the contours of the sentence be transformed, and what would I then become?"

[cosmicanger]

A 1/2 review of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood 2019 review

By Sam B.; Rewatched Jul 24, 2019

To be at the end of an era is one helluva thing, and Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood almost feels prophetic now, coming at the tail-end of an age for cinema, a medium that has since been irrevocably altered, with no clear path forward. The film itself is the opposite of a eulogy, a ressurection of some falsified past. It is a vile motion picture.

The first two interimible hours are a sub-par hangout movie with some cranky metatext. Dicaprio plays Rick Dalton, a star who never quite gets his due, in a startlingly nondescript role that leaves Leo floundering to make any choices in performance. Brad Pitt is very good and very wrong for the role of Cliff, a happy-to-be-here wife-killer stunt double who offers Dalton ceaseless half-earnest validation (the better version of this Hollywood arrived during the film’s awards campaign, in Pitt and DiCaprio’s interview with Marc Maron). The male bonding here is witless and monotonous; Without the too-clever dialogue as a distraction, Tarantino’s just a hack who can’t structure a narrative.

It’s an ugly looking film, too; The cinematography is piss-yellow and lifeless, as if the colorist colorist were a drunk housepainter for a Days Inn. For a filmmaker so enamored with artificial pastiche, Tarantino gives the audience little to gawk at, the low-key energy of those long drives distending into uninspired boredom.

The relative absense of Charles Manson himself in the film is one of the less sinister, clearer creative decisions in the film, because the leader was already omnipresent in California in the late sixties, his hoard connected to every production and party. It’s been argued that this is meant to be emasculating, but the lack of an actual figurehead prohibits any demystification of the cult, let alone real insight into its impact on culture. Manson is made a ghost, breaking any warm delusions the film presents about old Hollywood. The camera explores Spahn Ranch and its inhabitants with the same mild curiosity and nostalgia as the Sunset Strip as if guided by that spectre, but Tarantino offers inconsistent answers to what, exactly, he’s haunting.

OUATIH is hyper-focused on cultures that oppress women, though to what end remains unclear for most of the runtime. Much has been made of Margot Robbie’s lack of lines, but I am less concerned with that metric (her hacky, maudlin setpiece remains the only scene in the film to achieve a childlike wonder) than the quesy evocations of engendered violence. The casting of Maya Hawke (whose mother, Uma Thurman, was critically injured in a car crash on the set of Kill Bill due to negligence and pressure from Tarantino) as Flower Girl feels like commentary, but whether it’s an apology, a brag, or an expression of guilt never gets explored, mostly out of formal ineptitude and cowardice. When Margaret Qualley asks Brad Pitt to suck his dick and he responds asking her age, she muses, “Nobody has asked me that in so long.” This is a heartbreaking line, and coming after the camera has lingered on her feet for several minutes, could be read as confessional, a feeling of complicity on the part of Tarantino. But he demonstrates zero understanding for how this widespread pattern of trauma reverberates and replicates into the present day, compartmentalized into some vague historical evil. It is a useless evocation of real tragedy reduced to an allegorical complication. There are startling few hints at Manson’s white supremacy. The film’s defenders have used the Manson family’s racism as a way of justifying the climax, but this doesn’t take into account Hollywood’s own skiddishness in displaying it. Tarantino has never before shied away from tackling racism’s intersection with misogyny (see: his film directly before OUATIH, the heinous, nonsensical Hateful Eight), and the avoidance here doesn’t read as maturity. If it’s still positing the girls’ white supremacy as justification for Tarantino’s leering, condescending, misogynistic lens, that’s no less infantile, privileged, and stupid than his past work. Pitting two forms of oppression against one another in some kind of quantitative system of value judgement isn’t just lazy semiotics, it’s reactionary political theory.

All decorum falls aways by the time Dalton uses a flamethrower on a screeching, bloodied young girl in a scene that recalls New French Extremity’s sadistic obsession with desecrating women’s bodies as an antipathic aesthetic act. Rick gets the flamethrower from the set of a Nazi-killer flick, just as Tarantino gets the ending from Inglorious Basterds. But unlike his previous flirtations with historical revisionism, there are no films explicitly *about* the Manson Murders’ ripple effect off of which Tarantino can riff, so the ostensibly optimistic ending has no clear path forward. What future is he imagining, besides one where Polanski career is unsullied in some hypothetical alternative path where he’s never caught? The titular fantasy, where Rick Dalton and Tarantino finally get to be the stars of a world where history has been subsumed by cinema, is childish. That very same history carries countless women’s stories of suffering at the hands of men in power, and with a single gesture Hollywood offers not liberation, but total erasure. In its wake remains a film that, despite any political or nostalgic pretense, delights in the evisceration the bodies of women to protect a philosophical status quo.