Worlds Apart

Summary: In a muggle AU, Draco and Harry are left looking for magic in much more virtual places. For the both of them, the PC game World of Warcraft provides an outlet from their lives at school (where they're both still nasty rivals). When their characters meet in game and a romance blossoms, it's only a matter of time before they figure out who's on the other side of the computer screen. You really don't need to know anything about WoW to read this. Explicit in later chapters.

Chapter 1: Proudmoore

AN: I repeat: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO KNOW HOW TO PLAY WOW IN ORDER TO GET THIS. I understand that it's a rare mixture of personalities to love both erotic gay Harry Potter fanfiction and online massive multi-player roleplaying games, so I shall lay down the basics.

There are only a few things you need to know before we dive in. One, in the continent of Azeroth (the mainland of WoW), there are two factions. One is the noble and valiant Alliance, the other the orcish and ruthless Horde. Two is that Harry plays a worgen paladin, which roughly translates to a werewolf holy warrior. They can heal and fight equally well, and the worgen (like humans, night elves, gnomes, dwarves, and draenei) are a part of the Alliance. Draco plays a blood elf mage, the equivalent of an annoying wizard twink. They can only deal damage/control minions and blood elves (like orcs, undead, tauren, goblins, and trolls) belong to the Horde.

The Horde and Alliance have been at war (hence the name of the game) with both each other and the evil in their realm. Other than that, the world is a free-for-all where each hero picks their own path.

For those of you who do play (this will not appear in English to people who don't play), this is taking place in (I will be updating in real-time with the game, so you may see some of my own opinions on it in here haha) in Mists of Pandaria. I'm changing the fact that cross-faction characters cannot talk to one another so our boys can communicate. Also, I'm changing party systems so that for neutral content (LK, Deathwing, Mogushan Vaults) the Horde and Alliance toons can team up and they can trade. Also I made Proudmoore a pvp server, oops.

Okay, enough nerd talk. Onwards!

xxxxx

"Fucking fuck! You're all incompetent," Draco yelled at his computer screen. His mage made a dramatic noise as he fell to the ground, clasping his chest in death with the bodies of his comrades surrounding him.

The raid chat immediately flooded with similar sentiments.

[Raid] [Spader-Madoran]: dumbasses

[Raid] [Harcles-Dragonblight]: you have to fucking stack on the fucking people who have the fucking blue arrow on them. If you don't, we all get hit with 70k damage.

There was far more wrong with this group of players than just some messed up mechanics (a healer had run off the platform and fell to their death, the tank had terrible damage-per-second rates, and Draco was the only one dispelling anything), but Draco supposed that was also true. With each patch there were instructions on the fights, but people never read the instructions. Of course not.

This specific raid was on the Thunder King, in an Asian-inspired palace that held the secrets of lightning and thunder.

[Raid] [Toomanyheals-Deathwing]: your all a bunch of faggots.

That was where Draco had to step in on the madness and remind everyone that they were playing a game. He refused to fight the evil constructs of the first titans that roamed Azeroth with homophobes.

[Raid] [Dragonis-Proudmoore]: You wish you were a faggot. Just shut up and learn how to play.

[Raid] [Toomanyheals-Deathwing]: oooo u mad fag?

[Raid] [Axels-Frostmane]: i think the fag is mad

Dragonis has left the group.

Nothing in the world grated on Draco Malfoy like internet memes. They made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up and run away. Sure, it may have started out as a few cute jokes in front of some pictures of animals, but the shitfest of misogyny, racism, ignorance, homophobia, and general stupidity it had evolved into thanks to every eleven year-old boy with internet access was downright malicious.

"Fucking straight people."

Draco's character reappeared in the town he had been questing in before he had queued in the raid-finder. Everyone from casual players to hardcore gamers used the raid-finder to assemble random groups of twenty-five that would work together to conquer a common enemy.

In theory, the grizzled World of Warcraft heroes would come together from different servers (that gave them the name next to their username when in cross-server zones) and get along in peace and harmony against their foes. But unfortunately (or sometimes fortunately) each server had a reputation.

There were too many players (eleven million, actually) for there to be one central server, so there were hundreds. Each with its own strange quirks, like entering that server was playing in an entirely different game. They were all also named after items, people, or locations in the game. Dragonblight was full of assholes, Sporregar was full of freaks, Deathwing was full of new players, and Proudmoore was full of homos.

It did have 'proud' in the name, after all.

All the LGBTQ community on the game had banded together against their discrimination and picked one server to completely dominate. They had a celebratory pride parade in July where everyone got on horseback and ran through the continents in their skimpiest clothing. They had guilds for pansexuals, transsexuals, bears, drag queens, and every variation of the expanding queer community.

Draco had been glad to join such an inclusive server when he began playing, and he had watched its community and economy grow. In the chat channel that was supposed to be used for Proudmoore trade, people argued over the sexuality of pop icons and debated worldwide issues.

Sure, some kids on the server were still a special kind of Warcraft stupid—or hadn't known they'd picked the queer server when they signed up for the game—but for the most part they were bearable human beings.

Now that Draco and his lean blood elf were back into the server of the heteroflexible, he immediately felt safer in the game. If anyone called you a 'fag' in Proudmoore, it was most likely a compliment.

Even with all that being said and done, Draco still had some pent-up anger to take out on some unsuspecting member of the opposite faction.

Dragonis and his silvery blonde and decidedly virtual hair mounted his proto-drake, taking to the skies. The green dragon flapped its fearsome wings while Draco's character rode on its back. Using his mouse, Draco could adjust his character's view of the horizon. He searched the grasslands for some Alliance dog he could swarm when his eyes finally landed on one unlucky worgen.

The wolf-creature seemed to be busy looking at its map, and when Draco's dragon swooped in closer he could see that the worgen was a paladin. Pffft. Easy kill, especially if the bastard was in his healing gear. Damage output decreased significantly in the wrong set of armor.

Dragonis flew off of the emerald dragon with a grand leap with a flurry of spells. Arcane explosion, frost nova, deep freeze, flamestrike—

That was when the worgen seemed to realize he was the victim of Draco's sneak attack. Whoever was controlling it had begun to defend themselves with healing and shielding spells before striking back to hit Draco.

Ugh, that one move gave 20k damage out of the meager 370k health points that Draco had. Being a flimsy spell-caster was a rough life.

Draco had thankfully gotten the upper hand when he attacked first.

[Worgasm]: Fuck off.

[Dragonis]: Only after I kill you.

It seemed the battle lines were drawn. Just because they were virtual didn't mean they made Harry any less enraged.

There he was, trying to find some rare artifacts on his map, and he was blindsided by some Horde nut. That was the way of the Warcraft, but still.

He fired every smiting holy spell he had at that slippery blood elf. The mage's health declined as his did, but not nearly as fast. With a defeated shout, his werewolf crumpled to the ground in death. Fuck. Now he was going to have to spend some hard-earned gold on repairing his broken armor.

[Dragonis]: Nice name, by the way. How early did you have to log on to get it?

[Worgasm]: Midnight on release date of the Cataclysm expansion pack. Also, fuck you.

[Dragonis]: Sucks to suck.

Harry, helpless to do anything about it, watched the blood elf hop back on his dragon and fly into the night sky. It was lucky for him that the concept death was only temporary in the virtual gaming world.

He released his spirit from his corpse, effectively resurrecting himself after combat with less health and the power source for his spells (mana) than he'd had before dying. It'd take a few minutes to regenerate back to its full capacity.

"Whatever." Harry closed the game screen.

He'd saved up for his own personal computer in his room after a summer of babysitting, lawn-mowing, dog-walking, and any other odd job he could scrape up. His aunt and uncle would never deign to give his ungrateful nephew a brand-new gaming computer with a hard-drive nerds would drool over and the kind of graphics card that only existed in Harry's wet dreams before he bought one for himself.

It ran like a beauty.

Unfortunately, it was time for Harry to leave his 'beauty' to go fulfill a biological need. He was hungry, and had been for the past half-hour, but the game had held his attention.

Careful not to wake any of his plump and spoiled relatives, Harry walked down the stairs of his Little Whinging home so he could sneak into the kitchen.

The Dursleys hadn't taken their Christmas decorations yet, most likely because they expected Harry to. He wasn't doing it this year, not after the way Dudley boasted about his new 3DS and iPhone 5. If they were going to give Dudders top-of-the-line technology and Harry dusty old books most likely found in a resale shop, then he wasn't fucking cleaning up after them.

Harry's teenage years had led him to be one rebellious little fuck in the face of his aunt and uncle. They thought him a menace and a sinner for the porn site they once found on the family computer's history.

Luckily, that at least scared Dudley out of sneaking into his room at night.

Either way it was the last day of winter break, the last eve of freedom before school began. Harry figured he had to eat right.

Instead of his usual gamer's feast, Harry decided on a bowl of cereal before bed. The gamer's feast consisted of soda pop, cheese doodles, chips, and cookies that all combined to give him some pretty weird dreams after eating.

Watching the sleepy town outside his window, Harry poured the cereal into a bowl and wished for something extraordinary to happen.

Harry wished he could wake up with powers like his character, with the respect and exultation that his worgen received in battle. He wanted someone, anyone, to break down his door and tell him he was going to have a better real life because he was special. He was magic.

When no creatures of the night emerged to fulfill Harry's wish, he let out a disappointed huff. The only way he'd gotten through his abusive childhood was clinging to fantasy novels and sneaking on Dudley's computer to play simpler games with knights and kings.

Harry marched back up to his room with the bowl in-hand.

It was a struggle, but Harry tried to restrain himself from gaming when it was a school night. His grades were above-average in every class but chemistry, and he wanted it to stay that way. The last thing he needed was Hermione harping on him for ignoring his studies. Again.

Maybe the reason why he was doing so badly in chemistry was a fault of his classmates. Neville was scared shitless of the teacher, Luna was always trying to talk to him about some ghost or another she swore she'd seen, and then there was Draco Malfoy.

Teacher's pet, spoiled brat, obnoxious, and filthy rich. His parents bought him a car for his fifteenth birthday, a brand-new corvette. Stuff like that made Harry crazy. Malfoy probably didn't even know the value of a dollar like Harry had had to learn. Malfoy probably hadn't worked a day in his life.

Everyone at school feared the git because his father practically bankrolled the place. They knew that if they upset Malfoy, his father would hear about it.

Harry finished his cereal. Why the hell was he stewing over his grade school rival before bed?

Well. There was a bit of an explanation for that, too.

Malfoy was gorgeous. He had a crop of blonde hair that looked so tempting to grab that Harry almost did it once. His frame was thin, his arse was fit, and his eyes did that smoldering thing Harry had only seen models do.

He'd wanked over Malfoy in bed before, even though he'd never admit it to even Ron or Hermione. After all, what stayed in Harry's head wasn't a crime, right?

Giving in to his hormones, Harry put the empty bowl on his wooden dresser and moved his hand under his pajama pants and underwear, jumpstarting his stirring arousal. After all, there was nothing more satisfying than seeing your enemy the morning after you jerked off about them.

Putting his thick-rimmed glasses down next to his empty bowl, Harry went to do just that.