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A Very Walpurgis Night\'s Madness	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 2613 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter; that belongs to J. K. Rowling. I am making no money from this fic.

Chapter List
- 1-A Very Walpurgis Night's Madness
- 1
Title: A Very Walpurgis Night’s Madness

Pairing Harry/Draco.

Rating: R

Warnings: Profanity, violence, shameless abuse of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, voyeurism, slash sex. DH spoilers but no epilogue.

Word count: ~20,000

Summary: The fading and diminishing of the English faeries was caused by wizards; they bound them away from the mortal world so that only shadows of them could come through. Now one powerful being, known to humans as Puck, has escaped from confinement. Harry and Draco have to imprison him again before he can turn the whole of England into a twisted faerie amusement park.

Disclaimer: Characters are the property of JK Rowling, et al. This was created for fun, not for profit.

Author's Note: This was written for the 2009 hds_beltane fest, for graylor, and beta-ed by a friend of mine named Linda. The prompt was Adventure, romance, plot over porn, happy endings a must, no main character death, h/d only, and Aurors!

A Very Walpurgis Night’s Madness

            “Yes,” Harry said for the tenth time, holding on to his temper with his teeth, “but I don’t see why I have to do it with him.”

            Kingsley opened his mouth, but Malfoy interrupted before the Minister could say anything. “He doesn’t need to know, sir.”

            Harry spun around and glared. Malfoy’s mouth was prissily set, his lips clamping onto each other. He looked as if he hadn’t changed at all since Hogwarts, other than growing taller, but Harry knew better than that. Malfoy was one of the best Aurors in the Department now. What he wasn’t was easy to work with.

And there was no particular reason for him to be assigned to this case, either, since he and Harry had never worked as partners. Harry knew that Kingsley needed him in order to soothe the fears of the public, should the public ever find out about this. But Malfoy—

“Don’t be difficult,” Harry managed to say, which was much more diplomatic than what he wished to say. “If you have expertise of some kind, then I should know about it, so that I know what I can rely on you for.” He almost didn’t say the next words, but Malfoy had started to look too smug. “And what I can’t.”

Malfoy’s eyes narrowed, but Kingsley said, “Yes, very well. In fact, it’s Malfoy’s wand that ties him into the case.”

Harry cast a doubtful glance at the hawthorn wand. Malfoy shifted his body a little, as if to guard it from Harry’s sight. Harry snickered under his breath, and Malfoy gave him a glare sharp as a sting. The wand had never quite given him back the loyalty that it had transferred to Harry.

“Hawthorn is tied to the realm of Faerie,” Kingsley said, as if that was a normal and everyday thing to proclaim. Harry checked carefully, but yes, it looked as if the Minister was fully in possession of his sanity, more was the pity. “Specifically, hawthorn trees traditionally bloom on the first of May—Beltane.”

            “And you said that this Puck person—”

            Kingsley held up a warning hand. “Puck is a faerie, and not a person,” he said. “You need to keep that in mind, Harry. Think of him as human, and you’ll expect him to act like one. But he won’t, and in fact faeries have no morals and no habits as we traditionally understand them.”

            “No souls,” Malfoy muttered.

            “That is still under dispute,” said Kingsley, in the tone of someone who’d spent too much time arguing with Hermione about house-elves. “But yes, Puck will be trying to raise power towards the first of May, specifically on Walpurgis Night, the night of April thirtieth. It was an old Celtic holiday, the first day of their summer, the celebration of warmth and light. Fires, fertility, that sort of thing.”

            Harry snorted. “I know all about Beltane celebrations, sir.” He’d been used to patrol several last year, mostly so that drunken young wizards who thought they were reviving “ancient traditions” wouldn’t be tempted to revive the tradition of Muggle-baiting.

            “No, you don’t, Potter.” Malfoy’s voice was peculiarly low, peculiarly intense, and made Harry eye him sideways. But Malfoy stared straight ahead of him, instead of looking back at Harry. Harry rolled his eyes. Does he think that makes him impressive? “You really don’t.”

            “Various celebrations use different rituals,” said Kingsley diplomatically. Harry wondered if he wanted to cover his eyes and shake his head—it was the way he tended to deal with Harry’s pointing out that he didn’t need protection anymore—but though his hands twitched, he kept them on his desk. “The important point is that hawthorn trees are also associated with faeries, the otherworld, and sometimes the entrance to that otherworld. As much as the experts on the situation can tell us, they believe that Puck will try to use the power of this night to free his people from the otherworld.”

            “And we don’t want that to happen,” said Harry, barely managing not to make it a question. He really didn’t know much about faeries, except for vague memories of small creatures with wings sitting on toadstools—Mrs. Figg had had wallpaper like that in one room—and Hermione dragging him to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream two years ago. He assumed that Puck freeing his people was bad, because nothing else could require him and Malfoy to work together, but he didn’t understand it, intellectually or emotionally.

            “It depends, Potter,” Malfoy said with brittle brightness. “Do you want to go back to a world where you have to put iron above your children’s cradles to keep faeries from stealing them? Where certain nights mean certain death? Where not leaving out milk or bread or other gifts for the faeries, or speaking of them by their names, might mean your house being destroyed or your life taken?”

            Harry watched him closely. Malfoy’s hand was clenched on the hawthorn wand as though he wanted to snap it. He noticed Harry looking and tossed him a hostile glance. Harry turned back to Kingsley, because he could be graceful and diplomatic like that. Right.Nice to know that there’s no chance of camaraderie with him, just in case I forgot.

            “Puck is strong enough to bring his Queen through,” Kingsley said, very gently. This time, it was the white-knuckled grip of his hand on the side of the desk that let Harry know he was actually frightened. “And that could well mean the end of modern civilization. It almost did when we fought the last war against the faeries.”

            “I never heard anything about that,” Harry said.

            Kingsley shook his head. “Our ancestors destroyed most of the knowledge about the war and how they bound the faeries away, because they were afraid someone would try to free them. Not every wizard agreed with the decision to banish them. There have always been fools who liked beauty better than peace.” He was quiet a moment. “Destroying that knowledge leaves us at a disadvantage right now, but it was the wisest thing to do,” he added. “We do know that the faerie war was what caused our revealing to Muggles in such large numbers that the witch burnings started. And now that Muggles have worse weapons and a longer reach, we don’t want that to happen again.”

            Harry blinked, shaken and sobered. Faeries must be powerful, then. I’ll have to learn to think of them as something other than little creatures with wings.

            “How did Puck escape?” he asked. “Or do we know?”

            Kingsley nodded. “We were able to find his entrance to our world and examine the broken bindings. Apparently the wizards who chained him were charmed by him and deliberately made the chains a little weaker than they were supposed to be.” He shook his head, then fastened his eyes on Harry. “You’ll have to be careful when you face him, Harry. The one thing all the stories about him agree on is that he’s amusing and clever. He’ll do his best to trick you instead of simply killing you. You must not be taken in.”

            Harry nodded back. Something that could scare Kingsley was no laughing matter. “How do we find him now? Or how do we know where he’s going to try to force the entrance for his Queen?”

            “That’s where I come in,” Malfoy said quietly, stepping up beside him.

            Harry ignored the frisson of awareness that moved through him. He was at least as much an expert on ignoring that kind of thing as Malfoy was an expert on hawthorn. He often had that reaction to attractive male Aurors—and one had to call Malfoy physically attractive, if only to say something nice about the poor bastard. Harry knew what the shiver meant, but he didn’t have to act on it.

            “My wand connects me to Faerie,” said Malfoy, his hands moving slowly over the hawthorn wood. “Really, any hawthorn wand has that connection. But in this case, it happens that the wood was taken from the most likely stand of trees for Puck to try and force an entrance through, because it’s the most powerful. And my wand has been vibrating in my hands and trying to pull me in certain directions since the first day of spring.” He smiled tightly. “I’m fairly sure we’ll have no trouble finding him. It’s what happens when we do that’s the problem.”

            Harry nodded again. He wondered idly if the distraction of the vibrating wand was why Malfoy had flat-out lost to him in a duel the other day, something that had never happened before. They were more equally matched in training than in Quidditch. “And do we have a strategy for fighting him?” he asked, turning back to Kingsley.

            “Read the reports and files before you go.” Kingsley spread his hands. “I’ve already had our researchers talk to the Aurors who found the broken bindings and gather as much information as is available on the first war against the faeries. Beyond that, I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

            Harry exhaled. His heart had begun to beat a solemn, steady tattoo, similar to the one it had played when he went up against Fenrir Greyback, the last of the truly dangerous Death Eaters, but worse. Greyback, whatever his status as a personal threat to Harry, was hardly capable of destroying modern civilization.

            And it was April twenty-ninth today.

            This, at least, is an adventure.

*

            As they left Shacklebolt’s office, Draco glanced at Potter. He wanted to sneer. He could see the slightly dreamy look in those green eyes that meant the scarred git was thinking of it as an adventure.

            He doesn’t understand how powerful or dangerous Puck is.

            But Draco kept his sneer to himself, because Potter had become quick to notice signs of disrespect directed towards him in the last few years, and Draco had no wish for their mission to fail because of bickering. It would probably fail anyway, of course; that was how his luck ran. But he wouldn’t add an extra burden to it.

            “I think we should visit the place Puck escaped from,” Potter said suddenly, startling Draco. “I’d like to examine the bindings.”

            Draco clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. His immediate impulse was to protest that they didn’t have time, but that was only because Potter had made the suggestion. In reality, he would have said something similar himself, if he’d thought of it.

            “We should,” he said. “But we’ll talk to the researchers first, so that we can know where that place is.”

            Potter gave a long, aggravated, aggravating sigh. “Of course we have to do that, Malfoy. I’m not stupid, you know.”

            “You do a bloody good impression of it,” Draco muttered before he could stop himself. Really, he didn’t mean to, but Potter would keep giving him such perfect openings.

            “What was that?” Potter glared at him.

            Draco was very careful not to look fully at him, this time. Those eyes had a devastating power over him that Potter hadn’t discovered and Draco had no reason to let him know about. And it was simply ridiculous and unfair that Potter had become more fit and more steady since he was an Auror, dropping the ugliness and the rash behavior that Draco had used as defenses against his own tendency to be attracted to the Chosen Blunderer.

            “I said you have bloody good ideas sometimes,” he said.

            Potter looked vaguely dissatisfied, but Draco stretched his strides out, and Potter had to scramble to keep up. Give him one indignity to worry about, and he was less likely to question the other.

*

            Harry winced as they Apparated into the grove of trees that had contained Puck for five hundred years. He hadn’t seen a sign of the bindings yet, and the magic vibrating in the air still stung his skin and made his hair curl harder.

            They stood on the top of a small hill, until recently shielded by an Unplottable spell. The Aurors who had investigated the escape had broken the spell so other people could come in. Harry looked around and rubbed his arms. The hill was tiny, the countryside about it flat and blandly green, the “grove” a few scattered thorn trees. That didn’t seem to matter. The magic made it all stronger and stranger than it should be.

            “Shite,” Malfoy said, arriving beside him.

            “What?” Harry asked, picking up his wand and turning in a slow circle. He didn’t see anything, but after what they had learned from the researchers, he realized that didn’t necessarily mean much. Faeries were good with glamours and shapeshifting and tricking the senses, and Puck was one of the most powerful among them. Harry did resent the time it had taken them to consult the researchers, which meant this was now the day Puck was supposed to bring his Queen through, but there could be no doubt they’d learned some useful information.

            “My wand is vibrating,” Malfoy said under his breath. Unconsciously, Harry leaned closer to him, and then regretted it when Malfoy glared up at him with intense eyes. Harry hadn’t had sex in four months, and his brain was still too apt to turn in directions it shouldn’t when he was in close quarters with someone. Why couldn’t Malfoy be a woman? he thought irrelevantly. “That means that he’s probably here.”

            Harry resisted the urge to cast a spell that would detect eavesdroppers, or one that would muffle his and Malfoy’s words. No use giving up the advantage of surprise if Puck hadn’t realized they were talking about him.

            “Can we do anything?” he murmured.

            Surprisingly, Malfoy nodded. Harry reckoned he hadn’t yet joined Kingsley’s “We-Are-All-Going-to-Die-Because-Puck-Is-Free” Club. “It would actually be easier to confront him here, where the bindings still have some of their force. We might be able to chain him again.”

            Harry smiled and turned so that his back was to Malfoy’s. “Come out, come out, Puck, wherever you are!” he called, cupping his hands around his mouth.

            “You blithering idiot,” Malfoy said, neither raising his voice nor adding any inflection to it. “What did you want to do that for?”

            Harry shrugged, eyes intently searching through the trees in front of him. He had the feeling that the magic had changed when he called out the name, but he couldn’t tell for certain. He didn’t even know whether it had grown weaker or stronger. “Because the researchers said that faeries admire courage,” he said.

            “Yes, but they detest being named,” said Malfoy, and caught his arm. “Call them the Good People, or the Fair Folk.”

            Harry frowned at him. “If they’re either of those, it’s only because it’s what suits them at the moment. That’s what the researchers said.”

            “But that’s the way they are,” said Malfoy. “For God’s sake, Potter, you have to understand—”

            He stopped speaking. Harry followed his gaze, the tension of the magic prickling down his spine.

            He nearly laughed with relief when he realized that a black donkey with one white spot on its head was the only thing that stood watching them. “That’s not him,” he told Malfoy, who obviously needed some help understanding this.

            “Shapeshifters, remember?” Malfoy hissed out of the corner of his mouth. He didn’t take his eyes off the donkey.

            Harry felt a bit stupid for forgetting that, but he still didn’t see the point of hiding, especially when Puck knew they were here. He marched forwards to confront the donkey.

            It watched him come, twitching its ears back and forth and champing its teeth. Maybe it was eating a thistle, Harry thought crazily. A faerie thistle, since he couldn’t see anything in its mouth.

            “Good donkey,” he said, pausing a step away.

            The donkey cocked its head and eyed him up and down. Harry flinched a little, then shook himself. If there wasn’t human—or being—intelligence behind those eyes, he would feel really stupid.

            Abruptly, it moved towards him. Harry could smell the scent of wet fur and bark, strong enough to make him wrinkle his nose. There was nothing of the sweetness that the researchers had said would surround Puck.

            Then the donkey stepped delicately on his foot.

            “Bloody—” It hurt so much that Harry couldn’t even finish swearing. He clutched his injured toes and hopped up and down, teeth clenched on a howl. Malfoy, the git, laughed out loud before he managed to stifle it. Harry shot him a murderous glare. He wasn’t going to forget that one.

            Then another laugh cut the air, and Harry didn’t have to be told that it wasn’t Malfoy throwing his voice. It was far too high, shrill and sweet, like a soprano lark. He turned around, trying to draw his wand and hold his foot away from the ground at the same time.

            The donkey had vanished. Facing him was a slender young man as tall as Harry, with curly golden hair hanging to his shoulders, so that he looked like a more dandyish Lucius Malfoy. He had pointed ears, emerging from under the hair and projecting up the sides of his head until they looked like a cat’s. His eyes were slanted sharply, and a riotous green so rich that Harry looked hastily at the ground, only then remembering the researchers’ warning about becoming trapped in a faerie’s gaze.

            “The old jokes are still the best ones, I feel,” said the man comfortably. “And you can’t say that I hid. I came out when you called me, did I not? You called my name, and I came.” He paused, apparently savoring the sound of the words, then shook his head regretfully. “I can’t let it stand, I’m afraid. What with the unfortunate turns that human language has taken over the centuries, there are too many of my peers who would laugh if you told them that I come when called.”

            He made a casual gesture at Harry, adding, “It’s rather too bad. I like your eyes.”

*

            Draco had been on edge from the moment the donkey appeared, not least because the hawthorn wand was vibrating a warning like a rattlesnake’s tail against his hand. And he had sense enough not to look into Puck’s eyes, if Potter didn’t.

            Then the faerie made a gesture that resembled the rising and falling of an executioner’s axe.

            Draco knew it was meant to remove Potter’s head in the exact same way.

            He had spent some time among the Dark Arts books in his parents’ library since he received the wand’s first warning—and if Shacklebolt believed that all knowledge of how to fight Puck’s kind had perished with the original binders, he was sadly mistaken. Draco’s ancestors had fought in that war, too, and they had delighted in recording how they managed to overcome a terrible, powerful set of foes that, until the Queen had wanted to destroy the entire world because she was bored and dying humans were pretty, no one had tried to fight.

            He’d sneaked one hand into his robe pocket whilst Puck was busy with Potter. Of course he was fascinated with Potter; everyone was. And those green eyes were a sign, perhaps, of faerie heritage in the far-distant past.

            But Draco could not be fooled by mere beauty, and he threw the weapon he held at Puck without hesitation. It formed two loops, and one of them was hawthorn wood.

            The other was cold iron.

            Puck swung around to face the loop the moment it was thrown, and his hand came down, completing the gesture but severing the hawthorn wood instead of Potter’s throat. Draco began to breathe again. He carefully kept himself from looking at Potter, of course. He knew the idiot would be gaping gormlessly, and that reminded him how unlikely they really were to survive this.

            “Foolish,” Puck began in a sober tone, wagging his head, “to use hawthorn wood against me so close to Beltane—”

            And then the iron loop, which had continued whirling, utterly unaffected by faerie magic, hit him across the face.

            Puck screamed, his head flying back with the force of the blow. Draco knew he couldn’t count on it laying him out unconscious, the way it surely would have a human, so he darted forwards, grabbed Potter’s hand, and then tugged him back to a safe distance.

            The iron flared with blue fire, and there was a scent like roasting chestnuts. Draco shuddered. Well, I reckon we should be grateful that faerie skin doesn’t smell like meat when it burns.

            Puck reeled away, then caught himself with a hand on one of the thorn trees and stood there for a moment. Draco had to put his wand away, so hard were the vibrations. He had practiced Apparating without it, though, so he moved close to Potter. Potter still hadn’t said a word, and hadn’t looked away from Puck. Draco wondered in some irritation if it was possible for a faerie so powerful to hypnotize a victim without using any song or glamour.

            Puck looked up at them at last. An enormous burn scar crisscrossed his face, and the effect was like destroying part of a paper mâché mask; behind it was nothingness. Draco shivered.

            The more so when he realized that Puck was smiling.

            “A real challenge,” said Puck. “At last. Most of my imprisonment was spent listening to humans congratulate themselves. I could hear their language. The bindings were meant to leave us in partial contact with your world, after all, or how would we know what we had lost?” He shook his head solemnly. “But most of them aren’t real challenges. My Queen will know what to do with them, when she comes.

            “But you, I like.” He nodded to Draco. “And you—” He turned to Potter, and then the smile vanished from his face as if knocked off.

            “You,” he said, and his voice was a soft snarl. “Who are you? What are you? Even if he had not flung the iron at me, my spell would not have touched you.” His voice sank further. “What are you?”

            “I don’t know what you mean,” Potter said, his voice sounding dazed. Draco cursed under his breath. Elf-shot.He’ll tell the truth to any question Puck asks him, now. At least he doesn’t know the answer to this one.

            “No matter,” said Puck, and his voice was cheerful again, like the rush of a small stream downhill in the rain, though his fierce frown stayed. “It’ll only take one turn to be rid of you.” And he lifted his arms and flapped them twice.

            The thorn trees uncoiled in a wash of blue lightning, and something like a gauzy golden curtain swung out to embrace them. Draco shouted and tried to Apparate—

            The nothingness that usually surrounded them during Apparition was full of dazzling green eyes and blond hair instead, and Puck’s voice, echoing from everywhere and nowhere, said, “Lord, what fools these mortals be.”

            And then the air went silent. Draco lifted his head and looked around fearfully.

            They stood on a meadow crowded with lilies, bending and crackling underfoot. Draco only knew they were lilies because he recognized the shape of the flower. They were blue, and the sky was green, and an intolerable, honey-sweet scent was everywhere.

            Puck had cast them into the otherworld.

            And, almost incidentally after everything else that had happened, a black unicorn was charging them with a lowered horn.

*

            Harry didn’t know what had happened to him. He didn’t know how they had got where they were now, in a field of flowers that smelled bad and beneath a sky that looked like a storm was coming in, with a unicorn charging them.

            But he knew one thing.

            He didn’t like it.

            Anger burst through him like a vision from Voldemort, and he whipped his wand out and screamed, “Abiscido!”

            The spell soared away from him in a burst of boomerang-shaped air and hit the unicorn hard between the eyes. Its horn cracked in two down the middle. Then it wavered and crumbled to dust.

            The unicorn stumbled to a stop and spent a moment crossing its eyes in a vain attempt to see the middle of its forehead. Then it turned those enormous, betrayed eyes, liquid like a cow’s, on Harry, and backed away a slow step.

            “I can’t believe you just did that, Potter,” Malfoy said in a faint voice. Harry didn’t need to look at him to know he would be wearing an expression of shocked disapproval. He always did when he used that tone.

            And since when can I link his expressions to his tone?

            Harry ruthlessly ignored the question and watched as the unicorn turned and trotted into the forest of thick, lumpy trees that had suddenly appeared across the meadow, its head bent so its mane trailed the ground. “It was charging us,” he pointed out. “I think that’s a pretty good reason to deprive a unicorn of its horn.”

            “Yes, but you don’t do that,” Malfoy began.

            “You don’t drink a unicorn’s blood, either, but Voldemort did,” Harry snapped, and shifted from foot to foot. His toes still ached where Puck had stepped on them in donkey form.

            “And do you always take the Dark Lord for your role model?” Malfoy had obviously recovered from whatever Harry had done to shock his proprieties, as his tone was perfectly acidic.

            “We don’t have time for this discussion,” Harry said, and deliberately made his voice harsh enough that he felt Malfoy jump beside him. Good. I don’t need the git getting in my way. “Puck tried to get rid of us so that we can’t interfere with his dumping his Queen into our world. That’s clear enough. The question is, what do we do about it?” He turned and looked at Malfoy expectantly.

            Malfoy appeared both upset and coy. “Why assume I know, Potter?”

            “Because you managed to scar Puck,” Harry said. “You know how to fight him. Anything you know about faeries, I need to know.”

            “Well, that knowledge doesn’t include a map of the otherworld, Potter,” Malfoy snapped, all traces of a smile vanishing from his face. Good, Harry thought. I like him better when he doesn’t smile. He’s always plotting something when he smiles. “I don’t think it’s possible to make a map.” He looked around apprehensively; Harry followed his gaze and noticed that the forest had vanished again, replaced by a stand of unnaturally blue and sharp mountains, which appeared at once distant and close by. “The otherworld shifts and changes constantly. Two doors out of it might be side by side and at the same time come out thousands of miles apart in our world.” His voice sank.

            “Save the cheap theater,” Harry said, and started out across the lilies in the direction of the mountains, less because it was the direction he would have chosen than because the mountains were at least different. “In the meantime, I’ll be tackling the problem directly.” The heads of the flowers swished against his robes.

            Malfoy choked on a noise of disgust and hurried after him. “Weren’t you listening to Shacklebolt, Potter? Faeries can’t be fought as if they’re human.”

            “I know,” Harry said absently, studying the flowers. Was there something moving underneath them? He thought he could catch a glimpse of a sinuously sliding body, like a snake’s, but after Voldemort he had a tendency to pin any sudden movement that way. “But we’re human, and I don’t believe we can think like them. We’re going to end up fighting them like humans no matter what we do.”

            Malfoy paused to think about that one, which Harry was glad of. It gave him more time to look around the otherworld and try to determine what was so strange about it.

            Honey-scented air and green sky were things he could conceive of. He could even imagine an entire field of lilies Transfigured to blue. And the appearing and disappearing forest and mountains were really no stranger than some of the hallucinations he had seen whilst under the influence of the narcotic potions administered during one of the final Auror exams.

            It wasn’t even the fact that nothing had a shadow, although that was an unpleasant shock when he realized it. No, his breath was speeding up and his skin was crawling for no reason, and he hated it.

            “It’s land adapted to another species,” Malfoy said suddenly.

            Harry spun around and stared at him. “What?” It wasn’t every day that Malfoy suddenly started sounding like a Muggle biology textbook.

            Malfoy gestured at the field and the mountains, which had shrunk to lemon-colored hills. Each hill had a tall, slender tree in the exact middle of the summit. “We’re used to tame countries,” he said. “Countries we’ve tamed, I should say. We’re the superior species in our own world. We don’t worry about unicorns stepping around the corner to spear non-virgins through the heart or centaurs raping us in the middle of the night. But here, the faeries are the superior species. We’re just prey.”

            Harry thought about that for a few seconds. Then he said evenly, “Bollocks.”

            Malfoy lifted his eyebrows. He was sweating for some reason, and his face appeared to be pulling apart at the corners. “I thought you were the one who wanted to trust my expertise on faeries?’

            “We can’t sense something like that,” Harry said irritably. “Unless you’re claiming that we’re nervous in the same way we would be if we were traveling a wild jungle and being stalked by a jaguar.”

            Malfoy shook his head. “This goes deeper. The faeries have conquered and tamed their nature as thoroughly as we have ours. The problem is that the effects are different, and so we’re walking through a land that’s spent thousands of years being sculpted by alien minds and aesthetics.” He ripped his nails down his arm whilst his face turned into a blue lion’s. “That’s what we’re feeling.”

            “Bollocks,” Harry snapped again. “And stop shapeshifting.”

            “I’m not,” said Malfoy, even as he dropped to all fours and began to gambol in circles.

            Harry backed up, aiming his wand carefully at this strange apparition. Clearly Puck had managed to replace Malfoy when he wasn’t looking.

*

            Draco closed his hands into fists and held perfectly still, though he knew that it probably wouldn’t help if Potter was seeing a complete faerie illusion. Damn it, I know this is one of the side-effects of being elf-shot. I should have been prepared.

            But unfortunately, the treatments the books recommended for helping someone recover from glamour-sickness involved numerous potions, only two of which Draco was carrying with him. And those probably needed to be saved for later and more severe trouble.

            Draco forced himself to speak almost casually. Again, that wouldn’t make a difference if the illusion had twisted him into a creature Potter hated and feared, but he would win any slight advantage he could. “Tell me what I’m doing. What kind of creature do you see me as?”

            “A lion. A blue lion. With a bleeding arm.” Potter sounded belligerent and confused at the same time, as if he knew what he saw didn’t make any sense but didn’t have the courage to doubt the testimony of his senses.

            Draco could have laughed in relief. Whether it was Puck who did this or one of the faeries he was certain was watching him, they had made a miscalculation. “But why should you be afraid of my shapeshifting into a lion?” he asked, keeping his voice innocently confused. “A lion is the Gryffindor house symbol.”

            Potter relaxed as he thought about that. Then he said, “Not a blue lion.”

            “So perhaps I bred with a Ravenclaw.” Draco moved closer to him, step by slow step, his voice still low. Potter’s eyes widened, then narrowed. Still no hint of what he’s really seeing. Sod it. “I’m supposed to be here with you, Potter, no matter what shape I’m in. And we have a Puck to catch.”

            “How can you catch him on four legs?” Potter demanded.

            “I’ll carry my wand in my mouth,” Draco said. His heart was pounding hard enough to fill his ears with sound, but at least that was better than some of the things he might have heard in this country. “And when Puck comes near, I’ll cut his knees apart. He won’t expect that.”

            Potter laughed. Then he doubled over, gasping, one arm wrapped around his midriff, and something small and dark green flew out of his mouth.

            Thank Merlin, he coughed up the elf-shot. Draco didn’t touch the thing, though, instead backing away and casting Incendio at it. All he needed was to have the shot sink into his skin and for Puck to gain control over him that way.

            Potter wiped his mouth for a moment as the elf-shot burned, then squinted at Draco. “Malfoy, you’re not a blue lion anymore,” he said vaguely. Then his eyes sharpened. “Why did that work?” he asked.

            “I used the kind of irrelevant humor that a faerie would try on you,” Draco said calmly. “The weapons they use on mortals can’t withstand their other weapons.” He arched an eyebrow. “Feeling better?”

            “You saved my life, I think,” Potter said, smiling at him. Draco hated the frantic flutter in his stomach and banished it to the deepest, darkest depths of the place where Weasleys went when they died. “Thank you.”



            “I certainly do hope you’re feeling better,” purred a voice behind Potter.

            Both of them turned, and Draco felt the flutter in his stomach return with a vengeance—though not for his own sake—when he found himself facing the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

            Fuck. I can protect myself against her, I think, but what about Potter?

*

            Harry blinked. He had assumed that any faerie finding and speaking to them in this country would be Puck—after all, why would others want to reveal themselves to invading Aurors when they could remain hidden and still have the advantage of surprise?—but no, this was a tall, slender woman with pale skin, delicate dragonfly wings, a tumble of red hair that put Ginny’s to shame, and stunning green eyes.

            She moved slowly towards him and reached out one hand. Her eyes shone with curiosity and a quality that Harry could only call impishness.

            Remember that imps were originally fiends of hell, he thought, and stepped backwards, raising his wand.

            The woman pouted and stopped, flinging curls of fiery hair back from her pointed ears. “Oh, you aren’t any fun free,” she said, and concentrated.

            In moments, her face acquired extra dimensions of beauty, as if it were a diamond with more polished facets. Her skin shone, her eyes were blazingly, unnaturally bright and emotional, and Harry could imagine how soft her hair would feel wrapped around his throat, how her arms would cradle him. This was the part, he decided, where he was supposed to fall down fainting at her feet.

            Except for the other part where I’m gay.

            Yes, he decided as the minutes passed and the faerie woman looked more and more bewildered, completely gay. I reckon I owe the faeries something for teaching me that, at least.

            “That doesn’t work on me,” he said, when he decided that she was getting angry anyway. “Sorry.”

            At least the woman, unlike Puck, gave some notice before attacking. She crouched, her arms held out in front of her like a praying mantis’s, and hissed through her teeth. Then she sprang at him like a mantis on a bug.

            Harry had learned from the way Malfoy scarred Puck, though. He twirled his wand, and two manacles of iron popped into existence on her wrists. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw them materialize. He hadn’t been sure how far his magic would work in the otherworld, one reason he hadn’t tried Transfiguring the grass or flowers into chains the way he normally would have.

            The faerie woman stopped and stared at her hands. Then she uttered a shivering scream that made Harry reach up automatically to his ears, thinking his eardrums must have shattered. They hadn’t, but it was a near thing as the woman raked her hands over the iron bands again and again.

            Harry endured the screaming for a moment or so, then used a Silencio. The woman’s mouth went on moving; maybe she could still hear her own cries. All that mattered to Harry was that he couldn’t.

            “I am impressed, Potter,” Malfoy murmured behind him. “Maybe you’re learning how to fight faeries after all. Though of course I had to instruct you first.”

            “Shut up, Malfoy, you annoying git,” said Harry in a weary tone, and, since the woman’s mouth was still moving, suspended her upside-down in midair to get her attention. “Now,” he said when her green eyes fixed on him, and cautiously lifted the Silencing Charm. “I want you to tell us the way out of the otherworld.”

            The woman’s hands flexed in the manacles. Sometime in the last minute, she’d replaced her ordinary fingernails with glistening glassy claws. Harry kept a sharp eye on her as he waited for her to respond.

            “That is a great gift,” she said at last, and her voice sounded like knives scraping together. Harry shuddered involuntarily. “I would not give you such a great gift for such a little one as to escape scarring.”

            Harry huffed. Wonderful.She wants to bargain. The researchers had warned him that would probably happen, since faeries loved to trick mortals and a bargain that made the mortals greedy and eager was their favorite tool. But he had hoped he wouldn’t run into someone like that.

            “I can do more than scar you,” he said, and leaned forwards threateningly. “I can cut off your wings and your hands.”

            Malfoy made a small, contemptuous noise behind him, eclipsed a moment later in the faerie woman’s laugh. She had grown thinner all the time, so that now she really did resemble a mantis, her shoulders hunched forwards under her wings and her face spare and triangular. “You couldn’t do a thing like that. You don’t have the heart for it.” Her tongue flickered out and around her lips as though she were tasting the air. Snake, insect, I wish to Merlin she would make up her mind what she wants to be, Harry thought. “I’m very good at seeing mortal hearts. I know you won’t hurt me. And if you did? I could simply grow the limbs back again.” She twisted in the manacles, rubbing her chin against her arm. Harry wondered if that was some sort of odd preening gesture.

            “You understand nothing,” Malfoy said roughly, and shoved past him. “Here. Let me bargain with her.”

            Harry would have refused, except he saw the way the faerie woman’s eyes narrowed on Malfoy and turned wary, and he decided that anything that scared her about Malfoy was all to the good.

            So he satisfied himself by falling behind his partner and scowling menacingly. If Malfoy wanted to think the scowl was all for the woman, then he could.

*

            Draco kept his eyes locked on the faerie woman’s as he moved forwards, and noted absently as he went how much it was like matching stares with Potter. He must have faerie blood, somewhere, even though people said he inherited his eyes from his mother. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that a child who could have made trouble for a pure-blood woman was dropped off for Muggles to adopt.

            Then Draco realized what he was thinking and shook his head in disgust. Focusing on Potter’s parents when he had to make a bargain! Really, Potter had been creeping into his head far too often lately.

            He halted a respectful distance from the woman. He had already cast a spell that would moisten his eyes without giving him the trouble of blinking. The slightest sign could make the faeries think you weak. Draco knew they would have enough trouble merely getting an answer out of her. No need to add extra problems to the process.

            “You can see what I am,” he told her. “What I was.” He made a tiny gesture to his left forearm, where the Dark Mark was hidden under the sleeve; the faerie looked in that direction, and recoiled. Draco smiled. Faeries were amoral, not immoral. Dark magic like Voldemort’s was likely to repel them, especially because it wasn’t beautiful. “You can bargain with me. And I know more about your kind than my partner does. I assure you, whilst I might not be able to mark you permanently, I can hurt you much more than he would.” He bared his teeth. “And I’d enjoy doing it.”

            For long moments, the woman went on looking at him with defiance in her face. Draco held still. Faeries were flighty, fickle, difficult to predict. He’d done all he could to encourage her to see him as a fellow predator and not a foolish mortal; time would tell if he’d managed.

            And then she sighed, and tilted her head down, and said, “You know all about hunting, I see that. But it will take someone like your companion to force a way through the door.”

            “Someone like my companion,” Draco said, not wanting to admit ignorance when he actually had the faerie cooperating. “Of course. I didn’t plan on leaving him behind.” He smiled when she started at that, her head swaying back and forth like a pendulum. Keep her off her guard. “And what price will you take for the location of the gate?”

            “A small thing,” sad the faerie, her voice wistful and sly. “I have mated so often with my kind that the thrill of it has worn off—which is the only reason I tried to enchant your companion.” She pouted at Potter; Draco heard him grunt in irritation. “I wish a kiss from you.” She opened her mouth wide and tapped her pointed tongue against her teeth, as if to reinforce what the kiss would mean.

            Draco considered it carefully. He knew, from what both the researchers and his own studies had said, that he shouldn’t offer a lock of hair or a drop of blood. Faeries could use those to gain far too personal a control over a human’s body and actions. But he didn’t think they could use saliva, and a kiss was different.

            Besides, he suspected what the woman would try to do since her trick hadn’t worked on Potter, and he was vastly amused at the idea of pulling her into such a bad bargain.

            “Agreed,” he said. The faerie brightened and ran her tongue all the way around her mouth again, which did seem as if it could open uncomfortably wide.

            Potter’s hand closed on his arm at once, with a grip as punishing as that the iron manacles had on the faerie. “No!” he hissed. “Are you mad? She’ll do the same thing she tried to do to me, except with you she’ll succeed, and—”

            “You are making no sense, Potter,” Draco said in a high-pitched voice, as if he were much more nervous and irritated by Potter than he really was, and twisted free. He turned around with a haughty tilt of his head and faced the faerie woman. Her eyes were wide and shone, and her pointed ears pricked forwards, signs of sexual interest. He used his wand to flip her right-side up.

            I don’t care how well you can read hearts, Draco thought, as he stepped up to her and clasped a hand behind her neck. Youcan be fooled by fairly simple devices, and that makes you an idiot.

            His lips met the woman’s, and she immediately darted out her tongue, scrubbing at his gums and teeth frantically, hopefully. Draco could feel the smooth movement of something richer and thicker than saliva along his tongue, and laughed silently. Yes, she had planned to enchant him. She wanted one victim that her wiles worked on, and if she couldn’t do it by means of a glamour on her face, she’d use venom.

            Except the venom only made the kiss a bit more wet, and caused Draco to spit out a gob of congealed liquid on the ground. The faerie woman pulled back and looked at him, eyes so wide that he thought they might turn as round as human eyes in a moment, instead of unnaturally doe-like.

            “I only like men,” he murmured, loud enough for Potter to hear. He didn’t know how the fool had managed to resist the faerie’s glamour, but he knew he had to announce his means, so that Potter didn’t mistake it for Dark magic.

            The woman shrieked in anger and tried to bring her hands up to scratch him, but Draco had suspected that would happen and danced lightly out of the way. She was left flailing and jerking. Draco spat one more time, to rid himself of the last of the venom, and then inclined his head.

            “The gate?” he asked.

*

            Malfoy’s bent, too?

            Harry knew he should be thinking about something else—such as whether the faerie would really tell them the truth about the exit’s location when they’d hurt and tricked her—but his mind was fastened on that seemingly irrelevant fact. He’d assumed it was bravado that made Malfoy decide he could survive a faerie’s kiss. But no, it was the same reason Harry could.

            It was a reason that mattered to Harry, stupid as it was to be concerned with such things when they were in another world and had no idea if they would escape in time to stop Puck, much less manage to stop him when they found him.

            The woman remained silent until a shudder ran over her body, bowing her back and making her wings twitch. Harry stepped forwards in concern, but Malfoy’s wand was still at his side, although his mouth was locked in a wide smile. He hadn’t done whatever was making the faerie convulse, Harry decided cautiously, and retreated until he was out of the way.

            “The gate is at the base of the mountains, inside three blue stones.” The faerie literally spat the words, so that both Harry and Malfoy moved out of the way to avoid a string of honey-colored venom. Harry thought Malfoy’s casual movement was more designed to show how utterly he despised the woman for trying to seduce him even now, though. “And you will not survive it.”

            Harry bristled, thinking she meant him at first, and then noticed that her eyes were locked on Malfoy. “What do you mean?” he demanded, forgetting that she had no reason to answer him truthfully, since they hadn’t made a bargain.

            The faerie woman laughed at him, high and mocking. “Do you wish to offer me something and then ask the question again?”

            Harry snarled in frustration. Malfoy had the knack of negotiating with faeries, but he had proven too openly that he didn’t.

            Malfoy laid a hand on his arm and shook his head. “Not worth it, Potter, even if you could think of something she wanted. Let’s go.”

            Harry nodded and turned to follow him. The hills had turned back into the mountains, luckily, so at least they didn’t have to chase them across the otherworld.

            “You have not removed the iron,” the faerie called after them, her voice taking on a haunting tone, like a bell ringing in the distance. “Even with my claws like this, I can’t cut them off myself.”

            “I wasn’t going to remove it,” Harry said over his shoulder, and waited until the incredulous screech had died before he added, “Maybe you aren’t so good at reading hearts after all.”

            The faerie apparently tried to fly after them, if the sound of beating wings was any indication, but something—the mere heaviness of the manacles, perhaps—dragged her to the ground. Harry chuckled and walked faster, raising his wand. The sky was changing and darkening, so he cast a Lumos that stabbed a path of light out before them. He hoped the sky’s change didn’t mean that hours had passed outside whilst they were trapped in the otherworld.

            “You’re crueler than I thought you were, Potter,” Malfoy said thoughtfully.

            “And you’re braver.” Harry shot a sideways glance at him. Malfoy was walking with his head slightly bowed, his forehead wrinkled as though he had to think long and deeply about Harry leaving the manacles in place. “Unless you knew all along that the faerie’s kiss wouldn’t affect you.”

            Malfoy gave him a glare deep enough that it actually rocked Harry on his heels. “I knew,” he snapped. “But I don’t think you can claim that it takes anything away from my bravery.”

            “No, no, of course not!” Harry said hastily. Bloody hell, I try to pay him a compliment and this is what it winds up as. “That would be stupid. Especially since you’ve been the one taking all the risks and counting up all the achievements since the beginning of this adventure.”

            Malfoy slowed down as he thought about that. Harry had to conceal his surprise. He would have thought the git was always silently measuring his actions and concluding that he deserved more acknowledgment than he received.

            “I have, haven’t I?” Malfoy eventually said, sounding pleased as they moved on through the swishing lilies and tall, lighted strands of individual grass that hissed as they rubbed against their robes. “I was the one who scarred Puck, the one who bargained with the faerie, the one who knew what it meant when Puck transported us to the otherworld—”

            “The one who’s rubbing it in right now,” Harry muttered, but he wasn’t as upset as he pretended to be. Malfoy sounded more positive, more confident. Harry could do with some confidence right now, when he had so little himself.

            It’s the smugness that comes with it which I object to.

            “You can’t deny that I’m as good an Auror as you are,” Malfoy said, looking around as if he sought an audience who would agree with him. “Better, right at the moment.”

            And Harry saw a chance to regain control of the conversation. He smiled. Malfoy, turning around to face him again, actually started and fell backwards a step.

            “Right at the moment, yes,” Harry said amiably, and then stepped past him and walked on towards the three blue stones that concealed the gate, whilst Malfoy spluttered and scrambled after him.

*

            He’s gay—he must be, to resist her so easily when he succumbed to the elf-shot—and he admires me.

            It had been so long since those two thoughts went together for Draco that he had to work hard not to simply stare at Potter with his tongue hanging out.

            But it would have been stupid to do that. Clearly, Potter still delighted in taking him off-guard; he had deliberately done it a few minutes ago. There was nothing to say that he would still return Draco’s admiration when the crisis was past and they had managed to stop Puck.

            If they managed to stop Puck.

            That was another reason he shouldn’t think too much about Potter’s vague attentions, Draco told himself virtuously as they hiked up a steep hill and towards a triple gleam of blue. They were fighting a deadly enemy at the moment. He had to keep his mind on that and not on spinning dreams of—what? Dating Potter? Of all people?

            Don’t make me laugh, he thought, but the retort was less effective when the person he directed it at was himself.

            He shook his head and then turned around, narrowing his eyes. He thought he had heard a laugh behind him. But, of course, hearing things in the otherworld was no guarantee that they actually existed, and all he did was make Potter look at him sideways in curiosity.

            “Nerves,” he said briefly, and Potter nodded and smiled as if he understood, before he turned back to the three blue stones in front of them.

            Draco eyed them. They stuck out of the hill like teeth, he thought, and the center one had a dim white line on it that he could imagine widening into a door that led elsewhere. But no matter how much Potter tapped them with his hand or his wand, hopped around them, kicked them, or sang them the names of faeries—ones he had picked up from Muggle drama, Draco understood incredulously—nothing happened.

            “I don’t reckon you know how to open this thing, do you?” Potter asked at last, turning towards him. His hair was disheveled and his eyes wide with desperation. Draco cursed himself for finding it heart-warming.

            “No,” Draco admitted. “I could have asked the faerie, but that would have cost me another bargain, and I doubt I would have succeeded in tricking her this time.” He hesitated. “I don’t reckon you have any idea what she meant when she said that you would survive the passage through the gate and I wouldn’t?”

            “If I did,” Potter said sharply, staring at him, “I would have done something already to extend the protection to you.”

            Draco swallowed to avoid showing how much that meant to him. Then he said, “It has to have something to do with faerie magic. Have you noticed that all the ones we’ve met so far have eyes the same color as yours, Potter?”

            Potter looked away and kicked at the ground with one foot. “Lots of people must have them,” he muttered.

            Draco shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’ve never met another one.” He paused reflectively, forcing his racing thoughts—which wanted to contemplate Puck, and the lack of time they probably had, and Potter’s attractiveness, and many other irrelevant things—to lie still. “But then again, your mother was a Muggleborn.”

            Potter gave a short, clipped nod, peering suspiciously at Draco as if he thought an insult would come out next.

            Draco thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. “That doesn’t rule out anything, unfortunately,” he muttered. “A faerie could have slept with a Muggle as well as a witch or a wizard, and left a trace of their blood behind.” He paced back and forth in front of Potter, his head bowed. “There has to be something there, and it has to be something we can turn to our advantage.”

            “Does it?” Potter muttered darkly. “It would be like faeries to refer to some ‘advantage’ that doesn’t make a bloody bit of difference.”

            Draco scowled at him over his shoulder. “You’re supposed to be the Gryffindor optimist and the hero around here,” he said. “The shining symbol of the light. The answer to all our hopes.” Potter grimaced, looking as if he’d bitten into a sour apple. He should; Draco had stolen those titles from headlines in the Daily Prophet of the more fawning kind. “So come up with some hopeful perspective on the situation.”

            Potter took a deep breath. “Well, I don’t think my blood is going to do it,” he said, and he made a successful struggle not to sound snappish. Draco was impressed in spite of himself. “But the researchers told us other things. About hawthorn, and the first day of summer, and fertility, and—and things.” His face flushed, which made Draco bite down hard on his lip. There’d been nothing spectacularly naughty in the papers they’d seen, which made him wonder how Potter would react to his own books about Beltane at home.

            “In case it escapes you,” Draco said dryly, “there’s no hawthorn around here, and neither of us is a woman, to get pregnant and hope that the ‘blessing’ for a child conceived on Beltane would transfer to us.”

            “Malfoy!” Potter snapped, and raked a hand through his hair. “I’m trying to be hopeful, and you insist on picking holes in my suggestions.”

            Draco fluttered his lashes at him, beyond interested to see the way that it made Potter flush and his eyes stick to Draco’s lips for a moment. “But Potter,” he said, “I’m only fulfilling my natural role in things, the same way you are. It’s a perfect example of a working ecology.”

            “Eco—” Potter slapped his brow against one palm and shook his head. “I’m not even going to ask how you know that word,” he said.

            “But it’s a very interesting story,” Draco said innocently.

            “Of course it is,” Potter muttered, and began to massage his scar. He stopped suddenly and lowered his hand, looking at it. Draco looked at it, too, but couldn’t see anything so special about it that it should take Potter’s attention away from Draco.

            “I should have remembered that,” Potter breathed. “I really should have, and stopped investigating all the less obvious possibilities first. After all, it always comes back to this bloody scar, doesn’t it?” His voice was sharp, but Draco found it hard to tell if he was angry or not.

            “What does?” Draco demanded, taking a step forwards. “Have you thought of some way that you could survive the gate? What is it?”

            Potter took a deep breath and looked up, his face pale. Draco began to reconsider whether he wanted to know anything about this method of surviving the gate, but then Potter said in a flat voice, “The researchers told us about the holiday being a holiday of in-between things, right? Like most of the Celtic holidays. It’s the dividing line between spring and summer, between a less fertile time and a more fertile one. And the ceremonies often took place at sunset, which is the dividing line between light and dark. And the faeries’ gates are like—borders. Boundaries. Or on borders and boundaries.”

            Slowly, Draco nodded. “All that’s true,” he said. “But I don’t understand why you think that you embody some kind of boundary. Unless you’re going to tell me that because of the scar you’re part good and part evil.”

            Potter didn’t smile, which irritated Draco. He’d thought it one of his better jokes. “I’m in between two different things,” he said. “Life and death.”

            “I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Potter,” Draco said, and stuck his nose in the air, but his heart had begun to pound with ferocious rapidity, and wouldn’t be silenced or struck still. Good thing, too, he thought. Oryou’d be dead. He felt a mad giggle try to rise, and cut it off.

            “I died to get rid of—well, something dangerous that Voldemort had put inside me,” said Potter quietly. “Behind my scar. I couldn’t kill him unless I died first. And I assumed I’d stay dead, but because I sacrificed my life for love, the same way that my mother sacrificed hers for me, what I really did was give protection to people on my side from Voldemort’s spells.” He rubbed his fingers together nervously, as if there was a film on them from his scar. “I died, but I returned. I’m standing on the boundary between life and death.”

            Draco stared at him. “You’re not making any sense,” he said.

            “I think,” said Potter, his voice so low that Draco wouldn’t have heard him at all if he hadn’t been straining his ears by then, “that I have to die again, and then my sacrifice will protect you as we go through the gate.”

            Draco had taken a step away before he had realized he was going to, and drew his wand with the same kind of speed. “You are mad,” he said. His voice had gone very calm; privately, he thought that he had entered shock. “You are mad. I’m going to Stun you, Potter, and take you back to the point where we entered the otherworld now. It’s possible that we could find some way to escape there if we searched.” He aimed carefully at Potter’s right hand. “I would prefer it if you give up your wand without a struggle, but I reckon that’s out of the question?”

            Potter snorted. “You’re an idiot,” he said. “A fine pair we make, the idiot and the madman together.”

            “So you don’t deny it.” Draco edged sideways, having realized only then that his position didn’t allow him the best amount of space to cast a spell. “Then you should have no problem about giving up your wand.”

            “I think,” Potter said, “that I’m still between life and death. The faeries seem to think so, anyway—”

            “They said no such thing.”

            Potter ignored him, which made Draco think of all the stories he had read in his books about people who went mad in the otherworld. It didn’t take much, or so the books had insisted, but Draco hadn’t seen Potter eat any food or drink any water. If simply breathing the air could do it, he should have gone mad at the same time.

            “But I can’t be sure my sacrifice will protect you.” Potter’s eyes were wide and solemn. There was a bit of fear in them, but not nearly as much as Draco thought the situation warranted. “So I’ll need to die again, and for the same reason. And if I’m right—”

            “If you’re right?” Draco was afraid that his voice had risen in an actual shriek, but he cared about more than his dignity right now.

            “Then dying as a sacrifice should allow me to return again. And especially because I’ve already died once.” Potter looked thoughtful for a moment. “I wonder if I can die, normally,” he mused.

            “Let’s find out,” Draco snarled, and flung himself at the imbecile.

*

            Harry had known Malfoy was going to do that. Really, he thought as he danced sideways, lashing out with one foot so that Malfoy caught the blow in his gut and went down, he went through the same Auror training I did, and he’s supposedly a lot more subtle and cunning, if the way he bargained with the faerie’s any indication. I don’t understand how he can be so obvious.

            He summoned Malfoy’s wand with a casual Disarming Charm, and shook his head when Malfoy glared at him. “You’ll have it back,” he said. “I rather imagine that it’s going to drop from my hand when I fall over.” His voice emerged with light playfulness, and Harry blinked, startled at himself. He hadn’t known he could do that. He had thought his heart should be beating the way it had when he walked to his death in the Forest.

            Well, this time I know I’ll survive.

            I hope I’ll survive.

            I have a slight chance.

            “Don’t joke,” Malfoy said, his voice so deep with meaning that Harry had to gasp to keep from flinching. Malfoy leaned forwards, his elbows braced in the dirt, as if he thought he had a real chance to stand up and snatch his wand back from Harry before Harry could stop him. “You have no idea what this means. You can’t possibly do this and come back alive.”

            “That’s rather the point,” Harry said cheerfully, and then lifted his own wand so that it pointed at his face. He considered the best way to do this, and discarded the possibility of the Killing Curse. He’d already resisted it twice; he didn’t think it would harm him now. Besides, he didn’t want to be arrested for casting one of the Unforgivables when he came out of the otherworld.

            That statement stinks of optimism, he decided, but he had other things to concern him, such as whether he’d be able to choose an appropriate spell. He frowned in concentration.

            About that point Malfoy tackled him around the waist and knocked him to the ground. Harry rolled over with a spat curse, trapping Malfoy’s wand under his body. He hoped he hadn’t broken it, but changed his mind when Malfoy slapped him, an open-handed blow that snapped his face to the side and almost stunned him.

            “Fool,” Malfoy panted, trying to wrestle the holly wand away from Harry and not even seeming to realize what he was saying, “bastard, idiot, git, prat, attention-seeking hero—” He spoke like the last word was the worst of the lot.

            Harry stared up at him. Malfoy’s hair floated free around his face, which was flushed red from the force of his emotions. Spittle rained from his lips down onto Harry’s upturned cheeks, and his words were incoherent already. His eyes blazed with a combination of anger, anxiety, disbelief, and fear.

            Harry reached up, snagged one hand firmly behind Malfoy’s head, and dragged him down to kiss him.

            Malfoy made a surprised, indignant sound, and Harry lifted his legs so that they clasped Malfoy around the hips and kissed him again. Malfoy gulped—apparently he had decided to deal with the intrusion of Harry’s tongue in his mouth by swallowing it—and then yelped and bit and clawed backwards. By the time he stopped moving, he was crouched seven feet away with a hand poised at the corner of his mouth as if he couldn’t decide whether to wipe it or not.

            “Why did you do that?” he demanded.

            Harry smiled at him, winked, and said, “I wanted to know what you tasted like, one time, in case I didn’t get the chance to again. Farewell, and let’s hope I’ll see you on the other side.” He aimed his wand at his heart, thinking all the while of the taste and heat of Malfoy’s mouth—no, Draco, call him Draco—and then spoke the spell he had settled on.

            The Blood-Constricting Spell did nothing more than squeeze a couple of the largest veins or arteries in the body for a few moments, preventing the passage of potentially dangerous substances through the body. But Harry had aimed his wand at the one place they were told never to aim it in Auror training, and he kept it up for more than a few moments.

            Even the most basic spells are deadly, he thought hazedly as his mind began to cloud and a crushing force settled on his chest. I wonder if they realized that when they started declaring spells Dark Arts centuries ago—

            And then he dismissed the thought, both because he didn’t know if this would work if he had negative thoughts in mind and because that wasn’t what he wanted to be thinking when he died, and went back to the memory of Draco’s face.

            It followed him down into the darkness.

*

            Draco stared at Potter’s body, at the way it trembled and convulsed for a moment, and his left arm shook, and his whole body rolled to the side as if pushed. His wand fell from his hand.

            Draco’s wand rolled out from under the body with a tiny bumping noise, an anticlimax in the middle of the most final and painful moment Draco had ever known.

            He snatched it up and promptly aimed it at Potter’s heart. He didn’t know exactly what had been cast, because the bastard had done it nonverbally, but he could guess, and he could know, and then he could make it work, and then he could bring Potter back, he could, and everyone would be grateful to him and awed at finding magic that could counteract death—

            His first attempt to cast made no sense, because the tears got in the way.

            He tried again, and Potter’s body arched off the ground, then fell limply back. Draco stared. He could sometimes “feel” objects he was trying to manipulate through his magic, and at the moment Potter’s body felt utterly empty, stiff with the blocky sensation of death and nothing else.

            As though it had never contained life at all.

            No. No, that’s not right. I know that’s not right. Draco cast again, the spell that was supposed to restart a temporarily stopped heart, all sorts of nonsense babbling in the back of his head. During Auror training, they’d received basic medical advice, both from Healers and from an Auror who knew about Muggle things. She’d said something about the amount of time it took the brain to die. Draco thought it was four minutes. If he could bring Potter around again before four minutes had passed, then he might have brain damage, but he’d live.

            If you haven’t lost four minutes already, what with bawling like this!

            Draco ground his teeth and tried again, and then again. Each time, Potter’s body flopped back and not a stutter of motion came from his chest, and Draco’s “sense” of him through the magic got fainter and fainter.

            Finally, he had to admit that there was nothing else he could do, and he crouched in silence beside Potter, hand on his chest. He stared at his face, at the staring eyes and the way his mouth had formed into a faint smile, as if he had died thinking about something that made him happy.

            Was it me? Then Draco stiffened and forced the treacherous thought away. What had happened between him and Potter ought not to have happened at all, clearly. And he would do whatever was necessary to get rid of it, ignore it, deny that it had happened—

            Even if it was the memory that occurred to him for the rest of his life, when he was sitting in Azkaban for murdering Potter, because of course that was the way Weasley and Granger and the rest of them would see it.

            Then he threw back his head and began to laugh, even as the tears flowed again. As if that will happen! With Puck and his Queen taking over the world, what Weasley or Granger or Shacklebolt think won’t matter much.

*

            Harry looked around. This time, he stood only in the middle of silvery mist, and no matter how hard he concentrated, neither King’s Cross nor Dumbledore would form out of the fog.

            Harry found himself oddly disappointed. He’d been looking forwards to seeing Dumbledore again, and asking a few last questions.

            He shook his head, and told himself not to be ridiculous. Then he started looking again, this time seeking some sign that he really had invoked the sacrificial protection for Draco by dying like that.

            He saw a smear, dark as afterbirth, in the distance, on what could have been either a floor or simple air, and curled his lips back from his teeth. All that remains of the piece of Voldemort that was inside me. I hope.

            But what’s supposed to help me get back to my own body and my own life, if Dumbledore isn’t here to tell me how?

            Maybe I’m not supposed to go back.

            Harry shuddered deeply when he thought that, but shook his head stubbornly. It was true that he’d done this without knowing if it would work—because how would you test something like that?—but he wasn’t giving up before it was clear he had no choice. He started walking, or drifting, through the silvery fog, to find something he could use.

            The fog parted and then closed in again around him, brushing against his skin with cool fingers and what sounded like taunting whispers. Harry gritted his teeth and drifted on, wishing he had something solid to strike his feet against. It was hard to march determinedly when you had to do it without a sound.

            Then he saw something glowing golden up ahead, the light of it piercing the fog. Harry hurried towards it, and stooped over it when he realized that it was lying on the same floor he’d seen the stain on. Now his feet thumped on the floor satisfactorily, and he grunted appreciation under his breath as he lifted the glowing thing.

            It was a cloak, as light and finely-spun as his Invisibility Cloak. It seemed the glow around it, rather than the cloak itself, was the heavy thing. Harry turned it sideways and tried to slip it around himself, wondering if it would guard his health on the way back through the fog, but it slid off his shoulders like water. Harry clucked his tongue and stood studying the cloak for a moment, wondering what to do with it.

            Well, it looks like it’s made to fit a man, but what if it’s not meant for me?

            And then Harry started smiling, because he was fairly sure he knew what the cloak was for, after all, and it didn’t make sense that he would be the one wearing it, when he was the one who had some chance of surviving without protection.

            Calmly now, as if he’d always known what to do, he held up the cloak and shook it hard. The golden light sprang off, quivered on the silvery floor for a moment, formed into a hoop, and then rolled forwards, sending golden beams stabbing ahead.

            Harry followed, and tried to ignore the way the fog still clung to him and the floor sometimes sloped in impossible directions. He had come to a place that made no sense in order to do what he had to do, to protect someone who deserved protection, and now he was on the way home.

            He wondered absently what Draco’s mouth would taste like the next time he kissed it.

*

            Draco cursed softly. Something was wrong. Each time he tried to Levitate Potter’s body so that he could take it back to the point where they’d entered the otherworld, it flopped to the ground again. It was as though it was so heavy that his magic couldn’t lift it.

            Or, more likely, your own degree of anger and panic is making it hard for you to keep a grip on your spells.

            Draco took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

            He always regretted that, afterwards. It meant he missed the first signs of Potter’s soul returning to his body. Potter argued later that it couldn’t have been that special, since Draco saw almost everything else, but Draco disagreed; he’d treasured the first sight of anything since he was a child.

            A golden glow hit his eyelids, and he snapped his eyes open in dread, thinking that one of the faeries must have seen them. Or, if the sun was rising here, that might indicate that a great deal of time had passed in their own world and they were too late to stop Puck.

            Instead, he saw the golden glow surrounded Potter’s body. It slipped out of his fingers and oozed out of his hair. It flopped sideways, shivered, and congealed, and Draco realized that he was looking at a cloak, or at least light in the shape of a cloak. It had a cavernous hood that he thought could have hidden two faces, and thick, elaborate folds around the bottom.

            And then Potter sighed, and stirred, and groaned, and sat up, rubbing his head. Draco transferred his stare to Potter’s face. His scar had an edging of golden light like the stuff that had formed the cloak, but already it was fading.

            Potter opened his eyes. He caught sight of Draco and grinned shakily. “Hi,” he said. “I went to find what you need to get through that gate alive. Miss me?”

            Draco punched him.

            It was a sudden impulse; he didn’t know he was going to do it until it had already happened. Potter yelped and flopped back on the ground again, holding his broken nose. Draco stood over him, breathing hard.

            “Idiot,” he said, and picked up the long list of names he had called Potter right before they kissed. Potter blinked at him and went on blinking, even after he picked up his wand and cast Episkeyon his nose. Then he picked up the cloak, shook it over his arms, and offered it to Draco. Draco lifted a hand in warning. He hadn’t finished all the names he wanted to call Potter yet, even though he was running out of things he hadn’t said.

            Potter sighed, stood, and swept the cloak around Draco’s shoulders. Draco gasped as a chill tingle cut right through him, starting in his marrow and radiating out to his neck and ears and eyes. He tried to shake his hands free of it, but his fingers had curled involuntarily, and he couldn’t make them open.

            “I thought it would fit,” Potter said quietly, satisfied.

            “What are you talking about?” Draco demanded, and lifted his shoulders so that he could shrug off the cloak. The chill had died, but that didn’t mean he wanted to wear the thing.

            Potter clamped his hands on Draco’s shoulders, said, “That’s what’s going to keep you safe on the passage through the gate,” and then whirled around so that he faced the center stone. A wild, reckless smile passed over his face. “I should have known it would be just like the first test I ever faced on getting into the wizarding world,” he muttered.

            And then, to Draco’s horror, he ran right at the stones, towing Draco behind him like a bouncing puppet. Just as they reached the central boulder, he whirled around, dragged Draco into his arms, folded the cloak all the way around Draco’s body, and kicked and dropped them into—

*

            Somewhere else.

            Harry had thought, instinctively, that he had to run at the boulder as if he were running at the wall to get onto Platform 9 ¾. That was the one thing they hadn’t done, and although the tapping and kicking and rapping with wands had “proven” the stone solid, Harry had thought it was possible that a faerie glamour would hold up to such subtle probing but not to a charge.

            But now they weren’t in another place, the way that they would have been if they had gone through the wall at King’s Cross Station. Instead, they tumbled through glittering fire, silver and scented and harmonious by turns, that coiled about their legs and began trying to eat into them.

            Harry at once draped himself more fully around Draco, making sure that every part of him was shielded either by the golden cloak or by Harry’s own body. He twined his legs with Draco’s, wrapped his arms around Draco’s waist, and forced Draco to tuck his head into the crook between Harry’s shoulder and neck. Draco made a few weak struggles to get away, but then he shuddered and clung more tightly.

            Perhaps it was because the music had begun by then.

            The fire had been harmonious before, but now it actually sang, swinging madly back and forth in Harry’s ears between pure melody that made tears streak down his face and shrieking fury and loathing. He heard voices he knew in the flames, Ron shouting and Hermione laughing and Voldemort chanting the Killing Curse. There was Snape demanding that Harry look at him, so he could have the sight of Lily’s eyes one last time, and there was Dumbledore bellowing with pain as he drank the poison that guarded the fake locket Horcrux. The Dursleys abused him, Cedric gasped and stuttered in death, and his mother screamed as she sacrificed herself so Harry could live. All that was there, the sounds not piling on top of each other but drilling through each other, until Harry was hearing them all at once and could feel his sanity teetering.

            And then there was the other way, the other slide. The music he had sometimes woken hearing in his dreams. The gorgeous, subtle scent of perfumed flowers that he had dreamed about when he was forced to tend Aunt Petunia’s distinctly ordinary gardens. Phoenix song, Fawkes’s lament for Dumbledore as he flew around and around the school. A pair of arms encircling him, warm and strong: one of Mrs. Weasley’s hugs. The look on Ron’s face when he had stabbed the locket with the Sword of Gryffindor. The sharp glance Harry had received from the first Auror instructor who respected his abilities for themselves, instead of because he was the Chosen One.

            All there. All present. All making their way into his body, scraping him up and down, tearing him apart.

            This is why the faerie said Draco wouldn’t survive, Harry thought dimly, and coiled himself even tighter around Draco, trying not to let a single part of him escape unshielded, though he didn’t know how much difference that would actually make if the fire could pierce everywhere. Itwould call him to life, and call him to death, and tear him apart trying to make him comprehend everything at once.

            But no matter how hard the fire ripped at Harry, it kept falling back from a barrier within him, which Harry experienced as something like a steel plate dividing him in two. Whenever his mind wavered and almost tipped over the brink, it righted itself again, and Harry got a moment to breathe before the sensations came back.

            And Draco, too, in his arms, gasped and wriggled in surprise, but he didn’t scream. The golden cloak sparked continually, as though blows were hitting it from all sides and it was driving them off. When Harry could be sure he was seeing what was in front of him and not what he imagined or remembered, he saw the bright gleams of light the cloak shed like stars falling away from a sheaf of golden universe. A nebula or whatever they were called, he thought hazily. He hadn’t done well at Astronomy.

            He folded his arms more tightly around Draco, bowed his head, and braced himself for an impact he felt was coming, though he didn’t know how or when, or how it could compare to the impacts striking them from every side and at every moment—

            And then they landed, and Harry felt an enormous quake rip through him, fighting his position between life and death, trying to shove him out of his narrow standing on the boundary. The thoughts rippled through him so quickly he didn’t understand them fully. He didn’t think he had to try. His body contracted in rejection, and Harry snarled, thought of Draco, and Draco’s smile, and Draco’s kiss, and dug deep within himself to throw the faerie magic away.

            And then they crouched on green smooth grass, in the light of the setting sun, with hawthorn trees all around them, and Draco lifted his head and stared, dazed, at Harry, as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or die.

*

            I can’t believe that he died to save me from—that. Draco shut his eyes and panted, unable to remember most of what had happened during the trip through the gate. He thought his mind was working to keep him from remembering it.

            Maybe his death had nothing to do with it at all, argued the stubborn part of himself. Ormaybe he didn’t really die. The way he returned would suggest it.

            Either way, Draco wasn’t about to argue aloud with Potter at the moment—especially when he sat up and the golden cloak slid away from his shoulders in tatters. Draco swallowed and touched a finger to it, only to watch a scrap of “cloth” curl away from his touch with a hiss. The passage through the gate had damaged the cloak, an incredibly powerful piece of magic from the way it chilled him, and it might have done the same to his body if he had gone without protection.

            Somehow, Potter had produced this protection for him. And he had shielded Draco with his body in the fall through the fire, too. Draco thought he owed him for that, no matter how he’d done it.

            “Thank you,” he mumbled, and cast a sideways glance at Potter, wondering if he would gloat when he heard the words.

            Amazingly, Potter only smiled and reached out his own hand to smooth the hair back from Draco’s forehead. Draco thought he would say something, but the smiling and staring continued, to the point where he was uneasy.

            Then Potter leaned forwards and gently, insistently, kissed him again.

            Draco didn’t know whether he would try to bite or not until he found himself opening his mouth and welcoming Potter in. Potter made a soft contented noise and increased the depth of the kiss, propping himself forwards on his hands. Draco curled his tongue slowly around Potter’s. His own deep, shuddering moan surprised him.

            I’m allowing this because the kiss is so different from the fire we went through, he justified it to himself whilst he lifted his hands to clasp Potter’s shoulders. I need gentleness just now. Protection. Sweetness—

            Potter leaned closer still, so that Draco wavered and fell to his back, and the sweetness turned and changed. Abruptly it was every bit as keen and cutting as the sensations he had felt when he traveled through the fiery gate, but Draco only wanted more of it no matter how bad it was for him. He shifted, meaning to lift a leg and slide it away so that Potter would know he was welcome to bring his weight down.

            And then Potter pulled back, smiled at him with dazed eyes, and said, “I certainly hope we can resume this later, because right now we have a faerie invasion to stop.”

            It should have acted like a bucket of cold water on Draco’s libido, but it didn’t. Instead, he found himself tilting his head back, licking his lips, and saying, “I’m going to hold you to that, Potter,” whilst the sweetness simmered back into a low burn.

            “I’ll hold myself to it.” Potter’s deep voice held the slightest hint of a growl as he ran one hand around the back of Draco’s neck, cupping and pressing his fingers into specific places that made Draco arch. “No way I could forget it.” Then he made a harsh throat-clearing noise and said, “I think you said something about your wand’s wood coming from a particular hawthorn grove? A grove that we need to get to to stop Puck?”

            “Yes.” Draco told himself he sounded ridiculous with his tongue so thick in his mouth, and sat up, keeping his gaze away from Potter. His wand jumped and stung his hand when he gripped it, then spun like a Muggle compass needle to point the way. Draco smiled grimly and left behind thoughts of love for thoughts of war. “West,” he whispered. “We need to Apparate to the west.”

            Potter gave him a fierce smile and pulled him to his feet. Draco found himself glorying in the easy strength of his arms, in the way that Potter’s eyes—bright with human passions that no faerie would ever know—focused on him, and in the way that Potter nodded in response to his words, face alive with his own thoughts.

            “Then let’s go,” said Potter. He stepped closer to Draco and lowered his voice. “I find myself rather impatient with both Puck and his Queen for disrupting the normal business of life.”

            “They’ll do a lot more than that if his Queen breaks loose,” Draco retorted, but he was smiling as he took Potter’s arm for a Side-Along Apparition.

            I’ll put it aside when we find Puck. I’ll manage to fight with all my attention on the battle. But it is rather appealing to be the center of attention for someone who would die for me.

            And who kisses the way I always imagined a hero should kiss.

*

            They came out of the last Apparition with a sharp crack that left Harry blinking and wondering what had gone wrong. Not that anything had; there was a grove of hawthorn trees ahead of them, in a glory of white bloom and with an unusual height that made Harry instinctively certain they had come to the right place.

            It was just that coming out of Apparition normally sounded like a clapping pair of hands, and this sounded like gunshots he’d heard on the telly. It prepared him for something to go wrong.

            Something did.

            Harry heard a slight whine above his head, like a bird with a throat problem. He ducked, and the whirling plate of bronze that had been meant to scalp him dashed past and exploded on the ground near them, the shrapnel becoming a cloud of glittering fragments that promptly flew back towards them.

            Harry lifted a layered Shield Charm, casting Protegotwice in a row. It turned out to be a good thing he did, because the bronze fragments tore through the first Shield Charm and hit the second hard enough to make it vibrate and crack. Then they fell to the ground—harmlessly, Harry hoped—and Harry whirled around to find the attacker, automatically dragging Draco behind him. Draco said something shapeless about how Harry had better not bloody try to protect him, when he could fight as well as anyone, and stepped up to his side. Harry tipped his head in acknowledgment and apology.

            Puck faced them, in faerie form this time instead of as a donkey and taller than before, with blond hair cascading to his waist and glowing like fire amid the whiter flames of the hawthorn blossoms, his green eyes mad with laughter.

            “I should have known,” he said. “And you should have known. There are two minutes to sunset, and at sunset my Queen comes through the gate.”

            For a moment, panic seized Harry and tried to freeze his feet to the ground. But Draco shoved at him, and hissed into his ear, “I think he’s lying. The magic in the air isn’t strong enough. And if it’s true, then we’re wasting minutes when we could be taking care of her standing here.”

            Harry shook his head sharply—he shouldn’t have needed Draco to remind him of that—and aimed his wand. If he could conjure iron manacles on Puck the way he had on the woman in the otherworld, then—

            But Puck skipped sideways before he could try, of course, and then crouched on all fours and began to grow. His back and sides shimmered with dazzling blue. Harry flung his hand over his eyes, squinting. He could hear the deep breath and smell the fire-tinted air, though, and he knew what was happening.

            When he dropped his hand, he wasn’t surprised to find an enormous blue dragon, all his scales edged with gold, slinking slowly towards them. His neck trailed on the ground in folds of flapping skin and coiling muscle, and one of his shimmering, slightly curved white horns could have spitted both Harry and Draco and never slowed down. His mouth parted slightly; Harry could see fire glowing like an ember at the back of his throat.

            “That’s not illusion, is it?” he breathed to Draco.

            “I would say that it’s shapeshifting,” Draco replied, with a voice that quivered with emotion and tension just below the surface. Harry thought at least one of the emotions was probably suppressed hysteria.

            Harry faced the dragon as it darted a tongue out. Of course they couldn’t stand up to the blast of its fire, but they didn’t have to. They would figure out some other way to fight it. And in the meantime, he thought he might try what Draco had tried with the woman, using flattering, riddling language to catch Puck’s attention.

            “You don’t frighten me,” he said. “Do you want to know why?”

            Draco’s hand clenched down on Harry’s arm, but Harry didn’t understand why. After all, they were probably as good as dead anyway whether they taunted Puck or not. Then the dragon’s head rose, and the tongue flickered out, and a sharp hiss mutated into words that Harry could understand.

            “Parseltongue. You speak Parseltongue.” Puck slinked closer still, until his head swayed a few feet away and breath reeking of sulfur moved over Harry’s face. “How is it that I did not know of this? How is it that you did not lose the gift when the one who gifted you with it died?”

            Well. I got his attention, at least. Harry shoved away the idea that he didn’t think dragons spoke Parseltongue; maybe natural dragons didn’t, but Puck clearly did. In the meantime, he had to worry about fascinating and enchanting Puck.

“There are many things you don’t know about me,” he said, and curled his lip. “We came through a gate that should have killed Draco, but I died and brought back a golden cloak from death that gave him the strength to survive it. Did you expect that? Did you know that I stand halfway between life and death, in the same way that I stand halfway between humans and snakes?”

Draco swallowed beside him. Harry thought it was probably because he didn’t know exactly what Harry was saying in Parseltongue, and felt briefly sorry for him. He moved a step backwards, drawing both Draco and Puck with him. Puck’s head wavered, now, and his tongue flickered constantly, and his green eyes never left Harry’s face. Harry noted absently that he must have been lying about his Queen coming through the gate in two minutes; she would have been here by now if that was true.

“Halfway between humans and snakes?” Puck said slowly. “That can be true for no one save your dead Dark Lord, and he was human in all the ways that mattered.” A sharp frisson of contempt scrolled along the word for human that Harry had never heard a snake give before. Of course, that was probably because most snakes feared humans as creatures that could crush them.

            “Voldemort was wrong about his own resemblance,” Harry said, in an arrogant voice that he was astounded to realize he possessed. “He was only like a snake physically, and that wasn’t near enough.” He was speaking one of the wilder stories that had run in the Prophet about him once he finished the Battle of Hogwarts, and he was wagering that Puck would likely be as fascinated by it as the people who had read it were—certainly more interested in it than in the truth. “I’m like a snake spiritually. Part of Voldemort’s soul was within me for a time. That left a mark on my spirit.”

            Puck sat down, rearranging his haunches beneath him with a motion that shook the hill like subtle thunder. “I have never heard of such a thing,” he said gravely, but his eyes never wavered and he hadn’t even looked at the gate, which glowed furiously now in the light of sunset. Harry told himself that he hadn’t seen a flicker of gold and green in the center of the gate, because even if he had there wasn’t much he could do about it now, and brought his gaze back to Puck.

            “Of course not,” he said. “Why would you? This is the first time it’s ever happened.”

            Puck’s head darted out quite suddenly. Draco choked back a cry, if the way that his fingers dug into Harry’s skin was any indication. Harry held still, and sure enough, the forked tongue only caressed him, touching his skin, his hair, and his eyelids, before pulling back.

            “Something new.” Puck’s voice was reverent, and his head turned to the side. Harry had to hold his breath against the brimstone reek by now. “Do you know how long we have sought something new in the mortal world, Harry Potter, and how rarely we ever find it? We are immortal. We have seen everything.” He parted his jaws in what was probably meant to be a grin, his fangs shining, as bright and nearly as long as his horns. “But not this. But not you.”

            Harry smiled back, and abruptly knew how he was going to stop Puck. He wished he had had more time to look at the bindings in the cage from which Puck broke free, but, well, he’d had good luck improvising before.

            “Would you like to know another new thing?” he asked, lowering his voice.

            Puck bobbed his head like a kitten following a piece of string, and lay down, stretching his forepaws out before him and making Harry and Draco have to retreat about fifteen yards. Harry was grateful. It might give them a few more seconds, because it would slow Puck in getting up.

            “I’m in love with Draco Malfoy,” Harry whispered confidentially. “And no Potter has ever been in love with a Malfoy before.”

            He was taking a chance, going on his incomplete remembrance of the Black tapestry and a few other representations of pure-blood genealogies he’d seen, but it seemed true; Puck’s eyes flared deeper and wider. “Show it to me,” he said. “There were lovers, once, in the forest, who did not love the right ones…love is most interesting when opposed. Show me, show me, Harry Potter!” His voice built to a roar that nearly sent Harry and Draco off their feet.

            Harry turned towards Draco, cradled his face in his hands, and smiled at him as tenderly as he could. Draco stared into his eyes in silence, his body tense. Harry knew he had every right to resist the kiss, since he couldn’t understand a word of the conversation Harry and Puck had just had.

            But in another moment he relaxed, and tilted his head back in acceptance.

            The trust in Draco’s eyes meant more to Harry than the taste of his mouth.

*

            Draco didn’t know exactly what Harry had said, but he knew that it held Puck captivated and staring for the moment, and that was enough for him. And then when Harry began kissing him, from the way the dragon went on staring, he reckoned Harry had made an offer to display their “love” somehow.

            The dragon made low, complicated rumbling sounds. Draco tried to ignore the feeling that he was on display and concentrate on Harry’s stroking tongue and the hand running lightly up and down his back, coaxing his arsecheeks apart but not lingering, speeding up to stroke along his spine again.

            It was easier than he had expected. This was a man he had admired before, as good a flyer as he was and—though Draco would only admit this in the deepest, darkest depth of his private thoughts—a better Auror. And this was the man who had died to save him, if only temporarily, and who had pulled him from the Fiendfyre, and who hadn’t made a fuss about owing his mother a life-debt, and had even listened to Draco once he discovered Draco knew how to handle faeries.

            There was no one else who could have fulfilled those roles in his life, and still fewer people that Draco would not have resented for doing it. He lifted his own hand to cradle Harry’s jaw, and heard someone sigh. It irritated him that he couldn’t tell whether it was his own doing, or Harry’s, or Puck’s.

            He entered so fully into the kiss, absorbing the salty taste and the quick motions of Harry’s tongue across his, that he didn’t catch what else Harry was doing until his wand flicked through several quick motions, and that was the end of the spell.

            Puck gave the loudest cry anyone had ever uttered, in pain and surprise.

            It drove Draco to his knees, hands clutching his ears. He stared in disbelief. A sheet of solid iron covered Puck from head to tail, conjured from nowhere and clinging closely to all his limbs. He raged and shook and spread his hanging wings, but the iron simply bulged around them. He roared, and part of the iron turned as red as a phoenix, but still it stayed up instead of melting.

            Draco thought of the magical power that it must have taken Harry to do that, and abruptly the erection between his legs was a throbbing necessity instead of a distraction from the kiss. He took a deep breath and forced himself to scramble to his feet, ignoring the brief stab of hurt that Harry had been able to manage such a complicated spell when he was engaged in kissing. The strength of that spell made up for it, and when Draco could finally have that attention fixed all on himself…

            “That won’t hold him for long,” he said tensely.

            “I know.” Harry’s voice was sharp and quick, despite his swollen lips and the way he tossed his hair out of his eye as he faced the hawthorn gate. Draco looked at it, too, and realized that his wand was as cold as the iron in his hand and that green and golden fire was stabbing in bars through the blossoming may-trees, as if they looked into some strange dawn in a green sky—like the sky of the otherworld. “What do you know about sealing a gate? I don’t think the researchers said anything about it. They assumed we would bind Puck before this could happen, or lose.” His words were rushing together in his agitation, and he ran a hand through his hair again and again.

            “Not much,” Draco admitted dryly. “Gates are usually in in-between places, boundaries of sorts. They open most often at twilight and at dawn, between the night and day.” He was shouting to be heard now, since the sound of Puck fighting against his iron prison was growing louder and louder. “On a day like this, a powerful day in the Celtic calendar, the magic opening them will be so strong that I don’t think we can hold it back.”

            Harry spun to face him and grasped both his hands. “But the researchers said something about human celebrations of Beltane replacing the faerie ones,” he said, and this time Draco really had to concentrate to make out the different words. “What about that? Can we hold a celebration of our own? Can’t we take advantage of Beltane magic?”

            Once he understood Harry, Draco began to smile.

            “We can indeed,” he said softly, and raised his wand. “Incendio!”

            One of the hawthorn trees took fire, and Draco, with another snap of his wrist, severed its roots, so that it fell over. The grass caught, then, and the flame that sprang up was not natural. Blue-white, lovely, swaying from side to side in deliberate dance-like motions, it outshone the green and golden dawn coming through the gate.

            Draco laughed in triumph. A wind spun away from the flame and through his hair, and he smelled something like the Manor’s apple gardens at high noon on a brilliant summer day. And why not?Beltane was the beginning of summer.

            “The power is ours,” he said, and turned to hold a hand out to Harry. “We only have to show that we accept it—”

            Harry yanked Draco into his arms with a ferocity which astonished him, though after a moment, as they rested chest to chest, he found nothing to complain about. Holding Harry’s gaze, and smiling all the while, he cast a spell that would surround them and their fire with a circle of iron and salt. Salt had sometimes been used as an effective weapon against faeries who wanted to steal children; a ring of salt around a cradle would force them to flee.

            Harry wrapped an arm around his neck and pulled him closer still. Draco struggled to make a choice between drowning in the kiss and breathing, then reminded himself that you couldn’t die from holding your breath and decided that going temporarily unconscious was a fair price to pay for the warmth now vibrating between his groin and his mouth.

            Harry coaxed him lower and lower, sometimes tilting him, sometimes falling with him, until Draco rested on his back in the grass. He heard the fire sing madly, like many bells clashing together. He smiled and lifted a leg so that Harry could have easier access to the trousers he was trying to remove. Draco’s outer robes were already gone.

            Sweat soaked him, Harry’s eyes shone like a faerie’s as they locked on his, the apple-smelling wind swirled around him, and the fire sang and sang and sang.

            The sound of tearing cloth, and he was naked. Draco uttered a laughing protest, but Harry was already fumbling at his clothes, a fierce frown of concentration on his face, and paid no attention. Draco watched him in amusement for a moment—desperation was making it impossible for Harry to work the buttons—and then rendered him naked with a single flick of his wand.



            “Bloody useful spell,” Harry said, tossing his head back. His hair was dripping sweat down his neck and chest, sweat that gleamed with fire. “Shame you couldn’t have used it earlier.”

            Draco began to sneer, but rather lost it when Harry lay down on top of him, bringing their chests together. Draco arched violently, then brought his hands up to feel at the curve of Harry’s shoulders. He worked down to the curves of his arse, which he grasped and squeezed and viciously pinched. Harry huffed a warning to be careful, then lost it and groaned into Draco’s ear.

            I knew he’d like some level of pain, Draco thought smugly. Anyonewho charges into danger as often as he does must be a masochist.

            Harry panted, his breath washing along Draco’s jaw. The wind smelled now of peaches as well as apples, and Draco thought he could taste peaches in his mouth, the fruit breaking apart and the juice sliding down his chin, sticky-sweet.

            And the fire sang and sang and sang.

            Harry sat up, sliding his legs down on either side of Draco's. Draco closed his eyes and tried to decide if he liked Harry nearly crushing Draco's erection between his arse and Draco's thighs.

            Then Harry smiled, and lifted his hand in the air, and brought it down with his fingers covered with sticky gel. Draco blinked. Had that been wandless magic, or Harry merely calling on the enchantment of Beltane?

            It could have been either, really. By now, the sensation of fire was everywhere; a slow burning had begun in Draco’s cock and groin, as if he had already reached the brink of orgasm. The fire’s song had varied and split, so that now it sounded like three or five choruses singing from different directions. Draco could see odd lights from the corners of his eyes, which he hoped was their circle of iron and salt burning to protect them rather than the gate opening wider to admit the Faerie Queen.

            Harry slid his fingers slowly into Draco’s arse.

            And the world tumbled and changed.

            Draco was lying flat on the ground, gaping into Harry’s eyes. He was floating. He was tumbling slowly through space, spinning sideways, over and over again. He could feel the fingers in his arse, stretching him. He could feel the fire playing over his skin, consuming him. He could feel himself smothered in apples and peaches. He was cradled by downy soft leaves.

            A hand rested on his forehead, branding him. Draco knew without asking that it was the hand of the Faerie Queen.

            And then Harry slid into his arse, as slowly as he had inserted the original finger, and Draco arched his back with greed and drove his heels into Harry’s legs and urged him on, faster, faster, faster, finally with something to focus on.

*

            Harry didn’t know exactly when the first blue-white fire had spread out, engulfing them in a circle of flame that burned where Draco had cast the salt and iron. He didn’t know, from one moment to another, how the wind could change so that he smelled fruit, then new-mown grass, then baking bread, then sun-warmed amber. He didn’t know why Puck, whose smoking iron prison had fallen to shards a few moments ago, hadn’t attacked them yet.

            But he did know that the tight squeezing pressure of Draco’s arse was more delicious than anything he had ever felt in his life.

            He looked down, and Draco spun beneath him on a golden plate that changed the next moment to silver grass, and then to a disk with no railing and no straps, skimming through space. But he himself was always the same, his hair shining and his face shining and his lips widening into a smile that danced on the edge of laughter.

            Harry smiled and bent to kiss him, and then gasp-groaned at the way that that nudged his cock forwards. Draco groaned languidly, the way Harry thought he might groan on rising from bed on a morning when he had nothing to do, and then hooked his legs up and around Harry’s waist. Harry seized them and raised them higher, until they rested on his shoulders. He thought vaguely that they should have been uncomfortable—when he’d heard from other men about doing this, they said they always used cushions—but since the ground Draco rested on was constantly changing anyway, he didn’t think he’d worry about it.

            From the furrow on Draco’s brow, though, he was worrying about something. Harry frowned at him inquiringly.

            “Why aren’t you moving yet?” Draco demanded, in his snottiest tone.

            Harry laughed, and began to do so. The golden plate, which was beneath them again, rocked for a moment, and then steadied. Draco’s legs quivered, then firmed up as if he intended to strangle Harry with them. The smell of the wind all around them leaped higher in the direction of fruit, then subsided into sunlight on grass again.

            And the song was everywhere.

            Harry rocked, and Draco moaned. Harry pushed, and Draco gasped. Harry thrust, and Draco wailed.

            And the song was everywhere.

            A symphony, Harry thought, smiling down into Draco’s face, shaking his head and sending drops of sweat flying that looked like drops of fire. We’re creating a symphony.

            Abruptly, something tore his attention away from Draco and made him look up. That was literally what it felt like, as though his attention was a rope that someone had detached from Draco and tied to themselves.

            Puck crouched at the edge of the ring of fire, still in dragon form, watching. His tongue lolled across the grass, and his green gaze was bright and somehow bent inwards, as though his eyes had become long tunnels of mirrors. He stared at Harry for a moment, then pointed beyond the burning circle with his tongue. Harry’s attention followed the gesture.

            In a halo of white flame, of gold and green and the blue of a heavenly summer sky, stood the Faerie Queen.

            Titania, Harry thought, with the same hazy recollection of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that had produced the name Puck. OrGloriana, maybe. But she’s the Queen.

            She didn’t need a crown for him to see that—though in fact she wore one, a crown of sculpted indigo and lilac flowers wound over her pointed ears. Her gown was green, ornamented with golden lace and lilies, and displayed one white shoulder. Her hair fell as a long sheet of flame around her shoulders and to her ankles, a draping curtain of gold and red with subtle lights of orange and white and blue moving through it. Her hands were clasped in front of her; her fingers were too long, as if they had extra joints to them. Her face was smooth and pale, her eyes greener than those of his mother when she had come to him as a shade.

            She was the most beautiful woman Harry had ever seen. It had nothing to do with finding women attractive or not. She simply had beauty as an inherent quality, the way that fire had heat. Harry thought he could have knelt to her and felt her destroy him in the next moment, and died happy.

            He understood now why she would conquer the world and end human civilization if she was freed. She wouldn’t need weapons and violence, unless she wanted to use them. Everyone would simply kneel and gaze at her, and that would be it.

            But now his body was rocking gently, inside Draco’s, and Draco, who couldn’t see the Queen from his position, gave him another kick to hurry him up. And as Harry began to move faster, he saw the Queen’s eyes soften.

            The sorrow in them could have shattered worlds; it fell away. What replaced it was the joy of wolves, and the desire of dragons. And Harry saw her stretch her hands out as though he and Draco were a fire she could warm herself at.

            The world began to spin again. Harry was able to look away from the Queen’s eyes, and Puck, and forget they were watching. Draco was beneath him, white and gold, blue where the shadows of the flames moved across him, beautiful everywhere.

            Harry sped up his motions again, purely for the pleasure of watching Draco shudder with delight as Harry hit his prostate.

            And still Puck and the Queen simply watched. Harry didn’t know why. Perhaps a Malfoy and a Potter making love really was such a new thing that it contented them to observe it. Perhaps the power of wielding a human Beltane ceremony against the faerie magic was working.

            When his orgasm shot up from the base of his spine and through his body like one of the flames burning around them, and pleasure greater than anything he’d felt in his life went through him like arrows, and Draco’s mouth widened with delight and surprise, he didn’t think he cared.

*

            Life filled Draco.

Petals were growing through his body. Grass surged in his knees. A tree with white flowers and white fruit and white bark rose shining through the middle of his body and spread out above him, its shade soft and cool-scented. Canopies of leaves spread everywhere, whilst fruit split and opened and dropped seeds and grew more trees, which fruited in turn. Entire gardens of flowers laughed at the sun.

            Fertility.Beltane is about fertility.

            And though neither he nor Harry could conceive a child, still life filled him when Harry shuddered above him and came into his arse. Draco arched his neck and came back, feeling it was the least return he could make for such a gift.

            Pleasure wrung him out and through and around, as if he were a wet cloth someone was squeezing. Draco shuddered and gripped Harry with his legs, which had slipped off Harry’s shoulders. His spin through space suddenly halted, and then he was most definitely in a grove of hawthorn trees, on a field of burning grass.

            When he turned his head, the Faerie Queen was curtseying to them.

            Draco froze. It seemed innately wrong for the ruler of the otherworld to bow to them; he wanted to jump up and protest. But, for now, his body was far too weak, and he only twitched a little when he tried.

            He wondered for a moment if she was about to take over the mortal world. He didn’t think he would have protested even if he’d been in a condition to do anything about it.

            But she straightened from the bow, turned, and walked back through the gate he could still see shining golden and green, her hair moving like a train of fire behind her. The gate shrank a moment later, to little more than a glimmer.

            Someone cleared his throat. Draco turned his head in the other direction, and found Puck, in faerie form, gazing down at them.

            “My lady will not invade your world.” His voice was amazingly gentle, full of tenderness like light. Draco felt tears sting his eyes. Yes, there was a reason it had taken wizards so long to banish the faeries, dangerous as they were. “You have given her something she has never seen. No Malfoy and no Potter have ever joined as you have, in purest love and in purest fire.” And he bowed with a sweeping motion of his hand and body.

            “But,” Draco said, so dazed that he could only think of what was wrong with Puck’s words, “we’re not actually in love yet.”

            Puck’s laughter rose all around them, like small sharp pieces of stars raining to earth. “Do you think I did not know that? Love was the only thing spoken of, and the only thing lied about. A trick worthy of a faerie.” He leaned over them, and there was admiration in his eyes that Draco found more appalling than hatred. “There are still new things in your world. You have deserved the victory you have won here.”

            “Thank you so very much,” Harry said, sounding exhausted.

            Puck laughed again and walked through the hawthorn trees towards the gate. His stride was sure and steady, his golden hair flapping around him. Draco thought for certain he would go straight through, but instead he spun around, winked, and pointed a finger at Harry. “Your eyes,” he said. “That’s a sign of faerie ancestry. I would get that looked at, if I were you.”

            And he sprang into the gate, which showed him as a dwindling, blazing figure for long moments. Then the gate snapped shut.

            The fires around them ceased burning at the same instant, and they lay on shining, blackened ground in the aftermath of an April sunset—or May, if you were counting the Celtic way, Draco thought.

            Harry cleared his throat. Draco looked at him and smiled. Harry’s face was so painfully uncertain he had to smile. It was amusing.

            “I don’t know what this means to you,” Harry began carefully. “But it means something important to me. I—I want it to continue.”

            His lip was practically trembling, his eyes pleading, and he had started to run a hand along Draco’s ribs and then snatched it back, as though uncertain of his welcome. Draco couldn’t let him go on tormenting himself any longer. He caught his hand and squeezed it, noting along the way that his fingers barely had enough strength to do that. Harry really had worn him out.

            “I want it to continue, too,” he said.

            Harry stared at him with open wonder. “Even though it’ll never be like—that—again?” He gestured at the wreckage around them. “Even though we used to hate each other?” He touched his face suddenly. “Even though I have faerie eyes?”

            “I hated you when I was a child,” Draco said. “Not that easy to get over, but I think this helped.” Harry grinned. “And I wouldn’t expect it to be like this every night. Not every night is Beltane.”

            He took up both of Harry’s hands this time and brought them to his lips. “And do you really think,” he whispered, “that your faerie eyes, or past histories, matter to me at all when you died to save me?”

            Harry stared at him. Then he smiled and said, “I hope that rigorous fucking counts for something.”

            Draco was astonished to find himself catching the deeper uncertainty beneath Harry’s words. He didn’t want someone who only saw him as a hero.

            “The rigorous fucking counts for at least half of it,” said Draco judiciously. “Though, as I said, not every night will be Beltane. We’ll see how long you can hold my interest.”

            Harry laughed, or growled, and bent to kiss him. Draco lifted his head and swirled his tongue lazily against Harry’s.

            A wind smelling of apples blew past him, and he thought that was as open a blessing on their future as he could have asked for.

            If he concentrated, he thought he could still hear the fire in the distance.

            And the fire sang.

            End.
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A Very Walpurgis Night\'s Madness