Chapter 3: Extra Roast Potatoes
I woke up at ten on Christmas morning in a bed the size of a Quidditch pitch, with a cat sitting on my chest.
The cat was enormous and grey and looked at me with an expression of deep aristocratic disappointment, as though it had expected better and was going to have to write to someone about it. I hadn't known Draconia had a cat. I hadn't known she had a flat in Kensington, or that it would have high white ceilings and a tall window full of snow-covered rooftops, or that she slept curled on her side with one hand tucked under her cheek like somebody who had been told off for taking up too much room and never forgot it.
I lay there and looked at her. I couldn't help it. In the grey winter light her hair was a pale tangle across the pillow and there was a crease on her cheek from the sheets and a small purple mark low on her neck that I was fairly sure I had put there. She looked softer asleep. She looked like someone who had been holding her breath for a very long time.
The cat put one paw on my face.
"Lucius," Draconia mumbled, without opening her eyes, "get off him."
I froze. "Your cat's called Lucius?"
"My mother named him. It's a joke. Nobody gets it." She opened one grey eye and looked at me over the pillow, and something moved across her face, fast, a flicker of surprise and then fear, as though she had expected to wake up alone and had been ready for it. Then it was gone, and she reached out and shoved the cat off my chest with the flat of her hand. "Hello."
"Hello."
"You stayed."
"You asked me to."
"People say all sorts of things at midnight." She pushed herself up on one elbow. The sheet slid down. She didn't bother to pull it up. "I wasn't sure you'd still be here when it got light. I thought you might have remembered who I am."
I reached out and tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear.
"I know exactly who you are," I said. "You're the woman who corrects my grammar."
She laughed, startled, the way she had at the party, with her head going back so I could see her throat. I leaned over and kissed it. Her laugh turned into something else.
It was different in daylight. Slower. In her office there had been seven years of pressure behind it, all of it coming out at once; now we had all morning and nowhere to be, and I wanted to take my time. I wanted to learn her.
She lay back against the pillows and let me. I kissed the crease on her cheek and the corner of her mouth and the underside of her jaw. I found the scar on her collarbone again and asked her about it this time, quietly, and she told me: Bellatrix, a punishment, the spring before the end. I kissed it until her breathing went uneven. I worked my way down her body inch by inch, the soft curve of her breasts, the faint ladder of her ribs, the dip of her waist, the sharp edge of her hip, and when I reached her left forearm, she went very still.
The Dark Mark had faded after the war like they all had. It was a grey shadow now, like an old bruise. She tried to pull her arm away, and I held it, gently, and looked up at her.
"Can I?" I said.
She stared at me for a long moment. Then, so slightly I almost missed it, she nodded.
I pressed my mouth to the inside of her wrist, just below the mark, and then to the mark itself. Her eyes filled. She didn't cry, she's a Malfoy, but she turned her face into the pillow and her other hand came down and gripped my shoulder hard enough to bruise.
"You're a menace, Potter," she said thickly.
"I know."
"Come here."
I went. She pulled me up over her and wrapped her legs round my waist, and I braced my arms on either side of her head and slid into her, slow, watching her face. She was soft and wet and ready, and she sighed when I filled her, a long shaky breath, as if she'd set something heavy down. I stayed still for a moment, buried in her, our foreheads touching.
"All right?" I asked.
"More than." She ran her hands down my back and pressed, urging me deeper. "Don't rush. Please. I want it to last."
So I didn't rush. I moved in her slowly, long deep strokes that made the bed creak in time and made her eyes flutter half closed. I kissed her through all of it. Her hands roamed everywhere, over my shoulders and down my spine and into my hair, and she whispered things against my mouth that I'll keep to myself, mostly my name, mostly please, once something in French that I'm fairly sure was filthy. The snow went on falling outside the window. The cat, offended, had gone to sit on the windowsill with his back to us.
When she started to tighten around me I slid a hand between us and touched her where she needed it, small slow circles, and she grabbed my wrist and held it there and said "Yes, like that, Harry, oh," and came with her heels digging into the backs of my thighs and her mouth open against my shoulder. I followed her a moment later, helpless, her name breaking out of me like something I'd been keeping locked up for years.
We lay there tangled together afterwards, sticky and warm, the duvet half on the floor. She traced idle shapes on my chest with one finger. After a while I realised she was writing words.
"What are you writing?"
"Corrections," she said. "You've got a lot of them."
"Like what?"
She wrote something slowly across my sternum, letter by letter. I lay very still and felt it out.
I. L.
She stopped. Her hand went flat.
"I've been very stupid," she said quietly into my chest, "for a very long time. I think I'd like to stop."
I put my hand over hers on my heart and held it there.
"Finish the sentence," I said.
She lifted her head. Her face was pink and her eyes were bright and frightened and fierce all at once, the way they'd been in the Atrium with the whole Ministry staring at us, the way they'd been in the tent in Bulgaria in the snow, the way they'd probably been for most of her life whenever she wanted something and didn't know if she was allowed to have it.
"I love you," Draconia said. "There. I've said it. If you laugh, I'll set Lucius on you."
I didn't laugh. I pulled her down and kissed her, and when I came up for breath I said it back, and then I said it again in case she hadn't heard, and then she was laughing, not me, laughing and crying a bit and calling me a sentimental Gryffindor idiot, which I took as a yes.
At two o'clock a silver Patronus came straight through the bedroom wall.
It was Mrs Weasley's. The silvery cat prowled across the duvet and sat down neatly between us and said in her voice, warm and slightly dangerous: "Harry, dear, Christmas dinner is at four. George tells me you'll be bringing someone. He says she's very blonde and that he's owed eleven Galleons by half the family. Don't be late. Tell her I'll do extra roast potatoes."
The cat vanished in a puff of light.
Draconia sat bolt upright in bed.
"He's been taking bets," she said.
"Course he has."
"On us. On me. With your entire family."
"Probably since Bulgaria." I lay back against her pillows and grinned at the ceiling. "Ron told me Hermione had a list of broom cupboards."
She was silent for a long moment. I turned my head to look at her. She was sitting up against the headboard with the sheet clutched round her and an expression on her face I had never seen before, somewhere between terror and a sort of wild, reckless hope, as if she were standing at the open door of a plane.
"Molly Weasley," she said, "is going to do extra roast potatoes. For me."
"She will. They're very good."
"My father tried to get Arthur Weasley sacked. I called that family blood traitors to their faces for years. I said unforgivable things to Hermione..."
"I know," I said, and sat up, and took her hand. "So did I, about a lot of people. So did Ron, once, about Percy. That's what Christmas dinner at the Burrow is, Draconia. It's a load of people who said unforgivable things to each other once, passing the gravy." I squeezed her fingers. "You don't have to come. I'd understand. But I'd like you to."
She looked at me for a long, long time.
Then she slid out of bed, stark naked, and crossed to the wardrobe, and flung it open.
"I have nothing to wear," she announced. "Nothing in this entire flat is appropriate for meeting the Weasleys as your..." She stopped, one hand on a hanger.
"As my what?" I asked, very innocently.
She turned round. Her chin went up in that old, insufferable, unbearably lovely way.
"As your girlfriend, Potter," she said. "Obviously. Try to keep up."
Then she pulled out the holly-red dress from last night, held it up to the light, and frowned at the missing clasp.
"Also," she said, "you're going to have to explain to Mrs Weasley why it's been Vanished."