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: 8900 words

Summary: After ten years of marriage, Harry forgets.

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

Chapter Five

For the next several days, Harry spent most of his time hiding in the bedroom. It was at first a massive relief to be somewhere quiet and by himself, where there was no one to have an opinion about his opinions about the way his life had turned out. By Tuesday, however, this had begun to have shades of summers at Privet Drive, and he was forced to emerge again.

Malfoy now seemed about as keen to avoid interacting with Harry as Harry was to avoid him in general. In the mornings, he took roughly one second to peer into Harry's face, then either made himself scarce, or pointedly ignored him in favor of doing whatever it was that he was up to at any given moment. Sometimes this seemed to be scratching away on yet more parchment from his Leaning chair, or adding yet another memory to the Pensieve; still other times, he locked himself away in his study to do who knew what, which, when Harry put his ear to the door to try to hear what he was doing, seemed to consist of one part more scratching, one part pacing, and one part muttering under his breath.

There was nowhere really to go outside of the house. Public places were out, when he was meant to be at Hogwarts; so were most people's houses, for the same reason; even Grimmauld Place no longer seemed like a very friendly destination. 

Harry was thus left with few options that didn't involve obsessing over Malfoy. He wasn't going to obsess, and so he went with reading, starting with the books in his study with cracked spines and notes in the margins. It was somewhat disconcerting to see his own thoughts reflected back at him from the white spaces, but both the text and the thoughts were new to him, so he persisted.

Hermione and Ron had both owled him on Sunday, thick letters which remained unopened atop his dresser. Harry felt too strange and raw, somehow, to want to try to read them, even if they turned out to be about something other than the ways in which he was meant to be wrong about everything.

On Wednesday, another owl came, carrying two letters from Teddy. One was addressed to Harry. The other wasn't.

"Can I be trusted to write my own little cousin?" Malfoy said snidely upon spotting his letter (over Harry's shoulder, just as he was trying to decide whether he ought to let Malfoy know about it in the first place). "We just don't know."

"Yeah, alright," Harry muttered, and gave it a valiant attempt not to storm out on the spot. 

Malfoy plucked his letter away and swished out of the room so dramatically that Harry was forced to go stomp about the woods after all if he didn't want to follow Malfoy and hex him for it back instead. Upon reflection, he didn't. It would have done little good even if he had, considering Malfoy had most definitely read his letter already.

Being out of the house, even if it was only to the outdoors, again made him feel much better, especially once he happened upon a grass snake who had suffered bad hunting lately and was happy to hear him complain about Malfoy as long as she could complain about the wiliness of frogs, mice, and toads in her turn. After which he found a dry log in a nice sunny location to sit on for a while, where he was briefly joined by an adder who seemed about three yawns off from hibernating for the season. Once the adder had moved on again, Harry finally got to open his letter.

Knowing, intellectually, that his godson wasn't three and doing finger paintings these days was not quite enough to prepare him for a letter in which he was very clearly Harry's age--the age he remembered being, rather than the age he was meant to be now--and writing things that seemed to be half a (coded) personal letter and half a (also coded, and with the very strong implication that his superiors--meaning, probably, Ron--would be better off not knowing how much Teddy had let on about to Harry) accounting of how the case was proceeding from his end. 

What it came down to was that here was nothing to report: other than the tainted Boom-slang Skins, they'd not found any more tampered ingredients at Hogwarts. No suspicious activity that didn't involve students hexing each other or sneaking around at nights for (most likely) shagging purposes. Even fewer suspicious characters than that, which was to say none at all. There was more of a learning curve to teaching than Teddy had planned on, but more than enough subterfuge to make it interesting.

Reading between the lines, it sounded as if Teddy were having the time of his life. Unless he were the sort of bloke who put on a good face about everything, or was doing it to cheer Harry up--neither of which, knowing Andromeda, he was very likely to have been raised to do--he probably actually was. It was a relief except for all of the ways it wasn't...because what it sounded like, when it came down to it, was the sort of assignment Harry would have given his eye teeth for as recently as last week. Which meant it wasn't guaranteed safe by any means, even if it was quiet right now.

He would write Teddy back, Harry decided, and let him know he had to be careful. Only he'd have to do it in such a way that Teddy wouldn't see it as, as nagging, or Harry overstepping anything, or...Merlin. It had been, what, five days since he'd woken up thirty-nine? And already he couldn't think of how he'd have talked to any of his fellow Auror trainees, when it came to something like this. Maybe he wouldn't have seen the need, or maybe he'd known them well enough that he'd have known what did or didn't need saying in the moment, even without being quite able to imagine it now. 

Now, all that was clear was both that there was a need, but also that a few-pages' long letter wasn't nearly enough to tell him about what sort of relationship he'd formed with Teddy over the last eighteen years. Harry didn't, actually, know him at all. 

It was a depressing thought, and one that kept him company the whole walk back.

*

When Harry came into the living room, Malfoy was once more standing by the Pensieve. This time, he didn't seem to be taking memories in or out of his head. Instead, he seemed to be stirring the mixture of memories that were already there with the tip of his wand, occasionally giving them a good sharp poke for good measure. 

"Er, Malfoy," Harry said awkwardly.

Malfoy's shoulders stiffened. "Yes?"

"Er." He wasn't sure, really, how to begin, which was largely because he also wasn't at all sure what he wanted to say. Why he was talking to Malfoy to begin with, when they'd spent the last few days barely speaking at all. It had been blissful, mostly, except for the part where his entire life was the opposite of bliss. "About Teddy..."

"If you're going to tell me not to owl him back, you're a bit too late. I've already sent a response," said Malfoy, a statement that seemed to be corroborated by Herbert's absence from his perch, Harry now noticed.

"I wasn't going to tell you not to owl him," Harry said, and was surprised to find that this was completely true. Somewhere during the last few days, he must have stopped worrying about it. Perhaps it had been nothing but yet another kneejerk instinct that had caused him to react so strongly in the first place; or maybe it was just that there were one too many photos around their house with both Malfoy and Teddy in them to have kept worrying about it for much longer than it took to get a good night or two of sleep. "I, just..."

"Yes?"

"I thought, maybe," Harry said, and found he did know what he wanted to say, after all, even if the next bit was going to take some courage to get through. He wasn't a Gryffindor for nothing, he thought, and forced himself through it anyway: "I thought, since you know him better than I do, you might know how to talk to him."

Malfoy turned around, just enough to get a look at Harry's face. "I'm not going to tell him to leave Hogwarts," he said, and Harry wondered, for the first time, if Teddy hadn't been the only one who'd owled Malfoy as well as Harry. Maybe Hermione had, too. Maybe Ron had, even. After all, Ron was the one who'd clapped Malfoy on the shoulder. "I know better than to stick my nose in that far. And--and I'm not going to do anything that might endanger you, either."

"It wouldn't endanger me," said Harry, and then, before it could become another argument, like had happened back at Grimmauld Place, which he'd barely had the stamina to do with Ron and Hermione, and absolutely didn't when it came to Malfoy: "That's not what I'm saying. And, don't sneer at me about it."

"I wouldn't." Malfoy said this so quietly and seriously, Harry actually believed him.

"Right. So. I just want to make sure he's being careful. That he's not, I don't know, taking unnecessary risks."

"Because you've never taken an unnecessary risk in your life?" Malfoy said. "That's not me sneering, by the way. It's, just--it's a fact. An ironic one. In this case."

"What's your point, Malfoy?"

"I'm getting to it. So, you're worried Teddy's going to do something idiotic and get himself killed? Right? That's the main concern?"

"Yeah," said Harry. "That and the getting killed part in general."

You didn't, really, have to be stupid to get killed, when you were an Auror. Some cases were fine, no matter how deadly they looked like they might be at the outset. Others could surprise you, routine check-ins that turned into hostage situations or other types of things. This was one of the many facts his instructors had been taking care to drum into his head. Not, really, that he had needed them to drum anything. Not after the years he'd had at Hogwarts, where Teddy now was.

"I mean, I can't do anything about that last bit," Malfoy said, which was both a relief, because at least someone was admitting it, but also maddening, because for some reason Draco Malfoy was the only person admitting to him that Teddy could get himself killed doing what he was doing. "I can tell you, though, that if something happens, it won't be because he's not careful."

"Yeah?"

"Yes. I mean, you taught him. You even wrote his recommendation for the Aurors."

"Yeah, I've heard," said Harry, despairing a little; what could he have been thinking? It was too easy to think of the Harry who would have done that as another person altogether, again; not him, but some person who looked like him and sounded like him, but did things and married people Harry himself never would have in a million years.

Malfoy made a frustrated sound. By now he had stepped a little closer to Harry, and tucked away his wand. "No, I mean-- you wrote his recommendation. You wrote it for him. Do you know how many students ask you, every year? And--not even just seventh years, but people you taught years ago? And you--you turn down nearly all of them."

"Er, why do I do that?" asked Harry, when he couldn't work out what the significance of this was meant to be, or why Malfoy was giving him an equally significant look. "If you're just going to tell me he's good at his job--"

"He is good, of course. He's very good. But everyone in any of your NEWTs classes would be, and you don't write recommendations for most of them. Even if they ask. Which they all do, of course. And, do you know why that is?"

What Harry didn't know was why Malfoy wanted to be cute about it, why he couldn't just get to whatever he was trying to--

Oh.

"Because I only write my recommendations for the really careful ones," Harry said. Because, of course, he would. If he were going to be partially responsible for putting someone, anyone, into harm's way. He would. If teaching Defense was what he'd decided to do with his life, he would help make sure they knew what they were getting into, that they were prepared for it, that he sent out only the best and the brightest and, above all, the most cautious. He wouldn't have wanted to send out anyone particularly timid, either, no one inclined to hesitate when they shouldn't, that would be even worse than recklessness; but for the first time it almost seemed to make sense as to why he'd have gone to teach future Aurors at Hogwarts when he could no longer be one himself.

"Yes," said Malfoy.

"Alright," Harry said, and was surprised to find that, while he didn't feel entirely better about things--might never, he reckoned, feel entirely better about things--there was a tremendous sort of relief in there, too. "Er, thanks, Malfoy."

"You're most welcome," said Malfoy, then, when Harry had turned to go up to his room, so he could sit and think through what it meant, that Teddy Lupin was evidently so careful, whether it was actually enough to change anything; so he could work through it in private, where no one could see it on his face and later use it against him: "Though, if you really want me to feel thanked, you might consider using my name."

"Malfoy's your name. Er, part of it, anyway."

"Yes, but even if we weren't married--"

Harry, who managed by sheer force of will to forget that he was married to Malfoy a minimum of several times per day, had managed to lose track of the fact again during the course of their conversation, and couldn't help flinching a little at having been reminded.

"--Even if it weren't for everything else," Malfoy continued, "whether they're things you like or not, I don't--we're not in school anymore, are we? I use your name. Can't you at least call me by mine?"

Harry didn't particularly want Malfoy calling him Harry. At the same time, he wasn't all that keen on having Malfoy sneer " Potter"at him, either. It would have been fine, or at least would have been what it had always been before, if it hadn't been for Malfoy calling him Harry all the time now. He had almost, kind of, more or less got used to it.

"If you would," added Malfoy.

"Right," Harry said, making in an instant a decision that would have been unthinkable a few days ago, or even when he'd woken up this morning, the pink gumminess behind his eyes combining with the stomach-dropping knowledge of where and when he was, and who he was married to, and every other unwanted fact of his life: that just because he didn't want to be married to Malfoy, that didn't mean they had to behave like enemies. It might even be worth calling a truce about, considering how often Malfoy had acted like a half-decent human being since Harry had got here. "Alright, Malfoy. Er, I mean, Draco," he said.

He all but fled back up the stairs, getting out of there before Malfoy could say anything like requiring more thanks in the form of Harry sticking his head in Malfoy's Pensieve, or something.

*

On Thursday morning, Harry woke (gummily, again) and went for a walk, first thing. It turned out that what made him feel better when he was in a temper made him actually cheery when he went out in a more neutral sort of capacity, so that by the time he returned to the cottage for breakfast, he was practically whistling. He was in a good enough mood that it didn't tank when he saw Malfoy at the breakfast table; in fact it didn't dip at all until Malfoy had his usual morning look at Harry's face, which went on for seconds longer than usual, Malfoy's eyebrows drawing together before he seemed to abruptly decide he would rather be elsewhere again.

This was fine with Harry, who didn't think their truce, if they were in fact in one (could you be in a truce without having an actual at least tacit agreement with the person you were in a truce with?), ought to require he have morning breakfast chats with Malfoy immediately. Or at all, even.

The rest of the morning and afternoon went quietly enough. Unlike the gumminess or "Harry," the quietness became more strange with every passing day. It, out of everything, was the thing that was the most different. Not for nothing was Auror training regarded as brutal, grueling, spitting out some seventy-five percent of applicants in the first year, another ten percent in the two years that followed. Harry was used to running from the moment he got up in the morning to the moment he lay down at night. If he wasn't in class, he was studying; if he wasn't studying, he was sifting through records or writing reports; if he was having quite a good week, he got to be out on a field test instead of any of the schoolish bits; and if he was doing none of that, it was only because he'd had to stop to sleep--four hours, maybe five if he were lucky, before he got up to do it all over again. 

Brutal, grueling, they said, and there had been multiple features in the Daily Prophet disagreeing with each other about whether he was being overworked or clearly being given special treatment. Aside from the articles, Harry hadn't at all minded being overworked. It had meant his life was all action and very little thinking about anything other than his training. It had been easier that way. Better. He'd liked it. Loved it. After everything that had happened, maybe he'd needed it. And the best thing about it had been the way he hadn't had to think about how much he needed it while any of it was going on, the way he was thinking about it now.

For some reason, and despite the promising start, today seemed to be the worst of the lot as far as all the thinking was concerning. Why dwelling on his own lack of busyness should have been worse in some ways than dwelling how he was married to Malfoy's stupid, pointy face, or on how his friends didn't seem to understand why it was so terrible for him to be married to Malfoy's stupid, pointy face, Harry didn't know. It just was. It had him staring blankly at books he'd at least been mildly interested in on Tuesday and Wednesday, reading the same sentence over and over for ten or fifteen minutes before it occurred to him that he still had no recollection of just what he'd read. It had him going up to the third story every half hour, only to discover that Alohomora didn't work on either locked door the seventh, ninth, or twelfth time he tried it, either.

He wasn't obsessing. He wasn't going to obsess. It was just that there wasn't, really, much else to do.

*

The licking door had just licked him again, for the third time in as many unlocking attempts, when someone said, quite loudly, "Oh, bugger!"

The door to Malfoy's study banged open. Malfoy burst out of it, looking pointier than he had since he'd told Harry to go fuck himself. 

"Ow," said Harry, yanking his hand away from the door, which had taken advantage of this distraction to bite him. He tried to look innocent, as if he'd just happened to be passing by. "Er, I mean--what's wrong?"

"It's the second Thursday! Fuck!"

Malfoy swept down the stairs. Harry swept down after him and into the living room, where Malfoy proceeded to pull the curtain away from the front window and peer out.

"What's that mean, it's the second Thursday?"

"It means I forgot to tell him not to come," said Malfoy. "And just now I saw him going down the drive, so it's too late."

"We have a drive?" Harry asked, having failed to notice this feature of the front garden previously.

"We do on second Thursdays. Fuck!"

"Will you stop yelling and tell me what's happening?"

"I was going to tell him to stay home this month," said Malfoy. "Then you had to go and be a giant arsehole about everything--"

"Hey! I haven't been a--"

"--and, anyway, I forgot. I mean, I still might not have managed it, Muggle letters are so--I can never remember if the stimpers go on the letter itself, or if you use them to seal the envelope--"

"Er," said Harry, who, having been friends with Ron since he was eleven, had a certain sort of kneejerk response to confusion about Muggle things, "if you're talking about stamps, they go in the top right--"

"I don't care! I'd have thought to owl him instead if you hadn't been so--this is all your fault!"

"WHAT IS?!" Harry bellowed. By now he'd managed to shove between Malfoy and the curtain, so that he could see into the drive. Which was, indeed, there. A little blue car was parked at the end of it. There did not seem to be anyone around who might have left it there. "Whose car is that? And why are you being a massive drama queen about it?"

A knock came at the door, a solid-sounding sort of rap. 

"You might as well answer it," said Malfoy. "Unless you think he might go away if we pretend we're not home."

"Who might?" Harry asked, thinking that even the most unwanted visitor couldn't possibly be worth all this. "Do you think you'll need a fainting couch?"

"Quite possibly!"

Another knock came. Harry moved to answer the door, but stopped halfway there in order to glance back at Malfoy, instead. "Are you really not going to tell me who it is?"

Malfoy had crossed the room over to his chair. He now sank down into it, and draped his forearm across his eyes as he reclined backwards. "I won't have to. You'll know him. Then you'll wish you'd listened to me. And I'll wish I was allowed to dr--um."

"Hullo?" called a voice, not an unfamiliar one but also not one Harry could place immediately. "Harry? You home? Draco? Anyone?"

"Better answer it, Harry," said Malfoy.

A moment before, Harry had planned to. Now, given Malfoy's abrupt departure from his previous opinion, he was suddenly not at all certain he ought to. He glanced at Malfoy, then back at the door, then back at Malfoy again.

"I'll be here for moral support, I suppose," Malfoy added. "At least until the shouting begins. I'll make myself scarce then. If you could wait at least a few minutes before starting, my delicate constitution would appreciate it."

There was no way, if he asked Malfoy why he was about to be shouting, that he would get a serious answer, Harry figured. He steeled himself--Gryffindor, he was a Gryffindor--and went to the door, and opened it.

There, standing on the porch of the last person he'd ever have expected to share a house with, was the absolute last person he'd have expected to come and visit him at it.

"Oh," he said. "Er, hi, Dudley."

*

Harry had barely a moment to think that Dudley hadn't turned out to look as much like Uncle Vernon as anyone would have expected. Or at least, hadn't turned out enough like him that you could mistake one for the other. Or maybe it was just that Harry wasn't concussed, this time, and knew he was thirty-nine, or whatever it was, and so was less susceptible to mistaking people for their fathers. At any rate, there was not really any question of who it was.

He was unable to move on to whatever his next thought on the subject might have been, mostly because he was right at the end of that first one when someone said, "I need your wand!"

Harry looked down, and found that, standing right next to Dudley, there was a little girl quite a bit taller than Alice Weasley, but perhaps still a mite shorter than a first-year.

Before his imagination could supply him with the screaming tantrum that would surely follow if he refused--because this girl, blond and round-faced, couldn't more obviously have been Dudley's daughter if she'd had her paternity stamped in large red letters on her forehead; and because a staple of Harry's childhood had been Dudley's screaming tantrums, which seemed the sort of thing that could be expected to be hereditary--Dudley said, surprisingly firmly, " Deirdre! What do we say?"

"Sorry, Dad," said Deirdre, apparently. "Please may I borrow your wand, Uncle Harry?"

"Er," said Harry, not at all caught up on this, and also disinclined to hand over his wand. "Did you want to come in?"

They came in. Harry closed the door behind them. Then Dudley Dursley and his daughter were standing in Harry and Draco's living room, which was not a sentence or a series of facts that was going to manage to feel anything other than surreal anytime soon. He would have given a very great deal to be about to duel a few Dark wizards in some horrible cellar instead. At least then he'd have had the first clue what to say or do.

"Hullo there, Draco," said Dudley, as if nothing about this was at all odd. As if it happened on the second Thursday of every month, or something.

"Dudley," said Malfoy politely. "Deirdre."

Things managed somehow to get surrealer in the next few moments. Draco, still draped across his chair with one arm over his face, had let his wand dangle from the thumb and forefinger of his other hand. One casual swish of it in their direction was enough to have Deirdre rushing forward to take it ("Thanks, Uncle Draco!"). Then she had it, and was waving it around, and--

Sparks sputtered out of the end of it, pink and gold and orange and red.

"You've a magic kid," said Harry, which seemed until he'd finished saying it the surrealest fact of the lot, and at that moment went on to seem the most forgone conclusion among them. Of course Dudley had a magic kid. 

"Yeah," said Dudley, grinning as Deirdre started trying to cast a Wand-Lighting Charm.

Malfoy corrected her pronunciation in a low voice, then actually sat up to look at what she was doing, and moved on to correcting her wand movements. At no point did there come a sneer into his voice, or even his expression. If there had, Harry was distantly quite sure he would have killed him, or at least hexed all the pointiness from off his face.

"Dudley, did you know your daughter's a witch?" Harry said, after having watched this for a minute or two.

"Huh? Er, yeah, I did." Dudley squinted at Harry's face, a move that gave Harry the distinct and uncomfortable feeling that he might want to get a running head start so no one could try to shove his head into any toilets. "You alright, Harry?"

Harry was getting distinctly tired of the sound of his own name. "Yeah," he said, "fine, I, just--I didn't expect it."

"But we're always by this time on second Thursdays," said Dudley.

"I'd gathered," said Harry. "Given all the yelling."

More of that squinting. "--You're being weird. Why are you being weird?"

"I'm not being weird!" Harry said, though he suspected no one would listen, or care if they did. 

"Draco, why's he being weird?"

"Um," said Malfoy, and shooed Deirdre off to practice her Lumos elsewhere. She promptly disappeared into the drawing room. "Well. He had an accident last week. At work. It made him lose his memory. He's likely to start being nasty to you about it any moment now."

"I'm not going to start being nasty," said Harry loudly, at the same time Dudley said, "You lost your memory? What, like Aunt Marge?"

"Not exactly," Harry said before Malfoy could answer for him. "I mean, I wasn't Obliviated, or anything. It wasn't intentional, by anyone. Or, I guess it was, but it wasn't--aimed at me."

"We can't know that," said Malfoy sharply.

"Yeah, because it's so likely that Dark wizards knew I'd be subbing in the day the bad Flobber-worm Mucus got used. Seems really reasonable, doesn't it?"

"It could have been an inside job," said Draco. "Then they'd have known well enou--or not," he amended, as a wave of that cold horror went through Harry again. "I don't really know enough to have an opinion. So, I don't. Have one, I mean."

Harry looked away from Malfoy long enough to discover that Dudley was staring at him with quite an odd expression on his face. "What?"

"Harry, do you--do you know who you are? Do you know who I am?"

"No, Dudley, I don't know who you are," said Harry. ("See? Nasty," said Draco.) Then, when Dudley's face went a little red, he abruptly recalled that they'd left things alright, actually. After the war, they'd met up at a Muggle pub to catch up. It had been awkward enough that they hadn't done it again, but they'd exchanged Christmas cards ever since. It had still been awkward, but at a distance, and Harry had always felt genuinely pleased to receive his card, these last couple years (though it hadn't arrived until March, the Christmas he'd still been in Grimmauld Place; Muggle post really wasn't a good match for certain sorts of wizarding buildings). "Er, sorry."

"No, it's alright, it was a dumb question," said Dudley. "So, er. What all of your memory did you lose, then?"

Abruptly, Harry found that he didn't want to talk about it. Not to yet another person. Certainly not to Dudley, who would have tons of questions, probably, about every wizarding term he hadn't heard or didn't remember; and who might, even if he did have a witch for a daughter, still be at least somewhat frightened of magic things. 

Absolutely one-hundred percent not to Dudley, who was looking at him with an expression that might have been an awful mixture of concern and sympathy.

"You can explain it," Harry said to Malfoy. He was probably salivating to anyway. 

Harry wasn't quite all the way to the door to the drawing room when Malfoy started talking in a low voice.

*

In the drawing room, Deirdre seemed to have more or less figured out how to cast a Lumos, as the tip of Malfoy's wand was now glowing brightly enough to have lit up the room, if the sun hadn't still been up, or if the curtains had been closed. The trouble now seemed to be something else.

"Nos," she said, not looking at Harry in a way that seemed somehow pointed. "Nos."

The light didn't go out, of course.

"Er, it's actually Nox," Harry said.

"Nox," Deirdre repeated, but still nothing happened.

"You've got the incantation right, but you forgot to flick your wand." Harry drew out his own wand, cast a silent Lumos, then, with the slightest little flick, had it go out again. "Like this, see," he said, and did it again.

Next time she tried, it worked. Seeming delighted, Deirdre lit up the end of Draco's wand and put it out a dozen or so more times. The last several times, though, she seemed to be eyeing Harry nervously. Harry wondered if he ought to say something, or if he'd be better off to pretend he hadn't noticed. He hadn't spent a lot of time around children. Even when he'd been at school, he'd been too busy trying not to get killed to spend much time getting to know anyone more than a year or so after him.

He was saved having to make a decision when Deirdre said, "Did you really lose all your memories, Uncle Harry?"

"Er," Harry said, and recalled very vividly an image of Dudley listening at doors when he'd been about her age. It felt a bit like a punch in the stomach, or someone stomping on your face. "Not all of them."

"How many did you lose? Was it just a few or, like, a lot?"

Two impulses seemed to be warring within Harry. One of them was to mumble something and run back up the stairs, and let Malfoy do the explaining again, given he was so keen. The other impulse, though, was that if someone was asking him about something important, and he knew the answer, the right thing to do was to give it to her. That went double if the person asking him was a kid, one he was probably at least partially responsible for.

This second impulse was the one that won, in the end.

"About half my life," Harry said, hoping there wouldn't be too many more questions.

"Which half?"

"The, er, recent one," Harry said.

She seemed to take this in. "I don't think I'd want to forget half my life." With a thoughtful expression, she waved Malfoy's wand back and forth, more sparks coming out of its tip. "Or, I dunno. I would bits, maybe."

"Yeah?" Harry said.

"Like when Mum died, you know," she went on, apparently having forgotten that he didn't know. "I wouldn't want to forget her, but..."

"Yeah," said Harry, feeling uncomfortably as if he were being told secrets, even if they were likely, since he and Dudley were in touch, not actually meant to be secret from him at all. He wondered if he'd known Deirdre's mum at all, or if this whole reconciliation thing had come later. After. "That makes sense."

"Or...I wouldn't want to forget my magic, obviously. But it'd be alright not to remember the way Dad and Granddad used to fight, after it came."

Harry took this in in a distant sort of way. "Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah. Dad didn't like me to know they were, so he'd pretend to talk to someone else on his mobile. But then he'd always end up calling Granddad an...um," she motioned for Harry to lean down, and whispered a few right nasty words into his ear. "Then he'd shout a lot more, and then hang up and stomp around the rest of the night. So, I figured..."

"Sounds like Uncle Vernon, alright," Harry said, before really thinking it through.

"He wasn't so bad always," Deirdre said. "Just later. Those are the parts I'd forget about him. If I could."

Harry didn't have memories of Vernon Dursley that weren't bad. Not unless you started including memories that didn't have him in them at all. Somehow, most likely through a truly heroic effort of will, he managed not to say this.

"And last week, Sadie Higgins called me a," Deirdre said, and whispered at Harry a word so filthy he wouldn't have believed someone her age would have known it, if he hadn't been called worse when he was in primary school. "I can't believe I used to be friends with her! I'd rather not remember it at all! I can't wait to go to Hogwarts and get away from her. And loads of others, too. But mostly her."

"Right," said Harry, feeling a bit as if he needed a fainting couch for himself, after this series of confidences. "When are you headed to Hogwarts, again?"

Not next year, he was hoping. What if this weren't all settled by September? Ron's case had been going so long already...

"Year after next," said Deirdre with a sigh that suggested she might, no, definitely would, expire well before then. "Uncle Harry?"

"Yeah?"

"Does forgetting half your life mean you forgot me? I mean, you said half, and you're pretty old..."

"Thanks," said Harry. "And, yeah, it does mean that."

"That sucks."

"Yeah. It does," Harry said again, and meant it. For this one thing, at least. "But you know what?"

"What?"

"I'm starting to feel like I know you already."

This must have been the right thing to say, or something near it, because the confidences didn't stop or even slow down for a while.

*

Harry had nearly forgotten Malfoy and Dudley were in the living room discussing him until he headed back there and found them still standing huddled together. They caught sight of him at the same time, and gave him identically miserable blond looks.

"Excuse me," Harry said firmly, determined to ignore the looks. He stepped between them to one of the shelves along the wall, rummaged around until he found the deck of cards he'd wanted. "Exploding Snap," he said, and then, maybe because Malfoy had accused him of being nasty one too many times, or maybe because it really was rude to invite Dudley to come watch without also inviting Malfoy along as well, "We're about to play in the other room, if you both want to come."

They looked at him, blondly again, then back at each other. Harry really was getting tired of all these looks the people he knew liked to share between them. This one wasn't as bad as Ron and Hermione's, but still awful enough.

"Alright," said Malfoy a little stiffly.

"Yeah, me too," said Dudley. "Though I'll be there in just a few--I've got to go and..." His eyes cast upward as his forehead wrinkled. "Oh yeah--I've got to go check, you know, my voicemail. I'll be back in a minute."

"Alright," said Harry.

He watched as Dudley all but fled out the door, and then a little ways into the woods. Then he took a flat and rectangular something from out of his pocket, and poked it on its side. After a minute, it lit up very brightly in the forest shadows, strangely not at all unlike a television screen. He proceeded to do quite an odd little dance with it. It seemed mostly to consist of holding it away from him at various angles, looking at it again, shaking his head, and moving to a new spot before repeating the entire thing. 

"It doesn't work too close to our house," said Malfoy, eventually. "Muggle technology, you know."

Eventually, something must have come together, because Dudley stopped the rest of the dance in order to put the rectangular thing to his ear. He seemed to listen for a minute, then put it back into his pocket.

Moist mail , Harry thought vaguely, and, recalling the mobile phone Uncle Vernon had got the summer before sixth year, decided he had the basic idea of what was going on here, even if he was missing some of the particulars.

Instead of coming back in when he was finished listening, Dudley went to his car and got in the driver's side. For one panicky moment Harry wondered if he were leaving; if the part of him that had cottoned on to the idea that being normal meant maybe you ought to teach your kid basic manners had decided this was where he drew the line. Then Dudley rolled down the window, pulled a cigarette out from somewhere and lit it up. He proceeded to smoke it, very slowly, while looking frowny and concerned. It was an expression Harry had most been used to seeing on Dudley when he, Harry, had threatened him with something magical he couldn't actually make good on at the time. It was a rather weird expression to see now. Harry couldn't help but look around for someone to explain it to him. Unfortunately, the person he found was, of course, Malfoy.

"He's, um--he's a little upset," said Malfoy in a low voice.

"What?" Harry said. "Why?"

"He doesn't like it when bad things happen to you," said Malfoy. "Takes it personally, I suppose."

Harry managed, through another heroic effort of will, not to ask if the bad things had anything to do with waking up to find out he was married to Draco; that he wasn't an Auror; that he was completely unemployed, in fact; that his godson was pretending to be him at Hogwarts instead of doing something sensible like flying around on the toy broomstick Harry had got for last Christmas; and that literally all of his friends and family were on the opposite side to him about the whole thing.

Eventually, Dudley made it back in, and they all went into the drawing room for Exploding Snap. This didn't work out quite as well as it might have; only two wands between them meant only two out of three could play at a time, and no matter who was playing, Dudley managed a full-body flinch at every explosion.

They moved on to wizarding chess, which was better, since playing it with spectators was a bit like being on a game show on TV, with the pieces as well as whoever wasn't currently playing calling out advice. Of course, this resulted in terrible play--though Harry suspected it would have been terrible either way, given that the pieces didn't seem to like him. This made it more or less an even match between him and Deirdre, as the pieces did seem to like her. In fact, it might even have been an uneven match in the other direction, as Harry had never been even mildly decent at chess, while Deirdre checkmated him quickly in two games out of three as his pieces yelled at him about the kinds of imbeciles who got back ranked by a nine-year-old. Then Malfoy played Deirdre, and he didn't seem to be much good at it either, spending most of his turns trying to get her pieces to stage a coup rather than actually doing much of anything strategy-related, until she was giggling helplessly and no one, pieces included, could remember whose turn it was meant to be.

*

Sitting at the table for dinner with Malfoy, Dudley, and Dudley's magic daughter wasn't quite as surreal as it could have been. Still, Harry was happy when it was over, not least because the thought had come to him, halfway through, that this was meant to be his family now: Malfoy, and Dudley, and Dudley's surprisingly-unspoiled witch daughter. It was a strange thought, one that made him feel quite odd on one end (Malfoy, Dudley), but fairly pleased on the other (Deirdre, Dudley). It was all he could do to keep up with the conversation beyond tracking that it went from Dudley talking about work to Deirdre talking about school and her friends to Malfoy and Dudley cross-explaining various wizarding and Muggle concepts at each other in a way that would probably have been hilarious if Harry had been available to listen.

"Well," said Dudley, when the food was gone and the cleaning-up was done. (Harry and Draco had done it, with some attempted help from Deirdre which had turned into another how-to lesson.) "We've got to be heading home, I suppose."

"Dad, no," Deirdre whined.

"It's getting late," Dudley said, in a rather firm voice the likes of which he certainly hadn't learned from either of his parents. "I've got to use the loo first. Then we're off."

A minute after he'd headed up the stairs, Malfoy muttered something about also having to use the loo and headed up the stairs too. This was suspicious enough for Harry to follow both of them up (though not before handing Malfoy's wand, which had been left on the kitchen table, to Deirdre and suggesting she make the most of the rest of her time with it). He found himself wishing rather fervently that he had his invisibility cloak, wasted half a moment wondering just where it had got to, anyway, and then did his best to creep up the stairs slowly and quietly.

He was very nearly rewarded for his quietness on the second floor landing. Dudley had just come out of the bathroom, must have, for the sink had just turned off, and on his way up the stairs Harry had heard the toilet flushing. Draco, rather than shoving his way in past Dudley to the bathroom, seemed to have been waiting for him.

"Dudley," he said, in a low and urgent sort of tone. "Did Harry ever..."

"Yeah?" Dudley leaned forward. So did Harry, clutching at the bannister, not daring to move a step closer lest he hit the squeaky step that he couldn't remember whether it was on these stairs or the next set up.

"I'm just wondering if he ever--I don't even know if he would have mentioned it to you, but. Did he ever tell you we were trying--"

But Malfoy didn't finish his sentence. Mostly because he decided to pause and glance around, and, in glancing, caught sight of Harry, who, without his invisibility cloak and also lacking the innate ability to blend in with the walls, was right smack in the middle of Malfoy's glancing area.

In for a Knut, in for a Sickle, Harry figured. "What we were we trying to do?" he asked.

Malfoy had gone white the moment he'd spotted Harry. Now he went livid and--not sneering, but something past a sneer, worse and much more twisted. "That's between me and Harry," he said, more viciously than Harry remembered him being since school, maybe not even then, "Potter."

"Yeah, I know I'm Harry Potter," Harry shot back, a little stung, and a little more feeling like he'd just been slapped in the face. Hadn't Malfoy said just yesterday they ought to use given names for each other? And now he was being nasty about it even though he was the one keeping secrets, not to mention wandering around and trying to tell them to other people when it was Harry who had the right to know whatever it was-- "What's your problem, Malfoy?"

Malfoy looked for a moment as if he wanted to say something in an even viciouser way--only then he glanced slightly to his left, where Dudley still was, and said, "Not now. We have guests."

Harry thought of Deirdre Dursley, who liked to listen to conversations from other rooms; who would surely be listening to whatever they had to say, if they were to start shouting at her from up here loud enough for her to catch wind of it. "Fine."

"Er," said Dudley, with wide eyes and a caught-in-the-headlights sort of expression. "How about that Kidditch, then?"

*

Soon after, the headlights to Dudley's car cut through the now-dark. Harry watched it go until the taillights were no longer a pair of red glowworms, visible in the darkness from surprisingly far off. Then he went out in the front garden with a lighted wand and found, not too much to his surprise, that the drive that had been there before must have gone away with them.

He went back in, now looking for both Malfoy and his pissedness at Malfoy, the latter of which seemed to have leeched away, somehow, leaving a sort of inevitability behind it.

But he couldn't seem to find Malfoy. He wasn't in his study, wasn't in the bedroom he'd moved himself to (Harry hadn't seen it before, and felt more than a little strange peeking into it now; he tried not to notice anything too hard outside of determining that Malfoy wasn't there). He wasn't anywhere else. He didn't seem to be in the rooms he'd locked up on the third floor, which Harry checked for by virtue of pounding on them telling him to "Come out, Malfoy, I mean, Draco." And he wasn't in the attic, either.

He wasn't going to obsess, Harry decided. Not about where Malfoy was, or what he was doing, or what secrets he was really pretty poorly trying to keep. He didn't have to care what sorts of secrets he and Malfoy had had together, considering he didn't want to be here together with him anyway. What did it matter, when he'd be gone the first moment he had the chance to?

It didn't matter, he decided. It didn't. He didn't care.

Three minutes after he'd decided not to obsess, Harry began by tossing Malfoy's office. It turned out there was nothing, really, in his desk drawers outside of various more snarky pieces of parchment, as well as plenty of blank ones. There was nothing in or even behind any of the books on his shelves. Of the pictures of he and Harry together (of which there were a number, some seeming to have migrated there from other places in the house), not one had anything hidden in the frame. 

Then, given he still couldn't get past the locks on the other doors on this floor, Harry tidied up with a few quick swishes of his wand, and headed back to the ground story. Into the living room he went, searching behind and within every game, book, and shelf he could find. As he had in Malfoy's study, he tapped every even slightly-dodgy looking item, along with anything that looked so un-dodgy as to be suspiciously so, with the tip of his wand, casting a spell that would reveal most enchantments and a second spell that would reveal most of the remainder. Still, he found nothing. In fact the only thing he learned that he hadn't known before was that the bright paperbacks by Malfoy's Leaning Chair were in fact a bunch of wizarding romance novels with hideously embarrassing titles such as Loved by the Hippogriff and Wooed by the Minotaur. Even more hideously embarrassing were the largely unclothed cover models that leered and gyrated their hips at you.

Next was the drawing room. Harry had stopped expecting to find anything, as whatever secrets Malfoy had that weren't inside his own head were clearly locked up on the third story. As he passed by it, the Pensieve occurred to him for the briefest possible moment: Long enough to ask himself if he were anywhere near that desperate, long enough to answer that he wasn't, and wouldn't be unless someone's life were actually at stake. Possibly not then, depending on whose life it was. He wasn't certain he valued his own skin that much. It would have to be someone else's.

He no longer expected to find much of anything--wasn't sure he had ever really expected to find anything--which was perhaps why it took him a minute to spot the tiny mound of glittering silver powder which had been spilled in front of the fireplace. And, when he walked over to take a closer look, there was a note on the mantel, addressed to him: 'Harry - sorry to run, I've business to attend to. Don't wait up. - Draco'

Harry's pissedness, which had for the last twenty minutes been replaced by an intense focus he was choosing not to think too much about, suddenly turned to absolute fury. Part of it was that Draco was clearly lying--even if he did have business, which seemed so convenient as to be completely unbelievable to begin with, there was no way he was actually sorry for skipping out on Harry's questions. And, it was actually impossible to know which way he'd meant it when he said not to wait up. Did he actually not want Harry to wait up (because he was up to something and didn't want to be questioned on it)? Or was it a bit of reverse psychology, and he did he want Harry to decide to wait up after all, just because Malfoy had told him not to? 

And, and, he hadn't even said where he'd gone. After all that rot about how Harry had better not set a toe out of the cottage without giving him an itinerary!

For a minute, Harry found himself hating Malfoy again, as much as he had at school. More than he had then, because at least then he hadn't been stuck with him every single day. At least then no one had expected them to do more than occasionally exist in the same classroom or hallway without hexing each other. No one had expected them to be friends, nevermind...

No, he decided when the hot ball of anger in his chest had died down into something more of a smoldering. He didn't hate Malfoy. What he felt about Malfoy was that he didn't care. And he was just going to keep on not caring, no matter how many of his buttons Malfoy tried to push.

He wasn't going to wait up, either. It didn't matter which way Malfoy had meant his note. And, he wasn't going to obsess. What he was going to do, first, was go to bed. He'd figure out what he was going to do tomorrow when tomorrow came. Whatever it was that he went on to do, it wasn't going to have anything to do with Malfoy. It wasn't going to have to do with the third floor, either.

There would be no obsessing. One hundred percent. None whatsoever.