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: 9400

Summary: After ten years of marriage, Harry forgets.

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

Chapter Sixteen

Something was brewing all the way through breakfast. Harry could tell by the way Draco was looking at him, the sort of intense, pointy stare he hadn't, in retrospect, looked at Harry with since those first weeks in October. As if he weren't looking for the Harry he'd got, and more as if he were looking for...

Harry didn't want to ask, for reasons he wasn't exactly keen on thinking about (not with the you who's here right now...). Instead, he shoveled his eggs onto his toast and his toast into his mouth at top speed, and was done with his breakfast about three minutes after he'd sat down to start it. 

Then he went into the living room, which felt emptier than it had with all the Christmas stuff up, but somehow no less friendly, and sat for a while working on a letter to Hermione. She'd written him the night before wanting to how he was, really, after Ron had Floo'd the house wanting to know what had happened. As Harry wasn't sure how he was, really, he didn't get very far with this, especially considering how long the letter would have needed to be to get across just how much there was for him to not be sure about. 

In the end, he Vanished the parchment he'd been trying to write on, and wandered into the drawing room. Most of the Christmas stuff was gone from here too, with only the third tree left, branches now bare of the transfigured candles that had lit them up for the past weeks. Next to the tree was the largest box, opened and waiting. It looked like an invitation, and so Harry took it, not particularly caring when the tree got in its hits, even some pretty solid ones; within about fifteen minutes, it was properly in its box, and had been charmed to want to stay there--though it still seemed more lively, and possibly more fucked off about it the whole thing, than the other trees had been.

"Well, that was impressive," Draco remarked from behind him, which was an annoying thing to have remarked when Harry was breathing hard, and covered in sweat and tree sap. "By which I mean it certainly was a display of...something."

"What do you want?" Asking was probably a mistake. It felt like one before it was even finished coming out of his mouth, anyway. Maybe any question would have, but especially that one.

"Um. Nothing," Draco said, blinking at him. "I mean, not nothing, but I wasn't actually trying to--but how are you feeling today? Any better?"

"Better how?" Harry didn't consider how loudly he was asking this until Draco raised an eyebrow pointily at him about this. More quietly, but still very firmly, he added, "Better than before I passed out, or better in general?"

Draco glanced down at the tree in its box. "As you're still on your feet after besting this particular opponent, how about in general."

Harry thought about it. This, too, could have been a complicated question, except for the way it was clear that Draco was only really asking about one thing.

"Better than before," he said, and figured it was fine if he didn't clarify that when he said 'before,' he meant the last week as opposed to, like, before Christmas. The pink gumminess was about twice what it had been to start with, but nowhere near as bad as it had got lately. There had been no pink flashes this morning, and almost nothing in the way of pressure behind his eyes... "A lot better, really. So you don't have to worry."

"Good." Draco seemed to relax, a sneer curling at the corner of his mouth. "It'll be more alright in future," he went on, with a stranger and ginger-seeming sort of firmness of his own. "You're going to be more careful. No more doing things like taking, I dunno, one point six-seven times your intended dosage. Alright?"

"Yeah," Harry said, thinking that seemed like a really specific number opposed to 'about an extra thimbleful or two,' but also that he wasn't about to correct him, in case Draco picked up on anything Harry wasn't keen on him picking up on... "Can we not talk about it anymore?"

"--Alright." 

Harry slashed his wand at the tree box and Levitated it up the stairs and into the attic. Once there, he soon found the corner in which the other tree boxes were stashed, and set the drawing room tree down alongside them.

He went back down the attic ladder to find that Draco had followed him, or maybe had come up parallel to him; in any case, Draco was there, standing by the door to his office, staring at Harry again. He had stared at him all the day before, too, but not like the way he was staring today, a way that seemed a lot less concerned and a lot more piercing than it had before.

"What is it now?" Harry asked gruffly, very conscious of his stickiness and all the attic dust that had seemed to settle on top of it, and the spider he'd had to pull out of his hair not very many seconds before going down the ladder again.

"Just," Draco said. "What do you actually think..."

"What do I actually think about what?"

Draco stared at him a moment before his sneer reappeared, the same sort of half-hearted one from yesterday. "What do you actually think you're doing, stomping around here like some--"

Harry wasn't in the mood to listen to the rest of this, and was down the stairs before Draco could get to finish his criticisms. It was a normal sort of stair descending, which didn't involve tiptoeing, exactly, but definitely didn't involve any stomping whatsoever. If Draco was following him around trying to find criticisms, he was just going to have to find something else to do it about.

*

Draco didn't follow him, and, restless, Harry soon found himself stomping after all. Through the woods, without a coat or even a jumper, on what was a really quite chilly and even more quite gray sort of day. It took him the better part of the way to the snake's stump to remember to cast a Warming Charm. Once he was there, he stood and waited for a bit, listening hard for the slightest sign of any hissing, which might serve as an excuse to wake up the adder, and maybe spend a good long time telling her about his problems. But there wasn't any hissing; there was only, when he got a bit worried about it and cast a Somnum Revelio, the stump, lit up in a glowing green so bright it couldn't have been clearer there were eight or nine sleepers there.

Harry headed back to the house, by then not stomping, but more sort of trudging. Draco wasn't waiting for him in his Leaning Chair, which might have been because he hadn't noticed Harry going, or might have been because he was busy in his office, or might have been because he was wanting to spite Harry in some way, or might even have been because he was all the way fucked off about literally everything too. There was no point in asking, Harry thought, or in looking for trouble, and so he spent the rest of the day like that: irritable and restless and wanting very much not to think about anything.

*

The day after that started out better. Harry woke up to a pink gumminess that was about the same as it had been the day before, and was still only the pink gumminess instead of being everything else too. More importantly, he woke up feeling more or less normal: not cheerful, exactly, but not on edge either. More like a person than he had yesterday, even if there did seem to be a grimness curled around him, giving him the occasional squeeze.

"Still feeling better?" Draco asked, when Harry sat down for breakfast.

"Yeah," Harry said. "Loads better," which was true even if he didn't necessarily like that it was true. At least things had seemed to be happening, when he'd been on the verge of collapsing before...

"Good," Draco said. "You seem in a better mood too, but I've a cure for that!"

So saying, he brandished his copy of the Daily Prophet at Harry.

"...Fuck," Harry said, taking in the headline, the picture beneath it.

There was Draco, sitting in the big chair the Weasley's living room; there was Harry next to him, most likely just recovered from being a seal, judging by Harry's recollection of that night, which had had him wandering around in all the other rooms before the whole seal thing had happened; and in big, bold type above it were the letters:

EXCLUSIVE: BOY WHO LIVED TO BE A FATHER

"Great," Harry said. "Just excellent."

"I thought so," Draco said. "It's got me at my best angle. You're looking a little green, though, aren't you?"

It was true; picture Draco looked like the cat that had gotten the canary, sneerily, while picture Harry looked a bit as if he were regretting his entire life.

"Think someone took liberties," Harry said, because that was possible, with wizarding film. The spells used to make pictures move could make them more true to life, or less; and the more he looked at this one, the more he thought it wasn't a picture that had been developed in the intention of being kind to them...

"Read the story and you'll be certain of it," said Draco. "It all but says I've trapped you--though I admit I'm not really certain how, given we're married already."

"Yeah," Harry said. He took the paper, which Draco had now offered him, and skimmed the story. There didn't seem to be much to it, other than the facts, which were that they'd announced Draco's pregnancy at Christmas, and they were having a boy along with a whole lot of insinuations. "Mine was better," he said, when he was done, and was looking at the headline again. 

"Yours?"

"I figured they'd go with 'the boy who lived to reproduce.'"

"Shame you didn't go into journalism," Draco said dryly. "If we can even call this that."

"Yeah," Harry said.

"They had to get it eventually," Draco went on. "It's not like we didn't know that."

"Yeah," Harry said. "Who do you think..."

Draco shrugged. "There were a lot of people at Christmas this year."

"Yeah," Harry said. It seemed to be the sentiment of the day. "Er, sorry," he added.

"It's alright," Draco said. "We knew it had to happen eventually. And it's not as if either of us is going out in public much right now, anyway. Really it's Teddy who's likely to be in the thick of it."

Harry had a flash of wondering exactly what Teddy might come up with on the fly, if he learned about this from a gaggle of nosy third-years or something. "Er. Does Teddy know about...?"

"Ron told him," Draco said. "Relatively early on. He's got Harold Skeeter in his class, the last thing anyone would want is for an exclusive where you're shocked at the very idea I might be."

"Right," said Harry, only have flinched slightly about hearing Harold Skeeter's name again. He picked up the paper again, read back through the story, and more closely this time. He found that the insinuations he was having trouble with were less the ones about how him looking green at Christmas meant he felt a little nauseous about things all the time, and more the ones that suggested that maybe he wasn't actually the other father. 

"He's got my eyes," he blurted out, though there was no way the Prophet could have known this, since Harry hadn't said so to anyone at Christmas, and felt suddenly quite certain Draco hadn't, either. It was the kind of thing that still felt very private. Much privater, at least, than the rest of things.

"Yes," Draco said.

Harry swallowed, and turned the paper over so he could no longer see the headline, or picture, or any of the rest of the whole thing. "Do you want me to, you know..."

"What?"

"Go hex the person who wrote this?" Harry asked, finding that the more he thought about it, the more he actually kind of would be all right doing that. Actually kind of wanted to. Actually really wanted to.

"Not unless you want tomorrow's story to be about that," Draco said dryly. "No, I'd let it lie. They'll talk about it less if we ignore it, and don't parade around in public to be hassled about things. Anyway, the more of a fuss we make, the more likely we'll get enough attempted owls to break through the mail charms."

"Er," Harry said. "Mail charms?"

Draco looked at him. He looked relieved to be talking about something else now, or at least Harry could imagine that he looked it. His hand was resting on the curve of his stomach, a protective-seeming sort of gesture. "Why do you think you haven't got any fan mail recently? Love letters, love potions, that sort of thing? It's not because no one's interested anymore now you've gray hairs and love handles."

"Oh."

"We've an approved list, your family and mine, friends, subscriptions, that sort of thing. Mail from a sender not on it ends up going in circles a while depending on the stubbornness of the owl, and then going back. Anything addressed to Broomwandstick makes it here too, obviously. It helps our address isn't public knowledge, which means we haven't had to fully restrict the Floo--though of course you've experienced the precautions we did set up, in case."

"Right," said Harry. "No hexing then."

"No," said Draco. "Much as I'd love to come along to see it, honestly."

Well, there was another reason not to go hexing anyone, Harry thought, feeling he very strongly didn't want Draco to get in the middle of any sort of firefight. It was a strange way to feel, considering all the things they'd cast at each other in school...

"Right," he said again, and wondered a bit if he were ever going to feel less weird about feeling weird about Draco Malfoy. If it would sort of go around in his head weirdly forever, or if it would eventually settle into something a bit more normal.

*

The next day was the second Thursday. At breakfast, Draco asked again how Harry was feeling.

"I'm fine!" Harry said, and then, wondering if Draco was going to ask him every fucking day: "Are you really going to ask me about it every single day?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Draco, in a way that was less sneery than just plain arsey. "Do I really want to check in to be certain you aren't being slowly poisoned? I'm struggling with why I'd want to, truly."

Feeling he couldn't dispute this without giving various things away, and now somewhat missing the days when they could have just hexed each other and had done, Harry ate the rest of his breakfast in a moody silence. The silence and the moodiness then dragged out into the afternoon, and might have dragged out further than that if it hadn't been for Dudley and Deirdre's arrival.

Deirdre exploded into their house like an exploding thing, Draco's wand sparking pink and blue in her hand, words tumbling over each other as she told Harry about what had happened at Christmas. Apparently she had got even more excited (or possibly, Harry thought moodily, moody) about something while they'd been at her mum's parents' house in the evening, and had blown up a part of the house, or turned it maroon, or possibly it had been a bit of both in the end. This had resulted in wizards showing up to fix it, along with a team of Obliviators who'd had to go up and down the street, and it had all been very exciting so far as Christmas in previously unmagical suburbia had usually been.

"And then they wanted to erase Nana and Papa's memory too, only Dad yelled at them that they shouldn't, and then Grandmum fainted and Dad yelled at them some more, and then Grandmum said she gave up and went home. Then Nana asked them if they wanted to stay for tea, and mostly they didn't. Except then this one witch did, for a bit, and we talked a lot about Hogwarts, and she was really pretty..."

"Really pretty, huh?" Harry said, feeling remarkably more cheery than he had when this whole story had started (other than a momentary blip of kinship with Aunt Petunia over the fainting thing, which had been a bit nauseating).

"Er, I meant really nice," said Deidre in a higher pitched sort of voice than her normal one, and turning more than a bit pink. "And anyway, she said that when she went there, there was a Giant Squid living in the lake!"

Harry, who was not sure what the other Harry could have been telling her about Hogwarts if he'd somehow managed to leave out the Giant Squid, said, "I dunno about that."

Deirdre looked crestfallen, and not a little deflated. "Oh."

"There might be a couple of them by now," Harry went on. "I dunno how it, er, makes baby Giant Squids--" Abruptly, he recalled that he was speaking to a nine year old, who might or might not know how they made baby anythings, and might or might not ask him questions about it, and moved on quickly: "But there's definitely at least one! Merpeople, too."

"What's that?" Deirdre asked.

"Well, er," Harry, said, recalling that Dudley, who hadn't known what a unicorn was at the ripe old age of thirty-nine, was the one who'd had the raising of her. "D'you know what a mermaid is?"

"Oh, like Ariel?"

"Er, what?"

Deirdre went on to explain the whole plot of a film she liked, which had a villain that sounded a bit like the Giant Squid, or at least in how many legs she had. It was a much more coherent explanation than any Draco had ever given about anything, which led Harry to almost believe he was more or less following it.

"Right," said Harry, once Deirdre had finished. "Merpeople are...sort of like that, I guess? Not a lot, but they're shaped like people on the top and fish on the bottom, and all that. But they speak a different language to us, and they're...not really friendly, at all."

"That's so cool," Deirdre said.

"You can't go trying to make friends with them," Harry hastened to underline. "It wouldn't be safe."

"Do you think I'll get to see them sometime, though?" Deidre asked. "I'm to be there for seven years, that's got to mean I'll see them sometimes, right?"

"Yeah," Harry said, figuring plenty of people at Hogwarts had seen plenty of stuff that he'd only got to experience in the middle of things he hadn't wanted to be involved in to begin with. "Bet you'll see them a lot if you really want to."

Deirdre seemed happy enough with this, and they went on to talk about Hogwarts for a good long while. It was a bit weird--Harry didn't reminisce about Hogwarts a whole lot, and hadn't even before he'd wound up married to Draco Malfoy with a baby on the way. It hadn't ever been anything he was interested in doing, considering everything that had gone on while he was  there--Hogwarts had been his home, but everything that had happened at the end of things meant Hogwarts also hurt. But somehow it was different, talking about it with someone who was meant to be going there in another couple of years. Maybe it had been different for a while, considering Harry had apparently been teaching there for a lot of years--for more years, he knew, than he had been a student in the first place--but of course he didn't remember that to be sure of it.

A little while later, the conversation had drifted to more spells of the sort that a nine year old could manage to cast, and that were interesting enough for her to want to. Harry had showed Deirdre how to cast Wingardium Leviosa, which she was now practicing on a feather he'd transfigured for her. It was then that Harry finally noticed that Dudley and Draco must have wandered off a while ago from their conversation, having not actually been involved in it since before the Giant Squid had even come up. 

He poked his head into the den, and they weren't there. Then he headed toward the kitchen, and didn't find them there either. It turned out they had gone outside, and were huddled together a little ways from the back door, just in front of the broomshed. Whatever they were talking about, Draco seemed very intense about it, his hands moving around wildly the way they did when he was excited or upset; and Dudley seemed very serious, his shoulders hunched, and hunching even more when he actually managed to get a word in.

When Harry had first seen them out the sunroom window, they had seemed to be talking quietly, for all Draco's dramatic hand motions. As he went down the back steps, though, Dudley glanced at him, and Draco said, sharp and loud enough to carry, "I can't do that, are you mad?" His hands flew to the sides, a gesture of...something. "I forgot who I was talking to. You're related to him, of course you wouldn't understand the intricacies of--"

"Er, Draco..." Dudley said, lowly and urgently and with a not very subtle head motion toward Harry.

Since this was, again, not very subtle, Draco didn't seem to have any trouble following. "Oh. It's you," he said. "I see you've left Deidre unattended with my wand," he added, which seemed unfair, considering all the times Draco had done the same thing on just the second Thursdays Harry could remember. "Pardon me while I go to see what's happening with that."

He gave Dudley a very dirty look and stalked past Harry and back into the house, slamming the door behind him.

"What was all that about?" Harry asked.

"Couldn't say," Dudley muttered, having started a little guiltily at the question, but also looking at Harry in a mulish way that suggested he was unlikely to get anywhere even if he did decide to push it. 

"Right," Harry said, and where he might have been irritated at some earlier time by the idea of Dudley and Draco having secrets, right now he just felt kind of...deflated, a bit, and a bit more left out, instead. It wasn't that he wanted to know what they'd been talking about because he thought they were up to something--though it seemed quite likely, from Dudley's furtiveness at least, that they might indeed have been up to something--as that he'd have liked to have been invited.

"So..." said Dudley, still a bit hunched and with his hands in his pockets now. Harry's hands were in his own pockets, too; he had the feeling, distinct and awkward, though less uncomfortable than other kinships, that his shoulders were a bit hunched too, and did his best to stand up straighter. "How are, er, things?"

"They're alright," said Harry, thinking that really a lot had happened since the last time Dudley had been around. Christmas had been a turning point, midway between Dudley and Deirdre's last visit and this one; they'd been in before last time, and now they were in after, only no one but Harry and Healer Jenkins had realized it, or really even knew... "Christmas was really good."

"Yeah?"

No one really knew, Harry thought again. Not even Ron and Hermione did, because Ron and Hermione hadn't known he wasn't taking his potion, so telling them that he was now would have required quite a lot of explaining before they'd have understood how big it was meant to be...

Dudley had known, though. Not because Harry had told him, but because he'd guessed...and now he was waiting to hear whatever Harry had to say, about Christmas or whatever else.

"It was really good," Harry said again. "And I, er, started taking my potion."

"You did?" Dudley said, looking at him with less of a mulish and more of a wide-eyed expression now. "You're taking your medicine?"

"Er, yeah," Harry said, abruptly aware of how cold it actually was, out at the back of their house in January. This didn't stop his face from heating up in a very weird sort of contrast. "It's, just," he went on. "Draco's...he's not...everything's not what I thought it was at first, alright? It's...and he's...I really like him," he said, and casting a Warming Charm over both of them didn't really help at all with the contrast thing, considering his face now felt a bit as if a dragon had breathed on it. 

"Yeah?"

"I think I really...anyway, so I want to remember things now. Our life, and stuff. But it's not, er..."

"Not what?" Dudley prompted. "What isn't it?"

"It's not," Harry started, and couldn't really think of what it wasn't, now. "The thing is," he said, changing tacks, and worryingly slowly too--not that Dudley seemed to mind too much, or seemed likely to tell him to get on with it already, boy, the way Uncle Vernon would have done if he'd ever actually tried to listen to Harry's explanation of anything. "I don't know if it's going to work," he said finally. "I've been taking my potion since Christmas, but I haven't remembered anything yet. And my Healer said it's all about consistency, you know, more than how much I take..." He decided, without having to think very hard about it, to leave out all the collapsing and puking and being dragged off to St Mungo's. "But there's a time limit on it too. So even if I take it every day between now and then, it still might not, you know...work at all."

"Yeah," Dudley said, nodding as if he had already known this. Well, maybe he had; Draco had to have been talking to him about something before Harry had got out here. Something about Harry, that had had them both looking a bit upset...

Harry liked people looking upset about him even less now that he was a bit upset too, and about the same thing.

"So I just don't know," he said, and wasn't one hundred percent sure what it was he didn't know, at least until he kept talking and found out that it was: "What I can...what I'm going to do, if it doesn't work." If Draco would even--but he found that wasn't something he could even think to himself, nevermind say out loud to another person. "I'm really worried about it," he concluded, in case this wasn't obvious from the rest of the things he'd stammered out. That he'd stammered out to Dudley Dursley about Draco Malfoy, who...

Harry felt very hot-faced indeed by the time Dudley seemed to have worked his whole way through this.

"D'you want to know what I think?" Dudley asked once he had, his face having done some weird contorting things in-between before he looked straight at Harry to say this.

"Er," Harry said, not really at all sure what kind of advice Dudley was likely to give him, if it would be any good or not...but even if it wasn't any good, he realized suddenly, it would at least be better than having no one's thoughts about it but his own. "Yeah, alright. What do you think?"

"Right," Dudley said, in a slow way that gave less of an impression that he was unsure, and more of an impression of the opposite, mulish again as he went on: "What I think is you ought to talk to Draco about it. Tell him everything you just told me." 

This was such a terrible idea that for a long moment Harry could only stare at Dudley for having come up with it. "I can't do that," he managed, mumbling it before he said it again, and much more loudly. "I can't do that! I'd have to tell him that I wasn't taking my potion before...he'd be really upset." Now that Harry was thinking of it head-on, not as a thing he didn't want found out but as a thing that might very well be, his stomach sank all the way into the ground at the thought of just how upset Draco might be. He couldn't picture, exactly, what he thought Draco might do or say about it. Only that it couldn't be anything but really, really bad. "I can't do that to him," he said, with the further sinking feeling that he might have done quite enough already, ruined everything already. Even though there was still almost a month left for taking his potion, he might already have guaranteed there wasn't enough time for it to work...

"I think he'd understand," said Dudley, with a patient expression that also seemed pained, as if that sort of thing didn't come naturally to him (Harry could attest it really couldn't have). "He'd just be happy you're taking your medicine now...and really happy that you're doing it because you like him."

"I can't do that," said Harry again, because the way through was to keep taking his potion, and remember things, and fix them that way. And if he couldn't, and it didn't work out, he could figure out his next option then. "And you can't tell him either!" he added, when Dudley had glanced past him to the house, and then out to the forest, spread out to all sides. "You have to promise me you won't..."

"I won't say anything," Dudley promised, glumly indeed. "I swear."

Harry could have said more, but there didn't seem to be any need; Dudley hadn't, after all, said anything to Draco about his last confession. That had been months ago, and he'd kept it to himself...

"Right, then," he said. "Thanks."

"Any time," said Dudley, glumly again.

*

Harry was the one who felt glum, by the time Dudley and Deirdre had gone again. He could hardly help it; it came naturally on the heels of that conversation, now that he was thinking about everything he hadn't wanted to think about. Whether the potion would work or not; and if it didn't, what would happen then. It already seemed less about what Harry would do, and more about what Draco would...

"Have I got something on my face?" Draco asked irritably, when Harry had been looking at him miserably for what had in retrospect been a few seconds too long. "In my teeth, perhaps?"

"Er, no?" said Harry, and then, more boldly: "You look good."

Draco glared at him. "I do not look good. I'm so--I almost--surely you've noticed I'm--! You don't have to lie to try and make me feel better!"

"Er, noticed what?" asked Harry, not really sure what Draco could mean. He really did look good.  He'd seemed a bit slimmer while Dudley and Deirdre were here, but had dropped whatever charms he was using as soon as Dudley's car had gone far enough for their drive to have gone with it. The roundness of his lower abdomen held up against that former slimness was something like Harry's face had been outside: a contrast, but not a weird one this time so much as one that made Harry's chest fill with a twisting warmth. A softness seemed to come in behind his eyes, elbowing the pink gumminess out of the way for what might have been as long as several seconds.

Draco stared at him more than long enough for the pink gumminess to have come back before saying, "I'm all--sweaty, and--oh, would you just shut up about it now?"

"Shut up about what?" Harry asked, because Draco was a little pink in the face pretty much most of the time now, but not in a bad way. More of a way that had Harry wanting to take a second look every time he'd had a first one...which was what Draco didn't like, he guessed. "Alright, sorry!" he added, when Draco did a twitchy motion like he'd have gone for his wand if it hadn't still been halfway across the living room, on the side table where Deirdre had left it.

"You should be," Draco said, a severity with an odd edge to it. "Considering it's your fault."

Harry's face went very hot at this. "Yeah..." he said weakly.

"I don't care if you don't remember it, it doesn't change the fact," Draco went on. He glanced around, though it was unclear what he might have been looking for until he moved a step over and sat down heavily on the edge of the couch. He bent forward for a few moments, then leaned back again with a disgusted expression on his face. Harry was very familiar with it, the curl of Draco's lip, though it had usually been directed at himself or another person, and this version didn't seem to be.

"What's wrong?" he asked, figuring it was a safe bet something was.

"Nothing," Draco said.

"If it was nothing, you wouldn't be looking like that. Or sitting in my spot."

"It's nothing important," Draco said, drawling out the word 'important' like Harry should feel very stupid for having pushed it. It ought to have made him look arsey again, but what it actually managed to do was make him look a bit miserable. "I, just--my feet hurt, alright? I've been on them more today than usual. And I can't--I could reach them, sort of. But it's more effort than it's worth right now, isn't it?"

"Oh."

"And it's--this is my spot, actually. Yours is on the other end."

"Right," Harry said, magnanimously not pointing out that Draco always sat on his Leaning Chair, while Harry was generally sat in Draco's current location. "Is there anything I can do?"

Draco snorted. "Not unless you're keen on giving out foot massages."

"Er, alright."

Now the look Draco gave him was a lot less arsey and a lot more like Harry had suddenly sprouted a second head, and it didn't belong to someone alarming like Voldemort, but plain old startling, like Gilderoy Lockhart. "I'm sorry," he said, politely indeed. "I could have sworn you just offered to rub my feet. No one ever told me I was likely to hallucinate things in the second trimester. I'll have to bring it up with my Healer."

"I could," Harry blurted, his face going even hotter than it had been before. "I don't mind!"

Draco looked at him a moment longer. "Alright," he said. "Have a seat."

He waved at the other end of the couch, the one Harry never sat on. Harry went over and sat. Draco looked at him some more, eyes narrowed and lips a little on the thin side--and then, out of nowhere, he seemed to brighten.

"Alright," he said again, cheerily now, and reached down to pull off his shoes and socks. He waved his wand, and several pillows came zooming over to land in Harry's lap. "Elevation," Draco explained, and turned toward Harry on the couch, only to seem to change his mind once his feet were up in the air, aimed at Harry's lap too. "Um," he said, and put his feet back down on the floor. He pointed his wand at one foot, and then at the other, muttering a hasty pair of Scourgifies. Then he swung his feet back up again, and plopped them down onto the pillows.

Harry stared at him, and then back at the feet that were now, if you discounted the pillows between him and them, actually in his lap.

"Well, Harry?" Draco asked, more cheeriness which nonetheless seemed to have some of that edge underneath it again. "Hop to."

For a moment, Harry felt abruptly as if he were back in school, or something, taking on a dare. Only he'd never cared about being dared to do anything one way or the other, unless he wanted to do it anyway. Much less would he have cared if Draco Malfoy had been the one daring him. But this wasn't then, or there; this was now, and here, and the thing Draco was daring him to do was something Harry was fine with doing, after all.

"Right," he said, and picked up Draco's nearer foot. It was pink and a little puffy, dry and warm to the touch with a clean soapy smell. "I haven't, er, ever done this before..."

"It's easy," Draco said. "You can start by stroking it on the top or sides." For a moment, an alarm blared inside Harry's head, a reminder that this was Draco Malfoy, and that trying to give him a foot job was surely a fast track to humiliation the likes of which he had not yet known. Then Draco, who'd meanwhile gone very pink in the face, said, "I didn't mean it like--there are limited ways to say it, alright?"

"Alright," Harry said. The alarm seemed already to have been switched off; all there was left was a far-away feeling that there was something dangerous about this. But it was a distant thought indeed, and one that no longer seemed to actually have very much to do with Draco Malfoy, who was so different to what he'd been before...

So he ran his fingers down the top of Draco's foot, more of an exploration than anything that could possibly really count as a massage. Draco didn't say anything about it, though. He didn't do anything at all about it, at least until Harry had run his fingers down the bottom of his foot, causing Draco to jerk in a violent twitch, so that he came very close to kicking Harry in the face.

"Sorry!" he said. "Sorry. I'm a bit, um, ticklish there..."

This sounded like ammunition to Harry. If it had seemed like a different moment, he might have taken advantage of it. Forget might; he definitely would have, the idea of a ticklish Draco was hilarious. But it seemed a weightier moment than that, somehow, or at least a moment he didn't want to break.

"What'd you want a foot rub for, then, if you're so ticklish?" Harry asked, rubbing the top of Draco's foot with his thumbs now in a circular motion that seemed more intuitive than the whole stroking with his fingers thing.

It seemed to work for Draco, too, because he settled back against the other end of the couch in a relaxed way. "It was you who offered," he murmured. "And you give bloody good foot rubs. You do when you're not trying to have your teeth kicked in, anyway. How could I possibly have resisted your charms?"

Harry rolled his eyes. "Right." 

He went on rubbing Draco's foot some more. Up to his toes now, and between them, weirdly fascinated by the littleness of the bones there, and somehow not at all put off when Draco let out a breathy sigh. By the time he picked up Draco's other foot, Draco had gone pretty quiet, and had closed his eyes.

"Is your right one ticklish too?" Harry asked.

Draco seemed to have to rouse himself out of something to even answer. "No," he said, a low murmur indeed. "No, not really at all..."

By the time Harry had finished with his other foot, it had been quite a while since Draco had said much, encouraging or mocking or anything between. In fact he was so still and peaceful on the other end of the couch that he might have been...

"Are you asleep?" Harry asked, in the sort of low voice you always end up asking people that question when you don't want to wake them if they are.

Draco didn't answer except with a sort of mumble a few minutes later, a question or answer Harry doubted he could have made out if he'd poured that moment into a Pensieve and relived it several thousand times. 

After a few more minutes, Harry Summoned the book he'd started reading--one of Draco's, a later one which actually seemed to have some plot in-between the sexy scenes, and was somehow really interesting despite very obviously not having had any more fact-checking research done on it than the Hippogriff one--and read until it had become quite late. He didn't realize how long he must have been sitting there, first not wanting to move and then (once his bladder had started complaining at him) repeatedly telling himself he would go once he got to the end of the current chapter, until he had finished reading Beguiled by the Basilisk and finally got around to sneaking out from beneath Draco's feet.

Once he'd extricated himself, he looked back at Draco. He was still fully out, and hadn't gotten any more awake in response to Harry's sneaking.

Would Draco want to spend the night on the couch? There was no chance of Harry rousing him, either way. Not when he still had those circles under his eyes, which seemed to get darker and deeper by the week; not when he hadn't moved at all in an least an hour, outside of the occasional muttering breath.

"Accio blanket," Harry said in a voice that seemed much too loud even though he'd spoken as quietly as he could.

The blanket that came was a nice thick one that Harry judged would be good enough for a winter's night. He spread it over Draco carefully, not wanting to wake him. That done, there was no real reason he shouldn't have gone straight upstairs, considering how loudly his bladder was complaining at him by now. There was no reason he shouldn't have, no reason he should have stayed looking down at Draco, as if it would be unthinkable, somehow, to look away. Long enough for looking at him to hurt, for some reason. Long enough for a sense of freefall he'd felt weeks before to have come back, dizzying and somehow even more painful...

Harry couldn't move, and couldn't make himself move. This state of being seemed to stretch out endlessly, on and on, until the moment Draco shifted a little in his sleep, looking so peaceful and...for a moment, a little sneery, as if he were dreaming something that was...and he looked so...and...

Harry wanted to kiss him. He wanted it so badly, actually saw himself doing it so clearly that for a moment he thought it might be a memory instead of just something he wanted. Only then, in the same moment he thought it, he knew it couldn't have been one. The Draco he could see himself kissing was the same Draco who was lying there now, covered by the same blanket Harry had spread over him; the Draco who was very obviously pregnant now, with enough of a roundness to catch your eye even if you hadn't known.

Not a memory. Just Draco, as he was. Just the biggest part of Harry's life, the way it was. Just...

The spell, or whatever it had been, seemed to break. Harry took a step back, and another, and turned around, and ran up the stairs to the loo.

*

Harry woke up very suddenly. One moment he'd been in the midst of...and now he wasn't. Was, instead, so pink and gummy he could almost smell it; and with the pink gumminess was that same sense of unease from a lot of the other times he'd woken up in the middle of the night. It left him too jittery to wonder what he'd been in the middle of, after all--at least, he was until he'd lit the end of his wand and had a look around the room. It was no different than it had been when he'd gone to sleep, nothing moved and nothing moving and no unexpected shapes when he checked the closet and the nursery and then under the bed for good measure.

With a whispered "Nox," he lay back down in the darkness, and closed his eyes, and tried to think about things that weren't how much he'd enjoy getting back to sleep while not reliving the nightmare that had woken him. It was around then he realized there was something going on other than the pink gumminess or even the unease...

He'd been dreaming, yeah. Not a nightmare, this time. He'd been dreaming about something more...fuck, and he was hard, too, even through the pink gumminess, and even though the unease hadn't quite finished fading yet...

It was coming back to him, not a nightmare after all. In it, he'd kissed Draco, down the stairs, in one of the moments he'd wanted to, hours before; Draco, sleepy and warm, had kissed him back. Had drawn Harry down on top of him. There'd been more kissing, then, and touching, though what specific sort of touching it had been had been made up mostly of vague details and not at all vague arousal, none of which had bothered him, the way things like that didn't, in dreams...

Harry decided not to think anymore about it, or anything else about it either. His resolve lasted maybe all of two minutes as he turned onto his side and then onto his front, then realized he was in real danger of humping the mattress like a teenager if he stayed like that and so twisted around to lie on his back again.

The next part of the dream hadn't been vague at all...it had been very fucking clear what was going on, hadn't it, as Harry slid down Draco's body, kissing every part of his skin that he could, paying special attention, when he got there, to that roundness, and then even more to...

He couldn't begin to imagine Draco's dick, in the dream or out of it. In the dream he'd been too focused on what he was doing to worry about it, anyway...sucking gently on the tip for a bit before getting seriouser about it and taking it as far into his mouth as he could get it...

Harry reached beneath the covers, but not into his pants, his fingers stopping just at the elastic of his waistband. He was throbbingly hard, but that didn't mean he had to...

In the dream, Draco had come while making a sound, one Harry couldn't remember very clearly now, which might not have been very clear to begin with. He'd come, and that had been it for Harry of the dream. It turned out to be it for him now, too, just the idea of it; he shoved his pants down his thighs, and wrapped his hand around his dick, and wanked himself with an urgency he hadn't felt since he'd been here.

In the dream, he'd straddling Draco as he wanked himself off, so pleased what he'd done, and so...here, now, in his bed in his dark bedroom, he wasn't so much pleased with himself as fairly sure there was a reason he shouldn't do this...but his hand didn't care what his theoretical reasons were, it just moved faster and faster, in sync with the remembered dream-motions, his panting breaths filling the room as he got closer and closer to...

He'd ended in the dream by coming on Draco. On him, all over his bare round stomach, not hidden beneath his robes anymore...it didn't seem to matter that he'd never seen Draco like that, that there was no way of knowing if this actually was the way he looked, out of his clothes...

The idea alone was almost enough to send him over. Then he recalled the way his come had started to trickle down the sides of Draco's stomach, the single clearest image from the dream...

"Fuck," Harry said, with a deep groan, only vaguely aware it was far from the first of the last few minutes. "Oh, fuck, fuck," and came so suddenly and explosively that his back arched off the bed and his vision went actually white...

He recovered only slowly, and with the sense it was a good thing he'd been lying down, because it was unlikely his legs would have wanted to still hold him up if he'd been doing anything other than. By the time his breathing had slowed, he might have been due for a good torturous think about where the fuck that had come from. Except by then he was already halfway to being back asleep, so that he hardly had any time to start wondering, and nowhere near enough time to work up to actually worrying about it.

He might have found time to worry about the soft clicking sound that came when he was nearly all the way asleep again. Only, relaxed as he was, it seemed as likely to be the beginning of another really very nice dream as anything else.

Whether it was or whether it wasn't, he'd forgotten about that bit by morning anyway.

*

In the morning, Harry woke up and didn't panic, exactly. There was no reason to. He'd already known he'd liked it when Draco kissed him; that he could want to kiss Draco, and also do other stuff with him, could not exactly have come out of the blue, then, could it? They were married, after all, and having a baby together--and Harry really liked him. He liked Draco more and more all the time. So it wasn't surprising, was it, that he'd had a top five of his life orgasm just thinking about doing those things with him, when he hadn't had one that could be called even halfway good since he'd woken up in Mungo's?

So, that part was alright. It didn't upset him, or at least didn't upset him the way it would have done months ago.

It did make him late for breakfast, not so much because he was thinking about it in detail as he that he was mulling over it in general. More vagueness, somewhere in the back of his head this time, doing things he could probably have figured out what they were if he'd focused on them, but didn't quite dare to.

Draco had got to the breakfast table before him, as usual. Today, he had the Prophet opened in front of his face so that Harry couldn't see anything of him but his hands.

"Er, morning," Harry said.

"Good morning," Draco said, oddly stiff, and went back to reading.

"I'm fine today, too," Harry said, recalling that Draco was surely meant to ask him again how he was feeling, and thinking newly that he didn't want to get sidetracked with being annoyed about having been asked.

"Good to know," Draco said, still staying behind his paper. 

"Anything good in today's?" Harry asked, meaning was there anything more about them. There didn't seem to be any mention of the baby on the front page like there had been yesterday and the day before, but just because it was earlier in the week type of news didn't mean they weren't liable to get a mention.

"Nothing new, anyway," Draco said, not even flipping down a corner of the paper to have a look at Harry. "They still can't decide if he's the product of a steamy affair, or if he's yours and I'm trapping you. Somehow. Despite the fact that we've been married for fucking ages."

Harry was struck with the sense, once again, that the thing to do might be to march up to the Daily Prophet 's offices and start hexing everyone who worked there. This seemed counterproductive, though, when it came to what he needed to do today, or better yet right now.

He reached across the table and pushed the paper down until he could see Draco's face, which was very pink today, and also scowling at Harry.

"I need to talk to you," Harry said, not at all sure exactly what he was going to say next, only that he had to say something, now. It was one thing not to have minded it when Draco had kissed him; everything from last night was something else. Or, well, not everything from last night. The dream didn't not matter, but the way it mattered was less about the things he wanted to do to and with Draco, and more about how he wanted those things because of the softness that had come in behind his eyes, looking at him, the way he hadn't been able to look away while Draco was sleeping. It now seemed quite urgent to find out, if his memories didn't manage to come back, how much of a difference it actually would make for Draco...if he'd even be at all interested in... "And, er, ask you some stuff, I guess?"

"You want to ask me some stuff," Draco repeated, the scowl fading into a sort of blankness.

"Yeah," Harry said. "About last night..."

Draco flinched. Harry wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't been looking at him so closely, if he'd glanced away for even a second, or chosen that very moment to blink.

"What about it?" Draco asked, so casually Harry wouldn't have picked up on the strain if he hadn't already picked up on the flinch.

Harry would never be quite sure, later, what exactly he would have said, or in what order he'd have said it in, if it hadn't been for that flinch. Whatever had been on the tip of his tongue, he swallowed it down in that moment, so that it fell into his stomach and twisted there awfully.

"Er," he said, knowing he couldn't tell Draco now about having wanted to kiss him. Not if he was flinching at the barest mention of last night; not when nothing else had even happened last night for him, apart from that foot rub. There was really only one reason Harry could think of for Draco to be getting upset by that now, in the morning (not with the you who's...). "I finished reading your Basilisk book last night, that's all."

"Oh, yeah?" Draco asked, going from blank to interested, even eager.

He'd chosen right, then. Somehow it didn't make the twisting any less. "Yeah."

"--So what did you think?" Draco demanded. "You can't just leave me hanging, Harry."

"It was alright, I guess. If you like that sort of rubbish," Harry said, throwing himself into this because it was only about a thousand times better than letting himself get upset about things in front of Draco Malfoy. "Basilisks can't actually talk in English, though. It's all, you know, Parseltongue with them."

Coloring very nicely, and in a way Harry had come to know meant he was about to throw himself into the fray, too (usually with his quill, while reading the funny/vicious bits out loud), Draco rolled his eyes. "How do you know, are you one?"

"No, but I do have some, er, experience--"

"Basilisk slaying experience is hardly the same as Basilisk fucking experience, Chosen One," Draco said snidely. "Especially if the Basilisk is actually an Animagus. Which he was. Which you'd know if you'd bothered to read carefully instead of skimming to get to the sexy bits--"

"I wasn't skimming," Harry started, then gave up the idea of talking about anything sexy as a bad job for today in particular. "People can't talk in their Animagus form, either, unless it's a parrot or something. And his Animagus form couldn't have been a Basilisk anyway, it has to be a normal kind of animal."

"How do you know, are you one?"

Harry blinked at Draco, and grinned, the twisting in his stomach having mostly faded away in the face of this ridiculous conversation. "Am I which? A Basilisk or an Animagus?"

"Either, obviously," Draco said, eyes narrowed.

"I'm neither," Harry said cheerfully, and really it was only a little bit forced. "Still know more about both than you, though."

*

It wasn't until much later in the day that Harry let himself think about things. Thinking about things led to him getting out a calendar, counting off the days more officially than he had done before. It was only three weeks until February, only three and a half until the four month mark. 

He had barely any time at all left, he thought, with a sinking feeling that refused to go away, after.