And she's back with another one! This is going to be quite a bit different than Inheritance, so buckle up. I'm going full Heaven vs. Hell AU with an ensemble cast and absolutely no canon relationships (sorry folks). The premise of this story is inspired heavily by Good Omens* written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, and the title is pulled directly from a Kim Petras song (because in this house, we stan the spooky queen of Halloween).
summary: Eternity is forever. It's also annoyingly predictable, or rather it was until someone lost a few incredibly invaluable and irreplaceable trumpets. And somewhere along the line, definitely before the whole trumpet thing, a demon fell for the one thing he knew he couldn't have. Dramione, Heaven vs. Hell AU with a sprinkle of Harry/Theo, Blaise/Ginny, and Ron/Pansy.
disclaimer: These characters were created by J.K. Rowling, and I'm just here to throw them into something totally outrageous.
cw: there will be a lot everything – sex, drugs, violence/gore, and we'll be jumping right into it, so gird your loins!
*No actual antichrists were harmed in the making of this story.
Chapter One: Low life for life
Humans.
They're all so damn predictable.
It really doesn't take much to make them the perfect amount of suggestible. Pack them into a small space, pump them full of liquor (or whatever drug has been deemed the new favorite), turn the music up to eleven, and they all – all of them – will start doing wonderfully naughty things.
One shot too many, and the girl who swore she'd never talk to him again will be latched onto his lips, letting him finger her in the middle of the dance floor. Some crushed up Adderall, and the frat boy who spent most of his adolescence bullying anyone who lived a less than hetero life out in the open will be on his knees in the bathroom eagerly sucking someone's cock. And with some combination of the two, the man who promised – cross his heart and hope to die promised – that he'd never cheat on his wife ever again will wake up with his face buried between someone else's legs.
It was all so Old Testament, and so incredibly fucking repetitive.
But watching a human crumble apart, no matter how many times the same scenario played itself out, was also, without a doubt, Draco's favorite guilty pleasure. And once the fireworks started, no one, not even the Devil himself, could force him to look away.
Draco was a demon – a bloody good one at that – and like the rest of his kind, human depravity was truly the only currency that mattered to him. His entire existence centered around cultivating just the right set of circumstances for humans to become the most devious versions of themselves, and no matter how boring things got, no matter how easy his pawns slipped into his well-laid traps, he lusted for those moments in a way that would have been grossly inappropriate for anyone outside of his line of work. He wasn't just designed to get off on human pain (although he did, very much so), he had been sent up to Earth for one thing: to torment people until their souls were splendidly irredeemable.
There really was nothing quite like the high he got from witnessing someone's spectacular fall from grace, nothing quite like the delight he felt when someone let slip their deepest, darkest desires before acting on them in horribly exciting ways, but what he craved the most were someone's mortal sins, the ones that when tallied with everyone else's would eventually tip the scales in his side's favor. Those grisly transgressions weren't just invigorating, they were delectable, and Draco, the deviant that he was, enjoyed playing a part in someone's catastrophic self-destruction almost as much as loved coming.
Almost.
It's just that coming, preferably while buried deep inside someone else, was a wonderfully addictive thing.
And fortunately, sexual debauchery wasn't just encouraged for someone like him, it was built into his damn DNA.
Long before Draco had joined the ranks of Earthly tormentors, demons were simply sent above in the same beautifully grotesque forms they took whilst in Hell. However, it became obvious fairly quickly that those forms made it a bit too difficult to accomplish all of their work – demons couldn't exactly run around demon-ing very well if they couldn't get close to humans – and so, eventually every demon fated for the surface was issued a corporeal human form with all the accompanying accoutrement. And because there was nothing good-intentioned about a demon pretending to be anything but itself, it didn't take terribly long for any of them to figure out all the ways that they could use their newfound parts.
(And yes, that means exactly what you think it means.)
Demons loved fucking, more so probably than any other type of being, and Draco was certainly no exception, but being able to mingle undetected with humans meant he could finally dabble in the no-strings-attached-swiftly-followed-by-a-thorough-ghosting kind of penetration that hadn't been afforded to him when he was just another demon in Hell. And as it turned out, humans rather enjoyed fucking too, and at least in the confines of their own bedrooms, really did know how to have quite a bit of fun.
Draco didn't actually need to be beautiful to get people in bed, a demon never did, but he was better endowed than most, and his near-perfect human form had served him exceptionally well during his two millennia tenure on Earth. He was tall, broad, and beautifully pale which made him look, ironically, rather angelic, and there was something unmistakably noble and aristocratic about the way he carried himself, granting him a kind of power that humans just couldn't resist. His human body certainly helped him amass quite the long list of misdeeds, but the vast majority of his successes, especially the ones that resulted in the demise of entire kingdoms, could be attributed solely to his cock.
The exquisite appendage had helped him infiltrate royal courts, supplant kings, trick entire countries into attacking things that didn't need attacking, take down churches (and a few popes), disrupt law and order where things were generally lawful and orderly, and on one particularly difficult to explain occasion, buy his way off a cursed pirate ship. He buried it in women, men, and everyone who identified somewhere in between, and the fact that humans always seemed to make a fuss about the whole thing seemed rather ridiculous to him – fucking was fucking after all, and he would never apologize for where his libido took him, especially when the salacious act brought him both pleasure and professional prestige.
His cock was his prized possession, his Excalibur, and for all of the aforementioned reasons, he was incredibly fond of it.
He had been on Earth for so long that he couldn't actually remember the face of the first person he had the luxury of penetrating, but he would never forget how it had felt, how spilling into that first warm, wet hole that surely should have been too small for anything but a finger had made him nearly lose his mind. It felt fucking amazing (still did), so it was no wonder the other side, the horrid gatekeepers that they were, fought so adamantly for so long to keep people from taking any sort of enjoyment from it.
Idiots, the lot of them.
But if he had learned anything from his time on Earth, it was that there was always an exception to any rule. And naturally, she was like nothing he ever thought an angel could be.
The first time he laid eyes on her was over a thousand years ago in the middle of a battlefield.
She had been covered in blood, screaming loudly as she wielded a sword that probably weighed more than she did soaking wet. Of course, he had known what she was right away, could have sensed it from miles away, and was immediately intrigued by her somewhat unorthodox approach to her heavenly duties. No doubt, she had been sent there to thwart him – or had he been sent there to thwart her? he couldn't remember – but there was something in her eyes, a madness of sorts, that he was sure shouldn't possibly be allowed to exist in someone who was supposed to be virginal and pure.
He watched her out of the corner of his eye, licking the blood off his lips as he continued to drive his sword into any man marching under the opposing red and yellow flag. He loved the brutality of war, and working amongst the Northmen had probably been the least amount of bored he'd been in centuries, but not even all the death and suffering (which he enjoyed immensely) were enough to distract him from her.
It wasn't the first time he had come across an angel in the field, there were certainly one or two who deserved nothing less than a good ole neck snapping, but it was the first time he'd come across an angel who quite literally took his breath away.
And she was spectacular.
Her golden-brown hair flew wildly around her head as she fought, giving the illusion that she was wearing an elaborate crown, and not even the blood on her face nor the hideous colors she was donning could dim the glow of her rich caramel skin. She was small but impressively strong, carrying herself with a kind of grace more fitting for a queen than a foot soldier for some eternally doomed king. Draco tried to look away, he really did, and he tried to pretend that he hadn't seen her, that she had no effect on him whatsoever, but when he felt her eyes finally bore into him from somewhere across the field, the pretense was up.
He took out nearly thirty men trying to get to her, because staying away from her wasn't an option anymore, and when he was finally able to step unencumbered into her view, she simply smirked at him and slid gracefully off the horse she had wrangled under her control.
"You should take your Northmen home," she told him, her voice soft but commanding as she wiped at the side of her mouth.
"And why the fuck would I do that?" he replied, studying her curiously. "We're winning." He cocked his head slightly, gesturing around him with bloodied hands.
And the Northmen were, winning that was. The Northumbrian King she was fighting for was as good as dead. The fool had sealed his own fate as well as that of all of the men fighting in his name the moment he chose to murder the wrong fucking Viking, and anyone who tried to stop the invading army from getting to him didn't stand a chance in hell of doing anything about it.
She didn't reply right away, and her eyes narrowed as she finally took a moment to assess the carnage around her. "For now," she admitted, suddenly throwing her sword at his feet. "For now."
She didn't take her eyes off him, didn't even flinch, not even when he played his barbarous part and tossed her violently into the mud before any of the other men around him could. And still, even though she could miracle her way out the entire situation, she allowed herself to be chained up and corralled with the other hostages. Even after he walked away to join in a celebratory skål, Draco could see a fire burning so deep in her eyes that he thought the area around her would burst into flames. Whatever her motives were, he couldn't tell, but he was curious, and so instead of returning to the battlefield to help with the 'clean up' (read: murdering), he concealed himself nearby, watching and waiting and completely incapable of focusing on anything but her.
In the end, they had both been right. Her side lost in a spectacularly gruesome way that day, but decades later, Draco's side, much to his chagrin, was eventually expelled. And in the grand scheme of things, none of it really mattered – their sides' interests changed more frequently than the weather, and so too did their respective orders.
What actually mattered was that Draco, for some asinine reason, decided to make quite an elaborate show of breaking her out of the chains she had been put in before she could be whisked away, and that she, for some equally stupid reason, immediately transported them to the nearest unoccupied bed. And then, because none of that had been ridiculous enough, they proceeded to fuck each other with such a fury that neither of them had been capable of moving for days afterward.
It turns out that nothing fucks quite like an angel, and Draco, not caring about any of the potential consequences of involving himself with someone from the opposition, had been truly and royally screwed from the moment he first exploded inside of her.
Now, bending the rules was what demons did, but if there ever was a rule which if broken was grounds for termination, it would be don't fraternize with the enemy. Unfortunately, Draco couldn't help himself, and the battle had only been the beginning of his stupidity.
Every decade or so, and definitely intentionally, they'd find each other in the middle of some battleground or another. They'd bicker, continuing whatever it was they were doing before the other had arrived, and then, when their tasks were complete (or smoldering in ruins compliments of the other), they'd hastily make their way to some run-down building for a few rounds of incredibly mind-blowing sex. Sometimes their rendezvous would last for days, both of them neglecting their other bodily human needs to the point that they made themselves ill, while other times they were lucky to have an hour, nearly killing each other in the process of seeing how fast and hard they could fuck each other's brains out, but the moments were still theirs, and they were, surprisingly, more than enough for either of them.
It was dangerous, not to mention incomprehensibly stupid, but neither of them seemed capable of stopping whatever it was they were doing. Draco knew that she lusted after their time together as much as he did. He knew she searched for him just as often as he searched for her when they were forced apart by their duties to their sides. And he knew, despite never hearing her say the words, that she cared deeply for him. But he was a demon, and she was an angel, and they were, without a doubt, never meant to be anything other than enemies.
Unfortunately, no matter how much they tried to convince themselves otherwise, it never was just a simple hate-fucking.
Draco shouldn't have felt anything for her, shouldn't have been so drawn to someone born on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, and yet, he did and he was. He may have been given a human form, but he hadn't been given a heart – at least not a beating one – and for the life of him, he couldn't figure out why any of it mattered, why of all the beings he'd come across that it was her that he couldn't get out of his head.
Perhaps more importantly was the mind-bending quandary of what the hell an angel like her was doing messing around with someone like him?
Of course, they were never together, not really, and even if they had been, he wasn't sure it would have made a difference. She had done the one thing he couldn't; she disappeared and never came back.
It had been over fifty years since he had seen her last, and even for someone blessed with eternity, that was far too long. Draco wanted to wring her neck and put her back in the chains he had long since freed her from; he wanted to throw her against the wall and fuck her senseless, and he wanted to do all those things at the same time. She was infuriating and beautiful, and he had almost convinced himself that he was irrevocably and dangerously in love with her.
But love wasn't real, and he knew that.
He looked for her of course, telling himself it was simply because the sex had been so good, but she seemed to slip through his fingers each time he thought he'd cornered her in some godforsaken corner of the world, and when he accepted that she just didn't want to be found, he tried to forget her the only way he knew how. Unfortunately, even after all of the time and distance (and alcohol he'd drained from cellars around the world), he still couldn't erase the last gut-wrenching memory of her from his mind.
"We can't keep meeting like this," she had told him as she climbed out of bed, the pearly white sheen of her tattooed wings glistening in the morning sun.
"We always meet like this," he replied, leaning back against the pillow, his arms folded behind his head. "That much will never change."
"They'll find out eventually," came her reply, her voice just as angelic and pure as the rest of her.
Draco almost laughed but thought better of it. No one was watching them. No one really cared what they did in their free time. The space between their worlds would always just be a playground for their respective sides, a test-ground for what was to come.
"And would it really matter if they did?" he asked seriously, pushing himself upright so that he could sneak behind her.
"Perhaps not for you," she replied, moaning softly as he wrapped his arms around her. "But it would be a much longer fall for me."
She wasn't wrong.
"Ahh, but the creatures of the dark get to have all the fun," he told her, pausing to kiss her neck. "Black would suit you," he added, running his fingers along her back.
Despite having done this with her at least a thousand times, and once a few minutes ago, the black wings tattooed on his own back still shivered in anticipation. Being with her, even if just for an hour, was the only thing that got him through his annoyingly mundane existence.
"Well, do you want me to stop?" he asked when she remained quiet, his lips hovering near her pulse point.
She turned to face him, the gold in her eyes threatening to consume him.
"Never."
If he had known that was her goodbye, if he had known that she was planning to bolt, he wouldn't have rushed it. He would have taken his sweet damn time. He would have kissed her harder, thrown her against the wall and punished her for what she was about to do.
But of course, he didn't and so he couldn't do any of it. Instead, they parted ways like they always did, and then, she simply never came back.
Half a century, and Draco was finally over it; he had (absolutely) moved on, fucking his way through most of Europe until his balls ached – and not pleasantly. Memories of her definitely didn't haunt his very existence, and he definitely didn't think about her every time he saw someone with a head full of bushy brown hair – not all all. It had all been so un-demon-like anyways. He should have never let it get so personal, never should have gotten so attached, and honestly, he should be thanking her for ghosting him like she did. After a thousand years of being wrapped around her adorably dainty finger, he was finally back to his heartless ways.
And thank Beelzebub for that.
He was once again free to do whatever the hell he wanted, with whomever he wanted (not that she had ever stopped him), living his life harder and faster than he ever had before, and it was more exhilarating than he remembered – at least that's what he tried to tell himself. And sure, his life wasn't exactly a life per se, at least not in a way a human would understand, but it was his, and perhaps more important was the fact that it, whatever it was, was still pure unadulterated joy.
Except maybe, he had to admit, in this particular instance.
Draco's eyes scanned the sea of gyrating bodies below him as he leaned slightly over the metal railing at the edge of a lofted VIP section at the back of a ridiculously popular nightclub. His head was resting lazily on one of his hands, smooshing the side of his face, and his hips were thrown backward with one foot crossed over the other. It wasn't the most dignified of stances, especially for someone who was supposed to be in charge of the place and especially not in his ridiculously expensive Italian-made silk suit, but he had run out of fucks to give a few hours ago.
He was nursing a glass of bourbon which was tipped dangerously to the side almost to the point that the dark amber liquid within was threatening to spill over into the crowd below him. But the drink would be wasted on them, and he knew it, so he just let it sit there, waiting for something, anything really, to save him from his current nightmare.
Playing mysterious club owner was just a tad too pedestrian for him, and not even the near constant ogling from people in the mass below, which in any other moment and on any other day would have tickled him deeply, was enough to pull him out of the piss poor mood he was in. He needed to get out of there. He should be on the prowl, searching for a new collection of wretched souls ripe for corruption and doing wonderfully twisted things to keep his thoughts from wandering toward memories he'd rather forget.
Fucking, Blaise.
This was his club – his baby or brainchild or whatever the fuck he was calling it this week – and Draco was sick of babysitting it for him. He really did have shit to do, and he didn't have all night.
Well, technically he had an eternity, but who was really counting?
"If you're going to douse the patrons, you could at least do it with something that didn't cost me an arm and a leg."
"You certainly took your time," Draco said, not bothering to turn around. "Where the fuck have you been?" he added as he finally leveled his glass, making sure to emphasize his words with a bit more venom than usual.
"Got held up," Blaise replied, shrugging as he summoned a glass of his own and moved up to the railing to survey the tangled mess of bodies below. "Don't tell me you're bored?"
"To death," Draco told him, rolling his eyes. "If I had one, I'd have stabbed myself in the heart hours ago." He paused, crinkling his nose as he gestured at the crowd. "The smell in here is awful."
Blaise laughed. "You've been above ground for thousands of years," he began, pausing to take a sip of his drink, "thought you'd be used to stench by now."
Draco grunted, and took a much too large sip from his glass. "One is fine, two is somewhat bearable, but crowds – they're not really my thing."
"They certainly don't seem bothered by your disdain," Blaise countered, smirking as his eyes caught the hopeful gazes of at least twenty people staring at the towering blond next to him.
"For fuck's sake," Draco growled before swallowing the rest of his drink. "As if I'd stoop that low," he added, even though that's precisely what he was going to do. He caught the eye of a particularly delicious looking man below him and winked, smirking to himself as the man's knees seemed to crumble underneath him.
"We're demons," Blaise said, raising an eyebrow as he followed Draco's gaze. "You really should stop pretending that you don't get off on all this attention." He paused, straightening the sleeve of his black suit jacket. "Plus, you look like you could use a good hate fuck or two."
"Do you always have to be so bloody cheerful?" Draco asked, snapping his fingers impatiently to fill his glass with more bourbon as he tore his eyes away from the man.
"Yes," Blaise replied simply. "You should try it sometime. And better make the hate fucks at least three – you're insufferable when you get like this."
Draco snorted. "Trust me," he began, "cheer is morbidly overrated, and so is fucking the brains out of any of these misguided fools. Plus, I'm always insufferable, you know that."
"Well, if you don't do something about that," Blaise started, gesturing toward the man who was still staring longingly upward, "I'm going to have to go down there and take care of it myself."
"Be my guest," Draco replied, indifferently. "It's been centuries since I've found a man even remotely pleasing in bed."
I wasn't the truth, a good fuck was a good fuck regardless of who it was attached to, but it was always so much more fun this way – making Blaise want the man, then stealing him away at the last second. It was the perfect game.
And Draco adored games. They were the perfect distraction.
Blaise, who had been studying his friend out of the corner of his eye, threw his head back and laughed. "You really need to get out more," he said after recovering, wiping nonexistent tears from his face. "Some of them suck cock like you wouldn't believe."
"You say that like we didn't spend the Middle Ages together screwing everything that moved," Draco retorted, turning around so he could lean back against the railing.
"Touché," Blaise said, raising his glass. "How many Popes did we turn? Five?"
"Seven," Draco quickly corrected, the corner of his mouth turned into another one of his characteristic smirks. "Eight if you count the one that fainted when he caught us fucking his illegitimate daughter in his own bed. Although, technically I think it was the stealing from the poor that really did him in."
"Ahh, yes. How could I possibly forget?" Blaise said, smiling at the memory. "Those were the days."
Draco simply grunted in response. The way things had been going the last couple of decades, he was tempted to agree.
"You know, I could give it a go," Blaise offered, batting his eyelashes as he took a suggestive step forward and reached out to tug at Draco's collar.
"Oh, fuck off," Draco said, shoving him away, his drink sloshing dangerously in his hand. "We tried that once. Didn't work out, remember?"
"Yes, but you had tits then," Blaise replied, unbothered by his friend's rejection. "Imagine what we could do with two cocks instead of one?"
Draco laughed, genuinely for the first time all night, and ran his fingers through his platinum hair. Sometime early in the first century, after a particularly nasty encounter with a horrible excuse for a witch, he was hit with a curse, one that turned out to be particularly difficult to reverse. He spent the better part of three decades stuck in a female form before anyone could figure out how to change him back, and by then, he had grown so used to being a woman that he had almost been tempted to make the change a permanent one.
But then he had remembered his perfect cock.
"Bloody hag," he muttered angrily under his breath at the memory.
"To be fair," Blaise told him, chuckling quietly, "the hag at least knew what she was doing. You were unbelievably attractive as a woman."
And Blaise definitely wasn't wrong.
Draco, who was already used to a certain amount of attention, found that people threw themselves at him significantly more while he was in his more feminine form. So he, being ever the resourceful demon that he was, used his time as a woman to test out the whole fucking thing from a new and rather illuminating perspective. Unfortunately coming, as easy as it had once been for him before being turned, became a frustratingly elusive event, and after years of screwing anything he could get his hands on, he began to wonder if not being able to climax had been the hag's real revenge.
"You're insatiable, I hope you know that," Draco said finally, shaking his head. "And as tempting as your offer is, it's still going to be a firm no. Can't have you storming off again when you can't get me off. That little tantrum took you nearly a century to get over."
When Blaise had offered his services, promising to solve Draco's little problem with a few well-placed thrusts, Draco decided to give his friend a go. Unfortunately, the whole thing had been yet another embarrassing lesson in the complexities of the female orgasm, and although Draco had laughed their failure off, promising they could try it again once he stopped clutching his stomach from laughing so hard, it was too late – Blaise's overly fragile ego had been shattered.
"It was only eighty years," Blaise said, rolling his eyes. "Don't be so dramatic."
"Dramatic is my specialty," Draco reminded him before taking another sip of drink.
Blaise's eighty-year tantrum was the only time in two thousand years that they'd been apart for more than a few weeks, and although Draco would never admit it out loud, he had been unbelievably bored without Blaise by his side. While demons didn't put much weight into familial relations, they were as close as two horrible demented beings could ever be, and Blaise was, for all intents and purposes, the closest thing Draco would ever have to a brother.
"Aww, look at you two fuckers," came a voice from somewhere behind them, and Draco groaned, chugging the rest of his drink before turning around.
And then there was this asshole, who was, to use a comparable familial analogy, the drunk uncle at Thanksgiving dinner who couldn't stop shouting about aliens in Area 51.
"I thought this place was supposed to be idiot free," Draco noted with an air of frigidness.
"Hello to you too, oh exalted one," the man replied, bowing sarcastically as he finally moved out of the shadows.
"Theo," Blaise said happily, quickly conjuring a second drink. "I thought you were busy tonight," he added, holding out the glass.
Theo shrugged, accepting the glass. "Turns out, it doesn't take much time or effort to corrupt an entire political party."
"Which one this time?" Draco asked, although he truly didn't care. They were all the same.
Theo raised his eyebrows as he took a sip of his drink. "Don't you want to be surprised?" he queried, purposely side-stepping the question.
"Honestly, no," Draco scoffed, turning back around, his eyes quickly finding the man he had winked at earlier. "Was just trying to be polite."
"Good to see you still have that stick up your arse," Theo quipped, moving next to the blond to survey the land. "Probably should find someone to fuck that out of you."
Blaise, who had been mid-sip, choked on his drink as he once again found himself guffawing like a buffoon.
"I've been telling him that for years," Blaise managed finally, waving his hand to remove the liquid he had coughed up from the front of his suit. "He's still moaning about the golden girl," he risked before pursing his lips together to keep another snicker from escaping.
Draco didn't even have the energy to glare at either of them; this was the kind of thing he'd come to expect from them after the whole angel debacle. After all, it was own damn fault for telling them anything in the first place.
"And this is precisely why I hate hanging out with you two," he grumbled despite knowing it wouldn't stop either of the other demons from taking more cheap shots. "I'm leaving," he threatened, but all of them knew he wouldn't.
"Hey," Theo began, throwing a hand up in the air, "we're not the ones who fell in love with–"
"I will murder you if you finish that sentence," Draco snapped, his patience with the whole charade running dangerously thin.
Theo chuckled quietly and moved up to the railing. "I'd like to see you try," he goaded as he surveyed the land below. "So, who are we fucking tonight?" he asked after a moment, smartly steering the topic of conversation to safer waters as his eyes scanned the crowd below.
At Theo's words, Blaise noticeably perked up, his abnormally white teeth glowing against his dark skin as he smiled. "Oh, we haven't had an orgy in ages," he said gleefully. "I think Draco already found his contribution."
"We are not–" but Draco never got a chance to finish his thought because at that very moment he caught sight of a familiar head of curly brown hair, and his glass shattered in his hand.
"Oh, shit," he heard Blaise mumble.
"Well," came Theo's voice from somewhere on Draco's left, "she always did have impeccable timing."
Their words barely registered with Draco because this time, after so many false alarms, it really was her. It wasn't a dream, it wasn't some mirage; she was here in the flesh, moving briskly toward the stairs that would lead her to him. And with that realization, Draco's mouth went dry.
He wanted to scream, he wanted to rip out his non-beating heart and stomp on it until it was nothing but a mushy pool of blood, and in a strange turn of events that absolutely no one would have seen coming, he wanted to bring that damn witch back from the grave so that she could curse him in some new and horribly demented way. He wasn't supposed to care, he certainly wasn't supposed to be this unnerved at her sudden reappearance, but it was her, and not even the sea of potential witnesses was going to keep him from doing something stupid.
"Careful," Theo warned, watching with amusement from behind his glass. "Someone might think you actually care about her."
Draco hissed. "Shut it," he replied, quickly conjuring a new drink which he immediately downed. She hadn't lifted her head, not once, but there was no way she didn't know he was there; she was far too smart and cunning for that. She was here for him and him alone, and he was shaking, his feet frozen to the ornately tiled floor even though every muscle in his body was screaming at him to turn and run. "I don't fucking care about her," he added angrily. It wasn't true and they all knew it, but he said it anyway.
"Sure you don't," Blaise mused, his eyes flickering between the blond and the unruly haired angel below.
Draco ignored him, choosing instead to swear rapidly under his breath (like that would help).
And then, almost as if she could sense his discomfort, she looked up with her big, beautiful doe-eyes, and Draco knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was completely and utterly fucked.
Song - Heartless by The Weeknd.
a/n: Decided to forgo my holiday one-shot ideas because I was just too excited to get this one started. This idea has been bouncing around in my head for some time, and I'm eager to see what everyone thinks of it! I'll be posting a bit sporadically for the foreseeable future, but I am going to try my best to post at least once a week (no promises for consistency until the new year though).
The title of each chapter will pull from an applicable song, and I'll list those at the top of the end-chapter notes for those who are interested. See above for this week's song.
And lastly – for those of you that have read Inheritance, I put a little ode to that story in this Chapter. The battle where Draco meets her is the invasion of the Great Heathen Army (Northmen/Vikings) into Northumbria in ~865 AD. King Ælla was the King of Northumbria at (or around) that time and was, according to Old Norse sources, executed via the blood eagle.
