lomonaaeren (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lomonaaeren) wrote2011-05-27 06:32 pm
lomonaaeren) wrote2011-05-27 06:32 pm
[one-shots]: Silence, Fury, Laughter, R, 2/2
This is a long one-shot, sequel to two others I've posted, and so this is the second part of two. Don't start reading here.
"Harry, he could be arrested for murder."
Harry checked over his shoulder to make sure that Draco was really out of the house--it wasn't that he worried about him attacking Hermione, now, but he thought overhearing this conversation would be hard for him--and then faced his friend again. "Yes, he could," he said. "If I would testify against him, and any of the other witnesses could remember anything other than the overwhelming desire to touch him."
Hermione closed her eyes. She looked tired. He hadn't thought the rebuilding was that much work, but then, he mostly only contributed physical labor and the story of Voldemort's death as many times as people needed it told. Hermione was doing the much harder work of persuading audiences to believe that story and spending time around all sorts of people traumatized by the war. "We know that they're dazed because he used his allure," she said. "And he killed that man, Harry. You know he did."
"He was trying to kill us. Or possibly only Draco, but we have no idea what that curse would have done," Harry said.
"Which means that you don't know it was a curse."
Harry let his lip curl up in silent response.
Hermione shook her head. "It was still a killing," she said. "To show people that we take justice seriously, we need to arrest him."
"Are you going to arrest every Veela who uses allure for using the Imperius Curse?" Harry asked calmly. "Are you going to arrest members of the Order for the spells they used on people we thought were Death Eaters during the war?" He paused. Hermione still looked stubborn, so he played his trump card. "Are you going to arrest Ron for that woman he killed last week?"
Hermione closed her eyes at that, looking sick. It had been a hard war, Harry thought. "She was attacking him," she whispered.
"Like this man was attacking us." Harry lowered his voice when he saw how distressed she appeared. "Look, Hermione, I'm sorry it happened, too. I would have preferred to leave him alive." If only to discover what in the world he thought he was doing. "But this is the way it happened."
Hermione blinked at him again. "And I can't convince you to testify."
"Not against Draco, no. If someone insists, I can describe the curse he used and the conversation before that. And the way Draco killed him," Harry added. He thought the image of that would never leave him.
But even then, he was still more concerned about Draco than anyone else. Once, that hadn't been his reality. Now it was.
"If we're to set up justice after the war," Hermione said slowly, brow wrinkled as she fought her way through the puzzle that Harry had set for her, "then we have to try everyone. Including those who did things we don't like."
"Including people who killed in self-defense?" Harry asked. He shook his head. "You know that the Wizengamot doesn't convict people who used the Killing Curse in defense of their own lives, because the shield charms that their attackers used were too strong. That was in those documents we read when we were researching Horcruxes. And you'd have to try Ron, too." He hated it, but he would keep driving in the knife for Hermione for as long as she did it for him.
Hermione visibly swallowed. "Harry, do you know how bad this is going to look? Everyone and their grandfather is going to be after you for murder."
"I know." Harry kept his voice as gentle and serene as possible. "But we can fight this any number of ways. By playing up my status as hero. By saying that we were both still paranoid after Voldemort's dungeons, and that we tend to react badly when startled. By concentrating on Draco's Veela heritage--"
"He doesn't have any Veela heritage! It was all Transfiguration!"
"But a lot of people refuse to believe that," Harry said calmly, "the same way that they refuse to believe that I wasn't the one to defeat Voldemort. We have to use what we have, Hermione. Because I wouldn't trust Draco to be judged by a jury of his fucking peers, not when there's no one except me who sees him as one." And even that wasn't true all the time, he had to admit. Not when he commanded Draco in bed, and reveled in it. "And I won't give him up."
"There are sacrifices," Hermione whispered, but she already looked as if she'd given up. Weary, so weary that Harry couldn't help but lean forwards and pat her hand. He knew that he would pay for that later when Draco smelled her scent on him, but, well. He'd pay.
"I know," Harry said. "And I think I've made enough. I should get to enjoy the fruits of my labor. It'll take forever to pay all the debts that the wizarding world thinks I should owe them, if I start. So I'll stay out of it, help when I can and when I don't think it'll cost me too much, and enjoy Draco."
"You weren't like this before he ate the Horcrux," Hermione said. "I wonder if that changed you somehow--"
Harry laughed harshly, recognizing a theory taking root in her mind. He had to crush that out of existence as soon as he could. "Hermione. The Horcrux always needed to go if I was going to live or if Voldemort was going to be defeated, since we didn't know the first was possible at the time. And consider what Draco did to me in the dungeons. Do you really think I could be the same after that?"
Hermione gave him another unhappy look, then turned her neck away like a bird's. "Not the same. But I didn't realize you would change so much," she whispered.
"Neither did I." Harry shrugged. "But I have no particular anxiety to change back, and I like the person I am now, Hermione. If you don't, then will you tell me?" He held her eyes.
Hermione swallowed. Then she said, "I still like you, Harry. I'm still your friend. It's just that, it's hard being a hero."
Harry gave her a gentle smile. "That, I think I never denied."
Abruptly, Hermione leaned forwards and gave him a hug that practically enveloped his whole body. Harry hugged her fiercely back, glad that he was apparently forgiven. "Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you for being you, whoever that person is now, and thanks for the reassurances and help you've given so far. You're right, you do deserve a holiday. We'll handle this somehow."
Harry nodded at her and leaned back. "There's no reason that you have to handle it, either. Just say that you're not living with me in the Order headquarters anymore and they'll find someone else to bother."
Hermione hesitated. "But that could be worse for you and Malfoy. What happens if they attack here?"
"The wards tear them to shreds," Harry said. "The same thing that would happen if someone attacked Hogwarts right now."
"But that'll earn you more bad publicity." Hermione looked at him anxiously.
Harry nodded. "I know. But one's the same thing as the other at this point. The only thing I could do to satisfy them is something I'm not willing to do: give up Draco and my life to come back and be their hero. Even then, you know there's people who would hold out and mutter about how I got away with murder the same way that there were people still muttering that I was the Heir of Slytherin in my fifth year. I don't care anymore, Hermione. I'm tired of them. The way the world is now means that I can protect my privacy and be with Draco. So I am."
"All right," Hermione said, climbing to her feet. "If you're sure."
"I am," Harry said. "Please come to me if you're in danger, though. I couldn't stand that."
Hermione smiled so brightly that Harry pretended to wince and hold his hand over his eyes, and she laughed and hugged him again. "I told Ron that you couldn't have changed that much," she whispered. "I know that you still care about us."
"I always did, even when the rest of you were stupid," Harry said, and Hermione snorted. "I don't care about you more than Draco, just in different ways. You know that, right?"
"I always did," Hermione said. "I just needed a little more proof for Ron."
She left after that, and Harry leaned back against the wall and said aloud, not glancing at anyone in particular, "You saw it all. The only times she touched me, it wasn't sexual. She doesn't care about me that way."
"She touched you." Draco's voice was a soft snarl. Harry heard the scrape of his claws against wood as he grabbed the side of the windowsill and climbed up. The next moment, he slung himself into the room and crouched down in front of Harry, his wings bulging behind him. "Why would she want to do that if she doesn't want you?"
"If you hugged your mother," Harry asked, "does it mean that you wanted her?"
Draco's face shut down. "You weren't going to talk about them," he muttered, and turned his head away.
Harry reached out and put a gentle hand on his shoulder, above the beginning curve of the wing. "I asked you a question," he said. "That's all."
Draco grunted, and his wing stirred forwards enough that the curve brushed Harry's fingers. "I can't be sure," he whispered. "What happened to them. I hate that."
Harry nodded in silence. Draco had thought his parents had been killed for failing Voldemort, but the Death Eaters who'd supposedly seen them tortured and executed had had contradictions in their stories. Likewise with Snape; some people had said that he had died near Hogwarts, others that Voldemort had killed him months ago, or that he'd been locked into a secret underground lab to complete his potions and hadn't been seen in those same months, or that he'd fled England the night of Voldemort's death. There were clues, but the clues showed up too much and too often and contradicted each other.
Harry thought both Snape and the Malfoys had probably used Memory Charms on their enemies to make their flight safer. Of course, that didn't mean they were safe now, but it did make tracking them bloody difficult.
And when they heard that Draco was alive, that he had survived the transformation into a Veela instead of starving to death the way Voldemort had intended him to, would they come back? Harry didn't know. Draco sometimes talked about his parents with furious love, sometimes with violent rage. He could see them rejecting Draco or accepting him or living in some sort of strange in-between state where they kept Draco panting for their approval.
Until they visited or an owl came from them, though--or they received some confirmation that the Malfoys were indeed dead--Harry didn't think they should worry about it.
Draco took a few deep, shuddering breaths, and leaned back on the table. "I know that she just touched you to comfort you, or comfort herself," he said, to Harry's surprise. "But I don't like it. Can I have you now?"
Harry smiled, in helpless agreement as much as anything else, and opened his arms.
*
The message came borne on the wings of a large white swan. As the bird wheeled around their house, carefully avoiding the wards, Draco saw the silver scroll it carried, clutched securely in a black beak. He snorted. He reckoned it was safer than trusting a swan to carry it in webbed feet, at that.
The swan settled on the pond a good distance beneath their tree and sailed serenely for a moment. Then it came to a stop at the bank and looked up.
Who but Veela would use a swan for their messenger? Draco set his wings straight and glided down to a landing on the grass beside the water. The swan nodded, wriggled its bottom as though to spread the magnificent tail it didn't have, and bowed its neck so that the scroll dropped safely into Draco's hands.
The scroll shone the moment it did so, and then unfolded. Draco found himself rolling his eyes. Of course they would present it that way, and use a spell that would trigger only when someone with Veela magic touched the scroll. It would probably destroy itself any other way. Draco shook his head. If Harry had touched it, would they have blamed him for keeping their message from reaching Draco?
Probably.
He scanned the scroll. The top half was in Bulgarian, but the bottom provided what Draco assumed was an English translation of the original. In a lot of language that badly wanted to be legal terms but was too strained and flowery to do so, it proclaimed that Draco Malfoy had been judged and exiled by the Veela community from attending its rituals or having his choosing of his beloved officially recognized by them.
Draco turned the scroll over, frowning. Then he drew his wand and cast several spells to determine whether it bore writing concealed under a charm. Nothing resulted. Draco had to close his eyes and sigh until he ran out of breath before he could express the depth of his disappointment.
Why would they assume that I would care about such a thing when I wasn't born into the community and they know that? I thought Vasya came to try and turn me back into a normal human anyway. Accepting me was never a choice.
Draco tore up the scroll and cast the pieces to the ground like snow. The swan spread its wings and hissed at him as if it disapproved. Draco flicked his fingers at it and spread his wings back when it didn't move. The swan lowered its neck and seemed to debate charging him for a moment before it turned its back sulkily and sailed away across the pond, then turned again and began flapping to gain height. Draco kept his wings raised and the light glowing between them until it was safely gone.
"Are you all right?"
The quiet question startled Draco, which showed how much more absorbed by the Veela's scroll he had been than he should be. Normally, Harry couldn't have descended from their home without alerting both Draco's ears and his Veela senses that he was on the move. Draco turned around and swept his wings forwards to embrace Harry. "Of course," he said. "They chose exile. A neat way of refusing to acknowledge that I was never part of them or wanted to be, and that you acting with me showed that we had rejected Vasya's claims of your enslavement."
"Not what I meant," Harry said, and put his hands on Draco's arms, steadily meeting his eyes. "Would you have wanted someone you could talk to about this? Someone to exchange information with? That's the chance I regret you losing. And if I lost it for you--"
"You didn't," Draco said quickly. Grand changes or not, Harry still carried far too much guilt for random things. "I could have spoken to Vasya in a more reasonable tone and tried to arrange something less violent and coercive with her if I had truly wanted to be free. I didn't. I promise," he added, when Harry sounded as if he was drawing in breath to object.
Harry paused and looked at him, apparently searching for something in his eyes that Draco wasn't sure existed. After a moment, he relaxed and nodded. "All right. If you say so."
"I do." Draco seized his hand and kissed him just above the pulse. "I'll learn more about Veela from books. I'll talk with experts under an assumed name. I'll take classes where I can find them. And you forget, I can do some of my research just by feeling out the way my body reacts and what's good and what isn't. It's not like I'm trying to study Veela without being one."
Harry smiled, but there were subdued shadows of anxiety along his cheekbones. Draco wanted to kiss all of them away. "I know. And I'll help you."
"Good," Draco said. "That means a lot."
He escorted Harry back into the house, and they spent a few hours eating, making lists of the kinds of books they should look for, and writing owls to order them. It was the calmest morning Draco could remember since he'd changed, despite the news the swan had brought him.
Vasya had gone to such lengths to make the point that he did not belong with her kind, and ordinary wizards would reject Draco if they could. Well, then, Draco would make his own place.
At least he knew that he would never stand in it alone.
*
"I never knew you were good at that."
Harry jumped, and the stick of charcoal in his hand blurred across the parchment. He laughed nervously and stretched; he had got so involved in the drawing in front of him that he hadn't heard Draco's approach. But he couldn't be embarrassed with the way Draco's arms settled around him and his chin came to rest on Harry's shoulder.
"I didn't know I was, either." Harry shrugged, and then laughed when Draco turned his head with expressive slowness to look at him. "I mean, I drew when I was a kid, but it never seemed to matter, and it wasn't something I kept up. I don't know why I bought this." He toyed with the edge of the parchment. "Interest, I reckon. Curiosity."
"The best motive to do anything," Draco said in approval, and the bottom of his wing brushed Harry's hip. "Except desire."
Harry batted the hand away. "You would always think something like that."
"If I always think it, that makes it right," Draco responded, crowding closer to him and spreading his wings so that they completely surrounded Harry's head. "No one can be wrong so consistently."
"You'd be surprised," Harry muttered, thinking for a moment of the Dursleys, and then pushed at one of Draco's wings, making sure to keep his hand in the middle of the feathers and away from the edges that, depending on Draco's mood, could either bend too easily and hurt him or cut like icicles. "Back off for right now. I want to finish this."
Draco hummed under his breath the way he did when he was thinking of sex, but backed away obligingly, and Harry returned to the scene he was drawing. It was an image of Hedwig, perching in the branches of their tree with the house looming behind her. Harry didn't think it was a very good drawing, since he had never been in that part of the tree with Draco and had to only imagine what the angle would look like, but Draco was absorbed and silent behind him, and that was increasingly less likely to happen except when he really thought Harry's efforts at something were good. Draco loved him, Harry knew, but he had never been slow with criticism and wouldn't be now.
"You really are good at this," Draco murmured, when Harry had finished shading in Hedwig's eyes the way he wanted and had paused to consider his next move.
Harry shrugged. "I never thought that much about it, like I said. Little kids are always drawing."
"But you're not little anymore," Draco said, and this time it was his hand that sneaked around Harry's hip.
Harry batted it away, and Draco rumbled a purr and leaned his head on Harry's shoulder, heavily enough that Harry had to shift his weight to the side to balance it. But he didn't get angry about Harry's refusal. That was a change, too. Harry had to conceal a smile when he thought of what Ron and Hermione would say if they could see them now. They might be a little less convinced that Draco was bad for him and only wanted to fuck him.
Which Draco wanted, of course. But he wanted other things, too, and Harry was getting better at knowing when his refusals would inspire arguments, when they would inspire sulking, when Draco was only teasing, and when Draco would accept them and go on.
"No, I'm not," Harry said, and then said something he'd been thinking about for a while, trying to decide how to say. But Draco was a good audience for that kind of thing. Draco would respond. If he thought it was stupid, he would say so. Harry didn't mind that as much; he knew he could argue back, even get into a blazing row if he had to. He just didn't want his audience to sit there in embarrassed silence. "It's strange. I'm thinking I never got a normal life. A weird childhood I thought was normal sometimes, the knowledge I was different according to the Dursleys but not the knowledge of why, seven years of fighting a war, and now this. Maybe I'm finally learning to do things I would have done if I'd been normal."
"You're better than normal," Draco hissed, and his wings tightened protectively around Harry. Harry had told him more about the Dursleys now, and he hated the words "normal" and "freak" and would stare hard at Harry when he used them. At least Harry had talked him out of flying to Privet Drive to claw Dudley's eyes out.
"Fine," Harry said. "Just like everybody else, then."
"Not everyone else is better than normal." Draco's claws shone like knives from the corner of Harry's eyes, always a bad sign. Most of the time, they curved and bent like reeds.
"I meant," Harry said, "that I'm learning to be like everyone else."
"Not everyone else has a Veela for a lover." Draco seemed to think about that for a bit, and then added, "Or should. I would have had more competition for you."
"And all those Veela that don't exist probably wouldn't be as fantastically childish together as you can be all by yourself," Harry muttered.
That received an offended hiss and Draco actually drawing back from him and leaving Harry to contemplate his charcoal pictures in peace for a time. But Draco didn't go far, and Harry knew that was another thing about this life that was different from the way he had pictured it being: they could have an argument and not worry that it would break them apart for no reason except that they were arguing.
Harry would never have imagined that his life could turn out this way, no. But he was glad it had.
*
"Draco."
Draco was awake in seconds, his heart beating so hard that memories of the dungeon assembled themselves around him and wouldn't release him for long moments. The impression only increased when he saw the silver deer Patronus standing at the end of the bed. He flung out one arm and confirmed that Harry was still curled up beside him. He relaxed with a little hiss of air and leaned back on the bed, staring, wondering why Harry would need to send him a Patronus when he wasn't in danger.
Unless that wasn't Harry. But a bit of silver light shining on the ends of his fingertips lit Harry's face and the wing-shaped scar--a detail that most people didn't know about and would find hard to fake--and Draco relaxed. He refused to think that someone could have sneaked through the wards and into the house and used Polyjuice without him knowing it.
Then he turned back to the Patronus and noticed the lack of antlers.
"Draco."
The voice did cast him back in time into the dungeons, and for excellent reason. He'd last heard it from Professor Snape, declaring that he didn't care what Voldemort did with Draco.
Draco swallowed, and prickling cold swallowed him in return, creeping up and down his hands and freezing his wings. He huddled closer to Harry, as if his beloved could somehow protect him from the nightmare come back to life. Draco had assumed he would never see Snape again, and was more than happy to have it that way, despite curiosity over his fate. Snape had shown no such concern over him.
"Follow me, and I will lead you to your parents." The Patronus turned and walked away from the bed, aiming for the doorway of the house.
I should have put up wards against Patronuses, Draco thought, and clutched the blankets until they shredded beneath his claws.
The silver doe halted again at the door, and stood waiting.
Draco closed his eyes. He wanted to turn over and go back to sleep, choosing his future with Harry over the past. It was the only sensible decision, now that he had come so close to having what would content the Veela and the human halves of him alike.
But the curiosity would eat at him, and he reached out and roughly shook Harry's shoulder. Harry was up in seconds, a relic no doubt of war-raids, his wand held high. He started to speak a Lumos charm, but Draco shook his head and gestured at the silver doe.
It bounded out the door. Without a word spoken, without a thought needing to be exchanged, Draco seized Harry by the shoulders and followed with an easy, heavy wingbeat.
The Patronus hardly touched the ground as it leaped away to the west, hooves soundless, coat shining like a star. That confirmed for Draco that Snape and his parents--if actually alive and with the professor--knew about his transformation. He wouldn't be able to keep up on foot.
They almost certainly hadn't intended for Harry to come with him, whatever they knew. But Draco didn't care. If they hadn't planned for Harry to accompany him, then they were about to have a needed revelation.
The doe came to rest a long time later on a flat patch of grass that looked almost burned, at the foot of a rocky hill. Draco glanced around, but couldn't tell where they were off the top of his head. They had flown for less than an hour, but he hadn't explored for that long in all directions from the house yet.
The stone trembled in front of the Patronus's hooves, and faded, at the same moment as the doe herself did. A good illusion, Draco thought, the kind that his mother was skilled at casting. He choked on hope and landed. Harry kept a steady hand on his shoulder as they moved towards the cave.
His mother stepped out of the entrance.
Draco broke. He surged away from Harry and leaped into the air, coming down with a chop of his wings right in front of her. She had started when he moved, but now she saw him and her face shone. She opened her arms, and Draco embraced her, winding his wings around her shoulders at the same time.
A tentative hand rested on the primaries of the right one, and Draco looked up to see his father watching him over his mother's shoulder.
"Son," Lucius said, a word that hummed with acknowledgment of what hung between them. "Welcome."
Draco couldn't speak. He lowered his head back into his mother's shoulder, but twitched his wing out to include his father as well. He could feel Harry's watching, silent presence behind him, and knew that he would wait as long as needed, and then do what was needed. Whether that turned out to be introducing himself or staying quiet, he would do it.
It was wonderful, Draco thought, to have someone he could depend on the way he could depend on Harry.
Especially because it seemed likelier and likelier that his parents would ask for things he couldn't grant them. He sensed, at one and the same time, his mother's warmth and the painful strength of her hug, his father's steady touch on his wing and his pride, and the cutting glances his father gave Harry.
"Draco."
Professor Snape stepped out of the cave then and moved towards him. Draco turned to face him and restricted the aggressive stretch his wings wanted to make. His mother let out a slight gasp, and Draco realized why: his claws had sharpened at the same moment, abruptly slicing through the cloth of her robe. He removed his hands and held them harmlessly high, smiling at her before he returned his glance to Snape.
"You abandoned me to die," he said.
Snape shook his head. "I would have been unable to do so," he said. "I swore too many Vows to defend you no matter what happened." He was calm as black ice, which made Draco want to rage, but the rage was already there, and he would gain nothing by indulging it. "I judged that the best chance for your survival at the moment was as a Veela. I knew, if the Dark Lord did not, how long it took a Veela to starve to death, and guessed that he was likely to cast some other prisoner in as entertainment before long. You would have bonded with anyone introduced under such circumstances." His eyes flickered to Harry.
"Harry is not anyone," Draco said, and he knew that his teeth must look more like fangs than ever now. He dropped his hands and lowered them into position where he could claw Snape apart--if it hadn't been for his mother standing between them.
"Of course not," Snape said, and his voice had a low, vicious charge to it that Draco didn't understand and could only attribute to Snape's hatred of Harry. "He is your heart's desire, the partner you always would have chosen if you could have of your own free will. Of course he is."
"He is my beloved."
"A Veela term only." Snape, his eyes fixed on Draco as if he could ignore Harry even though he was speaking of him, reached into his cloak. Draco tensed to spring if he tried to fling a combat potion at Harry, but Snape only drew out a slender glass vial filled with a bright green potion that Draco didn't recognize. It looked like moss and smelled like summer. "I have the solution here, Draco."
"A potion to reverse the Transfiguration," Draco said, and his voice was high and thin and reedy. He hadn't meant it to sound that way. He had meant it to sound flat and rejecting. He glanced over his shoulder at Harry. Harry only smiled at him gently, which Draco didn't find that reassuring.
"Yes," Snape said. "I did not wish to contact you until I was certain that it would work."
Draco frowned. "How do you know it will?"
Snape looked at him silently, and Draco swallowed. Of course. Snape was silently telling him not to be stupid. Snape had Transfigured test subjects and then reversed the Transfigurations with the help of the potion. And if some of them had died in the research, Draco knew that would not have bothered the professor. He had none of Harry's code of morality; if he had labored to get rid of Voldemort, Draco thought it had depended more on personal motivations than an abstract sense of ethics.
Draco looked over his shoulder at Harry. Harry shook his head at him. Draco swept one wing down hard enough to almost strike his mother, hissing softly. Harry nodded and started talking.
"Fine. I think you should do whatever makes you most comfortable, Draco. If you want to be a Veela, or if you don't, then you know I'll stay with you, no matter what." He gave a smile, and Draco could see how thin it was stretched over the emotions brewing under the surface, even if he didn't know as well as he should have what those emotions were. "You have to make the decision."
"That's bollocks," Draco said.
His mother gasped, though perhaps more from the term than from the declaration. Draco could feel the increased tension from his father and Snape pressing against him like a heat wave.
He never turned around, never glanced at them. This was between him and Harry right now, and if they had wanted to have a place in it, then they should have contacted him earlier. As soon as they found out that he was alive would have been favorite.
Harry blinked once. "What?"
"You're involved in this," Draco said. "You're not going to dump all the decision-making on me so that you get to be a little martyr. You're going to make the decision with me, because you are part of me. Now stop being such a coward."
Draco had never seen the smile Harry gave him then, dazzling and wide and delighted. He nodded and said, "All right. I don't think that you should take the potion. For one thing, we're happy the way we are, and I think that you'd have to go through another tormenting process of accepting yourself if you drank it." He took a deep breath, and his eyes darkened for the first time. "Second, if Snape wants to protect your life and doesn't care about how much pain you'll go through as a result of it, who knows what that potion might have as consequences?"
Draco turned back to Snape and raised his eyebrows in question, ignoring the abrupt motion Snape made, as if he would cast a spell at Harry. Harry was well-prepared for that. He, too, had chains tangling and tying him to the three people here, but they were much slimmer and less complicated than Draco's.
"What are the side-effects?" Draco asked, when the silence had settled into a great tension like that before a thunderstorm and Snape still hadn't answered the way he should have.
The man's black eyes fastened on what seemed to be Draco's collarbone. Then Draco twitched a wing automatically to relieve a cramp, and his gaze followed it. As if becoming a Veela were the worst fate anyone could ask for.
Draco bared his teeth. He was less sure now that the test subjects had survived. Professor Snape was a wonderful brewer, and he might not let personal emotions affect him much in making the actual potions, but he could let them prejudice the way he reacted to a test.
"Well?" Draco asked.
"Draco," his mother whispered, and leaned forwards. Her lips came into contact with his cheek like a whisper, as if she had wings of her own. "Don't you want to be human again?"
"I am human," Draco said. "In all the important ways. I've got hands that can hold, and a tongue that can speak, and a brain that can think, and a prick that can fuck."
His mother went white. His father, strangely silent all through these proceedings, made an aborted movement. Professor Snape shifted carefully to the side. It was a better position from which to strike at Harry, but Draco was heartened to see that Harry realized the same thing and pointed his wand without hesitation.
"If you name those the most important qualities one can have," Snape murmured, "then you have indeed changed."
Draco laughed. He couldn't help it. He spread his wings and fanned them up and down, incidentally bringing one of them into the path of any curse Snape might try. "Of course you would say that," he said. "Because of course I shouldn't have changed after I was Transfigured into another species, and left in the darkness, and had to eat parts of Harry to escape, and learned how to fly and how to defend him and how to be with him. I should still be the same student and son that you left behind."
"If we had come back for you," Lucius said, "with the Order of the Phoenix hunting enemies and the countryside still unsettled, we might have been condemned to death without a trial. It would have accomplished nothing except to hurt you."
Draco nodded to his father. "Believe it or not, I am glad to see you," he said. "But I would have hoped--I would have wanted you to send me a message to me earlier. If you could use Professor Snape's Patronus, and did it late at night, then no one else would have intercepted it."
"If you are glad," Snape said, "why not take the potion right away?"
"Because I'm not the same," Draco said, exasperated. "Months of hiding changed you. Everything I named changed me. And I don't want to change back."
"Even if I asked you to?" His mother reached up to stroke his cheek. "Even if I said that I wanted to hold my little boy again without his wings getting in the way?"
Draco met her eyes, not tempted anymore to reveal how much her words hurt, and nodded. "Because it was your little boy who died in Voldemort's dungeons," he said, and watched the flinch sweep through them all as someone watching an alien terror. "I survived. If you can't accept me the way I am--something Harry did, even though we used to be enemies--then maybe we shouldn't be together anymore."
It was amazing how calmly he was able to accept this. Or maybe not amazing, exactly. He had fought his way through to his epiphanies partially by, as he explained it to Harry, realizing that there was no "real" him separate from the Veela. And there was no "real" Draco separate from the memories of the boy he had been. They were his, still, but they didn't define him anymore.
Anymore than his relationship to his parents did.
"Draco," his father whispered. His mother merely took a step away, her head turned to the side. She said nothing, but her shoulder could reject in a way that her face alone couldn't.
"You can't mean that," Snape said, but his voice was so flat that Draco doubted the professor was commenting on the way he would push his parents away if they didn't accept him. He was commenting, instead, on Draco's happiness with who and what he was.
Does he think that being human is so much better than being Veela? I wasn't aware he had any creature prejudice. Or maybe he can't accept that I wouldn't want to rely on one of his new, experimental potions.
The thought tugged Draco's mouth up into a sharp smile, and Narcissa exhaled loudly. "Draco," she said, and then again, "Draco. Please. Listen to yourself."
"I am," Draco said. "Since no one else except Harry seems inclined to. It's the rest of you who need some lessons in how to hear."
"I will not be lectured to by my son," Lucius said, in a haughty tone that sounded so out-of-place here Draco felt Harry's eyebrow rise.
"The time is past when you had authority over me," Draco said, and paused. When no one said anything, he added, "I notice that you haven't yet refuted my suggestion that you could have told me where you were at any time, by means of Professor Snape's Patronus."
"That was impractical for reasons that you do not understand," his mother said.
"Then explain them to me." Draco tried to drop his wings and put on his best attentive, willing expression, but only the last part was possible. His instincts stiffened his wings into immovable barriers in front of Harry. Well, so be it. "What were the considerations?"
"We had to see where you would settle," Professor Snape said.
Draco thought about that. It sounded reasonable, actually, given that the Order had had spies on him during those first days. Perhaps someone would have seen Snape's Patronus arrive after all. He nodded. "So you waited until we showed no signs of moving from our new home to send to me?"
"That's not what he means."
Harry stepped forwards to stand next to Draco, and Draco moved his wings to cover him. Harry ducked under them and stood within the circle of his embrace, but where his view of Snape wouldn't be blocked. Now Draco could see Snape's loathing for Harry more openly, and it made him hiss silently in warning. Snape never looked at him. "It means something else," Harry said. "Not simply place. They could have figured something out. Sent an owl to me and had the letter addressed to you. Sent you your parents' Patronuses. Sent a signal with an owl that no one else would recognize but you would."
Now that he thought about it, Draco realized that he could come up with two or three such signals easily. He looked at his parents.
"What does he mean, then?" he asked, and although he turned his head partially towards Harry, he was asking anyone who would have been willing to answer.
"He means," Harry murmured, "that they wanted to see where you would settle, human or Veela. Happy with me, or not happy with me. Mad or sane." He paused, then added, "I think they acted when they realized that you actually seemed to be living with yourself, not furiously trying to get rid of the changes. That's not what they want. They want to swoop in and rescue you from me and from your fate." His face held clear disdain as he glared at Draco's mother and father. "At least I gave up playing hero when I realized that he didn't want me to, you know?"
"I want to know whether that's true," Draco said. His voice had gone soft, he thought in wonder. His father had sometimes done that with him, but it seemed--well, odd for him to do it in return. But his father flinched the way Draco had in the past when Lucius confronted him with that tone, so he was doing something right. "Did you think that I needed you to take me away from the big, bad Potter?"
"How can you stand being less than human?" his mother murmured back. "Less than pure-blood?"
Draco shook his head. "I'm still human in the important ways. I told you. And as for the blood...Mother, do you think this change somehow made me into a Muggleborn?" He nearly used the other word, but a glance to the side, to make sure Harry was safe, also revealed Harry's elbow poised neatly in place beneath his ribs. Draco smiled and focused on his parents. "I want to know what you think. I want straight answers to my questions."
"There are no straight answers to something as complicated as this," Lucius said, and that at least sounded like truth to Draco. "We wanted to wait until we thought we wouldn't be killed as traitors or Death Eaters. Then we wanted to wait until we had a way to make you a Malfoy again." His eyes swept bitterly up and down Draco's body, lingering on the claws and the wings, since they were the two most visible markers of the change. Draco wondered if he saw the others, too, like the wing scar on Harry's forehead and the few holes in his body patched with feathers. "You refuse us now."
"One spell," Snape said, his voice exquisitely neutral.
Harry sprang and whirled towards him, ending up almost beyond the range of Draco's protective wings, his eyes so hot with fury that Draco shuddered in appreciation and his parents started. "You cast anything," Harry said, "and I'll kill you."
"You think you can," Snape said, and his voice descended into hatred that made Draco twitch with the lust to kill. "You think you can cut through the defenses of the Dark Lord's most successful potions brewer, the Order's most complex spy--"
Draco called and cast a ball of white light from his hand without hesitating. It struck the vial of green potion that the professor held, and it heated until it exploded. Harry had prudently ducked back inside the embrace of Draco's wings, and Draco held him, curving his feathers so that the bits of glass bounced off them. Snape, with a myriad of small cuts on his hand and his face drained of blood, took a step back, watching Draco in shock.
Draco bared his teeth at him and snarled. The snarl seemed to rip out part of his lungs, it traveled so deep into his body. "Leave my beloved alone," he said. "You only get this one warning."
"We're trying to help you," his mother whispered.
"A lack of answers to questions doesn't help me," Draco retorted. "Endangering my beloved doesn't help me. And now you lack the potion that would have changed me, and you can't force it down my throat, or bind me with a spell and do that, or whatever it was you were planning." He felt an ache deep in his chest, in the same place where he had hidden the knowledge of how much his parents' disappearance affected him, but he refused to show that on his face. "If you want me for myself, I'm willing. If you only want me changed, then it's best that we walk away from each other now."
His mother looked as if she was holding a bird with beating wings near her heart, her breath came so fast. She leaned back as if she wanted Lucius to support her, but he moved away, his back turned as though this was something they could not share. Narcissa stumbled and then stood upright again, her face bright pink with embarrassment.
Draco smiled in spite of himself. It made her seem more human, and he was happy to be reminded of that right now.
But perhaps his smile wasn't the best expression he could be wearing when his mother was looking for reassurance. She went pale, then fixed, and turned her back, stepping away to join his father.
Draco turned to Snape. Harry moved with him, tensed ready to protect. Draco draped a wing around his shoulders and raised an eyebrow in silent question at his old professor.
Snape stood looking at him as if he hoped to find the answer in Draco's eyes, then made an eloquent, twisting gesture with one hand. "You are not the boy I trained and taught any more than you are their son," he said.
"That settles that, then," Draco said, while his heart grew heavier and his wings grew lighter. "I'll thank you not to contact me. And if you try to set up a trap for either Harry or me, I'll consider you an enemy." He released his hold on his scrabbling instincts long enough for Snape to see what was really brewing in him at the moment, what he would have done to the man if he wasn't still a mixture of human and Veela rather than purely Veela.
Snape looked openly and honestly bewildered, for a lightning bolt of a second. Then he sneered and said, "I have known connections and bonds for which I made sacrifices, Draco. Be careful that you do not wake one day to find yourself a drained husk, and Potter gone, having obtained what he wanted from you."
"I was the one who had to chase him to get him to agree to this," Draco said. "And if he were so stupid as to try slipping off, I would simply chase him down again."
Harry laughed silently beside him. Snape stiffened as though the laughter was a sword through his guts, and Draco joined in. Snape ended up fading after Draco's parents into the cave, although he never turned his back on Draco and Harry as the elder Malfoys had done. The glamour of stone over the entrance sealed itself silently behind them.
Draco sighed and shook his head. "That's enough of that," he said. "Let's go home."
"If you want to," Harry said, leaning back and looking up at him. "If you think that's all we need to do here."
Draco considered forcing the glamour away again, forcing a confrontation with these people who were only determined to accept him without his wings or not at all. He had persuaded Harry to his point-of-view, after all. He might manage to persuade them.
But the truth was that he still remembered Snape betraying him to Voldemort, claiming Draco's fate did not matter to him. And he still remembered his parents sending him no letter or other secure message for weeks, because of their fear.
Of being captured, yes, but also of what he had become.
"I think it is," he said, and folded his arms and wings around Harry again for another brief embrace before they took to the air.
*
"This is actually a privilege that you get to do this to me," Harry said. It took him almost a minute to get that sentence out, panting and forcing the words into being around a moan.
Draco bit the back of his neck, hard enough to make Harry bleed, and then lapped it up in silent response. His hips flexed, and Harry staggered forwards, nearly shoved from his knees and elbows by the simple strength of that thrust.
"Yes, it is," Draco said. His voice was blurred with lust, with need, with blood. He shoved again with his hips, and Harry cried out in pleasure that spiraled up abruptly into painful, blinding light. Draco's magic had hit him at the same time.
After that, Draco settled down into a steady pattern of fucking him: pulling back slowly, thrusting hard on the forwards motion, and hitting his prostate at the same moments as the Veela magic poured through him. Harry whimpered and whined and in general probably sounded like someone in extreme pain.
Well, that was what stopping the sex right now would have felt like to him, so in some ways it was an accurate depiction.
Draco mumbled some words into the back of his neck and bit him again, and Harry flew apart from the inside out, until all that was left was a small center of sensation, locked around Draco's body like a silver ring. As if from a distance, he felt Draco press closer to him, murmuring and crooning and wordlessly speaking, until he came with a battering of wings about Harry's head that would probably have hurt him if he was less relaxed.
Harry yawned and rolled over, feeling Draco slip out of him and hearing the squelch. Draco growled, moved with him, and slid back inside. Harry rolled his eyes at the ceiling. "Fine, then you get us into a comfortable position," he said.
With a lot of rolling and adjusting of his wings and pausing to make sure that his claws wouldn't scrape down Harry's sides--which sometimes happened when he was excited, as his Veela instincts reacted to it like they did to rage--Draco managed. In the end, he was lying on his stomach, the pillows and blankets piled more around than under or above them, and Harry cradled beneath him, drawing all the warmth he needed from Draco's own body.
Harry closed his eyes and listened to Draco's slow breathing. "Any time you want," he mumbled sleepily, "we can track your parents, you know. They might be more reasonable if we got them away from Snape."
Draco hesitated, wings caught in mid-extension. Harry was sure that he was about to say something else, something that would change the conversation in a new direction, and he tried to sit up and open his eyes.
But Draco soothed him again with his claws on the back of Harry's neck, his tongue darting out and smoothing the skin up and down. Harry groaned as more sluggish pleasure rolled through him, and his cock twitched. Draco settled down again, though, so Harry did his best to do the same, and ignore the way his body quivered.
"Not right now," Draco said. "Later, maybe. I still haven't thought of any good answers for why they didn't try to contact me. Why did I have to join everyone else in believing they were dead until they had a 'solution' to my 'problem?'" His voice was dusty with bitterness.
Harry reached back and squeezed Draco's hand. "I know," he said. "There are reasons that I'm grateful I never have to see my Muggle family, either, and one of is because they didn't want to accept me unless I changed what I was."
"You never did tell me in detail about that," Draco said.
"Later," Harry said, "maybe."
Draco tensed enough that Harry thought he would insist, but in the end he offered Harry a soft laugh, and they lay down again in silence. Harry closed his eyes and gave a sigh of contentment that seemed to travel up from where his legs lay locked with Draco's, through his arse and Draco's cock, to his shoulders embraced by Draco's wings, and finally out his mouth.
Here. This is where we're supposed to be.
The End.
"Harry, he could be arrested for murder."
Harry checked over his shoulder to make sure that Draco was really out of the house--it wasn't that he worried about him attacking Hermione, now, but he thought overhearing this conversation would be hard for him--and then faced his friend again. "Yes, he could," he said. "If I would testify against him, and any of the other witnesses could remember anything other than the overwhelming desire to touch him."
Hermione closed her eyes. She looked tired. He hadn't thought the rebuilding was that much work, but then, he mostly only contributed physical labor and the story of Voldemort's death as many times as people needed it told. Hermione was doing the much harder work of persuading audiences to believe that story and spending time around all sorts of people traumatized by the war. "We know that they're dazed because he used his allure," she said. "And he killed that man, Harry. You know he did."
"He was trying to kill us. Or possibly only Draco, but we have no idea what that curse would have done," Harry said.
"Which means that you don't know it was a curse."
Harry let his lip curl up in silent response.
Hermione shook her head. "It was still a killing," she said. "To show people that we take justice seriously, we need to arrest him."
"Are you going to arrest every Veela who uses allure for using the Imperius Curse?" Harry asked calmly. "Are you going to arrest members of the Order for the spells they used on people we thought were Death Eaters during the war?" He paused. Hermione still looked stubborn, so he played his trump card. "Are you going to arrest Ron for that woman he killed last week?"
Hermione closed her eyes at that, looking sick. It had been a hard war, Harry thought. "She was attacking him," she whispered.
"Like this man was attacking us." Harry lowered his voice when he saw how distressed she appeared. "Look, Hermione, I'm sorry it happened, too. I would have preferred to leave him alive." If only to discover what in the world he thought he was doing. "But this is the way it happened."
Hermione blinked at him again. "And I can't convince you to testify."
"Not against Draco, no. If someone insists, I can describe the curse he used and the conversation before that. And the way Draco killed him," Harry added. He thought the image of that would never leave him.
But even then, he was still more concerned about Draco than anyone else. Once, that hadn't been his reality. Now it was.
"If we're to set up justice after the war," Hermione said slowly, brow wrinkled as she fought her way through the puzzle that Harry had set for her, "then we have to try everyone. Including those who did things we don't like."
"Including people who killed in self-defense?" Harry asked. He shook his head. "You know that the Wizengamot doesn't convict people who used the Killing Curse in defense of their own lives, because the shield charms that their attackers used were too strong. That was in those documents we read when we were researching Horcruxes. And you'd have to try Ron, too." He hated it, but he would keep driving in the knife for Hermione for as long as she did it for him.
Hermione visibly swallowed. "Harry, do you know how bad this is going to look? Everyone and their grandfather is going to be after you for murder."
"I know." Harry kept his voice as gentle and serene as possible. "But we can fight this any number of ways. By playing up my status as hero. By saying that we were both still paranoid after Voldemort's dungeons, and that we tend to react badly when startled. By concentrating on Draco's Veela heritage--"
"He doesn't have any Veela heritage! It was all Transfiguration!"
"But a lot of people refuse to believe that," Harry said calmly, "the same way that they refuse to believe that I wasn't the one to defeat Voldemort. We have to use what we have, Hermione. Because I wouldn't trust Draco to be judged by a jury of his fucking peers, not when there's no one except me who sees him as one." And even that wasn't true all the time, he had to admit. Not when he commanded Draco in bed, and reveled in it. "And I won't give him up."
"There are sacrifices," Hermione whispered, but she already looked as if she'd given up. Weary, so weary that Harry couldn't help but lean forwards and pat her hand. He knew that he would pay for that later when Draco smelled her scent on him, but, well. He'd pay.
"I know," Harry said. "And I think I've made enough. I should get to enjoy the fruits of my labor. It'll take forever to pay all the debts that the wizarding world thinks I should owe them, if I start. So I'll stay out of it, help when I can and when I don't think it'll cost me too much, and enjoy Draco."
"You weren't like this before he ate the Horcrux," Hermione said. "I wonder if that changed you somehow--"
Harry laughed harshly, recognizing a theory taking root in her mind. He had to crush that out of existence as soon as he could. "Hermione. The Horcrux always needed to go if I was going to live or if Voldemort was going to be defeated, since we didn't know the first was possible at the time. And consider what Draco did to me in the dungeons. Do you really think I could be the same after that?"
Hermione gave him another unhappy look, then turned her neck away like a bird's. "Not the same. But I didn't realize you would change so much," she whispered.
"Neither did I." Harry shrugged. "But I have no particular anxiety to change back, and I like the person I am now, Hermione. If you don't, then will you tell me?" He held her eyes.
Hermione swallowed. Then she said, "I still like you, Harry. I'm still your friend. It's just that, it's hard being a hero."
Harry gave her a gentle smile. "That, I think I never denied."
Abruptly, Hermione leaned forwards and gave him a hug that practically enveloped his whole body. Harry hugged her fiercely back, glad that he was apparently forgiven. "Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you for being you, whoever that person is now, and thanks for the reassurances and help you've given so far. You're right, you do deserve a holiday. We'll handle this somehow."
Harry nodded at her and leaned back. "There's no reason that you have to handle it, either. Just say that you're not living with me in the Order headquarters anymore and they'll find someone else to bother."
Hermione hesitated. "But that could be worse for you and Malfoy. What happens if they attack here?"
"The wards tear them to shreds," Harry said. "The same thing that would happen if someone attacked Hogwarts right now."
"But that'll earn you more bad publicity." Hermione looked at him anxiously.
Harry nodded. "I know. But one's the same thing as the other at this point. The only thing I could do to satisfy them is something I'm not willing to do: give up Draco and my life to come back and be their hero. Even then, you know there's people who would hold out and mutter about how I got away with murder the same way that there were people still muttering that I was the Heir of Slytherin in my fifth year. I don't care anymore, Hermione. I'm tired of them. The way the world is now means that I can protect my privacy and be with Draco. So I am."
"All right," Hermione said, climbing to her feet. "If you're sure."
"I am," Harry said. "Please come to me if you're in danger, though. I couldn't stand that."
Hermione smiled so brightly that Harry pretended to wince and hold his hand over his eyes, and she laughed and hugged him again. "I told Ron that you couldn't have changed that much," she whispered. "I know that you still care about us."
"I always did, even when the rest of you were stupid," Harry said, and Hermione snorted. "I don't care about you more than Draco, just in different ways. You know that, right?"
"I always did," Hermione said. "I just needed a little more proof for Ron."
She left after that, and Harry leaned back against the wall and said aloud, not glancing at anyone in particular, "You saw it all. The only times she touched me, it wasn't sexual. She doesn't care about me that way."
"She touched you." Draco's voice was a soft snarl. Harry heard the scrape of his claws against wood as he grabbed the side of the windowsill and climbed up. The next moment, he slung himself into the room and crouched down in front of Harry, his wings bulging behind him. "Why would she want to do that if she doesn't want you?"
"If you hugged your mother," Harry asked, "does it mean that you wanted her?"
Draco's face shut down. "You weren't going to talk about them," he muttered, and turned his head away.
Harry reached out and put a gentle hand on his shoulder, above the beginning curve of the wing. "I asked you a question," he said. "That's all."
Draco grunted, and his wing stirred forwards enough that the curve brushed Harry's fingers. "I can't be sure," he whispered. "What happened to them. I hate that."
Harry nodded in silence. Draco had thought his parents had been killed for failing Voldemort, but the Death Eaters who'd supposedly seen them tortured and executed had had contradictions in their stories. Likewise with Snape; some people had said that he had died near Hogwarts, others that Voldemort had killed him months ago, or that he'd been locked into a secret underground lab to complete his potions and hadn't been seen in those same months, or that he'd fled England the night of Voldemort's death. There were clues, but the clues showed up too much and too often and contradicted each other.
Harry thought both Snape and the Malfoys had probably used Memory Charms on their enemies to make their flight safer. Of course, that didn't mean they were safe now, but it did make tracking them bloody difficult.
And when they heard that Draco was alive, that he had survived the transformation into a Veela instead of starving to death the way Voldemort had intended him to, would they come back? Harry didn't know. Draco sometimes talked about his parents with furious love, sometimes with violent rage. He could see them rejecting Draco or accepting him or living in some sort of strange in-between state where they kept Draco panting for their approval.
Until they visited or an owl came from them, though--or they received some confirmation that the Malfoys were indeed dead--Harry didn't think they should worry about it.
Draco took a few deep, shuddering breaths, and leaned back on the table. "I know that she just touched you to comfort you, or comfort herself," he said, to Harry's surprise. "But I don't like it. Can I have you now?"
Harry smiled, in helpless agreement as much as anything else, and opened his arms.
*
The message came borne on the wings of a large white swan. As the bird wheeled around their house, carefully avoiding the wards, Draco saw the silver scroll it carried, clutched securely in a black beak. He snorted. He reckoned it was safer than trusting a swan to carry it in webbed feet, at that.
The swan settled on the pond a good distance beneath their tree and sailed serenely for a moment. Then it came to a stop at the bank and looked up.
Who but Veela would use a swan for their messenger? Draco set his wings straight and glided down to a landing on the grass beside the water. The swan nodded, wriggled its bottom as though to spread the magnificent tail it didn't have, and bowed its neck so that the scroll dropped safely into Draco's hands.
The scroll shone the moment it did so, and then unfolded. Draco found himself rolling his eyes. Of course they would present it that way, and use a spell that would trigger only when someone with Veela magic touched the scroll. It would probably destroy itself any other way. Draco shook his head. If Harry had touched it, would they have blamed him for keeping their message from reaching Draco?
Probably.
He scanned the scroll. The top half was in Bulgarian, but the bottom provided what Draco assumed was an English translation of the original. In a lot of language that badly wanted to be legal terms but was too strained and flowery to do so, it proclaimed that Draco Malfoy had been judged and exiled by the Veela community from attending its rituals or having his choosing of his beloved officially recognized by them.
Draco turned the scroll over, frowning. Then he drew his wand and cast several spells to determine whether it bore writing concealed under a charm. Nothing resulted. Draco had to close his eyes and sigh until he ran out of breath before he could express the depth of his disappointment.
Why would they assume that I would care about such a thing when I wasn't born into the community and they know that? I thought Vasya came to try and turn me back into a normal human anyway. Accepting me was never a choice.
Draco tore up the scroll and cast the pieces to the ground like snow. The swan spread its wings and hissed at him as if it disapproved. Draco flicked his fingers at it and spread his wings back when it didn't move. The swan lowered its neck and seemed to debate charging him for a moment before it turned its back sulkily and sailed away across the pond, then turned again and began flapping to gain height. Draco kept his wings raised and the light glowing between them until it was safely gone.
"Are you all right?"
The quiet question startled Draco, which showed how much more absorbed by the Veela's scroll he had been than he should be. Normally, Harry couldn't have descended from their home without alerting both Draco's ears and his Veela senses that he was on the move. Draco turned around and swept his wings forwards to embrace Harry. "Of course," he said. "They chose exile. A neat way of refusing to acknowledge that I was never part of them or wanted to be, and that you acting with me showed that we had rejected Vasya's claims of your enslavement."
"Not what I meant," Harry said, and put his hands on Draco's arms, steadily meeting his eyes. "Would you have wanted someone you could talk to about this? Someone to exchange information with? That's the chance I regret you losing. And if I lost it for you--"
"You didn't," Draco said quickly. Grand changes or not, Harry still carried far too much guilt for random things. "I could have spoken to Vasya in a more reasonable tone and tried to arrange something less violent and coercive with her if I had truly wanted to be free. I didn't. I promise," he added, when Harry sounded as if he was drawing in breath to object.
Harry paused and looked at him, apparently searching for something in his eyes that Draco wasn't sure existed. After a moment, he relaxed and nodded. "All right. If you say so."
"I do." Draco seized his hand and kissed him just above the pulse. "I'll learn more about Veela from books. I'll talk with experts under an assumed name. I'll take classes where I can find them. And you forget, I can do some of my research just by feeling out the way my body reacts and what's good and what isn't. It's not like I'm trying to study Veela without being one."
Harry smiled, but there were subdued shadows of anxiety along his cheekbones. Draco wanted to kiss all of them away. "I know. And I'll help you."
"Good," Draco said. "That means a lot."
He escorted Harry back into the house, and they spent a few hours eating, making lists of the kinds of books they should look for, and writing owls to order them. It was the calmest morning Draco could remember since he'd changed, despite the news the swan had brought him.
Vasya had gone to such lengths to make the point that he did not belong with her kind, and ordinary wizards would reject Draco if they could. Well, then, Draco would make his own place.
At least he knew that he would never stand in it alone.
*
"I never knew you were good at that."
Harry jumped, and the stick of charcoal in his hand blurred across the parchment. He laughed nervously and stretched; he had got so involved in the drawing in front of him that he hadn't heard Draco's approach. But he couldn't be embarrassed with the way Draco's arms settled around him and his chin came to rest on Harry's shoulder.
"I didn't know I was, either." Harry shrugged, and then laughed when Draco turned his head with expressive slowness to look at him. "I mean, I drew when I was a kid, but it never seemed to matter, and it wasn't something I kept up. I don't know why I bought this." He toyed with the edge of the parchment. "Interest, I reckon. Curiosity."
"The best motive to do anything," Draco said in approval, and the bottom of his wing brushed Harry's hip. "Except desire."
Harry batted the hand away. "You would always think something like that."
"If I always think it, that makes it right," Draco responded, crowding closer to him and spreading his wings so that they completely surrounded Harry's head. "No one can be wrong so consistently."
"You'd be surprised," Harry muttered, thinking for a moment of the Dursleys, and then pushed at one of Draco's wings, making sure to keep his hand in the middle of the feathers and away from the edges that, depending on Draco's mood, could either bend too easily and hurt him or cut like icicles. "Back off for right now. I want to finish this."
Draco hummed under his breath the way he did when he was thinking of sex, but backed away obligingly, and Harry returned to the scene he was drawing. It was an image of Hedwig, perching in the branches of their tree with the house looming behind her. Harry didn't think it was a very good drawing, since he had never been in that part of the tree with Draco and had to only imagine what the angle would look like, but Draco was absorbed and silent behind him, and that was increasingly less likely to happen except when he really thought Harry's efforts at something were good. Draco loved him, Harry knew, but he had never been slow with criticism and wouldn't be now.
"You really are good at this," Draco murmured, when Harry had finished shading in Hedwig's eyes the way he wanted and had paused to consider his next move.
Harry shrugged. "I never thought that much about it, like I said. Little kids are always drawing."
"But you're not little anymore," Draco said, and this time it was his hand that sneaked around Harry's hip.
Harry batted it away, and Draco rumbled a purr and leaned his head on Harry's shoulder, heavily enough that Harry had to shift his weight to the side to balance it. But he didn't get angry about Harry's refusal. That was a change, too. Harry had to conceal a smile when he thought of what Ron and Hermione would say if they could see them now. They might be a little less convinced that Draco was bad for him and only wanted to fuck him.
Which Draco wanted, of course. But he wanted other things, too, and Harry was getting better at knowing when his refusals would inspire arguments, when they would inspire sulking, when Draco was only teasing, and when Draco would accept them and go on.
"No, I'm not," Harry said, and then said something he'd been thinking about for a while, trying to decide how to say. But Draco was a good audience for that kind of thing. Draco would respond. If he thought it was stupid, he would say so. Harry didn't mind that as much; he knew he could argue back, even get into a blazing row if he had to. He just didn't want his audience to sit there in embarrassed silence. "It's strange. I'm thinking I never got a normal life. A weird childhood I thought was normal sometimes, the knowledge I was different according to the Dursleys but not the knowledge of why, seven years of fighting a war, and now this. Maybe I'm finally learning to do things I would have done if I'd been normal."
"You're better than normal," Draco hissed, and his wings tightened protectively around Harry. Harry had told him more about the Dursleys now, and he hated the words "normal" and "freak" and would stare hard at Harry when he used them. At least Harry had talked him out of flying to Privet Drive to claw Dudley's eyes out.
"Fine," Harry said. "Just like everybody else, then."
"Not everyone else is better than normal." Draco's claws shone like knives from the corner of Harry's eyes, always a bad sign. Most of the time, they curved and bent like reeds.
"I meant," Harry said, "that I'm learning to be like everyone else."
"Not everyone else has a Veela for a lover." Draco seemed to think about that for a bit, and then added, "Or should. I would have had more competition for you."
"And all those Veela that don't exist probably wouldn't be as fantastically childish together as you can be all by yourself," Harry muttered.
That received an offended hiss and Draco actually drawing back from him and leaving Harry to contemplate his charcoal pictures in peace for a time. But Draco didn't go far, and Harry knew that was another thing about this life that was different from the way he had pictured it being: they could have an argument and not worry that it would break them apart for no reason except that they were arguing.
Harry would never have imagined that his life could turn out this way, no. But he was glad it had.
*
"Draco."
Draco was awake in seconds, his heart beating so hard that memories of the dungeon assembled themselves around him and wouldn't release him for long moments. The impression only increased when he saw the silver deer Patronus standing at the end of the bed. He flung out one arm and confirmed that Harry was still curled up beside him. He relaxed with a little hiss of air and leaned back on the bed, staring, wondering why Harry would need to send him a Patronus when he wasn't in danger.
Unless that wasn't Harry. But a bit of silver light shining on the ends of his fingertips lit Harry's face and the wing-shaped scar--a detail that most people didn't know about and would find hard to fake--and Draco relaxed. He refused to think that someone could have sneaked through the wards and into the house and used Polyjuice without him knowing it.
Then he turned back to the Patronus and noticed the lack of antlers.
"Draco."
The voice did cast him back in time into the dungeons, and for excellent reason. He'd last heard it from Professor Snape, declaring that he didn't care what Voldemort did with Draco.
Draco swallowed, and prickling cold swallowed him in return, creeping up and down his hands and freezing his wings. He huddled closer to Harry, as if his beloved could somehow protect him from the nightmare come back to life. Draco had assumed he would never see Snape again, and was more than happy to have it that way, despite curiosity over his fate. Snape had shown no such concern over him.
"Follow me, and I will lead you to your parents." The Patronus turned and walked away from the bed, aiming for the doorway of the house.
I should have put up wards against Patronuses, Draco thought, and clutched the blankets until they shredded beneath his claws.
The silver doe halted again at the door, and stood waiting.
Draco closed his eyes. He wanted to turn over and go back to sleep, choosing his future with Harry over the past. It was the only sensible decision, now that he had come so close to having what would content the Veela and the human halves of him alike.
But the curiosity would eat at him, and he reached out and roughly shook Harry's shoulder. Harry was up in seconds, a relic no doubt of war-raids, his wand held high. He started to speak a Lumos charm, but Draco shook his head and gestured at the silver doe.
It bounded out the door. Without a word spoken, without a thought needing to be exchanged, Draco seized Harry by the shoulders and followed with an easy, heavy wingbeat.
The Patronus hardly touched the ground as it leaped away to the west, hooves soundless, coat shining like a star. That confirmed for Draco that Snape and his parents--if actually alive and with the professor--knew about his transformation. He wouldn't be able to keep up on foot.
They almost certainly hadn't intended for Harry to come with him, whatever they knew. But Draco didn't care. If they hadn't planned for Harry to accompany him, then they were about to have a needed revelation.
The doe came to rest a long time later on a flat patch of grass that looked almost burned, at the foot of a rocky hill. Draco glanced around, but couldn't tell where they were off the top of his head. They had flown for less than an hour, but he hadn't explored for that long in all directions from the house yet.
The stone trembled in front of the Patronus's hooves, and faded, at the same moment as the doe herself did. A good illusion, Draco thought, the kind that his mother was skilled at casting. He choked on hope and landed. Harry kept a steady hand on his shoulder as they moved towards the cave.
His mother stepped out of the entrance.
Draco broke. He surged away from Harry and leaped into the air, coming down with a chop of his wings right in front of her. She had started when he moved, but now she saw him and her face shone. She opened her arms, and Draco embraced her, winding his wings around her shoulders at the same time.
A tentative hand rested on the primaries of the right one, and Draco looked up to see his father watching him over his mother's shoulder.
"Son," Lucius said, a word that hummed with acknowledgment of what hung between them. "Welcome."
Draco couldn't speak. He lowered his head back into his mother's shoulder, but twitched his wing out to include his father as well. He could feel Harry's watching, silent presence behind him, and knew that he would wait as long as needed, and then do what was needed. Whether that turned out to be introducing himself or staying quiet, he would do it.
It was wonderful, Draco thought, to have someone he could depend on the way he could depend on Harry.
Especially because it seemed likelier and likelier that his parents would ask for things he couldn't grant them. He sensed, at one and the same time, his mother's warmth and the painful strength of her hug, his father's steady touch on his wing and his pride, and the cutting glances his father gave Harry.
"Draco."
Professor Snape stepped out of the cave then and moved towards him. Draco turned to face him and restricted the aggressive stretch his wings wanted to make. His mother let out a slight gasp, and Draco realized why: his claws had sharpened at the same moment, abruptly slicing through the cloth of her robe. He removed his hands and held them harmlessly high, smiling at her before he returned his glance to Snape.
"You abandoned me to die," he said.
Snape shook his head. "I would have been unable to do so," he said. "I swore too many Vows to defend you no matter what happened." He was calm as black ice, which made Draco want to rage, but the rage was already there, and he would gain nothing by indulging it. "I judged that the best chance for your survival at the moment was as a Veela. I knew, if the Dark Lord did not, how long it took a Veela to starve to death, and guessed that he was likely to cast some other prisoner in as entertainment before long. You would have bonded with anyone introduced under such circumstances." His eyes flickered to Harry.
"Harry is not anyone," Draco said, and he knew that his teeth must look more like fangs than ever now. He dropped his hands and lowered them into position where he could claw Snape apart--if it hadn't been for his mother standing between them.
"Of course not," Snape said, and his voice had a low, vicious charge to it that Draco didn't understand and could only attribute to Snape's hatred of Harry. "He is your heart's desire, the partner you always would have chosen if you could have of your own free will. Of course he is."
"He is my beloved."
"A Veela term only." Snape, his eyes fixed on Draco as if he could ignore Harry even though he was speaking of him, reached into his cloak. Draco tensed to spring if he tried to fling a combat potion at Harry, but Snape only drew out a slender glass vial filled with a bright green potion that Draco didn't recognize. It looked like moss and smelled like summer. "I have the solution here, Draco."
"A potion to reverse the Transfiguration," Draco said, and his voice was high and thin and reedy. He hadn't meant it to sound that way. He had meant it to sound flat and rejecting. He glanced over his shoulder at Harry. Harry only smiled at him gently, which Draco didn't find that reassuring.
"Yes," Snape said. "I did not wish to contact you until I was certain that it would work."
Draco frowned. "How do you know it will?"
Snape looked at him silently, and Draco swallowed. Of course. Snape was silently telling him not to be stupid. Snape had Transfigured test subjects and then reversed the Transfigurations with the help of the potion. And if some of them had died in the research, Draco knew that would not have bothered the professor. He had none of Harry's code of morality; if he had labored to get rid of Voldemort, Draco thought it had depended more on personal motivations than an abstract sense of ethics.
Draco looked over his shoulder at Harry. Harry shook his head at him. Draco swept one wing down hard enough to almost strike his mother, hissing softly. Harry nodded and started talking.
"Fine. I think you should do whatever makes you most comfortable, Draco. If you want to be a Veela, or if you don't, then you know I'll stay with you, no matter what." He gave a smile, and Draco could see how thin it was stretched over the emotions brewing under the surface, even if he didn't know as well as he should have what those emotions were. "You have to make the decision."
"That's bollocks," Draco said.
His mother gasped, though perhaps more from the term than from the declaration. Draco could feel the increased tension from his father and Snape pressing against him like a heat wave.
He never turned around, never glanced at them. This was between him and Harry right now, and if they had wanted to have a place in it, then they should have contacted him earlier. As soon as they found out that he was alive would have been favorite.
Harry blinked once. "What?"
"You're involved in this," Draco said. "You're not going to dump all the decision-making on me so that you get to be a little martyr. You're going to make the decision with me, because you are part of me. Now stop being such a coward."
Draco had never seen the smile Harry gave him then, dazzling and wide and delighted. He nodded and said, "All right. I don't think that you should take the potion. For one thing, we're happy the way we are, and I think that you'd have to go through another tormenting process of accepting yourself if you drank it." He took a deep breath, and his eyes darkened for the first time. "Second, if Snape wants to protect your life and doesn't care about how much pain you'll go through as a result of it, who knows what that potion might have as consequences?"
Draco turned back to Snape and raised his eyebrows in question, ignoring the abrupt motion Snape made, as if he would cast a spell at Harry. Harry was well-prepared for that. He, too, had chains tangling and tying him to the three people here, but they were much slimmer and less complicated than Draco's.
"What are the side-effects?" Draco asked, when the silence had settled into a great tension like that before a thunderstorm and Snape still hadn't answered the way he should have.
The man's black eyes fastened on what seemed to be Draco's collarbone. Then Draco twitched a wing automatically to relieve a cramp, and his gaze followed it. As if becoming a Veela were the worst fate anyone could ask for.
Draco bared his teeth. He was less sure now that the test subjects had survived. Professor Snape was a wonderful brewer, and he might not let personal emotions affect him much in making the actual potions, but he could let them prejudice the way he reacted to a test.
"Well?" Draco asked.
"Draco," his mother whispered, and leaned forwards. Her lips came into contact with his cheek like a whisper, as if she had wings of her own. "Don't you want to be human again?"
"I am human," Draco said. "In all the important ways. I've got hands that can hold, and a tongue that can speak, and a brain that can think, and a prick that can fuck."
His mother went white. His father, strangely silent all through these proceedings, made an aborted movement. Professor Snape shifted carefully to the side. It was a better position from which to strike at Harry, but Draco was heartened to see that Harry realized the same thing and pointed his wand without hesitation.
"If you name those the most important qualities one can have," Snape murmured, "then you have indeed changed."
Draco laughed. He couldn't help it. He spread his wings and fanned them up and down, incidentally bringing one of them into the path of any curse Snape might try. "Of course you would say that," he said. "Because of course I shouldn't have changed after I was Transfigured into another species, and left in the darkness, and had to eat parts of Harry to escape, and learned how to fly and how to defend him and how to be with him. I should still be the same student and son that you left behind."
"If we had come back for you," Lucius said, "with the Order of the Phoenix hunting enemies and the countryside still unsettled, we might have been condemned to death without a trial. It would have accomplished nothing except to hurt you."
Draco nodded to his father. "Believe it or not, I am glad to see you," he said. "But I would have hoped--I would have wanted you to send me a message to me earlier. If you could use Professor Snape's Patronus, and did it late at night, then no one else would have intercepted it."
"If you are glad," Snape said, "why not take the potion right away?"
"Because I'm not the same," Draco said, exasperated. "Months of hiding changed you. Everything I named changed me. And I don't want to change back."
"Even if I asked you to?" His mother reached up to stroke his cheek. "Even if I said that I wanted to hold my little boy again without his wings getting in the way?"
Draco met her eyes, not tempted anymore to reveal how much her words hurt, and nodded. "Because it was your little boy who died in Voldemort's dungeons," he said, and watched the flinch sweep through them all as someone watching an alien terror. "I survived. If you can't accept me the way I am--something Harry did, even though we used to be enemies--then maybe we shouldn't be together anymore."
It was amazing how calmly he was able to accept this. Or maybe not amazing, exactly. He had fought his way through to his epiphanies partially by, as he explained it to Harry, realizing that there was no "real" him separate from the Veela. And there was no "real" Draco separate from the memories of the boy he had been. They were his, still, but they didn't define him anymore.
Anymore than his relationship to his parents did.
"Draco," his father whispered. His mother merely took a step away, her head turned to the side. She said nothing, but her shoulder could reject in a way that her face alone couldn't.
"You can't mean that," Snape said, but his voice was so flat that Draco doubted the professor was commenting on the way he would push his parents away if they didn't accept him. He was commenting, instead, on Draco's happiness with who and what he was.
Does he think that being human is so much better than being Veela? I wasn't aware he had any creature prejudice. Or maybe he can't accept that I wouldn't want to rely on one of his new, experimental potions.
The thought tugged Draco's mouth up into a sharp smile, and Narcissa exhaled loudly. "Draco," she said, and then again, "Draco. Please. Listen to yourself."
"I am," Draco said. "Since no one else except Harry seems inclined to. It's the rest of you who need some lessons in how to hear."
"I will not be lectured to by my son," Lucius said, in a haughty tone that sounded so out-of-place here Draco felt Harry's eyebrow rise.
"The time is past when you had authority over me," Draco said, and paused. When no one said anything, he added, "I notice that you haven't yet refuted my suggestion that you could have told me where you were at any time, by means of Professor Snape's Patronus."
"That was impractical for reasons that you do not understand," his mother said.
"Then explain them to me." Draco tried to drop his wings and put on his best attentive, willing expression, but only the last part was possible. His instincts stiffened his wings into immovable barriers in front of Harry. Well, so be it. "What were the considerations?"
"We had to see where you would settle," Professor Snape said.
Draco thought about that. It sounded reasonable, actually, given that the Order had had spies on him during those first days. Perhaps someone would have seen Snape's Patronus arrive after all. He nodded. "So you waited until we showed no signs of moving from our new home to send to me?"
"That's not what he means."
Harry stepped forwards to stand next to Draco, and Draco moved his wings to cover him. Harry ducked under them and stood within the circle of his embrace, but where his view of Snape wouldn't be blocked. Now Draco could see Snape's loathing for Harry more openly, and it made him hiss silently in warning. Snape never looked at him. "It means something else," Harry said. "Not simply place. They could have figured something out. Sent an owl to me and had the letter addressed to you. Sent you your parents' Patronuses. Sent a signal with an owl that no one else would recognize but you would."
Now that he thought about it, Draco realized that he could come up with two or three such signals easily. He looked at his parents.
"What does he mean, then?" he asked, and although he turned his head partially towards Harry, he was asking anyone who would have been willing to answer.
"He means," Harry murmured, "that they wanted to see where you would settle, human or Veela. Happy with me, or not happy with me. Mad or sane." He paused, then added, "I think they acted when they realized that you actually seemed to be living with yourself, not furiously trying to get rid of the changes. That's not what they want. They want to swoop in and rescue you from me and from your fate." His face held clear disdain as he glared at Draco's mother and father. "At least I gave up playing hero when I realized that he didn't want me to, you know?"
"I want to know whether that's true," Draco said. His voice had gone soft, he thought in wonder. His father had sometimes done that with him, but it seemed--well, odd for him to do it in return. But his father flinched the way Draco had in the past when Lucius confronted him with that tone, so he was doing something right. "Did you think that I needed you to take me away from the big, bad Potter?"
"How can you stand being less than human?" his mother murmured back. "Less than pure-blood?"
Draco shook his head. "I'm still human in the important ways. I told you. And as for the blood...Mother, do you think this change somehow made me into a Muggleborn?" He nearly used the other word, but a glance to the side, to make sure Harry was safe, also revealed Harry's elbow poised neatly in place beneath his ribs. Draco smiled and focused on his parents. "I want to know what you think. I want straight answers to my questions."
"There are no straight answers to something as complicated as this," Lucius said, and that at least sounded like truth to Draco. "We wanted to wait until we thought we wouldn't be killed as traitors or Death Eaters. Then we wanted to wait until we had a way to make you a Malfoy again." His eyes swept bitterly up and down Draco's body, lingering on the claws and the wings, since they were the two most visible markers of the change. Draco wondered if he saw the others, too, like the wing scar on Harry's forehead and the few holes in his body patched with feathers. "You refuse us now."
"One spell," Snape said, his voice exquisitely neutral.
Harry sprang and whirled towards him, ending up almost beyond the range of Draco's protective wings, his eyes so hot with fury that Draco shuddered in appreciation and his parents started. "You cast anything," Harry said, "and I'll kill you."
"You think you can," Snape said, and his voice descended into hatred that made Draco twitch with the lust to kill. "You think you can cut through the defenses of the Dark Lord's most successful potions brewer, the Order's most complex spy--"
Draco called and cast a ball of white light from his hand without hesitating. It struck the vial of green potion that the professor held, and it heated until it exploded. Harry had prudently ducked back inside the embrace of Draco's wings, and Draco held him, curving his feathers so that the bits of glass bounced off them. Snape, with a myriad of small cuts on his hand and his face drained of blood, took a step back, watching Draco in shock.
Draco bared his teeth at him and snarled. The snarl seemed to rip out part of his lungs, it traveled so deep into his body. "Leave my beloved alone," he said. "You only get this one warning."
"We're trying to help you," his mother whispered.
"A lack of answers to questions doesn't help me," Draco retorted. "Endangering my beloved doesn't help me. And now you lack the potion that would have changed me, and you can't force it down my throat, or bind me with a spell and do that, or whatever it was you were planning." He felt an ache deep in his chest, in the same place where he had hidden the knowledge of how much his parents' disappearance affected him, but he refused to show that on his face. "If you want me for myself, I'm willing. If you only want me changed, then it's best that we walk away from each other now."
His mother looked as if she was holding a bird with beating wings near her heart, her breath came so fast. She leaned back as if she wanted Lucius to support her, but he moved away, his back turned as though this was something they could not share. Narcissa stumbled and then stood upright again, her face bright pink with embarrassment.
Draco smiled in spite of himself. It made her seem more human, and he was happy to be reminded of that right now.
But perhaps his smile wasn't the best expression he could be wearing when his mother was looking for reassurance. She went pale, then fixed, and turned her back, stepping away to join his father.
Draco turned to Snape. Harry moved with him, tensed ready to protect. Draco draped a wing around his shoulders and raised an eyebrow in silent question at his old professor.
Snape stood looking at him as if he hoped to find the answer in Draco's eyes, then made an eloquent, twisting gesture with one hand. "You are not the boy I trained and taught any more than you are their son," he said.
"That settles that, then," Draco said, while his heart grew heavier and his wings grew lighter. "I'll thank you not to contact me. And if you try to set up a trap for either Harry or me, I'll consider you an enemy." He released his hold on his scrabbling instincts long enough for Snape to see what was really brewing in him at the moment, what he would have done to the man if he wasn't still a mixture of human and Veela rather than purely Veela.
Snape looked openly and honestly bewildered, for a lightning bolt of a second. Then he sneered and said, "I have known connections and bonds for which I made sacrifices, Draco. Be careful that you do not wake one day to find yourself a drained husk, and Potter gone, having obtained what he wanted from you."
"I was the one who had to chase him to get him to agree to this," Draco said. "And if he were so stupid as to try slipping off, I would simply chase him down again."
Harry laughed silently beside him. Snape stiffened as though the laughter was a sword through his guts, and Draco joined in. Snape ended up fading after Draco's parents into the cave, although he never turned his back on Draco and Harry as the elder Malfoys had done. The glamour of stone over the entrance sealed itself silently behind them.
Draco sighed and shook his head. "That's enough of that," he said. "Let's go home."
"If you want to," Harry said, leaning back and looking up at him. "If you think that's all we need to do here."
Draco considered forcing the glamour away again, forcing a confrontation with these people who were only determined to accept him without his wings or not at all. He had persuaded Harry to his point-of-view, after all. He might manage to persuade them.
But the truth was that he still remembered Snape betraying him to Voldemort, claiming Draco's fate did not matter to him. And he still remembered his parents sending him no letter or other secure message for weeks, because of their fear.
Of being captured, yes, but also of what he had become.
"I think it is," he said, and folded his arms and wings around Harry again for another brief embrace before they took to the air.
*
"This is actually a privilege that you get to do this to me," Harry said. It took him almost a minute to get that sentence out, panting and forcing the words into being around a moan.
Draco bit the back of his neck, hard enough to make Harry bleed, and then lapped it up in silent response. His hips flexed, and Harry staggered forwards, nearly shoved from his knees and elbows by the simple strength of that thrust.
"Yes, it is," Draco said. His voice was blurred with lust, with need, with blood. He shoved again with his hips, and Harry cried out in pleasure that spiraled up abruptly into painful, blinding light. Draco's magic had hit him at the same time.
After that, Draco settled down into a steady pattern of fucking him: pulling back slowly, thrusting hard on the forwards motion, and hitting his prostate at the same moments as the Veela magic poured through him. Harry whimpered and whined and in general probably sounded like someone in extreme pain.
Well, that was what stopping the sex right now would have felt like to him, so in some ways it was an accurate depiction.
Draco mumbled some words into the back of his neck and bit him again, and Harry flew apart from the inside out, until all that was left was a small center of sensation, locked around Draco's body like a silver ring. As if from a distance, he felt Draco press closer to him, murmuring and crooning and wordlessly speaking, until he came with a battering of wings about Harry's head that would probably have hurt him if he was less relaxed.
Harry yawned and rolled over, feeling Draco slip out of him and hearing the squelch. Draco growled, moved with him, and slid back inside. Harry rolled his eyes at the ceiling. "Fine, then you get us into a comfortable position," he said.
With a lot of rolling and adjusting of his wings and pausing to make sure that his claws wouldn't scrape down Harry's sides--which sometimes happened when he was excited, as his Veela instincts reacted to it like they did to rage--Draco managed. In the end, he was lying on his stomach, the pillows and blankets piled more around than under or above them, and Harry cradled beneath him, drawing all the warmth he needed from Draco's own body.
Harry closed his eyes and listened to Draco's slow breathing. "Any time you want," he mumbled sleepily, "we can track your parents, you know. They might be more reasonable if we got them away from Snape."
Draco hesitated, wings caught in mid-extension. Harry was sure that he was about to say something else, something that would change the conversation in a new direction, and he tried to sit up and open his eyes.
But Draco soothed him again with his claws on the back of Harry's neck, his tongue darting out and smoothing the skin up and down. Harry groaned as more sluggish pleasure rolled through him, and his cock twitched. Draco settled down again, though, so Harry did his best to do the same, and ignore the way his body quivered.
"Not right now," Draco said. "Later, maybe. I still haven't thought of any good answers for why they didn't try to contact me. Why did I have to join everyone else in believing they were dead until they had a 'solution' to my 'problem?'" His voice was dusty with bitterness.
Harry reached back and squeezed Draco's hand. "I know," he said. "There are reasons that I'm grateful I never have to see my Muggle family, either, and one of is because they didn't want to accept me unless I changed what I was."
"You never did tell me in detail about that," Draco said.
"Later," Harry said, "maybe."
Draco tensed enough that Harry thought he would insist, but in the end he offered Harry a soft laugh, and they lay down again in silence. Harry closed his eyes and gave a sigh of contentment that seemed to travel up from where his legs lay locked with Draco's, through his arse and Draco's cock, to his shoulders embraced by Draco's wings, and finally out his mouth.
Here. This is where we're supposed to be.
The End.