Archive of Our Own

The sky is the mottled black of the centre of a bruise, star-split; Draco can't see the clouds yet but he can sense their movement, the density of their gather below the sickly moon. Full night, and fucking hell, how he wishes he could get some sleep. He's got a cocktail headache, mouth pinked and prickling from the citrus garnish; keeps drinking anyway. This high up the wind is a slap in the face, exactly what Draco needs, probably, or maybe just what he deserves.

He’s numb all the way through by the time he gives in and decides to go where he’s been waiting to go all night. The broom handle is frigid between his thighs; he brings his glass with him, one more for good luck, tips it all back in that bright hanging moment just before he kicks off from the rooftop, stars rushing in to meet him before he takes the nose down, his stomach swooping uneasily into the skittish energy of the dive.

By the time he lands outside the hospital wing, his glass has refilled itself, slopping over his senseless fingers, the drink stinging the worried skin-splits around his fingernails. There’s no one about, not even Pomfrey at her desk — that might be a good or a bad sign, Draco can’t possibly tell.

Teddy is asleep: mercifully, peacefully, probably druggedly asleep. He looks pale as death — paler even than Draco’s reflection when he catches sight of himself in the murky looking glass over the sink. Teddy’s hair is a lifeless brown against the pillow, and he seems unbearably, uncompromisingly childish with his face smoothed out. The lump on his forehead is horrid, even worse than Draco had imagined; it’s dusky with a sick sort of darkness, the rot of the spreading bruise staining his undereye, socket grotesquely stretched out with swelling.

Draco sits by the bedside and swills his drink around his mouth. The hospital wing is draughty, but the Warming Charms are strong, and his fingers and feet hurt with heat as the feeling returns.

It’s minutes, hours, maybe, before Teddy stirs, head shifting feebly on the pillow. He has blood on the collar of his shirt, a splitting crust of it in the folds of his neck, visible only as he stretches. His mouth had been bleeding, after the fall, though Pomfrey must have healed that. Draco swallows queasily, almost touches but pulls back. Teddy mutters something.

Pomfrey shows no sign of surprise at seeing Draco by the bed, but even all these years later, she still has no real time for him, and she doesn’t mind letting him know.

“Looking better, Mr Lupin,” she tells Teddy as she checks her monitoring charms. “Try not to move, you’ll only give yourself more of a headache.”

When she’s gone, Teddy is quiet for so long that Draco thinks he’s gone back to sleep, watches the hectic dart of his closed eyes. His lids are a fretwork of delicate veins next to the horrid bulge of his swollen socket.

“Who won?” The words obviously cost Teddy; he coughs with his eyes closed, tries to wet his lips.

“Beauxbatons,” Draco tells him shortly.

“Of course,” Teddy says, cracked-lip curl of a sneer. “Cheats.”

“Not cheats.” They might have been, of course — goodness knows the whole fucking competition is probably as rigged as it can be. But the Beauxbatons girl had been magnificent out there. Had made it look easy. “Good flying.”

“Oh, come on, Draco.” Teddy looks to be attempting to sit. His hair is wet behind his ears, stringy with sweat, a sheen on his upper lip. Draco puts the flat of his hand on Teddy’s chest to keep him from rising. It’s too easy; he goes down panting. “You saw me out there, I was on fire.”

“You made an absolute balls-up of it,” Draco tells him. He lets Teddy go, abruptly, but the stupid boy stays down, all his struggle gone. “You fucked it so spectacularly that you have absolutely no hope of regaining the points, and your poor grandmother is probably traumatised.”

“What do you care about Gran? You hate her!” Teddy turns the damaged side of his face into the pillow, stifles a whimper. “And you said you wouldn’t drink this weekend.”

“You nearly died, you stupid, stupid boy.” There’s a rattle of ice as Teddy’s movement tips Draco’s glass over, puddling wet seeping fatly onto the bedspread, hot fumes of alcohol rising. Draco snatches the glass up, watches the charm work its magic as the drink refills sedately, bringing with it a rising sweat of condensation.

“Leave me alone,” Teddy shouts, and Pomfrey is going to be back any second, Draco just knows it. He slams the glass down on the bedside cabinet and grabs across cold acres of bed for Teddy’s disinterested fingers, clutching at him, curling hand around hand until Teddy becomes agreeable, softens, tears pouring into his hair, his ears. He’s a complete mess. He grabs back at Draco, yanking him in for a hug. Draco has to be careful of his poor face, but he hugs him back as hard as he thinks wise.

“I thought you were dead.” He has a mouthful of Teddy’s hair. Teddy cries noisily; seventeen years old, and he’s as stupid and needy as a small child. He’s never known anything but kindness. Draco thinks of himself at seventeen, spoiled for love, how he had set out to get blood on his hands, but come away clean somehow. Back then, Draco might have been able to fly himself out of the sort of trouble Teddy had met today — but Teddy, soft Teddy, unspiteful, unresourceful Teddy, could never.

The door to the room opens. Teddy’s jump is delayed somehow, a syrupy startle, heavy drugged limbs and the fever touch of his skin at odds with the almost-adult sour of his sickbed sweat.

“For god’s sake.” Potter’s nose is wrinkled. He stands in the door, watchful nightlights flickering infinitely in the descending darkness of the corridor behind him. “You’ve got a nerve, Malfoy. How did you get in here?”

“Harry!” Teddy struggles free, trying to sit up by himself, nothing but Draco’s hand at his back keeping him steady. His first ever smile had been for Potter, apparently, and he hadn’t stopped since. There was a time when Draco didn’t mind the bright uncalculating clarity of it, how apparent the love has always been. Now it just pisses him off further.

“Hi, Ted.” Potter drops onto the other side of the bed, kisses the top of Teddy’s head briefly, the same idiot smile passing fleetingly over his own face as he looks down at the boy. He’s distracted by Draco, though, the threat of a scowl returning easily to his face as he leans across and picks up Draco’s glass, sips. He never did like gin, and never did learn to hide his hatred. “God, Malfoy, what is wrong with you? In a hospital room?!”

“You were putting it away yourself last night at the banquet,” Draco says — too loud, too defensive. Unnecessary too, to even mention it. Everyone connected to the Tournament had been there, had seen Potter with Firewhisky smoke curling lazily around his smile as he chatted and drank steadily and ate his way through all seven courses without looking over at Draco even once.

“What are you even still doing here, Malfoy? Don’t you have some firefighting to do at the Ministry, or some Prophet palms to grease?”

It’s too late for any of that; the news is already all over the papers, the picture of Teddy falling in silhouette against the gout of dragonfire repeating on a loop on every front cover.

“I feel sick,” Teddy murmurs between them, and Potter’s attention snaps back to him like someone’s turned the lights on. He grabs a bowl from the bedside locker and holds it while Teddy heaves and spits up nothing but liquid in the unsteady relentless blink of Pomfrey’s monitoring alarm.

“It’s the concussion,” Potter says.

Draco gives into his own worst impulses and replies, “Oh, well done, genius,” and Potter gears up for something awful, judging by the look on his face, just in time for Pomfrey to come sailing in.

“You two,” she says, eerily becalmed, and Draco suspects Potter will pay for this later as he stands, shamefaced. “Get out of my hospital wing.”

“I’ll be back in the morning, Ted,” Potter says.

“I’ll be back in the morning,” Draco adds. For a second all is just as it ever was — right, everything is right. Potter’s face is incandescent, alive with resentment, and Pomfrey has to shout at them again to get out. Draco just about sees Ted nod at them miserably as Potter’s shoulder hits Draco’s, hard, on his way to the door.

They’re in the corridor. Draco’s chest is heaving, his breath bringing shape and form to the frigid clarity of the air, and how could he ever have felt cold, before? Potter faces him, fists balled; it’s first year, it’s fourth year, it’s a bathroom floor, it’s a squall of leaping flame and they’re teenagers again for one pure, unaltered second before Draco remembers himself and everything he has to lose and steps back out of reach.

“Why don’t you just piss off?” Potter asks bitterly, and he makes for the stairs.

Draco follows, but slow, drink-weary. The spike-shocks of adrenaline have worn off for the first time since earlier, when he stood in the Ministry box and watched the Tournament he had spent months organising cut short almost before it even began. He can’t shake the memory of Teddy, Hogwarts’ golden boy, already their champion in all the ways that matter, dropping like a stone out of the flame-lit air, the dragon’s curling tongue licking at the space where he had been, the light of the hunt in her eyes.

Outside, on the ground, Draco’s broom lies. Alongside it, another — a school-issue one, tailfeathers patchy, the handle wounded with old gouges. Potter’s leaning against the wall, almost peaceful in his stillness. He doesn’t open his eyes.

“This is all your fault, you know.”

“You would say that.” Draco wouldn’t admit it here, wouldn’t admit it now or ever, and certainly wouldn’t admit it to this man. “Always looking for someone to blame.”

“Well, it’s not Ted’s fault.” Potter’s using his teacher voice; he makes Draco want to kick him in the shins, punch him in the mouth, make him unreasonable.

“Who taught him the move?” Draco says, and god, he wishes he had his drink. Every fresh breath of wind off the water is a shiver; far away, across the Lake, the lights of Hogsmeade wink through shifts of moonshadow.

“Don’t you dare—”

“No one but you,” Draco says recklessly, because he knows it’s true, “could have taught him that.”

Potter stares at him, face a hollow mirror of Draco’s own misery.

“I told him to be careful.” That Potter is even answering is a shock; he hasn’t let Draco start an argument in years, let alone finish one. “I made him promise he wouldn’t do anything reckless.”

Anything like Potter himself would have done, is what he means — but such a promise is a useless thing, because Teddy is nothing if not full of yearning to be just like Potter. Who else would Teddy be blind and foolish enough to imitate? And who but Potter would be so obtuse and so selfish, so lacking in awareness, that he can’t even recognise everything he is to the boy?

“I knew that was your move,” Draco says. Draco had been there, after all, the first time round. He had thought Potter was going to die then too; the dragon rampant; all the muscular density of her hind quarters as she reared skyward; her bared throat working like a clenching fist as she bellowed flame. And then, from out of the soaring heat, came Potter low to the broom, his dive as true and arcing as an unleashed spear. Everyone’s seen it a hundred times over this Tournament alone; they’ve charmed the stadium hangings to replay Pensieve memories of past glories over and over, Potter’s the most prominent and probably, to be fair, the most impressive.

“You’re meant to take care of him,” Draco says, some of the earlier hysteria creeping unexpectedly into his voice as though he’s still on his broom in the thin air, the breath-stealing rush. He waits, tries again. “While he’s here. You’re meant to keep him safe.”

It had been their agreement; Potter would watch over Teddy, and Draco wouldn’t come to Hogwarts, ever. So simple, so clean and so pragmatic. Remove all the viciousness and what’s left? Whatever this is: Teddy’s well-being split between them, as though by making two separate homes for him they could somehow still be everything he needed.

“It’s your fucking Tournament. You and your bloody precious department.” Potter kicks the broom — Draco’s, not his own. His words are an eruption. “I told you it would be a bad idea. I told everyone. But you had to fucking go ahead with it anyway, didn’t you, Malfoy?”

He hadn’t told Draco, actually — he had owled, twice, both times without any specific greeting, addressed generally to the Department of Games and Sports. He’d sent some Howlers too; those had been very specifically meant for Draco.

Publicity whore, he’d called Draco in one of the more memorable ones. Selfish prick, Ministry shill. Your father’s son: clearly that one had been designed to cause the most pain, as though Draco could be hurt by such an obvious truth. He saw it everyday in the mirror, in the gloss of his mahogany desk in the enormous office on Level Seven. He saw it in his vaults. There were worse things to be, probably.

“The Triwizard Tournament is a venerable institution designed not just to promote inter-school and international cooperation, but to showcase magical excellence and uphold a longstanding tradition,” Draco says, automatically. It’s direct from the press release and Potter knows it. He glowers at Draco.

“It’s a cynical money-making opportunity for the Ministry,” Potter says. “It exploits children.”

“They’re seventeen,” Draco answers. “They’re of age.” It’s the thinnest of arguments; Teddy is a baby, still, practically.

“You don’t care about anyone other than yourself,” Potter says, spits, fumes. His hands are out of his pockets, as though he’s going to… well, who knows? They’ve fought here before, of course, too many times, and Draco would almost welcome something to do with his body, the purity of pain, the clean sweep of rage scouring him out. But Potter’s not the boy he was back then, nor even the man he was six years ago when he split his knuckles on Draco’s jaw and Draco broke the skin of Potter’s forearm with a bite and they both walked away bleeding. But that was in London — 560 miles, or a three and a half hour broom ride, or two Apparition jumps away. Here, he’s Professor Potter. And Professor Potter keeps his temper, or so Draco’s heard.

“It was supposed to be a simple showcase,” Draco tells him. “Tame dragons, Potter. Monitoring charms. If Teddy had just stayed high…”

“He was terrified,” Potter says, and he’s moving, half tripping over the discarded broom, a splinter of electricity in the air between them in the split second before he reaches for Draco, fingers digging into the lapels of his robes. Draco’s back is already at the wall; he barely feels it when Potter slams him backwards. “He panicked,” Potter goes on. “You know what he’s like.”

“His name shouldn’t even have been in the Goblet.” Draco draws his knee up but Potter’s ready, twists his body away so Draco’s leg skims off his, though he gets a kick in on Potter’s ankle on the way. “I told him no.”

“Like you say,” Potter says, a groan of effort in his voice as he pins Draco harder to the wall, “he’s seventeen.”

“He hates me,” Draco admits, and it feels like a lie even as he says it, but it surprises the tension out of Potter’s grip, Draco’s robes fluttering through Potter’s fingers as Draco pushes him away. “He never listens to me anymore.”

“He doesn’t hate you,” Potter says, gruffly. It’s a slow, reluctant disagreement, which means he must actually mean it. “He just wants a bit of independence.”

Potter slumps back against the wall, and Draco — without thinking about it, because if he thinks he won’t do it at all — leans beside him.

“You indulge him.”

Potter possibly smiles at that; there’s a shift in the air where Draco is firmly not looking at him.

“He put his name in the Goblet, like every other bloody kid in his year did,” Potter says. “I wasn’t going to step in and stop him. And there wouldn’t even have been a Goblet if it weren’t for your bloody tournament in the first place. It’s archaic, that’s what it is, sending the kids up against dragons without any sort of training.”

“Teddy had training.” Draco doesn’t ask, he knows. It’s against the rules of the tournament to get any outside help, or to train in advance, but anyone could have guessed there would be dragons. It’s practically tradition.

“I couldn’t leave him to deal with it by himself.” Potter kicks at a clump of earth. His upper arm catches Draco’s with the movement, retreats, returns and stays, all of the contained heat of him just an armbrush away. “I just wanted… I just didn’t want…”

How little Potter’s changed, wanting and not wanting all tangled up together, a skein of ungovernable feeling and instinct. Draco feels the old impatience rising, inadvisable as ever.

“I have to get some sleep.” He’s never felt less tired. But it’s the longest conversation he’s had with Potter in about four years, and he’s learned the hard way that there’s a reason to keep these things contained.

“I thought you’d be running back to London,” Potter says. His tone has the flat unadorned quality of long-rooted bitterness. This close, he carries the faintest hint of cigarette smoke and the chemical stink of an inadequate freshening charm. He’d told Teddy he quit years ago. “You’ll be flat out smoothing all this over at work, I’m sure. McLaggen must be raging.”

McLaggen’s moving into private enterprise early in the new year — bought half shares in the Cannons, which Potter will be thrilled about when the news breaks — and anyway, all the publicity has done wonders for their advertising revenue; Spellovision subscriptions are through the roof. It’s all about the optics, and Draco can massage those. He wonders, briefly, as he often does, if his father’s watching, and what his advice would be. No use asking him; they don’t talk about Draco’s work, though Draco doesn’t think it’s personal. It’s just the fact that he has a job at all, really, his more-than-comfortable new money salary contaminating ancient Malfoy gold.

“It’s more about how we handle things than what actually happened,” Draco says. “We’re making it work for us. But yes, I’ll go back to London first thing.” Crisis management, the School Board are calling it. Draco prefers reputation recovery. “I’m staying one more night, so I can see Ted in the morning before I leave.”

“Are you actually worried about him?” Potter asks, so low Draco has to lean closer, a stumbling easy collusive press into Potter’s shoulder. “Or do you just want to be able to tell the press he’s recovered when you make your statement?”

Anger would be easier; it’s the self-pity Draco hates. He shouldn’t care, after all this time, that Potter still doesn’t understand that more than one thing can be true and right at the same time, that “all or nothing” only works out when you’re on the receiving end. But Draco will be damned if he lets Potter get away with taking Teddy from him — Teddy’s a Malfoy after all, which still matters to some people. It matters to Draco. And Teddy deserves the ease the name should bring; the ease Draco lost and the reason he’s spent seventeen years clawing his way back up the Ministry ladder. Sports and Games, of all things: chalk dust coating his palms, broom polish oil beneath his fingernails, the stink of wintergreen in his nostrils. But it’s good enough — better than Potioneering, his father had reluctantly conceded, the horror of even imagining a counter-jumper for a son still fresh in his gaze.

“Fuck off, Potter.” Draco pushes off the wall. “Owl me about the Christmas hols, and try to keep it civil this time.”

“I just don’t understand,” Potter calls after him. “Surely you can’t actually like working for those… those self-promoting braindead arseholes? And it can’t be the money.”

Draco looks back at him, and they stare at each other in a helpless sort of way, waiting. It was never like this before, when every word was a spark to dry paper, an inferno of arguments, their every interaction warmed by the smoulder of remembered insults. It wasn’t the money, though Draco can see why Potter might think so. Draco had cleared their shared vault before he even moved out of Grimmauld, hauled three sacks full of Galleons with his own hands between Vault 687 and his own personal one on Level Four. He hasn’t touched them since; they slump like sagging corpses in the corner, half-hidden by some of Draco’s investment bonds, drifts of parchment. They’ll go to Teddy, when he leaves school. Draco wouldn’t dream of touching a Knut of it. It wasn’t about the money, had never been, but at the time he had quite liked that Potter would think it was.

“You wouldn’t get it,” Draco calls back. He needs to pick up his broom, though his hands are clumsy with cold, needs to get back to his room in Hogsmeade and sleep this whole day and night off. “I mean, look at you. What sort of a life is this?” He gestures around, at the cold high cathedral of night sky above them, at the hospital wing with its yawning arches, the pinprick candlelit windows of the dormitory wing far off in the distance. The Lake, murmuring relentlessly against the shale; and even further again, the huddle of the village beneath the brow of the hill. Potter has lived here since he was eleven years old, on and off; nothing else has stuck for him, and nothing else has changed either.

“I have a life.” Potter’s fury, when it finally comes, is a crackle of energy in the dark. He’s lit up with rage, Draco can see the gleam of wild white in his widening eyes. “I have everything I ever wanted here. And what I do actually means something, unlike you, you sad little Ministry pawn.”

There’s still a minor wonder in getting to press a nerve, even after all these years. It’s like nothing between them has changed: Draco might as well be wearing a green and silver tie and squinting across a cauldron, or holding his stupid overconfident hand out in a train carriage.

“And what a life it is,” Draco says, meaningfully. “You seem so… fulfilled.”

Potter lifts his chin.

“I know you know,” he says. “About me and Anthony. Ted must have told you.”

Teddy would never talk about Potter to Draco; it comes as a surprise that Potter doesn’t get that. Draco does know about Goldstein, though; it was on the front cover of Witch Weekly and had a full page in the Prophet’s Sunday supplement. Draco even knows Goldstein a little, through work; he handles the events side of things, seems competent if unimaginative. He probably suits Potter down to the ground.

Draco hadn’t been able to avoid seeing the pics. Taken in the square outside Grimmauld, Draco could see the herb pots he’d planted in the communal garden, all of them empty now but for the mint, bristling with untended shoots. Potter was wearing the long wool coat that Draco had left in the hall cupboard six years before — his good winter coat, a favourite, slightly too long on Potter and trailing in the wind where he’d left the buttons undone. Goldstein had an arm around Potter, looking up into his face, and on Goldstein's other hand, the ring. Potter was staring down at his feet, avoiding the camera. He looked good, sort of. Not happy, but then he never did in photographs.

“Settling down at last,” Draco says. “Again.”

Potter’s silence is profound.

“You do know, though,” Draco goes on, “that you can’t get married to him while you’re still married to someone else. I’m sure Goldstein must be thrilled about that.”

“I’m not marrying him,” Potter says, which makes the Prophet’s headline a liar, and a mockery of the signet ring on Goldstein’s finger in that photo. Potter’s not wearing a ring now; Draco hasn’t seen him wear one since he took Draco’s off and threw it at him outside Fortescue’s.

“That’s not what the papers say.”

“I’m married to you.”

It’s been six years since they’ve been married in anything but name; almost four since the last time they fucked; at least two since the last kiss, and Draco will be damned if he’ll have Potter still claiming it. Claiming him.

“Oh, I see.” Draco had been wondering if this was coming, but the idea still shocks him into a querulous sort of self-pity. “You want to file the divorce papers.”

“I had them drawn up,” Potter tells him. “It’s just a matter of signing and sending the forms in, they said. Really simple, as long as neither of us contests it.”

“Why would I want to contest it?”

“Who said you wanted to?”

“Excellent,” Draco says, soaring on his own resentment. “Let’s go and sign them now, shall we? I presume you have them here, rather than at home?” Home — what a joke. Everyone knows Potter is never in London anymore. He always comes crawling back to Hogwarts in the same way that he comes crawling back to the Weasleys; he never has known how to let go of the things he loves.

“You know what?” Potter looks as though he’s going to punch the wall. Draco presses his own hands to the old stone, steadying himself. “Fine. Let’s go, Malfoy.”

He sets off, not towards the teachers’ wing but in the other direction, across the courtyard and down the dark sidling length of the covered walkway. He must have moved his quarters since the last time Draco was here with him, but then that had been when Ted started, six conflicted years ago.

Draco follows him through the arching dim, the air somehow colder and still in here, something subterranean to it. He should go back to his room. He should tell Potter to owl his solicitor. He should have drawn up his own papers, years ago. Ill-advised, all of this, like everything they’d ever done together. And yet Draco, like always, can’t keep away. Being with Potter was always complicated; still, Draco would choose it every time over the simple pain of being apart.

“My solicitor says it’s tricky because of the parental responsibility,” Potter’s saying, voice dropping out of the dark. “But I told him we’ve already worked out the custody arrangements.” It was the only thing they’d agreed on, in the end; everything they did should be with the aim of making things better for Ted. There was no more need for arguments when the only thing they still shared was loving someone else. In theory, at least.

“Surely the circumstances would simplify things,” Draco says. It’s what his own solicitor had told him, years ago when he’d first consulted him, scarcely believing that he actually would need to follow through on any of it; back then, he hadn’t understood the meaning of forever. “It wasn’t a love match, after all.” Ahead of him, Potter stumbles in the dark, and stills. “And there are no inheritance implications or splitting of assets.”

Draco’s proud of how sincere he sounds, how rational. Anyone would believe he meant every word.

“That’s because you took everything.” Potter laughs, too loud. “You cleared our bank account and left our house with every single possession you had. It was like you had never been there.”

“It wasn’t our house.”

“Don’t lie,” Potter says. His voice is closer now as Draco keeps walking forward, one step in front of another into the dark. There’s the faint outline of the door to the dungeons, and Potter’s shape in front of it that Draco would know like he knows his own hand.

“It was your house.”

“Stop, Malfoy,” Potter says, and Draco is practically on him now, can feel him without touching. “I mean, don’t lie about why we got married.”

“For Teddy, the adoption—”

“No.” Potter is chilling like this, colder than the air around them, more remote than the whole expanse of sky that Draco can no longer see. And then Potter opens the door to the dungeon and there’s light again, wall sconces leaping and sparking at their approach. “It wasn’t for Teddy, and you know it. Or… not only for Teddy.”

It had been such a beautiful wedding; just the three of them at the Ministry office of registration, through the hall had been thronged with press cameras, Potter fans who screamed when they arrived and had to be held back by ropes and security. It was the first and only time Draco had ever seen Potter wear a proper suit. Teddy was in his Cannons kit because he refused to wear anything else for almost a year. Potter hadn’t been able to stop grinning, and when the clerk had pronounced the spell and the Nuptial Knot had tightened around their joined hands, Potter had kissed Draco until the knot undid itself and that was it, they were married.

Later, after they’d settled Teddy with Andromeda for the night, Draco had taken Potter to a hotel. They never had been able to get enough of each other, and that night they were even more greedy for whatever it was that they had stumbled into, Potter balls-deep in Draco for the second time in an hour, choking on his fingers to lick around the ring he’d put on him for the whole world to see. Their rings had matched, because Potter was nothing if not traditional; even despite everything, despite their whole thing just being co-parenting that had slid into fucking and then, later, into friendship, Draco had believed that he would wear that ring forever.

Draco looks down at his bare hand. Potter looks too, and Draco sees that he’s touching his own naked finger with his thumb, stroking.

“Why are we here?” Draco looks around; he knows this corridor. At the end, a door: beyond it, dorms that had once held all his friends.

“So, there is something you haven’t seen in the papers,” Potter says happily. “Didn’t you know? I’m the new Head of Slytherin.”

It’s almost an insult to be taken by surprise. Draco wishes so very much that he had already known. An insult, too, to think of how perfect this job will be for Potter, who’s the ideal bridge between a bad reputation and a justified cause. The Slytherins, damn them, will adore him, once they learn to trust him. Draco is almost jealous, a stab of wistfulness for his old self.

“You really are a lost cause,” is what Draco actually says, shoving past Potter and grabbing the handle of the door to the suite of rooms where Severus once lived. Draco would know the feel of it even blind — the curve of the handle, the rough imprint of the S carved into the end. The door opens for him, wards be damned; Potter looks half-ashamed of himself, half-sick at the sight of Draco pushing his door open before him.

“Please, do come in,” he tells Draco’s back sarcastically, but Draco is already in, not holding the door behind him so Potter has to jam his shoulder to it as he moves through.

“Wow.” Draco looks around. It’s the same smallish sitting room, but it’s nothing like it was when Severus lived here, thank the gods — the almost savoury nose-itch of drying herbs, the musky body smell of the restricted ingredients he kept in a locked cupboard, damp wool and tea and books. No, this room could be any room in the castle; anonymous, impersonal, with a good-quality but well worn sofa, an armchair sitting in a pool of lamplight, a desk, slightly too big for the space and already too cluttered with paper.

It turns out that Potter’s room is just a room.

“It’s very comfortable.” Is Potter defensive, or is it just the way he talks to Draco? Impossible to tell nowadays; Draco wouldn’t presume to try.

“It’s a shithole.” Draco can’t even see any bookshelves; there are no pictures on the wall, not a moment of caught memory or a glimmer of personality. White walls, freshly painted blanks. “Get me those papers so I can sign them and get out of here.”

The desk is a battleground of sliding parchment stacks. Even so, Potter puts his hand unerringly on the envelope, half-hidden under a mound of essays that Potter’s obviously in the middle of marking. His handwriting looks just as terrible in red, but has a certain jaunty confidence in its instructional function.

“Here,” Potter says, but his fingers linger around the envelope, almost a caress.

“So, that’s it then.” Draco can’t quite bring himself to put his hand out. The envelope looks heavy, the parchment the excellent quality that denotes a well established law firm. He knows exactly how it’ll feel under his fingers, knows just how the ink of the quill will glide across the surface. His name, and Potter’s name, side by side. Draco’s chest is tight; being around Potter does this to him, always has.

“We probably should have done this years ago,” Potter says, and his voice cracks minutely on the final word.

Draco thinks of all that he has borne since the day he told Potter he was leaving and Potter didn’t try to stop him. He hadn’t realised he could bear it, but bear it he had. He’ll bear this too, he supposes.

He puts out his hand for the envelope, and it’s almost steady.

Potter stares at Draco. He’s flushing a distressed red, throat to cheeks. Finally, slowly, he holds out the envelope. When Draco takes it, their fingers brush in a brief touch, but the restraint is already futile; Draco drops the envelope and grabs for Potter’s face, his neck, the curling back of his hair, trying to touch all of him at once, pulling him even closer than he needs to be for kissing. Potter kicks the envelope so the parchment rasps along the floor and hits the door, already kissing Draco back before he even reaches his mouth, so that it’s almost chaste at first, lips to cheek, stubble sliding and catching.

“Fucking divorce papers?” Draco says, and then Potter’s tongue is in his mouth, the kiss moving too fast and too greedy, and Draco pulls a handful of Potter’s hair, sucks on his lower lip until he loses aim and bites at his chin. Potter’s skin tastes chemical where he’s shaved and dabbed on some sort of scented cream; it’s a new development, one that Draco never saw him do nor taught him, and he rubs his own face off Potter’s, too rough for pure desire.

“I’m not divorcing you,” Potter says, and wriggles a hand down the back of Draco’s trousers. “I won’t do it, I won’t.”

“Whatever will Anthony say?” Stupidly, Draco feels a slow-spreading throb of pain at the mention of the name — even though he’s the one doing the mentioning, even though Potter is here with him, closed-eyed and sighing sweetly into his mouth. Draco feels an electric tension, shockwave-sudden, just from being able to hold onto him unfettered. It runs directly to his dick.

“I haven’t told anyone yet,” Potter says, and spins Draco hard so he hits the wall, his head slamming back with the force of being kissed without any reason or circumspection. “But I broke up with him weeks ago. Obviously. God, it was awful.”

“I was waiting for that,” Draco tells him, muffled by his own shirt. He can’t get it off over his head, the buttons at the wrists are manacling him. Potter’s licking down his neck, sucking heat to the surface of his skin, thumbing a nipple. “You’ve never managed to keep anyone.”

“It was almost two years,” Potter says, cruelly, or maybe it’s just that the plain facts of it hurt enough that it feels deliberate. “I told him I loved him. I wanted to love him.”

“I’ll sign your papers for you right now.” Draco’s head finally emerges when he wrenches the buttons free. The shirt will be fittingly ruined; Potter’s already got his own trousers down around his knees. He has to shuffle forward to get between Draco’s thighs, kicking one leg then the other to get his feet out of the jeans. He’s obviously been flying a lot, and eating well. Draco had thought so from seeing him in his clothes — and he’s right. Out of them, Potter’s plump and well-kept, whorls of hair on his thighs pleasantly rough under Draco’s fingers. “If you want to settle down with him, I’ll let you, I swear it.”

It’s not an offer, it’s a threat, and Potter picks it up and runs with it, smiling like he did on their wedding day, catching Draco’s hand in his — the left one with the bare ring finger — and kissing his palm. With his other hand, he’s fondling Draco’s balls gently through his trousers.

“Swear it again,” Potter says, and Draco kicks at his ankle to make him give room, fumbles at his own trouser fastenings. “Go on, say it out loud, so you can hear how fucking stupid it sounds.”

“You’re the one who got the papers drawn up,” Draco says. He wants to get on his knees but there’s no room, Potter’s thigh is between his legs, and he’s pulling Draco’s trousers down at the back to touch him properly.

“I’ll never settle down with him.” Potter’s finger slips over Draco’s hole, and he tucks just the tip in for the beat of one more kiss before he pulls it out again, strokes and strokes — more ticklish than friction, too dry. “That would just be settling. Don’t you see? I try, and I try, Draco. And I just keep failing at not being married to you.”

“Where’s the bed?”

Draco has to practically shove Potter off him, but it’s easier without the dense gravity of his skin, his smell. Draco can get fully naked, socks and everything, and he’s halfway to the bedroom before Potter catches up with him, dick bobbing ridiculously, glasses discarded.

“Don’t get weird about this,” Potter says, and the bedroom door opens with a wave of his hand, light scattering like moving water along the floor and walls so that Draco is dazzled, momentarily, blinking his way into the room.

“This is more like it,” Draco says. Pictures, finally, and photographs on the walls, Weasleys and Potter’s parents and Teddy, of course. The formal family portrait Draco’s parents had given them as a wedding present, little Teddy nodding off in boredom, Draco and Potter smiling into each other’s eyes even now all these years later, an embarrassment of unity.

Below the painting, the bed, only one side rumpled. Draco wants to take a running jump onto it, but settles for a brisk walking pace, a swift sharp tug to pull the blankets back and expose the whole blank expanse, ripe for the unmaking.

“Get on the bed,” Potter says, “and tell me you married me because you loved me.”

“The portraits will talk,” Draco answers, and clambers up onto his knees. He spreads his legs. “And it was a marriage of convenience.”

“Remember,” Potter says, his weight settling on the mattress behind Draco, “the first night you fucked me? I’d never been so full. I could feel you in my throat.” With the words, he reaches along and under Draco’s jaw to clasp him tightly over his Adam’s apple, squeezing for emphasis.

“Remember Justin’s 30th?” Draco replies, and swallows hard so Potter will feel it against his palm. “You brought that woman, and then you ditched her and sucked off that weird cousin of Finnigan’s in the alleyway next to the smoking area?”

“I knew you were watching,” Potter says in satisfaction, and he crawls around Draco’s body on the bed to settle in front of him, already stroking himself, working the swollen head of his dick in close caressing motions. He pushes into Draco’s mouth without asking, but his hands make a gentle cradle around Draco’s face, thumbs pressing into the thin skin over Draco’s ears that no one but Potter has had cause to touch before. “I wanted you to see. Did you make yourself come thinking about it?”

Draco had, in the revolting, foul-smelling toilet cubicle of that horrid club, and then again at home later. He’d known Potter had meant him to see, had wanked over it with a sick sort of shame that wasn’t explained away by the knowing.

“God,” Potter says. “Fuck.” He pulls slowly, reluctantly out of Draco’s mouth, and gets Draco up onto his knees so he can kiss him again, lick around his teeth and along the roof of his mouth.

“Remember,” Potter says, “the weekend in Whitby. I asked you to marry me again even though you’d already said yes, and you said you meant it the first time.” He’s got his hand in the bedside drawer, pulls out a squeezy bottle that sighs and slurps the same viscous gel he’s always preferred all over his fingers. “And remember Ron and Hermione’s wedding? You were there with Astoria and you didn’t speak to me all night.”

“You left early,” Draco says, touching his face, helpless to do otherwise. Potter reaches around behind himself, the muscles of his upper arm bunching; he makes small sounds of effort that make Draco want to bury himself in the pillow and scream.

“I left early,” Potter confirms, and sucks Draco’s thumb into his mouth, teeth demurely tucked behind his lips, a soft encircling swelter of spit and tongue. It’s been so long — so desperately, intensely long — since Draco felt the ridge of the top of Potter’s mouth; he feels vaguely nauseous at the thought of having to take his finger out even to allow himself to put another part of him in Potter, dizzyingly missing him already in anticipation of even more of him to miss.

“Remember that charmed flask Molly gave me? I keep it filled with that grapefruit gin thing you like. Sometimes I sip it just because it reminds me of what your mouth tasted like last time you kissed me.”

It’s not enough, it’s too much.

“Remember when I tried to fuck you in that swimming pool in the hotel in Margate?” Draco says instead of dwelling on it, and taps Potter smartly on the back of the leg. “Up. On your hands and knees, I think.”

Potter kneels obediently, head bowed, back sinking low into a soft concave offering as he dips onto his elbows.

“You kept slipping out, and swearing.” Potter stifles his laugh in the pillow; he almost sounds like he used to. “Remember when I went to Bali with Anthony and I thought of you every single time I had sex with him?”

“No,” Draco says. “What? That was just this summer, wasn’t it? I—”

“Saw it in the papers? Yeah.” Potter wriggles lower, contented, spreads his legs wider so that Draco can see the shadow of his crease, the tight swell of his balls. From this position, it’s easy to press a thumb carefully into the crevice of Potter’s arse, feel around for the soft give of his hole. Draco dips his finger gently, then presses harder, Potter’s clenching body pressing back. He’s got some give to him, some welcoming wetness from where his own fingers had been.

“Jesus,” Draco says, a word he only uses because of Potter in the first place. He knocks his forehead onto Potter’s shoulder, breathes hot into his backbone. “You’re tight.”

Draco actually prefers not to fuck like this, usually — he gets performance anxiety at the best of times, let alone now, when his cock is all that’s between Potter and his orgasm. But Potter is so blissfully compliant, so sweetly eager, that Draco gets eager for it too, rubbing the head of his dick over Potter’s hole, waiting and waiting, watching the silvering trail of his precome slick a line through Potter’s dark hair. When he finally pushes in, Potter’s hips move against him, his body giving and giving.

Draco fucks him methodically, giving him no time to relax into it, short thrusts at what seems like an appropriate angle; it can’t be long before Potter starts clenching, quick jerking intimate flexes that make Draco’s vision flicker until he realises it’s just the lamplight guttering and surging, Potter’s Lumos faltering.

“Sorry,” Potter says lazily, slurring into the pillow. His face is pressed sideways, one cheek squashed and hot. Draco leans over him, stomach heaving against his lower back; it’s only when Potter seizes around him that Draco realises he’s coming, holding his breath, face a smoothed-out blissful blank.

“Tell me again how it wasn’t a love match,” Potter murmurs, and Draco pulls out of him, but gently, and starts wanking, the tight clutch of his hand almost more relief than pleasure.

“Why don’t you tell me?” Draco’s hand thumps off Potter’s arse, the meat and muscle of him, and Potter shifts obligingly.

“Come back to me?” Potter asks, the words almost wholly distracting Draco from his orgasm. It happens anyway, the bliss of it almost a surprise, the shock of a total undoing. He comes and comes, wringing himself out in wet splattering throbs all over Potter’s arse, then spreads it over his skin with the flat of his hand until Potter wriggles limply, disapprovingly.

The bed is actually jolly uncomfortable, despite its generous size. Draco is never going to sleep.

“I can’t stay,” Draco says, but Potter covers him up tenderly anyway, tucking the blankets around him.

“I can’t live with you,” Potter says.

“God, no. And I won’t quit my job,” Draco says. “I’m about to get a really big promotion.”

Potter sighs, but it’s resigned rather than disappointed. “Do we have to talk about your job?”

“I suppose not. And if we’re not going to live together, I’m going to buy a house in Hogsmeade. I’ll use the money from the joint account.”

“You still have it?” Potter’s face on the pillow is a creased, softened wonder. “I never understood why you took that. It’s not as though you needed it.”

“I wanted you not to have it,” Draco says. “And I really can’t stay.”

“You can,” Potter tells him. “It’s not quite morning. We have time.”