yule_balls_mod (yule_balls_mod) wrote in hp_yule_balls, @ 2008-12-27 12:07:00 |
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Entry tags: | 2008, character: charlie weasley, character: draco malfoy, fic, pairing: charlie/draco |
Fic: Almost Crimes, 1/3 (Charlie/Draco, NC-17) for the community
Author: magnus_leo
Recipient: The Community
Title: Almost Crimes
Rating: NC-17
Pairing(s): Charlie/Draco, Charlie/OMC, Charlie/Fleur
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended. All characters engaging in sexual activity are 16 years or older.
Summary: The war is over and Charlie is left languishing in Romania. Like every good veteran he's haunted by the things he's left behind, the people whose shapes are filled with the ruddy flesh of escapism. Just as the spiral reaches its end, Charlie stumbles on a half-familiar face from home. A story with too much vodka.
Warnings: mild D/s, spanking, rimming, orgasm denial, power play, racial slurs, lots of swearing, heavy alcohol use, dark themes, the palest whiff of incest, self-pity.
Word Count: 28,035
Author's Notes: I really hope you like this fic. I was really walking on thin ice with this one. For reference's sake, major inspiration came from Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union and Sondheim's Company. A million and a half thanks to T for guiding me through this one when I thought it would eat me whole. You are a very good muse, it must be said.
Charlie woke with a start, with a familiar name on his lips and that half-panic of the sudden unknown, to burst gasping from his lake of sleep naked and cold and hungover in some shit bedroom by the Black Sea.
The morning light was impartial and grey behind thin curtains, pooling unevenly through this foreign bedroom, mullioned by thick black clouds churning like a sickness over the rusty harbour, raw with the rush of sharp December air and the cloying perfume of diesel and the sea.
Wincing awake, Charlie slowly realised his body as a catalogue of pain: the hard springs rough in his ribs, irritating the bruises that marked his body like a blue-and-purple constellation. His calves overdrawn and sore with exertion. His head ached like the collapsed suspension of a car, spraying sparks as it dragged broken along the tarmac.
Charlie leaned up to his elbows, drew his naked chest from the uncomfortable bed with a few heavy breaths and rolled to his back. He couldn't remember this room, or how he got here. A small space, covered in books, spines with names in gold like Gogol and Baudelaire and Rimbaud, serious medical textbooks all in strict Romanian; a chair piled with clothes, bras and knickers; a near-empty bottle of vodka cold and digging into his hip like a gunslinger's six-shooter; an unfamiliar dark-haired woman asleep on her stomach beside him, her face turned away and breathing softly. She was described in the rounded curves of her figure, obviously Romanian, and the mole on her inner thigh, (and the sudden wet of her tongue on the cleft of Charlie's arse, the taste of her cunt,) and the vodka, her tempered beauty in sharp contrast to the angular mistakes of Charlie's nudity, made all of slender muscle, tattoos, freckles, bones, and burns.
The taste of sick was strong in Charlie's mouth. He unscrewed the top of the vodka and sucked down the last inch and a half, the gasoline-stink of it raw in his mouth. He drank it with the wretched daily duty of cod liver oil, a necessary medicine taken liberally in the morning.
Charlie couldn't find his shirt, but pulled on his boxers and jeans, got up and stood for a moment by the window, peeling-paint frame propped open with a hardback copy of Ulysses. Charlie's body radiated with goosepimples, from shadowed hips to tight nipples, flesh paling under the dark pepper of freckles and drawn taut in the white winter wind. He was by the sea, down near the Medieval district of old Constanţa, on the top floor of a low-rent apartment building with a high-rent view. From here, he could see the familiar minaret of the Great Mahmudiye Mosque, could see the froth of waves as they crashed against the tall stormbreakers by the rough-rock beach. Gulls, taxis, trams. Slouch-shouldered teenagers, boys with long hair and baggy jeans and rip-off designer t-shirts, walking the streets to school and putting Charlie quietly to mind of the off-hand rebellion of his youngest brother.
The nameless girl's phone was off the hook. Charlie replaced it on the cradle.
Shrugging away from the bedroom, Charlie pulled on his ragged black parka, plastic fabric clinging to his damp skin like polyester seaweed. He tucked his bare feet into his worn jackboots and worried the cold metal of his keys in one hand, with the other scratching quickly the top knot of his spine. He glanced back to the Romanian woman – still sleeping, thank Christ – and then closed the door behind him.
It wasn't the airy rush of alcohol, or the lofty hangover that made Charlie stumble, but rather a kind of terrified realisation: another escape from another room, another cold morning hungover at work. Another reason not to move, another vodka stinger. He glanced back down the sterile white cavern of fluorescent light. Just another one of those girls that he scattered through his life like disposable cameras, another vivid and guilty picture for the vodka-addled picturebook that chronicled his time behind the rusty Iron Curtain.
He staggered to the lift, jabbing the button with his forefinger, leaning heavily against the metal doorframe to wait for a machine that wouldn't come. He took the stairs instead, half-stumbling and shivering down eight floors, bare-chested underneath his parka and slick with a cold, drunk sweat. The lobby gave way and Charlie was outside, thrust into the busy Thursday morning traffic of Romania's busiest harbour, into the trembling rush of steel-grey clouds and honking horns that composed the symphony of paralytic Constanţa.
Another wave of nausea rushed past Charlie, like an errant train, like a swarm of hard-winged birds buffeting his naked body, making his transparent-pale chest swell with sudden, choked breath, the distant pulsing of his heart almost visible through paper-thin skin, a ragged red pulse that throbbed in the notches of his ribs. And then he puked in a garbage can.
It was an unseasonably cold December, well below freezing. Romanians and tourists alike were dressed in Arctic gear, inflated with overstuffed parkas and dense fur collars, knee-high boots and knit hats. Breath steamed in clouds of diesel exhaust, cigarette smoke. The puckered zip of Charlie's parka was broken, and so he shoved his hands in the shallow pockets and walked with his head bowed to the chill wind blowing off the Black Sea. His lungs reacted poorly to the cold, and his bare chest grew tight with winter, flesh taut over lean muscle and raw pink burns, the sprayed ink of freckles in sharp contrast to the fish-belly white of his body, his temperature falling by degrees.
Charlie lit a cigarette, a flattened fag from his back pocket: sucked once, and flicked it away as a taxi swung into view, a beat up old Merc that might once have been white. He fell in the car heavily, exhausted against the worn leather and said: "Klausenberg."
"Klausenberg?"
Charlie mumbled in the affirmative, closed his eyes to sleep against the cool glass of the passenger window, sagging deeply into the leather seat. The taxi driver spoke in a rapid Romanian that went easily ignored, something about the weather, and Charlie replied in half-hearted English.
"Român?" the taxi driver asked.
"Britanic," Charlie replied.
"Ah, ah, yes," the taxi driver attempted, "I very much in love your musics, yes?"
Charlie squinted at him.
The taxi driver gave a wide, yellow-toothed grin. "The Beatles. Cannot buy my love."
"Yeah," Charlie replied wearily. "Sure."
"I would like your hand," the driver continued.
"Yeah," Charlie added. "Brilliant."
"Help."
"Help," Charlie agreed.
They rushed on in silence, nudging through the wedge of impossible traffic as the grey and gold landscape of the town ran by in a hesitant blur. Inevitably, the sky opened up and rain pelted the car, melted the thin layer of snow and rendered the whole of the city slick, black, and bleak.
"Klausenberg," the driver finally declared, and Charlie opened his eyes. He paid with a handful of coins and staggered out of the cab; the driver waved cheerfully before merging back into the stream of traffic to disappear into the billowing curtains of rain.
The Klausenberg was a run-down kind of bar, something out of an East German rip-off Chandler novel, where the people were silent and the slivovitz was homemade and strong. Charlie suspected it of being some kind of front – for the mafia, or the Jewish bankers, or the Black Hand – the bar being such an impossibly small room set like a jewel into an immense brick and steel complex. To Charlie, every closed iron door promised a honeycomb of locked rooms and hideaways and kilos of cocaine, an arsenal of black market Kalashnikovs and M-16s bristling with that gunpowder smell of revolution. True or not, it leant itself to the atmosphere of wanton romanticism, that bleak and sinister kind of beauty the Balkan nations were known for. Only here could a vampire rise in the hierarchy of National Heroes.
It was the kind of dive that was busy at eight in the morning, mostly down-on-their-luck Romanians in makeshift winter clothes, toes sticking out of leather sandals with the slick black of bin liners worn like a headscarf. A boy with white-gold hair sat in a dark corner wrapped in black linen; a grey-haired woman rocked gently in her chair; a tall, thin man like a Bohemian rock star was pissing or puking in a corner – everyone was somehow both familiar and foreign, as a lonely tourist mistakes strangers for the smiling faces of friends and family. Much as he could help it, every red head was a Weasley searching him out, every blonde woman Fleur's haughty twin.
"Drink?" the bartender asked in Romanian, a thick, dirty man covered in matted black hair, his eyes peeking out from beneath bushy eyebrows and over a thick Jewish beard.
"Slivovitz," Charlie mumbled, holding up two fingers. "And a coffee."
The bartender uncorked an unlabelled bottle of Romanian water, poured two shots full and slid them over to Charlie. This was followed by a small, dense cup of coffee, slick layer of oil coating the surface like a gasoline rainbow.
Charlie swallowed one of the shots, knocked it back without a thought, without a grimace as the plum brandy seared his throat and settled burning in his stomach, a sick replacement for food. The coffee was rancid, but with enough cream and sugar he drank it, easing slowly the rough churn of his belly. Halfway through the cup of black, Charlie finished his breakfast with another shot of Romanian water and overturned it quietly on the bar. He left a bill on the counter, stuffed his hands again in the mouldy pockets of his jacket and left for home without a word.
As he crossed the busy roads, Charlie licked his thumb and counted his bills, the last of the Romanian lei tucked neatly into his wallet. It numbered no more than fifteen quid's worth. He swore in Romanian, and once in English for good luck.
The apartment was a flop, a real fleabag, just three small dark Soviet rooms joined by narrow arches carved through the drywall with all the skill and talent of an axe murderer. Charlie wandered from one extreme to the other: a kitchen-living room, a bedroom, a bathroom and shower; all of it a chaos of dirty dishes, torn clothes, ancient magazines, broken furniture, and outdated electronics. Dirty, stained carpet covered every room, even the bathroom, an awful orange colour left over from the sixties and a nest of mould and stink. True to form, the walls were covered in fake wood panelling, chipped in places by Charlie's drunken fingers and boredom, or else completely ripped off, huge chunks revealing stained drywall beneath. It was the anachronistic decor of an old Russian pornography, a tacky impression of idealized American suburbia, pastel-coloured furniture supporting the unwilling fruits of underage Russian labour.
Charlie stripped off his parka, tossed it onto the couch. His jackboots landed in a leather heap by the broken vent, and he wriggled out of his dirty jeans, peeling them off and dumping them on the kitchen table. Tugging a torn black jumper from one of the hangers he pulled it on, rolled up the ribbed sleeves and snapped off a couple of the loose strings at the cuff. Charlie stumbled to find a new pair of trousers, fingering the mess of dirty clothes to uncover ugly acid-washed jeans, ripped at the knees and the thigh. He put them on, jumping from one foot to the other and buckling it low around his waist.
Already late for work, Charlie made a cup of coffee. His cupboards revealed a clean mug and a half-empty bottle of vodka. He tipped a measure of spirit into his coffee, drank another half-inch and filled it again. He drained the cup and yawned, running his hands over his stomach up to pinch, bored, at his soft nipples. He scratched his rough stubble with dirty nails and flattened down his hair, a dark-red mop, an ear-length ginger mess that he brushed irritably from his face. The daze, the fluff of Russian water collecting like cotton in his mind grew warm and full.
It was only then he noticed the envelope on the carpet by the door, dirty with the tread of his boot. Charlie picked it up, scanned the return address. He tore it open.
Charlie,
This is beginning to feel like a monologue. Please, send a letter.
Fleur's pregnant.
So you were right. And now you're the first one to know. I'm telling mum and dad tonight, but I needed to tell you first. She's only a couple months along, but she's got a bit of a tummy. It's mad, I wish you were here. Everyone's going to go mental. Fleur invited her parents over for the next few months, to help out around the house. Things are getting back to normal.
I know you hate writing, so why not come back for a visit? You can stay here again. I've got contacts in the ministry (i.e. dad) who can get you a portkey for cheap.
I've told my owl to stay there until she gets a reply. But I need her back soon, so hurry the fuck up.
Fleur says hi,
Don't drink the water,
Love you,
Bill