[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Shards of the Mirror, Harry/Harry, R, 4/5

[lomonaaeren]

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Part Four

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course, Harry.”

Hadrian spoke the words in a reassuring way, but also with that smile lurking at the corners of his mouth that Harry was learning to distrust. It seemed—well, it seemed like Hadrian only smiled that way when he was enjoying some private joke at Harry’s expense.

And Harry was getting really tired of that.

“Why do you keep touching me the way you do?”

Hadrian blinked and studied him. They were sitting on either side of a small round table in the library of the house, which contained books bound in wrinkled leather and stinking of Dark magic. Honestly, it made Harry sneeze and disconcerted him. He didn’t like them.

Hadrian had seemed right at home, pulling a book off a shelf with a murmur of interest and sitting down next to the fire as though he did that kind of thing every day. And maybe he did, back home in his own world.

But he wasn’t in his own world, and Harry wanted to know things.

“What way is that, Harry?”

“You know it perfectly well,” Harry snapped, rattled, and shoved his chair back from the table. He walked over to stare out an enchanted window, although of course that didn’t actually show the forest that surrounded them. It just showed an endlessly rising and falling ocean. “Why can’t you just answer the damn question for once?”

“All right.”

Harry turned around slowly, leaning one elbow on the windowsill and staring at Hadrian. There seemed to be something new gathering around Hadrian, something that manifested as a smile on his face, but made Harry more than a little cautious.

“What do you mean, all right?”

“I’m answering your question. That’s what you wanted, right?” Hadrian put down his book and turned in his chair to face Harry, crossing his legs one over the other. There was plenty of light in the library from lamps that hung from the ceiling on golden chains, but he seemed to be cast in darkness anyway. He was doing something with his mouth that wasn’t smiling.

“Yes.”

“I want to take you to bed.”

Harry could feel his eyes opening wide, and what seemed like his toes turning red with the force of his blush. He cleared his throat, feeling scorched from the inside out. “You—you can’t really want that.”

“Why not?”

“You’re you.” Harry gestured at Hadrian, part of his stomach swooping and then settling. “You’re—you’re all muscled and stuff. And I’m still small and thin. And you’re a boy, and you’re me. Isn’t it like—incest or something to want to sleep with me?”

Hadrian ducked his head, his smile shining out for a moment. “I don’t know if there’s any proper word for it. I don’t imagine that two people from different worlds meet very often, and less often like this.”

Harry shrugged helplessly. “Yeah. But it’s still weird.”

“Weird? Perhaps.” Hadrian stood up and prowled over to him. Harry had watched him only yesterday, marveling at the way he moved and cast magic, wondering enviously if he would ever attain that potential. Right now, his skin was prickling with heat and his breath coming short, and he didn’t know if it was because he also saw the potential for him, himself, to move like this someday, or—

Or because he was imagining those hands on him, that body pinning him to the wall.

Hadrian, in fact, did not pin him to the wall, or even the windowsill. He halted far enough away that Harry could easily have darted past him and run out the library door. But Harry found that he didn’t want to. He stood in place, electrified, staring at Hadrian, as he leaned close and whispered a secret as softly as Harry had seen Ginny whispering to her boyfriends.

“I had no one and nothing in my world. No friends. No one who would have spoken to me after I destroyed Voldemort, even though I saved all their lives. I have no one here, except you. Is it any surprise that I want to be with you?”

“I—it doesn’t have to include sex! We could be, we could be brothers or something.”

“And who would you sleep with?”

“I don’t know.” Harry thought back to the terrible date and kiss he’d had with Cho this last year, and ended up shaking his head. “I don’t know, but I would find someone eventually.”

“And would you be able to share the story of where I really came from with them? Or would you cut me out of your life once you started dating someone, and never speak to me again, or introduce me to them?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Do you think,” Hadrian asked softly, and leaned a little forwards, so he was closer to trapping Harry against the windowsill, “that anyone you might find here could understand you as well as I could? That anyone else would understand what it was like growing up with the Dursleys? That anyone else could know why you want to learn Dark Arts and why you helped me bring down the wards at your relatives’ home?”

Harry shook his head slowly. “But I don’t have to tell them about that, do I?”

“Of course you could keep it secret,” Hadrian said, and gave him a terrible, tender smile. “But what would happen if they did find out? For that matter, do you think that even your best friends would forgive you so easily? One of them has rather rigid morals, from what you’ve told me, and the other one is a stickler for rules.”

Harry closed his eyes and breathed out. It was true that he could imagine Ron and Hermione eventually forgiving him for endangering the Dursleys, but he didn’t want to imagine how the conversations about it would go.

“You could tell me anything,” Hadrian went on, his voice as soft as velvet. “And although I’ve never had anyone I could really trust, I would trust you.”

His hand squeezed Harry’s arm. Harry opened his eyes and stared down at the hand. “Please let me go.”

Hadrian did, at once. Harry backed his way towards the far side of the library, staring at Hadrian all the while.

“I won’t touch you if you don’t want me to,” Hadrian said quietly. “My word. I want someone I can trust, too.”

“I—I don’t know what to do about this.”

“Then think about this. Even if you leave and go to Diagon Alley to do your shopping the week before term, we’ve got more than a month.”

Harry opened his mouth to say that he didn’t want to go back to Hogwarts, and then stopped, shocked. Just this morning he had been thinking that he shouldn’t wait to go back to Hogwarts, that he should want to get away from Hadrian.

Should want to isn’t the same thing as does want to.

Harry shook his head and bolted out of the library.

*

Hadrian snorted at himself in self-contempt as he sat down at the table and picked up his book again. He should have realized that Harry would figure out what he was doing and get upset about it. Harry wasn’t stupid, just naïve.

I’ll give him time to decide what he wants. But I won’t change my mind about what I do.

*

This was probably a stupid idea, Ron thought. If it was smart, Hermione or Professor Dumbledore would probably have come up with it already.

But by now, he told himself as he climbed the stairs, it was perfectly obvious that Harry wasn’t in the school. And the Headmaster also seemed to think that Voldemort didn’t have him. He’d be bragging about it if he did.

Ron’s best friend had last been seen heading in the direction of the Room of Requirement. If he had arrived, this ought to work. And if he hadn’t arrived, then this wouldn’t waste much time and wouldn’t leave them any worse off than they already were.

Ron took a deep breath and began to pace back and forth in front of the tapestry of the trolls, his eyes closed as he concentrated intensely on the request he had already spent last night thinking of. I require to see what happened when Harry was here last. I require to see what happened when Harry was here last. I require to see what happened when Harry was here last.

It was as carefully-phrased as he could make it. Otherwise, the Room might just show him the last D.A. meeting or something.

There was a soft click. Ron opened his eyes, and blinked. A plain wooden door was standing in the wall where the one for the D.A’s meeting room had always appeared, but there was an odd circle of smoke on the surface of it. Ron walked towards it warily.

Would Harry have summoned a fire? Would he—

Ron could barely think the words. Would he have hurt himself, because he was so upset after Sirius died?

Ron swallowed and swung the door open harder than he meant to.

The smoke that seemed to swirl in the door soared out abruptly and swarmed all over him. Ron opened his mouth to cry out, or cough as he breathed in the smoke, and discovered that it wasn’t really like that at all. He was standing in a large square room and staring through the smoke at a glittering image of Harry walking in and towards what looked like a magic circle of the kind Mum and Dad would have warned him away from.

Ron swallowed and stared intently at the circle, trying to make sense of it. He didn’t know if he could do that, but he could at least remember what it looked like, so they could put the memory in Dumbledore’s Pensieve later. Hermione had told him the Headmaster had one.

Then he lifted his eyes from the blue pentagrams that seemed to anchor the blue light, and got the shock of his life.

Harry was standing in the circle.

No, wait. This wasn’t really Harry. This one was taller and looked more muscular, and the scar on his forehead was really faded when he turned his head and Ron got a look at it. And he was—

He was colder.

Ron couldn’t explain where that impression came from, just from the bloke’s expression or if he was getting a flash of this other Harry’s magic, but that was what he felt.

He listened to the conversation in disbelief. Harry had heard about a prophecy. Harry was from another world—well, the one in the circle was. He had been summoned because Harry had asked the Room of Requirement for someone who would understand him.

Ron swallowed. I would have understood him. Hermione would understand him.

Although, Ron had to admit, maybe neither he nor Hermione would have listened the way this other Harry listened, with folded arms and a critical ear and silence, until Harry got to the end of most of the tirade. Hermione would have wanted to interrupt with questions, and Ron probably would have as well.

But it still didn’t tell Ron where Harry had gone, and he only half-listened to the conversation that followed, frowning. What had happened? Had this other Harry, who called himself Hadrian, convinced Harry to step into the circle and come to his world with him?

Ron supposed that would make sense of why Harry had vanished from the school apparently without a trace. Although not where Hedwig had gone.

He shook himself and focused his attention on the room again as he heard the end of the conversation. Hadrian was talking about Horcruxes, something called that, and how they had to leave the school and—

Harry went with this bloke?

Ron watched the interaction in silent, blank amazement, until Hadrian and Harry had disappeared through the door. Then the smoky glitter through which he’d watched the conversation vanished, and he was standing in a blank stone room.

Ron walked numbly to the door, and watched as numbly while it closed behind him.

He took a deep breath. He would have to tell this to Dumbledore and Hermione and show them the memory in a Pensieve. There was no way that they would believe him otherwise. For that matter, Ron had seen it, and he wasn’t sure he believed it, or himself and his own eyes.

One thought pounded in his head as he ran up the stairs towards the Headmaster’s office.

How badly must Harry had been worked up about that prophecy, to just go with this Hadrian bloke with no explanation?

*

“You’ve been thinking about it.”

Harry glared at Hadrian and turned his head away. They were back at the dining room table, eating more of the admittedly delicious stored food that had come with the house. Hadrian had cooked it with skills that Harry recognized. He had even seen his own distinctive wrist flip in Hadrian when he’d turned a crepe over to keep it from burning.

All of those things were the same, no matter how they had changed for Hadrian when he got to Hogwarts. No matter how much of a different person he was. They had endured the same childhood, grown up with Dursleys who seemed to be functionally identical.

Knew the same secrets.

It doesn’t mean we have the same taste in—everything, Harry told himself fretfully. I like girls. I don’t think Hadrian does. Or else he doesn’t like them as much as he likes the idea of having sex with me.

It was still a bit of a foreign thought, if Harry was honest with himself. Of course he had thought about having sex someday. Who hadn’t? He’d wanked thinking about it, but the images were vague, and anyway, he always came before his thoughts really got into a lot of detail.

He knew how sex between a boy and a girl worked. And he had an idea of how sex between two boys would work. Sort of.

“You probably think about it all the time,” Harry said resentfully. “You’re older than me. You’ve defeated Voldemort. You’ve probably done it a lot.”

“Not as much as you might think.” Hadrian laid his fork down and leaned back in his chair. Helplessly, Harry’s eyes traced the outline of the muscles in his arms as Hadrian folded them behind his head. “I did have sex with several people, both boys and girls. But it was boring.”

“Boring?”

Hadrian smiled a little. “It’s hard to imagine, right? Well, yeah, when you’re young and randy, sex sounds good no matter who it’s with.” He shrugged a little and stared out the window for a second, obviously seeing something far away. “But it was—well, no one knew who I really was, of course. I wouldn’t have been left alone if they’d known. So there was that. Having sex under a lie, under a glamour.”

I would know who he was.

Harry swallowed.

Hadrian went on without seeming to notice the swallow. “It wasn’t poetic. It wasn’t romantic. It was just a few minutes of pleasure, and then it was over.” He shrugged. “It didn’t matter to me. I couldn’t let my guard down.”

“I can’t imagine you letting your guard down at all.”

Hadrian focused on him again with eyes and a mouth that both smiled. “I let it down around you, Harry.”

Harry felt as though someone had lit him on fire from the inside. He coughed and blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “It sounds gross.”

“Because it’s sticky? Well, there are charms for that—”

“No! I mean, the way that two boys do it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Sticking your cock up someone’s arse. Isn’t that gross?”

Hadrian leaned forwards with his elbow on the table and his gaze fixed on Harry. It was disconcerting and hot and Harry squirmed in his seat.

“It could be,” Hadrian said softly. “It could, of course, be very gross. If you did it the Muggle way, I suppose it might be. But you can use cleaning charms there as well, and—well, did you know that two boys can do other things?”

Harry knew his face was on fire, and that he wanted to get up and walk away and pretend this conversation had never happened.

But that wouldn’t change the way that Hadrian had looked at him, or the fact that they’d talked about it, and come this far. And now Harry’s curiosity was getting the better of him, and some of his own House pride was shoving at him, too. Because he was curious about what it would be like to have someone touch him that way, and even if he went back to Hogwarts in September, he couldn’t imagine that—

He couldn’t imagine he would find anyone there who would know him better than Hadrian, who he would want to have touch him in the next few months.

“I want to know what it’s like. But I don’t want you to be weird about it.”

*

Hadrian smiled.

Got you.

But he stood up and came around the table slowly. This really did matter to him, in the way that brief flings with other people in his own world hadn’t. This was his own self, who had a chance to find more pleasure in the act than Hadrian ever had.

This was Harry.

Harry stood up to meet him. He was shaking, but he had his chin raised defiantly, and when Hadrian said softly, “We don’t have to do this right now,” Harry shook his head and reached out unsteady hands to rest them on Hadrian’s shoulders.

“I don’t want you to make fun of me.”

“I wouldn’t,” Hadrian said, a little shocked, and then saddened. Harry did expect that kind of mockery from him, the way Hadrian had the first time he went to bed with someone. He hadn’t felt it for more than a fleeting moment, because he was reckless and confident and he had seduced the girl easily enough, but Harry—

He was more vulnerable. In every way.

I have to make sure that he doesn’t regret this.

“You’re more experienced than me. You might.”

“I am you,” Hadrian said, and then gave up on the argument, because Harry’s jaw was thrusting out and he could imagine that they might be here all night trading barbs and accusations and arguments. He leaned forwards, gently splaying his fingers around Harry’s jaw, and kissed him.

Harry swayed towards him with a small shocked noise. Hadrian himself had to work to stand still, because the warmth of Harry’s mouth and the sensation of Harry’s tongue touching his like a hot needle weren’t things he was prepared for.

Kissing was kissing, pleasant enough but not great. Until now.

Hadrian pressed Harry back against the table, still kissing him, and combing one hand through his hair. He paused and scratched Harry’s scalp and tugged on his hair in all the places that Hadrian himself liked to be touched and scratched. Harry moaned and widened his legs, and Hadrian stepped neatly between them, leaning forwards.

An answering hardness met his own.

And for the first time, it really was answering. It wasn’t just the foreign pleasure of someone who would never feel all the things that Hadrian did, who would have moans just an octave off or want things he could never comprehend. It was perfect.

This was Harry.

Hadrian eased back, while he could still make himself do so and have some semi-coherent words come out of his mouth, and smiled dazedly at Harry. “Do you see how can it be with another boy?”

“With you.”

Harry’s eyes were sharp, and he reached out and curled his hand around the side of Hadrian’s arm, nails digging in, as possessive in his touch and hold as Hadrian was with him. “It’s like this because it’s with you. I don’t think I’d fancy another bloke.”

“You don’t need to,” Hadrian said smoothly, concentrating on the feel of Harry’s skin under his fingertips, and not the way that he wanted to think about murdering anyone else who might touch Harry. “I’m here. You don’t want to go off and touch someone else right now, do you?”

“Merlin, stop talking,” Harry commanded, and hauled Hadrian’s mouth down to his again, eyes shut and face a determined mask as his mouth worked, equally determinedly, against Hadrian’s lips.

Hadrian smiled, and did. But he did manage to steer them towards the bedroom that was just down the corridor, the one he had been using. It had a bigger bed, one he had Transfigured the first night they arrived here, and the sheets were comfortable, with a permanent Warming Charm.

Harry deserved nothing but the best for his first time.