Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Potter.”

Harry turned around warily. He’d come out to fly on his Nimbus and just be by himself for a while. Losing a bunch of points because of Hagrid’s dragon had made a lot of the Gryffindors hate him.

One of the Slytherin Chasers was hovering on his broom nearby, staring at Harry. He had dark hair and a kind of flat forehead and was maybe a year older than Harry.

Harry didn’t remember which one of the Chasers he was. His game against Slytherin had been so chaotic that he thought just recognizing the bloke as a Chaser was pretty good on his part.

“Yeah?” he asked, when he realized they’d both been drifting in silence for a while.

“What are you doing here?”

“Just flying.”

“Not training?”

“No.”

“Want to?”

Harry blinked at the Chaser. “Why would you want to? Your teammates were already going on about how my winning our game wasn’t fair.”

The Chaser grunted. “I want to win based on talent, Potter. You’ve got that. So we need to get better to beat you. Flint’s always talking about cheating and the like, but what does a victory matter if you don’t earn it?”

“That’s—sort of an unusual attitude for a Slytherin, isn’t it?”

“Do you want to train with me or not, Potter?”

“Fine. But what’s your name? I can’t remember.”

The Chaser grinned a little. “Adrian Pucey.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a Snitch that made Harry’s eyes widen. Then again, he’d heard that a lot of the Slytherins were rich, and he supposed that he would just carry a Snitch around too if he had one. “We’ll release this, and you’ll try to catch it while I try to block you.”

“But how does that benefit you? Chasers don’t block the Seeker.”

“Speed. I can get better at blocking in general with someone as fast as you than with the other Chasers on the team.”

Harry supposed that made sense. And he also couldn’t remember Pucey committing any fouls in the last game, either.

“All right. Come on.”

*

Pucey was good on a broom.

Harry hadn’t expected to be impressed just because Oliver was always saying that the Slytherin team wasn’t that great and the Gryffindor team was better, but Pucey really could fly. Sometimes he almost seemed to be communicating with his broom, the way he twisted back and forth and got in front of Harry just when he was reaching for the Snitch. And he wasn’t afraid to hang upside-down and wave his hands in front of Harry without touching him, either.

“That doesn’t count as a foul,” he argued when Harry brought it up. “Not unless I actually touch you or the broom.”

Harry supposed he should spend more time with Quidditch Through the Ages. But at least he would have some experience with that in his next game.

He and Pucey zipped back and forth until they were both tired, and Harry had caught the Snitch five times and Pucey had blocked him seven times. By the time that Harry landed on the ground again, panting and shaking his head, he was exhilarated. It was nice to not think about Nicholas Flamel and the three-headed dog for a while.

“Thanks, Pucey,” he said, as he handed the Snitch back.

“Next Tuesday evening at seven?”

“Yeah,” Harry agreed instantly. He would be able to sneak away if he just said that he wanted some time to clear his head. Hermione was very in favor of people clearing their heads and relaxing if at all possible.

“Good. See you then, Potter.”

Pucey flew back towards the school on his broom, and Harry went to shower. He expected to get pounced on by Oliver as soon as he got back to Gryffindor Tower, and it would be best if he could show that he hadn’t actually been sweating.

*

“Potter.”

Harry opened his eyes slowly and turned his head. Pucey was standing next to Harry’s hospital bed with a mighty frown on his face.

“What are you doing here?” Harry asked, slurring the words a little. He was still pretty tired after his confrontation with Professor Quirrell and the shade of Voldemort hiding in the back of his head. Just thinking about it made him want to huddle under the blankets and never come out.

“Heard you got injured.”

Harry eyed Pucey. “Yeah. You know the details?”

“Not all of them.”

And Pucey’s set jaw and closed expression said that he probably didn’t want to talk about them. Harry could understand. Slytherins would have a different perspective on Voldemort than anyone else.

But Harry didn’t talk about “normal” Slytherin things with Pucey, just Quidditch. “I’ll be well enough to do one more practice match before we leave for the summer.”

Pucey’s jaw relaxed a little. “Yeah. That was what I came to ask about.”

“Wednesday at nine?”

“Good for me. Be there.” Pucey hesitated, then reached out and knocked his fist so lightly against Harry’s scar that it didn’t hurt. “And try to keep your head in one piece, all right? You’re not going to be good for Quidditch if it’s broken open.”

“Yeah. Same to you.”

Pucey nodded to him, hint of worry already gone, and slipped out of the hospital wing. Harry lay back on the pillow with a little smile.

It was nice to know that someone valued him not because he was the Boy-Who-Lived or even because he was their best friend, but just because he was good at Quidditch. It was a small, good thing.

Chapter Text

“You didn’t tell me you were a Parselmouth.”

“Why would it come up during Quidditch? And anyway, until a few hours ago, I just thought that everyone could talk to magical snakes.”

Pucey blinked, hovering on his broom in front of Harry. Harry scowled at him. “I can’t stay long. I had to basically act like I was sick to slip away from Ron and Hermione. Let’s start practicing.”

“Why would you not know about Parseltongue?”

“I didn’t exactly grow up around a lot of other wizards, did I?”

“Huh?”

Harry sighed impatiently. Every minute increased the chance that Ron would try to open his bedcurtains, which Harry had spelled shut, and offer to get him a glass of water or something. “I grew up with Muggles. Are we going to play or not?”

Pucey gaped at him. Harry stared back. “You didn’t know that?” he added, when Pucey had remained silent long enough that it was really annoying.

“No—I mean, there were a few rumors, a few times someone said they’d met you in a Muggle place, but—”

“Well, it doesn’t matter much. Let’s play.”

Pucey gave him a glance now and then during this training session as if he thought it did matter that Harry had grown up with Muggles, but he had brought a Bludger and a Beater’s bat along with the Snitch, and Harry had to fly faster and pay more attention to the Snitch and the Bludger and Pucey all at the same time, and he didn’t really have time to worry about Pucey’s troubled expression.

*

“I don’t believe that you’re the Heir of Slytherin. You’re a good Quidditch player, and that’s all I need to know.”

Harry blinked at Pucey and pulled up to hover next to the Keeper’s hoop. Pucey had just knocked the Snitch out of the way of Harry’s reaching hand when he’d made that surprising declaration. The Nimbus 2001 was really a bit faster than the Nimbus 2000.

“All right,” Harry said slowly. “Thanks.”

Pucey nodded back, his face already settling into mask-like lines, and raised the Beater’s bat. Harry darted off and grabbed the Snitch out of the air. Pucey uttered a laugh that was almost bark-like and hit the Bludger at him anyway.

*

“Where are there bruises all over your torso, Harry?”

“Er.” Harry looked down and winced a little at the nasty blue-black one that covered his ribs. He hadn’t known that the Bludger that had almost hurled him from his broom had hit him quite that hard.

“Uh. Someone hexed me in the corridor.” Harry looked up at Ron with an expression he made as sheepish as he could. “You know. For being the Heir of Slytherin.”

“What! Who was it?”

“Some older Slytherin, I don’t know,” Harry said, with a shrug, and he quickly pulled his shirt back on and then the robe over it.

“Well, let me know if you see them again.” Ron scowled and rubbed his towel furiously over his scalp, which made the hair stick out as badly as Harry’s sometimes did. “That’s not on. We can’t have my best mate getting hexed in the corridors!”

Harry smiled at him, and made a mental note to dodge the Bludgers better next time.

*

“Why do you keep ending the year in the hospital wing?”

It was weird, really, when this had only happened once before, but Harry had been sort of waiting for Pucey. He shrugged helplessly, and then hissed a little as that pulled on the new scar that had formed over the basilisk bite. “I don’t know. Things just happen, and people would get hurt if I didn’t.”

“If you didn’t get hurt instead?”

“No!” Harry lowered his voice as he heard Ginny stir in the bed next to his. He didn’t want to wake her up. “If I don’t do something to help them.”

Pucey scowled at him for a few seconds. Then he grunted and said, “You’ll have to do better next year. You know we’re going to beat you next year.”

Harry laughed. “Then it seems like you wouldn’t want me to do better.”

“Want to win fairly, remember? That’s the only way.”

Pucey slipped out again a minute later, and Harry found himself oddly missing the playful knock on his head Pucey had given him last year. Then he went to sleep and forgot about it.

Chapter Text

Harry thought he was being kind of stupid to use the Invisibility Cloak just to follow Pucey around, but it was already three weeks into the term, and he hadn’t asked Harry to fly on the Quidditch pitch yet. Harry was pretty sure that Pucey wouldn’t care about the threat of Sirius Black and the warnings from the professors that Harry should stay in the castle.

So it had to be something else.

They got to almost the entrance of the Slytherin common room, and Pucey whipped around with his wand in his hand. “I don’t know who you are, but I can hear you just fine,” he snapped, his eyes going past Harry to scan the corridor. “So show yourself.”

Harry tugged down the hood. Pucey gaped at him.

Then he rolled his eyes and lowered his wand. “Potter. What are you doing?”

“I wanted to know why you didn’t want to practice this year.”

Pucey’s mouth turned into a slash on his face. Harry just waited. He didn’t think it was that intrusive a question, and it seemed weird that Pucey would want to practice for two years in a row and then just give up on the third.

“I didn’t make the Slytherin team.”

Harry stared at hm. “What?”

“Do you need your ears cleaned out, Potter? I said I didn’t make the team.”

“But you’re the best of the Chasers! I really paid attention whenever you played last year, and you’re the best.”

Pucey half-smiled at him. Then his face went sour again. “Tell that to Flint. He said that we needed more prominent families on the team.” His voice dipped into a deep growl that made Harry laugh in surprise; it was a good imitation of Flint’s voice. Pucey shook his head. “My family’s pureblood, but we don’t have much money, or the right politics.”

“Politics?”

“We hid during the war, Potter. We didn’t fight for the Dark Lord.”

“Well, that was the smart decision, right? Because I know the people who pretended to be under the Imperius Curse had to pay a lot of Galleons to the Ministry, and you couldn’t have done that if you didn’t have the money.”

“You have a—unique perspective.”

Pucey at least seemed like he was trying not to laugh, so that was better than how upset he’d been before. Harry smiled at him. “All right. But we can go on practicing, right? So you can get on the team next year and remind them why they never should have turned their backs on you.”

“You’re transparent, Potter.”

“And right!”

Pucey still looked uncertain, but after a few seconds of Harry staring pointedly at him, he nodded and lifted his hand. “Yes, all right. Our usual time on Monday?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” Pucey looked around. “Now, you should get out of here. There are some Slytherins who would be all too happy to hex the Boy-Who-Lived just for being near the common room.”

“You could tell them that I’ve already been in it,” Harry remarked, and disappeared under his Cloak again as Pucey stared at him.

Harry was smiling as he went back to Gryffindor Tower. It felt like he had helped a friend.

Maybe they weren’t really friends. He didn’t talk to Pucey about anything except Quidditch and during the yearly visit to the hospital wing.

But Harry still felt good about it.

*

“You’re not going after Sirius Black, are you?”

Harry had just dodged a Bludger and grabbed the Snitch that Pucey was trying to block him from reaching, and he took a second too long to react to the question. Then he had to twist out of the way as the Bludger came at his head.

“Pucey!”

“Sorry. It would be much worse in a real game, you know that.”

“Yes, but you asked me a question that people keep asking me, and I’m not going after Sirius Black.”

“You do know that he’s your godfather, right?”

“Now you sound like Malfoy.”

Pucey looked hilariously offended. Harry smiled at him and guided the Firebolt off to the side so that he could get around the Bludger Pucey threw at him a second later. The Firebolt really did move like a dream.

“I just wanted to make sure that you didn’t have some stupid Gryffindor plan of getting revenge that would put you in danger.”

“That sounds more like a Slytherin plan than a Gryffindor one.”

“It does not!”

They dissolved into bickering, and Harry was happy enough to move on from the subject of Sirius Black. But when they flew back down to the pitch at the end of the practice, Pucey looked at him with a mutinous scowl.

“I mean it, Potter. No stupid heroics this year.”

“Not trying to, Pucey. Didn’t you hear Malfoy’s story of how I fainted on the train because the Dementors confronted me? Not exactly heroic.”

“Malfoy’s an idiot, and so are you if you keep bringing him up!”

Harry rolled his eyes as Pucey stormed off. He was probably sore about being reminded that Malfoy was on the team this year, and he wasn’t.

But no, Harry didn’t intend to rush off searching for Sirius Black. He had other things to think about, like making sure that Pucey could get on the team next year.

*

“Were you training with a Slytherin?”

Harry cursed under his breath. He’d been less careful about coming back from the pitch this time, just wanting a shower and to get inside, since it was late. And Oliver had caught him as he was coming out of the showers.

“Yeah. Adrian Pucey.”

Oliver, who had had his mouth open like he was about to yell in outrage, paused. “He’s not on the team.”

“No. He cares about winning fairly and beating the person who beat him out for Chaser next year when they have tryouts. I don’t think it’s a risk to train with him.”

Oliver blinked, as though it was a surprise to him that Harry could make his own decisions about this. Harry just stared at him and waited.

“Huh,” Oliver said at last, and hesitated. Then his suspicion seemed to win out over the confusion. “But you aren’t showing him any secret Gryffindor team moves, are you?”

Harry almost laughed. Anyone who wanted to see how the Gryffindor team played just had to come down to the pitch while they were practicing. Oliver made some attempt to vary the hours and have them practice early in the morning when fewer people would want to get up, but once they started, he was so completely focused that it wouldn’t take an Invisibility Cloak like Harry’s to escape his notice.

Then Harry shrugged away the notion. He supposed it was more natural for him to think that way than not, if he was spending time with a Slytherin, but he didn’t really want to think that way.

“No, Oliver. I promise.”

“Good. There’s a strategy I’ve been working out with Katie and Alicia, and it would a tragedy if the Slytherins got their hands on it before we’re ready to deploy it!”

Harry only half-followed the discussion of strategy, just nodding now and then to show he was listening. He was actually wondering how it would feel to play one more time against the Slytherin team with Pucey gone from it. He hadn’t really noticed in autumn, but…

This time, he would notice.

*

When they won the Quidditch Cup, Harry’s gaze went to the Slytherin part of the stands, and the one person clapping and screaming as if he had temporarily become a Gryffindor for the day.

Harry knew there was no way that Pucey could see him smile at that distance, but Harry did it for him anyway.

*

“I really am sick of you ending up in the hospital wing.”

Harry came around dazedly. He’d been deeply asleep this time. Apparently time travel could do that to you. Hermione had mentioned something about it in her rushed explanation of how the Time-Turner actually worked and how she’d been using it all year without telling them before she collapsed.

Pucey was leaning on the edge of the bed, scowling at him. Harry blinked. He had just seen Pucey a few days ago for their usual weekly practice. He shouldn’t have looked so tall.

“What happened this time?”

Harry swallowed. He wondered if he should really tell a Slytherin he didn’t know that well about the Time-Turner and Sirius’s innocence, but—well, they’d told the Minister Sirius was innocent and Pettigrew was alive. And Professor McGonagall had known about the Time-Turner.

Harry told it as quietly as he could. It felt like deep night, and Hermione was asleep in a bed a few meters away and Madam Pomfrey was probably asleep, but he still didn’t want to wake anyone up.

Pucey listened all the way through without asking questions, even though his eyes widened now and then and he shook his head more than once. When Harry reached the end, he spun around, punched the wall, and yelled, “Fuck!”

“Pucey!” Harry hissed, glancing over at Hermione. She was still asleep, but Harry thought she had twitched like she was about to roll over. “Keep it down.”

“No.”

“Well, you have to, or Hermione is going to wake up and—”

“I mean, no. You don’t get to call me Pucey.”

Harry closed his eyes. It felt like a Bludger had slammed into him and broken his arm again. “Okay,” he whispered.

“Oh, for the love of Merlin,” Pucey sighed, in such a normal tone that Harry’s eyes popped open again. Pucey was leaning towards him with a frown so deep that Harry wouldn’t be surprised if it cut slashes in his face. “I just meant, you get to call me Adrian. And I get to call you Harry.”

Harry laughed despite himself, for the first time since Sirius had dragged Ron underneath the tree. “Really?”

“Yes, really. That’s the way it is.”

Harry smiled at Pucey and ignored the way his stomach fluttered. It was a little like the way he’d felt when he’d made friends with Ron on the train, but not exactly the same. Probably because he didn’t have many friends and making them with Hermione had been so different.

For some reason, Pucey—Adrian—looked away and cleared his throat. Then he said, “I’m going to be on the team next year.”

“Yeah?”

“I pointed out to Flint how Slytherin obviously lost to you lot because I wasn’t one of the Chasers.”

“But Flint finally passed his exams, didn’t he?”

Adrian snorted and leaned on the wall again, more relaxed than Harry had ever seen him. “Well, we all hope so. But it doesn’t matter. The next Captain is going to be someone I can talk around.”

“Really?”

“If I can talk you around, Harry, I’ll be able to talk anyone around.”

Harry smiled at Adrian again, and Adrian stepped forwards and pressed a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t die.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

Adrian at least punched him in the shoulder, which was better than looking as devastated as he’d been looking, and turned and slipped out of the hospital wing. Harry leaned back with his arms folded behind his head and grinned at the ceiling.

He was still grinning when he fell asleep.

Chapter Text

“No Quidditch.”

Harry smiled faintly at Adrian, who had come up to him as he was sitting on the edge of the lake and tossing pebbles in. “Yeah. Sucks. Doesn’t mean that we can’t still practice, though.”

“Right,” Adrian agreed, and sat down next to him. He was still scowling as he started to chuck his own pebbles into the lake, though. “I can’t believe that they thought the Tri-Wizard Tournament was more important than Quidditch.”

“Well, a lot of people seem to think it is.”

“I thought you would be sensible, Harry. The people who participate in the Tournament have a high chance of dying.”

Harry paused. From the way people had been talking about it, he hadn’t thought it was like that. “Really? There are a lot of Gryffindors not that much older than me who are really upset that only people of age get to participate in it.”

“Gryffindors. I rest my point.”

Harry laughed and shook his head. “We’re not that different, you know. The Hat considered me for Slytherin.”

Adrian flopped back on the ground and gave a long and dramatic groan.

Well, I didn’t think he would react that way. “What?”

“You mean you and I could have been on the same team? We would have been unstoppable. Unbeatable!” Adrian rolled over, scowling at Harry. “And I wouldn’t have had to put up with that little berk Malfoy as the Seeker.”

The thought of being on the same team as Adrian was the only thing that had ever made Harry wistful about the Hat’s decision not to put him in Slytherin. “Well, in a way, it’s his fault that I’m not there.”

“Huh?”

“I met him on the train, and he insulted Ron. Then he was Sorted before me. So I sat under the Hat and thought ‘Not Slytherin, not Slytherin’ as hard as I could. So I didn’t actually go up there thinking I wanted to be a Gryffindor. I just knew what I didn’t want to be.”

“I am going to kill that little fucker.”

“Malfoy?”

“Of course. Then next year we’ll have to have a new Seeker.”

“Too bad that people can’t play for two House teams at once. Or just have one Seeker in the sky, and then the score would depend on which team was ahead the most points when I caught the Snitch.”

Adrian paused. For some reason, a flush stole across his cheeks. Harry glanced down at his robes, wondering if he had dirt on them or something and Adrian was too polite to mention it.

“What?” Harry finally asked, when he couldn’t see any dirt and a subtle feeling of his teeth with his tongue hadn’t produced any food stuck between them, either.

“Just picturing you in green robes, that’s all.”

“Oh.” Harry shrugged. “They’re talking about that Yule Ball, too, so I suppose you’ll get to see me in green there. That’s the color of the dress robes I bought.”

“Yeah.” Adrian sounded half-strangled. “Suppose I will.”

Harry watched him in concern for a moment, but he didn’t seem to be choking on anything. Harry shrugged and nodded. “What color dress robes are you going to wear?”

“Er. An old gold set that’s been in my family for generations. My dad doesn’t believe in buying new things if we have old ones.”

Harry pictured Adrian in gold robes for a second, and his stomach swooped in a funny way. But then he pictured Adrian sipping butterbeer and scowling at people, and he smiled again.

“Have fun with that. At least they’re probably better than Ron’s robes. His are covered in lace that an eighty-year-old witch probably wouldn’t wear. Poor Ron.”

Adrian laughed, and Harry was glad that he could go back to enjoying this moment with his Slytherin friend.

*

“Harry.”

Harry looked up, his shoulders already braced against the blow. Ron didn’t believe that Harry hadn’t put his name in the Goblet, and neither did Seamus or Dean, and they had known Harry for a lot longer and spent a lot more time with him than Adrian had. And Adrian had that sense of fair play that made him want to beat Harry on his own merits.

It would hurt, the hatred coming from Adrian as much as everyone else, but at least they would get it over with.

“What are you doing here?”

Harry was in fact sitting in the Quidditch stands, looking out over the deserted pitch. He took a deep breath and turned around to face Adrian. “You might as well say it.”

“Say what?”

“What you came to say about the Goblet of Fire.”

Adrian blinked. Then he said slowly, “That you obviously didn’t put your name in it and someone is trying to kill you by doing it, just like happened all the other years we’ve been here?”

The slow tone fooled Harry at first, and he opened his mouth to snap back. Then he listened to what Adrian was actually saying, and he sagged on the stands and rubbed a shaking hand across his face.

“You mean you believe me? Even Ron doesn’t believe me!”

“I didn’t think he was stupid. Stubborn, maybe, but not stupid.”

Harry couldn’t say anything. Adrian climbed up the stands and sat down beside him. This close, his height made Harry feel envious. It was really obvious how much shorter he was than the Slytherin Chaser. Although Adrian had so many muscles in his arms from hitting Bludgers at Harry and the like that he could really be a Beater if he wanted.

“Why don’t you believe I did it?” Harry whispered.

“Because I know you, and you wouldn’t cheat like that,” Adrian said simply. “You’d do crazy things that some people might count as cheating, like catching the Snitch in your mouth at your first match, but you wouldn’t actually cheat.”

“Oh.” Harry had to force the word past the painful tightness in his throat. “Thanks.”

Adrian nodded. “Thought you should know that Malfoy was putting together some kind of badges in the common room. They said something about Diggory being the real Hogwarts Champion and that you stink or something.”

Harry closed his eyes. He should have expected it of Malfoy, and he expected lots of people would wear the badges, too. At least learning about it now was better than having to deal with it in public.

“Thanks for warning me.”

“Well, I said he was putting them together. They all caught on fire, somehow. Mysterious spontaneous combustion. Very mysterious.”

Harry gaped at Adrian. Adrian cleared his throat and shifted in place. “You know I’d do more for you,” he muttered, his ears going red.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do,” Harry said, even though he hadn’t really known that until just now. He found a smile for the first time since his name had come out of the Goblet, or at least it felt like that. Adrian stared at him with his mouth a little open. “Thank you. Thank you.”

Adrian cleared his throat and stumbled to his feet. “I—uh, I wish I knew some way to get you out of having to compete in the Tournament, but unfortunately, I don’t,” he said, almost babbling. “I’d do it. Because I would.”

Harry blinked and wondered what was wrong with his friend. It was natural for him to be confused about Adrian destroying the badges, because Harry hadn’t known he would do it, but Adrian had planned it, right?

“Er,” he said, when he realized that he hadn’t responded to Adrian’s words. “That’s okay. I’ll just have to survive.”

Adrian abruptly lunged forwards and grabbed Harry’s shoulders. Harry gasped. Adrian shook him a little and snarled, “You’ll survive, or I’ll figure out why.”

“Why I didn’t survive?”

“Yes! And then I’ll learn necromancy just to yell at your spirit, all right? Don’t you dare die!”

And then Adrian let go of Harry’s shoulders as though Harry’s skin had turned scalding underneath his hands, and turned and ran away across the pitch back to the school, leaving Harry gaping again.

Harry finally shut his eyes and shook his head. Adrian had a real problem with the idea that Harry might die, it seemed. And—

Well, he might be the only one in the school at the moment aside from Hermione who did. Harry leaned back against the stands and breathed out. He knew, now, that he would have to work harder on figuring out what the First Task was and surviving it.

For Hermione and himself. But also for Adrian.

*

“Dragons.”

Adrian hadn’t stopped whispering the word in a dazed tone since Harry had told him what Hagrid had shown Harry in the Forest. Adrian was slumped against the Quidditch stands, in fact, staring into the distance.

Harry tugged on his shoulders. “Yes, and I need your help.”

“I already said I couldn’t get you out of this binding contract, Harry. I tried! I looked at every book in the library that even mentioned the Tournament, but I couldn’t come up with a way to—”

“No,” Harry said stubbornly. “I have a plan. I’m going to outfly the dragon, okay? Hermione is helping me practice the Summoning Charm so I can Summon my Firebolt. But I could be a little rusty at flying right now because I haven’t practiced as much this year. So you’re going to help me practice.”

Adrian stared at him. Then he sat up, face so solemn that Harry blinked a little.

“Yes,” Adrian whispered. “Yes. I’ll make sure you survive. You have my word.”

That hadn’t been quite what Harry had been intending to ask him, but it was good enough, especially if it got Adrian out of his desolate mood. “Great. So can we focus on fire spells? Maybe the same ones that you used to burn the—I mean, the ones someone used to burn Malfoy’s badges?”

“Spontaneous combustion, I told you that was,” Adrian said, but his smile was coming back. He hadn’t been smiling a whole lot in the last week, either. “Probably something about the materials Malfoy was using.”

Harry snorted. “But you’re good with fire spells.”

“Sure. But that’s a coincidence.”

This time, Harry gave in and laughed. When he looked up, he saw Adrian staring at him in unabashed wonder, maybe because he thought Harry didn’t have much to laugh about. Harry cleared his throat. “We can practice?”

“Yeah, we can. Let me get my broom.”

*

In the end, Harry did manage to outfly the dragon, and he did it with skill and flair that he honestly hadn’t thought he would manage. When he landed, he lifted his head, eyes seeking out one specific person in the stands.

And yeah. Adrian was clapping and whooping the way he had deliberately done for other teams when the Slytherin one had left him off last term. Probably no one else would be able to tell exactly how sincere he was being.

Harry floated into the Champions’ tent, feeling like he could fly without the broom. And Ron did apologize a few minutes later, and then Harry’s happiness was complete.

Chapter Text

“Who are you taking to the Yule Ball?”

“No one.”

Harry peered over his shoulder, blinking. Adrian had sounded pretty sulky when he’d answered, which wasn’t like him.

Adrian turned around from tucking the Bludgers they’d been using for practice into their box, and shrugged expansively when he saw Harry watching him. “No one I want to date, no one who would ask me for reasons other than ulterior motives. What about you?”

Harry sighed. “I asked Cho Chang, but she’s already going with Cedric Diggory.”

“More fool her.”

“Oh, I didn’t know you disliked Diggory.” At least, not more than any other member of a different Quidditch team, Harry thought. Harry was Adrian’s only exception to the inter-House Quidditch rivalry as far as he could tell.

Adrian muttered something under his breath, then just shook his head when Harry looked at him. “Nothing. You have to have a date, don’t you?”

“Yeah. The Champions have to open the Ball with a dance. It’s tradition.”

“Why the sneer?”

“I don’t know how to dance, and I don’t care to learn, and I can’t think of anyone I want to take to the Ball if Cho won’t come with me.”

Adrian paused. “Really? No one?”

“I just—no? It would be one thing if I had a crush on someone besides Cho,” which made Adrian frown mightily, and Harry wondered if he disliked Cho, too, for some reason. “But everyone else who might want to come with me would just do it for Boy-Who-Lived reasons, and I don’t—I don’t know, is something wrong with me if I don’t want to kiss any pretty witch I see?”

“No,” Adrian said, and now he was giving the kind of superior little smirk that he did when he managed to hit Harry with a Bludger in practice. “It just means that maybe you need to grow up some more and think more about your preferences.”

There was a heavy weight on that last word that Harry didn’t understand. He ignored it in favor of kicking his legs in front of him. “So you don’t think there’s anything wrong with only asking a girl so that I’ll have a date?”

“Absolutely not. In fact, it would probably be better if she didn’t mean anything to you.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Because if you don’t want to dance, and don’t want to learn how, and don’t want everyone to be gaping at you for your fame and your pretty partner, then she’s probably not going to have a very good time.”

Harry sighed and leaned back so that he was watching the sky. “Yeah, you’re right,” he muttered. “It’s more important that I have a partner than that it be anyone I know and really like. And they probably won’t have a good time with me stepping on their toes.”

“If you really knew someone you wanted to ask…”

“But I don’t. I said.”

“Anyone at all…”

“Are you hinting at someone in particular, Adrian?”

For a second, Adrian flushed and opened his mouth. Harry leaned forwards. He more than half expected Adrian to say that he had heard a Slytherin girl talking about wanting to go with Harry or something, but the rest of him was poised and waiting for—

Something else.

“Er,” Adrian said. “No.”

Harry sighed and nodded. “Then I’ll just ask one of the Gryffindor girls and go with her. I wish I could go by myself the way you are.”

“At least I’ll see you there.”

*

It turned out that Adrian’s presence pretty much was the only redeeming feature of the Yule Ball (well, all right, it was sort of fun to see some of the nastier Slytherins gaping at Hermione like they’d thought she would never be pretty). Harry couldn’t dance even after lessons with McGonagall, Parvati abandoned him as soon as she could, and Ron and Hermione had a big fight after the Ball.

But Harry did get to go up to Adrian, when Harry was pretending to get a glass of the butterbeer and Adrian just happened to be standing near the table, and Harry got to say, “Did anyone give you any problems about coming by yourself?”

Adrian turned a sly smile on him that Harry had never seen before. He found his breath catching. Maybe he would have seen it if he was usually close enough to the Chasers during a Quidditch match and if they hadn’t canceled Quidditch, but he hadn’t.

Harry shook off the effect a moment later, with vague thoughts that Adrian ought to smile that way more often, because his friend was answering. “No. Someone did ask me if I was trying to make some sort of statement, but I asked them if they thought I was, and they couldn’t answer me.”

“Er. Were you?”

“Just that I couldn’t go with anyone in particular this time.”

“Er,” Harry said again, since he had thought Adrian wanted to attend alone, but he let it go. “The gold robes do look nice on you.”

Adrian’s smile turned into the calmer, funnier sort that Harry usually expected from him. “Thanks. The green robes bring out your eyes.”

Harry’s stomach did a flip, which was odd, because he wasn’t on a broom right now. He opened his mouth to say something else, but then Adrian looked over Harry’s shoulder, and his face slammed shut.

“Sorry, someone I have to talk to,” he growled, and stalked through the crowd.

Harry followed him with his eyes, and thought it was Malfoy. That sort of bothered him, when Adrian could probably talk to Malfoy any time in the Slytherin common room, but he put up with it.

Especially since Adrian might have lit Malfoy’s robes on fire. Not that anyone could prove it. It was pretty spontaneous.

*

“It was a stupid Task.”

“Yeah. You couldn’t even see what was going on beneath the water, could you?”

Adrian shook his head and leaned back on the sands, exhaling slowly. He had seemed oddly tense since Harry had caught up with him on the pitch that day, although some of it had faded during their practice. And it wasn’t like Harry had got hurt during the Task.

Adrian still seemed tense anyway.

“Why was Weasley the thing you would miss most?”

Harry blinked at Adrian. He had leaned forwards again, his hands dangling between his knees, and he didn’t seem intent on waxing his broom, even though most of the time he did it right away after the practice. He kept staring at Harry, though, one foot tapping.

“Er. Because he’s my best friend?”

“You don’t sound too sure of that yourself.”

“He is. He was stupid until the First Task, but that woke him up, seeing me face dragons.”

“I just wonder why it wasn’t—Granger. Or…”

Adrian kept his head turned away, staring out over the pitch, but this time, Harry felt as if he had woken from a dream. Maybe what he was about to say was stupid, but he thought he was right.

“Do you wish it had been you?” he asked quietly.

Adrian started and turned to look at him. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, but his grimace was half-hearted.

“I kind of wish it had been you,” Harry said. “But Ron is my best friend, and people know he’s my best friend. We’ve worked pretty hard to keep our practices secret. Would you have wanted people to know like this? To start thinking about why I valued you?”

Adrian hesitated. Then he said, almost inaudibly, “I’ll finish Hogwarts a year before you.”

“I know.” And there was a void in Harry’s chest when he thought about it, which he never really had before. Adrian would be gone. No more secret Quidditch practices. No more spontaneous combustion. No more yelling at him in the hospital wing.

“I want—I want—” Adrian looked at him. “I want people to know about it, but not right now. But I also want them to know about it right now. I don’t know how to say what I want. I don’t know that there are words for it.”

Harry’s mind made another leap, one that was sort of inconvenient, and he found himself flushing brightly. “Did you—did you want to come with me to the Yule Ball? As my date?”

Adrian sucked in his breath. But he had always been brave and blunt, for a Slytherin, and he stared Harry in the eye instead of trying to turn away.

“Yes. But you said that you only had a crush on one girl, so I didn’t think you would want to date a bloke.”

“I just didn’t think it was even an option,” Harry said, a little dazedly. His mind was trotting back and forth. He felt a bit like he’d fallen off his broom. “But if I was going to date a bloke, it would be you.”

Then he slapped his hand across his mouth and wondered if he should have said that.

But Adrian was looking at him with fervent thanks, and his mouth bent into a gentle smile as he said, “And if I were going to date a bloke, it would be you.”

“Do you—I mean, do you want to date blokes at all?” And this so wasn’t what Harry had thought they would be discussing after their Quidditch practice today.

“I’ve thought about it for a little while. Wasn’t sure, until I thought of you going to the Yule Ball with someone else and it made me sick to my stomach.” Adrian leaned forwards, eyes on, Harry’s mouth, that was it. “I didn’t want you going with anyone else, girl or boy. Just wanted you to myself.”

Harry swallowed. No one had ever said something like that to him before. The way that Colin and Lockhart had acted towards him had nothing to do with it.

Adrian edged towards him along the stands, until he was quite close. Harry stared up at him. Of course Adrian had been closer than this some of the times that they’d flown, but it was still—it was still—

“Can I kiss you, Harry?”

“Yeah,” Harry breathed. And this wasn’t the way he’d pictured his first kiss happening, either, but who cared? Adrian was all about the unexpected.

Spontaneous, Harry thought, and he was smiling as he leaned forwards to press his lips against Adrian’s.

It was warm, and dry, and clingy, with Adrian’s hands settling heavily on Harry’s shoulders. But there was nothing bad about that. Harry shifted closer so that he could get more of it, and Adrian made a soft little wondering sound against his lips.

Harry pulled back then and ducked his head, flushing. Adrian reached out and hooked his fingers under Harry’s chin, though, and pulled his face up.

Harry looked, wondering if it was going to be something terrible—

But it was just Adrian, his friend and Quidditch partner, grinning at him as if Harry had not only dodged a Bludger but managed to turn it back on him.

“Want to try again?” he asked. “I hear that it gets even better with practice.”

And Harry wanted to try again, and he and Adrian tried again, and it turns out that, yes, kisses were just like Quidditch, and better the more often you did them.

*

“I’m sorry. They wouldn’t let me through earlier.”

Harry blinked his eyes open. He felt—not drowsy, precisely. Not after everything that had happened that night, Fake Moody and Cedric and Voldemort and all. He rolled over in his hospital bed and looked at Adrian, who was standing beside his bed with an expression of anguish.

“I’m sorry,” Adrian repeated. “I wanted to be there for you.”

“I know,” Harry whispered.

And then suddenly he was in a long collapse, and he was crying, and Adrian was saying something helpless and holding him, and Harry rolled to the side so that his face was resting against Adrian’s robes and cried it out.

Sometimes words emerged, and he told Adrian about Cedric dying and Voldemort coming back and being tortured with the Imperius and the Cruciatus. Adrian held him and rocked him and talked in a low, terrible voice about how much he wanted to punish them.

Harry lay there, still, after he’d cried out the tears. Adrian touched his hair with a shaking hand.

“And now they’ve left you alone.”

“They—probably thought I was going to sleep.”

“They shouldn’t have left you alone.”

Adrian’s tone of voice said there was no use arguing with him, and honestly, Harry didn’t want to try. He closed his eyes and laid his head on Adrian’s shoulder.

“What can I do to help?”

“I don’t know,” Harry breathed. “They’re going to—they’re going to send me back to the Muggle world, I know it, and I’ll have nightmares of Cedric dying and Voldemort coming back every time I go to sleep, and I won’t be able to see anyone unless they decide to take me to Ron’s house or something during the summer—”

“That won’t be happening.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right, Ron’s parents probably won’t want me in their house if Death Eaters come after me—”

“That’s not what I meant. I mean you won’t be stuck in the Muggle world by yourself all summer.”

Harry’s throat closed with hope. He tried to swallow it, tried not to feel it. There were so many times that he had hoped that would come true, and it never had. Not with Sirius, not with his friends after first year, not when Aunt Marge was coming.

But he whispered, “How?” anyway, and Adrian held him close and told him.

When he kissed Harry before he left the hospital wing, his kiss tasted like steel, like sheer determination. Harry clung to it, and closed his eyes.

Chapter Text

Harry kept thinking there was no way it would work. After all, Adrian was a pureblood, and he admitted that he’d only been to the Muggle world once or twice. It wouldn’t work, Harry told himself as Uncle Vernon tossed Harry and his trunk into the car.

And then, when Uncle Vernon had stopped to let people cross the street and was scowling horribly out the window at them, it worked.

Harry’s car door abruptly opened. He swung his head around, his own mouth open. But he could see the handle of a broom sticking out from underneath his Invisibility Cloak, which he’d lent to Adrian, and then Adrian’s face flashed.

“Come on, quick!”

Luckily, the last people crossing the street in front of Uncle Vernon were little kids who were playing some game that involved screaming and spinning and running in circles. Uncle Vernon was too busy yelling and honking the horn to pay attention. Harry dodged out of the door with his trunk and Hedwig’s cage, slammed it shut, and scrambled onto the broom.

There were a few horrible mad moments when Adrian was trying to fit both of them—all of them—under the Cloak and fly away at the same time. Harry thought they must surely be seen. But all the Muggles in sight were looking at the children in the street, laughing at the children, or chasing them.

They climbed.

Harry leaned back and laughed. Adrian grinned at him and flew behind a house into a garden that looked overgrown and mostly deserted. When he landed, Harry slid off the broom and started laughing again.

“I can’t believe it worked, you madman!” Harry shouted.

“It nearly didn’t, trying to control the broom when I couldn’t see it was nearly impossible—”

“It worked! You do realize that we’re going to have to Disillusion Hedwig and the trunk on the way back?”

“Why? She can fly to my house, and we’ll shrink the cage and the trunk.”

Harry bent over at the waist, still laughing, tears pouring down his face. Adrian grabbed him and hugged him, holding him close as Harry’s laughter turned to desperate sobs, and he clutched at his boyfriend and held him close.

“Told you I wouldn’t leave you there,” Adrian whispered.

“Uncle Vernon might tell someone…”

“Do you really think he will?”

After a minute of thinking, Harry shook his head. Yes, Adrian was right. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia would be relieved that he wasn’t with them for the summer, and also intimidated at the thought of what the “freaks” might do to them for losing Harry. They didn’t have an owl, either, if Hedwig wasn’t there.

No, Harry could go with Adrian, and stay in the place on the Pucey property that Adrian had told him about, and this summer was going to be loads better than the last three had been, even if Harry had to hide from Adrian’s family.

“Let’s go.”

“Let me do one thing first.”

Harry looked at Adrian curiously, but Adrian leaned close to Harry and kissed him, his hand rising so that his fingers stroked softly through Harry’s hair. Harry shuddered and pressed close, and they might have got distracted if Hedwig hadn’t started making disapproving noises in her cage.

Adrian pulled back and laughed, and then opened the door. Hedwig took to the air immediately, heading for the horizon so determinedly that Harry might have been worried if he hadn’t remembered how she’d found him in the Leaky Cauldron after he blew up Aunt Marge.

“Come here, then.”

They draped the Cloak over them both with a bit of maneuvering, and Adrian cast a Disillusionment Charm to blur the bits of them that stuck out. Then they took off.

Harry leaned back against Adrian’s chest and closed his eyes. Adrian’s arms were firm around him, and he breathed in and out, slowly.

He wasn’t going home, but that didn’t matter. He was with Adrian, and that was what mattered most right now.

*

Years ago, Adrian’s parents had built him a small house on their property, when he’d said that he wanted to be by himself after an argument with his brothers. The house was still there, complete with a little window, a bedroom, a bathroom that had working Plumbing Charms on the small loo, and a sitting room with chairs that Adrian had Transfigured to match Harry’s size.

The building itself was a wooden one at such a distance from the Puceys’ house (called Athena’s Rest) that no one would notice Harry was there as long as he didn’t step outside without the Invisibility Cloak. Adrian’s personal house-elf, Holly, who was loyal to Adrian alone, would bring him his meals.

Adrian apologized while Harry stood in the house’s doorway and gaped around. “It’s not much, and you have to stay hidden, but you can use your wand here, and—”

Harry spun around and hugged him. “It’s more than I would have had at the Dursleys,” he said, his voice low and fervent. “I would have had to stay hidden most of the time at Privet Drive, too.”

“Privet Drive. What a stupid name for a house.”

“Oh, that was the street. Muggle houses don’t have names.”

“What? Why not?”

Instead of explaining that, Harry preferred to kiss Adrian instead. Adrian kissed enthusiastically back, and the names of Muggle houses were forgotten.

If Harry called the little wooden house “Sanctuary” in his mind, it didn’t need to bother anybody.

*

“They aren’t telling me anything in their letters.”

“Do they say why?”

Harry sighed and lay back against the pillow on his small bed. Small, but still more comfortable than the one in Dudley’s second bedroom. He smiled at Adrian. “Something about safety, and how the letters might be intercepted.”

“I’d like to see someone take a letter from your owl, really.”

Hedwig, sitting on a perch in the corner of the room, gave a smug hoot. She approved of Adrian, and had already nipped at his ears and groomed his hair the way she had only ever done with Harry.

“Yeah, but Dobby managed, so—”

“What?”

“Didn’t I tell you about Dobby?” Now that Harry thought about it, maybe he hadn’t. Adrian had only talked about the basilisk when he visited Harry in the hospital wing at the end of his second year, and they hadn’t talked about it since, really. Adrian didn’t seem to want to dwell on the times Harry had nearly died, and neither did Harry, so that was fair.

“No. That sounds like a house-elf’s name. Where is he? You shouldn’t have suffered so much with a house-elf looking after you.”

It took Harry a while to explain Dobby, the interference with his post, and the way that Harry kind-of-accidentally-but-not-really freed Dobby from Lucius Malfoy. Adrian listened, and laughed a little, but most of the time, he looked angry.

“You shouldn’t have had to go through that,” he said, voice very low.

“But I’m here now.”

“You are. But it doesn’t make your suffering right.”

Harry didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t think anyone had ever said anything like it to him. But when in doubt, he could kiss Adrian, and Adrian always responded enthusiastically, and there was that.

Honestly, as the summer went on, his biggest regret was that they couldn’t play Quidditch without being caught by Adrian’s parents.

*

Or that was his biggest regret until Adrian reported that his father had found two Dementors prowling near the wards. He’d seen them off, of course, but Adrian’s face was disturbed.

“You think they were here for me?” Harry asked. “Then why hasn’t Dumbledore or someone come to get me?”

“The Dementors might be told to find a particular person and eat their soul, and they would travel to wherever that person was. It happened with Sirius Black, after all.” Adrian shot Harry a heavy look. “But Dumbledore wouldn’t necessarily know anything about it unless he has a person in the office that controls the Dementors.”

“And with the way the Ministry’s turned against him, that’s not likely.”

“And against you.”

Harry shrugged. He didn’t care as much about the papers calling him mental and a cheater as Adrian did. According to Adrian, his parents were the most shallow opportunists to ever exist, and they would turn on Harry and give him to the Ministry if they thought it would gain them something.

Harry didn’t think that was the real reason Adrian was upset, but he didn’t need to spell everything out.

“Someone could have sent them after you.”

“Fudge? Surely there’s not that many people with direct control over the Dementors.”

“No. The Minister, the Head Auror, the Director of the DMLE, and the Minister’s Undersecretary.”

“I don’t think I’ve met any of them except Fudge.”

“But one of them could have done it if they wanted to silence you about the Dark Lord being back, or if they thought it would please Fudge.”

Harry shrugged and sighed and picked up his History textbook. It was more interesting than Binns. “Not much we can do, either way.”

“We could figure it out so we could destroy them first.”

Harry gaped a little at Adrian. He’d never heard his boyfriend talk about destroying anything except the badges that Malfoy had been making. (And that had been spontaneous). Adrian just stared stolidly back at him.

“You—why would you want to do that?”

“To keep them from destroying you.”

Adrian said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and Harry found himself relaxing. Yes, he could see where Adrian would have got that impression, even if he was wrong about the way Harry wanted to handle it.

“Why don’t we wait until something else happens, and see if we even need to do something? It’s not like this person would be able to send Dementors to Hogwarts. Maybe they’ll give up.”

Adrian’s extremely skeptical expression said what he thought of that, but Harry kissed him, and they found better things to do with their time.

*

“Does this count as something happening?”

Adrian had managed to fall into step beside Harry on their way out of the Great Hall, where Umbridge had just been introduced as the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. Harry sighed a little and kept his eyes forwards, working his way casually to the end of the Gryffindor line and back.

It wasn’t like he didn’t know where the Tower was, or like he really wanted to spend time around his roommates right now. Seamus had been glaring at him in a way that Harry thought meant he believed the stories in the paper.

He and Adrian slipped into the shadows of a nearby alcove, and Adrian formed fists with his hands, scowling. Harry shook away thoughts of better things for those hands to be doing. It would only distract them right now.

“Yeah, this isn’t great.”

“You think she’s here to reinforce the Ministry propaganda?”

“Probably.”

Adrian closed his eyes and stood there for a second. Then he said, “You have to try not to provoke her.”

“Er.”

“What?”

“I mean, if she starts saying that I murdered Cedric or something, I have to respond, don’t I?”

“Why? You and I know you didn’t, and your friends know you didn’t, and Dumbledore knows you didn’t, and probably the professors who matter the most know you didn’t. Snape’s a lost cause.”

“He’s your Head of House.”

“Yeah, and he favors Slytherins above the other Houses, but that extends to having favorites inside the House. He doesn’t care about me as long as I don’t get into trouble or blow up his classroom. He’ll care even less now, since I didn’t get the OWL mark to make it into NEWT Potions.”

“Shit, Adrian, I’m sorry. We didn’t even discuss your marks, did we?”

“We had other things to discuss.”

Harry flushed and ducked his head a little, but couldn’t stop the smile working its way up his lips. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll try not to provoke Umbridge.”

It turned out that he couldn’t not provoke Seamus, but Harry’s mind was on Adrian and the floating feeling in his stomach, how his legs seemed to barely touch the floor, and he ignored his roommate a lot more thoroughly than he’d be able to do otherwise.

*

“You said you wouldn’t provoke Umbridge.”

“I didn’t say anything for a week!”

Adrian rolled his eyes as he dipped Harry’s hands into the complicated mixture of what seemed to be Essence of Murtlap and another healing potion. “You’re lucky that I had this ready.”

“Did you know she had Blood Quills or something?”

Adrian shook his head. “I thought she would actually use spells, but these are the most powerful potions I know of for healing cursed wounds. And Snape would notice if I stole them from him, but Madam Pomfrey doesn’t check them often, so.”

Harry laughed a little, feeling a lightening in his mind and heart for the first time since that awful detention with Umbridge.

“Do you want to tell McGonagall?”

Harry sighed. “I did that when Umbridge sent me to her with a message. McGonagall just said that I should keep my head down and not provoke Umbridge.”

“In other words, the same thing I told you.”

“Yeah, but she doesn’t kiss me.”

Adrian shot him an oddly shy smile and then stepped back and nodded at where Harry was holding his hand in the bowl of mingled potions. “Keep it there. This classroom is far enough out of the way that no one should come looking for us, but you need at least a couple of hours of healing.”

“That sounds boring.”

“I know a way to liven things up.”

Harry felt his heart beating faster, a flush coming into his cheeks. It seemed sometimes that he would never get over that reaction, but then, he might not want to.

“You can do that without spilling the potions?” he murmured, lifting his face.

“You ought to see me focus, Potter.”

Chapter Text

Harry stood up from the Gryffindor table, swallowing a little. Today was the first Gryffindor-Slytherin Quidditch game where he would be playing against Adrian in two years. At least whoever the actual Slytherin Captain was this time had had the good sense to put Adrian back on the team.

Harry couldn’t help shooting a glance across the Great Hall. Adrian was sitting beside his teammates and eating like all the rest of them, with a calm, bored expression on his face. He looked at Harry as if he’d never touched him.

“Can I do it? Can I do it?”

Harry shook aside the temptation to keep staring at Adrian and turned to his best friend, who was so nervous that Harry wondered if something spontaneous would happen to him before they got on the pitch. “You’re going to be fine, Ron.”

“But you saw how I let through some of the Quaffles in practice…”

“You’re going to do fine, or I’ll know why not,” Kate Bell said, pausing behind them.

“Yes, ma’am!”

Harry hoped that his snappy salute to Katie would calm Ron down, but Ron just shook and trembled more as they walked out to get their brooms and robes.

Harry sighed a little. He hoped that they would win, or Adrian was probably going to be intolerable.

*

Harry was distinctly pleased, as they rose from the pitch, to notice that Malfoy looked ruffled. He kept glaring around at Harry, at Ron, at the other Quidditch players, as though he thought someone was going to sneak up behind him and yank on his robes.

Not a bad idea, really.

“Cat got your tongue, Malfoy?” Harry taunted as he swept past him and jerked his broom back and forth as if he’d seen the Snitch. Of course he hadn’t, but it made Malfoy, like the inferior player he was, glance back and forth wildly.

“What did you do with it?”

“I haven’t swallowed the Snitch this time.”

“No! My notes! My song!”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Malfoy.”

And since Harry really didn’t, Malfoy just cursed him and took off in another direction. Harry turned back to keep an eye on the Bludgers, and caught a glance from Adrian, who had the Quaffle for a moment until a coordinated attack from Angelina and Katie took it away from him.

Spontaneous? Harry mouthed.

Adrian’s smile glinted for a second before he dived out of the way and spiraled up beneath Katie to grab the Quaffle again.

Harry threw himself into the game. Ron was missing Quaffle after Quaffle, but the Gryffindor Chasers were good enough to keep them from falling hopelessly behind, and Fred and George operated like one brain in two bodies. He danced through the Bludgers and led Malfoy on a neverending chase.

Malfoy’s broom wasn’t as fast as the Firebolt. He wasn’t as fast as Harry. He wasn’t as graceful, as skilled and confident in the air.

Harry’s training sessions with Adrian had improved his skills as much as they’d improved Adrian’s.

But, of course, that was the point, and the same reason that Adrian and his spontaneity had happened to Malfoy’s notes, whatever they’d been. Adrian wanted to win a fair game. To him, nothing else mattered.

Of course, that didn’t keep him from snatching the Quaffle out of the air when he could get it and flying at Ron frighteningly fast. Ron dived to the side, and Adrian sent the Quaffle through.

Cheers broke out from the Slytherin stands. Harry saw Fred and George charge in Adrian’s direction, and he promptly shot into the air and then back down again, around and around the pitch, scanning for the Snitch.

The only way to prevent further humiliation for Ron and damage to Adrian was to find the Snitch quickly.

“Losing your temper, Potty?”

Harry arrowed forwards, Malfoy right behind him. Then Harry spun the broom so that he was riding backwards and smirked at Malfoy, who gaped at him with his mouth hanging open.

“Just proving how much better I am than you,” Harry said flippantly.

Malfoy opened his mouth to shout, and one of Fred’s Bludgers, which Harry had seen coming, slammed into his shoulder. Malfoy cried out and wheeled to the side, clutching his collarbone and whimpering.

He really doesn’t deal with pain well, Harry thought gleefully, and descended like a hawk as he saw the Snitch ahead.

He grabbed it and held it up, shouting out loud. Immediate cheers broke out from the Gryffindor stands, and Harry saw Ron drag himself back onto his broom and smile with something like relief.

Harry caught Adrian’s eye on the way as he flew over to get hugged by his teammates, and Adrian tilted his head towards him. His face was flushed, exhilarated.

He might have lost, but he got the fair game he wanted.

*

“I know you had something to do with my notes getting destroyed, Potty.”

Harry rolled his eyes and turned around. He was on his way back from another detention with Umbridge, and all he wanted to do was let his hand rest in the combination of potions that Adrian had prepared for him earlier and then go to sleep. He didn’t want to be debating his nonexistent crimes with Malfoy in an empty corridor.

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about, Malfoy.”

“I had notes for a song that was going to show everyone exactly who Weasley is.” Malfoy stepped towards Harry, one hand resting on his wand. “How he was born in a bin and always lets the Quaffle in.”

“Wow, how long did it take you to come up with that one?” Harry had to admit that maybe the words would have destroyed Ron’s confidence, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a stupid rhyme.

Malfoy puffed up and opened his mouth, but Adrian’s voice spoke in a low growl from the corridor behind him. “Piss off, Malfoy. Potter’s mine.”

“He destroyed my notes!”

“Then it’s up to me to punish him. Bugger off.”

Malfoy hesitated as he looked at Adrian. Harry knew that Malfoy’s family was wealthier than Adrian’s and had the “prestige” of being among the Death Eaters, which maybe meant that he would challenge Adrian. But Adrian loomed there with his muscles showing as he folded his arms, and Malfoy must have decided that he didn’t need to challenge his Housemate that badly.

“This isn’t over,” he hissed at Harry, and stalked off down the corridor.

“Good job on looking intimidating,” Harry whispered, when he was sure Malfoy was out of earshot.

Adrian ignored him, staring unhappily at the bloody lines on the back of Harry’s hand. “I told you to stop provoking her.”

Harry closed his eyes, fighting back the surge of anger and the pain in his scar that seemed to show up all the time lately. “It’s hard when she says such provoking things,” he muttered.

“Then I’ll have to stop her.”

“Adrian, you can’t—do something to her without being obvious.”

“But I can do something to her Blood Quills.”

“You can?”

Adrian had a frightening smile, sometimes, although Harry didn’t think that many people would shiver at the sight of it for the same reasons that he was. “I’ve been studying the wards on her office, and practicing with fire spells. Yeah, I can do something.”

Harry bit his lip as he thought about what it would be like not to have to use the Quills in detention, and then swallowed and nodded. “That would be wonderful.”

“Then go soak your hand, and remember that this is the last time you’ll have to do it.”

That didn’t happen immediately, of course, because Harry had to kiss his boyfriend, and that got rather involved. But by the time they released each other, and even though they were both panting a little, Adrian’s eyes were fiery with determination.

“Go on, and remember that this is the last time you’ll have to do it,” he repeated.

Harry flung him a small smile and went on to the Gryffindor common room, where Hermione and Ron would be waiting with the right combination of potions. He daydreamed all the way there of what he could do for Adrian, for doing such a wonderful thing for him.

Annoyingly, he couldn’t come up with much. But he would just have to do better.

*

“If anyone knows anything about a teensy fire that happened to take place, I would appreciate the knowledge.”

Umbridge’s smile was tight as her eyes swept across the room. They stopped and lingered more than once on Harry, but Harry painted his face with innocent confusion and just sat there, and Umbridge had to look past him.

Of course Harry knew what had happened, and he rewarded Adrian for it with plenty of snogging later than night. But no one was going to tell Umbridge.

It was enough for Ron and Hermione that Harry was coming back without bloody lines on his hand anymore.

*

“Are you okay, Harry?”

Harry looked up with a wistful little smile. Sirius was standing in the door of the Grimmauld Place library, where Harry had come to think and dream and be alone for a bit. He and Adrian had agreed to wait to exchange Christmas gifts until Harry got back to Hogwarts, since an owl flying in with a gift for just Harry might be a little suspicious.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Why do you ask?”

“I—you’ve been so quiet. I thought you might still be upset that you couldn’t come here during the summer.”

“I was a little irritated, yeah. But I understand why Dumbledore thought staying in the Muggle world would be good for me, so I could get away from the people who might gape at me and ask about Cedric’s death.”

Sirius stepped into the library and ruffled his hair. “I could tell you some stories about your dad, if it would help.”

It wasn’t really connected to what Harry had said, but he accepted that. Sirius had been in Azkaban for twelve years. Harry wasn’t going to demand the impossible of him, and sometimes, connected conversations were impossible. “Sure, I’d like that. But can you tell me something about my mum, too? I feel like the only thing people ever tell me is that I have her eyes.”

Sirius looked startled, and then he smiled. “Sure. If you want. You ought to know she had a temper, and she didn’t give James the time of day until we were almost finished with Hogwarts…”

*

“I do not need to see memories of you snogging, Potter.”

“Don’t look, then,” Harry spat, straightening up. He and Adrian hadn’t liked it when Dumbledore had said that Harry had to take lessons in Occlumency with Snape, but Adrian hadn’t been worried about Snape spilling that he was Harry’s boyfriend to anyone. Adrian’s parents weren’t Death Eaters, just the sort who would wait and see who won, and pretend they’d always been on the side that did.

Snape studied Harry with glittering eyes for a moment. Harry lifted his head and stared back.

“You have kept the secret of your friendship with Mr. Pucey from everyone for years.”

“Yes.”

“Apply that will to keep secrets to your Occlumency,” Snape said, raising his wand, “and you will do well. Legilimens.”

*

“Snape’s a bastard.”

“Yeah.”

They were sitting in the stands after another late-evening practice, and Harry was leaning his head against Adrian’s shoulder. Adrian stroked his hair slowly, rhythmically. Harry had never known how soothing someone touching him like that could be.

“Is he teaching you what you need to know?”

“No.”

Adrian just nodded, as though that didn’t surprise him. “Then I want you to promise me you won’t react too strongly to any vision that the Dark Lord sends through. Okay? Check it with someone before you believe it.”

“You think he’d try to trick me with a false vision?”

“Yeah, I do. It’s at least as likely as anything else.”

Harry settled slowly against Adrian’s side and stared into the cloudy night above them. He nodded. “I promise.”

*

“I can’t believe that worked.”

Harry pressed his hand against Hermione’s as they came out of the Forbidden Forest. “It wouldn’t have if Umbridge hadn’t been so stupid and prejudiced. But she just—decided that she could call them half-breeds and get away with it.”

“Yes.” Hermione turned and looked at him earnestly. “And you think we have to go to the Ministry to rescue Sirius?”

Harry took a deep breath and stared up at the stars for a moment. He remembered that evening on the pitch with Adrian, and Adrian’s insistence that Harry check with someone eels about his visions before just assuming they were real.

Voldemort probably knows that if anything could make me panic, Sirius in danger would do it.

“I don’t know if we have to,” he said. “I think—I think I should go and try to reach him on this mirror he gave me for Christmas. A communication mirror. I didn’t use it before, but that’s mostly because I resented that he—didn’t tell me everything about my dad and mum.” Like how big a berk James Potter had been, and how he had tried to blackmail Harry’s mum into going to Hogsmeade with him. “I think I should try it.”

“Yeah, you should.”

*

“I still don’t know why Voldemort wanted me in the Department of Mysteries.”

“I might.”

Harry turned his head and gaped at Adrian. “You do?”

Adrian touched Harry’s cheek, gently. They’d come inside after their latest practice, but they were still far away from both the Gryffindor Tower and the Slytherin common room, in a corridor that Harry thought they might be the only people to see for years. “It’s an idea. I didn’t say I did for sure.”

“Please tell me, Adrian.”

Adrian considered him for a moment, and then nodded slowly. “All right. You told me you had one of those communication mirrors that you used to speak to your godfather.”

“Yeah.”

“Malfoy has something like it. I don’t think it’s a mirror, not exactly.” Adrian frowned for a moment, tilting his head back and forth as though trying to remember. “It looks more like a polished coin. It glows with light when he wants to talk to someone in it, but of course that’s almost always his father. He thinks no one knows about it.”

“But you do.”

“When I was searching for things he was doing that I might need to foil spontaneously, I followed him into a secret passage. It was the only place he felt secure enough to talk to his father. And apparently one of the conversations was partially about that failed ambush in the Department of Mysteries. They study time there.”

Harry blinked. “You think that Voldemort wanted me to steal a Time-Turner for him?”

Adrian still flinched at the name, but he drew in a deep breath and shook his head. “No. There’s—they study the future there, too. That’s what Malfoy was talking about.”

Harry felt his mouth fall open. His mind went back to Divination, which he knew he had failed the OWL for, and—

“You think there was a prophecy?”

Adrian leaned nearer, looking around as though he expected Malfoy or Dumbledore to materialize from behind a tapestry and hunt them down. “Yeah. I mean, maybe. It’s the only thing that would fit all the clues.”

“A prophecy—involving me?”

“Yeah.”

Harry bit his lip, thinking about that. There was some reason that Voldemort had come after him when he was a baby. Dumbledore had said that at the end of his first year. And it sure sounded like it was after Harry specifically, not just because Harry’s mum and dad had annoyed him.

And—

“But why would they need me to go to the Department of Mysteries?”

Adrian shrugged, leaning back. “I don’t know. Maybe it had something to do with the prophecy’s fulfillment? There was supposed to be a confrontation between you and the Dark Lord there?”

“Maybe,” Harry mumbled. He was thinking hard. There had been a few people caught lurking around the Department of Mysteries, the Prophet had announced, but there had been no details, and so it might have been Order members who were doing—whatever—there, like Mr. Weasley, instead of Death Eaters.

But it could have been Death Eaters.

“Thank you,” he told Adrian, dragging his mind back to the conversation in front of him. “I think I have something to talk to Dumbledore about now.”

“Do you have to bring him up now?” Adrian complained, but from the smug way he dragged Harry into his next kiss, he didn’t care that much.

*

“I am sorry, Harry. It would be too dangerous for you to know the secrets of the Department of Mysteries when you cannot yet shield your mind with Occlumency.”

Harry left the Headmaster’s office disappointed, but not surprised. Adrian’s guess was still the best one as to why Voldemort had attacked him, and at least Harry could maybe formulate a strategy for the future based on it.

Chapter Text

Sirius didn’t say anything about staying with him for the summer, even though Harry knew the secret of Grimmauld Place from Christmas. So Harry just left under his Invisibility Cloak from King’s Cross, and he and Adrian Flooed back to the Puceys’ home from the Leaky Cauldron. Adrian had known his parents would be gone for a holiday in Greece.

“The week you come home from Hogwarts?”

Adrian lowered his eyes and shrugged.

Harry reached out and gripped his boyfriend’s arm, holding tightly for a second, to give Adrian a chance to talk if he wanted. He evidently didn’t want, and so Harry pulled back his hand and said, “At least this will give us a chance to train in the open for a while.”

Adrian grinned at him. “I reckon that I’ll be the best seventh-year Chaser the Slytherin team has ever seen.”

Seventh-year. Adrian will be gone when I’m in my seventh one.

Harry swallowed a little. Adrian peered at him. “What’s wrong?”

You know you can still count on him. You can even shelter here if you have to. You know he would never deny you.

Harry smiled back at Adrian. “Nothing you can help. Where’s the practice Snitch?”

*

“I suppose he’s decided that he’s had enough of being quiet.”

Harry nodded and shuddered, eyes locked on the front page of the Prophet. All the articles were about Dementors breeding after escaping the Ministry’s control, breakouts from Azkaban, attacks on Muggles that the Aurors had to cover up, and a few targeted murders. Harry was kind of glad that he’d managed to confirm from Umbridge that she’d been the one to send the Dementors after him. At least he didn’t have to feel bad that she’d been one of the first victims.

Because Voldemort was upset she didn’t cause enough chaos at Hogwarts?

Harry shook his head. He would probably never know.

“Have your friends said anything in their letters?”

“Just that they can’t tell me much. Oh, and Dumbledore wants to take me on that secret—mission, or whatever, that I told you about.”

“Yeah. That you have to go back to your relatives for.”

“He just said that he’d meet me there.”

“He’s going to want to talk to them. There has to be a reason that he’s meeting you there when he never visited before.”

Harry sighed. “You’re probably right, but you actually attended Apparition lessons this time, so you can get me there and back quickly.”

Adrian hesitated, but only muttered, “I don’t like the thought of you going back there at all,” when Harry looked at him expectantly.

Harry leaned against him and hugged him. They were once more in Harry’s little house on the Puceys’ property, looking out the window at a light rain that drummed across the grounds. “I know that you don’t. I don’t myself. But you can stay out of sight, and you can pick me back up when we come back.”

“Do you think he will bring you back?”

“I’m going to insist on it.”

*

“No, sir.”

Dumbledore paused with one hand—the blackened, scarred one that made it look like he’d been struck by lightning—on the knob of the Dursleys’ house. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, Harry.”

“I mean that you don’t need to talk to them, because I haven’t stayed here this summer, or last summer.”

Dumbledore turned to look at him. He seemed astonished, sorrowful, and very old, the way he hadn’t when Harry had first caught sight of his hand. He took a deep breath and then let it out without saying anything.

“Were they so terrible?” he asked at last.

“This year? Maybe they wouldn’t have been. Last summer, when I was grieving Cedric’s death and left completely out of the magical world by my best friends? Yes, sir. They would have been.”

Dumbledore looked at his feet as though considering what wisdom they had to impart to him, and then looked up with a faint nod. “I am sorry, Mr. Potter. I did not consider in full detail the kind of childhood I was giving you.”

It was probably the only apology Harry was ever going to get about it, since the Dursleys wouldn’t give him one. He managed to put a smile on his face as he stood up from where he’d been leaning against the house. “All right, sir. What was the mission that you wanted me to go on?”

Dumbledore looked back at the house for a moment as though he were going to say something else, but then turned to Harry with a broader, more cheerful smile. “There is a professor I hope to persuade to teach at Hogwarts this term. I think that bringing the Boy-Who-Lived along with me will make a stronger argument than any I could make myself…”

*

“And he doesn’t really teach you anything in those lessons.”

“No. We look at memories of—his past.”

“I can bear the name Voldemort.”

Harry blinked at Adrian. They were in a room deep in the dungeons that had evidently been used by the Slytherin Quidditch team as a strategy discussion room at one time. The walls were covered with old chalk drawings and scratches showing the names of plays and fouls and the tattered remnants of posters. “When did that change?”

“When I accepted that my boyfriend probably has no choice but to fight him.”

Adrian reached out slowly and laid his hand atop the scar on Harry’s forehead. Harry sighed and closed his eyes, moving nearer to rest against Adrian. “Our idea about the prophecy is only an idea,” he whispered.

“Dumbledore hasn’t even hinted at its existence?”

“No.”

“What exactly does he want?”

“He wants me to persuade Professor Slughorn to part with a memory,” Harry murmured. “Let him collect me. He said that at the beginning of the year. But he hasn’t told me exactly what memory yet, and—well, the ones that he shows me don’t seem to be connected in any particular way. He keeps telling me that I need to understand Voldemort’s origins before I can fight him.”

“Even though you’ve fought him a lot already?”

“Yeah.”

Adrian was quiet for a few minutes. Harry continued to lean against him. They were still practicing Quidditch when and as they could, but with them both being Captains now and Adrian having to study constantly for his NEWTS, most of the time, they could just meet up for half an hour or so like this.

“There’s that Slug Club thing that Slughorn is putting on,” Adrian said abruptly.

“Yeah. Although I still don’t know what memory Dumbledore wants me to get, so—”

“I didn’t mean that. I mean that I’ve been invited, and so have you.”

“Yeah?”

“So bring me as your date.”

Harry stepped back and stared up at Adrian. Adrian looked back at him with the same unyielding stubbornness he had used when he’d come up with a way for Harry to escape the Dursleys in the summer after his fourth year.

“You—you would want to?”

“I’m sick of the fact that we have to meet in secret. And that I’ll probably never get to go on a date with you while we’re still in Hogwarts if we don’t do at least this one.” Adrian let his hand ripple on Harry’s shoulder. His muscles were even larger than they’d been last year, and more attractive, too. “I’m still upset that I didn’t get to go with you to the Yule Ball.”

“What about your family?”

“I’ll just write them that it would be good to have an opportunity to associate with the Boy-Who-Lived. They’ll eat it up.”

“Okay,” Harry breathed. He was dizzy with delight. He hadn’t realized until Adrian said something how sick he was of it, too. Adrian was a fun secret, but Harry had to make more and more excuses to slip away, and he knew that Ron and Hermione suspected he had a girlfriend. Even that deception had started weighing on him. He wanted to say that he had a boyfriend instead.

Now he would get to.

“Yeah,” he said, smiling at Adrian. “I’ll attend with you on my arm, and it’ll be—”

“Why would I be on your arm? Why wouldn’t you be on mine? I’m older. And taller.”

“And I’m the Boy-Who-Lived, I’ll have you know.”

“Let me kiss that arrogance out of your mouth, then.”

Harry leaned up and gladly let him do so.

*

“Er. Harry?”

Hermione looked a little shocked as Harry walked up to Adrian, who was waiting for him outside the entrance to Slughorn’s party. Adrian bestowed an absent smile on Hermione, but most of his gaze was focused on Harry.

“You did wear the green robes,” he breathed.

“I said that I would. Are you calling me a liar?”

“After all the complaints about Slytherin colors…”

“I did that to give you something to argue about.”

“Harry!”

Harry supposed it would be a little odd for him to be flirting with Adrian right in front of Hermione and her date, Cormac McLaggen—whom Harry thought she’d only brought because she was upset with Ron. He turned around and waved a sheepish hand. “Sorry. This is my date, Hermione. I don’t know if you’ve ever met Adrian Pucey?”

“He’s on the Slytherin Quidditch team!” McLaggen bellowed, before Hermione could respond.

“Wow!” Harry let his eyes widen. “He is? Thanks, McLaggen! I didn’t know!” He turned around and told Adrian very seriously, “You need to work on your Chasing skills.”

Adrian held a solemn face for about a second before he dissolved into cackles. “Are you sure?” he asked around the laughter. “Because I thought I’d practiced them well enough, given what I caught!”

And he trailed a hand down towards Harry’s arse right in front of all of them.

Harry stared at him with his mouth open for just a second before he began to laugh, and his laughter rang out and around the little anteroom.

“Oh, ho, it sounds like someone is having a good time already!” Slughorn leaned out past the curtain that had apparently been draped over the entrance to the space where he was holding the party, and waved a full glass of Firewhisky at them. “Come on in, come on in, you’ll find it delightful!”

He squinted and blinked a bit when he saw Harry standing with Adrian. “Don’t think I know you, my boy,” he said. “Your name?”

Adrian smiled a little tightly. Harry knew he wasn’t taking NEWT Potions. “Adrian Pucey, sir.”

“Ah! Wasn’t it your aunt Melinda who invented the modification to Pepper-Up in 1972?”

“Oh, no, sir. That was a Muggleborn woman who happened to have the same name. No relation. But a brilliant potioneer.”

Harry had told Adrian about the way Slughorn had talked about Lily Evans, trying to prove he wasn’t prejudiced by claiming that he’d thought she was a pureblood. Adrian told the story with a completely straight face, and it might be true—Harry had never heard of Melinda Pucey one way or the other—but he didn’t think it was.

Adrian was a great liar, though.

“Oh.” Slughorn didn’t seem to know what to do with someone who disclaimed a connection with someone famous. “Well, you can still come in!” And with that generous invitation, he disappeared again.

Adrian snorted and held out his arm to Harry. “Shall we?”

“Harry, wait!”

Harry smiled at Hermione and said, “Come on, we should go in and talk about this. Professor Slughorn invited us!” And he followed his boyfriend into the wide, bright, cheerful party, ignoring the way that Adrian was cackling behind him.

It didn’t take long for Hermione to leave McLaggen behind and corner him and Adrian near the table laden with glittering heaps of fruit and biscuits that nearly didn’t look real. “Who is he, really, Harry?”

“Adrian Pucey.” And before Hermione could explode, Harry added, “My boyfriend.”

“Since when?”

“A year and a half ago,” Harry said.

“Minus a few days,” Adrian said, appearing at his side.

“Yes, yes, you and your need to be precise,” Harry said, and smiled up at him. Adrian reached out and put his hand on the back of Harry’s neck, his eyes turning dark.

“Harry, please, I am trying to talk to you!”

Harry sighed and turned away from Adrian, who was making an unsubtle two-fingered gesture at Hermione. Harry hit Adrian in the side with his elbow and asked, “Yes, Hermione? What do you want to know?”

“How long you’ve been dating. Why you chose him. How you met. Why you kept it secret from us. How—” Hermione took a deep breath. “How you knew you were gay.”

“We told you how long we’d been dating,” Adrian said, sounding mild. “And we kept it a secret because it wouldn’t have been good for—” He set his shoulders. “Voldemort to know that we were dating. Or, last year, Umbridge.”

“Or his Housemates,” Harry added. He was still a little worried about the reactions of the other Slytherins, but Adrian was a seventh-year, Quidditch Captain, and good with fire spells, and his family hadn’t been Death Eaters in the war. He was about as well-protected as a Slytherin could be when dating the Boy-Who-Lived.

“You could have told us! We would have kept the secret!”

“You and Ron?”

“Of course!” McLaggen, who had come up behind Hermione, looked offended that they weren’t including him.

“Frankly,” Harry said, “I wanted something just for me last year. And it was Adrian’s choice, and he wasn’t comfortable with you knowing.”

“And,” Adrian cut in, his voice cold enough that Hermione stopped in the middle of opening her mouth, “I wasn’t impressed with the way that you both abandoned him last summer. So I thought that he deserved to have privacy and something just for himself, too.”

Hermione’s face turned pink. She looked back and forth as though someone was going to come up and rescue her.

“What do you mean?” McLaggen demanded.

Adrian turned a glare on McLaggen that Harry had never seem him use, but which made the Gryffindor practically wilt. “I wasn’t talking,” he said slowly, “to you.”

McLaggen spluttered something, but Hermione jumped in again. “I thought you forgave us.”

“Harry did.”

Harry sighed and put an arm around Adrian’s waist, ignoring the way that Hermione’s eyes followed the movement. “I did, but Adrian has a right to express his opinion. And now, we’re going to go enjoy the party. I hope you do, too.”

“Harry, wait!”

“We’ll talk more when I get back to Gryffindor Tower,” Harry said, and shot a smile over his shoulder at her as he hauled Adrian off. “I promise.”

“I wish I could go with you and sit there to tell them all about themselves,” Adrian muttered, as they picked up plates of delicate sandwiches from a table groaning with platters.

“You know I don’t think they’re as much to blame as you do.”

“That’s because you spent the summer with me, and so you weren’t dependent just on them for company.”

Harry shrugged as he sipped from his cup of butterbeer. It was true, but he didn’t see the point of giving ground in arguments with Adrian. “Hey, there’s mistletoe. Shall we go kiss under it?”

Adrian gave him the good kind of dark look, and Harry was the one who dragged him over under the mistletoe and kissed him, feeling Adrian’s arms come around him and hearing the scandalized gasps of several people.

It made him feel good to be alive.

Chapter Text

Ron and Hermione were waiting for Harry when he got back to Gryffindor Tower.

Harry smiled at them, feeling as if his blood had been replaced by champagne, and sat down on the couch opposite them. A few other people who had been at Slughorn’s party were gaping at him, but he ignored them. They could either eavesdrop, which they probably would, or ask him later. “What do you want to know?”

“Adrian Pucey? Why him?”

“Why not?”

That appeared to perplex Hermione, so Ron was the one who jumped in. “My sister fancies you! You could have gone on a date with her!”

Harry blinked at Ron. He had been aware that Ginny had had a crush on him in second year, but he’d barely spent any time around her since then, so he hadn’t been aware it had endured. “Oh. Well, I like Adrian.”

“But you could have gone with her!”

“But I like Adrian. And I’m dating him.”

“Are you gay, Harry?” Hermione cut in, stepping on Ron’s foot for a second, probably because she wanted him to calm down.

“I suppose so,” Harry said. “I mean, I’ve had a few crushes on girls, but I haven’t looked at anyone but Adrian since we got together.” He grinned. “And I don’t want to look at anyone else, either.”

“But you could have told us.”

Harry decided that even though he had forgiven them for last summer, there was no reason he couldn’t use it as a bit of a weapon now. He leaned forwards. “The way that you told me that you were staying with my godfather last summer?”

“That was dangerous! This isn’t!”

“It could have been, with Adrian’s family.” Harry knew he was exaggerating a little, but that was all right. It wasn’t going to hurt his friends, and if they had their feelings a bit hurt by not knowing about his boyfriend until now, so what? Adrian’s safety was more important. “Things have changed, but it could have been dangerous.”

“You should tell us these things, Harry! We deserve to know!”

“And were you going to tell me that you started snogging last summer, or is that also the sort of thing it would be dangerous to put in a letter?”

Ron and Hermione stared at him with faces so red that Harry had to fight to keep from snorting in laughter. He leaned back in his chair and just grinned at them. Hopefully they would see now how silly it was to feel that keeping Adrian a secret for a while had been some horrible betrayal.

“How did you know about that?”

“It was obvious.”

Ron and Hermione exchanged glances, and then Ron swallowed and said, “It was just a bit of kissing. Nothing we had to tell you about.”

“And Adrian and I have just done a bit of kissing and spending time together, too. Nothing I had to tell you about.”

Ron and Hermione looked as if they wanted to disagree, but didn’t know how. Harry shook his head and stood. “I’m friends with both of you, but just like I don’t need to know about every single romantic thing you do together, you don’t need to know about mine.”

“What if he was a Death Eater?”

“What if one of you was one?”

“Harry!”

“He’s had plenty of chances to betray me, and he hasn’t,” Harry said gently. “So I don’t think he is one, and there’s no reason for me to sit around arguing with you about how he’s actually fine.”

Ron and Hermione still looked as if they wanted to ask more questions, but Harry turned and went up the stairs to his room, where he checked the paper on Adrian’s Christmas gift. He would love seeing Adrian’s face when he opened it.

*

“What is it?”

“You could open it and find out.”

Adrian shot Harry a dirty look and then tore into the silver wrapping paper. Harry had thought he was lucky to find not only paper that was a color associated with Slytherin, but one that had little golden Snitches all over it. He leaned back against the wall of the abandoned classroom they were meeting in this year, and watched his boyfriend.

Adrian seemed to have grown another half a meter since the start of the year, and his dark hair was longer than it had been, hanging around his shoulders. He would always be handsome to Harry, but Harry admired the new looks as improvements.

“Harry,” Adrian whispered.

“Do you like it?”

“Do I like it, the bloke says.” Adrian turned the crystal globe that had been inside the paper around with reverent fingers. It sat on a blue base and glowed softly with radiant inner light. “I love it. Which memory did you use for it?”

“A bunch of them, but the first one was you rescuing me from a Muggle car on your broom. You madman.”

Adrian sat back, and his smile bloomed again. He turned the crystal around and around in his hands. It would radiate the emotions that the wizard or witch enchanting it had infused it with. In this case, Harry had chosen happiness and warmth—and love.

He could admit, if only to himself, that he was in love with Adrian.

Given the expression on Adrian’s face as he sat staring at the crystal, Harry thought, he should say it aloud now. Who knew what would happen in the war? Adrian had made the choice to be known as Harry’s boyfriend, but that didn’t mean that Voldemort wouldn’t target him, and he could die in the fighting.

Harry leaned forwards and said softly, “I love you.”

Adrian froze, staring at him, and Harry wondered for a moment if he shouldn’t have said that after all. But then Adrian leaned in and kissed him impulsively, and Harry wrapped his arms around his boyfriend’s neck and kissed him back.

“I love you,” Adrian said, in the kind of whisper that told Harry he probably wouldn’t ever confess it in public.

“Good.” Harry closed his eyes and leaned his head against Adrian’s chest.

They sat like that for a moment, and then Adrian cleared his throat and leaned back, reaching for a package in orange paper next to him. “Here, here’s yours.”

“Why orange?”

“Compromise when it comes to Gryffindor red.”

Harry smiled at him and tore it open. There was a thick book inside that looked a little familiar, but didn’t seem to have a title or anything.

When he flipped it open, he found out why it looked familiar. There were pictures on all the pages, it was a photo album, but the pictures were of him and Adrian. Harry gaped at the photos, the perfect photos, of them laughing and playing Quidditch and sitting next to each other in the little house on the Puceys’ property where he’d hidden, but he knew that no one had actually taken pictures of them there.

He lowered the book and stared at Adrian, who looked as if his whole face was on fire.

With the air of someone confessing a crime, Adrian said, “There’s a potion that can transfer Pensieve memories into photos. It’s complicated and expensive, but I got it for you.”

Harry flung himself forwards and kissed Adrian again, his fingers working into his boyfriend’s collar. “I don’t think I’ve told you yet how very brilliant you are,” he breathed into Adrian’s ear.

Adrian uttered a choked little laugh. “Well, don’t stop on my account.”

So Harry didn’t.

*

“Ron and Hermione say that you have a boyfriend.”

Harry leaned back in his chair at the kitchen table and looked up at Sirius. His godfather had been pretty unsubtle in lingering behind after dinner and coming up with excuses as to why everyone else should go do something in another room or go back through the Floo to their own house. Harry hadn’t known this was exactly what Sirius would want to talk to him about, but he supposed he should have guessed.

“I do. His name’s Adrian Pucey.”

“Not Death Eaters, but lots of Slytherins in that family. And they’d betray you as soon as look at you.”

“Adrian’s different.”

Sirius was silent for a long moment, tracing his spoon through the remnants of the porridge in his dish. Then he looked up and asked, “Does this have something to do with the Order not seeing you outside of the house on Privet Drive for the last two summers?”

“I was wondering how long it would take you lot to catch on,” Harry said casually, although his heart was drumming hard enough that he thought Sirius could probably hear it.

“Harry.”

“No one’s explained why I have to stay there,” Harry snapped. “The blood protections on the house? The kind that I looked up and the books said they had to be powered by love or considering the house a home? Well, they’ve failed on both counts! And my best friends getting to stay with my godfather and me not being able to, everyone keeping secrets, everyone acting as though the summer after fifth year was just as dangerous as the one that Voldemort got resurrected in! I’m sick of the bloody secrets, Sirius! And you going along with them!”

Harry stopped, panting. He hadn’t known he was going to say all that. From Sirius’s wide eyes, neither had he.

“All right,” Sirius said. “I get it. That doesn’t mean that you need to run off and spend time with your Slytherin boyfriend for a whole summer. I could have talked Albus into letting you come here.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

Sirius winced and looked down. “Harry, there’s something very important that I can’t tell you—”

Harry stood up. Sirius stared at him with an agonized expression.

“Sick. Of. The. Bloody. Secrets,” Harry repeated, and then turned and stomped upstairs.

Ron and Hermione were lingering on the staircase that led to the bedrooms. Harry ignored them, walked into the library, and leaned back in a chair with his eyes closed.

They’d had to accept Adrian just because of the matter-of-fact way that Harry had gone about everything, but they still thought that he shouldn’t keep secrets and they could. Harry was sick of it, and he wasn’t going to put up with it anymore.

*

“Harry, can we talk?”

“Going to tell me any secrets?”

Sirius paused, and then jerked his head in an agonized way. “I—I can’t do that—because of what you might reveal to him.”

“Voldemort?”

Normally, Harry wouldn’t have enjoyed the way his godfather jumped and then stared around as if expecting Voldemort to materialize from the wall, but at this point, he was done. He was so sick of people creeping around and lying to him and expecting him to take it in good part.

“It doesn’t even make sense, you know,” he said aloud. Sirius walked into the library and sat down on the chair across from Harry, watching him with a yearning expression. “Ron and Hermione are almost as much at risk as I am. Everyone knows that we’re friends. If you trust them with secrets, Voldemort could grab them and read it out of their minds.”

“Not Ron,” Sirius said quickly. “Molly thinks that he’s too young for the Order meetings, and I have to agree.”

“Hermione?”

Sirius hesitated.

Harry sighed and turned to stare into the fire that Kreacher kept burning all the time, even though he looked upset that Harry was using the library.

“She’s of age,” Sirius said. “She can’t help it that she’s older than you are.”

“But she doesn’t know Occlumency, either. Voldemort could grab her and read whatever you’ve trusted her with out of her head.” Harry shook his head. “You’re making exceptions for me, sure, because I’m the Boy-Who-Lived, but it’s never the good exceptions. I don’t get to stay with my own godfather, or stay at Hogwarts for the summers, or know secrets concerning my own life. Why does Hermione need to know those secrets, for Merlin’s sake?”

His voice was raised at the end, and he turned to face Sirius. Sirius kept his eyes closed. Then he whispered, “You deserve the chance to just be a child. To have a normal childhood. That’s what Albus said.”

“I’m half a year away from being seventeen, Sirius,” Harry said, exaggerating a little, but he didn’t think Sirius was going to call him on it. “Any childhood I had was done and over with a long time ago.”

“You enjoyed being at home, didn’t you?”

“With the Muggles who abused me? No.”

Sirius stared at him with his mouth a little open, and Harry half-smiled. “I suppose Dumbledore didn’t tell you? I told him when he came to get me for a mission this summer.”

“I—no, he didn’t tell me.” Sirius bowed his head. “Do you think that he thought I shouldn’t know?”

“I think he probably just forgot,” Harry said, which he did actually think was likely. “Or else that he’s keeping so many secrets he forgot which one was which and who knew what.”

“That’s not fair, Harry. He’s trying to make the best decisions he can.”

“And sometimes they’re not the best ones.” Harry shook his head. “He won’t tell me why Voldemort went after me specifically, what the lot of you are guarding in the Department of Mysteries, what happened to make his hand look the way it does…I just think that if he’s going to keep all these secrets, I’m entitled to a few of my own.”

“But yours could put you in danger! Dumbledore’s won’t.”

“Really? You don’t think that I might need to know why Voldemort came after me, or how soon that curse on Dumbledore’s hand is going to kill him?”

“You think the curse on his hand is going to kill him?”

“It’s getting worse,” Harry said quietly. That was one thing he had figured out during the “lessons” that Dumbledore kept giving him, although he still hadn’t figured out the purpose of the memories or what kind of memory Dumbledore thought he should get from Professor Slughorn. “It’s spreading further up his arm. But when I asked him what it was or how he felt, he just waved his hand and changed the subject.”

“Oh.” Sirius slumped back heavily.

“Compared to that, my keeping the secret of my boyfriend for a few months really isn’t a big deal.”

“I suppose not.” Sirius hesitated and looked at him. “But Ron and Hermione seemed really hurt that you did.”

“I was hurt that they kept sending me silly letters that said nothing for two summers in a row and didn’t tell me they did at least a big of snogging last summer.” Harry honestly wasn’t sure if it was more than snogging. Ron and Hermione tended to both turn red and tell him two entirely different stories.

“But you’re—friendly with them.”

“I got over it. I forgave them. They’ll just have to do the same thing.”

*

“Is it really the best use of your time to date Adrian Pucey, my dear boy?”

“At least as good a use of my time as sitting through these lessons that you won’t explain, sir.”

Dumbledore paused and peered at Harry over his glasses. Harry stared back, and then glanced pointedly at Dumbledore’s blackened hand, which now looked as though it had some malevolent fungus growing all over it.

“We are not here to discuss that,” Dumbledore said, and shook his sleeve over his hand.

“I don’t think we’re here to discuss Adrian, either.”

“I simply wonder if he is…distracting you.”

“No, sir,” Harry said blandly.

“Really? Because you do not yet appear to have got that memory from Professor Slughorn.”

“Sir,” Harry said, hiding a little sigh, “you haven’t even told me what memory you want me to get. There’s no way I could get it. And he hasn’t exactly been a close friend or anything, so he would get suspicious if I just showed up and started talking about memories. What exactly is the memory you want me to get, and what is the point of it?”

Dumbledore stared at Harry. Then he said, “I’m sure that I told you what memory it was, Harry.”

“No, sir. You didn’t.”

A pause. Dumbledore was a Legilimens, and Harry thought he must be able to tell that Harry was telling the truth.

The Headmaster looked down and cleared his throat. Harry watched him closely. He was…embarrassed?

“I am so sorry, Harry,” Dumbledore whispered. “Now that you mention it—I have no clear memory of telling you which one I wanted you to retrieve from Horace. I was sure that I’d done it, but I can’t find a trace of it…”

“Is the curse on your hand starting to affect your memory, sir?”

“We are not here to talk about the curse on my hand, Harry.”

“If it’s affecting your memory and making you think you told me things that you didn’t, sir, then I think we should.”

Dumbledore looked away from him for a moment. Then he said, “I will of course show you the memory that Horace gave me, which I suspect is altered—in fact, it is obvious it is altered—and then tell you more about the one I want you to retrieve from him.”

Harry sighed aloud this time. At least he was getting some answers about this supposedly important task he needed to perform, but he couldn’t help but think that it would be more productive if they just talked about the curse on Dumbledore’s hand.

Then he started learning about Horcruxes, and forgot all about that.

*

“He made Horcruxes?”

Harry blinked. He had heard Adrian express a few different emotions about Voldemort, mostly fear and defiance, but this sounded like outrage.

“You know what they are?”

“My family has books on everything,” Adrian snarled, pacing back and forth in the little stretch of deserted corridor where they’d met this time. It was nice not to have to keep everything a secret, but having people pointing at them and giggling got old. “Just in case it’ll be useful someday. I read about Horcruxes years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“Whatever book you read that in. That can’t have been pleasant. I wanted to take a shower just hearing about them.”

Adrian turned and stared at him, mouth a little open, and then flushed red all down his chest. It was a nice chest. Harry craned his neck to watch where the blush disappeared into Adrian’s robes.

“Thanks,” Adrian said at last, softly, sitting down next to Harry on the bench they’d Transfigured from part of the wall. “But I just meant—there’s only a little magic I can think of Darker than that. And multiple Horcruxes? No one’s done that, as far as I know. He’s insane.”

“And probably thinks he’s so clever.”

“Hmmm.” Adrian put his hand on Harry’s back. “Dumbledore told you that that diary from second year was a Horcrux?”

“Yeah.”

“Then we know at least one thing that works against them. Basilisk venom.”

“You want to help me destroy them?”

Adrian leaned closer and looked into his eyes. “Did you hit your head on a Bludger or a floor that you didn’t tell me about?” he asked dryly. “Of course I’m going to help you destroy them. I’ll be by your side every step of the way.”

Harry thought that this statement deserved a kiss, and from the enthusiastic way Adrian returned the kiss, he wasn’t about to argue with him.

Chapter Text

“Professor? Could I talk to you?”

“Of course, of course, Mr. Potter! Just let me put this cauldron away.”

Harry stood patiently in the Potions classroom as Professor Slughorn Levitated a few cauldrons to their places. He didn’t remember seeing Snape doing that, but then again, he had never stuck around in Snape’s classroom unless told.

Harry hid a grin. At least he’d managed to impress Snape during Defense class. And the man had diminished the insults a bit since Christmas. It seemed actually being willing to admit to dating a Slytherin had given Harry some points in Snape’s mind.

“Now!” Slughorn turned around and clapped his hands. “What can I do for you, Mr. Potter?”

“I need the memory where you told Tom Riddle about Horcruxes, sir.”

Harry had decided that there wasn’t, in fact, much of a point to dancing around the topic. He was a Gryffindor; he did things the direct way. And Dumbledore hadn’t given him any particular instructions, just to get the memory.

Slughorn gaped at him with his jaw hanging open. Harry smiled back, calmly, apologetically.

“A-already gave it to Dumbledore,” Slughorn muttered, looking around as if he hoped a door would open and let him dart through it. “Never wanted to encourage the boy, everyone knows Horcruxes are Dark things…”

“You altered the memory you gave the Headmaster,” Harry said, firmly, pleasantly. “I need the real one.”

“You understand he would kill me?” Slughorn leaned forwards, his eyes and jaw both wobbling. “If he knew I’d told anyone?”

“I wouldn’t betray you to him,” Harry whispered. “I would never betray anyone to him. And, well, I’ve been in pretty desperate circumstances and afraid for my own life around Tom Riddle plenty of times. I still didn’t feed someone who really needed information an altered memory.”

Slughorn closed his eyes. Harry wondered if it was even worth trying to shame him, and then pushed that idea away. This was the plan he had.

And he wasn’t as good at lying as Adrian. So he might as well take the honesty he did possess as a weapon.

“I wanted to keep myself safe,” Slughorn whispered.

Harry had never really had that option, but he tried to make his voice as sympathetic as possible. “I know. But if he really does remember that you have that memory, he’s not going to care if you gave us the real thing or an altered one. He’ll kill you just for existing and possessing the memory.”

“You believe that?”

“If there’s one person I know, sir, it’s Voldemort,” Harry said, and ignored the way that Slughorn flinched hard enough to make cauldrons on the table jounce. “I know how he thinks. And even when he’s rational, he doesn’t tolerate threats to his safety.”

Slughorn looked around, this time very much as if he hoped someone would pop up and contradict Harry. But Harry remained standing where he was, and Slughorn swallowed and finally turned around to face him.

“You’ll take the memory straight to Albus.”

“Of course, sir.”

“You won’t—judge me because of what I did in it.”

Harry wondered how much of the altered memory Slughorn had given Dumbledore was really about making himself look good, rather than because he was afraid of Voldemort. He nodded. “I promise, sir.”

It wasn’t as though he really had to worry about keeping that promise. As long as he never talked to Slughorn about his judgment, the professor would never know.

Slughorn nodded and closed his eyes. Then he shuffled over to his desk to pick up a vial, and touched his wand to his temple. A silvery strand of memory stretched out and onto the end.

Then he gave the vial to Harry without a word, and turned to tidying up his classroom once more.

*

“Voldemort wanted to make seven. We already suspected that, anyway.”

Adrian snorted and lay back, stretching along the Quidditch stands, where they’d landed, as usual, after their practice. His head rested in Harry’s lap. Harry had been rather startled the first time that had happened, but then he’d decided he might as well enjoy it.

“I still think there’s another purpose behind these lessons that Dumbledore’s giving you.”

Harry sighed and ran his fingers through Adrian’s hair, down the back of his neck. Adrian closed his eyes and made a low groaning noise that was frankly the sexiest thing Harry had ever heard.

Harry bent over and kissed the back of Adrian’s neck. Adrian reached for him, groping, and drew Harry into a thick kiss. Harry was panting when they parted, and wanted nothing more than to reach out and—

“So getting that memory was a test, to see how much you obeyed him. Not an end goal in itself.”

Harry groaned and fell back, away from Adrian, because at the moment, touching his boyfriend just made him want things he couldn’t have. “I know, but I’m no closer to figuring out what Dumbledore wants than I was before.”

“Why not?”

“There are too many possibilities, Adrian! He could want me to volunteer to search out the Horcruxes, or he could want me to just show that I trust him and will do what he wants, or he could really believe that this history is important and the clue that will defeat Voldemort. I don’t know.”

“And when you ask him?”

“He dances around the subject endlessly.”

“Hm.” Adrian smiled up at him, his face loose and lazy in a way that made Harry tense with simultaneous dread and anticipation. “When you’re not getting results one way, try another one, I always say.”

“What do you mean?”

Adrian told him, and Harry laughed with delight.

*

“I do not recall inviting Mr. Pucey to these lessons, Harry.”

“Nope, but he’s here now,” Harry said cheerfully, and plopped into the chair in front of Dumbledore’s desk that he usually took. Adrian took the other one, glancing around with a curled lip that made Harry want to kiss him and laugh at the same time. “And he wants to ask you some questions.”

“What are you helping Harry will take from these lessons?” Adrian asked, turning to face Dumbledore. “The memory he got from Slughorn confirmed there were seven Horcruxes, but so what? You already suspected that. Was it just to see how obedient he was?”

“I did not realize you would tell your boyfriend about the Horcruxes, Harry.”

Dumbledore sounded grieved. Harry gave him a bright smile. “And I didn’t realize that you would try to keep secrets like what you’re guarding in the Department of Mysteries from me even after I was let into the secret of Grimmauld Place. I suppose that we’ll both have to get used to a bit of disappointment from each other.”

Dumbledore swallowed and looked down at the Pensieve on his desk. It was empty at the moment, Harry thought, and wondered if Dumbledore would retrieve a memory from a vial or from his own head.

But the Headmaster did neither. He looked up and shook his head. “The lessons will not continue as long as Mr. Pucey is here, Harry.”

Harry sighed. “That’s a shame. I was looking forward to figuring out something about this. But I reckon I won’t. Come on, Adrian.” He stood up, and so did Adrian, after giving one of the silver instruments on Dumbledore’s desk that was shaped like half a globe a dubious glance.

“I cannot tell you in front of him, Harry.”

“But you don’t tell me without him, either. I keep asking you, and you don’t tell me.”

“I do believe that the ultimate means of defeating Voldemort lies in these memories.”

“Why?”

Dumbledore was silent. Harry turned back to him to see that he must have missed something, because Adrian was gaping at Dumbledore.

“What?” Harry asked, leaning comfortably on Adrian’s side for a moment.

“He looked at your scar,” Adrian said, his voice faint. “I didn’t even suspect—holy shit, you think that Harry’s a Horcrux, don’t you?”

Harry felt as though he’d just taken that Portkey to the graveyard a second time. He stared blankly at Dumbledore, who had firmed his lips and clasped his hands on the desk in front of him. Harry had to hold on to Adrian so he wouldn’t fall over. There was hot, slick nausea climbing his throat.

“What?” he whispered.

“Yeah.” Adrian was peering at Dumbledore as if he were interesting and nothing else, but his hand on Harry’s shoulder shook. “He knew you were a Horcrux, and I suppose he was—trying to lead you into realizing that gently? Because it would hurt you if you knew it while he was alive? He was planning to die from the curse before he had to say it?” Adrian broke off then and shrugged. “Sorry, I don’t really know that.”

“You are correct, Mr. Pucey.” Dumbledore’s voice was calm, but Harry could hear the humming, underlying tension. “I did in fact hope that I would die before I had to see this expression on Harry’s face.”

Harry wanted to ask why Dumbledore hadn’t told him before, but he knew. Because of what Dumbledore had just said, and because no matter when or where he learned about this…

It would have had the same devastating effect.

“I have to die for Voldemort to die,” he said, his lips numb.

“Yes. My dear boy, I am so sorry.”

Dumbledore’s eyes brimmed with compassion, the first time Harry had seen them do that all year, but he didn’t get much chance to look, because Adrian was twisting so that Harry had to look up at him, his eyes wild. His hands clamped on Harry’s shoulders. Harry winced. It was the first time he had ever regretted that Adrian had got so much stronger during their private Quidditch practices.

“No,” Adrian whispered. “You’re not dying. I love you and you’re not dying, do you hear?”

“But if the alternative was me dying or Voldemort living forever…”

“He would live forever.”

Harry swallowed and closed his eyes. He wondered, dazedly, how he had managed to inspire such love in someone. Because Dumbledore knew about the Horcrux and still thought that Harry had to die, and he thought Ron and Hermione would at least have hesitated before saying that Harry had to live.

He leaned forwards and curled against Adrian. He was shaking. Adrian’s hand stroked his hair.

*

Harry heard little of the conversation that followed. Adrian and Dumbledore were arguing about things like “never even going to try” and “wouldn’t work” and “theoretically impossible” and “still a few months before the curse takes you.” But he woke up when Adrian marched him out of Dumbledore’s office and down the moving stairs that led to the gargoyle.

“Where are we going?” Harry whispered.

“To a place where we can talk.”

“Oh.”

They went to the pitch, of course, despite the fact that it was deep night now and only the stars shone overhead. Harry had the impression that a few people tried to stop them along the way, maybe prefects, but Adrian growled at them until they went away. Then they were on the pitch, and Harry was leaning back so he could stare up at the stars. Adrian sat beside him, shielding him from everything.

“What did you and Dumbledore talk about?” Harry asked at last.

Adrian didn’t act incredulous, or ask why Harry didn’t know when he’d been in the bloody meeting. Adrian must have been able to sense how withdrawn he’d been. He caressed Harry’s hair now and said in a low, fierce tone, “Transferring the Horcrux into something else.”

Harry felt his breath catch, and he turned around to look up at Adrian. “That would be possible?”

“He kept saying it was theoretically impossible, but then, so was a human Horcrux before you.” Adrian was hunched over Harry with silent ferocity, looking around as if he thought someone would come up and try to off Harry to kill Voldemort right here. “And he admitted that he hadn’t done any research on it.”

“Why not?”

“Because he thought it was impossible, and he also thought he was going to die before it ever became a concern.”

They sat in silence for a few more minutes, as nearly as Harry could judge, and then he stirred and murmured, “I never thought Dumbledore was a coward.”

“He’s not, when it comes to spells or fighting injustice—what he sees as injustice. But when it comes to emotionally hurting someone? Yes, he is.”

Harry just nodded, accepting that. He didn’t hate Dumbledore, although maybe that would come later, after he was no longer so numb. But he did think that it was possible the Headmaster was indeed a coward.

Adrian turned to him another timeless time later and leaned forwards to kiss his scar. Harry blinked back tears.

“We are going to help you one way or another,” Adrian vowed quietly. “I’ll do it myself if he’s too cowardly to help. We’re going to get you the help you need.”

“Thank you,” Harry breathed, and he reached up and twined his fingers in Adrian’s hair.

*

“I saw you and Adrian in the library the other day.”

Harry blinked and glanced up from the chess game that he was playing against Ron. At usual, he was losing, but maybe not as badly as he’d lost sometimes in the past. “Hmmm? Oh, yeah, we were researching.” He turned back to the board and carefully moved a pawn.

“Checkmate!”

Harry groaned as he studied the board again and saw the way that he’d left a path open for Ron to win. Possibly even more than one. “Why can I never see that before I make the move that lets you win, but it’s perfectly clear afterwards?” he complained.

Ron was obviously trying to hide a grin as he swept the pieces off the board. “Don’t know, mate.”

“What were you researching, Harry?” Hermione had sat down in a chair to the side of the chessboard.

“Oh, a few things related to one of Dumbledore’s lessons.” There, that sounded better than soul magic and ways to move the piece of soul that a Dark Lord accidentally left in me between me and another object.

“And you still can’t tell us what that is?”

Harry sighed. “Dumbledore is pretty insistent that we keep the subjects of these lessons just between us.” And that was true. Harry had simply brought Adrian to the latest lesson in defiance of what Dumbledore felt about it.

And it’s a bloody good thing I did, too.

“But if you can tell Adrian…”

“He’s my boyfriend.”

Ron and Hermione stared at him as if waiting for something else. Harry stared back, and finally decided that he would have to be the one to explain. He shook his head a little. “Hermione, you tell Ron things that you don’t tell me, right?”

Hermione blushed.

Harry turned to Ron. “And you tell Hermione things that you don’t tell me, right?”

“She’s my girlfriend,” Ron said blankly, and then blinked. “Oh.”

Harry nodded. “It’s a different kind of relationship. You’re my friends, of course, but Adrian is my boyfriend.”

“So you’re saying the relationship is closer.” Hermione’s voice was stiff, her eyes locked on the book in her lap as if she were going to lift it to hide her face any moment.

“I’m saying that it’s different.”

Ron and Hermione seemed to want to say something, but not to know what to say. Harry just shrugged a little. If they wanted to bring up the whole fact of his concealing his relationship with Adrian, then they would have to start talking about how they had stayed in Grimmauld Place and written meaningless letters to him, and that Hermione hadn’t even told him about being inducted into the Order of the Phoenix when she’d come of age. It was better to avoid the subject.

“All right,” Hermione said at last, reluctantly, when she seemed to realize that Harry wasn’t going to yield. “But you’ll tell us if you need our help, right?”

“Of course.” Harry smiled at her. “I know there are things you can do better than Adrian.”

Hermione perked up, and the rest of their conversation for that evening flowed smoothly. Harry hid inside his mind the fact that he didn’t really think anything would come up in their Horcrux research that Hermione and Ron could do better than Adrian could.

If only because Adrian wouldn’t pause for questions and lectures and worries about morality.

Chapter Text

“I think I found something.”

Adrian’s voice was low, his eyes averted. Harry turned around and took a deep breath, both because of the look on his boyfriend’s face and because of the crackling leather-bound book in Adrian’s hands. It all but exuded a miasma.

“But it’s not good, right?”

“It’s not easy.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

Adrian met his eyes, and then cast a pointed glance around the library. Harry nodded and stood up to put the books he’d taken out back on the shelves. Obviously, they should have a conversation in a different location.

*

They ended up going to the dungeon corridor they’d met up in so many times last year after Umbridge’s detentions. Harry didn’t think that either he or Adrian wanted to desecrate the Quidditch pitch with what they might say.

Adrian turned around and leaned against the wall. Harry stood opposite him, eyes flickering from the book in Adrian’s hands back to his face.

Adrian finally breathed out and said, “This book talks about transferring souls that have gone into portraits. It’s fairly clear that the soul can be transferred, but only between portraits of the same kind.” His hands tightened on the book. “You couldn’t put the soul of a wizard or witch into a painting that only contained a landscape, or animals. It would have to be a portrait that contained another—another painted person.”

Harry didn’t normally feel this smart, especially with the fact that he still couldn’t beat Ron in chess, but his mind made the leap this time. “The Horcrux I’m carrying could be transferred into another person,” he whispered.

Adrian gave a choppy nod. “Only.”

Harry stared blindly at the wall for a moment. He hadn’t felt the intense revulsion at the thought of hosting a Horcrux since the night he’d found out, maybe because he hadn’t really allowed himself to think about it. But the nausea he’d experienced then was nothing compared to his nausea at the thought of inflicting this burden on someone else.

“I did have one idea.”

Harry looked back at Adrian. Adrian’s face had gone completely blank, which was startling. For the first time since second year, Harry felt unable to read him at all.

Adrian moved a slow step forwards. “Dumbledore.”

“I—I can’t do that to him just because he kept the secret from me, Adrian.”

“No. Because he’s dying, and when he dies, the Horcrux will die with him.” Adrian took a slow breath. “And because he should feel guilty enough about what he did to you that he’d agree to the transfer.”

Harry gaped at Adrian for a moment. Adrian stared back, his face set but uncomfortable shadows in his eyes.

“This is—sort of a new manifestation of your idea of fair play, isn’t it?” Harry asked, with a smile that he knew looked manic.

Adrian took a long breath and drove a knuckle into his eye for a moment. “I can be ruthless when it comes to you, Harry. Your safety. You’re the only person I love.”

Harry had to close his eyes for a moment, both because of the overwhelming force of the declaration and because of what it said about Adrian’s relationship to his family. He nodded a little and reached out a hand blindly. Adrian grabbed it.

“Let’s talk to Dumbledore and see what he says,” Harry murmured, and Adrian pulled him into a desperate, smothering kiss.

*

Dumbledore heard them out in silence.

Harry let him have it. He would want the same courtesy if he was dying and someone had spoken to him about taking advantage of his death. He leaned against Adrian; he’d moved his chair enough that he could do that. Adrian sat with an arm around Harry’s shoulders and his eyes fixed on the Headmaster.

Dumbledore finally stirred and said, “I had thought to use my death in a different way.”

“You still could,” Adrian said, before Harry had thought of what to do with that objection. “The Horcrux itself wouldn’t kill you, any more than it has Harry so far.” His hand tightened around Harry until he thought he would have had trouble breathing if Adrian had maintained the hold, but Adrian was going steadily on. “We could do the transfer, and then it would die when you did.”

“That was not my understanding.”

“What was your understanding?” Harry said sharply. “And I thought you hadn’t really looked into transferring the Horcrux because the thought of me having it depressed you too much?”

Dumbledore glanced back and forth between them for a moment and then, inexplicably, began to smile. Harry felt Adrian flex in a way that suggested his free hand was dropping to his wand holster.

“I am humbled,” Dumbledore whispered. “I had looked into it enough to think that the Killing Curse from the hand of Voldemort himself might slay the Horcrux and spare your life, Harry. I confess, I did not want to tell you that because I thought the hope might be more painful for you than the despair.

“But you figured it out, and you humble me with your courage and your strength, Harry. You are still here instead of running away. I know many people who would have tried.”

Harry shook his head, dazed from the rush of emotions through him, and leaned harder against Adrian. “It wouldn’t work. Voldemort would have just tried to follow me anyway, and the Horcrux would still exist, so we couldn’t kill him.”

Dumbledore nodded slowly. Even though his eyes were fixed on Harry, Harry had the impression that he was really seeing something else. “Yes. But there would be people who would hope that Voldemort would give up on finding them or conquering them if they were not immediately available to be found or conquered.”

That idea seemed stupid to Harry. He just shrugged.

The Headmaster took a deep breath and clasped his hands together, the whole one and the withered one. “The Horcrux I destroyed was a ring that, unfortunately, bore a flesh-wasting curse that began to kill me when I touched it. The best efforts of our dear Potions master have only confined the curse to my right hand—”

Adrian coughed, and buried in the cough was a sound like, “Dear?” Harry laughed a little.

Dumbledore paused, faintly smiling, and then went on. “I believe that, at the very least, my original plan would not fail with the addition of the Horcrux to my own body. I still plan on taking a Killing Curse.”

“What?” Adrian blurted. “Are you going to go out and battle Voldemort face-to-face, then?”

“No,” Dumbledore said cheerfully. “Not quite. I was going to have Severus kill me so that he might establish his position in the Death Eaters as superior and his loyalty to Voldemort as beyond doubt. But it can still work this way. We will only need to make sure that we conduct the Horcrux transfer in the next few months, as the end of the term is rapidly approaching.”

“What?”

“What?”

“Surely you didn’t think I would let the curse on the Defense post simply destroy Severus? This way, he will leave, and you will be assured of future help as you work to destroy the Horcruxes, Harry.”

Harry exchanged a glance with Adrian. His mouth was twitching in a way that could turn into either a smile or a scowl. Harry had the distinct impression that he didn’t know how much to trust Dumbledore.

Well, neither did Harry. He took a deep breath and leaned forwards. “Let’s talk about that and the spells we found that could transfer a soul from one portrait to another, Headmaster.”

*

“Harry. Are you ready?”

Harry opened his eyes and gave Adrian a soft smile. Adrian and Dumbledore’s conversation had become so theoretical that he hadn’t been able to follow it, and he was still exhausted from the hours that he and Adrian had spent researching in the library, and the nights he’d spent lying awake worrying about the Horcrux.

“You’re ready to cast the spell?” he asked, yawning and standing up. The chairs in Dumbledore’s office were really comfortable, at least when he Transfigured them to be so.

“Yes.”

Adrian had a tight grip on Harry’s hand as he led him into the middle of the ritual circle that he and Dumbledore had spent a night laying out in the middle of the Headmaster’s office. But Harry walked calmly and confidently beside his boyfriend. He knew that Adrian wouldn’t have let him near the ritual circle unless he was sure the spell would work.

Or at least wouldn’t hurt Harry. Harry supposed it wouldn’t technically be pain if the Horcrux was left in his soul.

Even though his heart beat hard with the hope that this would work, the hope Dumbledore had been afraid of giving him.

Dumbledore stood in the middle of one half of the ritual circle, which was cut in two by a chalk line. His gaze was soft as it fell on Harry. “I should have researched and suggested something like this myself,” he murmured. “Please forgive me not doing it, Harry.”

“It’s not your fault, sir,” Harry mumbled, more than a little uncomfortable. He took his stance in the other half of the circle. This half had scatterings of black gems, obsidian and onyx and others Harry hadn’t heard them name, along the outside of the circle. Dumbledore’s had green gems, like emeralds. Something about the color of receptivity, but Harry had nodded off when Adrian was in the middle of trying to explain that.

“May I say, Mr. Pucey,” Dumbledore said, twinkling at Adrian, “that you deserve a high mark on your Arithmancy NEWT.”

Adrian nodded, but didn’t smile. His hand was shaking as he pressed it to Harry’s back.

“You’ll be fine, or I’ll know why not,” he mumbled, and then he stepped back and away from the circle.

Holding those words to him like a talisman, Harry turned to face Dumbledore.

“I’m ready to begin, sir.”

*

Most of the work in the ritual circle was sort of boring. Dumbledore chanted something long and in Latin, and then Adrian chanted something long and in Latin, and in the meantime, Harry had to close his eyes and concentrate his attention on the memory of the diary, the only Horcrux of Voldemort’s Harry had encountered close up.

Harry wasn’t really sure why he had to do that, but he concentrated harder and harder on the image of the shade from the diary, its laughter, the way it had told him they were alike, how Tom Riddle had become more solid as Ginny faded, the black blood that had spilled from the diary when Harry pierced it with the basilisk fang—

And then he could feel it.

There was a slimy stain on his own magic, and Harry could suddenly see it in the middle of himself like a black bug on a silver flower petal. He stared at it, revolted. He wondered why he’d never felt it before, when the diary Horcrux had been powerful enough to possess Ginny and release a basilisk.

Then again, that had been an active Horcrux, Dumbledore had said when describing them. This was “passive.” Maybe that was why Harry had never felt it.

“Are you ready, Harry?”

Harry shuddered and opened his eyes, the sense of the Horcrux still fluttering in his magic like a flame. “Yes, sir.”

Dumbledore nodded to him. The twinkle had faded from his eyes, and they were calm and solemn. “Very well. Then I want you to will the Horcrux to cross over into my body.”

“How, sir?”

“Will it to leave your magic. Will it to go elsewhere. You hate it, I would assume.”

“Yeah,” Harry whispered, swallowing. It wasn’t just that Voldemort had attached a piece of his soul to Harry, but that it had happened the night of his parents’ death, and also that it had been there all along when Adrian was holding and kissing and comforting him.

It was wrong. Harry wanted it gone.

As he thought that, a bell seemed to ring deep inside him, and Dumbledore began another chant in Latin, one that sounded calm and happy. Harry shuddered and stared towards the Headmaster in the other half of the circle, his hands clenching.

Get out! Leave me!

The Horcrux stirred. Harry abruptly had the sense of malevolent eyes watching him, and grimaced. He suspected the Horcrux had just become active.

Get out! Leave me!

Dumbledore’s chant soared at the same time, a song that Harry could only describe as welcoming. The words were blurring into each other and sounded more like pure birdsong than Latin.

There was a long moment when Harry thought he had to focus harder on rejecting the Horcrux. And then he felt the most slimy, disgusting sensation, and he opened his mouth and gagged.

The Horcrux slithered out of his throat, leaving a trail of slime behind. For a moment longer than any that had passed before, it hung in the air between him and Dumbledore, turning back and forth like a ribbon made of slugs.

Then it darted towards Dumbledore’s side of the circle.

Harry found it hard to watch as the Horcrux shard slammed into Dumbledore, but he did, because he felt he had to. The Headmaster bent over and shuddered. For an instant, it looked like his face was covered with a film of oil that was creeping around his eyes and into his ears.

And then it faded, and Dumbledore managed to stand up and smile a little, although Harry thought the skin on his cursed hand had darkened and cracked a little higher up the arm.

“Thank you, Harry, my boy,” he said softly. “Let me use Occlumency to settle and integrate the shard, and then you and Mr. Pucey should be able to leave.”

Harry found that it was harder, oddly, to watch the shadows of expressions that darted over Dumbledore’s face as he used Occlumency to make the shard into a passive Horcrux again. He turned around and looked at Adrian.

Adrian reached right across the border of the circle to drape an arm around Harry’s shoulders. Harry blinked, but he supposed that the circle wasn’t active anymore now that he had expelled the Horcrux. “How are you feeling?”

“As if I really need a drink of water,” Harry said, grimacing. It seemed the film the Horcrux had left behind in his throat wasn’t just metaphorical.

Adrian started and then reached for the glass of water he’d had standing by before the ritual started. He tipped it down Harry’s throat, and Harry drank as much of it as he could, grateful for the cold, cleansing nature of it.

“I have it.”

Harry started and turned around. Dumbledore was rising back to his feet, and the film of oil, or whatever someone should call it, was entirely gone from his face. He smiled at Harry and wiped away some of the sweat that was there instead.

“Your strength is greater than I knew,” Dumbledore mused, his eyes locked on Harry. “To have borne this every day for years and not have been corrupted by it? You are a wonder, Harry.”

Harry blushed at the praise, and leaned back against Adrian for a minute. “Do you—do you think that you’ll be able to hold it under control, sir?”

“Oh, yes. The Occlumency needed to control it is rigorous, but I mastered that level long ago.”

“Then,” Adrian cut in, his voice cool, “that means that you should be able to tell us about the prophecy and the secrets that you thought it was too dangerous for Harry to know now.”

Dumbledore opened his mouth, then closed it. “You know about the prophecy?”

“We deduced its existence last year. That’s not the same as knowing what it says, and I think Harry deserves to know that.”

“Yes,” Dumbledore said slowly, now staring at Adrian as if he were the wonder, and not in an entirely positive way. “Yes, I suppose I should give it to you, that you deserve it…very well.”

He reached for his Pensieve, and Harry sat down next to Adrian on the Transfigured chairs again, elated and about to be enlightened. He kept his hand resting on Adrian’s so that he could give a comforting little squeeze now and then.

Adrian always squeezed back, even through their viewing of the prophecy and the discussion that followed it.

Chapter Text

“What if the power that he knows not is the Horcrux, and you don’t have it now that we got rid of it by hiding it in Dumbledore’s body?”

Harry laughed a little and let himself sprawl in Adrian’s lap. Adrian stroked his hair the way Harry had done for him the other night, but he seemed abstracted, worried.

“I don’t think that is,” Harry said. “Dumbledore believes the power is love. I don’t really think that, at least not in the same way he means it, but I’m not worried.”

“Why not?” Adrian bent the full force of his thoughtful scowl on Harry.

“Because I think the power he knows not is you and your love for me,” Harry said softly, wrapping his hand around the back of Adrian’s neck. “And no one can ever take that away from me unless you decide you want to leave me.”

Adrian spun towards him and pushed him down on the bench, utterly focused on him. Harry swallowed, a rough little thrill running through him at the way that Adrian’s hands flexed on him and his eyes darkened.

“No. I would never do that.”

“Well, then,” Harry said in contentment, and leaned up to kiss Adrian and do other things that no one needed to know about except the two of them.

*

“It will be tonight.”

Harry bit his lip as he looked into Dumbledore’s eyes. The Headmaster had cornered Harry outside the Great Hall, during the perhaps one hour of Harry’s day when he would be alone. He’d been on his way back from NEWT Potions to Gryffindor Tower while Ron went to lunch and Hermione rushed off to exchange books, and Harry had been going to meet Adrian after lunch.

“The plan with Professor Snape that you told me about,” Harry said very quietly.

“Yes.”

Professor Dumbledore’s face was incredibly sad. Harry resisted the temptation to look towards his blackened hand. It was probably hidden under his sleeve anyway.

“Okay,” Harry said, exhaling.

“Originally I planned to take you with me to where one of the artifacts is hidden,” Dumbledore said, with a significant look that made Harry’s heart start pounding like a drum in his ears. “But I decided it would be better to let you remain in the school and deal with the potential chaos.”

“Chaos? Why? Just from your—death?”

“There are other things happening that you may not have known about,” Dumbledore said vaguely. “I will give you the notes on the artifact’s placement. Just keep in mind that the place is incredibly dangerous.”

“And will you ever stop being vague when you talk about secrets you haven’t given me yet?”

Dumbledore blinked at him. Harry stared back.

Then the Headmaster sighed. “Perhaps I deserve that. But, Harry, some things must happen in order to save souls.” And he pressed a piece of folded parchment into Harry’s hand that was probably his notes on the artifact’s placement, before turning and hurrying away.

Harry clenched his hand around the note so hard that he crumpled it.

“What was that? A note from Professor Dumbledore?”

Harry smoothed his face and turned around. Hermione had got back more quickly than he’d thought she would. He nodded. “Something that relates to the lessons he was giving me,” he said, with perfect truth, and slid the note into a robe pocket.

Hermione followed its path with her eyes, but said nothing as they went into lunch. Harry was grateful that they seemed to be on the track of repairing their friendship, and learning that they all had secrets to keep.

*

“Harry.”

Harry jogged towards Adrian. They’d originally been going to meet on the pitch for a practice, but Adrian had sent Harry a note through Hedwig that asked him to come to their quiet dungeon corridor. From the way Adrian was pacing back and forth, his face fixed in lines of rage, Harry thought that something terrible must have happened. He was already looking for wounds on Adrian’s skin as he came up to his boyfriend.

“I’m all right,” Adrian said. He gripped Harry’s arms and practically spat the next words. “But I figured out what was going to happen and cause the chaos that the Headmaster mentioned to you.”

“What?”

“Malfoy had some task from Voldemort. I don’t know all the details, but I know that he’d found a way to let Death Eaters into the castle.”

Harry stared at Adrian, still and shocked in a way that he rarely got nowadays. But he was so disgusted that he was trembling.

Innocent people would have been in danger and could have died if that had happened. Had Dumbledore really thought it was worth it to let Malfoy do that just so that Snape could—what? Prove himself in front of a larger audience of Death Eaters?

Harry swallowed back rage and shook his head. “But you stopped Malfoy.”

“It’s a good thing that I’m so good at fire spells. He’s tied up in bonds of flame in a corner of the dungeons where few people go. If he tries to get out, something spontaneous will happen.” Adrian smiled with one corner of his mouth, but it disappeared quickly. “I can’t believe that he would have…”

It didn’t really matter whether “he” was Dumbledore, Snape, or Malfoy. It could apply to all of them, Harry thought bitterly. He reached out and took his boyfriend in his arms, drawing Adrian close to rest his head on Harry’s shoulder, even though Adrian was taller than he was. At the moment, he thought Adrian needed the comfort as much as Harry ever had.

“You’re the only pure and good person I know,” Adrian whispered into his hair. “And Dumbledore would have let you die so that he could protect Malfoy. That had to be what he meant when he talked about saving souls.”

Harry nodded. He wasn’t entirely sure that Dumbledore would have let him die—he wanted Harry to survive and finish the task of tracking down the Horcruxes—but he hadn’t warned him, either. He had taken a last secret to his grave.

“What are we going to do now?”

“Make sure that we know where Dumbledore is and what he’s up to,” Adrian said, straightening and swallowing, “and tell him that he’s going to have to come up with some other way for Snape to demonstrate his loyalty.”

*

The password to the gargoyle was the same as the one that Dumbledore had used when they conducted the ritual to take the Horcrux from him. Only later did Harry think about what that meant.

They stepped into the office, and Snape swung around to glare at them. Then he aimed his wand at Dumbledore, who was slumped behind his desk. The black, cracked skin on his hand had worked most of the way up his arm.

“Avada Kedavra!” Snape spat.

Harry cried out and started forwards, but Adrian’s arm came down in front of him. He lifted a shield of fire. Snape cast them a quick glance, looked back at the man dead behind the desk, and then turned and ran.

“He thought there was some other audience coming,” Harry whispered, noting the way that Snape seemed confused for a single second before he vanished down the moving staircase.

“The other Death Eaters, likely.” Adrian shook his head in disgust. “It seems that just as Dumbledore didn’t tell us about Malfoy, he didn’t tell Snape that we already knew the truth of this little ploy.”

Harry sighed, and spent a moment staring at the Headmaster’s slumped form. He was—he had been such a big part of Harry’s life for so many years, even if he hadn’t actually interacted with Harry that much for some of them.

But now he was dead, and Harry and Adrian had to take up his work.

He turned and led Adrian out of the office, to spread the word about Dumbledore being dead. After all, there was nothing else they could do here.

*

“Will you tell us about what you were researching, now?”

Hermione’s chin was up, and she looked so determined that Harry knew he wouldn’t be able to slip out of this conversation with a platitude about how good Adrian was at research. Ron was standing behind Hermione with his arms folded, and that was a bad sign, too.

Harry cast an apologetic look at Adrian, who had sat beside him throughout Dumbledore’s funeral. Adrian just squeezed his arm, nodded, and then turned and walked away towards the lake.

“All right. But I need to raise a Privacy Charm.”

Harry and Adrian had already talked about how much they would reveal to Hermione and Ron about Horcruxes. Dumbledore would probably have wanted Harry to tell them everything, but Harry was nearly of age now, and had been failed by the Headmaster often enough that he wouldn’t do something just because Dumbledore would have wanted him to do it.

Ron and Hermione nodded, and watched in silence as Harry led them a little way away from the crowd and raised the charm. Then he turned around and folded his own arms.

“Voldemort created a failsafe so that even if he apparently died, the way he did when my mum defeated him, he wouldn’t entirely leave the world. It captures and holds his soul. It’s like—a net.” Harry moved his hands around in the air, trying to embody it. This should give them enough of the truth that they could help, if they wanted to, but not enough for them to run off and look up Horcruxes on their own.

I hate that I have to lie to my best friends this way.

But Harry didn’t think that Ron or Hermione would ever take it well that he and Adrian had transferred the Horcrux to Dumbledore before he died. They might not even take it well that basilisk venom and Fiendfyre—a spell Adrian had looked up—were ways to destroy the Horcruxes. Well, the venom might not bother them, but Fiendfyre would. There weren’t many spells Darker.

And they wouldn’t take it well, either, that Harry had known about the plan for Snape to kill Dumbledore, and hadn’t told them.

“A net?” Ron asked, sounding skeptical.

Harry nodded. “There are various anchor points that hold his spirit to the world, and keep the net in existence. Keep him pinned down, instead of fleeing the way that most souls would?” He could see that Ron and Hermione looked more disbelieving, not less. He sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m not explaining this well. Dumbledore said that he had to explain it this way because I wouldn’t understand all the magical theory.”

As he had thought it might, the invocation of Dumbledore made his friends relax and smile a little, although they still looked sorrowful. “A net,” Hermione said, nodding. “And you need to find the anchor points?”

“Yes. And destroy them. The problem is, we don’t know where all of them are. He protected them and hid them as carefully as he could.”

“Did the Headmaster find one? Is that what cursed his hand?”

Harry nodded again, grateful that he could weave some truth into the lie. “He didn’t give me all the details about how he intended to destroy it. But he did leave a few notes for me about where the next one is.”

“Come on! We have to find it right away!”

Harry gave Ron a stern look, and tried not to feel bad when he drooped. “We can’t just dash off and destroy it like that, Ron. It’s well-protected. We need to study the defenses, get ready to get past them first. Maybe do a scouting expedition.”

“Do you think we’ll be ready during the summer?” Hermione was biting her lip. “It sounds like we might need to study spells that we haven’t studied before and take a lot of time to study the defenses, too…”

Here it came. Harry braced himself. “Yeah, it’ll take more time, especially since I won’t be able to do magic legally for part of the summer. That’s why I’m not coming back to Hogwarts next year.”

“What?”

*

“It seemed to take a long time for you to explain that to them.”

“Yeah, well. Hermione isn’t used to thinking that there are more important things than marks. But once I explained why it was so important for us to destroy these things, then she accepted it.”

“They’re going with us, then?”

Harry still felt a warm squirm of affection in his stomach at the way that Adrian complained, but also made it clear that Ron and Hermione’s presence wouldn’t scare him away from accompanying Harry. “Yeah, afraid so.”

Adrian rolled his eyes—Harry could hear that without looking at him—and draped his arm around Harry’s shoulder. They were sitting by the Hogwarts Quidditch pitch for what might be the last time. Harry wasn’t going to discount the fact that it would be incredibly dangerous to hunt the Horcruxes, and he might die in the war.

Adrian was not going to die. Harry would sacrifice his life if he had to, to ensure that.

“You going to follow that plan we talked about leaving anchors at the various places?”

Harry nodded in silence. He would make sure to plant a vicious-looking stone or something similar at the cave that Dumbledore had left notes on, and any other places they found, and allow Ron and Hermione to destroy that while he found the actual Horcrux and took it away to destroy later.

“You shouldn’t have to go out of your way to fool them like this.”

“I know, but it’s the way it is. And it’s better than having to argue with them about things like transferring the Horcrux into Dumbledore.”

Adrian chuckled next to his ear and pulled Harry into a close embrace. “No. They wouldn’t appreciate how ruthless and practical you’ve become. And there’s another thing they wouldn’t appreciate.”

“Yeah?”

“How hot you are when you’re like that.”

Harry smiled, tilted his head back, and let his boyfriend’s kiss sweep him away from the present.

Chapter Text

“This is…Dark.”

Hermione was shivering, staring around the cave and the lake filled with Inferi, her eyes wide. Harry nodded grimly. He knew that he would probably never have found this place if not for the notes that Dumbledore had left, and he could only be grateful for them, while at the same time resenting the necessity.

If he hadn’t kept so many secrets…

But Harry pushed the idea away. Dumbledore was dead, he had paid the ultimate price for keeping those secrets, and Harry really couldn’t just stand around resenting him all his life. He had things to do.

“Here.”

Adrian was walking ahead of them. He had Apparated Harry in, since it would still be four weeks until Harry could legally do that himself. Harry broke into a trot to catch up, and found Adrian stepping back from a boat that was just shimmering into visibility.

“You knew that was there?”

Ron’s voice was suspicious. Harry sighed. “You saw Dumbledore’s notes, too, Ron.”

“Doesn’t mean I trust a Slytherin.”

Harry turned away without answering. Once again, his highest priority was to avoid an argument.

Although he was starting to wonder if it really should be.

“Those notes about the island and the boat and the potion made it sound like we’d have to torture someone to death to get to whatever it is on the island,” Hermione said in a tiny voice. She was wringing her hands, eyes darting around. “You said that the potion can only be drunk out of this basin, not drained or scooped out?”

“Yeah.”

“That sounds dangerous. Terrible.”

Harry shrugged a little. They already had a plan to deal with that.

Adrian raised his wand, concentrating. A flicker of blue blossomed at the end of his wand, and then more blue and white and still more blue and still more white, forming into a bridge of ice that arched from the edge of the lake over to the island. Adrian grunted with the effort of holding it, and Harry cast him an anxious glance.

“Fucking go,” Adrian muttered under his breath.

Harry knew why. Adrian could only perform this spell here because it was technically Dark Ars since it could breach wards. The longer he held it, though, the harder it became, given the pressure of Voldemort’s magic in the cave that was meant to make it impossible to bypass the lake with anything but the boat.

Harry ran up the bridge, and he heard Adrian growling at Ron and Hermione to follow. Ron sounded as if he wanted to stay and argue, but at least Hermione pulled him after.

The ice bridge was beginning to crack by the time Harry reached the island and turned around. He swallowed, anxious, as he watched Ron and Hermione reach the shore and Adrian pound up it with the kind of speed that he usually achieved only on a broom.

Adrian was still a meter or so out from the island when the ice flaked and vanished. He simply leaped, though, staggering a little as he came down next to Harry, but landing with a flash of a smile.

“Worried about me?”

“Of course,” Harry whispered, winding his hand into Adrian’s robes.

They might have started kissing, but Ron said something that Harry couldn’t quite make out in a complaining mumble, and Adrian moved back with a flash of emotion that closed his face. Harry sighed and turned to face the plinth on which the basin stood.

The potion, the poison, was tangible from here. But—Harry paused—there was something else he had expected to sense and didn’t. The Dark aura of a Horcrux was absent.

Harry glanced over his shoulder at Adrian, wondering if he was imagining things. After all, the only Horcruxes Harry had been close to were the shard from his own scar, which was rather different, and the diary, which was years ago. He could be misremembering, or this one was just different.

But Adrian was frowning, too. He waved his wand back and forth, mumbling a quick detection charm. The basin didn’t light up the way Harry knew it would have if they had found a Horcrux.

Adrian cursed, soft and low.

“What is it?” Hermione stared around at the cave walls, shivering, her arms wrapped around herself. “Is it—not the right anchor point?”

Harry started. He’d almost forgotten the stone that crackled with malevolent-looking illusion magic, which he’d put in his robe pocket. He bent over as if to examine the base of the plinth, and managed to pull it out and drop the stone.

“It might not be one as important as we thought,” he said, and moved out of the way. Ron and Hermione promptly started towards him. “But there’s a stone here, see?”

Ron and Hermione started discussing how they were going to break the “curse” on the stone. But in the meantime, Adrian had looked into the basin, and he was shaking his head a little as he looked at Harry.

Harry grimaced. There was a golden locket in the basin, under the potion, and it did resemble the one that he had seen in some of the Pensieve memories Dumbledore had shown him. But this wasn’t the right one.

A decoy? A trap?

Not a trap from Voldemort, Harry thought, a second later. He didn’t think this setup, as elaborate as it was, would have been to protect a fake. Well, maybe it would have been if Voldemort was smarter, but that would have required him to be smart enough not to make Horcruxes in the first place.

So.

A fake, from someone else.

Harry stepped back and nodded to Adrian. Adrian raised his wand and closed his eyes. Sweat broke out on his face after a second, but Harry just waited. He trusted Adrian, and besides, Adrian was good with fire spells.

A spark grew at the tip of his wand the way it had when he was conjuring the ice bridge. This time, it was red and hot and furious. It gathered at the base of the plinth and surrounded the stone in swirling, red-hot flame.

Ron and Hermione jumped back from it, swearing. They’d destroyed the stone that Harry had left, he saw, and now they all watched they flames rising, turning more blue and white as they did so. Harry saw one of the tongues of fire trying to grow a lion’s head, and felt the force of will that Adrian exerted to make the Fiendfyre tame and looking like the product of an overpowered Incendio.

Then it was gone. The plinth was destroyed, and the basin, and the potion. The locket slumped in a puddle of molten gold.

And it didn’t bleed black blood. It did nothing but look pitiful.

Harry grimaced and shook his head when Adrian glanced at him. Even if it hadn’t been certain before, it was now. The locket definitely wasn’t a Horcrux.

“What was that?”

“The plinth and the basin were part of the anchor,” Harry said quietly. “Adrian was destroying all of it so we could make sure that we didn’t miss any of it.”

“You almost got us!” Ron snapped, turning to Adrian. “You were trying to kill us!”

Adrian gave him a cool look. “If that had been the case, I wouldn’t have missed.”

Ron started to snap something else, and Harry’s anger and disappointment over this whole elaborate trap being a waste of time surged up and he shouted, “Enough!” before he even thought about it.

Ron turned to him, red-faced. Adrian remained as remote and cool as he had been, but Harry knew Adrian trusted him, wouldn’t think Harry was abandoning his boyfriend for his friends.

“I trust Adrian, and I trust the two of you, and I won’t have your arguing getting in the way and disrupting us,” Harry said. He swept his eyes back and forth across everyone’s faces, although Adrian just looked faintly amused. He would know as well as Harry that Harry wasn’t really talking to him. “Stop saying that he’s going to try to kill you. He would never try to kill one of my friends.”

“So he would try to kill other people?”

“If it were necessary to protect Harry,” Adrian said, putting a hand on Harry’s shoulder, “of course. Wouldn’t the two of you?”

Ron and Hermione exchanged sick glances.

Harry sighed. He knew he wasn’t going to get them past all their morality objections at once, and it didn’t matter, not when they had Horcruxes to find and a deception to keep up with Ron and Hermione thinking that they were destroying some kind of net of anchors instead. “Stop accusing Adrian.”

“Will he stop trying to kill us?”

“He’s not trying to kill you.”

“We can’t trust him.”

“If you can’t, then you should stop coming along on these expeditions, Ron, because Adrian is the only one who can cast spells like the one that got us across the lake.”

Ron glared mutinously, but Hermione tugged him towards her and whispered into his ear. Ron finally relaxed and sighed. “Yeah. Sorry, mate,” he said, pointedly only looking at Harry and not including Adrian.

At this point, Harry wasn’t sure he cared. “Come on. Let’s just get out of here.”

*

“You look upset, Harry.”

Harry sighed and flung himself into the chair across from Sirius. “Yeah. I just—this task that Dumbledore left us is complicated.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

Harry did, with a little more detail and truth than he’d used for Ron and Hermione, but sticking with the idea of anchors and a net of them that was meant to preserve Voldemort’s immortality. Sirius whistled under his breath as he listened, and then leaned back in his chair with his own Firewhisky.

“And you think that the anchor you destroyed was a fake one?”

“Yeah. I was close to one once in Dumbledore’s office, and it didn’t feel like that. We destroyed it anyway, just in case, but I don’t I think it was real.”

“What was it?”

“A stone that was spitting red sparks, and a golden locket.”

Sirius sat up, his eyes wide. “What did the locket look like?”

Harry blinked at him. “Golden, with an S made of emeralds on the front.” He thought Sirius might recognize the description, and volunteer that it was Slytherin’s locket, but Harry wasn’t going to.

Sirius swallowed. “There was a locket like that in one of the cabinets that Molly was having us clear out last summer. No, wait, the summer before this last one.”

“What?”

“You—right, you wouldn’t have known.”

“No, I was very carefully kept out of the loop,” Harry said cheerfully. “So what did this locket look like? Like I described to you? And where is it now?”

“Mundungus Fletcher—petty thief, member of the Order, you wouldn’t know him—was trying to steal treasures from the cabinets to sell, or what he thought were treasures. But Kreacher was rescuing them, and, well, I didn’t say anything. I don’t want them, but there’s no particular reason that Fletcher should profit, either.” Sirius took a deep breath. “Kreacher would know. Kreacher!”

There was a pop next to Harry’s chair, and he started and turned around. He hadn’t spent much time with Kreacher in the few days scattered here and there that he’d spent at Grimmauld Place. The elf had stared at him, muttered, and avoided him. Harry had thought he should let alone someone that determined to avoid him.

Now, Kreacher bowed and said in a surly voice, “Kreacher is answering the summons of stupid, no-good, filthy—”

“Enough of that,” Sirius cut him off. “We want to know where that golden locket that Mundungus Fletcher was trying to steal went.”

Kreacher dew himself up, his ears lifting with such offended pride that Harry stared, and wondered if a Horcrux could possess a house-elf. Or maybe if Voldemort would lower himself to possessing one.

“You are not taking Master Regulus’s locket,” Kreacher snapped.

“I—what? That belonged to my brother?”

Harry glanced at Sirius. He had heard Regulus mentioned a time or two, thought he remembered someone whispering about Sirius’s little brother being a Death Eater one of the times he’d walked into the Grimmauld Place kitchen, but the people who’d been talking about it had stopped the instant they saw him. Harry had assumed that was one of the secrets everyone had decided to keep from him.

“Master Regulus be dying for that locket.” Kreacher’s ears were quivering now. “Filthy Master Sirius is not touching it!”

“Why did Regulus give it to you?” Harry asked. It seemed odd that a possession that had killed a member of the Black family—because it was cursed? A Horcrux?—would have been so precious that the family’s only remaining house-elf.

Astonishingly, and terribly, Kreacher burst into tears.

*

“That’s four gone.”

Harry watched, nodding in silence as the locket bubbled and boiled, becoming no more than a mass of molten gold, on the floor of the cellar in Grimmauld Place where Sirius had led them when they’d told Kreacher they would destroy it. This one had definitely been a Horcrux. It had not only the miasma, but also the black blood and the hoarse voice screaming as it vanished from the world.

“I’m worried about finding the others.”

“I know. We got lucky with this one, but we won’t be able to rely on luck forever.”

Adrian’s hand rested hard and heavy on his shoulder in a way that meant Harry knew he had something important to say. He turned and looked up into his boyfriend’s face, tucking a stray curl of dark hair back from Adrian’s cheek.

Adrian swallowed. “We don’t know where the others are, but we know where one was.”

“The cave.”

“Yes. If we go back there…there’s a ritual that we might be able to perform to locate them…”

“Worse than the one we did to transfer the one in me to Dumbledore?”

Adrian blinked at him, opened his mouth slightly, and then closed it. “No,” he said, sounding hoarse. “Definitely not worse than that.”

Harry nodded. He was keeping his hope and his wonder firmly tamped down. “Then let’s do it.”

Chapter Text

“Are you planning to do something about the other anchors?”

Harry nodded to Hermione and swallowed the piece of toast in his mouth before he replied. “Yeah. We’re looking into finding some of the others now. Unfortunately, Professor Dumbledore only left notes about the one. He probably didn’t have time to look into any others, with that curse on his hand sickening him.”

“We?”

“Adrian and me.”

Hermione looked down at her lap. “Oh.”

Harry watched her for a moment, but she didn’t look back up. With a sigh, Harry reached across the table, took her hand, and squeezed it. “I absolutely wouldn’t be opposed to working on this with you, Hermione. But I’m not going to leave Adrian behind, and you know that Ron would still be there and would insist on making remarks about him.”

“It just—” Hermione looked up. “It feels like you’re leaving us behind.”

“Would you feel that way if you and Ron got married someday? That you were leaving me behind?”

“That’s different.”

“Why?”

Hermione looked away.

Harry nodded. He suspected it was different for her because it was her relationship with Ron, and her secrets, and she and Ron were so sure that Harry’s secrets were different, dangerous, necessary to know.

And to be fair, Harry hadn’t exactly told them that the danger of Voldemort reading his mind didn’t exist anymore since the destruction of the Horcrux in him. But telling them that would mean telling them about the Horcrux, and the Horcruxes in general, and Harry wasn’t in the mood for seventeen more arguments.

Sometimes, not being in the mood for them was enough.

“I hope we’ll always be friends, Hermione,” Harry said as gently as he knew how. “But we don’t need to always do research or spend every minute together to still be friends. We’ve spent most of the last few summers apart. It’s been all right.”

“I’m sorry, Harry,” Hermione whispered. “I know that we couldn’t have included you in everything we did those summers, but I should have pushed for us to tell you more that we could tell you. Especially since you were let into the secret of Grimmauld Place over Christmas in fifth year anyway.”

Harry just nodded, patted her shoulder, and stood up. He was meeting Adrian, in disguise, in Knockturn Alley in half an hour.

*

Harry stared blankly at the page before him, and swallowed.

“I told you this was a Dark ritual.”

Harry just nodded and shifted a little closer to Adrian, not caring that they stood in the bookshop called Darius’s Dark Things in Knockturn Alley where anyone could see them. Adrian’s glares were probably deterring anyone from approaching, anyway. “I—didn’t know that it would mean having to stop your heart.”

“Rituals require death,” Adrian said softly. “Blood. Sacrifice. The only reason that the one we already did didn’t was because Dumbledore was dying and because you were technically sacrificing a bit of soul.”

“Just not mine.”

“That kind of thing doesn’t matter to rituals.”

“If that’s the case, then we could use m—”

“No.” Adrian gripped Harry’s shoulders and bent down in front of him, so close that there was no way Harry could mistake the scowl on his face. “Just no, all right? I am not going to put you in danger even if you think you would prefer it that way. I love you too much to do that.”

“Why can’t I love you enough not to do it?”

“Because it is my privilege to protect you. And because you already went through one. It’s my turn.”

Harry hesitated, but Adrian had the stubborn look on his face, the way he had had when he was talking about how Voldemort could live forever instead of Harry dying, that made Harry nod. He knew that Adrian’s sense of fair play was engaged now, and there was no way for Harry to make a dent in that. “Fine. So what do we need?”

“What does the list say?”

Harry rolled his eyes a little and concentrated on the rest of the ingredients in the ritual list, the ones that he hadn’t paid as much attention to once he saw how the ritual would involve Adrian dying temporarily. “Oh. I don’t think we have most of these.”

“Your godfather might have some of them,” Adrian murmured into his ear, calm now that Harry agreed with him. “And the rest are in my family’s Potions stores.”

“Will they just give them to you?”

“Oh, no. But I don’t plan to ask, exactly.”

Harry cupped a hand behind Adrian’s neck and pulled him down to kiss him. “Just be careful,” he said fiercely. “I would go with you, but I think they might notice if I walked through the wards into the main house.”

“Yes. And there’s no way that my parents and brother would give up a chance to kidnap you and use you as a bargaining chip.”

Harry shuddered. At least Adrian’s family weren’t actual Death Eaters—Harry thought he might never have got together with Adrian if not for that, since Adrian wouldn’t have dared to approach him—but their ruthless, emotionless greed wasn’t much more attractive.

“Stay safe.”

“Of course I will.”

*

“How is coming back covered in smoke and burns at all safe?” Harry practically yelled at Adrian as he cast the healing charms on him.

Adrian coughed a little. He was on Harry’s bed in Grimmauld Place—he’d been brought into the Fidelius Charm at the beginning of summer—and he was still steaming from the ears as though he’d swallowed a Pepper-Up Potion. “I didn’t know my mother even knew that curse.”

“Which one?” Harry cast another charm, and sighed in relief as it reported that Adrian’s lungs were free of smoke damage. He still grabbed the potion that Sirius had left next to him without comment when he’d Levitated Adrian up to this bedroom and forced the whole contents of the vial down his throat.

Adrian coughed again, but then began to breathe more easily. “The Dragonsbreath Curse.”

“It made you actually experience standing in a wash of dragonfire?”

“Yes. But at least I wasn’t flying on a broom through it.”

“You would have been safer,” Harry muttered, and shook his head as he healed the last of the burns. He’d started studying healing magic at the beginning of summer because he’d thought they might need it around the Horcruxes, and it had turned out they did need it, just not in the way that he’d pictured. “All right. Your—family aren’t going to welcome you home again, are they?”

“No. But I did manage to take all of my personal things before they found me there.”

“And the ingredients?” Harry lowered his voice since he couldn’t ward the door of the bedroom well, with the house belonging to Sirius.

“Most of them. There are a few things we’ll have to gather or buy.”

“What will you have to gather or buy?”

Harry jumped as Sirius stepped through the doorway. “Some of the spells in case Adrian goes back for revenge on his family.”

“I won’t,” Adrian said. “They’re not worth it.”

“You also said you would stay safe.”

“Now you knew how I felt all those times you were in the hospital wing.”

Harry sighed and turned to Sirius. “I’m sure you could teach us a few handy prank spells. Even if Adrian’s doesn’t want to use them for revenge on his family, I might.”

Sirius grinned at them. “I’d be happy to teach you anything you wanted, Harry.”

“Don’t encourage him.”

Sirius and Adrian exchanged a few sentences of what sounded like genuine banter, while Harry watched Adrian in silence. He would never forget the feeling he’d had when Adrian, his robes shedding smoke and sparks and more than half gone, managed to fall through the Floo in Grimmauld Place.

Maybe it was something that Harry would just have to accept, the way that he would have to accept the necessity of stopping Adrian’s heart as part of the ritual to find the rest of the Horcruxes.

But he didn’t think he would ever get used to it.

*

“And you’re sure this is the best place.”

Harry couldn’t keep the doubt out of his voice as he stared around the cave that had apparently been the first resting place of the locket Horcrux. Adrian put a hand on Harry’s shoulder, but didn’t try to use it to steer him anywhere.

“I am. It not only has a connection to Horcruxes and the Dark Lord’s magic, it’s the only place we have access to that’s really large enough to lay out the ritual circle.”

Harry nodded reluctantly. They couldn’t very well do it in the cellars at Grimmauld Place, they couldn’t go back to Hogwarts, and they would never have access to the Pucey property and the little house on the outskirts of it again.

That realization had hurt Harry more than he wanted to admit.

“All right. Then let’s get started.”

Adrian bent down and kissed Harry, before he pulled back and began to scatter the shavings of obsidian around the circle he had already sketched out in chalk. Obsidian would have a part in this ritual just like it had in the one to transfer the Horcrux to Dumbledore.

Harry watched Adrian and worried. He seemed so alive as he bent, scattered, measured some of the plant ingredients and scattered them, too, and stood up to flash Harry a quick smile across the circle. And Harry was supposed to tie him down and stop his heart to find out about the locations of the other Horcruxes?

Adrian had said that Harry should think of it as Adrian always being in danger, like Harry, as long as Voldemort lived, so this was a way to get rid of that danger.

It still made Harry shiver with rage and terror.

But they had made their decision, and they had to deal with this.

Adrian finished the last of the sprinkling of obsidian shavings, as far as Harry could tell, and then turned and smiled at Harry. His hand was already reaching for the clasp of his robes around his neck, and he shed them with a roll of his shoulders and neck that made Harry gape at him a little.

“Are you…trying to take my mind off the ritual by flirting with me?’

“Is it working?” Adrian’s voice was deeper than usual as he shed the robes so that they drooped down and pooled around his feet.

“…Maybe?”

Adrian chuckled at him and reached up to take off his wand holster. He would have to be naked for the first part of the ritual so he could draw the runes on himself. “Any moment of pleasure or happiness I can give you is enough for me.”

“It won’t be enough for me unless you survive.”

Adrian paused, holding Harry’s eyes. “The ritual requires absolute determination to survive on the part of the person making the sacrifice, and absolute determination to bring the sacrifice back on the part of the person directing it. I’d say we have those.”

But is it enough?

Harry held his tongue as he watched Adrian take the rest of his clothes off, though. They had discussed this to death already.

And it didn’t mean that he didn’t get a little bit of pleasure out of seeing Adrian naked before he started drawing runes on himself. It just meant that Harry wasn’t paying it that much attention compared to the rest of the ritual.

*

“Ready.”

Harry nodded and stood in the middle of the circle, which glowed with a sullen red and black light around them, holding the knife they had chosen over the center of Adrian’s chest. Unlike the ritual to remove the Horcrux from him, this didn’t require a lot of chanting or preparation beyond the circle and the runes. As Adrian had said, it depended on their wills. To survive. To find the Horcruxes.

And to bring the sacrifice back.

Harry looked into Adrian’s eyes. Adrian smiled a little, softly, looking up at him with an expression of absolute faith. It struck Harry that Adrian looked less distressed than he had at the ends of the terms when Harry had landed in the hospital wing.

He really does care more about me than he does himself.

The realization rocked Harry. His hand tightened on the knife. He swallowed.

“I’m ready to begin.”

Adrian’s voice reached Harry and steadied him. He nodded. Adrian had given up a lot, including his family, to be here with Harry right now. Harry couldn’t show less than the same faith, the same love.

“I wish to know where the last Horcruxes are,” Harry whispered, focusing his mind as strongly as he could on the lingering sense of Voldemort’s magic in the cave, and the ones they had already destroyed. “The last three.”

Adrian arched his back so that his chest came closer to the knife. “And I am willing to offer my heart’s blood to the endeavor.”

The knife and the ritual circle around them both began to glow with a soft silvery light. That was what was supposed to happen, but Harry’s hand still shook on the knife as he aimed the blade downwards.

“You’ll begin now?” Adrian asked, and Harry only nodded before he lifted his hand and then let it fall, still holding the knife.

The silvery edge on the blade sliced into Adrian’s chest, parting the skin bloodlessly. Adrian gasped and stopped moving.

His heart, visible through the gap in the skin and muscle and flesh that had simply pulled aside, stopped beating.

Shaking, Harry dropped to his knees and repeated, “I wish to see the last three Horcruxes. Show them to me.”

The silvery light spread out around them, beating in a way that echoed the way Adrian’s heart could no longer move, and Harry lifted his eyes. He knew he had to look, had to absorb the vision they were showing him, or this would all be for nothing.

And Harry couldn’t bear the thought of wasting Adrian’s sacrifice like that.

He locked his eyes on the images pivoting around him, and committed each one to memory, something that turned out to be easy to do.

Nagini, curling around Voldemort’s feet as he sat on what looked like a throne at the base of a tree.

A golden cup, high on a shelf in what looked like a Gringotts vault. Harry tilted his head to the side and saw the flash of a badger on the cup.

A silvery diadem resting on the head of an ugly bust, itself on top of a cabinet that looked like a Vanishing Cabinet. The heavy stone walls around the image said “Hogwarts” to Harry, even though nothing else did.

And the vision snapped out, and vanished.

Harry crashed to the floor at the same time, struggling to keep his eyes open. Adrian was breathing shallowly, the blood around his heart bubbling now as it struggled to beat.

I love him, and he will come back. I do believe that. I believe that more than anything I have ever believed.

Harry took a deep breath, and pulled the knife from Adrian’s chest.

There was a long, horrible moment when he thought it hadn’t worked. Adrian’s entire body heaved and convulsed, his arms snapping up as if to fend an invisible attacker away, and Harry felt as though someone was biting his legs off. But then it passed, in a shimmer of reluctant magic that made Harry realize, at a wordless level, how close the ritual had come to not working.

Adrian swallowed and opened his eyes. Harry curled close to him, trembling more than a little, hand wrapping around his arm.

“I’m here,” Adrian whispered, as the wounds in his chest bloodlessly sealed themselves. “And I love you.”

Harry barely managed to whisper, “I love you,” back, before he was dragging Adrian towards the mouth of the cave and Apparating back to Grimmauld Place, not giving a fuck what the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery might do.

*

Adrian was a long time recovering.

Harry sat by his bed in Grimmauld Place and explained to everyone that they’d been looking for one of the means Voldemort had used to achieve immortality and had it blow up in their faces. People were sympathetic, and irritated, and sort of satisfied. They seemed to think that Adrian deserved it for doing Dark Arts.

Harry just shrugged. His priority was getting Adrian better and thinking of ways to reach the Horcruxes. Nagini would be hardest, but the one in Hogwarts not much easier.

Not with the announcements that had come through in the Prophet about how Snape would be Headmaster and all Muggleborns were “required” to attend. Not with the wanted posters everywhere showing Harry’s face on them.

Harry thought he might have the seeds of a plan, though. He worked on that as he nodded to the visitors and argued a little with Adrian about whether he should get out of bed yet and sneaked out in Polyjuice disguise to buy healing potions. At least Sirius was good at brewing Polyjuice and willing to wander London as a dog beside Harry, or by himself stealing Muggles’ hair.

It wasn’t the kind of Horcrux hunting Harry had thought would happen, but so what? What mattered was that they were still alive, and they would find the Horcruxes and eliminate them.

*

“You can’t Apparate inside Hogwarts.”

Harry nodded to Hermione as he worked with the Map to plot what he thought would be the best route. On the one hand, it wouldn’t be easy to locate the Horcrux; on the other hand, he had someone he could ask about a giant rubbish room. “Yeah, and not on the grounds. We’re not going to Apparate into the school.”

“What are you going to do, then?”

Harry smiled at her as he wrote down a note about the Invisibility Cloak. “Use brooms.”

“Oh. I—I’m not a good flyer. Should I go with you? What happens if I slow you down?”

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to. It should be okay.”

“But I feel as if I should.”

Harry just hummed a little as Hermione’s insecurities washed over him. It had actually become easy not to argue with her, or Ron, or Sirius, or any of the Order of the Phoenix members that sometimes drifted in and out of the house like sand washed back and forth on the tide. He knew what he was doing. Adrian knew what they were doing. This was much more important, and they would achieve it.

That was just the way things were.

*

“Yes,” Dobby said, in a squeak loud enough that Harry looked around worriedly, even though this stretch of the corridor was deserted and had been for some time. “The Room of Hidden Things be in the Room of Requirement, this way!”

“Of course it’s in the bloody Room of Requirement,” Adrian breathed behind him.

Harry half-smiled. He was covered by the Invisibility Cloak and Adrian by a Disillusionment Charm, and soaring hidden over Hogwarts’s grounds and sneaking in through a window of the Astronomy Tower had worked perfectly. Now they just needed to get in and out of Hogwarts as quickly as they possibly could.

And not expire from anxiety in the meantime.

“You have to be thinking of where everything is hidden,” Dobby explained, pausing in front of the tapestry of trolls dancing.

I need the room where everything is hidden…where everything is hidden…where everything is hidden…

And sure enough, the door appeared. Harry did wrinkle his nose when he stepped in and saw the piles of rubbish and dust and half-destroyed junk, but they knew what the diadem and the bust looked like. They would find it no matter how long it took them to trek through this mess.

“Accio diadem Horcrux!” Adrian hissed from behind him.

“Or we could do that,” Harry said, a little weakly, as the Horcrux zoomed towards them and hung in midair, stopped by the barrier that Adrian had hastily woven around it.

“Whatever would you do without me,” Adrian muttered as he cast another spell that scooped up the Horcrux. “Honestly.”

Two to go.

*

“And do you think that we can just sneak into Gringotts?”

“I wasn’t going to sneak into Gringotts.”

“What were you going to do, then?”

Harry sighed as he looked at Ron and Hermione. They leaned forwards, looking calm but unhappy. They’d looked that way since Harry had taken just Adrian, instead of at least Ron, to sneak into Hogwarts and “destroy the anchor.”

And it occurred to Harry to wonder: why was he lying to them?

Maybe it had been necessary when he’d thought they would have moral objections to Fiendfyre and the way he’d got rid of the Horcrux inside himself, but they’d managed to accept Adrian’s use of Dark Arts in the cave with only minimal argument. And there had never been a requirement to tell them all the details about the Horcrux he’d borne, either.

I acted sort of like Dumbledore, lying to them because I was afraid of their reaction.

“All right,” Harry said. “I’m going to give you some more details of our plans and why Adrian and I have handled these things so cautiously. It’s fair to let you know more about what they are. But I’m not going to put up with any arguments about how I shouldn’t trust Adrian or shouldn’t use certain spells. All right?”

“All right,” Hermione said, after she and Ron had exchanged mystified glances.

Harry sighed, and settled in to explain.

*

“So you were really using a Dark spell to destroy the Horcrux, and lying to us about it.”

Ron’s voice was dull. Hermione had turned away halfway through the conversation and was staring at the shelves of books around them in the Grimmauld Place library, as if trying to visualize the ones that Harry had found the Fiendfyre spell in.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t want to deal with your moral objections and a bunch of lectures,” Harry said. He winced at the look on Ron’s face, took a deep breath, and pushed ahead. “And maybe a little bit as revenge for your keeping secrets from me during the summers that you were staying here.”

“We had good reason for that,” Hermione whispered. “Professor Dumbledore told me when I turned seventeen. He knew that you had a connection to Voldemort, and that he could learn anything you did.”

“And he could also have captured you and tortured it out of you, since you couldn’t Occlude,” Harry said. He ignored the horrified look she gave him. “Dumbledore really did have that concern, but he barely did anything to address it. He had Snape teach me Occlumency, and didn’t follow it up when I walked out of those lessons. And I told you that he still let Snape kill him and planned to let Malfoy just walk Death Eaters into the school.”

“So how is imitating him any better?” Ron demanded hoarsely.

“Yeah, I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry.”

Ron paused for a moment, but Hermione went on. “And are you going to say sorry for all the other things?”

“Besides the lying? What do you mean?”

“Using Dark spells? Using Professor Dumbledore as a disposal bin for the Horcrux?”

Harry closed his eyes. Then he stood. “I’m not going to stay here and listen to this,” he said. “Dumbledore agreed with me doing that.”

“Only because he was cursed and dying and filled with guilt! You shouldn’t have asked!”

“And he shouldn’t have asked me to commit suicide via Killing Curse, which is what he was planning to do.”

Hermione buried her head in her hands. Harry felt a little sorry for her. She’d had to learn in a twenty-minute conversation that both Harry and Professor Dumbledore had done and planned to do horrible things.

“Are you going to give me lectures about this?” Harry asked.

“It’s horrible,” Hermione whispered.

“It’s war, Hermione. There wasn’t a non-horrible option to get rid of the Horcrux.”

“I would have—”

Hermione stopped. Harry watched her. “Yeah?” he asked at last, when some time had passed and she hadn’t said anything. “What would you have done?”

Hermione shook her head.

Harry nodded and let it go. He wanted to ask if she really would have died to get rid of the Horcrux, because he didn’t think she would have, but he didn’t feel like arguing. It was enough to know that his friends knew the truth, and also that he wouldn’t be bringing them along on any more Horcrux hunts.

It was hard to know that he’d been right and he couldn’t trust them, but good to know, as well.

“You don’t have to worry about it,” Harry said, as kindly as he could. “Adrian and I know where the last two are, and we’re going to find them and kill them. You don’t have to use Dark Arts or anything like that.” He walked towards the library doors.

“Harry.”

Harry looked over his shoulder. Hermione turned her head towards him, her eyes welling with tears. Ron put a hand on her shoulder, but didn’t try to stop her from speaking.

“Yeah, Hermione?”

“When did we stop being friends?”

“I think—the summer before fifth year.”

Hermione looked down and said nothing. Harry let himself out of the library and took a deep breath in the corridor beyond.

It wasn’t a happy feeling, but at least they had all been honest with each other. If they were ever going to find a way back to each other’s sides, it would come from that, and not from the kind of fond lies Harry could have told.

He walked away to find Adrian, aware of his lighter stride.

*

“And you are aware that you would have to promise us something of substantial value?”

“Yes.”

It had been all Adrian had said. Harry had remained silent at his side, under the Invisibility Cloak, while Adrian bargained with the goblins. He’d been able to approach the bank openly. From what Harry knew, Adrian was still not only a pureblood but someone who was in neutral-to-good standing with the Death Eaters. His family hadn’t announced his defection.

And now they were standing in a blank stone office with only a small desk and a small gold plaque on it with a name in goblin runes that Harry couldn’t read. He would have worried, but Adrian had told him that the plainer a goblin’s office was, the more highly respected that goblin was. It showed that they would have won their position without the need for decoration.

The door opened, and a tall goblin with long claws and fangs that projected outside his mouth stepped in. His skin was a deep grey that reminded Harry of some of the stone walls they’d passed. Adrian bowed to him, and Harry did the same thing, despite being under the Cloak. Most of the goblins had probably known he was there, Adrian had told him.

“Sit down, Mr. Pucey, Mr. Potter. And take that Cloak off.”

Harry did, still remaining quiet. Adrian sat in the chair as if he had always expected it to find it stiff and uncomfortable, but Harry had to hide how the rough stone was affecting his arse. He thought the goblin might get offended.

“What have you come to trade to us for this item that you say we have?” The goblin was watching Adrian as if were the most dangerous one—which, fair, Harry thought. “You must know that we would never normally give up one of our treasures.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Then tell us what you are offering.”

“The entire contents of the Pucey family vaults, including artifacts, books, and goblin-made weapons returned to their original owners, plus the vault space itself, plus the right of weregild against Dominique Pucey’s portrait.”

Harry choked.

The goblin sat up behind his desk, staring at Adrian in a way that made Harry abruptly hope that Adrian could give the goblin what he’d promised. “You are claiming that you can hand over the Pucey family vaults?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know that you can do this?”

“Because they should have disowned me, but they didn’t.” A smile widened across Adrian’s face that made Harry rather abruptly wish they were alone. “And I found my grandfather’s letters from fifty years ago that any member of the family can access the whole of the vaults and do with them as they will, once they’re of age.”

“He rather came to regret that provision,” the goblin said slowly. “Although he wouldn’t change it, because he enjoyed the vision of dispossessing his children too much. He was a rather stubborn human.”

“Yes. But it’s to my benefit, now.”

“Adrian,” Harry interrupted, before he could consider whether this was something he should do. The goblin did not look mortally offended, which at least was a good thing. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Adrian turned towards Harry with an adoring smile, and the goblin cleared his throat and turned his chair around to stare at the wall. Adrian reached out, hand shaking a little, as he ran the back of his knuckles down Harry’s cheek.

“I know that you’ll always take care of me,” Adrian said softly. “And my family didn’t disown me because they’re still hoping to profit from me and my association with the Boy-Who-Lived somehow. I want their greedy opportunism to bite them in their collective arses. Please, Harry. It would mean so much to me.”

Well, how could Harry say no to that?

“And you would give the vault space back to the bank?” the goblin interrupted. “You would give us the weregild without hesitation?”

“Of course. My ancestor’s portrait was a raving idiot to offend the goblin nation. I don’t know why my family has protected her for so long.”

“And the vault space?”

“Of course,” Adrian repeated. “What use would I have for vaults sitting empty?’

“You might want to fill them with your own possessions someday.”

“Harry has his own vault, and I can’t imagine that I would ever own so many things that he didn’t have a share in to need a whole other one.”

“What is it that you want?” breathed the goblin. He might be trying to sound neutral, Harry thought, but he was fairly sure Adrian had him.

“The golden cup engraved with a badger that is currently in a deeply disorganized vault belonging to a Death Eater. Probably a Lestrange or a Malfoy, and probably the cup of Helga Hufflepuff.”

The goblin paused for a moment. Then he said, “I know whereof you speak. And I see no reason that it should not be given to you. Perhaps it was stolen from Hufflepuff’s descendants, but we do not know that for certain.”

“Thank you.”

“You will sign a contract saying you are relinquishing the Pucey vaults’ contents, the vault space, and the portrait to us?”

“Yes.”

“Then,” the goblin said, and smiled with a mouthful of teeth so sharp that Harry leaned back a little in sheer appreciation, “I do not see why we cannot do business.”

*

“That was easier than I thought,” Harry said as they left the bank with the cup. “At least, if you’re willing to give up your whole family fortune, it was easy.”

“They never loved me more than the contents of their vaults, and they never used that ability to claim the whole vaults themselves.”

“Why not? Were they aware of it?”

“My father might not have been. He wasn’t born into the family. But my mother was. And it’s because she was always waiting for the right time, the best time, when she could see the expression on the face of someone else she hated while claiming the vaults for herself.” Adrian shuddered and shook his head. “So she wouldn’t even have the Galleons and artifacts and vindictive satisfaction she could have had, because she was always dreaming of the greater vindictive satisfaction she could have in the future.”

Harry leaned his head for a moment against Adrian’s shoulder, and then he pulled back, and Adrian Apparated them back to Grimmauld Place.

The cup and the diadem burned, and screamed in agony as they did.

And then there was the snake.

*

“You think he’s at Malfoy Manor?”

“It would make sense, wouldn’t it?”

“We don’t have any evidence. That vision I got was tightly focused on Nagini, and she and Voldemort really could have been anywhere.”

“But think about it.” Adrian leaned back in the chair in Harry’s bedroom in Grimmauld Place and counted the points off on his fingers. “Voldemort wants luxury. Malfoy Manor supplies that. Malfoy—the school-age one—had a task during this year, and Voldemort probably kept a close eye on him every time he actually went home. The Ministry isn’t looking at the Malfoys anymore because of Lucius’s claim to be under the Imperius in the first war, and the wards are the sort that would impress even a Dark Lord. It makes sense that he would be there.”

“So you’re saying we should at least investigate it?”

“Yes.” Adrian tipped his chair forwards so that it fell and the legs screeched on the wooden floor. Both of them ignored the sound of Mrs. Black starting to shriek downstairs. “And I know that we can’t break the wards, but we don’t have to.”

“Why not?”

“We have the perfect bait.”

Harry began to smile.

*

“Try to act a little more like a captive in distress, won’t you, Harry?”

“I’m no damsel, what do you want me to do?’

“Stop grinning.”

Harry did manage to wrestle his face back under control as Adrian dragged him to a halt outside the wards of Malfoy Manor. Adrian tapped his wand against Harry, and Harry obediently dropped to his knees in a posture of agony, as if Adrian had just cursed him. Then Adrian lifted his voice towards the wrought-iron gates and silent white walls.

“I come with a gift for the Dark Lord!”

It didn’t take long for a house-elf to appear, staring at them with huge eyes. It squeaked and vanished. Harry bowed his head and shifted a little to ease the pain in his knees from the gravel, complaining under his breath as Adrian’s wand dug into the back of his neck.

“I’ll do worse than this if you don’t stop complaining, Potter.”

“So it is true.”

Harry tensed against the bonds of fire that Adrian had conjured for him, hissing a little as the flames burned his skin. This was the first time he had been so close to Voldemort since the graveyard three years ago, and it was hard to remember that he should act as though his head was splitting open with the pain.

They had planned for that, though, so Harry let Adrian bow and begin the deceptive conversation. His attention was on the snake crawling behind Voldemort.

They had to have both of them outside the wards.

Harry gasped aloud and sagged in his bonds, and interrupted the “negotiation” Adrian was undertaking with Voldemort, in which he claimed to want revenge on Harry for his family disowning him. “Pucey, you bastard,” he groaned. “You said that he wouldn’t…”

“Wouldn’t what, dear Harry?”

Voldemort was only a meter or so away now, but Nagini was still within the wards. Harry raised his head and glared at Voldemort, but at the hems of his robes instead of his eyes. All they needed now was for Voldemort to read the truth about their plan from his mind. “Said that you wouldn’t feed me to Nagini,” he slurred.

Voldemort laughed and spoke in Parseltongue to Nagini. It was an odd, thrilling experience for Harry to realize that he could no longer understand his enemy. It seemed that the Horcrux really had carried Parseltongue with it.

But he didn’t need to understand her, since Nagini came slithering eagerly into the open, and Adrian let the bonds on Harry go.

“Avada Kedavra!” Adrian roared. The green spell spread out in front of them like a monstrous flower and gripped Nagini, ripping life away from her. She slumped, and then Adrian set her remains aflame with Fiendfyre, just in case the Killing Curse couldn’t completely destroy a living Horcrux.

Voldemort screamed, a sound so thin and high-pitched that Harry winced even as he stood and tackled Voldemort’s legs. Voldemort fell, but he was already growing sharp thorns and scales all over his skin, swinging his wand to face Harry—

“Reducto corpus!” Harry yelled.

From this close, he had no chance to duck the rain of muscle and flesh and blood and worse things that poured off Voldemort’s body. But he also had no chance to miss with a spell that had been designed to destroy magically-constructed bodies like those usually raised for Inferi.

Harry wiped his face off and staggered to his feet. The crumpled remains of Voldemort’s body all around him made him want to gag, but instead, he moved back as Adrian directed the Fiendfyre to eat that body, too.

There was a thin, high wailing, worse somehow than the louder cry Voldemort had given just seconds ago, and Harry winced. He knew it was the wraith fading from the world with no Horcruxes left to anchor it, and of course that was the result they had wanted and why they had done this at all, but—

For a moment, he felt fleeting unhappiness, felt guilt.

And then he turned and collapsed into Adrian’s arms, and sobbed aloud for joy.

*

“Where have you been?” Sirius hopped anxiously back to his feet as Harry and Adrian Flooed into Grimmauld Place’s kitchen. “You just disappear with no word, and Ron and Hermione said they heard something about you being held prisoner by him, and then—”

“We defeated Voldemort,” Harry said casually over his shoulder as Adrian steered him towards the stairs and the shower.

“What—?”

“He’s gone. We got him to come out of the wards of Malfoy Manor, and Adrian only pretended to take me prisoner, and Adrian killed the snake and I blew Voldemort’s body up. “The blood is his.”

“What—you can’t just appear and say that you killed You-Know-Who and just—Harry James Potter, get back here!”

*

“Do you think we should have done it in public?”

“What do you mean?” Harry rubbed a towel briskly through his hair, not bothering with one that would have covered his chest or groin. Adrian’s appreciative gaze told Harry all that he needed to know about how his boyfriend felt at the sight.

“I mean that people might not believe we defeated him. No one other than maybe the Malfoys saw him die.”

“People haven’t paid as much attention to him as they should have in the last few years, anyway. And plans get changed all the time. Just look at the way that Snape stupidly held to that plan he had with Dumbledore even though Malfoy didn’t get to bring him an audience of Death Eaters. And we didn’t need his help the way Dumbledore imagined we would. We can tell a few people, and some people will spread the word, and others will doubt us, but the Dark Lord won’t come around to command the Death Eaters anymore. That’s going to be the real ending for them, that he isn’t there to tell them what to do.”

“Do you think some of them might take up his mantle?’

“If they do,” Harry said, leaning up to kiss Adrian, “then we’ll be there to kick their arses.”

Adrian’s eyes sparkled as he bent down and returned the kiss, with interest. Then he drew back and said, “Yeah. I thought you would say something like this. And we’ll do whatever we have to do.” He paused, his face working. “I’ll get along with Weasley and Granger, if they become your friends again.”

“Maybe they will, and maybe they won’t,” Harry said. He thought he ought to feel sadness at that, but at the moment, nothing mattered except that he was happy. “Race you to the bed?”

Adrian cheated by sweeping Harry up in his arms before he could jump on the bed, and Harry dragged him down and kissed the breath out of him, and then they rolled on the floor, and that was just as good as the bed.

Harry left sadness behind as he held Adrian, as the joy soared through him.

They had defeated Voldemort, and there was nothing they could not do.

The End.