FIC: Own Two Legs (H/D, ~30 000, NC-17) 1/3
Title: Own Two Legs
Pairing(s): Harry/Draco, implied Harry/Ginny and Draco/spouse
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended.
Deathly Hallows compliant? Fully DH compliant, epilogue and all, with the exception of a sole offending sentence. :g:
Word Count: ~30 000 words
Summary:
Suddenly, he wants nothing more than to absorb her persistent ability to put one foot in front of the other and move forward. Not look back.
He wants to be able, like her, to live.
Author's Notes: I will need bullets here :g:
#1 This story was written as a gift to alexis_sd for the winter H/D Holidays fest of 2007
#2 Many, many heartfelt thanks to my beta, rinsbane, who made this piece far more readable and smooth than it was to begin with, taught important lessons about commas and full stops, and worked hard to meet my deadline. :) Thank you, sweet! Also much gratefulness for those wonderful people who held my hand and sent me optimistic thoughts when I thought I wouldn't be able to do it :g: You were wonderful, guys!
#3 Dear reader, beware just a little bit: our heroes have common history, and each tells his own half of it to make up a whole - but have in mind that Harry's perspective moves backwards, and Draco's goes forwards.
Own Two Legs
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
1.
Harry wakes up to the sight of a long-fingered, pale hand.
He can feel a dim sense of dread and a silent, impotent horror, already awake in him, if a faint cry from last night's brazen fear. A pity, that. He has always been better at up-front attack and defence than at waiting out the drag of a standstill.
He closes his eyes against the thought and pretends he's still sleeping. The unease slinks off unhappily to the outskirts of his conscience and begins to regroup for a second attempt.
He breathes in, slowly. It's a familiar and controlled gesture and it helps the sleeping pretence fabulously. The air smells of a closed window, of breakfast waiting patiently in the kitchen and - a little - of frantic, scared sex.
There goes his pulse again.
He exhales, and maybe it wasn't panic, after all, but him forgetting to breathe properly.
The sheets are warm underneath and on top of him, the bed long since perfectly comfortable, and his body is still full of liquid languor, of sleep.
Damn his mind for being awake.
The room is quiet but for the regular breathing beside him, and he wonders - briefly, for he knows it won't - if it will lull him back to the realm where thinking doesn't happen.
Now his muscles are all tense.
When was the last time he slept in late anyway? The last time he woke without rushing to a hospital, the last time he had a breakfast conversation in something that is not hushed, tight worry, the last time he saw her and she smiled.
He can't remember.
Through slit eyes he looks at the hand again. Halfway under it a bent elbow is visible, and Harry follows the limb down to where the other hand is tucked under the chin of a very calm, very awake face. Grey eyes, staring back at him.
I've always thought they were a watery blue, he wants to say, as he has done many times in the past.
The look turns amused, just a little condescending. It's nothing really; the tiniest twinkle and a bare flutter of lashes, but he can tell.
Every insult and sneer, every lie, every truth has its own cadence, its own gleam, an odd twitch of muscle here and a tick there. And Harry knows most of them.
After all, if knowing someone for thirty years really gives you something, it's wordless communication.
A delicate eyebrow inches up, and Harry contemplates if what he's thinking really is that obvious. The corner of an upper lip flicks briefly, the wry amused answer in a familiar exchange, so he guesses yes.
He has wondered for many years now if there is a limit to what you can say without words, with your eyes alone.
If there is, they have fortunately never reached it.
The leg tangled with his own is warm and relaxed, every muscle he sees is liquid calm, and from twenty paces away he'd still be able to tell how tense Malfoy really is.
He breathes in, then exhales, slow and controlled and audible, as if to say he knows.
Malfoy draws away at once, as if scalded, and begins with a practiced efficiency to work his clothes the right side out. When he's clothed and proper, he glances in the mirror on the wall, sets the single mussed lock back into its correct place and dusts a spot on the shoulder of his robes with utter imperiousness. It’s like a shield coming together, layer upon layer, to hide the sleepy relaxed moment Harry has managed to glimpse. The warmth that has kept Harry’s demons at bay all night is now covered, and Malfoy appears another person entirely - composed and self-sufficient.
A wake up call, for both of them.
"Maybe," Malfoy drawls without turning, and the sound of his morning voice, just beginning to return to normal smoothness, licks at Harry's collar bone, "you should pull yourself together and go." And Disapparates.
The pop leaves Harry feeling cold and bereft, uncertain, hanging, and without a delay, the sickness and horror attack him anew.
As he mourns the loss of merciful, pretended calm, now gone with Malfoy, he wishes it lasted longer. And then, dutifully, he squishes the thought and straightens up to face the demons of the new day. He isn’t sure which would be worse, to spend another day in this nerve-fraying status quo or to hope for a change and pray it’s not for the worse.
Malfoy’s watch lies forgotten on the nightstand, Harry sees just as he Apparates, and that, for some inexplicable reason, makes his chest constrict.
-:-:-
2.
It's odd that as the Chief Warlock appears in the chamber and approaches the raised dais with his seat before the Wizengamot, Draco doesn't think of anything at all.
It's been six months since the end of his initial trial, and soon the last of the festivities for the three-year anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts will mercifully die down. Draco feels like it has been a lifetime. A century. An endless array of perfectly identical days spent in one and the same frantic effort to staunch the bleeding and salvage what's left of his life and his family.
There isn't a Secretary whose wife he hasn't charmed, isn't an Assistant he knows nothing about. He closes his eyes, quite confident he can quote by name and position all employees that pass the gates of the Ministry in the morning. Each and every one of them: from the openly mocking hag checking in wands at the entrance of the new building, to the conceited nobody who instils order in the Minister's desk in the evening.
He has spent more time drinking tea in people’s offices than at home, and it's been like that for more than a year now.
In the end it was all for naught.
The Chief Warlock sits down, heavily, and takes his time arranging his robes and papers. An Undersecretary scurries forth and puts down a mug - thyme, no milk, one sugar, Draco knows - of tea in front of the man, and to Draco's left the barrister takes a deep breath and crosses his fingers under the cover of the balustrade.
"On the matter of..."
Draco can't breathe. All that effort, wasted once, hanging now on the last slender thread of hope. One last chance for him to set things as they once were.
He hardly hears, all trembling expectation, the gravel brought down, and the last word of the decision needs to echo several times through the chamber for him to pick it up properly.
For a moment, he can't comprehend, mind blank. His frantically beating heart stops, and he is light-headed and joint-weak all of a sudden.
Rejected. Life surges back into him with a painful acuity.
His limbs weigh like lead and disobey his orders, and his face remains impassive more out of frozen denial than of rigid control.
And isn't it surprising how in that moment he doesn't think of the family name, doesn't remember the gallery upon gallery of old portraits and gold-threaded family trees, doesn't consider the library of thousands of tomes in a dozen languages.
Instead, he sees the sunny morning parlour where his mother told him he was going to have a little baby sister. Hears his father's footsteps chasing after him as he rides his first full-sized broom in the ballroom. Feels the horror of coming home with Father to find Mother passed out in a puddle of blood, and later her white face in the bedroom as she tells him he is mummy's little man.
He remembers/smells/touches/loses room after room full of laughter and childhood and tears. Of magic and better days with nothing yet lost.
The ten minutes they need to leave the courtroom are pure torture, and the second he senses the wards sliding off his skin, he Apparates away, the lawyer's meaningless words echoing after him.
He appears in Diagon Alley; he doesn't know why. His feet are rooted to the spot, recalcitrant, heavy. His chest is empty and cold.
As minutes pass and passers-by jolt him blindly, another thought slowly forms, yet more painful:
How does he tell his father now?
He looks up, slowly - and why is his vision blurred? - and across the street Harry bloody Potter is staring directly at him with blatant pity written across his face.
Draco's chest swells. He flicks his wand violently, once; his motions are jerky and the tip hits his thigh. The constriction of Apparition barely registers with his hollow mind, and when he appears at his new location, the last red sparks are dying, and the cloth is singed.
Trust Potter to be precisely where he's least wanted.
-:-:-
3.
For a moment or two Harry doesn't react. Surely he must have heard wrong? But she is gazing up at him with such blazing, quiet satisfaction that it becomes slowly, painfully serious.
"What do you mean?" Harry hears himself ask stupidly, and she laughs. It's the kind of optimistic, determined and focused forward laughter that hasn't changes one iota ever since she was sixteen - it makes him cringe a little inwardly and recoil, as it always does.
"What can I possibly mean by 'I am pregnant,' Harry, beyond the obvious?" She throws a slanted, playful glance and continues chatting, while folding the clean laundry.
"I went to see Healer Worwick yesterday because you know I was breathless and tired all of last month, and I was worried that..."
A shadow passes across her face, briefly, before she brightens up with the practised ease that Harry has always admired and wanted.
"Well, I was worried it was something with the heart." She rolls her eyes as if such a thing would be ridiculous. "You know all the problems George is having."
Personally, Harry thinks that all the problems George is having amount to a heart broken beyond any Healer's skill of mending, and maybe living in a ghost-haunted shop is not particularly helpful, either.
He lets her talk for a while, and helps with the bed linens she's too short to fold easily alone. It's a silent ritual, familiar and comforting, and after a few minutes, when she's stacking the neat, fresh smelling pile in his arms and fussing over the last of the wrinkles and imaginary corners folded askew, he tells her, very quietly.
"Gin, I thought we agreed we've had enough children. You said yourself that three is a pretty number to leave it off at."
He's purposefully calm and reasonable, but he can't bring himself to look at her. Her hand, picking lint from his sleeve, pulls back as if scalded, and he goes to transfer the sheets in the wardrobe.
Her pointed silence behind him is a weapon tested and found effective many times over the years, but, he is dismayed to realise, never this early into a conversation.
"Don't you want it?" she says finally, in a voice which at best suggests tread carefully.
He turns slowly. Twenty minutes ago he finished preparing the garden for the expected first snow and she asked if chicken was all right for dinner, and now they are marching troops for a battle he has thought quite finished.
"It was so hard with Lily," he says instead of giving an answer. "Do you remember? All the..."
"Of course I remember, Harry," she cuts him off, and hugs herself. "It was my body, and my time, and..."
"And I was right here for every minute of it!"
"Yes, of course, you were. But that doesn't make it your pain or your throat or your back, does it?"
She's not yet reached screaming, but she's coming close now, and Harry is rather angry himself, tethering on an edge he's hoped to stay sheathed.
"That's a horribly unfair thing to say!" he throws at her, and yes, there is bitterness in there. "And it was me who did your work when you couldn't; me who took care of James and Al; me who virtually slept in St. Mungo's; me who..."
"You wanted her!"
"Yes, I did. And I am not sorry for the effort or for the hours I spent working with Jack, Ginny, but I really don't think we should play with fire like that a second time. Things could have gone very wrong, you realise! I..." He looks to the side, unable to pick the proper words. "I thought I might lose you. Do you know how..." He can't continue.
"I am not getting an abortion."
Her voice is calm and a little cold when she says it, ringing after a minute of angry silence, and maybe now that she's mentioned it, that's the real problem.
"No, you aren't, are you." His own timbre is not all that happy and generous, either. "You won't get an abortion, you won't think that James wants to go study Mediwizardry in two years and we both have to work for it to happen because your charity is like a hungry dragon, you won't even think that maybe my opinion counts. You'll just do what you want and to hell with me, I won't have a choice once the deed is done anyway."
He eyes are slits. The Bat-Bogey hex and the perfect Reducto, the stubborn Patronus and the determined championing of lost causes for years and years - all present; distilled and solidified.
"I fail to remember a moment when I forced you into anything, Harry, be it sex or social work. And in case you have forgotten, none of my family has studied in Oxford or even been able to imagine such a thing, and I'll have you know we are all perfectly happy!"
She's screaming against at him, both of them busy sharing blame on the two sides of the bed they've shared for seventeen years this spring. Rash words, thoughtless.
"Yes!" He shouts back at her. "But we aren't perf..."
It's barely out of him mouth when his brain catches up, and it's too late by then.
"We aren't..." she repeats slowly, quietly and deadly, her hand flying to cover her mouth. Wide, teary eyes, pure disbelief, shock; and here, where they've made love and shared plans of the future, he's managed to tear a rift he's not sure can be sewn back into wholeness.
The crack of her Disapparition is like a sword brought down.
-:-:-
4.
Draco feels quite sick.
The sun is shining outside, careless of his disdain for it, and the sky is a clear, horrible blue.
It's hard to breathe in the bright, cheerful summer day, and the House Elves bring the curtains down for him. He thinks he might be made from emptiness, inside his chest and his head. Heavy, wretched vacuum that wants to suck him into itself, into nothingness, into utter darkness. He orders himself to inhale but it's not that easy. His head swims with the slowness of it and his lungs burn.
It's a good burn, after a while.
Then he breathes in, finally, painfully, and the burn welds into hot misery.
He laughs; it doesn't sound like laughter.
Flung across the bed, humble and breathless under the plain cream of the ceiling, he fights and fails, and feels the prickle of nameless agony in his eyes and nose. He squeezes his lids tightly shut and pretends this is not real - it's easier like that, in the darkness. Laughter bubbles again in his chest, acidic and violent, and his limbs stay motionless, frozen; it's like he'll drown. Drown into thick, liquid anguish that compels him to run yet keeps him grounded and leaden.
He breathes. His throat is full. He flings an arm across his face. It is all so familiar - the smell, the bed, the hazy summer day - and for some reason, this sends a new wave of hot panic through him.
Well, it's all a lie, isn't it, this familiarity.
Three years, merely three, into this house, which he hates, with its perfectly new and modern architecture, new furniture to imitate a home lost forever, new cups and silverware, and rooms, and bed, and hangings, and sheets and bedroom view, a whole new facade to dress up the pretence into reality.
He hates it all.
Hates the neighbourhood, the tiny garden, the constant smell of the city. The sleek idiocies Muggles push around in the streets, the polite doorman, who always nods most cordially with a muttered 'Mr. Malfoy.'
When he was a child, this was a treat. Mother's eccentric retreat from the classic beauty of the Manor, the place where keep your voice down, dear, and your Snitch in your pocket, where shopping was the only thing on the schedule: a wondrous excursion into a world unknown.
Long ago, a sleepover in this house had been special and cherished, a sweet public secret Father pretended not to know. It was like hiding in the jam pantry with his toy broom under the Elves' indulgently blind eye, like nicking Father's wand while he was reading a book in his study and was suspiciously oblivious of the sparks flying.
The house that once meant lots of sweets and magical hours spent in boutiques and jewellery shops is now stale and stifling. It is all his now, his only house, despite his desperate efforts, and its shiny glamour has faded away, the alluring secrecy has fallen apart out in the open.
Draco thinks of the Manor's grand stairway, the chandeliers his mother's mother had brought from her ancestral home in France, the thick carpets that tickled his feet. He thinks of his room, bigger than this one, and with a much better view, with birds in the oak trees nearby and a magnificent sunset every night. He thinks... and then he falls asleep.
When he stirs, a loyal Elf has silently taken off his shoes and has tucked him in with a blanket. His head is splitting open and his ears throb, and it takes a few tries to blink the sandpapery blear away. His neck won't move, and his throat is unbelievably sore, and that puts the heat behind his eyes into a different perspective.
When he sits up on the edge of the bed, his knees pop. He feels so cold, so miserable and mellow, that it takes him a few moments to realise he is actually ill.
He laughs - how can he not? - at the splendid idea of the week of stuffy nose and prickly throat and broken voice that awaits him, unable as he is to even think of Pepper-Up.
He suddenly longs for Transfiguration homework and plebeian meals and the communal comfort of a lit fire an arm away.
And childhood.
He wishes he could afford to still be a child at twenty, like most people are.
-:-:-
5.
"You’re hopeless." Malfoy speaks from behind. For all his drawl and ostensible sarcasm, he sounds tense, and on any other day Harry would be much more amenable to cut him loose for that.
"The door is over there," he says instead today, cross and tired himself, and adds a few choice words in his head.
"Oh, but I can't let your day be any less that perfectly horrible, now, can I?"
It's actually exactly what Harry's first thought was, and he looks sharply behind himself, to where Malfoy is lounging on the sofa.
Malfoy raises an eyebrow and smirks, and props his booted feet on the coffee table, just the way it drives Harry out of his skin.
"Could you...?" he begins, but Malfoy cuts him off:
"Could I what? Disappear? Yeah, almost like magic," he drawls the word into a polysyllable of disdain with some odd, bitter chime ringing into it. "Could I shut up? No, you know how clueless I am at that. Could I fuck you senseless?" There's a pause, tingling, a tiny twist of lips, and then, "Probably. If you beg me prettily." The grin is full of teeth now, masking all else, and Harry feels a faint response tugging his mouth, his cock.
"Could you take your boots off my coffee table?" He speaks finally, quietly, then turns back to the glass tank and hisses a string of pointless lisps.
The wyvern, baking in the only sunny spot in the tank, doesn't move at all, tail nor claw, and he might as well be speaking Mermish to the wall.
Harry tries again, another sound, another stress, to much the same effect. He begins a third try.
"Oh, please. You'll break my heart," Malfoy spits from behind him. "What is it now, somebody died?"
Harry snorts. He is not the only one on the wrong foot today, obviously, with all the dryness in that voice and the quiet self-mockery, but he is not asking such questions.
"Why don't you go home and leave me alone?" he says, and Malfoy laughs, a sound of many things but not joy.
"I am beginning to tear up. Seriously. One more word of this tripe and I am going to really fucking cry." What has begun in delicate ridicule ends in pure sharp contempt, and it makes Harry feel lighter. Calmer. Grounded. Harry revels in the sensation, in the comfortable familiarity of decades.
"What is it then? Work drama? Don't tell me Wonder Boy is getting the sack in the latest head cuts forced by the Ministry?"
"The efficiency of the administrative system is being currently audited," Harry answers out of automatic loyalty, and Malfoy snorts.
"I’m sure. I bet the new Minister's most inconvenient opponents will be found sadly behind on their compulsory red tape, and a few choice sycophants will be in dire need of a promotion and new government flats."
"The system needs to be checked and improved every now and then," Harry puts in without much vigour.
"Please. Do you really believe that?" The tone is dry and sure of itself, and with a good reason, too. They both know Harry's answer is no, and when he remains tellingly silent, Malfoy's smugness is palpable in the air.
Out of the window, the trees in the nearby park are just beginning to colour. In a couple of weeks, when September gives way, they'll be a feast of fire. It's curious how Harry can tolerate their flame alone, and find it calming. The sky is as blue as only autumn sky ever is, and the sun is bright, all shine but no warmth anymore.
Harry thinks of the garden at home with Ginny's last roses in bloom. It's empty now, with the children all off to school the week before, and he has to take the swing in before the rains start.
The thought of coming home makes Harry shudder, only a tiny bit. Last night he woke to Ginny rocking in the wingchair by the window, crying, with Lily's first, excited letter clutched to her chest. She was gone this morning when he woke up, and he can just feel the beginnings of a great cloud of gloom gathering about her.
He knows what to expect: he has lived through it all before, with Al not so much - the Muggle-born project was just beginning then, so much work - but the first time, when James went, it was pure tragedy, with weeks of hidden tears and mood swings, and then the house got redecorated in midwinter.
Maybe he can bribe Neville into letting Lily Floo...
"Let go, you'll crush the tank," a soft voice speaks into his ear, and he realises he's clutching it with bone-white knuckles.
He forces his grip to relax - so hard! - and a sound slithers unbidden from between his lips.
The wyvern reacts for the first time in weeks, and Draco's hands clench on his shoulders.
-:-:-
6.
All in all, it's one of Draco's more boring balls.
Ostensibly, it celebrates the coming of age of the new Minister's oldest daughter, a surprisingly ugly ash blonde creature with an eye watering pink failure of a dress.
Running a well-trained eye over the guests, Draco strongly suspects this was the very first occasion the minister could use to boast his new position and still retain some vague sense of propriety. Not that Draco doesn't join half the population in wondering how on earth the post-war moron made it a full five-year mandate, but he finds the display a bit rash. He sees with sharper clarity than most how hating someone for years can make their favourites hard on the stomach. And still, rubbing it in like that is ill-grace at best and shockingly stupid for anyone of a sound political mind.
Talk about closing doors and losing resources. Or people-idiot Ravenclaws, whichever.
Not to mention that the occasion-used girl is depressingly flat-minded for one of her status. And the giggling.
Draco turns away with a grimace. Schooling his features back into something vague and relaxed is as easy as tea-sugar-milk. He remembers vividly how mere - what, six? No, it was seven - years ago he could cry more easily than he could make it through a full day.
It seems a lifetime away. Or maybe several. One slashed clean away, another Crucioed slowly out of existence, a new one baptised by fire. It wouldn't do to come out coddled and whiny, now, would it?
He sees a gleam of red a second before a body collides with his, and the Weasley harlot is flushed a most unbecoming maroon, and the situation slides to a much less civilised plane of existence.
Draco pushes her away unceremoniously.
"The fact that your family are used to living on top of each other, Weasley, doesn't mean the rest of us will tolerate being mowed over."
She mutters something unintelligible that sounds suspiciously like 'wasn't looking,' and he snorts.
"How cute of you to claim you are actually looking on another occasion."
His lips twist, and he can just taste his next insult when a finely clad arm appears around her shoulders.
"How dare you talk to my wife like that," Potter demands with much more calm and dignity that Draco would expect, and that, oddly, feels like a betrayal - feels like Potter has changed and moved on, away from Draco's ability to bait him into a pique with a mere word.
Draco can't help it, though; he laughs. Then bows, to their joint amazement, and takes Weasley's feebly struggling hand.
"I apologise." Her jaw drops, and he lays an air kiss on her knuckles to make it a permanent effect. "You are not at fault. It is clear that Potter's blindness is sadly contagious."
She pulls her hand away with an indignant yelp, but Draco can hardly care less about her. For just a second, the shortest time needed to rein the urge in, he could swear Potter's growl of rage has begun as a snort of twisted amusement.
Weasley has just hissed out a 'You filthy...' when Potter murmurs something in her ear and leads her away, saving her from the further abuse she doubtlessly deserves.
Draco is rather loathe to admit it, but he is curiously glad. In his fights with Potter the only place for another is in the stands, and it has always been like that: the stage is fully occupied. Ten feet away Potter spares him a furtive glance, and Draco is already feeling much better.
A tray floats by him and he takes another flute. He can think of ten better sorts and vintages, but he's drunk much worse champagne on Ministry parties, too, so...
Someone pushes him from behind, giggling stupidly, and he turns with the poison already dripping.
Then he stops.
Draco remembers her, vaguely, or rather, he can recognise the family features and recalls a girl of her age. He hasn't seen her... he was ten, she must have been seven, that means she is just over twenty now, right?
Draco discovers that the family name he slipped his mind. It was something French, or maybe it was Swiss. He remembers they were the Averys’ cousins, second or third, but they have the familial nose - she has it - and Draco has played Quidditch with her before they left England.
Mary? Megan? Muriel?
"Hey," she laughs, with the candy-vodka voice of the impossibly innocent, and practically splays on top of him.
She's far more drunk than propriety dictates, and Draco is not sure why, but he cares enough to sit her down and find a living Elf for a Pepper-Up. That takes a while. The sight of the potion, the smell!, makes him shudder as it always does, but the effect on her is immediate.
"I think I know you," she admits, audibly embarrassed, and there is a pronounced accent this time. She inclines her head to the side; inquiry. It's a childlike gesture.
Draco suddenly thinks he ought to marry.
-:-:-
7.
"James, where is Al?" Harry asks.
"Dunno." James is buried behind the latest Quidditch Monthly, and Harry, anxious and irritable, thinks for a moment if he's heard the question at all. Then the child puts down the magazine with a "Did you check the attic?" and Harry tells himself to breathe and not panic, and not run the stairs to the attic's trap door.
"Al?" he calls, no answer, before he pulls the ribbon and a ladder appears. "Albus?" Harry tries again, already feeling his heart quicken. What if he's not there? What if he got lost? His wand is down on the kitchen table - stupid child, who leaves their wand lying about? What if someone took him, and he has no means to send Harry a message, what if...
"Al?" Harry calls again, just to quiet the panicky voice growing more insistent. It's been years since he's last had such a fright, and he's forgotten how easily it is to sink back into dark times.
The child could have fallen and broken something, might be unconscious. What if someone hexed him?
The attic is dark, and Harry's Lumos! barely makes an impression over the dusty boxes upon boxes of God knows what. It smells of mould, and the thought alone is enough to send his pulse sky high and his stomach into a spin. Ginny has been meaning to clean it up here for ages now; maybe Harry will do it after all, for his own state of mind.
It takes a while for him to notice that actually the boxes are stacked on two sides of some sort of aisle, and that it is quite well-used, a small footprint just off it.
Why doesn't he know his own child spends his first summer holiday boarded up in the horrible attic?
A handful of feet - it feels like he has never moved faster, his pulse is a mess - and then the path makes a turn behind some old bookshelves, and that's why he hasn't seen the light all along. Albus is sitting on the floor with his legs crossed, before a tiny cauldron of something bubbling, with a pair of huge fluffy mufflers on his ears.
Harry is going to strangle him. Honestly. As soon as his breathing pattern returns to normal.
He gently waves a hand in front of Al's eyes, and the kid jumps up so violently he can't contain the relieved laughter.
"Dad!" Al cries a little too loudly, then pulls the mufflers off and lowers his voice. "I could have spilled the potion!"
In the mixed greenish-grey light of Lumos and Conjured fire the child's skin is sallow and his eyes sunken and dark. Harry steers clear of that particular venue of thought.
"If you disappear again and I don't know where you are, I'll chain you to the kitchen stove," Harry says with satisfying calm, and Al laughs with the carefree air of someone who's heard the threat great many times but has never been actually punished.
"What are you brewing?" Harry asks to stop his own smile, and Al immediately darkens.
"It's..." he begins, then stops, clears his throat and swallows, and at that point Harry already expects everything, from lubricant to Draught of Living Death.
"It'sFelixFelicis," Al mutters in one breath, and Harry hasn't expected that.
"What?!"
Harry shines his wand over the cauldron, the content is a copperish yellow, and looks like it's trying to leap but is too heavy for it.
Harry is more than impressed.
"It takes..." he begins, and Al interrupts, embarrassed.
"Yeah, a lifetime to make and now it's all wrong and worth nothing."
A cloud of gloom is visibly gathering.
Harry is a little helpless, split wondering between how on earth to soothe that, and whether he was like that too, whether he would have been like that too - oblivious he's given his father a stroke but embarrassed over some failed stunt.
"Let's forget for a moment that you've somehow procured a mandrake for that," Al's face turns visibly red, "and focus on why exactly you needed luck so badly."
Al's answer is stuttered and barely intelligible, and Harry just manages to distinguish 'Quidditch trials' and 'October' and a name he's seen innumerable times written in Al's letters, much to Ginny's annoyance.
"Al, you don't even like Quidditch that much."
Al looks at him as if he's grown a second head.
"That doesn't mean I'll let him beat me! He'll be on the team, I won't, I'm never going to live it down!" He sounds panicky, like Harry will stop him.
"Al, Felix is forbidden in competitions. And besides you can trounce Malfoy any day without..."
"Of course I’ll beat him," Al looks scandalised. "The potion's not for that!" There's a pause, nail picking, mouth opening and closing, and then, Al looks up, fierce:
"I was going to give it to James. He'll be meeting this girl he meets on Saturdays, and maybe if he gets really lucky, he'll forget we have trials!" Al's all feverish now and, as Harry is half amused, half-horrified to note, not ashamed in the least. "And he won't be there to tease me, and he won't be able to pick up those lousy things James's been making up over the summer, and he will sulk because I will be on Ravenclaw's team while all he'll have are year-old insults."
Harry is sorely tempted to laugh. Or groan.
He is sure McGonagall already secretly hates him - the Potter and Weasley rule-breaking skills, combined and doubled.
-:-:-
8.
Draco can't breathe. It's a practically permanent affliction now, in this stuffy room with its oppressive gloom and hushed conversation between flocks of scavengers.
He can barely move his neck. He's all stiff, tense as if expecting a blow. His limbs are slowly going asleep even as he stands there. Black and thin and motionless - is this a glass in his hand? - and everything is tingling and numb and he wants to move but can't.
His father has denied the truth and shut himself in his bedroom, and Draco wants - so much! - to be able to do the same, so bad he's ashamed. He wants... he wants to hide in a small black place, with no one to see and no one to hear, and simply fall apart.
"Deepest condolences," someone murmurs beside him and pats his arm, and Draco feels himself begin to fade away. It starts right behind his eyes, a prickling and a cold, distanced horror, and spreads all over him; a heavy panic in his chest that grips his heart to a skid; a vacuum in his stomach; a senseless tickle and twitch in his fingertips.
He can't see a thing, his ears recognise only meaningless ebb and flow of noise. He can't feel his legs and his knees have turned to water. Someone pats him again. There’s faint, toned-down laughter, and Draco thinks he might be descending into hysteria.
It can't be true, this preposterous gathering of vultures in his house, around his mother's coffin. It can't be real that she's lying there beautiful and pale like a porcelain doll, blue and cold under the glamour. He needs to scream and beg, and maybe cry, and wants so badly to have her hold him that his hands shake.
Dead.
She's dead and he's lost her, irreversibly, forever, so unexpected, and the only thing those people can manage is a low murmur of how he's such a useless host and how the canapés have run low.
It's a fine October day, blue sky and fiery hills, and the air is sharp and clean around them when they go to the burial site, a pointed contrast to the deceptive blaze of the sun. It has cost him almost more strings than he now possesses to bury his own mother in the family cemetery, now property of the Ministry along with the acres of green fields around the Manor. The house is just behind the hill on his left; he can practically count the steps, see the lane, the labyrinth and the oaks.
The words of the burial chant slide around him, sweet and clingy and painful, and he lets them envelope him in a cocoon of grief.
He shan't see her ever again. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, dirt rising in an orderly column to fall over the red roses and shiny surface of the lid, and then it's over.
The silence is ringing. A moment, two, ten, and with a low noise and a series of pops people file out, sated on both bread and spectacle.
He's rocking on his feet on the green grass of home and childhood, and loss has never been quite this sharp before, quite this important.
"I am sorry for your loss, Malfoy." A clear and familiar voice speaks, and Draco starts.
"You couldn't just leave quietly, could you," Draco says, and to his horror it comes out tired and broken and tear-streaked. "You had to come and rub salt in."
"This is not true," Potter dares answer. "Your mother, no matter her other deeds, saved my life and I’m not likely to forget that, ever."
"I wish she had left you die," Draco spits and means it, oh how candidly he does, for it is okay to hate Potter and be rude and lash out, because this is Potter and how things are between them.
"Look, I know what it is to lose a parent..."
Draco is sick just hearing the patience. He doesn't need patience, especially Potter's, or pity, or help. He just needs to hurt someone.
"What do you know?" he grinds out. "You know nothing ! You think you've lost a mother? You've never had one. All you've ever had was a mirage, a pitiful little fantasy!"
"I'll go now," Potter says, and his voice is just beginning to harden. "I don't want to fight with you today."
Draco laughs, a hysterical sound of total lack of amusement, and swings just as Potter raises his hand for the first flick of Apparition. "But I do want to fight with you very much."
Potter's arm, going up, catches Draco's, going down, and they end up hooked together through the tight flush of Apparition. They land both already pulling away.
Draco has seen enough Fidelii to know the sensation of entering one, and Potter looks like he's swallowed poison.
Draco staggers away with a shout; it is a perfectly ordinary sitting room. Potter's face goes through ten different shades and shapes before settling on wary acceptance.
It makes Draco furious. A perfectly legitimate, welcome emotion for him to hold onto and explain the tight throat and stomach with. He hasn't felt lethal in a long time, but he does now.
When he speaks, his voice is a hiss, full of derision, and slurs come easy as breathing. Potter answers, progressively angrier, colours flying and crazy hair, and all is as it was, normal and familiar, and Draco is lighter with every sound.
"Ungrateful, treacherous bastard," Potter draws after a while through white lips and punches him, hard, in the face.
Draco falls back, and before the stars have faded away, Potter is gone among cracks of static.
The couch is supple leather, darkest brown; the room - pure anonymity. The afternoon is clear as glass through the window and the light is setting the trees in the park outside afire.
Draco closes his eyes and comes apart. Not quietly.
-:-:-
9.
"I can't believe Malfoy's sheer nerve!" Ginny raves on the way out of the station. "To stand there with his perfect hair, perfect robes, perfect, foreign and probably stupid as you please wife, and only deign to greet us!"
Harry keeps silent. It's rather unhealthy, he has discovered, to take part in Ginny's Malfoy rages, no matter how. It's astounding how much feeling she still keeps for Lucius, how much clear, burning hatred, hidden. Harry has often thought how the clearest of all potions are poisons.
It's a trauma she never mentions, never confides about, not even to him, and it’s the only topic she can’t smile the gloom away from.
"Harry, dear, I have to go, Jack will be waiting," she interrupts the flow and visibly takes a deep breath. The tenseness is present, though, and the kiss on the cheek she gives him is hasty and perfunctory. "I'll try for dinner but Lily needs to be in bed on time."
Harry knows what this means, and it's not that she'll be home before midnight.
He makes a brief salute to make her smile, and she rolls her eyes affectionately, but he knows the stress lines are there even without seeing them, and Lily's offered cheek is most reluctant in response.
Ron's pleaded off red tape at the office and an audit, but Harry can see Hermione waiting patiently with a gloomy Hugo at the corner. He's wondered, sometimes, what it is like to send a sibling off like that; someone you've seen every day of your life now away for months on end.
Hermione smiles, she has been simply radiant in the past few weeks and Harry can't help but think she's been far too focused on getting that 'in Chief' position in her ward.
"Are you..." he begins, wracking his brains when the application results were to come out, almost certain already what they are. She mocks reproof and smacks him on the shoulder.
"There is etiquette, Harry James Potter, and it dictates that you wait until you are told!"
He laughs. "Come on, kids, a walk in the park and ice cream in you can find a vendor."
They both look up expectantly, especially Hugo who might as well pass for a sweets hoover.
"Harry!" Hermione is scandalised, but it is too late now and besides, it's not like she can resist the mint and vanilla flavour herself. "Their lunch!" she insists feebly even as Harry takes her to the car.
"Hermione, half our children are spoiling their lunch with chocolate frogs as we speak. Let's be fair."
"You are incorrigible," she tells him, and he starts. He's just been observing how blonde Lily is in the sunlight, and the words are a direct echo of another conversation just a week past.
"That's why you love me," he jokes, but his smile is hollow around the edges.
He wakes up with a start that night, from a dream he can't remember. The room is all chilly; he has left the window open, and the house is depressingly silent when he knows it's empty.
Lily was delighted at the opportunity to see Hugo's new broom, and Harry himself was thankful, at Hermione's offer for a sleepover, to be relieved of the cooking. He hasn't been in the mood to cook for a while now, and if someone can run one glance over him and know something's wrong, it's Hermione. And besides, he'll take Hugo next week, and the house won't be so quiet.
He Disapparates almost before the thought is formed. The room he appears in is warmer, the air not as crisp. Well, it's been a while. More than that, actually, but who's counting.
The wyvern's coiled, tiny wings folded, and the street lamps are sufficiently away for him to be able to see the stars. His fingers trace the edges of the tank with a practiced, unnoticed motion. The dark wood of the table underneath gleams in the scant light, and Harry stares at it. He hasn't touched it without meaning to for years, lest he call Malfoy without intending to, lest he betray his need without a real reason. It's a habit carefully and systematically eradicated, or at least consciously shifted.
He lets his hand fall lower, closer to the wood. His pulse quickens, along with his breathing. The first bare touch of a fingertip on the edge makes him shiver, a tightening in his belly. He traces a slow line along the wood, shining and smooth, and it feels like a caress.
A timid, tiny appeal, born and caped by the quiet, deceitful protection of the night time.
-:-:-
10.
It ought to be warmer already at this time of the year, but it's not. Draco remembers lazing around the lake in the scant few weeks between the sun's first appearance for the year and the pre-exams rush.
London is to the south of Hogwarts, and still, the light shining upon his father is cold and hollow through the open window. There is a breeze, very light, more a movement in the curtains than an actual sensation on Draco's skin, and quite frankly the room is freezing.
In the few times Draco has ever envisioned the moment, Before, it hasn't resembled the current scene even remotely.
He has imagined what his parents had told him about them getting engaged more than anything else, and there had been tears of joy and hugging and pats on the shoulder and well. Excitement.
Lucius, antisocial and inscrutable, barely shrugs now and doesn't even look at Draco after his announcement. Maybe the worst part of it all is that Draco hasn't been naive enough to hope, doesn’t even expect enough to be disappointed.
He stands there, with his silent-for-months father, pretending not to think - probably just like him - how his mother would have organised the engagement in high hope and higher enthusiasm all by herself, and watches how Lucius' hair is more white than blonde in the light.
The engagement ring, which Draco takes himself from its keeping place, glows briefly at the first touch and then returns to the tarnished glimmer of generations of accepted proposals and delighted, glowering pride.
It's much more ornate than Miriam's delicate ring finger can reasonably take and still, the brilliancy of her smile when she says yes and then looks up at him as he slides it home, puts the filigree and precious stones to shame.
The green of her eyes makes the sun appear far warmer than it seemed this morning in his father's room, and her upturned face is all young radiance when he bends to kiss her. The image of it remains imprinted on the inside of his lids when his eyes close, and his whole body thrums and loosens with the quiet anchor of the devotion in it.
Draco spends the better part of the night thinking. He isn't too far under to see all the details, the entire picture. He knows, with the perfect clarity of an adored son, taught carefully about duty and tradition: his mother would have been so viciously against... against her, that it would have hurt; his father, were he actually present, would have flayed his skin with acidic commentary.
She has all he's been looking for. But that doesn't make her the correct choice.
The family tree is pure perfection, as embarrassed as she was to admit it, and she has the most delicate bone structure he has ever had the pleasure of beholding. And yet the colours of her accessories were that little bit off tonight, again, and meaningless small talk is certainly not her forte. She has a favourite book he can't quite fathom, and knows about Muggle technology far more than someone of her standing possibly should.
And her French is better than his, although that's quite beside the point. Her accent is impossibly sweet.
Her answer to what she knows of the Second Voldemort War is "It's over?" He knows, he asked her. She smiled and added she doesn't get why in Britain everyone is so concerned with it when it hardly got any mention outside the country even as it was going on. She asked him which side he was on, still cheerful, and he questioned what she thought. She said she didn't care and all that mattered was that he was all right. The discussion had ended in a "Do you want to go to the cinema?" and he had been still awed and shocked enough to say okay.
She has a nose designed for the Malfoy bloodline, even if the blonde of her hair has more sun than moonlight, and also the tiniest, rebellious hint of red. He's not sure if her curls will sit well with his family's chin. But he is already curious which will win in the eyes of their children: her green or his grey.
And she has a beautiful voice. Perhaps that's what makes the Muggle-loving asides more bearable, he is not entirely certain. In all truth, she is the most refined form and high-standing incarnation of what he's always labelled the Weasley mindset, and he winces just to think it. Only, she's far more reasonable and levelled and bloody logical about it. And freckle-free, although he must admit he's wondered, sometimes, how a powdery smattering will look like on that perfect nose of hers.
She makes Draco pause and stills his breath, and maybe, with the rigidity of his old thinking gone with his family and a new life waiting to be built, that's what matters most.
-:-:-
11.
Harry wakes up with a cry. He's gasping, a sweaty mess of trembling limbs. The bed is empty beside him and he falls back, chest heaving, trying to shake off the burning image of the sunrise in his dream. He has seen it thousands of times, the bloody tinge of the first light, the clouds set afire and seemingly moving like living creatures, reds and oranges spreading through the skies like wild fire.
About the passionate, romantic beauty of sunrises Harry can only snort, and secretly wince. Your sweet solar obsession, Ginny will sometimes joke, but there's nothing sweet about it, and Harry has been obsessed with enough things in his life to know these are not the type of dreams it gives you.
He lies for a while, arms under his head, staring at the ceiling. The summer is already packing up, and with the window open, the cooling sweat soon gives him a chill. He stands. The horizon is just beginning to tint rose to the east, and he shivers. The apple tree in the yard will be ripe in a few short weeks, and maybe someone can be persuaded to make him pie, even though his puppy eyes hardly work on anyone anymore.
Maybe he'll make it himself.
He sees Ginny then, her ponytail bobbing up and down, dark in the scant light, as she jogs in the distance. It's odd that she's running, as smooth as things are going lately. The programme at Hogwarts ended, and with it Harry's teaching duties, yes, but the Muggle-born project will be a riot when it starts in a few months. No reasons for her to be nervous... except that they won't see James for months once they send him off today.
Harry closes the window and goes down in the kitchen. There are dregs from yesterday's tea and he flicks them away. The fresh water boils the second he snaps his fingers and he curses under his breath while waving it down.
The coffee mug is steaming in his hand not five minutes later, and he reaches to pull a biscuit tin out of the cupboard, while Ginny is not in to preach about the imminent danger of love handles. Something glittery rumbles down on him from the upper shelf the second he opens. In a flash the mug crashes on the floor, there is coffee everywhere, and he is clutching Lily's plain gilded circlet of a crown from the fairy party the week before like a lifeline, his pulse through the roof.
The curse this time is loud, long and sophisticated.
The mess gets banished in a moment, and Harry puts the repaired mug on the counter top, leaving the hot coffee well alone. He slides to the floor, boneless, and laughs, laughs, laughs, until his hands have stopped shaking and his breathing is almost normal.
He hears Ginny enter and stands up, slowly, to splash some water on his face and put the sadly unused biscuit box back into its hiding place. By the time she enters the room, ten minutes later, flushed with jogging and a shower, he's even managed to pour the now safely lukewarm coffee.
"Hey. Couldn't sleep?" she asks, bending for a quick morning kiss before getting her daily dose of healthy breakfast thing with the taste and appearance of sawdust.
He hums something noncommittal about cold and open windows.
"It's very fresh outside," she smiles, a brilliant show of habitual optimism. "But I'll need a sweatshirt soon. Away with another year," she adds, on an afterthought, while pouring milk, and sips from her coffee. "Wow. You've been up a while then?"
Harry flicks it warmer, pulls her to stand and kisses her thoroughly. She emerges laughing and flushed, and Harry thinks without connection that Snape was a damned liar because try as he might, he can't imagine stoppering that.
"The kids will need to be up soon," Ginny tells him as they abandon the breakfast, and he nods.
Five hours later he waves to the red train puffing away and carrying his little boy. It feels a little as if his heart has up and left.
"He'll come back for my birthday, right?" Albus asks, and puts his hand in Harry's, a very rare occasion now. Lily is ten feet away, seducing a stray cat.
"We'll see, sweet," Ginny says on Harry's other side. "If you are a very good boy."
Harry laughs, despite himself.
-:-:-
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Pairing(s): Harry/Draco, implied Harry/Ginny and Draco/spouse
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended.
Deathly Hallows compliant? Fully DH compliant, epilogue and all, with the exception of a sole offending sentence. :g:
Word Count: ~30 000 words
Summary:
Suddenly, he wants nothing more than to absorb her persistent ability to put one foot in front of the other and move forward. Not look back.
He wants to be able, like her, to live.
Author's Notes: I will need bullets here :g:
#1 This story was written as a gift to alexis_sd for the winter H/D Holidays fest of 2007
#2 Many, many heartfelt thanks to my beta, rinsbane, who made this piece far more readable and smooth than it was to begin with, taught important lessons about commas and full stops, and worked hard to meet my deadline. :) Thank you, sweet! Also much gratefulness for those wonderful people who held my hand and sent me optimistic thoughts when I thought I wouldn't be able to do it :g: You were wonderful, guys!
#3 Dear reader, beware just a little bit: our heroes have common history, and each tells his own half of it to make up a whole - but have in mind that Harry's perspective moves backwards, and Draco's goes forwards.
Own Two Legs
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
1.
Harry wakes up to the sight of a long-fingered, pale hand.
He can feel a dim sense of dread and a silent, impotent horror, already awake in him, if a faint cry from last night's brazen fear. A pity, that. He has always been better at up-front attack and defence than at waiting out the drag of a standstill.
He closes his eyes against the thought and pretends he's still sleeping. The unease slinks off unhappily to the outskirts of his conscience and begins to regroup for a second attempt.
He breathes in, slowly. It's a familiar and controlled gesture and it helps the sleeping pretence fabulously. The air smells of a closed window, of breakfast waiting patiently in the kitchen and - a little - of frantic, scared sex.
There goes his pulse again.
He exhales, and maybe it wasn't panic, after all, but him forgetting to breathe properly.
The sheets are warm underneath and on top of him, the bed long since perfectly comfortable, and his body is still full of liquid languor, of sleep.
Damn his mind for being awake.
The room is quiet but for the regular breathing beside him, and he wonders - briefly, for he knows it won't - if it will lull him back to the realm where thinking doesn't happen.
Now his muscles are all tense.
When was the last time he slept in late anyway? The last time he woke without rushing to a hospital, the last time he had a breakfast conversation in something that is not hushed, tight worry, the last time he saw her and she smiled.
He can't remember.
Through slit eyes he looks at the hand again. Halfway under it a bent elbow is visible, and Harry follows the limb down to where the other hand is tucked under the chin of a very calm, very awake face. Grey eyes, staring back at him.
I've always thought they were a watery blue, he wants to say, as he has done many times in the past.
The look turns amused, just a little condescending. It's nothing really; the tiniest twinkle and a bare flutter of lashes, but he can tell.
Every insult and sneer, every lie, every truth has its own cadence, its own gleam, an odd twitch of muscle here and a tick there. And Harry knows most of them.
After all, if knowing someone for thirty years really gives you something, it's wordless communication.
A delicate eyebrow inches up, and Harry contemplates if what he's thinking really is that obvious. The corner of an upper lip flicks briefly, the wry amused answer in a familiar exchange, so he guesses yes.
He has wondered for many years now if there is a limit to what you can say without words, with your eyes alone.
If there is, they have fortunately never reached it.
The leg tangled with his own is warm and relaxed, every muscle he sees is liquid calm, and from twenty paces away he'd still be able to tell how tense Malfoy really is.
He breathes in, then exhales, slow and controlled and audible, as if to say he knows.
Malfoy draws away at once, as if scalded, and begins with a practiced efficiency to work his clothes the right side out. When he's clothed and proper, he glances in the mirror on the wall, sets the single mussed lock back into its correct place and dusts a spot on the shoulder of his robes with utter imperiousness. It’s like a shield coming together, layer upon layer, to hide the sleepy relaxed moment Harry has managed to glimpse. The warmth that has kept Harry’s demons at bay all night is now covered, and Malfoy appears another person entirely - composed and self-sufficient.
A wake up call, for both of them.
"Maybe," Malfoy drawls without turning, and the sound of his morning voice, just beginning to return to normal smoothness, licks at Harry's collar bone, "you should pull yourself together and go." And Disapparates.
The pop leaves Harry feeling cold and bereft, uncertain, hanging, and without a delay, the sickness and horror attack him anew.
As he mourns the loss of merciful, pretended calm, now gone with Malfoy, he wishes it lasted longer. And then, dutifully, he squishes the thought and straightens up to face the demons of the new day. He isn’t sure which would be worse, to spend another day in this nerve-fraying status quo or to hope for a change and pray it’s not for the worse.
Malfoy’s watch lies forgotten on the nightstand, Harry sees just as he Apparates, and that, for some inexplicable reason, makes his chest constrict.
-:-:-
2.
It's odd that as the Chief Warlock appears in the chamber and approaches the raised dais with his seat before the Wizengamot, Draco doesn't think of anything at all.
It's been six months since the end of his initial trial, and soon the last of the festivities for the three-year anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts will mercifully die down. Draco feels like it has been a lifetime. A century. An endless array of perfectly identical days spent in one and the same frantic effort to staunch the bleeding and salvage what's left of his life and his family.
There isn't a Secretary whose wife he hasn't charmed, isn't an Assistant he knows nothing about. He closes his eyes, quite confident he can quote by name and position all employees that pass the gates of the Ministry in the morning. Each and every one of them: from the openly mocking hag checking in wands at the entrance of the new building, to the conceited nobody who instils order in the Minister's desk in the evening.
He has spent more time drinking tea in people’s offices than at home, and it's been like that for more than a year now.
In the end it was all for naught.
The Chief Warlock sits down, heavily, and takes his time arranging his robes and papers. An Undersecretary scurries forth and puts down a mug - thyme, no milk, one sugar, Draco knows - of tea in front of the man, and to Draco's left the barrister takes a deep breath and crosses his fingers under the cover of the balustrade.
"On the matter of..."
Draco can't breathe. All that effort, wasted once, hanging now on the last slender thread of hope. One last chance for him to set things as they once were.
He hardly hears, all trembling expectation, the gravel brought down, and the last word of the decision needs to echo several times through the chamber for him to pick it up properly.
For a moment, he can't comprehend, mind blank. His frantically beating heart stops, and he is light-headed and joint-weak all of a sudden.
Rejected. Life surges back into him with a painful acuity.
His limbs weigh like lead and disobey his orders, and his face remains impassive more out of frozen denial than of rigid control.
And isn't it surprising how in that moment he doesn't think of the family name, doesn't remember the gallery upon gallery of old portraits and gold-threaded family trees, doesn't consider the library of thousands of tomes in a dozen languages.
Instead, he sees the sunny morning parlour where his mother told him he was going to have a little baby sister. Hears his father's footsteps chasing after him as he rides his first full-sized broom in the ballroom. Feels the horror of coming home with Father to find Mother passed out in a puddle of blood, and later her white face in the bedroom as she tells him he is mummy's little man.
He remembers/smells/touches/loses room after room full of laughter and childhood and tears. Of magic and better days with nothing yet lost.
The ten minutes they need to leave the courtroom are pure torture, and the second he senses the wards sliding off his skin, he Apparates away, the lawyer's meaningless words echoing after him.
He appears in Diagon Alley; he doesn't know why. His feet are rooted to the spot, recalcitrant, heavy. His chest is empty and cold.
As minutes pass and passers-by jolt him blindly, another thought slowly forms, yet more painful:
How does he tell his father now?
He looks up, slowly - and why is his vision blurred? - and across the street Harry bloody Potter is staring directly at him with blatant pity written across his face.
Draco's chest swells. He flicks his wand violently, once; his motions are jerky and the tip hits his thigh. The constriction of Apparition barely registers with his hollow mind, and when he appears at his new location, the last red sparks are dying, and the cloth is singed.
Trust Potter to be precisely where he's least wanted.
-:-:-
3.
For a moment or two Harry doesn't react. Surely he must have heard wrong? But she is gazing up at him with such blazing, quiet satisfaction that it becomes slowly, painfully serious.
"What do you mean?" Harry hears himself ask stupidly, and she laughs. It's the kind of optimistic, determined and focused forward laughter that hasn't changes one iota ever since she was sixteen - it makes him cringe a little inwardly and recoil, as it always does.
"What can I possibly mean by 'I am pregnant,' Harry, beyond the obvious?" She throws a slanted, playful glance and continues chatting, while folding the clean laundry.
"I went to see Healer Worwick yesterday because you know I was breathless and tired all of last month, and I was worried that..."
A shadow passes across her face, briefly, before she brightens up with the practised ease that Harry has always admired and wanted.
"Well, I was worried it was something with the heart." She rolls her eyes as if such a thing would be ridiculous. "You know all the problems George is having."
Personally, Harry thinks that all the problems George is having amount to a heart broken beyond any Healer's skill of mending, and maybe living in a ghost-haunted shop is not particularly helpful, either.
He lets her talk for a while, and helps with the bed linens she's too short to fold easily alone. It's a silent ritual, familiar and comforting, and after a few minutes, when she's stacking the neat, fresh smelling pile in his arms and fussing over the last of the wrinkles and imaginary corners folded askew, he tells her, very quietly.
"Gin, I thought we agreed we've had enough children. You said yourself that three is a pretty number to leave it off at."
He's purposefully calm and reasonable, but he can't bring himself to look at her. Her hand, picking lint from his sleeve, pulls back as if scalded, and he goes to transfer the sheets in the wardrobe.
Her pointed silence behind him is a weapon tested and found effective many times over the years, but, he is dismayed to realise, never this early into a conversation.
"Don't you want it?" she says finally, in a voice which at best suggests tread carefully.
He turns slowly. Twenty minutes ago he finished preparing the garden for the expected first snow and she asked if chicken was all right for dinner, and now they are marching troops for a battle he has thought quite finished.
"It was so hard with Lily," he says instead of giving an answer. "Do you remember? All the..."
"Of course I remember, Harry," she cuts him off, and hugs herself. "It was my body, and my time, and..."
"And I was right here for every minute of it!"
"Yes, of course, you were. But that doesn't make it your pain or your throat or your back, does it?"
She's not yet reached screaming, but she's coming close now, and Harry is rather angry himself, tethering on an edge he's hoped to stay sheathed.
"That's a horribly unfair thing to say!" he throws at her, and yes, there is bitterness in there. "And it was me who did your work when you couldn't; me who took care of James and Al; me who virtually slept in St. Mungo's; me who..."
"You wanted her!"
"Yes, I did. And I am not sorry for the effort or for the hours I spent working with Jack, Ginny, but I really don't think we should play with fire like that a second time. Things could have gone very wrong, you realise! I..." He looks to the side, unable to pick the proper words. "I thought I might lose you. Do you know how..." He can't continue.
"I am not getting an abortion."
Her voice is calm and a little cold when she says it, ringing after a minute of angry silence, and maybe now that she's mentioned it, that's the real problem.
"No, you aren't, are you." His own timbre is not all that happy and generous, either. "You won't get an abortion, you won't think that James wants to go study Mediwizardry in two years and we both have to work for it to happen because your charity is like a hungry dragon, you won't even think that maybe my opinion counts. You'll just do what you want and to hell with me, I won't have a choice once the deed is done anyway."
He eyes are slits. The Bat-Bogey hex and the perfect Reducto, the stubborn Patronus and the determined championing of lost causes for years and years - all present; distilled and solidified.
"I fail to remember a moment when I forced you into anything, Harry, be it sex or social work. And in case you have forgotten, none of my family has studied in Oxford or even been able to imagine such a thing, and I'll have you know we are all perfectly happy!"
She's screaming against at him, both of them busy sharing blame on the two sides of the bed they've shared for seventeen years this spring. Rash words, thoughtless.
"Yes!" He shouts back at her. "But we aren't perf..."
It's barely out of him mouth when his brain catches up, and it's too late by then.
"We aren't..." she repeats slowly, quietly and deadly, her hand flying to cover her mouth. Wide, teary eyes, pure disbelief, shock; and here, where they've made love and shared plans of the future, he's managed to tear a rift he's not sure can be sewn back into wholeness.
The crack of her Disapparition is like a sword brought down.
-:-:-
4.
Draco feels quite sick.
The sun is shining outside, careless of his disdain for it, and the sky is a clear, horrible blue.
It's hard to breathe in the bright, cheerful summer day, and the House Elves bring the curtains down for him. He thinks he might be made from emptiness, inside his chest and his head. Heavy, wretched vacuum that wants to suck him into itself, into nothingness, into utter darkness. He orders himself to inhale but it's not that easy. His head swims with the slowness of it and his lungs burn.
It's a good burn, after a while.
Then he breathes in, finally, painfully, and the burn welds into hot misery.
He laughs; it doesn't sound like laughter.
Flung across the bed, humble and breathless under the plain cream of the ceiling, he fights and fails, and feels the prickle of nameless agony in his eyes and nose. He squeezes his lids tightly shut and pretends this is not real - it's easier like that, in the darkness. Laughter bubbles again in his chest, acidic and violent, and his limbs stay motionless, frozen; it's like he'll drown. Drown into thick, liquid anguish that compels him to run yet keeps him grounded and leaden.
He breathes. His throat is full. He flings an arm across his face. It is all so familiar - the smell, the bed, the hazy summer day - and for some reason, this sends a new wave of hot panic through him.
Well, it's all a lie, isn't it, this familiarity.
Three years, merely three, into this house, which he hates, with its perfectly new and modern architecture, new furniture to imitate a home lost forever, new cups and silverware, and rooms, and bed, and hangings, and sheets and bedroom view, a whole new facade to dress up the pretence into reality.
He hates it all.
Hates the neighbourhood, the tiny garden, the constant smell of the city. The sleek idiocies Muggles push around in the streets, the polite doorman, who always nods most cordially with a muttered 'Mr. Malfoy.'
When he was a child, this was a treat. Mother's eccentric retreat from the classic beauty of the Manor, the place where keep your voice down, dear, and your Snitch in your pocket, where shopping was the only thing on the schedule: a wondrous excursion into a world unknown.
Long ago, a sleepover in this house had been special and cherished, a sweet public secret Father pretended not to know. It was like hiding in the jam pantry with his toy broom under the Elves' indulgently blind eye, like nicking Father's wand while he was reading a book in his study and was suspiciously oblivious of the sparks flying.
The house that once meant lots of sweets and magical hours spent in boutiques and jewellery shops is now stale and stifling. It is all his now, his only house, despite his desperate efforts, and its shiny glamour has faded away, the alluring secrecy has fallen apart out in the open.
Draco thinks of the Manor's grand stairway, the chandeliers his mother's mother had brought from her ancestral home in France, the thick carpets that tickled his feet. He thinks of his room, bigger than this one, and with a much better view, with birds in the oak trees nearby and a magnificent sunset every night. He thinks... and then he falls asleep.
When he stirs, a loyal Elf has silently taken off his shoes and has tucked him in with a blanket. His head is splitting open and his ears throb, and it takes a few tries to blink the sandpapery blear away. His neck won't move, and his throat is unbelievably sore, and that puts the heat behind his eyes into a different perspective.
When he sits up on the edge of the bed, his knees pop. He feels so cold, so miserable and mellow, that it takes him a few moments to realise he is actually ill.
He laughs - how can he not? - at the splendid idea of the week of stuffy nose and prickly throat and broken voice that awaits him, unable as he is to even think of Pepper-Up.
He suddenly longs for Transfiguration homework and plebeian meals and the communal comfort of a lit fire an arm away.
And childhood.
He wishes he could afford to still be a child at twenty, like most people are.
-:-:-
5.
"You’re hopeless." Malfoy speaks from behind. For all his drawl and ostensible sarcasm, he sounds tense, and on any other day Harry would be much more amenable to cut him loose for that.
"The door is over there," he says instead today, cross and tired himself, and adds a few choice words in his head.
"Oh, but I can't let your day be any less that perfectly horrible, now, can I?"
It's actually exactly what Harry's first thought was, and he looks sharply behind himself, to where Malfoy is lounging on the sofa.
Malfoy raises an eyebrow and smirks, and props his booted feet on the coffee table, just the way it drives Harry out of his skin.
"Could you...?" he begins, but Malfoy cuts him off:
"Could I what? Disappear? Yeah, almost like magic," he drawls the word into a polysyllable of disdain with some odd, bitter chime ringing into it. "Could I shut up? No, you know how clueless I am at that. Could I fuck you senseless?" There's a pause, tingling, a tiny twist of lips, and then, "Probably. If you beg me prettily." The grin is full of teeth now, masking all else, and Harry feels a faint response tugging his mouth, his cock.
"Could you take your boots off my coffee table?" He speaks finally, quietly, then turns back to the glass tank and hisses a string of pointless lisps.
The wyvern, baking in the only sunny spot in the tank, doesn't move at all, tail nor claw, and he might as well be speaking Mermish to the wall.
Harry tries again, another sound, another stress, to much the same effect. He begins a third try.
"Oh, please. You'll break my heart," Malfoy spits from behind him. "What is it now, somebody died?"
Harry snorts. He is not the only one on the wrong foot today, obviously, with all the dryness in that voice and the quiet self-mockery, but he is not asking such questions.
"Why don't you go home and leave me alone?" he says, and Malfoy laughs, a sound of many things but not joy.
"I am beginning to tear up. Seriously. One more word of this tripe and I am going to really fucking cry." What has begun in delicate ridicule ends in pure sharp contempt, and it makes Harry feel lighter. Calmer. Grounded. Harry revels in the sensation, in the comfortable familiarity of decades.
"What is it then? Work drama? Don't tell me Wonder Boy is getting the sack in the latest head cuts forced by the Ministry?"
"The efficiency of the administrative system is being currently audited," Harry answers out of automatic loyalty, and Malfoy snorts.
"I’m sure. I bet the new Minister's most inconvenient opponents will be found sadly behind on their compulsory red tape, and a few choice sycophants will be in dire need of a promotion and new government flats."
"The system needs to be checked and improved every now and then," Harry puts in without much vigour.
"Please. Do you really believe that?" The tone is dry and sure of itself, and with a good reason, too. They both know Harry's answer is no, and when he remains tellingly silent, Malfoy's smugness is palpable in the air.
Out of the window, the trees in the nearby park are just beginning to colour. In a couple of weeks, when September gives way, they'll be a feast of fire. It's curious how Harry can tolerate their flame alone, and find it calming. The sky is as blue as only autumn sky ever is, and the sun is bright, all shine but no warmth anymore.
Harry thinks of the garden at home with Ginny's last roses in bloom. It's empty now, with the children all off to school the week before, and he has to take the swing in before the rains start.
The thought of coming home makes Harry shudder, only a tiny bit. Last night he woke to Ginny rocking in the wingchair by the window, crying, with Lily's first, excited letter clutched to her chest. She was gone this morning when he woke up, and he can just feel the beginnings of a great cloud of gloom gathering about her.
He knows what to expect: he has lived through it all before, with Al not so much - the Muggle-born project was just beginning then, so much work - but the first time, when James went, it was pure tragedy, with weeks of hidden tears and mood swings, and then the house got redecorated in midwinter.
Maybe he can bribe Neville into letting Lily Floo...
"Let go, you'll crush the tank," a soft voice speaks into his ear, and he realises he's clutching it with bone-white knuckles.
He forces his grip to relax - so hard! - and a sound slithers unbidden from between his lips.
The wyvern reacts for the first time in weeks, and Draco's hands clench on his shoulders.
-:-:-
6.
All in all, it's one of Draco's more boring balls.
Ostensibly, it celebrates the coming of age of the new Minister's oldest daughter, a surprisingly ugly ash blonde creature with an eye watering pink failure of a dress.
Running a well-trained eye over the guests, Draco strongly suspects this was the very first occasion the minister could use to boast his new position and still retain some vague sense of propriety. Not that Draco doesn't join half the population in wondering how on earth the post-war moron made it a full five-year mandate, but he finds the display a bit rash. He sees with sharper clarity than most how hating someone for years can make their favourites hard on the stomach. And still, rubbing it in like that is ill-grace at best and shockingly stupid for anyone of a sound political mind.
Talk about closing doors and losing resources. Or people-idiot Ravenclaws, whichever.
Not to mention that the occasion-used girl is depressingly flat-minded for one of her status. And the giggling.
Draco turns away with a grimace. Schooling his features back into something vague and relaxed is as easy as tea-sugar-milk. He remembers vividly how mere - what, six? No, it was seven - years ago he could cry more easily than he could make it through a full day.
It seems a lifetime away. Or maybe several. One slashed clean away, another Crucioed slowly out of existence, a new one baptised by fire. It wouldn't do to come out coddled and whiny, now, would it?
He sees a gleam of red a second before a body collides with his, and the Weasley harlot is flushed a most unbecoming maroon, and the situation slides to a much less civilised plane of existence.
Draco pushes her away unceremoniously.
"The fact that your family are used to living on top of each other, Weasley, doesn't mean the rest of us will tolerate being mowed over."
She mutters something unintelligible that sounds suspiciously like 'wasn't looking,' and he snorts.
"How cute of you to claim you are actually looking on another occasion."
His lips twist, and he can just taste his next insult when a finely clad arm appears around her shoulders.
"How dare you talk to my wife like that," Potter demands with much more calm and dignity that Draco would expect, and that, oddly, feels like a betrayal - feels like Potter has changed and moved on, away from Draco's ability to bait him into a pique with a mere word.
Draco can't help it, though; he laughs. Then bows, to their joint amazement, and takes Weasley's feebly struggling hand.
"I apologise." Her jaw drops, and he lays an air kiss on her knuckles to make it a permanent effect. "You are not at fault. It is clear that Potter's blindness is sadly contagious."
She pulls her hand away with an indignant yelp, but Draco can hardly care less about her. For just a second, the shortest time needed to rein the urge in, he could swear Potter's growl of rage has begun as a snort of twisted amusement.
Weasley has just hissed out a 'You filthy...' when Potter murmurs something in her ear and leads her away, saving her from the further abuse she doubtlessly deserves.
Draco is rather loathe to admit it, but he is curiously glad. In his fights with Potter the only place for another is in the stands, and it has always been like that: the stage is fully occupied. Ten feet away Potter spares him a furtive glance, and Draco is already feeling much better.
A tray floats by him and he takes another flute. He can think of ten better sorts and vintages, but he's drunk much worse champagne on Ministry parties, too, so...
Someone pushes him from behind, giggling stupidly, and he turns with the poison already dripping.
Then he stops.
Draco remembers her, vaguely, or rather, he can recognise the family features and recalls a girl of her age. He hasn't seen her... he was ten, she must have been seven, that means she is just over twenty now, right?
Draco discovers that the family name he slipped his mind. It was something French, or maybe it was Swiss. He remembers they were the Averys’ cousins, second or third, but they have the familial nose - she has it - and Draco has played Quidditch with her before they left England.
Mary? Megan? Muriel?
"Hey," she laughs, with the candy-vodka voice of the impossibly innocent, and practically splays on top of him.
She's far more drunk than propriety dictates, and Draco is not sure why, but he cares enough to sit her down and find a living Elf for a Pepper-Up. That takes a while. The sight of the potion, the smell!, makes him shudder as it always does, but the effect on her is immediate.
"I think I know you," she admits, audibly embarrassed, and there is a pronounced accent this time. She inclines her head to the side; inquiry. It's a childlike gesture.
Draco suddenly thinks he ought to marry.
-:-:-
7.
"James, where is Al?" Harry asks.
"Dunno." James is buried behind the latest Quidditch Monthly, and Harry, anxious and irritable, thinks for a moment if he's heard the question at all. Then the child puts down the magazine with a "Did you check the attic?" and Harry tells himself to breathe and not panic, and not run the stairs to the attic's trap door.
"Al?" he calls, no answer, before he pulls the ribbon and a ladder appears. "Albus?" Harry tries again, already feeling his heart quicken. What if he's not there? What if he got lost? His wand is down on the kitchen table - stupid child, who leaves their wand lying about? What if someone took him, and he has no means to send Harry a message, what if...
"Al?" Harry calls again, just to quiet the panicky voice growing more insistent. It's been years since he's last had such a fright, and he's forgotten how easily it is to sink back into dark times.
The child could have fallen and broken something, might be unconscious. What if someone hexed him?
The attic is dark, and Harry's Lumos! barely makes an impression over the dusty boxes upon boxes of God knows what. It smells of mould, and the thought alone is enough to send his pulse sky high and his stomach into a spin. Ginny has been meaning to clean it up here for ages now; maybe Harry will do it after all, for his own state of mind.
It takes a while for him to notice that actually the boxes are stacked on two sides of some sort of aisle, and that it is quite well-used, a small footprint just off it.
Why doesn't he know his own child spends his first summer holiday boarded up in the horrible attic?
A handful of feet - it feels like he has never moved faster, his pulse is a mess - and then the path makes a turn behind some old bookshelves, and that's why he hasn't seen the light all along. Albus is sitting on the floor with his legs crossed, before a tiny cauldron of something bubbling, with a pair of huge fluffy mufflers on his ears.
Harry is going to strangle him. Honestly. As soon as his breathing pattern returns to normal.
He gently waves a hand in front of Al's eyes, and the kid jumps up so violently he can't contain the relieved laughter.
"Dad!" Al cries a little too loudly, then pulls the mufflers off and lowers his voice. "I could have spilled the potion!"
In the mixed greenish-grey light of Lumos and Conjured fire the child's skin is sallow and his eyes sunken and dark. Harry steers clear of that particular venue of thought.
"If you disappear again and I don't know where you are, I'll chain you to the kitchen stove," Harry says with satisfying calm, and Al laughs with the carefree air of someone who's heard the threat great many times but has never been actually punished.
"What are you brewing?" Harry asks to stop his own smile, and Al immediately darkens.
"It's..." he begins, then stops, clears his throat and swallows, and at that point Harry already expects everything, from lubricant to Draught of Living Death.
"It'sFelixFelicis," Al mutters in one breath, and Harry hasn't expected that.
"What?!"
Harry shines his wand over the cauldron, the content is a copperish yellow, and looks like it's trying to leap but is too heavy for it.
Harry is more than impressed.
"It takes..." he begins, and Al interrupts, embarrassed.
"Yeah, a lifetime to make and now it's all wrong and worth nothing."
A cloud of gloom is visibly gathering.
Harry is a little helpless, split wondering between how on earth to soothe that, and whether he was like that too, whether he would have been like that too - oblivious he's given his father a stroke but embarrassed over some failed stunt.
"Let's forget for a moment that you've somehow procured a mandrake for that," Al's face turns visibly red, "and focus on why exactly you needed luck so badly."
Al's answer is stuttered and barely intelligible, and Harry just manages to distinguish 'Quidditch trials' and 'October' and a name he's seen innumerable times written in Al's letters, much to Ginny's annoyance.
"Al, you don't even like Quidditch that much."
Al looks at him as if he's grown a second head.
"That doesn't mean I'll let him beat me! He'll be on the team, I won't, I'm never going to live it down!" He sounds panicky, like Harry will stop him.
"Al, Felix is forbidden in competitions. And besides you can trounce Malfoy any day without..."
"Of course I’ll beat him," Al looks scandalised. "The potion's not for that!" There's a pause, nail picking, mouth opening and closing, and then, Al looks up, fierce:
"I was going to give it to James. He'll be meeting this girl he meets on Saturdays, and maybe if he gets really lucky, he'll forget we have trials!" Al's all feverish now and, as Harry is half amused, half-horrified to note, not ashamed in the least. "And he won't be there to tease me, and he won't be able to pick up those lousy things James's been making up over the summer, and he will sulk because I will be on Ravenclaw's team while all he'll have are year-old insults."
Harry is sorely tempted to laugh. Or groan.
He is sure McGonagall already secretly hates him - the Potter and Weasley rule-breaking skills, combined and doubled.
-:-:-
8.
Draco can't breathe. It's a practically permanent affliction now, in this stuffy room with its oppressive gloom and hushed conversation between flocks of scavengers.
He can barely move his neck. He's all stiff, tense as if expecting a blow. His limbs are slowly going asleep even as he stands there. Black and thin and motionless - is this a glass in his hand? - and everything is tingling and numb and he wants to move but can't.
His father has denied the truth and shut himself in his bedroom, and Draco wants - so much! - to be able to do the same, so bad he's ashamed. He wants... he wants to hide in a small black place, with no one to see and no one to hear, and simply fall apart.
"Deepest condolences," someone murmurs beside him and pats his arm, and Draco feels himself begin to fade away. It starts right behind his eyes, a prickling and a cold, distanced horror, and spreads all over him; a heavy panic in his chest that grips his heart to a skid; a vacuum in his stomach; a senseless tickle and twitch in his fingertips.
He can't see a thing, his ears recognise only meaningless ebb and flow of noise. He can't feel his legs and his knees have turned to water. Someone pats him again. There’s faint, toned-down laughter, and Draco thinks he might be descending into hysteria.
It can't be true, this preposterous gathering of vultures in his house, around his mother's coffin. It can't be real that she's lying there beautiful and pale like a porcelain doll, blue and cold under the glamour. He needs to scream and beg, and maybe cry, and wants so badly to have her hold him that his hands shake.
Dead.
She's dead and he's lost her, irreversibly, forever, so unexpected, and the only thing those people can manage is a low murmur of how he's such a useless host and how the canapés have run low.
It's a fine October day, blue sky and fiery hills, and the air is sharp and clean around them when they go to the burial site, a pointed contrast to the deceptive blaze of the sun. It has cost him almost more strings than he now possesses to bury his own mother in the family cemetery, now property of the Ministry along with the acres of green fields around the Manor. The house is just behind the hill on his left; he can practically count the steps, see the lane, the labyrinth and the oaks.
The words of the burial chant slide around him, sweet and clingy and painful, and he lets them envelope him in a cocoon of grief.
He shan't see her ever again. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, dirt rising in an orderly column to fall over the red roses and shiny surface of the lid, and then it's over.
The silence is ringing. A moment, two, ten, and with a low noise and a series of pops people file out, sated on both bread and spectacle.
He's rocking on his feet on the green grass of home and childhood, and loss has never been quite this sharp before, quite this important.
"I am sorry for your loss, Malfoy." A clear and familiar voice speaks, and Draco starts.
"You couldn't just leave quietly, could you," Draco says, and to his horror it comes out tired and broken and tear-streaked. "You had to come and rub salt in."
"This is not true," Potter dares answer. "Your mother, no matter her other deeds, saved my life and I’m not likely to forget that, ever."
"I wish she had left you die," Draco spits and means it, oh how candidly he does, for it is okay to hate Potter and be rude and lash out, because this is Potter and how things are between them.
"Look, I know what it is to lose a parent..."
Draco is sick just hearing the patience. He doesn't need patience, especially Potter's, or pity, or help. He just needs to hurt someone.
"What do you know?" he grinds out. "You know nothing ! You think you've lost a mother? You've never had one. All you've ever had was a mirage, a pitiful little fantasy!"
"I'll go now," Potter says, and his voice is just beginning to harden. "I don't want to fight with you today."
Draco laughs, a hysterical sound of total lack of amusement, and swings just as Potter raises his hand for the first flick of Apparition. "But I do want to fight with you very much."
Potter's arm, going up, catches Draco's, going down, and they end up hooked together through the tight flush of Apparition. They land both already pulling away.
Draco has seen enough Fidelii to know the sensation of entering one, and Potter looks like he's swallowed poison.
Draco staggers away with a shout; it is a perfectly ordinary sitting room. Potter's face goes through ten different shades and shapes before settling on wary acceptance.
It makes Draco furious. A perfectly legitimate, welcome emotion for him to hold onto and explain the tight throat and stomach with. He hasn't felt lethal in a long time, but he does now.
When he speaks, his voice is a hiss, full of derision, and slurs come easy as breathing. Potter answers, progressively angrier, colours flying and crazy hair, and all is as it was, normal and familiar, and Draco is lighter with every sound.
"Ungrateful, treacherous bastard," Potter draws after a while through white lips and punches him, hard, in the face.
Draco falls back, and before the stars have faded away, Potter is gone among cracks of static.
The couch is supple leather, darkest brown; the room - pure anonymity. The afternoon is clear as glass through the window and the light is setting the trees in the park outside afire.
Draco closes his eyes and comes apart. Not quietly.
-:-:-
9.
"I can't believe Malfoy's sheer nerve!" Ginny raves on the way out of the station. "To stand there with his perfect hair, perfect robes, perfect, foreign and probably stupid as you please wife, and only deign to greet us!"
Harry keeps silent. It's rather unhealthy, he has discovered, to take part in Ginny's Malfoy rages, no matter how. It's astounding how much feeling she still keeps for Lucius, how much clear, burning hatred, hidden. Harry has often thought how the clearest of all potions are poisons.
It's a trauma she never mentions, never confides about, not even to him, and it’s the only topic she can’t smile the gloom away from.
"Harry, dear, I have to go, Jack will be waiting," she interrupts the flow and visibly takes a deep breath. The tenseness is present, though, and the kiss on the cheek she gives him is hasty and perfunctory. "I'll try for dinner but Lily needs to be in bed on time."
Harry knows what this means, and it's not that she'll be home before midnight.
He makes a brief salute to make her smile, and she rolls her eyes affectionately, but he knows the stress lines are there even without seeing them, and Lily's offered cheek is most reluctant in response.
Ron's pleaded off red tape at the office and an audit, but Harry can see Hermione waiting patiently with a gloomy Hugo at the corner. He's wondered, sometimes, what it is like to send a sibling off like that; someone you've seen every day of your life now away for months on end.
Hermione smiles, she has been simply radiant in the past few weeks and Harry can't help but think she's been far too focused on getting that 'in Chief' position in her ward.
"Are you..." he begins, wracking his brains when the application results were to come out, almost certain already what they are. She mocks reproof and smacks him on the shoulder.
"There is etiquette, Harry James Potter, and it dictates that you wait until you are told!"
He laughs. "Come on, kids, a walk in the park and ice cream in you can find a vendor."
They both look up expectantly, especially Hugo who might as well pass for a sweets hoover.
"Harry!" Hermione is scandalised, but it is too late now and besides, it's not like she can resist the mint and vanilla flavour herself. "Their lunch!" she insists feebly even as Harry takes her to the car.
"Hermione, half our children are spoiling their lunch with chocolate frogs as we speak. Let's be fair."
"You are incorrigible," she tells him, and he starts. He's just been observing how blonde Lily is in the sunlight, and the words are a direct echo of another conversation just a week past.
"That's why you love me," he jokes, but his smile is hollow around the edges.
He wakes up with a start that night, from a dream he can't remember. The room is all chilly; he has left the window open, and the house is depressingly silent when he knows it's empty.
Lily was delighted at the opportunity to see Hugo's new broom, and Harry himself was thankful, at Hermione's offer for a sleepover, to be relieved of the cooking. He hasn't been in the mood to cook for a while now, and if someone can run one glance over him and know something's wrong, it's Hermione. And besides, he'll take Hugo next week, and the house won't be so quiet.
He Disapparates almost before the thought is formed. The room he appears in is warmer, the air not as crisp. Well, it's been a while. More than that, actually, but who's counting.
The wyvern's coiled, tiny wings folded, and the street lamps are sufficiently away for him to be able to see the stars. His fingers trace the edges of the tank with a practiced, unnoticed motion. The dark wood of the table underneath gleams in the scant light, and Harry stares at it. He hasn't touched it without meaning to for years, lest he call Malfoy without intending to, lest he betray his need without a real reason. It's a habit carefully and systematically eradicated, or at least consciously shifted.
He lets his hand fall lower, closer to the wood. His pulse quickens, along with his breathing. The first bare touch of a fingertip on the edge makes him shiver, a tightening in his belly. He traces a slow line along the wood, shining and smooth, and it feels like a caress.
A timid, tiny appeal, born and caped by the quiet, deceitful protection of the night time.
-:-:-
10.
It ought to be warmer already at this time of the year, but it's not. Draco remembers lazing around the lake in the scant few weeks between the sun's first appearance for the year and the pre-exams rush.
London is to the south of Hogwarts, and still, the light shining upon his father is cold and hollow through the open window. There is a breeze, very light, more a movement in the curtains than an actual sensation on Draco's skin, and quite frankly the room is freezing.
In the few times Draco has ever envisioned the moment, Before, it hasn't resembled the current scene even remotely.
He has imagined what his parents had told him about them getting engaged more than anything else, and there had been tears of joy and hugging and pats on the shoulder and well. Excitement.
Lucius, antisocial and inscrutable, barely shrugs now and doesn't even look at Draco after his announcement. Maybe the worst part of it all is that Draco hasn't been naive enough to hope, doesn’t even expect enough to be disappointed.
He stands there, with his silent-for-months father, pretending not to think - probably just like him - how his mother would have organised the engagement in high hope and higher enthusiasm all by herself, and watches how Lucius' hair is more white than blonde in the light.
The engagement ring, which Draco takes himself from its keeping place, glows briefly at the first touch and then returns to the tarnished glimmer of generations of accepted proposals and delighted, glowering pride.
It's much more ornate than Miriam's delicate ring finger can reasonably take and still, the brilliancy of her smile when she says yes and then looks up at him as he slides it home, puts the filigree and precious stones to shame.
The green of her eyes makes the sun appear far warmer than it seemed this morning in his father's room, and her upturned face is all young radiance when he bends to kiss her. The image of it remains imprinted on the inside of his lids when his eyes close, and his whole body thrums and loosens with the quiet anchor of the devotion in it.
Draco spends the better part of the night thinking. He isn't too far under to see all the details, the entire picture. He knows, with the perfect clarity of an adored son, taught carefully about duty and tradition: his mother would have been so viciously against... against her, that it would have hurt; his father, were he actually present, would have flayed his skin with acidic commentary.
She has all he's been looking for. But that doesn't make her the correct choice.
The family tree is pure perfection, as embarrassed as she was to admit it, and she has the most delicate bone structure he has ever had the pleasure of beholding. And yet the colours of her accessories were that little bit off tonight, again, and meaningless small talk is certainly not her forte. She has a favourite book he can't quite fathom, and knows about Muggle technology far more than someone of her standing possibly should.
And her French is better than his, although that's quite beside the point. Her accent is impossibly sweet.
Her answer to what she knows of the Second Voldemort War is "It's over?" He knows, he asked her. She smiled and added she doesn't get why in Britain everyone is so concerned with it when it hardly got any mention outside the country even as it was going on. She asked him which side he was on, still cheerful, and he questioned what she thought. She said she didn't care and all that mattered was that he was all right. The discussion had ended in a "Do you want to go to the cinema?" and he had been still awed and shocked enough to say okay.
She has a nose designed for the Malfoy bloodline, even if the blonde of her hair has more sun than moonlight, and also the tiniest, rebellious hint of red. He's not sure if her curls will sit well with his family's chin. But he is already curious which will win in the eyes of their children: her green or his grey.
And she has a beautiful voice. Perhaps that's what makes the Muggle-loving asides more bearable, he is not entirely certain. In all truth, she is the most refined form and high-standing incarnation of what he's always labelled the Weasley mindset, and he winces just to think it. Only, she's far more reasonable and levelled and bloody logical about it. And freckle-free, although he must admit he's wondered, sometimes, how a powdery smattering will look like on that perfect nose of hers.
She makes Draco pause and stills his breath, and maybe, with the rigidity of his old thinking gone with his family and a new life waiting to be built, that's what matters most.
-:-:-
11.
Harry wakes up with a cry. He's gasping, a sweaty mess of trembling limbs. The bed is empty beside him and he falls back, chest heaving, trying to shake off the burning image of the sunrise in his dream. He has seen it thousands of times, the bloody tinge of the first light, the clouds set afire and seemingly moving like living creatures, reds and oranges spreading through the skies like wild fire.
About the passionate, romantic beauty of sunrises Harry can only snort, and secretly wince. Your sweet solar obsession, Ginny will sometimes joke, but there's nothing sweet about it, and Harry has been obsessed with enough things in his life to know these are not the type of dreams it gives you.
He lies for a while, arms under his head, staring at the ceiling. The summer is already packing up, and with the window open, the cooling sweat soon gives him a chill. He stands. The horizon is just beginning to tint rose to the east, and he shivers. The apple tree in the yard will be ripe in a few short weeks, and maybe someone can be persuaded to make him pie, even though his puppy eyes hardly work on anyone anymore.
Maybe he'll make it himself.
He sees Ginny then, her ponytail bobbing up and down, dark in the scant light, as she jogs in the distance. It's odd that she's running, as smooth as things are going lately. The programme at Hogwarts ended, and with it Harry's teaching duties, yes, but the Muggle-born project will be a riot when it starts in a few months. No reasons for her to be nervous... except that they won't see James for months once they send him off today.
Harry closes the window and goes down in the kitchen. There are dregs from yesterday's tea and he flicks them away. The fresh water boils the second he snaps his fingers and he curses under his breath while waving it down.
The coffee mug is steaming in his hand not five minutes later, and he reaches to pull a biscuit tin out of the cupboard, while Ginny is not in to preach about the imminent danger of love handles. Something glittery rumbles down on him from the upper shelf the second he opens. In a flash the mug crashes on the floor, there is coffee everywhere, and he is clutching Lily's plain gilded circlet of a crown from the fairy party the week before like a lifeline, his pulse through the roof.
The curse this time is loud, long and sophisticated.
The mess gets banished in a moment, and Harry puts the repaired mug on the counter top, leaving the hot coffee well alone. He slides to the floor, boneless, and laughs, laughs, laughs, until his hands have stopped shaking and his breathing is almost normal.
He hears Ginny enter and stands up, slowly, to splash some water on his face and put the sadly unused biscuit box back into its hiding place. By the time she enters the room, ten minutes later, flushed with jogging and a shower, he's even managed to pour the now safely lukewarm coffee.
"Hey. Couldn't sleep?" she asks, bending for a quick morning kiss before getting her daily dose of healthy breakfast thing with the taste and appearance of sawdust.
He hums something noncommittal about cold and open windows.
"It's very fresh outside," she smiles, a brilliant show of habitual optimism. "But I'll need a sweatshirt soon. Away with another year," she adds, on an afterthought, while pouring milk, and sips from her coffee. "Wow. You've been up a while then?"
Harry flicks it warmer, pulls her to stand and kisses her thoroughly. She emerges laughing and flushed, and Harry thinks without connection that Snape was a damned liar because try as he might, he can't imagine stoppering that.
"The kids will need to be up soon," Ginny tells him as they abandon the breakfast, and he nods.
Five hours later he waves to the red train puffing away and carrying his little boy. It feels a little as if his heart has up and left.
"He'll come back for my birthday, right?" Albus asks, and puts his hand in Harry's, a very rare occasion now. Lily is ten feet away, seducing a stray cat.
"We'll see, sweet," Ginny says on Harry's other side. "If you are a very good boy."
Harry laughs, despite himself.
-:-:-
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3