Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/715326.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Choose_Not_To_Use_Archive_Warnings
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Homestuck
  Relationship:
      Gamzee_Makara/Karkat_Vantas, Eridan_Ampora/Sollux_Captor, John_Egbert/
      Dave_Strider
  Character:
      Gamzee_Makara, Karkat_Vantas, Tavros_Nitram, Eridan_Ampora, Sollux
      Captor, John_Egbert, Dave_Strider, Kankri_Vantas
  Additional Tags:
      Online_Dating, Smut, Humanstuck, Loss_of_Virginity
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-03-10 Updated: 2014-12-04 Chapters: 7/? Words: 16969
****** CATFISH ******
by craigifer_(orphan_account)
Summary
     Karkat has been dating Gamzee online for six months now but has never
     met him in person. When he finally gets to meet him he soon realizes
     that things were not at all like he expected. (Human AU with tons of
     minor pairings. Primarily GamKar.)
Notes
     omg this is my first fic posted on AO3 and i'm so confused on how
     this site works bUT OKAY!
     it's a humanstuck au and is primarily gamkar but includes tons of
     minor ships blah blah blah!
     rated m???? there's smut ok.
     i plan on updating this one regularly! i already have it 100% planned
     out so i just have to actually write the chapters!
     all comments / kudos / bookmarks are appreciated! c:
***** Distance *****


      carcinoGeneticist [CG]  began pestering  terminallyCapricious [TC]
CG:  GAMZEE HURRY THE FUCK UP AND GET ON SO WE CAN VIDEO CHAT.
CG:  SCHOOL STARTS SOON AND YOU KNOW I CAN'T BE LATE JUST BECAUSE I WAITED FOR
YOU TO GET YOUR SLOW ASS UP.
I sighed, staring at the screen of my laptop, waiting for Gamzee to reply. I
had been dating this fuckass online for six months now and we always started
our mornings like this. I would get up about an hour or two earlier than I
needed to in order to get ready for school and wait around for my boyfriend to
get up and video chat with me before I left to actually go to the hell that was
school. It was actually really stupid because I could easily just video chat
with him once I got back from school and save myself some sleep, but no. For
some reason, I felt the need to talk to this guy every morning and see his
stupidly cute messed up morning hair through a shitty just-barely 360p camera.
He made me happy in the mornings, I guess, which I needed, considering that I
was definitely not a morning person.
TC:  AlRiGhT mOtHeRfUc;KeR, i'M uP.
TC:  :o)
CG:  GOOD. I'M GONNA START THE CALL NOW AND YOU BETTER ANSWER.
I smiled a little as I quickly hovered my cursor over the 'Start Video
Call' button and clicked it. It rung twice before Gamzee answered, smiling back
at me with his hair a trainwreck, just like I liked it.
"Good Morning, Karkles." Great, he just had to use that stupid excuse of a
nickname he gave me, first thing in the morning.
"Don't call me that, fuckass!" I groaned, my smile quickly turning into a
scowl. Gamzee just laughed and moved closer to the camera so I could see him
better. He didn't have his ridiculous clown make-up on in the mornings, which
was another reason I maybe liked him better in the morning. "It's a dumb
nickname and I, quite frankly, hate it."
"Aww, nah brother, you know you all up and love it when I call you that."
Gamzee did a lame excuse for a wink at me and I rolled my eyes. Sometimes
Gamzee would try to be seductive or sexy or whatever and every single time he
failed horribly. It was actually kind of funny, how bad he was at it. It was
like he didn't have the ability to be anything more than a silly asshole.
We chatted through webcam for about an hour straight, like normal, until I
looked down at the time and frowned. It was 8 AM now, which meant I had to hang
up so I could catch the bus to school.
"Fuck, I have to go now, Gamzee." I sighed, watching as my boyfriend frowned
too, except he did that weird clown frown thing where it was more of a happy
frown and it was actually too weird for me to explain, fuck it.
"Well give a brother a motherfucking kiss before you all up and leave,
motherfucker." Gamzee smiled again and leaned into the camera, pressing the
lips against his lens. I hesitantly moved close to my lens too and kissed it,
feeling instantly stupid afterwards. I just kissed a goddamn camera, so stupid.
But it made the clown happy and so I just laughed it off and waved at him
before hanging up. 'Time to go to my hell-hole of a school', I thought to
myself.
I quickly grabbed my things and walked out of my room, seeing my brother in the
living room doing whatever the fuck he does, I could really care less. His name
was Kankri and he was an annoying nineteen year-old prick. I really couldn't
stand him because he talked way too much about things that nobody cared about
and because he was always watching my movement, telling me to 'watch my
language, you might trigger someone' or 'don't wear that shirt, it has
offensive language on it that may trigger someone'. Trigger, trigger, trigger.
I swear that was his favourite word and it got on my goddamn nerves.
Unfortunately for me though, I had to deal with him all the time at home
because our dad died last year, leaving him to be the legal guardian in the
house. It was stupid, I was smart enough to take care of myself, I didn't need
that asshole sticking around any longer. But since I was only sixteen, I could
not legally live by myself, which was also stupid. Everything was stupid.
"Have a nice day at school, Karkat." Kankri said, not even looking at me as he
did because he was too busy typing something. I just waved and absconded the
apartment, seeing my neighbors conveniently leave at the same time as me.
I lived in a decently sized two-bedroom apartment in the middle of San
Francisco, right to the left of my two classmates, John and Dave. My apartment
number was 6 and theirs was 7, making us have the two apartments right in the
middle of the hallway. We would usually wait for the bus together and walk home
together too after school since we lived so close.
John happily waved at me, greeting me as usual in his cheery tone. "Karkat!
Morning, dude!" He chimed. His boyfriend Dave did his stupid cool-kid wave at
me and I just glared at him. God he pissed me off. He always thought he was
just the coolest thing on earth and it was annoying. He was just about as cool
as a fucking pizza roll right out of the microwave. Pizza rolls were scorching
when they came out of the microwave, not cool. ...You probably took that the
wrong way, I was not calling Dave hot, okay? He's just... not cool.
"Hey guys." I finally said, starting down the hallway with them. We all stood
together as we waited for the elevator to come up, which only took a split
second considering that we lived on the second floor. The first floor had no
rooms on it, it was simply just a big lounge that nobody ever used.
When we had all made it to the bus stop, I quickly claimed the entire bench,
throwing off my backpack to the right of me so that neither John or Dave could
sit there. I made sure that they never sat on this bench anymore because last
time they did they just spent the whole wait making out with John straddled on
Dave's lap. It was gross and I had no idea how they had the indecency enough to
just sit in public and make out as if they were home alone together. It always
made me jealous, seeing how close they were. They got to touch eachother
everyday, hold hands, and kiss whenever they wanted to. It wasn't fair, I could
never do those things with my boyfriend because he lived two hours away and the
closest I could ever get to that was our silly camera kisses.
Gamzee lived all the way in Sacramento, a fucking boring city that also
happened to be in California as well. Even though we both lived in the same
state, we never got to meet because neither of us had licenses. I didn't
because, well... I failed every fucking driving test I took. The teachers would
always tell me that I was 'way too impatient and drove too fast' and that my
test answers were usually way off. It wasn't my fault that when the question
asked me what to do when waiting for pedestrians to walk through a crosswalk I
put 'honk at them until they hurry their slow fuckasses up'. I just really
hated fill-in-the-blank tests because apparently whatever answer I wrote ended
up being wrong. I wanted my license so fucking bad but because of those tests,
I never got it.
And Gamzee, on the other hand, well he was 18 years old, I had no idea why he
hadn't gotten his license yet. I actually didn't know much about him at all.
All I knew was that he was finished with highschool, graduating last year, and
that he had a weird obsession with clown paraphernalia. And that he made me
happy for some reason. We met through facebook, ironically, since I hated that
website. He sent me a message saying that he thought I was 'motherfucking
cute' and that he had to add me because of that. I was weary of him at first,
thinking he was another one of those idiots who saw my sexuality listed as gay
on there and just wanted to bang me because I was into their gender. But no,
Gamzee never even brought up the subject of sex around me and he just would
listen to me rant everyday about god-knows-what. And the best part was that he
actually did listen, he would comfort me when I felt down and he would cheer me
up whenever I went into one of my crying fits. We grew closer and I found
myself starting to like him more and more with every other time we talked. And
during one of our video calls I accidentally blurted it out and Gamzee said we
should date then. And to think that all happened six months ago, it was weird.
It felt like yesterday when I had started dating the goofball. I loved Gamzee
but I hated the distance.
The bus finally arrived and I boarded it behind John and Dave. They walked all
the way to the end of the aisle, sitting in the back area where basically all
of our friends sat. I sat in the seat in front of them, taking out my phone and
sighing boredly as I opened up an app and started to play it. I could hear the
dumbasses behind me making out again and I wanted to throw my bag at them to
shut them up. Jeez, they just couldn't keep their hands off of eachother. The
bus stopped twice before stopping at the pickup area that our other friend,
Sollux, lived at.
I looked up and scooted over in my seat, already knowing that Sollux was going
to sit next to me, as he usually did. Sollux yawned, saying good morning to all
of us before he started angrily texting someone. I already knew who he must've
been texting, it was the only person who made him get angry like that whenever
he texted them. And speak of the devil, we were at his bus stop. I watched him
strut (yes, strut) onto the bus and didn't even bother to greet him. His name
was Eridan and he was a huge prick that nobody liked. He lived in the rich part
of town and always carried himself as if he was better than everyone else. He
bothered me, yes, but nowhere near as much as he bothered Sollux. Him and
Sollux sort of had this love-hate thing going on. One minute they were arguing
to no end and the next minute they were hate snogging all over the place. It
was one weird-ass relationship, to say the least.
Eridan sat in the seat to the left of Sollux, already starting an argument with
him that I ignored in favour of staring out the window to watch as the bus
passed a bunch of houses. Our small little group of friends had been together
since middle school, so we all knew eachother for a long time and we all knew
when and when not to ignore eachother. This was a time when they needed to be
ignored.
It was kind of funny how our group met. We all met in ninth grade in
orientation. We all had a bunch of classes together and we all had one thing in
common that made us all want to hang out with eachother: we were all gay. Being
some of the only homosexual kids at our school who had openly come out, we got
along and just turned into this small little pack of homos. The 'Fag Posse', as
some people liked to call it.
It was finally lunch time and I had been waiting for it all day. I spent so
long talking to Gamzee this morning that I had totally forgotten to eat, so I
was starving. But I hated school lunch food so I brought my own food everyday.
Today I had brought Subway, which was now cold from being in my backpack all
day, but I didn't really care. Usually I would wait for the others to sit down
before I ate, but not today. I was way too hungry.
By the time the other guys had came over and sat at the table I was already
more than halfway done with my food. Eridan smirked at me as I ate and I just
glared at him in return.
"What are you staring at me for, Eridon't?!" That was my personal nickname for
this asshole because I couldn't stand him.
"Wwell don't be fuckin' rude, Kar. I'm just observin' is all." I forgot to
mention that he also spoke with this ridiculously dumb accent.
"Thop tharing at kk, he doesn't like you dumbath." Oh yeah, I forgot to mention
that too. Sollux had a lisp.
"Shut the fuck up Sol, I wwasn't talkin' to you!" And here we go again, the
Eridan-Sollux hate war began.
They started to argue and I just toned them out, finishing my food. I grabbed
for my apple juice to take a sip out of until I noticed that it was gone, my
eyes quickly going straight to Dave, since I knew he was the only one who loved
apple juice enough to steal mine.
"Give me back my apple juice, fuckass!" I growled, watching the blonde
insufferable prick take a swig out of it.
"Okay here, you can have it back," He said, passing me the bottle. I was about
to drink the rest of it until he added on "but if you drink out of it you're
totally indirectly kissing me."
In annoyance, I slammed the bottle down. "What's with you guys trying to flirt
with me so much today?!" Dave just laughed and John elbowed him for it.
"I don't know man, you're pretty much the only single one out of all of us, you
look like you need some love in your life." Dave stated, only making me
angrier.
"I have a boyfriend!" Soon, everybody's eyes moved to me, Eridan and Sollux
even stopping their argument to stare at me too.
"Woah! Since when? Who is he?" John asked, smiling excitedly.
I just blushed a little and looked away. I didn't want them to find out about
my relationship, it just sort of came out of my mouth. I awkwardly stayed
silent for a while then finally answered, still looking away.
"His name is Gamzee, and no, he doesn't go to this school. He lives in
Sacramento and we're dating online, I guess..." I could already feel it. They
were judging me. All of them.
"Have you guys met before?"
"No."
John raised a brow at me, confused. "Well, how can you date some guy you've
never even met before then? Don't you think that's... weird?"
"It's not weird, it's just kind of... sucky. Like I can't really be with him in
person so our relationship is so limited. I just wish I could meet him just
once..." I sighed, staring at John and Dave. Lucky assholes got to be around
eachother 24/7 and they didn't realize how lucky they were.
"Well he lives in Sacramento, right? That's only two hours away! Just drive up
and see him!"
I glared at him. He knew good and well that I didn't have a license, so I just
kept glaring until he got the point.
"Oh... haha, yeah! I forgot you don't have one. Dave can take you, he has one!"
I perked up a bit, quickly moving my attention to Dave again.
"You'd take me, Dave?" It was kind of pathetic how much I was hoping for him to
say yes. But I just really wanted to meet Gamzee so bad, I would do anything.
Dave just sort of shrugged then gave in, nodding at me. "Yeah, sure. We can go
Friday night or whatever."
Words couldn't describe how happy I was to hear that. I just smiled a little
and looked down, excited as ever.
I was finally going to meet him.
I was going to meet Gamzee.
***** Patience *****
The rest of the school day was a blur. I couldn't focus on anything, the only
thing I could think about was the fact that I was really going to meet Gamzee.
I was going to finally get to meet the guy I've only been able to see through a
shitty webcam and pictures, in person. I would get to touch him, hug him, and
maybe even kiss him. Maybe...
Once I got home I rushed into my room, not even greeting my brother. I had to
tell Gamzee the good news as soon as possible, he'd be so thrilled. I'd hope
he'd be, at least. Maybe he wouldn't be though and I was just getting way too
excited. It was pretty rare for me to get so giddy about something like this
but, fuck, I couldn't help it. This wasn't something I could just pretend to be
chill about. I was not chill. I was fucking estatic and I was, unfortunantly,
going to show it.
I quickly spotted my laptop on my bed and flipped it open, logging onto
Pesterchum immediatly. Scrolling down my Chum list I found Gamzee's Chumhandle
and was dissapointed to see that he was offline. Fucking great, I got all
excited to share the big news only to find out that he wasn't even online. It
was actually sort of weird for him to not be online for once, he was usually
always online right after I got home from school because he knew that I liked
talking to him whenever I got home. I frowned and just shrugged it off, I guess
I would just tell him later then.
Now I had to find something to do. I still had to do my homework but... no.
That could wait. I needed something better to do than that. Maybe I could watch
a movie. Glancing at the shelf in my room full of my giant collection of
Romantic Comedies, I sighed. Most of those movies I had already watched a
thousand times, rewatching them would be just as boring as doing my homework.
Basically, everything that I could think to do sounded boring.
It quickly dawned on me how dependent I was on Gamzee. I literally spent all of
my time at home chatting with him on Pesterchum. I really didn't do much of
anything else anymore... It was kind of pathetic, really. Actually no,
it was pathetic. So pathetic.
With nothing else to do, I slumped out of my room and into the living room.
Kankri was in there, as usual, but this time he was on the phone with someone.
I was actually surprised that guy had friends to even call, he was such a
prick. I couldn't even imagine someone holding a conversation longer than five
minutes with him without getting absolutely annoyed by his trigger talk.
He hung up a few minutes later then turned his attention to me. "Karkat, I am
not going to be here this weekend, I'll be staying in Las Vegas with my friends
for a birthday party. I am hoping you can behave yourself while I am gone, I
won't be back until Tuesday."
I rolled my eyes at him. As if I cared that he was going to leave! "Yeah, well
I won't even be here this weekend, it really doesn't matter."
He raised a brow at me. "Oh? I do not think you informed me of that. Where will
you be going?"
I hated the way he spoke. It was so annoyingly proper, I just wanted to throw a
brick at him sometimes. Scratch that, not just sometimes. All of the time. I
don't think I could possibly get a more annoying brother.
"To visit Gamzee in Sacramento."
"Gamzee? Who is that?"
"My boyfriend."
Kankri just gave me that same surprised look that everyone else had given me at
lunch. Honestly, I didn't see what was so surprising about me having a
boyfriend. Did I really seem that hard to date?!
"Oh. Well, please do be careful. I'm guessing, and please do excuse me if I am
wrong, that he is the one you often chat with online?"
"Yeah, that guy. I'm leaving on Friday with Dave, he's gonna drive me or
whatever."
"Sounds good. I'm leaving tonight, so I suppose I will see you again on Tuesday
then. Have fun with your significant other!" He then got up from the couch and
walked into his room, I'm guessing to start packing. I really could care less.
Since he was finally out of the living room for once, I claimed the couch and
grabbed the remote, turning on the tv. Hopefully, I'd find a RomCom playing
right now that I hadn't seen before. Which was hard, considering that I used to
spend almost all of my time watching those movies before I met Gamzee.
I flicked through the channels until I saw 50 First Dates was on and settled
for that. I know I just said that I wanted to find a movie that I hadn't seen
before, but I couldn't resist this one. It was my absolute favourite and I
could honestly watch it on repeat for a whole week straight without getting
tired of it. It was just too great, don't judge me.
One minute I was watching Adam Sandler try to woe the woman of his dreams on tv
and the next minute i was in pitch black darkness. I rubbed my eyes a bit,
yawning as I did so. Apparently, I fell asleep on the couch while watching the
movie, great. The tv was off so I guessed Kankri turned it off before he left.
I slowly got up, feeling groggy as fuck. What time was it even? I checked my
phone and saw that it was already 9 PM, which meant I slept for about five
hours or something. Gamzee had to be on now, if he wasn't I would be pissed.
Once I got back into my room I quickly went straght to my laptop like I had
done before. I checked Pesterchum once again and let out a sigh of relief. That
idiot was finally online.

      carcinoGeneticist [CG]  began pestering  terminallyCapricious [TC]
CG:  WHERE THE FUCK HAVE YOU BEEN?
CG:  I HAVE LITERALLY BEEN WAITING ALL DAY FOR YOU TO GET ONLINE, SHITSPONGE.
TC:  oH sHiT MoThErFuCkEr, SoRrY fOr mAkInG yOu AlL uP aNd WaIt.
TC:  I hAd OnE oF mY bEsT bRoS aLl Up AnD oVeR aNd LoSt TrAcK oF tImE.
TC:  :o(
CG:  YEAH WELL IT'S FINE NOW, I DON'T REALLY GIVE A TWO-FACED FUCK.
CG:  I HAVE GOOD NEWS TO SHARE WITH YOU.
TC:  WeLl aLrIgHt tHeN, mOtHeRfUcKeR. lEt's hEaR ThE MoThErFuCkInG GoOd nEwS!
TC:  :o)
I was about to type it out to him but then decided against it. I'd actually
want to see his reaction, he'd probably do that huge smile again and say
something like 'wow that's motherfucking great karkat i can't wait to see
you' or something. Well, it probably wouldn't be worded exactly like that, but
I was more than positive that it would involve the word 'motherfuck' somewhere
in it because Gamzee apparently loved that word.
CG:  CAN I TELL YOU THROUGH WEBCAM?
CG:  FUCK.
CG:  WHY AM I ASKING YOU IF I CAN?
CG:  I *WILL* TELL YOU THROUGH WEBCAM WHETHER YOU WANT ME TO OR NOT.
CG:  I'M GOING TO CALL NOW, FUCKFACE.
Before even giving Gamzee the chance to reply I mashed down on the call button.
I was getting all excited again and fuck waiting. It took him till the fourth
beep to answer, which was sort of long for him. Then again, I was sort of
forcing him...
"Hey motherfucker." He said as he adjusted his camera so that I could see him.
He was eating one of those pies he seemingly always baked.
"What makes you think you can just call me 'motherfucker' all of the time?! I
am your goddamn boyfriend, stop calling me that!" Sometimes it just annoyed me.
It felt like every single time we webcammed he had to start out calling me some
stupid nickname or that word.
Gamzee just laughed at me and didn't answer. Instead he asked me about the
thing I wanted to tell him. "So what were you so all up and motherfucking
excited to tell me, Karbro?"
"I was gonna tell you tha-..." I cut myself off and glared at the wall behind
me.
OH.
FUCK.
NO.
I could hear Dave and John through the goddamn wall. They were fucking banging
eachother against the wall apparently and I could hear every single bit of it.
It was like there wasn't even a wall! If I closed my eyes and thought about it
enough, I could probably see them too! Fucking dumbasses!
"Why'd you stop talking, Karkles?" Gamzee just had a confused look on his face
and I glared at him as well.
"You don't hear that?!"
"Hear what? All I all up and hear is your motherfucking cute self talking to
me."
I rolled my eyes. Now was not the time for that.
"My fucking stupid neighbors are fucking! And I can hear them through the
wall!"
Once again, he just laughed at me. I picked up the closest pillow next to me
and harshly threw it at the wall. "HEY FUCKASSES. STOP HAVING OBNOXIOUSLY LOUD
SEX RIGHT NEXT TO THE FUCKING WALL. IT'S DISTURBING AND I'M TRYING TO TALK TO
GAMZEE!" I yelled at the top of my lungs to make sure they could hear me.
"O-Oh~! Wait Dave, Dave hold on! K-Karkat can hear u-us..." Of course I could
fucking hear them, they were RIGHT ON THE FUCKING WALL.
"Let him listen then, John. My dick is in fucking Cloud 9 right now and he is
not coming down yet." I swear to god if Dave wasn't the one taking me to see
Gamzee this weekend I would kill him for even saying that. They started fucking
the shit out of eachother again and I let out a loud groan before unplugging my
laptop and hauling it into the living room. I sat on the couch and looked back
on the screen and saw Gamzee laughing as if he just saw the funniest thing.
Hearing John moan Dave's name over and over again was not funny.
"Stop laughing! It's not even funny, dude!"
"Yes it motherfucking is!" He laughed a bit more before taking another bite of
pie. "So now, what were you gonna all up and tell me?"
I froze for a second. Suddenly, I started feeling scared. What if he didn't
even want to meet me in person? What if he thought this was taking it too far?
My mind started going through tons of negative thoughts and I basically had to
force myself to blurt it out.
"I-I'm gonna get to meet you, Gamzee! This weekend... My friend Dave is going
to drive me up to Sacramento... so I can see you..." My voice lowered at the
end and I slowly looked back at the screen, fearing the worst.
Instead of seeing Gamzee get upset about it, he did that huge smile that I had
originally been hoping for and honked.
"Woah man, what?! Really? That's motherfucking bitchtits awesome!"
I smiled too, glad to see that he was excited just like I was. "Yeah, it'll be
cool! I'll finally meet you..."
Gamzee gasped, hearing his phone ring, and picked it up. He typed something,
I'm guessing a text, to someone then looked up at me with a frown.
"Aww, bro, I have to all up and go. Tavbro wants me to help him with
something."
I may or may not have twitched a bit in annoyance. That 'Tavbro' person was
always taking Gamzee away from me. It seemed like every other time he had to
hang up on our calls it was because he had to go do something with him. I never
hung up on Gamzee to go hang out with one of my friends, it only seemed fair
that he'd do the same for me. But I guess not, apparently.
"Uh... Well, okay. Talk to you later, I guess."
Gamzee kissed the screen then waved at me. "I'll all up and talk to you
tomorrow, Karkles. Love you, motherfucker!" He smiled one last time then hung
up.
A sigh escaped my lips.
Now I had to decide on whether I would sleep on the couch again or risk going
back in my room to hear my friends go at it again.
I was definitely going to pick the couch.
***** Worries *****
The next day at school felt painfully slow. I swear all of the classes had
another hour added to them because it felt way too long. A sigh of relief
escaped my lips once we had been dismissed to locker break.
I quickly found my locker in the middle of the hallway, turning the knob on it
to unlock it. Luckily for me, I had an easy code. 6-9-6. It was almost too
simple, it kind of creeped me out. Those numbers were always around me. My
apartment number was 6, Kankri's favourite number was 9, and I was a Cancer so
my zodiac symbol even looked like 69. It was fucking weird, to say the least.
Sollux appeared next to me after a minute or two. His locker was right beside
mine so I always talked to him whenever we were at locker break. But I was
tired today and sort of didn't want to talk to anybody. It was hard to sleep
when your next door neighbors were loudly fucking against the goddamn wall.
"Hey kk," I turned my attention to Sollux, giving him a questioning look. He
just sort of narrowed his eyes at me and sighed. "You know about how you're
going to go and meet your weird internet boyfriend?"
"Yeah, what about it? And he's not weird!" Okay, that was a lie. Gamzee was
weird as fuck and it was dumb for me to even try and deny it. The fucker wears
clown make-up! If that doesn't scream 'weirdo' then I don't know what the fuck
does.
"Are you thure that's really a good idea?"
I glared at him as if he was stupid. Of course I was sure! I had been wanting
to see him for so long and I finally got a chance, hell yeah I was going to
take advantage of that!
"Fuck you, yes I am. What the goddamn problem?!"
He rolled his eyes at me. Or at least, I'm assuming he rolled his eyes. I
couldn't really tell since they were hidden behind those 3D looking glasses
that he always wore. I wasn't even sure how he saw things through those dumb
glasses but that's a whole different story.
"What if he'th not who he thays he ith!"
I just gave him another dumb look.
"I'm not fucking retarded, I video-chat with him all of the time, I'm positive
that he's who he really says he is! Only a dumb shit would go all the way out
to meet someone they've only met online when they've never even seen them over
video!"
I watched as Sollux slammed his locker shut in annoyance.
"You're not getting the point, kk! I'm not thaying what if he doethn't look
like he thays he doeth! I'm thaying, what if his perthonality ithn't the thame!
He could a fucking therial murderer and you wouldn't even know!"
Sometimes Sollux said really irrationally stupid things that made me want to
punch him in the face for saying. This was one of those things.
"Wow, Sollux, I think I would fucking know if my boyfriend was a serial killer!
Gamzee probably isn't even smart enough to succesfully kill someone, the guy's
a dumbass! Stop fucking worrying about me and worry about your own problems,
jesus christ!"
"Tho you're dating a dumbath?"
I twitched.
"Did you even listen to a word I said?! Ugh." My tone softed a bit now. "Gamzee
isn't a dumbass, okay? He's just... not always there? Like he spaces out all
the time and forgets things easily, I guess. It's weird okay!"
"Thounds like a thoner."
"...Gamzee is not a fucking stoner! He told me himself that he doesn't do
drugs! I would never fucking date someone who even remotely thinks about doing
drugs!" I hated drugs with a burning goddamn passion. No, it doesn't even
deserve my passion! I just hated them! It was always a touchy subject to me
whenever someone tried to bring up anything to do with them. My dad was on them
around the time he died and I'm almost positive that they were the things that
killed him. Of course, I'll never know how he really died, nobody ever told me.
Not even Kankri. I just sort of accepted the fact that he was gone and assumed
the drugs did it to him. Either way, I hated every single kind of drug out
there and decided I'd never associate myself with someone who even smoked. So
of course I would never date a stoner, Sollux was just being an asshole.
"I'm just thaying! He might not be the perthon you think he ith and I don't
want you to get hurt or anything! You thould at least be careful..." Sollux
sounded like he genuinely cared but I sure as fuck didn't.
"Yeah, well, like I said, don't worry about me! And you're one to talk about
bad boyfriends, look at your own boyfriend! He's a fucking hipster douchebag
who thinks he's sooo much better than everyone else in this school just because
his parents are rich!"
"Eridan isn't my boyfriend!" Sollux flared, I could tell he was mad now, he
didn't even have his lisp. He hated it when anybody ever called Eridan his
boyfriend even though it was so obvious that they were together. I even
remember him saying it himself that Eridan was his boyfriend like two months
ago in gym class. Someone had accidently hit Eridan with a volleyball and
Sollux got really mad and said something along the lines of 'Watch where you
throw the ball, you hit my boyfriend' ...something like that.
"Wow, okay, and my name isn't Karkat fucking Vantas. Don't even try to deny it,
Captor! We all know, you've even said it before!"
He was silent for a while before he began to talk again, speaking under his
breath.
"I just don't want everyone knowing, okay...? I hate the fact that I'm even
attracted to that fish face but I am?" Sollux groaned, tugging at his hair in
frustration.
"Yeah well, you just have to suck it up and deal. You like Eridan, nobody
cares! Except maybe I do because you're my friend and I think you could do
better, but sti-" I cut myself off, seeing that the hallway was now empty. We
were late to class and didn't even notice it with how much we were arguing. I
sighed, starting to walk towards my Algebra class. "We have to go..."
Sollux nodded and followed behind me, giving up on our argument.
It was 9 PM now and I was currently chatting with Gamzee again over webcam. We
had started out talking about some tv show we both watched and then ended up
talking about our favourite restaurants and now we were just awkwardly staring
at eachother. Gamzee's eyes were half-lidded as usual as he smiled dumbly at
me, making me smile too. I didn't even know a smile was contagious but
apparently it was.
Staring at Gamzee gave me time to think. The things that Sollux were saying
were now finally starting to sink in and bother me. What if he was right? What
if Gamzee really wasn't the same way he seemed over the camera? What if he was
some kind of crazy murderer with mental problems? Well no, that was still a
stupid idea. Gamzee was not a murderer, what the fuck would he even kill people
for? The guy always seemed like he had no care in the world, like nothing ever
bothered him. He would have no reason to kill someone.
But what if he really was a druggie and he lied to me? I mean, Sollux was
right, he did really act like a stoner. He would always seem calm, too calm.
His eyes were sometimes slightly pink, like he had been smoking. His voice even
kind of sounded like one of those generic stoner voices. Kind of...
My smile turned into a frown as I looked at Gamzee more. It was scary to think
that I would meet him soon but didn't know what to expect. I had to ask him
about some things now, I had to make sure that I wanted to meet him.
I took a deep breath before finally speaking.
"Hey Gamzee?"
"Yeah, Karbro?"
"You haven't lied to me about yourself before, have you?"
My stomach was in knots as I waited for him to reply.
"Awe, nah bro, I would never all up and motherfucking lie to you. What's got
you all up and thinking I would?"
I was so glad to hear to that.
"Uh... nothing. I'm just kind of nervous to meet you?"
He laughed then took a sip of the Faygo sitting beside him.
"You shouldn't be. I'm all up the and the same motherfucker you see right now.
Except in person some people say I'm all up and taller than they thought."
I laughed too, smiling again.
"Well, I'm short, so I might have to look up to see you."
"Short guys like you are always the motherfucking cutest~"
We argued for a while after that about whether or not being short was cute.
It was just like all of our other conversations, relaxed and fun.
There was absolutely no way I could see Gamzee not being the same in person.
No way.
***** Arrival *****
 
It was finally Friday.
It was fucking FINALLY Friday.
Today was finally the day that Dave said he'd drive me up to Sacramento to
finally meet Gamzee. I woke up extra early (as if I don't wake up early enough
as is) and quickly snapped open my laptop, hoping for Gamzee to be online so I
could video chat with him and tell him how excited I was. But, once again, he
was offline, which was very fucking disappointing. But whatever, I'd see him in
person today anyways, so it wasn't a big deal. The idiot was probably just
sleeping or something. It was like, five am right now, after all.
I shook my head and made my way into the bathroom, brushing my teeth before
going into the shower to get ready. After my shower I wrapped a towel around my
waist (which wasn't exactly necessary since I was literally the only one home
at the moment) and went over to my closet. I had no clue what I wanted to wear
today. It needed to be something decent since I was going to meet my boyfriend
but... Fuck. What would Gamzee like?
Wait.
No.
I wasnotdoing this.
I practically slapped myself on the forehead for even thinking about giving a
fuck about what I was going to wear. I sounded like some fourteen year-old girl
going out on her first date! There was no way I was going to allow myself to
sink down to that level. No goddamn way.
Groaning, I grabbed a grey sweater off of a hanger and threw it on. It was a
very basic, plain sweater except for the fact that is had the word 'NO.' across
it in all caps in a bright red font. I didn't even remember buying this sweater
but fuck, it was in my closet and I was going to wear it.
I moved over to my dresser and opened my underwear drawer. Once again I found
myself fretting over what I should wear... God fucking damnit! Why did I even
care?! It wasn't like the guy was gonna take my pants off and see my underwear
anyways! I was not that easy and there was no way I would let myself sleep with
him after just meeting him. It wasn't going to happen!
I rolled my eyes then pulled on some purple boxers, throwing on my plain denim
skinny jeans over them. This would have to fucking do and if Gamzee didn't like
it then oh fucking well. He'd just have to deal.
I heard my phone vibrate from across the room and I was sort of hoping that
it'd be Gamzee. But when I picked up the phone and checked it was just Dave.
Jeez.
NO I HATE THIS ASSHOLE at 5:39 AM - im gonna take you right after school so
like pack your shit for the weekend and bring it with you yeah
You at 5:40 AM - YEAH OK WHATEVER. YOU WANT ME TO MEET YOU IN THE PARKING LOT
AFTER SCHOOL AT YOUR CAR?
NO I HATE THIS ASSHOLE at 5:40 AM - obviously
You at 5:41 AM - FUCK YOU. I WAS JUST MAKING SURE, ASSWIPE.
And that guy wondered why I set his name on my phone to 'NO I HATE THIS
ASSHOLE'...
Going back over to my closet I just threw two other random shirts, some more
pairs of underwear and jeans, and some socks into my bag. I also grabbed my
toothbrush and shoved it in there because there was no way I was going to let
myself forget my own toothbrush and then be forced to share Gamzee's. That
would be... disgusting, to say the least.
Now I needed something with his address on it. I should have made sure I had
something with it on there before I even asked for Dave to take me all the way
up to Sacramento but I was being stupid and not thinking. Really stupid. How
were we supposed to get there without the address?!
I frantically searched around my room before seeing a box in my closet. It was
the box that Gamzee had used to send me my birthday present in! I smiled and
quickly grabbed it, glad to have finally found something with his address on
it. I remembered when I had first got this package, he had sent me a little
stuffed animal crab because he said I was 'crabby and motherfucking small and
cute like a crab' and I always lied and told him I hated this present but the
truth was that I loved it dearly. That little crab plush always remained on my
bed, safe and sound there for me to cuddle with at night. Wow that came out
sounding alot gayer than I meant for it to sound.
I placed the empty box down on my desk and scribbled the address down on a
sheet of paper, stuffing that in my bag as well. Now we could actually know
where exactly we were going.
Once I was sure that I had everything I would need for the weekend at Gamzee's
I walked outside and to the bus stop. I was early today, obviously, so John and
Dave weren't by my side waiting with me this time. Actually, I didn't think
they would be riding the bus at all today since Dave had to drive me to
Gamzee's later. They were probably just going to go to school in Dave's car
today which was fucking fantastic news. No flaming PDA this morning, thank god.
I basically followed and stalked Dave all day during school. Even in math, the
class we don't have together, I kept an eye on him through the window that
conveniently panned out to his Language Arts class. I had to make sure nothing
happened to mess up our plans. Like, what if he suddenly got sick and had to go
home? Or if he fell asleep in class and ended up in detention? No. I was not
going to let any of that bullshit happen and if it did I would stop it. Because
nothing was going to get in the way of me getting with Gamzee.
Once the bell rung and we were dismissed, I rushed out of the school to find
Dave outside in front of his car with John. ...Making out with him. I swear
those two could not go five seconds without sucking face, it was so fucking
annoying.
"HEY DIPSHITS!"
Dave glanced at me somewhat, shrugged, then went back to frenching with John.
He annoyed me so fucking much.
"Don't just ignore me, stop fucking John's mouth for one goddamn second and get
in the fucking car so we can go!" I fumed, glaring at him.
He groaned then let go of John, waving to him as John went off to go catch the
bus home.
"Man, don't act like you won't be doing the same thing with Gamezee when you
see him tonight, Karkat."
"...Gamzee. It's pronounced Gamzee."
"That's what I said."
"No. You said Gamezee. Fucking say it right!"
Dave laughed before opening the car door and getting in. I just stood outside
of the car still, glaring at him even more.
"Are you gonna get in the car or what?"
"Not until you say Gamzee's name right, Evad!"
"...Did you just call me Evad?"
"Yes. Evad."
"What is that even...?"
"IT'S FUCKING DAVE SPELLED BACKWARDS, IDIOT. YOU'RE SO FUCKING STUPID, I SWEAR
TO GOD. I HATE YOU SO MUCH."
Dave raised a brow at me before breaking out into laughter again, making me
scowl.
"What the fuck is funny?!"
"You. Oh my god, you're comedic gold, Karkat."
I wasn't trying to be funny and if Dave laughed one more time I would probably
end up shoving my fist down his throat.
"NOTHING IS FU-"
"You know if you keep yelling like that I might not want to take you anymore."
...Shit, I wasn't going to risk it. Reluctantly, I got into the car, growling
in annoyance. Dave started the car and backed out of the school's parking lot,
speeding out of the place so he could get in front of the school buses. The guy
drove like a mad man but I really didn't mind the speeding if it meant I could
get to Gamzee sooner.
"Do you have the address?" He asked, glancing over to me as he drove. He should
really keep his eyes on the road...
"Yeah," I rummaged through my overstuffed bag and finally found the crumpled
sheet of paper I had wrote down the address on, passing it over to Dave so he
could get us there.
He stared at the paper for a bit and then set it aside, taking out his phone to
put the address into his navigation app. "It says we'll be there in like an
hour and a half."
That was a whole half hour shorter than I was expecting, which made me smile
ever so slightly. "Good. I'm just going to fucking sleep the whole ride
though."
Dave shrugged then turned on the radio. He went through a few stations and
apparently none of them were good enough for him so instead he connected his
iPod and started playing some of his own music.
And by some of his own music, I do mean some of his own music.
I thought I was going to sleep during the whole ride but his music was so awful
that doing so seemed impossible now. How the fuck did Dave listen to this
shit?! It sounded horrendous and almost as glitchy as that god awful webcomic
the guy ran.
"Dave your music is horrible, turn it off!"
"Oh okay."
I thought he was going to be a pal and turn it off but no. He just turned it up
louder and started driving slower. This asshole was torturing me.
"Fuck you, Dave! Ughhhh!!" I groaned as I covered my ears and tried to fall
asleep again. It took a while but eventually I found myself blacked out in
slumber, thank the heavens.
"Yo man, we're here." I felt a nudge on my shoulder as I woke up, turning
groggily to Dave. We were parked in front of a really nice house in the middle
of some really nice neighborhood full of other really nice houses. Everything
was... really nice. Too nice.
"Where are we...?" I asked, yawning and stretching a bit in my seat.
"At your boyfriend's house, apparently."
My eyes widened and I looked outside the window again, fully awake this time.
This fucking magnum opus neighborhood was the one that Gamzee lived in?! I
couldn't believe it, I was expecting some really lame small house in the middle
of a trailer park or some shit. Not this!
"A-Are you sure we're in the right neighborhood?!"
Dave glanced down at the sheet of paper with the address sprawled across it and
nodded. "Yeah, here look."
He passed me the paper and I compared the two addresses. He was right, this was
it. This was the house that Gamzee lived in. The fucker never told me he was
rich!
I picked my bag up and looked back over to Dave nervously. "Well then, I guess
I'm gonna fucking go..."
He smirked a little and gave me a thumbs up. "I'll pick you up on Sunday night
probably. Just give me a call if you need anything."
I slapped his stupid thumb down before getting out of the car. Hesitantly, I
waved goodbye to Dave and he did the same back to me before driving off and
away.
Turning back to the house, I sighed. This was all really happening. I was just
a few feet away from my boyfriend and this was probably the most nerve wracking
moment of my life.
I slowly made my way up to his front door and gulped. Okay, I was going to do
this. I was going to just fucking ring the doorbell and lunge myself into
Gamzee's arms or something lame like that.
Fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck.
My had shook nervously as it ghosted over the doorbell.
Here goes nothing.
Ding dong.
***** Expectations *****
Any second now, Gamzee would open the door and I'd finally get to see him in
person.
Any second now...
Any... Fucking... Second... Now...
My eye  twitched a little as I stared at his door. What the fuck was taking him
so goddamn long?! I had already been standing out here for a whole five minutes
now and it was starting to piss me off. Not to mention that it was freezing
cold outside since it was winter and all. I was literally freezing my ass off
waiting for this guy.
Just as I was about to re-ring the doorbell the door opened finally, making me
gasp a little since I wasn't really expecting it. My eyes wandered up and
oHMYGOD THERE HE WAS. It was really him. It was Gamzee!
Yeah, I was happy he finally opened the door but I was still pissed at him for
taking so long. There was no reason for him to take years to open a door when
he knew his boyfriend was coming over for the first time, jeez!
"Oh shit, it's you motherfucker! Karbro!" Gamzee gave me a big smile and I just
sorta glared back at him. But then that glare quickly turned into a soft stare
once I realized how goddamn attractive he really was in person. He had messy,
purple-tinted black hair, an adorably goofy smile, and eyes that felt like they
stared straight into your soul. No, literally, I could not look him in the eyes
anymore, it was giving me chills. My eyes wandered back down as I examined what
he was wearing. He had on a black t-shirt with a big purple ':o)' emoticon
splattered across it, matching purple jeans and black Doc Martens. His fashion
sense was alright, I guess... He could use a little bit mo- Fuck!
My eyes widened a little as I was pulled into a hug. I didn't hug him back but
that soon changed once I realized that I was really hugging Gamzee. I was
finally hugging my boyfriend for the first time ever. It took a while but I
finally hugged him back, nuzzling myself against his chest a bit. And that's
when it really sunk in. Not the sappy bullshit about me finally meeting him,
but the other big thing. The fact that I was basically a fucking midget in
height compared him!
Gamzee finally let go and laughed at me, still smiling. "I didn't expect you to
be so motherfucking short, Karkat." I rolled my eyes and blushed a little. This
guy had to be at least an entire foot taller than me. I was only 5'1" so that
would make Gamzee at least 6'1"... Why was he so tall?! It made things awkward,
I felt tiny. I was always shorter than all of my friends but the height
difference was never this big!
"Yeah, well it's not my fault that you're a fucking giant, Gamzee." It felt so
good to finally be able to say his name right to his face. This was all just
too great...
Gamzee laughed again then took my hand, leading me inside. "I think it's
motherfucking bitch-tits adorable though. Now come on, I'll show you around!"
My cheeks reddened a little bit as I followed him inside, deciding not to argue
back for once. I was too enthralled by his huge-ass house. It wasn't a mansion
or anything, but you have to realize that I live in a tiny two bedroom
apartment in San Francisco only with my brother. So coming to an actual house
for once in such a long time just felt plain weird and the house probably just
felt a lot bigger to me than it would to anybody else. But whatever, it was
nice. A little messy, but I could tell that Gamzee at least attempted to clean
it up for me because it was alot cleaner looking today than it ever was on
camera whenever we would video chat. That was thoughtful of him, I guess, but
it would have been nicer still if he would have opened the fucking door sooner.
"You motherfucking thirsty?" He asked, bringing me into the kitchen. I didn't
realize it until he asked, but it soon occurred to me that yes, I was actually
super thirsty. That whole car ride we didn't make any stops so I hadn't drank
anything since lunch this afternoon at school.
"Oh, uh yeah, sure." I felt so awkward, it was weird actually talking to him in
person... His voice even sounded different. Not drastically different, but his
voice just sounded a bit smoother in person. He sounded alot more like someone
with sense than he did before.
Gamzee grinned as he quickly grabbed a drink out of his refrigerator and handed
it to me. It was a bottle with purple liquid and once I turned it in my hand so
that I could see the label I wasn't even surprised. Faygo. I should have
fucking known.
"Gamzee, I don't want to drink your stupid clown bullshit! I heard this stuff
is gross." I glared at the bottle as I spoke. There was no way I was trying
this shit.
"Awe, come on Kar, just try it! I promise it'll taste motherfucking amazing.
Faygo is a miracle~"
"Everything is a fucking miracle to you."
Another laugh from Gamzee. He just gave me lazy stare until I finally gave up
and sipped the dumb drink. And just like I expected, it was disgusting! I had
absolutely no clue how he drank this shit everyday!
"Oh my fucking god, this is horrible! Bleh!" I capped the bottle again then
threw it at Gamzee. "I want this taste out my mouth, ughhh!"
"I can all up and help you with that." Gamzee chuckled then moved in closer to
me, pinning me against a counter. I could feel myself blushing like a fucking
anime.
"What do you mean...?" The clown's face moved closer to mine and before I knew
it his lips were against mine. He wasn't just kissing me, he was french kissing
me, tongue and all. I panicked a little, having no clue what to do. I had never
kissed anyone before, especially not like this! I made small noises, trying to
pry Gamzee off of me. He was way bigger than me though so getting him off of me
was next to impossible. I decided to just give in, trying to use my tongue
against his as well. It felt so... weird! Gamzee deepened the kiss, pinning me
even harder against the counter as he got rougher with the kiss. A weird moan
escaped my lips and I slowly closed my eyes, starting to actually enjoy it. He
lips felt so nice against mine and I could tell he was skilled with this whole
tongue kissing thing for some reason. We went at it for about a minute or two
straight but then finally ended up stopping due to lack of breath. My face was
probably as red as a tomato now as I awkwardly stared at Gamzee again. Gamzee
just laughed softly.
"Was that... your first motherfucking kiss?" How did he know?! Was I really
that bad?! I stopped staring at him and instead looked away nervously.
"Uhh... Yeah. What the big fucking deal?! Yeah, I know, I probably sucked
really bad but you didn't even ask! You just went in and fucking forced your
tongue down my throat! How can you expect me to react when you do shit like
tha-" Gamzee shut me up with another kiss and at this point I didn't see any
use in arguing anymore. I gave in again, kissing him back.
"Chill, chill. You didn't suck, I could just tell because you all up and took a
minute to realize what was going on. I'm motherfucking glad I could be your
first kiss and all!"
"But... Ugh! Jeez, shut up!" I didn't know what to say. Whenever Gamzee said
nice things like that I would lose track of what I was trying to say and just
become really flustered and silent. I hated being the one who couldn't keep an
argument going, but with Gamzee I didn't even want to argue. He turned me into
such a submissive bitch, oh my fucking god. It was embarrassing.
I swear it was national laugh-at-karkat day because Gamzee was laughing again.
He would often laugh alot when we'd video chat but I never realized how much of
a giddy person he was until I had to hear that chuckle over and over again. Not
that I was really complaining though, his laugh was sorta cute. ...Cute? Wow,
did I really just say that?! Do you see how this asshole is making me think,
ughh!
"So, what do you want to motherfucking do now that you're finally all up and
here?" Gamzee asked curiously.
"I don't know... All I know is that I'm still fucking cold." I had no clue how
Gamzee could stand just chilling in his house without the heater on. Maybe I
was just sensitive to cold weather or some shit... Then again, this was Gamzee
I was talking about. The guy was a fucking weirdo who did alot of things that
normal people didn't do, he probably loooveeed the cold. Weird as fuck.
"Oh fuck, that gives me an idea. Wanna roast some motherfucking marshmallows?"
"If it'll warm me up then sure, why not?"
Gamzee honked at me before opening another cabinet, pulling out a bag of jumbo
puff marshmallows. I'd never roasted marshmallows before so this should have
been fun, I hoped.
"Follow me." Gamzee led me into the living room and sat in front of the
fireplace beside me. It was already lit and everything so I figured he must've
done this shit alot, probably. Either that or this was his lame excuse for a
heater. Sure, it was warm up close, but it was definitely not enough to warm up
the entire house or anything.
"Here you go, motherfucker~" He handed me a metal stick thing to put my
marshmallow on then put his own marshmallow on his. His looked all neat and
shit but when I attempted to put mine on I ended up clumsily putting it on all
sideways and wrong. But whatever, it should get the job done.
I watched as he held out his marshmallow in front of the fire skillfully,
making it nice and toasted. It looked easy, so I attempted to do the same with
mine. ...And failed. Mine ended up catching fire and I freaked out a little,
not sure what to do about it. Gamzee laughed at me then blew out the fire for
me. I frowned a bit, mine was totally burnt and black, not cool.
"Do you want me to all up and help you roast yours?" Gamzee questioned. I felt
so embarrassed, I hated getting help from anyone. Especially when it came to
easy shit like this.
"No, I can do it!" I stuck another marshmallow out in front of the fire but
then Gamzee pulled my hand away, shaking his head.
"You're doing it all motherfucking wrong. You can't put it that close, just let
me show you how." I tried to argue but, before I knew it, Gamzee had placed me
in his lap and wrapped one arm around my waist. I never realized that Gamzee
would be such a touchy person, I swear he was wrapping himself onto me whenever
he got the chance. It was nice to be held for once though so... I guess I'd
allow it. For now.
"Now look, you have to hold it out like, right motherfucking here." He held
onto my wrist and placed my hand in the right spot for my marshmallow to not
totally burn. "And then you have to turn it while it roasts so it wont get all
up and burned, Karbro."
I followed what he said and was surprised to actually do it right this time.
"Fuck, I did it! I didn't ask for your help though but... thanks..." I smiled a
tiny bit and Gamzee just grinned back. I was about to finally eat my
marshmallow but Gamzee stole the stick out of my hand before I could.
"Hey, I was gonna eat that, assho-"
"ShHhHhhHhHh."
"Don't fucking shh me!"
"Just let me motherfucking feed it to you, it'll be cute."
I just gave Gamzee a 'bitch r u srs' face and then turned away from him. "No!"
"Why nooot?" Gamzee tightened his arms around my waist and pulled me in closer
again. He was really strong and I wasn't sure if he noticed that or not but it
basically made me feel like a limp noodle being compared to a steel pole.
"A-Ah! Fine, if you'll stop holding me tight like this I'll let you! You're
gonna choke me..." I felt Gamzee loosen up on me and then kiss my cheek. I
guess that was his way of saying sorry but I doubt he was actually sorry at
all. It was just nice to be able to breathe again.
"Open up, motherfucker~" He chimed as he held out the stick with the
marshmallow on it for me. Reluctantly, I opened my mouth a bit and took a bite.
Oh god, it tasted so fucking good when it was roasted right. I took a few more
small bites until the marshmallow was completely gone (it took a while to
finish eating these jumbo sized assholes, okay) and then glared at Gamzee,
feeling as though I just totally gave into him. Which, I guess I did, but
still. I didn't want to come off as being easy to sway. And I usually wasn't
but... Shit. I was a sucker for this clown.
"It tastes fucking gross." I lied. Gamzee chuckled and I could feel the
vibration of his laugh against my back since he was still holding my close. He
leaned down and placed a playful kiss on lips and unintentionally I kissed him
back on impulse. And then the sloppy makeout session began...
It started out with us just exchanging small kisses while cuddling, then it got
more passionate and next thing I knew, Gamzee was on top of me placing little
kisses on my neck. It was weird, I'd never been kissed there before and it kind
of tickled.
"G-Gamzee stop, th-that tickles!" I managed to say in between laughs. I didn't
want him to find out I was ticklish because I was more than 100% positive that
he would use that to his advantage and start teasing me. Which he did because
soon those kisses turned into licks and then into gentle bites. It felt
really... good, honestly. Not like I would admit that though.
After a few minutes the fire stopped, leaving us in the darkness of his living
room. That was probably some sort of sign that we should probably go to sleep
now or something. I didn't really feel tired, then again I never slept, but
still.
"We should... move into your room?" I suggested.
"Oh motherfuck yeah, we all up and should!" Gamzee then proceeded to pick me up
like a goddamn princess (what a shitty prince he must be then) and carried me
into his bedroom. It was a rather big room, the walls were painted purple and
alot of the items in it were red, even his bed. I was placed on said bed.
"I've been motherfucking waiting for this the whole time, Karbro~" Gamzee
chimed, getting on top of me again. He kissed me hard and I sort of melted.
Yes, melted. I was a fucking ice cube and he was a match lit on fire. Analogies
are dumb.
"Waiting for what...?" I raised a brow at him, not quite sure what he meant.
"I've been waiting for this moment..." He leaned in closer to me, whispering in
my ear.
"I've been waiting all motherfucking day to be able to fuck you senseless
tonight."
 
***** Advice *****
"...I hope you're joking."
"I'm not."
...Fuck. He couldn't be serious.
"G-Gamzee, I can't!" I was going to admit it, I was fucking panicking. I had no
clue how the whole sex thing actually went down, I was still a virgin despite
the fact that all of my other friends had already lost their v-cards a long
time ago. I mean, this was my first real relationship, I hadn't even kissed
anyone until today, what made Gamzee think that I could handle having sex too?!
"Why not?" He leaned down again, kissing me softly on my lips. Hesitantly, I
pushed him off. I didn't come here to fucking sleep with him and I wasn't
expecting any of this to happen at all in the first place. I thought we'd just
cuddle and watch movies and shit and go on a date or something stupid like
that. Not this!
"I..." Fuck, how was I going to break this to him? I didn't want to seem like I
was pushing him away or anything but I didn't want to sleep with him either.
But... I figured it wouldn't hurt to at least tell him the truth... "Gamzee,
I'm a virgin, okay?! I've never slept with anyone before and I basically have
zero experience with anything relationship wise. And truth is, yeah, I'm
fucking scared to try things! You're just going to have to deal with that if
you're going to be with me and if you can't accept that then fucking get off of
me!"
I actually came off alot harsher than I meant to be... Watching Gamzee's facial
expressions, I frowned. At first, he looked shocked, then he looked
dissappointed, then he started laughing, leaning down to kiss my cheek gently.
I honestly didn't know how he felt about this now, his emotions changed every
fucking second.
"That's cool, motherfucker. I didn't know." Okay, now I knew. I could hear it
in his voice, he was really dissappointed and now I felt like shit. Was it
weird for me to turn him down? Maybe it was because I thought you weren't
supposed to fuck on the first date but... was I wrong? Was it normal for people
to just give themselves up that quick? Really, I didn't know anything. I needed
some advice, this was way too much for me to figure out on my own.
"Uh... I'm gonna go to the bathroom. I'll be back." Quickly, I absconded from
the room and down the hall into Gamzee's bathroom. I didn't really have to go,
I just needed some privacy so I could call someone.
Now who should I call? Not Sollux, his advice was always really stupid and
irritating. Definitely not Eridan, I didn't even need to give myself a reason
to not call him. And not Dave because he was an asshole and he could go fuck
himself for all I care. Maybe John? He was usually the more helpful and
reasonable one out of our group of friends and I knew he had some experience
with this type of stuff since he had been dating Dave for such a long time.
Yeah, I'd just go with John.
The phone rang a few times until someone picked up. Someone who was not John.
"Sup."
"Dave, what the fuck?! I called John, I want to talk to him, not you!" This
asshole I swear to fucking god. He was like an annoying stray cat that you
couldn't get rid of. I lay out my fucking food on my doorstep for my own cat to
eat but here comes this bum-ass stray stealing the food and mistaking it as a
sign to start showing up all the time. And then next thing you know, here I am
taking in that stray cat and letting it scratch up all my furniture. It was
fucking bullshit.
"He's in the shower. What's up? You sound worried."
"Uh..." It would be suspicious if I took too long to come back into the room
with Gamzee so I figured I would just suck it up and ask Dave for advice
instead, much to my dismay. "I need some help."
"Okay, what's going on?"
Okay, deep breaths Karkat, don't make yourself sound stupid...
"Basically, Gamzee wants me to sleep with him and I don't know what to do
because I'm a goddamn virgin and I have no experience with this shit and I
really don't want to seem like some sort of easy slut and just give in or
something. And I told him that and now he seems upset? What the fuck do I do?"
Oh god, I couldn't believe I was telling Dave this shit.
"Woah woah, slow down there cowboy. Okay, so you have to think of this from
your boyfriend's point of view. You guys have been dating or whatever for hella
long, like almost a year or something, right? Like you guys are deep into that
shit, right?"
"Six months of endless texting and skyping, yes. What does that matter for?!"
"Yeah, see. I mean, if this guy's been faithful to you this whole time and
hasn't cheated, especially with the distance and shit, he's probably got alot
of pent up sexual needs. Like, he probably has to fucking jack it every other
day or some shit. And now you're here and he can finally get a chance to bang
the babe after all this time and you said no. Imagine how he feels. It's like
he's been building this sandcastle for six months straight now, like it isn't
even hot outside anymore, man it's probably fucking winter and he's probably
ridden with all types of frostbite, and you just run over to it with your short
ass and kick it down then laugh about it right in his face and he can't even
cry about it because every tear that he lets out just freezes and sticks to his
face. You fucked him up."
I just started tuning Dave out after he said the word 'sandcastle' because
whatever we were just talking about had nothing to do with sandcastles and he
was probably just rambling again with his horrible analogies, as always.
"...So, are you saying I should just fucking do it or what?!"
"You're gonna have to do something. Because if you don't I'm pretty sure he's
gonna get bored of you and cheat on you with someone one of these days and
you're gonna regret it and then you'll have a really messy break-up and then
boom, there goes your relationship. Then I'll have to deal with hearing you cry
every night through the wall and you make really gross sounds when you cry,
dude."
"You think he's gonna cheat on me?! No, you're wrong, fuck you! There's no way
Gamzee would cheat on me, he said he loved me and he's not the type to do that
shit! And I do not sound gross when I cry! Wait. You've never even heard me
cry, shut up!" Now I was really starting to get frustrated.
"You said you wanted help and I'm just trying to give you it. He's gonna cheat
on you, no doubt about it, unless you satisfy him. I don't know, you don't have
to go all the way or anything, just like give him some head and you should be
good. Use those cute little lips of yours, Karkat."
"First of all, ew. Second of all, don't ever call any of my body parts 'cute'
ever again or else I will bitchslap you so fucking hard next time I see you. I
don't want to suck Gamzee's dick! I don't even know... how... to do that...
correctly..."
Penis in my mouth did not sound appealing in the slightest right now.
"Man, are you serious? You just take the thing and suck it like a lollipop,
minus the biting. It's pretty easy, even someone as dense as you could figure
it out."
"I... I still don't get it, I feel like he'll say something to piss me of
midway through it and I'll bite his... thing... off. And then I'm pretty sure
he'll never talk to me again sooo?"
"So. Fuck, I don't know I-..... Oh hey John."
I could hear John's voice in the background, I'm guessing he just got out of
the shower or something. He had a short conversation with Dave until finally he
asked Dave why he had his phone, which made Dave give him his phone back
finally. Now I could talk to the one I wanted to talk to.
"Hey Karkat! What's up?"
Here we go again.
"I don't feel like explaining myself, John, but basically... I need you to tell
me how to do... the do... Um. Y'know?"
"...Do the do? Huh?" John laughed a little in confusion. Ugh! I didn't want to
say it, it sounded so lewd and wrong on so many levels.
"Jeeez! ..........teachmehowtosuckadickokay........" I can't believe I said it.
"What? Wha...t? Wait. Oh. OH. OHHH, UM! Well... you see... You just... um...
take the thing and do the thing...?"
John was not helping at all and to be perfecting honest, Dave was ten times
more helpful than him, surprisingly.
"You're not helping! Ugh! I'll call you back later, I'm just going to call
someone else..." I hung up then stared at my contacts, unsure as to who to call
about this next.
I never really realized how many friends I actually lacked until I realized
that John, Dave, and Sollux were my only three actual friends. (Eridan doesn't
count. Ever.)
I did not want to deal with either Sollux or Eridan so I just decided to try
and figure this out on my own instead. And I was prepared to fail. Horribly.
Horrendously. Hideously. All of the unpleasant words that begin with 'H' all at
once.
I wished myself luck before opening the door to Gamzee's room once again.
Here goes anything.
 
 
***** Taking Advice *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
"Hey. I'm back."
I closed the door behind me, nervously setting my sights back on Gamzee. He was
laying on the bed, looking right back at me. He had a blank expression on his
face which slowly turned into one of his big dopey smiles. I was just glad he
wasn't mad at me. I was already mad at myself for doing what I was about to do.
"Are you all up and alright? You took a little motherfucking long." He laughed
then pat the area beside him on the bed for me to lay with him. I reluctantly
did, nervous to be close to him again. I wasn't sure if Gamzee was going to
just give up on sleeping with me or if he was going to try to get me to give in
again. I already had my mind made up though, I was just going to do what Dave
told me had to be done, as horrible as it sounded to me. I already pushed
Gamzee away too much with everything else I did and said to him and Dave was
probably right... If I didn't do this, I might end up losing my boyfriend.
"O-Oh yeah, I'm perfectly fine. 100% Peaches and fucking cream." I didn't mean
to have a sarcastic remark to Gamzee's question but I was too far in thought to
process the things I was saying. I was just mean without trying, I guess. I
should probably work on that.
Gamzee raised a brow before leaning over and kissing me softly on the cheek.
The cheek, not the lips. What did that even mean?! What did the differences in
placement of kisses mean?! I had no clue how affection and intimacy worked, I
wasn't sure if everything meant something or if I was just overthinking it all.
I could ask Gamzee but fuck no. I was not going to let myself sound even more
inexperienced that I already made myself out to be.
"Soo Karbro, are you all up and ready to get down and dirty~"
I can't believe he worded it like that and I honestly felt like slapping the
fuck out of Gamzee for allowing those words to come out of his annoying mouth.
But instead of beating the shit out of him I forced myself to lean up and kiss
him just barely on the lips. Maybe I could shut him up with kisses.
I guess Gamzee took that half-assed kiss as a yes because almost immediately he
started to kiss me back excitedly. Even though I had already kissed Gamzee more
than a few times today now, I still wasn't 100% sure that I was even remotely
good at it yet. Whenever I went in to return his kisses I felt myself tense up
and freeze until I could just barely convince myself to finish the job and kiss
him back. So that resulted in all of my kisses being slow and soft, nowhere
near as eager and playful as Gamzee's. Sometimes, though, I'd get so deep into
it that I would be able to easily kiss him back without freezing.  But only
sometimes. Gamzee knew I was new to this stuff now though, so I hoped he got it
through his thick skull that I would probably be horrible at these things and
that he'd just deal with it. Which, I'm pretty sure he did, because he seemed
content and happy as-is.
We locked lips for a good few minutes, sloppy messy kisses galore. Then,
finally, Gamzee broke the kiss and went down to trail kisses down my neck to my
collarbone, which made me giggle like a fucking girl all over again. I hated
the fact that I was ticklish because it made me seem so goddamn submissive when
I would end up laughing and blushing like this. I didn't care if Gamzee was my
boyfriend, nobody was supposed to see me like this. It was beyond embarrassing.
The kisses suddenly stopped and I watched as Gamzee moved one of his hands down
to tug at the bottom of my shirt, pulling it up. I quickly stopped him, placing
my hands onto his and looking away nervously.
"Wait wait wait!" How the fuck was I supposed to word this without sounding
like some sort of sex-crazed weirdo. "L-Let me um... uh... ugh, fuck! Gamzee,
let me try something first before you start trying to grab my ass and shit,
okay?!"
Gamzee had a confused but eager look on his face as he nodded and got up from
on top of me and sat on the bed beside me. I sat up and looked back over to
him, moving closer to him again, placing a soft kiss on his cheek. That was his
reward for obeying.
"I um... I don't know how to do this or anything but I wanted to try... for
you..." I kept stumbling over my own goddamn words, completely filled with
nervous shudders. I sounded like an incoherent shitfuck and I wanted to jump
out the nearest window asap because this was just really, really embarrassing.
Everybody knew me as the rude, tough one who never gave in to anyone, yet here
I was in front of Gamzee about to attempt to give him head. Not the ideal
situation but fuck all of this thinking, I was just going to get it over with.
"What are you even all up and try- ...Oh!" Gamzee cut himself off and gave me a
surprised look when he noticed that I was now trying to unbutton his jeans. I
heard him chuckle again then he positioned himself a bit differently so it'd be
easier for me to get his jeans off of him. I felt so dirty doing this, yet, I
had some sort of weird thrill of excitement and anticipation as I got his jeans
off of him. Was I actually looking forward to doing this now? No... no, I
couldn't be. Yet... I felt a smile creep over my face as I hooked my fingers
around the waistband of Gamzee's boxers.
Maybe I was just excited to see how much action Gamzee was packing inside of
those jeans. Yeah, totally. That was definitely the thing I was getting all
giddy and uncharacteristically excited for.
"You're actually motherfucking smiling?" Gamzee smiled too with me, happy to
see me show some good emotions for once. But still... I didn't know why I was
smiling now of all times. I was nervous and scared and... excited. Why?!
"Shut the fuck up before I stop right here and leave your ass with blueballs."
Even with that snarky reply to him, I still had that annoying smile plastered
across my face. I wanted to slap myself.
But back to the important matter on hand now. I stared at my own hands for a
bit before finally taking a deep breath and beginning to pull down Gamzee's
boxers. I saw more and more of his skin until I finally saw it. The thing. That
thing.
"O-Oh my fucking god, Gamzee! You're... you're fucking huge, what the actual
fuck?!" It's not like I could measure him or anything right now but let's just
say he was definitely alot larger down there than I ever expected. Bigger than
I'd ever seen, that's for sure. He had like one of those huge dicks you only
saw in pornos! And the scariest part was that he wasn't even hard yet...
Gamzee laughed as if he was already expecting me to say that.
"I hope you can all up and handle it, motherfucker."
"Is that a fucking challenge?!"
"Maybe~"
I glared at him then brought my line of sight back down to his length. If I was
going to do this I was going to do it good and make it worthwhile and I was not
going to let Gamzee think that I couldn't handle him because I bet I fucking
could, I could do anything if I was fired up enough for it, this shouldn't be
too hard anyways. Even though he was... huge... I could do this!
I wasn't sure exactly how to properly start so I experimentally started by
grasping him in my hand and beginning to pump him slowly. I knew how to do this
much, at least. N-Not that I ever did this in my own time, I mean...
Gamzee let out small groans, smirking as he watched me. His smirk pissed me off
so I hesitantly went faster, trying to wipe that dumb smile off of his dumb
face. He was still smirking though so I instead took my hand off of him and
brought my mouth to meet with his length. I was going to do this, I was going
to do this, I was going to do this...
I was going to do this.
After a few seconds of mentally preparing myself, I finally opened my mouth and
brought the tip of Gamzee's length into my mouth, which earned me another small
moan from my boyfriend. I didn't really know what to do next so I just sorta
swirled my tongue around his tip playfully to see if I could get another
reaction from Gamzee that way. And I did.
"M-Motherfuck Karkat, it's so motherfucking hot to see you like this."
"Shuth Uhpmh!" The fact that I couldn't say 'shut up' back to Gamzee properly
due to his dick being in my mouth made me just feel dirtier, which made me just
want to finish this sooner now. I figured now would be the time to start
putting some effort into this.
Slowly, I moved my mouth lower down his length, trying to take all of him into
me. It was harder than it looked though, since Gamzee was larger than most
people down there. And to make things worse, now he was hard and now he was
even bigger. I was scared to think about having to have that actually inside-
inside of me, but for now I was just sucking him off so I tried not to think
about that.
I was about halfway down his dick when I realized I couldn't take anymore of
him in my mouth without feeling like I was about to gag. Well, at least an
attempt was made. I looked up to Gamzee, who was biting his bottom lip and
smiling at me still. He was enjoying it, so that was good. I think? I hoped he
was...
Since I couldn't go any deeper, I figured I'd just set the middle of his huge
thing to be my boundary. I'd just make sure I didn't go any deeper than that
while doing this and I should be fine. I started to bob my mouth up and down on
Gamzee's length, rubbing my tongue up and down him as I did. I really hoped I
was doing this right.
"Sh-Shit Karkat, ah..." Gamzee lowly moaned, placing his hands on my head and
gently tugging at my hair for more. It was actually... a huge turn on... to see
him like this...
I felt my cheeks redden a bit as I quickly went back to focusing on sucking
him, moving at a faster pace than before. It got a bit easier over time, as I
gradually began to go faster and faster until Gamzee let out a sharp hiss and
came inside my mouth. He didn't even warn me that he was going to cum, that
asshole!
I tried my best to swallow while still having him in my mouth but that wasn't
really working out so I instead pulled my mouth off of his length then
swallowed, looking back at Gamzee after I did. I felt so gross for doing that,
for having Gamzee look at me with those glazed-over sex-crazed eyes that I
hadn't ever seen until today. But at the same time, I felt like I wanted
more... Like I wanted something too. I wanted to feel whatever sort of pleasure
Gamzee felt when I made him cum, and the thought that I wanted that made me
feel disgusted with myself. But who was I kidding? I was probably just as lewd
as Gamzee and just didn't know it yet.
"D-Did it feel alright...?" I finally asked, my cheeks redder than ever.
"Alright?" Gamzee moved closer to me and brought me into a kiss, holding my
cheeks adoringly. "That was motherfucking miraculous."
"Miraculous. Of fucking course you'd use that word of all the words in the
english vocabulary to use. Of. Fucking. Course." I rolled my eyes but couldn't
help but laugh a little. It was nice to know I did well even though Gamzee used
a word that I rather not hear out his mouth ever again.
"Shh." Gamzee deepened the kiss, pushing me back down onto the bed as he got
atop of me again. He was a bit rougher this time, but I actually liked it. I'm
not even going to lie, I was starting to enjoy all of this now. I couldn't wait
to feel Gamzee inside of me, the anticipation was driving me insane.
Gamzee started to pull up my shirt again and this time I actually let him,
wanting this more than ever. It felt like he was taking so long to hurry up and
undress me and do this, it was starting to annoy me.
"Gamzee... Hurry... I... want you..." It was hard for me to say that because I
hated feeling like I had to beg for things. Especially beg for... this... of
all things...
"You're motherfucking eager now, aren't you Kar?~"
"Shut up and fuck me!"
Gamzee stuck his tongue out at me then moved down and unbuttoned my jeans and
pulled them off just like I had done to him before. Then he got to my boxers
and stopped.
"What are you stopping for?! Come on, Gamzee!"
"Your boxers..."
"...What about them?"
"They're motherfucking purple. That's my favourite motherfucking colour." He
grinned, leaning down to kiss around the waistband of said boxers.
I had no goddamn idea why Gamzee was thinking about colours right now when all
I could think about was him fucking me senseless right here, right now.
"Gamzee, come onnnnn! Fuck my boxers, take them off already!"
"Alright alright, fine motherfucker." He laughed then finally undressed me
completely. It was weird being naked in front of him for the first time but I
didn't really give a fuck as long as I was getting the D.
"Hold up brother, let me grab something..."
"What the fuck would you need to get right now at this moment?! I need you,
ugh!"
"So you want to all up and do this without lube, Karkat?"
"Oh. Erm... Yeah, you get the stuff..." I should have realized that was what he
was getting before I started making an ass of myself. But oh well, I was
extremely sexually frustrated right now. Extremely.
Gamzee nodded then grabbed a bottle of lube from under his bed (don't ask me
why this guy keeps this shit under his bed, I don't know and I don't want to
know) and then poured some into his hand. He then moved back over to me and
held a finger up, twirling it around in the air.
"Let's all up and get you ready first~"
"Wh-Wha- Ah!" I gasped when he abruptly stuck his finger into my opening. It
didn't hurt, it just felt... weird. I couldn't describe the feeling.
He moved it around a bit before adding a second one, causing me to gasp again,
this time out of slight pain. But it still wasn't as painful as it was
uncomfortable to me. He skillfully moved the two fingers around inside of me,
scissoring them to help stretch me out a bit. It was all just so weird, I had
to bite my bottom lip to keep from making noises.
"A-Are you almost done?! I can't wait anymore..." The anticipation was driving
me crazy.
"One more finger, Karkat," As he said that he stuck the said finger into me and
that's when it really started to hurt. I winced, biting my bottom lip harder. I
wasn't expecting to be in pain from just his fingers but I sure as hell was. At
this rate, I had no clue how I was going to actually handle having his entire
cock inside of me, especially considering it's size.
"Nngh! Gamzee ow..." I tried to hold my breath, anything to help myself from
sounding like a whiny bitch. I got myself into this and I was going to see it
out to the end, regardless of how much it ended up hurting me. Giving up and
making myself look like a wimpass baby was not an option.
"Okay, okay. I'll stop with the fingers. Let's just get down to this~" Gamzee
passively chimed as he pulled all three fingers out and positioned himself in-
between my thighs. I stared up at him, preparing for either the worst or best
feeling I would ever experience. Hopefully this whole sex thing would be as
good as everyone always claimed it to be.
He grabbed the bottle of lube, slicking his dick up with some before bringing
it right to my hole. I closed my eyes, readying myself for the pain that was
surely about to come when he finally entered me. And it came. Ohhhh fuck did
the pain come.
"Mngh! Oh my fuCKING GOD." It literally felt like I was being torn in half.
There was no other way to explain it.
"It's okay Karkat, it's okay!" Gamzee leaned down, kissing me softly on the
cheek for reassurance. But I didn't want fucking kisses or reassurance right
now, I wanted his dick to leave the premises of my asshole immediately.
"It's not okay! It hurts- fuuuuck stOP MOVING IN MORE, I HATE YOU!" I was a
loud person and I always yelled at people, but I don't recall ever yelling at
anybody this loud in a long, long time.
"Kar, I have to motherfucking get all up inside of you before it'll start
feeling good, y'know." Gamzee tone sounded so calm and I wanted to punch the
shit out of him.
"How much is even in so far?!"
"Almost half."
Oh hell no. Almost half? ALMOST half? I thought he was already entirely inside
of me with how much this was hurting and to hear that he was only almost
halfway inside of my so far made me want to get up right at the moment and run.
But like I said before, quitting was not an option right now.
"Hurry up and get it all in! Just do it!" My eyes began to tear up and my voice
cracked a bit. It looked and sounded alot like I was crying and maybe I was
just a little bUT HEY FUCKER LOOK. I HAVE A HUGE PENIS INSIDE OF ME RIGHT NOW,
FUCK YOU.
Gamzee nodded and did something I wasn't prepared for at all.
In one rough thrust, he filled me up entirely, causing me to make the sharpest
and loudest gasp I think I have ever made in my entire sixteen years of living.
It felt like someone had just stabbed me right in the fucking ass.
"HOOOOLY FUCK G-GAMZEE, WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO THAT FOR?!"
"You just motherfucking told me to ge-"
"Not like that, jesus fucking christ!" I closed my eyes tightly to try and hold
back the tears that I knew were coming.
"It's okay, just relax. Get comfortable. Let me know when you're all up and
ready for me to move, alright?" Gamzee had a really comforting tone and for
once I decided to just listen to him and try to relax a bit.
We stayed like that for about three minutes straight in an awkward silence.
"...You can move now. I think I'm alright..." I looked away from him nervously.
The pain was finally gone, yes, but I was pretty sure it was about to come back
right when he started to move again.
And it did.
I held my breath again, trying not to make even more loud sounds while Gamzee
was gradually going faster and faster. It hurt so goddamn bad and I really had
no idea at all as to how anybody could ever find this to be pleasurable.
That is, until I felt Gamzee thrust into a certain spot that made a wave of
pleasure go through my body. A loud moan out of sheer shock of from the sudden
pleasure escaped my lips.
"F-Fuck!~" Embarrassed, I covered my mouth with my hands, looking away from
Gamzee. Gamzee chuckled, leaning down to whisper in my ear.
"Found your special spot, motherfucker."
And that's when the whole thing started feeling good. Really good.
He began to keep thrusting into the same spot, making my body ache with an
overwhelming pleasure that I had been waiting to feel this entire time. I
couldn't even explain the feeling if I wanted to, it just felt so damn good.
And now the whole sex thing was starting to make sense.
"G-Gamzee! Ah~ Please, more!" I wanted to fucking shoot myself in both of my
knees for even letting myself beg like this. It wasn't like I was trying to do
it either, it was like the words were just coming out of my mouth without my
control over it. Repeated callings of Gamzee's name and honestly embarrassing
sounds of pleasure kept coming out of me and at this point I was too far gone
in this to even process my own thoughts or words.
"You want it harder, don't you, motherfucker?"
"Oh fuck, yes! Harder..."
His thrusts quickly became stronger and faster. I was pretty sure I was seeing
stars at this point because I could not think of anything but how good this
fucking felt. My vision was blurred and my body was trembling as he fucked me
harder and harder, placing kisses on my neck from time to time.
"I'm... Hngh~ I'm coming, Gamzee!" I could feel myself reaching my climax as my
body throbbed for more. Gamzee told me he was close as well as he began to go
as hard as I thought he could possibly go.
"Motherfuck, Karkat!" Gamzee finally pulled out, releasing all over my chest. I
came soon after, also ending up releasing all over myself.
After finally catching my breath and regaining my thoughts, I actually noticed
the gross stuff all over me now. I was covered in it.
"Fuck you, why did you do it all over me?! Get it off!"
"You look so cute when your hair is messed up like that and your body is all up
and soaked in my cum, Karkles." Note to self: Punch the shit out of Gamzee once
you can actually move again.
"Shut up, shut up, shut up! Ugh, just give me a tissue or something so I can
wipe this off of me..."
"Lick it off." Note to self: Grab a goddamn chair and bash Gamzee's head in
with it once you can fucking move again.
"Do you want to die today or...?"
"Okay, okay, fine!" Gamzee laughed, leaving for a bit then coming back with
some toilet paper to give to me. I quickly snatched it from him, wiping the...
stuff... off of me. Yeah, sure, I did sorta swallow the stuff earlier when I
gave him a blowjob but this was different! There was a lot more of it this time
and... well... fuck, it was just different, okay?!
After throwing the tissue into the garbage can, I rolled over and covered
myself in his blanket, closing my eyes so I could rest. It was a lot more
tiring to get fucked than I thought it would be. I felt like if I even
attempted to move off of this bed I was topple over and have absolutely no
balance. So no, I was gonna just lay here and sleep instead.
"G'night, Gamzee..." I sighed. I felt Gamzee kiss my cheek before laying down
beside me and wrapping his arms around my waist adoringly.
"Nighty night, Karbro~"
I was beginning to drift off to sleep until suddenly I realized how perfect
this moment was. It was one of those moments that I had always dreamt about
having with Gamzee. The way we were finally in bed together, the way his arms
were wrapped around me, the whole fact that we were both extremely tired from
having sex... It was a moment that I had to stop and appreciate for a bit.
The distance that was in between us for so long was finally gone and even
though I would only be here for the weekend, at this moment, it all felt so
worth it.
Happily, I nuzzled myself more into Gamzee.
I fell asleep smiling for the first time in a long, long time.
 
 
Chapter End Notes
     i haven't updated this fic in over a year, i've only recently added
     the completed chapters to ao3 because before i only had them
     available on ff.net,,,,, with that said, i'm not sure when i'll
     actually update this, but i haven't completely dropped it??? i'm
     sORRY.
Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed
their work!
 it properly at the moment.
   Kennedy paused when she recognized the men that had been on her computer
screen just hours ago in her driveway accompanied by a whole SUV of camera-
toting men and women. “Oh.”
   “Hey, I’m Harry and this is Draco. We’re here from with the crew for MTV’s
Catfish.” Harry jarred her from her momentary star-struck paralysis.
   “Hey! Hi! Hello!” she ejaculated. “Come in! I baked cookies for Mary but
you’re more than welcome to share.”
   Mary crossed her arms and made it clear that she didn’t want to share, so
Kennedy waved her back inside with an exasperated sigh.
   “Sorry about her,” laughed Kennedy as she brought them into the house. The
tile floors looked clean enough to eat off, even to Draco. He was sure to get a
shot of them for posterity. “Here, let’s go to the living room—this is my
father.”
   Kennedy motioned to the man on the couch. There was no mistaking it, he was
definitely her father. They had almost exactly the same nose and both had blue
eyes.
   “Hey there.” Mr. Rogers slowly extended his hand to shake with the two men,
and the effects of his disease became obvious to Draco. “How are you?”
   Mr. Rogers sucked loudly on a throat lozenge to keep his mouth occupied and
his hand maintained a distinct tremor when greeting Harry and Draco. When he
put his arm back down to rest at his side, Draco could see the flash of pain
from the joint movement.
   “We’re great,” Draco told him. “Thanks for having us in your lovely home.”
He was the designated cohost to deal with parents from his genteel upbringing.
   Plus, back in the car he’d read over Kennedy’s email. He discovered that her
father’s mobility was affected enough for him to be on disability pay, and had
shamefully enough had to actually Google what Parkinson’s Disease was in the
first place.
   “Any time,” Mr. Rogers offered. His voice was considerably more free and
loose than his body let him be. “I’ve been trying to get Computer Face over
here to meet Brooke for ages.”
   “Dad,” Kennedy sighed. How many times did she have to tell him ‘Computer
Face’ was not a witty nickname?
   “Consider us your enforcers, then. We’re here to get your daughter face-to-
face with whoever runs the Brooke profile,” Draco assured him.
   Harry cut in. “With Brooke herself, hopefully.”
   All of that hope would exhaust someone like Draco after their last
disappointment, but Harry held it somehow.
   “Where can we set up to ask you some more questions about Brooke?” Harry
asked. The crew had gotten plenty of footage of them standing around with her
father, and Harry knew if it were him on that couch he wouldn’t appreciate all
the cameras in his home.
   “My room would be fine,” Kennedy shrugged. She bent down to kiss her dad on
the cheek before leading them down another hallway.
   “So it’s really great that your father is supportive,” Harry mentioned to
fill the dead air time as they filed into Kennedy’s room.
   “Yeah, he sort of always knew. I used to make my Barbies date each other
even though I had an ample amount of Ken dolls.”
   The piles of teddy bears and butterfly stickers on the wall indicated that
she’d lived there as a child. Draco felt horrible for her; he could never sleep
in his childhood bed past the age of twenty. Harry wondered if the Barbies were
still around.
   Smoothing out her sheets, she offered Harry and Draco a couple of spots at
the end of her bed while she sat at the head of it. “Ask away.” The sooner they
got all of the song and dance of the television show over the sooner she could
see Brooke.
   If it weren’t for that, Kennedy strongly believed she would have never, ever
ended up on reality television.
   Draco turned the camera on Harry and the crew on the other side of the room
did the same. “So you met online,” Harry started. “But what was different about
her? What about talking to her made you want to be in a relationship with her?”
   “She was different,” Kennedy told him. “Not different like quirky, but
different like completely unique. We talked about the craziest stuff—stuff I
could never talk about with anyone else without them thinking I was totally
insane. Our first conversation was about these YouTube videos of adults playing
really intense Yu-Gi-Oh card games and screaming when they lost, it was
completely hilarious. The humor was just so specific, you know? We’d both seen
the show as kids and to watch these grown adults play it like we had then? It
was so funny.”
   “So you like her humor,” Harry said with a smile. That was essential to all
of his relationships.
   Kennedy nodded. “It’s almost exactly like mine. We’re always sending each
other funny videos. Not like ‘cat making weird noises’ funny, but ‘two punk
boys getting their lips rings caught while making out’ funny.”
   The love that formed over watching ridiculous videos together was often the
strongest.
   “And, of course, I love her,” Kennedy added. It seemed like such an obvious
fact that she’d forgotten to say it out loud. “More than anything.”
   “Want to show us some of your online interactions?” Draco wanted to verify
this girl was who she said she was before he got his hopes up, but it looked as
if it was too late for Harry.
   He was all sunshine and smiles, and while Draco was growing fond of the way
Harry’s nose crinkled up when he was excited to bring ‘soulmates’ together, he
worried Harry was going to be betrayed again by some dishonest person behind a
computer screen.
   Kennedy woke up her laptop and opened to Brooke’s Facebook page. “Here she
is,” she showed proudly, the chat log from their conversation the night before
still open.
   “What…?” Draco pointed at the square where a profile picture should have
been and instead there was what looked like a flying tropical banana tree
monster.
   “It’s her favorite Pokémon!” Kennedy replied as if that were obvious. “There
was this month that everyone on Facebook changed their profile picture to a
Pokémon and that’s Tropius.”
   “What. Why.” Draco phrased it more as a pair of statements than questions.
   Kennedy, who was clearly not connecting the dots as Draco was, looked to the
two men inquistively. “What is it?”
   “Well,” Draco broke the news to her gently. “It seems Brooke’s profile
doesn’t have any actual pictures of her. Do you see how that could be
problematic?”
   “She has a picture of her feet at the edge of her bed somewhere in here…”
   “What about her face?” Harry guided, using the mouse to view all of Brooke’s
past profile pictures.
   Just as Draco expected, they were various cartoon characters, drawings, and
one was just the poster for the Silence of The Lambs movie replaced with
Nicolas Cage’s face. Okay, that one was kind of funny.
   Still! Amongst the many rules Draco both made up and adhered to, not having
a single identifying picture of the person one was dating hadn’t even become a
rule until that moment because Draco hadn’t thought it possible. “You don’t
know what she looks like?”
   “I mean, she’s told me the basics. She’s got blonde hair, blue eyes, she’s a
size zero…” Kennedy recounted dreamily.
   With that it seemed Draco and Harry had their work cut out for them.
xxx
   Harry would have been dragging Brooke’s profile pictures into Google image
search if they were pictures of actual humans, but alas. The only solid piece
of evidence for Brooke’s identity was her phone number.
   “I don’t want to hit enter,” Harry lamented.
   He and Draco were just about to search who the phone was registered to, and
Harry was afraid his hopes for Kennedy and Brooke’s romance would be squashed
like their last case.
   “Just do it. ‘Brooke’ is lying.” Draco lay on his stomach, camera pointed at
the screen. The hotel room they’d been given this time around in Ohio was nice
but had considerably less room. No desk, no lounge chairs. The room was bare
except for two beds, a dresser, and an old television.
   Draco complained loudly to Kingsley over the phone about it but it as usual
with Draco’s bitching fell on deaf ears. Kingsley had said something along the
lines of “Life must be so hard for you, Malfoy,” and hung up.
   Harry hit enter on the cellphone number search since the show had to go on,
but Harry was unconsciously holding his breath anyway.
   “Dammit.”
   “No name registered to the phone,” Draco read out loud. He turned the camera
back on Harry’s disappointed face. “You look like a kicked puppy.”
   “I just want Kennedy to be happy!”
   “So do I, but—“
   “I want her to not only be happy and learn from this experience,” Harry
countered before Draco even rehashed his point about even the failed romances
being valuable experiences. “But I want her to come out of it in love with a
real, genuine girl.”
   “Sap,” Draco accused blamelessly.
   Harry gave him a look. “It happens, you know. People can fall in love online
and it can all work out.”
   “I’m not saying it doesn’t happen.”
   “I want it to happen,” Harry clarified. “I want it to happen for all of
these people, every single one in that inbox the network set up.”
   That was the very definition of sap, according to Draco. “I never took you
to be one of those guys who’s obsessed with love. True Love and all that.”
   “I’m not obsessed! Everyone wants to find someone they can share their life
with, it’s not that strange.”
   “I’m not saying it’s strange,” Draco replied calmly. Even Draco with all of
his cold ways and sarcastic defense mechanisms longed for someone to curl up
next to at night, someone who really understood him. “It’s just… interesting
that you think that.”
   Whatever Draco was trying to imply with that sailed right over Harry’s head.
“Yeah, yeah. I think there’s someone out there for everyone and that it would
be nice if everyone found their respective someone. There’d be less war;
everyone would be getting laid.”
   “Harry James Potter, humanitarian extraordinaire,” Draco snorted.
   “I really am,” Harry deadpanned, mimicking how Draco pretended not to pick
up on tone. “That’s why I do this job, for the people. Even you, Draco Malfoy,
have a soulmate out there. If I could bring you to that poor bastard, I would.”
   Draco couldn’t help but laugh. Harry was such a riot, the way he placed his
hand over his heart dramatically when he was pretending to be serious and the
way his big, green eyes somehow got bigger behind his glasses. “’Poor bastard’
is a really strange way of saying ‘luckiest man alive’, but I suppose I’ll take
your kindness even with your grievous pronunciation errors.”
   “You’re a saint, Draco.”
   Draco figured he must have been getting better at his job, since he hadn’t
realized the camera was still on for that entire conversation. A light flush
came to his face. “Anyway, Peacekeeper Potter, let’s try something else with
that number of ‘Brooke’s.”
   “Try what?” Harry tilted his head to the side and Draco had to force down
more color from entering his cheeks. Harry really needed to stop looking so
adorably innocent.
   Not the sort of innocent that most people used the word to mean—after all
Draco had seen Harry attempting to get in a man’s pants just a day ago—but the
sort of innocent that was untainted by sadness. Harry had experienced sorrow
and hardship at one point or another, but it hadn’t seemed to have stuck to
him.
   Harry had been hurt but he forgave—he even forgave Draco. Harry was a
sarcastic little fuck, but never out of pessimism or melancholy.
   By Draco’s definition, Harry was jaded some aspects, probably filthy in bed,
but still innocent. Harry still opened himself up to people anyway.
   “Draco?”
   Oh, shit. “Call the number.”
   “I don’t know if you remember how well that went last time—“
   “Just call it,” Draco pushed on. “If this ‘Brooke’ is telling the truth like
you want her to be then she needs money to support her father, and she’d use
her phone for business. Unidentified numbers calling her in the afternoon? It
looks like business, not like her girlfriend checking up on her.”
   “You’re evil,” Harry grinned.
   That was so typically Harry, smiling at the idea of evil and dialing the
phone number without hesitation.
   Harry put it on speakerphone and crossed his fingers. “Pick up, pick up…”
   “Don’t mutter to yourself, you’ll sound insane if she does pick up.”
   The phone rang.
   “What if she doesn’t pick up?” Harry asked. “Then what? We’ve got nothing
else.”
   “Shh!” Draco hushed him.
   The phone rang again.
   “But we have nothing else!”
   “We have the Facebook profile, calm down. We might hear back from some of
her Facebook friends since we sent them questions,” Draco hissed.
   “Oh.” Harry had really let his anxiety get the best of him in the moment.
   “Um… Hello?”
   Harry let out a sigh of relief. It was a woman’s voice on the other end of
the phone.
   To the woman on the phone, however, that sounded like the creepy heavy
breathing that serial killers used on the phone before announcing they were
inside of their victim’s house. “Who is this?” she demanded.
   “Sorry,” Harry said quickly, lifting the smartphone up to speak into its
receiver. “This is Harry Potter. Is Brooke speaking?”
   “Yes, what is it?” Brooke’s reply was short, and in the background the whir
of some kind of machine could be heard. A laundry machine? A dishwasher?
   “I’m from MTV’s upcoming show, Catfish, but that’s not really important.
What is important is that I’ve been talking to a bright young lady named
Kennedy, and she would really like to meet with you. I know it hasn’t been
possible in the past—“
   “Kennedy sent you toinvestigateme?” she snapped.
   Draco held the camera steady, smiling at the sight of Harry getting the
third degree.
   “Well, no, she really just—“
   “Who even are you? Are you a friend of hers?”
   “Yes,” Harry answered. “We are.”
   “We? Who else is there?”
   Harry looked to Draco for help but the blonde just kept on filming. Harry
flipped him and the camera off. “My partner and I, Draco, we bring people
together who have online romances—“
   “I don’t care what you and your boyfriend do! Look, I have to go, my
father’s physical therapy is almost done and I have to pick him up,” she
dismissed them. Draco snorted at the ‘boyfriend’ comment, since that would only
happen in Harry’s dreams.
   The call wasn’t a complete failure though, Draco and Harry at least got to
see she was serious about having a father who needed help—or she was just one
hell of a vigilant liar. “Listen, we’ve been down here talking to Kennedy and
she wants to meet you,” Harry cut to the chase. “She loves you, and money isn’t
an issue. We can provide for travel.”
   “Meet me? Oh, now she’s really lost it. I—I can’t! I have to go—“
   “Please tell me you’ll think about it. Please, consider how much this
relationship means to her and to you. I know you’ve found someone who’s at
least a friend in Kennedy, and we just want to make sure you can let that grow
into more by meeting.” Harry’s legs felt like they had to run after Brooke, his
hands clutching the phone tightly. “And you can text me back if you can’t call.
Kennedy wants to see you and after all this time with her, I’d think you’d want
to see her too.”
   “I do!” Brooke argued. “Of course I do, I just—my father. It’s all my
father. Now’s not a good time because I’m living with him.”
   Draco seriously doubted it was ‘all her father’. Brooke was a grown woman;
she wasn’t beholden to her parents anymore. “It’s never going to be a ‘good
time’,” Draco finally spoke into the phone. “If you wait for a ‘good time’ then
you’ll wait for the rest of your life. Kennedy wants to meet now.”
   From Brooke’s end of the line there was silence for a moment. Harry let
Draco’s words hang in the air, waiting for her response.
   “I’ll… I’ll think about it.”
   “Please get back to us soon,” Harry pressed on, the spark of hope in the pit
of his stomach blazing brighter. “Text me whenever you can.”
   “Fine. I have to go now.”
   The phone clicked off.
   Harry put the phone back on the bed with his shoulders feeling significantly
lighter. “There we go.”
   “All we know is her voice, Harry,” Draco reminded him.
   “Shut up and let me enjoy what is definitely going to be my victory.”
   “Yourvictory?”
   “Yes, mine,” nodded Harry. “You’re the skeptic and I’m the believer, and
this time believing is going to win out.”
xxx
   “You have to chase your heart, baby,” Mr. Rogers had said to his little girl
(well, she was a grown woman with all kinds of responsibilities and hardships
but he still saw her as a little girl sometimes) when he was left with the
live-in nurse from the network.
   No matter what was going on in Brooke’s side of the relationship regarding
lies or evading meetings, Kennedy’s excuse for not seeing Brooke was a
legitimate one. Harry and Draco saw her father’s conditions in person, and had
called Kingsley to make sure Mr. Rogers had someone to take care of him while
Kennedy was off for a few days in search of answers about who she was currently
in a relationship with.
   It was a long-overdue vacation for Kennedy in Draco’s humble opinion, and in
a significantly less-humble opinion he held that not knowing the person one was
in a relationship with was just sad.
   The world spun on regardless of Draco’s opinion as usual.
   Harry had received the text from Brooke just an hour after their heated
phone call that yes, she would meet but no, it would have to be away from her
house.
   “We’re going in even more blind than before,” Draco had grimaced, handheld
focused on the text message. “At least with Chris we knew he was lying about
something. This time around we have no dirt, no ammunition on what could be a
Catfish. I can’t believe Kennedy is doing this without demanding a picture.”
   “Maybe Kennedy doesn’t care what Brooke looks like,” Harry had offered in
reply. “We have Brooke’s voice and a café to meet at, so at least we know this
is a real woman in Michigan who we’re speaking to.”
   That wasn’t enough for Draco.
   All of the memories of arguing with Harry in the hotel room about if someone
could truly fall in love without seeing someone’s face and Kennedy hugging her
father goodbye swirled around in Draco’s head on the plane ride over.
   Harry had his headphones on and was engrossed in some awful-looking movie
with animated owls when Draco got the nerve to challenge just what the hell
Kennedy was thinking. She’d requested the window seat, so for politeness’ sake
he’d sat in between her and Harry.
   “You love her but you don’t know what she looks like?” Draco finally blurted
out.
   Kennedy turned her head from the window like she’d been expecting Draco to
ask that. “Yes.”
   That was just insane. “You know the whole ‘blonde hair, blue eyes, size
zero’ thing is probably a lie, right?”
  “I believe her,” Kennedy said firmly.
   “Believe her or just want to believe her?”
   “I told her,” Kennedy articulated as if she’d told herself this a thousand
times before. “That she could be honest with me and I wouldn’t judge her. I
don’t see a reason as to why she would lie about her appearance when I don’t
care.”
   “You ‘don’t care’? That’s completely bizarre. What if she has no teeth, or a
massive case of acne?” Draco intruded. He couldn’t help himself, the idea of
putting physical attraction low on the list of relationship requirements was
just too foreign to him.
   “Her looks just aren’t that important to me! What would be important is if
she lied.”
   Draco realized he’d have to cushion this poor girl’s fall. Of course Brooke
was lying. “If,” he offered. “Totally hypothetically, you find out she was
lying about her appearance, what would that mean to you? What would you do?”
   “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” she replied coldly.
   “But if it does?”
   “It won’t.” With that, she rolled onto her side and tried to make the best
of the hour-long flight as a nap instead of an interview.
xxx
   Kennedy maintained her determination on the moonlit drive to the hotel,
texting Brooke on her way there.
   Once again Harry was smiling that stupid, huge, pretty smile, trying to get
a look over her shoulder. “What are you saying? Is that an ‘I love you’? I
can’t wait, I can’t wait for you two to meet,” he had narrated to the camera.
   Draco, meanwhile, had grit his teeth and filmed.
   When he woke up the next morning in a cold sweat that haunted him for
seemingly no reason, he found that his jaw had actually begun to ache from all
of his teeth grinding.
   “Come on!” Harry tossed at Draco from across the room to wake him up.
“Today’s the day.”
   The day that Kennedy figures out she’s been duped, yes, Draco thought
bitterly to himself and got dressed.
   Consumed with that thought while Harry played the role of Kennedy’s personal
cheerleader on the way over to the café Brooke had requested a meeting at,
Draco hadn’t even noticed how fast that car ride was.
   “Draco,” Harry repeated for the third time. “Come on, turn on the camera and
let’s go. The crew’s already setting up inside.”
   Maybe Draco was getting sick. His forehead was burning hot and his thoughts
were blurring even as he sat down in the café.
   They picked the table right in the front to be sure that Brooke knew who
they were and Draco ignored whatever flu or bug he’d picked up on their jet-
setting travels, blaming his vulnerability to any illness on the stress he was
under watching people make terrible romantic decisions. Still, the show must go
on, right? “Rolling.” When Draco spoke the back of his mouth tickled.
   Kennedy settled into her Victorian-style chair. If Draco’s wits had been
one-hundred percent with him he would have noted the way her braid was done
differently. Instead of casually falling down her shoulder, the braid sloped
neatly down her back in a fish tail.
   “You look good,” Harry assured Kennedy in Draco’s stead. He’d noticed Draco
wasn’t as animated as usual that morning and was planning on keeping a close
eye on him until they could talk about getting him some rest alone.
   Kennedy thanked Harry but her eyes darted from camera lens to camera lens,
clearly too absorbed in her own thought to pay any attention to the co-hosts.
   Harry, on the other hand, paid attention to the job he had to do. He had to
entertain. “Did you talk at all to Brooke last night after we got to the
hotel?” Harry asked Kennedy.
   “Mhm.”
   “Did she say anything about the meeting?”
   “Nope.”
   “Then what did you talk about?” he tried again.
   Kennedy’s eyes impatiently fixed on the closed door to the café. “The
usual.”
   By the time Harry finished a long hiss of air and reminded himself to be
patient with guests on the show like Kingsley had said, someone else had
entered the café.
   “Oh my god,” Kennedy breathed.
   Her eyes locked with the other woman’s in complete understanding.
   She was, as Draco had predicted, not a size zero or a blonde. She was a
meager brunette, plump around her face and her thighs. She’d dressed nicely in
anticipation of her meeting with Kennedy but even her black dress couldn’t hide
that she was somewhere around a size fourteen.
   Trying to think on the bright side, Harry was almost about to say ‘well at
least she isn’t the Pokémon in her profile picture!’ when ‘Brooke’ spoke first.
   “Hi,” she spoke up. “Hi, Kennedy.”
   Kennedy stood. “Brooke?” she asked, needing to know if it was real.
   “That’s me,” she responded meekly.
   “But you…?”
   “Lied,” Draco finished. He wasn’t happy about being right, but he had to
keep his and Harry’s presence strong in front of the cameras. They were the
voice of the audience, or at least supposed to be the voice of the audience,
and Draco imagined the viewers at home would be thinking the same thing.
   Brooke’s defensive demeanor from when they spoke on the phone had softened.
“I… I did.”
   “Why?” replied the victim of the Catfish. Next to her, Harry sat slack-jawed
for another mute moment before standing beside Kennedy and putting a protective
hand on her shoulder.
   “I don’t know,” Brooke shrugged.
   Draco was the last one of the group to stand, camera in his hand. “Yes, you
do. Come on, you know.”
   Kennedy stayed eerily silent when waiting for Brooke’s response. “Um,”
Brooke tried. “It wasn’t because I thought Kennedy wouldn’t accept it or get it
or whatever. I swear. Kennedy, it wasn’t you that made me lie.”
   “Then what was?” Harry asked gently. “And was that all you lied about?”
   “Yes! Of course! How could I have lied about anything else?” Brooke’s
defense flared for a moment before she receded back into herself. “I didn’t lie
about anything else.”
   “I swear to god, I swear if you’re lying right now—“ Kennedy started, finger
pointed at Brooke accusingly.
   Brooke tried her best not to shrink away from Kennedy’s stare. “I’m not
lying. I promise you.” She stood her ground and told the truth that time
around. Kennedy deserved that much. “This time I’m really not.”
   A heavy shudder passed through Kennedy, and for a moment Harry felt like he
was the only thing holding her upright. “I don’t care what you look like, B. I
love you,” Kennedy told her girlfriend weakly. “I just have to know why you
lied.”
   “You are so kind, do you know how kind you are?” Brooke responded, her own
eyes getting glossy. “I want to be thin, you have no idea how I want to lose
this weight and how I hate my stupid hair. I want to be thin for me, and maybe
that’s why I lied.”
   “You’re beautiful,” Kennedy reinforced.
   “You don’t have to lie,” Brooke shook her head. “Please don’t lie. I don’t
look like all the pretty girls do, and maybe you can somehow accept that but I
can’t. I want to lose this weight, but I never have the time or the energy to
do it.”
   Kennedy moved away from Draco and Harry’s protection to wrap her arms around
the other woman. “If you want to change for you, then I’ll help you.”
   “No, no, you’ve helped me so much already.” Brooke’s voice was muffled since
her face rested on Kennedy’s shoulder. Maybe that was an advantage to being
shorter than Kennedy, being able to be held. “I can’t keep asking things of
you. My conscience won’t let me ask that much of you.”
   “I’ll help you change,” Kennedy repeated anyway. “I’ll help you be whatever
you want to be. If you want to lose weight I’ll be your trainer, if you want to
stay the way you are then I’ll be just as happy.”
   “Stop being so nice, fuck, I haven’t even come out to my father! You’re too
nice,” Brooke emphasized as if she didn’t deserve the kindness.
   The scene unfolded before Draco and Harry as they watched in awe.
   “You don’t have to come out to your father, you can be in the closet your
whole life and I’ll put on a suit and you can pretend you’re with a man—“
   “You are too nice! You’re too nice to me and you’re out of your mind!”
   “Have you forgotten?” Kennedy asked quietly. “Have you seriously forgotten
everything you’ve done for me? You’ve been there, B. You’ve been there when I
needed you so I’m just returning the favor. I’m gonna support you. Why do you
think I wanted to meet you? So I could reject you? Come here, please don’t cry,
come here…”
   Their embrace grew tighter and their words hushed.
   After a couple beats, Draco figured he would be the one to intrude on behalf
of the show. “You want some alone time?” he asked with a guarded smile. Kennedy
and Brooke’s journey had only just begun, and real-world break-ups and fights
happened all the time. He wanted to hope they’d be able to somehow push past
their glaring errors—Brooke’s self-confidence, their care of their fathers and
the distance—but he didn’t dare show it. “We can interview you later tonight.
You can have the afternoon to yourselves.”
   As Harry and Draco walked back to the car with their pack of cameras, one
camerawoman got a shot of Kennedy and Brooke’s first kiss.
xxx
   “I’m not sure which one of us won this one,” Harry admitted. “But—“
   “If you say something cheesy like ‘Brooke and Kennedy won’, Harry, I will
not hesitate to lock you out of the hotel room for the night,” Draco cut in
with a sniffle. His wooziness from back at the café had gotten worse, and he
needed to lie down just to keep from getting dizzy.
   Harry cleared his throat. He and Draco really seemed to be getting to know
each other well if he could predict what Harry was going to say. “Well.”
   Draco laughed. “Anyway, I think I won. Brooke was lying and Catfishing.”
   “But Kennedy could accept it in the end! You heard them in the interview,
they were willing to work through this together. At least Brooke only lied
about her appearance. Chris lied about his job, his whereabouts, his true
feelings,” Harry listed.
   “Brooke had less lies, I’ll give you that, but that doesn’t make her lying
null and void.”
   “It’s easier to get over less lies, though,” Harry went on. “I think they
can make it.”
   “You’re nuts.”
   “You’re cynical.”
   “Rightfully so,” Draco nodded. “I’ve had my fair share of shit relationships
and I know how they end up after someone breaks the trust. Then it’s just
question after question about everything that happens.”
   From Harry’s perch on his hotel bed, felt a tiny jolt of shock that some man
in Draco’s past relationships had fucked him over. He knew he shouldn’t be
surprised because he’d run into his fair share of bad men in dating, but it
just shocked him that it happened to Draco, too.
   Any idiot could see Draco was a catch in terms of looks, and Harry was
beginning to see how someone could even grow fond of his personality after some
serious time together.
   Harry shrugged, not knowing how to respond. “I hope things are different for
Kennedy, then.”
   “So do I,” Draco reinforced. “But I doubt that they will be different.”
   “Time will tell then, I guess.”
   A moment of silence passed between them before Draco’s lungs decided to act
up again. He coughed the crook of his arm with a particularly disgusting wet
hack. “Unghk.”
   Harry frowned. “Hey, should I be calling a doctor?”
   “No,” Draco sniffled, voice full of self-pity. “I’d rather suffer and wait
it out than find some quack doctor in Michigan. My family’s physician is the
only one I trust.”
   “Oh my god. Are you seriously telling me the Malfoys have a family doctor
like you’re some group of royals?”
   “She knows all of my medical history and knows how to keep things discreet!”
   Harry rolled his eyes. “If you don’t see a doctor here then you’re going to
get me sick, and you know we can get back on a plane to New Hope with you like
this,” he sighed.
   “Don’t care,” Draco whined. “I won’t see some hack.”
   “You are so pretentious, Draco. You need to at least take some kind of over-
the-counter medication to keep you from turning this hotel room into an incubus
of disease.”
   “Then why don’t you get it?” he whined again, tipping his head back against
his pillows.
   “Because I’m not your servant!”
   “Do you want to get sick?”
   He huffed. “No, Draco.”
   “Then get me something. Aspirin, Mucinex, coughdrops, I don’t care.”
   “No—“
   “Nyquil! That’s what I need,” Draco found the right word. “Something to make
me sleep through it. It keeps me to the bed so you won’t have me breathing on
your things and I won’t be bored and snot-nosed all day.”
   Harry couldn’t believe Draco was still speaking. “I’m not making a drug-
store run for you.”
   “Yes you are.”
   “No, I’m not.”
   “Are so.”
   “Are not.”
   Draco let out a terrible, messy sneeze.
   “Draco! That’s absolutely disgusting!”
   Draco sneezed again, this time scrambling to do it on Harry’s phone.
   “How could someone so snooty be so goddamn gross—“
   Another sneeze tore out of Draco, but this one was less forced and more of
his genuine illness.
   Harry threw his hands up in defeat, arriving back at the hotel with a
plastic bag full of Aspirin, Mucinex, Nyquil, coughdrops, tissues, and
disinfectant spray just twenty minutes later.
***** Day Off *****
Chapter Notes
     As much as I love sharing the stories of others (and as much as Harry
     and Draco love sharing the stories of others) it’s about time to give
     these two a little break in filming their series. This is a bit of a
     filler. I’ve been watching Black Butler lately, and I love Sebastian/
     Ciel so Draco’s dream is inspired by them.
Chapter 4: Day Off
  Draco was just where he belonged.
   “Fetch me more fast food and room service,” he demanded of the man at the
foot of his throne. Draco’s feet themselves were clad in emerald green slippers
of the finest of silk to match the extravagant robes he was wearing.
   The raven-haired servant boy below Draco’s decked-out throne and attire
acquiesced without hesitation. “Of course, your highness.”
   Draco smiled smugly. All was as it was meant to be. He had his kingdom far,
far below him in a location that seemed to defy Draco’s original idea of where
the floor was because of the serving boy.
   Looking back down, Draco noted that his inferior was actually floating. How
smart of him, somehow surpassing gravity in order to better serve Draco. If
Draco were paying this man he would have certainly given him a raise for that
display of loyalty and dedication.
   Even though he hadn’t left his place at the foot of Draco’s golden throne,
Draco knew he was somehow getting food also. The logic was blurry, but Draco
didn’t question it because at the time it all benefitted Draco.
   “It’s because he knows that if he gets me food and actually goes away, I’ll
have nobody for decent conversation,” Draco concluded out loud. The floating
servant seemed not to hear him, and upon a squint of Draco’s eyes to get a
closer look at him, it was revealed that he was playing with some camera lenses
that floated similarly to him, but in front of him.
   A sinking feeling entered Draco’s chest.
   No, no, he could feel his kingdom slip away—he couldn’t think of the show
when he was having such a fantastic dream!
   Draco tried his hardest to change the camera lenses to something else in his
dream, tried to use his mind to actually work for him and not against him, but
it failed. The harder he fought the creeping in of reality, the swifter it
came.
   “No,” Harry heard Draco grumble in his sleep. “No, no cameras.”
   Harry snorted, the first noise he’d made in hours. Even though Draco was a
heavy sleeper, he’d stayed quiet in his hotel room comings and goings in order
to assure Draco was too busy being knocked out to pester him for more blankets
or gripe about how he was ‘surely dying’ and then refusing to see a ‘common
physician’ when Harry suggested they just give up the farce and get a
professional’s help.
   “Bring me back to my castle,” Draco whined, sounding slightly more cognizant
than he had a few moments ago.
   Harry didn’t even look up from his laptop. “Only in your dreams, Draco.
Literally in your dreams.” Harry had the day off because of Draco’s sickness as
well, since the show couldn’t exist with one host according to Kingsley.
   On his day off in the middle of Mason, Michigan (a singularly boring town,
as Harry had learned when he snuck out to explore a little) Harry decided it
was best to stay in and surf the internet rather than the frigid waves of the
local lakes—which were all inexplicably brown.
   He had checked in with Luna, Neville, Dean, and wished Ginny a happy
birthday on her Facebook timeline before Hermione finally logged on and he
could unload some of his wild tales of Draco Malfoy-isms onto her.
   Hermione mostly pitied Harry for having to be around such an insufferable
man—even after Harry explained Draco had matured since high school—but laughed
occasionally at the bizarre things that happened while Harry and Draco were
filming.
   It would also be a lie to say that Hermione wasn’t smirking to herself about
the fact that Draco was at Harry’s mercy from being sick, forced to rely on
someone he’d taken so much pleasure in torturing back in school. While Harry
was relatively forgiving, Hermione held grudges.
   Hermione suggested replacing Draco’s treasured shampoo and conditioner with
much less hygienic substances, and even had a mischievous idea or two about
what to do when Draco was asleep that involved a glass of water, a can of
whipped cream, three strawberries, and a small dog. Hermione did not easily
forget when someone slighted her, even when it was years ago.
   Harry decided in the middle of the chat that he would make Draco apologize
to Hermione later for what he’d done to her specifically in school.
   Not only would that ease the tension between Harry’s new coworker and
Harry’s best female friend, but it would make Harry feel less guilty when he
laughed at one of Draco’s jokes or caught himself quietly admiring Draco’s more
physical features.
   Harry would feel a lot better about acknowledging the fact that Draco was
and always had been hot when Draco acknowledged what a complete dick he’d been
and asked for both Ron and Hermione’s forgiveness.
   Harry wouldn’t make Draco apologize when he was sick, though. If he did then
that opened up the door to Draco shrugging off the apology as something said in
an ill stupor.
   More than anything, Harry wanted Draco to have his wits about him when he
informed Harry’s closest friends that he had amended his ways. Well, sort of
amended his ways. Draco was still an asshole, but it was over things like hat
choices and honesty rather than over social class and physical features as he
had in school.
   “What time is it?” Draco asked, finally having gone through an intense
emotional journey to accept the fact that his Perfect Dream wasn’t coming back
to him and it was time to wake the hell up.
   “It’s four in the afternoon,” Harry told Draco. “You really needed the sleep
and I needed the break from being ordered around.”
   Draco chuckled to himself and anticipated a cough, but one never came. “I
have specific needs, Harry. You can’t blame me for going after them.”
   “I can blame you for whatever I want. You made me take three separate trips
to the pharmacy! You weren’t satisfied with regular tissues, no, you had to
have the ones with the lotion—“
   “They’re different!” Draco defended. “They are a markedly different tissue
experience.”
   Harry rolled his eyes while typing a ‘goodbye’ to Hermione. Conversations
with Draco needed his full attention. “Only you would use the phrase ‘tissue
experience’,” Harry said after he finished typing.
   Draco nodded. “You’re right. I’m much more sophisticated than anyone else on
this planet.”
   “Before you passed out you ate about five orders of cheese fries.”
   “Your point…?” Draco asked, either not seeing the odd juxtaposition of
behaviors or not caring.
   “You’re disgusting,” Harry decided. “And I pity the staff that has to
disinfect this room when we leave.”
   “Hey! At least I didn’t get you sick!”
   “The coughing on me really helped that, I imagine,” Harry laughed. He closed
his laptop and put it to the side and hugged his knees to his chest. It was
amusing to watch the faces Draco made when he talked; that was honestly half of
the spectacle.
   So, Harry kept his eyes on Draco and Draco didn’t disappoint. He twisted his
features in thought and scrunched his nose up. “Hm. It really is a wonder I
didn’t get you sick.”
   “Don’t jinx it.”
   “I’ll jinx whomever I please whenever I please,” Draco argued petulantly
before a cough finally sputtered its way out of his throat.
   Harry laughed. “Don’t exert yourself, it clearly upsets the germs.”
   “I’ll upset whomever’s germs I please whenever I—“ Draco was cut off by his
own cough.
   Shaking his head, Harry reached for the night stand in between them to get
some more cough drops out of the bag. “Here,” he sighed, plopping two into
Draco’s opened hand and making sure their fingers didn’t touch. If Harry got
sick just as Draco was getting better, Kingsley would probably have a
conniption.
   “Thanks,” Draco mumbled, remembering his courtesies before popping the
lozenges into his mouth.
   “You’re welcome.”
   “Want to watch TV?”
   “Sure.”
   The next hour passed easily. The episode of whatever crime drama was on the
hotel’s main channel was interesting enough to keep Draco and Harry quiet, but
nowhere near entertaining enough to put them on the edge of their seats with
each twist and turn in the story.
   The next day, on the other hand, would be their toughest case yet.
   In that day of rest, however, they were allowed a marathon of crime stories
in companionable silence. They were able to sit back, relax, and exist together
peacefully. If anyone from their home town were able to see them they would
have declared it a miracle or at least a divine occurrence.
   Privately, Draco called it ‘sort of wonderful’, because for the first time
it seemed as if in spite of their clashing personalities, Harry and he could
actually get along.
 
***** Lorraine and… Well. *****
Chapter Notes
     For those of you about to read this, I salute you. For some context:
     well. I’m writing this fic for my friends (the gay conglomerate known
     as The Nick Cages) and we all really, really love making fun of
     Macklemore. It’s gotten out of control. This is for them and is
     probably going to be exhibit A in a trial against my own sanity
     someday. Also, I’ve officially committed to a college and have been
     very busy (I know, this update took like ten thousand years) but I
     really am planning on writing more often after this. Thanks for
     sticking by me, guys!
Chapter 5: Lorraine and… Well.
   Draco’s eyes widened. He couldn’t pick a word for what he was feeling
because there was no word for it, not a single existing one in the English
dictionary.
   It was, after all, an extraordinary circumstance he found himself in with
Harry Potter as his companion and fellow witness.
   The out-of-body experience began when they saw the subject header of the
email.
   “Click,” Draco ordered. “Click it, click it,
click!”                                                                
   Harry didn’t have to ask which email Draco was referring to. The both of
them through either their queer connection or their similar senses of humor had
spotted the subject line.
   It was a diamond in the rough. Between emails of ‘my lover needs to see me!’
and ‘I don’t think my boyfriend is telling the truth’ was the holy grail of all
MTV Catfish emails.
   As Draco continued to search for the word to describe the rising in his
chest, his only thoughts were scrambled descriptions of divine intervention
causing a spiritual awakening and clips of Grammy footage that would haunt him
until the end of his days.
   “No,” Harry whispered as he clicked on the email, repulsed yet drawn to it
like a moth to a flame. “No, this can’t be real. This is a joke. This is
someone’s idea of a joke.”
   “I don’t care. I don’t care if it’s a joke. This is the funniest fucking
thing that has ever happened to me. Look, there’s her Skype information. Call
her, Harry. Fucking call her.” Draco was so excited that his camera hand was
shaking and he’d forgotten the ‘keep the cursing to a minimum’ rule.
   Harry shook his head and didn’t stop shaking his head even as he added the
woman who sent the email’s contact information to his friends list on Skype.
   “Holy shit. Holy shit,” Draco repeated over and over again. When the woman
accepted the friend request and a green little symbol popped up next to her
name to signal that she was online, Draco’s ramblings grew even more obscene
and entirely incomprehensible. “Fucking shit fuck holy mother of—“
   “Shut up!” Harry laughed. He wasn’t sure when he’d started laughing but it
had definitely grown in intensity over the moments he’d spent typing in her
contact information. “I have to call her,” he laughed out. “Fuck, fuck, we have
to call her. Shut up, stop laughing, stop—“
   Unable to stop laughing himself, Harry dissolved into a string of curses
similar to his partner’s.
   “This is a joke, fuck, it has to be,” he tried. “Fuck, fuck, god damn shit
motherfuck.”
   The screen showed that this woman was trying to contact them through a
webcam call and though neither would admit it later, they both let out a scream
of laughter.
   Draco, unable to keep himself composed for much longer, snuck his arm in
between Harry’s and stole the computer mouse to answer the call. “Hey!” Harry
responded, trying for a moment to wrestle it back.
   “Um, hello?”
   “Oh my god.” Harry’s laughter kept him from noticing the world around him
for a moment, and he certainly hadn’t noticed that Lorraine had popped up on
their screen.
   “Hello?”
   Harry and Draco, interrupted from their melee, snapped to look at the
screen.
   As the designated one with manners for the day, Harry was the first to
speak. “Hello.”
   “It said on the screen that you guys are from MTV’s Catfish?” Lorraine
questioned carefully.
   Harry blinked. “Yes.”
   “So you got my email…?”
   When faced with the author of the email, Draco and Harry were speechless.
Lorraine seemed like a normal human being. She had dyed red hair with curls
that were clearly only there from a curling iron indicating she was physically
capable of operation one, wore a turquoise frock that indicated she wasn’t
locked in an insane asylum, and was looking more like a terrified kid than a
prankster.
   Could the email have been serious?
   “Yes,” Draco took over, his smile still wicked even in the face of a
seemingly innocent young woman. “We got your email about your online
relationship. This is customary—“ total lie. “so could you please describe
yourself for the camera? I just—we just—the network just needs to hear your
case out loud.”
   Lorraine nodded. “Okay,” she started nervously. “Well, my name is Lorraine
Carter, I live in West Virginia, and I’m in an online relationship with the
rapper Macklemore.”
   Harry had to make sure this case was worth pursuing not only for his and
Draco’s amusement, but the amusement of an audience. There was no way the
audience would believe Macklemore was dating a random woman online, so he
needed more if Lorraine’s case was going to be aired on MTV. “You have to know
how unlikely that is,” Harry tried slowly, elbowing a cackling Draco out of the
frame.
   “That’s what I used to think,” Lorraine nodded. “I swear—I hardly ever do
stuff like this. But that was before the money.”
   “The money?” Draco collected himself enough to ask, popping back into view
of the webcam.
   “Well… Yeah. You see, I told Macklemore that I was having trouble paying my
rent,” she explained as if she hadn’t just referred to her online ‘boyfriend’
by his stage name. “And he told me that I would never have to worry about rent
when I was with him, that he’s made enough money off of The Heist—my favorite
album of all time—to support me forever.”
   Draco and Harry exchanged looks. That was seriously what his album was
called? It conjured up the mental image of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis in cat
suits robbing a bank.
   “How much money has he given you?” Harry asked for clarification’s sake.
   “Hmmm… Exactly? Well. My rent is two thousand a month, plus the gifts on my
birthday…” she looked up at the air above her head like she could see the
numbers floating there. “Carry the one… Plus utilities…”
   Harry and Draco waited with baited breath.
   “I’d say Macklemore has given me about thirty thousand.”
   “What?” Harry squeaked. “Thirty thousand what?”
   “Dollars.” Lorraine watched Harry and Draco’s astonished expressions unfold
on her computer screen. “Yeah,” she shrugged. “I sort of stopped asking
questions after the money.”
   Harry’s face was still frozen in that stunned look. Draco promptly blamed it
on his having grown up poor and being dazzled by money and took over the
conversation. “But you’re asking questions now?” Draco pressed Lorraine. “How
come?”
   “I want to see him,” admitted the woman on the screen. “I want to see
Macklemore.”
xxx
   If somewhere out there existed a net value of all the things a person had
done in their life with positive values representing the good deeds they’d done
in their life and negative values representing the deeds they’d done that were
detrimental to society, Ben Haggerty (known as his stage name ‘Professor
Macklemore’ at the beginning of his career that later devolved into just
‘Macklemore’) would have a positive score.
   Macklemore wasn’t a murderer or a thief, he wasn’t particularly mean, and he
didn’t let malice guide his actions. As ridiculous and self-serving as his
popular song about marriage equality was, he probably made it thinking he was
doing the LGBTQIA+ community a service.
   ‘Same Love’ had probably even changed some minds in the world and created a
discussion amongst thick-headed straight people that led to the conclusion of:
hey, maybe gay people are people too (a shocking concept to Americans along the
Bible Belt).
   In the minds of queers everywhere, though, Ben ‘Macklemore’ Haggerty was a
running joke.
   After having made millions of dollars off of ‘Same Love’ and having not
donated a cent of it to actual queer causes, the community as a whole realized
what a singularly bizarre man Macklemore was.
   Clad in only a fur coat, coonskin hat, and being applauded as ‘the first
rapper to ever, ever stand up for ‘the gays’’ (hint: he wasn’t even close to
being the first rapper to support marriage equality, as there are actually gay
rappers) Macklemore and his white bread face and piercing blue eyes gained the
mockery of queer individuals worldwide.
   This wasn’t to say that Macklemore had done anything wrong since there were
more errors with the way the media praised him lavishly as the first straight
savior of the homosexuals, but he was a joke nonetheless.
   All of that contributed to the red tinge in Draco’s cheeks when he held back
laughter through his and Harry’s Skype call with Lorraine and the smile on his
face that lasted for much, much longer than that.
   “This woman is off of her rocker,” he laughed, one elbow on Harry’s shoulder
as they scrolled through the email again on Harry’s laptop. The airport lounge
was actually pretty quiet for once—no screaming kids or loudmouths on phones
had arrived at the gate yet. It was quiet businesspeople and college kids
returning home as far as the eye could see.
   Harry, hyper-aware of how physically close Draco was to him, laughed a bit
more breathily than usual. It wasn’t like Hermione had never hugged him or Ron
had never fallen asleep on his shoulder before, but this physical contact was
from a newly-approved friend instead of a childhood friend. That was what Harry
told himself to explain the difference in sensation, anyway.
    “How completely deranged do you have to be to first-of-all want to date
Macklemore, and to second-of-all actually think someone you’ve never seen in
your life is Macklemore instead of some Catfish. This is officially the most
deluded person we’ve ever met,” Draco blabbed on. If he was bothered by his
closeness to Harry he didn’t show it.
   Fucking Draco. He was bothered by the taste of mint and was irate when
servicepeople attempted to give him water in a Styrofoam cup, but personal
space was a nonissue with him. Harry would never understand that.
   “How wild would it be if it were actually Macklemore?” Harry stoked Draco’s
fire. The mere suggestion was laughable, but what would be even more gut-
bustingly hilarious was if it truly, truly was the rapper Macklemore carrying
out an online relationship with a fan. “It’s not out of the realm of
possibility.”
   Draco’s hot breath tickled Harry’s ear when he laughed again. “I think I
would perish.”
   “I mean, look at the story. She messaged the official Macklemore fanpage not
expecting a reply—just to say she liked his music or whatever—“
   “Straight people,” Draco sighed.
   “Yes, yes, I’ll admit Lorraine has terrible taste, but she messaged the
official account. That has to mean it’s someone who’s high in the ranks of the…
Hierarchy of Macklemore or whatever.” Harry tried to search for words that
didn’t sound completely ridiculous, but it was Macklemore they were talking
about after all.
   “The hierarchyof Macklemore?”
   “What would you call it?” Harry demanded with a bristle.
   Draco shook his head. “No, I’d call it that,” he admitted. “It sounds insane
coming out of your mouth, is all.”
   “Right, of course.” Harry rolled his eyes. “Anyway, what I’m trying to say
is that no matter how unlikely and ‘insane’ it all sounds, it could be the
truth because of the money.”
   “Thirty thousand is not that much,” Draco shrugged.
   “I really shouldn’t have expected you to say anything different. Your car
back in school was at least sixty grand.”
   Draco tilted his head to the side. “I’m not sure how much it was. I just
picked out a model and my parents bought it.”
   “My point exactly,” Harry laughed. “You don’t know what it’s like to
struggle with rent like Lorraine was struggling, and you don’t know what it’s
like to not have a random thirty thousand dollars to give away.”
   “I’m not the only rich guy around, though,” Draco pointed out, not even
bothering to address his own financial privileges. “There are plenty of people
with my sort of wealth—usually less than what I have, but still.”
   Harry couldn’t have possibly rolled his eyes harder. He had to get it out of
his system before getting back to the real point of why Harry brought up the
money that was given to Lorraine. “Someone who has money is talking to Lorraine
online. Macklemore has money.”
   “Fine, fine. One point in the Mackledaddy’s favor.”
   “Wouldn’t it be crazy if we got even more points that it was Macklemore,
though? What if it really is him? You know what they say, ‘when you have
eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable…’”
   “If we ever go down that road, it’ll be after our research.” Draco paused to
shake his head at how keen Harry was on this actually being the mayonnaise pop
star.
   On one level, of course, Harry was the one out of the pair who frequently
thought about ever-elusive Happy Endings, but on another level this case was
completely ludicrous. What kind of happy ending could possibly come from
Macklemore?
   Draco looked up at Harry again, eyes significantly wider. “Do you…? Do you
actually wantto meet Macklemore?”
   “What? No!” Harry responded, highly offended that Draco would ever say such
a thing. “He robbed actually great artists at the Grammy’s and keeps making
creepy commercials. It’s not even like he’s attractive.”
   “You want to meet Macklemore.”
   “No, I don’t!”
   Draco made a ‘tsk, tsk’ noise. “You’re a disappointment to gays everywhere,
Harry Potter.”
   “I do not want to meet Macklemore,” Harry argued. Thankfully they weren’t
too close to anyone else while waiting in the terminal; otherwise they would
have gotten even more strange looks than they usually did. Something about
Draco and Harry being out and about together in public seemed to draw stares.
   “You so do! You want to fuck Macklemore.”
   Harry went into shock for a few seconds before he could properly respond.
“Draco, you are absolutely disgusting.”
   “Flight 394 boarding now at Gate C-16.”
   “The most disgusting human being I’ve ever met,” Harry continued, grabbing
the straps of his carry-on bags.
   With a shrug, Draco decided he’d continue the joke for the rest of the
flight to keep things interested. “You’re just saying that so you can have some
alone time with your new boyfriend Mackleman and his freaky, rectangular head.”
   Harry groaned loudly. This was going to be an even longer filming process
than usual.
xxx
   With the camera crew at their backs, Draco and Harry hopped out of the rent-
a-car they’d gotten for their escapades in West Virginia.
   Before they could so much as get a clear shot of the apartment building that
Lorraine lived in, a sandy-haired man who’d been leaving the building as they
arrived walked right up to them and began pestering them with questions.
   They weren’t entirely unused to that. Filming all over America seemed to
prove that Americans did have one thing in common—they wanted to be on camera.
   When the saw a professional crew walk down the street focusing on two well-
dressed men (Harry was finally looking sharp thanks to Draco) they pounced on
them. Draco and Harry hadn’t even taken promotional shots for the show yet and
people were treating them like celebrities.
   “Is there someone famous who lives here?” the man asked. “I see the MTV
logos.”
   “Congratulations,” Draco awarded him flatly. “You can read.” The man had
glasses with rims thicker than the ones Harry wore back in high school so Draco
wouldn’t have been surprised if the man could see into outer space with those
magnifying glasses on his face.
   “What show on MTV?” the man pressed on like Draco hadn’t just tried to snub
him.
   Making his explanation of the show as short as he possibly could, Harry told
the man. “And today we’re investigating someone who believes they’re in an
online relationship with someone famous.”
   The man’s face went pale and Harry excused it as being starstruck. “Famous…?
Who is this person dating?”
   “Macklemore,” Harry sighed defeatedly. Saying the name out loud to a
stranger was embarrassing.
   Draco made a huffing noise but didn’t look up from his handheld camera. “She
thinks she’s dating Macklemore. We’re going to find out who it actually is.”
   And like that, the sandy-haired man was gone. He nodded feverishly and
headed to his car, leaving Draco and Harry at relative peace.
   “Do you think she has Macklemore posters up?” Draco snickered as they walked
towards the building.
   Harry tried his best to stifle a laugh. “No making fun of her to her face,
Draco,” Harry warned him once they reached Lorraine’s door and knocked.
   Eternally amused that Harry’s morals were more skewed than Draco originally
saw in high school, he kept his smile on his face. “I’m serious, though.
Imagine if we walked in there and there were wall-to-wall Macklemore posters
covered in lipstick stains and other mysterious liquids.”
   Almost immediately after Draco finished his sentence Harry heard footsteps.
“Shh!” he hushed Draco, hand reaching out to grab his arm out of instinct in
order to get him to hush. His hand landed on Draco’s elbow, a much more
intimate gesture than he’d originally planned on.
   Quietly, Harry cursed himself for even trying.
   Lorraine thankfully opened the door to disperse whatever lingering
awkwardness there was with the two hosts of the show. “Hello. Oh, I didn’t
realize the television crew would be here on the first day,” she laughed
nervously, shifting on her feet.
   “Is it a problem?” Harry started to ask, about to tell the camera crew to
stop recording for a moment when Draco cut in.
   “It shouldn’t be a problem—“ Draco really couldn’t help himself. “—if you
date a celebrity, there are cameras everywhere.”
   Harry smacked Draco’s arm this time. “Ignore him,” he advised Lorraine.
   “I get it a lot,” Lorraine sighed as she tried to get used to the big, black
eyes of the cameras on her. “People doubt that I’m really with Macklemore all
the time. All of my friends and parents do, anyway. Here, come inside. I’ll
show you the page that I contacted him on.”
   When they entered the small apartment, Draco was disappointed to see that
there were no Macklemore posters covered in mysterious substances anywhere.
   Harry took the reins on talking this time around. People who were just being
introduced to Draco’s sense of humor often perceived it as cruel when in
reality it used to be much, much crueler. Harry had an advantage in that
department—knowing Draco’s past behavior was even worse made this snarky, sort
of bitchy Draco look like an angel.
   Draco also physically sort of looked like an angel when he smiled, too, but
that was irrelevant to the Macklemore Mystery that had been put into Draco and
Harry’s laps. Harry would think about that later in much, much greater detail.
   At the moment they had a job.
   They watched Lorraine pull up the Macklemore and Ryan Lewis fanpage and her
chat history with the ‘Macklemore’ who ran it.
   “How far back do these go?” Harry asked.
   “We’ve been talking for two years now—before he was famous,” Lorraine said
that with such pride. “And the romance started almost immediately. He was
always really flirtatious.”
   Draco just kind of shook his head sadly. Macklemore. Flirtatious.
   “He’s been working hard since day one, though. That’s why we haven’t been
able to meet, because he’s almost always in the studio writing lyrics or making
music.”
   “What about talking via webcam?” Harry pressed on, trying not to let the way
that Lorraine talked about an absurd celebrity like they were in love bother
him. ‘Macklemore’ and the thirty thousand dollars he gave Lorraine should have
at least had the cash to shell out for a webcam.
   Lorraine shrugged. “He’s never had the time or the computer skills. It’s
actually sort of cute how terrible he is with technology. He’s always making
autocorrect errors.”
   “You could have always asked him to say you’re name at a show, or on
television, or really at any appearance he makes,” Draco suggested. “I meant
what I said about the cameras. He’s had every chance to look into one and say
he knows you and is dating you.”
   Once again, Lorraine had someone giving her suggestions she’d already talked
over with Macklemore—or, whoever was pretending to be him. “He wants to be
perceived as a serious artist by the mainstream media,” she explained in
exactly the way that Macklemore had told her. “On the phone he always is
talking about how people think he’s too silly, so saying my name would only—“
   “You talk on the phone?” Harry cut in. “As in, you’ve heard his voice?”
   “Yeah,” Lorraine nodded. She had actually mentioned that in her email, but
Draco and Harry were too busy dicking around with one another to notice.
   “And it’s him?”
   Lorraine scrunched her nose up. “I’ve heard his music enough to know his
voice. Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s him. The combination of the things he says
about his career, the way he speaks like he does in interviews with the press,
his genuine kindness and tolerance, his money, and his voice all make me think
it’s him.”
   She scrolled through some more of their chat logs in search of a specific
conversation as Harry and Draco watched words like ‘love’, ‘bae’, and ‘studio’
fly by.
   “Here.” Lorraine stopped on a section of replies that looked more like
essays they’d sent to one another than actual one-liners in conversation. “We
talk all the time about gay rights because he believes all love is equal and so
do I.” She said that with a swell of pride in her voice as if she had done a
noble and rare thing.
   Draco didn’t know how to tell Lorraine that lots of people actually thought
that, not just white rappers who had gay uncles.
   Harry, on the other hand, was rather impressed with the amount of qualifying
factors in the messages that Lorraine and ‘Macklemore’ swapped. The man on the
other end of the phone calls put some serious effort into this. That, or it was
actually Macklemore.
   As if Draco had read Harry’s mind, he shook his head. “You’ve received no
confirmation past these messages and the money?” he asked Lorraine. She shook
her head. “Can we see some kind of financial transaction receipt? If it
happened online you should have received an email or have a transaction
statement on your online banking account.”
   Draco knew a thing or two about online banking being the son of an affluent
family. They spared no penny on Draco when he grew up but instead Lucius would
sit the young Draco on his knee and show him on the computer screen just how
rich the Malfoys were.
   For a very, very long time, those high numbers in the bank accounts were
what made Draco think he was superior to everyone else in his school, staff and
sanitary workers included. He’d been terrible to everyone, really.
   “Oh,” Lorraine uttered as she pulled up some tabs on her browser. “Can you
turn the camera away for a second?”
   Draco obliged as she typed in her username and password to some small local
branch banking site.
   “Here it is.” She pointed to a deposit log that showed consistent donations
from this ‘Ben’, which was Macklemore’s real first name. Harry gave Draco a
look and got another smack on the arm in return; Harry didn’t even need to open
his mouth for Draco to know what he was going to say.
   Draco also didn’t have to open his mouth for Harry to know what he was going
to say. “There are a lot of men in the world named Ben,” Harry prefaced his
statement. “But these details help the case that it might actually be him.”
   “Just barely,” Draco huffed. It was insane of Harry to even get the poor
girl’s hopes up.
   Draco copied down the account number where the money came from on his phone
and resolved that in his and Harry’s research, they’d find that this Ben was a
sham—a sham with an eye for detail, yes—but a sham in the end like the rest of
the Catfish had been.
xxx
   The phone number’s registration was hidden by the phone company and
according to the woman Draco had verbally berated on their customer service
line, ‘they couldn’t just go around handing out names to people with MTV
shows’.
   The bank account was similarly privatized in the company. It was Harry’s
turn to call and check if they could use the show’s big-name network to coerce
someone who worked there into letting even a little detail out, but he came
back with nothing as well.
   “You know what we have to do now,” Draco said ominously from his place on
the edge of the hotel bed.
   “I called the bank,” Harry pointed out, looking at Draco instead of his
camera. Harry would have forgotten the camera was there in the first place if
it weren’t for the red light it displayed when recording. “It’s your turn to
make a call now. You know whatyou have to do.”
   “No!”
   Harry narrowed his eyes.
   “No way in hell am I making this call.”
   “The network has connections, they’ve had Macklemore host shows and they’ve
done interviews with him—“ Harry tried.
   “I am not calling MTV and asking them for their Macklemore connections,”
Draco repeated, highly offended that Harry would even consider making him do
something so wildly embarrassing.
   Harry crossed his arms. “Don’t be so difficult, Draco. It’s your turn fair
and square.” God, Draco could be so fucking annoying.
   After a couple more minutes of persistent bickering, the two of them
realized the camera was still on. Harry gave Draco a Look. Draco gave Harry a
Look.
   “I’m stubborn,” Harry reminded him. “We could be here for hours and I still
wouldn’t call the network.”
   “You’re incorrigible.” Draco let out an annoyed huff, looked away from the
camera, and picked up his phone. He grumbled something along the lines of
‘ridiculous’ and ‘unbelievable’ as he dialed the network representative.
   The phone almost rang out before Draco got ahold of someone.
   ‘Speakerphone,’ Harry mouthed.
   Draco rolled his eyes and hit the speaker button so whatever people actually
tuned into this show could hear him make a fool of himself.
   “Hello, this is Draco from Catfish,” he sighed into the receiver.
   “Hello, Draco, this is Aubrey. How can I help you guys? Is everything
alright?” The voice on the other line was friendly and so blissfully unaware of
the case that Draco and Harry were on being their most insane yet.
   Draco glared once more at Harry for good measure. “Everything’s fine,
Aubrey. We just, ah, have a question to ask about the case we’re currently on.”
   “A question that the network could answer?” Now the confusion was apparent
in her voice.
   “Well.” Draco wasn’t sure how to approach this, as he was with most things,
so he just did what he usually did and charged in to make a mess of things. “We
need to speak with someone who personally knows Macklemore.”
   Aubrey paused. “Like, the rapper?”
   “That’s a kind word for it,” Draco nodded.
   “Look, I really can’t call in personal favors for you guys right now, you’ve
just started filming—“
   Draco corrected her immediately. “This is not a personal favor! Not even a
little bit!”
   “Oh, but I thought you were, you know.”
   Ah, of course. The classic ‘you know’ when they meant ‘queer as a three-
dollar bill’. Draco would never understand why straight people could dole out
anti-gay slurs left and right and then when it came to talking to a person who
actually identified as gay they couldn’t even say the word.
   “Because he’s so progressive,” Aubrey tried to explain.
   “I,” Draco clarified sharply. “Do not want to meet Macklemore. The girl in
our current case does. She thinks that she’s been talking to him online and via
text.”
   Harry snickered and Draco picked up the nearest object—one of their shoes,
he wasn’t paying attention to whose it was—and threw it at him. It missed by a
longshot.
   “Oh. Well. I could contact Macklemore’s assistant. We usually don’t deal
directly with him when scheduling events,” Aubrey offered. “But I really don’t
think he’s dating anyone right now. I mean, he’s famous. Why would he date some
random girl?”
   “Just contact his assistant and ask,” Draco replied shortly before
remembering that his and Harry’s salaries were at MTV’s mercy. He added a
reluctant: “Please. Then text me the results of the conversation.”
   Aubrey agreed, Draco hung up and the torture was over. Harry stopped filming
and let himself laugh.
   “At least she agreed with me. There’s no way this is actually Macklemore,”
Draco jabbed at Harry’s idea that it could ever actually be him. “He’s famous.”
   "I would hate to be famous," Harry laughed, hands outstretched over his
head. He said the words with such certainty while reclined on the hotel bed. If
there were any universe out there where he was famous, he’d be miserable about
it.
   "Right, so that's why you took a job as the host of an MTV show," Draco
snorted right back. "Excellent planning."
   Harry didn't seem to mind the prodding. "I liked the job description. I'm
having fun, aren't you?"
   "That's not the point."
   "Then you did this for the recognition?" Harry hoped that wasn't true.
   "No," Draco insisted to put a rest to whatever sad resignation was rising in
Harry's throat. "Well, partially yes. I would like to be recognized everywhere
I go so I don't even have to introduce myself. Plus, men like to sleep with
people who're on TV."
   "You have a problem getting men to sleep with you now?" The compliment
sailed right over Draco’s thick head.
   "What!" Draco had almost forgotten that could be a possible implication of
what he had said. "No, no. I have no trouble getting laid, Potter." He whipped
out the last name for effect.
   Harry chuckled and flexed his fingers. "That's what I thought. Then why
would you need to be famous to do something you can already do well on your
own?"
   "It's less chit-chat if they already know my name."
   "Of course," Harry nodded as if that made all the sense in the world.
Sometimes he was able to pretend he knew what Draco was getting at. Sometimes.
   "The same would go for you." A perverse curiosity grew in Draco's gut. "When
was your last lay?"
   "If it weren't for you I would have screwed that guy in the clothing store–"
   Draco shook his head. "He had gauges, Harry. I had to stop you from being
desperate enough to stick your dick in them."
   Harry recoiled. "Oh my god. That is so foul!"
   "My point exactly!"
   "I wasn't going to–"
   "Who cares! You were going to fuck the guy with gauges and that's gross and
you need to get higher standards," Draco concluded, crossing his arms.
   "You're disgusting for thinking like that. Fuckhis gauges. Fuck. Where do
you come up with shit like that?"
   Draco usually liked to respond to something like that with 'ask your father'
but figured that would be highly inappropriate to say to an orphan. He
exercised discretion for once. "Active imagination."
   "You're gross."
   "You're gross."
   They sat like that for a while–in quiet disgust with one another but making
no move to separate–before getting up to see the reply text from Aubrey.
xxx
   Lorraine was distressed. “I’ve been thinking about the discrepancies in
Macklemore’s stories for the past few days, and now… I’m getting a bad feeling
about this.”
   Draco had read Aubrey’s text word-for-word to Lorraine at least three times
before she got what it said. Aubrey had talked to Macklemore’s assistant and
explained the situation to her only to get a reply that Macklemore was not in a
relationship with anyone at the time and that Macklemore was a very, very busy
man.
   “It isn’t looking like this man is who you think he is,” Harry offered
carefully.
   “But why would someone do that?” Lorraine asked, her trusting nature getting
the better of her once again. “Why would someone pretend to be someone that
they’re not?”
   Draco actually had some insight into that. “From what we’ve seen and the
people whose cases we’ve had in the past, people who pretend to be someone else
online are usually insecure. They don’t feel comfortable being themselves and
have some unresolved issues of their own.”
   “Still,” she muttered. It didn’t satisfy her to think this was just some
lonely guy with issues trying to get the best out of some online contact.
Lorraine wasn’t sure what would satisfy her, though. “I want to meet him. I
want to see him no matter who he is so I can move past this.”
   That was the pattern that this show seemed to be falling into. Harry wished
that just once someone was actually who they said they were—not that this case
would be the best one to start out a streak of honesty with. Harry was hungry
to see some true love, but not so desperate as to see it with Macklemore
involved.
   “Then that leaves us one last option,” Draco announced, looking to Harry.
“And it’s your turn to make the call.”
   That was what Harry tried to do, anyway.
   They were in the comfort of Lorraine’s apartment but Harry still felt the
need to rush. He put in ‘Macklemore’s number twice and it rang out right to
voicemail, so he tried texting the number.
   “Alright,” he muttered before narrating what he wrote for the camera’s sake.
“’This is a friend of Lorraine’s, I was wondering if we could talk on the
phone’.”
   “Let me call,” Draco sighed, reaching for his own phone.
   “Or I could try,” Lorraine offered. “He doesn’t know your numbers so he’s
probably not picking up because he thinks you’re telemarketers.”
   Draco hadn’t even heard the word ‘telemarketer’ since 2008. This case was
really messing with his perception of pop culture.
   So, with one cameraman filming the three of them on the couch feverishly
typing and holding the phone up to their ear, the hope was that ‘Macklemore’
wouldn’t be able to ignore so many calls at once.
   That was when the cameraman heard it. “Do you hear that?” he asked, keeping
his lens focused on the couch but trying to look to Draco and Harry for some
help.
   “Hear what?” Harry asked. He hadn’t spent enough time with the crew to know
all of their names, but this man was named Tim or Tom or something else with a
‘T’.
   “The ringing phone,” he replied.
   All three people on the couch stopped dialing. “What?” Draco stressed,
vaguely terrified. That was a line right out of a horror movie and he was not
about to be the attractive blonde who died within the first fifteen minutes.
   “It’s gone now,” the cameraman frowned. “Sorry. I don’t think it was
anything. It just felt like for a moment it lined up with your calls.”
   Draco and Harry exchanged looks. “Call again,” Draco asked of him.
   Harry typed in the number again, this time lowering the phone from his ear
so he wouldn’t have to hear the ringing that actually came from his phone.
   And there it was. Under thin West-Virginian apartment floor the ringing of a
phone could be heard below them.
   Draco couldn’t resist. “Macklemore is in the building.” He hadn’t known how
badly he wanted to say that until he actually said it.
   “That could be any phone,” Lorraine said more to comfort herself than anyone
else. “It could beany phone.”
   Harry ended his call and the ringing stopped. “Lorraine,” he said slowly.
   “It could be any phone!”
   “Who lives in the apartment below you?” Harry asked gently.
   Lorraine shook her head. “It couldn’t be him. Mackle—whoever was
masquerading as Macklemore—gave me rent money! Randy can’t even pay his own
rent.”
   “Randy.” Draco got a name out of all of that denial. “How well do you know
Randy?”
   “It couldn’t be him,” Lorraine insisted. “He doesn’t have the money and I
haven’t heard the phone ring down there before.”
   “Let’s go downstairs to check what’s going on. After all, you said you
wanted the truth.” Harry tried not to scare Lorraine further back into denial
as best he could.
   She nodded reluctantly and Draco was sure to get every reaction as close-up
as he could with his handheld. He hadn’t seen this coming and Lorraine had a
point with her not being able to hear the phone ringing before that day. This
could have been a lead or a dead end, and Draco wanted to capture every second
of it.
   Harry, Lorraine, and Draco followed by the rest of the crew shuffled down a
narrow flight of stairs to the floor below Lorraine’s apartment with only some
minor trips. Lorraine, being the only one who was familiar with the footing of
the apartment building, reached the bottom of the stairs first but waited for
Harry to be the one to knock on the door.
   Harry didn’t hesitate in it, either.
   He knocked on the door for both Lorraine’s truth and an end to whatever kind
of white-rapper circus this was turning into.
   The sounds of footfalls and something crashing inside the apartment made it
clear that Randy was home. Harry knocked again.
   “One second!” the voice from inside the apartment yelled.
   “That’s not the voice I hear on the phone,” Lorraine insisted.
   When Randy had sufficiently fixed whatever kept falling over inside his
apartment, he appeared in the doorway looking as white as a sheet.
   Draco narrowed his eyes. He’d seen this man before; when they first arrived.
He’d come up to Draco and Harry and asked why they were filming before running
off abruptly. There was now no doubt in Draco’s mind—in spite of the voice and
cash discrepancies—that this man was involved in the rouse.
   Randy was still wearing the thick glasses he’d worn when he first met Draco
and Harry, too, so even Harry had recognized him.
   “Hello again.” Harry was venturing into uncharted territory. They’d never
had a Catfish who lived so close to their victim before. Well, victim was a
subjective term since he had after all given her money rather than taken it.
“I’m Harry, this is Draco, and I think you know Lorraine already.”
   “Yeah,” the sandy-haired man rasped. “Yeah, I do.”
   “It can’t be you,” Lorraine blurted out.
   If there hadn’t been a group of cameras breathing down his neck then Randy
would have tried to lie. He would have gone for the ‘what couldn’t be me?’
response and feigned complete uninvolvement, but he’d always been bad at lying
to crowds. “I…”
   That sealed the deal for Harry and Draco at least. “Do you mind if we come
in to talk about this?” Harry asked.
   “No,” Randy said quickly. “Here is fine, here is fine.”
   “Then in that case, for Lorraine’s sake, could you clarify why you think
we’re here?” Harry asked.
   Randy glanced upwards at the cameras and felt his stomach turn. “Because
it’s me,” he mumbled.
   “What’s you?” Draco demanded. He wanted to hear the man say it so there
wouldn’t be any room for interpretation.
   “I’m the guy,” Randy sighed. “I’m the one Lorraine has been talking to.”
   Lorraine was taken aback. “Talking to? Is that what you’re going to call
what we’ve been doing? You—you’ve been lying to me! You were pretending to be
someone else!”
   “I thought you’d figure it out eventually, that this would fizzle out and
end before anything crazy happened, but it didn’t—“
   “It didn’t,” Lorraine interrupted him. Her arms were crossed and her body
language becoming more guarded by the minute. “It sure didn’t.”
   “Why did you let it continue?” Draco translated for Lorraine. She was too
hurt to be thinking of what she needed to hear.
   Harry felt like shit about the entire situation. Yet another trusting person
would learn not to put faith in others because of a sour online romance. He was
angry with Randy and everyone like him for taking advantage of the people like
Lorraine.
   “I like you,” Randy admitted to Lorraine. “I like you and I heard you liked
Macklemore so I sucked up to the admins of his official page until they let me
be an admin, too. I was originally going to try and talk to you about
Macklemore but when you thought I was him—nobody had ever spoken to me like you
spoke to me when you thought I was him.”
   Lorraine was too shocked to reply to that.
   “And what about your voice on the phone?” Harry asked, keeping himself in
between Randy and Lorraine protectively.
   “I watched enough videos to know what Macklemore sounds like.”
   “So you watched a bunch of Macklemore videos until you could imitate him to
elaborate on your lie?” Draco couldn’t get the mental image of this lemming
sitting cross-legged at his laptop repeating Macklemore’s phrases from a
YouTube video.
   “Uh,” Randy tried. “Yeah. But that was because she’d be so disappointed if
she knew the truth! Like she is now, I guess. I just wanted to prevent this.”
   “And you could have,” Lorraine spoke up once more. “By telling the truth.”
Her voice was raw with hurt. As much as Draco and Harry had made light of the
man she thought she was dating, she really was invested in this persona as her
love interest, her boyfriend, and someone she could rely on. It was a betrayal
no matter what Randy pretended to be. “And you were here this whole time. You
were one floor away from me and you said nothing.”
   Randy cast his gaze downwards. “I’m sorry, Lorraine. I’m really, really
sorry.”
   “What about the money?” Draco asked bluntly. Lorraine may have been shut
down by this temporarily but she would want the answer to that later on.
   “I saved up. I skipped out on stuff. I wanted her to stay in her home.”
Which was honestly creepy because her home was so close to Randy. “It was no
big deal for me. I wanted to do it for her.”
   “Yet you couldn’t tell thetruth,” Lorraine said breathily before a deep
breath. “I… I have to go now.”
   “I’m sorry, Lorraine. I’m really sorry.”
xxx
   Draco had set up the camera for their final words on the matter. Finally, on
their seventh take, they had gotten a semi-coherent collection of ideas about
how the case had gone. The first six takes, however, had been a clusterfuck of
Draco trying to make Macklemore puns while Harry tried not to laugh.
   “Okay. Okay, it’s done,” Harry sighed and laughed at once with relief. “It’s
done.” He took the camera down from its perch. “You piece of shit. That took so
much longer than it needed to. I need to sleep.”
   Draco snickered as he began to remove his clothes for the night. “You just
need to learn to accept Mackleman into your heart. Only then can you truly
sleep.”
   “Oh my god.”
   “There is no rest for the weary hearts of this world until Macklemore
blesses them. I’m pretty sure that’s in the Bible.”
   Harry needed to stop laughing. He really, really needed to stop laughing and
go to sleep and it was all Draco’s fault for keeping him up and loopy with
Macklemore jokes. “You’re horrible,” he managed before flopping onto his hotel
bed.
   Draco, now shirtless, crawled across Harry’s bed to the night stand. He dug
around in the drawer until he found the book most hotels kept in stock.
Flipping open to a random page, Draco decided he would replace any mentions of
god in the passage with Macklemore.
   Harry’s reactions made everything so worth it. Draco didn’t even really find
what he was doing funny after the first hour of it, but Harry was still
cracking up.
   “One thing I ask of the Macklemore,” he began. “This is what I seek: that I
may dwell in the house of Macklemore all the days of my life, to gaze upon the
beauty of Macklemore and to seek him in his temple.”
   Harry screamed into his pillow before reaching up to swat the Bible out of
Draco’s hands.
   “Now you’re going to Mackle-hell,” Draco told him seriously. “You’ll be
forced to listen to his voice boom above you in a barely-intelligible rap as
you mine beats for him for all of eternity.”
   Harry’s laugh bubbled out of him. “You’re insane, Draco. You’re completely
insane. Go to bed!”
   “I am in bed.”
   “Your bed.”
   Draco rolled his eyes fondly. “You should be so lucky to have me in your
bed. Macklemorian priests are actually only allowed to be gay. That’s the whole
point of ‘Same Love’.”
   Macklemorian. Fuck. Harry would be laughing about that one for weeks. “Go to
bed!”
   “Fine,” Draco agreed, noting on the hotel clock that they’d stayed up past
midnight and would have to pick a case the next day regardless. He hopped out
of Harry’s bed and into his own, shedding his pants and turning off the light
somewhere along the way. “Sleep tight.”
   Harry grunted in response.
   “And don’t let the Ryan Lewis’s bite.”
***** Alvaro and Emmett *****
Chapter Notes
     It’s time to turn the pressure up on these two. I’m so bad at
     updating slowbuild fics—which you all know—but it’s really just so
     hard to imagine any world where Draco and Harry aren’t already
     together. Also, this may sound strange, but I have something in the
     works that I think all of my readers will really enjoy. It’s not
     fanfic—it’s an RPG centered around Drarry. I’ve started development
     for it now and I’ll update you with my progress until it’s playable.
     TW for mentions of Harry’s physically abusive childhood with the
     Dursleys.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Chapter 6: Alvaro and Emmett
   “No,” Draco sighed in reference to the email Harry had read.
   “Agreed. It’s too obvious that it’s a Catfish,” Harry nodded. That may have
been the name of the show but it certainly wasn’t what Harry was looking for at
the moment. Harry wanted at least one honest person in the world if that wasn’t
so much to ask for.
   Draco snorted. “And much too heterosexual. I can’t deal with straight people
after what I’ve decided to call ‘Macklegate’.”
   Harry’s hands flew to cover his ears. “No! I can’t deal with that! No more
Macklemore puns!” he laughed. “I can’t take it anymore!” He had, after all,
been kept up almost all of the previous night with them.
   “Can’t take it any Macklemore?”
   “I’m going to kill you in your sleep.”
   “My jokes are hilarious,” Draco told him and playfully shoved his shoulder.
   “That’s true, but—“
   “Wait, you think it’s true?”
   Harry was surprised by the interruption. Draco knew he was funny, so what
did it matter? “Yeah,” Harry treaded lightly before turning back to the
computer screen and scrolling through more emails. “I think you’re funny. You
think you’re funny, too.”
   “Of course I think I am. I am.” Draco shook it off. “I just didn’t know your
taste had improved.”
   A rush of air escaped Harry’s lips that was supposed to sound annoyed but
really just sounded like another laugh. “Sure,” he said purely so he could say
something.
   Draco repositioned the camera to get a better shot of the emails in their
inbox after the moment passed. He was amazed by how many emails they were still
getting every day when the show hadn’t aired a single episode yet. The masses
of internet-based lovers seemed like a bottomless pit.
   “Here,” Harry said and clicked on an email titled ‘The Man I Want to Marry’.
“You wanted something less heterosexual? Here are two guys.”
   “Perfect,” Draco declared before Harry had even read what their story was.
   “Shut up and listen. ‘Dear MTV, my name is Alvaro Belasco. I live in
Provincetown, Massachusetts and love my life here. The gay community here is in
control, but I never found the dating scene all that exciting so four years ago
I tried online dating and met the most amazing guy. His name is Emmett and he
lives on the Jersey Shore.’”
   Pansy Parkinson, Draco’s longtime confidant, had a house on the Jersey
Shore. Draco recalled it fondly, as the last time he’d been there it was a blur
of booze and men (and some women for Pansy) cycling through the house and
spilling out onto the beach.
   It was truly amazing. One could find young, restless queer people in
literally every corner of the world ready to party and down to fuck. The LGBTQ+
community wasamazing.
   “Okay, but the marrying bit?” Draco asked as Harry began reading off
information about where Alvaro worked and some other boring things the network
would probably include in the episode.
   Harry frowned and scrolled until he found the first mention of it. “Here.
‘Emmett and I have been together for three years and about a year ago he told
me that if he ever gets to meet me in person, the first thing he’s doing is
proposing to me. I guess that’s kind of like an engagement.’ Wow.”
   Draco shook his head slowly. When his future husband proposed to him, he
would smack the poor bastard if he ever gave away when he was going to do it
over a Facebook chat.
   “’But he won’t meet me. He’s always busy with work and lives paycheck to
paycheck, which means that plane ticket money isn’t in the equation’,” Harry
read some more.
   “We’ve heard that before.”
   “He could genuinely not have the money for a ticket, Draco. We’ve been over
this, you were raised rich—“
   “It wouldn’t matter,” Draco cut him off firmly. “If I loved someone—if I
really, really loved someone and talked about proposing, money wouldn’t be an
object. I’d hitchhike there, I’d take a canoe, it doesn’t matter.”
   Harry rolled his eyes. “You? In a canoe? You’d topple the thing over before
turning around and heading home with sopping clothes and a headache.”
   With a glare, Draco made his point clearer. “Fine, that was a bad example.
What I mean is that I’d find a way to be with the man I loved. I’d find a way
and it’s hard for me to believe that all of the people we’ve talked to haven’t
found a way on their own.”
   It was fanciful, it held no realistic basis finance-wise, but that little
speech of Draco’s was sweet.
   “Why are you looking at me like that?” Draco asked and furrowed his brow.
   “What?”
   “Quit looking at me like a sap. I’m just saying that if I loved someone
enough to marry them that a huge part of it would be dedication to, you know,
seeing their face. That’s important,” Draco grumbled.
   “I agree,” Harry said honestly. Had he really been staring at Draco
strangely?
   “And you can’t fuck unless you see them.”
   And there was the Draco that Harry knew and lov—liked. Tolerated. Found
amusing. Yeah, that was it. That was definitely it.
xxx
   Harry knew that Provincetown was a gay metropolis, but he really hadn’t
gotten the picture until he and Draco drove away from the airport and towards
the town.
   It was an eight minute drive from the local airport to the town and only a
fifteen minute drive to the beach. Provincetown was found on a thin peninsula
in Massachusetts that connected to a major road.
   One by one the houses in town they passed had more frequently occurring
pride flags strewn across their porches while almost every boutique had rainbow
stickers and ‘gay business bureau’ stickers on the windows. People’s lawns had
political signs for liberal candidates and nautical accents for their proximity
to the ocean.
   It was a charming town—the sort Harry would want to live in. It was small
enough for there to be a strong sense of community but large enough to not have
any neighbors breathing down his neck. The schools were beautiful on the
outside from what Harry could see from his seat and most likely run by gay
parents.
   The kids raised in Provincetown would be a respectful, happy bunch. Harry
wondered how much a house would cost in the area if he ever found someone to
settle down with.
   “We’re here,” Draco had to announce to stir his partner from whatever
daydream he was immersed in.
   Harry shot up immediately in his seat. “Right, right,” he nodded and clicked
the seatbelt off before hopping out of the car and onto a gravel driveway.
Compared to some of the small apartments of previous Catfish ‘victims’, this
house was beautiful and roomy.
   Harry saw why when he got to the door.
   A woman opened it—her hair was curled and her nails freshly done for the
camera—and turned over her shoulder to yell. “Alvaro! The people you emailed
are here.” She turned back to Draco and Harry. “Sorry ‘bout that, he’s busy
checking himself in the mirror for the thousandth time today. I’m Rosa, his
sister. We live here together.”
   Draco and Harry shook her hand before entering the home. It made sense to
have a roommate not only for the extra cash but for company. Draco never had a
sibling so he imagined what fun it would be to live with someone like Pansy all
the time—though there would be ups and downs—and Harry knew what it was like to
live with Dudley so he shied from the idea.
   “It is not the thousandth time!” a man’s voice rang from the back of the
house before he stepped out and revealed himself. He was smiling as he gave his
sister a shove on his way to greet Draco and Harry. “I’m Alvaro, and—wow, you
brought the cameras already—and do you want something to eat? Something to
drink? The flight here can be murder.”
   Harry politely declined as Draco eagerly accepted.
   “Perfect! I’ll put in some popcorn,” the man grinned and headed off to the
kitchen. The camerapeople and Harry both shot Draco a look.
   “I’m starving,” he defended. “Cut out the footage of me eating later if it
bothers you so much.”
   “Priss,” Harry accused Draco blamelessly.
   Ever the pinnacle of maturity, Draco stuck out his tongue at him and sat
down on Alvaro and Rosa’s couch.
   When Alvaro returned with a bowl of freshly-popped popcorn, though, Harry
simply couldn’t resist. He grabbed a handful and avoided eye-contact with the
camerapeople, electing instead to talk into Draco’s handheld.
   “So,” Harry began. “Tell us everything.”
   With a wistful sigh, Alvaro did. “Emmett is my heart, he really is. He can
act like a big, tough guy but I know what a sweetheart he is. Ha! Don’t put
that on TV, he’ll kill me,” he laughed. “But really, I am so happy that he’s
the one I talk to and the one I share my day with. He always seems to know just
what to say.”
   “You love him,” Harry nodded with a tiny, hopeful smile. This could be the
real deal.
   “I do. I am going to say yes when he proposes, after all.”
   Draco needed to be the skeptic at that moment more than ever. Otherwise,
Harry and Alvaro would just talk each other up into the clouds for hours. “What
contact information do you have for him?”
   “Hm? Well, I have his old dating profile—that now says he’s in a
relationship, of course—and his number and a private chat room we use. He’s not
into Facebook or Twitter, and that makes things difficult,” Alvaro explained.
   “But you have a picture of him, right?” Draco asked.
   “I saved all the ones he sent over the chat room. Let me just, ah, pick some
out to show you,” he said carefully, knowing he’d have to hide the nudes before
he let Draco and Harry see anything.
   Harry was blissfully unaware of the implications of Alvaro’s tone. He, just
as Draco was always saying, was pretty thick. “Great. Can we see his old
profile, too? If you email all of that to us we can start investigating.”
   “And the number,” Draco interjected. “For when we need to call him.”
   “Of course, of course,” Alvaro nodded, a big smile across his face. “I can’t
wait to see Emmett. I’ve waited for three years now, and soon I’ll see him.”
   Harry admired the optimism Alvaro had and couldn’t help getting caught up in
it himself.
xxx
   “It’s the moment of truth,” Draco said over Harry’s shoulder in an effort to
psych him out. “If these pictures match any other profile out there then this
isn’t true love and we have another Catfish on our hands.”
   Harry rolled his eyes. Was there anything in the world that Draco wasn’t a
complete twat about? They were on the same side and had been for a while during
filming but Draco kept up his taunting—though it was admittedly lighter
taunting than when they’d been enemies.
   An absurd thought crossed Harry’s mind. Was this how Draco treated his
friends?
   He tried to think back to high school—something he very, very rarely did—and
search for old memories of Draco walking down the hall laughing with Pansy,
Crabbe, Goyle, Theo, or Blaise. All he could remember was how expensive their
clothing looked, though, and not much of their conversation.
   “Okay, enough suspense,” Draco sighed, bored of toying with Harry. He took
the mouse and dragged one of the pictures of Emmett into the Google image
search bar.
   The whole thing was actually extremely simple—alarmingly simple—and it was a
shock that nobody had Googled how to do something like it before, but it kept
Harry and Draco in a job.
   “No matches,” Harry read out loud for the camera and for gloating purposes.
“Looks like Emmett isn’t lying.”
   “That was just one picture. We need to search the rest,” Draco huffed. He
wouldn’t accept defeat so easily for the sake of the audience watching—but deep
down he was pleasantly surprised. Maybe someone was actually who they said they
were.
   Harry, never one to back down, put every picture of Emmett through the
search engine. One by one the results came back that the photos had no other
existing copy on the internet and Harry turned around to give Draco and his
handheld camera a victory grin.
   “You’re hideous when you’re smug,” Draco lied. Harry was quite the opposite
of hideous. He had one of those smiles that reached his eyes and behind his
glasses they looked even bigger and brighter.
   “As opposed to how you’re constantly hideous?”
   “I hate you. You’re lucky just to be in my presence.”
   “So you’re always telling me,” Harry nodded. “And, you know, I was just
kidding about—“
   “Obviously, Harry. We’re kidding,” Draco reassured him, amused that Harry
actually wanted to point that out. Draco usually just insulted people he was
fond of and assumed they would understand that it was in good fun.
   Draco made a face. Had he just admitted to himself in some strange way that
he was Harry’s friend? That Harry was his friend? This whole working situation
was really fucking with Draco’s perception of friendship in general.
   Luckily for Draco, Harry hadn’t noticed any of his contemplative facial
expressions. Harry had entered the number that they were given for Emmett into
a public database and gotten nothing. “Damn.”
   “Damn,” Draco echoed in an effort to pretend he had been paying attention.
“Now would be the time to call, then.”
   “I’ll do it, but if I hear a phone ringing in the distance I’m quitting,”
Harry joked.
   Draco smirked. “I better put my phone away, then, because I’m actually
Emmett. I’ve been messing with Alvaro this entire time,” he said with mock-
solemnity.
   “That’s horrible of you,” Harry mock-chided. “This show will bring you down
on cable television for it.”
   “As it should. Now dial.” Draco sat on the edge of the hotel bed and pointed
the camera directly at Harry. With his eye hidden by the lens, Draco was able
to step back and take a better look at his cohost. They were situated in a
somewhat-decent hotel and hadn’t gotten used to the sleep schedule of travel so
Harry wasn’t exactly glowing, but he didn’t look terrible either.
   I need to get out, Draco thought to himself. I’m in P-Town. There’s a
thousand available gay men here and the only reason I’m looking at Harry is
because I’m stuck with him. He also has a pair of fit legs, that cute, messy
hair thing when he wakes up, and steady and strong-looking hands, but that’s
all beside the point. Right?
  Harry, with his cellphone on speaker, was already a few rings into the call
when Draco stopped thinking about the way Harry’s legs met the curve of his
ass.
   There was a click on the other end signaling someone had answered the phone.
   “Hello?” Harry asked expectantly.
   “…Hello?” a man’s voice said from the other end of the line. “Can I help
you?”
   “This is Harry, I’m a friend of Alvaro’s,” Harry started out with. He would
mention that this would be on TV a bit after the man stopped sounding so
suspicious. “Is this Emmett?”
   “Yeah, it is, can I help you?” The voice didn’t sound any less distressed.
   Harry looked at the camera as a way of exchanging a concerned glance with
Draco. “Listen, we’re from MTV’s show Catfish. It’s a show about people who’ve
met online, and I know for sure that Alvaro doesn’t just want to be with you
online. You don’t have to worry about money or hotels or flights, we can take
care of that, I just want to know if you’re willing to meet Alvaro in person.”
   There was a tense silence on the other end. Draco waved his hand at Harry to
say something, but Harry waited.
   “Wow,” Emmett finally murmured.
   “We’ve talked to Alvaro and he really cares about you. This is an
opportunity to meet someone who really does want to be around you,” Harry
pressed on.
   “I don’t know if this is the best time.”
   “Emmett,” Harry asserted. “This may be the only time.” That wasn’t entirely
true, but it would be the only time that they could meet with MTV’s monetary
assistance.
   The other end of the line went quiet. Draco was sure that ‘Emmett’ was going
to back out and cut the story short until he spoke up again. “Alright, yeah.
Alright. I do… I really do want to see him.”
   As they began working out the details, Draco and Harry both knew that there
was still something Emmett was hiding.
xxx
   “’Random’ security checks,” Alvaro laughed and straightened his shirt
collar. “Gotta love ‘em.”
   “Are they even allowed to feel you up like that? What do they think you
possibly have to hide under your clothes?” Draco asked, appalled that he had to
watch this man get patted down by some nitwit in an airport uniform. “Tiny
guns?”
   Harry gave Draco a look. “Don’t say ‘guns’ in an airport,” he told him in a
hushed tone. “We don’t need anything turning out like the last time you
insulted a gate attendant.”
   “He reeked,” Draco reminded Harry. “It was a public health hazard. I was
doing all of us a favor by telling him to take a bar of soap to his greasy
hide.”
   “He made us empty our carry-ons like three times.”
   Draco shrugged. “By embarrassing him I saved thousands of people from
funneling through that airport feeling assaulted by his odor.”
   “Is your goal to make me crazy, Draco?” Shaking his head, Harry rested his
eyes for a moment. The travel was rough, but the waiting aspect of it had to be
the absolute worst. Harry knew they’d be sitting there for at least an hour
waiting for the plane to New Jersey.
   “Yes,” Draco decided before scooting to the edge of his seat and hopping up.
“I’m going to the bathroom.”
   Harry, one elbow propped up on the back of the airport bench and one knee
curled in to his chest, opened his eyes to be unconsciously the image of an
admirer of someone who infuriated him as Draco walked away.
   "So," Alvaro said, putting his own elbow on the bench to get a better look
in Harry's eyes for the truth. "How long have you two been dating?"
   The question didn't register with Harry for a moment. "...What?"
   "I said," Alvaro repeated. "How long have you two been dating?"
   "No, no, no no no," Harry assured him, withdrawing into himself and waving
his hands frantically in an attempt to get far away from that idea. "We're not
dating."
   "What? But you're both gay–"
   "That doesn't mean we're dating!"
   Alvaro shook his head. "I know that. I was going to finish with 'and you
clearly want each other'."
   "What?" Harry shook his head quickly and repeated himself. "What!"
   "Don't act so shocked when you were the one making goo-goo eyes at him on
the line for tickets. And don't even get me started on the way he goes out of
his way to make you laugh."
   "That's impossible. Alvaro, you've only just met us and don't know the full
story, so you should trust me on the fact that Draco and I could never work
out," Harry scrambled for words. Most of all, he scrambled for reasons why they
wouldn't work out when they didn't immediately pop into his head like he
thought they would. "He–I–He and I... We have too much history!"
   Alvaro cocked his head to the side. "Did he go out with a friend of yours?"
   "What? No, he hasn't," Harry assured Alvaro quickly. The thought of Draco
having been with any of Harry's friends would have made him sick for many
completely platonic and pure reasons. Completely.
   "Did he steal from you?"
   "That's even crazier. No, he has not–"
   "Fuck, did he kill your pet dog or burn down your house or something?"
Alvaro climbed in intensity. He needed to know what was keeping this couple
apart when they were so clearly great for one another.
   "No!" Harry replied loudly. "None of that!"
   "Then what did he do?"
   "He..." Harry realized in comparison to all the things Alvaro had mentioned
that this would sound utterly lame. "He was mean to me in high school. And to
my friends. He was mean to me and my friends."
   Alvaro slumped back in the airport bench, put his head in his hands, and
whispered "Dios mío." before Draco came back from the men's room.
   "Did I miss anything?" the blonde asked them both and resumed his
seat–though seemingly closer to Harry this time in Harry's own imagination.
   "No," they replied at once and Harry thanked Alvaro for the solidarity.
   There was no way that Harry was making ‘goo-goo’ eyes earlier. Was there?
No, it must have just been in Alvaro’s head. It had to be! The guy was in a
relationship with someone he had never met in person, so maybe he was simply
bad at picking up romantic social cues in person.
   Harry had to think it was that and ignore the fact that Alvaro lived around
more gay couples than Harry could count because if he didn’t—then that meant
Alvaro was right. That meant that maybe there was something there between Draco
and Harry, some sort of beast of unsaid longings growing between them, and
Harry really, really didn’t know how to deal with that.
   He’d obviously dated people before—but none of them were Draco Malfoy.
   How was one supposed to ask Draco Malfoy out on a date? Or kiss Draco
Malfoy? It was Draco Malfoy.
   Harry couldn’t wrap his mind around any of it, so he dug his headphones out
of his carry-on with the goal being to listen to music that didn’t make him
think of love, or relationships, or Draco.
   When Macklemore’s ‘Same Love’ came on in his ears he almost fell off the
bench.
xxx
   The three of them had survived the flight and a night’s stay at a
questionable hotel on the Jersey Shore only to find themselves restlessly
waiting on the strip of beach that Emmett had told them to meet at.
   Alvaro was tired but didn’t quite show it in the way that Draco and Harry
did. The two co-hosts were drowsy enough to sway with the sea wind and let
their eyes close under the warm sun.
   “Beach was a bad idea,” Harry murmured so only Draco could hear. There was
no need to shake Alvaro’s positive attitude in spite of the news that Emmett
had ‘something he needed to tell Alvaro’.
   “You’re not the one who had to put on a gallon’s-worth of sunscreen just to
come here, you bronzed bastard,” Draco murmured back, vicious in tongue even
when he was sleepy.
   Harry smirked. “That’s what took you so long in the bathroom this morning?”
   “Obviously. What did you think I was doing, jerking off? I’ll have you know
that sunscreen actually makes for terrible lube,” he grumbled.
   “It sounds like there’s a story there.”
   “Yes, but not a very good one,” admitted Draco. “Just another drunken
shenanigan after a night of drinking with Pansy and these twins—“
   “Oh my god. Do not tell me you had a threesome with twins. That’s insane
even for you!” Harry laughed. Ahead of them on the beach Alvaro turned around
for a moment and they remembered that they weren’t alone.
   Draco kept his voice hushed. The crew was trying to get dramatic shots and
Draco and Harry didn’t want to distract them. “I didn’t screw both of
them—don’t look so scandalized. There was a gay one and a straight one and
Pansy had the straight one in her grasp from the moment he looked at her. She’s
an evil temptress,” Draco remarked fondly.
   Harry never knew what it was like with Ron or Hermione to be single and out
with them on the look for a one-night stand. He never would know, either,
because Ron and Hermione’s relationship just kept getting stronger with time.
Sometimes he went drinking with Neville, but he could never envision them
trying to hook up with some fraternal twins. “Wow.”
   “Shut up,” said Draco. He opened his eyes for a moment to squint them and
saw something in the distance. “Shit.” He pressed the ‘record’ button on his
camera and motioned to the crew on top of the sand dunes to their left. “I
think this is it.”
   Draco and Harry stepped closer to Alvaro in order to flank him with support
and so Draco could get a better camera angle.
   The man coming down the beach’s features were becoming more and more
clear—and it was more and more clear that Emmett really was who he said he was.
The same defined jaw and even the same haircut from the photos were discernible
from a distance, and his physique seemed the same as well.
   Alvaro’s smile could not have been bigger.
   He waited for Emmett to walk up to him mostly because he was glued to the
spot in shock. When Emmett did finally reach him, Harry opened his mouth to say
something for the show’s sake and was cut off by the two men embracing in a
tight hug.
   Emmett gripped onto the other man and with a breathy laugh said, “You’re
shorter than me.”
   “Shut up,” Alvaro laughed into his shoulder. “The first thing you say to me
in person and it’s about my height? You’re such a little bitch. Where’s my
ring?” The words were harsh and frank but the tone he said them in was full of
joy.
   Harry looked to Draco triumphantly. Finally, they had a genuine couple be
the focus of the show if only for an episode after the deceit of previous
episodes.
   “Before the ring—” Emmett said, withdrawing from the embrace for a moment.
He noticed Draco and Harry standing there once again, having previously
forgotten them. “Oh, uh, hello. I’m Emmett.”
   “You are,” Harry nodded, his sappiness at an all-time high in Draco’s
opinion. “I’m Harry Potter and this is Draco Malfoy. We’re the ones you spoke
to on the phone.”
   Emmett shook hands with the both of them quickly while Alvaro looked to him
imploringly. “Well?” he asked Emmett.
   As a nervous tick Emmett put his hand on the back of his neck and rubbed
there as he looked down at the beach. “Well.” He took a deep breath. “You know
how I didn’t come out to my family until about a year ago?”
   “Yeah,” Alvaro nodded. Draco fixed the camera on the both of them, trying to
capture whatever was about to happen.
   “And you helped with that, and I want to thank you. You were, ah… You always
were there when I needed you,” Emmett rambled. “But before you I was really,
really closeted. I dated women all the time until something happened.”
   Harry felt more invested in the success of this relationship than was his
place. He stood tensely next to Alvaro and prayed it was something Alvaro could
forgive.
   “I was dating this one woman—my friend Kathy, I talk about her sometimes—and
she got pregnant.”
   Draco’s eyebrows could not have been any higher on his head. He knew that
there were gay men who had sex with women before they came out, but he hardly
ever heard of circumstances like this.
   “And that’s why I work so much, why I have almost no free time. Kathy knows
I’m gay and knows what we did was a mistake, but… I could never just leave my
kid. I want to support him even though I don’t love his mom,” he told Alvaro.
“He’s my kid and I love him. I just… I didn’t want it to ruin things between
you and I. I knew that a kid might scare you off.”
   Alvaro had gotten significantly paler in the face, even with his dark skin.
“I…”
   “I’m sorry.”
   “I don’t… I don’t really know what to say, Em.” Alvaro took a huge, shaky
breath. “You should have told me.”
   “I know.”
   Harry was literally holding his breath.
   “I need time to adjust to this,” said Alvaro as he tried to maintain a clear
head. Draco could see him trying to be logical, trying to be rational in the
face of something so emotionally tumultuous. “But… It doesn’t change the way I
feel for you. I hope you know that.”
   Harry finally remembered to breathe.
   “I love you,” Emmett blurted out. He’d been holding his breath as well.
   “And I love you.” Alvaro stepped forward not for a hug this time but for a
kiss. He knew it was naïve now to have wanted to marry someone without meeting
them, but he also knew that he cared about this man immensely.
   The kiss was sweet but didn’t last long—it was clear Emmett was
uncomfortable in front of the cameras after having revealed something so big.
   “We should go,” Harry said to Draco who was already thinking the same thing.
   They said their goodbyes to the couple knowing that they had more than
enough problems to work out on their own.
xxx
   “This is pathetic,” Draco sighed. They had arrived back at the hotel to
sleep off the jet-lag and other forms of travel-induced exhaustion that weighed
them down. “There are at least ten gay bars within walking distance of this
place.”
   “What would be even more pathetic would be falling asleep at the bar.”
   Draco sighed again, dramatic as ever. He was on his bed while Harry occupied
the other one. Neither of them were feeling productive enough to take off their
day-clothes so they just lay down in rumbled outfits.
   “We should film our reactions,” Harry said with no intention of getting up
to do that. “I need to gloat about this guy not being a Catfish.”
   “But he has a kid.”
   “Still not a Catfish. His pictures and profile and feelings were all real.”
   Draco turned his head to look at Harry’s body splayed out on the opposite
bed. “But he essentially left out enough information to trap Alvaro into step-
fatherhood.”
   “I don’t think his intention was to trap Alvaro,” Harry said, turning on his
right side to face Draco. “He loves him. He wasn’t honest and that was wrong,
but it wasn’t malicious.”
   “Still.”
   Harry didn’t know how to respond to that so he simply didn’t respond at all.
Instead, he blurted out a thought that had been stewing in his head since
Emmett first revealed his secret. “How could he have been so closeted that he
would lead a woman on into sex?”
   “Not everyone is as stupidly brave as you,” Draco shrugged. “Some people
really care about the way that others see them—especially close family.” The
‘you had no family to really come out to’ point was stuck somewhere in Draco’s
words.
   “But you cared about what your family thought of you and you came out in
high school anyway,” Harry protested. He had originally intended to use the
fact that Draco wasn’t brave as a counterpoint for the argument that coming out
was brave—but now that he had gotten to know Draco better he didn’t truly
consider him to be a coward.
   Draco laughed. “My family is… Different. On top of the fact that they knew
from the moment I could talk that I was gay, it was never a point of
contention. I care about what they think of mebecause they loved me enough to
deal with my sexuality.”
   “Oh.”
   Harry was used to seeing Draco talk on the phone with his parents in small
snippets before they took off airports or before they went to bed on days they
weren’t emotionally wiped, but he never had much insight on their relationship
before.
   It was nice to hear Draco talk about something he loved. Sure, watching
Draco complain and bitch and whine was amusing in its own way, but Draco looked
so much softer reclined on that hotel bed talking about his family.
   Alvaro’s words rung in Harry’s head—“How long have you two been dating?”—and
Harry realized he was lusting after Draco when he was talking about hisparents.
The whole thing was sick.
   “How did you come out to your aunt and uncle?” Draco asked. He knew it was a
touchy subject, but he also knew that anything to get Harry out of that weird,
broody trance he was currently in was worth it.
   He, perversely enough, wanted to hear Harry’s voice again. If Harry could
read minds he would know that Draco was similarly panicking over the thought of
being attracted to Harry and needed to find a conversational topic that would
kill the good mood.
   “It was never really a secret,” Harry admitted. “When I was seven or eight I
asked my uncle if two boys could get married because I had my first crush on a
boy.”
   “Who was it?” Draco demanded. He knew that Harry and he had both lived in
the school district since birth. It had to be someone from their grade.
   Harry let out a huff. He knew that telling Draco would result in some sort
of teasing but he also knew that Draco rarely gave up on things without an
answer. That’s why they hosted a show about internet mysteries. “It was Dean
Thomas.”
   “No way! Anartist. How Parisian of you,” Draco snorted. “Did he make you a
finger painting?”
   “He made me three, actually. I liked the one of the dog best,” recalled
Harry. “But when I asked my uncle about marrying a boy he became irate. He said
he knew that leaving me in the house to do chores while the rest of the
‘family’ went to church was bound to pervert me, so they tried to take me to
church one time after that and I think I wound up biting the priest. They never
made me go back again—said I was a ‘devil child’.”
   “You thinkyou bit the priest?” Draco had to be sure of the accuracy.
   “Vernon hit me pretty hard afterwards so it’s kind of splotchy,” Harry
admitted without much shame.
   Draco’s eyes were wider than saucers. “He hit you?” That was appalling to
Draco. Maybe it was his pampered upbringing or the way his friend Theo’s father
used to treat him, but hurting children set his blood on fire. It made him feel
dangerously angry and he didn’t even like kids that much.
   Harry watched Draco sit up and realized Draco probably wasn’t even aware
he’d moved. Draco looked too furious to notice. “Not often and not too hard. I
learned to run really quickly as a kid and he couldn’t keep up so he’d give up
if I bolted,” he minimized. “And not past the year where we started having to
change in a locker-room in gym. I think he figured at that point people would
notice.”
   “He hityou.”
   “Yeah…?” Harry knew it wasn’t normal or loving or at all a healthy behavior
and sometimes he got angry about it when he sometimes flinched when people
touched him, but it didn’t haunt his nightmares or anything.
   Draco was still upright on his bed, his tense posture having stuck with him
all through Harry’s explanation. “That’s so wrong. That’s so wrong, and
disgusting, and revolting, and—“
   “Draco, it’s fine,” Harry waived away quickly, feeling his face heat up
involuntarily. He hadn’t known that Draco would react so strongly to this. “I
know it’s wrong.”
   “And they probably still don’t. What’s their number? Did they change
addresses? We should press charges, sue them for all they—“
   Harry got up off his bed and maneuvered quickly to Draco’s, grabbing Draco’s
wrists gently but firmly to stop the frantic hand motions he was making.
“Draco—it’s fine. I’m fine. I don’t even think about it anymore.”
   A slow shudder of a sigh left Draco’s body. “You should have never had to
think about it at all. It should have never happened,” he murmured, looking
down into Harry’s eyes.
   “I know, you’re right,” Harry murmured back. If he wasn’t so busy thinking
about how maybe he had blocked out some of the memories, maybe it really was as
big a deal as Draco was making it out to be, he would have noticed how close
they were.
   Draco had tried to kill the mood and it had worked.
   But still, there was an undeniable growth of something between them. Draco
had become fiercely protective over Harry at a moment’s notice.
   The moment passed and Harry let go of Draco’s wrists—his skin was so
soft—and they decided they should film their reactions to get it over with. But
first, Draco would call and check in on his parents.
Chapter End Notes
     I'm not crying, you are.
***** Henry and Nina *****
Chapter Summary
     Tension.
Chapter Notes
     Prepare yourself for one of my favorite tropes of all time. Also, my
     recent re-watching of The Shining may have influenced this. A lot.
     Sorry again about the slowness of updates! I just moved into my dorm
     and I’m getting into the swing of being a college student.
Chapter 7: Henry and Nina
   “Hey,” said Harry, his face knit with concern as he clapped his hand on
Henry’s back.
   Henry’s gaze had been glazing over every time Harry tried to speak to him on
the way over, so he figured being out of the car could give him a physical
advantage on saying something that might actually get through to the other man.
   “No matter what happens we’ll find out who Nina is—and the world won’t end.
Even if she’s lying, you can learn from this and move on,” Harry tried. “Trust
us on that.”
   With the same sad look in his eyes but with a bit more cognizance behind
them, Henry nodded.
   Draco blamed Henry’s comatose state not only on the man’s weariness from the
flight—California to Delaware was a haul for all of them—but also on his
general lack of wit.
   Draco was surer than ever that their current case involved the work of not
one but two Catfish(es?), swapping off this man between one another for laughs.
The typing styles were different and both typing styles had told Henry
different lies about why they couldn’t meet.
   The fact that Henry never did any investigating on his own of this
phenomenon had Draco wondering how Henry hadn’t been Catfished before being as
vulnerable and gullible as he was.
   “Tomorrow we’ll go to the address she sent us,” Harry spoke calmly and
gently to Henry as if there really was just one woman on the other side of the
messages that Henry received. “And it’ll all be over with one way or another.”
   “Okay,” Henry finally spoke.
   “Okay!” Draco piped up and clapped his hands together in that way that
annoyed Harry so terribly. He always did it when he was planning to leave a
situation or trying to cut someone off.
   Even one of the camerapeople snickered at that. Draco’s larger-than-life
personality had quirks that were becoming obvious to all his coworkers. “Let’s
turn in, guys,” the cameraperson said and ended their recording. “That’s enough
travel and hotel footage for now.”
   Once all the cameras were turned off after that, Draco was free to grumble,
“And what a hotel it is…”
   Harry snorted, having to agree. The place that Kingsley booked for them was
somewhere beyond lackluster and had an eerily rustic decor. Sure, the people
pretending to be ‘Nina’ were living out in a pretty remote area along the coast
of Delaware, but there had to be better hotels in the area.
   This hotel wasn’t even a chain operation. It wasn’t any form of Hyatt,
Hilton, Sheraton, or Marriott or any of their smaller branches, and it didn’t
have anywhere near the crowd of one.
   It seemed like that could be a positive—a hotel with not too many guests
meant less noise and less bother—but it really just reminded Draco of some
horror movie. Less people around to hear him scream.
   The second they walked in, a stuffed owl mounted on the wall was there to
greet them with its beak open in a silent screech. There were plenty of animals
fallen victim to taxidermy around the lobby, but that owl in particular gave
Draco the creeps. He turned away from it with a shudder to see the crew
escorting Henry to his hotel room while Harry was grabbing the key for theirs
at the front desk.
   That was where Draco found the only creature in the room more disturbing
than that owl.
   Behind the oaken desk was a man with a sharp smile that Draco found
impossible to trust. His head was bald as a baby’s and combined with his neat
hotel uniform, he looked… Not right.
   “Room 394,” the man announced cheerily as he handed Harry the keys—real
keys, not like the magnetic cards they were used to. “One queen-sized bed and a
charming view of the forest.”
   “Two,” Harry corrected. Kingsley always said there would be two regardless
of the hotel.
   The man tilted his head to the side. “I’m afraid that’s incorrect. That room
only has one bed.”
   Draco stomped over to the counter. Harry was going to be too nice to this
man and he could tell that wasn’t going to work. “We need two,” Draco demanded.
“The network paid for two, and if you don’t comply I’ll be having a word with
the manager.”
   A little laugh escaped the man. “I am the manager. Mr. Lark of the Delaware
Hotel at your service.”
   “You’re not at my service if you don’t listen to me,” Draco retorted. The
sun had already set and the plane ride gave him a crick in his neck. “We need a
room with two beds.”
   “Well, I’m afraid I can’t simply—“
   “What, open up an empty room? There’s hardly anyone here and I assure you
that I can pay for the cost of the room upgrade out-of-pocket,” Draco snapped
before mumbling to himself that Shacklebolt would, of course, have to pay him
back.
   Mr. Lark shook his head. “There are no available rooms,” he told Draco in a
serious tone. “None are ready for guests.”
   “Look, I can just make the beds myself if that’s what you’re worried about,”
Harry cut in. He probably wouldn’t even mind sleeping on a bare mattress he was
so wiped. “I’m not going to write a bad Yelp review or anything.”
   Draco certainly would be writing one, though.
   “I can’t open any other rooms.” Mr. Lark said every word with great emphasis
and purpose.
   “Yes,” Draco hissed back. “You can. There is no law of physics preventing
you from reaching behind you with your grubby little fingers, picking any key
whatsoever of a room with two beds, and handing that key to us. As far as I’m
concerned, it is within your physical power unless you have a mental block on
how to do your damn job.”
   The expression on Mr. Lark’s face soured. “I am doing my job. You are the
one who ordered the room incorrectly.”
   “I didn’t even order the room! The network did!”
   “Well, well, well,” Mr. Lark dragged on with the same wide eyes as before.
He looked as if he’d suddenly figured Draco out or heard some secret about him.
“You celebrity types are just going to have to live like us common folk for a
day. No special treatment when your fancy talent agents order incorrectly.”
   The strength with which the man spoke about that disturbed Harry. His
intuition kicked in past his exhaustion. “The show hasn’t even aired yet,” he
told the man quickly. Harry put a firm hand on Draco’s arm. “We should just get
going to our room.”
   “What? You cannot seriously be giving in—“
   “Draco.” Harry yanked him away with the grip on his arm so they weren’t
facing the man behind the counter. He lowered his voice down to barely a
whisper, too. “Do you want to get murdered in your sleep by some pop-culture-
hating Delaware hillbilly tonight?”
   Draco turned for a moment to look at Mr. Lark who had thankfully not heard
any of Harry’s premonition as he was back to smiling with all of his teeth. He
turned back to Harry. “Not particularly. But aren’t you the risk-taker of the
two of us?” Why Harry was counseling to back down?
   “You want to know what else I am?” Harry asked rhetorically. Draco almost
answered with ‘an idiot’. “I’m the street-smart one of the two of us. Let’s go
to the room.” And beyond that, he really was tired. Draco only snored a little
bit and stopped if he pushed him on his side, so sleeping next to him was
better than not sleeping at all by a long shot.
   Draco looked over his shoulder again and Mr. Lark had not gotten any less
creepy. “Fine,” he grumbled to Harry. “But I get the left side.”
   “…Fine?” Harry wrote it off as another quirk of Draco’s he would never
understand.
   “Fine,” Draco grumbled again like a spoiled child who hadn’t gotten a toy
that day.
   Admittedly a private bed was less of a luxury than a toy, but Draco still
reminded Harry of his brat of a cousin sometimes with the way he talked. Not in
his actions, though. They were two entirely separate people in that department.
   The halls were lined with vertically-striped wallpaper that peeled at the
edges if one looked closely enough, and Draco had an eye for detail.
“Disgusting,” he said flatly. He was past arguing with Harry and the bug-eyed
hotel clerk and had resigned himself to complaining as he and Harry trudged
down the hall.
   Harry certainly couldn’t argue with that.
   They found their room at the end of the hall and to the left and much to
Draco’s dismay, the key fit in the lock. If it hadn’t, he could have complained
to the manager some more and demanded an upgrade based on that even though
there were ‘no other rooms available’.
   Once inside there wasn’t anything obviously wrong with the room. The bed did
have fresh linens and the floors weren’t covered in crumbs or anything, but
something was off about it all.
   Maybe it was the size of it that freaked Harry out for his hatred of small
spaces since the Dursleys shoved him in a cupboard for eleven years. Maybe it
was the sad, rustic color scheme that freaked Draco out for his hatred of tacky
interior design. But neither of them could put their finger on exactly why the
room made the hairs on the back of their neck stand up.
   Harry put down his travel suitcase by the far edge of the room so Draco
would have some space to throw his down, too. Harry slept in nightclothes while
Draco preferred to strip and pass out on the closest bed-like surface.
   A little chill ran through him at the thought of lying there next to Draco
in the dark when all he had on was a pair of tight Calvin Klein briefs. Harry
tried his hardest to ignore it.
   They had spent plane rides sleeping next to one another in the seats, Harry
tried to reason with himself, but there always was an arm rest (that Draco
hogged) between them.
   Draco had put his suitcase down and was undressing as he usually did when
the thought crossed his mind that yes, he would be near-naked in a bed next to
Harry Potter. He vowed to himself that he wouldn’t do anything desperate that
night, but it was a feeble vow.
   The atmosphere of the hotel was strange enough without begrudging sexual
tension between Draco and his co-host and he was tired. Harry was tired too, a
bit lonely, and altogether very weak when it came to attractive men.
   It was a recipe for disaster.
   The both of them had grown closer over filming, yes, but the both of them
also held their doubts.
   Harry put on his thin white tank and cotton pyjama pants and hopped into the
bed first to avoid the temptation that would be Draco sitting reclined, looking
entirely gorgeous. Harry screwed his eyes tight shut, put his glasses on the
bedside table, but even then he saw Draco. Dammit.
   “I should have let the clerk murder us,” he said out loud when it should
have been a thought.
   Draco laughed, both shocking and exciting Harry. “But then who would solve
the Catfish mysteries of the world?” he said dismissively, knowing Harry was
talking about their sleeping situation.
   Draco, per usual, was all talk. His confidence in the evening not dissolving
into something they’d both regret was feigned. Pretending that he wasn’t at all
short of breath, he reached for light switch and the room went dark.
   After some fumbling, Draco found his side of the bed—the left one, as
requested—and quickly drew the comforter over himself.
   With a sigh, Harry yanked some of the comforter back as Draco had taken far,
far too much of it.
   “Hey!” Draco pulled the comforter back again and a handful of sheets with
it.
   Harry pulled back. “You’re taking too much.”
   “I’m cold,” Draco defended. “And this thing is ratty as it is.” This time
when he pulled back Harry’s strong grip had him stuck.
   “Have you ever considered that maybe I’m cold too?” Harry asked sharply.
“Just stay on your side with half of the damn comforter like a person with some
sort of concept of sharing.”
   “You took way more than your half.”
   “I did not! This perfectly in half!”
   The two both gave a sharp pull at once in their opposite directions. The
fabric stretched before springing them towards one another so their backs
collided.
   “Ouch,” Draco grumbled, fumbling his hand back to rub where Harry’s shoulder
hit him. His knuckles brushed against Harry’s back in the process, giving Harry
a rather embarrassing shiver. “Quit being dramatic,” Draco said as if Harry’s
shiver was from the cold.
   That made Harry bolt right up in the bed and turn to the lump that was Draco
in the darkness. “I’m being dramatic? You—How can you—! I am not the dramatic
one!”
   “Your reaction to that says otherwise.”
   “You,” Harry began. Draco, Draco, Draco. “You—you little—you! You make me
crazy! You make me dramatic!”
   The covers shifted and Harry could see the faint outline of Draco’s hair as
he turned to him. “You were crazy to begin with,” he informed him seriously.
   Harry became hyper-aware of his own shaky breathing. “Not like this.” It was
Draco wherever he turned and whenever he closed his eyes. All he could see was
this snotty, beautiful, wonderful jerk.
   Another thought popped up in Harry’s mind as a clear sign his subconscious
was on a mission to sabotage him. He thought of how he missed having a man on
top of him, how good it felt to succumb to something physical. He thought of
how the weight of a man pressed up against him was never crushing—just a firm
pressure keeping him down and grounded.
   He could have slapped himself for being stupid enough to think of it while
being in bed with Draco Malfoy, but instead he kept very still.
   He could hear Draco swallow in the dark and wanted to take what he’d said
back—let Draco take all the covers he needed and sleep cold and safe in his
solitude. Draco had other plans.
   Draco’s hand was on his shoulder in an instant. His long fingers carefully
draped themselves on his skin like a test to see if Harry would shake them off.
Harry didn’t shake them off.
   The world grew very small and very quiet.
   The only real sound Harry could hear was the soft, wet parting of Draco’s
lips as they closed around his.
   Harry let his eyes flutter shut. Draco’s mouth was so warm and his head swam
as he leaned into that warmth, letting it send chills down his spine.
   As Draco’s grip on him grew more confident, Harry grabbed blindly in the
darkness for the other man. His hand settled on Draco’s bare waist and he let
out an embarrassingly content sigh into their kiss over how damn great that
felt.
   Draco, damn him, laughed against his lips and moved closer.
   Harry pressed his palm flat against Draco’s smooth skin and decided that if
Draco would laugh he would at least have his fill. His hand moved past Draco’s
surprisingly tight core and up to his chest.
   The feeling of Draco leaning in to his touches was so much better than it
had been in Harry’s imagination. And oh, how he had imagined it.
   As their lips moved together, Draco took it upon himself to get even closer
to Harry. He swung a leg over him in the dark, comforter bunching up around
them, and settled into Harry’s lap.
   Harry’s brain short-circuited. There was a gorgeous, half-naked man pressing
his groin right against Harry’s and it made him feel reckless. All thoughts of
resistance were long-dead.
   He let his mouth open, allowing Draco to swirl his tongue past his teeth.
   Almost frantically, Harry moved his tongue to meet Draco’s and wherever they
brushed together sparks flew.
   “Off,” Draco managed through their kiss, and Harry’s first and most pathetic
thought was no, please, don’t get off me. “Your shirt.”Oh.
   Harry had to pull back from their kiss to remove the tank, but he hardly
felt the absence as Draco’s hands pawed at any and all of the skin Harry
revealed. It was dark, and Draco couldn’t see much, but what he was feeling was
more than enough.
   Harry was the slightly more muscular of the two, which Draco was pleased to
discover upon groping the curve of his pectorals.
   Draco groaned. It didn’t even matter what a terrible idea sex with Harry
Potter was, he was absolutely eating it up. Harry was eager beneath him and his
breath was sinfully hot as it came out in puffs in Draco’s mouth when they
reconnected their frantic kisses.
   And Harry—so adventurous, so brave—rutted his hips up against Draco’s.
   “Fuck,” Draco rasped and pushed back down so he could feel that bolt of
pleasure hit his stomach again.
   Arms wrapped tightly around one another, they rocked in the bed as it
creaked and groaned beneath them. It wasn’t ideal, but Draco figured they could
find a softer bed later. Later? Would there be a later? Draco didn’t want to
think like that. He wanted to get off.
   Harry seemed to have the same idea. He’d begun pushing his pyjama pants
down, and Draco fumbled in the dark to help them off of his legs.
   Draco rested his forehead against Harry’s as he ghosted his hand up the
inside of his leg and to the bulge in his underwear. Draco could feel that
Harry was not only hard and ready, but his size was nothing to scoff at.
   “You want this?” Draco asked teasingly because he couldn’t help being a git
and because he genuinely needed to know. Things were moving fast enough to
create a regrettable evening if Draco didn’t check in.
   Harry put a curve in his back and moved his groin up into Draco’s hand.
“Yes, yes, you bastard. You have no idea how long I’ve wanted this.” And how
long he’d denied wanting it, too.
   A nervous laugh left Draco’s mouth, betraying his air of confidence. He’d
wanted this and had been in denial, too. He’d dreamed of it and felt guilty for
it and everything. “Okay. Okay, let me—“ Draco’s hand moved up to the waistband
of Harry’s boxers and pulled down.
   Harry’s hands flew to help him, and soon enough Harry could kick his boxers
off of his ankles and lay back with his erection no longer constricted by
fabric. Draco wished that he had some magical power to turn the lights on or
something. He wanted to see Harry all laid out, hot, and bothered. He settled
for wrapping his hand around his cock.
   “Oh,” Harry let out. His length throbbed at the touch, and his thoughts fell
to incoherency immediately.
   Draco smirked, quite pleased with himself. Perversely, he thought of how
proud his younger self would be of him, pinning The Great Harry Potter to a bed
and making him whine like a girl with a few touches.
   He stroked Harry from base to tip, sure to get every last inch of him in on
the friction.
   “Draco,” Harry shuddered, and oh, how wonderful his name sounded on Harry’s
lips. “Draco.”
   While Draco continued his languid strokes, Harry’s lack of clear speech
hardly affected what his hands would do. He cupped Draco’s erection in his
underwear, squeezing tightly enough to make Draco’s breath hitch.
   Harry pushed Draco’s briefs down feverishly, his hands warm and his
breathing uneven as he closed his fist around Draco’s length.
   “Yes,” Draco hissed. “Yes, that’s it—“ He was cut off by a moan when Harry
circled his thumb around the tip, spreading the precome there and letting it
dribble down the sides of Draco’s thick cock.
   Draco’s pace sped up, creating greater and faster strokes around Harry, his
whole arm involved in the effort.
   In anticipation of what was to come Harry’s toes curled under. Still, he
wanted to last longer than that for Draco’s sake. Harry felt he had to prove
his prowess to Draco, who from his stories, had been with quite a few men.
“Here,” Harry said between pants. “Give me.”
   He pulled Draco body so close that the only way they could manage it was to
press their cheeks together, and pulled Draco’s hand off of his cock. Making
sure they missed the friction for only a moment, Harry pressed their sides of
their members together and widened his grip to stroke them in tandem.
   Harry never knew a moan like that could come out of Draco Malfoy.
   Draco closed his hand around Harry’s to help him move up and down around the
both of them, his hips thrusting into the grip blindly alongside Harry.
   Feeling Draco’s cock and his move together was almost too much for Harry. He
only lasted a few more thrusts up before he cried out Draco’s name, his nails
digging into Draco’s soft skin.
   It was only when Harry was coming down from his high—and oh, what a high it
was. His whole body was warm and charged with electricity that danced from limb
to limb—that he realized Draco had come, too—and he’d yelled Harry’s name.
   As completely ridiculous as it was, Harry felt rather proud of himself. He’d
brought the gorgeous man on top of him to orgasm.
   And they were a sticky, sweaty mess, their breathing still uneven. Draco
kissed Harry’s lips anyway, ignoring how his come had covered his chest.
   If Harry had been able to think beyond oh my god, oh my god, he’s so good at
this, he’s so pretty, his hair is so soft, his lips are like candy, then he
would have had one burning question.
   What now?
xxx
   Back in the lobby on the far side of the Delaware Hotel, ‘Mr. Lark’ paid the
real receptionist his bribe in cold, hard cash.
   “That’s all five hundred,” he said, his cheery disposition gone. “Now, you
know my boss would be very cross if you were to inform the two men here that I
was never really their clerk.”
   The real receptionist was a stout man of fifty with dark skin. He could care
less about what some MTV crew really wanted when they were paying him so much
to ‘step out’ for fifteen minutes while one of their actors talked to the hosts
of some show. “My lips are sealed. You have a good night, now.”
   ‘Mr. Lark’ nodded his goodbye, pulling out his cellphone as he exited the
building. The place was so damn creepy, but it at least gave him the
inspiration for the glass-eyed character he’d played.
   He dialed his boss’ number and only had to wait one ring before he picked
up.
   “Did it work?” Kingsley Shacklebolt asked.
   “’Course it worked. They’re in one bed. Is MTV really so desperate on saving
on hotel fees?”
   “No,” Kingsley said, stirring his glass of gin back in his penthouse. “But
every show needs a little… tension.”
***** Vera and Wesley *****
Chapter Notes
     Hey, everyone! Thank you for the likes, favorites, reviews, and
     follows. Seriously, you’re all the greatest. I’m at college now and
     I’m finally happy for the first time in a long time and I wish all
     that happiness to you guys. Seeing little alerts every day that you
     all enjoy my story really makes me feel like I’m doing something
     right. Also, kick my ass if I don’t write any faster on the next
     chapters—I’m being way too lazy for you lovelies. TW for brief
     mentions of stalking in a relationship, general unhealthiness (not
     Drarry, of course).
Chapter 8: Vera and Wesley
   Nina wasn’t Nina. It wasn’t at all a terrible surprise to Draco or Harry,
but it was to the poor loser who’d fallen for the wiles of two sisters having
fun on the other side of a keyboard.
   Henry had held back tears in front of the camera when the sisters quietly
admitted it was all a joke, and it was all very repressed and masculine. At
least that was what Draco called it as they walked back to the network car
after filming was over. Harry had just been holding the camera and letting
Draco do the talking.
   Ever since Harry had woken up in a hotel bed next to a naked, sated Draco
Malfoy, the online misadventures of the general public paled in comparison.
Harry felt guilty for thinking so as he’d taken the job in an effort to make
people happy and unite them with their distant loves, but he had hooked up with
Draco Malfoy.
   The world hadn’t imploded or exploded as Harry thought it would should ever
such a thing occur, but it did put him on edge.
   “Shotgun,” Draco called, hopping in the passenger’s seat.
   The blonde was similarly nervous, but distraction was a technique that
seemed to fit him well. If he worked hard, if he asked all of the right
questions to the Catfish(es), then he could forget about how Harry whimpered
out his name in the night.
   Draco, even though trained from birth to steel himself and hide his
emotions, was never very good at it. Eventually distractions would run out and
he would be stuck in a car ride back to a shared hotel room in complete silence
with the man whose hand he’d been thrusting into just a sunrise ago.
   The silence was deafening. The only voice to speak on the way back to the
hotel was the GPS, and Draco once again that day forgot he was on television
and was supposed to be exchanging witty banter with his cohost to make the show
interesting, not because he had a hard-on for him.
   But the cameras created an even greater problem.
   Draco couldn’t exactly discuss his hard-on for Harry James Potter only to
have it broadcasted on MTV to millions of teenagers who would doubtlessly
slander him on the web for it. Those who didn’t slander him would get far too
into it, and fan-art and erotic stories would pop up like weeds between the
cracks of the internet.
   Hell, Draco couldn’t discuss his hard-ons or feelings for anyone at any time
terribly well at all.
   If the feelings weren’t returned, if it had just been a shitty decision that
came from Harry’s loneliness, then Draco would be crushed. Draco wasn’t used to
rejection because he was afraid of it, and therefore never left himself open
and vulnerable to its sting.
   Draco would maintain a strict distance from a man until that man proved his
affections clearly enough for Draco’s taste.
   There would have to be a space with no cameras, like their hotel room at
night, to talk themselves into some sort of compromise, for Draco to even
attempt such a conversation.
   Night was far away, however, and they had filming to get done.
   First up on their agenda was picking another Catfish case to pursue.
   They arrived back in their creepy hotel room in the same tense silence that
followed them throughout the beginning of the day. The equally-creepy clerk
wasn’t behind the counter when they arrived, and somehow that made Draco feel a
bit better.
   “Um,” Harry made like he was about to start some big, heartfelt speech. “I—“
   “I’m using my laptop this time. Yours is slow as hell,” Draco decided. The
door to their room was sealed behind them and while no cameras were currently
on, the sooner they shot themselves picking the next Catfish the sooner they
could get in a plane and continue to not speak to each other.
   Harry’s heart was beating like a deer running from a hunter. Draco had to
speak to him. He had to know what was going on in Draco’s head before the
anticipation killed him.
   Harry wasn’t the sort to sleep with people he didn’t see a relationship
forming with, and if Draco had just been scratching an itch it would devastate
him. Harry was the brave one, though, and he had to face possible devastation
in order to gain possible bliss.
   “I wanted to talk to you about—“
   “Rolling,” Draco informed Harry.
   “Uh,” Harry stuttered again. He was doing a lot of that lately.
   “Welcome back,” Draco said into the camera with his perfect, celebrity
smile. “I’m Draco, this is my cohost Harry, and we have a wild one for you
today. Well, once we pick it.” Draco had planned out each little thing he would
say already, feigning surprise or little twists in his voice. It was disturbing
how good he was at it. “Well, once Harry picks it.”
   Draco looked at Harry with those big, silver eyes and Harry caved. He would
hop on Draco’s train to Denial Central any day when he looked at him like that.
   “Thank you,” Harry replied with a smile and sat down next to Draco on the
bed. The bed they’re jerked each other off on. Harry tried not to think about
that, and put Draco’s laptop at a comfortable typing distance to check the
Catfish emails.
   Draco shrugged. “Ladies first.”
   “You’re insufferable,” Harry said for the millionth time in his life and
looked at Draco instead of the camera in his hand. Fucking Draco.
   “I’m chivalrous. I thought you loved chivalry,” Draco teased. Was flirting
out of the question when they were both ignoring the fact that they’d had sex?
Apparently not.
   Harry was hyperaware of the way his breath felt cold in his throat when
Draco said that. “Shut up,” he replied weakly. He had no more ammunition; he
was a dead man walking and Draco The Conqueror didn’t seem like the sort to go
easy on captured enemy troops.
   Harry had to soldier on for the cameras, though.
   “Here’s an interesting one: ‘Dreams Turned to Nightmares’.” Harry clicked to
open the email. “’Dear MTV, my story is not really typical. From what I’ve seen
on the forums about this show, almost everyone is in love with the person they
met online. I used to be, but not anymore.’”
   “Then why even email us?” Draco scoffed, ready to reach over Harry’s lap and
close the tab for him.
   “Listen,” Harry chastised Draco. For someone who liked to pretend he was
horribly regal, Draco really was an impatient man. “’I met Vera on a forum
about theories on ‘The Shining’. Vera was so much fun to talk to at first. We’d
chat for hours about movies and TV shows we both liked. We were boyfriend and
girlfriend for a few months, but as time went on Vera got more and more
possessive. She got angry whenever I posted pictures of me with friends who are
girls.’”
   Out of impatience, Draco had read the rest of the email over Harry’s
shoulder as he narrated for the camera. What was at the end of the email made
him swallow his words from before. This case really was different from the
others.
   “’After weeks of her accusing me of cheating on her when I wasn’t, I got
sick of it all and broke up with her. Since my birthday was at the beginning of
the relationship, I gave her my address to send a card. And I guess now’s a
good time to mention we only live an hour’s drive away. I live in south Arizona
and she lives in Kansas. After I ended things with her, weird things started
happening around my house.”
   Draco held his breath. Hearing Harry read what was going on aloud made him
even tenser about it.
   “’I’ve gotten graffiti marks on my front door,” Harry read on. “’And
sometimes I swear someone is watching me. I don’t know if Vera even looks like
her profile picture, but whoever has been vandalizing my house hasn’t been
caught on camera. It might not be her, but I have a hunch that it is. Please,
help me find her so I can talk to her about this and ask her to stop. Thanks,
Wesley’.”
   “Shit,” Draco said, releasing his tension in his expletive. They’d have to
bleep that out on the show.
   “This is a dark one,” Harry nodded in agreement. “I think we should take it,
though.”
   “You’re too brave for your own good. I’ve feared my own safety on one of
these cases before, so this would be the first. What if this ‘Vera’ comes after
us since we’re helping Wesley?”
   “That’s all the more reason to help him. Wesley could be in danger and maybe
Vera needs some kind of professional help that we can secure through the
network. Maybe she just needs to talk to someone,” offered Harry.
   “’Talking to someone’ can’t cure crazy,” Draco snorted.
   “But it can help two people work things out in a relationship.”
   “They’re not even in a relationship anymore. Talking can’t help them; they
just need to forget and move on.”
   Harry spoke with a force that made it clear that this conversation was not
just about Vera and Wesley. “They need to talk. If they don’t talk, the gap of
misunderstanding will only grow wider. You can’t forget things like this.”
   “Whatever,” Draco mumbled. He knew where the conversation could go—in front
of the cameras, of all places—if he didn’t derail it. “We’ll take the case and
get on the next plane to middle-of-nowhere Arizona. I’m going to go take a
shower before we Skype this guy.”
   Draco had bolted all the way to the bathroom before Harry could even turn
the camera off.
xxx
   “Thank you,” Wesley said again, his face framed by his poor-quality webcam.
“She always said she couldn’t chat on camera, but I’ve heard her voice on the
phone, ah, I’m rambling. I thought this was a hopeless cause, is all.
Just—thank you. I can’t wait until this is all over.”
   “We’re happy to help,” Harry nodded, holding his camera steady on the
computer screen while someone from the crew got his and Draco’s reactions.
“We’ll find who Vera is and get her to stop.”
   If Draco were feeling more himself he would have chastised Harry for making
a promise that he wasn’t sure they could keep. The ‘we’ factor in that sentence
made Draco uncomfortably responsible.
   After their typical on-camera goodbyes and off-camera discussions of
paperwork Wesley needed to sign, the call with the sad, sunken-eyed graduate
student was over.
   “I wonder why he didn’t go to the police,” Draco commented after the call.
With all the talk of business it had slipped his mind that he was supposed to
be icing Harry out.
   “Not everyone trusts the police—and for good reason. Plus, they probably
would have been sexist about the whole thing in thinking that women can’t be
predators or making light of the situation.”
   “You sound like Granger,” replied Draco not as an insult but as an
observation.
   “She is one of my best friends, yes.” Because of that, Harry was constantly
riding the tide of third-wave feminism and kept up to date on all of the human
rights crises in the world. “And she’s always right.”
   Draco snorted, but he wasn’t about to disagree. Granger was an astute woman
back in school and was probably more intelligent than Draco and Harry combined
with whatever degree she got at whatever college, as little as Draco liked to
admit that. “Where did Wesley say he lived?”
   “Prescott, Arizona. Listen, Draco—“
   “I’ll call Kingsley and tell him to book the flight.” Not allowing for any
protest from his cohost, Draco bounded out of the hotel room.
   As he’d been spending the last couple of months cooped up in hotels, Draco
had discovered a few things that most shared. There was almost always a vending
machine at the end of each hall, and there was almost always some sort of
conference room on the first floor that was empty.
   The first time that Draco had seen Harry as an adult was in one of those
rooms. Draco felt tempted to smash his head against a wall for thinking such
treacherous thoughts.
   The conference rooms provided a modest amount of privacy, and usually had
spinning chairs. Like every other hyperactive white boy, Dracoloved spinning
chairs. He could fidget with them for hours, and he often did. With his phone
in one hand he could spin and spin and spin until the lights in the room
blurred. It was how he preferred to talk on the phone, and in school he used to
put his laptop on his knees and spin to do homework.
   Draco’s mother, of course, had gotten him a top-of-the-line chair with
lumbar support and a massage cover strapped to it, but the two-bit chairs at
The Delaware Hotel would have to do.
   He plopped down in one and took a test spin, trying to shake Harry Potter
out of his brain before calling Kingsley.
   That concerned look in Harry’s eyes, the big talk he wanted to have, and the
way he was trying to squeeze it out all day signaled danger to Draco. Harry was
going to tell him it had been a mistake, wasn’t he?
   Draco’s head hurt. He could just see Harry looking down to him and talking
with a honey-coated condescension to tell him that it was ‘better if they were
just friends’.
   Were they even friends to begin with? What did someone call the person they
flirted with, bickered with, wished better for, and had once slept with? Draco
avoided the phrase ‘cared about’ because if he cared then he could be hurt.
   Giving the same pain to countless men in his past was one thing, but Draco
could really not take what he dished out.
   Draco pushed the corner of the conference room table with his foot to make
his chair spin again.
   As the world went fuzzy around the edges, Draco lifted up his phone as a
beacon of clarity and went to Kingsley’s contact information. If he got this
over with, perhaps he could spin the chair so fast it would take off like a
helicopter and he could fly far, far away.
   “Draco,” Kingsley greeted him warmly, having expected a call from him all
day.
   “I know we’re a bit behind filming schedule, but—“
   Kingsley hushed him. It made Draco feel like a child. “Don’t you worry about
that, Draco. I’m just glad that you’ve called. I know this job doesn’t lend
itself to much off-time, so I can imagine how the schedule can be maddening.”
   “Er, sort of?” Draco was caught off-guard. What was wrong with Kingsley?
“Are you sick? ‘Cause I could just call an intern to schedule the flight.”
   “No, no, I’m fine,” Kingsley amended quickly. “I just wanted to ask how you
are doing. How you and Harry are doing.”
   Draco couldn’t help the bitter laugh that pushed its way out of him. “Great.
We’re just great. Are you sure you’re okay?” Where was the brutal honesty?
Where was the scathing professionalism? Kingsley was either violently ill or he
was up to something.
   Draco cleared his throat and made his suspicion clear in his voice. “What
exactly do you want?”
   “An update on how you’re doing. How’s filming? What’s it like meeting these
desperate fools? How’s Harry?” The emphasis that Kingsley put on the last
question made it clear that he only wanted an answer to that one.
   Realization crept up Draco’s neck like a spider. His mouth was dry for a
moment. “Kingsley.”
   “Yes, Draco?”
   “There was an error with the hotel room you booked here.”
   From his office on the other side of the country, Kingsley frowned. So much
for Draco being the easy one to manipulate with all of his emotional hysterics.
Damn. “Really?”
   “You only got one bed for two people,” Draco edged in carefully.
   “Well, I’ll talk with the board of the show about that. That’s certainly not
what the network ordered for you.” Kingsley tried one last time. “It won’t
happen again, but did you two work it out?”
   Draco narrowed his eyes. “Of course. Harry slept on the floor,” he lied, his
tongue feeling sharp in his mouth. “Now for the next case we need a flight to
Prescott, Arizona and a hotel. With two beds. Can you, the board, and the
network all manage that?”
   “There’s no need to be curt, Draco,” Kingsley couldn’t help but fight back.
His voice had returned to its usual gravelly sternness. “Consider it done.”
   “Good.” The call ended with a click from Kingsley’s end.
   The creature of realization that had crawled up Draco’s shoulder had gone
feral with rage. It was Kingsley’s plan the whole time.
   He stopped his spinning chair and forgot the dizziness that came along with
that. Draco struggled against his own stumbling as he made his way back to the
room in a tornado of anger. He smashed his key card into the hotel door and
threw it open.
   “That rat bastard!”
   Shocked by the entrance, Harry’s head snapped to attention. He’d been busy
fretting on the edge of the bed before Draco burst in, and had been planning to
fret and anguish for several more hours before seeing Draco again. “What—?”
   “That,” Draco repeated, feeling like he was going to heave. The door slammed
shut behind him. “Bastard. It was his plan. This was all his plan.”
   Harry rushed to Draco’s side at an embarrassingly quick pace. “Who? What’s
going on? What happened with Kingsley?”
   With wild eyes, Draco turned to Harry. “Kingsley got one bed on purpose.”
   “What—? Draco, what could he possibly have gained from that?”
   “It’s not about gain! It’s abouttelevision!” Draco’s voice rose in volume
and intensity. “The skeptic and the believer trope. I can’t believe I didn’t
see it before! He’s made us Mulder and Scully, chasing down freaks and oddities
to the ends of the country!”
   “Draco,” Harry said slowly, trying to be patient with him. “Did Kingsley say
he got one bed on purpose?”
   “No, no, of course not. He’d never admit to it—that would spoil his plans.
It was in his voice, Harry. His fucking voice showed it all. Trust me. Haven’t
I always known when people are bullshitting us?”
   Harry huffed. “Of course I trust you, but you’ve only found bullshit in the
past before because you’ve been looking for it! You always expect the worst.”
   “Because the worst is always there! Our producer lured us into fucking!”
Draco shouted. Draco only realized what he was saying as it left his lips.
   “So you have no ownership in that, hm?” Harry questioned. His whole frame
bristled with anger.
   “No, that’s not what I meant.”
   Harry shook his head and rubbed his temples in frustration. “You make me—“
   “—crazy, I know,” Draco sighed. “I… I’m sorry.”
   “So it was just you being bored? And your boredom was planned by Kingsley?”
Harry murmured, wounded. Did even Kingsley know Harry would be putty in Draco’s
dexterous hands?
   “No,” Draco replied quickly. “No, no—“
   “Then what the fuck are you doing, Draco?”
   “What the fuck are youdoing?” Draco countered, unable to help himself in the
heat of their bickering. His need to be right and get the last word was
overpowering.
   Draco was a mix of at the very least twelve conflicting desires, and Harry
seemed to be composed of the same confusion. “What are we doing?” Harry
demanded and quickly followed it up. “Don’t answer that. I can’t stand talking
in circles like this. Look—regardless of whatever Kingsley’s done here—do you
want to be with me?” He threw all his cards down on the gamble.
   A moment of hesitation from Draco was all it took to cave Harry’s chest in.
He let out all of his air and anger, and with that went the color in his face.
   “Yes,” Draco piped up, finally finding his voice.
   All of the life flowed back into Harry with a hint of bitterness that it
took so long for Draco to come to his damned senses. “Really?”
   “Yes, really,” Draco grumbled like a child being forced to share his
feelings for the first time. “I’ve come to see that you’re not as horrible as I
used to think you were.”
   “Gee, you really are a charmer,” Harry replied flatly. Why was he attracted
to Draco again?
   Draco sighed and positioned his hands in Harry’s hair in a sort of awkward
fashion, not quite used to touching him yet. Once he found a good grip, Draco
could rub his thumbs along the shells of Harry’s ears. Harry was reminded why
he attracted to Draco when he caught a whiff of the vanilla-clean scent that
always seemed to roll off of Draco. “I’m sorry. Again,” he sighed. “But I think
it’s understandable that I’m pissed after having been toyed with for the
purpose of television.”
   “Well,” Harry replied, putting his hands on Draco’s waist. He felt warm
there, and strong. “I seem to recall from high school that you used to be able
to concoct quite a revenge scheme when someone wronged you.”
   “Hm.” Draco’s lips spread into a smile. “Yes, yes I could.” He kissed Harry
as if to confirm that statement. “So revenge it’ll be.”
   Harry would have pitied the utter hell that was coming Kingsley’s way, but
his lips had found Draco’s again. The planning would come later.
xxx
   What would have been a grueling cross-country flight had actually turned out
to be Draco and Harry’s best yet. They talked the whole way there, and even
though Harry let Draco have the window seat, Draco didn’t turn away from him
once.
   Harry taught Draco a palm-reading technique that their high school
psychology teacher Dr. Trelawney had shown him after class once. Draco laughed
and denounced them both as insane, but kept his hand in Harry’s for the rest of
the flight. Apparently, Draco had a long ‘love line’. He made dick jokes for a
solid five minutes after that, and Harry couldn’t exactly disagree with how
proud Draco was of his endowment.
   The case upon arriving in Arizona, however, was anything but enjoyable.
   The only moments of true clarity amongst the muddled relationship between
Wesley and Vera, who later turned out to be a frequent customer of the ice
cream stand Wesley worked at, were in the moments Draco and Harry planned while
off-camera.
   Their next booked hotel room had two beds, so they used one to lay out
charts and schematics.
   Even though through Kingsley’s meddling they’d found each other, their
producer wasn’t getting off of the hook so easily.
  
***** Viewing Party *****
Chapter Notes
     College has been so insane and I haven’t gotten a moment to write.
     Seriously though, kick my ass for taking this long. Thanks again to
     all of you lovely, lovely readers who put up with my shit.
Chapter 9: Viewing Party
   Harry knocked on Draco’s door with his free hand.
   It was odd to not sleep in the same room as Draco every night once filming
ended. Harry had grown so accustomed to Draco’s boisterous personality filling
up a room that returning to his apartment seemed wrong. It was quieter than
ever.
   There was nobody there to complain to but the walls and ceiling, and when
Harry rolled over in his bed there was nobody to reach out and touch.
   Sure, Draco was over Harry’s apartment quite frequently and vice versa, but
Harry missed him more and more each time they were apart. Draco called him a
sap for it, but smiled like he agreed.
   One of the unforeseen benefits to working in television, other than falling
for one’s co-host, was the fact that after filming they had months at a time to
relax. The show had been in post-production and edited half to death while they
lounged around and spent the first of their many royalty checks.
   But even post-production came to an end. In Harry’s hand was the finished
product—season one of MTV’s ‘Catfish’ starring Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter.
   Everyone involved in shooting was given an advanced copy of all the episodes
while the public would watch the first episode of the season that evening on
television.
   Draco and Harry were wrapped up in getting commercial footage and voice-
overs for the past week so that the show would actually garner an audience, and
from the online buzz, it seemed that people liked the concept.
   Time would only tell what their ratings and viewership would be, though.
Draco and Harry had agreed that they didn’t really care about that, and that
the finished product of their weird adventure was reward enough, but both hoped
for a renewal of the show without getting their hopes up too high.
   The door to Draco’s apartment opened. His face lit up on seeing Harry, and
stepped back to usher him in quickly. “Hey. You have the—?”
   “Yup,” Harry nodded. Draco didn’t even have to finish his sentence for Harry
to know what he meant. Their nonverbal communication had improved far beyond
what it was during the show, and there were several reasons for that.
   The most important reason was that they had gotten to know each other’s
bodies very, very well.
   Draco gave Harry a kiss and closed the door behind him.
   “I’ve got pita chips, wine, that disgusting cheese puff thingyou like…”
Draco listed, motioning to the display of booze and food on his coffee table.
   “I know you love Cheetos,” Harry insisted. “Don’t lie to me.” He knew
Draco’s apartment very well, too, and made himself at home by plopping down on
Draco’s couch.
   The apartment was exactly what Harry expected on his first time visiting.
Expensive white drapes, smooth leather couches, and tastefully-placed accent
pillows.
   “You’re so… Gay,” Harry said, shaking his head when he first saw the layout.
   “Says the man who had my dick inside him last night.”
   It was comfortable for all of its cold elegance, and Draco’s Egyptian cotton
sheets were always warm when Harry slept in them.
   Draco picked up the DVD case and popped it open. It was unmarked, and they
were contractually obligated not to show it to anyone who wasn’t involved in
production. Draco would probably show it to Pansy and Theo later anyway just as
Harry would show it to Ron and Hermione.
   “There’s something I should say before we watch this.” Draco’s voice was
deadly serious. “I’ve been Catfishing you the entire time. I’m a sixty year-old
man from Michigan who just needed to feel young again.”
   Harry’s laugh in response was full and loud. “Well, then I should tell you
that I’m really aseventy year-old man from Alaska who’s been writing to you
after each of my murders. That’s the only time I can feel arousal.”
   “Now that’s a lie,” Draco laughed after popping the DVD in his player. His
wide-screen TV with game consoles and players and speakers coming out of every
orifice was his pride and joy, and Draco sincerely hoped the resolution made
him look handsome on television. “Because you’ll get aroused by almost
anything.”
   “Is that a complaint I hear?”
   “Hardly. I love that you’re easy,” Draco responded with a wry smile. He
walked back towards the couch and fit himself comfortably in Harry’s arms when
he reclined.
   Harry adjusted to finally having Draco close to him again, breathing in his
scent and wrapping his arms around him. He kissed the back of Draco’s neck and
felt the fine hairs there.
   “Are you ready?” Harry questioned.
   “Wait.”
   Draco leaned forward and poured them both glasses of wine—just in case.
Editing was a majority of reality television, and they could have had their
every move twisted and taken out of context for the sake of drama for all they
knew.  If Draco was going to be publically slandered, he at least wanted to be
buzzed for it.
   With Kingsley’s plan having succeeded in spite of Draco wanting to give the
man what he wanted, there would doubtlessly be some mention of Draco and
Harry’s personal life.
   Draco handed a glass back to Harry—a dark glass of Amarone—and downed his
own with ease. “Now,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’m ready.” He relaxed
back into Harry once again.
   With a chuckle, Harry clicked ‘play’ on Draco’s remote.
   “Oh, god,” Draco groaned in pain before he even saw himself on screen.
   “What?” Harry laughed again. The two of them then appeared on the screen in
several shots of them driving and riding in planes. “You look fine.”
   “Just fine?”
   “For fuck’s sake, Draco. You look utterly fuckable and altogether lovely.
Happy?”
   Draco shrugged. “A little.”
   Some narrator’s voice told of the show’s premise, to ‘get to the truth’ and
all of that noble bullshit Draco liked to roll his eyes at. “The truth was
always depressing,” he recalled.
   “…And from the truth of others, can Draco and Harry find something more?”
  “What,” Harry said flatly, not even phrasing it as a question.
   “While others find love or heartbreak…” The television lit up with a shot of
Harry looking at Draco with dramatic, romantic music framing his gaze. “…What
will happen to our hosts? Meet Draco, a public relations agent with a sassy
side.”
   If Draco was as much of a dragon as his name implied, smoke would have been
coming out of his nose. “They are notframing me as some sassy gay best friend.
I’ll slit their fucking throats.”
   “That’s not very sassy gay best friend of you,” Harry teased and earned an
elbow to the gut for it.
   “And Harry, a hopeless romantic post-grad who used to be Draco’s frenemy in
high school.” They cut to a shot of Harry laughing with Draco and then
immediately to one of them glaring at one another from their post-sex
awkwardness.
   “What! Those shots were filmed months apart!” Harry said indignantly to the
television as if it would respond to him. “And I wasn’t your ‘frenemy’, you
were just an asshole to me.”
   “And you were plenty of an ass back!”
   “Shh, they’re getting to actual footage of us talking.”
   Draco’s hands flew to his mouth when the television fed him back a noise
that was, apparently, his voice.
   “The same city and they won’t meet? I call Catfish right now,” the Draco on
the screen said with a scowl.
   “Do I really sound like that?” Draco demanded of Harry, smacking him a few
times for effect and in hopes of a quick response.
   “Er,” Harry thought out loud. “Yes? I mean, it’s definitely not a bad-
sounding voice. Wait, before you ask for more—it’s a sonorous, beautiful voice
full of decidedly masculine tones.”
   Draco grumbled in response.
   The rest of the episode descended on them in a similar fashion.
   Draco would complain about the angle from which he was shot by the crew and
Harry would complain about the crew catching every second that he looked at
Draco.
   “Maybe,” Draco said. “You were just always looking at me.”
   The episode brought back memories of Ruth and her ‘male model’
disappointment.
   While sometimes the show portrayed Draco and Harry as one-dimensional, at
least Ruth’s air-time did her justice. Her kindness showed through, and her
story was never framed in a way that would mock her. Harry breathed a sigh of
relief for her sake. She was the one who had taken the real risk in revealing
her love-life on television.
   The editing crew even blew up some of the screenshots of her and ‘Chris’s
conversations for the world to see. The motive behind doing so seemed to be
lodged in building bridges between the viewer and Ruth, but still. It was a
private matter made public.
   Draco suffered through seeing the tragedy unfold again, taking long drinks
from his glass of wine. He suffered through it all for one scene.
   “He looked like the kind of guy who’d jack off to My Little Pony!”
   A burst of laughter took over Draco’s body. “They kept it in! They kept the
brony joke in!” he cackled, leaning back into Harry harder as his core shook
with laughter.
   “You’re disgusting,” Harry said fondly. He ran his fingers through Draco’s
soft wispy hair.
   Before they knew it, the episode was over.
   “I’m not sure if I can watch another right now,” Harry admitted. While he
didn’t have as great of a dramatic flair as Draco did, he too was weirded out
by seeing the slightly-younger version of himself talk to the camera.
   “Agreed.”
   Before the next episode could suck them back into obsessively watching how
MTV had presented them, Harry hit the power button on the DVD player.
   The room was quiet then, but in a comforting sort of way.
   Draco was tipsy but lucid, and weighed down on Harry carelessly. Harry had
wished for a man on top of him back in Delaware, hadn’t he?
   “I think in some sick way, both Kingsley and we got what we wanted,” Harry
pondered aloud.
   “Doesn’t mean I’m not going through with the plan at the reunion show,”
Draco retorted.
   “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
   Draco put down his wine glass on the coffee table. If he was really going to
give in to relaxation, he had to get the expensive crimson wine away from his
expensive white couch.
   He sighed contentedly and twisted slightly so he could touch his nose to
Harry’s. “My parents are going to murder me when they see the show,” he
commented airily.
   “Are you sure they won’t murder me?” Harry smirked and nudged their noses
together. “Almost half of that episode was me looking at you like you’re my new
god or something.”
   “They expect everyone to react that way to me. I’ll have to explicitly
inform them of your romantic intentions for them to go into full-on protective
stance,” Draco told him. His stomach felt light with Harry so close. Draco
tilted his head, brushing his lips lightly over Harry’s left cheek.
   “Hmm?” Harry was loath to get into serious talk when Draco was being so
amorous. He wanted nothing more than to disappear into his arms and soak up
every last bit of affection he’d never thought he deserved before Draco but
thoughts of murderous Lucius Malfoy coming after him made him hesitate. “You’re
going to tell your parents?”
   Luckily, the question didn’t make Draco back off. It didn’t scare him away.
“Yes,” he answered simply and gave Harry’s cheek a sweet peck. “You’re my
boyfriend and I feel that they ought to know that.”
   Harry’s heart threatened to burst. “Oh,” he said, filling that one syllable
with what felt like every last molecule of breath in him.
   And then came Draco’s throaty, low laugh. Harry could feel the vibrations
even through their clothes.
   Harry let a tide of shivers take him and resolved that no clothes should
ever block Draco’s anything from Harry ever again.
  Both hands grabbed different sides of Draco’s sweater and pulled upwards,
meeting no resistance from Draco himself. In fact, Draco was the one who tossed
the sweater to the floor once it got over his shoulders. The fabric was
probably something expensive and made by some designer whose name Harry
couldn’t pronounce, so the gesture wasn’t lost on him.
   Draco tasted like wine when their lips finally met, but only faintly. He
mostly tasted of Draco, a taste that Harry couldn’t quite wrap his mind around.
He knew no words to describe it, but he knew it made his toes curl under.
   Kissing Draco felt like falling onto a soft mattress after a long, hard day
of work. Embarrassingly enough, it almost made Harry sleepy. He wasn’t used to
feeling so warm and relaxed; almost like his muscles could melt right off of
his bones—but in a way that was somehow pleasant rather than terrifyingly gory.
   Relationships were strange like that. Especially with Draco, Harry would
find himself doing absolutely ridiculous, slightly scary things and enjoying
them.
   Just last week he’d caught himself folding Draco’s laundry. He wasn’t even
really sure how it happened—one moment he heard Draco’s dryer timer go off and
the next everything was folded and he was thinking about doing a load of his
socks. His socks.
   That was certainly just as horrifying as gelatinous muscles.
   “Lay down.” Draco’s voice cut through Harry’s jumbled thoughts.
   Harry happily moved onto his back, resting his head against a throw-pillow.
Squirming into a comfortable position and tipping his eyes back up to Draco, he
cracked a huge smile.
   “See? So easy and eager.” Draco climbed over him so their hips rested
together and dipped down to kiss his neck. “I love your smile.”
   A happy noise came out of Harry that he would be dreadfully ashamed to make
in front of anyone else in the world. He tilted his chin up so Draco could more
easily cover him in kisses.
   Draco gave Harry a collar of love bites that would leave light marks that he
could marvel at in the morning. Harry in any sort of collar made Draco short of
breath.
   All the while, Draco’s hand stroked Harry’s chest up and down in languid
motions. Harry’s body rolled up to meet them, edging his hips up against
Draco’s lightly.
   As their hips rocked together, Harry’s jeans and Draco’s dark trousers grew
tighter. The knowledge that he could get Draco Malfoy hard made Harry feel
infinitely powerful and confident. He bucked his hips up sharply with a needy
growl.
   “Draco,” Harry said because fuck, was that ever a beautiful name. He lightly
moved his nails down Draco’s back and up to grab his hair. Draco’s hair was
always neatly groomed, and Harry took the utmost pleasure in mussing it up.
   “The one and only,” Draco acknowledged with one of his signature smirks
before closing his lips around one of Harry’s nipples. Draco knew how that
drove him mad and loved to use it to his advantage.
   Harry’s cock twitched in his pants as Draco sucked there until the nipple
perked up under his tongue. Then, Draco clamped down lightly and rolled the tip
in between his teeth. “Fuck, fuck,” Harry cried out, his hand in Draco’s hair
tightening.
   Draco hummed to himself, looking down at his handiwork. He gave Harry’s
reddened nipple a sweet kiss before coming back up. “Hey,” he said as if he’d
had a grand realization. “You’re fucking a TV star.”
   “So are you,” Harry laughed. Draco could be so ridiculous. “Want my
autograph?”
   “I’ll tell you where you can put your autograph,” Draco snickered and began
to undo Harry’s belt.
   Harry’s belt buckle hit the floor with a satisfying ‘clack’, and from there
Draco was free to unzip his pants and wrestle them off.
   Never one to be selfish, Harry assisted Draco with getting his pants off,
too. They laughed breathily as they disrobed each other, dealing with where the
clothes bunched and got caught with an unmatched enthusiasm. “You are so, so
gorgeous,” Harry reminded Draco.
   “Not too bad yourself,” Draco teased, rubbing the bulge in Harry’s briefs as
a reward for being so sweet.
   “Fuck you,” Harry laughed.
   “You can do that after I fuck you.”
   There was certainly no arguing with that.
   Draco took off the last piece of clothing on Harry triumphantly. He didn’t
hesitate to take Harry’s erection in his hand and begin stroking him, letting
out a low hiss as he saw the way Harry grabbed the side of the couch in
response.
   “Draco,” Harry moaned, his eyes screwing shut. Realizing he still had his
glasses on, Harry ripped them off and tossed them onto the coffee table. Both
men laughed at that little outburst, and it felt like Harry hadn’t stopped
laughing since Draco came into his life.
   His head felt light. Harry was dizzyingly happy, and in no mood to find his
footing in this strange state of bliss.
   “Draco,” he said again, more pleadingly.
   Draco, one hand wrapped around Harry, used his free hand to grab the bottle
of lube he kept under the couch. He and Harry had bought it together when Draco
ran out of his usual brand, and that had been one hell of a day.
   They’d probably have to do it again sometime soon; the bottle was half-empty
already.
   Draco spread the lubricant on his fingers, licking his lips at the sight of
Harry moving his ass up, all-too ready for Draco to open him up.
   Draco easily pushed one finger into Harry, pumping it through the rings of
muscles before adding a second. It wasn’t just the lube that made it easy,
Harry’s complete trust in Draco and his skill allowed him to relax and fit to
whatever Draco wanted to do to him. He always knew it would feel spectacular.
   “Fuck,” Draco murmured and grabbed the base of his prick. Harry spread out,
face flushed, and hole taking his fingers was a breathtaking sight. It would be
even better if he was taking his cock.
   Draco scissored his fingers open and gave himself a few strokes with his
lube-covered hand before nudging the tip into Harry.
   Harry’s hands immediately flew to Draco’s hips, trying desperately to pull
him in closer.
   Without even thinking about it, Draco positioned himself so he could kiss
Harry. Harry in response wrapped his legs around Draco’s waist, sighing as
Draco’s length sank into him.
   “Harry,” Draco tried through his groan. It was his turn to look at Harry
like he was some new god, some gift from an unknown force that made his cock
leak inside of him.
   Draco thrust forward, pushing deep into Harry with each roll of his hips.
The couch beneath them bounced slightly with their movements, and Harry muffled
his satisfied moan against Draco’s lips.
   Their tongues swirled together, with Draco’s plunging into Harry’s mouth so
he could run his tongue along the back of his teeth.
   The wet noises of their kiss and the slapping of Draco’s skin against
Harry’s filled the room. Draco, as always, had found just the right angle to
thrust forward at so that he brushed against Harry’s prostate and sent bursts
of heat through his body.
   Harry felt himself coming close to the edge even without Draco’s hand on
him, content to be fucked into the couch by Draco until he let out a pathetic
whine and came, but Draco would never let such a thing happen.
   Draco reached back down and made a tight fist around Harry’s cock, stroking
him and pushing down his foreskin with each pump of his hand.
   In an attempt to say Draco’s name, Harry just wound up getting out a couple
of mangled vowels before his release came. When it hit him, his whole body
tensed for a moment and he could have sworn he saw some kind of white light.
   “Draco,” was all Harry could say as he came down from his high. “Draco,
Draco, Draco…”
   Draco came as Harry clenched around him, riding out the orgasm with a few
more thrusts into the other man. A shudder shook his body before he filled
Harry with his come.
   The pair clung to each other as they caught their breaths, their chests
rising and falling in sync.
   Harry rubbed the marks he’d left on Draco’s back earlier and kissed the
crook of his neck. “You’re really very good at that.”
   “I’ve had a lot of practice.”
   “Don’t ruin the moment, you dick,” Harry said before pinching Draco’s side.
   Ever the wimp, Draco yelped and immediately went into a pout. “Hey.”
   Harry laughed and leaned up to kiss his nose, lingering there for a moment.
“Let me take you to bed,” he said quietly. “I do believe you said something
about me fucking you.”
   “That I did,” Draco nodded. “And this time we don’t have to worry about the
crew walking in.”
   “Don’t remind me of that.”
   “Hey, you weren’t the one with your legs open. Now carry me to bed,” Draco
ordered imperiously, climbing off of Harry so that the brunette could do as he
was told.
   Harry rolled his eyes. Draco was a romantic in the strangest of ways, and
they often came out as commands more than requests. Still, he ignored the
slight burn in his backside and stood, opening his arms to Draco and looking to
make an amazing night even better.
***** Season Finale *****
Chapter Notes
     Wow, uh, three years later? I promise I actually had this planned but
     then lapsed into suddenly hating the story and Fearing writing for
     it. Paranoia aside I’m glad to bring you the final chapter. Every
     time I watch Catfish I think of this stupid fic, and everyone whose
     read it has been really indulgent of me in doing so. Like,
     objectively, ‘Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter host MTV Catfish’ is the
     least structurally sound idea I’ve ever had and so many of you still
     read it. Thanks, everyone. Don’t know where I’d be without you.
Chapter 10: Season Finale
   The techies decorating the bare stage looked like worker bees, always moving
but never colliding.
   Harry adjusted his collar. It would be burning up there for sure under those
lights, and the people who would be watching him in the studio audience and at
home on their televisions would also doubtlessly make Harry sweat.
   This was in front of a live audience, not just the friendly camera crew.
   He knew people with far worse stage fright than him and tried to be brave in
comparison, but his own seemed to grow by the second. There were so many ways
this could go wrong.
   “Potter!” Kingsley boomed from the back. “Backstage! We’re bringing the
audience in!”
   “Already?” Harry asked, hesitating before stepping onto the stage.
   “We have a comedian on-site to warm them up and throw t-shirts at them. That
makes the audience more likely to like you. Trust me,” Kingsley advised him.
Kingsley’s suit was sharp and his head freshly-shaved even though he wouldn’t
be appearing on screen to his knowledge.
   Harry snorted. “Right. Trust you.”
   Kingsley either didn’t hear Harry or pretended not to hear him. It didn’t
really matter. “And get to hair and makeup.”
   “Isn’t Draco still in there?”
   “Is he? Goddammit,” Kingsley grumbled. He broke into swift strides off of
the stage.
   Harry was quite pleased at how that little lie went over. Draco’s fussiness
was legendary, and Harry was glad to see it work out in their favor for once.
   Draco was indeed stalling hair and makeup—but not because they couldn’t get
his coloring right. Okay, that was part of it—those incompetent hacks!—but that
wasn’t the whole reason. Draco was buying Harry time.
   The last thing Harry wanted to do was waste it. Moving offstage like he had
been instructed, Harry ducked into the tech booth.
   “Can I help you?” a woman wearing a headset asked, clearly upset that her
sanctum had been disturbed.
   “Yes, actually. You can. I’m really sorry to barge in like this, and I know
you’re probably working with cues and a hundred other things,” Harry prefaced
his request with in order to look like he wasn’t doing something entirely
nefarious. “But Kingsley asked me to add this as a last surprise before the
credits roll.”
   Harry produced a flash drive from his back pocket and held it out to the
woman.
   Harry’s earlier apologies didn’t do much to alleviate her scowl. “Right
before the credits? God, Kingsley can be so demanding.” She took the flash
drive anyway. “Tell him I’ll handle it.”
   “Thank you so much,” Harry gushed. “I know how hard he is to work with,
trust me.”
   The woman’s gaze went to the door, so Harry took that as a sign to step out
of her territory. He closed the booth door behind him and moved seamlessly back
into the frenzy of people rushing around.
   He headed for hair and makeup, guided mostly by Draco’s voice.
   “You don’t understand, I know my hair best!” Draco declared dramatically. “I
already know gel doesn’t work—I don’t care how fancy your products are!”
   “Malfoy,” Kingsley grumbled. He stood behind him in the mirror. “Just let
them do their jobs.”
   “No hair gel. No cheap foundation. You’re going to have to redo it all—“
Draco cut himself off when Harry entered his line of sight. Harry gave him the
signal. “Actually, I think I’ll just redo it myself. I’ll be fine.” Draco
hopped out of the chair and sped off.
   Everyone in the room seemed to have whiplash from his sudden departure.
Draco really didn’t know what the meaning of ‘a subtle exit’ was. With a fond
roll of his eyes, Harry sat in the chair to have his hair and face harassed
with a never-ending stream of products.
   “What is his problem?” Kingsley asked.
   “Oh, you know us gays. We’re able to be easily paired with one another
because all gay people are attracted to each other, and we’re born with
intimate knowledge of beauty products,” Harry replied with a shit-eating grin.
   Kingsley wasn’t amused. Still, he took the scathing sarcasm and shoved it
into the back of his mind to deal with later. He had a show to run.
   Harry smiled to himself as the larger man went to go yell at someone else.
If Kingsley thought he could play Draco and Harry because of their sexuality,
they could play him right back with it.
   On the main stage the comedian wrapped up his act with some jokes about
hotel rooms, which seemed terribly appropriate to Harry’s life.
   “…Anyway, I wouldn’t want to be the hotel staff that had to clean up that
mess when it was done. Lord knows what a blacklight would reveal!” The audience
laughed, but that was mostly because whoever laughed the loudest got a free
shirt.
   Harry’s smile grew. He knew what a blacklight would reveal in plenty of the
hotels Draco and he shared. That was objectively disgusting but felt like a
victory. Harry Potter took his wins where he could get them.
   “Alright, thank you!” The comedian took a bow.
   “That means you’re on in five,” a person dressed in head-to-toe black told
Harry. He had no idea who these people were backstage, but they were the sort
of mix of stern and focused that he did not want to mess with. The head manager
was named Minny something—that was all he knew—and there they were working
together on live television where everything could go wrong.
   Well, working together on live television while unaware that Harry and Draco
had meticulously planned for something to go wrong. Harry bit his lip and hoped
none of the backstage crew would get the blame.
   He felt a hand on his shoulder and didn’t need to turn around to know who it
was.
   “Scared, Potter?”
   “You wish.”
   “No more re-takes when you laugh so hard you start coughing,” Draco reminded
him. “Live TV.”
   “Quit being an ass,” Harry laughed back. If there was one thing he got out
of the entire taping experience it was a bolstered immunity to most of Draco’s
prodding. “You’re the one who’s going to have to avoid being obscene out
there.”
   “When,” Draco started, his arms snaking around Harry’s waist so his chest
was fully pressed to his back. “Have I ever been obscene?”
   “Would you like specific examples?”
   “Yes, several. And use your phone sex voice to describe them.” Draco
narrowly dodged the elbow in the gut that Harry threw at him, cackling all the
while.
   “There’s one specific example,” Harry offered before allowing Draco to put
his arms back around him. What were a couple shoves between co-hosts?
   “Positions!” a voice called out from behind them.
   When Harry lifted his gaze to the stage again he was shocked. The sparse
setup that the comedian had was replaced with massive logos, signs for what
hashtags to tweet, pictures, monitors, screens—how had the crew gotten all of
that into position in such a short amount of time?
   There was, perhaps, a certain magic to a stage crew.
   Draco and Harry broke their embrace in favor of something even hotter—the
stage lights.
   They’d rehearsed for cues and marks the day before, so that wasn’t a
problem. What was a problem was the crowd of faces staring up at them. They
burst into applause immediately when Harry and Draco stepped into view.
   Harry should have expected a warm welcome, but it still felt strange. What
had he really done to deserve any of this? He looked to the other wing of the
stage.
   Ah, right. There they were. The hopeless romantics, the not-so-web-savvy,
the entirely naïve and the utterly resilient Catfish story stars. They were
lined up behind the curtain and would go out in the order their episode aired
for interviews.
   They were more nervous than Harry and Draco combined. After all, it was
their lives that were really on display.
   Harry gave Kennedy a little wave from the stage while some more stagehands
adjusted his microphone. She was so busy focusing on her breathing that she
hardly noticed it. Poor thing.
   It was strange to have so many people from so many states in one place who
would have otherwise never known each other. Those who had found love and those
who truly had been Catfished stood side-by-side and exchanged nervous but
excited glances.
   And so the parade began. That was the easy part.
   After introductions and another explanation of the concept of the show by
Draco and Harry, the reunion show was officially on.
   Draco knew that on the other side of the camera they spoke into that Pansy
and Theo were sharing mimosas and truffles in her living room with hearts full
of envy and pride. Harry knew that on the other side of the camera Ron and
Hermione were eating pretzels and sipping butterbeer, too.
   They didn’t know who else was beyond that blinking red light and tried their
hardest not to think about it too hard. Draco was sure his parents were
watching while Harry a sinking feeling that the Dursleys would be keeping their
eyes peeled for a misstep.
   He hated that feeling. He swallowed it deeper as they welcomed Ruth to the
stage.
   She’d really stepped up her make-up for the cameras. Draco wondered if that
fedora-toting nerd was out there watching and weeping with regret. He certainly
hoped he was weeping.
   ‘Chris’ had declined the invitation to come explain himself once again at
the reunion show, which Draco surmised to be the smartest thing he’d done in a
long while.
   Ruth entered stage-left and the audience burst into cheers. Some even called
her name.
   “So good to see you again,” Harry said after his hug with the victim of
their first Catfish case. “Tell us how you’re doing since filming.”
   “Great, actually,” she began and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
Ruth was far more comfortable in front of the cameras surrounding her at that
moment than she had been when Draco and Harry held the devices.
   Draco was a little offended, but when wasn’t he?
   “Work’s going well and I’m saving up for a bigger place,” Ruth told them
just as she had rehearsed it in the mirror fifteen times that morning.
   “Fantastic,” Draco said and was shocked by how genuine that actually was.
“So, your story was our first and one of our strangest. Have you had any
contact with ‘Chris’ after he revealed himself to be Brian?”
   She shook her head. “No. I made the decision to let all of that go and to
delete all my online dating profiles.”
   The audience ‘ooh’-ed and ‘ah’-ed.
   “Maybe it’s for the best,” Harry laughed. The way the people in the audience
leaned forward to hear every word—had they actually made good television? Were
these people really invested?
   “But what about other men? Real, in-person men,” Draco implored.
   “Oh, none really. As of now I’m still single,” she admitted.
   The crowd went nuts for that one. Hoots and hollers echoed through the
studio and made Draco and Harry’s Southern Belle blush.
   One of the cameramen gave Harry the signal to move into the Q&A portion of
the interview. Each Catfish hopeful got some time to chat with Harry and Draco
before turning them to the real challenge—the audience.
   “Now, Ruth—“ Harry quickly looked to the teleprompter for the name. “’Toby’
here in the audience has a question for you.”
   A boy in the third row stood while a stagehand forked over a mic.
   “Hey,” Toby tested his volume and found himself far too loud. He adjusted
his voice lower. “Hey, Ruth. Uhm, something really similar to your situation
actually happened to me about a year back. Watching your episode made me feel
really connected to you.”
   Someone a couple rows back in the audience let out a loud “aw!”.
   “So, yeah. My question is: how are you getting over it? I mean what’s helped
you move past it?” the blushing man finished.
    “Friends,” Ruth said resolutely before adding on. “Family. A lot of ice
cream.” The crowd loved that one. “Just looking for the real support around me
that I had been ignoring by talking to someone who wasn’t worth my time.”
   “Yeah,” Toby continued as the extent of his follow-up. “Wow, yeah.”
   “Yeah,” Ruth echoed. Things were going well.
   Things continued to go well, and Harry felt his jaw unclench from its usual
locked position whenever he was nervous. The stage seemed smaller than it once
had, and the room of strangers just a bit more intimate.
   Harry smiled whenever he caught Draco’s eyes because how could he not?
Whatever Draco was looking at seemed ten times more interesting than anything
else in the room, whatever he pointed to Harry immediately followed the line of
his hand to, magnetized.
   He couldn’t truly be cross with Kingsley. But then again, he wasn’t as
forgiving as some would like him to be. Once the interviews were over and the
audience had exhausted their time for questions it was time to roll credits.
There was no telling if they’d do this again, if the show would get renewed or
ridiculed, and Harry might actually even miss Kingsley if it ended here. Not
before his revenge, though.
   “One last thing,” Harry cut in and nodded to the woman in the booth.
“There’s someone who has been so invaluable to this show.”
   “And he asked us for the opportunity to appear onstage today,” Draco
continued for Harry. “So he could ask someone in the audience something very,
very…” Draco continued with his ‘very’s until he spotted Kingsley in the wings
and zeroed in on him, waving him on. “Special. Right Kingsley?”
   Roughly a thousand words were communicated with the following facial
expressions Kingsley made, from ‘how dare you’ to ‘oh god, why me?’.
Nevertheless he stepped forward. Nothing was worse than dead air time,
especially dead air time with Draco looking expectantly offstage.
   Kingsley steeled his expression into one of geniality and walked onstage.
“What is it, Draco?”
   “That question you wanted to ask,” Draco said as if he were reminding him.
“To Martha.” Draco gestured to a woman sitting in the audience smiling ear-to-
ear.
   “Babe…? But she—“
   “She’s here!” Draco said with the most pep he could muster after having
baked under the stage lights just a little too long.
   Above them on the screen where clips had aired was a wreath of purple and
gold flowers, texting sliding down from the top of the screen to rest in the
middle.
   MARTHA, WILL YOU MARRY ME?
   The crowd went wild. Martha went something beyond wild. “Yes!” she called
out immediately. “Yes, I’ll marry you, baby!”
   Before Kingsley could sort what happened his girlfriend of five years
hurdled over three rows of chairs to fall into his arms. “I,” he stammered.
   “Finally!” Harry said and clapped Kingsley on the back. “You straights do
love marriage, huh?”
   Harry half-expected steam to come out of Kingsley’s nostrils. He looked
furious, his fiancée’s face buried in his jacket. Behind them, credits rolled.
   “You’re dead men,” Kingsley mouthed to his stars. “Dead men.”
   Draco put his arm around Harry’s shoulder. Behind them the Catfishers and
Catfishees filed out, whooping and cheering for the newly-engaged couple. Draco
turned Harry by the waist and kissed him front-on in the chaos.
   “Draco,” Harry laughed.
   “Want to go home and watch The X-Files?”
   “I thought you’d never ask.”
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