Chapter Text
XVII (I do not love you...)
by Pablo Neruda
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
January 2013
Harry has no thoughts out of the ordinary the morning his world is turned upside down. He swings his legs over the side of the bed, stretches tall with his elbows locked as his stomach rumbles, and thinks regretfully, shit, I’m still out of eggs.
And when he sleepily itches at the waistband of his pyjamas and shuffles to Jules’ enclosure, he drops breakfast in for the creature still lurking hidden under a hollowed-out dome and thinks, well, I certainly am almost out of crickets.
In fact, he trails all the way down to the kitchen thinking perfectly normal thoughts; that the hallway is cold, that he can’t stop yawning. Grimmauld Place is silent but for the clicking as he starts the hob, which he does absentmindedly before even checking for the existence of eggs. Then, in the white light of the fridge, he blinks momentarily at a full carton he can’t remember buying, shrugs, and cracks a couple into the pan.
It’s less ordinary how sleepy he is. Perhaps feeling as though his eyes are heavier than stone would make sense after a terrible rest, but he’d had an uneventful, dreamless night’s sleep. That first turns him inquisitive. And his head aches—not at the scar, but in the back, by his brain stem. He frowns at the eggs, poking at them as he starts to run a quick bodily analysis top-down:
Grogginess. Headache. His shoulders are sore. There’s a twinge in his centre back. Did he take a fall he doesn’t remember?
Lower still, in his gut—he’s hungry but a little queasy, too.
Did he have an entire night out that he doesn’t remember? It’s beginning to seem all-too reminiscent of an early-twenties hangover. He humphs, stumped by the symptoms.
The eggs are coagulating when a new bodily analysis is needed:
Two hands, cold and thin, wrap themselves around his ribs.
And attached are two long arms, which pull a body closer to his from behind.
This takes a breath longer to comprehend than the knot in his back. He’s still blearily registering whether it’s a dream when warm lips touch the skin of his neck, wet and so real, and it works like a pinch, confirming his consciousness. He drops the spatula in his hand straightaway, spinning, throwing the arms from around him and pushing—hard—for the intrusion.
Draco Malfoy—Draco Malfoy?—falls roughly, wincing as his back hits the kitchen table with the force of Harry’s panicked shove. He doesn’t catch himself before his feet tangle up with the chair and table legs and send him flat onto the floor.
There’s a moment where his expression is pained just before it’s completely overwhelmed by shock. It’s a look Harry mirrors, staring down in speechless surprise, but Draco’s the first to speak and when he does his voice is terrifyingly even, as if much more dangerous emotions are being held carefully at bay.
“Don’t you… ever touch me like that again,” he utters slowly and sharply. “I will be gone before you can even attempt to justify yourself.”
Harry, who had been stuck wildly investigating the man on his floor, the familiar blonde hair tossed in front of darkly shining grey eyes, pointed features drawn even sharper in furiousness, feels a temper beyond comprehension flush through his system. The longer he stares, the hotter he feels, and at the sound of the intruder’s voice, it seems to erupt into uncontainable levels.
He lords over Draco’s fallen figure, one hand braced firmly on the table. “You put your hands on me in my own fucking home and try to tell me what to do?” he spits. “I’ll hit harder if it really makes you leave. You’re lucky I had a spatula in my hand and not a knife.”
Better than both of those would be his wand, which is undoubtedly sitting by his bed. Why had he left his wand upstairs?
Because he reckoned he’d be safe in his own kitchen, surely, he thinks.
Draco’s face, which had been pinched in, slackens in perplexity. “Your home… Put my hands…” he mutters, climbing to his feet. “Are you feeling alright? Answer wisely, because it elects how I handle that… unbelievably upsetting show of nastiness just now.”
He lunges forward—deftly catching the wrist Harry throws up haphazardly in defence—and leans past to turn off the hob.
Lunge, despite the pounding heartbeat he can feel in his throat, is maybe not the word. It was only a step. A brush past. Something is happening to him. Harry frowns, wrenching his hand away. He takes a step back and Draco does the same, holding his hands up in surrender.
“I’ll ask you again, Malfoy,” he recovers when their eyes meet, shaking off the strange feeling. “What are you doing in my home? Who let you in?”
Draco is tall. He’d forgotten in the years since they’ve seen each other, but it’s making it difficult to stand intimidatingly, and his lifted chin and hard expression seem to have a limited effect on the man opposite. He tries to present a broadness instead, pulling his shoulders back.
Draco acts unfazed. His brows furrow in. “Malfoy? I… Harry, tell me what’s happening.”
He speaks slowly, like to a child. It’s demeaning and Harry’s fists clench tight, nails biting into his palm. He’s not afraid to take a non-magical approach to get an unwelcome prick out of his home—Draco had once taken an extraordinarily non-magical approach to breaking his nose once, after all.
“What’s ha-ppe-ning,” he answers, equally slow (Draco is the dunce, Draco doesn’t understand the absurdity of breaking in and expecting a friendly tête-à-tête), “is you’ve gotten past a Fidelius and into my kitchen, and now you’re standing there trying to hold a two-sided conversation as if I shouldn’t be whacking you back across the threshold with the end of a broom like vermin.”
Draco’s eyes widen, darting between his like he’s a riddle to solve. Harry’s had quite enough of this. He needs his wand, so he can bind Draco, interrogate him, find out how he’d made it through the door and why he would… Thinking about the specifics at the stove and the wetness that had lingered on his neck for disconcertingly long sends his stomach flipping, so he pushes the line of questioning away.
First, the upper hand. He makes sure to clip Draco’s shoulder as he passes him, pounding quickly up the stairs.
“Wait! Where are you going?” the other man calls after.
Harry doesn’t answer. If he’s daft enough to break in and calmly let him run for a wand, he’s deserved of anything that comes of Harry pointing it at him. A fist closes around the cotton of his tee and the contact is like an electric shock. He has whirled around, grabbed at the thick collar of Draco’s knit jumper, and tugged him by the neckline down onto the landing of the stairs before he can even register how it all made him feel. Draco’s startled yelp at the action hangs in the air.
“You have a lot of fucking nerve,” Harry hisses. Draco’s hands circle his wrist, gentle. Why are they so gentle? It makes his throat tight. He pulls at the fabric in his hand, frustrated, leaning down over him. “Fight back.”
“I’m not going to fight you!” Draco drops his arms with a sigh. “I just need you to stop and talk—”
Harry shoves at his shirt as he lets go. The patience is maddening. “You don’t need shit.”
“Harry, look. Just look!”
Draco stands, wavering slightly, dishevelled, and moves his arms towards Harry. Harry tenses, but the hand just points benevolently past him, where he follows it to a large bronze-framed photo on the wall, centred above a thin table as though it’s meant to live there and has lived there a long time.
Harry stands happy printed on the canvas, same in many ways to now except for the darkness of his already-tan skin—a summer complexion—and the length of his hair the way he kept it on top years ago and that he appears to be standing on the bright blue coast of what appears to be Italy—a country he’s never visited.
This is enough to stop him in his tracks, just to wonder when he’d gone to the Italian seaside, but the way his portrait-self looks at Draco Malfoy standing next to him is completely baffling; it’s with love, or adoration, or something equally embarrassing and degrading.
That flash of temper rises again. This time, with it, comes a feeling long forgotten—fifteen, frustrated, and feeling a fury well up in him unprovoked as he meets Dumbledore’s eyes.
He turns back to Draco, mouth drawn tight, but the expression that faces him only makes him feel caught out, like a confused, enraged animal backed into a corner, scared more than it’s letting on. He feels it all, for a moment, but worse, he can tell that Draco sees it all, too. That hardens him, draws his face stony again. This was not unprovoked fury. Against Draco Malfoy, even looking his way was a provocation.
“Can we firecall Ron?” Draco asks slowly. “You remember Ron?”
He scowls. “Of course I remember Ron.”
“Alright, so let’s go back downstairs, you can keep your eyes on me at all times, and we’ll contact Ron.”
“My wand is upstairs,” he grunts out.
“A perfect reason to go downstairs.” Draco holds his hands up again. “I’m wandless, too, alright? I was merely… I heard you in the kitchen so I came from the living room to say… hello. Let’s go together and get Ron and Hermione.”
Harry agrees, brusquely with his arms folded, mostly because he’s speechlessly perplexed by the framed portrait, and because he trusts himself to manage without his wand; there are knives sharpened to culinary quality in the kitchen if Draco dares touch him a fourth time. The sooner Hermione and Ron join them and set things straight, the better.
Sometimes it’s been so long since Grimmauld Place existed as it did under Black reign that Harry forgets how it once looked. Only the top floor, Sirius’ floor, remains completely untouched, like those historical homes preserved for education. All his senses shift when he reaches the fourth storey; the musty smell returns from the untouched rooms, the cheerily painted walls are replaced with peeling wallpaper, the landing begins to creak where it transitions back into a flight of the original, sagging wood. And he’d swear the air feels thick, tastes bitter and sad. He doesn’t go up often.
He was sure, however, that he knew all the renovations he had done on his own home, so he stalls in the living room doorway while Draco moves through as if he owns the place—shifting a doorstop in front of the too-well-oiled French doors, closing the lid to the piano keys, moving an empty teacup from the couch and sinking into its cushions, setting the saucer with a clack on the glass coffee table. He seems unsurprised by the overabundance of instruments in the room.
Harry scans the walls; behind the piano hangs a guitar and two violins, plus two bookshelves stocked with thin books and records. He doesn’t remember owning the record player sitting beside them either.
He turns his head back towards the familiar stranger with further disbelief, but Draco looks up with sharp grey eyes and Harry’s thoughts spin to the Italian coast, which is scary and infuriating, so he thinks of Ron instead and tears his gaze away to kneel by the fireplace.
Ron.
He can’t decide if it’s stupid or deft that Draco recognised the value of having Ron and Hermione there, outnumbering him. They’ll have answers—they always seem to—and they’re a comfort either way. He reaches for the powder and calls their address, sticking his head into the licking flames and reappearing in a sunny living room with tall windows. He’s not alone.
“Uncle Harry!” Rose lounges on the rug with a sticky bun in her hands, but she sets it on a plastic plate and rolls on her stomach to face him, hands propped on her chin. Her curls, wild as Hermione’s with a hint of Ron’s ginger warmth, are kinky with bedhead. It’s impossible not to smile back. “Good morning.”
“Morning, Rosie, er, are your mum and dad up and around yet?”
“Hugo’s fault,” she says with an eye roll. “Some sort of dinosaur exhibit to go to.” She sits up again, turns away from the floo and shouts “MUM!” loud enough for Harry to wince, then when there is no response, sighs and stands, leaving his view entirely.
He takes the moment to duck out of the fire and set his eyes on Draco. He’s still sitting on the couch, tense but unmoving, chewing his lip, and he shows his palms again under Harry’s watch. He’s gestured in surrender an awful lot.
Harry nods curtly. When he ducks back in Hermione’s staring back. He sighs audibly at the sight of her. “Oh, Hermione, thank god. Draco Malfoy is in my living room.”
“Okay… he practically lives in there, this is what you rang for? Or is it a rescue mission to get him out of the room? We’re off to the Natural History Museum if you two want to come…”
Harry purses his lips. She’s not understanding. She’s in on it. Why does she sound like she’s in on it?
“Draco Malfoy, Hermione,” he enunciates. “And there’s… there are pictures of us. There’s one on the stairs where—it looks like I went on holiday? With him. And I was in the kitchen and he came up behind me and…” He can’t speak it so he drifts past, aware that Hermione’s brows have knit together considerably the longer he’s talked. “Something is wrong, I think. I don’t mean to interrupt your plans.”
“Plans interrupted,” she says quietly. “Draco’s okay?”
The mention of his name with such care sends irritation through him. “Adequately shaken when I threw him down on the stairs.”
Her eyes widen. “Why did you do that, Harry?” she asks, tender and careful again, with that same primary school teacher tone Draco affected earlier.
“He’s in my home, Hermione, I reacted! I… when I look at him, I just want to… I want to…”
Images flash into his mind of things Draco deserves. Hexes and punches and hurting words. Meanwhile, he can see her thoughts racing as she scrutinises his face. “If I leave you to get everyone together and we come over in five, can you be alone with him?”
Harry glares.
“Okay, okay. Five minutes, Harry. For Circe’s sake, leave Draco alone until then. We’ll be right over.”
He catches the look she lets slip then, as she turns from the fire, fading from friendly gentleness to intense solemnity, as if she’s gravely aware of a seriousness that even Harry hasn’t digested yet.
Draco has been miraculously obedient. He’s not moved an inch from his stiff position, though his fingers tap a nervous melody on his knee that freezes when Harry extricates himself from the hearth.
“Is he coming?”
He nods down at his feet—a safer subject of his attention if Hermione’s advice is to be followed. “They all are.”
Draco makes a sound of approval. Eyes follow Harry as he sits in a chair furthest from the couch. He doesn’t have to look up to feel them laser into his back. And yet it’s charitably quiet for half a minute. In the silence, Harry can feel himself coming down again.
Coming down from what?
Draco clears his throat so Harry rolls his eyes preemptively.
“You don’t remember me at—”
“If you feel like clinging to life a while longer, you’ll stop talking,” he grumbles, massaging circles on his temples. “Every word out of your mouth makes me want to strangle you.”
He says it diplomatically but Draco is stunned into silence. If it results in no more speaking, Harry doesn’t quite care what the intermediary emotions are.
They sit in complete, tense muteness just waiting for the fire to light. Harry finally sneaks a sidelong glance towards the other man fiddling his thumbs and registers the bottom half of his attire—grey joggers with ‘Chudley Cannons’ in thick bright orange lettering down one leg. They’re Harry’s.
And his appearance; Harry last remembers him in their early twenties, fresh off the war and gaunt in the presence of trial attendances. At thirty-two, he looks healthier, his face perhaps a little wider with age just as Harry’s had grown. His hair is a bit longer, like he could tuck the front strands behind his ears from where they hang in his eyes, but he’s no less pale, no less lanky, and certainly no less serious.
They’re still perched like wax statues when the entire Granger-Weasley family arrives through the floo. The sudden presence of two children warms the room’s chill, especially when they both run to hug Harry. He hisses a breath when they give an equally loving reception to Draco, but Ron’s at his side with a hand on his shoulder before he can linger on the interaction.
“Hi mate, ‘Mione said we’ve got a minor emergency on our hands.”
Harry gestures an open hand sharply to the blonde man on his sofa. Draco offers Ron a hopeless shrug. This vie for sympathy seems audacious, but Ron simply returns it with a soft commiserating frown.
“I see,” he murmurs. “We’ll have the monsters go out back and—”
“Does Jules want to come with us?” Hugo interrupts, two small hands on Harry’s arm. The tenseness leaves him again, as it seems to any time the topic of Draco is completely ignored.
“I’m sure Jules would be happy to come outside with you. I know you were supposed to go to the museum. He’s no dinosaur,” Harry leans in like he has a secret, “but his great-times-a-bajillion grandparents likely were.”
“Yes!” Hugo grins, then turns on his heels and clomps up the stairs with excitement. Harry looks back at Ron just as Hermione’s panicked call cuts off whatever would come next.
“DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!” she shouts shrilly, sounding strained. Her hand’s dropped from Rose and she’s across the room before he’s blinked. “HUGO! Come back down!”
He returns sullenly, a little shaken, into her clutches before she’s taken a step up the staircase, not carried far on his little legs. All the adults but Harry seem to relax their shoulders. Her hand moves with reverence into her son’s mop of tight curls, direction him back into the room.
“I was thinking a cursed object, too.” Draco looks up like he knows her well enough to read her mind. She nods back.
Watching these familiar—familial—interactions fills Harry with enough confusion and aggravation to make him physically nauseous, so he seizes the excuse to walk out by standing abruptly, watching the heads follow him, and saying, “I’ll get Jules.” He doesn’t wait for responses.
“That’s not Harry…”
Draco’s voice floats dimly through as he turns into the hallway. He huffs, shifts it from his mind, and focuses on his singular task. Upstairs, the crickets in his habitat are gone, and the small leopard gecko himself lays sunning on a log under the heat lamp. Harry pops the lid off and holds his hand out flat.
“The little ones are here,” he explains, waiting patiently as the little padded feet step onto his palm. “They long for your entertainment.”
Too hungry to entertain, comes the squeaky, small reply. Crickets help.
“You had breakfast.”
No crickets from you, then ice queen will be persuaded.
Harry freezes, hand halfway to his shoulder. “Ice queen?”
Long one. Mate. You call ice queen.
Harry purses his lips. Jules corroborating this story is too much to swallow.
“No crickets,” he says shortly, finishing transferring Jules to his shoulder. “I know where the cauldron’s kept.”
This quip hushes Jules as it always does—Harry had found the little lizard in a potions shop while wandering Diagon Alley in the ingredients section. A small pipped, Where am I? had stopped him and had him turning every which way searching for a snake. Instead, he’d seen only its cousin.
“Was that you? Hello?” he asked, kneeling to peer into the small container.
Hello. Where am I?
“Why can you speak this language?”
It is what I speak.
Fair answer, he decided. His own response would likely be just as succinct.
Where am I?
“Er, potions shop.”
What for?
Harry stuttered, searching for easy words. How does one tell a small animal that it’s worth two sickles, expendable, part of a recipe?
A joke, said the creature in his hesitation. I know my fate.
That had done it—either the discovery of a lizard with a sense of humour or a resolved acceptance of impending death. Harry’d had both. He walked out of the shop with the little reptile, where his friends had stood waiting with much less impulsive errand purchases.
“What are you called? Your name?” he’d asked that night, setting up the tank.
What is in a name?
Harry grinned. “Quite right, Juliet.”
What is Juliet?
“You.”
Jules does win a cricket, as he does every time Harry gets snarky enough to make a potions comment, and when he gets back downstairs the adults are sitting crowded on the couch together, Hugo and Rose waiting bored. They bound over when Harry returns. He kneels to put his shoulder at eye level.
“Hello, Jules, how are you today?” Hugo asks with a toothy smile, holding his hands out. He looks up at Harry expectantly, who is used to playing the role of translator.
“Hugo wants to know how you are today.”
Hungry. Proud.
“Proud?”
Little ones love properly. I am royalty.
Harry smiles at Hugo. “He’s good, he likes seeing you because you two love him so much.”
“Awwww,” Rose coos.
“Outside, please, and don’t touch anything.” Hermione’s hand is rubbing Draco’s back and Harry stiffens. It had been nice upstairs, without the temper. In the children's absence, all eyes train on him and he sits uncomfortably, waiting for someone with more answers than he—with more memories than he, maybe—to begin fixing things.
Ron clears his throat. “So. Did you touch something, Harry?”
He thinks through this morning. “Eggs. Crickets.”
“All in a balanced meal,” Draco tries humourlessly. Harry snaps his head over with a glare, clearly not the only one feeling more comfortable in his friends’ presence. The hands go up again.
“Last night?” Ron starts again.
He shakes his head. “I don’t remember.”
“Maybe we search floor by floor,” Hermione suggests. “Do you feel okay otherwise?”
Like he slept on a rock bed, double-dosed on Dreamless Sleep, and woke up with an award-winning hangover. With emotions he can’t even keep up with, much less comprehend. Exhausted by the running of his mind, then warmed through with a brief reprieve from it all the moment he makes Draco Malfoy upset.
He shrugs, because it’s easier.
Hermione scrunches up her mouth and nods slowly. They all stand, set in a mission, but Harry stays seated. He feels stunted. Like his reactions have been condensed to Angry or Not-Angry. And Draco’s face is Angry but, he thinks as he sits alone, he might be able to scrounge up a third something called Hunger if he stays out of Harry’s way long enough. So he moves in a trance back down to the eggs sitting cold in the kitchen and can’t even conjure up the energy to remake them. They taste like elastic in his mouth as he stands there, listening to the footsteps overhead. Just as he’s set his dishes in the sink, a sound of strangled anger comes from somewhere above him.
“HARRY!”
It’s Draco.
Ron meets him on the first-floor landing, looking just as cautiously concerned. The steps above them shake, then Draco appears with Hermione close on his heels. His wand levitates something in front of him.
“Do you recognise this?” he snaps, dropping it on the hallway table.
It’s a lilac-coloured envelope with a broken gold seal, hardened with small flowers stuck in the wax. There’s a letter sitting on top, just under the triangular tab and Harry leans down awkwardly to read under it without touching.
Harry Potter,
I cannot begin to define just what you mean to me. I’m not special, of course—you mean much to the entire wizarding world. We all praise your heroics, but I praise you beyond that! I praise you for beautiful green eyes (Twentieth Century Wizards says you got them from your mother, is that true?) and for a Quidditch physique… It’s a universal truth that you’ve been wasted on the likes of Draco Malfoy. I read in the Prophet that you cook for him! You would never have to cook for me. I’d make you a home-cooked meal every night.
You’ll forgive my methods, but if you’re reading this, I’m halfway to you already. I can’t make you fall in love with me and I’m not fond of the falseness of love potions, but I can at least help you reconsider what you deserve.
I hope you’ll understand, Harry. You do what you must for love.
Yours truly,
A Secret Admirer
Ron and Hermione had leaned in beside him to read too, and he straightens up just before they follow suit. Draco’s arms are folded, his face severe.
“I haven’t seen this before,” Harry answers.
“And yet it was sitting opened on the dresser.”
“Well, then I suppose I—”
“You suppose you did it? Have you read it? You-you absolute imbecile! You halfwit, I can’t—” Draco shakes his head and throws his arms up. He shouts with something dissimilar to the cold-hearted anger Harry had traded him earlier. It’s strained, like Hermione calling for Hugo, and his face is growing embarrassingly red. “HOW many times have I told you?! NO bringing fan mail home and certainly no opening it yourself! This is why! THIS IS WHY! You complete… oh for fuck’s sake!”
Harry looks away, to avoid both the awkwardness of watching his watery eyes and the queasiness in his own chest when Hermione pulls Draco further away and begins to speak appeasingly. Ron signals his head back towards the living room, so together they return. His shoulders drop just to be a room away.
“Merlin, Harry,” Ron mutters, scrawling a fast note without looking up. All business. He’s a great Auror, though this isn’t how Harry would choose to experience his expertise. “You’re really in the doghouse once we get this fixed.”
“What’s the note?”
“For Bill. We’ll get the letter to him as soon as possible, so they can start diagnosing exactly what’s happened. Between him on the curse remedy and me tracking this admirer down, we can keep it in the family, file the case on a need-to-know basis… The world doesn’t need to be aware that Harry Potter has partial amnesia.”
“This whole life. Together. It’s real,” Harry murmurs then, slowly sinking back down into the armchair. If it wasn’t for the very real physical reactions he’s been having, he’d be inclined to think it all a dream. The statement is more for himself—a reminder, not a discovery—but Ron looks over quickly, face grave in a way he rarely sees it.
“Yes,” he says. When he leaves, he takes the note with him.
The living room is the largest on the floor, taking up half of the home’s girth and spanning its length, so that the piano, sofa, and fireplace only fill a third of the room. Left alone, he wanders it anew. The piano, when he lifts the cover and taps a key, doesn’t wail horribly out of tune. He walks the length of the bookshelves, a finger dragging across titles he doesn’t recognise, until he reaches the back window and its view of the garden. For a minute, he stands and watches Rose and Hugo lay in the grass, occasionally reaching their hands out to something deep in the greenery that must be Jules. He hopes the warming charm is enough for the little creature.
He’s still standing with his arms crossed when he hears a processional return, then feels a hand on his shoulder.
“Time to talk,” Hermione says gently.
Someone’s brought tea in. Placed begrudgingly back in his armchair like an interviewee before a panel, he takes a mug gently, sipping slow and swallowing tiny in a way he hopes won’t disrupt his unsettled stomach. Draco speaks first, sitting furthest from Harry. His face is a little puffy. It’s unsightly against his angularity.
“What do you remember?”
“I remember most things. How to tie my shoes. Who’s Minister for Magic. How to get no-good ex-Death Eaters out of my fucking—”
“Harry, what do you remember about Draco specifically?” Hermione interrupts exasperatedly.
“Malfoy is an arsehole. A bigot.” It’s like a recitation. He doesn’t even have to think. Like the questions trigger an algorithm in him that leads straight to his tongue. Words he feels strongly and can’t fight. “A bigot who’s time and again proved he hates me, cursed me, called my best friends horrible things, invited Death Eaters into—”
“What about after school?” she adds softly. Harry doesn’t miss the quick nervous glance to her right, the way her hand begins moving up and down Draco’s back again. He’s tense, and something deep in Harry decides good.
“After school… he came to clean up Hogwarts. Likely out of guilt. Shame.”
“Can we please keep it fact-based?”
“So far, so factual, ‘Mione,” Draco supplies quietly. It’s good to see, from the look she shoots him, that he’s not immune to her chiding eyes. Harry smirks at him.
“I can’t actually, anyway,” he admits, “keep it objective.”
He looks at Ron as he says it. His position pushes Draco the furthest into his periphery. Ron nods, a small but encouraging gesture which makes him feel slightly more strengthened to continue without hesitation.
“Since then… I know he plays the piano. Professionally, I think. That it was the fact that he plays piano that probably kept him from the post-war conviction he deserved because he’d chosen a pitiably wandless career.”
“Draco—” Hermione again with that unending, painful compassion. “—maybe you should leave.”
Draco, however, stares steely-eyed directly at Harry, who takes it as a challenge and meets the glare with his own. “No. I want to hear.”
This seems like an invitation to continue.
“He only wormed his way back into our lives through Pansy and Luna. Love them. And Blaise. Malfoy used to leech onto our dinners with them. Then nothing from him for a decade, at least.”
“Nothing since when?” asks Ron. “When’s the last you remember him?”
Harry thinks hard, screwing up his face as he ignores the wave of nausea that comes with the recollection. “Maybe… god, maybe 2001? 2002? I dunno.”
“Everything else in the last decade is fine?”
“Teddy’s fifteen. Rose is eight. Hugo’s six. The carrots in my garden should be ripe next month and I keep the tea in the drawer to the left of the fridge with the little spoons and there are two broom pickups on Tuesday.”
Ron leans back, tapping the quill against his chin. They’re tilting their heads, all three of them, like he’s some sort of experiment. His grip on the mug tightens.
“Do you remember Draco moving in?”
“No.”
“Getting married?”
Harry’s breath hitches for a moment. “No.”
“Christmas dinner this year?”
“It’s… yes, it’s there. I remember. Some of it feels fuzzy.”
“My fault, then,” Draco interjects. “I attended.”
“Here’s one!” Ron’s voice picks up in interest like it’s a game, but Harry waves that off. He saves all his Angry for Draco. “Just you and me now. No Draco. Your stag night, talking about your wedding? Marriage and vows and all that?”
Harry shakes his head. The entire night is nonexistent.
“Last night, you sent me a note,” says Draco. “‘We need to talk. Wake me when you get home.’ Do you know what that was?”
Risky, Harry thinks, to ask him something directly again. His mouth moves before his brain catches up. “I don’t remember writing it, but it sounds like what I’d say if you’d fucked up. Did you fuck something up?”
Draco opens his mouth soundlessly, paled well past what Harry would’ve calculated as a success for the quick quip. Ron leans across his wife to meet Draco’s gaze. “Did you wake him?”
“No, I—he was sleeping so peacefully… I assumed it could wait for morning.”
Harry stares at his feet. He doesn’t feel like he slept peacefully. He feels woozy. Perhaps in part because he’s just been told someone watched him sleep last night.
“You must feel dreadful,” Hermione says.
He assumes she’s talking to Draco again, but when he looks up she’s gazing right at him. She smiles sadly at his wide eyes. “Bad manners aside, you’ve been cursed, and a concoction, too, clearly; there’s a memory charm in there, but it seems a hate spell on top. Which is the opposite of a love spell, so it’ll surely make you feel a bit ill. You must be… confused, nervous, not in control of your emotions, all of which can’t be sitting well physically, either.”
“A little nauseous,” Harry volunteers. “Especially when I look at his face.”
When he spares a glance at Draco, he scowls and rolls his eyes.
“Serious,” he adds, brows raised in sincerity.
Everyone is frowning and Harry’s frown feels comforted by the company. They finally all seem stalled in shock of the morning, and truthfully he is feeling ill the more they talk specifically about Draco. No one stops him when he takes one of his books on broom mechanics from the shelf and joins the kids in the garden.
For a while, he sits against a tree and listens to Rose and Hugo screech loudly and run with Jules deposited back on his knee. The fresh air is a godsend, as is the space from a certain man in his living room who thinks it’s their living room. When Ron and Hermione finally come to gather their brood, it’s clear that they’re only leaving because reinforcements have been called in.
“Bill said hopefully tomorrow for some sort of emergency antidote,” Ron tells him, a hand on his shoulder. “Hermione was right, of course. Hate spell and memory charm. So just take it easy and get some rest.” And when he adds “Cheers for giving me work on the weekend,” there’s a half-smile on his face. Harry returns it, grateful to be included in anything lighthearted on such a dismal day.
Hermione leans down to hug him after and confirms his suspicions of backup in the process. “Obviously, we’ve updated the group,” she says. “Sticking to your tree this afternoon?”
He nods into her hair. “Better out here.” It wasn’t until her arms were firmly wrapped around him that he realised just how badly he needed them. There’s enough hatred coursing unwarranted through his body perhaps for little gestures of love and care to feel like nectar of the gods.
“They’ll know where to find you. Expect comfort food.”
Harry smiles gratefully and leans his head back against the trunk as he watches them go. Through the window, he can just make out the shadow of Draco pacing the living room.
The tree steadying him mentally and physically is tall, light-coloured, and thick at the base, with a curvature perfect for his back. He’s inclined to think that he’d imprinted a perfect groove into the bark the same way rivers carved the Grand Canyon—years of making his presence against its form tireless, eons of giving it no choice but to mould to him as it aged.
It’s a wiggentree, a magical rowan known for its many uses; potion-based, protection-based, wand making-based. They have a long history of defence against evil, but also of bowtruckles that like to emerge when Harry’s been sitting still long enough to become as benign as the vegetation around him. He often rests under with a book or a broom handle to carve or to watch Rose and Hugo run around or, once upon a time, to watch Teddy do his own gallivanting. The teen is less energetic nowadays unless the children are here to entertain, though sometimes he’ll join Harry under the shade on his back in the summer and toss a snitch as he talks about school and classes and girls. It’s Harry’s favourite spot, and it’s where Luna finds him even hours later, Pansy a step behind her. They’re both bundled warmly, Luna with the addition of huge orange fuzzy earmuffs that’ll be regretfully unnecessary under Harry’s charms.
“I bet someday you’ll die of old age and we’ll find you all sunken into that tree with the roots meshed into your skeleton,” Pansy says as they approach. Her hands aren’t empty, Harry notices, but rather busy balancing multiple thermoses and sandwiches.
He sits up further and sets the book down. “Pans, you don’t know what a thrill it is every time someone mentions me dying of something as glorious as ‘old age’. Do say it again.”
“Ah, see, I know him!” she says, nudging Luna’s shoulder. “All that ‘not Harry’ business, but that’s Harry.”
They’ve been talking about him, without him. There’s no time to linger, though, because Luna’s uncapping a steaming thermos while Pansy unfolds a blanket to sit on the grass. His stomach drives him over.
“Soup and toasties,” Luna smiles, handing him a bowl. “Couldn’t go wrong, we thought. And hot chocolate. I wasn’t sure what you were feeling up to.”
“The longer I’m out here away from him, the better I feel.”
The first mouthful is wonderful, warm, heating his insides as it travels down. It’s followed quickly by a second, then a third. He’s hardly eaten today. Now, he lets the girls talk while he finally does. They’re good at reading his emotions and providing the right atmosphere, which in this case is gifting him ten minutes of useless conversation that doesn’t involve today’s crisis.
“So Harry, as you know Luna has insisted on modest living for the length of our romantic contract—”
“Eternity,” Luna clarifies.
“—which means when she finally needed silver polish to buff some sort of fantasmical fortune device—"
“A scrying mirror.”
“Right, so this mirror, it was old and dirty, and guess who comes flouncing into the bedroom to ask if perhaps I’d saved some of the supplies from the house elves’ cleaning cupboard in the old home…” Pansy affects large, blinking eyes and an endearing pout, then shakes her head. “I had! Now I get fresh baked goods for a week instead of saying words that rhyme with… ‘I sold you snow’. I’m thinking lemon squares, macarons…”
“I got the mirror at that tiny antiques shop a few blocks from the high street—you know the one, Harry? With the stone gryphon out front? Bran something…”
“Bran’s Bibelots,” Harry supplies between bites. “One of my favourites. That’s where I found that biting Bludger.”
Luna’s eyebrows rocket up. “I knew something greater led me to that door! I’ll have to go back. We’ll go back. Once… once this is all…”
Two inquisitive pairs of eyes meet over Harry’s bowed head.
“Go ahead and ask,” he sighs.
They shake their heads dismissively, and for a few minutes more they all eat in contentment. Harry uncaps the thermos and pours hot cocoa into the cup-shaped lid. It smells of cinnamon and rich dark chocolate.
Pansy breaks first. Definitively, she sets her sandwich down and places her hands flat in her lap, brows drawn in.
“You don’t remember Draco at all?”
He takes another sip. “Certainly nothing… together… thank god. But I remember him before… souring Hogwarts with his presence.” It’s like something he’s watching from afar, how easily it all pours out. “Should’ve been done with him then and yet somehow he was still a thorn in my side after. I mean, who let that happen? Wasn’t the war itself punishment enough?”
Pansy pats his hand lightly. “Okay, Harry.”
They don’t ask him any more questions.
Sometime after the soup and sandwich have left him feeling better than he has all day he ends up laying on the blanket with his knees bent up and his head in Pansy’s lap. Her hand sweeps through his hair while he closes his eyes and focuses on the crisp air and easy conversation. It’s returned to delightfully daily chatter.
For a while, Pansy tells them about a fellow journalist who’d gotten an unbelievably juicy story just because her interviewee got ‘on’ and ‘off’ record confused (“Apparently he thought ‘off’ record meant ‘off to the press’… numbskull,” she says with a hungry grin). Her hands intermittently leave Harry’s head and shoulder to gesticulate emphatically.
Luna competes with her publication woes and a mysterious print issue that’s turned all the Quibbler ad pages for mirrors into actual mirror images (“I can’t tell if it’s a headache or the world’s best accidental marketing scheme…”). They even ask Harry about the shop. He brightens and talks a full five minutes uninterrupted about a book signing on the premises last week.
It’s late afternoon but the winter sky above Pansy’s head is darkening around them and he begins to come to terms with the fact that he’ll be forced to retreat inside soon or drop into nightfall. Luna starts packing up their supplies as if she’s thinking the same, and Harry lifts his head just as the back door opens again.
“My hare-brained friend! Usually, such a continual flurry of insults in Draco’s direction would deserve my respect, but that sulky mess is absolutely no fun. We’ll still compare notes when you’re better. Add to the arsenal.”
Blaise, loud with an incongruous smile for the circumstances, opens his arms as he walks to where they’re slowly standing and brushing leaves from their trousers. Harry lets himself be wrapped in his arms and expensive cologne.
“You remember me, don’t you?” Blaise asks, holding Harry at arm’s length while rotating his head at all angles as if to jog some visual recollection.
He chuckles, shrugging from his grip. “You make yourself extremely difficult to forget.”
“Glad to hear all his obnoxiousness worked towards something,” says Pansy. “I take it your late lunch was less enjoyable?”
Blaise’s eyes grow. “I’m always stuck with doom and gloom while you lot entertain yourselves with Mister Ignorance is Bliss—no offence, Harry.”
Harry carves a smile when they all do, a little too preoccupied thinking about the evening and tomorrow to fully participate. He’s glad they’ve come, glad that Ron and Hermione summoned them when he might not have wanted to be a bother, glad that he’s spent some time laying outside and feeling like himself, but being left home alone with so much to think about is daunting.
At the door, he collects three more invitations to come calling at a moment’s notice, and he’s already envisioning a quick stop in the kitchen for snacks before cosying up in bed for the night when he turns to see Draco climbing the stairs from the kitchen.
“Did they go already?” He looks even more haggard than earlier, eyes ringed red.
“And you didn’t go with them?” Harry’s voice is hardened. Draco’s been the worst version of a Russian doll set, cracking open at each turn to present a more complex and despondent expression, but this one grows steadily more readable as Harry glowers.
“It’s my house, too!” He looks furiously surprised—eyes widening while his mouth pinches even tighter.
Instead of answering, Harry groans in frustration, shoving past him up the stairs. So long as he keeps him out of sight, the terrible feelings bubbling in his chest will disappear. He can be like outside, like under the tree. ‘Not Harry’ replaced by ‘Harry’.
“It’s my house, too!”
“I worked hard to get the Dark energy out of Sirius’ home,” Harry shoots back as he goes. “It’s useless with a Malfoy in these walls.”
“I painted these walls with you, arsehole! I got that ghastly portrait to unstick!”
Oh joy, Harry thinks, the voice is following him up the stairs. In a more fortunate world, it would be growing fainter, not louder.
“Piss off,” he grumbles, stomping louder. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder, haven’t you heard? So-so you’d fuck off if you were actually obsessed with me.”
“Harry, you’ve been cursed, we’d be mad to leave you alone. I—It’s-it’s okay, I know this isn’t you, I know that... So I’m trying to keep calm, but Jesus, you don’t make it easy. Just imagine how hard my day has been.”
Harry spins on the landing. Why do they keep stopping under this photo of the two of them? Their sunny holiday smiles loom over him as he turns almost directly into Draco, who takes a couple of cautious steps back.
“How hard your day has been?” he snaps. “I just woke up into a nightmare where Draco fucking Malfoy lives in my home.”
He stamps up the rest of the stairs without stopping, certainly without engaging further, and when he finally reaches his bedroom he slams the door behind him without turning—hopefully in Draco’s face. He paces the room, taking it in with an alertness that had escaped him this morning, and frantically turns the pictures of him and Draco on the bedside tables down on their faces. Jules watches through slow blinking eyes, returned to his tank.
With anger-fueled adrenaline, Harry investigates further. A tall wardrobe he doesn’t quite remember purchasing stands invitingly, and when he opens it he finds a complete set of clothes he’s never seen before. Pressed slacks, expensive jumpers, so many button-down shirts. But also a few t-shirts, a hoodie, and—at the end of a line of nice dress shoes—a pair of trainers.
In the bathroom, too, are three times the toiletries he’d consider needing, an extra toothbrush, too many towels.
There’s a knock at the door. He startles and drops a shampoo bottle, ducking his head back into the bedroom.
“Please,” he hears. “Just… my toothbrush. My pyjamas.” It’s embarrassingly small and pitiful sounding.
Pyjamas would require opening the door. After a beat, though, Harry slides the toothbrush under the crack, bristle side down, then watches until the shadows under the door walk away.
He locks the door and takes a hot shower. It’s not even six and all he wants to do is sleep, but at the same time, the adrenaline is still rushing through his system, keeping him alert enough to find it in him to be angry, and he thinks—in spite of everyone’s desire to fix this version of Harry—that he’s lucky. If this is a second chance at life without Draco Malfoy, then maybe it’s best not to look a gift Hippogriff in the mouth.