[From Litha to Lammas]: Covet, Harry/lots of people, R, 4/5
Part Three.
Part One.
Title: Covet (4/5)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Theodore, Harry/Blaise, Harry/Draco/Astoria, Draco/Astoria, Harry/Zacharias, Harry/Luna
Content Notes: Humor, not epilogue-compliant, polyamory, harem fic, magically powerful Harry, screwed-up wizarding law, angst, brief violence
Rating: R
Wordcount: This part 6200
Summary: It turns out that, when various people begin asking Harry for legal and magical shelter, he has the power to marry them all as per an ancient Ministry law that says the conqueror of a Dark Lord can have multiple spouses. Harry knows the marriages are in name only, and it’s not like they require sex, just a magical oath. He thinks he’s doing very well at resisting temptation, not realizing what a temptation he is himself.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Litha to Lammas” fics being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August this year. As you can see from the summary, this fic is not meant to be taken entirely seriously. It should have four parts.
So, this will not be the last part after all, due to this chapter growing much longer than I’d anticipated. “Covet” will be five chapters, and get its last part tomorrow.
Part Four
“Late night?”
Harry flushed a little as he watched Blaise, who had wandered into the kitchen to fetch tea almost immediately after Harry did, study him. Harry had become aware that he had scratches on his own shoulders, and he didn’t even know where he’d got them. He’d come down to the kitchen shirtless, because why not make it a tradition?
But he arched his neck a little and said, “Good night.”
Blaise grinned. “Good.”
“No jealousy?” Harry asked. He’d wondered if that was something he’d need to deal with, with so many different personalities in the house and the fact Draco had alluded to that Blaise would have liked to date Astoria.
Blaise thought about it, then shook his head as he made his own tea. Kreacher appeared, gave them a mournful stare, and then popped away and came back with bacon and eggs. Blaise took them with the kind of absent nod that Kreacher seemed to like better than thanks, though Harry had never managed to stop himself from saying thank you yet.
“How much do you know about the way I grew up? I understand that you know something about Smith’s and Theodore’s.”
“A little about Draco’s, too,” Harry said as he swallowed his tea and gestured for Blaise to sit at the kitchen table across from him. “And Luna’s. I know that your mother has a certain reputation.”
“Say it, Potter, she kills her husbands.”
Harry hesitated. “Did she kill your father?”
“That’s something she’s never admitted to. If she did, then she covered that one up the best.” Blaise lifted his teacup in a way that made Harry think he was doing it to shelter his face. “Strange as it is, I don’t think she intended to get pregnant with me-by any of her husbands-but she kept his name and she sheltered me from rumors of his death and…I don’t think she wanted me, but once she had me, she loved me.”
“But.”
“But it was a lonely existence at best. I learned early on not to get too attached to anyone. Not my stepfathers. Not my friends, because my mother would pick me up and we would move on to some other place to escape the accusations. Not teachers, because we would leave them behind the same way.”
“Hogwarts must have been a sort of escape for you, then.” Kreacher once again appeared and treated Harry to mournful eyes, so Harry speared some bacon and ferried it to his plate.
Blaise nodded. “I had more stability than I’d ever had in my life. And pretty soon, I would have done anything to protect that. I didn’t always like Draco and Astoria and Theodore and Pansy and the other Slytherins, but they were mine. Part of the most unchanging group of friends I’d ever had in my life. I would have killed to defend them. How can I be jealous of them? Particularly when it was Theodore who had the idea to do this in the first place, and Draco who woke you up.”
“What about Luna and Zach, though?”
“Zach told me something about what he went through. Not as bad as what I did, I’d say, but bad enough.” Blaise looked the other way, frowning. Then he smiled, which Harry could see clearly even with his face in profile. “And being jealous of Luna is…it doesn’t work.”
“Neither does resisting her,” Harry said wryly.
Blaise started to respond, but Harry whirled out of his chair as he felt something hit the wards. He’d felt magic like that once before, right before the Unspeakables tried to tie him down and had taken whatever chunk of his memory they’d taken.
“You sure your co-workers don’t have a problem with you being here?” Harry growled as he shook his hand and his wand fell into it.
“Yes, of course.” Blaise’s eyes were wide. “What’s going on?”
“I won’t know for a minute.” Harry rushed out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Now he could feel two kinds of impacts on the wards: a steady pressure of the kind that was probably meant to take them down, and a quick, jabbing magic that felt familiar. But that made no sense, because it was very distinctive, and he surely would have felt-
Then his gaze fell on the scar on the back of his right hand, still there after all these years, and he understood.
“Umbridge is out there,” he said. “And I think she’s joined forces with the Unspeakables.”
“That really is impossible.” Blaise was striding behind him, trying in vain to see out the windows. With danger to the wards threatening, they would show nothing but the circling grey power of the shields. “We wouldn’t give her the time of day. She’s a joke among us.”
“Then somebody who learned magic from the Unspeakables.”
“That can’t be right, either. You know we keep it close. I suppose someone who might be a former Unspeakable, but-shit.”
Harry turned his attention away from the wards for a moment. They were holding well for right now. “What is it?”
“Theodore’s father,” Blaise said, his eyes bleak. “He was an Unspeakable at one time. Got kicked out for-I don’t know what, but it was bad. They seared his name into a doorway as a warning. It means he isn’t allowed to enter the Department of Mysteries under any circumstances.”
Harry relaxed. Very few things made him nervous, but the fucking Unspeakables did. It was actually better if he knew what he was facing, and it wasn’t them. “So Umbridge probably joined forces with Theodore’s father to come and get the both of you back.”
Blaise nodded. “I’d assume so. We didn’t keep quiet about our marriages.”
“I wouldn’t have wanted you to.” Harry closed his eyes and analyzed the pressure of the magic against the wards for a minute. “All right. If I do something that’s generally not something anyone in the Ministry knows about, will you have to tell your colleagues about it?”
“Unspeakables are all about secrets.” Blaise sounded smug. “And the wedding vows are generally interpreted as spouses being bound to keep each other’s secrets anyway.”
Harry nodded. Then he lifted his arms and hissed.
His magic flared around him the way it had the night the dog-man chased Zach. It flowed around his body for a second, pushing against the walls from the inside. Harry deliberately took a long step back in his mind, calming himself down. Otherwise, there was every chance that he would collapse Grimmauld Place on top of himself and his family.
“Holy shit,” Blaise blurted.
Harry opened his eyes, and smiled as he watched the divided magic turn into two gigantic black serpents. They were flowing and wavering back and forth as he looked at them, apparently made of mists and shadows. In truth, if he looked long enough into them, he would see gleaming red eyes and Sirius falling through the Veil, but he forced his attention away.
“The man who is the source of the Unspeakables’ magic and the woman who looks like a toad,” he told them. “Traumatize them.”
The snakes dived through the floor and were gone. Harry leaned on the wards and forced them to dismiss the swirling grey that occupied the windows with a sharp motion of his hand. Then he could see into the street.
The street looked hazy under the influence of the Muggle-Repelling Charms that Umbridge and her cronies must have cast on it. Harry could see Belisarius Nott, his eyes fanatical and his hood falling down his neck, aiming his wand at the house. Umbridge stood not far from him, waving a quill in the air that must have been related to a Blood Quill. A few other hooded people stood behind them, probably some of the ones who owed Umbridge a debt and had come after Blaise.
“What’s going to happen next?” Blaise asked, coming up beside him. “Where did the snakes go?”
Harry tilted his head at the street just as the snakes erupted from it, one of them wrapping around Umbridge, one around Nott. Nott screamed for a sharp moment before he went absolutely still and his eyes rolled back in his head. Umbridge simply fainted.
Blaise frowned a little. “That’s all they get? That’s disappointing.”
“The snakes are made of nightmares,” Harry said. “They have the ability to seek out whatever the worst nightmare is of the person they’re embracing and force them to relive it. And they’re trapped like that until I let them wake up.”
Blaise was staring at him, Harry could feel, but he didn’t look away from the snakes or their victims. Umbridge’s hooded companions were already taking long steps backwards, and probably on the verge of Apparating away. That was fine. Harry would get their magical signatures from the wards and send targeted letters to them warning them away from Blaise.
Blaise finally whispered, “Is there any way to see their nightmares?”
It was something no one had ever asked before, but then, Harry didn’t generally share the fact that he could do this with anyone. He nodded. “Sure.” He laid his hand on the glass pane of the window, fingers wide, and breathed between them.
His breath seemed to dissolve the window, although it was only happening along a sort of image continuum between him and the snakes. The images of the nightmares they were causing opened up in front of the window like pictures on the telly.
Umbridge was in the middle of a group of people that Harry took a moment to recognize, since they seemed to waver back and forth between the Wizengamot and a crowd of pure-bloods in robes as fine as the Malfoys’, all staring at her with righteous scorn. But no, they had definitely stabilized as the Wizengamot, and one of them took a step forwards and flung the broken pieces of her wand down in front of Umbridge.
“Since you are a half-blood,” said the woman in a voice like crystal bells, “by the laws that you helped pass, you are hereby exiled from the wizarding world.”
Harry raised his eyebrows. Umbridge was a half-blood? Of course, maybe that was just part of the nightmare.
But from the way Umbridge was weeping and cringing with her hands over her face, he thought it was probably true. And he had to admit he derived a certain amount of vicious satisfaction from watching her stumble backwards, and then turn and run from the imaginary chamber where the Wizengamot met.
Of course, another chamber just formed, and another humiliation took place within it. Harry smiled and turned to see what Theodore’s father was facing; it played next to the image of Umbridge’s dream, as if on a different screen.
Belisarius Nott stood with his back against a door that opened out onto a bridge. Gliding towards him was-the Grey Lady? Harry blinked. People could have all sorts of nightmares, of course, but he wouldn’t have thought Ravenclaw’s ghost would be part of a Death Eater’s dream. Particularly since Belisarius had been in Slytherin, from what Theodore had said.
Then he caught a glimpse of the woman’s face, and nearly choked. That was Theodore’s face, except for the depthless black eyes.
“I killed you,” Belisarius breathed. “You’re dead.”
Harry swallowed. Theodore had never said that his father had killed his mother. Maybe he didn’t know. He shot a glance at Blaise, who was tense and silent. Then he turned away as if he would rather watch Umbridge instead. In a way, Harry couldn’t blame him.
“You told everyone that I died bearing my child,” said the ghost. “You could have saved me, though, couldn’t you, Belisarius? If you had been a little faster with casting the spell that stopped the hemorrhage. But you stood there, and watched me die.” She halted, facing him, and her hands reached up and seemed to cup the sides of his face from a distance, sliding down, her fingers wavering. “Now you can experience it for yourself.”
Belisarius caught his breath. Whatever he was staring at now wasn’t visible to Harry, but it must have been horrific, because he began to scream, and scream, and scream.
And then he started to bleed from between his legs, the way his wife must have when she died. He grabbed at himself, but the blood continued to flow, and then something broke off and floated along with it that-
Harry turned away abruptly. He had enough cocks to look at. He didn’t need to see the way Theodore’s father imagined his own genitals.
“Are they going to wake up?” Blaise’s voice was a little strangled.
“When they get far enough away from the edge of the wards.” Harry blew between his fingers, and now he could see the view of the street as it really was, not through the nightmare-filled eyes of Umbridge and Belisarius. Umbridge’s co-conspirators had vanished completely. Harry chuckled.
“Can they even run?”
“Oh, yes.” Even as Harry watched, Umbridge scrambled around and ran away, sobbing. Her hand was feeling at her side for what was probably her wand. Harry hoped so, at least. The nightmare-snake looped itself after her, but faded as she crossed the edge of the Muggle-Repelling Charm. “I do think we should inform the Ministry that we didn’t put up that huge charm that breaks the Statute of Secrecy right in the middle of the street.”
“Probably wise.”
Blaise sounded a little strangled, and Harry would have turned to face him, but Belisarius had decided to cast wildly in an attempt to end his nightmare, and Harry had to tune the wards to deflect the spell. At least the motion seemed to have snapped Belisarius enough out of the nightmare that he could run. He did, and the snake faded.
Harry sighed. “That ought to take care of them.”
He turned around, and Blaise tackled him to the floor.
Harry rolled as he did so, instinctively trying to throw Blaise off. His first thought was that some trace of Belisarius’s spell had got through after all, and he was controlling Blaise’s mind and using him as a weapon against Harry and the rest of the spouses in Grimmauld Place. But Blaise moaned and pressed against him, and Harry stopped as he realized that Blaise was hard.
He turned around and stared at him.
Blaise stared back, his lips parted enough to pant and his hips straining forwards. “I told you,” he breathed. “Your wandless magic gets me hot.”
“I reckon so,” Harry said, a little faintly. He was already rising to the occasion, as it were, but he did push Blaise back and then push him to the floor of the kitchen, his hands clasping Blaise’s wrists, his eyes carefully locked on his. “You’re sure about this? You want this even though you just watched me take two people apart?”
“No one else could have taken them apart so beautifully.” Blaise closed his eyes and seemed to concentrate for a moment. Harry waited, because he wouldn’t blame Blaise for having second thoughts-
And then Blaise’s clothes shimmered and disappeared. Harry’s breath escaped in a hiss that had nothing to do with Parseltongue as he reached down and stroked Blaise’s gleaming, sweaty dark skin. Damn.
“You didn’t mention that you could do wandless magic yourself.”
“Why should I? It’s a nice surprise.” Blaise concentrated again, and Harry visibly saw his entrance slickening and loosening, and shit, if he came all over the kitchen floor from watching his husband’s wandless magic Harry was never going to forgive himself. “Come on, then, you know you want to.”
Harry took a deep breath, seized the moment and obeyed his instincts the way he had when he’d suddenly plunged his head between Astoria’s legs, and slid roughly into Blaise.
And sure enough, Blaise didn’t shriek, and he didn’t compare Harry to an Erumpent, either. He gasped and grunted encouragingly, and wrapped his legs around Harry’s waist so tight that Harry was glad that all the blood possible was already in his erection, because otherwise it probably wouldn’t have got there. “Fuck yeah, Harry.”
Harry grinned at him and then decided to follow another instinct and flicked his fingers at Blaise’s wrists. The invisible magical bonds that snapped into being were as firm as any steel cuffs, but wouldn’t chafe like them. They locked Blaise’s hands to the floor, and Blaise arched up with a full-body ripple and said, “Don’t come, don’t come.”
Harry laughed and kissed him, knowing Blaise was telling himself that, not Harry. Harry, for his part, was beginning to move, his eyes watching Blaise’s face for the slightest sign of discomfort or hesitation.
It never came. Blaise was a babbler during sex, it seemed, and he broke up comments on Harry’s name and fucking prowess with words about “nightmares” and “enemies” and “never be afraid of Umbridge again” and “Unspeakables were crazy to try and hold you.”
Harry agreed with all of that, except maybe Blaise’s extravagant praise of Harry’s ability to fuck him, and that was at least nice to hear. He got his hands behind Blaise’s waist, holding him slightly off the floor, and began to slam him fast and thoroughly. Blaise had his eyes shut the entire time, lost in some world of his own, his hips moving nearly as fast as his mouth.
Harry came first, embarrassingly, but then, he was high on his own power and the feel of Blaise around him, hot as wandless magic, and the fact that he’d successfully kept his spouses safe. He reached out and heated his fingers with his power again, this time soft harmless flames of it, and even as he bucked and jerked through his orgasm, he linked his thumb and second finger together in a loop and slid them around Blaise’s cock.
Blaise screamed like he was falling and soaked Harry’s hand. Harry grabbed his waist and dragged him up to be kissed, and then cursed and hastily loosened the bonds that were still holding Blaise’s hands to the floor.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” he muttered, wincing from the arch of Blaise’s arms. The bonds snapped and vanished with a spark of blue.
Blaise opened his eyes, stared at him, and then snickered.
“What?” Harry demanded, dragging Blaise onto his lap and trying to ignore the uncomfortable twist of his own cock that was still buried in Blaise’s arse. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I know you didn’t.” Blaise stretched against him, as sleek as a lion. “But by now, you should have figured out that I like a little bit of pain.”
“A little. That looked like a lot.”
“I’ll tell you if it’s too much, Harry.” Blaise was suddenly cupping his chin, turning Harry’s head in a way that made Harry feel as if he was the weakest one here. “I’ll always tell you. You don’t have to worry about that.”
Harry swallowed and nodded.
Blaise smiled at him, and then it turned wicked. “Besides, you must have seen by now that it’s almost impossible to get me to shut up.”
Harry’s relieved laugh only cut off when Zach padded into the kitchen and stared at them for a second. Then he pointed at Blaise, said to Harry, “I want a turn,” and went to pick up a cup of the tea.
“With him or with me?” Blaise called out after Zach, languid and satisfied.
“Both.”
But Harry, studying Zach from behind, thought there was a tension encoded in his shoulders, and bit his own lip. He didn’t have time to sort it out now, with Zach obviously intent on making an exit from the kitchen as soon as possible. But he would make sure that he did it before their five-o’clock appointment tonight.
He never wanted any of his spouses to suffer-unless they enjoyed it.
It was really hard to drag himself away from Blaise and his eyes and his brilliant smile to go to work, but Harry could make sacrifices for the good of the people.
*
“Auror Potter.”
Harry raised his eyebrows a little. He’d been sitting in front of Gawain Robards’s desk for at least five minutes. Most of the time, the current Head Auror didn’t keep anyone waiting that long. He told people exactly what he thought of them. And while they didn’t exactly get along, Robards had never shown that he disliked Harry, or didn’t respect him.
“Sir?”
Robards stared a moment longer, then collapsed back behind his desk, his hands over his face. Harry blinked harder. That had never happened before. Robards was so stoic most of the time that this was practically his version of a nervous breakdown.
“Would you mind telling me why there was an enormous Muggle-Repelling Charm in front of your house this morning?”
Harry shrugged a little. “You probably know that my husband Blaise Zabini sa’Potter got Dolores Umbridge angry at him, and she used her connections to try and persecute him. She hasn’t dared to attack him directly since he married me, but this morning she decided to change that. She showed up with some cronies of hers, and also the Death Eater Mr. Nott.”
Robards snapped his head up. “Your husband Nott?”
“No, his father. The one he sought my protection from,” Harry added, and let his voice cool. This was one of the places that he and Robards differed. Harry was as eager to hunt down former Death Eaters as any Auror, but he restricted that definition to “people with the Dark Mark actually on their arms,” while Robards extended it to mean “anyone even slightly connected to people who had the Dark Mark on their arms, including people who once shared a room with them.” “Evidently he thought that he could get through my wards alongside Umbridge, especially since he apparently knows a bit of magic from the Unspeakables’ domain.”
“Yes, he once trained with them.” Robards leaned forwards intently. “Is what he did enough to let us arrest him?”
“It depends on what you think of my response.”
“Which was, Auror?”
Harry managed to keep his body from straightening up like he was giving a report by reminding himself who he had been protecting, who was depending on him. “Snakes conjured from Parseltongue that wrapped around them and gave them their worst nightmares until they left.”
Robards blinked at him, then tilted slowly back in his chair. Harry wondered if he was going to get a blistering tongue-lashing, and then Robards said, “Why in the world would you think I had a problem with that?”
“Because Parseltongue is usually considered a Dark Art, and you have enough problems with the Death Eaters.”
“I admit I think you’re mental for marrying a Death Eater and a Death Eater’s wife and a Death Eater’s son,” Robards said casually. “But that isn’t the same as being one yourself. And the Dark Mark is different from Dark Arts, which is different again from Parseltongue. So. Do you think Umbridge or her cronies will return to bother you? What about Nott?”
Harry had to smile in spite of himself when he thought of the vision of Umbridge being humiliated in front of the Wizengamot and Nott confronting his dead wife. “No. They might try something else, but there’s no way that they’re going to come after me with full force the way they did before.”
“Then you accomplished what you set out to do, and without even killing anyone.” Robards shrugged in a way that made his chair creak, with the angle it was tilted at. “The mark of a successful Auror.”
Harry nodded. “Then is the Muggle-Repelling Charm and what I did to get rid of my enemies the only thing you wanted to talk to me about, sir?”
“No.” Robards rapped his fingers hard on the desk in front of him, and a charm that Harry hadn’t noticed disappeared with a soft pop. It had been covering a stack of parchment on the side of the desk. “Are you aware of the objections to your marriages?”
Harry rolled his eyes. “Yes, sir. The Prophet has a story about it every morning, speculating about when it’ll come out that one of my spouses has been giving me a love potion or similar.”
Robards snorted. “I didn’t mean that rubbish. I meant the objections in the Ministry. Particularly from your-” He paused, rolling his shoulders as if looking for the right word. “Your colleagues.”
Harry stared. It was true that some of the Aurors had been near-enemies instead of best friends, but they’d always had his back and they’d maintained that stance even when he got involved in controversies outside the Ministry for not behaving the way the “Chosen One” was supposed to.
Now…
If he couldn’t trust them at his back, he couldn’t go on being an Auror.
He swallowed. “What do you want me to do about them, sir?”
“So you weren’t aware.”
Harry shook his head with cold squirming into his stomach. He liked being an Auror. He enjoyed the process of investigation, tracking down Dark wizards and bringing them to face justice, or, occasionally, proving that the suspicions were wrong and there was no reason to suspect a particular person of dabbling in Dark Arts. He had never forgotten the lesson Snape had taught him, that his immediate conclusions could sometimes be wrong.
But he would give it up in an instant if it meant that he couldn’t trust his comrades not to leave him vulnerable. He wanted to come home to his spouses more than he wanted to go on being an Auror.
“Potter?”
Harry blinked and glanced up, catching Robards’s eye. He actually looked concerned, which made Harry blush. He couldn’t imagine how bad he must have looked to get that expression on Robards’s face. “Sorry, sir. How bad is it?”
“You weren’t aware.” Robards’s fingers did another intricate tap-roll on top of the pile of parchment. “What is your reaction? What do you think is going to happen now?”
Harry squared his shoulders. “I think that sooner or later, someone is going to be a little slow when a Dark wizard tries to curse me. Or they’ll forget about a charm they knew that could have saved my life. They wouldn’t do it themselves-well, more than one or two,” he had to add, because Robards was as aware of anyone of tensions within the Auror ranks. He had moderated the two duels Harry had fought with people who simply wouldn’t shut up and stop challenging him, and he had made sure that the losers knew that they were no longer welcome in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. “But I can’t trust them. I’ll have to quit.”
Robards leaned forwards. “Really?”
Harry glared. This was probably about Draco, Astoria, and Theodore again. “Yes, sir. I’d rather live and enjoy life with my spouses. And I hope our children,” he added, because Robards had a deep, doubting expression on his face, as if the existence of Harry’s marriages wasn’t enough to convince him Harry would quit. “Better that than a few months, maybe a year, of waiting for someone to betray me.”
Robards sat back with a huff. “I’m disappointed, Potter.”
“Yeah, well, sir, it doesn’t much matter to me what you feel once I’m free of the badge-”
“No, Potter, I mean disappointed that you think I would indulge this shit.” Robards smacked his hand on the desk hard enough beside the pile of parchment that it leaped.
Harry eyed it, then turned back to Robards. “If you never intended to indulge it, why did you ask me if I’d seen it? Sir.”
Robards leaned in. “Because I wanted to know if you had a plan to deal with it. And because you’re right, you can’t trust some of these bastards with your back.” His teeth flashed in a grin. “So we’re going to make sure that you don’t have to.”
“How, sir?” Harry wanted to hope, but authorities had never exactly had his back effectively before.
“Effective immediately,” Robards drawled, “I’m going to remind everyone that the Wizengamot’s Marriage Expansions Act passed last year applies to all the employees in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, too.”
Harry’s eyes widened. Hermione had authored that act, and passed it through the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures; it had gone to the Wizengamot next, amidst fierce fighting. Harry and George and everyone else influential they knew, including reporters at the Prophet who had done it as the price of an interview from Harry, had campaigned for it. It said that an employee of the Ministry couldn’t be sacked for marrying a goblin, a giant, a werewolf, any other magical creature or half-blooded magical creature, or someone whose family practiced Dark Arts. That last part had been in there mostly because some people had been sacked for marrying someone who’d had relatives among the Death Eaters, no matter how distant. The only major loophole in the law did allow the Ministry to punish someone who had knowingly covered up or aided their spouse’s crimes.
At the time, Harry hadn’t thought it would really apply to him. He hadn’t had plans of marrying anyone then, much less a goblin or giant or Death Eater. But now, he began to grin, in a way that he suspected matched Robards’s slightly evil one.
“It’s the law,” Robards said happily. “And what are we tasked with enforcing?”
“The law.” Harry laughed because he couldn’t help it, but he also couldn’t help giving Robards a thoughtful glance. Robards noticed it and puffed up.
“What, Auror Potter?”
“I never had the impression that you liked me all that much, sir.”
Robards pointed a finger at him. “I’m not here to like people, Auror. I’m here to make sure that we fulfill our function, and that we don’t lose good people because of nonsense like what’s in those parchments.” He slammed his hand down next to the stack again. “Some of which comes from jealousy, if I’m any judge.”
Harry blinked. “Jealousy?”
“You married a whole lot of people who you can shag any time you feel like it, and the others can’t object,” Robards said calmly. “Aurors and other people who didn’t defeat Dark Lords and who might want to marry more than one person can’t help but be jealous.”
“Maybe that should be in the next iteration of the Marriage Expansions Act, then,” Harry suggested. He could see why it hadn’t been in the first one. Hermione had set up the law from the beginning with the notion of protecting people who had creature blood or creature spouses, and the proviso about people from Dark families had only been added on later. But now, it seemed an obvious omission to Harry. “That people can marry multiple spouses. So they can leave mine alone.”
“Collaborate with Granger to write it, then,” Robards said, and waved his hand at Harry. “Later. For now, you have that case I assigned you that we still haven’t found the principal on. I want the witch or wizard who put those poor saps under the Imperius, Auror Potter, not the poor saps who they used like puppets.”
Harry grinned. It was a novel sensation to know that someone in authority actually supported him, but he was going to use it for all it was worth. “Yes, sir.”
*
Harry shook his head and conjured water onto the cloth he was holding to clean the spaghetti sauce off his face. He was going to let Kreacher handle the walls.
Who would have known a food fight would result from Theodore simply questioning Draco’s hair color?
If Draco did charm it blond, of course, Harry was going to have to go to the other end of the house to hide his laughter. But he really didn’t think so. He’d seen the identical golden hair between his legs last night, after all.
He knew his smile was self-satisfied, but he couldn’t help it.
“Harry?”
Harry glanced over his shoulder and grinned as he saw Zach come back into the kitchen. “Come to help me clean up?” His spouses had fled the scene of the crime when Kreacher had appeared and stared at them, the cowards.
“Oh. I can do that.” Zach drew his wand and cast a charm Harry didn’t know at the nearest explosion of sauce, which dried it in a second and peeled it off the wall as if it was no more than a sticky explosion of paste.
Harry blinked. “Well, if you want to do more than that-do you want to talk?”
Zach nodded and glanced in the other direction. “It’s almost five.”
“I know,” Harry said softly. “I was going to come to your bedroom. I wouldn’t expect you to have sex with me on the kitchen floor the way Blaise did this morning.” He’d remembered the tension in Zach’s shoulders from this morning, but he’d had no chance to talk to him about it privately before dinner.
“No, that’s not it.” Zach clenched his hands and shifted his balance.
“I can’t pretend that I’ll understand or notice everything you want to tell me right away,” Harry said, and walked up behind Zach to put his arms around him and lean his cheek against the middle of his back. Zach had gone stiff, and not in the good way. “But once you tell me, I am pretty good at dealing with it.”
“All right. I-I heard both Luna and Draco and Astoria talking about what you’re like in bed.”
“And you saw it with Blaise. Right.” Harry stepped back a little, but left his arms linked around Zach’s waist. “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t-I don’t want it to be like it was with them.”
“Rough?”
“No.” Zach turned around, swallowing, his eyes aimed over Harry’s shoulder. “I don’t think I’m ready to, or even want.” He stopped helplessly. Harry held him in silence, and Zach finally looked at him. “I’m not good at this.”
“I’m not good at it, either,” Harry replied. “I’m plunging into this and going ahead, but it’s new to everyone. No matter what Theodore thinks he planned or encouraged,” he added, because Theodore had been getting on his nerves about that during dinner.
Zach lowered his gaze this time. “So I should just go ahead and say it, then.”
“Probably,” Harry said. “I think we’re confirmed that I’m not good at guessing.”
Zach nodded. “I don’t want you inside me. I just want to…” He closed his eyes.
“That’s perfectly fine.”
Zach opened one eye and looked at him, wary enough that Harry really wanted to go get his wand and then find the Smith family’s Floo address so he could explain a few things to them. “Really?”
“Yes,” Harry said. “I enjoy sex, Zach, a lot. All kinds.” He grinned as Zach blushed. He was fairer-skinned even than Draco, and probably hating it at the moment. “But I had the kind of sex I did with Blaise and the others because it was the kind they asked for. What gets me off best is my partner’s pleasure. So we’ll do what you want.”
“Oh, thank Merlin,” Zach blurted, and then flushed. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry about it. Just guide me as to what you want.” Harry ran his hands gently up and down Zach’s arms. He thought he could guess part of it, based on what Draco had said about Zach’s drunken complaining, but he also thought it wasn’t a great idea to reveal that Draco had told him about that. “What is it you want?”
Zach swallowed. “To suck you off.”
“I think we can manage that.”
“And to have you…”
This time, Zach appeared truly incapable of saying it. Harry finished the sentence for him. “To have me suck you off?”
“I’ll understand if you think it’s inappropriate,” Zach muttered, looking off to the side.
“Why would I?”
“You’re my lord. I’m not supposed to imagine you going down on your knees for me.”
“I hate everything about being a lord except that it let me marry all of you, and it lets me protect all of you.” Harry gently tapped Zach’s nose with one finger. “In the bedroom, we’re just Zach and Harry. Unless you want something different.”
“Not like this.” Zach’s ears were turning a brilliant red, but he kept speaking, with a courage that Harry wasn’t sure he could have matched. “It sounds stupid, but I think I fell in love with you the minute you defended me. I told you how rare that was.”
“Yeah.”
Harry leaned forwards and kissed Zach gently, insistently. He wasn’t going to react to the love confession, since Zach at the moment looked like he wished he hadn’t said it. And he didn’t know if he was in love with anyone he’d married yet.
But in the moment, he had something else to offer.
“Shall we go up to your room?”
And Zach changed in an instant into someone who was watching Harry with the same kind of hunger that he was slowly getting used to seeing from his spouses.
“Yes.”
Part Five.