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lomonaaerenTitle: Divine Gifts
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: Ignores the epilogue, established relationship, flashback, violence, gore, implied sex, Master of Death Harry, present tense, minor character deaths, Dark Harry
Rating: R
Wordcount: 2000
Summary: Harry remembers the day he fell in love with Theo—the same day that Theo fell in love with him.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Theo/Harry Confectionary,” or short Harry/Theo stories, being posed between the first of December and the winter solstice.
Divine Gifts
“Harry?”
Harry sighs a little. He’s sleepy and sated and relaxed and, call it what it is, well-used. He just wants to go to sleep.
But he rolls over on his side in their vast bed and smiles at Theo. “Yeah?”
“You never answered my question.”
“Was there a question?” Harry leers a little at Theo, and Theo flushes porcelain pink. “I had the impression there was a bit of ordering, but—”
Theo leans down to kiss him, stealing his breath with it. Harry knots his hands together behind Theo’s neck, in his waving black hair, and kisses him in return. He’ll never get tired of this, the heat blazing between their mouths as they shift closer, Theo’s stuttering breaths, his hands clenching and scrabbling on Harry’s shoulders.
Theo finally draws back, licking his own lips and drawing Harry’s longing gaze, and murmurs, “I asked you when you fell in love with me.”
Harry blinks at him, one hand still resting on the back of Theo’s neck, his mind still ablaze with the kiss. “I thought you knew,” he says slowly.
“Why would I know?”
“Because,” Harry says, and drags Theo down on top of him, smiling as he feels the lazy stirring between his thighs, “it was the same day you fell in love with me.”
*
It’s a risk, shopping in Diagon Alley. Harry knows that. But he’s finally past the worst of his mourning for Hedwig, and he needs an owl if he’s going to communicate with half the bloody nuisances who write to him.
He attracts a crowd within a few minutes of arriving in the alley. Harry sighs, and ignores them as best he can. He just needs to go to one shop—or maybe two, if he can’t find any owls in the first one he likes—and then he can retreat back to the safety and peace of Grimmauld Place.
Astonishing, that that house has become a safe and peaceful place for him since the war, but it’s the truth.
He doesn’t make it to Eeylops before the first fan approaches him for an autograph, a bulky man bobbing and bowing and smiling and apologizing. “Please, Mr. Potter, just a quick scratch?” He holds up a piece of parchment. “It would mean so much to my little daughter.”
Harry gives him a strained smile and reaches into his pocket for a quill.
He’s not sure what alerts him. Maybe the hot excitement in the man’s eyes, not the kind of thing Harry would expect to see on someone who’s just happy about getting an autograph. Maybe some kind of shimmer on the surface of the parchment that shouldn’t be there.
Regardless, Harry flings himself backwards, and the parchment’s explosion doesn’t catch him.
People are screaming and milling around, not Apparating away, because that would be too sensible, but trying to stay distant and see what’s going on at the same time. Harry hisses in annoyance and draws his wand.
The Elder Wand. It’s always the Elder Wand now. Harry knows that he can destroy this fool, but his anger is thrumming through him like magma, and he wants to do something else instead.
Especially with the disguise the man has been wearing gone, and the face glaring at him that of Rabastan Lestrange.
“I’m going to kill you for what you did to my brother,” Lestrange breathes.
“You realize I killed him because he attacked me first?”
“You should have died with your Mudblood of a mother!”
Harry lets the fury roar through him, and waits. Lestrange is so angry that he’ll throw a lethal spell now. And that’s all Harry needs.
Sure enough, Lestrange hurls a Blasting Curse point-blank at Harry’s chest. Not only that, but quick pops of Apparition of other people arriving, in black robes instead of the scarlet ones belonging to Aurors, mean that Harry has even more people to hurt.
To have fun with, says a voice in his head that might be that of the wand.
Harry smiles, and catches the Blasting Curse on the air in front of him.
More than one former Death Eater shrieks as Harry coalesces the Blasting Curse into a lacy cloud of blue light. Harry glances at them, smile sharply, and shapes the light with a few motions of the Elder Wand. Long, thin blue lines are extending from it.
Lines. Or spikes.
“Are you just going to play with pretty lights all day, Potter?” taunts a voice from among the new arrivals, and oh, Harry’s day has just become even better, because that’s Fenrir Greyback. “Or are you going to attack like a real wizard?”
“For Remus,” Harry says under his breath as he turns to face the hulking form of Greyback. “For Bill. For Lavender.”
The Death Eaters are beginning to move in on him now. Harry smiles at them, and swirls the Elder Wand above the blue cloud of light.
It spins and snaps outwards, the spikes projecting from it suddenly much longer. They transfix Greyback, and Yaxley, and Macnair, and two other men Harry doesn’t know the names of, in white Death Eater masks.
More than one of them screams as pure magic tears through their inner organs. Harry smiles at them with all his teeth and jerks the cloud sideways.
The spikes tear through the Death Eaters, in some cases slicing them in half, torsos and heads toppling in one direction, legs toppling in the other. The screams are terrible. The blood that mists in the air is coating the watchers, who are also screaming now.
Bet they’re sorry they didn’t leave when they had the chance.
Harry’s spikes reach Lestrange, who is backing up, trying and failing to Apparate. Harry smiles at him and says softly, “The Master of Death sends his regards.”
Lestrange gives him a blank look before the spike tears into his stomach and his face goes blank forever.
Harry retracts the spikes into the blue cloud in the moment before they would probably begin to assault innocent people. He raises his wand, and the cloud dissipates.
It’s a gift that being the Master of Death has given him. All he needs is a lethal spell, and he can take its force and change it into a lethal spell of his own.
Harry worried at one point that being the Master of Death would make him immortal. But honestly, he like this better. Someone could still kill him with an ordinary spell, but that’s not the kind of thing the Death Eaters or most of the people determined to assassinate Harry Potter go for. It’s always Killing Curses and explosive spells and jinxes that are meant to make the blood boil in his veins.
Harry is counting on living as long as he wants, really, and taking Death’s hand as an old friend, not because he’s forced to.
He lowers his wand at last and looks around the Alley. Ashen faces stare back at him. Harry feels a little bad when he sees some of the sobbing children next to their parents, but honestly. Harry was only blocking Apparition for the Death Eaters, his magic latching on to them and making any attempt to evade their deaths impossible. The children’s parents could have taken them and gone.
That they wanted to be spectators instead…
Harry trails his eyes distantly from face to face. Anger, fear, hatred, incredulity. He knows all the emotions and dismisses them all.
Wait.
Harry’s eyes meet a pair that are locked on him, but all they show is fascination, pure and simple. Harry blinks. He can’t remember the last time someone looked at him with that kind of emotion.
Maybe not ever? Even in first year, when there were people who gawped at him on a daily basis, the wonder wasn’t pure. They expected certain things from him. They were disappointed, some of them, that he didn’t come to Hogwarts riding a dragon and wielding the Sword of Gryffindor. And most people’s attitudes towards him have become decidedly more mixed in the years since.
Harry takes a step forwards. The man who’s staring at him in fascination promptly walks towards him, impressing Harry with his courage.
Harry doesn’t know him, even though he looks as if he might have been in Harry’s year at Hogwarts. He raises a hand in mirror to Harry’s, and takes his hand when Harry extends it to him.
“Sorry, I don’t know you,” Harry says, as he studies dark eyes, dark hair, a face seamed with a scar down one cheek and shining without any fear at all.
“Theodore Nott.”
Harry blinks. He does remember the quiet Slytherin who never said a word to him but was always snickering with Malfoy, but he wouldn’t have spotted the features of that boy in the man’s.
“I tried to avoid attention on purpose. Don’t blame yourself for not remembering me.”
“I wasn’t blaming myself.”
Nott gives him the most dazzling smile Harry has ever beheld. “You’re amazing.”
Harry tilts his head back at him, his own smile widening, although he doesn’t think he’ll manage to blind Nott the way Nott is him. “You’re pretty damn amazing yourself. Do you want to get out of here before someone calls the Aurors?”
“Please. Talking to them is always so boring.”
Harry laughs, and leads Nott away.
That’s the beginning.
*
“I—you can’t have fallen in love with me right at that moment. I didn’t fall in love with you then.”
“I fell in love with the essence of you,” Harry corrects, combing his fingers through Theo’s hair. Theo’s eyelids are fluttering. He’s always reacted to having his hair touched that way. It’s frankly adorable. “And you told me that you did fall in love with me then. You saw me plainly, and you didn’t turn away.”
“I did tell you that. I didn’t know that you took it as a love confession.’
“Then you never have told me when you fell in love with me.”
Theo is silent for a long moment, laying his head on Harry’s chest. Harry goes on petting his hair. He isn’t worried. He knows Theo is in love with him, fully, deeply, with the Master of Death as well as “just Harry” and everyone Harry is in between.
With the Dark Lord that Harry could have become. With the naïve child he still sometimes feels like. With the young wizard he is on days when he’s laughing and joking with George and testing pranks in the shop.
Just as Harry is in love with the Death Eater’s son, and the Alchemy genius, and the torturer and killer Theo was to survive in the madness of his seventh year at Hogwarts, and the patient Slytherin who knows when to retreat for survival’s sake, and the shrieking madman Theo becomes on a broom.
“Maybe,” Theo says at last, “I partially fell in love with you that day.”
Harry laughs. “Maybe you did. Maybe I fell partially in love with you.”
“I still can’t believe you weren’t arrested that day.”
“Death protects its own,” Harry murmurs. By the time the Aurors arrived, most of the people who were in the Alley forgot exactly what happened, what they had seen. It might have returned in their nightmares, but all they would know for certain was that Death Eaters had staged an attack, and someone had slaughtered them.
Harry lives free as long as he serves Death and uses the Elder Wand, as long as he slaughters those who would slaughter him.
As long as he delights in the slaughter.
“I want to study that. I want to study how it works.”
Harry laughs and kisses Theo’s forehead. “The Hallows are yours as much as mine, Theo.”
Theo smiles at him, and it’s the smile that makes Harry think of him as a gift, that makes him wonder if maybe Death does give gifts other than just the Hallows and the ability to use lethal force and get away with it. Because there is no other explanation for how glorious Theo is, and so perfectly and willingly Harry’s.
Feeling Theo stir again, Harry forgets about his sleepiness. He spreads his legs, and Theo gasps and gets distracted.
Hallows later, sex now, Harry thinks with a smile as he kisses his husband again and guides Theo to where he wants him to be.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: Ignores the epilogue, established relationship, flashback, violence, gore, implied sex, Master of Death Harry, present tense, minor character deaths, Dark Harry
Rating: R
Wordcount: 2000
Summary: Harry remembers the day he fell in love with Theo—the same day that Theo fell in love with him.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Theo/Harry Confectionary,” or short Harry/Theo stories, being posed between the first of December and the winter solstice.
Divine Gifts
“Harry?”
Harry sighs a little. He’s sleepy and sated and relaxed and, call it what it is, well-used. He just wants to go to sleep.
But he rolls over on his side in their vast bed and smiles at Theo. “Yeah?”
“You never answered my question.”
“Was there a question?” Harry leers a little at Theo, and Theo flushes porcelain pink. “I had the impression there was a bit of ordering, but—”
Theo leans down to kiss him, stealing his breath with it. Harry knots his hands together behind Theo’s neck, in his waving black hair, and kisses him in return. He’ll never get tired of this, the heat blazing between their mouths as they shift closer, Theo’s stuttering breaths, his hands clenching and scrabbling on Harry’s shoulders.
Theo finally draws back, licking his own lips and drawing Harry’s longing gaze, and murmurs, “I asked you when you fell in love with me.”
Harry blinks at him, one hand still resting on the back of Theo’s neck, his mind still ablaze with the kiss. “I thought you knew,” he says slowly.
“Why would I know?”
“Because,” Harry says, and drags Theo down on top of him, smiling as he feels the lazy stirring between his thighs, “it was the same day you fell in love with me.”
*
It’s a risk, shopping in Diagon Alley. Harry knows that. But he’s finally past the worst of his mourning for Hedwig, and he needs an owl if he’s going to communicate with half the bloody nuisances who write to him.
He attracts a crowd within a few minutes of arriving in the alley. Harry sighs, and ignores them as best he can. He just needs to go to one shop—or maybe two, if he can’t find any owls in the first one he likes—and then he can retreat back to the safety and peace of Grimmauld Place.
Astonishing, that that house has become a safe and peaceful place for him since the war, but it’s the truth.
He doesn’t make it to Eeylops before the first fan approaches him for an autograph, a bulky man bobbing and bowing and smiling and apologizing. “Please, Mr. Potter, just a quick scratch?” He holds up a piece of parchment. “It would mean so much to my little daughter.”
Harry gives him a strained smile and reaches into his pocket for a quill.
He’s not sure what alerts him. Maybe the hot excitement in the man’s eyes, not the kind of thing Harry would expect to see on someone who’s just happy about getting an autograph. Maybe some kind of shimmer on the surface of the parchment that shouldn’t be there.
Regardless, Harry flings himself backwards, and the parchment’s explosion doesn’t catch him.
People are screaming and milling around, not Apparating away, because that would be too sensible, but trying to stay distant and see what’s going on at the same time. Harry hisses in annoyance and draws his wand.
The Elder Wand. It’s always the Elder Wand now. Harry knows that he can destroy this fool, but his anger is thrumming through him like magma, and he wants to do something else instead.
Especially with the disguise the man has been wearing gone, and the face glaring at him that of Rabastan Lestrange.
“I’m going to kill you for what you did to my brother,” Lestrange breathes.
“You realize I killed him because he attacked me first?”
“You should have died with your Mudblood of a mother!”
Harry lets the fury roar through him, and waits. Lestrange is so angry that he’ll throw a lethal spell now. And that’s all Harry needs.
Sure enough, Lestrange hurls a Blasting Curse point-blank at Harry’s chest. Not only that, but quick pops of Apparition of other people arriving, in black robes instead of the scarlet ones belonging to Aurors, mean that Harry has even more people to hurt.
To have fun with, says a voice in his head that might be that of the wand.
Harry smiles, and catches the Blasting Curse on the air in front of him.
More than one former Death Eater shrieks as Harry coalesces the Blasting Curse into a lacy cloud of blue light. Harry glances at them, smile sharply, and shapes the light with a few motions of the Elder Wand. Long, thin blue lines are extending from it.
Lines. Or spikes.
“Are you just going to play with pretty lights all day, Potter?” taunts a voice from among the new arrivals, and oh, Harry’s day has just become even better, because that’s Fenrir Greyback. “Or are you going to attack like a real wizard?”
“For Remus,” Harry says under his breath as he turns to face the hulking form of Greyback. “For Bill. For Lavender.”
The Death Eaters are beginning to move in on him now. Harry smiles at them, and swirls the Elder Wand above the blue cloud of light.
It spins and snaps outwards, the spikes projecting from it suddenly much longer. They transfix Greyback, and Yaxley, and Macnair, and two other men Harry doesn’t know the names of, in white Death Eater masks.
More than one of them screams as pure magic tears through their inner organs. Harry smiles at them with all his teeth and jerks the cloud sideways.
The spikes tear through the Death Eaters, in some cases slicing them in half, torsos and heads toppling in one direction, legs toppling in the other. The screams are terrible. The blood that mists in the air is coating the watchers, who are also screaming now.
Bet they’re sorry they didn’t leave when they had the chance.
Harry’s spikes reach Lestrange, who is backing up, trying and failing to Apparate. Harry smiles at him and says softly, “The Master of Death sends his regards.”
Lestrange gives him a blank look before the spike tears into his stomach and his face goes blank forever.
Harry retracts the spikes into the blue cloud in the moment before they would probably begin to assault innocent people. He raises his wand, and the cloud dissipates.
It’s a gift that being the Master of Death has given him. All he needs is a lethal spell, and he can take its force and change it into a lethal spell of his own.
Harry worried at one point that being the Master of Death would make him immortal. But honestly, he like this better. Someone could still kill him with an ordinary spell, but that’s not the kind of thing the Death Eaters or most of the people determined to assassinate Harry Potter go for. It’s always Killing Curses and explosive spells and jinxes that are meant to make the blood boil in his veins.
Harry is counting on living as long as he wants, really, and taking Death’s hand as an old friend, not because he’s forced to.
He lowers his wand at last and looks around the Alley. Ashen faces stare back at him. Harry feels a little bad when he sees some of the sobbing children next to their parents, but honestly. Harry was only blocking Apparition for the Death Eaters, his magic latching on to them and making any attempt to evade their deaths impossible. The children’s parents could have taken them and gone.
That they wanted to be spectators instead…
Harry trails his eyes distantly from face to face. Anger, fear, hatred, incredulity. He knows all the emotions and dismisses them all.
Wait.
Harry’s eyes meet a pair that are locked on him, but all they show is fascination, pure and simple. Harry blinks. He can’t remember the last time someone looked at him with that kind of emotion.
Maybe not ever? Even in first year, when there were people who gawped at him on a daily basis, the wonder wasn’t pure. They expected certain things from him. They were disappointed, some of them, that he didn’t come to Hogwarts riding a dragon and wielding the Sword of Gryffindor. And most people’s attitudes towards him have become decidedly more mixed in the years since.
Harry takes a step forwards. The man who’s staring at him in fascination promptly walks towards him, impressing Harry with his courage.
Harry doesn’t know him, even though he looks as if he might have been in Harry’s year at Hogwarts. He raises a hand in mirror to Harry’s, and takes his hand when Harry extends it to him.
“Sorry, I don’t know you,” Harry says, as he studies dark eyes, dark hair, a face seamed with a scar down one cheek and shining without any fear at all.
“Theodore Nott.”
Harry blinks. He does remember the quiet Slytherin who never said a word to him but was always snickering with Malfoy, but he wouldn’t have spotted the features of that boy in the man’s.
“I tried to avoid attention on purpose. Don’t blame yourself for not remembering me.”
“I wasn’t blaming myself.”
Nott gives him the most dazzling smile Harry has ever beheld. “You’re amazing.”
Harry tilts his head back at him, his own smile widening, although he doesn’t think he’ll manage to blind Nott the way Nott is him. “You’re pretty damn amazing yourself. Do you want to get out of here before someone calls the Aurors?”
“Please. Talking to them is always so boring.”
Harry laughs, and leads Nott away.
That’s the beginning.
*
“I—you can’t have fallen in love with me right at that moment. I didn’t fall in love with you then.”
“I fell in love with the essence of you,” Harry corrects, combing his fingers through Theo’s hair. Theo’s eyelids are fluttering. He’s always reacted to having his hair touched that way. It’s frankly adorable. “And you told me that you did fall in love with me then. You saw me plainly, and you didn’t turn away.”
“I did tell you that. I didn’t know that you took it as a love confession.’
“Then you never have told me when you fell in love with me.”
Theo is silent for a long moment, laying his head on Harry’s chest. Harry goes on petting his hair. He isn’t worried. He knows Theo is in love with him, fully, deeply, with the Master of Death as well as “just Harry” and everyone Harry is in between.
With the Dark Lord that Harry could have become. With the naïve child he still sometimes feels like. With the young wizard he is on days when he’s laughing and joking with George and testing pranks in the shop.
Just as Harry is in love with the Death Eater’s son, and the Alchemy genius, and the torturer and killer Theo was to survive in the madness of his seventh year at Hogwarts, and the patient Slytherin who knows when to retreat for survival’s sake, and the shrieking madman Theo becomes on a broom.
“Maybe,” Theo says at last, “I partially fell in love with you that day.”
Harry laughs. “Maybe you did. Maybe I fell partially in love with you.”
“I still can’t believe you weren’t arrested that day.”
“Death protects its own,” Harry murmurs. By the time the Aurors arrived, most of the people who were in the Alley forgot exactly what happened, what they had seen. It might have returned in their nightmares, but all they would know for certain was that Death Eaters had staged an attack, and someone had slaughtered them.
Harry lives free as long as he serves Death and uses the Elder Wand, as long as he slaughters those who would slaughter him.
As long as he delights in the slaughter.
“I want to study that. I want to study how it works.”
Harry laughs and kisses Theo’s forehead. “The Hallows are yours as much as mine, Theo.”
Theo smiles at him, and it’s the smile that makes Harry think of him as a gift, that makes him wonder if maybe Death does give gifts other than just the Hallows and the ability to use lethal force and get away with it. Because there is no other explanation for how glorious Theo is, and so perfectly and willingly Harry’s.
Feeling Theo stir again, Harry forgets about his sleepiness. He spreads his legs, and Theo gasps and gets distracted.
Hallows later, sex now, Harry thinks with a smile as he kisses his husband again and guides Theo to where he wants him to be.
The End.
