A War at the End of the World

As usual I don’t own, operate, or in anyway control rights or anything else attached to Harry Potter.


Sorry this took so long to write. I work at a bookstore. You can imagine how that was. Thanks for the reviews. They make it easier to write. Thanks.

Chapter Three: Of Course

Draco couldn’t tell what was worse: smell or the longing. Three days since his season had started, three days of torment. It wasn’t at all like his mother had described it. She had said that he would feel discomfort and a need to find his mate, not this gnawing hunger that never left him or the heavy weight that settled across his chest every time he wondered about who his mate was and what he might be doing. At least he knew it was a he. Not that it did him much good, but in a small way that just barely kept him from loosing his frustration out on his entire house, it made him feel better knowing. Closer. It soothed the aching, barely, like blowing on a burn.

And then there was the scent. Veelas found their mates by scent and for every mate, every veela, it was different. His mother had said that it would be a pleasant smell, comforting, that just a whiff of it would make him want to fall asleep.

Draco was beginning to think that his mother knew nothing about being a veela.

Oh there was a scent. And if he were prone to understatement, Draco could be forced to say that the scent was pleasant. But he wasn’t. And pleasant didn’t begin to describe the scent. As for making Draco want to fall asleep… Well if his mother meant that it would make him harder than he had ever been in his entire life, then she had hit the nail on the head because Draco hadn’t loss the erection that had sprouted three days ago when he had gotten on the train.

Three days was a very long time.

A very long time.

The whole experience was beginning to make him appreciate the service that his godfather had done him for the last three years since he had begun physically maturing and his veela traits began to awaken. Though at night when it was near unbearable he found himself cursing the man for not being available to make the suppressing potion while at the same time hoping he burned alive for making it at all and delaying the locating of Draco’s mate.

In fact the only good thing about the situation at all was that Draco knew for a fact that his mate was at Hogwarts and not in his house. Had he been the young veela would have pounced on him the minute they all settled back into the dorms. Pounced and kept the boy locked away for an indeterminate amount of time. But No, Draco’s mate was not a Slytherin. Not that he cared. And in some small ways he was almost relieved. None of the Slytherin males were up to Draco’s standards. Maybe Blaise, but only if Draco was very drunk and Blaise refrained from speaking. If he had to listen to one more Quiditch statistic he was going to set something on fire.

The only problem with his mate being in another house was that it was slowing down the search. Since getting back to the castle most of the other students had stayed in the dormitories unpacking or simply catching up on work that had been neglected over the holiday. Classes had been scheduled to start the day after they had returned, but for some reason that plan had changed and had been scheduled to start next week. Though only some of the students had received the letter stating such. The school was barely half full; most of the Slytherins and Gryffindors being present while only a handful of the other two houses could be found among the current residents of the school. It was a strange situation, but one that Draco was more than willing to use to his advantage to find his mate.

And find him he would, because freezing cold showers like the one the blonde was currently taking were not even helping ease the ache in his groin and he was sure that another day of this torture and he would start shagging anything that moved. And quite a few things that didn’t.


The itching was drying Harry insane. It had started three days ago as a mild itch on the back of his neck. Nothing serious. A flea off one of the garden gnomes that lived in the garden at the Burrow, a little salve and he would be right as rain. Then it was his arms and legs. A little more serious, but nothing Pomfrey couldn’t handle. She was a bit of wonderful in a white robe.

Only Pomfrey hadn’t been able to take care of it. In fact she had told Harry that there was no reason that he should be scratching at all. There was no rash, no bite; he didn’t even have dry skin. He should be itch free. So then Harry wanted to know why he was sitting in the Great Hall scratching like a mad man?

“Harry, Mate,” Ron said from across the table where he sat watching the black haired teen scratch himself red. “What the bloody hell are you doing?”

“Fishing Ron. I’m fishing,” Harry replied with little humor, though he did have a look of bliss on his face. He had just reached the spot that he had been struggling to reach for the last five minutes.

“I mean why are you scratching like that? You like you’ve got fleas,” the other boy said only half seriously. He knew Harry didn’t have fleas. He just wanted his friend to stop scratching. It was contagious.

“I itch Ron. Just like I did yesterday. And the day before when I got on the train, I itch, ands it’s only gotten worse.”

“Blimey. I thought you were going to see Pomfrey, see if you couldn’t get something for that or something.”

Harry blew out an irritated breath and counted to ten. He wasn’t mad at Ron. Not much at least. The boy hadn’t done anything, but try and be a friend. But the itching was putting him in a foul mood and if Ron didn’t watch himself he would find himself petrified and shoved in the deepest closet in the Gryffindor common room, just like Colin.

“I did. She said there wasn’t anything she could do for me and that it was probably nerves?”

“Nerves?” Ron repeated. “That sounds—”

“Like Shite. Cause it is. Complete and utter shite.” Harry’s tone made Ron look down at his plate and shovel a fork full of egg into his mouth. Grumpy Harry was an unfriendly Harry. Not that he could hold it against the teen. Three days of straight scratching would have driven him mad as well. In fact it was driving him mad and he was just watching. He didn’t want to think about how the smaller boy was dealing with it.

Hermione chose that moment to plunk a huge book next to Ron before taking a seat at the table. “Morning Ron, Harry,” she said to the boys she spent all of her free time with. A worried look settled itself on her face when she saw Harry scratching the spot in the middle of his back.

“You’re still itching Harry? I thought you were going to go to Pomfrey?”

Ron touched her should and shook his head as Harry huffed another annoyed breath out and started scratching a new spot.

“You don’t want to go there right now Hermione,” Ron told her softly. “Harry’s grumpy.” The redhead’s tone was serious, but there was a twinkle of mischief in his eyes that reminded anyone who saw it what pair of twins he was related to.

“Oh, Harry’s being grumpy now is he,” Hermione said, catching on quickly. After the disaster that had been their fifth year Ron and she had worked out a way of making sure that Harry didn’t fall into the funk that they knew he was prone to when things were going less than spectacularly for him. That it involved hexing him with a tickling charm until he couldn’t breath properly didn’t bother her in the least.

Harry narrowed his eyes at his two oldest friends. He recognized the tone their voices had taken and realized he was close to being on the business end of a hex. “I am not being grumpy. I’m just tired of being so bloody itchy all the time.” The boy scratched at a spot just under his neck to emphasis his point.

“So if you would be kind enough to tell me what you found out I could stop being grumpy,” Harry said, making little quotes in the air with his fingers.

“What makes you so sure that I was doing any research for you?” Hermione asked innocently at the same time that Ron said, “Air quotes. Really?”

Harry stuck his tongue out at Ron who grinned widely before turning back to Hermione.

“Of course you did research on this. You’re Hermione. I bet you started looking it up the minute we got off the train. Besides, do you usually tote around books that are too big for any other practical use than research?”

Actually she often did. But Harry was trying to make a point.

“I could,” the girl responded defensively.

Harry leveled a disbelieving stare at her.

“And maybe while I was toting it around I might have looked through it a bit.”

“Uhuh.”

“Oh all right,” Hermione burst out before grabbing the huge book and flipping to a page that she had book marked.

“Okay Harry. Have you had any other symptoms other than the itching?” she asked not looking at Harry, but staring intently at the book.

“No. Not so far.”

Hermione made a sound that he recognized from all the time he spent with Pomfrey. She then took out her wand and made a series of intricate movements that ended with the end of her wand turning green and Harry feeling like something was fizzing in his head, a not entirely unpleasant feeling, but one that made him happier when it was vanished.

“All right now I need to know if there is a mark on the back of your neck,” the young witch said looking up at Harry expectantly.

“Well I can’t tell! It’s on the back of my neck.”

Hermione rolled her eyes. “Honestly. Harry, turn around.”

Harry had the decency to look sheepish before turning in his seat so that Hermione could have a look at his neck. He could hear her making little sounds in the back of her throat the way she always did when she was studying something she didn’t quite understand, but knew she would get. Harry heard an intake of breath and the rustling of pages turning too quickly, and he knew that the girl had that look on her face that told everyone how much smarter she was than they without actually saying it.

“I knew it. I knew, knew it, knew it.”

“Knew what Hermione?” Ron said looking up from his plate as Harry took the opportunity to turn around and face his friends.

“Yeah, care to clue us in?” Harry asked with only a hint of impatience in his voice. The girl was still holding her wand and she was far to good at wordless casting.

“I did a diagnostic spell on you, Harry,” she said with a large grin of the triumphant.

Harry looked at the girl as if she had gone mad. “So? Madame Pomfrey must have done dozens of spells like that on me.”

“You’re probably right,” Hermione said, her triumphant look not diminishing in the least. “But I bet all of those spells were for wizards.”

“Well of course they were. I’m a wizard.”

“Not just a wizard though Harry.” Hermione leaned across the table, the sleeve of her jacket dipping into the bowl of jam. “You know you’re…different.” Hermione made eyes at Harry and expected him to understand.

And he did.

Dumbledore had told Harry on his seventeenth birthday that he wasn’t entirely human, though that had been fairly easy to figure out when he had woken up glowing. Even for wizards, glowing was strange. The only surprise had been what kind of non-human.

He of course had told Ron and Hermione.

“Okay. So what you had to find some obscure diagnostic spell?” Harry asked, reaching for toast and the jam, making Hermione sit back and look at her sleeve disgustedly.

Hermione didn’t answer for a moment, too busy stealing Ron’s napkin. “Like I said, I cast a diagnostic spell. That’s all,” she said sounding to innocent by far.

Harry watched Hermione suspiciously before looking to book she had just closed. Harry’s eyes widened.

“Tell me you didn’t use a spell from a third year Care of Magical Creatures book.”

“Of course not,” the girl said emphatically, but then added under her breath, “it was a sixth year spell.”

Harry put his hand over his face and moaned loudly; luckily most of the other students were coming to breakfast late so there were few people about to hear him.

Ron looked like he was having a seizure in his plate of eggs, he was laughing so hard.

“What a bloody rot.” Harry shook his head a little and sat a little straighter. “All right. So what did you find out?”

“You’re not sick.” Hermione stated.

“Well that’s a relief.”

“You’re in heat,” she said clinically.

Harry was struck dumb by the statement.

Ron’s seizure became a full on epileptic attack.

“You’ve got to be joking,” Harry whispered harshly, leaning forward over the table, his own sleeve finding the jam bowl.

“No. I’m quite certain. You’re in heat. And you’re probably the submissive member as well if you’re just itchy. The dominant mate would be, well, more aggressive. Being itchy is fairly common for the submissive…well, you know,” Hermione said making the strange eyes at Harry again.

The young Gryffindor stayed silent in thought before he stood up rather quickly and left the Great Hall without a backwards glance. Hermione watched her friend go and worried that maybe she should have kept her mouth shut.

“Oh dear, we should probably go after him,” she said looking over at Ron.

The redhead wiped the tears from his eyes before shaking his head. “Nah, he just needs so time to himself. Let him have it. We’ll find him later,” Ron finished scooping another forkful of eggs into his mouth.

“You just want to finish your breakfast don’t you?” Hermione questioned.

Ron shrugged and shoved a piece of toast into his already full mouth.


Harry wandered through the halls, just thinking. He realized once he left the Great Hall that he wasn’t really upset that he was in heat. Or that he was a submissive. In the grand scheme of things he could live with it. It didn’t help his mood that Ron could barely keep the food in his mouth. Harry made a mental note to put some of the animated spider models Fred and George had sent him in Ron’s bed tonight.

But while Harry wasn’t upset about the circumstances the whole thing posed a different sort of problem that had only a small part to do with the mate issue. Dumbledore had told Harry that he would undergo changes and that there would be things that he would have to adjust to. But Harry didn’t want to adjust, didn’t want to have to deal with changes. He had spent years feeling like an outsider with the Dursley’s, but ever since coming to Hogwarts he had felt a sense of peace like he belonged. Harry didn’t want that ripped away from him, didn’t want to be the magical creature among all the wizards, and he knew that if he had a mate he wouldn’t be able to hide how he was different.

And that was no good.

Harry turned down a deserted hallway and went in search of the room where Fluffy lived, deciding to visit the dog to get his mind off of things. Ever since their first year the three-headed dog had been allowed to live inside the castle since he didn’t take well to living in the dark forest. A crying three-headed dog is one of the worse things to ever have to listen to. Harry shook his head at the memory and moved further into the castle.


Draco was on his way to the Great Hall when the smell struck him. Warm and inviting. Lonely. Needy. His mate. Draco followed the scent of the mysterious boy into the deserted portion of the castle. Draco wondered what his mate would be doing in this part of the castle before when he rounded a corner and the scent intensified nearly one hundred fold, as the boy he had been searching for was no more than a few feet in front of him walking down the middle of the hall.

Draco had just enough time to realize that his mate was Harry Potter and that the boy seemed to be looking for something before his body acted of its own accord and he rushed forward. Draco grabbed the black haired boy from behind, wrapping his arms around him, and pressing his straining erection into the other boy’s rear.

“I found you,” Draco said murmured into Harry’s neck.


Harry had been looking for the door that led to Fluffy’s room when he was suddenly grabbed from behind. He was about to scream for help and scream he did, except what had started as a cry for help had suddenly become one of passion. The moment he had been grabbed the itching and furious need to scratch that he had been trying to ignore erupted into lightning across his skin before centering around the places where the taller boy him was touching him.

He felt the other boy’s excitement pressing into him and had to fight the need to push himself back into the embrace. A pair of lips found the side of his neck and Harry could have sworn that he saw the world in pure white for just a moment.

Just as Harry was about to give up and give into his desire he heard a familiar voice that seemed strange to him whispered into his neck and without a sneer added to it.

“I found you,” Draco said.

And in that moment Harry Potter could think of only one thing to say.

“Of course.”