Sedation left me in the hazy ether between waking and dreaming, cogent enough to hear the goings-on around me but not to respond. For hours – days, perhaps, for time became less and less meaningful – my mind filled with a thousand strange and otherworldly visions of bizarre structures and impossible geometry.
But in between the hallucinatory lapses were periods of what felt like lucid dreaming, and those moments were wonderful. My dreamscape was clay in the hands of my subconscious to shape in the way my heart of hearts wished, and shape it they did. There were full of warm and sunny fields of heather, laughing children with sandy hair and bright gray eyes, a sprawling manor-house on the edge of the water, and wedding bells, low and sonorous. They were full of laughter and warmth and soft rains that brought the scent of petrichor, they were full of loving whispers and wet heat and gasps and strangled words of more, please, yes. They were full of Draco, Draco smiling, Draco laughing, Draco and his silvery hair, Draco and his sharp wit, Draco and his fire, Draco and everything about him.
When at last I roused, it was with trembling limbs and a unshakable certainty of what I had to do.
There were a few suits laid out for me, so after washing up in the ensuite I dressed and went downstairs. By then, the last traces of sunset left stripes of orange-gold along the walls and floors of Avebury Manor, and my still-healing wound didn't trouble me at all.
I knew at once where they were, because I could hear them arguing through the walls. I stopped outside the sitting room door.
"—being perpetually obstinate, if that's honestly what you think will get the job done—"
"Are you so deluded that you still see my actions as obstinance? Is it impossible for you to step out of your own solipsism and try to understand something from another perspective?"
I frowned and pushed open the ajar door. The squeal of its hinges brought the conversation to a very abrupt halt.
Draco and his father were both facing me; Draco was standing by the birdcage, in front of a window opened to the cold December air. His father stood by the fire, his hands clenched tightly at his sides. I regarded them both in silence for several long moments.
"Get out," I said to the earl without preamble.
It seemed to startle both of them.
"Excuse me?" the earl said.
"Get out," I said again, turning my head towards him.
I couldn't tell if the earl was more offended or confused. Either way, I found the look on his face intensely satisfying.
"How – how dare you—?"
"How dare I? Very easily, as it happens. I'm the Duke of Oxford and I don't like you, so get out."
His expression settled into rage. It was all the more delicious because there was nothing he could say to something like that and he knew it.
"We'll speak later, Draco," he hissed, before turning on a heel and striding past me with a furious stare.
I locked the door behind him and looked back at Draco. His gaze could only be described as hungry, and when I saw it I suddenly began to feel rather peckish myself.
"You're feeling better?" he asked, voice low.
"A bit sore," I replied, "but your butler has a magic touch. Overall, I feel ten times better than I have any right to."
Draco was keeping a polite distance, but I could see – and, hell, feel – his eyes moving across the lines of my body. It wasn't until a strong breeze carried a familiar scent over to me that I suddenly realized—
Proestrus. Draco would be going into heat soon. Maybe a day, maybe a few hours, but soon. My mind began to blank of anything else in the world that wasn't my delicious, beautiful angel. I took in a deep breath of the tantalizing yet achingly thin aroma of nearing heat.
"You're dressed to your station," he remarked. There was a subtle tenseness in his voice.
"There were a few suits left for me," I answered as carefully as I could.
"You wear it well."
"The suit or my station?"
"Both."
God, but he looked absolutely edible. Behind him, the winter sun was sinking down behind the forest, setting him on fire with an orange halo of light. Wind-tousled hair, pale skin flushed from the cold air whipping around him, and that intoxicating, irresistible scent…
"Draco, I…"
He swallowed, and the lines of his throat rolled. "Yes?"
I stepped forward. "You were ready to give up everything for me."
Draco gave a start. That clearly wasn't the direction he was expecting me to take, but I had to get through the point.
"I – what?"
"The night I was attacked. Knowing nothing about my inheritance, you were ready to run away with me, leaving behind everything."
I closed in on him. The scent was thicker and it was getting harder to concentrate. I could feel the thrumming reaction in the bones of my body, and my fingers itched to work him out of that handsome three-piece suit.
"Harry…"
"I have never loved anyone in my life so much as I have loved you," I said. "I feel as though we are two halves of a whole, and that night proved to me beyond any doubt that you felt the same."
Draco took in a shaky breath and lifted his chin. I nearly buckled at the sight. There was no way it could have been anything but absolutely deliberate. Draco was presenting his throat to me – supplicant, submissive, wanting. I felt my heartbeat in my neck and my cock stirred at the mere sight of it.
I reached out and ran my thumb up one of the lines of his throat and Draco arched eagerly into my touch.
"Now that I have this inheritance – and God knows, I have no idea what to do with it, but it doesn't matter. It's made me worthy of you. Whatever this new life may become, I want to share it with you."
"Harry," he mewled, pressing closer, "you were always worthy of me. And I would never want to spend my life with anyone else."
"Draco," I said, "will you marry—?"
Before I could finish the question he was kissing me, and I was undone by an all-consuming fire the kiss sparked within me. I groaned into his mouth and pulled him closer with an arm around his waist, pressing our bodies flush together. Winter wind whipped around us, the sun vanished behind the forest, and any pretense of self-control evaporated. I needed Draco more than I needed my next breath of air.
"Yes," Draco said into my mouth. "Yes, I'll marry you. Of course I'll marry you."
A groan tore its way out of my throat. An agreement of marriage should not have been as intensely erotic as it was. "Draco," I muttered, raking my hands down his sides, "God, I need you."
"I'm already yours."
My fingernails dug into his hips, and when he fell onto the fainting couch between the fireplace and the birdcage, he took me down with him. My hands were clumsy, frenzied, as I worked open his waistcoat and shirt, frantically undressing him, desperate for the heat of his skin.
"God in Heaven, Draco," I said when his torso was bared before me, and he was perfect, all pale lines and gooseflesh from the wind, "if you want to protect your virtue form me you should speak now. I don't think I'll ever be able to stop touching you once I start."
Draco reached up and pushed my jacket off my shoulders.
"To hell with my virtue," he growled.
The words went straight to my cock, which was by then straining uncomfortably against the front of my trousers. Undressing felt like an impossibly difficult task when all I wanted to do was memorize every inch of Draco's skin with my tongue, but we did it, somehow – layers of restrictive clothing came off one by one, falling in uneven piles on the floor. Thank God I'd had the foresight to lock the door.
I kissed lines down Draco's stomach as he arced and squirmed on the fainting couch, making delicious little noises of desire under my ministrations. As I came lower, I nudged open his thighs and was nearly knocked flat by the scent.
His inner thighs were slicked with wetness, glistening in the firelight. He smelled ambrosial, so good that my mouth watered and I felt my knot start to swell at the base of my cock.
"Please," Draco whimpered, and my mind went back to the night he presented. My hands dug into the skin of his hips. "Please, Harry, I need you…"
There were a million things I wanted to do to him, but one more than the others. I crawled up his body, between his thighs, and loomed down over him. I carded a hand through his hair.
I hushed him, kissed him once. "I'll take care of you," I promised. Draco was so supplicant, so utterly responsive; I was hypnotized. "I'll make the pain stop."
Draco keened and bucked his hips, and his wetness smeared against the length of my cock. My entire body twitched in response to it, and when Draco threw his head back, I gnashed my teeth against that exposed neck. It drew a hoarse, desperate shout from him.
"Beautiful," I whispered against his throat as I positioned myself between his legs. "I'll fill you, angel. I'll knot you, angel, breed you."
"Yes," he sobbed. "Yes, please. Please, now."
I moved my hips forward, sinking into that wet and waiting heat and it was only by the grace of God that I did not scream myself hoarse at the sensation. It was an enveloping, all-encompassing feeling, being so buried inside him, a feeling so exquisite that it felt as though we were alone in the universe.
"Angel—" I managed, voice strangled.
Draco was all but sobbing from sensation underneath me, his hands scrabbling at my arms, his neck presented, his mouth open. He was inarticulate, panting out words like yes and God and Harry and more.
I started to rut, my hands braced on his hips, and as I stared down at him he was the most beautiful creature on God's earth.
I bent down over him. My knot was swelling ever wider. "I love you," I rasped against his throat.
"Harry," my angel wailed.
"I love you and I promise to spend every day we are married proving it to you again and again."
His arms moved around my shoulders and he pulled me into an urgent kiss. My body shuddered and my hips slammed faster.
"I will sire by you," I whispered, realizing it for the first time. "I'll watch you swell with our children. God, but you'll be so beautiful when you're with child."
My knot had expanded and God, Draco's body was clamping down around it. We were tied, some distant part of my mind realized, and it was such an ecstatically beautiful and profoundly uncomplicated sensation. My thrusts became shallower, faster. I was close, and by the way Draco's body was gripping me, so was he.
"I'll grow old with you," I said, though it was getting harder to talk. I pushed my fingers through his sweat-streaked hair. "I'll spend my life with you."
"Harry—"
"I love you, I love you."
"I l-love you – Harry – oh, God—!"
His body bucked and spasmed. From behind us, there was a clatter as his leg hit the birdcage. And as I shouted into his skin and emptied myself into him, knot throbbing, as he screamed and came around me in tight pulses, the birdcage fell and broke open, and the little canary flew away and out the window, free, soaring into the dusk.