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

Summary: After ten years of marriage, Harry forgets.

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

Chapter Seven

When Harry woke the next morning, he found a scrap of parchment pinned to him, or rather pinned to his blanket.

'Harry - I've gone out. I'll be home by this afternoon. - D'

Harry read this blearily, parchment held an inch away from his nose. For a moment, nothing made sense, starting with the note itself and ending with the way the lighting was different than it usually was in his room, and the bed considerably less comfy. Then he remembered everything that had happened yesterday, and that he'd gone to sleep on the sofa because Draco had fallen asleep in his bed...after kissing him on the...

But before all that, Draco had offered to show him what was on the third floor. And now he had run off to do Merlin knew what instead. Maybe, Harry thought, less gummily but easily more glumly than he'd been at bedtime the night before, he was taking the chance to move anything really incriminating out of the house beforehand. Not that he couldn't have done that at basically any time since Harry had left St Mungo's. Probably he had in the very first week, which was a thought that had occurred to Harry at various moments, but that he'd always shoved away before; it was easier to keep his eye on the prize when he wasn't letting himself dwell on the fact that there might not actually be one anymore by the time he got there.

Reaching around, Harry eventually found his wand, which had rolled beneath the sofa half an inch or so. He Accio 'd his glasses, and the living room came into sharp relief. A low hoot came from Herbert, who was standing on his perch by the window, and who now seemed to be regarding Harry as blearily as Harry had regarded Draco's note.

"Er, morning," Harry said. He still braced himself before going into the living room, usually so automatically he didn't even have to think about it. He hadn't had the chance, this time, and so was startled to discover it didn't actually seem to matter, anymore. Maybe it really hadn't for a few days, or even a week. It wasn't so much that he'd stopped noticing Herbert favored Hedwig as that part of him seemed to have gotten used to the idea while he was busy being focused on other stuff. "Did you want an Owl Treat?" he asked.

It seemed Herbert did, the bleary look turning to more of an owlish one as he hooted again.

Breakfast was on the kitchen table when he made it that far, the usual Warming Charms set on his plate. Harry was halfway through his eggs--no ham or kippers in sight, but plenty of flapjacks and sausages to make up for it--when he determined there was a sort of singed smell in the room, and it wasn't coming from his toast. A brief search turned up a pile of ash in the rubbish bin, along with a few scraps of burnt paper, none large enough to really make out what they had been from.

Still, though: paper, not parchment.

Harry went back up to his room, came back down with three Sickles (it had nearly been two, but then he wondered if there might have been a price jump sometime in the last nineteen years, and hedged against the possibility).

"Can you get me a copy of the Prophet, please," he said as he handed the Sickles over to Herbert, who looked at him judgily enough for Harry to add, "Er, it looks like the one we had might've gotten Incendio 'd."

It seemed obvious that if Draco had burnt it up, it had been to keep Harry from finding out what was in it. Only, when Herbert arrived back with a new copy of the paper several hours later, Harry took one look at the headline and decided that Draco'd might've just been fucked off about it. For on the front page was a photo of the two of them from St Mungo's the day before: Draco advancing on a reporter, wand out and sparks flying out of it. Behind him was Harry, who, far from looking stunned, which was the way he remembered feeling at the time, made a very rude gesture.

The enormous bolded type above the photograph read, TROUBLE IN PARADISE? It was followed by an article which began, "On the thirty-eighth anniversary of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's first defeat, Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, and husband, former Death Eater Draco Malfoy, were spotted..."

Feeling this was a rude beginning--he hated being called the Boy Who Lived, even moreso since he'd discovered it was more accurately the Boy Who Had Part Of Voldemort's Soul Squatting In His Head Up Until Recently--and possibly it was even ruder for them to have gone out of the way to point out the former Death Eater bit, just because Draco looked a bit nasty when he was threatening to hex people who'd damned well deserved it--and couldn't anyone say the fucking name when Voldemort was more than twenty years dead by this point--Harry nonetheless read on.

The rest of the article was, if anything, even ruder. Over three pages, Harry learned that their marriage was falling apart; that he'd grown tired of Draco, possibly because he was having an affair with the new Charms professor at Hogwarts, a pretty young witch who, according to the article, had only just sat her NEWTs three years ago. Meanwhile, Draco was growing ever more bitter, probably drinking too much and/or experimenting with recreational potions, judging by how he'd been spotted at St Mungo's on several occasions in the last month. He'd never not been dangerous, due to the former Death Eater bit, but was most likely returning to his former ways and/or likely to end up being admitted to St Mungo's for treatment soon.

Draco himself appeared out of the fireplace not long after Harry had finished reading the article, but before he'd finished reading it a second time, just to be sure he hadn't missed any of the sneakier implications.

"Er," Harry said, and then, without being quite sure why, "I'm not shagging the Charms professor."

"...Yes, because I was so concerned about it," Draco said, after an awkward moment during which he seemed to be taking this in. "Though, she did flirt with you a bit at the faculty party last Christmas. You got very uncomfortable. You always are whenever anyone other than me tries flirting with you."

He felt certain he'd go up in flames if Draco were to try flirting with him now, as an example or whatever. Hoping desperately for a subject change, he said, "Where were you?"

"You couldn't do anything without my knowing about it, anyway," Draco continued, as if he hadn't heard this, or cared. "You're not exactly subtle, you know. About anything. It'd be all over your face from the moment it happened." He stepped out of the fireplace, and continued, more awkwardly, "Anyway. I went to see my mother. It's been a while since I've been, and I needed--I had to tell her about some things. So."

"What things?" asked Harry, with the new, horrible suspicion of what Draco might mean.

"What do you think?"

"You didn't tell her about me, and, Teddy--" Harry began.

Draco didn't let him finish. "That was one of the things, yes." He scowled, and added, "Of course I told her! She's my mother!"

"Yeah, but--"

"Listen," Draco said, steamrolling over him. "She didn't give a fig about you back when she saved your life. She'd have gone the other way without blinking, if it'd been more likely to--but you're family now. Things are different. And Teddy, he's family, too. I mean, things with Aunt Andromeda, they're--she'd never risk it, alright? Not for anything. Definitely not for whatever idiotic rationale you've come up with inside your stupid head."

"I'm not stupid," said Harry, though it was sort of by rote rather than coming out as hotly as it could have. Mostly, he couldn't help remembering the way the Malfoys had huddled together after the end of the battle; the way, long before it had ended, all Draco's parents had really wanted was to find him, make sure he was safe.

"I know," said Draco. "It's what's making things so--it would be easier if you were, honestly."

What this was supposed to mean, there was no telling. But Harry was still thinking about the clannishness of Malfoys. Draco's mum, and... "You, er--you didn't mention anything to your dad, though, right?"

Draco stared at him long enough for Harry to feel as if he must have somehow put his foot all the way into his mouth and down his throat, despite the fact that it seemed like a reasonable enough question. Narcissa Malfoy might be trustworthy these days, but Lucius Malfoy would surely never be.

"No," Draco said finally. "I didn't give my dead father any ammunition about you."

"Oh," said Harry.

"And wouldn't have, either way, since I'm not a fool. Regardless of what you evidently think of me."

Part of Harry wanted to point out that it wasn't as if Draco could have had any better an impression of him, like, a month ago--from his point of view, at least. He definitely seemed to think Harry was a fool in the present. But the rest of him was the part that couldn't not get that, no matter what Harry himself had thought of him, Lucius Malfoy had been something very different to Draco.

"Sorry," he said. "About your dad. I didn't know."

"I'm aware," said Draco, a little stiffly. Then, out of nowhere: "Mother thinks I ought to stay with her until--um, for a while."

"Okay..." Harry said slowly.

"I'm not going to, obviously. I couldn't, just--you need me here, of course. Anyway. I'd have been back an hour ago, only I had to talk her down a bit..."

"Alright."

"I don't think she's likely to send you any Howlers about it, or anything. But if she does--I thought you should have, you know, a heads up. In case you get any weird letters, or anything."

"Alright," Harry said again. "Er, thanks, I guess."

"You're welcome." Draco glanced at the Prophet, which Harry was still holding, Draco's photographic wand still sending out sparks in all directions. His lip curled, which was an expression very much in the same family as photographic Draco's face. "If there was anything in that rag you'd wanted to know about, I'd have told you."

"Could have done without reading about your incoming mental breakdown," Harry said. Commiserating about the papers suddenly seemed a thousand times better than discussing how he got on with Narcissa Malfoy, who it was just occurring to him must be his mother in law. Merlin, that was a thought.

"That's how I feel about your affairs," said Draco, looking relieved; maybe he hadn't really wanted to keep talking about his mum, either. "You've had about a hundred since we--every time you so much as smile at a witch or a particularly fit wizard, the papers are at you again. They never went this hard after your other relationships, you know. It's just that they hate me so much, it ends up getting smeared all over you..."

Dryly, Harry said, "Hadn't noticed." He looked down at the paper again, those opening rude lines, which didn't get any better by page two or three. "Do they always, you know, call you an ex-Death Eater and stuff?"

Draco shrugged. "Depends how peeved off they are, really. They're never very pleased when I cost them an interview."

Harry couldn't imagine he did a lot of interviews, with or without Draco's interference. He couldn't recall ever having done one--not of his own free will, anyway. He couldn't help it if sometimes things he said by accident ended up on the record. "That's not on," he said, dredging up his indignation from before, finding that it wasn't really any less for having an awkward conversation between then and now. "Do you want me to, I dunno, say something to them?"

He'd done it before. Not when the Prophet had printed some rot about him, he didn't care about that other than the hassle of it when they wouldn't leave him alone when he was trying to live his life--but he had when they'd started in on people he cared about. And if Draco didn't exactly quite count as one of those people, he'd been alright yesterday, hadn't he? If Draco had defended Harry from reporters, then that more or less meant the only right thing to do was for Harry to defend him from reporters back.

And, Draco was staring at him again. "Do I want you to go down to the Prophet and start shouting at people, you mean?"

"Yeah," said Harry firmly, having decided that he would damned well do it, even if it meant they printed something tomorrow about him still being madly in love with Draco, after all. "There's no call for all that. There wouldn't have been before, either. Back then, I mean. But it's been twenty years since the war, and they're still on about it. It's not right."

"Twenty-one years. And no, thank you."

"No, what?"

"I mean, usually yes? But this time no. I don't need you to march down there and say nice things about me you don't mean."

"Right," Harry said, oddly stung. "So I won't tell anyone you're not a complete wanker every moment of every day, then."

"Appreciate it," Draco said, with the flash of something that might once have been a smile, if it hadn't been a little too weird in the room for all that. "Have you finished with that?"

He seemed to be gesturing at the paper. Harry was far past the point of never wanting to see it again, and gave it over without complaint. Draco Incendio 'd it with a flourish, then levitated the ashes out of the room, presumably over to the rubbish bin in the kitchen again. Then they looked at each other for a long moment.

"You're still going to show me--" Harry said, in the same moment Draco said, "Did you still want to see--"

They trailed off together.

"Right," Draco said. "Yeah. We're doing this, I guess. Come on."

He headed out of the drawing room, toward the stairs. Harry followed him up.

*

"Licking door first," said Harry, when they were back to the third-floor hallway. He'd spent a lot of time up here in recent weeks. Somehow, it didn't look the same as it had then. It was as if something had shifted, somewhere. Or maybe it was just that Draco was with him, this time.

"Um," said Draco, balking even though he was the one who'd offered in the first place. "That one's actually not--there's nothing really worth seeing in there."

"If there's nothing important in there, you won't mind opening it up," said Harry, feeling abruptly more cheerful about the whole thing. If Draco didn't want him to see what was in one of the rooms, then surely that meant he hadn't managed as much of a removal operation as he might have done. It meant there was a possibility Harry actually would find out something Draco didn't want him to know.

"...Alright," Draco said, looking not very happy at all about it. "I'll just--I suppose--"

Harry watched carefully as Draco slid between Harry and the door, the doorknob licking and snapping at him. He was listening carefully, too, interested in knowing just what the incantation was. The conclusion he'd come to last night, tossing and turning on the sofa, was that Draco had probably been telling the truth about it being a custom one...it would, he knew from his reading, have been the easiest thing, especially the easiest that he could do in the hurry he must surely have been in at the time.

Draco cleared his throat, pointed the tip of his wand at the doorknob. "Openo," he said.

"Openo?" Harry repeated, barely noting that the licking door's tongue had frozen mid-lick. "Your super-secret custom incantation is Openo?"

Draco didn't look at him. The back of his neck had gone brightly pink. "Shut up," he said. "You'd never have guessed it, would you? Not even if you told it to open in every language."

Harry had done, in fact. Mostly because Introduction to Locking Charms had claimed seventy-five to ninety percent of locks that wouldn't open for Alohomora would open for some variation on Open. There'd even been a handy list at the back of the book.

The door swung open. At first, there was nothing to see other than indistinct shapes in the shadows. Then the overhead light came on, and the blinds in front of the windows rolled up, and it took Harry a few seconds to be clear on what he was seeing.

This room was filled with stacks of books. Not Dark books over-brimming with nasty spells. Not scholarly books on any of a myriad of subjects, or even the same subject. These were paperbacks. They were, Harry determined as he approached the first stack, more romance novels like Draco had on the shelf by his Leaning Chair downstairs. This first stack seemed to consist of roughly thirty more copies of Loved by the Hippogriff.  

"Er," Harry said, after casting a Revealing Charm that revealed nothing except the cover model's hips doing more of that gyrating thing at him, so that his face seemed to have burst into flames. "What's the point of all this, then?"

"Don't you like your collection?" Draco asked sweetly.

"It's not mine!" Harry said, because he couldn't have changed that much, not even if he'd become the sort of person who would marry Draco Malfoy (even a not completely a wanker at every moment version of Draco Malfoy). He picked up the topmost book. The cover model, who seemed to have on, basically, a loincloth and not much else, kept gyrating. He was also leering at Harry, now. Beyond his shoulder, in the distance, a shadow could be seen, flying toward them in a star-lit sky. A Hippogriff, Harry figured. That much at least seemed obvious. "I don't read romance books. Or ones with, um. Wizard-Hippogriff relations."

Saying this last bit had his face not so much bursting into flames as erupting into them volcanically. 

"Oh, for fuck's sake," muttered Draco. "It's not bestiality, you berk. The Hippogriff is really an Animagus."

"Animagi can't be Hippogriffs, though," Harry pointed out.

"How do you know, are you one?"

"Er, no? But your Animagus form has to be, you know, a normal animal. Not a magic one." Harry made to put the book back down, but noticed something else that he hadn't when he'd been poking around in the living room, which was that the book's author was someone called... "What kind of name is Perry Broomwandstick?"

"It's a pen name, obviously," said Draco. "A phallic one. Which is useful in selling this kind of book. I mean, I assume."

In any other circumstance, Harry would have snickered. If he'd been with Ron, they could have had a good half hour of fun over this. Assuming Ron still knew how to have fun, anyway. Harry hoped he'd have the chance to find out in the relatively near future. With Draco, though, 'phallic' seemed to be a good cue to move on, before the discussion could turn to anything more...weird and sexual than holding a weird romance novel with a horrifically sexual cover already was. He put Loved by the Hippogriff back atop its stack, and backed hastily out of the room. Draco all but ushered him out, too, his hand not leaving Harry's elbow until they were back out in the hallway with the door closed and prone to licking again.

"That was weird," Harry said, and hoped the other room would be both less so, and also more relevant to anything he cared about.

"It's hardly my fault you think you're twenty and can't appreciate your current-day hobbies," Draco replied, snottily.

Harry could have pointed out that it was very obviously Draco's weird hobby--though actually a surprisingly harmless one, considering the kinds of things he'd used to get up to--except that he very much wanted to see the other room, and didn't want to delay anymore. If what was in there was something else even more weird and random, then fine. But he wasn't going to get into it with Draco over something he didn't even care about, and maybe end up not getting to find out about the other room after all.

"Right," he said. "Next door, then."

"Alright."

*

They went over to the other door. Somehow, even though he didn't say anything against it, Draco looked even more reluctant than he had for the locking door. At least, he seemed to be going more slowly, as if he were swimming in slow-motion, or through molasses. He raised his wand and aimed it at the doorknob, which didn't lick or snap at you or, really, do anything except sit there being unopenable. "I'm not actually certain this is a good idea," he said. Then, before Harry could say anything, even try to object to the implications of this, he added, "No, I'm not--it's a little late to change my mind, isn't it? But I want it on record. That's all. Openo."

The door creaked open, really more of an impression than a sound. Draco went in. Harry followed.

In this room were maybe a dozen shapes of various heights and widths. Impossible to say what any of them were, as they were, to a one, covered in white sheets. Furniture, Harry might have thought, from the size and shape of most of them; only there was something else in that room, and it made wondering about whatever cast-off armchairs and chests and so on they might have packed in here seem foolish at best. 

"What is this doing in our house?" Harry asked.

For there, in the center of the room, there was a mirror. It was not the sort of mirror to set above your dresser, or to hang in the bathroom so you could check on your hair after using the toilet. This mirror was framed in gold, the sort that looked as if it should have been displayed in a museum alongside thrones and crowns and other old, expensive stuff. It stood on two clawed feet, and reached nearly to the ceiling, which itself must have been a few feet higher than any other in the house. 

And, Harry knew he ought to leave now. That what he should do was turn around and walk away. There was no good reason for the mirror to be here; no reason that didn't feel like something not so much Dark as...gray, and, slimy. Sleazy.

Instead of turning around, he moved past Draco, toward the mirror. When he was close enough, the inscription was there, just as he'd known it would be: Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi.

"I show not your face but your heart's desire," Harry muttered. Then, more loudly: "What the fuck is the Mirror of Erised doing in our house?"

He didn't intend to look, yet found he could not turn away. Maybe you couldn't stand in front of that mirror, knowing what it was, and refuse. Or maybe it was just that he couldn't. Harry, personally. He stepped closer again, this time to bring himself to where he could simply look forward, and see what the mirror's reflection had to show him.

It wasn't like being eleven, when you could be flattened by a desire that had been with you for all your life, but rarely spoken of because what was the point when it would only have you sent to your cupboard without supper for certain instead of only maybe? A desire you'd barely even acknowledged, because it wasn't like you remembered your parents, anything about them, wasn't as if you would even have known they'd existed if they hadn't had to in order for you to exist in your turn, for your aunt and uncle to resent you for the fact of it. This wasn't like that, because now Harry was twenty, or thirty-nine, whichever it was, and he knew exactly what he was going to see. It was with him daily, when he woke up in the mornings and when he went to bed at nights; in the urgent and the boring moments of the days, and in the dark of the night when nightmares or that other disquiet had roused him. There was where he was, and there was where he would have given anything at all to be again.

There he was, in the mirror, gray hairs gone, extra pounds vanished with them, sitting on the sofa in his old apartment. He had on his red robes with the brown trim. They were patched in places, outright tattered around the wrists. There was a scorch mark up by one of the shoulders, not one Harry had put there; for these were trainee robes, which had been handed down from Auror to Auror. Next to him sat Ron, wearing similarly-patched robes much more lightheartedly than he ever would had they been secondhand for any other reason. He was young again too, and so was Hermione, sitting on his other side...they were in the middle of a serious conversation, twenty-year-old Harry and his best friends, huddled with their heads together. For a moment Harry could even almost hear the sort of conversation they could, should be having...

"Harry, that's just...that's just mental!"

"Yeah, I know, I kept trying to tell you--"

"Mate, you know I'm fine with you shagging blokes, but I draw the line at you shagging Malfoy. Ugh."

"Harry can't help his dreams, Ron."

"Nightmares, more like." There might have been gagging sounds then, to go with the face mirror-Ron was pulling. "Why don't you look more upset, anyway? Hey, you didn't get a happy ending or anything in your Malfoy dream, did you?"

"Ron!"

"My mistake, you'd have just offed yourself if you had..."

"Yeah, probably," mirror-Harry might have said, without even the slightest sense of unease about it; because there would have been, after all, no actual Draco of yesterday to feel even slightly defensive of. "No, it's just that I'm so glad to be back. Or, not to have been there at all."

"Oh, come on, Hermione, even you have to admit it's mental, Harry having a dream like that."

A few drinks and a lot of badgering later, mirror-Hermione might even have admitted it. "Well...it's not exactly ideal, is it?"

"You can say that again," mirror-Harry might have said, before putting it all out of his mind and going on with his life...

But Harry wasn't on that side of the mirror. He was on this one, and the longer he looked, the more something seemed to be building inside his chest. There was the ache, the one that had been with him since he'd first begun to understand just how much he'd lost, waking up here; but there was also something hotter and louder there, too. It was a feeling that coiled and twisted, not so unlike a snake, ready to strike out at the first movement from someone else.

Someone, somewhere, was saying something to him. Not imagined words from the mirror, but real ones from behind him.

"What was that?" Harry asked, still gazing into the mirror, at what could have, what should have been. What he'd wished for every moment since he'd woken up here, in a future nothing at all like the one he'd always wanted.

"I said, McGonagall let me borrow it," said Draco. "For your, um--for your therapy."

"My therapy," Harry repeated, and still he did not look away. By now, he had drawn his wand. He thought distantly that if he turned around, one or the other of them was liable to explode. If he didn't turn, then surely that was better. It meant he could keep seeing what he wanted to, instead of anything else. There it was in the mirror, the life he'd worked for; the life he'd wanted and never really thought he'd get to have until Voldemort had lain dead on the ground. It was all there, distilled into a single beautiful, imperfect image...

And when he turned away, it would be gone again, and all it would leave behind was an ache at least twice what it had been before.

"What do you see?" asked Draco, and the thing that had been building inside Harry became an understanding.

"Not you," Harry said coolly. "That's what I was meant to see, right, Malfoy? Your pointy face?"

"Why not? I see yours," said Malfoy. Then, more falteringly, "I mean, I thought, maybe--I thought it was possible? Honestly. If you were close to breaking through anyway. Or--or even if you weren't. I thought it could be, I don't know, a catalyst? I mean I hoped it could. Especially after--after what the Healer said yesterday, I had to do something."

"You thought wrong." Now Harry did turn, leaving behind the Ron and Hermione who weren't and who would never be again, and meeting Malfoy's eyes, instead. "You did this," he said. "You set me up."

"Harry--"

"And, you didn't set me up yesterday," Harry said. "We were together all day, you didn't have the time. You could have done it this morning, but I don't think so. You started this way back in the beginning. Before I was even discharged from Mungo's, probably."

"Not quite that early," said Malfoy, swallowing hard. "I was still--I don't know, thinking it through then. Hoping I wouldn't have to use anything I was thinking."

"You should have thought it through a little more!" Harry said, aware now that he was all but shouting, and about a flick of his wand away from actually hexing Malfoy, and not really caring if he did do either thing. "What did you think was going to happen? I'd spend a month trying to get in here, and then when I did--what? I'd see what you wanted me to see, and, what? Fall into your arms?"

"That part's not required, actually," Malfoy said, and he'd dredged up that cold drawl from somewhere, and raised his chin up too. "I mean, would it have been nice for you to see me, and--yes, alright, that was my best case scenario. I knew it wasn't necessarily going to happen! But that's not the only--I wouldn't have brought you here just for the chance. I'm trying to make a point too!"

"I don't care about your point!" Harry said, betrayal still running shockwaves through him, maybe all the worse for having started to warm up to Malfoy, even just little. All the time, Malfoy had been manipulating him, not by locking things away the things he didn't want Harry to see, but by staging the ones he did want Harry to see. That he'd wanted to soften him up about, first.

"Well, you'd better start caring," said Malfoy. "I need you here. Not in the past, or--anywhere else. That's my point. If things were different, maybe I could--I could be more patient, then. But they're not, and I--I really need you to be present, right now. Alright?"

Harry got it. Couldn't help but get it, given the way it was trying to beat him over the head, an echo of the past that couldn't have been anything but deliberate. It does not do to dwell on dreams... "I don't want to be present!" he said. 

"Yes, I'd gathered," said Malfoy, a little wobbly, now. "But you--Harry, you don't understand."

Harry understood perfectly well. "We're married. You're not happy that I don't want to be, anymore. And now you're trying to, manipulate me into it, or whatever--"

"Yes, how dare I encourage you to remember our life together. That's so much worse than, I don't know, setting you up to be killed by Voldemort," said Malfoy, a flash of anger overcoming the wobble. "My mistake, I forgot only one person was ever allowed to lead you around by the--"

"You don't get to talk about him--"

"Shut up! It's been over twenty years, I'll talk about whomever and whatever I want," Malfoy said, raising his voice. "If I want to call Dumbledore a bastard, I will. If I want to tell you you're being an arsehole, I'll do that too. I'll say whatever the hell I want! And I don't care what you think about it, I'll do whatever I have to in order to--"

"I'd really suggest you don't say anything else," said Harry, more aware than ever of the wand in his hand, and how much he wanted to raise it. The only reason he hadn't yet was that he wasn't at all sure what he was going to cast if he did. There was something niggling at him, a reason he shouldn't, when it was Malfoy specifically, and through the reddening haze of anger he couldn't remember exactly what that reason was, only that it was important... "What was all that yesterday, then?" he asked, because he couldn't help but think of it, about how for just a few hours, Malfoy had seemed so much less Malfoy-ish, and how it was all that that made all this seem so much worse than it ought to have been. "You were trying to soften me up for this, right?"

"Ohhh, am I allowed to talk now?" Malfoy asked, as if he hadn't also told Harry to shut up, like, ten seconds ago. "In any case, no, I just thought you'd like to have a nice day. I thought I deserved one too, all things considered! I wasn't even going to--it was you who pushed me about the third floor again. And I just, I'd kept putting it off, it never seemed like the--but maybe there was never going to be a right time to try it? So it was either that, or take it back to McGonagall, and decide on something different. But I couldn't think of anything else, and you--God, Harry, you're getting further from me every day, and I--I hate it. You aren't even--you won't even try, and I hate it."

"So you thought you'd try for both of us, is that it? Since you don't actually care what I think about it."

"For us, and...someone has to! One of us needs to give a fuck! I wasn't trying to, you know, hurt you--"

"You couldn't," Harry assured him tightly, aware even as he said it that it wasn't quite true, anymore, that simply seeing his heart's greatest desire of the past few weeks wouldn't have been enough to make betrayal roar through him like this if it hadn't even briefly stopped being the sort of thing he'd have expected from Malfoy.

"Well, I wasn't trying to, I just..." Draco took a deep, shuddering breath, his already-reddening face seeming to crumple. "Harry, I love you more than I've ever loved another person," he said, so that whatever heat Harry had felt inside turned instantly to a cold sort of horror. "I know you probably don't think that means anything, but it does. And I do. And I'm not going to, just--" He took another of the shuddering breaths. "I have to tell you something now."

"No, you don't," said Harry, because whatever it was, if it was going to be the kind of thing that started with a love declaration, it couldn't possibly be anything he'd want to hear. Especially not right now, in the middle of--whatever this was, whatever was happening here, Malfoy falling to pieces right in front of him, looking like he was about to cry--or was, possibly, already starting to...

"I actually do. Not that it won't be obvious in another few weeks, but," Malfoy said, bafflingly and--horrifyingly, again, though less because of what he said and more because of how he said it, really actually crying now, voice thick and eyes squinted together and face growing wet and shiny. "Harry, you have to--"

"Stop it," said Harry, because what was going on here was that Draco had wronged him--Malfoy had--regardless of the reasons he'd done it, and now he was trying to make like it was out of love, when in fact it had to have been out of self-interest or... or even ambition. Slytherins were all about that, and so that's what this had to be, whatever it was that Harry didn't, actually, want to know about, now that he was here and Malfoy was...crying at him, still... "I don't want to hear about it."

"You have to," Draco said again. "You, just--I'm sorry it has to be like this, it wasn't supposed to be--it was supposed to be a good thing--"

"Stop it," Harry said, as the red-hot rage came rushing back into him, this time tinged with something else, that might have been offense, at the way Malfoy was still trying to turn this situation around into something else, or might even have just been fear. "I don't care!"

"...You don't care," Malfoy repeated, voice flat now, like it was trying for that same cold drawl, but not coming anywhere near reaching it. "You don't even know what I'm talking about, and already you don't care."

"That's right," said Harry.

"Well, fine," Malfoy said. "If you don't care so much, you can just get the fuck out, then!"

Harry looked at him. Saw, pretty clearly, the moment when Malfoy knew he actually would; the horror that flashed into his face, like he'd have given anything to take back what he'd said.

He saw it. He still didn't care. He couldn't, whatever it was. Whatever it was, it wasn't his to care about. Like everything else here, it belonged to that other Harry, the Harry he wasn't.

"Oh, fuck," said Draco, stepping toward him, reaching out his hands... "Harry, wait--please--"

Harry Apparated.

*

The squeezing dark receded, leaving only the woods around him. 

Of course it had to be the fucking woods, again, Harry thought darkly. There wasn't anywhere else he could go, even after a scene like...whatever that had been. There was nowhere in the wizarding world he could go and be sure no one would notice he was in two places at the same time. There was nowhere in the Muggle world he could go and be sure not to be seen by someone who shouldn't have seen him appearing from out of nowhere.

And there was nothing else to do, now that he was in the woods, but to go stomping around in them. So Harry chose a direction and stomped in it, railing at Malfoy inside his head all the while. 

He never had done before, really. When they were at school, nothing Malfoy'd ever said had stayed with him longer than a few minutes. Not unless it was things like cheating and making him lose Quidditch games or--or skulking about in the Room of Requirement all through sixth year, working on letting Death Eaters into Hogwarts. Only then, Harry hadn't been incensed about it. He'd just wanted to know what Malfoy was up to, that was all. So he could put a stop to it. Even then he hadn't replayed their conversations over and over again in his mind the way he was this one.

What right did Draco have, saying he loved him? And, and tricking him like that in the first place! It meant everything he'd been working on the last three weeks had been for nothing. Malfoy had always been going to make sure Harry saw that mirror. When he thought the timing was right. When he thought it would benefit him. This whole thing was nothing more or less than that, Malfoy manipulating him for his own ends, no matter what he claimed to feel about Harry. And bringing Dumbledore into it too! At least when Dumbledore had done what he'd done, it had been for selfless reasons. He'd set Harry up to die to save the whole wizarding world. And if Harry sometimes felt weird about that, if he wavered a little more now that things had wound down than he'd ever have admitted to another person--well, that was his business, and none of Malfoy's. Who, by the way, had manipulated Harry because he wanted him for himself. It was different! Obviously it was different. And so there came to Harry a thousand ways he could have pointed this out, some cleverer than others and others a good deal nastier, and none of them any use in having been come up with now that he wasn't in a room with Malfoy anymore.

It was colder there in the woods than it had been flying the day before; clouds had moved in, blocking the sun, and the temperature must have dropped a few degrees. So it wasn't long before Harry's arms were radiating cold. It took much longer for him to remember to cast a Warming Charm, but not very long at all after remembering to decide he didn't want to. He wanted to feel the cold. It was, maybe, the only way he could survive the inferno inside. It was very probably the only thing bracing enough to keep him from going back and hexing Malfoy's face actually off.

He stomped along, and didn't know how long he'd been stomping along for when something went

CRACK!

Harry looked down to find his foot had gone through a rotted old tree stump, one so close to the ground and so well-hidden in the underbrush that he'd never have noticed it otherwise. He yanked his foot out again, prepared to go right on stomping and ranting inside his head...

Until someone said, "You dare?"

Harry peered into the hole his foot had left, and found a pair of eyes looking back at him. After a moment, shapes became visible, there in what must have been a cocooning darkness before he'd tripped into it: coiled bodies, curled up next to and around each other, what must have been seven or eight adders, all told.

"Sorry," he said, in the sort of surprise that left no room for thinking about whatever had been going on before. "I didn't see you there."

"Oh, it's you," said the adder who'd awoken; all the others, smaller than she, seemed to still be asleep, or--no, Harry was certain, he'd have noticed if anything had been soft and giving underneath his foot. "Look what you've done! This is all your fault!"

"Yeah, sorry," Harry said. "I'll fix it, promise."

"You had better," sniffed the adder, just as irritable as most adders were most of the time, which was a fact known to Harry but not really to other people, who usually just thought they were shy instead of being grumpy little complainers. It was why he liked adders more than most snakes, and he already liked most snakes quite a lot. "My young are all here with me. It's been hard enough keeping them from the hawk and the fox, nevermind idiot wizards who don't watch where they're going."

"Really? They're all yours?" He'd noticed the others seemed smaller than the female who was talking to him, but hadn't thought anything of it. Lots of snakes holed up together in the winter, so their dens would stay a bit warmer to get them through it. But it was a weird thought, an adder or any other snake keeping company with her own babies specifically after they were born. Sometimes baby snakes would stick around their mum for the first few days, but after that... "How'd that happen?"

"I've barely slept since the summer, watching after these little fools like you said. But I've kept them all safe! I haven't lost one!"

"Dunno what you're on about, sorry," said Harry. In his head he was already thinking through an assortment of repairing spells, trying to figure out one that would both fix rotting wood, and perhaps make it rotting a little less. He even considered making the stump's inside a little warmer--only then maybe the adder and her babies wouldn't be able to sleep at all. They'd wake up like it was an unusually warm winter's day, only maybe it wouldn't be, and then they'd have to venture out into the cold and find someplace else to hibernate. Harry didn't like their chances, in that sort of case. "I don't remember meeting you before. I had an accident, a while back. A magic sort of one. So I don't remember anything recent."

"Wizards!" sniffed the adder again, with an extra-long flick of her tongue at him about it.

"What did I say, anyway, to make you, er, want to look after your babies?" Harry asked as he cast the first spell, the one that would make the rotted wood of the den a little bit stronger, so that no matter what stomped on it, no one would get hurt except possibly the stomper.

"Well," said the adder in a more conversational sort of a tone, slithering out of the hole and up Harry's calf, "first you nearly killed me, tripping over me with your feet." She said 'feet' even more hissily than most snakes said most things, which had much the same effect of a human-shaped person distastefully repeating the worst word they know of. "Then you asked me when I was due. I said due for what!"

Harry was grinning now, couldn't help it; he could just picture trying to have that conversation with a fat little adder, being probably hissier and even more wound-up than she was right now. "Ha! What'd I say back?"

"You said I was going to have some young. I said I couldn't! You asked me why not. I said my mother had had young when she had me, and the hawk got them all and the fox got the rest!"

"That's awful," Harry said, because it really was, when you thought about it. "So I told you, what? That you should keep an eye on them for yourself if you wanted them to keep safe?"

He began to knit the splintered wood back together as the adder said, "You said that was how you do it with your young. You stay with them when they're small and stupid. You teach them about the hawk and the fox. Then even when they're big and strong enough to go away, they come back sometimes. You get to know what happens to them! But you didn't tell me it would be hard!"

"Oh, yeah?"

"They always want to wander off. I have to be--little fools! GET BACK INSIDE!"

Several of the baby adders had peeked their heads out. Now, with their mum advancing on them with furious hisses that were for the most part not meant to be words, they retreated their heads back in. As Harry watched and listened, the hissing continued, a scolding that was joined by the hissing of other voices, which seemed to be largely made up of whiny complaining. As this didn't seem likely to come to an end anytime soon, he finished the repair work, knitting wood back together until he could no longer see any of the adders, long bodies wiggling inside their dark shelter.

"Well, 'bye then," he said, but wasn't sure the adder heard him, or had anything to spare for him if she did; the hissing still seemed to be ongoing, though more muffled than it had been before. "Good luck with your babies."

He stood back up and brushed himself off. There came no answer from inside the stump, though the hissing eventually subsided a bit. 

He started walking again, not really thinking about the direction he was headed in. Mostly what he was thinking about was that he had to tell Hermione about this. It couldn't have been weirder, a snake wanting to look after her own babies. Hadn't she said something at least once about the way being around magic in the long-term tended to change even non-magical animals? And if it was happening to snakes around Harry's house, and he was talking to them about it, that probably counted as a primary source, didn't it? She'd flip, and Harry would be alright with going along with any research she wanted to do, since snakes were actually really interesting. Ron might be interested to come along, too, especially since there were no giant spiders in these woods. He didn't have to only see his friends in a mirror, did he? Not even if they'd changed in the meantime.

He was so focused on thinking about this that he didn't notice the uneasiness that came with it until it had grown fairly intense. He didn't know, at first, where it had come from; even wondered, for the barest moment, if there might be a Dementor here, in the woods around his house. Except when he looked closer at what he was feeling, it really was uneasiness, instead of despair. But still he couldn't think where it had come from.

He wasn't uneasy about the argument he'd had with Malfoy; he'd been pissed about that, and hurt about the trick he'd pulled, and feeling really rather stupid for having been hurt by Draco Malfoy of all people. He definitely still would be all those things when he let himself think about it again. But, nothing had happened since except the adder. So--something with her, maybe. Something she'd said? Something he had? Harry turned back as he thought back over their conversation, just in case he'd, he didn't know, missed something when he was fixing the stump...he wouldn't be able to forgive himself, if something happened...

But it wasn't that. He'd done good work fixing the stump. He'd known it as he was doing it, and he knew it again now.

As he turned it over and over again, what she'd said, what he had, there was one thing she'd said that kept jumping out at him, every time he got to that part of their talk.

Your young, she'd said. And, obviously she'd meant it as a general thing. He'd told her about the way wizards raised their kids, that was all, which was also the way human beings raised them in general when they weren't his aunt and uncle. There was no reason such a phrasing should be hitting him wrong. No reason it should be pinging him as...something.

As what?

Your young, the adder had said. Yours.

"Mine," Harry muttered, coming to a halt. His thoughts right then were like what they were when he was floating above a Quidditch field, letting his eyes relax because there were no obstacles between him and the Snitch. This time it was his mind, though, that seemed to be relaxing, or at least going very still and quiet indeed.

In one moment, it still made no sense, there still seemed to be no reason what the adder had said should have struck him as significant, or related to his own life in any way. In the next moment, everything knitted together, seemingly of its own accord. Meaningless splinters that, when connected, made up a whole that seemed to have a great deal to do with Draco, after all. Draco, who'd allegedly been in and out of St Mungo's for weeks, if you believed the Daily Prophet. Draco, who'd acted as if he was going to be sick in the street yesterday afternoon. Draco, who sometimes said things that...or stopped before he could say them, actually more times than that. Draco, who'd, who could get weird and vicious over seemingly random turns of conversations...only maybe not actually so random after all...scared of falling from his broom, he'd said, and weeks ago to Dudley he'd said that before Harry had lost his memory they'd been trying to...

Draco, who'd wanted to tell him something important, before he'd left. Something he'd been frantic about, that couldn't wait any longer...something that was going to be obvious before too long, anyhow, according to him...

Harry turned back toward the house, no longer thinking of the adder. No longer thinking of much of anything. He couldn't. He couldn't even feel anything. Not outside, where the chill wind was still blowing at him, and not inside, either. It was as if his heart had dropped out of him, a soft plop down onto the dark forest floor. When he began walking, fast as he could, he'd be leaving it there...

But it didn't matter. All that did was getting back, quick as he could. All that did was getting the answer, quick as he could.

Harry walked faster, and faster yet, until you couldn't really call it walking at all, what he was doing.