The Man Who Forgot

Fandom: Harry Potter

Pairing: Harry/Draco

Warnings/Tropes/Etc: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Mpreg, Past/Referenced Child Abuse, Past/Referenced Character Death

Chapter Length: 5700 words

Summary: After ten years of marriage, Harry forgets.

The more things change, the more Draco Malfoy is still up to something.

Chapter One

Words from out of the dark, and a voice that seemed almost to be aimed at himself:

"Professor?"

Not a voice he knew, or at least not one he recognized. High in the way that meant young, more than a little panicked in a way that could have meant anything from a minor crisis to a quite major one.  

Harry squinted his eyes open to find there was an anemic sort of light shining down from the ceiling. There was also pain. In his head, though coming from the back, or somewhere in the middle. Not his scar, so then most likely nothing worth panicking about, not even if the pain did seem to be growing and pulsing, almost writhing behind his eyes.

"Professor, are you alright?" The speaker was a witch, who looked to be a first year only if they made them about five years younger than they'd used to. She had big black hair, bigger tearful eyes. She was looking right at him. "I'm sorry!" she hiccupped, and burst into tears. "I didn't mean to!"

Harry sat up from where he'd been lying on cold, damp stone--and, this was all very odd. If he was at Hogwarts, which he must have been, and if he was in the potions dungeon, which he clearly was, then he ought to have been investigating...something. And if he was investigating something, there ought to have been another adult present. The Potions Master, in this case. Instead, there were only ten or twelve other first years (Harry hoped, since otherwise it would mean there were even smaller students wandering the halls at this very moment), crowding around him.

"You nearly killed him," sneered one. "Excellent work. You're going to lose House points for sure."

"Oh, do shut up," said someone else, as the big-haired girl's tears turned to wails.

"Er, I haven't been nearly killed," said Harry, as firmly as was possible when he'd just thought about standing up and found that, aside from feeling as if it were about to explode, his head was also spinning, and that getting on his feet would surely result in capsizing his whole self onto who knew how many tiny persons. He'd crush them. Crushing students was surely frowned upon, for visitors. "Not even close. And, no one's losing House points."

But the pain wasn't getting any better. The spinning seemed to be getting actively worse. None of the students seemed to know what to do, and as they had no teacher at the moment, it was thus Harry who needed to know what to do. 

What to do was harder to get to than he felt it ought to have been, but finally he managed it.

"Someone fetch Madame Pomfrey," he said, as he started slipping back into the dark. "Find where the Potions Master has gone to, as well."

For one of the things he was certain about in that moment--so certain that it didn't even occur to him to wonder if it might be otherwise--was that no matter why he was in the dungeon,  a classful of students all around and no other teacher within sight, the Potions Master was someone other than him.

He was right about that much, in the end. It was just that it turned out to be the only thing other than his own name he had right.

*

Dark gave way to light a few more times, but the light was never enough for him to be completely certain of what was happening. There came distant voices, some of the times, none of them near or non-mumbled enough for him to make them out. Still, even if his thoughts themselves were somewhat jumbled, he'd been magically injured often enough to get the gist of the thing. To follow the cadence of the voices, even if he couldn't make them out; even to identify the gliding sensation. It was clear, even through the haze, that he was being cared for, even transported. There was no reason to worry very much about it, because when he woke up he would surely be...

Lying in a bed now, within a room darker than either the potions dungeon or the Hospital Wing. There was no light on in the room he was in; what little light there was peeked in around the edges of the closed door, a fugitive from a hallway which bustled with yet more unidentifiable voices--though this time, that particular aspect seemed to be because there were too many voices to single out any one.

For the first while, Harry was compelled neither to move nor to speak. It wasn't terrible, lying there. In fact it wasn't much of anything. He was simply there, and aware of his there-ness.

Eventually, he turned his head, and found that his there-ness was accompanied by someone else's. A figure he couldn't make out, which was further obscured by being between him and the light from the door, thus casting a shadow that might have been anyone. Even in a grayer sort of light, it might have been, since whoever the person was, he wasn't sitting up straight, but rather seemed to be asleep, with his head pillowed on his arms.

He must have been here for quite some time, Harry reasoned, for Ron to have fallen asleep next to him (it surely made sense for it to be Ron, for the figure was too broad to be Hermione; and he'd just recently filled out the Auror paperwork for St Mungo's, meaning there was no one else who'd have been left alone with him, if he ended up in a hospital bed in the line of duty). He didn't manage to reason anything else, such as what had happened, or how he had come to be at Hogwarts to begin with, when he ought to have been in the middle of...

He couldn't remember just what he ought to have been in the middle of. 

This might have eventually become alarming, if his throat hadn't chosen that moment to feel dry and itchy, and if the dry itchiness hadn't caused him to cough, softly at first, but then a little harder when it turned out the coughing helped the itchiness, if not the dryness that had caused the itch in the first place.

Harry had stopped coughing by the time the sleeping shadow began to stir.

"Hmph," said the shadow sleepily, clearly not Ron after all, that much was obvious immediately, for Harry knew what Ron's voice didn't sound like just as much as he knew what it did. "Harry? You're awake?"

Harry didn't say anything. He was too busy being surprised, or wondering why his surprise didn't feel very much like anything.

"You are awake," continued the shadow, which now was sitting up. "I can tell you are. Your breathing's changed, so don't even try to pretend you aren't." 

"Alright," Harry said, for a lack of anything else to say.

"How are you feeling?"

"I," said Harry, feeling he would have felt awkward, if he'd felt much at all. "I'm alright."

"Good," said the voice, which before had been gravelly and soft with sleep, but now seemed to be forming into something cooler and drawling. "Now, do you mind telling me what you thought you were doing? Subbing in for the Potions Master! You've always been rubbish at potions."

"Er," said Harry, for there seemed to be nothing in any of this pronouncement that made the slightest bit of sense, nor did the person making it seem to be Ron, after all. Or maybe he'd already known that. "What?"

"You heard me. Though--I suppose they did say you might be confused. Are you? If so, I'll simply save up everything I have to say until later."

"Er, very," Harry managed. "Who are you? And, where are we? What happened?"

Ron, he'd assumed. St Mungo's. Some sort of accident while he was investigating...something he didn't remember. Now, he wasn't so sure about any of it.

"You really must be, with multiple 'er's in a row," muttered the voice, derisive but with something else beneath it, too. "You were in an accident--a potion gone wrong, during Potions class. We're at St Mungo's now. As for me, I'm your loving husband, of course."

"What?"

"'What,' what? I'm really very unclear as to what part of that was confusing."

"You're--I haven't got a husband," Harry managed, and for the first time felt he was completely awake and aware of this conversation. The serene sense of there-ness seemed to have gone, banished by really quite a lot of confusion, and more than a little conviction that something was much more seriously wrong here than he'd started out believing. "And I don't teach Potions class. I don't teach anything. Seriously, who are you?"

"Lumos," muttered the shadow, and Harry's view filled with light, which must have been from the end of the shadow's wand. Only Harry couldn't see a wand. All he saw, in the moment before the pain came back, more of it than before for a brief terrible moment before he fell back into the dark, was whiteness, bright and consuming: and within it, the pale, pointy, frowning face of...

Lucius Malfoy?

*

Harry didn't wake again for what must have been a long while after that. It felt long, anyway; and however long it had been, it must have been at least enough time for night to turn into morning; for when he woke, it was no longer dark within his room, or at least not as dark as it had been. It was a sort of dusky color, the sort of thing that happened when it was very bright outside, but the windows were small or had been dimmed.

There was a shadow next to him again, but this time he could almost, sort of, make it out; and the moment Harry stirred, the shadow moved--not toward him, or for a wand, this time, but upward, and away: or rather, out of his seat and toward the door, which he opened.

"I need a Healer!" he called, out into the corridor, in a voice that clearly said, Now. "He's awake again."

Almost immediately, there swept into the room a witch or wizard in Healer's robes. A light flashed into the room along with them: a dim, gray sort of floating ball of it, not enough to spark anything in particular behind Harry's eyes, but enough for him to see that what he had was Lucius Malfoy, again, and (from the badge at the front of her robes) the Head Healer. 

"Hello, Harry," said the Healer, crouching down next to him, examining his face in the light from her wand. "How are you feeling?"

Harry's mind, meanwhile, was moving quickly, or as quickly as it could given that his thoughts felt as if they were wound in gauze. There was no way Lucius Malfoy would be allowed in his room at St Mungo's. Therefore he must not be at St Mungo's, after all, even if it felt like it must be in all other respects.

"Alright," he said, firmly. In control. When one had been taken by Dark wizards, it helped to appear in control (at least until the point where it didn't--but until he'd determined he'd arrived at such a point, it was best to act otherwise). "Where am I?"

"St Mungo's Hospital," said the Healer. "You had an accident at Hogwarts. During Potions class. Do you remember anything of that?"

Shadows casting down from the dungeon walls. The big-haired witch, bursting out into tears. The pain at the back of his skull, reaching toward the middle of his head, vines and tentacles of pain he could still feel the shadows of. And there had been something sticky and wet down the front of his robes; he hadn't noticed it then, but it came to him now, as he wondered what he'd spilled, or had spilled on him.

"Some," said Harry, meeting the Healer's eyes, looking for any sign she was...that this was...

Some people, even some other Aurors, swore you could always tell from people's eyes whether they meant you harm or not. Even whether they were hiding anything from you or not. That this was nearly complete nonsense was something Harry knew from experience. What you could tell from people's eyes went only as deep as you could go into the minds behind them, and he'd never be a Legilimens. Someone could appear to care for you, and be intent on your downfall; or they might appear to hate you, might even hate you in fact, and be on your side in the end. So there was not very much point in looking, at least not if you expected it to mean anything. But as there also wasn't much else to look at, he looked anyway, and saw something that might have been some mixture of kindness and professionalism, and felt what he would later recognize as the first stirrings of doubt.

"Maybe you could refresh my memory," he added, when no one else said anything, and he was torn between remaining silent to see what they would say if he did, or taking the tone of the questioner and thus maintaining at least a sense of control in this situation in which he was incapacitated, missing his wand, and in some unknown location which was meant to look like a location he knew. "What did they all say happened?"

Asking was enough to make him wonder, with a sharp stabbing of guilt, just what had happened to that room full of first years. If any of them had been hurt, when he'd been taken; if he even had been taken at Hogwarts in the first place, or if it had been later, if he'd been snatched out of the custody of some other group of people. Either way, it might be yet more names to add to the list of those who'd suffered for his sake. Suffered, or even--

But he couldn't fall into thinking about that now. It wasn't that it didn't matter, but that imagined collateral casualties were a distraction he didn't need. It wasn't that he wanted to look past it so much as he had to, for now. He'd had training in it, now. It ought to be easier than it might have been in the past. Yet it still took him moments, long ones, before he had moved past it long enough to realize the Healer had said something, and he was now meant to respond to it.

"What was that?" he asked.

"You're meant to say what you remember first," said Lucius Malfoy--not coolly or drawling this time, but sharply, with a worrying edge of something beneath it, and a curious sort of frown on his face. "So your recollections aren't...influenced."

"That doesn't make any sense," Harry said, because it really didn't if he'd been captured by Dark wizards who wanted to find out something he knew; in that case, they'd dose him with Veritaserum and have done. It was the sort of thing that would only make sense if he were really being medically evaluated. Only he wasn't, but perhaps they were trying to confuse him. Maybe they thought he was better at Occlumency than he was, or carried antidotes around with him (though surely they'd have searched him before now, and found he didn't?); or perhaps they didn't have a supply of it at all. Perhaps they'd taken him out of desperation or convenience rather than because of a particularly well-put-together plot. Harry certainly didn't remember enough to be sure, on that last bit. "What recollections?"

The Healer hesitated. Lucius Malfoy, making a low sound of disgust that reminded Harry of someone else, or would have done if he'd had an un-pulsing moment to think about it, didn't. "You've been cursed. Or, rather, you came into contact with a potion that had been tampered with, causing you to appear to have been cursed. After which, you hit your head," he said. "You--don't you shush me--I'll tell him whatever I please--had a concussion. Quite a bad one. That on top of the curse, which, since you imbibed it, took rather longer to remove than it might have otherwise. And so."

And now it did make sense, or would have if he'd really been in St Mungo's, and the Healer had really been a Healer, and Lucius Malfoy had been (your loving husband) a person allowed in to see him when he was vulnerable, instead of someone it was horrifying to think of being vulnerable to. If they weren't sure what the effects of the potion in question were; if they weren't sure how much he'd remember. It was actually the commonest trouble, when it came to spells gone wrong, whether it was Dark magic or merely something else that had got all twisted up. It was why nearly everyone who stayed in St Mungo's for the longterm had to stay in the first place. They didn't remember themselves, or didn't remember enough of themselves; they couldn't hold onto what they were told, or thought they were something else entirely, no matter how you tried to reason with them.

If it had really happened, and if this had really been a Healer and someone who cared about him speaking to him, they'd have wanted to know he was himself.

Harry looked from one to the other, thinking.

"I want my wand," he said slowly, because if there was one thing Dark wizards wouldn't give him, it was that. "Once I have it, I'll answer whatever questions you like."

"Now, Harry," began the Healer, looking less nervous now (and it was only then apparent that she must have been nervous before, as she took on the severe expression of someone who was about to tell you that what you'd asked for wasn't good for you, and you weren't going to get it besides), "it's against policy to return a patient's wand before they've completed their initial eva--"

"Accio Harry's wand," said Lucius Malfoy, in the same cold and drawling voice Harry recalled from that dream he'd had before, the one that reminded him of...someone.

The wand must have come, for although Harry didn't see it, soon it was being pressed into his hands, that thin familiar length of holly, the only thing in the room that seemed friendly or warm. As he wrapped his fingers around it, he looked down and saw that even his wand hand seemed wrong, somehow, though in that moment he couldn't have said exactly how, for it wasn't the back of his hand he needed to keep an eye on.

"Right," said Harry. "That's...better." He looked from one face to another: the Healer's, exasperated; Lucius Malfoy, regarding him with a frown. Despite himself, Harry looked into his icey grey eyes, and found...he wasn't sure, and it wasn't as if eyes were traditionally all that truthful anyway, and so then he looked away. Found himself eyeing Malfoy's hairline instead, marking it as something to remember: sometime in the last three years, Lucius Malfoy had begun balding.

He'd meant to say, next, that if this were truly a medical evaluation, that he didn't want Malfoy here. But now...it seemed he might have an ally, or even be completely wrong about what seemed to be going on here. Perhaps someone he knew had use Polyjuice to become Lucius Malfoy, for some reason. At any rate, he was beginning to think he had no true idea of the situation here, after all. Best to keep all the pieces he knew of within sight until he did.

"I was at Hogwarts," he said. "I woke up in the Potions Dungeon..."

He went on to describe what had happened--leaving out the description of the big-haired girl, or any of the other students, under the theory it was better not to describe anyone else who had been there when he still hadn't the first clue what was going on.

When he was done, the Healer said, "All right. Do you recall what you were doing before then?"

"Er," Harry said, but try as he might to remember, he couldn't recall what series of events had led him to be in the Potions Dungeon, or even at Hogwarts in the first place. "No. Not really."

Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dim light, Harry saw the parchment floating to the side of the Healer, a quill which was automatically jotting down notes. There was no reason this should have made him nervous, yet he still didn't like it. 

"Now," said the Healer, who had been sounding ever more professional and matter-of-fact the more questions Harry answered. "Your name, please?"

"Harry James Potter."

"And your age?"

"Twenty."

There came a choking sound from Lucius Malfoy, whose bald spot seemed to have grown even more eye-catching in the last few minutes.

"Mr. Malfoy, I really must insist you remain silent while I conduct the remainder of Mr. Potter's evaluation," said the Healer, at the same moment in which Harry blurted out, "I don't want him in here."

"I don't suppose you would," said Malfoy. "Not if you really think you're twenty."

"Mr. Malfoy!"

"Yes, yes, alright, fine. I'm going. I have a previous appointment, if I'm not wanted anyhow. I'll be back in an hour, Harry. Maybe an hour and a bit, depending on whether--anyway. Do try to have remembered a bit more by then, wouldn't you?"

When he'd gone through the door and it had shut behind him, the sounds of the corridor outside made themselves audible for the first time since the last time Harry had woken. The Healer regarded him once again. Briskly, though by no means unkindly, she asked, "And what is the year?"

"Two-thousand and one," said Harry, and although he knew it wasn't a trick question, the Healer's face seemed to be shifting into something even more kind, that made him feel quite vulnerable indeed. The shifting continued as he answered the current Minister of Magic (Kingsley Shacklebolt), his current occupation (Auror-in-training), his address (his flat outside of London), and so on, until he felt almost as if these questions about his own life were in fact an exam on a subject for which he had never so much as cracked open the book, nevermind managed to study for.

"Nearly done," said the Healer. "Just one more, and I'll let you rest: Do you by any chance recall today's date?"

This was not a difficult question, or it shouldn't have been. Yet Harry could not think of the answer. It was two-thousand one. He was twenty. Kingsley Shacklebolt was Minister of Magic. But he couldn't recall the date, or what time of year it was, or even, now that he had thought of it, what he'd been doing yesterday.

"Er," he said.

Too kindly, again: "Even the month would do."

Harry didn't even have that. He couldn't think of what month it was. He couldn't think of the day of the week, other than that it must not have been a weekend, if there'd been a class going in the Potions Dungeon. The more he tried to remember, the more seemed to be missing. Where was he at in his studies? When were his exams? Practicals? What errands did he have to run, what chores did he have at home that couldn't be put off? When was the last time he'd gone out with friends? What had he had for breakfast this morning? Some of these things might have been forgotten in the course of a normal day or week, but he should have been able to recall the majority of the details with little difficulty. They were, after all, the details of his life.

"Have I been Obliviated?" he asked, because something had clearly happened to muck with his short-term memory; and there had been some other concern, a few minutes before, but it had been replaced by something else. Not panic, or at least not quite. His scar didn't hurt, after all. So there was no reason to take it to extremes. Yet what did hurt, aside from the aching that remained toward the center of his head, and a strange sort of twisting, almost a crushing sensation inside his chest. It was getting harder to breathe. Harder even than that to think. 

"Nothing quite so simple," said the Healer, in a soothing, kind voice he would have liked a lot better if it hadn't also sounded like pity. "It's time you rested. I'm going to cast a Sleeping Charm now. While you're under, we'll complete our evaluation, and do our best to finish repairing the damage. If all goes well, you'll wake feeling much better."

She raised her wand, a motion in the near-dark that Harry didn't have the first chance of countering, even though his own wand was already in his hands. A feeling came over him, like the personification of that soothing tone. He fell into darkness again, but this time it didn't feel so much like falling into a void as it did falling onto a cloud-soft mattress, not too terribly worried about it. He couldn't be too worried about anything, really, with all that softness beneath him, carrying him..

*

When he woke again, it was much brighter in the room than it had been, the windows no longer dimmed now that it was day. Someone was holding onto his hand. When Harry opened his eyes, he found that it was again Lucius Malfoy who was with him. Having woken less explosively this time, Harry was able to watch him for a few moments before his waking was noticed; and the main thing he saw was that Malfoy looked like the cat who caught the canary. He seemed to be lit up inside by his smugness; and, when he caught sight of Harry's squinted-open eyes, his mouth did something that seemed the opposite of a sneer.

"Good morning," he said, a strange cool croon. "Feeling any better?"

Harry did, in the sense that his head no longer hurt, and felt clearer than it had since all this had begun. He didn't, in the sense that he still had no idea what the hell was going on. All he could be sure of--all he was suddenly quite sure of--was that he really must be at St Mungo's. It was less that Dark wizards weren't still out for him than it was that there was no reason for anyone to go through a ruse such as this. Mind games were one thing, but they'd have resorted to torture long before now. Unless there were a ransom, he'd have been killed and transfigured into an old shoe and buried hours or days ago.

None of which went very far in explaining why Lucius Malfoy was here, or even whether it was better to answer him or not. Except, now that Harry did have a clearer head, he also thought he had a better instinct for what he ought or ought not to do or say. And right now what his instinct said, and what much of his training agreed with, was that he ought to play along until he'd begun to understand more.

"A bit," he said, finding that his wand had been left with him, so that he could curl his fingers around it, and feel a warm sweep of magic against his skin that comforted him as much as any amount of explanation might have. This had the dual effect of allowing him to remove his hand from Lucius Malfoy's grasp. "What're you so happy about?"

"I'll let you in on it when you're well again. As an incentive for you to get on with it," said Malfoy, grinning all the more. He leaned forward, not seeming to notice Harry's recoil, and said, in a conspiratorial voice, "They've found you out, you know."

"Er. Who has?"

"Your adoring public. All of St Mungo's has heard it by now: the great Harry Potter, holed up in some ward somewhere around here. Though they don't seem to have cottoned on to anything more specific than that. I was two floors up when I heard a group of witches speculating about whether you'd sign their--"

"Well, I won't," Harry said, to forestall the end of this mortifying sentence, which might from past experience have been anything from a piece of parchment to a copy of his biography to any of a variety of body parts.

"Obviously," said Malfoy, waving his hand dismissively. "But that doesn't make it any less amusing." 

He clapped his hands together, batted his eyelashes, and proceeded to repeat a blow-by-blow version of the conversation he'd overheard. It was a reenactment not nearly as mean-spirited toward Harry as he somehow felt it ought to have been; Malfoy told it with a sort of glee that might even have been infectious, if Harry hadn't been so focused on trying to remember where he remembered this from. It wasn't from anytime recent, didn't seem to have anything to do with anything else that had happened. It was, instead...

It wasn't until Malfoy, perhaps spurred on to greater heights by Harry's complete lack of amusement, began to mime an entire chorus (though it had only been three, at the beginning of his story) of witches swooning that Harry recognized where he had seen this before. Hadn't he done that sort of thing all the time when they were at Hogwarts together? And nearly always at Harry's expense?

"You're Draco Malfoy," he said, so fiercely that Malfoy stopped mid-swoon in order to blink at him.

"I--yes? Was that in doubt?"

"I thought you were your...you're old," Harry said, because there was no doubt that was what Draco was. He'd always looked like Lucius Malfoy in miniature; now he looked like his father in fact. The lines around his eyes were different, and the lines on his forehead; and Lucius Malfoy had had a full head of hair when Harry had last seen him, at his trial before the Wizengamot.

"I'm thirty-nine, Harry," said Malfoy, all amusement suddenly falling away, and leaving something else in its place, like treacherous black waters underneath seemingly solid ice. "Same as you are. I'd hoped I could jolly you into reme--"

Harry's fingers had wrapped around his wand of their own accord. Now his arm pointed it at Malfoy without his even having decided to do it. "Get out."

"Harry, don't--"

"GET OUT!"

The reaction that had seemed instinctually like a bad idea when he'd thought it was Lucius Malfoy in the room with him seemed like the only possible response now that he knew otherwise. Harry rose from his hospital bed, wand in hand, as Malfoy jumped up from his chair and backed toward the door.

"Harry--"

"LEAVE! I DON'T WANT YOU HERE!"

"But, I--you--"

"STUPEFY!" Harry said--but before he'd finished saying it, Malfoy had gone through the door, and slammed it closed behind him, so that all that happened was that the jet of red light from his wand hit the door instead.

*

Breathing hard, Harry lowered his wand and tried to think. He didn't have much time. St Mungo's security would most certainly be by shortly, and he had no illusions about being able to resist them. You couldn't Apparate in or out of St Mungo's except via the apparition point by Reception--and anyway, he didn't really want to escape, not anymore. He might not remember everything he ought to, and he might not be certain what was happening, but he remembered enough to be sure things were wrong enough that he didn't want to have to deal with them on the run and by himself.

He thought back to what he did remember, which was the minutes in the Potions Dungeon, and, afterward...

Draco Malfoy, not Lucius, trying to "jolly" him into remembering...what? Draco, not Lucius, retrieving his wand for him. Draco, not Lucius, sleeping with his head down on Harry's hospital bed. Draco, scolding him for subbing in for the Potions professor. Draco, who'd claimed to be...

Harry looked down at his hands. On the ring finger of his left was a plain gold wedding band. But that wasn't what he'd noticed before, was it? When he'd looked at his wand hand in a much dimmer light than was in this room now?

On the back of his right hand was a series of words that ought to have been familiar. An old, silver scar which had been written in his own handwriting, which now read...

I m t ot tel l es.

Letters that were broken or smudged, that hadn't been before; changed most likely not by magic, but by something slower, and more inevitable.

"Accio mirror," Harry said, meaning a hand-held mirror of any type.

Outside in the hall, something crashed against the door. The murmuring from the hall had stopped what must have been a minute ago, so that when voices exclaimed about it, there was no doubting everyone out there had noticed someone's mirror colliding with the door, and knew just who must have called it. So it wasn't safe to retrieve, not if he wanted to have a look at his own face in peace.

There was another door in the room, a smaller one left slightly ajar. Harry opened it, and found a bathroom with a toilet and a sink for washing up...and above the sink, there was a large oval mirror, attached to the wall. Harry looked into it, and saw what he'd begun to suspect he might, once he had the other pieces put together:

There were gray hairs smattered all through his hair, wrinkles around the corners of his eyes that hadn't been there before. Even his build was different. He was wider than he had been, not in a fat sort of way, but in an older person sort of way.

Thirty-nine. Malfoy had said he was thirty-nine. And he'd also said...

"I am not married to Draco Malfoy," Harry said, firmly. "I'm not."

"Kick him to the curb, hon," said the mirror.