Reparations Update

Okay - the next bit of Reparations, the seldom*-updated story in which Neville can set things on fire with his mind and Draco is a hooker.

* ahem, understatement

[part 1: matched set] [part 2: homecoming] [part 3: like riding a bike]
[part 4: make it easier] [part 5: if that's what you're asking] [part 6: it has to hurt]
[part 7: an awful lot of trouble, for someone like you]



I’ll bring you back


“Do you want a blowjob?” Draco asks, the fourth time he catches Neville watching him at breakfast, but he already knows the answer. Neville tells him what he wants, in terms so simple and blunt that he might as well be telling Draco that the cauldrons need to be descaled; lately, they haven’t seemed to need words at all. There’s the tilt of Neville’s thumb on his zipper when he finds Draco in the library or the laboratory, or his open hand on Draco’s stomach before dawn, when he often wakes Draco for a fuck, flipping him to his stomach with one easy hand, fingering him thoroughly open. He never seems bothered by Draco's yawns.

Neville pulls the toast basket toward him before saying anything; they’ve been eating breakfast in a parlor Draco doesn’t remember ever seeing before in his life, toast and fruit and sticky buns crammed onto a short round table between their two armchairs, The Daily Prophet tucked into the corner of Draco’s chair, a little creased. Draco thinks Glory has somehow taught herself to read.

“How’s the wand?” Neville says.
“Good,” Draco says. It’s still awkward in his hand, but it’s difficult to tell how much of that is from rusty technique and how much is attributable to the wand not being his in the way a wand ought to be. Neville rolled his eyes at this when Draco brought it up, last week, and suggested that it was probably Draco’s poncy grip on the thing.
“All very well and good for those of us who don’t need a wand,” Draco said.
“I need a wand,” Neville said.

“I thought we could fight,” Neville says, spreading marmalade on his toast.
“Funny,” Draco says, not bothering to look up from the crossword.
“Duel, I mean,” Neville says. “You liked to, at school.”
“At—-“ Draco looks up. “I was twelve,” he says.
Neville shrugs. Draco taps his pen against the paper thoughtfully, counting off letters in his head.
“Carbuncle,” Neville says.
Draco sighs and inks in the word carefully. Neville can only read his mind when he’s not paying attention.
“A duel,” he says, staring at the mostly empty crossword; he usually gives up, stymied, fifteen clues in. “You’re—-you realize you’ll kill me.”
“I’ll bring you back.”
“You—-“ Draco gives up and tosses down the paper on the ottoman. Neville half smiles around his toast, and wipes a smear of jam off the corner of his mouth.
“I thought that big corridor beyond the fourth floor picture gallery,” he says.

They knock each other unconscious, that first morning, and Draco wakes in mid-afternoon, cotton-mouthed, staring at the carpet pattern beneath his cheek. His head aches and he stumbles when he tries to get to his feet, his thigh weak as water. He finds Neville in the kitchen, gulping a glass of water, one hand wrapped tightly over the edge of the sink. There is a black bruise on his temple and his hands shake a little when he turns and puts a full glass in front of Draco, but not enough to slop the water over the edge of the glass.
“Were you just going to leave me there?”
“You were all right.”

Neville drinks a second glass of water, slowly this time and then says, “I can’t really do that. Bring you back from—-“
“oh.” Draco puts his empty glass down on the table between them.
“I was kidding,” Neville says. “It was a joke.”

There’s nothing to say, so Draco points at Neville’s bruise and says, “That looks like it hurts.”
Neville grins, fleetingly. “Hermione alw—-Harry always said you were all talk." He’s handsome, Draco realizes all over again, even with the bruise – especially because of the bruise – and the twist of his mouth looks warm and kind.
“You don’t have to flirt with me,” Draco says. He snatches his refilled water glass out of Neville’s hand.
“Really.” Neville’s voice is dry as dust.

They duel again the next afternoon and then three days after that, although what they do is nothing so polite as the word duel suggests. They curse each other and, more than once, ignore their wands for an spleeny exchange of blows; the walls of the manor are left pitted and burnt from spell recoil. They fight because Neville wants to; Draco does not admit that he wants to as well. He doesn’t enjoy it, exactly. He thinks, sometimes, that perhaps he just forgot what magic was like, before, but mostly he understands that Neville has run a brutal fingernail under a scab that’s not quite ready to be pulled away and opened inside him some yawning capacity for—-for what, he does not know.

The duels excite him, Neville’s strength and speed, and his quick-closing ability to match it. He is not stupid enough that he cannot understand that Neville is being easy with him, coaxing him a little, but there is something in the way Neville takes his arm, twists him around, lets Draco slam him back against a wall with a curse, that makes Draco’s stomach throb with heat, with anticipation, with the everyday lustful ache he had thought lost to him, irretrievable.

It doesn’t worry him as much as the day Neville cradles his dislocated knee in quiet hands, and the fine hair on Draco’s forearm stands stiffly to attention. Neville is kneeling in the snow beneath the second story window they were taking turns jumping from, frowning over Draco's leg. Draco sucks in a breath and makes himself look away and stare only at the growing wet patches on the knees of Neville’s trousers.

They fuck in Neville’s bed more often in the months after Neville buys Draco his wand, usually just before, or after dueling. Neville is still mostly awful in bed: a little too greedy, too grabby, now and again unintentionally rough, sometimes boring, and just uncoordinated enough to make the whole thing frustrating, but he’s got a big cock, and he’s started giving Draco lengthy, slopping handjobs so that Draco usually comes, gasping, a few minutes before Neville.

"Can't you, just--" he says once, when they’re fucking after having spent the morning destroying the green room and the winter conservatory, where Draco hadn’t been allowed until the Christmas holiday of his fourth year, as a reward for having won a quidditch game against Ravenclaw that kept Slytherin in the running for the cup. They took turns flinging each other through the long, glass windows onto the icy promenade the runs along the south side of the house, Draco in one of Neville’s cast-off sweaters, cuffed thickly over his wrists. His back is still tender from his one bad landing, although Neville knelt behind him and pushed at his shoulders until the muscle eased, a little, just before apparating them both to his bedroom. They started with Draco on his knees, resting his cheek against the mattress, but now he’s on his back, one ankle resting against Neville’s shoulder while Neville fucks him with a maddening, sluggish rhythm, and the words are out of his mouth and echoing in his ears before he realizes he’s said anything.
Neville stops. “What?”
“Nothing,” Draco says. He presses his lips together tightly, feels himself redden.
“What,” Neville says again, seemingly content to kneel between Draco’s legs, staring down at him, his stiff cock brushing against Draco’s inner thigh.

“You should go a little faster,” Draco says finally. Neville squints at him; the sun has gone down on them while they’ve been fucking and the room is dim dusk, dead of winter although it’s barely past three. Neville hesitates and then hitches Draco’s hips a little closer. Draco’s eyes slide closed when Neville kneels up to push back inside, but he forces them open. There’s a set of shiny new scars on Neville’s forearm and his cheeks are a little flushed.
“Faster,” he says, leaning forward, close enough to touch.

Draco closes his eyes.