Title: Put it in Writing
Author: Flora
Characters/Pairings: Charlie/Draco
Rating: R
Kinks/Themes Chosen: erotographomania
Other Warnings: none
Word Count: 2500ish
Summary/Description: Draco goes looking for secrets and finds porn.
Author's Notes: So where I was going was, erotographomania, and then I tossed in next month's alternate pairing for the help_japan winner's entertainment with a slight hint of maybe some Gideon/Fabian interaction because that's this month's. I used to post on the 7th, now on the 6th, and I am busy like a busy thing right now, but I am still up so it is totally still the 6th. *nods* It remains as true as ever that it's okay to tell me if I have annoying typos, although this week ...well, I might manage to fix them next week?



Draco looked over his shoulder as he lifted his wand to release the ladder from where it was affixed to the ceiling so he could go up into the attic. He didn't need to look, and he knew it; Charlie had explicitly said he was welcome to poke around, that if he was going to live there he had every right to rearrange things to suit and whatnot. It didn't matter; it still seemed peculiar to him that when Charlie had let him into his life, he'd... well, let him into his life. Nothing was particularly off-limits, even though Draco was still all but constitutionally unable to offer the same, and hadn't.

Secrets were how one maintained one's place, according to his upbringing and education, and prying at the secrets of others was how one moved up. He'd said as much, more or less--he'd been a bit preoccupied with Charlie's mouth at the time, and couldn't be held responsible for the extent to which the words had been jumbled--but Charlie had only nodded and said perhaps in time he'd feel differently. He doubted it.

It had occurred to him briefly that perhaps if a man simply didn't keep secrets, it was impossible to use them against him, which would explain how this could even work for Charlie, but it still felt strange and unstable, like no sane man would make this choice. But Charlie was sane. Sturdy. Very sturdy. Very...

Draco wet his lips and redirected his thoughts away from all the ways in which Charlie was strong and sure, all the ways in which he wanted nothing more than to keep Charlie home and in bed, to be the kind of interesting, fascinating person that could make him drop his responsibilities and let the dragons fend for themselves for a day or two. They could, right? They were dragons. But of course, that was ridiculous, and it wasn't that Charlie hadn't regretted going out the door, damp from the shower, thick coffee in his hand because he'd been distracted until later than he meant to be, but... well, Draco didn't know but what, but whatever it was, it was annoying. Irritating. Unsatisfying. Damn it.

Which was why he'd had the idea. He wanted to go up into the space above the bedroom and see what was there, see what was hidden away, and that was going to involve bringing the ladder the rest of the way down. He was bored, he reminded himself, and probably there was something interesting or useful or both stored away up there, right?

He climbed up quickly and out of habit pulled the ladder up behind him, then turned to the neat stacks of boxes.

None of them looked particularly different from any other; they were labeled at an angle in Charlie's blocky handwriting and said things like "2001 records" and "expense reports 92-97." This wasn't going to help with boredom, if that had actually been his reason for coming up, and it wasn't likely that he was keeping actual secrets in labeled boxes, now was it?

Draco unfolded the top of a box to see if the contents matched the label. They did. He scowled, and then scowled more because Merlin, he was just pathetic, trying to find a reason to keep Charlie, like it was in any way going to work to try to blackmail him into doing that thing with his tongue again, like anything other than honesty and reason had ever worked for talking to him, like... fuck. He was definitely pathetic. He closed the box and sealed it with a spit charm and a wave.

He was stepping back, returning to the ladder to go downstairs and be pathetic somewhere else, when the charm zinged across the top of the box and sparked up and over the next stack with a thump and a clink as it 'fell' down behind--and damn, he hadn't actually intended to seal up the window as well. His father would be mortified at such a ridiculous loss of control. No, no, he was mortified, was the trouble. Lucius would have merely pretended he'd meant it, and Draco wasn't going to be that kind of man. Right. Fuck. He pressed himself flat against the wall and moved past the piled boxes to undo whatever damage he'd done.

--

"Draco?" Charlie was early, Draco thought, and then he realized that the sun was low. He wasn't early; Draco was still in the attic, still looking through the contents of the chest of drawers shoved under the sill behind the boxes. The chest he'd unsealed before realizing it had been sealed before his charm. Well, once open, he'd thought he might as well look.

The top drawer had been empty, or nearly; it had held a few stray scraps of parchment and a dried-out inkwell, along with a battered Muggle booklet filled with lined paper. Draco had opened the second drawer expecting more of the same and wondering why anyone would seal an empty chest. Unless it was to prevent vermin. He stopped with his hand on the knob, wrinkling his nose and looking around for signs. Not that he was entirely sure he'd know them if he saw them; well-raised wizards were generally not, he believed, exposed to vermin. Chewed edges, maybe? Nests? In any case, he saw nothing untoward, and put the thought aside, tugging at the heavy second drawer.

It was filled with papers--parchments and scrolls, notebooks and diaries, pages covered with smudged ink and charcoal pencil, with the occasional photograph affixed with failing spellotape.

His pulse had sped as he looked at the photographs, as he watched the sluggish movement of old unwatched images sealed too long in the dark. They still worked, of course, or they would with a few minutes to re-emerge, but he guessed, rummaging through the papers, that they must be from at least thirty years prior; the dates at the tops of those pages that were letters came from about that time.

He flipped back to the first of them, moving at a more appropriate speed now, and gasped. This was definitely a chest--a drawer, anyway--of secrets.

Although, if his guess was correct about the identity of the man whose lips were eagerly, busily teasing at a thickening cock, they mightn't be secrets about which anyone might be concerned.

He watched until the photograph cycled back through, wondering whose cock Gideon Prewett had sucked for the camera, then flipped to the next image.

His own cock pulsed at the new scene, at the way Prewett looked past the frame, clearly laughing at whoever was doing the photographing; it was an expression he'd seen on Charlie many times, a dare and a laugh rolled together.

Actually, that was more or less the expression and the attitude Charlie fell back to quite often. In the next picture Gideon, still bare-chested, still laughing, was pointing at his twin, and in the one after that, the twin was speaking animatedly to the naked man on the bed. Draco turned the page again.

Gideon,

I know, too busy to write, war on, Death Eaters to exterminate. But I took quill in hand to try to persuade you never the less. I'm writing one-handed (well of course I am; writing with both at once would be either awkward, if one tried to write upon one page with two quills, or genius, if one were able to produce two separate letters at once, or a letter and a drawing. Still, what I mean to say is, my other hand is engaged. Doing exactly what you were just thinking--excuse the bits where I stop to scrub away errors. Distracting, this is. Also, if you were for some unfathomable reason under the clear impression I was a first-rate pornographer, you will now have to agree, I'm not. As erotic fiction goes, long sentences about the fact my other hand is busy are almost certainly not arousing. They are definitely not like the sort of things you come up with, when you can be bothered to write. Not that I'm complaining, of course. This entire missive is all your fault, since it was that I was thinking of you.

I could go with something a bit shorter, perhaps--not that you are short, or that I'm looking to find a man with a short--how do I get off on these tangents. I wish you were here, though. Your mouth--that thing you do with your tongue--would be a lot better than my hand. Do you think you'll be back in time for midsummer festivities? We could take lunch out to the lake, perhaps, or have supper somewhere nice?

Right. That's not in any way pornographic; in fact, my willy has fallen over distraught at my own efforts. It's sad. Back in a tick; I need to tend to things at hand because writing this and thinking about you should be and is much more cheery than that, and I refuse to distract myself so badly.

All right, back. Don't mind the smudges.

Writing naked in bed alone isn't quite the same as using your back as a desk, though, and more than that, my hand isn't like your mouth. Perhaps I should have asked Fabian round again to immortalize me on film.

Shut it, you know he would, just for the laugh and to hold it over you if he weren't bloody with you, leaving me alone and tragic in Exeter. It's absurd.

Write back to me soon, if only to prevent me sending anything quite this pathetic again. Or just come back; it will prevent tendonitis in my wrist.
-B.

Draco had read through the letter, pretending at least for part of the time that he was appalled, then read it again, not pretending he wasn't aroused, and proceeded to search through the drawer to see what else "B" had written.

Quite a lot, it came to pass, and Gideon had written back; B's assessment of his relatively better porn was accurate, and Draco had groaned and sat down in the cramped space beside and past the chest, behind the boxes. He read letter after letter, sorting the papers into piles between them without much attention to their content and squirming as he thought about writing such a letter to Charlie. Not that he was going to. Not that he would ever make it through the second sentence. Fuck.

Charlie shouted again. "Draco! Your coat is here, and you'd not have gone out in this..."

"Up here," Draco called, beginning to stuff pages back where he'd found them, feeling caught and ridiculous and as though he was where he didn't belong. "Um, I'll come down, just..." He pushed at the drawer, which didn't want to close. "Just a minute!"

"Up... in the attic? Seriously?" Charlie was standing just below him now, and Draco sighed as the ladder creaked. He should have just Apparated down, but now he was here, and getting past the open drawer to go by the boxes wasn't going to happen before Charlie was in the room.

"Yes?" he said. Charlie took the top box off the pile and peered over.

"Where--oh. Oi, did you unstick the chest? Wow, I stuck it with some kind of mutant hybrid charm once when some of the children were over and were playing spies all over the house. Just in case they, well. And then it didn't unstick, which was a hell of a loss, I'll have you know. Did you look?"

"It wasn't sealed because it was...weren't your uncles--they took pictures together? And there was--"

"Yes, then, you did." Charlie moved another box, and another. "See anything you like?"

"Um." Draco glanced away. "Letters. Pictures. Are you angry?"

"Do I look angry?"

"No." Draco opened his mouth to say something else, something about how he'd snuck up here and Charlie should be annoyed and why on earth had he gone and left Draco with the run of the house, and then he stopped and shook his head. "No, you don't look angry. I've no idea how you are the way you are, because if someone pried open a sealed drawer in my--in the house in which I was raised, there would probably be something cursed inside, but then, you keep telling me--"

"That I wasn't raised as you were. So, were you sneaking up here looking for things to use against me?"

Draco sighed. "In a way. Except that it wouldn't work anyway, and also Merlin, I can't go showing any of that to anyone! There's cocksucking! And chests! And evidently your uncles had matching--"

"Tattoos, yes. Although I recall there was mention in one of the letters of a new one I never saw, likely because even my perverted ridiculous uncles didn't go showing off their tattooed-and-pierced genitals to a seven year old."

"You were seven, when you found this?"

"No, I was sixteen when I found this, in my grandmother Prewett's attic, entirely not sealed up and under about a mile of dust. I appropriated it and never told my mother because Christ, I suppose that would be a secret you could use against me, except you'd probably never survive the conversation, and if you did the Howlers would never end. So." Charlie held out a hand across the box directly on the floor.

"I am not going to even contemplate that conversation. Your mother is scary."

"Only when it comes to topics she thinks are inappropriate. Still, I think we should see about getting me some good blackmail material as well, don't you? Just to be fair?"

"Some what?"

Charlie stepped across and righted the slightly-askew drawer, pushing it in easily, then opened the last drawer at the bottom, where there were unused scrolls and a couple of quills. "I have ink downstairs," he said. "Come on. You can use my back as a desk, and write me a letter."

"You're right here."

"Humor me." Charlie raised a brow. "So I'll have something to read when you go off to your training next month. I mean, your first owl won't get to me for a whole day, right?"

Draco swallowed. "You want to read a letter from me? About that thing you do with your tongue? It might be boring."

"Sure, and you don't bore me, except if we mean to use the word bore another way entirely, so I look forward to an epic on uses of the tongue. Or an ode to how your cock feels in my mouth, or a limerick about the dangers of fucking on a balcony in the snow."

Draco remembered the balcony and shivered, not from the memory of the cold. "Fuck."

"Later."

Draco sighed. "Not what I meant. And if I'm writing an ode, it's to the muscles of your arse." He let Charlie help him across the box and went toward the ladder to start down. "But in case this isn't clear, my Howler skills are excellent, too."

"Then we'll be equal," Charlie said. "How it should be." He followed Draco down the ladder and Summoned the inkpot from the table.