The Prey

The Prey

by Melancholy

Neville is sitting on the staircase to Gryffindor Tower, feeling heavy. He feels the rolls of flesh on his stomach compressing against his hunched posture as he waits, the wobbliness of his cheeks pulling the corner of his lips down, like twin paperweights, like sponges filled with water.

The darkness ticks by, heartbeat by heavy heartbeat. The cold has steadily been seeping through his arse cheeks from the stone. So much for all that human insulation, he thinks nastily. Then as if his thoughts made him tired, he exhales heavily into the cold and silence. This, Neville thinks, is not what I fucking want.

There is a clicking sound of sharp footsteps, and Neville wonders if he should bother to get up and meet him halfway. The cold was starting to numb his soul, and he would have to get up sooner or later anyway. Move to whatever place he has in mind for them tonight. Seated he remains, listening to the hollow sounds of dragonskin boots approaching. At times like this he feels like his mind and body are not acquainted with each other, or perhaps he's having an out-of-body experience, staring down dull-wittedly at himself. Maybe he's dead, which is why all his experiences feel so surreal.

So he waits, and soon his face, smooth as glass and reflecting the moonlight, slides into view. The Slytherin slips a hand out from the black cape pulled closely around him. Skeletal, Neville thinks looking at the proffered hand. I'm holding hands with Death. And he claps it with his own pudgy, cold fingers.

They walk without words to Greenhouse Eight, his left hand clasped under Death's cloak. He walks without thinking, without seeing, directed by varying shades of shadows and subtle nudges and the pressure of bony fingers on his hand. The nursery had been lit with candles, a table cleared with a pitcher of pumpkin juice on it, probably spiked into a hasty cocktail. Neville wonders if the lordly Slytherin had actually consigned to sully his own hands with something as sordid as house cleaning.

"Place looks good." Neville says, though he doesn't look around, just stare unseeingly at the bare table.

"I thought we might enjoy spending time together in your favorite greenhouse," comes the reply, slightly above his left ear and gently tickling. The arm that winds itself around Neville waist doesn't feel substantial at all, rather like a coil of rope or snake.

Neville's mind hones in on words like 'spending time', 'favorite', and 'together'. He thinks of how they sound, falling and melting upon contact like snowflakes, too illusory for the real world. How Draco's thin lips are vastly more suited for words like 'tryst' and 'revelry' and 'perverse'. He feels those thin lips feathering the fringes (salty and sweat-laden) of his forehead, and can't decide if skin or lips felt cooler. The border between the two becomes insubstantial, and he feels dissolved in the salt of cold sweat that the Slytherin tongue is licking up, and Draco was sucking in drops of distilled Neville through sallow, puckered lips.

He stands utterly still, hands limp and unresponsive at his sides, as the Slytherin trails dry kisses (hollow cupping vapors) over his forehead, cheeks and ears, before drawing back with a violent sigh and giving Neville a look that barely suppressed something wild and angry within.

"Well? What's wrong with you now? " the Slytherin spits out, each uttered syllable resounding like silver bullet in the glass cage he had found them. When Neville winces, (knee reaction) the sharpness mellows immediately into a low bassoon, deliberately entreating and smooth.

"Neville, you always come. You wait with for me. You want something out of this." Neville watches cadaver hands slither up and coil around his neck, their bony strength coaxing with a barely perceptible squeeze. "We can give each other what we want."

Draco has a voice which is multi-textured; though not rich, sinuous; though not sibilant. Draco's voice makes him think of the black mahogany piano whose sideboard he once ran his fingers over at some rich relative's house, whose pristine ivory keys he left fudgy fingerprints on and got smacked for. He had fat cheeks then too, and they wobbled just as violently then as they do now when smacked.

Neville admits that he has a perverse streak. He likes Draco best like this; enraged, tense, and trying. He likes the ever-present resentment that lurks and sometimes blazes out of that carefully blanked expression. Sometimes when Draco is kissing him, Neville fantasies about an alternate scene a second later when he provokes the Slytherin into a violent, automated rage and gets his head cracked open against the castle wall, or something equally masochistic.

Yes, for Draco must be shimmering with hatred, every time he touched Longbottom: squib, dim-witted oaf, and fatso extraordinaire. Draco must be just as perverse as Neville himself if he was able to lust and hate so well, mange to maintain such dignity in their depravity, if he could weave disgust and desire together into a perfect rope and strangle the both of them with it.

It had been Draco that did all the work, Draco that had started to pursue him in the middle of the term, suddenly, surreptitiously and out of the blue. It was who Draco overcame his initial anxiety, swept away all Neville's blubbering excuses, Draco who arranged all their meetings under the cover of darkness, who did everything that had brought them both to this point. Neville still didn't know if he hated him for doing this much, or hated him for not doing enough.

And now, perhaps the Slytherin feels he has ventured too much in return for too little, and his touch begins to have a silent entreating, the exhalation of his breath tinged with an unbecoming desperateness. It comes out of Draco's dilated nostrils as a stench and Neville tries not to breathe in the air for fear of catching a similar infection. As such when they kiss Neville always has a pinched look about his features.

Draco picks up one palm and examines it, his sallow fingers, tracing out its landscape of hills and dips. Neville dislikes it when he does that, because it makes him conscious of the squishiness of his palms. He should be flattered, or repulsed. He feels rather impatient instead, and weary, wanting more of something he can't identify; tired, because there was no sense in feeling impatient. He ignores these thoughts and favor of indolence for a good reason; because thinking about it for more than three minutes makes his head heavy and fills the hollow cavities of his head with molten lead

He dislikes it when Draco touches him, running his spidery hands along his body as if measuring the length of web he would spin for his prey. (Huge and meaty should satiate for quite a while.) When Draco uses the anchor of his hands to pull Neville into a kiss he opens his mouth under the thrusting tongue but his jaws click, and the flesh under his chin becomes tightly packed wadding against the jowls of his neck. Jaws locked, Neville can't help but slobber, and watches as Draco withdraws with repulsion, wiping his mouth hastily against the back of his hands.

"Longbottom...eew," Draco makes an impatient noise and lifts his eyes to Neville's own.

Neville looks at his own saliva on Draco's hand, glistening in the cerulean flames, being conscientiously scrubbed away by the corner of a cloak. "Mm," he offers in a wretched recompense. Sound rises from his throat with difficulty (bile with ease).

Suddenly there are claws on his shirt, and Neville is hoisted up and pushed back on the balls of his feet. A rush of exhilaration wells up in the pit of his stomach, but Neville thinks he can no longer tell between the inevitable and the trepidation. Both sensations mirror each other, and Neville looks forward to them with a stoic sort of gratification, because there is a sequence to everything, and when one mirror shatters he can move on to the next, until there is nowhere left to go and he will finally be allowed to rest.

A sigh (hiss) writhes through the air, the cold mist conjured from Draco's parted lips its creating its sinuous body. "Wake up and breathe, Longbottom!" it snarls, incisors bared and gleaming. The dragon, dissatisfied, is now snorting smoke. Noxious, the fumes, Neville thinks. The dragon is dying, and desires a handmaid to follow it to Hell.

And Neville wallows in it. There is some perverse thrill to be had in the very real danger that Draco Malfoy is not one to be trifled with, and they both knew it.

This is my only power.

Why then, does he feel like a puppet on a string?

Immutable minutes passes away, dissolving into the silence like it was never alive.

Still, he dares to not return an answer or acknowledge any understanding. He is aware that this is not the same as feigning ignorance. The claws are still in Neville's chest. He can barely see anything in those irises; perhaps it is too dark, or perhaps there is nothing to see in them.

He wonders if Draco would give in to theatrics and kill them both. It had not escaped his notice that the Slytherin favored strangulation; Draco had looked almost fondly at Mrs. Norris while he slowly choked the life out of the misfortunate animal, when she had walked in on them in the Astronomy Tower. This satisfies him, Avada Kedavra was too straightforward, too clean, too often used in these war-fueled times; 'something even the Longbottoms can do.'

"Neville, just..." Another sibilant sigh is sacrificed.

Power, is when the hunter releases its prey.

"Just... live, if you can manage it."

Survival, is when the pray slaughters its predator.

And Draco is declawed, defanged, defeated. The fair head hangs at a desolate angle, as if his neck is broken. Neville watches it turn around and walk away, its footsteps ringing hollow. At one point, he opens his mouth to speak, an exercise in futility because the only sound he manages to produce is a dull croak which comes out as a groan, and the only thing he feels is how dumb and fat he is, how stupid and lethargic and empty.

"You truly are Gryffindor," he remembers Draco saying to him once. "Although your valor is dark."

Like a dark mark?

The Death Eater remains in the darkness for some moments, before lumbering after Draco's now silent footsteps, his wand drawn. Aveda Kedavra, he softly repeats to himself. Such a simple spell. Something even a Longbottom can do.