[one-shots]: Jericho Rose, 1/2, H/D, R
Mar. 2nd, 2012 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lomonaaerenTitle: Jericho Rose
Pairing: Harry/Draco (past Draco/Astoria, Harry/Ginny)
Rating: R
Word Count: 17,000
Summary: Harry never did anything about his fondness for Draco Malfoy, knowing Malfoy happily mated as he was. But after Astoria Greengrass’s sudden death, he knows what he wants: to make Draco happy again.
Warning(s): (highlight to read)*Minor character death, angst*
Beta: My friend Linda (does not have an LJ)
Disclaimer: This piece of art or fiction is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros. Inc. No money is being made, no copyright or trademark infringement, or offence is intended. All characters depicted in sexual situations are above the age of consent.
Author's Notes: This was written for vaysh11 in the 2012 do_me_veela fest; her prompt gave me the background of the story, with Draco and Astoria being mated, Harry in love with Draco, and Astoria dying suddenly. Thank you to her for the prompt and the mods for running the fest!
Jericho Rose
The headline screamed across the paper when it happened, even though the letters weren’t any bigger than the ones the Daily Prophet would ordinarily use to announce something like this. But for Harry, sensitive as he was to the slightest mention of the Malfoy name anywhere near him, the scream was almost audible.
He reached out and laid his fingers across the words ASTORIA MALFOY DEAD IN TRAGIC BROOM ACCIDENT. Then he swallowed and looked at the photograph.
The Prophet would have got pictures, of course. Of course they would have. But to Harry’s intense relief, a relief that passed through him and left him shaken and panting, the photo showed only Draco’s broad back, bent over his wife as he cradled her in his arms. Even when he moved, twisting to glare at the reporters over his shoulder, nothing revealed the broken neck that the article said had killed Astoria.
Harry shut his eyes and shook his head. Better for the people reading the paper, but not better at all for Draco.
Harry shut the paper and rose to his feet. He’d come to the office early for a quiet cup of tea, as much as to escape the reporters who still haunted him, but he knew he could move around freely right now. They would all be elsewhere for the moment.
He stepped out into the corridor and met Ron coming along. Ron waved his own copy of the paper, and then saw Harry’s face and stopped.
“Oh,” he said. “So you already know, then.”
Harry nodded and started walking. He didn’t know yet what would happen when his brain settled; for the moment, it was clicking and fizzing and whirling like some of the odder instruments Dumbledore had kept around. Ron hurried beside him.
“I don’t know if he’d want to see us right now,” he ventured, after a moment’s silence. “I mean, it just happened, and it’s—we’re okay with him now, but not exactly friends…”
Harry nodded in silence. He knew all that. Several things had kept them from being close friends with Draco, even though he worked with the Unspeakables as an “outside attaché” between the Department of Mysteries and other Departments in the Ministry and therefore needed his charm to conduct his job. Part of that was the old Weasley-Malfoy feud. Part of it was that, while Harry and Draco had exchanged apologies and handshakes, it was difficult to pretend that the intense experiences they’d shared were ever really bygones.
Part of it was that Harry had looked at Draco’s face in passing, perhaps a year after his slow, gentle divorce from Ginny, and felt something stir to life inside him, a gravitational pull that he didn’t intend to let make him orbit Draco. Draco had a wife, lovely and loving and beloved.
More important, Draco, as someone with Veela heritage—regularly explained to those in the Department who might have tried to flirt with him or Astoria—had a mate. And he’d found her two years after the Battle of Hogwarts, in a love story that the Prophet had covered in awed, envious tones. A fairy tale ending, half the reporters said. That he didn’t deserve, Rita Skeeter added.
Harry had learned well enough over the years how horrible he was at resisting temptation. Better to place temptation out of the way entirely by never going beyond nods and smiles with Malfoy, and courteous conducting of the business that brought them together for public interviews and departmental disputes.
Now, though…
Now, he had to do something.
And because he had no idea what it was yet, Harry let his steps lead him, until he ended up in the dust-quiet library that formed the heart of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. The Ministry preferred that its Aurors and Hit Wizards not have to go elsewhere to do research on the properties of dangerous Dark artifacts, or anything else that might tell the criminals they pursued too much about their cases.
Harry walked straight to the section on magical creatures, used more by the Department in charging of regulating them than by Aurors, and ran his fingers along the edge of the shelf. Yes. There was the large tome, bound in white leather, on Veela that he had examined soon after he learned Draco was one. Not because he wanted to break the mating bond, but because he wanted to understand everything he could about Draco. It was one way of being there, being close, without doing something harmful.
Harry had barely settled himself with Veela and Their Bonding when Ron tapped him on the shoulder and peered worriedly into his face.
“What’s the matter, mate? You look like you’ve caught some kind of book fever from Hermione.”
Harry smiled at Ron, and said, “I’m going to do something about the broken mate bond. You know Draco will die without it.”
Ron’s face gained color again, and he sighed, a great whooshing noise that ruffled Harry’s hair. “Oh, so it’s your saving-people thing again. You had me worried there.”
Harry squeezed his friend’s hand and turned to open the book, and Ron, with a nod and a gentle press on his shoulder, left him there.
*
Harry stared up and down the rows of plants clustering around him and muttered into his hands. He looked down at the book in front of him, then up again at the plants. Daffodils and roses and some giant blue flowers that he didn’t recognize—
And none of them would help him a bit.
The book was insistent. He could potentially save Draco’s life, but he had to make sure that the new bond he would establish that way was the opposite of the old Veela bond in at least three important ways, because three was magically significant and nothing could replace a Veela bond, so it had to be based on contrarian magic. Harry knew two of those three ways, because the book had detailed them, and he met the conditions. He would choose Draco, instead of Draco choosing him, and it would happen because of his magic, not Veela magic.
For the third way, he had thought he would embody the magic in an object, both so it would be the opposite of the original bond being located in a person and so that Draco wouldn’t have to actually deal with Harry if he didn’t want to. Keep the object around, and he should remain healthy. The book suggested this, and recommended a plant. It would reproduce itself, the magic could be passed on to any seedlings it had, and, oh yes, it had to be symbolic in some important way.
Harry had thought he’d choose a flower. A delicate, graceful thing that Draco could accept into his life once Harry included the note that explained what it was and where it had come from.
But no, the book said—and Harry looked down one more time to check on it—it had to be symbolic of the new bond and the person establishing that new bond. And a graceful flower was the last thing that Harry had ever felt like.
Plus, he thought of the bond as a kind of rebirth. He wanted a plant that was a symbol of that. And flowers were anything but, with the brief way they bloomed and then faded.
“Harry! Can I help you?”
Harry turned around with a smile that he didn’t bother to hide. Neville was bustling up behind him, wiping dirt off his hands. He looked so much more comfortable and at home than Harry had ever seen him that Harry couldn’t resist teasing him a little. “Well, I was planning to steal all your valuable plants and sell them for profit, but then I remembered. You probably have a specially trained attack plant that eats anyone who’d think to try that.”
Neville grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. “You ought to see what some of the mandrakes could do.” He cocked his head at the book in Harry’s hands. “Is that a book on Veela?”
Harry nodded. “And fuck if I know what to do next,” he said. “I’m trying to do this ritual that will save someone’s life. But I need a plant that’s symbolic of rebirth, and symbolic of me. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Neville gave him a long stare that seemed to see into the back of his skull. Harry shifted. If not for his obsession with plants, he would have suggested that Neville become a Healer, because he had the trick they did since the war: he looked at you and just knew everything important. Or at least most things important.
“Someone,” Neville said. “That someone wouldn’t be Draco Malfoy, would it?”
Harry waved a hand. “You could say he goes by that name.”
Neville blinked, and then his face returned to looking solemn. “Harry. Ritual magic involving plants can be powerful and dangerous. And to do it for someone you don’t really know…”
“I promise,” Harry said firmly. “I know enough of the risks that I can do it. The ritual itself is fairly simple to perform, and it won’t even involve me introducing myself to Draco. It’ll just give him something to keep with him that’ll act like a substitute mate and keep him from dying. But I need the something, and I don’t know what it can be.”
Neville stepped back, and for a moment Harry was afraid he would tell him to fuck off. Or worse, raise more concerns about Draco, the way Hermione would be if she knew what Harry was really doing.
Then Neville shook his head, said, “I might have just the thing for you,” and walked off towards the back of the greenhouse.
Harry sighed and looked up at the nodding white rose right above him. It was a slender, strong flower on a stem that bent like Draco’s arms when he was sitting in a chair and thinking deeply, and it had a faint yellow tint along the petals that might have come into his hair.
“Why can’t I have something like you?” he whispered, and swallowed around the lump in his throat. “Sometimes I wish I was more like him.”
He turned around as Neville bustled up again, holding out a shallow dish filled with sand and glowing heat. Harry knew without asking that it was probably a perfect replica of whatever environment the plant inside it grew in.
He took a look at the plant—
And blinked. It was a tiny, shaggy, brown thing, mostly twisted in on itself, although its outer limbs sprawled along the sand in Neville’s dish in ragged curls. Harry couldn’t imagine anything less like the white rose standing above him.
“Well,” he said, before Neville could speak, “I see it’s symbolic of my hair, at least.”
Neville rolled his eyes and murmured a spell that Harry recognized as one that could encourage plants to grow faster. Then he whispered, “Aguamenti,” and splashed the water over the World’s Ugliest Plant.
And it grew.
It sprawled, it twisted, it reached. The brown curls unfurled from the center, and ones under them unfolded, and ones under them, striving greedily towards the water. Harry actually took a step backwards. It still wasn’t pretty, but damn if it wasn’t alive.
“It’s called a Jericho rose,” Neville said softly, eyes on Harry. “Among a lot of other things. It can survive the driest weather for years and years, until water falls on it, and then it wakes up.” He paused, then added, “It’s a resurrection plant.”
“It’s perfect,” Harry said, when he could speak.
Neville’s eyes flickered up to his scar for a moment, and he returned Harry a private look, the one that spoke about the bond that they shared—the two possible Boys-Who-Lived—before he nodded. “Yes, it is. For you and the ritual.” He smiled. “Should I wrap it up for you?”
*
Harry laid the book down in front of him and then looked at the Jericho rose, sitting on the table in its dish. “Right,” he said, licking his lips and looking back at the book. “Right.”
He would have liked another day, more time to memorize the words of the ritual, to calm himself down. The book said it was very important to have a calm and ordered pattern of thought, to have things arranged just so, like furniture, in your head. But he had seen an article that morning about how Draco’s condition had worsened overnight. Now he was molting narrow strips of skin that left thinner skin behind. It wouldn’t be long, the Healers had warned, before the molting skin would expose bone, and they could do nothing for a part-Veela like that, one who knew his mate was gone at the level of his flesh.
So Harry had to go ahead and do the ritual. At least he knew that if he got it wrong, the backlash would recoil on him and not Draco.
He touched the book one more time, and then forced himself to step back from it and circle the table. On the table, besides the Jericho rose in its bright dish taken from Neville’s shop, were a number of other things: a strand of Harry’s hair resting on top of a photograph of Draco, happy and smiling; a photograph of his parents; a Veela wing feather Harry had purchased hurriedly at the only apothecary he could find who kept such things on hand; and a thin circle of oil surrounding the whole.
There was no reason to delay any longer. Harry knew the words as well as he would ever know them; the ritual wouldn’t take long. He had to use powerful magic, but it was all his own.
He raised his wand, waited for his hand to stop shaking, and spoke the first incantation.
“Veelam adlego.”
The Veela feather trembled and rose into the air, floating so that its stem pointed down at the Jericho rose. Harry let out a trembling breath. So far, it had gone well, but he knew this was only the first step, and the simplest.
He gestured with his wand, sweeping it slowly back and forth across the whole circle, so that it touched everything with its shadow, and spoke the second incantation.
“Draconem adlego.”
This time, the strand of his hair rose, with the picture of Draco right behind it, and they did a complicated little dance of their own, orbiting the plant until they came to rest beside the feather in the air. Harry moved a step to the side, and released yet another breath. Yes, this step had worked as it should, too. There was no trace of the hair left, but a thin shadow shone in the photograph, behind Draco, a shadow that had green eyes and a lightning bolt scar if you looked hard enough.
I swore I would protect Draco. That’s what I’m doing.
Harry walked the circle around the table one more time. What he had to do next was the hardest bit, not in terms of the magic it pulled from him but just because of the decision he had to make. Well, he had promised.
And…
If he could see his mum and dad again, he thought they would understand.
He snapped his wand out straight in front of him and said strongly, “Posthac adlego!”
The photograph of his parents rose, tottering in the air. Harry grimaced and forced more will to flow down his wand. He had to be sure about this, or the ritual wouldn’t work.
He thought of Draco, and the way he would be lying in his bed right now, his eyes shut, the murmur of Healers around him. To have to deal with his illness so soon after the death of his wife, his mate, whom Harry knew he had loved…
That was a lot harder than Harry had ever done.
The photograph of his madly waving parents snapped up and into place, forming the tip of a triangle with the feather and the altered picture of Draco. Harry nodded and turned to the circle of oil on the table. He had chosen this method of destruction because it would mean something to both him and Draco, and whether Draco was ever aware of the ritual or not, it was still important to include something like this. Symbolism was very important, or Harry could have used that slender white rose from Neville’s shop and been done with it.
“Ignem adlego!” He meant to shout, but it came out more like a hoarse whisper, probably because magic was suddenly flowing from him as if he had pierced a vein. He staggered, but caught himself on one of the chairs pushed in under the table and watched, despite himself, with eager, staring eyes.
The oil roared to life, the fire leaping around the floating tools and the Jericho rose. Harry smiled as he watched it. Of course, as a small, tame blaze, it wouldn’t show the monsters and demons of Fiendfyre, but it still meant something, on a small scale, to them both. Harry had saved Draco’s life there. He wanted to do the same thing again.
And as Harry had the thought, he saw the heart of the fire flare dazzling sunset-red, as was supposed to happen. The flames bent inwards and curled around the photos and the feather, tendrils of heat touching them as though to taste. Then the photographs began to curl and blacken, even the one of his parents.
Harry felt the pang of loss travel through him, and wondered for a moment what Hagrid would say if he could see this.
Then he shrugged. He thought Hagrid would understand, just like his mum and dad would. His dad had died fighting for him; his mum had sacrificed her life so Harry could live, and saved the world; Hagrid had carried Harry’s body back to the school when he thought he was dead. They would know why this was important.
The flame closed in, nearer and nearer. Harry counted under his breath, and cast the fifth and final incantation the moment he saw the red begin to change to gold, as described in the book. “Rosam adlego!”
The fire seemed to blow up in silence, a great pillar of yellow flame rising for the ceiling. Harry clung to his wand as it vibrated in his hand. It felt like it might pull his fingers off, but he didn’t care. This was what the ritual in the book had said to do. This was what would save Draco’s life.
Faster and faster the pillar of flame spun, and then it turned and slammed towards Harry. The root of the pillar was in the dish that held the Jericho rose. Harry swallowed, but remained still as the flame touched his heart.
He did scream as it burned the skin there away. He had to. The pain was bright, and sudden, and gave him no choice. For a moment, he wondered if the flames would actually surround and burn his heart. It felt as if they might.
Then the flames were there, and he could feel them burning his heart, and he could see them crisping the strands of the Jericho rose, and he felt—
Nothing but cradling warmth.
The gold flames turned red as he watched them, and then scarlet, and then orange, and then blue. The colors of a phoenix, the colors the book had told him the flames ought to turn if this was working.
The colors of rebirth.
When the flame vanished and Harry sagged to his knees, a moment before he gave in to the blackness pressing against the corners of his vision, he saw the Jericho rose glowing with the subtle colors of a reflected sunset, and knew it had worked.
Draco would live.
He spiraled down into blackness, happy enough to give him a new set of flames in his chest, of a different kind.
*
Harry sighed as he settled the dish with the Jericho rose on the table next to Draco’s bed. St. Mungo’s had tightened security precautions since the war, when some people had sneaked in objects that poisoned those with important information to one side or the other, and he could no longer send the plant to Draco as a gift and hope he would receive it. He knew that the mild sleeping charms he’d cast on the Healers near the door would wear off gently enough to make them feel that they had fallen asleep naturally.
Draco, being under a heavy Dreamless Sleep potion, wouldn’t wake. Harry hesitated, and then turned to face the bed, which he had avoided looking at since he entered.
Draco looked far worse than the—probably arranged—photo from that morning had made him seem. The skin had begun to peel off his face, and one could see glimpses of bone and teeth here and there, through the holes. His hair looked like straw in both color and consistency, and Harry saw the lines of pain that ran through his skin like the cracks. His hands, folded on top of the blanket, were already molting muscle as well as skin.
Harry licked his lips and raised his wand. He knew it would work, because the ritual had gone perfectly, but his voice still cracked as he whispered, “This is the gift that I make to you. Choosing where you had chosen, free-willed where you had followed the bond, in an object where yours was in a person. This is the free gift.”
He brought his wand down.
The Jericho rose’s subdued colors flared to life, and the warmer shades of the rainbow leaped across the space between it and Draco. Draco caught his breath as the fire played around his heart for a moment, and then moved up to his hair. Harry watched with his mouth going dry. Surely there had never been anything more beautiful.
A slight, strange sound, like someone dragging sheets off a bed, came to Harry’s ears, and he looked down at Draco’s hands, where it came from. Skin was growing across the gaping holes where it had dropped away.
When he looked up again, he could no longer see any of Draco’s teeth, and his hair already looked softer and finer.
Harry closed his eyes and sagged against the wall for a moment. All right. All right. It was working.
He reached into his pocket for the letter he had written—explaining that the plant was keeping Draco alive and would as long as he kept it with him—and dropped it gently next to the plant’s dish. Then he cast a charm that would keep anyone except Draco from touching or harming the Jericho rose. Although the Healers should realize the letter was telling the truth, since nothing they did could cure a broken Veela bond, Harry didn’t want to take the chance of some well-meaning protector throwing the plant out before it had had the chance to heal Draco completely.
And then—
He could do this, couldn’t he? Just once? He would never ask for anything after this. He had chosen to embody the magic in an object in the first place so that Draco wouldn’t have to interact with him if he didn’t want to.
He bent down and brushed his lips across Draco’s mouth. His lips parted under Harry’s as he gasped. Harry drew back quickly, before their tongues could touch. Draco was probably dreaming of Astoria, and Harry didn’t want to take any more.
He looked one more time at Draco, and then he slipped out into the corridor and walked, muffled, away from there.
*
Draco awoke.
He could feel the burning current in his chest, as though someone had fed him a potion that filled him with fire, and turned his head. It had been a dream, then, that Astoria was dead. Nothing else could have made him feel this way but her presence at his side.
There was a woman in the chair at his bedside, but it was his mother, who closed her eyes once when she saw him looking back at her. Then she reached out and took his hand in hers. “How are you feeling?” she asked quietly.
Draco sat there for a moment, blinking, feeling the warmth of the pillows against his back and the cool touch of Narcissa’s hand on his in contrast. He shuddered as the memory of Astoria’s death returned, and his mother must have guessed what he was thinking about, because she leaned forwards quickly and laid her lips against his forehead.
“None of that, please,” she murmured, voice gentle but iron-like as she smoothed back the hair from Draco’s forehead. “Do not give me any reason to regret that you woke. You are alive, Draco, and everything else must continue on from there.”
“Why am I alive?” Draco grimaced when he heard how pathetic his voice sounded, and Narcissa smiled at once and lifted a cup of water from the bedside table. Draco reached out to take it, pleased that his hand was steady.
“The Healers know it has something to do with the plant, although they don’t understand the ritual or spell that was used to make it work,” Narcissa said, and nodded at the plant on his table.
Draco turned his head. For some reason, he had expected to see a flower, or a rosebush, or a young tree—something strong and slender and full of life, the way he felt. Astoria was not with him, no, and she never would be again, but the grief was something he could feel now, instead of simply lie under.
There was no slender plant there. There was no plant there at all, at least to Draco’s eyes, until he readjusted his expectations and saw the shallow glass dish of glowing sand with what looked like dry weed scattered on it.
“I don’t understand,” he said at last, although he could feel the warmth rising from the dish, echoed in his chest. “What about that could bring me out of the coma?”
His mother reached down with her free hand—she had never let go of him with the other—and picked up a letter. Draco flipped it over, wondering as he did who it could possibly be from. None of the Greengrass family, coolly friendly though they were to him, would have done such a thing; none of his Hogwarts friends would have risked doing magic that might take their lives; another Veela could not have achieved it, as one Veela could not become the mate of another. And Scorpius, his son, his daring, darling son, might have wanted to attempt it, but Draco thought it was beyond an eleven-year-old.
And that was what this was—a modified mating bond. Draco knew it, could taste it in the way his tongue moved freely in his mouth and his tears were dry.
Dear Draco and the Healers of St. Mungo’s,
I hope you don’t find this presumptuous, but I’ve used a modification of the Tellus Ritual to save Mr. Malfoy’s life. It required choosing the bond, and making the decision of my own free will, and investing my own life in the plant. It’s called a Jericho rose, and it can live a long time with a little water. Mr. Malfoy should keep it near him, and take care of it. As long as it stays there, he’ll be able to live.
Draco, I’m sorry. I know I’m not Astoria, and that you probably didn’t want another mate. But this way, you at least get to attend her funeral. I promise I won’t ever impose on you.
A Friend.
Draco stared and stared at the writing, but no matter how long he looked, it refused to blur into a familiar hand. He began to wonder if he was wrong, if one of his friends or one of the Greengrasses would have taken the risk after all. It was true that the Tellus Ritual was one of the more common pieces of Veela magic, available in most good books on them.
“Draco?”
He looked up. His mother reached over to take the piece of parchment from his hand, her gaze deep and calm.
“Does it matter who did it?” she asked. “For now, you are safe, and should be as long as you tend this plant. And now you can mourn for Astoria.”
Draco swallowed. “Yes,” he whispered, and closed his eyes so that he could see his wife’s mangled body. Because he would have to see it, until he stopped seeing it. He would have to look at it, until he could get past it.
She was gone, and nothing could change that, no matter the new warmth thrumming in his chest.
The mystery of the plant and his strange savior could wait a while.
*
Harry reached up and touched his chest, then shook his head with a smile. No, he really didn’t think there was a strange touch of warmth there, at least no more than usual. After all, he had constructed the bond with the plant to put it at a distance from him on purpose. It was bound to him, but not that way, not that close.
The warmth came from seeing the picture in the paper, Draco standing at his wife’s funeral, his face calm and reserved. He turned to say something to his mother and son, and then directed a glare at the camera; the reporter had probably chosen that moment to step forwards.
Harry lingered over that glare, at least in the moment he could before the picture looped back and began to show the moving images over again. It was the way he had seen Draco look several times over the last several years: asking with delicate outrage what someone was doing by infringing on his privacy. He didn’t ever have to ask. He could intimidate with a glance.
Not what Harry had ever thought someone he was attracted to would be capable of doing. But, well, things had changed a lot since school. And someone who didn’t seek attention out would have a lot of attraction to Harry, for a variety of reasons.
“Mate, what did you do?”
Harry looked up curiously, and then put down the paper. Ron loomed in front of him, his head bowed as he stared at Harry. Harry started to stand. Ron usually only looked like this when something had happened with one of their cases, or Harry had forgotten to turn a report in. Harry glanced at his desk, wondering, but no, it was bare of reports and their dreaded lists of numbers—times, expenses, property damage.
“Not that,” Ron said, and the queer tone in his voice made Harry turn back to him. “With Malfoy. I know you said you were going to help him, but I didn’t think you’d actually manage.”
Harry snorted and sat down again. “What did you expect, Ron? For me to give up and let him die?”
“No, no, of course not.” Ron sat down on the edge of his desk, but in a position that left one leg free to swing. “Not—I knew that you wouldn’t do that. But it really is weird, given that I know the only thing that can save a dying Veela is a new mate, and you’re not his mate. He couldn’t have got out of that coma and come seeking you even if you were.”
Harry gave him a faint smile and shrugged. “There was a ritual that meant I could use an object as a placeholder for a mate instead. I did that, and left a letter explaining that he would be fine as long as he kept the object close to him. I reckon he must have, or otherwise he couldn’t look like that.” He nodded at the photograph on the front page of the Prophet again, and looked away before he could be caught too much by the sight of Draco’s strength.
“That’s insane,” Ron said at last, when Harry had been looking expectantly at him for a while and the clock had chimed the new hour. “I know you’re a hero, but that’s a little extreme even for you.”
Harry sighed and picked up his robe from where he’d hung it on the back of the chair. “I don’t see why. I found something that worked, and did it. It doesn’t compel him to be with me. It doesn’t take the place of his mate. I know no one can do that.” He heard the wistful tone in his voice, and grimaced, checking on Ron from the corner of his eye. Luckily, Ron didn’t seem to know what the tone meant, from the way he carried on staring. “It worked.”
“You took a huge risk,” Ron whispered. “There could still have been backlash.”
“I know,” Harry said, a little irritated. “But it was my risk to take. You know that.”
“I think you should consider us a little more,” Ron said. “Me and Hermione. Mate, we—” He shut his eyes and shook his head. “We’ve already nearly lost you so many times in the past,” he whispered. “Don’t do more things like that without at least warning us, okay?”
Harry wanted to smile and couldn’t; wanted to cry, and couldn’t. Of course it would be something like that. Ron and Harry didn’t talk about their friendship all the time, but it was always there. Harry stepped closer to Ron and gave him a tap on the back with a closed fist, somewhere between a pound and a pat.
“Come on,” Harry said. “I think we have a witness to look after on the Duggart case, don’t we?”
Ron stared some more at him, and then beamed and bounced back to his feet, nodding so hard that it looked like his head was bouncing too. “You’re right,” he said. “Of course you’re right. And he might get nervous and leave if he’s kept waiting much longer. That’s the reason I came in here in the first place.”
Harry grinned, and followed him. It was all right again, and now Harry understood that Ron had just been worried about him, and Ron might understand how strongly Harry felt about Draco. Good things had happened all around.
Harry did think that he caught a trailing glimpse of a grey dress robe vanishing around a corner, but he put it out of his head. Draco probably hadn’t returned to work yet, which meant that stray person couldn’t be him.
And from here on out, their lives would be the same, would proceed the same way they always had. Now that Harry had confirmation that the ritual had worked and Draco was going to live, he didn’t need anything else.
*
Draco sat back in his bed—large, like everything in the Manor, draped with the billowing white gauze curtains that Astoria had loved and ornamented with sky-blue pillows. Draco ran his hand down the silky material of the pillows and closed his eyes. The windows were open, a wind blew through the curtains and his hair, and he imagined he could hear her voice if he listened hard enough.
A moment later he had popped to his feet and was striding in great, neat movements that beat the pressure of his heels deep into the carpet.
There was no reason for it, when it had been almost a year since Astoria’s death and the plant still sat in its dish next to his bed, but he was feeling the craving, tugging pull in his chest and mouth that he had felt only once before. The urge to court, to seek a mate.
And if he did that, there could be only one candidate.
Draco turned again to the plant and reached out his hand. As had happened when he wanted to touch it before, a stir of warmth answered him. It could have been caused by the magical heat leaking from the plant, or the ritual that he sometimes thought he could still feel when he concentrated.
But he knew it was not. Whoever had done this had gone deeper than they intended. They had wanted to give Draco something to lean on, something he could live with, even though it would mean that he wasn’t living for it in the same way that he would for a mate.
But instead, they had created a second, true mating bond. All the oppositions mentioned in that note, including the fact that this bond was embodied in an object, meant nothing against the depth of feeling they had invested in their magic. Draco hadn’t loved Astoria at first, the Veela magic compelling him to seek her because of sheer need, but that intensity had been enough to pull them together, to hold them together, and to bring love along with fate not many months after their marriage.
This person’s intensity of feeling could do the same thing. Would do the same thing, if the magic Draco felt was any indication.
Draco had no idea who they were. He felt as though he should have. How could someone have conceived a passion for him that great and that lasting without him having the slightest idea of their identity?
And there was more. Lying awake in the nights over the past year, watching the plant, watching the way it unfolded when he sprinkled water on it, and feeling the warmth around his heart that supported him through the funeral and sleepwalking through the first days and getting out of bed on the mornings that followed that, he had come to understand that he wanted to meet this person, of his own free will and for his own free reasons. To say thank you, if nothing else.
Draco lifted his tongue and tapped it against his canine teeth. It was a myth that they grew sharper like a vampire’s when the mate came near, but when one was in the toils of an incomplete bond, they could feel sharper, and his did now.
It will be for something else than just to say thank you. I will make sure of that.
In the meantime, though, he had to make sure that he knew how to look for that person. And considering that the Jericho rose at his bedside probably hadn’t been bought at a Muggle shop, Draco thought he knew exactly where to start.
*
Longbottom was hovering near the ceiling on an enchanted bubble of bright air when Draco walked into his shop, using a pair of pruners on the long, thick vine of a shaggy green plant Draco didn’t recognize. It looked like it was about to eat its trellis. Draco stood quietly for the moment, looking around the shop. Here and there he could see shelves and walls and pots, but for the most part, it was like an incredibly organized jungle; the herbs and flowers and bushes flourished enough to hide their containers.
Longbottom turned around, blinked at Draco, and then nodded when he saw who it was. “Don’t mind me,” he said, flapping his hand at the plants around him. Draco wondered if he was aware that the tendrils reached for him and the leaves trembled in time with him, which was more than the breeze caused by his hand. “I get caught up in caring for them, and I lose track of where I am.”
“Of course, I absolutely understand,” Draco said. Longbottom stood taller now, his eyes as clear as ice, his pose conscious and not self-conscious. “I was hoping that you could help me. Someone gave me a plant as a gift—oh, a year ago. I was unsure how much magic it was infused with, and whether it would be all right to cast spells on it.”
“Of course,” Longbottom echoed back to him as he slid to the floor, not seeming aware of the echo, either. Draco didn’t mind; one side-effect of his Veela magic was that people often repeated his words or actions. “Do you have the plant with you?”
Draco felt his chest muscles contract, and had to wait a moment before he responded. “I don’t like carrying it about too often,” he said carefully. He had found that he could spend up to two days away from his rose before he began to tire and see skin flaking off on his hands again; he preferred a speedy return to bringing the plant out in the open around strangers. “But I can give you a precise image.”
He held up his wand, arching his eyebrow. Longbottom nodded as if he had never had any reason to fear a spell Draco might have cast.
That, Draco reflected, as he remembered some of the hexes Longbottom had mastered by the end of their first seventh year, is probably true.
He pulled the glamour together from strands of colored light rather than making the image come into being all at once. It was easier and built a more precise illusion, but he had another reason for it now, as well.
He kept one eye on Longbottom, and knew the moment when he recognized the dish, from the tiny sigh that escaped his lips and the glint in his eye. Draco finished the portrait and waited, his free hand twisting behind his back.
“I can tell you it’s been used in a very powerful ritual,” Longbottom said, studying the plant. “But the ritual’s earthed itself there, and it can’t change now, or be affected by anything other than curses aimed directly at it. You can cast spells to speed the growth or give it more water or whatever you think necessary.” He looked up with a polite smile.
“Tell me who it was,” Draco said quietly.
“Who enchanted it?” Longbottom held his eyes and shook his head, slowly. “No one can know that unless you have a means of tracing their magical signature. They didn’t leave a note, telling you?”
Draco felt his shoulders hunch, the slow spiral of heat up from the band that always lay around his heart now. Normally, he didn’t have enough Veela in him to show any of the open traits, only to experience the emotions. But that could change when he knew someone was obstructing him from his mate.
He held himself in check, however, the way he had when he went back to Hogwarts immediately after the war and heard people whispering and exclaiming about him behind their hands. It was possible that Longbottom didn’t know as much as Draco thought he did.
“They left a note that said they would never impose on me,” Draco said. “But now I want them to. You sold them this plant. Who is it, Longbottom?”
“You don’t know it was me,” Longbottom said, not turning a hair. “There are plenty of other wizarding herbalists and apothecaries who could sell that plant.”
“But I’m certain that anyone who would send me one would know of your reputation as the best, and come to you.” Draco couldn’t control the flatness of his voice now, or the warbling snarl in the back of it. He had no idea if Longbottom knew how dangerous someone like Draco could be, but he would try to show him without an explosion. “I want my mate. Who was it?”
Longbottom took a step back for the first time, and Draco saw another wave of movement travel through the vines around them. Longbottom might have his own home-grown defenses, literally. Draco settled his shoulders and tried to do the same thing with his magic, which circled him and buzzed.
“They wouldn’t be your mate,” Longbottom said, voice thick and slow. “Your mate was Astoria.”
“They are now,” Draco said. He paused and moved away from Longbottom, turning his head as though to admire the long-stemmed roses near him. His mate couldn’t be a person like that, he thought, or they would have chosen these plants as symbolic of the bond. “They didn’t mean to, perhaps, but that ritual sealed the bond. They chose me. They loved me enough to potentially sacrifice their life for me, to embody part of their magic in a plant that symbolizes rebirth. The Veela magic only knows one way to respond to something that intense, and it’s a bond. We have one now.”
“You can’t know that for sure,” Longbottom said. “If—if you’re right and the Veela magic responds like that, then perhaps it’s only something the magic is mistaking for a bond, rather than a real one.”
Draco kept his face, and thus his smile, averted. He had heard the changing tone in Longbottom’s voice that might mean he had convinced him. He turned around and made sure that he maintained his earnest expression while he shook his head. “No, Longbottom. I’m sure of this, now. Utterly and absolutely. The magic might fool my brain, but the physical sensations I’m picking up on are the ones that belong to a bond.”
Longbottom paused, studying him. Then he said, “Can’t you just follow that pull and find the person, then?”
“No,” Draco said, showing his teeth. “Because the little idiot planned too well, and the bond, as you pointed out, is earthed in the plant. Trying to follow its pull just leads me straight to my own bed.” He leaned nearer, letting that intensity, that ripple-reflection that made people imitate him, reach for Longbottom again. Sometimes it could also make people desire what Draco desired—the only kind of Veela allure he would ever have. “This is serious. You know it. It might not have been meant to happen, but it did.”
Longbottom sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “If it were just a matter of that person’s happiness, I’d tell you,” he muttered. “But, Malfoy, there’s a reason he just left a note. It’s for your happiness, too.”
“He, then,” Draco said, and shifted closer. He would do what was necessary to follow the bond to his mate: romance Longbottom, influence him, touch his arm and look softly into his eyes with the air of a melting lover. “I can live with that. Perhaps it will be strange, after Astoria, but the bond accustoms you to many things.”
“Damn.” Longbottom shut his eyes briefly. Then he opened them and shook his head. “Didn’t you listen to what I said? You would be unhappy with this mate. He knew that. It’s the reason he held himself back. Well, that and that he’s too decent a bloke to try and make himself your mate when you were grieving.”
“Did he want to be my mate, then?” Draco smiled as he watched his magic work on Longbottom, pulling and plucking at his closed mouth like harpstrings. “That’s very interesting. That subdued desire might be at the bottom of the magic he infused in the plant. That might be the reason we have a mate bond now instead of only what he intended, the ritual that saved my life.”
“I don’t,” Longbottom said, and then reached out and tapped his wand against a glass-colored, bell-like blossom next to him. It swung down in front of his face, and he inhaled what looked like pollen from it. When he faced Draco again, his eyes were unexpectedly clear, and hard. “Don’t try that again,” he said softly.
Draco raised his hands. “I wouldn’t have to if you would tell me. The bond can accustom me to anything. It already makes me want this person like I wanted Astoria.” His voice would still waver on her name, and he didn’t think that would help convince Longbottom. He cleared his throat and tried to sound brisk. “And he wants me. Tell me.”
Longbottom stared at Draco some more. Then he said, “Tell you what. I’ll firecall him this evening and give him the choice to contact you himself. That’s the best I can do.”
“That will do,” Draco said, partially because he could feel the pressure in his chest and teeth easing, and partially because one vine was sneaking towards him along the floor. He nodded majestically at Longbottom and turned away, parading towards the door.
He would give his mate the chance to come to him. He might as well.
But if that did not happen…
Draco thought he might enjoy the chase. If nothing else, it would be another way in which this bond was different from the one he had shared with Astoria.
Part Two.
Pairing: Harry/Draco (past Draco/Astoria, Harry/Ginny)
Rating: R
Word Count: 17,000
Summary: Harry never did anything about his fondness for Draco Malfoy, knowing Malfoy happily mated as he was. But after Astoria Greengrass’s sudden death, he knows what he wants: to make Draco happy again.
Warning(s): (highlight to read)*Minor character death, angst*
Beta: My friend Linda (does not have an LJ)
Disclaimer: This piece of art or fiction is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros. Inc. No money is being made, no copyright or trademark infringement, or offence is intended. All characters depicted in sexual situations are above the age of consent.
Author's Notes: This was written for vaysh11 in the 2012 do_me_veela fest; her prompt gave me the background of the story, with Draco and Astoria being mated, Harry in love with Draco, and Astoria dying suddenly. Thank you to her for the prompt and the mods for running the fest!
Jericho Rose
The headline screamed across the paper when it happened, even though the letters weren’t any bigger than the ones the Daily Prophet would ordinarily use to announce something like this. But for Harry, sensitive as he was to the slightest mention of the Malfoy name anywhere near him, the scream was almost audible.
He reached out and laid his fingers across the words ASTORIA MALFOY DEAD IN TRAGIC BROOM ACCIDENT. Then he swallowed and looked at the photograph.
The Prophet would have got pictures, of course. Of course they would have. But to Harry’s intense relief, a relief that passed through him and left him shaken and panting, the photo showed only Draco’s broad back, bent over his wife as he cradled her in his arms. Even when he moved, twisting to glare at the reporters over his shoulder, nothing revealed the broken neck that the article said had killed Astoria.
Harry shut his eyes and shook his head. Better for the people reading the paper, but not better at all for Draco.
Harry shut the paper and rose to his feet. He’d come to the office early for a quiet cup of tea, as much as to escape the reporters who still haunted him, but he knew he could move around freely right now. They would all be elsewhere for the moment.
He stepped out into the corridor and met Ron coming along. Ron waved his own copy of the paper, and then saw Harry’s face and stopped.
“Oh,” he said. “So you already know, then.”
Harry nodded and started walking. He didn’t know yet what would happen when his brain settled; for the moment, it was clicking and fizzing and whirling like some of the odder instruments Dumbledore had kept around. Ron hurried beside him.
“I don’t know if he’d want to see us right now,” he ventured, after a moment’s silence. “I mean, it just happened, and it’s—we’re okay with him now, but not exactly friends…”
Harry nodded in silence. He knew all that. Several things had kept them from being close friends with Draco, even though he worked with the Unspeakables as an “outside attaché” between the Department of Mysteries and other Departments in the Ministry and therefore needed his charm to conduct his job. Part of that was the old Weasley-Malfoy feud. Part of it was that, while Harry and Draco had exchanged apologies and handshakes, it was difficult to pretend that the intense experiences they’d shared were ever really bygones.
Part of it was that Harry had looked at Draco’s face in passing, perhaps a year after his slow, gentle divorce from Ginny, and felt something stir to life inside him, a gravitational pull that he didn’t intend to let make him orbit Draco. Draco had a wife, lovely and loving and beloved.
More important, Draco, as someone with Veela heritage—regularly explained to those in the Department who might have tried to flirt with him or Astoria—had a mate. And he’d found her two years after the Battle of Hogwarts, in a love story that the Prophet had covered in awed, envious tones. A fairy tale ending, half the reporters said. That he didn’t deserve, Rita Skeeter added.
Harry had learned well enough over the years how horrible he was at resisting temptation. Better to place temptation out of the way entirely by never going beyond nods and smiles with Malfoy, and courteous conducting of the business that brought them together for public interviews and departmental disputes.
Now, though…
Now, he had to do something.
And because he had no idea what it was yet, Harry let his steps lead him, until he ended up in the dust-quiet library that formed the heart of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. The Ministry preferred that its Aurors and Hit Wizards not have to go elsewhere to do research on the properties of dangerous Dark artifacts, or anything else that might tell the criminals they pursued too much about their cases.
Harry walked straight to the section on magical creatures, used more by the Department in charging of regulating them than by Aurors, and ran his fingers along the edge of the shelf. Yes. There was the large tome, bound in white leather, on Veela that he had examined soon after he learned Draco was one. Not because he wanted to break the mating bond, but because he wanted to understand everything he could about Draco. It was one way of being there, being close, without doing something harmful.
Harry had barely settled himself with Veela and Their Bonding when Ron tapped him on the shoulder and peered worriedly into his face.
“What’s the matter, mate? You look like you’ve caught some kind of book fever from Hermione.”
Harry smiled at Ron, and said, “I’m going to do something about the broken mate bond. You know Draco will die without it.”
Ron’s face gained color again, and he sighed, a great whooshing noise that ruffled Harry’s hair. “Oh, so it’s your saving-people thing again. You had me worried there.”
Harry squeezed his friend’s hand and turned to open the book, and Ron, with a nod and a gentle press on his shoulder, left him there.
*
Harry stared up and down the rows of plants clustering around him and muttered into his hands. He looked down at the book in front of him, then up again at the plants. Daffodils and roses and some giant blue flowers that he didn’t recognize—
And none of them would help him a bit.
The book was insistent. He could potentially save Draco’s life, but he had to make sure that the new bond he would establish that way was the opposite of the old Veela bond in at least three important ways, because three was magically significant and nothing could replace a Veela bond, so it had to be based on contrarian magic. Harry knew two of those three ways, because the book had detailed them, and he met the conditions. He would choose Draco, instead of Draco choosing him, and it would happen because of his magic, not Veela magic.
For the third way, he had thought he would embody the magic in an object, both so it would be the opposite of the original bond being located in a person and so that Draco wouldn’t have to actually deal with Harry if he didn’t want to. Keep the object around, and he should remain healthy. The book suggested this, and recommended a plant. It would reproduce itself, the magic could be passed on to any seedlings it had, and, oh yes, it had to be symbolic in some important way.
Harry had thought he’d choose a flower. A delicate, graceful thing that Draco could accept into his life once Harry included the note that explained what it was and where it had come from.
But no, the book said—and Harry looked down one more time to check on it—it had to be symbolic of the new bond and the person establishing that new bond. And a graceful flower was the last thing that Harry had ever felt like.
Plus, he thought of the bond as a kind of rebirth. He wanted a plant that was a symbol of that. And flowers were anything but, with the brief way they bloomed and then faded.
“Harry! Can I help you?”
Harry turned around with a smile that he didn’t bother to hide. Neville was bustling up behind him, wiping dirt off his hands. He looked so much more comfortable and at home than Harry had ever seen him that Harry couldn’t resist teasing him a little. “Well, I was planning to steal all your valuable plants and sell them for profit, but then I remembered. You probably have a specially trained attack plant that eats anyone who’d think to try that.”
Neville grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. “You ought to see what some of the mandrakes could do.” He cocked his head at the book in Harry’s hands. “Is that a book on Veela?”
Harry nodded. “And fuck if I know what to do next,” he said. “I’m trying to do this ritual that will save someone’s life. But I need a plant that’s symbolic of rebirth, and symbolic of me. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Neville gave him a long stare that seemed to see into the back of his skull. Harry shifted. If not for his obsession with plants, he would have suggested that Neville become a Healer, because he had the trick they did since the war: he looked at you and just knew everything important. Or at least most things important.
“Someone,” Neville said. “That someone wouldn’t be Draco Malfoy, would it?”
Harry waved a hand. “You could say he goes by that name.”
Neville blinked, and then his face returned to looking solemn. “Harry. Ritual magic involving plants can be powerful and dangerous. And to do it for someone you don’t really know…”
“I promise,” Harry said firmly. “I know enough of the risks that I can do it. The ritual itself is fairly simple to perform, and it won’t even involve me introducing myself to Draco. It’ll just give him something to keep with him that’ll act like a substitute mate and keep him from dying. But I need the something, and I don’t know what it can be.”
Neville stepped back, and for a moment Harry was afraid he would tell him to fuck off. Or worse, raise more concerns about Draco, the way Hermione would be if she knew what Harry was really doing.
Then Neville shook his head, said, “I might have just the thing for you,” and walked off towards the back of the greenhouse.
Harry sighed and looked up at the nodding white rose right above him. It was a slender, strong flower on a stem that bent like Draco’s arms when he was sitting in a chair and thinking deeply, and it had a faint yellow tint along the petals that might have come into his hair.
“Why can’t I have something like you?” he whispered, and swallowed around the lump in his throat. “Sometimes I wish I was more like him.”
He turned around as Neville bustled up again, holding out a shallow dish filled with sand and glowing heat. Harry knew without asking that it was probably a perfect replica of whatever environment the plant inside it grew in.
He took a look at the plant—
And blinked. It was a tiny, shaggy, brown thing, mostly twisted in on itself, although its outer limbs sprawled along the sand in Neville’s dish in ragged curls. Harry couldn’t imagine anything less like the white rose standing above him.
“Well,” he said, before Neville could speak, “I see it’s symbolic of my hair, at least.”
Neville rolled his eyes and murmured a spell that Harry recognized as one that could encourage plants to grow faster. Then he whispered, “Aguamenti,” and splashed the water over the World’s Ugliest Plant.
And it grew.
It sprawled, it twisted, it reached. The brown curls unfurled from the center, and ones under them unfolded, and ones under them, striving greedily towards the water. Harry actually took a step backwards. It still wasn’t pretty, but damn if it wasn’t alive.
“It’s called a Jericho rose,” Neville said softly, eyes on Harry. “Among a lot of other things. It can survive the driest weather for years and years, until water falls on it, and then it wakes up.” He paused, then added, “It’s a resurrection plant.”
“It’s perfect,” Harry said, when he could speak.
Neville’s eyes flickered up to his scar for a moment, and he returned Harry a private look, the one that spoke about the bond that they shared—the two possible Boys-Who-Lived—before he nodded. “Yes, it is. For you and the ritual.” He smiled. “Should I wrap it up for you?”
*
Harry laid the book down in front of him and then looked at the Jericho rose, sitting on the table in its dish. “Right,” he said, licking his lips and looking back at the book. “Right.”
He would have liked another day, more time to memorize the words of the ritual, to calm himself down. The book said it was very important to have a calm and ordered pattern of thought, to have things arranged just so, like furniture, in your head. But he had seen an article that morning about how Draco’s condition had worsened overnight. Now he was molting narrow strips of skin that left thinner skin behind. It wouldn’t be long, the Healers had warned, before the molting skin would expose bone, and they could do nothing for a part-Veela like that, one who knew his mate was gone at the level of his flesh.
So Harry had to go ahead and do the ritual. At least he knew that if he got it wrong, the backlash would recoil on him and not Draco.
He touched the book one more time, and then forced himself to step back from it and circle the table. On the table, besides the Jericho rose in its bright dish taken from Neville’s shop, were a number of other things: a strand of Harry’s hair resting on top of a photograph of Draco, happy and smiling; a photograph of his parents; a Veela wing feather Harry had purchased hurriedly at the only apothecary he could find who kept such things on hand; and a thin circle of oil surrounding the whole.
There was no reason to delay any longer. Harry knew the words as well as he would ever know them; the ritual wouldn’t take long. He had to use powerful magic, but it was all his own.
He raised his wand, waited for his hand to stop shaking, and spoke the first incantation.
“Veelam adlego.”
The Veela feather trembled and rose into the air, floating so that its stem pointed down at the Jericho rose. Harry let out a trembling breath. So far, it had gone well, but he knew this was only the first step, and the simplest.
He gestured with his wand, sweeping it slowly back and forth across the whole circle, so that it touched everything with its shadow, and spoke the second incantation.
“Draconem adlego.”
This time, the strand of his hair rose, with the picture of Draco right behind it, and they did a complicated little dance of their own, orbiting the plant until they came to rest beside the feather in the air. Harry moved a step to the side, and released yet another breath. Yes, this step had worked as it should, too. There was no trace of the hair left, but a thin shadow shone in the photograph, behind Draco, a shadow that had green eyes and a lightning bolt scar if you looked hard enough.
I swore I would protect Draco. That’s what I’m doing.
Harry walked the circle around the table one more time. What he had to do next was the hardest bit, not in terms of the magic it pulled from him but just because of the decision he had to make. Well, he had promised.
And…
If he could see his mum and dad again, he thought they would understand.
He snapped his wand out straight in front of him and said strongly, “Posthac adlego!”
The photograph of his parents rose, tottering in the air. Harry grimaced and forced more will to flow down his wand. He had to be sure about this, or the ritual wouldn’t work.
He thought of Draco, and the way he would be lying in his bed right now, his eyes shut, the murmur of Healers around him. To have to deal with his illness so soon after the death of his wife, his mate, whom Harry knew he had loved…
That was a lot harder than Harry had ever done.
The photograph of his madly waving parents snapped up and into place, forming the tip of a triangle with the feather and the altered picture of Draco. Harry nodded and turned to the circle of oil on the table. He had chosen this method of destruction because it would mean something to both him and Draco, and whether Draco was ever aware of the ritual or not, it was still important to include something like this. Symbolism was very important, or Harry could have used that slender white rose from Neville’s shop and been done with it.
“Ignem adlego!” He meant to shout, but it came out more like a hoarse whisper, probably because magic was suddenly flowing from him as if he had pierced a vein. He staggered, but caught himself on one of the chairs pushed in under the table and watched, despite himself, with eager, staring eyes.
The oil roared to life, the fire leaping around the floating tools and the Jericho rose. Harry smiled as he watched it. Of course, as a small, tame blaze, it wouldn’t show the monsters and demons of Fiendfyre, but it still meant something, on a small scale, to them both. Harry had saved Draco’s life there. He wanted to do the same thing again.
And as Harry had the thought, he saw the heart of the fire flare dazzling sunset-red, as was supposed to happen. The flames bent inwards and curled around the photos and the feather, tendrils of heat touching them as though to taste. Then the photographs began to curl and blacken, even the one of his parents.
Harry felt the pang of loss travel through him, and wondered for a moment what Hagrid would say if he could see this.
Then he shrugged. He thought Hagrid would understand, just like his mum and dad would. His dad had died fighting for him; his mum had sacrificed her life so Harry could live, and saved the world; Hagrid had carried Harry’s body back to the school when he thought he was dead. They would know why this was important.
The flame closed in, nearer and nearer. Harry counted under his breath, and cast the fifth and final incantation the moment he saw the red begin to change to gold, as described in the book. “Rosam adlego!”
The fire seemed to blow up in silence, a great pillar of yellow flame rising for the ceiling. Harry clung to his wand as it vibrated in his hand. It felt like it might pull his fingers off, but he didn’t care. This was what the ritual in the book had said to do. This was what would save Draco’s life.
Faster and faster the pillar of flame spun, and then it turned and slammed towards Harry. The root of the pillar was in the dish that held the Jericho rose. Harry swallowed, but remained still as the flame touched his heart.
He did scream as it burned the skin there away. He had to. The pain was bright, and sudden, and gave him no choice. For a moment, he wondered if the flames would actually surround and burn his heart. It felt as if they might.
Then the flames were there, and he could feel them burning his heart, and he could see them crisping the strands of the Jericho rose, and he felt—
Nothing but cradling warmth.
The gold flames turned red as he watched them, and then scarlet, and then orange, and then blue. The colors of a phoenix, the colors the book had told him the flames ought to turn if this was working.
The colors of rebirth.
When the flame vanished and Harry sagged to his knees, a moment before he gave in to the blackness pressing against the corners of his vision, he saw the Jericho rose glowing with the subtle colors of a reflected sunset, and knew it had worked.
Draco would live.
He spiraled down into blackness, happy enough to give him a new set of flames in his chest, of a different kind.
*
Harry sighed as he settled the dish with the Jericho rose on the table next to Draco’s bed. St. Mungo’s had tightened security precautions since the war, when some people had sneaked in objects that poisoned those with important information to one side or the other, and he could no longer send the plant to Draco as a gift and hope he would receive it. He knew that the mild sleeping charms he’d cast on the Healers near the door would wear off gently enough to make them feel that they had fallen asleep naturally.
Draco, being under a heavy Dreamless Sleep potion, wouldn’t wake. Harry hesitated, and then turned to face the bed, which he had avoided looking at since he entered.
Draco looked far worse than the—probably arranged—photo from that morning had made him seem. The skin had begun to peel off his face, and one could see glimpses of bone and teeth here and there, through the holes. His hair looked like straw in both color and consistency, and Harry saw the lines of pain that ran through his skin like the cracks. His hands, folded on top of the blanket, were already molting muscle as well as skin.
Harry licked his lips and raised his wand. He knew it would work, because the ritual had gone perfectly, but his voice still cracked as he whispered, “This is the gift that I make to you. Choosing where you had chosen, free-willed where you had followed the bond, in an object where yours was in a person. This is the free gift.”
He brought his wand down.
The Jericho rose’s subdued colors flared to life, and the warmer shades of the rainbow leaped across the space between it and Draco. Draco caught his breath as the fire played around his heart for a moment, and then moved up to his hair. Harry watched with his mouth going dry. Surely there had never been anything more beautiful.
A slight, strange sound, like someone dragging sheets off a bed, came to Harry’s ears, and he looked down at Draco’s hands, where it came from. Skin was growing across the gaping holes where it had dropped away.
When he looked up again, he could no longer see any of Draco’s teeth, and his hair already looked softer and finer.
Harry closed his eyes and sagged against the wall for a moment. All right. All right. It was working.
He reached into his pocket for the letter he had written—explaining that the plant was keeping Draco alive and would as long as he kept it with him—and dropped it gently next to the plant’s dish. Then he cast a charm that would keep anyone except Draco from touching or harming the Jericho rose. Although the Healers should realize the letter was telling the truth, since nothing they did could cure a broken Veela bond, Harry didn’t want to take the chance of some well-meaning protector throwing the plant out before it had had the chance to heal Draco completely.
And then—
He could do this, couldn’t he? Just once? He would never ask for anything after this. He had chosen to embody the magic in an object in the first place so that Draco wouldn’t have to interact with him if he didn’t want to.
He bent down and brushed his lips across Draco’s mouth. His lips parted under Harry’s as he gasped. Harry drew back quickly, before their tongues could touch. Draco was probably dreaming of Astoria, and Harry didn’t want to take any more.
He looked one more time at Draco, and then he slipped out into the corridor and walked, muffled, away from there.
*
Draco awoke.
He could feel the burning current in his chest, as though someone had fed him a potion that filled him with fire, and turned his head. It had been a dream, then, that Astoria was dead. Nothing else could have made him feel this way but her presence at his side.
There was a woman in the chair at his bedside, but it was his mother, who closed her eyes once when she saw him looking back at her. Then she reached out and took his hand in hers. “How are you feeling?” she asked quietly.
Draco sat there for a moment, blinking, feeling the warmth of the pillows against his back and the cool touch of Narcissa’s hand on his in contrast. He shuddered as the memory of Astoria’s death returned, and his mother must have guessed what he was thinking about, because she leaned forwards quickly and laid her lips against his forehead.
“None of that, please,” she murmured, voice gentle but iron-like as she smoothed back the hair from Draco’s forehead. “Do not give me any reason to regret that you woke. You are alive, Draco, and everything else must continue on from there.”
“Why am I alive?” Draco grimaced when he heard how pathetic his voice sounded, and Narcissa smiled at once and lifted a cup of water from the bedside table. Draco reached out to take it, pleased that his hand was steady.
“The Healers know it has something to do with the plant, although they don’t understand the ritual or spell that was used to make it work,” Narcissa said, and nodded at the plant on his table.
Draco turned his head. For some reason, he had expected to see a flower, or a rosebush, or a young tree—something strong and slender and full of life, the way he felt. Astoria was not with him, no, and she never would be again, but the grief was something he could feel now, instead of simply lie under.
There was no slender plant there. There was no plant there at all, at least to Draco’s eyes, until he readjusted his expectations and saw the shallow glass dish of glowing sand with what looked like dry weed scattered on it.
“I don’t understand,” he said at last, although he could feel the warmth rising from the dish, echoed in his chest. “What about that could bring me out of the coma?”
His mother reached down with her free hand—she had never let go of him with the other—and picked up a letter. Draco flipped it over, wondering as he did who it could possibly be from. None of the Greengrass family, coolly friendly though they were to him, would have done such a thing; none of his Hogwarts friends would have risked doing magic that might take their lives; another Veela could not have achieved it, as one Veela could not become the mate of another. And Scorpius, his son, his daring, darling son, might have wanted to attempt it, but Draco thought it was beyond an eleven-year-old.
And that was what this was—a modified mating bond. Draco knew it, could taste it in the way his tongue moved freely in his mouth and his tears were dry.
Dear Draco and the Healers of St. Mungo’s,
I hope you don’t find this presumptuous, but I’ve used a modification of the Tellus Ritual to save Mr. Malfoy’s life. It required choosing the bond, and making the decision of my own free will, and investing my own life in the plant. It’s called a Jericho rose, and it can live a long time with a little water. Mr. Malfoy should keep it near him, and take care of it. As long as it stays there, he’ll be able to live.
Draco, I’m sorry. I know I’m not Astoria, and that you probably didn’t want another mate. But this way, you at least get to attend her funeral. I promise I won’t ever impose on you.
A Friend.
Draco stared and stared at the writing, but no matter how long he looked, it refused to blur into a familiar hand. He began to wonder if he was wrong, if one of his friends or one of the Greengrasses would have taken the risk after all. It was true that the Tellus Ritual was one of the more common pieces of Veela magic, available in most good books on them.
“Draco?”
He looked up. His mother reached over to take the piece of parchment from his hand, her gaze deep and calm.
“Does it matter who did it?” she asked. “For now, you are safe, and should be as long as you tend this plant. And now you can mourn for Astoria.”
Draco swallowed. “Yes,” he whispered, and closed his eyes so that he could see his wife’s mangled body. Because he would have to see it, until he stopped seeing it. He would have to look at it, until he could get past it.
She was gone, and nothing could change that, no matter the new warmth thrumming in his chest.
The mystery of the plant and his strange savior could wait a while.
*
Harry reached up and touched his chest, then shook his head with a smile. No, he really didn’t think there was a strange touch of warmth there, at least no more than usual. After all, he had constructed the bond with the plant to put it at a distance from him on purpose. It was bound to him, but not that way, not that close.
The warmth came from seeing the picture in the paper, Draco standing at his wife’s funeral, his face calm and reserved. He turned to say something to his mother and son, and then directed a glare at the camera; the reporter had probably chosen that moment to step forwards.
Harry lingered over that glare, at least in the moment he could before the picture looped back and began to show the moving images over again. It was the way he had seen Draco look several times over the last several years: asking with delicate outrage what someone was doing by infringing on his privacy. He didn’t ever have to ask. He could intimidate with a glance.
Not what Harry had ever thought someone he was attracted to would be capable of doing. But, well, things had changed a lot since school. And someone who didn’t seek attention out would have a lot of attraction to Harry, for a variety of reasons.
“Mate, what did you do?”
Harry looked up curiously, and then put down the paper. Ron loomed in front of him, his head bowed as he stared at Harry. Harry started to stand. Ron usually only looked like this when something had happened with one of their cases, or Harry had forgotten to turn a report in. Harry glanced at his desk, wondering, but no, it was bare of reports and their dreaded lists of numbers—times, expenses, property damage.
“Not that,” Ron said, and the queer tone in his voice made Harry turn back to him. “With Malfoy. I know you said you were going to help him, but I didn’t think you’d actually manage.”
Harry snorted and sat down again. “What did you expect, Ron? For me to give up and let him die?”
“No, no, of course not.” Ron sat down on the edge of his desk, but in a position that left one leg free to swing. “Not—I knew that you wouldn’t do that. But it really is weird, given that I know the only thing that can save a dying Veela is a new mate, and you’re not his mate. He couldn’t have got out of that coma and come seeking you even if you were.”
Harry gave him a faint smile and shrugged. “There was a ritual that meant I could use an object as a placeholder for a mate instead. I did that, and left a letter explaining that he would be fine as long as he kept the object close to him. I reckon he must have, or otherwise he couldn’t look like that.” He nodded at the photograph on the front page of the Prophet again, and looked away before he could be caught too much by the sight of Draco’s strength.
“That’s insane,” Ron said at last, when Harry had been looking expectantly at him for a while and the clock had chimed the new hour. “I know you’re a hero, but that’s a little extreme even for you.”
Harry sighed and picked up his robe from where he’d hung it on the back of the chair. “I don’t see why. I found something that worked, and did it. It doesn’t compel him to be with me. It doesn’t take the place of his mate. I know no one can do that.” He heard the wistful tone in his voice, and grimaced, checking on Ron from the corner of his eye. Luckily, Ron didn’t seem to know what the tone meant, from the way he carried on staring. “It worked.”
“You took a huge risk,” Ron whispered. “There could still have been backlash.”
“I know,” Harry said, a little irritated. “But it was my risk to take. You know that.”
“I think you should consider us a little more,” Ron said. “Me and Hermione. Mate, we—” He shut his eyes and shook his head. “We’ve already nearly lost you so many times in the past,” he whispered. “Don’t do more things like that without at least warning us, okay?”
Harry wanted to smile and couldn’t; wanted to cry, and couldn’t. Of course it would be something like that. Ron and Harry didn’t talk about their friendship all the time, but it was always there. Harry stepped closer to Ron and gave him a tap on the back with a closed fist, somewhere between a pound and a pat.
“Come on,” Harry said. “I think we have a witness to look after on the Duggart case, don’t we?”
Ron stared some more at him, and then beamed and bounced back to his feet, nodding so hard that it looked like his head was bouncing too. “You’re right,” he said. “Of course you’re right. And he might get nervous and leave if he’s kept waiting much longer. That’s the reason I came in here in the first place.”
Harry grinned, and followed him. It was all right again, and now Harry understood that Ron had just been worried about him, and Ron might understand how strongly Harry felt about Draco. Good things had happened all around.
Harry did think that he caught a trailing glimpse of a grey dress robe vanishing around a corner, but he put it out of his head. Draco probably hadn’t returned to work yet, which meant that stray person couldn’t be him.
And from here on out, their lives would be the same, would proceed the same way they always had. Now that Harry had confirmation that the ritual had worked and Draco was going to live, he didn’t need anything else.
*
Draco sat back in his bed—large, like everything in the Manor, draped with the billowing white gauze curtains that Astoria had loved and ornamented with sky-blue pillows. Draco ran his hand down the silky material of the pillows and closed his eyes. The windows were open, a wind blew through the curtains and his hair, and he imagined he could hear her voice if he listened hard enough.
A moment later he had popped to his feet and was striding in great, neat movements that beat the pressure of his heels deep into the carpet.
There was no reason for it, when it had been almost a year since Astoria’s death and the plant still sat in its dish next to his bed, but he was feeling the craving, tugging pull in his chest and mouth that he had felt only once before. The urge to court, to seek a mate.
And if he did that, there could be only one candidate.
Draco turned again to the plant and reached out his hand. As had happened when he wanted to touch it before, a stir of warmth answered him. It could have been caused by the magical heat leaking from the plant, or the ritual that he sometimes thought he could still feel when he concentrated.
But he knew it was not. Whoever had done this had gone deeper than they intended. They had wanted to give Draco something to lean on, something he could live with, even though it would mean that he wasn’t living for it in the same way that he would for a mate.
But instead, they had created a second, true mating bond. All the oppositions mentioned in that note, including the fact that this bond was embodied in an object, meant nothing against the depth of feeling they had invested in their magic. Draco hadn’t loved Astoria at first, the Veela magic compelling him to seek her because of sheer need, but that intensity had been enough to pull them together, to hold them together, and to bring love along with fate not many months after their marriage.
This person’s intensity of feeling could do the same thing. Would do the same thing, if the magic Draco felt was any indication.
Draco had no idea who they were. He felt as though he should have. How could someone have conceived a passion for him that great and that lasting without him having the slightest idea of their identity?
And there was more. Lying awake in the nights over the past year, watching the plant, watching the way it unfolded when he sprinkled water on it, and feeling the warmth around his heart that supported him through the funeral and sleepwalking through the first days and getting out of bed on the mornings that followed that, he had come to understand that he wanted to meet this person, of his own free will and for his own free reasons. To say thank you, if nothing else.
Draco lifted his tongue and tapped it against his canine teeth. It was a myth that they grew sharper like a vampire’s when the mate came near, but when one was in the toils of an incomplete bond, they could feel sharper, and his did now.
It will be for something else than just to say thank you. I will make sure of that.
In the meantime, though, he had to make sure that he knew how to look for that person. And considering that the Jericho rose at his bedside probably hadn’t been bought at a Muggle shop, Draco thought he knew exactly where to start.
*
Longbottom was hovering near the ceiling on an enchanted bubble of bright air when Draco walked into his shop, using a pair of pruners on the long, thick vine of a shaggy green plant Draco didn’t recognize. It looked like it was about to eat its trellis. Draco stood quietly for the moment, looking around the shop. Here and there he could see shelves and walls and pots, but for the most part, it was like an incredibly organized jungle; the herbs and flowers and bushes flourished enough to hide their containers.
Longbottom turned around, blinked at Draco, and then nodded when he saw who it was. “Don’t mind me,” he said, flapping his hand at the plants around him. Draco wondered if he was aware that the tendrils reached for him and the leaves trembled in time with him, which was more than the breeze caused by his hand. “I get caught up in caring for them, and I lose track of where I am.”
“Of course, I absolutely understand,” Draco said. Longbottom stood taller now, his eyes as clear as ice, his pose conscious and not self-conscious. “I was hoping that you could help me. Someone gave me a plant as a gift—oh, a year ago. I was unsure how much magic it was infused with, and whether it would be all right to cast spells on it.”
“Of course,” Longbottom echoed back to him as he slid to the floor, not seeming aware of the echo, either. Draco didn’t mind; one side-effect of his Veela magic was that people often repeated his words or actions. “Do you have the plant with you?”
Draco felt his chest muscles contract, and had to wait a moment before he responded. “I don’t like carrying it about too often,” he said carefully. He had found that he could spend up to two days away from his rose before he began to tire and see skin flaking off on his hands again; he preferred a speedy return to bringing the plant out in the open around strangers. “But I can give you a precise image.”
He held up his wand, arching his eyebrow. Longbottom nodded as if he had never had any reason to fear a spell Draco might have cast.
That, Draco reflected, as he remembered some of the hexes Longbottom had mastered by the end of their first seventh year, is probably true.
He pulled the glamour together from strands of colored light rather than making the image come into being all at once. It was easier and built a more precise illusion, but he had another reason for it now, as well.
He kept one eye on Longbottom, and knew the moment when he recognized the dish, from the tiny sigh that escaped his lips and the glint in his eye. Draco finished the portrait and waited, his free hand twisting behind his back.
“I can tell you it’s been used in a very powerful ritual,” Longbottom said, studying the plant. “But the ritual’s earthed itself there, and it can’t change now, or be affected by anything other than curses aimed directly at it. You can cast spells to speed the growth or give it more water or whatever you think necessary.” He looked up with a polite smile.
“Tell me who it was,” Draco said quietly.
“Who enchanted it?” Longbottom held his eyes and shook his head, slowly. “No one can know that unless you have a means of tracing their magical signature. They didn’t leave a note, telling you?”
Draco felt his shoulders hunch, the slow spiral of heat up from the band that always lay around his heart now. Normally, he didn’t have enough Veela in him to show any of the open traits, only to experience the emotions. But that could change when he knew someone was obstructing him from his mate.
He held himself in check, however, the way he had when he went back to Hogwarts immediately after the war and heard people whispering and exclaiming about him behind their hands. It was possible that Longbottom didn’t know as much as Draco thought he did.
“They left a note that said they would never impose on me,” Draco said. “But now I want them to. You sold them this plant. Who is it, Longbottom?”
“You don’t know it was me,” Longbottom said, not turning a hair. “There are plenty of other wizarding herbalists and apothecaries who could sell that plant.”
“But I’m certain that anyone who would send me one would know of your reputation as the best, and come to you.” Draco couldn’t control the flatness of his voice now, or the warbling snarl in the back of it. He had no idea if Longbottom knew how dangerous someone like Draco could be, but he would try to show him without an explosion. “I want my mate. Who was it?”
Longbottom took a step back for the first time, and Draco saw another wave of movement travel through the vines around them. Longbottom might have his own home-grown defenses, literally. Draco settled his shoulders and tried to do the same thing with his magic, which circled him and buzzed.
“They wouldn’t be your mate,” Longbottom said, voice thick and slow. “Your mate was Astoria.”
“They are now,” Draco said. He paused and moved away from Longbottom, turning his head as though to admire the long-stemmed roses near him. His mate couldn’t be a person like that, he thought, or they would have chosen these plants as symbolic of the bond. “They didn’t mean to, perhaps, but that ritual sealed the bond. They chose me. They loved me enough to potentially sacrifice their life for me, to embody part of their magic in a plant that symbolizes rebirth. The Veela magic only knows one way to respond to something that intense, and it’s a bond. We have one now.”
“You can’t know that for sure,” Longbottom said. “If—if you’re right and the Veela magic responds like that, then perhaps it’s only something the magic is mistaking for a bond, rather than a real one.”
Draco kept his face, and thus his smile, averted. He had heard the changing tone in Longbottom’s voice that might mean he had convinced him. He turned around and made sure that he maintained his earnest expression while he shook his head. “No, Longbottom. I’m sure of this, now. Utterly and absolutely. The magic might fool my brain, but the physical sensations I’m picking up on are the ones that belong to a bond.”
Longbottom paused, studying him. Then he said, “Can’t you just follow that pull and find the person, then?”
“No,” Draco said, showing his teeth. “Because the little idiot planned too well, and the bond, as you pointed out, is earthed in the plant. Trying to follow its pull just leads me straight to my own bed.” He leaned nearer, letting that intensity, that ripple-reflection that made people imitate him, reach for Longbottom again. Sometimes it could also make people desire what Draco desired—the only kind of Veela allure he would ever have. “This is serious. You know it. It might not have been meant to happen, but it did.”
Longbottom sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “If it were just a matter of that person’s happiness, I’d tell you,” he muttered. “But, Malfoy, there’s a reason he just left a note. It’s for your happiness, too.”
“He, then,” Draco said, and shifted closer. He would do what was necessary to follow the bond to his mate: romance Longbottom, influence him, touch his arm and look softly into his eyes with the air of a melting lover. “I can live with that. Perhaps it will be strange, after Astoria, but the bond accustoms you to many things.”
“Damn.” Longbottom shut his eyes briefly. Then he opened them and shook his head. “Didn’t you listen to what I said? You would be unhappy with this mate. He knew that. It’s the reason he held himself back. Well, that and that he’s too decent a bloke to try and make himself your mate when you were grieving.”
“Did he want to be my mate, then?” Draco smiled as he watched his magic work on Longbottom, pulling and plucking at his closed mouth like harpstrings. “That’s very interesting. That subdued desire might be at the bottom of the magic he infused in the plant. That might be the reason we have a mate bond now instead of only what he intended, the ritual that saved my life.”
“I don’t,” Longbottom said, and then reached out and tapped his wand against a glass-colored, bell-like blossom next to him. It swung down in front of his face, and he inhaled what looked like pollen from it. When he faced Draco again, his eyes were unexpectedly clear, and hard. “Don’t try that again,” he said softly.
Draco raised his hands. “I wouldn’t have to if you would tell me. The bond can accustom me to anything. It already makes me want this person like I wanted Astoria.” His voice would still waver on her name, and he didn’t think that would help convince Longbottom. He cleared his throat and tried to sound brisk. “And he wants me. Tell me.”
Longbottom stared at Draco some more. Then he said, “Tell you what. I’ll firecall him this evening and give him the choice to contact you himself. That’s the best I can do.”
“That will do,” Draco said, partially because he could feel the pressure in his chest and teeth easing, and partially because one vine was sneaking towards him along the floor. He nodded majestically at Longbottom and turned away, parading towards the door.
He would give his mate the chance to come to him. He might as well.
But if that did not happen…
Draco thought he might enjoy the chase. If nothing else, it would be another way in which this bond was different from the one he had shared with Astoria.
Part Two.
