WIP Snip

Thank you for the tag @drarrily-we-row-along - absolutely loved the delicious snip you posted, read it here!

100k into my current WIP and having a crisis as it just occurred to me that maybe none of it makes sense… talking myself down very gently but it means i can’t post the latest bit i wrote in case i find myself spiralling further into confusion so here’s a snip from an older extract i’m just about to edit!

i’ve missed loads of tags recently so apols if i’m missing anyone - off the top of my head i’m going to tag sprint buddies etc @coffeedrgn87@corvuscrowned@katie-alden@maesterchill@makeitp1nk@mintamintathings@oknowkisskiss@onbeinganangel@shealwaysreads@thesleepiesthufflepuff@the-starryknight@sweet-s0rr0w@teacup-tai@wolfpants and also please anyone else who fancies doing this and distracting me from my misery!

Wartime AU, Voldemort still knocking about, Wolfstar lives, Draco deserted the Order and then came back. Harry has just returned from multiverse-travelling and accidentally brought a Malfoy from another universe with him, who’s been telling them all about his world.

“I can’t believe everyone just left him to die!”

Sirius was in a rage, prowling restlessly around the room, black hair gleaming in the shivering light from the sconces. 

“Dumbledore—yeah, I mean, I can see that,” Ron said consideringly. “But there’s no way our Sirius or Remus would have ever let Harry die. Your versions must be absolute incompetents,” he said, looking at Remus and Sirius. “No offence.” 

Remus rolled his eyes.

“Not to dwell too much on my equivalent’s shortcomings,” he said to the other Malfoy, “but how could they have been so careless? Albus, yes, I can see that. He always wasambitious when it came to Harry. But if our world is so close to yours, I just can’t imagine how…” His eyes flickered momentarily, and Harry realised that other Malfoy had flinched the tiniest bit. Remus, wolf-sharp, had noticed of course. “Oh. Oh.”

“Oh, what?” Sirius said crossly. “There’s no ohabout it, Moons. If they let Albus talk their Harry into walking to a certain death before he’d even finished school then we should take Malfoy’s Time-Trip thing and go and kick their arses ourselves.”

“To be fair to other me,” Harry said. “It does sound like the sort of thing I might do.”

“Which is exactly why Moony and I keep you on the straight and narrow,” Sirius told him, grabbing his hand. Sirius was a bit too thin, always, from the nervous prowl of him and the long nights of no sleep and the hunt. His fingers slipped around Harry’s smoothly, tight at the knuckles, ropey with tendons as he clutched harder. 

“Pads,” Remus said quietly. “I think what the other Malfoy is trying to tell us is that, in his world, we’re—what, both of us?” He eyed other Malfoy, who nodded. “We’re dead, I think.”

“You went first,” other Malfoy said to Sirius, “which is what started it all for my Harry. And then you—” Remus sat back heavily in his chair “—went and got yourself killed in the battle, and you two—” he stabbed a finger accusingly at Ron and Hermione “—weren’t even around when he decided, like a twat, to trot off into Voldemort’s camp and thus face certain death. Anyone with a modicum of sense would have known he’d do something epically foolish, and yet…” He spread his hands out dismissively, and settled back into his chair, shoulders relaxed, spine soft.

He was, Harry realised, enjoying himself, the bright eyes of an adventurer. Sirius’s fingers twitched in Harry’s grip, nose wrinkled in irritation as he listened to other Malfoy. Across the room, real Malfoy was watching, eyes flat as they lingered on his-face-but-not. He looked paler than usual, though it might just have been the contrast with other Malfoy and that red, red thread of scarring that tugged his lips into a smile and threw the line of his cheekbone into sharp relief.

Six Sentence Sunday

Hello from beautiful Blocksville, population me. Writer’s block has hit, hopefully only mildly. Very little new stuff that i can share but i did vow to keep posting snips so here we are. It’s a little saucy Legilimency action between Harry and Draco, in which Draco distracts Harry away from the memories Draco doesn’t want him to see. Unedited.Tagging everyone who wants to do this!

“Fine. You want to see what I’m hiding? Here,” Malfoy whispered almost gleefully, and Harry wasn’t sure if the words were spoken aloud or just in his mind, because he was surrounded by Malfoy’s thoughts now, the mental link between them pulsing open wide, a flood.

Harry himself was there, looking tired and worried in Lucius’s study, then disappearing under the sweep of the invisibility cloak, just a recent memory, and then more, older ones these times but Harry remembered them vividly—himself on a broom, flying low over the eaves of the Grimmauld roof, laughing down at Malfoy who was lying back on the rough tarred surface under the casement windows, so high up, both of them drunk, they must have been crazy. Harry drinking tea, hands meeting around the cup, eyes lost to thought as steam rose, Padfoot running in. Harry again, this time in school, a split lip, blood on the front of his torn shirt, looking furious about something.

“What are you doing?” he whispered to Malfoy.

“You were the one who went snooping through my memories,” Malfoy said, sneering, and then they started up again, times that Harry didn’t even remember but that he knew must be from before, because he looked so young and so stupidly happy and hopeful.

Harry with a wand, practicing something over and over, sparks filling the air of the blue drawing room.

Remus, a fresh unhealed wound under his left eye, arms tight around Harry’s neck, whispering something into his ear while Sirius rubbed Harry’s lower back in circles, and along with that a feeling of wistful jealousy that Harry realised was Malfoy’s.

Harry on the old horsehair couch at one end of the library in Grimmauld Place, waving a wine glass as he talked, face so bright and interested and alive.

And then the memory began to shiver a bit, Harry’s young unlined face and shorter curls shifting into something different, making him look more like he did now but with something not quite right about it. He looked… handsomer, he thought, eyes a brighter green than he knew they were, the flush of stubble making him look dashing rather than unkempt, a glossy sheen to his long hair.

“Malfoy…” he began, but then the version of himself in Malfoy’s mind smiled, not the sweet interested smile of the earlier vision, but something altogether different, his teeth catching on the wine-reddened curve of his lower lip, something promising and dark and vulnerable in it. He lay back against the arm of the couch, and now the background had faded into an indefinable nothingness, and it was just this image of Harry with his head back, throat bared, back arching just a little before he reached down to the button of his jeans and flicked it open carelessly with one thumb.