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“It’s not called fuck-or-die, Ronald.”
Hermione takes a pointed sip of wine, the prim glass and respectable portion doing nothing to un-ludicrous the absolutely ludicrous statement. Ron takes a bigger one.
“It ought to be!” Ron argues, front teeth doused red. Across from both of them, Harry looks away, stature slowly being swallowed up by the booth. The wine is not working as advertised. This does not feel like a mature or adult discussion at all. Ron goes on, “That’s the whole point, isn’t it. And amor-morsentia just sounds like you’ve sneezed in the middle of a word.”
Harry’s exhausted.
Just once, just fucking once, he’d love for the magical world to remind him of its inherent magical-ish-ness with a few rabbits wriggling out of a fedora or something. Anything that’s not his coworker taking an unassuming sip of some bland, Ministry-issued coffee in the morning and coming down with an honest-to-god fuck-or-die curse by lunch.
“I just don’t see why it has to be Harry. I mean, I get it. But I don’t get it.”
Ron’s professorial after two glasses and honestly seeming way too okay with the whole thing. When Dorit stopped by their shared office in the morning and told them about what happened, Ron snorted a full swig of tea out of his nose. Not from abashed shock or anything; it went down in a deluge of mad giggling. Thinking of it, Harry’s scowl tightens. This isn’t funny. Malfoy could die.
Hermione, because she can’t not say it even with all three of them pretty well aware, announces the reasoning out loud, quite loud, and Harry’s chin connects with the edge of the table.
–
Malfoy leaves early on the day of the incident and then he doesn’t show again until Friday. By then, the office’s gotten quite feral about the whole thing.
Dorit doesn’t even bother knocking this time. She’s been doing this a bit more often the past few months, stopping by to hand-deliver gossip. The timing and also the penchant for gossip pretty much leads Harry to being 100% positive that she’s the one who spread it around about the holiday party thing.
She shoves her head and one shoulder through the crooked open part of Harry and Ron’s door, just as Harry’s setting down his jacket and mug. “Just thought you might want to know, Malfoy’s just got in.”
Ron, thankfully, is in the bathroom. Harry leaves immediately.
–
Knocking tidily until he hears a responding yelp, though it’s of the wrongly-accented variety, Harry tosses open the Wizarding Relations office door and lets himself through.
The office is tiny, only two desks wedged up against each other, and the only occupant is Unste—Eddie. Just Eddie. No nickname that’s been burned into Harry's brain simply because the poor, clumsy bloke managed to fall down a stairwell a few times. Honestly, Harry thinks, the Auror Department maybe ought to be investigating why one of their own seems so prone to injuries, instead of elbowing each other and snickering about it in the break room. He adds this to his long, long mental list of Things That Need To Start Changing Around Here.
Eddie, for his part, sounds terrified. Harry could have gone easier on the door.
“D’you—sorry, Auror Potter.” Standing, he runs an unsteady hand over his head, flattening his already decently flat hair. “How can I be of service?”
“Er, sorry.” Harry shifts his weight, sneaking one more glance at the empty, achingly neat desk shoved up next to Eddie’s. He makes his face affable and, he hopes, unsuspicious-looking. “I—no. I thought.” Jesus, he should have come up with an actual reason before barging in. The traditional, unseasoned where’s Malfoy? hasn’t cut it for about ten years. “Did you guys maybe need me for something?”
–
Better than he ever was at it before, Malfoy manages to avoid him until the middle of the following week.
Harry, unfortunately, corners him in a bathroom.
Malfoy’s washing his hands, which Harry suspects is a big cover for having actually come in here to stand rigidly with his arms crossed until he thought the coast cleared.
Less than twenty minutes prior, Harry told Ron, door propped open and hitching the volume of his voice to just under anniversary-speech level, that he wanted to pay Malfoy a visit. He endured the look, and waited twelve minutes for the gossip circulatory system to route the information over to the WR, or at least to the secretary outside of their office door, in close enough range that Malfoy would definitely be able to catch it. Then he headed immediately for the Ministry corridor bathroom just outside the main entrance to the department.
They hadn’t put Harry's name on the little plastic Auror of the Year trophy for nothing.
“Oh, joy.” Malfoy says, turning the tap off and looking up at Harry through the mirror for, Harry assumes, dramatic effect. “I was just thinking to myself, you know what, I hope Potter hasn’t gotten quite enough of humiliating me in a bathroom for one lifetime. I really hope he shows for an encore performance.”
Harry feels the licking heat up his neck and he can’t tell if it’s from the way Malfoy still says his name, sort of like he’s spitting, or performance. Or, humiliate. Or—bathroom. All are, well. Not great signs.
“C’mon.” Harry sighs, slumping against the tile wall because it does sort of feel too threatening to just be standing here, between Malfoy and the door, alone with him in a historically not fabulous place, for them. He leans one elbow on the hand dryer, balking and stepping back when he sets it off. Malfoy nearly looks pleased.
“Are you doing alright?” And, that look gets dashed away immediately.
Harry shifts. “We ought to talk about it. Come up with a plan or something. I’m not going to just let—obviously, I’m not gonna just…”
“Just what?” Malfoy asks, turning to look at him and then not stopping as he makes his way past Harry. It’s one smooth motion, spun simple like cream going into spoon-stirred coffee.
He looks miserable and also really, really good. He’s adapted a mostly Muggle wardrobe and the suits are way too nice for someone who regularly runs meetings on how to correctly fill out a timesheet. They fit Malfoy’s shoulders and chest obscenely well, comfortable-looking and defining, and the fabric always looks kind of wet. This one’s a shade of chin-tucked gray, coy. Harry swallows and nothing settles back down.
Malfoy, at the door, turns. “Not everyone wants to play damsel for you.”
Inexplicably kind of exhausted after the door quietly swings shut with Malfoy gone behind it, Harry slumps back against the hand dryer, setting it off with another startling bang.
–
Malfoy is slippery. Harry, intentionally, does not think ferret-y.
Ron does though, and says so over Friday night drinks when Harry complains about how difficult it’s been to manage to get a hold of him.
“He’s always been like that. Ferret.” Ron taps his fingers on the table. “It stuck for a reason.”
They’ve put a moratorium on words like Malfoy and fuck-or-die when it comes to drinks, but Harry keeps breaking it and then demanding it be reinstated when the conversation gets away from him.
“Nobody says that but you.”
“They used it in The Prophet last week! Or, ‘pointed features’, it's the same thing, really.” Harry pulls a look, close to calling it. “Either way, you’re lucky that I’m the easygoing one and Hermione’s still in the loo. If she heard you complain about how hard it is to get a firm grip on Malfoy, while using the word slippery.” Ron looks at him with a stale face, the same one he’s worn for six months. Nearly a year, on and off, if Harry’s being honest. “You’d pretty much never hear the end of it.”
Ron’s grin breaks clean through and Harry says, “Muriel, Muriel,” frowning and grinding his teeth in the vague direction of his pint. Harry can’t remember how it started, or if it’s actually at all related to Ron’s Aunt, but in their years of miraculous friendship the terminology has come to mean: stop it right the fuck now because I’ve had enough of you, you fucking fuck.
–
A month in, just as everyone’s mostly starting to forget about it, Harry starts feeling a little frantic. His work performance is slipping and he can’t finish off a morning run. There’s a ticking pocket watch, the chain of it tightening around Malfoy’s neck, and just because they haven’t really talked since—just—well, Harry’s not about to let Malfoy’s abundant pride finally do him in.
He sends Malfoy note after embarrassing note, and each one is delivered back to his desk with a big Return to Sender stamp. It’s Malfoy’s stamp—he’s seen it on his stupid, too clean desk, where it’s really easy to see things. The landscape’s sparse. One whole corner is just a single framed photo of his Mum, charmed to look blank if anyone harboring ill will for her happens to glance at it. Malfoy never told him that, but Harry can see the austere, nearly-still portrait of Narcissa, and Eddie can’t.
The second time Harry showed up trying to sniff Malfoy out from their shared office, Eddie mentioned it.
“Weird bloke. Empty picture frame. He always brings his own lunch and the room reeks. Cabbage.” Eddie curls his lip, from the thought of Malfoy or the cabbage, Harry doesn’t know. Maybe for him they’re the same thing.
Eddie, like most of the rest of the Auror office, and honestly a decent amount of the world, keeps the ardent flame of a sturdy post-War grudge well-stoked. Later, once he makes it back to his desk and yanks open a drawer, Harry begins scrawling hurried notes down on a lined, canary-colored page.
–
By the time Malfoy finally writes back, Harry’s got three pages of the notebook filled up. The response arrives on non-Ministry parchment delivered with a non-Ministry owl in the middle of the night.
Harry hasn’t really been sleeping lately, so when he rolls over, even in the low light, shit-visioned, he catches sight immediately of the stern, blurry silhouette against the glass. Less than five seconds later he’s over to the window, heart-thudding and wand raised, before he recognizes it's just a really, really big owl. Not a rabid fan or someone popping by to murder him in his sleep or any of the other things that’ve dragged him out of bed before.
He figures it’s Malfoy’s owl because it’s too haughty to even peck at the glass. It just stands there.
“Hi.” Harry says, gentle as the soft wood of the window as he slides it up.
The owl looks at him disparagingly. He can’t tell if it’s the lack of sleep scrambling his brain or the uncomfortable feeling that it might report back to Malfoy, but it almost looks like the creature’s beak dips down to take in the full brunt of Harry’s pajamas: giant ratty shirt and boxers he’d have to burn immediately if he ever got a boyfriend. He clears the near-sleep out of his throat. “Do you have something for me?”
The owl hoots and shoves a foot out.
Harry unfurls the note; he’s got to hold it down with two hands to keep it from curling into itself. Malfoy’s deigned to respond, fucking finally, like Harry’s the one who took a swig of evil potion and has since been cursed with a limited amount of allotted life.
The message is basically a simple command. Harry follows it.
–
God knows why Malfoy chooses the bowels of the Ministry cafeteria, after-hours, to meet. While leaning against one of the rounded tables in the dim light, Harry asks.
Malfoy’s sort of sideways in one of the chairs, the seat of which is a bit too low for him. His knees bend up to fit his feet against the floor and the position makes his legs look really long, folded and spread open like that, and suddenly Harry can’t remember where he normally puts his tongue in his mouth. Between his teeth? Is there always this much spit?
Leaning his elbows on his thighs, Malfoy says, “Because it’s the least sexual place imaginable.”
Harry tries to swallow and nods absently, right, sure. Hooking his fingers under the edge of the table and immediately retracting when he touches something sticky, Harry starts, “So.”
“So.” Malfoy repeats, and sits up a little more, crossing his arms. “You’re the one who needed to speak with me so badly.”
“Sorry for seeming so desperate about trying to save your life.” Harry says, and despite all the mouth-issues, the venom comes out easy.
“Oh, you’re so very selfless and giving,” Malfoy snorts and Harry glares, “what a hero.”
“I don’t know why you’re being such a twat about this,” Harry grumbles. “I’m trying to help you.”
“You know exactly why.” Draco says, a clean cut, and Harry does not think about the taste of gingerbread, which he’s always hated except, it seems, when it’s being licked off of someone else’s tongue.
“I obviously am not going to let you die.”
“It’s not even surprising that you think you’re in any way in charge of this.” Malfoy tightens the grip he has on his own biceps. “Like I’m your decision.”
Like a dropped fork echoing in the sallow room, Harry’s voice comes out loud and jarring. “I don’t think that. I just mean, I care about you,” but those words come out too easily; he hesitates, voice grating, “as a person.”
Malfoy’s lip curls.
“I didn’t mean I think I’m in charge of your life. I just meant, I mean—I’m willing. I want to help.”
There’s a stretched moment of silence and then, finally, Malfoy looks right at him again.
“Well, even if we went through with it, it wouldn’t work. But thanks for the grand heroic rushing in. A certain element of purity is needed to break it." Malfoy licks his lips. "You’d have to be a virgin.”
Harry keeps every muscle on his face particularly still, hoping it looks to Malfoy as absolutely blank as it feels to him. Half a minute passes.
“No.” Malfoy, already doing a poor job of sitting normally on his chair, bends in half, nearly falling out of it. He’s laughing. “No, Potter, no. No—don’t—you’re twenty-five years old!”
“And?” Harry asks, heat staining his face.
This late, the Ministry cafeteria is empty aside from the two of them. The room fills easily with Malfoy's breathy, strange laugh.
His shoulders shake—but there’s something off, like the noise doesn't feel particularly amused. It’s a hollow, mean lament, as if the joy has been scraped out with a butter knife. Closer to the sort of groan forced out by a particularly tenacious boot pressed down on the ribcage.
“You’re Head Auror.” A moan, then, fully. He sounds genuinely upset. Harry shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “You've been plastered at the top of Witch Weekly's ‘Coven's Most Coveted’ list for more than half a decade—last time they included that bloody photograph of you gallantly throwing yourself down a rope off a fucking cliff with your wand between your suspiciously straight teeth.” Malfoy pulls himself back up. He wheezes, nearly angry, throwing out one hand. “Look at your shoulders!”
Harry rolls his eyes and draws them into himself, uncomfortable with the attention paid, along with a lot of other elements of this. Clearing his throat, he runs his tongue along his teeth—which are a normal amount of straight.
"Shut up. You're twenty-five, too, you tosser. What are you doing reading Witch Weekly?"
Malfoy pulls himself together slowly, serious again.
“No.” He says, the last dregs of the laugh clearing off as he stands. He looks at Harry and it does seem like someone’s pressed something in somewhere on him, too hard. Like there's a dent left. “This was a bad idea.”
–
It takes them a long time to get anywhere after the cafeteria. Or it feels like a really long time. Technically it’s about three days.
Harry stops cornering him, or sending notes, or anything else. Malfoy seems to take well to that, not being cornered. Harry resolutely does not think ferret-y. And he doesn’t tell Ron about any gossip-worthy updates.
There aren’t any, even. Malfoy sends him another midnight note, and this time, they meet in Slough of all places. Harry got a car a few years back, a muscle cramp of an idea he hadn’t been able to stretch out until giving into it, and he drives out with it. Malfoy, he thinks, probably takes several Floos.
Harry picks him up on a miserable street corner, gray building repetitive against the gray day. Gray street, Draco in a long gray trench, and, in the big smear of brusque utilitarianism, still managing to look devastatingly bright.
He gets in quickly with a fervid, odd energy and then just sits silently with his hands clasped very tightly between his legs.
“Hi.” Harry starts with, after three solid minutes of watching the circulation erode while the sharp turn of Malfoy’s knuckles blanches.
“I wasn’t in today.” Malfoy says, still not looking.
“Yeah, I heard.” The stubborn cloud cover lets a glimpse of sun through, or Malfoy’s face twitches. It’s hard to tell with him, sometimes.
“This morning.” Malfoy starts and then snaps his teeth together loudly. Another full minute passes and Harry bends his wrist, hand draped over the soft leather of the steering wheel. “I had a nosebleed and I couldn’t get it to stop for three hours.”
The pang resounds loudly. Harry wants with every nerve in his body, every leashed atom, to move his hand on top of Draco’s and slowly, intentionally unclench Draco’s fists from where they’re clutching each other. He lets out a long, low breath instead.
“So.” Draco’s face does twitch then, a big jagged jolt. He’s clenching his teeth and his profile is sharp and oddly gentle in light of day. It’s easy to look at him while he’s staring straight ahead; he hasn’t looked over at Harry even once.
Mean jawline. Pale, short hair, eyes like the peeled off shine of a pearl, like a fairytale prince with a prettier mouth and a voice only a little reminiscent of the frog he was before. Harry likes basically every part of him. “If you’re still willing.”
–
A trough of nervousness breaks through; Malfoy’s sharp features are relentlessly vivid this close, held between Harry’s hands. He’s kissed people before, obviously, but—Hermione said it’s not about technique as much as it is about fitting. It’s about making sure you’re a good fit.
He inhales sharply and the breath stills in his lungs, eager, all of him expectant and brimming with a needy vacancy. Then Harry presses his lips to Draco's, against and soon alongside the soft, lilted wonder of his mouth, open and ready and eager.
Well. They fit.
–
“Do you feel ready?” Malfoy asks, staring at Harry’s hands. They’ve gotten Thai food together, back in Slough the next day, because Malfoy is adamant that no one sees them together. He won’t talk about the curse situation explicitly, even when Harry asked him a week ago to come by to make an official statement for the case.
“Yeah.” Harry shrugs, heart clawing its way up his throat. “Sure.”
“Sure?” Draco’s graduated to his eyes. Or more likely, the bridge of his glasses. Harry squints. Maybe even the tip of his nose. It helps very much that Malfoy is blushing blaringly loud, like if a foghorn were a shade of pink. “Yeah?”
“It wasn’t—it wasn’t for any special reason.” Harry says, frowning. He hates this sort of thing. No one asks anyone else why they want to have sex.
Malfoy’s face softens slightly and Harry’s shoulders follow suit. “I know people who are waiting, that way. For a special reason to show up. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“No, I know.” Harry slumps forward a little over the oblong plate of ped makham. It’s a nice presentation. They made a little flower with the garnish. “I know that. I just mean, it just hasn’t ended up happening, for me.”
Malfoy looks a little fired up, like Harry’s shoulders may potentially be brought up again, and Harry keeps going if only to avoid another discussion orbiting around any part of his body. Ron keeps some clippings from the opinion pieces and photo collections that the rags roll out every other month to tape on the dart board in their shared office. A month ago, he’d gone around the department confiscating every copy of whatever shit magazine published the ranking of Harry's biceps through the years. They’d included a bunch of pictures, starting at age sixteen.
It’s fucked. And really, he doesn't need any more reminders of who everyone else assumes he is.
“It took a few years to get myself right,” and at the raised drawbridge of Draco’s brow, “Er. More right. Better. I didn’t exactly have a typical go of being a teenager, you may or may not recall. And after that, it wasn’t like, okay, let’s just forget about all that nasty war stuff. It took a long time.”
He rubs at the ache in his jaw that’s been there forever, for long enough that he can’t remember when the visceral grinding of his teeth or being unable to sleep for months ended. And after, there were still years of mining lead out of his chest; the heavy, unbreathable sore that wouldn’t settle. That’s—he’s sort of still working on that. And as for the jaw, Harry honestly doesn’t know if it still aches, or it’s felt so real for so long that the idea of it is just as painful.
Draco sits very still across from him, hands flat on the table.
“And then, when. Well. I haven’t had the most spectacular time with dating. You may have picked up on that in your devoted study of Witch fucking Weekly.”
For his part, at least, Malfoy flushes. “It’s not as though I think it’s a respectable publication, but. It’s just for fun. Who am I going to get gossip from?” He slumps a bit further in his seat, drawing a figure eight with his forefinger, a little infinite nothing on the plastic tablecloth.
Every year, someone sees to it Harry has an office birthday do, a full cake, an enormous pile of cards. Half the day dissolves into consuming a throat-congealing amount of sweets, drinking whiskey out of paper cups a little too small to hold comfortably, the radio playing raucous in the break room. He gets it four times a year, actually. The team insists on doing his half-birthday, and seems to have created the concept of quarter-birthdays, all just for him.
He’s never seen a card go round for Draco.
–
Malfoy keeps wanting to meet in Harry’s car, because he’s a paranoid freak, because a lot has happened to him that justifies a little paranoia. Just a little while ago, he was doused with a potentially lethal curse, actually.
They’re in the middle of some decently heavy petting in the extension-charmed backseat when Malfoy pulls suddenly off, so Harry does too, both of them a mirrored, awkward scramble on opposite sides of the seat.
“Are you alright?”
“The dynamics of this are disgusting." Malfoy sighs in one big exhale. He's shirtless. His back is pressed against the passenger side window of Harry's car, a fog halo-fanning out from where his back is plumbed.
Or Harry doesn’t know. From the snogging. He has no clue how the science of air or body heat or snogging works. Really, he just recognizes a lot of stuff as Malfoy standing in for the gravitational center for the rest of the universe.
Malfoy goes on, frowning. "How is there supposed to be actual consent involving terminology like have to."
"Yeah," Harry says. "It's not great." He shifts in his seat, knees knocked out the wrong way, and also desperately hard. His hands had stopped on the previously-lain track—roaming all over Malfoy's shoulder blades, down the warm line of his arms, the giddy plane of his stomach.
“But doesn’t that make it better, that we,” Harry’s throat stops and starts. “Almost, before?”
Malfoy’s eyebrows drag up and his voice goes paperwork-placid. “Do you think previously given consent guarantees consent on every future encounter?”
Harry makes a garbled noise of protest. “Of course not.”
“Well.” Malfoy says, and stares furious and hard at the window, and Harry can’t stop thinking about the word hard, or watching the flush fading, the mottled pink unblooming across a big stretch of Malfoy’s chest.
–
Regarding the almost, before—
–
Harry doesn’t think about it—nearly a religious practice, after months of habit.
Even still, two weeks into all the stopping and starting (which, on a personal note for Harry, is becoming an actually concerning issue—he’s never wanked more in his life and there’s no fucking way he’s getting Auror of the Year this go around. Even the filing is starting to feel like edging.) Malfoy brings it up anyway.
“Why now, and not before?”
There’s no lead up. He just asks. Harry knows exactly what he’s talking about.
They’re in the car again, because Malfoy always wants that to be where they go, which Harry wishes wasn’t still the case but would also be willing to fuck him in the middle of the cafeteria at noon on a work day using the canned syrup from Thursday’s peach dessert for lube at this point, if Malfoy were into it.
And, obviously, the talking is important. Talking is important. Harry absolutely gets that.
They’ve both got their shirts off again and Harry rolls off, grabbing Draco’s up first off the floor as he does, offering it over. The whole thing’s uncomfortable, Harry knows—he feels the same way, like his skin’s on too tight. He wants it to be even a little bit less so.
“We talked about this,” Harry tries from the other side of the backseat, pretty bold.
Malfoy glowers at him. Seeing him like this, with pink roughed across the bridge of his nose and a glaring dollop smudged down either cheek is still too much. Harry looks resolutely at his own hand—which doesn’t help—and then at the back of the passenger seat’s headrest.
“It was an unfinished conversation, from what I remember.”
“Because.” Harry says, chest tight enough that he manages to completely mangle the delivery. “The eating where you shit thing, or—whatever.”
“Is that what you’re into? Would you like to lick me clean?” Malfoy’s eyebrow curls up and he slumps back against the cushiony leather.
Oh, fucking hell. Yes. “I—.” Harry’s 90% sure Malfoy is faking, that the occasional really-good-at-sex vibe he puts on is almost definitely just a new way to freak Harry out. But god, that leftover percentage. It sets off a molten flare, low in the gut. “You know what I mean. Prick.”
Malfoy waves him off, idly carving down a distracted path, even though he’s the one who brought this shit up in the first place. “Boring. Everyone already knows you like those. They would have included it as auxiliary information on the ballot if they could have.”
Harry, mostly embarrassed and still confusingly turned on, bites his lip.
“I—you’re making jokes, but you’re the one who asked.” His face is still too hot. At the look, he goes on, a little sour. “Because there’re rules. You of all people should know that. You wrote half of them.”
“How dare you,” Malfoy says, mulled. He cocks his head back against the headrest, arching his neck, Adam's apple jutting out at a horribly edible angle. “I’m a nobody, a peon. I’m a stamped signature in a memo, merely—”
Harry rolls his eyes.
Malfoy’s voice becomes woolier, serious. “Since when did you start caring about rules?”
“I follow rules.”
“I write you up once every other week for the failure to do exactly that,” Malfoy scoffs.
“I thought that was flirting.” Harry tries a newborn-foal smile, shaky as it stands, and Malfoy stares at him, unmoved. “Okay. Okay. I—I don’t know. I freaked out.”
Malfoy’s watching him very carefully, like at any moment Harry’s going to crack up laughing and reveal the whole thing’s actually been one enormous joke. There’s an odd feeling in his chest, like part of his heart’s been claimed up by static.
“What changed?”
“I—” Harry’s teeth grate on his lip. “You needed me.”
Malfoy leans far enough away that his side’s pressed along the gear of the car door. Staring resolutely not-at-Harry, he bites out, “I know you’re very special and everything, but it turns out I’m actually exclusively interested in fucking people who actually want to fuck me, not just as an item to be crossed off the self-sacrificial to-do list."
“I do want you.” Harry says. The words are plucked out of him, reached for down deep in the gut, and come up with the roots still hanging off. “I—” he breathes out, “I like you. Too.”
Malfoy snorts and it’s ugly. “How convenient.”
“Jesus. I don’t—I thought you wanted to talk about this.”
But Malfoy just lolls his head to the side, a glazed glare aimed toward the window.
He’s actually not that angelic or fairytale, at all. His hair is coming in at the roots; it didn’t stay white-blonde the way it’d grown naturally when they were two feet shorter with nearly a decade and a half less lived. He uses potions to fake it—Dorit gushingly informed Harry and Ron, a few weeks after the holiday party, of just this fact.
Malfoy’s vain and really, really mean. He cares about the stupidest things—the correctly done buttons on uniform robes; filling out timesheets the proper way; requesting holiday leave a full month in advance.
He cares, Harry thinks. He tries really hard, even though—it doesn’t matter if the hair Harry’s running his fingers through is sullen lemon or the downy shade of an angel’s wing. He just wants to hold it, really, to hold him.
“I changed my mind,” Draco says, tugging his dismantled shirt back down over his long chest, rushing to smooth it over his shoulders, still not looking.
“About what part?” Harry asks.
“Everything.”
–
Back in December, when they end up in the supply closet together after the serious awards are given out and while the joke ones are being handed around, with a weird buzz from the cheap rum, Harry pulls away after Draco kisses him, after Draco says, the velvet little sigh of it laid right on Harry’s tongue, I like you so much. And it’s overwhelming, he thinks in a rush, that—it’s too—he didn’t—and now, now.
Now.
–
Malfoy stops sending him stern notes in the middle of the night with a date and a street corner neatly penned, slanted like the letters are trying to get somewhere, and he quickly manages to disappear completely into the general din of the office. Even as Head Auror, it’s not like Harry can go marching over there—it’s, even—well, he completely respects what Malfoy wants. And he also has to do something about it.
Ron tosses his eyebrows up now that he’s not balking on pub plans every other day anymore, and Harry shrugs one shoulder.
And it turns out, not spending every other day thinking he’s going to fuck the shit out of Draco Malfoy at the end of it and also, as a side effect, rid himself of the virginity he’d nearly forgotten he left lying in the back of a junk drawer, bestows upon Harry a decent amount of new free time.
He pours himself into the Amor-morsentia case. A familiar-shaped cup, it holds the unwieldy spill of him easily, and three days later he’s got a lead on a seedy connection from Madrid who specializes in a home-brewed potion, tasteless and scentless, that tips over the hourglass and gives a person three months to live unless they, the hand-written ad that washes up reads, lay entangled with whomever they love. Harry can’t think of a single reason someone would need to engineer this specific situation except one that ought to end with the purchaser of the potion in jail for many, many, many, many years.
They see each other a week later in the break room, and Malfoy’s using the elegant little floral mug. He’s careful with his hands and careful to extricate himself quickly; they used to favor a short break for tea at around the same time. The room feels fluorescent and tighter without him.
When Malfoy’s not around later and the mug’s left in the strainer, Ron picks it up with two over-acted delicate fingers and pretends to drink from it really proper-like, with his pinky finger sticking out.
Harry’s heart nearly leaks out of the recently-carved crevasse in his chest.
–
“Why do you do that?” Harry asks the next day, when they’re emptying a kitchenette cabinet in anticipation of a long, long night. On the schedule it’s a stake out, but in the car it’s trading kips and arguing sleepily over the performance statistics of their individual thermoses. Harry points with his nose, hands full of crisp packets, at the porcelain mug in the drying rack. “With Malfoy’s mug.”
“Oh,” Ron says, “Low-hanging fruit. Just taking the piss to see you get all sour-faced.” When Ron looks up to find Harry looking at him, he shrugs again, “Sometimes feels like you need to take it all a little less seriously.”
Harry frowns, gently trying to settle the packets into the bottomless pack without crunching too many.
“Take what less seriously? He could die.”
“Yeah, mate, I know.” Ron turns, a slow yank of seriousness settling in. “But this is before then, right? You put up the moratorium after Christmas, and—” at the expression on Harry’s face, “we don’t have to talk about it, just.”
Ron shrugs and Harry says nothing, dedicating himself entirely to the task of crisp-arrangement.
At a crawling hour in the early morning, reclined in the passenger seat, ripped right down the middle between a mired exhaustion and a buzzing overload of caffeine potions that Harry can feel in every fingertip, Ron says, “I didn’t think it was funny, but, it’s funny. The stuff with Malfoy. It’s like, you needed a push and then, well.”
–
The morning Harry waits, heels bouncing, at the tube that will deliver the arrest warrant for one Edward Barnette, Draco comes into work late. The document dispensary sticks out just across from the head secretary’s desk, opposite the front doors of the department, so it’s one unbroken line when Harry looks up and sees Malfoy come through. His chest gives way to a pack of leaping hounds, their claws drag down the inside of his ribcage.
He’s usually really fastidious about it, but the bottled moon-shade of Draco’s hair has given away almost entirely to a dingier natural blonde. His face is muttered pink, hollering in some stretches—not the same flush as the handsome, easy one that Harry’s kissed into him before. He’s near enough that Harry can also see the black smudge of blood crusted around his left nostril.
Malfoy looks at him and then immediately away, ducking through his office door—and that’s, yeah. That’s fine. Harry has to see someone in WR for some unrelated business, anyway. The wound-up warrant coagulates into existence in the cradle of the recieval tube and Harry pockets it.
He does hesitate a moment, heart hammering, thinking Draco is maybe just on the other side of the door, unfastening his coat with belligerent care before hanging it, every part of him so intentional and—
There really isn’t time.
“Official Auror business,” Harry barks, and raps on the door a sturdy couple of times before bursting through it.
–
Before all the stuff in the back of Harry’s car, which was both a monumental, tectonic-plate-shifting amount of stuff in one way and also technically not much at all on the other, they had Thai food at the same spot in Slough again.
Malfoy likes it, Harry thinks. He likes to talk.
Well—that isn’t true, but he likes to know and be sure of something, and he’ll move careful notches of language around like completing a jigsaw puzzle until he gets there.
“In regards to not really dating.” Malfoy says, looking at the spring roll he’s dragging through the chili sauce Harry loves and Malfoy does a semi-decent performance of enduring. He’s going to leave this one to marinate and Harry’s going to end up with it, just like the last two.
“What about it?”
“Well.” Malfoy drops the spring roll, tilting one hand like a renaissance painting, a limp languid pretty gesture, like this qualifies as an actual response.
“Er,” Harry says, and though he basically is, “I’m not really sure what you’re asking.”
“For a person such as yourself, I have a very hard time believing it didn’t work. Finding a partner, romance, or a one-off,” Malfoy shoots a quick, obvious look, “whatever you’re into.” Harry glances down at the table, hoping his stupid face isn’t radiating falling in love, marriage, a huge garden, medium-sized dog, coffee brought up to bed in the morning and kissing before we’ve brushed our teeth, or if it is, that it at least looks a little bit nonchalant.
“Um, thanks, I guess.” He runs his hand over the side of his jaw. “I don’t know. It’s not really been easy to meet people. Pretty much everyone who isn’t someone we knew at age eleven thinks I’m like, well, the action figure version. So either they figure out I’m not, or I kind of quickly catch them trying to knick my used socks or something-”
A champagne laugh bubbles out, really rare from Malfoy. Harry tries not to be openly delighted with the sparkle of it.
“Alright, fine. That makes more sense.”
“I thought, maybe.” Harry busies himself by claiming the spring roll, biting off most of the glazed end, taking his time to chew and swallow with Malfoy’s gaze like a thick velvet curtain this close. “That was kind of what I was thinking happened with you. I thought maybe it was because they’d given me that dumb Auror of the Year award earlier on.”
“Merlin, no.” Malfoy says, annoyed, “I can barely tolerate that you’re an Auror at all. It’s embarrassing.”
Harry laughs. “You’re aware that we work in the same department?”
“I know.” Malfoy smiles, wobbly, like it’s propped up on sticks. “I live with the shame of it every day.”
They go quiet and eat for a bit, but Harry can’t shake off the unfinished feeling entirely. He brings it up again even though the words sort of feel like a thick paste. It’s ruined every other thing; it’s hard for him to say, still.
“So it’s not because of—” He gestures to himself.
Malfoy pulls a face like he has before with the chili sauce, but this one remains unburied. “You’re asking, did I want to specifically because you’re Harry Potter?”
The heat varnishing his jaw is dangerously close to becoming a permanent fixture. “Yeah.”
“Don’t be stupid.” Malfoy huffs. He really is not into the whole talking thing, when it comes to anything he has to rummage around for in the trunk of his own chest. “If anything, it’s despite your being who you are, not because of it.”
Harry laughs, “Okay, smooth operator. And, now?”
“I—despite—I don’t know, maybe in a certain way because of.” Malfoy runs a hand through his hair, looking toward the opposite corner of the restaurant and then finally back. “But my Harry Potter’s always been very different from the rest of the world’s.”
The smile breaks on his face like a crack in porcelain.
Malfoy looks at him close-range, which Harry should know better, he’s trained for this—it’s a potentially fatal thing. The whites of his eyes, yes, but also the firm, soft, lovely-to-be-held-within gray, and then the central black pools that he, all of him, Draco is just behind. A threshold, the murky passageway that Harry thinks, wildly, is where they meet. Seeing and being seen, just where he’d like to live.
Oh Harry’s fucked.
He can feel it heavy over his chest, taste it in his throat—his whole body is humming with it. It’s devastating. It’s amazing.
Watching intently, the hearth of his gaze already a home, Draco says, “Well, you’ll always be different.”
–
Eddie confesses pretty much right away. It’s a shorter interrogation than Harry even planned for, and he went expecting pretty much zip. Cabbage comes up so many times Harry has to ban him from mentioning it—no matter how you shake it, committing the act of having a really foul smelling lunch is just not a justifiably murderable one. Legally speaking.
And he’d gone for the virginity clause of the potion intentionally.
On the official record, he agreed, of course he knew about the holiday party supply closet thing, and after some grousing around, admitted that he was an avid fan of Witch Weekly too, a publication which had reported back in 1999 that Harry Potter lost his virginity during an orgy with the Weird Sisters.
“He’s obsessed with you! Always darting beady little looks—” Harry calls off the quill transcribing official notes—this’ll be an easily accessible document, Malfoy can, and will, read it—and Eddie leans in conspiratorially. Harry’s good-cop mask hangs on by one very, very frail thread of composure. “He casts a breath-freshening charm before stepping out for a tea break, isn’t that sad?”
They have a counter-curse, or they will very shortly. With the easy spill of additional information from Eddie and the sample the team collected from the Madrid raid, the lab says they can have it as early as the next day even, just after lunch.
At the end, in the claustrophobic little closet with the way-too-blue, way-too-low bite of fluorescent lighting, hand-to-shoulder, you can tell me, I’m really your friend here, help me help you, Harry asks why. Why Amor-morsentia?
“Because he deserved it.” Eddie says, shaky and certain. “Pathetic louse. He deserved to snuff it knowing how little you thought of him.”
Since Harry is a good man, reportedly and in this one instance actually, Eddie remains unmurdered for the time being.
–
The interrogation is short enough that Harry gets back to his desk before the end of the day. At the perfect time, really, when most everyone in the office is mulling about trying to look busy but no one actually is. Near enough to six that nothing’s getting done, but far off enough that it can’t reasonably appear that way.
He scrawls a note to Draco and sends it drifting off at a languid pace. On its way over to slip under the Wizarding Relations’s office door, it’ll pass by basically the entire rest of the Auror department. He’s written Draco’s name three times larger than entirely necessary, his first name only, and it’s placed just under a monogram that labels the paper, unmistakably, Harry James Potter’s official stationary.
No more Slough, no more doing this unseen in the gutter, alongside the rest of their lives. If they’re going to do it at all, he wants everything.
–
“Well, good.” Malfoy smirks, apparently very pleased with himself on Harry’s couch. “I don’t feel so guilty about the time-delay tripping jinxes. Fucking Unsteady Eddie.”
Harry groans. They’re sitting close. There are two perfectly good armchairs on either side of the coffee table that would have been reasonable for either of them to have sat on instead, but Draco sank right down, next to him.
And he looks really good. There's been the onset of a pretty sunny disposition, probably entirely the result of being told the curse he thought was going to end his life in relatively short order will now instead be neatly done away with after soup and salad tomorrow. It probably has next to nothing to do with Harry’s note asking him to come round for dinner. They dug into a glorious pile of takeaway, more Thai, and the well-scavenged containers lay abandoned back in the kitchen.
“You can’t tell me things like that.”
“What? I said I don’t feel guilty. He deserved it, obviously. He’s always been such a fucking prick.”
“You’re not the arbiter of justice here.”
Draco, fully meaning it, says, “And I suppose you are?”
“Well, I basically have a nameplate that says so.” Harry laughs. He’s been feeling really, really giddy. Ron caught him sort of bouncing in his seat after he sent the note off, half-spinning his chair, and when he tossed his eyebrows up, Harry just grinned. I know, I know. Can’t help it.
“You’re confusing law enforcement with the judicial system—and! He kept throwing away my lunches.” Draco exclaims this sullenly, like this is also justification to attempt murder. They badly need to overhaul the whole department if this is the prevailing mindset. Luckily, Harry’s got an in with the knob in charge of WR.
“You could have literally killed him!” Even trying very much to mean it, the smile stays stuck on Harry’s face.
“What is he, one thousand years old? It was half a staircase, for fuck’s sake. Also, he literally tried to kill me! In a wildly uncalled for humiliating and personal manner! You might remember, from arresting him several hours ago!” Draco, working himself up, is sunk half into the cushion and fully facing Harry. His hands are darting and diving between them, an erratic flutter. It’s all having an effect on Harry pretty unrelated to the topic at hand. “He’s deranged, an actual psychopath, also, when he sneezed, he did so not only without a handkerchief but the prick didn’t even cover his fucking mouth—”
It’s too much, Draco with the warm line of his leg pressed against Harry’s on the couch, Draco in Harry’s apartment, the demanding, rude, wonderful center of Harry’s universe. Harry leans in and kisses him.
Draco’s surprised breath, a hesitant delight, catches in the soft of Harry’s mouth. There’s a tuning fork moment—and then he’s kissing back, Draco’s kissing him, petal-press gentle, and soon, the rough-hewn turn.
It’s exuberant and easy. They’ve been learning each other for a long time.
Like a sat-down slow dance, Draco drags his teeth over Harry’s lip until Harry’s slides his tongue back against his and in the seamless warmth, shoulders are pulled closer then held steady.
His brain is reduced quickly; mostly just a dull, pleased hum with one or two electric thoughts sparking up suddenly. Flat on his back with one leg spilled off the side of the couch, Harry almost gets an idle one out in the wrappings of an articulation—until Draco, kissing up Harry’s jaw like the garden wall along a wild, lush-grown scape, begins hitching his hips, dragging coarse and deliberate and hard right against him, and everything muddles back into haze.
Harry, minutes later when his brain connects back to his mouth, grabs at Draco low on the tilt of his back and barely manages anything. “You remember—we could just—you’re fine. You’re gonna be fine tomorrow, we don’t have to.”
“I remember.” Draco laughs, a warm flushed thing. The same flavor as the heat all over his neck. And fuck, Harry’s going to—he should have wanked before Draco came over, but there was all the time tidying up—and then the rough of Draco’s jaw stubble-scratches against his cheek as he kisses Harry’s ear, and the magnificently sensitive inch just under, at the start of his neck.
A loud, low breath. “Do you still want to?”
“Yes–” With a leap in his chest. He answers so quickly there’s almost an overlap. And that’s nice, because he’ll take everywhere he can get with one of them on top of the other. And there’s room now—he can’t believe they almost did this in the back of the Granada.
Draco pulls back enough for Harry to see the marvel of his face, bright and smirking, before ducking back in, kissing down the side of Harry’s throat, taking his time and grinding right against him, the press of his cock very hard and very obvious, both of them soaked in daylight. He’s pinning Harry down, a long line of sprawling vivid heat and honestly, honestly—Harry would love to do this in the back of the Granada. He wants this in every possible where and way.
“Yes, absolutely, yes, yes.” Abundance a non-issue here, Harry says so again and again.
“Well—good.”
Before he loses the thread completely, and also because he really wants to feel the warm shape of the words laid against the notch at the base of his throat, Harry asks, “And you want to? You just—want to?”
Draco takes his tongue away for only a moment. “Yes, yes,” a little tucked laugh, “I just really want to.”
There’s more snogging until that starts to come apart at the seams. Draco keeps arching himself against Harry, needy and quicker and more, and there’s fumbling thrusts in return. Harry says, jesus, Harry says, oh my god, and his head keeps falling back against the couch cushion, slack. They get down to their pants, blush rippled everywhere they’ve touched each other, all these undeniable blooms of wanting and having.
“We should—” Draco pulls off from where it’d felt as though he’d been neatly unfastening Harry’s chest, dragging his tongue in lazy lines and wearing his teeth over the ridges of skin. Something so nothing shouldn’t be allowed to be so much.
“Yeah,” Harry says, nodding fervently, no idea what they’re talking about.
“Your bed,” Draco smiles.
It’s an odyssey to get all the way to Harry’s room, and the flat’s not even compensating for anything, size-wise. Normally, when Harry scrapes himself up from the sofa at the end of a too-long day after he’s kipped there accidentally and slept weird on his neck, it’s about a five-second journey.
Now they can’t leave each other alone long enough to make it further than one step for every vibrating minute. Draco keeps kissing him and Harry grabs the slope of his hips hard, a keening lean, and even biting his own lip or Draco biting Harry's isn’t stopping all the sap-thick sounds he’s making, awe cresting and splintering aloud.
Finally, finally, Harry lays back across the bed that he hurriedly made a few hours ago. He’d done a lot of tidying, anticipating, and he burnt that pair of boxers. He did it earlier over the kitchen sink, because, well—Draco really seems like he wouldn’t be above going through Harry’s rubbish bin. Not for fingernail clippings or hair, the way Harry’s caught other blokes rummaging around for, but solely with the intention of finding something to mock him relentlessly over. It takes a lot not to smile at the thought, but then Draco climbs in next to him and the whole thinking thing is a total wash again.
Draco’s hand is very light, tracing toward the crease of one thigh. Harry whines.
“How did you want to?”
They’re facing each other, lying close enough that he can see Draco perfectly, even though his glasses are shoved somewhere in between the couch cushions.
“I didn’t really think about it.”
Harry keeps on at Draco’s bemused look. “I mean, I’d like to—I don’t have a preference. Every way. I don’t really care which is first.”
“Merlin, fuck. Harry.” Draco murmurs, three quick, hot puffs of air shoved against Harry’s shoulder now that Draco’s groaning and leaning on it, echoing a thick, pleased tide low in Harry’s belly.
Then Draco says, with a firm squeeze through Harry’s pants, “I’ve been wanting your cock in my arse for so long, wanking, teasing myself open thinking about. And I want to put my fingers inside you, lick you open until you’re dripping and begging for it and then fuck you, and, also—” he squeezes Harry again, a wonderful, awful, blunt pressure—“everything.”
“Jesus, Draco, Jesus. Jesus.” Harry, most of him melted down at this point, keeps saying, ragged in the mouth as Draco takes Harry’s pants off. He’s lying flat on his back while Draco gets his own off, too, and he stays very still, taking in the lean, light-licked tower of him as Draco repositions himself, his pink, wanting cock jutting up against his stomach, just above Harry’s own—he breathes out a full lung’s worth of air, hands loose on either side of Draco’s hips.
“Do you finger yourself?” Draco asks, a sort of scrubbed-raw voice, and Harry nods feverishly. “Do you use a spell?” His hand finds Harry’s and he leans up, one knee on either side of Harry’s hips, Harry agreeing with the jerk of his head, throat feeling too full to speak. “Can you do it?”
Harry does it. Thick with honey and dripping just as sweet, he nudges Draco’s guiding hand away and feels Draco for himself, first under and up the cleft and finally at the tight furl of muscle. Tracing around it, Draco’s thighs twitching, Harry works into him the way that gets his own toes curling as desperately as his hips, watching, watching Draco’s face go stern with effort and then slack, mouth hanging open until he’s fallen forward onto Harry’s chest, pushing back into it where Harry’s crooking his fingers, pressing.
A moan breaks in the middle and Draco's hand loops around Harry’s wrist desperately—“Stop—stop, I’m going to—I’m going—I’m ready, I’m ready.”
“Good—good, okay.” Harry says, and it’s hard to tell which one of them is shaking by then. Both, maybe, humming at the same frequency. “Yeah, yes, ready.”
Harry feels like he’s breathing something extra, like the air is thicker like this, watching as Draco lines himself up—the taut line of his shoulders, his body arching up, legs spread, hands working behind his back. It’s a too-bright, wonderful thing, and then Draco sinks down onto him shiver-slow, and Harry’s being swallowed by it, the tight, tight, wring. All around him, everything. A sweet, small oh slips out as Draco takes him down to the hilt.
One hand flat on Harry's chest, Draco’s palm is a pleading pressure, fingers stretched out wide. They stay like that, suspended for moments, smiling at each other delirious and exuberant—Harry had no idea it would be like this. Smiling—the overwhelming joy.
It doesn’t matter that it’s the first time, this would have felt like one anyway. It’s Draco. He’ll always be different, too.
“Okay?” Harry’s hand skirts up the warm slope of Draco’s side, and Draco nods, pleasure-fizzed grin unwavering. He’s so beautiful Harry does have to shut his eyes against it, again, until Draco leans forward, both of them groaning, a throttled delight, and he puts his hands on Harry’s face. Laughing, there’s laughing here, in this—there’s bliss and wonder and Draco says in this sucked-in little gasp, “Alright, I’m—you can move, slow, go slow—”
And Harry does, gentle, really gentle, starting to thrust in a steady rhythm, even though it feels like he’s been waiting for so long—not for this as an act, but for Draco, to have him, to really have him this way. The tight pressure of realization pushing in on every side, an aching, aching thrill, it's hard to keep from—Harry bites down on his bottom lip.
Following the delirious heat, Draco searing and tight around him, his hips start to snap, bucking them both up off the mattress. Hand too greedy to keep from it any longer, Harry spits into one, Draco groaning, and shoves down, wrapping around Draco’s cock and jerking him off messily.
“Fuck—I’m, oh, Harry—”
“I like you so much,” Harry says, voice bouncing and breathless, and Draco agrees, he’s making these little noises; Harry’s knocking the noise out of him. They’re making each other—with the slow bucking up into impossible heat—it’s overwhelming, he wants to keep his eyes closed but can’t bear to miss it, Draco slack-jawed and the wet, rosy, marvel softening his mouth and—fuck. He’s not going to last very long at all, it's already—"I—oh my god, Draco—fuck, fuck."
Draco says, "Yes, yes, I—you're so, everything—" which is nonsensical, really, and entirely clear.
Flush with it, with the whole giddy, wild thing, Harry gives himself over to it, coming hard and arching off the bed. One hand twists around Draco and the other bruises into his hip when he cries out, riding it out, fucking up into him through it until Draco thrusts forward, falling apart, spilling over Harry’s fist and slick onto his stomach.
After, they lay tangled and close, Draco sighing a sweet laugh, hearts rioting, impossible to tell one from the other.
It's everything, really.