"What the fuck was that?"
The very old, very famous double doors leading into the office of the Minister of Magic slam shut, and somehow the only thing Scorpius can think about is chiding him for being so aggressive with a piece of magical history.
"If I had to take an educated guess," Scorpius answers, "I'd say it was an assassination attempt."
"This is the kind of shit you have to tell me," Harry bellows at him. "If you See that some psycho comes at you with his wand outstretched, you drop me a fucking hint!"
"I am under no legal obligation to do any such thing," Scorpius replies icily.
"Don't get fucking smart! You know as well as I do that your obligations to me are a little more than legal!"
Scorpius bares his teeth as Harry comes stalking toward him, to where he's standing by the blazing hearth.
"Policy is policy," Scorpius says. "If I had told you about Zielinski's actions, it would have endangered a lot more people than just me."
"How convenient," Harry growls.
"You're not upset that I didn't tell you," Scorpius continues, despite or perhaps because of the fact that he knows where this line of the argument leads, "you're upset that you couldn't protect me on your terms, that you couldn't fucking save me."
Harry laughs bitterly. "Boy, does this conversation feel familiar. Scorpius, in case it's escaped your notice, you could fucking use someone looking out for you right now. You're the youngest Grand Seer in history and by far the most socially liberal—"
Scorpius feels like he could punch him. And likely several other things that would get both of them in even more trouble.
"—and every time you're pulled into geopolitical conflict, you somehow manage to get every single party angry! I am not your enemy in this, Scorpius; I can help you if you'd just let me!"
"You – can't – help me," Scorpius growls. "And I'm not just saying that as the aggrieved friend, I'm saying that as the Grand Seer. You cannot help me; there is nothing you can do to save me from—!"
Scorpius has to physically bite his tongue. He turns sharply on a heel, away from Harry's sudden look of dawning alarm, and stalks toward the liquor cabinet, where he pours himself a brandy.
"This is that trauma again, isn't it?" Harry says. "Was the attempted assassination not it? What's going to happen?"
Scorpius overfills a snifter with expensive, Minister of Magic-quality brandy and drinks all of it in one breath.
"If there's one thing I learned after the War…"
God. Scorpius feels the alcohol burn behind his eyes. He knows what Harry's about to say, knows all the walls it will bring down.
"I was part of a prophecy, too," Harry says. "I'm not unfamiliar with fate. And I'm telling you that even if this terrible thing is inevitable, it is still worth fighting. Even with the certainty of defeat – especially with the certainty of defeat. If we all just lie down in the face of some cosmic inevitability, then what's even the point of having free will? Just tell me what it is, I can help you, I know I can."
Everything hinges on how Scorpius answers this question. Don't fucking preach to me about prophecy, he could say, and reignite the argument, ending it with a furious storming out. You're fundamentally misunderstanding the concept of time, he could say, and let the conversation fade like embers in a burnt-out hearth.
What he ends up saying is:
"Prophecy is not independent of free will, Harry, it's an extension of it."
Harry's brow furrows. Scorpius can't blame him for not understanding.
"This thing that's coming, it's not some inscrutable force of nature, it's all choices. Choices driven by ideology and passion and all the fundamentally human things that drive all of us. It's prophecy because some minds cannot and will not be changed. And my decision to keep you out of it is my choice. I cannot and will not be changed. I have chosen and will always choose to protect you."
Scorpius counts the breaths until Harry's hand rests on his jaw, and his eyes fall shut. There's an instant between that first contact and Harry's next breath that is a moment of ecstatic bliss, a moment where Scorpius can almost, almost let himself forget—
"Draco, I'm supposed to be the one protecting you."
The moment shatters like glass in his cupped hands. He should drop it to the floor in fear of being cut, but instead he holds onto it all the tighter, until the shards dig into his skin and hot blood pools in his palms.
I'm not my father, Scorpius could say, but doesn't, because Harry knows he is not his father. It's not as though he is so blinded by his own regrets that he looks at Scorpius and sees Draco. It's just a mistake.
It's always, always just a mistake.
Scorpius chooses to focus on that, instead of the logical conclusions that can be discerned from all those mistakes.
He lifts his eyes. He had Seen this months ago, the closeness, the sudden electricity crackling between them, deep green eyes burning with fierce affection, and then with sudden concern.
"I should—"
Harry moves to draw his hand away. Scorpius grabs his wrist before he can move it an inch. There follows a deep pain carving itself across Harry's face.
"You should," Scorpius says, "but don't. Please?"
"This is dangerous," Harry says.
"You've never been a danger to me a moment in my life."
"Scorpius, you have no idea—"
"You think I'm wrong, but I'm not. I've been a Seer since I was thirteen, you think I couldn't See all the things you never did, never said?"
He can feel muscles tense under Harry's skin.
"You've had every opportunity to endanger me, but you never did, because you never would."
"Shit," Harry says, mortified.
"But it's been a long time since I was a stupid kid with a crush I didn't understand," Scorpius continues.
The lines of Harry's throat roll as he swallows. He is so close that his breath flutters in Scorpius's hair.
"I am old enough to be your father," Harry says.
"Yes," Scorpius agrees.
"I'm – I'm fucking married," Harry says.
"Yes."
"My son—"
His words fall off on their own. The silence that falls is thick and unforgiving.
"Yes," Scorpius says for one last time. "And yet here we both are anyway, all cards on the table."
Scorpius counts the breaths again – one, two, three, four – until Harry crashes into him. They go careening into the wall with such force that the china cabinet just to the left of them rattles precariously. At once, Scorpius's thighs are hauled up around Harry's waist; at once, he rips open Harry's robe and spreads his fingers through the narrow v-shape of dark hair down his chest.
Harry keeps his grip on Scorpius's thighs and spins around, throwing him down onto the Minister's Desk, sending expensive quills and unread legislation toppling onto the floor. Scorpius pushes Harry's shirt off his shoulders; Harry tugs open the clasps on his formal white robes. The whole ensemble falls open at once, and Harry draws back to look down at him.
The chaos lapses as Harry spends a while, drawing his eyes down Scorpius's chest, his stomach, his pelvis, his cock – then back up to his chest, green eyes searching the skin for something that he can't find. There's an intense emotional pain and resentment that twists in Scorpius, and he rolls over sharply, so Harry is sprawled on the desk, so more important documents and expensive stationery go toppling onto the floor.
Scorpius rips open the fronts of his trousers; Harry's cock is thick and long and half-hard and Scorpius climbs forward, straddling his hips and immediately rolling back onto it.
"Fuck," Harry says, knocking a small globe onto the floor as he reaches to grab hold of Scorpius's waist. "Fuck, yes."
The heat of him slides first along Scorpius's own cock and, with some readjusting, back along the crest between his thighs, moving along but not into his entrance. Even the mimicry feels good; Scorpius presses both hands into Harry's chest and lets his head fall back, rolling his hips, Harry's cock sliding deliciously, addictively against the taut ring of muscle.
Fingers dig into the skin of his thighs. "God," Harry whispers, "I could fuck you dry."
"I could let you," Scorpius answers breathlessly, because he wants to hear that heavy, throaty moan it pulls from Harry's chest.
"Dangerous," Harry says, flying up into a sitting position and once again hauling Scorpius up by the back of his thighs.
They kiss like a hurricane and go careening through the doors of the adjacent Minister's Residence like an avalanche. They go slamming onto an end-table so Harry can rip off Scorpius's open robe. Scorpius pushes him down onto the luxurious scarlet armchair and straddles him again.
"You're not taking me dry," Harry says, and at this point Scorpius is so desperate that he's about to beg to differ, but Harry seizes him by the back of the neck with one hand, and with the other, presses two thick, spell-slicked fingers into him.
"Merlin," Scorpius sobs at once, hips trembling. He frantically tries – and mostly fails – to buck back onto the exquisite, breaching heat.
"Eyes on me, beautiful," Harry mutters.
Scorpius forces his eyes open and looks down at Harry's face. The look Harry fixes him with is, somehow, more intensely erotic and intimate than the fingers spearing him, working him open with patient, experienced diligence. Harry's grip on the back of his neck holds steady and his fingers press deeper.
"Good?" he breathes.
"Yes," Scorpius answers hoarsely. Harry crooks his fingers forward and Scorpius sees stars. "Fuck. Fuck. Yes, yes, yes, please, yes."
"I feel like I've been waiting thirty years for this," Harry says, crooking his fingers a second time, pressing hard onto Scorpius's prostate, making his entire lower half buck.
Scorpius tries not to think about why he chose thirty years. "Right there, just there – fuck! Yes!"
"If I hurt you," Harry says, "let me know."
"I like it when it hurts," Scorpius answers at once.
The hungry look on Harry's face lasts only for an instant before he grabs Scorpius around the waist, picks him up off the chair as though he were no heavier than a doll, and slams him down spread-eagle on the coffee table, and Scorpius grips the edges hard. No sooner as he landed, back bowed upward, head bowed over the far edge of the wood, than has Harry pushed into him in one long, deliberate stroke.
He's so big. So long that Scorpius feels him in places he didn't know he had; so thick that it feels like Scorpius might rip in half. And it hurts, and it's sudden, and it is perfect.
It's so perfect that Scorpius can't even see past the haze of white that's filled his vision; so perfect that he can't hear anything past the intense ringing in his ears. Harry fucks him, thoroughly, roughly, and nothing he ever Saw could have prepared him for exactly how ecstatically perfect it feels. Harry fucks him so forcefully that the aging wood of the coffee table groans in time with his thrusts, that Scorpius's cock, absolutely untouched, lies hot and red against his stomach, inches from climax. He grips onto the edges of the coffee table all the tighter.
Harry's hands are holding his waist, his hips snapping in time, and Scorpius knows that he'll feel the echo of this for days.
"Eyes on me," Harry says again, panting, and Scorpius dutifully blinks open his eyes in time to see Harry, expression wanting and ferociously possessive, bending over him. Scorpius can see all the months of unspoken tension in his expression, all the intensity from all the times they didn't dare knotted into that one look.
Scorpius feels like he might break apart underneath it.
One hand leaves Scorpius's waist to knot in his hair, but the rhythm of his cock in and out, in and out, doesn't falter for an instant.
"I'm going to come," Scorpius gasps, voice small and shaking, body taut.
The hand in his hair tugs sharply; Scorpius wails, his hips jerk, his cock throbs in desperate warning.
"I want to feel it," Harry says into the lines of Scorpius's throat, each stroke faster and impossibly deeper than before.
Scorpius shakes, holds onto the coffee table. His back arcs higher. He feels his body start to clamp down, on itself, on Harry's cock.
"Fuck," Harry whispers. "That's it, beautiful. Come for me."
The orgasm that rips out of him happens gradually, and then all at once. The first pulses of intense, body-melting heat, and then an all-encompassing whiteness that swallows him entirely. He stills, his voice hitches into silence, his body bucks, and he comes to a climax more intense than Scorpius even knew was possible. He breathes with it, his heart beats with it, and he falls apart with it, too.
There's soft words whispered against the shell of Scorpius's ear that he doesn't hear until what feels like hours of intense orgasm later. Harry, less than a minute behind him, bucking against his hips, stilling, gripping his hair and emptying heat into him.
And after all the rush and the chaos and the fury, time seems to slow. Scorpius's eyes refocus. He looks up at Harry, who's looking down at him, cock still buried in him, heartbeat slowing against Scorpius's skin.
Their lips are inches apart, but neither of them move to close the gap. They breathe, and they hold each other's gaze, and they both realize the same thing at the same time.
"Shit," Harry whispers.
Scorpius shuts his eyes. "Shit."