Second Night - Draco/Neville
Second Night by A.J. Hall

Second Night

"No!!"

The boot slammed, accurately, into his ribs. Again.

"So: you think we were asking for your opinion, were we?"

The boot hit its mark once more with precise, calculated, force.

Involuntarily, he gasped. There was a note of gloating triumph in the voice from a good metre and three-quarters above his head.

"I said we weren't asking for your opinion. Understood?"

By some alchemy he realised that any grunt he emitted — whether acquiescent or defiant in its tone — would be interpreted by these people as an admission of weakness. His will sealed his lips, and he was proud to have emitted no discernable sound as the boot slammed in. Again.

There was a rapid gaggle of noise. He became conscious of a dominant voice: contemptuous, over-arching. Talking to — at — him. Even if indirectly.

"You know, the Powers that Be. Need to be reminded. Sometimes. About what real people think. Really — think. Like about this scum."

Once again, the boot found its mark. The pain juddered through every nerve-ending. With a supreme effort he aborted his gasp of outrage unborn. A faint froth bubbled up onto his lips. His tongue flickered out involuntarily, to wash it away.

Roughly, someone seized him by the chin, turning his face, positioning him more conveniently for the next assault Even while his tortured consciousness gasped: No, I never wanted to be here at all, not me, no not my fault, not in any sense whatsoever, no, never — he was moving his arms feebly to protect his face again the blow he knew had to come—

Except that it didn't.

"Hold on!"

The warning shriek filled the Universe: was all-consuming. There was a pause, and then the sounds of booted feet departing hurriedly in a panicked stampede.

Something — who gives a fuck what? — had, it seems caused his tormentors to flee. Abruptly but — thank God-or-whoever-is-in-charge — comprehensively.

He gasped, feebly, and then turned over onto one bruised side. He had, it seemed, been left abandoned on the howling draughtiness of the corridor of this unspeakable Muggle hotel. Unbelievingly he looked down at the — linoleum — was that what the Muggles called it?

The white, pink and beige swaying below his erratic vision was spotted violent scarlet with his own blood — and, he had to admit — greenish-grey with his own snot, too. He swore, feebly. It was hardly that he held violent prejudices against broken noses in general — indeed, he would be the first to say that in the right face a broken nose might look rather fetching — no, fuck that, downright sexy — but nevertheless — not his own nose.

He retched, feebly, and tried to stand upright. It was not an unqualified success.

Oh, Well. Crawl then. If you must.

They had caught up with him before he got to the walk-way that joined the annex onto the rest of the converted Muggle hotel. That was one blessing. They could hardly work out where he had been heading from where they had jumped him.

But he had no alternative now.

His attack on the bedroom door was more scratch than knock, he had to accept. But it fell open before his feeble assault with gratifying speed.

“Draco? What kep — oh, fuck!!!!!”

In his imagination, if he had ever thought about it at all, once battered almost to oblivion, being swept up in a protective loving embrace ought to have made up for all the agony that had gone before. Inconveniently, it seemed, his bruised and broken ribs had not read the script.

“Sorry,” Neville muttered, responding to a gasp of pain which — blessed freedom — he need, no longer, suppress, and breaking away from him. “But what the hell happened to you?”

Shrugging — the slightest possible movement of his shoulder blades informed him — was right out. And, indeed, the way his lips felt they were swelling, getting words out sooner rather than later seemed like rather a cunning plan, too.

“A bunch of hooded thugs jumped me — just in the main block corridor—" Oddly, he yawned. It was suddenly exhausting even to think about it. Neville caught him as he started to topple over.

He woke to hear angry voices a bit above his head. Involuntarily he curved an arm round to protect his face, before distinguishing the flat, warm Lancashire cadences that reassured him he had reached safe harbour, despite his fear-ridden imaginings. Oblivious of his gesture, the speakers pressed on with an evidently heated argument.

"No, Hermione. Can't you get it into your skull that if he isn't safe walking about the corridors of this base, then he most certainly won't be safe in an Infirmary where everyone knows not only where he is, but that he'll have been stuffed with sleeping potions to the eyeballs and can’t defend himself? Or, instead, paint a target on his chest and peg him out in the middle of the nearest Quidditch pitch, why don't you?"

Hermione's voice — his wavering consciousness registered, now, its familiar high, determined tones — responded.

"Look, Neville, I'm sure the Base Commander or High Command can't really have colluded — they'd be shocked to find out—"

There was a snarled sound of sheer exasperation.

"Fancy standing up and running that argument to his mother, happen you've guessed wrong? Oh, I forget, Hermione. You haven't actually met her. Pray you don't. At least, not in these circumstances. I'd as soon piss off Gran. Or the Dark — You Know Who. No, I don't suppose any of Command know a thing about it. Taken bloody good care not to, for what that's worth. I'm just betting — heavily — that whoever did do it had — reason — to believe there wouldn't be too full-blooded an investigation if they did manage to kill him or cripple him for life."

The voice changed, became desperate. "Hermione, you've got to help. Otherwise the only thing for it is for me to try and heal this mess. And you were at school with me. How sensible is that as an idea, do you think?"

Draco, involuntarily, emitted a small moan, pitched somewhere between protest and assent. Both of them turned — he could dimly make them out through his fast-swelling lids.

“He's awake,” Hermione observed, somewhat unnecessarily.

No shit, Sherlock.

It was far too much effort to speak the words aloud. He yawned, hugely, suppressing a squeak of pain as the stretching of his mouth tore apart raw skin that was just beginning to bond, though not necessarily to what it was supposed to.

“That's another thing,” Neville said urgently. “He just staggered in and fell asleep, and he hasn't been awake for more than about a minute and a half at a stretch ever since.”

“Concussion.”

He had spent almost seven years of school being irritated almost beyond bearing by those bossy, confident tones and general knowitalwfulness, but the firm diagnosis — how dare anything not be what she declared it to be? — was suddenly deeply reassuring. He had never underestimated her talents, much as he had wanted to in the past , and her formidable sense of justice was now, by some irony of fate, on his side.

He had learned — some time after he had turned the corner from half-dead and almost wholly rotted into a fragile and despairing convalescence — that the Allies had been bullied by her into organizing a search party to bring him in hours before his mother had even been made aware of his danger. Without Narcissa's inside knowledge, the Allies could never have been in time, and he had — especially in the light of recent developments — no illusions about the degree of enthusiasm that the Allied search party would have brought to their task — but still, Hermione had cared enough about justice to a stricken enemy to mobilize it. And had had the imagination to realise that he would need help, too.

Yet another part of his body chimed in with a protest at its treatment.

His instinctive whimper of pain turned into a small sigh as a warm, dry, squared off hand slipped under his shoulders, lifting his head gently so an Analgesia Potion could be tipped drop by drop, and with infinite care, between his swollen lips.

“It's OK, Draco.” Warm breath stirred his hair — where it was not matted to his skull with blood, that was. “Hermione's going to repair what they did to you. Aren't you?”

And the gentle, reassuring tones nevertheless conveyed a hint of underlying steel. He could not, by now, open his eyes at all, but it would not have surprised him at all if Neville's other hand was at that moment extending a wand at Hermione. There was a squeak of surprise, and then, in a voice that held a note of grudging respect, Hermione said, "Yes, Neville. If you insist. But I'm not a trained Healer, and if I miss anything, on your own heads be it. Both of you."

"Thanks, Hermione." Neville's voice sounded slightly hesitant, as if conscious of having gone too far, but his arm, curved around Draco's shoulders, remained steady. His lips brushed close to Draco's ear.

“Don’t worry.” A broken, hesitant whisper — barely audible, even at this range. “I’ve got you. And I’m not letting go.”

And then the darkness closed in around him.

::~::~::~::

Neville perched anxiously on the edge of the bed. The swelling on Draco’s face was subsiding, but ample residual bruising remained. There was an abrupt groan of pain as Draco, evidently, recovered consciousness. His long-lashed lids flicked up, and he stared straight up at the ceiling, not acknowledging Neville’s presence at all. The expression on his face — haughty, bleakly sneering out from some high tower onto the peasantry cowering far below — was hideously familiar from nearly seven years of school.

Neville gulped.

It’s just knowing what’s going on behind it that’s new.

He stretched out a tentative hand, allowing it to rest on Draco’s shoulder, bare where they had had to cut the blood-stained shirt away to re-seat the dislocated joint.

“Hermione’s gone,” he reported.

“Oh. Good.” Draco’s voice was flat, wholly uninflected. With an effort — there was obviously a ferocious legacy of pain still throbbing under his bruised skin, for all their efforts — he sat up on the bed and swung his feet to the floor. “Well, I suppose I’d better be doing likewise.”

He stood up, apparently suppressing a gasp of discomfort with an effort of sheer will.

“You what—?” The sheer idiocy of it rendered Neville, momentarily, speechless. Then, as Draco hobbled a painful step or two near the door, he jolted into action.

“You aren’t going anywhere, you fuckwit,” he snapped. Draco turned, favouring him with an eyebrow-raised stare which was intended to indicate arrogant disbelief that anyone had the temerity to question him but which, given the state of Draco’s face and his dishevelled hair, seemed merely absurd and a trifle pathetic; a toy poodle assuming borzoi airs. Neville grabbed hold of the edge of the duvet and flipped it back. “Get in.”

“I beg your pardon?”

There was a charged silence before Draco continued.

“Look, whatever our plans may have been before those thuggish imbeciles intervened, I’d expected that the concept of not precisely in the mood might have got through to you.”

Neville felt himself flushing hotly. “That wasn’t what I meant. How shallow do you think I am, anyway?”

Draco shrugged, eloquently. “Tramp’s bath?”

Neville took a step closer. “Look, you should be in bed. And I’d have thought even you would have worked out why it isn’t the brightest idea for you to be running about the corridors this evening, trying to get back to yours.”

“Running?” His voice went up, incredulously. “I can’t imagine myself running anywhere again. Thanks to your loyal friends and comrades in arms.”

“I know.” His arm went round Draco’s shoulders but Draco shrugged it off, as though it burnt him. Neville tried not to let the pain of the rejection show in his voice.

“Do you want me to go to the Base Commander after all?”

“What would be the point?” The flat bitterness in Draco’s voice turned his heart over. “I couldn’t fault your analysis earlier. They must have been pretty certain that no-one official was going to be arsed to look out too hard for me. But they were dead wrong to overlook ma. You were right there, too.”

“If there should come a thousand swords to carry my bones away / Belike the price of a jackal’s meal were more than a thief could pay,” Neville murmured, unstoppably, before he thought. Draco, plainly not recognizing the Muggle quotation, simply looked blank before continuing, still in the same flat, hopeless tone.

“Anyway, if you know what’s good for you, you should chuck me out before they cotton on I’m here. Or they’ll decide that you’re next on the list for — re-education. And god forbid if they ever find out about—”

His gesture encompassed the events of the last twenty-four hours, without need for words. Neville, his heart sinking, saw how Draco had turned away from him; the resolute avoidance of any touch — the determination, it seemed, to go it alone.

In desperation, he caught at Draco’s shoulders with both hands, swinging him round to face him, trying to summon into his voice some fugitive echo of his Gran’s tone when trying to order recalcitrant house-elves back into line (her family, a faint voice at the back of his mind commented cynically, being far too brow-beaten to offer any acceptable resistance).

“Well, we’ll talk about that in the morning. But for you: bed, now. You look awful.”

Draco raised an eyebrow; there was a wavery flicker of his lips.

“Not two sentences that make a lot of sense in conjunction,” he drawled.

Neville set his teeth, conscious that he seemed to be winning, aware that the merest hint of weakness would have Draco going out of the room to face — whatever wandered the corridors of the base awaiting his return.

Abruptly, with that blood-congealing certainty by which he Knew things — had Known them ever since early childhood, no matter how nonsensical the adults thought him — he realised that Death was waiting outside in the corridors of the base, and that if Draco were, even now, to leave the room he would never see him alive again.

He reached out and gripped his wand firmly. Draco’s eyes widened with shock, pain and — heart-rendingly — a sort of recognition.

At last, it seems, I’m talking his language. Oh shit.

Notwithstanding the self-evident threat he posed as he stood there (and where was Draco’s wand, anyway? Had the thugs stolen it? Smashed it?), he made his voice very gentle.

“I don’t want to have to go through this again. For my sake as much as yours. Get into bed, and we’ll talk about it in the morning.”

Draco sighed, abruptly. Fastidiously, and as though every movement hurt (as well they might) he stripped in a couple of economical gestures, and slid under the duvet. Trying to conceal his sigh of relief, Neville climbed in beside him. Draco lay on his back: frozen and unequivocally distanced. Neville found himself withdrawing his protective, comforting arm before it had been half extended.

It became a long, wakeful, self-conscious darkness in the bedroom.

At about two or so (Neville was aware of when the base typically shut down for the night, and the bare two hour window before it awoke, and even though he could never stand to wear his wrist-watch in bed, his judgment of time was precise) his nerve snapped.

“Well?” he demanded.

There was a muffled, broken noise out of the darkness beside him. He resisted an impulse to stretch out his hand once more.

“Why is it,” he asked reasonably into the silence, “that you seem to think it’s less intimate for you to let me bugger you than to see you cry?”

There was a pause. And then Draco said, in a voice that was trying very hard to be off-hand, but only succeeded in coming over as choked,

“Well, at least in the first case I can be clear about what’s in it for you.”

At that, without thought of the reaction, he put both his arms round Draco’s scrawny chest and held on. Although Draco wriggled to evade him, he persisted. Grimly.

“Oh, you stupid, stupid bastard,” he muttered into the fine hair which intruded before his nose and mouth as he exhaled.

Imperceptibly — incredibly — the emaciated body relaxed in his arms.

“Why?” a high, aggrieved voice demanded.

“Because.” He shifted position a little, to make the burden — slight as it was — a little lighter against his protesting biceps.

“And?” Draco’s breath trembled against his chest hairs.

“Because I wanted to.” He paused, and realised, inevitably, that he had — at last — come to a place where embarrassed equivocation would not do. He cleared his throat.

“Because I wanted you,” he clarified.

“Me?” There was an infinity of bitterness in the tone which came back out of the darkness to him. “You fool. I’ve let down everyone who’s ever relied on me. And my own father, it turned out, hated me so much he tried to kill me. Slowly, at that.”

There was a pause. The voice continued.

“You know — the best thing that could have happened — this evening — would have been if no-one had come along until they’d finished the job. For everyone concerned. Especially you. And me, for that matter. I’d certainly not have said no.”

“Don’t.”

His guts wrenched.

His embrace had tightened before he knew it. One hand slid down along Draco’s back — where every vertebra was clearly defined — over the sharply carved buttocks, the sunken flanks — back up his spine, came up to tangle, suddenly frantic, in the soft downy hair at the nape of the neck, his other hand reaching up to pull the head down, the thin unresisting lips forced hard against his own, his legs wrapping around the slender waist, the vision — too vivid in his head of what might have been — oh god, no, please no, not now, not now I’ve found you at last , oh god no, no—

His voice came out as an inarticulate sob.

“Please don’t ever say that again. Please?”

He paused. There was something about the angle of Draco’s head — propped against his chest—

“Look — I’ve known you’ve been running on empty since practically the first time I saw you again—”

A brief, dismissive exhalation. “Running on what?”

“Forget it. Something Muggles say.”

He paused. His heart was thudding, and he knew that the thing was impossible.

How do you say to someone that being with them isn’t even a matter of choice: that so far as you’re concerned it’s something inevitable, something you knew, instantly was irrevocable — was inherently right — from the first time you saw firelight beating on their thin, exhausted face in a deserted kitchen — and even in that moment of realization you recognised it was onlya revelation of something you ought to have known long before, not new knowledge, not in any sense that mattered at all—

To say anything of that at this moment would be to offer himself up to total ridicule. And though heaven knew he had had enough of that in his life, and should, by all rights, have been hardened to it—

Not here, not now.

Not about this.

Not from you.

But the hurt — the hurt radiating off the fragile body clutched against him was so palpable. There must be something he could do.

Oh, my love—

At least, it seemed, his hands were still capable of communication. And he could feel — if it was not all useless optimism and wishful thinking — as it might well be, after all — that Draco was becoming calmer in response to his touch. Impulsively, he hugged him close again. Draco released a small, choked sound from the very depths of his throat.

The noise, somehow, unlocked Neville’s ability to speak.

“Sweetheart. I — look — you should know that I do care about you. Very much. In fact — massively.” He freed himself, and pushed himself up on one elbow, looking down at Draco’s frail body in the moonlight. His tone, he knew (and cursed himself for) was heavy with apology. “But — look — I’m not trying to get heavy. I mean — I can understand if you didn’t want to know — it’s not that I’m expecting you to—”

He broke off. With an effort, Draco too had pushed himself up to look him straight in the eye in the dim room. His voice shook.

“You actually care about me? I mean, actually care? It isn’t just the sex?”

“I — well — yes — but—"

The intense pale eyes glowed uncannily at him out of the darkness. Draco’s voice had a note of sheer incredulity.

“You do realise what you’re saying? You do realise what I’m like?”

He paused, momentarily. Then the full implications of Draco’s response struck home, and he thought his chest was going to burst apart from sheer pleasure.

“Oh, yes,” he said, aware he was grinning like a lunatic, hopeful that the room was still sufficiently dark and that Draco had not had the presence of mind to case an ex tenebris charm. “Arrogant. Obnoxious. Absolute git.”

Draco’s exhalation of sheer fury was all he could have hoped for.

“What?” he snapped, in a clipped tone that was almost a parody of his normal accents.

Neville shrugged, apologetically. “Did I get miss something out? I thought you were worrying, in case I hadn’t worked out the full implications—”

“Yes, but — arrogant? Obnoxious?”

He nodded, his eyes dancing. Gradually Draco — who had jerked into an upright posture at his initial words, swiveled round to face him. Uncharacteristically, his shoulders drooped.

“Actually — I can see why — you might feel that way about me. After all, school—"

Neville raised his hand in an utterly foreign — but somehow, utterly right — gesture of decisive interruption.

“You can forget school. Given that you behaved like a total little shit — and you did—”

Draco’s squawk of protest was lost as he surged unstoppably on.

“You still had one thing going for you which no-one else in that dump — pupil, staff, cat or ghost — had.”

“Ack?” Draco, it seemed, was too overwhelmed to make his question coherent. Nevertheless, Neville gestured explanatorily in his direction.

“You were the only one in the entire fucking place who treated me exactly the same as he treated Harry.”

The flabbergasted pause seemed inclined to become prolonged, when Draco, abruptly, registered something.

“You — aren’t taking me seriously.”

Neville’s grin was by now, he realised, sounding in his voice. “Well, I thought you were doing quite enough of that for both of us.”

His tone changed, abruptly. He reached out once more to pull Draco against him, and to breathe into his hair.

“I can’t imagine ever being without you, love. So don’t go getting yourself killed. Please?”

Draco made a small assenting noise, and Neville, turning to cradle his still, presumably, bruised body against his chest more effectively, felt contentment ripple down through his whole body, to the very extremity of his toes and fingers.

The lock to my key. The missing piece of the jigsaw. The resolution of the anagram.

Sleepiness was heavy on his eyelids, and as he moved into a more comfortably position he felt Draco move, also, to accommodate him, almost by instinct, as though they had once been part of the same being, then sundered, and now rejoined after an infinity of searching.

:::::end:::::