Roulette.

roulette.

draco malfoy x gryffindor!reader

*requested

it’s an accident, the way she falls, the way he burns.

prompt list.

x

Draco meets his match on a nippy October morn. It’s a blur of lurid, cherry lips, fleeting palpitations, splinters digging into palms, and broomsticks stitched across bleeding hearts. She‘s standing in front of the line up with a knife-sharp glare intact and a knee-jerk grin on the ready.

He thought Potter was the enemy.

He just hadn’t met her.

x

She plays rough, dirty. All crimson caked knuckles and midsummer thunderstorms bursting in color across cheekbones.

She gave him his first black eye. He almost thanked her.

“You know, Malfoy, perhaps you should consider trying. That way practice could actually be worthwhile.”

Draco grits his teeth and digs his nails into the neck of his broomstick and squeezes, squeezes, squeezes his eyes shut till his vision bleeds of titian fireworks and shooting stars.

“Well, perhaps you could try winning for once instead of talking big like you Gryffindors are known for doing.“

She smiles, molasses-slow and honey cloy.

He swallows, thick and audible.

“You haven’t won yet, Malfoy.”

It’s not a race. It’s a game.

And Draco intends to win.

Whatever it takes.

x

The opening match of the season takes place on a frostbitten morn in early November. Thick, silver tendrils weave their fingers through Draco’s hair as raindrops hang heavy on his lashes and the earth bruises his cheeks.

As if Draco believed in miracles, Potter split the bones in his wrist mere hours before. He doesn’t know how this came about. He suspects Flint is behind it.

“We need you to take Harry’s place,” Angelina says storming into the Great Hall before the game is set to begin, voice shrill and nerves visibly disheveled. “He managed to break his arm this morning, and you’re the next best on the team.”

He doesn’t expect her to be good.

He doesn’t expect to lose.

x

His heart is pounding in perfect tandem with the crowd, wrought iron veins in a twist beneath the gossamer veil of his wrist. He can feel thunder coiling beneath his feet. The applause is deafening, defeating, bruising, bleeding. Draco believes he might be drowning.

When he finally catches sight of the snitch - hair-trigger and razor-sharp and gold, gold, gold - she’s diving nose first towards the ground. The crowd comes to an asphyxiating standstill.

Draco tells himself she can’t make it, she won’t. She’s going to crash, and she’s going to burn, and she surely won’t, no, she can’t -

She does.

He watches, mesmerized, as gilded gold melts between her fingers, dribbles up her arm, and seeps into her veins. She swerves around, stares him down, smirks, winks, then turns the other way.

Draco never did believe in miracles.

No, not until today.

x

She snatched the snitch and stole his heart, the once bruising palpitations kicking his chest now nothing more than a tender, bated breath.

“You’ve been distracted, Malfoy,” Flint says one evening after practice. The sound of metal kissing metal grates against Draco’s eardrums and makes him shiver.

“Yeah? How so?” he replies, too tired to look up.

He does anyway.

Flint angles his head and squares his shoulders disproportionately. He’s smirking, the crimson crusted over his lips begins to gleam.

“It’s the girl, isn’t it.”

It’s not a question.

“I’ve hardly noticed her.”

Flint wants to laugh. Draco can see that in the superficial lilt of his lips and the dimple puncturing the center of his right cheek.

He doesn’t believe him.

Draco doesn’t care.

X

Draco tells himself it’s an accident.

Draco knows it’s not an accident.

Knows this because of the glint in Flint’s eye and the way Goyle chuckles just a little too hard after the bludger has been sent flying across the pitch, ending in a breathtaking kiss. He knows it’s not an accident, no. Because she’s fading, falling, spiraling into an abyss. Endless and black and ensnared between the tangled web of space and time.

Draco knows the feeling all too well.

X

When she wakes, the sun is seeping through the filigree and permeating the sheets. Her eyes are bleeding, and her head is spinning, and her ears are ringing, and -

“Good, you’re awake.” a woman says.

She turns her head. Her eyes have stopped bleeding, but the ringing -

God, the ringing is incessant.

“What happened?”

“You had a bad fall during Quidditch practice this morning. Just a couple of bumps and bruises. Nothing to worry yourself over.”

She sinks her teeth into her lips, tastes something bitter, but not blood, no, not exactly.

“That note there is for you, dear. A boy stopped by earlier. Suppose he wanted to check in and see if you were alright.”

“A boy? Was it Harry?” she says, eyes catching fire as the room begins to spin. The words inside her head hardly make sense.

“He was gone before I could get a good look at him, but from what I could see, it wasn’t Mr. Potter.”

She knits her brows, studies the penmanship, knows it’s not Harry’s, no.

She recognizes who it belongs to, yes. Can distinguish languid syllabus and tender vowels dipped in curlicue ink and swiped away in ebony streaks.

Harry never signs his name in cursive.

X

The words are sweaty in her palm, draped across lifelines and stamped into her bloodstream.

Meet me in the Astronomy Tower at midnight, the note reads, vivid, obsidian ink coiling in the late November breeze.

She stumbles across the cedar planks leading to the Astronomy Tower balcony. Stops, stutters, stalls when she sees a sliver of moonlight steal beneath the swell of his lips and the slope of his clavicle.

“Malfoy,” she seethes, narrows her gaze and clutches the tea-stained scrap of parchment in her hand. She can feel crimson streaks racing down her palm.

“You came,” he says, sitting on the edge of the ironclad railing. His fingertips are pressed white hot against the intricate rods.

She thinks he might jump.

“I didn’t think you’d actually come,” he continues after a beat, a spell, a moment stolen, a moment lost, he’s hardly certain.

She crosses her arms across her breast, favors her left leg, says, “There are many things you think of me, Malfoy. But you forget, I prove you wrong quite often.”

He clears his throat, runs his tongue along his lip, can taste something vile and tangible, but not blood, no, not quite.

“Then let me ask you this,” his shadow spills across the floor, heels caressing the walls and hands slipping languidly between the silken threads of his pockets.

The mere conception of it all is vexatious.

“Why are you here?”

She looks up at him with indignation shining brightly in her eyes. When he looks at her the way he’s looking at her now, she doesn’t feel quite so brave or bold or much like a Gryffindor at all.

“I’m tired of pretending,” she whispers tenderly, tiresome, lungs rubbed raw and words bled dry, “It’s hard to hate someone you don’t truly hate.”

He’s quiet for one, two, three -

“I suppose it is rather exhausting,” he replies, shifts his weight from side to side, sees the stars align and then collide, fall, burn all for her, only her, always her.

“If you didn’t think I’d show, why did you even bother asking me to meet you here?”

Draco purses his lips and bites his tongue and digs, digs, digs his nails into his palms. He can feel the lifelines snap and the sapphires shatter. 

And it’s sudden how nothing else matters when he kisses her. All blistering rubies and glistening pearls and blood on his tongue that burns, bubbles, bruises. 

He presses her spine against the woodwork, fits his fingers to her hips, and spells her name across her lips. He can feel the Earth crumble beneath the whorls of his veins like the rubble running down the streets of Pompeii. 

He doesn’t know what it means.

He will.

Draco dating a Hufflepuff in the same year as him

❝Loving her is like Russian Roulette. 

❝A game, a chance, a dangerous thing.❞

Jesus girl I love your writing style 😍

my heart just did this thing where it did a couple somersaults, stumbled, then melted. seriously, thank you so much, darling. it makes me so happy to hear you enjoy something that brings me such joy ❤️

Hi hello can I know about your dream date to the art museum?

We’re swimming in a Van Gogh daydream, in colors and acrylics and tear-stained canvases. All is still as we stroll through each room, hand in hand, in awe of the art as the art admires us.

The cuff of his navy blazer tickles the roadmap of my veins. A threadbare camera strap hangs languidly from his neck. I’m wearing my favorite burgundy combat boots, the ones with scuffed soles and frayed laces. He’s wearing a pair of battered Brogues, cognac and patent leather and a little worn around the toes. His footsteps reverberate off the walls, across my ribcage, through my veins.

After we’ve seen all there is to see indoors, we sit in the gardens and sketch the sculptures lining the walls. He uses the charcoal stub he always carries around in his pocket to capture the perpetual smile of an elegant stone statue. The day is sunny, sweet, and slow. Gritty saccharine and sticky honey melting down the slope of my shoulder blades. It’s not quite summer, but the season is near. The air is warm, but not quite parched. His lips are chapped, but taste like sugar.

We leave the museum, and he takes me to the park across the street. I packed a small picnic in my bag - cherries, strawberries, saltine crackers, cheese, a baguette from the baker’s, a bottle of San Pellegrino and a tin can full of the chocolate chip cookies I baked the other day for two minutes too long.

We’re living in a Monet reverie, in pastels and brushstrokes and blushing waterlilies.

And everything - his hands, his lips, his lazy grin - is bliss.

domino effect.

draco malfoy x slytherin!reader

*requested

x

Draco’s blood is not pure, has been contaminated with bittersweet toxins that feather his veins and stain his wrists a terribly virulent shade of black. He can feel the Yew digging white-hot into his flesh, has to bite his lip and choke on the bile ascending his esophagus to defuse the pain.

Accepting the mark was his first mistake, an inevitable fate, a terribly hideous disillusionment he cannot erase.

He sees that now.

x

Draco doesn’t exactly forget the summer of his sixteenth year, no.

Not quite.

Because there’s a succession of nightmares spinning round and round his peripheral. A woman, and a teacher, and an innocent fragment of collateral damage levitating ten feet from the dining room table, flames licking her face, eyes glossy and lifeless and perpetually fearful.

The memory is the first of many.

Fragmented and enigmatic and easily misunderstood. They begin as ink-stained silhouettes that eat up the walls in the dead of night. They’re fuliginous and obscure and only reside within the back of his head, or so he says. 

Because now he’s doubled over in a wicked, wretched pain, has a prayer like a kiss falling from his lips and blood dribbling down his hands like an omen.

He pinches his skin.

Feels the pain.

x

Draco’s sixth year at Hogwarts is unlike the other five, is more like handcuffs and confines and secrets that morph into pretty white lies. He has splinters in his palms and ink between his fingers, vitriol in his veins and words stuck between his teeth.

Amortentia never did smell so sweet.

He inhales the saccharine aroma of honeysuckle blossoms, heady wood polish, and the summer nostalgia of his fifteenth year spent languidly sprawled across the serrated shingles lining the roof of Malfoy Manor. Summer had felt infinite then, with the days melting down the hills and the jut of her chin, suffusing the lilac currents of her wrists and spewing out the ends of her fingertips. He remembers feeling the desire to kiss her - hard, soft, asphyxiating, inebriating. He did, and it was exhilarating.

But summer is gone, has faded with the dusk, has been replaced by perpetual nightfall and a bitter, biting chill that slips through his spine and the teeth of his ribs.

“I smell,” she begins, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear so he can see the potion catch in her eyes like dewdrops on spider’s silk. “Eucalyptus and sandalwood and something,” she stops, closes her eyes, inhales, “Something sweet. Like freshly fallen rain.”

It rained earlier that morning.

x

The cabinet is broken, is nothing more than dust mottled crevices and musty drawers that don’t even open.

And time is not on Draco’s side, no, for he can feel the hands of his grandfather's wristwatch slipping down his wrist and into his veins. Can feel the burn, burn, fucking burn searing his flesh and boiling his blood. 

It’s poison, and he’s drowning. 

He can still taste the toxicant bite of the witch’s apple fresh on his tongue as a heavy curse hangs from his fingertips and comes undone at his lips. He peels back the starch of his sleeve, digs his nails into his flesh, prays, hopes, wishes that maybe, just maybe he can turn back the hands of time and change his mind.

x

She’s a daydream caught between a labyrinth of ancient incantations and finger-smudged ink.

He thinks he may as well be dreaming.

Because the last light of day is catching fire on the ends of her hair as kaleidoscopic shadows race down the notches of her spine. Her wooly skirt brushes up against the sides of her thighs as an emerald green mosaic paints a landscape of shadows across her face.

Draco feels his equilibrium slipping off its axis.

Because he’s chasing her like he once chased those sultry summer sunsets from the roof of Malfoy Manor, can feel her melt like wax between his fingers, and her lips pressed to his. Can taste her lipgloss dribbling down his chin like sticky sugar liquor and gossamer candyfloss.

He’s running out of time.

Can feel the sand slipping through his grasp and filling up his shoes. Can feel the water crashing against his lungs and crushing his ribs and oh, God, oh, God, this is what it feels like to die, isn’t it? 

He’s certain this is a dream. A bitter, bittersweet reverie.

He closes his eyes.

Sees the world in colors he’s never seen before.

x

Draco watches as the sun slips between the fingers of the pines lining the horizon, watches as the syrup-thick rays catch in the murky window panes of the fourth-floor corridor and spill across the timeworn stone, across the patent leather of his Brogues.

Within minutes, the stars coagulate in an array of constellations as the night saturates the sky in caliginous shades of violet. The time has come to do what must be done.

“Draco, there you are. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

The moon drags its teeth across her face, stars bleeding out, dying, in her eyes. “Where have you been?” she asks, again, differently this time.

"There's something I need to tell you." He says, twists his fingers behind his back, and slides his teeth across his tongue, and feels the earth tremble beneath his feet.

She takes a tentative step forward and angles her head. Draco can see her wide eyes gleam beneath the midnight sheen of the balmy June night, can see the silver dollar smile of the moon reflect off her emerald green tie.

“What’s wrong?” she no more than whispers. 

It sounds like a scream.

And he can hardly fucking breathe as he drags his arms from behind his back, wholly bare and visibly bruised, laid out explicitly for her to see.

She's quiet for a moment, a minute, a heartbeat, a lifetime, and he's desperate for her to speak, to say something, anything, everything, or maybe nothing at all.

She reaches out, brushes her fingers across the roadmap of his veins, drags her nails across the ink, across the teeth of the stain that mars the flesh of his left arm. He feels the sting, then the bite, then the forest fire burn of her touch.

She’s intrigued, he thinks.

“When?” she whispers, not quite letting go of his arm, holding on just a little bit tighter. “When did this happen? When did he do this to you?”

“Last summer. Right after I turned sixteen.”

She nods and he swallows, suddenly feeling as though he’s choking, or suffocating, or drowning, maybe. He takes a step back, states his desperate need to leave and turns around before she can blink and he can cave.

“Wait, no, I’m not letting you leave like this,” she says, snatching his wrist and pulling him back into a tender, bittersweet kiss.

All Draco can taste is a tangible, decadent doom. A premonition of the end. Her lips are soft and their kiss is sacred and this moment is fleeting, fleeting, gone.

He pinches his skin.

Numbness.

hey there! I absolutely adore your writing, you’re so amazing! You use so many descriptive words in your writing, and I was wondering if u had any suggestions to how I could get better with crafting metaphors and expanding my own vocabulary? Thank you 💛

oh, my! you are so sweet. it means a lot to me that you enjoy my writing so much you would send in this ask. 

the biggest thing that has helped me grow as a writer is reading. classic literature and poetry especially. my favorite authors are f. scott fitzgerald and jane austen. fitzgerald, in particular, uses the loveliest of words and metaphors in his stories. he paints the most vivid images in the reader’s mind. one cannot help but get lost within the pages of his words. i felt so mystified by the glitz and glamour of the great gatsby that i immediately purchased the rest of his works after reading it.

 i try not to read other writer’s works (here on tumblr) because it makes me question my own work. i then find myself comparing my writings to theirs, which is not healthy at all. as a writer, it can be difficult to not be critical of your own words, stories, and ideas. that’s one of the reasons i’ve gone so long without posting anything (that and several other personal reasons:)

i also recommend using a thesaurus. they come in handy when you simply cannot find the right words. i use mine, as well as thesaurus.com, on a daily basis. whenever i stumble upon a word i’ve never heard before, or am unsure of its meaning, i write it down and look it up.

i hope i was able to help you in some way. writing is an art and it takes time to find your voice. i look back on past stories i have written and am happy to see the progress i have made. however, there are parts i read that make me cringe, haha! i wish you the best of luck as you delve into the world of writing and sharing the stories that dwell inside your head.