[one-shots]: Defendere, H/D, R, 2/4

[lomonaaeren]

Harry came awake with a gasp and pushed one hand down over his chest, shutting his eyes. He hated it when he woke up like this, with his heartbeat filling his ears and images of the war filling his mind.

His memory was half-convinced that he was still in the middle of the dream-a horrible one where he and Ron and Hermione had never got out of Malfoy Manor-and so when someone moved in the darkness, he ripped the air as he rolled around, rising to one knee, and aimed his wand in the movement’s direction.

“Shhh,” Malfoy murmured, and then slipped into bed next to him, cradling him close as his arms wrapped around Harry’s ribs with a familiar air. “I knew that I’d have to soothe your nightmares. Your voice is loud in my head, and it started screaming five minutes ago. I’m here. I have you.” His voice was low and clear, not sleepy, and he rubbed his hands up and down Harry’s ribs as though he’d done this kind of comforting before.

Harry bared his teeth. For all he knew, Malfoy might have done it before. He hadn’t kept up with what Malfoy was doing in the last few years. Malfoy might work at St. Mungo’s or as a professional nightmare-soother.

Not that he would have the chance to do that now, because the bond and Harry had stolen him away from his old life.

Abruptly, Malfoy stiffened, and his hands paused in mid-stroke. Then he leaned back and considered Harry with his hands hanging down between his knees, shaking his head.

“What?” Harry snarled. He knew that look already and hated it. He had done something to disappoint Malfoy, something not in keeping with the nature of the bond.

“You can’t keep thinking like that,” Malfoy said. “Treating me like a thing. A tool. This kind of thinking does that far more than treating me like a slave does, do you know? Assuming I have no choice. Assuming that I don’t want to be here.”

Harry winced, remembering what Hermione had said about the ways the bond would change Malfoy. “You only want to be because the bond-I don’t know, rewrote your thoughts or something. Changed them.”

“That’s the worst thing you’ve ever said to me,” Malfoy said, and he seemed to be on the other side of the world at the moment, even though he hadn’t moved. “Worse than anything about my father or the Dark Lord or Slytherin could ever have been.”

Harry winced again, reached out with one hand, and then let it fall. But Malfoy caught it before it could touch the bed and held it between them, gazing down with an abstracted expression, as if he was trying to read Harry’s future from his palm the way Trelawney would.

“What can I do?” Harry asked quietly, when some time had passed and Malfoy didn’t seem inclined to either stop touching him or go away. “I’m not-good at this. I know I would be disgusted at what happened to you happening to me. I was disgusted at the thought of doing it to you. But I keep making it worse.”

Malfoy looked up at him and took a deep breath, one that seemed to rush out of him and rustle around in the air between them. “Accept that for me, this is different,” he said. “No, I don’t have to soothe your every fucking desire, but the ones I can, I want to. And you need more protection than you think you do. Yes, you do,” he added, as Harry frowned and opened his mouth in instinctive defiance. “Believe me, Potter. There’s so much I can feel under the surface of your mind, and the nightmare is just some of it rising to the surface. That’s by no means all.”

Harry watched him for a moment, biting his lip. Malfoy gazed back at him, his hands clenching for a moment. He seemed more tired than Harry felt, even with how exhausted the nightmares usually left him.

“All right,” Harry said, and forced himself to lean back against the pillows, shutting his eyes. “What would help you most right now?”

Malfoy gave a sigh with a chuckle clinging to the end of it. “Of course you can only let me help you under the guise of helping me,” he said. “But it’s so much better than what you might have given me that I’ll take it.” He leaned forwards and let his chin rest for a moment on Harry’s shoulder, closing his eyes when Harry looked. “Budge up.”

Harry turned obediently to the side, and Malfoy curled up behind him, letting his legs embrace Harry’s and his arms curl around his waist. Harry blinked. He couldn’t remember the last time he had let someone this close-oh, sure, he’d dated, but most of his lovers didn’t end up staying the night-and the overwhelming warmth that beamed into his skin made him wonder how he’d ever fall asleep.

“You’ll manage,” Malfoy whispered to him, and one hand came loose from the tight link around his waist to stroke up and down Harry’s chest, coming to rest on his hip. “Come on. Think good thoughts. Go to sleep.”

Harry’s eyelids fluttered, and he let his head lean back. It was surprisingly easy, when Malfoy put it like that, to think of the warmth as another blanket. He sighed and tugged the blankets up to his chest. The images from the nightmare were already fading.

“Yes, Harry,” Malfoy whispered into his ear. “That’s it. Relax. Let go.”

“Easier said than done,” Harry whispered, but he was more than halfway back to sleep, and there was-there was something comforting about having Malfoy there.

He did try to think that in the deepest, darkest part of his mind, though, so Malfoy wouldn’t hear it through the bond.

A chuckle low in his ear made him suspect Malfoy had heard anyway.

*

“But I don’t understand exactly what it’s like for you. And I want to.”

Malfoy spent a few minutes staring at him over the edge of his toast dripping with butter. Harry had promised himself that he would get up early in the morning and go and get some food, since Malfoy whinged so much about not having enough in the house, and make Malfoy a proper breakfast.

Instead, he slept late under the influence of the gentlest charm he remembered encountering in years, and then woke up to find that Malfoy had found the food and cooked breakfast-or, more to the point, bullied Kreacher into doing so-and all he had to do was sit down at the table and eat and enjoy.

It wasn’t something he wanted to do. He had complained, loudly. But Malfoy had smiled at him, and murmured something about Harry needing his sleep and a holiday from chores of this variety, and put a hand on his shoulder in a heavy, comforting way that scared Harry out of his wits. To avoid a conversation about why Malfoy thought “chores” like this were the bane of his existence, he’d sat down and eaten the toast and blood oranges (only Malfoy) and thick, tiny, salted fish of a kind that he didn’t recognize.

As he had eaten, though, he’d thought. Maybe there was a way of breaking the bond, if Malfoy could describe what it felt like. Harry had heard Hermione say before that it was relatively easy to end curses if one knew how the victim experienced them.

And Harry wasn’t a curse-breaker by profession, but for this, he was willing to become one.

Malfoy smirked suddenly and laid the toast down in its own puddle of butter. That wasn’t one thing Harry would have expected, that Malfoy wanted butter on everything. He’d even draped the fish with it. “You can stop thinking like that at any time you want to, Harry.” He tilted his chair back by the simple expedient of hooking his feet under the table and pushing. “You’re not going to get rid of me that easily.”

“Have you considered,” Harry said, pausing in the middle of the sentence to take a long bite so he wouldn’t cast a hex over the table at the person he was trying to get to help him, “that you might serve me best by telling me? Because my greatest need is probably to get rid of this bloody bond.”

Malfoy paused, and let the chair tilt forwards again. “No,” he said, his voice practically lilting. “You think that should be your greatest need, because you hate the idea that you’ve enslaved me. But you need other things more.” His voice sank. “Shall I tell you?”

“If it’ll tell me something about how you experience it,” Harry said, and paused to lick butter off his fingers. Perhaps he could drive Malfoy away with his appalling manners. Malfoy just watched him, though, and Harry at last sighed and stared at him. “Then yes.”

Malfoy got up and walked around the table with a sort of noiseless grace that Harry sometimes used, too, and had thought was a product of Auror training, since he’d never moved like that when he was a child. Maybe that was another gift the bond had given Malfoy, though.

Malfoy stopped behind him. Harry stiffened in spite of himself, and thought about wands pressed to spines. Not Malfoy’s wand, specifically; Harry hoped he was over that sort of nonsense. But he’d had a lot of enemies, in his time.

Malfoy leaned down near his ear, and breathed out. Harry shivered in spite of himself, and lifted a hand to swat the way he would with a fly.

Strong, slender fingers caught his wrist, and Malfoy murmured, “Your thoughts move through my mind like flashes of light. How do I know what you need? How do you know when a storm is nearby? You see the lightning flickering through the trees. You feel the pressure in the air. There’s no intuition involved. I can sense them.”

“But you can still choose which ones to fulfill,” Harry said, or begged, a taste like vomit in his mouth.

Malfoy paused, and then said, “That matters to you. That matters so much. Have you considered that your need for a certain answer might prejudice you?” His fingers flexed open on Harry’s shoulder.

Harry clenched his hands on the table and started to rise.

Malfoy pushed him back down, murmuring in his ear, “No, Potter, stay, it was only a joke, and if I had known before how much this mattered to you-absurdly-then I wouldn’t have made it. Yes. I can see and sense the needs, and I can pick and choose among them. But so many of the things you want are so simple, and it won’t take much work to fulfill them and make myself feel good at the same time. Why not do it?”

“That could be the bond talking, too, the bond changing your mind,” Harry said, then paused. “Make yourself feel good.”

Malfoy snorted into his hair, and sank down beside him, his hands splaying over Harry’s back as if he was going to create the ice armor again, to protect him from some unknown threat. “The Defendere bond has no reason to endure if it’s absolutely unpleasant to contemplate and experience. Of course, most people don’t have your delicate sensibilities, but it was meant to do a number of things, and none of them are torture. When I can do something for you, it feels good, yes.”

“I wanted to avoid that aspect,” Harry murmured.

“You really are too quick to attribute everything to sex,” Malfoy said, his fingers sliding up and down Harry’s spine in a way that didn’t do much to take sex out of Harry’s head. “No. This is more like the pleasure you get from sitting in sunlight on a warm day. I promise, Potter. It’s not actually something I would sacrifice everything for if I actively didn’t want to do something.”

“Like leave me alone?” Harry twisted around to glare at him.

“That’s a need,” Malfoy agreed, and then his grin became one that little fish must see heading their way fairly often. “But you need other things more. Someone to guard your back-you do get tired of doing it all yourself, and although you trust Weasley you work with him on a lot of different levels, and you have to do it for him, too-and relieve you of a few of the burdens that you carry around all the time. Someone to talk to, and cuddle with, and hold back the nightmares.”

“What we did last night was not cuddling,” Harry began.

“No, it was sleeping together,” Malfoy said, and clucked his tongue, moving his hand to Harry’s forehead. “Careful with the blushing, Potter. You look as though you’re liable to take a fever at any moment, you know.”

“You idiot,” Harry snarled, and swatted his hand off. “You’re talking as though I wanted someone to take care of me.”

Malfoy said nothing for a few minutes, and Harry wondered if he had finally made him go away. Then those warm hands descended on his shoulders again, and turned him around. Harry went, and watched Malfoy staring at him. His eyes had a shade, a sheen, in the back of them that Harry didn’t recognize.

“But you do,” Malfoy said. “Of course you do. All people want someone to take care of them sometimes. It’s a very human desire. But then, normal humans don’t put it off all the time, either. I don’t actually think yours would be as intense as it is if you indulged it once in a while.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “You can pick up all these needs that I don’t know I have? I promise, Malfoy, I wasn’t sitting in my house pining for someone to cook and clean for me and pick up the pieces.”

“No. And that’s the problem, really.”

Harry tried to stand up, because really, this whole situation had gone on for long enough, and while the Ministry had given Harry a brief holiday to deal with the bond, which he appreciated, he didn’t intend to spend it sitting at breakfast and debating obscure philosophy with Malfoy.

“I’m not trying to be obscure,” Malfoy said, and took a deep breath, one that ruffled the blond hair hanging down on either side of his face. “Not on purpose. It’s just that so much of what you think about the bond and what I think is so totally different.”

Harry halted and blinked at him. The sigh was the first thing that had made him think Malfoy might be as frustrated by this situation as he was. And the way Malfoy was staring at him, strong and steady but with his eyes blinking more than usual, said it, too.

“All right, Malfoy,” Harry said, and sat down again. “Then can you tell me how you can hear my thoughts some of the time, and the rest of the time you’re responding to things that I didn’t really think?”

“Everything that the bond tells me comes out of the inside of your skull,” Malfoy said. He watched Harry warily, head half-tilted to the side, as though he assumed Harry had something he would launch at him in a moment. Then, a moment later, he smirked and took the seat next to him, which at least meant Harry could look him in the eye without tilting backwards in the chair. “But some things are very close to the surface of your mind, like the need that you think you have for me to stop being obscure, and some things aren’t. Like your need to be taken care of. I decided to leave hospital when I figured that one out.”

“It might not really be there,” Harry said. “Maybe you only think it is. Maybe you’re making that need up to fuck with me.”

Malfoy’s eyes lit with suppressed laughter. “Consider why it would be an effective method of fucking with you, Potter, and how sad that makes you sound, in a way. Why?”

“Because I don’t need to be taken care of,” Harry said shortly. Yes, Malfoy had seemed human a minute ago, but now they were back on this weird track again. “I should think that’d be obvious. I’m one of the Ministry’s most capable fighters, I don’t have any injury or illness, and it’s not like I’m starving for company or have no friends.”

“And that’s all that one needs, of course,” Malfoy said, rolling his eyes. “To be physically healthy and have friends.”

“Yeah, it is,” Harry said, and found himself baring his teeth. He stopped and blinked. Was the bond doing something to him, too? He was never that angry normally about someone telling him that he needed to take more time off work or something. Hermione said it all the time. Harry would laugh and put her off, and she would let it go, because she understood how important his work was to him.

“What it’s doing is revealing.”

Harry glanced at Malfoy again. Malfoy had dropped the laughter and leaned forwards with his hands on his knees and his fingers poised as if he really would like to strangle Harry and was only barely being prevented from it.

“No one can be a hero all the time,” Malfoy said. “But you act like you have to be, that asking for compassion or care from someone else is a weakness-”

“I would never think anything like that!” Harry snapped. “I’ve seen plenty of people in my job who need things like that, and I would never think they were weak, I think they’re stronger than the Aurors who rescue them sometimes-”

“You personally,” Malfoy said, stressing each word individually until Harry wanted to poke him. “You. Think. That asking for help undermines you, or your mask of the hero, or something. But you do want someone to make breakfast for you sometimes, and hold you when you have nightmares, and be concerned for you first some of the time.” He paused, perhaps expecting Harry to retort, but Harry was a little too incredulous for that. Malfoy rolled his eyes. “And it doesn’t make you weak.”

“But what you’re talking about,” Harry said, “I could have that, too. Kreacher makes breakfast for me if I ask him nicely enough, and I know Ron and Hermoine are concerned about me all the time.” They’d be more concerned right now if they knew how mental Malfoy is, he added to himself.

“You spend time taking care of them, too, and being concerned for them.” Malfoy held up his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Sometimes-not always, just this much time-” His fingers pinched together and the small space vanished. “You want someone you don’t have to care about in return. Someone who puts you first and doesn’t ask for the same thing from you in return.”

Harry shivered and scratched at his arms. He felt as if he were covered in a coating of slime.

“That disgusts you,” Malfoy said, staring at him and shaking his head. “To the point that you never acknowledged the desires when they tried to surface in your mind. That surprises me, Potter, it really does. About some things, you must be more sensible by now. You know that you’re not less a hero for accepting care from someone else. Unless you think that Weasley is less than a hero when he lays his head on his Granger’s shoulder.” Malfoy paused, and then added, “And I can’t believe I just said that.”

Harry took his hands away from his arms with an effort. “Yeah, it disgusts me,” he said shortly. “Because the only people who do that without someone crushing part of their personalities are house-elves or under the Imperius Curse. Or fictional.”

“Or the Defendere bond.” Malfoy’s teeth flashed. “I’m here to protect you, Potter. To fulfill your needs. And those include the ones that you’ve hidden from yourself, the ones that you would hesitate to admit no matter how much you have to. For most people, the ones who can admit that they’re real, the bond would function to let them accomplish something they couldn’t otherwise, by giving magic to their protectors. It’s given me magic, sure, but what you really need is some honesty in your life. And I’m here to provide it.”

“What I really need, right now,” Harry said, rising and turning his back, “is to be alone.”

Malfoy studied him in silence for some time, then nodded. Harry could hear the sound even though he didn’t turn around, and hated it. He was already getting attuned to Malfoy’s little movements and gestures, it seemed. It bothered him.

“I think you do,” Malfoy said, sounding surprised. “Very well, Potter. But please remember, I’m here for you.”

“Never have those words sounded so like a threat,” Harry muttered, and Malfoy laughed and reached out to run a casual, possessive hand down the middle of his back. Harry jumped, and Malfoy laughed again, with a different timber in his voice this time.

“If you ever want to talk about this in detail, and without the coaxing,” Malfoy murmured, “we can. But I think you need the coaxing right now, too. You need someone who’s willing to put up with dragging it out of you.” He paused, and his voice deepened. “To make up for all the times that people should have asked questions and didn’t, perhaps?”

And that told Harry exactly why he hated this, and why he couldn’t have Malfoy asking questions. He whirled around and brought his wand up. Malfoy had already retreated to the far corner of the kitchen, his hand on his wand and his eyes bright and attentive.

“So that’s the way of it.” Malfoy nodded, and then actually swept something like a little bow, which Harry would have screamed at him for if he wasn’t already lost in a jarring, juddering sensation of shock. “All right. Harry. I’ll let you have a few hours for yourself. I don’t reckon you can do anything too horrible in that time.”

He left the house, stroking the hawthorn wand Harry had given him back last night. Harry watched him go, then ducked his head and pulled at his hair.

He knew only one place to go when his muscles were trembling like this, his throat throbbing with unspoken words, and the holiday the Ministry had given him didn’t matter.

*

The target in front of him, a large and amorphous sack that was only reshaped to look like a human figure on occasion, blew up with such a spectacular burst of blue light that Harry picked himself up from the floor with his ears ringing. He gestured with his wand as he stood, and the next sack jerked forwards on the enchanted chains. Harry took careful aim.

It wasn’t that he brooded senselessly on thoughts of the Dursleys and Cedric and Sirius and all the other things that he sometimes woke in the middle of the night wishing people had asked him about, or that he’d had some help to recover from. For the most part, he acknowledged them as there, part of his memories, and he otherwise got on with his life, and it was mostly a happy one.

The sack exploded hard enough to make Harry feel as if he was flying. And then he realized he was, when he hit the wall. He groaned and picked himself up again.

It was just that Malfoy didn’t have the right to bring it all back with a simple glance and a few simple words.

It was just that…

Harry sighed, and felt down his side for broken ribs. There were none. And apparently simply being hurt wasn’t enough to make Malfoy dash through the door like an avenging angel, for which Harry was duly grateful. He took a step away from the wall, sagged back against it, and shook his head.

It was just that admitting that maybe, yeah, he wanted someone to take care of him sometimes, someone who would ask the questions that Dumbledore hadn’t and treat him like a person instead of a pawn and listen to him sympathetically and wait on him hand and foot, hurt. He’d tried so hard to be a good person, especially once he woke up after the war was over and discovered that being a good person and being a hero were not the same thing.

But it wasn’t good to want someone to wait on you hand and foot, was it? It was-weird. You might dream about something like that, but you couldn’t try to make it real, because real people didn’t work that way.

Harry grimaced and bent down to pick up a piece of the sack, conjuring another sack from it when another one didn’t jerk forwards right away. He was afraid that his last spell might have disrupted the enchantment on the chains, though not actually afraid enough to do anything about it.

“Harry, mate. You all right?”

That was Ron’s voice, behind him. Harry felt his shoulders drop from their odd position, and nodded. Being with Ron, talking to him, was all right, because they had done lots of things for each other instead of him just doing it all for Harry. And they had chosen to be friends, not been compelled into it by a bond.

“Yeah,” he said, turning around and smiling at Ron. “But Malfoy said some things that got me angry, so I needed to work off the steam.”

“Now there’s a surprise,” Ron said, and rolled his eyes as he dropped onto a bench along the wall, beginning to stretch and do all the other exercises that Aurors were supposed to do before training and which Harry never bothered with. “If anyone could find a way to get around a bond that forces you to defend the master of the bond, it’s him.”

“How permanent is this bond?” Harry asked. He couldn’t ask Hermione to do the research, not while the wedding was preoccupying her, but Ron was glad of an excuse to think of anything not relating to the wedding.

Ron stopped in the middle of a stretch and looked up at him. “I told you it was permanent when you decided to do the ritual to save Malfoy’s life, Harry,” he said, and there was all sorts of pity in his eyes that Harry couldn’t face, so he turned away and blasted a hole in solid rock. While the echoes and the flying drops of molten stone were still dying away, Harry heard Ron swallow and say, “Are you finding it that hard, when it hasn’t even been a day yet?”

Harry shut his eyes and rubbed his hand across them, but that just made yellow starbursts dance on the back of his eyelids, without making anything clearer. “I-don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s the kind of thing that only gets easier from this point on. Maybe I can live with it. But, Ron, he talks about how he has to tend to me, and that’s-that’s not something he would ever want to do before the bond.”

“Oh, I see,” Ron said, and his voice was different, somehow. Harry heard him stand up from the bench and walk towards him, but he didn’t look up. It seemed the best course to keep his head bowed for right now. “Harry. Look at me.”

Harry dropped his hand and did, and now Ron’s eyes were gently terrible, the way that Hermione’s could be when she was scolding you. Ron reached out and slapped Harry’s right cheek, with the same terrible gentleness.

“Look,” Ron said quietly. “You’re thinking of the person he was before the bond as the real him, right? And the person he is now as some sort of false copy?”

“How can I not?” Harry snapped, and shoved himself back so that he was pacing in a circle. Destroying the targets didn’t seem to have diminished the anxious lightning skipping under his skin. “You know that he wouldn’t have chosen to be friends with me, or serve me, or whatever the Defendere bond is really about. He chose to be my enemy, he chose to regret what his father had done, he chose to save his parents, but not this!”

“Yeah, right,” Ron said. “And I’m going to be a different person after my marriage to Hermione, of course, and the one that’s here right now is the real me that’s going to die.”

Harry spun around. That hit harder than the slap. “Of course not!” he snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous! That’s not the same thing at all.”

Ron rolled his eyes. “Really? But I knew about the Defendere bond in the first place because of all the bindings and bonds that Hermione made me look up, so we could choose which one we liked best. It’s a stronger one than the vows Hermione and I are going to make, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s completely different. People are the same after bonds and vows and that kind of thing, Harry, I promise. The wizarding world has a space for things like this. I know it’s different for you because you don’t think of it the same way.” He kindly left the “raised by those bloody Muggles” out of the sentence. “But it’s not the end of the world. It doesn’t mean that Malfoy’s a slave. It doesn’t mean that he’s anything but who and what he wants to be, right now.”

Harry shook his head, mute and not knowing why. Then he found his tongue, thinking about Ron’s words. “But you and Hermione both chose that. Malfoy didn’t.”

“That’s right,” Ron said, with such gravity that Harry was fooled for a moment. “You held him down and poured that blood down his throat. You didn’t give him every chance to refuse. You spoke words that absolutely defined his service as slavery. Every time I see you go by, I think, ‘That’s the ruthless Harry Potter who never gave anyone a choice, that is’.”

Harry shut his eyes, and rubbed them again. This time, the starbursts looked pink, but it still didn’t help.

“He had as much choice as you did,” Ron said quietly. “Yeah, you were the one who decided on the nature of the bond, but you had to bind him. You didn’t walk in there expecting that to happen, any more than Malfoy expected to wake up in a magical circle he couldn’t escape. For fuck’s sake, Harry. Go home. Think about it. But stop mucking around with magic when you’re in this mood. Let someone take care of you for once.”

“But not for always,” Harry said, muffled, although his hand was over his eyes and not his mouth. “That’s-I can push back and take care of him sometimes, right?”

“He lives!” Ron cried out, and when Harry dropped his hand to look, Ron had his arms and his face upraised to the ceiling in ecstasy. “He thinks! He learns! Someday soon he might learn that his experience is not the whole of the universe! We can but live in hope!”

Harry punched him, hard, for what that deserved, and when he walked out of the training room, he was smiling for the first time that day.

*

“What the hell did you do to yourself?”

Harry started awake. For some reason, he had thought Malfoy would be in Grimmauld Place the minute he reached it, but he hadn’t been, and Harry had fallen asleep on the couch in the drawing room.

And he hadn’t cast anti-pain charms or stretched or showered or whatever it was you were supposed to do before that, either. His ribs screamed at him, and his breath came out of him in a hiss when he tried to sit up. His shoulder hurt, too, probably from when the blast of his own magic had thrown him against the wall. He tried to pry his shirt collar back from his neck, and had to stop, because it hurt too much.

Malfoy murmured something, and Harry’s shirt vanished. Malfoy took a step towards the couch, and stopped.

“Who the fuck was it?”

Harry jerked his head around, and then hissed as he remembered why that wasn’t a good idea, either. Malfoy took another long, slow step towards him, hands extended and eyes narrowed. He seemed to assume that his primary task right now was not to frighten Harry.

And maybe my mind really did tell him that. Harry wasn’t sure that he could trust his unconscious right now, not if it had revealed to Malfoy that he wanted someone to take care of him. He let his head fall forwards, and sighed. “No one beat me up or cursed me. I was training, and this is the result of hitting the wall.”

He turned his head more slowly, responsive to the pain in his neck that felt right now as if it could come from a slightly fractured bone or sleeping strangely on it, and stared. There was a huge, blossoming bruise on his shoulder, looking like a great purple handprint with black edging it. No wonder Malfoy thought it came from someone touching him.

Malfoy stepped up to the couch and stared at him for a moment. Then he said, his voice still low and rough enough to scare any number of hardened criminals, “I thought you were on holiday.”

“I was,” Harry said, and then remembered that he’d never visited Shacklebolt and got himself put back on duty. He grimaced. “I mean, I am. But I needed to get rid of some of the emotions that-got stirred up this morning. And anyone can come in and train. It doesn’t matter if they’re on holiday or not.”

Malfoy shook his head. His face was expressionless now. “Lie down,” he said. “I’ve brought some oil that has pain-dulling properties with me, I wanted to clear out my lab, but I want to make sure that you’re not going to do something else to fuck up your back in the time I’m gone.” He flicked his wand again.

Harry wondered why until he realized that he was sinking into the couch the way he would into a swamp. He yelped and flung his hands out, but they only touched softness. Malfoy had Transfigured the couch into a huge bed.

“That was my couch,” Harry pointed out, while Malfoy dipped into a bag at his feet and came up with a small jar of oil that Harry could smell from here. It smelled like oranges and lemons, which was counterproductive, because it just made his mouth water instead of relaxing him.

“It was puce,” Malfoy said, and dipped his fingers in the oil. “Lie down. No, on your stomach, you idiot. Do you think I can reach your back and shoulders if you’re lying on them?”

Harry sighed and flopped down on his back, then rolled onto his stomach, to prove he could. Not such an intelligent idea, he had to admit, when his ribs flared fireworks through his body. Malfoy hurried to his side with what sounded like a pattering of footsteps, but when Harry glanced up at him, his face was stern, still.

“Do you need a pain potion for your ribs?” Malfoy asked.

Harry sighed. “Shouldn’t the bond tell you that?” In truth, he hurt far more than he had anticipated. Maybe his magic had tossed him into the wall harder than he thought, or maybe he did ordinarily do things, like stretch, that would have relieved it. At the moment, his head was so hazy with pain that he couldn’t remember.

“I was trying to give you a choice,” Malfoy murmured. “But yes, now that you mention it, you need it.” He turned away and went to fetch the potion.

Harry closed his eyes and grimaced. His skin felt thin and fragile, stretched over his bones. His fingers curled in the softness of the bed beneath him, and he shook his head. What he wanted was a firmer mattress. This would make his back hurt worse.

“Stop groping, it’s not going back to being puce no matter how you poke at it,” Malfoy murmured, and then he was close behind Harry. There was the sound of a cork coming out, and then the smooth lip of a vial at Harry’s mouth. “Swallow.”

Harry swallowed the thick potion, which tasted of mint-the first one he’d ever had that did so and didn’t turn out to be something else nasty and surprising a few moments later-and said, “A firmer bed? That would be good for my back.”

“In a little while, when you actually sleep,” Malfoy murmured. There was a low note in his voice. Harry listened a second, and identified it as pleasure. Malfoy climbed onto the bed, and knelt behind him. “If you did this to yourself, Potter, I can’t imagine what your enemies do to you,” he added, in more his normal tone, and the first drop of sweet oil went onto Harry’s back.

Harry sighed as the potion doused the fire of his ribs in coolness and shook his head. “I didn’t think,” he mumbled. “I was angry. Thinking about what I’d done to you and what you might do to me.”

“That’s a new one,” Malfoy said, and his fingers dug deep, so that Harry opened his mouth to say he was bruised, not tense. But the pain began to slide away from his shoulders and back, too, a pain so subtle that Harry hadn’t noticed it, or had decided that he had no choice but to live with it. He groaned this time, and Malfoy’s voice shaded dark again. “The small, pitiful Malfoy, scaring the great Harry Potter.”

“You might get me used to this,” Harry mumbled into the bed, wondering if the potion had been laced with Veritaserum, or if the oil was. “Then what would happen? What if I got decadent and started expecting it from everyone I met?”

There was silence, for everything except the faint sound of Malfoy’s fingers stroking his skin, and Harry groaning in spite of himself. Then Malfoy said, “You’re believing too much of your own press.”

“I don’t believe it enough, that’s the trouble,” Harry murmured. “They’re always saying that I’m vulnerable and human really, and I need to remember that. Then maybe I wouldn’t end up with wounds like this.”

“They’re always saying that you’re human enough to be corrupted by the special treatment that they think the Ministry gives you,” Malfoy corrected sharply. Harry tried to raise his head at the tone, but Malfoy’s fingers were too clever and skilled, and Harry found that he just wanted to lower his chin to the mattress and close his eyes again. “That’s the part that you shouldn’t believe. You’re the least likely person to become decadent that I know. Merlin knows that you’re stupid and reckless and can cause damage without thinking about it, but loving pleasure too much? No, I don’t think that’s likely.”

“But I want to help you sometimes, too,” Harry said, and he sounded terribly earnest and terribly full of mattress fluff in his mouth at the same time, so he wasn’t sure how much of it Malfoy heard. “Not just have you take care of me.”

Malfoy paused, and then he said, “Yes, I can feel that. The desire burning in you, underneath everything else.”

“Then why’re you taking care of me?” Harry asked the bed. The pain was leaving. The pain was gone. It felt so much better than when he would just swallow a pain potion or a headache potion and leave it at that. “Why not lean back and let me help you, too? What’s the difference?”

“You need that, but you need this more,” Malfoy said quietly, and poured more oil onto the middle of Harry’s back, making him smell as if he stood in the middle of an orchard. Harry laughed at the thought, and Malfoy bent down, his head near Harry’s ear as he whispered. “You do have your friends and family to take care of. But I’m the only one you can trust this way, to hold you down and touch you like this, because the bond convinces you that I can’t harm you.”

“Can you? Maybe that was poison.” Harry shut his eyes. His hands sprawled out to the sides, and his fingers barely moved when he tried them. “Maybe you’re planning to kill me and steal my house-elf and my puce couch.”

“Even if they take me to Azkaban for it,” Malfoy said solemnly, “that couch is never going to be puce again.”

“I like that,” Harry said sleepily. “I like that you can joke about it. You’re strong.”

Malfoy paused, and then pulled Harry’s hair back from his ear and bent even closer. “What do you wish you could joke about?” he whispered. “What makes you think that you’re not strong? What do you wish they would have asked about?”

Harry sighed. The way he felt like now, he didn’t think he’d mind talking to Malfoy about it. He’d probably hate himself in the morning, but then again, he’d hated himself for lots of worse reasons, too.

“I wish they would have asked about the bars on the windows,” he whispered. “There were a lot of other things that happened that were inside the house, but not the bars, you know? Mrs. Figg should have seen them, at least. And Ron saw them, too, but that’s different, he did try to ask and I kept ignoring him. And he was only twelve, anyway. You can’t expect a twelve-year-old to ask those kinds of questions for long, it’s not what they care about. But the adults should have asked.”

There was a long pause that was worse than the others, because Malfoy wasn’t making any sound to let Harry know he was still there. But then he drizzled on more oil, and Harry rubbed his face into the pillow and made pleased drowsy noises.

“Go on,” Malfoy said. “What else should they have asked about?”

Harry yawned, and then giggled. “I don’t think the word ‘ask’ will sound like a word by the end of the evening,” he muttered.

“Go on,” Malfoy said, but he didn’t specify again. He was just there, his hands working the oil into Harry’s shoulders and his thighs resting on either side of his back. Harry spared a moment to be grateful that Malfoy was still wearing clothes, but that realization whirled away like so many others.

“They should have asked if I was all right the summer after I saw Cedric die,” Harry whispered. “I was alone in the Muggle world and had no idea what was going on, if there was a war on or if Sirius was all right or anything. Oh, they came and got me finally, but no one really asked those questions.”

“They should have,” Malfoy whispered back, but nothing more, and his voice was so much like an echo of Harry’s own that Harry could pretend it was, and continue.

“They should have asked me about the basilisk. I killed this monster snake on my own, and I almost saw Ginny die, and I thought I was going to die, the fang stabbed me through the arm, and I was only twelve years old! That’s not the kind of thing that you survive without being scarred.” Harry yawned again. “But no, I just spent some time in the hospital wing and then they sent me home for the summer. Again. I wonder what I did in a past life to deserve being stuck with the Dursleys.”

“I don’t know anything about fate, Potter.” Malfoy’s voice had gone all stiff again, and Harry knew that if he let himself, he would think about what an utter idiot he was being and how he would regret this in the morning.

He didn’t let himself think about it. He just reached back, groping, and caught Malfoy’s hand, squeezing hard.

“I didn’t mean that seriously,” he whispered. “They were just so awful. I wonder what crime was enough to deserve being stuck with them.”

“Tell me.” Malfoy’s hands were at work again, though this time Harry didn’t think there could be any part of his back still bruised with all the oil being put on, and Harry let Malfoy’s wrist go, not without a sigh of regret. The pulse and the skin felt warm beneath his fingers. Everything felt so warm.

“They hated magic,” he murmured into the pillow. “So they hated me. It was all these chores and all these sideways stares that I didn’t understand because they didn’t tell me about magic and not enough food and a bedroom in a cupboard. I mean, I don’t know, I s’pose it’s not as awful as some things, I knew a few kids who had things a lot worse, but it was bad enough, you know?”

Malfoy had gone still. From the light tickle of hair on his back, Harry thought he probably had his head bowed, and his body was being racked with light shivers.

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” Harry murmured, aware that he was rapidly approaching that maudlin state of general apology for the world that he got into when he was drunk enough. “Did I remind you of something?”

“No,” Malfoy said. “I just didn’t know.” He rolled off Harry, and Harry, with a puzzled frown, rolled over to see him.

Malfoy lay by his side, his own legs stretched out along the bed, his face set in its own frown. He touched Harry’s face, eyes and jaw and chin and eyebrows. Harry turned his head obligingly to the side so that Malfoy could reach his ears better, and sighed as the git’s fingers brushed over them. Harry hated to admit it, but he did have talented hands.

“You need a lot more,” Malfoy whispered. “Or I thought you did. There were all those ideas in your mind, burning so bright and clear, and the minute you started talking, all the life drained from them.”

Harry was enough himself to snort. “That’s probably because I only need to talk about them once. I’ve pent them up for a long time, but the things that I did talk to Ron and Hermione about felt better right away, and I haven’t thought of them much since.”

“Why didn’t you talk to them about these things?” Malfoy combed his fingers into Harry’s hair, and kept them still.

“Because they knew,” Harry said, and yawned. “Just like Ron knew about the bars. But there was always something else going on, and I would be fine, so they didn’t think they needed to ask about things like the basilisk or Cedric.”

Malfoy was quiet, and said nothing more. Harry reached out for his wand, charmed the mattress to be a little firmer, and arranged some of the pillows in front of him. He thought they had been the sofa cushions, but he wasn’t sure. All he knew was that the bed was more comfortable now, which meant he could sleep.

And Malfoy had eased his bruises, which probably would have prevented him sleeping, too.

“Thanks,” Harry murmured, opening one eye so he could watch him. Malfoy hadn’t moved; he was watching Harry with a grim set to his jaw and the fire glittering in his eyes. Harry wished he wouldn’t. He reached out and pushed some of Malfoy’s hair back from his forehead. Malfoy shivered at his touch, and then caught his hand and turned it back and forth. He might have been looking for a Dark Mark in Harry’s palm.

“What?” Harry asked. “You can go back to your own room, by the way. There’s no law saying that we need to spend two nights together.” And then his mind caught up with his tongue, and for the first time that evening, his face flamed.

His blush seemed to bring the smile back to Malfoy. He slid down beside Harry and cast a spell that removed his own shirt. “Nothing except your need and our bond,” he said, slinging one arm around Harry’s waist and pushing his chest to Harry’s back. Harry caught his breath. “And my desire.”

“That you wouldn’t even have if not for the bond,” Harry said, but his words simply didn’t hold the same resentment that he knew they would have a few hours ago, and he expected the slap that Malfoy gave him to the back of the head.

“It’s what I want right now,” Malfoy said. “More philosophy than that, I refuse to get into at this ridiculous hour.” He paused, as if waiting for something, but Harry had already closed his eyes and turned his face away. “Good night, Harry.”

“Good night, Malfoy,” Harry said, and Malfoy sighed and splay-stroked his fingers through Harry’s hair.

“If you want to do something for me, you could call me by my first name,” he said, and his voice was low and slow. “I would enjoy that.”

Harry paused, blinking. He had assumed that Malfoy would want to put more distance between them if afforded the opportunity, and of course he wouldn’t want Harry striking towards a false intimacy when he knew how Harry felt about him and how the bond had altered his mind.

But maybe Malfoy was like Ron-raised in the wizarding world, he made a place for the bond in his mind. Although Harry was still determined to destroy it if he could.

“Good night, Draco,” he said, and his mouth was more full of cotton than it had been when he was simply mumbling into pillows. He thought Malfoy’s hands tightened on his hip and back for a moment. “And put a bloody shirt on,” Harry added, firmly closing his eyes and deciding that nothing else was going to get him to open them tonight.

“You don’t really want me to,” Malfoy said, and luckily, he must have fallen asleep himself, or else the bed was really comfortable, because Harry didn’t remember much after that.

Part Three.

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