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: 11,500

Summary: After ten years of marriage, Harry forgets.

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

Chapter Seventeen

In the third week of January, Draco locked himself in his office, only emerging from it for about two seconds at breakfast each day.

"Haven't I told you I'm on deadline?" he said, when Harry complained about this. "I have a whole book to write by Friday. You're not my first priority unless you're about to drop dead, and probably not then."

"Shouldn't you have, er, started on it before now, then?" Harry asked, and was then greeted by probably the most hateful look Draco had ever sent his way.

"You think I haven't tried to? I've been--it hasn't exactly been easy when you--! You know what, I don't have time for this. Fuck's sake." Draco slammed his office door in Harry's face. Then he opened the door again and added, very viciously, "I know all about you and the Triwizard Tournament. So if you ever think I want to hear your opinions about when to start things--!"  

He slammed the door in Harry's face again, and went back to the muffled cursing and scratching he'd been at before. Harry didn't see much more of him until eleven fifty-nine on Friday night, when Herbert flew off with a fairly impressive stack of parchment.

"Well, that's it," said Draco, lowering himself into his Leaning Chair. "The last book I'll ever publish."

"What, really? You're giving up on your writing? What for?" Harry didn't like the sound of that at all. Didn't Draco like writing his books? He certainly seemed to enjoy having gigantic fights over them...

"I don't want to," Draco said gloomily, with his arm draped over his eyes. "After this one's out, I'll have to. That's the situation we're looking at. God, I wish I could have a drink."

"Er, you can't," said Harry, and was greeted by an expression that was only a little hateful, though possibly because it was mostly hidden by Draco's arm. "What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing! Everything! It's awful. I've forgotten how to write," said Draco, very gloomily and as if he hadn't spent all week writing stuff. "The book is complete rubbish. I doubt it makes any sense at all. Certainly no one will buy it. I'll be ruined."

"It can't be that bad," Harry said, managing not to grin out of sheer effort of will.

Draco let out a low, miserable sort of groan. "Can't it?"

"Is there, I dunno, anything I can do to help?"

"There's nothing you can do. There's nothing anyone can."

"Do you always freak out like this when you finish one?" This seemed likely to Harry, given Draco's general disposition and all-round Draco-ness. "What do I usually do to help?"

"Well," said Draco slowly, eyes still hidden under the crook of his elbow. "Usually, you tell me I'm brilliant, and fabulous, and the first printing will sell out within minutes, leading to riots in the streets. That sort of thing. And then you help me get very drunk, followed by comforting me with your body."

None of that sounded very like him, Harry thought. Outside of maybe the drinking and the shagging. And even if he did want to shag Draco now (and he couldn't deny, really, that he did; he'd even had another sexy dream on Wednesday night, following which he'd frantically wanked off to the image of shagging Draco on top of his office deck while he whinged about how he wasn't done with his book yet, so Harry had best hurry it up), still, it wasn't actually an invitation just because Draco had brought it up...

Face growing hotter by the second, Harry said, "Not sure I'd say any of that." The corner of Draco's mouth twitched, a little, which made Harry's chest swell with that warmth again. "It can't be more rubbish than the Minotaur one," he added, on the off chance this counted as helpful. He'd read through a lot of Draco's books this week, because he was there and they were there too, or maybe just because Draco had written them and Harry had wanted to know. He'd started out liking them more than he'd expected to, before he'd read a few in a row and started to be a bit disappointed at how similar they all were underneath. Then he'd read the Minotaur one, which had killed off the Minotaur character at the end and had the other one pine away for the rest of his life, and decided predictable was fine after all. "People bought that one, right? Or else you'd have stopped writing them before now..."

Draco took his arm off his eyes, looking at Harry in a way that had become familiar indeed. "Harry," he said, in a much carefuller tone to before. "Do you..."

"I don't remember anything," Harry said, but even as he said it he was racking his brains, trying to think if he could bring up anything about having done this before. If anything seemed even vaguely familiar when it came to Draco being dramatic about his new book, which knowing him he had most likely done for every one, several dozen times by Harry's count...

But it didn't matter how many times they must have been here together. It never seemed to matter. When he reached for those other times, to find out if an echo of even one remained, there was nothing there to grab hold of. There didn't even seem to be any gap or chasm things might have disappeared into. It was as if there was nothing to find, and never had been.

"Sorry," Harry said.

"It's fine," said Draco tightly.

Harry hated to see Draco like this, pinched and unhappy in way that wasn't at all hilarious. He hated even more being the reason why, so much he couldn't have imagined it just a few months ago. "Sorry about your crap book, too," he said, trying for light past the lump in his throat, the plummeting panic below that which never seemed to quite have gone away anymore.

After several moments of silence that it was unclear what it meant, Draco said, a little weakly but with a sneer too, "I'm certain you're not qualified to be a critic."

"Why, because I actually know stuff?" Harry asked, and he was going for cheerful, again, but wasn't at all sure he'd made it. All he could really feel was the strain.

*

In the fourth week of January, Draco said, "I've another appointment at Mungo's tomorrow, just so you know."

"Oh, yeah?" Harry said. "What time?"

Draco told him, which made it a little confusing when, at eleven o'clock the following day, he whirled on Harry at the Apparition Point near Reception, and hissed, "Just what are you doing here? Have you reverted to sixteen? You think you get to follow me around everywhere?"

"Er," Harry said, distantly aware there were were definitely a few people down at the corner by the elevator, who had probably seen them, and would definitely be trying to listen in if they had seen them, and so he needed to talk at a low pitch too. "You said you had an appointment!"

"So you'd know where I was!" Draco said, still in a hiss. "It wasn't an invitation!"

"Oh, well, sorry!" Harry said, feeling suddenly, twistingly stupid. "I'll go back home, then," he added, in what was probably a less low pitch--but it was hard to sustain that level of hissiness if you weren't a snake, or currently having a conversation with one. "Sorry again," he added, and stepped back so he could safely Apparate without having Draco too close to him.

"Harry, wait," Draco said, no less hissingly, which might have indicated he actually was part snake. "I just didn't think you'd be--it's nothing exciting, this time. I mean, we only get to have the Glimpsing once. This is--it's just a routine checkup, alright?"

"Yeah, I figured," Harry muttered, wishing Draco would stop talking so he could go home, and take his robes back off once he'd got there, and go for a long stomping walk on top of it all.

"Alright," Draco said. "We'd better get up there then, before you make me late. Come on."

They ended up in same private waiting room to before, even though the whole world now knew what they were waiting on, and would have an idea which floor they were on, too, if it got out they were at St Mungo's this afternoon. There were all the same parenting magazines laying out, which Harry flipped through again, unaware a new one had been put out until Draco said, "We're on Babywatch, apparently."

When Harry looked at him, he was brandishing the January edition of Family Magic, which had...a picture of them on the cover. It must have been an older one; they were both a bit thinner, Harry's hair darker than it was now, and Draco's not quite as far back from his forehead as it was now. The article, when Draco had stopped taunting Harry with the cover, turned out to be a lot of speculation: some of it wondering when Draco was due (sometime between next month and early July seemed to be the consensus), followed by a bunch of stuff speculating about how they'd be as parents based on a few facts that seemed to have been stretched out beyond recognition.

"Don't tell them much, do we?" Harry muttered, having discovered that he was likely to be dangerously lax (due to something to do with the average number of kids that ended up in the Hospital Wing per term due to curses/jinxes/etc incurred during his classes), while Draco was more likely to be very strict (due to being related to Lucius Malfoy, from what Harry could tell). The article then went on to explain how other parents could manage not to fall on either extreme when it came to parenting styles.

"Why would we need to tell them anything?" asked Draco, much more cheerily than seemed indicated in this situation. "They've got it right this time without any help. By which I mean, yes, you are a menace."

Harry snorted. It was hard to get very worked up by any of it when he was mostly just relieved the article hadn't said anything about his life with the Dursleys.

*

Soon they were led into an exam room, where Draco's Healer went through the same set of alarming questions as she had the last time--and then better ones, like if Draco had felt the baby kicking yet, and how often it happened, and if it had happened today ("Yes") and when was the most recently it had ("Downstairs, while I was yelling at Harry--oh, don't look at me like that, it was justified, anyone else would have yelled at you too. That was about thirty minutes ago.").

Finally, she asked how he'd been sleeping.

"Better," Draco said, looking tired in the way people only really could when they were trying very hard to seem less exhausted than they were.

"About the same, maybe a bit worse," interrupted Harry, and the dirty look Draco gave him at this went a long way toward making him feel better about Draco not having wanted him to come. Draco wanting to be able to get away with stuff was a massive improvement over not wanting Harry there just because. "And he hasn't been taking his sleeping potion."

"You've got a lot of--!" Draco started, going redder than Harry had seen him in a while. He pressed his lips tightly together, then said, "What makes you think I haven't been taking it?"

If Harry hadn't been sure, that kind of hedging would have clinched it. "You haven't been sleeping," he said, because his own sleep had gone to shit, and yet every time he was up it seemed Draco was up too. "If you were taking it, you would be. Also, the level of potion in the bottle hasn't gone down at all." Draco had put it in the bathroom cabinet, and not touched it since so far as Harry could tell.

"Well, pardon me for not being better at being an enormous sneak," said Draco, a little shrilly. "So sorry to disappoint!" He turned to the Healer and said, much more nicely, "I'm sorry, I just don't like Sleeping Draughts. And I'm--having trouble sleeping at nights, mostly. I'll try to nap more. Harry can give me more foot rubs, those always put me right out..."

"Yeah, I could!" Harry said, then realized how eager this had come out sounding. He'd have instinctually walked it back, except that then he remembered he didn't actually want to walk it back. "I don't mind," he added, for clarification purposes.

It was hard to say what the Healer thought of Harry, mostly because she still seemed very focused on Draco. "I'd like you to try for that nap daily," she said. "You'll have the best results if you're consistent. Try to lie down at the same time each day, and for the same amount of time. Earlier in the day is likely to be better than later, so it doesn't interfere with whatever sleep you are getting at nights."

"Alright," Draco said.

"I'd like you to keep a sleep journal for the next few weeks as well. Your entries should include the time you lay down and the time you get up again, as well as how rested you feel before and after--and how rested you feel on a day-to-day basis. If your overall sleep seems to deteriorate further, you should come back in," the Healer said. She then went on to say quite a lot about sleep hygiene, none of which Draco looked very happy about, even though he nodded and said 'alright' every time she left him enough of a pause to say anything.

Finally, with all the lecturing finished, there came the exam part. This was what Harry had been waiting on. It was the same thing as it had been the other time, the light that meant Draco glowing blue-ly once the Healer had cast the spell. Soon it was joined by the smaller, purple-y light, the one he'd been dying to see again...

After a minute, Harry realized Draco was looking at him, and kind of anxiously. "Well?" he demanded.

"Looks alright to me," Harry said, not a hundred percent sure what the lights would have looked like if there were something wrong, but fairly confident their colors would have been different, or dimmed, or would have brought with them some sense of unease instead of a sense of peace and well-being. At least, he was confident until he'd said it, and afterward hoped very hard to have been right on this one. "His light's bigger this time. It's a little brighter too..."

It had to be a good thing, right? Draco seemed to think so too, or at least seemed to relax, his shoulders falling downward a bit. "Good."

"His major systems still seem to be developing well. I've more tests to run, but I see nothing of concern thus far," said the Healer. She did something with her wand, a swish and a flick, and then added, almost idly, "It's a rare gift, you know, being able to see magic without training--even for someone you're very close to. If you ever want a change in career, you could do worse than to go into Healing."

"I'm, er, not really worrying about my career right now," Harry said.

When the Healer had finished with her casting, the lights faded from view. "Perfect," she said, putting her wand away again. "Everything is progressing very well. Still, I'd be happier if you were sleeping more; while your magic shields you and the baby from many of the negative effects of stress, you're likely to find a lack of sleep even more distressing as your pregnancy progresses."

"It's not my lack of sleep that's distressing--alright, yes, I'll do my best. Fine," said Draco through gritted teeth.

"Please do," said the Healer. She shared a glance with Harry, in which her glance seemed to be suggesting that he should see to this, and his glance back said he would try--though he wasn't sure what he could do about it if Draco wanted to eat or drink things too close to bedtime, or do some work within an hour of when he was meant to get to bed, or anything else on the list of sleep hygiene things.

*

Draco looked two parts annoyed, one part relieved all the way to the elevator, and all the way down to the ground floor. Then, when they had come to a stop from spinning around and around, something happened in his face; first it seemed to crumple, and then went white and awful.

"What's wrong?" Harry asked, hastily casting the charm that would stop the elevator before its doors could spit them out to the lesser or greater mass of reporters that were certainly waiting on them. 

"We've fucked up," Draco said, in a very calm voice that was not actually any less awful than his pale face. "Well and truly. The both of us."

"What is it?" Harry asked, panic sending his hand to the grip of his wand. "What's the matter? Draco, you've got to tell me--"

"Teddy," Draco said in a strange, dull voice, which was also somehow filled with something Harry couldn't place for a moment. "You followed me here, but I hadn't expected you to, so I didn't--I didn't even think to warn him. And you--you didn't ask about it..."

Horror, Harry realized, as the tension leeched out of his body. The expression on Draco's face was horror. "It's alright," he said, and then before Draco could explode all over him--he could see it coming, rising up underneath the pale pointiness, a rant probably about how it wasn't automatically alright just because Harry Potter, Savior of the wizarding world, was trying to claim it would be--quickly added, "It is, I swear! I wrote him last night and mentioned it. He wrote back saying he'd got it covered."

"Oh," Draco said. Did the horror on his face seem to be a little less? It seemed, at least, not to be growing any worse...

"I thought it was a bit weird his letter back was so short," Harry went on. "Usually he goes on for a while, but this was just the one line. Guess it makes sense if you hadn't cleared it with him before then...he must have had to scramble, yeah?"

"Oh." Draco's voice was very faint this time. "Yes, I suppose he must have." He closed his eyes, and leaned against the elevator wall, his head tipping back to thud against the shiny metal surface. "Fuck," he said hoarsely.

"It's alright," Harry said again, but kind of rotely; his heart was beating like mad, his chest filling with more of that warmth while all of him felt like he was going into freefall again. Later, he'd think that if there had been any single moment, then this must have been it, for him: Draco Malfoy, caring this much about someone Harry cared about, too. It wasn't that this hadn't been obvious other times, so much as it hadn't brought this new, almost frightening tenderness along with it before. "It really is," he added, a lot less rotely. "Everything's alright."

"This one thing is, anyway," Draco said, pushing off the wall again and visibly putting himself together as he did, so that Harry wouldn't have known he'd just been falling apart if he hadn't seen it happen.

"Yeah," Harry said. He gestured at the elevator door with his wand. "Ready?"

"I suppose," Draco said. "You've a lot of nerve learning that charm, by the way."

"Nervy Potter, that's me," said Harry stupidly--but however put-together he looked like, Draco gave a little laugh at this, instead of sneering.

The moment the elevator door opened, people were yelling out questions about the baby. Considering it wasn't a secret from anyone anymore, Harry felt more than justified in waving his wand just as angrily as he liked to get them to clear a path, and, just as importantly, to stay away from Draco. Speaking of nerve.

*

When they were home again, Harry hung around until Draco said, "Is there a reason you're hovering?"

"I always am, according to you," Harry pointed out, mostly because this specific complaint had got a lot more common over the last couple weeks. "I'm always staring at you, too," he added cheerfully.

"Well, stop it," Draco said. "I'm trying to get some work done."

What it looked like he was doing was sitting on "his" side of the couch to work on his letter to his editor, which he had started on three days ago. This was, so far as Harry could tell, made up solely of all the reasons he couldn't make any changes to his new book (even though he'd been convinced it was horrible when he'd sent it off).

"Why don't you just tell her you aren't changing anything?" he asked, leaning forward in his seat to get a better look at Draco's face, which was always the funniest whenever he was yelling at people about his books, even when he was muttering under his breath a lot instead of reading bits out loud. "It'd be a lot shorter that way."

"I'm changing some things," Draco said. "I have to so she believes me when I explain why I can't change anything else. And I do have to explain; if I don't, she might assume I don't have a good reason for saying no."

Harry, who after two nights in a row of listening to Draco rant on this subject was totally sure Draco had reasons and not at all sure on the goodness of them, grinned. "Not sure you really want your letter back to be as long as the book, but alright."

Draco looked up to glare at him. "It won't be as long as the--oh. You think you're being funny."

"Guilty," said Harry, with that sense of freefall again, like he'd just parted ways with his broomstick in the middle of a dive, but was completely certain he'd be alright; wasn't it always alright, when he'd got the Snitch in his hand? "Though actually I think I'm being really hilarious."

"Hmph," Draco said, which was what he said when he wasn't really mad, but was really playing it up a bit. 

He scratched away on his letter for a little while, reading some of the most dramatic bits aloud ("I think that might be a bit much," Harry said at one point, and Draco said, "Oh, fine," and was very dramatic about rewriting that bit.). Eventually, the scratching seemed to slow--not because he was nearly to the end of the letter, Harry thought (he usually sped up, when he was leading up to an even more dramatic last paragraph), but maybe because he was tired. He looked tired, anyway, not starkly pale as he'd been in the elevator, but more like a dingey sort of gray, which left him fuzzy around the edges, and made the circles under his eyes stand out in a sharp and awful relief.

"Why don't you have your nap now?" Harry suggested. "And then you can always have them at half two."

"I suppose," Draco said--but when Harry pulled a pillow into his lap, and made a 'come on, give me your feet' gesture at it, his face went very strange and somehow quiet. "Harry," he said. "I was just--you don't have to give me a foot rub. I was joking, before."

"I don't mind," Harry said, firmly. 

It was possible this didn't mean to Draco what it did to Harry, or maybe it was just that it didn't come across the way he'd meant it to; in any case, Draco's face did a momentary twisting thing. "You don't have to--to try to take care of me, just because I'm..." He trailed off, then started over: "You don't have to."

"I don't mind," Harry said again, and more firmly this time.

"I'm not even--I don't need help to take naps." Draco got off his Leaning Chair, and came to sit on the other side of the couch to Harry, keeping his feet on the floor and his eyes there too. "Getting to sleep is not the--I don't need help with it. Truly, I don't." He said it like a confession. A confusing one that made no sense. "So you don't have to--schedule yourself. To help me with it."

"I really don't mind," Harry said firmly, because no matter what Draco said or how he tried to say it, he still needed to sleep. Harry, for one, did not intend to let himself get distracted off this fact.

"Anyway, you heard the Healer," Draco said. "Not sleeping isn't going to actually hurt anything. You don't have to put yourself through it just to--"

"I'm not putting myself through anything."

"Yes you are, you--" Draco took a big, deep breath, then changed subjects, quick enough for whiplash: "Do you think you'll go off to be a Healer, when all this is..."

"Er." It took Harry a second to remember where that had come from, that remark from the Healer he had barely paid attention to at the time. "I don't--I'm really not thinking about my career right now. I've just been focusing on..."

When he trailed off, Draco cut in, a little wryly, "Not being an Auror?"

Harry hadn't given any thought to being or not being an Auror in a while. Really he hadn't been giving anything outside of their house much consideration at all. "Not so much," he said. "More like...life, and stuff."

"The baby," Draco said, not a question.

"Yeah," said Harry. "And..."

You, he could have said. Almost meant to say, but didn't actually manage to get there. There was nothing to stop him, but he stopped anyway, as if even that single word had got stuck in his throat, somewhere between where it had started and here.

"Yes," Draco said, very quietly, almost subdued. "When this is all over, what do you think you'll--nevermind. Moving on, please!"

"--Right," Harry said, feeling a bit flat-footed, but also as though, if they were moving on anyway, he ought to move them back to the subject he'd meant to be on in the first place. "Socks off, Malfoy."

Draco made a sound, one which it was hard to say where in the spectrum of angry or upset or incredulous it might fall. His face twisted some more, turning blotchy and red while he was at it. "I already told you you don't have to--I don't need you to--" He put his face in his hands. "Fuck."

"Are you alright?" Harry asked. From this vantage point, it kind of looked like Draco was... "Are you--why are you crying?"

"Fuck off," Draco snarled.

"Did I do something--"

"No!"

"Then why are you so upset--"

"I don't know!" Draco said wetly. "I, just--God, Harry, I..."

"What?"

"Everything is--it's all so--" Draco said, more wetly yet. "Everything is hard, alright? Everything's so hard, and I can't--I hurt, all the time. And I'm tired, all the time. And I--"

Harry had, during this, crept in closer to Draco, until he was fully on the middle couch cushion, close enough to touch. He reached out his hand to Draco, and did touch, the tips of his fingers brushing the curve of Draco's shoulder. "What hurts?" he asked, not sure at all if that was the right way to ask, if anything he was doing was the kind of thing you were supposed to do when someone was having what looked a lot like a breakdown...

"Fucking everything!" Draco said. "My head hurts. And my joints too, in places you don't want to hear about. And I get these fucking leg cramps, every day. And none of it's that bad, by itself--but it's multiple things, all the time, and I'm--I'm tired. God, I'm so fucking tired, Harry, I can't--"

Harry had started rubbing Draco's back. Up and down and very slowly, not sure he was doing it right, trying to remember if this was how Draco had done it when it had been the other way around... "You really should try for a nap," he said. Draco sniffed in response, a loud, wet sound, and wiped his face with his hands. "You don't have to let me rub your feet!" he added, before Draco could get wound up about it again. "But you should have some sleep."

"Probably," Draco admitted, finally. He wiped at his face a bit more, then straightened up. "But you really don't have to..."

"I want to," Harry said, in case this had somehow been unclear this whole time. "But if you don't, er, want me to, that's alright too!" he hastened to add, because Draco bringing up his footrubs at St Mungo's didn't have to mean that he actually would like another one after all...

Now Draco did look at him, for maybe the first time since he'd sat down on the couch. His eyes were red, but somehow that didn't seem to be what was making him look really, unbearably sad. "Alright," he said. "If you're really--if you're sure about it."

"Yeah," Harry said. "I really am."

*

Midway through the fifth week of January, Draco had been acting weird since morning. Usually Harry was the one who supposedly hovered and stared and so on; now, Draco seemed to be following him from room to room, occasionally opening his mouth to say something, then shutting it again without having said a single thing at all.

"What is it?" Harry finally asked, once he'd decided that, while this whole act wasn't quite as annoying as Draco liked to pretend it was the other way around, it was bad enough. "You want to spit it out?"

Draco stared at him for a moment, then said, in a way that was urgent or miserable or somewhere in-between the two, "Will you go somewhere with me?"

"Er, go where?"

"I can't tell you where," Draco said. "It might help with--it's not like the mirror was, I swear it's not a trick or anything. It's not--I mean I think it would be better if you didn't..."

Meaning, Harry translated, Draco thought he was more likely to remember things if he were slapped in the face with whatever it was. "Just as long as it's not something..." he said, not knowing what he exactly meant, but figuring Draco would know what kinds of things would cross the line.

"It isn't," Draco said.

"Alright," Harry said. "What am I wearing?"

Muggle clothes was the answer to that. Explicitly nothing fancy: just jeans and a T-shirt, and a thick red jumper. 

Once he'd passed inspection, Draco Apparated them to a narrow, dimly lit alley. Around the corner was a pub called the Stag's End. It was dimly lit too, outside but also inside. It was all but deserted on a Wednesday afternoon, just them, two blokes at the corner table, and the barman moving bottles around behind the counter.

"Well?" Draco asked anxiously, just inside the door. "Do you..."

Harry was thinking of a way to answer this when the barman glanced their way, then glanced over again, looking suddenly a lot more alert about it.

"You two," he said. "Out."

"Er," Harry said, very aware of how the blokes in the corner were suddenly looking at them too. It was an amount of attention he wasn't used to getting in Muggle spaces, where they were occasionally recognized by a server, but rarely paid any mind to by the other customers. "You want us to leave?"

"And don't come back, if you know what's good for you," the barman said ominously.

*

Back out on the pavement, Harry stuck his hands in his pockets. "Was that, er, what you wanted me to..."

"No," said Draco miserably. "I wanted us to sit at the bar. I didn't think he'd still remember us all these years later..."

"What does he remember us for?" Whatever it was, Harry suspected it couldn't have been anything good.

"You're better off not knowing."

"Draco..."

Draco was looking away from him, across the street where someone who was parallel parked in a tight space was trying very poorly to unpark from it. "We were shagging in the bathroom, alright?"

"Oh," Harry said, feeling his face heat up. "Kind of small for all that, isn't it?"

"Not so much. I mean, we made it work," Draco said--and then his head whipped around so that he was staring at Harry, eyes very wide indeed. "Harry, do you remember--"

"No," said Harry very quickly, and could have kicked himself for letting there be any confusion on this point. "I was here a few times. By myself." After Ginny, and after he'd grokked that he might not only be interested in girls. Him and other blokes had seemed like the sort of idea was best off explored where reporters weren't. Better yet, it had seemed like the kind of idea that was best explored where no one he knew was. It hadn't been that he was worried about it, exactly, so much as it was something he wanted to feel his way around without any kind of audience. So he'd come here, to the Stag's End, choosing it more or less because of its name, and on his rare day off had got to find out what it was like to be flirted with by other blokes without having it be a front page story. Ultimately he hadn't really liked it much more than being flirted with by women he didn't know, or ones he did know but didn't fancy; but being able to go places without being Harry Potter had still been nice enough to make up for it sometimes. It hadn't been a habit for him, not yet, but he could see where it could have become one. "I never saw you in here," he added, just to be really clear, unable to stand the thought that Draco might go on having the wrong idea...

Maybe he made it a little too clear; there came that flinch again, flashing across Draco's features. "Alright," he said. "I didn't realize--I knew that, I suppose. That you'd been here before we..." He swallowed. "I just--I wasn't thinking..."

Harry leaned against a nearby streetlamp and grinned at him, hands still in his pockets, dimly aware, somewhere not that deep down, that if Draco was paying as much attention to Harry's face as Harry did to his, he would surely see that the grin was a very strained one. "It's alright," he said. "I don't mind you got me kicked out of my favorite pub."

He half-expected Draco to snort and say that if it had actually been a favorite, Harry would surely have suggested visiting it before now, considering they'd been all over London to various places, and Draco had given him the choosing of more than half of them; he way more than half wanted Draco to, to make this something that wasn't about to be awful. Awful was what it felt like it wanted to be, the sky above overcast and gray, making the chill seep through his jumper and into his bones. It was beginning to snow, too, small single flakes drifting down.

"Sorry," Draco said.

"It's alright," Harry said again. "Really it is..."

"No," Draco said. It was less than clear which bit he was saying no to. "Could you..."

"What?"

Draco took Harry by the shoulders, walked him backwards and to the side. Not at all sure what this was about, Harry let it happen, until he was in front of the alleyway they'd come out of. Then Draco backed up again, until he was next to the streetlamp Harry had been leaning against.

"I know you don't like me to ask," Draco said, in a low and terrible voice. "But are you certain you don't remember this?"

Harry gave it a few seconds. Long enough to really think about it. To decide whether there was any familiarness to where he was standing, to where Draco was. Though it wasn't, really, a decision, in the end. There didn't actually seem to be any gaps in his memory, anymore than there ever had. For this, like with everything else, there was a part of him that thought, 'If I had ever been here with you before, I would remember it.' It was the sort of thing he'd have been fine saying to Draco months ago; now it was the sort of thing he'd rather have died than thrown in Draco's face now.

"No, sorry," he said instead, and wished more than anything he could have said something else.

"You were standing there." Draco made as if to raise his hands, then lowered them again. "And I was standing here..."

"And then what?"

Draco didn't say anything, for just long enough that Harry wondered if he was meant to guess. The snow picked up, in those few moments, a pointless effort; it wasn't cold enough that any of it would stick to anything but grass, and that only for a little while.

At last, Draco said, "You wouldn't understand."

"Try me," Harry said, meaning it as much as anyone had ever meant anything.

Draco's face twisted for a moment, then smoothed back out again. He looked away from Harry, and didn't seem to want to look back again. "This is stupid. Let's go home."

"Draco--"

"It's too cold to be standing out here. Please, can we just go home?"

"Alright," Harry said, with the sinking feeling that this had been a very final sort of test, and that he'd failed it as badly as it was possible to fail anything. "If you want to."

*

On the first day of February, which was a Saturday, Draco stared at him a lot at breakfast, then, when Harry had nearly finished cleaning his plate (which took a lot longer right now than it usually did, partly because of how intensely Draco was staring at him, but mostly because over the past few days his stomach had started doing this twisting, ache-y thing that made him unexcited about food in general and eggs in particular), said, "Have you made your appointment at Mungo's yet?"

"Er, not yet," Harry said. He knew he needed to, that it was coming up quickly; he'd known it even before he'd gotten the reminder owl two weeks ago. Still, he hadn't been able to make himself do anything about it other than decide he would send Herbert over there about it tomorrow, for the last week running.

"I thought as much," Draco said, maybe a little wryly, but with a whole lot more of something that looked like resignation. "I'll handle it. How does Tuesday sound?"

Tuesday would be four months plus one day since he had woken up in St Mungo's, Harry knew without so much as having to glance at a calendar.

"If you want," he muttered, with very strong conflicting feelings, some of which were that he ought to be the one to do it, and the rest of which were if Draco was that eager about it, then he could be the one to.

"Alright. So that's settled, then." Draco didn't look very happy about it, which made two of them.

"I'll write Teddy," Harry said. "Once you have."

"Alright."

Harry looked down at the last few bites of egg, which abruptly felt less unpleasant than impossible, no better than shoving slightly dampened sawdust down his throat.

"Er, Draco?" he said.

"Yes?"

Harry wasn't sure what he was going to say, or ask, until it came out: "How long was I out, before I woke up with you? I mean...was it hours or was it days? Back in October, I mean."

"Um." Draco blinked at him. "Your accident was on Tuesday the first, in the early afternoon. You woke up at about four the next morning, you seemed very confused. Then you didn't wake up again until about three that afternoon. You went down again after your initial--evaluation, I suppose it was. Then you woke up properly around ten on Thursday morning."

"That was Thursday the third," Harry said, though he'd already known that much. What he couldn't bring himself to say was that this meant Tuesday the fourth of February, three days from now, would make it four months and three days since he'd lost his memory. It was not a math he wanted to be doing, but also wasn't an avoidable one, now he knew it had been four months. Not would be four months tomorrow or the day after. Was, right now.

"Yes," Draco said, very neutrally. It was impossible, in that moment, to know if he had done the same math. If he was doing it now, and coming to what couldn't help but be the same conclusion. "Why do you ask?"

"Just, er, wondering," Harry said. He poked his eggs a bit more, but didn't make an attempt to finish them, not at all convinced he'd be able to gag them down if he were to try.

*

On Tuesday the fourth of February, Harry dragged himself out of bed and into some robes. He didn't bother to drag himself down to breakfast. Yesterday there had been pancakes, after he had made a complaint about eggs on Sunday he couldn't remember exactly what it had been starting from the second he'd made it. He had at least been able to finish yesterday's breakfast, but not without feeling incredibly low about it, for reasons he wasn't keen on examining very closely.

Instead of going downstairs, he stayed sat on the side of his bed, and tried to remember something. Anything. A single moment he could pull out later and say, 'there, see, it's not all gone.' He thought about everything he'd been told about, and the places he'd been, and even just the things he could guess at...

Nineteen years could not have gone up in a puff of smoke. What they seemed to have gone up with was a puff of nothing. There still didn't seem to be a gaping hole inside him; there didn't even seem to be any crack he could lever open. He felt like what he always had: a Harry who'd woken up twenty years later, with all the gaps on the outside of him, waiting to be tripped over...

After a while, he got up and looked out on the Quidditch field behind their house. His eyes went unfocused, and his mind too, as if maybe that could do it...as if his memories were no more than another shining Snitch, and all he had to do was keep an eye out so he could put out his hand for them if they came near, or go into a dive to catch them if he spotted them farther off...

It wasn't the first time he'd tried this. It had started to be every morning, and every night, over these last few weeks--and it wasn't working any better today than it had on any of the other times. 

Harry kept on with it anyway, until a tentative knock came on his door and threw him out of it, followed by Draco's voice, tentative too: "Harry? Are you ready yet?"

"In a minute," Harry called, not sure what he needed it for until he'd crossed the floor, not over to the door where Draco was waiting, but to the dresser, where his potion was. The bottle was about half-full, not that the half that had gone into him over the past weeks had done any good.

For a moment, he could see himself hurling the bottle at the wall, watching the explosion, curled shards of glass flying in all directions. In the next moment, he thought of Draco, out in the hall and waiting on him. Draco, who had been waiting on him all this time...

He unstoppered the bottle, and took a large swig from the neck, and then another. He put the bottle back on the dresser, checked his robes over in the mirror, and went over to the door.

*

Draco was very quiet as Harry's head began to fill with what threatened to be a heretofore unknown level of pink gumminess. He stayed quiet down the stairs and into the living room, where the first tendrils started to expand behind Harry's eyes. He stayed quiet from the Apparition Point by Reception to the elevator up to Potion and Plant Poisoning on the third floor, where everything started to seem a bit unreal, the pressure in Harry's head well-started already...

When Harry looked at him, in a process that didn't quite recall the flashing pink lights from weeks ago, Draco's face seemed as still as the rest of him was quiet. It was weird, even rattling; Harry would've expected Draco to at least look worried, to be asking or at minimum visibly trying not to ask whether Harry had come around to remembering anything...

Even if the pink gumminess had been at normal taking-his-potion levels, Harry doubted he'd have been able to figure out how to ask Draco about it. He'd have had to start by knowing what he wanted to ask, but that was in short supply lately, when it came to Draco in general or this subject in particular. So, instead, he waited with Draco to be checked in. Then he waited with Draco to be taken to the exam room. Then he waited with Draco some more there, white-knuckling it so that he didn't wouldn't keel over, or be sick, or even do what he was starting to really want to do and shove his fists into his forehead in the hopes it would do something about that fucking pressure behind his eyes.

Finally, after what might have been a few minutes or might have been longer, Healer Jenkins arrived.

The first part of the exam was about the same as it had been at his four-week checkup. There were also more questions than there had been the last time, not just whether or not he'd remembered anything, but if he'd ever felt as if he were on the verge of remembering anything.

"I don't...think so," Harry muttered in answer, eyes squinted against the hospital lights, which weren't fluorescent but might as well have been for how well they went over inside his head, twisting and compressing until it had his stomach rolling over. "There was this thing at Christmas, and again recently...like a kind of freefalling?"

It was not the kind of thing he'd usually have been willing to say to another person, mostly because it wasn't the kind of thing that would make sense to anyone else; it was, in fact, the kind of thing that could get you weird looks, as people couldn't properly decide whether you were an idiot for saying whatever you had, or for having thought it in the first place. It was why Harry kept all that type of thing to himself, usually. 

It didn't seem to make any sense to Healer Jenkins, either. Or at least, what she said was, "Mmm. Have you ever felt as if there were something you could nearly recall, waiting just around the corner? Or perhaps behind you, if you could  turn quickly around quickly enough to glimpse it?"

"Er, no," Harry said, because trying to remember his memories or wanting to catch them like he had this morning wasn't the same thing. Even through this intensity of pink gumminess, he knew it wasn't the same thing at all.

"Alright," she said. "Now, I'd like to talk about your dreams."

So Harry answered questions about that, too. His dreams hadn't really changed, except with the re-advent of his crying dream, and all the sex dreams he'd been having lately. He admitted to the crying dreams, more so that Draco wouldn't rat him out about them than anything else, but left out the other ones. There was nothing there, he knew, even as he had to go over all sorts of details of his other dreams, in case there was anything that might have been related to some snippet of memory...

There was nothing. Even through the pink gumminess, Harry knew no one else, not Healer Jenkins and not Draco, was going to see anything there that he hadn't. He'd been looking for more than a month, every day, in every way and every direction he could think of. If there had been anything, he would have known it first.

"Can you think of anything else that could be significant?" Healer Jenkin asked, when that bit was over. "Anything you can think of that doesn't quite seem to fit? It doesn't have to seem important on the surface; all it has to do is come to your mind."

"There's nothing," Harry said, because the only thing he had left was how he hadn't started taking his potion until Christmas, and she already knew that.

Draco cleared his throat, another tentative thing. "He's seemed different, lately," he said. Could that be significant?"

"Different in what way?" asked Healer Jenkins.

"He, um. Initially, he spent all his time avoiding me. Lately he's been hovering around wanting to, I don't know, hang out together, and--things have been better. Than they were before, I mean. He's been a lot more like--he's seemed closer to his old self."

Hearing this without that pressure behind his eyes would have been awful, Harry felt sure; with the pressure behind his eyes and the pink flashes starting in front of them, it was excruciating. It made him say, without thinking about whether he ought to say it, or whether he should soften it some, "That's not because I've remembered anything. It's just me."

He'd have gone on to add that he liked Draco more now, and that was why, it was just that the way he acted when he hadn't wanted to be married to Draco was a lot different than the way he was going to act when he did, but at that moment a wave of dizziness came over him, so he had to grip onto the exam table to keep from toppling over; and by the time he could have said anything else, Healer Jenkins was in the middle of talking some more:

"--not necessarily indicative of anything to do with your memories, especially given you're not reporting any of the signs we'd hope to see," she said. 

"Yeah," Harry muttered. There did not seem to be anything else to be said to this.

"If there's nothing else you'd like to discuss, I'd like to run some tests now." She said it very gently, and even through the pink gumminess there could not really be any doubt that she knew exactly how this was meant to end up, too. "As we've already got a baseline from you, these won't have to be as invasive as the tests we ran through at your first visit, nor will they take quite as long."

Harry remembered sitting with five or six witches and wizards pointing their wands at his head. He remembered things happening, or trying to happen, inside his head...

This time, there was only Healer Jenkins to point her wand at him. And no matter how hard Harry concentrated, while she did, there didn't seem to be even a ghost of anything going on in there, underneath the pink gumminess. He concentrated harder, dug down deep, until he had to close his eyes to keep the room from spinning, had to bite the inside of his mouth to keep him focused enough to keep on with it.

*

Afterward, Healer Jenkins put her wand away, and took a breath. This alone said so much that she didn't need to say the rest. Or, at least, Harry had no desire whatsoever to have to hear it. 

"I'm afraid I see no evidence of any of your memories having been recovered," she said. "There's no sign of that process having begun, now or previously. This wouldn't always be definitive--mind magic is imprecise at best--but when paired with the fact that you have yet to recover even the slightest hint of any single memory, I believe it's reasonable to come to a conclusion." She paused, for questions or reactions or...whatever. 

Harry very nearly told her to get on with it; part of him, very far back, was surprised Draco hadn't done. 

"Yeah," he said, when it seemed like she was waiting for him to say something, and he found there was once again nothing else to be said.

"As I've mentioned before, the pattern we see after four months is what we expect to see going forward. Therefore, I no longer think it likely you'll recover your memory, either in whole or in part," she said. "I'm so sorry."

Movement, off to the side; he'd have followed it, only there was a roaring between his ears, too, combining with the pink gumminess in a way that made him once again have to hold on very tightly to the hospital bed until it had passed. It was not a feeling that seemed to last forever, but a one which seemed to crash into him for a thundering moment, only to lift again in the next, leaving him just as pink and gummy and considerably more dizzy than he had been before.

"Er," he said, and found he couldn't deal with the pink gumminess and what he'd just found out. Not both at the same time. He glanced around, to see if Draco was listening, only to find that there was no more Draco in the room at all. "Where's Draco?"

"He had to step out," she said. That movement, out of the corner of his eye... "It can be overwhelming news for loved ones; I'm certain he'll be back soon."

"Yeah," Harry said, figuring he'd best make this quick, then, in case Draco came back in the middle of things. "Look, can I have some of that potion you gave me after Christmas? The detoxing one? I, er, had a lot of my memory potion this morning, just in case..."

A pause in which any sort of criticism might have lived; but she didn't say any of it. Instead, she reached into the pocket of her robe and drew out a little vial, another thimble-sized cup. Harry was getting absurdly sick of thimble-sized cups. 

He downed the Detoxification Potion in one swallow. It came back up again a swallow later, just as nastily as the last time, into a bedpan that had not been in evidence until he needed it. With the pink gumminess and the pink flashes gone, what he was left with was the reality of the exam room, stark and bright and awful.

"Thanks," Harry said, and thought he might never have been less thankful for anything.

Everything stayed stark and awful for several moments. Then, after taking the little thimble cup back from him, Healer Jenkins said, "You must have questions."

"Yeah." There was only one he could think of, only one that could matter. Harry hadn't wanted to know the answer to anything less, at least not since a couple minutes ago. "If I had been taking my potion, from the beginning. Would I have." He swallowed again, and knew he had to say it, and braced himself to-- "Would I have remembered, if I had been taking it this whole time?"

Healer Jenkins set the thimble cup down on a nearby shelf. "Perhaps. And perhaps not. The memory curse you were hit by must have been very powerful: it had to have been, to cause you to forget so many years of your life, and so totally. Out of the similar cases I've personally seen to, roughly a third have never recovered a single memory. Another third have recovered anything from a wisps of memory up to half of what they'd lost. It's possible nothing you could have done would have made any difference. I'd even call it likely, considering your early test results."

From the way she said it, this was obviously meant to be some kind of comfort. For Harry there was nothing comforting about it. Half wouldn't have been enough, wisps wouldn't have been enough, but it would have at least been something. Something he might have had, if he'd just known earlier he'd want to have it. "But you don't know that, though," he said. "Not for sure."

"No," said Healer Jenkins. 

"Right," Harry said. A moment later, she seemed about to say something else, and he realized he couldn't stand to hear another word of this. And besides that... "I have to go."

Besides that, there was Draco.

*

Some part of him, in the moment between when he jumped off the exam table and the moment he escaped out into the hallway, was beyond certain Draco wouldn't be there. That from the instant he'd heard the news, he'd been finished. Finished with Harry, done with...

But Draco was there after all, his back to the exam room door. Standing up straight and tense, doing nothing else but staring blankly down the corridor.

"Draco," Harry said, stopping where he was, his heart in his throat and everything still way too much all around him. "Hey."

Draco turned to look at him. He was very pale, his eyes dry but rimmed with red. Harry was sure he'd seen other people wearing that kind of expression before, but could not, in that moment, recall precisely when that might have been.

"Are you alright?" Harry asked, though the answer was obvious, wasn't it?

It was even obviouser when Draco, instead of snapping at him, said, in a small, faint voice, "No."

"Right, sorry," Harry said. "Let's go home, then?"

He hadn't meant for it to be a question, and yet it still was one: would Draco even want to come home with him, now? Or would he want...

"Yes," Draco said. He took a shuddery sort of breath, and squared his shoulder. "Yes, alright."

*

Harry stepped out of the fireplace behind Draco, the words the other Harry had helped record twisting and echoing in his ears ("I'll get a laugh out of it...").

Healer Jenkins had caught up with them before they'd got all the way to the elevator again; she'd had some pamphlets on permanent memory loss, several parchments covered in the contact information for various Mind Healers, and directions to the third floor's private Floo, which was only meant for people who worked there usually, but apparently could be meant for exceptions on occasion, too.

"You've got what you wanted, then," said Draco, brushing some wayward ash from his robes. "For you it's the Good News Floo."

Harry didn't clock any nastiness in this, though it felt strongly as if there ought to have been some. "The what?"

"The Floos of St Mungo's," Draco said woodenly. He was looking past Harry, to the mantel or to one of the pictures they had hanging on the wall over the mantel. "Collectively they're called the Bad News Floos. They only offer to let you use one when you've just got bad news."

"I don't think it's good news," Harry said slowly, after a couple seconds spent working through what Draco had said, the way he must have meant it.

"Don't you?" asked Draco, distantly, like he didn't care. 

"No," Harry said, more of a breath than a word, not because he didn't mean it but because it had just hit him again, what had happened. What he had known for days and weeks was bound to happen, but had seemed to come at him from out of nowhere anyway: Now that he wanted to remember, he wasn't going to. Those years were gone, forever. His life, whatever it had been, everything he knew about and everything he didn't and everything he didn't even know enough about to guess it could have been there, that was all gone too. And Draco...

Draco still wouldn't look at him.

"Draco," Harry said. 

Draco still didn't turn his head, or even seem so much as track Harry with his eyes. Harry couldn't tell what he was thinking. He had got used to usually having a good idea what Draco was thinking, but he didn't have even the start of one now. It was enough to send panic bubbling through him, so fast and hard that he didn't realize he was going to laugh until he had done, a horrific sharp sound that didn't feel as if it could have come from him.

"Draco," he said again, more than a little desperately, now that that laugh had made Draco look at him, finally, with what was for the moment a wide-eyed blankness. "Does it really...does it have to matter?"

"Does it have to matter," Draco repeated, in a cold drawl Harry knew, but hadn't heard in what must have been months now. "Does it have to matter? Not to you, I suppose. It fucking does to me, though."

Draco was halfway through the living room by the time Harry clocked that he had left, on his way up the stairs by the time Harry had made to follow him.

"Wait up," he said. "Draco..."

Halfway up that first flight, Draco whirled around, and again there was a terrible look on his face now, not a sneer but closer to a snarl, vicious and wild and trapped. "Don't," he said, not a drawl this time, but still cold enough to burn. "Just don't."

Harry didn't. He stayed there, in the middle of the living room, and watched Draco disappear up the stairs.

*

Harry waited for the slam of a door but didn't hear one. When he didn't hear Draco coming back down the stairs either, he sat on the couch, head in his hands, and tried to think. Taking so much potion this morning had been a massive mistake; without it, maybe he wouldn't have felt so scattered, and as if he were floating through some surreal nightmare. Maybe he'd have been able to, to think, instead of feeling the panic crawl up again from his stomach again, setting his hard to thumping painfully in his chest...

Fuck. Fuck.

Sitting here wasn't helping. He was halfway to the back door before he realized: if he went on a long, stomping walk, he wouldn't know if Draco were still here when he got back from it again. If he stayed, at least he'd know if Draco came through the living room to get to the drawing room for the Floo. He'd most likely hear it, too, if Draco Apparated, even if it was from two floors up. If he could be sure Draco was still here, then...

Harry paced into the drawing room and then back into the living room. Back and forth, a few more times. It didn't help as much as a good stomp through the woods would have, but after a while it seemed to be helping a little.

Back and forth. Draco was still here. He'd had time to maybe calm down a little too, now. Maybe this whole thing seemed surreally awful to him, too. And, maybe...maybe he hadn't really got what Harry had been trying to say to him. Or then again maybe he had, and he'd meant it exactly the way Harry had been worried about... 

Back and forth. There was no way to know without asking him, was there? Harry could do that. He could ask. He could. Could explain what he'd meant, better than he had done when it had just spilled out of him. That it wasn't that it didn't matter, it just didn't need to make a difference with whether or not they...

Yeah. He could say that. He could. He might even, by the time he was saying it, have figured out what to say at the end.

Just deciding on a course of action had calmed him down. Knowing what he was going to do, that there was something he could do. A goal, shining and glittery in front of him. He might not get it, but at least he knew where it was. He could aim for it, and then...

He didn't find Draco in his bedroom, or in Harry's room, or in any of the other bedrooms, or even in the nursery. He didn't find him on the third floor either: not in his office and not in Harry's, not in the library or behind the licking door or in the room where all the stuff for the nursery was still stored. It was then that he started to question whether or not Draco was actually still here. Maybe he'd Apparated after all, with a pop so faint it hadn't carried between floors. Or maybe...maybe he'd got Harry's invisibility cloak out of his vault at some point, and gone past him that way...

Or, there was still the attic. There wasn't any reason for Draco to be up there, but there wasn't any reason for Harry not to check, either.

By the time he was halfway up the ladder, there was a static-y feeling in his ears: someone had cast Muffliato. Harry knew a counter-charm from his trainee days, which would let him listen in without dispelling the Muffliato entirely, and cast it without having to think very hard about it--

Beneath the Muffliato, someone was--

For a moment, Harry froze where he was on the ladder. Then he went up the last few steps, peeked his head over the top.

Draco was sat on a Christmas tree box, faced away from the attic door. He was not just crying, but sobbing, bent over with his arms around his middle. After a few moments, this was cut off by long seconds of hyperventilating, like he'd been crying too hard to even breathe...

Harry was desperate to go to him. He even almost did, started to pull himself up into the attic proper--but then froze again, realizing. He hadn't seen Draco crying like this before. Not when he'd been really tired, and overwhelmed with stuff. Not when he'd been trying to tell Harry about the baby, and afterward. No, the way Draco was crying now...

This was the way people cried when someone had died.

Not just someone. He, Harry. Not the Harry who was here, watching Draco. The other Harry, the one Draco had married, made a baby with. The one he'd wanted to have back, all this time.

Harry still almost went over there. His hands reached out, as if he could touch Draco from here, tell him it would be alright, and that they could...except now he knew for sure that Draco wouldn't want to hear it from him. Draco didn't want to hear about how Harry, who was never going to remember being married to him, had fallen for him. He just wanted his own Harry back. For Harry to go in there to him now, would be...

Draco wouldn't want to see him, right now.

Harry went back down the ladder. Closed the attic door, quietly as he could. Went all the way down the stairs, and into the living room. Into the drawing room, where the Floo was, but without any idea where he wanted to go.

He didn't want to go anywhere. He wanted to stay here, with Draco. He wanted it as much as he'd ever wanted anything.

Into the living room again. Not sure what he was looking for, only that he was looking for something. There had to be something, didn't there? If he couldn't fix it, if there was nothing to do that would fix it, then at least there had to be...

On a shelf behind Draco's Leaning Chair was the Pensieve. How often had Harry seen Draco using it, adding in this memory or that one, then stirring them around? How much of his life must have made it into it by now, in a swirling mist that had been waiting for him, all this time...

He could find out right now, if he wanted to. What the other Harry had really been like. What his life had been like. And, maybe, just maybe, seeing Draco's memories would do for him what the potion hadn't. Maybe he'd had the right of it, taking so much extra potion this morning, a big push for the finish line; maybe he'd just chosen the wrong thing to push at. Maybe, when he had seen the memories Draco had put aside for him, he'd remember everything else, too...

Once he'd thought it, and before he could even begin to overthink it, Harry did the only thing there was left to do: He went to the Pensieve and stuck his whole head in.