Kneeling

A/N: Thank you so much to all the people who took the time to review! You are what gives me the motivation to get up at insane hours and write.


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The next time it happened in a storage closet. Ron and Hermione were studying in the common room, but he’d already done most of his homework the night before in a fit of insomnia, so he was more or less aimlessly wandering the castle, looking for something to do.

Malfoy found him in a corridor on the third floor, boredly studying a painting of a rather pretty, red-headed maid in a medieval dress, who was shyly fanning herself and throwing him curious looks from beneath lowered lashes. She scowled as he suddenly lost any interest in her at the sound of Malfoy’s voice.

“Harry.” It was the tone he was already getting to know as invitation, and he didn’t bother resisting for long as Malfoy dragged him through a hidden door and was already on his knees before the door had even properly closed behind them.



His life fell back into a weird kind of routine, after that. Two or three times a week Malfoy would meet him in some hidden place and would either suck him or let Harry fuck him. He never asked to change positions, which meant that Harry didn’t have to say no. He wasn’t sure what his answer would be if the question ever did come. Certainly not yes, that much he knew for sure.

Nothing else changed between them. Well, nothing much, anyway. Malfoy was still as much of a supercilious jerk as he’d always been, though maybe not quite as vicious - but then, he might have imagined that.

Ron, Hermione and him were closer than ever, welded together by the dangers they’d lived through and the enemies they’d fought. But still, he sometimes found himself looking at them, wondering if they’d live to graduate from Hogwarts, if he himself would survive long enough to see them do it. Those times he’d feel something like icy fingers closing around his heart, squeezing until he couldn’t bear it anymore, until he had to get up and away from them. At those times he’d wander about the castle, alone until Malfoy found him, and he’d fuck him till there was nothing but the pounding of his blood in his ears, the waves of pleasure crashing through his body, and Malfoy’s hot, silken skin under his hands.

Sometimes, when it was particularly bad, he didn’t even take the time to undress, because nothing mattered then except getting Malfoy naked and bent over the nearest flat surface and thrusting into him until the cold went away.

He was never quite sure what Malfoy got out of these encounters, but there had to be something, because almost always it was Malfoy who found him, rarely the other way around. But in the end, Harry didn’t care much about Malfoy’s motivations, as long as he was there when he needed it. Which he was, most of the time.

So for a few weeks, he managed to balance his two lives, Malfoy and his friends, without much of a problem. But then everything went to hell. It didn’t happen all at once, no huge catastrophe, but rather a gradual progression of ominous things.

The first clue that something was wrong came from Lupin’s letters. Harry had gotten these little notes from Lupin all year. There never was anything really important, basically just variations on the theme of “I’m alive and well, don’worry. Take care.”

But now, the tone had changed. There were still the familiar reassurances, but Harry thought he could read signs of exhaustion, of fear and growing doubt between the lines. Some of the letters were badly creased and stained, the writing shaky, as if Lupin hadn’t even been able to hold the quill steady anymore. One of them had little droplets of blood in a corner. Harry could only imagine the state Lupin had to be in not to have noticed those. (Because, as he still seemed determined to sound cheerful and reassuring, he surely wouldn’t have sent the letter if he had noticed.)

Then Dumbledore had a long conversation with Hermione in his office one day, from which she emerged tight-lipped and pale and unwilling to tell them a single word of what had been said other than that she had been asked to help with research for the Order.

After that, she spent almost all of her time in the library, scrawling away on endless scrolls of parchment. She hardly slept anymore - there were dark shadows like bruises under her eyes, worse than those she’d gotten in third year, trying to keep up with her insane schedule.

Harry worried about her, and he could see that it affected Ron even more - could see it in the way he kept bringing her drinks and snacks from the kitchen when she missed yet another meal, in the look in Ron’s eyes when he had to coax her to eat at least a few bites before pushing the plate away, immediately forgetting it over her studies.

Sometimes at those moments Ron would turn to him with a desperately hopeful look in his eyes, as if he was waiting for Harry to do something, to make it all better.

He didn’t think Ron was even aware that he did it, but somewhere on an unconscious level, the hope was clearly there. It was the same look Harry sometimes saw in the eyes of other students, or even of passing strangers on the street who recognized his scar - the faith in the Boy Who Lived, the hope that he would save them all, as he had done once before.

Sometimes he thought of Malfoy telling him to stop being the saviour of wizardkind for at least a moment. If Malfoy only knew how desperately he wanted to be able to do that.
It made him feel so incredibly helpless, to carry the weight of all that hope on his shoulders, on top of his own fears, and that in turn made him both angry - and ashamed of his anger at the same time. Because how could he be angry at them for hoping for a saviour? Wasn’t that what he wished himself?

It was always Malfoy who bore the brunt of his confused anger, because of course he couldn’t take it out on Ron and Hermione, who had more than their own share of problems.
He never broke the promise he’d made to himself on that first day - he never physically hurt Malfoy again. But sometimes, when he could feel his blood boiling red-hot with anger, he was rough and impatient, and he found himself whispering hateful words instead of the endearments he might have whispered in the ear of a real lover.

Malfoy never resisted him, never even complained, and he still sought him out, if maybe a little bit less regularly than he used to do before things had taken such an ugly turn. In the rare moments when Harry thought about why he did it at all, he suspected that maybe Malfoy just liked it rough, or didn’t care much either way. But mostly his mind was too full of his own problems, his own fears, and the worry about his friends, to think much about it at all. It just wasn’t all that important, compared to those other things.

One day, the letters from Lupin, which had been getting less and less regular these past few weeks, stopped completely. After two weeks with no word from him Harry was half mad with worry. Finally he cornered Dumbledore, but even that brought no relief. “Don’t worry, Harry - Lupin is on a mission for the Order and can’t contact us right now. I’m sure he’s fine”, was all he got in the way of an answer.

Harry was quite sure that what that meant was “He’s probably alive, but certainly not safe, and even that much I don’t know for sure.”

Harry suffered through two more weeks of uncertainty and growing irritation with the world at large and Dumbledore in particular until Lupin returned.

It was only by chance that he saw him at all. He’d been on the way up to a secret meeting with Malfoy, already half-hard and frantic with the thought of finally relieving the last few days’ tension, when he saw him coming round a corner, propped up by a tall, dark-haired wizard Harry didn’t know. He ducked into an alcove in the wall until the two of them had passed, then followed cautiously behind.

Lupin looked terrible, worse than he had ever seen him. His formerly lean form had slimmed down so much that he looked gaunt, collarbones sticking out like blades under the skin. His robe was torn and bloodied in countless places, his fingers scraped raw, and there was a large, bleeding gash through the left side of his face. His left ear was caked with dried blood, and Harry wondered at the odd form of it, until he realized that a large chunk was missing. He barely suppressed a scream of horror. God, what had they done to him?

Still he stayed hidden. He didn’t want anyone to ask what he was doing up here, even now, when the danger of discovery seemed small and insignificant in the face of Lupin’s condition.

“Don’t you think you should go to Madame Pomfrey first, Remus?” the other wizard asked gently, the resigned tone of his voice making Harry suspect that he had asked the question before, probably more than once. Lupin only shook his head again.

“No. I have to report to Dumbledore first of all. This is important, he’ll want to know it right away.”

Harry flinched at the sound of Lupin’s voice. It was hoarse and broken, hardly more than a raw whisper. Sometimes he paused between words, as if it took all he had just to find the strength to keep talking.

Just then, Lupin stumbled, and would have fallen if the other wizard hadn’t been there to hold him upright. He let his head sag against the man’s black-clothed shoulder for a moment, before he carefully straightened up again. The gesture spoke of his bone-deep fatigue to Harry, who knew how rarely Lupin touched others, even those he was close to. The other man seemed to notice, or at least guess it, too, because he tightened his hold on Lupin, taking more of his weight, and sighed.

“Who did that to you, anyway? I thought you were dead when we found you, you looked so bad - and to tell the truth you don’t look much better now, either.”

The reply was almost lost to Harry, faint as Lupin’s voice was right now, but the two words he did hear where enough to make his blood start to boil in his veins. He didn’t even stay long enough to watch the wizard lead Lupin through the secret entrance to the headmaster’s office.

His thoughts were a tumbled mess - fear for Lupin, who had well and truly looked like hell. A strange, aimless hurt he couldn’t quite explain to himself - and, most of all, clawing, burning, gut-clenching hate and a rage that tinged his vision with red and made his fingers clench until he could feel his nails drawing blood in the skin of his palms. And throughout the mess, ringing like a rusty bell, echoed the same two words in Lupin’s broken, hoarse voice:

“Lucius Malfoy.”