Work Text:
Harry fumbles his fake Muggle driving licence and barely gets it into the bouncer’s hand.
The man doesn’t care, and neither does Harry. He just wants in.
Except he doesn’t, really. Harry doesn’t want the narrow hallway or the throbbing rainbow lights or the bone-crunching beat. He doesn’t want the close-packed bodies on the dance floor, which is bloody irritating, because he thought maybe he’d feel better if he was surrounded.
But he was a fool, and no surprise. The thrashing elbows and the swaying hips are as bad as the situation outside.
His hands go nervous-slick—why did he think this was a good idea?—so the driving licence slips out of his hand. When he straightens, tasting coppery humiliation and bitter disappointment, ready to run, he—
Can’t.
Because someone’s watching.
Grey eyes. White-blond hair. Sharp features.
A familiar face. An unfamiliar expression.
Harry’s too tired and too keyed up to pull a fake reaction over his real, visceral one.
Malfoy’s gorgeous. Harry stopped calling him ugly even in the privacy of his own mind months ago.
Maybe even years.
And now, thirteen months after the war ended, one month after Hogwarts spat him out following an eighth-year that felt wrong, every part of it, Harry’s come face to face with an inconvenient truth in the form of Draco Malfoy.
Eighth-year was wrong because Malfoy wasn’t there.
He’d planned on Malfoy coming back. Harry couldn’t imagine Malfoy doing anything else. He was never the type to let anyone else decide where he was allowed to be.
Maybe Malfoy was the one who decided not to come back.
And how dare he? Harry had planned on him being there, like he always was before. Obviously, Harry hadn’t told him so, because when was he supposed to do that? On the witness stand at Malfoy’s trial? Also, I’m lying about all of this unless Malfoy goes back to Hogwarts for eighth-year, since that’s what I’m doing and it makes no bloody fucking sense if he’s not there, too.
Malfoy’s face is doing something complicated.
Harry has no idea what his own face is doing. Nothing attractive. He probably looks like a kicked orphan who’s been kept in a cupboard too long, all forlorn and betrayed for no reason. After all, he did win the war, right? He did become a national hero. What’s a little time in the dark compared with all that?
He swallows another lump of disappointment, even though Harry didn’t expect this place to be good. He should have expected it to be horrible. He should’ve known better than to come in at all.
Harry can’t quite look away. That’s half the problem. The rainbow pulse of the club’s lights on black walls couldn’t be more different from Madam Malkin’s, and it makes his breath go all thin and funny to see Malfoy like this. He couldn’t be more different from the boy stood on the next stool getting his robes pinned up. Harry hadn’t known how nervous Malfoy was, back then—he was too busy bracing himself to be woken from the dream. It all had to be a dream.
Harry’s eleven-year-old memories line up next to Malfoy now. He’s not radiating nervousness anymore. Far from it. He looks like he always wears tight Muggle jeans and a black vest that on anybody else would look normal, almost boring, but on Malfoy looks like a wet dream.
And he’s let his hair grow out, and he’s pulled it up, and the rainbow lights are doing things to the starlight colour that Harry wants to grab with both hands like a little kid and never let go.
And—
Great. Now he’s staring and doing something horrible with his face.
A quick exit is the only way to salvage this.
But before Harry can lift his hand to give Malfoy what he’s sure will be an awkward, laughable wave—what the bollocks is he even thinking, waving goodbye to Malfoy?—Malfoy puts his hands out.
Both hands. Palms up. Towards Harry.
And he can’t breathe at the sight of that offer, because eleven-year-old Malfoy is right there, always right there in Harry’s head, and he can see that high-strung half-handshake like it was yesterday, and it occurs to Harry that maybe this is what he really wanted all through eighth-year.
They’re not in House colours now. Not on different sides of a war neither of them chose. Malfoy isn’t even putting his hand out to shake, this time, he’s—
Malfoy beckons, his long, elegant fingers like a spell themselves. Come here, it says. And silently, underneath—don’t go.
Merlin help him, Harry goes.
Malfoy keeps his hands out the whole time Harry’s moving across the alcohol-and-sugar-coated floor, his shoes sticksticksticking with every step.
He waits for Malfoy to drop his hands. To sneer. To say he was only having a laugh, Potter.
But he doesn’t.
He doesn’t.
And then Harry’s there, and it’s not a handshake, is it? So he can’t shake. He puts his hands in Malfoy’s, ignoring the searing heat in his cheeks and his shirt clinging to his back, ignoring the what-the-bloody-fuckness of it all.
Malfoy squeezes his hands, gentle as the rainbow light, and beams. “Tiens, mon cœur. Je t’attendais.”1
“Er…” Has Harry fucked up? This is Malfoy, isn’t it? He should probably let go of his hands and make sure, but he can’t. He can’t. “Hi?”
“Rebonjour. It’s me, Potter, no need to look so stricken.”
“But why are you—that was French, not—”
Malfoy purses his lips. He runs the pads of his thumbs in little arcs across Harry’s knuckles like it’s an old habit. “I’m trying to demonstrate my personal growth via concrete means.”
“What?”
“You’ll know I’ve changed if I speak to you in French.”
Harry doesn’t need a second language to know Malfoy’s changed. He saw Malfoy’s eyes in the Manor. He’d felt Malfoy’s I can’t be sure down to the tips of his toes. And if Malfoy wanted to pick up where they’d left off, he’d have stuck out one hand, not two.
“But I don’t know any French.”
Malfoy looks into Harry’s eyes, the corner of his mouth lifted in this little intimate smile that Harry wants to see again.
And again.
And again.
And then Malfoy leans in.
He smells like his magic, silver-sweet and fresh as rain, and his soap and his hair potion and something soft, like clean sheets.
“Ça ne fait rien.”2 And then Malfoy’s guiding Harry into the crowd, still holding his hands. “Tu as l’air si triste, mais tu ne devrais pas,” Malfoy coos. “Je suis là. Je te protégerai. Oublie les autres et viens danser avec moi.”3
Malfoy stops, and Harry keeps walking until they’re right up against each other.
He doesn’t care what it looks like.
He just wants in.
Malfoy’s got an aura or something, and when Harry’s close, nobody else touches him. Harry could cry from how good it feels. How weird. How glad he is that the music is so bloody loud, because it’s covering up his pounding heart.
Hopefully.
“I have no idea what you just said, Malfoy,” he shouts over the music.
“Je veux t’épouser depuis notre quatrième année.”4 Malfoy slides a hand onto Harry’s waist. “Dance with me.”
“Okay.”
Malfoy points to his chest. “Draco.”
Then he looks at Harry expectantly, so earnest that Harry laughs, and feels Draco’s hips against his when he does.
“Er, Harry,” he says. “Harry Potter.”
“Harry.” Draco brushes his fingertips to Harry’s bottom lip like he’s pressing a kiss there made of Harry’s own name. “Viens danser avec moi, mon cœur.”5
Draco slides his hand onto Harry’s waist like they’re on a crowded dance floor every time he steps close enough to do it.
He leans his forehead against Harry’s and talks to him like they’re the only people in the world, and Harry believes it when all he can see is silver-grey.
He says viens danser avec moi, mon cœur so many times that Harry doesn’t think of the words, just the way Draco puts pressure on the small of his back with his fingertips to move him to music. It doesn’t matter that half the time, it’s only in Draco’s head.
The summer goes by, and the autumn, and the winter, and spring comes, damp and green, smelling like he’ll have to go back to the house on Privet Drive. There are things Harry wants to keep shut up in that cupboard, so he leaves them there alone in the dark, packed away where Draco can’t see.
The backseat of the rented car is warm with body heat and Draco’s skin and Harry’s magic. Harry’s nape is hot with Draco’s breath and the sweat between their bodies and he’s absolutely stuffed full in every conceivable way.
Mostly, he can only think about Draco inside him, doing these slow rolls of his hips and barely sliding out of Harry.
“I think,” Harry pants, his hands clenching on the headrest without his input, “I can feel your dick in my throat.” It’s more of his heart area, really, and he knows it’s not Draco’s actual dick, but the glowing, sheltered sensation doesn’t want to fit itself into any other words.
“Oh, no,” Draco says. “Are you all right, mon cœur? Can you breathe?” He lowers his voice, tilting his hips so he’s even deeper, Merlin, how does he do that? “Should I take it out?”
“Nrg,” Harry manages. The sensitive head of his own cock is pinned between his body and the seatback, the fabric soft enough to feel good and rough enough to give him a sort of sparkling oversensitivity that takes his breath away. “Jesus. No.”
When they’re shagging—and they shag a lot—Harry doesn’t mind how fucked up he is and maybe always has been. His little panics and rages float overhead like clouds and never come down far enough to ruin things. Or maybe it’s Harry who floats overhead. There’s floating involved, that’s what he knows. Draco’s between him and the world and all his stupid feelings, so he can ignore them.
There’s always a moment, though, when it gets too good and Harry’s hips get heavy and his pleasure winds into a ball in his belly and the tether of his control is a fraying thread, and it scares the wits out of him, honestly, it does, and every time, Draco wraps an arm around him and gets all close and says n’aie pas peur, ça arrivera quand ça arrivera.6
Harry has no idea what that means, but he likes the sound of it, and he never asks for a translation, either, because he comes afterwards, inevitably, a few seconds later or a minute later or forever later and then he doesn’t remember to ask for anything except more of Draco.
It happens like that, Draco dragging himself over Harry’s prostate, the car park out the back windscreen, sweat on his spine and Draco’s lips on the curve of his shoulder and Harry’s entire body stretched around Draco and that pleasure sweeping in like a line of storms.
“N’aie pas peur.” Draco says, pulsing inside Harry, his voice trembling with how near he is to coming. “Ça arrivera quand—Merlin alive, ça arrivera.”
Harry holds his breath, wanting to choose to go under, wanting to choose it at least a little, but he doesn’t get to. It happens to him, like always, like Draco, and he can’t be too angry about that.
Afterwards, the wind off the sea at the White Cliffs wants to play with Draco’s hair, and he has to catch it in both hands to tie it up, laughing, cheeks already pink from ten minutes in the sun and the shag they had, and Harry thinks I could tell him. I could say it, and he’d still look at me the same.
But he doesn’t.
“Je veux t’épouser,”7 Draco calls from the cliff’s edge, the sea sparkling behind him.
“I want to shag again,” Harry answers.
Draco sings while he brews tea.
He sings little songs in French, humming whenever he forgets the words.
He buys flowers for the kitchen table, and Harry learns to make a fuss whenever the flowers are new, because Draco picks them out specially for Harry. Yellow arrangements with lesser celandine. A blushing cascade of everlasting pea. Purple and white ambrosia set off with baby’s breath.
And, every Friday, two big, blooming roses, one red, one pink, their stems wrapped together in a slim glass vase by Harry’s side of the bed.
It’s not a secret.
It’s not a secret he means to keep from Draco, anyway. It’s not even really a thing.
It’s what Ron calls Harry’s no-heat explosions, which is funny for about five seconds before it isn’t. Dr Filibuster’s Fabulous Wet-Start No-Heat Fireworks at least give people something nice to look at. Harry’s outbursts are more like Reducto and Incendio gave birth to a demon.
He lets Draco take him dancing and drinking and back to his flat to shag, then melts down in Auror training. He yells—fine, he screams—at Robards twice before he gets benched from training, then grits his teeth through four months of Mind Healing sessions where he pretends to confess his deepest fears. He goes back to the DMLE and keeps his head down for the rest of training, then beats up a bloke in a pub on Diagon Alley who’d gotten too close and kept touching him like some relic on display for public enjoyment. He graduates from Auror training, gets assigned to three weeks of mandatory leave, and goes back to his flat shaking with a horrible, cold fury, and when Draco comes over that night, he asks Harry to move in with him.
So he moves in.
Because the parts of Harry that go up in flames over nothing—Robards making a change to a training exercise when they’ve already started, somebody touching him on the street when he wasn’t expecting it, a last-minute reshuffling of assigned cases—don’t bother him when he’s with Draco. They can’t get to him there.
And because—
Look at Draco. Listen to him. He’s at the Ministry, too, liaising with the Ministère des Affaires Magiques de la France, only he does it better than Harry does his job. And he’s always saying things to Harry in French like n’aie pas peur, ça arrivera quand ça arrivera.
And Harry wants to be near him. And to touch his hair. And to let Draco kiss him the way Draco does several times a day, like he’s seeing Harry for the first time in decades and has to feather him with kisses to understand the shape of his face. And then his lips. And then his mouth.
It’s not a secret. Harry just doesn’t say anything about how sometimes changes in plans make him so angry he sees stars. Or maybe he sees stars because he can’t breathe. Or maybe it’s because it makes him literally ill to have the rug pulled out from under him again.
And again.
And again.
“Do you know,” Harry says, groggy, his tongue thick in his mouth, curled on top of Draco in the middle of the night—he’d had a nightmare, but now he can’t remember what it was about. He forgot while he was listening to Draco’s heartbeat.
“Je sais.”8 Draco’s thumb circles Harry’s nape.
“I love you.”
He feels Draco smiling—his jaw moving just so, his quick little breath, his hand spreading out between Harry’s shoulder blades.
“I love you, Harry.” Draco sighs. “Mon cœur.”
Pansy stares at him from across their desks, pushed together in the middle of their office because they’d had three fights that turned into duels over case files that neither one of them wanted to have to move.
“Potter,” she says, and Harry realises too late, like a twat, that she’s said his name more than once. “You look like a dragon’s bitten you through the brain.”
A dragon has bitten him through the brain. Harry can feel the teeth. His dying wish is that it would breathe fire through his skull and kill him.
It doesn’t, so he’s left to pull his glasses off to see if that helps.
It doesn’t, so he’s left to claw at his temples a bit to see if that makes the pressure let off or at least clears the weird strings of light through his vision.
It doesn’t, so Harry sicks up on his desk.
Pansy’s voice is distorted, but they’ve been partners long enough that he knows she’s saying things like Merlin’s arsehole, what the bloody inelegant fuck, Potter, no, I don’t know, he turned a horrid Gryffindor red and stopped breathing, then took off his glasses and regurgitated a pile of toast onto his desk.
At some point, Draco enters the conversion. What happened beforehand?
And Pansy, from somewhere off Harry’s right elbow, says nothing happened, Draco, don’t look at me like that, I mean it, I will hex you into next year if you—no! I only said Ellis down in Weather and Environment said it was going to rain.
That’s the day Harry learns what a migraine is, because he has one that lasts until the weekend.
What’s he supposed to say that Draco doesn’t already know?
It’s not like he wants to bring whatever this is home with him. Not to their townhouse in Croydon, which isn’t posh enough for anyone to suspect the Boy Who Lived now lives there, and which Draco finds hilarious on account of the top-floor main bedroom. Harry thinks he’s ducking his head all the time because it makes Harry laugh, but then Draco hits his head on the ceiling.
“I thought you were—” They end up on the carpet mid-sentence, and Harry kisses Draco off-centre and awkward, still laughing. “—joking.”
“Why would I joke about my impressive height?” Draco pouts for far longer than necessary, then rolls them over so Harry’s pinned. “Does this seem like a joke to you now, Potter?”
No, it does not, because being pinned like this inevitably makes Harry mad with lust, which is bloody serious.
And then what? Is he supposed to peel himself off the carpet and say by the way, it happened again at work, Robards sent me to the Leaky for the whole afternoon instead of sacking me, but it’s not a big deal?
Is he supposed to say I’m two different people, did you know, and I’m afraid the other half’s going to follow me home through the Floo one day?
Is he supposed to say I think it’s getting worse, but I can’t tell?
And then what?
What if Draco’s face gets all solemn and cold and he does that thing where he turns away a little bit and looks at Harry sidelong, and then Harry’s coming home to a half-empty bedroom and a note that says sorry, Potter, you weren’t for me after all?
“Mon cœur,” Draco says, leaning down to kiss him right between his shoulder blades.
“Yeh?” Harry mumbles into the carpet.
“N’aie pas peur. Ça arrivera quand ça arrivera.”
“Are you going to tell me what that means?”
“Non,” says Draco.
Harry decides it’s not a problem if he can solve it himself.
The last time he tried this strategy, Ron followed him out of the Burrow and told him to get his head out of his arse. In that instance Ron happened to be right. Harry would have died without Hermione.
But now Hermione is dragging the whole of the wizarding world into the future by holding several simultaneous jobs at the Ministry, and Ron’s a Healer at St Mungo’s, so there’s nobody to tell Harry to get his head out of his arse.
Draco could be telling him that, but Harry wouldn’t know.
It’s not until after the raid that Harry has a no-heat explosion, which makes no bloody sense—he realises that. But in a Muggle context, the context in which he was raised in a cupboard, it does make sense in terms of magical things, dangerous things. Dr Filibuster’s Fabulous Wet-Start No-Heat Fireworks don’t need flame to create glittering trails of sparks in the air, and Harry doesn’t need a hex or a curse to get him going.
All he needs is a Stabilising Charm, aimed at him without warning in the St Mungo’s A&E.
From a distant corner of his mind, a whisper: you’re being mental, you’re being mad, they didn’t do anything to hurt you, but he can’t hear it over the howling in the rest of him. The charm swept through his chest and his muscles, freshening the oxygen in his blood and giving him a deep breath for the first time since the Diffindo made a hole in his side, and now that Harry can breathe, he can also get his arm to work to assist him in grabbing the Mediwix by the collar and yanking the man down by his blue robes.
“Potter,” says Pansy.
“What in Merlin’s fucking fuck do you think you’re doing?” he growls—yells—into the man’s face.
“Mr Potter. You are—were—experiencing significant blood loss—”
“Potter! You can’t—”
“Don’t touch me,” Harry barks, his fingers digging into the blue robes, spattered with Harry’s own blood. “Don’t fucking touch me. Do you hear me? I said don’t fucking touch me. I’m confiscating your wand. You’re under arrest. You’re—”
Two arms come around him from behind, locking over his chest. “Harry, no. Mate. No. Stop. Let go. Let go, mate. Harry. Let go.”
Oh.
It’s Ron.
Oh.
The Mediwix is turning blue.
Ron’s freckled hand covers Harry’s, and he pulls Harry’s fingers away from the man’s robes, and Harry opens his mouth to apologise for almost killing him like a madman and instead sicks up what feels like pure blood all down his front.
The robes are already red, so.
That’s good.
“Ronald, what is—what are we supposed to—Robards is going to have a fit, oh, Merlin’s arsehole, he’s going to—die? Stop it! Potter, snap out of it—”
“Sorry,” Harry gurgles, and then he passes out.
When he comes to, it’s only Ron and Draco in the room, and Harry swims under heavy Sedating Charms until they’ve put his blood back where it belongs and repaired the hole, and when he gets home he drags Draco into the bed with him.
“I’ll die if you don’t shag me,” says Harry.
“Mon cœur.” Draco helps Harry find a pillow and pushes him down into it. “You have only just been released from hospital.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Je veux t’épouser.”
“I won’t hurt myself. I’ll just, like, lie here.”
“Ah! Then I can do all the work, is that it?”
“Please.” Harry sounds pathetic, but hospital or not, what he needs right now is for all of him to be in one place, and he feels most like that when Draco is everywhere around him and inside him and he can’t think about anything else.
Draco is concerned about the whole hospital thing, or maybe he’s playing it up to make Harry laugh, but either way, he turns it into the sort of production Harry absolutely loves, with too much shushing and quiet orders whispered in his ear and Draco easing into him, easing and easing until he’s eased himself so far inside Harry that his mind blanks out.
And then Draco leans over him and presses a little more. “How is it, my love? Can you breathe?”
“Dick,” Harry croaks. “Throat.”
“Wonderful,” says Draco, and finds his rhythm, slow and steady, lulling Harry into an orgasm, then to sleep.
So, it might be a problem.
But Harry can keep the problem—which is really a small problem, when you think about it, when you compare it to, like, a murderous Dark Lord coming back to life and taking over the government and killing people all over the place—in the quiet corners at the Ministry, like the break room no one uses because the kettle’s gone missing and the office no one uses because the door won’t stay shut and the corridor nearest Draco’s office, which isn’t exactly quiet, but which can become quiet if Harry hangs around long enough for Draco to come out and find him there, and then all the magic that’s stuffed inside his veins is finally worth it, because nobody can do a Muffling Charm like Harry can, and nobody can do a Notice-Me-Not like Draco, so nobody hears, and nobody notices.
If Draco did notice what Harry was hiding from, he might break up with him.
Harry doesn’t spend all his time waiting to see if Draco’s going to break up with him.
Just some of it.
“Mon cœur,” Draco says, leaning against their kitchen counter with a cup of tea in one hand, reaching for Harry with the other. “Marry me.”
Harry goes to Draco’s outstretched arm. He folds himself along Draco’s body—long, lean, perfect, perfectly dressed—and hears what he said on a bleary delay.
“What?”
Draco spreads his hand wide on Harry’s back and rubs in a slow circle. “Marry me.”
Harry pulls back. He’s wandered out to the kitchen without his glasses and doesn’t know where they are, but even his shitty eyes confirm that Draco’s serious. He’s making a welcoming curve of himself, standing the way he is, and Harry wants in.
He wants in to the shelter Draco always offers.
“Yeah?” That sounds like he’s asking permission. “Yes. I—yeah. Yes.”
It’s still not a secret. A secret is something you intentionally keep to yourself, hour after hour, day after day.
Harry doesn’t have a secret. He has, er, management priorities. For managing what happens to him. He can’t scream at Robards if he’s out in the field responding to low-level calls and being the fourth backup on a raid so his sole purpose is standing around. He can’t get a migraine over a weather report if Pansy doesn’t give him a weather report. He can’t get ambushed by photographers because Draco pulled a ring out of a tea tin and put it on Harry’s finger like he’d been planning that move for years.
Well, that last one—that can happen, and it does. Because four years have gone by, season after season, morning after afternoon after evening, and when Harry looks back, it all seems like a blur of Draco’s mouth on his and Draco’s hand on the small of his back and Draco next to him in bed and at the pub and everywhere.
Harry manages the first ambush by sort of hiding behind Draco, which is easy because of Draco’s impressive height, though he’s pretty lean, so he doesn't hide all of Harry. He manages the second one by letting Draco dazzle his way through a bunch of questions that are pure bollocks about the secret engagement. He manages the third one by not managing it and accidentally blows a window out of a shop across the street with his magic, showering everyone in broken glass.
That ends in another migraine.
He tells Draco he’s just hungry, then sicks up his soup all over the kitchen table.
It’s nothing.
Nothing at all. Nothing Harry’s expecting. Nothing he can ever anticipate. He’s not even thinking about it when he and Pansy step out of the Hat-Rabbit after the sort of parchment-audit day at the DMLE that makes Harry want to murder people.
Not, like, literally, but with people from Accounting and Records swarming at all the Auror offices with random questions about quill usage and broom miles and just a general estimate, rounding up is fine, of how much tea you’d say you’d drink in the average two-week period, Harry’s got a thudding headache and a thirst for vengeance that even a solid hour of venting to Pansy over several rounds of Firewhisky couldn’t quench. Home sounds like paradise right now. He’ll go down on his knees and beg Draco for a shag that’ll wash this day out of his brain and his muscles. He can already taste I’ll do anything—sweet, that—and hear whatever French nonsense Draco will say back that means get on the bed on your front, darling, if Harry had to guess.
He’s thinking about their bed and how fuzzy the Firewhisky makes his brain, so he doesn’t think to check for photographers. It’s the sodding Hat-Rabbit, anyway, not the Leaky or somewhere in the middle of Diagon where Skeeter-types like to buzz around and get comments from sources at the Ministry who prefer to remain anonymous.
A camera flash goes off in Harry’s face, temporarily blinding him, just as Pansy says, oh, it looks like rain.
He can’t see to turn around and go back inside, which is his first and strongest instinct—get in, get in, get in—and now that a camera’s gone off, it won’t be any better at the pub.
Harry doesn’t go for his wand. Most of the time, he doesn’t need it, and he certainly doesn’t need it now, when all his magic is so hot at his fingertips that it burns. Sod incantations. Sod wand movements. He’s just getting these pricks away from him, across England if he can manage, and of course he can bloody manage, he’s Harry Potter, which is the thought that slams into him at the speed of a freight train when his left hand—his off-hand—comes up in front of his face and his engagement band, a classic gold loop that looks nice with his skin tone, glints on his finger.
Pansy has both hands on his elbow. She says his name, sharp. Potter. Potter! But Harry’s already got where she’s going.
He’s lost it.
Again.
He pulls his hand closer to his face, stomach roiling with horror.
The ring.
The ring.
That’s what’s going to bring this all down on top of them.
The ring comes with Harry everywhere. He likes the weight of it on his finger and loves what it means and absolutely cannot keep it on for one more second.
He turns towards Pansy, giving his back to the photographers—three of them, shouting questions—and pulls it off his finger. Harry’s going to sick up and cry, or cry and sick up, or do both at the same time, and he can’t do it here.
“Potter,” Pansy says. “Harry.”
He shoves the ring onto his little finger and digs in his pocket for a parchment-pad and quill, then scribbles out the only thing that comes to mind:
Sorry sorry sorry
I’m sorry
And then he folds the ring into the note and presses the ugly wad of it into Pansy’s hands.
“I’m leaving,” he says, his breath a pinprick in his lungs. “I’m going. Sorry. Sorry, Pans. I’m sorry.”
“Harry—”
He Disapparates.
Hermione would dress him down if she knew he’d Apparated like this—drunk and crying and out of his mind. Harry has no idea how he doesn’t Splinch himself. He hasn’t even chosen a destination, but he lands in one piece anyway and immediately sicks up onto the thick, knobby trunk of an elm tree in the middle of a field.
Takes a few heaves to stop.
Harry stands up and wipes off the tears from his glasses, then trudges towards the village proper. It’s not really a village. It’s a hamlet in Cambridgeshire that he and Pansy visited once to locate an old wix who’d lived on the outskirts and wasn’t responding to her son’s owls.
She’d had a cottage for let or something like that, and there’s no telling whether she’s still alive or still lives there, but Harry can’t stand the thought of going into the pub here—it’s the size of his cupboard, more or less, and he needs to breathe.
The wix isn’t happy to see Harry, which is fine by him, but she is happy to let out her cottage to him for a period of time that Harry can’t remember the moment he steps away. Said cottage is down the lane, can’t miss it. That’s putting more faith in Harry’s ability to see than is probably reasonable, but he goes down the lane, stopping a few times to sob at a tree or two and finally arriving at a tidy little place with a front garden that’s entirely made of roses. The front gate swings on its hinges, broken, but the cobblestone path is clear. That’s the only thing that’s clear. The roses aren’t just in the front garden. They make up the front of the cottage, too.
At the door, Harry fumbles the key—an antique, heavy and brass, on a worn leather strap—but finally gets it into the lock.
Finally gets in.
Finally shuts the door behind him.
There’s not much to it. Well—maybe there’s more than meets the eye, but Harry can’t see as it is and then he really can’t see without his glasses. He tosses those onto a little side table and keeps moving through the tiny sitting room to the tiny bedroom, shedding his outer robes and leaving them in a red puddle on the floor, then his uniform pieces underneath, then his boots and socks until he’s down to pants and a vest.
Which is enough for what he’s got planned.
Which is to find the bed and pull down the covers and get in.
And then to pull the covers over his head.
They’re clean. The cottage is clean, if a bit dusty, but he might as well be inhaling a forest fire or a curse.
The sheets are clean, but they’re not right, because they don’t smell like Draco, and they’re never going to smell like him again, now that Harry’s given back the ring.
It wasn’t a mistake.
Sure as bloody Merlin feels like one from the gaping hole in his chest, but it wasn’t.
Because what Harry realised outside the Hat-Rabbit was that the ring was a link between the two halves of him. The happy-at-home side of him and the side of him that—
Did he almost murder some photographers?
That side.
The ring was going to bring all of that home where Draco could see it, and Harry would rather die.
He’d just rather die.
Maybe he will, now.
First, he’s going to disappear into this bed.
Crying himself to sleep under the unfamiliar blankets feels like crying himself to sleep in a cupboard.
But, Harry figures, at least he can spare Draco the disappointment of finding him out after the wedding.
That would be worse.
He’s sure it would be worse.
Sometimes, light comes through the window.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
Sometimes Harry thinks the blankets must be the heaviest blankets ever made.
Sometimes he knows it’s not the blankets that are so heavy.
Sometimes he cries until the pillow is damp and disgusting, and it takes ages for him to work up the energy to roll over. Turning the pillow itself is a non-starter.
Sometimes he just stays where he is.
Sometimes he gets up.
Mostly, he doesn’t.
Harry keeps waking up. It’s an uncomfortable, irritated waking, the blankets tangled around him and his eyes puffy and his whole body heavy and sluggish.
He closes his eyes tighter against the light. It’s one of the light times, then. Bollocks.
Harry spends his morning energy on rolling away from the window and pulling the blankets over his head.
But he’s been in the bed too long, so it’s too hot to stay underneath.
He folds them down below his nose and thinks about dark places and dark dreams and a dark eternity that seems a little dramatic, honestly, but it also seems comforting, so Harry holds that in his mind and waits to fall back asleep.
Except he can’t.
There’s a rustling like wind in leaves, a stirring.
“Hrmp,” he grumbles at his empty cottage. Who needs a breeze? The breeze can shut up.
Only, as Harry slowly, slowly realises, it’s not the sound of the breeze keeping him awake.
It’s not just the sound of the breeze outside.
It’s the sound of magic.
Looking back, it was surprising how fast the sound of magic became commonplace when Harry was a kid. Probably because it was so quiet. There was the occasional crack or sizzle, of course, but more often a hum or a whisper, something like the sound of his own breathing, which he mostly tuned out.
Now, after…some amount of time in the silent cottage, he can hear it like his own snotty heaving.
Except it’s not snotty heaving going on outside. It’s little zips, like Professor Sprout’s secateurs.
Also.
A voice.
“Enfin, je t’en veux pas, mais crévindiou, crévindiou, mon cœur!”9 Then, softer: “Il s’est dépassé sur ce coup là. Je sais que tu as des ennuis en ce moment, mon cœur. T’inquiète.”10
Well. Maybe Harry’s finally dying, because the more he breathes, the more he can smell Draco’s magic, which is sweet and silvery and polished, something that would shine in the light, and there is no way Draco’s here.
Harry pulls the blankets tight around his shoulders and squeezes his eyes shut. He can’t remember crying before he fell asleep the last time, but his eyelids ache too badly to keep them squeezed, so he just shuts them normally and waits for the hallucination to pass.
It doesn’t.
The magic just keeps coming, the voice getting clearer, and finally the front door to the cottage cracks open with a la vache, mon cœur.
So much fresh air spills through the tiny hideaway that Harry nearly gasps. It’s a summery breeze, like May turning into June, and oh, bollocks, he really didn’t plan to be here in this bed when May turned to June. His plan wasn’t that solid, come to think of it. Even so, Harry has obviously failed.
Draco—hallucinated Draco, probably—is talking to himself.
“Hmm,” he says. More magic. It settles over Harry like a mist. If he could just die fast, that would be ideal.
Water runs.
That sounds like actual water.
Real, literal water going through the pipes in the cottage.
A lot of water.
Harry’s face gets hot.
That’s the sound of a bath being run, he’s pretty sure, and it’s not the sort of sound he’d be able to imagine so vividly.
He doesn’t think.
And he can breathe a bit better, what with the fresh air and Draco’s magic, and his head is a bit clearer, and it all sort of comes together, then, that he has no idea how long he’s been in the bed or in the cottage but it’s long enough to be a problem.
Okay.
This probably isn’t a hallucination, and neither is Draco’s humming.
Footsteps go into the kitchen, and Draco switches to singing.
Pourtant quelqu’un m’a dit…
Que tu m’aimais encore,
C’est quelqu’un qui m’a dit que tu m’aimais encore.
Serait-ce possible alors?
It’s lovely, is the thing, and light, and Harry wonders for a second if he has died and this is an afterlife where there’s no King’s Cross, just Draco singing.
That wouldn’t be so bad.
Would it?
Draco taps around in the kitchen, more of his magic zipping and swishing and singing, his magic is always singing, and Harry wishes he could become one with the mattress so Draco won’t see him like this.
But maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll go out again.
No such luck.
Draco appears in the bedroom doorway a minute or two later, a shadow in the slits of Harry’s swollen, cried-out eyes, and if he could, he’d turn away just to hide.
But he can’t.
So.
“Tiens, mon cœur!”11 Draco says, like they’ve been playing some weird fucked-up game of sardines with just the two of them. “Je t’ai cherché.”12
And then he picks his way across the floor, sending the dried-up puddles of Harry’s uniform to a chair in the corner he hadn’t ever noticed, shaking themselves clean and un-wrinkled as they go.
And then Draco perches on the edge of Harry’s disgusting, overheated bed, his fingers so gentle in Harry’s hair that he could cry.
That he is crying.
Again.
“I,” he says, his voice all creaky and horrible from however long he’s been pretending to be a corpse.
“Shh,” Draco answers. “I wouldn’t try to talk yet, if I were you. I’d wait until I had tea and a bath.”
Harry makes a blubbering sound.
“Well, no, of course you can’t do that on your own, otherwise you’d have done it already, wouldn’t you have? That’s why I’m here, darling, dearest, mon cœur.”
“But.” It’s like sandpaper, honestly. Sawdust. Choking and dry. “Why?”
Draco looks at him, all grey eyes and silver affection. “Because you’re here. Where else would I be?”
Harry doesn’t feel he deserves a bath—doesn’t feel he deserves anything, really—but his lack of participation in his life has rendered him too weak to fight Draco off when he extracts Harry from his bed-nest and tucks him against his chest in a bridal carry like Harry is horribly ill.
Which, all things considered, he might be.
All other things considered, Harry has no interest in fighting Draco off. His throat hurts down to his chest, and his chest hurts down to his fingertips, and it’s not like he can go back, after what he did, so this must be it. This must be a final parting gift from Draco before he leaves him to his cottage.
Harry thinks it has to be a final parting gift when Draco strips them both down and gets into the tub with him.
It’s probably for practical purposes. Left to his own devices, Harry would slip under the water, and maybe not even because he wanted to. Maybe because his head weighs so much that he can’t hold it up and has to—for practical purposes—rest it on Draco’s shoulder.
Draco seems to have no trouble with this at all. He sets about making bubbles for the bath and Summoning a potion for Harry’s hair and casting a thin, weightless Repelling Charm over Harry’s eyes so no soap gets in. His Freshening Charm for Harry’s mouth tastes like wild mint.
For a long time, Draco sings the same song he did in the kitchen and works at Harry’s hair. It’s very tangled, he gathers from how Draco’s fingers stay in it, lingering in one spot, then another, then adding water, then more potion, rinse, repeat.
Harry can’t help it. He turns over eventually and finds the scars on Draco’s chest, finds where one of them starts high on his cheekbone, almost translucent, and traces it down to where it ends.
Draco doesn’t stop him.
Except once, when he catches Harry’s hand and sends a stream of pearlescent bubbles over his fingers, then rubs the lightly scented soap into each of Harry’s knuckles with his own fingers, like he knows a flannel would scrape off Harry’s skin.
Harry’s drifting, thinking of staying in the tub forever, when Draco kisses his cheek.
“Better,” he pronounces, and before Harry can say push me under, that’d be fine, Draco stands up again, Harry in his arms. He dries Harry off with two of the largest towels Harry has ever seen, bathwater caught in the hollow of Draco’s throat and making little runnels from his starlight hair to his shoulders to his arms to the floor. His final touch is to wrap one of the towels over Harry’s head and pull it tight under his chin, then lean in for a kiss.
Which makes his eyes burn and well and spill over.
“Tu as l’air si triste, mais tu ne devrais pas,” Draco says, and wipes the tears away.
Draco hasn’t brought any of Harry’s clothes for him to change into.
That seems right.
Seems even more right after Harry’s covered, head to toe, in Draco’s things—the expensive joggers and jumper modelled after a Quidditch kit that would never, ever stand up to anything more than a light breeze because it’s too soft. The vest and pants might be Harry’s, actually, but they’re new and he can tell by the smell of them that they’ve only been washed once.
Draco rolls up the joggers to Harry’s ankles and the sleeves of the jumper to his wrists and pulls the hood up over Harry’s hair even though they’re inside. He straightens all the clothes while he bites the inside of one cheek, concentrating like it’s important, like they’re about to get married or something, not like he’s dressing a useless prat who sent him the worst note ever with Harry’s ring tucked inside.
Then he leans back, still crouched at the side of Harry’s bed—fresh sheets, fresh blankets, the whole thing done up like a hotel or the Manor—and considers his work.
“Ah.” Draco’s eyes go wide and pleased. “I knew there was something missing.”
Harry’s answer curdles in his mouth. He coughs up some of his embarrassment. “Er…what?”
Draco holds out his hand.
There, in the dip of his palm, is Harry’s ring.
“I,” Harry says.
“You never take this off,” Draco muses. “Not ever. It’s always Charm it, Draco or let me rinse it, Draco or fine, then, see if there’s a curse, Draco, see while it’s on. Doesn’t it feel awful to be without it?”
“Yeah.” Nothing has felt worse. “But.”
“But what?”
Draco’s eyes are so steady. It doesn’t make any sense. Harry would’ve fallen over by now, or gotten a cramp in his calves, or forgotten what he was doing and wandered off.
“But I sent it to you.”
“Quite. And I’ve brought it back.”
“But.” This is horrible. Harry’s horrible. “You.”
“Me,” Draco agrees. “Rebonjour. It’s me, your fiancé.”
“Still?”
“Did you think you could get rid of me with a tear-stained note? You’ll have to try harder than that, Potter. Come, come.”
Harry can’t. He really can’t get up. He’s too tired from having a bath.
All Draco seems to want is his hand, though.
So Harry holds out his hand.
And Draco puts his ring back on.
It’s warm from being against Draco’s skin.
The maddening ache in Harry’s throat goes out of him in a whoosh, and he sort of crumples off the edge of the bed and into Draco’s arms.
It’s massively uncomfortable, this wave of sobbing. It’s like something big and sharp is trying to get out of him, and Harry can’t bottle it anymore, so he ruins a lot of Draco’s careful work by snotting all over his face.
Harry doesn’t hear a word of what Draco says until a long time later.
“Viens, prenons le thé. Viens, mon cœur. Viens.”
Tea. He’s talking about tea.
They go out to the sitting room, where Draco tucks a blanket over Harry’s lap, then goes to get the tea.
“You’re supposed to drink it, too,” Harry says when he realises Draco has abandoned his tea on the side table.
Draco shushes him.
He has a point, Harry guesses. His arms keep getting really tired, and Draco has to steady the cup several times to make sure Harry doesn’t drop it.
There can’t be much sugar in it. Harry doesn’t like a lot of sugar in his tea, so Draco wouldn’t make it for him like that. But Harry feels syrupy, like melted chocolate, by the time his tea is half gone. He feels like he did at the end of his first-ever Welcome Feast at Hogwarts, sated and bewildered, not knowing if it was supposed to be like that or if he should’ve tried to eat more.
The choice is made for him. He can’t keep his eyes open, much less put anything else in his mouth.
When Harry wakes up again, the sitting room is awash in an orange-y light.
“Rebonjour,” Draco says from underneath him. He’s been there the whole time. “It’s sunset.”
Harry almost—almost—sicks up the tea. “Are you—do you have to go?”
Draco smiles at him like he’s being a bit silly. “Non.”
He doesn’t go anywhere.
Harry switches between being sure he’s hallucinating and being sure he’s in the afterlife. At the very least, he feels like he’s never been alive before. It makes no sense to him when Draco brings him toast cut into triangles, and when he understands, he doesn’t like the idea.
But Draco insists.
When Harry eats half a triangle and won’t take another bite, Draco brings a tiny cup of soup. When the soup has filled him to the top of his head—he can’t fit any more into his body, he swears—Draco brings him a boiled sweet that tastes like strawberries.
Harry falls asleep with the sweet still in his mouth. It’s the first time in a while that his throat hasn’t hurt. He could sleep the rest of the night right there, but Draco shakes him awake and puts his arm around Harry’s waist and makes him walk the few steps to bed.
To Harry, this is unreasonably cruel, and he crawls into the blankets whinging his heart out, his legs sore—sore!—from having to walk so far and his bloodstream swimming with so many calories that he feels drunk.
And then Draco cancels his Lumos and gets into the bed with him, and Harry doesn’t feel drunk anymore.
He feels incredibly, painfully sober, every inch of him aching, and the only way to make it stop is to wrap himself around Draco as tightly as he can, arms, legs, everything.
Usually, Draco complains at least a little because Harry’s squishing him.
He doesn’t complain at all. He just holds Harry back.
It’s weird, waking up in the morning.
Not, like, just waking up. But waking up when the light coming through his window is a gentle pinkish-yellow, soft on the blankets and soft on Harry’s eyes.
Draco’s still here.
Harry turned over in the night, and they’ve traded—Draco’s the one curled around him, now, his arm around Harry’s waist and his fingers tucked under him a bit.
“Rebonjour,” Draco says sleepily, and plants a kiss on Harry’s nape that lasts so long Harry thinks he might’ve fallen asleep.
“Are you ever going to tell me what that means?”
“Re,” Draco mumbles. “Bonjour.”
“Re-hello?”
“Hello. Again.”
“Hello again.” The light really is something. Harry’s heart feels…not perfect, but not so heavy. He thinks that’s more to do with Draco. And the fact that his sheets smell like Draco’s magic and Draco, and they’re the right amount of warm, and his ring is there on his finger where it’s supposed to be. “Hogwarts, too?”
Draco snorts, a completely inelegant sound that puffs onto the back of Harry’s neck. A few more beats pass. He can tell—he just knows—that Draco’s trying to decide whether to retrace their old steps or say something new.
“Yes,” he says finally. Harry doesn’t have to see him to know he’s smiling. If Harry had to guess, Draco’s probably remembering that day on Diagon Alley, both of them on stools and draped in robes that didn’t fit yet but would, soon, pretending they knew what they were doing and that all of it was very fine and normal and not a big deal at all. “But first, I’m getting up.”
Harry aims for a sound of manly complaint but ends up with a pathetic whinge.
“Oh, no.” Draco pulls his arm away from Harry’s waist. “Are you all right, mon cœur? Can you breathe?”
“No,” Harry whinges. “Something’s missing.”
“Is it…” A kiss on his temple. “My dick? In your throat?”
“Maybe,” Harry says faintly. “Fuck me and see if that’s what it is.”
His heart gives a few panicked thuds. It’s a bit much, isn’t it? Look at Harry. He’s only clean and dressed because Draco showed up to dig him out of his blankets. Draco might not want anything to do with the sexy bits anymore. There might not be any sexy bits, now that—
“Mmm.” Draco’s arm returns to his waist. “I thought you’d never ask.”
“These blankets can’t stay here,” Draco announces, then uncovers Harry. His eyebrows shoot up. “And you’re still hidden! That won’t do.”
He Banishes Harry’s clothes piece by piece. Jumper, he says, and then it’s gone. Vest. Joggers. Pants.
Draco purses his lips. “Charms.”
They always feel better when Draco does them. Or maybe Harry’s just used to the shivery feeling as a precursor to getting shagged. His mind does a slippery, sliding thing, blurring out into something that’s even better than blankets, better than soft sheets, better, better, better.
Draco’s eyes get dark, the grey taking on a silver sheen, and he strokes down Harry’s front until he finds his cock, all hard and wanting, and wraps his fingers around it, and leans down to give Harry a minty kiss.
“Tiens, mon cœur,” he says. “Tiens.”
Look at you.
I’m going to touch you here.
Here, too.
Ah—
You missed me, didn’t you?
I can tell.
Shh. Be patient, mon cœur.
Harry, be—
Patient. All right, all—
Fuck.
All right.
Can you breathe?
Can you—
Oh, you can.
T’inquiète—
Ah—ah—sweet magic Merlin’s bells—
There you are.
There you are.
There.
Harry must fall asleep again. How could he do anything else? He’s orgasmed his brains out and now he’s tired.
He was, according to Draco, a good boy.
So.
Nothing to worry about.
He wakes to a kiss on his temple.
“I’m getting up,” Draco murmurs.
“Ferhg,” Harry answers. Fine.
“I’m drawing a bath,” Draco calls a minute later, aloe-scented magic in the air, water running.
“I’m taking you to the bath,” he says, wriggling his eyebrows suggestively as he lifts Harry out of bed. “I’m putting you in the water.”
“Are you getting in?”
“I am getting in,” Draco announces, then climbs in and balances over Harry and kisses him until most of the bubbles have popped and he has to re-cast them.
“I’m choosing your clothes,” Draco says, while Harry sits on the edge of the tub, a ridiculously fluffy towel over his head and tight under his chin and another wrapped around his waist.
“Your clothes, you mean?”
“You’ve found me out!” Draco reappears in the doorway, dressed—why is he always so fast at that?—with a stack of his own clothes in his arms for Harry.
“I’m making tea,” Draco sings from the tiny kitchen. “Il vous aime, c’est secret, lui dites pas que j’vous l’ai dit, tu vois quelqu’n m’a dit—”
“What are you singing?” Harry is once again tucked in on the sofa, wishing he had the energy to stand with Draco. Maybe he can work up to it.
“Je chante une chanson, mon cœur.”
“Yeah, but, like…what song?”
“Someone told me you still loved me. Could that be possible?”
“Er…obviously? Wait, who said that?”
“Quel enfer, I’ve burnt the toast. I’m starting over!”
“I’m…” What is Draco on about? Harry doesn’t know, but how much can it matter when he’s here? “Looking out the window?”
“Keep looking,” Draco orders. “Tell me if you see anything beautiful.”
The garden’s fine. Maybe it’s beautiful. Harry doesn’t know what counts, but the trees he can see are a nice shade of green, leaves full-sized and ready to wave themselves into summer, and the bits of blue sky through the branches are…
Nice.
They’re nice.
“I’m bringing tea and toast,” Draco calls from the kitchen, all of five paces away. “Over—to—you.”
The plate of toast floats ahead of him, landing softly on the side table. Draco stops at Harry’s place on the sofa and holds out his cup of tea.
He’s picked the same sort of outfit for himself, only he doesn’t have to roll up the wrists and ankles, since they’re his joggers and his other jumper, and he absolutely doesn’t look like he’s recently been pried out of bed by his boyfr—his fiancé—and probably couldn’t look like that even if he tried, since his hair always just goes up in this somehow perfectly casual bun-twist-thing that Harry’s hair would never do even if he begged it, and with his pale eyelashes and the pink in his cheeks and his eyes bright, like he’s looking at someone he’s proud of, that he loves—
Like Draco looks at Harry.
Like he always looks at Harry.
“I,” Harry says.
Draco’s brows knit. “Ca va bien?”
Harry’s vision blurs ever so slightly, and so does Draco. Bollocks. He’s got all teary, but he’s not going to cry, or sob, or go back to bed. Instead, he clears his throat.
“I saw something beautiful.”
Draco becomes even more beautiful when he smiles, a shocked little wavering thing, the tips of his ears going pink, then scoffs, still beaming. “Je t’aime aussi, chéri. Now—stop trying to seduce me and take this. It’s time for tea.”
He thinks it’s sort of a sex thing, all Draco’s announcements, and that Draco’s being funny when he keeps announcing what he’s going to do, or what they’re going to do, after they’ve gotten out of bed.
And Harry does find it hot, honestly. He does like everything Draco says, and he especially likes when Draco says it flirtatiously or secretively or conspiratorially, as if he must keep the information that they are going to sit on the sofa while Draco reads aloud to Harry as close to the vest as a state secret.
But then—Harry finds everything about Draco hot.
Is it weird?
Harry thinks maybe it’s a weird thing to do—announce everything like that. Except Draco never acts like it’s weird. He acts like he’s been doing it his entire life.
And anyway, they’ve got a new life now.
Harry probably would have called it a small life, before.
Not now, though. Now, it seems to be exactly as much life as he can handle. He hadn’t thought about what he’d do after he got out of bed because he didn’t plan on getting out of bed, but now he’s out of bed, and it’s like he’s never gotten out of bed before.
Sometimes he wants to laugh when Draco says we’re going to sit on the sofa and then we’ll have a nap, because what sort of plan is that? Harry’s not a toddler, and he’s not a hundred years old. He’s not even twenty-five. He should have the energy to go six rounds with Draco in bed and then leap up and save the world, or at least sit at his desk at the DMLE and fill out paperwork, which was mostly what he was doing before he—
Er.
Ran. Away. Before he ran away.
That’s not in the cards at the moment. Having a bath—even one where he barely has to do any of the work—and having tea and toast and sitting on the sofa for an hour is unbelievably taxing. When they go to have a nap, Harry falls asleep fast, his eyelids heavy like he’d stayed up all night.
And then there are the afternoons, with more tea, more toast with strawberry jam, biscuits that Draco breaks in half and shares with him, boiled sweets, little bowls of soup, a single perfect scrambled egg in a dish, water that Draco flavours with lemon or mint or cucumber—
There’s a whole routine.
It takes some time—a week, maybe, or two—before Harry stops getting winded moving from the bedroom to the sofa, and they start going out to the garden in the afternoons.
Draco spells a sunshade over a bit of grass so Harry doesn’t get overheated. I am constructing a sunshade for you, mon cœur. We are going once around the garden, and then you’ll sit underneath this lovely sunshade. We’re going twice around the garden. Oh, all right, all right, that was too far. One and a half times. Now, sit, sit, these roses must be tended, or we will have a ruin on our hands.
“Who taught you all those spells?” Harry calls one afternoon, when Draco has spent the better part of an hour coaxing climbing roses off the roof and onto a bower he made at the front of the house. “I think the roses like them.”
“The roses love them, chéri.” Draco holds his sunhat—a big, floppy straw hat that makes Harry’s heart race with delight every time Draco puts it on—onto his head with one hand and looks Harry in the eyes, serious as anything. “Also, my mother.”
“She taught you how to garden?”
Draco flicks his eyes towards the sky. “She taught me how to tend roses.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Yes. I’m moving this one just here.” Draco points out a bloom with his wand, then guides it onto the bower. Its stem and leaves wrap around the white frame, settling in.
“Should I—er—do you think I should—” A fluffy cloud trundles overhead. Harry’s pleasantly warm, his feet and shins sticking out from under the sunshade. He feels medium-heavy. Not tired enough to need a nap, not energised enough to sit at a desk or go on a raid or whatever. “Shouldn’t I owl work? And see?”
Draco points his wand at Harry with a playful little flourish. “Non.”
At the cottage, Draco doesn’t have to buy roses. He brings two of them in from outside and puts them in a narrow vase on Harry’s side of the bed, stems together, every time.
“We’re going to the village,” Draco announces, post-nap, pre-sunshade.
“We’re—what? It’s not a village.”
“It is too a village. There’s a shop, and we will walk there.”
Harry crosses his arms over his chest. Draco stretches out next to him on the sofa, miles and miles of long legs and his pretty, perfect mouth, and Harry does not want to leave this cottage or its garden. “Why?”
“For food.”
“I’m not—”
“You are not coming into the shop, mon cœur. You will sit on a lovely bench outside while I endear us to the lady who works there, and when I come out, you’ll tell me if you saw anything beautiful.”
“I won’t.”
Draco leans over and takes Harry’s chin in his hand. “You might.”
“Not if you’re inside, I won’t.”
“You’ll try,” Draco says, and when he’s all soft like that, all authoritative, Harry can’t resist him. “For me.”
Obviously.
Obviously, Harry will.
Going to the shops—the shop—is not a small thing. It’s a lot longer walk than Harry was expecting. It didn’t take him nearly as long to get to the cottage in the first place, did it?
He can’t remember.
He’s sweating by the time they’re in sight of the shop.
“Look.” Draco points. “There’s the bench. We’re almost there, chéri. Then you’ll sit for a few minutes.”
Harry grits his teeth too hard, and they make a disgusting crack. His heart flops all out of rhythm. The street is empty except for one old man in the far distance, but his brain or whatever doesn’t seem to realise that. “What if someone talks to me?”
“They won’t. I’ll cast a Notice-Me-Not on the bench.”
“But what if—”
“I’ll come out every minute to make sure nobody’s here to bother you.”
“That’s—that’s ridiculous, Draco, you can’t—”
“I can. The whole of the shop could fit in the palm of my hand. Here we are—sit. Would you like a sunshade?”
“Yes,” Harry grumbles.
Draco casts, and there it is.
Then he takes Harry’s face in his hands and bends so they’re at the same level. “I’m going to go in for the shopping. I’ll look out every minute.”
Harry wishes, very badly, that he could wave this off, but he thinks he might scream if Draco leaves for a minute and one second.
“Okay.”
They go to the shop every three days, and it’s—
It’s—
“We’re going to walk past the stone fence,” Draco announces. “Perhaps the pink flowers will have bloomed.”
“Great.”
“Oh, look! They have. And the bird with the nest in the knobbly stump came back.”
Harry fumes while he sits on his stupid bench, fumes while he listens to Draco chat to the woman behind the counter, and fumes all through the trip back to the cottage, which is no longer drowning in roses. Draco fixed the fence, too, so that’s all better.
“We’re almost there,” Draco says, holding the gate open for Harry. “Then you’ll sit in the garden while I put the shopping away.”
“Why?” Harry’s chest burns with humiliation. “Why do you keep doing that?”
“Keep doing what?” Oh, isn’t Draco innocent? Isn’t he bloody fit? Doesn’t Harry want to shag right now despite how ugly and pathetic he must look?
“Why do you keep telling me every single thing that’s going to happen? I’m not—I’m not—I know what’s going to happen. We do the same thing every day.”
Draco puts down the shopping right there in the grass, pulls Harry through the gate, and leans his forehead against Harry’s. Both his hands rest on Harry’s waist, and Harry’s going to cry, Merlin’s bollocks, and he does not want to.
“I do it because that’s what you need.”
“I don’t—”
“Right now, that’s what you need. You can’t tolerate uncertainty or surprise any longer, mon cœur. You simply can’t.”
“What.”
“You can’t, Harry. You tried for as long as you could, and you reached your limit, and now you’ll have a rest. You’ll have a break.”
“But why? Why would I need—that’s not a real thing, Draco! People don’t have zero surprises because they’ve turned into pathetic whinging babies—”
“You’re not a baby.”
“I can’t! You can’t!”
“You can, and I certainly can, and I know you’ve noticed.”
“But!” Draco’s being so perfect and Harry wants to sit under his sunshade and freak out, and it is not comforting to realise he might already be freaking out. “Our jobs!”
“Will be there when we get back. If we go back. I’m insufferably rich, chéri. Abhorrently rich. I could never work another day in my life and still be monstrously rich. You’re not badly off, either.”
“But!” Harry cries. “Why did you even get a job! If you don’t need a job!”
Draco looks at him very intently from such a short distance that Harry can only see silver-grey.
“Draco!”
Draco sighs.
“I’m going to show you,” he says softly. “Stay where you are.”
Harry has no idea where else he’d go.
Draco’s face fades out, and then he’s not looking at silver-grey anymore, he’s looking at a bunch of strangers writhing all over each other, bouncing to a beat that strikes him as shockingly new, shockingly odd. The rainbow lights are intensely bright, and he has the sense that he’s landed on another planet. It’s not so bad, but it is…missing something. A drink, maybe. Something extremely alcoholic.
Harry only understands that this is Draco’s memory when it changes. It’s a bubbly feeling, sort of like champagne, but more like a waterfall, rushing all over him, wild, barely contained, like the moment before a lightning strike except headier and deeper and more exhilarating, with a sweetness to it that’s just as wild.
That’s his magic.
That’s what his magic is like to Draco.
“I,” Harry says.
“Shh, shh. T’inquiète.”
In the memory, he—Draco—has forgotten about getting a drink. He has forgotten that drinks even exist. He’s only interested in one thing, and that is locating where Harry’s magic is coming from.
And then Harry comes out of the dark, narrow hallway, his balance fucked, his eyes huge. His vest is slightly damp at the shoulders, the fabric a bit shinier in spots.
“Oh, Jesus.”
He’s never seen himself like this before, obviously, and it’s—it’s a shock. Harry hadn’t known he was shaking like that at the time. He hadn’t felt it.
His fake Muggle driving licence drops to the floor. Of course it does. Harry can’t be trusted to hold onto anything. When he straightens up again, he looks completely shell-shocked, his teeth chattering and his chin dimpling and his shoulders hunched like someone’s raised a hand to him.
And.
His magic.
Is like a windstorm turned inside out. It’s not shoving Draco away. It’s two hands on a life preserver. It’s the last bit of rope before a hard fall. It’s pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease, senseless, helpless, lost.
So Draco puts his hands out.
And Harry comes.
The memory shifts, and there’s Harry in the hallway outside Draco’s office, his expression hopeless until the moment he sees Draco, and then—
Sheer relief.
There’s Harry coming through the door of their townhouse, his hands shaking—why hadn’t anyone told him?—and his magic only a little different: thereyouarethereyouarethereyouare.
There’s Harry, his whole body relaxing when he sees the flowers on the kitchen table.
Draco murmurs something Harry doesn’t understand. It’s probably in French, and he can’t hear it anyway because he’s busy making embarrassed, protesting noises and trying to get himself out of this bloody—
“Look,” Draco says, louder. “Look.”
Harry with his tongue between his teeth, baking, looking strong and focused and happy.
Harry with his hair an absolute wreck, a deep blush all down his neck from a recent shag, his eyes sparkling. Oh. He wants to shag again.
Well, yeah.
Harry at the pub, ignoring ten other people because he’s so busy staring at Draco like he’s made of magic.
“Okay,” he gasps. “All right, okay, okay.”
He rests his head on Draco’s shoulder, and Draco puts his arms around him, and they stay there in the garden until Harry comes back to the scent of roses in the air and Draco’s sun-warmed skin and the world outside his hot, teary face.
“But,” he says, miserable. “Why?”
Draco breathes, his chest pressing closer against Harry’s. “You never did have a rest, did you? After so much time, it would be hard to tell the difference between a real threat and—”
“A surprise?”
“Yes.”
Harry lets himself get heavier. “What if I can’t ever tell the difference again?”
“You will.” Draco sounds so sure. “But in the meantime, chui là. And not a threat,” he whispers.
“Obviously not.” Harry’s voice is doing that thing again. “You’re a surprise.”
“Tiens!”
“Tiens yourself.”
Draco kisses him instead.
“I’ve heard there will be storms this week or next,” Draco mentions one day not long before the end of June.
Harry’s stomach turns. The hairs on the back of his neck pull painfully tight. A horrible, coppery taste thickens on his tongue. He swallows it, then swallows it again.
“Okay.”
“It will be all right, chéri. It will be very wet and very windy and some of the flowers will come down, and then it will be over. We’re going out to the garden. Bring my book, would you?”
Harry tries not to dread it.
It’s rain. It’s not, like, a big deal.
Except he really does hate it, and after Draco showed him all those memories, now he gets why.
Sort of.
He’ll get over it.
He will.
It gets hot, the air hovering over the cottage. The roses bloom into the heat, becoming enormous bursts of red and pink and white and purple.
Harry sits under his sunshade and glares at the sky.
“I wish it would happen already,” he tells Draco, who’s coaxing more of the climbing roses onto the bower.
“N’aie pas peur, mon cœur. Ça arrivera quand ça arrivera.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Draco looks at him. He’s way more beautiful than any of the roses. “Yes, you do.”
It’s afternoon when the wind picks up. Tendrils of cold air spear down into the garden in gusts, catching them before they go inside. Harry watches from the sitting room window as the leaves in the trees turn over, showing their underbellies to the sky. Blue melts into grey overhead, then slate, and then the wind is tossing little branches against the cottage. Thunder rolls somewhere Harry can’t see, but he knows what it’ll look like—a wide stretch of clouds, cutting through the sky, coming on fast.
The rain starts all in a rush, droplets battering the window, and Harry jumps back on instinct, his heart in his throat.
“Draco,” he calls. “Draco.”
Draco doesn’t answer, so he turns, searching, which is apparently the story of Harry’s life.
The cottage door is open.
Draco’s in the front garden, face tipped towards the sky. He’s already soaked through, his hair glistening with rain, his skin glistening, everything precious with what little light is left.
Harry really.
Really.
Wants to hide in bed.
Draco opens his eyes and finds Harry there.
He puts his hands out.
Both hands. Palms up.
Draco beckons, his long, elegant fingers like a spell, tugging on some thread between them.
“Come here,” he calls over the clattering drum of the rain on the roof.
Merlin help him.
Harry goes.
Because Draco’s outside, but Harry wants in. He wants to be wherever Draco is.
It’s horrible, like always. He wants to cover his head, his face, his whole body so none of the raindrops touch him, and none of the flying rose petals, either. Harry walks with both hands out, knowing he must look like a toddler taking his first steps, hating it, hating it, it’s touching him when he didn’t plan on it, it’s touching him like everything else has always touched him, against his bloody will, when he doesn’t want it—
But—
It’s warm.
It’s a warm rain, and the drops are fat and sort of soft, and then his whole vest is wet so it’s not so awful, and then he takes one more step and his hands are in Draco’s, and Draco pulls him right in, his hand going to Harry’s waist, Harry’s other hand caught, safe, and Draco spins him.
Harry laughs. “It’s a storm! It’s raining!”
“Je ne laisserai pas la pluie te faire du mal.”13 Draco spins him again. The music’s only in his head. “La pluie est terrifiante, mais je ne la laisserai pas t’atteindre. Je te le promets. Does it hurt?”14
“Not with you,” Harry shouts. It’s not so bad. It doesn’t hurt at all, really. It’s okay. “Not with you, it doesn’t.”
“Viens danser avec moi,” Draco shouts back, and kisses him.
Harry can’t help knowing what that means. At least a little.
“I am!” Their shoes splash in the rain collecting in the garden. “I am! Dancing with you!”
“You are,” Draco agrees, his smile bright, like the sun.
