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Grimmauld Place shines—the house always does put its best face forward when Draco comes calling, on account of the house liking Draco more than it does Harry (and Harry can’t fault Grimmauld this clear favor, if only because Harry likes Draco quite a bit too). Harry’s with Draco in the drawing room and the rug is clean, the floorboards shine with fresh polish, the light is bright, and the mantelpiece gleams. Draco does too.
They’d gotten takeout from the hole-in-the-wall restaurant they favored, three blocks away, and the food, post a pint or two from the Hound and Hare’s taps, is fucking perfect. Pineapple curry for Draco and lamb vindaloo for Harry (and chicken korma for Kreacher, set politely aside without further comment in the kitchen), mango lassis to chase it all down.
Draco takes the sleeve off his straw and winds it into a little, delicate paper ring.
This, he flicks Harry’s way with a sly smile, teasing—meaning nothing, of course. Draco steals the sleeve (significantly more mangled) from Harry’s straw, too, and sets to work again.
This is just what he does when he’s given scraps of paper, Harry’s found. Given napkins at bars, receipts at cafes, and straw sleeves with takeout dinners, Draco will set to folding, his fingers flashing deftly, capably—Harry thinks of it as an endearing holdover from their school days, and he keeps the treasures when he can.
He’s got a box full of them: a whole menagerie of animals and flowers, cranes and crabs and frogs and elephants and turtles, peonies and lilies and lotuses and more.
And now, somehow the first of its kind: a ring.
Harry slides the ring onto the middle finger of his left hand. It’s a little tight on that finger. Plausibly so—so. Harry, casually, moves it (this thoughtless and treasured offhand paper creation of Draco’s) one finger over.
And it fits. Perfectly. Right there on the ring finger of his left hand. And when he looks up he finds that Draco’s teasing smirk has gone soft and fond, and that he’s folded the second paper ring onto his own hand, too. It’s sitting right next to the ring on his pinky that was the Malfoy family signet ring, until he let a friend melt it down and reforge it for her silversmithing course—I think it suits me better now, don’t you?—like it belongs there, like it’s always been there and it always will be.
Draco smiles at him, shining like starlight in the drawing room of Harry’s home (which honestly doesn’t feel much like a home unless Draco’s in it), the both of them wearing paper rings, and Harry’s heart kicking wildly in his chest. It only hurts a little.
Then Draco flings a bit of rice at Harry’s face, because while Harry may be a little, unfortunately, irrevocably in love with him, he really can be such a child. Harry squawks, and the moment passes.
But that’s how Harry starts thinking about rings, and Draco, and finds he can’t stop.
;
Because Harry is himself, haunted by his legions of ghosts, thoughts about rings and Draco and marriage inevitably leads to thinking, too, about his parents.
He hauls out the photo album Hagrid made for him when he was eleven, brushing the worn cover with care, paging through the photos with reverence and a grief dulled by time and distance. His parents, Sirius, Remus—a whole cohort of vibrant young people smile out at him, looping through the fragments of their lives (too short, all of them) caught on film.
He watches his father and his mother in their wedding robes, smiling, laughing, dancing. Rings shine on their fingers, their hands clasped tightly together. Lily blows a kiss at the camera, and James lunges forward to catch it out of the air. The photo loops. Their rings flash.
He’d asked Minerva once, many years ago now, who arranged his parent’s funeral, what had happened to their wands, their rings. She said she believed it had been Remus who arranged the service. She said she believed those particular personal effects had been buried with them. There had been no one else, no one left, who could have confirmed or denied this. Minerva had apologized, had said she wished she had something more certain to give him.
(On the wall behind her, Dumbledore’s portrait had closed his eyes. He said nothing. Snape was not in his portrait at all.)
His parents dance and dance on enchanted celluloid. Sirius and Remus toast them, drink to their health, and dance and laugh and live with them. Harry is nearly older now than any of them got to be.
Grief is a funny thing, a sharp ache shooting through his chest even now—these people, they should be strangers to him, but he knows them anyway. He inherited their love and has it still: that’s why he still carries the grief, after all. Harry had so little for so long that he’s always had a little trouble letting go of what he’s been given, what small scraps he could hold onto, holding on tight even if it hurts.
Which brings him back to Draco, and to rings.
It's not a mad proposal (hah), is the thing.
That Draco doesn’t live with him at Grimmauld is a formality at best, because Draco likes his flat, worked really quite hard for it, and it’s useful to keep a mundane flat when one has mundane friends (even when stretching the Statute so thin its nearly gossamer). It’s a rare night that they don’t spend with each other, at one place or the other. Their lives are entwined, from shared dresser drawers and wardrobe space at both Grimmauld and the flat, to friend groups (as blended as they can be—see again: Statute). At parties and functions and pub nights they introduce each other to others as my partner, Draco; my partner, Harry.
And, well—they have talked about it.
He already has Draco, heart and hand, body and soul—but there remains that stubborn, core part of Harry (underfed, underloved, clinging) that aches to be held. To be kept, in an inarguable, tangible way—he wants it very badly, to add a new word to their shared vocabulary: husband.
Draco knows this about him, and this is the mad thing: Draco wants it too. Practically dared him to go do something about it with those paper straw rings, sitting in the box in Harry’s bedside drawer.
Harry could go to a jeweler tomorrow, knowing Draco’s ring size and tastes both, and walk out with something lovely that suits. Draco would say yes, of course. They’d be engaged by Sunday.
But Harry’s a romantic and a sentimentalist, and he knows that Draco is too.
Malfoy heirlooms are out if what he did with the family signet ring is any indication, but his mother was a Black first, before her own marriage. Harry’s got access to the Black family vaults willed to him by Sirius, merged with the Potter holdings in the wake of the war (suggested by the bank for sake of ease regarding the accounting-and-reconciliation of the whole dragon business). He finds he likes the idea of using something from their shared history as a cornerstone for the future they’ll build together. He really, really likes it.
So, to Gringotts he goes.
;
The Potter-Black vaults are disorganized in the way that wizarding spaces often are, the ephemera of whole generations of lives, mothballed and stasis-spelled and tucked away down in the dark with the mountains of galleons and sickles and knuts, precious metals glimmering under his wandlight.
It’s been nearly twenty years since the war ended, and despite working (nominally, at least) for Gringotts he’s only visited his actual vault a handful of times. It's always daunting, the clutter reminding him a little too much of the Room of Hidden Things, and he never knows what exactly he’ll find whilst searching for what he came for, diving into these labyrinthine depths—though the vault does seem to offer up what he needs, even if he hadn’t known it at the time.
This time he finds a portrait.
The painting is in a Baroque style, propped up on the top of an ancient, scuffed credenza. The subject is a woman, turned slightly away from the front of the portrait, drowsing in a velvet armchair, a dark wood-panel wall inset with an open window behind her. The window opens onto a rolling green field, silver thunderclouds building in the far distance. Trees, the grass, a gauzy white curtain, all flutter in the painted breeze, and Harry shivers.
He leans close, his conjured lights drifting in with him, to read the engraved plate at the bottom of the frame—Miranda Potter, née Barnes, 1723—when he looks up, intending to try to catch the details of her face, he finds keen hazel eyes blinking back at him.
She rises from her chair and comes to the front, eyes flickering over his face, taking him in just as he takes in her. She looks kind. Familiar, even if he’s never seen her before in his life—Miranda Potter—familiar. Family. The silver shooting through her dark hair springs primarily from her right temple, just like it’s starting to on Harry’s head. She smiles. He has the same dimple in his cheek.
“Oh my, you look just like Monty’s boy,” she says, grinning now, a hand on her heart as she drinks him in. Abruptly, her expression turns thoughtful, though no less delighted. “Well, except for your eyes, those are all Lily. I’m sure you’ve heard that before: striking woman, your mother.”
Harry gapes.
“I,” he says, his mouth suddenly very dry, “Sorry?”
“You are him, yes? James and Lily’s son? I admit, I was expecting you rather sooner than this, young man,” she levels him with a stern look, undercut by the smile still breaking through her seriousness.
A moment passes, then two. Harry finds his tongue, just about, and says, “Pardon, I, yes? Sorry, you are…?”
“Oh! My apologies,” she laughs, hides briefly behind her hand before she sobers, straightens, though the wry tilt to her mouth persists, “You spend all your time gadding about with other old paintings and goblins and your manners desert you entirely —forgive me, please. I’m Miranda. Our exact relation is a little tricky to pin down, as I'm sure you can imagine, but you can call me Grandaunt if you like.”
“A pleasure,” Harry says by rote, falling back on the manners Draco likes to pretend he doesn’t have. Grandaunt, Harry mouths to himself, wonderingly. “I’ve never seen your portrait here before?”
She sniffs pointedly, raising a brow. The expression lasts a moment before it’s wiped from her face, replaced with a gentle smile. “I imagine you weren’t looking for a ring, before. That is why you’ve come, yes? I’m here to help. Imagine how long you’d be fumbling around in this old place if I weren’t!”
“Right,” Harry says, slowly, feeling more than a bit bowled over, “Right, a ring. Rings, really. I was thinking, well, his mother was a Black, so a family heirloom would be nice?”
“Ahhh, a Black. I might have guessed," she nods seriously, then winks at him, then starts chattering at a truly remarkable clip: “I don't mean to generalize, of course I’m only speaking from a few centuries of truly anecdotal experience, but you Potter lads do tend to get a certain way about your beaus from that family, and as a result we do have plenty of rings that were worn by one Black son or daughter or another laying around here—oh, you would not believe how young Dorea had your Uncle Cee wrapped around her finger, and frankly from the way your father went on sometimes I was sure he’d bring Orion’s lad around to meet me before too long, imagine my surprise when he brought along your mother instead! Not that dear Lily was an unpleasant surprise, heavens no, quite the opposite! It’s only that I’m so rarely wrong —”
Here she stops so abruptly that Harry is left reeling. The smile falls from her lovely, familiar, painted face.
Harry gathers himself, asks, “You met them? My parents?”
“I did,” the portrait of Miranda Potter says, “I met James many times, and Lily twice. And forgive me if I’m wrong here again, dear, but if it’s a family heirloom of a ring that you’re after, wouldn’t you like to see yours?”
Harry blinks. Blinks again. “Pardon?” he asks, parroting himself.
“Your parents’ rings, my dear. I have them here.”
It’s the strangest thing, all the air seems to have fled from the vault. He can’t quite draw a proper breath, and only barely keeps control of his Lumos. Still, the light flickers wildly, doing strange things to the shadows around him and nothing at all to the shadows on Miranda Potter’s painted face. She watches, waits patiently.
Grief is a funny thing.
Harry’s eyes sting, and finally, finally he draws in enough of a ragged breath to croak, "I thought they'd been buried with them."
"Oh, darling,” the portrait’s face folds with heartbreak. She presses her hand against the fore of her portrait, like she can reach out of her canvas and comfort him with warm, living hands. Like she’d like to, at least. She says, “With their wedding bands, I'd imagine. Their engagement bands, though—they left those here for you."
Harry finds he’s run out of words. He swallows, and swallows again. He sees his parents, dancing forever in a photograph, smiling, holding hands into eternity. Oh, he does not say, though his mouth forms the shape. Miranda’s eyes are so very gentle.
“Would you like to see?”
His heart beats hard in his chest—it hurts, but only a little. Only in good ways.
He nods.
;
Harry apparates into Grimmauld’s back garden, short one promise to visit an old portrait (and to introduce her to someone very special, very soon), plus one velvet pouch kept safe in his pocket. He knows Draco’s around (that he’s home) even before he steps into the kitchen and sees the pot burbling happily away on the stove, the ledgers from the pub left out on the kitchen table, before he hears the music coming from the drawing room. Standing in the dark of the back garden, the house washes him in warm, glowing light.
Harry goes inside, happily. He follows the music, snagging the open bottle of wine from the counter as he passes.
He finds Draco exactly where he expects: sprawled out on the sofa, creased paperback in hand, nearly empty wine glass hanging from his fingertips.
He smiles when he sees Harry, sets the paperback down, holds out his glass. “Hello there. Be a dear?”
Harry goes to him, takes the glass from his hand, and sets both it and the bottle aside. Then he takes Draco’s hand and presses a soft kiss to the inside of his wrist.
“Hello,” Harry says, smiling against the flutter of his pulse. “I have something for you.”