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: 8200

Summary: After ten years of marriage, Harry forgets.

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

Chapter Nine

The morning went by achingly slowly. The afternoon, even moreso. Then the sun began to set, and everything came to a halt completely--except, that was, for the clock, which kept ticking on by at what now seemed to be quite an alarming rate.

"Can't you pace somewhere else?" Draco snapped from his Leaning Chair when Harry had peeked out the front window for only the thirteenth or fourteenth time. "I'm trying to concentrate."

He'd ignored Harry up until now, nearly as pointedly as he'd avoided him for the past two weeks, during which he'd barely appeared downstairs for more than a few minutes at a stretch. It hadn't been until an hour ago that he'd plopped into his chair, for the first time since the first of November as far as Harry knew, and begun, with his reading glasses perched upon his nose and a thick stack of opened letters in his lap, to answer his mail. He'd been in the middle of answering it a moment ago, scratching furiously with his quill.

"It's just," said Harry, who'd spent the last hour trying to pretend he hadn't noticed Draco sitting stiffly in his chair, the better to keep from sending him fleeing back upstairs for the thousandth time this month. "Shouldn't they, you know, be here by now?" 

He was a hundred percent certain Dudley had gotten to the house before dark, on the last second Thursday...

Draco looked at him over the rims of his reading glasses. It was decidedly an odd way for Draco Malfoy to look at him, Harry thought, though possibly not actually odder than...other things. Literally anything else. "It depends. Sometimes he gets his car stuck."

"Stuck how?"

Draco waved the hand he was holding his quill in. "Stuck. With all the other ones. In--I forget what it's called."

"Traffic?" Harry guessed. 

"Something. I don't fucking know," said Draco irritably. "Muggle time changing also happened recently. Might want to account for that too."

It took a second for Harry to work his head around this, which just went to prove it was easier to guess what Draco meant when he wasn't being casually confident about what Muggle things were called. 

"Summer Time ended?" he guessed again.

"I--yes? It's November now? Don't tell me you've forgotten how to read a calendar too."

Harry tried once more: "I mean, you're talking about daylight savings?"

"If you say so. Sounds like a different thing to me." Draco turned back to his letter, and after a moment began scratching at it even more furiously than he had been before.

Harry watched him for a second. Now that he possibly didn't have to worry about Dudley so much, it was much harder to act like he didn't notice Draco there. Sat in his Leaning Chair, all...pregnant, with Harry's baby, and...was that any more obvious than it had been two weeks ago? Not really, so far as Harry could tell, though it was hard to say with, with Draco's robes, and the fact he was, you know, sitting, and had loads of stuff piled onto his lap...

"What?" Draco said, after what surely couldn't have been more than a few seconds of Harry looking at him.

"Er," Harry said, and cast about for something that wasn't...any of that stuff he'd been thinking. "Who're you writing to?"

Draco looked at him again, cross but at least not sneering. "None of your business," he said snidely, and went back to his scratching.

Trying to read over his shoulder felt like something that would end with Harry being stabbed with a quill. Maybe he would just...go wait out in the front garden. Then he'd see Dudley's car, just as soon as it was there to be seen.

He'd just turned toward the door when there came a sort of sizzling sound from the drawing room, followed by several seconds' worth of loud clattering. Harry glanced at Draco, who'd startled upright in his chair; then he headed quickly into the drawing room, wand in hand, to find...

Another Harry Potter climbing out of their fireplace.

"What's going on with your Floo?" he asked cheerfully, upon spotting Harry. "That version was...different. Probably shouldn't have told it I was you..."

"What?" Harry said. "Who...?"

But the answer occurred to him even as Teddy grinned and said, "Sorry to barge in like this." He didn't sound sorry at all, or look it. "Really ought to have come sooner, Grand High Wanker's been on my case for two weeks now..."

"Yeah?" said Harry weakly, thinking that he might have known something about this had he opened Teddy's last letter. Which he hadn't, just in case Teddy had said anything about that story in the Prophet...

"Said if I was going to run off my mouth like that, I need to make myself scarce from Hogwarts two nights a week minimum. Visibly, like."

Grand High Wanker, Harry thought distantly, recalling that Ron had coined that term back when Robards had been Head Auror...it felt surreal that Teddy was now calling Ron so. Though not really any more surreal that Teddy was in the drawing room being twenty-one and looking like Harry at thirty-nine...

"Thing is," Teddy continued, still cheerily,  "if I were to go anywhere public, I might end up in the papers again. I can't be getting sacked in the middle of the case!"

"He'd never actually do it," said Draco from the doorway. "You're indispensable to the department."

"You should tell him so," Teddy answered. His hair, which had started out being black as Harry's, was now bright red and getting brighter. "Seeing as he doesn't listen when I try it..."

"I'll tell him nothing if you're to come into my house looking like that," sniffed Draco. "Hideous, as usual."

"Hey," Harry said, ready to jump to Teddy's defense because--what did it matter, if he wanted to change the color of his hair? It was brilliant, really, Draco was just being a--

But Teddy rolled his eyes, and grew an inch or so taller, slightly leaner, and pointier indeed, until there were two Draco Malfoys in the room, one of whom had hair that was steadily going from red to lavender. "Better?"

"Much, thanks," said Draco brightly.

"Hey," Harry said again, with quite a lot more personal offense this time.

"How long until you're missed?" Draco asked, ignoring him. "Harry's cousin's due by any minute. I'm sure you wouldn't want to stay for dinner."

He said this in such a way as to make it clear he absolutely expected Teddy to want to stay for dinner. 

"Being missed is the idea, isn't it? The rest depends on how long shagging generally takes you blokes," said Teddy easily.

Harry felt his face heat up, probably to about the same shade of red Teddy's hair had so recently been, forcibly reminded just what Teddy had been reported to have said in the Prophet, that was the reason Ron had told him to make himself scarce sometimes in the first place. 

"Er!" he said.

Draco smirked in his direction, then said, even more brightly than before, "It depends. Is it quick and dirty, or is it slower and filthy?"

"Er," said Teddy, his Draco-face going very pink indeed. "I didn't need all the details! Just, I should be scarce long enough to make it seem authentic, you know..."

"So you don't get sacked," Harry helped, though personally he didn't think this was very likely. Ron had obviously just been blowing off steam, and besides, it'd jeopardize the case...well, probably...it wasn't like the details were exactly being confided in him, or had been since pretty much the first week...

"You're no fun," Draco complained. "Now, are you staying for dinner or not? I'm assuming we're still pretending you didn't know what day it is. Go on and pretend to have a think about it too."

Teddy winked at them, then put on an exaggerated thinking face. It was an expression that reminded Harry, suddenly and achingly, of Remus, even though Teddy currently didn't look like anyone but Draco. "I dunno, maybe. What're you having?"

"I'd considered serving food of some kind," said Draco, lightly mocking.

"You don't say? Count me in."

*

A while later, Draco and Teddy were still chatting, sat opposite each other in the living room. Teddy had complained about Ron quite a bit more, shared more Hogwarts stories, and gone into a bit of behind-the-scenes gossip (which Draco added to, based on things Harry had evidently told him), after which then they'd started talking Quidditch. Harry hadn't any insight on any of this, not even the Quidditch bits considering he'd missed twenty seasons and hadn't the first idea how any of the players were.

Teddy had changed again, this time into his usual face, and briefly into what must have been his usual hair color, a sandy sort of brown. He looked very like Remus, though not so much like him that Harry could have mistaken him for his father. There was a bit of Tonks around his nose; and there was a lightness to him Remus had never had, even in Pensieve memories from when he'd been younger than Teddy was now. It seemed like an odd thing to be true, considering Teddy was an orphan...then again, Harry reasoned, he hadn't been a werewolf from a young age, or at all. There had been no war looming when he'd been in school, probably no deaths or enormous betrayals among his closest friends. Whatever sorrows there had been in his life, maybe the joys had outweighed them...it was a good thing to see, and to know.

"Do you suppose you could make yourself scarce from Hogwarts next Wednesday?" Draco asked, when the conversation had entered a sort of lull, right around the time when Harry began to feel awkward, as if he ought to be saying something, contributing in some way, but couldn't think of what, or how. "From, say, noon onwards?"

"I might," said Teddy. "How come?"

"It's personal," Draco said, and to Harry, with a studied sort of formalness, "I've an appointment that day. You should come."

"...Alright," said Harry. "What kind of--"

There came a gravelly noise from outside. Getting up, Harry could see the light of the headlights through the curtains without even having to go over to the window. 

"Finally," Draco said, getting up. "I'd begun to worry they'd--what sort of trouble can you run into with Muggle cars, again?"

"Breakdowns?" Harry said.

"Collisions!" said Teddy.

"Massive traffic jams?" Harry said, hoping very much that Dudley was a careful driver, and that the same could be said for every other one he encountered on the roads.

"Any of those things, I suppose," Draco finished. 

Harry wondered what the chances were he'd remember any of them accurately, later. Probably very low.

Then there was the sound of car doors closing, and voices, one low and one much higher, and then before Dudley could knock at the door, Harry was opening it to let him and Dierdre in.

"Sorry we're late," said Dudley at once. "There was a massive moose in the road, a few miles back..."

"It wasn't a moose, Dad," Deirdre said, sighing loudly.

"There couldn't have been," Harry said. "There aren't any moose in Britain."

"It was a moose," Dudley said stubbornly. "It was glowing."

"Maybe someone's Patronus?" offered Teddy.

"Just standing in the road, though?" Harry said.

Draco said, "Could have been something else. Maybe a Bicorn? We've lived here long enough to attract magical creatures sometimes--though since there's only the two of us, they've never stayed long."

Was it just Harry's imagination, or had Draco gone out of his way to put emphasis on 'the two of us'? It definitely seemed like it had been an intentional thing. Had he meant something by it? Suddenly, all Harry wanted anymore was to ask him--he wasn't sure, really, what he wanted to ask him, and found himself floundering.

"It was a moose," Dudley said again. "Maybe it escaped from the zoo."

"It would've been on the wireless, Dad," said Deirdre. As Dudley, Teddy and Draco trooped outside, as if the supposed moose from miles away was likely to have followed the car and ended up in the garden, she waited until Dudley was out the door, then turned to Harry and said, "It was big, but it wasn't big enough for a moose. Moose are huge! I saw this one on tumbler one time, it was like three times the size of our car..."

"...Er, you saw one where?" Harry asked, blinking down at her, having tried and failed to come up with a mental visual that both made sense and involved a drinking glass three times anyone's car with a moose inside it.

The explanation that followed gave him a new understanding of how pureblood wizards probably always felt when having Muggle things explained to them. It made him feel tired, and old, and seemed to have started a headache for him underneath the once again ever-present pink gumminess (which had returned with a vengeance after a couple days free from it weeks before).

"So it's, what, like a television station? On the, er, computer?" he managed. She'd said something about the internet at several points, anyway. Harry had a vague idea of what that was; they'd never had one at the Dursleys', probably because it wasn't actually a computer game and Dudley had therefore never pitched a fit about wanting it.

"No-o," said Deirdre. "It's an app. You use it on a device."

"...Right," said Harry. 

"I mean, you can, on a computer? I think? Maybe. But, I'll ask Dad if I can bring my tablet with me, next time, to show you...it might not work here, though."

"I'd like that," Harry said, though really he wasn't sure. Then, because she'd glanced toward it several times during the course of all this, he asked, "Did you want to borrow my wand?"

He'd barely finished asking when Deirdre grabbed it--somewhat less pushily than Dudley might have, at this age, but with a sort of fervor that recalled him as a kid anyway--and said, "Yes, thanks!"

Then she was off and trying to cast stuff. Lumos, followed by Nox, a few times; she seemed to have both of them down, not stumbling even a bit, even though she was only nine, and not anywhere near Hogwarts yet. Or, Harry supposed, really meant to be doing underage magic...but he certainly didn't care about that, and it seemed very obvious that no one else really did, either, considering how free Draco had been with his wand the last time.

The others trooped back in a few minutes later.

"No moose, huh?" Harry said.

"I never said it followed us," said Dudley. He had a somewhat sullen look on his face, which was not quite the same expression he'd used to wear at Privet Drive when he was about to kick a wall, or a chair, or Harry, but was nonetheless close enough for Harry to take notice. Then someone--Draco, Harry saw--gave him a commiserating sort of pat, and the sullenness seemed to retreat a bit. Then, Dudley must have caught sight of Deirdre, still playing with Harry's wand, and it was vanquished all the way in favor of a soft, fond sort of look. Dudley looked so much like his father that this might still have been sort of alarming--that look had never meant anything good for Harry, anyway--if it weren't for the fact that Vernon Dudley would never have looked at anyone holding a wand with anything but alarm or, or hatred...

Meanwhile, Draco had drawn his wand, and was now holding it in front of himself in a manner that wasn't really how anyone ought to be holding their wand, given that it would take about half a second for it to get knocked out of their hand that way.

"En garde," he said, and perhaps the most surprising thing about his fencing stance was that he pronounced this correctly.

Deirdre giggled, and held her wand out in front of herself too--correctly, Harry noted, meaning someone had taught her the right way. Likely he had done it himself, during some past visit. Then, still giggling, she and Draco began to "duel"--if by duel, you meant chasing each other around the living and drawing rooms, wands sparking at odd moments as they cast absolutely nothing at each other. Deirdre was doing quite a lot of squealing, Draco quite a lot of saying "I'll get you! See if I don't!" and that sort of thing, and in the first few moments it went on, Harry's chest began to ache again, something very close to that strange longing that had seemed to hit him at odd moments, these last couple weeks...whenever he remembered he was going to be a dad, now...

"D'you suppose you'd remember where you saw it?" Teddy asked Dudley, still on the whole 'moose' subject, seemingly not at all affected by the chaos that was currently going on around them. "You could drive us back that way..."

"Er," said Harry, struck by the thought that he didn't actually know how good a driver Dudley was to start with, much less if he was being distracted looking for a glowing moose with multiple very loud wizards in the car with him. "I don't know that that's the best idea..."

From the way they turned to stare at him, Teddy's eyebrows up around his hairline, and Dudley's face questioning, too, Harry got the impression that he would normally have been up for such an adventure. In fact, he probably would have now, too, if it weren't for...

"I dunno if Draco would want to ride around in your car," he said to Dudley, with absolutely no idea how he was going to sell this, considering Draco would probably want to tell him off again if he let on about the baby...and possibly tell him off if Harry turned down activities on his behalf too...but there wasn't much help for that second thing now, was there?

But Dudley just grinned. "He's got you running scared of my 'deathtrap,' huh?" he asked.

"I guess," Harry said.

"It's a bloody Nissan," Dudley said, followed by some stuff about the safety rating. Quite a lot of stuff about the safety rating. An eye-glazing amount of stuff about the safety rating.

Harry didn't really follow any of this, even before it reached the point of being way, way, way too much in the way of details. His attention was too divided to really pay much attention. On the one hand, Deidre and Draco were still at war, Deidre running around the couch and Draco bounding over it to try to catch her. On the other hand, it had just occurred to him that he hadn't actually had to introduce Teddy to Dudley and Deirdre. They all seemed used to each other already, to the point where Dudley hadn't mentioned or even flinched about the fact that Teddy's hair had been purplish when they'd arrived, but was green fading toward blue now. 

At some point in the middle of Dudley's very earnest explanation, Teddy rolled his eyes, said something about how unfun they both were, and joined in the chaos, so that there were three people running around their house with sparking wands...the ache in Harry's chest only seemed to be growing greater, and expanding, until there seemed to be more of it than there was of him...

"Alright, Harry?" Dudley asked, peering at him.

"I, er," Harry said. "Yeah. I'm fine. Yeah."

Dudley's eyes searched his face some more. It was a bizarre feeling to know he wasn't looking for weakness. Or at least, not so that he could exploit it. Probably. "Do you still not remember stuff?"

"Yeah," said Harry. "I mean, no, I don't remember anything..."

*

Later, Harry wouldn't ever really be sure how he and Dudley ended up out back of the house. The 'duel' had only lasted a few minutes more, as both Draco and Teddy claimed to be winded, while Deidre, red-faced and out of breath, claimed not to be. Now they were doing more wand work, much more quietly, their first order of business being to get Deirdre to cast a proper Reparo on a vase that had met an untimely death due to all the acrobatics, and Harry and Dudley had slipped outside.

"You still don't like Draco, then?" Dudley asked, when they were sat on the ground, backs pressed against the side of the shed, with the Quidditch field and the dark forest looming out in front of them. If there were in fact lighting charms on the Quidditch field, Harry didn't have his wand to try to set them off, and so the light they were left with was from the single bulb from above the backdoor. It made the dark ahead seem even darker, somehow, than it would have been without any light on at all.

"No," said Harry, and then remembered Draco defending him to reporters, and all the other times he hadn't been terrible, since Harry had woken up to find out they were married...really, he'd barely been awful at all, most of the time... "I mean, I don't know," he amended. "It's weird."

"Weird how?"

"It just," said Harry, thinking that no one else had been all that keen to listen to him about this, so probably Dudley wouldn't be, either. "This isn't the way things were supposed to go, alright? I was supposed to be an Auror. I was supposed to...I dunno. Do something else." Other than making Auror, it seemed less clear now than it once had what that something else was. It had been vague even at the time, Harry supposed. There hadn't been time for anything other than working toward his next set of practicals, every waking moment and a good deal of his sleeping ones focused on making it through. "Have an entirely different life, by now."

"Yeah," said Dudley, which wasn't at all what Harry had expected. Not that he knew, really, what he'd expected... "I get that."

"Yeah?"

"Audrey wasn't supposed to fall pregnant," Dudley said, which gave Harry a startled moment before he realized it wasn't a targeted example so much as a regular kind of one. "She'd a year left on her PhD when Deirdre was born...we'd meant to wait, you know. And then, she wasn't supposed to get sick, or..."

Harry hadn't known what Dudley's voice sounded like when there was grief in it; when it was full of it, familiar with it, like something that was with him all the time even when it wasn't meant to be showing. It was an odd thing not to have known about someone you'd grown up in the same house with, probably.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Me, too. But I'm not trying to, I dunno, win? I'm just saying I get it. And it'd be a lot, if I woke up one day and didn't, you know. Remember any of it. How I'd got to be here. And, it'd be hard. Really hard, like."

"Yeah," Harry said. To his horror, he found that his throat had gone tight and his eyes a bit misty. 

He hadn't cried in front of Dudley since...he didn't remember. He knew he must have sometimes, when he was very young. Back when he'd still been learning that the Dursleys weren't people you could let your guard down around, ever. He wasn't about to start now, either, but had the distinct impression it was getting to be a close thing. 

He blinked quickly, until he felt steadier--and then, without being sure quite why, he started talking, a little, about what it had been like. Not everything--not the baby, still, less because Draco wouldn't like it than because Draco'd almost told Dudley for himself, last month--it made it seem as if it'd be worse, somehow, if Harry told him than if he told anyone else--but other stuff. The way he still didn't feel like he belonged here, or that here didn't belong to him. The way being cooped up here didn't actually help. The way he couldn't change any of that, because of everything that was going on with Teddy, the investigation he barely knew anything about...

"And," he said, a while later, because Dudley, who'd always been more than happy to talk over him, had let him talk and talk and talk, without adding more than a few encouraging sounds, or the occasional brief question that had led to more of Harry getting to talk, "they gave me this potion, at St Mungo's. Medicine," he clarified, in case Dudley didn't know about potions. "It's supposed to help bring my memories back..."

"You're ducking it, aren't you?" Dudley asked, after Harry had crashed to a halt, but before he'd decided whether or not he actually wanted to admit so to anyone, nevermind Dudley specifically.

"Er," Harry said, and would later wonder why it had been relief rather than panic that seemed to flood through him. "Who said I am?"

"It was kind of obvious," Dudley said.

"...Thanks a lot," Harry said.

"The, you know, way you were talking about it? I dunno. Sorry."

"It's alright," Harry said, and found, to his surprise, that it was. 

They sat there for a minute, quiet and awkward now. Maybe they ought to go back inside, Harry thought. Yet somehow he felt reluctant to do that. Not because what was in there was so terrible, but because what was out here didn't feel quite finished yet.

"Draco's alright, you know," said Dudley, and somehow this change of subject didn't manage to put Harry off his previous reluctances at all. "I wasn't sure, at first, about you being a--" Harry could hear the gears turning in Dudley's head, all the ways he could have said that Harry had ended up marrying another freak like him, who happened to also be another bloke. "I wasn't sure," he managed, eventually. "And he was kind of...weird, at first."

"I bet," Harry said. He could picture it.

"I kind of was, too, though," said Dudley, which Harry was content to imagine as the world's most enormous understatement. "But he was really good, you know, after Dad died." If he was looking at Harry at that moment, if he noticed the way Harry's entire body seemed to jerk at this news, he didn't say anything; and Harry didn't dare to look at him to find out if he had. "We've got on well enough since. And he's always got on with Deirdre, too."

Harry had very little trouble believing any of this. Especially that last bit. He'd seen for himself how well Draco got along with everyone, all the people most important to him...

"Yeah," he said.

They sat there a little longer, not talking, Harry with new information that he didn't know what to do with, didn't feel anything about now it was sinking in--was he meant to feel something about Uncle Vernon being dead? What did it say about him as, like, a person if he didn't?--and Dudley sitting with...whatever he was thinking through, again giving the impression of gears, grinding and grinding.

"Why don't you want to take your, um, stuff?" Dudley asked. "Don't you want to remember anything?"

"No," Harry said at once, then thought of Dudley and Deirdre, and Ron and Hermione and Alice, and getting to remember what Teddy had been like, growing up...all the things that were unexpected in one way or another, but not in any way actually bad. "I don't know."

A few more non-talking moments, a bit more of that gear grinding, so loud inside Harry's head he was tempted to tell Dudley to shut up even though he wasn't actually saying anything.

Then, Dudley said, "Do you think you might want to take it? Later on, I mean?"

No, Harry meant to say again, but what came out, instead, was, "I don't know." 

He hadn't known until that moment that he didn't know, that he still wasn't entirely sure. It hadn't been a question he'd thought to ask himself.

"Just don't mention it to anyone, alright?" he added, having abruptly been stabbed by a memory of all the times Dudley had found out something about him and spread it around to everyone, and how messy and awful it would end up being if he decided to spread things around to, say, Draco, this time around.

"I won't."

"It's just that it's, you know. Private," Harry said.

"Really, I won't."

"I believe you," Harry said, and found that he did. "Er, thanks."

*

"Dudley," Harry said a minute later.

"Yeah?"

"That what you saw earlier?"

At the far edge of the Quidditch Field stood...not a moose. It also wasn't glowing, exactly. It was just that its coat was such a pure white that it seemed to be, as if casting away every shadow that tried to touch it. It lowered its head to crop at the grass, then raised it again, seeming to look right through them. It went very still for a moment, then whirled around and was gone again, the whiteness of it visible for no more than a moment or two as it glided back off into the woods.

"Er, yeah," said Dudley hoarsely. "What was it?"

"Unicorn," Harry said. 

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"How the fuck was I supposed to know that?!"

Just about anyone else would have known that, wizard or Muggle. No one else had had parents who were so weird about magic stuff that all the teachers in primary school (Harry was realizing, just now) had probably assumed they were in a cult.

"I mean. It's a horse with a horn on its head," Harry said, unable to entirely reign his incredulity back entirely, even so.

"So's a moose!"

"Er," Harry said, at a loss for exactly how to tell Dudley the actual problem here might be that he didn't appear to know what a moose was, without saying it very sarcastically after making sure he'd have a running head start. "Moose are more...they have antlers? Like this," he said, putting his hands on top of his head and wiggling his fingers around to show the basic idea.

"The hell they do," said Dudley, and pulled out his mobile phone, the one with a screen like a miniature television. It was so bright it hurt Harry's eyes, but Dudley expertly hit it with his thumbs a bunch, until there were five or six tiny moose pictures showing. "Fuck!"

By the time they made it back inside, Harry had almost stopped laughing. As for Dudley, he'd only punched him once, in the shoulder (and then stammered an apology, just in case he'd hit too hard). 

Teddy was entertaining Deirdre in the living room, the two of them playing Gobstones while Draco was in his Leaning Chair, watching them with an expression that was somehow both several degrees warmer than usual and rather pinched.

"And where have you two been?" he asked touchily, after the slightest glance in their direction.

"Out back," Harry said. "You'll never guess what we saw going by."

"Ohh, not the mystery beast?" Teddy said, looking up from the game just in time for one of Deidre's gobstones to shoot some sort of thick purple sludge at his shirt. It went well with his hair, which was a metallic sort of yellow at the moment.

"Yeah," Harry said.

"What was it, what was it?" Deirdre asked, jumping up as a thick pink sludge shot up and got her right on the neck.

"Shut up," Dudley muttered to Harry.

Harry winked at him, then said, very seriously, and making sure he was out of arms' reach, not to mention several feet closer to the stairs than anyone else, "Didn't you hear? It was a moose."

*

Hours later, after quite a lot more chaos and a good amount of dinner, everyone had gone, Dudley and Deirdre out of the drive and Teddy back through the Floo. Harry couldn't recall the last time he'd been so tired, mentally speaking, without also being kind of devastated.

He came back in from seeing Dudley off to find Draco gathering up his papers from next to his chair.

"You don't, er, have to," he said.

"...I don't have to what?" Draco asked, pausing for a moment in what he was doing.

"Hide upstairs," Harry said. "It's your house, too, isn't it?"

Draco stared at him a moment. Harry was suddenly conscious of just how little Draco had said to him, or even looked at him, all night long. And he'd only come out in the first place because it was the second Thursday...

Finally, Draco said, "I suppose," and sat back down. "Good of you to have noticed," he added, much more sarcastically than Harry'd said anything about moose (and he hadn't been able to resist saying quite a lot). He picked up the parchment on the top of the pile of parchment and began to scratch on it with his quill. This went on for a minute, and then he spent another minute thinking, his quill poised as if to scratch some more, before he said, "Must you stare at me?"

"Er, sorry," Harry said, and tried not to. But there wasn't really anything else in the living room he was all that keen on looking at, so that even once he was sat on the Leaning Chair across from Draco's, with a book on fighting the Dark Arts opened in front of him, he couldn't help but sneak more glances at Draco instead of focusing on his reading.

It didn't take long for Draco to notice, or have an opinion about it. "Sincerely," he said. "What is so--"

"Sorry," Harry said again. "I, just..."

"What?"

He didn't know, really.

"I'm going back to my office," Draco said, in a huff. "At least there I'm not being stared at, like I'm some sort of--like I'm an animal in a zoo."

He gathered his parchments all together in his arms and stood up.

"You..." Harry said.

"I what?" Draco snapped.

Harry wasn't at all sure what he meant to say, what he was trying to come out with; only that there was something in there, digging its way up from inside him.

"Do try not to smudge up the glass with your nose, watching as I go up," Draco said, turning toward the stairs.

Still without having any idea it was going to come out of his mouth until it had, Harry said, in a rush, "You, er--you're good with kids."

Now Draco was the one staring.

"I," he said. "You--!" The viciousness was covered up so quickly that Harry might not even have seen it in the first place if he hadn't been, well, staring. Draco swallowed. "Yes. I--I like them," he said, and then, with a sort of defiance: "It's why I wanted to have yours."

"Yeah..." Harry said. He tucked this away, information about Draco he hadn't had before, or that had just become apparent in so many words: Draco Malfoy was good with kids, and liked them. This probably should have been very obvious, not just because how he was with Deirdre, but because he'd been at Grimmauld Place all of, what, three minutes that time before he'd had Alice riding around on his shoulders...and Harry'd been back over there a few times, the last couple weeks, and she always asked for him...

Meanwhile, Draco had sat down again, and was back to looking down at his letters. His cheeks were pink, and he'd swallowed hard a couple more times. Harry tried not to stare, since it was bothering him so much, but every other time he couldn't help but glance over, he found Draco glancing at him in return.

"Was there something else?" Draco muttered after a while, somewhat less snappishly than before.

"Who are you writing to?" Harry asked. Draco really did have quite a lot of parchment on his lap...they couldn't all be letters to Teddy or whoever, could they?

"Trying to write to. When I'm not being observed, like a--oh, here," Draco said, waving the topmost parchment in Harry's direction instead of telling him to mind his own business.

Harry got up and took it.

'Dear Sandra,' it began. 'I would say I was delighted to hear your take on the book, if only there had been anything in your letter that seemed to indicate you had read it. Alas, your reading comprehension leaves something to be...'

It went on in this very rude vein for another paragraph and a half, rudeness increasing by the word before cutting off abruptly in the middle of the page.

"Who's Sandra?" Harry asked.

"A person I'm writing to," said Draco snidely.

"Yeah, I got that. Why're you being a raging arsehole to her, though?"

For a moment, Draco looked as if he were thinking about being a raging arsehole to Harry, too. Then he shrugged and said, too casually to really be, "She had a wrong opinion about a book."

"Oh," Harry said, trying to think what sort of book Draco might be so defensive of. The ones he had thousands of copies of upstairs, probably. "The Hippogriff one?"

"No, the new one. It's the latest in the same series," Draco said, turning even pinker and hesitating for a moment before erupting, "Someone's got to set people straight when they want to be that wrong!"

"Right," Harry said.

"Anyway, she had her opinion at me first, so I'm entitled to have mine back at her."

"Sure," said Harry, handing the parchment back over. Part of him wondered if he shouldn't have more to say to Draco about this. The rest of him thought it was kind of funny, actually: Draco Malfoy, who'd once let Death Eaters into Hogwarts, now spent at least part of his time--possibly even a large percentage of his time, judging by the size of the stack on his lap--yelling at people who didn't like his favorite books in the same way he did. It was a basically harmless activity, wasn't it? All things considered? 

And, honestly: completely, one-hundred percent hilarious, too.

"You always think it's so funny," Draco said, severely but also clearly not. "It's not funny. It's very serious, in fact."

Trying and mostly failing not to snicker, and completely, a hundred percent failing not to grin, Harry said, "If you say so."

He sat back in his own Leaning Chair, and then leaned it way back. He found that, although reading wasn't any easier than it had been a few minutes ago, it was now somewhat less difficult to keep his eyes on his book.

Eventually, the scratching started again, hesitant at first and then at speed for a while, and then falling silent again as Draco got up to hand Herbert his finished letter. Then he started on the next one, scratching hesitant at the beginning, then speeding up, until, by the time Herbert had returned, there were another few letters ready to go.

And through it all, Harry thought about it, the stuff he now knew about Draco Malfoy. He was good with kids, and liked them. His favorite books were weird romance novels, which he liked to send nasty letters to people about if they didn't like them in the same way he did. He didn't even, now that the whole thing with the baby had come out, really seem to be up to much of anything.

These seemed, somehow, like important things to know.

*

Green light, everywhere...how long it had been there, or how long he had, there was no telling. All he knew was that it was here, and he was here, and everyone else was...

"Harry."

The voice seemed to come from outside, from the same place the light had...not from the end of anyone's wand, but from far away...from the sky up above, and in through tall windows...

"You're dreaming, Harry."

There was no purpose to looking for the source of the voice anymore than there was a purpose to looking for the source of the light. There was no purpose, no meaning to everything, because everything that had ever meant anything lay at Harry's feet...the bodies were spread out from him in a line that went on and on...he couldn't remember what had happened, but the one thing he knew, the one thing that was certain was that they'd all died for him...he hadn't saved them, he'd failed, after all...

Somewhere, far back in his mind, it came to him to wonder where Voldemort was...but, too, it didn't seem to matter, anymore, not when everyone was...not when he was the only who was left...and what did it matter where Voldemort was now, when Harry must have been too much of a coward to go to him when it would have made a difference?

"Aguamenti," the voice said, very sharply this time, and with it came the dousing, an ice cold sense of...

Harry sat up in the dark, drenched and gasping and...not in the Great Hall. A moment later, he was dry again, squinting against the sudden brightness of light that had come out of the end of someone's wand.

"You're alright," someone said, a voice that seemed as if it ought to have been cold and drawling, but was instead something warmer and soothing. "It was just a dream."

"Everyone was dead," Harry said, aware distantly that he was crying...that he might have been crying for ages, must have been... "Everyone's...fuck, I have to..."

"They're all alright," the voice said again. "You were just dreaming. The same old one, I assume?"

He could still see them, all of them...Ron's face, Hermione's, still and gray and awful... "Um," he said, trying to catch up with this, with being here and not...and not there...he found his glasses shoved into his hands, and in putting them on found that things became just a bit clearer, and not just the ones that were in front of his face. He was in his bed, in his bedroom, where he'd gone to sleep however many hours before, not quite as pink or gummy as he usually was when he woke in the middle of the night. Draco was there, crouched next to him, the hand that wasn't holding his wand resting on Harry's forearm. He didn't, in the light off the end of his wand, look nearly as much like Lucius Malfoy as he had the last time they'd been like this... "Yeah," he said. "I've had it before..."

He'd had plenty of screaming dreams, before the war had ended. Before it had begun, even. He'd had plenty since, too, and the only good thing about them was that his scar never hurt from them, anymore. 

The crying dreams, though, hadn't started until later. Until after he hadn't been living in a tent with Ron and Hermione anymore. Until after Remus and Tonks and Fred had been buried, and all the others who had died, for him or otherwise. Until after he'd moved out of the Burrow, not able to stand the idea of intruding any longer. Until he was out of Grimmauld Place, too, living alone for the first time in his life. That was when he'd started having quiet, terrible dreams; when he'd started waking up equally quietly, tears slipping out of him for a long time after, as if they'd never end...

And now Draco Malfoy was here, knowing about his crying dreams, apparently. Fuck. Harry took his glasses off again, grateful for the way Draco's pointiness went even more fuzzy around the edges than he already was in the dark, and wiped at his eyes with his hands.

"Yeah," he said again, when his glasses were back on his face and he thought he might, maybe, be finished with crying in front of Draco Malfoy. "I've had that one before. I guess I still do..."

"Not as often as you used to," Draco said, answering as if it had been a question even though Harry wasn't sure, really, if he'd meant it that way. "Your cousin's visits set them off sometimes, as far as I can tell."

Harry supposed that made sense. Things between him and Dudley seemed good, but could they ever be quite normal? It was hard to say, but part of him doubted it. There was too much between them, lurking in the shadows of Harry's old cupboard.

"Yeah," he said again, and then blurted out, "Did you know my uncle died?"

"...He told you," Draco said. "What did he go bringing that up for?"

"I guess he thought I already knew," Harry said, because that much, at least, had been obvious. And, now he'd blurted it out, he found he didn't actually want to talk about it. It wasn't a not wanting to talk about it with Draco thing so much as it was a not wanting to talk about it with anyone, ever thing. "What're you doing in here, anyway?"

He really had thought his crying dreams were quiet ones...had Draco had his ear to the door, or something? Did he only cry quietly by the time he was awake, but more loudly before then? Or, some third thing...?

Draco's hand withdrew from Harry's arm, clearly taking it the wrong way. "Did you want me to go?" he asked coldly.

"No!" Harry said, before he'd really thought about it. Then he did think about it, for just a moment, and remembered that the worst thing about the crying dreams had always been being alone, after them. They always came in the middle of the night, in the darkest and loneliest time, when it was late enough that there was no chance it would seem like a non-weird thing for him to show up at anyone else's. In his flat there hadn't even been a common area or someone else's living room to go hang about in, just in case another person had a touch of insomnia too... "I mean, you don't have to. If you don't, er, want."

"Alright," said Draco, somewhat stiffly. "Budge over, then."

For a moment, Harry knew he was going to have to draw the line at letting Draco Malfoy be in the same bed with him, and at the same time. Then he thought of how awful and aching it really would be, to be alone in the wake of that dream, and budged over. Draco got up from his crouch and sat next to him on top of the covers.

"Alright, Harry?" he asked, leaning back against the headboard.

Alright for Draco to be there? Alright as in feeling better from his dream? It was unclear which he meant, but either way Harry figured it had to be the same answer. "I guess so," he said.

"Good," said Draco, and put out his wand, so that there was no more seeing what, exactly, he was doing. "Go back to sleep."

It was probably a bad idea, letting Draco stay. It was less that he was next to Harry, a somehow pointy presence even in the dark, and more that this time of night was a bad one to share with people you didn't want to have long, personal conversations with. Harry had had enough of this time of night back in the Gryffindor dorms to know all about that. Ron and Neville and Dean and Seamus knew more about him, and he knew more about them, than any of them ever would have if they hadn't slept in the same space together for those six years...

It occurred to Harry that he must have slept in the same space together with Draco for longer than that. It was a very odd feeling, an uncomfortable thing to have realized. He might have even said something about it, except that talking at all would open him up to one of those conversations. He wasn't entirely sure he wanted to have one, when it was Draco who was here with him...but, bizarrely, the thing that actually seemed to be stopping him from saying anything was that he wasn't entirely sure he didn't want to have one, either.

In the end, it was Draco who spoke first, or next.

"Are you asleep yet?"

"Mmm," said Harry, who hadn't realized he was halfway there until Draco had interrupted him. "Not yet."

A while later, Draco said, "Harry? Sleeping yet?"

"Mmm," said Harry, not quite awake enough to manage anything else.

If Draco asked for a third time, at some later moment, Harry must've been, after all.