[One-shot]; Alicorn, H/D, R, 1/2
Title: Alicorn
Pairing(s): Harry/Draco
Summary: When Narcissa invokes her life-debt-and offers her help-to ask Harry to take Draco into hiding in the past, strange things happen. Like fractured tripartite universes. And slave bonds. And rescues of Harry from the Dursleys. Even when there’s more than one Harry. And more than one Draco.
Rating: R
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended.
Warning(s): Slavery bond, some dub-con and Stockholm Syndrome, heavy angst, violence, minor character death, time travel, alternate universes, some use of omniscient POV and present tense.
Epilogue compliant? Ha-ha, not even.
Word Count: 13,000
Author's/Artist's Notes: Written for versatillite in the 2016 Serpentinelion Glompfest. I hope you enjoy, and that it’s not too confusing. Thanks to Karen for the beta and to L. for offering, even though she didn’t have time.
Alicorn
There is more than one way of being true.
One way of being true that wizards of Britain knew, and know, about is that drinking a unicorn’s blood offers a cursed life. Better to take it as a gift, if the unicorn will give it. And the same with hairs from their tails, and the shards of their hooves, and the light from their eyes.
But their horns are the most dreaded, as they are the most precious, of all.
One true thing that wizards of Britain do not normally know: alicorn, gleaming heavy and still on the forehead of a dead unicorn or a live one, cleaves open all possibilities as its tip cuts through time. Unicorns seem to pass from shadow to shadow and melt into the distance not just because of inherent grace, but because they flow from moment to moment. Alicorn opens the path, and unicorns choose one, making others collapse and become nothing more than fate-glimmers until the unicorn turns in a different direction.
For a wizard, however, the paths might be endless, the possibilities all borne in motion at once, all true.
But a path must still have a beginning, at least for time-bound creatures like humans.
This is one.
*
Harry didn’t move after Narcissa told him what she wanted him to do. He looked around the huge, bare room in Malfoy Manor. She needed a favor from him, but she still couldn’t bring herself to take him into the rooms where portraits hung and people lived, he thought. This was the dining room that he knew Voldemort had had Nagini eat people in.
The kinds of articles that came out, after the war.
Well, had come out, before the papers turned so sharply against former Death Eaters that throwing them to sharks would have been kinder.
Harry reached out and picked up the collar from Narcissa’s hand. He heard her breathe out, and then she bowed her head. She was kneeling in front of him. It was the only way she had brought him anywhere close to agreeing.
“I’m not agreeing,” he told her.
“Of course not,” she agreed.
Harry glared at her, and then looked more closely at the collar. It was made of some silken-smooth, bone-colored material, but it didn’t feel like bone. Ivory, he decided at last. The chased inlay around it were silver, and there was a clasp that was studded with tiny, deep green stones that had even tinier spots of red.
“Bloodstones,” Narcissa said. Harry looked up and noticed her watching him with clever eyes through that long tangle of almost-white hair. “They channel and funnel the Dark magic without its hurting the possessor.”
“What’s the collar made of?” Harry shifted it and watched it sparkle. It looked huge for a human neck, but Narcissa had assured him it was “the right size,” whatever that meant.
“Unicorn horn.”
Harry actually tried to throw the collar at her, but Narcissa caught it and shook her head. “The silver and the bloodstones neutralize the curse that comes with taking alicorn that wasn’t given freely,” she said. “In fact, that curse is an integral part of its design. It has to be that way, or it couldn’t function as a slavery collar.”
“And you want me to make your son a slave and take him to hide in the past.” It didn’t get less mental no matter how often Harry said it.
“Yes.” Narcissa still didn’t get up from her kneeling position. “It’s the safest place, Mr. Potter. I know they would find him at the home of anyone who still sheltered him. He is the only one who has the Dark Mark on his arm and is still walking free. My husband is dying in Azkaban. So are the others, or they’ve been executed.”
“I know that,” Harry snapped, and scratched the back of his neck. It hurt like fury, as if he wore a collar of his own. “But if we go back in time, and change it that way, how is it going to save him? I mean, what happens to the younger version of him then? Does he just cease to exist?”
“If he wears the collar…yes.” Narcissa stood up. “There will be two versions of you present there. But not him. He will seem to vanish someday, and his parents will never know what became of him.”
“I’m surprised you’re willing to do that,” said Harry, a little shaken.
“I care for the woman I am, not the woman I was.”
And that would do it, Harry thought. He looked at the collar again, dangling limply in Narcissa’s hand now. She started spinning it slowly at the tips of her fingers, as if she imagined the silver and bloodstones glinting in the light would make it more attractive to him, instead of horrifying.
“What kind of slavery is this, exactly?” Harry asked, and knew his tone was abrupt, from the way Narcissa stopped the spin of the collar, but he couldn’t care. “Does it mean that I’m going to be able to command him to do things, or have complete control of his life, or read his thoughts, or what?”
Narcissa smiled as if she knew that was the moment he agreed. It probably was, Harry thought later, when they were in the same dining room and he was watching Narcissa clasp the collar around Malfoy’s neck, with whispered instructions in his ear. It probably was.
*
The alicorn of that collar opens up different paths. All of them have certain things in common.
All of them involve Draco Malfoy wearing a cursed collar, and Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter traveling in time. And all of them involve a certain bond developing between them, necessitated by the nature of the collar itself.
None of those paths are exactly the same. All of them can be affected by decisions, narrowed and made anew by others, and none of them can be seen as morally superior to the others. None are better than others.
Except, perhaps, for the people who must live through them.
*
Draco opened his eyes and turned on his side to look at Harry. There was a stretching and straining and stickiness in his throat when he tried to call him by his last name, and sometimes even when he tried to think of him by it. And although Draco knew the bloody collar was at fault, it was easier to give in than to go on doing something that only hurt himself.
Harry slept with his mouth slightly open in the large bed. They’d been able to buy a much nicer house than Draco had thought they’d be able to, when they came back in time. It seemed that the goblins cared about their surnames and their blood, not who they were or whether they were technically supposed to be nineteen instead of eleven. They had silken sheets, and mahogany and ebony furniture, and enough space that they didn’t get on each other’s nerves during the day.
They also had something else.
Draco reached out and trailed his fingers down Harry’s face with exquisite slowness, from the curve of his ear to the top of his cheekbone, from the top of his cheekbone to the side of his eye, from the side of his eye to the shaggy stubble that Harry never spent enough time trimming. By that point, Harry’s eyes were awake and burning a question.
“I think you’ve slept long enough,” Draco murmured, and eased towards him. Harry’s legs fell open, and so did his lips. Draco bent down and kissed him hard enough to steal his air and any protests he might make.
As Draco’s hand slid under Harry’s clothes, he smiled. The collar had wrought changes. If Harry gave him a deliberate order in public, or even during the day, Draco had to obey it. But at night, and in the bed…
Draco was in charge. And if he had ideas he needed to persuade Harry of, the collar gave him the strength and the courage to do that.
It was probably the closest he would ever come to being a Gryffindor.
And he knew it wasn’t the kind of happy life his mother had envisioned sending him into when she’d given Harry the collar and begged him to hide Draco in the far reaches of time. But it was the one he’d arrived at.
As Harry kissed his neck, the way Draco knew, and eased further down his body, Draco closed his eyes and drank in the moonlight and his own quickening pleasure.
*
“We’ll probably go to hell for doing this.”
“I don’t know why,” Harry said, as they stood at Platform 9 ¾, waiting for the Hogwarts Express to pull up. They both wore glamours, of course, one for Harry to change the shape of his face, the state of his hair, and the scar, and two for Draco, one to hide his distinctive hair color and one to conceal the collar. “We know what your mum said. You’re the only one who disappeared from this time. We can’t do anything about that. We can spare the younger me from six more summers of the Dursleys, though.”
Draco gave him an opaque glance. He’s always doing that, Harry thought. He would explain and argue and discuss, and Draco would either make a cryptic remark or just say nothing.
Harry thought it was probably related to the collar. It hadn’t taken them long to discover the limits of his “control.” He could order Draco to do things, yes, but it worked best if he gave the orders thoughtlessly, like “Come here” and “Take that cup to the sink, would you?” If he yelled at Draco in anger, the collar hummed and spat and fussed like a frightened cat, and Harry woke up in the night to a sensation of wild beasts’ eyes watching him.
He preferred to avoid that.
“You didn’t argue that much,” Harry added now, as he heard the shrill whistle of the Express pulling in. “You seemed to think it was perfectly all right except for one or two questions last night.” They already had an extra bedroom for young Harry, and toys for him, and a conjured bed. Harry didn’t remember the right size of clothes, so he would take him to the shops as soon as he could.
“You’re the one who’s in charge of explaining to him where we came from,” Draco said. “And telling him why we weren’t here before. And explaining about this.”
Harry knew he would be touching the collar, although Harry didn’t look at him to see that. His eyes were on the thin, messy-haired figure with a trunk bouncing behind him and a white owl in a cage. The sight of Hedwig made him ache almost more than seeing the way young Harry joked with Ron and Hermione.
I left them, to come here. The fact that he couldn’t have done otherwise ate at Harry, sometimes. Narcissa had invoked a life-debt, and he couldn’t bring anyone with him, and even if Ron and Hermione had been able to come, it would have meant bringing the rest of the Weasleys and Hermione’s parents-at the very least-along with them. And then there was Fleur’s family, and Angelina, and…
It would have meant too much disruption to the timeline. And Harry couldn’t let Draco simply die, the way Narcissa had been able to prove he would if he stayed in their original time.
Harry would remember his farewells with his friends for the rest of his life, at least. There was that.
He released most of the glamour on his face with a little flicker of his wand just as young Harry looked in their direction. He didn’t dare reveal the scar on his forehead, but he thought Harry would trust him more if he could see the Potter face and Lily’s eyes.
Young Harry looked at him, attracted by the wand movement, and then gaped. Harry made his way slowly forwards, reassured when he heard Draco moving behind him. He was heartened, too, to see the way little Hermione and Ron bunched up around their friend, and glared at him in suspicion.
No matter what, even if he wants to go back to the Dursleys, at least he has people who love him, Harry thought, and kept his voice low and soothing as he said, “Harry Potter? I’m Henry Potter. I’m very happy to meet you.”
*
“I want to leave England.”
Draco didn’t think it that outlandish a request, but apparently it was one Potter wasn’t expecting. He leaned back in his chair and considered Draco with a piece of bacon hanging out of his mouth. Draco twitched with uncontrollable desire to reach across the table and push it back in.
Then he found himself actually doing that. Apparently his magic and the collar interacted in ways that he still hadn’t learned how to control, even when he thought he had.
“Why?” Potter finally asked, when he’d swallowed and leaned away from Draco’s fingers.
He’d spent a lot of time looking at Draco’s hands and face since they arrived here. Draco thought he knew why, but he was still going to make Potter bloody work for it, not just assume he could have Draco since Draco wore the collar and Potter “commanded” him. They’d learned the limits of that command right bloody quick.
Draco sat down again and said, “My family is looking for me. And someone saw us in Diagon Alley the other day. My mother’s already owled me asking me if I’m a Malfoy relative, or if I might know what’s happened to her missing son.”
Draco felt his muscles ache numbly as he stared at the letter on the table. Only knowing that his mother in the future willingly made the sacrifice so Draco would be free had let him resist her pleading so far. Draco, in this time, disappeared, the eleven-year-old boy he was dissolving as the eighteen-year-old one stepped back in time.
Draco didn’t know why he’d vanished when there was apparently still a copy of Potter somewhere out there. But his mother had mentioned it had something to do with the collar, and at least he was prepared.
“Shit.” Potter tugged hard at his hair. “You realize it’s going to be a lot harder to survive outside England without Galleons and properties?”
“You realize that it would be dangerous to use the Potter properties anyway, in case Dumbledore gets suspicious and investigates?” Draco asked dryly. “Or even someone else. I don’t know if Black could find his way in, but it’s not impossible, given how much your father trusted him.”
Potter shut his eyes. “Sirius. Shit. I haven’t thought enough about him, either.”
Draco shrugged, unimpressed, and looked around the tiny flat they’d rented off Diagon Alley. It took them almost all their converted Muggle money, the ceiling leaked, the furniture wobbled, and Draco wanted to get away. “You had some plan to free him and make sure he could look after your younger self, you said. Well, I would go ahead and set that in motion. Then he’s taken care of, and we can leave.”
Potter sat there and chewed his lip. Then he nodded. “I wanted to go to the Ministry, investigate, get them to look into the situation and be there when they freed Sirius…”
“That was always a stupid-”
“Shut up, Malfoy.”
Draco felt his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, and grimaced. There was the inconvenience of the collar again.
“But I’ll have to get Scabbers away from the Weasleys and change him back and send him to the Ministry with an explanation instead, I suppose,” Potter went on, sounding more and more unhappy. “I hope my writing is different enough from Harry’s to make it seem he didn’t write it.”
“As if anyone would suspect a sheltered eleven-year-old of being able to track down an Animagus and capture him,” Draco said impatiently. He could see why Potter was preoccupied with his eleven-year-old self-they’d arrived during the summer after the boy’s first year at Hogwarts-but he didn’t want to raise a child, and he didn’t want to stay in England. “Go ahead and do it.”
Potter nodded and stood up to go to the fireplace they’d illegally hooked to the Floo, but he gave Draco a sharpish look over his shoulder as he did. “I thought you were going to stay quiet longer than that.”
Draco didn’t even bother to make his smile less smug. “Don’t blame me if the collar interprets your orders the wrong way, Potter.”
The mention of the collar and the slave bond was one sure way to make Potter shut up. He was so uncomfortable with his own power. It tired Draco. He wouldn’t rather have a cruel master, but he would rather have one who didn’t give him orders and then pause and stutter, only to give orders later anyway.
If I want to be more comfortable, though, Draco thought, linking his hands together behind his head as he studied Potter’s back, I’ll have to make the atmosphere more comfortable with him, too. Make him more tempted to give requests instead of orders. And get him out of England so he isn’t only thinking about people from the past-future-whatever.
No order Potter gave him could prevent the operation of his mind. Draco was already working on how to make sure that Potter would only give him orders for their mutual benefit and enjoyment.
*
The paths of time spin and spiral around each other. The cursed nature of the alicorn places humans in the position of the unicorn-but humans were not meant to live in that time-free way. They feel that something is not quite right. They see glimpses of other paths out of the corner of their eyes. Or they dream of them. Or they wake one morning, perhaps, in one place, and the next in another.
On the other hand, as the curse settles, as the paths grow older, the humans walking them become more and more like different sets of people in different universes, rather than one set split in two.
Or in thirds, as the case may be.
*
“I don’t really understand what you’re doing to me.”
Draco smiled at Harry and slid a hand through his hair. Harry caught his breath, closing his eyes. He had thought his confession would change something-although now that he thought about it, why would it? They were safe. They were secure.
The goblins had been willing to sell them recipes for potions that would permanently change the way they looked, so Harry didn’t have to worry about being “mistaken” for a Potter or Draco found out for a Malfoy. They had simple lives. Draco worked for an apothecary in Knockturn Alley. Harry had taken up a variety of odd jobs creating pranks for Zonko’s. He felt a little betrayal for using some of Fred and George’s ideas from the future to live now, but he also knew they were extremely clever at coming up with new pranks.
Hell, they might even work harder than before once they realized they supposedly had competition in Zonko’s.
Harry had wanted to do something about his younger self, but Draco had convinced him to leave it alone. They didn’t know what would happen if they changed the past any more than they already had with the younger Draco’s disappearance, Draco argued. And they didn’t want to draw Dumbledore’s attention. And how would they ever convince an eleven-year-old to keep quiet about the truth?
Harry had hesitated, but in the end, Draco had convinced him.
Draco was really good at being convincing.
“Yes, you know exactly what I’m doing,” Draco said into his ear. Harry shuddered and closed his eyes, letting his head sag back against the chair. Draco’s hand slid slowly along his neck, and then down along his nape, scraping with the ring he had bought not long after they moved into this flat. Harry had no idea what Draco wanted with a plain silver ring that had a black stone on it, but obviously it was something.
Now and then, Harry thought it was for this: seducing him out of his mind.
“I’m making you into a good little pet,” Draco whispered into his ear. “Someone who has no thoughts of ordering me around. Because I don’t like that, and you wouldn’t like me when I don’t like something.”
Harry had to admit that that, at least, was true, from some of the things Draco had said, or done. Harry never wanted to encounter those disappointed, turned-away eyes again.
And in truth, Draco was the only one he had to trust and depend on. Going to Dumbledore to explain things would only end up with Harry being used. He was certain of that. Draco made him more certain. Young Harry’s friends were his friends, and Harry had no claim on any of the adults like Molly or Arthur. Going to Sirius once he was free might be an option, but right now, it would mean changing the past, as would approaching Lupin.
It was easier, safer, simpler, to slide into the soft seduction that Draco opened up beneath him.
“Want to go to bed?” Draco asked into his ear, fingers playing with the collar of Harry’s robe as if he was going to take it in a minute and choke him with it.
Harry surrendered. His head dropped, his hand reached up and brushed against the ivory smoothness of the alicorn collar for an instant, and he whispered, “Yes.”
Draco chuckled, and took him there.
*
“I don’t…understand.”
Young Harry’s voice was soft and strained. Draco sighed and shrugged. He was worn out with trying to explain this in a way that a child could understand.
The façade of “Henry Potter” and “Draconis Malfoy” hadn’t lasted long. Young Harry might not know much about his family, but he was absolutely certain there were no surviving bastard siblings of James Potter-less because he really knew, Draco thought, than because he couldn’t comprehend why “Henry” wouldn’t have come for him before.
He’d squinted at Draco and then shook his head and proclaimed, “You look too much like him. Malfoy, I mean. You’re just him grown-up, aren’t you?” For a moment, he looked disturbed. “Wherever he went. Did you get into a Time Potion or something?”
And then, one morning when Harry-the adult one-had been careless and yawning and in the bathroom when his younger self came in, the young one had seen his scar.
“There’s not much to understand,” Draco said. “My mother wanted to save me. You haven’t met my mother yet, but you will, and she can move mountains.” He touched the alicorn collar. It was the one thing young Harry had eyed all the time but not asked questions about. “This sent us back in time. It’s made from unicorn horn. It’s incredibly powerful.”
Young Harry shivered, and Draco paused, remembering for the first time that this was the year the boy had seen the Dark Lord drinking unicorn blood in the Forest. He grimaced, wanting to say something comforting, but then the moment passed and young Harry glared another demand for answers.
“Why did you decide to adopt me, though? If you weren’t supposed to change anything about time?”
Draco grimaced at him again. They were in the large sitting room Harry had insisted on decorating in blue and red and gold, as if he expected his younger self to be some strange Ravenclaw-Gryffindor hybrid. Harry was at Auror training, thank Merlin, where his pretense of “Henry Potter” was accepted without much question.
“Because Harry wanted to save you from growing up the way he did.”
“Maybe you should call him Henry, after all.” The youngster frowned and folded his arms so tightly his shirt creased. “It’s too confusing to have two of us.” He went on while Draco was still trying to decide how to respond to that. “And what do you mean, growing up the way he did? I already grew up with the Dursleys. He can’t do anything to change that.”
Draco gave a short nod. “I think so, too.”
“You don’t want me here,” young Harry said, giving Draco one of those looks he remembered so well, the ones that used to start battles in Potions on a regular basis.
“I didn’t,” Draco said. “Harry was the one who made that decision.”
“Harry who’s me.” The younger Harry pulled his glasses off and spent a moment rubbing the scar on his forehead, which was redder than the one Draco was used to staring at. “God, this is weird.”
“Yes.” Draco leaned back slowly on the couch and shut his eyes. He was tired of explaining. He thought the child understood. The problem was getting him to accept it. “And you realize you can’t tell anyone about this?”
“Oh, I’m used to keeping secrets. Adults have a tendency not to believe me, anyway.”
Draco snapped his eyes open again, and studied the kid. He sat with his face turned slightly away from Draco, staring out the window. There was a tension to his jaw that Draco hadn’t noticed before.
He thinks he’s come from one bad situation into another. He thinks that he can live with magical people now, but we’re going to treat him like the Muggles did.
Draco shook his head. He couldn’t stand for the kid to think that, and he reached out before he thought about it and shook young Harry’s shoulder. The boy jumped and turned to look at him again.
“We’re not going to do that to you,” he said quietly. “I’ll believe whatever you tell me, and so will Harry.”
For a moment, the boy only stared at him. Then he whispered, “Why? I mean, not He-Henry, but you. You never believed me when I said anything at school.”
“I’m not that boy, even if he disappeared so I could come here.” Draco shrugged a little and gave Harry a light smile. “I’ve grown up. I know what it’s like to be in a situation where people are laughing at you, and others are just waiting for you to fail.” He touched the collar around his neck when little Harry glared like he didn’t believe him. “In case you ever forget, I’m wearing this collar because I failed. I became a Death Eater-”
“One of Voldemort’s followers. You said.”
Draco would never get used to how someone so small and with such bright green eyes said “Voldemort” so fearlessly. “And then I was on the losing side of the war,” he said through a choked throat. “I was in so much danger that my mother called on Harry to take me away, and he did.”
“Why did he want to come with you, though? How could he bear to leave Ron and Hermione?”
Draco shook his head again. “That’s something you’ll have to ask him. My mother told me I was going to safety, and I was so terrified that I agreed before I asked about the consequences. She spoke to him in private.”
There was a long moment when Draco thought that he would have to backtrack, or at least explain some of the concepts involved over again. Harry looked at him with those watching, judging eyes, and there was no way to escape them. Draco found himself holding still, wanting to pass the test anyway, even though he knew how small the chances were that he could.
Then Harry nodded and said, “I think you might be okay. What’s for dinner?” and Draco smiled, knowing that he had.
*
“Will you pay attention to what’s in front of us?”
Harry shook his head a little and focused on the painting in front of him. They were touring a wizarding museum in Paris, which Malfoy insisted was much better than the Muggle ones, and properly famous to anyone with a proper upbringing. Harry only knew that so far most of the paintings were either boring landscapes or mixes of bright, abstract colors that made him nauseous.
This one was at least a landscape instead of colors, but it was a bland one. A few trees on the bank of a lake, or maybe an ocean; Harry didn’t know how you told the difference in a painting. There was blue water and curling waves, and that was all he knew.
“It’s pretty,” he said, and Malfoy gave him the expected roll of eyes and the disgusted look.
“Pretty, he says about the most famous painting since Merlin’s death,” he muttered, then flung out a hand dramatically. Harry noticed he still looked at the little plaque on the wall beside the painting, though, so it wasn’t like he knew all this information off the top of his head. “This is the work of Peter Styer.” He paused.
Harry instinctively bristled at the name “Peter,” but only said, “So?”
Malfoy closed his eyes in a slow blink that was the most exasperated gesture Harry had ever seen him make. Then he muttered and shook his head and spoke in a gentle voice that Harry suspected he’d spent time practicing. “He was a Seer who could look back in time and paint what he saw. This was what he saw at the moment of Merlin’s death.” Malfoy again stabbed a finger at the painting. “This is what was happening then.”
Harry stared some more, but no matter how much he looked at the picture, he didn’t see a wizard, or a tombstone, or a deathbed, or even a boat. Wasn’t there a legend how Merlin had been carried somewhere on a boat and he would stay there until he was ready to wake up because England needed him again?
No, wait, that was King Arthur, Harry thought, and shrugged. “So?” he asked again.
Malfoy stalked off. Harry followed him with a faint smile.
The smile faded as he considered what he’d left behind him in England. Sirius was free now, and in charge of Harry. Remus had even come back to live with them, once Sirius’s letter had found him, and he’d seen the newspaper articles about the trial. His younger self was as safe as he could be, growing up with people who cared for him.
But Harry couldn’t help worrying. His younger self would be in Hogwarts now and hearing the basilisk slithering through the walls. Harry had warned him about the diary and the Heir of Slytherin, but Sirius had written to say that they hadn’t been able to stop Lucius Malfoy from slipping it to Ginny, and no one had seen it since, even after Ron helped young Harry search through all of Ginny’s books. So maybe someone else had it now.
He might still go through what Harry had to. He would still have to fight Voldemort. Harry couldn’t. He wasn’t a Horcrux and he didn’t have the blood protection from his mother anymore. If-
“They have a life, and you have a life, too.”
Harry started. He’d thought Malfoy had left the museum altogether, but instead, he’d simply stopped in front of him and stood with folded arms, studying Harry while a muscle ticked in his jaw.
“If they knew everything about what was really going on,” Malfoy went on, barely raising his voice, “instead of thinking you were just a long-lost Potter relative, then they would urge you to go and live your life. Lupin and Black would say they could handle it. And you survived it once before.”
“Things are different now. What if Sirius and Remus are wrong? And what if-”
Malfoy put out a firm hand. Harry started as Malfoy touched his shoulder. They had to sleep beside each other in the bed due to the restrictions imposed by the slave bond and the damn collar, but they rarely touched each other during the day. That Malfoy would do something now…
“It’s partially for my own sake,” Malfoy admitted as he caught Harry’s wondering gaze. “I don’t want to spend the rest of what should be my holiday or my life having no companionship because you’re back in England in your mind.”
“You could make friends,” Harry muttered, but he knew as well as Malfoy how hard that would be. The collar around his neck meant he couldn’t spend too much time apart from Harry. They couldn’t just abandon each other, either, or go through the day carefully not speaking and looking in opposite directions. They’d tried that for about a week. It had been lonelier than summer at the Dursleys’, with Harry not even having the reassurance that his Hogwarts and his friends existed somewhere and he could go back to them.
“I need you to be my friend,” Malfoy muttered, and then grimaced. “Believe me, you aren’t my first choice, either.”
Harry slowly breathed out. He tried, for the first time, to think of the positives of what he had instead of only the negatives. Freedom to travel the world. Someone who did know everything that had happened, instead of him having come back in time alone. No war, no Voldemort. The knowledge that a lot of hardships were behind him.
The knowledge that Sirius and Dumbledore and Remus were all alive here, and forewarned, so things were less likely to go wrong than they had.
I’ve done as much as I can. Malfoy is right. I can’t spend the rest of my life grieving and wondering and dashing back to England to help. If nothing else, it’s only six more years until this Harry is out of Hogwarts. What do I do then? I’ll only be twenty-five.
“Okay,” Harry said. “You’re right.”
Malfoy stumbled, even though he still had a hand on Harry’s shoulder. Harry laughed aloud, and reached out to punch Malfoy in his shoulder.
“I can’t go on thinking about the past,” Harry went on, “Or the future that’s going to happen to someone other than me. I have to decide whether to enjoy this or forget all about it and go back to England and hover over my younger self, which is probably what would happen.” He sighed out a deep breath and added, “I want to change things that haven’t happened yet. I want things to be different. Please call me Harry.”
Malfoy eyed him in dazed wonder. Harry nodded to him and smiled until his face hurt, and finally Malfoy said, as though the word pained him, “Harry.”
“There you are. And you’re Draco.” Harry looked around and realized that, for the first time, they stood in a room that contained statues as well as paintings. Some of the statues were of centaurs and dragons instead of wizards, and he felt a stirring of interest. “Tell me what they’re about?” he added, gesturing to one of the statues.
With many darkling looks over his shoulder at him, as if he assumed Harry would tell him he’d been joking any second, Draco led him over to the statue of the nearest centaur and said, “He was Venin. Walked into a camp of Merlin’s Shields fifteen centuries ago and told them they were about to be overrun by an army of Muggles…”
Harry listened, and learned.
*
Defining moments can be so small, and at least for humans, not all are pre-defined, set in place like the spirals on a unicorn’s horn. Humans have, or at least they tell themselves they have, freedom to make choices, to choose what they want, to live the lives they decide on.
And to a certain extent, that is true. But still, paths are constrained. They cannot become wizards if they aren’t born with magic. They can’t practice professions they never hear about, or that only come into being after they’re dead. They have to choose what’s more important to them, complete freedom or compromising to keep people they care for, and most choose the compromises.
Single moments can alter a unicorn’s path.
Or a human’s.
*
Draco groaned as he slid into Harry. He had enjoyed this pleasure for months now, and still it never staled, never made him feel as if he was going to grow bored.
Their lives had assumed a measured, rational pace here. They had their separate jobs. They earned enough money to live in a bigger flat. They still sometimes went wrapped in glamours when they were with people who might notice the collar, but it was growing easier.
Draco woke up now in the morning and touched a finger to the alicorn collar to reassure himself it was still there, rather than cursing the fact that it was. He felt the soft prod to his thoughts when he tried to resist an order Harry gave him during the day. He obeyed because it amused him to do so.
His thrusts into Harry’s arse were much harder than any proddings from the collar ever could be.
Harry lay beneath him, arms stretched out so that his hands dangled off the edge of the bed, and groaned. His legs were spread the same way, and he shuddered as Draco drove and drove into him. Draco knew that he was probably hurting Harry more than a little.
Did that matter? Of course not. What mattered was that Harry was his, and so far his that he now looked at Draco for orders, that he was now the one to beg for kisses and for Draco to touch his hair, that he shied away from the people who would have tried to become his friends.
In all the world, Draco only had Harry and Harry only had Draco. And their joy was intense, and their pleasure-
Draco rode Harry to the end, in a blaze of strength that made his mind churn. He slumped down beside him and looked at Harry’s hand. Yes, frantically pumping away at himself, as usual.
“Finish,” Draco said, cracking the word in half with a yawn.
It didn’t matter. Harry always finished the instant Draco commanded him to.
Draco smiled and curled up around Harry, closing his eyes. His breathing was slowing now, his hair spilling around the collar and into Harry’s face.
Harry lay in the wet spot. Draco didn’t have to tell him to. He did it just because he wanted to, and he would gloat over his “sacrifice” in the morning and go to shower with a brilliant smile on his face.
My mother knew what she was doing, sending us back in time, Draco thought lazily, and he dropped his head to the pillow and inhaled their mingled scents. And in giving me the collar. I thought she was making me a slave.
But she was granting me the freedom of power.
*
Harry-hell, he almost thought of himself as “Henry” now-stood in the window and watched Draco and Harry playing Quidditch in the back garden.
They lived in Hogsmeade, and so they could have a back garden and brooms and enough room to play Quidditch. Henry watched as his younger self dodged a Bludger and laughed. He hadn’t been hunted by a Bludger this year; Henry had managed to reassure Dobby that he and Draco would protect Harry, and the little elf had just watched from a distance instead of trying to interfere.
And the minute Harry had heard the basilisk hissing in the walls, he’d owled them-well, owled Draco, really. Draco had explained matters to Dumbledore, and together they’d taken the diary from Ginny before she injured herself or someone else with it. Dumbledore went down into the Chamber of Secrets, and how he killed the basilisk and destroyed the Horcrux, Henry didn’t know.
The only thing that really mattered to him was that Harry hadn’t had to do it.
Harry laughed again as he caught the Quaffle Draco was tossing around to distract him from the Snitch, and Henry closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the cool glass.
There was something else they had to think about, something Draco had mentioned the other day, utterly startling Henry when he did.
Little Harry was still a Horcrux. It was the one thing they’d kept from him, and when they did, Henry had discovered a new sympathy for Dumbledore. How did you tell a child that they were destined to at least temporarily die to get a soul-shard out of their head? That the soul-shard was from the man who had murdered their parents?
Henry couldn’t come up with a way to break it gracefully, and Draco didn’t think they should tell Harry at all. So Harry didn’t know.
Draco thinks he’s going to die. Draco thinks we should train him. Draco doesn’t trust Dumbledore to hunt out other methods of destroying the Horcruxes.
Henry watched the innocent gleam in their son’s eyes, and decided that he would have to make the decision soon. He didn’t want to tarnish Harry’s innocence.
But he would rather see those eyes dimmed and dulled with pain than dimmed and dulled forever.
*
“Shit.”
Draco put his head in his hands and tried to calm his breathing. Harry had already sat up beside him, blinking slowly.
He nodded when he caught Draco eye and Summoned a glass, then conjured water. Draco pressed the glass to his forehead before he sipped from it.
Harry remained sitting up, his hands resting on the crisp sheets of the bed in the Muggle hotel they’d chosen to stay in. Draco hadn’t wanted to, not at first, but after a full day of exploring the sights in the Muggle part of Rome, they’d both been too tired to Apparate. And Harry didn’t look tired now.
He was waiting.
Draco bit back an impatient curse and asked, “I suppose it wouldn’t do any good if I said I didn’t want to talk about my nightmares?”
“I would accept that decision,” Harry said. “That’s why I’m not asking you. But I wouldn’t go back to sleep.”
Draco grimaced and rolled over. He would suffer if Harry didn’t go back to sleep. Not from the collar. It never punished him at night, and Harry had learned better than to order him around unless his life was in danger.
But since they had started calling each other by their first names, Draco had learned that he hated lying there while he listened to Harry’s soft, shallow breathing. He was tense if Harry was tense. He slept best when Harry slept.
It was an effective threat without invoking the slave bond or the collar at all. And for that, Draco had to respect Harry as much more cunning than he’d initially thought him.
He turned and said reluctantly, “I dreamt that our escape failed. I found myself in the Manor with a dozen Aurors coming to escort me to Azkaban, and you-you stood back and shook your head when my mother appealed to you. And then they broke my arm, and you laughed.”
Harry listened without saying he would never do anything like that. He just nodded and then reached out and put an arm around Draco.
“I had nightmares about Voldemort constantly when we still shared a link. One night I dreamed that a Muggle caretaker was going into a house to investigate, because he thought he’d heard people there. He found them. This disgusting baby-like creature sitting in a chair, and a sniveling man that the baby called Wormtail…”
Draco listened in silence, tracing his fingers in a slow, dance-like pattern over Harry’s arm. He noticed something he didn’t think Harry had meant him to: the absent shiver Harry gave him when Draco touched him like that.
Draco smiled. Now that he had managed to convince Harry to think about their living future instead of either version of the past or their buried future, he had more courage, despite the nightmares.
Enough courage to explore what this meant tomorrow night, perhaps.
Part Two.
Pairing(s): Harry/Draco
Summary: When Narcissa invokes her life-debt-and offers her help-to ask Harry to take Draco into hiding in the past, strange things happen. Like fractured tripartite universes. And slave bonds. And rescues of Harry from the Dursleys. Even when there’s more than one Harry. And more than one Draco.
Rating: R
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended.
Warning(s): Slavery bond, some dub-con and Stockholm Syndrome, heavy angst, violence, minor character death, time travel, alternate universes, some use of omniscient POV and present tense.
Epilogue compliant? Ha-ha, not even.
Word Count: 13,000
Author's/Artist's Notes: Written for versatillite in the 2016 Serpentinelion Glompfest. I hope you enjoy, and that it’s not too confusing. Thanks to Karen for the beta and to L. for offering, even though she didn’t have time.
Alicorn
There is more than one way of being true.
One way of being true that wizards of Britain knew, and know, about is that drinking a unicorn’s blood offers a cursed life. Better to take it as a gift, if the unicorn will give it. And the same with hairs from their tails, and the shards of their hooves, and the light from their eyes.
But their horns are the most dreaded, as they are the most precious, of all.
One true thing that wizards of Britain do not normally know: alicorn, gleaming heavy and still on the forehead of a dead unicorn or a live one, cleaves open all possibilities as its tip cuts through time. Unicorns seem to pass from shadow to shadow and melt into the distance not just because of inherent grace, but because they flow from moment to moment. Alicorn opens the path, and unicorns choose one, making others collapse and become nothing more than fate-glimmers until the unicorn turns in a different direction.
For a wizard, however, the paths might be endless, the possibilities all borne in motion at once, all true.
But a path must still have a beginning, at least for time-bound creatures like humans.
This is one.
*
Harry didn’t move after Narcissa told him what she wanted him to do. He looked around the huge, bare room in Malfoy Manor. She needed a favor from him, but she still couldn’t bring herself to take him into the rooms where portraits hung and people lived, he thought. This was the dining room that he knew Voldemort had had Nagini eat people in.
The kinds of articles that came out, after the war.
Well, had come out, before the papers turned so sharply against former Death Eaters that throwing them to sharks would have been kinder.
Harry reached out and picked up the collar from Narcissa’s hand. He heard her breathe out, and then she bowed her head. She was kneeling in front of him. It was the only way she had brought him anywhere close to agreeing.
“I’m not agreeing,” he told her.
“Of course not,” she agreed.
Harry glared at her, and then looked more closely at the collar. It was made of some silken-smooth, bone-colored material, but it didn’t feel like bone. Ivory, he decided at last. The chased inlay around it were silver, and there was a clasp that was studded with tiny, deep green stones that had even tinier spots of red.
“Bloodstones,” Narcissa said. Harry looked up and noticed her watching him with clever eyes through that long tangle of almost-white hair. “They channel and funnel the Dark magic without its hurting the possessor.”
“What’s the collar made of?” Harry shifted it and watched it sparkle. It looked huge for a human neck, but Narcissa had assured him it was “the right size,” whatever that meant.
“Unicorn horn.”
Harry actually tried to throw the collar at her, but Narcissa caught it and shook her head. “The silver and the bloodstones neutralize the curse that comes with taking alicorn that wasn’t given freely,” she said. “In fact, that curse is an integral part of its design. It has to be that way, or it couldn’t function as a slavery collar.”
“And you want me to make your son a slave and take him to hide in the past.” It didn’t get less mental no matter how often Harry said it.
“Yes.” Narcissa still didn’t get up from her kneeling position. “It’s the safest place, Mr. Potter. I know they would find him at the home of anyone who still sheltered him. He is the only one who has the Dark Mark on his arm and is still walking free. My husband is dying in Azkaban. So are the others, or they’ve been executed.”
“I know that,” Harry snapped, and scratched the back of his neck. It hurt like fury, as if he wore a collar of his own. “But if we go back in time, and change it that way, how is it going to save him? I mean, what happens to the younger version of him then? Does he just cease to exist?”
“If he wears the collar…yes.” Narcissa stood up. “There will be two versions of you present there. But not him. He will seem to vanish someday, and his parents will never know what became of him.”
“I’m surprised you’re willing to do that,” said Harry, a little shaken.
“I care for the woman I am, not the woman I was.”
And that would do it, Harry thought. He looked at the collar again, dangling limply in Narcissa’s hand now. She started spinning it slowly at the tips of her fingers, as if she imagined the silver and bloodstones glinting in the light would make it more attractive to him, instead of horrifying.
“What kind of slavery is this, exactly?” Harry asked, and knew his tone was abrupt, from the way Narcissa stopped the spin of the collar, but he couldn’t care. “Does it mean that I’m going to be able to command him to do things, or have complete control of his life, or read his thoughts, or what?”
Narcissa smiled as if she knew that was the moment he agreed. It probably was, Harry thought later, when they were in the same dining room and he was watching Narcissa clasp the collar around Malfoy’s neck, with whispered instructions in his ear. It probably was.
*
The alicorn of that collar opens up different paths. All of them have certain things in common.
All of them involve Draco Malfoy wearing a cursed collar, and Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter traveling in time. And all of them involve a certain bond developing between them, necessitated by the nature of the collar itself.
None of those paths are exactly the same. All of them can be affected by decisions, narrowed and made anew by others, and none of them can be seen as morally superior to the others. None are better than others.
Except, perhaps, for the people who must live through them.
*
Draco opened his eyes and turned on his side to look at Harry. There was a stretching and straining and stickiness in his throat when he tried to call him by his last name, and sometimes even when he tried to think of him by it. And although Draco knew the bloody collar was at fault, it was easier to give in than to go on doing something that only hurt himself.
Harry slept with his mouth slightly open in the large bed. They’d been able to buy a much nicer house than Draco had thought they’d be able to, when they came back in time. It seemed that the goblins cared about their surnames and their blood, not who they were or whether they were technically supposed to be nineteen instead of eleven. They had silken sheets, and mahogany and ebony furniture, and enough space that they didn’t get on each other’s nerves during the day.
They also had something else.
Draco reached out and trailed his fingers down Harry’s face with exquisite slowness, from the curve of his ear to the top of his cheekbone, from the top of his cheekbone to the side of his eye, from the side of his eye to the shaggy stubble that Harry never spent enough time trimming. By that point, Harry’s eyes were awake and burning a question.
“I think you’ve slept long enough,” Draco murmured, and eased towards him. Harry’s legs fell open, and so did his lips. Draco bent down and kissed him hard enough to steal his air and any protests he might make.
As Draco’s hand slid under Harry’s clothes, he smiled. The collar had wrought changes. If Harry gave him a deliberate order in public, or even during the day, Draco had to obey it. But at night, and in the bed…
Draco was in charge. And if he had ideas he needed to persuade Harry of, the collar gave him the strength and the courage to do that.
It was probably the closest he would ever come to being a Gryffindor.
And he knew it wasn’t the kind of happy life his mother had envisioned sending him into when she’d given Harry the collar and begged him to hide Draco in the far reaches of time. But it was the one he’d arrived at.
As Harry kissed his neck, the way Draco knew, and eased further down his body, Draco closed his eyes and drank in the moonlight and his own quickening pleasure.
*
“We’ll probably go to hell for doing this.”
“I don’t know why,” Harry said, as they stood at Platform 9 ¾, waiting for the Hogwarts Express to pull up. They both wore glamours, of course, one for Harry to change the shape of his face, the state of his hair, and the scar, and two for Draco, one to hide his distinctive hair color and one to conceal the collar. “We know what your mum said. You’re the only one who disappeared from this time. We can’t do anything about that. We can spare the younger me from six more summers of the Dursleys, though.”
Draco gave him an opaque glance. He’s always doing that, Harry thought. He would explain and argue and discuss, and Draco would either make a cryptic remark or just say nothing.
Harry thought it was probably related to the collar. It hadn’t taken them long to discover the limits of his “control.” He could order Draco to do things, yes, but it worked best if he gave the orders thoughtlessly, like “Come here” and “Take that cup to the sink, would you?” If he yelled at Draco in anger, the collar hummed and spat and fussed like a frightened cat, and Harry woke up in the night to a sensation of wild beasts’ eyes watching him.
He preferred to avoid that.
“You didn’t argue that much,” Harry added now, as he heard the shrill whistle of the Express pulling in. “You seemed to think it was perfectly all right except for one or two questions last night.” They already had an extra bedroom for young Harry, and toys for him, and a conjured bed. Harry didn’t remember the right size of clothes, so he would take him to the shops as soon as he could.
“You’re the one who’s in charge of explaining to him where we came from,” Draco said. “And telling him why we weren’t here before. And explaining about this.”
Harry knew he would be touching the collar, although Harry didn’t look at him to see that. His eyes were on the thin, messy-haired figure with a trunk bouncing behind him and a white owl in a cage. The sight of Hedwig made him ache almost more than seeing the way young Harry joked with Ron and Hermione.
I left them, to come here. The fact that he couldn’t have done otherwise ate at Harry, sometimes. Narcissa had invoked a life-debt, and he couldn’t bring anyone with him, and even if Ron and Hermione had been able to come, it would have meant bringing the rest of the Weasleys and Hermione’s parents-at the very least-along with them. And then there was Fleur’s family, and Angelina, and…
It would have meant too much disruption to the timeline. And Harry couldn’t let Draco simply die, the way Narcissa had been able to prove he would if he stayed in their original time.
Harry would remember his farewells with his friends for the rest of his life, at least. There was that.
He released most of the glamour on his face with a little flicker of his wand just as young Harry looked in their direction. He didn’t dare reveal the scar on his forehead, but he thought Harry would trust him more if he could see the Potter face and Lily’s eyes.
Young Harry looked at him, attracted by the wand movement, and then gaped. Harry made his way slowly forwards, reassured when he heard Draco moving behind him. He was heartened, too, to see the way little Hermione and Ron bunched up around their friend, and glared at him in suspicion.
No matter what, even if he wants to go back to the Dursleys, at least he has people who love him, Harry thought, and kept his voice low and soothing as he said, “Harry Potter? I’m Henry Potter. I’m very happy to meet you.”
*
“I want to leave England.”
Draco didn’t think it that outlandish a request, but apparently it was one Potter wasn’t expecting. He leaned back in his chair and considered Draco with a piece of bacon hanging out of his mouth. Draco twitched with uncontrollable desire to reach across the table and push it back in.
Then he found himself actually doing that. Apparently his magic and the collar interacted in ways that he still hadn’t learned how to control, even when he thought he had.
“Why?” Potter finally asked, when he’d swallowed and leaned away from Draco’s fingers.
He’d spent a lot of time looking at Draco’s hands and face since they arrived here. Draco thought he knew why, but he was still going to make Potter bloody work for it, not just assume he could have Draco since Draco wore the collar and Potter “commanded” him. They’d learned the limits of that command right bloody quick.
Draco sat down again and said, “My family is looking for me. And someone saw us in Diagon Alley the other day. My mother’s already owled me asking me if I’m a Malfoy relative, or if I might know what’s happened to her missing son.”
Draco felt his muscles ache numbly as he stared at the letter on the table. Only knowing that his mother in the future willingly made the sacrifice so Draco would be free had let him resist her pleading so far. Draco, in this time, disappeared, the eleven-year-old boy he was dissolving as the eighteen-year-old one stepped back in time.
Draco didn’t know why he’d vanished when there was apparently still a copy of Potter somewhere out there. But his mother had mentioned it had something to do with the collar, and at least he was prepared.
“Shit.” Potter tugged hard at his hair. “You realize it’s going to be a lot harder to survive outside England without Galleons and properties?”
“You realize that it would be dangerous to use the Potter properties anyway, in case Dumbledore gets suspicious and investigates?” Draco asked dryly. “Or even someone else. I don’t know if Black could find his way in, but it’s not impossible, given how much your father trusted him.”
Potter shut his eyes. “Sirius. Shit. I haven’t thought enough about him, either.”
Draco shrugged, unimpressed, and looked around the tiny flat they’d rented off Diagon Alley. It took them almost all their converted Muggle money, the ceiling leaked, the furniture wobbled, and Draco wanted to get away. “You had some plan to free him and make sure he could look after your younger self, you said. Well, I would go ahead and set that in motion. Then he’s taken care of, and we can leave.”
Potter sat there and chewed his lip. Then he nodded. “I wanted to go to the Ministry, investigate, get them to look into the situation and be there when they freed Sirius…”
“That was always a stupid-”
“Shut up, Malfoy.”
Draco felt his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, and grimaced. There was the inconvenience of the collar again.
“But I’ll have to get Scabbers away from the Weasleys and change him back and send him to the Ministry with an explanation instead, I suppose,” Potter went on, sounding more and more unhappy. “I hope my writing is different enough from Harry’s to make it seem he didn’t write it.”
“As if anyone would suspect a sheltered eleven-year-old of being able to track down an Animagus and capture him,” Draco said impatiently. He could see why Potter was preoccupied with his eleven-year-old self-they’d arrived during the summer after the boy’s first year at Hogwarts-but he didn’t want to raise a child, and he didn’t want to stay in England. “Go ahead and do it.”
Potter nodded and stood up to go to the fireplace they’d illegally hooked to the Floo, but he gave Draco a sharpish look over his shoulder as he did. “I thought you were going to stay quiet longer than that.”
Draco didn’t even bother to make his smile less smug. “Don’t blame me if the collar interprets your orders the wrong way, Potter.”
The mention of the collar and the slave bond was one sure way to make Potter shut up. He was so uncomfortable with his own power. It tired Draco. He wouldn’t rather have a cruel master, but he would rather have one who didn’t give him orders and then pause and stutter, only to give orders later anyway.
If I want to be more comfortable, though, Draco thought, linking his hands together behind his head as he studied Potter’s back, I’ll have to make the atmosphere more comfortable with him, too. Make him more tempted to give requests instead of orders. And get him out of England so he isn’t only thinking about people from the past-future-whatever.
No order Potter gave him could prevent the operation of his mind. Draco was already working on how to make sure that Potter would only give him orders for their mutual benefit and enjoyment.
*
The paths of time spin and spiral around each other. The cursed nature of the alicorn places humans in the position of the unicorn-but humans were not meant to live in that time-free way. They feel that something is not quite right. They see glimpses of other paths out of the corner of their eyes. Or they dream of them. Or they wake one morning, perhaps, in one place, and the next in another.
On the other hand, as the curse settles, as the paths grow older, the humans walking them become more and more like different sets of people in different universes, rather than one set split in two.
Or in thirds, as the case may be.
*
“I don’t really understand what you’re doing to me.”
Draco smiled at Harry and slid a hand through his hair. Harry caught his breath, closing his eyes. He had thought his confession would change something-although now that he thought about it, why would it? They were safe. They were secure.
The goblins had been willing to sell them recipes for potions that would permanently change the way they looked, so Harry didn’t have to worry about being “mistaken” for a Potter or Draco found out for a Malfoy. They had simple lives. Draco worked for an apothecary in Knockturn Alley. Harry had taken up a variety of odd jobs creating pranks for Zonko’s. He felt a little betrayal for using some of Fred and George’s ideas from the future to live now, but he also knew they were extremely clever at coming up with new pranks.
Hell, they might even work harder than before once they realized they supposedly had competition in Zonko’s.
Harry had wanted to do something about his younger self, but Draco had convinced him to leave it alone. They didn’t know what would happen if they changed the past any more than they already had with the younger Draco’s disappearance, Draco argued. And they didn’t want to draw Dumbledore’s attention. And how would they ever convince an eleven-year-old to keep quiet about the truth?
Harry had hesitated, but in the end, Draco had convinced him.
Draco was really good at being convincing.
“Yes, you know exactly what I’m doing,” Draco said into his ear. Harry shuddered and closed his eyes, letting his head sag back against the chair. Draco’s hand slid slowly along his neck, and then down along his nape, scraping with the ring he had bought not long after they moved into this flat. Harry had no idea what Draco wanted with a plain silver ring that had a black stone on it, but obviously it was something.
Now and then, Harry thought it was for this: seducing him out of his mind.
“I’m making you into a good little pet,” Draco whispered into his ear. “Someone who has no thoughts of ordering me around. Because I don’t like that, and you wouldn’t like me when I don’t like something.”
Harry had to admit that that, at least, was true, from some of the things Draco had said, or done. Harry never wanted to encounter those disappointed, turned-away eyes again.
And in truth, Draco was the only one he had to trust and depend on. Going to Dumbledore to explain things would only end up with Harry being used. He was certain of that. Draco made him more certain. Young Harry’s friends were his friends, and Harry had no claim on any of the adults like Molly or Arthur. Going to Sirius once he was free might be an option, but right now, it would mean changing the past, as would approaching Lupin.
It was easier, safer, simpler, to slide into the soft seduction that Draco opened up beneath him.
“Want to go to bed?” Draco asked into his ear, fingers playing with the collar of Harry’s robe as if he was going to take it in a minute and choke him with it.
Harry surrendered. His head dropped, his hand reached up and brushed against the ivory smoothness of the alicorn collar for an instant, and he whispered, “Yes.”
Draco chuckled, and took him there.
*
“I don’t…understand.”
Young Harry’s voice was soft and strained. Draco sighed and shrugged. He was worn out with trying to explain this in a way that a child could understand.
The façade of “Henry Potter” and “Draconis Malfoy” hadn’t lasted long. Young Harry might not know much about his family, but he was absolutely certain there were no surviving bastard siblings of James Potter-less because he really knew, Draco thought, than because he couldn’t comprehend why “Henry” wouldn’t have come for him before.
He’d squinted at Draco and then shook his head and proclaimed, “You look too much like him. Malfoy, I mean. You’re just him grown-up, aren’t you?” For a moment, he looked disturbed. “Wherever he went. Did you get into a Time Potion or something?”
And then, one morning when Harry-the adult one-had been careless and yawning and in the bathroom when his younger self came in, the young one had seen his scar.
“There’s not much to understand,” Draco said. “My mother wanted to save me. You haven’t met my mother yet, but you will, and she can move mountains.” He touched the alicorn collar. It was the one thing young Harry had eyed all the time but not asked questions about. “This sent us back in time. It’s made from unicorn horn. It’s incredibly powerful.”
Young Harry shivered, and Draco paused, remembering for the first time that this was the year the boy had seen the Dark Lord drinking unicorn blood in the Forest. He grimaced, wanting to say something comforting, but then the moment passed and young Harry glared another demand for answers.
“Why did you decide to adopt me, though? If you weren’t supposed to change anything about time?”
Draco grimaced at him again. They were in the large sitting room Harry had insisted on decorating in blue and red and gold, as if he expected his younger self to be some strange Ravenclaw-Gryffindor hybrid. Harry was at Auror training, thank Merlin, where his pretense of “Henry Potter” was accepted without much question.
“Because Harry wanted to save you from growing up the way he did.”
“Maybe you should call him Henry, after all.” The youngster frowned and folded his arms so tightly his shirt creased. “It’s too confusing to have two of us.” He went on while Draco was still trying to decide how to respond to that. “And what do you mean, growing up the way he did? I already grew up with the Dursleys. He can’t do anything to change that.”
Draco gave a short nod. “I think so, too.”
“You don’t want me here,” young Harry said, giving Draco one of those looks he remembered so well, the ones that used to start battles in Potions on a regular basis.
“I didn’t,” Draco said. “Harry was the one who made that decision.”
“Harry who’s me.” The younger Harry pulled his glasses off and spent a moment rubbing the scar on his forehead, which was redder than the one Draco was used to staring at. “God, this is weird.”
“Yes.” Draco leaned back slowly on the couch and shut his eyes. He was tired of explaining. He thought the child understood. The problem was getting him to accept it. “And you realize you can’t tell anyone about this?”
“Oh, I’m used to keeping secrets. Adults have a tendency not to believe me, anyway.”
Draco snapped his eyes open again, and studied the kid. He sat with his face turned slightly away from Draco, staring out the window. There was a tension to his jaw that Draco hadn’t noticed before.
He thinks he’s come from one bad situation into another. He thinks that he can live with magical people now, but we’re going to treat him like the Muggles did.
Draco shook his head. He couldn’t stand for the kid to think that, and he reached out before he thought about it and shook young Harry’s shoulder. The boy jumped and turned to look at him again.
“We’re not going to do that to you,” he said quietly. “I’ll believe whatever you tell me, and so will Harry.”
For a moment, the boy only stared at him. Then he whispered, “Why? I mean, not He-Henry, but you. You never believed me when I said anything at school.”
“I’m not that boy, even if he disappeared so I could come here.” Draco shrugged a little and gave Harry a light smile. “I’ve grown up. I know what it’s like to be in a situation where people are laughing at you, and others are just waiting for you to fail.” He touched the collar around his neck when little Harry glared like he didn’t believe him. “In case you ever forget, I’m wearing this collar because I failed. I became a Death Eater-”
“One of Voldemort’s followers. You said.”
Draco would never get used to how someone so small and with such bright green eyes said “Voldemort” so fearlessly. “And then I was on the losing side of the war,” he said through a choked throat. “I was in so much danger that my mother called on Harry to take me away, and he did.”
“Why did he want to come with you, though? How could he bear to leave Ron and Hermione?”
Draco shook his head again. “That’s something you’ll have to ask him. My mother told me I was going to safety, and I was so terrified that I agreed before I asked about the consequences. She spoke to him in private.”
There was a long moment when Draco thought that he would have to backtrack, or at least explain some of the concepts involved over again. Harry looked at him with those watching, judging eyes, and there was no way to escape them. Draco found himself holding still, wanting to pass the test anyway, even though he knew how small the chances were that he could.
Then Harry nodded and said, “I think you might be okay. What’s for dinner?” and Draco smiled, knowing that he had.
*
“Will you pay attention to what’s in front of us?”
Harry shook his head a little and focused on the painting in front of him. They were touring a wizarding museum in Paris, which Malfoy insisted was much better than the Muggle ones, and properly famous to anyone with a proper upbringing. Harry only knew that so far most of the paintings were either boring landscapes or mixes of bright, abstract colors that made him nauseous.
This one was at least a landscape instead of colors, but it was a bland one. A few trees on the bank of a lake, or maybe an ocean; Harry didn’t know how you told the difference in a painting. There was blue water and curling waves, and that was all he knew.
“It’s pretty,” he said, and Malfoy gave him the expected roll of eyes and the disgusted look.
“Pretty, he says about the most famous painting since Merlin’s death,” he muttered, then flung out a hand dramatically. Harry noticed he still looked at the little plaque on the wall beside the painting, though, so it wasn’t like he knew all this information off the top of his head. “This is the work of Peter Styer.” He paused.
Harry instinctively bristled at the name “Peter,” but only said, “So?”
Malfoy closed his eyes in a slow blink that was the most exasperated gesture Harry had ever seen him make. Then he muttered and shook his head and spoke in a gentle voice that Harry suspected he’d spent time practicing. “He was a Seer who could look back in time and paint what he saw. This was what he saw at the moment of Merlin’s death.” Malfoy again stabbed a finger at the painting. “This is what was happening then.”
Harry stared some more, but no matter how much he looked at the picture, he didn’t see a wizard, or a tombstone, or a deathbed, or even a boat. Wasn’t there a legend how Merlin had been carried somewhere on a boat and he would stay there until he was ready to wake up because England needed him again?
No, wait, that was King Arthur, Harry thought, and shrugged. “So?” he asked again.
Malfoy stalked off. Harry followed him with a faint smile.
The smile faded as he considered what he’d left behind him in England. Sirius was free now, and in charge of Harry. Remus had even come back to live with them, once Sirius’s letter had found him, and he’d seen the newspaper articles about the trial. His younger self was as safe as he could be, growing up with people who cared for him.
But Harry couldn’t help worrying. His younger self would be in Hogwarts now and hearing the basilisk slithering through the walls. Harry had warned him about the diary and the Heir of Slytherin, but Sirius had written to say that they hadn’t been able to stop Lucius Malfoy from slipping it to Ginny, and no one had seen it since, even after Ron helped young Harry search through all of Ginny’s books. So maybe someone else had it now.
He might still go through what Harry had to. He would still have to fight Voldemort. Harry couldn’t. He wasn’t a Horcrux and he didn’t have the blood protection from his mother anymore. If-
“They have a life, and you have a life, too.”
Harry started. He’d thought Malfoy had left the museum altogether, but instead, he’d simply stopped in front of him and stood with folded arms, studying Harry while a muscle ticked in his jaw.
“If they knew everything about what was really going on,” Malfoy went on, barely raising his voice, “instead of thinking you were just a long-lost Potter relative, then they would urge you to go and live your life. Lupin and Black would say they could handle it. And you survived it once before.”
“Things are different now. What if Sirius and Remus are wrong? And what if-”
Malfoy put out a firm hand. Harry started as Malfoy touched his shoulder. They had to sleep beside each other in the bed due to the restrictions imposed by the slave bond and the damn collar, but they rarely touched each other during the day. That Malfoy would do something now…
“It’s partially for my own sake,” Malfoy admitted as he caught Harry’s wondering gaze. “I don’t want to spend the rest of what should be my holiday or my life having no companionship because you’re back in England in your mind.”
“You could make friends,” Harry muttered, but he knew as well as Malfoy how hard that would be. The collar around his neck meant he couldn’t spend too much time apart from Harry. They couldn’t just abandon each other, either, or go through the day carefully not speaking and looking in opposite directions. They’d tried that for about a week. It had been lonelier than summer at the Dursleys’, with Harry not even having the reassurance that his Hogwarts and his friends existed somewhere and he could go back to them.
“I need you to be my friend,” Malfoy muttered, and then grimaced. “Believe me, you aren’t my first choice, either.”
Harry slowly breathed out. He tried, for the first time, to think of the positives of what he had instead of only the negatives. Freedom to travel the world. Someone who did know everything that had happened, instead of him having come back in time alone. No war, no Voldemort. The knowledge that a lot of hardships were behind him.
The knowledge that Sirius and Dumbledore and Remus were all alive here, and forewarned, so things were less likely to go wrong than they had.
I’ve done as much as I can. Malfoy is right. I can’t spend the rest of my life grieving and wondering and dashing back to England to help. If nothing else, it’s only six more years until this Harry is out of Hogwarts. What do I do then? I’ll only be twenty-five.
“Okay,” Harry said. “You’re right.”
Malfoy stumbled, even though he still had a hand on Harry’s shoulder. Harry laughed aloud, and reached out to punch Malfoy in his shoulder.
“I can’t go on thinking about the past,” Harry went on, “Or the future that’s going to happen to someone other than me. I have to decide whether to enjoy this or forget all about it and go back to England and hover over my younger self, which is probably what would happen.” He sighed out a deep breath and added, “I want to change things that haven’t happened yet. I want things to be different. Please call me Harry.”
Malfoy eyed him in dazed wonder. Harry nodded to him and smiled until his face hurt, and finally Malfoy said, as though the word pained him, “Harry.”
“There you are. And you’re Draco.” Harry looked around and realized that, for the first time, they stood in a room that contained statues as well as paintings. Some of the statues were of centaurs and dragons instead of wizards, and he felt a stirring of interest. “Tell me what they’re about?” he added, gesturing to one of the statues.
With many darkling looks over his shoulder at him, as if he assumed Harry would tell him he’d been joking any second, Draco led him over to the statue of the nearest centaur and said, “He was Venin. Walked into a camp of Merlin’s Shields fifteen centuries ago and told them they were about to be overrun by an army of Muggles…”
Harry listened, and learned.
*
Defining moments can be so small, and at least for humans, not all are pre-defined, set in place like the spirals on a unicorn’s horn. Humans have, or at least they tell themselves they have, freedom to make choices, to choose what they want, to live the lives they decide on.
And to a certain extent, that is true. But still, paths are constrained. They cannot become wizards if they aren’t born with magic. They can’t practice professions they never hear about, or that only come into being after they’re dead. They have to choose what’s more important to them, complete freedom or compromising to keep people they care for, and most choose the compromises.
Single moments can alter a unicorn’s path.
Or a human’s.
*
Draco groaned as he slid into Harry. He had enjoyed this pleasure for months now, and still it never staled, never made him feel as if he was going to grow bored.
Their lives had assumed a measured, rational pace here. They had their separate jobs. They earned enough money to live in a bigger flat. They still sometimes went wrapped in glamours when they were with people who might notice the collar, but it was growing easier.
Draco woke up now in the morning and touched a finger to the alicorn collar to reassure himself it was still there, rather than cursing the fact that it was. He felt the soft prod to his thoughts when he tried to resist an order Harry gave him during the day. He obeyed because it amused him to do so.
His thrusts into Harry’s arse were much harder than any proddings from the collar ever could be.
Harry lay beneath him, arms stretched out so that his hands dangled off the edge of the bed, and groaned. His legs were spread the same way, and he shuddered as Draco drove and drove into him. Draco knew that he was probably hurting Harry more than a little.
Did that matter? Of course not. What mattered was that Harry was his, and so far his that he now looked at Draco for orders, that he was now the one to beg for kisses and for Draco to touch his hair, that he shied away from the people who would have tried to become his friends.
In all the world, Draco only had Harry and Harry only had Draco. And their joy was intense, and their pleasure-
Draco rode Harry to the end, in a blaze of strength that made his mind churn. He slumped down beside him and looked at Harry’s hand. Yes, frantically pumping away at himself, as usual.
“Finish,” Draco said, cracking the word in half with a yawn.
It didn’t matter. Harry always finished the instant Draco commanded him to.
Draco smiled and curled up around Harry, closing his eyes. His breathing was slowing now, his hair spilling around the collar and into Harry’s face.
Harry lay in the wet spot. Draco didn’t have to tell him to. He did it just because he wanted to, and he would gloat over his “sacrifice” in the morning and go to shower with a brilliant smile on his face.
My mother knew what she was doing, sending us back in time, Draco thought lazily, and he dropped his head to the pillow and inhaled their mingled scents. And in giving me the collar. I thought she was making me a slave.
But she was granting me the freedom of power.
*
Harry-hell, he almost thought of himself as “Henry” now-stood in the window and watched Draco and Harry playing Quidditch in the back garden.
They lived in Hogsmeade, and so they could have a back garden and brooms and enough room to play Quidditch. Henry watched as his younger self dodged a Bludger and laughed. He hadn’t been hunted by a Bludger this year; Henry had managed to reassure Dobby that he and Draco would protect Harry, and the little elf had just watched from a distance instead of trying to interfere.
And the minute Harry had heard the basilisk hissing in the walls, he’d owled them-well, owled Draco, really. Draco had explained matters to Dumbledore, and together they’d taken the diary from Ginny before she injured herself or someone else with it. Dumbledore went down into the Chamber of Secrets, and how he killed the basilisk and destroyed the Horcrux, Henry didn’t know.
The only thing that really mattered to him was that Harry hadn’t had to do it.
Harry laughed again as he caught the Quaffle Draco was tossing around to distract him from the Snitch, and Henry closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the cool glass.
There was something else they had to think about, something Draco had mentioned the other day, utterly startling Henry when he did.
Little Harry was still a Horcrux. It was the one thing they’d kept from him, and when they did, Henry had discovered a new sympathy for Dumbledore. How did you tell a child that they were destined to at least temporarily die to get a soul-shard out of their head? That the soul-shard was from the man who had murdered their parents?
Henry couldn’t come up with a way to break it gracefully, and Draco didn’t think they should tell Harry at all. So Harry didn’t know.
Draco thinks he’s going to die. Draco thinks we should train him. Draco doesn’t trust Dumbledore to hunt out other methods of destroying the Horcruxes.
Henry watched the innocent gleam in their son’s eyes, and decided that he would have to make the decision soon. He didn’t want to tarnish Harry’s innocence.
But he would rather see those eyes dimmed and dulled with pain than dimmed and dulled forever.
*
“Shit.”
Draco put his head in his hands and tried to calm his breathing. Harry had already sat up beside him, blinking slowly.
He nodded when he caught Draco eye and Summoned a glass, then conjured water. Draco pressed the glass to his forehead before he sipped from it.
Harry remained sitting up, his hands resting on the crisp sheets of the bed in the Muggle hotel they’d chosen to stay in. Draco hadn’t wanted to, not at first, but after a full day of exploring the sights in the Muggle part of Rome, they’d both been too tired to Apparate. And Harry didn’t look tired now.
He was waiting.
Draco bit back an impatient curse and asked, “I suppose it wouldn’t do any good if I said I didn’t want to talk about my nightmares?”
“I would accept that decision,” Harry said. “That’s why I’m not asking you. But I wouldn’t go back to sleep.”
Draco grimaced and rolled over. He would suffer if Harry didn’t go back to sleep. Not from the collar. It never punished him at night, and Harry had learned better than to order him around unless his life was in danger.
But since they had started calling each other by their first names, Draco had learned that he hated lying there while he listened to Harry’s soft, shallow breathing. He was tense if Harry was tense. He slept best when Harry slept.
It was an effective threat without invoking the slave bond or the collar at all. And for that, Draco had to respect Harry as much more cunning than he’d initially thought him.
He turned and said reluctantly, “I dreamt that our escape failed. I found myself in the Manor with a dozen Aurors coming to escort me to Azkaban, and you-you stood back and shook your head when my mother appealed to you. And then they broke my arm, and you laughed.”
Harry listened without saying he would never do anything like that. He just nodded and then reached out and put an arm around Draco.
“I had nightmares about Voldemort constantly when we still shared a link. One night I dreamed that a Muggle caretaker was going into a house to investigate, because he thought he’d heard people there. He found them. This disgusting baby-like creature sitting in a chair, and a sniveling man that the baby called Wormtail…”
Draco listened in silence, tracing his fingers in a slow, dance-like pattern over Harry’s arm. He noticed something he didn’t think Harry had meant him to: the absent shiver Harry gave him when Draco touched him like that.
Draco smiled. Now that he had managed to convince Harry to think about their living future instead of either version of the past or their buried future, he had more courage, despite the nightmares.
Enough courage to explore what this meant tomorrow night, perhaps.
Part Two.