Redemption's Son

Draco is five when his grandfather Abraxes dies. It's the only time he ever sees his father cry: he wonders why, at the time, because his father's always seemed to hate his grandfather. It isn't until he's fifteen and Lucius is in Azkaban that he understands.

For a long time he compares every man he fucks with Lucius. This one is stronger, bigger, older. This one's hands are more slender, or the hair is shorter, the skin fairer. None of them smell the way his father did, of magic, tobacco, horses and the sea. None of them love him; his father, for all his sins, loved him once.

His father loved him. That's the part Draco can't forget, the thing that makes it all so incomprehensible. So he washes his hands a thousand times a day, and he never looks at himself in the mirror, and he never, ever sleeps with anyone he can get pregnant: his father did it, his grandfather did it, Draco won't.

He fucks Ron for the first time in the handicapped stall of a filthy nightclub bathroom, because with Potter dead Ron Weasley is the only person he can think of who might hate Draco more than Draco hates himself. Ron's so drunk he can barely stand up, and Draco's mostly sober.

It's a Tuesday night. Ron has two exwives who don't speak to him and three children; Ron is nothing like Lucius. Draco hates him for it, and for other things, longer ago than the war, than Hogwarts.

Ron comes by his office on Thursday morning, red-haired and freckled and glowering: the boy Draco knew grown up into a man he recognizes. Draco smiles at him, and waits for Ron to throw the first punch. He wants to be hit in the face, he wants to be fired, he wants to go to Azkaban, he wants to die. He wants to fall asleep and dream of his father's strong white hands on his body, his father's mouth on his cock; he wants never to think of his father again.

“You were good, Weasley,” he says. “You were really good.” He keeps his hands at his sides, still and quiet. His father would have hit first. His father would have said something crueler than any blow—or smiled and charmed Ron into peace. Lucius never uses weapons when he can use words, or words when he could use magic.

Draco is his father's son, but he's not his father. He waits. Ron moves closer, leans in, kisses him. Draco's job is gone, no matter what. There are no queers on the staff of the Prophet. He could push Ron away, or punch him in the nose. But one method of self-destruction is as good as another. He opens his mouth under Ron's.

That afternoon he cleans out his desk. He doesn't need the job: he's a writer, he can freelance; he's a Malfoy and he doesn't need any job, ever. That evening he meets Ron for dinner. He looks for differences, similarities. Ron Weasley and Lucius Malfoy are as different as two men can be. Ron's freckled all over, and his hair's pretty much always in his face. His hands are short and thick, and he has a mark on his finger where his wedding ring used to be. His voice is a little too loud and his tie is a little too flashy.

“Tell me something,” Draco says. “Something you don't ordinarily tell people.”

Ron frowns at him. “Like, something dirty?” he says finally. “Because this is a pretty nice restaurant--”

Draco slides his hand under the table and squeezes Ron's thigh, hard. “You know what else was nice?” he asks. “My job. Like, something private,” he says. “Something no one else knows.”

He and Ron both do and don't have this shared history, all the years at Hogwarts but in different houses, all the years of war but on different sides. He waits, rubbing Ron's thigh a little to keep them both focused on where this is ultimately going to end. “My father fucked me,” he says, when Ron doesn't say anything. “For years and years, and everyone knew—my mother, Snape, Dumbledore, and none of them raised a finger to stop them. Something like that, Ron. Something you're ashamed of.”

“I raped a woman during the war,” Ron says finally, staring down at his wine glass. “A Death Eater. I was supposed to be interrogating her. She kept crying. I just wanted to stop her—I just.”

“I bet she stopped after that,” Draco says, but he doesn't really mean anything by it. It's just something to say. “Let's get out of here and go fuck.”

“Yeah,” Ron says and crosses his knife and fork on his plate.

Draco likes that Ron doesn't say he's sorry, for what he did or for what Lucius did. If he were the type who apologized for everything he and Draco would be doomed from the start. He lets Ron top this time, and he doesn't complain when Ron's rougher than he likes. They're only bruises, it's only blood; anything that doesn't kill him outright will heal eventually.

Ron doesn't seem to be a big believer in foreplay, but once he's inside he bites Draco's neck, twists his nipples painfully. Draco doesn't have much room to move, but the sheet is harsh against his cock, just enough friction to keep him hard. And eventually Ron's hand makes it down, and he's rough here, too, but Draco's far enough along for it not to matter.

Later, they're lying together in Ron's bed, warm and sticky despite the cooling charms, and Ron says hesitantly, “If you ever want to pretend that I'm your father--.”

Draco isn't surprised. He has yet to meet a man who isn't wired this way, who doesn't find this arousing. It might be because he only dates assholes. “I spend most of my time pretending I'm not pretending that,” he says. “There's a limit to how fucked-up I want to be.”

“Okay,” Ron says.

“I'll let you rape me some time,” he offers. “If you want. I can fight back, or whatever. We can talk about it.”

Ron bites his lip, and Draco feels a cock stirring against his thigh. “Okay,” he says. “You don't think it would be too weird?”

“'Love as thou wilt,'” Draco says. “My father's motto. He was a pedophile and a Death Eater, but, yeah, as long as no one gets hurt.”

Ron runs his fingers down Draco's arm. It's something Lucius Malfoy used to do, but his fingers were smooth and soft; Ron's are calloused and blunt. He's the anti-Lucius Malfoy, and boy is it fucking time.

Draco falls asleep before Ron even puts the lights out, and dreams of his father.

In the dream he's very young, ill with one of the sudden high fevers that only small children seem to get. His father has been summoned to London, because the government has fallen. He's kneeling beside Draco's bed, a dark cloak flung over his bright robes. He's younger than Draco is now, but he looks years older, mouth and eyes bracketed by lines, long fair hair pulled back in a queue.

“Draco,” he says, his hand cool on Draco's face. “I'm going to do terrible things to you, little son. And some day you'll hate me as much as I deserve. But I can't seem to stop myself.”

“I love you,” Draco says in the dream, the way he never had a chance to, when his father went to Azkaban.

“You shouldn't,” Lucius says, and leans down and kisses him on the mouth.

When Draco wakes up, Ron's in the kitchen making coffee. Draco wraps the sheet around his hips and shuffles in and sits at the table. He feels terrible, hungover and sweaty, his teeth unbrushed and his head aching.

Ron pours him a cup and Draco drinks it, slowly. They don't look at each other. “Did you really lose your job?” Ron asks.

“It had been coming for a while,” Draco says, which is mostly the truth. “They didn't appreciate me there.”

Ron fiddles with the coffee maker. “I appreciate you,” he says, which is sweet. “But--”

“Don't worry,” Draco says. “I won't starve.”

“I know,” Ron says, and there's just the faintest hint of bitterness to it. “You're a Malfoy.” He should be bitter; his side lost the war. There's a life lesson in there somewhere: never bet against the Malfoys. Even when they lose they win.

“Always have been,” Draco says. He thinks of kissing Lucius Malfoy's white throat, bruising that pale skin. His father is on the cover of the Prophet, which is a charming coincidence. Once Ron leaves for work, Draco flips the paper over and goes back to bed.

The sheets are cool and damp against his skin, but the bed is soft enough—he's slept in worse places. When he wakes up, Ron is home. They eat Chinese takeaway, and Ron pays, which Draco assumes is meant as an apology. Midway through dinner Ron catches his hand and says, “About your father.”

“What about him?” Draco asks, wary. He and his father haven't spoken since Draco was fifteen, before the war and before Lucius went to prison.

“What I asked you last night,” Ron says. “I was out of line. And I'm really glad you said no. I have an eight year old boy, did you know that? The thought of anybody doing something like that to him--.”

“Yeah,” Draco says. He's had sixteen hours of sleep today, but suddenly he's tired again. “Well. Your kids are safe from me, Weasley. That's one Malfoy tradition I have no intention of emulating.”

Ron leans over and kisses his palm. “That wasn't even close to what I meant, Malfoy,” he says. “You aren't your father anymore than I'm mine.”

“That's good,” Draco says, “because there's no way in hell I'd do with your father what I'm about to do with you.” Of course, Ron's father is dead; Draco's father is the Minister of Magic and his face is everywhere.

He does Ron slowly this time, so slowly it makes them both squirm: kisses his way softly down Ron's neck to his chest to his stomach to his cock, one kiss for each freckle he finds on the way. Ron's too big to fit properly in his mouth but Draco licks gently at one ball and then at the other, scrapes a fingernail down the underside of Ron's cock. By the time he finds the tube of lubricant under the bed, Ron's begging for his fingers, begging for Draco to touch him everywhere, fuck him senseless. Draco slides the first finger in and sucks the head of Ron's cock into his mouth.

“Please,” Ron's saying, “please, please,” like he's forgotten any other words even exist. When Draco finally pushes into him, he convulses and his eyes roll back in his head. Draco wipes his hand on the sheet and finishes at his own pace, listening to Ron gasp for breath.

One thing he learned from his father: sex isn't meant to be rushed. If you're going to sin, you might as well enjoy it. Love as thou wilt, Lucius Malfoy had been so fond of saying, an' it harm no one. But he had hurt Draco, not with what they'd done together, but when, afterward, he'd chosen to walk away. Ten years, and that wound is no closer to healing.

It's too hot to lie so close to Ron, but he can't bring himself to roll away. It feels good, for some reason he won't allow himself to contemplate, good to have someone to touch, good not to have to wake up alone, sick of himself.

After a while Ron goes to sleep, and Draco gets up and takes a shower. His face in Ron's mirror is unfamiliar, shadowed faintly with two days growth of beard, his hair a little too long and his eyes a little too crazy. He looks nothing like his father, for which he's sometimes grateful and sometimes sorry.

He shaves with Ron's razor, brushes his teeth with the edge of Ron's spare towel, lies on Ron's couch reading Ron's copy of Ars Magica and looking at Ron's semi-dirty magazines. He 's tired, but he's too nerved up to sleep yet.

He's afraid that when he closes his eyes he's going to be right back where he started: Lucius Malfoy's son, Lucius Malfoy's easy lay, good enough on a dark night, but nothing his father will acknowledge now. All the ways his father fucked him, all the times he made Draco scream, the one that hurts the most is the one that ended it, when his father walked by Draco at the gates of Azkaban, with his face turned the other way.

He was six when it started, and he didn't think it was anything out of the ordinary. Just something fathers did with their sons—an exploratory hand moving over his body, a gentle mouth on his. He was eleven the first time his father came inside him, and the thought of it still makes him wince. He was thirteen before he decided he liked it.

Draco pretends that it's his darkest, dirtiest secret, but the truth is it wasn't his fault, and he knows that. The thing he's ashamed of is how much he misses the way Lucius made him feel. His father is the Minister of Magic now, and Draco could ruin his political career with a dozen words in the correct ear.
He doesn't, because he loves his father. He hates the current administration, with its emphasis on pureblood values no pureblood ever bothered with. They hate queers, they reward procreation; Draco fucks men for recreation. He takes his revenge where he can find it, even when he doesn't enjoy it. What his father did to him is the worst betrayal imaginable, but it isn't anything he won't get past. Eventually.

He likes Ron, which is entirely unexpected. Likes that Ron doesn't remind him of his father, but likes him for himself, too. And if it works out, it will drive his father absolutely mad.

Ron staggers out of the bedroom, wearing only his shorts. “There you are,” he says. “Come to bed.”

“Yeah,” Draco says. “I am.” He drops the magazines on the coffee table and his shirt on the couch, and kisses Ron, light but lingering, on the way by. So maybe he's his father's son, maybe he never apologizes, never explains, never does anything just because. So what?

Fin.