Chapter 2: Rules for the Fridge
The rules of the arrangement, as written by Draco Malfoy on a sheet of parchment and stuck to my fridge with a Sticking Charm, were as follows.
One. Physical contact to be limited to what is medically necessary.
Two. What is medically necessary to be determined by Healer Pye, and not by Potter.
Three. Potter will stop asking me what I meant on Wednesday night.
Four. Potter will stop leaving his socks on the stairs. This has nothing to do with the bond. It's just disgusting.
I added a fifth rule underneath in biro on Friday morning, while he was watching me from across the kitchen with his arms folded: Malfoy will stop pretending he doesn't like the coffee.
He took the parchment off the fridge, read it, set fire to it with a glance and went back to drinking the coffee.
It went on like that for nine days. We touched at breakfast and we touched at dinner, his hand on my wrist, my hand on his shoulder, formal and brief, and each time the fever went out of his face for a few hours and the wings stayed folded down to nothing. In between, he took over the old lab in the basement and filled the house with smells, some of them good. He reorganised my bookshelves alphabetically, then by colour when he got bored. He won Kreacher over so completely that Kreacher started making him crêpes. He and I argued about everything. Quidditch, the Ministry, whether you could call a Muggle a Muggle in front of Hermione, which he couldn't, and whether he could call me Potter in my own house, which he could, and which I started, against my will, to like.
The nights were worse. Most nights he knocked around three. Most nights I sat on the corridor floor and talked to him until he stopped shaking. Most nights he got a little closer.
He never answered my question. I never stopped thinking about it.
On the tenth day, Hermione came to lunch.
She was at the Ministry by then, Magical Law Enforcement, working on creature rights legislation in a way that was making several old men in the Wizengamot very nervous. She brought three books about Veela, two of them in French, and read them at my kitchen table while I made sandwiches and pretended I wasn't hovering.
"Pye's right," she said eventually. "About the allure. It doesn't work on mates at all. There's a lovely account here from eighteen-forty about a Veela in Lyon who chose a blacksmith, and the blacksmith said she was the ugliest woman he'd ever seen and he wouldn't marry her for all the gold in France." She turned a page. "He came round, apparently. Took him four years."
"So I'm not…" I put the bread knife down. "Nothing I'm feeling is coming from him."
Hermione looked up at me over the book. She has a look, Hermione, that she's had since we were eleven, which makes you feel like she's already read the end of you and is waiting politely for you to catch up.
"Harry," she said. "How long have you been staring at the basement door?"
I hadn't realised I had been.
He was at his workbench when I went down, stirring something blue in a pewter cauldron, sleeves pushed up past the elbows. The Dark Mark on his left forearm has faded with every year since the war, the way they all have. It's grey now, more like an old bruise than a brand. He doesn't hide it anymore, not down here. I liked that he didn't hide it from me.
"If you've come to ask about Wednesday," he said, without turning round, "you can turn around and go back upstairs. Rule three."
"I've come to ask about something else."
"Rule two, then. Talk to Pye."
"It's not medical." I came down the last steps and stopped on the other side of his workbench. "Hermione says Veela allure doesn't work on a mate. At all. She showed me. There's a blacksmith in Lyon."
His hand stopped stirring.
"So I wanted to check," I said, "that I've understood it right. Because if I have, then every time I've wanted to put my hand on the back of your neck instead of your wrist, that was me. And every time I've sat on that floor at three in the morning thinking about what your mouth would feel like, that was me too. Nothing to do with your great-grandmother. That's just me."
The cauldron hissed. He took it off the flame, very carefully, with both hands, and set it down on the stone, and he still didn't look at me.
"Unfortunately for you," he said, very quietly, "yes."
"Right," I said. "And on Wednesday night. In the corridor. When you said it picks the person the Veela already…"
"Potter."
"… already what, Draco?"
I'd never said his first name to his face. I watched it hit him. He closed his eyes, and his shoulders came up around his ears, and behind him the air flickered, the wings beginning to ghost into the room.
"Wants," he said, through his teeth. "Already wants. Already loves, if you'd like the whole humiliating thing in full, which I imagine you would. Already has done for a pathetically long time. It doesn't create anything. It just takes what's there and makes it so you can't walk away from it. It's in Hermione's books, I expect, on the page after the blacksmith." He opened his eyes. They were gold, and wet. "There. Now you can stop asking. Now you can go back upstairs and keep shaking my hand at breakfast and feeling sorry for me, and I can die of embarrassment instead of the bond, which would at least be quicker."
I walked around the workbench.
He watched me come with the expression of someone watching a curse coming at them, and he didn't move away. I stopped close enough to feel the heat of him. He always ran hot, that summer. Close up, he smelt of whatever he'd been brewing, something green and sharp, and under it the smell of his skin, which I'd been trying not to notice for ten days.
"Rule one," I said. "Physical contact limited to what's medically necessary."
"Yes," he said. His voice had gone rough.
"I'd like to break it." I lifted my hand and stopped it an inch from his face. "Can I?"
He looked at my hand. Then at me. And something in his face just gave, like a dam does, all at once.
"If you don't," Draco said, "I really will set fire to you."
So I kissed him.
He kissed me back like he was furious about it. His hands came up and fisted in my shirt and dragged me in, and his mouth opened under mine, hot and demanding, and he made a low, wrecked sound into my mouth that I felt in my spine. The wings burst out behind him all at once, no longer smoke but real, solid, huge, knocking a rack of phials off the shelf, and neither of us cared. I got my hand on the back of his neck, finally, where I'd wanted it for ten days, and his skin was burning, and I pushed him back against the workbench and he went, and he pulled me with him.
"Upstairs," he said against my jaw. "I'm not doing this next to a Draught of Peace. It'll curdle."
"You're so romantic."
"I've waited years, Potter, I'd like a bed."
We made it to the stairs. We made it most of the way up them. I had him against the wall on the first-floor landing, under the house-elf heads, with my mouth on his throat, and his hands were already pulling my shirt over my head, and his wings were filling the whole stairwell, brushing the banisters, white and silver in the gloom. Walburga's portrait woke up and started screaming about filth and blood traitors and abominations in her house. Draco waved a hand at the curtains without looking, and they swept shut so hard the rail rattled.
"You've been able to do that the whole time?" I said.
"I've been able to do lots of things the whole time." He bit my lip. "Bedroom. Now."
The biggest bedroom. He'd made it his in ten days, green bedspread and books everywhere and the window open to the summer night. I pushed him down on the bed and he pulled me after him and for a while it was just that, kissing, long and slow and unhurried, his hands moving over my bare back and mine finding the waistband of his trousers. He arched when I touched him through the fabric. He was hard, straining, and he swore at me, viciously, in a way that sounded like begging.
"Tell me what you want," I said. "Tell me, and I'll do it."
He looked up at me, flushed and wrecked and gold-eyed, his hair a pale mess on the pillow, his wings spread out across the bed and hanging over both edges of it. "I want you to stop being so bloody noble," he said, "and fuck me."
"Are you sure? You're not feverish? This isn't the…"
"Harry." He caught my face in both hands. His palms were warm now, ordinary warm. His eyes were clear. "I've never been less feverish in my life. You've been touching me for an hour. I'm thinking perfectly clearly, and what I'm thinking is that if you stop to ask me one more question, I'll hex you." His thumb moved across my cheekbone. "I want this. I've wanted it for longer than the bond's been awake. Yes. Is that clear enough for the Auror Office?"
It was.
I undressed him slowly, because I could, because I'd spent ten days imagining it and I wanted to see. He was long and lean and pale all over, flushed pink across the chest, a faint silver scar across his ribs I knew I'd put there years ago and that I put my mouth to, deliberately, until he shuddered. I took him in my hand and he cried out and pushed up into my fist. I took him in my mouth and he stopped making words at all. His fingers knotted in my hair and his wings beat once, hard, against the bed, a great gust of air that knocked the books off the nightstand.
He summoned the oil from the bathroom without a wand, which I'll admit is the most attractive thing anyone's ever done in my presence. I opened him up with my fingers, slick and slow, watching his face, and he watched me back, gold-eyed and open-mouthed and moving against my hand, saying my name, my first name, over and over, as if he'd been saving it.
When I finally pushed into him, he held my gaze the whole time. He was tight and hot, and his breath stuttered out of him, and his hands gripped my shoulders. Then his legs came up around my waist and pulled me deeper, and we both stopped breathing. I stayed still for a long moment with my forehead against his, both of us shaking.
"Move," he whispered. "Please. Harry. Move."
I moved. Slow at first, deep, rolling into him, the bed creaking under us, his wings curling up off the mattress and around my back, enclosing us both. They were soft. I hadn't expected that. Soft and warm and impossibly strong, holding me against him so there was nowhere to go except deeper. He met every thrust. He dragged his nails down my back and arched up off the bed and said things into my neck that I'll remember when I'm a hundred. I wrapped my hand round him and stroked him in time, and he came first, crying out, spilling hot across my hand and his own stomach, his whole body clenching around me and his wings snapping open so wide they hit the walls. The sight of him, the feel of him, undid me. I came deep inside him with his name in my mouth and his wings around me and the whole house shaking with it.
Afterwards, we lay in a mess of sheets and feathers. A lot of feathers. He was moulting slightly, he said, which apparently was a good sign, and also humiliating. His head was on my chest. The wings had folded down into something softer, draped over both of us like a blanket.
"Ten days," I said into his hair. "You should've just told me on the first night."
"You'd have laughed."
"I wouldn't."
"You'd have been kind," he said, "which would have been worse." His fingers moved idly over my ribs. "Go to sleep, Potter."
I did.
When I woke up, the bed was cold. The sun was well up. The feathers were still there, scattered across the sheets, white and silver, but Draco wasn't.
I found the note on the kitchen table, propped against a phial of something clear and faintly shimmering. I knew what it was before I read the label in his narrow, slanted handwriting. Hermione had shown me the page. Severing draught. Rare, dangerous, illegal to brew without a licence. Breaks the bond permanently. Leaves the Veela unable ever to bond again, and burns out a part of their magic they never get back.
The note said: You were kind. I knew you would be. I brewed two. I've taken the other one with me. You don't owe me anything, Harry. You never did.
I read it twice. Then I was already running for the door.