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: 6800

Summary: After ten years of marriage, Harry forgets.

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

Chapter Thirteen

By the time they were back to Hummingbird Lane, the buzzing had come back inside Harry's head. The squeezing dark of Apparition failed to dispel it; even Draco's voice barely cut through: "Sit down before you fall down. No, not--over here." Then someone's--Draco's--hands were on Harry's arms, guiding him backwards and to the right. "There. Sit now."

Harry sat. His arse knew the leftmost cushion of the couch, which was where he sat most nights he and Draco hung out together. Otherwise he might not even have recognized which room they'd landed in. Everything seemed even more disjointed and strange now than it had at the Burrow. It was as if he were several steps outside of his own skin, outside of everything...

"Protego Minium," Draco said, a low murmur that might not have made any sense even if Harry had felt nearer to it.

"What..." Harry said, or thought he did, and then wasn't sure what he was meant to be asking, and so stopped again. "I don't," he said, what might have been the start of a greater thought, except that he couldn't even manage to think whatever it was, nevermind make the jump to saying it out loud.

"Alright, Harry?" Draco asked, seeming not to have heard this, or to have disregarded it altogether. "And is it alright if I--"

The rest of what he said got lost behind the buzzing, but it was clear there was a question there...

"Yeah, go ahead," Harry muttered, not even knowing what the question was. It didn't seem to matter, or at least it didn't until Draco drew away. Harry looked up for where he'd gone and found their living room looking just as strange and sideways as the Burrow had, the figure that was Draco slipping into the drawing room...

Harry would have followed him, but there still seemed to be a disconnect between what he wanted to do and what his limbs were willing to do. So he stayed sat, and looked down at his feet, which seemed to be the one thing he could do without intentions getting fucked along the way. 

That was when the real trouble started. Something about the whorls of the floor made the buzzing even weirder inside his head. Dizzying, but squeezing too, like his brains were Splinching off to some other place, leaving the rest of him behind. The squeezing slithered down to the rest of him then, merely uncomfortable for the first while, however long that it was, before turning to something both squeezing and painful within his chest, as if there was something inside him digging its way out, wanting to erupt from some deeply-buried corner...

He wasn't sure he was breathing. Then he took a breath and found he must not have been, for breathing was the worst pain of all, the same sharpness it had been at the Burrow. The worse it got, the less air he could draw into his lungs...

Everything twisted, and twisted some more, and he didn't know what was happening to him...this couldn't be what dying was, he'd died before and it hadn't been like this at all...yet what else could it be...

He couldn't hear anything but the buzzing, couldn't feel anything but the awful pressure within--and then the pressure released, all at once, and there came a roaring outside of himself, a deafening clamor that seemed to go on for a long time.

Then, quickly as it had begun, everything outside of him was quiet again. All Harry could hear was his own breathing, ragged-sounding gasps that filled up the world.

His eyes were closed now, though he couldn't have said how long they'd been. He couldn't have said, either, what would be there when he opened them.

He opened them, and found that what was there was still the wood flooring, and his own two feet.

Another sound from somewhere. This one quiet, too, compared to what the rest had been like. Footsteps, careful ones, coming over to him, then stopping. Then the part of the couch to Harry's right sank down, and someone's hand was on his shoulder, and someone, Draco, was saying, "Better now?"

Harry thought about this, the thoughts he was trying to have splintering off in this direction and that one, never coming together long enough to really be able to focus on anything. "I guess so," he managed, eventually, through and past several dozen other things he might have said, if he'd been able to think them to begin with.

"Deep breaths," Draco said. "In, and out. Sometimes it helps if you put your head between your knees." It took what seemed a very long time for this to finish penetrating, and longer for Harry to manage to do it. The hand that had been on his shoulder began rubbing his back, in slow soothing circles that somehow weren't any less soothing even after his thoughts had wrapped around to whose hand it must have been. "Just breathe, until you feel like you can do something else."

Harry didn't feel like he could do anything else. He didn't, really, feel like he was going to be able to do anything else ever again. It was a feeling that went on until it began to not go on.

"What was that?" he asked, when it finally occurred to him to wonder. But before Draco could answer, he realized. "That was one of them, wasn't it? The...spells, or attacks, or whatever. That you said I have."

"Yes," Draco said.

"You weren't lying," Harry said. He'd been so sure of it, so fucked off at Draco for saying it on that first day home...

"No," Draco said.

Harry looked up, meaning to look at Draco, find out something of what he thought about all this...if this was really as pathetic as a growing certainty was telling him it was, or if it was the sort of thing that would have Draco sneering in a nasty way...or, even worse, looking at him pityingly...

Only before he got that far, he saw what had happened to the living room. The Christmas trees had toppled over, their branches bent this way and that, some of them snapped off entirely. Worse, the ornaments were scattered across the floor, along with everything that had been on the shelves, from snowglobes to wizarding games to Draco's books...this room had been perfect for weeks, and now everything in it was ruined.

Harry didn't clock the sound he made, at seeing this, but he must have made one, or done something else, because Draco said, sharply, "What's wrong?"

"You didn't say my--whatever it is has me doing accidental magic," Harry said. "All our things...fuck."

"It's alright," Draco said.

"It's not alright," Harry said. Even if their things were new to him, they weren't to Draco, which meant that all of them surely had meant much more to Draco than it did to him. And they had meant quite a lot to him, so much so he wasn't actually sure he could handle this having happened at all, nevermind with having been the one to have caused it... "I'm really sorry."

"Harry," Draco said. "Look at me." Harry did, and found that Draco wasn't sneering, or looking pityingly at him, or anything but serious. "First of all: they're things. You're a person. It wasn't intentional. So it'd be alright either way. Accio clay dog." The little dog ornament Deirdre had made came floating into Draco's hand. He handed it to Harry. It seemed to be in one piece, and surrounded by a clear sort of bubble...and now Draco really was sneering. "Secondly: it's alright, you complete idiot. I cast a Shield Charm over everything breakable the moment we got home."

"But, the trees--"

"There are half a dozen Mending Charms that will work on those trees," Draco said. His hand was rubbing Harry's back again, or possibly had never actually stopped. "We'll fix everything back up later, when you're feeling better. It'll be just as it was before. No permanent harm done."

There was no denying Harry didn't feel better right now. His head was still sluggish in a molasses of thoughts that seemed impossible to wade through, while every other part of him felt mired in quicksand...but there was nothing in him so sluggish as to keep the next horrific idea from occurring to him.

"I could have hurt you," he said, with a cold rising horror. "Are you...did I..."

"You didn't," Draco said, firmly indeed. "You've never hurt me or anyone else. Your magic tosses things about a bit, but mysteriously always misses anyone who might be around. Not that I was in here when it happened, mind," he added quickly. "Didn't you notice me ducking out beforehand? You've always been very serious about not wanting me near you, during. Needless, in my opinion, but usually I prefer not to fight about it. But of course now..."

"Yeah," said Harry, and would probably have felt a rush of relief, if he could have felt much of anything but a tired weight, bearing down on him... "That's good."

They sat there for a while, though Harry couldn't have said how long a while, before Draco said, in a voice that seemed as soft and warm as his palm between Harry's shoulder blades, "If you want to lie down, I know of something that helps."

So Harry lay down on the couch, and closed his eyes, and once he had closed them, found he didn't have anywhere near the energy to open them again. 

Draco went somewhere else that wasn't the couch but still nearby. After a minute, he started to read something aloud. One of his letters, it sounded like, only without the usual pauses involved in waiting for Harry's reactions.

*

Harry wasn't listening, not really. He was by now more sort of drifting, floating along the edge of sleep or some other buoying place. 

He wasn't really listening, but sometimes a word or phrase came through. The first few times, it was things like, 'he began to,' or 'beneath him, the,' or 'the feathers tickled against.' Normal sorts of phrases that didn't seem all that out of place, even if he didn't know how the sentence they were part of had begun, or ended. The rest of it came through as more of a mumbling, the sort of thing he could have made out if he cared to, but was a comforting listen so long as he didn't.

He didn't start to emerge until weirder phrases started jumping out at him whether he cared for them to or not. "Mumble mumble emerald orbs," Draco said. "Mumble mumble raven locks," and the mumbling bit was fine, it was familiar from every other night he'd read to Harry, even if Harry had listened to more than just the cadence of Draco's voice then... "Mumble mumble turgid member," Draco said, and that was a bit weirder, wasn't it... "Mumble mumble weeping cock," Draco went on, and Harry abruptly felt both better and awake enough to have had enough.

"What is this rot?" he demanded.

By the time he was done demanding it, he'd sat up to get a better look at Draco, who was sat in his Leaning Chair holding a book in front of his face. He now turned the cover toward Harry. It was a copy of Loved by the Hippogriff, only one of the roughly several thousand they had in the house.

"I told you it would make you feel better," Draco said smugly.

It was true that Harry felt better, though he was quite sure it hadn't anything to do with emerald orbs or...turgid members, or...he felt alright, anyway. Clear-headed, in a way he hadn't since before he'd stopped being a seal. Nothing looked weird anymore, or seemed to glance oddly off the inside of his head. At worst, everything seemed a bit sad, all the ornaments strewn around the floor, the Christmas trees still twitching lacklusterly where they lay on the floor...

"It always helps perk you up," Draco continued.

"Yeah?" Harry scoffed. "Out of what, self-preservation?"

"They're your favorite books. Like I told you before. I wasn't lying about that either, by the way."

Harry snorted. "Right. Hey, what's that charm you said we could use for the tree?"

Smirking a bit more, Draco taught it to him, and they got busy putting things to rights. The trees went back up much more easily than they'd gone up the first time, as if having been Christmas trees for the last few weeks, they were keen to go on being them. The ornaments and so on were more fiddly, not because they were less agreeable than the trees, but because while Draco had cast the Shield Charm on all of them at once, it had to be removed thing by thing.

They were only about halfway through--the counter-charm involved an annoying wrist flick Harry could only get right every one of three tries--when Harry said, "Hey, Draco."

"Yes?" asked Draco, in the process of taking his sweet gitty time putting the next ornament on the tree, with a sneer on his face that seemed to be a commentary on how long Harry was taking with the counter-charms.

"Did you write those books?"

It'd be funny, later, how fast the sneer wiped off Draco's face, at this. "--Um. What makes you think so?"

"It sounded like you," Harry said. "While you were reading it."

It really had sounded like Draco's letters. Not just because Draco was the one reading it to him, either. It, just...the sound of it, the places where the pauses were and the places that went on for a while...even when Harry was hearing it as mostly a lot of mumbling, it had given off the same sense of being kind of mean but also kind of really funny. As theories went, it made at least as much sense as thinking Draco was a big enough fan of anyone's else's books to have a shrine to them up on the third floor, and probably a great deal more.

Draco turned away from Harry, the back of his neck pinking up nicely. "Yes. Well. It was all your idea, just so you know."

"It was somehow my idea for you to call yourself..." Harry picked up the nearest awful book (Rescued by the Leucrotta) from off the floor. "Perry Broomwandstick?"

"Not exactly. Though you did veto my first brilliant pen name," Draco said, with a dramatic flair that would very likely have been even dramatic-er if seen from the front. After a slight pause, he looked over his shoulder at Harry, frowning. "Aren't you going to ask what it was?"

"No," said Harry, less because he didn't actually want to know--he wanted very badly to know everything about this--and more because if he'd agreed to know it, Draco wouldn't have been making that face at him.

"It would have been incredible," Draco said, finally, after squinting at Harry's face for the better part of a minute. "I wouldn't have had to do any marketing at all if you'd just let me call myself Perry Plotter."

"What," Harry said, forgetting for a moment that he was trying not to grin, mostly because there was absolutely no chance of grinning in the midst of having been bludgered in the face by this particular suggestion. "You can't name yourself after me!"

"I didn't, as you'll note," Draco said. "But it would have been brilliant. They'd have all been snatched up from the start. I would never have been forced to--are you sure you don't remember any of this?"

"No," said Harry. "What were you forced to do?"

Draco picked up the next ornament, the teensiest Snitch, which had been sitting on the shelf nearest him for about five minutes now, and turned back to the tree. "Well, when I put out Hippogriff, no one wanted to buy it--but you don't want to hear this story."

"Yeah, I do," said Harry, grinning after all, because this was back to being amazing. "I really, really do. Please tell me this story."

The back of Draco's neck went all the way to red. "Alright," he said, putting out his hand for the next Snitch, which Harry hastily attempted several counter-charms at before finally getting one right. "No one bought it, so then I had to put in a few orders to get things moving. I ended up with about five hundred copies--don't you dare laugh."

"I'm not laughing!" Harry coughed hastily into his elbow before casting a counter-charm at the next ornament, which was one of the little broomsticks.

"For one thing, you've no room to, considering how indignant you got on my behalf. It was really rather sweet," Draco said. "You couldn't exactly march up to random people wanting to know why they weren't buying my book, so instead you went and ordered another five hundred copies. Neither of us knew the other was doing it, it was all very Gift of the Magpie. Anyway, it ended up as a top bestseller that year. Made something of a sensation, actually. All thanks to your assistance. So don't get all high and--"

Harry was trying not to laugh. He really was. Except...Draco Malfoy, who'd once been a Death Eater, had decided his actual life's ambition was to write romance books (and have vicious fights with everyone who owled him with criticisms about them). There couldn't have been anything funnier in the world than knowing that the room upstairs wasn't a shrine so much as where they must have stuffed all the extras...

By the time his laughing fit had died down, Harry felt at least fifteen times better than he had at the outset. Draco, though, was still red-faced, and a little pinched-looking too.

"Why didn't you tell me this before?" Harry asked, flipping through the Leucrotta book, grinning too hard to falter when, every time he stopped to skim a page, the characters were doing more things to their weeping members or whatever.

"I--um. I didn't know what you'd think about it," Draco said. "You were taking so many other things badly. It seemed best to--I preferred not to give you any more fucking things to judge me about, alright?"

"I'm not judging!" Harry cast a counter-charm at the lump cat ornament Alice had made them. To his surprise, he got the wrist flick right on the first try, this time. "I think it's brilliant."

"I'm sure you do," said Draco darkly.

If Harry snickered about it a whole lot more as they finished setting the living room back up, it wasn't actually his fault, as far as he was concerned.

*

A while later, the living room was back to the way it had been. Harry was back on the couch, Draco in his Leaning Chair. Christmas dinner from the Burrow eaten, and all their presents from there opened too, they each now had part of the contents of Herbert's stocking. It turned out owls didn't care much for chocolate frogs, much as they might like the regular kind. (Apparently, in a mysterious recurring coincidence, this ended up being the case every year.) Draco had ended up with more than half, claiming he deserved it on account of being pregnant and made fun of; Harry had let it happen, mostly because he'd been too busy snickering to put up much of a fight.

He was done snickering by now, though.

"You're looking serious," Draco observed, in something that seemed to be an inquiry without quite making it to an outright question.

"Do you think anyone else noticed my, er, thing? Earlier, at the Burrow," Harry said, thinking he might want to send Herbet with a note if anyone had picked up on him acting weird...

"Doubtful," Draco said. "You're decent at masking it. You are when it first starts, anyhow. People would have to know what it looks like to know it's a problem. Besides, all eyes were on me, remember?"

"Yeah," Harry said. It was one less thing to worry about, which only left everything else...

"Harry?" Draco said after a minute.

"Yeah?" 

"What are you thinking?"

Not very long ago, Harry would never have answered a question like that. Not when it came from Draco Malfoy. Not when it had an answer like this.

"I can't be an Auror," Harry said.

"No," said Draco. "I'm very sorry, Harry."

It wasn't as if Harry hadn't known Auror was out as a career choice, regardless of whether he had any kind of spells or not. It wasn't even as if he'd thought about it very much over the last few weeks. For years it had been his whole life, but lately it had become something he never remembered unless he looked right at it. He was looking at it now, and wasn't sure where the grief stopped or the relief began.

He didn't want to talk about that part anymore.

"How am I teaching at Hogwarts?" he asked, because professor was making less and less sense too. "Isn't it dangerous? It's got to be..."

"Not really."

"I'm the Defense professor! Kids have got to be casting stuff at me all the time..."

"Yes, and you're braced for that. You're prepared, mentally speaking. It's not the same animal as accepting things from George on Christmas and being surprised when you get turned into something." As hard as Harry looked for it, Draco didn't seem to be sneering. Instead, he'd leaned forward in his chair, and was looking at Harry seriously again. "It's not only when you get completely knocked on your arse. It happens at random too. Less often now than it did--once a year, maybe twice? And you recognize the signs earlier. You've always got home before anything happens. McGonagall knows about it too. It's all aboveboard."

That it was still happening at all was a problem, as far as Harry was concerned. Why hadn't he been doing more about this? "Why don't I have a Mind Healer, then? If this has been going on this whole time."

"You used to have one," said Draco, and hesitated before adding, "Then you fired him, and didn't look for another."

"What'd I fire him for?" Harry asked.

Draco's face went a little pink. "Does it matter?"

"Yes," Harry said. "It's my fucking life, isn't it?"

Draco stared at him for a moment, wide-eyed. "Too right," he said next, and a little hoarsely. "Alright. You had a Mind Healer, when we first--by the time we started going out, you had one. You talked to him about more things than your episodes, I suppose, because eventually it came out you were also talking to him about me."

"So he, what, insulted you, or something?" Harry asked, figuring he could see where this was going. "And I fired him to, what, defend your honor?"

"Not...exactly," Draco said, turning even pinker. "More like--I wasn't there, obviously. But I gather you asked him something about how a relationship like ours could work, or why he thought it had happened in the first place. Considering how we were back in school, and so on. And I guess he told you it made sense because you were in a bad place, and I was something familiar to go back to. Even if we'd never liked each other, I was there, or whatever."

"Oh," Harry said, thinking that that kind of sounded like it could be true, but that he didn't care for it at all.

"For what it's worth, I think he was probably right," Draco went on. "Anyway, you didn't like it. Not one bit. I think you thought he was implying I wasn't anything you'd have considered if you were in your right mind? Or something? For all I know he might really have been. Again, I wasn't there." His face twisted into indecision for a moment before he added, "I admit I did tell you to fire him. But that's your own fault, given you did a very nasty impression of him talking about me beforehand."

"I don't think I'd fire someone just because you told me to," said Harry, really the only part of all that he wanted to touch.

"No," said Draco. "I'm just telling you what happened."

"Yeah." Harry was overcome with the urge to lean back on the couch and close his eyes again. "Thanks."

A minute later, Draco ventured, "Even your old Mind Healer said your spells weren't likely to improve much over what they were then. Which is more or less the same as they are now. But if you want to try a new one, I'm not stopping you."

Harry didn't want to try a new one. "Right," he said, thinking if there was anything else... "Aren't there any, you know, potions I could take?"

"Not unless you want a nasty dependency, or to walk through every day of your life sedated," said Draco after a beat. "You tend to hate the side effects, anyway. Not worth it to be miserable all the time so you won't occasionally have a bad hour. Or so you've said."

"Right," Harry said again, and found he didn't want to talk or even think about any of this anymore, and especially not on Christmas. "Have we got anymore of that treacle tart, do you think?"

"I'm sure we must," Draco said after a moment. "Molly never lets you leave without taking roughly a pound of it home with you. Let's see here..."

*

"Listen, Harry," Draco said, after things had been quiet long enough for Harry to wonder if they were going to make an early night of it, even if it was Christmas. "I got you something."

"Er, what?" Harry asked.

Draco brought out a wrapped box, upon which it became apparent exactly what.

"It's alright you didn't for me," Draco said quickly. "I mean, I don't expect--you haven't been anywhere without me, so when would you have had the chance to sneak off and buy something?"

"I did get you something," Harry said.

"--You did?"

"Well, er, sort of." Did it count as a proper present if he hadn't actually bought it? Normally he'd have said yes, but this was Draco Malfoy, who'd once got him a set of Christmas owls that must have been worth at least one or possibly two of the top-of-the-line brooms in their back shed... "Don't get too excited?"

"I'm not excited," said Draco excitedly. "Where's my present?"

Harry got up from his seat, and had almost got to the stairs when Draco changed his mind: "No, wait, open mine first. Then if yours for me is awful, at least I got to enjoy this part."

Harry went back over for the box, which was not a very heavy one. 

The wrapping paper Draco had used had reindeer flying around all over it. Draco, Harry had discovered when they'd opened all their Burrow gifts, did not have much patience for the sort of present unwrapping that left the wrapping intact afterward, even if it was easier on the cavorting reindeer. So he sat down with the box and tore the wrapping off all at once, to find...

"I picked it up in Muggle London, the same day I got Dudley's present," said Draco. "Usually I'd know exactly what to get you, but this year I wasn't sure--but you'd said something about it, so I thought maybe...if you hate it, we can return it," he added in a tone that somehow managed to suggest both that he, Draco, would be mortified by this eventuality, and that Harry would be lucky if he didn't wind up hexed in the face by the end of things.

"Don't return it," Harry said, fascinated already. He'd never got a good look at a plastic Christmas tree before, and now here was a two-foot tall one to get acquainted with. "It's brilliant, I love it."

Now sounding as if he'd never had any doubts whatsoever, Draco said, "I thought you could put it on your dresser, keep out a few of the regular decorations to go with it. Then you'll have a bit of Christmas all the time, without trying to argue me out of taking everything else down on the first of January."

"Christmas decorations ought to stay up til Easter," said Harry firmly, having not previously had an opinion about this, but not sure he was ready to let all their Christmas things go away again in less than a week.

He opened the box and started pulling out the various tree parts.

"--It's broken," Draco said, with the sort of dawning outrage that would have been more appropriate if someone had, say, stamped on the box repeatedly. "They sold me a defective--don't worry, Harry. I'll take it back tomorrow and have it exchanged. Or--refunded, and then I'll go somewhere else..."

Harry pulled the instruction sheet out of the box and waved it in Draco's direction. "It's not broken. I just have to put it together first."

"Oh," Draco said.

Putting the little tree together didn't take very long, even with Draco hovering over the proceedings. When it was done, it looked almost like the eerily still picture on the box; when Harry fluffed up the little plastic branches, it looked even closer to.

"Very nice," Draco said dismissively, as if he hadn't been breathing down Harry's neck for the last five minutes. "Might I have my present now, if you're done obsessing over yours?"

"Alright," Harry said, and took his tree with him upstairs to set on his dresser. It looked good there, or seemed to in the two seconds he let himself consider it. 

He reached into his sock drawer for the thing he'd been working on, and headed back down the stairs. He took the first set two steps at a time, but slowed down as he went, until you couldn't call what he was doing between the first and ground stories anything but dawdling.

"Do you have it, then, or did it go sneaking away on you?" asked Draco, hovering between Christmas trees in a way that made Harry both very anxious to give him his present, and very anxious not to have to.

"It was just an idea I had," Harry said. "I haven't had a chance to wrap it, or anything."

He'd only gotten the charms the way he wanted them the night before, after weeks of wrestling with them. He hadn't been sure even this morning if he wanted to give it to Draco after all...but there wasn't any getting out of it now, not with Draco looking at him, expecting it...

"May I see it?" Draco asked, very politely.

"Er, alright," Harry said, and took it out of his pocket. It wasn't, he realized now, really much more than a scrap of cloth...not really much of anything...

Still, though, he touched the tip of his wand to it, and thought the incantation that would start it going.

Draco unfolded it carefully indeed, the little blue Christmas stocking Harry had made out of leftover fabric from up in the attic. He must have read what it said, then read it again when the lettering changed. He must have read it, but he stayed staring at it for a very long minute, more than long enough for the words to have changed back and forth a few more times...

Draco wasn't laughing. Harry had thought he'd laugh. Harry had laughed a lot, thinking it up in the first place and then about half the time he'd been working on it.

'Jack,' it said at first, in big sparkly letters, before changing to 'Or some other, worse name.'

"I got the idea from our other stockings," he said, when it didn't seem as if Draco was likely to say anything, approving or not. "We don't have to hang it up if you don't, er, want..."

Draco swallowed, and blinked fast a couple of times. "I love it," he said finally, in a thick voice. "Of course we'll hang it with the others."

"Alright," Harry said, beginning to feel pleased with himself, as if he'd got this very right after all, if not in exactly the way he'd meant to.

Draco looked back at the stocking, then looked at Harry's face again. Then, with no warning at all, he leaned in and kissed Harry on the mouth.

It lasted just long enough for Harry to realize it was happening. Then Draco drew back, all color draining from his face.

"Fuck," he said, eyes wild. "I--you--I forgot, alright?"

"It's okay," Harry said quickly, before Draco could freak out, or Harry could.

"I forgot," Draco said again. "For one--just for a second. You've been so--today, in particular, you've seemed...and this is the exact kind of thing you'd have done, before." He swallowed again, what seemed much harder this time. "I'm sorry, alright? Let's not make a scene about it."

"It's alright," Harry said, when Draco, looking at him miserably, left him room to say anything else. "Really. I don't--"

And suddenly, Draco was reddening again, his voice rising in a fury. "I know you don't! You don't have to keep on telling me so every time you get the chance. I'm not--don't think I'm stupid enough to think my lips are going to make a difference when your mind's already made up. Because I'm not. And it was an--it wasn't intentional. And I said I was sorry. And now I don't want to talk about it anymore!"

"You're the only one talking about it at all," Harry pointed out; when Draco's expression flared, he thought better of it, and added, "It really is alright! Don't, er, worry about it."

"Fine," Draco said, and then stood there, holding the little stocking Harry had made him for Christmas. He was breathing heavily, his face blotchy. He looked like he might cry. It was a horrible sight, not at all what Harry had wanted. He'd have given a lot not to have Draco looking at him like that.

"If you want..." Harry said.

"What?"

"We could hang his stocking up with the others," Harry said, distantly aware of his damp palms, his pulse beating rapidly in his throat. It was a different sort of distance to the one before; not a squeezing, darkening thing, but the exhilarating giddiness of another freefall. It wasn't the sort of feeling that ought to have gone very well with desperately not wanting Draco to cry, but somehow it seemed to anyway. "When we're finished, you could read me some more of your rubbish. If you want."

Draco stared at him for a long moment in which it seemed that he might decide on having a scene after all. Then he nodded, a little stiffly, and said, more stiffly still, "I suppose that would be alright."

The giddiness didn't last long. Lying on the couch as Draco read to him, Harry began to feel as if some supporting object had been removed from within him, leaving everything unsteady around where it had been. Part of this might have been due to his spell, or panic attack, or whatever it had been. Most of it, though, could only have been the other thing.

Draco read to him from the Hippogriff book for nearly an hour. Harry didn't manage to pick out a single word of it this time. He was too busy thinking about that kiss, what he'd almost said about it before Draco had stopped him...

The more he thought about it, the more often he played it back, the more certain he was of what it would been. Not 'I don't feel that way about you,' or whatever Draco had thought...

I don't mind, Harry thought again, and a little wildly, and couldn't think just when that had happened.

*

Draco seemed more or less back to normal by the time Harry went up to bed, and didn't seem to notice Harry wasn't.

Harry took several little Snitches and two of the twelve owls upstairs with him. They didn't seem to buy that the plastic Muggle tree was in fact another Christmas tree; convincing them of it took enough in the way of concentration that Harry was able to forget, for a little while, that Draco Malfoy had kissed him and he hadn't minded it.

Once the Snitches were whirring around in their orbit, and the owls had tucked their heads back under their wings, Harry found he had nothing to do but remember again: Draco Malfoy had kissed him, and he hadn't minded it. If Draco had kissed him for a second or two longer, he might even have...

He'd definitely have got stuck on that thought again for another hour, or another few, or even all night, if it hadn't been for something else on the dresser catching his eye.

He hadn't really thought about his potion in ages. Dumping a bit of it every night had come to have much the same weight as brushing his teeth: something he was in the habit of doing, but that wasn't necessary to think about very much.

He didn't think about it very much now, either. Not the potion itself, which was just as blue with specks that winked as goldly at him as they had months ago. No, what he thought about, with a sense of rising determination not at all unlike the one from earlier today, was...

Draco Malfoy was so different to how he'd been before. He'd made friends with Ron and Hermione. He was on good terms with Molly and Arthur Weasley, kind to Dudley and Deirdre every time they'd come to visit. He was very bad at knowing about Muggle things, but put in the effort to try to know them. At no point had he done any sneering about any of these things, none of which could have come easily, or quickly either...

Draco Malfoy was having Harry's baby, and Draco Malfoy wrote hilarious romance books when he wasn't busy writing people and telling them they were stupid for not liking his hilarious romance books, and Draco Malfoy hadn't seemed to hesitate at all before sassing his mum on Harry's account...

Draco Malfoy had turned fun, and funny, and a bit weird--all of it in a way that made Harry like hanging around with him and not mind at all that Draco, given the option, seemed to prefer to hang around him too over doing anything else. He had a sneer that couldn't actually have been any less sneery than it always had been before, but which now seemed to be a joke Harry was on the inside of far more often than it seemed to indicate Harry was the joke. He was still pointy, but it was becoming more and more a welcome sort of pointiness...

Draco Malfoy had kissed him tonight, and Harry hadn't minded--and the only reason he could think of for why he hadn't minded was that he must have wanted him to...or maybe he had only learned to want him to after it had happened...

And, stuff about Draco aside, it was true, too, what he'd said earlier. This was his life. His, Harry's. It wasn't what he'd thought it was at first. Maybe it would turn out not to be what it looked like right now, either--

But how could he know for certain if he never...?

It was his life, and he wanted, suddenly and very fiercely, to remember it. Not just the bits of it where Draco wasn't, but all the places where he was. Everything he so desperately hadn't wanted to remember in the beginning...he wanted to know them now. He had to know.

Uncorking the bottle, Harry felt a bit mad again. Was he really thinking of doing this? For a moment, he hesitated. 

In the next moment, he stopped hesitating.

In the end, it was more anticlimactic than anything. He'd lost the little cup his potion had come with, and so he raised the bottle to his lips and took a sip from the neck. Then, in case the first sip hadn't been quite thimble-sized enough, he took a second one.

Half an hour later, he hadn't remembered anything. Half an hour after that, lying in bed with the light off, he still hadn't. An unknown amount of time later, as the pink gumminess began its nightly rise behind his eyes, he still hadn't.