lomonaaeren

Harry kept thinking there was no way it would work. After all, Adrian was a pureblood, and he admitted that he’d only been to the Muggle world once or twice. It wouldn’t work, Harry told himself as Uncle Vernon tossed Harry and his trunk into the car.

And then, when Uncle Vernon had stopped to let people cross the street and was scowling horribly out the window at them, it worked.

Harry’s car door abruptly opened. He swung his head around, his own mouth open. But he could see the handle of a broom sticking out from underneath his Invisibility Cloak, which he’d lent to Adrian, and then Adrian’s face flashed.

“Come on, quick!”

Luckily, the last people crossing the street in front of Uncle Vernon were little kids who were playing some game that involved screaming and spinning and running in circles. Uncle Vernon was too busy yelling and honking the horn to pay attention. Harry dodged out of the door with his trunk and Hedwig’s cage, slammed it shut, and scrambled onto the broom.

There were a few horrible mad moments when Adrian was trying to fit both of them—all of them—under the Cloak and fly away at the same time. Harry thought they must surely be seen. But all the Muggles in sight were looking at the children in the street, laughing at the children, or chasing them.

They climbed.

Harry leaned back and laughed. Adrian grinned at him and flew behind a house into a garden that looked overgrown and mostly deserted. When he landed, Harry slid off the broom and started laughing again.

“I can’t believe it worked, you madman!” Harry shouted.

“It nearly didn’t, trying to control the broom when I couldn’t see it was nearly impossible—”

“It worked! You do realize that we’re going to have to Disillusion Hedwig and the trunk on the way back?”

“Why? She can fly to my house, and we’ll shrink the cage and the trunk.”

Harry bent over at the waist, still laughing, tears pouring down his face. Adrian grabbed him and hugged him, holding him close as Harry’s laughter turned to desperate sobs, and he clutched at his boyfriend and held him close.

“Told you I wouldn’t leave you there,” Adrian whispered.

“Uncle Vernon might tell someone…”

“Do you really think he will?”

After a minute of thinking, Harry shook his head. Yes, Adrian was right. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia would be relieved that he wasn’t with them for the summer, and also intimidated at the thought of what the “freaks” might do to them for losing Harry. They didn’t have an owl, either, if Hedwig wasn’t there.

No, Harry could go with Adrian, and stay in the place on the Pucey property that Adrian had told him about, and this summer was going to be loads better than the last three had been, even if Harry had to hide from Adrian’s family.

“Let’s go.”

“Let me do one thing first.”

Harry looked at Adrian curiously, but Adrian leaned close to Harry and kissed him, his hand rising so that his fingers stroked softly through Harry’s hair. Harry shuddered and pressed close, and they might have got distracted if Hedwig hadn’t started making disapproving noises in her cage.

Adrian pulled back and laughed, and then opened the door. Hedwig took to the air immediately, heading for the horizon so determinedly that Harry might have been worried if he hadn’t remembered how she’d found him in the Leaky Cauldron after he blew up Aunt Marge.

“Come here, then.”

They draped the Cloak over them both with a bit of maneuvering, and Adrian cast a Disillusionment Charm to blur the bits of them that stuck out. Then they took off.

Harry leaned back against Adrian’s chest and closed his eyes. Adrian’s arms were firm around him, and he breathed in and out, slowly.

He wasn’t going home, but that didn’t matter. He was with Adrian, and that was what mattered most right now.

*

Years ago, Adrian’s parents had built him a small house on their property, when he’d said that he wanted to be by himself after an argument with his brothers. The house was still there, complete with a little window, a bedroom, a bathroom that had working Plumbing Charms on the small loo, and a sitting room with chairs that Adrian had Transfigured to match Harry’s size.

The building itself was a wooden one at such a distance from the Puceys’ house (called Athena’s Rest) that no one would notice Harry was there as long as he didn’t step outside without the Invisibility Cloak. Adrian’s personal house-elf, Holly, who was loyal to Adrian alone, would bring him his meals.

Adrian apologized while Harry stood in the house’s doorway and gaped around. “It’s not much, and you have to stay hidden, but you can use your wand here, and—”

Harry spun around and hugged him. “It’s more than I would have had at the Dursleys,” he said, his voice low and fervent. “I would have had to stay hidden most of the time at Privet Drive, too.”

“Privet Drive. What a stupid name for a house.”

“Oh, that was the street. Muggle houses don’t have names.”

“What? Why not?”

Instead of explaining that, Harry preferred to kiss Adrian instead. Adrian kissed enthusiastically back, and the names of Muggle houses were forgotten.

If Harry called the little wooden house “Sanctuary” in his mind, it didn’t need to bother anybody.

*

“They aren’t telling me anything in their letters.”

“Do they say why?”

Harry sighed and lay back against the pillow on his small bed. Small, but still more comfortable than the one in Dudley’s second bedroom. He smiled at Adrian. “Something about safety, and how the letters might be intercepted.”

“I’d like to see someone take a letter from your owl, really.”

Hedwig, sitting on a perch in the corner of the room, gave a smug hoot. She approved of Adrian, and had already nipped at his ears and groomed his hair the way she had only ever done with Harry.

“Yeah, but Dobby managed, so—”

“What?”

“Didn’t I tell you about Dobby?” Now that Harry thought about it, maybe he hadn’t. Adrian had only talked about the basilisk when he visited Harry in the hospital wing at the end of his second year, and they hadn’t talked about it since, really. Adrian didn’t seem to want to dwell on the times Harry had nearly died, and neither did Harry, so that was fair.

“No. That sounds like a house-elf’s name. Where is he? You shouldn’t have suffered so much with a house-elf looking after you.”

It took Harry a while to explain Dobby, the interference with his post, and the way that Harry kind-of-accidentally-but-not-really freed Dobby from Lucius Malfoy. Adrian listened, and laughed a little, but most of the time, he looked angry.

“You shouldn’t have had to go through that,” he said, voice very low.

“But I’m here now.”

“You are. But it doesn’t make your suffering right.”

Harry didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t think anyone had ever said anything like it to him. But when in doubt, he could kiss Adrian, and Adrian always responded enthusiastically, and there was that.

Honestly, as the summer went on, his biggest regret was that they couldn’t play Quidditch without being caught by Adrian’s parents.

*

Or that was his biggest regret until Adrian reported that his father had found two Dementors prowling near the wards. He’d seen them off, of course, but Adrian’s face was disturbed.

“You think they were here for me?” Harry asked. “Then why hasn’t Dumbledore or someone come to get me?”

“The Dementors might be told to find a particular person and eat their soul, and they would travel to wherever that person was. It happened with Sirius Black, after all.” Adrian shot Harry a heavy look. “But Dumbledore wouldn’t necessarily know anything about it unless he has a person in the office that controls the Dementors.”

“And with the way the Ministry’s turned against him, that’s not likely.”

“And against you.”

Harry shrugged. He didn’t care as much about the papers calling him mental and a cheater as Adrian did. According to Adrian, his parents were the most shallow opportunists to ever exist, and they would turn on Harry and give him to the Ministry if they thought it would gain them something.

Harry didn’t think that was the real reason Adrian was upset, but he didn’t need to spell everything out.

“Someone could have sent them after you.”

“Fudge? Surely there’s not that many people with direct control over the Dementors.”

“No. The Minister, the Head Auror, the Director of the DMLE, and the Minister’s Undersecretary.”

“I don’t think I’ve met any of them except Fudge.”

“But one of them could have done it if they wanted to silence you about the Dark Lord being back, or if they thought it would please Fudge.”

Harry shrugged and sighed and picked up his History textbook. It was more interesting than Binns. “Not much we can do, either way.”

“We could figure it out so we could destroy them first.”

Harry gaped a little at Adrian. He’d never heard his boyfriend talk about destroying anything except the badges that Malfoy had been making. (And that had been spontaneous). Adrian just stared stolidly back at him.

“You—why would you want to do that?”

“To keep them from destroying you.”

Adrian said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and Harry found himself relaxing. Yes, he could see where Adrian would have got that impression, even if he was wrong about the way Harry wanted to handle it.

“Why don’t we wait until something else happens, and see if we even need to do something? It’s not like this person would be able to send Dementors to Hogwarts. Maybe they’ll give up.”

Adrian’s extremely skeptical expression said what he thought of that, but Harry kissed him, and they found better things to do with their time.

*

“Does this count as something happening?”

Adrian had managed to fall into step beside Harry on their way out of the Great Hall, where Umbridge had just been introduced as the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. Harry sighed a little and kept his eyes forwards, working his way casually to the end of the Gryffindor line and back.

It wasn’t like he didn’t know where the Tower was, or like he really wanted to spend time around his roommates right now. Seamus had been glaring at him in a way that Harry thought meant he believed the stories in the paper.

He and Adrian slipped into the shadows of a nearby alcove, and Adrian formed fists with his hands, scowling. Harry shook away thoughts of better things for those hands to be doing. It would only distract them right now.

“Yeah, this isn’t great.”

“You think she’s here to reinforce the Ministry propaganda?”

“Probably.”

Adrian closed his eyes and stood there for a second. Then he said, “You have to try not to provoke her.”

“Er.”

“What?”

“I mean, if she starts saying that I murdered Cedric or something, I have to respond, don’t I?”

“Why? You and I know you didn’t, and your friends know you didn’t, and Dumbledore knows you didn’t, and probably the professors who matter the most know you didn’t. Snape’s a lost cause.”

“He’s your Head of House.”

“Yeah, and he favors Slytherins above the other Houses, but that extends to having favorites inside the House. He doesn’t care about me as long as I don’t get into trouble or blow up his classroom. He’ll care even less now, since I didn’t get the OWL mark to make it into NEWT Potions.”

“Shit, Adrian, I’m sorry. We didn’t even discuss your marks, did we?”

“We had other things to discuss.”

Harry flushed and ducked his head a little, but couldn’t stop the smile working its way up his lips. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll try not to provoke Umbridge.”

It turned out that he couldn’t not provoke Seamus, but Harry’s mind was on Adrian and the floating feeling in his stomach, how his legs seemed to barely touch the floor, and he ignored his roommate a lot more thoroughly than he’d be able to do otherwise.

*

“You said you wouldn’t provoke Umbridge.”

“I didn’t say anything for a week!”

Adrian rolled his eyes as he dipped Harry’s hands into the complicated mixture of what seemed to be Essence of Murtlap and another healing potion. “You’re lucky that I had this ready.”

“Did you know she had Blood Quills or something?”

Adrian shook his head. “I thought she would actually use spells, but these are the most powerful potions I know of for healing cursed wounds. And Snape would notice if I stole them from him, but Madam Pomfrey doesn’t check them often, so.”

Harry laughed a little, feeling a lightening in his mind and heart for the first time since that awful detention with Umbridge.

“Do you want to tell McGonagall?”

Harry sighed. “I did that when Umbridge sent me to her with a message. McGonagall just said that I should keep my head down and not provoke Umbridge.”

“In other words, the same thing I told you.”

“Yeah, but she doesn’t kiss me.”

Adrian shot him an oddly shy smile and then stepped back and nodded at where Harry was holding his hand in the bowl of mingled potions. “Keep it there. This classroom is far enough out of the way that no one should come looking for us, but you need at least a couple of hours of healing.”

“That sounds boring.”

“I know a way to liven things up.”

Harry felt his heart beating faster, a flush coming into his cheeks. It seemed sometimes that he would never get over that reaction, but then, he might not want to.

“You can do that without spilling the potions?” he murmured, lifting his face.

“You ought to see me focus, Potter.”