[one-shots]: The Inner Lands, 3/3
Third part of a very long one-shot. Don't start reading here.
Malfoy raised Harry's right hand and brushed the back of it with his lips, while watching Harry intently. "You realize that we will have to travel fast and far?" he asked. "And that we will go into the inner lands?"
"So what?" Harry asked, thinking of the snowy world and the manor house that Malfoy had shown him last night. "I've been there before, and you've showed me others."
"Those were the shallowest parts," Malfoy breathed, still watching Harry so intensely that Harry thought he would probably find holes burned in the wall behind his head when he came back to his house. "These are the deepest parts, the ones closer to the Center. You will swim among colors there, and legions, and names. I do not know if you will survive."
"You'll be along to protect me?" Harry raised his eyebrows as he thought of the enemies Malfoy had described living in the inner lands, enemies that even the Sidhe found hard to battle.
"I will be there," Malfoy said, and then went silent, still gazing at him in that uncomfortable way.
Harry half-nodded, and smiled as he thought of the way he had ridden the winged tiger the other night. "I could use a bit of risk," he said. "I'm willing to take this route."
Malfoy stepped back, releasing Harry's hands, and bowed formally, then made a series of passes in front of him with his hands. Harry thought they were probably the magic gestures that opened the inner lands, but nothing seemed different when Malfoy had dropped them; the air didn't even change colors.
"Where is the magic?" Harry asked finally.
"Oh, I was paying homage to you," Malfoy said, his face going still for a moment, as though he couldn't imagine anyone not knowing the meaning of his gestures. "As someone who has chosen to die the most horrible death anyone can imagine."
"Will the Queen see us if we do get there?" Harry asked, feeling his heartbeat speed up and saliva flood his mouth.
"It's her caprice," Malfoy said, the way someone else might say "It is destiny," and then reached out and gripped the air, ripping it up and down like a sheet of paper.
There was a gasp and a sigh, and Harry found himself standing on a shore of such blazing gold sand that he expected it to ring like coins as he moved his feet through it. Around and in front of what looked to be a small island stretched a boundless ocean, shifting mixtures of purple and blue and green and gold and black and rose. Harry reached out a hand towards the water, because something wasn't right--
And the nearest wave rolled up and broke, and left a sensation like silk along his fingers. The sea was a billowing tapestry, made of cloth. Harry laughed in wonder.
"You cannot remain here," Malfoy said, looking around the beach with his eyes narrowed. Harry didn't know why, since the sunshine here was the gentle, perfect light that he generally only saw on a summer's day, but perhaps it was against those dangers that he had talked about. "There are already predators coming."
Harry drew his wand. Malfoy glanced down at it, and then looked back up at Harry's face. Harry flushed. His contempt for Harry's ability to defend himself couldn't be more openly stated if he had spoken.
"All right," he said. "So how do we get to the point where we can go to the next inner land?" He thought there must be some kind of restriction, or Malfoy would have already opened the door into the next one.
Malfoy started to answer, but then suddenly jerked his head up and stared into the distance. His nostrils twitched. He sighed, and reached out to draw Harry into his arms. Harry let himself be pulled in slowly. He didn't know whether this was a sign of real danger or just another attempt from Malfoy to get him into bed.
"They are coming," Malfoy said, and turned his head to track the flight of an invisible bird. Harry kept his wand drawn anyway, because if it was useless, at least he felt it better with it in his hand. "They are here."
The sound of hooves crunching on sand came from behind them, and Harry turned around.
Trotting towards them were a pair of shaggy white ponies. Harry looked automatically for the riders on their backs, and saw nothing. Then he focused on their heads, where a flickering light seemed to strobe and play.
And made out the single sharp silver horn that glistened there.
"We're afraid of a pair of unicorns?" he whispered to Malfoy.
"Watch," Malfoy said, without changing expression. He pulled out or conjured a fresh green leaf and threw it towards the unicorns. A breeze that Harry reckoned was under his control made the leaf spin instead of fall, and then land on the beach in front of the unicorns.
The nearest one stamped his hoof once, and then moved. Harry blinked. He knew the creature was running, but it was strangely difficult to focus on. It was easier to understand the movements after he had seen them, through images that seemed to linger on the air.
The leaf fluttered in front of the unicorn, but something, perhaps Malfoy's will, kept it in the same place, and it didn't whirl away as the unicorn's hooves trampled it.
The leaf withered. It turned as white as paper, as the shaggy coats on the unicorns, and then tore apart and blew away. Harry stared. He had never seen something lose color faster.
"They are purity," Malfoy whispered. "Sterility. And they make everything else as pure as they are, once they touch it."
The unicorns turned to face them and began to trot. Their horns appeared, vanished, appeared, vanished. The edges of their hooves began to do the same thing, and through the light of their bodies, Harry thought he glimpsed an icy plain of the kind that Malfoy had escorted him to the other night. But this one had no drifting icebergs, no falling flakes. It was nothing but flatness and whiteness forever.
"What do we need to do to escape them?" he whispered, and shook himself out of his fascination. The unicorns were already much closer than he had thought they were. He felt his eyes trying to stay open in that dreamy stare again, and he turned back towards Malfoy, looking at his inhuman face to ground him.
Malfoy reached out without answering and put his hand on Harry's, his fingers gripping the holly wand. Harry could have tried to resist, but he felt the strength in Malfoy's arm, and he knew it was useless. So he waited to see what would happen, and tried not to lock his muscles in automatic rejection.
"Come with me," Malfoy whispered. "Say that you will. Mean it as you look into my eyes."
Harry grimaced and met Malfoy's eyes. "I'll come with you if it'll save me from them."
Malfoy's smile shone like a reflection in his eyes, while his face and his mouth never moved. "I thought you wanted to journey to the inner lands and seek the Queen of Faerie," he murmured. "And I'm afraid that an admission that grudging simply won't do. You must come with me of your own free will."
He curved an arm around Harry's waist and bent his head down as if smelling his hair. "Come, now, do," he whispered. "Tell me that you want to be with me of your own free will. Tell me that you'll come."
Harry scowled as he thought of the other meaning that word could have, but, well. The hooves of the unicorns blurred nearer and nearer, and he thought he could already feel one of their horns poking him in the back. And if he let himself lean forwards, he could feel the strength of Malfoy's arm around his waist and the breath blowing through his hair, and part of him felt a slight smugness that he had managed to make a lord of the Sidhe breathe like that.
He thought of the inner lands, and the tigers, and the meal Malfoy had served him, and he managed to lean near to his ear and whisper, "Take me."
Malfoy groaned into his ear, and the sound of the unicorns' hooves was close and real, and Malfoy's arms were so solid around him that he gasped, and the air that touched his throat was cold, and he could hear the crashing of real seas.
When he looked, he thought they were back in the mortal world for a moment. The beach beneath their feet was a shingle one, and the waves that curled up it didn't involve any unusual colors or bear unusual beasts. Harry relaxed, and then heard Malfoy chuckle. Assuming it was because Malfoy had convinced him to come along with him after all, Harry ignored him, and started to take a step forwards. A small, clear stream ran into the sea not far from his feet, and he wanted to drink from it.
"Not so," Malfoy whispered into his ear again, and tightened his arms. "Do you think that drinking from water in the inner lands is safe?"
Harry sighed and looked back at him. "What's going to happen now? Will this make my cock wither and drop off?"
"I'd hate to think so," Malfoy murmured, and ran a hand up and down his spine. "I have a use for it."
The humor was human, and that startled Harry into laughing. Malfoy grinned at him with teeth as bright as any vampire's.
"No," Malfoy continued. "But the stream is part of the inner lands, and therefore you must know it before you can consider it safe, by definition. Watch." He bent down, fumbled in the sand at Harry's feet for a moment--something that made Harry feel unaccountably pleased, because it meant that Malfoy couldn't be inhumanly perfect all the time--and then launched the stone he'd found in a low arc at the stream.
The stone skipped and beat against the sand for a moment, and then dropped into the water. Harry waited to see if anything rose to greet it. When nothing did, he opened his mouth to tease Malfoy for being such a poor shot that he couldn't even launch his stone all the way without it touching the ground.
The stream turned upside-down. Suddenly Harry was staring at an irregular bed of sand and pebbles and dripping mud, while the water flowed quietly along beneath it. It still flowed into the sea and kept to the course it had had before, but now there was an audible trickling and splashing as it did so.
Harry shook his head and stared up at Malfoy. For once, his eyes must have asked the question for him sufficiently, because Malfoy inclined his head and said, "Yes. If you had drunk from the water, it would have turned your body upside-down in the same way."
Harry grimaced and said, "Is there any water in the inner lands that's safe to drink?"
"Oh, there's this," Malfoy said, and conjured a silver goblet out of thin air, holding it out to Harry. Its middle was etched with a band of what looked like blazing blue metal, and its rim edged with diamonds. Harry winced as he thought about drinking from it and having those stones cut into his lips, but he could hear the water singing against the sides of the cup, and took it with his throat burning.
Then he looked up, and found Malfoy smiling.
Harry lowered the goblet and frowned at him. "I know that Faerie food and drink can sometimes keep you in Faerie," he said. "I ate your meal last night and didn't have to stay here, but technically, that happened--even if it was mostly glamour--in the house that's still in my world. What happens if I drink water from your hand in the inner lands?"
Malfoy blinked at him, and then said quickly, "That would only be true if we were in Faerie. But not all the inner lands are Faerie, as I have told you before. That is our home, the place where our kind were lifted to light and life. In the other inner lands, different laws and traditions hold sway."
Harry snorted, and turned the goblet over, pouring the water on the sand. He couldn't help noticing that the shingle smoked where it landed. "Of course," he drawled. "And that would be why you couldn't see me last night when I turned my clothes inside out, even though I don't think we were in Faerie."
Malfoy held his eyes, and was still, except for the hand that reached out to the side and made that gesture of flipping open a door.
They stood in another place then, one that made Harry stare around in wonder despite his dislike of showing that emotion in front of Malfoy. They were on the midst of what looked like a giant silver staircase, curving slowly, lazily up the face of a shallow sapphire-colored hill. On every side of Harry, shining silver arches stretched away, overlaid with what looked like sapphire fabrics and painting on air that deepened to black in the corners. Dark rosettes blossomed here and there on the places where the fabrics and the arches overlapped.
"What is this place?" Harry whispered.
"One of the more inner of the inner lands." Malfoy looked at him, and there was gentleness in the look. Harry wondered if his face was more likely to change emotions as they moved between worlds. It wouldn't have surprised him. "Closer to the Queen. Closer to home. Closer to everything we are, and to the Center, which is--"
"Everything," Harry couldn't help finishing in a dry voice. "Yes, I recall you mentioning something about that once before."
"Do you?" Malfoy asked, and raised his eyebrows, and smiled, and said no more. He began to lead Harry up the staircase, while the treads fell away shining beneath them, and Harry stumbled from the firm grip that Malfoy had on his wrist, and he gaped all around him at the beauty, trying to see what sort of world it was.
But he couldn't. He couldn't see any air beneath them, or land, or sea, or leaping fire for that matter. There was only the drop, and the arches, and the "air" that probably was in fact made of panels of fabric.
Harry walked up the staircase in an awe that deepened when he saw the silver mist that wreathed the steps ahead. It didn't act like normal fog; it drifted in a circular pattern, and when Malfoy lifted his hand, it rose and parted like a door.
"This is the place where you can no longer turn back," Malfoy said, facing Harry with his eyes glittering queerly. "This is the place where you walk and there's no time to tell me that you don't want to be here, there is no road back from Faerie, there is nothing here but what we grant you."
Harry could taste his heartbeat as he lifted his head and met Malfoy's eyes, and he didn't care. He thought about the invasion, and his world, and his friends, and the notions rotted like cloth and fell away. He knew that he was here of his own free will, and yes, there was no turning back. The difference between him and Malfoy was that Malfoy thought the knowledge should scare him, but--
Harry knew the knowledge freed him.
He turned and tugged away from Malfoy, darting into the mist, calling over his shoulder, "Race you there!"
He never knew if Malfoy swore in the human-like fashion that Harry had heard before, or if he cried out or gasped or even applauded. The mist clasped and swung him, and Harry knew he was moving through a motionless grey country, the fog dancing at his side like waves, and he wondered for a moment whether all the inner lands closer to the Faerie Queen had water as an important part of them--
And why not? Even the Sidhe would need water, wouldn't they? Though come to think of it, he hadn't really seen Malfoy eat much.
The grey waves faded, and Harry was suspended in the blue land of black rosettes and silver arches overlaid with blue again, or what looked like the same place, but this time, there was a slender silver bridge at his feet, overlaid with a pearly shimmer of what could have been tiles or scales, the chains on either side of it stretching up into--nothingness. Harry felt something solid beneath him, but didn't look down. He knew without asking that it wouldn't be visible, and also that it would crumble the moment he stepped onto the bridge.
He reached out, put his hands on the chains on either side of the bridge, and accepted its silent challenge, stepping forwards.
The bridge bulged and rippled underneath him. Harry laughed aloud and let himself go with it, being tossed up and then landing, the instability of the material beneath him part of the challenge, part of the game. He had never walked on something like this before, but he thought it was probably similar to a Muggle trampoline.
Malfoy appeared on the bridge in front of him, although he walked with his hands clenched on the chains as if they and not his own will held him upright. Harry grinned at him and bounced again. Malfoy promptly seized one of his arms and dragged him close, shaking his head in such fury that Harry thought he could see individual strands of his hair glittering.
"What are you doing?" he whispered.
"I'm bouncing," Harry said, and since Malfoy was holding him firmly enough now that he couldn't bounce, he tapped his foot instead. That set up a lot of ripples still, although not satisfactorily enough compared to what he'd been creating at first.
Malfoy closed his eyes, opened them, and then said, "And it never occurred to you that you could anger the Queen enough that she might decide to crush your world beneath the inner lands now?"
"I don't know what she would do," Harry said simply. "If I had tried to reckon it, you would probably have told me that Sidhe don't feel human emotions and I was being presumptuous. Wouldn't you have?" he added, because Malfoy had opened his mouth as though to deny it.
Malfoy gave a small, sharp laugh, as sharp as the teeth that he bared a moment later at Harry. "Perhaps I would have," he said. "But--you act as if you aren't afraid. You act as if you weren't approaching one of the most powerful creatures in all the inner lands."
Harry took a step closer to Malfoy. His blood was thrumming, and it seemed to bear words along with it, words that spilled out of his mouth when he wasn't looking, because he knew that he definitely hadn't planned this speech.
"I don't know what that means. I don't have a standard for judging the inner lands the way you do, because I've never lived in them. I don't know how strong the Queen is, and if I did try to judge, I'd probably get it wrong.
"But what is being afraid going to gain me? You'd find it charming, or exasperating, or enough of a reason to destroy the wizarding world immediately. I never know, and I refuse to worry about it. You'll do what you do in response to me, and I can't predict or control that. The only thing I can control is my reaction. So I might as well be fearless."
Malfoy stared at him, and then he reached out and stroked a hand down Harry's cheek, along to the back of his neck, and through his hair. It felt a little different--at least--from the similar gestures he had made before, and Harry raised his eyebrows and waited, his head tilted to the side.
"I didn't realize how much I had missed that," Malfoy whispered, and took a step back, looking along the bridge, which had now begun to move like a fall of water, spilling towards the destination--wherever that was, Harry didn't know. "Come. The Queen awaits."
And this time, he made no objection when Harry bounced behind him and made the whole bridge shake and tremble as they proceeded along it towards the Queen's throne--if she was enough like a human monarch to need one in the first place.
*
Later, of course, Harry tried to remember his visit to the Queen of Faerie, and he couldn't. Or at least, he could imagine, and he could relive some of the details, and he knew what had happened in a broad outline, because the memory of his own words remained unclouded in his mind, and that meant--
It meant he might know what she had said in response to it. No more than that.
It wasn't like a dream, not exactly. There were burning images, shining ones, ones that clustered around his thoughts and danced when he thought about it. But they didn't connect to one another. The bridges were missing, the transitions.
He became aware of a woman sitting impaled on spikes and bones as he settled before her, a woman with knives sticking out of her ribs and antlers out of her skull and blades thrusting through her eyes--
And he saw a woman who shone like dawn, with sun-golden skin and black hair and green eyes that broke the heart--
And he saw a warrior woman in blood-stained mail, and a chariot with spokes of iron on the wheels (he knew, seeing them, that they were there to show off the Queen's great strength, that she could be near iron and make it serve as a weapon of war), and a horse snorting and tossing in the traces that was all slick and gleaming flesh and muscle without skin--
And he saw a being of fog and mist, ice and snow, and she blew through him like a cold wind and away, and left him shivering and stunned, shocked, blowing on his hands to warm them--
And all of these she was, and none of them, and Harry spoke to her, and said, "Please don't invade my world."
The Queen looked at him, and there was a slow amusement radiating out of her. Harry shivered and blew on his hands, and then looked up and said, "Because there might be wizards there to change into you, to be your children, but they won't be there if you succeed in turning my world into one of the inner lands. I don't think we could stand the creatures that you could unleash if you wanted to."
The Queen reached out and touched him with long fingers like frozen twigs. Harry closed his eyes and leaned back against Malfoy's arm and said, "There is no reason that you should grant me what I ask. Only my courage in coming to you, and the fact that I ask, and--and the fact that I might have been one of you, if Malfoy is right, except for this." He pushed back his fringe to show his scar to the Queen, who bent forwards to look at it, her neck creaking.
And she was a queen in portraits, gold-framed portraits of roses and ladies with golden hair, and Harry shook his head and said, "Malfoy? I knew him when he was human. I don't love him. I don't--know him. I knew him as a boy, but I didn't become familiar with him again before he changed and left."
Malfoy shivered against him, and bowed his head, a crown of ice tickling the back of Harry's neck. Harry reached back to adjust it and said, "There's no reason."
Then he said, "A bargain? I don't know what I could offer you that would make you agree. I offered Malfoy the chance to persuade me, and he accepted it. But I can't think that you want anything from me in particular."
There was light singing around him in a waterfall, and there was warmth lapping around his legs, and Harry closed his eyes and bowed his head and said, "If you wish."
Then the sun flashed through him, and the world dissolved into tears and diamond dewdrops. Harry shivered violently and went on shivering, and then Malfoy was with him and there were warm lips against his ear and a voice murmuring, "You were the bravest thing I have ever seen. Many people have done far worse in confrontations with the Queen. Many of our own kind, even. Fantastic. Marvelous."
Harry turned and fastened his lips on Malfoy's with a violence that surprised him. Perhaps he simply wanted the comfort of something he had experienced before after that unsettling encounter with the Queen.
Malfoy made a muffled sound and wound his hands in Harry's hair, holding him still as he licked and lapped. The cold touch of his tongue made Harry jump and gasp, but he kept up with it, until he pulled away from Malfoy and took a single step back along the trembling bridge that had appeared behind them.
"Are you going to give me the chance to persuade you to sleep with me?" Malfoy's voice was low and husky, his eyes fastened on Harry as if he assumed that he might disappear at any moment. Harry felt like that, really, as though the kiss had sucked some of the life and vitality out of his body. He licked his lips and watched Malfoy's eyes follow his tongue.
He smiled.
Malfoy moaned and stretched out one hand in front of him, touching the air as though he would tear the way open to another world. Harry shook his head, and then smiled again, because Malfoy had lowered his other hand and was touching his cock.
"You are the bravest thing I have ever seen," Malfoy whispered. "What was your bargain with the Queen?"
"That's for me to know and you to try desperately to find out," Harry said. "As for whether I'll sleep with you, you ought to think about it. What have you given me so far that's worth me doing that?"
"The question should be," Malfoy said, and his eyes lidded themselves and his face was lovely and warm and the least human Harry had ever seen it, "what kind of wild pleasure will you have with me?"
Harry laughed and leaned back against the chain behind him. Malfoy caught his breath as if he expected Harry to tumble into the abyss from the bridge, but Harry knew the chain would support him. Hadn't he just finished talking to the Queen about that?
(Well, had he? Harry couldn't remember, not now, but he knew the burning memories would probably come clear enough, if he simply waited).
"I don't know that you can give me that kind of pleasure," Harry retorted. "So far, you've taken me to cold worlds and tried to seduce me in the middle of snow. And you've talked more about the dangers of the inner lands than the pleasures that you can find there. What do you think? Should I believe you when you talk about what you can give me, when there hasn't been a sign of it so far?"
Malfoy looked at him for a moment. Then his face changed again, beautiful and spring-like, with the wind of his expressions rippling and altering. "You would prefer a warm world?" he whispered. "You want me to seduce you in the middle of summer?"
Harry snorted. "I won't limit you to that, both because you won't necessarily seduce me and because I don't know if all the inner lands have something you could call summer. But I do expect you to show me what else you can do that you haven't shown me so far."
Malfoy nodded and moved forwards with his hands extended. This time, after due thought, Harry allowed Malfoy to catch hold of his hands. Malfoy held them to his lips, once, and lowered them so that both of them were pointing at the center of the silken, trembling bridge that led towards the Queen's sanctum. Or might lead there, now, Harry thought. He was not enough of a fool to think that directions and roads in the inner lands would always stay the same.
"You want excitement," Malfoy murmured. "I know you were impressed by our flying beasts--"
"Winged tigers?" Harry asked. "Yeah, I was."
Malfoy tilted his head to the side like a bird this time. "Is that how they appear to you? How curious."
Harry could have asked about that, but it would have given Malfoy too much satisfaction. In the end, he preferred to lift his eyebrows and wait.
"Let me show you something like that," Malfoy said. "Let me show you the most beautiful of the inner lands, where no one ever comes, where the Sidhe walk among unfallen leaves and unfading flowers."
"If it's such a beautiful, immortal country, why don't you stay there all the time?" Harry whispered. He felt more than slightly breathless as Malfoy moved a step closer, stared into his face, and then moved a step closer again.
"Because we want other things in our lives," Malfoy said, watching him. "Wars and challenges. Fights and battles. Struggles against those who would see us dead if they could." His eyelids flickered once, and he smiled, as if he was picturing Harry fighting in their battles. "New creatures to meet and befriend. New lovers. New pleasures."
"And I'm the new pleasure," Harry murmured, feeling his heartbeat slow a little as he contemplated that. "What happens when I'm the old one?"
Malfoy touched him tentatively, fingers smoothing into his hair, and up, and back. Harry resisted the temptation to close his eyes and purr. You are not a cat, he reminded himself.
"I can never imagine you being old," Malfoy whispered into his ear. "And now, let me show you our land."
The air burned around them, and turned red and gold. Harry was about to tease Malfoy for using Gryffindor colors to transport them, but then he stepped back and turned around, and realized that this was something else altogether.
This was a world of trees in red and gold leaf, not withering and dying, but bearing those colors all the year round. This was a world beneath a drowsy colored sky, a permanent aurora, wavering lights, of soft rose and deepest aqua and indelible green. Flowing away down the hill in front of them was a stream of what could have been grass and what could have been water; when Harry reached down to touch the surface, it bobbed beneath his fingers, and then small questing flowers lifted their heads from it and opened their petals.
"Are they trying to bite me?" Harry whispered, feeling Malfoy lean against his shoulder and kiss the skin beneath his ear.
He felt it, too, when Malfoy shook his head and his hair rustled gently along Harry's spine. "No. They're curious, that's all. These are the flowers that never die, that simply stay rooted and do not decay. Over time, they develop a feeling for the world about them, and an interest in other creatures."
Harry looked around at the trees, and what he had assumed was solid earth or grass at their feet. Now he could see the soft bobbing motions that infected it, up and down like the stream, and see the roots of flowers that had turned upside-down to thrust their heads beneath the earth and investigate what they found there.
"A world where everything is alive," he whispered. "I can't even imagine how busy it is here. How rich."
Malfoy drew him back up and turned him around. Harry let himself be kissed, and then took control of the kiss, so that Malfoy sighed into his mouth and let his tongue lap out. Harry lapped it in return, and thought about being wanted by someone who had become a Sidhe more than five years ago, who had all the wealth and wonders of the inner lands at his disposal, and a legitimate reason to distrust wizards.
About being the greatest desire of someone like that.
But it still wasn't enough, so he stepped away from Malfoy, looked around at the trees, and said, "I'd like to see more of this place."
Malfoy took his arm and led him without a word over the half-stream and into what had looked like a forest from a distance. Now Harry saw that there was something else beneath the trees, a great coiling shape that he saw the jeweled eyes and horns and shining neck of a moment later. The dragon stirred, stared at them with jaws slowly opening to show the fire at the very back of the throat, and then turned away and laid its head back down, rooting into the earth like the flowers did.
Harry looked at the trees. "Are those separate things, then, or are they just spines on the dragon's back?" he asked.
Malfoy said nothing. Harry glanced at him for the answer and found him smiling.
"Yes," he said.
Harry snorted and pushed at him, and they walked over the dragon's back and out of the "forest," to the shore of a waterfall. The water shone gold from the reflection of a gold part of the aurora immediately overhead, and tiny elves sported and danced above it, growing wings and losing them as they dived, creating boats of leaves and then blending with them so that the leaves had legs and arms along the sides and flat faces on the bottom, rising as a mingling of serpent and fish and yawning at the sun before they dived again and became swirls in the current.
"I've never seen anything like them," Harry whispered.
"You can shout as loud as you like," Malfoy murmured in his normal voice, or at least the one it seemed had become normal for him to use around Harry. "They won't care. And no, they're a species of Faerie creature that never made it to our world, unlike the house-elves or the fairies that we sometimes capture for the Christmas lights."
Harry felt a sharp thrill snap through him, up and down his spine. It took him a moment to realize why. Malfoy had said our world, as though he still considered himself a wizard instead of a Sidhe.
"How much do I matter to you?" he asked, as Malfoy lifted him over a stone that lay, flat and saucer-like and brooding with jeweled flies, in the middle of the stream.
Malfoy looked at him as they waded through the blue-tinged grass of an apparently endless pampas, and Harry thought he had his answer. He paused with his hand against Malfoy's chest on a hill in the middle of the pampas, watching as golden gazelles and obsidian panthers flashed in and out among the grasses, appearing and vanishing like images in a dream.
"What is it?" Malfoy whispered, and pushed Harry's fringe back and out of his eyes.
Harry shivered. He wanted to say that he hadn't seen anything dangerous enough yet, and perhaps that was true. He also wanted to say that this was the most beautiful place he had ever seen, but Malfoy knew that already.
His tongue was thick and heavy in his mouth. His body felt so limp and odd that he wondered for a moment if there was some kind of drug in the air that he was breathing in, but it seemed that he was simply--relaxed.
That was it. This world was so far away from the mundane thoughts that plagued him. Sidhe didn't have to deal with the Wizengamot, or worry about whether the political power of their names was going to be great enough to save the world this time, or nightmares of Voldemort. Malfoy had been marked by Voldemort, but even he had shed that, gone on, gone on past, and up, and in.
"Come away," Harry murmured.
Malfoy stirred beneath his hand like the grass stirring in the passages of the animals. "Anywhere you like," he whispered back.
Harry laughed and looked up at him. "No," he said. "That's a line from a poem about the Sidhe that I was thinking of. A Muggle wrote it--at least, I think it was a Muggle. But I can see now why you've tempted so many people over the centuries. This is--beyond. Beyond everything, beyond all the mundane problems that we have."
Watching Malfoy smile then was like watching a statue smile, as though pure joy had been enough to move carven stone. "Thank you," Malfoy said simply. "And now?" He let his hand rest on Harry's waist and arched his eyebrows.
Harry burst out laughing. "Is sex all your ever think about? I thought an immortal creature who lived in a world like this would have more on his mind."
"I can have whatever I want to on my mind," Malfoy said, and lowered his head, his nose poking against Harry's neck like an eagle's beak, and waited.
Harry caught his breath and turned his head towards Malfoy in turn, nose brushing Malfoy's cheek. Pale, and strong under his touch, like marble, but the bones felt brittle, ready to cut through the skin. The Sidhe were creatures of knives and wind, weren't they? Among the many books Hermione had had him read before she judged him ready to lead the delegation to the Sidhe, Harry thought he remembered reading an explanation of the Sidhe as being wind, or part of the wind, or something like that.
Or maybe only that it was a wind of change that blew when they went by, swept into the lives of all around them and scattered their ordinary duties and thoughts like pins.
Harry raised a hand and laid it along Malfoy's neck, feeling the cords there, but not the muscles he expected. Then they manifested, and Harry snorted, a little breath that never got to the point of making noise. Well, if the Sidhe could shift about from inner land to inner land and change their minds and their whims and their voices and their nature when they were born as human, then he reckoned he couldn't be surprised about an ability to change their own bodies, too.
Malfoy didn't press him. He stood there, quiet, and let Harry have a moment of his own to be quiet in, too. Harry felt down Malfoy's back, the shoulder blades that curved like wings, and the center of the back that shifted under his touch and quivered and trembled and then went still, and thought.
He had fought to be free of the wizarding world and its expectations for so long. Not being an Auror, not being the Ministry's lackey, refusing interviews, setting up his business so that he could teach dueling instead of Defense Against the Dark Arts, turning away those who wanted to know what he was going to do next with a smile and a shake of his head, or a smirk and an insult, until they stopped asking.
But. . .
But lately, he had found himself drawn back into politics anyway. And the Wizengamot didn't listen to him, and his friends were his friends and he loved them, but it was a small circle to have as the only people who cared about him.
He could step beyond. He would have to step beyond, given what he had promised the Queen. He could find something more exciting, and no one would blame him, except the people he held in contempt and who would never know, anyway, unless he told them.
Harry took a deep breath, and Malfoy quivered in response, in time, to that breath.
I want to do this. I want to try this. And if it doesn't work out, there's no reason to think that he and I are bound forever. I'm mortal, he's not. I could die, and he'd go on.
That was the most comforting thing of all. Here was someone for whom Harry was not responsible, either to save or to damn. A wild creature, like him, a being, like him, and in one of the inner lands they were met, for what they chose to do.
And he let go.
Malfoy sensed it without Harry saying anything, and gave a single, low cry that built into a piercing whistle like an Augurey's. His mouth descended on Harry's, his hands gripping his shoulders, his legs pressing into his. Urgent, demanding, with the coldness of his lips and tongue and the sudden spreading heat in the middle of his back, as if he were going to grow phoenix wings, unlike a human lover's. Harry tilted his head back, opened his mouth, and bared his throat.
Malfoy bit him. Not like a vampire--his teeth didn't sink in--but in a way that Harry knew would leave a mark, and which sent satisfaction through him until he wanted to shout. He clawed and kicked at Malfoy, battered him with his shins, slammed chin into lips, and Malfoy pushed him backwards.
For a moment, falling, Harry thought he would fall into the abyss that lay on either side of the trampoline bridge leading to the Queen's land. And then he landed on sinking softness, softness that billowed up on either side of him, like wings.
They were, Harry realized, when he sat up and looked around. He was in the middle of white feathers, on a sailing swan's back, its gigantic wings cupped up and around him like the sides of a boat. For a second, the great head turned to regard him, black bird's eyes with an incurious stare and a dark beak that could have broken his bones, and then the swan faced forwards again and went on swimming. They were in one of the flower-streams in the Sidhe's world, but longer, broader, and full of bobbing blue-green blossoms that tangled around the swan's feet and swayed dreamily next to its wings.
"Do you like it?"
Malfoy, kneeling next to him with head bowed and hair swaying around his face in time, Harry realized, to the rhythm of the flowers. One might have said "rhythm of the water" and understood it the same way, in another world. Harry nodded and reached up with hands and mouth that had not lost their urgency.
Malfoy covered him, all burning heat now, because the swansdown beneath Harry's back was cool softness. Malfoy breathed a word, and then another one, and Harry was naked and so hard that he snorted again. He let Malfoy hear him this time.
"So lacking confidence in your power to arouse me," he murmured, because the Sidhe had pride worse than any human, and Malfoy would have to take that as a challenge.
Malfoy bent down, and did.
His fingers danced above Harry's skin, gentle, caressing, making Harry catch his breath and arch his hips in helpless desire. Then Malfoy was naked, and turning so that one of his shoulder blades, the same ones that Harry had touched and thought felt like wings, brushed Harry's side. Harry turned his head to the side and tried to kiss it, but it was already gone.
"Keep your eyes closed," Malfoy murmured, when Harry would have opened them. "I prefer to touch you this way."
Harry would have disputed with him yesterday--or whatever time had been like before he ventured into the inner lands, whatever relation it had to time as it was lived here--but now, why? The only good of a challenge was to make Malfoy touch him, and he was doing that already. So he let his head tip back and his arms fall open and his legs sprawl, and Malfoy caught his breath and cursed him in a shaky voice.
"Still so human," Harry said, and smiled, not having to open his eyes to see the expression on Malfoy's face because he could picture what it would be all too easily.
Malfoy's retort was a swift sweep of a hand down his side, and Harry gasped and then cried out as his skin pebbled beneath the touch. He turned, mouth open, blindly seeking, and Malfoy slid a finger between his lips.
Harry sucked on it, and felt the finger lengthen, and thicken, and then become slender again, altering, changing, flowing in the space of a breath. He knew without thinking about it that it was Malfoy's own challenge, asking if Harry could handle being with someone who could change himself like this and ready to reject him in an instant if the answer was no.
Or would he reject him? The Sidhe were so capricious that Harry reckoned he might never know for sure unless he manages to make both answers at once.
In any case, he would only make one. He let his tongue swirl around Malfoy's finger in response, and heard the cry, high and shrill as an eagle's, and smelled the scent of flowers sharper and stranger than the ones that bobbed in the stream around the swan.
The swan itself ruffled up its feathers, and they prickled against the underside of Harry's (naked) back and made his waist, as Malfoy arched above him, feel embraced from below. Harry thought for a moment of the swan watching them, but he chose not to open his eyes, and he chose to believe that it was keeping its head turned forwards.
Malfoy licked him, a long, straight, thoughtful stripe from his collarbone to the base of his cock, and Harry arched and murmured as he had before. This time, Malfoy went on licking as though he would not be put off. Harry didn't mind that, and just let his legs sprawl open even wider than before.
"The insults that my schoolboy self would have given you, if he'd ever caught you looking like that," Malfoy said from above him. Harry was smugly pleased to note that he was breathless.
"The low chances that my schoolboy self would ever have slept with him," Harry said, and arched his hips again, as a clue to get on with it.
Malfoy slid wet fingers into him, without a pause, without a hint, punishingly. Harry bit his lip and wriggled down on them, and they eased and softened and bent. Sidhe body control tricks again, Harry was sure, and wished he could open his eyes and look.
But he had promised, and anyway, in some ways it was more thrilling not to know what Malfoy was doing, to trust everything to blindness and chance. He waited a moment until he thought Malfoy was being delicate, and then jerked himself down and tried to take in the fingers at least until the second knuckle, if Malfoy had them anymore.
Malfoy was the one who cried out again, and then he bent down near Harry's ear and whispered, "You're beautiful, and you'll never experience anyone else fucking you like this again."
"Ah," Harry said, not letting his muscles tense because he wouldn't. "So this is the ultimate sign that this is a one-time only event for you, that you really don't want to sleep with me more than once. That would be boring."
"The next time," Malfoy said, and his voice drifted and rang like chimes around Harry as he sat back and positioned himself, "will be different. So that you don't get bored."
Harry wondered for a moment whether Malfoy had used more lube than it felt like, and then wanted to grin, and did. They were fucking on the back of a giant swan sailing down a river of flowers in Faerie. Malfoy wanted to please him, not hurt him. Why bother with such petty questions?
Malfoy thrust forwards--
And Harry felt magic around him, pressing in and on and through him, and shouted as the feeling slammed back and forth through him, swinging like a pendulum, and redoubling with each swing, until his eyes ached and his ears rang and tears poured down his face. It wasn't a climax, but it was the most similar to it he'd ever felt without one.
"That is the kind of thing I can do to you," Malfoy whispered, smug and breathless, "and which no human lover can. You can open your eyes now."
Harry did, blinking away a thin film of tears, and found Malfoy gazing down at him with eyes that shone almost blue-silver with the fulfillment of desire. Harry met his gaze and arched his hips suggestively, and Malfoy laughed and thrust.
And although Harry could still feel swansdown beneath his back, he could see spirals of blue and silver along the sides of the lifted wings, and reckoned that they were tumbling through an ancient region of space, inhabited by old galaxies. Malfoy would probably do that if he thought he could get away with it, just to impress Harry away from any other potential lovers.
He's doing--a pretty good job--at that--with everything else, Harry thought, his mind moving as sluggishly as his mouth would have been if he'd tried to speak words.
Because Malfoy's thrusts snapped Harry's hips up, and came so fast that it made it almost impossible to thrust his arse back--although Harry tried anyway, of course--and his magic whispered and shone in Harry's arms and skin and bones and flesh, and Harry was writhing beneath him with the pleasure and half-shouting with it, and Malfoy filled him and pushed back in so quickly that it felt as if there were no withdrawing.
"I knew you would like this," Malfoy whispered, his gloating tone a little ruined by his wild-eyed expression. He pushed one more time, and held himself there--
And his magic thrust one more time, pushing itself in and out of Harry's mouth for a moment, swirling down to add still more fullness to his arse, brushing between the webs of his fingers and into the pores of his skin, until he was lying there, aching and open and stunned breathless with the pleasure of it.
To feel good, at that moment, seemed the highest aim in the world, and Harry could see why the Sidhe would have sacrificed so many of their lesser desires, and even whole worlds, for it.
He fell back into his body with such slowness that it echoed the arching tumble of silver spirals and blue sparks across the sky. He turned his head and opened his mouth as slowly, and Malfoy, knowing what he wanted, glided his fingers in. Harry sucked on them, and tasted himself, and sighed.
"I knew I could do it well enough that you would never want another lover again," Malfoy whispered, and then paused. Harry found himself turning his head and opening his eyes to find out why he had done that.
Malfoy stared down at him, eyes as luminous as moons. He whispered, "Will you go back to someone else, when you return to your world?"
Harry blinked, and even those movements were slow, luxurious. He thought of the Wizengamot and felt only a distant wonder that they wouldn't converse with the Sidhe enough to know they could cause pleasure like this, that they considered them inferior magical creatures. Malfoy had taken even that source of aggravation and upset away from him. Hermione would probably say that it was Sidhe magic, but Harry was still grateful for it.
"I don't have a lover right now," Harry said, when he could separate lip from tongue and speak. "You know that."
"But you might have one," Malfoy whispered, his knees driving into the down beneath them. Harry became vaguely aware that the swan had stopped and seemed to be drifting in one place on the stream, like a boat at anchor, but he couldn't look away from Malfoy's face, so he wasn't sure. "And I don't want you to."
Harry arched an eyebrow. "What, now that you've fucked my arse you don't find yourself desiring something else? The way that your kind wanted a new world when they were done with this one?"
Malfoy's hand stroked Harry's head and cheek and hand the way he might caress a jewel. Harry considered that and wasn't displeased. It wasn't the way he would want to matter to another human, but. . .for Malfoy, it might be all right.
"I want to have you again and again and again," Malfoy whispered. "I want to show you more of the inner lands. I want to find a way to reverse the stunting that happened with your scar and make you into what you should have been, a lord of Faerie, glorious and free."
Harry reached up with a grin and rested his palm against Malfoy's face. Now it felt human, or at least there was a normal temperature to the skin and the bones didn't feel as if they would pop out and cut through it. From the way that Malfoy looked at him, shyness and pride and so much else in his eyes, he might feel much the same way, too.
"I'll think about it," Harry said. "It'll give me something nice to think about in the middle of the Wizengamot sessions about what exactly happened when you invaded our world."
This time, when Malfoy kissed him and settled on top of him again, Harry felt the crumbs of bread sift out of his pocket and fall to the swan's back, no longer necessary.
*
"We are grateful to you, Mr. Potter."
It was Allona who said that, and the other Wizengamot members behind him nodded furiously. The ones who had spoken the most against Harry, or resented him the most, were the ones who looked most constipated now. Harry smiled serenely at them and turned around to bow his head so that the Minister could drape the Order of Merlin around his neck.
The crowd of wizards gathered around the stage in the middle of the Ministry Atrium--temporarily displacing the Fountain of Magical Brethren--let out a cheer, and someone began to play music. Harry didn't know whether that was a result of a spell or a band had been hired for the occasion. He frankly didn't care. He was only here to receive his Order of Merlin in person because Ron and Hermione had both ignored his arguments about how they could perfectly well accept it for him.
He had to step off the stage and shake hands with everyone, of course, and then go back onto the stage and shake hands with the Wizengamot, while the cameras flashed. Allona and everyone else put on their most pious faces for the reporters, and everyone had something to say in praise of Harry when asked.
Harry saw the sidelong glares they cast him, and only smiled in response. It was the politically aware thing to do, and he knew it.
And it was real. No one else understood how the invasion had ceased so suddenly, except Harry's friends, whom he had chosen to trust with that information. The Wizengamot only knew that one minute they had been arranging to battle winged tigers over London, and the next, they had been conversing with several noble, gently-spoken Sidhe who had made them see that it would be far more worthwhile to declare wizards of age at twenty-two and convinced the Wizengamot so well that they didn't start thinking about it until after the Sidhe had gone away.
Harry didn't know exactly what had happened in the sense that he didn't know whether the Sidhe had altered people's memories or done something else at the command of their Queen. But it didn't matter. It was done.
And he knew the promise he had made.
As they filed off the stage, Harry bent down and pretended to examine the laces of his boot to see if they had come untied. In actuality, he was casting a small pebble made of packed white seeds, wrapped in the head of an immortal flower, down next to the stage. He glanced away in response to a question from Rita Skeeter, and when he looked back again, the seed was gone. Harry nodded in satisfaction. It would have dug down already, and next year, the Ministry would be surprised by a growth of an unusual kind.
Not a literal growth. Not a flower transplanted from that inner land that the Sidhe considered their own. But a different kind. A return of magic and wonder to a world that had come to seem sterile and overly demanding to Harry since the war.
If some people chose to speak to Sidhe with iron in their pockets, or saw them riding their winged beasts on a moonlit night, or chose to understand the change that could be in them and embrace it after this, then who was to say that that was a bad thing? That was part of the price Harry had agreed to pay the Queen. The Sidhe would have their outposts here, and the wizarding world would become more like the inner lands in beauty, in its capacity to stun its population and cast them into admiration.
Harry thought that a worthy goal.
"Mr. Potter," Skeeter said, her voice rising in more than mere annoyance that she had lost his attention. She had learned to read Harry better than most of the other reporters, having more experience with him, and she always knew when he had really found something more interesting than her and when he was shamming. "I said, don't you think that this will inaugurate a new era of cooperation and understanding between yourself and the Ministry?"
Harry sighed and shook his head. "I've told you before, Madam Skeeter, I don't enjoy it when you talk about me as if I were a foreign government."
Skeeter flushed, but, being herself, persisted. "But would you say that you've grown up and learned political responsibility, now?"
Harry paused as if thinking hard about it, then gave her a perfect smile, a hero's smile with all his white teeth showing. Skeeter leaned eagerly forwards.
"No," Harry said.
Skeeter turned and stomped off. Harry chuckled and made his way down the dais, clearing his way through the crowd with no more than a few sharp glances. Those rumors about his supposedly incredible power and short temper worked well to serve him here, too.
And the truth was. . .
The truth was that he didn't feel as cynical and hopeless about the general state of the wizarding world as he did before. But that was partially because he knew that he had a door open to leave it, now.
*
"You don't want to come over to dinner with us tonight?" Ron stared at Harry out of the fire, his eyes so wide that Harry thought he could see most of the optic nerve inside, and then burst out laughing and winked at Harry. "I've got it! A hot date!"
"Yes," Harry said, and nodded through the rest of Ron's congratulatory speech about how he finally had a life and his friends had wanted him to have one for a long time. Then Harry shut his Floo and went on dressing for said date, humming a little under his breath as he buttoned up the rich green robes. They had appeared in his wardrobe the day after the ceremony with the Order of Merlin, and they were the color of the grass in Faerie.
When he was ready, he stepped out of his house and looked around, one hand resting on the lump of iron in his pocket. The touch of the cold iron dispelled the shimmering glamour that rested next to the house, and Harry walked to meet it, smiling when he saw Malfoy draped in ordinary human clothes. They disguised him, without the glamour, as effectively as sheets on a phoenix would.
"Hullo," Harry said, and let Malfoy feel his cheeks and his eyes and even his teeth, as if he needed to make sure that none of them had fallen out in the intervening week, before he kissed him. Malfoy stood then, holding him by neck and shoulders and watching him with that glimmering, almost human look in his eyes.
"You are ready to go?" Malfoy asked softly.
"Yes," Harry said, and pressed close to Malfoy's side, watching, as he tore a hole in the air.
In front of them opened a rippling red land, ruby mountains in the distance with a purple sunset dying on their flanks, and, rising to meet them, crimson and scarlet and heart-of-fire foothills. Harry made sure that the spells to protect his clothes from heat were intact, and then stepped through the gateway into the inner lands.
Malfoy already had a ripe fruit from one of the shadowy trees that bent and swayed like grass--it was those, and not real grass, that covered the hills--for him to eat. He pushed it to Harry's lips, and Harry bit in, wincing and shivering in anticipation at the same time as the taste roasted his tongue and the juice burned his chin.
This was the other part of the bargain the Queen had required him to make: that he promise to return to the inner lands from time to time, because she wanted them sometimes to receive the presence of a mortal with such courage and such grace under pressure, and whatever other qualities she had seen in him and the Sidhe admired. Harry suspected she was probably hoping to convert him, or unstunt him, the way that Malfoy had talked about.
It didn't matter. He wanted to come here, and while he had the prospect, the life he had been leading was refreshed by the constant presence of waiting beauty.
Malfoy pressed close to him, and followed the fruit with his tongue, chasing the taste back into Harry's mouth, licking his chin for the juice. His hair changed color and length, and his silver eyes shone, and the trees made a noise like harp-music when they walked on their roots.
And this, Harry thought, as he lifted his mouth for another kiss from a lover he found exhilarating and fascinating by turns, but never, never boring, is worth journeying for.
The End.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/456350.html. Comment wherever you like.
Malfoy raised Harry's right hand and brushed the back of it with his lips, while watching Harry intently. "You realize that we will have to travel fast and far?" he asked. "And that we will go into the inner lands?"
"So what?" Harry asked, thinking of the snowy world and the manor house that Malfoy had shown him last night. "I've been there before, and you've showed me others."
"Those were the shallowest parts," Malfoy breathed, still watching Harry so intensely that Harry thought he would probably find holes burned in the wall behind his head when he came back to his house. "These are the deepest parts, the ones closer to the Center. You will swim among colors there, and legions, and names. I do not know if you will survive."
"You'll be along to protect me?" Harry raised his eyebrows as he thought of the enemies Malfoy had described living in the inner lands, enemies that even the Sidhe found hard to battle.
"I will be there," Malfoy said, and then went silent, still gazing at him in that uncomfortable way.
Harry half-nodded, and smiled as he thought of the way he had ridden the winged tiger the other night. "I could use a bit of risk," he said. "I'm willing to take this route."
Malfoy stepped back, releasing Harry's hands, and bowed formally, then made a series of passes in front of him with his hands. Harry thought they were probably the magic gestures that opened the inner lands, but nothing seemed different when Malfoy had dropped them; the air didn't even change colors.
"Where is the magic?" Harry asked finally.
"Oh, I was paying homage to you," Malfoy said, his face going still for a moment, as though he couldn't imagine anyone not knowing the meaning of his gestures. "As someone who has chosen to die the most horrible death anyone can imagine."
"Will the Queen see us if we do get there?" Harry asked, feeling his heartbeat speed up and saliva flood his mouth.
"It's her caprice," Malfoy said, the way someone else might say "It is destiny," and then reached out and gripped the air, ripping it up and down like a sheet of paper.
There was a gasp and a sigh, and Harry found himself standing on a shore of such blazing gold sand that he expected it to ring like coins as he moved his feet through it. Around and in front of what looked to be a small island stretched a boundless ocean, shifting mixtures of purple and blue and green and gold and black and rose. Harry reached out a hand towards the water, because something wasn't right--
And the nearest wave rolled up and broke, and left a sensation like silk along his fingers. The sea was a billowing tapestry, made of cloth. Harry laughed in wonder.
"You cannot remain here," Malfoy said, looking around the beach with his eyes narrowed. Harry didn't know why, since the sunshine here was the gentle, perfect light that he generally only saw on a summer's day, but perhaps it was against those dangers that he had talked about. "There are already predators coming."
Harry drew his wand. Malfoy glanced down at it, and then looked back up at Harry's face. Harry flushed. His contempt for Harry's ability to defend himself couldn't be more openly stated if he had spoken.
"All right," he said. "So how do we get to the point where we can go to the next inner land?" He thought there must be some kind of restriction, or Malfoy would have already opened the door into the next one.
Malfoy started to answer, but then suddenly jerked his head up and stared into the distance. His nostrils twitched. He sighed, and reached out to draw Harry into his arms. Harry let himself be pulled in slowly. He didn't know whether this was a sign of real danger or just another attempt from Malfoy to get him into bed.
"They are coming," Malfoy said, and turned his head to track the flight of an invisible bird. Harry kept his wand drawn anyway, because if it was useless, at least he felt it better with it in his hand. "They are here."
The sound of hooves crunching on sand came from behind them, and Harry turned around.
Trotting towards them were a pair of shaggy white ponies. Harry looked automatically for the riders on their backs, and saw nothing. Then he focused on their heads, where a flickering light seemed to strobe and play.
And made out the single sharp silver horn that glistened there.
"We're afraid of a pair of unicorns?" he whispered to Malfoy.
"Watch," Malfoy said, without changing expression. He pulled out or conjured a fresh green leaf and threw it towards the unicorns. A breeze that Harry reckoned was under his control made the leaf spin instead of fall, and then land on the beach in front of the unicorns.
The nearest one stamped his hoof once, and then moved. Harry blinked. He knew the creature was running, but it was strangely difficult to focus on. It was easier to understand the movements after he had seen them, through images that seemed to linger on the air.
The leaf fluttered in front of the unicorn, but something, perhaps Malfoy's will, kept it in the same place, and it didn't whirl away as the unicorn's hooves trampled it.
The leaf withered. It turned as white as paper, as the shaggy coats on the unicorns, and then tore apart and blew away. Harry stared. He had never seen something lose color faster.
"They are purity," Malfoy whispered. "Sterility. And they make everything else as pure as they are, once they touch it."
The unicorns turned to face them and began to trot. Their horns appeared, vanished, appeared, vanished. The edges of their hooves began to do the same thing, and through the light of their bodies, Harry thought he glimpsed an icy plain of the kind that Malfoy had escorted him to the other night. But this one had no drifting icebergs, no falling flakes. It was nothing but flatness and whiteness forever.
"What do we need to do to escape them?" he whispered, and shook himself out of his fascination. The unicorns were already much closer than he had thought they were. He felt his eyes trying to stay open in that dreamy stare again, and he turned back towards Malfoy, looking at his inhuman face to ground him.
Malfoy reached out without answering and put his hand on Harry's, his fingers gripping the holly wand. Harry could have tried to resist, but he felt the strength in Malfoy's arm, and he knew it was useless. So he waited to see what would happen, and tried not to lock his muscles in automatic rejection.
"Come with me," Malfoy whispered. "Say that you will. Mean it as you look into my eyes."
Harry grimaced and met Malfoy's eyes. "I'll come with you if it'll save me from them."
Malfoy's smile shone like a reflection in his eyes, while his face and his mouth never moved. "I thought you wanted to journey to the inner lands and seek the Queen of Faerie," he murmured. "And I'm afraid that an admission that grudging simply won't do. You must come with me of your own free will."
He curved an arm around Harry's waist and bent his head down as if smelling his hair. "Come, now, do," he whispered. "Tell me that you want to be with me of your own free will. Tell me that you'll come."
Harry scowled as he thought of the other meaning that word could have, but, well. The hooves of the unicorns blurred nearer and nearer, and he thought he could already feel one of their horns poking him in the back. And if he let himself lean forwards, he could feel the strength of Malfoy's arm around his waist and the breath blowing through his hair, and part of him felt a slight smugness that he had managed to make a lord of the Sidhe breathe like that.
He thought of the inner lands, and the tigers, and the meal Malfoy had served him, and he managed to lean near to his ear and whisper, "Take me."
Malfoy groaned into his ear, and the sound of the unicorns' hooves was close and real, and Malfoy's arms were so solid around him that he gasped, and the air that touched his throat was cold, and he could hear the crashing of real seas.
When he looked, he thought they were back in the mortal world for a moment. The beach beneath their feet was a shingle one, and the waves that curled up it didn't involve any unusual colors or bear unusual beasts. Harry relaxed, and then heard Malfoy chuckle. Assuming it was because Malfoy had convinced him to come along with him after all, Harry ignored him, and started to take a step forwards. A small, clear stream ran into the sea not far from his feet, and he wanted to drink from it.
"Not so," Malfoy whispered into his ear again, and tightened his arms. "Do you think that drinking from water in the inner lands is safe?"
Harry sighed and looked back at him. "What's going to happen now? Will this make my cock wither and drop off?"
"I'd hate to think so," Malfoy murmured, and ran a hand up and down his spine. "I have a use for it."
The humor was human, and that startled Harry into laughing. Malfoy grinned at him with teeth as bright as any vampire's.
"No," Malfoy continued. "But the stream is part of the inner lands, and therefore you must know it before you can consider it safe, by definition. Watch." He bent down, fumbled in the sand at Harry's feet for a moment--something that made Harry feel unaccountably pleased, because it meant that Malfoy couldn't be inhumanly perfect all the time--and then launched the stone he'd found in a low arc at the stream.
The stone skipped and beat against the sand for a moment, and then dropped into the water. Harry waited to see if anything rose to greet it. When nothing did, he opened his mouth to tease Malfoy for being such a poor shot that he couldn't even launch his stone all the way without it touching the ground.
The stream turned upside-down. Suddenly Harry was staring at an irregular bed of sand and pebbles and dripping mud, while the water flowed quietly along beneath it. It still flowed into the sea and kept to the course it had had before, but now there was an audible trickling and splashing as it did so.
Harry shook his head and stared up at Malfoy. For once, his eyes must have asked the question for him sufficiently, because Malfoy inclined his head and said, "Yes. If you had drunk from the water, it would have turned your body upside-down in the same way."
Harry grimaced and said, "Is there any water in the inner lands that's safe to drink?"
"Oh, there's this," Malfoy said, and conjured a silver goblet out of thin air, holding it out to Harry. Its middle was etched with a band of what looked like blazing blue metal, and its rim edged with diamonds. Harry winced as he thought about drinking from it and having those stones cut into his lips, but he could hear the water singing against the sides of the cup, and took it with his throat burning.
Then he looked up, and found Malfoy smiling.
Harry lowered the goblet and frowned at him. "I know that Faerie food and drink can sometimes keep you in Faerie," he said. "I ate your meal last night and didn't have to stay here, but technically, that happened--even if it was mostly glamour--in the house that's still in my world. What happens if I drink water from your hand in the inner lands?"
Malfoy blinked at him, and then said quickly, "That would only be true if we were in Faerie. But not all the inner lands are Faerie, as I have told you before. That is our home, the place where our kind were lifted to light and life. In the other inner lands, different laws and traditions hold sway."
Harry snorted, and turned the goblet over, pouring the water on the sand. He couldn't help noticing that the shingle smoked where it landed. "Of course," he drawled. "And that would be why you couldn't see me last night when I turned my clothes inside out, even though I don't think we were in Faerie."
Malfoy held his eyes, and was still, except for the hand that reached out to the side and made that gesture of flipping open a door.
They stood in another place then, one that made Harry stare around in wonder despite his dislike of showing that emotion in front of Malfoy. They were on the midst of what looked like a giant silver staircase, curving slowly, lazily up the face of a shallow sapphire-colored hill. On every side of Harry, shining silver arches stretched away, overlaid with what looked like sapphire fabrics and painting on air that deepened to black in the corners. Dark rosettes blossomed here and there on the places where the fabrics and the arches overlapped.
"What is this place?" Harry whispered.
"One of the more inner of the inner lands." Malfoy looked at him, and there was gentleness in the look. Harry wondered if his face was more likely to change emotions as they moved between worlds. It wouldn't have surprised him. "Closer to the Queen. Closer to home. Closer to everything we are, and to the Center, which is--"
"Everything," Harry couldn't help finishing in a dry voice. "Yes, I recall you mentioning something about that once before."
"Do you?" Malfoy asked, and raised his eyebrows, and smiled, and said no more. He began to lead Harry up the staircase, while the treads fell away shining beneath them, and Harry stumbled from the firm grip that Malfoy had on his wrist, and he gaped all around him at the beauty, trying to see what sort of world it was.
But he couldn't. He couldn't see any air beneath them, or land, or sea, or leaping fire for that matter. There was only the drop, and the arches, and the "air" that probably was in fact made of panels of fabric.
Harry walked up the staircase in an awe that deepened when he saw the silver mist that wreathed the steps ahead. It didn't act like normal fog; it drifted in a circular pattern, and when Malfoy lifted his hand, it rose and parted like a door.
"This is the place where you can no longer turn back," Malfoy said, facing Harry with his eyes glittering queerly. "This is the place where you walk and there's no time to tell me that you don't want to be here, there is no road back from Faerie, there is nothing here but what we grant you."
Harry could taste his heartbeat as he lifted his head and met Malfoy's eyes, and he didn't care. He thought about the invasion, and his world, and his friends, and the notions rotted like cloth and fell away. He knew that he was here of his own free will, and yes, there was no turning back. The difference between him and Malfoy was that Malfoy thought the knowledge should scare him, but--
Harry knew the knowledge freed him.
He turned and tugged away from Malfoy, darting into the mist, calling over his shoulder, "Race you there!"
He never knew if Malfoy swore in the human-like fashion that Harry had heard before, or if he cried out or gasped or even applauded. The mist clasped and swung him, and Harry knew he was moving through a motionless grey country, the fog dancing at his side like waves, and he wondered for a moment whether all the inner lands closer to the Faerie Queen had water as an important part of them--
And why not? Even the Sidhe would need water, wouldn't they? Though come to think of it, he hadn't really seen Malfoy eat much.
The grey waves faded, and Harry was suspended in the blue land of black rosettes and silver arches overlaid with blue again, or what looked like the same place, but this time, there was a slender silver bridge at his feet, overlaid with a pearly shimmer of what could have been tiles or scales, the chains on either side of it stretching up into--nothingness. Harry felt something solid beneath him, but didn't look down. He knew without asking that it wouldn't be visible, and also that it would crumble the moment he stepped onto the bridge.
He reached out, put his hands on the chains on either side of the bridge, and accepted its silent challenge, stepping forwards.
The bridge bulged and rippled underneath him. Harry laughed aloud and let himself go with it, being tossed up and then landing, the instability of the material beneath him part of the challenge, part of the game. He had never walked on something like this before, but he thought it was probably similar to a Muggle trampoline.
Malfoy appeared on the bridge in front of him, although he walked with his hands clenched on the chains as if they and not his own will held him upright. Harry grinned at him and bounced again. Malfoy promptly seized one of his arms and dragged him close, shaking his head in such fury that Harry thought he could see individual strands of his hair glittering.
"What are you doing?" he whispered.
"I'm bouncing," Harry said, and since Malfoy was holding him firmly enough now that he couldn't bounce, he tapped his foot instead. That set up a lot of ripples still, although not satisfactorily enough compared to what he'd been creating at first.
Malfoy closed his eyes, opened them, and then said, "And it never occurred to you that you could anger the Queen enough that she might decide to crush your world beneath the inner lands now?"
"I don't know what she would do," Harry said simply. "If I had tried to reckon it, you would probably have told me that Sidhe don't feel human emotions and I was being presumptuous. Wouldn't you have?" he added, because Malfoy had opened his mouth as though to deny it.
Malfoy gave a small, sharp laugh, as sharp as the teeth that he bared a moment later at Harry. "Perhaps I would have," he said. "But--you act as if you aren't afraid. You act as if you weren't approaching one of the most powerful creatures in all the inner lands."
Harry took a step closer to Malfoy. His blood was thrumming, and it seemed to bear words along with it, words that spilled out of his mouth when he wasn't looking, because he knew that he definitely hadn't planned this speech.
"I don't know what that means. I don't have a standard for judging the inner lands the way you do, because I've never lived in them. I don't know how strong the Queen is, and if I did try to judge, I'd probably get it wrong.
"But what is being afraid going to gain me? You'd find it charming, or exasperating, or enough of a reason to destroy the wizarding world immediately. I never know, and I refuse to worry about it. You'll do what you do in response to me, and I can't predict or control that. The only thing I can control is my reaction. So I might as well be fearless."
Malfoy stared at him, and then he reached out and stroked a hand down Harry's cheek, along to the back of his neck, and through his hair. It felt a little different--at least--from the similar gestures he had made before, and Harry raised his eyebrows and waited, his head tilted to the side.
"I didn't realize how much I had missed that," Malfoy whispered, and took a step back, looking along the bridge, which had now begun to move like a fall of water, spilling towards the destination--wherever that was, Harry didn't know. "Come. The Queen awaits."
And this time, he made no objection when Harry bounced behind him and made the whole bridge shake and tremble as they proceeded along it towards the Queen's throne--if she was enough like a human monarch to need one in the first place.
*
Later, of course, Harry tried to remember his visit to the Queen of Faerie, and he couldn't. Or at least, he could imagine, and he could relive some of the details, and he knew what had happened in a broad outline, because the memory of his own words remained unclouded in his mind, and that meant--
It meant he might know what she had said in response to it. No more than that.
It wasn't like a dream, not exactly. There were burning images, shining ones, ones that clustered around his thoughts and danced when he thought about it. But they didn't connect to one another. The bridges were missing, the transitions.
He became aware of a woman sitting impaled on spikes and bones as he settled before her, a woman with knives sticking out of her ribs and antlers out of her skull and blades thrusting through her eyes--
And he saw a woman who shone like dawn, with sun-golden skin and black hair and green eyes that broke the heart--
And he saw a warrior woman in blood-stained mail, and a chariot with spokes of iron on the wheels (he knew, seeing them, that they were there to show off the Queen's great strength, that she could be near iron and make it serve as a weapon of war), and a horse snorting and tossing in the traces that was all slick and gleaming flesh and muscle without skin--
And he saw a being of fog and mist, ice and snow, and she blew through him like a cold wind and away, and left him shivering and stunned, shocked, blowing on his hands to warm them--
And all of these she was, and none of them, and Harry spoke to her, and said, "Please don't invade my world."
The Queen looked at him, and there was a slow amusement radiating out of her. Harry shivered and blew on his hands, and then looked up and said, "Because there might be wizards there to change into you, to be your children, but they won't be there if you succeed in turning my world into one of the inner lands. I don't think we could stand the creatures that you could unleash if you wanted to."
The Queen reached out and touched him with long fingers like frozen twigs. Harry closed his eyes and leaned back against Malfoy's arm and said, "There is no reason that you should grant me what I ask. Only my courage in coming to you, and the fact that I ask, and--and the fact that I might have been one of you, if Malfoy is right, except for this." He pushed back his fringe to show his scar to the Queen, who bent forwards to look at it, her neck creaking.
And she was a queen in portraits, gold-framed portraits of roses and ladies with golden hair, and Harry shook his head and said, "Malfoy? I knew him when he was human. I don't love him. I don't--know him. I knew him as a boy, but I didn't become familiar with him again before he changed and left."
Malfoy shivered against him, and bowed his head, a crown of ice tickling the back of Harry's neck. Harry reached back to adjust it and said, "There's no reason."
Then he said, "A bargain? I don't know what I could offer you that would make you agree. I offered Malfoy the chance to persuade me, and he accepted it. But I can't think that you want anything from me in particular."
There was light singing around him in a waterfall, and there was warmth lapping around his legs, and Harry closed his eyes and bowed his head and said, "If you wish."
Then the sun flashed through him, and the world dissolved into tears and diamond dewdrops. Harry shivered violently and went on shivering, and then Malfoy was with him and there were warm lips against his ear and a voice murmuring, "You were the bravest thing I have ever seen. Many people have done far worse in confrontations with the Queen. Many of our own kind, even. Fantastic. Marvelous."
Harry turned and fastened his lips on Malfoy's with a violence that surprised him. Perhaps he simply wanted the comfort of something he had experienced before after that unsettling encounter with the Queen.
Malfoy made a muffled sound and wound his hands in Harry's hair, holding him still as he licked and lapped. The cold touch of his tongue made Harry jump and gasp, but he kept up with it, until he pulled away from Malfoy and took a single step back along the trembling bridge that had appeared behind them.
"Are you going to give me the chance to persuade you to sleep with me?" Malfoy's voice was low and husky, his eyes fastened on Harry as if he assumed that he might disappear at any moment. Harry felt like that, really, as though the kiss had sucked some of the life and vitality out of his body. He licked his lips and watched Malfoy's eyes follow his tongue.
He smiled.
Malfoy moaned and stretched out one hand in front of him, touching the air as though he would tear the way open to another world. Harry shook his head, and then smiled again, because Malfoy had lowered his other hand and was touching his cock.
"You are the bravest thing I have ever seen," Malfoy whispered. "What was your bargain with the Queen?"
"That's for me to know and you to try desperately to find out," Harry said. "As for whether I'll sleep with you, you ought to think about it. What have you given me so far that's worth me doing that?"
"The question should be," Malfoy said, and his eyes lidded themselves and his face was lovely and warm and the least human Harry had ever seen it, "what kind of wild pleasure will you have with me?"
Harry laughed and leaned back against the chain behind him. Malfoy caught his breath as if he expected Harry to tumble into the abyss from the bridge, but Harry knew the chain would support him. Hadn't he just finished talking to the Queen about that?
(Well, had he? Harry couldn't remember, not now, but he knew the burning memories would probably come clear enough, if he simply waited).
"I don't know that you can give me that kind of pleasure," Harry retorted. "So far, you've taken me to cold worlds and tried to seduce me in the middle of snow. And you've talked more about the dangers of the inner lands than the pleasures that you can find there. What do you think? Should I believe you when you talk about what you can give me, when there hasn't been a sign of it so far?"
Malfoy looked at him for a moment. Then his face changed again, beautiful and spring-like, with the wind of his expressions rippling and altering. "You would prefer a warm world?" he whispered. "You want me to seduce you in the middle of summer?"
Harry snorted. "I won't limit you to that, both because you won't necessarily seduce me and because I don't know if all the inner lands have something you could call summer. But I do expect you to show me what else you can do that you haven't shown me so far."
Malfoy nodded and moved forwards with his hands extended. This time, after due thought, Harry allowed Malfoy to catch hold of his hands. Malfoy held them to his lips, once, and lowered them so that both of them were pointing at the center of the silken, trembling bridge that led towards the Queen's sanctum. Or might lead there, now, Harry thought. He was not enough of a fool to think that directions and roads in the inner lands would always stay the same.
"You want excitement," Malfoy murmured. "I know you were impressed by our flying beasts--"
"Winged tigers?" Harry asked. "Yeah, I was."
Malfoy tilted his head to the side like a bird this time. "Is that how they appear to you? How curious."
Harry could have asked about that, but it would have given Malfoy too much satisfaction. In the end, he preferred to lift his eyebrows and wait.
"Let me show you something like that," Malfoy said. "Let me show you the most beautiful of the inner lands, where no one ever comes, where the Sidhe walk among unfallen leaves and unfading flowers."
"If it's such a beautiful, immortal country, why don't you stay there all the time?" Harry whispered. He felt more than slightly breathless as Malfoy moved a step closer, stared into his face, and then moved a step closer again.
"Because we want other things in our lives," Malfoy said, watching him. "Wars and challenges. Fights and battles. Struggles against those who would see us dead if they could." His eyelids flickered once, and he smiled, as if he was picturing Harry fighting in their battles. "New creatures to meet and befriend. New lovers. New pleasures."
"And I'm the new pleasure," Harry murmured, feeling his heartbeat slow a little as he contemplated that. "What happens when I'm the old one?"
Malfoy touched him tentatively, fingers smoothing into his hair, and up, and back. Harry resisted the temptation to close his eyes and purr. You are not a cat, he reminded himself.
"I can never imagine you being old," Malfoy whispered into his ear. "And now, let me show you our land."
The air burned around them, and turned red and gold. Harry was about to tease Malfoy for using Gryffindor colors to transport them, but then he stepped back and turned around, and realized that this was something else altogether.
This was a world of trees in red and gold leaf, not withering and dying, but bearing those colors all the year round. This was a world beneath a drowsy colored sky, a permanent aurora, wavering lights, of soft rose and deepest aqua and indelible green. Flowing away down the hill in front of them was a stream of what could have been grass and what could have been water; when Harry reached down to touch the surface, it bobbed beneath his fingers, and then small questing flowers lifted their heads from it and opened their petals.
"Are they trying to bite me?" Harry whispered, feeling Malfoy lean against his shoulder and kiss the skin beneath his ear.
He felt it, too, when Malfoy shook his head and his hair rustled gently along Harry's spine. "No. They're curious, that's all. These are the flowers that never die, that simply stay rooted and do not decay. Over time, they develop a feeling for the world about them, and an interest in other creatures."
Harry looked around at the trees, and what he had assumed was solid earth or grass at their feet. Now he could see the soft bobbing motions that infected it, up and down like the stream, and see the roots of flowers that had turned upside-down to thrust their heads beneath the earth and investigate what they found there.
"A world where everything is alive," he whispered. "I can't even imagine how busy it is here. How rich."
Malfoy drew him back up and turned him around. Harry let himself be kissed, and then took control of the kiss, so that Malfoy sighed into his mouth and let his tongue lap out. Harry lapped it in return, and thought about being wanted by someone who had become a Sidhe more than five years ago, who had all the wealth and wonders of the inner lands at his disposal, and a legitimate reason to distrust wizards.
About being the greatest desire of someone like that.
But it still wasn't enough, so he stepped away from Malfoy, looked around at the trees, and said, "I'd like to see more of this place."
Malfoy took his arm and led him without a word over the half-stream and into what had looked like a forest from a distance. Now Harry saw that there was something else beneath the trees, a great coiling shape that he saw the jeweled eyes and horns and shining neck of a moment later. The dragon stirred, stared at them with jaws slowly opening to show the fire at the very back of the throat, and then turned away and laid its head back down, rooting into the earth like the flowers did.
Harry looked at the trees. "Are those separate things, then, or are they just spines on the dragon's back?" he asked.
Malfoy said nothing. Harry glanced at him for the answer and found him smiling.
"Yes," he said.
Harry snorted and pushed at him, and they walked over the dragon's back and out of the "forest," to the shore of a waterfall. The water shone gold from the reflection of a gold part of the aurora immediately overhead, and tiny elves sported and danced above it, growing wings and losing them as they dived, creating boats of leaves and then blending with them so that the leaves had legs and arms along the sides and flat faces on the bottom, rising as a mingling of serpent and fish and yawning at the sun before they dived again and became swirls in the current.
"I've never seen anything like them," Harry whispered.
"You can shout as loud as you like," Malfoy murmured in his normal voice, or at least the one it seemed had become normal for him to use around Harry. "They won't care. And no, they're a species of Faerie creature that never made it to our world, unlike the house-elves or the fairies that we sometimes capture for the Christmas lights."
Harry felt a sharp thrill snap through him, up and down his spine. It took him a moment to realize why. Malfoy had said our world, as though he still considered himself a wizard instead of a Sidhe.
"How much do I matter to you?" he asked, as Malfoy lifted him over a stone that lay, flat and saucer-like and brooding with jeweled flies, in the middle of the stream.
Malfoy looked at him as they waded through the blue-tinged grass of an apparently endless pampas, and Harry thought he had his answer. He paused with his hand against Malfoy's chest on a hill in the middle of the pampas, watching as golden gazelles and obsidian panthers flashed in and out among the grasses, appearing and vanishing like images in a dream.
"What is it?" Malfoy whispered, and pushed Harry's fringe back and out of his eyes.
Harry shivered. He wanted to say that he hadn't seen anything dangerous enough yet, and perhaps that was true. He also wanted to say that this was the most beautiful place he had ever seen, but Malfoy knew that already.
His tongue was thick and heavy in his mouth. His body felt so limp and odd that he wondered for a moment if there was some kind of drug in the air that he was breathing in, but it seemed that he was simply--relaxed.
That was it. This world was so far away from the mundane thoughts that plagued him. Sidhe didn't have to deal with the Wizengamot, or worry about whether the political power of their names was going to be great enough to save the world this time, or nightmares of Voldemort. Malfoy had been marked by Voldemort, but even he had shed that, gone on, gone on past, and up, and in.
"Come away," Harry murmured.
Malfoy stirred beneath his hand like the grass stirring in the passages of the animals. "Anywhere you like," he whispered back.
Harry laughed and looked up at him. "No," he said. "That's a line from a poem about the Sidhe that I was thinking of. A Muggle wrote it--at least, I think it was a Muggle. But I can see now why you've tempted so many people over the centuries. This is--beyond. Beyond everything, beyond all the mundane problems that we have."
Watching Malfoy smile then was like watching a statue smile, as though pure joy had been enough to move carven stone. "Thank you," Malfoy said simply. "And now?" He let his hand rest on Harry's waist and arched his eyebrows.
Harry burst out laughing. "Is sex all your ever think about? I thought an immortal creature who lived in a world like this would have more on his mind."
"I can have whatever I want to on my mind," Malfoy said, and lowered his head, his nose poking against Harry's neck like an eagle's beak, and waited.
Harry caught his breath and turned his head towards Malfoy in turn, nose brushing Malfoy's cheek. Pale, and strong under his touch, like marble, but the bones felt brittle, ready to cut through the skin. The Sidhe were creatures of knives and wind, weren't they? Among the many books Hermione had had him read before she judged him ready to lead the delegation to the Sidhe, Harry thought he remembered reading an explanation of the Sidhe as being wind, or part of the wind, or something like that.
Or maybe only that it was a wind of change that blew when they went by, swept into the lives of all around them and scattered their ordinary duties and thoughts like pins.
Harry raised a hand and laid it along Malfoy's neck, feeling the cords there, but not the muscles he expected. Then they manifested, and Harry snorted, a little breath that never got to the point of making noise. Well, if the Sidhe could shift about from inner land to inner land and change their minds and their whims and their voices and their nature when they were born as human, then he reckoned he couldn't be surprised about an ability to change their own bodies, too.
Malfoy didn't press him. He stood there, quiet, and let Harry have a moment of his own to be quiet in, too. Harry felt down Malfoy's back, the shoulder blades that curved like wings, and the center of the back that shifted under his touch and quivered and trembled and then went still, and thought.
He had fought to be free of the wizarding world and its expectations for so long. Not being an Auror, not being the Ministry's lackey, refusing interviews, setting up his business so that he could teach dueling instead of Defense Against the Dark Arts, turning away those who wanted to know what he was going to do next with a smile and a shake of his head, or a smirk and an insult, until they stopped asking.
But. . .
But lately, he had found himself drawn back into politics anyway. And the Wizengamot didn't listen to him, and his friends were his friends and he loved them, but it was a small circle to have as the only people who cared about him.
He could step beyond. He would have to step beyond, given what he had promised the Queen. He could find something more exciting, and no one would blame him, except the people he held in contempt and who would never know, anyway, unless he told them.
Harry took a deep breath, and Malfoy quivered in response, in time, to that breath.
I want to do this. I want to try this. And if it doesn't work out, there's no reason to think that he and I are bound forever. I'm mortal, he's not. I could die, and he'd go on.
That was the most comforting thing of all. Here was someone for whom Harry was not responsible, either to save or to damn. A wild creature, like him, a being, like him, and in one of the inner lands they were met, for what they chose to do.
And he let go.
Malfoy sensed it without Harry saying anything, and gave a single, low cry that built into a piercing whistle like an Augurey's. His mouth descended on Harry's, his hands gripping his shoulders, his legs pressing into his. Urgent, demanding, with the coldness of his lips and tongue and the sudden spreading heat in the middle of his back, as if he were going to grow phoenix wings, unlike a human lover's. Harry tilted his head back, opened his mouth, and bared his throat.
Malfoy bit him. Not like a vampire--his teeth didn't sink in--but in a way that Harry knew would leave a mark, and which sent satisfaction through him until he wanted to shout. He clawed and kicked at Malfoy, battered him with his shins, slammed chin into lips, and Malfoy pushed him backwards.
For a moment, falling, Harry thought he would fall into the abyss that lay on either side of the trampoline bridge leading to the Queen's land. And then he landed on sinking softness, softness that billowed up on either side of him, like wings.
They were, Harry realized, when he sat up and looked around. He was in the middle of white feathers, on a sailing swan's back, its gigantic wings cupped up and around him like the sides of a boat. For a second, the great head turned to regard him, black bird's eyes with an incurious stare and a dark beak that could have broken his bones, and then the swan faced forwards again and went on swimming. They were in one of the flower-streams in the Sidhe's world, but longer, broader, and full of bobbing blue-green blossoms that tangled around the swan's feet and swayed dreamily next to its wings.
"Do you like it?"
Malfoy, kneeling next to him with head bowed and hair swaying around his face in time, Harry realized, to the rhythm of the flowers. One might have said "rhythm of the water" and understood it the same way, in another world. Harry nodded and reached up with hands and mouth that had not lost their urgency.
Malfoy covered him, all burning heat now, because the swansdown beneath Harry's back was cool softness. Malfoy breathed a word, and then another one, and Harry was naked and so hard that he snorted again. He let Malfoy hear him this time.
"So lacking confidence in your power to arouse me," he murmured, because the Sidhe had pride worse than any human, and Malfoy would have to take that as a challenge.
Malfoy bent down, and did.
His fingers danced above Harry's skin, gentle, caressing, making Harry catch his breath and arch his hips in helpless desire. Then Malfoy was naked, and turning so that one of his shoulder blades, the same ones that Harry had touched and thought felt like wings, brushed Harry's side. Harry turned his head to the side and tried to kiss it, but it was already gone.
"Keep your eyes closed," Malfoy murmured, when Harry would have opened them. "I prefer to touch you this way."
Harry would have disputed with him yesterday--or whatever time had been like before he ventured into the inner lands, whatever relation it had to time as it was lived here--but now, why? The only good of a challenge was to make Malfoy touch him, and he was doing that already. So he let his head tip back and his arms fall open and his legs sprawl, and Malfoy caught his breath and cursed him in a shaky voice.
"Still so human," Harry said, and smiled, not having to open his eyes to see the expression on Malfoy's face because he could picture what it would be all too easily.
Malfoy's retort was a swift sweep of a hand down his side, and Harry gasped and then cried out as his skin pebbled beneath the touch. He turned, mouth open, blindly seeking, and Malfoy slid a finger between his lips.
Harry sucked on it, and felt the finger lengthen, and thicken, and then become slender again, altering, changing, flowing in the space of a breath. He knew without thinking about it that it was Malfoy's own challenge, asking if Harry could handle being with someone who could change himself like this and ready to reject him in an instant if the answer was no.
Or would he reject him? The Sidhe were so capricious that Harry reckoned he might never know for sure unless he manages to make both answers at once.
In any case, he would only make one. He let his tongue swirl around Malfoy's finger in response, and heard the cry, high and shrill as an eagle's, and smelled the scent of flowers sharper and stranger than the ones that bobbed in the stream around the swan.
The swan itself ruffled up its feathers, and they prickled against the underside of Harry's (naked) back and made his waist, as Malfoy arched above him, feel embraced from below. Harry thought for a moment of the swan watching them, but he chose not to open his eyes, and he chose to believe that it was keeping its head turned forwards.
Malfoy licked him, a long, straight, thoughtful stripe from his collarbone to the base of his cock, and Harry arched and murmured as he had before. This time, Malfoy went on licking as though he would not be put off. Harry didn't mind that, and just let his legs sprawl open even wider than before.
"The insults that my schoolboy self would have given you, if he'd ever caught you looking like that," Malfoy said from above him. Harry was smugly pleased to note that he was breathless.
"The low chances that my schoolboy self would ever have slept with him," Harry said, and arched his hips again, as a clue to get on with it.
Malfoy slid wet fingers into him, without a pause, without a hint, punishingly. Harry bit his lip and wriggled down on them, and they eased and softened and bent. Sidhe body control tricks again, Harry was sure, and wished he could open his eyes and look.
But he had promised, and anyway, in some ways it was more thrilling not to know what Malfoy was doing, to trust everything to blindness and chance. He waited a moment until he thought Malfoy was being delicate, and then jerked himself down and tried to take in the fingers at least until the second knuckle, if Malfoy had them anymore.
Malfoy was the one who cried out again, and then he bent down near Harry's ear and whispered, "You're beautiful, and you'll never experience anyone else fucking you like this again."
"Ah," Harry said, not letting his muscles tense because he wouldn't. "So this is the ultimate sign that this is a one-time only event for you, that you really don't want to sleep with me more than once. That would be boring."
"The next time," Malfoy said, and his voice drifted and rang like chimes around Harry as he sat back and positioned himself, "will be different. So that you don't get bored."
Harry wondered for a moment whether Malfoy had used more lube than it felt like, and then wanted to grin, and did. They were fucking on the back of a giant swan sailing down a river of flowers in Faerie. Malfoy wanted to please him, not hurt him. Why bother with such petty questions?
Malfoy thrust forwards--
And Harry felt magic around him, pressing in and on and through him, and shouted as the feeling slammed back and forth through him, swinging like a pendulum, and redoubling with each swing, until his eyes ached and his ears rang and tears poured down his face. It wasn't a climax, but it was the most similar to it he'd ever felt without one.
"That is the kind of thing I can do to you," Malfoy whispered, smug and breathless, "and which no human lover can. You can open your eyes now."
Harry did, blinking away a thin film of tears, and found Malfoy gazing down at him with eyes that shone almost blue-silver with the fulfillment of desire. Harry met his gaze and arched his hips suggestively, and Malfoy laughed and thrust.
And although Harry could still feel swansdown beneath his back, he could see spirals of blue and silver along the sides of the lifted wings, and reckoned that they were tumbling through an ancient region of space, inhabited by old galaxies. Malfoy would probably do that if he thought he could get away with it, just to impress Harry away from any other potential lovers.
He's doing--a pretty good job--at that--with everything else, Harry thought, his mind moving as sluggishly as his mouth would have been if he'd tried to speak words.
Because Malfoy's thrusts snapped Harry's hips up, and came so fast that it made it almost impossible to thrust his arse back--although Harry tried anyway, of course--and his magic whispered and shone in Harry's arms and skin and bones and flesh, and Harry was writhing beneath him with the pleasure and half-shouting with it, and Malfoy filled him and pushed back in so quickly that it felt as if there were no withdrawing.
"I knew you would like this," Malfoy whispered, his gloating tone a little ruined by his wild-eyed expression. He pushed one more time, and held himself there--
And his magic thrust one more time, pushing itself in and out of Harry's mouth for a moment, swirling down to add still more fullness to his arse, brushing between the webs of his fingers and into the pores of his skin, until he was lying there, aching and open and stunned breathless with the pleasure of it.
To feel good, at that moment, seemed the highest aim in the world, and Harry could see why the Sidhe would have sacrificed so many of their lesser desires, and even whole worlds, for it.
He fell back into his body with such slowness that it echoed the arching tumble of silver spirals and blue sparks across the sky. He turned his head and opened his mouth as slowly, and Malfoy, knowing what he wanted, glided his fingers in. Harry sucked on them, and tasted himself, and sighed.
"I knew I could do it well enough that you would never want another lover again," Malfoy whispered, and then paused. Harry found himself turning his head and opening his eyes to find out why he had done that.
Malfoy stared down at him, eyes as luminous as moons. He whispered, "Will you go back to someone else, when you return to your world?"
Harry blinked, and even those movements were slow, luxurious. He thought of the Wizengamot and felt only a distant wonder that they wouldn't converse with the Sidhe enough to know they could cause pleasure like this, that they considered them inferior magical creatures. Malfoy had taken even that source of aggravation and upset away from him. Hermione would probably say that it was Sidhe magic, but Harry was still grateful for it.
"I don't have a lover right now," Harry said, when he could separate lip from tongue and speak. "You know that."
"But you might have one," Malfoy whispered, his knees driving into the down beneath them. Harry became vaguely aware that the swan had stopped and seemed to be drifting in one place on the stream, like a boat at anchor, but he couldn't look away from Malfoy's face, so he wasn't sure. "And I don't want you to."
Harry arched an eyebrow. "What, now that you've fucked my arse you don't find yourself desiring something else? The way that your kind wanted a new world when they were done with this one?"
Malfoy's hand stroked Harry's head and cheek and hand the way he might caress a jewel. Harry considered that and wasn't displeased. It wasn't the way he would want to matter to another human, but. . .for Malfoy, it might be all right.
"I want to have you again and again and again," Malfoy whispered. "I want to show you more of the inner lands. I want to find a way to reverse the stunting that happened with your scar and make you into what you should have been, a lord of Faerie, glorious and free."
Harry reached up with a grin and rested his palm against Malfoy's face. Now it felt human, or at least there was a normal temperature to the skin and the bones didn't feel as if they would pop out and cut through it. From the way that Malfoy looked at him, shyness and pride and so much else in his eyes, he might feel much the same way, too.
"I'll think about it," Harry said. "It'll give me something nice to think about in the middle of the Wizengamot sessions about what exactly happened when you invaded our world."
This time, when Malfoy kissed him and settled on top of him again, Harry felt the crumbs of bread sift out of his pocket and fall to the swan's back, no longer necessary.
*
"We are grateful to you, Mr. Potter."
It was Allona who said that, and the other Wizengamot members behind him nodded furiously. The ones who had spoken the most against Harry, or resented him the most, were the ones who looked most constipated now. Harry smiled serenely at them and turned around to bow his head so that the Minister could drape the Order of Merlin around his neck.
The crowd of wizards gathered around the stage in the middle of the Ministry Atrium--temporarily displacing the Fountain of Magical Brethren--let out a cheer, and someone began to play music. Harry didn't know whether that was a result of a spell or a band had been hired for the occasion. He frankly didn't care. He was only here to receive his Order of Merlin in person because Ron and Hermione had both ignored his arguments about how they could perfectly well accept it for him.
He had to step off the stage and shake hands with everyone, of course, and then go back onto the stage and shake hands with the Wizengamot, while the cameras flashed. Allona and everyone else put on their most pious faces for the reporters, and everyone had something to say in praise of Harry when asked.
Harry saw the sidelong glares they cast him, and only smiled in response. It was the politically aware thing to do, and he knew it.
And it was real. No one else understood how the invasion had ceased so suddenly, except Harry's friends, whom he had chosen to trust with that information. The Wizengamot only knew that one minute they had been arranging to battle winged tigers over London, and the next, they had been conversing with several noble, gently-spoken Sidhe who had made them see that it would be far more worthwhile to declare wizards of age at twenty-two and convinced the Wizengamot so well that they didn't start thinking about it until after the Sidhe had gone away.
Harry didn't know exactly what had happened in the sense that he didn't know whether the Sidhe had altered people's memories or done something else at the command of their Queen. But it didn't matter. It was done.
And he knew the promise he had made.
As they filed off the stage, Harry bent down and pretended to examine the laces of his boot to see if they had come untied. In actuality, he was casting a small pebble made of packed white seeds, wrapped in the head of an immortal flower, down next to the stage. He glanced away in response to a question from Rita Skeeter, and when he looked back again, the seed was gone. Harry nodded in satisfaction. It would have dug down already, and next year, the Ministry would be surprised by a growth of an unusual kind.
Not a literal growth. Not a flower transplanted from that inner land that the Sidhe considered their own. But a different kind. A return of magic and wonder to a world that had come to seem sterile and overly demanding to Harry since the war.
If some people chose to speak to Sidhe with iron in their pockets, or saw them riding their winged beasts on a moonlit night, or chose to understand the change that could be in them and embrace it after this, then who was to say that that was a bad thing? That was part of the price Harry had agreed to pay the Queen. The Sidhe would have their outposts here, and the wizarding world would become more like the inner lands in beauty, in its capacity to stun its population and cast them into admiration.
Harry thought that a worthy goal.
"Mr. Potter," Skeeter said, her voice rising in more than mere annoyance that she had lost his attention. She had learned to read Harry better than most of the other reporters, having more experience with him, and she always knew when he had really found something more interesting than her and when he was shamming. "I said, don't you think that this will inaugurate a new era of cooperation and understanding between yourself and the Ministry?"
Harry sighed and shook his head. "I've told you before, Madam Skeeter, I don't enjoy it when you talk about me as if I were a foreign government."
Skeeter flushed, but, being herself, persisted. "But would you say that you've grown up and learned political responsibility, now?"
Harry paused as if thinking hard about it, then gave her a perfect smile, a hero's smile with all his white teeth showing. Skeeter leaned eagerly forwards.
"No," Harry said.
Skeeter turned and stomped off. Harry chuckled and made his way down the dais, clearing his way through the crowd with no more than a few sharp glances. Those rumors about his supposedly incredible power and short temper worked well to serve him here, too.
And the truth was. . .
The truth was that he didn't feel as cynical and hopeless about the general state of the wizarding world as he did before. But that was partially because he knew that he had a door open to leave it, now.
*
"You don't want to come over to dinner with us tonight?" Ron stared at Harry out of the fire, his eyes so wide that Harry thought he could see most of the optic nerve inside, and then burst out laughing and winked at Harry. "I've got it! A hot date!"
"Yes," Harry said, and nodded through the rest of Ron's congratulatory speech about how he finally had a life and his friends had wanted him to have one for a long time. Then Harry shut his Floo and went on dressing for said date, humming a little under his breath as he buttoned up the rich green robes. They had appeared in his wardrobe the day after the ceremony with the Order of Merlin, and they were the color of the grass in Faerie.
When he was ready, he stepped out of his house and looked around, one hand resting on the lump of iron in his pocket. The touch of the cold iron dispelled the shimmering glamour that rested next to the house, and Harry walked to meet it, smiling when he saw Malfoy draped in ordinary human clothes. They disguised him, without the glamour, as effectively as sheets on a phoenix would.
"Hullo," Harry said, and let Malfoy feel his cheeks and his eyes and even his teeth, as if he needed to make sure that none of them had fallen out in the intervening week, before he kissed him. Malfoy stood then, holding him by neck and shoulders and watching him with that glimmering, almost human look in his eyes.
"You are ready to go?" Malfoy asked softly.
"Yes," Harry said, and pressed close to Malfoy's side, watching, as he tore a hole in the air.
In front of them opened a rippling red land, ruby mountains in the distance with a purple sunset dying on their flanks, and, rising to meet them, crimson and scarlet and heart-of-fire foothills. Harry made sure that the spells to protect his clothes from heat were intact, and then stepped through the gateway into the inner lands.
Malfoy already had a ripe fruit from one of the shadowy trees that bent and swayed like grass--it was those, and not real grass, that covered the hills--for him to eat. He pushed it to Harry's lips, and Harry bit in, wincing and shivering in anticipation at the same time as the taste roasted his tongue and the juice burned his chin.
This was the other part of the bargain the Queen had required him to make: that he promise to return to the inner lands from time to time, because she wanted them sometimes to receive the presence of a mortal with such courage and such grace under pressure, and whatever other qualities she had seen in him and the Sidhe admired. Harry suspected she was probably hoping to convert him, or unstunt him, the way that Malfoy had talked about.
It didn't matter. He wanted to come here, and while he had the prospect, the life he had been leading was refreshed by the constant presence of waiting beauty.
Malfoy pressed close to him, and followed the fruit with his tongue, chasing the taste back into Harry's mouth, licking his chin for the juice. His hair changed color and length, and his silver eyes shone, and the trees made a noise like harp-music when they walked on their roots.
And this, Harry thought, as he lifted his mouth for another kiss from a lover he found exhilarating and fascinating by turns, but never, never boring, is worth journeying for.
The End.
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