Chapter 2: Armand's Lock
The charm had a name, and the name was Armand.
Harry found it at the back of the oldest ledger, in brown ink that had once been red, under a sketch of a door with a tiny crude face carved into the lintel. Draconia read it over his shoulder in the morning room with her arms folded, because she would not sit down beside him and she would not let him read it alone.
"'*That those of this House who quarrel shall not part in anger,*'" Harry read. "'*Let the door hold them, and the hearth keep them, till they have spoken true.*' Armand Malfoy, eleven-something. Bit soppy for a Malfoy."
"He was married four times," Draconia said. "I imagine he was tired of chasing them down the corridor."
"It's old marriage magic. It must have been dormant for centuries, under everything else. Now everything else is going, and the house is pouring what's left into the one charm still awake." He turned the page. "It's not dangerous. Probably. It just won't let two people in this house walk away from a row."
"Two Malfoys."
"Two people *of this House*. I've been sleeping here for four days. The wards might have decided that counts." He glanced up at her. "Or it's broken, and it's just grabbing whoever's closest."
"Then we stop quarrelling," she said. "Or we stop being in the same room. I can manage either. Can you?"
She managed neither.
The second time was the orangery, on the sixth day, when he told her that the boundary wards on the west lawn were down to a thread and she told him to fix them and he said he couldn't fix a thing she wouldn't let him near, and the glass doors went gold and stayed gold for three hours, while the lemon trees dripped and they sat at opposite ends of a stone bench and didn't speak. It released them when he finally said, to the floor, that he'd been afraid to come back here, and he'd only taken the job because he didn't want anyone else to see him be afraid.
The third time was the wine cellar, the ninth day. That one lasted only twenty minutes. It opened when she told him, very stiffly, that she'd poured his first night's dinner down the sink herself rather than let the elves take it up to him, because she'd wanted to be sure he went hungry, and that she'd felt ill about it for a week.
He didn't laugh. She'd expected him to. He looked at her for a long moment in the cold and the dark, the racks of bottles going away behind her into shadow, and said, "That's the most Malfoy thing I've ever heard," in a voice so gentle that she had to leave the cellar quite quickly once the door let her.
They began to be careful. They ate at the same time in different rooms. He worked the wards in the mornings while she rode; she wrote her letters in the afternoons while he slept. When they passed in a corridor, they nodded, the way you'd nod at a portrait. Neither of them mentioned that the house now made a small contented sound, like a settling floorboard, every time they passed.
It was not enough. On the fourteenth night, at the end of the long gallery, under the portraits of nine centuries of her family, he asked her the thing she'd been waiting for him to ask since he walked up the drive.
"Why didn't you say it was me?"
She'd been on her way to bed. She had a candle. She stopped with it in her hand, and the flame leaned towards him.
"That night," Harry said. "When the Snatchers brought us in. My face was a mess, but you knew. I saw you know. Your aunt asked you straight out, and you looked right at me, and you said you weren't sure." He was standing at the far window, his back to the dark glass. "I've wanted to know for eleven years."
At the end of the gallery, very softly, the door to the stairs swung closed.
She heard the latch go. She heard the gold come up round the frame with a little sigh. She didn't look.
"Because if I said it," she said, "I'd have been the person who said it. And I would have had to go on being her for the rest of my life. I'd have known that's what I was." She set the candle down on a side table, because her hand wasn't steady. "I didn't know you'd get out. I thought you'd die anyway, upstairs or downstairs. I thought I was only choosing whether I'd have to live with it. That's all it was. I wasn't brave. I was selfish, and it happened to point the right way."
"That's not selfish."
"It's exactly selfish. Don't make me into something."
"I'm not." He'd come down the gallery while she spoke. He stopped a few feet off, in the candlelight, and she could see that he was angry, and that he wasn't angry with her. "You were standing in a room with *him* in the house, and your aunt holding a knife, and your father falling apart, and you said *I'm not sure*. Out loud. To her face. Do you know how many people I've met since who'd have said it was me in half a second to save their own skin?"
"Potter..."
"I've thought about it every time I've seen your name in the paper. Every time. I used to think about it and be angry, because I didn't understand it, and then I'd see your face at the trials and stop being angry and not know what I was instead." His voice cracked on the last word. "And then I walk up your drive and you've sealed the room and you won't look at me, and your house keeps shutting doors on us like it knows something I don't."
He was very close now. She could see the pulse going in his throat.
"I think it does," she said.
"Draconia," he said, and it was the first time he'd ever used her name, and it went through her like heat off a stone.
She kissed him first. She'd want that understood later; she made sure of it. She took a fistful of the front of his shirt and pulled, and he came, and his mouth was hot and startled and then not startled at all. His hand came up to her jaw, careful, then less careful, his thumb sliding back along the line of it into her hair. She heard herself make a sound against his mouth, low and unfamiliar.
He broke away first, just far enough to breathe. "Tell me if you want to stop."
"If you stop," she said, "I'll have the house lock you in the cellar for a year."
"That's a yes?"
"Merlin, Potter, *yes*." She dragged him back down by the collar. "Yes, I want this. I want you. Is that clear enough for the Ministry?"
He laughed into her mouth. It was the best thing she'd ever felt.
There was a long low settle against the wall under her grandmother's portrait, upholstered in faded green brocade that nobody had sat on in a century. They found it by walking backwards into it. She pushed him down onto it and climbed into his lap with her nightgown rucked up around her thighs. The grandmother in the frame above made a scandalised noise and swept out of her portrait into the next one, and Draconia didn't care, didn't care at all, because his hands were sliding up the backs of her bare legs, slow, as if he were learning a ward.
"You've been wearing this," he said against her neck, "every night. Walking around the house in it. Do you know what that's been like?"
"I have some idea." She rolled her hips down against him and felt him, hard through the flannel. He swore, softly and with feeling. "Yes. That."
She got the T-shirt off him. He had scars she didn't know, a pale twisting one at his side, a burn across one shoulder, and she put her mouth to the burn and felt him shudder under her. He pulled at the ribbon at her neckline and the nightgown slid off one shoulder and then the other, and he looked at her in the candlelight for so long that she would have been embarrassed if anyone else had done it.
"Say something," she said.
"I can't think of anything good enough."
"Try."
"You're beautiful," he said, simply, roughly, like it was a fact he'd been carrying around and was glad to put down, "and you've driven me mad for a fortnight." Then he bent his head and took her nipple into his mouth, and she stopped asking him for anything that required words.
His hand went between her thighs and found her wet, and he made a sound of real gratitude that she would have mocked under any other circumstances. He touched her slowly at first, exploring, and then, when her breath caught, with more purpose, two fingers working into her while his thumb circled, his mouth moving at her breast. She held onto the back of the settle above his head with one hand and onto his hair with the other and rode his hand shamelessly, her forehead dropping to his.
"Like that?"
"Don't you dare stop."
He didn't. When she came it was with her face pressed into his neck and his name in her mouth, his real name, *Harry*, over and over, and the candle on the side table flared tall and white and every portrait along the gallery woke up at once.
She was still shaking when she reached between them and pulled at his drawstring. He lifted his hips to help her. She wrapped her hand round him and he said her name like a prayer, and she lined him up and sank down onto him slowly, so slowly, watching his face the whole way.
His head fell back against the wall. "*Draconia.*"
"I know." She was breathless. He filled her completely; she had to stop, halfway, to remember how breathing worked. "I know, give me... there."
They found the rhythm together. He held her hips, not to guide her but as if he needed something to hold. She moved on him, rising and falling, and he met her, and the old settle creaked under them like a ship. His mouth found hers again, and then her throat, the hinge of her jaw, the place under her ear that made her gasp. She felt the gold of the house's magic humming under the floor, under the walls, pleased and warm, as if the whole Manor had been holding its breath for eleven years and had finally been allowed to let it out.
"I've thought about this," he said, against her collarbone, in a ragged voice. "God help me. Since the first night. In the library. Your feet tucked under you."
"*Since the library?*"
"Since you laughed."
That undid her more than anything his hands had done. She took his face in both of hers and kissed him hard, and moved faster, and felt him lose his rhythm, felt his fingers go tight on her hips, and he came with a long broken sound into her mouth. She went over again with him, smaller and deeper this time, clenching round him until he groaned.
For a long time afterwards neither of them moved. His heart was going under her palm. Hers was going too fast to count.
The candle burned down. The door at the end of the gallery stayed shut.
Eventually Draconia lifted her head and looked at it.
"Potter," she said slowly. "We've spoken true. Haven't we? I've just told you the worst thing I've ever done. You've just told me you've wanted me since the library. If that doesn't count..."
He followed her look. He went still under her.
"It's not opening," he said.
The gold ran round the frame, steady as a heartbeat. Under the floor, faint and deep, the house made a sound like a sigh. Then, from somewhere below them, from the ground floor, from the far end of the corridor she never walked down, there came the slow heavy click of a lock turning back that had not been turned in eleven years.
Draconia knew that sound. She'd made it herself, the week after the trials, with her wand and her hand shaking.
The drawing room was open.