one-shot, 6000 words, PG-13, And We Are At Our Apogee
title: And We Are At Our Apogee
e-mail: angelgazing [at] hotmail [dot] com
rating: PG-13
summary: Harry doesn't remember. Draco wanted revenge, but it didn't work out that way. It's really all about the cliche. Harry/Draco, baby.
notes: Hi, I'm new! ::waves:: A million thanks for the invite, I squeed for hours. ;) The word count is rounded up from 5945 or something. Beware the jumpy time line.
Harry stands on the beach with his jeans rolled up to let the waves crash over bare feet. The middle of winter and it’s cold-not cold like Hogwarts in the winter, of course, but cold for California-but when Draco wakes to an empty bed at dawn he will always find Harry watching the horizon with his feet almost in the ocean.
There are steps-carved into their life by eight months of repetitiveness-that they follow every morning.
Harry leaves the bed before Draco wakes, goes to let the waves of too cold ocean water slap his feet too early in the morning. Draco only has a second or two where all he can think is, oh, oh Merlin, this is it, isn’t it? But then he’ll breathe and the salt of the ocean is thick in the air, the crashing of waves is just that too loud, because Harry always opens the window first thing in the morning. The bed is just warm enough that Harry couldn’t have left it long ago.
Routine is something he lives for in ways that maybe he never did before.
So that by the time he gets out of bed and pulls on a pair of trousers he is mostly sure that no one knows anything more than they did the day before.
He shivers in the early morning air, runs a hand through his hair as he pads barefoot into the kitchen to start coffee and stifles a yawn. But it isn’t until he sees-through the glass windows that make up the wall of their living room that faces the beach, Harry standing just close enough to the water that it slaps his feet as it surges forward-that he relaxes.
It isn’t until after he’s brushed his teeth, pulled on a jumper and is walking outside with a throw, two cups of coffee (one with too much milk and the other with too much sugar) and an almost empty pack of fags, that he really starts to wake up.
Draco puts his chin on Harry’s shoulder for lack of a free hand and then grins against his cheek. “It’s too bloody early to be out of bed, you wanker,” he whines playfully.
Laughing softly, Harry turns his head and gives him a quick kiss. “Morning to you too, darling,” he replies, taking the blanket from Draco’s arm to spread across the sand, just out of reach of the waves.
They settle against each other with practiced ease. Shoulder to shoulder, each with their cup of coffee warming their hands, they watch the waves of the ocean almost come to meet them. Draco reaches around to dig into Harry’s left pocket where he keeps the lighter.
Harry makes jokes about the trainers Draco wears because he doesn’t like the feel of sand beneath his feet.
And it’s just that easy. Sitting together with coffee and a shared cigarette watching as the horizon turns to a brighter blue.
Draco thinks about the hard parts of revenge.
---
When Harry wakes up in the drafty flat in Liverpool, Draco is sitting, with his legs crossed at the ankles and his back against the headboard, on the bed beside him. He was half reading a book about Muggle medicine and half trying to follow the Muggle soap opera playing on the telly.
Harry stretches and Draco jumps before smothering his surprise.
“Hello,” Harry says, voice dry and thick, cracking with misuse and aimed somewhere around Draco’s hip. His brow furrows in confusion for a moment before he looks up. He is squinting. “Where am I?”
“Liverpool.”
“That’s very specific, thank you.”
“Would you like the address?”
Potter sits up with a cracking of joints and a slight groan. “I would like to know where I am,” he says then pauses as though considering, “and who you are.” He’s still squinting.
“What do you remember?”
He thinks for a while before he answers slowly and not without concern, but oddly, Draco thinks, devoid of anything close to the fear that should be there, “Nothing that should be important.”
To give himself time to think, Draco reaches across to pick up and hand Potter his glasses. Then, at least, the squinting stops. “You are here, I am Draco. Any more questions?”
“What’s my name?”
“Harry. At least that’s what I’ve been calling you,” he lies. “You looked like a Harry.”
Shifting uncomfortably, even after Draco is no longer leaning across him, he grumbles with a hint of defeat, “Where’s the bloody loo?”
“First door to the left, watch that the latch sticks.”
Draco watches him stumble and realizes he should have planned things better.
---
Harry likes the fireplace in the living room. He likes to build fires there even when it’s warm out and especially when it isn’t.
It’s easy to see, of course, that something about the crackling warmth of the fire probably reminds him of home. Or Hogwarts, but then for him Hogwarts was probably more of a home than anywhere else.
He lays on a rug in front of the fireplace, claiming that he’s cold, under a blanket and surrounded by pillows, while Draco sits in the chair across the room reading about the latest in home technology. He prides himself, quietly of course, for not thinking of it as Muggle technology anymore.
The magazine is practically in another language, and he’s mostly just glancing at the pictures on the glossy pages, mostly flipping pages idly while he waits. As though that isn’t how he does most things these days.
When the lamp behind his shoulder goes out he looks at Harry with an eyebrow cocked and the usual comment on the tip of his tongue. Except it isn’t like it usually is, not anymore, because Harry, with his wild ink black hair spread across a Gryffindor red pillow, is asleep.
Oh, he thinks, oh, Merlin. Like he has thought every afternoon for the past two weeks. Not usual, no, but it’s beginning to be. They had almost a year free of things like this before two weeks ago.
Draco paid attention in Divination, he knows, when he sees them, signs of Bad Things Coming To Bite You In The Arse.
The thick curtains they keep tied above the wall of windows that look to the beach shutter down and block out the afternoon sunlight that had been mostly lighting the room.
Harry rolls onto his side in his sleep. His eyelids flutter, but don’t open.
Oh, Merlin becomes oh, shit becomes oh, bollocks becomes oh, fuck.
The magazine is shaking in his hands, but that, he realizes a second later, is just because his hands are shaking. He throws it to the table and puts his head in his hands instead. “Oh,” he says out loud, into the heel of his left hand, “oh, fuck.”
The fire in the fireplace blazes suddenly brighter and hotter.
Draco feels sweat break out on the back of his neck.
He toes off his trainers absently. He breathes deep, so that the salt from the ocean hits the back of his throat and it burns, sometimes, but it’s better than when this happened in New York. Better by a thousand.
The window Harry opens first thing of the morning and closes last thing of the night slams shut in their bedroom.
He can’t quite get his breathing under control, and he needs to, he knows he does. But all he can think is how he should have known all along that this wouldn’t end well for him.
Harry, still fast asleep and dreaming, bites his lip and whimpers. Actually fucking whimpers.
Draco didn’t realize he’d stood until he was dropping down to his knees next to Harry and running his fingers through his hair.
The radio in the dining room starts playing Billy Idol loudly.
He lays down next to Harry, spoons against his back, and whispers softly in his ear, “Shush, love, come now, it’s only just a dream. No need for the theatrics.” He looses his fingers in black hair as he mutters empty reassurances against Harry’s neck and slowly, very slowly, his heart rate returns to normal.
He can deal with this, he’s done it before, he knows how to do it now. He just has to be calm, he just can’t worry that this dream is the one that ends it all.
“Come on, you bloody wanker, wake up, I hate Billy Idol.”
Harry just rolls over again, presses his nose against Draco’s collarbone and inhales sharply.
The fire returns to regular fire intensity.
Draco brushes a kiss across the scar on Harry’s forehead as the curtains go back up, then his lips as Billy Idol gets louder. “Git,” he mutters around the kiss.
Blinking up sleepily, Harry tries to smile and almost manages to keep it steady. He winds his arm around Draco’s waist to hold him close and then presses his nose back against collarbone to hide his face. “Fuck,” he says, his voice rough, as if he’d been screaming from the top of his lungs for days.
“It was a bad one then?”
“I rather fancy White Wedding actually.”
Draco slips his fingers under Harry’s t-shirt to rest warm against the small of his back and-silently, secretly grateful-doesn’t press the subject. “Be a bit of an untruth for you to have one, now wouldn’t it?”
“Says the man who taught me all I know.”
They lay there for a moment quiet before Harry admits softly, almost under his breath, “I think they’re getting worse.”
---
“What kind of tea do you like?” he asks without even thinking.
Harry looks puzzled, looks thoughtful and Draco has to bite his tongue to keep from saying the dozen or so remarks that fly to his mind upon seeing that expression.
But he is a Malfoy, he can pull this off. He won’t bollocks it up in the first month just because Potter looks like he’s thinking for the first time since they met.
He pads on socked feet over to the wobbly table and takes a seat in the chair that has somehow become his. He plucks absently at his t-shirt and then spends a good two minutes drumming his fingertips on the table top, all while Draco is waiting more patiently than he has ever waited in his life. Finally, Harry answers, “I don’t know.”
Draco nods and taps the blue ball point pen on the spiral bound notebook-both of which, he must admit, are brilliant inventions and much more logical than quill, ink and parchment-on the counter top in front of him. The list isn’t going so well.
He mourns, not for the first time, that House-Elves are only bound to the magic in the blood. He mourns for a lot of things really, but he knows not to think of them now if he is going to get through this.
Not now if he is going to make this work.
Harry tells the tabletop, “I’m not sure I really like tea.”
“You’ve been drinking it for weeks,” Draco says absently, and then, “Oh. Well, aren’t you just an insolent little shit.” The corner of his mouth twitches with the sudden urge to smile. “Honestly, not liking my tea, and not having the courage to say as much. I can see the masses kneeling to your superior bravery now.”
“Draco,” he says, “I’m sorry to inform you that your tea tastes like shit. I could, if you’d like, offer you a written statement of that fact. Also, I apologize profusely for not telling you sooner, it was terribly impolite of me.”
Draco crumbles the shopping list into a ball and launches it at Harry’s head, laughing.
Potter, still all Quidditch reflexes even when he doesn’t remember the game, catches it easily. He lays it flat on the table and uses the side of his hand to smooth away the wrinkles. “You forgot to put milk on the list again.”
---
Draco dreams of Snape. Still, even now. Years later and on another continent.
It was easy to reason coming to America. He wanted to put a fucking ocean between Harry and himself and them.
But he still dreams of Snape in the potions classroom, dressed in a black cloak just like one his father had owned. Just like one he himself had owned. Snape has his hood pushed back so the light from the candles overhead cause his nose to send his face into shadow.
“It all comes down to blood, you know,” Draco says conversationally. “My father is dead because of Harry Potter, and I want his blood.”
Snape is stirring a large cauldron, thick blue steam rising from the potion within, clouding the room. The shadows make it impossible to tell if he raises his eyes to look at Draco. “You won’t get it. Potter’s blood isn’t for you to spill.”
“I want to avenge-“
“You want revenge, there is a difference.”
“Not enough of one to matter. I’ll take revenge, if that’s all I can get, but I’ll have it.”
The steam from the cauldron thickens even more, turns so dark it’s nearly black and it smells foul. It smells like rot and death and empty homes. Draco can scarcely breathe.
Snape, with so much less subtlety than he’d ever really used, snaps, “This isn’t play anymore. This is life and death, you foolish little boy, open up your eyes and see. The dead are gone, revenge is useless because the living are the dying. This is war and you’ve chosen the side that doesn’t stand a chance, out of something so petty as revenge that you will never have.”
“No, Professor, I will have my revenge. I will.”
He moves from behind the cauldron quickly in a swirl of robes and cloak and steam. The potion stirs itself and turns to gray. “This,” Snape hisses, digging long and bony fingers painfully into Draco’s forearm, “is bigger than revenge, you fool. This is bigger than you can even dream of being. I can assure you, if it does come down to blood on the pavement, Harry Potter’s won’t be spilled by you or me. This is bigger than revenge. It’s bigger than the Malfoy name and it’s thicker than Malfoy blood. The living are all dying now, Draco, and Harry bloody Potter is out to save them all. Look at the covered faces beside you and see the death and blood that they don’t even try to wash from their hands. This has always been war, and you chose the losing side.”
Draco wakes with a start, tangled in the sheets, shivering and sweating. Harry is breathing, steady and hot, on the back of his neck.
With his heart pounding louder than an African drum in his ears it takes him a while to notice that the house is silent except for their breathing. Silent like it was wrapped in cotton because he can’t even hear the waves from the ocean now.
It takes him all of two seconds to close his eyes and pretend not to notice until he falls back asleep. There are things, after all, that he doesn’t want to learn the hard way.
---
Shopping is always something of an experience.
It is surprisingly difficult to just buy sugar, tea, bacon, eggs, bread and milk. Mostly because Harry declares halfway through the store that he is tired of takeaway.
“The cooker,” he tells Draco, “cannot possibly be as likely to kill us both as you seem to think. We seem reasonably intelligent, I’m certain that we should at least try to cook something other than bacon.”
Draco, in what he feels is a startling display of strength, manages not to tell him that the famed Gryffindor courage is merely stupidity. Instead he says, “I’m not sure it’s really such a grand idea for you to be playing with fire and you were just saying again this morning that I cannot even manage a decent cup of tea.”
Potter, condescending as he ever was before, pats Draco on the shoulder and-his eyes sparkling with amusement in a manner that undoubtedly would have made Dumbledore himself proud-says, “I’m sure there are books that tell you how to cook round here somewhere if it would make you feel better.”
“I must say, Harry, that I utterly loathe you.” He smiles suddenly. “In fact, I feel that fiery Death By Cooker is the least that you deserve. By all means, darling, load up on whatever you’d like.” He bats his lashes playfully and then, because there is an old woman down the aisle who has been eavesdropping shamelessly and following them through the store, presses a kiss to Harry’s cheek.
“Sorry to disappoint you, love,” Harry says, and, noticing the old woman just as she looks scandalized, returns the kiss. “Worse that will happen is it goes to the rubbish bin and we spend another night arguing over whether or not curry should be consumed on a daily basis.”
Draco just looks doubtful.
Finally, Harry sighs. “We’ll stop by the bookstore on the way home and get a book. We’ll follow the directions and everything.”
He pauses, in the midst of remembering how arse Harry always was at potions, to swallow against the shallow show of victory at the word home. Just a slight hint of victory though, because he learnt his lesson about getting ahead of himself when it comes to Potter. “There is nothing wrong with curry.”
“And yet there is everything wrong with curry four nights running.”
“I’m not going to win this am I?”
Harry laughs and puts an arm around Draco’s shoulders. “You get a book.”
“This is a battle I have lost. A battle, yes, but not the war.”
Harry stops so suddenly it takes Draco a few seconds to realize. He looks confused, and he is mouthing to himself silently, war. His expression, slowly, starts to bleed into something nearing fear.
Draco feels his stomach tighten sharply. “What is it?”
“I… I don’t…” He’s blinking rapidly and his knuckles are white on the handle of the cart.
No, no, no, he thinks. No, not yet. He takes a step closer. “Harry?” Draco reaches out and brushes his fingers across the back of Harry’s hand.
Every carton of milk beside them explodes at once.
Looking from the milk to Draco and back again, Harry shakes his head. His entire body seems to be vibrating.
Draco, suddenly fearful like he maybe should have been before, desperately misses his wand. “Let’s go home. We’ll come back tomorrow-after we stop off at the bookstore-and you can buy whatever you want to attempt to cook.” He looks from Harry to the milk and back again, there is a crowd beginning to gather around them, drawn by the noise. He is shaking nearly as badly as Harry. “One more night of takeaway won’t kill us.”
Reluctantly, Harry nods and takes his hand. “Anything with curry and I’m leaving you.”
They manage to get out of the store before Draco asks Harry how he did it.
He doesn’t realize they are still holding hands until Harry pulls his away. “I don’t know. I didn’t mean to do it.”
---
Harry has more scars than Draco ever would have thought.
There’s the obvious one, of course, the bolt of lightning on his forehead that Draco runs his thumb over when he has his hand buried in Harry’s hair.
Then there are the words etched into the back of his right hand that Harry eyed warily for months; that he always tries to hide. It’s his one self-consciousness, he’ll pad round their house naked without a second thought, but he pulls his hand away when Draco looks too hard or for too long. Even now he does it, as though afraid Draco will think him a liar if he stares at them too long.
Across his shin there is a puckered line, he shivers when Draco goes over it with fingernails, and another line on his shoulder from a cut that didn’t go as deep. Both, Draco remembers, from Triwazard tasks.
The one that stands out brighter, newer, deeper than all the others that lays on the palm of his left hand.
It’s the ones he never knew before that really fascinate Draco, though. The one on the inside of Harry’s elbow, that is sensitive to the touch. The line across the small of his back that Draco is almost sure came from the hit a belt that broke skin, but even if Harry did remember, he didn’t think he could bring himself to ask. One on his right knee, another over the arch of his left foot. A bite mark deep in the muscle of his forearm, a barely visible line from a nick to his thumb.
Draco feels odd and awkward with his one almost scar in comparison. He feels too pale and too thin and oddly tall.
Harry likes walking on the beach barefoot and does it even after he cuts the sole of his foot on a broken bottle and Draco forces him to go to hospital and get a tetanus shot. He walks barefoot on the beach even when the salt from the ocean water stings the cut and takes the mickey out of Draco for reading more medical textbooks than some doctors whilst Draco cleans sand from the cut and bandages it.
He keeps his hair long because Harry likes it that way, and Harry wears his clothes just a little tighter than he would otherwise for Draco.
So when he has his mouth on Harry’s and his hands on Harry’s skin, Draco doesn’t think about revenge at all. He doesn’t think about how well they fit together. He doesn’t think that this was either the best or worst idea he ever had; he just thinks that he loves knowing every scar and every inch of Harry’s skin.
---
“Goddamn mother fucking donkey shit,” Harry says with a great amount of feeling.
Draco grins wildly, though he will deny it with vigor if questioned. “Problems, love?”
“Go to hell, Malfoy,” Harry answers. And glares. And glowers.
He spares a moment to ponder the redundancy of that while he tries to keep his grin from widening. “You could try using the key.”
“This is practice, which you keep insisting I need. This is torture and it is all for your sadistic amusement.” He turns his glare to the door. “Why the bloody hell isn’t this working?”
Draco shifts the bag of alcohol and fags to his other arm and forces the smile off of his face. “I am most certainly not amused, Harry. Not in the slightest. We have braved the cold winter streets of New York on bloody New Years Eve so we could celebrate by getting soused in the comfort of our own home, and yet we stand outside of the comfort and warmth of our lovely, if small, flat, because you refuse to use the buggering key.”
Harry spares another glare over his shoulder. “I can do this.”
He shifts his weight to his other foot on the dirty red carpet worn thin by traffic in the hallway. “So can I,” Draco mutters, “with the key.”
“God damn it,” Harry says again.
He isn’t entirely sure if Harry swears like a Muggle or an American, just that he’d never really heard anything like it. Not at home, not at Hogwarts, and certainly never from the golden boy of the wizarding world. There are a lot of things Harry says now that he never did before; Mother fucker and Christ, I love your hands and God fucking damn it and pass the coffee and good morning and Draco.
“Right.” Draco, ever careful of the glass bottles in the paper sack in left arm, turns Harry with a hand in the pocket of his jeans and shoves him against the door with mostly the force of surprise. “Right,” he says again.
He kisses him until the lights in the hallway flicker because Harry bloody Potter wants. Until neither of them can breathe.
“Fuck, Draco,” Harry whispers. “Fuck.”
“That’s the idea, yes.”
Harry laughs softly, his face buried in the crook of Draco’s neck, and reaches behind himself to turn the doorknob. The door opens. “Told you I could do it.”
“You’re magic, you are,” he agrees, walking past Harry and into their flat at last.
---
He has a mental list titled The Hard Parts Of Revenge.
It runs through his head when he least expects it; when he least wants it.
They’re sitting in front of the fire, Draco reading with Harry’s head in his lap while he dozes. And it’s comfortable and right in ways that he never expected. In ways he never really wanted it to be, because it only makes things harder.
He runs his fingers through Harry’s hair-softer than Draco’s ever was-and he thinks, in some idle part of his mind, that he likes the way it feels against his fingers.
The next thing he knows the words on the page in front of him blur because his mind is going through the list.
142. You have to know, every time you touch it, that you are going to miss his hair.
15. You know everything, but you can’t tell him any of it or it’s all over.
87. He looks at you like he knows you’re lying.
11. You cannot fall in love with him
49. You like this life.
2. Careful what you say. Don’t bollocks it all up.
50. It’s all going to end.
156. It always comes back to bite you in the arse.
97. Bugger fuck, you cannot be in love with him.
31. He still has all the power.
64. Don’t let your guard down.
98. It will kill you if you are.
The list is disorganized and all encompassing; it has rules and pitfalls and things that are going to hurt. Things he’s done and buggered up and things that he dreads.
And it’s all he can think of when they sit together in the quiet of their living room. When he’s listening to Billy bloody Idol because it’s struck Harry’s fancy lately.
“Bugger,” he whispers, when he knows that Harry is fast asleep. “Bugger it all.”
56. It becomes his revenge if you really love him.
122. He won’t stay when he remembers.
---
On their way to Florida they ended up at a bed and breakfast in a small town along the coast of North Carolina and almost two weeks later still haven’t left.
They walk along the beach-early enough in the year that it’s just them-holding hands. It’s easy and lazy and Draco mentions once or twice that they could buy a house here, but Harry, with his jeans rolled up and his shoes in Draco’s other hand, seems to think that they won’t like it when tourist season really begins.
There’s a church down the beach from where they’re staying that they walk past everyday. It’s barely more than a small square building with the white paint chipping and peeling from the outside walls. But every single day at noon the bells ring out from the decrepit tower, across the town and the ocean.
Harry stands on the beach with the waves of the Atlantic washing over his feet, holding Draco’s hand, and listens to the church bells.
On the way back he says, “I keep having this dream…”
Draco is tempted to make a joke of it, because ever since the dreams started he has known with absolute certainty that he doesn’t want to know about them.
“I’m standing in a church at sunrise with the light from outside just beginning to pour in through the stained-glass windows, and I can see that all the windows are cracked and there is a layer of dust on the floor and so thick in the air I could choke. And there is a woman there, she looks kind of like an insect, and from what I can see of her eyes-her glasses are so thick they can’t possibly help her vision-her eyes are sad… She says, this is it. Today is the day. You’ll save us all, but you won’t come back. This is it.
“And I think… I think she’s ridiculous, but I’m nervous anyway, and there are people to each side of me. A boy and a girl-they can’t be old enough to be called a man and a woman yet-she rolls her eyes like it’s nothing, but she’s scared too, I think. Everyone is. I can feel it, in the air, I can feel it and I know that something big is about to happen. I know that I won’t come back from it.”
They’re silent the rest of the way back to their room.
When they go out for dinner they both pretend not to notice the way he looks twice at the redhead that passes their table.
Finally he says, “Let’s get back on the road tomorrow.”
Draco is only too happy to agree.
---
The mark on Draco’s arm looks like a tattoo in white ink, it’s so light on his pale skin that you can barely see it even when you know it’s there. He likes to think of it as a scar.
Harry traces it with his index finger while Draco tries to watch CNN.
It isn’t that he cares, it’s that he’s learnt the hard way that it’s good to know everything you can. He understands now, like he never really wanted to, why the Ravenclaws could always be found with their noses in books. Knowledge is something he needs now like he didn’t before.
They both flinch when the word war is mentioned, and Harry changes the channel to a rerun of some inane American sitcom and puts his head in Draco’s lap.
“The thing with war,” he tells Draco’s thigh, after a moment of consideration, “is that even if you win you lose.”
With the fingers of one hand lost in Harry Potter’s hair and the other lazily drawing shapes on his hip, he doesn’t really see the point in denying the truth. “The question then becomes do the losers win?”
“Everyone loses, in the end.”
“I am,” Draco tells him, “completely in love with your optimism and sunny disposition.”
“And here I was thinking it was my arse you stuck round for.”
As if cued, the laugh track starts.
“That too!”
Harry says, quietly, “I remember some things, you know.”
On the telly, the laugh track rolls over and dies.
It’s not until after he tenses that he realizes he probably just gave himself away. It’s not until he realizes what a stupid idea it is to throw everything away that he manages to keep himself from saying just how much he knew that already. “What things?” he asks, after the year it seems to take for his heart to start beating again and his courage to build. “Honestly, you can tell me the truth, now, I’ll love you regardless. Were you a sideshow freak in your other life, Harry?”
“You know exactly what I was in my other life, Draco.” Harry doesn’t sit up, doesn’t pull away, doesn’t even bloody move except to close his eyes and breathe. “I remember you now, I have for a while, I think. You were there when it happened.”
The show ends with far too cheerful music. Draco doesn’t answer because he can’t answer. The proper response to this situation is completely lost to him. He doesn’t think he is even breathing.
Harry is still tracing the scar/mark on Draco’s forearm with a blunt fingernail. “The others aren’t clear… Their faces, I mean, I can’t see them. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I remember the knife, I remember you on your knees with your arm outstretched. I remember that this was black, almost as though it was a burn… Or a brand, maybe. You weren’t there by choice, they held you down. And I didn’t stop them because it was war, and I had to win. That’s what I kept thinking, war, war, war - it was practically a bloody chant. You just laughed like a nutter and said, ‘it all comes down to blood.’ I remember the magic-I think it was magic-that hit me before it went through me.”
Draco pulls on Harry’s hair just enough to make him stop talking. “It was… Magic, I mean, a wall of it almost. Mine and… You took it from everyone who had the Mark-I don’t know how you did it, something about your blood-but you did it. And you won the bloody war.”
Harry fits the scar on his palm over where he’d been tracing the skull on his arm, in an imitation of that night that makes Draco’s stomach clench. “Did I?” he asks, arching an eyebrow in an expression that Draco can’t see so much as know is there.
“More of a win than I ever had with you.” And just like that the truth is there.
Laughing, softly, bitterly, Harry says, “There are other things, too, standing alone but seeing other people behind me in a mirror. My parents, I think… My family. A girl with bushy hair and too big front teeth. A lot of redheads. A stone room with an archway covered in a ratty veil… That’s important, somehow, I know it. I just can’t remember why. A rat, an owl, a giant, a diary. I remember flying, I mean… it’s not a dream, it’s a memory, the first time in the air on a broom. I remember green light, and someone falling next to me. I remember knowing that they were dead. Nothing fits together, not like it should.”
“I can’t give you your answers,” Draco says finally. “At least, not all of them.”
“Then just give me the one I really want,” he demands in reply, voice still so calm it sends chills through Draco. “Did you get it?”
“The mark?”
“No,” Harry answers, shaking his head. “Your revenge. Did you get it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes. I’ve got you, is that revenge?”
“You whisper it when you dream, that’s why I remembered. I thought at first it was just… But it felt so real… You whisper it when you dream. It all comes down to blood. You whisper about wanting my blood.”
“I’ve got you, Harry,” he repeats. “is that revenge?”
“No,” Harry says on a short, rough laugh. “You love me; you want me. You didn’t want me to remember before and you don’t want me to remember anything more now. It’s obvious, Draco, that your greatest fear is that I will remember and I’ll know why we were on opposite sides of a war. It was supposed to be revenge, maybe, but it isn’t now, is it?”
“Not now, no.” He runs his fingers through Harry’s hair again and looks out the window toward the beach. “I think it will be though, when you remember everything. It just won’t be mine.”
Harry sits up, finally, a presses a kiss to Draco’s lips. He smiles and says, “Don’t be so sure that it isn’t mine already.”
He flinches at the anger in his smile, just a little, but then he nods. “I haven’t been sure of that for quite some time now.”
“Good.”
e-mail: angelgazing [at] hotmail [dot] com
rating: PG-13
summary: Harry doesn't remember. Draco wanted revenge, but it didn't work out that way. It's really all about the cliche. Harry/Draco, baby.
notes: Hi, I'm new! ::waves:: A million thanks for the invite, I squeed for hours. ;) The word count is rounded up from 5945 or something. Beware the jumpy time line.
Harry stands on the beach with his jeans rolled up to let the waves crash over bare feet. The middle of winter and it’s cold-not cold like Hogwarts in the winter, of course, but cold for California-but when Draco wakes to an empty bed at dawn he will always find Harry watching the horizon with his feet almost in the ocean.
There are steps-carved into their life by eight months of repetitiveness-that they follow every morning.
Harry leaves the bed before Draco wakes, goes to let the waves of too cold ocean water slap his feet too early in the morning. Draco only has a second or two where all he can think is, oh, oh Merlin, this is it, isn’t it? But then he’ll breathe and the salt of the ocean is thick in the air, the crashing of waves is just that too loud, because Harry always opens the window first thing in the morning. The bed is just warm enough that Harry couldn’t have left it long ago.
Routine is something he lives for in ways that maybe he never did before.
So that by the time he gets out of bed and pulls on a pair of trousers he is mostly sure that no one knows anything more than they did the day before.
He shivers in the early morning air, runs a hand through his hair as he pads barefoot into the kitchen to start coffee and stifles a yawn. But it isn’t until he sees-through the glass windows that make up the wall of their living room that faces the beach, Harry standing just close enough to the water that it slaps his feet as it surges forward-that he relaxes.
It isn’t until after he’s brushed his teeth, pulled on a jumper and is walking outside with a throw, two cups of coffee (one with too much milk and the other with too much sugar) and an almost empty pack of fags, that he really starts to wake up.
Draco puts his chin on Harry’s shoulder for lack of a free hand and then grins against his cheek. “It’s too bloody early to be out of bed, you wanker,” he whines playfully.
Laughing softly, Harry turns his head and gives him a quick kiss. “Morning to you too, darling,” he replies, taking the blanket from Draco’s arm to spread across the sand, just out of reach of the waves.
They settle against each other with practiced ease. Shoulder to shoulder, each with their cup of coffee warming their hands, they watch the waves of the ocean almost come to meet them. Draco reaches around to dig into Harry’s left pocket where he keeps the lighter.
Harry makes jokes about the trainers Draco wears because he doesn’t like the feel of sand beneath his feet.
And it’s just that easy. Sitting together with coffee and a shared cigarette watching as the horizon turns to a brighter blue.
Draco thinks about the hard parts of revenge.
---
When Harry wakes up in the drafty flat in Liverpool, Draco is sitting, with his legs crossed at the ankles and his back against the headboard, on the bed beside him. He was half reading a book about Muggle medicine and half trying to follow the Muggle soap opera playing on the telly.
Harry stretches and Draco jumps before smothering his surprise.
“Hello,” Harry says, voice dry and thick, cracking with misuse and aimed somewhere around Draco’s hip. His brow furrows in confusion for a moment before he looks up. He is squinting. “Where am I?”
“Liverpool.”
“That’s very specific, thank you.”
“Would you like the address?”
Potter sits up with a cracking of joints and a slight groan. “I would like to know where I am,” he says then pauses as though considering, “and who you are.” He’s still squinting.
“What do you remember?”
He thinks for a while before he answers slowly and not without concern, but oddly, Draco thinks, devoid of anything close to the fear that should be there, “Nothing that should be important.”
To give himself time to think, Draco reaches across to pick up and hand Potter his glasses. Then, at least, the squinting stops. “You are here, I am Draco. Any more questions?”
“What’s my name?”
“Harry. At least that’s what I’ve been calling you,” he lies. “You looked like a Harry.”
Shifting uncomfortably, even after Draco is no longer leaning across him, he grumbles with a hint of defeat, “Where’s the bloody loo?”
“First door to the left, watch that the latch sticks.”
Draco watches him stumble and realizes he should have planned things better.
---
Harry likes the fireplace in the living room. He likes to build fires there even when it’s warm out and especially when it isn’t.
It’s easy to see, of course, that something about the crackling warmth of the fire probably reminds him of home. Or Hogwarts, but then for him Hogwarts was probably more of a home than anywhere else.
He lays on a rug in front of the fireplace, claiming that he’s cold, under a blanket and surrounded by pillows, while Draco sits in the chair across the room reading about the latest in home technology. He prides himself, quietly of course, for not thinking of it as Muggle technology anymore.
The magazine is practically in another language, and he’s mostly just glancing at the pictures on the glossy pages, mostly flipping pages idly while he waits. As though that isn’t how he does most things these days.
When the lamp behind his shoulder goes out he looks at Harry with an eyebrow cocked and the usual comment on the tip of his tongue. Except it isn’t like it usually is, not anymore, because Harry, with his wild ink black hair spread across a Gryffindor red pillow, is asleep.
Oh, he thinks, oh, Merlin. Like he has thought every afternoon for the past two weeks. Not usual, no, but it’s beginning to be. They had almost a year free of things like this before two weeks ago.
Draco paid attention in Divination, he knows, when he sees them, signs of Bad Things Coming To Bite You In The Arse.
The thick curtains they keep tied above the wall of windows that look to the beach shutter down and block out the afternoon sunlight that had been mostly lighting the room.
Harry rolls onto his side in his sleep. His eyelids flutter, but don’t open.
Oh, Merlin becomes oh, shit becomes oh, bollocks becomes oh, fuck.
The magazine is shaking in his hands, but that, he realizes a second later, is just because his hands are shaking. He throws it to the table and puts his head in his hands instead. “Oh,” he says out loud, into the heel of his left hand, “oh, fuck.”
The fire in the fireplace blazes suddenly brighter and hotter.
Draco feels sweat break out on the back of his neck.
He toes off his trainers absently. He breathes deep, so that the salt from the ocean hits the back of his throat and it burns, sometimes, but it’s better than when this happened in New York. Better by a thousand.
The window Harry opens first thing of the morning and closes last thing of the night slams shut in their bedroom.
He can’t quite get his breathing under control, and he needs to, he knows he does. But all he can think is how he should have known all along that this wouldn’t end well for him.
Harry, still fast asleep and dreaming, bites his lip and whimpers. Actually fucking whimpers.
Draco didn’t realize he’d stood until he was dropping down to his knees next to Harry and running his fingers through his hair.
The radio in the dining room starts playing Billy Idol loudly.
He lays down next to Harry, spoons against his back, and whispers softly in his ear, “Shush, love, come now, it’s only just a dream. No need for the theatrics.” He looses his fingers in black hair as he mutters empty reassurances against Harry’s neck and slowly, very slowly, his heart rate returns to normal.
He can deal with this, he’s done it before, he knows how to do it now. He just has to be calm, he just can’t worry that this dream is the one that ends it all.
“Come on, you bloody wanker, wake up, I hate Billy Idol.”
Harry just rolls over again, presses his nose against Draco’s collarbone and inhales sharply.
The fire returns to regular fire intensity.
Draco brushes a kiss across the scar on Harry’s forehead as the curtains go back up, then his lips as Billy Idol gets louder. “Git,” he mutters around the kiss.
Blinking up sleepily, Harry tries to smile and almost manages to keep it steady. He winds his arm around Draco’s waist to hold him close and then presses his nose back against collarbone to hide his face. “Fuck,” he says, his voice rough, as if he’d been screaming from the top of his lungs for days.
“It was a bad one then?”
“I rather fancy White Wedding actually.”
Draco slips his fingers under Harry’s t-shirt to rest warm against the small of his back and-silently, secretly grateful-doesn’t press the subject. “Be a bit of an untruth for you to have one, now wouldn’t it?”
“Says the man who taught me all I know.”
They lay there for a moment quiet before Harry admits softly, almost under his breath, “I think they’re getting worse.”
---
“What kind of tea do you like?” he asks without even thinking.
Harry looks puzzled, looks thoughtful and Draco has to bite his tongue to keep from saying the dozen or so remarks that fly to his mind upon seeing that expression.
But he is a Malfoy, he can pull this off. He won’t bollocks it up in the first month just because Potter looks like he’s thinking for the first time since they met.
He pads on socked feet over to the wobbly table and takes a seat in the chair that has somehow become his. He plucks absently at his t-shirt and then spends a good two minutes drumming his fingertips on the table top, all while Draco is waiting more patiently than he has ever waited in his life. Finally, Harry answers, “I don’t know.”
Draco nods and taps the blue ball point pen on the spiral bound notebook-both of which, he must admit, are brilliant inventions and much more logical than quill, ink and parchment-on the counter top in front of him. The list isn’t going so well.
He mourns, not for the first time, that House-Elves are only bound to the magic in the blood. He mourns for a lot of things really, but he knows not to think of them now if he is going to get through this.
Not now if he is going to make this work.
Harry tells the tabletop, “I’m not sure I really like tea.”
“You’ve been drinking it for weeks,” Draco says absently, and then, “Oh. Well, aren’t you just an insolent little shit.” The corner of his mouth twitches with the sudden urge to smile. “Honestly, not liking my tea, and not having the courage to say as much. I can see the masses kneeling to your superior bravery now.”
“Draco,” he says, “I’m sorry to inform you that your tea tastes like shit. I could, if you’d like, offer you a written statement of that fact. Also, I apologize profusely for not telling you sooner, it was terribly impolite of me.”
Draco crumbles the shopping list into a ball and launches it at Harry’s head, laughing.
Potter, still all Quidditch reflexes even when he doesn’t remember the game, catches it easily. He lays it flat on the table and uses the side of his hand to smooth away the wrinkles. “You forgot to put milk on the list again.”
---
Draco dreams of Snape. Still, even now. Years later and on another continent.
It was easy to reason coming to America. He wanted to put a fucking ocean between Harry and himself and them.
But he still dreams of Snape in the potions classroom, dressed in a black cloak just like one his father had owned. Just like one he himself had owned. Snape has his hood pushed back so the light from the candles overhead cause his nose to send his face into shadow.
“It all comes down to blood, you know,” Draco says conversationally. “My father is dead because of Harry Potter, and I want his blood.”
Snape is stirring a large cauldron, thick blue steam rising from the potion within, clouding the room. The shadows make it impossible to tell if he raises his eyes to look at Draco. “You won’t get it. Potter’s blood isn’t for you to spill.”
“I want to avenge-“
“You want revenge, there is a difference.”
“Not enough of one to matter. I’ll take revenge, if that’s all I can get, but I’ll have it.”
The steam from the cauldron thickens even more, turns so dark it’s nearly black and it smells foul. It smells like rot and death and empty homes. Draco can scarcely breathe.
Snape, with so much less subtlety than he’d ever really used, snaps, “This isn’t play anymore. This is life and death, you foolish little boy, open up your eyes and see. The dead are gone, revenge is useless because the living are the dying. This is war and you’ve chosen the side that doesn’t stand a chance, out of something so petty as revenge that you will never have.”
“No, Professor, I will have my revenge. I will.”
He moves from behind the cauldron quickly in a swirl of robes and cloak and steam. The potion stirs itself and turns to gray. “This,” Snape hisses, digging long and bony fingers painfully into Draco’s forearm, “is bigger than revenge, you fool. This is bigger than you can even dream of being. I can assure you, if it does come down to blood on the pavement, Harry Potter’s won’t be spilled by you or me. This is bigger than revenge. It’s bigger than the Malfoy name and it’s thicker than Malfoy blood. The living are all dying now, Draco, and Harry bloody Potter is out to save them all. Look at the covered faces beside you and see the death and blood that they don’t even try to wash from their hands. This has always been war, and you chose the losing side.”
Draco wakes with a start, tangled in the sheets, shivering and sweating. Harry is breathing, steady and hot, on the back of his neck.
With his heart pounding louder than an African drum in his ears it takes him a while to notice that the house is silent except for their breathing. Silent like it was wrapped in cotton because he can’t even hear the waves from the ocean now.
It takes him all of two seconds to close his eyes and pretend not to notice until he falls back asleep. There are things, after all, that he doesn’t want to learn the hard way.
---
Shopping is always something of an experience.
It is surprisingly difficult to just buy sugar, tea, bacon, eggs, bread and milk. Mostly because Harry declares halfway through the store that he is tired of takeaway.
“The cooker,” he tells Draco, “cannot possibly be as likely to kill us both as you seem to think. We seem reasonably intelligent, I’m certain that we should at least try to cook something other than bacon.”
Draco, in what he feels is a startling display of strength, manages not to tell him that the famed Gryffindor courage is merely stupidity. Instead he says, “I’m not sure it’s really such a grand idea for you to be playing with fire and you were just saying again this morning that I cannot even manage a decent cup of tea.”
Potter, condescending as he ever was before, pats Draco on the shoulder and-his eyes sparkling with amusement in a manner that undoubtedly would have made Dumbledore himself proud-says, “I’m sure there are books that tell you how to cook round here somewhere if it would make you feel better.”
“I must say, Harry, that I utterly loathe you.” He smiles suddenly. “In fact, I feel that fiery Death By Cooker is the least that you deserve. By all means, darling, load up on whatever you’d like.” He bats his lashes playfully and then, because there is an old woman down the aisle who has been eavesdropping shamelessly and following them through the store, presses a kiss to Harry’s cheek.
“Sorry to disappoint you, love,” Harry says, and, noticing the old woman just as she looks scandalized, returns the kiss. “Worse that will happen is it goes to the rubbish bin and we spend another night arguing over whether or not curry should be consumed on a daily basis.”
Draco just looks doubtful.
Finally, Harry sighs. “We’ll stop by the bookstore on the way home and get a book. We’ll follow the directions and everything.”
He pauses, in the midst of remembering how arse Harry always was at potions, to swallow against the shallow show of victory at the word home. Just a slight hint of victory though, because he learnt his lesson about getting ahead of himself when it comes to Potter. “There is nothing wrong with curry.”
“And yet there is everything wrong with curry four nights running.”
“I’m not going to win this am I?”
Harry laughs and puts an arm around Draco’s shoulders. “You get a book.”
“This is a battle I have lost. A battle, yes, but not the war.”
Harry stops so suddenly it takes Draco a few seconds to realize. He looks confused, and he is mouthing to himself silently, war. His expression, slowly, starts to bleed into something nearing fear.
Draco feels his stomach tighten sharply. “What is it?”
“I… I don’t…” He’s blinking rapidly and his knuckles are white on the handle of the cart.
No, no, no, he thinks. No, not yet. He takes a step closer. “Harry?” Draco reaches out and brushes his fingers across the back of Harry’s hand.
Every carton of milk beside them explodes at once.
Looking from the milk to Draco and back again, Harry shakes his head. His entire body seems to be vibrating.
Draco, suddenly fearful like he maybe should have been before, desperately misses his wand. “Let’s go home. We’ll come back tomorrow-after we stop off at the bookstore-and you can buy whatever you want to attempt to cook.” He looks from Harry to the milk and back again, there is a crowd beginning to gather around them, drawn by the noise. He is shaking nearly as badly as Harry. “One more night of takeaway won’t kill us.”
Reluctantly, Harry nods and takes his hand. “Anything with curry and I’m leaving you.”
They manage to get out of the store before Draco asks Harry how he did it.
He doesn’t realize they are still holding hands until Harry pulls his away. “I don’t know. I didn’t mean to do it.”
---
Harry has more scars than Draco ever would have thought.
There’s the obvious one, of course, the bolt of lightning on his forehead that Draco runs his thumb over when he has his hand buried in Harry’s hair.
Then there are the words etched into the back of his right hand that Harry eyed warily for months; that he always tries to hide. It’s his one self-consciousness, he’ll pad round their house naked without a second thought, but he pulls his hand away when Draco looks too hard or for too long. Even now he does it, as though afraid Draco will think him a liar if he stares at them too long.
Across his shin there is a puckered line, he shivers when Draco goes over it with fingernails, and another line on his shoulder from a cut that didn’t go as deep. Both, Draco remembers, from Triwazard tasks.
The one that stands out brighter, newer, deeper than all the others that lays on the palm of his left hand.
It’s the ones he never knew before that really fascinate Draco, though. The one on the inside of Harry’s elbow, that is sensitive to the touch. The line across the small of his back that Draco is almost sure came from the hit a belt that broke skin, but even if Harry did remember, he didn’t think he could bring himself to ask. One on his right knee, another over the arch of his left foot. A bite mark deep in the muscle of his forearm, a barely visible line from a nick to his thumb.
Draco feels odd and awkward with his one almost scar in comparison. He feels too pale and too thin and oddly tall.
Harry likes walking on the beach barefoot and does it even after he cuts the sole of his foot on a broken bottle and Draco forces him to go to hospital and get a tetanus shot. He walks barefoot on the beach even when the salt from the ocean water stings the cut and takes the mickey out of Draco for reading more medical textbooks than some doctors whilst Draco cleans sand from the cut and bandages it.
He keeps his hair long because Harry likes it that way, and Harry wears his clothes just a little tighter than he would otherwise for Draco.
So when he has his mouth on Harry’s and his hands on Harry’s skin, Draco doesn’t think about revenge at all. He doesn’t think about how well they fit together. He doesn’t think that this was either the best or worst idea he ever had; he just thinks that he loves knowing every scar and every inch of Harry’s skin.
---
“Goddamn mother fucking donkey shit,” Harry says with a great amount of feeling.
Draco grins wildly, though he will deny it with vigor if questioned. “Problems, love?”
“Go to hell, Malfoy,” Harry answers. And glares. And glowers.
He spares a moment to ponder the redundancy of that while he tries to keep his grin from widening. “You could try using the key.”
“This is practice, which you keep insisting I need. This is torture and it is all for your sadistic amusement.” He turns his glare to the door. “Why the bloody hell isn’t this working?”
Draco shifts the bag of alcohol and fags to his other arm and forces the smile off of his face. “I am most certainly not amused, Harry. Not in the slightest. We have braved the cold winter streets of New York on bloody New Years Eve so we could celebrate by getting soused in the comfort of our own home, and yet we stand outside of the comfort and warmth of our lovely, if small, flat, because you refuse to use the buggering key.”
Harry spares another glare over his shoulder. “I can do this.”
He shifts his weight to his other foot on the dirty red carpet worn thin by traffic in the hallway. “So can I,” Draco mutters, “with the key.”
“God damn it,” Harry says again.
He isn’t entirely sure if Harry swears like a Muggle or an American, just that he’d never really heard anything like it. Not at home, not at Hogwarts, and certainly never from the golden boy of the wizarding world. There are a lot of things Harry says now that he never did before; Mother fucker and Christ, I love your hands and God fucking damn it and pass the coffee and good morning and Draco.
“Right.” Draco, ever careful of the glass bottles in the paper sack in left arm, turns Harry with a hand in the pocket of his jeans and shoves him against the door with mostly the force of surprise. “Right,” he says again.
He kisses him until the lights in the hallway flicker because Harry bloody Potter wants. Until neither of them can breathe.
“Fuck, Draco,” Harry whispers. “Fuck.”
“That’s the idea, yes.”
Harry laughs softly, his face buried in the crook of Draco’s neck, and reaches behind himself to turn the doorknob. The door opens. “Told you I could do it.”
“You’re magic, you are,” he agrees, walking past Harry and into their flat at last.
---
He has a mental list titled The Hard Parts Of Revenge.
It runs through his head when he least expects it; when he least wants it.
They’re sitting in front of the fire, Draco reading with Harry’s head in his lap while he dozes. And it’s comfortable and right in ways that he never expected. In ways he never really wanted it to be, because it only makes things harder.
He runs his fingers through Harry’s hair-softer than Draco’s ever was-and he thinks, in some idle part of his mind, that he likes the way it feels against his fingers.
The next thing he knows the words on the page in front of him blur because his mind is going through the list.
142. You have to know, every time you touch it, that you are going to miss his hair.
15. You know everything, but you can’t tell him any of it or it’s all over.
87. He looks at you like he knows you’re lying.
11. You cannot fall in love with him
49. You like this life.
2. Careful what you say. Don’t bollocks it all up.
50. It’s all going to end.
156. It always comes back to bite you in the arse.
97. Bugger fuck, you cannot be in love with him.
31. He still has all the power.
64. Don’t let your guard down.
98. It will kill you if you are.
The list is disorganized and all encompassing; it has rules and pitfalls and things that are going to hurt. Things he’s done and buggered up and things that he dreads.
And it’s all he can think of when they sit together in the quiet of their living room. When he’s listening to Billy bloody Idol because it’s struck Harry’s fancy lately.
“Bugger,” he whispers, when he knows that Harry is fast asleep. “Bugger it all.”
56. It becomes his revenge if you really love him.
122. He won’t stay when he remembers.
---
On their way to Florida they ended up at a bed and breakfast in a small town along the coast of North Carolina and almost two weeks later still haven’t left.
They walk along the beach-early enough in the year that it’s just them-holding hands. It’s easy and lazy and Draco mentions once or twice that they could buy a house here, but Harry, with his jeans rolled up and his shoes in Draco’s other hand, seems to think that they won’t like it when tourist season really begins.
There’s a church down the beach from where they’re staying that they walk past everyday. It’s barely more than a small square building with the white paint chipping and peeling from the outside walls. But every single day at noon the bells ring out from the decrepit tower, across the town and the ocean.
Harry stands on the beach with the waves of the Atlantic washing over his feet, holding Draco’s hand, and listens to the church bells.
On the way back he says, “I keep having this dream…”
Draco is tempted to make a joke of it, because ever since the dreams started he has known with absolute certainty that he doesn’t want to know about them.
“I’m standing in a church at sunrise with the light from outside just beginning to pour in through the stained-glass windows, and I can see that all the windows are cracked and there is a layer of dust on the floor and so thick in the air I could choke. And there is a woman there, she looks kind of like an insect, and from what I can see of her eyes-her glasses are so thick they can’t possibly help her vision-her eyes are sad… She says, this is it. Today is the day. You’ll save us all, but you won’t come back. This is it.
“And I think… I think she’s ridiculous, but I’m nervous anyway, and there are people to each side of me. A boy and a girl-they can’t be old enough to be called a man and a woman yet-she rolls her eyes like it’s nothing, but she’s scared too, I think. Everyone is. I can feel it, in the air, I can feel it and I know that something big is about to happen. I know that I won’t come back from it.”
They’re silent the rest of the way back to their room.
When they go out for dinner they both pretend not to notice the way he looks twice at the redhead that passes their table.
Finally he says, “Let’s get back on the road tomorrow.”
Draco is only too happy to agree.
---
The mark on Draco’s arm looks like a tattoo in white ink, it’s so light on his pale skin that you can barely see it even when you know it’s there. He likes to think of it as a scar.
Harry traces it with his index finger while Draco tries to watch CNN.
It isn’t that he cares, it’s that he’s learnt the hard way that it’s good to know everything you can. He understands now, like he never really wanted to, why the Ravenclaws could always be found with their noses in books. Knowledge is something he needs now like he didn’t before.
They both flinch when the word war is mentioned, and Harry changes the channel to a rerun of some inane American sitcom and puts his head in Draco’s lap.
“The thing with war,” he tells Draco’s thigh, after a moment of consideration, “is that even if you win you lose.”
With the fingers of one hand lost in Harry Potter’s hair and the other lazily drawing shapes on his hip, he doesn’t really see the point in denying the truth. “The question then becomes do the losers win?”
“Everyone loses, in the end.”
“I am,” Draco tells him, “completely in love with your optimism and sunny disposition.”
“And here I was thinking it was my arse you stuck round for.”
As if cued, the laugh track starts.
“That too!”
Harry says, quietly, “I remember some things, you know.”
On the telly, the laugh track rolls over and dies.
It’s not until after he tenses that he realizes he probably just gave himself away. It’s not until he realizes what a stupid idea it is to throw everything away that he manages to keep himself from saying just how much he knew that already. “What things?” he asks, after the year it seems to take for his heart to start beating again and his courage to build. “Honestly, you can tell me the truth, now, I’ll love you regardless. Were you a sideshow freak in your other life, Harry?”
“You know exactly what I was in my other life, Draco.” Harry doesn’t sit up, doesn’t pull away, doesn’t even bloody move except to close his eyes and breathe. “I remember you now, I have for a while, I think. You were there when it happened.”
The show ends with far too cheerful music. Draco doesn’t answer because he can’t answer. The proper response to this situation is completely lost to him. He doesn’t think he is even breathing.
Harry is still tracing the scar/mark on Draco’s forearm with a blunt fingernail. “The others aren’t clear… Their faces, I mean, I can’t see them. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I remember the knife, I remember you on your knees with your arm outstretched. I remember that this was black, almost as though it was a burn… Or a brand, maybe. You weren’t there by choice, they held you down. And I didn’t stop them because it was war, and I had to win. That’s what I kept thinking, war, war, war - it was practically a bloody chant. You just laughed like a nutter and said, ‘it all comes down to blood.’ I remember the magic-I think it was magic-that hit me before it went through me.”
Draco pulls on Harry’s hair just enough to make him stop talking. “It was… Magic, I mean, a wall of it almost. Mine and… You took it from everyone who had the Mark-I don’t know how you did it, something about your blood-but you did it. And you won the bloody war.”
Harry fits the scar on his palm over where he’d been tracing the skull on his arm, in an imitation of that night that makes Draco’s stomach clench. “Did I?” he asks, arching an eyebrow in an expression that Draco can’t see so much as know is there.
“More of a win than I ever had with you.” And just like that the truth is there.
Laughing, softly, bitterly, Harry says, “There are other things, too, standing alone but seeing other people behind me in a mirror. My parents, I think… My family. A girl with bushy hair and too big front teeth. A lot of redheads. A stone room with an archway covered in a ratty veil… That’s important, somehow, I know it. I just can’t remember why. A rat, an owl, a giant, a diary. I remember flying, I mean… it’s not a dream, it’s a memory, the first time in the air on a broom. I remember green light, and someone falling next to me. I remember knowing that they were dead. Nothing fits together, not like it should.”
“I can’t give you your answers,” Draco says finally. “At least, not all of them.”
“Then just give me the one I really want,” he demands in reply, voice still so calm it sends chills through Draco. “Did you get it?”
“The mark?”
“No,” Harry answers, shaking his head. “Your revenge. Did you get it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes. I’ve got you, is that revenge?”
“You whisper it when you dream, that’s why I remembered. I thought at first it was just… But it felt so real… You whisper it when you dream. It all comes down to blood. You whisper about wanting my blood.”
“I’ve got you, Harry,” he repeats. “is that revenge?”
“No,” Harry says on a short, rough laugh. “You love me; you want me. You didn’t want me to remember before and you don’t want me to remember anything more now. It’s obvious, Draco, that your greatest fear is that I will remember and I’ll know why we were on opposite sides of a war. It was supposed to be revenge, maybe, but it isn’t now, is it?”
“Not now, no.” He runs his fingers through Harry’s hair again and looks out the window toward the beach. “I think it will be though, when you remember everything. It just won’t be mine.”
Harry sits up, finally, a presses a kiss to Draco’s lips. He smiles and says, “Don’t be so sure that it isn’t mine already.”
He flinches at the anger in his smile, just a little, but then he nods. “I haven’t been sure of that for quite some time now.”
“Good.”