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: 14,300

Summary: After ten years of marriage, Harry forgets.

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

Chapter Ten

Harry woke up on the following Wednesday at half past two of the morning. It was an ordinary sort of waking, unrelated to any nightmares. He had not dreamed at all, so far as he could tell. He had simply woken, pink and gummily and with the usual sense of unease, the latter of which seemed to pass the moment he sat up in bed and found the moon shining back at him, a bright thinning crescent.

What didn't pass, once he lay back down, was the sense of alertness beneath the gumminess. After another half an hour, it became apparent that glaring at the ceiling while telling himself that what he actually wanted was to stay awake as long as possible wasn't going to send him off this time. He sat up again, pulled on his dressing gown and slipped his slippers on at the door. He headed out into the hallway, which was dark and quiet; headed down the stairs, which were dark and quiet too. 

Downstairs, the light in the kitchen was on. By the time Harry was far enough down the stairs to notice this, he could also hear people speaking: Draco's low voice, and some other person, or maybe another several other people, speaking in a much higher tone. It was strange, and possibly suspicious, enough for Harry to creep down the rest of the way from the first floor.

He was halfway between the stairs and the kitchen doorway when there came the deafening crack of Apparation. In the moments it took to finish his creeping, there came no more voices.

Harry reached the kitchen doorway, peeked in. Draco was standing at the kitchen table, upon which was a wicker basket. He reached into it and brought out a plate, which looked to be loaded up with breakfast foods. He brought out another, which was loaded up with more of them. Then a third plate, which was for a turkey sandwich and some crisps, and a fourth plate with a roast beef sandwich instead. The fifth and sixth plate seemed to contain large helpings of shepherd's pie. And then there were even more plates after that, with desserts and things on them...

"I thought you made our food," Harry said, though truthfully he hadn't spared much thought for how there was always breakfast with a Warming Charm on it when he got up in the mornings, and lunch and supper in the afternoons and evenings. It had reminded him of meals at Hogwarts, which had never required much in the way of thinking. In retrospect, it probably should have come off as weirder than it had...

Startled, Draco looked up. For a moment, he appeared very tired, the dark circles under his eyes somehow much more obvious at three in the morning than they were at other times. Then he said, "No? I don't cook, I never have. You do, sometimes. Over Christmas holidays, or in the summer. We get delivery from the Free Elves the rest of the time."

"Oh," Harry said. 

"If I were Hermione, I'd wax eloquent about the progress we've made in the past decades. As I'm not, I'll just say we pay too much, but it's worth it to me not to have to use the stove, and worth it to you to not have a personal House-Elf."

Harry watched from the doorway as Draco checked the Warming Charms on each of the plates, then used a Levitation Charm to move them into the kitchen cabinet next to the sink. There were three shelves inside, each one just the right size for one meal's worth of plates.

"Do you have to get up this time every morning? For when our food comes?" he asked. It'd explain why Draco looked so tired, if he was waking up before three on the daily...

"No," Draco said, a little sharply. "I mean, I don't--I was up anyway. Thought I might as well come down and take delivery. We're longtime customers; they know to leave everything on the table and go if there's no one around."

"Alright," said Harry, relieved that he didn't have to offer to start waking up early for food delivery shifts, now he knew about them.

"Anyway. Did you need something?" Draco asked, closing the cabinet doors with another swish of his wand, and sending a sort of sideways look in Harry's direction.

"Er, not really?"

"Ah. So you're just sneaking about in the middle of the night for no good reason. Delightful."

"I have a reason," said Harry. "Don't you know I'm having you followed?" He didn't realize he was waiting on Draco to laugh until Draco snorted. It wasn't exactly the same thing, and he was turned away from Harry so he couldn't see his face, but it was something, at least. "No, I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep, is all."

"Ah," Draco said again, sounding less disgruntled about it this time, and did look at him now, one of those looks that made him look much less pointy, and made Harry's stomach wiggle around in a way he'd have called nauseously a few weeks ago. "More nightmares?"

"Just nerves, I think," Harry said honestly. It was really the only thing it could have been, considering he'd gotten back to sleep quickly every other time he'd woken up pink and gummy in the middle of the night.

"...About?"

"What?"

Very slowly, in a tone that made it clear he thought Harry was being dense, and probably doing it on purpose to spite him, Draco said, "What. Are you. Nervous about?"

"Oh. Just your thing tomorrow." Though really it was Draco's thing later today, by now. "You know, the one you haven't told me what it's about yet."

Ever since having Teddy free up Harry's schedule for this afternoon, Draco had gone out of his way not to tell Harry exactly what it was he'd wanted him freed up for. Every time Harry made up his mind to ask, Draco immediately made himself scarce, so that Harry had concluded he was seeing the question on his face and running away from it. He'd tried to stop letting his face do...whatever it was, but he'd never spent a lot of time practicing faces in front of a mirror like a prat, so he was pretty much pants at any on-purpose expression that wasn't meant to look forced (or deranged).

"Ah," Draco said for a third time. Now he wasn't looking at Harry again. "You'll want to have your sleep for that, I expect. You should go back to bed."

"How about I don't?" Harry said, having worked out that he was between Draco and the stairs this time, so that unless he wanted to go outside in the cold and dark and damp, it would at least be annoying for him to try to get past Harry and up the stairs.

Draco must have been making the same calculation; he looked around Harry, then at the back door, then made a huffy sort of sound. "Alright, fine. If you insist," he said, turning back toward the cabinet with the food in it. "I have a checkup," he said, pulling out a plate of shepherd's pie and setting it down on the kitchen table. "At Mungo's."

Harry had more or less figured that much. "For the baby?" he said, just to be sure, anyway. "To make sure it's...growing right, and stuff?"

"'And stuff,'" Draco said mockingly, in what, if it was meant to be mimicking him, wasn't managing it either very well or very hilariously, in Harry's opinion. He then sat down and dug into his shepherd's pie and began to demolish it. 

It wasn't until he'd watched Draco chew and swallow three or four large mouthfuls that Harry realized he must not actually intend to say anything more.

"Is it, though?" he asked, once the slight urge to hex Draco in his stupid, annoying face had died down. "Growing right, and stuff, I mean? Er, so far."

Draco still hadn't been looking at him. Now he did. It was an unreadable sort of look now, which was weird. Draco was very easy to read most of the time. He had been easy to read in school, too, though back then all there'd ever been to see was sneering, miming, and variations on other nastiness.

"I--yes," he said, putting down his spoon. "They wanted to see me every ten days or so at first, in case--just because it's complicated. You know, with all the potions and things I had to take to get it to happen in the first place."

This was news to Harry, who'd assumed Draco was one of the few wizards able to fall pregnant naturally. Or, well, he would have assumed it, if he'd thought to wonder about it one way or the other. Now he added this information to the list in his head, the one it seemed somehow safer not to look right at except when he was tacking on something new to it: Draco Malfoy was not only having his baby, on purpose, but there'd been extra amounts of on purpose to it right from the start.

"But everything's been alright? Up til now?"

"Didn't I just--!" Draco began hotly, but then his face did something else, unreadable again, though also a bit twistier, this time. "Um. Yes. Everything's been--fine. Really good, actually. We're right on track, they've been saying, this whole time. It's just--if it's still--" He took a deep breath, the kind that could be easily heard across the kitchen, and possibly from across the house, and looked down at his hands.

"If it's still what?" Harry asked, only vaguely aware his palms were sweaty, and his pulse beating in his throat, bringing with it an iron-y sort of taste. "Are you worried about something? What about?"

There came a flash of something into Draco's eyes. Fear, or terror, or something close to. "I'm not worried." He shoved his plate away, then, before Harry could point out that he obviously was, about something, he said, in a rush, "I asked about the Glimpsing, last time."

"Yeah?"

"They said there's no reason we couldn't do it this week, if everything's still--we can almost certainly expect to have it done today. If we want to."

"Right," Harry said, because even if he didn't have the first idea of what the Glimpsing was meant to be, it was obviously something important.

"And that's why I invited you along," Draco finished, as dramatically as if he'd spent the last twenty minutes building up to the punchline of a story, instead of the last several trying to avoid telling Harry anything at all. "I wouldn't have it done without you."

"Er, good," said Harry. His heart wasn't in his throat anymore, which made him think he'd probably survive waiting to find out what the Glimpsing actually was until tomorrow. Otherwise, he'd have to press Draco more about it tonight, and he seemed to have hit a wall. Or, rather, seemed to have slumped against the wall, and slid down it, to sit in a heap on the floor. Only on the inside, though. On the outside, he was still standing there, feeling abruptly exhausted.

And also a bit hungry, though that last bit was probably because Draco had started shoving his shepherd's pie back into his mouth again. It looked good. Luckily for Harry, there was another whole plate of it in the cabinet.

"What are you doing?" Draco asked, when Harry sat down across from him. "That's meant to be your supper."

"What about your supper?"

"Your child was hungry now," said Draco, blurting it out then immediately turning very pink.

"Yeah, me too," said Harry, his face heating up to feel as pink as Draco's looked, if not quite as pink as the inside of his head. "Like father, like...thingy, right?"

"Thingy?!"

Harry shrugged, and took a bite of his shepherd's pie.

*

"Is that really what you're going to wear?"

Harry stopped on the bottom step in order to look down at himself. His shirt was clean, his trousers were clean too even if they hadn't been, like, pressed. He'd even combed his hair (which had taken about a week to grow back after the splinching incident, but was by now back to normal). There wasn't anything wrong with his outfit, yet Draco was still standing in the living room and looking pinched at him.

"Er, yeah." It was obvious from the way Draco's face got even pinchier that this was not meant to be the right answer. "What's wrong with it?"

"It's not that you can't wear Muggle clothes to Mungo's, or anything," said Draco with the sort of practiced patience Harry had somehow come to associate with him, over the past several months. "It's only--could you put on some robes, please?"

Harry wanted to argue this point. He'd gotten out of the habit of robes after Hogwarts. Then he'd gone into Auror training right after the end of the war, and had to wear his trainee robes all the time...but with the knowledge that once his training was done, he could more or less wear whatever he wanted. It wasn't so much that he didn't like the idea of robes--his school robes had been fine, a lot better than wearing Dudley's cast-offs--as it was that he preferred the freedom of other things. It made him only slightly more conspicuous in wizarding spaces, and made it much easier to duck into Muggle ones.

"It's just," Draco said, possibly seeing the argument on Harry's face in the same way he saw questions. "It's an occasion. Or--it might be. Like I told you before. Occasions mean robes."

The way Draco was pointing his chin at Harry said they weren't going anywhere until he'd put on his robes. That this particular thing was more important to him than it was to Harry also seemed fairly self-evident.

Harry said, "...Right. Alright."

He went back up the stairs and into the bedroom closet where his robes lived. It wasn't at all uncomfortable until he'd been sorting through robes long enough to realize there was a window at the back, sunlight filtering past cloth so that the space wasn't nearly as dark as it might otherwise have been. At that point he became very uncomfortable and grabbed the nearest set of robes in a darker-than-Gryffindor red. They seemed newish, clean, and neither overly dressy nor overly not, so he pulled them over his shirt and trousers. He briefly considered changing out his trainers for dressier shoes. Given there was little chance of his feet being looked at when his scar was right there for people to pretend not to be looking at instead, he decided he didn't need to, and headed back down the stairs.

He didn't think that maybe he ought to have combed his hair out again until he got there. But maybe Draco didn't notice, or agreed it wouldn't have made much difference, because he looked Harry up and down for a second time, then gave a stiff sort of nod.

Then he just stood there, until Harry started to feel antsy.

"Er, when are we meant to leave?" he asked. It was several minutes past noon, which was when Draco had wanted Teddy to be scarce.

"My appointment isn't until twelve-thirty," Draco said. "We've a few minutes." He was still just standing there, looking at Harry with an unhappy-seeming downturn to his mouth.

"What's the problem?" Harry asked. He was too tired to figure out what this look meant on his own; he'd eventually gotten back to sleep, but not until about two hours before he'd had to be up. The tiredness had lent the pink gumminess an eerie sort of quality, one that made you feel, for whatever reason, as if you didn't want to look too closely at it.

"This might not be the best idea," Draco said. Before Harry could ask why not, or decide if he wanted to ask why not when he could go upstairs and collapse back into bed, instead, he added, "My Healers don't, you know. Know about your memory. They think we're still--I don't know."

"Oh," Harry said. "That's good."

"I wasn't hiding it," Draco said, still looking very unhappy even though Harry was agreeing with him. "I was just--my checkups aren't about you. And I didn't want them to be--I wanted the focus to stay where it ought to be, that's all. And I didn't want anyone's pity, either. It's not like you died, or anything."

"I'm not, er, mad," said Harry, when Draco paused long enough that it seemed like Harry was meant to say something. All he'd been thinking was that it was good Draco hadn't gone around telling people. "It's good that you didn't. Considering, you know, Teddy."

"Oh. Right," said Draco. "That's--a good point. One I definitely considered!" he added, in a way that made it clear he hadn't considered it at all, at least not in the context of his checkups. "I, just--I don't expect you to act doting, or anything? But they're not going to know you don't--you can't make any scenes, alright?"

Harry, not loving the implication that he was the more likely to make a scene, out of the two of them, felt abruptly soured on this conversation. "I won't if you won't," he said, and felt he'd more or less proved it by not saying this through his teeth.

"No promises," said Draco. "I'm pregnant, after all. Pregnant people are allowed to make scenes."

"Yeah, right. I bet six months ago you'd have said you're allowed to because you're a Malfoy."

Draco gave him piercing sort of look, the kind that made Harry feel as if he really might end up impaled on that pointy chin. "We're allowed to make scenes too, yes. Convenient, isn't it?" He breathed out noisily and tapped on his chin with his index finger, looking both conflicted and like a total wanker at the same time. "I don't know."

"You said I could come with you," Harry pointed out.

"I know I did."

"You invited me."

"I know, but--"

"If you don't want me to come, I won't. But I'm not going to embarrass you, or whatever," Harry said, beginning to be fucked off about this whole thing.

"I didn't say you'd embarrass me," Draco said, flushing. "I just don't want you to--"

"If you don't want me to come, tell me not to come," said Harry. "I don't care."

He really did care, and Draco, all pink in the face again, obviously did care too. He opened his mouth, then shut it, then opened it again, then shut it again, then slitted his eyes at Harry for an even more piercing look. "You don't care?" he managed, eventually. "It might be the Glimpsing! There's no way you don't care about it. You'd have to be--completely heartless, or something--"

"I don't not care!" Harry said, mostly because watching Draco work his way through whatever he was thinking this time was actually physically painful.

"Do you even know what it is?" Draco asked, and then Harry's face must have done one of the things he'd never managed to make it not do, because he pounced: "You don't. I knew it."

There wasn't really any point in denying this. "Yeah. So, what is it? This, er, Glimpsing thing?"

"You knew about it before. I never had to explain it," Draco said accusingly.

"Bet I had more time to read up on it then," said Harry, who had actually been doing some reading up lately. Just not pregnancy books. Mostly it had been, like, parenting books for wizards, stuff like that. He'd read the first chapter of one, or just the introduction if there was one, get to feeling a little lightheaded, and then start on a different book just in case that one was better.

"I suppose," said Draco. "The Glimpsing is--it's a spell. A special one. For--you get to see it."

It took Harry a second or two to process this, and to realize what exactly Draco meant by it.

"Oh," he said.

Draco looked at him piercingly again, or possibly hadn't ever stopped. "Still want to come?"

"Yeah," Harry said.

*

They didn't run into any reporters in the hallway by the Apparition Point this time, but unfortunately were spotted by a group of people who immediately started whispering loudly about whether or not they'd just spotted Harry Potter (and Draco Malfoy, too).

"Bets we'll end up with an entire crowd of journalists again on our way out?" Draco murmured, when the elevator doors had closed behind them, shutting out the loud whispering.

"No bet," said Harry. "We really should've brought my invisibility cloak with us."

"No, we shouldn't," said Draco sharply.

But Harry barely heard him. Now that he'd thought of it, he didn't know why he hadn't before. Even if using the cloak with Malfoy would mean being shoved up underneath it with him, so close they'd be breathing on each other and constantly bumping into each other and... "Do I keep it at Hogwarts, do you know?" he asked, because he certainly hadn't turned it up in his room or anywhere else in their house. "Or is it still, you know, in my vault?"

Draco did the thing with his wand, the one that stopped the elevator in-between floors. "It's at Gringotts," he said.

Harry winced. That was what he'd been afraid of. Immediately upon starting with the Aurors, he'd been told in no uncertain terms that he was not to have the cloak on his person during his training--off-duty or on. The resulting visit to Gringotts had been intensely uncomfortable, to the point where he'd been glad it would be another three years before he'd have to face the goblins again. He wasn't too keen on facing them twenty years on, either, but was willing to do it to get his cloak back, now he'd remembered he was allowed it again.

"Right," he said. "We'll stop by on our way home, then."

"No," said Draco.

"Er, alright," said Harry. "I'll go by myself, then, if you don't want to come." He wasn't sure, anyway, why he'd just assumed that Draco would tag along... "How long's Teddy planning to stay out tonight?"

"Midnight or so. Not that it pertains." Draco took a breath, one that was pretty loud, there in that shared echo-y space. He didn't look at Harry, but instead at his own reflection in the elevator door, pointy on one side and pinched on the other. "I didn't mean no I'm not coming. I meant no as in you can't have it."

Harry stared at him, for a moment unable to believe what he was hearing. Or, not so much unable to believe it, as unable to process it in the first place. "What do you mean, I can't have it?"

Draco took another loud breath, then let it out through his nose even more loudly. "It's not in your vault. It's in mine. Good luck getting the goblins to let you into it without my permission. You should plan on doing your future banking elsewhere, if you want to try that."

He wasn't wrong. There'd been a whole contract Harry'd had to sign after the war, going over all the funny stuff he wasn't allowed to do at Gringotts, as well as the normal stuff he wasn't allowed to do there anymore. This included basically anything other than meekly being taken to his vault with his eyes closed, then being taken back up again, eyes still closed, and possibly searched on his way out too. He was completely certain he wouldn't have been allowed into another person's vault for any reason, including being married to him and having permission in triplicate every way it was possible to have permission in.

"What the fuck is my cloak doing in your vault?" Harry asked between gritted teeth.

"I put it there," Draco said. "When it was obvious you were--God knows what you'd get up to, if you thought you could sneak around wherever you want. It's one thing if you're sneaking about at home. It's another if you're trying to get away with things out in public."

"I wasn't going to try to get away with anything."

"Oh, really? How long do you think you'd have it before you started getting ideas in your head? My money's on about five seconds."

"It was my father's--"

"Yes. And you'll have it back when you remember, or--or when you leave me, and not a moment before," Draco snapped.

"I'll have it back now," Harry said, and the worst part about being so angry wasn't how hot his face was, or how everything was raging in the center of his chest; the worst part was that even thinking about how much he'd love to hex Draco right now came with along with the thought, But, the baby, which was the sort of thing that more or less just ruined the whole experience of thinking of hexing anyone. "After your appointment, you're going to go to your vault and get it for me."

"No," Draco said again. "That is not happening. And if you're going to keep carrying on about it once we're outside the lift doors, you can take yourself home instead."

If they'd been out of the house for any other reason, Harry would have done. He didn't want to see Draco right now. Didn't want to talk to him, didn't want to deal with him at all, in any way. Not when he was fucking stealing from him, and not just anything, but the one thing he had that had once been his father's...and that could have meant a bit more freedom for Harry right now, too...it wasn't a crime, was it, if sometimes he might want to go somewhere that wasn't their house or the woods behind it or even Grimmauld Place, without having to coordinate everything with Teddy?

"Fine," he said.

Draco looked at him for a moment, pale and with thinning lips. "If you want to go, you can go," he said. "I said I wouldn't have the Glimpsing done without you, and I still won't. We can do it the next time."

"I don't need to go home," Harry said firmly, because the only thing cutting through the anger right now, the only thing that maybe could have, was what Draco had said before, about getting to see it... "It's fine. We'll just, I dunno, have a row about it later."

"...Fine," Draco said.

A minute later, they were still standing there. Probably because Draco hadn't yet cast anything to start the elevator back up.

"What's the holdup?" Harry asked.

"I'm waiting on your face to turn back a normal color," Draco said flatly.

"...Right."

"Deep breaths. Count to ten inside your head."

"Or how about you just--" Harry started, then had to take a deep breath after all. Not because Draco had told him to, but because if he didn't, he was going to actually start yelling, and if he started yelling, he might not stop for a while. Like for about an hour.

"You can count to twenty, now," Draco said, very unhelpfully.

*

They made it to Draco's appointment with barely a minute and a half to spare. Then they were led to a private waiting room, where they ended up sitting for a while.

"There's a more public waiting area around the other side," Draco explained in a low voice, as if there were some strong chance of them being overhead even though they were alone here. "They haven't had me wait there due to our, um, privacy concerns."

He hadn't wanted it leaked to the Prophet, Harry translated. He supposed he didn't want that either. He felt weird enough about the whole impending fatherhood thing without the entire wizarding world having opinions at him too. It was bad enough that the Prophet reported every time Teddy spent half the night out of Hogwarts, with the implication being that he was somehow being derelict in his professor-y duties even though he was actually spending more time at Hogwarts than Harry himself apparently ever had since he'd begun teaching. If they got ahold of this, each day's paper would be front to back 'Harry Potter: The Boy Who Lived To Reproduce.' No, thanks.

"Yeah," Harry said, instead of any of this. 

He sat in the chair next to Draco's and picked up a parenting magazine. It was a wizarding one he'd never heard of, which didn't mean a lot considering he'd never paid attention to the Muggle kind either. He flipped through it and found an article about the different ways accidental magic could show up in children--sometimes even ones under six months old. That was interesting, and so was the next article, which was about how to baby-proof a home when the baby in the question might be able to do things like Summon a forbidden potion into their cot or appear randomly atop a tall cabinet where the family cat had gone to hide. So was the third article, which was about choosing between Muggle primary schools, wizarding primary schools, and teaching your kids at home. At least, it was until the line, 'Harry Potter himself attended' appeared, at which point Harry abruptly found himself tired of reading.

"Do you think..." he started, newly wondering if his parents had ever sat like this, reading magazines while waiting to learn things about him...

"What?" Draco said, sounding testy. Was he still wound up about the thing in the elevator? He didn't have a magazine or anything. Possibly he'd already read them all. Or possibly he'd been...watching Harry read, or something. Out of the corner of his eye, maybe, otherwise Harry felt certain he would have felt him looking...

"Nevermind," Harry said. He picked up another magazine, hoping this one would have less in the way of mentioning him in it.

He'd only just flipped past the letters to the editor when Draco said, more softly now, "No, really. What is it?"

There wasn't any purpose to asking Draco questions about his parents, Harry figured, no matter how strongly they were burning inside him to be answered. It wasn't like he would know, wasn't like he'd been there...

"What's the Glimpsing, really?" he asked, because he hadn't really pushed for an answer, before, and there was an article titled 'Preparing for the Glimpsing' in the table of contents, that he could be reading right now if it weren't for Draco wanting him to ask him stuff instead. "You didn't say any details before. Is it like an, er, ultrasound scan?"

"...A what?"

So then Harry had to explain what an ultrasound scan was. This was a process somewhat hindered by the fact that all he really knew about it was what he'd gleaned from Aunt Petunia's soaps and things, most of which he'd only heard from inside his cupboard, or, the summer he'd turned sixteen, from beneath the bush outside the living room window. Still, though, he had enough of the basics to have a decent enough grasp, and definitely to explain it pretty well.

"No," said Draco, when he'd finished. "The Glimpsing isn't anything like that."

"Oh."

"That's disgusting, to start with. Why would I want to see all my guts and things?"

"You don't see your guts and things," Harry said, a little more confidently than he really felt. "It's...I dunno, a big deal for Muggles. They take pictures of it home and everything."

"A picture of my guts," Draco repeated, in a tone to make it clear what he thought about this. "Repulsive. Think I'll pass."

Harry's seen enough of those pictures (well, one, but it had been Dudley's, so of course he'd seen it about a thousand times whenever Aunt Petunia'd been going through his baby book again) to be completely, one-hundred percent sure there weren't any guts in them. "I don't think--" he started, then recalled they weren't at the Muggle doctor's, and it wasn't like Draco would ever be in the position to have a picture taken of an ultrasound scan, anyway, and so what did it matter if Harry thought it would have been kind of a nice thing to have around? "So what does it show us, then?" he asked. "If it's not, you know, that?"

Draco didn't say anything for a moment, a thoughtful rather than a sneering look on his face. "It doesn't show us what we've got now," he said, which might or might not have proved he actually had got the gist of what ultrasounds were and was just winding Harry up for the sake of it. "It shows us what we're going to get."

"Oh," said Harry.

He had a thousand or so questions about this, too, but before he could ask them, nevermind get frustrated with Draco and turn to that article, the door to the waiting room came open. Not the door they'd come in through, but the one on the opposite end. A witch stood on the other side of it, with a clipboard in hand, upon which pieces of paper were fluttering as if blown by a small but strong wind. 

"Draco?" she said.

Draco stood up. "That's us," he said to Harry, unnecessarily.

"Come along," said the witch, and so they went.

*

The exam room wasn't too different to the Muggle ones Harry had been in before. The walls were covered in anatomical diagrams, which, unlike in a Muggle's doctor's office, moved around in ways that were a bit uncomfortable (especially as most of them involved things being inside uteruses). There was a table to one side of the room, on which Draco sat; there were several chairs by the wall, one of which Harry sank down into as the witch asked Draco about how things were going. Harry listened to this carefully while avoiding eye contact with anyone including the diagrams, having previously been unaware that Draco's morning sickness was more or less gone, or that he got a little dizzy sometimes and had leg cramps.

"So it's like, what?" Harry said once she had left again, determined to get at least some of his questions out of the way now, especially since it hadn't occurred to him to bring the magazine with that article in here with him. "What exactly did you mean, when you said we'll see what we're getting?"

"It's," Draco said, then lapsed into thoughtfulness for a moment. "I don't really know how to explain it? I've never been to one, or anything. It's just--it's the Glimpsing, alright? I never had to explain it before."

"Okay, but what kinds of things does it show?" Harry pressed. "Is it, like." He thought about it, the kind of thing the word 'glimpsing' itself seemed to imply... "Is it a crystal ball kind of thing? Like, a real one? It shows us, I dunno, the future?"

Draco seemed to think about this, kicking his heel against the bottom of the exam table. "It doesn't show the future, exactly," he said. "Like, you can still--something could still happen. They wait until there's no reason to think the, um, pregnancy will go wrong on its own. But it still could, or, or there could still be--an accident, something. So it's not a guarantee, or anything."

None of this had been quite what Harry had been asking. Not that he knew, really, what he had been asking. It was still hard to think about this for more than a few seconds at a time, straight-on. At least not without getting lightheaded, things starting to get fuzzy, or far-away seeming...

"Okay," he said.

Before he could figure out how to approach the question again, or if he even wanted to try some more, a knock came at the exam room door, followed by a witch in bright yellow robes. This was, Harry figured, Draco's actual Healer, judging by the way all the Healers on this floor seemed to be in bright yellow instead of the lime green of elsewhere in the building.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Malfoy," she said. "Sorry to keep you waiting, we'd a bit of a situation in the ward today."

"That's alright," Draco said. "What sort of situation?"

"I really shouldn't--oh, hello, Professor," she said.

This, after a look around, seemed to be directed at Harry. He looked at the witch, who didn't, even once he'd racked his brain very hard, seem to be the slightest bit familiar. "Er, hi," he said.

"Yes, Harry was able to join me today," Draco said, in a conspiratorial tone that seemed to be for show, as far as Harry could tell. "Or, well, finally wore me down into letting him come. He's awful to live with right now. Overprotective, you know."

"I'm not overprotective," Harry protested.

"He's also been away too much lately, so I was punishing him too," Draco went on glibly. "But, considering we might be able to do the Glimpsing today, well..."

"I understand," said the Healer, flashing Harry a smile, but not the kind of smile strangers gave him in the streets. They must have known each other, definitely. She looked on the young side, so maybe she'd been a student of his? Probably that was it, he decided. The Healer consulted her clipboard, then said, "Things seem to be progressing alright on your end?"

"As far as I can tell," said Draco, with a quick glance at Harry. From this Harry took that everything else was progressing all right except for Harry. Well, not like that was something he hadn't already known...

"Any abdominal pain? Twinging, dull aches, deep cramping?"

"No."

"Any bleeding? Heavy, light, even very faint spotting?"

"No."

"Any sense of slipping or loosening in your lower abdomen?"

"No."

"I see you've had some dizziness. Have you experienced darkening vision, or any loss of consciousness?"

"No," said Draco, who didn't seem alarmed or even worried at all about this line of questioning, though Harry felt he ought to have been. Next thing, she'd be asking about if he'd ever started, like, having seizures or bleeding out his eyeballs, or something.

"He's, er, been having some insomnia," Harry offered, when the Healer fell silent in order to scribble down some notes.

"I have not," Draco said.

"Yeah, you have," Harry said. "He stays up so late it's early. Then he's up again before I am, every day."

This wasn't necessarily a hundred percent true, given Harry had only run into him at a weird hour once, which had been this morning. Still, though, it felt true, considering the circles under his eyes...over the past week, Draco had often sat up with him in the living room, reading out bits of his letters as he wrote them, and there hadn't been a single time he'd been the first to go up to bed...

"Only because of what you've put me through," Draco said. "And it's not as if I couldn't sleep if I wanted to. I just--"

"You just what?" Harry asked.

Draco scowled at him, a look that by itself probably counted as making a scene. "Alright, fine. I'm not sleeping much. Happy?"

"Incandescent," Harry said.

The Healer cleared her throat, so that they both looked at her. Possibly she was used to bickering, because next she said, mildly, "How many hours of sleep would you say you're getting per night? An average will do. Err on the low side, please."

"Um. Two or three hours on bad nights," Draco said, with a nasty look at Harry. "Four or five on better ones. But I nap a lot too! Just, whenever I'm tired enough..."

"Hmm." The Healer jotted some more things down, but her quill must have been spelled so only the writer could read what it had written, because Harry couldn't make heads or tails of it when he tried to peek. "Try for at least six hours daily. They needn't be consecutive if it's not working, but you should be resting as much as possible."

"I'll do my best," said Draco stiffly.

"Excellent. Any unusual stress?"

"No," said Draco, at the same time Harry said, "Yes."

When the Healer's eyebrows raised, Draco turned to Harry and quickly said, "Just because you think I can't function while you're at Hogwarts--!"

"I, er, don't think you can't function," Harry said, baffled for only a second before he recalled that Draco's Healer didn't know he could expect to remain more or less on house arrest for the near future, and so Draco must've thought he was about to blurt it all out...and honestly, he couldn't say he hadn't been about to at least refer to it. "I do think you're freaked out about stuff."

"What stuff?" Draco asked in a measured tone, but with an expression that suggested he dared Harry to say it, and that if he did, Draco would most likely hex him. Right here, in the Healer's office, knowing Harry didn't dare retaliate.

"For one thing, you're having a baby," Harry hissed. "And you're up all night every night worrying about it!"

He didn't think for a moment the baby was what Draco was up all night worrying about...but considering all the things the Healer had asked about, couldn't it be part of it? Harry almost preferred to think it was, so that everything Draco was worrying about wasn't completely Harry-shaped. Except then, if Draco was worried about baby things, then maybe Harry ought to be worried too. If that was the case, then he was doomed to be light-headed about his impending fatherhood all the time, wasn't he?

"I suppose," said Draco. "And now you're adding to it, aren't you? I said no scenes!"

"I'm not making a scene," said Harry, feeling this was really very unfair, even if their conversation did feel a little more heated than was strictly comfortable in front of the person meant to be evaluating Draco (and, to some extent, possibly Harry too). "I just wanted your Healer to know what's going on," he added, distantly aware there was a certain amount of hypocrisy in there somewhere, but also not really able to bring himself to care. "Er, sorry."

"--It's alright," Draco said, after seeming to bite off something nasty he'd been about to say. "I'm aware you just..."

"If I may," said the Healer, again as if she had to stand around listening to people have charged conversations all the time. Which probably she did, if she had to deal with, like, future parents all the time. Which was her job, and so...probably, right? "I'm going to prescribe you a mild Sleeping Draught. It will help you fall asleep, but shouldn't hinder waking. This particular composition includes a calming element, to help with any stress you may or may not be experiencing."

There were a few more questions after that, none quite as alarming as ones about bleeding and passing out and so on had been.

Finally, the Healer said, "I'd like to perform the exam now." She consulted her clipboard again and added, "Afterward, are you still interested in having the Glimpsing performed?"

"Yes," said Draco at once. Then he glanced at Harry, and seemed suddenly less sure. "I mean, we are, aren't we?"

"Yeah," said Harry. "I, er...yeah. Definitely."

"Then I'll begin," the Healer said.

*

Some part of Harry had more or less expected Draco to be told to take off his shirt, minimum. Possibly his trousers, too, in which case he'd end up in a hospital gown that was open at the back. Then the Healer would have him lie back, and would feel his stomach and things, which Harry hadn't yet got to see, but would now unless Draco sent him out of the room. 

As the Healer set aside her clipboard and raised her wand at a fully-clothed Draco, it occurred to him that this was an obsolete set of expectations, most likely left over from another of Aunt Petunia's soaps.

She cast a wordless spell or series of them at Draco, and then...

A light bloomed from inside him, sudden and startling. It hadn't been there before, and then it was, glowing strong and so blue-ly that for a moment Harry shielded his eyes. When he lowered his hand again a moment later, the light was glowing a little less brightly, but hadn't got any less blue.

"What's that?" he asked.

"What's what?" Draco asked, a little sharply.

The Healer didn't so much as glance at Harry, or even at Draco. She seemed to be looking only at the light. "What you're seeing is the visual representation of his magic. I'm surprised you can see it; most people can't without at least a few months' training."

"Oh," said Harry, a bit uneasy at being told he was apparently good at yet another random thing he'd never heard of before. "Why're you looking at his magic right now? Aren't you meant to be looking at the, er..."

"Magic is interwoven with life," said the Healer, and abruptly Harry had some idea of why he could see, untrained, what other people couldn't. He'd walked with the dead in the Forest, hadn't he? Died himself, and spent some few minutes there before deciding to come back? The uneasiness now seemed to have become an inevitability, a known but still not entirely comfortable thing. "They're the same, to some extent. For witches and wizards, at least."

"Oh," Harry said again. "But why is it--"

"What are we looking at?" Draco asked, less sharply now but rather more testy. His arms were wrapped around his stomach, a gesture that did nothing to prevent that blue light from shining through. "I think I've got the right to know, considering!"

"There's, er, a light," Harry said.

"A light," Draco repeated.

"Shining out from you," Harry said. "It's blue. And..." He didn't know how else to explain what else it was. The feeling that came from out of it, so that it wasn't like looking at a street lamp, or even a spotlight. It was a Draco-feeling sort of light. It had to mean other things, too, or else the Healer wouldn't have called it up in the first place. After all, what did Draco's personality have to do with whether or not everything was going alright with the baby? Harry couldn't see those other things, though, or didn't know how to read them. "It's, er, nice," he concluded, feeling as if this were not the best explanation in the world, not even a terribly good one, but would have to do.

Draco, meanwhile, was looking at him like he was an idiot. This was at least better than Draco looking at him in some of the other ways he'd looked at him recently. "What's it blue for?" he asked, wrinkling his nose. It wasn't quite clear which of them he was asking until he said, "I was a Slytherin in school, you know."

The Healer gave a little laugh, as if nothing about this conversation were out of the ordinary, as if they could be any two people in for a checkup. It was not a way Harry was used to being treated, outside of close friends and family; he'd gotten the strong impression it still wasn't, even now. Was this the way all his former students acted around him? More people who knew him as something other than the Savior of the wizarding world, a person instead of something they could shove up on a pedestal and try to punish him whenever he didn't stay where he'd been put?

"It's unrelated to House colors, of course," she said, smiling. "Though there's a range of colors the light can be, there's no proven meaning to any of them, and no one better than any other."

"I suppose," Draco said. "I'd still have rather--what's happening now?"

What was happening now was that the Healer had kept casting as she talked about this. Draco's light had been joined by something else. Harry couldn't take his eyes off it, not until he thought he ought to check to see if the Healer was still smiling, and saw that she was, and then looked back.

"There's a second light now," he said. It gave the sense not of something that had just appeared, but one that had just been revealed, as if a curtain that had been drawn in front of it had now been opened. "It's sort of...a lot smaller than yours, but attached? To you, I mean."

"Attached to me," Draco repeated faintly.

"Yeah," Harry said, and didn't say that for a moment he thought he'd seen a flash of something else within this new light, a familiar shape curled in on itself, hidden for now but not forever...he squinted, to try to see it again, but there was no use. All there was was the light, which seemed to not be quite its own thing yet, its edges seemed to merge and meld with that of the greater light. "It's, er, sort of an purple-y color."

"Purple-y," Draco repeated again. "I sincerely hope that doesn't mean you're red," he added, in a tone that suggested there'd never even been a House Cup win so unfair as Harry (possibly) having gotten a Gryffindor color when Draco hadn't got a Slytherin one.

"I dunno," said Harry, having no interest in what color he was or wasn't. He couldn't stop looking...

He didn't know how long he'd been looking when the light faded out again--not as if they'd been snuffed out, but as if the curtain that had been hanging in front of them before had been pulled out in front of them once again.

"Everything seems to be progressing normally with you as well as the baby," the Healer said, with a bright smile. "I see no reason for any concern."

"So can we still do the, er, thing?" Harry asked, when Draco, who seemed bafflingly tongue-tied at that moment, sent him a panicked look that seemed almost to be asking him to be the one to ask.

"I see no reason to delay the Glimpsing," she said.

"If you still want to?" Harry said to Draco, who now looked a little faint even though he hadn't been the one seeing the light, feeling it seep into him, flooding his chest with a curling sort of warmth...

"Yes," Draco said. "Yes, of course."

*

They were led down the hall again, this time to an unmarked door with no window to see in by. It opened into a cozy little room with a sofa and a few armchairs, all set in a half-circle around a raised platform. Upon the platform sat a large stone bowl that resembled nothing so much as a Pensieve--yet it could not have been one, for as they passed it Harry saw that holes of varying shapes and sizes had been carved into it, so that any memory placed in it would only have wisped out of it again.

In the hall, the Healer had been joined by another witch, who wore green robes with a badge on the front that, if Harry was remembering right, indicated that she floated between floors to cast the more complicated sorts of spells. For a minute, they conferred in low voices, until they touched the tips of their wands together, and a spark of light seemed to pass between one and the other. And now it was the other witch who closed the door leading into the hallway, cutting off the distant hospital sounds more fully than any other door at St Mungo's had ever seemed to, in Harry's recollection.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen," she said, beaming. "Are we excited?"

Harry abruptly found himself wondering what it meant if he wasn't sure if he were excited or not.

"Extremely," Draco said, with a sidelong look at him. "Alright, Harry?"

"Yeah," Harry said, though in fact he felt as if he were on the verge of a bout of afternoon sickness, which might or might not have been a thing. "I'm just, er--a bit nervous, I guess."

"Perfectly normal," said the witch, in an unnaturally chipper sort of voice that seemed to Harry to be the tone most people reserved for extremely fluffy kittens. "Now, have you any other children, or have you ever attended a Glimpsing before?"

There was no way she didn't know they didn't have any other kids, as often as the Prophet reported on every aspect of Harry's life they could get a handle on. 

Maybe Draco was annoyed by the fakeness of this, too, because he made a motion with his head that seemed as if it wanted to be an eyeroll when it grew up, and said, "Obviously not. It would have been all over the papers, if we had."

"Of course," said the witch, sounding slightly less chipper about things now. "Well then, I'll run you through the basics."

"Please," said Draco, so politely Harry might have imagined the near-eyeroll from before if it weren't that he definitely hadn't.

"You may sit anywhere around the Perceptieve. When you're ready, I'll cast the spell-- Futuris Infans, otherwise called the Glimpsing. It will take a minute or two to take full effect. Once it has, it will last for seven to ten minutes. The spell cannot be ended early, but you may leave at any time." Before Harry could gear up to ask why they would want to do that, the witch continued: "It's not uncommon to become overwhelmed, and no shame to be found in withdrawing."

"Or to be disappointed," Draco, who had inched closer to Harry at some point since they'd got here, said in a low voice into his ear. "If you had your heart set on something you're not getting."

Harry, who was pretty sure what they were getting was a baby, didn't have much to say back, other than, "Shhhh, I'm trying to hear."

"Once the effects of the spell have faded, you may remain in this room for as long as you wish without fear of interruption," said the witch. "If you're in need of further instructions from your Healer, or find yourself with any questions, please stop by reception on your way out. If you have any prescriptions, they'll be waiting for you there as well."

Draco's sleeping potion, Harry thought. They'd have to make sure they didn't forget to pick it up on the way out.

"Now, before we begin: Do you have any questions?" asked the witch.

"None that aren't about to be answered," said Draco, at the same time Harry said, "Er, you're not going to stay for it, are you?"

He'd abruptly found that he didn't want her to; that whatever this was going to be--and he was starting to have a fairly good idea, now, despite how poorly anyone had explained it to him--it wasn't the sort of thing you wanted random people sticking around for.

"I won't, no," said the witch. "It's against regulations--and the spell has the potential to go a bit sideways when uninvolved persons are present, anyway."

"Okay, good," Harry said, firmly; he didn't know what 'a bit sideways' meant, but wasn't keen to find out, either. "And, er, thanks."

"You're most welcome," said the witch. "Shall we begin?"

"This century, if you don't mind," said Draco, though not as gittily as he could've, if he'd really been trying.

*

Once Harry and Draco were situated in front of the Perceptieve--Draco sat first, and Harry sat next to him on the sofa, only fleetingly thinking that it might have been better to choose a further-away armchair instead--the witch cast the spell. It seemed rather anticlimatic, all things considered, but so were most spells that didn't have an immediate and dramatic visible effect, and even some that did. In this case, the witch pointed her wand at the Perceptieve and said, "Futuris Infans," turning to point her wand at each of them in turn before she had finished the incantation.

"There," she said, with a low satisfaction that said something, somewhere, actually was happening, even if they hadn't spotted it yet. "Congratulations, gentlemen."

She disappeared back into the hallway. Behind her, the door closed. The lights also seemed to be dimming, or perhaps had been dim to begin with--or maybe it was just that there hadn't been another source of light in here before, and now there was: it didn't seem to have come from the Perceptieve, but from Draco himself, the same blue-and-purple light from before...only this time, instead of staying where it was, it split into twenty or thirty smaller, fuzzier lights, which bobbed toward the Perceptieve and then in through its holes.

"Can you see the lights this time?" Harry asked in a low voice. There was something about the feel of the room that seemed like it would reject yelling, or even talking in a normal tone.

"I--yes," said Draco, a little unsurely, and also too loudly, as if he hadn't got the memo about the feel of the room. The last of the lights had entered the Perceptieve, which now glowed purplish out the top. The lighting of the room had dimmed some more, so that all the light that was in there now seemed to have come from it. "I'm not sure why I'd need to be able to see lights when we're meant to see--"

There came a sound, high and, for a moment, refusing to take a shape that made sense inside Harry's head. Then it came again, and he knew what it was, even as the hairs stood up on his forearms: It was the sound of a child's laughter, happy and carefree.

"Is it meant to be a bit, er," Harry said, and tried to think of a word that wasn't 'creepy.'

"Ominous?" Draco asked, which at least showed they were on the same page about disembodied laughter. His voice matched the lowness of Harry's as he added, "I really don't know. No one's ever said--oh."

Within the Perceptieve, some shape was forming, the reason for Draco's caught breath. Harry leaned forward, to try to see...and for a moment, all there was to see was a sort of purple-y wispyness, the same thing you might see when you looked into a filled Pensieve...but the wisps were coming together now, twisting around and through each other, until a picture had formed...

It wasn't like looking into a memory, not really. For one thing, Harry's surroundings (on a sofa at St Mungo's, next to Draco) remained the same, he didn't have the feeling of having been transported anywhere; and for another thing, it was, just...it was...

It was something different to anything Harry had seen in similar ways before. This was something else. Something new. Not something someone was remembering for you, nor something you had seen in a mirror's reflection because your heart wanted it so badly. Nothing like that, but, instead...

When he leaned forward, to look through the nearest opening in the Perceptieve, what he saw there was...

A little boy, maybe six or seven years old. He had his head tipped back, and was laughing; the reason, maybe, for a sound that no longer seemed very creepy at all.

The Perceptieve turned. Now there was a toddler, seeming to walk toward them on unsteady legs. He wasn't laughing, this time, looked very serious indeed about getting to wherever he was going, green eyes flashing with intent under messy blond hair...then he stumbled, and fell, and Harry's heart seemed to fall with him, only to rise again when he got back up again, flashing even more stubborn...

The Perceptieve turned. Now the boy was older, gangly and Hogwarts age, a third or fourth year maybe, grinning crookedly at them with his hands shoved into his pockets...he'd the sort of chin that looked as if it could cut glass, when raised; he still had Harry's mother's eyes.

"Is this real?" Harry asked, and, once he had asked, found he was afraid to know what the answer was, if it was anything that wasn't yes.

"Um." Draco's voice sounded thick. Not hesitant, exactly. More like dazed. "Like I said, it's not showing us the future--not directly, anyhow. It's just...showing us what should be. If, you know, nothing happens to prevent it..."

The Perceptieve turned. Now the boy was younger again, five or six years old maybe, grinning widely at them and pointing to the gap at the front of his teeth...

"Is it ever wrong?" Harry asked. Part of him wondered if he ought to ask, if they ought to even be talking at all. Couldn't it wait? But another part of him thought that it wasn't like they'd gone to see a film, wasn't like there was anyone else here to be bothered by them...and somehow, it just felt as if it were not just alright, but actually right to say whatever came into his head, right now.

"I--no," said Draco. He squeezed Harry's hand, which was the first moment Harry realized that was happening too.

"Are you sure?" Harry pressed. He had the feeling that it wouldn't be a very good thing to get too attached to the person he thought he was seeing, if he turned out to be someone different...

"Mmm, well," said Draco, in the tone Harry had come to learn meant 'sit back, I'm going to explain wizarding stuff, and you're going to like it if you know what's good for you.' "The only times I've heard of the Glimpsing being wrong was always something like with Blaise."

"...Blaise?"

"Zabini," Draco said. "He, um. The Glimpsing showed the Zabinis that they were getting a boy. Then when he was born, they thought they'd got a girl instead. Only a few years later, they found out they actually did have a boy, after all. So they went to Mungo's and had it all fixed, and anyway the Glimpsing was right after all."

"Oh," Harry said. The Perceptieve turned, showing a boy a few years older than they'd yet seen, and on the cusp of manhood. Those eyes weren't Harry's mother's eyes, Harry realized, for the first time; or, they weren't only her eyes. They were Harry's eyes. His and Draco's son was going to have his eyes. "I don't remember hearing any of that at school."

"Yes, because you always paid so much attention to anyone other than your friends," Draco scoffed, which was the moment Harry became aware Draco's thumb was stroking the side of his hand. "They kept it all pretty quiet anyway. I mean, it was the nineties," he added, as if this cleared up anything at all.

The Perceptieve turned, now showed a baby lying in a cot, so small and red that Harry felt it must have been a new one indeed...his eyes, this time, were gray enough for there to be a question, except that, looking at him, Harry felt he'd have known him anywhere, with eyes of any color in the rainbow...

"So we're definitely having a boy, then?" Harry said, because that was what he'd wanted to know, confusing stories aside. The Perceptieve turned. Now the new baby who had been a boy on the cusp of manhood was a man in fact. "One with my eyes and your, er, whole entire face?"

Draco laughed, a sound as low as their voices had been, this whole time. "Does that bother you?" he asked teasingly. Then, when Harry didn't answer, and more seriously: "Wait-- does it bother you? That he's going to look like me?"

"No," Harry said, right away this time, because he wouldn't--he'd never judge a kid for looking like one of his parents, no matter who the parent was in the question. "Not like my hair doesn't make up for your face, anyway."

The Perceptieve turned. As blond as their son was going to be, there was no denying where the wildness of his hair had come from, in every glimpse of him they'd been given where he had any hair to speak of...

"It's the other way around, I think," Draco said, lightly and not, and in the same soft tone both of them had been using almost since the spell had been cast.

"Oh, so my face makes up for your hair, then?"

"Naturally."

The Perceptieve turned. Harry drank in what it showed him, again and again and again. There was a feeling in his chest, which had been growing from his very first glimpse. It was warm, and it was huge. It felt as if it was bigger than he was, as if it dwarfed him entirely and he only lived within it, somewhere near its very center. Part of him wasn't sure he would survive it. Did all parents feel this way? As if their whole heart had been carved out of their chest, and now belonged to someone who wasn't even here yet? Who wasn't even properly a person yet, no matter what Harry thought they were seeing...

Harry glanced at Draco, who was wiping his eyes with his free hand, and thought maybe they did. He didn't know how to ask about that, though, if it was even the kind of thing you could ask another person...

"Do you think," he started, and then stopped, too stunned by the new question he'd just thought of to continue with it.

"What?" Draco asked, turning to him in that dim light; there was something strange and almost even humbling about that, having Draco's actual full attention while the Perceptieve still turned...

"Do you think my parents might've done this?" Harry finished, because now that the thought had occurred to him, and now that he knew what the Glimpsing was, he couldn't not ask. It was almost like breathing, something your lungs did unless you held your breath, or something else stopped them...something that forced itself out of you without consideration for anything else... "You know, when my mum was going to have me?"

"Yes," Draco said at once. "Of course they did." Too quickly, Harry thought. He'd answered too quickly. How could he possibly know? There was no way Draco Malfoy could know for sure what Harry's parents had or hadn't done, back then. "It's an ancient spell," Draco continued as the Perceptieve turned. "Everyone has the Glimpsing done, once it's safe to. Everyone. If your parents hadn't, there'd still be gossip about it. Especially since you're, um, you."

"Okay," Harry said. He wasn't entirely certain whether he ought to believe this. He found he believed it anyway, all but entirely. It was another warmth inside his chest, a new aching strangeness. Before he'd even been born, his parents had seen what he would be...they'd known him, had a glimpse further along than the fifteen months he'd had them...and maybe they'd felt this way, too, from the moment they first glimpsed anything of him...or maybe even before, from when they'd first known he existed at all...they'd felt all these same things for him.

The Perceptieve turned. Now what they were seeing wasn't a man, wasn't a boy either, or wasn't yet. The light from before seemed to have gathered together once again. Within it was a shape, curled in that particular way...it became clearer than it had been in the brief glimpse Harry had seen of it before, so that there was no doubting what it was. Or at least, there wasn't for him.

"Is that..." Draco said, sounding actually unsure, for the first time.

"What it looks like right now? Yeah, I think so."

It was much better, Harry thought, than an ultrasound scan would have been. It was in color, and not fuzzy at all, so that they could see every detail...

"Is it normal for its head to be that big?" Draco asked.

"I think so," Harry said again, very slowly, wanting to be sure for himself with every syllable before he spoke it. "They weren't going to let us do it today if everything wasn't alright, right?"

"That's true," said Draco, relief seeming to warm his voice. His hand squeezed Harry's again. Harry could hardly bring himself to mind, though there were, he knew distantly, reasons he ought to put a stop to this much, at least.

The Perceptieve turned again, and a few more times, showing what their baby had been before now, and what he'd grow into, in the next weeks and months, until...

The Glimpsing ended as gently as it had begun: with the bright peal of a child's laughter, and a glowing purple-y light that bobbed its way slowly back to where it had been before.

*

Reality didn't seem to rush back in until the elevator doors opened on the ground floor. Then it rushed in with a vengeance. It couldn't really have done otherwise: there were roughly ten reporters between them and the Apparition Point.

Next to him, Draco, holding the little bag with his sleeping draught in it, stiffened, which was somehow something Harry didn't have to be touching or even looking at him to know.

In the next moment, Harry was out of the elevator.

"Mr. Potter, do you have any comment on--"

"Not today," Harry said loudly, heading toward the Apparition Point and dragging Draco along with him.

"Mr. Malfoy, do you have--"

"No comment!" Harry said, even more loudly.

Then they were at the wiggling yellow line, and then they were beyond it, and in the moment it took Harry to fix the cottage at 1 Hummingbird Lane in his mind, he remembered something else he'd been meant to do, at some point...and there was no time like the present, was there...

"I'll Side-Along you," he said, for Draco's ears only. "Buggeration!" he said, for Teddy, so loudly it would probably be tomorrow's headline.

Then he Apparated, himself and Draco and some third someone through the squeezing dark, until, together, they landed in the middle of the living room.

A fluffing sort of sound came from near the window: Herbert, peeking his head out from beneath his wing to glare at them, then shuffling himself about to get comfortable again.

"Judgy, isn't he," Harry said, and then realized he was holding Draco's hand again--must have been the one who'd started it, this time; he actually did sort of remember grabbing Draco by the nearest part to get them out of St Mungo's faster--and quickly dropped it. "Er, did you come through it alright?"

"Come through what?" Draco asked, with a distant sort of expression that suggested he, at least, might not have come back to reality quite yet.

"Apparating? It was alright? You didn't leave any parts behind you, or anything?" Harry asked, suddenly rather anxious about this, given he couldn't remember the last time he'd Side-Alonged anyone, but could absolutely remember the last time he'd Splinched himself, even if he hadn't actually noticed when it had happened.

"Oh," said Draco. "I--yes, all of me's here." He glanced around the living room, blinking, then looked at Harry. "We're having a boy," he said.

"Yeah," Harry said, very softly. There wasn't, really, any other way he could have said it in.

"Suppose we ought to start talking about names again, before he joins us," Draco continued.

"...Yeah," Harry said. It wasn't something he'd thought about before, but he did now. "Maybe Jack?" he suggested, as the first one to come to mind.

Draco stiffened again; no, Draco froze. The distant expression was gone between one moment and the next, replaced by a piercing one that was incredibly uncomfortable even before turned on Harry, and even worse then.

"Harry," he breathed, "do you--do you remember liking that name for a boy?"

"Er," Harry said. "No?"

"Oh," Draco said.

"I just, er, like it," Harry said, understanding then that there must have been a conversation, at an earlier time than this, and Jack had been his own suggesting, during it;  and it had come up again now because whatever that other version of him had been like, they were both still Harry, who automatically liked any name the Dursleys would have called common...

"Oh," Draco said again. He didn't seem distant anymore, or intense either; he'd slumped a little, and looked a bit deflated. It was not the way anyone ought to look on a day like this one.

"Sorry," Harry said, for a lack of anything better to be said, and made to shove his hands into his pockets, which got awkward when he encountered the fact that his robes didn't have any when his trouser pockets would have been.

Draco looked at him for a long moment, unhappiness seeming to twist at the corners of his mouth. "It's fine," he said, finally. "Or at least it's not your fault." He seemed to draw himself up, chin coming up too, a now-familiar pointy weapon. "Now, can you go away for a while, please? I've got to fire-call my mother. I promised her I would, if we had it done today..."

"Right," Harry said. "Alright. Going."

*

He drifted around for a bit, first to his room to change, then up to the third floor and the room where the Mirror of Erised had been. It was the first time he'd gone there since the first of November; he was surprised and not at all surprised to see that the Mirror itself had gone. What was left was everything else, including the baby things in the far corner...the cot, in which he'd someday lay sleeping...in which, later on, he might stand up in, and bang on with his little fists, waiting for someone to come lift him out...the little dresser that went with it, painted white to match it, which would hold all his little shirts and trousers and things...and maybe that third thing was a changing table, or something?

That stuff didn't belong up here, among the dust, Harry decided. It ought to be in the nursery. But he only got it all halfway to the door when he thought to wonder if Draco would want it there. The nursery was, after all, attached to Harry's room. Maybe Draco'd prefer to have all that stuff in his room, when the time came that it was needed. Or maybe they'd switch rooms, by then? Or--Harry didn't even know if he'd still be here in May, did he?

In the end, he didn't really know, and didn't want to think too much about it either, and so he put everything back where it had been and went back downstairs. Draco's voice could be heard from the drawing room, still. Figuring he must still be talking to his mum, Harry headed out the back end of the house for a walk. It was too cold to stay gone very long, too dismal and gray to even really enjoy it, but he stayed out long enough, anyway, that he figured Draco really ought to be done.

Only when Harry got back to the house, Draco was still talking. How long did fire-calls to people's mums usually take? Harry didn't know, except that it must have been almost an hour...none of his own fire-calls had ever taken this long. Though that had always been stuff like, "you're late for training, Potter, get your arse over here," or secret conversations that had to be short because one end or the other of you was liable to be found out at any moment, or unsecret conversations that were short because one of you was making sure the other one was home before you stepped through for a visit...really, didn't it make a lot more sense to have your actual longwinded conversations in person? 

He would, he decided, go back upstairs and move the cot and stuff into the nursery after all. If Draco didn't like it, well, he could move it all back, or ask Harry to, or whatever. If he even, you know, noticed anytime soon. Did he ever even go into that room anymore, now he wasn't hiding any of the things that were in it?

Except that before he could get all the way up the stairs, Draco's voice, which had been a soft murmur, became something quite a bit louder, to the point where it could very nearly be made out from rooms away. Harry hesitated a few steps up, and then turned around and headed back into the living room, edging closer to the door to the drawing room. He wouldn't, he decided, go to a lot of effort to try to listen in...if he could manage it by casually standing on this side of the door, no one could really expect him not to hear things...

He didn't even have to get all the way to the door before he could hear Draco saying, "--not going to. No."

There came Narcissa Malfoy's voice, not as loud; muffled a bit, maybe, by the fireplace, or maybe she just wasn't talking as loudly as her son was. 

"Well, stop asking me then," Draco said, sounding really very irate. "The answer's still no, it's going to stay no--" Another low murmur, and then: "It's not like that. It's--things are getting better. I think. I mean, they definitely are! Absolutely."

The murmuring seemed to go on for a longer time, now. Harry shuffled closer to the drawing room, risked a quick peek around the doorframe. A fire was going in the fireplace, of course; Draco was standing before it, his back to Harry. His hands, down by his sides, were clenched into fists.

"Mother," he said after a minute of this, and must have been interrupting, because then he had to say it again: "Mother. Will you listen? I am not going to do that. I won't--I'm staying here. It's not a negotiation either!" More murmuring, or the attempt thereof, because it took only a second or two before Draco snapped, "I don't care. No, I don't--I don't care, I--Mother! Listen to me! I mean it!"

More murmuring, this a bit louder than the rest, so that Harry could almost make out what Narcissa Malfoy was saying about him. Because whatever they were talking about, it almost had to have something to do with him, didn't it?

"I would, if you'd just--ugh," said Draco, a sound of frustration that seemed like the sort of sound he was more likely to make in Harry's direction, these days. More murmuring, sharp and pointed, which seemed to go on for a while; and when his mum stopped talking, this time, it was a few moments before Draco started again--and when he did, his voice was very cold and almost scarily calm. "I was only calling you to tell you about your grandson, you know. I was not asking your opinion about my marriage. I didn't--no. I wasn't hitching the Malfoy star to his when I married him. You ought to know that already. And I'm not going to unhitch it now, just because he's--I wouldn't leave him if he were sick. I'm not going to do it just because he doesn't--" As measured as Draco's voice was, his shoulders heaved up and down as he talked, as if he were breathing heavily indeed. "I am not faithless," he said, still coldly, but so loaded with venom that it felt like a slap in the face even from behind him. "And that's all I have to say on the subject, or ever will. Goodbye, mother."

Harry's instincts at this moment said to get as far the fuck away from the drawing room as possible. As quick as Draco doused the fire and came storming out, though, he didn't manage to get farther than Herbert's perch by the time Draco arrived in the living room.

"What are you lurking around here for?" Draco snapped, as if he hadn't just been professing his undying...something, a moment ago.

"Er," Harry said. "I'm feeding Herbert?" There was in fact an Owl Treat in his hand, grabbed up the moment before Draco had appeared in the living room. He poked the treat at Herbert's face, and got glared at for his troubles. It was very clear Herbert had no interest in bonding, at least not in the middle of the afternoon, but might very well have an interest in snacking on one of Harry's disemboweled fingers, if pressed.

"Fine," Draco said, and, scarlet-faced, went over to the Pensieve and began transferring more memories into it in long silver strands.

"I," Harry said, with no real idea of what he was going to say, but aware that he really probably ought to say something, "er..."

"I know," Draco said. "I promise you, I am aware you have no intention of ever looking at any of my memories. I just--it's the only thing that's working right now, alright? So shut your stupid trap before I shut it for you."

"I wasn't going to say anything about it," Harry said, and then, because even if Draco was upset, he was also being an enormous arsehole: "You tosser."

Draco snorted, and seemed to go a little less stiff than he'd been. He stayed at the Pensieve stirring things around for a few more minutes, and got less stiff still. When he holstered his wand, he said, "I don't know how much of that you heard, and I don't care either. I, just--I don't want to talk about it, alright?"

"Talk about what?" Harry said.

Draco snorted again, and when he finally turned around, he'd have looked almost friendly, if he hadn't also looked sort of...resigned? But what about?

"Did you actually want something?" he asked. "Are we going to have a row about your cloak now?"

It wasn't that Harry hadn't thought of his cloak at all, since they'd got home. He'd barely been halfway up the stairs, a little while ago, when he'd tried to Summon it, on the off chance it wasn't actually in Draco's vault after all. But it hadn't come to him, and that it hadn't didn't seem to matter as much as it would have earlier in the day. It wasn't that he didn't care anymore so much as that it felt like something that had happened a while ago, between one state of being and the next. And that was more or less why he said, "Er, wasn't planning on it. Unless you wanted to?"

"Fuck no," Draco said. "I've had enough rows to last the month, thanks. Maybe even til Christmas, if you don't mind."

"Sure," Harry said.

A minute later, Draco came away from the Pensieve, sat down in his Leaning Chair, and leaned back in it with a long sigh. Then he grimaced, reached behind himself, and came out with a bottle full of orange-y sleeping draught. He set it on the nearest shelf, with an expression that caused Harry to wonder, for a moment, if Draco were actually going to take it, or if he was going to, like, pour it down the sink in increments, instead...but that was a bit stupid, wasn't it, since there was no reason Draco could have for not wanting to get his sleep? It was the kind of thing Hermione would call projection, probably.

Draco leaned back in his chair again, and closed his eyes. "What a fucking day," he said.

"Yeah," Harry agreed. "Hey, Draco..."

Draco's eyes slitted open at him. "Yes?"

"Do you want to, maybe," Harry said, because something, some restlessness seemed to be building in him, maybe had been for a few minutes now, or maybe ever since they'd gotten home, and he'd only just noticed... "I dunno, go somewhere?"

"Go somewhere?" Draco repeated, sitting up straight again, eyes completely open now. "What were you thinking?"

Possibly Harry hadn't thought this through very much, before he'd suggested it. All he'd been thinking, really, was that Draco Malfoy had cried a little, getting to see what his baby that was half-Harry's was going to look like; he'd then gone on to come home and get really quite shirty with his mother, all on Harry's account. Had sort of...not only defended him, but taken his side very firmly indeed. Draco Malfoy had. Of all people. And he was the only other person who'd gotten to see all that Harry had gotten to see, today...

"I thought we could go get something to eat," he said. "Out at a pub, or something. The same place from last time, maybe?" he suggested. "Or somewhere else, if you want. Teddy'll be out a while longer, won't he? It's not even very late yet..."

It wasn't. As long as the day had felt like, it was barely even on the verge of getting dark yet.

Draco said, slowly and while searching Harry's face what seemed to be pretty intensely, "He won't be back at Hogwarts until after midnight, probably. Planning to make the most of his freedom, I hear."

"Alright," Harry said, having heard much the same thing in his own last letter from Teddy. "Then, we could--if you want to? Dunno about you, but I'm getting hungry...and we already had our supper, earlier..."

Eating shepherd's pie together at three that morning seemed somehow much longer ago than arguments over invisibility cloaks. Maybe it did for Draco, too. In any case, he stared at Harry's face for a long few more moments, and then smiled at him.

"Yes," he said. "I'd like that."