[one-shots]: Jericho Rose, 2/2, H/D, R
Mar. 2nd, 2012 06:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lomonaaerenSecond part of a long one-shot. Don't start here; go to Part one!
Dear Dad, can I have some money?
Harry groaned a little and flung Albus’s letter down on the floor, rubbing at his head. There was an ache behind his temples that just wouldn’t go away. If it had been behind his scar, he would have worried about it being Voldemort coming back—he sometimes did think about that, even now—but this ranged. Now it was in his temples, and sometimes it felt like a dull iron band pressing all the way around his skull. And sometimes it just hurt.
He sat back up and shook his head. Now that Albus was twelve, he was becoming a little more independent, asking if he could have Scorpius Malfoy and other friends over to visit during the holidays, and asking for a new broom—he hadn’t got that one yet—and asking for his own room. And he had become reconciled to his parents’ divorce, too.
But this was the first time he had asked for Galleons, and Harry was a little afraid to know what it was for. He thought about writing back to Albus and demanding answers, but the thought broke up and drifted away under the pressure of his pain.
Stupid headache. Harry had no idea what was causing them. Hermione had insisted on checking his glasses, but they functioned perfectly. And he’d been eating right lately, and sleeping right, and not using a lot of magic, since Kingsley had the stupid idea that sometimes his best Aurors might enjoy not being in the field.
Harry wandered over to the window and stared out. He usually enjoyed this little house, which he’d bought after their divorce, and which sat on the outskirts of Ottery St. Catchpole and looked out over a field. But it was February now, and snow drifted and skittered in circles. Not much snow, not enough to make things look pure and peaceful and magical, just enough to get underfoot and cause falls at all the wrong times.
Harry massaged his forehead again. He was nearly desperate enough to try a stronger potion than the Headache Draughts Hermione judged safe for him to take. Normally, Harry didn’t dispute her judgment on potions. He still didn’t know as much about brewing them as he should; it was a miracle that Kingsley had been willing to accept him into the Aurors anyway.
Not a miracle, and you know it.
At the moment, though, headache or not, Harry didn’t feel like subjecting himself to another long train of thoughts about How Horrible It Was For People to Think He Was The Chosen One. He didn’t even want to go in search of a stronger headache potion. Staying here and sleeping seemed like a good idea. He wandered back to his chair, flopped into it, and watched the flames.
When the Floo chimed at him—a self-possessed little whistle that at least let him know it was a call from a friend and not the Ministry—Harry sighed and seriously thought about pretending not to be home. But he was an adult now, theoretically, and it could be important. Maybe Ron and Hermione had found out what Al needed money for. He leaned forwards and tapped the stone on the side of the hearth that made the connection come to life.
Neville’s face appeared in the fire, and Harry relaxed, letting his legs sprawl out. At least Neville had no kids, so he was unlikely to call Harry about a family crisis. Maybe a rogue rose had escaped and eaten half the shop. “Hey, Nev. What is it?”
For a few moments, Harry thought he would get a lecture, because Neville’s eyes were dark and his jaw set. Then he took a deep breath and said, “Harry, Draco Malfoy was in here a few minutes ago, and he managed to influence me into letting him know that a man bought a Jericho rose from me and made it into a talisman that could help him.”
Well, Neville sure knows how to banish boredom, Harry thought a moment later. His body had reacted faster than his mind; he’d already sat up, his heart beating louder in his body than the headache, and gripped his wand. “Shit,” he said. “Oh, shit. Why did he do that? How did he track you down?”
Neville snorted a little. “He said that someone would have bought the plant from me because I was the best.”
Harry blinked. “Well, you are.”
Neville glared at him, as if he thought Harry was making fun of him, and then relaxed with a small sigh. “Well. Thank you. But he says—he says that your magic was more powerful than you knew, Harry, and that there’s a real mating bond between the two of you now. And he doesn’t seem worried about what might happen when he finds out who it’s with, because he believes that the bond can accommodate him to any kind of mate, although I tried to warn him that this kind might not be the one he’s expecting.”
Harry felt his heart leap and dive at the same time. Part of him shrieked in glee and clapped its hands. Yes, this is what I wanted, this is what…
No, Harry thought then, and shook his head. He can’t be over the grief from Astoria’s death, not yet. Maybe the bond is still lingering from her, and that’s what he imagines he’s feeling.
“It seemed pretty serious,” Neville added, anticipating Harry’s main objection even before he opened his mouth. “I don’t think he would have been able to use the Veela magic on me if it hadn’t been. That magic’s not active unless they’re looking for a mate, not for a part-Veela like him.” He flushed a little when Harry stared at him. “After you bought the Jericho rose, I did some reading.”
“Well, shit,” Harry said again, and ran his hand through his hair. The headache made his temples pulse this time, and he winced. He had a pretty good idea now why he’d been having those headaches. He’d still needed Neville’s words for confirmation, though, because the last thing he wanted to do was face up to it.
And I really never would have reckoned on it being this, either.
“What are you going to do?” Neville asked simply. “I told him I would contact you—not you, obviously, the one who had bought the rose—and give you some time to make up your own mind, but he seemed pretty determined to hunt you down if you didn’t comply and come to him.”
A long shudder seemed to ring through Harry, so long that he shifted uncomfortably and wondered what could be causing it. Perhaps it was some weird side-effect of the mating bond, one that he’d never read about because he’d never thought that something this weird and stupid could happen when he used the Tellus Ritual—
And then he groaned, and realized the truth.
It’s just the realization that I can’t do anything but brace myself. I can’t end the ritual; I won’t take Draco’s life away from him. I can’t be his mate in the way he thinks, and maybe once he sees me, he’ll realize that. I care for him, but there’s—too much baggage there. Harry was more than smart enough to realize that a nodding acquaintance in the corridors of the Ministry and having sons who were best friends wouldn’t mean anything to Draco.
But I can’t run away from this. I have to face it.
“I’ll send him an owl,” he said, and sighed heavily, dragging his hands through his hair. “Since he’ll definitely hunt me down otherwise.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t want to be hunted down by Malfoy, not in the mood he looked to be in,” Neville said, and looked at Harry sympathetically.
Harry tried to smile, but the corners of his mouth seemed stuck. He kept swallowing to ease his dry throat. “Can we get together for a drink sometime next week?” he asked. “I have the feeling that I’ll need it, and—it’s not something I can tell Ron and Hermione about right now.” Ron didn’t hate Draco, not anymore, but he still made jokes about Malfoys and pure-bloods that Harry didn’t want to listen to. Either he would be angry and astonished at the mating bond, or he would make a huge joke of everything. And Hermione would bury him with books about Veela and second love and the logistics of pure-blood marriage.
Harry was really, really not ready to listen to that.
“Yes, of course,” Neville said, and gave him a gentle smile. “Hannah would be happy to have us in the Leaky, you know that.”
“I know,” Harry said, and then he said good-bye, and then he spent some more time staring at the snow out the window and trying to decide how in the world he should phrase his letter to Malfoy.
In the end, what could he say but the truth, the way he had in the note that he had left with the Jericho rose on the bedside table in St. Mungo’s? He had the feeling that this would be a significantly less welcome truth than that had probably been, but there was nothing he could do about that, either.
Maybe Malfoy knows something that can get us out of a secondary bond like this without hurting anybody. He has to know more about Veela than I do.
But when Harry sent his owl off later that evening, all he had was the gloomy conviction that Ron had been right after all: he had tried to do something good for somebody and had fucked it up. The consequences had just taken a while to show up, this time.
*
Draco raised his eyebrows as the brown owl settled on the dining table, nearly in the middle of his cheese, and held out its leg to him. A common post-owl, and a rude one, too, to interrupt him in the middle of dinner. Of course, the mating hunger made his appetite sharper, so he was now in the middle of the third course, but there were standards to be upheld.
He looked carefully at the writing on the letter as he took it out of the envelope. Although there was no reason in the world for Scorpius to be using a common post-owl when he had his own bird, Draco had received a request for money earlier that day that still made him wary.
But the handwriting was unfamiliar, and Draco’s practiced eye caught no official seals. Curious, he looked at the signature.
Potter.
The warmth coiled deep in his chest roared to life, and for a moment, Draco felt as though he stood in the embrace of a bonfire. He shook his head and stared at the signature again, this time noticing the first name that went with it. He ran his fingers along the paper to the top, and then held it near his nose.
It had always seemed bizarre to him that he would have a sense of smell that dealt with locating a mate, since the birds that Veela resembled didn’t, but on the other hand, perhaps that had to do with all his senses sharpening when he sought one. He could smell ink here, of course, and paper, but also a tang of sweat and the sharp saltiness that seemed to cling to the skin of most humans.
And the smell made him want to melt back into the chair. Or attack the sender with teeth bared.
It was Potter.
That made him turn all the more eagerly back, now, to the letter in his hand, because it seemed odd to him that Potter would have done this for him and never communicated with him until now. On the other hand, the reckless gesture for someone’s “good” suited Potter to the core. And Draco could remember the Fiendfyre.
Dear Draco:
I reckon I should have written to you right away, but I honestly didn’t think that there was any way the ritual I did would replace your bond to Astoria. Sorry. It was only supposed to give you the chance to keep on living.
The Tellus Ritual said that the object I enchanted and chose as the substitute for the bond should symbolize me and that bond; that was why I chose a resurrection plant. But it’s also the opposite of what you had in so many ways. That’s another reason I thought you would be safe. I chose you, not you choosing me. Why it didn’t work out that way, I don’t know.
I imagine this has probably bewildered you. I don’t know how much I want to say in a letter, but you deserve some explanation, so I just want to say that I’ve cared for you for several years now. If you weren’t mated to Astoria, I would have gone after you, but of course I didn’t want to disrupt that.
Sorry, I’m rambling. But I just want you to know that I’ll be at home this evening, and my Floo address is Spiderweb Place. If you want to talk to me personally, that’s where I’ll be.
Harry Potter.
Draco licked his lips and leaned back in his chair, balancing the letter in his hand. The owl on the table bounced and hooted impatiently, and Draco flicked a fleck of cheese at it. The owl bit into it, discovered it wasn’t meat, and glared at him. Draco ignored it. He had enchantments on the dining room table to clean up any pellets after a few unfortunate incidents with his mother’s elderly owl.
So. Harry Potter had been the one to find the Jericho rose, the one to enchant it, the one to give Draco another chance. But he had kept out of the way—and he hadn’t even said why in the letter, other than that he had never meant this to become a mating bond. Perhaps he expected Draco simply to know.
“Oh, I do know,” Draco murmured. “Noble idiot that you are.” His fingers flexed against the top of the table, and he knew he could have left grooves in the dark wood if he wanted to. But this was a relatively new table, bought after the war to replace the one that the Dark Lord tended to feed people to his snake on, and Draco preferred not to damage it.
The hunger that surged through him was strong enough to make him want the rest of his food, and he finished eating. Then he retired to his study to determine what he thought about it.
In the end, he came to the same conclusion that Potter had. (Draco prided himself on the knowledge that he would have reached that conclusion earlier, if he had had all the knowledge and been in a place that allowed him to make the decisions). There was no running from this. There was no fighting it. They were two grown men, and should deal with what fate had handed them.
Aside from that, there were two other things Draco knew that Potter did not, or at least did not seem to have considered.
First, the war had taught Draco very well what kinds of things he could change and what he could not. He could change his ideals, his beliefs, the way he acted, the amount of deference he paid to his father’s ideals. He could not change his blood or his family background, and he did not wish to. But he could try to make that history something to be proud of, instead of wincing from the reminders. For Scorpius’s sake and Astoria’s, if not his own, he had wanted to.
He could change his mind about Potter, too. But he could not change the Veela bond. It was obvious which of the two, in that case, would have to yield.
Second, the war had been over for twenty years. Draco did not remember it fondly, but he had worked hard to survive and then erase the scars. Twenty years was enough time for all but the worst to have healed over.
His memories of Potter were far from the worst ones of the war. Potter could not, after all, compare to the Dark Lord.
Which made it only all the more amazing that he had defeated him, in the end.
Draco held up his small glass of crystal-clear elf-wine to the light, and then drained it in one draught. It made his teeth feel like diamonds in his mouth, and filled his throat with buzzing lightning.
His mate was Harry Potter, and it was far from the worst thing that could happen.
He looked forward to what would happen when they met.
*
Harry tugged at his robes, and then cursed and turned away from the mirror. If he spent much more time fussing around with his clothing, then he would probably miss the Floo call, and Draco would be free, and right, to think that Harry’s owl today had taken all his courage and left nothing else.
Harry padded into his drawing room and sat down in front of the fire. He did get up, once, and smooth out a wrinkle in the blanket he’d draped over the couch. It had too many stains and crumbs on it to count as “nice,” but the blanket, a rich mixture of orange and gold, could make it look fit to be part of someone’s life, at least.
Part of Draco’s mate’s life.
Harry swallowed, and then spent some time picking at his trousers. He had no idea what to say or do when Draco firecalled. He had no idea how angry Draco would be. Granted, that he had gone to Neville showed he couldn’t be too angry at the thought of the mating bond itself, but that it was Harry? That Harry had done this without asking permission? That he was bound to someone he’d always hated?
Well. Harry had sent the owl, and he was committed, now. Hoping the owl had gone astray and Draco had never received the message was childish.
The fire flared. Harry’s breath caught, and he sat up, even as part of his brain tried to convince the rest that it was only Ron or Hermione calling with an invitation to dinner.
But Draco’s face formed out of the flames, and Harry swallowed again and stuck his hands beneath his knees, because otherwise he would do something stupid, he really would. A year of seeing it from a distance, and knowing that Draco was alive because of him, had done whatever work was wanting. Harry really wanted to reach out and touch Draco, although he knew this was only an image.
“Hello,” Draco said.
Harry blinked at him, and then managed to smile in spite of himself. He was glad that Draco was beginning with something so normal, something that really didn’t require much effort to respond to. “Hullo,” he said. His heart was thumping along fast, and he shivered, but his voice sounded calm. “You got my owl, of course?”
Draco’s eyebrows pinched together. “Why would I be calling you, otherwise?”
Harry winced in spite of himself—of course there was no reason for Draco to look twice in his direction without the bond—but he reminded himself again that they were both adults, and from Draco’s words to Neville, he was committed to dealing with this. “Sorry,” he said. “I forgot how much you hate it when people refer to the obvious.”
“Perhaps,” Draco said, and eyed him. “But I hate it more when people trip over their own tongues with apologies that are not needed.”
Harry smiled and leaned back on the couch. “Tell me what you’re comfortable with, then,” he said quietly. “That’s what I want to know, because I have no idea. I’ve—liked you for a while, but that’s not the same as really knowing you.”
Draco stared at him, and then apparently leaned back on something and sighed. “That’s—the whole of you,” he said. “The essence. You did this for me, you gave me life, but you have no idea whether I could like you back.”
Harry shrugged. “The ritual didn’t require me to get your blood, you know. It was sort of easy to give you a gift and then leave it again.” He wondered for a moment whether he should talk about the stolen kiss in hospital, and then left it alone. Draco might be upset about that right now, considering that Astoria had still been so recently dead at the time. He might talk about it later.
“You don’t consider grand gestures grand,” Draco said slowly. “That’s the opposite of Astoria, in many ways.”
Harry concealed a wince. If Draco didn’t mind talking about his dead wife, why should Harry? “She liked to give you gifts like that?” he asked.
“She knew the value of the gifts she gave,” Draco said, and studied Harry again. “She never would have said that a ritual to save someone else’s life was ‘sort of easy.’”
Harry rolled his eyes, but he could feel some of the tension creeping out of his muscles, and his arms fell more freely along the back of the couch now. “Well, good for her. But we’re different people.” He paused, but Draco had questioned him more sharply than Harry had expected, and Harry didn’t want to get into the habit of shutting up just because he was afraid to ask. “How much is that going to bother you?”
“That you are male, and she was female?” Draco ran his eyes over Harry’s body and then brought them back to his face, and Harry flushed at what was in them. “The mating bond doesn’t care.”
“But do you care?” Harry persisted. “And I was talking about more important things.”
“Of course you are,” Draco said, and a smile slipped slowly along his face, like a shadow on the surface of the moon. “I am beginning to understand you now, I think, Harry. Well. She was the mate I thought I would have for the rest of my life. And when I lost her, I had no reason to think any differently. Veela follow their mates into death. You know that.”
Harry nodded. It had been the knowledge that drove him to the Ministry Archives the moment he heard the news, after all.
“I think that the idea is still too new for me to say how I will feel about it in a year from now,” Draco said, and watched him again for some minutes before he continued. “But I would like to speak to you more extensively, to get to know you, to know you better. Will you come to the Manor for dinner tomorrow night?”
Harry blinked, thrown. He had hoped, but he hadn’t thought, of anything like this. “Of course,” he said. “If you want me to.”
Draco abruptly leaned nearer, and for a moment, his face seemed as if it would emerge from the fire. Harry shivered in spite of himself.
“I want so many things,” Draco whispered harshly. “I want, and I want, and I’ll never be satisfied until I have you here, beside me.”
Harry felt the prickling flush creep all the way up to his cheeks, so there was no doubt that Draco had seen it. Draco laughed low, wicked and delighted, and then leaned back again. “I’m sure the house-elves can have the meal ready by seven,” he said. “And that will give me some time to speak to my mother. Good-night, Harry.” He paused, then added, “I never expected this, as I said. When I realized what had happened, I was more surprised than anything, rather than considering what I hoped for. But now—I am glad that it was you.”
And the Floo connection shut. Harry took a deep breath and rubbed his hands up and down his trousers, removing a sheen of sweat as well as, he hoped, some of the blush.
It took the mirror in his bedroom to tell him he was smiling.
*
Watching Harry advance across the dining room to meet him was not an experience Draco would forget in a hurry.
For one thing, changing the name Potter that had echoed in his mind on the rare occasions when they crossed paths during work to Harry seemed to change the light, the angles of the room, and a good many other things, as well. Suddenly he saw the way Harry stiffened his neck so as not to stare around at the walls, and the light way he placed his feet, and the way he kept his right elbow cocked, as though to shake his wand into his hand at any moment. And he saw the faint wrinkles around Harry’s eyes, and the balance he carried within himself, so different from the taut and trembling teenager Draco still half-remembered when he dreamed of the Battle of Hogwarts.
Harry might have more practice in seeing Draco anew, since he apparently liked him. Draco was not sure, but thought it might be worth finding out.
Second, the mating bond rang him like a bell the moment Harry stepped into the room, and Draco’s faint, far doubts that Harry might have lied about sending him the Jericho rose were laid to rest. This was him, yes. The ache behind his teeth receded, and Harry paused, one hand rising to his head as though a pain there had left him as well.
For a moment, they seemed to tilt back and forth like empty shells on the crest of a wave, and Draco was not sure what would come in to replace the emotions they had been feeling up to that point.
Then their balance changed, and Draco knew. Hunger drowned him, and Harry arched his neck back and looked into Draco’s eyes as though he could feel it, as though he knew.
Draco reminded himself there was food on the table already, salads looking as though they were made of emerald and diamond, and that more would come. He could satiate his hunger through food for now, and worry about the rest of it later. He extended a hand, moving around the table, and stopping himself only when he knew that he would charge at Harry if he did not.
Harry stepped forwards and swung his empty hand almost like a weapon to meet Draco’s touch. Draco’s hand closed down, and then spasmed as lightning and magic seemed to run up it. He had forgotten what touching his mate for the first time was like.
Harry felt it, too, from the way he closed his eyes and swayed backwards, leaving only Draco’s hand to support him, to keep him from falling. Draco licked his lips and watched until Harry’s eyes came open again and he shook his head, hair frizzing out gently around him. “Is it always like that?” he asked.
“That intense?” Draco gave him a look that he wished he could make hard, but which was simply too blissful for that. This was the good part about having Veela blood, as much as he might have complained; he would feel, he had to feel, and no one could blame him for that, not even the shadow of his father in the back of his mind. “No. Only with mates.”
“But, I mean,” Harry said, and visibly calmed himself before he continued on. Draco mentally lifted an eyebrow. Harry was doing well. Even Astoria, with more time for self-control, had clasped her hands to her mouth and needed a few minutes before she could continue speaking.
But she was also much younger.
Draco wondered how that was going to change: a male mate instead of a female one, an older mate instead of a younger one. He hoped the reason he licked his lips again was not too obvious.
“Is it like that every time?” Harry asked. He left his hand in Draco’s, but reached out and rested the other on Draco’s shoulder, as if daring something to happen. They both quivered at the same time from the arc that seemed to leap between their bodies. “Or only the first time we touch each other?”
“That particular sensation is first-time only,” Draco said, and turned his head to breathe on the side of Harry’s hand. Harry swallowed and swayed, then got control of himself with a scowl. “The others will last until we fully take control of the bond. And then there will be others, different ones.”
“I—see,” Harry said, and focused wild eyes on his face. “How are we going to wait that long?”
“That is entirely up to you,” Draco said, in a low tone that he heard rattle plates behind them anyway. “I am not against taking up the bond immediately.” The hunger in his belly was worse, and no, food would not truly satisfy it. He moved closer to Harry, and felt, for the first time, the warmth that swirled around his heart thanks to the Jericho rose singing in time with an echo.
“I—no,” Harry said, and moved away from him. “I came here for dinner. We should have it. And I don’t know that you want this, not yet.”
Draco snorted and shifted so that Harry could feel, if only against his hip rather than between his legs, the evidence that Draco wanted this. “What else will it take to convince you?” he whispered harshly.
Harry held his eyes, and there was a glimpse of pity mixed in with the intensity that made Draco want to hit things. “How much of your grief is left unsorted?” Harry asked quietly. “How much do human emotions play into it? For me, they’re all of it, and I’d like some reassurance that they—no, not that they are for you, because it’s asking too much. But that they could be. Do you even like me, as opposed to want me?”
Draco bit his upper lip, then his lower, and forced himself to stand down. He badly wanted Harry, yes, but nothing would be accomplished if he made Harry run before he got to know him properly. “I do,” he said. “I could, at least. Will you come and sit down?” Once again, he gestured Harry towards the table.
Whatever his need for reassurance, Harry didn’t question that statement. Perhaps he trusted Draco to know his mind that well. He smiled and nodded. “Dinner looks good,” he said, and let Draco pull out his chair.
*
Dinner was good. Harry ate most of his salad, nearly all of the lamb that came out—although Draco had to tell him it was lamb, since Harry really couldn’t really remember having it before—and then the cheese, and the bowl of fruits and nuts, and sipped at the butterbeer that Draco’s house-elves provided for him without question. It was nice to have butterbeer, to remind himself he wasn’t drunk and couldn’t get that way.
But he felt drunk, with the haze that brewed in his head and the way his foot wanted to tap and his hands make random gestures. Gestures that would take him closer to Draco, each time, so perhaps not random after all.
It was incredible. He had felt the warmth in his chest, he had felt the headaches, but he hadn’t realized it would be like this, the grip and the tear and the pull and the urge to be up and doing—
Doing someone, as a matter of fact.
It was one reason he had wanted to sit down to dinner instead of going up to Draco’s room immediately. There was part of him that had been wondering what it would be like to touch Draco’s face for years, sure, and slide his hand down inside Draco’s tight-fitting trousers. It was a part that had spoken up five years ago, not long after he and Ginny had decided that remaining pretend-married until all the kids were out of Hogwarts wasn’t what either of them wanted, after all. Apparently Harry’s desire needed official divorce papers to make itself known.
But he felt that overwhelming pressure beating against him like a wave, and sensed it must be worse for Draco, and it made him worried enough to study Draco. Draco, who’d been talking about the latest detention Al and Scorpius had received when the baby dragon that they’d been keeping captive in the school had escaped, looked up at him and raised an eyebrow.
“I hope you can speak your mind and not just stare at me,” he said dryly.
Harry nodded and decided that there were advantages to being mated to a part-Veela you’d really, really disliked back in school. You knew he was going to say some blunt things, and you could say them back. “This bond could have chosen anyone,” he said. “I kind of forced it with the rose, though. Are you really not unhappy that it picked me?”
Draco laid down his own spoon and studied Harry for a moment with a thoughtful face. Then he murmured, “Will you let me do something, and not either answer back or move while I do it?”
“Yes,” Harry said. “Well, not if it’s breaking my neck.”
Draco smiled at him. “If the bond was truly as strong as it is said to be between a full Veela and their mate,” he said, pushing back the chair and standing, “you would be hard-pressed not to allow even that. But we have free will, Harry. The bond is—part of it, that is all, and a part I’ve had a long time to come to terms with.”
Well, that was true, at least, Harry supposed. He held still as Draco walked around the table, but did tilt his head back when Draco stepped behind his chair. He wanted to see him, though; he didn’t distrust him. Although he might only have realized that himself when he thought of how vulnerable baring his throat like this made him.
Draco stared down at him for such long seconds Harry thought he had changed his mind. Then he reached out and trailed his fingers down the side of Harry’s face.
Harry shuddered. The burning sparks that leaped up in his skin made him want to cry out. And that was with nothing more than the barest brush of Draco’s hand, only the tips of his fingers, really.
Draco, eyes intent and drowning in grey, crouched beside him and drew his fingers down Harry’s throat. Then he lifted his other hand and ran them through his hair, holding up individual strands of it, all the while gazing at him.
Harry stared back, breath short and tight. The heart that beat in his chest had been joined by a second in his throat, he thought, and then a third in his face as Draco touched him again there, tracing the shape of his lips. When Draco stood and moved behind him to stroke and lift and separate Harry’s hair with both his hands, Harry moaned and sank forwards to rest his head on the table, letting Draco touch him all over, his hands light and restless on Harry’s shoulders.
Draco bent over to kiss his ear. His voice was gentle as he said, “Feeling this much pleasure? I say yes to it.” He kissed again, and Harry turned his head in that direction. Draco spoke without moving away. “Being alive again, rather than dying and having to leave my son and my mother and my life behind? I say yes to it.” He kissed again, his tongue darting out to trace the shell of Harry’s ear, and Harry writhed in his chair. “Discovering that the one who saved my life did so with no selfish motive, even wished to leave me alone because he was so concerned about forcing me into anything?”
There was no answer to the question for a few minutes, and Harry had started to lift his head, turn it, when suddenly the lips and the tongue and the breath were all there in his ear, the words hissing at him like Parseltongue.
“I say yes to it.”
Harry lifted his head and whirled around. Draco’s mouth was still in place, and Harry kissed him, hard enough to make Draco hiss a little and raise a hand to cup his chin. Harry let Draco restrain him for their second kiss, and show him how good it would be when Harry was kissing a part-Veela who knew how to direct the leaping sparks of sensation to the most sensitive places.
Then Draco reared back and stared down at him with enormous dark eyes. “I’m thirty-eight years old, and I know what I want,” he said softly. “I don’t mind that it’s inevitable. I didn’t know I would have a second bond, but I’ve had a year to think about this, and this is what I want. And I know that Astoria wouldn’t disapprove, either.” His hand slid in restless circles on Harry’s chest. “This is the beginning, not the end, but let’s make the beginning. Come with me, Harry.”
And Harry—
He was divorced, and happily so. He and Ginny were friends, but they had both wanted more than they could have as husband and wife. So they had parted, and he had started spending time with his kids and his job, and she had gone off to write and fly, still under the Potter name, because she had begun her career that way. And they both had what they wanted.
His two sons were at Hogwarts. His daughter, who had forgiven them both for the divorce after the first year or so, was with her mother, and would be ready for Hogwarts next year herself. His friends were happy for him, and Ron, at least, understood about the depth of his feelings for Draco.
Harry could do what he wanted.
And right now, that was to sleep with the part-Veela who wanted him, and no matter how permanent the bond that came from that experience, you could see it as just a continuation of the linkage that Harry had already chosen to forge when he infused the Jericho rose with power. Which it was.
“I will,” he said, and laid his hand in Draco’s.
*
Draco had been half-afraid that Harry might think the grand sweeping staircase up to his room or the room itself too large, and more than half-afraid they might meet his mother. She had stared at Draco when he explained the situation, and then kissed him and taken herself away for a holiday somewhere in Ireland. Draco knew she had friends there, but even their names were unknown to him. She had gone there sometimes when she needed time to think about things, as she had after his father’s death.
But she could have come back, and he thought Harry’s courage might have stuttered to a stop under his mother-in-law’s piercing stare.
Now, though, they were in his room, and Harry only blinked at a few of the many paintings on the walls and the sculpture of a thorn tree in the corner, and smiled at the Jericho rose in its dish on the table, before he turned to Draco. “Nice,” he said. “Are you sure I’m going to be enough to fill up that bed for you?”
The bed, Draco had to admit, was an indulgence, larger than the one his mother had thought appropriate for him when he was growing up, large enough, in fact, for six people. But now, it let him smile at Harry and say, “The more room to fuck you on,” and watch his eyes grow wide and his mouth hang open.
Then Harry began to pull at his shirt, but Draco shook his head and reached a hand towards Harry. He didn’t actually touch him, but the gesture was enough to make Harry stop stripping at once. “I would rather,” Draco murmured.
Harry smiled at him, the same gentleness in his eyes that had been there when Draco pulled out his chair, and then lay down on the bed, looking for permission even before he kicked his boots off. Draco nodded. He didn’t mind that part, since Astoria had generally been barefoot before they got this far.
For a moment, he felt a brutal grief hovering behind his lips, but he shook his head and dismissed it. So he would make some comparisons; that was inevitable. What was not was falling victim to that grief.
Astoria would have smiled at him with brilliant eyes and murmured to him how beautiful Harry was. Draco touched the memory of her until he was sure that it was blessing, not bane, and then let it go and knelt down in front of Harry, delicately unbuttoning his trousers.
Harry’s cock was visible at once, a rigid outline against his pants. Draco exhaled gently, making sure not to laugh, and reached up to run his fingers along it. Harry made a strangled sound and tossed his head back, his eyes closed in bliss similar to Draco’s own, his face drowning in all that black hair.
Draco’s eyes moved from his hair to the Jericho rose, and he smiled, rising to his feet and beginning to remove his own clothes. Harry opened his eyes and rolled over to watch him.
He was staring with open mouth long before Draco finished, and Draco wondered if part of it came from fear. As far as he knew, Harry had never been with a man, even if he had been in love with one for a good long while.
But when he pulled his own pants down, Harry moaned and reached for him, and Draco moved forwards far enough that Harry could feel him. Harry cupped Draco’s shaft in his palm and bent down until his mouth hovered a few inches from it.
“Fuck me with it, please,” he said, and glanced up at Draco, his eyes so bright that Draco fell on him, and kissed, and pulled off his shirt while Harry was still thrashing to get his arms free of it and keep one hand on Draco’s cock.
Harry was scars and muscle and lean, flowing, restless motion under his hands, lunging up to kiss him, moving down to shrug off one sleeve and laugh quietly in the back of his throat, rolling over and spreading his legs with what Draco considered a commendable haste. Draco found his wand and cast a number of spells that he would have spread out over a lengthier period of time if he’d had his way.
But Harry was beneath him, and arching his arse, and scraping the backs of Draco’s legs with his toenails whenever he thought Draco was slowing down too much, and the choice was not all his.
As it should be.
Harry didn’t react as though the stretching and lubricating sensations were unfamiliar to him, and spread his legs wider and wriggled down at Draco’s cock as though he assumed he would be left to do all the work. Draco laughed, the hunger in his mouth making him have to kiss Harry, and then he pushed forwards, and—
There was heat around him, and tightness, and silence.
And very great pleasure.
Draco could feel the bond shock to a stop in him; for the first time in months, he was entirely without the sensations that he had come to associate with the search for his second mate. He opened his eyes, gazing down at Harry, and found Harry drifting open-eyed on the pillow, his hands limp on Draco’s arms.
“Now,” Harry whispered when he saw Draco looking, and shifted to the side and down, Draco shifting with him, so they could both get one of Harry’s legs over Draco’s shoulder. Where the first one had gone, the second one went easily, and Draco bent and panted into Harry’s mouth, and Harry panted back at him.
“Now,” Draco echoed, or perhaps they both said it at once, and Draco began to thrust. Harry closed his eyes and lay there, half-drunk on something that looked an awful lot like happiness.
The bed was as white as the snow that lay clustered on the ground outside, and Harry’s hair was as dark as the night sky, and his eyes were as green as—as summer, Draco thought. The summer of his life that had come back to him, out of season, out of the cycle, but there, there and he would not give it up, never give it up.
Harry looked up at him, and laughed, perhaps because he read the truth of what Draco was thinking from his look. Then he tensed, paused as if counting heartbeats, and thrust his face up in a clumsy movement.
Luckily, Draco was in tune with him, the bond alive and singing again, and he lowered his head at the same time. They kissed, awkwardly and for as long as Harry’s straining neck could stand it, and then Harry sank back on the pillows and gasped and kicked and began to come.
There was heat everywhere, circling around Draco’s heart, blazing from the dish on the bedside table, heat enough to melt the snow. Draco slowed, rocking and watching as Harry’s shakes and shudders played themselves out, and Harry sprawled in a sweetly sticky mess of limbs across the bed, his eyes closed. Draco lowered his head again.
Harry opened his eyes and turned up his hand, the side of his wrist towards Draco.
Draco lowered his head and bit, sinking his teeth deep enough that he felt the throb of blood against them. The bond had wanted that, and he wanted to go along with it, and Harry wanted it enough to sense the bond. It was well.
Harry pulled his bloody wrist back, and blinked at the toothmarks on it, and blinked up at him, grinning. “Come on, you bloody bastard,” he said, voice thick and soft, and then clenched his arse down around Draco.
Draco yelped, and sealed their future bond with his own deep motions and undignified shaking. Harry reached up and laid his bitten hand along Draco’s shoulders, smearing him with blood, letting it trail slowly down as Draco braced himself on shaking arms above Harry. He held Harry’s eyes, and Harry’s smile slowly faded.
The bond was between them now, burning hot and cold, like stars and space, both at once, and then the moment collapsed as Draco did, splintered like his strength, and the intensity was replaced with the gentler warmth of the Jericho rose. Draco rolled over to one side and licked at Harry’s temples, smoothing the hair there away like a cat.
Harry said, “Mmmm,” and pushed close enough to kiss him. Draco tucked Harry’s head under his chin and stroked his shoulder.
“Should I bandage this?” Harry asked lazily, and waved his bloodied wrist around. It had already stopped bleeding, Draco noted, but it would scar. He knew it would scar, and knew, from the beating of the sun-like strength in their bones, that they both wanted it to.
“No,” Draco said, and curled close around Harry. His hands knew how to hold his shoulders, now, and his legs knew how to tangle with his. The bond no longer sparked and leaped between them, but held them, warm and flowing as the Mediterranean. Draco swallowed and closed his eyes.
Come back to life, come back to love.
They had managed it. Harry had taken the first step, but they had managed it, together.
And Draco’s happiness and his grief, his second bond and his first, leaped together and danced like candle-flames lost in one large fire, or like the tendrils of many reaching plants all blended together.
*
Harry was the one who woke to the tapping on the window, which he thought strange until he remembered how hard Draco had worked last night. He smiled and slid out from the covers and the curtains and Draco’s arms and worked his way over to the glass, thinking it was probably from his friends, wondering where he was last night.
But the owl slid into the room with his beak pointed almost at the ceiling, as though he was used to better people than naked, sticky men receiving his messages, and held out his letter with his head turned completely away. That made Harry start to suspect the truth even before he sneaked a glimpse inside.
Dear Dad,
I know that you’re mad because we hid that dragon and got detention, and you’re right, that’s what we needed some of the Galleons for, to buy food for it. But not all of them. I promise, we have something else going on this time, something that’s going to make us famous and earn a lot of money, and all we need is a hundred Galleons. Please?
Your loving son,
Scorpius.
His snort of laughter woke Draco, although the first Harry knew of it was Draco’s arms draping around his waist and a quick kiss on the back of his neck. “Opening my post already?” Draco murmured.
“I wondered what news we were going to have from our sons this time,” Harry replied, and held out the letter.
Draco took it, and read it, and then began to laugh. The silent quakes of his amusement traveled into Harry at first, and then he laughed aloud, making the eagle-owl hop about in agitation before it turned its back altogether, too highly-strung to deal with all this.
Harry leaned back against Draco and closed his eyes, feeling the stir and the brush of winter air against his front from the open window, and the warmth of Draco against his back, and the warmth of the bond coiled about their shoulders like a basking serpent, full and fiery with promise.
And, from the side, the shining warmth, the resurrection heat, of the Jericho rose.
The End.
Dear Dad, can I have some money?
Harry groaned a little and flung Albus’s letter down on the floor, rubbing at his head. There was an ache behind his temples that just wouldn’t go away. If it had been behind his scar, he would have worried about it being Voldemort coming back—he sometimes did think about that, even now—but this ranged. Now it was in his temples, and sometimes it felt like a dull iron band pressing all the way around his skull. And sometimes it just hurt.
He sat back up and shook his head. Now that Albus was twelve, he was becoming a little more independent, asking if he could have Scorpius Malfoy and other friends over to visit during the holidays, and asking for a new broom—he hadn’t got that one yet—and asking for his own room. And he had become reconciled to his parents’ divorce, too.
But this was the first time he had asked for Galleons, and Harry was a little afraid to know what it was for. He thought about writing back to Albus and demanding answers, but the thought broke up and drifted away under the pressure of his pain.
Stupid headache. Harry had no idea what was causing them. Hermione had insisted on checking his glasses, but they functioned perfectly. And he’d been eating right lately, and sleeping right, and not using a lot of magic, since Kingsley had the stupid idea that sometimes his best Aurors might enjoy not being in the field.
Harry wandered over to the window and stared out. He usually enjoyed this little house, which he’d bought after their divorce, and which sat on the outskirts of Ottery St. Catchpole and looked out over a field. But it was February now, and snow drifted and skittered in circles. Not much snow, not enough to make things look pure and peaceful and magical, just enough to get underfoot and cause falls at all the wrong times.
Harry massaged his forehead again. He was nearly desperate enough to try a stronger potion than the Headache Draughts Hermione judged safe for him to take. Normally, Harry didn’t dispute her judgment on potions. He still didn’t know as much about brewing them as he should; it was a miracle that Kingsley had been willing to accept him into the Aurors anyway.
Not a miracle, and you know it.
At the moment, though, headache or not, Harry didn’t feel like subjecting himself to another long train of thoughts about How Horrible It Was For People to Think He Was The Chosen One. He didn’t even want to go in search of a stronger headache potion. Staying here and sleeping seemed like a good idea. He wandered back to his chair, flopped into it, and watched the flames.
When the Floo chimed at him—a self-possessed little whistle that at least let him know it was a call from a friend and not the Ministry—Harry sighed and seriously thought about pretending not to be home. But he was an adult now, theoretically, and it could be important. Maybe Ron and Hermione had found out what Al needed money for. He leaned forwards and tapped the stone on the side of the hearth that made the connection come to life.
Neville’s face appeared in the fire, and Harry relaxed, letting his legs sprawl out. At least Neville had no kids, so he was unlikely to call Harry about a family crisis. Maybe a rogue rose had escaped and eaten half the shop. “Hey, Nev. What is it?”
For a few moments, Harry thought he would get a lecture, because Neville’s eyes were dark and his jaw set. Then he took a deep breath and said, “Harry, Draco Malfoy was in here a few minutes ago, and he managed to influence me into letting him know that a man bought a Jericho rose from me and made it into a talisman that could help him.”
Well, Neville sure knows how to banish boredom, Harry thought a moment later. His body had reacted faster than his mind; he’d already sat up, his heart beating louder in his body than the headache, and gripped his wand. “Shit,” he said. “Oh, shit. Why did he do that? How did he track you down?”
Neville snorted a little. “He said that someone would have bought the plant from me because I was the best.”
Harry blinked. “Well, you are.”
Neville glared at him, as if he thought Harry was making fun of him, and then relaxed with a small sigh. “Well. Thank you. But he says—he says that your magic was more powerful than you knew, Harry, and that there’s a real mating bond between the two of you now. And he doesn’t seem worried about what might happen when he finds out who it’s with, because he believes that the bond can accommodate him to any kind of mate, although I tried to warn him that this kind might not be the one he’s expecting.”
Harry felt his heart leap and dive at the same time. Part of him shrieked in glee and clapped its hands. Yes, this is what I wanted, this is what…
No, Harry thought then, and shook his head. He can’t be over the grief from Astoria’s death, not yet. Maybe the bond is still lingering from her, and that’s what he imagines he’s feeling.
“It seemed pretty serious,” Neville added, anticipating Harry’s main objection even before he opened his mouth. “I don’t think he would have been able to use the Veela magic on me if it hadn’t been. That magic’s not active unless they’re looking for a mate, not for a part-Veela like him.” He flushed a little when Harry stared at him. “After you bought the Jericho rose, I did some reading.”
“Well, shit,” Harry said again, and ran his hand through his hair. The headache made his temples pulse this time, and he winced. He had a pretty good idea now why he’d been having those headaches. He’d still needed Neville’s words for confirmation, though, because the last thing he wanted to do was face up to it.
And I really never would have reckoned on it being this, either.
“What are you going to do?” Neville asked simply. “I told him I would contact you—not you, obviously, the one who had bought the rose—and give you some time to make up your own mind, but he seemed pretty determined to hunt you down if you didn’t comply and come to him.”
A long shudder seemed to ring through Harry, so long that he shifted uncomfortably and wondered what could be causing it. Perhaps it was some weird side-effect of the mating bond, one that he’d never read about because he’d never thought that something this weird and stupid could happen when he used the Tellus Ritual—
And then he groaned, and realized the truth.
It’s just the realization that I can’t do anything but brace myself. I can’t end the ritual; I won’t take Draco’s life away from him. I can’t be his mate in the way he thinks, and maybe once he sees me, he’ll realize that. I care for him, but there’s—too much baggage there. Harry was more than smart enough to realize that a nodding acquaintance in the corridors of the Ministry and having sons who were best friends wouldn’t mean anything to Draco.
But I can’t run away from this. I have to face it.
“I’ll send him an owl,” he said, and sighed heavily, dragging his hands through his hair. “Since he’ll definitely hunt me down otherwise.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t want to be hunted down by Malfoy, not in the mood he looked to be in,” Neville said, and looked at Harry sympathetically.
Harry tried to smile, but the corners of his mouth seemed stuck. He kept swallowing to ease his dry throat. “Can we get together for a drink sometime next week?” he asked. “I have the feeling that I’ll need it, and—it’s not something I can tell Ron and Hermione about right now.” Ron didn’t hate Draco, not anymore, but he still made jokes about Malfoys and pure-bloods that Harry didn’t want to listen to. Either he would be angry and astonished at the mating bond, or he would make a huge joke of everything. And Hermione would bury him with books about Veela and second love and the logistics of pure-blood marriage.
Harry was really, really not ready to listen to that.
“Yes, of course,” Neville said, and gave him a gentle smile. “Hannah would be happy to have us in the Leaky, you know that.”
“I know,” Harry said, and then he said good-bye, and then he spent some more time staring at the snow out the window and trying to decide how in the world he should phrase his letter to Malfoy.
In the end, what could he say but the truth, the way he had in the note that he had left with the Jericho rose on the bedside table in St. Mungo’s? He had the feeling that this would be a significantly less welcome truth than that had probably been, but there was nothing he could do about that, either.
Maybe Malfoy knows something that can get us out of a secondary bond like this without hurting anybody. He has to know more about Veela than I do.
But when Harry sent his owl off later that evening, all he had was the gloomy conviction that Ron had been right after all: he had tried to do something good for somebody and had fucked it up. The consequences had just taken a while to show up, this time.
*
Draco raised his eyebrows as the brown owl settled on the dining table, nearly in the middle of his cheese, and held out its leg to him. A common post-owl, and a rude one, too, to interrupt him in the middle of dinner. Of course, the mating hunger made his appetite sharper, so he was now in the middle of the third course, but there were standards to be upheld.
He looked carefully at the writing on the letter as he took it out of the envelope. Although there was no reason in the world for Scorpius to be using a common post-owl when he had his own bird, Draco had received a request for money earlier that day that still made him wary.
But the handwriting was unfamiliar, and Draco’s practiced eye caught no official seals. Curious, he looked at the signature.
Potter.
The warmth coiled deep in his chest roared to life, and for a moment, Draco felt as though he stood in the embrace of a bonfire. He shook his head and stared at the signature again, this time noticing the first name that went with it. He ran his fingers along the paper to the top, and then held it near his nose.
It had always seemed bizarre to him that he would have a sense of smell that dealt with locating a mate, since the birds that Veela resembled didn’t, but on the other hand, perhaps that had to do with all his senses sharpening when he sought one. He could smell ink here, of course, and paper, but also a tang of sweat and the sharp saltiness that seemed to cling to the skin of most humans.
And the smell made him want to melt back into the chair. Or attack the sender with teeth bared.
It was Potter.
That made him turn all the more eagerly back, now, to the letter in his hand, because it seemed odd to him that Potter would have done this for him and never communicated with him until now. On the other hand, the reckless gesture for someone’s “good” suited Potter to the core. And Draco could remember the Fiendfyre.
Dear Draco:
I reckon I should have written to you right away, but I honestly didn’t think that there was any way the ritual I did would replace your bond to Astoria. Sorry. It was only supposed to give you the chance to keep on living.
The Tellus Ritual said that the object I enchanted and chose as the substitute for the bond should symbolize me and that bond; that was why I chose a resurrection plant. But it’s also the opposite of what you had in so many ways. That’s another reason I thought you would be safe. I chose you, not you choosing me. Why it didn’t work out that way, I don’t know.
I imagine this has probably bewildered you. I don’t know how much I want to say in a letter, but you deserve some explanation, so I just want to say that I’ve cared for you for several years now. If you weren’t mated to Astoria, I would have gone after you, but of course I didn’t want to disrupt that.
Sorry, I’m rambling. But I just want you to know that I’ll be at home this evening, and my Floo address is Spiderweb Place. If you want to talk to me personally, that’s where I’ll be.
Harry Potter.
Draco licked his lips and leaned back in his chair, balancing the letter in his hand. The owl on the table bounced and hooted impatiently, and Draco flicked a fleck of cheese at it. The owl bit into it, discovered it wasn’t meat, and glared at him. Draco ignored it. He had enchantments on the dining room table to clean up any pellets after a few unfortunate incidents with his mother’s elderly owl.
So. Harry Potter had been the one to find the Jericho rose, the one to enchant it, the one to give Draco another chance. But he had kept out of the way—and he hadn’t even said why in the letter, other than that he had never meant this to become a mating bond. Perhaps he expected Draco simply to know.
“Oh, I do know,” Draco murmured. “Noble idiot that you are.” His fingers flexed against the top of the table, and he knew he could have left grooves in the dark wood if he wanted to. But this was a relatively new table, bought after the war to replace the one that the Dark Lord tended to feed people to his snake on, and Draco preferred not to damage it.
The hunger that surged through him was strong enough to make him want the rest of his food, and he finished eating. Then he retired to his study to determine what he thought about it.
In the end, he came to the same conclusion that Potter had. (Draco prided himself on the knowledge that he would have reached that conclusion earlier, if he had had all the knowledge and been in a place that allowed him to make the decisions). There was no running from this. There was no fighting it. They were two grown men, and should deal with what fate had handed them.
Aside from that, there were two other things Draco knew that Potter did not, or at least did not seem to have considered.
First, the war had taught Draco very well what kinds of things he could change and what he could not. He could change his ideals, his beliefs, the way he acted, the amount of deference he paid to his father’s ideals. He could not change his blood or his family background, and he did not wish to. But he could try to make that history something to be proud of, instead of wincing from the reminders. For Scorpius’s sake and Astoria’s, if not his own, he had wanted to.
He could change his mind about Potter, too. But he could not change the Veela bond. It was obvious which of the two, in that case, would have to yield.
Second, the war had been over for twenty years. Draco did not remember it fondly, but he had worked hard to survive and then erase the scars. Twenty years was enough time for all but the worst to have healed over.
His memories of Potter were far from the worst ones of the war. Potter could not, after all, compare to the Dark Lord.
Which made it only all the more amazing that he had defeated him, in the end.
Draco held up his small glass of crystal-clear elf-wine to the light, and then drained it in one draught. It made his teeth feel like diamonds in his mouth, and filled his throat with buzzing lightning.
His mate was Harry Potter, and it was far from the worst thing that could happen.
He looked forward to what would happen when they met.
*
Harry tugged at his robes, and then cursed and turned away from the mirror. If he spent much more time fussing around with his clothing, then he would probably miss the Floo call, and Draco would be free, and right, to think that Harry’s owl today had taken all his courage and left nothing else.
Harry padded into his drawing room and sat down in front of the fire. He did get up, once, and smooth out a wrinkle in the blanket he’d draped over the couch. It had too many stains and crumbs on it to count as “nice,” but the blanket, a rich mixture of orange and gold, could make it look fit to be part of someone’s life, at least.
Part of Draco’s mate’s life.
Harry swallowed, and then spent some time picking at his trousers. He had no idea what to say or do when Draco firecalled. He had no idea how angry Draco would be. Granted, that he had gone to Neville showed he couldn’t be too angry at the thought of the mating bond itself, but that it was Harry? That Harry had done this without asking permission? That he was bound to someone he’d always hated?
Well. Harry had sent the owl, and he was committed, now. Hoping the owl had gone astray and Draco had never received the message was childish.
The fire flared. Harry’s breath caught, and he sat up, even as part of his brain tried to convince the rest that it was only Ron or Hermione calling with an invitation to dinner.
But Draco’s face formed out of the flames, and Harry swallowed again and stuck his hands beneath his knees, because otherwise he would do something stupid, he really would. A year of seeing it from a distance, and knowing that Draco was alive because of him, had done whatever work was wanting. Harry really wanted to reach out and touch Draco, although he knew this was only an image.
“Hello,” Draco said.
Harry blinked at him, and then managed to smile in spite of himself. He was glad that Draco was beginning with something so normal, something that really didn’t require much effort to respond to. “Hullo,” he said. His heart was thumping along fast, and he shivered, but his voice sounded calm. “You got my owl, of course?”
Draco’s eyebrows pinched together. “Why would I be calling you, otherwise?”
Harry winced in spite of himself—of course there was no reason for Draco to look twice in his direction without the bond—but he reminded himself again that they were both adults, and from Draco’s words to Neville, he was committed to dealing with this. “Sorry,” he said. “I forgot how much you hate it when people refer to the obvious.”
“Perhaps,” Draco said, and eyed him. “But I hate it more when people trip over their own tongues with apologies that are not needed.”
Harry smiled and leaned back on the couch. “Tell me what you’re comfortable with, then,” he said quietly. “That’s what I want to know, because I have no idea. I’ve—liked you for a while, but that’s not the same as really knowing you.”
Draco stared at him, and then apparently leaned back on something and sighed. “That’s—the whole of you,” he said. “The essence. You did this for me, you gave me life, but you have no idea whether I could like you back.”
Harry shrugged. “The ritual didn’t require me to get your blood, you know. It was sort of easy to give you a gift and then leave it again.” He wondered for a moment whether he should talk about the stolen kiss in hospital, and then left it alone. Draco might be upset about that right now, considering that Astoria had still been so recently dead at the time. He might talk about it later.
“You don’t consider grand gestures grand,” Draco said slowly. “That’s the opposite of Astoria, in many ways.”
Harry concealed a wince. If Draco didn’t mind talking about his dead wife, why should Harry? “She liked to give you gifts like that?” he asked.
“She knew the value of the gifts she gave,” Draco said, and studied Harry again. “She never would have said that a ritual to save someone else’s life was ‘sort of easy.’”
Harry rolled his eyes, but he could feel some of the tension creeping out of his muscles, and his arms fell more freely along the back of the couch now. “Well, good for her. But we’re different people.” He paused, but Draco had questioned him more sharply than Harry had expected, and Harry didn’t want to get into the habit of shutting up just because he was afraid to ask. “How much is that going to bother you?”
“That you are male, and she was female?” Draco ran his eyes over Harry’s body and then brought them back to his face, and Harry flushed at what was in them. “The mating bond doesn’t care.”
“But do you care?” Harry persisted. “And I was talking about more important things.”
“Of course you are,” Draco said, and a smile slipped slowly along his face, like a shadow on the surface of the moon. “I am beginning to understand you now, I think, Harry. Well. She was the mate I thought I would have for the rest of my life. And when I lost her, I had no reason to think any differently. Veela follow their mates into death. You know that.”
Harry nodded. It had been the knowledge that drove him to the Ministry Archives the moment he heard the news, after all.
“I think that the idea is still too new for me to say how I will feel about it in a year from now,” Draco said, and watched him again for some minutes before he continued. “But I would like to speak to you more extensively, to get to know you, to know you better. Will you come to the Manor for dinner tomorrow night?”
Harry blinked, thrown. He had hoped, but he hadn’t thought, of anything like this. “Of course,” he said. “If you want me to.”
Draco abruptly leaned nearer, and for a moment, his face seemed as if it would emerge from the fire. Harry shivered in spite of himself.
“I want so many things,” Draco whispered harshly. “I want, and I want, and I’ll never be satisfied until I have you here, beside me.”
Harry felt the prickling flush creep all the way up to his cheeks, so there was no doubt that Draco had seen it. Draco laughed low, wicked and delighted, and then leaned back again. “I’m sure the house-elves can have the meal ready by seven,” he said. “And that will give me some time to speak to my mother. Good-night, Harry.” He paused, then added, “I never expected this, as I said. When I realized what had happened, I was more surprised than anything, rather than considering what I hoped for. But now—I am glad that it was you.”
And the Floo connection shut. Harry took a deep breath and rubbed his hands up and down his trousers, removing a sheen of sweat as well as, he hoped, some of the blush.
It took the mirror in his bedroom to tell him he was smiling.
*
Watching Harry advance across the dining room to meet him was not an experience Draco would forget in a hurry.
For one thing, changing the name Potter that had echoed in his mind on the rare occasions when they crossed paths during work to Harry seemed to change the light, the angles of the room, and a good many other things, as well. Suddenly he saw the way Harry stiffened his neck so as not to stare around at the walls, and the light way he placed his feet, and the way he kept his right elbow cocked, as though to shake his wand into his hand at any moment. And he saw the faint wrinkles around Harry’s eyes, and the balance he carried within himself, so different from the taut and trembling teenager Draco still half-remembered when he dreamed of the Battle of Hogwarts.
Harry might have more practice in seeing Draco anew, since he apparently liked him. Draco was not sure, but thought it might be worth finding out.
Second, the mating bond rang him like a bell the moment Harry stepped into the room, and Draco’s faint, far doubts that Harry might have lied about sending him the Jericho rose were laid to rest. This was him, yes. The ache behind his teeth receded, and Harry paused, one hand rising to his head as though a pain there had left him as well.
For a moment, they seemed to tilt back and forth like empty shells on the crest of a wave, and Draco was not sure what would come in to replace the emotions they had been feeling up to that point.
Then their balance changed, and Draco knew. Hunger drowned him, and Harry arched his neck back and looked into Draco’s eyes as though he could feel it, as though he knew.
Draco reminded himself there was food on the table already, salads looking as though they were made of emerald and diamond, and that more would come. He could satiate his hunger through food for now, and worry about the rest of it later. He extended a hand, moving around the table, and stopping himself only when he knew that he would charge at Harry if he did not.
Harry stepped forwards and swung his empty hand almost like a weapon to meet Draco’s touch. Draco’s hand closed down, and then spasmed as lightning and magic seemed to run up it. He had forgotten what touching his mate for the first time was like.
Harry felt it, too, from the way he closed his eyes and swayed backwards, leaving only Draco’s hand to support him, to keep him from falling. Draco licked his lips and watched until Harry’s eyes came open again and he shook his head, hair frizzing out gently around him. “Is it always like that?” he asked.
“That intense?” Draco gave him a look that he wished he could make hard, but which was simply too blissful for that. This was the good part about having Veela blood, as much as he might have complained; he would feel, he had to feel, and no one could blame him for that, not even the shadow of his father in the back of his mind. “No. Only with mates.”
“But, I mean,” Harry said, and visibly calmed himself before he continued on. Draco mentally lifted an eyebrow. Harry was doing well. Even Astoria, with more time for self-control, had clasped her hands to her mouth and needed a few minutes before she could continue speaking.
But she was also much younger.
Draco wondered how that was going to change: a male mate instead of a female one, an older mate instead of a younger one. He hoped the reason he licked his lips again was not too obvious.
“Is it like that every time?” Harry asked. He left his hand in Draco’s, but reached out and rested the other on Draco’s shoulder, as if daring something to happen. They both quivered at the same time from the arc that seemed to leap between their bodies. “Or only the first time we touch each other?”
“That particular sensation is first-time only,” Draco said, and turned his head to breathe on the side of Harry’s hand. Harry swallowed and swayed, then got control of himself with a scowl. “The others will last until we fully take control of the bond. And then there will be others, different ones.”
“I—see,” Harry said, and focused wild eyes on his face. “How are we going to wait that long?”
“That is entirely up to you,” Draco said, in a low tone that he heard rattle plates behind them anyway. “I am not against taking up the bond immediately.” The hunger in his belly was worse, and no, food would not truly satisfy it. He moved closer to Harry, and felt, for the first time, the warmth that swirled around his heart thanks to the Jericho rose singing in time with an echo.
“I—no,” Harry said, and moved away from him. “I came here for dinner. We should have it. And I don’t know that you want this, not yet.”
Draco snorted and shifted so that Harry could feel, if only against his hip rather than between his legs, the evidence that Draco wanted this. “What else will it take to convince you?” he whispered harshly.
Harry held his eyes, and there was a glimpse of pity mixed in with the intensity that made Draco want to hit things. “How much of your grief is left unsorted?” Harry asked quietly. “How much do human emotions play into it? For me, they’re all of it, and I’d like some reassurance that they—no, not that they are for you, because it’s asking too much. But that they could be. Do you even like me, as opposed to want me?”
Draco bit his upper lip, then his lower, and forced himself to stand down. He badly wanted Harry, yes, but nothing would be accomplished if he made Harry run before he got to know him properly. “I do,” he said. “I could, at least. Will you come and sit down?” Once again, he gestured Harry towards the table.
Whatever his need for reassurance, Harry didn’t question that statement. Perhaps he trusted Draco to know his mind that well. He smiled and nodded. “Dinner looks good,” he said, and let Draco pull out his chair.
*
Dinner was good. Harry ate most of his salad, nearly all of the lamb that came out—although Draco had to tell him it was lamb, since Harry really couldn’t really remember having it before—and then the cheese, and the bowl of fruits and nuts, and sipped at the butterbeer that Draco’s house-elves provided for him without question. It was nice to have butterbeer, to remind himself he wasn’t drunk and couldn’t get that way.
But he felt drunk, with the haze that brewed in his head and the way his foot wanted to tap and his hands make random gestures. Gestures that would take him closer to Draco, each time, so perhaps not random after all.
It was incredible. He had felt the warmth in his chest, he had felt the headaches, but he hadn’t realized it would be like this, the grip and the tear and the pull and the urge to be up and doing—
Doing someone, as a matter of fact.
It was one reason he had wanted to sit down to dinner instead of going up to Draco’s room immediately. There was part of him that had been wondering what it would be like to touch Draco’s face for years, sure, and slide his hand down inside Draco’s tight-fitting trousers. It was a part that had spoken up five years ago, not long after he and Ginny had decided that remaining pretend-married until all the kids were out of Hogwarts wasn’t what either of them wanted, after all. Apparently Harry’s desire needed official divorce papers to make itself known.
But he felt that overwhelming pressure beating against him like a wave, and sensed it must be worse for Draco, and it made him worried enough to study Draco. Draco, who’d been talking about the latest detention Al and Scorpius had received when the baby dragon that they’d been keeping captive in the school had escaped, looked up at him and raised an eyebrow.
“I hope you can speak your mind and not just stare at me,” he said dryly.
Harry nodded and decided that there were advantages to being mated to a part-Veela you’d really, really disliked back in school. You knew he was going to say some blunt things, and you could say them back. “This bond could have chosen anyone,” he said. “I kind of forced it with the rose, though. Are you really not unhappy that it picked me?”
Draco laid down his own spoon and studied Harry for a moment with a thoughtful face. Then he murmured, “Will you let me do something, and not either answer back or move while I do it?”
“Yes,” Harry said. “Well, not if it’s breaking my neck.”
Draco smiled at him. “If the bond was truly as strong as it is said to be between a full Veela and their mate,” he said, pushing back the chair and standing, “you would be hard-pressed not to allow even that. But we have free will, Harry. The bond is—part of it, that is all, and a part I’ve had a long time to come to terms with.”
Well, that was true, at least, Harry supposed. He held still as Draco walked around the table, but did tilt his head back when Draco stepped behind his chair. He wanted to see him, though; he didn’t distrust him. Although he might only have realized that himself when he thought of how vulnerable baring his throat like this made him.
Draco stared down at him for such long seconds Harry thought he had changed his mind. Then he reached out and trailed his fingers down the side of Harry’s face.
Harry shuddered. The burning sparks that leaped up in his skin made him want to cry out. And that was with nothing more than the barest brush of Draco’s hand, only the tips of his fingers, really.
Draco, eyes intent and drowning in grey, crouched beside him and drew his fingers down Harry’s throat. Then he lifted his other hand and ran them through his hair, holding up individual strands of it, all the while gazing at him.
Harry stared back, breath short and tight. The heart that beat in his chest had been joined by a second in his throat, he thought, and then a third in his face as Draco touched him again there, tracing the shape of his lips. When Draco stood and moved behind him to stroke and lift and separate Harry’s hair with both his hands, Harry moaned and sank forwards to rest his head on the table, letting Draco touch him all over, his hands light and restless on Harry’s shoulders.
Draco bent over to kiss his ear. His voice was gentle as he said, “Feeling this much pleasure? I say yes to it.” He kissed again, and Harry turned his head in that direction. Draco spoke without moving away. “Being alive again, rather than dying and having to leave my son and my mother and my life behind? I say yes to it.” He kissed again, his tongue darting out to trace the shell of Harry’s ear, and Harry writhed in his chair. “Discovering that the one who saved my life did so with no selfish motive, even wished to leave me alone because he was so concerned about forcing me into anything?”
There was no answer to the question for a few minutes, and Harry had started to lift his head, turn it, when suddenly the lips and the tongue and the breath were all there in his ear, the words hissing at him like Parseltongue.
“I say yes to it.”
Harry lifted his head and whirled around. Draco’s mouth was still in place, and Harry kissed him, hard enough to make Draco hiss a little and raise a hand to cup his chin. Harry let Draco restrain him for their second kiss, and show him how good it would be when Harry was kissing a part-Veela who knew how to direct the leaping sparks of sensation to the most sensitive places.
Then Draco reared back and stared down at him with enormous dark eyes. “I’m thirty-eight years old, and I know what I want,” he said softly. “I don’t mind that it’s inevitable. I didn’t know I would have a second bond, but I’ve had a year to think about this, and this is what I want. And I know that Astoria wouldn’t disapprove, either.” His hand slid in restless circles on Harry’s chest. “This is the beginning, not the end, but let’s make the beginning. Come with me, Harry.”
And Harry—
He was divorced, and happily so. He and Ginny were friends, but they had both wanted more than they could have as husband and wife. So they had parted, and he had started spending time with his kids and his job, and she had gone off to write and fly, still under the Potter name, because she had begun her career that way. And they both had what they wanted.
His two sons were at Hogwarts. His daughter, who had forgiven them both for the divorce after the first year or so, was with her mother, and would be ready for Hogwarts next year herself. His friends were happy for him, and Ron, at least, understood about the depth of his feelings for Draco.
Harry could do what he wanted.
And right now, that was to sleep with the part-Veela who wanted him, and no matter how permanent the bond that came from that experience, you could see it as just a continuation of the linkage that Harry had already chosen to forge when he infused the Jericho rose with power. Which it was.
“I will,” he said, and laid his hand in Draco’s.
*
Draco had been half-afraid that Harry might think the grand sweeping staircase up to his room or the room itself too large, and more than half-afraid they might meet his mother. She had stared at Draco when he explained the situation, and then kissed him and taken herself away for a holiday somewhere in Ireland. Draco knew she had friends there, but even their names were unknown to him. She had gone there sometimes when she needed time to think about things, as she had after his father’s death.
But she could have come back, and he thought Harry’s courage might have stuttered to a stop under his mother-in-law’s piercing stare.
Now, though, they were in his room, and Harry only blinked at a few of the many paintings on the walls and the sculpture of a thorn tree in the corner, and smiled at the Jericho rose in its dish on the table, before he turned to Draco. “Nice,” he said. “Are you sure I’m going to be enough to fill up that bed for you?”
The bed, Draco had to admit, was an indulgence, larger than the one his mother had thought appropriate for him when he was growing up, large enough, in fact, for six people. But now, it let him smile at Harry and say, “The more room to fuck you on,” and watch his eyes grow wide and his mouth hang open.
Then Harry began to pull at his shirt, but Draco shook his head and reached a hand towards Harry. He didn’t actually touch him, but the gesture was enough to make Harry stop stripping at once. “I would rather,” Draco murmured.
Harry smiled at him, the same gentleness in his eyes that had been there when Draco pulled out his chair, and then lay down on the bed, looking for permission even before he kicked his boots off. Draco nodded. He didn’t mind that part, since Astoria had generally been barefoot before they got this far.
For a moment, he felt a brutal grief hovering behind his lips, but he shook his head and dismissed it. So he would make some comparisons; that was inevitable. What was not was falling victim to that grief.
Astoria would have smiled at him with brilliant eyes and murmured to him how beautiful Harry was. Draco touched the memory of her until he was sure that it was blessing, not bane, and then let it go and knelt down in front of Harry, delicately unbuttoning his trousers.
Harry’s cock was visible at once, a rigid outline against his pants. Draco exhaled gently, making sure not to laugh, and reached up to run his fingers along it. Harry made a strangled sound and tossed his head back, his eyes closed in bliss similar to Draco’s own, his face drowning in all that black hair.
Draco’s eyes moved from his hair to the Jericho rose, and he smiled, rising to his feet and beginning to remove his own clothes. Harry opened his eyes and rolled over to watch him.
He was staring with open mouth long before Draco finished, and Draco wondered if part of it came from fear. As far as he knew, Harry had never been with a man, even if he had been in love with one for a good long while.
But when he pulled his own pants down, Harry moaned and reached for him, and Draco moved forwards far enough that Harry could feel him. Harry cupped Draco’s shaft in his palm and bent down until his mouth hovered a few inches from it.
“Fuck me with it, please,” he said, and glanced up at Draco, his eyes so bright that Draco fell on him, and kissed, and pulled off his shirt while Harry was still thrashing to get his arms free of it and keep one hand on Draco’s cock.
Harry was scars and muscle and lean, flowing, restless motion under his hands, lunging up to kiss him, moving down to shrug off one sleeve and laugh quietly in the back of his throat, rolling over and spreading his legs with what Draco considered a commendable haste. Draco found his wand and cast a number of spells that he would have spread out over a lengthier period of time if he’d had his way.
But Harry was beneath him, and arching his arse, and scraping the backs of Draco’s legs with his toenails whenever he thought Draco was slowing down too much, and the choice was not all his.
As it should be.
Harry didn’t react as though the stretching and lubricating sensations were unfamiliar to him, and spread his legs wider and wriggled down at Draco’s cock as though he assumed he would be left to do all the work. Draco laughed, the hunger in his mouth making him have to kiss Harry, and then he pushed forwards, and—
There was heat around him, and tightness, and silence.
And very great pleasure.
Draco could feel the bond shock to a stop in him; for the first time in months, he was entirely without the sensations that he had come to associate with the search for his second mate. He opened his eyes, gazing down at Harry, and found Harry drifting open-eyed on the pillow, his hands limp on Draco’s arms.
“Now,” Harry whispered when he saw Draco looking, and shifted to the side and down, Draco shifting with him, so they could both get one of Harry’s legs over Draco’s shoulder. Where the first one had gone, the second one went easily, and Draco bent and panted into Harry’s mouth, and Harry panted back at him.
“Now,” Draco echoed, or perhaps they both said it at once, and Draco began to thrust. Harry closed his eyes and lay there, half-drunk on something that looked an awful lot like happiness.
The bed was as white as the snow that lay clustered on the ground outside, and Harry’s hair was as dark as the night sky, and his eyes were as green as—as summer, Draco thought. The summer of his life that had come back to him, out of season, out of the cycle, but there, there and he would not give it up, never give it up.
Harry looked up at him, and laughed, perhaps because he read the truth of what Draco was thinking from his look. Then he tensed, paused as if counting heartbeats, and thrust his face up in a clumsy movement.
Luckily, Draco was in tune with him, the bond alive and singing again, and he lowered his head at the same time. They kissed, awkwardly and for as long as Harry’s straining neck could stand it, and then Harry sank back on the pillows and gasped and kicked and began to come.
There was heat everywhere, circling around Draco’s heart, blazing from the dish on the bedside table, heat enough to melt the snow. Draco slowed, rocking and watching as Harry’s shakes and shudders played themselves out, and Harry sprawled in a sweetly sticky mess of limbs across the bed, his eyes closed. Draco lowered his head again.
Harry opened his eyes and turned up his hand, the side of his wrist towards Draco.
Draco lowered his head and bit, sinking his teeth deep enough that he felt the throb of blood against them. The bond had wanted that, and he wanted to go along with it, and Harry wanted it enough to sense the bond. It was well.
Harry pulled his bloody wrist back, and blinked at the toothmarks on it, and blinked up at him, grinning. “Come on, you bloody bastard,” he said, voice thick and soft, and then clenched his arse down around Draco.
Draco yelped, and sealed their future bond with his own deep motions and undignified shaking. Harry reached up and laid his bitten hand along Draco’s shoulders, smearing him with blood, letting it trail slowly down as Draco braced himself on shaking arms above Harry. He held Harry’s eyes, and Harry’s smile slowly faded.
The bond was between them now, burning hot and cold, like stars and space, both at once, and then the moment collapsed as Draco did, splintered like his strength, and the intensity was replaced with the gentler warmth of the Jericho rose. Draco rolled over to one side and licked at Harry’s temples, smoothing the hair there away like a cat.
Harry said, “Mmmm,” and pushed close enough to kiss him. Draco tucked Harry’s head under his chin and stroked his shoulder.
“Should I bandage this?” Harry asked lazily, and waved his bloodied wrist around. It had already stopped bleeding, Draco noted, but it would scar. He knew it would scar, and knew, from the beating of the sun-like strength in their bones, that they both wanted it to.
“No,” Draco said, and curled close around Harry. His hands knew how to hold his shoulders, now, and his legs knew how to tangle with his. The bond no longer sparked and leaped between them, but held them, warm and flowing as the Mediterranean. Draco swallowed and closed his eyes.
Come back to life, come back to love.
They had managed it. Harry had taken the first step, but they had managed it, together.
And Draco’s happiness and his grief, his second bond and his first, leaped together and danced like candle-flames lost in one large fire, or like the tendrils of many reaching plants all blended together.
*
Harry was the one who woke to the tapping on the window, which he thought strange until he remembered how hard Draco had worked last night. He smiled and slid out from the covers and the curtains and Draco’s arms and worked his way over to the glass, thinking it was probably from his friends, wondering where he was last night.
But the owl slid into the room with his beak pointed almost at the ceiling, as though he was used to better people than naked, sticky men receiving his messages, and held out his letter with his head turned completely away. That made Harry start to suspect the truth even before he sneaked a glimpse inside.
Dear Dad,
I know that you’re mad because we hid that dragon and got detention, and you’re right, that’s what we needed some of the Galleons for, to buy food for it. But not all of them. I promise, we have something else going on this time, something that’s going to make us famous and earn a lot of money, and all we need is a hundred Galleons. Please?
Your loving son,
Scorpius.
His snort of laughter woke Draco, although the first Harry knew of it was Draco’s arms draping around his waist and a quick kiss on the back of his neck. “Opening my post already?” Draco murmured.
“I wondered what news we were going to have from our sons this time,” Harry replied, and held out the letter.
Draco took it, and read it, and then began to laugh. The silent quakes of his amusement traveled into Harry at first, and then he laughed aloud, making the eagle-owl hop about in agitation before it turned its back altogether, too highly-strung to deal with all this.
Harry leaned back against Draco and closed his eyes, feeling the stir and the brush of winter air against his front from the open window, and the warmth of Draco against his back, and the warmth of the bond coiled about their shoulders like a basking serpent, full and fiery with promise.
And, from the side, the shining warmth, the resurrection heat, of the Jericho rose.
The End.
