Chapter 2: Terms and Conditions
The contract was two feet long and written in his terrible handwriting, and Draconia rewrote it in red ink at her kitchen table while he drank his coffee and watched her do it.
Clause one, as drafted by Potter: The parties will spend one hour a day in physical contact, as advised by Healer Strout.
Amended: The parties will spend one hour a day in physical contact, defined as hands, wrists, or forearms only. Contact to occur at a location of the Veela's choosing. The Veela will be referred to as Miss Malfoy, or Healer Malfoy, never as the Veela.
"You wrote the Veela," he pointed out.
"I'm allowed."
Clause two: Neither party will tell anyone.
Amended: Neither party will tell anyone, and Potter will not tell Granger or Weasley in particular, and will not look smug in the presence of either.
"I don't look smug."
"You're looking smug right now."
"This is just my face."
Clause three, as drafted: No kissing unless both parties want to. She'd crossed it out entirely and written, beneath it, No kissing. And then, under that, because she was a Malfoy and liked the last word: Ever.
"That seems a bit absolute," said Potter.
"I'm an absolute sort of person."
"Yeah." He took the quill from her, gently, and initialled each of her amendments in turn. Then he wrote one of his own at the bottom, and turned the parchment so she could read it. Clause four: Either party can end this at any time, for any reason, and the other one won't argue.
She looked at it for a long time.
"I don't expect you'll use it," he said. "But it's there. Sign it, Malfoy. I've got a briefing at nine."
She signed. Then he held out his hand across the table, palm up, and after a long moment she put her hand in it, and the fever went out of her like a tide going out, and she closed her eyes and very nearly wept.
They did an hour a day for three weeks.
At first it was terrible. They sat on her sofa at opposite ends with their hands linked across the middle cushion like a pair of Victorian chaperones, and she read the Healer's journal and he read Auror reports, and neither of them said a word, and the clock ticked, and every second of skin on skin was a relief so intense it was almost indecent. He held her hand the way he did everything, without fuss. His palm was warm and calloused from his broom. His thumb moved, sometimes, across her knuckles, absent-mindedly, and every time it did she lost her place on the page.
Then it became something else.
She didn't notice when. It might have been the Thursday he fell asleep against the arm of the sofa, still holding her wrist, and she sat there for two hours rather than wake him. It might have been the evening she came home from a double shift with her hands shaking and he took one look at her and made her eggs, badly, in her own kitchen, and talked about nothing while she ate them. He was funny. She hadn't known that. He told stories about the Auror Office that made her laugh against her will, and he listened when she talked about the ward, actually listened, asking about patients by name the next day. He was lonely. She hadn't known that either. He lived alone in that black house in Islington with a house-elf and a portrait that screamed, and some nights he didn't want to leave, and some nights she didn't want him to.
She stopped thinking about the fever. The glamour faded to a faint shine at the ends of her hair. Strout examined her and said, "Coming along nicely," in a meaningful tone, which Draconia ignored.
One hour became two. Hands became wrists became, one rainy Sunday, her bare feet in his lap while he read, his hand curved around her ankle, and she watched his thumb move over the bone there and thought about the contract. Hands, wrists, or forearms only. She didn't say anything. Neither did he.
On the twenty-second day he came in through the doors of the Spell Damage ward on a stretcher.
Draconia was halfway through a shift. She heard the commotion at the end of the ward and turned and saw the Auror robes and the black hair and the blood, and the fever came up through her so fast and so hot that every bulb on the ward burst at once. The trainee next to her dropped to his knees and stared at her. A patient began to sing.
"Out of my way," she said, and her voice was not entirely human.
It was a slicing curse across his ribs, deep but clean. She closed it in eleven minutes with her hands steady and her hair blazing so bright that the other Healers had to squint. She didn't let anyone else touch him. When it was done and he was stitched and sleeping, she sent everyone else out, pulled the curtain around the bed, sat down on the edge of it, and put her hand flat over his heart, and stayed like that until he woke.
"Hi," he said, groggy.
"You absolute idiot."
"Yeah." He looked at her hand on his chest. Then up at her face. "You're glowing."
"I'm aware."
"You're crying."
"I am not."
He reached up, slowly, wincing, and wiped her cheek with his thumb. She let him.
She took him home with her, against Strout's advice, to the flat in Kensington, because the bond wouldn't let her leave him at St Mungo's and she wasn't going to sit in a hospital chair all night like a spaniel. She put him in her bed. She meant to take the sofa. She stood in the bedroom doorway in the dark and couldn't make her feet go.
"Come here," he said quietly, from the bed.
"The contract says hands, wrists or forearms."
"So hold my hand. Here. Where I can see you."
She lay down beside him on top of the covers, in her robes, and held his hand, and looked at the ceiling, which her hair was painting faintly silver.
"I need to know something," she said to it. "And I need you to tell me the truth. Strout says the bond can't make me feel anything that isn't there already. She says it only points. But I can't tell any more, Potter. I can't tell what's the blood and what's me. When you came in today..." Her voice cracked. "I don't know if I want you, or if it wants you and I'm just the thing it's using."
He was quiet for a long time.
"Then let's find out," he said. "Clause four. You can end it any time. So end it. Right now. Let go of my hand, and tell me what you want. Not the bond. You."
She let go of his hand.
The fever came back, slow, a low heat under her skin. She lay there and felt it. Then she felt the other thing, underneath it, that had nothing to do with fever at all: the memory of his thumb on her ankle, his laugh in her kitchen, his face when he woke and saw her crying. Three weeks of it. The bond wanted him close. That was all it had ever wanted. Close. Skin.
But she wanted him naked, and gasping, and saying her name. That was hers. The blood had nothing to do with it.
"I want you," Draconia said. "Me. Not the blood. The bond just wants you near. I want..." She turned her head on the pillow and looked at him. "I want you to take your clothes off, Potter, and I want to break clause three."
He looked at her for one long second. His eyes were very dark.
"Say it again," he said. "Tell me you're sure."
"I'm sure. I'm completely sure. If you don't kiss me in the next ten seconds I'll do something drastic."
He kissed her.
It was slow at first, careful, because of the stitches, and she was the one who made it not careful. She rolled over onto her side and pulled him in by his collar and opened her mouth to him, and he groaned against her lips, low in his throat. He kissed the way he flew, she thought dizzily. Instinct and nerve and no fear at all. His hand came up into her hair and the silver light pulsed under his fingers, and she felt it through her whole body, a long slow throb of heat that had nothing to do with fever.
"Your ribs," she said against his mouth.
"Are fine. You fixed them."
"I'm a very good Healer."
"You're bloody brilliant," he said, and found the clasp of her robes.
She helped him. She was impatient. She shed the lime-green robes and the blouse underneath and lay back in the silver light in nothing but her knickers, and he propped himself on his good side and looked at her for so long that she began to feel it like a touch.
"Potter."
"Give me a second. I've thought about this for longer than three weeks."
That stopped her. But then his mouth was on her breast, warm and wet, his tongue circling her nipple until it peaked, and she arched into him and forgot what she'd been going to ask. He took his time. He kissed his way across her chest, down her stomach. He hooked his fingers into the sides of her knickers and looked up at her, and waited, and she said "Yes, yes, Merlin, Harry," and he slid them down.
She'd never said his first name aloud before. They both heard it.
He touched her with his fingers first, slowly, learning her, the way he'd listened in her kitchen. He found where she was wet and spread it, and circled her clit until her hips lifted off the bed, and pushed one finger into her and then two, and she gripped his shoulder hard enough to bruise. She was already so close. Three weeks of his thumb on her knuckles. She came with his name in her mouth, shuddering, her hair blazing so bright the room went white, and he held her through it, murmuring something against her temple that she didn't catch.
Then she pushed him onto his back, mindful of the stitches, and straddled him.
"Is this all right?" she said. "Your side..."
"Draconia." It was the first time he'd said her name. It came out of him rough and reverent. "If you stop now I'll actually die. You'll have a dead Auror in your bed. Think of the paperwork."
She laughed, breathless, and got his trousers open and wrapped her hand around him. He was hard and hot and he swore when she stroked him, his head pressing back into her pillow. She rose up on her knees and guided him into her and sank down, slowly, inch by inch, until he was all the way inside, and they both went still.
The bond went quiet. All of it. For the first time since the gala, the fever was simply gone, and in its place was only this: the stretch of him inside her, his hands on her hips, his eyes on hers.
Then she started to move.
She rode him slowly at first, rolling her hips, finding the angle that made her breath catch. His hands slid up her waist to her breasts and she leaned into them. He watched her the whole time, his lips parted, his glasses askew, and she took them off him and set them on the bedside table and he laughed and said "I can't see," and she said "You don't need to," and moved faster. The bed creaked. Her hair spilled over both of them, glowing. He thrust up into her, meeting her, and the sound he made when she clenched around him was the best thing she had ever heard.
"Harry," she said. "Harry, I'm..."
"I know. Go on. I've got you."
She came again, harder, and he followed her with her name breaking in his mouth, his hands gripping her hips, holding her down on him as though he'd never let go.
She woke at dawn, with her cheek on his chest and his heart under her ear. The silver light in her hair had dimmed to a soft glow. She lay there, listening to him breathe, and waited for the bond to settle, the way Strout had promised.
It didn't. It was quieter, but it was still there, a low hum under her skin, waiting.
"It hasn't settled," she said.
"No." His voice was awake. He'd been awake for a while. "Because you haven't accepted it yet. You've just had sex with it."
She lifted her head. He was looking at the ceiling.
"I've been reading," he said. "About Veela. Every night after I left yours. Most of it's rubbish, but there's one book from the French Ministry that says the mate feels it too. Not the fever. Something else. A pull." He turned his head on the pillow and looked at her. "I've felt it since the gala. I didn't tell you, because I didn't want you to feel you owed me anything."
"Since the gala," she repeated.
"Well. No." He smiled, a little crooked, a little sad. "The pull's new, since the gala. The rest of it isn't. It's not new for me, Malfoy. It's just louder."