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: 12,000

Summary: After ten years of marriage, Harry forgets.

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

Chapter Fourteen

Harry woke up on Boxing Day pinker and gummier than he had on any day yet. He'd more or less figured out how to ignore it by now, but trying to ignore this was something like trying to ignore a strange owl on your shoulder, one which was insisting upon being fed and/or paid if you wanted to keep your ear attached to the rest of you. Meaning, it took some placating--in this case, pulling the covers back over his face for a long few minutes in order to exist with the pink gumminess there ahead of trying to exist with it anywhere else--before he felt as if he could manage anything at all.

He dragged himself out of bed, then into yesterday's clothes, then down the hall and into the bathroom, and then halfway down the stairs towards breakfast, before he remembered everything that had happened yesterday. The Burrow, and winning Christmas, and being a seal; having a spell or panic attack or whatever it had been; Draco's books, and...that kiss, and how he hadn't minded it...

He still didn't, past the pink gumminess, remember anything at all from between sometime when he'd been twenty, and October of this year.

Harry paused between one stair and the next, one foot still in midair. For a moment, he couldn't decide what he thought about any of it, in this pink gummy light of day. It could have been a horrific mistake in judgment, brought about by the weird heightened emotions of the day--the same sort of thing that'd had his instructors in the Aurors telling them that it was generally better to pull strangers at the end of a bad case than it was to fall in bed with one's partner (though since Harry's partner had been Ron, it hadn't seemed very worth worrying about). In that case, it'd be fine that he didn't remember. Preferable even, since it'd mean he could go back to not taking the potion, and let everything go back to the way it had been before...

On the other hand, it might have been something else. Even if it had been a really weird day; even if it was Draco Malfoy, of all people...

Harry wasn't decided on which thing it was until he got to the kitchen and saw that Draco was as usual already there, waiting on him. Today he was sat at his normal place, his elbow on the table's surface and his head leaned into his hand. As Harry watched from the doorway, Draco's head did a little drooping thing, before he jerked upright again.

"Morning," Harry said, everything he'd been worried about since halfway down the stairs now dissolving into a lightness within his chest.

Draco sat up straight then, and glared at Harry like he hated him. Somehow, this only made things seem even lighter. "You finally emerge," he said. "I thought you might have gone and died up in your room," he added nastily, in a tone that suggested it might have been alright if Harry had, because then Draco wouldn't have had to look at him.

A glance at the kitchen clock showed that it was nearly noon, not really that much later than Harry usually got up, considering he didn't have classes, or a job, or anywhere that he could go, or much he could really do other than hang around uselessly... 

"Nope, still alive," Harry said cheerily, and sat down in front of his breakfast.

"Sleep well?" Draco mumbled, his face pressed into his hand again, as if it were all that was holding him up.

Er, no, not really. He'd tossed and turned for what must have been hours before he'd finally gotten to sleep...but his body, in this current moment, didn't seem to remember that, filled with enough energy that he might have gotten a full night's sleep without knowing it. "Pretty well," Harry said, shrugging as he shoved a forkful of scrambled egg into his mouth. "Better'n you, I bet," he said, not that it was much of a bet, considering the dark circles under Draco's eyes, and the way he was set to fall asleep at the breakfast table.

"No bet," Draco said. "Ugh."

"Bet you'd sleep better if you took your sleeping potion," Harry went on.

"Sleeping Draught," corrected Draco.

"Whatever. You should take it, it might help," Harry said. "It'd have to be better than getting egg in your hair."

"I haven't got egg in my hair."

"You will once you fall onto your plate," Harry pointed out, and then, buoyed with a certain new righteousness on this subject: "I don't get why you can't just take it."

Draco, who had been glaring at him, now glared more. "I don't think you want to go there," he said dangerously. "I'm not in the mood for being lectured at by you."

"Right," Harry said, after a moment in which he came very near to saying 'That's what she said,' and another moment in which he felt correspondingly insane due to the first moment. "Go and take a nap then," he said. "You're making me want to keel over too," he added, with a yawn not so much purposely as timely.

"I haven't time to take a nap. You haven't either. You've barely got time to shower and make yourself presentable.

"Er, why?"

"Put on something clean when you're back out," continued Draco, suddenly imperious. "Not robes, but not anything faded or with holes in, either. And brush your hair after it's dried, for Merlin's sake."

Harry blinked at him, suddenly feeling as if he hadn't had enough sleep to handle today, either. "Are we going somewhere?"

"I won't ask if you remember, as you've always got amnesia on this particular subject," Draco said. "Just--go and make yourself presentable."

"Can I finish my breakfast first?" asked Harry, hedging his bets by taking the largest bites he could and not worrying too much about thoroughly chewing his food before swallowing it.

Draco sniffed, sneer making its morning debut. "If you must."

Harry finished his breakfast, not as quickly as he had been going, but not what anyone else might call slow, either. 

Once he was on his way back up the stairs, far enough away from Draco so as to be unlikely to be hexed for asking, he said, "Where're we going, anyway?"

Somewhere cool, he was hoping. To do something that would be fun, or at least not awful. It was Boxing Day, after all, and that meant you spent it with family and so on...

"To visit my mother, same as we do every Boxing Day," Draco said. "Do try not to drown yourself in the bathroom."

*

Harry didn't drown himself in the bathroom. Mostly, he spent his shower feeling a bit baffled.

"Do I not get on with your mum?" he asked, when he'd gotten downstairs, all freshened up and dressed up--not in robes, or in jeans and a t-shirt, but in a dress shirt and slacks he'd found near the back of the closet, just his size and with the distinct air of being saved for things like going to Draco's mum's house in Muggle clothes. 

Draco was frowning at him, all freshened up too, and not looking any less like he was about to fall asleep on the nearest surface. "It's not that," he said. "So much as--I don't know. I haven't really talked to her since the--and even at the best of times, she can be a bit--you fucking heard her, when you were snooping around here like you think our house is Hogwarts and I'm the most suspicious character enrolled in it."

"I didn't really hear much of what she was saying," Harry said. "Just what you were."

"Yes, well, you ought to be able to extrapolate," Draco said. "I'm sure they taught how you how to at Auror school." He said this looking not so much hugely fucked off as tired and a bit fucked off, and immediately turned regretful. "Sorry, I didn't mean to--"

"Yeah you did, git," said Harry easily, finding that being swiped at about Auror stuff was not as painful as it perhaps ought to have been. It surely would have been during the first few weeks, when all he'd been able to think about was all the ways his life had gone differently to what he'd wanted. But now, it wasn't at all, as if last night had not been so much the initial realization that it wouldn't work, but a continuation of some other, earlier thing.

"Yes. Well. She's likely to be worse when we're in person. Just so you know," Draco continued. His face contorted into a couple different things before he added, "I love my mother, and I know she loves me, but it's--difficult, sometimes. That's all. And I don't want you to think that I..."

"That you what?"

"Nevermind," said Draco. "By which I mean 'you'll see.'"

"...Right," said Harry, finding that none of this had illuminated anything other than a growing nervousness. "We can't skip it?"

"I wish," Draco said. "Which is not something I'd ever say to you if you did remember, honestly. I couldn't, I don't know, encourage ideas like that inside your head. But no, we can't insult my mother that way. If one of us were literally on our deathbed, we'd have to put in an appearance at the townhouse."

He sounded so grim that Harry couldn't help but ask, "Do you not get on with your mum?"

"Not very much lately," Draco said. "Mostly because she won't let up on--but we're going to have a nice visit anyway," he added firmly. "As long as neither of you--just don't, alright?"

"Alright," Harry said, filled with considerably more trepidation now than he had been before. "I won't start any scenes, if you're so worried about it."

"I'm not worried," said Draco, not convincingly in the least.

*

A few minutes later, they stepped out of an Apparition point somewhere in London. It was gray and overcast, which made it feel chillier than it was; there was a light drizzle coming down, which made it feel chillier still. Draco had brought an umbrella, and was in a foul mood about it, having not enjoyed Harry's enjoyment of watching him try to open it. Thankfully, it was both large and charmed to repel water without appearing to anyone else to be any better at its job than most umbrellas. It also might've been charmed for warmth unless Draco had secretly cast a Warming Charm (he might've, considering he had Harry carrying all the other stuff, and was the one with a hand free to cast anything). And so the chilly walk was not really very much so after all.

In fact, it was all kind of nice, Harry thought. Nice to be out of the house. Very nice to be walking with Draco. Possibly not nice to be visiting Draco's mum--but then she couldn't be all bad, could she? She'd saved Harry's life, once. Whether she'd given a fig about him at the time or not, she certainly did about her son, and always had...

"This isn't Wiltshire, I'm sure you noticed," said Draco when they'd been walking for a few minutes with no signs of stopping.

"Oh, yeah?" Harry said. "Are you sure? Looks about the same to me."

Draco snorted, and rolled his eyes. "I just mean," he said, "if you have questions about why we're not visiting Malfoy Manor today, I'd rather you ask them to me than to Mother. Or, you know, in front of her."

"Haven't got questions about why your mum doesn't want to live where Voldemort did for a year, no," Harry said. It did seem really obvious. "Besides, I'm not really, you know, surprised. It was all over the papers for a while, anyway, wasn't it? No one was living in it already." 

He hadn't gone out of his way to know about what any of the Malfoys were doing, but it had been a big subject of conversation among the Auror trainees. Some of them had been itching for the chance to tackle Malfoy Manor and whatever curses and Dark magic might have been left behind. Harry for his part had never wanted to go back, to the point where a good part of his cheer at being in London on this dreary day might have been about not having landed in Wiltshire.

"Ah. I'd forgotten about that," Draco mused. "My father was never interested in selling it--it was our family seat for fifteen generations, you know. Aside from that, it would have become a curiosity. An embarrassment. Here's where the prisoners were kept. Here's where the tortures were done. Here's the room where Voldemort lay his foul head at nights."

"Yeah?" Harry asked, thinking that, of all people, somehow it was Draco Malfoy who had learned to say the fucking name. He thought next of what Malfoy Manor might look like by now, all boarded up, maybe starting to be overgrown by vines and things...it was better, somehow, than thinking of it being held within various stasis charms, exactly as it had been when the war had ended, It was as if the idea of new things growing there, right now, might make up for some of the rest.

"He had it burned down, a few years after the war. Fiendfyre," Draco went on, and the picture of it in Harry's head now wasn't anything growing, wasn't even a burnt-out devastation: it must have been nothing more than a black stain on the ground, stretching as far as the Fiendfyre had been allowed to burn. "They threatened to arrest him over it--he hadn't the permits--but no one could really get worked up enough to actually bother to do it, I suppose."

"I guess not," Harry said, looking at Draco, trying to see if there was anything like upset in his face. It seemed like the kind of thing that might have been upsetting, if you'd grown up in a house that mattered to you the way various houses that weren't on Privet Drive mattered to Harry...and yet at the same time he couldn't imagine missing a place like the Manor, which had not struck him at all as a place you could love. "Sorry," he added.

"It was a long time ago," Draco said. "Longer ago for me than for Mother, I think sometimes."

"I won't say anything about it," Harry promised.

"Much appreciated," said Draco, and looked a little less pointy thereafter.

They walked on for about twenty minutes more, turning at a few street corners along the way, so that before long Harry had lost track of how they had got to be where they were. He wasn't worried about it, which wasn't a new feeling, but also wasn't quite old enough a feeling not to call for a little reflection. Draco Malfoy was taking him somewhere, and Harry was following along of his own free will. He wasn't even worried about getting hexed, or outright murdered, or really anything other than that he might drop the wine bottle on the pavement or the wrapped gifts in a puddle...

Eventually, they came to a line of well-kept brick townhomes. Draco slowed down, then stopped on the pavement between two townhomes. He glanced at Harry, then took in a breath.

"Alright," he said. "Let's do this."

Then he turned, and stepped toward the townhomes, and then disappeared completely.

"Er," Harry said, still standing on the pavement, the cold drizzle of the day rushing back now that the umbrella was gone along with Draco. "Where'd you go?"

There was a pause, which seemed somehow to be pointy even if Draco was actually invisible or whatever right now. Then Draco reappeared, and stood there with his umbrella, which seemed like an even brighter canary yellow now that it had appeared with him from out of nowhere, and frowned. "Fuck," he said. "You won't remember this either. I didn't think to think of it."

"Oh," Harry said, getting it now. It would have been hard not to get it, considering. "Your mum's house is under Fidelius?"

"Obviously," Draco said, coming forward enough for the umbrella to cover both their heads again. The warming effect was instant, but Harry's hair was still a bit damp, and there were little water droplets on the wrapping paper and wine bottle.

"Why's your mum's house under Fidelius?"

"Death threats," Draco said shortly. "People weren't happy my parents avoided Azkaban--or me, for that matter, but the brunt of it has always been directed to them."

"Oh," said Harry, who even before he'd liked Draco had been fine with him and his mum not going to Azkaban, but couldn't help but feel his dad really ought to have.

"Most of them weren't serious. No one serious sends Howlers," Draco went on. "It was the quieter ones that were the more--anyway."

"That's awful," said Harry, thinking that that was an insanely long time to have to hide. Depending on when, exactly, it had started, Narcissa Malfoy might have been in hiding longer than the amount of his life he could remember living. He wondered what if anything the Aurors might have done to help...

"Before you ask why we didn't go to the Aurors, how about you don't," Draco said. "And let's not have an extended row about it on the street in front of all the neighbors who don't know they're her neighbors, either."

"Alright," Harry said, figuring there'd be time to come back to this apparently twenty-odd year old subject later. "Do you need to go inside to get the address, or something?"

"No," Draco said. For a moment his face twisted into something like indecision, not for quite long enough for Harry to start getting fucked off at the idea that he, Harry, maybe couldn't be trusted to be inside Draco's mum's house after all. 

"It's not like I don't get it," Draco said in a rush, evidently not on the same subject as Harry after all. "People died in the war. A lot of them because of my family, directly or...less directly. And if you ever--if someone I cared for ever died, and it was someone else's fault, that person would not be safe from me, alright? So I do get it. But she's my mother, and I don't think..."

"I'm not judging you for wanting your mum to be safe," Harry said.

"--Alright," Draco said. 

For the next few moments, there was quiet. In those moments, the rain picked up enough to patter onto the umbrella, a soft low sound.

"Narcissa Malfoy lives at 5 Confiend Street," Draco said, slowly and clearly.

"Oh," Harry said, and, looking between 4 and 6 Confiend Street, found that another townhome had popped into existence between them, and that they were standing at its front walkway.

"My father was Secret Keeper initially," Draco said, after they'd approached the townhouse enough to make it unlikely anyone who didn't know the secret would spot them standing there. "After  he died, it trickled down to twelve or thirteen people, so of course we had to redo the whole thing. Now it's just Mother and me who are--and you, as it happens. Though I'm not sure if you are anymore, now. You'd have to try to tell someone, to be sure."

"I'm not going to tell anyone," said Harry.

"You'll try to tell Ron or Hermione, next time you're at Grimmauld Place," Draco said tightly. "Or--try to write it down, when we're home. Something. I'd rather not leave it to chance."

He sounded pretty anxious about the whole thing. Though Harry couldn't envision a situation where he let it slip, nevermind to anyone with the intention of going after Draco's mum, equally unlikely things had happened with Fidelius before, and would again...and if he knew he could tell people, he'd be more guarded against it than if he wasn't really sure.

"Alright," Harry said, before catching sight of movement in a window, "Think we've been spotted."

Draco whirled around, though not before the curtain in the first story window to the left of the door had settled back into place. "Wonderful," he said. "Now she's going to think we've been making a scene in the street."

"We've just been talking," said Harry. "It's not like we were having a row, or--"

"It doesn't actually matter," Draco said. "It's about appearances more than it is--we'd better head up the walk."

He then headed up the walk so quickly that Harry was momentarily left in the cold splattering no-longer-a-drizzle before catching up to him again.

When they got to the door, Draco glanced at him again, then rang the doorbell.

*

If Harry had thought about it, he'd have assumed there would be a house-elf to answer the door. He hadn't thought about it, but still, he was startled when the door opened and Narcissa Malfoy was standing there.

"Draco," she said warmly, and kissed Draco on the cheek. "Harry," she said next, warmly but not as much so, and didn't try to kiss him, which Harry appreciated since Draco probably wouldn't have liked it if he'd turned and run from this whole thing. "It's so good to see you both."

Was he just imagining it, or had there been a pause between 'you' and 'both'? He must have been imagining it, Harry decided. Then Draco glanced at him in a worried sort of way, and he wasn't so sure if he had imagined it after all. Then Draco nudged him, and he remembered:

"This is for you," he said, offering Narcissa the bottle of wine he'd been carrying. "It's, er, a..."

"Hostess gift," said Draco, not tightly; in fact, he sounded as if he were smiling, though his expression wasn't anything stronger than maybe a mild fondness. "Not a 'thingy.' Honestly, Harry."

"Right," Harry said.

"You never could remember before, either. No one cares," Draco said. "Right, Mother?"

"Of course not, dear," said Narcissa, who looked them up and down in a way suggesting that not only were hostess thingies worth caring about, but so were things like Muggle trousers being worn in polite company. "I'll just take this into the other room."

"Gift on the table, coats on the hanger," said Draco, gesturing toward the things in question. "Then into the drawing room for tea." Then, in a lower voice, he said, "Really, etiquette would probably call for someone to take our coats--but Mother can't stand having house-elves around anymore, nevermind servants, and I don't think it's ever occurred to her to do for herself."

"Er," said Harry, who'd never once in his life wanted anyone to get his coat, and had been very uncomfortable indeed at the few events he'd been to that had involved it. "It's alright?"

"Yes, I know you don't care," Draco said, shucking off his coat and hanging it from the ornate wooden coat hanger between the front table and the front door. "I don't, either, really, it's just--it's still weird, alright? Even after all these years. And I'm a bit nervous, honestly."

"And you talk when you're nervous?" Harry guessed, knowing already that Draco talked when he was excited, and for half a dozen other moods including 'wanting to be insufferable about knowing things other people don't, even when he doesn't actually know them either.'

"You talk when you're nervous," Draco said, and headed off in what must have been the direction of the drawing room. Harry finished hanging his coat, made to follow, then heard his coat fluffing to the floor and had to turn back to hang it again, and made to follow Draco again.

"Are you nervous I'll embarrass you?" Harry asked when they'd got to the drawing room, not exactly fucked off about it, but more...not so much irritated, or even hurt, so much as...nervous too, he guessed.

Draco looked back at him, mouth pursing as he considered this. "Not you so much as all of you," he said. "Or, well, the two of you, looks like, today. Probably still one of you too many, honestly. This is going to be a disaster. We shouldn't have come."

"We had to come," Harry pointed out. "It's Boxing Day, and you haven't seen your mum for Christmas yet. Even if you're still fighting..."

He didn't actually know if Draco and his mum were still fighting, come to think of it. There hadn't been any more Floo calls since November, that Harry knew of at least; but for all he also knew, Draco might have popped over here to visit with his mum one of the times he'd gone out Christmas shopping.

"We're not fighting so much as we're not speaking," Draco said, which went to suggest that the Fish Owl that had kept showing up and being sent away again must have been from his mum after all. "I'd really rather this visit didn't become a--she's coming, sit down somewhere. No, next to me. No, not that close, she'll see right through it. Not that far away, either, she'll think--alright, that's about right, I suppose."

*

Mostly it was Draco and his mum who did the talking. Harry just sat, and tried not to look too interested in the drawing room (not too different than most; in fact, if it hadn't been for the currently empty picture frame above the mantle, and the books with Dark-sounding titles on a nearby bookshelf, it could have been anyone's, wizard or Muggle), or in Narcissa herself, or for that matter in Draco. He suspected all this not looking was making him look like an idiot, but there didn't seem to be a lot to be done about it if he didn't want to be dragged into a conversation that seemed to be largely gossip about people he didn't know, or didn't care about if he did know them.

Really, there was nothing to look interested in but the tea, which was fine, and the biscuits, which were...pretty good, actually. Harry had eaten five or six of them before it occurred to him that he might be making a pig out of himself. Then he focused on sipping his tea instead, until he'd had several cups more than he actually wanted, and realized he'd better stop that too if he didn't want to have to ask for the loo.

So of course he was sitting there looking stupid, greedy, and as if he was momentarily going to need to cross his legs or else run up the stairs in search of the toilet, when the portrait's occupant returned, causing Harry to leap to his feet in alarm.

"Narcissa!" Lucius Malfoy bellowed, glaring out of the portrait frame. "What is Harry Potter doing in our house?"

"He's our son-in-law, dear," Narcissa said, sounding tired in what was for some reason a familiar sounding sort of way.

"Draco! Is this true?"

"Yes, Father," said Draco, sounding tired in the same way. "As we've told you, oh, several thousand times now. We suspect the artist who painted him did it on purpose," he asided to Harry. "He never had any problems with his memory, so the portrait shouldn't either, unless something else were going on. By the time we realized the issue with it, he was too ill to let us have another one painted..."

"This is idiocy," Lucius said. "If our son were married to a man, I'd remember it. Nevermind if that man were Harry Potter--!"

"Here we go," said Draco, dropping his head into his hands.

"You are the Malfoy heir, my only son," Lucius went on, sneering. It was not a nice sneer, but rather one which suggested Harry was a turd stuck to the bottom of his shoe, and no one who associated with him was much better. It was the only look Harry could actually remember seeing on Lucius Malfoy's face other than fear or anger. "It's your duty to marry a pureblood witch or wizard to continue our line."

"I don't give a fig about my duty, actually," Draco said loudly. "Or about making you pureblood heirs in general, come to that."

"But won't ours be...?" Harry started, not really, in the end, sure how to ask a question about blood status that had not actually occurred to him before, or probably ever would have without prompting.

"No," Draco said, sighing. He glanced at the portrait, where Lucius Malfoy now seemed to be listening to them, with his lips pressed tightly together, then at his feet. "You're a half-blood with Muggle grandparents, so he'll be a half-blood too. If he grows up to marry a pureblood, our grandchilden will be purebloods--though only in the strictest sense of the word. By which I mean the people who care will still care, and the people who never did still won't."

By the end of this explanation, Draco had reddened all the way up. Lucius Malfoy had turned red in his portrait, too, but seemed to look more on the raging end of the spectrum rather than the kind of embarrassment people had probably died from.

"Draco!" he said, in a hard, cool tone. "What is the meaning of this? If I understand you correctly, you have determined to sully our bloodline by--"

"Lucius," said Narcissa warningly.

"Leave him alone," Harry said, drawing his wand, and then feeling rather foolish about it, because it wasn't like you could duel a painting, or really do much to it at all other than pack it away or set it on fire.

"--mingling them with that of a--"

"Lucius, you will cease this behavior at once!" Narcissa said, striding over to the portrait, where an intense, hissing sort of conversation began by her adding, "This is your son--"

"Let's just go," Harry said, meaning that they could leave the house, and that the nice thing about Draco's mom being in hiding was that no one was likely to follow them or try to make them come back.

"...Good idea," said Draco, who up to now had been rubbing his face with his hands. "There's no fireplace in the living room, but I suspect it'll still be warmer there."

In fact, even without a roaring fire to radiate heat throughout the space, the living room did seem a great deal warmer--not to mention a great deal more lived in, with a wizarding puzzle set up on a table by the window, shapes flashing from one piece to another, and a half-finished cross-stitch (also wizarding, judging by the vibrating needle stuck into it) on a comfortable-looking chair. Draco had grabbed the tea stuff on their way out, so by the time Draco's mum joined them, Harry had drank another cup, and then crossed his legs about it, and then eaten a few more biscuits in hopes that they might soak up some of the tea in his stomach before it could join the tea that had already made it down to his bladder.

"I swear he wasn't that bad--not for quite a long time before he died, anyway," Draco said, after he'd had about three more cups of tea himself. His leg was jiggling anxiously, and he'd rubbed his face a whole lot more. "We think the artist might have, um, exaggerated his worst qualities? We couldn't track down the one we used later, came to find he'd used an alias, so--but that portrait's the only one we've got of him, mum can't bear the idea of getting rid of it..."

"It's alright," Harry said, meaning he wasn't about to judge Draco about this, either. He'd have given a lot to have a portrait of either of his parents; even if his dad's had been of the prat he'd been at fifteen instead of the person he'd grown into later, there was no way Harry ever would have done anything but keep him around. "Are you alright, though?"

"I'm fine," Draco said, and if he'd sneered about it this might have been fully believable, but as it was he still looked pretty serious, and so Harry couldn't be quite sure... "Really. Stop looking at me like that."

"It's just," Harry said. "Don't you think he would've been happy about the baby if he were still, you know...?"

"I don't know what he would have thought of it," Draco snapped. "And as he's dead, it hardly matters."

"Your father would have been nothing but delighted by your news, darling," said Narcissa, coming into the living room. "Never doubt it."

The way she said it, it was hard to, at least until you remembered it was Narcissa Malfoy who was saying it, at which point you got the idea that even if her husband wouldn't have been delighted about it, he still would have pretended to be if he knew what was good for him.

"I apologize for that scene," she went on. "He hasn't been in his frame in six weeks. I never imagined he would choose this hour to return."

"It's, er, alright," said Harry, mostly because he felt as if her eyes were boring right into him.

"It really isn't," Draco said. "When he left, had you by any chance just informed him of our delightful news?"

"He left during the course of a personal conversation. What it was about is immaterial," said Narcissa, which seemed to suggest that she absolutely had done, and sat down across from them. "Harry," she said, the first time she'd addressed him by name since they'd got there. "You've been very quiet today. How have you been?"

"Er," said Harry, not at all sure whether this was a politeness question, or one he was meant to answer by talking about how he didn't remember anything yet. It definitely wasn't one he could answer by saying he'd finally taken his potion last night, and even though he knew he might not remember things right away, it was still unsettling to want to remember now and still not be able to. "Alright, I guess?"

*

A while later, Draco, who'd been fidgeting for a few minutes, said, "I've got to run to the loo. Don't interrogate Harry while I'm gone, please. He's been through enough as it is."

"Of course, dear," said Narcissa, in a tone that made it clear it was ridiculous to suggest she would ever do any such thing (it seemed to be the same tone Draco used for a lot of Harry's suggestions). Then, the moment Draco's footsteps on the stairs were replaced by the sound of a door closing, she turned to Harry and said, "There is something I wished to speak with you about."

"Er," said Harry, who'd drank at least four or five more cups of tea than Draco had, and felt ready to vibrate out of his chair for what seemed to be multiple reasons. "Go ahead?" he said, figuring whatever it was about, his chances of getting her to stop without having to run out of the room were about nil, and the chances of running out of the room jostling his bladder overmuch too much greater to be risked.

"The current situation is unacceptable," she said, flatly now, a fact that wouldn't be argued with. "It would not be satisfactory in any case, but even less so under the current circumstances."

"You mean because he's pregnant," Harry said, not having a lot of patience when people didn't just come out and put a name to the thing they were talking about. "And because I don't remember things."

"Yes," said Narcissa. "My son cares for you deeply, but it is not enough. None of this is good for him. I have only to look at him to see that."

The circles under Draco's eyes, the way he walked through the house like a zombie some mornings...

"Yeah," Harry said, not exactly an agreement, but not exactly not one, either. "What do you want?"

"Direct as ever," Narcissa said. "And so I will answer directness with directness: Draco should come here. Until my grandson is born, or you..." A flash of something crossed Narcissa's face, so quickly Harry might not have caught it if he weren't pretty used to Draco's face by now. Until he'd seen it, he'd thought she disliked or even hated him; after he had, he wasn't so sure anymore. "Please," she went on. "Speak with him. Make him see reason."

A sick feeling had started twisting around inside Harry. "I can't make Draco do anything he doesn't want to do," he said.

"Oh, but you could. Only you could. My son is a Malfoy in name, but a Black at heart: he came by that fanatical devotion later than others in my family, but it is there, and it is all for you."

For a sickening moment, Harry thought of Bellatrix; then, in a more bracing one, of Sirius. "No," he said firmly, thinking not of any of the Blacks, but of Lucius Malfoy, hateful and supposedly even more twisted within his frame than he'd been out of it. "Draco doesn't want to live here." Harry didn't want him to, either, but it didn't seem like something he could or should say, not to Draco's mum when Draco wasn't even in the room...as if it would be, once he'd said it, the sort of thing that would make Draco into a squeak toy being pulled on by two dogs at once.

Narcissa made an impatient sound. "What my son wants is not--"

But then a door closed upstairs again, and Draco flew down the stairs, much more quickly than he ever came down the stairs at Hummingbird Lane.

"All better," he said with a cheer that didn't seem quite on the up and up. "What did you two say about me while I was gone?"

Harry thought quickly, or at least reacted quickly. "Er, nothing. I've got to use the loo too!"

He ran up the stairs Draco had just come down and hid in the bathroom for as many minutes as he thought he could get away with--which was not, in the end, anywhere near long enough.

*

Several hours and an uncomfortable luncheon later, they turned off Confiend Street again. The pattering rain had gone, replaced again by that same cold drizzle, and so the umbrella had come back out too.

"That was, er," Harry said weakly, having intended to say 'nice,' but not managing it in the end.

"Quite," said Draco. "I'm pleased you've survived my mother once again. That's a thirteen-year running record, by the way. Bravo."

"Fuck off, git," Harry said, not grinning, exactly, but not quite able not to smile, though weakly again.

There was a minute or two of not talking. Then Draco said, "What did she say to you when I left you alone?"

"Nothing," Harry said, the weakest of anything that had happened yet.

"She obviously said something. I would like to know what it was, please."

Draco's voice was hard, but was there a sort of wavering, underneath it? Harry thought there was, and somehow that was what decided him. 

"Don't worry about it," he said, much more strongly.

"Harry--"

"She's worried about you, that's all," Harry went on, more strongly yet. "I don't want you to have another row with your mum," he added, a feeling he hadn't known he had until now, that fit strangely and yet somehow perfectly with knowledge that Draco Malfoy was a person who would take Harry's side against his mum's in a moment, if pressed. "Not because of me."

"Oh," said Draco, less resistant about this than Harry had expected, almost subdued in fact. "Alright."

They walked a while longer before either of them said anything else. It was a journey whose twists and turns ought to have been familiar, but which weren't except in snatches that could be explained by the fact that Harry had noticed this storefront on their way to Confiend Street hours ago, and had noticed the blue tricycle in that overgrown garden the same way. It left Harry with an aching sort of melancholy, which seemed to interact oddly with the quietness of the street. Outside of the occasional passing car, no one else seemed to be out. It made it seem oddly intimate to be with Malfoy underneath the dry warm refuse of the umbrella.

Finally, Draco said, "I wasn't being fair before, you know. About Father."

"Yeah?" Harry said, not sure what there had  been for Draco to not be fair about.

"I, just--when I said I didn't know how he would have felt about have a grandson, even one who's not..." Draco started. "He'd actually have been very happy, even if he was a little--alright, so he would have been weird about it. In general, because of the whole--and because of your involvement, too, probably. So, yes, he'd have been weird about it, but he wouldn't have been awful. Nevermind the portrait, it's just someone else's worst view of him. He'd have been very happy to be a grandfather."

"Okay," Harry said. "I believe you." It wasn't like it was hard, believing Lucius Malfoy would have cared about his grandson. Harry had hated the man, doubted he'd ever liked him much--but he'd seen what the Malfoys had been like when Voldemort had been squatting in their house. He'd seen what Lucius Malfoy had cared about most, in the midst of that last battle.

Draco was quiet for a minute, and then blurted, out of nowhere, "I still don't think I would have wanted to do it while he was still alive." Before Harry, a bit confused, could ask what Draco was talking about now, he added: "I don't know if I'd have wanted to have a son, especially." This statement hung for a moment between them, before he stopped on the pavement, and, when Harry had stopped too, said, low and intensely, "Do you think that makes me an awful person?" Then, before Harry could answer, Draco pinkened, and said, "Don't answer that."

He started walking again, twice as fast as they'd been going before, so that it took a few seconds for Harry to catch up in either of the ways there were to catch up in.

"I, er, don't think you're awful," Harry managed. "You're not at all," he went on, and then stopped, because he was fairly certain it wouldn't go over well to say that waiting for Draco's dad to kick it had probably been the smart thing to do for a multitude of reasons, even if Draco had more or less just admitted to the same idea too. "I don't think," he finished, firmly as he could.

"Well. Thank you for that scintillating defense," Draco said. "I suppose."

"You're welcome, git," Harry said, not certain if it was the right situation to be pulling 'git' out again, but also completely certain that when Draco was being sarcastic at him, he ought to be called on it in some way. "Did he, er. Why wouldn't you have wanted...I mean, is there a reason...?"

He wasn't really sure how to ask what he was asking. He was less sure what he was meant to be asking in the first place. It was not a series of questions that seemed likely to go well inside of his head, nevermind when spoken aloud.

"None you don't already know about," said Draco, sounding more resigned than anything else, at least at first. "Not that you'll remember a lot of the details, given you don't recall me telling them to you, but there's nothing you couldn't guess at. I mean, he never--not anything like what happened to you. It's just--"

"It's alright," said Harry, to whom is sounded as if Draco were starting to work himself up, which seemed like a bad idea, out here in Muggle London, in the rain and far from an Apparition Point, without even any obvious alleys or corridors that might be used for Apparating in a pinch. And then, feeling a certain madness come over him once again, he added blithely,  "He didn't lock you in any cellars or beat you bloody or anything. I get it."

He hadn't quite realized this was, in fact, what he'd meant to be asking before until Draco rolled his eyes and said, "No. And that's why it seems--I don't know, cruel? To have waited until he was--not that I was waiting, exactly. I think it was more you who..."

"I was, er, waiting to have a baby until your dad died?" Harry asked, when Draco didn't seem primed to complete this thought.

"No," said Draco thoughtfully. "I think you might've been waiting until your uncle did."

"Oh."

"You never said as much, mind. It's more a feeling I had," said Draco, partly careful and partly some other thing. "I don't know if I'm right. I never exactly got the chance to ask."

He wasn't looking at Harry, as he said this, and so it was hard to know, exactly, what the other thing in his voice might have been.

"Oh," Harry said again.

"I mean, I don't think you were purposely holding off for that happy event, or anything," Draco said. "If I'm right in the first place, it was probably an unconscious sort of thing."

"Right," Harry said. Then, because maybe it wasn't needed to know things exactly, on strange quiet moments like this one, crossing yet another street at yet another corner he didn't remember: "I think you probably were right," he said, not knowing this for certain and at the same time feeling he was very glad not to live in a world where Vernon Dursley could conceivably lay eyes on his son, even if only in the pictures they'd surely sent Dudley home with, one day; and feeling, too, that this was something that wasn't very likely to have changed, no matter how much time had gone by.

"Most likely," agreed Draco, and the main thing in his voice this time might not have been so much relief as it was the end of some sort of tension. "Anyway. We started trying about a week after the funeral, is the other thing."

"Wait, really?"

"Mm-hmm," said Draco.

Harry found he didn't particularly want Draco to elaborate on this subject, though perhaps not for very many of the same reasons he wouldn't have wanted him to before. And, when the rest of the walk went by in a mostly-comfortable silence, he was mostly relieved that Draco didn't.

*

The minute they were home again, Draco went up to the Pensieve and added a memory to it. Harry could only imagine what it was.

"What, er, sort of memory was that one?" he asked, once the silver strand of memory was no longer dangling from the end of Draco's wand.

It had only occurred to him just then that he could ask. It had not occurred to him Draco might whirl around, eyes widening, only to narrow them a moment later, and draw himself up haughtily, and say, "Come and see for yourself if you want to know. I've done too much work to just tell you."

"Oh," said Harry. "I don't..."

"Then you don't get to know about it, do you?" Draco snapped, not so much deflating as seeming to fold into someone less tall than he'd been before.

"Sorry," Harry said, finding that he still didn't want to look at Draco's memories. In fact, he might want to look at them even less than he had before. Then, he hadn't wanted to know anything about his life with Draco at all; now, he didn't want to see second-hand anything he might remember having lived by tomorrow. Who wanted to view their own life as if it were a stranger's? Not him, thanks.

"It's fine," Draco said, in a way that made it clear it was the complete opposite. 

He turned back to the Pensieve, and, rather than adding another memory, seemed to poke and prod at the ones already in there. Every so often, Harry caught a glimpse of some shining strand, as Draco pulled it up away from the rest, and then put it back in a slightly different place.

What was he doing, exactly? Harry's practical knowledge of Pensieves started and ended with having watched other people's memories in them a few times. He didn't even know the trick of extracting them; there'd never been a reason to try it, anymore than there'd ever been a reason to alter his own memories, or put them in any kind of order, or whatever else Draco was doing as he stood there with his back to Harry, jabbing at his own memories.

Feeling asking what, exactly, Draco was doing now wouldn't go over any better, Harry stood there, hands shoved in his pockets, until Draco turned around again. He didn't look fucked off anymore; instead he just looked slumped.

Harry hadn't noticed, before, just how dark the circles were beneath Draco's eyes. And, how long had he been walking around looking like he was about to fall over?

"You look really tired," he said, trying for concern and landing somewhere much more stilted. "You should try for some rest."

Something between irritableness and rage flashed pointily over Draco's features. He opened his mouth, then closed it, and closed his eyes for a moment before opening them again. "Yes, alright," he said, in a tone that made it seem very much as if what he really wanted to say was something closer to 'fuck off and die.' "I'll try to make it to bed at a decent hour tonight."

"Maybe you could take a nap," Harry said. "We haven't got anything else to do today, do we?"

He'd meant it as more of a rhetorical question, but it turned out to be more of a non-rhetorical one when Draco said, "I suppose. It's not as if Ron and Hermione are going to invite us over later, just as they've done, oh, every single other year since we've been together."

"Yeah?" Harry asked, remembering vaguely that they'd fire-called him to come over to the Burrow the first Boxing Day after the war, and then again on the second one. A distant warmth seemed to fill him at the thought that this had become a tradition, and evidently a longstanding kind of one.

"Yes," Draco said. "So I really can't, right now."

"That won't be til later, though," Harry said, because the warmth really did seem far away held up next to Draco, who looked ready to drop in the same space Harry was in. "You can nap before then and I'll wake you up when it's time to head over."

Draco gave him a hard look, which seemed to go on longer than necessary for what Harry, at least, had felt was a very reasonable suggestion. "Alright," he said, with a yawn that had him looking even crosser and pointier once it had finished with him. "But don't go forgetting to wake me," he threatened once he was halfway up the first set of stairs, glaring down at Harry. "I mean it. I don't want you going over there and leaving me behind today."

"Alright, I won't," Harry said.

Draco went up another step, then stopped again. "Harry?"

"Yeah?"

"It was just something you made me think of." Draco's voice was a little strange now, and strangely subdued, his knuckles white where he gripped the banister. This time, he didn't look down at Harry at all. "The memory, I mean. I, just--I can't talk about it, alright? I'd like to, but I just...I can't."

"Alright," Harry said, for a lack of anything else to be said, or at least anything he could think of.

*

Harry heard from Ron an hour and a half later or so. He'd been wandering about aimlessly, messing with the Christmas ornaments and things in the living room sometimes, and digging around at the bottom of their stockings looking for any Chocolate Frogs they might have missed finding yesterday, and flipping through Draco's books some more. He'd made sure to ignore the Pensieve all the while--not as he'd been ignoring it up until now, as if it were something that had nothing whatsoever to do with him, but as something much more significant he was now choosing not to think about. Choosing very firmly not to think about. Not thinking about at all, because of how totally he'd decided not to think about it.

He wasn't thinking about it so totally that, when a Tawny Owl flew in through the window and landed on the back of the couch next to his head, gave a little yelp and a large jump. 

The owl blinked at him. It tilted its head to the side, and then to the other side, sizing him up and, probably, laughing at him.

The letter it had brought was a short one. ('Harry, Hope you survived Draco's mum's! Come over when you get this. -Ron')

As the owl flew off again, Harry got up off the couch. Up the stairs, he stopped at Draco's bedroom door and rapped lightly.

"Draco? Hey, Draco."

Draco didn't answer. 

Was he even in there? Harry tried the door, found it locked. So Draco probably was inside, unless he was hiding another Mirror of Erised in there or something. 

He debated between knocking harder and Alohomora. That second thing seemed like a terrible idea, even and maybe especially if Draco actually was in there. But there was a third thing too he could try, a charm he'd been taught early on in Auror training, and had recently spotted in some parenting books too.

"Somnum Revelio," Harry murmured, pointing his wand at Draco's door and thinking about how Draco was allegedly on the other side, and it would be really very nice to know if he was awake or not.

It wasn't a particularly fast-acting charm, which made it not a great option for tracking down Dark wizards. It was more for welfare checks, that sort of thing. So it would be a minute before anything happened, or several to be clear nothing was going to. Harry waited, and waited a big more. Then, just as he'd begun to think maybe he'd cast it wrong and should try again, his side of Draco's door began to glow.

If it had glowed orange, it would have meant he was in there and awake. Yellow would have meant he was most of the way asleep, but likely to come awake if startled. Red was for serious injury or distress, black for mortal peril. And no glow at all would have meant no one living was in there.

Draco's door wasn't any of these things. It was glowing green, which meant sleep. And it was a true green rather than tinged with yellow or orange around the edges, which meant he was sleeping deeply and well. And that meant Harry was going to have to knock harder after all, if he didn't want to cast Alohomora and go in and shake him awake.

He hadn't wanted to knock harder, before he'd cast anything. He still didn't want to knock harder.

Why didn't he want to knock? He thought again of the circles under Draco's eyes, the air of exhaustion around him. The sleeping potion he definitely wasn't taking, even though he really ought to be...

Yeah, so the answer to that one was obvious. Draco was having a good sleep for once; waking him up would mean he wasn't anymore. Yet he'd made it really clear he'd be all the way fucked off about if he woke up later and found out Harry had gone visiting without him, and so he'd better not go for that option either...

*

Harry's knees were on the hearth at Hummingbird Lane, with most of the rest of him there with them; it was only his head that had made it to Grimmauld Place, spinning and spinning seemingly even more than he did when it was all of him Flooing somewhere. He'd found them in the drawing room, which was just as decked out for Christmas as anything at Hummingbird Lane. Ron was helping Alice do a wizarding puzzle, though one with fewer and larger pieces than the one spied at Draco's mum's house; Hermione was sat on the couch with a stack of thick dusty tomes, sneaking apparently as much research in as she could before the crow-shaped timer perched on her shoulder finished counting down to zero.

"Sorry we can't come," he said. "Draco's asleep...he's been really tired lately. I don't want to wake him, he'd probably kill me if I came over without him..."

He'd more or less expected some sort of argument here, them saying he ought to wake Draco up after all (he wouldn't), or that he might as well come over if he wasn't doing anything else (he couldn't). Instead, Ron and Hermione shared another of those married-people glances, and then Hermione said, "Of course we understand, Harry," at the same time Ron said, "Oh, he'd definitely kill you."

"We could come over tomorrow instead?" Harry went on. "Or some other day before New Years."

They assured him it was a rain check. Then, just as he was about to go, which was also just as Alice realized he was both there and about to leave again, and started wobbling her lip like she was definitely going to have a good screaming cry about it, Ron said, "Hold up, mate. There's something I wanted to tell you about."

"Alright," Harry said, and stuck around with his head in the Grimmauld Place fireplace long enough to hear what Ron had to say.

*

It had been nearing dusk when Harry's head had poked in over at Grimmauld Place, and was long after dark by the time Draco came tromping back down the stairs again. What was left of his hair was mussed up, his face wild and yet also somehow blank in a way that suggested he might not be entirely all the way awake yet.

"What time is it?" he demanded upon spotting Harry in the living room. "How long was I asleep for?"

"Er, about ten o'clock?" Harry said. "And I dunno, a while?" Draco, already a bit pink, presumably from something to do with sleep, now went all the way to a furious red. "I didn't go over to Ron and Hermione's!" Harry hastened to add. "So don't get upset."

Draco looked at him, a look that was more measuring by the moment as he continued waking up. "You didn't go," he repeated. "Why didn't you? Fuck, did you have another row with them? Am I going to have to put up with you pouting around here until after New Years? Fuck's sake, I wanted a decent Christmas holiday this year."

"Er, nothing like that," Harry said, and went on to explain. It was the sort of explanation that began to feel sillier the more he explained about it, no matter how neat a solution it had seemed at the time, so that by the time he was finished, he felt rather embarrassed about the whole thing.

Draco, though, took in the explanation in what seemed a serious, non-sneery sort of way. "Alright," he said when Harry had finished. "I can accept that, I suppose."

"Thanks," said Harry, just barely leaving off 'git' as the sort of chaser it seemed to have turned into. "Did you sleep alright?"

"Passably," Draco said with a dismissive wave of his hand, which Harry took to mean he'd slept well indeed. He knew Draco had, in fact, since he'd run up to cast the Revelio a couple more times since he'd got his head back from Grimmauld Place, and it had always come up solidly green. He thought he would have known even without that benefit, though; Draco still had circles under his eyes, but the aura of exhaustion that had seemed to be around him had gone, leaving him brighter-eyed than he'd been in weeks. "What else have you been up to?"

What Harry had been up to was not very much, really. Given the opportunity to wander around the house by himself, he'd gone up to his office and looked around at the pictures on the walls, and spent some time poking around the stuff on his shelves and in his desk: books he must've taught from for Defense, various artifacts that might've once been Dark objects or else might have been gifts he didn't remember receiving from students he didn't remember having taught. Essays he still hadn't graded, which were dated the week before he'd lost his memory; everyone must have given up the idea of ever getting marks back on those ones. It was kind of a funny idea, but also one that didn't seem to have much to do with himself, no matter how many pictures of Harry-the-professor were hung up on the wall. 

And none of it had helped him remember anything, while at the same time underlining how much more there was to remember.

"Reading and stuff," he answered, shrugging.

Not too long after, they'd settled into their usual evening places, Draco in his Leaning Chair, and Harry on the couch. Draco had got out his big stack of parchments, and was now scribbling away at a letter--possibly a nicer sort of one, since he hadn't made any annoyed noises or read any of it to Harry yet. For a moment, Harry wondered if Draco would start writing his books out here again now, or if he ever had; it wasn't like Harry knew for sure whether it was something that had happened before, and therefore not like he could prove there would be an 'again' aspect to it if it were to happen now.

Then he remembered the other thing he'd had to think about, besides his memories and his job and the Pensieve, while Draco slept.

"Ron did tell me something," he said. "While my head was over there." Draco looked up very quickly, causing Harry to rush to add, "It's good news, though!"

"What sort of good news?" asked Draco suspiciously. "You'd better not tell me Ron has a bun of his own in the oven. I won't have him stealing my spotlight."

"Er," Harry said, running face-first into the knowledge that his best friends had a sex life together, and he was once again in a conversation that had to go and acknowledge this. "Not as far as I know."

"If it turns out he does, I'll warn you now that you will in fact be having a massive row with him. In fact, you won't even be speaking to him for the duration of--"

Feeling this would be even more unbearable the more moments Draco continued with it, Harry said loudly, "It was about the case."

"The case," Draco repeated, seeming to have gone very still as he looked at Harry over the rims of his reading glasses.

"You know, with the tampered-with Flobberworm Mucus and all," said Harry, reminding Draco of this on the chance it had started to slip his mind in the same way in which it had started to slip Harry's: as if it were something that didn't have much to do with him, because his life was here instead of in the Aurors helping to investigate it, or down in the Potions Dungeon getting splashed by more dodgy potions, or anything else. He really hadn't thought about it much at all lately unless he were writing to Teddy, or Draco mentioned Teddy, or Teddy had come by...

"Yes," said Draco, so sharply Harry waited half a beat for him to say something sneery or even nasty about Harry's intelligence levels, and felt a bit wrong-footed when he didn't. "What about the case?"

"Ron thinks it's about to break open," Harry said.

"Oh," said Draco, a little faintly.

"He says it shouldn't be more than a couple weeks, maximum."

"Oh," said Draco, even more faintly.

"I dunno if he's exactly right on the timing," Harry went on, not sure at all what Draco's reaction meant, and left with few other options than to try to clarify a bit more. "When I was in Auror training, a couple weeks could mean anything from twenty-four hours to, like, a month or two. So him saying it's about to break open just means it's going to happen soon."

"I know what it means," Draco said, not very faintly, now, and also a lot more bleakly than Harry had expected.

"It's good, right?" Harry said. "When it's all done with, we won't have to worry about Teddy anymore."

"No, it's not--" Draco began. "I mean, yes. It's very good we won't have to be concerned about--if you'll excuse me."

He jumped up from his chair, scattering parchments on the floor. He looked a little green, which was enough to make Harry ask, "Are you alright?"

"No," Draco said. "I mean, yes. I mean, I've got to--I really don't think your sneaky little nap agreed with me," he concluded, and fled back up the stairs. A moment later, a door slammed. 

There followed an eerie, muffled silence of the sort that had first been a thing in the mornings months ago. At the time, Harry hadn't known about the baby, and had more or less assumed Draco was being weird about having bowel movements, or something. 

Now, though...Harry wondered if he ought to follow him. Part of him wanted to, even if he wasn't really sure what he could actually do to help if Draco was doing what he was certainly doing in the bathroom right now. The rest of him felt somehow very sure he wouldn't be wanted anyway, even if he were good at this sort of thing, which he definitely wasn't...

Draco came back down about twenty minutes later, not looking very bright-eyed anymore.

"Better now?" Harry asked, only to have Draco ignore him completely. 

He gathered up his parchments, which Harry had by then stacked on the seat of his chair, without a word or even a glance to Harry, and headed back up the stairs with them.

"Right," said Harry, very sarcastically and not at all sure Draco was still close enough to hear him. "Good to know you care so much about your cousin," he said, much more loudly, not actually wanting to start a row and at the same time all the way fucked off about Draco apparently having decided to snub him over this.

There came no response to either thing, nor any sign that Draco had even heard him.

*

Not very long after that, Harry went up to bed. It wasn't as peaceful an activity as it had been two nights ago, not only because he was still pissed off at Draco, but because the first thing that greeted him, once again, was his potion. 

That he was going to take it for a second time was not really in doubt; it was, in fact, so far from doubt that at first he couldn't work out where the unease at spying the bottle had come from. Why was he so worried about this? There had to be a reason, right?

Maybe it was because of hearing about the case again, he thought. He'd been splashed with one bad potion, and now he was taking one he didn't actually know very much about. He hadn't even read the directions...

It was a place to start, anyway.

"Accio directions," he said, and was then forced to hit the floor as roughly thirty sheets of paper and parchment came flying at him from behind his dresser. By the time he sat up, he was covered head to toe in them, so that they plopped to the carpet in a crowd.

Sorting through, he eventually found the parchment that must have come with his potion. It was called a Memory-Induction Potion--ironic, that he'd forgotten that bit--and there didn't really seem to be a lot to it.

He was supposed to take a thimbleful every night before bed--he'd known that. He needed to have it brewed anew every fortnight--Draco was taking care of that aspect, as a new bottle had appeared on his dresser every two weeks like clockwork. If he hated the taste of it, or had trouble swallowing potions, there were instructions on how to distill it into a mist so he could breathe it in instead--he hadn't noticed it having much of a taste, and given the instructions on distilling it took up about ninety percent of the space on the parchment, he'd give that a pass for being way too complicated, thanks. If he had side effects, which were unspecified because everyone's mind was different, and they were bad enough to affect his daily life, he should see his Healer to see about altering his prescription--he hadn't had any side effects yet, and figured it was unlikely to be an issue.

And, that was it. There wasn't anything ominous there, nor was there anything particularly comforting, and so it must have been something else that was making him feel weird about it.

What could it be, then? It had to be related to the potion. And it had to be something that had happened today, otherwise he'd have felt the same uneasiness last night...

Confiend Street, and Draco's mum, and his dad's portrait. Walking together under Draco's oddly cheerful yellow umbrella, talking about things that were mostly uncheerful, but that hadn't felt, in the end, bad to talk about. Getting home, Draco being weird about the memories. Heading over to Grimmauld Place, Ron telling him the case was meant to wrap up soon, Draco being weird about that too...

The case was going to wrap up soon. It was a good thing, couldn't be anything but, and yet now that Harry thought of it again, his stomach seemed to sink.

The case would be wrapping up soon. There was a timeline on it now...but it wasn't the only thing there was a timeline on, was it? His Healer had said as much at his Halloween checkup. If he didn't get any memories back within four months of the accident, he was vanishingly unlikely to get any of them back at all. She'd been very clear that, while stranger things had happened--many of them to Harry, who'd survived the Killing Curse not once but three times, among other things that had been a lot less publicized--it would not be useful to hold out hope, beyond that point.

Four months from October was February. Yesterday had been Christmas.

It didn't leave a lot of time, did it? Really it was almost no time at all. A month plus an extra week; that was all that was left. Maybe the time he'd already lost was too much time to make up. 

Then again, maybe it wasn't.

"Accio potion cup," Harry said, and however many cups might have been hiding behind the dresser, only one thimble-sized one came flying out. He put out his hand and caught it, as he'd caught any number of Snitch ornaments lately.

He poured one thimbleful of potion into the cup, and drank it down. Then he poured a second thimbleful, and drank that one down too.

He wouldn't expect to remember right away this time, he decided. There had to be a reason he was supposed to take the potion before bed, right? It must be more likely to work while he was sleeping, which meant he shouldn't expect much to happen until the morning, if anything happened then at all...

He reminded himself of this for hours, which felt like very long and dark hours indeed.