I hear the shouted questions and see the flashpots bursting in the corners of my vision right up until I step into the hearth and back into Grimmauld Place.

Not that it hasn't gotten easier to deal with journalists these days, but I still find myself disliking encounters with them and going far, sometimes almost inappropriately far, out of my way to avoid them. I thought I'd gotten pretty good at it, at least until—

"Is it true?"

I look up as I charm the soot from my robes, then give a start. It's Draco, sitting right on the edge of the sofa facing the hearth, hands on his knees.

These days I never really know when I'll see him. Over the past few weeks our relationship has been an irregular pattern of long periods of silence interspersed with brief, torrid, painfully arousing instances of snogging him up walls. I feel like it's mostly a product of him trying to keep his distance and not being able to. Sometimes I feel like I should do the responsible thing and keep myself at arm's length until I sort myself out, but I only have so much self-control.

"Uh, what?" I answer. "Also, hi."

"Hi," he returns, rising off the couch. He has a copy of The Daily Prophet in one hand. "Is it true?"

I eye the headline, creased down the middle thanks to his grip. Harry Potter Lord Black to propose veto powers, sources confirm.

"Oh, that." I shrug my coat off, toss it over a nearby chair. "Yeah. I mean, I hadn't really intended it to get out this soon. I wanted to run it by a few Consul members and Shacklebolt. I didn't think it would be leaked."

Draco is staring at me. The grip on his copy of the Prophet seems to tighten.

"I think I finally see what you mean about the wizarding world being resistant to change," I say. "It's not a new concept, veto power, but for all the outcry of how disgracefully it defies tradition, you'd have thought I'd proposed a flag-burning rally. Haven't even officially proposed it yet and already—"

The sentence abruptly ends when I am knocked backward into the wall. Draco is kissing me like a drowning man gasping for air and I immediately forget the rest of my sentence, what we had been talking about, or that we had been talking at all.

It's going to be one of those snogging days, apparently.

"Mmnm," I say against his mouth when my mind kicks back into gear. I reach up to card my fingers through his hair and return the enthusiasm. These random sessions always leave me desperately hard and feeling rather like a lovesick schoolgirl, but never so much as to make me think of stopping them.

It's not until my fingertips move around to trace his cheeks that I realize—

"Draco—" I pull away, alarmed, "—are you crying?"

Fuck, he is. Bloodshot quicksilver eyes stare up at me, but there's no sadness in his features – in fact, now that I think about it, he seems—

"Harry," he says, though it comes out as a croak, "that's wonderful."

"I – well, I mean, it's not a bad idea, but I don't think a system of checks and balances is quite worth crying over—"

He laughs wetly. "No," he says. "Harry. That's not – this is it."

I don't know what he's talking about but I'd rather like him to stop crying, even though the tears are apparently happy. "What's it?"

"This is – this is it," he says. "This is you, coming into your inheritance with enthusiasm. You, showing renewed concern for the world, concern that's positive instead of negative. It's what I've been waiting for."

He presses himself back into me and buries his face in the crux of my neck. Despite his explanation, "I still have no idea what you're talking about."

"Your idea is brilliant," he says, hands gripping at my shoulders. "You are brilliant. Harry, this is the proof."

"What p—oh. Oh." Little tremors of excitement spark down toward my fingertips. I draw away and look down at him, just in time for him to lean back up and kiss me again, and not that I'm not interested in continuing along that particular path, but I feel like I really should confirm— "You mean you—?"

"This is the sort of man I want inheriting the Malfoy Estate," he says. "The sort of man I could spend my life with, who I want to sire my children—"

"Jesus," I say. "Draco, are you sure?"

"Yes."

"I'm still in therapy," I remind him, because this is capable of being the best news I've received in years, and I want to be completely sure it's happening before I let this excitement in me solidify. "It's not like I'm at 100%, not yet—"

"I never wanted that," he says. "All I wanted was you. Any iteration of the man I'd fallen in love with, healthy and stable—"

But I stop listening after those three deafening words – fallen in love – and at once I gather him around the waist and haul him forward and up into a kiss. I am almost embarrassed by the slowly-spreading ecstatic joy in my chest, and I sweep him into the wall and deepen the kiss just to make it perfectly clear.

"I love you," I say into his mouth, "and you have no idea how long I've been waiting to hear—"

"I love you," Draco says, hands knotting in my hair. I shudder, press into him. My heart is slamming in my neck.

"Sounds just as good the second time."

He hooks one leg against my hip and kisses me again, holding on as though for dear life, as though he might slip away into the ether if he didn't have a solid grip. Perhaps he might. I hold him just as tightly to make sure he doesn't. My hands start at his sides, move downward, his hips, his thighs, his calves. Pinned to the wall as he is, it's all too easy for me to explore every inch of him. He shudders under my touch.

God, he's so responsive. I want to map every inch of his body with my fingertips, my tongue, undo him, take him apart piece by piece.

"I'll say it however many times you want," he says, voice taut, and I know he's just as desperate as I am, "if you take me upstairs."

And if I am overeager, I blame the weeks of sporadic snogging sessions followed by long periods of distance. And if I quite literally throw him over my shoulder and physically carry him up the steps, I do not at all consider that to be unreasonable.

The sound he makes is equal parts laughter and yelping "This isn't quite what I meant—"

"Then you should have clarified better," I answer, and he laughs again.

We make it upstairs and I toss him down onto the bed, immediately covering his body with my own. His arms slip around my neck, his stomach arches up against mine, and I claw at the fastenings on his trousers. He lifts his hips and I tug them down and away while he pushes his hands up under my jumper.

"I am so in love with you that it is embarrassing," I say to him, and in his Oxford shirt and nothing else, he looks absolutely sinful. That gorgeous, slender cock of his is flushed and half-hard. I drag my fingernails down his stomach and he whines, arching his body into the touch. "And you are far too gorgeous to be real." I bend down and lock my mouth over the long lines of his throat, working out of my own trousers.

His breath hisses. "Harry—"

"Let me suck you off," I say into his skin which drags a sort of desperate, keening whine out of him.

"Couldn't you just fuck me? I'm so wound up I don't think I can wait."

The sound I make is a bit undignified. My hands fumble; I look up at him. He stares back at me, all tense anticipation.

"That—" I falter. "Yes. I mean, yes, that's – absolutely, yes, but – what happened to saving yourself for marriage?"

"Turns out I'm not patient enough," he says lowly, and the words bypass my brain and go straight into my cock because, fuck.

"Patience is rubbish," I say, throwing out my hand and using a quick, wandless spell to summon a vial of lubricant from the bottom of the sock drawer. "Fuck patience."

"No, fuck me," he corrects.

I groan again. "Yes. Jesus, yes."

I kiss him wildly and nearly break the damn vial trying to work the cap off blindly. His legs are moving along my sides, and he is bucking and grinding his pelvis against mine and fuck the skin of his thighs are smooth, and my cock feels electric sliding along them and stupid fucking stupid vial open goddammit—

I spill half the contents of it onto my palm and onto the bedspread, which I decide to be angry about later. For now, I work myself upright between his thighs and immediately press a hand against his thigh, sliding upwards toward—

"Fuck!" he half-screams, half-sobs, bucking violently against my hand, and Jesus he looks fucking delicious. I work my hand harder, slicking my fingers in the excess lubricant running down towards the bed, pushing one in— "Fuck! Harry, that – hhaaahnn—!"

My mind is a rage of confliction. On the one hand he looks so impossibly, scorchingly hot bucking and grinding on my fingers that I want to get him off with just that, in turn providing me with ample wank fodder for the rest of my life. On the other hand, if I don't fuck him open in the next ten seconds there is a very real chance I might actually die.

I add a second finger and he keens, throwing his head back and scrabbling at the bed spread. The ring of muscle is drawn so tightly around my fingers that it makes my cock physically ache with the base desire to take, conquer, fuck – the movements of my hands become more clumsy, more frantic, I work him open as quickly as I can because—

"Enough!" he nearly sobs. "Stop, it's enough, please, this is torture—!"

He's loosened somewhat around my fingers, and good enough, because I am right there with him. Twenty-eight years of figurative foreplay and four months of literal foreplay are taking their toll. I slick my cock with the excess lube on my palm, grab him by one calf, line up, and drive into him.

He's making some kind of sound, but I can hear it. I am deafened by the sensation of it, the hot, wet vise clamping down around my cock, the bucking, thrashing body around it, the hands scrabbling along my back, fuck, I sink my teeth into his shoulder and gather every last scrap of self-control I possess not to just move, to fuck him bloody – he's a virgin, I remind myself, which leads to the startling and intensely arousing realization that this is that irreversible claim I had wanted, fucking Draco Malfoy, creating that indelible mark—

Fuck fuck fuck fuck I start to move for no other reason than I can no longer stay still; I hold him by both hips and fuck him, deeply and thoroughly, and already I am blind to the rest of the world. I grip him and I fuck him and he spreads himself under me, hands knotted in my hair, head thrown back, panting, gasping in time as I fuck him.

My body is taut; every muscle in me is whipcord-tough, and when I next look down at him, Jesus—

He is coming – spectacularly, gorgeously, he is coming, screaming, cock completely untouched, as I fuck him and Christ, I'm not far behind – I grip him all the tighter, bury my face in his hair – the muscles of my back and hips strain but keep moving on raw and animalistic autopilot until I feel as though I am being ripped in half, and I am coming and coming along with him, emptying into him in blinding, shredding pulses that leave me weaker and weaker and softer and shakier—

Lips on my jaw, shaking hands on my back, hot and shaky breath in my hair. I can feel each sensation grow stronger as my mind comes down from the high.

"Harry," I hear him say, and I turn my head to kiss him. I feel his fingertips on my spine, stripes of his come drizzling down my stomach, and how can anything this perfect possibly be real?

"I love you," I hear him say, and I thread my fingers through his sweat-streaked hair.

"I love you," I answer, and I do, and there is nothing else in the world that matters quite so much.