lomonaaeren (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lomonaaeren) wrote2024-08-30 07:51 pm
lomonaaeren) wrote2024-08-30 07:51 pm
Entry tags:
[More Theo/Harry in the World Project]: Lux, R
Title: Lux
Pairings: Harry/Theo, mentions of Ron/Hermione and Ginny/Dean
Content Notes: Ignores the epilogue, fluff, brief mention of past character death, established relationship, references to child abuse and violence
Rating: R
Summary: Harry and Theo’s thoughts on how they found their way to each other and got engaged, and the light that currently fills their world.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “More Theo/Harry in the World Project” series of one-shots. Ashley requested engaged Harry/Theo. The title is the Latin word for light.
Lux
“Wake up, love.”
Theo loved to watch Harry come awake. He stretched his arms all the way above his head, fingers rasping and catching against the pillow while he yawned as if he were trying to swallow a frog. Then he stretched his toes and legs until Theo’s ached with sympathetic pain just watching him. And then he rolled over and smiled at Theo.
That part was always first, after the stretching.
“Good morning, Theo.”
Theo bent down and kissed his lover. Harry’s hand rose, his fingers curling into the hair at the base of Theo’s neck. He traced the old scar there, where Theo had barely escaped someone in their Auror training class determined to kill him and make it look like an accident.
Even Theo didn’t touch the scar all that often. But Harry sought it out every morning, as if to make sure that it stayed closed.
Or as if to make sure that Theo knew he remembered the challenges Theo had survived, to come with him each morning. To this bed.
They lay in a sprawl of sunshine when Theo was done with the kiss, Harry half-dozing. Theo didn’t mind, even though he was always fully awake from the moment he opened his eyes, no tea or Pepper-Up Potion needed. He knew what it meant for Harry to lie on this huge bed with its white counterpane and window next to it with the sunlight pouring through.
He knew about the cupboard. He knew about the bedroom with the bars on the window and the locks on the door. He knew how much it meant to Harry to have an enormous bed in open air, and the ability to go in and out of the door as he pleased. It stood slightly open even now, because Harry wanted it that way.
Theo had had a large enough bedroom growing up, but he had had a small bed and no ability to choose the colors of the walls or the sheets or anything else, given his father’s strict control over everything in Nott House. So he enjoyed this, too, and the enchantment of hot and perfect sunlight on their faces.
Which, at least today, happened to actually match the weather.
“I’m awake,” Harry murmured, not opening his eyes. His fingers wandered up to curl around Theo’s scar again. “When’s breakfast?”
*
Harry enjoyed watching the way Theo ate.
It was such a small thing, but it was also a sign of trust. Harry had noticed quickly, early on, that Theo didn’t like people watching him eat in the eating hall set aside for the Auror trainees. He took only small portions, always ate with neat, quick bites, and vanished from the room as soon as possible.
But Harry could watch him here.
Theo, left to himself or with someone he trusted, would stir his tea with his spoon while he read the Daily Prophet and made fun of the articles. He would linger over the scones Kreacher made. Harry had once thought Kreacher would never want to leave Hogwarts, or Grimmauld Place, but he had been beside himself with joy at the thought of having a new house to decorates.
It had ended up more to Kreacher’s taste in some places than either Harry or Theo’s, but the kitchen was a bright and gleaming place, filled with white wood and brown wood and light. That was enough for Harry.
Theo leaned back in his chair and finished off the last of the scone in front of him. As his hand groped under the paper without lowering it, Harry pushed the plate of chocolate biscuits Kreacher had made that morning towards him.
“Thank you, love,” Theo murmured, still deeply involved in the story about the latest Ministry corruption scandal, and seized a biscuit. A second later, he bit into it and then stopped. “Harry,” he said.
Harry grinned, already awaiting the moment when Theo lowered the paper and scowled at him. “Yes?”
“You know that I don’t eat chocolate in the mornings.” The paper rustled, but didn’t lower.
“Says the man who was sneaking chocolate biscuits nonstop a fortnight ago when I got up after you and you didn’t see me.”
Theo jerked the paper down, flushed all over his face. It made a small scar near his temple stand out more. Harry knew that scar had come from his father flinging a paperweight at him. He knew so many things, and he loved so many things, about Theo. “You saw that?”
“Of course I did.”
“But you yawned and made a lot of noise coming down the stairs!”
“The second time. I went back up and came down again to give you a chance not to show me you were eating chocolate biscuits if you didn’t want to.”
Theo struggled silently for a moment. Harry stole a biscuit and ate it himself, noting the way that Theo’s eyes dropped to Harry’s throat when he swallowed. Harry smiled and leaned back in his chair, allowing Theo to get a glimpse of his neck all he wanted.
“I—made a rule for myself when I was younger,” Theo said. “My father mocked me for eating sweets in the morning. He said it was something only a child would do.”
“You were a child,” Harry said, and softened his voice as Theo stared helplessly at him. “But you sneaked out to eat biscuits anyway, didn’t you?”
Theo nodded, in a way that made it seem as if the muscles of his face had clenched up.
“I know that, and you know that, and your father is dead,” Harry said, and reached across the table. Theo grabbed his hand hard enough to hurt, but Harry didn’t wince, staring straight at his lover instead. “You can forgive the child you used to be, and eat chocolate biscuits in the morning all you want. Without sneaking them.”
Theo nodded again after a moment. Then he smiled wryly. “I was congratulating myself earlier on how much we knew about each other, and it seems that we didn’t know some important things after all.”
“Now we both know them,” Harry said softly. “You can eat chocolate biscuits at any time of the day, and I’ll be happy to let you explain anything.”
Theo’s hand tightened even more, and Harry sat with him there in the light.
*
“Where’s Potter, Nott?”
Theo kept his head ducked for a moment so that he could finish reading to the end of the sentence in his report. He did that both because it was better for his concentration and because he knew it would irritate Kayla Yaxley. Then he lifted his head and gave her a dazzling smile. “Liaising with the goblins.”
Yaxley narrowed her eyes at him. Theo had heard people in Slytherin talk about beautiful she was—she’d been two years older—but he had never seen it. She squinted all the time. “That doesn’t make sense. He broke into Gringotts during the war.”
“Yes, and it pleases the goblins to make him their liaison for that reason, when they can. I never claimed to understand.”
“Well, he was the one I wanted to talk to.”
“I suppose you’ll have to wait.”
Yaxley regarded him for long enough that Theo thought—hoped—she would storm off. Instead, she shook her head and took the visitor’s chair in their office, which Weasley occupied most of the time. “What’s it like, being the lover of a half-blood?”
“What’s it like, being so stupid that you insult the most famous wizard in Britain on a regular basis?”
“You remember what he cost us!”
“What he cost you. I’m sorry, I don’t particularly want to live in a country controlled by someone so mad for murder and torture that he inflicted them on his own followers.”
“We would have had—”
Harry swept through the doorway of the office, aiming a smile at Theo and a raised eyebrow at Yaxley. “Presumably you’re here to talk to me instead of argue with Theo,” he said, and flopped into the chair behind his desk. It was incredible how he could sprawl there and yet look completely calm and in control. Theo loved him all the more for it. “Come on, what is it?”
Yaxley shot a narrow look at Theo. “Perhaps we should discuss this in private, Auror Potter.”
“Is this related to the Urania case?”
“No.”
Harry sighed and shook his head, but glanced at Theo as he stood again. “Then I suppose I’ll be back for lunch. Do you want me to bring you a sandwich, or do you want to leave the office and go somewhere?”
“Leave the office. Come here before you go, though.”
Harry walked over with a curious look on his face, which he really should have known better than to have. After all, it just tempted Theo to do what he did, which was to grab the back of Harry’s neck and haul him down into a kiss.
Harry gasped, and then went along with a will. They practically snogged for a moment before Yaxley cleared her throat.
“Oh, right, you’re still here,” Theo said, not bothering to hide the thick disappointment in his voice, or the huskiness, as he drew back from Harry. Harry was licking his lips and staring at Theo with such wonder that Theo shot another smile at Yaxley.
“If you would please, Auror Potter.”
Harry didn’t turn to look at Yaxley. His burning eyes were fixed on Theo, and his expression said how much he wished he could continue what they’d just started instead of going off somewhere with Yaxley.
But, in the end, he jerked his head down sharply and murmured, “I’ll see you at noon,” and turned and left. Yaxley trailed after him, giving Theo a sneer over her shoulder.
Theo waved at her with lazy fingers, which made her snarl and Theo grin as he turned back to his report.
It was always good to remind the people who despised Harry but wanted to profit off his fame somehow that Theo was in the center of Harry’s life and would guard him from anything they tried to do.
And getting to kiss Harry in front of those people was—
Theo cast a charm that would dampen his arousal, but he did nothing about the smile on his face.
It was good.
*
“Nott couldn’t make it tonight?”
Harry laughed and shook his head as he settled into the chair Ron and Hermione had saved for him in the Leaky Cauldron. “He probably could have come, but he’s determined to crack that code Greyback is leaving behind near the bodies of his victims.”
Ron grimaced and shook his head. “Don’t know how you deal with all that shit, mate.”
“It helps to have Theo as a partner.”
Ron looked a little stricken. “I wish I could have—”
Harry held up a hand. Ron felt guilty for leaving Auror training to help George run the joke shop, but it didn’t matter to Harry. He had seen how the rules and the Dark magic they’d had to deal with on a daily basis even in training wore down on Ron and crushed his sense of humor and his spirit. “No, it was better for you to leave. You’re doing what makes you happy, and I’m doing what makes me happy.”
“Screwing Theo,” Hermione muttered into her drink.
Harry snorted. Hermione had already had a little too much, then. “Hard day in the Creature Regulation mines?”
“It’s ridiculous, Harry!” Hermione’s waving hand nearly knocked over Ron’s Firewhisky, which he scrambled to rescue with a yelp. “There’s all these laws from four centuries ago that they want us to follow when it comes to house-elves, as if we couldn’t get better results by talking to them…”
Harry listened and made sympathetic noises, while Ron drank and shook his head. They had all, in their own ways, found out the world was harder to change than they’d believed when they were in school and it seemed to be mostly a matter of killing Voldemort. Hermione was still fighting for house-elf rights, and Harry had made strides in making sure that Muggleborns and other people weren’t simply turned away when they came to talk about purebloods with the Aurors, but it was difficult.
Theo made it better, though. He made everything better.
“—and they want to paint all werewolves green—”
“What?” Harry asked, snapping his attention back to the conversation.
“Told you he wasn’t paying attention,” Hermione said, holding out her hand, and Ron sighed and flipped a Sickle at her.
“Hey!”
“Harry, mate, when you get that look on your face, you’re never paying attention to the conversation. You’re thinking about Theo.”
Harry sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Yeah, well. It’s hard not to, you know?”
“It’s incredible how much you coo over each other even years after you got together.” Ron pointed a finger at him. “You have to admit that Hermione and I were never that bad.”
“What about the birds in sixth year?”
“We agreed not to mention the birds,” Hermione said quickly.
Harry laughed again, and let it go. That was something he and Ron and Hermione had all had to learn how to do as they got older, too. Some things weren’t worth fighting about.
Some things would have been, but Theo had taken great glee in donating almost all his father’s money to the legal reparations fund trying to make sure that Muggleborns condemned to Azkaban during the war got free and got their property back, including new wands if their old ones had been snapped or confiscated. That had persuaded Hermione to accept him more than any posturing about apologizing would have.
Ron had been easier. He’d simply shrugged when he heard that Harry and Theo were dating and said, “Well, if you want him, mate. At least he isn’t Malfoy.”
Harry had nodded, even though Malfoy was hardly Malfoy these days—he had never apologized, but he had stayed out of the way—and let it go. His friends and his fiancé got along, and that was all he could ask for.
Ron, as if sensing the direction of Harry’s thoughts, leered at him and said, “So when’s the wedding?”
“Don’t let Theo hear you say that,” Harry said solemnly, and tried to steal Ron’s Firewhisky. Ron slapped his hand away without even looking.
“Oh, right, it’s a bonding, yeah?”
“What’s the difference?” Hermione asked. She’d been drinking quietly, probably brooding on the wrongs of house-elves, but now she leaned forwards and slopped some of her drink down the table. Harry shook his head and cast a Cleaning Charm.
“A bonding is like a wedding with more magical steps. We’ll be bonded at mind, heart, and soul, so we can hear each other’s thoughts and feel each other’s emotions. And when we die, we’ll reincarnate together.”
Ron stared at Harry over the top of his mug, his mouth slightly open. Harry looked smugly at him. “Did you have something to say, Ron?”
“Only that that’s mental.”
“Why?” Hermione asked. She must really be drunk if she wasn’t interrupting with questions about what exactly the bonding meant. She leaned back, cradling her mug close, as she looked between them.
“Because it means that when one of them dies, the other does, too!”
Hermione gasped and whipped around to face Harry. “Oh, Harry, no! You can’t! What’s going to happen if—you’re both Aurors, it’s a dangerous career! Why in the world would you do a bonding like that?”
Harry snorted a little as Hermione’s eyes fixed appealingly on him. “I wouldn’t want to live without Theo anyway. But the bonding isn’t going to be exactly the kind Ron is worrying about. We could live past each other’s death.”
“Oh, good.”
Harry smiled politely at his friends. He didn’t mention that they would live past the moment of each other’s death only if they wanted to.
If they wanted to punish the enemies who had taken the other one away, for instance.
Harry was still the man his friends had known, in many ways. But he was also the man he had become by loving Theo, and he saw no reason to trouble his friends with how dark the waters he swam in were.
Not all that dark to him, honestly, as long as they were illuminated by the light of Theo’s presence.
*
When Harry was riding Theo, his head tilted back, his eyes closed, his body clenching around the cock inside him, he glowed.
At least to Theo’s eyes as he lay on the bed, part of him bathing in the warm pleasure, but part of him entranced by his fiancé.
How he shone. His skin had an undertone of gold that only came out during these moments, in the soft firelight or lamplight they kept beside their bed, and his hair had tinges of red, and his soft wet gasps made Theo’s hips surge up towards the sound like a moth spiraling towards the light.
Beautiful. Deadly. Burning.
But all Theo’s.
Theo had seen that light shining in Harry back when he was Potter, their first day of Auror training class. Potter had glanced at him, and Theo could see the hard radiance in his eyes, like sparks struck from a heated diamond.
He had walked towards Potter, hardly realizing what he was doing, and halted perhaps a meter away. Potter had watched him without the light in his eyes softening at all.
“Do you want to partner for the day?” Theo had asked, and started. He hadn’t recognized his own voice, deep and husky in a way that he hadn’t even sounded when he’d just been snogging one of his school boyfriends.
“Why?”
“I’d like to.”
Potter had tilted his head in what wasn’t really a bow, more an acceptance, and then he’d smiled, too. “Yes, all right. It ought to be interesting to duel someone I’ve never dueled.”
Theo had smiled, and then they’d turned to face the front of the classroom as the Auror instructor started to speak.
Theo shuddered with the remembered warmth, and the love and the light slamming through him, as he slammed up into Harry and released. Harry gave a thick gasp and did the same thing a second later, soaking Theo’s stomach. Theo waited until Harry drooped down towards him, and then kissed him.
Harry kissed him back, strong and lazy at the same time, like a great coiled python. Theo smiled into the kiss and drew Harry closer.
They’d been like that. Now they were like this. And their souls would be joined beyond breaking soon.
Theo fell asleep thinking of that.
*
Harry cupped his hand around Theo’s cheek and watched him breathe. Theo’s face was soft and peaceful with slumber. He would hate to hear that description if Harry told him.
Harry smiled. I should tell him.
But maybe in private.
Theo, sprawled on the bed with his hands curled in the sheets, looked so much like the fellow Auror trainee Harry had met on the first day of class. He was still pale, still long-legged, still broad-shouldered, still grey-eyed and dark-haired. But Harry had learned to see the light that lived beneath his skin, and he would never surrender it.
Theo was—
He had seemed so alive as they dodged around each other, their wands sparking with the few spells they were allowed to cast, his lips parted in a delighted laugh. He had ducked under Harry’s guard that first day and come to a halt with his wand resting in the hollow of Harry’s throat.
“I win!” he’d declared.
“Look down,” Harry had advised him, and he’d relished the way Theo’s eyes had widened when he realized that Harry’s wand was resting right on his groin.
But he hadn’t sulked like Malfoy would have or even some of the Gryffindors. He hadn’t been afraid or intimidated the way that some other people would have been, either. He’d looked at Harry with his eyes sparking, and although the instructor had called their attention back right then and begun to dissect the duels, Harry hadn’t known it wouldn’t be the last time they partnered.
Nor, as Theo made it clear before the end of the week, with the number of remarks he made about Harry’s wand and his groin, would the trainee class be the only time they saw each other.
They’d argued constantly, had glorious sex, fought it out about pureblood politics (which Theo thought were bollocks, but more because they would have been impossible to enact than because of moral principles like Harry’s), had more sex, broken up more than once, had uneasy meetings with the Weasley family and the only one of Theo’s cousins he could stand and a few of his Slytherin friends, and once separated for three months. Harry had really thought that would be the end of it, and from the way that Ron and Hermione had tried to comfort him, they’d thought it would be, too.
But Harry had woken up to the whoosh of his Floo at three in the morning, and discovered Theo standing in the middle of the sitting room, waiting. The instant he saw Harry, he’d strode towards him and caged Harry against the wall with his arms.
“I thought I could live without you, but I can’t,” he’d said, his shadow stretching long on the floor behind him in the firelight, and then he’d kissed Harry desperately, his fingers winding around his neck and into his hair.
Harry had kissed him back and taken him to bed, where Theo had fucked him with a light hovering overhead as if he couldn’t bear for either of them to be in darkness, and the next day, he’d proposed.
Now, Harry couldn’t imagine that they’d ever be apart.
He laid his hand on Theo’s chest, feeling the steady thrum of his lover’s heart beneath his palm, and closed his eyes, drifting off into a long dream of bonding and of firelight on Theo’s face in the years to come.
The End.
Pairings: Harry/Theo, mentions of Ron/Hermione and Ginny/Dean
Content Notes: Ignores the epilogue, fluff, brief mention of past character death, established relationship, references to child abuse and violence
Rating: R
Summary: Harry and Theo’s thoughts on how they found their way to each other and got engaged, and the light that currently fills their world.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “More Theo/Harry in the World Project” series of one-shots. Ashley requested engaged Harry/Theo. The title is the Latin word for light.
Lux
“Wake up, love.”
Theo loved to watch Harry come awake. He stretched his arms all the way above his head, fingers rasping and catching against the pillow while he yawned as if he were trying to swallow a frog. Then he stretched his toes and legs until Theo’s ached with sympathetic pain just watching him. And then he rolled over and smiled at Theo.
That part was always first, after the stretching.
“Good morning, Theo.”
Theo bent down and kissed his lover. Harry’s hand rose, his fingers curling into the hair at the base of Theo’s neck. He traced the old scar there, where Theo had barely escaped someone in their Auror training class determined to kill him and make it look like an accident.
Even Theo didn’t touch the scar all that often. But Harry sought it out every morning, as if to make sure that it stayed closed.
Or as if to make sure that Theo knew he remembered the challenges Theo had survived, to come with him each morning. To this bed.
They lay in a sprawl of sunshine when Theo was done with the kiss, Harry half-dozing. Theo didn’t mind, even though he was always fully awake from the moment he opened his eyes, no tea or Pepper-Up Potion needed. He knew what it meant for Harry to lie on this huge bed with its white counterpane and window next to it with the sunlight pouring through.
He knew about the cupboard. He knew about the bedroom with the bars on the window and the locks on the door. He knew how much it meant to Harry to have an enormous bed in open air, and the ability to go in and out of the door as he pleased. It stood slightly open even now, because Harry wanted it that way.
Theo had had a large enough bedroom growing up, but he had had a small bed and no ability to choose the colors of the walls or the sheets or anything else, given his father’s strict control over everything in Nott House. So he enjoyed this, too, and the enchantment of hot and perfect sunlight on their faces.
Which, at least today, happened to actually match the weather.
“I’m awake,” Harry murmured, not opening his eyes. His fingers wandered up to curl around Theo’s scar again. “When’s breakfast?”
*
Harry enjoyed watching the way Theo ate.
It was such a small thing, but it was also a sign of trust. Harry had noticed quickly, early on, that Theo didn’t like people watching him eat in the eating hall set aside for the Auror trainees. He took only small portions, always ate with neat, quick bites, and vanished from the room as soon as possible.
But Harry could watch him here.
Theo, left to himself or with someone he trusted, would stir his tea with his spoon while he read the Daily Prophet and made fun of the articles. He would linger over the scones Kreacher made. Harry had once thought Kreacher would never want to leave Hogwarts, or Grimmauld Place, but he had been beside himself with joy at the thought of having a new house to decorates.
It had ended up more to Kreacher’s taste in some places than either Harry or Theo’s, but the kitchen was a bright and gleaming place, filled with white wood and brown wood and light. That was enough for Harry.
Theo leaned back in his chair and finished off the last of the scone in front of him. As his hand groped under the paper without lowering it, Harry pushed the plate of chocolate biscuits Kreacher had made that morning towards him.
“Thank you, love,” Theo murmured, still deeply involved in the story about the latest Ministry corruption scandal, and seized a biscuit. A second later, he bit into it and then stopped. “Harry,” he said.
Harry grinned, already awaiting the moment when Theo lowered the paper and scowled at him. “Yes?”
“You know that I don’t eat chocolate in the mornings.” The paper rustled, but didn’t lower.
“Says the man who was sneaking chocolate biscuits nonstop a fortnight ago when I got up after you and you didn’t see me.”
Theo jerked the paper down, flushed all over his face. It made a small scar near his temple stand out more. Harry knew that scar had come from his father flinging a paperweight at him. He knew so many things, and he loved so many things, about Theo. “You saw that?”
“Of course I did.”
“But you yawned and made a lot of noise coming down the stairs!”
“The second time. I went back up and came down again to give you a chance not to show me you were eating chocolate biscuits if you didn’t want to.”
Theo struggled silently for a moment. Harry stole a biscuit and ate it himself, noting the way that Theo’s eyes dropped to Harry’s throat when he swallowed. Harry smiled and leaned back in his chair, allowing Theo to get a glimpse of his neck all he wanted.
“I—made a rule for myself when I was younger,” Theo said. “My father mocked me for eating sweets in the morning. He said it was something only a child would do.”
“You were a child,” Harry said, and softened his voice as Theo stared helplessly at him. “But you sneaked out to eat biscuits anyway, didn’t you?”
Theo nodded, in a way that made it seem as if the muscles of his face had clenched up.
“I know that, and you know that, and your father is dead,” Harry said, and reached across the table. Theo grabbed his hand hard enough to hurt, but Harry didn’t wince, staring straight at his lover instead. “You can forgive the child you used to be, and eat chocolate biscuits in the morning all you want. Without sneaking them.”
Theo nodded again after a moment. Then he smiled wryly. “I was congratulating myself earlier on how much we knew about each other, and it seems that we didn’t know some important things after all.”
“Now we both know them,” Harry said softly. “You can eat chocolate biscuits at any time of the day, and I’ll be happy to let you explain anything.”
Theo’s hand tightened even more, and Harry sat with him there in the light.
*
“Where’s Potter, Nott?”
Theo kept his head ducked for a moment so that he could finish reading to the end of the sentence in his report. He did that both because it was better for his concentration and because he knew it would irritate Kayla Yaxley. Then he lifted his head and gave her a dazzling smile. “Liaising with the goblins.”
Yaxley narrowed her eyes at him. Theo had heard people in Slytherin talk about beautiful she was—she’d been two years older—but he had never seen it. She squinted all the time. “That doesn’t make sense. He broke into Gringotts during the war.”
“Yes, and it pleases the goblins to make him their liaison for that reason, when they can. I never claimed to understand.”
“Well, he was the one I wanted to talk to.”
“I suppose you’ll have to wait.”
Yaxley regarded him for long enough that Theo thought—hoped—she would storm off. Instead, she shook her head and took the visitor’s chair in their office, which Weasley occupied most of the time. “What’s it like, being the lover of a half-blood?”
“What’s it like, being so stupid that you insult the most famous wizard in Britain on a regular basis?”
“You remember what he cost us!”
“What he cost you. I’m sorry, I don’t particularly want to live in a country controlled by someone so mad for murder and torture that he inflicted them on his own followers.”
“We would have had—”
Harry swept through the doorway of the office, aiming a smile at Theo and a raised eyebrow at Yaxley. “Presumably you’re here to talk to me instead of argue with Theo,” he said, and flopped into the chair behind his desk. It was incredible how he could sprawl there and yet look completely calm and in control. Theo loved him all the more for it. “Come on, what is it?”
Yaxley shot a narrow look at Theo. “Perhaps we should discuss this in private, Auror Potter.”
“Is this related to the Urania case?”
“No.”
Harry sighed and shook his head, but glanced at Theo as he stood again. “Then I suppose I’ll be back for lunch. Do you want me to bring you a sandwich, or do you want to leave the office and go somewhere?”
“Leave the office. Come here before you go, though.”
Harry walked over with a curious look on his face, which he really should have known better than to have. After all, it just tempted Theo to do what he did, which was to grab the back of Harry’s neck and haul him down into a kiss.
Harry gasped, and then went along with a will. They practically snogged for a moment before Yaxley cleared her throat.
“Oh, right, you’re still here,” Theo said, not bothering to hide the thick disappointment in his voice, or the huskiness, as he drew back from Harry. Harry was licking his lips and staring at Theo with such wonder that Theo shot another smile at Yaxley.
“If you would please, Auror Potter.”
Harry didn’t turn to look at Yaxley. His burning eyes were fixed on Theo, and his expression said how much he wished he could continue what they’d just started instead of going off somewhere with Yaxley.
But, in the end, he jerked his head down sharply and murmured, “I’ll see you at noon,” and turned and left. Yaxley trailed after him, giving Theo a sneer over her shoulder.
Theo waved at her with lazy fingers, which made her snarl and Theo grin as he turned back to his report.
It was always good to remind the people who despised Harry but wanted to profit off his fame somehow that Theo was in the center of Harry’s life and would guard him from anything they tried to do.
And getting to kiss Harry in front of those people was—
Theo cast a charm that would dampen his arousal, but he did nothing about the smile on his face.
It was good.
*
“Nott couldn’t make it tonight?”
Harry laughed and shook his head as he settled into the chair Ron and Hermione had saved for him in the Leaky Cauldron. “He probably could have come, but he’s determined to crack that code Greyback is leaving behind near the bodies of his victims.”
Ron grimaced and shook his head. “Don’t know how you deal with all that shit, mate.”
“It helps to have Theo as a partner.”
Ron looked a little stricken. “I wish I could have—”
Harry held up a hand. Ron felt guilty for leaving Auror training to help George run the joke shop, but it didn’t matter to Harry. He had seen how the rules and the Dark magic they’d had to deal with on a daily basis even in training wore down on Ron and crushed his sense of humor and his spirit. “No, it was better for you to leave. You’re doing what makes you happy, and I’m doing what makes me happy.”
“Screwing Theo,” Hermione muttered into her drink.
Harry snorted. Hermione had already had a little too much, then. “Hard day in the Creature Regulation mines?”
“It’s ridiculous, Harry!” Hermione’s waving hand nearly knocked over Ron’s Firewhisky, which he scrambled to rescue with a yelp. “There’s all these laws from four centuries ago that they want us to follow when it comes to house-elves, as if we couldn’t get better results by talking to them…”
Harry listened and made sympathetic noises, while Ron drank and shook his head. They had all, in their own ways, found out the world was harder to change than they’d believed when they were in school and it seemed to be mostly a matter of killing Voldemort. Hermione was still fighting for house-elf rights, and Harry had made strides in making sure that Muggleborns and other people weren’t simply turned away when they came to talk about purebloods with the Aurors, but it was difficult.
Theo made it better, though. He made everything better.
“—and they want to paint all werewolves green—”
“What?” Harry asked, snapping his attention back to the conversation.
“Told you he wasn’t paying attention,” Hermione said, holding out her hand, and Ron sighed and flipped a Sickle at her.
“Hey!”
“Harry, mate, when you get that look on your face, you’re never paying attention to the conversation. You’re thinking about Theo.”
Harry sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Yeah, well. It’s hard not to, you know?”
“It’s incredible how much you coo over each other even years after you got together.” Ron pointed a finger at him. “You have to admit that Hermione and I were never that bad.”
“What about the birds in sixth year?”
“We agreed not to mention the birds,” Hermione said quickly.
Harry laughed again, and let it go. That was something he and Ron and Hermione had all had to learn how to do as they got older, too. Some things weren’t worth fighting about.
Some things would have been, but Theo had taken great glee in donating almost all his father’s money to the legal reparations fund trying to make sure that Muggleborns condemned to Azkaban during the war got free and got their property back, including new wands if their old ones had been snapped or confiscated. That had persuaded Hermione to accept him more than any posturing about apologizing would have.
Ron had been easier. He’d simply shrugged when he heard that Harry and Theo were dating and said, “Well, if you want him, mate. At least he isn’t Malfoy.”
Harry had nodded, even though Malfoy was hardly Malfoy these days—he had never apologized, but he had stayed out of the way—and let it go. His friends and his fiancé got along, and that was all he could ask for.
Ron, as if sensing the direction of Harry’s thoughts, leered at him and said, “So when’s the wedding?”
“Don’t let Theo hear you say that,” Harry said solemnly, and tried to steal Ron’s Firewhisky. Ron slapped his hand away without even looking.
“Oh, right, it’s a bonding, yeah?”
“What’s the difference?” Hermione asked. She’d been drinking quietly, probably brooding on the wrongs of house-elves, but now she leaned forwards and slopped some of her drink down the table. Harry shook his head and cast a Cleaning Charm.
“A bonding is like a wedding with more magical steps. We’ll be bonded at mind, heart, and soul, so we can hear each other’s thoughts and feel each other’s emotions. And when we die, we’ll reincarnate together.”
Ron stared at Harry over the top of his mug, his mouth slightly open. Harry looked smugly at him. “Did you have something to say, Ron?”
“Only that that’s mental.”
“Why?” Hermione asked. She must really be drunk if she wasn’t interrupting with questions about what exactly the bonding meant. She leaned back, cradling her mug close, as she looked between them.
“Because it means that when one of them dies, the other does, too!”
Hermione gasped and whipped around to face Harry. “Oh, Harry, no! You can’t! What’s going to happen if—you’re both Aurors, it’s a dangerous career! Why in the world would you do a bonding like that?”
Harry snorted a little as Hermione’s eyes fixed appealingly on him. “I wouldn’t want to live without Theo anyway. But the bonding isn’t going to be exactly the kind Ron is worrying about. We could live past each other’s death.”
“Oh, good.”
Harry smiled politely at his friends. He didn’t mention that they would live past the moment of each other’s death only if they wanted to.
If they wanted to punish the enemies who had taken the other one away, for instance.
Harry was still the man his friends had known, in many ways. But he was also the man he had become by loving Theo, and he saw no reason to trouble his friends with how dark the waters he swam in were.
Not all that dark to him, honestly, as long as they were illuminated by the light of Theo’s presence.
*
When Harry was riding Theo, his head tilted back, his eyes closed, his body clenching around the cock inside him, he glowed.
At least to Theo’s eyes as he lay on the bed, part of him bathing in the warm pleasure, but part of him entranced by his fiancé.
How he shone. His skin had an undertone of gold that only came out during these moments, in the soft firelight or lamplight they kept beside their bed, and his hair had tinges of red, and his soft wet gasps made Theo’s hips surge up towards the sound like a moth spiraling towards the light.
Beautiful. Deadly. Burning.
But all Theo’s.
Theo had seen that light shining in Harry back when he was Potter, their first day of Auror training class. Potter had glanced at him, and Theo could see the hard radiance in his eyes, like sparks struck from a heated diamond.
He had walked towards Potter, hardly realizing what he was doing, and halted perhaps a meter away. Potter had watched him without the light in his eyes softening at all.
“Do you want to partner for the day?” Theo had asked, and started. He hadn’t recognized his own voice, deep and husky in a way that he hadn’t even sounded when he’d just been snogging one of his school boyfriends.
“Why?”
“I’d like to.”
Potter had tilted his head in what wasn’t really a bow, more an acceptance, and then he’d smiled, too. “Yes, all right. It ought to be interesting to duel someone I’ve never dueled.”
Theo had smiled, and then they’d turned to face the front of the classroom as the Auror instructor started to speak.
Theo shuddered with the remembered warmth, and the love and the light slamming through him, as he slammed up into Harry and released. Harry gave a thick gasp and did the same thing a second later, soaking Theo’s stomach. Theo waited until Harry drooped down towards him, and then kissed him.
Harry kissed him back, strong and lazy at the same time, like a great coiled python. Theo smiled into the kiss and drew Harry closer.
They’d been like that. Now they were like this. And their souls would be joined beyond breaking soon.
Theo fell asleep thinking of that.
*
Harry cupped his hand around Theo’s cheek and watched him breathe. Theo’s face was soft and peaceful with slumber. He would hate to hear that description if Harry told him.
Harry smiled. I should tell him.
But maybe in private.
Theo, sprawled on the bed with his hands curled in the sheets, looked so much like the fellow Auror trainee Harry had met on the first day of class. He was still pale, still long-legged, still broad-shouldered, still grey-eyed and dark-haired. But Harry had learned to see the light that lived beneath his skin, and he would never surrender it.
Theo was—
He had seemed so alive as they dodged around each other, their wands sparking with the few spells they were allowed to cast, his lips parted in a delighted laugh. He had ducked under Harry’s guard that first day and come to a halt with his wand resting in the hollow of Harry’s throat.
“I win!” he’d declared.
“Look down,” Harry had advised him, and he’d relished the way Theo’s eyes had widened when he realized that Harry’s wand was resting right on his groin.
But he hadn’t sulked like Malfoy would have or even some of the Gryffindors. He hadn’t been afraid or intimidated the way that some other people would have been, either. He’d looked at Harry with his eyes sparking, and although the instructor had called their attention back right then and begun to dissect the duels, Harry hadn’t known it wouldn’t be the last time they partnered.
Nor, as Theo made it clear before the end of the week, with the number of remarks he made about Harry’s wand and his groin, would the trainee class be the only time they saw each other.
They’d argued constantly, had glorious sex, fought it out about pureblood politics (which Theo thought were bollocks, but more because they would have been impossible to enact than because of moral principles like Harry’s), had more sex, broken up more than once, had uneasy meetings with the Weasley family and the only one of Theo’s cousins he could stand and a few of his Slytherin friends, and once separated for three months. Harry had really thought that would be the end of it, and from the way that Ron and Hermione had tried to comfort him, they’d thought it would be, too.
But Harry had woken up to the whoosh of his Floo at three in the morning, and discovered Theo standing in the middle of the sitting room, waiting. The instant he saw Harry, he’d strode towards him and caged Harry against the wall with his arms.
“I thought I could live without you, but I can’t,” he’d said, his shadow stretching long on the floor behind him in the firelight, and then he’d kissed Harry desperately, his fingers winding around his neck and into his hair.
Harry had kissed him back and taken him to bed, where Theo had fucked him with a light hovering overhead as if he couldn’t bear for either of them to be in darkness, and the next day, he’d proposed.
Now, Harry couldn’t imagine that they’d ever be apart.
He laid his hand on Theo’s chest, feeling the steady thrum of his lover’s heart beneath his palm, and closed his eyes, drifting off into a long dream of bonding and of firelight on Theo’s face in the years to come.
The End.