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Blood-red lips
They shake like leaves
Your flesh and blood
But what's underneath?
Don't turn out the lights
Kiss yourself goodnight cause there's a killer
And he's coming after you
Kiss yourself goodnight
Tonight, 'cause there's a killer, and he's coming after you
*
Tom Riddle’s eyes glinted with orange from the fireplace in his study.
Red stared at him in the kind of sharpness that predators reserved for prey, canines dipping in poison and bright in the afterglow of dancing flames and dying embers. Tom slid a folder across the wooden desk, a single glance being enough to tell that it was a contract forged for yet another person’s blood—dark red staining and bleeding into stacks of paper money in a reminder of how they were acquired.
“A new one, then?” Draco asked for the first time since he was called, fists opening and closing at his sides, stained by the phantom feeling of how blood clung to his skin and fingernails like ghosts he couldn’t really chase away.
Like it or not, he was tied to Tom Riddle. Draco was forced to do his bidding and kill and kill and kill until the man deemed him fit enough to leave and restore the name to his family; the Malfoy name that had been ground to dirt after the mistakes of a father.
Killing was just the lesser evil in the bigger picture.
Tom nodded, bringing his chin to rest on his hands.
“Yes,” he said, “but don’t give him the usual treatment. Gather his data before you finish up.”
Draco raised an eyebrow.
Why, he didn’t say. What he asked instead was: “He interested you, didn’t he?”
The smile he received in return was low and sly. “Correct,” Tom said, and there was no mistaking the amusement lacing his tone. “Harry Potter, a scourge from the Potters that we all had presumed to be spectacularly dead until his trails began to appear one by one in the past few months until his surprising return a few weeks ago. Now”—and now his smile was crueler, every inch the terrible sadist Draco had come to be acquainted with—”he sits at the top of the food chain with dogs lapping his feet.”
“Rivaling you,” Draco finished, taking the folder in his hands when Tom’s languid (dangerous dangerous dangerous) pose got too much on his nerves.
Harry Potter was a man whose age was the same as his; a man with a long scar cutting through his eyebrow and down his eye, a man with bronzed skin similar to the revered heroes of Greek and verdant green eyes behind gold-plated glasses that were too similar to the emerald necklace his Mother wore every high-end fundraisers. Draco thumbed the slightly raised ink, taking in both the picture and the fact that a dead kid from a dead mafia line had somehow managed to come back and caught Tom Riddle’s attention.
“You understand me,” Tom shrugged, leaning back in his seat. “Thankfully, one of our… patrons decided to give us a call. You know what to do.”
“I do,” Draco said.
“I’m sure you do.” Tom waved dismissively. “Deal with the folder as you see fit.”
But burn it when you’re done memorizing it, was what he didn’t say but the order being as obvious as a gunshot after dark.
Draco bowed, strands white-blond hair falling into his periphery from where they had gotten loose from his bun. The way his shoes had tapped the expensive smooth marble tiles was muscle memory working and, by the time he realized it, the door to Tom’s study had already been closed with a quiet click, leaving him in the empty hallway of the Riddle Mansion.
The folder in his hands was an accusing weight, like fire underneath his touch.
*
The Chosen One.
That was the title Potter was going by in his ‘other’ job.
Draco thought that it was all just a bunch of bollocks.
He sighed, slumping on his couch and staring at the walls of his penthouse; at his potted plants and the large glass window overlooking the city below. Draco absently twirled the handle of his hairpin, thumb brushing against the intricate carving of the snake that curled around its main body as he tried very, very hard to think about his current mission and not, well, trying to rip Potter apart to sate his own growing curiosity—why would anyone blessed with a normal life choose this one?
He thought—and this wasn't an overreaction, no matter what people would say to him—that it wasn't fair, not really.
It wasn't fair how Potter had the picture-perfect life outside of this gang war bullshit and still chose to come back to it as though he was a freak obsessed with shrewd, blood-dipped legacy while Draco was here barely keeping his head afloat because this was the only life he had ever known, playing Atlas with his family name as his sky: the one thing that was forcing him to keep living and yet were also the shackles binding his wrists.
Actually, calling it shrewd might be a little too much. Draco knew from stories that the Potter family weren’t as awful as the other handful he knew—Notts, Parkinsons, Goyles—but even then, they still dealt in this business. They were still scum to a degree which, in the end, allowed the whole topic to loop back to the beginning:
“The Chosen One,” Draco muttered into the silence. “Are you as terrible as your title?”
Potter’s picture stared back at him, curved lips unmoving, as cocky as the devil himself.
All would be revealed in due time, he supposed.
*
After two recon jobs and one boring infiltration—he had disguised himself as a middle-aged butler in the very lavish home of one young money Hermione Granger—Draco had managed to forge himself an invitation to the Potter Gala next week along with a new identity of a promising playful young man named Calen Fawkes who was looking for chances to step his foot into the playing field.
Calen had sky blue eyes, glittering like diamonds underneath the sun with long white-blond hair that was kept up in a loose bun by a snake-carved hairpin. He was stylish with his white pressed suit and slacks, black tie kept open and hanging loose around his collar, complementing the rest of his outfit as flawlessly as his heeled boots did. He was—for the lack of a better word—he was perfect. His smiles came quick and flirty: artificial enough to resemble a living doll and being nothing more than a plaything to be passed around with people’s matching white-toothed smiles and bright red lipstick tailing just behind.
Calen was lovely and smart, naive in his attempts to follow his grandfather’s footsteps in a world full of gunshots and wine swirling with poison.
Draco hated him.
But Calen was the persona crucial to his success in the gala. The flirtiness of his persona would no doubt assist him in wading through the crowds and reaching his target. Besides, Draco had spent the past year polishing the Calen mask—first started on an impromptu mission in the snow-covered lands of Switzerland—and he would be damned if he let it crack now.
So he took the blue contact lenses from his dresser and placed them on, refilling the poison in his hairpin and looped his hair around it.
See? Muscle memory.
The Potter Gala was all the things he had expected.
It was held in a ballroom that stretched almost infinitely, at the topmost floor of the tallest building the Potters owned, dressed fully in all gold, silver, and scattered crystalline lights, chandeliers glinting like auriferous metal in the haze of warm orange lights. A slow ballad music filled the air, paired with low murmured conversations and the occasional clinking of sloshing champagne glasses.
Calen moved carefully, each step telegraphed to be as graceful as ever as he started a conversation with Dean Thomas, marveling at his newest project, ah, yes yes, that’s wonderful. Do you have a fixed time frame until its completion? I would like to follow its progress, before moving to another person and another person, clinking glass and sipping priceless champagne until he caught sight of his target.
Harry Potter stood in the middle of the crowd, donning a black suit with no tie and hair that could’ve been styled way better.
He remembered Tom’s words. Dead scourge, but miraculously alive.
And he thought: no wonder everyone’s trying to take a bite of his flesh.
Calen’s eyes met Potter’s across the room, blue to green, and the ballad began slowing to a lull in its preparation for its next act.
Potter muttered something that might’ve been an excuse, leaving poorly-hidden disappointed stares behind as he walked forward to meet Calen across the ballroom, shoes a muffled series of tap tap tap against pristine tiles.
When they stood face-to-face, Potter leaned down to grab his right hand, lips brushing his knuckles in a greeting, a small smile on Dra—Calen’s skin. “I don’t think we’ve met,” Potter said, straightening from his bow but not really letting go of his hand.
His touch was fire, gasoline fuelling ignition. Draco had to force himself to focus, go back to Calen, back to playing Calen, and return the smile with his own carefully curated one. It came as easy as breathing.
“I'm new,” he said, voice drifting just right over the background music. “I'm here to try my hand at this business. I was just lucky enough to be invited.”
Potter’s eyes glinted. “Ah, the newcomer. Fawkes, was it?”
“Calen,” Draco corrected, all while resisting the urge to sneer at Potter’s face for his audacity in calling him newcomer when this gala was all about him reintegrating to business after presumed death.
“Then call me Harry,” Potter said, still smiling. “How much do you know now?”
The lights danced gold overhead, bouncing off expensive black dresses and pearl earrings. The ballad took pace again, shifting and shifting into a new song which Draco wasn’t familiar with. Potter stared at him with amusement lacing his features, looking languid with his guard down despite the .32 handgun Draco knew he carried everywhere underneath his clothing.
(Paranoid, one could say, but Draco was here with poison in his hairpin and the ashes remains of a folder ghosting his fingerprints. Maybe paranoia was a constant welcome thing in their world.)
“The basics, honestly,” Calen said, then, fully ignorant of the danger lurking beneath green green green eyes. “My grandfather left me a journal for me to study if I were to follow his path,” he continued, a little bit abashedly, something he didn't admit often. “I'm still debating on which sector I want to try and dip my hands in. Certainly not weaponry, though - the Parkinsons have that covered.”
Potter grinned. “Well, that’s true.”
People moved around them; waves of blood covered under glamor ever-changing in peripheral vision while they stood still in the middle of the ballroom, stuck seemingly on a note that was a few beats too long, Potter’s hand still on his and Draco had to fight the urge to shiver at the warmth of the touch.
It wasn’t until Potter leaned closer to whisper next to his ears—”Would you like to go somewhere private?”—that Draco felt his hackles rise.
It was—
Draco blinked, suspicion curling like a tight whip in his guts.
“Of course,” Calen whispered, feeling Potter’s warmth breath on his skin, cheek, before he was guided out of the ballroom with their hands still touching and liquid fire coursing lazily like molasses in his veins. It was easy to act as Calen Fawkes—to agree with every single thing Potter offered him with, his naivety winning over intelligence as the false hope of rising in the business dangled in front of him. It was harder when he was Draco Malfoy, especially when he felt his own mask crack underneath the pressure Potter had unknowingly rained upon him; all charming crooked grins and obvious verdant green obsession.
Based on the building schematic that he had pored over the past few days—Potter was guiding them to a hidden alcove in the left wing, the one with a ceiling-to-floor one-way glass window overlooking the city stretched vast to the horizon, neon lights glimmering like glitter against the backdrop of the night sky.
“Are we really going to talk?” Calen asked as they stumbled into the alcove, his questioning tone laced with something flirty and downright sultry underneath its currents. He moved his arms to curl loosely around Potter’s neck, blue to green, green to blue, curiosity spiking just enough for Draco to dig his heels into the floor and stop himself from asking something stupid like who the fuck are you, really?
Potter paused when Draco curled his arms around him, considered, licked his upper lip and smiled.
“Are we?”
“I don’t know,” Draco said, his words too raw, too real. Their faces were a few inches too close. “How about we start about the fact that everybody thought you were dead?”
And here something flashed in Potter’s features—quick enough to be unidentifiable but slow enough that a trained eye could see. That was—okay. There was something there, then.
Draco thought about the folder, the brief, almost nonexistent section where it talked about Potter’s childhood (and even then almost all of them were speculations) and of the way Tom Riddle had smiled like a predator as he said correct to Draco’s question about how Potter had interested him. He thought about how quickly Tom wanted to dispose of Potter despite the latter only rejoining the business now and thought, oh.
Oh, Tom’s issued hit on Harry Potter was personal.
(What the fuck did you do? Draco wanted to ask, to question the strange man in front of him that was more of an enigma than sense.)
“Actually,” Potter said—whispered, pulling him up up up from his thoughts, “maybe it’s better if we don’t talk.”
And Draco didn't know what happened afterwards, not really.
What he remembered was being pulled in by the waist, their lips meeting each other with the smell of champagne thick in the air, twisting and turning in tandem with each breath they shared just enough to make Draco's head swim. Potter’s lips were soft and heady, his kisses relentless and so, so much for Draco's senses that he wasn't Calen Fawkes anymore—that he was fully Draco Malfoy now with his mask cracked and shattered, gleaming on pearly white tiles along with the bounce of neon lights from the skyline.
Draco gasped when Potter moved lower, nipping where his pulse point was, one of his hands reaching upwards to tug slightly on Draco's bun.
The sharp tang of copper filled his nose when Potter bit down; teeth digging in with enough force to make Draco shudder and curl his hands into fists, nails creating crescent-shaped indents on flesh.
This was: dangerous, terrible, reckless in all the ways that wasn't Draco.
It was the first time Draco felt so out of his elements—played like a fool in his own game of catch and chase, because for some reason Potter had the ability to peel his skin away from muscles—his dangerous sharp grins a terrible match-up to the countless of Draco’s crafted personas, and, fuck, he tugged on his hairpin, letting white-blond hair fall before Potter had hungrily ran his fingers through them to yank and—and Draco pressed the switch on his hairpin to let poison drip drip drip before angling the sharp edge and driving down to Potter’s neck—
There was a gun pressed to his side, safety unlatched and cold barrel digging in in a warning.
Potter smiled at him.
It was not a kind one.
“You know,” Potter said, devilish, lips red and swollen and so goddamn bloody perfect, “I don’t remember ever inviting Calen Fawkes to this gala.”
“You must be mistaken,” Draco answered, hairpin just centimeters away from breaking golden skin.
“Am I?”
Draco’s throat was dry. “Yes.”
“And I'm supposed to believe that and not the fact that Tom Riddle had most definitely sent you,” Potter shook his head, chuckling coldly. “Figures.”
At that, Draco hesitated. No one called Tom by that name anymore ever since he seized complete hold of the underworld. Voldemort was what people called him—bringer of destruction, precursor of tragedies, the man with the crown and the iron grip around people’s necks like nooses. Nobody called him Tom unless they knew him personally, like Draco’s situation with the steel chains bound around his legs in a poor fuck-ass oath of pledge. Nobody did, and yet—
Potter must’ve seen his hesitance, because he said: “He killed my family, you know?” He leaned closer, lips ghosting over Draco’s abused pulse point at the neck, littered in red and blooming blue before biting hard, teeth colored in crimson when he finally pulled back, a smirk ghosting his face as he took in the necklace of bruises around Draco’s neck. “Killed them and tried to kill me too,” he said, gaze tinged with a kind of fervency resembling more to mania. Draco shuddered. “Tied me inside a plastic bag before throwing me to a river.”
Draco ran his tongue over his bottom lip.
“Why haven’t you told anyone?”
“Would you believe it if you were an outsider?” Potter asked, and no, Draco wanted to answer, but the barrel of Potter’s handgun dug deeper in a reminder of their current position. “No, you wouldn’t,” Potter said, concluding. “It would be easier if I dismantled Riddle’s empire by myself.”
“Then,” Draco said, “are you going to kill me now?”
The echoes of the ballroom’s ballad ran like ghosts in the hallway outside of their solitary alcove. Like smoke; last wisps of notes carried by the air to fill the tense silence they were in.
(A repertoire, this was. A play they were playing as the mere pawns of this game of chess.)
“I guess.” Potter’s fingers were in his hair, strands of white-blond untangling as he carded through them. “It’s a shame,” he murmured, and his eyes were emerald and bright, brows drawn to a little frown. “A pretty snake, but Tom Riddle’s slave nonetheless.”
Before Potter could pull the trigger on him and smattering blood everywhere—because this was real and it was terrifying to be so easily held at gunpoint like this, and because there was warmth pooling inside his guts and blood going down down down from the distance they had between them, or the lack thereof—Draco loosened the hand holding his hairpin, letting metal fall to the floor, clinking as it rolled to a stop.
The gun stilled.
“I’m not his slave,” Draco said, a little bit breathless. “I’m not - and I’ve never been.”
Potter watched him with something like incredulity, disbelief taut in lines of muscle. “What’s this, then?”
“He’s threatening my family,” Draco answered. He didn’t know what spurred him on to disclose this out loud—Potter’s info dump from earlier, maybe, but it felt like a dam was breaking inside of Draco and he was going to die if he didn’t let it all out. “My father gave everything for him in his admittance of loyalty including, well, me.”
He thought about their differences: Potter having all the chances in the world to steer clear from this terrible, messy world that their kind lived in but still dipping his legs into murky waters anyways, and Draco, who was forced to have blood engrained so deeply into his nail beds that it became almost a part of him; a disgusting, revolting life in which he had to live through unless he wanted to see his parents’ head decapitated and staked through a pole.
Maybe Draco wanted life to be just a little bit more fair, to go on without him having to draw any more blood to his hands.
There were a lot of maybes for today.
At Potter’s silence, Draco continued: “I would do everything to be in your shoes. At least then I could live my life with my own free will, not with - not with Tom’s summons every few days asking me to end his competitors with the stab of a knife. Not with my family with chains around their hands and guns aimed for their heads point blank along with a ticking timer.”
This was crazy, this was, and yet Potter lowered his own handgun, pocketing it swiftly away underneath all of the layers of clothing which he wore.
“You could work with me,” Potter said, and that was—
“That’s crazy,” Draco said, moving a step backwards.
“No, listen,” Potter said again, moving forward to close the space between their chests once more. His voice was no more than a whisper. “I attack him from the outside, and you can do it from the inside. You can do something so simple, right?”
Draco sneered.
“Yes,” he snapped. “But that’s it? You’re going to trust me just like that?”
Paranoia was a constant in this business, and yet Potter held it as though he had no fear for anything. It brought Draco back to his main conundrum: was it better to be a brilliant coward or a brazen fool, brave enough to take the leap towards the stretched horizon?
Was it better to let things stay the same or try to turn against fate itself? Against the power hungry madman he had had to call master for the past years?
“What happens next is up to you,” Potter said. “You can work with me and it’ll prove your honesty, or you could lie”—he mimed a gun to Draco’s head—”and go bang along with your parents. We’ll go with whatever your choice is.”
And that—
That felt like the first drop of salvation on Draco’s tongue. Like the faint beginnings of hope edging on his reality after being presented a way out of all the things which had given his life hell.
The alcove was silent, yet Draco couldn’t hear anything over his own rabbiting pulse—beating rapidly like a war drum against his ribcage, quick enough that he almost feared of being crushed by his own excitement.
“Draco Malfoy,” he said, watched green eyes widen slightly in recognition, and smiled. “Pleased to start doing business with you.”
And with that he was pulled again, an arm around his waist and tightening, lips drawn into a kiss no less bruising than last, champagne and ballads and crystalline glimmers intoxicating him inside out. “And so I,” Potter murmured, his free hand roaming beneath his waistband just enough to make Draco gasp and moan at the sensation.
There were the ashes of a burnt folder resting in the fireplace of his penthouse and, for once, Draco didn’t care.
He couldn’t bring himself to.