@kinkuary Day 1/28: Gagging

society depicts hell as the hot underworld from Dante’s Inferno, but I think we’ve all encountered some variation of Satan’s influence and it fucking looks like this:

i love figures in folklore who are morally ambiguous like. their wikipedia page will say like 'they will help lost travellers find their way back to the path also they are sometimes known to drown people and eat their bones.' ok!!!

My brother passed away last year during a time when I couldn't see friends or all of my family due to lockdown. AO3 absolutely helped me get through the darkest days of my life.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m perfectly happy to explain my philosophy. I’ve had a quarter of a century in fandom to think about it, after all.

No one can donate to every cause, and every year there are horrible things going on in the world.

You have to pick.

If you try to do everything, you will accomplish nothing.

I don’t owe anyone my time or money and I don’t feel guilty when people try this hackneyed anti-AO3 tactic on me. It’s common in every activist space too as a form of sealioning. It’s not a gotcha: it just means you have bad values and don’t understand how to be an effective activist in real life.

For a lot of people, their AO3 donation is part of their entertainment budget, not their ‘help starving people’ type donation budget, so they aren’t even related in the first place.

For me personally, supporting arts organizations is about recognizing that spiritual and emotional needs are valid too. Literal physical survival is only one small part of human existence.

AO3 has been fantastically important for people’s mental health during the pandemic.

1x01 || 3x13

Written for day four @hpkinktober prompt Amortentia.

Thank you so so much to @rockingrobin69 for the wonderful beta and great cheerleading. You really helped my spirits.

Amortentia is fickle. It's a fickle potion, due to how its properties constantly change. The ingredients stay the same, Draco knows them like the back of his hand. But the smell changes — consistently.

He would brew small portions, to keep a few vials on hand. Wanting the shop to smell comforting, clean and welcoming with the potion happily bubbling in the far back, behind a closed door.

Everyone smelled something distinct, a sensitive nose to what was lingering around the bottles, trinkets and ingredients. All customers would comment on the fragrance of the shop, saying how lovely the smells always were. Many would comment on the familiarity, only changing the most miniscule amount. Draco always found that rather fascinating.

Were these people falling out of love? Did their heart split into two and the aroma linger on two or more objects of their affections? Draco always wondered and pondered. Others would stop in while browsing and compliment the new fragrance for today, making Draco aware of their own hearts wandering nature.

It was something to pass the time. Pure amusement when he would watch his customers’ eyes glaze lightly — the smell entrancing them for mere seconds. Shaking their heads and continuing on as if nothing had stopped them in their tracks.

He enjoyed this, but also did this for selfish reasons. His shop was home, and this helped solidify that notion. Smells being the closest to memory and emotion — Draco knew how his Amortentia smelled.

It never did change.

When Granger first walks into the shop, a tiny bell tinkling announcing her arrival, Draco is rather surprised. She asks about Valerian root, and what potions he has in stock for sleeping aid. He's still rather surprised she's even here, looking at his inventory and asking about proper sleep potions.

However, she does compliment how clean the shop is — and how gorgeous it smells.

"Like a crisp autumn morning and baked treats. A lot like treacle tart."

He knows his eyebrows raise to his hairline, and also knows she has to be smelling Weasley. Which is a little off-putting — but he thinks it's because Weasley has never really been his favorite person. He'd rather not know what he smells like.

Granger brings Potter into the shop a few days later. Draco finds it amusing how he ogles the crystals at one side of the shop, eyes wide with wonder. Poking at the magical plants in the corner and picking up a few potions for purchase.

Almost as if he hasn't been a wizard all his life.

They both walk towards the counter as Draco opens the till and the smell is so overwhelming that tears prickle his eyes as he raises a hand quickly to his nose.

"Are — are you alright?" Potter looks concerned and Granger has one brow raised in a quizzical expression.

"Yes — I thought I was going to sneeze. Pardon me."

Draco continues with their purchase, with the bouquet circling up and around his nose, filling his head and making him float.

It's broom polish, sandalwood with hints of citrus. Still the same after all these years —he just wasn't aware of who the potion portrayed.

Days go by, and he contemplates the idea of throwing away any and all of the potion that sits in his back room, behind the closed door. Wants to scrub the pearlescent liquid away and never have it trace his shop again.

But this smell — the one that smells of home and love. He's grown so accustomed to it, that he can't bring himself to toss the cauldron. Lets it simmer and sit like he always does. The incense and deep perfume still wafting throughout his shop as he sits in the back with the small sign on the door flipped to closed.

Granger is a regular now. Picking up items that she needs for additional health purposes, potions for Weasley and their tiny freckled baby at home. She's an interesting witch, though Draco will never speak that aloud to anyone — she invites him to the pub. His mouth hangs open and she smiles as he agrees and is now irritated with the predicament he's placed himself in.

He slides into the seat next to Granger as she passes him a glass of whiskey and a pint.

"I wasn't sure what you drank, so I grabbed the drinks I thought you might enjoy."

He smiles at her, and feels oddly at home.

Draco is well into his third pint when Potter stops by, sliding into the open seat next to him.

"Hello. Hermione did say that you'd be here this evening."

Potter grins and Draco's stomach jumps into his throat. He's never really been this close to Potter before and he smells exactly like his shop. He's mortified with himself and doesn't quite understand it.

The smell has never changed all these years.

"Did you work today?" Potter takes a sip from his glass, foam stuck to his beard as he dabs it away with a napkin.

"Earlier I did, yes." Draco sips on the small shot of whiskey, the burn sliding all the way down his throat.

"Ah, that makes sense — you smell just like your shop. It's like parchment and lavender. I always wondered how you made it smell so nice."

Draco chokes on the rest of his whiskey.

Spring

Under the slowly awakening trees the dappled sunlight softens their edges. One nymph-like in his beauty, all cheekbone and pale arches, weaves spring flowers into his sleeping lover’s curls. Long dark lashes against golden skin flutter open and green eyes glitter up at him. Their lips are kiss-bitten; pink and full like the blossoms all around.

@drarrymicrofic prompt: Androgynous

Hannibal (2013-2015)

1x01 || 3x13

on anti culture & how narrative influences reality

So look.

A common point of discourse from anti-shippers is the fact that narrative influences reality, and therefore - they claim - depictions of harmful acts will have a normalizing effect on how real people perceive those acts outside of fiction. The problem with this claim is that, while there is evidence for the idea that narrative can indeed influence reality, it’s a gross distortion of fact to say that it does so in the specific way they mean.

Read on below the cut:

Keep reading

✨They’re dating✨ I needed a boost of serotonin so I decided to draw my beloved couple: possessive Draco and clueless Harry.

Btw, I feel like he’s prettiest Draco I’ve ever drawn. I usually prefer him with wavy long hair with a man-bun or something like that, but I think that it makes more sense that he didn’t have such long hair or that kind of hair style before his 20s.

Love,

Cuckooboo

the weed which strings the hangman's bag, by peachpety

A gift for @gryffindorhearts

A Wheel of Drarry Mini-Exchange 2.0

* * *

Rating: M || TW blood & injury || angst; hopeful ending; mild hurt/comfort; smoking

Lightning flickers in the clouds above the narrow alleyway. Harry counts three Godric’s-Hollows before the boom of thunder rattles his bones. The storm approaches quickly; the last gap had been five. He pulls up his hood, muscling a shiver into submission at the caress of soft cotton against his shorn scalp.

He had been slouched at the kitchen table, his curls a dark scattering of commas on the table around him, carving stripes into the label of an empty beer bottle with the shears, when the folded crane note had flitted through Grimmauld’s kitchen window.

Gallows | 20:37

His upended chair hadn’t even hit the floor before he Apparated.

Wind howls through the pub’s alleyway like the hollow note singing from the bottleneck of a stout. Another lightning strike bleaches Harry’s vision, but it’s the crack of Apparition a moment later that shocks him. His magic eddies in his palms, coiled and ready.

Thunder rolls, and Malfoy steps from the shadows, an agonizing emergence, each step a revelation that he’s alive—a scarred Chelsea boot, soft-worn jeans sagging below a Ramones t-shirt, his blond hair.

Alive, not dead.

Relief softens Harry’s muscles, followed quickly by clenching anger. “It’s been a fucking month.”

Malfoy chuckles blithely. “It’s good to see you, too, Potter,” he says.

Harry intentionally limited interactions with his undercover agents, but this was borderline negligence. And insubordinate and dangerous and...

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck me yourself.”

Harry's shoulders relax. “You wish.”

Malfoy leans against the opposite brick wall. He lolls his head back and juts his hips forward, watching Harry with hooded eyes. The cigarette tucked behind his ear flits into his hand, and he lights it with the snap of a Muggle lighter. The flame’s glow highlights his knuckles, mangled and bloody.

Harry’s magic spikes, warming his fingertips. “You’re hurt.” He reaches for Malfoy’s hand.

Malfoy jerks his arm away. “Don’t.”

“It looks fractured.”

“It is.” Malfoy cinches his grin around the cigarette, inhaling his cheeks hollow.

Harry exhales a curse. He used to believe that Malfoy bloodied and beaten was retribution, that his broken bones were recompense. It had happened often enough at the hands of fellow trainees, and once by Harry. Only once. Instead of vindication, he’d felt as he does now—nauseated and repentant at the realization that he was the only one who could beat life into eyes as dead as slate.

“I have the information,” Draco announces.

Harry straightens. “I’ll take you in,” he says in a rush. “We can debrief Robards—”

“No.”

Harry frowns. He’d been warned by his superiors, cautious tales of undercover Aurors gone rogue, good men and women who got too involved, who couldn’t separate the job from reality.

“There’s another meeting next month,” Malfoy says. “Bigger fish.”

The clouds light up, revealing Malfoy’s face in a kinetoscope series of flashes—earnest, focused, resolute. Like that day in Robards' office when he demanded to be given the mission and Harry was assigned point. Like later that same day in the showers when Harry was on his knees and Malfoy moaned Harry’s name like a prayer.

He’d left on assignment an hour later.

Smoke curls from the tip of Malfoy’s cigarette, an ephemeral rope cast asunder by the wind, as murky as the puddles peppering the cobblestones between them. Slick film coats the water’s grey surface, shiny with misshapen rainbows.

Like Malfoy’s eyes, Harry thinks madly. Alive, not dead. Alive, not dead.

“There are other Aurors—” he begins.

“This goes deeper in the organization than we thought—”

Harry’s plea raises his voice over Malfoy’s. “Others who can do this—”

“I can do this—”

“No!”

A flash and a boom announces the storm’s arrival seconds before the sky opens up.

Malfoy narrows his eyes, mouth twisting in the rain. “You think I can’t—”

“Of course you can!” Harry slumps against the wall. The bricks dig into his shoulder blades. “You’re the best agent the Ministry’s seen since the First War.” He punches his hands into his hoodie pocket and finds a siege of paper cranes. He wads them in his fist. “You’re”—brilliant, insufferable, everything—”a twat.”

Malfoy stares. Rain pelts his face and drips from his eyelashes. He summons a crumpled pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket, and in two steps he’s in front of Harry, Amazonian-tall and weed-thin. A crescent bruise mars his cheekbone.

“I only have one left,” Malfoy says softly. Blood pools in the inner white of his eye. It’s shaped like a heart, and Harry wants to drown in it.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Hey, blondie,” a greasy voice cuts through the rain. A Muggle bloke stands nearby—too close, Harry thinks. The man sways in a drunken cloud of stale beer. “You got a cigarette for me?” He licks his lips, leering at Malfoy, and Harry’s magical hackles rise.

Malfoy moves as if to offer, and Harry yanks his hand from his pocket, littering the stones with papers. He digs the cigarette out of the pack and puts it in his mouth. The taste is sharp and biting.

The drunk shuffles away. Harry wrinkles his nose and the stones beneath the man’s feet lift to trip him.

A sly grin slides onto Malfoy’s face. He crowds in closer, igniting the Muggle lighter, protecting the flame from the rain with a bubble of dry magic from his elegant broken hand. Harry cups his hand over Malfoy’s. His healing magic leaches into pale skin, knitting sinew and bone. With a deep inhale, he draws the flame onto the cigarette, smoke into his lungs, only to collapse into a coughing fit.

Malfoy’s smirk softens, and he sweeps his gaze over Harry’s face. He pauses, eyebrows furrowed, and in a swift movement he yanks the hoodie off Harry’s head. Rain wets Harry’s scalp, a pitter-pat beat matching Malfoy’s deepening inhales and exhales.

“Harry.”

“It’s been a month,” Harry rasps. “A fucking month.” He drops his gaze to his own feet. He’s not wearing shoes.

Malfoy vanishes the cigarettes and draws Harry to him with a firm hand to the back of Harry’s neck. Harry goes easily, melting into Malfoy’s comforting solidity and warming magic, tension slackening like a stayed hangman’s rope.

Alive, not dead.

“It’ll grow back by morning,” he mutters into Malfoy’s shoulder. “It always does.”

Draco chuckles. “Good. We can’t have you looking like a naked mole rat when we debrief Robards tomorrow, now can we?”

Harry’s heart shudders in his chest like paper cranes in the rain. “Fuck you.”

Malfoy guides Harry’s face to whisper against his lips, “Fuck me yourself.”

And he kisses Harry’s smile.

* * *

For the brilliant and wonderful @gryffindorhearts! It's been a long time coming and I apologize for making you wait, but FINALLY here is your gift! Writing this was an entire journey...and while the fic is short, the path was long and I thank you for your patience in allowing me to travel at my own pace.

Big thanks to toluene and @wheezykat for the beta & encouragement. It takes a village y'all and I'm blessed.

Thanks to @hogwartsfirebolt and @drarrymicrofic for this gift exchange - it's wonderful!

READ ON AO3