Very Midsummer Madness

The marble-breasted tyrant

"... a wreck past hope he was:

His life I gave him and did thereto add

My love, without retention or restraint"

Antonio V(i)

This sunrise is where the ending begins.

Let me take your hand. Today is a day for farewells. For meetings, yes, and for surprises; for reunions and revelations, sacrifices and tests of faith, but also for a parting of ways. Yet. if my grip on your fingers becomes tight, know that it is not only grief. There is expectation also: the air is thick with it. For the endpoint is what gives shape to the journey. It is the closing co-ordinates of the arc, by which all the clumsy acts preceding it navigate their place and take on meaning and order. The ending is where we find our purpose. Alas that the price of this discovery should be the loss of so much else.

Time is short.

And so.

From the balcony of the Olivier villa, look down. The magnificence of the northern plain is muted in the twilight, but here and there you can make out a silver-grey sweep of crop fields, the river glinting faintly as it lumbers seaward, and the smudges of woodland folding darkly down out of the hills. The clouds spilt like cream over the eastern mountains are edged in orange and getting brighter. A scattering of stars burns obstinately over the ocean. With each moment they fade.

Early morning is a time for serene contemplation.

Or so you would think. Not here. The low parts of the Olivier estate are still drowned in darkness when the cows stir and make their first gentle demands to be milked. The youngest of the goats, spring-new and silly, tumble on the rocky slopes and draw sleepy reprimands from their mothers, while the quartet of roosters false-starts the dawn once again and its clamour makes the spiders in the darkest cobwebbed corners of the villa pull their eight feet over their ears and scowl. There is a shuffling - a tremendous shuffling and silent grumbling in the stuffy rooms behind the kitchens and under the stairs as the lower household draws on coats and shawls against the chill to begin its day.

It is a day like any other.

Yet for Harry, as he awakes - behind us, in the corner room that overlooks the rose garden - the world is new and unexpected. There will be no ritual to guide his way.

And so Harry wakes ... No. Not Harry but Sebastian. To your eyes, he is Harry; there is no denying the scar, nor the fleeting hint of vulnerability he communicates even in sleep. Yet in his mind, as he shakes off dreams of bursting sails, of the sea's tireless swell, of sardines silver and slippery as darts in the hull, he could wake to either name. He stirs in his sleep. Watch with me as Harry-Sebastian sighs, rubs an itch at his temple against the blanket, and opens his eyes.

There was a shapeless feeling of benevolence and a delicious fatigue in his limbs. The exhaustion he knew from hard Quidditch practices when all his muscles were loose with fatigue and his reflexes - exhilaratingly awake - were sensitised to the slightest tremor in the wind, leaving no room in his mind for any thoughts beyond movement and speed. Distantly, he knew that the bony ankle digging into his shinbone - jagged as quartz even with two blankets and a layer of clothing between them - belonged to Draco Malfoy. All night, a bit of him had held back from sleep to remember who was lying beside him. Malfoy's presence had come into his dreams - his feverish tossing and turning echoed in the waves. He slept peacefully now, with his knuckles making Harry's skin warm where they rested against the back of his neck. The rest of Harry, curled in the bed's corner on top of the covers in search of coolness and peace, was out of reach to him. Harry wondered if perhaps it was too much of a concession the way he'd let Malfoy stretch down the centre of the small bed and claim it all. But then he had the feeling that, if found the right way to ask, he could have Malfoy sleeping on the floor.

Beneath the window, feeble light marked out a finely carved bureau scattered with possessions: a jewelled silver cross as tall as a cauldron, a book, a pair of vicious looking spurs, coins; and on the wall beside this a crested tapestry and a portrait whose patrician profile Harry recognised even in the dimness. But also a strand of rosemary jutted stiffly off the side of the desk; there was a torn stocking, a yellow apple bitten once and then discarded. Casual mess among the history and treasures. Harry had not prepared himself for that.

As he removed Malfoy's hand carefully from his neck and stretched out beside him, he was still unsure whether he intended the sleeper to wake. Pallid in the half-light, Malfoy gave the impression that slumber itself was a trial and a bore. It was not a mood Harry wanted to wake him in. Not when, if he closed his eyes, he could call to mind a very different Malfoy of the night before, who had reached for Harry's wrist in the darkness to lead him blind through the debris of his room. Perhaps it was all the defensive angles of his face that were to blame. It was only when you couldn't see Malfoy that you could believe there might be gentleness in him.

Harry closed his eyes, listening for the faint whine in Malfoy's breathing, and waited for the regret to claim him.

In the growing light, bold yellow was chasing the grey out of the drapery above the bed. The smell of baking crept in the open window and sounds of life rustled up from below.

*

Not so far away - how far? How far will the sound of a big bronze bell carry when struck at the top of a tower? The span of a hillside, a valley, a little further? Well then, about two bronze-bell-lengths away, another Harry sleeps. A twin. A doppelganger. A magical mirror-self alike in every respect ... and yet not. These days in Illyria have shaped them both.

One, whom the waves of fortune tossed on Sirius' shore, stepped into a man's shoes and has walked a man's hard road, bent under fishing nets and his pack's new weight. The warmth of Sirius' approval, like the sun, has driven out the shadows so that you can no longer make out the circles of grief around his eyes. His arms are brown and strong and eager to grasp new challenges. Like swordplay. Like sailing. Like being Draco Malfoy's lover.

The other Harry has led a gentler life. Gentler and more testing. The green dress which turns his eyes from remarkable into speech-stealing seems to him like convict stripes. It is a one-man prison which hugs the lines of his body and constricts him into outward displays of girlishness: quietness, obedience, helplessness. Oh he fights it - he is Harry; he does - but in a world where he has washed up friendless and anonymous, there are limits to his rebellion.

In a stuffy room behind the kitchens, no more than a cranny in the grandeur of the Duchess Orsino's great castle, Viola - this feminine Harry - lies face down on his bed with his green skirts flung about him. Motionless except for the slow rise and fall of breathing, he looks like the shipwreck detritus he was when you first saw him.

If he woke now, he might find himself a happier path to his ending.

But such sentiment is not for us. Come back with me. Let him sleep.

*

Veering slightly to the shadowed side of the corridor to obscure the fact that his shoes were lost and the silk shirt he wore was not his own, Harry-Sebastian slipped down the stairs, unnoticed in the morning bustle, and into the gardens. Beyond the rows of cypress, by the edge of the precipice, he stopped. The first sunlight drifted over the horizon and settled in his hair, coating the side of his face.

This washed-out sensation, the slight dizziness, the half-disbelieving drag and lurch as his mind caught up to what his body has just experienced, all this was wearily familiar. How many times before had he woken to the clunk of Madam Pomfrey's sturdy heels on the infirmary floor, dreading the seep of consciousness which would allow him to localise the throb of pain through his body and slowly piece together the memory of what brought him there. Waking had always been a process of corruption as it all came back to him: the latest betrayal, the deaths and wounds, the knowledge of how much he had lost and how many greater and harder sacrifices would be necessary before he could rest. Today, though, it was different. This time, as he traced the scars of recent history on his skin - the daisy chain of bruises Malfoy's grip had imprinted around his upper arm, the cracks in his raw and swollen lips - each memory came to him like a gift. The corners of his lips turned up wryly. I did that? Somehow, he still couldn't locate his sense of regret.

His mood took him uphill, where the seaward running ridge threw up a rocky rise before turning down again. From the top, he could look back on the Olivier estate's formal gardens where, tossed as casually as autumn leaves among the rosebeds, the statues held court, their bare marble forms armed with discus or lyre and each one paying homage to masculinity and to youth. He tried to picture the reclining hermaphrodite guarding the Honeydukes passage in place of the One-Eyed Witch. But, like so many things he had seen and done here, it would be unthinkable in the world he had come from.

He sat on the broken blocks of a long-forgotten altar which gave the impression of being slowly devoured by the earth beneath it. As the air warmed and the blowflies got to work, he closed his eyes and let the night past replay itself in his muscles. The memories were sharp and stirring. Each touch still felt as crisp against his skin as the first sting of snowflakes.

As he lay back beneath the tide of colour flooding into the sky, his smile grew bemused. Something had changed overnight. Or had the air always smelled so tantalisingly, so flirtatiously, so disarmingly, of oranges?

*

Meander with me along the road towards the sea, towards the castle, towards the other Harry. Slow your pace. Make your steps loose, like mine. The other Harry will not wake for some time. See, there is no cause for impatience, not when the short-lived dew is still scattered like diamonds in the fresh spider webs and in the dillweed.

Time is slippery, isn't it? With your fingers entwined with mine, you slip through the hours as smooth and sleek as a kingfisher diving. The morning is ripe now. Your hair is hot with the sun. We are not so far from noon and - look - we have arrived.

*

"Well hang me if she's any different from other women under her velvet skirts!"

The pile of crumpled green linen stirred, a low groan emerged, and the two dust-encrusted feet poking out from beneath it gave a twitch. Harry pressed his face into the scratchy surface of the mattress. The chambermaids' distant voices were pulling at his mind like meathooks and dragging it out of slumber.

"That's the truth, and my lord Olivier shall discover it this morning if our mistress has her way. Perhaps he should want to compare. I wouldn't mind Lord Olivier exploring my skirts."

"You wouldn't mind anyone exploring in your skirts," answered the older voice pertly. "More expeditions have been mounted into your petticoats than the New World and the whole of Cathay."

There was an audible wink in the voice that answered. "And I'll warrant my lord Olivier knows how to find the North Sea Passage."

Behind the laughter came the faint rumbling of wheels outside. Harry's head jerked up off the bed, red rims around his eyes and his right cheek scraped by the straw. He didn't know what time he had stumbled back into the castle last night after the gruelling walk from the town, cursing and turning his ankles in rabbit holes as he tried to find his way by moonlight, but it had been too late to wake Ginny and risk making her curt with him when he was about to plead for Sirius' life. It seemed like seconds ago that he had laid his head down. And now the sound of the carriage proclaimed that Ginny was leaving and condemning him to failing Sirius again.

He fended himself off walls as he stumbled out of the little room. In the kitchen he halted but it was useless: no slicking of water could control his hair which hung like a foreign thing in his face, stiff and bulky with dust. Wrestling it beneath the torn green shawl, he tugged his bodice and the camouflaging scarf back into place where his bare chest was showing.

The carriage was moving through the gates when he saw it. He hitched his skirts around his knees and sprinted after it. When he ripped open the door, the wheels not quite stopped, the rebuke froze on Ginny's lips.

"Viola," she observed a little breathlessly. "You have returned to us."

A single glance told him that it was not surprise that made her breathless. She sat stiff and straight to ease the tightness of her corset, and she was either dangerously constricted or wearing too much rouge. Possibly both. There was no doubting her intended audience.

"You can't leave." Harry's voice was hoarse with fatigue, untutored, masculine and, for the first time, his own. "Come back inside."

With horror, he noticed the filthy state of the hand he was holding out to her. Though he curled the dirtiest fingernails inward, he didn't let it fall.

"I will no longer play the fool for him," Ginny said, and took a few skittering breaths as if she was re-learning the art of respiration. "I mean to have a forthright answer from my lord Olivier and I mean to have it today. You shall accompany me." As usual, her tone presumed obedience. "Come now, Viola. Step up and take your seat. Curio was wise. Company will be a welcome distraction."

The journey would take him a step closer to the town and to Sirius. It would give him time to convince her. Ginny moved the folds of her gown aside to make room for him: pale blue silk, the colour of thyme flowers. The cut of it was demure, he noted with satisfaction. On the narrow seat their elbows pressed together and thick in the air was the scent she wore - a lily fragrance applied so generously that the aroma of it washing off her skin made him feel a little drunk - and as the coach jogged over ruts and rocks, the cobweb of silver thread and crystal beads at her neck jingled. It was barely a day he had been away. There was no reason why being back in her presence should make his palms moist. But every time he struggled with the right words to broach the topic of Sirius, she would turn to the window so that the two loose curls which hung from the intricate loops and jewelled combs of her coiffure swept over her bare shoulders and distracted him.

As the hasty carriage ate up the time he had with her, he forced himself to picture it: Sirius standing on the scaffold with his hands bound behind him and the tendons in his throat going tight against the cut of the noose.

"You have to -"

"I think you-

Their voices clashed, and Harry was surprised to find that he was the one who had stopped speaking.

"I think you would counsel me against this course," said Ginny. He looked at her blankly. "You have been candid with me when no others dared. You have cast aside the proper courtesies of your position and I have allowed it for friendship's sake. There is something in you, Viola, that defies all regulation. So speak your mind."

What came to Harry's mind was that she was wearing too much powder. It collected in her pores and in the crease between her brows and he wanted to wipe it away, along with the kohl and the rouge and the too-strong perfume. What Harry thought was that, whether she went to him glittering with diamonds or clean and plain as a nun, Malfoy would see soon enough how her determination could be used against her, and with quiet contempt and knowing hands he would bend her to his will.

She took Harry's hand between both of hers and his fingertips curled in her palm. "It is you who have shamed me into this boldness. What a pitiful creature I had become when you arrived, turning my mood to his whim like he was the moon itself - and I a duchess with the governance of all these lands as far as the mountains! Then you walked out of the rubble of a shipwreck. You, with your faded skirts and your torn slippers, standing in my hall as haughty as Cleopatra herself and demanding sanctuary."

She lifted his hand and kissed the back of it, as if his nails weren't overgrown and stained with black arcs of dirt, as if the silk of her glove wasn't losing its smoothness with the dust and the sweat. Her lips were dry.

"I bless the day you came to us, Viola." And her breath slipped between his fingers as her voice grew faint: "I could stop the carriage here. You could tell me stories and take the pins from my hair again. I need not face his verdict, not yet."

Outside, the passing landscape slowed as they tilted up into the last rise before the Olivier villa and Harry found his voice.

"Then don't."

As she turned, her cheek hot against his knuckles, he felt a sudden weightless surge, like leaning out over a chasm, and he knew he was going to tell her.

But there was a shout from the coachman above and the carriage rocked to a halt. With a small, steeling sigh, Ginny gathered her skirts and eased open the door to descend.

"My lord," she was smiling, a little stiffly, as Harry followed.

Where he stood at the top of the rise with the villa and all his estates spread out behind him, it was as if Draco Malfoy were centred in the frame of a portrait whose background was specially composed to illustrate his magnificence. And yet, even in the moment his eyes skated past Ginny to watch Harry struggling with his skirts on the long step to the earth, Harry saw that he was bare of his usual jewels with a crest of matted hair sticking up at the back of his head. Something very like a smile seemed to lurk in the corners of his lips.

"You do not keep promise with me." It was Harry whom he addressed, and if was possible for a voice alone to commit acts of gross indecency his had just perpetrated a hanging offence. "You force me to seek you out. And so, like a dutiful servant, here I am, ready to hear your command."

Harry, who had censored every detail of Malfoy's pursuit of him from his reports to Ginny, found his mouth dry. He cast his gaze into the dirt, surly already. "My mistress came to speak with you. I have nothing to say."

"Indeed," Ginny cut in severely. "You forget yourself, my lord."

Malfoy turned to her like she was a long-forgotten, mouldering meal, and his deep, protracted bow had more than an edge of insult.

"Your Grace," he said with practised smoothness. "What would you ask of me that I have not denied you twenty times before? I pray you, speak quickly. Your entreaties to me are like howling after music, never more so than today."

There was a startled pause, long enough for anger to darken Ginny's cheeks.

"Sir, can you not be civil?"

"Madam, can you not be gone?"

Malfoy must have regretted words of exasperation immediately. His lips parted and closed again, as if hoping a retraction would find its own way out. Behind him, Hermione appeared over the rise, captured the situation at a glance and slid inconspicuously into the shade of a tree.

Strictly measured, Ginny and Malfoy were of a height, but his indolent slouch took an inch off his stature and her formal coiffure and the indignant stiffness of her back gave the impression of looking down.

"My lord." The chill in her words reminded him that her superiority was not only in height, and the fierce light made the beads at her throat blinding. "I have made every effort to believe in your virtues. No-one has searched them out as devotedly as I. No-one has been more determined to see your wickedness as daring, the foul rot in you as worldliness."

With a faltering smile, Malfoy turned to the carriage horses, making a show of straightening their bridles and stroking their necks. Despite the unconscious ease of his hands in their coats, they sensed something in him that made them stiffen.

With each word, Ginny grew in conviction. "Your cruelty defies reason and exceeds all endurance. And yet I believe I can repay you in kind. For I have guessed now where you have bestowed your affections. I know whose melody you prefer to my howling."

The horse jerked away from Malfoy's grip and he muttered an obscenity. Harry pulled the folds of his shawl over his reddening ears. There was no call for guilt. At worst, he had been curious and flattered by Malfoy's attention. He had never sought it, not deliberately. From the corner of his eye he saw Hermione's gaze on him and gave the shawl another tug.

Ginny clasped her hands behind her back.

"You will not have Viola," she said evenly - and Harry did not miss the flicker of triumph in it. "She is dearer to me than anyone. She will not see you again. Now, Viola, let us be on our way."

Astonishingly, her eyes sparkled with mischief as she strode back toward the carriage. Her haughtiness seemed to slip into play-acting. How like the Weasleys, Harry thought. It was easy to miss the extraordinary resilience in them until you saw them in adversity.

His heart was suddenly lighter. In this victorious mood, she could be persuaded to help him. He was dearer to her than anyone. For him, she would see Sirius reprieved. Already he was picturing the moment he would ask her, as she leaned back in the carriage, pulling the combs out of her hair and teasing the ringlets free.

He had scarcely turned when Malfoy was at his side, his hand damp and warm through Harry's sleeve.

"You have my protection," Malfoy hissed urgently. "I have given you every proof of this. There is no cause for you to fear her displeasure."

How he snarled when he pronounced the word 'her'. Harry shrugged off the touch.

"Where are you going?" Malfoy's pitch rose and this time his grip was violent. "Stay here. Take up the honour I have offered you. Tell her - for heaven's sake, tell her what I am to you!"

There was sweat on his brow and a feverish quickness in his movements, and Harry was not so virtuous that he could fail to appreciate the sight of Malfoy in distress. Gently, Harry disengaged the thin fingers and held them.

"What you are to me? How can I find the words for that?" he whispered, and waited for the first glimmer of smugness to return to Malfoy's eyes. Then he cast the hand away and raised his voice. "A trial. An annoyance. A canker, a blister, a boil, a vicious and pitiful leech. That's what you are to me." He inclined his head in a mocking imitation of a bow. "My lord."

The newest of the goats had a way of swaying on their twig-thin legs as if they doubted their ability to hold. For an instant, Malfoy seemed to teeter in the same way. Then the sneer twisted his face, a solid structure to hold him together.

Ginny's foot was on the step of the carriage when Malfoy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and spoke, quietly enough to conceal the hoarse notes in his voice. "You are the spirit of charity, Your Grace, to offer sanctuary to my discarded lover."

And she paused, just long enough for doubt to get the better of her.

"Lover?" she demanded, curious.

"And this is the least of her secrets."

"That's not how it was!" Harry recognised his own voice and felt the blood rushing into his face.

As she lowered her foot back to the ground, he knew he should have stayed silent. He had meant to tell her. A handful of moments ago he had been on the point of telling her. Now, the way Malfoy would say it, his girlish disguise was going to sound like a violation.

One gloved hand still retaining its hold on the carriage door, Ginny observed: "You would not make this scandalous claim without proof."

"Don't listen to him." Harry protested, but this time she did not even acknowledge him.

Malfoy smiled a slow, thin smile like a crack spreading through glass.

"Maria." He called over his shoulder to where Hermione was trying to sink into the elusive shadows. He called again.

"My lord," Hermione acknowledged him warily as she came forward.

"You must help us discover the truth, Maria. Answer honestly and say only what you know of your own knowledge." Malfoy lingered, clearly relishing the task of composing his next sentence. "Did I last night entertain this ... person in my private chambers?"

Hermione looked at Harry evenly. "You did."

"Until what hour?"

"Not long after dawn. Or so one of the kitchenmaids reported. I saw nothing with my own eyes." As Malfoy let the satisfaction spread out on his face, she went on hurriedly. "My lord, there are guards attending -"

"It will wait." He silenced her with a flick of his hand.

Harry concentrated on peeling away his arms, which had crossed instinctively over the place where his breasts weren't, to make them lie still by his side. There had been no hesitation in Hermione's voice. None. One possibility was that Hermione had lost the moral core of herself and become a barefaced liar. The other possibility made him dizzy when he considered it. Muddle-headed and tired though he had been as he stumbled home last night, he could not have forgotten a meeting with Malfoy. He was sure of it.

"And thus, Your Grace," Malfoy purred. "If you must have so vulgar a thing as proof, I lay it before you."

"Yes," Ginny said in a distant voice, and then with certainty: "Yes, so you have."

It was simply done, the way she cut herself free of Harry and cast him out of her household. She gave him one nod, insultingly curt, remarked "Good day, Viola. I do not expect our paths to cross again", and pulled the carriage door closed behind her. The clatter of wheels swallowed up Harry's clumsy protestations and left him coughing in the dust.

When his anger had spent itself, the hateful green shawl and the scarf were torn off and crumpled on the grass and he could feel his face shiny with exertion. Behind him, Malfoy was laughing the sort of laugh that aimed for the heart.

"My lord," Hermione prompted, now impatiently. "There is business awaiting you at home. The guards have apprehended the fugitive Antonio who waylaid and damaged your father's ship, The Phoenix. He was taken in a brawl on the high road and awaits your judgment."

Harry groaned softly. Never mind the strange name, there could only be one man she meant. "I know him," he sighed, each word as heavy as a log to heave out of his mouth. "You have to help him."

"You," Malfoy said in a deadly voice and rounded on him, "can hold your treacherous tongue."

"You have to help him." Though Harry felt like a crab bidding the ocean itself to be still, sheer bloodyminded determination was rising in him. No matter what his name, this man Antonio wore Sirius' face and had rescued him from a swordfight he could not have won. In this place there were no Death-Eater plots to unravel, no great destinies pressing down on him, nor even the everyday concerns of NEWTS and Quidditch strategy. If the only thing he could do was save Sirius from the gallows, then damned if he was going to let this chance at redemption slip through his fingers. His voice hardened. "He's a good man. You can't let them hang him."

The retort formed on Malfoy's lips like a bubble, then deflated. His quiet laugh gave way to silence. The road before them and behind was empty and hazy with heat.

"You presume too much on our encounter," said the count. "Consider your position. Compromised, disgraced, and now abandoned by your patron. Friendless and alone in a strange land. If I am your only ally, I should think you are the very definition of helplessness." His hand shot out to grip Harry's elbow and his breath was hot in Harry's ear. "If you wish to save your friend from the gallows, I suggest you begin with an apology for your conduct this morning and pray that I can find it in my heart to allow you to beg."

The cut of his fingernails into Harry's flesh suggested that the sort of apology he had in mind was not going to be gentle. But Harry had learned hard lessons about pride and its consequences and with each moment his determination grew.

"I'm sorry," he said in a very flat voice. "Do you hear me? I'm sorry."

Malfoy's whole body seemed to smirk, right down to the fingertips which finally released him.

"That is no more than the barest beginning of what you owe me. Maria, bid the guards wait upon us. I shall return presently. And have the hangman prepare the tools of his trade. They may yet be needed." With that, he set off into the trees, throwing over his shoulder: "You. Accompany me."

It was impossible to stop the calculations ticking over in Harry's head: if he ran, could he get back to Sirius before Hermione did? If he snatched a weapon from one of the suits of armour in the villa, how many guards would he have to defeat with it, and in any case was Sirius in any condition to outrun a pursuit? If he hit Malfoy over the head with a rock and left him there, who could pardon Sirius in his stead - Snape or Hermione or Ron? But he pushed these thoughts away and watched Hermione disappear towards the villa. This was not a time for recklessness. He had a chance that would not come again.

He caught up with Malfoy as the last of the trees gave onto a cleared shelf overlooking the estate's gardens, a sun-struck place which bore the ruins of an ancient sanctuary.

"Tell me," Malfoy began as he chose a suitable foundation stone and leaned on it. "This man Antonio. A brigand, a pirate and a common thief. What is he to you?"

There were broken blocks, columns and fragments of carvings all around; Harry picked his way over them gingerly in his bare feet. "He did me a good turn yesterday. He didn't have to. I'm in his debt."

Malfoy watched Harry's difficulty with pleasure. "I can imagine the sort of good turn a sailor might do for someone like you." He grabbed a fistful of Harry's dress and dragged him forward, and those sharp fingers clutching his waist were less forgiving than the corset struts. "Perhaps you have a taste for brutality after all."

When Malfoy leaned in, appreciatively following the scent of Ginny's perfume which had clung to his hands and shoulder, Harry could feel the breath in his hair, delicate and hot. It was only the repetition of Sirius' name in his mind that stopped him from striking. In any other time and place, Malfoy would be cowed and bleeding by now. They both knew it. The knowledge glinted in Malfoy's eyes.

"You have to release him."

Malfoy sighed theatrically.

"What patience I have bestowed upon you." His finger traced Harry's cheekbone. "I have courted you when I might have commanded. I have indulged your hesitance and allowed you to withhold what I should have taken by right. And you repay me with duplicity."

"I've never -" Before he could protest, Malfoy's hand was over his mouth and the salty taste of his fingers was on Harry's tongue.

"There will be no more indulgence, my little counterfeit. You needn't visit that scowl upon me. Let me make your situation plain. I expect you to humour me in every respect, and in good grace, unless you wish your friend to hang for his crimes." His grip on Harry's chin was rough. "Come now. You are a playactor of the highest order. If you can fool the world with a ragged dress and a maidenly blush then surely you can pretend you are as violently besotted with me as your shameless duchess. Go on. Lay down your pride and convince me."

Pliant as a plank of wood, Harry bent until his lips were at the base of Malfoy's neck. White skin flushed in the heat, with a curved hollow behind the tendon and the faint acid smell of sweat rising from it. His mind was full of the memory of Ginny, of the night he had unwound her hair in the close air of her chamber, her skin warm under his fingers and the heavy length of her hair spilling down the front of his dress. Malfoy's collarbone rose out of his flesh like a blade. There was no comparison.

"Release him first," he bit out, and felt Malfoy repress a shudder at the movement of his mouth. "After that, we can continue this in private, in a more fitting place."

Malfoy threaded his fingers into Harry's hair. "Here." His command was cold. "Now. And if you persist with this procrastination I shall have your pirate whipped in the meantime."

Harry splayed his hands over the stone at Malfoy's hips and dug his fingers in. His heart thumped with the effort of quelling the instincts that urged him to fight. After Sirius was safe he could look to revenge. For now, he would comply. It would be like that first time flying. If he didn't think about what he was doing or how, it would come to him naturally.

He found the tenderest part of Malfoy's throat, just under his jaw, and pressed his mouth over it, hard. Malfoy's grip jerked in his hair and he wrapped his hand around the far side of Malfoy's neck to hold him still as he teased him with gentle breath and the barest touch of his lips. The heavy pulse beat up against him. He drove his mouth into Malfoy's flesh and sucked and bit until that heartbeat was a frantic rattle and helpless breaths were tumbling out of Malfoy's mouth.

Harry straightened. He had never heard Malfoy so silent. Where his mouth had been was a scorched looking oval of skin with a trench of tooth marks cut around it, though from Malfoy's grip on his shoulders he couldn't tell whether he meant to tear him limb from limb or pull him back for more. The taste in his mouth was bitter, but from his fingers still rose the scent of Ginny's perfume, faintly. Her carriage would be rattling through the castle gates now, past the wall he'd sat on to watch her picking cornflowers, past the path to the orchards down which she'd accompanied him recklessly unshod to sit in the sun and pry from him half-true stories about giants and Lethifolds. Perhaps just now she was even suffering the first pangs of doubt over her hasty judgment.

The anger rose in him. He wrenched at the front of Malfoy's shirt and brought their mouths together, feeling the sudden nervousness in Malfoy but also the shiver of arousal. To the sound of tearing silk, he closed his eyes.

*

end