Notes: Hi again.
Sorry for the delay.
And now ...
Welcome to:
SPIDERWEB
13- The Guardian
Draco felt the bony protuberances enter his skin, and lodge in his throat, familiar and unpleasant as the bite of an insect, or the shards of a bone.
The pain of the entrance was like the bass of a melody, present, but buried under other more strident instruments; burning anger, the sound of his own breathing turned into a rasping gasp, trapped between the ducts of his trachea …
Anticipation spilled hot in the pit of his stomach, while he twisted uselessly, against the body that kept him immobilized.
He expected pain, agony. Something red and intense, but it was an instinctive waiting. He did not think about what Potter could do to him, there were no coherent thoughts in the histrionic cacophony of his brain; just boiling rage, stifling hatred, and a muffled agony, that had taken possession of his neurons.
The mixture slid from his synapses to his mouth, where it turned into bile. Unpleasant and disgustingly bitter, while the first injection of venom, (caramel and cyanide in his arteries) loosened the cords of his muscles; Hot, warmer than the blood within his body.
A honey thread searing and tangling inside his skull, like a bandage on an open wound, containing and appeasing the cutting splinters of his feelings.
Draco was still furious, filled with hatred and pain, but they were no longer so terrible as to stop him from thinking.
His brain sharpened like the rusty razor of an old knife, sharpened by blood and time, bringing to light a twisted curiosity, a defiant strangeness, that could not reconcile the young Gryffindor from his memories, with the monster at his back.
His desire to hurt Potter was a visceral need, a disheartened shout in his veins. And it wasn't going to disappear, because he could not do so with claws and teeth.
He still knew how to hurt with words, and cut with murmurs.
And he wanted to know.
He needed to know, how could Potter justify what he had done.
oOo
(Harry)
The desire was a surprise, a carmine filament that tangled in his gut, the same instant his fangs penetrated the white skin.
The morbid taste of blood, sliding down his throat, to pour into his reddish, tender entrails, and mingle with the venom's spicy and exquisite embrace.
The resultant potion of both substances burned on the inside, soft and obsessive, sticky and maddening, like an old flower liqueur.
Poison and blood ...
Swallowing guilt and resentment.
Harry felt relieved. He did not want to think, he did not want to contemplate the past, he refused to remember.
He could not help but feel the coagulated blood on his skin, firmly pressed against his. Feel its warmth. Absorb its perfume.
oOo
(Draco)
He tossed his head back, gently, gracefully, languidly, allowing his skull to lodge on the other's shoulder, just because he needed to push his lips away from the stone, enough to be able to speak.
Potter's breath had turned into a gasp on his skin, and the hand he was not grasping his wrists with, had tangled around his waist, searching for his skin beneath his robe and shirt.
Potter's hair brushed his cheek like delicate insect legs. A shiver ran down his spine, making him nauseous, drying his mouth.
Absently, he licked his lips, and the taste of Raksa / Potter flooded his tongue, still caught in the crevices of his parched lips corners. Hating him even more deeply ... and longing for him.
A sensation like a mad rhapsody, which suddenly lit up in his veins, with the taste of the other, and the murmur of the venom.
Draco threw his hips back, instinctively, brazenly, involuntarily, disgusted with himself, and with that part of him, now hidden in his gut, still wanting the contact. Twisting against that thing, no-Draco that was melting in a purr of pleasure, as he brushed the other's pelvis with the curve of his buttocks, like a bitch in heat.
Potter was erect, hard and firm against him.
Realizing it was like a bucket of cold water, disgust stirred in his guts.
He barely twisted in Potter's grasp, with his few remaining energies, reveling against the animal craving, feeling Potter gasp against his neck, his fangs flexing in his flesh. The movement caused the black widow to press against him more firmly. Adapting the planes of their bodies.
His erection slid between Draco's half-open legs, in a unpleasantly intimate contact, through his pants soaked in blood and fluids.
And Draco could not contain a desperate shiver of repugnance, and perverse pleasure, which he refused to even contemplate. Instead, he clung to the rage and anger he felt, like a slash that could not be ignored, which needed to spill out his lips and through his throat.
"Potter," she whispered. Just a gasp, a stifled sound in the sticky soft warmth of the toxin. "The chosen one," he muttered. The sound cracked delicately between his teeth. "The child who survived," he panted. -"The Savior of the Magical World…"
Potter choked on his blood at those names, coughing against his throat what he had swallowed.
The tranquility that the desire had brought him, breaking like glass.
For ten years no one had called him those things, and the pain of that time, buried but not healed, the memories he had tried to forget, threatened to awaken, with an agonizing, terrible snarl, like that of a gutted animal, dying abandoned in the asphalt.
Harry could not stand it.
Draco felt the sound in his skin like a furious vibration, which made the bite loosen. Harry released the abused bloody flesh from between his jaws, without injecting more of the toxic load.
"Shut up," Potter mumbled, his voice rough from coughing, a deceptively soft murmur that reeked of iron. Anger barely contained, frustration, and strange, stiff, pain.
As his fingers closed in his blond hair (carmine and sticky), they tensed and pulled, forcing Draco to arch against him, if he did not want to feel his neck break.
The spy let himself be manhandled, with the indolent self-assurance that often pricked the nerves of those who were trying to bring him down.
He was furious, furious as he had never been. But the poison turned his body into relaxed curves.
He laughed soft, cold and cruel.
"Does it hurt you the remind of who you were? To recognize the monster you've become?"
Harry gritted his teeth, Malfoy was playing keys that should never have sounded again ...
oOo
The guardian was quieter than the spider and the human, his priorities clearer, and his anger milder, preferring to observe and give advice. But what he could see coming in the furious troubled mind of the human could not be allowed. Harry was not in his right mind.
'If you hurt him we can lose him.'
The human ignored his words.
Draco moaned in pain before he managed to contain the sound, as Potter's hand tightened around his wrists, pressing the fine bones, until they creaked like delicate paper.
"Shut up Malfoy, I'm starting to get very tired of listening to you." Hate-like syllables. Fingers like iron tongs, growing thinner.
'Enough is enough, Harry.' called the Guardian.
'Do not mess with me Raksa.' Harry replied in a violent growl that did not attend to reasons. He had to shut Malfoy up!
Draco gasped in pain.
"You say that you're tired?" -Ruel broken fun.
The pressure became greater.
If he continued his wrists would break like fine dry wood. Draco knew it, as he knew what he was courting with his defiant tone, but he did not care. Everything hurt and burned inside.
Outside, inside ... What did it matter a little more pain?
"Tired of what, Potter? Of running away? Of murdering? Of betraying those who loved you? Do you know how Siriu ... " Perhaps he should not have uttered that name. "AAAAAAHHHH!" The delicate bones split with a horrifying creak, and the poison that had softened his muscles, and sensitized his skin, magnified the agony until it became unbearable.
Harry smiled with satisfaction.
Raksa had already seen more than enough.
His anger could be softer than the spider's and the human's, but when it reached a critical point, it was more dangerous than both. And he was upset, very upset ... with his own human side.
He grabbed Harry and crushed him against the back wall of the inside of his skull, so hard that the impact resonated like a migraine in his brain.
A tacit warning.
To remove the spider was easier, because the widow was not happy with the unnecessary pain to his pregnant mate.
He took total control of the body, as he had not in years. The sensations, long discarded, of the flesh, made him hypersensitive to every detail of information offered by the body; Draco in his arms, warm and trembling. The dried blood on his flesh, sticky and unpleasant. The discomfort of his body still sensitive after healing, the odour in his lungs; The smell of dead flesh, clotted blood, and other things he decided to ignore. The taste of the vitae of his submissive still on his tongue. The fine pain of the scratch on his side.
"Malfoy," he whispered against his ear, making a conscious effort to calm the erection he could feel pressing against the curves of the other body, a result of the spider's desire.
Draco kept trembling, struggling to control the agony. But he could barely catch air in the frightful sensation of his broken bones, and he knew he had begun to sob.
The poison, the tension, the change, the pain ... too much, too much in such a short time for a creature that a few days ago did not even know he was not human.
He was going into shock.
Raksa dropped the grab on Draco's arms, and sheltered him against his chest carefully, before sitting on the bloodied floor with the slytherin in his lap.
"Malfoy," he repeated softly, trying to catch his attention.
But Malfoy did not listen, trying to break away from him, resisting in spite of everything, but he had no strength left. Not with the poison softening his muscles, and suffering breaking his chest.
His sobs had the sound of a broken gear trying to run without the missing pieces. A painful and desperate effort.
Raksa thought it was a sound he would never had wanted to listen to.
"Calm down. Sssshh" He hesitated, not sure Malfoy could hear him. Knowing that nothing he said would help.
He reached for his arms to see the state his wrists were in. He had to treat the break before it would heal on its own.
A widow's metabolism is terribly fast, and soon, if the bones were not put in place, they might not be properly aligned when welding. With the result of an improperly fitting joint, that would have to be re-broken to be properly healed. A lesson he had learned painfully enough.
The slytherin shivered at the touch, unpleasantly, like a wounded animal. Luckily Raksa knew how to treat a wounded creature.
"I'm not going to hurt you," he repeated softly. Kind words that tried to be soothing. Movements careful, and calm, so that the other saw him come without surprises.
Laughter caught him completely off guard. A breathless gasp of laughter at Draco's red lips, a sound of steel and sharp crystals, mingled with tears. His body kept shuddering.
"F ... forgive me, ... if I do not believe you, Harry, "he muttered acidly in a broken voice, between choked breaths.
The Guardian watched the shivering skin, the tears wiping away the dried blood on the sunken cheeks, the fatigue, the strange smile.
'Hysteria, or shock. Surely both.' Nothing good. He had to calm him, or this could escalate into a panic attack.
"You have your reasons to not put any credulity in my words." - Seriousness and calm.
He grabbed his right arm with clean, technical movements to study it. The epidermis around the wrist was beginning to show the first signs of bruising, yellow and purple on white skin. He palpated the area carefully, the small bones of the joint clearly splintered.
Draco hissed in incoherent pain.
"DO NOT…!"
"Thank you." Potter's whisper made the irascible wheel of hate and agony inside Draco take a momentary leap.
"What ...?" he panted weakly.
"I did not thank you for saving my life. I would have died without your help."
He looked up ... his green eyes no longer had that quality of the colored glass, hard and toxic, which always made Draco think of hatred and violence. Now they showed the softer, more fluid hue of swamp water. A vegetable and mysterious green. Not less dangerous ... but different. A green that drew you inside, to its muddy bottom, instead of locking you outside behind the crystals of the pupils.
Draco blinked, confused, horribly sore, shivering. Of all the things he'd hoped for, a thank-you was not one of them. Another part of itself, darker and primal, seemed to calm down a little with the words. What seemed to Draco to make no sense, and yet the sensation was there, finally letting him breathe. Tender, in the midst of all that was ripping him inside.
" ... a little late for that. Don't you think?" Draco hissed, finally able to take air with with to give voice to his words.
Strangely, it was not a sound of visceral hate, but of tired pain. He no longer had the strength to continue with that ... the shock began to take its price ... his breathing was beginning to calm down, becoming heavy ... shivering more and more ... he could not move ... suddenly he was so cold...
One of the other's hands settled on his head, and slid through his hair in a kind caress, which for a moment made him feel better.
"What…?" he looked up at him. Not understanding anything.
Draco didn't know what was happening, why Potter had suddenly changed to this calm personality that was nothing like what he had seen him do so far.
Maybe the old Gryffindor was sick on the head, maybe living like a creature in the forest had broken something intrinsic in his brain. Or maybe it was something of his kind, he did not feel sane either.
'I'm not even human.'
He shrugged unconsciously, looking for some warmth. The caresses in his hair were comforting.
"I admit that my human self has not been very sympathetic." Raksa said with gentle command. Harry shouted something from the place where he had been locked in, but the Guardian shut him up.
"Your human self?" Draco blinked, briefly ... so tired. The direction of the conversation was beginning to show signs of disturbing madness.
The guardian leaned over him, his lips on his white throat, and he whimpered, panicking at the edge of his broken mind. He wanted no more venom in his blood.
He could not stand it.
"No ..." Draco mumbled, not really resisting. He felt weak and soft like a rag doll.
"Shhh," the other man quieted. "Yes. The human part of me. The Harry you probably remember." The words brushed his neck, and the breath tickled his skin. Draco raised a hand, not knowing how, and propped it tremulously on Potter's shoulder with the intention of pushing him away, but once there, the appendage ran out of energy to push.
"What are you talking about?" He whispered quietly. Something ... something inside him, was finding the contact deeply pleasant and soothing.
The gryffindor began to lick the strip of skin just below his jaw thoroughly, the spot where the skull found the neck. Nibbling and kissing, as he spoke.
"Widows like us, who are spiders and humans, are so in every way. A spider part, a human part, in my case, another part that belongs to the forest. Because his spirit is my responsibility." The contact intensified to a smooth, constant, strangely tender and careful rhythm, which was undoing the suffering, the anxiety ... very slowly.
Why? Why was he feeling this way? Draco tried to understand ... when he sensed it.
Oh, oh ... Draco recognized the presence of the other, the creature within himself that had not so long ago been intertwined with him. There, right at the edge of his conscience, purring and relaxed, in the caress of the tongue and the lips of the other.
The spider.
His spider.
His other self.
The spider recognized his presence and pulled him inside in a strange moment of madness. Draco sank into that other primary part, like being swallowed slowly by quick, hot, suffocating, quicksand. Feeling what he was. His calm, his satisfaction, the need to have the other, to be desired, protected, loved.
Experiencing the spider for the first time consciously.
Perceptions and sensations alien to him ... and yet, familiar like his own skin. They swelled within him and grew to be uncontainable.
Draco whined, and if he had had the strength to, he would have embraced Potter to seek his refuge.
"Do you understand now?" The guardian released his throat, that spot that was the most sensitive area of a widow, to be able to look into his eyes.
"... " Draco needed a minute to recover something like sanity, to unravel from the spider and become rational again. The experience left him disoriented and euphoric. "What ...? What was it…?"
Raksa smiled.
"That was the spider. You'r spider."
Draco blinked ... understanding, for the first time, what was happening. What it meant to be a widow. What he was seeing.
"Who are you?" He whispered weakly. 'Who are you? Why I have not seen you before? Why have not been you from the beginning?'
Raksa looked up, pleased that Malfoy no longer seemed hysterical or on the brink of panic. And he smiled very softly. A mystical curve of lips, like that of the Mona Lisa, if the Mona Lisa had green fire eyes.
"Raksa, the Harry who protects the forest."
To be continue.