Between knowing and uncertainty, between imprisonment and freedom, between having and having not, there exists a long, thin line. Society tells us that it is preferable, desirable, or even necessary to be as far away from that line as is possible to be, and after a few months at Avebury Manor, I began to understand why.

I lived in that in-between, straddling that long, thin line. It became a second home to me. For months I served as hall boy for Avebury Manor – making friends, carving out a place for myself, establishing an identity and a purpose – and yet miserable. Miserable, because despite all the ways in which my life had turned around precisely as I had hoped it would, I walked along that terrible, wonderful line of having and not having Draco Malfoy.

I had learned from a thousand little moments – stolen glances across the garden, lingering silences in hallways, shy and secret smiles, stuttered breathes – that my affections for him were not unrequited. In any other situation that fact would have given me hope, but it only made me miserable. It seemed a cruel, cosmic irony – now not one but both of us were forced to suffer the unbearable burden of loving someone for whom showing that love would be an unforgivable indiscretion.

But oh, when it was good, it was wonderful. Our hands brushed and my heart stopped; he said my name and it was a sound sweeter than music; he smiled at me and the world stilled on its axis. I would have been furious with him for making himself so easily an extension of my own heart if I hadn't been so desperately in love with him.

I remember with extreme clarity the night that he presented. I think it's fair to say that it has been seared indelibly into my memory.

Summer had ended early that year and turned into a vibrant autumn. By mid-September, the forest surrounding Avebury Manor was all shades of crimson, orange, and gold, and the air was cool and crisp with the tang of nearing winter.

It was a Thursday, and I was on my way down to the servants quarters after doing my nightly chores when I heard some consternation and calls of alarm. Concerned, I peered down the corridor from which the noises came and saw two chambermaids hurrying away. The door to Draco's bedroom was wide open.

There could be no pleasant reason for such alarm that late at night, and with a knot of worry in my gut I headed over.

When I came to his door I knocked hesitantly on the wall since the door itself was wide open. "My Lord—?" I began, but my voice left me almost immediately.

Omega.

The thought came to me before my conscious brain could catch up with it.

Omega. There was an omega in this room. An omega in heat. An omega saturating the air with an impossibly enticing blend of pheromones that, in a moment, in an instant, rubbed raw every nerve in my body.

Draco was sprawled out on his canopied bed—

—God above, my mind interrupted—

—limbs splayed, shaking and panting and dressed in nothing but a long nightgown. His porcelain skin was glistening with sweat. The lines of his body were taut, trembling.

He was staring at me and my world came undone around me.

"Harry."

Omega, my body thrummed. Draco was an omega. He was in heat.

"Harry…"

All the songs and poems by the great artists of history fall woefully short of truly encompassing an omega's estrus and its effects on an alpha. It was as though my body, my mind, the very essence of me was burning up, and he was an oasis of clear water into which I could throw myself. I wanted to – I had to, for surely my body would rip itself apart and burn to ash if I did not.

He arched his swanlike neck in a sign of supplication and submission and my very soul ached at the sight of it.

"Please," he sobbed. "Harry, please…"

There was wanting in his voice, but also pain and desperation. A combination of insufficient education and rumor had told me that an uncoupled omega in heat would be in unendurable agony, and the idea of my sweet angel being in such pain was unthinkable.

I could end his pain, some dark little part of my mind whispered. He wanted me to – he was begging me to. My body reacted to the mere thought – bending down over him, hushing him, assuring him that I would take care of him – smelling the wetness between his thighs, tasting his skin – knotting him – breeding him—

There was a firm hand on my shoulder that spun me around. I'm sure I made some ugly, inelegant sound as my attention was ripped away.

Mr. Snape was staring down at me, dark eyes searching. Finding words was the hardest thing I'd ever had to do.

"I—" I stammered, "—I heard a clamor, I didn't know…"

"You would not have been expected to know," Mr. Snape said. His voice was firm, but not unkind. "Under the circumstances, your restraint was remarkable. But you should leave now."

"I…"

I looked back at him. Draco sobbed again and the sound of it ripped the heart out of me.

"Go outside and take several deep breaths of fresh air," Mr. Snape continued. "It will help to clear the pheromones from your body. When you've gathered your wits, go and tell His Lordship of this development."

I nodded dumbly but my feet refused to move.

"Go, Harry," Mr. Snape said with gentle urgency, and he pushed me from the room. Once I was in the hall, he shut the door with a resounding noise.

I stood for several moments, feeling like I no longer knew how to move the muscles in my legs. With a great concentration of effort, I took a step – then another – and another. Soon I was stumbling down the hallway.

My head was full of images of Draco, supine on the bed, wanting, needing, desperate, but unfulfilled. I could go back – it was not too late – if I could just—

I stopped at a window and fumbled with the brass locks so I could push them open and stick my head out the window. Deep breaths, Mr. Snape's voice echoed in my mind. My body shuddered, and I braced my hands on the sill, willing myself to calm down.

The night air did relax me – or at the very least, it softened the sound of my own heartbeat in my ear – and though images of Draco and the numerous things I wanted to do to him subsided, one fact remained quite stubbornly in the forefront of my mind:

Draco was an omega.

I had no idea what this meant to me in any practical sense. It seemed somehow terrible, wonderful, astonishing, and unsurprising all at the same time. It meant nothing to me, and yet somehow it had changed everything.

I closed the window and moved stiffly for the ground floor.

At this time of night, His Lordship was always in his study, working on ledgers or answering correspondence by candlelight. When I knocked on the handsome oak door I heard his familiar baritone rumble through.

"Enter."

I pushed open the door and became aware of the little canary in its cage by the candelabrum on the desk. It was one of many throughout the house, and it was frantic – crying and twitching and flapping its golden wings against the bars. I was overcome with the desire to reach in and soothe away its fears.

His Lordship Lucius Abraxas Malfoy, Earl of Wiltshire, looked up at me over a pair of thin reading spectacles.

"Ah," he said. "Harry. It's getting quite late, I assumed most of the staff had gone to bed. You seem pale…"

I opened my mouth. I wanted to respond – really, I did – but I could not make myself speak.

"Has something happened?"

That poor little canary flapped and fluttered with all its might, desperate to be free. I set my face and swallowed my anxiety.

"My Lord, your son…"

The earl sat up a little straighter, and the line of his mouth twitched downward into a frown.

"What's wrong with Draco?"

"I… nothing, My Lord, not as such, I – he…"

"Out with it," he said impatiently, my words having done little to soothe his anxieties. Nothing ever did, when it came to his son.

"He's presented, My Lord," I managed. "He has gone into estrus."

There fell a long and dreadful silence, punctuated only by the little canary, restless and crying.

The expression on the earl's face was inscrutable. After a moment he looked away from me and down at the half-finished letter he'd been writing.

"Did you alert his chambermaids?"

"They knew already, My Lord. I didn't discover him, I just – there was some noise and I went to investigate – Astoria and Penelope are getting everything ready."

"A spot of brandy, thank you, Harry."

I swallowed and hurried across his study. There was a small cabinet on the wall with an assortment of drinks in fine glass bottles. I hurriedly uncapped one and poured him a glass.

"Omega," he said when I returned to his side with the brandy. "My son, an omega. The Lord is indeed a vicious bastard."

I did not know what to say to such a remark. I had a suspicion that he wasn't saying it for my benefit, in any case. I remained silent.

"The only heir of House Malfoy cannot inherit. No relatives to claim the estate nor wife to carry another child."

The canary cried and battered against its cage. I thought of Draco, shut up in his room, likely being bound by his hands and feet to protect his virtue, and my chest ached.

"So ends four hundred years of legacy," he said, before taking a rather overlarge swallow of his brandy. "A disappointingly anticlimactic denouement, don't you think?"

I couldn't imagine caring about any of that, and I wondered how he could. His son was going to spend the next three days tied up in his room in unbearable agony. I wanted to find him a sedative strong enough to let him sleep through his pain; I wanted a physician to advise him through his body's treachery. How could anything else matter?

"Draco always was so disagreeable as a child. I might have known he'd present as omega to spite me."

It was a joke, I knew, but I thought it cruel and unfunny. I set my mouth and bit my tongue to keep myself from speaking.

"I'll promote you in the morning."

I nearly cut open my tongue for the way my jaw clenched. "Excuse me, My Lord?"

"To valet."

"That – how could I be your son's valet, he's – it wouldn't be—"

"You will not be his valet," he said, "you will be mine."

He took another swallow of brandy and I stared at him, utterly lost for words.

"As a reward for showing such restraint," he continued when the lapse of silence grew too long. "I know from experience that self-control around a room-bound omega is no easy feat. Besides, it would not do to keep an alpha in such a low rank. You were promised a promotion."

"But – but Mr. Pettigrew—"

The earl waved one hand dismissively, cutting short my protestation. "A simpering beta fool. I've been eager for an excuse to be rid of him. If he won't accept the demotion, he can find work elsewhere. Besides, we alphas should not spend time around common folk, if we can avoid it."

In the months I'd thus far spent at Avebury Manor, I had thought myself growing rather fond of the earl. He had an admirable poise and careful dignity about him that I found laudable; he had seemed to me to be exactly what a nobleman should be.

But now the curtain had been pulled back and I saw to the ugly, twisted core of him. He was noble in name but not in virtue. He was a man who was told his son would spend three days a month in agony for the rest of his life and thought of his estate; a man who thought betas both figuratively and literally beneath him.

He was no nobleman, he was a blackguard. The coldness of this realization seeped into my bones.

"Yes, My Lord," I said.

The little canary wept and wept in his cage and when he dismissed me, I went down to Mr. Snape's storeroom to find something – anything – that might be able to help Draco. Someone had to.