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lomonaaerenTitle: Seven Hundred Forty-Nine
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: Angst, fluff, present tense, mentions of child abuse
Wordcount: 2000
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Sequel to “Prelude to a Winter’s Bonding.” Harry is preparing for his bonding with Theo, seven hundred forty-nine days after they became boyfriends.
Author’s Notes: This is the last of my “Theo/Harry Confectionary” series stories for this year and a sequel to a short fic, “Prelude to a Winter’s Bonding,” posted during my Solstitial Shorts series in 2021. Happy Solstice!
Seven Hundred Forty-Nine
“You are still here.”
Harry looks up from adjusting the sleeves of his long, winter-blue robe in front of the mirror. “Yes,” he says slowly to Bellerophon Nott, Theo’s father, who stands looking at Harry with his huge black eyes like a pleading dog’s. “Theo and I are getting bonded today.”
“I thought you had run off.”
“Why? I love Theo.”
Bellerophon silently pulls up his left sleeve. Harry sighs at the sight of the Dark Mark.
“Yes, I know,” he tells Bellerophon. “I know what you were. I know what you are. It doesn’t make me think less of Theo.”
“But you could still run off,” Bellerophon says with a certain melancholy pleasure, as though he will enjoy being proven right when Harry suddenly has a cowardice transplant. “Better now than years after when you have a child.”
“I’m not going to run off.”
“Could.”
Harry rolls his eyes and goes back to considering himself in the mirror. The lines of the robes flatter his shoulders, or so he imagines Theo would say. Harry thinks they’re a bit itchy, but the way they make Theo’s eyes light up when he sees them has persuaded Harry to wear them for their bonding.
“You could sneak out the back,” Bellerophon suggests from behind him. “Down the cellars. Theo would never know you had gone.”
“If you think Theo wouldn’t come after me and pin my hands to the wails with nails while he demands to know why I left, you don’t know your own son.”
“Knives.”
“What?” Harry turns around and glares at his father-in-law, who’s not the raging monster Harry once thought he would have to deal with, but also seems unable to conceive of the notion that Harry and Theo are bonding for love instead of because Theo is a devious seducer who has utterly taken Harry in.
“Knives. Not nails. Theo wouldn’t use those. Too Muggle. Knives hurt more going through your palms.”
Harry just snorts and tugs his sleeves down a little.
“You could run off.”
“You could stop repeating yourself.”
That at least works, because when Harry glances into the mirror again, Bellerophon is gone. Harry sighs. He’ll probably go out into the gathered crowd and croak his melancholy predictions at anyone who will listen, but that’s better than dealing with him.
*
“Harry.”
Theo’s voice and eyes are alight with joy. Harry leans up to kiss him, and the kiss gets involved enough that Theo has to draw back, swearing under his breath and murmuring, “We’re getting bonded today, we’re getting bonded today…”
“You have to remind yourself of that?” Harry teases him.
“Have to remind myself why I can’t throw you on the floor right here.”
“Here” is the room that leads out to the gardens, where Harry and Theo will say their bonding oaths in front of a huge blue tent sheltering the guests from the falling snow. Harry smiles at him. “It’ll only be a few hours.”
“Why did we decide to do this instead of elope?” Theo whispers, bending down to close his hands around Harry’s hard enough to ache.
“You wanted to bond on the winter solstice. And I wanted our guests to witness it.”
Theo opens his mouth to say something else, probably to explain why he only wanted a few guests, but a thump interrupts them. Theo glances up with a frown, and then his eyes widen.
“Who invited him?”
Harry peers over Theo’s shoulder, and ends up sighing. Draco Malfoy is kneeling in the doorway, hands clasped and head bowed. “Well, I didn’t. Maybe your father thought you were still friends.”
“That’s probably it. Get up, Malfoy.”
Malfoy ignores Theo’s demand and intones in a low voice, “Harry Potter, I ask that you listen to my plea and forsake your bonding.”
“You’re such a dramatic, whiny little baby,” Harry says wearily. “Stand up and go away, Malfoy.”
“I love you. I am the only one who truly loves you.”
“No, you’re the only one who’s obsessed with me like a stalker and following me around.”
“I thought there was one other person,” Theo says, leaning his chin on Harry’s shoulder and watching what’s probably his free entertainment. “That reporter, Robin something, the successor to Skeeter?”
“She just wants to make money. She doesn’t think she’s in love with me.”
“I know I’m in love with you, Potter!”
“No,” Harry says. “You were obsessed with someday defeating me in a duel, and somehow it spun into this thing where you followed me around and bragged you would give me the best sex I ever had.”
“He said what?” Theo’s voice deepens, and his fingers clench on Harry’s shoulder. “You never told me that.”
“It didn’t come up. And you have nothing to worry about. Malfoy’s a lifelong virgin, how was he going to show me anything?”
“Potter!”
Malfoy’s back on his feet with his hand digging in his robe pocket for something, probably his wand. Harry sighs. “See? You’re not in love with me. You get upset the instant I insult you, which you wouldn’t if you were in love with me.”
“I will make you see—“
“Stupefy maxima.”
Theo’s special version of a Stunner catches Malfoy and drops him where he stands. Harry grins and leans back against his fiancé for a moment. “Why that one? He could be unconscious all night.”
“This way, he won’t wake up until after our bonding is done with,” Theo explains, and pulls a laughing Harry into the gardens.
*
“Oh, Harry! You look great!”
Harry smiles and hugs Hermione as she runs up to him, Ron trailing behind. “So do you!” Hermione is wearing red robes like she did at her own marriage to Ron, and her hair is up and held with little sparkling onyx clips. Ron has dark green dress robes on that are much nicer than the ones he wore to the Yule Ball in fourth year.
“I bought her those clips,” Ron says.
“And I bought Harry these robes,” Theo says, wrapping his hands around Harry’s shoulders and tugging him gently but inexorably away from Hermione.
“You don’t have to be jealous,” Harry whispers, leaning back so that his head touches Theo’s shoulder. He can remember so many nights when they lay on the grass and named stars, and evenings when they ate around the fire and laughed about the Ministry’s incompetence, and nights in bed together. “There’s no one but you.”
“I want everyone to remember that,” Theo says, still not letting go of his shoulders. “Besides, Weasley did it first.”
Harry rolls his eyes and leans up to kiss him. Behind him, Ron is doing the same to Hermione.
Theo clings to him, using his tongue the way he did the first time he and Harry kissed. Then it was just because Harry wanted to invent a boyfriend to put Malfoy off. Now, he can’t imagine kissing someone else. Loving someone else.
Bonding with someone else.
“The bonding is very deep, isn’t it?” Hermione asks when Ron lets her go. “I don’t think I’ve ever read of a magical marriage ceremony like it. I know that ours included vows, but—”
“These are oaths,” Theo says, not taking his eyes from Harry. “Words with magic behind them. But different even from a vow. A vow punishes you for breaking it. An oath makes sure you can’t break it.”
“That sounds—harsh.”
“It’s what I want,” Harry says.
He doesn’t want someone to love potion him and make him betray Theo. With his vows in place, he won’t be able to sleep with someone else, kiss them, touch them in any way that would lead to sex, no matter how much he might feel like he wants to.
He won’t be able to ignore Theo, pretend he doesn’t matter. He won’t be able to do anything Theo would feel is abusive, even to speak words that might seem funny to him. He’ll be subtly encouraged to take Theo seriously, give him consideration, pay attention to him.
And Theo will do the same for Harry.
That’s the main reason they chose the oaths. Because with the way they grew up—the way they both grew up—it’s something they both want, and Harry would never let Theo make an oath for him without doing the same in return.
Neither would Theo, for that matter.
“Oh. Well, I’m glad that you agree,” Hermione says, with a slightly worried smile.
Harry smiles back. It’s sweet that she worries, but she doesn’t have to. He and Theo turn and walk, side by side and hands entwined, into the tent that houses their guests.
Harry can see Mrs. Weasley dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, Luna and her father beaming at them from one corner, Blaise Zabini laughing quietly into his drink for reasons known only to himself, and Bellerophon staring at them with a mournful frown, apparently disbelieving that Harry is still here. Harry shakes his head, smiles, and moves to the front with Theo’s hand still linked in his.
As they turn to face each other, ice-blue swirls of magic arise from the floor next to them, on the opposite side from the audience. The magic plays over them, and Theo relaxes with a loud huff.
Harry eyes him. “You told me they would just appear.”
“Hush, Harry.”
“You didn’t know until now that they would. You didn’t know that I was utterly sincere about making these oaths.”
“Hush, Harry.”
Harry smiles at him and falls silent, since they agreed Theo would begin. But it warms something inside him, the same part that agreed to the oaths in the first place, that Theo was willing to come out here in front of an audience and do something that might have humiliated him if no magic appeared.
Not that he has anything to worry about. Harry is as gone on Theo as Theo is gone on him, and they only waited two years (and nineteen days) to bond because Theo wanted to do it on the winter solstice and Harry honestly wasn’t ready during their first two.
Theo’s eyes lock on him, and if the crowd makes noise after that, Harry can’t hear it. He’s too busy listening to Theo’s soft words.
“I will make the oath to treasure you, to never misuse you, to give you joy as I give it to myself, to defend your life as I would defend my own…”
It’s a long chain of promises, and with each one, a curl of ice-blue magic drifts over and wraps around their joined hands, Harry’s right and Theo’s left, until it looks as if they’re wearing gauntlets of icicles. Theo falls silent at last, and Harry squeezes his wrists and begins.
“I will make the oath to treasure you, to never misuse you, to give you joy as I give it to myself, to defend your life as I would defend my own…”
There is the sound of quiet weeping from the audience as the magic winds around Harry’s left hand, Theo’s right, and binds them together. Harry shudders a little from the feeling of the oaths sinking into his magic, but Theo is smiling at him in a way he never has before, free and carefree.
Theo feels protected by these oaths, able to relax around other people who aren’t Harry or his father or closest friends, and that’s enough for Harry. That would be reason enough to swear them just by himself, if that was what Theo wanted.
But Theo wanted to be all in with him, and that is more than enough.
The blue light of the magic flares once more and sinks into their skin. Harry knows that for the rest of his life, he’ll have the sensation of wearing light shackles there, but he doesn’t mind. This is what he chose.
Theo is who he chose. Theo is his fate.
He leans forwards. Theo does, too, and as their lips meet and Theo’s curve in a small smile and the fireworks George planned take off outside the tent, Harry feels something deeper than joy and wilder than love settle into his very bones.
The End.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: Angst, fluff, present tense, mentions of child abuse
Wordcount: 2000
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Sequel to “Prelude to a Winter’s Bonding.” Harry is preparing for his bonding with Theo, seven hundred forty-nine days after they became boyfriends.
Author’s Notes: This is the last of my “Theo/Harry Confectionary” series stories for this year and a sequel to a short fic, “Prelude to a Winter’s Bonding,” posted during my Solstitial Shorts series in 2021. Happy Solstice!
Seven Hundred Forty-Nine
“You are still here.”
Harry looks up from adjusting the sleeves of his long, winter-blue robe in front of the mirror. “Yes,” he says slowly to Bellerophon Nott, Theo’s father, who stands looking at Harry with his huge black eyes like a pleading dog’s. “Theo and I are getting bonded today.”
“I thought you had run off.”
“Why? I love Theo.”
Bellerophon silently pulls up his left sleeve. Harry sighs at the sight of the Dark Mark.
“Yes, I know,” he tells Bellerophon. “I know what you were. I know what you are. It doesn’t make me think less of Theo.”
“But you could still run off,” Bellerophon says with a certain melancholy pleasure, as though he will enjoy being proven right when Harry suddenly has a cowardice transplant. “Better now than years after when you have a child.”
“I’m not going to run off.”
“Could.”
Harry rolls his eyes and goes back to considering himself in the mirror. The lines of the robes flatter his shoulders, or so he imagines Theo would say. Harry thinks they’re a bit itchy, but the way they make Theo’s eyes light up when he sees them has persuaded Harry to wear them for their bonding.
“You could sneak out the back,” Bellerophon suggests from behind him. “Down the cellars. Theo would never know you had gone.”
“If you think Theo wouldn’t come after me and pin my hands to the wails with nails while he demands to know why I left, you don’t know your own son.”
“Knives.”
“What?” Harry turns around and glares at his father-in-law, who’s not the raging monster Harry once thought he would have to deal with, but also seems unable to conceive of the notion that Harry and Theo are bonding for love instead of because Theo is a devious seducer who has utterly taken Harry in.
“Knives. Not nails. Theo wouldn’t use those. Too Muggle. Knives hurt more going through your palms.”
Harry just snorts and tugs his sleeves down a little.
“You could run off.”
“You could stop repeating yourself.”
That at least works, because when Harry glances into the mirror again, Bellerophon is gone. Harry sighs. He’ll probably go out into the gathered crowd and croak his melancholy predictions at anyone who will listen, but that’s better than dealing with him.
*
“Harry.”
Theo’s voice and eyes are alight with joy. Harry leans up to kiss him, and the kiss gets involved enough that Theo has to draw back, swearing under his breath and murmuring, “We’re getting bonded today, we’re getting bonded today…”
“You have to remind yourself of that?” Harry teases him.
“Have to remind myself why I can’t throw you on the floor right here.”
“Here” is the room that leads out to the gardens, where Harry and Theo will say their bonding oaths in front of a huge blue tent sheltering the guests from the falling snow. Harry smiles at him. “It’ll only be a few hours.”
“Why did we decide to do this instead of elope?” Theo whispers, bending down to close his hands around Harry’s hard enough to ache.
“You wanted to bond on the winter solstice. And I wanted our guests to witness it.”
Theo opens his mouth to say something else, probably to explain why he only wanted a few guests, but a thump interrupts them. Theo glances up with a frown, and then his eyes widen.
“Who invited him?”
Harry peers over Theo’s shoulder, and ends up sighing. Draco Malfoy is kneeling in the doorway, hands clasped and head bowed. “Well, I didn’t. Maybe your father thought you were still friends.”
“That’s probably it. Get up, Malfoy.”
Malfoy ignores Theo’s demand and intones in a low voice, “Harry Potter, I ask that you listen to my plea and forsake your bonding.”
“You’re such a dramatic, whiny little baby,” Harry says wearily. “Stand up and go away, Malfoy.”
“I love you. I am the only one who truly loves you.”
“No, you’re the only one who’s obsessed with me like a stalker and following me around.”
“I thought there was one other person,” Theo says, leaning his chin on Harry’s shoulder and watching what’s probably his free entertainment. “That reporter, Robin something, the successor to Skeeter?”
“She just wants to make money. She doesn’t think she’s in love with me.”
“I know I’m in love with you, Potter!”
“No,” Harry says. “You were obsessed with someday defeating me in a duel, and somehow it spun into this thing where you followed me around and bragged you would give me the best sex I ever had.”
“He said what?” Theo’s voice deepens, and his fingers clench on Harry’s shoulder. “You never told me that.”
“It didn’t come up. And you have nothing to worry about. Malfoy’s a lifelong virgin, how was he going to show me anything?”
“Potter!”
Malfoy’s back on his feet with his hand digging in his robe pocket for something, probably his wand. Harry sighs. “See? You’re not in love with me. You get upset the instant I insult you, which you wouldn’t if you were in love with me.”
“I will make you see—“
“Stupefy maxima.”
Theo’s special version of a Stunner catches Malfoy and drops him where he stands. Harry grins and leans back against his fiancé for a moment. “Why that one? He could be unconscious all night.”
“This way, he won’t wake up until after our bonding is done with,” Theo explains, and pulls a laughing Harry into the gardens.
*
“Oh, Harry! You look great!”
Harry smiles and hugs Hermione as she runs up to him, Ron trailing behind. “So do you!” Hermione is wearing red robes like she did at her own marriage to Ron, and her hair is up and held with little sparkling onyx clips. Ron has dark green dress robes on that are much nicer than the ones he wore to the Yule Ball in fourth year.
“I bought her those clips,” Ron says.
“And I bought Harry these robes,” Theo says, wrapping his hands around Harry’s shoulders and tugging him gently but inexorably away from Hermione.
“You don’t have to be jealous,” Harry whispers, leaning back so that his head touches Theo’s shoulder. He can remember so many nights when they lay on the grass and named stars, and evenings when they ate around the fire and laughed about the Ministry’s incompetence, and nights in bed together. “There’s no one but you.”
“I want everyone to remember that,” Theo says, still not letting go of his shoulders. “Besides, Weasley did it first.”
Harry rolls his eyes and leans up to kiss him. Behind him, Ron is doing the same to Hermione.
Theo clings to him, using his tongue the way he did the first time he and Harry kissed. Then it was just because Harry wanted to invent a boyfriend to put Malfoy off. Now, he can’t imagine kissing someone else. Loving someone else.
Bonding with someone else.
“The bonding is very deep, isn’t it?” Hermione asks when Ron lets her go. “I don’t think I’ve ever read of a magical marriage ceremony like it. I know that ours included vows, but—”
“These are oaths,” Theo says, not taking his eyes from Harry. “Words with magic behind them. But different even from a vow. A vow punishes you for breaking it. An oath makes sure you can’t break it.”
“That sounds—harsh.”
“It’s what I want,” Harry says.
He doesn’t want someone to love potion him and make him betray Theo. With his vows in place, he won’t be able to sleep with someone else, kiss them, touch them in any way that would lead to sex, no matter how much he might feel like he wants to.
He won’t be able to ignore Theo, pretend he doesn’t matter. He won’t be able to do anything Theo would feel is abusive, even to speak words that might seem funny to him. He’ll be subtly encouraged to take Theo seriously, give him consideration, pay attention to him.
And Theo will do the same for Harry.
That’s the main reason they chose the oaths. Because with the way they grew up—the way they both grew up—it’s something they both want, and Harry would never let Theo make an oath for him without doing the same in return.
Neither would Theo, for that matter.
“Oh. Well, I’m glad that you agree,” Hermione says, with a slightly worried smile.
Harry smiles back. It’s sweet that she worries, but she doesn’t have to. He and Theo turn and walk, side by side and hands entwined, into the tent that houses their guests.
Harry can see Mrs. Weasley dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, Luna and her father beaming at them from one corner, Blaise Zabini laughing quietly into his drink for reasons known only to himself, and Bellerophon staring at them with a mournful frown, apparently disbelieving that Harry is still here. Harry shakes his head, smiles, and moves to the front with Theo’s hand still linked in his.
As they turn to face each other, ice-blue swirls of magic arise from the floor next to them, on the opposite side from the audience. The magic plays over them, and Theo relaxes with a loud huff.
Harry eyes him. “You told me they would just appear.”
“Hush, Harry.”
“You didn’t know until now that they would. You didn’t know that I was utterly sincere about making these oaths.”
“Hush, Harry.”
Harry smiles at him and falls silent, since they agreed Theo would begin. But it warms something inside him, the same part that agreed to the oaths in the first place, that Theo was willing to come out here in front of an audience and do something that might have humiliated him if no magic appeared.
Not that he has anything to worry about. Harry is as gone on Theo as Theo is gone on him, and they only waited two years (and nineteen days) to bond because Theo wanted to do it on the winter solstice and Harry honestly wasn’t ready during their first two.
Theo’s eyes lock on him, and if the crowd makes noise after that, Harry can’t hear it. He’s too busy listening to Theo’s soft words.
“I will make the oath to treasure you, to never misuse you, to give you joy as I give it to myself, to defend your life as I would defend my own…”
It’s a long chain of promises, and with each one, a curl of ice-blue magic drifts over and wraps around their joined hands, Harry’s right and Theo’s left, until it looks as if they’re wearing gauntlets of icicles. Theo falls silent at last, and Harry squeezes his wrists and begins.
“I will make the oath to treasure you, to never misuse you, to give you joy as I give it to myself, to defend your life as I would defend my own…”
There is the sound of quiet weeping from the audience as the magic winds around Harry’s left hand, Theo’s right, and binds them together. Harry shudders a little from the feeling of the oaths sinking into his magic, but Theo is smiling at him in a way he never has before, free and carefree.
Theo feels protected by these oaths, able to relax around other people who aren’t Harry or his father or closest friends, and that’s enough for Harry. That would be reason enough to swear them just by himself, if that was what Theo wanted.
But Theo wanted to be all in with him, and that is more than enough.
The blue light of the magic flares once more and sinks into their skin. Harry knows that for the rest of his life, he’ll have the sensation of wearing light shackles there, but he doesn’t mind. This is what he chose.
Theo is who he chose. Theo is his fate.
He leans forwards. Theo does, too, and as their lips meet and Theo’s curve in a small smile and the fireworks George planned take off outside the tent, Harry feels something deeper than joy and wilder than love settle into his very bones.
The End.
