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Crimes of Passion	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 7423 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Part V. In the Light.

            Draco didn’t know how long he stood there, while freezing waves alternating with hot ones swept over him. He wanted to weep, to protest that he hadn’t known the truth about Scorpius and no one could make him absorb it now, to smash a clenched fist into the walls and dare them to defy him, to brew a potion that would kill him, to find Harry and confront him and tell him the that he knew the truth he had been hiding and so Harry’s sacrifice was useless.

            Thought would not come out of that clashing chaos of emotions and impulses. In the end, Draco had to sit down at the table where matters of law and brewing policy—rational things—had been discussed not long ago, and put his head between his knees. The rush of his blood made him have to listen to his body, and then he finally forced away the shock and the shaking of his hands and stood up again.

            Yes, Harry’s sacrifice was useless. But Draco could see why he had made it, now, and why he hadn’t held any faith that Draco would believe him if he tried to confess the truth.

            Even now, Draco’s skin stung with sweat and his head whirled with the hope that it had been a mistake, that Scorpius might have written the letter but not tortured Herrington and Colnbrook, that he was the accomplice of someone more powerful, or that Draco could blame some arcane influence of the Dark Mark on his own arm and on Lucius’s, passing down through the blood.

            Except that Draco had carefully studied the influence of such magical brands before he had even sired Scorpius, because the worry had not been beyond the realm of possibility. His study had satisfied him that the Mark would have had to be in the family for generations to affect Scorpius.

            I was so proud of him when I was born. My perfect little son.

            Draco clenched his teeth and shook his head. That didn’t matter. He had been proud of Scorpius only hours ago, in fact, when he thought of the way that Scorpius had achieved so much, or had the potential to achieve so much, at twenty-one years old, while Draco felt that all his potential had bled out of him when he was seventeen and never returned.

            An earthquake could have thrown down and cracked the Manor, and he would have felt less disoriented. He had never experienced something like this before.

            Yes, you did. The night Harry came to you with his carefully crafted false confession and told you things that you’d never expected to hear he was capable of.

            Draco bowed his head, digging his fingers into his elbows. He had had something similar happen to him, then, and that meant he could deal with it. He could tame the chaos and put Scorpius’s faults in perspective.

            Then he glanced towards the half-crumpled letter that still lay on the table.

            Except…

            Except that he had never counted on this level of murderous anger, or the taunt buried in the letter that clearly implied he would start killing again unless and until Harry came back to the wizarding world and “showed” himself to Scorpius.

            It was Scorpius who had met Harry outside the walls, and cast the Carver’s Curse on him, and stood listening to the conversation between Draco and Harry, to make sure that Harry said nothing too revealing. And Harry had known it all the time, and hidden it from Draco as stubbornly as he’d hidden the original truth, because however much Draco’s feelings for him might have changed, he had known that Draco’s love for his son would not have.

            I was such a purblind fool.

            That had been the odd thing about the footprints, of course, other than the fact that they had been made by the dragonhide boots that Draco had seen on Scorpius’s feet. They pointed away from the Manor, as though the attacker had come from inside. Draco should have seen that at once, although he had no experience in tracking criminals by their footprints, as Harry did; it was simple enough.

            So. Draco paced in a circle, his eyes scoring the stone as his boots could not. We all had a hand in this. Myself, for not seeing what was beneath my nose earlier. Harry, for deciding to act “nobly” without telling me what he was going to do, and then going ahead and doing it. Scorpius, for…

            Draco lifted his head. It occurred to him that, other than the sly and teasing implications in the letter, all of which could be denied in front of a court, he didn’t know exactly what Scorpius had done. The most likely story was that Harry had caught him torturing Herrington and Colnbrook, taken them to St. Mungo’s, and wiped their memories. And then he had made a promise to Scorpius, or a deal with Scorpius, to keep the secret as long as he left the wizarding world.

            But what had made Harry so sure he could trust Scorpius to keep his end of the bargain? Since his return, Scorpius had made at least one determined attempt to kill him, and Harry had hidden that, too, so it wasn’t that he thought Scorpius’s sadistic impulses had somehow been finished off when he attacked his first two victims.

            How do I know they were the first?

            Draco wiped the corner of his mouth, aware of both cold sweat and cold saliva there, and shook his head. He needed to know more about this. And the only way that he could do that was to talk to Harry. Yes, Weasley and Granger knew the truth, but Draco doubted they would give him all the details even if he told them what he had figured out. Their first loyalty was still to Harry, and they hadn’t turned in Scorpius, either, when they could have.

            Yet how could he find Harry, who could be hiding anywhere, even within one of the Auror safehouses that he had used when part of the Ministry?

            A moment later, Draco smiled grimly to himself. There were ways of locating Harry that didn’t depend on conventional, law-abiding methods. Of course there were. He had only hesitated at the thought of employing them because of what he had made himself into: a respectful, respectable, meek wizard who crouched down and didn’t use Dark magic to show that he could play nicely with others.

            A meek Malfoy wouldn’t do such a thing. Harry had probably counted on avoiding those means of detection because he knew Draco.

            He knows me as I was before I changed, Draco thought, rising to his feet and reaching for the letter that had dropped from Harry’s pocket. Before he changed me.

            And before I had the motivation to change again.

*

            Draco checked the mirror—a simple, flat sheet of tin surrounded with silver—in his hand one more time. Then he nodded and smeared the mingled ash and blood on the surface into an unrecognizable mess, destroying at one and the same time the runes he’d drawn and the reflection of the building in front of him.

            He didn’t need it anymore. He’d found Harry.

            It was a semi-ruined building in Muggle London, near the same part of London where Draco knew that Scorpius had spent some time. He didn’t know if that was deliberate or a coincidence, but he could use the quiet anger and sadness it stirred in him as weapons.

            He wondered if that was one reason Scorpius hadn’t ever been worried about him finding out the truth, because he “knew” his father and knew that such emotions weren’t ones that he often felt.

            Draco shook away that nagging question. At the moment, Scorpius was less important as his motivation than as his catalyst. He was here to deal with Harry first, to—express his emotions was a fair way of putting it—and then see what would come out of that meeting, and where they would go next.

            There were wards on the door. Draco went through them without slowing down, recognizing them as the kind that would send alarms to the one they were tied to without harming the one who passed them. He stepped inside and watched as piled bricks and stone melted away like the illusions they were, to show a functional room with a few basic necessities, including a plain wooden table and a pallet on the floor.

            Harry was sitting up on the pallet, staring at Draco as if he imagined that he could get away with disbelieving in him.

            “Surprise,” Draco said casually, and caught Harry’s wand as his nonverbal Expelliarmus pulled it towards him. Then he thrust the wand into his pocket, skin stinging from the familiar feel of Harry’s magic behind the holly wood, and stared at him. “Are you going to sit here and listen to this conversation, or am I going to have to tie you up?”

            Harry was sensible in the minor matters, if not the large ones like the way he disposed of Draco’s heart and life. After a single noisy, gasping breath, he tightened his fists in the tattered sheets spread around him and inclined his head sharply. “I assume that you know,” he said.

            “I do,” Draco said, and watched.

            As he had thought would happen, Harry’s face turned the color of old milk. Draco sighed, a sigh in which impatience and love and disgust were mixed. “You ought to have known that I would find out the truth sooner or later, Harry,” he said. “The only thing I can’t understand is why you assumed you had the right to make decisions for me.”

            “Draco, I’m so sorry.”

            Draco came near losing his tight grip on his emotions just then. Of course the first thing Harry did was apologize for his knowing the truth. (Draco wasn’t foolish enough to think that Harry was apologizing for making the decision for him). He had compassion at all the wrong times. He could extend it everywhere—except to those people who needed it most.

            “You should have told me in the first place,” Draco said.

            “How could I?” Harry was tense still, as though he suspected Draco would lower his guard and let him spring to the side. Draco remained motionless, staring at him, and Harry sighed and let go his grip on the sheets. But all he ended up doing was folding his arms defensively, so Draco wasn’t sure how much that accomplished. “You love your son, Draco. You love him still. You might not think so, but I can see the marks of your suffering in your eyes. I know you that well.”

            Draco bowed his head. “Yes, you know me. You know what blinds me and makes me ignore the evidence of my senses. That was why your confession bewildered me in the first place. But you should have known that I would have wanted the chance to choose the truth, or the falsehood, for myself.”

            “How could I have let you without taking the choice away from you by telling you the truth right away?” Harry cast his hands up. “I did what was best for you, Draco.”

            “And best for yourself?” Draco asked.

            “That’s never mattered to me as much as you and my friends and my children have.” Harry’s gaze was calm, clear, steady, apparently really not seeing what was wrong with his position.

            “You cost me four years of peace,” Draco said, and his voice began to rise despite himself. He wouldn’t allow Harry’s wall of obstinacy to persist, because there was too great a chance that he would go on thinking himself right. “Four years of love, of living with you. Yes, I didn’t know about Scorpius then and you might think that I got four years of peace with my son,” he added, seeing Harry’s mouth open. “But it was without you. I missed you. I wanted you back. Can you understand that?”

            “I should just have stayed away,” Harry muttered, picking at the sheets. “Then you wouldn’t have to suffer like this.”

            “Fuck you,” Draco said, the first thing that came into his mind, and saw Harry’s eyes widen. “Yes, you didn’t expect that, did you?” he asked, leaning forwards until his breath was brushing Harry’s face, making his eyes blink. “You thought that I would be grateful for what you did if I ever found out. You thought that you could play the martyr and you’d have no competition. But this time, Harry, you do. I’m the one who was hurt by your decision.”

            “I thought you’d be bloody destroyed over losing your son, that’s what I thought,” Harry snapped, his face finally taking on the furious glow of temper that Draco would have expected him to show long since. “Don’t act like I’m the criminal here. I did all I could to spare you. I lied, I destroyed my own life, I exiled myself from the wizarding world—”

            Draco did grab his shoulders and shake him, then. Harry’s teeth shut on his tongue, and he winced, raising his hand to the small trickle of blood spilling down from his mouth.

            “You chose it all,” Draco said. “You had at least that luxury. I didn’t. I didn’t know what was happening, I didn’t know why, and it made me want to rage and scream against the world. The thought of losing you. But instead I convinced myself that I was wrong, that I’d just never known you at all, and that was the reason I should step back into the shadows and let Scorpius have center stage.”

            Harry stared at him with wide eyes. “Then—you blamed yourself? Draco, how could you? I told you I was to blame.” He reached out as if he would stroke Draco’s hair, but drew his hand back at the last moment.

            Draco caught the hand and crushed it, his emotions crashing against each other so violently he barely knew what he would say next, only that it needed to be said. “How could I not blame myself? I should have noticed what you were up to long ago, I thought, if you were torturing and murdering people and then lying about it so well that everyone thought you were a hero. I should have done something. I should have arrested you, never fallen in love with you, exiled you from my home and made you see a Mind-Healer—everything. Anything. I blamed myself, Harry, because I couldn’t believe you were like that, but you made me believe you were.”

            Harry closed his eyes. “I should never have done that,” he whispered.

            Now, finally, he’s blaming himself for the right thing. Draco would take it as a first step, although eventually he wanted to get Harry beyond blame altogether and into the realm of what they would do now that Harry didn’t have a secret to hide anymore. But he held Harry and stroked his hair, knowing it would take baby steps.

            Harry sat motionless for long seconds, as if he assumed that Draco would flinch away in disgust when he recovered his senses. Then he threw his arms around him with a muffled sob.

            Draco cradled him fiercely, muttering into Harry’s hair. “Stupid, idiot, deranged, muddleheaded,” he said, and it sounded like a chant of affection even in his ears. He hoped it sounded like that to Harry, too.

            Harry snuffled into his embrace and whispered, “I did the best I could. I did what I thought was best.”

            “And it wasn’t,” Draco said. “If you’re ever tempted to do something so stupid again, come talk to me about it, and we can figure it out together.” His voice was getting husky. He cleared his throat, wondering when the last time was that he d felt so much. With Harry gone, it was as if his heart had walked out of his body. “What really hurts most of all, Harry, is that you didn’t trust me.”

            Harry winced and lifted his head to look at him. “I wanted to,” he said. “But all I could see was your face when you heard the news.”

            Draco shook his head. There was something he still didn’t understand, and wanted to know, although he expected Harry’s answer would infuriate him in other ways. “Why did you assume that losing Scorpius would be something I couldn’t survive, but losing you would be?” he asked.

            Harry stared at him with slightly parted lips. Draco brushed a black curl of hair out of his eyes and waited.

            “Because—because you’d only known me four years,” Harry said at last. Draco snorted, and Harry rolled his eyes. “All right, fine, you’d only really known me for four years. There’s no reason that you would miss me more than your son, whom you’ve known and loved all his life. And there were all sorts of pure-blood feelings about heirs and the continuation of the family line tied up in that. I know how important family is,” he added softly, as if afraid that his voice would press too hard on Draco’s ears. “I would never want to cost someone his.”

            Draco bowed his head until his chin rested on Harry’s head. He remembered the warmth of Harry’s skin, shining like a discrete sun, but he clearly hadn’t remembered it enough. This made him want to bury his hands in Harry’s hair and never release him. “You’ll always undervalue yourself,” he whispered. “I should have remembered that.”

            Harry made a motion as though he was swatting away a fly. “No,” he said. “If I knew someone better, like Ron or Hermione, and I discovered that one of their children was a monster, then I might have tried. But—Draco, I was afraid.”

            “Afraid of how I would react?” Draco asked quietly.

            Harry nodded, eyes downcast. “I didn’t want to be,” he said. “I wanted to think most about your pain if you lost Scorpius. But I can’t deny that that motive was driving me a lot. If you didn’t believe me, I would have sacrificed both your trust in me and your peace of mind for nothing.”

            Draco couldn’t deny that, at least. “I would have rejected what you said, but I wouldn’t have rejected you,” he said.

            Harry smiled at him, and it was the saddest smile Draco had ever seen, even worse than the one Harry had given him after his confession to the torture of Herrington and Colnbrook, when Draco had told him to leave. That smile had held a hint of triumph, Draco now understood, because Harry had achieved his goal of making Draco turn away from him. “You would have tried not to,” he said. “But worry would have eaten at you, and in the end you’d have had to make a decision: to trust me, or to trust Scorpius?” He shook his head, his hair swishing softly around his ears. So much grey, Draco thought, staring at it. “Trying to have us both, you’d have had neither, or only him. But even then, I don’t think you would have been able to forget.”

            Draco grunted. Harry had known him well and played him well. But he hadn’t thought through everything.

            “What was it you saw about Scorpius that made you doubt him?” he asked. “You said it had something to do with the way you looked, and so did the letter of his I found. What does that mean?”

            Harry stiffened, then sighed. “I should have known that you would see the letter,” he whispered. Draco stroked his back and said nothing, because verbal comfort at the moment would only interrupt Harry, when Draco was deeply interested in seeing that he finished his speech. “I…was trained in how to identify criminals, Draco. Sometimes I could look at someone and see the tendencies in them. That was how I looked at Scorpius and saw the way he behaved. I didn’t know that he was a potential torturer of humans—not for sure—until the night I caught him torturing those two children.” Harry’s voice tightened. “But that didn’t surprise me.”

            “You could have come to me about that, then,” Draco whispered. “Or you could have hinted about your suspicions.”

            “How?” Harry asked, and now his defensiveness and his anger alike were gone. He sounded as if he were speaking from nothing but a vast weariness. “There—there was no evidence, Draco. I kept thinking that I must be mistaken. I knew that you’d raised Scorpius to have pride in himself and his heritage, while I tried to raise my children to be modest because I was so afraid that most of the world would try to play upon their pride. Maybe it was just the difference in the ideals we taught them. But more and more signs kept appearing, and after a while, I couldn’t deny it anymore.”

            “What signs?”

            “You never noticed what he did to the house-elves, then.” It wasn’t a question.

            Draco thought suddenly of the house-elf he had seen recently, beating itself in punishment for—what? He shook his head. “I thought I was too soft with them, myself,” he admitted reluctantly. “I couldn’t bring myself to require punishments from them after what I saw and did under the Dark Lord, but my father told me often enough that they would wander away from their true paths and become worse servants if I didn’t. That it wasn’t good for them.”

            “I don’t know about that,” Harry said. “I’m not Hermione, and I don’t know a lot about house-elf psychology. But I know that Scorpius ordered them to break their bones, to gouge out their eyes, to shatter their skulls. I buried two of them.”

            Draco closed his eyes. He didn’t know why he had expected anything different, after hearing what Scorpius had done to Herrington and Colnbrook, but somehow this struck deeper, closer to home. He had lived in the same house with the elves, and never noticed that they were disappearing.

            “How could I not have seen that?” he whispered.

            “Only two,” Harry said hastily, as if to reassure him and excuse him for his obliviousness. “He—he learned pretty quickly not to do that, because it was too obvious and would leave a trail behind. And he knew that I was his enemy, or potentially his enemy, if he did anything too bad.”

            “What else did he do?” Draco asked. “You can tell me,” he added, when Harry hesitated.

            “When I buried the first house-elf,” Harry said softly, “I found a lot of little graves. Animals were—in them, Draco. And I know a little about reading skeletons, too, from Auror training and some of the cases that I went through along the way. All of them died by violence, except a few that I think he buried alive.”

            Draco shook his head. “Why did you never tell anyone?” he murmured. “If not me, at least a Mind-Healer or the other Aurors. I can’t believe that you would let house-elves die like that.”

            Harry went tense in his arms. It took Draco opening his eyes and looking before he could be sure that Harry was tense with anguish, not some other emotion.

            “That was the thing I really couldn’t forgive myself for,” Harry whispered. “Along with all the others, lying to you and not telling you the truth the first time I suspected it and not doing something to stop him before he worked his way up to humans. But—I cared more about you than I did about them. You would have found out about it, in the end, even if the Healers treated him or the Aurors arrested him quietly. And—I could have been mistaken. I have been, before. Sometimes people are violent at a low level without ever getting worse.”

            Draco leaned his head helplessly against Harry’s, wondering where either of them would find forgiveness. Because if Harry should have told him about this much sooner, Draco should have noticed it sooner than that. He knew his son. He loved his son.

            He’d thought he had.

            “I’m so sorry,” Harry whispered.

            Draco paused, took a deep breath, and looked up, shaking his head. “It’s not your fault.” His voice buzzed in his ears, as though he’d been on the verge of a faint through loss of blood. He cleared his throat, and, as he had in the moments when he had first wrestled with what it meant that Scorpius was a person like this, moved forwards. “We have to decide what we’re going to do now.”

            Harry looked at him with eyes large with pain. “I don’t know what we can possibly do,” he said simply. “Scorpius will keep his promises—his threats—when he realizes that I’ve told you everything. Or you’ve figured everything out,” he added, probably because he had seen Draco’s mouth opening to challenge that pronouncement.

            Draco nodded shortly. “Why did Scorpius choose those two particular victims, and that particular place?” he asked, a less urgent question that nevertheless troubled him. “He must have known that someone would find him.”

            “He was hoping that it would be me, I think,” Harry said in a subdued voice. “Most of the Aurors leave—left—between four and five. Usually I was the only one there at that time of night. I was the most likely person to find him.”

            “Why Herrington and Colnbrook?” Draco asked softly. It hadn’t escaped his attention that Harry had avoided answering that question.

            Harry turned his head to the side and chewed his lip, his eyelashes fanning out over his cheek. “They were enemies of his from school,” he said reluctantly. “Colnbrook once teased him, I think. Herrington did better than he did at some class or another, and might have teased him, too. It was his revenge. I don’t know how he got them there in the first place, because I never got the chance to ask. He might have lured them; he might have Apparated them. I had to use a Memory Charm to take away their memories of the attack and make them think that more time had passed before they went to St. Mungo’s than really had. That took away their memory of what had happened right before the attack, too, and they had to make up stories to fill it in.”

            “If he can do such things because someone once earned a better mark than he did,” Draco said quietly, “he is no son of mine.”

            Harry winced. “Draco—”

            Draco laid his finger across Harry’s lips. “You’ve protected him,” he said. “You’ve done a better job of defending Malfoy honor in the last few years than I have. My father would be pleased.”

            Harry paused and cocked his head. “You usually sound proud when you talk about your father. But not now.”

            “I’m not,” Draco said. “I used him as an excuse.” He had to wince as he spoke. It felt as though he was pulling out something deeply-rooted in his heart, something that would leave a heavily bleeding wound behind. “I said that Scorpius was like him and therefore I could ignore the things that sometimes troubled me about Scorpius. I said that at least my father had acted, something I never did until it was too late, and that excused everything else.”

            “I wish you wouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” Harry whispered to him, drawing Draco’s hair through his fingers and curling it tightly around them for a moment, then gently.

            Draco had to laugh. “Look at us,” he said. “A pair of old men both trying to reassure each other, both trying to protect our wounds so that the other won’t feel the urge to comfort us. Can anything be more pathetic?”

            Harry’s smile was slow in coming, but it came. “Maybe that was the reason at the root of all this,” he admitted. “I couldn’t stand to see you humiliated, and I hate it for myself. At least forcing you to accept a lie meant I didn’t have to admit I was wrong.”

            “Far too much has gone wrong because of our pride,” Draco whispered. “It’s time for that to end. You’ll have to arrest Scorpius. Or have Weasley do it, if you really think you can’t,” he added, because Harry’s eyes were wild with a fear that came from God knew where. “I have to stop thinking that Scorpius is a real Malfoy and I’m not. I have to act. And if it means that my son goes to Azkaban or to St. Mungo’s—I don’t know how they’ll judge him, guilty or insane—then that’s what happens.”

            “But—I don’t understand,” Harry said. “That would mean your direct family line would end.”

            Draco nodded. “I know.” The world was breaking in pieces around him, but he knew it had been a rotten world anyway, a wrong one, based on lies and self-delusion. He would simply have to accept the pain as best he could. “That isn’t something I like, but it’s something I think has to be. There’s no way I can rescue Scorpius, not when he’s gone this far. And I think he was thinking of killing me.”

            Harry flinched. “That was the implication I got from the letter, yeah,” he muttered. “It was why I had to come back. I’d fought to protect your peace of mind; I couldn’t see you slaughtered.”

            Draco’s hand found his wrist and squeezed. “I’m glad to see that you recognize something as more important than my peace of mind.”

            Harry gave him a wan smile.

            “Scorpius is the one who chose to waste his life, his freedom,” Draco said. “And if he’s insane, rather than acting on sadistic impulses because he thinks he can and no one will notice, then it’s partially my fault for not noticing that he needed help earlier. The only way I can redeem that is to make sure that other people are safe from him.” He leaned forwards to stare into Harry’s eyes. “Including you.”

            “I didn’t care what he did to me,” Harry said, “as long as he didn’t hurt you.”

            “I know, you idiot.” The anger was coming back, and Draco let it. “That’s why you took the Carver’s Curse and almost died. I’m going to lose my son now. Nothing can change that. I want you at my side. If you try to do something like that again, then I’ll cast a curse I know which makes your skin break out in boils that are impossible to ignore whenever you go more than a few feet from me.”

            Harry’s mouth fell open for a moment, and he looked genuinely surprised. Then he said, “You do know how to sweet-talk me.”

            “Will you promise me that you won’t do anything like this again?” Draco resolved to cling to his focus and keep his attention on the conversation, although Harry’s words had made a sudden and powerful need surge to life in his chest.

            Harry swallowed. “I have to,” he said at last. “Consider my track record when I try to fight for your peace of mind on my own. I think you’re right, Draco, and you’re the only one who can make decisions about what you need.”

            “Finally,” Draco said, with the sensation of a dam breaking inside him to let a reservoir of tainted water flood out, and he leaned forwards and kissed Harry.

            The same dam seemed to have burst inside Harry; like Draco, he might have felt every second of their four years apart in the same instant. He returned the kiss enthusiastically, clawing at Draco’s shoulders. Draco shoved him down and fumbled at the clasp of his robes, at least until he remembered his wand and undid them that way.

            Harry was there before him, incredibly fast, stripping down to trousers and pants with his hands alone. Before Draco could feel jealous that Harry still had that much speed and coordination even when he was shaking with desire, Harry stuck a hand down his pants and grabbed his cock.

            Draco moaned and lost focus on what he was doing. His head drooped on Harry’s shoulder the way it had earlier, and his hips shuddered and bucked up into Harry’s hand. Harry chuckled harshly against his ear and stroked again, making Draco’s skin crawl deliciously with the urge to bite and the urge to come.

            “Got you now,” Harry whispered, and pulled his hand out of Draco’s pants so that he could spit on the palm and reach back down again.

            When he did that, though, Draco reoriented himself, given a moment to think by the sudden lack of pressure on his erection. And he found Harry’s cock, too, as long and slim as he remembered. He stroked up, and Harry yelped; he stroked down, and Harry leaned against him, shaking.

            When he felt Harry return to his grip, Draco had the rhythm in his fingers and mind, and didn’t need to take another second to get used to the stubby, callused fingers on his skin. He bit Harry’s neck. Harry bit his chin. They rocked together, their panting muffled, the sheets of Harry’s pallet rustling roughly beneath them.

            Harry jerked and twisted. Draco knew he would, he always did that, but he was no better about resisting it than he’d ever been. He exhaled hot breath against Harry’s cheek and whimpered, then pinched the head of Harry’s cock. Harry went stiff against him, all over, muscled locked tight like his hips, like his skin, like his breath. Draco smiled and fucked himself along Harry’s palm, then pinched again.

            Harry cried out and came, and that was all that was needed to trigger Draco’s own orgasm, a sudden splatter of warmth and stickiness that was reaching and rushing towards familiarity, towards the days when they had been together and not apart.

            He leaned on Harry when he was done, bearing him back, and Harry opened his arms like a lover, embracing Draco, holding him close, murmuring words so faint that Draco felt them more than he heard them, passing across his skin and into his ears. He closed his eyes and lay still. For the moment, he need do nothing more.

            There were decisions to be made—decisions as to what he would do about Scorpius, how much he would tell the Aurors or whether he would, how they would bring in Harry’s friends or if they would, what to do next. They hammered in his head like the beating of a second, newborn heart, so insistent that Draco could feel them driving his blood.

            But that didn’t mean that he had to rise to his feet and answer the demands right now.

            He linked his fingers with Harry’s and closed his eyes, weary beyond weary.

            And home, with hope, at last.

*

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Crimes of Passion