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People have spent years telling you that your trust issues are a problem. Usually right before something went very wrong.
It did, and now you are here.
You watch Draco make your food with peculiar devotion. The meat is carefully selected, hand-cut into bite-sized cubes and fried in butter while he hums in the kitchen, often Bowie songs his wife rolls her eyes at.
You weave between his legs while he cooks, making yourself as inconvenient as possible. He nearly trips over you twice.
Cats are allowed to do that.
Draco calls you a menace and scratches between your ears anyway.
You eat whatever Draco puts in front of you.
You also eat anything Astoria offers, even when some traitorous part of your brain wonders whether she might one day poison you.
But the best thing about being a cat is this: distrust looks a lot like temperament.
🐾
Scorpius gives you treats. All the treats.
He is twelve, home from Hogwarts for the summer and apparently determined to spend it teaching you tricks.
High-five him with one paw: treat.
Roll over: treat.
Jump across his back when he crouches on the lawn: two treats and helpless laughter.
You comply far more often than your feline dignity should allow, but the boy is precious and clever. He looks so much like his father, with Astoria's waves softening his hair, and sometimes you watch the two of them together and imagine things you have no right to imagine.
That this could have been yours.
Then Scorpius laughs again, bright and unguarded, and you think of the children you left behind.
For one sharp moment, you nearly leave, as strays do.
Draco calls you from the kitchen.
You stay.
🐾
In the evenings, you curl into the warm hollow of Draco's lap while he reads by the fire. He's not as bony as you thought he'd be.
Astoria never joins him on the sofa. She watches from an armchair instead, sipping scotch while she writes polite letters to less polite people.
They don't crowd each other. They don't trade barbs that dissolve into laughter like Dean and Seamus. They don't tease and nudge like Ron and Hermione, or roughhouse the way you and Ginny once did.
There is no cruelty in it, either. No fighting. Almost nothing at all.
🐾
Sometimes you hiss when Astoria comes too close to Draco. You can't help it.
Once, when she bends to kiss him goodnight—on his cheek, always his cheek, never his lips—your claw nicks her throat before you can stop yourself.
Astoria touches two fingers to the thin red line.
Draco looks down at you. You brace yourself for the scolding, the punishment.
Instead, his fingers slide beneath your chin and scratch exactly where you like it. You melt against him.
"My jealous little beast."
You absolutely are.
🐾
Blaise and Pansy come for tea in the garden. You doze in the sun on an otherwise unoccupied chair while they tell Draco what Theo and Greg and Millie have been doing.
Something about Theo, magical drums and an escalating disagreement with his neighbours makes Draco laugh hard enough to put his teacup down.
You open one eye. He looks happy, so happy.
Then Pansy unfolds the newspaper. The photograph on the front page is yours.
HEAD AUROR POTTER STILL MISSING AFTER MINISTRY WARD COLLAPSE – NO BODY FOUND
The laughter disappears.
"Pansy," Blaise warns quietly.
Draco stares at the headline. "He can't be dead," he says. It isn't really a statement. "He can't die, can he?"
You climb down from your chair and into his lap. He scoops you up immediately, pulling you against his chest and pressing his face into your sun-warmed fur. His breathing is wrong.
So you stay.
🐾
By the fire, Draco holds his book in one hand and strokes you with the other.
Sometimes he reads aloud.
Sometimes he talks instead.
Tonight his fingers keep abandoning your fur for the thin chain around his neck. He worries at it until a pink line appears against his pale skin, twisting the pendant between thumb and forefinger.
A small golden lightning bolt.
He told Astoria it was a memento from a Bowie concert. Only half a lie.
The first time you pawed at it, he caught your paw between two fingers and held it.
"Nosy little thing, aren't you?"
You purred so hard your chest hurt.
Tonight he twists it again.
"I'll tell you a secret," he whispers conspiratorially.
You nudge his hand with your head. Go on.
"Astoria is leaving when Scorpius goes back to Hogwarts." His fingers drift through your fur. "Not leaving leaving. Merlin, that would require paperwork."
You blink at him.
"A grand farce, all of it. She has decided, quite independently, to spend term-time in Belgium and make the occasional ceremonial return for the holidays. Apparently she feels safe enough to finally leave me alone." He falls quiet for a long moment, presses his lips into a thin line. "She says she isn't worried anymore that I'll work myself to death taking triple shifts." His hand settles over your ribs. "Because I have you to come home to."
Something inside you clenches. You wish, dangerously, that he knew what he was saying.
"It's called an arranged marriage because the pieces perpetually require exactly that." His thumb strokes over your ear. "Arranging."
He glances down at you, and you purr and purr.
"Are you a new piece for me?" A pause. "Or were you a missing one?"
🐾
There is an empty bottle of wine on the table by the time Draco starts talking about Potter.
"I used to wait for him." You go still, but Draco doesn't seem to notice. "Not deliberately." His thumb worries at the lightning bolt again. "But every time those A&E doors opened after midnight, some part of me expected Potter to stagger through them." He gives a quiet laugh. "Bleeding profusely. Cursing. Insisting he was perfectly fine and required nothing more than something for the pain."
You remember.
"He objected to every bloody stage of the assessment. Wouldn't answer a question properly. Lied about his symptoms as though I couldn't see him listing sideways." Draco's fingers tighten around the pendant. "And then eventually he'd stop fighting." His voice softens. "He let me take care of him. Every time."
He looks into the fire. You lay one paw against his chest.
"I suppose that makes me a bad person."
Your ears twitch in confusion.
"I'm still hoping he'll get himself hurt wherever he is. Just enough to come back. Enough to need patching up. Need me."
You push your head beneath his hand, try to reassure him. I'm here.
"Maybe he'll whisk me away next time," Draco murmurs, almost laughing. "He looked like he wanted to, sometimes, you know?"
You know.
Draco's expression changes. The chain pulls taut again. "It was too much for him. He was half-mad with stress, held together by adrenaline, stubbornness and magic. I saw the potions in his blood. Stress potions. Calming draughts. Dreamless Sleep. Merlin knows what else." Draco swallows. "He wouldn't admit any of it. Not even to his wife."
First comes the anger—you know that expression—only then his face crumples. You climb fully onto his chest before the first tear falls, spread yourself across him and begin to purr. His heart hammers against your ribs.
"I miss him."
You stay.
🐾
Scorpius's trunk is packed. Tomorrow he goes back to Hogwarts. He's excited to see Albus again.
"Good morning, my darlings."
Draco steps into Scorpius's room, already dressed for the day. He runs a hand down your back as you lie on the boy's bed. You roll over and shamelessly present your belly. Draco obliges with scritches.
"He needs a proper name before I go," Scorpius says.
"He's managed this long without one."
Scorpius looks at you thoughtfully. "He's a little hero."
You are. You have chased away the krup that tried to nip Scorpius's ankle. The magpies that swooped down for the ring he left beside the herb beds. The wasps determined to drink his pumpkin juice.
"Can—" Scorpius hesitates and looks at his father. "Can we call him Harry?"
Draco's fingers stop, and everything inside you goes still. Draco looks down—not glances, looks.
Into your green eyes. At the scar disappearing through the wild, dark fur above one eye and running towards the torn edge of your split ear. Your ears flatten against your skull. Your pupils widen until green becomes black. Your tail lashes once. Adrenaline rises like a tide. You're still on your back, vulnerable.
Draco crouches. For several long seconds, he simply stares, grey eyes sharp and calculating.
You consider running. You consider transforming.
Draco's mouth curls.
"Hello, Harry."