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Draco is eighteen

Draco didn’t come here to jump.

He didn’t, honestly. He’d climbed the stairs to the platform of the Astronomy Tower out of an urgent desire for air. It had been hot in the eighth-year common room, all blazing fires and glowing optimism and Firewhisky to match. His surviving classmates’ eyes gleamed like the new year had come early and washed away the dirt and grime and horror of the war.

Look at them, all shiny and new.

Draco stands at the parapet and leans, just a little. 

It would be a great rush of air, wouldn’t it? Clear and cold over his face. Into his lungs. 

For a moment, he’d be able to breathe.  

For a moment, he’d fly.

Ah, but he can’t.

A letter from his mother crinkles in his pocket as he steps back from the drop. Its buttoned-up sentences look like teardrops on the page. The Ministry has declined to release your father’s body. They’ve guaranteed a stasis charm. Perhaps in the spring? 

Draco’s father had been dead for nine days by the time he and his mother were notified. Would it have made a difference to know? He doesn’t think so. His chest aches all the time. Has done since sixth-year. What died then that was worth mourning? His sense of certainty, perhaps. His sense of anticipation, certainly. 

Draco has a soulmark, for Merlin’s sake. He’s the Boy Who Was Marked Twice. 

Somewhere in the dark stretch of the world, there’s a person whose soul and magic mirror his own. Fate hasn’t been kind to Draco. It’s been almost gleefully cruel to his soulmate.

He hopes they never find him. The disappointment of never crossing paths would be infinitely less than discovering the ugly truth of what he is.

Do you know what would help?

A cigarette.

He’s going to stop in the new year. Only a few seconds left.

Draco has the cigarette and the intention for the spell to light it in hand when there’s a quiet scuffle at the top of the stairs.

Potter steps out into the night and tips his head back, breathing like Draco did when he arrived a few minutes ago—slightly desperate, like he’d been suffocating in the common room.

It’s very likely that he was suffocating in the common room. The Potter who went off to war isn’t the same one who came back. Or he’s had his outer layers stripped away. Draco has felt an odd compulsion, all year, to speak to him softly.

“Potter.” He snaps his fingers for the flame. Lights the cigarette. 

The Boy Who Lived startles, turns, the orange catching in his eyes. Draco breathes deeper in spite of himself. The air is fresher when Potter’s close. He thinks of wind in his face and the swoop and catch of flight. 

“Malfoy.” Potter comes to Draco, dragging his feet, and something loosens in Draco’s chest. A tie between them, slackening, giving his blood room to flow. “Why are you up here?”

“Why are you?”

Draco exhales and watches the smoke disappear into the sky. Every breath these days comes with a distant surprise—oh, I’m still alive, am I? Yes, his lungs remind him. Yes. Yes. Yes. 

He’s not half as sorry with Potter standing next to him. 

“I thought it would be…” Potter gestures at the courtyard below and the grounds beyond and all the twinkling stars. “More momentous up here, or something.”

“What would be?”

“The new year. It’s the first—” Potter’s voice catches, that catch echoing across the air to Draco. He wants to reach towards him. Is he as warm as he looks? As warm as he smells? Potter’s magic smells like heat, like summer, like lightning searing the air. “First year without—you know. Everything.”

Draco wants to—what? Comfort him? He feels the impulse first, then registers the anxious wobble in Potter’s voice. 

It’s out of order. It’s all out of order. It’s not the first year without everything. Draco’s father is under a stasis spell in the Azkaban morgue if the Ministry kept its promise and rotting on damp rock if they didn’t. The Mark is still as fresh on Draco’s skin as it was the day the Dark Lord put it there. It all came with them. Nothing’s been left behind.

But Potter’s face—

His hope is so fragile in the moonlight.

Draco can’t bear to watch it break. Not something so precious. Not something so delicate, held in the palms of his hands. 

“Ah.” He takes another drag of his cigarette. “Well, it was quite momentous, actually. There were fireworks and trumpets and a choir.”

Potter gapes at him. “What? When?”

“At the moment of the new year.” Draco gazes at the sky. It has been steadfastly the same since he stepped out on the platform. “You missed it, of course. You were late.”

Potter lets out a strange, unpracticed laugh. “Tosser.”

“I was early. I saw everything.”

And then Potter does this thing—this thing that had infuriated Draco when they were younger, and now—

In the first breaths of the first year without Potter’s destiny bearing down on all of them—

Now it makes Draco’s heart ache. He thought he’d stopped feeling things so keenly, thought he’d be half-numb forever. He was wrong.

Because Potter’s expression hints at suspicion, and then that suspicion disappears into an innocence that Potter certainly doesn’t know he has. 

And he can see in Potter’s eyes, lifted towards the sky, that he has allowed himself to believe in the song and the light and the call.

He’s beautiful like that.

Potter swallows. “Was it nice?”

Draco tears his eyes from Potter’s profile and looks out into the dark. His chest caves, heart thudding miserably against his ribs. He’d been thinking of his mother, flickering green in the flames of the Headmistress’s Floo. It was the cold, she had told Draco, tears running down her face. The cold took him. She had been torn in two by the news, heartbroken and relieved. 

The cold, not the Kiss, she didn’t say. 

She didn’t need to.

A younger, more vicious Draco might sneer at Potter. Might say something sharp and mocking to prove that he wasn’t soft the way the Saviour was. 

This Draco, now, is sheltering an ember from the wind, keeping it alive in his hands. 

Literally.

“It was lovely.” Why not buy in, just for a moment or two? “If a bit lonely.”

Draco wishes Potter would move closer.

It’s a silent, absent wish, but Potter moves closer as if he’d heard. 

Draco’s balance shifts towards Potter like he’s a fire in the forest. Draco’s cold, and he wants to be warm, but he doesn’t know how to say that without sounding foolish. 

“What do you think you’ll do?” Potter asks. 

“I don’t know.” Draco really and truly doesn’t. He Vanishes his cigarette and puts his hands into his pockets. “I’d like to avoid becoming my father, if at all possible.”

He would like to avoid freezing to death, alone on a rock in the ocean. He’d like to avoid causing his mother so much grief.

Potter doesn’t comment on Draco’s father.

“I’d like to avoid being alone,” he says, after a minute. “But I can’t picture it.”

Can’t he? “You’re never alone, Potter.”

“I mean…” The corner of Potter’s mouth turns down. “I mean, I’d like a family, or—or a person. A partner. It’s just hard to imagine how that would—how I’d find—everybody knows me. They already think they know who I am, and if I was with someone, they’d probably figure out—”

“That you’re even more of a saint than the Prophet says?”

“That I’m so fucked up,” Potter blurts.

Draco snorts. Of course he is. He is so very fucked up, with his magic trembling and a bit uncertain all the time, like the shiver in the air before rain. Draco hadn’t allowed himself to see it, in the beginning, but after all these years, it’s unavoidable. Potter’s fucked up. They’re all fucked up. Nobody made it out unscathed. 

Potter bursts out laughing. 

It’s as clear and ringing as Draco’s imagined choir, and he can breathe again. It’s a sound that demands an answer and Draco’s body tosses him into it—into joy—without looking to see what’s below.

They laugh and laugh and laugh, voices echoing off the stone and the sky. 

The sound of Potter’s laugh burrows into Draco’s head, and into his heart, and in a wild moment Draco thinks, Merlin, I’ve always loved him, always, always. 

He’s beginning to feel lightheaded—dangerous on the Astronomy Tower—when he reaches for Potter’s shoulder to pull him to standing. They can’t stay out in the cold forever.

Draco’s hand changes Potter’s angle so that the breeze ruffles Potter’s hair, and the moonlight shines down on the nape of his neck, and the world shifts, whirling in another direction, gravity changing underneath him.

Because.

Potter has a soulmark. 

He has Draco’s soulmark. 

It’s just there, peeking out from black curls, the holly and hawthorn scattered on his skin like stars. 

You, Draco thinks, and then no, because—

Not after all Potter’s been through. No. He can’t. He can’t do that to him.

Potter straightens up, his smile brilliant, and wipes at his eyes. Draco’s laugh has turned a bit hysterical, because of course, of course, of course. Potter doesn’t seem to notice. 

Good. Yes. Draco can protect Potter from this catastrophe, this cruel joke. He can keep the delicate hope in his eyes from shattering.

Promises surge through him, unbidden, definitely unwanted by Potter, but it’s the spirit of the thing, he can’t just—

“I’m certain you’ll find your Gryffindor prince.” Draco is absolutely sure of this—Potter will. “But worry not. If you’re still single in ten years, I’ll marry you.”

Potter puts his hand out without hesitating, like something out of a dream, his smile incandescent. “If we’re both still single, we’ll marry each other.”

What else is Draco supposed to do? How else is he supposed to live with the magic humming in him, reaching for Potter? 

He takes Potter’s hand. “I accept your terms.”

“New Year’s Day.” Relief, everywhere in Potter’s voice. “Ten years from now.”

“Ten years. I swear.”

Draco squeezes Potter’s hand and lets go.

Draco is nineteen

Ron Weasley perches on the edge of Draco’s desk and shoves an enormous bite of biscuit into his mouth. “I’m fine waiting,” he says, spraying crumbs.

“Really, Weasley—” Draco would very much appreciate it if Weasley would leave. Now, preferably. 

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist.” Weasley—Ron, after all those months of training, fine—brushes biscuit detritus from the front of his jacket. “I’ll be out of your way soon enough.”

Not soon enough, but there’s no convincing Ron. There’s no convincing anyone. Not even Harry, though Draco’s not going to stop trying. He’s been dreading Tuesdays since this entire awful exercise began. The only solution is to offer Harry something better.

“It can’t be curse-breaking, but that might be a decent intermediary step.”

“What are you on about? You’re not seriously thinking of leaving. Not when we’re finally going to get in the field.” Ron taps his wand against his opposite bicep. “What’s the bin for?”

A chill trickles down Draco’s spine, and his heart kicks up. That’s Harry on his way down the hall, his magic a mess, a hot and cold front shuddering against one another. 

“Stand behind my desk, would you?”

Ron spins himself around to the other side of the desk and hops off. “Okay, mate, but—”

Harry pushes the office door open, his green eyes vivid against the ashen pallor of his skin. He knocks it shut again with one hand on the wood for balance. 

“Merlin’s arse,” Ron says from behind Draco. “What happened?”

No answer from Harry. There never is. Not on Tuesdays at half-eleven in the morning. He stares into the middle distance, his breathing ragged.

Draco steps forwards with the bin just before Harry heaves. He pats at Harry’s back while he’s sick, saying the things he always says on Tuesdays—it’s quite all right, Potter, don’t worry, I know, I know—until Harry straightens up. Draco Vanishes the bin. He casts a Freshening Charm for Harry’s mouth. He is ready when Harry fumbles for Draco’s shoulder and puts his head down, his entire body shaking.

Ron’s footsteps approach, slow and steady, and Draco manages to take a few steps back from the door, bringing Harry with him.

There are questions in Ron’s blue eyes. He’s pale with worry, his freckles standing out on his skin. He opens his mouth, then closes it again.

Draco’s grateful for it. His chest hurts, and Harry’s magic is panicked and cold. Draco wishes very much that he could whisk them both away.

Ah, but he can’t. 

“He doesn’t know you’re here.” Draco keeps his voice low and his arms around Harry. “He doesn’t know I’m here. He comes back from all of the appointments like this.”

Ron’s eyes go wide. “Those appointments?”

Draco had not had an opinion on the mandatory Mind Healing sessions before they’d left training. Now he hates the policy with an unruly passion that tests his restraint over and over. He wants to march down to Robards’ office and insist that they put a stop to it. He’d threaten to leave the force if it would have any effect. 

“Yes.”

Ron glances at Harry, then back at Draco.

“In about five minutes, give or take, he’ll go to his desk, run his hands over his face, and say I think I took a turn. I’ll bring him tea and ask him how the appointment went. And he’ll frown—” This is the thing that’s torn Draco in two. Heartbreak and relief. “—and say I don’t remember.”

“Maybe—” Ron rubs the back of his neck. “Maybe curse-breaking, then.”

The wizard is a shadow against the warehouse wall until the moonlight slashes across his face.

It happens fast.

Raised wand. A sharp grimace. Teeth biting into an Avada.

All of Draco says no. 

Not Harry.

He puts his right hand on Harry’s chest and throws the answering curse wordless. It hits the wizard square in the chest. He drops, crumpling like Draco cut him at the knees, the death curse meant for Harry sliced in two, Kedavra unformed. It feels like nothing, casting this Curse successfully for the first time in Draco’s life. Nothing at all. 

“No,” Harry whispers, his voice thready, and then Draco’s palm is hovering in empty air.

Draco doesn’t have time to wonder where Harry’s accidental Apparition took him.

From the opposite end of the street, where they’d set up command for the raid, Harry’s screams break through the Silencing Charms.

He’s never run so fast.

Harry is on the floor when he gets there, his back against the wall and his hands over his ears. His eyes are huge and terrified. 

Where are his glasses? He can’t see without his glasses. ¹

Draco can’t spare the time to find them.

He crouches down over Harry’s thighs, his own heart thudding out of his ribs and his hands tingling with suppressed magic. Draco’s heard exactly one person scream like this, and it was George Weasley the day of the Battle, clutching the front of his dead brother’s shirt.

It’s all he can do to follow any semblance of protocol.

Step one: check for visible wounds. 

There are none.

Step two: check for apparent curse damage.

None. The bastard didn’t get any spells off before Draco cast.

“Malfoy,” an Auror named Williams shouts from the hall. “Is that Potter? Do you have him? What the fuck is—”

“I’ve got him,” Draco shouts back. True. The next thing he says is very nearly true. “A curse just missed him. It’s a panic attack.”

It’s more than that, though. Harry’s wild grief is metallic on his tongue. That copper taste, along with the reverberation of Harry’s screams through his magic, tells Draco this: Harry thought the curse came at them. He thought, somehow, that the green flash was coming for Draco.

Harry screams louder and throws his head back into the wall, once, then again and again and again. Tears shine in his eyes. 

Draco puts his hand on Harry’s face and tips his head away from the wall. He tears his other glove away with his teeth. He gets Harry’s other hand in his and pulls it to his chest.

There’s no earthly way Harry can hear him, but it’s an ingrained habit after so many Tuesdays. 

“It’s quite all right, Potter. Don’t worry. I know. I know.” He presses Harry’s hand more firmly to his heart. “It’s all right. There. See? It’s all right. Look, Potter. Look. I’m all right. It didn’t touch me.”

Harry’s hand curls up into a fist and he hauls himself into Draco’s arms, clinging, sobbing, the sound so raw it feels like a knife.

A certain panic is beginning to set in—what has he done? What in Merlin’s name has he done?—but Draco ignores it. He gets himself down to the floor and takes Harry into his arms. Other Aurors come into the room. A pair of Mediwixen.

The tension of Harry’s magic pulls even tighter. He cries and cries, then sucks in a great breath just as Ron kneels next to them.

“I can’t,” Harry sobs. “I can’t, I can’t. Please, don’t. Just don’t. Please. Be done.”

“We’re done.” Of course they are. Of course Draco won’t be able to stay. Of course they won’t let him stay once they know what he’s done. Of course he can’t let this happen to Harry again, ever again. “All right? Don’t think about it anymore.”

“Oh, God, but you—but—”

“We’ll find something else to do,” he promises.

Harry hisses, and Draco’s heart breaks all over again. He’s trying to apologise.

“Shhh. It’s all right. It’s perfectly fine. Weasley, I think you’d better—”

Harry’s head gets heavier on Draco’s chest, the rest of his body following, and Draco locks his arms tight around him. 

“Mate,” Ron says.

“I think you’d better—” He can’t hold off the adrenaline rush any longer, a great shivering thing. “I think you’d better arrest me now.”

“Arrest you?”

His teeth click together, chattering. It’s awful that he doesn’t feel any crushing guilt. He can’t make that man matter to him the way Harry does, and—shouldn’t it have been harder? Shouldn’t he have struggled? He hadn’t, not for a second. And how is he supposed to regret it when it was Harry?

“I cast, Weasley. One of them was at the corner of the warehouse. He got halfway through the Killing Curse, and I had to—” Draco’s throat burns. “They won’t care that it was in the line.”

“No. That was me.”

“What?”

“That was me. I saw him, and I cast it. Tall bloke, wasn’t he? Angry. There wasn’t any time.”

“Ron, you can’t—”

Ron’s hand comes down on his shoulder. “You think I wouldn’t cast an Unforgivable to save my best mate? You think I wouldn’t cast a hundred? You think it won’t be worse if he comes out of this and you’re not there? Not a bloody chance, I can tell you that. It was me.”

Draco blinks, and Ron’s face blurs. 

“Let’s get the both of you out of here, yeah?”

“Harry’s glasses,” Draco manages.

Ron Summons them, the frames twinkling in the light, then wraps his hand around Draco’s wrist. “Hold tight. I’ll Apparate us. Ready? One, two, three.”

Draco is twenty

Draco doesn’t cry at the graveside, and neither does his mother. Bibsy, their house-elf, is the only other person in attendance at his father’s interment. Draco’s mother holds his left hand in a tight, painful grip. Bibsy holds his other hand the way she has since he grew into his height—with all of her fingers wrapped around two of his. 

Something’s gone wrong with his mind. Draco thinks the Ministry must have lied about the Stasis Charm, or else they must not have been very good at it, because they sent his father to the Manor in a sealed iron coffin that they had to put inside his casket. None of them could spell it open, and Draco couldn’t understand how, when he’d fixed the cursed Vanishing Cabinet. Bibsy had taken away the robes that Draco’s mother had chosen to dress his father in. She did it so quietly that he didn’t hear her footsteps. 

And now he can’t remember exactly how his father looked when he was alive. It hasn’t been so long since he died, and his face is softly blurred in Draco’s memory. 

The moment that replays over and over like a photograph in his head bothers Draco.

It’s nothing to do with the war. Nothing to do with the Dark Lord.

No, it’s from much earlier. Draco had woken in the night. He can’t have been older than four or five, and for whatever reason, he hadn’t called for Bibsy. He’d padded down the hall with his stuffed dragon and found his father in the study.

Lucius had been sat by the fire in his dressing gown, his hair in a plait over one shoulder, looking over some parchment or other.

When he saw Draco in the doorway, he’d smiled and said, ah, just in time.

And Draco had gone, stuffed dragon and all, to sit on his father’s lap. They’d looked at the parchment together, Lucius explaining what it meant in terms Draco wouldn’t understand for another ten years at least, and when they got to the bottom, he’d let Draco sign his name underneath his own.

By then, Draco had been half-asleep and warmed through. He’d had a sense of rising, his head on his father’s shoulder, held in his arms. There was the silk of the dressing gown under his cheek and his father’s plait in his fist and one of the portraits breathing evenly nearby. Lucius had smelled warm, a scent that reminded Draco of velvet and brandy and, faintly, of soap, and even now, Draco thinks that’s what a man smells like. Confident and sure of himself.

His father had tucked him into his bed with his stuffed dragon and bent to kiss Draco’s temple and said—

He’d said—

“Draco,” Iris the Mind Healer says, and he realises he’s staring out the window, his nails digging into the arms of the chair. It’s their last appointment before she retires to…paint? Draw? Be happy, probably. 

“I can’t remember,” Draco answers. “I don’t know what he said. I have to go.”

He doesn’t cry at the solicitor’s office when he goes to complete the purchase of the little shop he’d seen on the way to one of his appointments with Iris.

He doesn’t cry in the shop itself, which he spells into something resembling presentability in a frenzied hour of casting and cleaning or when he leans on three different wizarding suppliers to deliver a shop’s worth of biscuits and books later in the day.

Afterwards, he goes out into the rain. The saturated breeze tosses a bit of parchment onto his shoe, and when Draco bends to dislodge it, there’s Harry.

The torn front page of a gossip rag features a paparazzi shot taken from outside a pub. Harry sits at the bar, his hands wrapped around a pint in a tight, desperate grip, and he’s looking up at some bloke leaning down to speak to him. The only difference between the photo and the night they’d quit the Aurors is that Harry isn’t screaming. He looks resigned to his fear and his exhaustion, to the dark hollows under his eyes.

He’s had those hollows for months. 

Draco’s not going to cry over a photo until he is crying over a photo in near-silent sobs that are painful to swallow. He stands there, gripping the wet parchment, until there’s a tug at his elbow

A little witch in a red coat, her other hand tucked into her father’s, looks up at him. “Are you lost?”

“No,” he says automatically. “No, I’m not lost, but thank you for asking.”

Then he Apparates to Grimmauld Place.

He is simply not strong enough to stay away any longer, and that’s what he’ll tell Harry. That it had been a nice idea, getting some distance from the wizarding world after the Aurors, but unfortunately that iron coffin broke something essential in Draco, and he cannot breathe, looking at photos like that. He cannot bear losing Harry, too, and they must do something about it. 

“Malfoy?” Harry comes down the stairs, looking unsteady and ill and utterly beautiful.

“Good morning doesn’t seem to be an appropriate greeting.”

“Not really.” Harry sticks his hands in his back pockets. Draco would do anything to make him laugh like he did on the Astronomy Tower. “Why are you here?”

“Why are you?” Draco teases, in lieu of saying to save you. Or perhaps to save me. 

Harry doesn’t laugh. “I live here.”

“Ah. Right.” Draco looks down at his shoes, his throat aching. 

“Did something—er. You okay?”

“Oh, it’s nothing, really. Just a bit of a breakup.” It’s technically true, though it happened three and a half months ago and was more of a mutual disinterest than anything else. He doesn’t want to tell Harry about his father, or the burial, or the grief he’d thought he was long past by now. “Listen, would you like a job?”

Harry’s eyes get huge. “A bit of—what?”

“A job,” he repeats. “Would you like one?”

“Who says I don’t already have a job? I was just—I took some time off, it’s not—”

“It’s part bookshop, part café.” He presses on, because that’s how it has to be with Harry, sometimes. “Hard to be in two places at once, if you know what I mean.”

“What—” Harry looks so hopeful that Draco wants to cry again. “What place did you—I mean—”

“There’s the books.” He puts one hand out. “Or the part with coffee and biscuits.” He extends his other hand, then bobs them in the air like two plates of a scale and raises his eyebrows at Harry.

“Who takes the other one?”

Draco drops his hands. “Me.”

“Yes,” Harry says instantly, then hesitates, his face flushed. “Er. I mean. Yeah, that sounds good. That would be fine, I think.”

“I agree.” Draco takes a slip of parchment out of his pocket. “There’s the address. Hours are seven to three.”

Harry’s fingers brush against his, warm and alive, and Draco remembers what his father said against his temple, something that Draco had taken for granted for years and years and years.

I’ll meet you in the morning.

Draco is twenty-one

Iris is the first customer at the bookshop. 

Draco hadn’t asked her to come, and he can’t recall telling her about the shop, but he must have. And, of course, he’s told her plenty about Harry.

Iris takes one look at Harry and comes back the next day, and the next. She arrives at seven, as soon as they open, and leaves at eight, ever consistent.

Draco charms the door of the bookshop so customers don’t notice they’re open until eight.

Not because he thinks Harry will ever talk to her, just…

In case.

And Harry won’t, not until he has confirmation that she’s trustworthy. Which, Draco realises, can only come from him. So he is visibly and genuinely happy to see Iris each morning and never hesitates to chat with her. 

It takes two months for Harry to approach Iris’s table and another month for him to sit down with her. He likes the look of her sketchbook. Draco knows she’s won him over when she brings Harry one of his own, and after that, they draw together.

He keeps himself purposefully out of earshot, so he truly doesn’t know what, if anything, they discuss other than art.

But gradually, as the weeks go by, the shadows under Harry’s eyes disappear.

One day, when Draco is behind the counter, Harry leans his chair back and laughs like he did on the Astronomy Tower, and Draco has to wipe his tears on the sleeve of his jumper.

The day she tells Harry about the residency in France, his shoulders droop.

After she’s gone, Harry closes his sketchbook and comes to put it under the counter. Then he leans against the biscuit case and lets his elbow brush Draco’s.

“She’s leaving.” Harry chews at the inside of his cheek. “To do that residency thing.”

“You’re going to apply, of course,” Draco says breezily. 

“What?”

“You’re going to apply. I’ve seen your work. You’d get in.”

“It’s in France.”

“France isn’t far,” Draco points out. “Don’t you think—I don’t know, Harry, don’t you think a change of scenery might be nice?”

Harry looks at him, brow furrowed, until the bell on the door chimes and a pair of wix come in.

He watches Draco the rest of the day, as if he’s trying to figure out if Draco was having a laugh.

At closing, Harry flips the sign. “The Leaky?” he asks, his shoulders tense.

“Yes,” Draco agrees.

They’re eating chips when Harry lets out a breath. “Is it that…you want to see something different?”

“Hmm?” Draco bites through a particularly good chip.

“Do you want to look at something else? At the shop, I mean. You said a change of scenery might be nice.”

Draco looks across the table at Harry and his spring-green eyes and the colour in his cheeks and the worried crease in his forehead and thinks he never wants to look at anyone else again. He thinks there could be nothing worse than Harry being in another country. He thinks this is the last thing he’ll ever admit out loud.

“No.”

Harry shakes his head. “Then—”

“I thought it might be nice to do something you’d chosen. Something that was only for you.”

There’s a long silence while they eat more chips.

“But,” Harry says eventually, his eyes on his plate. “If I did get in, and I did go—I’m not saying I am.”

“Of course.”

“If I did, you wouldn’t replace me at the shop. I could come back.”

“Always, Harry.” It’s only at the sound of his name that Harry looks up. That same fragile hope shimmers in his eyes alongside fear. “Always.”

Draco is twenty-two

Draco is not in France long enough to ask why they didn’t owl him sooner. He’s been listed on Harry’s paperwork since the Aurors, and it’s beyond him how they waited until this morning when Harry has apparently been shut up in his room for two weeks, maybe three, and hasn’t spoken to Iris or anyone in over a month.

He’s barely there long enough for the directeur to lift her hands and apologise for the early hour. 

She hasn’t said Harry’s name yet when a wave of magic shudders itself through the walls and the floors. It carries the scent of a tree cut down in a lightning strike, a fire in high summer.

It’s thick on Draco’s tongue when he arrives at Harry’s door and pushes through the tattered, sparking boundary of Harry’s wards.

The room is pitch-dark.

No—every available space is covered in pages torn out of various sketchbooks, covered in canvases, all of them windows into some wretched hole with bare slivers of light. Draco doesn’t know it, doesn’t recognise the outlines of the small, broken figures that cast grey shadows onto endless black.

He finds Harry huddled in a corner near the window.

“Oh.” The sight drives the word out of him like a punch to the gut. Harry’s staring eyes don’t move towards Draco. “Oh, mon cœur.” ²

Step one: check for visible wounds. 

A gash on Harry’s cheekbone, probably from the handle of the paintbrush clutched in his hand. Blood curls around his chin. 

Step two: check for apparent curse damage. 

Faint trails of lightning flash in and out of view. Burns in the same pattern over his arms. His neck. His face. Everywhere. Harry shakes. His head knocks softly against the wall. This isn’t a curse, but uncontrolled magic might as well be. 

And then Harry’s legs go rigid and his head bangs into the corner, and the entire room rattles with more magic.

Draco lunges for the paintbrush. Harry’s fingers won’t unlock. His nails cut into his palms. 

The handle wasn’t red to start with.

Step three: if curse damage is present, activate emergency Portkey via the use of the relevant Charm. Do not make direct contact with curse victims.

Fuck step three.

Draco Vanishes the paintbrush and gathers Harry—brittle, almost skeletal—into his arms. There isn’t time for separate Shield Charms, so he casts one around them both, inverts it to keep the magic contained. The lash of power is hot, but his soulmark feels like a deep well of cold, clear water. 

For what is perhaps the first time in his life, Draco is desperately grateful to have it.

“I know,” Draco says as he stands. “I know. Don’t worry. It’s quite all right. It will be all right, mon cœur, we’ll go—we’ll find—”

Iris is in the doorway holding up a piece of parchment with Apparition coordinates on it. 

Draco hadn’t heard the shrill whine of the magic until now. It pulls Harry’s screams out of his memory and they multiply until there’s nothing but a raw echo inside the shield with them.

He concentrates on the coordinates.

Deliberation.

Determination.

Destination.

It takes a team of six Mediwixen eighty-nine minutes to stop the self-reinforcing loop of Harry’s magic from tearing him apart. Draco sits on the floor in an emergency containment field for the first hour, then transfers to a bare cot surrounded with Healer-grade Countering Charms. He can’t put Harry down, or else—

He can’t.

He can’t lower his own shield except in short intervals. Harry bites his tongue, his cheek, his lip. Draco finally resorts to putting the side of his free hand between Harry’s teeth with as much of a shield as he can manage over the skin, if only to keep Harry’s mouth from filling with blood. 

When it’s over, the robes Draco pulled on senselessly this morning are fused to his shirt. His skin at every point of contact with Harry, no matter how indirect, is a deep pink, nearly red, but the magic didn’t burn him. 

Even if it had, Draco wouldn’t have let go.

Draco is twenty-three

Half the time, Draco can’t open the bookshop. It hurts to inhale the familiar scent of the books without the sunny, stormy scent of Harry’s magic. It hurts even before he’s stepped inside. It hurts before he’s gotten out of bed.

The other half, he can’t leave. He keeps the shop open until four or six or eight. He stays for five more minutes in case Harry’s decided to come back. He stays another five. He stays until the sun comes up, his knuckles white on the counter by the register, then goes back to his flat and Dreamless-Sleeps the day away.

They hadn’t let Harry out of hospital yet when Draco left France. 

When Harry asked him to leave.

When Harry told him he wasn’t coming back.

And Draco had begged. He’d wanted to cry. He’d wanted to get down on his knees.

But Harry had looked so small in the bed, his hands in fists in the blankets to keep them from trembling, and Draco knew without a shadow of a doubt that if he got down on his knees he would not be able to stop himself from clutching at Harry’s blankets and his hands and his face and coming apart at the seams, and so he’d said please with the most calm he could muster and when Harry said I can’t Draco took it gracefully and came back to his flat and screamed himself hoarse.

Harry’s letter undoes him. 

Draco, I can’t do this to you any more, it begins. His handwriting is uncertain, as if it was hard to hold the quill to the parchment, and Draco would hold his hand for him if he’d only come back. 

When he reaches the end of the letter, Draco has to grit his teeth to keep from screaming again.

Forget me as much as you can. I’m so sorry. I just want you to be happy. 

He buys the rings with the letter in his pocket, furious for a reason he can’t explain and angrily, viciously hopeful. 

He pounds on the door of the Portkey Office in the Ministry until the overnight clerk lets him in, and he pushes a teetering stack of Galleons across the counter with shaking hands. 

He goes to Alabama with the letter in his pocket, too.

Draco stands on the pavement near the small house Harry’s rented as the moon rises and whispers a spell they learned in the Aurors. It glows a faint pinkish-gold: one person in the home, alive, asleep.

He stares at the house, at the pinkish-gold ball that bobs in the air, until the Portkey sinks its claws into his clothes and tears him away.

It’s wrong to go to Alabama. Draco knows that. He waits as long as he can between trips. Sometimes, that’s not very long. The overnight clerk at the Portkey Office chats with him, and he answers mindlessly, and one day the man follows him out of the office after Draco’s return trip.

“—often enough,” he’s saying. “You must be hungry, with all that travel. I could take you to your favourite spot.”

Hermione Granger hurries up the pavement towards the Ministry. She picks up her head and sees Draco standing there with this man from the Portkey Office.

It’s a waking nightmare. Draco can’t get himself out of it. He’s carried along on Granger’s chatter and somehow, some-bloody-how, he finds himself at the Burrow for Sunday brunch, his elbow brushing against the clerk’s. He doesn’t know the man’s name. He doesn’t want to know the man’s name. He wants Harry to come back. It’s absurd that Draco is at the Burrow and Harry isn’t. It’s absurd that something could have happened, anything could have happened, and Draco wouldn’t have the faintest idea, because they’re an ocean apart.

He drags the nameless clerk out of the Burrow by the arm under a swell of fond laughter, and it’s not until they’re back at the Portkey Office that the man blinks, understanding at last that they’re not going back to Draco’s flat, for Merlin’s sake.

Draco sits on the pavement. The pinkish-gold Charm hovers in the air. Alive, it says. Asleep. Cool, humid air settles over his shoulders in the predawn dark. A bird trills and calls in the nearby branches. 

Alive. Asleep. Alive. Asleep. Alive. Asleep.

An owl flies overhead. It lands near a window and pecks gently at the glass.

The Portkey drags Draco away before Harry wakes.

Draco is twenty-four

It’s almost time for tea, and his mother is in the garden.

Draco feels her presence there the moment he steps through the Floo. Goosebumps rise on his arms.

It’s almost time for tea.

His mother is in the garden.

He moves through the Cooling Charms that hang in the Manor like translucent curtains. They touch him softly, lightly. The heat outside is damp and clinging, and his mother is in the garden.

“Mum?”

She looks up at him from the blushing-orange Lady of Shalott cupped in her palm. “Hello, mon cœur. Aren’t you up early?”

“It’s almost time for tea,” Draco answers over the clanging, incessant alarm bells ringing ringing ringing in his mind. It’s afternoon. He doesn’t live at the Manor anymore. 

Pink blotches the colour of her Darcey Bussells spread on his mother’s cheeks. A dull glaze covers the blue of her eyes. Draco can’t be sure who she sees when she looks at him, past him, and smiles.

“Tell your father it’s time, wouldn’t you?” Draco’s mother rises on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. Her lips feel like a sunburn.

And then she wilts right in front of him.

Draco catches her before she falls into the roses. Before the thorns can get to her. But he can’t wake her for teatime, or dinnertime, or anything else.

Bibsy goes for a Healer—she must, because Draco can’t think, yet three Healers appear in the Manor nonetheless. 

Bibsy goes for Pansy, who brings Blaise and Greg and Ron and Hermione and the house magic presses outward at his chest as if it’s jostling for space, as if there’s more than he had before, and he puts his head down on his mother’s hand in his and he’s not leaving her, of course he wouldn’t dream of leaving her when she’s so ill for reasons he can’t possibly understand and there’s a hand on his shoulder and his mother’s hand has gone cool and dry and limp in his and he picks his head up and—

“I’m so sorry, darling.” Pansy’s face is moonlight-pale.

“For what?” he asks.

One of the Healers says something that can’t be true, and Draco tells him so in a calm, level voice, and he certainly does not draw his wand on the man, he certainly does not swing a fist at him, he does not let go of his mother’s hand.

It’s too late when he realises what he’s done. Greg’s solid, immovable mass presses him out into the hall, one huge hand curled over Draco’s fists. Then Pansy begs him, begs him, to take the Dreamless Sleep she’s brought and rest. The sun rises in the window behind her. His throat tastes like copper and screams.

He can’t remember drinking anything, but he can’t hold his head up, either. Can’t keep his eyes open.

“My parents are on their way,” Ron says to someone else, voice rough and exhausted. “I know it’s not—I dunno. My mum will know what to do.”

The funeral is already planned, and has been since before Draco was born, but Molly Weasley and Hermione and Bibsy carry out his mother’s wishes. Draco gathers as much from the low voices that hover in his room. He can’t breathe. He can’t speak. He can’t even cry. Grief, sharp and black as one of Harry’s paintings, lodges in his throat and seems to be stuck there permanently.

On the day of the ceremony, he comes to on the floor of the shower in his en-suite, Pansy in the water with him, her black slip stuck to her skin and her face set in concentration. Her hands move briskly through Draco’s hair. Someone else—Ron, Draco thinks—holds Draco upright by his shoulders. Blaise and Greg wait outside to dress him.

The garden is crowded with people. It’s a riot of roses behind his mother’s casket.

“Pansy,” he says.

Her hand shoots out to cover his. “What is it, darling?”

Draco nods towards the casket. “Is she in there?”

Pansy’s hand tightens on his. “Yes. She’s wearing her favourite garden robes.”

“The blue?”

“Yes.”

She holds his hand in a hard, sturdy grip, which is perhaps the only reason Draco can speak at all.

“Could we take her out?” The inside of his throat has been punctured by thorns. “Pans, I want to take her out of that box.” ³

He can tell from her grip that she doesn’t know what to say. Perhaps Draco will stand up and claw through the top of the casket with his fingers. He’d much rather bury his mother by himself, wrapped in one of the blankets from her bed. He’d much rather do anything but this, anything, anything.

A breeze wafts through the garden, stirring the heat, and Draco inhales on a silent gasp. There’s not a cloud in the sky but the air shivers like a storm’s blowing in from across the grounds. It carries the cool beneath the trees and the promise of rain.

Draco survives the rest of the ceremony by breathing in Harry’s magic and breathing it back out again, and then he lets Pansy take him upstairs. He lets her balance him while he kicks off his shoes and stands so she can lift away his dress robes and crawls into the bed and waits.

Down on the ground floor, Harry comes inside.

The storm seems to have collected in Draco’s lungs.

It’s not long before the bedroom door opens, then closes, and there are quiet footsteps on the carpet and the pat pat pat of clothes dropping to the floor like incipient raindrops.

And then the covers lift.

And then Harry climbs into the bed. 

He curls himself around Draco like he’s done it for lifetimes upon lifetimes, his body familiar and strong and safe. He’s not so thin anymore. Draco’s chest aches with relief. He pushes back into Harry, wanting as much of Harry’s weight as he can get.

A tendril of guilt rises above the surface of his grief.

Harry doesn’t want to be here. Never wanted to come back to England.

“You didn’t have to come.” It’s all he can offer. He can’t say he doesn’t want Harry to be here. He won’t say it. He needs him too much.

Harry lets out a soft breath against Draco’s nape. “Actually, I think I should have been here earlier.”

Draco lifts one shoulder, lets it drop. “There was nothing to be here for. It was fast. It happened so fast.”

“I’m sorry.” Harry’s lips brush the back of Draco’s neck with his apology. “I’m so sorry she’s gone.”

Draco can’t bear it. He’s only aware of pushing himself up and over Harry when the startled green of his eyes comes into view. He’s never felt so desperate, so wretched.

“I can’t do this,” Draco whispers. He can’t, he can’t. He can’t live without Harry anymore. Not when his parents are dead.

He drops his forehead onto Harry’s chest, unable to support any of his weight at all, and then the storm breaks and he’s sobbing hard enough to crack his ribs.

Harry holds him, his voice humming through his chest. Shh, I know, he says, and désolé, désolé, and mon cœur, tu dois te reposer, and it occurs to Draco that Harry Potter is the only person left who will speak to him this way.

“Elle est morte,” Draco cries into Harry’s shirt. “Pour toujours.” ⁴

“Shh, je sais.” Harry says it again and again. ⁵

Draco falls asleep to the sound of Harry’s voice and wakes to the sound of his breathing. He hasn’t let go of Draco. If anything, Harry’s holding on tighter in his sleep. Pansy rubs Draco’s shoulder again. She leans over him from the side of the bed.

“Do you want me to tell them you’re not coming down?” she whispers.

“No, I’m coming,” he whispers back. “I’ll come.”

Harry stirs when the door closes behind Pansy. He blinks at Draco, his eyes huge and vulnerable without his glasses. 

“Please.” Draco doesn’t mean to say it any more than he means for his hands to turn to fists in Harry’s shirt. He doesn’t mean to leave it without explanation, either, but anything he might’ve said is choked off by a seizing terror that Harry will say I can’t like he did in that hospital bed and Draco cannot do it again, he cannot live with it again, he will die. 

“T’inquiète.” Draco’s fist has landed over Harry’s heart, and Harry gently, gently, uncurls his fingers and lets his hand rest flat on his chest. Draco can’t remember the last time he felt anyone’s heart beat so steadily. “I’ll stay.” ⁶

The rest of the year between twenty-four and twenty-five is like a mirage. He lives at the Manor. Cannot leave the Manor. Cannot leave his bed. The days go by like dreams, anchored by the weight of Draco’s body.

Harry lives at the Manor, or else he’s there so frequently that he may as well live at the Manor. Pansy and Blaise and Greg, too. Hermione and Ron take turns walking with Draco in the garden when he shakes himself awake in the autumn.

Winter gathers all of them close, as if they’re searching for warmth, and Draco wanders through the long, dark days looking for a bit of light himself.

And he finds it.

To his surprise, he keeps finding it, again and again.

When he walks into the sitting room to find Harry mouth-open, asleep, perhaps dreaming, propped against Ron on the sofa. Hermione sits on his other side and guides Harry’s hands through exercises to make his tremors less uncomfortable.

When the portrait of his mother at sixteen in the upstairs hallway wakes and asks him with genuine curiosity what happened to her, and he tells her that she slipped away in the rose garden, and a Lady of Shalott blooms in her palms as she laughs and says oh, that sounds lovely.

When Blaise lets slip that he’s been keeping the bookshop open all by himself for weeks so people don’t think it’s abandoned.

When the days get longer again, and longer still.

One night early in June, he falls asleep to the sound of his friends practising the birthday song. Every note is perfect.

Draco is twenty-five

On the day that Harry goes back to Alabama to collect his things, Draco stands behind the counter and thinks he won’t survive.

Ah, but he has to. Harry can’t come back to a bookshop without him. He wouldn’t. 

The next day, Harry is there at seven, the bell tinkling against the glass, and Draco wants to grab him, pin him in place, beg him to stay forever this time.

He waits all day to ask about Alabama. They hadn’t spoken about it at the Manor. 

“How was it really?” Draco asks. “Did you meet anyone?”

Harry shrugs. “I met a Mind Healer.”

Draco tilts his head. “For business or pleasure?”

Harry screws up his face. “Business.”

“What fun,” Draco teases.

“What about you?” Harry teases back, colour rising in his cheeks. “I never got his name, you know.”

“Whose name?” 

“Hermione said—” Harry brushes at nonexistent dust on top of the biscuit case. “She said you were seeing someone.”

“All I see is you.”

And how beautiful he is, in his Muggle clothes with the warmth of summer in his skin and the black hair that hasn’t changed once in all these years. How very many times Draco has wanked furiously to the thought of touching him. Just that was enough.

“Draco,” Harry says, his face deeply flushed, and for a moment Draco thinks that now’s the time, he could just ask, he could admit—

Ah, but he can’t. What they have seems so fragile, and he can’t bear to watch it break. Not something so precious. Not something so delicate, held in the palms of his hands. 

“Honestly, Harry, I can’t think who she would have been talking about.” Draco waves the idea away. “Whoever he was, he certainly didn’t stick.”

And then there are the books and the biscuits, the opening and closing, the living.

That December it snows and snows and snows. Some days, Draco thinks of closing the shop, but he never does. Harry tromps through the drifts in heavy boots, a scarf wound around his hat and tucked into his collar and his cheeks red from the chill.

On those days, they sit at Harry’s favourite table together and trade sections of the Prophet. They spend the whole stretch of the shift drinking hot chocolate and leafing through the new titles. The sun never breaks through the clouds and the snow never ceases. Draco asks about Alabama. Harry asks about Draco’s father, and idly wonders what happened to all his pieces from France. He never went back for them.

“I brought them home,” Draco answers, and flips to the next page of a coffee table book called Everyday Magic. It has photos of Hogwarts. “I meant—I brought them to the Manor.”

Harry makes a questioning sound.

“The library has a rather complex network of archival charms.” The ache Draco has come to know quite well returns to his chest. “I knew they’d be safe there.”

He declines to mention how badly he wanted to bring Harry there, all those times he Portkeyed across the ocean.

The city is still shut down several days later. Christmas lights from the nearby shops glint red and green on great expanses of snow, and Draco is admiring the peace of it all when Harry makes a strange choking sound.

He whirls around and finds Harry crying behind the register, both hands over his face.

Draco rushes to him, a fierce gladness fighting with worry. He puts his arm around Harry’s shoulders, his heart pounding, aching, alive. “Mon cœur, what is it? What’s wrong?”

Harry lifts his right hand, his elbow brushing Draco’s side. His fingers curl, trembling only a little, around the form of a pencil that isn’t there. 

“I miss them.” Harry’s chest hitches. His eyes are red, and Draco can’t bear the sad, wavering slope of his mouth. “My drawings.”

Draco thinks of Harry’s bitten tongue and cheek and lip, the moon-shaped cuts on his palm, the blood. How terrified he’d been. How Harry’s magic had seemed to be endless, as if the Healers would never stop it, and Draco hadn’t been afraid to die, he’d been afraid they’d be separated. Draco had failed many times in his life, but there could be nothing worse than failing to protect Harry, and he already had.

He’d let that happen to Harry. All of it.

He won’t let it happen a second time.

His soulmark warms with determination, the heat reaching all the way up to his heart.

Draco cannot—will not—let Harry’s magic hurt him again. He won’t let him suffer without his art, either. He’ll stand by like he should have in France, ready to intervene, and if Harry is angry about that, then Draco loves him enough to—

Then he can be angry. It’s perfectly all right. 

He buys Harry a new sketchbook and a new set of pencils and charms the door to the shop so that no one will notice they’re open until eight, and he keeps the shop quiet and warm and safe. 

That’s what he’s here for.

Draco is twenty-six

Harry comes into the shop in the middle of July with his forehead creased in a frown. His hand trembles more than usual around his pencil, and he presses hard and frustrated on the paper. Draco’s certainly not trying to violate his privacy, but he can’t help noticing that Harry only uses black. He can’t help feeling the jittery tension in Harry’s magic. He can’t help worrying that it will rise to some inevitable, unstoppable peak.

He Occludes for the better part of Harry’s sketching hour to shelve his memories of those appointments in the Aurors and Harry’s little room in Paris like neat rows of books. Draco stops when Harry starts tapping his foot, clearly agitated, even if he doesn’t know it himself. Harry has never asked Draco to stop Occluding before, but Draco knows it makes him nervous. Draco has never had to imagine what it would feel like to have Harry shut him out of his emotions, because Harry has always been pants at Occluding.

At five to eight, Draco approaches the table with an offering of sugary tea that’s half-milk. 

Harry doesn’t close the sketchbook, not even when Draco leans over him to put down the cup. He sits back in his seat and nods, ever so slightly, towards the page.

It’s the first time since France that Harry has shown Draco any of his art. Draco’s throat closes up tight and that ache might as well be his whole heartbeat. He thinks I love him, I love him so much, I can’t stop, I’ll never stop and doesn’t say a word.

He takes a deep breath and looks.

“I dreamed about them.” Harry rubs absently at his scar. “There must’ve been a hundred. Couldn’t get away.”

The Dementor on the page screams out of a black background, its inhuman jaw unhinged in mid-Kiss. Shadows suggest that there are others following close behind.

“The impression is similar to your work in France,” Draco says, keeping his tone mild.

“That was different. That was the cupboard under the stairs.”

The way Harry says it freezes Draco to the core. “Is that what it was?” he manages. “I didn’t recognise it.”

“When I lived with my aunt and uncle, they kept me in there until I got my letter.” Harry chews on the end of his pencil, then rolls it in his fingers. “They kept me in there a lot. Whenever they got angry. Sometimes I think they weren’t even angry. They just forgot about me.”

Draco goes very still and seethes inwardly with shock and rage. It’s been an unfortunate habit since he was a boy. His father was unnerved by it and his mother worried over it. Neither of them are here to see it now.

Harry doesn’t notice Draco holding his breath and determinedly not moving, and then he does, and startles.

“Draco!” Harry takes his hand and pulls. “Draco, what’s wrong? You’re all red.”

“A cupboard?” he forces out.

Harry stands up, his hand still in Draco’s. “Please, don’t be upset. It’s okay.”

Draco stares at him.

Harry’s eyes get huge. “I know it’s not okay, I know—Draco, I know it was bad. Really bad. But I promise, I’ve worked it out. I did.”

“Give me one good reason I shouldn’t turn that house to rubble.”

“My aunt and uncle don’t live there anymore. It’s just Dudley, and—”

“Wait here for me.”

He moves towards the door, but Harry pulls him back. “It’s Dudley and his wife. They have a little girl. None of that was her fault. You can’t.”

Draco has to do something. He has to. So he throws his arms around Harry’s shoulders and hugs him as tight as he can. Tighter than he did the night they quit the Aurors. Tighter, perhaps, than he’s hugged anyone.

Harry doesn’t hesitate. His arms come around Draco’s waist, and he rests his head on Draco’s shoulder, and if he trembles more than usual, Draco can pretend not to notice. 

“That won’t happen again,” Draco swears, though he’s years and years too late. “Not ever again.”

“Okay,” Harry says into his shoulder, and his body gets a bit heavier in Draco’s arms. “Okay.”

The dream Harry had about the Dementors bothers Draco for weeks, long after Harry has stopped drawing them. It’s nearing the end of August when he wakes up knowing what to do.

He Floos directly to the Manor, strides to his mother’s rose gardens, and kicks off his shoes. It’s so early and so humid that the dew on the grass sticks to his feet.

“Lovely.” Draco wiggles his toes in the dew. It’s been miserably hot, and the soft grass, the cool dew, is something like forgiveness, or absolution. Not that he’s looking for it.

If he closes his eyes and breathes deep, he could almost forget he’s twenty-six and his mother is gone. He could be seven, carrying her basket of gardening tools and wearing her sun-hat. He could be thirteen, too old to be following her about the garden and doing it anyway under the pretence of bringing her lemonade. He could be twenty-one, Flooing to the Manor as the sun came up to avoid the heat, back to carrying her basket and telling her about the shop and the biscuits and the books and Harry and Harry and Harry.

“Expecto Patronum.”

Nothing happens.

He works the Charm until Bibsy comes out and drags him forcibly inside for lunch. She keeps him inside and casts Sunblocking Charms all over him while he whinges and complains. When it’s time for dinner, Bibsy drags him inside again, quite against his will. 

Draco means to have her send a message to Harry. He really and truly does. It’s only that he wants to send the message himself, via Patronus, and can’t bring himself to stop trying.

He casts again and again and again. 

He fails again and again and again. Eats. Sleeps a little. Fails some more.

It’s so hot. 

Draco tries one more time.

“Oh, for Merlin’s sake.” Draco feels Harry’s magic mid-whirl, and at once his heart thumps and his stomach drops, because it’s been days. “Harry! Fuck!”

“Hi.” Harry waves. “You didn’t come to work.”

“I’m sorry.” He readjusts his grip on his wand. His fingers are getting tired. “I was—I should have sent an owl. I got caught up.”

Harry ambles farther into the rose garden. “Want help?”

“I’m sure I don’t.” He’d wanted to send the Patronus himself. He’d wanted to be able to do this. He’s well aware that Harry can cast a corporeal Patronus, which is astonishing, given things like the cupboard under the stairs. 

Draco still wants to burn that house to the ground. 

Harry’s green eyes travel over the roses, a little smile on his face. He doesn’t seem to hear Draco denying him, or else he’s flat-out ignoring him, which would be just like him, honestly. He stops close enough for Draco to catch the scent of his soap. Merlin, he could drown in his own longing, right here in the sun.

“Have you managed it before?” Harry asks.

“Once.” It’s not a particularly happy memory, either. He’d been panicked and desperate, with Greyback stalking in the hall outside his rooms, angrier by the second about the impenetrable wards Draco’s mother had cast. The full moon wouldn’t set for hours. “And it wasn’t corporeal.”

Harry looks him up and down. “Bibsy.”

Bibsy pops into the garden. Draco is only a little jealous of how ecstatic she is to see Harry. “Harry Potter has called for Bibsy?”

“Could you bring us some lemonade?”

“Right away!” Bibsy cries, and disappears with another pop.

Draco narrows his eyes at Harry. “What does lemonade have to do with the Patronus Charm?”

“Hard to cast a corporeal Patronus when you’re thirsty.”

“I’m not.” And then, of course, it’s like he’s never had anything to drink before. His mouth feels like it’s full of gritty sand. “Ugh.”

When Bibsy returns, they take the lemonade and lean against the marble fountain that Draco’s father had made for his mother on their tenth wedding anniversary. The lemonade is delicious, as it always is. Bibsy makes it the way Draco has preferred since he was old enough to say lemonade. The moment they finish, Harry takes Draco by the wrist and tugs him over to the shade of a tree in one corner of the garden. Then Harry takes him by the shoulders and turns him away. 

He loves when Harry touches him. Loves it. Can’t admit it, obviously, but loves it just the same. 

“What are you doing?” Draco demands. 

“Close your eyes.”

“What does that have to do with—”

“Close your eyes, Draco, Merlin. Do you want me to teach you my Chosen secrets or not?”

Draco makes another ugh sound and folds his arms over his chest. 

He knows Harry’s checking to see if he’s done it, can feel him everywhere in the air.

And then he can feel him everywhere else, too, because Harry slides his hands over Draco’s waist and wraps him up in his arms. He settles his right hand over Draco’s heart and his left hand over Draco’s wand-hand.

“Harry.” Draco can hardly catch his breath. It’s too hot to be touching like this, and he doesn’t care. He wants it to go on forever. “What does this have to do with casting the Patronus Charm?”

Harry releases a breath. “You always walk around like a maniac, but for this, you have to be still. Just for a minute.”

“I can be still without you clinging to me like a Niffler.”

“No, you can’t.”

Draco drops his head back until he realises it’s about to rest on Harry’s shoulder, then straightens up again. “Fine.”

“Just stand here with me.”

The mid-morning quiet of the garden isn’t quiet at all. Birds call in the tree, and roses rustle in the breeze, and in the distance there’s the Manor and the grounds. Draco feels it humming within him and without him. All the various parts of his life and his family and his inheritance are alive, like a song, and it’s even better with Harry at his back.

And—

“Harry,” Draco says softly. “Your hands.”

They’re still and calm, touching Draco. Here, at the Manor, when Draco own magic is steadied by generations of his family’s, Harry’s hands don’t shake.

“You must be magic,” Harry says, his breath warm on Draco’s neck.

Merlin, he’s so happy. It’s such a deep, unshakable joy that Draco’s eyes burn.

Ah, but he can’t cry. That would worry Harry, who is not worried at all, now. He’s utterly at peace. With Draco. 

“You need a strong memory.” Harry murmurs into the same stretch of skin on his neck, and spreads his fingers on Draco’s chest. “Part of the trouble with the Patronus is that people explain it wrong. They say it needs to be a happy memory, but it’s deeper than that. You need a memory that’s warm. You need one that glows.” He pats Draco’s chest. “One that you can feel here.”

Draco cannot speak. If his happiness were light, he’d be glowing. 

“All right,” he manages, after a minute. 

“You’ve got it?”

“Yes.”

“Let it fill up every empty space in your mind. You’re standing in it. It’s everywhere around you. If you opened your eyes, you’d see it.”

The fact that Draco keeps breathing should earn him an Order of Merlin, because Harry’s right. He is standing in it. The memory is happening as he speaks. Draco doesn’t have to let it fill up any empty space because there is no empty space. There’s just him and Harry and both of them here and safe and happy.

“Okay,” Harry whispers. “I’m not going to do it for you, but I’m not letting go of your hand.”

“You’d better fucking not,” Draco whispers back. He wants to add ever, but he doesn’t.

He holds the moment in his hands for another perfect, shining heartbeat.

And then he lifts his wand, bringing Harry’s hand with him into the movement. “Expecto Patronum.”

A silver shape bursts from the tip of Draco’s wand, and Harry takes a quick breath. Draco spins around on instinct and claps both his hands over Harry’s glasses, because the Patronus—

Because—

“I did it!” he shouts. “I fucking did it! 

“I knew it!” Harry shouts back. “I knew you could!”

“Merlin, that’s—” The silver-white phoenix flies in an arc around them, the tips of its wings brushing their shoulders. “Oh, look at that.”

“Are you going to let me see?” Harry asks.

He must, but he can’t. He can’t deny Harry this memory, but if he sees, he’ll know. Draco swore to himself all those years ago that he’d protect Harry from being soulbound to him and he knows so very deeply that love, for Harry, is the same thing.

So Draco pulls Harry’s glasses away with his hands. He protects him again.

Protects him still.

He can tell from Harry’s expression that he doesn’t recognise the phoenix’s shape, but he’s so proud of Draco, so transparently, unabashedly proud, a wide grin on his face and a sparkle in his eyes, that Draco’s heart almost doesn’t break. 

Draco is twenty-seven

At first, he thinks Harry is screaming. It pulls him back to that night, that raid, like a Portkey. All the hairs on the backs of Draco’s arms stand. He’s going for the door of his flat before he understands that there is no screaming, only heavy footsteps in the hall and a high wave of magic. The sensation of Harry in distress pricks at his palms like needles.

Draco opens the door just as Harry hurtles up to the frame and throws himself through, jostling Draco’s shoulder.

“Harry, what—drop your wand.” 

He gives the order even as the intention to kill surges into his fingertips. The man chasing Harry has dark hair and blue eyes and a mouth twisted in anger and Draco registers his features separately, disgustedly. 

He tears himself back from the edge. When he casts it’s not Avada Kedavra, it’s a shield-counter-hex-shield-counter-hex-shield-stunner-Incarcerous that drops the man to the floor in the hall.

Draco strides out, stands over him, and aims a cold Rennervate at the man.

His eyes pop open and swing wildly in his skull until they latch onto Draco. If he could run, he’d run, but as it stands the Incarcerous has quite taken that option from him.

“I could gut you,” Draco tells him. All the spells are just there, the intention just there, and Draco has never been much for violence, honestly. Blood turns his stomach. But Harry’s fear is so palpable in his own magic, in his own heartbeat, that he wants this man’s blood, wants to hurt him so much. “You can’t begin to understand how badly I want to. If it wouldn’t terrify him, how much I—” He crouches lower so he’s closer to the man’s face. His eyes bulge, and he manages to rock himself a bit in his bonds. Draco casts another Incarcerous just for the hell of it. “Not him,” he says, directly into the man’s ear. “Do you understand me? You don’t touch him. You don’t chase him. You don’t scare him. He’s mine, and you’re a worthless bastard, and if you ever so much as look at him again, I’ll cut you to pieces and toss them to the pavement one by one.”

He wants to cast some more, to drive the lesson home, but he doesn’t. Harry is so frightened, and Draco doesn’t want to be that kind of person—he doesn’t want Harry to think he’s the kind of person who would kill a man in cold blood, though it isn’t, really, when Harry was running from him like his life depended on it.

In lieu of murder, Draco takes several deep breaths. He casts his second-ever Patronus. The memory of his mother’s rose garden and Harry’s arms around him is nearly vivid enough to block out the vicious urge to demonstrate more clearly the magnitude of this man’s mistake.

The phoenix takes wing and flies away to find Ron. 

Draco returns to Harry.

He finds him huddled up against the wall, his hands over his ears, in the grips of a panic attack. Draco looks into his wide eyes and pulls Harry’s hands away from his ears. He holds them in his, tight, and the words come back to him like they left the Aurors yesterday.

“It’s quite all right, Harry.” He squeezes Harry’s hands, runs the pads of his thumbs over Harry’s knuckles. “Don’t worry. I know. I know. That was awful, but it’s over now, I promise. I swear. You’ll be able to hear me soon enough. I won’t leave. It’s perfectly all right. I promise, I’ll stay here. Harry. Tell me when you can hear me.”

“I can,” Harry chokes, still wheezing. “I can. I can hear you.”

“There’s something I need you to see. Can you get up?”

“No.”

“All right.” Draco puts his arm behind Harry’s back and helps him to his feet. He keeps his arm just where it is while he walks Harry to the door of his flat. At the threshold, Harry turns, clutching at Draco, and Draco has to hold him upright. “I’m not making you leave. I just need you to see this.”

They meet the Aurors in the hallway. Ron gives Draco a glance that weighs more than his questions, and Draco reassures him with a shake of his head. He makes the usual Auror business as quick and painless as possible, then brings Harry to see the man.

He knows Harry would rather not, would rather be inside—that he needs to be inside. But Draco also knows that Harry will look for this person everywhere he goes unless he sees.

They stand near the man on the floor, red-faced and helpless in Draco’s Incarcerous.

“That’s done,” Draco says, his voice soft and even. “Don’t think about him anymore, or anyone like him. They won’t bother you again.”

Harry cuts a glance at Draco, trusting and terrified all at once. He tries several times to speak, and when he finally manages it, it’s in French the way Draco recognises—the accent rough in places and so pure in others it aches, uniquely Harry’s. 

“Ils pourraient essayer de—” ⁷

Draco shakes his head. “Non, parce que je n’arrêterai pas.” ⁸

“Non?” ⁹

“Je ne m’arrêterai pas aux maléfices. Et personne ne m’arrêtera.”  

“Je veux rentrer à la maison.” ¹⁰

“Entre,” Draco says. “Tu y es, mon cœur.” ¹¹

He is not in any way glad for the man who sent Harry running to him. He’d known about the date, of course, even if Harry hadn’t told him as much. Instead, Harry had arrived at the bookshop that morning wearing what he thinks of as his best shirt and had carefully mentioned that he’d be busy in the evening, and Draco had said how lovely and had not pressed him, because Harry might be his in the sense that he’ll kill for him, die for him, but not his in the sense that Draco can ask him on a date without breaking his previous vow to protect Harry from the soulmark catastrophe.

Still, when Draco’s warded the door of his flat with several spells past the necessary, he’s overcome with a sense of relief so final that he can’t tell if it’s easier to breathe or impossible.

Harry won’t sleep anywhere else tonight. They don’t need to discuss it. Draco hadn’t known how much he’d loved being under the same roof at the Manor, hadn’t been able to conceive of it, until just now.

There’s the matter of a shower so Harry can rinse off the sweat of his panic, and finding pyjamas, and it’s far too early to go to bed but Harry gets in without complaint. He falls asleep quickly, but he’s restless in his sleep and only settles when he’s taken over half of Draco’s pillow and slung his arms and legs over Draco’s.

And if Harry hesitates at closing time the next day, if his nerves sing through his magic, then it’s easy enough for Draco to calm him.

And if it’s patently obvious that Harry needs to be cared for, gently and unobtrusively, then Draco has studied such care for most of his life. It’s nothing to him to have Harry’s things collected and brought over, and it’s even less to cancel the lease of Harry’s old flat, and yes, fine, it means everything to Draco to be able to ward the door behind them both when they’re home for the night.

And if that bastard’s friends, pissed-off and out for retribution, come to the bookshop one day—

Well. Draco’s studied for that, too. 

He takes Harry by the elbow and says, “Turn this way, Harry.”

And of course Harry turns without hesitating, of course his thoughts are elsewhere because Draco has been watching and waiting so Harry doesn’t have to, and of course Harry trusts him implicitly, so Draco can put one arm around his back and cast over his shoulder, the whole incident over and done before Harry realises what’s happening.

And so a life takes shape around them like a garden blooming into summer. 

Draco learns about the telltale hitch in Harry’s breath when he’s beginning to panic in a pub, and their friends learn to collect their coats when they make a sudden departure. 

He learns how Harry asks without asking, how he’ll hold out a package of crisps at the shop and wait for Draco to toss it into the basket. He appears in the sitting room one evening with his sketchbook and pencils and hovers until Draco says I suppose another hour won’t hurt, as long as you’re careful and Harry says can’t be anything else when you’re right there and sounds so relieved by it that tears swell in Draco’s throat.

He learns how Harry will inevitably nod off in the middle of Draco’s programmes, and how that’s the perfect time to take his book and his pencil and guide his hands through the exercises Hermione learned for the tremors, because that’s when he’s the most relaxed.

He also learns the equal and opposite.

The way Harry tries ten different recipes before he successfully recreates the biscuits Draco loves at Christmastime.

The way Harry insists on putting photos of Draco and his parents and all their friends in the sitting room, and won’t let Draco keep them hidden.

The way Harry reads the recaps of Draco’s programmes religiously so he’s never behind, despite constantly falling asleep mid-show. 

One night, Harry stumbles into Draco’s bedroom in tears, saying something incomprehensible about Dementors. In the face of the nightmare Draco lifts the covers and Harry crawls underneath them, and Draco whispers Expecto Patronum, and the silver-white phoenix glides around the ceiling in slow circles while Harry falls asleep again.

Draco’s drifting off when it occurs to him that he never dared to hope for this while they laughed on the Astronomy Tower.

And if he can’t tell Harry he’s in love with him, and has been all this time—

Well. He has more than he ever deserved, and more than he’d ever ask for.

He has enough.

Draco is twenty-eight

It’s December, but he dreams of summer. Draco’s mother clips a Lady of Shalott and places it in her basket. She’s filling it with blushing-orange sunrises, and her blue robes are the colour of the dawning sky. He has the sense they’ve been talking for hours, but the sun is slow and gentle in its rising, giving them time.

“What’s got you up so early?” she asks, another Lady of Shalott cupped in her palm.

“I was waiting for Harry.” He’s nearby—Draco can feel him in the garden, just out of sight, awake, alive, awake, alive.

Draco’s mother sighs, smiles. “He loves roses.”

“Yes,” Draco agrees, though he didn’t know it until now. His mother is right, of course. He and Harry visit the Manor often in the summertime. Harry brings his sketchbook to the garden and fills pages with blooms. “He does.”

“You must hold the ceremony here. Think of the sunset. The fairies would be so lovely afterwards for the dancing.”

“I wanted you to be there.”

His mother reaches up and touches his face, her eyes shining. “I will be, darling. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” She turns back to her roses. “Don’t worry about your robes. You’ll find them when it’s time.”

“When?”

“They’re not for the binding ceremony, my love. They’re to be seen.”

“How will I know them?”

His mother turns a faintly scandalised expression on Draco, and he laughs. “You’ll know them for the timeless design and the white, naturally.”

“What about Harry?”

“Green,” she pronounces. “I told the Manor they would be green.” A little frown. “I hope you didn’t think I left it too late. I wouldn’t, Draco. I made certain.”

A breeze rustles through the roses and scatters the sweet-dew scent of the petals. 

“When did you know?” he asks.

“Holly and hawthorn bloom at the same time,” she says in a light, conversational tone. “You came home that summer with both of them on your wrist.”

Across the garden, Harry stirs. When he’s close, Draco can feel him moving. He hadn’t been able to when Harry was in Alabama, and it was like missing a limb.

Draco’s mother beams at him. “It’s almost time.”

“For what?”

She rises on tiptoe and kisses his cheek. He can’t tell the difference between her perfume and the roses. He thinks perhaps they’ve always been the same.

“Merlin bless the binding,” she whispers.

“Draco,” Harry says. His footsteps are close now, and closer.

Draco turns at the last moment and opens his arms, and Harry’s body thuds into his, heavier than he expected but never too heavy to bear. Ah, the flat—the end of December. “What is it, mon cœur? Is everything all right?”

The resulting silence pulls Draco farther out of his sleep, and he cracks one eye open. “Harry?”

Harry’s above him, his hair tousled from sleep but his green eyes exceptionally clear, and he’s just staring at Draco like he’s witnessing some sort of miracle, and he’s so very warm and awake and alive, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, that it briefly robs Draco of breath.

And then Harry puts out his hand and says “Expecto Patronum.”

It doesn’t shock him, exactly, to see Harry perform impossible wandless magic, but the silver-white dragon that bursts from Harry’s palm is shockingly huge. Draco pulls Harry down to his chest on instinct. A dragon, he thinks wildly, his heart racing. A dragon. Me. 

The meaning follows belatedly, like lightning, and Draco’s patience splits apart. He puts his hands on Harry’s neck and draws him down to a kiss that tastes like mint and heat and a summer storm and there’s not an ounce of fear in it at all.

It’s almost time.

He should have done it ten years ago, should have asked that night on the Astronomy Tower, has to stop himself from pinning Harry to the mattress and meet his eyes instead.

“Marry me,” Draco demands. “Marry me a day early.”

“Yes,” Harry gasps.

There’s the matter of showering the night off them, an achievement in itself, because the sight of Harry’s body in the water nearly stops Draco’s heart. He wants to fuck him in the shower.

Ah, but he can’t.

Or—he could, but Merlin bless the binding, he’s not waiting another day. Draco rushes them into clothes and collects the rings and Floos them both to the Manor, Harry’s hand held tightly in his. He supposes, as he drags Harry up stairs and down hallways, that a more decorous setting might be called for, but dismisses the formal parlours in favour of his own rooms, which have always been his like Harry has always been his, and where his mother’s magic still wards the door against anyone with ill intentions. 

I will be there, darling.

Draco’s heart is in his throat when they reach his rooms and the windows looking over the grounds. He can feel the whole Manor, every inch. It hums with anticipation, waiting. 

And then Harry’s across from him, awake, alive, his springtime eyes wide and his face flushed and so obviously in love with Draco that every second he waits seems like an unforgivable waste.

“I love you,” Draco announces, and it’s like letting out a breath after holding it for a decade. “You’re the only person I ever want to love.”

Harry swallows. “I’m so fucked up.”

They both are. Everyone is. No one escapes life without a few indelible scars, and Harry has more than the average. Because he is more than the average. He’s more than the world.

“I know.”

“Did you know ten years ago?”

“Yes, and I made it worse. I didn’t go to France with you, and I should have. Forgive me. Please, forgive me.”

“No, I don’t need—I was never angry. Not at you. I forgive you, if that’s—but—” Harry wavers, looking as terribly vulnerable as he did screaming for Draco on that Auror raid. “Did you think—did you hope I would be—”

“You are so fucked up.” And Draco has never wanted, not for an instant, for Harry to be anything other than what he was. Never. “And I love you. And I’ll never stop loving you.”

“I’m so sorry.” Harry shakes his head. “I was late. You were early. And I’ve been late for so—Draco. I would have married you then.”

“Marry me now.”

“Je t’aime. Je t’aime pour toujours.”

He takes Harry’s face in his hands, pulls him in, and murmurs shh, je sais, je sais. Because he does know. It’s the same for both of them.

When he can stand to touch Harry slightly less, he takes the box out of his pocket.

Harry startles. “Your pocket? Your pocket? Draco!”

Harry’s surprise is full of such joy that Draco can only continue. He opens the box to show Harry the rings and presses on. 

“I want to perform the ritual and I am in need of a bonder,” he says.

The Manor’s magic—his family’s magic—sweeps up in a great surge like it’s been waiting ten years, too. It covers them, holds them in a column of white and gold, and sings. Draco’s mother had told him stories about it many times when he was younger, but she’d never been able to put into words exactly how it felt. Like a cool, fresh breeze. Like sunshine on roses. Like shelter from any storm, every storm. The song grows until it vibrates through everything.

Draco slips the gold ring onto Harry’s finger.

“I promise,” Draco says. “I swear.”

He could say more, but the magic only asks for a promise, and after ten years, he’s certain that this is what Harry needs. 

“I swear,” Harry repeats, and slides the silver ring onto Draco’s finger. “I swear, pour toujours.”

Draco brings him in for a kiss that he means to be rather soft and chaste, but Harry kisses him back like he feels the same urgency that pounds in Draco’s veins. It’s the song in the magic, yes, but not nearly as much as Draco’s own heady, long-suppressed want. 

“We have to seal the bond,” Draco says into the kiss. They haven’t talked about this—he’ll wait, if Harry wants to, of course he’ll wait, but the bond won’t wait as long. 

“Draco,” Harry sighs, his voice trembling. “If you don’t fuck me soon, I’m going to die.”

There is no universe in which Draco lets Harry die, none whatsoever. What ensues is a wild stripping-off of clothes and glasses, then kissing Harry to the bed. Draco tosses pillows onto it, thinking soft, he should have all the softness I can give him, and the two of them curve down over the pillows. Harry seems loath to stop kissing him and finally puts his hand at Draco’s nape and presses his forehead to Draco’s, his breath so choppy that Draco can’t make out what he’s saying.

“J’ai jamais,” ¹² Harry finally manages, and Draco waits for a long moment for Harry to finish the sentence before he grasps its meaning and then he has to think very hard about paintings of his plainest ancestors and peacocks chasing him and chess to stave off a purely possession-driven orgasm and ruining everything.

In lieu of coming massively, embarrassingly early, Draco covers Harry with his body and kisses his way over shoulders and spine and down and down and down until he finally, finally, spreads Harry open and drags his tongue over his bollocks and back up, all the way to the base of his spine.

Harry lets out a low moan into the pillows, and Draco simply has to hear that again. He can get it for the exceptionally low price of lapping his tongue against Harry’s hole and teasing it with the tip of his tongue and rolling his bollocks over his fingers.

Eventually he pulls himself away from a trembling Harry and climbs up the pillows to his side, pressing his body along Harry’s and stroking him with his fingertips until he’s worked his way back down to his hole and Conjured far more lube than is strictly necessary.

Harry makes a soft, panicked sound, his eyes wide and fixed on Draco’s.

“Shh,” Draco says. He meets Harry’s panic at the centre of their magic with his own calm. “It’s all right. I won’t hurt you, I promise. Keep looking at me. That’s it. I’ll make you feel so good, I promise. I swear. It’s all right, yes, shh—”

Harry makes a lower sound, a longer one, and Draco slips one finger inside him and Draco says you’re so beautiful like this, you feel so tight and hot and wet, how are you so perfect, je pourrais faire ça pour toujours, relax, relax and then he finds Harry’s prostate and Harry gasps, begging incoherently, and he’s fucking himself on Draco’s fingers and Draco could let that go on forever, too.

Ah, but he—

But he can’t.

The bond.

Harry whimpers when he withdraws his fingers, but Draco isn’t going far. He settles himself behind Harry and leans down over him. 

This time, he kisses the soulmark.

Harry shivers, head to toe. “What—what was that? I felt—”

“Your soulmark.” Draco nuzzles into that spot, then kisses it again. 

“What? What?”

Draco laughs, because there’s only joy and astonishment in Harry’s magic, and not a trace of disappointment. 

“I want to see!” Harry cries. “You have to show me! A soulmark?”

It’s a mad, laughing, naked scramble to Draco’s dressing room, where by some miracle of Merlin he finds a hand mirror and kneels behind Harry to show him the mark. 

Harry stares, leaning close to the mirror.  “What? Those are holly berries and—”

“Flowers from the hawthorn tree.”

“What’s yours? Where’s yours?”

Draco holds out his arm.

Harry drags his fingers over the constellation of holly and hawthorn. “When?”

“Oh, I’ve always had a bit of pink there. My mother thought it was a birthmark. But then, when I was eleven, it changed into this. I only saw yours that night on the Astronomy Tower.”

“You never said!”

“I wanted…” I wanted you, but I was so certain it would be a disaster, and you didn’t deserve any more of those. Not you. “I didn’t want you to feel obligated.”

“Don’t you?” The worry in Harry’s expression is so earnest. “Don’t—for the last ten years, you’ve—”

“Harry, I loved you long before then.”

Harry leans in and kisses him, then sits back again, shivering under another swell in the bond’s magic. He brandishes a finger at Draco.

“You tell me next time we’re soulmates,” he demands. “You tell me.”

“I will,” Draco promises, and then he gets his mouth back on Harry’s, and it’s like they never left the bed. 

He keeps them there on their knees, because the prospect of being able to watch this happen is too tantalising to refuse. Harry leans into Draco, warm and trusting, and Draco bends his head to kiss his shoulder while he lines himself up.

He feels Harry start to panic, and knows how to soothe him. How to touch him. How to put a hand on his chest and whisper into his ear. 

He steadies Harry with his other hand on Harry’s hip and coaxes him onto his cock.

In the mirror, Harry’s mouth drops open as Draco pushes in, slowly, gently, and it’s a bit like magic, isn’t it? He’s enveloped in tight wet heat, and he’s never wanted anyone else, never wanted anyone but this, never dared to think he’d have it. He can’t take his eyes off Harry, so he doesn’t, he keeps talking, he says shh, je t’aime, shh, je t’aime, you’re opening so well, you feel wonderful, move your hips towards me, ah, again, again, that’s it, I love you, I love you and then he’s seated inside Harry and Harry’s making a sound that can only mean yes oh Merlin oh God yes.

He turns his face into Draco’s neck, babbling, while Draco drags his cock over Harry’s prostate. He watches Harry in the mirror to make sure he’s got the angle just right, and then Draco gets to wrap his fist around Harry’s cock and stroke him, and then he gets to hold Harry up while all his muscles tighten, gripping Draco tight tight tight, and he comes all over the floor.

Draco drops his head forward, his mouth open on Harry’s shoulder, and thrusts, the song like a sunrise in him, like a star, hot and glowing and endless.

His own orgasm barrels into him at full speed, the marriage bond peaking with it, and it’s like being the sun, it’s so lovely and bright.

And then Harry appears, rolling into Draco’s magic. It’s blinding for a few moments. Once, Draco’s mother had told him that there had been a shift in her, in her magic, as if the world had tilted towards his father, but Draco’s magic doesn’t shift.

Harry is already at the centre of it.

Draco takes a deep breath as the magic readjusts to Harry’s presence. It lights everything it touches—the Manor and the grounds, the forest and the lake, the gardens under snow.

Harry’s magic stretches out and brushes against Draco. He can feel it all now, too. 

“Oh,” Harry breathes. “That’s—that’s lovely.”

Draco holds him close. “Yours now, too,” he says.

Harry takes Draco’s hand in his and kisses the soulmark on his wrist. “Mine now, too.”

Draco is twenty-nine

The June sun is sweet on his mother’s roses.

Draco stands in the dappled light beneath the tree, Harry in his arms. His left arm loops around Harry’s waist, and his left hand rests over Harry’s heart.

His right hand curls over Harry’s in a gentle hold. 

Draco doesn’t add any pressure to Harry’s hand, but he doesn’t let go. He never wants to, and he never will. Not really.

The painting on the canvas is of the two of them, just as they are now. Harry’s finishing the last of the highlights. He paints them like this all the time, and it never fails to thrill Draco. Look—his happiest memory, there on the canvas. His deepest joy. How did Harry put it? They’re standing in it. It’s everywhere around them.

Tomorrow, the garden will be filled with guests. Their wedding robes appeared in Draco’s dressing room yesterday morning—dark green for Harry, white for Draco. Harry refuses to take off his ring for an exchange, so it’ll be a handfasting ceremony at sunset.

Tomorrow.

One last stroke, and Harry leans into Draco with a contented sigh. “It’s done,” he says.

“It’s beautiful.” Draco drags a kiss over Harry’s neck, tasting faint salt there. “Shall we take it inside and find something else to do?”

“Je t’aime,” Harry answers. “Yes.”