Addict
This was what always happened. Draco cursed himself and kicked at a stir stick on the floor, balling his hands up into white, shaky fists because he couldn’t direct his anger at the thing that really deserved it: himself. All of this was his fault. If he’d protested more when Pansy had suggested inviting them, if he hadn’t gotten so tipsy, or if he’d just managed to keep his fucking hands to himself… It might have prevented this.
But now it was too late, and Draco felt that knowledge deep within his bones. Touching Harry had been a mistake. Before, the memory of hands on his bare wrists and the feel of the Auror’s magic on his skin had been outweighed by Draco’s anger and sense of betrayal. Those touches hadn’t been real, even if his brain still tried to cling to them.
But now… He'd gotten a taste of what it could be like and now he was obsessed. All day long, anytime he'd had a spare moment or let his mind wander it went to figuring out how he could get more. Would it be unprofessional? His hand flexed, trying to chase the ghostly feeling of Harry’s fingers trailing over his skin. He continued counting mouse feet.
For possibly the hundredth time that day, Draco’s eyes drifted towards his desk where the beginning of a letter was glaring back at him. All he’d managed to write was ‘Harry,’. What was he supposed to write? Would Harry get annoyed by him owling him at work when he was likely doing something important or enjoying being away from him? Even if he did owl, what would he say?
Nothing hurt his pride quite like the idea of telling Harry: hey, remember that time you touched my skin and I almost cried because I’d forgotten what human touch felt like? What if you did that again? What if—now hear me out—what if you touched and squeezed and held every square centimeter of my body that you could get? Would that be crazy? What if you traced nonsense patterns over my palms and squeezed my wrists until I forgot how much everything hurts? Would you relish having that kind of effect on me?
Draco swore under his breath and nearly managed to cut off the tip of his finger instead of the mouse toe. He threw down the knife in frustration, collapsing back into his chair’s hollow embrace. The wood felt like a mockery as it dug into his muscles and taunted him with the knowledge that it would never be Harry’s hands.
His entire body ached for it. He felt desperate and weak and dependent. Pathetic. This was why he never let people get close. This was why he never tried to get comfortable with touch. He was too quick to get addicted.
It was humiliating how badly he wanted it. The whole world was twisting beneath his feet, trying to throw him off balance, and everything felt distinctly not enough. His robes brushed his inner arms, but they weren’t enough to distract him; they weren’t warm enough to be human, and they grated against his skin and his nerves in equal measure. Everything felt fake. Draco knew, logically, that nothing had changed and that he’d been perfectly content with his chair just the day before, but now it was wrong. The hard, jutting wooden edges were too stiff to be fingers and the worn leather seat was too even to be skin.
He was in too deep.
Now, he would do anything for that touch. Anything. And as soon as Harry found that out, the Auror would use it against him. Draco knew that he was touch starved—Pansy had even drunkenly accused him of it once—but it wasn't entirely by accident. It was safer not to let himself have it. Once he got that first little taste, he would be stuck constantly brewing in this agonizing stage of 'not enough'. Because it was never enough.
He just wanted someone to hug him or hold his hand or trace his face. No, he wanted someone he trusted to do that. Someone male, that he trusted. Not that he trusted Harry, of course, because the Auror had hardly proven himself to be trustworthy but… Draco would take what he could get.
Fear and self-loathing washed over him. He was digging his own grave and he should have known better from the very beginning. Dammit, this was all his fault! If he’d just been more guarded, more careful, or even just less weak. But now he wanted it—and not in some far off, abstract way like he had before. Now he wanted it viscerally. Deep in his core.
He felt pathetic and vulnerable. Part of him urged his arms to wrap around his middle but the ghost of a hug from his own arms was just salt in the wound. It would never even come close to the feeling of another human being’s touch. Draco couldn’t remember the last time someone had hugged him. Not a quick, friendly hug like the kind he got from Pansy but a deeper, soul-crushing embrace that would finally drown out the chaos inside his head.
Again, Draco swore at himself. He’d never discussed this particular issue in great detail with anyone, but Elle had brought up something similar when he’d first been released. She’d pointed out how isolated he’d been for the last year or so, she’d talked about how important human connection was when it came to healing, and she’d never said the words ‘touch-starved’ but the idea had been there. Without being asked, she’d given him a list of suggestions that would help him ease that pain himself.
Weighted blankets
Self massage.
Warm baths.
Sleep with a body pillow.
It all felt so worthless in comparison to what he knew Harry's touch would feel like. He could drown himself in hot water and suffocate himself with weighted blankets but at the end of the day they were all just material things. A body pillow was just a cruel imitation of what he could never have.
Vaguely, Draco could remember an advertisement he’d seen once on a Muggle TV in a bar with Pansy. The rest of the table hadn’t noticed his attention shifting. From the subtitles, Draco had been able to figure out that it was an ad for a brand of soap but it just showed countless reels of small, innocent animals coated in oil and being scrubbed clean. Ducklings, mostly.
Draco felt like a duckling right now. His brain helpfully conjured the image of him as an orphaned baby animal being treated in a shelter, just like the TV. Those animals all looked so happy and normal after being cleaned, but Draco knew that wasn’t the case. They were alone.
A thousand clean blankets, stuffed animals, and heating pads would never even come close to having a mother. Volunteers with rubber gloves on could feed him formula from a syringe and play a soundtrack of a heartbeat on loop and sure he would survive... but it would all be fake and forced. And he would be left aching and longing for something he would never be able to get.
He could survive without it, but he didn’t want to anymore.
Once again, Draco cursed himself and every decision he’d ever made. This was always his problem. Now that he’d gotten a taste, he wanted more than he would ever be able to have and it was embarrassing. Malfoys weren’t supposed to be needy or desperate, they were supposed to be strong enough to stand on their own. But Draco was tired of standing on his own.
A deeper, darker fear whispered and danced at the very back of his mind. Draco knew from experience how far he would go to get that touch—much farther than he should have, and much farther than was healthy. The last time he’d let himself get addicted, he’d stayed with Blaise through months of secret hookups. He’d let the taller, stronger Slytherin make him forget for a while and he’d been so fucking deprived that he’d stayed in that ‘relationship’ long past the point of emotional destruction.
Then Blaise had gotten off with two months parole, and married the first pureblood witch who’d let him propose. And it wasn’t entirely the older Slytherin’s fault that he’d left Draco high and dry—they weren’t legally allowed to even write letters, of course—but that didn’t change the end result. Draco had gone through months of withdrawals and swore that it wouldn’t happen again.
But it had. Less than a year later when he’d met a random Dom in a Wizarding club with sadistic tendencies and a degradation kink. Every single insult had cut straight to his core. He’d taken so many hits across his forearms, over his Dark Mark, that he was sure one day he would be punished enough. He never was, though.
And Draco had positively lived for the things that came after the hits. The harsh, needy grip on his hips, the press of lips against his skin, and the feel of another person’s skin against his own. His inner addict had shown itself. He’d become so devoted and so convinced that he needed to earn that touch that he would have taken a hundred more punches just to feel some kind of connection. And he'd been devastated to lose that abuse.
Draco knew that he was overwhelmed. This feeling, like most feelings, would eventually pass and he would be able to breathe normally again even if he couldn’t remember how. Logically he knew that.
But fuck it sure as shit didn’t feel like it would ever get better. He was drowning and everything hurt so fucking badly. That wasn’t new, of course, but the hurt was so much more poignant and intense now that he’d remembered he could feel things physically. His brain suggested blocking out all the sensation and disassociating entirely, but he couldn’t. Already, his body was fighting the idea.
A huge, hollow, aching need had settled itself in every fiber of muscle in his body and it panged any time he thought about ignoring it. Shutting off the sensation, even if he desperately wanted to, wasn’t an option. His body wouldn’t allow it.
Because losing the pain meant losing the ghost of Harry’s touch.
Harry groaned as he downed his second hangover potion for the day, the first one having only taken the edge off. Barely. He knew he’d drank a lot more than he usually did, but Merlin his body was punishing him. The whole universe was punishing him, apparently.
Aidan flashed him a grin across the conference table and Harry had to swallow the urge to send a jinx his way when no one was looking. They’d been conducting this briefing for over an hour and a half now, which meant that Harry had been listening to Kingsley’s bored, monotone, Minister-voice for about twice his usual tolerance level. He’d been assigned lead on the case, though, so he could hardly duck out to find a cup of coffee.
Aidan had been annoyed that Harry was now, technically, his superior for the case but that irritation seemed to have been combated nicely by the fact that Harry was obviously hungover. Every now and then, the psychoanalyst squeaked his shoe against the floor and savored Harry’s wince. Harry just tried to focus on the briefing.
There was a proper team for the case now, which was why they’d needed to hold the briefing in the first place. It would be good to have other Aurors and investigators working with the evidence, but Harry was still wrestling with how the hell he was supposed to have Draco be a valuable asset if the blond couldn’t do any investigating in front of any other Aurors. He needed to figure out what was going on with Draco’s magic.
No, not his magic, Harry corrected himself. Draco had been able to use Harry’s wand just fine—better than fine, though Harry was still trying not to think about that—which meant his magic wasn’t the problem. His wand then, maybe?
Harry didn’t particularly need an excuse to visit the potioneer. Between the case, their private contract, and their general semi-associate-level relationship, Harry didn’t need to justify his excursion to Whirlwind Industries to anyone. He wanted to know about Draco’s wand, though. So, as Kingsley started up answering another round of inane and useless questions from the junior Aurors being added to the team, Harry made a decision. After the briefing, he would Apparate to Whirlwind.
Draco bit his lower lip and began picking at his nails again. He’d managed to shake off the sharpest of the emotions from that morning—helped, no doubt, by the reminder that Kaiser had returned from their vacation—but he was still off. Nothing felt right.
There were countless things he should have been doing at that moment, but he couldn’t look away from the empty cauldron on the other side of the room. He hadn’t heard from Potter or the Ministry since they’d visited the crime scene. Part of him wondered if he’d been taken off the case and no one had even bothered to tell him. Potter also hadn’t reported back yet on how the last wolfsbane batch had worked—or hadn’t worked—which was why Draco had an empty cauldron in his office to begin with.
Tomorrow was the new moon. The halfway point between full moons, and yet Draco hadn’t even started his next batch for Potter because they’d been a bit… distracted. It would have been better if Draco had remembered to ask for the results, because then it would be solely on Potter for forgetting to give them to the potioneer. But he hadn’t asked and he also hadn’t started brewing yet.
Bitterly, Draco thought that it would have even been better if he’d managed to fill his time with other potions orders or research for the case. He could have dedicated hours to trying to decipher whatever potion their last victim had drank, or he could have redoubled his efforts in deciphering the scrap of a recipe that they’d found. Draco had done neither, though, and instead had just sat there, somehow ending up on the floor.
Elle said it was good to just sit sometimes. She said it was his brain’s way of resting and trying to process whatever it was chewing on without letting him consciously focus on it. That was bullshit, in Draco’s opinion, and even if she was probably right that didn’t mean he had to like it. His chest was filled with a frantic, panicky energy. He needed to move or work or do something other than just sit there but he couldn’t.
A huge, heavy sadness had draped itself over his shoulders at some point during the last few hours and Draco couldn’t even remember it happening. Had it always been there? No, he could remember a distinct lack of heaviness that morning. The deep, resounding ache from that morning was still present too, albeit muted now, which meant that it hadn’t morphed into this crushing weight either.
What had changed? There was no horrible potion disaster or scathing howler that could have ruined his mood. Even without a cause, though, Draco knew that the only reason he could feel it now was because he was actively searching his body and mind for a reason as to why he was stuck sitting there uselessly on the floor.
Useless. It’d been a long time since Draco had felt useless. Hopeless and helpless were constants in his life while powerless and meaningless were frequent guests. But Draco made it a point to always be useful—he made potions, after all. He’d chosen possibly the only job he was even remotely qualified for that gave him a clear and immediate reassurance of his own utility every time he delivered on an order. Sure, people didn’t strictly need teeth-whitening potions or leather-polishing tonics but they bought them. They paid Draco to make them, and that made him useful.
He’d been useless during the war, though. Over and over again, he’d had the ability to change things or to make someone’s life a little bit easier, and he’d opted for inaction. Sharper examples of that uselessness still clouded his nightmares occasionally.
He could vividly remember the first time his father had ever called him ‘useless’ to his face. They’d been sitting around the Manor’s dinner table over a very tense, uncomfortable Christmas dinner during Draco’s Sixth Year. Narcissa had asked him how school was going, clearly trying to ask about his assignment from the Dark Lord. When he’d admitted it was proving to be difficult, his father had snapped. He had ‘gently’ reminded Draco of what would happen to them all should Draco fail, and he’d accused the younger blond of intentionally trying to be useless.
As if Draco had the nerve to try to stall the Dark Lord.
Draco bit his lip hard enough to draw blood but, given that he was on the floor and far from any brewing potions, he let it bleed. He deserved to bleed. His eyes were starting to glass over and he was distantly aware of tears trying to fight their way to the surface. Part of him wanted to cry, arguing that it would be a relief. But a much larger, deeper part of him knew that crying was inherently a weakness and Draco was not in a place or position where he could afford to show weakness.
The tears started to fall. Draco cursed himself for being so emotional and for being so weak. He should have been strong enough to keep it hidden and he should have been able to push it down the way he usually did. Today, everything just felt heavier. All the thoughts and emotions brewing just beneath the surface refused to be shut down or held back and Draco knew intuitively that it was because he didn’t want to hold back. For the last… what? Ten years? He’d done nothing but hold them back and force himself to wear a mask.
He wanted to let it go. But, more than that, he wanted someone to be there for him when he let it go. Someone who would—
Draco killed that thought the second his mind suggested flashes of dark, calloused hands pressed against his own sickly pale skin. He couldn’t think like that—he wouldn’t think like that—and he tried to shake it off. Pulling himself to his feet, Draco lurched with how unsteady his limbs had become and he cursed himself again; this time, for not eating. It was a coping mechanism, according to Elle, and an unhealthy one but Draco didn’t give a shit at the moment because he would take any amount of ‘coping’ he could muster. Even if it left his stomach aching, and even if it felt more like self punishment with each day that passed.
“Is now a bad time?”
Draco looked up, half dreading to see Aidan or Kaiser, but he’d already registered the voice and affixed a calm, hopefully-normal smile on his face. Andrea was standing in the doorway. She looked hesitant and still had one foot halfway out the door. Was she still mad at him for the whole Ministry debacle? He desperately hoped not because Draco was not sure that his brain could handle anyone else being angry at him on top of all his current self-loathing.
“No, not at all. Come in.”
Slowly, she entered the room but, the second the door was closed behind her, she’d shifted back into normal-Andrea mode. The tension leaked from her shoulders. She started for her settee, but took a second look at his face and paused. All at once, the tight, distant smile that she’d carried on her lips gave way to an expression that looked dangerously like concern.
“You okay, darling?”
It was the petname that got him. The question was one that he’d been expecting and he’d had a dodge and a retort already prepared, but the petname… Draco swallowed hard. Her voice always softened just the slightest bit whenever she said it. Just like Pansy. He bit his lip again to avoid answering, but his teeth fell into the small wounds he’d bit earlier and he winced. That got her full attention.
“Hey,” She stepped forward, taking the shaking glass from his hand before he could drop it. “Darling, what’s wrong? What happened?”
Draco shook his head, trying to remember the deflection he’d had ready in his head, but Andrea had taken his hand. She was so fucking warm. It was as if Draco’s body had forgotten over the years what temperature a human was supposed to be and he’d become so, so cold without even realizing it… The skin-to-skin contact was enough to make everything fuzzy. Beneath him, he felt the ground begin to lurch and sway along the diagonals the way it always did before he just collapsed. He swore under his breath, biting his lip with renewed vigor.
“Hey.”
A hand settled on his cheek—so warm and so human that it hurt—and a thumb gently but firmly pressed on his jaw. Without even comprehending the request, Draco let his jaw go slack. Andrea cast a spell that Draco didn’t hear, healing his lip effortlessly, and pulled him into a tight hug.
The moment her arms closed around him, Draco shattered.
He let out a choked, embarrassing little sound and buried his face in the top of her shoulder as the tears came in earnest. This was the kind of hug he’d meant. Nothing about this felt good or safe or beneficial, but Draco wasn’t in control anymore. Vaguely, he heard Andrea whispering soft reassurances. Her hand was in his hair, he realized, and the other was pressed firmly against his lower back as if daring him to pull away. This definitely wasn’t safe—no display of weakness was—but it felt secure.
Gradually, Draco let himself relax a little bit into the hold. He couldn’t let himself collapse into the Gatherer the way his body so desperately wanted to because he had no guarantee that she wouldn’t pull away any second now, but he let the more tense muscles calm down. Everything felt far away and difficult, as if he were fighting his way through a pit of mud.
“Hey, Darling, it’s okay. I’ve got you and I’ll stay right here with you for as long as you want, alright? I just need to know if you’re physically okay.”
Draco’s insides churned and, for a second, he considered trying to explain to her how it felt. There weren’t words to describe the way his mind was spinning, as if someone had decapitated him and put his head on an axis like a novelty globe. Or how every muscle in his body felt like undercooked elastic, just waiting to snap. His mouth went dry at the thought of telling her how badly he wanted to fall to his knees and beg her to make it hurt less.
But that wasn’t what she was asking. He was cognizant enough, at least, to understand that she was trying to assess whether or not she needed to take him to a Healer. It came from a place of concern, he was sure. Even if the idea of seeing a Healer sent waves of anxiety through him, Andrea was just trying to help. She was just trying to see if this was some kind of reaction to inhaling bad potion fumes, or if Draco was just really falling apart at the seams in the middle of his office. He couldn’t bring himself to lie and say he was okay—even physically—so he settled for mumbling back:
“S’just the depression.”
Andrea squeezed him a little tighter at that, but didn’t comment. She didn’t ask how he knew it was depression, if he was okay, or if he’d tried eating better and getting good sleep. There was no mention of getting Harry, or contacting his Mind Healer. Draco was pretty sure he could have accepted or even appreciated sympathy in that moment, but he liked this better without it. If Andrea talked, then half his energy would go into arguing with her.
Instead, she just stood there with him and, true to her word, she didn’t let go or even loosen her grip. She ran her fingers gently through his hair, sending tingles down his spine. Draco realized in that moment that no one had ever played with his hair before and he wondered if that was something people normally did. Maybe only if they were dating? Or close friends? Andrea seemed completely comfortable doing it, at least.
She was also gently rubbing his back, tracing her fingers up his spine and then smoothing down between his shoulder blades. The movement and the contact were so hypnotic, Draco couldn’t focus on anything else. It was strangely grounding. No one had ever rubbed his back, except maybe his mother when he’d been very young… Once again, he caught himself wondering if that was normal.
“Um, thanks,” he managed to squeak out.
He wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be a signal to Andrea that he was fine now and that she could let go, but she did. Most of the way. Her hand left his hair and settled on his shoulder. The other, he realized, had moved to rest just above his elbow. Slowly, watching his expression, she smoothed it down over his forearm and circled it gently around his wrist.
Something panged deep in his chest when she squeezed.
“Of course, darling, I’m always here if you need anything. Would a distraction be good right now? We could go get coffee.”
Draco smiled at the offer—because it was polite, and because he’d been trained to since birth—but shook his head. There were too many things he’d ignored and too many potions that he’d procrastinated on. He forced his shoulders to relax, letting her hand there slip off. But, internally, he willed the one on his wrist to stay just a couple seconds longer…
“Alright, no coffee then. Is there anything else I can do to help you?”
“Can you strip some bindweed vines?”