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Articulation	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3486 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Articulation
- 2-Part Two
- 1
- 2
Title: Articulation

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

Pairing: Harry/Draco

Warnings: Issues of disability, BDSM, angst, episodic, present tense

Rating: R

Wordcount: 2600

Summary: Harry being disabled might mean that Harry and Draco have to give up certain types of sex. It doesn’t mean the end of their relationship—at least as far as Draco is concerned.

Author’s Notes: This is another Wednesday one-shot written for phonixfeder, who asked for Harry and Draco being in a BDSM relationship with Harry as the sub and Draco as the Dom until Harry is disabled in a way that makes some of their sex impossible. It will have two parts, the second to be posted next week.

Articulation

            Draco remembers the way Harry felt beneath him.

            He could use almost anything to bind Harry—chains, ropes, the silken bedsheets that he’d brought back from Malfoy Manor when Harry once whispered to him about a certain decadent desire, magical bonds that had no tangible presence and caused no chafing. What really kept Harry tied was his own ardent will, in line with Draco’s, for him to lie there.

            And Draco sometimes spanked him, and sometimes lay beside him teasing him idly with one fingertip until Harry writhed with his lip between his teeth, and sometimes only waited, eyes on Harry’s back, until he was satisfied that Harry could obey a simple command. That might include waiting, not moving, speaking what he was thinking, touching himself with one free hand…it varied from night to night and morning to morning. Harry liked it as much as he did.

            That was the only thing that made their relationship possible.

            Draco stands in front of Harry’s bed at St. Mungo’s, studying him in silence, and can say nothing when he sees the way Harry tries to shift in his sleep, and his legs…simply don’t move with the rest of him.

            Oh, yes, Draco can remember.

*

            Not that remembering does any good as he watches Harry try to heave himself out of bed. They start this way every morning, with Harry insisting that he wants to try to walk.

            Draco stands back and lets him try. He bites the corner of his lips, the inside of his cheek, his tongue, his own teeth. Sometimes he has to go aside during the day and cast Healing Charms on the sores he’s inflicted on his tongue and the insides of his mouth.

            But it works. He never says anything while Harry tries to place his feet flat on the floor, having to look down to do it. He remains silent while Harry loops an arm around the iron circles of the headboard, and looks again, and hauls. He looks and doesn’t speak as Harry balances, pulled only by the force of his arms, wavering.

            He casts a spell that catches Harry before he crashes back to the floor, if it looks like he’s going to. If Harry falls back on the bed, Draco goes over and gently moves his legs into a comfortable position before he fetches the floating chair.

            If Harry turns his head to the side and cries angry tears in the time that Draco’s gone, that’s something Draco doesn’t need to speak of, either.

*

            The Healers did try to offer Harry new legs. But all they could have done was give him wooden legs like the one Moody had—useless, when Harry couldn’t walk and the wooden legs would only make him more unsteady—and cure the scars and wounds on his original ones—which they did.

            They can’t reconnect Harry’s spine, which is what needs to happen, for arcane reasons with lots of Muggle terms that Draco can only guess at. It was severed when the building fell on him.

            The building brought down by Dark wizards who were so desperate to avoid capture that they were evidently willing to die. They cast the curses that weakened the ceiling and the walls. Draco got there when the dust was still drifting in the air, the twin of the bracelet he gave Harry for his last birthday suddenly heating on his wrist when he was in the middle of examining one of the equations his apprentice had created.

            He still remembers what it was like, to float rubble and wood up, ignoring the cries of Aurors who tried to tell him there were other people trapped in there, too. He remembers finding Harry, still, his eyes half-open, instead of either properly open or closed.

            Harry was trapped between one room and another, shielded from part of the falling building even as the rest of it crushed his spine. Trapped his legs. Made it impossible for him to feel or move anything below the waist.

            They can cope more easily than Muggles. A floating chair instead of a wheelchair. Spells to make sure Harry’s comfortable, doesn’t fall, and no longer suffers any pain and didn’t suffer any long-lasting infections or scars. Even spells to remove the liquid from his bladder so he doesn’t have to go to the bathroom without someone to lift him on to the loo.

            Not that Harry wants that. He would rather simply cast the spell himself if Draco’s not around, every hour on the clock.

            Harry, who used to never want to depend on anyone for anything, who took years to surrender to Draco’s care for him and accept that Draco really did find that surrender exciting, is the worst possible candidate Draco can think of for this kind of survival.

            He knows Harry wishes he had died. And yet, Draco doesn’t agree, even as he has his horrid thoughts and lies awake at night listening to Harry’s breathing and not reaching out a hand in comfort because Harry would shrink from it.

            Harry is still alive. That means something else can happen.

            Maybe. If they will ever let it.

*

            “Leave me alone for one day.”

            Draco hesitates when he hears those words, about to come into the kitchen. Harry is wielding his wand to butter and cut his toast, and then to float it over on a plate to the table. The look he turns on Draco is so stubborn that Draco finds himself falling back before he thinks about it, raising one hand almost as a shield.

            “You’re sure?” It’s the only question Draco can ask, and all it gains him is a tightening of Harry’s lips and the way that his hands close on the knife and fork as if he’d like to use them as artificial legs.

            “I’m sure. Your apprentice’s training is suffering, anyway.” Harry gives him a smile that is a parody of the one he had before the accident. “How can you expect Natalie to become a good Arithmancer if you continually neglect her education?”

            “She’s offered to come here. I’ve offered to host her lessons here.” Harry knows that, of course, and it’s an effort for Draco to keep his voice neutral. He has worried about Natalie’s lessons. He studied Arithmancy after the war, published a few critical papers, and suddenly had people who wanted to study with him. Natalie is the latest in a long line of apprentices, and she’s paid well for the privilege.

            But of course Harry hasn’t wanted anyone to see him.

            “Kreacher will bring me anything I can’t reach or float to.” Harry will use the floating chair, but he doesn’t like it. Draco knows he doesn’t like crossing a room unless he can do it with his feet pressed against the floor, looking down to make sure they’re going in the right direction.

            “Well. If you’re sure.” Draco pauses near the door. He knows it’s ridiculous, really. Harry knows all the right spells, and Kreacher could help him into the chair if he fell out of it, or the bed, or an ordinary chair. Really, now that he thinks of it, Draco isn’t sure why he felt compelled to spend every minute with Harry before now.

            “I’m sure.” Harry gives him a brittle smile that nevertheless glitters as bright as sugar. “Go and enjoy your day, Draco.”

            It’s only when he’s deep in the throes of an equation Natalie couldn’t solve that Draco understands why he didn’t want to leave. Harry thinks that Draco can’t enjoy a day spent with him, not anymore.

            In the middle of the afternoon, when he has to Floo Kreacher, Draco understands another reason. He keeps thinking that as long as he’s there, no other building can fall on Harry.

*

            “No.”

            Harry says the single word, pushes him away with a single hand. But Draco would respect far weaker barriers than that.

            It’s the frozen tone in Harry’s voice that shuts him out completely. Draco turns and sits sideways with his legs dangling off the bed. He saw, earlier, how Harry’s eyes darted down to his groin and then away, and his face almost drained of blood.

            Looking at the wall, Draco asks simply, “Why?”

            “Because I can’t feel anything below the waist.”

            Draco closes his eyes. Then he says, “I knew that.”

            “And you wanted to have sex anyway?”

            Draco turns back. They have to have this conversation looking each other in the eye, even if Harry keeps turning his head. The way he’s propped up in bed, he can’t turn far enough away to avoid Draco. “Yes. I thought you could touch me, since you can still move your hands. And I could touch you above the waist.”

            “What good would that do?”

            “What good…” Draco is lost. Obviously things have changed and they can’t do everything the way they used to. But he thought they could at least bring each other some pleasure.

            “I can’t feel it even if I can still come,” Harry says, and his head turns enough that Draco knows he must be straining his neck. “What good is it?”

            Draco finds a sour stickiness in his throat, and he doesn’t know where it came from. He coughs to clear it out and mutters, “I thought that our sex wasn’t all about orgasms. That was what you told me that evening I teased you and put you to bed in handcuffs and then I thought I went too far, and you said that was fine, that was exactly what you wanted sometimes, and I was—”

            “We can’t do that anymore. So what does it matter?”

            Draco stares at him. Harry keeps looking away. And the thought of him in this kind of pain isn’t exciting. It was only ever exciting when it was shared between them, and Draco was the one who got to choose how much there was, because Harry trusted him to find the balance.

            Numbed, Draco stands up slowly. “Would you prefer I sleep somewhere else?” he asks quietly.

            Harry sits there with his head turned away.

            “Somewhere I can’t bother you?”

            Harry sits there with his head turned away.

            In the end, Draco can’t just walk out of the bedroom they’ve shared for so many years. He conjures another bed beside Harry’s, and lies down, closing his eyes. He won’t open them again, he’s decided. He won’t look.

            “I’m here if you need anything during the night.”

            Harry doesn’t reply, and Draco breaks his promise to himself and opens his eyes. At least Harry is lying in the bed with his face turned up towards the ceiling, and that’s likely to be less strain on his neck.

            It’s the only consolation Draco finds that night.

*

            “I wonder if I should move out.”

            Draco feels his shoulders tighten so fast that they send shocks of pain down his spine. But he moderates his breathing and only says, “If you think that’s best.”

            “I should make the decisions about myself.”

            Draco turns around. Harry is in his floating chair by the window, gripping the sill in the way he used to when he was contemplating some sins of the Auror Department. But in those distant times three months ago, he was standing. And now, if he goes back to the Auror Department, they’ll have him doing paperwork.

            Draco knows Harry won’t be able to stand it.

            “If you think you should,” Draco manages to say, working his tongue loose from where it’s braided around his teeth, “then of course you should.”

            “You sound condescending.”

            “It’s a decision you have to make yourself.” Draco sets down the half of a grapefruit he’s been eating. Harry used to always make faces at it, so Draco took to eating it on the windowsill during the mornings when he wants it. But this new Harry doesn’t seem to think about it or care at all. “You’ve made it clear that you don’t really trust me to help participate in those decisions.”

            “I never said that!” Harry swings the floating chair to face him.

            “What we had was based on trust,” Draco tells him, wanting to snarl. “Not just the part where I tied you up and did what we both liked. Every part! Or you wouldn’t have agreed to trust yourself to a Malfoy, and move in with me, and date me when the press disapproved and everyone else in Diagon Alley stared. You would have done the easy thing, or just never given me a chance in the first place, if you didn’t trust me.

            “It’s fine you for to change your mind.” Draco strives with the words, but says them. He wouldn’t have said them before the accident. Harry made it clear then that he wanted to be tied by stronger bonds. But this is a new Harry. The building’s fall shattered old promises, too, that’s clear now, not just Harry’s spine. “But I have the right to know what you’re going to do.”

            Harry stares at him with those wild eyes. Draco just stands there. He doesn’t know what the right thing to do is, to try and influence Harry’s decision or not. Nothing makes any sense, either way.

            He waits, and Harry turns the floating chair and zips out of the dining room. Draco just stands and watches his breakfast dishes until Kreacher comes to clear them away.

*

            When Draco gets home that evening from his lessons with Natalie, Harry, his floating chair, and some of his clothes are gone.

            Kreacher is the one who hands him the letter that Harry left propped against the pillow on his side of the bed. Draco tears it open with hands that he knows are shaking. He bites his lip and tries to remain collected as he reads it.

            Dear Draco,

            I need some time to think. I’ve gone to Grimmauld Place, and I’ve asked Kreacher to come and help me when you aren’t home. He’ll be happy to split his duties between two houses for a while, I think. There’s not that much that needs to be done in any one place, but two will make him busier.

            And I’m sorry that I can’t stay with you right now. I need to think. I don’t want to leave, but to prevent a permanent separation, I need one right now.

            So many things have changed. I need to decide what I want, though, because you’re right. You can’t decide for me. And I would end up resenting you if you tried.

            Let me have this space. I’ll let you know what I’ve decided one way or the other soon. And we can talk by the Floo this evening.

            Love,

            Harry.

            Draco runs his finger along the top of the letter, and breathes out. It heartens him that Harry has said he doesn’t want to leave.

            It’s the only thing that lets him remain calm as he goes about this evening routine, in fact. And several times he looks at the fireplace.

            But he has to hold back. He has to let Harry contact him of his own free will.

            Harry’s will and desire, mingled with his, is what let them trust each other in the first place. And Draco wants that back far more than he wants Harry to be an Auror again, or able to feel, or able to walk.
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Articulation