Chapter 3: Day Four
He lasted until Thursday.
He spent Wednesday night in the armchair by the peat stove with his wand across his knees, not sleeping, listening to her move around the tiny bedroom on the other side of a door with no lock. At midnight he heard her stop working. At one o'clock he heard her get into bed. At two he heard her turn over, and over again, and sigh into the dark like somebody who was also not sleeping, and he sat with his hands clenched on the arms of the chair and stared at the glow of the stove and recited Article One to himself until the words lost all meaning.
At half past six in the morning Ron's Patronus came bounding through the wall, a silvery Jack Russell terrier, and sat down in front of him wagging its tail.
"Got your four," it said, in Ron's voice. "Mate, they're all from Transportation. All of them. Robards has locked the department down. Kingsley wants her testimony moved up to tomorrow morning, nine o'clock, before anyone else gets ideas. We'll have a team at your coordinates at eight to bring you both in. Hermione says tell Malfoy the Seeker's Thread was brilliant work. I say tell Malfoy I'm still a bit scared of her." The terrier paused, and then, in a different, much more careful voice: "Harry. You all right? You didn't sound all right last night."
The Patronus dissolved.
Harry sat there for a long time.
Tomorrow. Nine o'clock. A team at eight. In twenty-five hours she would stand up in front of the Wizengamot and burn half the Department of Magical Transportation to the ground, and she'd be safe, and she wouldn't need a protection officer anymore. She would go back to Gringotts and her snuffboxes and her flat in Islington he'd never seen, and he would go back to the office and file his report and sign Article One for the tenth time for the next witness.
He got up and went to the bedroom door.
He didn't knock. He stood outside it with his hand flat on the old wood, the way he had once stood outside the Mirror of Erised, wanting something so badly it frightened him.
"I can hear you breathing, Potter," said Draconia, from the other side.
He opened the door.
She was sitting up in the narrow bed with the blanket round her waist, wearing one of his old Auror training shirts that she must have found in the chest of drawers, faded maroon, much too big for her. The grey light from the small window fell across her face. Her hair was tangled. Her eyes were dark-ringed and very steady.
"Ron's Patronus," he said. "It's over. They got the network. You testify tomorrow at nine. There'll be a team here at eight to take you in."
"I heard."
"You're safe." He stayed in the doorway. "You don't need me anymore."
"No," Draconia agreed. "I don't."
She pushed the blanket back and got out of bed, and crossed the cold stone floor barefoot in his shirt, and stopped in front of him. She had to tilt her head back to look at him. She did it the way she did everything, as if she were the taller one.
"I don't need you," she said. "I haven't needed you since I was eighteen years old. I've got a vault at Gringotts and a flat in Islington and the best curse-breaking reputation in Europe and a teapot for every occasion. I asked for you by name, Potter, because you're the only person in that whole rotten Ministry I ever wanted to spend a week alone in a house with." She put her hand flat on his chest, right over his heart, and he felt it slam against her palm. "I don't need you. I want you. I've wanted you for a long time, and I'm frightened of absolutely nothing right now, and it's Thursday." Her fingers curled into his shirt. "So unless you're about to tell me you don't want me back..."
Harry kissed her.
He'd imagined it, if he was honest, more times since Monday than he would ever admit, and none of the imagining had been anything like this. She made a small sound against his mouth, half laugh and half relief, and then her arms were round his neck and she was kissing him back, hungry and sure, as though she'd been waiting four days, or ten years, or her whole life. He backed her into the room. He got his hands into her tangled hair and tilted her head and kissed her deeper, slower, and she shivered all over and pressed herself against him, and through the thin worn cotton of his own old shirt he could feel every line of her.
"Still sure?" he said against her mouth.
"If you ask me that again," Draconia breathed, "I'm going to hex you. Yes. Yes. Take it off me."
He drew the shirt up over her head and dropped it on the floor.
For a moment he just looked. He couldn't help it. She stood in the grey morning light in the little stone room with her hair tumbling round her bare shoulders, pale all over, with the faded shadow of the Mark on her forearm and the little white burn scars on her knuckles, and she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. She let him look. Her chin came up, a little defiant, but her breathing had gone uneven.
"Your turn," she said.
She undressed him herself, impatient, her fingers clever and quick on his buttons. When she got his shirt off she stopped, and touched the new pink scar above his hip very gently with her fingertips, the place where her hands had been on the hillside, and then she bent and pressed her mouth to it, and Harry made a sound he'd never made before in his life.
He picked her up. She wrapped her legs round his waist and laughed into his neck, low and delighted, and he carried her the two steps to the narrow bed and laid her down and followed her, and the old frame creaked like it was outraged.
He took his time. He'd told himself, if this ever happened, that he would. He kissed her throat and her collarbone and the soft underside of her breast. He took her nipple into his mouth and felt her arch up off the mattress, her fingers knotting in his hair. He worked his way down her body slowly, and when he settled between her thighs she went very still, and looked down at him along the length of herself with her lips parted.
"Potter," she said, unsteadily.
"Is this all right?"
"It's more than all right, I just..." She swallowed. "Nobody's ever done anything slowly with me before."
"I've got until eight," Harry said, and lowered his head.
She tasted of salt and heat. She was wet already, and she gasped when his tongue found her, and then she stopped talking entirely. He learned her the way he'd once learned spells, patiently, paying attention to every reaction: the circles that made her breath stutter, the pressure that made her hips lift, the long slow strokes that made her moan his name to the low ceiling. When he slid a finger into her, then two, curling them, she grabbed the iron rail of the bedhead behind her with both hands and swore in French, and he kept going, steady and unrelenting, until she came apart, her thighs trembling against his shoulders, the sound she made raw and astonished.
She pulled him up by the hair. She kissed him, hard, tasting herself on him, and then pushed him over onto his back on the narrow mattress and swung a leg over him.
"My turn," she said, flushed and fierce, her hair falling round them both. "I've been thinking about this since you made me read your stupid protocol."
She wrapped her hand round him and stroked him once, slowly, watching his face, and he groaned and gripped her hips. She lined him up and sank down onto him in one long slide, all the way, her head falling back, and for a moment neither of them moved. She was tight and hot around him. He could feel her heartbeat. He could feel his own.
"Draconia," he said, hoarsely.
She looked down at him. Her eyes were very bright.
"Say it again," she whispered.
"Draconia."
She began to move.
Slowly at first, rolling her hips, finding the angle she wanted with little gasps of discovery, her palms braced flat on his chest. He held her waist and let her set the pace, and watched her: the flush spreading down her throat, her lip caught in her teeth, the way her lashes fluttered when he thrust up to meet her. The bed groaned in protest. Rain started to patter on the turf roof. She leaned down to kiss him and the change of angle made them both gasp, and after that there was no more slow. She rode him hard, and he met her stroke for stroke, one hand on her hip and the other sliding between them to touch her where they were joined, and she cried out and said "Harry, Harry, don't stop," and he didn't. She came first, clenching round him so tight he saw stars, her whole body shuddering, and he followed her over helplessly a moment later with her name on his lips and her hands holding his face.
She collapsed onto his chest. For a long time the only sound was the rain on the roof and their breathing slowly coming back to normal.
"That," Draconia said at last, muffled against his collarbone, "was a breach of Article One."
"I know."
"Possibly several breaches."
"I know."
"How do you feel about it?"
Harry thought about it. He thought about Dawlish the Younger in his hospital bed, crying, saying I just wanted to hold her hand. He'd always thought the lesson was don't. He understood now, lying in a narrow bed on Skye with the woman he'd been circling for a decade warm and boneless on top of him, that the lesson had been something else all along. It had been: don't wait so long that you never get to.
"I'm going to hand your case to Ron," he said, "this morning. Before the team gets here. I'll sign it over. Then I'm not your protection officer anymore, and Article One doesn't apply." He ran his hand slowly down her spine. "And then I'll come to the Wizengamot tomorrow and sit in the gallery like anyone else, and watch you set fire to the Department of Magical Transportation. And afterwards I'd like to take you to dinner. If you'll let me."
She lifted her head and looked at him. Her face was soft and flushed, her eyes very bright.
"You'd give up your own witness? For me?"
"I'd give up a lot more than that," said Harry, "for you."
She stared at him for a moment. Then, very slowly, she smiled, and it was nothing like the cool sharp curl of her mouth at the farmhouse. It was open and unguarded and a little stunned, as though someone had handed her something she had never expected to be allowed to hold.
"Dinner," she said. "Fine. But I'm choosing the restaurant."
He laughed, and pulled her down to kiss him, and she was still smiling against his mouth when the second Patronus came through the wall.
It was the terrier again. It wasn't wagging this time.
"Harry," said Ron's voice, flat and urgent. "We've got the four from Transportation in the cells and one of them's talking. They weren't working alone. There's someone in our office. Someone who knew you'd go to ground somewhere only you knew about, and who's known about Skye for months." The terrier's silver ears flattened. "It's Proudfoot, mate. Your own partner. And he left the Ministry an hour ago."