Work Text:
i killed a plant once because i gave
it too much water. lord, i worry
that love is violence.
— José Olivarez, from “Getting Ready to Say I Love You to My Dad, It Rains,” Citizen Illegal
*
Everything gets worse when Potter starts to smile at him.
Potter smiles more in the first month of classes than he did the entirety of his life before the war. It always seems like an accident, something that overtakes his body the way a fever would, a reflex he doesn’t notice happening. There is too much smile in him, and he gives of it freely, to his friends, to Professors, to the minuscule first years who are too young to understand that the castle’s scars are hidden by glistening reconstructions, patched exterior walls, and clean, unscuffed corridors.
The smiles he gives Draco are shakier than the others — hesitant, half-formed. Draco thinks at first he is just in the wrong place at the wrong time, stepping into the aimless light of Potter’s gaze as he walks into the eighth year dormitory, which is more like the Gryffindor dormitory since Draco is the only Slytherin who returned. But Potter’s smiles linger in the way accidents do not, no matter how fleeting they are. Maybe Draco would hate them less if they didn’t feel like apologies — apologies that Potter was seeing him, apologies that Draco was there at all.
Most days, Draco wishes he had never come back. There was nothing waiting for him on the other side of Hogwarts, save for the delayed inevitability his friends had the bravery to face — a world which had every right to reject them and did so soundly and at every turn. It is a fate that would be easier to accept if he had never learned how that smile could light up the hollow parts within him he tried so hard to ignore. How the sound of Potter’s laughter carrying up from the common room had no place in Draco’s past, but still rings out like memory. How sometimes, in the darkest quiet of night when Draco is alone with nothing but himself and the thin musk of ancient wooden bed frames and the lumbering creek of a spent, sighing castle — it seemed like the sound of something that may be in his future.
But Draco has learned long ago that the way he wants is wrong. Wanting isn’t supposed to feel like this, something that would chafe his hands to hold, that would burn his throat to swallow. Desire shouldn’t feel like a chasm, the empty, hollowed parts of him luring victims to the depths. His smiles shouldn’t feel so distorted when he tries to return them, like a complex charm he’d yet to master. His lips shouldn’t feel like two twisting snakes, pulling the skin of his face taut with a false, empty lie.
Potter’s smiles are dangerous, the way they invite Draco to forget. But the blood red stain on his arm reminds him every night. He feels it in his sleep: serpent slithering from skull, traversing the planes of his skin as he sleeps, and salting the Earth behind it.
*
His mother used the spell in her rose gardens when he was a child: Crescere Vis. It required a delicate flick of the wrist, like guiding the music of a symphony, or like asking a favor of the magic in the air instead of making demands of it. He watched her from his window during the long summers in the Manor as the skies grew dark and rumbling, tending to the only source of color in a world turned grey.
The easiest way to know which of her roses were natural or magicked was by touch. The Earth made flowers that were delicate, that knew to bruise at a pinch and wither in the cold. The petals of Narcissa’s flowers felt too thick between his fingers, fortified against the claims of nature. They never died properly, refusing the Earth their fallen petals, refusing to expose what death would make them — stem, and thorn, and naked bud.
Draco casts at the edge of the Forbidden Forest on the precipice of dusk. His wrist is clumsier than Narcissa’s, his wand disobedient in preference for its previous owner. The Mark swirls beneath his wand, jaw unhinging in an unimpressed yawn. The beast slithers through cavernous eye sockets, its tongue tickling his skin in a silent hiss. He casts once, then twice, and then more times than he can remember. But flowers can’t bloom on barren land.
Potter is sleeping on the couch in the common room when Draco returns, the reflections of the fireplace dancing across his glasses. Draco wonders what it might feel like to cover him with the blanket crumpled at his feet, to deliver safety and warmth with shaky hands. But the pop of the fire pulls Draco from his thoughts and reminds him that hands cannot warm what they have tried to burn.
*
Draco wakes in the night to the unmistakable sensation of growth.
It is a feeling of hunger, of being pushed and pulled at once, of being wrung out from the core. It is not just the growth, but the emptying of what growth requires, and if he knew less of pain, he might think it felt similar.
He casts a lumos in the darkness, and finds upon his arm a blooming artifice of spring. The Mark has flowered in an array of blush pink and ivory white, blanketing his forearm in petal and leaf and vine as if inked onto his flesh with magic. He watches as the flowers sway in an artificial breeze that pushes goosebumps across his skin. A blood red tongue flicks out from between them, and the beast follows, slithering on its belly across the field of roses and carnations before retreating into the hollow socket of the skull’s eye.
Potter sits up in the bed beside him. Draco is too slow to extinguish his wand, and Potter glimpses the best and worst of him, bare and on display, before the darkness can forgive him.
Potter rubs one eye with a fist like a child trying to erase the memory of a nightmare. “What are you doing?” he slurs in thick, half-asleep speech. “So bright.”
“Nothing,” Draco says.
But Potter has never been able to resist the abjections of a victim. “Is it hurting you?” he asks, as if he could ever understand. He moves slowly to the bed, the mattress caverning beneath his weight as he sits at Draco’s feet. “Let me see.”
Draco doesn’t know why he lets him do it, but he does. Maybe it’s because it would be the first time Potter ever touched him that wasn’t in anger or mercy. Maybe because despite what Draco has learned, there is still that seed of ignorant hope that Potter might understand.
But he can see immediately in Potter’s eye that he doesn’t. Disgust, or the revulsion of abhorrence, would have been easier. Pity would have been easier. Even hatred, Draco knows, is easier.
Potter’s eyes illuminate with wonder instead, and Draco knows that this is worse than his smile could ever be. His lips part, his fingers hovering thoughtlessly above Draco’s arm before he lowers them, five breath-light whispers of touch on Draco’s skin. Draco keeps the wince off of his face. This is one skill he knows expertly.
“It’s — “ Potter whispers, seemingly surprised by the words as he says them. “It’s beautiful.”
The traces of it are already on Potter’s lips. Draco pulls his sleeve down to his wrist before they can attempt a smile.
Potter draws his hand away, looking at his fingers in chastisement of their betrayal. Draco yanks the blanket up and edges Potter from the bed with the force of it. “I’m sorry I woke you,” he says.
Potter looks from Draco’s arm to his face, trying to believe that his body has created both. Draco rolls over in his bed and lifts his sleeve again in the privacy of night. In the darkness, the peach tones of flowers blend against his forearm, but the red lines of the Mark are brighter, its roots burned deeper than skin.
*
It is painful to become beautiful, and the process does not offer respite. The flowers gnaw the life from his body to spring into lush bursts of color on his arm, invading up to the tip of Draco’s shoulder and down to the base of his wrist. He licks away the tears that pool on his lips while the flowers grow at night. He sits in the backs of classrooms and attempts to let the low drone of professors or his teeth biting into the flesh of his cheek distract him from the constant undertaking of growth.
At night, he inspects the work his body has done. Branch and bush nurse a forest of life — bright, petaled flowers as simple as a child’s drawing; soft blue blooms resemble downturned bells; small circular whips with petals as thin and reaching as tiny fireworks. They take up residence in his flesh and offer their beauty in return, their vines winding across the blue of his veins. The slithering beast slumbers in fields of daffodils.
When the flowers run out of skin to blanket, they expand the perimeters of their invasion. Draco swallows an acrid cry as a stab of pain lances his arm. A room of students turns to look at him, joined by the glint of glasses frames. As he stands from the table, his sleeve drags a line of blood across his desk.
Draco stumbles to the bathroom and slams a stall shut just in time to watch the display. When he pulls his sleeve up, it snags on a dozen tiny, ink-black thorns pushing their way out from his skin.
The growth’s swiftness is both unforgiving and merciful, and there is nothing Draco can do but watch. Small, dark stems burrow out of his arm, pushing leaves into the air in a fruitless bid to meet the sun. The pain of his splitting skin holds no match to the agony when the flowers begin to bloom. He crumples to the ground with a cry as they burst into fruitful life, uncanny in their rigid perfection.
The flowers devour all that the soil of his flesh can offer. He can hear them growing, the trembling compact between parasite and host. It does not stop until his arm is a flowerbed, and though it is stained with thorn and crimson rivulets, it is at least the first time the Mark has been hidden in years.
Draco sucks in heaving, shaky breaths and drops his cheek onto the cool tile of the bathroom, inches from the toilet. He considers whether he may die right here, whether they might harvest the flowers from his arm and lie them on his grave to remember that he eventually offered the world something beautiful.
But death is not so merciful, and the fog of pain is slowly pulled away. Draco takes a stem of blooming lavender between his fingers and twists and twists until it’s cut away and blood runs down its side.
*
Potter is standing in the corridor when Draco steps outside. He may have been gone for ten minutes. It might be the next day.
Draco wants to grab Potter’s face before he has to see that stupid smile again. He wants to push his thumbs into the divot above Potter’s jawbone and let it form beneath his hands, to see if it’s strong enough to force its way past Draco’s grip. He wants to hold Potter there, just like that, in the middle of this corridor, to feel the smile muscles beneath his skin and tell him how he’s the most frightening thing Draco has ever known. How he should turn and run away right now, because Draco’s restraint has been beleaguered by a war of vibrant growth, and if Potter isn’t careful, Draco might just unhinge his jaw and swallow him whole.
But Potter doesn’t smile. His whole face pitches downward — mouth, brows, eyes. “Are you alright?” he asks. “You just bolted out of there.”
Potter is too close. Draco takes a step backwards. And then, because he’s already begun, he turns and walks in the opposite direction. “I’m fine.”
There is only the sound of Draco’s footsteps for a contemplative moment and then a scuffle as Potter jogs up next to him. Outside, leaves drop from trees, caught by the wind as it gently lowers them to the ground. Potter’s fingers grip Draco’s arm. “Malfoy, wait.”
Draco pulls his arm away. Potter leaves a small red stain on Draco’s sleeve where his hand pressed into his forearm, saturating the fabric with blood.
Potter looks down at his palm. It’s crimson with more than Draco’s blood, bleeding from a cut across the middle where a thorn dug into his skin. Potter stares at it with parted lips, then looks up at Draco with confusion so profound it approaches reverence. Draco worries that Potter’s eyes might carry sunlight, and if they shine on him too long, he’ll have no choice but to grow, and grow, and grow.
*
The night brings clarity in its darkness, obscuring all but the barest of truths: the patches of red that seep into his sheets. The sounds of the peaceful slumber only the victors of a war can know. The taste of silk as Draco bites hard on his tie as he snaps new growth between his fingers, gathering copper beneath his nails.
And with night’s clarity comes the understanding that what is happening is what he deserves. Because his love would never be sated by touch alone. It would never be sated by anything short of devouring.
Draco can feel them crowding his lungs with every inhale, the papery petals that stir in his chest. He can feel them digesting in his stomach, acid eroding the stubborn blooms that don’t know how to die. He shakes pollen from his hair and wonders if his exhales carry the scent of lavender.
Four posters of aged cherry oak cage him as Draco sits at the foot of his bed. Potter sleeps in the bed beside him, his face pushed into the pillow, lips slightly parted as he pulls in indulgent, oblivious snores. If this was a fairytale, true love’s kiss would break the spell. But people in fairy tales knew how to love correctly, in a way that didn’t become overgrown and covered in thorns.
Draco doesn’t dare a lumos. He can feel it in the darkness, coiling beneath his skin, the roots just beneath the surface, lying in wait to break free. He closes the door carefully behind him, knowing that if Potter wakes, he’ll make the same mistake he’s always made. He’ll think that Draco is worth saving.
The Forest welcomes him with outstretched arms, knotted branches, the whistle of night’s wind. Draco showers petals onto the ground with each step, dotted red with blood. The air is thin and perfumed with the sweetness of decay that scattered the forest floor.
As Draco lies across it, he can’t fathom how he’d ever found it frightening — the forest, or the growth that punctures his skin. Neither are beautiful despite their destruction. They’re beautiful for it.
It’s too late for Draco to be saved. But at least, here, he can bloom.
