![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lomonaaerenTitle: Three Silver Rings
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Content Notes: Hogwarts “eighth year,” ignores the epilogue, soulmate marks, threesome, angst
Pairings: Harry/Blaise/Theo, mentions of Ron/Hermione and Ginny/Neville
Wordcount: 3300
Summary: Harry didn’t know why an image of three silver rings had appeared on his shoulder after the war, especially since no one he knew had anything similar. He keeps it hidden until the night when he finds out, unexpectedly, what it means—and the people he might spend the rest of his life with.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” fics, one-shots being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This is for a prompt by Ellory, who asked for Harry/Blaise/Theo as soulmates. Hope you enjoy.
Three Silver Rings
Harry sat with his feet dangling on the edge of the Astronomy Tower, staring up at the constellations he no longer had to study. After he had come back to Hogwarts, he hadn’t bothered to pick up Astronomy again. In fact, he was only taking five classes now: Potions, Transfiguration, Defense, Charms, and Herbology. Hermione had been upset about that, but Harry had other things to think about.
Like the mark on his shoulder.
For the fifth time in an hour, Harry lifted his sleeve off his right shoulder and tilted his gently lit wand to look at it. The light of the stars and moon was too faint to let him see it.
Three silver rings, bound together in a triangular shape, shone on his shoulder. They were an extraordinarily bright color, like actual metal, although Harry felt nothing but ordinary skin when he ran his fingers over them. All three of them interlocked with each of the other two, but each also had an odd gap in it, as if more rings had been meant to appear and build out a shape beyond that.
Harry had no idea what they were. He’d questioned people as casually as he could, but no one else had reported having a mark like that. It had simply appeared on Harry’s shoulder the day after the Battle of Hogwarts, and wouldn’t go away no matter how much scrubbing he did or how many healing spells he’d cast.
Harry had tried to find some mention of such a mark in the library books, too, using spells Hermione had taught him to search for words like “silver,” “rings,” and “triangle.” Nothing.
Maybe it had something to do with the Deathly Hallows. But although Harry still used the Cloak, he hadn’t seen the Stone since leaving it in the Forbidden Forest, or the Elder Wand since putting it back in Dumbledore’s tomb. And this mark was as different as it could be from the simple, geometric mark of the Hallows, while still being vaguely triangular.
Harry sighed and let his sleeve fall into place, then sat back, swinging his legs.
He didn’t know what he wanted to do, he thought morosely. Well, he’d wanted to come back to Hogwarts, and he’d got to do that, which was wonderful, even if they did have to scramble around the occasional crack in the walls or stairs that hadn’t been fixed. And he’d wanted to study to be an Auror, and the classes he had would let him do that. And he’d wanted to be with his friends, and Ron and Hermione were still great friends when they weren’t off snogging.
He actually hadn’t decided if he’d wanted to get back together with Ginny or not. After patiently waiting for a few months, Ginny had given up on him and was now dating Neville.
But now that he was at Hogwarts, Harry felt he was drifting along when he wasn’t in classes. Just a leaf in a stream, he thought, carried on and on.
He wondered if that was what it was going to be like for the rest of his life. He hoped not.
He reached out and found his new broom he’d bought this summer beside him. He’d flown the Firebolt out of Gryffindor Tower to the top of the Astronomy one, and he’d been sitting here, trying to decide on…anything. At least when he flew, the feeling of being aimless went away, although nothing replaced it.
He slung a leg over the broom now and jumped off the top of the Tower, enjoying the breeze whipping through his hair. He soared out over the quiet dark grounds, aiming for the Quidditch pitch. Maybe he could at least toss a Quaffle around or something.
*
The Quidditch pitch was occupied.
Harry alighted behind the Gryffindor stands and cocked his head to watch the two figures playing with the Quaffle on brooms near the center of the pitch. They had conjured torches stuck in the grass, but they flew fast enough and high enough that it was hard for Harry to make them out at first. Only when they came nearer the ground could Harry make out Slytherin robes and see that one of them was Zabini. The other was probably Nott, the only other Slytherin boy besides Malfoy in their year who had come back. And Harry would have recognized Malfoy at once.
Harry sighed. Well, there went his plan of playing around. He turned and mounted the broom again, aiming to fly back to the Tower.
“Who’s there?”
Zabini’s voice was sharp and guarded. Harry turned around, letting his hand fall to his wand. Zabini and Nott were staring in the direction of the Gryffindor stands, but not directly at him. They must have just seen a flicker of movement.
Harry shook his head. He didn’t want a confrontation with Slytherins this year. All of them who had returned to repeat their seventh year were ignoring Harry, anyway. He backed up into the shadows and pulled the Invisibility Cloak out of his pocket.
“You’re sure you saw someone, Blaise?” Yeah, that was Nott’s voice, low and guttural. Harry thought it was the most words he’d ever heard Nott speak at one time.
“Of course I’m sure, Theo. We have to find out who. You know that if Draco sees us flying, he’s going to whine about being left out.”
Harry snorted. Well, that at least explained why Zabini and Nott were out here in the middle of the night.
“Hear that? Someone snorted!”
Harry grimaced at his own instincts and started to swing the Cloak around his shoulders. But Zabini and Nott dived at the stands and swept over them before he could, and then landed side-by-side and stared at him.
Harry stared back, half-covered with the Cloak. He thought it must be an unnerving sight to have half his body vanished, but neither Zabini nor Nott was backing up. They even leaned forwards as if to see him a little better.
Nott broke the silence. “What are you doing out here, Potter?”
“Flying. Just clearing my head.” Harry sighed a moment later. It wasn’t like either of them would care about that, or like he had to explain himself to them, either. “Sorry for disturbing you. Won’t happen again.” He gathered the Cloak close once more and started to cover his head.
“Wait,” Zabini murmured. He sounded non-hostile enough that Harry paused and did. Zabini darted his gaze back and forth between Nott and Harry, and then looked at Harry. “How long were you watching?”
“Just a few minutes. Why?”
“So you didn’t fly overhead just a minute ago?”
“No,” Harry said, and craned his neck back, wondering if there was someone behind him. It felt paranoid, but, well, not all the Death Eaters had been arrested after the war, either.
Zabini and Nott were exchanging intense glances when Harry looked back at them. Then Nott faced Harry and said, “All right, this’ll sound weird, Potter, but it’s important. Do you have a mark of three silver rings somewhere on you?”
Harry started and found himself cocking his arm to draw his wand. Neither Zabini nor Nott moved, though. Zabini’s face just grew more intense, what Harry could see of his expression in the light of the torches, and Nott reached out and put one hand on his own left sleeve.
“I—yes,” Harry croaked at last. “How did you know that?” He hadn’t told anyone. He had wanted to deal with it himself, yet another thing that made him a freak, and he’d been desperately hoping it would go away.
Nott slid his sleeve up and back. Three silver rings flashed into being on his left shoulder. As far as Harry could see, it was the exact same mark he carried, although tilted in a different direction, including the gaps in the rings.
Harry glanced at Zabini, wondering what he thought of the weird image his friend was carrying around, and then broke off to stare. Zabini had pulled his light flying shirt up. The same mark shone on his stomach. He was closer to the torches, and the rings were so bright, they looked as if jewelry was embedded in his dark skin.
Harry blinked and blinked. Then he drew his right sleeve up, although he didn’t know if they needed the confirmation. Nott hissed between his teeth and nodded, though. Zabini’s eyes seemed to grow brighter.
“How did you know?” Harry asked, subdued. “I’ve been keeping it a secret for so long.”
“They’re rare,” Zabini said. “But not unheard of. Some people call them soul-marks. They supposedly connect people who are soulmates,” he added, and continued on despite Harry’s scoff. “Theo and I noticed that we were constantly aware of each other all the time. We could point straight to where the other one was through a stone wall. And we started spending more time together, and. Well. We fit together.” He smiled.
Harry envied him the smile. He shook his head a little. “I don’t get it. If you two are soulmates, why do I have the same mark?”
“It means all three of us, Potter,” Nott murmured. “Theoretically, there’s not a limit of how many people can be bound together, but in this case, it seems like three is the designated number. Hence the number of rings on our shoulders. Blaise and I knew someone was missing because of the two gaps, but never that it might be you.”
He swallowed after the speech, maybe because he thought he’d spoken too much. “And you felt me fly overhead,” Harry whispered. “You knew I was there.”
“Yes.” Zabini was raking his eyes over Harry, as though trying to imagine him in a different context than just “Boy-Who-Lived” or “enemy of Slytherins.” “We just didn’t know what we were feeling at first because it was brand-new. We’re all in this together.”
Harry’s heart ached. If I could believe that—if I could have a direction beyond just drifting around and hoping I find a way to aim at the future—
But he shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Where these marks come from, why we have them, why you think I would be a good match for you of all people—”
“Neither of us were Death Eaters,” Zabini said flatly.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Harry said, and he really hadn’t. The truth in his voice seemed to smooth down Zabini’s hackles. “I just mean…I’m just me, when all’s said and done. There’s no more Voldemort to defeat. I’m no one special in particular without that. Why me?”
“You think I’m special in particular?” Zabini asked. “For years, the one thing most people has known about me has been the rumors about my mum. Nothing about me, on my own.”
Thinking about that, Harry supposed it was true. He remembered thinking Zabini was handsome—something that made him flush now—but never hearing about Zabini’s own academic accomplishments or whether he was a good flyer or liked particular subjects. Same thing for Nott. Harry glanced at the pale boy.
Nott was leaning against Zabini, his eyes hooded. “People think about my father,” he said shortly. “Not about me.”
Nott’s father, who was a Death Eater, one of the ones who had been arrested. Harry nodded slowly. “And you think—what creates these marks? Where do they come from?”
“Magic?” Zabini offered, with a shrug.
“Oh, come on.”
“It’s as good an answer as any,” Nott said. “No one really knows, or why certain people get them and not others. But they appear when they’re needed. When did yours appear, Potter?” Zabini nudged him, and Nott added, “Harry.”
Harry shivered. For some reason, listening to Nott speak his name made him—it made him feel—
He shoved aside the emotions that wanted to invade his mind, and shrugged a little, and said, “The day after the Battle of Hogwarts. Yours?”
“The same,” Nott murmured. “The day I finally knew I might be free of my father.”
“The first day of June,” Zabini said, his face blank. “The day I went home and found my mother’s house in Italy cleaned out. She was gone. I have no idea where.”
Harry caught his breath. He no longer expected anything of the Dursleys, but the idea that someone who had raised you could just disappear like that was horrible. He reached out before he knew what he was doing. Then he flushed and started to pull his hand back.
Zabini caught it.
Harry felt a sharp spark course from Zabini’s arm up to his shoulder. When he turned his head, it was to see one of the gaps in the silver rings melting away. Now two circles, whole except for where they were interlinked, and one with a gap perched on his shoulder.
Nott smiled and reached out to rest his hand on top of their clasped ones. Harry watched the third gap seal itself with a stream of bright silver. Glancing over, he saw that the same thing had happened to Nott’s and Zabini’s marks.
“Wow,” Harry said.
“Yes,” Nott said. He was looking at Harry with a thoughtful gaze, tilting his head. Harry wondered what he was seeing, what he wanted, but then he started to lean forwards, slowly and with plenty of time for Harry to dodge.
Harry didn’t dodge, and Nott kissed him.
Harry shuddered. The same ringing warmth that had flooded through him from the mark healing and filling in shot down to his stomach and back up. It wasn’t like what he had felt when he had kissed Ginny, but it was a good difference.
“Nott,” he muttered.
“Theo,” Nott said at once, and then moved out of the way and gave Zabini an expectant glance.
“Unlike Theo, I can at least ask for what I want,” Zabini said dryly as he stepped forwards. He tilted Harry’s chin with a warm hand, and Harry shivered. He’d thought Zabini was handsome in sixth year; he looked even better now, with his features somewhat hardened by loss and suffering. “Can I kiss you, Harry?”
“Yeah, Blaise,” Harry said, and saw Blaise’s eyes darken before he bent down.
This kiss sent a different kind of sharpness through him. Blaise kissed for a longer time than Theo, with more tongue, and when he pulled back, Harry was breathless.
“What does this mean?” he asked, when he’d licked his lips to get some of the taste, and to see their eyes follow his tongue.
“It means that we’re bound to each other,” Blaise said, his eyes still intense. He trailed a finger over the mark on Harry’s shoulder, and a noise like a bell rang in Harry’s ears. “We can, of course, try to ignore it.” He said the words with difficulty. “Date other people, never mention it again, never touch each other again.”
“You made it sound like we couldn’t…”
“Of course he did,” Theo said softly.
Harry looked back and forth between them, and then groaned. “Slytherins. You could have just told me that and then kissed me, you know.”
“How could we know that you’d let us get to the kissing?” Blaise shook his head. “Until tonight, Pot—Harry, all we really knew about you was your House and your Quidditch skills and that you weren’t good at Potions when Professor Snape was teaching it. And what’s public about your defeat of the Dark Lord. Everything else was rumor, half-guess, suspicion. We thought you might reject us outright because we’re Slytherins once we saw that it was you. Yes, we wanted to show you that the bond could feel good before we mentioned anything else. Can you blame us?”
No, honestly, Harry couldn’t, not when the aimless, drifting feeling had been torn away and he could see a dozen paths stretching forwards now. It was as if he had suddenly decided. No, he didn’t want to date Ginny again; no, he didn’t really want to be an Auror; he wanted to do well in his classes and see what kinds of other careers his marks could qualify him for. He had goals again.
He wanted to see what kind of place Blaise and Theo could hold in his life.
Harry reached out and snagged Theo’s wrist, pulling him closer. Theo blinked at him, but followed the pull. Harry moved his hand from Theo’s wrist to the mark on his left shoulder while he splayed his other hand over Blaise’s stomach.
They all three shuddered. Harry was sure he wasn’t the only one who heard the bell-like sound of the marks, now tripled and resembling a sweet, challenging song.
“I don’t want to reject this,” Harry said softly. “I don’t know what it means, exactly, but I want to find out.”
Theo closed his eyes and swayed towards Harry’s touch without moving his hand. Blaise reached up and touched Harry’s mark. The song was even louder this time.
“Then let’s see a sign of your commitment,” Blaise murmured.
“You mean, beyond the mark?”
“I told you, it’s a sign things could work out, not that they will. Walk into the Great Hall with us tomorrow and announce that you’re dating us.”
“You’re on.”
A moment later, Harry saw from the way Blaise and Theo had frozen that they hadn’t actually expected him to go through with it. Harry laughed aloud, and the sound was also freer than it had been for months now.
“I told you, I want to see where this goes.”
“Gryffindors,” Theo said, not under his breath.
Harry smiled at him.
And if there was time for a bit more kissing before they left the Quidditch pitch to sneak back into Hogwarts, it wasn’t like anyone with Harry was going to tell.
*
“Ready?”
Harry nodded and took a deep breath. His nerves were buzzing with anticipation and excitement. He held out one hand to Blaise and one to Theo, and when they were all three touching, a smaller version of the marks’ chime rang through their bond.
“Now,” Harry said, and they started in through the doors.
No one seemed to notice them at first, or probably just thought it was a coincidence they were walking in together. But then someone must have caught sight of their joined hands, because there were outcries and pointing, and more than half the Great Hall was gaping at them by the time they sat down at the Gryffindor table. They’d agreed that was best. If nothing else, Ron would be less disruptive than Malfoy.
“Harry?” Hermione asked slowly, eyes darting back and forth between Blaise and Theo.
Ron was less restrained, leaning over Hermione’s shoulder with one hand near his wand. “What are they doing here?”
“They’re my soulmates,” Harry said casually, and he knew he would always treasure the memory of Ron’s jaw falling open and Hermione’s face wiped blank by shock.
“What? You have a mark?” Ron croaked. Hermione turned to look at him, apparently still unable to speak.
“We all three do,” Theo said, and “casually” pulled up his left sleeve at the time Blaise pulled up his shirt. Ron and Hermione turned as one to look at Harry, and he smiled and tugged his right sleeve up.
“Why didn’t you tell us, mate?”
And Ron seemed so much more concerned about why Harry had kept it secret, while Hermione was asking a hundred questions about soulmates in a breath, that the confrontation Harry had feared never actually materialized. It probably would later, especially with the way that people down the table and at other tables were muttering and giving them glances.
But for now, Harry was more than happy to explain things to his friends, and feel the presence of Blaise on his right and Theo on his left.
Everything felt brand-new, and full of possibilities.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Content Notes: Hogwarts “eighth year,” ignores the epilogue, soulmate marks, threesome, angst
Pairings: Harry/Blaise/Theo, mentions of Ron/Hermione and Ginny/Neville
Wordcount: 3300
Summary: Harry didn’t know why an image of three silver rings had appeared on his shoulder after the war, especially since no one he knew had anything similar. He keeps it hidden until the night when he finds out, unexpectedly, what it means—and the people he might spend the rest of his life with.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of Summer” fics, one-shots being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This is for a prompt by Ellory, who asked for Harry/Blaise/Theo as soulmates. Hope you enjoy.
Three Silver Rings
Harry sat with his feet dangling on the edge of the Astronomy Tower, staring up at the constellations he no longer had to study. After he had come back to Hogwarts, he hadn’t bothered to pick up Astronomy again. In fact, he was only taking five classes now: Potions, Transfiguration, Defense, Charms, and Herbology. Hermione had been upset about that, but Harry had other things to think about.
Like the mark on his shoulder.
For the fifth time in an hour, Harry lifted his sleeve off his right shoulder and tilted his gently lit wand to look at it. The light of the stars and moon was too faint to let him see it.
Three silver rings, bound together in a triangular shape, shone on his shoulder. They were an extraordinarily bright color, like actual metal, although Harry felt nothing but ordinary skin when he ran his fingers over them. All three of them interlocked with each of the other two, but each also had an odd gap in it, as if more rings had been meant to appear and build out a shape beyond that.
Harry had no idea what they were. He’d questioned people as casually as he could, but no one else had reported having a mark like that. It had simply appeared on Harry’s shoulder the day after the Battle of Hogwarts, and wouldn’t go away no matter how much scrubbing he did or how many healing spells he’d cast.
Harry had tried to find some mention of such a mark in the library books, too, using spells Hermione had taught him to search for words like “silver,” “rings,” and “triangle.” Nothing.
Maybe it had something to do with the Deathly Hallows. But although Harry still used the Cloak, he hadn’t seen the Stone since leaving it in the Forbidden Forest, or the Elder Wand since putting it back in Dumbledore’s tomb. And this mark was as different as it could be from the simple, geometric mark of the Hallows, while still being vaguely triangular.
Harry sighed and let his sleeve fall into place, then sat back, swinging his legs.
He didn’t know what he wanted to do, he thought morosely. Well, he’d wanted to come back to Hogwarts, and he’d got to do that, which was wonderful, even if they did have to scramble around the occasional crack in the walls or stairs that hadn’t been fixed. And he’d wanted to study to be an Auror, and the classes he had would let him do that. And he’d wanted to be with his friends, and Ron and Hermione were still great friends when they weren’t off snogging.
He actually hadn’t decided if he’d wanted to get back together with Ginny or not. After patiently waiting for a few months, Ginny had given up on him and was now dating Neville.
But now that he was at Hogwarts, Harry felt he was drifting along when he wasn’t in classes. Just a leaf in a stream, he thought, carried on and on.
He wondered if that was what it was going to be like for the rest of his life. He hoped not.
He reached out and found his new broom he’d bought this summer beside him. He’d flown the Firebolt out of Gryffindor Tower to the top of the Astronomy one, and he’d been sitting here, trying to decide on…anything. At least when he flew, the feeling of being aimless went away, although nothing replaced it.
He slung a leg over the broom now and jumped off the top of the Tower, enjoying the breeze whipping through his hair. He soared out over the quiet dark grounds, aiming for the Quidditch pitch. Maybe he could at least toss a Quaffle around or something.
*
The Quidditch pitch was occupied.
Harry alighted behind the Gryffindor stands and cocked his head to watch the two figures playing with the Quaffle on brooms near the center of the pitch. They had conjured torches stuck in the grass, but they flew fast enough and high enough that it was hard for Harry to make them out at first. Only when they came nearer the ground could Harry make out Slytherin robes and see that one of them was Zabini. The other was probably Nott, the only other Slytherin boy besides Malfoy in their year who had come back. And Harry would have recognized Malfoy at once.
Harry sighed. Well, there went his plan of playing around. He turned and mounted the broom again, aiming to fly back to the Tower.
“Who’s there?”
Zabini’s voice was sharp and guarded. Harry turned around, letting his hand fall to his wand. Zabini and Nott were staring in the direction of the Gryffindor stands, but not directly at him. They must have just seen a flicker of movement.
Harry shook his head. He didn’t want a confrontation with Slytherins this year. All of them who had returned to repeat their seventh year were ignoring Harry, anyway. He backed up into the shadows and pulled the Invisibility Cloak out of his pocket.
“You’re sure you saw someone, Blaise?” Yeah, that was Nott’s voice, low and guttural. Harry thought it was the most words he’d ever heard Nott speak at one time.
“Of course I’m sure, Theo. We have to find out who. You know that if Draco sees us flying, he’s going to whine about being left out.”
Harry snorted. Well, that at least explained why Zabini and Nott were out here in the middle of the night.
“Hear that? Someone snorted!”
Harry grimaced at his own instincts and started to swing the Cloak around his shoulders. But Zabini and Nott dived at the stands and swept over them before he could, and then landed side-by-side and stared at him.
Harry stared back, half-covered with the Cloak. He thought it must be an unnerving sight to have half his body vanished, but neither Zabini nor Nott was backing up. They even leaned forwards as if to see him a little better.
Nott broke the silence. “What are you doing out here, Potter?”
“Flying. Just clearing my head.” Harry sighed a moment later. It wasn’t like either of them would care about that, or like he had to explain himself to them, either. “Sorry for disturbing you. Won’t happen again.” He gathered the Cloak close once more and started to cover his head.
“Wait,” Zabini murmured. He sounded non-hostile enough that Harry paused and did. Zabini darted his gaze back and forth between Nott and Harry, and then looked at Harry. “How long were you watching?”
“Just a few minutes. Why?”
“So you didn’t fly overhead just a minute ago?”
“No,” Harry said, and craned his neck back, wondering if there was someone behind him. It felt paranoid, but, well, not all the Death Eaters had been arrested after the war, either.
Zabini and Nott were exchanging intense glances when Harry looked back at them. Then Nott faced Harry and said, “All right, this’ll sound weird, Potter, but it’s important. Do you have a mark of three silver rings somewhere on you?”
Harry started and found himself cocking his arm to draw his wand. Neither Zabini nor Nott moved, though. Zabini’s face just grew more intense, what Harry could see of his expression in the light of the torches, and Nott reached out and put one hand on his own left sleeve.
“I—yes,” Harry croaked at last. “How did you know that?” He hadn’t told anyone. He had wanted to deal with it himself, yet another thing that made him a freak, and he’d been desperately hoping it would go away.
Nott slid his sleeve up and back. Three silver rings flashed into being on his left shoulder. As far as Harry could see, it was the exact same mark he carried, although tilted in a different direction, including the gaps in the rings.
Harry glanced at Zabini, wondering what he thought of the weird image his friend was carrying around, and then broke off to stare. Zabini had pulled his light flying shirt up. The same mark shone on his stomach. He was closer to the torches, and the rings were so bright, they looked as if jewelry was embedded in his dark skin.
Harry blinked and blinked. Then he drew his right sleeve up, although he didn’t know if they needed the confirmation. Nott hissed between his teeth and nodded, though. Zabini’s eyes seemed to grow brighter.
“How did you know?” Harry asked, subdued. “I’ve been keeping it a secret for so long.”
“They’re rare,” Zabini said. “But not unheard of. Some people call them soul-marks. They supposedly connect people who are soulmates,” he added, and continued on despite Harry’s scoff. “Theo and I noticed that we were constantly aware of each other all the time. We could point straight to where the other one was through a stone wall. And we started spending more time together, and. Well. We fit together.” He smiled.
Harry envied him the smile. He shook his head a little. “I don’t get it. If you two are soulmates, why do I have the same mark?”
“It means all three of us, Potter,” Nott murmured. “Theoretically, there’s not a limit of how many people can be bound together, but in this case, it seems like three is the designated number. Hence the number of rings on our shoulders. Blaise and I knew someone was missing because of the two gaps, but never that it might be you.”
He swallowed after the speech, maybe because he thought he’d spoken too much. “And you felt me fly overhead,” Harry whispered. “You knew I was there.”
“Yes.” Zabini was raking his eyes over Harry, as though trying to imagine him in a different context than just “Boy-Who-Lived” or “enemy of Slytherins.” “We just didn’t know what we were feeling at first because it was brand-new. We’re all in this together.”
Harry’s heart ached. If I could believe that—if I could have a direction beyond just drifting around and hoping I find a way to aim at the future—
But he shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Where these marks come from, why we have them, why you think I would be a good match for you of all people—”
“Neither of us were Death Eaters,” Zabini said flatly.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Harry said, and he really hadn’t. The truth in his voice seemed to smooth down Zabini’s hackles. “I just mean…I’m just me, when all’s said and done. There’s no more Voldemort to defeat. I’m no one special in particular without that. Why me?”
“You think I’m special in particular?” Zabini asked. “For years, the one thing most people has known about me has been the rumors about my mum. Nothing about me, on my own.”
Thinking about that, Harry supposed it was true. He remembered thinking Zabini was handsome—something that made him flush now—but never hearing about Zabini’s own academic accomplishments or whether he was a good flyer or liked particular subjects. Same thing for Nott. Harry glanced at the pale boy.
Nott was leaning against Zabini, his eyes hooded. “People think about my father,” he said shortly. “Not about me.”
Nott’s father, who was a Death Eater, one of the ones who had been arrested. Harry nodded slowly. “And you think—what creates these marks? Where do they come from?”
“Magic?” Zabini offered, with a shrug.
“Oh, come on.”
“It’s as good an answer as any,” Nott said. “No one really knows, or why certain people get them and not others. But they appear when they’re needed. When did yours appear, Potter?” Zabini nudged him, and Nott added, “Harry.”
Harry shivered. For some reason, listening to Nott speak his name made him—it made him feel—
He shoved aside the emotions that wanted to invade his mind, and shrugged a little, and said, “The day after the Battle of Hogwarts. Yours?”
“The same,” Nott murmured. “The day I finally knew I might be free of my father.”
“The first day of June,” Zabini said, his face blank. “The day I went home and found my mother’s house in Italy cleaned out. She was gone. I have no idea where.”
Harry caught his breath. He no longer expected anything of the Dursleys, but the idea that someone who had raised you could just disappear like that was horrible. He reached out before he knew what he was doing. Then he flushed and started to pull his hand back.
Zabini caught it.
Harry felt a sharp spark course from Zabini’s arm up to his shoulder. When he turned his head, it was to see one of the gaps in the silver rings melting away. Now two circles, whole except for where they were interlinked, and one with a gap perched on his shoulder.
Nott smiled and reached out to rest his hand on top of their clasped ones. Harry watched the third gap seal itself with a stream of bright silver. Glancing over, he saw that the same thing had happened to Nott’s and Zabini’s marks.
“Wow,” Harry said.
“Yes,” Nott said. He was looking at Harry with a thoughtful gaze, tilting his head. Harry wondered what he was seeing, what he wanted, but then he started to lean forwards, slowly and with plenty of time for Harry to dodge.
Harry didn’t dodge, and Nott kissed him.
Harry shuddered. The same ringing warmth that had flooded through him from the mark healing and filling in shot down to his stomach and back up. It wasn’t like what he had felt when he had kissed Ginny, but it was a good difference.
“Nott,” he muttered.
“Theo,” Nott said at once, and then moved out of the way and gave Zabini an expectant glance.
“Unlike Theo, I can at least ask for what I want,” Zabini said dryly as he stepped forwards. He tilted Harry’s chin with a warm hand, and Harry shivered. He’d thought Zabini was handsome in sixth year; he looked even better now, with his features somewhat hardened by loss and suffering. “Can I kiss you, Harry?”
“Yeah, Blaise,” Harry said, and saw Blaise’s eyes darken before he bent down.
This kiss sent a different kind of sharpness through him. Blaise kissed for a longer time than Theo, with more tongue, and when he pulled back, Harry was breathless.
“What does this mean?” he asked, when he’d licked his lips to get some of the taste, and to see their eyes follow his tongue.
“It means that we’re bound to each other,” Blaise said, his eyes still intense. He trailed a finger over the mark on Harry’s shoulder, and a noise like a bell rang in Harry’s ears. “We can, of course, try to ignore it.” He said the words with difficulty. “Date other people, never mention it again, never touch each other again.”
“You made it sound like we couldn’t…”
“Of course he did,” Theo said softly.
Harry looked back and forth between them, and then groaned. “Slytherins. You could have just told me that and then kissed me, you know.”
“How could we know that you’d let us get to the kissing?” Blaise shook his head. “Until tonight, Pot—Harry, all we really knew about you was your House and your Quidditch skills and that you weren’t good at Potions when Professor Snape was teaching it. And what’s public about your defeat of the Dark Lord. Everything else was rumor, half-guess, suspicion. We thought you might reject us outright because we’re Slytherins once we saw that it was you. Yes, we wanted to show you that the bond could feel good before we mentioned anything else. Can you blame us?”
No, honestly, Harry couldn’t, not when the aimless, drifting feeling had been torn away and he could see a dozen paths stretching forwards now. It was as if he had suddenly decided. No, he didn’t want to date Ginny again; no, he didn’t really want to be an Auror; he wanted to do well in his classes and see what kinds of other careers his marks could qualify him for. He had goals again.
He wanted to see what kind of place Blaise and Theo could hold in his life.
Harry reached out and snagged Theo’s wrist, pulling him closer. Theo blinked at him, but followed the pull. Harry moved his hand from Theo’s wrist to the mark on his left shoulder while he splayed his other hand over Blaise’s stomach.
They all three shuddered. Harry was sure he wasn’t the only one who heard the bell-like sound of the marks, now tripled and resembling a sweet, challenging song.
“I don’t want to reject this,” Harry said softly. “I don’t know what it means, exactly, but I want to find out.”
Theo closed his eyes and swayed towards Harry’s touch without moving his hand. Blaise reached up and touched Harry’s mark. The song was even louder this time.
“Then let’s see a sign of your commitment,” Blaise murmured.
“You mean, beyond the mark?”
“I told you, it’s a sign things could work out, not that they will. Walk into the Great Hall with us tomorrow and announce that you’re dating us.”
“You’re on.”
A moment later, Harry saw from the way Blaise and Theo had frozen that they hadn’t actually expected him to go through with it. Harry laughed aloud, and the sound was also freer than it had been for months now.
“I told you, I want to see where this goes.”
“Gryffindors,” Theo said, not under his breath.
Harry smiled at him.
And if there was time for a bit more kissing before they left the Quidditch pitch to sneak back into Hogwarts, it wasn’t like anyone with Harry was going to tell.
*
“Ready?”
Harry nodded and took a deep breath. His nerves were buzzing with anticipation and excitement. He held out one hand to Blaise and one to Theo, and when they were all three touching, a smaller version of the marks’ chime rang through their bond.
“Now,” Harry said, and they started in through the doors.
No one seemed to notice them at first, or probably just thought it was a coincidence they were walking in together. But then someone must have caught sight of their joined hands, because there were outcries and pointing, and more than half the Great Hall was gaping at them by the time they sat down at the Gryffindor table. They’d agreed that was best. If nothing else, Ron would be less disruptive than Malfoy.
“Harry?” Hermione asked slowly, eyes darting back and forth between Blaise and Theo.
Ron was less restrained, leaning over Hermione’s shoulder with one hand near his wand. “What are they doing here?”
“They’re my soulmates,” Harry said casually, and he knew he would always treasure the memory of Ron’s jaw falling open and Hermione’s face wiped blank by shock.
“What? You have a mark?” Ron croaked. Hermione turned to look at him, apparently still unable to speak.
“We all three do,” Theo said, and “casually” pulled up his left sleeve at the time Blaise pulled up his shirt. Ron and Hermione turned as one to look at Harry, and he smiled and tugged his right sleeve up.
“Why didn’t you tell us, mate?”
And Ron seemed so much more concerned about why Harry had kept it secret, while Hermione was asking a hundred questions about soulmates in a breath, that the confrontation Harry had feared never actually materialized. It probably would later, especially with the way that people down the table and at other tables were muttering and giving them glances.
But for now, Harry was more than happy to explain things to his friends, and feel the presence of Blaise on his right and Theo on his left.
Everything felt brand-new, and full of possibilities.
The End.
