Chapter Text
Aurora wakes to the feeling of his mouth on her skin.
She doesn’t open her eyes at first. She lies there and tries to place it: the warm press of lips, the soft drag of breath, the faint rasp of stubble. She is still half asleep, and for a moment she thinks it might be a dream her body has produced out of habit, the way it produces hunger.
Then her nerves catch up to her. Soreness blooms, sharp and specific, and she inhales through her nose.
"Stop it," she says, voice rough with sleep. "I’m sore."
The mouth presses in, just above her knee. She feels him smile against her.
"Morning to you too," he says.
She opens her eyes and squints at the ceiling. The crack in the plaster above the bed looks worse than last week. She really is going to fix it. At some point. When she is not working sixteen-hour days and letting Harry Potter climb into her bed at strange hours of the night.
"Harry."
"I'll be gentle," he says.
"You said that the last three times."
He lets out a short breath that might be a laugh, except it doesn’t sound amused. His hand tightens around her thigh, as if he’s embarrassed with himself.
"You weren’t complaining," he says. "You—" He stops, seems to think better of whatever he was about to say. “You didn’t exactly hate it.”
He is talking about how she'd come apart under him, how her body had gone loose and shaking even when she'd told him she was done. How she'd begged, voice breaking on his name. He won't say it, but they both know.
The worst part is that he's right.
Every time he's said he would be gentle, it has ended with her clutching at him, pushed past where she meant to stop. Every time she has let it happen.
He shifts, and she watches the crown of his head in the grey light, the line where his neck meets his shoulders. There's a small scar there she's never asked about. His skin looks pale, almost soft. It's an illusion. Most of his body is one long story of damage.
His hand slides higher, fingers brushing the crease where her thigh meets her hip. The touch is light but deliberate, mapping territory he knows too well.
"Ro?" he asks, careful, waiting.
She could tell him no, and he would stop. She knows that. Whatever else he is, he has never pushed her past where she wants to go. The trouble is that where she wants to go is almost always exactly where he's heading.
"You're going to be late," she says instead.
"So will you," he replies, resting his cheek against her inner thigh, turning his face into her skin. The warmth of his breath ghosts over her, intimate and unhurried. "We can be late together."
She imagines walking into the Auror Office with her hair still damp from a rushed shower, him beside her with that same careless, straight-backed stride, as if nothing in the world could touch him. She imagines their colleagues' faces if they knew what he looks like now, sprawled between her legs, sheets tangled around his hips.
"I really am sore," she says quietly.
"I know," he says, voice softening. He presses a kiss to her thigh, then another. "I'll be good. Promise."
She snorts. "You're terrible at promises."
He laughs against her leg. The sound vibrates along her skin. It should not still do this to her, the small unspooling in her chest, like someone easing the laces of her corset. She finds it irritating that it does.
"I'll try, then."
For a moment neither of them moves. The street outside is waking up: distant shutters opening, someone shouting about fresh cauldrons, an owl's sharp cry. In here it's just the sound of their breathing and the faint creak of the bed when she shifts.
"Fine," she mutters, scrubbing a hand over her face and shoving her hair back. "But you don't get to complain when I'm slower on raids today."
His grin is bright and boyish, absurd at this hour. "Deal."
His hand moves with purpose now, no more pretense. He circles her slowly, almost teasingly, then he's pushing two fingers inside her, and the stretch makes her gasp. He watches her face as he presses inside, slow and deliberate, giving her body time to adjust.
"Still sore?" he asks.
"Yes," she says, but her hips shift toward him anyway, betraying her.
He works her carefully, fingers curling, finding the rhythm her body knows too well. She's not wet enough yet — she never is, this early, when her body is still protesting — but he's patient in a way he never is anywhere else. His thumb finds her clit and she gasps, legs falling wider.
"There you go," he murmurs, almost to himself.
She wants to tell him to stop being smug, but then he adds a third finger and her breath catches. Her body is responding now, slick and willing, even as the soreness pulses underneath. It's too much and not enough, and she hates that he knows exactly how to play that edge.
When he finally withdraws his hand and settles between her legs properly, she almost protests the loss.
Then his mouth is on her, and the protest dies.
He kisses her hipbone first, fleetingly tender. "Tell me if I'm hurting you."
You already are, she thinks, but not in the way you mean.
She doesn't say it. Instead she slides her hand into his hair, guiding him where she wants him.
He makes a sound against her skin — something soft, almost reverent — and then he's licking into her with single-minded focus. His hands grip her thighs, holding her open, and her body reacts with the humiliating immediacy it always does with him, as if it has no loyalty to her pride.
She tries to keep quiet, to maintain some shred of dignity, but it slips away from her as her breath changes, as her hips move without her permission.
He's good at this. He knows exactly what she needs— when to be gentle, when to press harder, when to add his fingers again to work her from the inside while his tongue moves in maddening circles. The soreness becomes background noise to the mounting pressure, the heat coiling tighter in her belly.
"Harry," she gasps, and her fingers tighten in his hair, half pulling him closer, half trying to push him away.
She's close. So close. She can feel it building, that inevitable crest, and she's reaching for it when he suddenly pulls back.
"What—" she starts, breathless and disoriented.
He's already moving up her body, kissing a path along her stomach, her ribs, her throat.
"Look at me," he says.
She turns her face away, as if she can refuse him the intimacy of it.
Harry catches her chin gently and turns her back. "Look at me."
"Why?"
“Because,” he says, like it’s obvious. Like it’s just a fact. Like she is something he wants to see.
She does. His pupils are blown wide, his hair a mess, his mouth still glistening. He looks at her like she's something precious. It's a lie, but it's a good one.
He hovers there for a second, as if he might say something else. Instead he kisses her softly, almost tentative, and she can taste herself on his tongue. Her mouth goes pliant under his, and for a moment it feels like a different kind of closeness.
"I need to be inside you," he says against her lips, and there's an urgency in his voice that makes her stomach clench.
"You bastard," she manages. "I was almost—"
"I know." He positions himself, the head of him pressing against her entrance. "You'll get there."
She wants to tell him to go to hell. Instead she wraps her legs around him and pulls him closer.
When he pushes inside, they both make sounds— hers sharp and startled, his low and guttural. He's right that she's wet enough now, but the stretch still steals her breath. Her body is still tender, still protesting, but it opens for him anyway because it always does.
"That's gentle?" she manages.
He exhales a laugh against her neck. "You're doing great."
He moves with an urgency that has her grip tightening, nails finding purchase through sweat-slick skin. Like he's trying to drive something out of himself. She can feel the strain in him, the way his breath catches, the way his jaw locks when he loses control.
The angle shifts slightly and suddenly he's hitting that spot inside her that makes her vision white out at the edges. The pleasure that had been building under his mouth comes roaring back, sharper now, more insistent.
"Oh," she breathes, and her back arches involuntarily.
"There?" he asks, doing it again, and again, until she's clutching at him.
"Don't stop," she hears herself say. "Don't—"
And then she does.
It comes on like something breaking loose, her breath catching in her throat as her body tips over without asking permission. She turns her face into his shoulder like she can hide there from the fact of it, like she can make it mean less. Her hands clench hard enough to hurt him, and she shakes through it, wave after wave, while he keeps moving inside her.
He stills for half a second, like he's listening to her, like he's taking it in. Then he follows with a sharp sound, forehead pressed to her shoulder. For a moment he stays inside her, shaking slightly, as though he's holding on so he doesn't float away.
Aurora stares at the ceiling. Her heartbeat is too loud. Her body is still humming with it.
Harry kisses her shoulder, gentle now, like it's an apology for the way he couldn't be.
"Sorry," he murmurs, barely formed.
"For what?" she asks, because it's safer to keep it casual.
He doesn't answer. He eases out of her carefully — she feels the loss, the wet slide of it — then rolls onto his side and draws her in, fitting her against him like it's habit. His arm settles across her waist, warm and heavy. He exhales, the last of his tension leaving him, and within minutes his breathing evens out. He's falling asleep.
Aurora lies still, caught under the weight of his arm, listening to him drift off. She can feel the stickiness between her thighs, the deep ache in her muscles, the tenderness that will make walking difficult later. Evidence of him, all over her body.
The room goes quiet around them. She hates how much space he takes, even now. She hates that her body makes room for him anyway. She hates, most of all, that some part of her feels it like relief.
Like having him here, even like this, is better than not having him at all.
The second time that morning nearly happens by accident.
Sometime later, when the bedroom smelled like sweat and warmed dust and their mingled breath, Aurora lies on her back and stares at the cracked ceiling while Harry attempts, with mixed success, to gather the sheet around them.
“You’re a menace,” she says. Her voice lacks conviction.
“Thank you,” he says, as if she’s handed him a commendation. He leans in and steals a quick kiss from her mouth, then sits up. The mattress shifts with his weight. "What time is it?"
She reaches for her wand. “Half seven.”
"Brilliant." He stretches, and she watches the muscles of his back move under scarred skin. "Plenty of time."
“For what, another round?” she asks dryly.
Harry glances back over his shoulder, eyes flicking down her body with a look that is equal parts temptation and regret.
“Don’t make offers you don’t intend to follow through on, Malfoy. It’s cruel.”
“That was not an offer,” she says, sitting up carefully. Her thighs remind her, pointedly, of every decision she’s made in the last twelve hours. “Some of us have jobs.”
“Me too,” he says. “Unfortunately.”
He pads out of the room in just his pants, leaving his shirt on the floor. Aurora watches him go, then reaches for the discarded shirt. It's warm, slightly damp with sweat, and smells like him — soap and something else, something that makes her chest do uncomfortable things. She pulls it on anyway.
In the kitchen, she puts the kettle on with a flick of her wand. The flat is small enough that she can hear the water in the pipes, the faint thud as someone below shuts a cupboard. The walls are thin, the life she’s built here thinner than she likes to pretend. Second-hand table, mismatched chairs, clean but chipped crockery.
It is not the Manor, but then she is not that girl anymore.
Harry emerges ten minutes later, damp hair sticking up worse than usual, his shirt half-buttoned and hanging open over his chest. Droplets of water cling to his collarbone. He moves around her kitchen with the ease of someone who’s done it often: opens the right cupboard, finds the good mugs without asking.
“You’re getting the floor wet,” she says, watching a drop of water land on the wood between his bare feet.
He looks down, then back up at her, all innocent. “Terrible shame.”
“Don’t,” she says, immediately, because she can see the joke forming.
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” he replies, and the grin proves he absolutely was.
"You're incapable of restraint," she says, turning back to the kettle before he can see her own mouth twitch.
He laughs, comes closer, and for a second she thinks he's going to kiss her— something soft and unthinking, a continuation of the bed. Her body tilts toward it before she can stop herself, the stupid, treacherous hope of it.
But he doesn't.
He leans past her instead to reach the bread bin, the heat of him ghosting over her shoulder. She feels the moment where her expectation has nowhere to go. It leaves a small hollow behind her ribs, quickly covered by irritation.
She steps aside, giving him space, and busies herself with the tea.
He puts slices of bread in the toaster with unnecessary attention, as if it were a delicate potion. She pours tea— strong and dark, the way he likes it, the way she’s gotten used to drinking it. They move around each other without collision, the dance of people who know each other’s rhythms too well.
“You know,” he says, without looking at her, “some people say thank you when someone makes them breakfast.”
“You haven’t made anything yet.”
"Touché." The toaster clicks. He pulls the toast out and immediately burns his fingers. "Ow! See? Sacrifices."
She rolls her eyes and slides a plate towards him. He drops the toast on it, then reaches for the butter.
He's close enough that when he turns, the edge of his hip bumps hers. It's nothing, a tiny contact, but her body remembers the kitchen counter from last night — the way his hands had bracketed her there, the solid press of him at her back while the kettle screamed.
He glances at her. Some silent thing passes between them, an echo of that memory. His eyes drop to her mouth, then lower, to where his shirt hangs loose on her frame.
"No," she says, though her pulse has already quickened.
He lifts his eyebrows. "I didn't say anything."
“That look,” she says. “The answer is no. My legs have suffered enough in this room.”
His mouth quirks. “What about mine?”
“Your legs are your responsibility.”
He leans his hip against the counter next to her, toast forgotten in his hand. “You sure?”
She is not sure. That is the problem.
Aurora can already imagine how it would go— him lifting her onto the counter, her legs wrapping around him, the desperate urgency of it. The way he'd swallow her sounds with his mouth, the way she'd let him.
"We're going to be late," she says, and it comes out weaker than she intends.
“That’s not a no,” he murmurs.
His hand comes up, fingers ghosting along her jaw. Not quite touching, but close enough that her skin prickles with awareness.
“Harry,” she warns.
He huffs a breath — frustrated or amused, she can't tell — then straightens and steps back, hands raised in mocking surrender. The loss of his proximity feels like cold water. "All right. Fine. I'll be... professional."
"You don't even know how to spell that," she says, grateful for the return to familiar ground.
"I resent that." He gestures with the toast, indignant. "I've seen the dictionary. It's the thick one on Hermione's desk she uses to hit people when they're being annoying."
She laughs despite herself. He grins at her, quick and bright, and for a second the ache in her body feels like less of a problem.
They eat standing up, leaning on opposite sides of the counter. The toast is slightly burnt. The tea is too strong. It's perfect in the way nothing between them is supposed to be.
"I should go," he says finally, setting down his empty mug. He doesn't look at the door when he says it. His gaze flicks to the peacock-shaped clock Theo gifted her as a joke, then to her, briefly, as if checking whether she'll stop him. "Need to swing by Grimmauld first. I— left some files there."
Aurora nods, because that’s what you do with excuses that are also boundaries.
She's learned not to ask why he keeps things at Grimmauld. Learned not to point out that he could just keep files here, could connect their floos, could do any number of things that would make this easier.
Those questions lead nowhere good.
"Right," she says. "Of course you did."
He winces, just slightly. "Don't start."
"I'm not starting anything. I'm finishing my tea."
He gives her a look that is almost grateful for the permission to keep it shallow.
He retrieves his cloak from the chair where he dropped it last night, still damp around the edges from the rain. When he looks at her again, properly, she wonders what he sees: messy hair, his shirt on her body, the faint shadows under her eyes. Something he did. Something he likes. Something he doesn’t want to talk about.
“Thanks,” he says.
It’s a small word, tossed out casually, but it lands with disproportionate weight. For the sex? For the tea? For being convenient?
She swallows past the lump forming in her throat. "Try not to get yourself killed before nine."
"No promises," he says, automatic. A joke they've made a dozen times before.
She watches him put his hand on the door. He hesitates, like he might come back to the kitchen, might stay and finish the conversation they never had.
He doesn’t.
He just waits a beat — long enough to make her feel it — then goes.
The door shuts quietly behind him. The wards give a soft, final click. The flat feels bigger and smaller all at once, full of all the things he's just taken out of it — his laughter, his warmth, the illusion that she's not alone.
Now there's nothing but silence, and it gets in everywhere, even behind her ribs.
Her eyes go to the two mugs on the counter. One ring of tea left inside hers. His already empty, abandoned like always.
She feels the sudden urge to throw them both at the wall, to know for certain what breaking sounded like.
Instead she cleared them away with her wand, steady-handed, and got dressed for work.
By half eight the Ministry atrium is already crowded, a slow-moving tide of robes and briefcases and bored-looking witches on security duty.
Aurora joins the queue for the lifts, wand in hand, hair pinned back in a clip that will start to give her a headache by midday. She feels vaguely hungover, though she had not drunk anything last night except cold tea. It is the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from too little sleep and too much thinking.
The golden grate of the lift rattles open. People surge forward. Memos flutter overhead like low-flying birds that have lost their way. She gets bumped from behind by a junior clerk and steps in, catching the rail with her free hand. It is always the same: someone smells of too-strong aftershave, someone else is muttering about a missing form, someone is already sweating through their robes.
“Hold that?” a voice says behind her.
She does not have to turn to know who it is. The back of her neck prickles. She keeps her eyes on the list of departments as the doors close.
“Level Seven, Department of Magical Games and Sports,” announces the cool voice of the lift. "British and Irish Quidditch League Headquarters, Official Gobstones Club, Ludicrous Patents Office…"
Harry stands just behind her left shoulder. She knows this without looking because she can feel the heat of him, the familiar presence that her body has learned to track like a compass finding north. It's ridiculous, how aware she is. There are at least twelve people crammed into the lift but her body knows which one had his hands on her only hours ago.
His hand brushes hers briefly where she grips the rail.
It could be an accident.
It is not.
“Morning, Malfoy,” he says, low enough that only she can hear.
“Potter,” she replies, equally low, eyes straight ahead.
There's a slight pause. Then, "how are your legs?"
The question is worse than a touch. It sends colour to her face before she can stop it. She's suddenly convinced everyone in the lift can see it, that the witch from Muggle Liaison will turn and say, Oh, have you been thoroughly shagged by your partner before work, how unprofessional!
Aurora tightens her grip on the rail. "We are at work," she says, her tone clipped. "So maybe don't."
"What?" He sounds blankly innocent. "I meant from the mission yesterday. You took that hex to the thigh."
She cuts a sharp look sideways. He's watching the floor indicators, jaw tight, as though he's not enjoying himself at all.
Guilt slides in, unpleasant and immediate.
"Oh," she says.
She's forgotten the hex, actually. There was hot pain in her thigh when it hit, then adrenaline, then the familiar tug of Portkey. Later, at home, she assumed the ache was only from him. The mission feels like another lifetime now, layered under the more recent memory of his mouth between her legs.
"It's fine," she says, because it's simpler than the truth. "I've had worse."
He glances down at her, quick and unreadable. “You don’t have to snap,” he murmurs.
“I’m not snapping.” She is.
On Level Four a group from Magical Creatures squeezes in. The lift is now so full that Harry ends up pressed against her back. His chest brushes her shoulder whenever the lift judders. She can smell tea on his breath, the faint clean scent of her own soap on his skin.
The knowledge that he used her shower — her soap, her towel, her space — is suddenly intimate in a way the sex was not. It implies a kind of belonging that they've never actually discussed.
She stands very still and tries not to think about it.
“Merlin, you two again,” a voice says, further forward. It is Wilkes from their own office, loud enough to carry. “Do you ever go home separately?”
A few people chuckle. Aurora feels Harry go very still against her back.
She stares at the brass doors in front of her. There is a scratch in the metal in the shape of a crooked letter S. She's never noticed it before.
"We work late," Harry says, his voice carefully neutral. "Robards' orders."
“Must be exhausting,” Wilkes says. “You’d have to blow off steam somehow, at that rate.”
The laugh that goes around the lift is light, careless. No one means anything by it. They're just talking, filling the cramped air with sound.
But Aurora feels the heat crawl up her throat and into her face. She keeps her expression blank. She knows how to do this; she learnt years ago how to let other people’s voices slide off her, the remarks about her name, her family, who was on which side.
This should be easier in comparison.
It is not.
Because if they knew— if they could see Harry's hands on her last night, her back arching, the desperate way she'd said his name—
She shuts down the thought like slamming a door.
Harry says something flippant in reply, some joke about Robards being the one who needs to blow off steam. The conversation shifts. No one is looking at her anymore.
But she can feel Harry's awareness, the tension in him. His hand twitches at his side, close enough to brush her hip, and then he deliberately moves it away.
“Level Two, Department of Magical Law Enforcement,” the lift announces at last.
The doors open. People spill out into the corridor. Harry reaches past Aurora to hold the gate for her, automatic courtesy that probably means nothing.
"After you," he says.
She walks out without touching him. At the edge of her vision she can see the curious glance Wilkes gives their backs as they head towards the Auror Office.
The office is already busy— junior Aurors filing reports, someone arguing loudly about evidence chains, the smell of burnt coffee from the break room. Aurora and Harry have adjoining desks, a arrangement that had seemed practical nine months ago and now feels like a kind of torture.
They settle in without speaking. Harry drops his file on his chair and shrugs out of his cloak. Aurora opens the top file on her desk, not really seeing it.
"You okay?" Harry says quietly.
It's the same question as in the lift, really, just rephrased. She finally looks up from the parchment, expression carefully neutral.
"Why wouldn't I be?"
He looks at her for a moment longer. She can feel the weight of his gaze, the question he's not asking. Then he shrugs, the movement too casual. "Briefing in ten. Robards wants us."
“He always does,” she says.
Harry turns away to organize his desk. Aurora waits until his back is to her before she allows herself to exhale, slow and controlled, like she's coming down from a difficult spell.
It's ridiculous, she thinks, that she can face down armed criminals and Dark Artefacts without blinking, but one offhand joke in a lift can make her feel like her skin does not fit.
She straightens her stack of files with unnecessary precision. Work is easier. Work has rules. She understands those.
Whatever this thing with Harry is, it feels like something without rules at all.