lomonaaeren

Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the end of the story. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it.

Chapter Twenty—Awakening to Power

“I wouldn’t get in his way. That’s Potter! You heard about what he did to Malfoy’s mum.”

If Harry had heard those words a few years ago, he would have been upset, the way he was when he heard people calling him the Heir of Slytherin. Now, he just turns around with a pleasant smile. The two boys who were whispering in the corridor behind him, fifth-year Gryffindors Harry vaguely recognizes, cringe away from him.

“And don’t you forget it,” Harry says.

He goes on his way, conscious of Ron’s amusement and Hermione’s disapproval at his shoulders. He doesn’t need to look at them to know their reactions, after all these years.

“Harry, did you need to do that?”

“Did they need to whisper behind me like that? And they wanted to be overheard, or they would have been quieter or not done it right behind me.”

Hermione sighs as they sit down at the Gryffindor table and she picks up the marmalade. “That’s probably true, but they could also just be young and stupid.”

“Then I’m doing my part to make them less stupid. Can’t do anything about the young part. I’ll just have to hope that cures itself.”

Ron laughs out loud as he spoons scrambled eggs onto his plate. “Come on, Hermione, you have to admit the looks on their faces were pretty funny. And Harry’s right, they didn’t need to talk about him right there.”

“We should still think about kindness,” Hermione begins.

Harry tunes out the lecture. Hermione has her faults and foibles just like everyone else, and one of them is believing sincerely in the need for kindness while excusing herself from always practicing it.

He eats mechanically, looking at the Slytherin table now and then. Malfoy is acting happy and chattering away to Zabini, who just looks amused. Harry can’t wait to hear how Theo pulled that off.

Theo walks into the Great Hall a few minutes later, and the whole room seems to inhale.

Part of it is just his perception, Harry’s sure, but other people are craning out of their seats to get a look at Theo, and some of the Slytherins are definitely cringing away. Is it because of what he did to Malfoy? Maybe they think it had to be something really bad, and permanent, to change that much of Malfoy’s demeanor.

Granted, the people from other Houses are probably doing it because Theo is Harry’s boyfriend or something, or because they think Harry dueled Mrs. Malfoy for Theo and they want to see him more closely.

Theo looks around for a moment, and Harry wonders how he’s going to deal with all the attention. Harry has the strong impression that until this year, Theo was the kind of person who prefers to stick to the background.

A smile like a throwing knife darts across Theo’s face. He inclines his head and sweeps towards the Slytherin table like a king. People make room for him immediately, but he chooses to just sit down next to Zabini, and greet Malfoy. Harry can’t hear what Malfoy says at this distance, but he responds with a bright smile.

Yeah, Theo did something bad to him.

Harry sits back with a slight smile for himself. The thought shouldn’t make him hard, especially in the middle of the Great Hall, but he’s done lying to himself about what Theo makes him feel.

“Why is Malfoy talking to him like that?” Ron asks, gaping at the Slytherin table.

“I don’t know,” Harry says, which has the virtue of technical truth. “And close your mouth, Ron, you’ve got egg all over your tongue.”

That makes Ron close his mouth nearly hard enough to choke, which sets off another lecture from Hermione. Harry looks up from his own chewing to find that Theo’s eyes are fixed on him, a slight smile edging up his lips.

Harry looks back, joyful and fearless, and knows that they don’t have to arrange a meeting. Theo will find him later on.

And he will tell Harry what he did to Malfoy, and hopefully, do something about Harry’s erection, too.

*

“Yes, yes, Mr. Nott, you may work with Mr. Potter, if you think that you can keep your mind on your potions!”

Slughorn’s jovial tone is more than a little hollow. His eyes keep going to Draco and back to Theo. He must know that Draco’s general cheeriness is false, but he can’t work out how. He won’t be able to, even if he’s a Legilimens. The Divided Mind Curse has locked away the part of Draco that will scream eternally, and he’ll show nothing but genuine joy and remorse to anyone who looks.

Theo smiles back at his Head of House without much care for what Slughorn will think of him. Slughorn didn’t defend Harry when it mattered. “Yes, sir.”

He sits down next to Harry, who looks up at him with a smile that Theo promptly wants to kiss off his mouth. With an effort, Theo arranges his knives and vials in front of him instead, and then glances at the board to check on the ingredients.

“Are we really going to be able to do this?” Harry mutters next to him.

Theo has an inspiration. Sometimes he does, brushing like a god’s kiss across his mind. He bends down and whispers to Harry, “Keep your mind on potions in the class, and I’ll fuck you after.”

Harry’s hands freeze for a long moment on his knives. Granger casts them a dubious glance from the table she’s sharing with Weasley. Theo just shrugs back at her. He has no quarrel with her, truly. She just doesn’t matter to him enough.

“I—I thought you would need…”

“Months more to recover?”

“Something like that.”

Harry is whispering, too, and Theo lowers his voice to match him. “I decide the pace of my recovery, Harry. I know what they did to me, and I know how I’ve repaid them. And I know who I want, and who helped me, and how much I love him.”

Harry jerks his head up to the point that Theo hears something snap in his neck. His eyes are focused on Theo, devouring and wondering. Theo could fall into them. He could look into them for the rest of his life.

Slughorn clears his throat, because of course he’ll impose class discipline for Harry Potter where he won’t for anyone else. Harry tears his eyes from Theo’s face to smile at their professor, and then looks back at Theo.

“I’m going to need a repetition of that when we’re in private,” Harry breathes.

“You’ll have it. As long as you do sufficiently well on your potion for Slughorn not to regret seating us together.”

Harry smiles, then, his expression that reminds Theo of the hidden wildness in Harry, as deep as the Forbidden Forest’s. He stands up to go to the supply cupboard, and brushes one hand across Theo’s back in passing. Theo is the one to jerk this time. He never thought a touch there, high, near his shoulder, would be enough to make him think about heat and nakedness.

“Let’s see you do the same.”

Theo’s eyes can’t leave Harry’s back and arse as he saunters towards the supply cupboard, even when Granger clears her throat noisily. Then he blinks and turns back to his cauldron, picking up his knife.

He is going to do the best job on everything today. Inside of class and outside of class included.

*

Harry feels as though he’s drowning in anticipation by the time he turns in a potion that is one of the best he’s ever done without the Half-Blood Prince’s book. Slughorn gives him a weak smile as he takes the vial.

“Good job, Harry, my boy. And having Mr. Nott sitting beside you didn’t bother you?”

“Oh, he bothered me a bit, sir, but not the way you mean.”

Slughorn turns red and splutters. Harry grins. After how useless he was in the Malfoy situation, Harry doesn’t care about embarrassing him.

He turns around, and meets Theo’s eyes. Theo also turned in a good potion, probably one better than Harry’s, but he’s better at the class in general, anyway. Theo winks at him and slips out the door.

Harry scurries back to his desk to collect his books. It’ll be torture returning them to Gryffindor Tower, but at least Potions is their last class today and he can go meet Theo after that.

“Harry, are you all right?”

“More than fine, Hermione.”

Hermione sighs a little and glances in the direction Theo went. But whatever she has to say, Harry isn’t waiting to hear it. He waves at his friends and slips out into the corridor, hurrying towards the nearest exit from the dungeons.

Someone grabs his arm as he’s passing a side corridor.

Harry swings around in their hold, in a way that will end up with his wand pressed against their throat, and realizes halfway through why this feels familiar. But he doesn’t stop his movement, and so he’s leaning on Theo’s chest a second later, wand denting the skin above Theo’s pulse. Harry watches that rapid beat.

“Couldn’t wait?” he whispers.

“No.”

Theo’s voice is hoarse, and Harry immediately looks up. Theo’s eyes are wide and dark and open and happy in a way that Harry has never seen them. Theo is finally confident enough to touch him like this, something Harry assumed would take a lot longer given the Amortentia dosing, and he wants Harry to know exactly how he feels.

Harry, knowing what he should do as if he were a Legilimens skimming Theo’s mind, drops his wand into his pocket and leans up to kiss Theo.

Theo grabs his shoulders, and Harry’s books are all over the floor somewhere behind them, and he thinks he can hear the clatter of his wand falling, too, but he doesn’t care. He can’t care, as Theo casts a ward that will prevent anyone from entering or being able to see into this corridor.

Not when it comes to something like this, and he’s desired Theo for eons of feeling.

*

Theo didn’t actually plan for his and Harry’s first time to take place in a dungeon side corridor, but he’s skilled enough at Transfiguration to turn a bit of stone rubble on the floor into a bed. And Harry promptly flings himself on it, the way he’s sometimes flung himself at the Snitch in games.

He rolls on his back and smiles up at Theo, and Theo’s hand is shaking as he reaches out to take the glasses from Harry’s face. He can admit it.

“We can stop as soon as you want,” Harry tells him earnestly. He seems to have decided Theo’s tremors are from fear.

“I just want to savor this.”

Harry turns a slow, rosy color, and then nods. He lies still, arms spread, letting Theo look his fill.

Harry is shorter than most of the other boys in their year, lean, ready to dodge and duel and kill. His body seems too small a container for the strength that Theo knows lives inside him. His hair is its usual dark tumble, but this time, it makes Theo imagine what it’ll look like when they’re done. And his face is so beautiful.

Theo bends down and kisses Harry again, then takes his robe off in one smooth motion, spells off his socks and shoes, and climbs onto the bed with Harry.

Harry is the one who lies still, staring, this time, and Theo arches his neck and turns his head a little, gestures that he knows show off his profile more. Harry smiles, but he doesn’t laugh. His hand comes to rest on the cloth of Theo’s pants, over his cock, slowly tracing.

“You’re so beautiful.”

“You, too.”

Theo’s own voice startles him—so deep, so hungry—but Harry only smiles at him and lies back on the bed, clasping his hands on the pillow above his head that Theo doesn’t even remember Transfiguring. Theo blinks at him.

“You’re not going to undress?”

“I thought you would like that honor.”

Theo would indeed. He wonders how Harry knew. But then he shakes his head and reaches for the buttons on Harry’s robe, watching his face.

He has better things to do than wonder.

*

Theo undresses him gently.

His fingers are little brushes of warmth and pleasure against Harry’s chest as he undoes the buttons, and then as he reaches down and drags off Harry’s shirt. Harry shivers, from heat far more than cold, as Theo bares his chest and strokes over each of his scars, staring at them as if they’re tarot cards that could tell him the future.

Then he kisses Harry again, slides his shoes off, and takes off his pants. Harry is so glad that he didn’t wear trousers under his robes today the way he sometimes does.

Because he’s happy that Theo wants to take his time and savor this, but he also wants to be fucked. It feels like he’s twitching all over from the lack of sex by the time Theo hefts Harry’s cock in his hand.

“I want to watch you come.”

Theo’s voice coils around him like a cobra, sensual and so dark. Harry spread his legs and arches his back, almost involuntarily.

“Before you fuck me?”

“No, while I do it.”

“Trust me, Theo,” Harry says, and he’s working hard not to pant as Theo stares at him, “that is not going to be a problem.”

Theo gives him a savage smile and picks up his own wand from where he must have retrieved it when Harry wasn’t watching. Harry does watch this time, with dazed eyes and shivers, as Theo casts a lubrication charm that coats his cock and fingers. But instead of immediately reaching down to Harry’s arse, he sits back and draws his hand slowly up and down his cock.

His eyes remain on Harry’s the entire time.

It feels almost absurd, how intense Harry feels as he watches. Theo is showing off, turning a little so that Harry can watch the slide of his thumb and the glistening of the lube. His cock is flushed, tapered, and Harry thinks suddenly that that’s going into him, and his arse clenches and he gasps.

Theo observes him for a second before he laughs, a sound like snowfall. “I think I’ve tortured both of us enough,” he says, and pulls his hand away from himself, reaching for Harry’s legs with his free one.

Harry spreads his legs to welcome him in.

*

Theo would never have said that he could have a new experience of heat.

But he’s had two, now, since the term began. The obscene desire of Amortentia burning through his body, trying to burn him into submission. The fear mingled with it, the flaming hatred he felt for his enemies, the fiery fall he only barely avoided, all of those were part of it.

And the other new experience is the heat he feels as he pushes into Harry’s body a few minutes later and meets those sun-bright eyes. Theo has to close his own for a moment.

Like standing in the heart of summer.

When he feels that he might be able to move without immediately spilling all over Harry, he cautiously looks again. Harry is smiling at him, one hand raised so that it hovers above Theo’s shoulder.

“You can touch me,” Theo whispers.

Harry does, and eagerly. Theo does wait a moment to make sure that Harry’s touch won’t ignite the other kind of heat.

But it doesn’t, not that he truly thought it would, and Theo begins to move.

It’s amazing, how good he feels. It’s amazing, his first time with someone he truly desires, loves, whom he would die to protect. Harry continues smiling up at him, even when he shuts his eyes sometimes and gasps.

Theo is bringing him pleasure. Pleasure.

It’s insane, how good he feels.

He lasts much longer than he thought he would, but he lets go at last, with a gasp that wrings itself from him like sunlight. Harry follows him, his arse clenching down and his throat shaking with soft noises that wring more and more from Theo, his hands tightening on Harry, his eyes fastened on him, his body here and for him—

They both collapse at the same time.

Theo runs his fingers softly, idly, over Harry’s face and cheek. Harry turns his head so that he can kiss Theo’s palm.

“I love you,” he says.

“I love you,” Theo breathes back, and words he once thought he would never speak are there, making him feel complete, wanted, held, embraced.

Harry shuts his eyes. Theo cradles him close.

There are challenges to come, he knows that. There will be consequences from at least some people for what Harry did to Mrs. Malfoy. There will be the wariness of Harry’s friends, and maybe attacks on him or Theo from enemies who think the Boy-Who-Lived ought to do as they say. Snape’s portrait might find a way to break the spell Theo put on him. Theo’s father might someday wake from the coma into which he cast himself.

But none of that can diminish the way Theo feels right now.

He loves Harry, and it is a love he chose. He has reclaimed the power that Draco and the rest tried to steal from him.

The sun is rising, at the dawn of their lives, and Theo welcomes this fire with all that’s in him.

The End.