Chapter 1 of The Bubo
Where a whimsical and macabre plot device is introduced.
Thursday, November 19, 1994
Draco drew the barbs of his crow-feather quill back and forth over his lips. His half-written History essay swam languorously in his unfocused vision, lit by the dappled, green-tinted sunshine that filtered through the lake outside the window. The tickling sensation had a strange rapport with the fickle, dancing light, especially when he teased the very tip of his upper lip. With perfectly measured pressure, he could make the tingling travel all the way down to his toes.
In his mind’s eye, it wasn’t the feather tickling his lips, but the soft, barely-there baby hair on the nape of Potter’s neck. Draco had seen it a few times, lighting up like a golden halo when the sun struck Potter’s profile just so in the Transfiguration classroom, even though Draco usually sat on the other end of it. Unlike Potter, Draco had exceptional eyesight.
A shadow passed over his light show. He looked up just in time to see a tentacle of the Giant Squid trailing past the window. When he lowered his eyes on his essay again, he frowned. “Harry Potter,” the essay said, on a fresh line all its own, followed by an animated sketch of a beating, anatomically correct heart getting struck by lightning while a serpent coiled around it. And then, embarrassingly,
“The boy who lived and the boy who loved”
“The boy who lived and the boy who died”
It was his handwriting. The sketch was in his style. There could be no doubt he had done that, and recently, judging by the wetness of the ink, but he had no memory of it. He shook his head. What a disgrace, Father’s voice hissed in his ear. As if it weren’t bad enough that you’re pining for a boy. Did it have to be this one?
Draco wholeheartedly agreed. It was bad. It was so bad, he couldn’t imagine it being any worse. The unwanted, unwelcome attraction threatened to rip him asunder. Wild urges coursed through his body all day, every day, morphing from lust to rage to longing to horror like a boggart in a crowd.
It had started on the train, where he seized an unprecedented opportunity to stare at Potter, unobserved and uninterrupted, for fully three minutes as they left the King’s Cross station. Which was more than long enough to count the inches Potter had gained over the summer (he was still shorter than Draco, thank Merlin for small favors), and get hypnotized by the bobbing of the sharp new bulge in Potter’s throat while he drained an entire water bottle in one go, and to twitch uncomfortably at the action of Potter’s newly muscled arms, nude in his sleeveless Muggle shirt, while he heaved the cages on top of the overhead shelves. Long enough to map the new angles of his face, strange in its familiarity, mark a new nook between the ear and the jaw, the beginnings of a new dip in the chin, the sharpened cut of the eyebrows. Long enough to feel a stab of desperate envy when someone else made Potter laugh. Long enough for Potter to finally look his way and wound him with that reckless green gaze. And if Draco imagined that something had fractured in Potter’s features too, if only for that single moment, so be it. A fantasy to soothe the ache.
He had scarcely had time to reflect on the frightening ways his body and soul reacted to this assault on the senses, let alone come to terms with them, when, only a day after, there’d been the ferret episode. The most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to him, and of course bloody Potter had to be there not only to witness it, but to be all chivalrous about it. Draco wasn’t sure if it was a blessing or a curse that his memories of the brief time he had inhabited an animal form were sketchy at best. He knew Potter had carried him through the school. Picturing it made him cringe. He knew Potter had been tasked by McGonagall to “attend” to Draco—naked, frightened and disoriented—after his transformation back to a boy. He remembered most of the conversation that had followed, though some parts he wasn’t sure he hadn’t invented, and others, he wished he had. One shouldn’t be allowed to converse with their inexplicably attractive rival after one’s been freshly transfigured.
Draco hadn’t been able to get the scents of Potter’s robes and skin and hair out of his nose for weeks after the incident. No one else would ever know what inspired the POTTER STINKS badges. Those had been great fun, but didn’t really help with his problem. Nothing helped with his problem, and he feared nothing could.
That was fine. He could afford a little teenage angst. What he could absolutely not afford, was making it someone else’s problem too. Such as Mother’s and Father’s. Or Professor Snape’s. And the prospect of it loomed ever closer with each test and exam. He couldn’t focus, and his grades were showing it. Where he had used to pass easily with Es and the occasional A in previous years, now it was more like Ps and the occasional D. And the end of term was only a month away.
Which was why he was stuck in here, studying, while everyone else was out in Hogsmeade.
He grabbed his wand, pointed it at the parchment, then thought better of casting in the direction of the essay with his left hand. So he put down the quill before vanishing the offending lines. The sketch he left. He’d spell it out of the essay and into his sketchbook later.
“Hey, Draco,” said Vince, and Draco jumped. He’d forgotten he wasn’t alone. Vince had been uncharacteristically calm and silent, almost hidden behind the teetering tower of books they had piled in the middle of the table.
Draco jutted his chin out in response.
Vince grinned conspiratorially, leaned closer, and lowered his voice to say: “Would you like to see my bubo?”
The ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner behind them suddenly filled the room like some doomsday countdown. Draco stared. Did Vince just offer to show him his… boob?
“Your what?” Draco asked, his brows high enough now to meet his hairline.
“The bubo,” Vince whispered excitedly, like it was a given that Draco would know what he was talking about. And then, to Draco’s horror, he began to undress.
Draco took quick stock of the Slytherin common room, though he already knew who he’d see there: no one. No one at all. They were alone in the dungeons, perhaps in the entire castle. And the thought suddenly filled Draco with unease.
Vince had always been a bit… strange. Most people took it for stupidity, the way he laughed at things no one else found funny, and forced himself to laugh when everyone else did even though it was very painfully obvious he didn’t get the joke; the way his cheeks got flushed, sometimes, while he stared at the mid-distance, lost in thought, and the way he’d look at you if you dared stir him from such reveries, his gaze disturbingly sharp and intense, like it belonged to someone else.
His dorm-mates knew better. They knew about his wax-box, where he liked to melt candles of all colors, dripping hot wax onto his palms and fingers and playing with the flame for hours, quiet and happy. They knew about the time he had set his bed curtains ablaze in the middle of the night, toying with the latest in his ever-growing repertoire of fire spells. He’d been naked waist-down. While trying to put out the flames, Greg ended up with burns not one of them knew how to heal. Draco had to bribe Marcus Flint to find someone among the older Slytherins to do it, and Isabella Sallow, the seventh-year prefect, to keep a lid on the whole thing. Vince still owed him the last leg of that debt.
Greg and Draco knew some things even Blaise and Theo didn’t. Like the story of the shed in the Crabbe estate that had mysteriously caught fire on a rainy morning in the summer of 1992. The blaze had been magical and could not be put out till it ran its course. The unfortunate house elf who had been in the shed when the fire started, and died in it, apparently unable to Apparate out, was blamed. And Draco knew, from eavesdropping on Mother and Mrs. Crabbe during the Easter break, that Vince was to start seeing a neuromancer. Whatever that was.
“Vince,” Draco said, doing his best imitation of Father’s stern, reasonable, no-nonsense tone. “What are you doing?”
Having loosened his tie, Vince was now unbuttoning his shirt. “Wait till you see it,” he said. “I wanted to tell you about it, but it only started to show a few days ago. And now it itches.”
Draco swallowed, feeling the first stirrings of actual fear, though he couldn’t say what he was afraid of. He knew Vince wouldn’t… assault him, or anything like that. Would he? Draco’s palms had gone sweaty and he tightened the grip on his wand. “What are you talking about?”
“The bubo,” Vince insisted, like Draco was the one behaving oddly. He ripped the shirttails from under his belt and lifted his left arm. “Look!”
Under his shirt, Vince wore a white cotton vest that mercifully hid his doughy breasts, though some of his black, wiry chest hair showed above the low neckline. Several large zits spotted the pasty skin along his collarbones. His armpit was shockingly hairy, much more so than Draco’s, who barely had a wisp of silky golden hair there—or anywhere. The black strands curled with sweat.
But all of that was peripheral. Something bulged under the skin just under Vince’s armpit. Snitch-sized, oblong, and engorged with blood, it looked like an obsidian pebble embedded in the flesh.
The bubo.
Images of those infected with and deceased from the bubonic plague poured into Draco’s mind. Bulbous black growths bubbling from armpits and groins. The beaked masks of Muggle healers. The piles of emaciated corpses on cartwheels and in smoking mass graves—or was that from one of their World Wars?
Then he randomly remembered the moving picture he’d found in Grandfather’s study when he had been nine, of a man—presumably a Muggle—tied by the arms and legs to a horse on each side, and when the horses were spurred, getting dismembered. The geysers of blood issuing from the sockets of the torn limbs, the wet plop of the disconnected torso as it hit the ground. Draco had been unable to sleep for a fortnight after seeing it, and had occasional nightmares about it for years. The door to Grandfather’s study had vanished in the days that followed, never to appear again, only a faint scent of Mother’s magic left in its place.
Yet despite the mild nausea caused by these hodge-podge recollections, Draco was overwhelmingly relieved. Vince really had… a bubo. It wasn’t anything… untoward.
Vince chuckled. “You should see your face.”
“Are you… ill?” Draco asked, schooling his features. The plague could infect wixen, but it was easily cured with magic.
“What?” Vince snorted. “Of course not.” He stared at Draco expectantly for a few more moments. “You really don’t know what this is?”
“How the hell would I?”
“You know everything,” Vince said with conviction.
“Well.” Draco released his wand and wiped his sweaty hands on his trousers. “Go on, then. Enlighten me.”
Vince grinned. “It’s going to cure me,” he said.
“Cure you? Didn’t you say you aren’t ill?”
“Not that way. It’ll cure me of…” Vince leaned forward once more, to whisper, “my obsession.”
Draco frowned. He was getting tired of guessing. “What obsession?”
“You know.” Blushing, Vince looked at his bubo, then caressed it. Draco squinted. Something was swirling in it. Something bright? Like…
“Fire?”
Vince flinched and glanced at Draco reproachfully. “Shhh!”
“There’s no one here.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Pfft. Who would want to spy on you? Perhaps you should rather look into curing paranoia.”
“You’re the one to talk, putting silencing charms around your bed every night, like no one can guess what you’re—”
Draco hit the desk, making the scrolls and quills and inkwells jump and the book pile lean precariously. He glared at Vince, who had gone pale and shut up at once, but it was too late. Draco’s cheeks were burning. When had Vince become so observant? And what had he been doing awake when Draco, sleepless, sought release in the dead of the night with Potter’s name on his lips?
“Come closer,” he barked. “I want to have a look.”
Vince nodded and stood up. He unbuttoned his cuffs and took his shirt off entirely, then approached Draco and lifted his arm again. Draco held his breath against Vince’s body odor, but he soon forgot about it. Something was definitely moving inside of the bubo: an orange glow, like a tiny torchlight.
“Does it hurt?” Draco asked.
“No. It just itches. You can touch it if you want.” To demonstrate, Vince nudged the bubo from below, and Draco could see it shift under the skin, liquid and loose. Frowning, he touched it gently. Vince chuckled. “That tickles.”
Draco felt the bubo with a bit more purpose. It was firmer than it had appeared, but it did have a bit of a give. Like the stubborn blisters he had nursed on his palms for a whole term when he started playing Quidditch on the Slytherin team. The bubo was hot under Draco’s fingertips, feverishly so, and there was a vague halo of magic about it, just barely at the threshold of his senses.
“How’s it supposed to cure you?”
As Vince lowered his meaty arm, a whiff of warm air heavy with the musk of sweat hit Draco’s face and he breathed it in before he could stop himself. Both Vince and Greg were ahead of the other boys in their cohort: taller, hairier, and smellier. Draco hated it. It was disgusting. Yet a part of him was drawn to it, to their brutish masculinity—the same part that wondered, day after day, whether Potter shaved and if so, how often, and if he had nests of soft black curls under his armpits, and how his sweat smelled, and tasted. Inevitably, this led to wondering about other nests of soft black curls on Potter’s body and how those smelled and tasted. And then Draco would find he’s half-hard and all twisted inside, aching, aching.
“I take potions,” Vince explained. He was putting his shirt back on, thank goodness. “They channel my… problem… into the bubo. It will grow larger. It might hurt. And then it’ll pass, and I’ll be cured. It’s like… what was the word?” He paused with his shirt half-buttoned up (off by one button), looking up and moving his lips. “In-something? In… occupation?”
“Inoculation,” said Draco.
“Yeah!” Vince beamed. “Inoculation. I think it means…” he did a few more buttons. “Well, I don’t know. But in the end, I’ll be cured.”
“It means you’ll be immune.” Vince blinked at him, uncomprehending, and Draco sighed. “You’ll never fall victim to the same… problem… again.”
“Ah, yeah! That’s what Doctor Thorn said.”
“Who’s that?” asked Draco, though he could guess.
“My neuromancer,” said Vince. “Oh.” He realized he had buttoned his shirt wrong and started to undo it, but Draco clicked his tongue and waved his wand, redoing the buttons perfectly. Vince grinned. “Thanks!”
“You were saying?”
“Right. Mum hired him. After…” Vince seemed to stall, putting on his tie now.
“Go on,” said Draco, softening his voice. “You can tell me.”
Vince swallowed. “You remember the World Cup?”
What he meant, of course, wasn’t the World Cup itself, but what had happened after. Draco nodded, feeling the blood drain from his face. Whatever it was, it wasn’t going to be good.
“Mum took me home when they—when it started.”
Made sense. Draco’s mother had meant to do the same. She and Father had argued after the game, but Draco had been too preoccupied stewing over the fact that Potter had obviously had a grand time with a pack of weasels, ignoring Draco completely, to try and eavesdrop. Feeling Father’s silent support, he said no when Mother asked him to side-along with her back to the Manor. He woke up alone later in the night, when it started, as Vince so eloquently put it, and rushed out, not knowing where he was going or why, until he saw Potter. Draco had been so overcome with relief that he even warned that mudblood, Granger, to get out of sight. Merlin, what an awful night.
“And when he got back,” Vince was saying, “he was…”
“Wasted,” Draco filled in. There was no need to specify who he was. Draco had seen the lot of them revel in the wake of the chaos they had caused, raising cup after cup to the Dark Lord and His Mark in the sky, though triumph had been tinted with terror on more than a few faces. Draco shuddered.
“Mum was mad,” Vince went on, haltingly. “She yelled at him and he… he…” Vince looked out the window, his mouth a thin, downcast line. “I was too scared to do anything. But later that night, after he’d gone out again—I guess I got up, I don’t really remember—and… and there was a fire in his study.” Vince turned to Draco with one of those over-intense, disquieting looks. “I didn’t mean to do it, I swear. I don’t even remember.” He knotted his tie and heaved a long sigh. “He didn’t come home before I left for Hogwarts, or he would’ve skinned me alive.”
Draco looked away, his brow heavy. Mr. Crabbe’s penchant for domestic violence was a well-known secret in their social circles. He supposed he ought to be grateful Father never raised his wand when he drank, sinking into distasteful melancholy rather than flaring up in rage. Rage had been Grandfather’s thing, by all accounts.
Draco wondered what kind of drunk he was going to make one day. For there was little doubt that he would become one, forced into an arranged marriage to a woman he could never love, into fathering children with his eyes screwed shut while imagining a man under him. Into never knowing happiness.
Happiness? Father’s voice scoffed. Love? You’re a Malfoy, Draco. The scion of a bloodline older than the stone built into these walls. You must hold yourself above the petty ideals Muggles have polluted our world with, lest you find yourself under the heels of those who do.
Vince shook himself and shrugged on his robes. “Don’t tell the others about this?”
“No—I—” Draco’s mouth had gone dry. “Of course not.”
* * *
But the thought hardly left him, hanging in the back of his mind like a spider, waiting for unsuspecting prey to fall into her net.
At dinner, Draco put a special effort into his stories and jokes, and was glad to see Vince cheer up a little as a result. But he felt none of the cheer himself. Over at the Gryffindor table, Potter sat brooding as well. Not for the first time, it struck Draco that their emotions were inexplicably synchronized. Everyone knew Potter’s weasel friend had stopped speaking to him after his name had come out of the Goblet of Fire, and Draco’s reasons for feeling depressed could not have been more remote, yet still he was sure there was a connection. A thread of fate stretching between them, sometimes as thin as spiderweb, other times as solid and unyielding as a manacle.
It drew them into close proximity as the crowd thickened at the door of the Great Hall, though Draco didn’t realize it at first. People were trickling out one at a time. Draco looked at Greg, then gestured with his chin, and Greg started to expertly push his way through to see what had caused the holdup. There was a yelp as Vince stepped on someone’s toe and another as he slammed his elbow into someone else’s face while turning around, bewildered. Millicent let out one of her infamous gigglesnorts, cracking up all the rest of the Slytherins, and even some of the Ravenclaws standing about joined in laughter. Draco was still smiling when he turned around, certain that it must’ve been Pansy, pinching him gently above the elbow.
It was Potter.
Draco froze. Potter froze too, his eyes comically round behind his jar-bottom glasses. He looked just as shocked as Draco, if not more. Could he have thought he’d been about to… touch… someone else? Not bloody likely. Draco’s eyes darted over the nearby faces: none of the other Gryffindors were around, so chances were, it hadn’t been an attempt at some prank.
What then? Did Potter want… to talk?
Out of nowhere, Draco’s heart was drumming so loud against his chest he was afraid others might hear. He’d forgotten how to breathe. Potter’s tongue darted out to wet his lips, and a bolt of painful want forked through Draco. He recalled his sketch: the heart, the lightning. Apt enough for an O in Divination. The scar puckered from Potter’s damp forehead, red and angry like it’d been scratched raw. Potter caught the direction of Draco’s breathless gaze and hurried to tug at his tangled, overlong fringe till it hung over the rims of his glasses, hiding the scar like the evidence of a crime. He took breath to speak—
“Hagrid dropped a house-sized pumpkin!”
Both Draco and Potter jumped. But it was only Greg, come back to report. He laughed. “They’re knee-deep in shit, you should come see before someone levitates it out.”
Pulled by the throng, with Greg’s large hand warm and grounding on the back of his arm, Draco walked to the dungeons in a haze, completely oblivious to chaos in the entrance hall as he replayed the strange encounter frame by frame behind his unseeing eyes.
He and Potter hadn’t stood so close to one another since the day when they’d wrestled like the worst sort of Muggles. That had been a week ago. The strain of the impending competition, combined with the prominent lack of support from his friends and fans, had apparently taken their toll since. Tonight, Potter’s hair hadn’t been just tangled: it had been greasy and peppered with dandruff. Unwashed for many days. His lips hadn’t been just dry: they’d been chapped and picked bloody. His fingernails, bitten down to the stem. The loose collar of the faded Muggle t-shirt he shamelessly wore under his robes—because no one was about to take House points from Harry bloody Potter for violating the dress code, were they?—had been dark where it brushed the skin, and smeared with an old food-stain. Nobody had told him his jumper was turned inside out.
And there had definitely been an odor, easy to make out at such a distance even among the crowd. Of stale sweat and skin grease and clothes in desperate need of laundering. Potter truly stank.
Draco should’ve been disgusted. Yet somehow, he wasn’t. He was… sorry. Potter had never been good at taking care of himself. Not for the first time, Draco wondered if it was the consequence of being an orphan, or being raised by Muggles, or both. But this went beyond Potter’s usual sloppiness. The weasel and the mudblood likely kept him in check in normal circumstances. But now they let him walk around wearing his jumper inside out, and for what? Being stupid enough to cheat his way into the Tournament? Big sodding deal.
Anger churned in Draco’s stomach. If Potter were his friend, Draco would take good care of him. Like he took care of Vince and Greg, who were also slobs, yet their beds were always neat, and their uniforms smelled fresh.
If Potter were his…
Draco reconsidered the unprecedented opportunity the whole Tournament situation had presented for him. The miraculous opening in the Potter’s friends department. He could do it. He knew Potter’s triggers, possibly better than Potter knew them himself. All Draco would need to do was dial up his charm, avoid purist slurs, dish out a few teary-eyed apologies and pretend he believed that someone else had entered Potter for the Tournament.
Oh, and swallow his pride.
Which was where that train of thought always screeched to a halt.
He tossed and turned in his bed for hours that night, thinking the same thoughts in a loop. When he sank into sleep at last, he found himself back in the Great Hall with Potter, who wanted Draco to look at his scar. There was something sinister about it. Once Draco got close enough, he saw that Potter had a bubo there, bulging up from between the inflamed ridges of the old wound like a blister about to burst. At first it looked entirely black, but then Draco saw a flash of eerie green in it, swirling like smoke to form a familiar shape.
The Dark Mark.