lokifan | Permanent Failure

Title: Permanent Failure
Word count: ~500
Characters/pairings: Harry/Draco, Harry/Ginny
Rating: R
Summary: Draco hated the scars at first. They’re a permanent mark of failure.
Warnings: angst
Disclaimer: The boys belong to JKR, even though I’m often much nicer to them than she is.
Author’s Notes: This was my third (and final, I promise!) ficlet written for this week’s

sortinghatdrabs. The pairing was Harry/Draco and the prompt was scars – we all have them.

Scars – we all have them. Every member of my almost-lost generation carries their own marks of the war.

I hated mine at first: white lines across my chest and neck, interrupting my flesh. I already felt cripplingly vulnerable, crumbling under the weight of my responsibility and the knowledge of my helplessness. To be half-killed while I cried – the shame burnt in my stomach afterwards, while the curse wounds slowly knit.

I hated Potter even more that year: he was Quidditch captain and I couldn’t eat from fear. But he’d disappeared into the mental mist that now surrounded everything outside my narrow, hideous situation. I thought of Mother and Father and the Dark Lord and Dumbledore and Snape, with an occasional thought for Vince and Greg. That claustrophobic terror didn’t allow for school rivals. But I couldn’t even beat him; Snape had to save me.

For the next eighteen months those scars were proof of my failures.

It started to change after Potter was captured and escaped. The Dark Lord descended on us like a black storm. A dozen spells hit me; the light had barely faded from one before his high voice was calling the next. They hurt and attacked and burnt.

Limp in bed that night, after Mother had sneaked in to heal me, I worked my fingers carefully over new skin, learning the marks I was left with. Nothing was as deep – as effective – as Potter’s curse, and over the years they faded. Only a few remnants were left by the time Harry and I got together at Terry’s twenty-first.

He stumbled against me in the hall of Terry’s flat, and I stumbled into the wall. Harry followed. The kiss was sloppy and drunken and involved too much tongue, but I was kissing Potter and that was too bizarre and brilliant for me to stop.

He shuddered at the sight of the scars when he pulled my shirt off, and lowered his head to press damp kisses along the raised lines. He was wincing and apologetic at the very sight of them.

Nine months of fantastic sex, Quidditch matches, joking and hexing and learning far more about him than I ever realised there was to know. By the end, he’d stroke my chest and trace the scars when we lay in bed with an expression far from that wincing guilt.

Then Ginny Weasley came back from the continent.

Harry wanted the white picket fence with roses round the door, the vivacious wife, the three children and a crup. I was a fling while he was young, not the start of a new life: the call of cosy Weasleyness was too strong. He didn’t understand I would have been constant too, that there were other ways to inextricable bonds than childhood comfort.

He should have done, after all that’s been between us.

I wear the scars proudly now: Harry’s mark on me, and the only lasting thing he ever gave me.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

being-lola-star.livejournal.com

*whimpers* I'm all teary now. But it's so beautifully in character that I just can't bring myself to complain. This could be the prequal to a million of my favourite fics that include the epilogue and then have Harry and Ginny breaking it off after because Harry just can't get over Draco because that's what he really wants.

From:

Permanent Failure

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