Chapter 3: This Is My House
The gallery door let them out the moment she decided to go downstairs.
She noticed that. She noticed everything that night with the strange cold clarity of someone walking into deep water: the chill of the marble under her bare feet, Harry's shirt, which she'd pulled on because her nightgown was somewhere under the settle, his hand, warm, in hers. She didn't remember taking it. She didn't let go.
The corridor to the drawing room was the long one on the ground floor, east of the hall. She'd walked its whole length perhaps four times since the trials. The portraits along it had been turned to face the wall; she'd done that too. As they passed, she heard them muttering behind their canvases, the old voices of her family, curious and querulous. *Who is it? Who's that with her?*
The double doors stood a few inches open. Gold light spilled out of the gap, the deep red-gold of a hearth.
"You don't have to," Harry said quietly. "We can go back up. It'll still be here tomorrow."
"That's rather the problem." She was surprised by how level her voice was. "It will always still be here tomorrow. Do you know how many tomorrows I've had, Potter? Four thousand. I counted once. I stood outside these doors on my birthday and worked it out." She looked at him. "I don't want another four thousand."
He didn't say anything. He just stayed. She thought that might have been the bravest thing anyone had ever done for her, and it was so small.
She pushed the doors open.
It was only a room.
That was what struck her first, and almost made her laugh. A long, high, ordinary room, with tall windows hung in dust-sheeted velvet and a great cold chandelier, and the furniture under white cloths like a crowd of ghosts at a party. The long table they'd used for those meetings was gone; she had had it burned, and she'd forgotten she'd done it. The floor was bare. Someone, a house-elf most likely, had scrubbed it until the boards were pale.
The fire was lit. It had lit itself. It burned in the great carved hearth as if it had been burning all along, and above it, cut into the stone of the mantel, was the face from the ledger: a little crude grinning man with a key for a tongue.
Draconia stood in the middle of the floor and looked at the place where her aunt had knelt on Hermione Granger, and at the place by the window where she herself had stood that night, and at the place on the boards where he had lain with his face swollen out of shape, and she waited for it to come for her. It had come every time she'd so much as thought about this room for eleven years.
It came, a bit. She let it. Harry's hand was still in hers, warm and steady, and the fire was warm, and after a while it went past her, the way a cold wave goes past you if you stand your ground in it.
"I'm all right," she said, wonderingly.
"I know." His voice was rough. "So am I."
She turned to look at him. He was looking at the same place on the floor she had looked at. His jaw was tight, his eyes very bright behind his glasses, but he was standing. He'd come in. Of course he had.
It was Harry who worked out what the house wanted. He knelt at the hearth with his wand over the stone, and the gold of the warding came up through the flags thick as rope, not grey any more, bright as new wire, all of it gathering at the base of the mantel and circling, waiting.
"It's not dying," he said. "Not exactly. It's waiting for a keeper. The wards were bound to the head of the house, and when your father died, they didn't go to you. They should have, you're the heir. But you never claimed them. You never stood in here and took the house. So it's been holding everything in trust, spending itself down, and the only spell it's had the strength to keep awake is the one that might get somebody into this room." He sat back on his heels. "It's been herding you. For two years. And then I turned up and gave it something to work with."
"Something to work with," she repeated.
"I'm told I'm very annoying."
"You are spectacularly annoying." She knelt beside him on the hearthstone. Her heart was going hard. "What does it need?"
"Blood. Not much. And you have to mean it. You have to want the house." He hesitated. "All of it. Including this."
She looked around once more at the room, at the shrouded chairs and the scrubbed boards and the fire, and found that she could. That was the surprise. Not that it was easy; it wasn't. But it was hers, the good and the unbearable, and she had been refusing it for so long that she'd forgotten refusing was a choice.
She held out her hand. He gave her his wand, handle first, without being asked. She drew the tip across the pad of her thumb, a quick, clean sting, and pressed her thumb to the stone face's grinning mouth.
"I'm Draconia Malfoy," she said, "and this is my house."
The gold went up all at once. It went up the walls and across the ceiling and through the chandelier, which shivered and rang with a sound like many small bells, and out through the floor and down into the foundations and away across the lawns. She felt it go out over the yews and the gates and the hill, sealing, mending, a whole network of old magic waking up and turning towards her like heads in a crowded room. The peacocks in the grounds screamed all together. Every portrait in the long corridor behind them turned itself back to face the right way round.
And then, quieter, a thread of it turned back. It curled round her bleeding thumb and went searching sideways across the hearthstone, delicate as a vine, until it reached Harry's knee, and stopped there. It waited.
"It's asking," Harry said, very carefully, "whether I'm a guest."
She understood it the moment he said it. Armand's lock, and all the old marriage spells, and the House's own logic, nine centuries of it. *Those of this House.* It wasn't asking whether he was a guest. Guests left. It wanted to know whether he'd be let back in.
She thought about saying no. Not for long.
"He's not a guest," she told the hearth, in a voice that didn't quite stay level. "He's welcome. Whenever he likes. Always."
The thread brightened and sank into him. He jerked, startled, then went still. Then he looked at her with an expression she would have paid every Galleon in the Malfoy vault to see again, and she knew she would get to, because it was going to happen many times.
"Draconia," he said.
"Don't make a speech."
"I wasn't going to make a speech."
"You were. I could see it coming. You have a speech face." She took his face in her hands, the cut on her thumb smearing a little blood along his cheekbone. "Take me upstairs instead."
Her bedroom was in the west tower, and the house opened every door for them before they reached it. She found that funny, and then she couldn't think about anything funny at all, because he'd turned her against the inside of her own door the moment it closed and was kissing her as if they had all the time in the world and he intended to use every minute.
It was different from the gallery. The gallery had been a door breaking. This was slower, and so much worse, because there was nowhere to hide in it. He undid the buttons of his own shirt down her body, one at a time, kissing each inch as it appeared, and she stood against the door with her hands in his hair and let him. When he went to his knees on the rug and looked up at her, asking, she could only nod. He took her thigh over his shoulder and put his mouth on her, slow and thorough and devoted, until she was shaking against the door and saying his name to the ceiling.
He didn't let her come. Not then. He stood and lifted her, and she wrapped herself round him, and he carried her the six steps to the bed as though she weighed nothing and laid her down in the moonlight on her own green silk.
"Look at you," he said, low, like he couldn't believe it. "In your own bed. In your own house."
"Our," she said, before she could stop herself. "The house thinks so. It's very stupid. It's in love with you."
He went still above her, braced on his forearms. "Only the house?"
She could have lied. She'd been doing it to everyone for eleven years. She looked up at him, at his wrecked hair and the smear of her blood on his cheek and those eyes, and the door stayed open, and nothing at all was making her say it.
"No," she said. "Not only the house."
He made a sound she would remember for the rest of her life. Then he was inside her, one long slow push that took her breath away, and he stayed there, deep and still, his forehead against hers. She felt him trembling with the effort of not moving.
"Harry."
"I know. Just... let me have this."
She let him. She held him. When he began to move, it was slow and deep, and she wrapped her legs round him and met every stroke, and they kept their eyes open, both of them, the whole time. She had never done that with anyone. She'd never wanted to be seen like that. He watched her face as if every change in it were news and murmured to her, filthy and tender by turns, *you feel so good, you feel like home, God, look at you*, until she was arching under him and gripping his shoulders hard enough to leave marks.
"Tell me," he said. "Tell me what you want."
"Harder," she breathed, and he gave it to her, and the bed knocked against the wall and somewhere in the house a hundred candles lit themselves at once. She came with a cry she didn't try to swallow, clenching round him, and he followed her with her name in his mouth, buried in her, holding her so tightly that she felt it in her ribs.
Afterwards he lay with his head on her breast, and she combed her fingers through his impossible hair and watched the moon move across the window.
"The month's up on Friday," he said eventually, into her skin.
"I know."
"I'm supposed to report that the wards are stable and go home."
"Then you'd better go home." She made her voice light. It was harder than anything in the drawing room. "The Ministry will want its Auror back."
He lifted his head and looked at her for a long moment. Then he kissed her once, softly, and rolled out of bed. He found his trousers. He went to the door and put his hand on the handle.
It didn't open.
A thread of gold ran round the frame, warm as a laugh.
Harry looked at the door. Then he looked back at her over his shoulder, lying in the tangled green sheets with one arm behind her head.
"That one isn't Armand," he said.
"No," said Draconia. She didn't even try to look innocent. "That one's me. Come back to bed, Potter. I've decided you're staying for breakfast."