Chapter 3: Chosen
Draconia did the only reasonable thing. She got dressed, kissed him once, hard, on the mouth, and Disapparated to her mother's house in Wiltshire before he could say another word.
Narcissa was in the conservatory among the white roses, in a grey morning robe, drinking tea. She looked up as her daughter walked in barefoot with her hair glowing and her robes on inside out, and set down her cup, and said, "Ah."
"You knew."
"I knew it was possible. I'd hoped it would pass you by." Narcissa poured a second cup and held it out. "Sit down, darling. You look like a comet."
Draconia didn't sit down. She stood among the roses and told her mother everything: the fever, the contract, the ward, the bed. Narcissa listened without a flicker, which was a gift Draconia had never properly appreciated until that moment.
"And now he says he felt it before," she finished. "Before the blood. Years before. And I don't know what to do with that, Mother. If it's only the bond, I can hate it. I can blame some French grandmother and be furious and have the whole thing be something that happened to me. But if he felt it first, and if I..." She stopped. "If it's real, then I chose it. And then it's mine. And then I can lose it."
Narcissa was quiet for a while. A peacock screamed somewhere out on the lawn.
"Your great-great-grandmother was called Séraphine," she said at last. "She was the Veela. Did you know she married a Malfoy?"
"I assumed. Given the hair."
"Armand Malfoy. A truly unpleasant man, by all accounts. Arrogant, rude, a dreadful dancer. Séraphine refused him for two years. She told everyone in Paris that her blood had chosen him and she'd rather throw herself into the Seine than be ruled by it." Narcissa sipped her tea. "There's a letter of hers, in the family papers. Written on her wedding day. Do you know what it says?"
Draconia shook her head.
"It says, 'The blood does not choose for us, whatever they tell you. It only chooses what the heart is too proud to.'" Narcissa set down her cup. "Your father never believed that. I always rather did."
Draconia stood very still in the roses, with the morning sun on her and her hair shining.
"He's been in love with me," she said slowly, "for years."
"Darling," said Narcissa. "The entire Ministry has known that for years. Why do you think I asked you to the gala?"
Grimmauld Place was a tall, black, narrow house in a row of tall, black, narrow houses, and when Draconia knocked on its door at eleven o'clock that morning, it was Harry who answered it, in a T-shirt and jeans, with bandages showing at the neck. He'd discharged himself from her flat. He looked like he hadn't slept.
"Hi," he said.
"You left my bed."
"You left first. You went to Wiltshire. I thought..." He stopped. "I thought you'd used clause four."
"I don't use clause four. I've never used clause four. I'm keeping it in a drawer." She pushed past him into the hall, past the curtains where the portrait of his godfather's mother hung silent, and turned to face him in the dim light. "Shut the door, Potter."
He shut the door.
She had planned what she'd say, all the way from Wiltshire. A speech, measured and dignified, with clauses. It went out of her head the second she looked at him.
"I chose you," she said instead. "Not the blood. Me. I don't know when. Maybe in my kitchen, when you burned the eggs. Maybe before, years before, and I was too proud to know it, and the blood just said it louder than I could." Her voice shook. "The bond doesn't choose. It only chooses what you're too proud to. My mother has it in writing. I'm choosing you. Harry Potter, the last man in the world I'd ever choose, I choose you. Out loud. On purpose. And I'm not going to stop."
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then something in her chest went quiet. Not the fever going out, as it did when he touched her. Something settling. Like a bird folding its wings. The hum under her skin, which had been with her every waking second since the gala, softened into a warmth that sat low and steady behind her breastbone. Her hair dimmed to a soft, ordinary gold. When she looked down at her hands, they were her own.
Harry was staring at her. "Did it..."
"It settled." She laughed, unsteadily. "It settled, Harry."
He crossed the hall in two strides and kissed her.
They didn't make it upstairs the first time. They barely made it to the drawing room. He kissed her against the doorframe and she pulled his T-shirt off over his head, careful of the bandage, and he got her robes off her in a tangle of silk and swearing, and somehow they ended up on the old faded sofa in front of the cold fireplace with the morning light coming grey and green through the dusty windows.
It was different, this time. Last night had been a question. This was an answer. There was no fever, no hum, nothing in her blood telling her what to want. There was only him, and the plain overwhelming fact that she wanted him more without it.
"Slow," she said, when he moved to kiss down her body. "Please. I want to remember all of it. I want to know it's me."
So he went slow.
He kissed her for a long time first, until she was boneless and breathing hard, his hand stroking up and down her side. Then he worked his way down. He spent a long time on her breasts, licking, sucking gently, until she was arching under him and pulling at his hair. He kissed the inside of each thigh. When he finally put his mouth on her, she cried out and grabbed the arm of the sofa, and he held her hips down and licked her slowly, thoroughly, as though he had all the time in the world and meant to use every minute of it. He made her come like that, once, with her fingers wound in his hair and her heels digging into his back, and then he made her come again with two fingers inside her and his tongue on her clit, until she was shaking and laughing and begging him to stop.
"Inside me," she said. "Now. Please."
He was so careful getting his jeans off that she nearly screamed. Then he was over her, his weight on his forearms, his forehead against hers, and he pushed into her slowly and they both held their breath.
"All right?" he whispered.
"More than all right."
He moved. Long, deep, unhurried strokes, every one of them drawing a sound out of her. She wrapped her legs around his waist and held on. The sofa springs creaked. Somewhere downstairs, Kreacher was muttering to himself. She didn't care. She looked up at Harry, at his messy hair and his green eyes and the faint lines at the corners of them, and she thought, very clearly, I chose this. Mine.
"Say it again," he said, as if he'd heard her. "Please. I need to hear it."
"I choose you." She dragged his mouth down to hers. "I choose you, I choose you."
He came with a groan against her throat, and she followed him a moment later, clenching around him, and in the warm settled place behind her breastbone the bond shone, briefly, like sunlight on water, and then went quiet and content.
They made it upstairs eventually, to his bedroom, where the sheets were clean and the bed was large and nobody screamed from any walls. They spent most of the afternoon there. Some of it sleeping.
Near sunset, Harry's owl arrived with the evening edition of the Prophet. He opened it while she lay with her head on his shoulder, and went quiet, and then started to laugh.
On the front page, under a large moving photograph of Draconia walking out of the Remembrance Gala with her hair streaming silver and every wizard in the Atrium staring after her, the headline read: VEELA HEIRESS BEWITCHES MINISTRY. IS THE CHOSEN ONE NEXT? By Rita Skeeter.
"Want me to have a word with her?" Harry said.
Draconia took the paper. She looked at the photograph for a long time: at herself, furious and glowing; at the crowd of dazed men; and, at the very edge of the frame, at one figure by the fountain, frowning, already setting down his drink, already starting toward her.
"No," she said. "Get it framed."
He laughed into her hair. Then he said, more quietly, "So what happens now? Strout said once it settled, that was it. Bonded. For life. No clause four for that."
Draconia folded the paper and put it on the bedside table, next to his glasses.
"Now," she said, "I'm going to rewrite your contract."
"Again?"
"Clause three," she said, and kissed him. "I'm striking out the word ever."