Chapter 7 of The Bubo
The calm before the storm.
Friday, November 27, 1994
Next morning, Draco could detect no trace of the bubo. He spent half an hour inspecting his armpits, feeling them carefully for signs of swelling, but there was nothing there. Between worrying about it and failing from minute to minute to keep Potter and his merciless words out of his mind, Draco thought little of the mild, nebulous ache at the top of his right thigh while he slathered himself with soap in the shower. But then it made itself known more insistently when he lifted his leg to put on his pants. He felt gingerly about the base of his cock, where his hair, such as it was, grew thickest. Sometimes he got painful zits there, deep under the skin and as hard as pebbles, that he’d squeeze viciously till they’d discharge their load of blood-streaked puss over his fingers, taking twisted pleasure in it even though he knew the spell to remove them painlessly.
This time, however, the pain surrounded something large and soft. A swelling.
Sweat broke on his forehead. He spread his legs wide and bent to have a look.
And there it was: the bubo. Not in the armpit, but in the groin. It was smaller than Vince’s, but darker, perhaps on account of the pallor of Draco’s skin. Vince had said it didn’t hurt, but Draco’s did. And it didn’t seem as solid, or as loose under the skin. Draco’s pulse ticked as if he were running while he poked and prodded at it, terrified and hopeful.
Vince seemed to know at once. “Did it show already?” he whispered conspiratorially, though they were alone in the dorm.
Draco nodded.
“May I see?”
“It’s between my legs,” said Draco, thinking it a sufficient explanation.
But Vince shrugged, unselfconscious. “I don’t mind.”
And he wouldn’t, would he? In some matters, Vince looked up to Greg more than to Draco, and Greg looked up to an elite circle of older boys lorded over by Marcus Flint, who, in Draco’s opinion, barely qualified for Gryffindor, let alone for Slytherin. It was from them, Draco suspected, that Greg had picked up a selection of barbaric habits, such as spreading his legs as far as he possibly could whenever he sat down, and adjusting himself shamelessly whenever he got up; working up and spitting out dense, bright-white gobs of saliva with shocking precision instead of swallowing like a normal person; walking with his shoulders hunched in front of him like an ape; and last but not least, boasting to anyone who cared to listen (or didn’t dare say otherwise) about the prodigious frequency and fertility of his masturbations.
And if Vince couldn’t quite pull off these manifestations of manliness, it wasn’t for the lack of trying. He couldn’t spread as much because his trousers were always a bit too tight, and when he reached between his legs to ease the imaginary discomfort, sometimes he forgot his purpose and kept scratching himself absently like an overgrown toddler. His spittle was watery and stretchy and almost without exception, ended up on his chin, his chest, or his sizable belly when he spat, and not the intended target. He could only keep up the ape-walk for several strides at a time because most of his weight was already at the front of his body, so the silly posture unbalanced him. And thankfully, he never volunteered the details of his solitary sex life. When Greg pressured him, he grunted and snorted without really saying much. But he never said no to a circlejerk and was likely as used to the sight of other boys’ genitals as that of his own.
Draco, on the other hand, had never said yes, and was never going to, despite his curiosity. “I mind,” he said archly. “If you must know,” he added after a few moments, taking pity on Vince’s comically obvious disappointment, “it’s still small, but it’s darker than yours, and it hurts.”
Vince seemed to consider it. Then, “It hurts me too when… when I think about it.”
Draco paused combing his fringe. He’d been trying to arrange it over the ugly bump on his forehead. “About the bubo?”
“No. About…” Vince gestured haplessly.
“I see,” said Draco. He put the comb down, closed his eyes, and recalled a moment from one of his favorite fantasies: of Potter pinning him against the stone wall in a deserted corridor, like he’d almost done that day, when he’d ripped the badge from Draco’s chest. Only in the fantasy, he’d press his entire weight onto Draco’s body, and breathe hot and hard into Draco’s face, stealing the breath from his mouth, and then their lips would crash together and—
The familiar bolt of desire came with a side of ache in his crotch. His eyes shot open. The bubo throbbed with his pulse, tugging lightly on his magic. Was punishment by pain, then, how it was supposed to wean him off his obsession? If so, it wasn’t going to work. The ache was almost… pleasant.
“I see,” he repeated.
“Did you just…?”
Draco fixed his perfectly knotted tie, looking resolutely in the mirror.
“What is it?” Vince asked in nearly a whisper.
“What’s what?”
“Your… thing.”
Draco clicked his tongue. He was tired of this talk but it suited him to delay going out of the room for a few more minutes till his hardon flagged. “Something I want, but can never have,” he said.
Through the mirror, he could see Vince frown with the effort of trying to imagine what that could possibly be.
* * *
The Defense essays were due that afternoon and Draco skipped the morning period to copy in his own words and hand the scroll Potter had given him. Had he obtained it in any other circumstance, he would’ve fully expected it to be rubbish. But Potter had been bound by their deal to put in a decent effort, just as Draco had been bound to return the Invisibility Cloak in one piece and not in ribbons once his time with it had been at an end, despite itching to do exactly that.
They were supposed to pick a research topic of their own, which was one of the reasons Draco had dreaded it. His pulse picked up as he let the scroll unfurl, surveying the expanse of Potter’s even handwriting, a curious combination of cursive and straight block letters, with round, fat-bellied As and Bs and Ds, and deep-diving Js and Ys and Gs. Then he read the title, and hair rose on the back of his neck.
“How to thwart an invisible foe” it said. “Told you not to spy on me, Malfoy,” stood in place of a signature.
Draco closed his eyes. Of course he had tried to spy on Potter. But after his rather successful infiltration of the Champion’s tent on the day of the First Task, he hadn’t had much luck with it. On his first attempt to enter the Gryffindor tower, he had been deterred by the ungainly rabbit hole that he’d glimpsed behind the portrait of the Fat Lady as he followed behind a group of oblivious first-years. Had he too been a first-year, perhaps he could’ve managed it, but to crawl on all fours while maintaining the cover of the Cloak would’ve been impossible, not to mention undignified. Next time, he came by night, armed with the password, but he never got farther than the common room because someone had layered sticking charms on the stairs leading to the dorms thickly enough to hold a raging graphorn. Which had been a blessing in disguise: had the enchantment been more subtle, Draco would’ve likely been bereft of his favorite boots.
And sure enough, the sticking charm appeared as one of the subtitles in the essay.
For a moment, Draco’s mood teetered between outrage and amusement, but then he was grinning, and then he was laughing.
“Tosser,” he murmured. He was alone in the common room—or was he? “If you’re in here, Potter,” he said, casting about, “suck on these!” And he stabbed the air repeatedly with the middle fingers of both hands.
There was no answer.
* * *
Finnigan didn’t show up for class that day. It was a shame, because Draco had a good one for him. A hex that would make coarse, thick, pig hair grow out of every pore on his body till he looked like the animal he was. Draco agreed to take a whole galleon off Theo’s debt over their Tournament wager in exchange for gathering some intelligence. But all Theo managed to learn was that Finnigan had ended up in the Hospital wing. With a bleeding arsehole, Draco hoped.
Meanwhile, Potter ignored him studiously, taking out a book at every meal and pretending to read from it, but Draco knew better. He could practically hear the grinding of Potter’s teeth. Potter made a distinct face while doing it, with his square chin jutting out and his lips curling down. Every time Draco put an arm around Pansy’s waist or let her kiss his cheek, Potter’s ears would pull back, stretching the skin over his cheekbones to give him an unusually severe look, like a great cat about to pounce. And even if all of that was just Draco’s imagination, he certainly did not make up the fact that their eyes didn’t meet once the whole day. In the three and a half years of their schooling, that had never happened before. It didn’t matter whether it was jealousy or Potter felt bad about his bitter words. Either was good. Good enough to make the bubo ache with appreciation.
It ached an awful lot. As Draco stepped over the bench after dinner, he jostled it and the pain that flared through him was sharp and nauseating, like getting hit in the testicles. The weather had improved enough to go to the Gatehouse—a favorite haunt of the older Slytherins that most of Draco’s cohort were eager to court—but he pulled Vince aside on the way out, and they stole back to the dungeons.
“It hurts,” Draco explained once they were behind the closed doors of the dorm. Saying it aloud made the pain all the more acute. “It hurts all the time. Is that normal?”
“I don’t know,” Vince said, brow creased with concern. “Mine doesn’t, though it’s grown really big. Sometimes I pinch it with my arm—” he demonstrated, making the motions of a clucking hen “—and then I feel the bump, but otherwise… only when I think about it.”
Cold sweat broke over Draco’s forehead. It wasn’t exactly as if it hadn’t occurred to him before that taking an unidentified potion likely concocted with dark magic and illegal ingredients might not have been his most brilliant idea, but it only now registered fully. Draco was barely more than half Vince’s weight; perhaps a single dose for Vince was like a double one for Draco. Worse, the recipe might’ve been attuned to Vince’s psyche, physique, and magic, and would do gods knew what to someone else. Draco must’ve hit his head a lot harder than he had thought last night, to rush into something so dangerous without a thought spared for his own safety.
He swallowed. “Strip. I need to see.”
Like that day in the common room, Vince disrobed down to his white cotton vest and allowed Draco to inspect his armpit. Vince’s bubo was almost twice its initial size now and it seemed to teem with a life of its own. An orange light swirled through the blackness under the thin layer of skin in time with Vince’s sedate heartbeat. The magic around it had grown dense and full of purpose. When Draco tried to prod at it, the tip of his finger got burned as if he’d pushed it into flames.
“What do you think?” said Vince.
Draco chewed on his lip. Ah, to hell with it. He kicked off his boots, unbuckled his belt, and pushed his pants down together with his trousers till they slid to the ground. His shirttails hung low enough to save him the indignity of walking around bare-arsed till he sat on his bed. Then he spread his legs as wide as he could and held his genitals aside with his right hand, while stretching the skin of his left thigh over the bubo. “Look,” he said, and braced himself for what was to come.
There really was nothing for it. Vince knelt before him, practically between his legs, and Draco held his breath. It was the first time anyone’s face had ever been so close to his crotch. Vince could no doubt smell him. Perhaps even feel the heat inexorably pooling at the base of Draco’s spine. He could not have been less attracted to Vince, but Vince was still a boy and Draco’s body acted independently of his mortified mind.
“What do you think,” he echoed Vince’s words from a minute ago. The bubo bulged obscenely from where his pelvis met his thigh, the size of a small potato and the color of blueberries.
“It’s almost as big as mine,” Vince said. Then his eyes grew wide, and his cheeks turned pink. He looked up at Draco. For a moment they stared at one another, speechless, and then they burst out laughing.
“Piss off,” Draco said, not unkindly, as the tension wilted away.
But then Vince raised his hand and said, “May I?”
Draco hesitated. To say no, now that they’d come this far, would be stupid. “Just be careful.”
“Yeah,” said Vince, leaning even closer, and Draco felt the tickle of a hot breath on his balls. Lords. It was the first time anyone had touched him there since he’d been ten, and it was a different story now, wasn’t it? The unsought-for intimacy of the strangely quiet moment wrapped around Draco’s throat, making it hard to breathe. Vince’s thick fingers were gentle, almost reverent, as he drew them over the bubo. Draco’s cock twitched with interest.
“It looks about to burst,” Draco said to divert himself. “Every time I cross my legs, I half-expect it to pop.”
But Vince shook his head. “It just looks that way because you’re skinny.”
“I’m not skinny!” Draco snorted. So what if his legs were a bit spindly? It was only because he’d gained so much height in a short time. “You do realize that being fat doesn’t make everyone else skinny, right?”
“I’m not fat,” Vince returned. He was aping Draco’s defensive tone, but with a good-natured smirk, and Draco couldn’t bring himself to get mad at him. “I’m well rounded. That’s what Mum says.”
Not even a mother would kiss your ugly mug.
With a shudder, Draco closed his mind to the memory. Thinking about Potter now would be disastrous. He was half hard already.
“Stop tickling me.”
“Sorry.” But instead of pulling away, Vince stroked the bubo more firmly.
“Yours zapped me with magic,” Draco pointed out.
“Yeah? I don’t feel anything.”
“Maybe it’s not working.”
“Maybe it’s too early.”
“It hurts,” Draco said, and it was almost a moan, because the real ache was hiding several inches to the right, under his hand, and suddenly he feared he wouldn’t be able to say no if Vince offered to get him off.
As if reading his mind, Vince rested the full weight of his forearm on Draco’s thigh, skin to bare skin, giving him a speculative look. Heat simmered up Draco’s neck. He knew without a shred of doubt that both Vince and Greg were as straight as the goal posts. But he was also quite sure they had done more than just watch each other wank.
And would it be so terrible? To let a friend lend a helping hand? All Draco’s reasons to abhor it seemed childish and insignificant in the face of his mounting need.
Vince took breath to say something when the door burst open and both he and Draco jumped.
“Oh,” Blaise said, eyebrows gone high enough to scrape his hairline. “Awfully sorry.”
He didn’t look sorry. He looked positively enraptured. Before Draco could think of anything to say, Blaise flashed his blindingly white teeth at them and the door clicked shut behind him.
“He’s gonna tell everyone,” Draco whispered, unable to find his voice. Blaise had been waiting for something like this since their first day at school. He would jump at the opportunity to tear Draco apart.
“Tell them what?”
Draco just stared at his friend in horror. It took several long moments, but at last, understanding quickened Vince’s confounded features.
“If my father hears about it…” Draco’s voice wavered.
Vince sat back on his haunches, color fading from his cheeks. “Want me to… have a chat with Blaise?”
“Find Greg. Go together.”
Vince was on his feet already. Glancing down, Draco realized that he’d released the hold on his genitals, and they rested limply between his shirttails. He slid off the bed and started dressing.
“Don’t worry,” said Vince, grabbing his robes. His shirt was still open. “We’ll take care of it.”
Draco nodded, fumbling with his belt buckle. “Thanks,” he whispered. But by then, Vince had long gone out.