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“That wand’s more trouble than it’s worth,” said Harry. “And quite honestly,” he turned away from the painted portraits, thinking now only of the four-poster bed lying waiting for him in Gryffindor Tower, and wondering whether Kreacher might bring him a sandwich there, “I’ve had enough trouble for a lifetime.”
* * *
He had Kreacher bring sandwiches for all three of them; they ate in silent contemplation around the cold fireplace, staring at each other and the empty common room and their own laps. Harry didn’t finish his — after about four or five bites his stomach started curdling and he decided he needed sleep before his body could even begin to contemplate the energy it required to digest food. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d closed his eyes for more than a few minutes. It seemed to his exhausted brain to have been weeks instead of two days ago at Shell Cottage.
But when he went up to his bed in the familiar dormitory, alone, Ron and Hermione having gone off by themselves, he found he couldn’t sleep either. He crawled into bed and breathed deeply and told himself it’s finished, over and over again, until the words and the phrase lost all meaning, and he tried to find unconsciousness, only his eyes kept popping back open to stare at the ceiling.
So he stopped trying and decided to wander the castle until his mind gave in and let him rest.
It was nearing eight in the morning, a little over two hours since he'd violently consummated this particular era of his life, that Harry found himself outside the Room of Requirement. His feet had taken him there with little effort on the part of his conscious mind — he was feeling exceedingly strange now, not hollow but a bit numb, a feeling he thought (and hoped) would wear off after he finally managed some sleep and had more time to process everything.
Voldemort being gone, namely. He wondered vaguely where the body would be taken, how it would be dealt with, but he didn't much care when it came down to it as long as he never saw it again in his waking life.
He had a feeling he would meet Tom Riddle in his dreams for a long time to come.
He looked at the blank stretch of wall hiding the Room of Requirement and wondered whether it would open for him if he asked. And if it did, what would be inside? Would it still work, or would anybody who used it simply find the burnt remains of a room that had been a hiding place to centuries of guilty Hogwarts students? It occurred to him to try, but he thought better of it in the end. He realised he didn't want to know the answer — not right now, at least.
"Potter."
Harry turned to find Draco Malfoy looking at him from not far away. There was a bruise on his cheek, likely where Ron had punched him earlier. He was strikingly pale and thin: Harry thought that he'd never seen anyone who looked so pathetic. He thought it with no anger or hatred. It was exactly what he would expect Malfoy to look like at this moment in time. He couldn’t decide how he felt about seeing him here now, knowing only that he felt no anger. Some part of him even wondered how Malfoy was feeling.
He reached into his pocket and drew out the hawthorn wand.
"Here," he said.
Malfoy came closer and took it, looking ambivalent.
"S'pose you don't need it anymore," he said. "The Elder Wand and all."
"I got rid of it," Harry told him — not perfectly truthful, but it amounted to the same. It was back where it belonged now. He saw the surprise on Malfoy's face, which quickly returned to a neutral expression. "I fixed my old wand."
"Fancy yourself powerful enough without it, Potter?"
Harry smiled tiredly. There was no malice in Malfoy's voice that he could detect, only half-arsed sarcasm.
"Sure," said Harry. "If you like."
"So it was really mine?"
Harry nodded, searching Malfoy's face for evidence of what he might be thinking, but there wasn't much.
"And when you took my wand at the manor, that's when it became yours?"
"Yeah," said Harry. "Would've been pretty gruesome if I'd be wrong though, eh?"
He'd meant it half in jest and half in utter seriousness. Malfoy didn't smile, and something in his cold grey eyes said he didn't think it was very funny. Something not very deep inside of Harry agreed that the idea of his plan not having worked was not funny at all.
"The 'would have's don't much matter," Malfoy said. "You're alive. He's dead. Prophecy fulfilled."
Succinct, which Harry could certainly appreciate at the moment.
"Yeah," he agreed hollowly. "I feel a bit ... I dunno, numb, when I think about it? I feel like I’m still supposed to be doing something but I don't know what." He shook his head and absently touched his scar, remembering suddenly how it hadn’t been there at King’s Cross, with Dumbledore. It made no sense at all to be telling this to Malfoy, yet here he was. "I s'pose it's because I've been going nonstop for so long. It’s habitual. I’m restless."
"We could fuck."
Harry blinked. He looked over at Malfoy again, gobsmacked, sure he'd heard wrong. Sure of it. His overworked mind was playing odd tricks on him. Malfoy was leaning back against the wall, arms crossed, white blond hair in disarray and ashy with smoke from the fire. There was a smudge of it under one eye, as well. He stared at Harry with a single eyebrow lifted, challenging.
"I’m sorry, what?"
"Just a suggestion," Malfoy said with a shrug.
Harry blinked at him again. It took him another few seconds to locate his voice.
"Why would ... why would you even say that?"
For just a moment — a horrible moment where his insides felt loose and watery — he wondered if he was dreaming. If everything, all of this, Hogwarts, the Fiendfyre, the Shrieking Shack, the pensieve, the forest, the Great Hall ... if he'd just been dreaming. If he was actually asleep somewhere, Shell Cottage or the Hog's Head, or perhaps he'd passed out after jumping off the dragon and swimming to shore, currently in the throes of exhausted delirium. It was pretty obviously not the case, but he still couldn't force his sluggish brain to make sense of what he was hearing or accept it as reality.
"You said you were restless," said Malfoy. "Something to do, isn’t it? I hardly think you feel like fighting, although I s'pose if you wanted to hit me you'd be entitled. Bear in mind Weasley already did that."
Harry stared at him. There was an impossible stirring in his groin, and for a confused couple of seconds he tried to force himself to think about it objectively, just for the hell of it, as a concept, a concrete idea, fucking Draco Malfoy. He could see Malfoy watching him, frowning a little like he was trying to discern Harry's thoughts.
"I genuinely can't tell if you're serious," said Harry finally. He expected Malfoy to burst into cruel, mocking laughter, but he didn't.
"I'm being one hundred percent serious, Potter," he said instead, unfaltering. "If you want to fuck me, you can."
"Why —" Harry started and broke off, speechless. He laughed in disbelief, dumbfounded by the awareness that he was getting hard. It was adrenaline, surely. Adrenaline and exhaustion and he hadn't gotten off in ages and he'd just finished off Voldemort and he realised suddenly how good it would feel to fuck someone, to have that release, to be able to pour everything he'd been feeling the last twenty-four hours into something so raw and simple, something that needed no brain-power, something he’d never even done before.
He felt sure he’d be able to sleep then.
He swallowed. "Why in … why would you ever think I'd want to fuck you?"
He saw Malfoy's eyes widen slightly, as if it wasn't precisely the response he'd been expecting, but his expression quickly became impassive again. His fair cheeks, however, were flushed a dull pink. Harry had trouble convincing himself he was really seeing it there.
"I just told you, it's something to do," said Malfoy. "Something mindless to do. Been sort of a weird night, hasn’t it? I don't think it can get much weirder."
"No," said Harry slowly, "it definitely can. You've done that, Malfoy."
To his surprise, Malfoy smiled. It wasn't a happy smile: he looked bitterly amused. Harry wondered suddenly if Malfoy was hard too, and the idea served only to exacerbate his own confused, helpless arousal.
And then something insane occurred to him, and he looked at Malfoy with a sense of dawning wonder and incredulity.
"Wait ... do you want me to fuck you?" he asked in disbelief. The colour on Malfoy's cheeks darkened. It was an answer in itself, although Harry couldn’t really process it.
"I wouldn't have offered if I didn’t, Scarhead."
Voldemort's gone and Malfoy wants me to fuck him, Harry thought to himself, nearly laughing. While he tried to let that thought properly sink in his eyes wandered back to the empty wall marking the Room of Requirement, and he remembered suddenly that a few hours ago Malfoy had watched one of his best mates fall into some cursed fire and burn to death, which seemed like the kind of thing that could make someone act … like this.
"Malfoy," he started to say with a sigh, only Malfoy cut him off.
"Don't," he said sharply. Harry looked at him and saw that he'd tensed up, no longer casually leaning back against the wall.
Part of Harry wanted to ask him if he was happy with himself. If being cruel and bullying people his whole life had been worth it, standing here on the other side of everything, with Crabbe dead and his father's Pureblood mania destroyed and nothing left for him but a future that was going to look very different than the one he'd grown up imagining for himself.
He didn't, though, because he didn't think he needed to. He could see on Malfoy's face that he'd already begun asking himself that very question.
"Can you at least tell me why you suddenly want this?"
"It's not sudden," said Malfoy with a roll of his eyes.
"Right, I must’ve made it up in my head that we’ve hated each other the last seven years."
"I can hate you and want to fuck you. I'm sure that's difficult for a morally-dense Gryffindor to comprehend."
Harry lifted his glasses and put a hand over his eyes, pressing his fingers into them, rubbing hard.
"What the fuck are you on about, Malfoy?" he said tiredly. “I’m not in the mood for mind games at the moment.” His erection was starting to throb now, trapped beneath his jeans. He suddenly couldn't stop picturing it, fucking him, Malfoy. He wanted to stop, but he couldn't.
Malfoy stepped in front of him, face expressionless, and suddenly his hand was on Harry's cock, cupping loosely around the shape of it, and instead of pushing him off and demanding to know what the fuck this was supposed to be, he let his head fall back against the stone wall and swallowed hard.
"I literally don’t know how else I can explain it to you, Potter,” said Malfoy quietly. His hand moved slowly up and down the hard line of Harry’s cock, thumbing over the head and drawing a broken sound out of him. “You just defeated the greatest Dark wizard of the last century; if that doesn’t make you feel like fucking someone, I don’t know what else possibly could.”
“Sure,” Harry croaked, “but you?”
Malfoy laughed sardonically, and when Harry brought his gaze back down he saw — with a sharp twist of arousal — that Malfoy was getting to his knees. His slim white hands fumbled briefly with Harry’s flies and then he was reaching into his jeans and his fingers were curling around Harry’s swelling cock, tugging him free, just like that. He swallowed again, eyes closing, heart pounding, head falling back against the wall. Maybe he was dreaming, but he decided he didn’t care anymore, not even that it was Malfoy. He’d never been touched like this, not even by Ginny; in fact, he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d gotten himself off. Not since they’d left Grimmauld place, that was all he knew.
“Have you ever had your cock sucked, Potter?” Malfoy enquired. His voice was saturated with dark amusement. It made Harry’s cock twitch and when he felt Malfoy squeeze he bit back a groan.
“Nope,” he said. “Been too busy.”
“Too busy to have sex? Surely the Weaslette —”
“Don’t,” Harry said, cutting him off sharply. He opened his eyes and looked down at the impossible sight before him, and on Malfoy’s face he saw a subdued smirk. He squeezed again and then leaned forward, dragging the flat of his tongue up the vein on the underside of Harry’s cock. Harry’s head fell back again and he said, voice slightly strained, “Just … shut the fuck up for once, Malfoy, and keep doing that.”
Malfoy laughed. “Feel good, Potter?”
“What did I just say?” Harry bit out. It sounded much less steady than he’d have liked.
And then Malfoy’s mouth was on him. On him. His lips folded over the sensitive head, sucking lightly, and then he was opening wider and Harry groaned as he was taken into that wet warmth. It was like nothing he’d ever felt, the slight suction, the velvety inside of a mouth as it hallowed around him, the feeling of a hot tongue pressing up against his swollen flesh. And of course that it was Malfoy with his lips stretched around Harry’s cock, Malfoy’s fingers stroking the base, Malfoy who had spit and pre-come drooling out of the corners of his mouth.
“Done this before?” Harry managed in a croaky voice that gave him away. And he didn’t even fucking care, to tell the truth. He cared so little that he let his hand tangle in Malfoy’s ratty blond hair and gripped it so hard he heard Malfoy whine around his mouthful. Malfoy pulled off with a wet sound and licked over the head.
“Course I have,” he said. “Us Slytherins aren’t nearly as prudish as the rest of you.”
Harry laughed weakly and finally closed his eyes once more. The back of his head touched the stone wall, and though his mind tried flitting to a hundred different places at once — back to the forest, back to the Shrieking Shack, to Bathilda Bagshot’s house, to the sight of the dead in the Great Hall — it gave up with a shuddering completeness the moment Malfoy took him back in his mouth, and the relief was so huge that Harry moaned, the sound agonised and grateful and broken.
Either Malfoy was thoroughly enjoying himself or he’d picked up on the obvious fact of Harry’s sudden, blazing need, and either seemed an absurd explanation for the way he was putting all his energy into this fucking blowjob. He suddenly took Harry in deep, lips touching the edge of his fist, so the head was pressing all the way into the back of his throat as he swallowed around it. Harry tightened his fist in Malfoy’s hair and pushed further, sliding into his throat, which made Malfoy gag finally and pull off. Harry opened his eyes in time to see a string of spit and come connecting Malfoy’s swollen lower lip and the head of his cock before he licked his lips and it disappeared.
“This isn’t even fucking real,” Harry told himself, and he pressed his free hand to his forehead, like he might feel a fever burning there.
“Isn’t it?” Malfoy’s hand stroked up his cock, passed over the glans, and back down. “What d’you s’pose this is, then?”
Harry shook his head. Shrugged. “I died,” he said. He blinked down at Malfoy, his red lips, his flushed cheeks, the ash in his white hair and his cold grey eyes — which, actually, were a bit less frosty than usual at the moment. One might even have ventured to say that looked quite warm right now. “I did die in the forest, that’s what happened.”
“And this is, what?” Malfoy squeezed around his cock and a faint smirk touched his mouth. “Heaven?”
“All right, maybe I’m sleeping, then.”
Malfoy rolled his eyes. “So are you gonna fuck me, Potter?”
Harry held his gaze, on some level still, even now, trying to decide if Malfoy wasn’t having him on in a hugely elaborate way. His prick throbbed in that tight grip, leaking pre-come so steadily he could see it dribbling all over Malfoy’s hand.
“Are you serious?” he asked again. And then he laughed, a little hysterically. “I’ve never even — I’d never had a blowjob before now, you think I’m just gonna …?”
Malfoy lifted both eyebrows. His hand came off Harry’s prick and he stood up, looking at once provoking and quite serious. He waited for Harry to finish, although Harry had an idea Malfoy knew perfectly well what he was thinking.
On the heels of that he thought of Ginny, quite suddenly, and it startled him to realise this was the first time she’d entered his mind since Malfoy started touching his cock. With the realisation came a terrible anxiety, but not the kind he would have thought: he was desperate not to think of Ginny, not to ruin this for himself by second-guessing and feeling guilty and wondering about her, because — it disgusted him a little to think it — he didn’t care about any of that at the moment. What he cared about was how fucking hard he was, and how more than anything he did want to fuck Malfoy. He wanted to bend him over and sink as deeply into his body as he could get and pound him until he came.
And then sleep. For days he thought he would sleep.
“Just going to what?” Malfoy said when Harry said nothing else, only stared at him with his prick hard and red and leaking between them.
But Harry decided not to say it. Because what was ‘virginity,’ after all, other than the first time one had sex? It didn’t mean anything. And he wanted this, it was all he fucking wanted after everything the past forty-eight hours, the past year, the past seven years, his whole bloody life; and really, he thought, maybe it wasn’t so bad, maybe it was kind of apropos, if his first act as a free man was to fuck the last person he or anyone else would have ever expected him to fuck.
Harry didn’t answer the question. Instead, he said: “Where?” Malfoy’s pupils grew. The flush on his cheeks darkened. Harry was visited by a desire to feel whether it made Malfoy’s cold, marble-like skin warm. As Malfoy looked behind them, Harry pulled his boxers back up over his erection.
“Here,” said Malfoy, and he went to a door a few yards further down the corridor, away from the blasted wall where Fred died (Harry had to forcefully shove this thought away) and the Room of Requirement. Harry followed him inside and found an untouched classroom, western-facing and thus still somewhat dark. When the door was closed Malfoy turned back to him and reached immediately for Harry’s shirt, which Harry let him pull over his head.
“Jesus.” Malfoy’s hand went to an enormous ugly bruise covering the whole right side of Harry’s ribcage, already a deep and angry-looking dark purplish-blue. Harry stared at it, transfixed, and felt the tender skin with his fingertips.
“It’s where the curse hit,” he said quietly, a little breathless by the sight of it. Malfoy prodded gently and Harry drew in a breath, it stung, but he didn’t push him away. Finally Malfoy looked up at him, searching.
“Why can’t you die?”
Harry croaked out a laugh. He felt strange. Alive. Immortal.
“I can now,” he said.
Something passed across Malfoy’s face that made Harry’s stomach feel weird. He ignored it and went for Malfoy’s shirt, which was singed in a few places. Underneath it he found the scars he had put there himself last year, and he looked at Malfoy, and Malfoy looked back at him defiantly, almost stubbornly, and they said none of the things they were both thinking.
Harry tried to think, looking at him, if there had ever been a time before when he’d felt a sexual attraction to Malfoy. He wondered whether other blokes could make him this hard, or if perhaps it was a Malfoy thing, if there had simply been so much volatile emotion simmering at the surface of their hatred for one another, for so long, that there came a point when this part of it, the fucking, became inevitable. When there just stopped being a difference in the way they expressed all of it.
He thought it wasn’t just Malfoy, though. He thought there was something to this, the sex-with-a-bloke thing … but he also thought it was Malfoy. He thought it was somehow both things at once.
And he also thought Malfoy was right: Harry didn’t feel like fighting right now. Not ever again, maybe.
With Malfoy’s hand on his boxers, finding his erection again, Harry made the split-second decision to act on a crazy impulse and leaned forwards, recklessly, to kiss him.
Their lips had barely brushed (Harry’s heart was banging like a war drum in his chest) when Malfoy pulled back. He gaped at Harry, hand stalling, looking about as gobsmacked as Harry’d felt when Malfoy first suggested they fuck. Under different circumstances he might have wilted under the humiliation, but right now he was too drained to feel anything other than vague exasperation, mixed with a bit of amusement and even disappointment.
“What are you doing?”
Harry laughed weakly, a thin, strained sound. Malfoy’s grip slackened.
“So in your mind,” Harry said, “it’s perfectly normal to suggest fucking, but kissing is a hard line?”
“They’re two completely different things, Potter.”
“Right,” said Harry. He wasn’t wrong, which made him wonder why he wanted to do it so much. But then Malfoy — maybe seeing something on Harry’s face he didn’t like — tightened his hand again and started stroking, long, slow movements from base to tip, as if to distract him. “Then I wonder why you’re bothering with all this foreplay? Maybe we should just get to the fucking.”
The shock (and was that embarrassment?) in Malfoy’s eyes set Harry’s blood on fire. Again he felt the urge to kiss him, to taste humiliation on that sharp tongue, and fought it.
“Maybe we should,” said Malfoy finally. He squeezed Harry’s prick and then let go. Harry tried not to let anything show on his face as he watched Malfoy toe off his shoes; his hands went to his flies, he undid them, and then he stripped out of his trousers altogether. Draco Malfoy stood before him in socks and nothing else, so many scars on his chest Harry couldn’t count them at a glance, white hair dirty with ash that might have been the burnt remains of contraband or what was left of Vincent Crabbe, a bruise growing darker on his cheek all the time. Harry stepped closer and Malfoy eyed him, cheeks flushed, chest rising and falling with every unsteady breath, and for a second Harry thought he’d meet resistance when he put his hands on Malfoy’s hips and applied pressure; instead, with a look that Harry placed halfway between ambivalence and anticipation, he allowed Harry to turn him around. He put his hands against the wall, and then his forehead. Harry took him in from head to foot: the way blond hair lay over the nape of his neck, the long, pale, aristocratic line of his back, the roundness of his arse, the slimness of his thighs and how his ankles looked weak.
He could barely reconcile this person with the Draco Malfoy he’d always known. At the same time it couldn’t have been anyone else, for nobody else could have made Harry feel this close to the edge of his sanity.
“Oh,” said Malfoy suddenly, “hand me my wand.”
“What?”
“My wand,” he said again. “From my trousers.”
Harry did, and though he heard Malfoy murmur a few spells consecutively (and saw something flicker across his face), he had no idea what had been done. It was only the last one, which made something slick appear on his right hand (lube, he realised), that did anything he could see. Malfoy dropped his wand to the floor and looked back at Harry over his shoulder, grey eyes darker than usual.
“Go ahead,” said Malfoy.
Harry licked his lips, heart hammering, and took his cock in hand. The lube was cool against his hot skin and made the slide easy when he stroked, from swollen base to leaking tip. He tried to ground himself, to make it feel less like a vivid dream he was having, to force himself to inhabit the reality of the moment, because what a moment it was.
Some quiet part of him wondered, as he stared at Malfoy’s arse and — holding his breath — rubbed his cock along the tempting cleft, whether he shouldn’t be doing something else first, preparing Malfoy in some way. Harry knew fuck-all about sex, but his common sense told him a bloke would need some kind of preparation first (the thought made his cheeks burn and he was glad Malfoy was facing the wall). Another, equally quiet voice answered that those were the spells Malfoy had performed a second ago.
He closed his eyes and breathed out through his nose and tried not to imagine why Malfoy was so adept at those kinds of charms. When he opened them again, he used the thumb of one hand to pull Malfoy’s cheeks apart, used his other to steady his cock, and he held his breath as he lined up. He was shaking slightly — with hunger, exhaustion, grief, lust, want — and it made it difficult to find Malfoy’s hole. But he finally did, and the broken moan he let out when he started pushing inside seemed to come from somewhere deep in his gut, a place he hadn’t known existed. Malfoy’s arse sucked him in, his tight, hot channel clinging to Harry’s cock perfectly, stealing his breath. Malfoy panted beneath him, shaking too.
He switched his grip to Malfoy’s waist once he was halfway buried, fingers digging into supple skin. He couldn’t take his eyes away from the sight of his cock disappearing into Malfoy’s arse, Draco, Draco fucking Malfoy … he would have laughed, but all he could do was groan and force his cock deeper, eyes falling closed, forehead pressed to Malfoy’s white-blond hair. He could smell the sweat and smoke and adrenaline, and, fittingly surreal, a hint of fruity soap underneath it. Maybe apple.
Equally surreal was the warmth of Malfoy’s hand covering Harry’s on his hip and dragging it forward, so it was flat against Malfoy’s stomach and he could feel his navel on his palm. He dug his fingers in and felt every breath expanding his lungs. Harry moved his other hand to the wall for balance, fingers brushing Malfoy’s there too.
When he was buried as deep as he could go he stopped just to linger in the moment, to memorise the feeling of being, for the first time in his life, connected to another person this way. Physically, carnally, with no barriers. Inside.
That it was Malfoy factored into it in a way Harry felt incapable of understanding at the moment. He was too tired, too empty, too starved for touch and for mindless release to bother deciphering his emotions.
He wanted to fuck. And Malfoy wanted to be fucked, so.
He felt clumsy and a little awkward as he pulled out, head catching on the reddened skin of Malfoy’s hole, and pushed back in. And he didn’t care that it was awkward and inexperienced. It felt like salvation, like the culmination of everything, all boiling down to this. His strokes were messy but enthusiastic, and he found a rhythm quickly that pulled little gasping whimpers from Malfoy and made Harry’s veins shiver with want. His awareness of the world around him shrank until the classroom didn’t exist anymore, and nor did the crumbling castle it stood inside or its mourning inhabitants — the only real thing was Malfoy: his warm, yielding body under Harry’s hands, the smell of his hair, the impossible clutch of his arse, the soft noises he made every time Harry filled him.
He didn’t know how long they stood like that, with Malfoy pressed to the wall and Harry holding him, fucking him, breathing him in, whispering his name because it was the only word his mind wanted to come up with right now. Draco, he thought —
(a sneering boy in a robe shop talking about slytherin a blond boy with friends like bodyguards holding his hand out malfoy draco malfoy faking a broken arm working for umbridge lying in a pool of his own blood on a bathroom floor lowering his wand)
— and he tipped his head forward against the back of Draco’s neck and dug his nails into his stomach and clenched his teeth and felt the body under him tense and gasp and —
He pulled out. Draco made a sound like he was dying. He turned and looked at Harry with wide, frantic eyes that hid nothing: not his arousal, his need, and not his pain or his fear either. Harry saw everything in that moment, a Draco Malfoy stripped naked and raw and vulnerable, and it stirred up so much emotion he nearly felt sick with it.
“Floor,” he said. It felt like the best he could do. “C’mere, on the floor.”
He thought for a second Draco wouldn’t do it, but then he did. He lowered himself to the hard, tiled classroom floor and parted his legs when Harry crawled between them on his knees. He wanted to see his face, that was the thing — he wanted to watch, wanted to know it was Draco. Dawn light was finally spilling in through the western-facing windows and Harry thought he looked kind of lovely bathed in its soft palette, laid out on the tile all bruised up and filthy and broken.
He lined up and slid in more easily this time. Draco breathed out a sigh and lifted his hands to Harry’s shoulders; one of them went further and took his glasses off, discarding them beside him on the ground. The urge came again, even stronger than before, and this time when Harry bent to kiss him Draco didn’t resist. The visceral grip of his emotions startled him a little but didn’t deter him: Harry stuck his tongue in Draco’s mouth with as much finesse as he was fucking him, and it didn’t matter it was sloppy because it reminded him how very alive he was in this moment. He took one of Draco’s hands and pressed it to the floor, linked their fingers together, moaned softly into his mouth. Draco hitched a leg up higher on Harry’s waist and trembled.
He reached for Draco’s cock with his other hand and stroked out of time with every sharp snap of his hips. He kissed him with lips and tongue and teeth, wanting more than his exhausted body would allow, more than he’d have known how to take even if it hadn’t been. Draco’s fingers curled around his, their sweaty palms pressed together, and when he stopped kissing and started making mewling noises into Harry’s mouth he knew it was because Draco, like him, was approaching some critical peak.
Sweating, panting, half-delirious, Harry gripped Draco’s thigh, shifted his angle, and let go of the last of his resolve. Draco cried out and clenched around him, nails digging into his back, and it took five hard thrusts for Harry to tilt himself over the edge. The orgasm washed over him like a warm, tingling wave, tensing his muscles and then turning them to liquid as he spilled endlessly inside Draco’s arse. Draco squeezed his hand and came only seconds later, turning his face away and straining under Harry’s body. Harry forced his useless muscles to move so he could grip Draco’s chin and turn his head and kiss him again, sloppy and wet and uncomfortably poignant.
He could feel Draco shivering through the last of his orgasm, cock spurting weakly beneath his own tight grip, and then he went boneless. The sound of their panting breaths was suddenly loud in the otherwise silence. Harry kissed him again, breathlessly, before pulling out. He dropped to the floor beside Draco and threw an arm across his eyes, feeling his racing heart, the cool tile, the fading throbbing of his balls.
He thought he should say something, but he couldn’t summon the energy to find his voice: not even when he felt Draco turn towards him, soft lips on his knuckles.
He wanted to say something, and he told himself just one more minute, I just need to catch my breath, but he was asleep almost before he’d finished the thought.
He woke to someone shaking him; he shot up and started fumbling for his wand before he remembered there was no danger. Heart hammering, he lay back down, fumbled his cock back into his boxers, and covered his face with his hands, trying to force away the memory of waking in the forest after his brief trip to limbo, the smell of leaves and dirt and blood. When he took his hands away he looked over at Draco, who was watching him from a sitting position. He’d put his clothes back on but hadn’t bothered to button his shirt, so his scars remained visible. Harry stared at them, and then lifted his gaze to Draco’s face.
“D’you know how long we slept?”
“No,” said Draco. “But going by the sun I’d say it’s still early. Ten, maybe. Not long.”
“I should find Ron and Hermione.” The numbness was back, a feeling like time had stagnated and reality was so thin he could tear a hole in it. “What are you doing?”
Draco shrugged. “No idea,” he said tonelessly. “Find my parents, I s’pose.”
Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy. All the Death Eaters, really. Something would have to be done about them, and Harry thought it seemed likely Kingsley would want to speak with him formally. About that and a million other things. That didn’t feel very real either, though — he supposed it might once he left the castle.
He found his shirt and glasses and pulled them on, then collected the cloak and his wand.
“What d’you think they’ll do to me?” Draco asked suddenly. Harry wished he hadn’t. He looked at him and saw fear behind his deliberate calm. He remembered the way Draco had looked when Harry was fucking him, the raw openness of expression, the implicit trust, that thing, that feeling, that had settled between them.
“Nothing,” said Harry finally. “Not to you. Maybe not to your mum either.”
He saw on his face that Draco took his meaning. An echo of his old sneer appeared, but it was directed at the floor and it looked more like a grimace than a sneer anyway. Harry realised he wanted to kiss him again.
When he went over to him and did it — lifted his chin and pressed their lips together and felt Draco stop breathing while it happened — he realised something else too: he was feeling something beyond the obvious. Not just sexual attraction or the flare-up of seven years of mutual loathing, but real curiosity. A desire for physical affection not from anyone who’d give it (not even from Ginny) but from Draco sodding Malfoy, who was just as lost and lonely and confused as Harry was. Harry put a hand on his cheek and opened his mouth and felt something inside of him slide into place when Draco touched his jaw and kissed back.
Draco broke it first and looked away, cheeks pink.
“I’m gonna go find Ron and Hermione,” said Harry. He wanted to say something else to the tune of why did you ask me to do this? or are you feeling the same way I’m feeling right now? but Draco was still staring at the wall, away from him, and Harry swallowed all his questions.
On one of the unused desks he found a scrap bit of parchment and used his wand to spell out ‘12 Grimmauld Place London,’ which he then handed to Draco.
“If you need anything,” he said. Draco looked at it and then at him, eyes flickering back and forth between Harry’s.
“Why?”
Harry didn’t answer. He didn’t think he needed to. Eventually Draco put it in his pocket.
“Will he come back again?” he said abruptly. Harry looked at him, thinking of Horcruxes and King’s Cross and the screaming thing Dumbledore told him he couldn’t save and the gargantuan bruise on his ribcage.
“No,” he said. “He’s gone.”
Draco nodded. “Cheers, Potter.”
Harry laughed. It was a weak sound. “Don’t lose that address,” he said.
“I don’t plan to.”
“Good,” said Harry. “I’ll see you soon then.” He hitched his thumb over his shoulder. “Gonna go sleep for a few weeks.”
For a wonder, Draco flashed a wry grin. Then he stepped forward, and even though the kiss was short it promised other things to come.
“See you, Potter.”
“Yeah. Soon, I hope.”
Draco shrugged. Harry thought it meant yes.
In the midst of all the loss this night had brought with it, the fear and horror and the pervasive feeling of things ending, here, at least, was a beginning.