Chapter 3: On Purpose
I didn't know where he lived. That's the first thing I had to admit to myself, standing on the front step of Grimmauld Place in yesterday's trousers with my wand out and no idea where to go. Ten days I'd shared a house with him and I'd never once asked where his flat was. I'd assumed the Manor. Then I remembered the Manor had been sold years ago, to pay the reparations, and that I'd read about it in the Prophet and felt something about it I hadn't wanted to name.
I Flooed Pye. He was in the middle of somebody's Splinching and told me so with feeling. Then he gave me an address in Bloomsbury, and when I'd thanked him and was already pulling my head out of the fire, he said, "Mr Potter. If he's taken it, bring him straight in. Straight in, you understand? Don't wait."
I Apparated so hard I nearly Splinched myself.
It was a Georgian terrace, wizard-converted, the top floor. The door was locked and warded, and I took the wards down with a Blasting Curse that will definitely appear in a disciplinary report one day, and I went up the stairs three at a time with my heart trying to come out of my mouth.
He was sitting at a little table by the window. Fully dressed, collar buttoned to the throat, hair combed flat, as if he'd tidied himself to die. In front of him, on a saucer, was a phial of something clear and shimmering. The stopper was still in.
He looked up when the door hit the wall. He didn't look surprised.
"You blew up my wards," he said.
"You left me a note." I could barely breathe. "Did you take it?"
"No." He looked down at the phial. "I've been sitting here for two hours. Turns out I'm a coward. Who knew."
I crossed the room in four steps and picked up the phial and threw it out of the open window. It hit the pavement three floors down and shattered, and a passing Muggle with a dog swore at the sky.
Draco stared at me.
"That," he said, "took me eleven days to brew."
"Good."
"There's another one in your kitchen."
"I'll smash that one when I get home." I put both hands flat on the little table and leaned over it until I was right in his face. "What the hell, Draco? What was that? You were kind? Is that what you think last night was? You think I fucked you out of pity?"
He flinched. "I think you're Harry Potter," he said, very evenly. "I think you've been saving people since you were born. I think you'd have done anything to stop me dying in your guest room, because you couldn't bear it, because you can't ever bear it, and I think last night you did the most generous thing you've ever done in your life and I am not letting you spend the rest of it chained to me by a curse in my blood because you were too decent to say no." His voice broke. "I'd rather lose the magic. I'd rather never have this again with anyone. I'd rather that than watch you wake up one morning in ten years and realise you never actually chose it."
The room was very quiet. Outside, the Muggle with the dog had moved on.
I let go of the table. I went round it, and knelt down on the floor in front of his chair, which put my eyes level with his. His hands were knotted together in his lap. I put mine on top of them.
"I don't let people buy me a drink out of pity," I said. "Ask Ron. Ask anyone. Somebody in the Leaky tried it two years ago because he'd read that I'd broken up with Ginny, and I made him take it back to the bar. I'm terrible at being looked after. I'm worse at doing things I don't want to do. I'm an Auror and I still won't do paperwork. You think I'd do that, last night, out of kindness? Draco. Look at me."
He looked.
"When you stood up at my trial," I said, "you were eighteen, and so was I, and everyone in that room hated you. And you stood up anyway in that awful grey robe and told the Wizengamot what you'd seen and you never once looked at me. And when it was done, you walked past me on the way out and said thank you, like it cost you a tooth. I've thought about that every week for seven years. Then you started at the Ministry and I watched people spit on your shoes in the Atrium, and I watched you just keep walking, and I didn't know what it was I was feeling, I thought it was guilt, for ages I thought it was guilt. I've been wanting to put my hand on the back of your neck since before your great-grandmother's blood ever woke up. Nothing chained me to you. I was already standing there."
He was crying, silently, without seeming to notice.
"You're not even feverish," he said. "You're just saying it."
"I've never meant anything more in my life. Ask me if I'd choose it. Go on. Ask."
He breathed in, ragged. "Would you?"
"Yes," I said. "I already did. Last night. In the basement. When I asked if I could kiss you, and you said you'd set fire to me if I didn't. That was me choosing. Now it's your turn."
His hands turned over under mine and gripped, hard.
"Pye told me how it completes," I said. "The bond. He told me the first day, in his office, when you wouldn't let him tell you anything. It needs a mark. It needs the mate to take one and give one. On purpose." I swallowed. "So I'm asking you. On purpose. Will you?"
He kissed me before I'd finished.
It wasn't like the night before. The night before, we'd been finding out. This was knowing. He pulled me up off the floor and I pulled him out of the chair and we went backwards through the flat, crashing into a bookcase, knocking a lamp off a table, kissing like it was the only way to breathe. His wings came out in the narrow hallway, all at once, sending framed prints flying off the walls. I got my hands under them, into the hot place where they joined his back, the feathers giving way to the smooth pale scales, and he made a noise I'd never heard a person make and nearly took us both to the floor.
"Sensitive," he gasped. "Merlin. There. Do that again."
I did it again. His knees went.
His bedroom was small and plain and clearly hadn't been slept in for ten days. I got his shirt open, one ruined button at a time, because he'd done them all up to the throat like armour and I wanted to take it apart. He got my trousers off in a single impatient tug that I'm fairly sure involved magic. Then we were on the bed, both naked, both shaking, his wings spread over the both of us like a tent of white and silver, and he rolled us so he was on top, straddling me, looking down at me with those molten gold eyes.
"My turn," he said. "You had your way last night."
"I didn't hear you complain."
"I'm complaining now. Lie still." He took my wrists and pressed them down into the pillow on either side of my head, and held them, and bent and kissed me slow and thorough and filthy, and moved his hips against me until I was gasping. "You're going to let me do this properly. Yes?"
"Yes," I said. "Fuck. Yes."
He reached for the oil and slicked us both with long, deliberate strokes, watching my face the whole time like he was memorising it. Then he rose up and sank down onto me in one slow, devastating slide, and we both cried out at the same time.
He rode me like he'd been thinking about it for years, which I suppose he had. Slow and deep at first, grinding down, his head thrown back and his throat long and his wings arching high behind him, beating the air in time with his hips, every downstroke making the whole bed shake. I let go of the pillow and got my hands on his hips and he let me. He leaned down over me and braced his hands on my chest and started to move faster, harder, the slap of skin and the creak of the bed and his breath coming out of him in broken little sounds, and the wings came down around us, enclosing us completely, so all I could see was him, his flushed face, his gold eyes, his mouth saying my name.
"Now," I said. "Draco. Now. Do it."
He bent down and put his mouth to the side of my neck, just above the collarbone, and bit.
It hurt for exactly a second. Then it didn't hurt at all. It was heat, pouring into me from that one point, filling me up, like drinking something warm on a cold night, and I could feel him. Not only his body on mine. Him. The edges of him, his fear and his want and something enormous and bright underneath, and I understood all at once what he'd been carrying around for ten days, for years, alone.
I turned my head and found the place on his throat where his pulse was hammering, and I bit him back.
He came apart. His whole body locked, and his wings snapped open so wide that they hit both walls of the little bedroom and knocked a mirror clean off its nail, and he cried out, and spilled hot between us without either of us touching him. The feel of it, the sound of it, the bond blazing open between us so I could feel what he felt, tipped me straight over after him. I held him down on me and came so hard my vision went white at the edges, and for a long, impossible minute I couldn't tell which of us was which.
We lay there for a long time afterward in the wreck of his bedroom. There were feathers everywhere again. The mirror was in pieces on the floor. Somewhere outside, a church bell was ringing noon.
There was a mark on my neck. I could feel it, a warm ache that pulsed slow and steady, like a second heartbeat. There was a matching one on his throat, which he kept touching with his fingertips as if he couldn't believe it.
"It doesn't hurt," he said. "At all. It's meant to hurt for days. Pye said."
"Pye's a pessimist." I kissed his shoulder, just where the scales began. He shivered. "How do you feel?"
He was quiet for a long time. His wings had folded down soft over both of us, warm as a quilt.
"Quiet," he said at last. "It's been screaming at me since June. Now it's quiet." He turned his head on the pillow and looked at me, and his eyes were grey, ordinary grey, the gold just a ring around the edge. "I can feel you. Is that strange? Not like a voice. Like knowing which room you're in."
"Same," I said. "You're very smug in there."
"I'm not smug. I'm appropriately pleased with myself."
"You're smug, Draco."
"I'm a Malfoy with a Potter in my bed, I'm allowed to be smug." He was smiling. He'd never smiled at me before, not properly, I realised. It changed his whole face. "The bond doesn't do patience," he said. "That's what Pye told me in June. He made it sound like a warning."
"And?"
"And neither do I. I've just been better at hiding it." He pulled the wing tighter over both of us. "You know what this means, of course."
"What?"
"You have to tell my mother."
I groaned into his shoulder. He laughed, properly, the whole length of him shaking with it against me, and somewhere deep in my chest the bond hummed back, warm and steady and entirely, unmistakably his.