How the War Was Won

Harry loved America.

He was intimately familiar with it by now, the endless stretches of highway from whence arose monolithic cities and the ingrown squabbles of tiny lanes surrounded an all sides by buildings with no connection to the soil on which they were built.

It had been seven years since Harry Potter had seen a wizard. And seven since he had used magic. He wandered the empty spaces of the country, guiding his car with the fierce aimlessness of a man deranged. He suspected that he was, in fact, a man deranged.

His flight from Britain after Dumbledore's death had taken him first to France, but he had not been able to escape there. In only a year, Ron had found him, holed up in some nameless and filthy hotel, and begged him to return. Hermione, he said, had found all but one of the Horcruxes and destroyed them with the aid of the Order. Ron had a plan and a scraggling beard, a scar down his face that traveled beneath his shirt and drew Harry's eye to his collar. They had made love there, in Harry's stale sheets for the first time, Harry's hands grasping weakly past the empty bottle to clutch at the mattress while Ron strained above him, still begging.

Begging for Harry to come home, begging for him to fight, begging for salvation and begging for Harry to love him.

Harry left him there, sleeping, and boarded a plane to America that night, sheathed as fully and with as much desperation as Ron had been sheathed in him not two hours past.

In the Wizarding quarter of Melbourne he had used Cedric's name for a set of American papers and changed the entire worth of his vault and Sirius's to American currency. Then he bought a car. He was still driving.

Places caught his fancy like the breeze sweeps up petals, and he lingered many months in some, always drifting away. Then he had ventured into Austin's magical community and stayed long enough to read a single magazine. The war was over. Voldemort had assumed utter control of the UK in a month-long blood-soaked coup. It meant little in Texas, shops owned by muggleborns no longer received any business from Britain of course, but the pureblood movement had yet to cross the pond. He was mentioned only once, and not by name. Only as a rumor of a boy who might-have-saved-someone, a rumor of a destiny.

He had not used magic since the magazine erupted into flames in his trembling hands as he closed it. He had not seen a wizard since he lurched past another young man on his way out of the district to vomit noisily in an alleyway several blocks away.

Harry drove from city to city, staying mostly in motels, sometimes in boarding houses if a place called to him. He drove, he smoked, he drank in dim-lit bars and pulsing nightclubs. He drove and tried not to wonder what had become of Hermione, or Ron, or anyone. He drove and sometimes he wept, though he never knew it till he tasted the salt.

This might have been what he had sought all along the way then, maybe. To stagger, drunk, through the bare corridors of his hotel in Seattle, cigarette hanging twisted and lit from his lips, and find a man sitting on the foot of his bed.

Harry hadn't noticed at first. He had gone directly to the bathroom to splash his face with water and stare into his own eyes, only to have his glance caught by the figure silhouetted against the neon glare on the curtains. He briefly pictured his wand, lying discarded on the matted pillow by Ron's sleeping head where he had left it, and pictured longer the gun locked in his glove compartment beneath a huddle of tattered maps.

"Harry Potter." The man was turned away from Harry and haloed by the blueish light reflecting on white-blond hair. A Malfoy then, but which?

"I was." Harry turned, calm, and walked out of the bathroom. The tap dripped once behind him, then was silent. He sat in the single armchair facing the bed, and the man slowly turned to face him. Malfoy the younger. "How's your father?"

Malfoy reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a cigarette case and lighter. He placed a cigarette in his mouth, flipped the lighter open and slid it over his thigh to ignite it. Harry studied him in the flicker of flame. Malfoy wore bluejeans dyed almost black, and a battered leather jacket with some furred trim that flared out behind him across the bedspread covering most of a Slytherin green jumper. His face was older, fuller, and he had a scar on the left side of his chin. His eyes were almost warm in the glow of the flame as he dragged lazily to light his cigarette, but they were the same shade of gray.

Malfoy exhaled and the smell of some perfumed wizard cigarette hit Harry abruptly. "Dead." He flicked the lighter shut and replaced it in his pocket.

"Pardon?" Harry felt almost under-dressed for the occasion in his own battered jeans and thin black tee shirt.

"Dead, Potter. My father is dead."

"Oh."

Malfoy took another languid drag and Harry watched the flare of light illuminate his face and fade away. "Was your friend Hagrid that got him. Broke his neck."

"Oh," Harry said again, "I hadn't heard."

"Of course you hadn't." Malfoy sounded amused.

"Right." Harry lit his own cigarette and stared at his hands in the near darkness. He could feel Malfoy's eyes on him.

Neither man spoke again till Malfoy dropped his butt to the carpet and ground it out with a booted heel. "Why did you run?"

When he opened his mouth to speak, Harry tasted salt. "Why would I have stayed?"

"You have a point." The blond stood, and Harry looked up at him as he paced to stand in front of the chair. "You know why I'm here."

"Right." Harry closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then started violently, jerking back in his chair as he felt one of Malfoy's slim fingers part the fringe of dark hair over his forehead. "What are yo-" The look on Malfoy's face stopped him cold. There was something almost worshipful in his expression, something that jumped Harry's heart a beat. He swallowed hard. "What are you doing Malfoy?"

"Touching."

"What?"

"You."

"That's not what I meant."

"You're a fool." Malfoy looked into the darkness and the angle of his head called echoes into Harry's drink-addled head. His fingers were still on Harry, the chill of them drilling into him with a studied grace.

"Just do it."

"Stand up."

Harry stood slowly, acutely aware of how close he was to Malfoy now. Only inches separated them. Malfoy's hand had risen with Harry, and the icy cold of his fingertips were now pressed against Harry's scar. He was surprised that there was no pain.

"We watched Weasley's memories." As he spoke Malfoy began tracing up and down Harry's scar. "What was it like for you, Potter?"

Harry struggled for words to express something, anything he felt. To speak of outrage, denial, hatred, love. Malfoy cut the pregnant silence like a scalpel. "It was goodbye, wasn't it?"

And then his mouth was on Harry's with bruising force and his cold hand had slipped into Harry's hair, holding him in the punishing kiss. Then Malfoy's tongue was in his mouth and Harry knew without really knowing that it was a moan that had opened his lips. Draco Malfoy tasted like something sweet long forgotten in the icebox, like the freezer burn on the last popsicle of a dry summer.

Mlafoy's other hand had joined the game, drawing cool lines onto the exposed skin of Harry's hips where his shirt had ridden up when their clothing was caught between them. Harry gave in, pressed his own warm tongue against Malfoy's and reveled in the fact that the other man's mouth was as warm as his own.

Malfoy broke away first, pulled back in two long strides and stared at the picture Harry made in the near darkness of the room. "You've been drinking."

Harry had nothing to say to this, but some momentum pushed him deeper into the twisted emotional debris around them, and he lifted his shirt over his head in one smooth movement. Malfoy hesitated for only a moment before he was on Harry again, a frenzy of touch. His long coat had been forgotten at the foot of the bed sometime in mid-lunge, and Harry felt the whisper of cashmere against his chest as Malfoy attacked his neck with lips and tongue and teeth.

Harry's head fell back and his fingers scrabbled to find purchase under the hem of Malfoy's jumper, noting the texture of the fine wool trousers the other man wore, the coolness of the leather belt against the foreign heat of Malfoy's skin, and then the jumper was over the blond head and Harry stepped away from Malfoy.

The scars crossing the pale skin were slightly raised, and stood out in the dim light, picked out in shadow. They formed a cross-hatched pattern much like the scales of a snake. Malfoy bore Harry's long scrutiny in silence and shifted only slightly, removing his boots. Harry felt the bit of magic that had aided the action and it thrilled him to the bone, that familiar pressure against his own innate abilities. Harry kicked off his own battered sneakers and moved forward.

Malfoy moved back as he did, until Harry had him backed against the bed and only inches separated their bare chests, inches that Harry covered with one trembling hand to trace the scarred pattern of Malfoy's skin. Malfoy shivered once beneath Harry's cool fingers, but allowed the tentative touch, bolstering it to a caress as Harry savored the texture of the scar tissue, following one of the long lines diagonally to a dusky pink nipple. He circled it and smiled at the small noise that escaped the other man before pushing forward, closing the distance and letting the action bring his lips again to Malfoy's own.

Malfoy, for his part, was not idle. His hands traced scrawling trails around Harry's sides and he wrapped the smaller man in his arms, leaving Harry clinging to his shoulders and engrossed in exploring his mouth, trading the slightly acrid taste of an evening in the tavern for the spice of the clove cigarettes Draco favored. Then Draco wrenched his hips sharply around to the dual purpose for pressing his hardness against Harry's and levering the was-not saviour around. The motion caught Potter off-guard and he fell back onto the bed, where Draco pursued him eagerly, with kisses and gentle pressure, to the headboard.

Harry paused briefly and Draco fell to kissing his collarbones tracing half-formed thoughts from Harry's head with each hungry little growl that escaped him.

There was something not right here, something not real. Draco Malfoy was not really here, was he? He was not really groping frantically at Harry's belt with hands somehow grown warm in mere minutes.

'Maybe', Harry thought, 'maybe I;m already dead.'

And that was the end of rational thought, or irrational, as it may have been.

Draco Malfoy wrapped his hand around Harry Potter's weeping erection and began a rhythm of fierce tugs and gentle twists that drew Harry's hips up from the bed without his volition, and slid his body up Harry's even as his hands continued their work. Their chests were flush together again, and Malfoy was kissing him hungrily. The tingling rush of magic spread over Harry's skin again just before the cool air hit his newly bared legs and Malfoy slid two slick fingers into him.

"That was it, wasn't it, Potter?" Draco growled into the smaller man's ear as he stroked the thick cock in his hand and twisted his fingers inside Harry's tight little ass. "That's how you gave it all up. How you said goodbye?"

"Y-ye-nngh."

"Say it, Harry."

Magic poured over Harry's skin as he struggled to speak against the coiling heat in his groin and stole away his breath. Malfoy gave an especially brilliant twist of his fingers inside Harry, then withdrew, urging the other man's legs up and around his waist with the surprising strength of his slender fore arm.

Malfoy's trousers were gone and the head of his cock was nudging against Harry, then inside him in a flare of white heat.

"Malfoy!"

"Merlin, Potter."

Draco set a quick pace that had Harry's shoulders knocking against the headboard, and he never took his slender fingers from Harry's cock, even when he drove the pillows from beneath Harry with his thrusts and began brushing his prostate with every stroke, driving the Gryffindor to mewling frenzy beneath him.

"Say it. Say it say it say it."

"Malfoy - I'm gonna - aahngodgodgod." Harry was coming between them, painting Draco's pale chest and belly with semen, and it was more than Draco could bear. He came silently into Harry, frozen there on his knees for long minutes until the heat of his own seed began dripping down his and Harry's testicles.

Then he pulled out of the other man with a quiet grunt, swung his shaky legs off the bed, and stood. Potter lay still, he didn't even shift when Draco summoned his wand, though Draco knew from his earlier reactions that the active presence of magic was physically thrilling to him.

He studied Potter carefully, committing the tableau to memory, Potter with his legs splayed, head thrown back, his spent cock still flaccid against his right thigh where Draco had left it. His pink and swollen lips, the faint bruising of kisses already darkening his throat.

Draco was lifting his wand when Harry Potter finally opened his eyes.

"That was an apology. This was goodbye. Draco."

"Avada Kedavra."