Draco Malfoy's peacock sanctuary had seen its fair share of strange patients, but the strangest so far was Harry Potter.

Dressing gown clutched around his thin frame, Draco had tugged open the Sanctuary's front door at midnight—equal parts concerned and infuriated by the incessant knocking—and found the Saviour of the Wizarding World slumped against the doorframe. He shook his head, the remnants of a strange dream fading rapidly away, along with the repeated words swallowed pride, a hand to take that had been circling through his mind ever since he woke, and startled into action.

The first words that came out of Draco's mouth were, "It's not that kind of Sanctuary, imbecile." And then he'd realised this was actually quite serious, blast it all, and tugged the feverish and delusional man inside. The second words he uttered were along the lines of oh fuck oh fuck shit shit shit but he couldn't quote them verbatim on account of the shock.

"Malfoy," Potter mumbled, grasping for Draco and succeeding in wrapping the gilded lines of his collar around feeble palms. "Help me... It... It burns."

Mind Healer Scottsbury had long since drilled into Draco's head that humour as a coping mechanism was rarely acceptable if one was in company, and yet it still took all of Draco's willpower not to make a dick joke. Not that Potter would likely have noticed; the man was barely coherent. Draco set to work making the living room habitable for the infirm, lighting a fire with his wand and setting the kettle boiling and an all-purpose tincture pouring with a few more well-placed flicks. He had no idea what Potter had done to himself, but if he'd come here instead of to St Mungo's, Draco's best bet was to get the man stabilised before deciding anything further.

Potter was an Unspeakable these days; who knew what nasty thing he'd become embroiled in? And what Draco had to do with it.

Fortunately, whatever malady Potter was suffering responded well to the gentle tincture made from helichrysum and asphodel, and Draco made a mental note that the herbs worked on humans as well as peafowl. That was good. He didn't want to be labelled responsible for poisoning as well as whatever had sent Potter to his door in the first place.

Now that the moaning had stopped, Draco seated himself in the armchair opposite the chaise longue, where he had deposited the Boy Who Lived so he might lie back to display the full dramatic effect of his dire illness, as he no doubt desired. Steepling his fingers, he regarded his charge for several moments, noting with appreciation that the fever sweat was already drying, thanks to the helichrysum, and the manic, pained look in his eyes had been replaced with a glazed appreciation of all things sensory. That was no doubt thanks to the asphodel, or perhaps the vodka the tincture had been steeped in.

"What burns, Potter?" Draco asked.

"My..." Potter's hand hovered over his thighs for a moment, and Draco collected all his willpower not to take the piss once again. Then the hand moved higher, over his chest. "My heart."

"Is it possible," Draco muttered dryly, "that you are experiencing indigestion?"

"Fuck off, Malfoy."

Draco's stomach pitched in relief that Potter was still normal underneath it all, although he did immediately wonder why he cared.

"One has to ask. I recall how you ate at Hogwarts."

"I recall how you sat," Potter mumbled, mopping the last of the sweat from his brow with his sleeve and closing his eyes. "Like you had a stick up your arse." He snapped his eyes open again. "Oh look, you're doing it now."

"Very funny."

"Nah, I can do better. Just gimme a sec."

"Potter," Draco interrupted. "Why are you here?"

Potter's eyes met his, and for a moment, Draco thought the firelight was reflected in them. Then he realised the colour was wrong: blue instead of red. The sapphire flames licked Potter's eyelashes, darting up his hairline and into the ether. They vanished, but the answering call flickered from Draco's heart—a pounding drum of heat and fire and longing.

"Oh no," Draco breathed, the reality of Potter's condition hitting him full in the face.

Potter had got himself caught up in a Veela soulbond. And like a responsible wizard lover, he'd come straight to his mate's doorstep to resolve it.

*

The asphodel sent Potter straight to sleep after that, and so Draco set to work on his own tincture minus the herbs. As the vodka burned its way through his bloodstream, he wondered dully what this particular punishment was for.

It took him some time, but eventually he recalled the Stevenses had Veela blood in their line back around the fourteenth century, and the Malfoys had been responsible for Roderick Stevens' mental deterioration after the war. He called his pinboard in, his wand movements so sloppy he nearly took his own eye out, and marked a tally on the board between a line of red string and several photographs. The number of people Draco had wronged could not accurately be counted, of course, but Fate liked a round figure. By his calculations, one hundred was appropriate, and he had counted ninety-eight so far. Ninety-nine, including tonight. One more, and he would be free of his own curse, self-administered, painstakingly healed.

He Vanished the board and stared dully into the fire.

So Potter had messed with a Veela, had he? That was the only plausible answer. Veela mating rituals could occur naturally, of course, but for that to happen one needed to have been courted by a Veela. And Draco for damn sure hadn't courted the Boy Who Lived.

Which left the Veela Curse. Enacted as revenge for interfering with a Veela nest, the enraged mother could curse the invader with an appropriate mate.

Appropriate mate loosely translated to: the Veela most likely to tear the victim's heart out.

As the only wizard in Wiltshire possessing Veela blood, and possessing, too, a decades-long feud with the man in question, Draco doubted there was anyone who fit the bill more than he did. And, of course, he had been wondering when he would owe reparations to the Boy Who Lived.

To be quite honest, he couldn't fucking believe it had taken this long.

Only... why was the debt Fate called of him one that put Potter in harm's way? The curse's appearance had Fate's name written all over it, but apart from saving Potter's life by removing it, Draco couldn't see how this was meant to benefit him. No, it had to be a debt owed to the Stevenses. But then, why was Potter caught up in it at all, particularly when Draco still owed him? His loose brain could make neither heads nor tails of the perplexing detail, so he temporarily ignored it.

He swirled the remaining drops of vodka around in his glass and studied his fingernails. His claws only came through under the harvest moon, but his other Veela traits had proven less coy. Small mercy they'd only appeared his sixth year at Hogwarts; it made keeping his family's secret shame hidden an easy enough task. Few people wanted to date a Malfoy these days, and Draco had even less interest in dating them.

His heart thudded, reminding him that, as of thirty minutes ago, this was no longer true.

The Veela Curse worked on the chosen Veela as well, it seemed. That was something the legends hadn't prepared him for.

But then... this feeling wasn't exactly new. And now that it was back, he was quietly stunned he had ever forgotten it. He closed his eyes, wincing as the familiarity of it sunk into his skin. It had to be the curse, warping his mind and replacing cultivated disdain with curiosity, but he couldn't deny that his Hogwarts days had been marked with a similar curiosity. An obsessive, furious curiosity that he really did not need to see start up again in his late twenties.

Especially not when there was nothing here to distract him from it. Nothing but them. Two men.

Two men and a curse.

With an aching heart and blurry vision, Draco stood up and navigated a path to the bookshelf so he could research his newfound predicament.

The dust coating on his medical texts was so thick, it floated into the air in giant chunks when Draco blew on it. At age seventeen, these books had been a constant bedside companion as he poured through page after page explaining his symptoms. At twenty-eight, he hadn't looked at them in years.

Several of the chapters had dog-eared corners—the mark of a desperate man—as he'd returned again and again to the sections detailing the more ferocious Veela traits, analysing himself against the symptom checklist to make sure they hadn't emerged yet.

They never did. His great aunt Tremidia had sprouted wings whenever she got into a spat, which was frequently, but Draco remained wingless. The beak his great, great, great grandfather Vermillion had claimed as an eccentric mask worn only on the new moon served as little more than a cautionary tale.

The frequent rages, the territorial displays along property borders, the—Draco shuddered—mating dances all remained absent.

As he considered the familiar checklists, Draco began to wonder, with an air of sickened dread, if he should whip out the old symptom-tracker journals once more.

Penned at the top of each checklist was a note Draco had only ever skimmed before. It had become part of the scenery—irrelevant to the young Veela descendant who cared only for what might happen to him now. The future was irrelevant.

Fate never liked to be ignored.

The Veela Curse is a blood curse cast upon a human in response to an infringement of safety or repeated infringements of territory boundaries. It is instantaneous and irreversible, cast via Veela Flame and sealed with blood. If inflicted on a mature Veela, regardless of age, the Veela will revert to fledgling as the Curse begins its first of three stages: evaluating the blood compatibility of the human and their chosen mate. Once the pair's souls are successfully linked, stage two will see the trial commence, and stage three will witness the final judgement.

All signs listed below should be considered as possible symptoms during any of the three curse stages, even if their contradictory symptoms have presented themselves in the past.

Thanks to Potter, Draco was now cursed to go through Veela puberty. Again.

The sun had lifted above the horizon by the time Draco refamiliarised himself with the curse. Along with reverting him to fledgling state, it appeared the first stage, whereby the curse bonded them together, might last days. During which Draco would experience bouts of uncontrollable rage towards Potter.

And bouts of uncontrollable desire.

And therein lay the most malicious part of the curse: the fact that it relied on the unparalleled heights of a wounded mate's fury and creative malice to ensure its justice. The curse was more than an execution; it was a vindictive, calculated slaughter. Veela needed very little justification to go to war on behalf of their blood. However, because they were above all else creatures of fate and family, the mating bond should also be taken seriously. The curse had to first connect them so wholly, so completely, that the inevitable destruction of the offending human would become a blow that rippled through the entire community. A tragedy. A lesson in tradition and honour and the lengths to which one should go to defend those.

In short, Draco would learn to love Potter, and then he would kill him.

Draco ran a hand through his hair and studied the idiot snoring on his chaise longue. He supposed there was a chance the curse would fail, unable to find any compatibility between them at all. But as much as the thought of becoming soulmates with Potter was not only ludicrous but frankly incomprehensible... Draco couldn't risk those odds. He had to break it himself.

An insistent pecking roused Draco from his thoughts, and he left the living room, padding down the long hallway to the conservatory. Alan liked to roost among the moth orchids arranged on the top shelf. Phalaenopsis bloomed regardless of day length, and as the neighbouring cottage often forgot to extinguish their garden lanterns, the moth orchids had been a good choice to minimise light from the west window during night time. For some reason, Alan had gotten it into his head that moth orchids were the only acceptable roosting shrubbery, prompting Draco to change his name from what had been Cassius to a name that more adequately favoured the peacock's prized phalaenopsis.

"Here you go, feather-head," Draco muttered, opening the conservatory door and arranging the moth orchid pots so that the daylight was appropriate for the rest of the plants.

Alan cried out his appreciation, the haunting baby-like wail answered immediately by the other four peafowl that roosted by the conservatory, and scurried out onto the lawn. Draco spent a lavish thirty minutes inspecting the orchids, adjusting a few pots where he had expected blooms by now and making a mental note to trim the vines he had, perhaps foolishly, allowed to grow on the southern corner of the conservatory. A couple of yellowed leaves gave him mild cause for alarm, but given the bespectacled elephant sleeping inside his living room, it didn't last long.

Eventually, he could ignore the inevitable no longer, and he made his way back inside.

Potter was awake.

The scent of strongly brewed coffee wafted through the house, and Draco bit down on his tongue—hard—to avoid giving a moan of appreciation.

"Nesting already, Potter?" Draco asked flatly as he stepped into the living room, forgetting for a moment that Potter didn't know the nature of the curse that had hit him.

Of course, Potter frowned at him and lifted the coffee pot with a questioning shake. "I didn't know if you preferred tea or coffee," he said slowly, sounding as confused as he no doubt felt, guided by the curse to play house with a Malfoy but internally resisting it as only a Potter could.

"Tea," Draco muttered, turning to the kitchen and setting his morning pot brewing. "I see you brought your own coffee pot."

"Yeah..." Potter's confusion would be laughable, except that it really wasn't.

"Do you want the good news or the bad news?" Draco asked.

"Start with the good. My head hurts too much for bad news just yet."

"The headache is temporary." Draco shot him a dry look. "That's the good news. The bad news is that you've pissed off a territorial Veela, and now we're both going to pay the price."

Potter's frown deepened, although Draco had the impression he was only half-listening, as he stared around the room with the coffee pot half-raised, searching for a place to put it.

"Oh, for Merlin's sake." Draco Summoned the pot and set it on the kitchen table. "Sit."

Potter sat. Their eyes met and the furrow of Potter's brow eased somewhat; a fact that signified how quickly the curse was moving, and served only to raise the tension in Draco's shoulders.

He'd kept tabs on Potter since Hogwarts. Who hadn't? Mostly, he'd found the attention-seeking golden boy had continued much as he'd begun—with the world handed to him on a silver platter, despite how little he cared to follow its rules. It was infuriating, but Draco had learned to ignore it and focus on his own crap. There was more than enough of it to take up his attention. And eventually he had sort of... forgotten Potter.

As he felt the familiar stirrings of an old obsession, he wondered if he had forced himself to forget.

"What did you say about Veela?" Potter asked.

"You've bothered one. Shocking, I know." Draco poured himself a cup of tea and sat opposite Potter, who was in the middle of taking long, grateful sips from his own brown mug. Also brought from home. "Have you heard of the Veela Curse?"

That got Potter's attention. "You mean the ritual execution?"

"I suppose." Draco shrugged, gritting his teeth at the barbaric summary but unwilling to argue semantics given the current time constraints. The longer he spent talking to Potter the more he would have to acknowledge how nice the man smelled. "You show all the symptoms, right down to the blue flame flickering in your pupils." He paused a moment to study the dim reflection that caught the light every few minutes, mixing with the emerald green of Potter's intense stare. "Quite unmistakeable at that point, even if the other symptoms could be explained."

Potter stared down into his mug. After a few seconds, his attention snapped up to the coffee pot and then back to the mug with new understanding. "You said I was nesting."

"I did say that, yes."

Potter's eyes met his, and Draco winced, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"Why did the curse bring me here?"

Any second now. Potter wasn't stupid, no matter what he wanted others to think. He put two and two together better than most.

"It's the peacocks, isn't it?"

"I'm sorry, were you dropped on your head as a child?"

"Come off it, Malfoy. I know about the wands."

Draco froze. "What wands?" he asked, carefully stirring his tea.

Potter smirked. It was an odd expression on his face, and one that sent a strange warmth flipping over in Draco's stomach. "Unicorn hair core?" He shook his head.

"Malfoys often have Unicorn hair as our wand core," Draco spat, clenching his mug tighter. "Are you calling me a liar?"

"No, Malfoy. But I carried your wand for a while, remember?"

Draco rolled his eyes. "Oh, did you? Gosh, I hadn't even noticed being without my wand for six months. What a dill."

Potter's eyes flashed, not just with anger. Blue fire flickered there, and Draco forced himself to play nice.

"I carried your wand, Malfoy," Potter muttered, expression fierce. "I know how it felt. A Unicorn hair core? In a wand that had been used for the Dark Arts for more than a year? That wand should never have worked, not just for me, but for you. It should have been overcome with melancholy."

Alerted to an insistent grating sound, Draco realised he was grinding his teeth together. Clearly, there was no point in playing innocent. Potter knew it all anyway.

"And it would have," Draco agreed. "Except that Unicorn hair cores are the only Supreme Core that know how to ask for help. Why don't you take a leaf from their book, Potter, and get to the point?"

They stared at each other for several seconds. Potter was the one to break the moment, draining his coffee mug and dropping it onto the table with a dull thud. "Your wand overcame its melancholy by drawing a second core to it, long before Hogwarts," Potter said softly, his eyes darting to the kitchen window.

Through the glass, Alan could be seen perched at the very top of the water fountain. The morning sun caught his feathers, highlighting their rainbow-like radiance, shadows dappling as the wind ruffled. With a shimmer, Alan fluffed out his tail in proud formation, each feather a work of art as he displayed himself for their viewing pleasure. An owl swooped above him, taunting the peacock as was its weekly ritual, and dropped a letter from his mother on the kitchen window sill. He didn't move to collect it; he had no burning desire to read the contents, knowing, as he did, that the update would not be good. It never was.

"Malfoys have always derived our true power from peacock feathers," Draco admitted softly, the confession filling the space between them like a sigh.

And not just from their wands, but from their very presence itself. His father had admitted to him, once, during an incredibly depressing night filled with whisky and the shattering of childhood illusions, that it was the avian link between Veela and peacocks that made their presence at the Manor so vital. It was almost impossible to imagine his father had once bothered to care for the needs of his Veela blood, but the memory was there all the same.

Avian blood born by a human required an avian conduit for its magic to be fully expressed. Veela hair would have worked, too, of course, but Draco's great, great, great grandfather found something better. A flock of birds raised alongside Malfoy heirs for generation upon generation, soaking in their magic, feeding it back to the land they lived off. Connecting witch and wizard to the magic of the earth in a way few understood or remembered.

It was why Draco had begun this peacock sanctuary. He was giving back in the only way he knew how, the only way the world would accept from him: by caring for, amongst others, the magical flock that had cared for his family for centuries. By making amends for the shit-awful way his family had used that gift. By trying, desperately, to say sorry.

"I know," Potter muttered.

Draco had almost forgotten what they were talking about, and then he registered the strange tone to Potter's voice. When he looked up, Potter wouldn't meet his eye, an odd sheepishness there that didn't match Draco's maudlin thoughts.

"Hang on..." Draco frowned. He'd been so caught up in the shame of his family's impure bloodline and the fact Potter was somehow now a part of it that he hadn't registered the enormous leaps of deduction Potter was making. "What do peacocks have to do with Veela?"

He knew what the connection was: the Malfoy line. Peacocks were linked to Malfoys, and Malfoys were linked to Veela, but what the hell did Potter know?

In answer, Potter gave him a funny look, then stood up and Vanished his coffee set. "Doesn't matter. Sorry to barge in on you like that, Malfoy. I know what I've got to research now."

And then, with an awkward shuffling motion that might have been intended as a wave, Potter left.

It was only after the morning sun was well above his kitchen window that Draco realised Potter hadn't shown any sign of knowing Draco was part Veela at all.

*

The house was quiet following Potter's departure, and Draco made his rounds of the animals in silence. He kept waiting for the curse to hit him, for blue flame to flicker out of the corner of his eye and an overwhelming lust for Potter to overtake his thoughts. It didn't, but he could feel it taking hold nonetheless, and that only unsettled him more.

Apart from that initial interest hitting him in a rush, it didn't seem to be physical at all. It didn't even feel like a lie.

Instead, his thoughts kept drifting to Potter, as though following a familiar path to a destination he'd lost. He'd be lying if he said he never thought of Potter, but when he did, he thought of him as he was now: an annoying but distant problem that didn't have much to do with Draco anymore.

But the curse had changed things, reminding him that his relationship to Potter had once been quite different. Once, there had been very little else in Draco's thoughts but the injustice that was Potter's existence, and it seemed he needed far less prompting than he would have assumed to go back to that.

Draco didn't know what that said about him.

After the animals were taken care of, Draco only managed twenty minutes of quiet contemplation in the garden before he discovered Harry Potter pounding on his door for the second time that morning. He wondered idly if he should start selling tickets. It would serve the git right: invade Draco's privacy, and he would show equal respect in turn.

However, since that would mean dealing with people, he begrudgingly just let him in.

"What is it now?" Draco sneered, but he walked away without waiting for an answer; unwanted guest or no, his parents had raised him with manners, and it was nearly eleven by now, so he led the way to the kitchen where they could discuss Potter's numerous issues like grown men. Potter shuffled awkwardly behind him, picking objects up and putting them down again like he hadn't just been here and also didn't know how to be a functioning adult.

In a rousing show of fortitude, Draco's hands moved through the expected etiquette of preparing tea for his guest, despite their intense urge to strangle him instead.

"Um, so, I need some feathers," Potter said sheepishly when the contents of Draco's crystal cabinet failed to occupy him any longer. "Also, I can't get your front gate to work—is there some trick to it?"

Draco's hands stilled, clenching the teapot with a white-knuckled grip as Potter charged headfirst into the neighbourly fence of decorum Draco was attempting to erect and knocked it all to the ground.

"Business comes after tea," he gritted out.

Potter tilted his head to the side in confusion.

Draco clunked the teapot down on the counter and abandoned it.

"Peacock feathers?" he queried, stomping around the kitchen island and towards the increasingly wrong-footed-looking man in his living room. "That's what you're after? Or are you requesting that I climb a tree for you and obtain a nice array of raven plumes to match that stupid hair?" Something occurred to him in the middle of his rant. "Are you honestly telling me you've been here for thirty minutes because you couldn't get my front gate to open? You are a wizard."

Potter awoke from his undignified stupor in time to step the last remaining foot into Malfoy's space, bringing them nose to nose, and glared. "I'm not asking you to do anything," he insisted, as entitled liars do. "I'm requesting your permission to pick up some feathers from your grounds. And I didn't need to open the gate before now. I sent a Patronus for the research because I knew I'd likely end up straight back here. And I was right: I need feathers. So I thought I'd go round the lane and get any that had drifted over the back, but it wouldn't open."

"Why do you need feathers?" Draco spat, refusing to budge even though he was becoming faintly cross-eyed at this distance. The thought of Potter waiting it out in his front garden, only to slip away when he needed Draco's help, pissed him off for reasons he couldn't explain.

Potter rolled his eyes. "Because I thought it'd be a fun activity. I need it to stop the curse, you git."

"How. In Merlin's name. Will peacock feathers stop the curse?" Draco gritted out.

And he really wanted the answer. Potter seemed to know something Draco didn't, and since Draco's own research diving into his ancestral books had proven largely unhelpful, he wanted to know what it was.

Potter's face closed over. "'S not your business, really."

The strangest thought hit Draco—he had missed this. There was always something about Potter that got under his skin in ways no one else could ever rival. Potter never backed down from him, never ignored him, and it made Draco feel like... like—like he took up space. As though he was real and he existed and the things he did were important.

It made Draco feel alive.

How long had it been since he felt alive?

Draco breathed in and out slowly through his nostrils and took a step back. "You know you look eleven years old again when you pout like that?" he shot out, and then he poured them both tea.

It was a good brew, based on petals from the Dendrobium chrysotoxum—the Gold orchid, said to bring youthful qualities through its elixir. Potter didn't deserve it.

As they sipped, a different mood descended on the living room. The open windows brought the sound of soft scuffling as Alan, Maisie, and Turquoise—only one of whom Draco had named—scratched in the earth searching for insects. And with that sound came peace. The fragrant liquid soothed Draco's mind, the breeze soothed his body, and even Potter seemed to relax.

After several minutes, Potter set down his empty cup and sighed. "Veela use peacock feathers to line their nests."

Through the fog of contentment, Draco acknowledged mild shock. He'd never heard of this.

Then he realised Potter meant true Veela, not half Veela, and the reason why he had never found that tidbit in his own texts slotted into place.

"Ah," he said wisely, leaning back in his chair. "And, like a conscientious mate, you're willing to prepare your new lovenest to their liking?"

Potter turned gratifyingly pink from the top of his hair to the dip of his collar bone. "I'm going to use the feathers to track down whatever Veela I've pissed off," he mumbled, unable to even return the barb.

So, Potter truly didn't know that Draco was the Veela he'd pissed off—or rather, the Veela with whom he would have to make amends. Since Draco was not in the habit of lining his house with peacock feathers, Potter's method was also unlikely to work.

"And how will you do that?" he pressed, failing to keep the smugness from his tone.

There was probably something pathological about the twists and jumps Draco's mind had done to take joy in this situation, but since it presently involved Potter being wrong, he didn't question it.

Potter ran a hand through his hair. "The Veela I've... annoyed... lives in the hills along the border of this sanctuary," he said, making Draco's stomach dip. "I've seen it flying after midnight."

Draco's stomach churned with jealousy, which overwhelmed him immediately after with shock—he knew there was another Veela, so why was he suddenly so annoyed? And in the turbulent mess of emotion, he almost missed the obvious question. Fortunately, his brain was still working.

"What were you doing on my property after midnight?"

To Draco's surprise and fury, Potter laughed. "I actually can't tell you that, Malfoy. Sorry. Occupational necessity."

Somewhere deep down inside, Draco knew Potter wasn't insulting him—the lowly peacock keeper hosting the Unspeakable—but it still felt like it.

Draco leaned back in his chair, drumming his fingers on the table in front of him. "So, after snooping here for Merlin knows how many hours—days?—you now request my permission to collect feathers from my peafowl, conduct some spell no doubt also on my property, and engage with the Veela who hates you so much they have submitted you for execution. Is that the summary?"

Potter grinned. "Just like the good old days, hey, Malfoy?"

This time, Draco jolted at the sight. Up until now, he had been astutely avoiding Potter's gaze, lest the spell ignite the second stage. After the feather confession and smug pulling of rank, he was so pissed off he didn't care. As Potter grinned, Draco met his gaze evenly, and this time he saw what was underneath.

Fury.

Potter was angry—deeply, indescribably angry. And Draco had no idea why.

Shifting in his seat, Draco blinked rapidly and forced himself to remain calm. Unfortunately, pathways long dormant in his mind had fired up again, and he found himself drawing unconsciously closer to Potter. Trying to dissect him. Wondering what it would take to turn all that fire and righteousness in Draco's direction.

"Should I dress up in my Hogwarts robes, then?" he muttered, searching for levity. "I think I've still got the tie somewhere."

Something flashed in Potter's eyes, but Draco couldn't read it.

"So I have your permission?"

"While you've already proven you don't need it, yes, you have my permission. Just watch out for Igrelda. She bites."

"Noted."

Draco sighed, and then forced himself to ask what he really didn't want to ask. "You do know that the Veela Curse doesn't usually bind the wizard to the territorial Veela, don't you, Potter? It chooses another."

Potter blinked. "Really? Why?"

Draco opened his mouth to answer and then frowned. "Well, because they're so familial. It's all about defending their bloodline with the harshest justice possible, and you don't get much harsher than a scorned lover. Which then proves the Veela's loyalty to their flock: they'll destroy their own soulmate if that's what it takes to defend the territory."

Now that he said it out loud, the answer sounded strange.

Although not strange enough to distract him from the fact that Potter swallowed thickly when he heard the word lover drop from Draco's lips.

"Why doesn't the defending mother just do it?" Potter asked, looking away. "It's all about infringed territory and safety, right? Seems odd to get anyone else involved."

Draco laughed, forcing it to come out louder and more certain than he felt. "I guess Unspeakables don't know everything then, do they?"

Potter only shrugged. "What does it matter? The feather spell will still work, and I doubt it's bonded me to another Veela. There can't be that many more around here, can there?" he added with a laugh.

Gritting his teeth, Draco reached over to pick up a basket from by his foot, hooking one slender finger beneath the handle. All plans to inform Potter of the facts he had overlooked fled his mind—let the git suffer. "Surely not," he agreed with a smile, quietly relishing the anticipation of the moment Potter did his little spell and realised Draco was the Veela he would have to tangle with.

Potter took the basket, bemused. "I brought a bag for the feathers."

"That's my grain basket," Draco explained, smiling with all his teeth. "Igrelda will be nicer if she thinks you come bearing gifts."

Potter frowned. "What should I do when she realises I haven't?"

Draco grinned wider. "Run."

*

It was only after the gentle sounds of peacock scratchings faded into the distance, chasing Potter and his illustrious grain basket, that Draco put two and two together.

Slowly, he edged out of his seat and made his way out the front door, down the path towards the gate. When he'd bought the Sanctuary, he'd made sure to purchase a property as far from the Manor in style and feel as possible. As such, his land was bordered with a white picket fence, the gate neatly latched with iron hardware. He kept it oiled because he couldn't stand the squeak.

Taking a fortifying breath, Draco lifted the latch and tugged at the gate.

Nothing happened. The latch moved, the gate shifted, but it simply did not open.

"We're stuck here," he said flatly to no one in particular.

Potter answered, emerging from the bracken lining the shadowy south side of Draco's front fence. A line of hopeful peacocks and one peahen followed him. "Yeah. Thought so."

When Draco turned to him, all the glib, dismissive banter that had marked their previous interactions had gone; even the familiar competitiveness was absent. He had no idea how he hadn't noticed the rage before. Had Potter hidden it that well, or was Draco truly that much of an idiot?

The midday sun had begun to drift behind the trees lining his house, and the creeping disappearance of its rays left Potter's face in shadow. Draco swallowed.

"I guess the curse won't let you leave."

"Or you," Potter said, something unreadable in his tone. He opened his mouth to say something else, but seemed to change his mind and shut it again without speaking. Eventually, he simply said. "When I get these feathers..." He trailed off.

"Let me guess: you'll line your love nest and be on your way." Draco would confess to being the Veela soon. When Potter brought in the feathers.

Potter shot him a withering look but didn't replace the glib humour with an actual answer.

He actually looked rather hopeless.

Draco turned his attention to the peafowl, finding Potter's face suddenly difficult to look at. "Igrelda's getting a mean look in her eye," he said idly.

Potter huffed a laugh. "Ten Galleons says she's your favourite, hey, Malfoy?"

Before Draco could indignantly reply that she wasn't—even though she was—Potter disappeared back into the brush, hunting for more feathers and dragging a trail of mystery, unease, and peafowl behind him.

*

As the surreal nature of this latest development began to fade along with the morning sun, Draco realised that having Potter stuck here was going to put quite a dampener on his plans. Being trapped himself wasn't an issue; Draco arranged all of his supplies via delivery anyway. He couldn't recall the last time he'd voluntarily left his cottage grounds. But with Potter here, it would make Draco's research difficult to conceal. Draco was running out of time. He didn't need someone interfering or slowing him down.

In fact, he would need to ask Blaise to investigate the lead he had found regarding the O'Reillys and two peacocks discovered roosting in an old barn near Bath. If he was right, it would be the last of it, so he could not afford to miss the chance, but neither could he afford Potter messing it up for him. Potter had always been a nosy child, and since he had grown up to become an Unspeakable one could only assume he had become not only nosier but more entitled about it. Draco would send Blaise a letter now.

But speaking of letters, Draco had one he needed to read.

He trudged inside, folded himself into his favourite armchair, and opened the letter from his mother.

Dear Draco,

Your father continues to deteriorate. His faculties are erratic at best, and although I suspect they will return to him once this current bout passes—the Stevenses are adept at memory loss spells—there will of course be permanent damage. More than the assault to his mind, his body becomes weaker.

Nonetheless, he asks for you daily.

When will you visit? I am sure I needn't tell you there is not long left before the opportunity will be lost forever.

Your loving mother,

Narcissa Malfoy

Draco read the letter three times, then crumpled it up and threw it at the wall. Then he remembered Potter was stuck here, nosing about, so he retrieved the letter, smoothed it out, and stored it in a locked drawer. So, his father was nearly dead. He'd been dying for ten years—it was about time. Not that Draco wanted it to happen; he merely wanted to stop fucking witnessing it. He'd long since given up having any control over Lucius Malfoy's stubborn decisions, and he refused to watch the man slowly wilt into nothing.

However, the faster Lucius deteriorated, the less time Draco had to make his final two—now one, thanks to the curse—reparations. Creatures of fate and family. His fate was tied to his family, and his family to his fate. If he was fast enough, perhaps the son could save the father.

Too slow, and the father might damn the son forever.

The specifics of the letter wormed their way into Draco's mind, and he stiffened. The Stevenses, his mother had said... but surely they were tied to Draco. Why else would a Veela Curse of all things have turned up now?

Since Veela were creatures of fate, the Malfoys' actions during the war had sealed their own as surely as an arrow to the heart. Fate would guide their reparations to their doorstep, burying them beneath the weight of their actions until every last one had been accounted for.

Unless you were a stubborn old man who refused to make amends for his choices, and instead chose to allow Fate to destroy you on the altar of your own pride.

Draco sighed and called in his pinboard, removing the mark he'd made against the Stevenses. If his father was paying for their transgressions against the Stevenses, then Draco couldn't be. And now that he was more sober, it seemed an odd choice for a Veela Curse.

They were creatures of fate, but the thing about fate was that it was always a perfect fit. His father's ailing memory fitted what the Dark Lord had done to Roderick Stevens under the Malfoys' roof. Draco's current predicament did not.

He stared at the pinboard for a while, trying to work out what he was making up for by undergoing this horrible entanglement with Potter. It couldn't possibly be owed to Potter, could it? But then, how could it not? He had one more debt to pay after his one, and no reparations made to Harry Potter so far, which was a hilarious concept. Truly hysterical. As if Fate would ever let him off without paying his debt to Harry Potter.

But why would it put Potter in danger for it? Draco searched for another answer, but could find no obvious link and eventually Vanished the board before Potter could walk in and question him.

There would be a tie of fate behind this mess, and Draco would discover it and mark his tally one count closer to the end of what he owed. Then he'd pay the last of it and be free of fate forever. But first, he had to get rid of the fucking curse.

Voices from outside interrupted his thoughts. It had been a very long time since conversation that did not include Draco had existed on this property; what the hell had Potter done now? He made his way towards the back sunroom, where the sound carried from, and leaned in the doorway to listen unashamedly through the open windows.

"I'm not a bloody idiot, Ron," Potter hissed into a device on his wrist. Draco hadn't noticed it before, assuming Potter was simply wearing a watch. "I know there's something bigger at work here. I'm not going to fall into it just because it's knocking on my door."

Weasley's voice scoffed in response. "When do you not fall head first into the middle of things? You're Harry Potter; it's what you do."

"Ron." Potter's voice sounded utterly betrayed. Even Draco felt a little wrong-footed listening to this, but he didn't leave.

"Look, I get it." Weasley's voice softened. "It's not your fault that you're always dragged into these things. I'm not blaming you, I'm just saying... you're always banging on about the Unseen Hand. Well, now's your chance to prove you're better than it." He sighed. "I just want to make sure you don't trust the wrong people, even if it feels like something bigger wants you to. Hang back as long as you can, at least until you know more."

"Believe me, Ron," Potter said sharply. "I know Malfoy's the wrong sort. I'm not about to forget that."

"Even if your dream comes true?" There was amusement in Weasley's manner now, and rising confusion in Draco's own. "I know it's come back. I can hear it in your voice."

Potter scoffed. "I don't have a Time-Turner, Ron. I can't change the past."

"Well..." All amusement faded so abruptly Draco had whiplash. "You've changed the future before. Don't forget, Harry—you still don't know what you're dealing with. Veela are creatures of fate." His voice was loaded with so much meaning, every cell in Draco's body vibrated with the need to decode the mystery before it leaped out of the shadows to bite him.

But Potter just mumbled something that sounded like, "I make my own choices, Ron," and switched the device off, and Draco had to run back to his kitchen before he was caught eavesdropping like a little kid.

As he mulled over what he'd seen, he realised that something about Potter seemed different, and just as quickly he realised what it was. Although, then he wondered if it wasn't different at all, but rather that Draco simply had never noticed it. Either way, it was obvious now—how Potter leant into the conversation, his entire body revealing what he tried to conceal with humour and casualness. The curse revealed it: Potter was lonely.

Very, very lonely.

*

Draco soared above the Sanctuary, moonlight limning his wings. It was strange, because he didn't have wings, and neither could he fly, and yet there was the world below him. Laid out like an adventure map, the distant hills a borderline that warned: here be monsters.

Except Draco was the monster.

He stretched his claws into the wind, opened his beak, and screeched.

The sound broke through his dreams, snapping Draco wide awake in his bed. He sat bolt upright, staring at the moonlight on the opposite wall and shivering as he remembered how it had felt to survey the ground with murder pulsing in his veins.

So that was the Veela whose territory Potter had invaded. Draco's gut roiled in displeasure. Somehow, the full-blooded Veela had called to him, melding their minds together in its dreamscape, and as he had soared with its wings, he had no doubt at all that it would not be satisfied until it tasted Potter's blood.

And it had ignited Draco's own jealousy, tearing at him until the mere thought of Potter entering this Veela's territory made him want to kill. To rend flesh from bone until nothing was left behind. In a state like this, he didn't care about breaking the curse.

He embraced it.

What in Merlin's name were they going to do?

Slipping from his bed, he realised something aside from the shock of his dream had awoken him. A steady sound thrummed through his cottage, almost beyond his hearing. Like a pounding, beating drum.

Like blood pulsing in a vein.

Draco hooked his velvet dressing gown over his shoulders and followed the sound. It led him beyond the conservatory, out the slim glass door that led to the side path, past the rows of elaborately styled enclosures that encouraged the peafowl to choose their own adventure. The sound faded from his ears but began to beat in his veins, tugging him forward so strongly he could have walked the path blind. Eventually, he found its conclusion.

It led, of course, to Potter.

"You're just in time," Potter murmured, staring into some contraption Draco had never seen before. Made of a series of three glass orbs, it hovered in the air between them. As Draco watched, something floating in the central orb caught the light, and he realised each sphere was filled with feathers.

"What the—"

"Which feather do you like best?" Potter asked, peering around the glass to stare at him with an eerie intensity.

"Excuse me?"

Potter jerked his chin roughly towards the feathers. "I'm wooing you—peacock style."

Relief flooded Draco's chest. "Oh, I see. This is another dream."

With a shrug, Potter turned back to the glass contraption. "Sure. You're passed out on the garden path, and I'm only going to remember this as a fever dream. But I'm also messing with you—I'm trying to woo the Veela."

"You are," Draco stressed, enunciating very carefully, "a total imbecile."

One of the feathers exploded.

Potter yelped in triumph. "It's working!"

Draco scrubbed his palm across his face and winced, suddenly feeling immensely tired. "Potter, you know I'm the Veela, right?"

The air froze, dreamlike and wispy as it caressed Draco's face and then fled the clearing. Potter stared at him, face slack with shock, and Draco struggled to breathe.

"You're what?"

"I'm part Veela, Potter. Congratulations—you now know the Malfoys' most carefully guarded secret."

"But..." Potter trailed off, shaking his head. "I can't seduce you."

Draco spluttered. "I should think not."

Except the curse stirring within his blood told him that wasn't true.

Then he realised what Potter had said.

"What?"

"Well, I'm sorry Malfoy, I'm flattered, but—"

"For Merlin's sake, that's not what I— The plan, Potter. Are you honestly telling me this was your plan?"

Potter shrugged. "Well, yeah. I thought if I could trick the Veela into thinking I'd made a nest for us, I could make the curse think it had... worked."

Somewhere outside the sphere of frozen time in their dreamscape, a cricket chirped.

Eventually, Draco simply said, "So we're doomed, then."

Unease settled on Potter's features, along with another glimpse of the rage Draco had seen earlier. "Unless you remember how I hurt you, I guess."

Draco frowned. "When did you hurt me?"

Potter's expression grew still. When he spoke, it came out in a strange voice, too quiet, and all he said was, "It's time to wake up now, Malfoy."

Draco woke to a twilight sky and Potter's concerned face staring down at him.

Ah, his twisted, messed up brain thought. So that's what it takes to make him look at me.

"Okay, so first of all," Potter said, rubbing his head and wincing. "That was not my plan. Christ, Malfoy, what do you take me for?"

"You said it, not me," Draco complained, sitting up and staring at his front door from the wrong side of it. "Didn't you say you wouldn't remember this?"

"That wasn't me," Potter said in an odd voice. "That was the version of me you conjured in your head. I was... floating around. I work with dreamscapes, Malfoy. Of course I can recognise one and remember it." He cast him a sideways glance. "When were you going to tell me you were the Veela?"

"I was getting around to it."

"I mean, I'm all for going at your own pace, but we are on something of a deadline."

"I'm aware of that," Draco snapped, turning away and rising awkwardly to his feet.

His bones ached; he must have been out here for hours. Potter rose behind him, dusting down his trousers and staring at the sky with a calculating expression.

"It's after midnight," he said lightly, going by no obvious medium but the stars. "Guess I'll try the gate. If it's going to open at all, it will be now."

Draco nodded, watching as Potter strode down the lane to his front step and wriggled the latch. He looked smaller from this distance, even though Draco knew it was only his mind playing tricks on him and twisting length and shadow into an inaccurate rendition of fact. The facts had already been determined; no amount of perception could alter them.

Potter tried the latch, it failed, and he walked back up the steps without meeting Draco's eye. They remained standing side by side for several moments, staring out into the night.

"How long do we have until the curse takes over?" Potter asked quietly.

"I think it already has," Draco confessed. "Can't you feel it?"

Potter twitched, like he wanted to reach for Draco. It didn't make sense, because Draco had already determined the curse didn't manifest anything physical.

If anything, the curse had so far seemed to strip away layers rather than construct the artificial. Draco hadn't noticed anything about Potter that he'd never seen before; rather, the things he had already noticed, years ago, came rushing back in full force. Like how Potter always gave Draco his full attention. And how he never really did that for anyone else.

And how Draco always really, really wanted him to.

Was the curse doing something similar to Potter? How did Potter see him?

Why did none of this feel changed, when everything was changing?

"I can sleep in the conservatory," Potter said abruptly, studying the building with tight lips as he ran his hand through his messy black hair. "I'm used to being out in the field."

Heat coursed through Draco as the curse latched onto their blood, thriving as the walls closed in tighter. Blue flame flickered in Potter's eyes, and Draco wanted to burn in it.

"Don't be ridiculous." Draco turned and strode through the front door. "The Prophet would never let me live it down if they caught wind. The guest room is down the hall."

Having had just about all he could take of Potter and curses and dreams that lit his blood on fire, Draco went to bed.

He studied his own face in the mirror for several minutes before turning out the lights, searching as he often did for signs that death had come for him as it was knocking for his father. There were no visible markings, but Draco could feel it lurking in the shadows all the same. He had two more debts to pay. This curse was one, and Blaise was researching the final, the hundredth, the one that would free Draco and let him finally rest.

Draco turned out the lights and went to sleep.

*

The figure appeared shortly after midnight, Draco's eyes snapping open to find it watching him from the corner by the window. Oddly, he didn't feel terror, and not only because his nights at the Manor had prepared him for the occasional incident like this, random Death Eaters ensuring no traitors had slipped away in the night. No, he wasn't afraid because this figure didn't feel dangerous—not to him.

It watched him, tilting its hooded head to the side as though assessing him. Moonlight glinted as the tree outside his window swayed, and for a moment he saw a flash of what might have been a beak.

Then the figure disappeared. When Draco woke in the morning, he would have forgotten it had ever been there.

*

Fortunately, Draco did not dream of Potter again. He dreamed of perfectly ordinary things, like handshakes and first impressions and Hogwarts feasts that lasted for days. When he woke, the curse had buried itself deep in his bones, and he realised that everything up until this moment had only been a prelude to some new level of shitfuckery that he couldn't even imagine.

Two golden, bird-like eyes stared back at him from the mirror, and Draco silently vowed to eviscerate every single organ in Potter's body. But only after he'd saved his life first.

When he emerged from his bedroom, Potter did a double take at the sight of his face but wisely did not mention the eyes. Draco noted, uncharitably, that this may have been more due to the fact that he had covered Draco's living room in peacock feathers rather than any sense of polite conduct.

"I cannot work with you on this if you're going to insist on acting cryptically in ways that I can only assume are a threat," Draco said tiredly, studying the wisps of fluff floating in the air—remnants of down feathers divested of their bodily shackles. "You didn't even ask if I was allergic."

"I took a wild guess that the peacock keeper would manage just fine." Potter bared his teeth in a smile, watching Draco over the top of his coffee mug. "Do you want to know what the plan is?"

His gaze lingered too long on the vee of skin visible atop Draco's silk pyjamas. Draco swallowed thickly.

None of this felt strange, and that was the strangest part. He wanted Potter to... do something. Something he couldn't articulate, and it was making him edgy just thinking about it. Like he was on the precipice of discovering something he didn't want to know.

"I thought you weren't going to line the nest."

"No, that was a particularly stupid idea."

"It was a dream," Draco argued indignantly. "It also said you hurt me, if you recall, when anyone with a functioning memory knows—" He broke off, thinking of pinboards and red string and Potter's photo having yet to trace to anything Draco could name. Draco swallowed. "What is this then?"

Potter tilted his head to the side, studying him. Then he shrugged and turned back to the feathers. "You wanted to know why I've been on your property after midnight?"

Only like a Crup wants the juiciest of bones.

Draco made a non-committal noise.

"There's something wrong with my magic."

All the breath left Draco in a rush at Potter's confession. "What?"

Potter shrugged. "It's been that way for years—ever since I borrowed your wand." He sighed, swilling the last of his coffee around in his mug. "I've been studying the dual core, specifically the peacock feather, and my research turned up a complimentary link between the feathers and Veela magic about two years ago. I stupidly—"

Aah, Draco mentally interjected, we agree on something.

"—assumed that's why you added the second core to yours and your father's wands. So you could bring some of the Veela Divination mastery into your spellwork and help Voldemort with his prophecy obsession." Potter shrugged.

Draco snorted at the realisation of how little Potter understood his father's distaste for impure blood. "Not quite."

"Yeah, it was much simpler than that: you're Veela." Potter huffed a laugh, a tinge of pink blooming in his cheeks. "Who knew?"

"Don't beat yourself up about it," Draco mumbled, folding his arms and leaning back in the doorway. "You're the first person to put it together in two centuries."

Potter's eyebrows lifted. "Do I get a medal?"

"For getting yourself cursed and volunteering me as executioner? You're lucky I haven't just given into the curse and called it divine retribution."

Potter muttered something that sounded awfully like put us both out of our misery, but Draco maturely ignored it. He waited for Potter to continue, still not certain how Potter had thought feathers were the answer to the Veela Curse.

Potter cleared his throat. "So, I've been studying the feathers to see if being connected to creature magic, even briefly, might have muddled my own magic. Still don't know the answer to that, but I guess I must have pissed off a nesting mother somewhere by nicking all those feathers from your property and studying them, and you've been tasked with slapping me on the wrist for that transgression."

"And does the Great Harry Potter have a plan to appease this nesting mother?" Draco couldn't resist asking, rankled that Potter had come up with so many ridiculous theories without ever thinking to ask for his help.

He'd crept around his property after midnight for Merlin's sake. Would it have killed him to knock on the door once and say, hey, Draco, about that wand I stole for a while... I need your help. Draco ground his teeth together and fought not to give into stage two earlier than strictly necessary.

"Yeah, I think our best option is to talk to the Veela. When I cast this spell, the feathers will create a vortex to heighten your Veela strength, and you can reach out for a parley. Much simpler than my initial plan, which was to hope I found some feathers once used in its nest and put a tracing spell on them."

"No," Draco snarled, and the tone of his voice was unrecognisable—all pitched and screeching on the edges.

Potter reeled. "Okay," he said slowly, holding up his hands. "It's okay, I didn't realise..." He stared at Draco, edging backwards.

Draco's shoulders itched. Just the thought of that Veela landing on his property made him want to rake his claws across its face. Nothing was allowed here, near him.

Near his mate.

Blue flame licked the feathers closest to him, and he shifted his gaze to watch the fuckers burn.

"Easy now," someone was saying. "No one's coming here, Malfoy. You can strengthen the wards, do whatever it takes."

Someone was in his house. Someone who needed to be hunted and initiated. Someone who had wronged him so very, very deeply.

Lessons must be taught. Reparations must be given. Redemption earned.

"Malfoy!" The voice broke through his mounting rage, and when Draco turned to study the room through the leaping blue flames of retribution, he found his mate kneeling in supplication at his feet.

The flames died, and Draco stumbled backwards in sudden exhaustion. "What in Merlin's name?" he muttered weakly, clutching his head.

The room stunk of singed feathers, but nothing else was damaged. Downy fluff floated past his face, its edges still crisping in fiery embers.

"Easy," Potter repeated, creeping his hands slowly above his head but remaining on his knees. It soothed Draco, somehow, seeing him like that. Knowing he wasn't about to run. "This is your house. We'll work this out together."

The last of the curse left him, sapping him of his energy, and he sank to the ground. "What happened?" he asked, stronger this time.

This time, when he looked at Potter kneeling in front of him, eyes downcast in self-preservation, he didn't feel relief—he wanted only for Potter to notice him, like Potter always did, and for the noticing to mean something, like Draco had always hoped.

That's when it hit him. It was a soft realisation, where most of Draco's truths in life had been harsh and jagged, and it was perhaps that more than anything else that made it real. Because when had Draco ever been given anything soft? Soft things led to disaster, and this could only lead to the most earth-shattering disaster of them all, so it had to be true.

Oh, he thought. How long have I been in love with Potter?

Potter looked as though he might be about to say something profound, but then he licked his lips and said slowly, "I made a mistake."

"Did you?" Draco couldn't even find it in himself to enjoy the moment. If he breathed too hard, he could still smell Potter's blood.

"I didn't realise your Veela heritage was just dormant. I thought the line had faded completely in you."

Draco nodded slowly. Potter had assumed him weak; it figured. What else was new?

"I reverted to fledgling stage when the curse hit," Draco explained, staring at his hands. "Anything is possible." He huffed a laugh. "Might even grow a beak on the new moon. Isn't that fun?"

The biting edge had returned to his voice, thank Merlin, and Potter seemed to notice it too. He climbed slowly to his feet. "New plan," he said lightly, although there was a hardness to his jaw that Draco didn't want to examine too closely, lest it reveal more than he wanted about the man he was indefinitely locked up with. "We work on this together. Let's start from the beginning—do you have any texts I can read?"

Draco snorted. "My how things change," he muttered, part of him wishing dearly for Hogwarts and lazy Sundays spent witnessing Potter and Weasley's absolute inability to do any of their own homework.

But he said none of that, and simply climbed to his feet with increasing tiredness.

"Malfoy," Potter said abruptly, wetting his lips and looking nervous. He paused, and Draco waited expectantly. "If you're Veela, shouldn't I be... well... falling at your feet or something?"

Draco lifted his eyebrows and, with a savage and malicious glee, let go of his hold on the glamour that kept his Veela charms hidden.

Potter's eyes darkened, and he moved forward with a lurch, eyes glazed and filled with desire. It opened up a pit of yearning within Draco's heart, seeing a future he could never have become real before his eyes. This curse might well be the worst thing that had ever happened to him, because there was nothing in it he could trust, and—he was slowly, painfully realising—everything that he had always wanted.

Because the curse hadn't needed to make Draco love Potter, after all; it had only needed to make Draco remember him. Draco had done the rest.

Viciously, he pulled the glamour back into place.

"You aren't falling at my feet because I don't want you to," Draco snapped.

Before Potter could respond, he turned away and went to fetch the texts.

*

Draco's library had never had so much restless energy in it before. He didn't know what to make of it. Potter researched the same way he killed Dark Lords; all in, keep them moving, sacrifices always an option. Over the course of two hours, he sat by the window, at the desk, on the ottoman by the door, and reverted to standing with his book propped on the mantlepiece and one leg inexplicably propped on the stool. Draco was reminded absurdly of sitting in the Slytherin common room and watching the Giant Squid through the windows as it circled but never stopped, its prey mimicking those same movements seconds in advance.

Did Potter's restlessness belong to predator or prey?

"You said something was wrong with your magic," Draco said when he realised too long had passed with him staring at Potter's arse. The gold had fortunately faded from his irises, but he'd bet the curse wouldn't need much to get going again. "What does it do?"

Potter sighed, closing his book and turning to Draco as if glad for the distraction. "It's erratic... Mostly people wouldn't notice, but after the Elder Wand my magic has been more susceptible to fluctuations. I notice them more, I mean. It's hard to explain." He pulled a face, looking for a moment like the schoolboy Draco remembered. He realised suddenly that, despite how they had slipped into their childhood rivalry like there were seconds rather than years between them, that schoolboy had been absent until now. "I've felt more connected to my magic since... the Elder Wand. It's like I am my magic, and it's me, but neither of us are running at the right speed."

Draco frowned. "You're reminding me of the moment Veela blood takes hold," he admitted. "That's how puberty feels."

Potter sniggered at the word 'puberty', and Draco shot him a mulish glance.

"Sorry," Potter said, not looking sorry at all. "Go on."

"If I grow a beak, I'm going to bite your face off with it," Draco said pleasantly, and then went on to explain about Veela puberty. "Magical creatures are different to wizards in that they don't need wands as a conduit for their magic. They are connected to the very source of their magic, and it manifests in their body—as opposed to wizards who access a stream of innate magic via spellwork and the wand conduit."

Potter nodded, looking the opposite of confused, which bothered Draco on levels he didn't want to acknowledge. "And when a child does accidental magic, it accesses the core of their magical self, using the blood as a conduit, the same way as an adult does wandless magic."

"Quite." Draco shifted in his seat, trying to regain the upper hand and finding it impossible. Potter was an Unspeakable; he probably knew more than Draco did. "A person may be forgiven for thinking that this blood conduit is functionally the same as a magical creature, like a Veela or a house-elf, but it is not. Blood as a conduit still limits the magic to the blood, requiring focus to appropriately wield the channel of power. A creature is magic. It's why we use hair and feathers as wand cores rather than blood. We don't need it. When Veela blood takes hold..." He swallowed. "It feels raw. Not even like you're on fire—like you are fire. And it's up to you not to burn."

"Is that how your magic feels?"

Draco shuddered. "I stopped feeling my magic a long time ago, Potter," he gritted out, admitting something he hadn't wanted to think about until the last of his debt to Fate was paid. If he reached for his magic, guilt and sorrow came with it. It was better not to reach at all. "It's there when I need it, and that's all that matters."

To Draco's surprise and confusion, Potter winced. "That sounds awful."

His voice came out softer than usual, tinged with empathy rather than the cutting edge of pity. Something warm kindled in Draco's chest, and he changed the subject before he could be foolish enough to enjoy it.

"Yes, well, it's not exactly relevant."

A strange look crossed Potter's face. "Wait." He picked up a previously abandoned text and flicked through until he obviously found what he'd been looking for. "Curse words."

"You're nearly thirty, Potter, you can say them out loud now. Promise I won't tell."

"No, Malfoy." Potter shook his head exasperatedly. "We were just talking about the feeling of magic—types of magic feel different, yeah? Well, this curse has felt strange ever since it settled, and I just worked out why. It doesn't feel like an ordinary blood curse. It feels like a casting, like there are words that set it off."

Draco sighed. "But it is a blood curse, and those don't need a casting. It's blood to blood."

He wanted to make a quip about how many curses the Ministry inflicted on its Unspeakables for training, if Potter could identify them by feeling, but judging by the look on Potter's face he didn't want the answer.

"Yeah, but this is a Veela blood curse, Malfoy. Here, listen. As creatures of family and fate, Veela prophecies are written in blood." Potter snapped the book closed triumphantly. "It's a Veela blood curse, which makes it a prophecy, and prophecies have words. What are the words, Malfoy? Maybe if we can find the specific prophecy that started it, then we'd have a shot of undoing it."

Draco gritted his teeth together, furious that he hadn't figured that out himself. "Words, feathers, blood—this curse is getting awfully fucking complicated."

"Well, to be fair, the feathers are more about the wands and my magic's... weirdness. They probably have nothing to do with the curse."

Draco tilted his head to the side, curious. "Why are you so caught up on feathers, Potter? I know they're linked to Veela and you think the creature magic has addled you, but this is starting to sound like a fetish."

Potter shrugged, leafing idly through the book he had just shut. "Well they were only a lead at first, but then the feathers kept responding strangely to me."

"Strangely?" Draco asked, his stomach sinking.

Potter cleared his throat. "They keep bringing me back here, Malfoy." His voice came out odd, all tight and strangled when Potter was normally explosive and sharp. "I'd wake up to a trail of feathers leading me out the door. I'd see them floating on the wind. My magic... it wants to be here. It has for years."

"Here..." Draco said slowly. "In Wiltshire?" He knew what Potter meant; he wasn't stupid.

But it was impossible.

"Here with you. There's this dream..." Potter broke off but met his eye, and flame flickered there, and Draco stopped caring about controlling the curse at all.

Maybe he'd kill Potter, but he'd get to kiss him first.

He jolted forward, out of his chair, but came to his senses halfway across the room and froze. Something caught the light in the corner of his eye, looking like an hourglass with the sand running out, but Draco didn't own an hourglass so that must be wrong.

Draco realised, through the fog of desire, that Potter was watching him with fear. It was well hidden, masked carefully with the calm surety Draco recognised from Hogwarts, but it was there.

He swallowed and lifted one hand in a placating gesture before turning away. "Have you found any other leads?" he asked the wall. "I don't fancy guessing the specifics of a prophecy when it could be anything. Unless we have the exact wording, knowing a prophecy exists is next to useless, whether it's Veela or otherwise."

"No leads. The only other thing I didn't already know is that the curse can be cast unconsciously, but since the Veela probably sensed me cross its territory line and cursed me without thinking, I don't see how that's helpful." He gave Draco an odd look. "But I can recognise the Veela in you now." When Draco turned back, Potter had moved closer. The fear was still there, but curiosity had joined it. "What if we tried to draw your Veela blood out?"

"I like my blood where it is, thanks, Potter."

Potter shook his head. "I mean hurry it up. It's going through fledgling state again, right? And when it finishes and it's worked out what it's doing, the curse activates properly. Let's hurry it up. Give ourselves something to actually fight."

The hourglass that didn't exist wobbled.

Draco let out his breath in a rush. "Are you mad? If we let it out here, now, I'll murder you."

"Not here." Potter rolled his eyes. "In a dream. I might be able to trace the curse back to its trigger that way, too."

Yes, Draco thought idly, his attention captivated by the astonishing green of Potter's irises, absolutely mad.

Then, he followed him willingly into madness anyway.

*

Potter needed to collect a sample of herbs before they could descend into a dreamscape together, but Draco's herb garden was well-stocked, and they left the herbs steeping beneath the growing twilight and went out into the cottage's empty field to throw a Quaffle back and forth as though they were friends.

Potter hurled the first one so hard it hurt, and Draco responded in kind, because no matter what the curse was doing to them, they weren't friends.

"Your angle is too wide," Potter instructed, after they'd each scored a handful of unacknowledged points by directing the Quaffle to thwack against shoulders and legs. He sighed, dropping his hands, including the one holding the Quaffle, and shrugged awkwardly. "You always did that in school, too. I can show you if you like."

Draco considered a biting retort, but he always had struggled to aim the Quaffle perfectly, and...

It had been so long since anyone visited like this. He would have Blaise for tea, or Pansy via owl or Floo, but it was never like this. Never so... companionable.

"Alright," he said warily. "But you're half a second delayed when you catch. You need to make your decision when the Quaffle leaves my hands, not when it's mid-air."

Not with how they were throwing anyway.

Potter nodded, and then directed Draco how to hold the Quaffle to get the right angle, and suddenly they were passing it back and forth without the anger.

Draco realised, abruptly, that the anger he kept seeing in Potter was completely gone as well. He actually looked happy.

"How long has it been since you left the Sanctuary?" Potter asked suddenly, catching the Quaffle with ease and lobbing it straight back to Draco's chest.

"Years," Draco said lightly as he threw it back. "I like it here."

"Clearly."

"No need to be a twat about it."

Potter shrugged. "I just—" He stopped, Quaffle poised above his shoulder. "Don't you ever feel lost out here, all on your own? You've only got yourself for company."

All the time, Draco realised silently, noting it with the same quiet sadness he noted all of the consequences his choices had led him to.

But he shook his head. "I have the animals," he said, forcing himself to laugh. "They're more valuable than you realise."

He caught the Quaffle Potter sent sailing in a high lob above their heads, then sent it back fast and low. "I bet your house is Gryffindor party central?" he asked, an undisguised mixture of disgust and longing in his voice.

Potter laughed, an odd look in his eye. "No," he said, glancing at the device on his wrist and jerking his head towards the door. The herbs must be done. "No, my house is very quiet," he added, chewing on his lip thoughtfully. "Most of the time, there's only myself for company, really."

Draco didn't know what to say to that. "But what about Weasley and Granger?" he found himself asking.

Potter glanced at him sideways. "Well, they've got each other, don't they?" he said with a shrug. "It's different. Everything's different, out in the real world. Away from Hogwarts."

The way Potter looked at Draco hadn't changed. The way he hung on Draco's words, even if he hated them, hadn't changed. The way he made Draco feel seen and heard and known when the rest of the world had always been so quick to tell him what he was without ever wanting to know... That hadn't changed, not even a bit. Not even at all.

"Yes," Draco agreed. "It's different."

*

Potter brewed them a potion, something to help them slip into dreams when neither of them were even close to tired. Draco watched him sprinkle various leaves across the water, muttering toneless incantations as they slipped below the surface. He kept waiting for the curse to properly hit, for their compatibility to be ordained by Fate and the soulmate bond to tighten around his heart. Surely it was close? Hours had passed since Potter first arrived at his doorstep, and yet, apart from certain personal realisations, Draco felt basically the same as he always had.

In all honesty, he felt like he had at Hogwarts, drawn to the golden boy who broke all the rules but could do no wrong. But this time round, it was like the resistance was gone. He was older now, and he was just so tired. Draco recalled the sensation of hating Potter, of needing him to fail and Draco to win, but it was as though someone had just taken that away.

And in taking that away, Draco was left to see what lay beneath.

Potter's brow furrowed as he stirred the brew, three times clockwise, three times anticlockwise, and then raised it to smell. As the smell hit his nostrils, his nose wrinkled in distaste, and he wiped the fog of heat from his glasses with his sleeve.

"Ready," he declared, sliding one mug across the counter to Draco and glancing at him.

He still looked lonely. Lonely and alone.

"I didn't know soulmates felt like this," Draco said before he could stop himself.

"What? Normal?" Potter huffed a laugh and then froze.

Neither of them could look at each other, staring down at their mugs as the water slowly cooled enough to drink.

Draco sipped experimentally after a few minutes, and then nodded. "If you're drugging me, Potter," he muttered, pausing as he tried to think of an adequate punishment. Eventually he shook his head and finished, "poor show."

Then he drank, toasting to the inanity of the world just before it faded away.

*

Draco soared, as he had once before, and surveyed the land below him. But this time, he sensed Potter in the air beside him.

"Focus, Malfoy," Potter said firmly, the sound coming from nowhere and everywhere. "What does the curse want? What are the words that started it?"

"It wants to kill you, you giant twat," Draco snarled, fighting the urge to hunt. His vision was turning red at the edges.

"You sure that's not what you want?" Potter asked drily.

It was an odd experience to be chastised by a bodiless entity.

"The curse and I are currently in agreement," Draco muttered, spitting the words around the shape of his beak. "Give me a minute."

Potter was right—of course. There was something there... Something deeper than the outer urges to hunt and kill.

A need. Draco needed something from Potter.

The idea was ridiculous. What could he possibly need from Potter?

The curse washed over him, and with cold certainty Draco realised that, whatever it was, if he didn't get it, Potter's wouldn't be the only life the curse would take.

Wind hit him abruptly, throwing him off course, and then everything shifted. He perched atop a chandelier and stared down at a familiar scene—one he had lived before from ground level.

Directives were snarled, hexes thrown, Bellatrix's wild hair whipping in a frenzy that punctuated every flash of hatred from her wand.

Voices surrounded Draco as though in a fog.

"Dobby has no master! Dobby is a free elf, and Dobby has come to save Harry Potter and his friends!"

"Ron, catch—and GO!"

Potter lunged for the wand in Draco's hand—

—the air shifted strangely, as though time were slowing down, impeded by the fog of despair and unhappiness that permeated from Draco as he realised what was about to happen, how defenceless Potter was about to leave him—

—and the ceiling cracked with lightning as Potter snatched his wand and left.

Draco no longer soared, but the walls of the Manor did fade for his own Sanctuary. Peace filled him, even if it were not quite happiness, and he sank into the knowledge that he had made it through his darkest days and found a safe way to repay Fate for all he had done under the Manor's roof. People had rejected him, unwilling to accept his clumsy attempts at reparations, but creatures did not. They could not talk back, and he had to repay his debt somehow because Fate required it, and he was his father's son but he was not his father.

The gate of the Sanctuary creaked open in his dream, and he saw Potter tiptoe onto his property. Something looming and ancient surged within the cottage where Draco of the past slept, because this was clearly a memory—just not his own this time. Even though Potter of the present was nowhere to be seen or felt, and had not been since the Manor appeared.

Draco froze as he watched Potter take in his surroundings. How much could Draco trust this dream? Was it accurate? Because Potter was staring at the cottage the same way Draco might imagine an eternal wanderer stared through a foggy window to a warm hearth and a feast within. Longingly. Desperately. And with the absolute conviction that they were unwelcome.

Power radiated from the Sanctuary, ancient, furious power, but the clueless wizard on his path continued on, dooming them all. Draco sank back into the bushes—which had become, through Draco's discomfort, the bushes of the present—unwilling to watch the moment the Veela cursed him.

But there was something strange about that thought. He thought it around scents that humans could not smell, around trails of prey he should not see. He had become the Veela again, but he had not meant to.

And the pieces were slowly sinking into place.

And he stumbled, the earth catching him as he fell, branches snagging on his clothing, before the dream faded away.

Draco sat bolt upright on the couch. Potter had yet to awaken, stirring restlessly in his sleep.

Running a hand through his hair, he emerged with a leaf, his fingers finding grazed skin in the place where the branch had hit him. His first thought was how strange—I didn't know mind melds worked that way.

His second thought connected the dots. Mind melds did not allow the alteration of physical boundaries. If Draco had experienced something physical, it was because he had physically been there, transported via a dreamscape. And, given the unusual scope of the dream and that this wasn't the first time he had dreamed it, had likely done so more than once.

As the knowledge hit him, vague recollections of past dreams entered his mind. They were so blurred he couldn't distinguish them from an ordinary nightmare—nothing out of the ordinary for Draco's sleep. But their frequency—and his obliviousness to them—only supported the uncomfortable truth settling in his mind.

There was no other Veela.

The curse was Draco's.

Somehow, in between Potter sneaking around on his property under the moonlight and Draco's unwitting midnight territory patrols, he had cursed the Boy Who Lived to die.

*

"If you're going to fuck with me, Malfoy," Potter snapped, face white, "at least take me out to dinner first."

Draco rolled his eyes. "I'm not messing with you. The curse is mine, so we just need to work out how I can rescind it."

"If it's your curse then surely you just need to take it back," Potter cut back, voice rising to the familiar pitch Draco recalled from their last years together at school.

Like sinking into a familiar jacket, Draco found his blood boiling in response. "I know you've allegedly got a brain in there," he snapped, vicious and cutting, "so try to use it. This curse can only end once the transgressor has paid for their sins."

Potter rolled his eyes so hard it must have hurt. "My sins. Right. Trust you to see visiting your house as a sin."

"Uninvited!" Draco yelled. "You weren't invited, and you didn't announce yourself, and you still somehow think you're in the right?"

He was furious. Rage coursed through his veins, and suddenly the strange intensity in Potter's eyes was like a mirror, even if Draco still didn't know the source of Potter's anger.

"All you have to do," he spat out slowly, "is leave. That's it. The curse will probably lift if you just leave me alone, and you won't even do that."

Potter's eyebrows shot up, incredulous. "You think I want to stay here with you? The curse is keeping me here!"

"Of course it's keeping you here! It will continue to keep you here until you admit what you did wrong! We're obviously in the bloody judgement phase now, having hurtled past the barrier between stages one and two like it was a goddamn race!"

Potter laughed, sounding slightly unhinged. "Yeah, okay, and once I confess, the final stage will activate and you'll fucking kill me. Call me crazy, but I don't see much incentive."

Draco closed his eyes and breathed slowly. Potter was right, of course, but he didn't know what else to do. "Just try it," he whispered, still with his eyes closed. "Just try to say sorry."

I don't want to kill you, he thought, and when he opened his eyes for a moment the look on Potter's face made him worry he'd said it out loud. He caught his reflection in the mirror by the door and saw the golden Veela eyes were back. He suspected they wouldn't disappear again, not until the curse was done.

He flexed his fingers, and claws that should only have appeared beneath the harvest moon unsheathed themselves from beneath his human nails.

"I'm sorry I trespassed," Potter said slowly, and the bastard even sounded like he meant it. "I didn't mean to make you feel... unsafe."

Draco nearly laughed. The idea that a passive, unnoticeable visitor to his large estate could make him feel unsafe was hysterical only because it was true.

"Thank you," he said quietly, and something jolted inside him, like a stone that wanted to give away. He felt, for a second, as though an avalanche of rock sat within his ribcage, waiting for the right note to make it topple and reveal the hidden cavern's entrance, but the stone didn't fall and the curse didn't lift and Draco suddenly wanted very badly to go to sleep.

"Okay," Potter said, sounding equally tired, "so that didn't work. Let's try to confront the curse again. I nearly got it before."

"No you didn't."

"Malfoy, I know it pains you to hear this, but I know what I'm doing. The curse has... shape in your dreams. I had to identify it before, so I couldn't attack, but I know it now. I can fight it. I lost you when the dream started to shift around, but I won't this time."

"Not everything in this world can be solved by headbutting it, you do know that, don't you?"

Potter laughed, drawing Draco's attention more than arguing would. "Malfoy. Trust me."

An owl whooshed through the open window, carrying a thick letter stamped with Blaise's seal, and it was deeply important because Blaise had been researching the final reparation for him, but Draco didn't open it.

"You're different these days," Potter said, watching him. "I think I've just worked out why."

"Do share with the class."

"You're alone."

Draco jolted. "Wow," he muttered. "Your manners are as top notch as ever, I see."

"I didn't mean lonely." Potter shook his head. "I meant you aren't surrounded by cronies. That sort of... defined you at Hogwarts. You were the head of a pack of idiots. Even when you were alone you were... part of something else. A thought that didn't belong to you. But here, you're just you." He shrugged. "I like you better this way."

Draco couldn't hide his surprise. He tried to shrug it off, but the words buried deep inside him. Potter liked him better this way.

Was it an insult, or a compliment?

Did Draco like the man he'd become? It was an odd thought, one that had never felt relevant before. Who cared what he had become? It was his past that defined him.

"All right, let's try again. But not my dreams, this time," Draco insisted, shuddering as he remembered the moment Potter took his wand. Seeing it again had awoken something deep and wretched inside him, and even knowing that this moment had somehow caused Potter's magic to irrefutably reject him, he couldn't bear the thought of seeing it for a third time.

Something dark and uncertain crossed Potter's face, but eventually he shrugged and said, "Okay."

The wind ruffled the curtains, slipping through the cracked window as Potter mixed together various herbs from Draco's collection. When he handed the glass to Draco, it was almost domestic this time, two companions sharing a drink.

"Bottom's up," Potter said, mouth twitching. "But maybe sit down first. Two dreamscapes in one night, you're going to pass out quick."

Draco sat, and Potter sat beside him, and Draco rather thought Potter was wrong—he had been lonely. But he wasn't now.

They drank, and together they fell asleep.

*

Potter's dream swirled around him, tasting of apple cider and tea cake. At first, that's all it was—barely lucid memories of Hogwarts, filled with a warmth Draco reluctantly confessed he had forgotten, and then occasionally a small dark space spilling over with fear. Perhaps a cupboard? He searched for a sign of his curse given form, or a way to prod at it and get it to give him a clue, but his thoughts were filled with Potter and there were no signs of Veela anywhere.

Then it shifted, and he thought for a moment he was back in his own nightmares, in the memories Potter had stirred up by talking of borrowed wands and drastic measures. But he couldn't be. These dreams were Potter's.

That's when he understood. The memory of Potter taking his wand hadn't been stirred up by the appearance of the man himself; it was a memory Potter dwelled on, a dream he dreamt. It made sense, given everything that had happened to his magic since the Elder Wand, but then, why return to the moment he had taken Draco's? He knew, vaguely, that the event had been complicit in giving Potter the Elder Wand, but this felt... like something more.

Prophetic.

As he thought the word, the dream folded around him like the warm haze of a cozy fire, and someone began to speak.

A hand denied, a hand withdrawn
The outcast cannot be reborn
Swallowed pride, a hand to take
A weary load to choose one's fate

Draco felt the warm, comforting press of someone's hand in his own, tugging him forward, and the hot ache of tears followed quickly behind. He snatched his hand back, feeling abandoned and scornful all in one, and watched the sparkling glass of a broken chandelier whirl around him, slicing his face open, bleeding him dry.

He woke coughing and spluttering, furious because they had failed again and terrified because he had a feeling he'd just discovered something he didn't want to know. Again.

Potter gripped his shoulder, fingernails digging into Draco's skin and his face pale with fright, but before he could explain what the fuck had just happened, an odd sense of calm descended over Draco. They weren't alone.

There was a figure in the corner of the room, and Draco realised he had seen it before. They were no longer dreaming—and he hadn't been dreaming when the cloaked figure first appeared either—but there was definitely a hooded Veela standing in his living room, and Draco selfishly, stubbornly, and stupidly did not want to offer it tea.

Potter followed Draco's line of sight and froze. "That's the curse," he said quietly, and Draco nodded as though he had already figured it out.

As soon as Potter said the words, it was obvious. Of course this was the curse—it had to monitor them somehow, and since this was a blood curse, it made sense that it would appear as his Veela ancestor. It watched them with golden eyes half-hidden in shadow, as alive as the two wizards on the couch, and clicked its beak.

Draco really would have preferred the Veela to appear in its beautiful human form, but he supposed it was angry, since it was a curse after all.

"You saw it in the dream?" Draco asked flatly, studying the creature although it made no move towards them.

"Yeah."

"Well go on then." Draco gestured, lifting his eyebrows. "Fisticuffs, wasn't it? That was your plan?"

Potter rolled his eyes. "It was meant to be in the dream." He almost sounded afraid.

"Will you do what must be done?"

Neither he nor Potter were responsible for those words, and Draco's blood chilled as the voice—sounding like infinite skies and the howl of wind around mountains—washed over him.

"No, I won't bloody kill him," Draco snapped, voice shaking. "Can't you just leave us alone? I forgive him, alright? Wandering into places he doesn't belong is a bad habit that started in childhood; we can't expect it to disappear now."

The Veela tilted its head as it had once before, the memory slamming into Draco's brain. "But you do not forgive him."

The Veela waved its hand, and the middle of three hourglasses Draco had not noticed before turned over. The one on its right was suspended in the air, horizontal, its sand not yet ready to fall.

The one on its left had already run out.

"When the sand runs out, reparations must be made and accepted—or rejected."

Draco frowned. That almost sounded like... "How do I accept them?"

The Veela did not answer. With a sound like sand trickling over glass, it disappeared.

Potter stared at him. "I thought this was meant to be an execution curse," he said thoughtfully. "But it can't be if it's possible to accept reparations."

Draco crossed the room to the mantle and tried to turn the hourglass onto its side, like the right-hand one. But it wouldn't move—obviously. "These must represent the three phases." He ran a hand through his hair. "It's found us compatible, and once this phase concludes, the execution will start."

A strange shudder raced through him as he said those words, and he wondered what moment the curse had witnessed to deem them soulmates. Had it been when Potter stole his wand, leaving him defenceless at the mercy of the greatest Dark Wizard alive? Or had it been when Draco's family had carved hateful words into the skin of the people Potter loved most? Which one, which one... So many choices.

Had the curse always known it would hurt Draco more than Potter? Was that the bitter twist of irony sealing his final debt to Fate? Soulmates or not, Potter would never want him after this, and even when they finally managed to fix the curse, Draco would have to live with the knowledge that he had never wanted anything more than this cryptic, golden-hearted, puzzle of a man. Alone.

He would have to live with the knowledge alone.

"What aren't you telling me?" he asked through gritted teeth, mostly for two reasons. Firstly, because Potter was hiding something, and hiding things right now was stupid. Secondly, because Draco didn't want to think about the fact that he hadn't cared about anyone like this since...

Hogwarts. Since regret.

"I dream about you," Potter said so suddenly, Draco choked on his own spit. "I dream about you, and when I dreamed too many times to take it anymore, I changed the dream, and it changed the future."

"What do you mean?" Draco muttered. "The future isn't written."

"It is if it's prophesied," Potter smiled grimly.

The world froze.

"That's impossible," Draco whispered. "No one can change a prophecy."

Potter toyed with a priceless figurine on Draco's mantle, spinning it this way and that. "Except, apparently, a prophecy-child."

A prophecy-child.

A prophecy-child who had become soulbound to a creature of fate.

Draco's head spun. Something was at work here, some piece of fate that he couldn't trace, and if it went one way Potter would die, and if it went another...

Soulmates.

"What was the prophecy? Was it the one I heard in the dream?" Potter nodded, and there was something in his features, something that made Draco's blood run cold as he realised the rest. "What line did you change?" he asked, even though he already knew. It was the line he had dreamed of, the night Potter first appeared and this whole mess began.

"Swallowed pride, a hand to take. It used to say born to die and born to hate."

A hand denied, a hand withdrawn
The outcast cannot be reborn
Born to die, and born to hate
A weary load to choose one's fate

Draco closed his eyes. "Let me guess: you changed it the night you came here."

Potter grimaced. "The one before. Technically."

"You opened the curse," he whispered. Then he snapped his eyes open. "You didn't think to mention this?"

"Seemed unrelated."

"Everything is related, you imbecile!" Draco yelled. "Fate! Creature of fate! Prophecy-child! This is the key, Potter."

"Well I didn't bloody know you were Veela," Potter snapped. "And I thought it was my magic, all right? I've been studying this prophecy for years, and dreamscapes too, and they're mostly metaphorical, for Merlin's sake. I thought my dream meant I accepted the creature magic from your wand, and the curse was just another hurdle getting in the way."

For a second, he looked so wretched that Draco's anger faded away. "I suppose I can understand that." He sighed. "How did you change it?"

"I didn't leave you in the Manor this time," Potter said, awkwardly turning away. "I took you with me."

An ache long forgotten started up in Draco's chest. "Well, congratulations on changing the future, Potter, but it's not like you can change the past."

"I know."

There was regret in Potter's voice, and that hurt, but there was also anger. Which was bloody rich, in Draco's mind.

"Why didn't you clue into the prophecy when you knew I was the Veela?" he snapped. "You're meant to be the smart one, these days."

To his utter shock, Potter's cheeks turned red and he looked down at his feet. For a long time, he didn't answer, and then he finally said, "It's getting difficult to think clearly when I'm around you."

Which was about the least likely thing Potter could ever say, and rendered Draco quite effectively speechless.

"All right," he said slowly, mind buzzing. "Well, the prophecy. Is the one you've been dreaming of the beginning of the curse, do you think?"

Potter shook his head. "I hadn't seen you for months when the dreams began. I don't think so. And I studied them for years before I stepped foot on your property."

Unlikely then.

"So, we need two things," Draco summarised. "The words of the Veela prophecy that ignited this mess, in case there's something in them to undo it, and—in case there isn't—to find out how I can accept your reparations instead of beheading you. Or however I'm meant to do you in at the end, I don't actually know that part."

"Let's not find out," Potter said with a grimace.

"You know what?" Draco said tiredly. "We need one more thing: a drink."

Potter laughed, the sound filling Draco with a triumph that didn't make sense. "Now you're talking, Malfoy."

*

Draco read Blaise's letter while Potter was in the shower, speeding through the information with a rising sense of excitement. Everything matched—the peacocks had belonged to the O'Reilly's, the O'Reilly children had reported decreasing affinity with spellwork over the two months leading into winter, and when Blaise arranged transportation for the following day, two shining feathers had fallen. This was it. The final debt Draco owed, and it would be paid by tomorrow lunchtime.

He couldn't quite connect to the idea. It didn't feel real. So much so, that he was still trying to find an appropriate expression of joy when Potter emerged from the shower, clothed in loose black pyjamas he had borrowed from Draco and towelling his hair.

"Christ, Malfoy, did your food go down the wrong hole or something?"

Draco rolled his eyes. "Believe it or not, Potter, good news still exists in this world."

Potter sat down and stared at him expectantly. After a pause, he said, "Well?"

"I'm not sharing it with you."

"Oh, I see—lose Witch Weekly's Most Charming Smile award again, did you, and now you're trying to save face?"

"I'm serious, Potter. This is good news, excellent news. Best news I've had since you graced me with your unwelcome presence."

Potter reclined in his chair, watching him, and since he clearly wasn't going to give up and leave it alone, Draco sighed and dropped into the chair opposite, pouring them both a glass of wine from the bottle he'd already set out. "Blaise has acquired two new peacocks for the Sanctuary."

Potter's face did something complicated, like he needed to smile but he didn't want to, and the whole thing annoyed him. He settled for frowning instead. "I've been meaning to ask, what's with the peacocks?"

He could lie, he supposed. But what was the point? Draco was already trapped in some kind of prophecy with Potter. He may as well explain about everything else Fate was handing out.

"It's a way of making amends," he said carefully and called in his pinboard.

It appeared in the centre of the kitchen, and he picked up his glass of wine and walked over to it, so he might better explain certain pieces.

Potter's eyebrows shot up, and he followed, leaning forward to study the links Draco had drawn to each family. "You said something to me recently," he said slowly. "What was it? It was really appropriate—oh, right. Were you dropped on your head as a child?"

Draco bristled, swirling his wine in his glass and staring down into the whirlpool of red. "I bare my heart to you, and you call me idiotic. Merlin, Potter, what a wonderful soulmate you are."

The words caught on the air, changing it, changing them. Potter cleared his throat. "How does raising peacocks make amends for"—he waved his hand at the board—"all those families?"

Ah. Draco relaxed a little. "Because of the magic," he said simply. "Peacocks are especially appropriate for Malfoys, of course, because of the avian link between peacock and Veela. Particularly as both are birds of beauty," he added drily. "But peacocks are magical creatures in their own right. Not as casters, but as filters; they soak the magic in and return it to the earth.

"I have... wronged people, Potter. And since I am at least partially a creature of fate, Fate demands the debt be paid." The room had descended into a strange sort of trance, with Potter listening intently, blue flames flickering in his eyes behind a very human—and wholly impossible—expression. "I tried paying it in person, but it seems it is not enough to offer reparations. They must also be accepted." He shrugged. "And no one would accept mine. So, when the misfortune hitting me in life is too neat to be coincidence, I recognise it for what it is: Fate demanding payment."

Draco paused a moment, eyes unfocused as he stared at his pinboard. So near the end, and those final steps felt insurmountable. The closer he came to wiping his debt, the less he believed he deserved to.

He cleared his throat and went on. "When she comes calling, I seek out the displaced magical custodians of families who can no longer, or who will no longer, care for them. And I heal them. And in so doing, whether the families realise it or not, I heal the magic that I once thought they did not deserve. The magic that I harmed by allowing Voldemort to destroy their homes and the earth they were attuned to."

When he looked up, he noticed Potter staring at him with wide eyes. The bizarre thought occurred to him that, for all their shared glances, Potter had never truly looked at him before, and now he was, and Draco didn't know what to do about it.

"Because magic comes from the earth," Potter said softly. "With your Veela blood, you'd know that. You'd know how that feels."

Draco inclined his head, but Potter wasn't done.

"You mean, all those pure-blood lines, they're connected to the earth as well, they just don't know it?"

"It is impossible," Draco said, twisting the cuff of his shirt between restless fingers, "to occupy an estate for centuries upon centuries and not imprint yourself upon it. Voldemort knew this, although he may not have understood it all. He knew, nonetheless, how to target it. His Death Eaters destroyed homes and sacred land belonging to those he deemed blood traitors, damaging the magic of both its human and animal custodians for... Merlin, decades, probably."

"Except when you step in."

They were closer than before, Draco leaning back against the sink and Potter propped on one hand beside him, almost caging him in. When had they moved?

Why weren't they moving back?

Draco allowed himself to smile, ignoring the slight shake of his hands and the way Potter's eyes were dark with something other than shadow. "Except when I step in. This Sanctuary is home to forty-seven peafowl, six hippogriffs, eighteen Thestrals, twenty-three chickens—don't ask—and one unicorn. There were more peafowl at one point, but, delightfully, many went home."

Potter gave him a small smile, something hidden in it that Draco didn't know how to read, and before he could think it through, he asked, "Has the curse made you remember me as well?"

Potter swallowed, seeming to know exactly what Draco meant, but his answer hit a different note entirely. One Draco was not prepared for. "Malfoy, I never forgot you."

They stared at one another. They stared so long, Draco felt only something truly momentous could break the moment, but then all Potter said was, "Pure-bloods really like peacocks, hey."

"You have no idea."

"And two more arriving tomorrow?"

Draco nodded, glancing at the pinboard. "And with them... an end to this. Finally. My debt will be paid. Well—as soon as we solve this curse."

At that, Potter frowned. He seemed to be warring with something internally, but he only said, "What's the curse reparation for?"

"I can't figure it out," Draco admitted. "But it has to be something. Everything keeps tying together, over and over. Fate has her hands all over this."

Something chimed like a bell, and Potter looked down at the device on his wrist. Whatever he saw there, it made him flinch and recoil, the expression on his face shifting back into that anger from before. Only this time, it came with some inner conflict—sick and wretched. Draco wondered how he could read Potter so well, but before he could question himself, it was gone.

"What is it?" he asked carefully, not sure he wanted to know.

Potter shook his head. "Nothing, just..." He sighed. "Ron's working late in the Department of Mysteries, and he says my prophecy is glowing. It's probably nothing. I mean, we're in the middle of it, aren't we? Of course it's glowing." He fell silent, staring ahead at nothing.

Draco recalled the conversation, and Weasley's insistence that Potter could prove he was better than the Unseen Hand—presumably of Fate—and wondered whether that meant Potter wanted to fight the prophecy or change it back to what it was. What would it mean for Draco if he did either?

The silence stretched, and it was oddly pleasant, until Potter said, "Paying things back doesn't mean you're off the hook, though."

Irritation spiked, and Draco straightened up with a jolt. "And killing a Dark Lord doesn't mean you get to play judge, jury, and executioner." No, apparently that was Draco's job, which only pissed him off more. "Who are you to question what Fate deems adequate?"

The argument rose from nowhere, but it was like they'd been in the middle of it all along. Something that had started years ago and never been resolved.

"I'm just saying, you're treating it like a transaction." Potter stared at him, jaw tight, guilt and anger spreading across his face. "Are you even sorry? Or do you just want Fate off your back?"

Draco's stomach sank. Of all the things Potter could say to him. Of all the mean-spirited, ill-willed, rigid-minded...

"Well, she's gone and made you my soulmate," Draco said flatly as he pushed away from the sink and walked towards the bathroom. "So I'd say take it up with her, but it looks like you're in agreement—she wants to punish me for eternity, as well."

"Maybe she should," Potter shouted after him, and Draco took great pleasure in slamming the door.

A vision flashed in his bathroom mirror, there and gone in seconds but marked by the familiar blue flame that told him it was no hallucination. Potter stood in a blackened room, gripping a glass orb and staring at it with his face twisted into anguish. But not only anguish.

Longing.

Potter wanted something, and with the cold certainty of a dream, Draco knew it was something that would end this whole wretched business once and for all. But Potter wouldn't take it. He just stood there, consumed by the thought. Wanting, wanting, wanting.

And wasn't that just like Potter, sanctimoniously denying himself something he wanted and damning them both in the process?

The vision faded, leaving Draco shaking, angry, and alone.

*

Draco stewed on Potter's words all night, but when he woke up the hourglass on his bedside table had nearly run out, and he decided nothing really mattered anyway. He sat up, going through the motions of getting dressed and caring for the orchids, and by the time he had joined Alan outside in the cottage garden, Potter appeared.

"Would you like to come for a walk with me?" Draco asked, because there was every chance they would both die soon and it seemed a wasted opportunity to not at least attempt to make Potter step in chicken dung.

Potter shrugged, dark circles rimming his eyes, and the anger was back but it was as tired as Draco felt. He stepped into line beside him.

"Why are you so angry?" Draco asked, handing him one of the two grain baskets he used in the morning. "I feel like I'm locked in with a—" He'd been about to say Death Eater, because that's what Potter reminded him off, but he caught himself at the last second, noting the comparison unwise. "A rabid lion," he finished lamely.

They set off down the path, bees buzzing around their heads as the garden flourished into spring. Hydrangeas bloomed along the wire garden dividers, and daisies sprouted amongst the stones of the path beneath their feet, defiant as they speckled the property with the least pure-blood flower Draco could imagine. He loved tending to the orchids, but daisies were his favourite.

Potter shot him a piercing look. "Well there's not much to be happy about, right now."

"I suppose not, but you're all twisted up in knots. This anger isn't new." Draco surprised himself by realising he was right.

"No, it's not new," Potter agreed. "But it's—" He broke off and scrubbed a hand across his face. Then he said abruptly, "I'm angry at myself. It's nothing to do with you. Sorry I was a dick last night."

"What?"

"You were telling me you were trying to heal the families you'd hurt, and I told you it wasn't enough, and whether it is or isn't that doesn't matter because you're trying."

Draco narrowed his eyes. "This feels like a terrible apology."

"Well it's all I've got."

"Aren't you meant to be all about forgiveness?" Draco spat. "How the mighty have fallen."

Something broken and rotting twisted in Potter's expression, and he stumbled to a halt. "If I forgive you, what does that say about me?" he gritted out.

Draco gaped at him. "After everything I know about the great Harry Potter," he said slowly, "I really shouldn't be surprised that you've made this about you, and yet." He stalked off down the path, shaking his head. "It's like Hogwarts all over again," he said over his shoulder.

Potter grimaced, and something beneath the anger broke free. Suddenly, he looked so completely lost that Draco stopped and simply stared at him.

"Don't you ever think," Potter said haltingly, "that we could have been so much more than this?"

"What?" The word came out far weaker than Draco meant it to as he froze in place.

"You and me." Potter's gaze held him captive. "If we'd been on the same side, what could we have done together, Malfoy?"

Draco noticed Potter didn't say if you'd been on the right side, Malfoy. It didn't mean anything, but Draco noticed.

"We keep coming back to each other," Potter went on. "Keep saving each other—at the Manor, in the Fiendfyre, at the trials. Now. Because you know we'll somehow save each other now, too."

And Draco, who had been thinking they would simply die instead, listened, enthralled.

"I keep thinking... it's like Fate is guiding us. Like she's always wanted us to be more than what we are, like she wants to see what we can do. Even now, it's as if she wants me to forgive you for everything you've done."

Draco wasn't sure what made him do it, but he let go of the glamour on his charms, just to see what would happen.

Nothing happened. Potter continued to stare at him with that same broken, wretched expression, and neither of them moved, chests heaving as they stared one another down, and his charms Did Not Work.

Which meant Potter wanted him with or without the Veela charms, and he was so deep in the wanting that he hadn't even noticed Draco change.

Movements slow from shock, Draco restored the glamour and shook his head. "Why do you keep holding back?" he asked, voice shaking, the question absolutely nonsensical to anyone who couldn't see inside Draco's head.

"Because I don't know what's Fate, and what's me." Potter understood him anyway. "I need to know it's my choice. Everyone keeps making choices for me, and I need this one to be mine."

Draco didn't ask what Potter meant by this one; the answer was in the echo of the word soulmates, ringing around in his head.

"What if they aren't as far apart as you think? Fate and choice?" Draco couldn't breathe.

What were they saying?

How could a creature of fate and a prophecy-child, bound by a curse, ever make their own choices?

Potter turned away. "I don't know how we'd ever know," he said flatly. Then he huffed a laugh, low and humourless. "The dreams are getting worse."

Something inside Draco snapped. "Is it so much of a hardship to save me from that awful place?" He pushed open the gate to the chicken garden and strode towards the coop to let them out.

"Well, yeah, now you mention it," Potter shot back, dodging the piles of dung with offensive ease. "Because then you would've been a danger to the rest of our mission, and probably wrecked it, and then Voldemort would still be around and we'd all be dead."

Draco straightened and stared at him. "Those are some incredible leaps of logic," he said airily. "Are you sure those are real prophecies you're dreaming of? Because I'm beginning to think your imagination just needed another outlet."

Several chickens scurried past his feet, breaking up the conversation as they dove at the vines of peas lining the yard and began to jump up at the leaves, pecking at the fresh pods in unbridled delight. Draco scattered grain around the garden, turning his back very deliberately on Potter—who seemed to be stewing—and led the way back out onto the path.

As he closed the gate behind them, a puff of pink smoke wafted through the chain link, and Potter furrowed his brow in alarm.

"Don't. Ask," Draco reiterated, doing his best not to recall the sheer panic with which he had survived those first few months with his new flock.

"Draco!" a familiar voice called, and they turned to see Blaise strolling up the path. "And Harry Potter." He lifted his eyebrows. "You weren't lying, Draco. I thought it might be code for something."

"Not exactly," Draco said ruefully. "Did you have any trouble getting the peafowl sent over?"

Blaise handed him a bit of paper with a slowly moving figure etched across a map. "Not at all. You can track their progress here. I insisted, since you never can trust those live postal services, in my mind. Potter, how've you been?"

Draco waved in his pinboard while they were talking and marked off the final—or ninety ninth, technically—debt owed. A warm pool of contentment settled in his chest; he'd done it. One more to go: just this blasted curse with its notation on his board exasperatingly free of any connecting ties, and he would be free. He would never succumb to the horrifying tuberculosis-ridden end his father had chosen.

He might even save him.

Draco Vanished the pinboard, and as it disappeared a funny jolt twisted in his stomach. A tugging, pulling thing. He straightened and shook his head—bizarre.

"Alright. You?" Potter shuffled his feet.

Draco was struck by the firm, unyielding belief that Potter could not remember Blaise's name. He grinned.

"Can't complain." Blaise studied him closely, then Draco, where he stared in particular at Draco's new-coloured eyes, then back to Potter. "What did you say this curse was again?"

Draco glanced at Potter, mulling it over, and decided there was no point keeping it secret. "Blaise is the only other person who knows about me," he explained to Potter, throwing him a bone by dropping Blaise's name in. He turned back to Blaise. "Potter trespassed while I was sleeping and set off the Veela Curse."

Blaise's eyebrows shot up. "You're kidding me." He turned to Potter. "Shouldn't you know better? You're an Unspeakable, aren't you?"

"I didn't know he was Veela," Potter snapped. "I only found that out after I saw him soaring through the bloody sky—not that he even told me then. You waited a good long while, didn't you, Malfoy?"

Blaise ignored the dig and nodded sagely. "Yes, you did used to do that at the end of seventh year; I'd forgotten."

"What?" Draco gaped at him. "No—it's new. It only got set off when Potter ignited the curse and sent me back into fledgling."

Potter and Blaise both frowned at him. "No," Potter said slowly. "I saw the Veela flying well before the curse started up. Before I changed the prophecy, too."

Blaise raised an eyebrow at that, but nodded along. "You were definitely doing it in seventh year. I remember the first night it happened, it was strange as anything. You were in your bed, but a silver cord connected you to this creature swooping outside the window. Like you were dreaming it, but the dreaming made it real."

"No," Draco breathed, shaking his head. "I passed fledgling stage in fifth year. After sixth year, no new symptoms should have shown themselves. Not unless—" He broke off, staring at Potter.

"Not unless the curse began earlier," Potter said slowly.

A peacock appeared on the path behind Blaise, and Draco distantly noticed the distinct red feather above her eye—Igrelda. But he couldn't place any of that into context, because his mind was whirring. If he hadn't cursed Potter for trespassing, when had he cursed him? Why had he cursed him?

Why had Potter taken so long to appear at his doorstep?

The peacock crept closer, closer, and as Draco suddenly registered the present day again, she darted forward and bit Blaise on the bum, warbling as he yelled and hunting for the grain in Draco's basket.

None of that made sense in Draco's mind, the grain basket falling to the delighted Igrelda's ministrations, because as quickly as he registered the present, it escaped him again, sending him into a coughing fit. Bright red droplets spattered onto his hand, followed by even brighter fear, sharp, consuming him.

He passed out onto the ground. As his eyes closed, they took with it the glittering vision of an hourglass before him with only three slow grains of sand yet to fall.

*

In the haze of his fever, he saw Potter leaning over him and felt the silken cushions of his own couch below. A wet cloth was dabbed carefully against his forehead, gentle fingers trailing against his skin in a touch more tender than any he remembered, and conversation broke through his winding thoughts.

"He's too stubborn for his own good," Blaise was saying in exasperation, then, more shrewdly, "So are you. Why can't you both see it?"

"There's nothing to see," Potter snapped. "It's a curse, nothing more."

It was surely the fever, but Draco swore he could hear Blaise rolling his eyes.

"A curse that's waited ten years," Blaise said cryptically. "Surely you're not that stupid. I'd have to write to the Ministry if you were—tell them their Unspeakables had fallen into ill repute."

"Well, why don't I feel any different, then?" Potter asked, sounding so genuinely lost Draco nearly opened his eyes.

There came a sound like someone's hand clapping, perhaps on a shoulder, and Blaise said quietly. "Because the curse chose you both for a reason."

Potter snorted, bitter and quiet. "Fate chooses whoever she feels like. It doesn't mean anything."

"I know you have trust issues," Blaise said drily, "what with having a wretched upbringing and all, but has it ever occurred to you that, sometimes, people choose something for you because they know you'll enjoy it?"

There was silence for a while, and then Potter asked, so quietly Draco almost missed it, "You mean like a gift?"

"Yes, Potter. Like a fucking gift. Now don't be a bore about it for too long—gifts can still be rejected."

With that warning ringing in his ears, Draco faded back into sleep.

*

Draco awoke in his living room, the robed figure of his curse tapping the almost depleted hourglass on the mantle before disappearing, while Potter studied the enormous cage of peafowl with trepidation. He thought he could remember Blaise being here, too, but the details were absent and he was nowhere to be seen.

"I didn't know where you wanted them," Potter muttered defensively when he noticed Draco had woken up. "How do you integrate peacocks anyway?"

"They like it when you dance for them," Draco murmured, wiping a hand across his face. His voice sounded strange, like the edge of a shriek.

Potter tilted his head at the birds, looking thoughtful with one arm half poised, and then he stopped—unfortunately. "What? Really?"

Draco snickered. "No, but I nearly had you."

Something soft hit his face, and he opened one eye to find a pillow as his only protection from Potter's glare.

"So," Draco said quietly as he sat up. "The curse goes back further."

"Yep."

"When do you think it started?"

Potter hunched over, staring down at his feet. "Well, it's obvious isn't it? Seventh year. It's when I took your wand."

Draco's heart thudded. The sensation in his chest from earlier tugged again, and he fought the urge to cough. "We're running out of time," he said, glancing at the hourglass.

For some reason, its progression had slowed. He watched one single grain fall, fall, fall, still inches from the bottom, with two more poised above it waiting for their turn. It was as though the curse wanted to give them a chance, which was absurd, because the curse should have wanted to kill them.

"I know," Potter said softly. "I walked in your dreams—this is it, isn't it?"

"I'm sorry, let's backtrack for a second. You did what?"

Potter stood abruptly, hands clenching by his side as he ignored the soft coos of the sleepy birds and crossed the room to the armchair beside Draco's. "I dreamwalked, because we're running out of time, and I thought, since this curse is your own unconscious casting, your subconscious might hold answers your mind doesn't. Don't worry, I didn't learn any of your deep dark secrets."

Draco bit his tongue to keep from pointing out that Potter already knew them all.

"What did you learn?"

"That Lucius is dying." Potter waved a hand vaguely to encompass Draco's person. Draco glanced at the mirror, and saw both the Veela in him and his own father, alone in his chair by the Manor fire, and he understood at once that they were still in the dreamscape. They were still dreamwalking. "Same way as you will, if you don't pay off that debt to Fate. You've got one more debt to pay, one more reparation owed, and it's apparently this curse, and we can't figure out who you owe it to or what it demands of you."

"No, we can't," Draco agreed. "And why would it be something I owe when you're the one making it up to me?" He blinked. "Have you worked out how to do that yet, by the way? How to make up for taking my wand? We have"—he glanced at the hourglass—"two grains of sand left before you'll need to make a grand gesture of repentance. Otherwise..." Draco sliced a finger across his neck.

He'd been going for funny, but it just felt morbid.

"I might have," Potter said cryptically, leaning back in his chair. "But whether it works or not is another question. Also, I think it's more than the curse and the debt you owe to Fate. I think it's my magic, too. My magic has pulled me to you for years, trying to get the curse to take hold. I suppose if we fix it, that heals as well."

"That's quite a lot of important things weighing in the balance," Draco said idly.

"And they're all linked," Potter said softly, intently. "Draco, I don't think this is an execution curse. Or if it is, it's killing you first. Why would it kill you if it wants you to kill me?"

Potter had called him Draco, and he couldn't even appreciate it because the Veela in him was taking over. Tiny feathers had sprouted over the backs of his hands. The curse was transforming him into a fully-fledged Veela, ready to perform the final task the curse demanded of him.

"Because I didn't repay my debt fast enough," he said, wriggling his shoulders to see if wings came out. They didn't—not yet.

Potter shook his head, careful and oh so certain. "Ten years, Draco. The curse waited ten years until we were ready to be soulmates. It doesn't want to kill us; it wants to save us."

Draco laughed, the sound harsh and bitter. "Well if the curse is to be believed, it should be very easy to save us. You need to repay me for the wand you stole, and I need to accept your payment. If it's that simple, why can't we do it?"

Potter's eyes caught his. "I don't know," he admitted. "Maybe because I don't want to repay you. I needed that wand, and I wouldn't take back what I did."

"I don't care about the fucking wand, Potter," Draco snapped, the snarl elongating into a bird-like hiss. "I care that you left me there. That my own house-elf came to save Harry Potter and his friends, and I wasn't one of them." He wanted to stop talking, but he couldn't. "I fucked up, Potter. And that was when I knew it. If I'd only chosen your side instead, I'd have been saved then, too."

"The words," Potter said quietly. "Those are the curse words, written in blood."

Draco thought of chandeliers shattering, scratching his face as the meaning of Dobby's words sank in.

"The mystery unravels, but it's still just as useless as words," Draco muttered, closing his eyes and waiting for death.

It didn't come, and when he gave up on waiting, he found Potter with his head clutched in his hands. Draco blinked, confused.

"You make it so easy," Potter mumbled, so soft Draco could barely make out the words.

"What?"

"You make it so easy to forgive you." Potter looked up at him, and at last the rage had given way to what was beneath—fear. "Is this Fate, trying to pull us together again? Or do I just want to forgive you this badly?" he whispered. "What if you're the wrong person to forgive?"

Draco remembered, suddenly, that Potter had walked into the forest to die once, simply because Fate had deemed he should. For the greater good, Harry Potter could give his life and save the world, and so he had. And now, for the greater good of forgiveness and mercy, he could forgive a Malfoy, offer his hand, and save both their lives.

How must it feel to believe Fate is making you forgive the one person you shouldn't?

"I don't think forgiveness is about right or wrong," Draco said slowly, staring at the feathers growing up his forearms. "It isn't about being just—it's the opposite of justice, actually, Potter—wrap your Gryffindor head around that one. It's separate from it. Forgiveness is just something you offer. If you want to."

Potter contemplated this as Draco thought of curses that were really gifts, and the idea that they might die for them anyway, and then Potter nodded.

Then he asked, "Do you want to forgive me?", as though that were all it took.

"Do you know what you did wrong?" Draco asked airily, part of him cringing because he knew so, so deeply that no matter what Potter had done to him, Draco had done far worse.

Potter watched him, quiet and intense, as though he could read Draco's thoughts. "I can't turn back time and take you with me," he said. "But I wish I could have. I wish I hadn't left you there. I left you under Voldemort's control when you'd saved me by refusing to recognise my face, and I..." He trailed off, looking confused and lost. "I'm sorry."

"I don't understand why it's up to me." Draco frowned. "This is meant to be about what I owe, not you."

All those families. Everything he'd done wrong. How could he ever deserve to let it go? One hundred lives, two hundred—how could his debt ever be repaid?

"I mean, I'm not a Veela," Potter said, studying his very human hands, eyes flicking to Draco's. "But it looks to me as though the last debt is an offering of mercy."

"What?"

Potter cleared his throat. "The outcast cannot be reborn."

Oh.

Did Draco want to be reborn? Or had he wanted merely to suffer, thinking he had nothing else to offer?

"I can't change the past, but I'm offering you my hand now," Potter said, growing very still as something caught his attention.

Draco noticed the hourglass had come to rest on the table between them, its last single grain falling lower and lower.

"It isn't enough to offer reparations," Draco said wearily. "They must be accepted."

"Do you accept?"

The dream whirled strangely around him, and he could feel the rage mounting beneath his skin. The curse sensed its end approaching, the Veela in him scenting the proverbial blood on the wind, because if this was no execution curse it was a redemption curse. For both of them. Perhaps the curse didn't always bind the transgressor to the Veela they had wronged, but in this case, there was no one who could fit the role more appropriately than Draco. Potter wanted to forgive him, Fate or no Fate, and Draco wanted to forgive Potter for leaving him there. They both held that power, and if one of them would not see then it would destroy them both.

But Potter had, and now the choice was up to Draco.

If Draco could accept, his debt to Fate would be paid in full.

"Whose fate do you think we're choosing?" he asked lightly, watching the sand fall and thinking of the final line in Potter's prophecy. He answered without waiting for Potter. "I think it's our own. And each other's. And a million other entwined fates, always... Our fates are always wrapped up in someone else's, even if we wish we could deal with them alone." He sighed. "Do you think I'm weak, Harry, if I accept your apology just like that?"

Harry shrugged. "Personally, I've always found relief in accepting things as they are." He smiled wrily, and Draco realised then that Harry thought himself weak, for being relieved that Fate might make his hardest choices for him.

"You still made the choices," Draco said slowly. "Fate offered them, but you made them. Even now, you changed the prophecy. You opened the curse." His words came out almost reverent. "It might have been a dream, but you made the choice."

Harry blinked at him, and at last Draco saw true acceptance pass across his face.

There was a truth in it all; this was how things were. Harry was sorry, and Draco was sorry, and they had been for years. They simply hadn't yet accepted it.

It was easier not to accept.

But it was also lonelier.

And Draco wanted to be reborn.

For a moment, the dream changed, shattered glass floating between the harsh screams of his aunt's hatred.

Draco sighed, reached out, and took Potter's hand.

*

It was dark outside the window.

Draco stared at the rain pouring down the glass, and he wondered if it had ever stormed so much as it had this year or if it were only that he had never noticed.

"Your classmates will ask you about the Manor when you return, Draco," his father said, struggling to maintain the authoritative drone that had used to define him. "You will tell them nothing."

Draco huffed a laugh, keeping his face turned away so his father didn't see. "As if I'd want to," he said quietly.

"You will keep your thoughts to yourself," Lucius snapped. "The Dark Lord does not appreciate the misguided gossip of those who cannot understand. We will not fuel it."

"Consider me an enigma," Draco mumbled.

Once, his father would have reprimanded him for talking back so much, but not anymore. Now, he only settled further into his ramblings, staring into the fire. When he was called away, Draco thought nothing of it, and when the messenger came scurrying back to fetch Draco as well, he felt only the thick slide of dread at what might be to come.

Of course, it was as bad as he had anticipated. Harry Potter stood within the Manor walls, and Draco could not believe that no one could identify him. How could they miss it? That scar, mangled by some kind of hex but clearly there. Those eyes.

He closed his own and tried to turn the fear into confusion. Into doubt.

There was very little Draco could do to turn the tide of the war, not with all he had so far done. But he could perhaps do one thing. He could get Potter out of here before the Dark Lord came.

And perhaps Potter could take him, too.

Hope kindled low in his belly, unfamiliar, and he wracked his brain to think of a way they could all escape.

But chaos descended, and Potter—naturally—fought him as the enemy, wrestling him for his wand. Even still, it wasn't until Dobby proclaimed that he had come to rescue Harry Potter and his friends that Draco truly realised how much the mistakes of his past had come back to haunt him, would always come back to haunt him.

He sagged against the floor, lost and alone.

But then a hand caught in his, and instead of pulling away, like Draco instinctively felt he should, he did what he desperately wanted to instead—he followed it.

The Manor disappeared in the blackened ink of Apparition, and solid ground found him standing before a beachside cottage, holding hands with Harry Potter.

They stared at one another, chests heaving with adrenaline, eyes too filled with terror to hide behind walls or protections. Just two boys, lost on some shore together—for once, on the same side.

"Dobby!" someone sobbed, and Potter's face split into anguish.

He took his hand from Draco's and carefully settled the unconscious goblin he was carrying onto the ground. Then he knelt over the body of Draco's old house-elf and wept.

There was a lot, Draco realised, that he had missed over the years. And as tears slid down his own cheeks, memories overwhelming him—of Dobby sneaking him treats and helping him clean up messes he had accidentally made while his parents were out—he had the strange thought that those things may not have been so far out of reach as he had always assumed.

They buried the elf together, at first an awkward distance apart and then side by side as Potter glared at him and told him to do some work for the first time in his life. Somewhat uncalled for, but Draco didn't have it in him to argue. He had offered to cut the grave with his wand, but Potter had snarled at him that it needed to be done like this, without magic, and since the alternative had been to stand around awkwardly in the cottage with people who clearly did not want him there, Draco had helped.

When they finished, they were covered from head to toe in sweat and earth, and Draco could feel the magic beneath the grave rise up and caress them, generations of wizards and something familiar but rare—perhaps selkies—gifting their magic to the elf and to the two wizards who had buried him. Potter looked at him, his eyes red and his skin puffy from the exertion and the tears that still hadn't quite stopped.

Potter looked at him, and frowned, and said, "You're crying."

"I liked him," Draco said simply, because he had. Then, because Potter appeared to be judging him, "He was good to me."

"Were you good to him?"

Draco sighed, the truth slipping free. "No. Not when it mattered."

His honesty drew forth a strange hitch of breath from Potter, and the judgement, bizarrely, disappeared.

"We could wash up inside," Potter said, staring at the lights of the cottage.

Draco listened to the crash of the sea against rock. It was far too cold for a swim, but the thought of the cottage was stifling. "I might take a walk," he said numbly, staring out into the blackness of the night and wondering what he had left behind, and what he was walking into in its place.

"I'll come, too."

They made their way down onto the sand, helping each other over rocks they could barely see. Draco leaned down to rinse his dirty hands in the water, shivering at the icy bite of the waves, and splashed his face several times until he could no longer feel his own skin.

Beside him, Potter did the same, sighing with relief, teeth chattering. It was easier to see, down by the water, where the ocean reflected the moonlight. He watched Potter stare out at the infinite expanse of sea before turning to glance at him, a strange light in his eye.

"I'll race you to that rock," Potter said through chattering teeth.

Adrenaline overtook Draco's confusion, and he laughed, breaking into a run before he'd even agreed. Potter easily caught up to him, and they raced side by side, their lingering tears burning away in the wind, gasps of exhilaration and pain and grief turning into laughter as tiredness crashed into them and they fell upon the sand at the base of the finish line.

Draco leaned against the rock, forehead pressed against his hands. "I'm not a spy," he said out of nowhere, needing Potter to believe him.

"You don't have the balls to be a spy, Malfoy," Potter said tiredly from where he lay on the sand, one hand covering his eyes, and Draco laughed because it was true.

"Where are you going now?" Draco asked, dropping down beside him.

"I think we have to break into Gringotts."

"Well, fuck."

Potter laughed softly. "You don't have to come. Bill and Fleur can find a place for you—somewhere safe, with the Order."

Draco knew what almost none of those words meant, but he shook his head. "I want to help," he said, and found it—for the first time—to be true.

His head rolled sideways, and he found Potter already looking at him. It occurred to Draco that he was the least appropriate person to be sharing this moment with the golden child of Gryffindor, but as he took in the tired lines of Potter's face and the overwhelming sense of loneliness that drifted from him in waves, he realised that he was the only one Potter would have allowed. Because Draco was lost, floating completely and utterly adrift from everything he had ever known or believed in.

And despite all that Draco had assumed, Potter was equally lost, too.

The moment drifted around them, and between the time they laid down upon the sand and the time they stood, Potter reaching down to help Draco up with an offered hand that Draco gratefully accepted, they became friends.

Potter, it seemed, had not been lying. Days swirled around them like dreams, and they broke into the unbreakable, stole the unstealable, and destroyed what should have been impossible to destroy. Draco's hope grew, even as the aura of despair and disaster thickened. There was a difference, he found out, between the despair of leading a life you did not want, and of leading a doomed life that you did.

Occasionally, blue flame would flicker in Potter's eyes, and Draco realised with mounting horror that, amongst the second great wizarding war, he was courting the Boy Who Lived. He hoped Potter didn't notice, and that he didn't notice the claws that raked across a Death Eater's face when they were attacked at Hogwarts with the full moon high above them—not a harvest moon, but close enough for his frazzled nerves. And he hoped Potter didn't notice the protective blue flame that followed them through the Fiendfyre Vincent unleashed, burning high on the fuel of Draco's fear.

And then they tumbled from their broom, and Potter kissed him, pressing him against the wall and holding him with a desperation Draco recognised in himself, and Draco realised it didn't matter what Potter noticed after all because the courting had worked and neither of them were lost anymore.

A thought that made no sense occurred to him: that the curse may not have shown him a future he could not have after all, and that maybe all he needed to do was trust and choose.

As the dream swirled around him, soothing him, healing him with the joyous possibility of a life he could have lived, Draco slowly woke up.

*

His living room was quiet apart from the soft coos of the sleeping peacocks, and Draco sat up carefully.

He did not need to ask to know the past had not been changed. His two opposing memories of the war ran alongside each other, but one was visceral, imprinted in the scars left behind on his body and the weariness in his hands. And the other was the golden memory of a dream, something that never happened.

Perhaps, though, it had at least lifted the curse.

"I don't want to look in a mirror," he confessed, staring down at the carpet as the one thing he could trust not to betray him.

"Look at me instead," Harry said softly. "I'll tell you if it worked."

Slowly, Draco lifted his head and looked into Harry's green eyes. Blue flame flickered there, and he knew it was in his own expression as well because it drifted across his vision and tinged the room turquoise.

Harry smiled. "Your eyes are grey."

Draco let out a sigh of relief. "And no feathers?"

"None at all."

He looked down at his hands, and found only skin. No claws, no feathers.

"What do you remember?" Potter asked hesitantly, confirming that he had witnessed Draco's dream. "Did we change the past?"

"No." Draco shook his head. "The past can't be changed."

"But it isn't the same."

Draco stared at him, a strange warmth kindling in his chest. "What do you mean?"

"I mean..." Harry shook his head. "What do you remember?"

Draco shrugged, the words tumbling free without emotion, despite how his heart began to shatter. "You took me with you. We fell in love. You won the war again."

"And you lived that?" Harry asked, oddly determined as he drove the knife in deeper.

"Yes," Draco snapped. "I lived it, every single second of it, and this is the worst fucking hangover of my life. If the curse is done, I want you to leave so I can get over this in peace." His voice choked on the final words, and he fell silent.

Harry, like an arsehole, grinned. "I lived it, too."

Draco blinked at him. "Well, I gathered you'd witnessed it," he said slowly, uncomprehending.

"No, Malfoy. I lived it. Not witnessed. We didn't change the past, but it was a shared dream anchored on the crux of a prophecy, which means it was once a possible future."

The pain, which should have doubled at knowing the life he could have lived was one he had missed only because of his own choices, began to fade. Draco frowned. "Why does this feel different?" he asked, more thinking out loud than anything else. "It shouldn't make a difference whether it was possible or not." It's not like he hadn't dreamed of that life more than once before.

"I think it makes all the difference," Harry said awkwardly. "Because now we know it was our choices that made it, not fate, which means our choices can make it again."

Our choices. Our choices.

What might the choices of a prophecy-child and a creature of fate amount to when they were finally allowed to make them?

The warmth in Draco's chest grew. "And the curse is over now?"

Harry looked up, face bright with hope, but then he froze as his eyes landed on something behind Draco's head. "Nearly."

Draco turned to see Harry staring at the final hourglass on the mantle.

"What?" he whispered, feeling suddenly sick. The first two had run out, and this final one seemed shorter, half the sand already gone. "But there's no execution now, is there? What does it want from us?"

Harry shook his head, and Draco realised suddenly how pale his face had grown. "What did the Veela Curse say again? Do you remember?"

Draco closed his eyes. "It didn't say anything about the final stage. But my book... it said stage three witnesses the final judgment. But there is no judgment. I don't understand."

"Draco." Harry's voice was strange, and Draco's eyes snapped open to see a peacock feather floating between them.

In the background, a softly cooing peacock ruffled its tail and slept on.

He followed its idle path, jaw slack. "What did you say about feathers the other day?"

"They keep leading me here."

They stared at one another. "Because of your broken magic." He swallowed. "And I heal magic."

Harry frowned. "You said your magic was off, too, didn't you?"

Draco reached for his magic, grimacing in anticipation, and found the same sick guilt he always found. "Yes. Look, if I could heal this I would. But this isn't how it works—neither of us have custodian flocks to heal. Or any other group of animals. Our magic damage is purely in our bodies."

"Didn't the Manor have peacocks?"

"They're here now, and it didn't make a difference to me."

"Maybe because they were never really yours, not like all of your animals together are," Harry suggested, and then he reached out and took the feather from the air. Light bounced off the radiant colours, reflecting in ways that spoke of magic rather than physics, and Harry said, "These are the last two birds for your Sanctuary, aren't they? Your flock have all come home now?"

Something tugged in Draco's chest, a sensation he was familiar with but had never really followed before. Whether it was from exhaustion, or desperation, or the possibility that, somehow, they still lingered in the dreamscape with Harry holding his hand and pulling him forward, Draco followed it. Veela flame flickered across his vision, tingeing the world blue, and he saw the knot in his magic that was tied to Harry's.

It was old, years old, and frayed at the edges. Both ends were damaged, as though each side had tried to pull the knot free over the years without ever succeeding.

Draco smoothed his fingers over his side of the knot, watching it heal beneath his touch.

"Where is your wand?" he asked, realising that he had barely seen Harry hold it since he arrived here.

With a jolt, Harry removed his wand from its holster in his sleeve and handed it to Draco without hesitation.

Draco laid their two wands side by side and studied them. "Phoenix feather?" he asked, glancing at Harry.

Harry nodded, and Draco couldn't help laughing.

"Of course it is," he muttered, then he took the peacock feather from Harry's hand and laid it across his wand.

Fire absorbed them, surrounding them, and the last of the sand trickled through the hourglass as Harry's wand welcomed its second core and Draco's wand finally, after so long alone in misery, welcomed his soulmate home.

Colours mixed in with the flame, swirling higher and higher, and their magic danced in joy. Draco recalled seeing Snape duelling once, at the height of his power, the earth rumbling in ecstasy as he spun in balance with it. He'd never felt magic like that before, but he felt it now, and it grew and grew, bringing with it the echo of Harry's words to him, so recent but so long ago.

Don't you ever think that we could have been so much more than this?

"My magic." Harry laughed in delight as the flame receded. "It feels like mine again."

And Draco's... Draco had never felt like this. So light and pure.

He swallowed. The future opened up before him, and Draco suddenly felt more scared than he had in years.

"Would you mind if I checked on the orchids?" he asked, rising to his feet. "It soothes me."

Harry blinked and nodded, standing to follow him.

They crept around the sleeping cage of peacocks and down the passage to the conservatory. As Draco tended to his orchids, losing himself in the familiar ritual of checking every leaf, Potter leaned in the doorway and watched him.

"I can't take back the hurt I caused," Draco said with his back turned. "But I would. I need you to know I would."

"I know," Harry said, coming to trail his fingers along the path Draco's had taken, brushing the front of the pots and watching the leaves stretch in the moonlight.

An owl swooped through an open window and dropped a letter from his mother. The penmanship was hastily written, far hastier than Narcissa Malfoy would ever write a death notice, far too full of excitement and disbelief. Draco smiled, knowing the contents without needing to open them.

Draco turned to Harry and found the open stance of his body an invitation, and he decided to accept.

Stepping into the circle of Harry's arms, he pressed their foreheads together, hands resting on Harry's forearms, and just breathed.

"You know I wanted you so much I actually started to smile when I thought of those stupid badges?" Harry said conversationally.

Draco burst into laughter, and then they were kissing.

He'd dreamed of kissing Harry Potter once. He'd dreamed that the kiss was brutal and rough, a mixture of repressed desires and hidden shame, knowing that he wasn't good enough for this and taking it anyway. There was still a hint of that now, as they carried the past into the future with them, and there was even a surprising amount of shame from Harry himself. It made Draco think of the small dark spaces in Harry's dreams and all the things they didn't know about each other.

But there was more than the past as well.

Harry's lips were soft, still tasting of the herbs of their shared dreamscape, and he kissed Draco like he wasn't completely sure how. Not unskilled but cautious, slow, the Gryffindor in him subsiding as he waited for something Draco didn't know how to recognise. So, he gave him all that he could and hoped it was enough, bringing his hands to twist in Harry's hair, pushing him back against the table of orchids that wobbled a little in their pots, pressing their hips together and deepening the kiss until everything else faded away.

"I didn't know soulmates felt like this," Draco confessed once they'd pulled back from each other, still with his forehead pressed against Harry's, the warm rush of their breath dancing across his skin.

"How does it feel?" Harry asked, sounding a little breathless.

Draco mulled it over. After so long racing against the clock—to live, to save his family, to save Potter—it was difficult to identify the feeling, but eventually he did. Everything about the curse, about his destiny, had so far been a mounting pile of problems. Even the good parts were still something new added to a pile of stuff that got taller and taller and wobblier and wobblier. Knowing Harry was with him for good didn't feel like one more thing to add to the pile; it felt like the pile had disappeared. Like time no longer existed, and fate was something he could choose.

"It feels like I'm not alone," Draco said, and then he kissed him again.

In the future, Potter would take Draco's hand and lead him through the front gate, out into the world beyond. But it wasn't the future yet; for now, it was the present, and Draco lived.