Warning: The fourth scene here contains very heavy slash.

Chapter Seventy-Nine: A Dream of Spring

Harry wondered if they could have achieved this peace and perfection in any other season.

Draco stood beside him as they watched the hippocampi through the transparent rock separating them from the sea, his hands resting flat as though he wanted to brush his fingers against the fins of the water-horses swimming by. Harry had to divide his attention as he leaned with his own shoulder on the rock, his eyes now and then on the darting herd, now and then on Draco's face.

He knew Draco had looked at the tadfoals and the mares before, but he must not have been with him. Or he didn't remember enough about it from those heady days at the end of summer when he'd been trying to negotiate with the pack and the Ministry and learn about Falco's threat for the first time.

Or he simply hadn't seen Draco change enough then to appreciate what a difference this made.

Draco's eyes half-closed now and then, as though the magical light reflected through the rock were too strong for him. His fingers opened and closed in small instinctive motions that imitated the foals' swimming. His face had shadows on it; Harry sometimes decided they were the shadows cast from his nose and mouth, and sometimes believed they were the lines of good and evil that Draco had learned to make real in the intervening months. A strand of blond hair became crushed between him and the rock as he leaned close, blue light filtering over his skin, staring at the ring-game the tadfoals had started.

The herd appeared entirely unconscious of the humans watching them, and Harry saw no reason they should be informed. Their manes floated behind them, uncoiling like whips, then jerked towards their necks again when they made a sudden movement. Their tails lashed harder and faster, columns of smooth muscle beside which even the tails of sirens looked weak and powerless. Their eyes shone like an Antipodean Opaleye's, and their skin was blue, was green, was some changing color in the light of magic and the ocean. Harry watched as a mother hippocampus turned upside-down to better shield a very young foal from a harsh current, and felt an emotion move through him, deep and slow. It took him a moment to recognize contentment.

"And the Blacks really didn't breed them?" Draco whispered.

Harry shook his head. The mother and foal had flipped back over and were swimming in circles now, the mare patiently spreading her tail when necessary to shield, but dropping it more and more, so that her child could feel the full force of the water. Harry watched the foal's webbed hooves open and close like gills, learning the Atlantic carefully, as if he walked on top of jagged stones. That's what I asked Regulus at first. But he said they came here on their own. Just some magical creatures doing what wizards don't want them to do, he added, and hoped Draco could read the pride that had slipped into his writing. Not that he'd had anything to do with bringing the hippocampi here, of course, but he thought, as a vates, he was allowed to be happy that some magical creatures did not obey the iron wills of his own kind.

"They're beautiful," Draco murmured.

Harry cocked his head, hearing something in his voice, and slid his own shoulder along the glassy rock until he stood next to Draco. This time, he was the one to put his arms around Draco's waist, returning the gesture that was more usual the other way. More beautiful free than any other way?

Draco nodded in distraction, and then blinked and glanced at him. "Wait. What do you mean by that?"

Would you find them as beautiful if they were bound by a web?

A click of the tongue, the same "tch" noise that Draco had made when he'd written the letter, and then he turned to face Harry completely. "We came here to enjoy ourselves, not argue," he said.

We can do both at once. Harry regarded Draco as best as he could from so close and with Draco's breath almost fogging up his glasses. No one says that all arguments have to be screaming matches. Some of them are spirited intellectual debates.

Draco snorted and was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "I do hope that you've remembered to have your Hogsmeade owls direct deliveries of food here."

Harry recognized the distraction technique for what it was, but felt more than prepared to accept it. Arguments could be part of this holiday, Draco's conviction notwithstanding, but there was no reason to make them the whole. If Draco wanted to wait to talk about it, they would wait to talk about it. Harry still wanted to spoil him.

Better.

The light from the sea put strange shadows on Draco's face as he turned completely away from the hippocampi. "Better? What do you mean, better? You didn't have that much time to arrange matters when we came to Cobley-by-the-Sea."

Harry chuckled at him, though the first trickle of actual sound from his throat hurt badly, and anyway Draco gripped his arm to make him stop. I know. But I've been practicing, too. I knew that you probably wouldn't want to eat food from the shops, and of course I won't want to eat food from a house elf.

"What did you do, Harry?" Draco looked torn between wonder and wariness. Given what else had sometimes happened when he sprang a surprise, Harry really couldn't blame him.

For an answer, he asked, What sweet would you want to have right now, if you could have anything in the world? Answer honestly.

He watched Draco's eyes, and caught a slight widening, but none of the darting or flicking off to the side that would have meant he was making up an answer to the question. Instead, Draco simply said, "A Chocolate Implosion."

Harry looked polite incomprehension at him, and Draco's cheeks flushed a faint pink.

"It, um. It's a sweet that the house elves made for me a few times before my mother realized that I'd invented it and forbade them to ever make it again. It starts out as a chocolate cake, but it's scooped out and filled with just pure liquid chocolate, not cake. Then the cake top is put back on, and decorated with chocolate-covered cherries. And then another layer of pure chocolate." By now, Draco's cheeks shone like the sunrise. It was the most embarrassed Harry had seen him in months. "My mother made me study magical tooth care, too, for a solid week. She was so angry."

So it's been years since you've had it?

Draco nodded, and looked torn between hope and horror as Harry stretched out his flesh hand, pointing towards a carved stone chair. Harry took a deep breath and unspooled his magic, forcing it not through the narrow channels that a Transfiguration spell would normally have taken, but through an image of pure desire and will backed by Draco's words. Sweat sprang out on his forehead. It was tiring, especially since he had a tendency to think of Transfiguration as the Animagus transformation now and start trying to use the techniques that Peter had taught him.

But he persevered, and the chair shimmered and slowly began to collapse inward, turning the brown of rich, life-giving dirt on the way. Harry yanked his imagination away from dirt when the chair began to smell like soil, though. Carefully, he filtered more and more of his magic into physical substance. Now he had to ignore the warnings in his own head about doing so. If he used so much power on this, then he wouldn't be ready to defend himself if battle came—

But battle was not going to come. He and Draco were on holiday, and he had said that he wanted to do this for Draco, so he was doing this for Draco. He spun and forced and imagined. The part he had to expend the most imagination on was the chocolate-covered cherries; he'd never tasted them, so he went mostly with the taste of pure chocolate mingled with what little he could remember of the fruit and hoped for the best.

He was panting, a little, gasping, by the time it was done, but he'd finished it. He stepped back and surveyed his creation.

The Transfigured chair resembled nothing so much as a chocolate cake in several layers, with those layers trembling precariously on top of the rest. Small cherries, some showing smears of red under the chocolate, peeked here and there like eyes. Harry could smell it, too, so overwhelmingly sweet that he wasn't surprised Narcissa had discovered what the house elves were up to and made Draco stop.

He turned to look at Draco, only to find Draco staring at him.

"How could you do that?" he demanded.

Harry's first impulse was to see the demand as anger and worry that he'd done something wrong, somehow ruined Draco's childhood memory. Then he reminded himself sternly that the mere existence of a cake like the one Draco described couldn't ruin anyone's memory, and it was far more likely that he was just surprised.

I've been working hard on Transfiguration, he said simply.

Draco stared at him a moment more. Then Harry saw his whole body trembling, apparently with the suppression of the impulse to run over to the Chocolate Implosion and start eating it right away. He suppressed a smile of his own.

Draco seized his face and kissed him as if he couldn't get enough, opening Harry's mouth in moments with his tongue, holding him still as he ferociously licked and bit. Harry returned as good as he received, and Draco broke away from him in a moment, looking half-dazed and deliriously happy.

"I am so much in your debt, Harry," he said. "I don't suppose you could Summon plates and knives?"

Harry did so from the kitchen's cupboards, more amused than anything else. He did make sure to write on the air, Not in my debt, Draco. I wanted to do this for you. Spoiling you, remember?

Draco only looked happier. Once the knives and plates had arrived, he approached the Chocolate Implosion with the air of a hunter stalking a savage beast. Harry muffled his laughter and followed.

"You won't believe how good this is until you taste it, Harry," Draco whispered, half-reverently. "You really won't." And then he stared at the cake as if he were trying to figure out where to start first.

Harry watched the light gleam off his creation, and hoped it didn't taste like sawdust, and drank down Draco's smile like fine wine.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Draco decided the best time to do it was in the early morning, before Harry was properly awake, and therefore before he could decide that something was wrong and get nervous or irritated.

Only, it turned out to be mid-morning, nearly ten-o'clock, because he had to sleep off the massive feast of the Chocolate Implosion the night before.

No one's perfect.

But he would like to make Harry feel he was, Draco thought, propping himself up on his elbow and staring down at Harry, who was still wound in the sheets of their bed and deeply asleep. His mouth was open, and he breathed through that and not his nose, with a little whistling sound. Now and then he turned over, though he usually turned back immediately. As it was, he made a tiny amount of progress towards the left side of the bed each time, and might eventually roll over if it weren't for the fact that he'd be waking up before then, and Draco's guarding eye.

Draco leaned over and gently pressed his lips to Harry's, waking him. Harry blinked and returned the kiss with interest, then hissed something in Parseltongue. Argutus, asleep on one of their trunks, hissed back, and he and Harry conducted what sounded like a casual conversation and not an argument to Draco. Of course, he could be mistaken. Sometimes half the hissing sounded angry.

He waited until it was done, then murmured, "What did he say?" into Harry's ear.

Harry started to answer, but a yawn interrupted. Draco found himself smiling a phenomenally silly smile as he watched Harry wrinkle his nose and curl his lips, before he brought one hand up to politely hide it.

"He said—" Harry shook his head in annoyance, and resorted to writing, though he strung the letters in a row above his chest and face so that Draco didn't need to turn his head. I asked where he'd been. He told me about the sweetness of the insects and rats he caught in the walls, and said that I couldn't have had something as sweet for dinner. I told him about the cake, but he latched on to the name I gave it—it sounds different in Parseltongue, implosion, you know, like shedding skin?—and won't believe that it was good.

"Just a lazy, silly, early-morning argument," Draco murmured.

"Hmmm." Harry stretched his arms and arched his back, unselfconscious in a way Draco had barely seen him act in their bedroom. Draco's eyes slid greedily up and down his body, but were stopped by the sheets. Well. They'd had sex last night, and right now he wanted to offer Harry something else.

"I have something not as silly to show you," he told him, and planted a kiss behind Harry's ear. "Share it with me?"

Something in his voice must have warned Harry. He paused in the middle of his stretch, and rolled his head over until his gaze locked with Draco's. Draco Malfoy, what are you doing? his writing demanded.

"Something wonderful," said Draco, and used his most enigmatic smile and brightest eyes until Harry gave in.

All right.

"Good, Harry," Draco breathed, emboldened by the trust on his face, and rose to fetch the mirror from the wall.

He brought it back half-concealed in his hand, but Harry saw it, or knew it from the feeling of the magic, and sat up almost at once. Draco stopped and held it out, making Harry look, and not moving forward when Harry's eyes widened.

I'm not sure what you want to do, Harry wrote at last, the letters growing thorns and snaps and flourishes over his head, the thorns pointing at his heart. But you're slightly mad if you believe that I'll think this is wonderful.

"It is, though, Harry." Draco made sure to remove all blame from his voice, and wondered if Harry knew that he responded to that croon by slightly rolling his head to the side, baring his throat. "I promise. I won't force you to accept this. I simply want us to look at you together so that I can tell you what I see."

You could do that without the mirror. I know what you think I look like.

Draco wondered where he had acquired the patience to coax Harry into this instead of rushing him. "And yet that's been easy enough to avoid in the months since Christmas, hasn't it? This is a holiday, where I want to spoil you. This would count as spoiling you."

Harry was silent, watching him, brow furrowed.

I know how to do this now. And he did. Draco pitched his voice low, the way he would speak to a wild unicorn, assuming that one ever approached him. "Harry, I believe that you have the courage to do this. I saw that in your face when you went up into the Midwinter storm." Harry shivered, but wasn't inclined to break the spell of his voice for the mere mention of Fawkes, and that encouraged Draco. He had to take some chances, risk making some mistakes. "I know how strong you are, how far you've come. I know that you don't need to face your reflection in the mirror in the same way or for the same reasons that you had to face your parents. You'll survive without considering yourself beautiful. But I want you to live, not just survive. And I really think this will make your life better, not just content me. Will you let me show you the glass and tell you what I want to tell you? Please?"

He could only wait, then, because Harry's face had gone smooth and blank and he had no idea which way the balance would tilt. He had to wait while Harry's right hand opened and closed on the blankets beside him. The silver hand flexed a little, too. The heel of the palm had turned almost flesh-colored now, and Draco didn't think the movements were all born of magic. The hand was starting to connect with Harry's body.

He waited.

At last, Harry ducked his head and gave a kind of nervous nod.

"You're sure?" Draco demanded.

Again, a nod, and this time it was accompanied by a glare and one of the lynx-like hisses.

Happily, Draco clambered onto the bed beside Harry and picked up his right hand, clasping it around the mirror. He leaned towards the glass, and watched as the ordinary appearance of Harry's face flashed, rippled, and grew more beautiful. Harry, as expected, stiffened, because he wasn't used to seeing himself Transfigured like that, as if he were a stained glass-window with the sun shining through it.

Draco leaned over his shoulder and kissed his cheek, and began to talk in a low, gentle tone.

"You grew into your magic, Harry, in a way that I don't think anyone else could have. You fascinated me from our very first meeting on the Hogwarts Express, when I knew that you would be in Slytherin, but if it had only been a matter of magic, I think I would have grown bored and gone on eventually, the way you were always waiting for me to do. It was more than that. I think I sensed, even then, that you had potential to become a great wizard."

Liar. Harry's words wrote themselves over the glass, somewhat obscuring his reflection. Draco didn't think that was an accident. You cared about power then, mostly.

"Not just power," Draco corrected, mildly surprised. He doesn't think Lucius taught me better than that? "I had seen people who had power. My father sometimes had friends over to the Manor, and my mother, too. Some of them were magically powerful wizards who made my father look small. And there was Professor Snape; I knew he was stronger than Father. But though Father respected them, and taught me to respect them, that wasn't the only quality you could judge someone on. And he had something, and Mother had something, that none of them did. You have it, though." Draco rubbed his cheek against Harry's hair, delighted to feel him relaxing a little against him.

What is that?

"Strength. The ability to go on surviving, enduring, and making the best of what you had. People who can only function in one particular environment—the dueling room, say—don't do very well. You have to be able to change quickly on the battlefield, survive."

I refuse to believe you knew I could do that. I didn't know I could do that.

Draco raised his eyebrows, and leaned nearer, breathing on the letters that covered the mirror, scattering them. "You did. Didn't Lily teach you to use whatever weapons you could find against an enemy? You did that a few months after I met you, on the Quidditch Pitch against the Lestranges. You used some spells, but you also used the Bludger, and you used the Slytherin team to protect your brother in a way you couldn't have if you'd refused the position as Seeker."

Harry was silent, and wordless. Draco licked his lips. He was, essentially, repeating a lesson Lucius had taught him the summer before he left for Hogwarts, but he had to put it in his own words. And he wasn't good with those. Someone could be listening, and he didn't want to reveal weakness.

He reminded himself sharply that no one could overhear them here, and that many of Harry's allies already considered him weak. That was one thing that he was here to change.

"There are wizards in the world who are powerful, Harry," he whispered. "You respect them, but you can avoid them. Professor Snape is one of those people. And there are people who are both powerful and strong. You respect them, and you endeavor to be one of them, and you follow them if you can't.

"And then there are people who are powerful, and strong, and mighty. That means they have this kind of wild beauty—" Draco could feel his own blush steadily climbing "—that unites the other qualities and sends them flowing above their heads, flapping like a banner, calling other people to notice them. My father didn't think might was something you could be born with, or even decide to develop. You had to climb to meet it, and it's so tiring to live life at that level that most people never make it."

Draco's hand clamped down on his shoulder. "You've waved that banner for me, Harry. What's more, you've taught me that it is possible to try to climb. If you fall on the way, you've still done more, tasted more of life, then all the people who are content to remain on flat ground their whole lives long. That's one reason I love you, Harry. Because you're wonderful, yes, but you've taught me to recognize the wonderful in myself." He leaned his head alongside Harry's neck and nodded at the beautiful reflection in the mirror. "And there's the man who does that."

Harry twisted around and kissed him almost desperately. Draco held himself back only long enough to insure that the mirror was safe on the bedside table, and then returned the kiss.

Harry's eyes had a light in the back of them now, where there had been only shadows before. Draco had reached him. He might not believe it completely yet, but he believed something like it. That was good enough for right now.

Draco closed his eyes and let Harry bear him away.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Harry stepped back and surveyed the table narrowly, then nodded. He hadn't had a chance to look at the book that described this ritual in a few weeks, since he'd first decided on the idea of a holiday with Draco and timing it to coincide with the spring equinox. But he thought it was still right. Those intense memorization skills Lily had trained into him had not faded completely.

He stepped back and looked at the door of the study with a faint smile. He'd sneaked away from the bedroom while Draco took a nap, more than slightly worn out from their activities earlier. And he'd managed to arrange the necessary components for the ritual before Draco awakened. From the sound of the hasty steps outside the study, though, his sleeping beauty was asleep no longer.

"Harry, what—"

Draco took a step into the room, and then his voice died. He stared blankly. Harry met his eyes and smiled more broadly. He held out a hand.

Draco descended the small flight of stairs into the study, eyes staring, face blazing.

Harry had decorated the walls with branches. A few of them were tapestries or paintings that he'd moved from other rooms, but more were conjured or illusions. All wrapped around each other to enclose the study in an endless wall of green. The sweet smell of pine needles filled the room, and laurel leaves, and here and there the scent of newly budded greenery that wouldn't open for a month or more without magic. Harry had used illusions for that part. They had learned to Transfigure food so it smelled good, but not other objects as yet.

Rushes carpeted the floor. Harry had learned how to Transfigure those, once he realized what a part of the ritual they were. Rushes had covered the floors of the places where Dark and Light wizards came together on the once-a-year meetings of reconciliation and trade that had, long ago, been common on the equinox. Harry was going to have rushes, even if it was a few days past the first day of spring.

The table had a soft glow enveloping it, shaped like a double-sided cone that narrowed from both ends as it neared the wood. One side was dark green, the other gold. They mingled into pale blue on the table itself. The colors of Dark and Light and the undeclared wizards; the book had made it plain that he must incorporate them somehow, and Harry had chosen this way.

And lining the table were sixteen candles, all alight, surrounding a seventeenth, mostly-built, candle in the center.

"Harry, what is this?" Draco asked, when he'd reached the bottom of the stairs and stood staring at the dark green cone of light, not knowing what to do.

This is an equinox ritual, Harry wrote, stepping towards him. I read up on it and adapted it. He nodded towards the candles. Those are for you. You're not quite seventeen, so the final one isn't lit yet. He smiled at Draco. We can light it on your birthday, if you'd like.

Draco tilted back his head to look at the branches. "And these?"

Greenery. New life. Harry kissed him. And a container, of sorts, for this spell. He stretched out his silver hand, and tested his voice. "Accio crystal ball!"

Draco looked as if he might laugh when the crystal ball rose from beside the table, where Harry had put it, and skidded across the floor to land in his hand. "Really, Harry, I know that you got an O at Divination, but—"

I told you I adapted the ritual, scribbled Harry, smiling at him. Once, it was used to arrange marriages between feuding families, and to predict the future of the marriage. This time, I'm going to use the crystal ball to show you what I hope for in your future. He breathed on the crystal ball, and held it up, letting Draco see within it. He was using a modified version of the spell Draco had invented to put memories with one's mindset into a Pensieve. It had pleased Harry to work his own magic on his partner's magic, as much as it pleased him to come up with a ritual of their own in between the major joining rituals.

Draco stared as the magic formed into distinct images. The first was of the man they had both seen before, in a room at Hogwarts that foretold a possible future for both of them. This Draco was an adult, more relaxed, and they'd last seen him kissing Harry under some kind of a green canopy.

This one stood in front of a garden of red flowers, looking at them with quiet satisfaction. A jeweled fly buzzed over one of the flowers, and it lashed up and ate it. The Draco in the image chuckled. The real one looked startled.

I don't think you could ever invent something beautiful that wasn't also deadly, Harry told him.

"Harry—"

Draco wanted to say something, but the next image showed him entwined in a bed with Harry, and his eyebrows rose to his hairline. Harry flushed. He'd deliberately been more daring and more detailed than he usually allowed himself to be, and he was afraid it didn't look quite right as a result.

He shook his head. Draco was looking anything but disappointed. In fact, he made a low, pleased sound in his throat as he watched the figures in the bed shift.

Then the bed was gone, and Draco grimly dragged a wounded Harry off a battlefield of yellow sand, back into the shelter of red rock hills. He knelt over him briefly, received the imagined Harry's nod of reassurance, and then leaned around the cliff and cast a curse at their enemies. The green light of Avada Kedavra made him look even older, but also more dangerous, more determined, more decisive. All traces of softness and childishness had gone from his face; he was a man grown.

No matter what we come to, I know that you'll protect me, Harry told him.

Draco flew on a broom that might have been a Firebolt over a Pitch crowded with struggling players. He swerved above them all, and then let out a yelp of triumph as the Snitch smacked into his palm.

I think you could be a fine Seeker, if you wanted to, said Harry. But, of course, there were never fair tryouts.

Draco enchanted a clock to keep time and sing in a phoenix's voice, and was showered with money by a grateful witch who'd always wanted just that. He walked among the powerful, and they respected him in his own right, and not just for his family name or for being Harry's lover. He stood in Malfoy Manor and swore to uphold the ideals of his family while making them his own, so that he was not a copy of Lucius Malfoy, and the ancestors in the portraits stiffly nodded their approval.

Image after image after image, and Harry filled them with all the love and faith of which he was capable.

At last, they faded, and Draco said in a kind of choked voice, "They can't all be true."

Harry studied him, and smiled. Draco said that, but he wanted to believe they could all be true. He was so greedy of many different kinds of recognition and achievement that he would take them all and more.

I believe you have the capacity to achieve them, Harry wrote. Whether you do? Is a different question. There will be some you aren't interested in, and some that you would rather fulfill in different ways. He stepped forward and laid a hand on Draco's cheek, letting the crystal ball drift away. But I believe that you can do it.

And Draco kissed him.

Harry gasped. That was not part of what he'd had planned, not that he was complaining. He had planned a quiet meal and a long conversation to be held while he and Draco watched the hippocampi. But Draco was clasping the back of his neck, tilting his head back, and whispering into his ear.

"I want you, Harry. Want you so badly right now. The gift of you. So that you'll lie still and let me do whatever I want, spoil you however I like. Will you let me do that?"

And Harry could only close his eyes and whisper an acceptance.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Draco took Harry back to their bedchamber. He'd felt a different succession of emotions in the last fifteen minutes: irritation and concern when he woke up without Harry, startlement at the state of the study, and then astonishment and shock and delight when Harry showed him that series of images he could become.

Now, he felt determination to make Harry share that delight, to shake with pleasure in the one realm he'd always seemed reluctant to take pleasure in.

He eased Harry back on the bed, kissing him deeply enough that Harry made a startled little sound against his lips, but didn't try to pull away. He didn't try to remove his own clothes, either, and Draco nodded approval as he took up his wand and murmured a spell to take them away. Harry really was surrendering, letting Draco do what he wanted.

And what Draco wanted to do right now was study Harry.

Harry opened and closed his hands in nervousness as Draco looked at him, but made no attempt to cover himself. Draco gave him another small nod. Just a few months ago, Harry had been too nervous when naked—and underwater, no less, so that Draco couldn't get a good look at him—to stop shaking. Now, he looked torn between embarrassment and desire that Draco get on with it.

And Draco did.

But slowly.

He avoided the place on Harry's neck he already knew about, since he wanted to learn what other places would make Harry shake as if he were drunk, or gasp, or squirm with repressed longing to curl up, or thrust his hips. He ran his hands gently through Harry's hair, arranging it in different shapes and making Harry tilt his head back and forth and raise his shoulders, half-helplessly. He kissed his scar, which brought the strongest defensive reaction; Harry had to fight to hold still on the pillows. His magic jerked and tumbled about him when Draco located a spot on his shoulder blade that made his toes curl, and he gasped and gulped several times when Draco leaned in to play with his nipples as if they were toys.

He also blushed. Violently. Draco could feel the slight added heat to the skin as he let his hands glide over it, and smiled, amused. Well, he would see if he could make Harry forget all about his embarrassment in a moment.

He lay down gently next to Harry, arranging himself so that he could stroke Harry's shoulder and that tempting spot with one hand while he trailed the other lower and lower. He let it hover over Harry's groin until Harry made a tiny impatient noise, and then he slowly, slowly, clasped his cock.

Harry made a gasping sound and tried to hide his face in Draco's shirt.

"Harry?"

He felt the rasp of Harry's hair against his chin, and barely heard the whisper. "I just—it's too much—Draco, you've never—"

"I know. But you have." Draco kissed the back of his neck, and felt his skin jumping and shuddering with his heartbeat. "Hush, Harry. It's all right. You can take without giving, sometimes. And this is just as much spoiling for me as you. It's what I want." He stroked gently, one time, and Harry seemed undecided whether to breathe or moan. Another stroke, and his body made that decision for him; Draco thought it sounded as if the noise had begun in his feet.

He shifted himself, keeping Harry distracted with the steady and slow motion of his hand, and picked up his wand with the hand that until that point had rested on Harry's shoulder. He cast a spell Harry didn't notice, then added a time-delaying charm to it. That done, he moved down yet again, and very gently took Harry in his mouth.

Gasps and soft cries came from above him. Draco thought that only half of them were from pleasure. The other half came from Harry fighting himself, trying, as hard as he could, not to sit up and demand that Draco take something for himself, too. Sacrificial instincts, training against pleasure, Harry's constant worry that he would be too selfish—Draco knew it had many names.

He also didn't care about its source, not right now.

As slowly as he could bear, he licked at and around Harry, and kept one hand in place, stroking his hips and his balls and now and then his arse, building the level of pleasure slowly but steadily. Then he let the time-delayed charm go with a whispered word, at the same moment as he sucked and sucked hard.

Sudden pressure closed on the spot on Harry's neck that always made him tremble, the spot on his shoulder blade that had caused his toes to curl, his nipples, his scalp, and all the other sensitive places Draco had found. Some would feel like mouths, some like hard pinches, some like the mere touch of trailing fingers. But all of them were working at once to give Harry as much pleasure as he could feel.

Draco felt Harry lose the battle against what he would probably call his better self. He felt it with all five senses: the sight of Harry writhing in abandonment, for the first time, without a ritual of some kind to coax him into the right mood; the sound of him practically howling; the feel of sweetened skin tightening under his hands; the smell of steadily increasing musk; the taste in his mouth, not the most wonderful taste in the world, but making him feel smug and triumphant and loving.

He crawled back up Harry's side and kissed his forehead, slowly waking him from his daze. Harry blinked at him, and Draco rejoiced in the sight of his eyes.

All barriers down, finally, and it wasn't because of a damn ritual, or because he was so emotionally exhausted that he couldn't maintain them after a day of shrieking and crying and witnessing death and despair. Simply down because he was sated, and because he trusted Draco.

Harry said, with a tone in his voice that Draco had never heard, "Thank you."

If he had to give a name to the tone, Draco thought, kissing Harry's lips this time, he would call it dawning self-discovery, even wonder that something so simple and physical could feel so good. And no, it hadn't been a matter of life and death that Harry get over this bit of his training.

It had just been something Draco wanted to do.

He was so smugly pleased that he could ignore his own arousal for a few moments, at least until Harry suddenly shook himself like a seal rising from the ocean and wrote, My turn.

And his magic blazed around him, and his smile shone, and Draco felt joy break open in him like a spring of water, like a springing bound, like the rising season of spring.

This may be no more than a dream, he thought, as he lay back and let Harry kiss him senseless. Just a fleeting glimpse of what we can't ever have permanently. But dreams were meant to be enjoyed.

And we've sure as fuck earned this one.