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The scene is cold and pink around Draco, pale clouds stretching their slim fingers on the batch of glassy sky above him. He levers himself to a sitting position. The ground, covered in fir needles, is bristly and pliant under his palms. It’s cold, probably even freezing, judging by the way heat evaporates visibly from his skin, but Draco only feels where the needles poke his skin, sticking to his sweat.
He inhales carefully, forcing control over his nervous system. Even now he aims for subtlety. The cold air lashes at his throat and lungs as familiar scents penetrate his consciousness. He tries, just for a moment, to concentrate on the mundanity of the wintery forest, like keeping to that means keeping to his sanity.
Sparkling frost on the dark green branches. The promise of snow. Ghosts of rabbits that might have lived. His own sweat. And —
Potter.
Everything always smells of Potter.
Always. Everything.
It’s the worst thing about being friends with Hermione Granger — that Potter’s smell is etched into Draco’s every waking moment. It was there, faintly, when Draco first started feeling the effects of his… condition, becoming stronger as his first moon started growing in the sky.
It had taken a while for Draco to catch on, because the smell is exactly that of magic.
Not man-made magic, like the magic of Malfoy Manor, or Hogwarts, or the Ministry. Not the ozone of spells or curses, of used magic, but the fresh pure clean dangerous longing intangible home of magic that exists as itself. It’s everywhere, though not at the same intensity. Some places are more inherently magical. More naturally magical.
More. Alive. With magic.
The Forbidden Forest. Stonehenge. Dragons and thestrals and the Whomping Willow.
That is what Potter smells like. Like frozen pine sap. Like heated metal. Like every phase of the moon.
And it calls to Draco — to his bones, to his blood, to his essence. The call is a million hooks pulling him apart, towards something that isn’t there — or is there, sometimes, when Draco is subjected to existing in the same space as Potter. The scent of him is almost corporeal, then, as it always is on the mornings after a full moon.
Draco yearns to inhale it, and he does inhale it, every chance he gets. Subtly, carefully, in control. Never to attract attention.
Right now he’e alone, yes, he’s sure, and so he doesn’t have to be any of those things.
He can indulge.
He gasps entire lungfuls of magic, wanting to store it and hold it and have all of it. He’s greedy, and he’s possessive, and he wants to consume every bit of it — a placeholder for Potter himself.
In an impossible mix of hyperventilation and yoga breathing Draco opens his arms as if to welcome a blast, and lets the scent intermingle with his very heartbeat. His throat aches, his bones weep, his blood is made of fire, and his cock demands to be touched. Oh, how he wants to touch it, no, wants Potter to touch it, to be there, to lick and hold and pull and bite. Delirious, Draco collapses on his back, and closes his eyes, and revels in all the images his mind conjures.
It’s only a matter of time, Draco thinks, until he snaps.
Until he seeks out Potter and forces those infuriating eyes on him, only on Draco, only ever on Draco. Digs his fingers into that enraging mess of hair and pulls, tears, until Potter gives up his vulnerability to Draco.
Only ever to Draco.
Until he plants his nose, his mouth, his tongue and teeth on him. In the soft damp at the nape of Potter’s neck.
And devours.
The best thing about being friends with Granger, of course, is Granger herself. Her unwavering, loyal support.
Granger was already there, kind and forgiving and challenging and obnoxious and real, when Draco was bitten, and she’s been there ever after as well. It’s thanks to her that Draco was able to turn the forest on the Manor grounds into a personal, safe, unescapable enclosure. It’s thanks to her that Draco can exhibit his species-typical behaviour every full moon, that he can go without the wolfsbane potion and its dangerously understudied but already worrisome long-term effects.
But Granger has regular lunches with Potter, and Draco hates it, if only because she comes back from those lunches with his scent so heavy on her skin that Draco could swear his nails become sharper, his teeth longer, the hair on his back thicker just from being in the presence of it. Regardless of the moon phase. Though it is the worst right before and after.
Potter knows. Potter does it on purpose.
Draco doesn’t remember much about his nights out in the full moon, but that doesn’t worry him.
What does worry him is that he knows how the wards around the forest were made. He knows how to untangle them, if he wants.
He knows too much.
He wants too much.
He worries his wolf does, too.
He wishes someone had made a portrait of Remus Lupin when he was still alive, solely so that he could ask him what to do. It’s a selfish wish, seeing as the man left behind a son and so many people more deserving of his attention. But Draco needs help.
His obsession with Potter is waxing like the moon, and he has no idea how to keep it leashed.
Draco has talked about it with Granger, a little. Not with names, of course, but as a concept. It hasn’t been very helpful.
You’re not a monster, Draco. You’re not a beast run by instincts and genetics and animalistic demands. You’re a person, a good person.
But Draco was never good. Not the way Granger is. Not the way Potter is pretending to be.
And he’s getting worse.
Lupin would understand, Draco is sure of it. Based on what he knows of Sirius Black. Lupin would know what it’s like to want so much it feels like resisting it is killing him.
Or, no, not exactly.
It’s more that the promise of having is the biggest temptation Draco’s ever had to face, and he’s never been good at holding back. At restraining himself. Never needed to be.
And Draco's instincts now are telling him — taking is being alive. It is blood and muscle and adrenaline. It’s sinking his teeth in and feeling the give of tendon and bone. It’s howling at the moon. It’s giving up, giving in, giving over. It’s release.
It’s intoxicating.
Years ago, when he was first learning about his new senses, Draco had thought the scent was Granger, and for that short while it served as the biggest most vindictive fuck-you to his father. That a mudblood’s magic was so strong it threatened to overpower a pureblood’s sense of decorum. That it rivaled that of the most naturally magical of beings.
He wondered, then, what Albus Dumbledore would have smelled like. How the Dark Lord’s magic compared.
When Draco realised the truth of it, the smell of Potter — on Granger, around Granger, then everywhere — became the most delicious of tortures, and once more, Lucius Malfoy got the last laugh.
Draco sighs, deeply. The addictive scent of being alive has grown teeth in Draco’s mouth.
It is everything, and never enough.
He swings to his front, grimacing as needles and cones dig into his soft skin, and pushes himself up. The freshly risen sun bathes the clearing in pale yellow, and Draco takes shaky steps towards the centre of it, the only point in his cage that allows Apparition.
Another successful moon, accomplished. He’s still here, whole.
Himself.
⋆ ☾ ⋆
Malfoy’s skin gleams in the morning sun like oiled marble, the light catching in his hair the way it has for decades. With a silent huff of disappointment, Harry watches his steps become firmer as he gets further away.
Harry licks his teeth, nicking his tongue on a sharp corner.
The age of anticipation is making him careless.
A crack of disapparition.
Not yet, then.
But soon.