lomonaaeren

Sirius didn’t say anything about staying with him for the summer, even though Harry knew the secret of Grimmauld Place from Christmas. So Harry just left under his Invisibility Cloak from King’s Cross, and he and Adrian Flooed back to the Puceys’ home from the Leaky Cauldron. Adrian had known his parents would be gone for a holiday in Greece.

“The week you come home from Hogwarts?”

Adrian lowered his eyes and shrugged.

Harry reached out and gripped his boyfriend’s arm, holding tightly for a second, to give Adrian a chance to talk if he wanted. He evidently didn’t want, and so Harry pulled back his hand and said, “At least this will give us a chance to train in the open for a while.”

Adrian grinned at him. “I reckon that I’ll be the best seventh-year Chaser the Slytherin team has ever seen.”

Seventh-year. Adrian will be gone when I’m in my seventh one.

Harry swallowed a little. Adrian peered at him. “What’s wrong?”

You know you can still count on him. You can even shelter here if you have to. You know he would never deny you.

Harry smiled back at Adrian. “Nothing you can help. Where’s the practice Snitch?”

*

“I suppose he’s decided that he’s had enough of being quiet.”

Harry nodded and shuddered, eyes locked on the front page of the Prophet. All the articles were about Dementors breeding after escaping the Ministry’s control, breakouts from Azkaban, attacks on Muggles that the Aurors had to cover up, and a few targeted murders. Harry was kind of glad that he’d managed to confirm from Umbridge that she’d been the one to send the Dementors after him. At least he didn’t have to feel bad that she’d been one of the first victims.

Because Voldemort was upset she didn’t cause enough chaos at Hogwarts?

Harry shook his head. He would probably never know.

“Have your friends said anything in their letters?”

“Just that they can’t tell me much. Oh, and Dumbledore wants to take me on that secret—mission, or whatever, that I told you about.”

“Yeah. That you have to go back to your relatives for.”

“He just said that he’d meet me there.”

“He’s going to want to talk to them. There has to be a reason that he’s meeting you there when he never visited before.”

Harry sighed. “You’re probably right, but you actually attended Apparition lessons this time, so you can get me there and back quickly.”

Adrian hesitated, but only muttered, “I don’t like the thought of you going back there at all,” when Harry looked at him expectantly.

Harry leaned against him and hugged him. They were once more in Harry’s little house on the Puceys’ property, looking out the window at a light rain that drummed across the grounds. “I know that you don’t. I don’t myself. But you can stay out of sight, and you can pick me back up when we come back.”

“Do you think he will bring you back?”

“I’m going to insist on it.”

*

“No, sir.”

Dumbledore paused with one hand—the blackened, scarred one that made it look like he’d been struck by lightning—on the knob of the Dursleys’ house. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, Harry.”

“I mean that you don’t need to talk to them, because I haven’t stayed here this summer, or last summer.”

Dumbledore turned to look at him. He seemed astonished, sorrowful, and very old, the way he hadn’t when Harry had first caught sight of his hand. He took a deep breath and then let it out without saying anything.

“Were they so terrible?” he asked at last.

“This year? Maybe they wouldn’t have been. Last summer, when I was grieving Cedric’s death and left completely out of the magical world by my best friends? Yes, sir. They would have been.”

Dumbledore looked at his feet as though considering what wisdom they had to impart to him, and then looked up with a faint nod. “I am sorry, Mr. Potter. I did not consider in full detail the kind of childhood I was giving you.”

It was probably the only apology Harry was ever going to get about it, since the Dursleys wouldn’t give him one. He managed to put a smile on his face as he stood up from where he’d been leaning against the house. “All right, sir. What was the mission that you wanted me to go on?”

Dumbledore looked back at the house for a moment as though he were going to say something else, but then turned to Harry with a broader, more cheerful smile. “There is a professor I hope to persuade to teach at Hogwarts this term. I think that bringing the Boy-Who-Lived along with me will make a stronger argument than any I could make myself…”

*

“And he doesn’t really teach you anything in those lessons.”

“No. We look at memories of—his past.”

“I can bear the name Voldemort.”

Harry blinked at Adrian. They were in a room deep in the dungeons that had evidently been used by the Slytherin Quidditch team as a strategy discussion room at one time. The walls were covered with old chalk drawings and scratches showing the names of plays and fouls and the tattered remnants of posters. “When did that change?”

“When I accepted that my boyfriend probably has no choice but to fight him.”

Adrian reached out slowly and laid his hand atop the scar on Harry’s forehead. Harry sighed and closed his eyes, moving nearer to rest against Adrian. “Our idea about the prophecy is only an idea,” he whispered.

“Dumbledore hasn’t even hinted at its existence?”

“No.”

“What exactly does he want?”

“He wants me to persuade Professor Slughorn to part with a memory,” Harry murmured. “Let him collect me. He said that at the beginning of the year. But he hasn’t told me exactly what memory yet, and—well, the ones that he shows me don’t seem to be connected in any particular way. He keeps telling me that I need to understand Voldemort’s origins before I can fight him.”

“Even though you’ve fought him a lot already?”

“Yeah.”

Adrian was quiet for a few minutes. Harry continued to lean against him. They were still practicing Quidditch when and as they could, but with them both being Captains now and Adrian having to study constantly for his NEWTS, most of the time, they could just meet up for half an hour or so like this.

“There’s that Slug Club thing that Slughorn is putting on,” Adrian said abruptly.

“Yeah. Although I still don’t know what memory Dumbledore wants me to get, so—”

“I didn’t mean that. I mean that I’ve been invited, and so have you.”

“Yeah?”

“So bring me as your date.”

Harry stepped back and stared up at Adrian. Adrian looked back at him with the same unyielding stubbornness he had used when he’d come up with a way for Harry to escape the Dursleys in the summer after his fourth year.

“You—you would want to?”

“I’m sick of the fact that we have to meet in secret. And that I’ll probably never get to go on a date with you while we’re still in Hogwarts if we don’t do at least this one.” Adrian let his hand ripple on Harry’s shoulder. His muscles were even larger than they’d been last year, and more attractive, too. “I’m still upset that I didn’t get to go with you to the Yule Ball.”

“What about your family?”

“I’ll just write them that it would be good to have an opportunity to associate with the Boy-Who-Lived. They’ll eat it up.”

“Okay,” Harry breathed. He was dizzy with delight. He hadn’t realized until Adrian said something how sick he was of it, too. Adrian was a fun secret, but Harry had to make more and more excuses to slip away, and he knew that Ron and Hermione suspected he had a girlfriend. Even that deception had started weighing on him. He wanted to say that he had a boyfriend instead.

Now he would get to.

“Yeah,” he said, smiling at Adrian. “I’ll attend with you on my arm, and it’ll be—”

“Why would I be on your arm? Why wouldn’t you be on mine? I’m older. And taller.”

“And I’m the Boy-Who-Lived, I’ll have you know.”

“Let me kiss that arrogance out of your mouth, then.”

Harry leaned up and gladly let him do so.

*

“Er. Harry?”

Hermione looked a little shocked as Harry walked up to Adrian, who was waiting for him outside the entrance to Slughorn’s party. Adrian bestowed an absent smile on Hermione, but most of his gaze was focused on Harry.

“You did wear the green robes,” he breathed.

“I said that I would. Are you calling me a liar?”

“After all the complaints about Slytherin colors…”

“I did that to give you something to argue about.”

“Harry!”

Harry supposed it would be a little odd for him to be flirting with Adrian right in front of Hermione and her date, Cormac McLaggen—whom Harry thought she’d only brought because she was upset with Ron. He turned around and waved a sheepish hand. “Sorry. This is my date, Hermione. I don’t know if you’ve ever met Adrian Pucey?”

“He’s on the Slytherin Quidditch team!” McLaggen bellowed, before Hermione could respond.

“Wow!” Harry let his eyes widen. “He is? Thanks, McLaggen! I didn’t know!” He turned around and told Adrian very seriously, “You need to work on your Chasing skills.”

Adrian held a solemn face for about a second before he dissolved into cackles. “Are you sure?” he asked around the laughter. “Because I thought I’d practiced them well enough, given what I caught!”

And he trailed a hand down towards Harry’s arse right in front of all of them.

Harry stared at him with his mouth open for just a second before he began to laugh, and his laughter rang out and around the little anteroom.

“Oh, ho, it sounds like someone is having a good time already!” Slughorn leaned out past the curtain that had apparently been draped over the entrance to the space where he was holding the party, and waved a full glass of Firewhisky at them. “Come on in, come on in, you’ll find it delightful!”

He squinted and blinked a bit when he saw Harry standing with Adrian. “Don’t think I know you, my boy,” he said. “Your name?”

Adrian smiled a little tightly. Harry knew he wasn’t taking NEWT Potions. “Adrian Pucey, sir.”

“Ah! Wasn’t it your aunt Melinda who invented the modification to Pepper-Up in 1972?”

“Oh, no, sir. That was a Muggleborn woman who happened to have the same name. No relation. But a brilliant potioneer.”

Harry had told Adrian about the way Slughorn had talked about Lily Evans, trying to prove he wasn’t prejudiced by claiming that he’d thought she was a pureblood. Adrian told the story with a completely straight face, and it might be true—Harry had never heard of Melinda Pucey one way or the other—but he didn’t think it was.

Adrian was a great liar, though.

“Oh.” Slughorn didn’t seem to know what to do with someone who disclaimed a connection with someone famous. “Well, you can still come in!” And with that generous invitation, he disappeared again.

Adrian snorted and held out his arm to Harry. “Shall we?”

“Harry, wait!”

Harry smiled at Hermione and said, “Come on, we should go in and talk about this. Professor Slughorn invited us!” And he followed his boyfriend into the wide, bright, cheerful party, ignoring the way that Adrian was cackling behind him.

It didn’t take long for Hermione to leave McLaggen behind and corner him and Adrian near the table laden with glittering heaps of fruit and biscuits that nearly didn’t look real. “Who is he, really, Harry?”

“Adrian Pucey.” And before Hermione could explode, Harry added, “My boyfriend.”

“Since when?”

“A year and a half ago,” Harry said.

“Minus a few days,” Adrian said, appearing at his side.

“Yes, yes, you and your need to be precise,” Harry said, and smiled up at him. Adrian reached out and put his hand on the back of Harry’s neck, his eyes turning dark.

“Harry, please, I am trying to talk to you!”

Harry sighed and turned away from Adrian, who was making an unsubtle two-fingered gesture at Hermione. Harry hit Adrian in the side with his elbow and asked, “Yes, Hermione? What do you want to know?”

“How long you’ve been dating. Why you chose him. How you met. Why you kept it secret from us. How—” Hermione took a deep breath. “How you knew you were gay.”

“We told you how long we’d been dating,” Adrian said, sounding mild. “And we kept it a secret because it wouldn’t have been good for—” He set his shoulders. “Voldemort to know that we were dating. Or, last year, Umbridge.”

“Or his Housemates,” Harry added. He was still a little worried about the reactions of the other Slytherins, but Adrian was a seventh-year, Quidditch Captain, and good with fire spells, and his family hadn’t been Death Eaters in the war. He was about as well-protected as a Slytherin could be when dating the Boy-Who-Lived.

“You could have told us! We would have kept the secret!”

“You and Ron?”

“Of course!” McLaggen, who had come up behind Hermione, looked offended that they weren’t including him.

“Frankly,” Harry said, “I wanted something just for me last year. And it was Adrian’s choice, and he wasn’t comfortable with you knowing.”

“And,” Adrian cut in, his voice cold enough that Hermione stopped in the middle of opening her mouth, “I wasn’t impressed with the way that you both abandoned him last summer. So I thought that he deserved to have privacy and something just for himself, too.”

Hermione’s face turned pink. She looked back and forth as though someone was going to come up and rescue her.

“What do you mean?” McLaggen demanded.

Adrian turned a glare on McLaggen that Harry had never seem him use, but which made the Gryffindor practically wilt. “I wasn’t talking,” he said slowly, “to you.”

McLaggen spluttered something, but Hermione jumped in again. “I thought you forgave us.”

“Harry did.”

Harry sighed and put an arm around Adrian’s waist, ignoring the way that Hermione’s eyes followed the movement. “I did, but Adrian has a right to express his opinion. And now, we’re going to go enjoy the party. I hope you do, too.”

“Harry, wait!”

“We’ll talk more when I get back to Gryffindor Tower,” Harry said, and shot a smile over his shoulder at her as he hauled Adrian off. “I promise.”

“I wish I could go with you and sit there to tell them all about themselves,” Adrian muttered, as they picked up plates of delicate sandwiches from a table groaning with platters.

“You know I don’t think they’re as much to blame as you do.”

“That’s because you spent the summer with me, and so you weren’t dependent just on them for company.”

Harry shrugged as he sipped from his cup of butterbeer. It was true, but he didn’t see the point of giving ground in arguments with Adrian. “Hey, there’s mistletoe. Shall we go kiss under it?”

Adrian gave him the good kind of dark look, and Harry was the one who dragged him over under the mistletoe and kissed him, feeling Adrian’s arms come around him and hearing the scandalized gasps of several people.

It made him feel good to be alive.