Chapter Text
Draco Malfoy was dead at Bellatrix’s feet, a motionless heap of limbs and blond hair, but the little bitch in the cot was still wailing.
Bellatrix came forward cautiously. There was a new magic humming in the air, so powerful and obvious that she could feel it against her skin. It felt like a warning.
The baby saw her and screwed up her face, wriggling in her swaddle. Bellatrix stared hard at her. If this was Potter’s child, it was better off dead—but if if it was His Lordship’s?
“Merlin, there you are. You should have said you’d found him.”
“I can take care of one little omega,” she snapped over her shoulder as Greyback came prowling into the room.
“But not an infant, apparently,” Greyback bit back. “What are you waiting for?”
There was a nonzero chance that the Dark Lord would be upset if something happened to his offspring—but then, maybe not. Maybe killing the little cunt who’d been bewitching him had been enough to bring him back to his senses, and the bizarre behavior Bellatrix had seen from him over the past few months would finally end.
Or maybe not. It was a delicate, dangerous line to walk.
She reached down to pick up the baby.
Her hand barely made contact before the magic CRACKED loudly and send her flying backward into the opposite wall. Pain, more intense than Bellatrix had ever felt, was radiating up her arms from where she’d tried to touch the child, so all-consuming that she barely even detected the pain in her back from being tossed into a wall like a ragdoll.
“What in the—?”
Bellatrix forced open her eyes in time to see Greyback looking at her in stunned silence. He turned his wild eyes to the cot, where the little bastard was still squalling in her cot.
“What kind of magic is this?” he asked. “What’s a child even doing here? Is it the omega’s? Who’s the father?”
Greyback produced his wand from his pocket to perform a paternity spell, but the second his wand made contact with the baby’s forehead, the magic CRACKED a second time, and Bellatrix watched in horror as his wand splintered apart and Greyback went crashing into the chest of drawers, which shattered apart under his weight with a tremendous sound.
“Dammit,” Bellatrix hissed, forcing herself back onto her feet. “It’s Craft.” There’s no way it wasn’t. And if the little slut was willing to give his life to cast it, it was probably powerful. “We aren’t going to be able to touch it.”
Greyback huffed and wheezed in pain, struggling to pull himself out of the wreckage of the dresser to middling success. “Fuck, that hurt. What—what kind of spell—?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Bellatrix decided. “We’ll let His Lordship decide what to do with the baby.” Since, clearly, neither of them were getting near it. “For now, we take the corpse to Hogwarts. His Lordship will want to know that the bitch who bewitched him is dead.”
Bellatrix cast a spell and levitated the corpse up. Draco Malfoy’s body was limp in midair, head lolling back, long blond hair trailing the ground. His eyes were closed, expression almost serene. For reasons Bellatrix couldn’t quite identify, the sight of the omega’s peaceful face filled her with rage. He was already dead, and still she wanted to hurt him, to claw at his pretty face and tear out his pretty hair for his crimes. How dare he defy the Dark Lord, bewitch him, steal him away from her?
She breathed slowly, ground her teeth. Perhaps, if she was very lucky, the Dark Lord would allow her to defile his corpse on the grounds of Hogwarts, now that his magic had lifted.
“Hey,” Greyback barked, drawing her attention away. “Are we leaving or what?”
Bellatrix snarled, but said nothing. With a tug on her wand to drag his body closer, she started out of the room and down the steps, out of the house to Disapparate.
The baby they left crying, alone in her cot. If Bellatrix was very, very lucky, the little bitch would die there.
Tom Riddle stared into Severus’s eyes. He knew what he had to do. He’d known for ages now, and had been putting off.
He’d told himself that the delay was out of loyalty—the same loyalty that Severus had always shown him.
(And surely the same loyalty that would have him willingly forfeiting his life, should the Dark Lord ask him to make such a sacrifice? It wasn’t a sense of loyalty.)
“The Elder Wand cannot serve me properly, Severus, because I am not its true master. The Elder Wand belongs to the wizard who killed its last owner. You killed Albus Dumbledore. While you live, Severus, the Elder Wand cannot be truly mine.”
(He had to do it. He had to do.)
“I see, My Lord,” Severus said, very slowly. “If you find Draco before the end, I hope you will send him my regrets that I could not be there for him.”
And there it was: the real reason he had been stalling. Because Draco Malfoy loved Severus Snape, and Tom Riddle, infuriatingly, incomprehensibly, loved Draco Malfoy.
His hand clenched and unclenched around the Elder Wand. If he did this—if he killed Severus—Draco would never forgive him. Letting his mother waste away had been a hard enough blow to the omega, but this? Willfully, knowingly killing his beloved godfather?
He wanted to scream. He wanted to bite, and tear and claw, like an animal. He hated that he was weak to this—weak to one person in the whole world, who wasn’t even here and yet still had such a grip on the remaining shred and tatters of his soul.
Nagini was curled at his feet, poised to strike. The word kill was at the tip of his tongue, but somehow, he couldn’t force it out.
“My Lord,” Severus said, after a few very, very long minutes of horrible silence, “what stills your hand?”
He asked the question like he wanted an answer.
“You mock me,” Tom growled. “You mock my weakness.”
“No,” Severus answered slowly. “In fact, I do not even blame you. Draco Malfoy is easy to love, as you’ve already discovered.”
“You speak with presumption.”
“I speak with understanding. You better than most know I am all too familiar with holding onto hopeless love. Even after all my years of loyal service to you, I never stopped loving her.”
He was angry. Or at least he thought he was, wanted to be. Anger would have been familiar, at least, and easier to explain.
“Loving Lily Evans was the greatest thing I ever did,” Severus continued. “It was the masterpiece of my flawed soul. It was, by turns, the reason I nearly ended my own life a dozen times and the only thing that kept me alive.
“That is what love is. That is why it hurts. Because nothing worth having comes easily. If it doesn’t have the power to ruin you, it isn’t real.”
“I cannot afford to be ruined,” Tom hissed.
“It’s not your choice anymore, My Lord, and the sooner you acknowledge that, the easier this will be. You are in love with Draco Malfoy.”
“Silence.”
“And you cannot change it. He is a part of your soul now, as Lily is a part of mine. And it is a weakness, yes, but only if you do not allow it to be a strength.”
Tom’s breath heaved. He hated it—this horrible feeling in his chest, burning like fire and trembling like an earthquake. He hated that the only thing he wanted in this moment was to find that damned omega and—and—
“It is not too late,” Severus said.
“I should kill you,” Tom answered.
“Perhaps.”
Tom did not kill him. He stormed past him and away, Nagini slithering along at his heels. He still did not have the Elder Wand. He still did not have Potter.
And he still did not have Draco.
Albus Dumbledore looked over when he felt the magic of the limbo ripple. He looked up, expecting to see Harry—for whom he had been waiting for nearly a year—and instead saw Draco Malfoy.
His eyes were wide and wild, and he spun in his spot, looking frantically around the room which, to Albus, looked like his childhood bedroom, where he and Gellert spent so many evenings in their youth, talking and plotting and falling in love.
“Oh,” he said slowly. “Oh, Draco, I’m so sorry.”
“Where am I?” he asked. “I—the last thing I remember, I was—”
He almost wanted to interrupt, to tell him what this what—it would be a mercy, surely, to rip the bandage off before it fused to the skin—but opening his mouth to try, no words came.
Draco pushed his hands through his hair. He was shaking.
“No,” he whispered. “Celeste…”
“I’m sorry,” Albus said again. “Why don’t you sit?”
To Albus’s mind, he was gesturing to the spot beside him on his childhood bed, burgundy duvet and cream sheets, right under the large window looking out onto the fields behind his childhood home where he used to run and run. Draco sat beside him heavily, buried his face in his hands.
“My daughter,” he croaked.
“I’m sure you did all you could,” Albus reassured him. He reached over and patted his knee. The omega crumpled forward over it.
“I won’t get to see her grow up,” he said into his hands. His shoulders shook. “I… she’ll never know how much I loved her.”
“She will know,” Albus said. “She will grow up shrouded by it, protected by it. She may not always feel it, but it will always be there when she needs it. You did all you could.”
He sobbed once, lifted his eyes to the ceiling, where Albus had painstakingly painted an aurora when he was a child, and enchanted it to shine and glimmer as a precocious teenager. He wondered what Draco saw when he looked at it.
“I promised Harry,” he sobbed.
“It can be such a challenge, can’t it, loving an alpha?” Albus looked across the room. On the chest of drawers by the standing mirror, a picture of himself and Gellert stood upright in a frame, its subjects smiling at one another, too young to know the cost of their new love. “They are so… dedicated. They hold you, and tell you they will do anything for you, and you believe them, and you try to be worthy of that kind of devotion. It’s easy to feel like you’ve fallen short, when trying to match a love like that.”
Draco sniffed, sobbed, wiped his eyes with his wrists, but didn’t speak.
“But the thing about love like that, devotion like that—when it’s real, it is without condition. You do not have to be perfect to be worthy of it. He loves you, Draco, and one broken promise to save your daughter’s life will not change that.”
“He doesn’t want her to grow up an orphan,” Draco croaked, “like he had to.”
“I’m sure he’d rather he grow up an orphan than die before ever having a chance to live.” Albus dared a small smile. “Besides, you may just get the opportunity to make your apologies, and your last-minute declarations.”
“He wasn’t able to find the Stone in time,” Draco sobbed.
“Are you sure?” Albus asked, and nodded across the room, where at the door, appearing with a quiet twist of magic—
“Harry.”
“Draco!”
He sprang off the bed and raced for him. Harry, delirious, caught him in open arms and pulled him in, face buried in blond hair, shoulders heaving with tremendous emotion.
“What—what is this? Where are we?”
“We’re in between,” Albus said. “Welcome, Harry. Did you finally solve my little riddle?”
“I… Headmaster? You’re…”
Harry was putting the pieces together, clearly. Green eyes swiveled away from Albus and landed on the omega, who in his arms had begun to tremble.
“Draco, what are you—?”
“I’m sorry,” he sobbed into Harry’s chest. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Bellatrix and Greyback—I couldn’t have fought them both off, so I—I did what I had to do. I protected our daughter. I hope it was enough.”
“No,” Harry whispered, voice fracturing. “Draco, no…”
“I’m so sorry,” Draco sobbed, over and over.
“You have a choice, Harry,” Albus intoned, gently, and stood up slowly from his childhood bed. “A choice to stay here with him, or even to go with him to the next great adventure together. You could leave together now, hand-in-hand past the veil of death.”
Harry’s young face was torn by conflict, by his bonded mate sobbing against his chest, and by the duty awaiting him back in the land of the living.
“Draco,” he said, “I…”
The omega withdrew, eyes bloodshot, cheeks tearstained. “Did you find the Resurrection Stone?”
Harry nodded. It seemed just about all he could do.
“Then you have to go back,” Draco wept. “She needs you. Celeste needs you.”
Harry had to force out every word of his reply: “I… I can’t leave you behind.”
“You can. You must. Harry, you told me yourself—you can’t let her grow up an orphan.”
Harry’s breath shuddered. He cupped Draco’s face in both hands as though he could keep his soul tethered to earth through touch alone.
“How could I go on without you?”
“Because I’m begging you to.”
Harry swallowed visibly, Adam’s apple bobbing, the first few tears breaking their banks and rolling down his face.
“Harry, please. I’m not scared of what comes next as long as I know my daughter has someone with her, to raise her, to love her in the way only a parent can love a child. She deserves that. You deserve it, too.”
Harry dragged in a hard breath and, with a look of resignation that broke Albus’s heart, nodded.
“She’s in Calais still. Get back to her as soon as you can. Dolly and Dotty—I told them to hide, so they could look after her once I—just… just hurry.”
“For what it’s worth,” Albus said, “I am sorry that you are in this position at all, Harry. I’m sorry you’ve had to lose so much, and that so much more was demanded of you. Seeing your love for each other is, perhaps, my only consolation. It is the strongest magic of all, and certainly worth dying for.”
Something changed on Harry’s face, though his eyes never left Draco’s.
“It’s worth living for, too,” he eventually said. “Draco—make me one promise.”
“Anything. Anything.”
“Wait,” Harry said. “Wait here. Just a little longer.”
Draco’s brow furrowed. “Wait? Why?”
“Because I’m begging you to.”
And then, Harry Potter opened his eyes. He was once again face-down in the loam of the Forbidden Forest.
“The boy… is he dead?”
No answer. Harry could tell there were multiple people around him. His heart was beating like a drum in his chest, in his neck, behind his eyes. He had only one goal now.
“You. Examine him. Tell me whether he is dead.”
Someone—Harry didn’t know who—rushed over. Hands, softer than he’d been expecting, came down to press to the pulse point on his neck, and Lucius Malfoy’s voice whispered, barely louder than his breath:
“Is Draco alive? Is he safe?”
He was less than inch from Harry’s ear. He stayed very still.
“He will be,” he breathed back.
Then the hand withdrew, and Lucius sat upright.
“He is dead!”
The next few minutes were an indistinct blur. His glasses were pushed back onto his face. Hagrid’s enormous arms lifted him, even as his breath stuttered against Harry’s ear, the wracking sobs of a friend who loved him and had lost him.
He came out of the forest, across the open field surrounding the castle, and then—because he allowed himself the barest millimeter of a single open eye—into the front courtyard.
Voldemort walked past him.
“Harry Potter is dead,” he said. His voice sounded different. “We bring you his body as proof that your hero is gone.”
Someone screamed. It was visceral and terrifying. Harry would have never imagined McGonagall could scream like that.
“Harry!”
“Harry, no!”
“The battle is won,” Voldemort continued, speaking over their protests. “You have lost half of your fighters. My Death Eaters outnumber you, and the Boy Who Lived is finished. There must be no more war. Anyone who continues to resist—”
“My Lord!”
It was Bellatrix’s voice, so sudden and startling that even Hagrid jumped as he spun toward it. With that fraction of an open eye, Harry could see—
“No.”
—hovering in the air behind her, the limp, pale form of Draco Malfoy.
“You are victorious! And you are free from the wicked enchantments that once held you!”
“Draco!” screamed Lucius Malfoy, from the side.
“No!” came Cordelia’s voice, a moment later.
“Hagrid,” Harry whispered, now that all eyes were off him. Hagrid startled and looked down.
“Harry—!”
“Put me down, Hagrid,” he said.
“I thought you—!”
“I have some unfinished business,” he said.
“Bellatrix, what have you done!”
When Harry was finally on his feet again, the first thing his eyes searched out was Draco. He was on the ground, eyes cloudy and sightless, body already several shades paler in pallor mortis.
The second thing his eyes searched out was Voldemort.
He was stalking toward her, wand out, and Bellatrix, mad-eyed and bewildered, did not seem to understand that she was in danger.
“My Lord, I freed you from his heretical magic! And just in time—you won the battle!”
“How dare you!” Voldemort screamed, and with a huge gesture of his wand, flung her. She screamed and went rocketing backwards, careening into a nearby statue with a horrible CRACK that snapped her spine like brittle glass and killed her instantly.
But Voldemort wasn’t done. “How dare you lay a hand on him!” he screamed, and flung her again, into another statue on the far end of the courtyard. The secondary impact was so hard that it twisted her head nearly all the way around with another awful sound. “How dare you take him from me!”
Harry returned his attention to Draco. He went staggering forward, one step, two—the students, initially caught up in Voldemort’s theatrics, were starting to notice that Harry was alive, and stumbling on unsteady steps toward the corpse of his love.
Not that long ago, Draco had described his understanding of Craft as instinct. It clicks into place in my head. I know what I need to do, and what it will take to do it, and I ask for the exchange. Harry hadn’t understood at the time.
He did now.
Voldemort was standing over Bellatrix’s corpse, broken several times over at his feet, shoulders heaving with rage.
Harry had been prepared to lash him and leash him, to drag him all the way back to France if he had to, to force Voldemort to pay for his sins. He felt oddly fortunate that Bellatrix had made it easy for him.
“Take your price,” Harry said.
Voldemort had scarcely looked up before he was consumed by blue flame.
He screamed.
“Energy for energy,” Harry said, and felt magic warp around him. “Life for life. Take, and give.”
The exchange was huge, a massive demand and a massive price. The air around him, in his very lungs, twisted and lurched as if in protest, the laws of nature themselves bending and wrenching to accommodate Harry’s request.
He’d expected to feel pity, but he didn’t. As Voldemort dropped to the ground, his muscles locking up, his skin blackening, his very body turning to ashes, the last thing those red eyes found were Draco—just as Draco came alive with a gasp.
Harry did not feel pity. He didn’t even feel remorse. If Voldemort truly loved Draco, then he’d willingly give his life for him.
And based on the way his red gazed was fixed as it was consumed by fire, that was precisely what he did.
“Do they know what you did?” was the first thing Cordelia asked Harry when she found them both in the Hospital Wing, which had never been quite so full. “Do they know it was Craft?”
Harry shrugged gamely. “Don’t know. Don’t care. It worked, and that’s all that matters.”
Then Harry looked at Draco, who met his gaze unhesitatingly. His body felt stiff and weak still, but his heart was beating—he knew, because just seeing Harry made it absolutely pound against his ribs.
“Best not to let on, maybe,” Cordelia said. “I don’t know how they’d react to the news the Great Savior used Craft to save the world.”
“I didn’t do it to save the world,” Harry said, and he was looking at Draco.
“You’re a sap,” Draco answered, smiling.
Harry smiled back, helpless and lopsided. “I am,” he said, and leaned in to kiss him.
“You know,” Cordelia remarked, “I never got the opportunity to be a sister about you two.”
Draco glanced over at her, laughing. “What?”
“You know. To put Potter through his paces, make sure he’s worthy of your hand or whatever.”
Draco laughed again. “I had no idea you felt that instinct.”
“Will I have to duel you?” Harry asked. “Again?”
“How about you talk your best mate into letting me snog his sister and we’ll call it even,” Cordelia said.
“I can’t believe you and Ginny Weasley are still a thing,” Draco said. “What does she even see in you?”
“Dashing good looks?” Cordelia guessed.
“The piles of money don’t hurt, I bet,” Harry intoned.
“How dare you besmirch the honor of my beloved,” Cordelia answered loftily, which made all three of them laugh, before—
“Draco?”
He looked up. Standing in the doorway was Severus, a little bundle in both arms. Draco’s heart lurched behind his ribs.
“Sev!”
“Celeste,” Harry said, like the wind was knocked from his lungs. “God—”
They both raced toward him, with varying levels of difficulty. Harry immediately took Celeste in his arms, which caused her to immediately settle down and start cooing contentedly; Draco, meanwhile, threw his arms around his godfather’s shoulders and buried his face in his chest.
“I’m so glad you’re all right,” Draco whispered. “I’m so glad you made it out.”
“At the risk of sounding sentimental,” Snape said, “I wouldn’t have if it weren’t for you. His love for you quite literally stayed his hand and saved my life.”
“I’m glad it did,” Draco answered, “because it never would have been good for anything else.”
“Hello, darling,” Harry whispered into the side of his daughter’s head, and kissed her over and over. “Are you all right, my little love? Did that nasty bitch Bellatrix hurt you at all?”
“Harry,” Draco chided, “language.”
“She’s three months old,” Harry protested. “She hasn’t even managed papa yet, so I think bitch is safely beyond her abilities.”
Draco couldn’t be angry, in any case. Once Sev had released him, he went to Harry’s side, sliding his arms around his waist and resting his head on his shoulder so it was level with Celeste’s.
He couldn’t believe they’d all made it. He’d literally given his life, as had Harry, and it felt like they’d cheated somehow, like they’d pulled a fast one on Death—but Draco wasn’t complaining.
He had his alpha, his daughter, his sister. There were so many pieces, still, to pick up: a Ministry in need of serious reform, the dead who still needed burying, and literal rebuilding. But he had what mattered most.
“So this is my niece,” Cordelia said, trying for a tone of casual ease, but the tremble in her contralto voice betrayed her. “Celeste, right?”
“Celeste Lily Potter,” Draco said.
“Hello,” Cordelia continued, voice shaking even more, and drew two fingers through her hair. “Hello, Celeste.”
“Draco…”
It was Lucius, standing battered and wounded in the door of the Hospital Wing. Snape was eying him distrustfully, as was Harry.
But Draco had just come back from the dead, and he was so grateful just to be alive. He’d rake his father over hot coals later.
“Father,” Draco said, “come meet your granddaughter.”
They married three years later, on a cool, brisk, bright Halloween morning. To give me something to celebrate on a day that will make me sad, Harry had insisted. Draco would have married him in the dead of winter in a cardboard box, of course, but was happy with the bright red foliage, dahlias, and roses blooming in the garden behind the little cathedral in Godric’s Hollow.
On their honeymoon, though, things went ever so slightly wrong.
Harry found Draco on the balcony overlooking the beautiful Mediterranean Sea after their first failed attempt at having sex as a married couple. He placed a hand gently on Draco’s back, who was sobbing into his hands, doubled over the railing.
“I’m sorry,” Draco whispered.
“Draco,” Harry said, and sidled closer, “you have nothing to apologize for.”
“I wanted to—I swear, I really wanted to—”
“Draco,” Harry said again.
“We’re married,” Draco wept, “and he’s dead, and I should be able to perform oral sex on my own husband without—”
“Draco, stop,” Harry insisted, and wrapped him up in both arms. A cool wind off the sea came in, salty and strong, whipping Draco’s dressing gown around his ankles and Harry’s hair in front of his eyes. “Stop it right now. You were raped. You do not have to apologize for trauma.”
“But I want,” Draco began, but Harry cut him off:
“Well, I don’t. Not if it hurts you. Not if it brings back all the horrible shit you lived through back during the War. Draco, the only part of our sex life that is non-negotiable to me is you. I would be happy never having sex ever again, so long as you were still my wife.”
Draco sniffed wetly, rubbed his face with the sleeve of his dressing gown. “I don’t want to be celibate,” he protested. “I like sex.”
“Then we’ll have sex,” Harry assured him. “Just… maybe not that particular kind of sex, at least for a long while, all right?”
Draco sniffed again, buried his face in Harry’s shoulder. “All right.”
“I don’t want you to hurt yourself on my behalf, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.” Draco slid his arms around Harry’s back. “You’re so good. I don’t deserve you.”
“Yes, you do,” Harry whispered. “You deserve everything, and I’ll spend the rest of my life making sure you get it.”
They didn’t talk much from that point on. They sat down on the little loveseat on the balcony off their hotel room as the sun went down on a wine-dark sea, curled into each other.
They did make love, eventually, slow and sweet and tender, with Draco gasping and writhing on Harry’s lap while Harry whispered over and over how beautiful and good Draco was.
Healing, Draco knew, would be slow. There were wounds in his soul that went deep, and couldn’t just seal up overnight. But on that first night together as a married couple, while Draco clung to his husband and Harry refreshed the bond bite on Draco’s neck, Draco allowed himself to believe that, in time, with patience, they would heal one day.
He had the rest of his life, after all.
“Mama, Mama, look!”
“I’m looking,” Draco said.
Sometimes, when he saw Celeste come into her magic, he wondered if that meditation-induced hallucination of Julien de Montfort had been right, if there really was a genetic component to Craft. It may have skipped his mother, Black by blood, but it had manifested so pronouncedly in Draco—and even in his daughter.
“Magic!” Celeste said.
“Yes,” Draco agreed, and (with some difficulty) sat down beside her in the garden out behind Grimmauld Place. It was spring, bright and beautiful and getting warmer every day, and Celeste had spent nearly every day outside, waddling through the flowers and chasing their crup, Archie, around the grass. “And you did a very good job with it.”
Celeste had found a little sunflower seed on the ground, remnants of a snack from a few days ago, and in her cupped hands full of dirt, had brought it to bloom, small and bright yellow and arching toward the midmorning sun.
“You’d better put it in the ground,” Draco advised. “If it gets much bigger, it’ll outgrow your hands.”
“Where?”
“How about right by the patio? That way we can see it when we take tea in the garden.”
“Yeah!”
She wandered a few feet away and buried the sunflower carefully. Draco watched her with a smile, his heart full.
When she deemed it suitable, Celeste stood up and came toddling back over to his side. Her hands, as they had been with more frequency as Draco had been starting to show these last few weeks, found his stomach.
“Is Sirius coming today?” she asked.
Draco laughed, because she asked the same question every day, sometimes two or three times. Four-year-olds didn’t have a great concept of delayed gratification, he was coming to understand.
“No, not today,” Draco said. “Not for a few more months.”
“Oh,” she answered, sounding disappointed. “Can you tell him to hurry up?”
Draco laughed again, a little more loudly. “I’ll try, but I don’t think he can hear me in there.”
“Hurry up!” Celeste bellowed in the direction of Draco’s stomach. He felt a rather firm kick in response, which made him laugh even harder.
“Keep trying, love,” Harry said as he came outside. Draco looked over his shoulder and saw his husband walking into the sunlight with a tray full of Dotty’s cream buns balanced on one hand. “I’m sure if you keep asking very, very nicely, eventually he’ll listen.”
“Cream buns!” Celeste said, distracted, and went hurrying over to her father’s side, who was already setting them on the table.
Draco took a long, slow, deep breath. It was a suspiciously nice day in central London, with only a few wisps of clouds to obstruct the golden sunlight. There were birds singing from somewhere nearby, and Draco’s eyes swept the garden before he found—
“Oh, a lark feather.”
If either his husband or his daughter heard him, they showed no sign of it. Draco picked up the feather in two fingers. It was small and a bit raggedy, but he could feel the magic humming in it, a bright vibrato against his fingertips.
His mind went back, to a spell he’d cast so long ago, fighting for his life in the middle of a war. The spell that had given him wings. It had been such a terrible time, but the wings—the wings he remembered with tremendous fondness.
And in the remembering, a little knot of something, a tangle of grief and pain and agony, shook loose.
“Mama, what’s that?” Celeste asked. When Draco looked up, she was coming forward, a cream bun in both hands and powdered sugar on her chin.
“It’s a feather,” Draco said. “Celeste, do you want to see a magic trick?”
“Yeah!”
Draco smiled widely, took the cream bun, and handed her the feather instead. She took it reverently in both hands.
“Take this feather,” Draco said. “Hold it tight, rub it, and then blow.”