Draco Malfoy and The Aeternum Caput | Drarry

The dragon birthday

Harry was so screwed. He stared at the ten criminals tied down at his feet without feeling a single ounce of joy or accomplishment, even though he had been dedicating himself fully to capture them for the past two and a half weeks. Harry had started working with a team to catch these people, just after he came back from his two-week break with Draco.

The Aurors had been following a group of animal smugglers around for too long without ever getting to their main storage, but then they received an anonymous tip on the location of one of their secondary storages. So last week Harry decided to take a risk and go fully off radar for a while, alone.

The group of criminals was smuggling magical and non-magical animals out of the country. So, Harry disguised himself as his hawk animagus and let himself be captured, in hopes that they'd take him to their main storage. Was it stupid? Yes. But Harry Potter was not known for his safe work methodology.

Harry had warned people he'd be off the radar for a while, so it should have been fine. He said to his team he had a plan but that he was going to execute it alone, and being the Saviour of the Wizarding World usually meant that he was not questioned at times like these.

He had sent messages to Draco via their two-way mirror, with some basic information and how long it should take for him to get back. However Harry didn't add the fact that he planned to let himself be captured in his hawk form, to avoid worrying Draco too much.

The problem was that the last update he had given Draco was on May 25th, and he said that he was supposed to come back on May 31st. Now it was June 4th, and he had been missing for four days after going undercover as an unregistered animagus and with no backup.

Draco naturally hated everything Harry said to him via the mirror and insisted that he shouldn't go, even without knowing about the animagus thing. But Draco was in Norway helping Elena until May 31st, so there was little he could do to stop Harry, who was a very stubborn human being.

And to make everything the absolute worse, in a few minutes, it would be Draco's birthday.

Harry's plan had worked out in the end. He ended up in a huge deposit of stolen animals, and after creating an opportunity to escape his cage and turn back to his human form, he arrested all the smugglers in the blink of an eye. But the whole ordeal still cost him four days longer than he had planned.

Essentially, that meant two things. The first one was that nobody heard from him in four whole days, and the Wizarding World was probably drowning in despair, thinking that Harry Potter was not ready to live up to his famous deeds, and met his destiny a bit earlier than planned.

He could see the Daily's Prophet headline: "Harry Potter has gone missing: another Dark Wizard at play or just lack of experience?" The Prophet had found a good balancing between flattering and doubting him, and he hated it very much, but the public loved the speculation.

Harry, however, could not care less about the Wizarding World's opinion, or what the Daily Prophet wrote about him at that moment. Because in less than an hour, it would be his boyfriend's birthday, and he has not only been missing for four days without a single explanation, but Harry had also not fetched his beautiful and meaningful present, that he had planned out for almost two months in advance.

Therefore, he was screwed. Draco would be at the very least, completely worried, and probably very pissed at Harry. That was definitely not the right way to celebrate the birthday of the man he loved for the first time since they got together and was so far away from what he had planned that there was not even a way to start expressing his frustration with this whole thing, and with himself.