Chapter Text
xX Epiloque Xx
Not Quite Two Years Later, June 5th
Professor Higginsworth gasps when she walks into the room in which Harry has been assigned to get ready, and—really overdramatically, Harry thinks—her hands fly to cover her eyes.
“I’m wearing a towel,” Harry complains.
“It’s not the nudity,” she exclaims. “It’s him!” And then she points to where Draco had been standing and is no longer.
“Professor,” Draco chides, his arm slipping around Harry’s damp waist. “He is my fiancé, and”—checking his watch— “in less than an hour, my husband. If you’re having the vapours over our chastity, I fear that ship has sailed.”
Now they’ve pissed her off. She drops her hands and spits, “It’s not that either! You’re simply…” She waves her hands at them in frustration. “...not to see one another before the ceremony.”
Harry frowns and checks with Draco. “Isn’t the rule that we’re not supposed to see one another in our outfits before the wedding? As we’ve already established, I’m in a towel here…”
“And it’s not a wedding,” Draco adds.
“No, right, it’s a hand-fasting.”
“Yes, a year and a day.”
“A lifetime like that hopefully,” Harry says.
“Certainly,” Draco returns. Then, “We’re also two men, so there’s that.”
“Yes, that too,” says Harry, maintaining a straight face even as his heart beats harder for the handsome man next to him, who is now pulling Harry closer, in fact. “I’m just not sure the old rules apply here.”
She continues to frown at them and Harry breaks into a wide smile. “Speaking of one’s dress, you look exquisite, Higginsworth. Is that Banarasi silk?”
“I thought it fitting, for the occasion.”
Draco asks then, “And where is your date, pray tell?”
At this, she blushes and stammers. “I believe he’s, ahem, he’s seeing to the, erm… He’s setting up the chairs with one of your Weasleys.”
“I see,” says Harry. “Please do tell Kreacher thank you when you do see him, Professor.”
She gives them both one last angry-eared frown and then Disapparates.
Draco, already in his stylish Muggle suit with the green tie and the cufflinks Harry bought him, grasps Harry by the terry-clothed arse.
“I need to get ready,” Harry says, his hands resting on Draco’s chest, meeting his sparkling eyes. “I’ll ruin your suit.”
“Fuck the suit. I want you.”
Draco then kisses the warm purr from Harry’s lips, and somewhere in it, Harry loses his towel.
“Oh dear Salazar,” Pansy says, having walked quickly into the room and just as quickly right back out again. “The bloody door is OPEN,” she reprimands with her back to them, one hand on her sequined hip, the other on her head. “Potter, I’m here to ask if you need your friends to help you dress, and as clearly the answer is yes, I will report that to them posthaste. Draco, I blame you entirely for the state of his undress.”
“Some best man you are,” Draco says as Harry hides behind him and muffles his laughter into his back.
When Pansy’s gone, Draco flicks his hand at the door and closes it, sending up a ward as well. He turns back to Harry.
“We really don’t have time, you know,” Harry tells him.
“I know,” Draco agrees. “I just… wanted to see you like this, one last time.”
“What, naked?”
“No. I can see that anytime.”
Harry swats him, though it’s only the truth.
Draco continues, “I wanted to see my boyfriend once more, before I marry him.”
Harry smiles, his gaze falling to Draco’s plush lips. “Kiss your boyfriend then.”
Draco lights up at that, and leans in.
A loud clap of thunder precedes the downpour, and all Harry can do is watch from the window as the guests scurry into the tent, and their friends, saints all, get to moving the chairs and the archway with its lillies that are now being torn viciously from their stems.
“It’s going to be fine, Harry,” Hermione tells him, as Sujoy finishes putting the final touches on the pull-through braid they’ve given him. “Ronald, stop pacing and look at Harry.”
Ron stops, and his friends stare at him, Sujoy coming around in front of him to view their handy work. Hermione’s hands come up to cover her mouth. There are tears in her eyes.
“Harry,” Ron says, hushed. “Mate…”
“Yeah?” Harry checks, smoothing nonexistent wrinkles out of the gold achkan.
“You look stunning,” Hermione tells him, and then bursts into tears, her hand moving to her round belly.
“Hormones,” Ron says shrugging.
Hermione swats him in the stomach with a half-hearted backhand. “Our best friend is getting married. It’s perfectly normal to be emotional, you teaspoon.”
“I’m just saying!” Ron says. “It’s not a bad thing. Sujoy, did your partner get emotional before the children?”
“Well,” says Sujoy with a smile, “our children were both adopted, but it’s fair to say that we were both quite teary-eyed through much of the process, so…” They shrug diplomatically, and Harry turns from his friends to face the mirror, his breath catching at what he sees.
“Malfoy’s a lucky man,” Ron says, and Hermione smacks him again, harder this time. “Oi! Black! I’m sorry, okay? It’s hard to stop.”
“You’ve had two years,” Hermione says, tears gone. She wipes her wet cheeks and turns to Harry again. “He’s right though.”
Harry looks at his reflection—his brown skin and beautifully braided hair, his Jodhpuri clothes, his shoulders back, the pride and readiness sparkling in his own eyes—and he smiles. “He is a lucky bastard, isn’t he?”
His friends laugh with him. Sujoy squeezes his shoulder.
Harry sighs, checks the clock on the wall. He says, “Time to go.”
The chairs have been cleared, and the Kicking Pixies are well into their set as the rain rages on outside the tent and their guests are laughing, talking, drinking, dancing, and Harry is having trouble not smiling.
Draco’s hand presses to his lower back as they listen to Mrs Weckleshard—Sujoy’s next door neighbour who somehow invited herself—telling a third terribly boring story. And Harry can’t stop smiling.
One look at Draco shows this not to be the case for him, which only makes Harry smile harder.
“... and that’s when I said, ‘Wendell. Wendell Weckleshard, you get out there and degnome that garden. You get out there this instant!’ And do you know what he said to me?”
“No,” Draco says flatly, then, “Will you excuse us?” And he tugs Harry away.
“That was… unutterably rude,” Harry laughs.
“No more rude than she was being for keeping me from dancing with my husband,” Draco growls, pulling him out onto the dance floor and then into his arms.
“Say it again,” Harry demands, Mrs Whoseewhatsit forgotten as he gazes at Draco’s now smug face.
“My husband,” Draco says, voice rich and deep. “I want to dance with my gorgeous husband.”
“Well, that works out then, doesn’t it?” Harry says. “Because I want to dance with my fucking fit husband.”
“You are both so sickening!” Pansy hollers over the music. Then she slams a shot of something, Vanishes the glass with a joyous flourish, and joins Ginny, Luna, Theo, and Cho in a rigorous jumping dance that makes Harry dizzy to watch it. But better them than Seamus and Dean, who are trying to get a limbo competition going over by the stage.
Some of their oldest students are either standing on the sidelines looking too cool to dance, or have given up on it and joined in. The younger ones run through the throng, being shouted at by Minerva to slow down. A group of them are out playing in the rain with their centaur peers who prefer the open sky to a tent, Harry’s been told, accompanied by a very teenaged roll of the eyes from Torma.
Hermione and Ron are once again slow dancing, her back to his front so her belly has room. Arthur and Molly are minding a sleepy Rose, while Narcissa sits with Andromeda at a table under the twinkle lights, and Teddy holds court nearby with his Beauxbatons friends and one Durmstrang boy he seems to get suspiciously awkward around.
As Harry sways with Draco, Greg waltzes past with Padma; Blaise and Neville stumble by wrapped up in one another’s arms, drunkenly snogging; Astoria and Millicent Bulstrode are practically frotting on the dancefloor.
“It’s good to see her happy, isn’t it?” Harry says, and Draco muffles a snort against Harry’s neck.
“What?” Harry asks.
“No, sorry, I was still processing Blaise checking Longbottom’s tonsils with his tongue.” He clears his throat. “No, it’s…” He looks at Astoria, as happily queer as they are apparently. “It’s really good.”
“A right decision all around then,” Harry says, grasping his own fingers behind Draco’s neck.
“A right decision all around,” Draco agrees.
“I love you, you know.”
Draco’s smile turns soft, private. He moves a wispy curl off Harry’s forehead. “So you said in your vows. Did you write those yourself, Harry?”
“Oh fuck you,” Harry laughs, stepping on Draco’s foot on purpose, but not hard enough to hurt. Then he sobers. “I did write them. They’ve been half-written for a while, actually.”
Draco looks at him quizzically.
“I, erm… I’d already written most of it in that letter… to your… to your mum.”
Draco’s eyes go wide. “You…” He blinks. “To my mother?”
“Yes.”
“You wrote that you’d love me so well I’d never want for a thing. You said that to my mother?”
Harry nods. “And I told her that I already loved you so much I couldn’t ever bear to stand in the way of your happiness, even if your happiness wasn’t with me, but that I was pretty sure it might be.”
“With you.”
“With me,” Harry agrees.
“And here I thought Granger wrote all that.”
Harry shoves him, but Draco smiles and pulls him back close. “You said those things to my mother,” he says again, as if struggling to believe it.
Harry nods.
“Harry, bloody hell.” Draco’s eyes are stormy, his cheeks blooming in a blush. His thumb moves tenderly over Harry’s cheek. “To love this much is a tragedy.”
When Harry gets his breath back, he says, “But you married me anyway.”
Draco blinks, his long lashes catching the bright lights. “I married you anyway.”
They dance slowly, taking up three more songs just staring into each other’s eyes. Then Draco’s get a small, wicked flicker to them. “Come here.”
He promptly takes Harry’s hand and leads him quickly off the dance floor, between half-empty tables, out of the tent itself. He casts an Impervius over them and then tugs Harry around to the side of the tent, away from the frollicking children, into the shadows. His lips cover Harry’s, and Harry sighs, opening, letting his husband devour him.
“Here?” Harry asks when he feels Draco get hard against his leg.
“Mm, what if we just… go?”
“Go?” Harry exclaims. “Go where?”
“On our honeymoon.”
“What? Now??”
“Right now.” Draco has that wolfish look that says Harry will absolutely not regret leaving their own wedding reception right this minute.
“You’re a bad influence on me, Draco Potter-Black.”
“I hope so, Harry Potter-Black.”
Harry kisses him once more and whispers, “Take me then,” and in the next moment, they’re gone.
They make love three times on the rich silk sheets, the Mediterranean breeze coming in their open window. And then, catching his breath, sweaty and beautiful, Draco pants out, “Fancy a bath?”
Draco runs the water into the giant clawfoot tub that has its own view of the sea beneath them. As he adds bubbles and fragrant oils, and Harry finishes taking a slash in the loo, Draco laments for maybe the tenth time in a month, “I wish you’d have let me take you to India instead.”
Harry flushes the toilet and scoffs, gesturing out the window, “Is this phenomenal Monte Carlo view too drab for you then?”
Draco shrugs. “No, it’s just that… I only know France because the Malfoys were French. I’d rather get to know your ancestry than my own.”
“Draco.” Harry takes his face in his hands, presses a kiss to his forehead. “Don’t let your former name ruin all of bloody France for you.”
Draco lets out a small, reluctant laugh.
“Here, get in with me,” Harry says. He steps into the bath, and Draco mirrors him. They face each other in the hot steam, and Harry hums his pleasure at the sensation. They link their fingertips at the tub’s edge. “Besides, do you know how hot a Jodhpuri June is? No, we’ll definitely be making that a Christmas trip instead.”
Draco’s thumb moves over Harry’s. “Just not this Christmas.”
“No, not this Christmas.” Harry smiles at him.
Narcissa had made it very clear that her intention was to host Christmas at Grimmauld in the coming year, and Harry very much wants to support his mother-in-law in that.
Harry hums, happy and contented. They’re so far from where this started, and yet it feels like it was yesterday that Draco accosted him in the Prefects’ bath. “How do you think they’re doing?” Harry asks now. “Sinistra and Flitwick, minding the castle over the summer?”
“They're probably fucking in every room,” Draco says with a casual shrug.
Harry splashes him. “You are terrible.”
Unperturbed, Draco wipes the water from his face. “You’re too far away,” he tells Harry as their calves touch under the water.
Draco pulls on his hand, and they both slide toward the middle of the tub, Harry’s legs fitting over Draco’s slim hips.
“Are you tired of kissing me yet?” Harry asks, and Draco’s answer is to seize what’s left of Harry’s braid, yanking him in for a fierce and hot kiss.
It’s almost enough to render Harry senseless. But when the errant thought strikes him, his lips gasp away from Draco’s and he says, “Merlin, we just left, Draco.”
“Indeed we did,” Draco says, nipping playfully at Harry’s bottom lip.
“But we didn’t even tell anyone we were going. Fuck, I mean, they are going to kill us. They’ll be worried, won’t they? I should send my Patronus or something.”
But when Harry lifts his hand to Accio his wand, Draco gently pushes it down. “I’ll do it,” he says, Summoning his own wand into his hand. And then it’s looking right into Harry’s eyes, his expression so soft and alive and full of all the love Harry never would have dreamed him capable a few years ago, that Draco flicks his wand and says, confidently, “Expecto Patronum.”
He doesn’t even watch as it soars out the window. He just leans in, and he kisses Harry again, slow and deep, like they have all the time in the world.
So, it is unobserved that Draco’s Patronus glides out over the water, up between stars that bend their opalescent light down to the flashing surface of the sea. The wide wings flap, and a distinctive cry goes out in the dark like a song, and as Draco draws Harry tighter into his arms, the fiery phoenix crosses the light of the moon, and flies toward home.