Fest Fic: Fairies, fathers, and forevers [H/D - NC-17 - 54k]

[bottom_draco_comm]

Title: Fairies, fathers, and forevers
Author: ???
Prompt: PROMPT #42 submitted by themightyflynn
Pairing: Draco /Harry, also featuring Hermione/Ron
Word Count: 54k
Rating: NC-17
Contains (Highlight to view): *A little mystery and a lot of romance. If you are here for the sex only, feel free to skip ahead to the last chapter!* Disclaimer: Harry Potter characters are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended.
Notes: Thank you Sophy, best beta ever! Note to themightyflynn: I hope you won’t feel Draco’s fairy genes have turned him part female. He isn’t, even if he’s different. To think him less of a man for that would be discriminating, much like considering Hagrid to be dumb because he’s a half-giant ;) Concerning gore, I tried to keep it to a minimum, but when there’s use of Sectumsempra it can’t be completely avoided, so I hope you are okay with that! And lastly I hope you’ll agree that anal ejaculation has got nothing to do with scat. Enjoy the read!
Summary: All Harry was looking for that night in Knockturn Alley was a quick hook-up. But then he finds himself saving Draco Malfoy from a Dementor attack and taking him home to take care of his injuries and shattered sense of self. Since Draco’s fairy genes kicked in on his twenty-first birthday, he has been homeless and working as a rent boy. He needs Harry’s help to embrace his new identity as a half-breed and to get his life back on track. And to survive: It turns out that Dementor attack wasn’t a coincidence. Draco’s father can’t live with the fact the Malfoy name was erased from the list of the Sacred Twenty-eight, but he’s not the only danger to Draco’s safety. Harry needs all his skills as an Auror to protect the man who is the love of his life. Yes, his former nemesis not only mixes up Harry’s happy single routine with his impertinence and inability to tidy things away, Draco Malfoy has Harry rethink his attitude on happy ever afters. Suddenly everything being well, having his scar not hurting, and topping another pretty stranger each Saturday night isn’t enough anymore.


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An unusual accumulation of shrieking girls answering to pretentious names, vomiting from too much firewhisky, and wearing flimsy nothings that come at the cost of top-of-the-range tournament brooms.

And a pissing contest for the guys.

“It’s Draco Malfoy’s birthday party,” the girl behind the counter stage-whispers over the music as she hands me my ginger butterbeer. There’s a glimmer in her eyes that isn’t really PC now that being a pureblood, and ancient wizard aristocracy, isn’t supposed to be even a category anymore. Let alone a reason to be drooled over. “Draco Malfoy? Only son of the Malfoys? People say he has just moved to London to start working with the Ministry! And he’ll be twenty-one next Friday, and this is his party!”

Whose else would it be.

A purple-faced Pansy Parkinson pumps her hand down the front of Draco’s trousers, pulls his wand out, and holding it to her throat announces in an ear-splitting, magically magnified screech, “And the winner of the Flying Pumpkin long distance pissing finals is… Draco Lucius Malfoy!”

Who else would it be.

“Why would anyone celebrate their birthday a week early. And why does he have to choose the Flying Pumpkin of all places to throw his upper class orgies,” I grumble, rolling my eyes at Hermione and Ron. The Flying Pumpkin is our usual hang-out, it has been ever since the three of us moved to the capital after college and started working. Over a hundred different flavours of butterbeer, great Muggle music, nice, mixed crowd. Totally not Draco Malfoy’s scene.

I haven’t seen him in three years, not since the Dark Lord went down. All I’ve heard of Draco Malfoy is that he studied at some fancy college, then started managing the family estate for his father when his mother died. Yeah, he basically disappeared from my life after the Battle of Hogwarts. And that was fine by me. Really, I don’t know why he doesn’t keep to his oversized manor in the backwoods and do his partying where I don’t have to see it. The Malfoys are still one of the richest families in the wizarding world. Some things just don’t change it seems, even though we are all supposed to be equal these days. So there’s absolutely no reason for him to apply for a job as an intern with the Department of Magical Development. And even less reason for me to endorse said application. Yeah, it landed on my desk right this morning, with an audio-post-it attached to it asking me to preside over the selection panel. I hate everything admin. But it seems with everyone being equal and stuff, everyone has to do their part when it comes to time sinks like staff recruitment, even a top-ranking Ministry exec and former war hero like me. No class-consciousness here, but I’m an Auror, and I chose to be one because I’m good at duelling. Not to sit in some frigging panel and discuss whether or not one Draco L. Malfoy, born June 5^th 1980, juvenile offender in resocialization, five N.E.W.T.s marked Outstanding, meets our criteria for internships in the Potions Section of the DMD.

I turn to my butterbeer so I don’t have to watch him getting deep-throated by Pansy Parkinson. Her tongue is freakishly long.

“They say all Slytherin girls have tongues like that,” Hermione says, reading my thoughts, and as usual using them as an opportunity to spout some of her limitless wisdom. She didn’t get a permanent position as a professor for maginetics at the London University of Magic at age twenty for nothing.

“Might be because of residual snake genes,” she continues, settling back in her chair. “Okay, alien genes. I’m sure you’ve heard that a considerable portion of the wizarding community is assumed to be carrying gene snaps of non-human creatures. But did you know there’s a theory the Sorting Hat is really a special kind of gene analysis tool? Okay, the Sorting. It’s really old magic, so no one has ever been able to explain conclusively how it works. But contrary to common belief the Sorting might not be based on the hat reading people’s minds, but really on hair samples, and…”

“If it’s snake genes that make someone a Slytherin, then why would they affect just the girls’ tongues, what about the boys’ tongues,” I sullenly interrupt. I’m not really in the mood for one of Hermione’s Muggle style lectures.

“Yeah, Hermione, what about the boys’ tongues, Harry here would want to hear all about those, obviously, the old fairy,” Ron says. He pauses, hoping I’ll take the bait. I don’t; I’m not in the mood for that, either. Also, he’s been giving me shit like that for three whole years now, ever since I broke up with his little sister and came out. He knows perfectly well verbal gay bashing isn’t any more pc in today’s wizarding world than an avid interest in the private affairs of purebloods. But for a Weasley, there has ever only been one rule, and that’s family loyalty. I can live with that.

Across the room, there’s another burst of drunken laughter. Apparently Malfoy has stripped some item of clothing off Pansy Parkinson. Next thing I know, an oversized jewel-encrusted stiletto zooms past my head to crash into a bowl of Sangria on the table right behind me. Everyone around is spattered with wine. A tall wizard in a ruined dress suit who’s looking like the victim of attempted murder gets up from his chair and furiously demands who the fuck is responsible for this shit. Over in the part of the bar that’s occupied by Malfoy’s party mob, half a dozen burly guys, their dress robes in wild disarray, assemble into a sort of fighting formation. I recognize Marcus Flint at the front. He hasn’t changed much since the days he used to send people off to Hogwarts’ hospital wing by shoving them off their brooms as captain of the Slytherin Quidditch team. He’s still looking like he’s half–troll.

“Oh no, this could turn into a full blown bar fight,” Hermione murmurs, “let’s leave.”

“Leave? Now? Are you fucking crazy, woman?” Ron exclaims.

A slender boy gracefully sidesteps the thugs, directing them to fall back with a bored wave of his pale hand. His gelled hair gleams in the torch light like goblin gold.

Draco L. Malfoy.

Oh no, definitely not leaving.

“You there, did you just throw that shoe?” the man in the dress suit demands, glaring at Malfoy, adopting a threatening stance.

Malfoy walks up to him, his trademark arrogant sneer firmly in place. The man stumbles backwards. I don’t understand how Malfoy does it, he isn’t using his wand or anything, but the man retreats, his attitude combusting.

“All of this is just a disgrace,” he mumbles, folding into his chair, gesturing at the mess around.

“I’d have to agree, sir,” Malfoy says. “It truly is a disgrace, all this Muggle stuff that’s around these days. Dress suits. Drinks called Sangria.” He turns his back on the man, dismissing him, and motions at Hermione. “Dentists’ daughters.”

Next to me, Ron flares up like a Chinese Fireball.

Magic isn’t allowed in the Flying Pumpkin. House rules. So Hermione and I are reduced to snatch his wand from his hand and kick his shin, respectively, to remind him he’ll lose his job if he gets arrested for affray yet again. Now that Ginny’s dating again, he’s got a lot of guys to examine and, apparently, give a piece of his mind. It seems he hasn’t grasped yet that as a police officer with the Ministry’s Department of Law Enforcement, he’s supposed to defend the rules, not break them. All he came up with when his own boss asked him why he wrecked Ginny’s new boyfriend’s flat by unleashing her set of Quidditch balls in it was, “Isn’t it legit for people to watch out for their family”, his standard excuse. Anyway, he really can’t afford to Avada Kedavra anyone at the moment.

His face goes as red as his hair with the effort to keep his cool. Malfoy hasn’t spared him even one glance. The fact is, he hasn’t been looking at anyone but me during the whole scene. Now he moves over towards our table, a subtle stutter in his step betraying how drunk he is.

“Behold, it’s the Saviour,” he coos. “With his two funny friends. One a fox half-breed and the other one the daughter of a dentist.”

With a roar of rage, Ron flies from his seat. Discreetly flipping her wrist, Hermione performs a neat covert Half Stunning Spell. Ron slumps back into his chair, his expression transitioning to relaxed cluelessness. Hermione levelly says, “Two dentists.”

“Dentists,” Malfoy repeats, apparently stuck on the term, but still looking only at me. “Forever the third wheel, aren’t you, Potter? How come you still haven’t found The One? How come you can’t even get yourself a date? Doesn’t the Saviour get any offers to get laid these days?”

His gaze is bleary, his looks are corrupted by the puffy redness of skin and dark circles under the eyes that come with too much alcohol and too little sleep.

“Happy birthday, Draco,” I say softly. “And congratulations.” I motion in the direction of the piss bucket. “What’s all the competition. It’s supposed to be a chill night out for you, isn’t it?”

He doesn’t answer, it’s like he’s listening. I don’t know why he’d listen to me, but I’m going to use the opportunity. I get up. When I step up to him, I’m towering over him. He must have stopped growing at seventeen while I didn’t. I’m a head taller than he is and almost twice as broad. It feels good. Right.

“Why are you still trying so hard, Draco. What is it that you need to prove to me,” I say, my voice so low only he can hear me. “Tell me, Draco. What do you want from me?”

He sort of breaks at that moment. His lids come down over his cracked eyes and he turns away, his shoulders twisting. It almost looks like he’s suppressing a sob. He can’t be. He’s just walking away because he’s too drunk to come up with one of his snappy retorts and doesn’t care to lose face.

“Harry, man, you so rule,” Ron yelps. He’s rubbing his eyes, he only just came round from getting half-stupefied. “That was better than when you aced the Dark Lord, man!”

He clinks his beer mug against mine as I sit down again. I grin back at him and take a swig from my mug, but something has happened to that butterbeer, it tastes like the contents of the piss bucket. Putting the mug down, I observe Draco as he weaves his way through the crowded bar, back to his party friends, away from me. I register his pretty build and his special way of moving, ever graceful even though he’s drunk and stumbling. Yeah, and his beautiful white-gold hair. People say he’s of Veela ancestry, and fuck, I know he is. I’ve got to rearrange my junk in my jeans just from watching him in those old-fashioned, tent-like robes from behind. I wish I was wearing one of those myself. I shouldn’t have caved to Hermione’s claims that Muggle fashion is a statement in favour of diversity, plus can do magic setting off people’s assets.

“Harry?”

It’s Hermione.

On no account can she be allowed to read my thoughts now.

“They say he’s part Veela,” I say hurriedly, “Could he be? Aren’t Veela supposed to be female only? What do you say, Hermione?”

She pounces on that like a tarantula on a mouse. Thank Godric for her obsession with scientific facts.

“Okay. Back to witches and wizards who carry non-human genes. The degree to which the condition affects appearance and personality will vary depending on the percentage of the alien genetic heritage, obviously, but in all cases, while some characteristics will be present from birth, the full individual phenotype only manifests itself at the age of maturity which is still twenty-one in the wizarding world. Meaning, “ she takes a gulp of breath, then goes on, “meaning that it’ll be much clearer a week from now whether the general assumption that Draco Malfoy is a Veela gene carrier is actually correct. All we can do for now is speculate. Okay, Veela. Theirs are the only non-human genes that are considered acceptable among purebloods, even desirable. Just as a footnote, the species considered the worst in this context are trolls, for obvious reasons, and fairies, because of their lack of wit and obscure sexuality. Okay, the Malfoys. Narcissa Malfoy’s model looks have often been attributed to Veela ancestry, though it has never been officially confirmed by the family. I’d say her hair matches Veela hair in colour and texture, but let’s not forget she’s the only one of three sisters with this special characteristic. Also, we’ve got to take into consideration that Lucius Malfoy’s hair is very similar to his wife’s, but he’s most definitely not Veela. His hair and air aside, he’s got the appeal of a vacuum cleaner sales rep. The question we’ve got to ask ourselves in the case of Draco Malfoy is, is the Veela hair gene dominant or is it recessive…”

“My own,” Ron says. She throws him an exasperated glance, but he can do it, he can shut her up, just by saying that pet name. As good as.

“To sum things up, Harry,” she says, turning her back on Ron, “It’s too early to pass a final verdict, but yes, male or female, Draco Malfoy might in fact be part-Veela.” And then she adds thoughtfully, “Only then he would be likely to have a pull on all the girls, wouldn’t he.”

“He has, can’t you see?” Ron gestures sullenly at the girls crowding Draco and trying to take advantage of the fact Pansy Parkinson isn’t hanging off his neck for once. She has retrieved her shoe and is busy with trying out cleansing spells. Apparently the last one turned the Sangria on her stiletto into something brownish and smelly.

“Can’t you see,” Ron repeats.

“He doesn’t have a pull on me, and I’m a girl, too, can’t you see?” Hermione snaps, leaving Ron with his mouth hanging open as he gropes for an answer. It’s always a treat to see my best friend getting flattened like this by my best friend forever. Bffs, that’s what Ron has called Hermione and me ever since I told the two of them I’m gay. He insists I call him my pal friend when I introduce him to people these days, not my best friend. Because best friend might be abbreviated to bf, which could be mistaken for meaning boyfriend.

As if I’d ever go for him.

I’m still looking over at where Malfoy just extricated himself from his girl fans to go to the loo. I wonder why he needs to go there, with all the contest pissing he has done. Not that I’ve actually seen him in the act. I wonder if I shouldn’t go take a piss myself and make up for the missed opportunity. And I’ve got to cut that line of thought this second.

When I turn back to the table, I meet Hermione’s gaze. She’s looking at me like I was a bug under her microscope. I don’t like that, I don’t like that at all. And there it comes.

“Harry, does he have a pull on you?”

I take a sip of butterbeer and start coughing. When I’m done, Hermione continues seamlessly, “I mean, with you being, you know, you should feel those Veela vibes, shouldn’t you? It would only be logical.”

It would. It is. Totally. Hell.

Hell, I don’t want to talk about Draco Malfoy and his pull, not with Hermione, anyway, or with Ron. Or anyone.

“I mean, he’s extraordinarily good-looking, from a strictly objective point of view, yeah, Ron, I’m sorry, but I won’t deny the obvious facts, not even for your sake, so, Harry…”

“Don’t you remember anything of our time in Hogwarts?” I say heatedly. “I’ve always hated him, and he hated me right back.”

“Yeah, sure, but it’s a truth universally acknowledged you can strongly dislike a person and still feel sexually attracted to them,” she retorts smoothly, unperturbed.

It’s funny really, all of Ron’s offensive talking hasn’t once made me feel half as uncomfortable as Hermione’s utterly relaxed approach to the fact I like guys. The fact I’m sexually attracted to them.

By Godric, I wish she was just a tiny bit prissy. Like normal girls who don’t use terms like sexually in polite conversation.

Ironically, it’s Ron who saves me.

“Would you stop talking about Harry wanting to stick his wand up Malfoy’s fat Death Eater’s ass for a minute, please,” he growls.

I would have been grateful for a different kind of phrasing, but it does the trick. I'm off the hook. For now.

Draco Malfoy.

He hasn’t changed at all.

He looks exactly like he did when he wasn’t yet eighteen. Like when I last saw him after the Battle of Hogwarts.

I remember it like today. I had killed for the first time in my life, Fred Weasley was lying dead, all those people were dead, people who had been friends, people who were strangers. Or enemies. All dead. God, the bodies everywhere. I ghosted through the remains of what had been the only home I had ever known, literally stumbling over those mutilated corpses, and as I searched the rubble, Dumbledore’s legacy was like on loop in my head, mocking me, tormenting me.

Love is stronger than death. Stronger than death. Death.

Until I saw them in the Front Hall, their fair heads shining in the light the healers had conjured to operate on location. They were hunched on the steps of the big staircase, Lucius Malfoy staring into nothing, Narcissa Malfoy hugging her son like he had returned from the dead. And Draco let her hold him, his eyes closed, his body swaying like under some incapacitating spell. But he was unharmed. He was safe. I went down the stairs, jumping smouldering beams and gaping chasms, I went down to him without anyone noticing, just to make sure. I can’t describe what it did to me to see him preserved from destruction. Ever from that moment of deliverance in the middle of dust and debris and death, I have known.

Well, I guess I’ve known before. Only I didn’t admit to it, not even to myself. But there had been other such moments of truth before. Like in my sixth year at Hogwarts, when he was lying at my feet, cut open and bleeding, bleeding. Severus Snape saved him, but Draco nearly died of that curse. Sectumsempra. It had been me who had cast it; we were having a fight and I used that piece of dark magic on him without knowing what it was. I had nightmares of Draco bleeding to death for weeks after. I told myself it was all the gore, the shock of it. And it was; but also, it was the realization that he could be destroyed, and it made the ground crumble under my feet more than any image of war and murder I had seen, more than when I first learnt the story of my own parents’ death, more even than watching Sirius fall through the Veil.

He was Malfoy, forever scheming, sneering, madly annoying Malfoy. He was supposed to go on being my Hogwarts’ nemesis indefinitely.

But those days when we had been sharing classes and our kids’ conflicts were coming to an end. That sixth year was my last at Hogwarts. We never met up as fellow students again.

I was a complete mess all through the next year when I was drifting through the wilderness with my friends. I couldn’t deal with having to watch Hermione and Ron being a couple, and being cut off from that kind of closeness myself. Of course I didn’t want Draco like that; he hated me, and I hated him. But I hated the sheer physical distance between us even more. It had to be his Veela genes. How could little scraps of Draco Malfoy’s DNA have the power to make me feel this miserable? Make me feel in a way that made absolutely no sense at all? That was the question that kept me awake at night, when the Dark Lord was back and the job at hand was to come up with a plan to conclusively deal with him.

The pathetic truth is, I didn’t focus like, at all. I allowed us to spend weeks and weeks drifting, and completely relied on chance. It’s nothing short of a miracle we brought Voldemort down in the end, it was due to coincidence and pure luck, mostly. I didn’t deserve all the praise I got. I certainly didn’t deserve people dubbing me The Saviour.

Nobody knows I was just dealing with what came up as best I could while what really was on my mind were my totally irrelevant teenage emotions, my hurt, my confusion. My absurd yearning.

When we met at Hogwarts again, for the last time, he was a Death Eater, and ambushing me in the Room of Requirements. Then he nearly died in the Fiend Fire his friend Crabbe had conjured up. Everything Voldemort was wiped from my brain in those moments in the flames. All I knew was I had to get him out of that burning hell alive. And I did. Instead of trying to kill him, because he was a Death Eater and this was the Battle of Hogwarts, I saved his life.

Draco Malfoy has been struggling to get on the wrong side of me since we were both eleven years old. And he transitioned seamlessly from school bully to Death Eater. And I’ve been in love with him throughout. Now he’s a convicted member of a terrorist organisation, walking free on parole, and I still am.

Fuck, I still am.

Why the fuck didn’t he stay away. Why did I have to run into him tonight.

Why can’t I stop thinking about that moment he turned away from me. It was what I had aimed at, it was one more triumph in our apparently never-ending string of clashes.

Why the fuck does it feel like total, utter failure.

September the first. The scheduled date of Draco Malfoy’s job interview.

It’s five minutes to nine, and everyone is there, safe him. Professor Jenkins from the Potions Section, his assistant Sam Kendricks, Susan Bones from the Equal Opportunities Office, and me. We are sitting in Professor Jenkins’ office. It’s located in the basement, next to the main potions lab, and it’s gloomy and dank, thanks to the stinking oil lamps and naked stone walls. I don’t get why potions guys don’t seem to be willing to let go of the dungeon atmosphere of yore. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of charms to give this office modern day heating and to replace the pathetic oil lamps with eye-friendly lighting. Those lamps are a safety hazard, too, judging from Jenkins’ burnt beak of a nose and singed eyebrows. He’s lucky his hair didn’t suffer. It’s a mane that’s incredibly red, contradicting his wrinkly face and watering eyes. As we wait for Malfoy, Jenkins continually puts his wand to his eyelids to soak up the tears. It’s rather disgusting. Why’s Malfoy not showing up. It’s six minutes past. At ten minutes past nine, Sam Kendricks pulls a tiny bottle from his robes, squirts a gel-like substance from it and starts styling his hair. Essentially, the gel turns it from black and straight and glossy to black and super straight and super glossy. Catching my gaze, Kendricks winks at me. Okay, not going to happen. He’s got great hair, and he’s really well-built, but I don’t flirt at work. And he’s a potions guy. Ignoring him, I check my watch. It’s nine fifteen. Turning to Jenkins and Susan, I suggest to newly advertise the position.

Susan agrees emphatically. Malfoy was the only applicant, so obviously the Ministry’s pro-active approach to equality hasn’t been sufficiently communicated, and under-represented groups like half-bloods or witches haven’t been sufficiently encouraged to apply, or so she says. And surely Professor Jenkins as Head of Potions is interested in following today’s rules of good employment practice. Professor Jenkins, who keeps calling Susan Miss Jones, says all he’s interested in as Head of Potions is results, and Mr. Malfoy has got the perfect credentials, and why not simply set a new date for the interview. Susan won’t have that, and they embark on a lengthy discussion that ends with Susan shouting, “It’s B! B! Bones!”, and Jenkins echoing, sounding thoroughly confused, “Bibi Jones?”

And Draco still hasn’t come. At nine twenty-five. I’m mad, really mad he pulled this. It’s just so typical. He’s just a true Malfoy. Arrogant, self-involved, zero consideration for other people. Sends an application, then forgets all about it. He probably never intended to become an intern with the Department of Magical Development. And here we are, four people with loads to do who made time for this, for fucking Draco Lucius Malfoy, waiting for him to grace us with his presence.

And he doesn’t show up.

I’m so mad.

So mad.

I’ll go out tonight, even though it isn't a Saturday. I’ll go find myself a guy, maybe take him home. Just some guy with a nice ass. A random pickup. It’s what I do. If someone asked me about it, say Hermione, I’d tell her it takes the edge off.

Only it doesn’t, really. Not anymore.

I’ve grown sort of restless over the last years. I guess I’m on the lookout for something different. I don’t know what, exactly. It’s not like I had a special kink, apart from a bit of sub/dom. I don’t know. Of course it’s always hot to top a pretty guy, but sometimes, lately, it has been feeling a tiny bit, I don’t know. Redundant?

I’m not complaining about my life or something. Everything is running smoothly. I love my job, the thrill of it, the challenge. The victories. I’ve got great colleagues. I’ve got my friends; Ron and Hermione. We’re still a great team, the three of us. They moved in together a few months back. They’ve got a lot to discuss, couch fabrics and kitchen gadgets and stuff. There’s just so much I can take of that. We still share our Friday night drinks in the Flying Pumpkin, but apart from that, we don’t meet up as often as we used to. Most nights and most weekends, I’m alone in my flat. It’s okay, it gives me time to keep everything in order. I like my personal space shipshape. Growing up in a cupboard might have its drawbacks, but it teaches you to organize your stuff. And to feel a two-bedroom flat is all the luxury you need. I could have moved into Grimmauld Place when I started working with the Ministry, but living in a town house with twenty bedrooms would make anyone feel lonely, wouldn’t it. So I decided to just keep it locked up and rented a flat instead. My place is in a nice neighbourhood, and it’s got all kinds of modern Muggle appliances. There’s even a shared room with washing machines and dryers in the basement of the building, and I swear they work better than any laundry spell. Yeah, Saturday isn’t just Knockturn Alley Night, I’ve also made it Laundry Day.

Yeah, my private life is pretty okay. A little too much routine and monotony, some might say, but I like it that way. I used to be in mortal danger for the better part of my teenage years. I still am during weekdays. Being an Auror is my thing, but it’s not exactly a walk in the park. I know better than anyone there’s worse things than boredom. Or being alone.

And I do have my Y-Pad. It’s the most amazing thing, this small slab of Yttrium-Aluminium that contains every incantation and pop song and porn clip known to mankind; I’d say it’s the most advanced piece of magic that’ll ever be. Anyway, I love doing quests on it.

Yeah, and I know where to go on Saturday night.

None of those guys I pick up on that little street off Knockturn Alley ever made me want them to stay the night. They’re nice enough. Some are fans. Fans have enthusiasm, I like that. They tend to get clingy, though, and nobody likes clingy. The rule is, they’ve got to be gone before breakfast. I like to start my Sunday on my own, just me and my omelette. The fact of the matter is, I’m generally not that keen on other people. From what I’ve seen, sooner or later, other people mean conflict. I get to do a lot of fighting on the job, it’s why I chose the job, but I don’t need it at home. At home, I like my peace and quiet. Like I said. So for me, one-night-stands it is. It’s not like I’d be looking for my own bottom. Like I’d want anybody for keeps.

I do want a little bit more than a blowjob in the street, though. I like to fuck in bed, then cuddle for a bit afterwards. You’d think it’s not that much to ask. But in my experience, about half a minute after the sex is done with, most guys tend to reach for their wands and start doing all kinds of cleaning up. Or worse, they suggest switching.

People seem to consider being versatile as sort of a requirement these days. If you tell them you only top, they accuse you of having issues. Like just because your name is Harry Potter, you’re assuming all the world must want your spunk up their ass. I don’t believe that at all. I just happen to like topping.

And cuddling.

It’s not that much to ask, is it.

It’s not like I’d want my very own personal bottom for keeps.

-

It’s a moonless, starless night. Cold and foggy, too. I gather my robes together for warmth as I’m walking up Knockturn Alley, but it doesn’t help much. Perhaps I shouldn’t have gone out tonight after all. I was horny when I left my flat, real horny, but there’s not much left of the ten inches I got from those clips on bigwands.cum. The chill is creeping up my spine. Knockturn Alley looks gloomier than ever. I light some of the decrepit lanterns. The yellowish light gives the street and its crooked buildings a creepy glow. With every step I take, I feel more lonely. Suddenly I realize my whole existence is pointless.

And that’s when I understand.

Dementors should be locked up in their cages at Azkaban, never to be allowed to roam the land again. But there must have been a breakout, at least one of those deadly creatures must be right around the corner, or lurk in the black house entrance across the street, or...

There’s a bone-rattling scream. Drawing my wand, I charge forward, following the curve of the street, firing off lighting spells as I go. And there it is, a big, looming shadow above, blacking out the lantern I just lit. Below, a man is crouching in the street, and as the Dementor slowly descends on him, I can see his face in the flickering yellow light.

I recognize him instantly, and my voice dies in my throat with shock.

Draco. Oh my God, it’s Draco.

“Expecto Patronum,” he calls out weakly. A silvery wisp emerges from the tip of his wand, like of a candle going out; that’s all. Then the wand clatters onto the cobblestones. The Dementor comes swooping down. I fight for my voice. I’ve got to cast my Patronus, I’ve got to. I can’t let this happen. Draco losing his soul. Draco looking at me with his spirit gone. I fight the vision, because I know it’s what’s blocking me. But I can’t do it; it’s the first time in my life I can’t spell out the Patronus charm. As I watch in horror, the black creature hovers above its victim on the ground. It’s stalling. Somehow it’s being kept at bay. That never happens. Then the Dementor breaks through whatever barrier held it back. It seizes Draco’s body, it’s going to suck his soul from him. Draco’s head falls back in submission, and that is my image for my Patronus charm. I don’t hear myself intone the words over the roar in my ears, but I see my stag burst from my wand at last. Glittering and so gigantic it dwarfs the houses lining the street, it charges at the Dementor and douses it in seconds.

In an instant, the alley is back to its regular, everyday gloom. A mouse scurries past me, there’s the noise of a cart clattering over the pavement in the distance.

Draco is lying motionless. I rush to his side, kneeling down next to him on the cold ground. My hands shaking, I cradle his head in my palm and say his name. He doesn’t react; he’s unconscious. There’s blood glistening on my fingers, on the cobblestones, in his hair. He must have smashed his head when the Dementor let go of him. Following textbook first aid routine, I bend over him and tune my senses to his breathing. Five seconds, seven, ten. Then I allow myself to decide the warm draught that’s feebly caressing my cheek is real. He’s breathing like he’s asleep. That means his soul is safe. He’s safe. He hurt his head, he’s probably got a concussion, but the Dementor didn’t get to him.

I sit back on my haunches, forcing my own ragged breathing back under control. For the first time, I really look at him.

And that is when I notice the change.

His body is emaciated, instead of his habitual robes he’s wearing torn jeans and a t-shirt that’s way too tight, and his hair is a mat of filthy strands. But that’s not what has me stare at him in stunned disbelief. His features are altered. There’s a subtle but unmistakable change in his bone structure. Even with all the smut, I can see his face has gone from good-looking to ethereal. All the lines and angles are finer, more delicate.

And his ears are pointy.

He turned twenty-one three months ago, and as I’m looking at his filthy, blood-smeared, beautiful face, I can tell beyond doubt he’s a half-breed.

Only his non-human ancestry isn’t Veela.

It’s fairy.

I Apparate us home.

I put him on the couch in the living room, carefully, like he was made of glass, then bend over him to check his vitals again. He’s still out from hitting his head on the stony street. The blood has soaked his hair, and his grey shirt front, too. A stack of little cards slips from the chest-pocket of his shirt. They’re stained with blood, but I can still see there’s a little monthly planner printed on them, and the text scrolling over it.

Want something different? Select a free slot and Summon Fairyboy.

He can do the Protean Charm, I remember that from the old days. God, he’s been selling himself. To strangers who’d select a free slot in his virtual diary. It ties my stomach into knots. Fairyboy. God. So that’s what Hermione meant by obscure sexuality. That’s what his fairy genes did to him. His Change left him a whore.

He’s shifting, groaning with pain, still unconscious. Shit, I’ve got to focus. As I take up his wrist to feel his pulse, I see he isn’t wearing the Dark Mark. His pulse is a flutter under my fingers. He’s groaning again, feebly trying to push me away. There’s no time to think about anything; I’ve got to concentrate on what’s to be done. Stabilize his heart rate. Try to get him conscious. Treat his wound.

I apply a pulse-balancing charm, then put a pillow under his head. Leaving my hand on his brow, I say his name. And he opens his eyes and looks at me. His eyes are big, much bigger than I remember, and they are the clearest of greys. It’s like a distorting veil has fallen away from them, leaving no attitude, no disguise. Just that intangible shine that Dementor had come to take from him.

If he had looked at me like this once, only once in all the years I’ve known him, he wouldn’t be lying here, injured and soiled in ways much worse than lice and grime. I would have known it’s my duty to protect him, and I would have prevented this.

Oh Godric help me, he’s got the most beautiful eyes.

-

He doesn’t say anything. I’m not sure he has regained full orientation. I explain to him he’s in my flat, and that I’m going to patch him up, and that everything is going to be fine. For starters, I cast a simple bathing spell over him that doesn’t require any stripping. While the spell works on him, dissolving the filth and dried blood, his lids close again. I get him dry with a towelling charm, then start stitching up the wound at the back of his head. It takes me twenty minutes. It should be done with a flick of the wand, but then I’m not a trained healer. It’s a good thing he’s out again so he doesn’t flinch or get restless. Finally I get my first aid kit from the bathroom to put some iodine on the stitches and the open scratches on his elbows. I know there are all kinds of fancy disinfecting potions, but they tend to irritate the skin, and I’ve found a spray from the Muggle drugstore works just as well. And simple adhesives aren’t half bad, either. I put one on each of his elbows. When I check him for anything else that might need my attention, I see there’s fresh blood stains on his shirt front. There must be a wound under there that needs dealing with, and I’ll have to get his shirt off him for that. I grab the hem and pull it upwards, but the shirt doesn’t budge.

“I hexed that to my body. Secunda Cutis,” he says, completely startling me. He’s awake. Somehow it’s a whole different deal to be performing medical ministrations on him with him talking to me. I clear my throat.

“I need to have a look at your chest. Would you mind taking your shirt off?”

Feeling like a john, I offer him my wand, half expecting him to refuse. But he nods and takes it. The moment he does, I realize I just violated the one central rule any Auror learns on day one; never, ever give your wand away. Fairy beauty or not, he’s still Draco Malfoy. Why would I inherently trust him like this, so far as to forget my most basic training? We’ve been hurling curses at each other duelling countless times, and I know he can be counted on making use of any breach in an opponent’s guard. But before I can freak out, or try to incapacitate him with a wrestling move, he has written a tiny circle into the air with my wand and let it fly back into my hand. His shirt has split open across his chest. It’s smooth, delicately sculpted perfection, or it would be, if it weren’t for a gaping ten inches cut two hand breadths below the collarbone. Pulling myself together, I suck the blood into the tip of my wand so I can inspect the wound. It’s clean, no torn edges. This should be easy, this doesn’t require any stitches, just a simple Laesio Connexio spell. But when I say the words, nothing happens.

“You'd have to use Vulnera Sanentur on that. I’ve been trying to do it myself, but it never really worked. The slash always reopens. Can you do Vulnera Sanentur?”

I’m not a trained healer, but actually, I can. I was looking on when Snape performed that healing spell on Draco, saving his life, and it’s seared into my memory.

“Who did this to you?” I ask with my throat almost too tight to speak. Another trickle of blood pulses from the vile wound. His gaze flickers like he’s about to faint again. Shit. Shit. Quickly, I tap him with my wand, saying the one spell that counteracts Sectumsempra; Vulnera Sanentur. And the injury heals as I’m looking on, holding my breath and silently thanking whatever gods may be for the power of magic.

Only when I’m cleaning him up again, I notice his left nipple is missing. I must have made some sound, because he lifts his head and looks down his chest, following my gaze.

“Oh, that,” he says. “That’s ancient. Sixth year at Hogwarts. Remember?”

“I cut off a piece of your chest when I cursed you with Sectumsempra?”

“A piece of my heart, too.”

My own heart skips a beat at that.

“I did permanent damage to your heart?”

He laughs like I made a joke.

“Seriously, Draco, is it true? You lost a piece of your heart back then?”

He shrugs with a lopsided smile.

“Quidditch was never quite the same. I get that arrhythmia thing under stress. It’s why I quit playing that year. Don’t look like that. You didn’t know it was dark magic.”

He puts his hand to my forearm. His fingers are cold, testifying to how badly he’s still suffering from shock and loss of blood.

“And also, I guess I sort of had it coming,” he says, his voice so weak I can hardly hear the words anymore. He smirks at me, for a second totally looking like the Draco I used to know and hate, then passes out again.

-

When I walk into the living room the next morning, he’s up, apparently fully recovered. Too far recovered, as a matter of fact. The moment he sees me, he seizes something from the table, steps up to me and thrusts it in my face. It’s a small stack of cards. Fairyboy’s cards.

“So you searched me? Still nosy, are we, Potter? So now you know. I’m for sale. You didn’t have to do the saviour act to get me into your flat. You could simply have booked a free slot on my calendar, then Summoned me at the appointed time!”

“I hope you’ve at least had the sense to use protection,” I hiss back. I don’t know what I hate more, the fact he’s been giving his body away for money, or his toxic manner. Looks like he’s back to being the obnoxious, madly infuriating Malfoy I remember.

He laughs.

“What, you afraid of infection? I get it, it would be such a shame if Harry Potter, Saviour and Super-Auror, would be brought down by catching some germ from a half-breed street boy. Yeah, I’d say sorry for soiling you with my dirty blood, but then I never asked you to touch me, did I.”

His voice wavers.

I was wrong. He’s not the Malfoy I remember. Perhaps he never was.

He sounds so vulnerable that I can see right through him. He’s struggling to hold on to the one thing he got left, his sarcasm. He’s trying to get me to play the old game. But I won’t do that.

“I can’t catch anything, Aurors get vaccinated against just about everything,” I say pleasantly.

“Fine,” he says, deflated.

“And you don’t have to thank me for saving you.”

“I never asked you to do that, either,” he whispers.

Is he telling me he wanted the Dementor to take his soul?

“I didn’t want that thing to kiss me,” he says with a flicker of his former sparkle. “I’m not suicidal. And just since you asked, I’d say I know more about STD protection potions than you do, Potter. You always sucked at Potions. You should be worried about your own health and safety if Knockturn Alley is your scene.”

Now he’s done it, he got to me.

“It’s none of your business what’s my scene, Malfoy,” I bark. “And suicidal or not, letting total strangers Summon you to random places is crazy dangerous! So just so you know, your silly calendar went offline!”

“What’s offline,” he asks, honestly puzzled. Godric, so he’s still this total baby when it comes to the Muggle world, he isn’t even familiar with common adopted Muggle terms.

“I won’t have any random jerk using those cards to Summon you, so I deactivated your calendar,” I say, waiting for him to tell me to fuck off. But he just looks at me with a weird expression. Then he flops down onto the couch. With his belligerent attitude gone, his fatigue suddenly shows again.

His changed face is so gaunt and pale, and he has really thinned. Yeah, he looks like he’s suffering from some sickness, and has been for a while. Maybe it’s because of that Sectumsempra cut in his chest he didn’t get treated. But he didn’t have that wound the night of his party at the Flying Pumpkin, and he had looked worn out already then. Come to think of it, he has had this drained, sapped look since our sixth year at Hogwarts. Suddenly I feel certain it's got nothing to do with a habit of heavy partying. What if this is because I damaged his heart with Sectumsempra?

“Are you okay?” I blurt out, unable to hide my worry. “I get it you’ve been taking care of yourself when you... with the guys who you...” I clear my throat and try again. “I’m just wondering if you’ve been sick since I cursed you. You really don’t look that great.”

“Thanks,” he says.

“I mean...”

He puts his hands up with a crooked, defiant grin, stopping me.

“It’s the Change, okay? It’s the Change that’s ruined my looks.” He’s looking around. “Where’s my wand?”

I step up to the mahogany cabinet in the corner. It’s too large for a two-bedroom London flat, but it’s from Grimmauld Place and reminds me of Sirius. And also, its doors and drawers only open to its rightful owner, so it’s effectively a safe. I take Draco’s wand out of the top left drawer. His real wand.

Ten inches of hawthorn and a core of unicorn hair.

The outside made of one of the most aggressively spiky plants on the planet, the inside the essence of innocence.

I’ve thought a lot about Draco’s wand last night. Yeah, and Draco.

“Here you go,” I say, holding it out for him. His big eyes have grown huge. They’re resting on his wand with wonder and longing. I know what he’s feeling; I know what it’s like to get your real wand back.

“Come on, take it. I kept it for you.”

He looks up at me.

“I’m not allowed to use it. I’m banned from carrying a wand for life. It’s part of every Death Eater’s sentence.”

“Then take care no one sees you use it.”

I toss him the wand, and he catches it with the instinctive grace of the born Seeker. When he tentatively waves it in a half circle above his head, a shower of sparkles rains from its tip. His happy laugh hits me right in the heart.

“You’re aware you’ve just illegally armed a convicted Death Eater. You’re a weird Auror, Potter.”

“You don’t wear the Dark Mark. You’re a weird Death Eater, Malfoy.”

“I was found guilty of being one,” he says, sounding defiant.

“And how did that happen.”

“You know how it happened. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence. And I didn’t plead innocence.”

Oh my God. He was innocent. He is. My head’s a whirl. I knew it. I knew it. Or I should have. I try to remember everything I ever actually saw him do, to align the facts, make new sense of the seven years I knew him and settled for the easy way of dealing with the impact he had on me; blind hatred. I can’t think straight. All I know is that I should have seen it. He’s innocent.

And he never defended himself.

“Why not. Why not, Draco.”

He’s silent, but the answer is in the tilt of his head.

Malfoy pride.

“You could appeal to the High Court, fight to have your sentence revoked,” I croak.

“You don’t believe I was a Death Eater?” He looks at me in that weird, intense way again. “Everyone else does,” he adds, like he’s trying to convince me he’s guilty after all. I just shake my head.

“You should fight, really, you should. Go to court, Draco.”

He shrugs.

“Is it because you’ve fallen out of money?”

His smirk is back.

“I’ve been trying to hide in the gutter these last three months. I’ve been running about with that silly slash in my chest because I couldn’t stomach the idea of stepping into a healer’s office and sit down in a waiting room full of people. I had a job interview at the Potions Section of the Department of Magical Development yesterday, and I hadn’t got the nerve to show up and face that committee. As a Death Eater appealing to the High Court, I’d end up on telewizard. So, no, Harry. It’s not because I’ve fallen out of money. I wouldn’t go to court if you paid me for it, looking like this.”

He gestures at his exquisite head, and I know what he means. His new, exotic cheekbones and jaw line, the big eyes that mark him as a fairy half-breed.

“Sorry, Harry. You’ll have to accept you’re going against the rules if you let me keep this.”

His eyes are on his wand again as he weighs it in his hand, bends it, strokes it. Reverently. Lovingly.

I busy myself with the cabinet drawer, pretending it’s jammed.

“I’ve broken rules before. I like to think it’s what makes me a Gryffindor. And there’s no way I’ll let you run into another Dementor with no proper means of defending yourself. It’s obvious that wand you were using doesn’t work for you.”

“That’s my mother’s wand. I never managed to make it really understand me. But it’s not her wand that fucked up last night. It was me. I’ve never been able to cast a Patronus.”

I turn around to him.

“What, you still can’t do it? You’ve never cast a Patronus?”

He shrugs, looking mortified.

“You’ve got to work on that, Draco.”

“Thanks for the good advice, Auror.”

It’s funny how his smirk doesn’t irk me.

“Seriously, Draco. I could teach you.”

He carefully places his wand on the couch table, next to the first aid kit I forgot to repack and put back into the bathroom last night.

“I don’t know if that’s actually true. The Patronus Charm isn’t so much about the exact right intonation or movement of the wrist, is it. It’s about drawing on something that you have inside yourself. Something you were given at some point in your life. Like your stag. It’s your father who gave you your Patronus. That’s why you had the power to fight that Dementor last night, while I... while I...”

A shiver runs through him, and I know he’s reliving that moment when the Dementor was upon him. He has wrapped his arms around himself, hugging himself. Our eyes meet.

“Thank you,” he says hoarsely.

There’s a long pause, laden with those two words and with what has changed between us.

“How did it happen, Draco.”

He shakes his head.

“I don’t know. I was in my usual spot, and suddenly that Dementor was up on that roof...”

“No, I mean how... how did you end up in that place. Doing what you did.”

This time the pause is way longer.

“When my father saw me after the Change, he... let’s say he really didn’t like it. So I came back to London to live in the streets. I survived. I didn’t care much how.”

He’s talking in the past tense. It gives me hope. He won’t go back to his usual spot in Knockturn Alley. Not if he’s talking in the past tense. He can’t go back to... to...

“All I ever did was blowjobs,” he says. Then he excuses himself to go take a shower.

He gave blowjobs to tricks in the streets, and for three whole months. It’s not exactly the kind of thing anyone would want to hear from their love interest. But he used the past tense, again.

And all he ever did was blowjobs.

When I pack up my first aid kit, I almost feel like singing.

We are sitting in my tiny kitchen, having breakfast. I’ve never had breakfast with anyone who spent the night in my flat before. I’m having my usual ham and eggs. All he asked for was tea and toast, and a jar of honey. He has put honey onto the toast and into his tea, big slobs of it. As he’s stirring the mess in his cup, and I’m wiping some honey smear off the table top, I can’t stop throwing surreptitious glances at him. I offered to lend him some clothes, but he only accepted the sweat pants and insisted on wearing his hexed shirt again. The tear across the chest is gone; the grey fabric is hugging his upper body like a second skin. It does look nice, unlawfully sexy as a matter of fact, but that’s obviously not the reason he won’t change out of that shirt. At least not the only one. He catches my eyes and tilts his head.

“What.”

“What’s with the shirt,” I ask. He stops smiling. Then he puts his dripping spoon on the table, exactly on the spot I’ve just wiped clean, and draws his wand. Tapping the shirt, he murmurs something. It rides up his stomach and chest. After a second’s hesitation, he pulls the shirt over his head and throws it to the side. Staring at his hairless calendar boy chest, I swallow and wait, not knowing for what. He bends his head and flexes his shoulders.

“Don’t freak out,” he whispers. Something glistening catches the light behind his neck, then unfolds on both sides of him, framing his narrow shape.

And I understand the reason why he hexed that shirt to his body.

He’s got wings.

Not quite large enough to serve him to fly, but real wings. A transparent, silvery green, they sprout from his shoulder blades like those of a giant butterfly, and all I can think is how they set off his fair skin and golden hair to perfection.

I need to swallow again, but my throat has gone too dry to do it.

He’s observing me from under his fringes.

“You’re not going to say anything?” he asks hoarsely.

You are so beautiful I want to sit and look at you the whole day. No, make love to you till the end of eternity. Oh my God, I want you, I want you more than I ever wanted anything, ever. I won’t live if I can’t have you.

“I told you not to freak out,” he says, his voice trembling.

“I’m not freaking out,” I lie. “Why would I? You’re part-fairy, so you grew wings. It’s not that unusual.”

“It’s not?”

I shrug. The truth is, I’ve got no way of knowing what’s unusual and what’s not with someone who’s part-fairy. I’ve never known anyone with fairy genes. The truth is, I’m pretty sure he’s unique.

But it seems he likes my answer. He shrugs, too, giving me that lop-sided smirk of his.

“Yeah, well. Obviously I don’t care for just anyone to see that.”

He gestures over his shoulder, then bends to pick up his shirt from the floor, folding the wings to his back again. The delicate tissue perfectly aligns with the contours of his body.

“Having mixed blood is not supposed to be a problem these days,” I say.

“Maybe it isn’t. But not everyone can be expected to be as tolerant and open-minded as Harry the Saviour Potter when it comes to misfits and monstrosities.”

I don’t trust myself to say anything to that, because he mustn’t know my true feelings. He mustn’t know that I couldn’t be more desperately in love with him if he had changed into full Veela. So I keep silent. He puts the shirt back on, looking like a perfectly regular if over-the-top beautiful model again. Then he picks up his spoon to stir his tea in that careless way of his some more. A few droplets of honey land on the floor without him noticing. Kitchen cleaning day is Thursday, normally. That would be the day after tomorrow. Looks like I’m going to have to reschedule.

After breakfast he says thanks again for everything, and he’ll be on his way. I didn’t even think about the possibility he’d be leaving. And I can’t allow him to go; he’s so tired he can hardly keep his eyes open. But I can sense I mustn’t push. Carefully, cunningly, like he was one of the tiny woodland fairies that share his genes and are close to impossible to capture, I ask him to stay for a couple of days, just till he has recovered from everything. Maybe got some ideas where he wants to go. I tell him he can sleep in the second bedroom. It’s little more than a closet, but there’s a camp bed in there, and he can shut the door. And he can use my Y-pad to pass the time, or watch telewizard.

“I got twenty channels, even a couple of Muggle channels.”

“What, Muggles have telewizard, too?”

“It’s similar. They call it television, and they need a device for it.”

“A device?”

“The shows appear on a screen.”

He doesn’t seem to be able to envision that.

“Anyway, check out their programme. Watch their news. Or check out the Muggle internet. You can access it via the Y-pad. You’ll learn a lot about what’s going on in the Muggle world. It’s important.”

“How can it be important what’s going on in the Muggle world,” he says, having no idea how blasé he sounds.

“The worlds aren’t as divided as they used to be, Draco. Muggle culture is everywhere. Technology, too. We’re having classes on Muggle weaponry and electronic communication and computer surveillance in the Auror Department. Voldemort’s Death Eaters relied on nothing but magic in fights, for reasons of ideology I assume, but more and more of today’s wizard terrorists use Muggle explosives or firearms. I’m taking Muggle combat sports classes, too…”

He sits down on the couch, obviously having trouble to keep his lids open. Okay, not the time for filling him in on my job. He definitely needs to rest. So I cut short my lecture and tell him to just watch what he likes. I’m in the middle of explaining how to switch channels in my flat, which is quite a tricky business, when he falls asleep.

When I leave to go for work, I don’t lock the front door. But I make it blend in with the walls with a Porta Muro hex, effectively making my flat invisible. Nobody will be able to disturb him like this. Or to harm him.

Last night’s Dementor attack can’t have been anything else but coincidence, but I don’t seem to be able to get rid of that feeling that he needs to be kept safe.

-

I spend the better part of the day in my office, reading. It’s not at all uncommon for me to spend a workday at my desk in the Ministry. Contrary to what school kids might be imagining, being an Auror doesn’t mean you’re fighting all day. The fighting is five percent of it, if that. The rest is investigating crime scenes, interrogating suspects, and general research. And keeping fit. I spend half my days in the gym. I know that Muggles spend a lot of money on gym memberships, and I’m getting paid for working out. So that’s pretty cool.

I don’t really have a boss. Technically, the Minister of Magic is my superior, but he never interferes with what I do. Nobody would dream of controlling my working hours or anything like that. One of the perks of being Harry Potter.

And like every Auror in the Department, I’ve got my own Y-Mac in my office. Mac is short for Ministry-Accredited Research Tool, meaning I’ve got full access to every bit of information stored in the Ministry’s internal data pool, the internet. It’s being managed by the Y-Mac Department, and there’s everything in there from the latest findings in ongoing investigations to scientific articles of general interest to simple protocols of daily routines.

So the first thing I do on coming into the office is boot up my Y-Mac and check Azkaban’s data log. I filed a report to the Ministry late last night, told them I sighted a Dementor on the loose in Knockturn Alley. I didn’t mention Draco’s name or the attack on him. Media exposure is the last thing he wants. It’s also the last thing the management of Azkaban wants in such cases, or the Ministry. The entry in the prison log about last night is very short. It only says a Dementor broke out of a cage due to a technical defect at a door lock. The Dementor returned before the morning. No known victims. The lock was repaired, all other locks were checked and found to be in order. That’s all they write.

It doesn’t add up. Dementors are kept in cages in groups of ten to twelve. They are swarm creatures. So if there actually was a technical defect, it would have been more than likely that all Dementors in the cage would have escaped, not just one. Perhaps they did, perhaps this is the Ministry trying to play down a major incident of negligence on the part of the prison management. For now I’ve got no way of finding out. I decide to let the matter rest till later. There’s something else I need to look into.

I never took a particular interest in Care of Magical Creatures back in Hogwarts, and as far as I remember, fairies never came up in class. The bottom-line being, I don’t know anything about their special characteristics, biology, or history.

Or sexuality.

For starters, I open the Mac-version of Magical Creatures in Alphabetical Order.

Fairies is the first entry under the letter F.

–

When you look through the literature on fairies, you’ll soon come to realize there’s a lot of projection. Fairies are being described as superficial and vain, as spending whole days grooming, and making a fuss when they get their wings removed. It’s being done for beauty potions. Apparently there’s not just the notorious classic, Beautification Potion, but all kinds of products. Like fairy-wing facials. They are advertised as being highly effective, and sell at astronomical prices.

And then there’s Girding Potion. Used by athletes, but mostly by those who need help to get it up.

Yeah, this is why I don’t like potions guys. It’s just what they do, seeing everything as a potential ingredient. Using living things. Chopping them up and grinding the parts so some ugly old hag can change into a chick magnet, or cover his pimples with permanent glitter make-up.

Or have sex seven times in two hours.

Almost every article on fairies and fairy wing potions I come across contains the same sentence, stating the amputation doesn’t kill the fairy. Whether that’s true or not, the fact remains that cutting off any creature’s wings is a mutilation. How can such cruelties be going on on an everyday basis, and I didn’t even know about it. Or cared to know.

I guess I always considered fairies to be animals. But in Magical Creatures in Alphabetical Order, they say that today’s woodland fairies really are descendants of the ancient human-like race of elves and fairy-elves, just diminished in size and intellectual capacity.

There’s only one reference to sex in the article. It says that the fairy-elves of yore were the sexual counterparts of the elves, although both fairy-elves and elves were all male.

That’s exactly the kind of information I was looking for, but it’s all there is. One frigging sentence.

Shit. Looks like I’ll have to face the limits of the internet and ask a flesh-and-blood expert after all.

-

“What exactly did you mean by obscure sexuality.”

“You know,” Hermione replies, sipping at her soy margarine beer.

“I don’t.”

“For one thing, fairies are gay...”

“And that’s obscure.”

“You want to hear me out or not.”

I indicate to her to go on, taking a swig of my own bacon butterbeer. It’s really good, in spite of the strong flavour. Certainly better than that vegan stuff Hermione had me buy her. We are sitting at our usual table in the Flying Pumpkin, although it’s a Tuesday. There’s just the two of us. I called her in the afternoon and invited her to join me for a drink after work. She said she’d be thrilled to see me, and she sounded like she really was. Ron is having his weekly telewizard evening with his pals. They meet up every Tuesday at Ron’s and Hermione’s place to watch the week’s games of the National Quidditch League. It’s always useful to know people’s routines, not only when it comes to terrorist hunting.

“Okay. Fairy sex,” Hermione says. “To get the full picture, we’ll have to go back to the days of Middle Earth, to the ancestors of today’s woodland fairies, the elves and fairy-elves. They were of one and the same race, and they looked like humans. Both male, with the fairy-elves playing the female part in the sexual relationship. Meaning they could be impregnated by the elves.”

“Okay. And how would that work.”

“The original sources about Middle Earth aren’t exactly explicit when it comes to sex. That’s why I used the term obscure in the context. But maginetical research has answered a number of questions in recent years. Namely Portuba Muff has done some excellent work in the field.”

“Portuba Muff? I haven’t come across that name on the internet.”

She smiles condescendingly.

“Not every scientific publication is on the internet, Harry. There’s still a lot of stuff that can only be found in libraries. Okay. Back to Portuba Muff. Her data show that the fairy-elves of Middle Earth were closely related to insects. They had wings and were able to lay eggs. Their respiratory system was probably similar to that of insects, too. In every other respect, fairy-elves shared the physique of the elves and of human males, including the genitalia.”

“What happened, why did the fairy-elves disappear.”

“Over time, the elves started mating with human women. Abandoned by their elven partners, fairy-elves were left to have sex among themselves, which led to genetic degeneration over the centuries. The result are the woodland fairies we know today. As you know, they are no more than half a foot in size, and their minds have developed back to an animal-like state.”

“And the fairy-elves died out.”

Hermione nods.

“The only human-like carriers of fairy genes today would be wizards who are part-fairy. But they are extremely rare. Fairy-elves had been kind of scarce in number compared to elves even in the days of Middle Earth, but women who mate with part-elves today seem to almost never give birth to a part-fairy child. As a rule, their children are part-elf. We don’t have any exact data though. Portuba Muff says the biggest problem for statistics is the effect of infanticide. It shrouds the true numbers.”

“Infanticide?”

“Latin for child killing, Harry. You know a part-fairy witch or wizard would rank among the least respected of the known half-breeds, so it’s only natural for parents to try to get rid of such a child.”

“Natural.”

“Don’t look at me like that, Harry. All I’m saying is, people who set great store by public opinion won’t want to raise a part-fairy child, and they won’t commit open murder, either, ergo they might be tempted to resort to suffocate a baby who shows early symptoms, then make it look like SIDS or something. It’s not like I’d endorse that kind of thing. It’s obviously barbaric, and incompatible with modern society’s stance on diversity and tolerance. I’m just giving you the facts. Like you asked.”

“Well, thank you, I guess.”

“You’re welcome.”

She doesn’t ask me why I wanted to know all this. That’s the personal charm of Hermione; to her, simple thirst for knowledge is sufficient reason for wanting to learn about things, even about something as particular as the love life of fairies and their extinct forefathers.

I drink up my beer, then suggest we head to the apparition lot outside and go home.

I’ve heard enough for today.

When I come back home and make the door to my flat reappear, I feel like someone about to open a secret chest to check on a treasure he’s keeping hidden from the world. It gives me such a thrill it scares me.

He’s in the kitchen, waiting for me. He has made himself an omelette for dinner judging from the dirty pan and dishes strewn about everywhere. The hexed shirt is gone; he has put on one of the Muggle tank tops I wear to the gym instead. And he has cropped his hair down to the skull. I’m not being graced with an explanation; all I get when I look at him for a second too long is his regular crooked grin. He’s clearly happy to see me.

“I’m afraid I used a couple too many eggs, so there’s some left-overs. I’ve put the bowl in the cold cabinet.”

He’s talking about the fridge, and he used up all the eggs. I meant to use those eggs for my Sunday morning omelette, and it looks like he doesn’t know the first thing about household cleaning routines. But he as good as prepared dinner for me.

I mustn’t like this so much. I mustn’t want to keep him around so much, because staying in my flat is not in his best interest. So, when I’ve reheated the omelette and sat down at the table opposite him, I force myself to say it.

“You thought about what you’ll do?”

“I’ve had some ideas, but... well.”

“Yeah?”

“All of them involve me leaving this flat.”

“And?” I ask, although I know what he means.

“People will see me, that’s what.”

“Draco. Listen. I understand it’s not easy, but you’ll have to come out eventually. You’ll want to have a job. A life. You can’t hide in here forever.”

“You throwing me out?”

He knows I’m not going to do that.

“Think positive. You don’t have to make a big announcement. Just take up a job, and wait what happens. It’s not going to be as bad as you imagine. Why don’t you start by asking for a new date for that interview with the Department of Magical Development.”

He shakes his head, making the lamp light reflect against the surfaces of the kitchen cabinets. Cropped short, his hair has even more lustre than before. I know why he cut it, it’s the only thing fairy about him that he can lose. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that shorn like this, with his hair a shine of satiny white gold highlighting the contours of his head, he’s looking more delicate than ever. More fairy than ever.

He’s just so crazy beautiful.

If only I had the nerve to tell him.

“I’m afraid to even go out during the day,” he says miserably. “I’d rather get locked up in Azkaban than take a stroll down Diagon Alley. How am I supposed to survive that interview? The whole point of it is for me to be judged, and those guys will only have to take one look at my frigging face to know I’m part-fairy!”

“It’s not going to matter,” I say firmly. “They are supposed to not pay any attention to things like race. Modern good employment practice and so on.”

“I can’t face it.”

“You can. And I know you are meant to have a great career. Hell, Draco, it’s what you want, I know it is! You’re a fucking Slytherin, you always wanted to show people what you can do! You’ve always lived to win! You used to chant that song, what was it… About Slytherins who are meant to go to the top…”

I can’t remember that silly chant that used to drive me up the walls, and it doesn’t really matter, obviously.

“Draco. You giving up, that’s probably exactly what your father hoped you’d do when he let you walk away with nothing. Show him he hasn’t defeated you!”

“Sometimes I wish he had,” he says darkly, tracing the invisible scar of the healed slash under his collarbone with his thumb.

“What do you mean?”

“I never wanted to become what I am now,” he says, looking out the black window as if he hadn’t heard me. “I made this giant effort to hold on to my old life. Like if I just kept doing what I’d always done, it wouldn’t happen in the end.” He meets my gaze. “The Change.”

He’s talking about his Change to me. This is big.

“You knew you’d ... transform like you did?” I ask cautiously.

“Not like that. When the wings came out that night...” He shakes his head like someone trying to flee from a nightmare. “But I knew something was going to happen to me, and that it wouldn’t be good. I’ve known something was off with me for years. I’ve always had this freakishly soft hair, you know. Always needed to put tons of product in to hide it. And then later, when everybody grew a fuzz in the face and sprouted hair all over the place, I didn’t. Only I never figured out it was because of fairy genes. Which goes to show just how dumb fairies really are, I guess.”

I never saw the pain hidden under his smirk, but I do now.

“Did your mother never tell you?”

“All she told me was not to contradict people when they called me part-Veela. She never told me what I really was, didn’t dare to, I suppose. I didn’t get those genes from her, you see.”

His sneer is suddenly more pronounced than ever.

“All my father’s talk about pure blood and the Sacred Twenty-eight and how I must never sully our bloodline. I always knew he expected me to disappoint him in some epic way one day. I tried to be the super Slytherin, I tried everything, but he never gave me one sign he was proud of me. And all the time he knew he had passed those fairy genes on to me. Only he himself is part-elf, and elves are not that different from human males. All that sets him off is his hair colour and his pointy ears.”

I’ve ever only seen Lucius Malfoy wearing his hair in a mane that covers his ears. So there’s a reason for that; he does it to hide their elven tips. Simple.

“But I’m part-fairy,” Draco goes on, his gaze on me intent. “Wizards who are part-fairy are like human males, too, they are. I am. I’m just a bit different, there’s the wings, and... Anyway. My father knew what I was going to be. He couldn’t deal with it. He wanted me to be a normal pureblood. Or at least not part-fairy.”

“What did he do?”

He gets up from his chair to pace the kitchen.

“My shoulders hurt me for months this year, long before my birthday. I couldn’t hide it. My father knew what that meant, and he hated it. He hated me. So much so that one night, he had that outburst. He told me what I was, what I was to be. He screamed at me about how he had been jinxing me for years to prevent it. He started the year he went to Azkaban; he had Crabbe do it for him. It was the way to go, obviously, with Crabbe being permanently around me, and being who he was. After the Battle of Hogwarts, my father took over himself. It served his ends that my mother fell sick when I was in College; I went home every weekend to see her. When she died, he made me come home for good, claiming he needed my help with the estate. And I was so dumb to believe that, to actually be happy he wanted my help, and my company.”

The oversized tank top has kept slipping off his shoulders as he has been striding back and forth. When he takes it off and hurls it over the back of a chair now it is with the impatient vigour of a tormented soul.

“I had trouble dealing with my mother’s death,” he continues. “I wasn’t in a good place, and that probably got in the way of my judgement. Anyway, I took my exams early and moved home. And now he was standing there, saying he had only wanted me close so he could go on throwing curses at me to keep me from Changing. From sullying the Malfoy name.”

He has stopped by the door to turn the light switch on and off, eventually leaving the lights off.

“You understand, Harry? He jinxed me ever since that sixth year. Tried every curse he could think of to make me be normal. When he told me all that, I finally understood why I had been feeling sick for so long. I had become kind of used to the permanent headaches and nausea, but when I realized that it had actually been my father who had done that to me, well...”

“You left,” I say in a low voice.

“Yeah. I had seen Jenkins’ advertisement in the Daily Prophet, and I decided to send that application, then moved to London. I wanted to try a new start, but I was completely off the rails. I meant to turn my life around, but at the same time, I tried to cling to my old gang, my Slytherin pals, I tried to go on being Malfoy. You saw me in the Flying Pumpkin.”

“A week before your birthday.”

“Yeah, at least I had the sense to celebrate the real thing alone. When the wings broke from my body that night that was... Yeah, it hurt like hell, and it freaked me out so much I went back home. I was so stupid. I don’t know what I expected my father to do. Tell me he loves me just the way I am, I guess.” He scoffs mirthlessly. “I actually showed him the wings, can you believe that? First he simply tried to rip them off me. That didn’t work, though. I could have told him that much, I had tried it myself. These wings might not look like much, but they’re pretty resistant.”

He’s unfolding his wings, creating a glow in the dark kitchen, and with a twisted laugh, he gives the delicate curve above his left shoulder a cruel pull.

“Stop doing that!” I cry, startled by my own violent reaction.

“They won’t come off, I told you,” he says, but he lets go of the wing and resumes his pacing, casting light into the shadows with every step he takes.

“What happened then,” I ask. He shrugs, making the wings dance.

“When he got that he was making a fool of himself he hit me with a beating spell till I was out on the floor, then tried to get the wings off me with Sectumsempra. I came to when I got the first slash. He didn’t aim that well, he just hit me in the chest. I could hold him off for a while after that. I don’t know how, really, he had taken my mother’s wand from me. He went so mad when he couldn’t get the curse to work on me his focus slipped. Anyway, somehow I got him in a headlock and wrestled his wand from his hand. He’s not as fit as he used to be, the old man. Yeah, I stunned him with his own wand, then packed up and left. That’s all the story.”

I don’t think it is.

“You’re still feeling sick, aren’t you, Draco.”

He shrugs again.

“It’s going to get better. I guess it’s going to take a while for daddy’s curses to wear off. Curses that aim at warping nature are dark magic, and dark magic has this tendency to leave lasting effects, hasn’t it.”

Much like having your father call you things like misfit or monstrosity. He doesn’t have to tell me for me to know it’s what his father did. Trying not to think about the heinousness of the whole tale, I sit in silence.

He sits down on his chair opposite me again. I can’t make out his expression with the lights off. Somehow I can’t muster the energy to pick up my wand and switch them back on. And his wings shimmer so cheerfully in the dark.

“I know what you think,” he says after a while.

“I don’t think you do.”

“You think how it’s just so ironic that arrogant Malfoy turned out to be a half-breed himself, and the lowest of the lowest, too. A witless, useless fairy.”

“That’s not what you are.”

“Okay,” he says. “Maybe not wholly useless. I guess I could still be a Christmas decoration.”

“Professor Jenkins wanted you for the Potions Section.”

“How would you know.”

“I was on your panel, and he said it when we were waiting for you to show up for your interview.”

“Oh man, you must have been so mad at me,” he says with a laugh. I won’t have him divert me.

“He’d still want you.”

He scoffs and gets up again.

“Yeah, for my wings he would. I guess I could sell them to him at two-hundred-and-fifty Galleons each. Perhaps that’s what I should do.”

“You aren’t being serious.”

“What, you think I’m not even worth five-hundred Galleons?” He reaches back for his left wing again and roughly crumples up a handful of the shiny tissue in his fist. “You need to catch hundreds of woodland fairies to get that amount of material, he might even give me a thousand!”

I can’t bear to listen to him talking like that. Getting up from my seat, too, I step into his space and pry his fingers from his wing.

“Listen to me, Draco. You passed your college exams with special honours even though you took them early. You have five NEWTs marked outstanding. You’ve always been brilliant, and not just in Potions!”

“Have been.”

“You haven’t lost that!”

He looks at me, ninety-nine percent black desperation in his big-eyed gaze and one dust-speck of hope.

“You set up a Protean Charm,” I say, hoarse with an emotion I cannot even name. “You know there’s very few people who can do that. I know I can’t.”

We stand looking at each other for a couple more heartbeats, and something flickers in his eyes. I’d swear it’s stars. Then he says, so softly I can hardly hear it, “That’s because you’ve always sucked at Charms.”

“I thought I always sucked at Potions.”

“Let’s agree you just sucked.”

I shake my head and chuckle in spite of myself, and he grins at me, broadly, like never before.

I was right.

That’s stars in his eyes.

-

He got a new date for his job interview. Jenkins hadn’t filled the vacancy yet and set up an interview date the day he got the owl post with Draco’s reapplication. I’ve offered Draco my help with the interview. After all, I am Harry Potter. I am the guy who made the Dark Lord go down. It doesn’t mean I get my every wish granted, but I can make someone get an internship with the Ministry if I want to. But Draco has declined. He said he’d appreciate it if I told people about him, perhaps warned them in advance of his changed appearance if I felt it might make things easier for him, but he wouldn’t want me to use my position to directly help him get the job. What he said was he felt there was the potential for future complications, like discussions about a conflict of interest. He didn’t specify, but I liked his drift. The only thing he could have meant by that was that people might think we were involved. It’s almost like he said we were involved. Or so I like to tell myself. Anyway, I’ve given my place on the interview panel to Luna Lovegood, who has never yet said no to any job candidate.

And I’ve decided to talk to Susan Bones.

“He didn’t show the first time around, and you didn’t like it any better than I did, Harry. And now you’re telling me you want him to have a second chance? You’re aware it’s exactly what he’s used to, being a Malfoy. Special treatment.”

“He had a reason for staying away, he was sick.”

“He could have called.”

“You don’t understand.”

“In fact, I don’t. I’m certainly supporting resocialization, even if the candidate in question is a former Death Eater, but...”

“Draco Malfoy isn’t a Death Eater, he never was. He isn’t wearing the Dark Mark.”

“But... Are you sure about that?”

“I am, but his criminal record is not the point here.”

“What is the point here, then.”

He has authorized me to out him to individual people whenever I think it’ll be helpful. If ever it’ll be helpful, it’s now.

“Okay, here’s the thing, Susan. Draco Malfoy is part-fairy. Maybe you’ve heard some rumours. Well, they are true, and that means he belongs to a group grossly underrepresented in Ministry staff. As far as I know, he’s the only wizard with distinguishable fairy characteristics who ever even tried to get a job with the Ministry. As an Equal Opportunities Officer, you are expected to support his application.”

Susan stares at me like she has never seen me before. I can tell she has trouble following. She’s looking more Hufflepuff than ever.

“Draco Malfoy is...”

“Yeah, he is. Draco Malfoy is part-fairy, and he’s got the perfect credentials to be an intern with the Potions Section. Professor Jenkins’ very words, if I recall them correctly.”

“Part-fairy! But Fairies are...”

She doesn’t finish the sentence.

“Fairies are what?” I ask. “Intellectually less able? Or is it his sexuality that’s bothering you?”

Susan Bones might be a Hufflepuff, but she’s clever enough to know when she’s defeated.

-

I knew he’d get the job, and he did. He’s now an intern with the Potions Section of the Department of Magical Development. Meaning he’s the lowest ranking employee in the Ministry. But it’s a start. And it’s his field. He loves working with potions, and he’s good at it. Really good. He’s going to show them. He is going to rise. I know he is.

After all, he’s still a Slytherin, and everyone knows Slytherins don’t stop until they’ve gone to the top.

Yeah, it came back to me, that chant. Used to drive me up the walls.

After two weeks, we have established a routine. I hit the bathroom at six, an hour earlier than I used to, so I can squeeze in my ten-minute shave-and-shower ritual before Draco shuts me out to do whatever it is he does in there between six ten and seven. After breakfast, I drive us to work in my Mini. Yeah, I’ve got a driving licence and my own car. People have called me Muggle-Lover for it, but cars really are a great way to get around. They easily beat Floo powder and Apparating and Portkeys. I mean, who wants to be jostled about and get dizzy and feel sick all the time? It’s just kids who think that’s fun.

Initially, Draco claimed the Mini wasn’t cool and kept clawing at the seat at every turn of the street, but on the third day he started looking out the passenger window and enjoying watching London’s scenic views fly by. And on the fifth he started criticizing my driving and talking about how he’d get his own licence one of these days and how we’d see then who could go faster. When I observed that driving was about individual mobility, not a competition sport, he just smirked. –

Anyway, once we’ve dropped the car in the parking garage, by some silent understanding, we part for the day. No need to fuel gossip by entering the crowded lobby of the Ministry together. It’s ridiculously hard to tell him good bye. I’ve always loved my job, but now I kind of plough through my workday, be it at the office or somewhere out in the field, and part of me is just waiting for the moment I’m going to see him again. Every night at ten p.m., we meet up again by the fountain in the lobby to go home. There’s hardly anybody around anymore that late, so there’s not much harm in leaving together. Also, I wouldn’t want him to walk over to the garage by himself at this hour, maybe linger down there, waiting for me. The garage is located within the two-mile non-apparition radius they created around the Ministry complex a while ago, so he wouldn’t be able to simply disapparate in case of trouble. Not that there’s ever been any trouble, but I just can’t get rid of this sense of danger where he is concerned. Most nights we drop by my pizza place for take-out on the way home. He loves pizza. The other day he said it was two things that had reformed his view of the world lately; turning into a half-breed, and discovering that Muggles invented something as epic as pizza. I’d love to cook dinner with him, show him some more Muggle recipes, have him lecture me on how to stir a cauldron, but I fear it would come across as too couply to suggest it. We get home too late to start any serious cooking anyway.

It’s him who’s got these crazy working hours. Apparently Jenkins uses tons of dishes for his experimenting, and as the only intern, Draco is supposed to wash and dry and put away every last pot and pan before he goes home.

And he is supposed to come in the weekends, too; he’s working on Saturdays and Sundays like on every other day of the week. I’m doing the same now. I’ve been telling him there’s a lot going on at the Auror Department at the time, but the truth is, I want to be in the same building with him. I know it’s pathetic.

When he steps from the lift into the brightly lit lobby this Saturday night, it’s deserted. There’s nobody around but the receptionist in the second booth. He’s giving Draco a wave, a smile, and a completely gratuitous once-over.

“Good night, Reuben,” Draco calls out, then walks over to where I’m waiting for him by the fountain. I should be happy for him that he has settled in like he has. From what he has told me, everybody is being perfectly nice to him. And that’s great, obviously. It is. Only there’s no need for people like this Reuben guy to actually wave at Draco from a hundred feet away. I get why he would do that, though; in my black leather jacket, Draco looks like a Muggle movie star. He ditched his cloak the third day he went to work with me and has been borrowing my jacket since, claiming he wanted to embrace what I had told him about the merging of the cultures. That’s bullshit of course; he just wants to look like that movie star. He even used a shrinking spell on the jacket so it fits him better.

When he reaches me, I forget about being annoyed because of losing my jacket and Reuben’s inappropriate attempts at flirting. Draco’s face is drawn with fatigue. He shouldn’t be working so hard, he really shouldn’t. He is looking much better than he did; the residues of his father’s curses are definitely on the decline. It’s still important for him not to overdo it, and to get enough sleep. I always feel best when he goes to bed early. Therefore I’m not happy when I learn he’s not going to do that tonight. On the ride home, he tells me he’s going to meet Marcus Flint for a game of wizard billiard and a butterbeer later this night. No, not happy at all.

“Marcus Flint?” I say. “But he’s...”

“I know you used to say he was part-troll. And he certainly is a little bit on the rough side. They say he had to pay thousands of Galleons of fines for battery, and I can see how that happened. But he didn’t drop me after I Changed. He was the only one.”

“You met Marcus Flint after the Change? You told him about yourself?”

“I guess he had heard what had become of me. People must have seen me in Knockturn Alley, and people talk. And Marcus still contacted me. He came to see me in Knockturn Alley and offered me to sleep at his place.”

“You’ve been living with Marcus Flint?”

“I haven’t. There was this stink in his flat, and I just couldn’t take it. It wasn’t that cold outside yet, so I continued sleeping in shop entrances and the like. But Marcus still kept in contact. No one else made an attempt to reach out to me, let alone suggest hanging out. Not a single one of all the birthday guests you saw in the Flying Pumpkin. And here poor Draco had been thinking he had all these great friends.” He bats his lashes in a pantomime of naivety, mocking himself. “Yeah, I was having a bit of a hard time. You see, I didn’t get to meet anyone but my tricks during those weeks, and when I was out with Marcus, playing billiard and having beer like a regular person, that sort of made me feel I was still human.”

I nod, shaken.

“Yeah,” he says. “He doesn’t appear to be the most sensitive of guys, but he was really understanding about my situation. He suggested we go to bars where we could be sure nobody would know us, and he even provided me with Polyjuice Potion every time we went out so I could relax about my face or people recognizing me. And then I think you might actually be right about the troll thing. He uses deodorant spray like every ten minutes because he thinks he smells. If he is a half-breed, too, and struggling with it, I should show some support in return, don’t you think?”

I’m not one hundred percent happy with this reasoning.

“I think you shouldn’t go on seeing him if you don’t really like him. You don’t really like him, do you?”

Please say you don’t like him. There’s a long pause.

“It wouldn’t feel right to dump him now that I don’t need a billiard buddy anymore because I... because I got you.”

It’s too dark in the car to see much, but I can tell he’s blushing. Without thinking, I pull him into half an embrace across the hand brake.

“Just don’t go anywhere shady. And don’t stay out too long. You’re getting better, but you still need rest, okay?”

“Okay, Mom,” he says in the darkness, and this time, I can tell he’s sneering.

-

As soon as Draco has disapparated from my flat, I get my Y-pad, log in to my Mac account and do a background check on Marcus Flint.

It seems he agreed to meet Draco at the Flying Pumpkin tonight, and Draco did say all these nice things about him, but I don’t trust Flint. Not one bit. That’s why I sewed that shield amulet into the lining of my leather jacket while Draco was in the bathroom getting ready for his night out.

Flint has served almost a year for injury to property, assault, and battery. He never paid any damages. It seems he’s heavily indebted. Since he left Hogwarts, he has been doing odd jobs in various places. Mostly security and maintenance, ironically. He has been working for Quidditch clubs and bars, and he even was on the payroll of Azkaban for a couple of weeks as a janitor. A former inmate repairing damaged locks on prison doors. I’d think it funny, if I weren’t so strung up.

Marcus Flint is exactly what I feared he’d be. A criminal with nothing to lose. And he’s with Draco right now, and I can’t do anything about it, like drag Draco back home and ground him, because sadly I’m not really his mom.

I go pick up Draco’s briefcase where he dropped it to the floor in the hallway, then clean the bathroom to calm my nerves. Before Draco, I used to do the bathroom on Sundays, but he’s the type to tip over shampoo bottles on the window sill without seeming to notice and stuff like that every time he goes take a shower, so cleaning schedules don’t make much sense anymore.

I stay awake till two in the morning, when I hear the faint plop in Draco’s room, telling me he’s back home.

The next morning he doesn’t appear for breakfast. Eventually, I knock at his door, then go in to check on him. His brow is hot with fever and he’s suffering from a heavy shortness of breath. There’s a weird sweetish smell in the room. I try to talk to him, but he’s too weak to speak. It seems he’s been up being sick the whole night. When he tries to get up from his bed, he nearly passes out. A Fortifying Spell and a few shots of anti-fever potion later, he’s fit to sit up and argue again. He’s trying to convince me he can go to work. Yeah, he still doesn’t really know me. When I’ve put him back to bed, using a mild restraining curse that’ll last the day, I ask him if he has had episodes like this before; if this is the kind of nausea induced by his father’s curses he has been telling me about. He shakes his head. But apparently he has had trouble like this already a couple of times, ever since his Change in June.

“Maybe I did catch some germ in the streets after all. There isn’t just STDs around in Knockturn Alley, there’s other stuff, too,” he says. It might be true, but somehow it doesn’t seem probable. He had gotten so much better these last weeks compared to when I picked him up in Knockturn Alley.

“Did anyone use their wands on you last night?”

Again, he shakes his head.

“They’ve established this new policy at the Flying Pumpkin. Security collects people’s wands at the entrance now. They claim too many of the patrons have been disregarding the ban on magic.”

“What about outside in the apparition lot?”

“No illegal activity anywhere the whole night, Auror Potter,” he replies. “Unless you count someone trying to smuggle a magical object onto my person.”

“Who did that. Tell me! Who!”

With a smirk, he gestures at the leather jacket that’s lying on the floor, turned inside out. The amulet is gleaming through the satin lining where I sewed it in. I pick up the jacket and pull out the amulet to check it. The intricately patterned metal surface doesn’t have a scratch.

“You didn’t take the jacket off while you were inside the Flying Pumpkin, did you,” I say.

“I didn’t, but next time you decide to put jewellery on me, give me a heads-up. No more tricks, Potter. And now let me go to work.”

“No way.”

He can’t disobey me, thanks to the restraining curse; the most recent trick I employed on him. Thankfully he’s unaware of that, so he doesn’t complain. But he won’t stop fretting about how he’s letting his boss down.

Apparently Jenkins has been working on a special potion of outstanding potential relevance for three decades. And right at the moment there are all kinds of test runs to be done because he decided to add a special breed of wolfs bane to the formula that’s super poisonous if you don’t get the timing and temperatures during the cooking process exactly right.

Or something like that.

I’ve always had trouble understanding potions, and Draco is still feverish and not one-hundred percent coherent.

I promise him to go down to the Ministry to excuse him and reassure him that if the potion in question has been a work in progress for thirty years, a couple more days won’t do any harm. Then I hex him with Canto Dormantis, and he falls asleep.

-

When I get to the Ministry, I apparate straight down to the Potions Section. It’s just the Aurors who have a special, magically controlled apparition licence for inside the Ministry, and it’s actually one of the best perks that come with the job.

In the main lab, there’s just Kendricks, shirtless. He’s stirring a giant steaming copper pot under the fume hood and checking something on his Y-pad at the same time. When I step up behind him, he flinches so he nearly drops the Y-pad into the pot. Angling the screen away from me, he tells me Jenkins is in his private lab right off his office, then asks what’s up with Draco. He knows we are flatmates; Draco told him. I say Draco caught some kind of bug and won’t be coming to work for a while. Kendricks looks disproportionately frustrated at that. It’s evident he wants Draco around. He’s just so gay, and really muscly, too, and I can feel myself turning green with jealousy.

“The old bird won’t be happy,” Kendricks says, oblivious to the fact I’m boiling inside just as much as his cauldron. “He’s this total slaveholder, Jenkins. Wants everyone in all the bloody time, even on a bloody Sunday. Treating everyone like they’re house elves, Jenkins.”

Well, he doesn’t want to treat Draco like that, and it’s time someone told him. In an instant, I’ve apparated over to Jenkin’s private lab. It’s not the polite thing to do, but I’m not in the mood for polite.

I’m in a tiny, cramped room with a workbench in the middle and a big stove with a fume hood in one corner. Across the room, Jenkins is standing by an open cabinet. For a second I think it’s filled with rows and rows of small lamps, then I see it’s actually tiny glass bottles containing something like liquid light. Jenkins stares at me. His eye-brows have grown back, and his nose has healed, too. It looks like it never got burnt. It takes Jenkins two seconds to recover from the shock of seeing me. Then he hastily shuts the cabinet’s door and turns the key in the lock. The cabinet vanishes into thin air. Pocketing the key in his robe, he says, “Mr. Potter.”

Way too levelly. I’ve been an Auror long enough to know when something’s off. I’ve just barged into his private laboratory without any invitation or warning, and he should be pissed at me. He is, I can tell, in spite of his pleasant voice. Why would he try to gloss over it?

What’s with that invisible cabinet, and those lamp bottles?

When I tell him about Draco, he irritably taps his long nose with his wand.

“He’s not coming in today? That’s too bad. He knows I need those results.”

“He’s not coming in, and he will stay home till he’s better, and he won’t be working on Sundays in the future.” I step up to Jenkins, invading his space. “You’ve got no right to make him work like you do, Jenkins. He’s got a condition, chronic heart problems. He got hit with a dark curse as a teenager. As his superior you should be aware of that, it’s in his medical file. And he’s got a contract that guarantees regular working hours. You don’t want the works council coming down here and checking you aren’t breaking any rules, do you.”

I got to him. I can read the worry in his watery eyes. With a curt nod, I apparate up to the ground floor to go home. Yeah, I’ve been an Auror long enough to know when I’m done.

-

When I get home, Draco is worse. He’s got trouble breathing and his temperature is well over one-hundred-and-ten. It frightens me to the bone and makes me try every healing spell I ever heard of. Nothing helps. I get him some water and tell him we need to go to St. Mungo’s, but at the mention of doctors he gets so agitated he starts choking. He has put on one of my tank tops again, and I can see the upper curves of his wings. The delicate tissue seems to have lost all its lustre. He doesn’t protest when I ask him to let me check out his wings. When I’ve removed the top and carefully spread them, they are dry and brittle under my touch. It means he needs more water, but by now he’s too weak and disoriented to drink from a glass. I’ve got to drip the water into his mouth using my wand as a nursing bottle. Another twenty minutes later, I notice his breathing has slowed down. His chest doesn’t rise and fall more often than a couple of times per minute now. That can’t be good. It’s no use, I’ll have to take him to the hospital after all, even though he’s going to hate me for it. I’m already preparing to take him into a restraining hold and apparate us to St. Mungo’s emergency unit when I remember Anapneo. It’s being used in cases of choking and breathing arrest. Hoping I’m doing it right, I tap his chest and cast the spell. The next two minutes I spend pointlessly dabbing a tissue at his sweaty face and chest, waiting. Then the effect kicks in. His brow and cheeks are still hot and reddened, but his eyes clear up, and his wings seem to recover, too. Ten more minutes, and he looks almost normal again. I put my palms to his wings to check. Yes. They are back to their slightly rubbery feel; they are all elastic, vibrating satin again. It feels so good I can’t take my hands away.

He pulls his wings to his body and skids away from me. It’s his first conscious action since I got home.

“You don’t want to touch those, they’re disgusting,” he croaks.

“Draco...”

“I’m this aberration. This mons... monstrosity.”

There’s a feverish urgency to the stuttered words.

“You’re not. You’re an angel,” I say, my voice breaking, and then I simply pull him onto my lap and go on stroking the slick, veined wings.

“You realize I can’t fly, not without a broom,” he replies, a highly-strung chuckle ringing in his voice. He’s trying to be ironic, his usual technique when he’s trying to stay in control, but his wings tremble under my touch, giving away how much the caress is affecting him.

“You aren’t the most angelic of flatmates, either,” I say, glossing over the physical intimacy of the moment for both our sakes. We go on sitting together like that, and I lose any sense of time. Finally his lids come down over his eyes. I gently put him down onto the mattress, then sit back to listen to his breathing, taking pleasure in the quiet, rhythmic sound. A couple of times he changes position. I never stop stroking his wings.

“But you’re beyond beautiful,” I say the moment I’m sure he has fallen asleep. “You know you are.”

His wings shift under my palm and he opens his eyes again and looks at me. He heard me. I hold his gaze.

“Tell me you know it, Draco.”

He gives a feeble laugh.

“What I do know is those people who said you were nuts back in our fifth year at Hogwarts were obviously right, Potter,” he says.

But it’s not with his usual smirk, but with the sweetest of shy smiles.

Eventually, he gets better. He’s out of bed, but still too weak to go to work. So he lounges on the couch in the living room reading his fat lab protocols during the day, and watching talent shows on telewizard each and every night. Using my wand to change the channel.

I told him not to use my wand. It’s been quite tricky to handle since I mended it, and I wouldn’t want anything to go wrong, like spells backfiring on him or something. I explained that, and he said okay, Potter.

He has been using my wand interchangeably with his own since.

I also told him I hated telewizard shows, and he could do anything in my flat, just not conjure one of those programmes while I was home. When he did just that tonight, yet again, I reminded him this was my flat and I wasn’t watching shows on telewizard. Especially not crap like Waltzing Wizards. I took my wand from him, killed the telewizard waves, and tucked my wand under my belt. He told me I was rather elitist for a half-blood. And when I didn’t tell him I was a pure-blood, or stunned him, as he seemed to be expecting me to, he leapt up from the couch, snatched my wand from my groin, leaving me half stunned myself, and turned the programme right back on.

Now I’m trying to read the Daily Prophet while he delivers a running commentary on the show he’s watching. He has switched from that dancing show to a singing contest. Apparently he considers that a compromise.

He’s mocking every single witch or wizard the moment they appear in my living room to deliver their song.

“That’s Zacharias Smith. You remember him? Hufflepuff chaser. Used to be in your army thing. Now he thinks he wants to be a boy band front man. With that face. And that voice? If you ask me, a Screaming Yo-yo sounds like phoenix song compared to old Zac...”

He’s still Draco Malfoy, his smirk lending his lovely features an all too familiar mean edge. I shake my head at him.

“You haven’t changed at all, you know, not in essence. It’s one of the things you always liked best, pointing out people’s weaknesses.”

His expression changes instantly, he’s throwing me a wide-eyed, unhappy glance. Fidgeting in his seat, he flicks my wand. Zacharias Smith dissolves, his dissonant singing following suit. It’s a funny thing, Draco seems to be able to work the remote charm for my flat’s telewizard receiver better than I can, even though he’s using my wand. I watch him bite his lip and look down into his lap with his lids fluttering.

This is wrong. I don’t want him to look like that. Shit, I want him to go back to being bad, sneering, self-satisfied Draco. I want to hear what he’s got to say about the next contestant at MissionSinginMagician.

It seems I have a thing for his bitchy verdicts about people. Yeah, perhaps they’re unnecessarily harsh, but they’re also pretty entertaining. I’ve never known anyone whose slander is more to the point. And for good or for worse, it is part of who he is.

I pick up my wand and switch MissionSinginMagician back on.

-

After a week, he has fully recovered. Anapneo turned things around. Everything seems to be okay. He’s back to his default mode, bouncy and never tiring of piquing me and trying to ruffle my pride, and he’s excited to be getting back to work. It’s obvious he doesn’t want to talk about the strangeness of his sickness, so I don’t make him. But I’m still worried. It’s a kind of worry I’ve never known, eating away at me, haunting my sleep. Without Anapneo, he would have died, I’m sure of it. No way was that just some bug.

I have to get to the bottom of this.

Normally I ask Hermione about stuff I need to know.

He told me he has had bouts of illness for years because of his father cursing him. Even if he claims the times he fell sick since his Change were somewhat different, it could be that he’s still afflicted by residual effects of the curses his father cast on him. And that that is why he came down with that weird, sudden disease after going out with Marcus Flint.

Or he fell sick because someone did get past that amulet shield after all and for some reason cast a dark spell over him. Marcus Flint, for example.

But it could also be that he suffered like he did because of me.

He nearly suffocated before I thought of Anapneo. I can’t stop thinking he had to live through that agony because I hit him with Sectumsempra and damaged his heart all those years ago. If that is true, he won’t recover by himself. If that is true, I’ve got to find a remedy for Sectumsempra.

Only I’ve never heard of one.

Yeah, normally I would discuss this with Hermione. But I’m not ready to tell her about Draco.

If I can’t ask Hermione for advice, there’s only one other option.

During a lull at work in the office, I pick up my wand and use Video Phono to call Lin.

Lin G. Row.

I don’t know what she is exactly. She looks like a Muggle woman, but she might be carrying non-human genes. I don’t know her exact job description, either. Just that she’s definitely above the Minister of Magic.

She doesn’t like to talk much about herself. As an Auror, I’m trained at reading people. It’s a key skill when it comes to interrogating suspects, or profiling. I haven’t had much success trying to read Lin.

She’s slim, blond. Attractive. I guess. It’s hard to tell for a guy like me. It’s hard to tell her age, too. I’d say she’s not above using the occasional trick when it comes to age-concealment. And she seems to know absolutely everything. More than Hermione, actually. I don’t know how that’s even possible. Knowing more than Hermione, that’s close to being god-like.

It seems Lin observed me very closely during my time in Hogwarts, and without me ever being aware of it. I’ve heard it said she documented everything that happened, up until the Battle of Hogwarts and the downfall of Voldemort.

When I first realized how much she knew about my Hogwarts years, I suspected her of being an animagus, some little insect that hides in your hair, like Rita Skeeter. But I have come to think it really had to do with my glasses. After I had finished school, I got rid of them, had my eye-sight fixed by a healer. It only took a simple spell, I should have had that done a lot sooner. Glasses are a hazard when you duel. Or when you try to pick someone up in a bar.

When I first met Lin after I had started to work for the Ministry, she said she had liked me better with my glasses. I got the impression there was a reason for that, not just the fact she likes geeks better than the cool guys. Yeah, I’ve come to think she hexed my glasses shortly before I started out at Hogwarts so she could see everything that happened to me from my perspective. I mean, everybody in the wizarding world knew I was the Chosen One when I was a kid. It wouldn’t have been that hard for anyone to get their hands on my glasses when Aunt Petunia got them for me from the drugstore, not hard at all. All they had to do was pose as a sales clerk and hex them before putting them in their paper bag. And then boot up some magical screen at home and watch my life unfold.

Yeah, I’ve come to think that’s exactly what Lin did.

It is a bit creepy, but I don’t mind that much. I guess my life as a school kid was of a certain general interest, considering. When I once asked her straight on if I was right about the whole glasses thing, she said that if she hadn’t done what she did, the wizarding world wouldn’t be the world we know today. Maybe that’s even true. The main point is, she doesn’t seem to be monitoring me anymore. And she’s always trying to come up with a solution when I have a problem. On quite a number of occasions in the past, she has given me a magical object or told me about a hex I had never heard of before that saved the day.

This time, though, she just shakes her head.

“You can rule out that he got cursed when he was out with Flint if that amulet is undamaged. Curses that break through an amulet shield always destroy the amulet.”

“So you think his sickness got triggered by a dark curse that hit him at some point in the past?”

“Indeed I do. I think it’s the Sectumsempra curse you cast on him. Sorry, Harry. Nothing you can do about that now.”

“But...”

“Sectumsempra is dark magic, and there’s no known remedy. There’s just the healing spell, Vulnera Sanentur, that can be used to stop the bleeding and heal the wounds. But lost body parts can never be reattached, or grown back. A heart that lost muscle tissue to Sectumsempra will stay damaged. Obviously that means trouble with breathing for life. You know dark magic has permanent effects like that. You learnt that when George Weasley lost his ear, didn’t you.”

“But Lin. Can’t you do anything for me? For Draco?”

“Sorry, Harry. There are limits to what’s possible even in magic, you know that. Even I can’t abolish established facts.”

I know that’s true, but I’m still left with the feeling that she isn’t trying that hard to help me.

“But isn’t it still possible that someone will develop a remedy for Sectumsempra one day? Some specially gifted wizard?”

She shrugs.

“That would have to be a true whiz of a wizard,” she says, delighted with her word play. Then she ends the call.

I need to ask Hermione, after all. I can do it without mentioning Draco. Or the fact that he’s sleeping in my second bedroom, and that I’m dreaming of going over and fucking him senseless every single night. Sure I’m going to tell her and Ron he’s living with me one of these days. But there’s no need to push it. I can just ask her some general questions.

So the next Friday night at the Flying Pumpkin, I casually bring up the subject of lasting effects of dark magic. I say that lately I’ve been wondering if getting hit by a dark curse can lead to episodes of acute fever, nausea and breathing problems years later. Say if someone’s heart got hit by Sectumsempra. And if they’ve ever heard of any remedy.

Hermione comfortably settles back in her chair.

“Okay, dark curses. They do have lasting effects, and Sectumsempra is a typical example. George’s ear never grew back after it got cut off. But he doesn’t complain about any problems, apart from having to hex his reading glasses to his nose. As far as I know, the symptoms you’ve mentioned have never been reported after an incident of Sectumsempra, at least not in case Vulnera Sanentur has been successfully applied. Do you remember when you hit Malfoy with Sectumsempra back at Hogwarts? He completely recovered...”

“He lost a piece of his heart when I did that. Snape healed his wounds, but Draco never made a full recovery. He hasn’t been able to play Quidditch since then. And he’s been suffering from weird bouts of sickness for years, especially recently, and I really need to know if that might be connected to the damage to his heart.”

I’ve blurted all of that out on one single breath.

Ron and Hermione stare at me.

“Are we talking about Malfoy here?” Hermione asks. I shrug, hoping against hope there’s still a chance I can stall this.

“How would you know all that about Draco Malfoy’s health problems,” she presses on.

“Yeah, how would you know all that,” Ron echoes. So I do it, I tell them how I saved him from the Dementor, and that he’s currently living with me. When they keep staring at me like I had told them it was Voldemort who was sleeping in my spare bed, my uneasiness gives way to exasperation. I tell them to stop the gaping and that they must have heard at least some rumours about Draco and me, from Reuben from the lobby or someone.

If they have, it didn’t pave the way, not one bit.

They can’t get over it.

“But he’s Malfoy,” Hermione keeps saying.

“He’s a Slytherin!” Ron shouts.

“He’s Malfoy, Harry,” Hermione repeats yet again, like she’s got to get a point across to an especially dim-witted student.

“He’s a Death Eater!”

That’s Ron again, still shouting. And now I’m shouting back, crashing my mug down onto the table.

“He’s not, and I know he’s Malfoy, and I don’t fucking care he’s a Slytherin, so shut the fuck up!”

Hermione opens her mouth, then closes it again, flustered into silence by my outburst.

“He’s a potions whiz,” Ron says, then he pushes his chair back in a laughable attempt to put some safety distance between us.

I close my eyes and count to seven.

“You’re dating a potions guy,” Ron says. I never knew he had suicidal tendencies, but obviously he has.

“I’m not dating him.”

“You hate potions guys!”

I’ve got to shut up Ron, or I’ll burst like a card at Exploding Snap. And Draco did give me permission to tell people about him.

“Okay, here’s the deal. You want to know what he actually is? A half-breed.”

“Oh no,” Hermione exclaims. “Oh no, so he really is Veela!” She leans forward, her face scrunched up with concern. “Harry, listen, dear. Try to be reasonable. I know that must be hard for you right now, but still. You’ve got to realize he’s playing with you. You know it’s what Veela do...”

“He isn’t Veela. He’s part-fairy.”

There’s three full seconds of silence.

“Part-fairy? Malfoy?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard that rumour, too.”

“I have, but... Really? Part-fairy? But fairies are...”

“Vapid? Dumb? Gay?” I spit out.

“Calm down, Harry,” she retorts. “Now, fairies.” She clears her throat. I should have known she’d tackle this with her standard reaction; a lecture. “It’s only today’s woodland fairies who are generally assumed to be intellectually challenged. The fairy-elves of Middle Earth who would be the ancestors of today’s part-fairy wizards were the same level of intelligent as the average human, or slightly above. But they were also the essence of sweet-natured. It’s what Portuba Muff says in the History of Magical Beings.”

“So?”

“The essence of sweet-natured? Malfoy can’t be part-fairy.”

“Well, he is. His father was part-elf, and he’s part-fairy.”

“I don’t care if he’s fairy or Veela or everything combined,” Ron cuts in. “He’s Malfoy, and if you want to live with him, or whatever, go ahead and do it. Just don’t expect me to come visit!”

“Why would I want you to come visit! You smash people’s places, you troll!”

Ron has risen from his chair, his fists balled.

“At least I don’t look like one! It’s you who does, with all that pretentious muscle you’ve piled up! But then I guess Malfoy is totally digging that!”

Before I can think of an answer, or rip his head off, Hermione has grabbed Ron by the arm and steers him out of the pub. Only when they’re gone I remember why I brought the whole thing up in the first place. I still don’t know if it’s me who’s responsible that Draco fell sick. Or his father’s old curses. Or if someone managed to break through that amulet shield.

I drink up my bacon butterbeer, feeling helpless and lonely.

We are having breakfast in the kitchen. I’m having my ham and eggs, he’s eating honey from the jar, having abandoned his toast after just two or three bites.

I told him I asked around about Sectumsempra. It didn’t feel right to keep it from him that I have been talking about him with other people.

“Stop obsessing about those old school stories. I’m not sick, okay? Who did you talk to, anyway.”

“Lin Row. And Hermione.”

At the mention of Lin, he just raises an eyebrow. But Hermione’s name makes him put his spoon down.

“Hermione. The girl with the left hook who’s also a walking encyclopaedia. Does she still talk like she swallowed a book for breakfast? She must have hexed Weasley. He isn’t the type to go for clever girls with no tits. He’s the type that goes for bimbos. Yeah, I’d suspect her to be part-Veela, with the way she managed to tie him down. But then she can’t be, not with that kind of hair. She looks like the bottom of a broom after an especially rough Quidditch match.”

“Okay, you’re talking about my friends here?” I say, putting up my palms. His sneer fades. He’s silent for a minute or so, then he says, all nonchalance, “You aren’t going to introduce me, are you.”

“They know you.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Of course I’m going to. They are my friends, and you are...”

I break off. He smirks.

“You’re going to have to work on that introduction, Harry.”

-

When I walk up to our table in the Flying Pumpkin with my bacon butterbeer that Friday night, Ron and Hermione are already there. Ron is checking something on his Y-pad and slurping pumpkin soup, and Hermione is sipping at her horrible soy beer, but they are holding hands. They aren’t wearing any rings. I don’t know why I suddenly notice these things. I don’t know why I ask that question when I sit down either, but suddenly it’s out there, hanging in the air.

“Ever thought about getting married?”

Ron goes on looking intently at his Y-pad as if he hadn’t heard. Hermione turns to me, squinting at me over her mug.

“What, you want us to get married? How old-fashioned.”

“I don’t think it is.”

“Yeah, because you’re gay. Because you’ve spent so much energy campaigning for same-sex marriage to be made legal…”

“I haven’t, really.”

“Yeah, okay. But you’re still a special case. You lost your parents when you were a baby. Of course you’d have fantasies about happy family life. That’s what you saw in that mirror, didn’t you. The mirror that shows people their heart’s desire. It’s natural that for you, it would be your parents, your family. Love, faith, belonging.”

“So maybe I had fantasies about love, faith and belonging. What’s wrong with it.”

“Only that it’s just that, a fantasy. An Ideal.”

“So you’re saying that any marriage is doomed? That my parents would have split up if Voldemort hadn’t killed them first?”

“Okay, sorry, Harry. You’re right, no personal references. Let’s try again. Okay. Marriage. Wanting someone to belong to you forever. Wanting to own them. Thinking of your partner as being yours. It’s just wrong on so many levels!”

“Getting generic. Try again.”

“Okay, marriage is a concept of yesteryear! At best, wedlock is one option out of many these days, and not the most attractive one you’d have to conclude if you have a look at the statistics. And it has been an instrument of female oppression for centuries. With women’s economic status on the rise, they aren’t financially dependent anymore, so no need for anyone anymore to make promises that are hard to keep.”

“And what about you? Personally?” I say. She throws a furtive look at Ron who still seems to be engrossed in his Y-pad.

“I don’t need a wedding ring,” she says firmly.

“O my god, let that be not true, please!” Ron exclaims, throwing the Y-pad into his pumpkin soup and slapping himself in the face, then pulling at his hair with both hands like he wants to rip his scalp off.

The only explanation is he just bought a fifty carat diamond engagement ring.

“O my god,” he repeats, “the Cannons took another goal, they’re going down!”

Hermione looks slightly miffed.

“Harry was just asking if you intended to pop the question anytime soon.”

The look he gives me is priceless. Wtf with freckles.

Later in the bathroom he confronts me, fuming.

“That wasn’t cool, mate, putting me on the spot like that!”

“Don’t you want to marry her?”

He looks flustered.

“Don’t you?” I press on.

“That’s not the point here! It’s not your job to bring it up!”

“So, will you? Bring it up?”

He shrugs, looking close to hysterical. As close to hysterical as he can get, being Ron Weasley.

“Maybe. Eventually. When I’m ready. When it’s the right time. When I’ve got everything sorted out,” he says.

So he actually is planning to propose. I should have known. That’s why he’s been so strung up lately. Feelings of being inadequate. Fear of rejection. Practicing the talk.

And Hermione preached just now how she so doesn’t need that shit of yesteryear. But he didn’t listen, so he doesn’t know.

I could tip him off, but I decide not to. Because I’ve still got the feeling everything is going to work out with the two of them in the end. With or without a wedding ring.

And I?

I like things to be plain and simple. Ever since I defeated the Dark Lord, I’ve been perfectly content with what I had, my everyday life as a single. Voldemort gone, my scar not hurting. Everything being well. I’ve never felt the need for big concepts like Forever, or Happy Ever After. Or Finding The One. The only marriage I’ve ever seen at work from up close is the Dursleys’, and let’s just say theirs wasn’t the most inspiring example.

But still, family.

Hermione is probably right with what she said about me. But she’ll never truly understand. She will never know the desperate emptiness I feel deep down whenever I’m staying at the Burrow with the Weasleys, the burning envy at the shared everyday routines, at the natural way everybody just belongs.

Yeah, there is something about family. And if I know one thing, it’s that Hermione’s two dentists have given her far more than perfectly corrected teeth. And Ron will never reach the level of awareness to understand he had the best life imaginable as a kid.

Of course I’m a grown-up. I don’t believe there’s The One somewhere out there waiting for me. I don’t want to own anybody.

Or Draco.

Only every time I think about what would be the adequate term to call him when I’ll introduce him to Hermione and Ron at last, there’s the word my.

Like in, my flatmate. Or my carpool buddy. Or my best gay friend.

Or my heart’s desire.

He has discovered the Muggle mall outside my building, and now he’s permanently shopping in the drugstore. Apparently Vanity Spells and Muggle cosmetics totally complement each other, or so he claims. He must have spent half his first salary on those beauty products. Mostly shampoos and hair sprays and styling gels. They take up all the room on the shelf below the mirror in the bathroom. And he does take ages in there. I mean, a lot of people take long in the bathroom. Especially gay twinks like him. It isn’t necessarily a fairy thing. He also uses his wand to apply eyeliner. He even does it in the car, on the ride to work. It doesn’t mean he’s vain, though. He’s part-fairy, but that doesn’t make him vain, does it. I hate that kind of prejudice.

-

It’s not all prejudice. He is vain. It’s not just the eyeliner. Every morning when we set off for the Ministry he’s wearing a new hair style. He doesn’t even stop at pink hair extensions, or Rasta. And he seems to be doing stuff to his clothes, too. Lowering necklines, adding glimmering buckles to belts and stuff. It doesn’t help with avoiding attention, obviously. It makes people look. I mean, sure it’s great that he doesn’t feel he’s got to hide anymore. But that receptionist, that Reuben guy, he’s totally checking him out each and every night when we pass his booth. And Jenkins’ assistant, Samuel Kendricks with the muscle and the perfect hair, isn’t any better. I could totally read the look he gave Draco when we met in the parking garage yesterday morning. Of course he’s wondering what Draco looks like underneath those jeans. He has tightened them so they totally hug his ass. I can’t blame Kendricks for that, can I. I can’t blame anybody for staring at my flashy, lovely flat-mate slash carpool buddy slash best gay friend. I can’t blame those guys for having eyes and being as gay as I am.

But God, I do hate their guts.

I’ve checked back with the Azkaban prison management to gather some more intel about the Dementor that attacked Draco. The guy I talked to on Video Phono didn’t give any sign of recognition when he saw my face and heard my name. He appeared to be straight out of Hogwarts, not a day older than eighteen. He claimed he couldn’t give me any details over Video Phono, and that I’d have to bring a special permit for this kind of inquiries. That’s the trouble with young people; to them, the name Harry Potter isn’t the stuff of legend anymore like it still is for my generation. Yeah, maybe I’m just three years older than this noob, but he was still a kid when Voldemort became history, and that does make him a different generation. Anyway, I dropped by the Minister of Magic and got myself that permit, then went to pay those guys at Azkaban a call.

It was worth the trouble. I only brought back just one piece of information from that trip, but it changes everything.

The Dementor returned after less than an hour. You’ve only got to do the math. Azkaban is located in the middle of the North Sea, that’s at least a four hour flight to Knockturn Alley on a good broom. Now Dementors are obviously way faster than brooms, but even they need time to cover that kind of distance. The thing must have flown to London at top speed. It’s not at all normal behaviour for a Dementor to distance itself from its swarm like that. It must have acted on directions. It must have been promised an unusually delicious treat waiting for it at that specific spot in Knockturn Alley.

Like the soul of a man who’s part-fairy.

I’ve got absolutely no proof for my theory. But all my instincts tell me I’m right about this.

Someone put that Dementor up to take Draco’s soul.

It’s past ten p.m., and I’m still waiting for him in the entrance hall. There must be a lot of dishes to be washed up down at Potions today. There are machines for that kind of thing that are for more effective than old-fashioned cleaning spells. But obviously Professor Jenkins isn’t interested in having his section modernized like that. And why should he be, as long as he’s got Draco as his personal house elf. I get more exasperated with the old bird by the minute. And more nervous.

It’s ten twenty when I call the lift to go down to the basement and check on Draco. I don’t want to pop up behind him and give him a scare, so I don’t apparate. As the lift soundlessly glides downwards, I realize I should have gone check on him much earlier. When the doors slide open, the ding ringing ominously off the stone walls, my skin is pricking with apprehension.

The vaulted ceiling is hanging too low, it’s like pressing down on me as I start walking down the hallway towards the main lab at the end. He told me that’s where he usually spends the evenings, doing the dishes. The oil lamps flicker in the chilly draft, casting dancing shadows across the walls. Yeah, something about this place gets at me. I’m definitely not used to this Hogwartsy kind of gloom anymore. A big black mouse scurries past me, making me jump. Ever since Peter Pettigrew, I’ve had a problem with rodents. I always suspect they’re really people. And not the nice kind. This mouse could easily be an animagus, it could be some old Death Eater pal of Lucius Malfoy’s who evaded prosecution and kept his job in the Ministry and offered to ambush Draco after hours.

When I enter the main lab, he’s nowhere to be seen. It’s pitch dark. I call out his name. No response, nothing. I’ve just lit the room with Lumos, when I hear a sound in the hallway, coming from the direction of Jenkins’ office. I whip around, wand drawn, but before I see anyone or can react in any way, it flies from my hand. Disarmed like a bloody beginner. Fuck. Then the lights go out. Fuck again. Where’s that attacker, for fuck’s sake. Where’s Draco. -

And then, suddenly, there’s something like a heavenly apparition before me, three feet away. It’s him. His frame is lit from behind, his body and face are bathed in a warm glow. His chest is chiselled gold, and his wings are spreading from his shoulders shining like, yeah, like they’re made of fairy lights. He looks like an angel.

Or he would, if it weren’t for the Malfoy smirk.

“You afraid of the dark, Harry Potter?”

“Don’t do that kind of stuff,” I say hoarsely, struggling to regain my composure. Something flits across the floor, close to his feet. It’s the black mouse again. I cry out with shock.

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of mice, too! Harry, you’re The Saviour!”

He’s laughing at me. Sneering at me. It should stop me from worrying so much about him. It really should.

“Has it been following you around? The mouse?”

“Oh come on, Harry. You’re being paranoid. You came down here because you thought Jenkins was boiling me in the big cauldron, didn’t you.”

I shiver at the words. There’s a new horror vision.

“Chill, man, I was joking! Sorry I was late, but it’s really busy down here at the moment, I can’t always drop the wand at five to ten.”

“I know. I know. I’m just afraid something might happen to you.”

His expression softens in a way that makes him look one-hundred percent the celestial being I thought he was when he ambushed me just now.

“Don’t be, Harry. The Dementor was a case of wrong time, wrong place, I’m sure.”

“What if you father was behind it,” I say.

“He wasn’t. Ever since he was in Azkaban, he has been dead afraid of Dementors. You know, once he came into my room at Malfoy Manor when I was practicing the Patronus charm with a boggart, and he totally panicked at the sight of the Dementor. He wetted his robes, I swear. I guess it didn’t make him any fonder of me that I saw that.” He chuckles. “Anyway, he wouldn’t be able to go near a cage full of Dementors, let alone free one of them, even if you could just walk into Azkaban to do such a thing, which you can’t.”

“Still, Draco, I don’t like it that you’re working late all the time, alone. And down here.”

“There’s no safer place for me to be than this lab. We’re right in the Ministry, aren’t we. There’s security. No one can apparate in.”

“Can’t you at least promise me to wear your amulet at all times?”

He shakes his head, but he says yes to that.

While he packs up his things, then comes with me to the lift, he keeps talking about how I need to loosen up, and how I’m being totally paranoid.

Perhaps I am.

And then perhaps I’m not.

-

There is no black mouse in the Ministry’s Register of Animagi. But that doesn’t mean the mouse in the Potions Section isn’t a wizard. Or a witch. There’s animagi who never register with the Ministry.

I guess I do react particularly sensitive to rodents, like that black mouse. Its teeth remind me of Ron’s rat and its alter ego, Peter Pettigrew.

And they remind me of Marcus Flint, too.

I come into the kitchen, dripping wet, a towel round my hips. I stepped into the shower, than saw I had forgotten to take the new rinse-out hair oil I bought in the Muggle drugstore from the shopping bag. I've tried every Smoothing Spell to be found on the Y-pad on my unruly hair over the last years, and nothing's ever really worked. If what Draco says about Muggle products is true, and that product name, Ultra Effective Super Softening Oil, isn't a total scam, I guess it's worth a try.

Draco is at the kitchen table, eating honey straight from the jar and reading a Muggle paper. I expect him to keep doing that, or at least pretend to keep doing that. It’s the decent thing to do after all, with me being half naked. I fish the hair oil from the bag, then turn around again. It seems he doesn’t care for decent. He has put his jar and paper down and is totally checking me out.

“What now,” I say, clutching my hair oil bottle. I expect him to comment on that bottle, on how it seems I've suddenly become a little vain myself or something along those lines. But he doesn't do that. Getting up from his chair and walking up to me, he says, “Wow, Harry, you’ve changed so much. You’ve really filled out. You’re like, I don’t know. Like a bull, with that chest and neck and shoulders.”

He isn't laughing at me for a change, he's complimenting me. Yeah, there’s something in his tone that makes me like being called a bull. But then he ruins everything with his next sentence.

“You using an expanding potion?”

A potion? He thinks I got this body by drinking a bloody potion? I only use the occasional protein shake, that’s all!

“It’s called working out, Draco. A Muggle thing. Hard work in the gym.”

“The gym?”

“It’s a Muggle term. It’s what we call our training room in the Auror Department. We lift weights and stuff. This is no magic, just real, honest muscle.”

Draco’s eyes won’t leave my chest and upper arms.

“You don’t believe me? Feel free to check!”

I wouldn’t have offered that if I hadn’t felt so ridiculously offended. Turns out I can’t take it if Draco thinks my bulk is less than one hundred percent real.

It also turns out I can’t take him checking. The touch of his fingers on my skin sends a spark of heat down my spine straight to my crotch. I clutch at my towel. He doesn’t realize what’s happening to me.

“You got scars all over now,” he says, his voice low. “That’s because you’re an Auror, isn’t it. You got all these injuries from hunting down terrorists for the Ministry. People who’d use dark magic on you.” He’s tracing my scars with his fingertips. “Still putting yourself out there for the greater good. I guess you truly are what they call a hero.”

He circles the puckered skin of a fresh scar on my abs with his thumb, scrutinizing it from so close his soft hair tickles my chest.

“You weren’t wearing any protective gear when you got this, did you. Why would you be careless like that, Harry?”

“I don’t want to forever be the boy with just the lightning scar, I guess,” I say. My voice is shaking.

“I’m wearing that shield amulet for your sake, can’t you do the same for me?” he asks, ignoring my attempt at joking, his fingers still resting on my body. I’m so excited by now my breathing has lost all rhythm.

“You okay?” he asks, looking up at my face at last, his beautiful brow furrowed.

“Just need to grab... that shower,” I croak. Using the bottle of hair oil to keep my towel from tenting, I flee to the bathroom.

I beat off two times in a row before I get round to take care of my hair.

He’s out in the hallway, putting on my leather jacket, checking the Mohican he chose for the night in the mirror. He’s seeing Marcus Flint, again.

When I step between him and the mirror to tell him I don’t like it, he shakes his head.

“I do. It makes me look taller, you see.”

“You know what I mean.”

He sighs.

“You’re seeing your friends, I’m seeing mine. Where’s the problem.”

“Marcus Flint is the problem. He’s not your friend, he’s trouble. He might harm you.”

“Why would he want to do that? And also, if he did want to harm me, why hasn’t he done it already? He could have avada kedavraed me a hundred times by now!”

I can’t even bear hearing him spell it out. He could get avada kedavraed.

He reaches up to put his hands on my shoulders.

“Stop it, Harry,” he says. “Seriously, stop it. I’ll be fine. And don’t get it into your head to shadow me. You need to have some faith, else this is not going to work.”

What isn’t going to work? He has managed to send my thoughts off in a whole different direction with those last words; to create visions in my head of us, together. And he uses the moment to smile, throw a last glance at the mirror, and disapparate.

-

I’m pacing the living room like a caged tiger. Shit, I have a bad feeling. A very bad feeling, and it’s getting worse by the minute, and I can’t get a grip on it.

It’s like when my scar used to hurt me when Voldemort was on the move, only now the feeling isn’t in my head, it’s in my chest. My heart.

Does it mean he’s in danger? Or is it true after all what he says, am I just being paranoid? Or jealous, and just afraid for myself? Is this the shadows of my past, a subconscious fear of getting left behind again like I was twenty years ago?

Either way, I can’t stay here in my flat and do nothing. So I do it, I pull on the robe I keep for undercover missions, apply a Nondescript Hex to my face so no one will take notice of me, and apparate over to the Flying Pumpkin to shadow him.

-

Draco can’t be into Flint. Flint looks like he’s part-troll, he really does. I have been watching him for three hours now from behind the Daily Prophet, so I can safely pass judgement on this. That scruffy hair, and that heavy-set frame. No one can possibly dig that. Then I remember something Ron said the other night. About me looking like a troll.

There are certain parallels between me and Flint, as much as I hate to admit it. We both got bulk and black hair that looks unkempt. Only Flint’s really is, and there’s probably stink bugs living in it, judging from his smell.

It doesn’t help that he’s constantly using that deodorant spray Draco has been telling me about. Its sweet vapours drift over from the billiard tables to where I’m sitting at the counter, alternating with the wafts of Flint’s incredibly pervasive natural stink, making me slightly nauseous. Draco moves around the billiard table to choose the best angle for his next shot, and probably to bring some distance between Flint and himself. I lift the Daily Prophet for another couple of inches to keep my face covered. He has no reason to suspect the man with the less than memorable face sitting at the bar reading his paper is actually me. That Nondescript Hex has worked with all my acquaintances until now. But then he isn’t an acquaintance. I don’t know what he is exactly, but he’s definitely something else. I just know he’d recognize me if I let him.

But he’s concentrating on his game. He would. If there’s a game on, he wants to win. And he does. Flicking his cue wand through the air in a precisely calculated movement, he has driven three balls at once into their designated pockets, winning the game.

Flint puts some more spray on himself, then steps up to Draco, offering him a fresh drink. He’s clearly going out of his way to be nice to Draco. Maybe he’s gay. That would be too bad. I look on as he grins at Draco, high-fiving him to congratulate him on that incredible last shot. He has really unfortunate front teeth, Flint. Rodent teeth. No one goes for rodent teeth. Safe rodents, probably.

Shit, I’m not getting anywhere with this.

I decide to apparate back home. No point in risking him coming home before me and realizing he’s living with a deceitful, crazy creep.

-

This time, it’s both the plopping sound of his apparating and the sweetish smell of Flint’s deodorant wafting through his closed door that tell me he’s safely back.

In the morning, he’s perfectly fine. I feel more like that crazy creep than ever.

We go on a trip to the countryside in my Mini. It’s a rainy autumn day, and for want of a better idea, we visit a crumbling castle with a muddy park together with about a hundred Japanese tourists. Draco keeps making abusive remarks about the Muggle Y-pads they keep holding up to take pictures, always looking onto their screens and never at the real thing. On the way back, we stop at a cottage offering tea and scones and rickety garden benches to sit on that give you splinters in the backside. Yeah, it’s a lovely day, the kind of Sunday I want to have for the rest of my life, actually. And I’m just so happy that he isn’t angry at me for spying on him when I tell him on that bench what I did last night, and even more so that he’s fine.

But when we drive back into the city, he starts looking feverish, and when we have entered our building, he collapses on the staircase.

I don’t have time to think about why it’s happening again. It’s even worse than last time. Again and again, he’s going into choking seizures so his face goes all grey and the vessels in his large eyes burst, and I get afraid he’s going to die on my hands. Again and again, I cast Anapneo, but the effect doesn’t last like it did before. I gather him into my arms. There’s just one thing to be done now.

“Draco, I need to take you to St. Mungo’s.”

“No, no, don’t do that to me, Harry, don’t do that to me, please, Harry…”

He chokes, and his hands go to his throat in helpless agony.

“Anapneo,” I cry. “Anapneo!”

His breathing evens out. Oh God, let this be for good, please, God.

“Don’t take me to St. Mungo’s, Harry.”

“It’s alright, love, it’s alright, don’t waste your strength. We’re going to stay here, alright?”

“Yeah, we stay here, we stay here. I can’t have anyone see my wings, it’s just Harry who can see them, just Harry…”

It’s the fever that brings on this agitation, the fever that makes him lose orientation like this. It feels worse than anything that he doesn’t recognize me anymore.

“I’m here, Draco. I’m Harry, and I’m going to take care of you, here in my flat. Just calm down, please.”

“Harry. Harry. You know nobody must see what I am. The monstrosity I am.”

That word again. I want to kill Lucius Malfoy with my bare hands just for planting this word into his son’s head.

“You aren’t. You aren’t a monstrosity!”

He nods, like I confirmed what he said.

“I’ve known I was ever since I’ve known you. Long before the wings came out. You know, I had those dreams, all through our years in Hogwarts. Wet dreams. I was so afraid someone would find out, Harry.”

He’s sweating, fighting for breath again. When he goes on speaking, I can hardly make out the words anymore.

“I wanted to be dead I was so ashamed. So ashamed, Harry... Harry…”

I’ve got to calm him. I can’t have him live through his teenage traumas now, have him walk through the shadows of that old shame.

“Draco. You know it’s perfectly normal to have wet dreams at that age. Everybody had them.”

He’s sneering at nothing, his bloodshot eyes unfocused, like he’s drifting off to some place only he can see.

“Draco?”

“Trust me, not the kind I got,” he whispers. Then, from one second to the next, he falls into unconsciousness.

-

The next morning, he’s better. It was just helplessness that made me use Anapneo as often as I did, but it seems to have cured him.

For now.

He denies the sickness must have to do with Flint.

“He didn’t jinx me. I would have noticed. You would have noticed. And I’ve still got your amulet. It would ward off any kind of curse.”

“But that was no normal flu or anything!”

“Perhaps I don’t tolerate the alcohol as well as I used to. You know how I told you I’ve only been sick like this since I Changed? I’ve been thinking, maybe it’s the butterbeer. I don’t like it as much as I used to anyway, and I really hate those flavours. Maybe I should quit drinking.”

“You mean because you’re different now? Physically more delicate?”

“I’ll show you delicate, Potter!”

He deals me a blow into the ribs that’s really painful and that tells me that he truly is fighting fit again.

And his lovely open grin tells me he has forgotten what he told me last night in his moments of agony, about old dreams and wanting to die.

I’m training him in Defence against the Dark Arts. I’ve got some experience with teaching, dating back to the days of Dumbledore’s Army, and I do have a knack for it, though I say so myself.

I’m really motivated, too. Because I just know he’s in danger.

But Draco doesn’t take things seriously. He keeps calling me Professor, and constantly uses Expelliarmus. It makes our wands dance around each other mid-air. The two have a special relationship, it’s like they know it’s not a real fight.

It’s rather nice, but it’s making training difficult.

The worst thing is, he still can’t conjure a Patronus. I force him to practice every Sunday. Someone set that Dementor on him. Regardless of whether it was his father or someone else, it could happen again. Lately he has made some progress. He has managed a glimmering fog that looks like a big, shapeless beast. Only it never fully materializes into a corporal Patronus, it simply dissolves after two or three seconds.

Thankfully he’s really good at duelling. His reflexes haven’t dimmed one bit; if anything, they’ve sharpened since we fought each other in Hogwarts. When I compliment him on his skills after he has sent me skidding across the whole length of my flat’s hallway one night, he tells me it’s all thanks to my special gift as a teacher, and engages me in a discussion about my professional future. He wants me to quit the Auror Department and go into teaching instead. He’s saying he’s worried about my safety, and I just love that. I also love being an Auror, though, and I tell him that. Being Draco Malfoy, he doesn’t admit defeat that easily. He informs me that the position of Professor for Defence against the Dark Arts in Hogwarts has recently been newly advertised, yet again, then suggests I send an application, just so I’ll know my options. He knows the idea to go back to Hogwarts as a teacher appeals to me. And he also knows how to cut short his training sessions without me really noticing. There’s a sly in Slytherin for a reason.

He likes watching me fight, though.

“Show me how you do it,” he asks when I tell him we’ve got to get back to work, and then he settles back to watch me send a hologram of Voldemort crash against the wall.

“Shit, that’s just so drop-dead sexy, Harry. Do it again. That really works for me.”

And I do it, although I know I shouldn’t let him manipulate me like that. Only knowing he’s watching me with his eyes full of stars is really working for me, too.

Yeah, it is hard to train him.

Pun intended.

Go to PART TWO on DreamWidth



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