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lomonaaerenThis is the fifth part of a really, really long chapter. Don't start reading here.
Harry gasped and opened his eyes. They stood alone on the Tower now, the stars blazing softly overhead, the memory faded like a dream. He looked cautiously around, wondering if it was possible that there were two traps up here, and they would have to face the second in a fight to the death at any moment.
But then he thought of what might have happened to Draco if he wasn’t there, and accepted that there was more than one way to fight to the death.
Draco let the kiss go reluctantly, leaning heavily on Harry. His eyes were dark in the way that Harry had only seen them in the bedroom so far, and when Draco reached up and pushed shining fingers against his cheek, he gasped, half in shock. It seemed that Draco was aflame with desire, right here, right now.
“Thank you,” Draco whispered.
Harry nodded. “You’re—welcome,” he said, and hoped that he managed to say it without his voice cracking. He had, right? He didn’t want to check to make sure. “And now, don’t you think we should look for the riddle and the keyword?”
“Only keyword, this time.” Draco’s fingers stroked his chest, heading teasingly towards a nipple for a moment, and then pulling back. “This is the last riddle.”
Harry blinked. “Right,” he said. He had known that, too. God, he was out of it, and he didn’t know why. He wasn’t the one who had had to face his past self or have a major revelation about himself today. He pulled Draco upright and looked around for another bubble containing a twist of parchment like the ones that had held the riddles and keywords so far.
One moment it wasn’t there, and then it was. The bubble appeared with a shimmer and a gleam like that of soap bubbles, and Harry bent down to retrieve it. Draco’s hand glanced over his arse on the way. Harry grunted, half in shock, and stood up to glare at him.
Draco shrugged back unapologetically. “You know what I want, Harry,” he said, and his eyes shone like the bubble. “You’ll have to be a little louder about making your own desires heard.”
Harry shook his head and dragged him off the Astronomy Tower. He had questions to ask Dumbledore’s portrait, and a conversation to have with his best friends. And he and Draco needed to decide how they would handle the Ministry’s demand that would doubtless come for them to turn over the keywords to the wards.
And after that…
He and Draco would have to speak. Harry had no idea what he was feeling right now, no idea if he would want to continue their relationship or not. Perhaps, yes, as long as he could feel desire.
But Harry knew how quickly desire could burn out. Every time he had had sex in the last few years, he had felt free of it the moment he had come and his anger had calmed down for the next few months.
Every time except for the last time.
Harry physically hunched to chase the thought away from him. He would get Draco to the bottom of the stairs first, and then he would worry about the other problems.
*
“I told you that it doesn’t matter,” Draco said patiently. He had to wonder at how thick Harry could be. He had seemed smarter than this when they were up on the top of the Tower.
Then he remembered that this was the same man who had let the disapproval of his best friends ruin his life for years, and snorted softly. Yes, well, he could see traces of that man in the stubborn mask that faced him now.
“It’s—” Harry shook his head and stuck out his lower lip. Draco knew that he probably only did it because he was thinking, but it made him want to bite Harry. That, and the memory of those words Harry had spoken on the Tower, were enough to make him hard again. He had to turn his attention to the wall and examine it attentively so he wouldn’t embarrass himself. “Someone has to notice what you’ve done to Covington, Draco. Your potion may be undetectable, but she won’t act like herself.”
“She will if I command her to cover up what happened and act as though she’s normal, except for obeying my instructions,” Draco said. “Here, her reputation as someone who keeps her goals silent and her methods slippery—someone who was in Slytherin—will work against her. They might not understand what she’s doing, but they’ll assume that she has a long-range goal in mind that will benefit herself, no matter what it is. Advocating that they open Hogwarts again and start to hand control over to the school governors and the professors won’t be the strangest thing an employee of the Ministry has done. In fact, I’m sure there are factions in the Ministry who favor that and will support her.”
Harry gave him a faint smile. “I reckon you’re right,” he said. “I never bothered to understand politics much.”
“You don’t need to, now,” Draco said comfortably. “You have me.”
Harry paused, his brow furrowing. Draco sighed in disgust. “Yes, you do. Unless you’re going to let your friends’ opinions influence you even now, and you’ll shove me away so that you can embrace them.” He didn’t care about the jealousy in his voice. That encounter on the Tower ought to have taught Harry that he was important to Draco, which meant Draco didn’t have to expend as much effort on hiding his emotions.
“It’s not—that,” Harry said. “Not exactly.”
“I hope it isn’t some renewal of the shame of being with me, either,” Draco said, as quickly as he could.
“No,” Harry said. “But I have to wonder if you’ll want to be with me when we’ve fucked a few more times.” His face turned red. “I can’t change that much, Draco. I don’t have the sexual experience you do. When you realize that you can find someone else who can match you, when you’ve had me a few times, will you really want to stay with me? That’s the problem with a relationship based primarily on lust.” He tried to laugh, but the laughter caught in his throat.
Draco reached out and put a hand on Harry’s cheek, turning his head back and forth. Harry fell silent but kept his obstinate eyes locked on Draco’s face. Draco wondered for a moment what it would be like to live with such pessimism, hating what you had to do to keep yourself under control and alive, and, when you did finally find a solution to the problem, having to think that it wouldn’t last.
Draco had gone through horrible things in his life, but he had been an optimist compared to Harry. Amusing, when you considered their various histories.
Or perhaps simply understandable.
“Listen to me,” Draco murmured. “I will stay with you. We’ll work on your anger together. We’ll discuss other means of relating than pure sex. I’m willing to believe that it will be difficult, yes. But I am not willing to give up.”
Harry jerked a little, as though he wanted to remove his face from Draco’s palm but didn’t have the physical strength to do so. “I didn’t—I didn’t say I would,” he muttered. He seemed interested in all these subtle distinctions, Draco thought. He didn’t know why. As he saw it, only one thing was of importance, the fact that Harry wanted to go away and Draco didn’t want him to. “But I’ve started out with the best intentions in the world sometimes, always thinking when I walked away from each new bed that I wouldn’t need the fucking again, and something always proved me wrong.”
“That was your problem, then,” Draco said, his hand itching to slap Harry. He managed to keep the urge down, but the temptation filled his lungs like heavy smoke. “You thought this would end. You thought of the fucking as the means to an end and no more. You didn’t want to build a real relationship.”
Harry’s eyes fired, but still he didn’t move away. “You might be right,” he said. “But it’s presumptuous and arrogant to think that you’re the one who will make me different, isn’t it?”
“Presumptuous and arrogant is me,” Draco said, and leaned forwards to capture Harry’s lips. Harry held stiff and stubborn against him for a moment, and then leaned forwards with a little moan and kissed him back.
Draco pulled Harry closer still and whispered, “You can touch me, too. You don’t have to wait for an engraved invitation.”
Harry groaned hungrily and reached down to grip and stroke Draco’s cock. Draco rested against the wall, shutting his eyes so that he could focus on the sensation more strongly. Harry’s fingers were too quick and too rough and pulled in ways that made Draco squirm and hiss in discomfort. But it hardly mattered when Harry’s breath also rasped against his cheek, hushed and violent, and his eyes were fixed on Draco’s face whenever Draco looked.
Draco came in triumph, and kissed Harry again as Harry spelled his pants clean. Then Harry muttered, “We just turned to sex again. We can’t use that to solve every argument.”
“No,” Draco agreed, fluttering his eyes reluctantly open. He would have liked to go to sleep in Harry’s arms right there, but he knew that it wasn’t a good idea. “Just most of them.”
“Draco—”
Dropping to one’s knees and taking Harry’s cock in one’s mouth was an excellent means of shutting him up, as Draco discovered a moment later.
I know there are going to be problems, he thought in the moments before he lost himself completely to the taste of slick, salty skin. But unlike Harry, I refuse to worry about them until they get here. That’s all.
*
“Oh, Harry.”
Harry smiled uneasily. Hermione could sound like that for lots of reasons. She might disapprove of the sex flush that Harry could still feel on his face. Or maybe she knew what Draco had done to Covington and disapproved of that. Or maybe she saw the determined set of his jaw and feared what he would say.
All of those involve disapproval or fear, Harry thought as he leaned down to kiss her cheek. Maybe that should tell me something.
He sat down next to her and cast a glance at the bedroom door. Ron’s snores came from behind it, familiar from their time in Hogwarts as children.
As children. I can’t go back there, not now that I’m an adult.
“How’s Ron?” he asked.
“He’s fine,” Hermione said. “Only a bit tired from some of the potions that he had to take. And if you had waited for him to be fully recovered, then we could have joined you in finding the answer to the riddle.”
Yes, her voice was as reproachful as her face. Harry shifted uneasily and wondered what he could do or say to appease her. Then he shook his head. Why should he worry about appeasing her? He had come here to say a certain thing, and he had already known that Hermione wouldn’t take it well.
“I don’t think it’s going to work,” he said.
Hermione frowned. “What? Finding the riddle? But I thought you already did, from that look in your eyes.”
Harry experienced a crawling sensation in his skin and shook his head again. Once, he would have been happy that Hermione could read him so well, or at least accepted it as a natural consequence of their friendship. Now, it bothered hm. Why was that? Why should it trouble him that she had a friend’s privilege?
“Listen,” he said. “I’m not coming back to the wizarding world. I’m going back to the edges when this is done, to resume my old job.”
“Why?” Hermione asked softly. “We could find you a place to live. We could find you another job.” Her eyes were already bright with the planning for Harry’s future. “And someone you could work with—I mean, if you wanted to—to…solve your other problems.”
“I know you could,” Harry said, and tried to ignore the feeling that crept like a finger down his skin. What he was doing would hurt Hermione and Ron, but he had to do this, in hope that it would help them all later. “But, Hermione, I don’t want that. We can’t go back to what we were as if this row had never happened. I want to give myself some time to get used to not despising my own actions, and I need time and privacy away from you.”
Hermione’s mouth fell open. But she either hadn’t absorbed the implications of his words fully, or had decided not to let him see her pain. She shook her head. “Harry, I don’t know what you mean.”
“Most of this is my fault,” Harry said. He was willing to admit that. “I thought you were partially right. I didn’t want help for my problems, but I did think they were problems, even when I was indignantly telling you that they weren’t.” He frowned at the floor. It was hard to say this, which was one reason he had come to speak to his friends without Draco. Draco would want to speak for Harry, so that he could protect him, and as nice as the impulse was, Harry couldn’t let him do that. “Then I tried to repair our friendship too fast, by forgiving and forgetting everything. But I haven’t. I still look at you, and remember what you said, and resent your interference in my life. And I wanted—I wanted to demand other things from you when we had that reconciliation conversation, and I didn’t. Even though I had told Draco I would.”
“He ordered you to demand them, I reckon, and you didn’t.” Hermione’s voice was shrill, the color in her cheeks high. Only someone who knew her—or had known her—as well as Harry did would see the trembling tears behind her eyes. “Don’t you see that’s a good thing, Harry? He shouldn’t be able to control you like a slave.”
“No,” Harry said. “I wanted them, I thought of them on my own, and I didn’t say them. I was worried about hurting you. But—to heal, Hermione, I have to stop worrying as much about that. And then I can start worrying about it again. I was trying to be friends with you, these last few days, on false terms. I was relieved when you weren’t working with us. I was tense and anxious when you were.”
Hermione stared openly at him now. “Harry,” she whispered. “Even Malfoy got along better with us than that.”
Harry nodded. “But he didn’t have the history with you that I did,” he said. “The close friendship, and then the splitting apart. You’re—you’re all mixed and tangled up in my head with the parts of myself that I despise, Hermione. I think I’m slowly getting over them, but it’ll take more time and more work than I thought it would when I tried to charge back into friendship with you. I want to go away. The thought of talking with Ron fills me with dread. I’m fearful of the time when you start interfering in my life again. I don’t trust that you won’t.”
“You don’t trust us, in other words.” Hermione’s fingers knotted together.
Harry shook his head. “No. And you deserve to be trusted, at least if you really are the kind of people I always thought you were when we were at Hogwarts together.” He took a deep breath. He knew what he had to say, he thought he did, but it didn’t excuse the way that Hermione seemed to flinch as if from blows. “I really do want to trust you,” he whispered. “I promise. But it’ll need more time. There was nothing, for two whole years, except my brooding on the thought of how much I hated you. And now—I want your friendship back again, but I can’t have it, not the way it was. I’ll go away for a little while. I’ll owl you. I’ll visit once a month or so, and then make it more often. But right now, with everything else I’m trying to keep in mind and get used to and reconcile, I can’t do this, too.”
Hermione gave a complicated mutter in which Harry could only pick out the word “weak.”
“Yes, I am,” Harry said, and smiled a little as she gave him a look of shocked surprise. “I know. I wouldn’t have been able to admit that a while ago. But—Hermione, I do think you’re right about some things. I don’t know why I’ve been so angry since the war. I still don’t. I only know what soothes it, and that I think Draco can help me permanently, when no one else has been able to.” He winced, paused to shoulder the burden, and then pushed on. “Maybe you’re even right that the abuse I endured, and the manipulation, had something to do with the way I express my sexuality. But I can’t think about that right now. I’m too close to it. I’ll have to go away, think, and approach it carefully. And I can’t give up Draco. I can’t.” Harry thought he had done a good job, yesterday, of hiding how much the idea of Draco leaving him dropped him into utter, cold desolation. But he had believed that was what would happen. He had needed Draco’s denials otherwise, but he hadn’t been fishing for them.
“What you’re telling me,” Hermione said, pausing several times along the way as if she thought that Harry would speak up and contradict her, “is that it’s complex.”
Harry smiled at her. Sometimes, after all, she did know the right words. “Yes.”
Hermione took a deep breath. “I think that it would be better if you worked with Mind-Healers,” she said. “You gave up on them too quickly, Harry, and you were too convinced that you either had no problems or that you had to handle them on your own. You can try again.”
Harry listened to the echo of her words in his head, and then smiled in wonder. He no longer felt the fear and resentment he would have a short time ago. He could consider what she was saying more objectively.
Because he knew he would be going away, and he no longer felt compelled to be her friend in the way he had a few days ago, when he had thought he was going to repair everything, change everything, go back to being exactly as he had been.
He wasn’t their friend exactly as he had been. The relief he felt when he thought of leaving them behind at Hogwarts, and the way he hadn’t missed them when he and Draco went to the Astronomy Tower, said that.
“Maybe I can consider that,” he said. “It’s something I wouldn’t have given much consideration to before, just because it was your suggestion. But with some time and distance, then it might sound better.”
Hermione went very still. Harry wondered if his complaints and threats were finally becoming real to her, now that he was speaking them in a calm, happy voice and not begging to be brought back together with his friends.
“This is your dream, though,” she said. “Hogwarts is your home, Harry. You’ve told me that more than once.”
“I’ve had a few years to find another home,” Harry said. “I wouldn’t call the house I have now perfect, but I like what I do, and I’ll do it even better when I don’t have anger preying on my mind most of the time. I’ll have Draco, and that changes a lot of things. I can come back to Hogwarts for visits, but I don’t need it to be my home anymore.”
“I thought you did,” Hermione said. “I thought you always would.” Harry discovered that it was hard to make out emotions in her voice.
Harry shrugged a bit. “Well, now I don’t. I hope that you and Ron stay here, though. I think you’ll be great teachers, and someone will need to watch and make sure that the Ministry doesn’t try to take over again, the way they’ve done in the past. You and Ron are vigilant. You’ll think of some way around them if they do.”
“Mate? What’s going on?”
Harry turned. Ron had opened his bedroom door and stood there on the threshold, staring at Harry. He paused to wipe some sleep away from his eyes, then came closer, his gaze fastened questioningly on Harry’s face.
“I’m leaving,” Harry said. “I hope to visit and to owl you, and maybe you can come and visit me when you feel you’re ready. But I don’t think I can stay here. I was trying to recover a fantasy of friendship. But fantasies are easy to break, and not so easy to fulfill.”
Ron paused. Harry wondered if he was injured; as with Hermione’s tone, Ron’s face was hard to read. But then he shook his head and said, “I’m glad.”
“Ron,” Hermione hissed urgently. She seemed to think that Ron’s declaration would hurt Harry’s feelings.
Harry smiled at his best friend, though—his first friend. He couldn’t forget that, no matter how much solace he found with Draco. The problem was that it couldn’t keep meaning exactly what it had to an eleven-year-old child, either, because he was no longer that child. “What do you mean?”
“We’re adults now,” Ron said. “We’ve made lives here, and our peace with the Ministry, but I don’t think you can.”
Harry shook his head. “I don’t want to, anyway. Maybe I could, with a lot of time and effort, but I’m not willing to invest that.” He hesitated, then added, “I’m willing to put a lot of effort into building a new friendship with you two, though. Just not in resurrecting the dying corpse of the old one.”
Ron nodded. “The dead should stay dead.” He crossed the room and clasped Harry’s hand. Harry looked up fearlessly into his face. His dread of Hermione had melted away, and he no longer felt the weary impatience that he had around Ron in the last week, as though he was waiting for the next hurtful thing to emerge from his mouth and could do nothing else around him. Now, he could see that Ron had good qualities, was clever in his own way and protective of Hermione and Hogwarts, was grounded in and committed to the wizarding traditions that Harry had left behind. It was the life that Harry had once imagined he wanted.
But it wasn’t his life now. It was best to leave and build the good parts of that life into a new, stronger one when he could.
“I can’t say that I’m surprised, either,” Ron continued. “You know that we can’t accept Malfoy, and you need him.”
Harry held back the immediate response he wanted to make to that, and then finally said, “I hope that you’ll be able to accept him someday. But it’s best if you have the chance to get to know him through my owls and a few visits. We can’t expect you to get over your animosity towards him at once, and I don’t expect him to accept you just like that, either. It’s the reason that I didn’t let him come with me,” he added, deciding that it would do them no harm to hear that. “I knew that he wouldn’t be able to hold back on the insults, no matter how much he might want to be mature.”
“I don’t think that desire is very strong,” Hermione muttered.
Ron was the one who flashed her a chiding look and nodded to Harry. “I can see that, mate. I can’t say that I understand your choice, and I think you’re wrong about how soon we can accept him. But I don’t know that for certain.”
Harry nodded back and stood up. Nothing had to be certain yet, he reminded himself. The future hadn’t arrived. Ron might be right, and Harry would have to keep his friends and his lover apart. But nothing had been proven on that score. They’d had only a few days of close association, and those were in circumstances so tense that Harry didn’t blame Ron for being gloomy.
“Thanks,” he said quietly, shook Ron’s hand, and hugged Hermione. She hung on to him tightly, and Harry thought she would have retained him if she could, but Ron’s hand on her shoulder made her step back.
“I just hope this isn’t a mistake, Harry,” she said.
Harry gave her a temperate smile in return and shut the door of their rooms behind him.
*
Draco closed his eyes for a moment, and then smiled. He could feel the control that the potion gave him over Covington as a tight, thrumming bond stretched between the two of them, like a cord he could pull on to manipulate her limbs. He turned his head up to face the ceiling and exhaled slowly, then nodded once and sent forth the commands that made her stand up and turn around to face the gathered professors of Hogwarts and the witnesses who had come from the Ministry. The words that formed in her mouth and then spilled over her tongue were of Draco’s making, and though some of the witnesses from the Ministry exchanged uneasy glances and shifted as if they didn’t know what to make of this, they didn’t surge forwards and start shouting about treachery.
That meant they had won, Draco considered.
“Hogwarts was once the greatest school of magic in the world,” Covington said. “It has been closed for the past six years as we sought to make it safer and redress some of the errors of our predecessors.” Draco could feel her sweating. This was the part where she wanted to say something completely different. Doubtless there would be a lot of that in the speech that was coming up.
Draco didn’t care. She had paid the price for attempting to hurt Harry. She ought to have known what stupidity she was performing even as she inflicted it on herself.
“Dumbledore was the greatest Headmaster Hogwarts has ever known,” Covington continued, “but he was not perfect.” Draco had decided to go with that tactic in the end, as fun as it would have been to make Covington praise Dumbledore without reserve. Someone would have become suspicious if she did, and Draco never intended to have his meddling discovered. “He would have urged us to think carefully about our actions in the future, because there is little else more damaging than damage to education and the future of our world.”
The crowd nodded. They were grouped around the lake in front of Hogwarts, and Covington was standing on a boulder. She looked around as though she was concerned that not everyone could hear her. Draco was the only one who could feel her shifting against the bonds that tied her, seeking desperately for some way past them.
There was no escape, and in the end, she fell back into despair and continued with the patter that required nothing of her but her tongue and lips.
“In the future, we shall be more careful about what we teach our youngsters. Houses will not be permitted to stay apart in isolation and prejudice. Professors will bring them together and teach the ideals of the Founders—as well as the proper historical context of those ideals. We can no more live by purely Gryffindor rules than we can live by purely Slytherin ones, but all children should be allowed to have pride in their Houses.”
More judicious nodding. Covington turned to face Hogwarts and drew out the silver key to the Headmaster’s office that the keywords had released from one version of the Room of Requirement, once Harry and Draco had spoken all four together in front of the door on the seventh floor. The Sorting Hat and the Sword of Gryffindor had been in the same room. Draco had been amused to see the way Covington’s eyes shone when she lifted them out. Even enslaved to Draco, it seemed that she didn’t forget her love for luxuries and powerful artifacts.
“We will go forwards into a new future,” Covington said. “With the Ministry working closely with the Headmaster and the school governors, there is nothing we might not accomplish. And I am pleased to announce that the first Headmistress of the school will be none other than the candidate we are sure Headmaster Dumbledore had meant to announce, had he lived: Minerva McGonagall.”
The Ministry flunkies’ mouths hung open. McGonagall herself looked shaky and pale as she climbed up to receive the key from Covington. But she had been the best choice, Harry and Draco had both agreed, and Covington would be able to come up with the right lies to convince anyone who was shocked of the validity of her choice—the popular perception of Dumbledore, the need to acknowledge the continuity of his choices, and so on.
“Congratulations,” Covington said with a stiff smile.
McGonagall took the key and examined it for a few minutes. Then she visibly straightened to take up her new burden. Draco shook his head. That was Gryffindors for you, always thinking they had to do their duty no matter what. McGonagall could have refused and gone on to a peaceful, quiet retirement, but neither Harry nor Draco had ever really thought she would.
“Better her than me,” Harry, standing beside Draco in the third rank of watchers, muttered.
Draco nudged him hard with one shoulder. “You would be a disastrous Headmaster,” he whispered. “They’re supposed to last a few decades at least, and you would get yourself killed flying around the Astronomy Tower, or something equally ridiculous.”
“Or they’d find me bound to a bed and fucked to death by an overeager Slytherin,” Harry murmured back.
Draco couldn’t help the way his hand shook for a moment on Harry’s back. And when had his hand got there? He couldn’t remember reaching out. Harry only cocked his head wisely and fastened his eyes on McGonagall again. She was making some gracious speech now about how this honor was unexpected but she would do her best to support the burden and do a good job. The people around them were applauding politely, for the most part, but Draco could hear genuine enthusiasm among them.
“The Ministry will support the new Headmistress,” Covington said, with the assurance of tone that said she would personally take over that task.
Draco chuckled. She struggled more fiercely than ever when he made her say that. Harry winced beside him, and Draco glanced at him.
“I just wonder if it’s right,” Harry said, his eyes fastened on Covington. “To make her a slave for the rest of her life.”
Draco shook his head. “That’s what she would have done to you. Unless you think that she would have had a qualm of conscience in a few years. But even then, would she dare to release you? The first thing you would have done was turn on her. By that point, your anger and your magic would have built up to the point where they needed the release.”
Harry grimaced, but not in a way that said he resented Draco’s presumption. “I know,” he said. “I know that you can’t release her for the same reason.”
Draco smiled, glad that Harry had seen the drift of his argument before he had to make it. Harry wasn’t unintelligent. He simply didn’t allow himself to exercise his intelligence much. Too much hanging back when he was young and trusting Granger to come up with pronouncements and explanations, Draco thought.
Well, no partner of his was going to do the same thing. So far, Draco had demanded at least one exercise of Harry’s intelligence every day, and he intended to go on doing the same thing for day after day.
Until Harry left him, perhaps, or started realizing that Draco admired him for more than his ability to gasp when fucked.
“Yes,” Draco said. “Perhaps it’s more than she deserves. Perhaps she would have done something more than Obliviate you afterwards, to keep herself safe, so that she could release you. But I don’t think so. I think that, once you were leashed, the Ministry would have found you too convenient and supportive to let go. They must have told you more than once that you would do them, and the whole of the wizarding world, good if you just let yourself be chained.”
*
Harry chuckled in spite of himself, and the discomfort curling through his gut. Yes, they had told him that, and in almost the same words. “Do you think they don’t have consciences, then?” Like you? he almost added, but he knew that wasn’t the case. There were some things Draco wouldn’t do; he did have a sense of right and wrong. But he saw no reason to leave an enemy alive at his back.
Draco snorted. “I think they’re political. A political advantage like the Boy-Who-Lived is too great to let go.”
“But you aren’t trying to use me that same way,” Harry said, with a ripple of discomfort, but feeling at the same time that Draco had to have thought of this before Harry brought it up. “Why not?”
Draco turned to face him, and seemed to dismiss Covington from his mind, despite the fact that he must have told her what to say. His hand curled around Harry’s wrist and dragged him closer. Harry flushed, with more than embarrassment, but with embarrassment on top of that. He hated the fact that a simple touch could excite him so much.
“Because I know that you wouldn’t stay with me if I tried to use you without your full cooperation,” Draco whispered. “And I want you to stay with me more than I want any petty political gain that I might win with your help.”
Harry swallowed and nodded. It was an answer he understood, appreciated, even; the difficulty was in believing that it was true. He had shoved away people before Draco because he hadn’t wanted to go through the pain of finding out that it wasn’t, as well as because he had been ashamed of what he was and what he desired.
Draco ran a tender hand down his cheek. “If you’re going to leave me,” he whispered, “I’d hope that you’d tell me. Trust me that much. I would be angry, but I already know that I couldn’t hold you back.”
Harry raised his eyebrows. “Why?”
“Your magic is so much stronger than mine,” Draco responded, giving him a strange look, as if he couldn’t believe that Harry didn’t know that.
Harry smiled. In some ways, it was good to have a Slytherin lover, one who wasn’t shy to acknowledge power imbalances.
“Which is, among other things, what makes it so wonderful to watch you crush the impulse to conquer and yield to me instead,” Draco finished, with a self-satisfied smile.
Harry rolled his eyes. And then there’s this side to having a Slytherin lover.
*
“I didn’t expect it to work out this way. My dear boy. I did hope that you would find your way back to Hogwarts, but under rather different circumstances.”
Harry drew a deep breath as he faced Dumbledore’s portrait. Complicated emotions stirred in his chest. He wanted to say that he understood Dumbledore’s concerns, but despised them; he was beyond the simple boy who could be manipulated to find his happiness and the greatest good. And then he wanted to turn his back and walk away without another word. Hermione was right. Surely the old man’s manipulations had contributed to at least some of his anger and his inability to fit in.
But the man who had done all that to Harry was dead. Harry had come closer to him in the memory trap that waited at the top of the Astronomy Tower than he had in this portrait, who was only a fragment and a lesser version, not the whole man repeated over again in miniature. Dumbledore had been wise and brave and clever and foolish all together. This portrait had little power to make himself as wonderful and as terrible in the eyes of the living.
“I came back,” he said. “And I think that now I’ve come back once, I’ll visit more often. It was this place of fear to me, and I didn’t think that I could do anything to change what the Ministry would do. But now that I’ve been here once, it will be easier to come back.”
Dumbledore nodded and touched his beard as though he was thinking. “And—forgive me, my boy, but I must ask this. Are you going to sacrifice your chances of a normal life to a life with Mr. Malfoy?”
Harry gave him a sweet smile. “I gave up all chance of a normal life long ago, sir. You gave it up for me, when you put me with the Dursleys instead of letting a wizard family raise me.”
Dumbledore sighed. “I did think that I was doing the best thing, my boy. If you had been raised in our world, you would have been a pampered prince. They might not have meant to spoil you like that, but it would have happened. It is never a good thing for a child when adults stand in awe of them.”
“But that happened anyway,” Harry answered brutally. “They were either in awe of me, or they suspected me of being the Heir of Slytherin or in league with Voldemort or evil in some other way. After the myth of the Boy-Who-Lived got spread around, there was no other way for them to react.” He paused, panting, and realized that Dumbledore was watching him with sad eyes.
“I would have preferred being spoiled and insufferable to being abused,” Harry finished.
“I did not foresee that,” Dumbledore admitted sadly. “Please believe that I did not intend it, Harry.”
Harry shook his head. “I know. You had only the best of intentions. But you kept on having them even when circumstances should have pointed out to you that having them wasn’t enough. That’s where I distrust you the most, sir. I know that your original went on manipulating me even after he was dead. I don’t know that you’ve ever admitted you were wrong. All the things you’ve said to me since I came here don’t imply it.”
Dumbledore was still. Harry watched leaves blowing through the enchanted window on the opposite wall and waited until he spoke again.
“It is very hard to admit that your weaving of a young life has gone wrong,” Dumbledore whispered. “Because of all the ruined chances, all the delicate things that you have ruined. I am sorry, Harry. If I wanted you to have a normal life, I should have labored harder to give you one.”
That was more of a concession than Harry had expected. He turned back and nodded. “Yes, you should have,” he said. “And you should have trusted less in the prophecy and trusted me more, as well as taken more of an active part in the fight against Voldemort. But I have my life now, and I’m learning to be contented with it. If some things need to change, still, I don’t need to be ashamed of everything in it.”
Dumbledore watched him with bright eyes. “I hope that you are right, my boy,” he said. “I do sincerely hope that you are right.”
Harry rolled his eyes at Dumbledore’s stubbornness and inability to actually listen to him, rather than raise doubts, but he could let it go. “Good-bye, sir,” he said. “If and when I visit Ron and Hermione, then I’ll come and visit you, too.”
“I will look forward to that, Harry.”
That was the one thing he had said in the conversation that was likely to be one hundred percent true, Harry thought, as he shut the door of the Headmaster’s office behind him.
*
“You are making a mistake, Draco.”
“Am I?” Draco didn’t look up from packing his cauldron away, but in truth, he was more curious than he would let Severus see. He had wondered when Severus would try to discourage him from continuing to associate with Harry. Now and then over the past few days, Severus had mentioned fleeting hints of Harry’s good qualities, such as his ability to challenge Draco, but Draco had had no doubt that Severus still disapproved of Draco’s choice in partners on the whole.
“Yes.” Severus leaned forwards against his portrait frame, eyes narrowed. “I have learned some more about the requirements of a relationship like the one you are embarking on with Potter. You are temperamentally unsuited to it. Either you would demand too much of him and make him resent your power instead of trust you, or you would be unable to be as firm as he needs and let him get away with too much.”
Draco laughed aloud. “Severus, you do realize that you sound as if you’re talking about a pet, rather than a human being who has the ability to tell me if I do something he doesn’t like?”
“Does Potter have that much wit?” Severus sneered. “I honestly hadn’t noticed.”
Draco shook his head. “And this is yet another way in which you’re less than your original was. He would have given little credit to Potter for intelligence, but he still relied on it, enough that he trusted him to save the world when he was younger and less rational than he is now. You, on the other hand, act as though any relationship we have is foredoomed to disaster just because you hate Potter.”
Silence, and then, “You are like me,” Severus said, intensely. “You are more like me than you think.”
“There was a time when I would have taken that as the greatest of compliments,” Draco said lightly, and laid a stirring stick in the proper slim slot in his packing case. He could have packed by means of a spell, but he was determined to indulge in this last conversation with Severus. “Now I know that you mean I’m doomed to lose the first person I’m truly interested in because that is what happened to you, and I refuse the comparison.”
Severus caught his breath in what sounded like pain. Draco watched in curiosity. How much did portraits feel? He had never settled that question to his satisfaction. He especially didn’t know if this portrait could feel deep emotions, since he had acknowledged that it was a highly imperfect copy of the Severus he had known.
“I am not my original,” Severus said, after several moments of tense, painful silence—or at least they seemed painful to him. Draco felt much less than he would have expected. “I have seen things that he did not, including your strange fascination with Mr. Potter.”
“And you knew some things that he knew,” Draco said. “Did you remember him changing the last riddle so that it referred to the Astronomy Tower and the memory trap that I went through there?”
Severus’s eyes flickered in the way Draco had once known would be followed by calm, cold chastisement. Then he said, “Yes, I did.”
Draco nodded. “That was the hardest of the traps to go through for me, the one I might not have survived if Harry wasn’t there. He repaid me for being there with him in the Forbidden Forest when the centaur’s arrow struck him. I won’t give him up now. If you’d like to blame someone for my stubborn clinging to him, you might blame yourself.”
The portrait Severus turned and strode away, beyond the edge of the frame. Draco waited for a few minutes, but he didn’t reappear. Draco shrugged and returned to packing.
He felt satisfied, despite the exasperation that the past week and more had given him, despite the uncertainty in the future of his relationship with Potter lasting, and despite the fact that he had to control Covington from a distance. He didn’t mind the power that Covington granted him. And he could allow her a little freedom in certain actions, as long as he always kept the prohibition in place that she couldn’t speak or write or gesture to anyone about his control over her.
I’ll have to strengthen the prohibition against allowing anyone to read her mind, he reminded himself.
Coming back to Hogwarts had been less stressful than he once would have said it was. He had even managed to work with the Weasel and the Mudblood successfully. And Severus was not the man he had remembered in portrait form, overwhelming and stressful—disturbingly like an idol to him, as Draco saw now. He didn’t know everything. The man who had was dead, or, more likely, the product of a fevered adolescent’s mind and a few nights on the run.
And Harry…
Draco smiled a little as he shut the lid of his trunk. Yes, his relationship with Harry was uncertain, but he no longer wanted to live in a world studded only with diamond-edged truths and nothing else. Fucking someone was like brewing an experimental potion. If he could live with uncertainty and risks in the one, he could surely live with it in the other.
“Draco?”
Harry stood in the doorway of Severus’s rooms, waiting for him with folded arms and a raised eyebrow. Draco walked over and kissed him. He made the kiss forceful on purpose, and Harry grunted and then leaned into him, nearly bowling him over.
Satisfied that Harry had once again been reminded that Draco wouldn’t leave, Draco stepped away. “You’re ready?” he asked.
Harry nodded. “I’ve packed everything up. Who knows when my owl will follow me home, but I’m not worried about her.”
His eyes were fixed on Draco, clearly saying what he was worried about. Draco took his hand and turned it over, spreading the fingers. Harry watched him, brow furrowed in a way that said he wondered what Draco was doing.
“I trust your hand to drag me out of danger, the way you did with the memory trap,” Draco said.
Harry flushed. “That was nothing,” he muttered. “You would have overcome it on your own if I hadn’t been there.”
Draco shook his head and kissed Harry’s palm. “And I also trust your hand to be bound and strapped to my headboard,” he said. “Do you understand?”
Harry licked his lips and nodded. “It’s something I never thought I would have,” he said.
“But you have it now,” Draco said in that tone of cool command Harry liked. “Stop doubting me.”
Harry gave him a cocky grin and leaned in to kiss him back, using more than a hint of teeth. Draco shivered with delight. While he wanted Harry to understand all the terms of their relationship, it would have been no fun without the challenge.
“Come on, then,” Harry muttered. “I’m more than ready to go.”
And they left the castle, climbing up the stairs from the dungeons slowly. Draco could still feel his past self climbing along with him if he thought about it, a terrified teenager who sometimes looked at Harry Potter and envied him, and sometimes, more terribly, wanted him for himself.
Now I have him, Draco thought, listening to the man breathing beside him.
On the whole—and he thought the same could be said of Harry—he preferred his future to his past.
The End.
Harry gasped and opened his eyes. They stood alone on the Tower now, the stars blazing softly overhead, the memory faded like a dream. He looked cautiously around, wondering if it was possible that there were two traps up here, and they would have to face the second in a fight to the death at any moment.
But then he thought of what might have happened to Draco if he wasn’t there, and accepted that there was more than one way to fight to the death.
Draco let the kiss go reluctantly, leaning heavily on Harry. His eyes were dark in the way that Harry had only seen them in the bedroom so far, and when Draco reached up and pushed shining fingers against his cheek, he gasped, half in shock. It seemed that Draco was aflame with desire, right here, right now.
“Thank you,” Draco whispered.
Harry nodded. “You’re—welcome,” he said, and hoped that he managed to say it without his voice cracking. He had, right? He didn’t want to check to make sure. “And now, don’t you think we should look for the riddle and the keyword?”
“Only keyword, this time.” Draco’s fingers stroked his chest, heading teasingly towards a nipple for a moment, and then pulling back. “This is the last riddle.”
Harry blinked. “Right,” he said. He had known that, too. God, he was out of it, and he didn’t know why. He wasn’t the one who had had to face his past self or have a major revelation about himself today. He pulled Draco upright and looked around for another bubble containing a twist of parchment like the ones that had held the riddles and keywords so far.
One moment it wasn’t there, and then it was. The bubble appeared with a shimmer and a gleam like that of soap bubbles, and Harry bent down to retrieve it. Draco’s hand glanced over his arse on the way. Harry grunted, half in shock, and stood up to glare at him.
Draco shrugged back unapologetically. “You know what I want, Harry,” he said, and his eyes shone like the bubble. “You’ll have to be a little louder about making your own desires heard.”
Harry shook his head and dragged him off the Astronomy Tower. He had questions to ask Dumbledore’s portrait, and a conversation to have with his best friends. And he and Draco needed to decide how they would handle the Ministry’s demand that would doubtless come for them to turn over the keywords to the wards.
And after that…
He and Draco would have to speak. Harry had no idea what he was feeling right now, no idea if he would want to continue their relationship or not. Perhaps, yes, as long as he could feel desire.
But Harry knew how quickly desire could burn out. Every time he had had sex in the last few years, he had felt free of it the moment he had come and his anger had calmed down for the next few months.
Every time except for the last time.
Harry physically hunched to chase the thought away from him. He would get Draco to the bottom of the stairs first, and then he would worry about the other problems.
*
“I told you that it doesn’t matter,” Draco said patiently. He had to wonder at how thick Harry could be. He had seemed smarter than this when they were up on the top of the Tower.
Then he remembered that this was the same man who had let the disapproval of his best friends ruin his life for years, and snorted softly. Yes, well, he could see traces of that man in the stubborn mask that faced him now.
“It’s—” Harry shook his head and stuck out his lower lip. Draco knew that he probably only did it because he was thinking, but it made him want to bite Harry. That, and the memory of those words Harry had spoken on the Tower, were enough to make him hard again. He had to turn his attention to the wall and examine it attentively so he wouldn’t embarrass himself. “Someone has to notice what you’ve done to Covington, Draco. Your potion may be undetectable, but she won’t act like herself.”
“She will if I command her to cover up what happened and act as though she’s normal, except for obeying my instructions,” Draco said. “Here, her reputation as someone who keeps her goals silent and her methods slippery—someone who was in Slytherin—will work against her. They might not understand what she’s doing, but they’ll assume that she has a long-range goal in mind that will benefit herself, no matter what it is. Advocating that they open Hogwarts again and start to hand control over to the school governors and the professors won’t be the strangest thing an employee of the Ministry has done. In fact, I’m sure there are factions in the Ministry who favor that and will support her.”
Harry gave him a faint smile. “I reckon you’re right,” he said. “I never bothered to understand politics much.”
“You don’t need to, now,” Draco said comfortably. “You have me.”
Harry paused, his brow furrowing. Draco sighed in disgust. “Yes, you do. Unless you’re going to let your friends’ opinions influence you even now, and you’ll shove me away so that you can embrace them.” He didn’t care about the jealousy in his voice. That encounter on the Tower ought to have taught Harry that he was important to Draco, which meant Draco didn’t have to expend as much effort on hiding his emotions.
“It’s not—that,” Harry said. “Not exactly.”
“I hope it isn’t some renewal of the shame of being with me, either,” Draco said, as quickly as he could.
“No,” Harry said. “But I have to wonder if you’ll want to be with me when we’ve fucked a few more times.” His face turned red. “I can’t change that much, Draco. I don’t have the sexual experience you do. When you realize that you can find someone else who can match you, when you’ve had me a few times, will you really want to stay with me? That’s the problem with a relationship based primarily on lust.” He tried to laugh, but the laughter caught in his throat.
Draco reached out and put a hand on Harry’s cheek, turning his head back and forth. Harry fell silent but kept his obstinate eyes locked on Draco’s face. Draco wondered for a moment what it would be like to live with such pessimism, hating what you had to do to keep yourself under control and alive, and, when you did finally find a solution to the problem, having to think that it wouldn’t last.
Draco had gone through horrible things in his life, but he had been an optimist compared to Harry. Amusing, when you considered their various histories.
Or perhaps simply understandable.
“Listen to me,” Draco murmured. “I will stay with you. We’ll work on your anger together. We’ll discuss other means of relating than pure sex. I’m willing to believe that it will be difficult, yes. But I am not willing to give up.”
Harry jerked a little, as though he wanted to remove his face from Draco’s palm but didn’t have the physical strength to do so. “I didn’t—I didn’t say I would,” he muttered. He seemed interested in all these subtle distinctions, Draco thought. He didn’t know why. As he saw it, only one thing was of importance, the fact that Harry wanted to go away and Draco didn’t want him to. “But I’ve started out with the best intentions in the world sometimes, always thinking when I walked away from each new bed that I wouldn’t need the fucking again, and something always proved me wrong.”
“That was your problem, then,” Draco said, his hand itching to slap Harry. He managed to keep the urge down, but the temptation filled his lungs like heavy smoke. “You thought this would end. You thought of the fucking as the means to an end and no more. You didn’t want to build a real relationship.”
Harry’s eyes fired, but still he didn’t move away. “You might be right,” he said. “But it’s presumptuous and arrogant to think that you’re the one who will make me different, isn’t it?”
“Presumptuous and arrogant is me,” Draco said, and leaned forwards to capture Harry’s lips. Harry held stiff and stubborn against him for a moment, and then leaned forwards with a little moan and kissed him back.
Draco pulled Harry closer still and whispered, “You can touch me, too. You don’t have to wait for an engraved invitation.”
Harry groaned hungrily and reached down to grip and stroke Draco’s cock. Draco rested against the wall, shutting his eyes so that he could focus on the sensation more strongly. Harry’s fingers were too quick and too rough and pulled in ways that made Draco squirm and hiss in discomfort. But it hardly mattered when Harry’s breath also rasped against his cheek, hushed and violent, and his eyes were fixed on Draco’s face whenever Draco looked.
Draco came in triumph, and kissed Harry again as Harry spelled his pants clean. Then Harry muttered, “We just turned to sex again. We can’t use that to solve every argument.”
“No,” Draco agreed, fluttering his eyes reluctantly open. He would have liked to go to sleep in Harry’s arms right there, but he knew that it wasn’t a good idea. “Just most of them.”
“Draco—”
Dropping to one’s knees and taking Harry’s cock in one’s mouth was an excellent means of shutting him up, as Draco discovered a moment later.
I know there are going to be problems, he thought in the moments before he lost himself completely to the taste of slick, salty skin. But unlike Harry, I refuse to worry about them until they get here. That’s all.
*
“Oh, Harry.”
Harry smiled uneasily. Hermione could sound like that for lots of reasons. She might disapprove of the sex flush that Harry could still feel on his face. Or maybe she knew what Draco had done to Covington and disapproved of that. Or maybe she saw the determined set of his jaw and feared what he would say.
All of those involve disapproval or fear, Harry thought as he leaned down to kiss her cheek. Maybe that should tell me something.
He sat down next to her and cast a glance at the bedroom door. Ron’s snores came from behind it, familiar from their time in Hogwarts as children.
As children. I can’t go back there, not now that I’m an adult.
“How’s Ron?” he asked.
“He’s fine,” Hermione said. “Only a bit tired from some of the potions that he had to take. And if you had waited for him to be fully recovered, then we could have joined you in finding the answer to the riddle.”
Yes, her voice was as reproachful as her face. Harry shifted uneasily and wondered what he could do or say to appease her. Then he shook his head. Why should he worry about appeasing her? He had come here to say a certain thing, and he had already known that Hermione wouldn’t take it well.
“I don’t think it’s going to work,” he said.
Hermione frowned. “What? Finding the riddle? But I thought you already did, from that look in your eyes.”
Harry experienced a crawling sensation in his skin and shook his head again. Once, he would have been happy that Hermione could read him so well, or at least accepted it as a natural consequence of their friendship. Now, it bothered hm. Why was that? Why should it trouble him that she had a friend’s privilege?
“Listen,” he said. “I’m not coming back to the wizarding world. I’m going back to the edges when this is done, to resume my old job.”
“Why?” Hermione asked softly. “We could find you a place to live. We could find you another job.” Her eyes were already bright with the planning for Harry’s future. “And someone you could work with—I mean, if you wanted to—to…solve your other problems.”
“I know you could,” Harry said, and tried to ignore the feeling that crept like a finger down his skin. What he was doing would hurt Hermione and Ron, but he had to do this, in hope that it would help them all later. “But, Hermione, I don’t want that. We can’t go back to what we were as if this row had never happened. I want to give myself some time to get used to not despising my own actions, and I need time and privacy away from you.”
Hermione’s mouth fell open. But she either hadn’t absorbed the implications of his words fully, or had decided not to let him see her pain. She shook her head. “Harry, I don’t know what you mean.”
“Most of this is my fault,” Harry said. He was willing to admit that. “I thought you were partially right. I didn’t want help for my problems, but I did think they were problems, even when I was indignantly telling you that they weren’t.” He frowned at the floor. It was hard to say this, which was one reason he had come to speak to his friends without Draco. Draco would want to speak for Harry, so that he could protect him, and as nice as the impulse was, Harry couldn’t let him do that. “Then I tried to repair our friendship too fast, by forgiving and forgetting everything. But I haven’t. I still look at you, and remember what you said, and resent your interference in my life. And I wanted—I wanted to demand other things from you when we had that reconciliation conversation, and I didn’t. Even though I had told Draco I would.”
“He ordered you to demand them, I reckon, and you didn’t.” Hermione’s voice was shrill, the color in her cheeks high. Only someone who knew her—or had known her—as well as Harry did would see the trembling tears behind her eyes. “Don’t you see that’s a good thing, Harry? He shouldn’t be able to control you like a slave.”
“No,” Harry said. “I wanted them, I thought of them on my own, and I didn’t say them. I was worried about hurting you. But—to heal, Hermione, I have to stop worrying as much about that. And then I can start worrying about it again. I was trying to be friends with you, these last few days, on false terms. I was relieved when you weren’t working with us. I was tense and anxious when you were.”
Hermione stared openly at him now. “Harry,” she whispered. “Even Malfoy got along better with us than that.”
Harry nodded. “But he didn’t have the history with you that I did,” he said. “The close friendship, and then the splitting apart. You’re—you’re all mixed and tangled up in my head with the parts of myself that I despise, Hermione. I think I’m slowly getting over them, but it’ll take more time and more work than I thought it would when I tried to charge back into friendship with you. I want to go away. The thought of talking with Ron fills me with dread. I’m fearful of the time when you start interfering in my life again. I don’t trust that you won’t.”
“You don’t trust us, in other words.” Hermione’s fingers knotted together.
Harry shook his head. “No. And you deserve to be trusted, at least if you really are the kind of people I always thought you were when we were at Hogwarts together.” He took a deep breath. He knew what he had to say, he thought he did, but it didn’t excuse the way that Hermione seemed to flinch as if from blows. “I really do want to trust you,” he whispered. “I promise. But it’ll need more time. There was nothing, for two whole years, except my brooding on the thought of how much I hated you. And now—I want your friendship back again, but I can’t have it, not the way it was. I’ll go away for a little while. I’ll owl you. I’ll visit once a month or so, and then make it more often. But right now, with everything else I’m trying to keep in mind and get used to and reconcile, I can’t do this, too.”
Hermione gave a complicated mutter in which Harry could only pick out the word “weak.”
“Yes, I am,” Harry said, and smiled a little as she gave him a look of shocked surprise. “I know. I wouldn’t have been able to admit that a while ago. But—Hermione, I do think you’re right about some things. I don’t know why I’ve been so angry since the war. I still don’t. I only know what soothes it, and that I think Draco can help me permanently, when no one else has been able to.” He winced, paused to shoulder the burden, and then pushed on. “Maybe you’re even right that the abuse I endured, and the manipulation, had something to do with the way I express my sexuality. But I can’t think about that right now. I’m too close to it. I’ll have to go away, think, and approach it carefully. And I can’t give up Draco. I can’t.” Harry thought he had done a good job, yesterday, of hiding how much the idea of Draco leaving him dropped him into utter, cold desolation. But he had believed that was what would happen. He had needed Draco’s denials otherwise, but he hadn’t been fishing for them.
“What you’re telling me,” Hermione said, pausing several times along the way as if she thought that Harry would speak up and contradict her, “is that it’s complex.”
Harry smiled at her. Sometimes, after all, she did know the right words. “Yes.”
Hermione took a deep breath. “I think that it would be better if you worked with Mind-Healers,” she said. “You gave up on them too quickly, Harry, and you were too convinced that you either had no problems or that you had to handle them on your own. You can try again.”
Harry listened to the echo of her words in his head, and then smiled in wonder. He no longer felt the fear and resentment he would have a short time ago. He could consider what she was saying more objectively.
Because he knew he would be going away, and he no longer felt compelled to be her friend in the way he had a few days ago, when he had thought he was going to repair everything, change everything, go back to being exactly as he had been.
He wasn’t their friend exactly as he had been. The relief he felt when he thought of leaving them behind at Hogwarts, and the way he hadn’t missed them when he and Draco went to the Astronomy Tower, said that.
“Maybe I can consider that,” he said. “It’s something I wouldn’t have given much consideration to before, just because it was your suggestion. But with some time and distance, then it might sound better.”
Hermione went very still. Harry wondered if his complaints and threats were finally becoming real to her, now that he was speaking them in a calm, happy voice and not begging to be brought back together with his friends.
“This is your dream, though,” she said. “Hogwarts is your home, Harry. You’ve told me that more than once.”
“I’ve had a few years to find another home,” Harry said. “I wouldn’t call the house I have now perfect, but I like what I do, and I’ll do it even better when I don’t have anger preying on my mind most of the time. I’ll have Draco, and that changes a lot of things. I can come back to Hogwarts for visits, but I don’t need it to be my home anymore.”
“I thought you did,” Hermione said. “I thought you always would.” Harry discovered that it was hard to make out emotions in her voice.
Harry shrugged a bit. “Well, now I don’t. I hope that you and Ron stay here, though. I think you’ll be great teachers, and someone will need to watch and make sure that the Ministry doesn’t try to take over again, the way they’ve done in the past. You and Ron are vigilant. You’ll think of some way around them if they do.”
“Mate? What’s going on?”
Harry turned. Ron had opened his bedroom door and stood there on the threshold, staring at Harry. He paused to wipe some sleep away from his eyes, then came closer, his gaze fastened questioningly on Harry’s face.
“I’m leaving,” Harry said. “I hope to visit and to owl you, and maybe you can come and visit me when you feel you’re ready. But I don’t think I can stay here. I was trying to recover a fantasy of friendship. But fantasies are easy to break, and not so easy to fulfill.”
Ron paused. Harry wondered if he was injured; as with Hermione’s tone, Ron’s face was hard to read. But then he shook his head and said, “I’m glad.”
“Ron,” Hermione hissed urgently. She seemed to think that Ron’s declaration would hurt Harry’s feelings.
Harry smiled at his best friend, though—his first friend. He couldn’t forget that, no matter how much solace he found with Draco. The problem was that it couldn’t keep meaning exactly what it had to an eleven-year-old child, either, because he was no longer that child. “What do you mean?”
“We’re adults now,” Ron said. “We’ve made lives here, and our peace with the Ministry, but I don’t think you can.”
Harry shook his head. “I don’t want to, anyway. Maybe I could, with a lot of time and effort, but I’m not willing to invest that.” He hesitated, then added, “I’m willing to put a lot of effort into building a new friendship with you two, though. Just not in resurrecting the dying corpse of the old one.”
Ron nodded. “The dead should stay dead.” He crossed the room and clasped Harry’s hand. Harry looked up fearlessly into his face. His dread of Hermione had melted away, and he no longer felt the weary impatience that he had around Ron in the last week, as though he was waiting for the next hurtful thing to emerge from his mouth and could do nothing else around him. Now, he could see that Ron had good qualities, was clever in his own way and protective of Hermione and Hogwarts, was grounded in and committed to the wizarding traditions that Harry had left behind. It was the life that Harry had once imagined he wanted.
But it wasn’t his life now. It was best to leave and build the good parts of that life into a new, stronger one when he could.
“I can’t say that I’m surprised, either,” Ron continued. “You know that we can’t accept Malfoy, and you need him.”
Harry held back the immediate response he wanted to make to that, and then finally said, “I hope that you’ll be able to accept him someday. But it’s best if you have the chance to get to know him through my owls and a few visits. We can’t expect you to get over your animosity towards him at once, and I don’t expect him to accept you just like that, either. It’s the reason that I didn’t let him come with me,” he added, deciding that it would do them no harm to hear that. “I knew that he wouldn’t be able to hold back on the insults, no matter how much he might want to be mature.”
“I don’t think that desire is very strong,” Hermione muttered.
Ron was the one who flashed her a chiding look and nodded to Harry. “I can see that, mate. I can’t say that I understand your choice, and I think you’re wrong about how soon we can accept him. But I don’t know that for certain.”
Harry nodded back and stood up. Nothing had to be certain yet, he reminded himself. The future hadn’t arrived. Ron might be right, and Harry would have to keep his friends and his lover apart. But nothing had been proven on that score. They’d had only a few days of close association, and those were in circumstances so tense that Harry didn’t blame Ron for being gloomy.
“Thanks,” he said quietly, shook Ron’s hand, and hugged Hermione. She hung on to him tightly, and Harry thought she would have retained him if she could, but Ron’s hand on her shoulder made her step back.
“I just hope this isn’t a mistake, Harry,” she said.
Harry gave her a temperate smile in return and shut the door of their rooms behind him.
*
Draco closed his eyes for a moment, and then smiled. He could feel the control that the potion gave him over Covington as a tight, thrumming bond stretched between the two of them, like a cord he could pull on to manipulate her limbs. He turned his head up to face the ceiling and exhaled slowly, then nodded once and sent forth the commands that made her stand up and turn around to face the gathered professors of Hogwarts and the witnesses who had come from the Ministry. The words that formed in her mouth and then spilled over her tongue were of Draco’s making, and though some of the witnesses from the Ministry exchanged uneasy glances and shifted as if they didn’t know what to make of this, they didn’t surge forwards and start shouting about treachery.
That meant they had won, Draco considered.
“Hogwarts was once the greatest school of magic in the world,” Covington said. “It has been closed for the past six years as we sought to make it safer and redress some of the errors of our predecessors.” Draco could feel her sweating. This was the part where she wanted to say something completely different. Doubtless there would be a lot of that in the speech that was coming up.
Draco didn’t care. She had paid the price for attempting to hurt Harry. She ought to have known what stupidity she was performing even as she inflicted it on herself.
“Dumbledore was the greatest Headmaster Hogwarts has ever known,” Covington continued, “but he was not perfect.” Draco had decided to go with that tactic in the end, as fun as it would have been to make Covington praise Dumbledore without reserve. Someone would have become suspicious if she did, and Draco never intended to have his meddling discovered. “He would have urged us to think carefully about our actions in the future, because there is little else more damaging than damage to education and the future of our world.”
The crowd nodded. They were grouped around the lake in front of Hogwarts, and Covington was standing on a boulder. She looked around as though she was concerned that not everyone could hear her. Draco was the only one who could feel her shifting against the bonds that tied her, seeking desperately for some way past them.
There was no escape, and in the end, she fell back into despair and continued with the patter that required nothing of her but her tongue and lips.
“In the future, we shall be more careful about what we teach our youngsters. Houses will not be permitted to stay apart in isolation and prejudice. Professors will bring them together and teach the ideals of the Founders—as well as the proper historical context of those ideals. We can no more live by purely Gryffindor rules than we can live by purely Slytherin ones, but all children should be allowed to have pride in their Houses.”
More judicious nodding. Covington turned to face Hogwarts and drew out the silver key to the Headmaster’s office that the keywords had released from one version of the Room of Requirement, once Harry and Draco had spoken all four together in front of the door on the seventh floor. The Sorting Hat and the Sword of Gryffindor had been in the same room. Draco had been amused to see the way Covington’s eyes shone when she lifted them out. Even enslaved to Draco, it seemed that she didn’t forget her love for luxuries and powerful artifacts.
“We will go forwards into a new future,” Covington said. “With the Ministry working closely with the Headmaster and the school governors, there is nothing we might not accomplish. And I am pleased to announce that the first Headmistress of the school will be none other than the candidate we are sure Headmaster Dumbledore had meant to announce, had he lived: Minerva McGonagall.”
The Ministry flunkies’ mouths hung open. McGonagall herself looked shaky and pale as she climbed up to receive the key from Covington. But she had been the best choice, Harry and Draco had both agreed, and Covington would be able to come up with the right lies to convince anyone who was shocked of the validity of her choice—the popular perception of Dumbledore, the need to acknowledge the continuity of his choices, and so on.
“Congratulations,” Covington said with a stiff smile.
McGonagall took the key and examined it for a few minutes. Then she visibly straightened to take up her new burden. Draco shook his head. That was Gryffindors for you, always thinking they had to do their duty no matter what. McGonagall could have refused and gone on to a peaceful, quiet retirement, but neither Harry nor Draco had ever really thought she would.
“Better her than me,” Harry, standing beside Draco in the third rank of watchers, muttered.
Draco nudged him hard with one shoulder. “You would be a disastrous Headmaster,” he whispered. “They’re supposed to last a few decades at least, and you would get yourself killed flying around the Astronomy Tower, or something equally ridiculous.”
“Or they’d find me bound to a bed and fucked to death by an overeager Slytherin,” Harry murmured back.
Draco couldn’t help the way his hand shook for a moment on Harry’s back. And when had his hand got there? He couldn’t remember reaching out. Harry only cocked his head wisely and fastened his eyes on McGonagall again. She was making some gracious speech now about how this honor was unexpected but she would do her best to support the burden and do a good job. The people around them were applauding politely, for the most part, but Draco could hear genuine enthusiasm among them.
“The Ministry will support the new Headmistress,” Covington said, with the assurance of tone that said she would personally take over that task.
Draco chuckled. She struggled more fiercely than ever when he made her say that. Harry winced beside him, and Draco glanced at him.
“I just wonder if it’s right,” Harry said, his eyes fastened on Covington. “To make her a slave for the rest of her life.”
Draco shook his head. “That’s what she would have done to you. Unless you think that she would have had a qualm of conscience in a few years. But even then, would she dare to release you? The first thing you would have done was turn on her. By that point, your anger and your magic would have built up to the point where they needed the release.”
Harry grimaced, but not in a way that said he resented Draco’s presumption. “I know,” he said. “I know that you can’t release her for the same reason.”
Draco smiled, glad that Harry had seen the drift of his argument before he had to make it. Harry wasn’t unintelligent. He simply didn’t allow himself to exercise his intelligence much. Too much hanging back when he was young and trusting Granger to come up with pronouncements and explanations, Draco thought.
Well, no partner of his was going to do the same thing. So far, Draco had demanded at least one exercise of Harry’s intelligence every day, and he intended to go on doing the same thing for day after day.
Until Harry left him, perhaps, or started realizing that Draco admired him for more than his ability to gasp when fucked.
“Yes,” Draco said. “Perhaps it’s more than she deserves. Perhaps she would have done something more than Obliviate you afterwards, to keep herself safe, so that she could release you. But I don’t think so. I think that, once you were leashed, the Ministry would have found you too convenient and supportive to let go. They must have told you more than once that you would do them, and the whole of the wizarding world, good if you just let yourself be chained.”
*
Harry chuckled in spite of himself, and the discomfort curling through his gut. Yes, they had told him that, and in almost the same words. “Do you think they don’t have consciences, then?” Like you? he almost added, but he knew that wasn’t the case. There were some things Draco wouldn’t do; he did have a sense of right and wrong. But he saw no reason to leave an enemy alive at his back.
Draco snorted. “I think they’re political. A political advantage like the Boy-Who-Lived is too great to let go.”
“But you aren’t trying to use me that same way,” Harry said, with a ripple of discomfort, but feeling at the same time that Draco had to have thought of this before Harry brought it up. “Why not?”
Draco turned to face him, and seemed to dismiss Covington from his mind, despite the fact that he must have told her what to say. His hand curled around Harry’s wrist and dragged him closer. Harry flushed, with more than embarrassment, but with embarrassment on top of that. He hated the fact that a simple touch could excite him so much.
“Because I know that you wouldn’t stay with me if I tried to use you without your full cooperation,” Draco whispered. “And I want you to stay with me more than I want any petty political gain that I might win with your help.”
Harry swallowed and nodded. It was an answer he understood, appreciated, even; the difficulty was in believing that it was true. He had shoved away people before Draco because he hadn’t wanted to go through the pain of finding out that it wasn’t, as well as because he had been ashamed of what he was and what he desired.
Draco ran a tender hand down his cheek. “If you’re going to leave me,” he whispered, “I’d hope that you’d tell me. Trust me that much. I would be angry, but I already know that I couldn’t hold you back.”
Harry raised his eyebrows. “Why?”
“Your magic is so much stronger than mine,” Draco responded, giving him a strange look, as if he couldn’t believe that Harry didn’t know that.
Harry smiled. In some ways, it was good to have a Slytherin lover, one who wasn’t shy to acknowledge power imbalances.
“Which is, among other things, what makes it so wonderful to watch you crush the impulse to conquer and yield to me instead,” Draco finished, with a self-satisfied smile.
Harry rolled his eyes. And then there’s this side to having a Slytherin lover.
*
“I didn’t expect it to work out this way. My dear boy. I did hope that you would find your way back to Hogwarts, but under rather different circumstances.”
Harry drew a deep breath as he faced Dumbledore’s portrait. Complicated emotions stirred in his chest. He wanted to say that he understood Dumbledore’s concerns, but despised them; he was beyond the simple boy who could be manipulated to find his happiness and the greatest good. And then he wanted to turn his back and walk away without another word. Hermione was right. Surely the old man’s manipulations had contributed to at least some of his anger and his inability to fit in.
But the man who had done all that to Harry was dead. Harry had come closer to him in the memory trap that waited at the top of the Astronomy Tower than he had in this portrait, who was only a fragment and a lesser version, not the whole man repeated over again in miniature. Dumbledore had been wise and brave and clever and foolish all together. This portrait had little power to make himself as wonderful and as terrible in the eyes of the living.
“I came back,” he said. “And I think that now I’ve come back once, I’ll visit more often. It was this place of fear to me, and I didn’t think that I could do anything to change what the Ministry would do. But now that I’ve been here once, it will be easier to come back.”
Dumbledore nodded and touched his beard as though he was thinking. “And—forgive me, my boy, but I must ask this. Are you going to sacrifice your chances of a normal life to a life with Mr. Malfoy?”
Harry gave him a sweet smile. “I gave up all chance of a normal life long ago, sir. You gave it up for me, when you put me with the Dursleys instead of letting a wizard family raise me.”
Dumbledore sighed. “I did think that I was doing the best thing, my boy. If you had been raised in our world, you would have been a pampered prince. They might not have meant to spoil you like that, but it would have happened. It is never a good thing for a child when adults stand in awe of them.”
“But that happened anyway,” Harry answered brutally. “They were either in awe of me, or they suspected me of being the Heir of Slytherin or in league with Voldemort or evil in some other way. After the myth of the Boy-Who-Lived got spread around, there was no other way for them to react.” He paused, panting, and realized that Dumbledore was watching him with sad eyes.
“I would have preferred being spoiled and insufferable to being abused,” Harry finished.
“I did not foresee that,” Dumbledore admitted sadly. “Please believe that I did not intend it, Harry.”
Harry shook his head. “I know. You had only the best of intentions. But you kept on having them even when circumstances should have pointed out to you that having them wasn’t enough. That’s where I distrust you the most, sir. I know that your original went on manipulating me even after he was dead. I don’t know that you’ve ever admitted you were wrong. All the things you’ve said to me since I came here don’t imply it.”
Dumbledore was still. Harry watched leaves blowing through the enchanted window on the opposite wall and waited until he spoke again.
“It is very hard to admit that your weaving of a young life has gone wrong,” Dumbledore whispered. “Because of all the ruined chances, all the delicate things that you have ruined. I am sorry, Harry. If I wanted you to have a normal life, I should have labored harder to give you one.”
That was more of a concession than Harry had expected. He turned back and nodded. “Yes, you should have,” he said. “And you should have trusted less in the prophecy and trusted me more, as well as taken more of an active part in the fight against Voldemort. But I have my life now, and I’m learning to be contented with it. If some things need to change, still, I don’t need to be ashamed of everything in it.”
Dumbledore watched him with bright eyes. “I hope that you are right, my boy,” he said. “I do sincerely hope that you are right.”
Harry rolled his eyes at Dumbledore’s stubbornness and inability to actually listen to him, rather than raise doubts, but he could let it go. “Good-bye, sir,” he said. “If and when I visit Ron and Hermione, then I’ll come and visit you, too.”
“I will look forward to that, Harry.”
That was the one thing he had said in the conversation that was likely to be one hundred percent true, Harry thought, as he shut the door of the Headmaster’s office behind him.
*
“You are making a mistake, Draco.”
“Am I?” Draco didn’t look up from packing his cauldron away, but in truth, he was more curious than he would let Severus see. He had wondered when Severus would try to discourage him from continuing to associate with Harry. Now and then over the past few days, Severus had mentioned fleeting hints of Harry’s good qualities, such as his ability to challenge Draco, but Draco had had no doubt that Severus still disapproved of Draco’s choice in partners on the whole.
“Yes.” Severus leaned forwards against his portrait frame, eyes narrowed. “I have learned some more about the requirements of a relationship like the one you are embarking on with Potter. You are temperamentally unsuited to it. Either you would demand too much of him and make him resent your power instead of trust you, or you would be unable to be as firm as he needs and let him get away with too much.”
Draco laughed aloud. “Severus, you do realize that you sound as if you’re talking about a pet, rather than a human being who has the ability to tell me if I do something he doesn’t like?”
“Does Potter have that much wit?” Severus sneered. “I honestly hadn’t noticed.”
Draco shook his head. “And this is yet another way in which you’re less than your original was. He would have given little credit to Potter for intelligence, but he still relied on it, enough that he trusted him to save the world when he was younger and less rational than he is now. You, on the other hand, act as though any relationship we have is foredoomed to disaster just because you hate Potter.”
Silence, and then, “You are like me,” Severus said, intensely. “You are more like me than you think.”
“There was a time when I would have taken that as the greatest of compliments,” Draco said lightly, and laid a stirring stick in the proper slim slot in his packing case. He could have packed by means of a spell, but he was determined to indulge in this last conversation with Severus. “Now I know that you mean I’m doomed to lose the first person I’m truly interested in because that is what happened to you, and I refuse the comparison.”
Severus caught his breath in what sounded like pain. Draco watched in curiosity. How much did portraits feel? He had never settled that question to his satisfaction. He especially didn’t know if this portrait could feel deep emotions, since he had acknowledged that it was a highly imperfect copy of the Severus he had known.
“I am not my original,” Severus said, after several moments of tense, painful silence—or at least they seemed painful to him. Draco felt much less than he would have expected. “I have seen things that he did not, including your strange fascination with Mr. Potter.”
“And you knew some things that he knew,” Draco said. “Did you remember him changing the last riddle so that it referred to the Astronomy Tower and the memory trap that I went through there?”
Severus’s eyes flickered in the way Draco had once known would be followed by calm, cold chastisement. Then he said, “Yes, I did.”
Draco nodded. “That was the hardest of the traps to go through for me, the one I might not have survived if Harry wasn’t there. He repaid me for being there with him in the Forbidden Forest when the centaur’s arrow struck him. I won’t give him up now. If you’d like to blame someone for my stubborn clinging to him, you might blame yourself.”
The portrait Severus turned and strode away, beyond the edge of the frame. Draco waited for a few minutes, but he didn’t reappear. Draco shrugged and returned to packing.
He felt satisfied, despite the exasperation that the past week and more had given him, despite the uncertainty in the future of his relationship with Potter lasting, and despite the fact that he had to control Covington from a distance. He didn’t mind the power that Covington granted him. And he could allow her a little freedom in certain actions, as long as he always kept the prohibition in place that she couldn’t speak or write or gesture to anyone about his control over her.
I’ll have to strengthen the prohibition against allowing anyone to read her mind, he reminded himself.
Coming back to Hogwarts had been less stressful than he once would have said it was. He had even managed to work with the Weasel and the Mudblood successfully. And Severus was not the man he had remembered in portrait form, overwhelming and stressful—disturbingly like an idol to him, as Draco saw now. He didn’t know everything. The man who had was dead, or, more likely, the product of a fevered adolescent’s mind and a few nights on the run.
And Harry…
Draco smiled a little as he shut the lid of his trunk. Yes, his relationship with Harry was uncertain, but he no longer wanted to live in a world studded only with diamond-edged truths and nothing else. Fucking someone was like brewing an experimental potion. If he could live with uncertainty and risks in the one, he could surely live with it in the other.
“Draco?”
Harry stood in the doorway of Severus’s rooms, waiting for him with folded arms and a raised eyebrow. Draco walked over and kissed him. He made the kiss forceful on purpose, and Harry grunted and then leaned into him, nearly bowling him over.
Satisfied that Harry had once again been reminded that Draco wouldn’t leave, Draco stepped away. “You’re ready?” he asked.
Harry nodded. “I’ve packed everything up. Who knows when my owl will follow me home, but I’m not worried about her.”
His eyes were fixed on Draco, clearly saying what he was worried about. Draco took his hand and turned it over, spreading the fingers. Harry watched him, brow furrowed in a way that said he wondered what Draco was doing.
“I trust your hand to drag me out of danger, the way you did with the memory trap,” Draco said.
Harry flushed. “That was nothing,” he muttered. “You would have overcome it on your own if I hadn’t been there.”
Draco shook his head and kissed Harry’s palm. “And I also trust your hand to be bound and strapped to my headboard,” he said. “Do you understand?”
Harry licked his lips and nodded. “It’s something I never thought I would have,” he said.
“But you have it now,” Draco said in that tone of cool command Harry liked. “Stop doubting me.”
Harry gave him a cocky grin and leaned in to kiss him back, using more than a hint of teeth. Draco shivered with delight. While he wanted Harry to understand all the terms of their relationship, it would have been no fun without the challenge.
“Come on, then,” Harry muttered. “I’m more than ready to go.”
And they left the castle, climbing up the stairs from the dungeons slowly. Draco could still feel his past self climbing along with him if he thought about it, a terrified teenager who sometimes looked at Harry Potter and envied him, and sometimes, more terribly, wanted him for himself.
Now I have him, Draco thought, listening to the man breathing beside him.
On the whole—and he thought the same could be said of Harry—he preferred his future to his past.
The End.
