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: 12,200

Summary: After ten years of marriage, Harry forgets.

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

Chapter Six

He began obsessing the very next day.

Malfoy was back again, or had been, judging by how breakfast was out, the Daily Prophet discarded next to Malfoy's place setting, folded over in a way that made it clear it had already been read. Malfoy himself wasn't anywhere in evidence, though. It was the first time he hadn't shown up to squint at Harry's face over a meal.

It didn't mean anything, Harry decided as he worked his way through his eggs. Or at least, it shouldn't have meant anything. Or if it did mean something, after all, it shouldn't have meant Harry had to do anything about it. Only, he was less gummy this morning than he had been before, and so instead of thinking about how irritating that feeling was, he found himself thinking, instead, of the last time Malfoy had started skipping out on meals when they'd lived in the same place as each other. Sure, Malfoy probably wasn't hatching any murder plots this time; but did it follow that Harry could let him get away with it, whatever it was? Hard to say one way or the other without knowing just what it was he was doing. And, it wasn't as if Harry himself had anything else to be doing. There were only so many hours of the day he felt like walking around in the woods, especially given there'd be less and less company to be found in them going forward, everybody who wasn't yet hibernating bound to have started within the next few weeks. And he had only so much interest in reading more books with his own handwriting in the margins.

If he'd been able to go places, it would have been different. If he hadn't been stuck here. If there'd been much at all else for him to do. But all there seemed to be, all there really was, was trying to figure out what Malfoy was up to. 

So, fine. He'd keep going until he managed it. Once he had, then he could figure out what, if anything, he needed to do about it.

*

If he was going to obsess, then he was going to do it right, Harry decided. None of that stuff where he followed Malfoy around all the time without finding out much of anything. There was much less point in stalking him here than there had been at Hogwarts, anyway, given that whenever Malfoy wasn't visible in the kitchen or the living room, he was hiding in his study. 

No, what he needed to focus on was getting through those locks. Not by trying Alohomora on them for the hundredth time in the hopes this time would be different, but...methodically. He needed information, a plan of action. In that order, or more or less.

If he'd been with the Aurors, if this had been an official investigation, he could have called in a Locks Master if exploding the doors open didn't work or was unfeasible for other reasons. Well, exploding the doors was actually unfeasible, mostly because this was Harry's house, and people who blew up their own houses purposely tended to end up in custody and/or St Mungo's. He couldn't call in a Locks Master for half a dozen more reasons, starting with how he wouldn't have known who the Locks Master was these days even if he had still been an Auror, and ending with the fact that requests such as that had to go through the Head Auror, who was Ron, who would probably have a lot to say about it, and end up unwilling to help. 

What was left was research, which was how he ended up writing to Hermione for some books on the subject. First, though, he finally read the letter she'd written him, nearly a week after he'd gotten it. He'd assumed a lot of it would be about how right he and Malfoy were for each other, and indeed the first page or so were a lot of that sort of thing; but the rest of it was taken up by things Hermione thought he'd want to know. What people he'd known had gone on to do. Who had got married, once or more than once. Who'd been born and who'd died in the meantime.

Kreacher had died last year, after having been freed before Hermione and Ron moved into Grimmauld Place all those years before. George Weasley was father to twelve-year-twins called Red and Rick, who everyone understood were and weren't jokingly named for Fred (whose given name actually hadn't been Frederick, and who would in all likelihood have found the whole thing hilarious). Teddy Lupin was dating Victoire Weasley, who was Bill and Fleur's eldest daughter, and it seemed to be quite serious. Ginny had married Neville Longbottom, which was not exactly news to Harry in the same way it wasn't exactly painful; they had three kids in all. Harry's cousin Dudley was widowed and had a magic daughter, Deirdre Dudley age nine; they came to visit on second Thursdays, a date which Harry himself had guarded zealously for the last two years, and which was, by the way, meant to be later in the week, if Draco hadn't mentioned it to him already. And so on.

There was enough of that sort of thing that it took Harry the better part of an afternoon to process it all. He didn't manage to write Hermione back until the next day, thanking her for the information briefly before asking if she could find and send along any books she could find on locking charms. This must not have come off as very subtle, for on Sunday she wrote him back a short but scold-y letter about how if he wanted to know what Draco was hiding, he would be better off just asking him rather than going behind his back; however, on Monday she wrote him back again, this time saying that if he had so much time on his hands to read about locks, she hoped he would also take a little time to read through The Fragility of Recollection and Memories, Brewed, both of which she'd sent him copies of, along with an entire stack of books on magical locks (some of which were histories, and some of which, Harry was relieved to see, had to do with practical theory).

There wasn't much going behind Malfoy's back about it, in the end, considering that the enormous leaning stack of books was waiting for Harry by his breakfast plate that morning.

"Interesting subject matter," said Malfoy snidely from the other side of the Prophet. It was more or less almost the first thing he'd said to Harry in days, as if he thought the silent treatment was a punishment instead of something Harry was perfectly happy to live with. "Considering a change in career?"

"I'm considering camping out in the third floor hallway," said Harry. "Unless you're planning to confess."

Malfoy didn't go pale, this time. He barely seemed concerned about it at all. "Considering you're not an Auror, and I'm not in custody, I don't think I will, thank you." He got up from the table, folding the paper and sticking it into a pocket of his robe, and got halfway to the door before he paused, looked back, and added, in that old cool drawl, "If you'd like a hint, though, they've both got an anti-unlocking charm on them, as well as a custom personal locking charm. Extremely resistant to tampering. Nonlethal, though." None of this meant anything much to Harry, which must have been obvious on his face, or at least obvious enough for Malfoy to add, a little less coolly than before, "The custom ones are new in the last five years, you won't recall them. Unless--you won't remember them. Anyway. They won't open without the right incantation from the right person. And it always--it's always different, because the first caster is the one who decides what the incantation is. So this is all really a waste of your--why aren't you saying anything?"

"Just deciding how much you're full of it," Harry said, which was quite obviously a lot, wasn't it? If Malfoy really thought he couldn't get through those locks, he wouldn't have to try to dissuade Harry, would he? It was almost too obvious, even for a former Slytherin. "I've about settled on completely."

"Oh, for..." Malfoy said, a low angry mutter, followed by a lower, frustrated sound. He swept out of the kitchen, either back up the stairs or over to the Pensieve, there was no telling which.

Harry didn't follow him to find out. There was breakfast to eat, and quite a lot of work to be getting on with.

*

The next several weeks went by in a haze of reading and note-taking and experimentations. Harry wasn't certain whether he ought to start with the oldest sort of locking charms or the newest ones, which way Malfoy had been expecting to persuade him with his little mind game or whatever it had been. 

He spent one day with the oldest book Hermione had sent him, the next with the newest, working his way toward the middle of things. Every time he fully read up on a particular sort of locking charm--of which there were hundreds, even thousands, or quite possibly even tens of thousands; because for as long as there had been wizards there had been wizards wanting to hide away their secrets--he then went up to the third story to run diagnostics.

Over the course of this process, he was bitten half a dozen more times, licked perhaps three dozen. He got less and less sleep, grew more and more gummy behind the eyes the less sleep he ended up with. And nothing worked, or even came close to it as far as he could tell. The more kinds of locking charms he read about, and the more countercharms there were, the more it became evident that this was the sort of thing that might take years to resolve, or that might never be--especially if he'd skimmed over a crucial paragraph somewhere, or tried the actual charm he needed but mispronounced it, anything like that. He therefore kept the most detailed notes he could on his progress, and hoped for the best. This sort of thing wasn't his forte, but he'd long since learned you could get through just about anything if you kept at it doggedly for long enough.

*

Meanwhile, life outside the cottage seemed to be moving along, and trying to move Harry along with it. 

The last Thursday of October, four weeks after Harry had woken up in St Mungo's to begin with, he had an appointment back there to see about his progress. Setting this up mostly involved a lot of back-and-forthing with Teddy to make sure they'd properly coordinated the timing, and as little thinking as possible about what the Healers would have to say about his prognosis.

("Wouldn't a different day be better?" said Malfoy on Tuesday of the week before, when Harry informed him of their plans.

"Teddy's only got one class on Thursdays," said Harry, privately annoyed Malfoy meant to nitpick, when he ought to just be happy Harry hadn't quietly ignored the letter that had come from his Healer requesting he schedule a follow-up. Or hadn't ignored it for longer than about a week, anyway. "Can't do this week if you wanted it earlier, they haven't got any appointment slots this Thursday."

"But isn't that--don't you want..." said Malfoy, trailing off. "Alright, fine, if you're certain."

And that was the end of that particular bizarre conversation.)

Half an hour after Teddy finished seeing to his second-year Slytherin class, and therefore had the rest of his day free, and had been seen Apparating from out of Hogsmeade (straight into Victoire Weasley's flat, Harry was given to understand, with no plan of leaving again until quite late in the evening), Harry Apparated to St Mungo's. A moment after he arrived at the Apparition Point, which looked out onto a blessedly empty hallway, there came a faint pop from behind him. 

He turned and found Malfoy there.

"You didn't think you were going to your appointment alone, did you?" Malfoy said, snidely again, which was the tone he seemed to have settled on for speaking to Harry at this point, outside of the weirdness of the previous week's Tuesday. "Or not going to it, if you were to try sneaking--bugger."

Harry turned again, this time to see what Malfoy was looking at. The corridor was no longer empty. A witch had just rounded the corner--and not just any witch, but one who was surrounded by numerous floating parchments and quills. They stared at each other over a moment during which Harry considered Apparating back and doing all this next Thursday or the one after, instead. By the time he'd dismissed this as not worth either the stress around Teddy or, probably, the resulting row with Malfoy, the witch had recovered, and was striding confidently toward him, the floating quills around her seeming to quiver in anticipation of getting to write things about him.

"Mr. Potter!" she said, striding up so she was close enough to him for her quills to hear every little breath he made, or something. "Any comment about the recent change in your sleeping arrangements?"

"My what?" said Harry, and then cursed himself. He knew better by now than to answer reporters at all unless it was to say to get away from his door, or his windows, or his person in general. 

"We've had reports you're now living at Hogwarts. Tell me, is your marriage in trouble?"

"My marriage is fine!" Harry blurted.

Face burning, he all but fled to the elevator, Malfoy on his heels as the reporter, eager now, and out for blood, yelled after them asking for Mr. Malfoy's opinion on the matter. Mr. Malfoy, thankfully, stayed silent until the elevator doors shut behind them. After that, too, except to tell the elevator which floor they wanted.

They spun for a second, but the dizziness this time was nothing compared to the way Harry's head was already spinning. He couldn't believe he'd really said that. On the record, even.

"I, er," said Harry, trying to think of how to say he didn't think his marriage was fine or any other good or even neutral identifier, it was just that being in the presence of reporters made him go ever so slightly mad. "I didn't mean, you know--"

"Obviously," said Malfoy. The elevator doors had begun to slide open, but now slid closed again, Malfoy having made a 'hold on' sort of gesture at them with his wand. "We haven't been married ten years without my having noticed you close ranks around reporters."

"I don't close ranks around reporters," Harry said weakly, mostly because he was thinking: Ten years? Ron had said something about twelve or fifteen, so Harry, figuring he'd been exaggerating, had assumed it could have been no more than three, or, or maybe five at the very outside of things.

"Oh, no? The things I've heard you say to them," Malfoy said, lighting up with a look that said he was about to try to humiliate Harry mercilessly. Or at least, that was what it had always meant before, when he was seated at the Slytherin table in the Great Hall, miming about something Harry had done. "Did you know Filch was like a father to you? Or so you once claimed."

This was so unexpected and said so much less nastily than it could have been that Harry couldn't help grinning and saying, "Ha! No, I didn't."

"Oh, but you did," said Malfoy, lighting up even more, and leaning in in a conspiratorial way that was at odds with those memories of Hogwarts, considering then he'd always been making sure everyone could hear him, and now he only had Harry as his audience. "Mrs. Norris slept on your pillow at nights. Your gay awakening was Marcus Flint--"

"Hey! I just breakfast three hours ago," Harry complained. Also, he'd been, what, twelve when Flint had graduated? He hadn't had any kind of awakening until a few years after that.

But there seemed to be no stopping Malfoy as he went on to make ever more outrageous claims, ending with the fact that Harry had hung onto every word out of Professor Trelawney's mouth, and had also hero-worshipped Severus Snape. Harry felt this last one might be taking it a bit far--he went back and forth on the way he felt about Snape anymore, and while Ron or Hermione could joke about him alright, he wasn't sure how he felt about Malfoy being the one to do it--but before he could whether it was or not, or whether he ought to try to defend Snape's honor or some other daft thing, the elevator doors had opened again.

"Right," Malfoy said. "Let's get this over with, then."

"I haven't ever said that to reporters," said Harry.

*

First, his Healer--the Head Healer again; evidently they were taking no chances with him--interviewed him about what, if anything, he might have remembered from the past nineteen years. This part of the appointment was rather short, as Harry hadn't remembered a single thing. No, not even in his dreams. His worst dreams were the same as they'd always been: Voldemort, Cedric, other things that had happened or come close to happening, or that had never happened but would have been very bad if they had. His better dreams were all things like being back at Hogwarts for an eighth year, but missing out on all his classes, and then, once he'd failed all his exams by having neglected to appear in order to be examined, remembering that he'd already done his NEWTs and oughtn't to have been back at Hogwarts in the first place, and then waking up. He hadn't had an actually new dream since he'd woken up thirty-nine.

Talking about his dreams at all, though, reminded him of the pink gumminess. He'd more or less gotten used to it by now. Hard not to, considering it was always there, lurking behind his eyes--but now that he'd remembered it, it was at least something he could bring up.

"Mmm," said the Healer, lighting up her wand with what must have been a more medical sort of Lumos. It lit up the inside of Harry's head as she peeled his eyelids back, one and then the other, as if this might somehow let her catch a glimpse of the pink or the gumminess. "Is it better at a certain time of day? Worse?"

"Bad in the morning," Harry said, fidgeting with his glasses, which were held in his lap. "It fades a little as the day goes on. But I wake up sometimes--you know, in the middle of the night. It's worst of all then."

"Mmm," the Healer said again. "Likely a side effect."

Harry couldn't very well demand to know of what. Not with Malfoy standing by the window, pretending not to be paying attention but certainly hanging onto every word. A glance at him now showed his eyes were closed. Proof positive he was listening. "Are you sure?"

"When are you taking the Memory-Induction Potion? What time of day?"

Harry still hadn't. But he poured it down the sink around the same time every night. This surely didn't count, but just as surely couldn't be admitted to. Not with Malfoy still right there, hearing everything.

"Er, before bed," he said.

"Almost certainly a side effect," said the Healer again. "Nothing worth worrying about, though of course you should report any change--particularly any which seem sudden or extreme."

"And if it's not a side effect?" asked Malfoy sharply from the window. He'd now turned to glare pointily, not at Harry for once, but at the Head Healer. "What might it indicate then? Could it be a sign his memories are wanting to return?"

The Healer didn't mmm this time. She put out the end of her wand and motioned for Harry to put his glasses back on. "It's possible," she said. "There's quite a wide range when it comes to amnesia and memory loss. No two cases are ever quite the same. We may find an indication one way or the other when we run through the rest of our tests. Then again, we may not."

Malfoy nodded, a motion as sharp as his chin was pointy. It seemed likely to take someone's eye out. He didn't look happy at all. Harry wasn't, either, particularly. He thought he'd rather have had some sort of extra malady than to know that the gummy feeling might actually be his memories of being married to Malfoy, trying to worm their way back out no matter what he, Harry, actually wanted.

*

The Healer left the exam room for a few minutes. When she came back, she brought several friends, or rather several other Healers and a nervous-seeming Healer-in-training. They then ran all sorts of tests, which seemed to mostly consist of pointing their wands at Harry's head while muttering medical-sounding things at each other. They were staring at Harry so intently as to remind him of Legilimency, and so he closed his eyes and tried to think of things that weren't related to how he wasn't following medical advice even slightly.

It took forever, or seemed to. For the first few minutes he thought he felt even pinker and gummier, but for the eternity afterward felt just the same as he had when he'd gotten here. He could tell something was happening, or meant to be happening, inside his head; it felt like the ghost of the writhing that had come along with the pain, originally. By the time they'd finished, every muscle in his body seemed to have tensed up in response, so that he was as stiff and uncomfortable as if he'd had to sit in a lecture for hours, even if it really couldn't have been more than twenty minutes all told.

"Well?" Malfoy demanded, the moment they were done.

"One moment," said the Head Healer, and left the room with the other Healers. The exam room door had a window at the top of it, so that they could be seen out in the hallway, conferring with one another. It made Harry feel gummier again, and also a bit itchy. He knew he tended to be talked about, often seemingly by everyone all the time, but had never liked to see the evidence of it.

Then the others left and the Head Healer came back in.

"Well?" Malfoy said again.

The Healer looked from Harry to Malfoy and back again. "Mr. Potter," she said, in a voice that was so kind as to give the immediate sense that whatever this was, it was definitely meant to be bad news. "Harry. I'd hoped for evidence that your memory loss had begun to resolve itself. Unfortunately, we aren't seeing any."

"He's been on his potion for nearly a month," Malfoy said in a drawl as cold as any Harry had heard from, recently or at any time within memory. "Why aren't there results yet?"

"This doesn't mean it won't resolve, however," said the Healer, persisting on talking to Harry himself rather than being distracted by Malfoy. Harry immediately felt more warmly toward her because of this. "It can take time for the mind to recover from magical or other traumas--especially those related to memory. We'll know more a few months from now."

"And if he hasn't remembered by then, either?" Malfoy said.

The Healer seemed to think about this. "Generally speaking, the pattern we're seeing four months after a memory loss incident is what I would expect to see going forward. In other words, if you've begun to recover your memories by then, you should continue to do so for some time--though there is of course never a guarantee you'll recover everything."

"Alright," said Harry, who didn't think there was much else, really, to say. He could read rooms, sometimes at least, and what he was reading in this one was that no one else in it would welcome his opinion on the subject.

"And if he hasn't remembered anything by then, you're saying, what? That he won't at all?" asked Malfoy, sounding less cold and drawling than high-pitched and something else.

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," the Healer said, kindly again, which seemed like an answer in and of itself. "It really doesn't do to dwell on hypotheticals at this point."

"Unpleasant hypotheticals, you mean," Malfoy pressed, cool again and also quite flat. "You don't seem to have much of a problem discussing the best case scenario, now do you."

"Draco," Harry said, beginning with the intention of shutting him down, and ending with the thought that, actually-- "Wait, no, I'd like to know that too. If you don't, er, mind."

The Healer looked at them, from one to the other. Then, seeming very reluctant, in the way people did when they weren't thrilled to be giving out what they thought of as quite bad news, she answered.

*

Malfoy was very quiet on the elevator ride down. After they'd stopped spinning, he flicked his wand at the doors before they could even attempt to open.

"It's going to be alright," he said, not looking at Harry, but instead at his own bifurcated, chin-up reflection. "You'll--you're going to remember. Any day now. You're going to. It's going to be fine. In the--in the end. It will be."

"Er, right," said Harry awkwardly, not so much out of agreement as out of feeling he was expected to say something, and that as usual none of the things he wanted to say would be welcomed.

"You have to--you'll remember. You're going to," said Malfoy, and his voice wasn't drawling, or cold, or much of anything except intense. "And things will be the way they should have--they'll go back to the way they were. We won't have lost anything, save for a month or two. It won't be enough to matter, in the end. We'll even--we'll laugh about it. One day." Now he did look at Harry, who had the strangest feeling that Malfoy wasn't, really, talking to Harry as he was, but speaking to someone else entirely. Not the Harry who was actually there, but the one Malfoy still thought he might see when he looked at Harry piercingly in the mornings. "Even if you don't remember naturally, your potion will bring it back. I've done some research, and it's--it's the strongest one out there. The most effective. It'll work. It has to. It--it will." 

For a moment, there was silence, which stretched out just long enough for Harry to be suddenly certain that the next thing Malfoy was going to say was to ask whether or not he was taking his potion. He'd surely ask it in the same way he'd said the last few things, voice unsteady and on the edge of cracking. And even if Harry lied and said he was, Malfoy would know the truth, probably. Almost certainly. There was no longer any real denying that Malfoy knew him very well indeed; even in school, Malfoy had known him well enough to get under his skin, and to know when he'd gotten under it. If they'd really been married for ten years, then surely Malfoy knew him well enough by now to know when Harry wasn't being truthful to his face.

Malfoy didn't ask, though. Instead, he swallowed, Adam's apple bobbing in his throat. "That's what I wanted to say."

He said this last bit firmly enough that it didn't seem to invite comment. Then, as if to underline that impression, his chin snapped up, and his wand twitched, and the elevator doors slammed open.

Harry couldn't get out of that now claustrophobic-seeming space quickly enough. By the time he walked into the crowd of reporters that was waiting for them, he might have changed his mind, only by then it was already too late.

"Mr. Potter," said one, not the young reporter from before they'd gone up, but one of the others, the crowd that must have gathered once they'd learned Harry had come through here and would surely be coming back this way as well. "Today is--"

Malfoy rushed up from behind to shove between Harry and the reporter. His reddening face twisted up, not into a sneer, but more of a grimace of pure rage.

"Think twice," he spat, brandishing his wand an inch from the reporter's nose. Red sparks sputtered out its end.

The reporter stumbled back one step, two. The rest seemed to hesitate. 

A camera flashed, somewhere in the crowd. Malfoy grabbed Harry above the elbow and rushed them toward the Apparition point. They were barely over the line when the darkness of Apparition came squeezing around him. Then it was gone, and they were somewhere else.

"Good one, Malfoy," Harry said, and meant it very strongly; and so what if he did close ranks around reporters, when they were always trying to corner him so they could trick him into saying humiliating things on the record? "Draco, I mean." It was about then he realized how much darker it was, wherever they'd ended up. "Where are we, anyway?"

Only later would it occur to him that it hadn't occurred to him to wonder, for at least a moment, whether this had been a long game, meant to end in his being kidnapped, or even straight-up murdered. For now, though, Malfoy looked at him blankly for a moment or two, which was long enough for the darkness to begin to seem somewhat less dark. More gray, really, as it became apparent that there were brick walls to either side of where they stood, and that the grayness was less from that than it was from the sky, which was filled with the sort of clouds that promised incoming rain. 

"We can go home again if you'd prefer that," Malfoy said slowly. "I thought you might like to go out. Since, you know, you usually can't. We have an hour or two to do something. If you want. I'd have brought it up before we left Mungo's, only..."

Harry thought this over. "Yeah," he said. "Er, only so long as there aren't any reporters."

"We'll be alright here. This neighborhood is all Muggle." Malfoy glanced toward the entrance of the alleyway, then Vanished his robe. Underneath he was wearing a greenish jumper and khaki-colored chinos. Harry had never so much as  imagined Malfoy in Muggle clothing before, and wasn't sure whether which was more surprising: that he looked natural and somehow even slightly less pointy in them, or that, unlike  most wizards who hadn't grown up with at least one foot in the Muggle end of things, he hadn't ended up wearing some truly weird combination. A cocktail dress with suspenders over it and scuba flippers on his feet, to name just one memorable example. "You'll do, I suppose," Malfoy added, after looking over Harry, who had worn his everyday T-shirt and trousers to his appointment. Firmly, he said, "We're going to have a nice day now."

*

It turned out that what Malfoy meant by 'do something' was 'have lunch somewhere.' They ended up in a pub down the street which seemed to have a little of everything on the menu.

"Have anything you like, so long as it hasn't got ham in it," Malfoy said, once they'd settled in at a table.

Harry didn't want anything with ham in. He was a simple man who wanted nothing more than fish and chips. Meanwhile, Draco, also apparently a simple man, ordered the chicken tikka masala. Then they were left waiting for their food to be brought out. 

Harry began to think maybe this hadn't been the best idea, going out somewhere with Malfoy. Sitting across from him. Being expected to carry on a conversation with him. That was why anyone went to pubs with other people, rather than going by oneself. It was less about food than company, then. And even if you could argue that it was sometimes about the food, you couldn't really expect to convince anyone of it until the food in question was in evidence.

"Er, so," said Harry, casting about for a subject that wasn't his memories, or their marriage, or...anything like that. "Do we come here a lot?"

He cringed inwardly, because that was the kind of question that was sort of about their marriage, wasn't it? He'd largely avoided asking Malfoy too much about their life for that reason, anyway. But Malfoy, instead of jumping on this opportunity to...embarrass him, or try to talk him into wanting to be married to him, or something, only said, "Sometimes. Not too often."

"Yeah?" Harry said, for a lack of anything else to really add.

"We go around to a few Muggle places," Malfoy went on. "Generally when we want some, I don't know--privacy? Anonymity? We have a couple pubs we're regulars at. The rest we try not to go to too often. What?"

"Since when do you like anonymity?" Harry asked, before really thinking through how likely Malfoy was to feel antagonized by that statement (though he later felt he would have ended up saying it either way). "I just mean," he continued, because of the way Malfoy was looking at him, which reminded him mostly of the way Malfoy had always looked at him when Harry had stepped wrong and Malfoy was about to call him on it in the most humiliating way possible, "you always wanted attention before. In, you know, school."

"We're not in school," said Malfoy, mildly for whatever that look was meant to be. "I like being left alone for similar reasons as you. In public places, anyway. It's the way we--it's how we got together in the first place. What do the Savior of the wizarding world and an ex-Death Eater have in common? Not a lot, right? But you like to have a drink without anyone asking for your autograph, and I like going places where no one knows to sneer at me, sometimes."

"But don't you like getting to sneer back at them, though?" Harry asked, feeling this was a vital aspect of Malfoy's character, and also feeling he needed to shift the subject before he had to hear about their first date, or whatever.

"I did say sometimes," Malfoy said, and then, so sneerily it had to have been on purpose: "You might want to have that looked at, Potter."

"What?"

"Your listening comprehension," said Malfoy, and snickered as if this were a fine joke and not really a very unfunny attempt at one.

But it was hard to get too upset about Malfoy taking the piss, considering the sneeriness was clearly being put on, and that Malfoy had defended Harry to the press less than half an hour ago. Not that he'd needed defending, really--he was perfectly capable of threatening reporters all on his own, and would have done given another split second to get to it--but if he wasn't going to let himself be alright with Malfoy for that much, he'd have to be pissed with him about it instead. Of all the people who deserved to have their honor defended, reporters were at the absolute bottom of the pile, as far as Harry was concerned.

*

Their food came a few minutes before several more customers came into the pub: a woman with her young daughter, who was for some reason dressed up in a princess outfit of some kind, a blue and sparkly dress not quite normal enough to count as regular clothes.

Malfoy caught Harry looking, and said, "Elsa."

"Who?"

"Elsa," Malfoy said again, after swallowing another large bite of his chicken tikka. "It's a Muggle flim. Very popular. The main character is called Elsa too. The Muggle children dress up as her all the time. There's this dreadful song that goes with it, Deirdre sang it to us, what, something like fourteen times when they were at ours this one time? Left the fucking thing in my head for months. I tried complaining to your cousin about it, but do you know what he said? 'Now you know how I feel on the daily.' What an unbelievable wanker, right?"

Harry, feeling he might have enjoyed hearing about Dudley knocking Malfoy down a peg if he'd been able to really follow most of the rest of this, said, "Er, right."

"It really is a horrid song. You hate it too. Piss me off enough and I'll sing it to you. Then you'll wish you could forget it again."

"Right," Harry said again. He was finding he didn't really have to say much. The more he sat and listened to Malfoy, the more Malfoy went on about whatever came into his head. It turned out he talked with his hands when he got going, not quite as dramatic as when he was miming things, but nonetheless very obvious. Had he always been this chatty? Harry supposed he might have been, at school. It was hard to say, considering most of the time when he'd caught Harry's eye, it was because he was making an attempt at making Harry's life hell, or otherwise up to something. "Well, what's it about?" he managed, feeling he really shouldn't let Malfoy do all the talking, since that was a road bound to lead to more uncomfortable subjects. "The film Deirdre likes, I mean."

"Fucked if I know," Malfoy said. "You asked Dudley once, and he turned red and stammered something about how you wouldn't like it. I can only assume it's incredibly embarrassing, even for Muggles. Even he admits we've got it better than they do, since we don't have to deal with Fiznee."

His hands were still moving around a lot while he talked. As Harry watched, one of them moved across the table to Harry's plate and took a chip off it.

"Hey," he said indignantly. "That's mine."

Malfoy's hand paused halfway between Harry's plate and his own. "Did you want it back?"

Harry abruptly realized that if he had it back, he'd have to put something Malfoy had touched into his mouth in order to save face. "Er, no, you keep it."

"You didn't really want it anyway," said Malfoy, dipping the chip into his chicken tikka to mop up what was left of the sauce. "You'd have scarfed it already if you did."

Malfoy ate his curry chip. Then he took another chip off Harry's plate, and a third, and ate them the same way. Then he tore off a piece of Harry's fish and did the same thing to it, and didn't seem to notice or care that Harry's mouth had been on it earlier. 

Harry felt that even if he had had very much of an appetite, it would have been gone by the time he was done watching Malfoy clean up the rest of his lunch. It was the sort of thing he would have felt quite strongly as recently as early this morning, but that now seemed to exist inside him in more of a bemused, distant sort of way.

"Enjoying my food, Malfoy?" he said when this appeared to be more or less finished with. 

"Yes, thanks," said Malfoy sweetly. "I thought of eating with my mouth open, only I didn't want you to pass out."

Harry was struck by the need to hotly assert that he wouldn't have passed out. He managed not to out of the sense that this would only result in more mockery, even if there didn't seem to be anything very nasty behind it.

Malfoy went on: "Or, you know, start gagging."

Harry could have said he wouldn't have done that, either, except it seemed very likely that he definitely would have. "Yeah, thanks a lot," he said sarcastically. "Appreciate it."

"Thought you might."

*

They were waiting on dessert--or rather, Malfoy was waiting on three different desserts for himself, with Harry having decided that he wasn't especially in the mood for sweets--when Malfoy's face pulled into a twisted expression. 

"Ugh," he said, and then made an awful low retching sound. It was the sort of sound that makes you think that if the person making it doesn't lose their lunch all over the table, you might very well do it for them.

"Er," said Harry. "Are you--"

Malfoy made the sound again. Harry wished he hadn't been looking at his face when he did; he really did look as if he was about to be sick. It was enough to make Harry's stomach turn a bit too.

"I have to," Malfoy said, jumping up from the table. "I might--would you pay, please?"

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a purse to throw on the table, then fled. 

Harry stared after him a moment, then picked up the purse. It was full of Muggle money, notes and coins both. He tried to recall what any of the prices had been on their food and couldn't quite manage it. Higher, probably, than they'd been the last time he'd been to a pub. They hadn't ordered drinks, at least; he'd felt he ought to keep his mind clear, being out and about with Malfoy, and Malfoy apparently hadn't want anything alcoholic either, all of which left him with a wider margin for error.

He took out several notes from the purse and put them on the table. Then he remembered the desserts they'd ordered, and added another. Was it too much? It felt like too much, but he figured that at least had to be better than running out on part of the bill.

Sticking the purse in his pocket, Harry made to follow him. Malfoy had headed out into the street, which at least had to be better than heading straight for the restroom. Unless he was being sick outside, which, being more public, would probably be a lot worse.

"Leaving already?" the server called after him, having emerged with all of Malfoy's desserts.

"My--er," Harry said, calling it back over his shoulder, and was struck with a moment's paralysis of what, exactly, Malfoy was to him. His husband, technically, but it wasn't as if he could call him that, or wanted to. And he wasn't a friend, either, even if Harry was feeling slightly more friendly toward him on this particular day. "He's not, er, feeling well, I've got to--"

And then he was opening the door, and was outside again. Malfoy was also there, sagged against the nearest street lamp. He wasn't retching anymore, and there was no evidence that he'd spewed up in the meantime.

"Are you alright?" Harry asked, feeling rather awkward about it, not so much as a question in general but definitely as one he was currently asking Malfoy about.

Malfoy's eyes were screwed shut. He was shinier than he'd been inside the pub, his forehead beaded with sweat, nevermind that it was late October and thus felt properly October-y outside. "I mean, honestly, no? Not even slightly."

"Er, I meant are you going to be sick?"

"Ideally not," said Malfoy. "I'm trying not to, obviously. It's just--ugh." He retched again, which was only slightly less stomach-churning to listen to outside than it had been in.

"I thought I was meant to be the one gagging," said Harry, for lack of anything very comforting to try to say, but feeling he ought to say something. "What happened to that?"

"The woman next to us was having chicken and ham pie," said Malfoy sharply. "That's what happened to that. The smell alone--" He shuddered, but at least the gagging expression he made with it seemed to be theatrical rather than very serious. "I can still smell it, I don't know what to--"

Harry dug around in his pocket and found a handkerchief. It was not a particularly pristine one, but also didn't appear to have been used so much as having clearly lived in his trousers for a while. He offered it to Malfoy, more or less expecting to be met with some sort of cutting remark about how Malfoys didn't use secondhand handkerchiefs. 

Instead, Malfoy took it, and blew his nose once, twice, three times in quick succession, then wiped his nose what seemed to be very thoroughly.

"Er, better?" Harry asked. It was hard to tell, because although Malfoy wasn't retching again yet, he was also looking askance at the handkerchief.

"Much," Malfoy said. "I--thank you, I appreciate it."

He was still staring at the handkerchief in a weird way, though.

"What's wrong?" Harry asked, not as annoyedly as he could have considering he'd possibly, probably just saved himself from having to see Malfoy sicking up everywhere. It wasn't exactly a victory in the tradition of taking down Voldemort, but it felt pretty alright. No one had died in the process, anyway.

"Nothing, it's only--what am I meant to do with it, now that I've snotted it up? I can't Scourgify it out here in the street, can I? And I can't Vanish it, either..."

"Oh," said Harry. "Muggles usually put them back in their pockets."

Malfoy stared some more, now at him. "You've got to be joking."

"Er, no?"

"So why don't you put it back in your pocket, then?" Malfoy said, trying to shove it at him.

Harry stuck his hands in his pockets instead, and took a big step back. "I don't want your snotted up handkerchief, Malfoy!"

"Ugh," Malfoy said with another shudder, before stuffing it in his own pocket after all. "Well," he said, looking round, something in his mood seeming to shift in a determined sort of way again. "How about a walk? There's a nice park just down that way."

Did Harry want to go on a walk with Malfoy? Eating with him was one thing--he'd have had to have lunch eventually, and it wasn't as though they didn't have breakfast together more days than not--but walks were the kind of thing there was no reason to do without a reason to do them. Usually the reason was that you were both headed for the same place, or...or you just wanted to be together.

"Or we can go home, if you'd prefer," Malfoy said, clocking Harry's hesitation.

If he'd sounded annoyed, or impatient, Harry would have said fine, they may as well head back. He didn't, though; and, on reflection, he didn't really want to go back to Hummingbird Lane just yet. It was good to be out and about. He didn't even mind Malfoy being there, not really. And, he was getting tired of walking around in the woods at home. And, why the hell not? It wasn't as if it had to mean anything, in the end.

"No," Harry said. "No, it's alright, we can go to the park."

On the way there, they passed several dozen Muggle shopfronts, most of which Malfoy had some sort of commentary about: seventy-five percent of it wrong, twenty-five percent of it actually incomprehensible, and zero percent of it nasty. It was baffling. Every time Harry glanced at him, he found Malfoy was still talking with his hands. The more excited he was about whatever he was so wrongly talking about, the more dramatic his hands got, too.

The park, when they got there, was very nice. Harry could see how it would have been even better on a sunny day, rather than one that threatened rain. It would have made the trees, already dressed gloriously in red and gold, glow above their heads.

It had not, along the way there, seemed strange to be walking with Malfoy of all people. Now it did again, for no reason Harry could have given. Maybe it was because Malfoy had fallen silent, perhaps defeated by the way there was nothing really Muggle-related to be wrong about when it came to parks and park benches and trees. The quiet seemed somehow much weirder than hearing Malfoy prattle on confidently about what he thought record ("preflorg") shops and so on were all about. 

Was Harry expected to be the one to say things now? He tried to think of something.

"So," he said, still scrambling about for a topic even though he'd already started talking, "Draco."

"Yes?"

"What've you got against ham, anyway?" Harry managed.

"Um. What?"

"There was ham at Hogwarts plenty of times. You never made a scene about it then," Harry pointed out, quite reasonably, he thought. "And didn't we have ham at breakfast a couple of times last week?"

"Yes. Well," said Malfoy, in a strangely measured sort of way. "It was kippers I couldn't stand last week." The sound he made at this, which was not quite a retching sound but certainly in the same family, suggested his feelings on kippers hadn't warmed up very much for this week, either. "They're so, I don't know, fishy."

"You just had half my fish and chips." Harry didn't know why he was pushing this, exactly, except that there seemed to be something there. Not that he had any idea how it could possibly mean anything about anything important, Malfoy being a picky eater in his old age, but he'd never not pushed when it came to Malfoy.

Malfoy shuddered, not at all a determined sort of shudder. "Yes, but kippers are slimy and fishy. Ugh. Can we please talk about something else?"

Or maybe he actually didn't need to push it so much, if Malfoy was going to look like that when he did. As if he were on the verge of being sick again, nevermind that there wasn't any ham or kippers in the vicinity for him to get a whiff of.

"Alright," Harry decided, and cast around for a subject that wasn't how pretty the park was. "It's nice here," he said, feeling he hadn't really managed in his goal. "Peaceful."

Malfoy didn't say anything for a few moments. Maybe he was taking in the peacefulness. "Yes. Though, I suppose..."

"What?"

"We really oughtn't stay too much longer. I don't know what time the Muggles start their, you know, thing."

What thing he could have meant, Harry didn't know. If he asked, chances were he still wouldn't, judging by the last half hour of explanations on Malfoy's part.

He didn't ask. Ten or fifteen minutes later, they ducked together behind a particularly large tree, and Apparated back to Hummingbird Lane.

*

It wasn't disappointing, exactly, to emerge from the squeezing darkness into the front garden. The view wasn't that much different than the one at the park had been: trees everywhere, resplendent in Gryffindor colors, and here the sun was shining, leaving everything to glow. Yet somehow, Harry felt a bit let down to be here. He'd spent all his time here, ever since he'd gotten out of St Mungo's. And it was...fine, not at all like the prison it could or even should have felt like, but that didn't mean he was ready to come back to it yet. Especially not when it meant he likely wouldn't be able to leave again for another good while.

"Er, Draco," he said, his words seeming to catch and hold Malfoy on his way toward the front door; he had been headed toward it, but now he paused, and looked questioningly back. "Did you want to, I don't know, do something else?"

"Something else," Malfoy repeated, sounding a little incredulous, but in a warm sort of way that was going to make Harry uncomfortable if he gave it too much thought. "Yes, absolutely. What did you have in mind?"

Not really anything in particular. Not that he could say as much now. Harry cast about once again, looking around for just one single thing he could...

Beyond the roof of the cottage, something gleamed bronzely, and gave him an idea.

"What've we got in the shed out back?" he asked, and before Malfoy could answer, Apparated over to it.

A moment after he arrived, Malfoy did too, coming in behind him with a soft pop. Harry was already reaching for the shed door by then. It was locked, or appeared to be, but the door opened for him the moment his fingers brushed against it.

What was in there was what Harry had more or less assumed would be there, ever since he'd first spotted the shed between the back of the cottage and their home Quidditch field.

It was not a very large shed, seeming to consist entirely of shelves to either side, and hooks along the back wall. On the shelves lay four or five Quaffles and a few stacks of Quidditch gloves. There were also several large boxes, chained shut and now rattling ominously at them; surely those contained Bludgers. On the back hooks sat five or six broomsticks. Harry took a step forward, which was really all he needed to end up at the back of the shed. There were, according to the lettering on the handles, a Firebolt Supreme, a Nimbus 2015, a Starsweeper XXI, and a Thunderbolt VIII. Just glancing at them, without having seen any advertisements or even having any idea what they had cost (he hoped not more than the house, for the Firebolt Supreme), Harry knew these must be among the top echelon of broomsticks on the market, here in 2019.

And, upon the top set of hooks, there was a regular Firebolt. It could not have been the same broomstick Sirius had sent him in third year, as long lost as Hedwig herself was, yet it was still the one Harry reached for.

He had to slip past Malfoy to get out of the shed. When Malfoy emerged a moment later, he was holding, not too surprisingly, the Nimbus.

"Fancy a game?" said Harry, having already hopped onto the Firebolt and lifted into the air. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been on a broom. It felt incredible to be flying again, or even just hovering, high enough for a really good look at Malfoy's bald spot.

Malfoy looked up at him, now frowning a little. "I'm not--I don't know. Can't you go flying by yourself?"

"Hard to fancy a game by myself," said Harry, looping around the shed right-side up, and then looping around it again, sideways this time.

"It's only," said Malfoy. "If I were to fall--"

"If you were to fall," repeated Harry, somewhat incredulously. What kind of wizard had Malfoy turned into, anyway, to be actually concerned about taking a spill from a broom? When he must've been riding a broomstick around before he could even walk? When they had multiple of the sort of brooms that, from the looks of them, were probably able to go from zero to ninety within about seven seconds? "What do you think's going to happen if you fall?"

Something flashed over Malfoy's face, but was so swiftly buried that Harry hadn't a hope of telling what it had been. "I...um."

"Seriously. What?"

"I don't," said Malfoy. "I, just--alright. Even if I did, better now than later. I suppose."

"Er, why's that?"

"Why's what?"

Malfoy was, Harry felt, being deliberately obtuse about this. Through gritted teeth, he said, "Why's it better if you fall from your broom now than later?"

Malfoy's eyes flashed again. Even from a height, it was clear what this expression was, the same viciousness from those other times sneering down over his features.

Oh, fuck all the way off, Harry nearly said, was about to, only Malfoy's nasty expression seemed to melt away before he could--not easily, but in painful dribs and drabs, until what was left was just Malfoy, looking up at him again.

"It's worse because I might crack my skull open and spill my brains out everywhere" he said, not quite flatly nor quite anything else except lying through his teeth. "If I do it today, maybe you won't mind about it. If it happens a while from now, though, you'll have gotten attached and be sorrier."

Harry snorted. "Yeah, right," he said, and then, because it was easier than admitting that liking Malfoy at least a little bit no longer seemed quite so outlandish a suggestion as it would have done before, "I think you're just too chicken to come up here and face me."

"Too chicken to--!" Malfoy choked, turning red. He turned on his heel back to the shed, reached in, brought out a little box. He thumbed open the latch at the front. "No Bludgers, though," he said, hopping onto his broom. "Just us and..."

The box opened. Out of it came a golden darting something. It twinkled in the light for a moment, just a moment, then flashed away across the field. Behind it chased Malfoy, leaning as far forward as he could on his broomstick, urging it on after the runaway Snitch.

Halfway across the field, he glanced back over his shoulder at Harry. "Coming, Potter?"

Leaning down over his own broom, Harry shot across the Quidditch field after him.

By the time he caught up, the Snitch had, of course, disappeared on them both.

It was on.

*

Harry hadn't been flying in a while. It had been so long, in fact, that he couldn't remember just when the last time had been. It must have been even longer since he'd been out on the Quidditch field, just him and the Snitch and whatever obstacles might be between him and it. This time, though, there wasn't a whole other team and a couple of Bludgers; this time, it was just Malfoy, by himself. 

Everything else Harry had to worry about had faded away, in the face of that; had narrowed down to the search for the Snitch. The trees still glowed in the autumn sunlight; the October winds were still wild, trying to whip him this way and that, bringing a chill Harry could feel all the way into his bones. These were things he knew distantly, that the rest of him adjusted to without conscious thought so that he could keep his eyes out for the prize.

Other people often thought being a Seeker was about looking as closely and carefully as you could, seeing everything in the smallest of detail. That was true to an extent sometimes, when there were Bludgers to dodge and an announcer to listen to, a score to keep track of lest the other team draw too far ahead to make catching the Snitch a worthwhile move. But the only other thing to see right now was Malfoy, who was floating some fifty feet to Harry's left, searching too. So Harry didn't have to pay close attention to any one thing, as such. All he had to do was unfocus his eyes, take in the entire field, letting himself wait for movement that wasn't the wind moving through the leaves, or shifting the grass to and fro.

Sudden motion from his left, which turned out to be not the Snitch but Malfoy, scratching at his nose. When he caught Harry glancing at him, he smirked and said, "Oh, yes. I'm sooooo terrified of your Snitch-catching skills, I swear." Then he yawned, big and loud and obnoxious.

"Shut it, Malfoy," said Harry, grinning and not at all willing to examine the reasons this seemed hilarious, instead of enraging him the way it always would have before.

"Why don't you catch the Snitch and make me, Potter?" Malfoy said sweetly. He started flying figure eights with an expression so obviously bored that he must have been putting at least half his energy into making his face look like that. A minute later, he must have got bored of that, or else just meant to show off, because then he started doing loop de loops. Apparently he wasn't as worried about falling off as he had been before.

Harry was about to point out that distractions like these were unlikely to work when they meant Malfoy himself wasn't paying attention, either--but then his eye was caught by a different motion, fluttering and bright by the south-end goalposts. He turned and found the Snitch was there, hovering ten feet or so above the ground. Before he could think about it, before he had to, he was rearing back, and then going into a dive, faster and then faster still, the October wind nothing to the wind blasting past him on his way to the Snitch...

Everything had fallen away. There was nothing else, there was only him, and his goal, everything narrowed down to this...

Closer, closer, the Snitch still there, waiting for him...

He reached out his hand...

"LET IT GOOOOOOOOOO!"

And from somewhere behind him came a most terrible wail, so that before Harry could make sense of just what he was hearing, he'd pulled his broom up and looked back.

He shouldn't have. There, bearing down on him, was Malfoy, swooping in on his broomstick at speed...

Diving past Harry, another rush of air...

Rising up again victorious, his arm held over his head, the wings of the Snitch peeking out from between his fingers. 

"What the fuck!" Harry shouted after him.

Malfoy didn't appear to be listening. He was still singing, a song Harry didn't recognize, as loudly and also apparently as nasally as he could. He kept at it for several more verses ("THE COLD NEVER BOTHERED ME ANYWAAAAAAY!"), circling around Harry in a widening arc. Finally, he looked back at him, pink in the face and grinning wildly.

"Don't you like my song?" he snickered. "To think you claimed you'd never fall for that one again."

"Malfoy, you fucking cheat!" Harry said.

But Malfoy didn't seem to be listening. Now he was chanting ("Malfoy one! Potter none! Malfoy one! Potter none!"), doing a victory lap and then another around their Quidditch field, his hands both up above his head, clasping the Snitch between them. It was the most obnoxious thing Harry had ever seen, and seemed to go on forever. 

Finally, roughly a thousand laps later, or maybe only four or so, Malfoy came to hover by Harry again.

"Potter none!" he finished.

"Can't you count, you wanker?" said Harry. "Or did you just, I dunno, forget the Snitch is worth a hundred and fifty points?"

"It isn't really Quidditch anyway, is it? Not without teams. I prefer to refer to this as 'keep Potter's head a normal size by not letting him have the Snitch.'"

"Pithy," said Harry. "Not sure it's going to catch on, though."

Malfoy continued: "Anyway, 'Malfoy one-hundred and fifty' doesn't go half so well with 'Potter none,' does it? Style over accuracy, Harry. As I keep telling you."

Harry did not recall ever having been told this, as he also didn't recall having ever lost the Snitch due to Malfoy's rendition of...whatever, before. He didn't care about that, though. There was only one thing he really wanted right now.

"Hey, Malfoy," he said.

"Yes?"

"How about two of three? And, no more singing at me."

Malfoy snickered at him some more. "Why would I want to do that? I already won."

"Malfoy. Come on."

Malfoy seemed to think about it, theatrically as he could.

"Alright," he said, extended his still-clasped hands out in front of him. "Since you asked."

His hands parted, releasing the Snitch, which immediately flashed away toward the eastern side of the field.

Harry dove after it, not really caring about anything so much as getting the better of Malfoy, the next two times.

*

It turned out that neither 'Potter two, Malfoy one' nor 'Potter three hundred, Malfoy one-hundred and fifty' really had much of a ring to them. Harry didn't care, though. What mattered was that he'd won, in the end.

"Three of five?" he suggested. The Snitch fluttered against his palm. He was flushed and triumphant and feeling he could keep this up forever. "Or we can even start over, do two of three again." Then, before he knew he meant to say it: "If I win, you can show me what's behind the third-floor doors. If you win, I'll stop trying to get through them. How about it?"

"...I don't know," said Malfoy. He sounded as if he really didn't, and possibly not just because Harry had trounced him twice in a row and was more than ready to do it for a third or even a fourth time. "It'll be dark out soon."

"So what?" Harry said, who thought it unlikely they didn't have lighting charms set up all around the field in case of just such eventualities.

"Um," said Malfoy, at the edge of the Quidditch field furthest from the cottage and rapidly sinking toward the ground. He dismounted his broomstick and stood there, looking up at Harry. "I would, otherwise, it's just--"

Despite himself, Harry had followed, and now dismounted his own broom. "It's just what?"

"It's Halloween, Harry," Malfoy said baldly. "And it's getting dark."

Harry's lifted spirits now plummeted, a sinking stone through his stomach as he realized what Malfoy was talking about, what he meant. Because of course it was. Four weeks from the third was the thirty-first, wasn't it? And there'd been that Muggle girl at the pub, hadn't there, all dressed up like a princess? And the reporters, wanting to say something to him about what day it was...

"Oh," he said.

"You usually," Malfoy said, and gestured behind himself at the darkening woods. "By yourself, or I'd..."

"Yeah," Harry said.

He headed that way. Past Malfoy, who took his broom from him and the Snitch as well, and let him go--though not without saying, in what Harry would later decide had been a determined sort of way again, "I'll show you what's up there tomorrow anyway. If you like." 

It was an offer Harry would have jumped at just a few minutes before, but that he now tucked away to deal with later. 

And so he walked again into the woods where he'd already spent so much of his time, these past few weeks. They felt different than they had before; and maybe that was because he didn't usually go out this late, but more likely it was just the knowing. That on this day, what must have been thirty-eight years ago now, his parents had died trying to save him.

Harry had known what Halloween was to him since he turned eleven, but it wasn't until the last couple years that the knowledge had seemed to touch him. It wasn't that it hadn't mattered before; it was just that it hadn't seemed to change anything about the day itself, in the years he'd spent it at Hogwarts at least. It hadn't been until the first Halloween after defeating Voldemort that he'd realized the ground had shifted underneath him. Maybe it was because by then he'd actually seen them die, not just that awful snapshot of memory of his own, but Voldemort's memory of murdering them, so clear and brightly cold. More likely it was because of what had happened with the Resurrection Stone the following May. They'd been there with him, at the end, and Remus and Sirius too. Walking with him, through a forest like and unlike this one. They'd felt so close to him then. He wasn't sure if they did now, or had since.

They'd walked with him, and told him he was brave, that they were proud of him. He'd been about to die, then. Then, somehow, he'd lived, after all; and on both Halloweens since he'd found a dark place to walk and think of them, wishing they could walk with him again...that he could tell them about his life, what he had done and what he was doing and what he wanted to do next...that he could know what they thought about him, when all he was was himself and all he was doing was living his life...

He found himself wondering what they would have thought of all this with Malfoy...and the worst part of wondering was that he didn't know, didn't have the first idea, really, how it would have seemed to them...it wasn't as if he'd ever had the chance to know them, or ever would...

He walked for a long time, thinking and remembering, wondering.

If his thoughts alone could have called them up, they'd have been there, near enough to reach out to, near enough to touch. 

But they couldn't, and they weren't.

*

It must have been gone very late by the time he got back to the cottage. It was very dark at least, the clouds from the pub seeming to have followed them home to cover up the stars. 

Inside, Malfoy was waiting for him in his Leaning Chair again. He'd fallen asleep in it, his head lolling against his shoulder at what looked an uncomfortable angle. He had reading glasses on, which were teetering haphazardly on the end of his nose. He was so deeply asleep that he didn't stir when Harry came in, or even when his glasses made a valiant effort to plunge toward the floor, Harry whispering a Wingardium Leviosa that had them floating over to come to rest on the nearest bookshelf instead.

Harry meant to go up to bed, leave Malfoy to it. Only, he looked different, somehow, now. Not at all like the wanker Harry remembered from school. Maybe it was just that Harry couldn't recall ever having seen him sleeping before. It changed his face, made him even less pointy than his green jumper had. More likely it was because, no matter what Harry's parents would have thought, what Harry thought was that Malfoy had gone out of his way to try to give Harry a good day, on what easily could have been a very awful one. And...and when they'd been in school, he'd taken every chance he could to be nasty about Harry's parents...yet here, now, today, he'd been something about them that Harry couldn't manage to interpret as anything but kind.

And if someone didn't nudge him awake, he was likely to be sore as hell in the morning, having slept in that position all night long.

"Draco," Harry said. "Wake up."

Draco didn't wake up, and so Harry was forced to reach out and shake him by the shoulder, a little. "Hey, Draco."

"Mmmm." Draco shifted a little, but didn't open his eyes. "Whassit?"

"You've fallen asleep in your chair."

"Have I?"

"Yeah. You've got to get up and go to bed now. Come on."

Draco's eyes cracked open, just the barest sliver. "Up I get?" he asked, yawning and low.

"Up you get," Harry agreed, and probably shouldn't have been too surprised when Draco reached out and grabbed him by the arm, and pulled himself up that way, so that Harry more or less had to help or end up falling into the Leaning Chair on top of him.

When Draco was all the way on his feet, he said, blearily, "Don't you stay up too late, yourself." 

Then, before Harry could see it coming, or try to dodge him, he leaned forward and pressed his lips to the corner of Harry's mouth. It was so brief a kiss that it was over and Draco was headed toward the stairs before Harry really realized it had happened. 

Face flaming, he watched Draco go. He was clutching the banister as he stumbled up the stairs, giving the impression of a person who was still most of the way asleep. Surely he was. Surely otherwise he'd have remembered that Harry didn't want to be kissed by him, and wouldn't have...

After a few minutes of discomfort, which he dealt with by pacing around the ground floor, Harry found himself yawning, too. The tiredness he'd come home with reared back up inside him, so that he couldn't think about the kiss anymore, or his parents, or whether Draco had really meant it when he'd said that tomorrow he'd show him what was hiding on the third floor. All he could think about was how badly he wanted to sleep. To not think about anything for a while. How badly he needed it, after today.

But when he got to his bedroom, he found Draco had got there first. He was curled up on the side of the bed Harry didn't sleep on, snoring slightly already with the covers tucked up under his chin.

Harry stared at him for a long minute. Then, rather than doing anything about it, he turned the light off, closed the door again, and went back down to the living room, where he set up camp on the couch.