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 Eleven

On the first of December, Harry came into the living room sometime before lunch to discover every surface covered in boxes. Long rectangular ones on the floor, large square ones on the couch, small twitchy ones stacked on top of the Leaning Chairs, and no Draco in sight to explain any of it.

There was a Draco in hearing, however; just as Harry leaned down to have a look inside the nearest floor box, there came a thumping sound from up the stairs, along with some muffled swearing. By the time Harry got over to the bottom of the stairs, all of this was even louder than it had started out as being.

"What're you doing?" he called.

There was no point in going up the stairs to see, as half a dozen more boxes were now on their way down. They seemed to be under the sway of a not particularly good levitation spell, or perhaps merely an overextended one: instead of gliding smoothly down the steps, they floated jerkily down, occasionally thudding against this stair or that one, or even sideways to thunk against the banister instead.

Behind them marched Draco, red-faced and a little shiny. He must have been casting that spell nonverbally, because the only words coming out of his mouth were variations on 'bugger' and 'fuck.'

When the boxes had joined everything else in the living room, Harry said, "Did you ever think of throwing them down the stairs? Might be faster."

"Yes, and less likely to destroy the contents too," said Draco, glaring at him. "Your joke's neither new nor funny. I won't bother asking you if you remember it. You come up with the same one every year, and every fucking year I have to inform you it's not, in fact, a Potter original."

"Er," Harry said, getting that this still was more or less some way of asking, but not getting whether he was expected to answer or not. "What's all this, then?"

"What do you think it is?" Draco asked, not grumpily now, but in that same mild, curious way he'd started asking Harry things, the last week or so. Did Harry remember what they'd liked on the menu, the last time they'd been out to this pub? Did he recall what they'd paid for the last broomstick they'd brought? Was this weather more like last winter, or the winter before, did he think? It was never about important things, baby's names or whatever else; it was never quite pointed enough that Harry could seem to justify getting annoyed about it.

"I dunno," Harry said, not sure whether or not he actually wanted to be annoyed about it, in fact. "Stuff from up in the attic, I guess."

It was clear that it wasn't stuff from up on the third floor, as the boxes were all either too small or too wrongly shaped...

"Yes, but what kind of stuff?" Draco said.

Feeling abruptly that irritableness actually was around the corner if this continued very much longer, or guessing games replaced the occasional question in general, Harry said, "How should I know?"

"Harry," said Draco, with enough of a mocking lilt to it that the loaded part of this might actually be over now. "It's December now. What's coming up? Think about it."

At first the only thing Harry could think was they had a baby coming up. But he couldn't say so, and that wasn't until May besides. It was December, and...

It was December.

"It's Christmas stuff, yeah?" he said, and then, before Draco could ask any more questions, whether straight-up or more sideways ones: "And no, I don't remember it. If I do, you'll be first to know."

Draco looked at him. "Alright," he said, no longer mocking at all. "Where did you want to start?"

"I dunno," Harry said, looking around at all the boxes again. "What exactly are we doing?"

Draco looked at him some more.

"What?" Harry said.

"Really?"

"'Really,' what?" Harry said, feeling very much as if he didn't deserve the level of incredulity Draco had put into that statement.

"'What are we doing'?" Draco said, a little mockingly again. "It's the first of December and we've a thousand boxes stacked everywhere. We're decorating, obviously."

Part of Harry felt he ought to have known this. That he ought to have picked up on it without having to ask. It had been right there to be picked up on, after all. "Oh," he said.

"We always do it together, the first Saturday or Sunday in December," Draco said. "I tried to do it by myself one year, as a surprise. It didn't go well, meaning you more or less had to rescue me when you got home; the lights had got me all tangled up. If you hadn't arrived when you did, I might have wound up hanging by my feet from the window. I'd like to pretend it didn't happen, but you're insufferably smug about reminding me of it every year."

"Okay," Harry said again, taking this in. It was another thing Draco seemed to be doing more of: telling him more things, without asking if he wanted to know them. He couldn't have said if he did or didn't, anymore. "So where do we usually start, then?"

"Most years we come up with a new plan of attack first. It helps to be unpredictable."

"Sure," Harry said, and quickly thought about what kinds of Christmas stuff they might have, other than apparently murderous lights. "Have we got a tree? Or are we, er, waiting on one to be delivered, or something?"

"We did trees fifth last year," said Draco thoughtfully. "I suppose their time has come."

"So we've got one, then?" Harry craned his head around, but there didn't seem to be a tree anywhere. Just boxes and more boxes.

"We've got three."

"Where're they at?" Outside, maybe, he thought...but Draco looked a little too amused at him right now for it not to be something more like... "Oh," Harry said, noticing the long boxes on the living room floor again, and how there were in fact three of them. "They're boxed up."

"Yes, Harry," said Draco in a mild way which somehow gave the impression the mockery wasn't going to come to an end anytime soon.

Whatever, Harry didn't care. Something else had just occurred to him. "Wait, have we got plastic ones?"

"...Have we got what now?" Draco asked.

Harry barely heard him. The idea of having a plastic Christmas tree had filled him with an odd sort of excitement. He hadn't known wizards even had that kind of thing. The trees at Hogwarts and the Burrow had always been live ones as far as he'd been able to tell. The Dursleys had always had live trees too, at least up through the Christmas Harry had been ten. Aunt Petunia had liked to turn her nose up about the neighbors down the street she suspected of putting up plastic trees...it had been enough to make Harry sort of desperately want to get a good look at one...

He pointed his wand at the nearest of the long boxes along the floor. The flaps at the top swung open, so that, walking closer, he got a glimpse of miles of green pine needles, which gave the distinct impression of wanting to burst out of the box.

"Harry," Draco said warningly, with a light touch above his elbow. "I wouldn't get too close, just yet."

"Er, why not?" Harry asked

As if it had heard him, the tree shivered inside its box, a violent rustling that went on for about a minute before it calmed down again. A piney smell seemed to fill the room, getting stronger and stronger as it continued shuddering, and only tapering off slightly when it went still again.

So definitely not a plastic tree. But then what...

Feeling too interested in this now to be very disappointed, Harry inched a bit closer to the box, lighting the end of his wand for a better look in...

Something whipped out of the box and slapped at him, so quickly he didn't realize what else it had done until a moment later, when he looked down at his empty wand hand, and then back at Draco, who had laughed once, very loudly, and was now grinning very sneerily, as if he couldn't wait for an excuse to do it again.

"I think...the tree took my wand," Harry said, and then, feeling stupid for having said so, turned back to the box to double-check: And yes, he could see a fuzzy sort of light way down in there now, faint and distant, green from having to shine past who knew how many pine needles. "Your fucking tree stole my wand!" he said, turning back to Draco again.

"My fucking tree now, is it," snickered Draco, and then, to something past Harry: "Oh, no, you don't." He lashed out with his wand, causing the tree to shudder once again, and to retract the branch which had been reaching toward them. "Suppose we'll have to do this one first. Once you've got your wand back, the other two will go more easily. What?"

There were a thousand possible answers to this, pretty much all of which were also questions. "Why've we got mental Christmas trees?" Harry managed.

"Someone who lives here thinks they're fun," Draco said. "'What's Christmas without a little excitement?' he says. 'How's waving a wand around to transfigure new stuff every year better than having our own stuff?' He's very insistent."

Harry considered this. He'd never had Christmas ornaments of his own before, but he could sort of see the appeal in the whole thing... "I guess it would be nice to put up things with a history to them," he admitted, mostly because, now that he was thinking about it, it really did seem nice. He didn't have to admit how nice, or cop to the twisting feeling in his chest that almost certainly went back to the Dursleys, somehow.

"Yes. That's what you always say, more or less," Draco said.

"Oh, yeah?"

Draco didn't seem to catch on to this being a moment Harry might not have minded hearing about what he always said. "Right. So. You're the one who wanted the stupid trees in the first place, so you can wrestle this one. Once you've got your wand back, I'll show you the charms we usually use..."

"What'd'you mean by 'wrestle,' exactly?" Harry asked with a dawning suspicion.

*

The better part of an hour later, the tree was out of its box. Harry stood over it in a dueling stance, his wand back in his hand. He felt as if he'd just been through a harrowing Quidditch game, only instead of dodging Bludgers while keeping an eye out for the Snitch, he'd been beaten over the head by them continuously while hacking his way through a thick and thorny hedge after the Snitch, which was always somehow just out of reach.

Draco, meanwhile, had spent the fight casting this charm and that one to stun the tree for a moment whenever it seemed as if it were about to win. He'd shouted out plenty of advice from back near the doorway, and it had mostly been good advice--and, considering how hard the tree had punched, Harry couldn't even really resent him for not wanting to get closer. Not with all things considered.

"Now what?" he asked, looking down at the tree, which was on the floor now and not seeming very happy about it, though also not very robust; where it had seemed about to burst out of its box, it now drooped against the floorboards, one branch or another occasionally giving a lackluster sort of twitch.

"Next we'll put this one in the drawing room. Then we, meaning you, wrestle the next one into submission."

"Didn't you say there were charms for that?"

"The charms are for reminding them they like being Christmas trees," Draco said, with a sneery smirk that was all the worse because Harry was dripping with sweat and covered in tree stickiness, and Draco wasn't. "We don't really have any spells for getting them out of their boxes. It's not like you can Imperio them. I mean, they're trees? But they're magical trees, so they resist levitation charms and so on too."

"Great," Harry said.

"They don't have feelings, or anything. So don't get all worked up," Draco continued, his hands moving around animatedly as he got caught up in explaining this. "It's more like--they have instincts, I suppose? They fight us mostly because, having been stuck in a box for eleven months, they'd rather not be dragged out of it again. But then the really funny thing is, they'll fight us just as hard when it comes time to pack them back up."

"Right," Harry said, feeling that he might someday be able to see the appeal of this, but that it would be at a time that wasn't right now. "So when you say we're putting this one in the drawing room, what you mean is we're dragging it in there."

"Meaning you are. Yes," said Draco sweetly. "I'd help, but." He made a 'what can you do' sort of gesture that didn't do a lot to suggest he was actually doing anything but enjoying this.

Harry looked down at the tree and sighed. Then he tucked his wand into his back pocket, bent down, and got on with it.

*

Much later on, each of the three trees were in their right place. The first one had turned out to be the largest, and went next to the fireplace in the drawing room; the other two, a bit smaller, flanked the living room window. Harry had since been introduced to the idea of wizarding Christmas lights, which also had opinions of things: namely, that they shouldn't be required to go on trees, but would much rather wrap around people's various limbs and then squeeze.

"Since when do wizards have strings of lights, anyway?" Harry had asked irritably, 1.5 trees into getting the lights to climb the actual tree instead of climbing him. The wizarding Christmas trees he'd seen before had always had, like, candles or icicles or various other types of things. Never Muggle-style lights, though these at least did come on an actual string rather than an electric cord.

"I believe it's been since someone expressed a liking of them within hearing of a Witch Weekly reporter," said Draco. "You've only yourself to blame, really."

They'd breaked for lunch, and then breaked again for supper, and now all there was left was everything else. There turned out to be boxes upon boxes of decorations, at least twice as many boxes as Draco had levitated down the stairs. Apparently some of those had been three-in-ones, which split off into their proper number when left to their own devices for longer than a few minutes.

Draco, who'd stood well back through the entire tree-and-lights part of things, now began digging through boxes. "These are tree ornaments," he said, sending six or seven boxes to stack themselves up by the front window. "We'll do that bit last, if you don't mind?"

"You can do those ones," Harry decided. "Have fun getting your hands chomped off, or whatever."

Draco rolled his eyes. "So dramatic." Crouching down, he looked inside another box, then grimaced and closed it again. "Not this year," he said, and sent the box flying back up the staircase.

"What was in that one?" Harry asked, not feeling nearly energetic enough to follow it up the stairs to find out for himself.

"Nothing," Draco said, and then, before Harry could ask what kind of nothing: "Mistletoe. Regular and charmed both. I'm sure you'd prefer not to hear about all that."

"Er," said Harry, momentarily distracted by something else. Draco had changed into a T-shirt now there was a chance he might actually have to do something; the way it hung on him as he went from crouching in front of one box to going through the next hinted at a puffiness that surely hadn't been there before today. Draco'd had on a clingy sort of sweater when they'd been out to Muggle London for lunch the yesterday, and he'd been flat as an ironing board then... "No, it's alright. You don't, er, have to," he finished, somewhat lacklusterly, and not entirely caught up to what they were meant to be talking about.

"We usually have them hung up all over the house," said Draco, as if he hadn't heard this, or noticed he was being stared at the way he claimed to hate so much. "The stairs are particularly hazardous, not that that's ever stopped you. "

Oh, Harry thought. Mistletoe. Snogging. That was what they were talking about, or rather what Draco was. Snogging, which led sometimes to shagging, which led sometimes to...puffinesses that hadn't been there yesterday...

"That's alright, thanks!" he said, loudly and with a very hot face, and tore open the nearest box, which was full of yet more lights. "Where're these for?" he asked, with great suspicion. "Have we got a fourth or fifth tree you forgot about?"

*

Those lights, it turned out, were for the outside of the house. Half the strings were covered in alternating green and silver lights, while the other half were covered in red and gold ones. It wasn't hard to guess where that color scheme had come from, not after the paint cans that were still sitting around in the nursery...half of them ended up going on one side of the house, with the rest going on the other half. These went on somewhat only somewhat more readily than the inside lights had gone on the trees.

Inside again, and the rest of the boxes were filled with wreaths and garlands and snowglobes and figurines, every one of them magical, every one of them in motion either all the time, or when you got close enough for them to notice you. There were candles with colored flames for lining shelves and bookcases and the mantel, which flared up when a person entered the room, and dimmed down when they left it again. And there were three stockings to hang from the fireplace, and upon spotting them Harry's heart seemed to stop beating inside his chest; but then he saw they were named for 'Wanker,' 'Git,' and 'Herbert,' and began to breathe again.

"Am I Wanker or Git?" he asked, though he thought he had a pretty good guess, judging by the colors the stockings were.

"Don't be stupid," Draco said. "You're Herbert, obviously."

"Ha!" Harry said, grinning.

Herbert, who'd been observing these proceedings from his perch, shook himself, snapped his beak shut with a loud clacking sound, then turned his head back around and took off out the window.

"Must not have liked my joke," Draco said dryly.

"I didn't either," Harry said.

"And the award for the least believable joke of the evening goes to Potter," said Draco in a dramatic rendition, and grinning too.

After another few seconds, the lettering on the stockings blazed for a moment, bright and glittery, then rearranged into their actual names. Harry was Wanker, as it turned out, which was the opposite of what he'd thought, given the Harry-the-wanker stocking was the green one, and the Draco-the-git stocking a bright Christmas-y red.

"What've we got left?" Harry asked, looking around. There didn't seem to be any more boxes, but it also wasn't the first time he'd thought they might be about at the end of them...

Draco glanced around too, but not very intensely, as if he didn't expect to find much, either. "Just the trees, I think."

They went back into the living room, where the stack of boxes by the window no longer seemed so dubious. Truthfully the ground floor seemed as friendly as only being decked out for Christmas could make a place. Even the trees, which had fought so hard in the beginning, seemed less unhappy than they had initially; where they'd been sort of slumped and depressing at first, they'd perked up unto a proper Christmas-y shape at some point in the meantime.

As it turned out, the things for the tree were the least likely to object of all the Christmas things: which was to say they didn't resist being placed on the tree at all, or even fight a Levitation Charm. At first, Harry sat back in his own Leaning Chair to watch, figuring he'd done all of the actual work and deserved it. But as more ornaments made their way onto the trees, Harry got more and more interested in them. Where the other wizarding things, while magical, had mostly given the impression of things that had been bought in a shop somewhere (other than the stockings, which, while they could have been bought from George's shop, had a feeling that said they hadn't been), a lot of the ornaments seemed to be more personalized, even handmade. 

Draco helped with this impression, mostly by narrating. "This one's Muggle," he said, waving what appeared to be a painted, rather lumpy clay dog in Harry's direction. "From Deirdre. She made it in dart class a couple years back."

"There's no way you don't know what art class is," Harry said. He'd started to get a sense of when Draco really was mixed up about Muggle terms, and when he was playing it up to see if Harry would notice. The latter was more likely to include sideways glances in Harry's direction, like the kind Draco was sending him now.

"It says 2017 on the bottom," said Draco loudly and with a quirking up of the corner of his mouth. "And 'For Uncles Harry And Draco. My name is misspelled, but yours is alright."

This second statement turned out to be a massive lie; when Harry got up to look at the ornament on the tree, it turned out to be addressed to 'Uncles Hairy And Drago.' She'd run out of room on the bottom, so that 'Drago' was in very small letters, which nonetheless still ran halfway up the dog's left side.

"What was that about the spelling of mine?" he asked.

"Isn't that how you spell it?" Draco asked. "I never knew. You might want to write the Prophet and correct them, seeing as they've been getting it wrong all these years. Not that I blame them, considering you are very much covered in hair."

This was not particularly hilarious, so far as mocking went, but he said it softly, and there was something about it that seemed comfortable, so that Harry couldn't help leaning into it. "I like the spelling of yours," he said, carefully positioning the ornament back onto the tree. "Think you'll be Drago to me from now on."

"This next one was made by Alice," Draco said. "Last year. She had a class too, but that one was an art class."

Alice's art class must have been a wizarding one, because the (even lumpier than Deirdre's dog) cat ornament she had made for them opened its eyes, then closed them again once it was hanging from the tree, then did something that might have been a stretch, except for the way Harry couldn't quite tell.

Next Draco brought out a tiny ornament in the shape of a Snitch, with wings that fluttered delicately. "We've got a lot of these. We picked up the original the first year we were in the house. It was such a hit with everyone, people have been gifting us more ever since. Don't ask which is from whom, though; it's been a lost cause since the beginning, trying to keep track."

Once hung, the tiny Snitch detached itself from its hook and buzzed around the tree at speed a few times, before coming back to where it had started. It was soon joined on the tree by twenty or so other tiny Snitches, ranging from the size of Harry's pinky nail to about twice that, half of which were spinning around at any given moment, so that if he ever wanted to catch one, all he needed to do was stand between the trees and put out his hand.

Next there was a tiny broomstick, which Draco placed on the tree hastily and without comment. The reason for this seemed evident once Harry peeked at it and found that the tiny lettering on it said, simply, 'Harry & Draco - Happy 1st Anniversary.' There were nine others of these, which waited until they had all been hung from the tree to start moving around: not individual flyers, like the Snitches were, but swooping together in a flock, around the trees as well as in and out of the branches, each one seeming to try to make it through a narrower gap than the broomstick nearest it. This went on until the first broomstick smacked into a branch or something and plummeted to the ground; then, once the other broomsticks had all gathered around as if to check on it, it rose from the ground again, shakily at first, and it all began again.

"Do they ever, I dunno, try to catch any of the Snitches?" Harry asked, after watching this for a while.

"They've been known to try," said Draco, setting aside the latest, now-empty box, and pointing his wand to the next. "It doesn't typically work out very well, considering they haven't hands. Tragic, really."

*

When the last ornament had been hung, and the last box had been banished back upstairs, Harry looked around at their handiwork, taking it all in.

"This is amazing," he said, because it really was. "Everything turned out great."

"Thank you," Draco said. "It's all due to my efforts, of course. This year and every past one. I let you help, sometimes."

"Yeah, right."

"By which I mean it's all your doing, of course, and an enormous hassle, and I hate every minute of it."

"I really liked it," Harry said. Even the tree-wrestling part didn't seem as annoying as it had been at the time, in retrospect... "I haven't ever gotten to do anything like this before." 

He hadn't meant to say that...for a moment part of him froze in horror that he'd admitted something like that, and to whom...

Draco, who'd been glancing around with a smirky expression, turned his head so quickly to look at Harry that it made the awful squirming feeling in his stomach grow at least five times worse. "Excuse me?" he said, so odd and polite that there wasn't any telling what was behind it. "What haven't you gotten to do, again?"

"Er. To decorate and stuff. For Christmas," Harry said, feeling much sicker about saying it out loud than about it having happened. The Dursleys had made him do plenty of chores, growing up, but he'd never had a part in Christmas decorating. He'd been expected to stay out of the way when it came to that kind of family-togetherness stuff (and, once you got past some of his longest-ago memories, he'd been fine with staying as far away from it as possible). Even if Christmas at Hogwarts and the Burrow and so on had been different, and better, he'd always come in after the actual decorating bits...and he hadn't had to worry, or even think about what the Dursleys were up to for Christmas since the December he'd been ten, anyway. "Bet you're going to say I've told you that before," he mumbled, reaching out to grab the nearest tiny Snitch. He looked down at his closed fist, feeling it dart one way and the other, its tiny wings tickling him, focusing on it so he wouldn't have to focus on whatever Draco was...thinking about him, or feeling, or...

"No," Draco said slowly, after what seemed a very long few seconds indeed. "You actually haven't. But you were in the habit of dressing up your flat for Christmas by the time we got together. It wouldn't have--it never came up, I suppose."

"Oh," Harry said, feeling somehow even worse about it than he had before. He hadn't thought of decorating his flat before...he couldn't think why. He'd been busy with his Auror training; he'd been too busy to remember about much of anything else, probably.

"Anyway," Draco said, what seemed somehow very pointedly and very casually, both at once. "Now we're done revisiting your tragic childhood, there is one more thing we've got to take care of before we're finished."

"What?" Harry asked, too relieved to wonder very much (or even really at all) about why he wasn't finding anything insulting in Draco's slight sneer.

Draco struck a dramatic, about-to-cast-something-exciting sort of pose. "Are you ready?"

"Yeah," Harry said.

"Sure you're ready?"

"Yeah."

"Really sure?"

"Yes, git," said Harry, not sure, really, whether to be annoyed, or relieved some more, or just...really tired.

"Alight," said Draco, and struck his pose again. "Accio Twelve Owls," 

"Accio what?" Harry asked--but by the time he'd finished asking it, the answer had come, jewel colors sweeping down the stairs, not so fast as to be hard to see, but so unexpected it still took a moment to grasp. By the time, a second later, he realized the owls part had been literal, three of them had landed on his shoulders, and five on the Christmas tree nearer him, and three on the further one. The last owl, which shined a sort of pink, and flew around the room once before alighting on top of Draco's head.

"I bought these for you several years ago," Draco said. "We didn't have a row about it, which I appreciated."

One of the owls began inching its way down Harry's arm toward his elbow. He was able to get a very good look at it then: not a real living owl, of course, but very well-detailed, down to the little lines on its ruby-red feathers. If it had been breathing, he'd have wondered...but although it nibbled at his fingernail when he ran his index finger down its rigid back, and fidgeted its wings this way and that (each feather moving in its own direction, just as on a real owl), that was the one thing it didn't seem to be doing.

Soon the other two owls on his shoulder had traveled down to sit by the red one. They looked at him with big wide eyes for a few moments. Then the owl on top of Draco's head said "Who?" and flew off, and then the owls on Harry's arm said "Who?" and "Who?" and "Who?" and flew off to get settled as well, so that there were six owls to a tree.

"Where'd you get them?" Harry asked, full of a thousand questions.

"I had them commissioned," said Draco, looking very pleased with himself indeed. "I won't tell you how much I paid--but it was enough that I absolutely deserve to get credit for them with you twice."

"Yeah," said Harry, stepping closer to the trees, noticing now that the owls weren't copies of each other; that each was a different size, and shaped differently too, as if they were made out of not only twelve different gemstones, but made after twelve different species of owl... "Thanks," he said. "They're great."

"You're most welcome," said Draco. "Be back in a moment."

Harry was still admiring the owls--there was a turquoise sort of one he thought must be a Barn Owl, and a purple that was definitely a Tawny--when a gust of cold air blew in, suggesting where Draco had gone was out the front door. He was out there for a minute, not quite long enough for Harry to pull himself away from the owls to see where he had gone. 

There came another gust of air, and then Draco was next to him again.

"That was the last thing," he said. "Other than transfiguring something for the drawing room tree. I was thinking we could do candles this year. You always seem to like them. Reminds you of first year, apparently."

"Yeah, okay," Harry said.

So they went into the drawing room to get that tree set up. It only took a few minutes, and looked quite nice, once it was done, each candle flickering a pale sort of blue, which was slowly changing to green, then to violet, then to...

Only when they went back into the living room from there did it become clear just how active the other two trees were. Snitches looping, brooms diving, owls hopping from branch to branch, not to mention all the charmed snowglobes and things on every shelf in the room...for a single moment it was very near to being too much. Then in the next moment it all seemed to settle, and seemed only...Christmas-y, and homey, and very nice indeed.

"Er," Harry said, after the rest had sunk in well enough for him to notice what was going on out in the garden. "Do we always burn a tree for Christmas, too?"

Because one tree, a small one at a remove from anything else, was in fact on fire, its topmost branches flecking into black ash and floating away...

Draco turned a bit pink when Harry looked at him. "--No."

"What'd you do it this time for, then?" he asked.

"Well, I'd never gotten to set a tree on fire for Christmas before," said Draco, a little flatly. "Don't I deserve to have a first too?"

"Oh," said Harry, face flaming too now, and probably would have been able to figure what about this was so embarrassing if he'd wanted to think about it, which he definitely didn't. "Right, then," he said. "What now?"

"Whatever you want," Draco said. "We usually just relax, unless we feel up to--um. We usually just sit around, after we're done."

"Alright." Harry felt he was easily up to both sitting around, and to not knowing what it was they often did instead. "Did you want to answer any more of your letters?" he asked hopefully, because at some point that had become the best part of their evenings. Draco, sitting in his Leaning Chair and reading out the funny bits of his letters to Harry...if Harry laughed, Draco would return to his scratching with a renewed fervor; if Harry frowned, he'd roll his eyes and say something like, 'alright, alright, I'll tone it down,' and return to scratching more slowly and frownily. It was all incredibly hilarious, in Harry's opinion. Roughly a thousand times better to sit through than any of the things Draco had come up with back in school.

"I suppose," Draco said, as if this, and Harry, were a trial he had to put up with, as if he wouldn't be over-the-top about it at all.

*

On the second Thursday, Dudley and Deirdre came, this time bearing gifts.

"We always do presents early," said Dudley. "Since we've got to spend Christmas day over at Mum's."

He said this anxiously, like he thought Harry would mind he hadn't been invited. Harry very firmly didn't, to the point where if some part of him way down deep sort of did, it had been smothered to death a long time ago even though it was only just now occurring to him. Probably there'd been a mental Time Turner involved, or something.

"It's alright," he said easily, and glanced around to make sure Draco was still occupied with talking to Deirdre. Or possibly still teasing her over presents, as she'd come in the door wanting to know how many they'd got her and whether any of them were magic. "I'd actually much rather spend Christmas with Draco Malfoy."

This doubled as being both true and completely hilarious in about three dozen different ways. Dudley seemed to take it at face value, though. "So things are going better, then?"

"I guess," Harry said, though really the answer was probably yes. He thought. It was hard to say really. He didn't mind Draco the way he had before--liked him, even, a lot of the time--but he knew that couldn't quite what Dudley meant. "I'm still not, you know," he said, meaning he still wasn't taking the potion, still didn't think he wanted to...

"Yeah," said Dudley, and didn't ask anything more. He didn't really have the chance, because it was around then that Draco came over.

"We're to do presents first," he said, with an exaggerated wink at Deirdre. "Unless, of course, we'd like to be hostages  in our own home within the next few moments."

"Uncle Draco," complained Deirdre, not looking particularly dangerous as she swished Draco's wand this way and that. 

So they got down to the presents-opening part of the day, all of them sat between the two Christmas trees and the gifts that had shown up underneath them the other day. Draco had been doing the shopping--some by owl order, some by Flooing to Diagon Alley during the daytime (after saying something like, 'It's too bad you can't come, alas Teddy is in a class at the moment,' without seeming at all sorry about it)--and hadn't gone out of his way to show Harry what kinds of things he'd got, so it was as much a surprise to Harry as it was to Deirdre when he saw Draco had got her her own wizarding chess set, as well as several card games.

"Now, these are charmed to look like nonmagical versions when you've got Muggles around--your Dad excepted," said Draco. "You can't go telling any of your friends what really are, either."

Deirdre had a 'yeah, yeah' sort of expression on her face. It suggested she was well aware of the Statute of Secrecy, and didn't give that much of a damn about it. "I haven't got any friends, so it doesn't matter," she said.

For some reason, this statement had both Dudley and Draco looking at Harry. He didn't know what he was meant to say about it, but he'd just made up his mind to try when Draco said, "You'll have thousands of friends at Hogwarts. Just you wait."

"Yeah," said Deirdre, not looking very convinced, but also looking perfectly happy to converse with her new chess pieces, which were rude and insulting about having a young, green commander right up until the point where she said, "I've played loads more chess than you . You're brand-new!"

Then she started telling them about some of her games against Draco and Harry (and even, sometimes, Dudley, who was apparently the largest wimp of them all when it came to being willing to make big, bloody sacrifices on the board). By the time she was done, the brand-new chess pieces seemed very game for the whole thing.

From Deirdre, there was another ornament for the tree--this one a clay girl, holding a wand.

"Dad said I shouldn't've, but it's not like my teachers believe in magic," Deirdre said, somewhere between earnest and sullen. 

Honestly, this seemed fair enough by Harry, even if no one else looked quite convinced. "It's great," he said, going over to hang it on the tree. "I love it."

"You do?" said Deirdre.

"Absolutely," said Harry, and meant it, though he might've meant it less if he'd asked about why the clay-girl had a green and silver outfit on instead of, say, red and gold.

"Lovely color scheme," said Draco, who meant to gloat about this for the rest of all time, probably.

When it was Dudley's turn, he turned a little red, and mumbled, "You didn't have to. I mean, I don't need anything."

"Don't be absurd," Draco said. He levitated a medium-sized wrapped box over to Dudley's lap. "I had to go all the way to Muggle London to get it. You'll be grateful or I'll know why."

"Alright," said Dudley with a grin that said he really did like presents still, he just had to protest getting them for whatever reason these days. He tore open the wrapping--which could not have been from Muggle London, given the ribboned bunnies that were hopping around all over it--and sat in stunned silence for a moment.

"You're always complaining you haven't time to watch your...things," Draco said, having somehow forgotten the word 'programmes' even though Dudley really had done quite a lot of grousing about it over dinner last month. "Now you can precord them, and watch them later."

"Yeah," said Dudley, with a remarkable amount of enthusiasm when you considered he'd once been the kind of boy to throw a tantrum because he'd only got the first fifteen things on his list, and not the sixteenth one he'd added at the last minute. "It's great! Dunno what I ever did without one."

Harry was pretty sure what he'd done without a VHS player, which was use a DVD player, or whatever had been invented in the meantime to replace them. The Dursleys had tossed their VHS player actual years before Harry had left for good. Uncle Vernon had gloated over that state of affairs nearly as much as he had over his mobile phone...

"It was remarkably difficult to find," Draco said. "Apparently they're very rare these days? Must be why you never thought to get one."

"Er, yeah, that must be it," said Dudley, and the sideways glance he sent Harry was both panicked and funny enough that Harry almost couldn't stop himself from bursting into laughter. Almost. He did manage not to, but it really was a very close thing. "You should open mine now," Dudley said loudly, setting aside the VHS player and pulling out the wrapped gifts sat next to him.

For Draco, there was a stack of Muggle romance novels, which, judging from the covers, were probably about as trashy as those Hippogriff books he liked.

And for Harry...

Draco had gotten him a photobook. A quite nice one, already filled with photographs. None of them were moving, which was strange for a moment, and almost eerie; it'd been a while since Harry had even seen a photograph that didn't react to him, and he couldn't remember ever having seen an unmoving photograph that had meant anything to him. But it was immediately evident that these photographs would mean something different to him to past ones, because they were of...

Dudley and Deirdre, on the first page, though Deirdre seemed to be about a foot shorter, with a gap-toothed grin. 

"I just thought," Dudley mumbled, red and embarrassed. "It'd be nice, you know, since you don't..."

"Since I don't remember," Harry said, and found that the next few pages were more of Deidre, mostly: Deirdre with a backpack and a lunchbox on her first day of school; Deirdre drooling in a car seat, her head resting against her shoulder; Deirdre blowing out candles sometime between drooling and going to school, and in this picture there was a smiling woman with her, urging her on in the stillness. "Is that your mum?" he asked Deirdre, who had stopped chattering with her chess set in order to tuck herself next to him and look at the pictures too.

"Yeah," she said. "That's her."

She was in a lot of the pictures, Deirdre's mum. Dudley started being in more of them, too: Dudley holding a blanket-wrapped newborn in a hospital room, Dudley laying on a couch with a not very much bigger baby sleeping on his chest, Dudley frozen as he spun a roundabout and Deirdre in the middle of an open-mouthed laugh as she held on still-ly for what seemed like dear life.

Harry turned page after page before coming to a picture of the last person he'd expected.

"Is that..." he started, sure that it was but at the same time that it couldn't be. he'd never seen a picture of himself that wasn't moving. He wasn't sure any even existed anymore; it wasn't like the Dursleys had ever wanted any that had been taken of him in primary school.

It was very strange to see himself, glasses and grin both a little lopsided, with no chance of correction or change...so strange he hardly noticed who else was frozen in place in that photo until Deirdre said, "Don't worry, Uncle Harry, he liked it there."

"Who did?" Harry asked, finally looking at the rest of the people in the picture. Dudley was in it, and Draco too; somehow seeing Draco being that still was even weirder than seeing himself. He was smiling, very nicely and without a hint of a sneer.  That would've been the weirdest part, except for all the ways it didn't seem so anymore... "Draco liked it?"

"No, the snake," said Deirdre, which was when Harry finally noticed where exactly the four of them were posing. They were in front of what must have been a snake display at the zoo, with a large boa or something pressed up against the glass. "He told you it was good there. He's warm all the time and doesn't have to look too hard for his food."

That sounded about right for a snake, Harry thought. Mostly, the pet or zoo ones were happy enough to lay around under a sunlamp all day long. Some weren't--he suspected his adder friend would possibly hate it, not that adders ever liked much of anything--but most. The one he'd accidentally freed before his eleventh birthday had been different to most of them...

Suddenly he noticed the way Dudley of the picture seemed very uncomfortable, as if it were all he could do to stand there and be photographed, when he'd rather be running in the opposite direction. It was an expression that might or might not have been so obvious in a wizarding photograph, where he could have covered it up, or at least not stood there feeling one single thing for however long anyone wanted to look...

"We visit in summer, sometimes," Draco said when Harry had turned to the next page, which featured the two of them and Deirdre in a room he didn't recognize, with a very large television which seemed, somehow, to be hanging on the wall. It was the first thing he'd said at all, though he must have been watching closely all the whole. "It's second Thursdays when school's on, is all."

"That's good," Harry said, because it really was, to think of seeing more of the family that he'd ended up having, no matter how little he'd have expected to. It was even better, somehow, to think of it now, when it was Christmastime even if it wasn't actually Christmas for another almost two weeks.

When Dudley and Deirdre were about to leave--after a Christmas dinner that rivaled any Harry had had at Hogwarts, and which had been stacked in all the cupboards and all along the kitchen counters under Warming Charms since the Free Elves had left it in the morning--Dudley, who'd been thoughtful and quiet for a lot of the visit, said, after a sidelong look at Deirdre, who was chattering happily to Draco again, "You know she'll only talk about you and Draco at Christmas."

"Oh, yeah?" Harry said, not sure, really, where this was going.

"Yeah. And magic and Hogwarts and all that too. Drives Mum batty."

"Oh," Harry said, grinning and more surprised, somehow, to be grinning about this than anything else that had come up with Dudley, during his visits. "Good."

They'd gotten nearly all the way to the car by the time Harry thought of what he ought to have said, before. It came to him suddenly, like another gift, this one plopping down from out of the sky. He jogged out, saying, "Deirdre, hey."

"Yeah?" she asked. Dudley, perhaps sensing a serious conversation coming on, mumbled something about putting their presents in the boot, and went to do so.

"I didn't have any friends before Hogwarts, either," Harry said, leaving out the part where her dad had been the reason why, and her grandparents the reason why beyond that. "I had loads just as soon as I started, though."

"You're famous, though," Deirdre said, with an anxious-seeming sort of frown.

"I met both my best friends on the train there," Harry said, which technically wasn't a fib even if he wouldn't have wanted to repeat it around Hermione. "They're definitely not my friends because I'm famous. My famousness got in the way a few times, honestly," he added, which was something he wouldn't have wanted to repeat in front of Ron. "It'll be way easier for you, I bet..."

Deirdre looked at him very focusedly, in a way that somehow reminded Harry less of Dudley or even the elder Dursleys than of himself. Whatever she saw there made her shoulders, which had been stiffer than Harry had realized, relax again. "Okay," she said. "Thanks."

She hugged him fiercely then, which wasn't something that reminded him of any version of himself.

Getting into the car, she said, "Love you, Uncle Harry."

"Er," Harry said, more out of reflex than because there was really any question at all about this. "Love you, too. Have a good Christmas..."

He watched them go until there was nothing left to watch. Then he went back inside, where Draco was reading one of his Muggle romances and for some reason scratching notes in the margins, and had another look through that photobook.