[From Samhain to the Solstice]: All Fall, Harry/Theodore, R, 3/3

[lomonaaeren]

Thanks again for all the reviews! This is the end of the story.

Part Three

Did you change your mind?

Harry shuddered a little as Nott’s voice blazed to life in his head, warming his mind and his body alike. He ignored him as he undid his robes with shaking hands and dropped them to the floor.

Nott watched him from the other side of the cell, nostrils flaring, but not moving to attack yet. His self-control made much more sense now that Harry knew he was an older vampire, one who would have fed on other victims, probably killed his first, and lost the chance of becoming human again before Harry ever met him.

Which means I have a vampire who’s never going to go back to being human bound to me.

Harry glanced at Nott and then sighed. “Oh, all right. I came down here because I assumed you would be panting for a blood meal, but if you’re not…” He shrugged and bent down to pick up his robes again.

Nott crossed the room in a silent rush, his hands closing around Harry’s wrists and holding them against the wall. His fangs were abruptly so close. Harry gasped as he went from half-limp to hard, so fast it was painful, and humped up his hips to meet Nott without thinking about it.

Nott held himself back, but a faint, pleased smile crossed his face and exposed his fangs. He lowered his head and stroked the inside of Harry’s left wrist with them, so delicately that he never slit the skin.

I never thought a mature vampire would consent to have his magic bound to mine, but—

I consent. This time, Nott replied directly to Harry’s thoughts, his internal voice low and guttural. I want you in all the ways I can have you. You are my mate.

Harry swallowed. He had to remember that Nott had tricked him, while keeping that knowledge as much as possible out of his face and voice and scent. It was also difficult because Nott’s senses would be more mature, even if he had only been turned a few days before he came into the Ministry, than a newly-turned vampire who had never had anything but a willing blood meal from one person.

Nott flicked his tongue out, not touching the side of Harry’s throat but coming close. “Why do you resist?” he continued, aloud, although his words were so low they might have been mental instead. “Everything I heard about you says that you have wanted a vampire mate for longer than you have been an Auror.”

“Wait, what the fuck?” Harry demanded, jerked out of his daze as much as he could be when his erection hurt. “How in the world—Nott, I only discovered that I could help vampires this way after I entered Auror training!”

“What I heard about you in Hogwarts.” Nott’s eyes were intense and dark and, although Harry was immune to vampire thrall as he was immune to Imperius, he thought he might know what it was like when he met Nott’s gaze. “You must have wanted someone to protect you, in the trials that you passed through. You must have wanted someone to hold you down and drink from you, give you pleasure that you couldn’t find when the school turned on you and even your friends betrayed you.”

Harry laughed in his face. “You know nothing about me. My friends have never betrayed me.”

“When Weasley turned his back on you in fourth year, that wasn’t betrayal? When he walked away again during your hunt for something you’re keeping very carefully hidden from me, even in your thoughts, but which I know must have been the key to the defeat of the Dark Lord?” Nott lowered his head, his nostrils quivering. “When I can hear and feel how they judge you for being attracted to my kind?”

“I forgave Ron, and he was acting that way for reasons you know nothing about,” Harry spat. He threw himself against the hold Nott had on his wrists, but he might as well not have moved. The strength made him harder. He ignored that as best he could. “And my friends wanting me to find someone good to settle down with doesn’t mean they judge me for wanting to be bitten.”

“You can tell them that you’ve found someone to settle down with, then.”

Harry laughed again. “What, you think I’ll marry—”

“Mate, Harry. It’s a more lasting bond, and vampires aren’t allowed to get legally married in magical Britain anyway, by the will of our illustrious Ministry.”

Harry fell silent and just stared at Nott. Nott was looking back at him, his eyes that intense color Harry had already noticed, the color that no wizard’s eyes he had seen could ever match.

I can’t be considering this. I must be mad.

It really did seem, for a moment, though, as if Nott might be the answer to the problems that he had. He couldn’t bind a mature vampire—but he had. The vampires that he fed would always turn back to normal human beings and cease to interest him—but Nott wouldn’t.

Then Harry shook off the ideas. He couldn’t be the mate of any vampire, much less one who had lied to him the way Nott had.

“How have I lied to you, Harry?” Nott’s hands moved, transferring both of Harry’s wrists to one hold, while his now free right hand traced over Harry’s cheek. Harry shifted, and wished that he wasn’t still hard, so hard all the time.

“Stop fucking around in my head!”

“I’m not fucking around,” Nott murmured. “On my honor—”

Harry laughed again.

“Vampires can have honor. I think you know that very well.” For the first time, Nott’s hold on Harry’s wrist pressed down and was painful. “Don’t act like the short-sighted, foolish Aurors and Unspeakables who hold me here.”

“I know that you lied to me,” Harry said steadily. “You either retained some kind of wizard magic past your turning, which is supposed to be impossible, or you’re good at feigning it. You lied to me and said you were newly-turned. You’re not. You pretended that you wanted to be human again. You can’t. Your magic felt brackish because it was essentially already a vampire’s magic, wasn’t it? You’re obsessed with me, enough to let the coven turn you, and I have no idea why. But altogether, it means that I can’t trust you.”

“I lied to the coven because there’s no way that they would have turned me otherwise, unless they thought they were getting vengeance on you,” Nott replied instantly. “I lied to the Ministry to get brought into your presence, yes. And I had to pretend I was newly-turned, or I wouldn’t have had access to you.”

“Why did you want access to me, Nott? You still haven’t answered that question.”

“I’ve wanted you since you came out of the Forbidden Forest,” Nott said. “You’re powerful, you’re smarter than people give you credit for—”

“Oh, come on, no one who’s wanted to date me has wanted me for my brain.”

“The more fool them, then.” Nott’s voice was low and tender, and once again, Harry couldn’t tell if it was speaking aloud or in his head. “No, you’re not a bookish genius like your friend Granger. But that doesn’t mean you’re not intelligent. The coven told me all about the times that you’ve managed to fool them and spring their traps, or kill their assassins. You’re better than bookish. You’re intuitive, insightful, and that’s not something that can be feigned or bought.”

Harry bowed his head, overwhelmed. His memory went back to the series of images that Nott had placed in his thoughts earlier, and he snapped his head up again. “You can’t want me the way you say you do.”

“Oh?” Nott’s eyes were on Harry’s throat, his new scar caused by Nott’s fangs. “Why not?”

“Because I saw that image you shared of me coming out of the Forbidden Forest. You wanted someone to protect you. But now you’re talking as though you wanted to protect me.”

Nott smiled. “I think you could still protect me quite handily against some of the traps that various people would like to spring on me for being a vampire, or being the son of a Death Eater father.”

“And for that, you gave away your humanity.” Harry’s voice was resigned, because, yes, he was starting to suspect that Nott was as mental as all that, but still.

“You’ve given away your chance to live with and love a human to spend time with my kind.” Nott bared his fangs. “Believe me, Harry, I think we’re both as mental as each other.”

“Stay out of my head!”

“It’s hard for me to figure out what you’ve voiced aloud and what you haven’t, when the bond is in this incomplete state,” Nott murmured, and Harry reckoned that was all the apology he was going to get. “You need to choose, though.”

“Choose what?” Harry gave another yank at Nott’s hold, not that it did any good. He was staying right where Nott put him.

Merlin, that shouldn’t be so hot.

Nott’s nostrils flared as if he was smelling Harry’s arousal, but his smile was calm. “You can choose me and a future where you’re my mate and we can stand up to whoever we want. I told the coven that I would return and join them once I’d neutralized you, but I was lying. I used them to turn me and get me close to you, make me appealing to you.”

“You’re mental,” Harry could only repeat, a little dazed.

“I made the choice. I took a risk, yes.” Nott’s hands flexed, and then he took a large step back. “So. I think the risk paid off. I’m stronger than I used to be, and I have the chance of having you as my mate. You might not choose me.” A low growl rumbled in Nott’s throat as he spoke those words. “But you’re the one who moves forwards now.”

“Why did you attack an Unspeakable with your claws?”

“They taunted me.” Nott’s fangs flashed again. “Said that there was no way I would ever be important to you, that the vampires you helped turn back to human were just charity cases. And I wasn’t about to use my fangs when I only desire to drink from you.”

“I’d need my mate to have more self-control than that,” Harry scoffed, and then realized what he’d just said.

Nott’s eyes lit up with a dark blue as bright as Voldemort’s red had ever been. “I know you haven’t decided yet, because I would smell that kind of determination on you. But it’s a good sign.”

Harry shook his head sharply and turned away. He was determined to get out of that cell without speaking to Nott again. There was no way that he could ever yield to have Nott as a permanent mate.

But something from the letter that Kingsley’s spy in the coven had written returned to him, and he glanced over his shoulder. “How did you retain enough magic to tell which vampires would be mates to which humans?”

Nott blinked, then laughed. Harry told himself that the sound did not make him harder.

“That wasn’t magic, Potter,” Nott said, through the middle of a chuckle. “That was plain observation. I was good at it in Slytherin, too. I would stay quiet and watch, and people would forget I was there or think I wasn’t interested and spill their secrets in front of me. Then I would astonish them by predicting what they thought was the future, just based on what I already knew of them. It was the same thing in the coven. Spend enough time around them, and it’s easy to know what the tendencies of vampires are and which humans would suit them.”

“You belong with someone smarter than me.”

“I think I’m the one who has to make that decision. And as I told you, I’ve come as far as I can on my own.”

Harry shook his head, and prepared to let himself out.

*

“Harry, can we talk?”

Harry swiped a hand down his face. He had thought that the pounding knock on his front door had come from someone at the Ministry, that Nott must have escaped. Hermione was a surprise, especially at midnight.

“Okay,” he said with a yawn, and let her in, automatically waving his wand in the motions that would keep any vampires back. They liked to spy on him, and two of the assassins they’d sent had tried to dash through his wards when those were temporarily lowered to accommodate visitors who were entering.

Hermione looked around and relaxed back against the door with a long sigh.

Harry glanced at her curiously as he locked up again. “Is something wrong?”

“I thought—I thought I might find Nott here.” Hermione brushed her hair out of her eyes and stared at him, while Harry stared back, his mind whirling.

“Kingsley told you about some of what’s going on,” he said at last. Hermione and Ron had known that the latest vampire brought for him to turn back into human was Theodore Nott, but they could only have got the details of things like Nott being willingly turned and possibly able to escape from Kingsley.

Hermione nodded and sat down across from Harry on a short red stool near the hearth. Harry absently lit the fire with his wand, studying his old friend. Hermione extended her hands to the flames and avoided his eyes.

“Come on, out with it,” Harry said, after a few minutes had lurched past.

Hermione glanced over her shoulder. “It’s gone too far, Harry,” she said. “This obsession you have with vampires, or fascination, or whatever it is. I think you need a Mind-Healer.”

Harry pushed away the anger that was rising up in him. He had always known that the conversation was likely to go like this if Hermione ever brought herself to address the sexual aspect of it directly. “I had that, Hermione. After the war.”

“They didn’t do a good enough job!” Hermione spun around on the stool to face him. “You’re—something’s wrong, Harry!”

Harry closed his eyes and nodded slowly. “I’ve known that for a long time, Hermione.”

“Then why didn’t you go back to Mind-Healing?”

“I had Mind-Healing for two years. I stopped because both the Healer and I felt that we’d healed the trauma that was there to heal, the kind of thing that was giving me nightmares and making it impossible to concentrate. What else should I have done?”

“Kept going once you found out you had this kink.”

Harry glanced away from Hermione. The disgust in her voice was a little much, especially since he knew that she and Ron got up to some things that—well, it wasn’t like they had a vampire fetish, but it wasn’t like she had grounds to accuse him of being unhealthy or something, either.

There was a long silence, and then Hermione asked, “Will you do it? Will you go back to Mind-Healing?”

“And if it turns out that the Mind-Healer I go to doesn’t share your conviction that this is disgusting, or tells me I’m cured and I still have the fetish?”

“Find someone who can help you with more than that. Who can use magic, not just Muggle techniques!”

Harry laughed despite himself. “You realize that that kind of magic is kin to the Imperius Curse, right? What makes you think that’ll work on me when I can throw its stronger cousin off?”

Hermione blinked, and Harry saw the honest surprise in her expression. “I—I didn’t know that.”

Harry shook his head. “I did consider it for the nightmares. But my Mind-Healer felt it wouldn’t help me at all, and that I should confront the memories and work through them in a Pensieve. I’m glad I did that.”

“Will you go back to Mind-Healing for your vampire fetish?”

“No.”

“It’s wrong.”

Harry clenched his fingers in the cushions of the chair he sat in. He had always known this wouldn’t go well, yes. And he didn’t particularly want to ask Hermione to explain herself. She felt what she felt. She probably couldn’t help it.

But he couldn’t help what he felt, either. And if Mind-Healing managed to “cure” him, he also wouldn’t turn into the sexually normal wizard he thought Hermione was hinting at, either. He would probably just find something else that satisfied his danger rush, that could make him feel alive and, for a moment, overpowered by someone stronger than he was, while being in no danger of dying.

Harry blinked once. Then he thought, That’s it, isn’t it? That’s the heart of it.

It didn’t have to be a vampire who needed to be turned back to human. He had never dated someone he had fed that way, after they turned back. They were embarrassed and wanted to avoid him, and, well, he simply had no interest in them after they became human again.

If he had someone who was bound to him, the way Nott was with his magic still entwined with Harry’s…a vampire he could trust not to snap and drain him…

Then the choice Nott was asking him to make might be simple after all. If Harry could trust him.

“Harry! Are you paying attention to me?”

Harry blinked and turned back to Hermione, who had her arms folded and was glaring at him. “No, sorry, Hermione, I wasn’t.”

“Why not? Don’t you think the choice whether to go to a Mind-Healer or not is an important one?”

“It would be,” Harry agreed, standing up and seeing her follow him, “if that was the choice I intended to make.”

“You need to.”

Harry had to work hard not to laugh at the horrified face she was making at him. She would just get upset and misunderstand what he was doing, anyway. He shook his head and escorted Hermione to the door. “I disagree with you about how damaging and destructive my vampire fetish is, Hermione, obviously. And I have someone else I need to speak with tonight.”

“Harry.” Hermione stopped on the threshold and turned around, her face pale. “If you don’t stop doing this, I’m not sure…”

“Is this the end of our friendship, then?” Harry asked quietly, his hand on the doorframe above her head as he looked at her.

He wondered how much he would feel about it even if it was. He didn’t hate Ron and Hermione, but he had been drifting apart from them for the last few years, partially because of his sex life, partially because they kept urging him to join the Weasley family and reconnect and date someone, and Harry didn’t want to.

“No! Of course not!” Hermione’s hair threatened to stand on end around her head. “But you need to change, Harry. It’s not healthy!”

Harry laughed a little. “I might be on the verge of making a change, Hermione. It’s just not necessarily the same as asking a Mind-Healer to cure me of this fetish.”

“Then what?” Hermione asked, but Harry smiled and told her to go home and shut the door.

He had work to do, and since his body was buzzing with excitement and he wouldn’t go back to sleep anyway, he might as well do it now.

Besides. The night was the vampires’ time.

*

“Potter. What do you want?”

Harry grinned. He couldn’t exactly blame Alicia for her incredulity. It wasn’t like he had ever come to her nest to seek her out before. He settled back in the branches of the large tree that stood next to the abandoned belfry in the heart of wizarding London where she made her residence, and half-bowed.

“I need to know more about Theodore Nott and his role in the coven.”

Alicia’s eyes opened wide at him, and for a moment, her hissing stopped. Then she slammed her claws into the side of the belfry and leaped out onto the roof to face him.

Harry only raised his eyebrows at her.

“You must be against him.” Alicia’s fangs appeared to be getting in the way of her speech, not something that often happened. “He will destroy us.”

“I don’t think he cares about you that much,” Harry admitted. “But why do you think he wants to destroy all vampires?” He knew she must mean that, as Alicia didn’t consider herself part of the rogue coven, even if she was sympathetic to some of their goals.

Alicia hissed. Harry listened carefully, but heard no trace of speech in the sounds, Parseltongue or otherwise. “Because he is mad,” she said when she returned to normal English. “He gave himself to us, he acquired the strength and the power, and then he allowed himself to be captured.”

“So you don’t actually know what he’s doing?”

“He said that he wanted to strengthen you.” Alicia crouched lower, as if thinking about launching herself at him. Harry’s hand twitched towards his wand, and she relaxed. “Our enemy.”

“I don’t care about destroying all of you, either,” Harry murmured. “I destroyed the assassins, and I can destroy others who come after me or those I care about. But I never wanted to kill vampires, specifically.”

“You spend yourself with us.”

Harry nodded. Alicia and other vampires who lived to be her age had no use for sex, really. It made him wonder idly if Nott would achieve that age and lose interest in Harry, or Harry in him.

Well. If he does, then it may be I’ll be ready to die, and he’ll be ready to go on in other ways.

Harry laughed aloud as he realized that he really had already made his decision. He’d come to Alicia to find out if she knew more about Nott’s plans, something that would force Harry not to trust him, but more and more, he realized he could only get the important answers from Nott himself.

Harry stood up. “Well, if you don’t have any answers for me—”

“I know why your magic is different.”

Harry narrowed his eyes. Alicia had never hinted she knew that, and he reminded himself that he’d already been taken in by one vampire’s lies. “Oh? Why?”

Alicia’s claws rang on the roof of the belltower as she leaped abruptly to it and crouched there again. “Because you had not mastered death before the war. After you died, we could taste the sunlight in your blood.”

“What sunlight?”

“The sunlight of the other side. Where we do not want to go, and which we long for.”

Harry stared at her. His mind went back to the white blankness of that King’s Cross Station, and he shook his head. “It wasn’t sunlight in the way you understand it. At least, I never saw any when I was there.”

“Yours is not the thought that matters,” Alicia snarled, and leaped back into the shadows of her nest.

Harry was thoughtful as he turned and Apparated from the tree back towards the Ministry. He supposed it was useful to know why he was so different from the other people who had tried to feed vampires in the past, but it didn’t come to him as some great revelation the way he always thought it would.

In the end, it mattered what he thought, not what the rogue coven believed.

And what Nott thought.

*

Harry made his way easily into the Department of Mysteries. The Unspeakable guide was waiting for him even though he hadn’t set up an appointment ahead of time to feed Nott. Harry thought about being bothered by it, and then dismissed it. He had more important things to think about.

He felt, for a moment as he waited outside the intricate, slowly-unlocking wards, that Nott might have escaped, but the instant he moved into the cell, he saw those intense blue eyes focused on him.

Nott’s face was drawn, the face of a vampire who hadn’t fed in too long, and Harry was now sure that he hadn’t been turned long before Harry met him, even though he wasn’t new. The older ones were better at hiding it. But he rose to his feet he instant he saw Harry, and fastened his eyes on him. “Harry,” he breathed.

“I can’t be yours unless I have some assurance that you aren’t lying,” Harry said bluntly. “And that you won’t ever lie to me again.”

Nott stared at him for a long moment, silent and still, looking as if he was made of dried wax like any other vampire. And then he smiled, and the smile transformed him. Harry flushed, and saw the way that Nott’s eyes lingered on his face, following the rise of the blood.

Harry had sometimes thought that vampires were still capable of human expressions. They just never seemed to wear any around him, their enemy or their meal. But seeing the way Nott looked at him, knowing that Nott still had the fangs and the claws Harry wanted…

It’s not love. Right now, it doesn’t need to be. Our mutual obsession can get us there.

If I can trust him.

“Open your mind to me,” Nott whispered. “And you’ll feel that I can’t lie to you, not anymore. The only real way to lie before this was omission, to let you assume things about me and not do anything that would prove them false. Oh, Harry.”

His voice was a deep purr, throbbing through his chest like the sound of a great cat. Harry stepped forwards despite himself, then stopped.

“I don’t know how to open the mate bond fully,” he said.

“You have my magic bound to yours,” Nott said, his head half-bowed. “Reach down to where they join, and you’ll feel the bond. You can command it to open from there, the same way that you could release your hold on my magic at any time.”

Harry eyed him, but Nott wasn’t moving any closer, and it was true that Harry did have Nott’s magic bound to his. Harry took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and felt down the twined magic that sat quiet and still in his chest.

There was something else there, what felt to Harry like a hard little black bead of power. He probed it, but it did nothing. Without opening his eyes to check if Nott had moved closer—Harry was sure that he would have known that instantly—he spoke to it.

Open.

For a moment, the word seemed to echo in his head, the way that his hissed word to open the Chamber of Secrets had so long ago. Then it opened and bloomed.

Harry gasped as the bond struck through him like a needle of pure light or pleasure or blood, and he opened his eyes to see Nott standing in front of him with his hands extended, framing Harry’s cheeks on either side without trying to touch them.

You’re obsessed with me. You don’t even know half the reason yourself. You told me some of the reasons, but they’re not the—not the—

The center. Yes.

The center of that bond was a willing, wailing madness, and when Harry touched it, he knew exactly what it was like for a vampire to thirst for blood, and exactly what Nott tasted when he plunged his fangs into Harry’s throat. The wildness, the brightness, the thick sense of sunlight beyond an unknown verge.

He’s as obsessed with me as I am with a vampire that could give me what I want permanently.

Harry forced his eyes open. Nott’s hands had come to rest on his cheeks, but he’d known that, with some part of himself that was living more strongly in his body than he was. He stared at Nott, whose face seemed to coalesce and shimmer in his mind, and who became Theodore a moment later.

I’ll give you everything you want, everything you need, Theodore breathed, and Harry believed him. Had to believe him, when the bond was resonating within him like a wild gong, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, stirring up his blood. I can’t lie to you. I’ll give you what you want because—

I can give you what you want, Harry whispered, and his mind raced and reached out, encompassing Theodore’s memories.

Yes, he had wanted protection, and power. But he had wanted to offer someone more than just his need to be protected. There had been desire twisted there, and his observations of Harry as someone strong and blazing, and desire to race and bound in a stronger body and leave behind the weak one and the weak magic that hadn’t protected him from suffering when his father served Voldemort and then died in the war.

You’ll still suffer grief, you know that, Harry said, his hand reaching out to Theodore. You can’t leave that behind.

I can leave it as far behind as any vampire bound to the Master of Death can.

And yes, there was that. Harry shuddered and stepped forwards. Theodore met him there, his fangs out, which cut Harry’s lips as they kissed, his tongue sticking out to lap up the dripping blood.

Take me.

With pleasure, Theodore said, and his magic, under Harry’s dominion, stirred and vibrated back and forth again.

*

Theodore took him against the wall of the Unspeakables’ warded cell, his cock swollen with enough blood to give Harry a ride, Harry’s magic making his arse slick and easy to penetrate.

Harry was half-delirious from blood loss, and from the way that Theodore’s claws stroked up and down his face, never breaking the skin but capable of breaking the skin. If he wanted to. He was holding back because he wanted to.

Harry had never been so excited.

He’d expected to come before Theodore had done more than thrust into him a few times, but Theodore smiled at him and murmured, “Let’s wait, shall we?” And Harry forced his own erection down with magic, again, and if it rose right back up a few seconds later, at least he managed to feel what it was like to have a vampire inside him.

Theodore’s cock was as hard and unyielding as polished wood, and Harry trembled as Theodore held him up with nothing more than the hands on his shoulders. His legs, flung around Theodore’s waist, rested on slender hips with a faint warmth to them, nothing more. Theodore’s fangs were concealed behind his lips at the moment as he stared avidly at Harry, but they might emerge any second.

Harry had someone who could kill him. Who could not, because his magic was still in thrall to Harry’s.

Who could hold him in thrall if Harry wanted. If he let himself fall into those blue eyes. Who could not hold him if he didn’t want to be held.

Harry shuddered and gasped and, yes, he didn’t last long before spending himself as Theodore thrust inside, hissing with desire and obsession, his eyes never leaving Harry.

When Theodore came, it was nothing more than a soft spluttering, with the same faint warmth as haunted his skin. But the way he held Harry afterwards, claws still tracing their path, there was nothing faint about that.

Harry laid his head on Theodore’s shoulder and felt—not normal, never that. But settled, for the first time in a long time.

*

“You realize that almost no one is going to be happy to hear this.”

Harry did up his robes and smiled at Theodore. Theodore moved a step nearer, staring at him as if mesmerized.

Other people had looked at Harry like that before, but only because he was the Boy-Who-Lived or because they were drawn to his blood until he could turn them back into humans. With Theodore, the blood thirst was part of it, but only part.

And a part that would last.

“I know,” Harry replied. “But I’ve been confounding expectations since I was fifteen months old. And this is what I’ve chosen. I’m not about to go along with what people want me to have or be or what they would force on me against my will. You’re mine, Theodore, by choice.”

Theodore’s expression altered back and forth like silk rippling in high wind for a moment. And then he smiled.

He didn’t hide his fangs. He knew from the wide-open bond between them that Harry didn’t want him to, any more than he wanted to hide what they were to each other.

Harry stepped up to the door and knocked. There was the sound from the other side of the Unspeakables unlocking the wards.

He felt something move to the right of him, and looked out to see Theodore holding out a clawed hand.

Harry took it, and together they walked into the wider world.

The End.