Chapter Text
“Worthless cunt.”
Draco realises the words are aimed at him just as the saliva hits his jawline. It happens so quickly, he barely has time to process the insult.
He doesn’t reply. Doesn’t move in retaliation. Just wipes away the glob of spit dripping onto his neck courtesy of the withered-looking crone who glares in challenge. He keeps his expression bored and continues on his way down Diagon Alley.
Despite his best efforts, his face flushes.
Bystanders pretend not to have seen.
There’s something to be said for the phlegmatic humour of Wizarding Britain. He carries on, spine straight and eyes forward.
At least the aspiring hag hadn’t reached an orifice with her projectile.
He set out with a very simple mission for his morning. Sopophorous beans and a sloth brain from the apothecary. It’s been a few years since he last ran any errands, since he last had the freedom of movement to do so.
Diagon Alley feels smaller than it did during his annual school shopping.
More hostile, too.
At Slug and Jiggers, nobody spits on him, but the man behind the counter won’t look him in the eyes either. Draco pretends it's because he, following a recent growth spurt, is simply too tall now.
He swears he hears his family name spoken quietly by the other patrons, and without the reverence to which he is accustomed.
“Put this on my account,” he says to the crowded shelf of jewel-tone elixirs visible over the shop keep’s shoulder. They can both dispense with needless things like manners, or eye contact.
Draco tries to employ his best efforts in ignoring the whispers from the front of the shop. Tragically, his efforts are instead occupied pretending those whispers aren’t about him.
“We’ll still sell to you, Malfoy, but your line of credit’s ended here. You’ll have to pay the total upfront,” the shop keep says, tacking on an insincere afterthought of a “sorry.”
Draco, who doesn’t have a script for financial transactions in which his purchasing power isn’t taken on faith, pays. If he fumbles a bit fishing the coins from his bag, he can be sure the watchful eyes at his back catch this, yet another of his growing list of failures and inadequacies.
Such humiliation is not to be borne. Except, maybe, by a worthless Malfoy whelp who deserves little better.
His whole life, his father had impressed upon him the value of the Malfoy name. To be the purest of Purebloods. The oldest of dynasties, and as a consequence, the richest. To be heir to that legacy is to inherit centuries of carefully controlled breeding, consolidated wealth, and above all else, the deference owed to the peerless.
Lucius, whose imprisonment within the Manor continues on even as Draco is newly freed, maintains that money controls everything. It is the one lever to pull that operates unheeding of changing political tides.
The Malfoys have the largest share of it. To be a Malfoy man is to decide how the money is spent. To be the one who pulls the lever, upholds the dynastic reputation for power and preserves it for the generations that follow.
It’s disorienting, then, to re-enter society following his house arrest and discover through strangers’ spit and whispers in shops just how tarnished that reputation is.
In the wreckage of his House, here he is. Vaults still full, gold worthless.
He’d had control once.
But then the Dark Lord took over the Manor, made a mockery of the Malfoy name, and claimed ownership of their vaults.
Made Lucius his bitch.
Maybe that’s what it means to be a Malfoy man.
🐏
Completing his N.E.W.T.s has not, Draco is dismayed to learn, meant the end of life’s important lessons.
He learns how few powerful friends he has at his sentencing. He discovers how boring a house party is when one is on house arrest and the guests reluctant to attend lest the Prophet catch wind of their association.
He is still realising anew each next morning that alcohol makes him feel like shit.
After his disastrous shopping trip, Draco remains indoors when not completing mandatory charity work. He stops dressing for breakfast. He stops receiving visitors, except for Theo. He just… stops.
Sinking into the soft cocoon of his bed, dressing only to receive Theo’s call, well, it doesn’t do much to keep the nightmares at bay.
His sleep is bad with drink, worse without.
At least here, in his domain, there is the pretence of that control he’s meant to have.
He brews Draught of Living Death only to discard the whole batch after awaking in a state of paralysis, demons watching him from the corners of his bedchamber. It’s terrifying, the unknown quantity of time he spends desperate to move, to breathe. Trapped by a malevolent gaze.
And still, this is only the second most helpless Draco has felt in his life.
🐏
When Theo comes to call, he usually sticks to idle gossip and superficial topics. Asks in that indirect way after the letters from Pansy and Blaise that Draco lets idle on his writing desk, and says nothing explicitly judgemental about Draco’s failings as a friend or correspondent.
Draco thinks they have a tacit understanding that visitation privileges are conditional on Theo’s willingness to overlook Draco’s general state of unwashed isolation, to make no comment on his misery.
Until, of course, he does.
“Mate, this isn’t healthy— It’s also not charming, which is arguably worse.” Theo unzips his leather bag, digging about for something.
Draco scoffs. “Have you brought me some books with that muggle therapy you like so much, then?” Like so many of Theo’s tiresome phases, Draco will be overjoyed when Theo’s self-improvement obsession ends. He’s still working out daily bathing—many of his oldest friend's goals for him feel a touch too ambitious.
“Goodness no, I’ve something much better!” His smile is menacing in its brightness. Theo has always been so good at existing as though there aren’t monsters hiding in his periphery.
Draco, who still sees a Maledictus slithering around every shadowed corner of the Manor, envies him the illusory prowess. He quite liked snakes, before.
“Is that… what is that?”
“It’s a Muggle Device!” Theo starts loudly. Draco’s hand is over Theo’s mouth before he can continue to say what kind of device. It’s not the first time Theo has brought contraband into the Manor, but, given the totality of the events of the last few years, he doubts his parents will merely swat them for the insult, this time.
“Must you be so indiscreet?” he hisses at Theo.
And Theo, sweet, stupid Theo, at least has the sense the gods certainly did not give him to look contrite.
“Sorry, mate” he resumes, volume slightly diminished, “it’s a machine that lets you access the muggle library, they call it On-Line.”
Draco feels a thrill, the allure of the taboo.
And if that ended badly for him last time... Some lessons don't take the first time.
His Dark Mark itches.
“Like at Oxford?” Theo has been touring the muggle and magical world since the final battle. Draco has been celebrating his newfound freedom by showing up to community service grey and hungover.
They're both engaged in some kind of pursuit.
Muggles, it turns out, haven’t been much for burning at stakes in at least a hundred years, but mingling the way Theo does still seems dangerous. Especially for one as soft as Theo, who, lucky sod, lacks both the inclination and aptitude for Unforgivables.
“Right, except, there’s even more. More than the library at Oxford, or Hogwarts, even Malfoy Manor.” Draco doubts this last, sincerely.
He is quickly proven wrong. After a week of tutorials, with a few demonstrations specific to accessing pornography on something called Reddit, Draco is still no more eager to leave his bedroom, but at least he’s occupied.
When he hides himself away, now, it's because at least one of his hands is full.
In truth, it’s the most he’s wanked since he first learned how. He is struck by the breadth and depth of muggle sexual depravity. He particularly likes the films where it’s just a woman, and a cock, and he can pretend that it’s his woman, his cock, as he tugs on himself alone.
He imagines spilling his seed down a muggle woman’s throat, sullying both her body and his own in the act. The resulting orgasms white out his vision, a state of nonbeing that is tragically short-lived. And then, with barely a pause, he’s getting off again.
In the past, he was both prisoner and suspect in his own manor. Now, he hides by choice, fearful that his father—whose confinement is decidedly not elective—might discover the muggle device. The rest of it is the bone-deep shame of knowing what his mother would think about the sorts of things for which he uses the tablet.
And if, on occasion, he rubs himself raw, it’s a small price to pay for a full night’s sleep.
🐏
A certain swotty former classmate once accused him of purchasing his place on the quidditch team with Lucius’s money. He’s sure the rumours that he bought his grades can be traced back to the same source.
But the truth of it is that Draco has always been a prodigious learner.
In mere weeks, he graduates from videos of pseudo-step-daughters and contrite students with low marks and oral fixations to those of bound men and women, gags in their mouths to stop them from saying the stupid, whorish things that earned them their punishments in the first place.
He’d marvel at the violence of muggles but, as he spills into his hand for the third time in an afternoon, he does wonder.
If bound, could he prevent his hands from casting violent magicks? If gagged, could he silence the vitriol that’s earned him a reputation he can never dispel?
The non-magical set really might be onto something and Draco finds distraction and comfort in how much there is for him to learn.
🐏
The downside of being a prodigious learner, Draco comes to understand, is that he’s consumed the entirety of On-Line within his first few months of access. Genius has a cost, it seems.
He’d dedicated quite a bit of mental resources to figuring out better power systems and a more consistent way to connect to the On-Line in a magical estate, for the miraculous device—the work of a week in which he had no time for Theo and annoyed Lucius by being categorically unavailable to review the estate.
It was nice, feeling motivated to do something.
But now, he’s bored again.
He considers the possibility that he misses interacting with people. It sounds false, but it feels true. Unfortunate, that.
Would that muggles had invented pornography that reciprocates, something in the spirit of magical portraits to talk back and participate in an exchange.
And then, he discovers something even better.
🐏
Draco is delighted to share his discovery with Theo; he’s only a little bit showing off when he does. This is something truly exclusive, meant only for the discerning gentleman.
OnlyFans.
He picks a very clever play on his middle name as his handle, then dives deep into a veritable glut of sluts, eager to earn the title of fanatic for someone worthy.
And then he finds her: RealVenus_FauxFurs. Clever, literary, just like him. She's a bit of a hidden gem, too. A newer account he unearths late one night. This discovery, like the many others of the past few months, fills him with pride.
Some of the content he consumes, in moments of desperation, leans more obviously affected than truly alluring. But Venus? Just the captions on her photos have an aura of authenticity. An effortless dismissiveness that pours from gorgeous, plus lips. She really makes him feel like she’s talking to him, like he is the personal pronoun receiving her verbal abuse. When he looks at the salacious photos of her body wrapped in leather and lace, he can pretend they were taken just for him.
Draco feels a sense of ownership—personal investment—having subscribed so early on in what he is sure will be a long and successful performance given how much her profile has grown in a few short months. And through it all, the simps and subscribers who come and go, there's something special about being her largest donor.
Although a still image works just as well with the right connection, he is truly obsessed with her moving pictures, the compelling way she intersperses reading a filthy classic with insulting her audience mid-stream.
She keeps her face mostly obscured, but it’s enough.
It helps that she has fucking fantastic tits, too.
It's the tits, he thinks, and also the riotous curly brown hair that reaches just under those tits, sometimes obscuring his view.
The hair bears a certain resemblance to… but no.
As alluring as the idea is, it can't be her.
She's mean enough, though. Actually, truly mean. She nearly rivals the voice in his own head. Unbelievably nasty things come out of that pretty mouth.
Sometimes he fantasises about her struggling to fit those full lips around his cock. He pictures her telling him how impressive he is. He’s a thin man, a bit more reedy than he’d like to be, given his height, but he’s got girth where it counts.
Other times, he imagines her laughing at him, at the most impressive parts of him: his vault, his cock.
Those times, the fantasy, faux Venus spits in his face, and he comes with painful force followed by his own haunting shame for the things he wants, the surrender of his pride in favour of pleasure.
It’s an exchange he is increasingly willing to make.
🐏
Gods, he's not sure that the donating aspect is meant to be as gratifying as it is.
He tells himself that it's because he likes the extra attention, the opportunity to watch those tiny changes in the set of her mouth, a hint of awe at the size of the sum before she returns to dominant form.
She singles him out one day during her Wednesday Wank stream, and it's the best of his life. Truly, at least as good as the first time he learned how to touch himself.
“Apuleius, I see you've just sent another gift. I bet you think you're being generous—is your arse truly golden, I wonder,” she says, tone sultry. He sometimes thinks the depth of it might be affected, but the gravel he hears in her voice now is the genuine thing.
“I just want to keep my Venus happy,” he types back in the chat, emboldened by her attention, insisting on proper capitalisation even one-handed.
Details matter. This audience may have a shared purpose, but he is a Malfoy, he is a cut above the troglodytes in her chat, and he will eagerly exert himself to prove that to her.
She giggles, and the sound is familiar enough that it stops him mid stroke.
No, there is absolutely no possible way.
“Do you think this is enough to impress me?” The curve of her mouth turns cruel; the small sliver of her face that she shares is strikingly familiar.
He hasn't seen that dimple since Eighth Year.
“I bet it's not even yours, is it? Daddy's money, donating so a woman will talk to you. Pathetic.”
He is nothing without his money.
She runs her tongue over the edge of her teeth—ones he's now sure he hexed all those years ago—and he resumes pulling on his cock in earnest.
He is nothing.
And when he comes, it's to Hermione Fucking Granger, unimpressed with his lack of response:
“Worthless cunt.”