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Harry had forgotten how dark winter could be. Everywhere in Hogwarts there had been light: candles blazing through the Great Hall like a hundred shouts of joy, torchlight flickering in corridors, fireglow warming the common room. Now, as he huddled with the rest of the grieving Order at Grimmauld Place, he was haunted by silence and shadows. Through every moment of every long night, Harry ached for the sun.
Perhaps this was why he could think of nothing but his empty bed, now, even now, when every moment was clogged with musts: must protect, must defend, must avenge, must kill. Six months ago -- or was it six years? -- he'd told Ginny that their time together had been like a slice of someone else's life, a life not ruled by must. But his own life was a story that had begun long before his birth, and now it plunged relentlessly to its ending, leaving no time for digressions, for interludes, for long slow pauses of skin against skin.
He wanted another story: the kind his body whispered about in his dreams, the kind that did not end with him alone and aching in the dark. Harry was tired of darkness, tired before the darkness had truly begun. He wanted something else. He wanted something more. He wanted it now, before it was too late.
Spring
The first bloke Harry slept with was George, who treated the whole thing like a joke, but at least swore he wouldn't tell Fred.
He told Fred. Fred told Bill, who told Fleur, who told everyone. Ginny found Harry and slapped him across the face, hard; Ron moved to a couch downstairs, and wouldn't speak to Harry for two weeks.
Kingsley reminded them that there was a war on.
Sometime during all the shouting Malfoy turned up with two black eyes, serious magical wounds over half his body, and the Slytherin horcrux. After Malfoy's interrogation, Kingsley decided the best place for him would be the dank cellar room at Grimmauld Place. No one trusted Malfoy, but Voldemort's people had tried to kill him twice, and there was no place else for him to go. It had to be done. Molly gave him bedlinens with holes and odd stains; he sneered and didn't thank her.
The only thing they could agree on was that Malfoy need know nothing of the Order's business, nor Harry's. They'd reckoned without the Slytherin genius for extracting gossip from thin air. Three days after his arrival, Malfoy tracked Harry down in the dusty parlour; he smiled with sparkling malicious pleasure and asked if Harry planned to fuck his way through the entire Weasley family.
"You're the Boy Who Scored Again," Malfoy crowed.
"Shut up, Malfoy," Harry said.
"Yeah," said Ron. "Shut up."
It was the first time Ron had spoken in Harry's presence in days: a peace offering of sorts, and Harry took it. He needed Ron on his side. They talked, awkwardly, about the war, and less awkwardly about Quidditch. Harry didn't think about Malfoy until the room began to grow dim, and Ron lit the candles with a wave of his wand. They were alone; Malfoy had long ago made himself scarce.
"Let him go," Ron said. "Maybe we'll be lucky and he'll fall down a well, or something."
In the windowpanes their reflected images flickered: two boys talking, a quiet moment in a darkening room. Outside, the world hovered interminably between daylight and dusk. Against the flare of the street lamp Harry could see rain, the kind of needling cold spring rain that chills your skin and seeps into your bones.
Beneath the lamp someone stood alone: Malfoy, his face upturned to meet the electric glow. Water streamed through his hair, across his eyes, down his pale cheeks. Water soaked his robes and made them cling to his body. Water glistened on his hands, his long clever fingers, his pale, outstretched arms. Water turned the pavement around him to pools of shimmering radiance, and in them lay a whole world, inverted: a jagged line of reflected rooftops looming dark against a reflected sky. Malfoy spread his arms wide, and he looked like he was flying, soaring free above the glimmering shadow-world at his feet.
"Hey, mate," Ron said. "Penny for them."
Harry nodded toward the window, and Ron gave a soft whistle of disbelief.
"He's barking," he said. "Every wizard in England wants a piece of Malfoy's skin, and he's standing out there in the rain."
Outside, Malfoy turned, slowly, the water glistening on his skin, on his lips.
"He'll catch his death," Ron said.
Harry nodded, and refocused his eyes on the parlour. It was now dark, and all the window showed him was his own reflection and Ron's, ruddy and warm in the candlelight. He grinned cautiously at Ron, who was hurt, it seemed, and needed fixing. Harry would do it, because he must. Outside, in the rain, lay a mystery in glittering silver. But Harry could deal with Malfoy later.
Summer
The next bloke Harry tried was Seamus. That got a bit messy, because Ginny was sleeping with him too. She claimed she'd been sleeping with him first, but Hermione called her liar. Ginny stopped talking to everyone, and Ron returned to his couch, and Kingsley told them, again, that there was a bloody war on, and could they please at least be civil.
Malfoy laughed raucously, and offered to ward Harry's food against poisons. Harry refused.
The next bloke, sort of, was Neville, who asked Harry if he'd like to go to Kew Gardens on their free afternoon. Harry was so surprised he said yes.
Malfoy made no effort to restrain his glee when he caught Harry very casually glancing at his own reflection as he walked out the door with his date. "Longbottom?" he said, raising his eyebrows. "Longbottom, Potter?
"Shut up, Malfoy," Harry hissed.
"Hello, Draco," said Neville.
Malfoy snorted and returned to his book.
Harry and Neville strolled through the gardens, and Neville showed Harry the only Night-Blossoming Cat-Tree in Britain, an odd-looking plant in the magical section that purred when you touched it. They kissed, but then Harry found himself talking: about Ron, about Hermione. About Malfoy; for some reason Neville kept asking about him. About Dumbledore. Rather a lot about Dumbledore.
After a few hours Neville smiled shyly and offered Harry his handkerchief. They remained very good friends.
The next bloke Harry tried was Anthony Goldstein; they hadn't known each other well at school, but the war threw people together in ways that surprised them.
Harry had always thought of Tony as quiet; he was, unless something reminded him of quantum Divination, a pet subject of his. When that happened -- and anything could be related to quantum Divination, for apparently that was the point -- Tony dazzled Harry with a flow of words: words about alternatives, contingencies, endless branching possibilities, as if the world was a game of chess with no rules and, as far as Harry could tell, no meaning.
It was a bit overwhelming, but Tony was obviously fond of Harry and quite fit for a Ravenclaw. His eyes were dark and sparkling, and that mouth proved clever in more ways than one.
"My God, Potter," Malfoy said, walking in on them in the kitchen one day, "you found a way to make a Ravenclaw shut up."
"Shut up, Malfoy," Harry said, and pointedly returned to what he'd been doing.
The fling lasted less than two weeks; Tony had a chance to work in an advanced Arithmancy lab at Cambridge, and took it. Harry knew this was part of the war effort too, though he couldn't quite make out how. Tony's letters were friendly but short, as if his mind seethed with things that he knew Harry couldn't begin to comprehend.
He mentioned his mentor a little too frequently, however, and Harry did understand that.
Harry owled to say how much the Order valued Tony's help, and that they'd always be good friends. When the little bird flew off, Harry frowned at a vase by the parlour window, and it burst into flames.
"Wanker," Malfoy said. He lounged on the couch as usual, reading Tony's letter without permission. "His father worked for mine. Clever. Useful. Dull. Don't waste your time."
"I didn't ask for your opinion," Harry said.
"I don't wait for people to ask," said Malfoy. He picked up another letter.
For a few dizzying instants Harry choked on his own fury. When he was fifteen he would have pummelled Malfoy with his fists; when he was sixteen he would have hurled magic, screaming words and channelling power without knowing or caring what would happen.
Now he could do nothing. Malfoy turned the letter over, reading with an amused sneer, and Harry struggled to breathe: he would not give in to this, he would not, because he'd been fighting Death Eaters for over a year now with a strength that seemed to redouble after every battle, and he could feel power tingle in his fingers when he turned over in his sleep. He had no idea what his magic would do if he lost control.
Malfoy sprawled there, oblivious, reading one page of the letter and fanning himself with the other, his robes wide open at the neck and one leg dangling carelessly to rest on the floor. Light poured into the room, the summer light of hot dawns and endless days. It streaked Malfoy in shadow and burning gold; it lit dust motes like a halo around his head, the filth of a hundred years made brilliant and beautiful by the sun. It crept along his body to nestle at the base of his throat and heat the exposed skin, making him sweat, making him flush warm and red and wet.
Harry thought: I could kill him, here, now. Or not. Maybe not.
Malfoy stretched, arms raised above his head, elegant fingers flexing and curling as if he was trying to catch the light in his hands. Light toyed with him, teased him, rippled across his mussed robes as he moved, seeking out the shape of his long limbs, of his sinuous body twisting lazily beneath sun-soaked cloth. With a barely audible sigh of displaced air, Tony's letter drifted to the floor.
When at last the stretch ended, Malfoy lapsed back against the couch as if boneless, squinting against the light and shading his eyes with his hand. On one pale finger curled a ring in the shape of a serpent; the sunlight caught on it, flared white, shot towards Harry and past him, a pathway of molten silver.
Harry took a single step towards the couch.
Slowly, languorously, in a motion as inevitable as the turning of the earth, Malfoy turned his head, offering up the long line of his naked throat to the sun and the air. He looked at Harry, heavy-eyed.
"Potter," he said. "What do you want?"
"Shut up," Harry whispered.
Malfoy smirked. "Come over here," he said, "and make me."
Magic curled in Harry's gut like a living thing, reaching. He closed his eyes.
Somewhere a room or two away -- or was it a hundred miles? -- muffled voices rose and fell and rose again: a quarrel, tense and urgent and edged with panic. The sound of the Order, of the war, of frightened people he loved, all of them facing the unthinkable. The sound of must, Harry, you must, echoing down the hallways like a half-forgotten dream.
A word separated itself from the rest. "Harry!" The others needed him. He had to go. Of course he did. He didn't know why he was here. He tried to turn away, and didn't.
"Well?" said Malfoy.
Must protect, must defend, must avenge, must kill.
Harry knew what he had to do. "Shut up," he said again. He turned and left the room.
Behind him Malfoy lay silent, a question made of stone.
Autumn
"I don't know," Narcissa Malfoy said. She smiled at nothing and sipped her tea. Her fingers shook a little as she placed her cup back in its saucer. Once she had been a beautiful woman, and proud, but the war had not been kind.
"You've had no word?" Neville asked. "In all these years?"
"No word," she said.
Harry cleared his throat, and she jumped like a puppet on a string, seizing the cup in her bony fingers as if to hold him at bay.
Harry ignored this; he was used, by now, to the fear he instilled in other people. "Mrs. Malfoy," he said. "Do you think your son is still alive?"
Her cup shook; she ran her thumb along its elaborate pattern of gilt serpents intertwined. "Of course he is," she whispered. Her face twisted into a frown, and she stared blankly at something only she could see. "Yes," she said. "He is. He is."
"But you've had no word," Neville urged.
She didn't answer. Gently she leaned forward, almost imperceptibly, perhaps half an inch, as if she were about to whisper a secret, a confidence, a revelation. Neville smiled encouragingly.
Then she leaned back. Forward, back.
Forward, back.
Forward and back: she rocked, silent, dry-eyed, half crouched over a cup that dribbled tea down her fine silk robes unnoticed.
Harry stood. "You'll let us know," he said. "If there's word. If you should hear."
Still, she rocked.
Harry nodded sharply at Neville, and they turned to go.
"Mr. Potter." Her voice was raw, like something torn bleeding from her chest.
He forced himself to look at her. With shaking hands she held up the parcel he had brought. "I shall need you," she said, "to release the wards."
"Oh. Right." He raised his wand and watched her shake, watched her sit at his wand-point and bear her fear because she must.
"Harry," Neville said, laying a hand on his shoulder.
He knew what he must do. He murmured a word. Wards that had throbbed with every bit of his power faded and released.
The parcel undid itself, and in her hands Narcissa held the few possessions her son had brought to Grimmauld Place. They'd found them a few days after Malfoy had walked out the door empty-handed, snapping at Molly that he needed some air, that the place was suffocating him, that he was an adult and on their side, that she should grant him the simple courtesy of not watching every move he made.
"There," said Harry.
Narcissa Malfoy sneered, and didn't thank him.
Outside, as Harry and Neville walked down the long sloping lawn that led from the Manor, Neville asked Harry if he was all right.
"Of course," Harry said.
The ground was thick with fallen leaves, scarlet and gold and fragrant beneath their feet. Against the sunset rose the jagged silhouettes of barren trees, their topmost branches thick with huddled shapes. A cold wind stirred, and the shapes detached themselves: birds, hundreds of them, spreading dark wings and spiralling away like smoke.
Something teased at Harry's hair, and he shook his head to free it. Neville laughed. "Leaves," Neville said. "Just leaves."
Harry smiled absently and glanced back. The Manor loomed behind them, light flickering in one window. He could not see past the curtains, but he knew what lay within: a woman alone, turning over and over in her hands the last chance remembrances of her only son.
For these alone remained: a few potions textbooks inscribed by Snape. Some robes, once fine, now a bit frayed and carefully patched with inexpert stitches. A small gilt painting of Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy smiling before the Manor, haughty and beautiful and impossibly young. A page torn from the Daily Prophet with a stained, blurry photograph of Harry.
He raised his hand to his hair and disentangled a single leaf, so bright a gold that it glowed in the last of the November light.
"It's dead," he said, and tossed it away.
***
The next bloke Harry slept with . . . but no. All the faces blurred to nothing and the names were meaningless syllables. There was no story: no beginning or middle or end. There were only disconnected moments, tangles of writhing bodies and desperate need that happened, and stopped, and fell from him like dust.
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