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 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 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 comfort in 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 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 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 a 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 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 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 those 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.

12. "The eyes," Draco whispers in awe and traces an impossibly huge, adult finger over the flushed, soft cheek.

The baby produces a tiny mewling sound and blinks up at him with big velvety eyes of slate blue.

"They won't keep," Miriam tells him with utter confidence, and he can't help but be impressed yet again by her easy, matter-of-fact cognisance of all things baby.

He's always laughed at the whole fingers and toes counting ritual, which has been hopelessly banal and needless in his teenage eyes. Now, when he's done it himself, he sees it does take some counting, as tiny as they are. His own hands seem grotesquely out of proportion in comparison, and something swells inside him with quiet warmth. They are all there, ten plus ten, and he has no idea whose nose is that but it is just as tiny, and he has to forcibly suppress the need to coo.

The baby blinks again – apparently still blind as the Mediwizard claims – his translucent lids flutter, and with a barely audible sigh he falls asleep. Petal-rose lips are half-open, and Draco is losing the battle rapidly.

Miriam tucks a loose strand behind her ear, and Draco looks up to see her watching the blue-wrapped bundle in her arms. He has never felt like that towards another human being. She looks at him and smiles, and Draco leans to kiss her. It's a slow, languid caress, and his heart feels huge, beating against his rib cage.

The baby shifts and begins to protest, and they break apart. She murmurs a quiet something and touches a cheek, and he snuggles against her fingers, content to be petted.

"Thank you," Draco hears himself say, watching them, and he has never meant it quite that frankly before.

She laughs, a quiet sound, and in the sunlit room she's simply radiant, despite the bloodshot eyes and ghostly pale skin.

"Worth the china?" she jokes: over the last two months all the porcelain has met its end by explosion. Draco, quite positive this is worth far more than the entire world's supply of china, tells her so.

Truth be told, he wasn’t her parents’ ideal candidate, and he’s never doubted that if Lucius were a bit more sane, he wouldn’t have been thrilled, either. But Draco, having chosen with eyes wide open, thinks he's made the best of all choices.

"Are you quite sure...?" he asks her later, when an energetic nurse has come and under Draco's kicked puppy stare taken the shock of soft, coppery sunrise hair away.

"Yes," she tells him firmly. "Tradition needs to be preserved."

Draco isn't all that convinces that such a soft, tiny and blond creature deserves to be named like that, but awed, humbled and utterly dazed as he is, he can't put up much of an argument.

He tells her that her sister will arrive tomorrow and that she's actually deigned to talk to Draco without a mediator.

"You are horrible!" Miriam accuses him, but he strongly suspects her twitch is a second away from being a smile, or maybe a smirk.

"I love you," he says, very serious, and her eyes grow darker with silent intensity.

"I know," she answers, and it will occur to him much later that he has never actually said the words before.

The sun is shining on his back, a solid warmth, and he wants more than anything to wrap her and the small miracle that is their child into a cloak of safety and never let go.

The frightening nurse arrives again after a while to inform them the baby needs to be fed and that Draco has to go.

Despite the vehement protesting, Draco finds himself out in the street in record time, and spends a couple of moments admiring the scary, practical efficiency of medical personnel. Equally equipped to give news of a death and convincingly pat the crying on the shoulder, and throw out recalcitrant, tipsy-on-excitement fathers.

Draco walks home. It's not so close but it's a crisp Saturday afternoon, winter weather just beginning to mellow up. His coat is a bit too much, but he doesn't want to carry it. People pass him in the street, happy and moody, alone and in groups, laughing or silent, and Draco feels light as a feather. He gives a couple of coins to an old man playing the guitar at a corner, and never notices the stare the shape of them draws.

When he comes home, he's pleasantly tired, and his high has matured to a warm, grounded core. He should go visit his father but he can't make himself spoil the moment. Instead, he goes on the terrace and watches the stars. A couple of red lights blink closer than the rest and move rapidly east. Airplane, Miriam has told him. Draco repeats the word in his mind, and this makes him remember the programme she's been needling him about for months now.

He goes back inside and picks the leaflet for the hundredth time. As he reads it yet again, his fingers repeat of their own accord the familiar folds and lines, and the crane stands stable and sharp-edged on the tabletop.

Haven't got your Hogwarts diploma? The leaflet screams in painstaking schoolgirl writing.

Draco takes it and moves to the sofa. Maybe she is right, after all, and he should apply...

The envelope, caught in the cushions of the sofa and unnoticed until now, is brown and heavy, and bears Ministry insignia in High Priority red. He tears it open, already annoyed at the scatter-brained elf for forgetting to inform him of new mail received.

Official notice, it says inside, and Draco takes a deep breath and sits up straighter: the fate of his house and his money will be reviewed in six month's time on an official hearing.

He reads it again. Years of not one words and now... a line in small print says Instigated on official enquiry. Someone has asked for such a review. Someone who knows...

Draco suddenly has a very bad taste in his mouth. And is very angry.

He knows who has done this.

13. There's the shrieking of banshees attacked by pixie swarms, a flash of flames, and the actual source of the noise lands in a heap by the fireplace next to an already annoyed-looking Hermione.

"Hugo, if you bite your sister one more time, we are going home to decline Latin verbs."

Harry hides his smile before he is sent to bed without dinner, and hugs Hermione, who looks more tired than ever.

Galloping down the stairs, battle cry accompanied by the thump of a jump over the last three steps, James flies into the room with a triumphant laugh, managing to bang the door.

"James! " Harry hears Ginny yell from the second floor, before Albus runs in as well and everything settles into familiar, deafening cacophony. There are no less than a dozen screamed happy birthday! s

Hermione looks like she'll either strangle somebody, or topple over, whichever is more energy-preserving.

"Ginny's upstairs," Harry tells her. "Why don't you go, and I'll see what I can do."

She smiles her thanks, before exiting. "Ron will come with a Portkey sometime soon."

"Okay now," Harry shouts down the gaggle. "Who wants to have a snow fight?"

They all do, naturally, and Harry shepherds them out on the lawn, covered thigh-deep in snow that has already suffered three snow fights this week and has given birth to no less than four snowmen, all askew.

They begin Potters versus Weasleys with Harry refereeing, shift to old and young against the middle, and end with everybody against Harry with Harry on the ground struggling feebly and sputtering under the attack.

To no one's surprise and Ginny's mild exasperation, when they come in after repeated calls, they are wet to the marrow and cold as you please. Lunch is a noisy affair, and Harry has grown so hungry without noticing, that it's almost like being at school again. Ginny has made kidney pie, Albus' favourite, and something with vegetables in it, much to the children's combined disgust and indignation.

After that, Albus blows the seven candles off a cake shaped like a Quidditch pitch and almost tears himself in two trying to decide which he'd like more – to wolf down desert or to open presents. The problem gets resolved by doing them simultaneously, and Harry is split between being amused and cringing.

Al gets a new broom, much to James' somewhat obvious envy. It's the last transitory broom either of them will get – Harry will buy them each an adult Quidditch broom when they in turn start Hogwarts, even if it means fighting Ginny about it.

Hermione's present is, unsurprisingly, a book, My First Twenty Spells: The Basis for the Next Two Hundred and Rose, much of the same school of present giving has given Al a beautifully crafted, detailed chart of Latin grammar. Ron makes a faintly embarrassed face, for the presents carry his name too, while Harry is, as always, surprised how honestly Al likes them. The leaning is certainly neither his, nor Ginny's.

Then the party paper is all over the place and the herd stampedes away. Lily, who's just past a terrible bout of chicken pox, followed by stomach flu, and was only allowed a tiny bite of cake and none of the pumpkin juice, slinks unhappily away.

Ron leaves soon after with apologetic words about work and promises to call on Friday for a butterbeer, and Ginny tactfully offers a now-ashen Hermione to show her something in the study.

Harry doesn't even notice when he's dozed off, warmed by the fire. He remembers thinking it's been a fun day, and then, seemingly ten seconds later, Ginny is shaking him, asking if he's seen Lily.

She's not worried, and easily laughs away Harry's first, rather tragic notions. By the time they've check again every room, though, Harry has remembered a dozen carefully hidden moments of the past, and his stomach is frozen lead. He can't stop himself from thinking about all the horrible, frightening possibilities.

Bad people haven't just disappeared from the face of earth with Voldemort, and a five-year-old is a ridiculously easy target. With the snow and the dark, it'll be a few hours until a search party can be roused.

"Don't be ridiculous, Harry," Ginny tells him and looks at him with a frown of incomprehension. "She's somewhere around."

'Somewhere around' is not what can calm Harry down. He goes out – it's bitterly cold – and starts doing tracing charms. Small as she is, and no stable magical displays yet, the chance to catch her with one are minimal, but in Harry's terrified and irrational state, it is much better that waiting. He goes around the house, twice, but they've left so many traces while playing it is impossible to tell apart anything.

At that point Harry can think only about graveyards and darkness and how scary it is to be alone. He throws the broomshed door open...

She’s curled up on an old blanket, around a wet and wide-eyed cat.

Harry slides to his knees, joints to water, and the windows rattle. He's so relieved he's queasy. He hugs her and she stirs sleepily, her small warm body in his shaking arms.

"Baby, how many times has Daddy told you to never go out alone?" he whispers in her hair, soft and smelling of baby soap, and his voice is awfully uneven.

She murmurs something suspiciously like cat, and snuggles in his arms as he picks her up.

"Where was she?" Ginny asks simply, already smiling, and takes her from Harry to tuck her in.

Harry sits down on the sofa, bodily shaking, after he's made sure his daughter is indeed in her bed, and feels terribly unworthy of Ginny's bright, enthusiastic positivity, of her faith and strength to bury the past and live in the present.

His heart rate takes a while to settle, and even when he lies down by her later that evening, all he wants is a double whiskey, a dark room and someone who knows that sort of cowardice.

He wants Malfoy.

14. Draco isn't sure what, exactly, it is he's looking for.

The last time he came – his first purposeful visit – he screamed and accused and turned out to be right in his suspicion, and all the while Potter took the abuse for the most part quietly.

The view from the French windows leading to a spacious terrace is faintly familiar. Draco wonders where it is in relation to his own flat, where his wife is currently packing her trunks for a visit home. His heart skitters at the thought.

Scorpius' first birthday is precisely a month yet, and the winter has barely begun to let up. Staring at the dark, naked branches of the soaked trees outside, Draco is more scared than he has been in years. The mere idea of remaining alone makes his throat close up anew.

It's not a memory he is particularly glad to retain. It's nothing he can help, either. Miriam has been talking about the visit for weeks now, planning everything with excitement and obsessiveness that at times amused Draco to no end. He is still not entirely sure how the thawing in her relationship with her parents happened. After almost two years of marriage, during which Draco never even met her father, suddenly bridges need to be mended and some reasonable attitude affected. Whether it's Scorpius' cherubim looks, or old age mellowing up, Draco can only guess.

He is glad for her. He's made a perfunctory offer to accompany them, more to show support than in actual delusion he'd be welcome. She accepted it with a kiss and a smile, appreciated it for the effort it was and denied it as he'd expected her to.

They'll be home in time for Scorpius' birthday, and Draco, with no real reason to protest the visit, can only be thankful for the small mercies.

Except that he will be for almost a month in a flat haunted by a past he tells himself is now completely buried, but he is not going to admit that, even to himself. A sharp gust rakes the branches and the gutters are cracked somewhere because crystalline drops fly with the wind. The room smells of something soft and nice, although Draco hastens to tell himself that as far as praise goes, nice isn't much. The Fidelius lies against his skin like the most delicate of shivers. "What are you doing here?" Potter's voice comes behind him.

"I..." Draco's throat closes up; he hasn't idea. He should have gone for a walk instead. "I'll go now."

"And there I thought you’d come to apologise." Potter's voice is light and impenetrable, and Draco's temper flares up with a shameful ease.

"You can be fairly certain I won't apologise," he says, stone cold, and glances a dagger across the room to where Potter is now splayed on the sofa.

"Then I'll have you know your manners are perfectly appalling." Potter smiles sweetly, strychnine in the honey, and Draco's heartbeat goes to an override.

"Now listen here, you self-righteous mongrel. You can't just go and stick your nose into other people's business, doing whatever you damn please. I understand that your hero complex brings the harlots to shaky knees, but you can't just... shape other people's lives for them. You can't control my life, because I am the one who'll do it! I lost, okay? I don't need you to plead my case, to beg on my behalf for crumbs of what was rightfully my heritage!"

Harry's laughter is far more sincere and real this time. Draco stares.

"What are you laughing at, you idiot?" he demands, and through the still present anger and faint indignation, feels the urge to laugh himself, long and liberating and no more than a little hysterical.

"Shut up, scarface," he commands five minutes later, when they are both of them have calmed down and are silent, anyway. The only thing remaining to bother Draco is the discomfort at being aware how they've either exchanged or horribly messed up their roles.

"Coffee?" Potter says in a moment, and Draco nods hesitantly. It's not too far in the day, although Potter's coffee on principle can't be more than barely drinkable.

But it is. Strong and sweet and lots.

Draco, who has almost completely come to himself now, has sat up straighter, nearly managed to put on his normal face and is distinctly uncomfortable.

"I..." he begins, without any idea what he wants to say. It's been a while since he's felt that too. "I really meant what I told you the last time we met," he says eventually.

"You said," Potter starts slowly, "a lot of things I wouldn't repeat in front of a minor. Which bits did you mean...?"

Draco's face heats up, but he tells himself the light is poor. "Them too, but I am impeccably mannered," he articulates with care, "and won't admit it."

Potter laughs quietly; it's a tired sound. He looks rather rumpled on the whole, Draco notices without particularly trying. "I meant it when I said I don't want you to give me back the Manor," Draco says very calmly. "I don't want it to be you. Or like that." He doesn't. He's managed to somehow stem the bleeding and the last thing he needs is a different sort of wound.

"I am not involved in any decision making," Potter answers even more dispassionately. "The last hearing is still pending, yes? It is all in the hands of the Wizengamot."

Draco is going to reply, then doesn't.

"I am sorry about your father," Potter lies smoothly a few moments later.

Draco snorts. The silence stretches between them, before he hears himself whisper, "It's better like that. He was as good as gone anyway..." He hasn't meant to speak.

Potter nods once, stiffly.

Draco notes, with disdain mostly for appearance's sake: "You look terrible."

Potter smiles briefly and with an odd sentiment behind it. "My younger son has been sick all week. I haven't slept in days." He looks a little surprised to have said it.

Draco swallows. He knows how that feels. Minutes pass, and then he rises. He doesn't remember sitting down. "I'll go."

"Wait." Potter fidgets for a moment. "Do you play chess?"

Draco does. Potter, on the other hand, apparently doesn't.

15. Harry thinks he will drown.

It's not a thought as much as an impression, an ache at the back of his mind.

He is sweaty – his fringe is getting far too long again – and the irregular gasps barely manage to affect the burn in his lungs. He crashes to the floor on his back and skids a couple of feet, limbs flying: it makes the world grey for a second. "Protego! " he cries, waving the wand blindly, and the answering grunt is enraged more than anything else.

Harry knows he has to stop. People are getting nervous, as focused as he is on the duel, and anyway, it is getting way beyond the purpose of the display.

"That would be enough, Malfoy." He tries to sound calm and composed, perfectly aware Malfoy won't back down by himself.

Malfoy pauses in the middle of a wand motion Harry knows will be painful if finished, and visibly struggles to regain control over the adrenaline rush and follow what are, in this situation, the words of a teacher and not a childhood rival.

When Harry stands up and dusts his trousers with an impatient gesture, Malfoy has already stepped back among the others, face impenetrable. Harry feels hollow. He gives an essay for next time on low-impact protective wards and bids them all goodbye. At least a dozen hands shoot up with questions and he is only peripherally aware of a flash of blond out the door.

It is mid-afternoon when Harry finally unlocks his car and crashes thankfully in it. It's gloomy, the sky is palest grey and in the sad light Hogsmeade looks rather forlorn too. There are moments like this one, when Hogwarts feels like a trap and not like the safe place it always was for him, and he is – briefly – sorry for having caved in to Ginny’s persuasion to participate in the programme.

He meant to buy Ginny strawberry vanilla from Fortesque's, but only remembers twenty minutes later and curses. What a perfectly awful day.

Some lively music on the radio is struggling to fight the weather, and Harry – annoyed – soon turns it off. It begins to drizzle. Lightly, and after another mile or two it bleeds into one of those fogs foreign fiction writers are so fond of describing. Normally, it's a picturesque village road and a pleasure for the eye, trees and meadows and a pretty pond, but now all that can be seen are outlines of trees – mere impressions – among the whiteness. The road stretches a short distance forward and it honestly looks as if it's hanging in pure pale nothingness.

Harry slows down and stops by the side of the road. The engine purrs for a while pointlessly, then he turns it off and gets out of the car.

A slight chill is hanging in the air, along with the damp. It's fresh and sharp, and as he walks away. Eventually it looks like he's alone in the entire world, hardness beneath him and open, endless skies. Safe and anonymous. He closes his eyes and just breathes slowly, in and out.

He hasn't seen Malfoy outside Hogwarts for months and months now. He's loathe to admit how much he misses it. The thrill of the duel today still hums in his blood, low and constant and familiar. It's astounding how something so far in the past can feel more natural and real than the present moment. His mouth forms a string of lisps and hisses, and he wonders if it is reasonable and healthy to be clinging to the past like that. To invest energy in not forgetting. To lie to the person he’s closest to in the world.

The chill is sharper now, and his fingers are getting numb. He's never thought he'd be that sort of person. But it is such a relief, once in a while, to look at the fire from just that angle and start, and have someone who winces – silently and knowingly – along with you.

And not laugh it off. Not look with the incomprehension of memories dismissed. Not tell you to forget.

His eyes are burning. Or maybe his nose is very cold.

The car is unpleasantly warm afterwards. Unclear shapes swim through the fog, and he turns the radio on again. An earnest female voice tearfully insists I never meant to make you cry. It's not very funny.

Ginny meets him at the door and gives him a kiss hello, her whole body thrumming with energy. She's wearing jeans he hasn't seen in years and an impossibly bright grin.

"See?" she laughs and swirls around a couple of times. "It took me almost three years but I managed to squeeze myself in my pre-Lily jeans!"

“Oh, Ginny,” he hears himself utter. He could laugh.

"Hush, you!" she chides, and Harry shakes his head helplessly as he is lead towards the living room sofa, where she's been watching TV. "I look better like that, don't I?" she asks, and Harry thinks, I love all the ways you look. "No, don't answer that!" she goes on. "How was your day?"

"Perfectly horrible," he says instead, as she spells a blanket and a bowl of something hot from the kitchen. He only then realises he is freezing and awfully hungry. "We have reached protective wards and practical aspects of duelling. No one wants to co-operate. Most people detest having to learn that."

"Oh," she says, and he wonders if she can read the I am duelling Malfoy every practical lesson subtext.

"You are very good at teaching," she tells him later that night while she is almost asleep and she is preparing for bed. "Maybe you can try to do it, you know, full time, after the programme ends in a few years. McGonagall would love to have you for the students too."

He's thought about it himself.

"Perhaps." There's a pause as she slips under the duvet and they settle around each other. "After the kids have finished there."

"Harry!" she sits up sharply and looks at him. "Lily isn't yet three. It is fifteen years you are talking about!"

He drags up some sense of humour with an effort. "Is there some reason you want me out of the house more?"

She laughs and flicks the lights off.

"You know," she begins as she lies on his chest, legs twining. "I've been talking with Hermione..."

Harry groans.

"...you are awful, you know that? So we've been talking, and I think we might consider beginning a new project."

Harry tries to focus and not fall asleep.

"Because, obviously, the Hogwarts evening programme will die out eventually, for apparent reasons, and anyway, I need to change focus and look forward from now on."

As she always does. The future and the endless wonderful surprises it keeps hidden.

"And why were you talking to Hermione about it?"

"Well, we were planning, actually. I know she won't have the time to help with the factual details. But we were thinking how at sea Muggleborns are in their first year. Imagine if there was a summer camp organised for those who want to go, for example in August. Sort of a fast introduction to all things magical plus ten tips how not to get a Puking Pastry in your juice during week one."

There's a brief pause in which Harry remembers Hagrid and a pink umbrella against the stormy night sky, discovering what a Chocolate Frog was, and Malfoy’s proffered hand on a train of magic.

"You are set to make me a beggar, aren't you?" He says in a moment, lightly.

"I knew you'd like it!" She snuggles close and moves for a kiss. "Do you think McGonagall will approve?"

"If you bend her ear enough."

"Harry!"

16. To say that Draco is horrified is something of an understatement. He isn't entirely certain how large the step from chess to sex is, and he doesn't remember wanting to make it. Yet here he is, having almost completely managed it, if only in his mind.

He wakes in the middle of the night, overtaken anew with that single moment of stunning clarity when he looked at Potter and thought how much he'd like to pin him down and make him shut up.

It's a disconcerting experience.

He has a beautiful wife and a small child, and the single recurring problem he will admit to are the visits of the in-laws, which are pure torture. He has managed, by so many balls and backdoors, to rescue as much of his father's masterpiece of a library as he ever hoped for, and the better part of his mother's collection of children's books and delicate daggers.

He's got his ending: he owns a tiny piece of them both and of the life they had, Before, and his son, though by Potter's interference, will reclaim the Manor on his twenty-first birthday.

Life has finally straightened itself up and started to – haltingly – move forth. And yet...

Draco is drinking his tea in the morning parlour when among a jumble of screams and Scorpius, no! and Elf squee, Miriam Floos home, with a visibly forced smile and Scorpius horseback on the Elf.

Draco stands immediately to help her, both with the bags and the child, who – he is a little embarrassed to note – is a devil without even coming close to what Draco himself had been.

Later, over dinner Miriam leaves mostly untouched, it becomes clear that the academic position she applied for has been denied to her for unclear reasons.

Draco has had this happen to him enough to be perfectly aware of the reasons, and she must know them, too, even if she is too loyal to say them aloud. Draco feels gutted, faced as he is with her obvious disappointment due to something he's to blame for.

Draco isn't quite used to the role he plays for her; a shoulder to cry on, a crutch, a source of valued opinion and advice. A support. Now that he's let her down, just by being who he is, it is shamefully easy to remember being weak and taken care of.

In truth, he does not like her plan. The mere idea of a Lady Malfoy joining the scientific circles, as in a job, and in such an area too, probably has generations of proper, ball-organising Malfoy wives rolling in their graves. But she's stood by her decision and argued him into silence, and in the end, he can't quite imagine forcing her to give up what has apparently always been her dream.

His feeling that he can't be what she needs is much stronger the next day when he exits the Muggle Related Studies Department of the Greenwich University of Applied and Theoretical Magics, with a denial in no uncertain terms and just for the reasons he's known it to be for.

He wants to laugh – who is he deceiving, he can't be anyone's strong support – and finds himself Apparating to a now-familiar flat.

Without a delay, he moves towards the window. The wyvern is sleeping and doesn't even stir as Draco lays both hands on the beautiful oak table beneath it.

Draco has known for a while there’s a spell Potter has put on the table to let him know if someone touches it, and has been trying with a various degree of success to accomplish it the other way round, too. Sure enough, Potter appears not a second later, and Draco realises he hasn't even thought to check the flat for him first.

Potter, irritable and eye-contact avoiding as he is lately, growls something along the lines of devil chasing you or something? and Draco sees in sharp relief the reason for his own obsessiveness and queer thoughts – the anchor, the relief Draco has needed all along is right here, before him.

As he pounces, Potter all but squeaks. Draco moves with a fevered single-mindedness, and Potter doesn't put much of a struggle, a flush slowly seeping into his skin.

Potter, Draco can see now, is safe. He doesn't matter. Doesn't care. Draco can be as weak as he wants and as horrible as he pleases, and Potter won't even blink, because he has seen it all. Before. His opinion of Draco is below sea-level as it is, and without the threat of disappointment hanging, Draco doesn't need to pretend.

It's surreal. Dreamlike and slowed down to total, palpable awareness. Draco thinks... no, he doesn't think anymore. He only feels now – his brain shut down and fingers trembling with lust all of a sudden. His heartbeat, loud in the quiet room, the faint air of expectation and challenge.

He slides to his knees; the carpet is thick underneath him. Potter doesn't move once he's stopped protesting, and only looks at him warily instead, wide-eyed. Waiting?

Wanting.

Draco unbuckles the belt. His fingers are numb and unresponsive. The zip comes down all by itself, and the trousers sag a little. He pulls, hard, and Potter moves an inch away from the edge of the table to help him. His head is heavy, empty; his mouth is dry; his hands are sweaty and shake. He swallows and looks up: Potter is steadily watching him.

The underwear slides down more easily.

Potter is half-hard already, standing up. Draco traces a finger over him, and watches with fascination as his thighs tighten, relishes the thrill of the stifled sound, of the filling flesh.

He exhales and ruffles the dark, damp curls a little. Potter takes hold of the edge of the table, tawny skin against the gleaming wood.

Draco closes his eyes.

The groove between torso and thigh is sweet with the taste of sweat and man and lust, and somehow it's all the same thing. Draco licks along it, and then up, to the flat stomach and belly button, and muscles ripple beneath his lips. He wants to bite, and he does. He wants to preserve the moment, to keep the unique feeling of utter, precious disconnection. Potter's cock nudges his chin, begging, and he wants to know who the unsteady laugh belongs to.

But his hands shake no more.

The skin beneath his fingers – knees, thighs, buttocks – is smooth and even, and gives way to his nails with a faint shiver of goosebumps. He nuzzles the base of his cock. This, he thinks, should be harder than it is, or maybe it is just as easy as he needs it to be. He can't decide – can't think, can't say – if the significance of this is nonexistent or blown out of proportion.

He licks a path over the inner thigh, up along the juncture of body and leg, and ends on skin both tighter and softer than it looks like.

The taste is unexpected. Not that he has ever thought of this moment, ever, or would admit to it, if he has. The texture makes him salivate. He moves his hands up, fingers the dimples where the sweet arse begins and works his way down, between cheeks clenched with the effort of staying still.

He draws them apart, imagining behind tightly closed eyelids the dark damp place now out in the open. He licks the heavy head once. Potter doesn’t manage to stifle a deep, guttural beg of a sound, and Draco pushes his pelvis back, pressing the crack of arse open against the shiny edge of the table.

Potter moves his legs further apart, a bare inch, and then stays put, and Draco opens his eyes to a bowed head and abdomen tight with lack of movement.

Draco works his lips around the head. It's not that difficult. His tongue finds the small bunch of skin on the underside and pushes hungrily against it, against the slit, into it, greedy and scared and knowing. Draco wants to bite down, to suck it dry, to lick it like a sugar quill melting pink and sticky over teenage lips. He draws away and nuzzles his way down to the base, teeth and puffy lips and nails clenched in the soft skin between inner thigh and buttock.

He mouths the darker, wrinkly skin of the balls more because of the scent of lust than because he expects it to be great. The cock jumps up against his cheek and he repeats, digging deeper, sucking, making sounds he'll never own up to.

Potter's thighs – his whole body – are trembling against his palms, against his face, and Draco has never felt quite like this, fully in control, strong, commanding. He pulls away, suddenly, mouth and hands, just because he can, just because he wants. Potter's knuckles are ghostly white against the table's wood, clenched with great effort, and Draco drinks in his gasps, the sight of the bitten bottom lip, of the shaking effort of buckling knees locking to not follow his retreat. The pulsing vein and the shiny trail of spit and sweat. The glittering eyes, dark and bright and broken and bruised, focused in the shadow of a lock falling forward, in the light of desire he visibly tries so hard to control but only manages to hold onto.

Draco feels like he can do anything in the entire world. Like he owns Potter. Like the meaningless buzz in his head is making him drunk on sheer need.

His own limbs are so liquid, his joints immaterial, his body all pulse, that everything swims before him, in and out of focus.

He puts a hand over Potter’s cock, and Potter breaks into fresh sweat.

"Fuck me," Draco says, voice low and broken and forceful and ragged with swallowed sighs and need and want. Then he twists his hand and pumps him hard and brutal.

Potter screams. Comes apart, flies apart, immolated, sated, hurt and healed and sewn together, run ragged and whole, undone.

Draco is the one to close his eyes first, against the blaze of it, against the sensation, against the force.

They are slumped against each other when he opens them again, and his nails have left half crescents of silence from where he's held onto Potter when he's come apart himself.

The aftermath comes with an alarming speed. Potter, blinking back into focus and reason, curses; laughs in quiet, amazed disbelief and curses again, and Disapparates even before Draco has quite returned to conscious thought.

He dresses and makes a slow circle around the room in dazed surreality. The wyvern has moved a little, shifting along with the sunbeam working its way across the tank.

Draco is fighting not to panic. He isn't sure where his brain is, what was he thinking. Was he, at all? The single thing he's given the woman is his name and now...

He stops sharply and retraces the thought. Only his name. He can bet they haven't even read her application any further. He has yet to take Scorpius to her parents' this year and who will think to compare an impressive application from abroad to an unread, denied one, anyway? And the name will be different.

He has Apparated before the idea has fully formed.

"Miriam?" he calls and follows the muffled call back. "Miriam," he repeats once in the room, breathless. "Reapply from Switzerland with your father's name."

17. "There's nothing quite like trees turning," Harry says from his place by the window. "Life given up to protect life. There's something very poetic about it." He pauses. "And true."

"Yeah," Malfoy drawls from where he's teasing a reaction out of the wyvern. "Pure poetry, selfless idiocy, martyrdom for the masses." There's something nasty and bitter behind his words.

"I don't think you have any right to say that," Harry notes with exact enunciation, trying very hard not to fly off the handle. "Through a very blood experiment your opinion has been proven faulty, after all. There were people ready to die for a cause, and if memory serves you weren't among them."

Malfoy snorts. The wyvern, sensing tension, recoils from his touch and spreads its tiny wings, hissing.

"I am not interested in dying," Malfoy spits and barely manages to take his hand out of the tank, avoiding the snap of sharp teeth. He turns. "I don't want to die. It's something you have no idea about." His expression is no less vicious than the snake's.

"I chose..." Harry begins, and can feel blood thumping quick and careless behind his eyes.

"You chose nothing," Malfoy draws out, fist hitting his thigh for emphasis. "You walked a path you never questioned the point of following, a route someone else chose for you, and had not one reason to stop and think, not one obstacle to make you rebel."

"I risked my life again and again, and saw things no child should ever even imagine!" Harry is bodily shaking now and a mere nuance away from shouting.

"Oh, yes, I can imagine the emotional turmoil of a starry-eyed teenager faced with a great adventure. The drama! Was there a single turning where you had to decide for someone else beside your precious self? Someone you loved? Someone who would have suffered for your decision? Did you stand, ever, between two options, hating both? Did you..." Malfoy's voice is harsh, and striking and hurtful, and Harry can't care less.

"Screw you, Malfoy!" he screams, stung, memories quick to the surface. "I took the two people I loved most there with me! I risked their..."

"No, you fucking didn't! Don't you see? They chose it, they suffered it, they shouldered the hard part. You packed and left, secretly happy to have them, and didn't wake every morning wondering if your mother was still alive, didn't measure every step twice, lest it be the one that signed her death sentence, didn't..."

Harry is, at this point, well beyond any pretence of control and logic.

"Don't you dare try and reason your cause with me, Malfoy, don't you dare, or help me god..."

"Fuck the cause," Malfoy hisses, face splotchy, locks flying, two feet way from Harry. "Do you think I cared about the cause? Do you think I remembered what it was? Would you think about some bleeding heart drama if every breath you took were just the next nail in the coffin of everything you've ever known?"

Malfoy pauses to take a breath and kills Harry with a glare, his mouth twisted with resentment and disdain.

"Would you roam happily and pull childish stunts if your darling friends had chosen to stay in Hogwarts, hmm? If all you did hung like an axe above their heads? Would you be so brave then?"

Harry punches him in the face, hard and brutal and precise. It is not about wards and magic, but about the very primal need to stop the words. Malfoy cries out, once, and then attacks Harry back just as desperate and furious. They fall on the ground, trading kicks and hits, and Harry tastes blood. They roll around. He scrapes his way on top, grips Malfoy by the hair and beats his head against the floor, Malfoy writhing violently beneath him. A kick in his back renders Harry gasping, just for the second needed for the places to be reversed.

Then there are nails on his face and a mouth against his tongue, and his fingers clench and dole out bruises freely. It doesn't matter, none of it does, buttons flying and clothes torn away, only the simmering, desperate need to stop the words, now winging in his head, make them disappear, because it is not true, not true, just. not. true...

Teeth close around him, feeding lust into his body, and he is writhing, eyes closed, lungs not working, groping, pushing, pumping...

In his mind, Malfoy's keen from almost an year ago, Fuck me, blossoms like a bruise just as fingers breach him inexpertly. He's been thinking about that for months, and now he knows Malfoy has been, too, as he feels the spell he's been mouthing soundlessly in shame sometimes in the dark fill him up with slickness.

His body arches up, getting closer and away in the same heartbeat, and then his own weight bears him down on the intruder. He bites Malfoy's shoulder, savage, until he tastes blood, and Malfoy cries out and rams his fingers in. They tumble and roll and then Malfoy's mouth wreaks havoc in Harry's brain, and Malfoy slides into Harry's body without a pause.

Harry isn't quite connected. It hurts and tears him apart and holds him together, and Malfoy's hand pumps liquid need onto his cock. Harry is trying to chew through his lip, flay his skin away, press closer, clench harder, and then they are coming, coming, coming, so hard and fast and brutal the world fades.

They unfold like wet paper; slow, breathless, weak. Harry is so focused on the sound of Malfoy's gasps that he can't catch his own breath.

He's never been so sated and spent and ashamed. The oxygen in his lungs feels golden, and the world moves with his pulse.

Malfoy pulls away in a while, sharply, and only then Harry notices they are still holding each other, tangled and intimate.

Malfoy dresses and leaves in record time, not looking at him, and Harry tries to persuade himself the emptiness is not there. He hisses, tired and quiet, and the wyvern opens her eyes sharply and spreads her wings.

He goes home eventually; Ginny is not there.

The next morning, when he enters a chamber he hasn’t seen in years at Hogwarts, after months' siege on Ginny's part, and says, "Good morning, everyone, I'll be your DADA instructor this module," Malfoy's inscrutable face looks back at him from the back row of desks.

Harry shivers. A candle flickers and then burns higher.

18. Draco feels rather ridiculous.

He is thirty-two years old, has a nightmare of a son who he adores and a wife well on her way to becoming the next big name in Muggle Studies. He is a responsible adult, who's build a normal life from the abyss.

He is waiting for his NEWT results by the window with a hammering heart.

"Morning post is never punctual anymore," he grumbles.

"Draco, get back on the table." Miriam's exasperation is getting more palpable by the second. "If I reheat that coffee one more time, it won't be drinkable."

Said coffee, in a cup of fine chine, gets levitated to about a foot off the table, trembles precariously and before any of them can react, smashes back down with a deafening noise and a wave of coffee all over the place.

"Scorpius!" Miriam doesn't yell only because Draco's wife can't possibly be yelling. The child's answering laughter melds with the pop of an agitated elf appearing, with Draco's Banishing spell and the delicate melody of owl wings against the window glass.

Draco jumps as if scalded, then stops, pulls a dispassionate expression on his face and counts to ten in his head. The owl taps on the window pane. Five, four, three...

"Draco, don't be an idiot," Miriam tells him, and he realises he's closed his eyes and is counting his breaths. He looks down. She's crouched on the floor next to a solemn Scorpius, who's managed to fall off his chair and somehow scrape his knee on the silken carpet.

"What?" Draco questions, feigning nonchalance, stalling, and she rolls her eyes.

"If you don't get the owl, I will."

Draco turns towards the window. It's easy for her to say, she's finished her basic wizarding education at the proper time. He, on the other hand, is shaking with expectation over something most people his age have long since forgotten.

He opens the window. The owl, annoyed, waits no more than a second for him to take the heavy scroll away, and takes off with wings square in Draco's face and a none too gentle squeeze on his forearm.

"Do you want me to open it for you?" Miriam asks from behind him. He shakes his head no, and she wraps her arms around his waist and lays her chin on his shoulder.

Something swells inside him. He's never laid more open before someone and he's never felt so sheltered.

He breaks the wax seal.

"Oh, Draco," he hears Miriam whisper.

He reads it again, then a third time. His heart has stopped, his head is of lead. He reads it a fourth time.

Draco bursts laughing, knees turned to water, and drops the parchment. She squeezes him gently and lays a kiss on the side of his neck. It takes him a while to come down; he's laughed himself to tears. He turns and takes hold of her hand and waist. She nods, once, the beginning of the dance, a smile on her face, and they waltz, much to Scorpius' delight.

It was the first dance they did, years ago, her favourite, and after the last swirl Draco holds her close; her small body against his, the smell of her hair against his skin.

"Thank you," he says, quietly.

She does the traditional curtsy that ends the dance, and kisses him lightly on the lips.

"I'm so proud of you."

The funny part is, Draco has never had anyone say that to him.

"Mr Malfoy!" McGonagall greets him when he enters her office, but doesn't stand up.

Draco's barely seen her outside of this room in the two and a half years it took him to complete his NEWT levels, and in the scant few times he has, she's been relying heavily on a sturdy walking cane. He can see it even now, propped against the side of her desk.

Her hair is steadily going to pure silver.

"Good afternoon, Professor," he answers with the befitting deference. "How are you?"

She smiles slightly. It's a bare gesture, and her eyes behind the spectacles all but twinkle. Draco wonders if it's the office that's doing it.

"I am fine, young man, thank you for asking."

Draco blinks.

Her expression gathers a faint veneer of smugness, which Draco only recognises – a twitch of the eyebrow, the angle of her mouth canted just so – because he's been versed at reading people ever since he can remember.

He sharply remembers Transfiguration homework done in the library, paper cranes sent flying just when she appeared, and then a detention spent attempting to turn them into paper dragons. Praise and reproof, and being a child. Maybe that's her aim.

"Yours is an outstanding result," she says in a moment and Summons a heavy scroll from the upper room.

He watches it fly forth with a wild thrum in his chest. Every eighteen-year-old takes that scroll, that achievement, for granted, and he is bursting with pride.

He unrolls it, his hands steady by sheer will. The ink is typical Hogwarts ink, the parchment creamy and smooth, and each subject and grade are in an ornate, gilded cursive. Six Os and an E. The original document looks far more real and satisfying than the letter informing him.

He's beaten his father's record.

Draco traces the letters slowly. The first touch causes a high, clear tone, and he starts a little.

"There," McGonagall says with a pleased voice. "It's registered now."

There's a bit of small talk, and then Draco rises to go.

"Mr Malfoy," she begins slowly, pushing her glasses up with a delicate gesture of realised authority. "My Transfiguration teacher might be retiring this year. Would you be interested in filling her spot? I do recall your paper dragons had perfect wings."

Draco opens his mouth and then silently closes it. "What?" he manages eventually, rather shocked.

"Do not worry," she says with the faintest of smiles, pleased to have left him wordless. "Think about it over the summer. I will officially ask again in August."

The door opens on its own accord, and Draco steps out, dazed.

"And do pass your wife my regards."

19. James is building a tower of cubes on a blanket on the floor.

Harry watches him for a while, he's suspiciously silent tonight. It's not quite real, how fast the time passes. It was like yesterday they were only talking about children and what they'd be like, and here is the present day – James will be three next week and Ginny is pregnant for the third time.

The door opens with the smallest of sounds and Ginny sticks her head in, clearly hoping to see James asleep and thus shorten the going-to-bed war.

James, needless to say, is wide awake.

Ginny enters the room fully and makes her way to the couch. Harry watches her belly, unmistakably round now.

She sits down with a silent groan. "I barely managed to put Al and Rose to bed. I'll take James upstairs now, he'll protest the whole way and wake them both up."

She sounds pretty much ready to cry.

"Sh-h-h," Harry tells her and pats her thigh. "Give me your feet here."

She lies back with a sigh, head on the armrest, and obediently presents him with two white-socked feet. He takes the socks off and throws them up in the air, where they Transfigure into a music box and a rabbit, sail down sedately to James and settle among the building cubes.

"Harry, these are my worn socks!" Ginny chides half-heartedly.

"No," he winks and picks up one foot. "These are a rabbit and a music box."

His fingers are on her sole. She groans with palpable relief and practically melts on the sofa. The music box opens and starts playing something slow and sweet, and a colour-blind clown of glitter floats out of it.

James looks up from the cubes.

"What's that song?" Ginny asks, voice far calmer.

"No idea. Some lullaby?" Harry says, working her toes. "I must have heard it somewhere. Don't you have it?"

"Ngh-ugh," she mrows, and Harry laughs quietly:

"It must be Muggle, then."

"I feel like I'll fall apart any moment," she says after a moment.

James is staring rapt at the clown, the rabbit's ear clutched in a tiny fist, and a few of the building cubes have started to merge into something suspiciously like a pillow.

"Gin, maybe we should go see a doctor. I really don't remember you being so tired all the time with James or Al. And your feet are again stone-cold."

"They are warmer than yesterday," she makes a feeble attempt at a joke, but he only raises an unamused eyebrow.

"That's not very reassu..."

"I went to St. Mungo's today," she cuts him off, sobering up.

"What?" he sits up straight. "Why? Is this why you needled me all week to go to McGonagall just today?"

"No! Harry, you really should pass the course and get your NEWTs. And you are just the DADA instructor we need to have the entire programme ready for McGonagall to announce!" There's a pause in which Ginny glares at him until he backs down. "But why didn't you tell me?"

"Keep your voice down, please, James is almost asleep."

"Ginny." Harry's voice is level and very serious.

"Oh, all right." She flicks a lock back and closes her eyes for a second. "Every time we go together there's a riot."

"But that's not my f..." Harry begins to protest, but she interrupts him:

"And you are an utter panic."

"I’m worried about you, and want to make sure you get the best possible thing," he notes with a neutral tone after a pause, trying to hide his affront. "I don't think that's so bad."

"I know, just…" She sighs. "Let's not talk about this, okay? Some other time."

He nods unhappily.

"I went with Hermione. You know she practically lives at St. Mungo's now that internships have to be approved, and she stole some time to come with me."

Harry searches her face with anxious eyes. "Well, what did the doctor say? Is there something you should do? Or shouldn't?"

"Calm down, Harry," Ginny tells him impatiently. "He gave me another blend of vitamins and a potion for the fatigue, and forbade me to do pretty much anything except breathe, but too deep or too often, lest I disturb something." She rolls her eyes.

"Ginny, you have to take care of yourself. Of the baby. Maybe you should stop…"

"I know, Harry, and I am taking care, but I certainly won't spend the next twenty weeks in bed rest as he said I should!"

Harry counts to ten in his head, breathes in deeply a couple of times and picks up her foot again with great concentration. "Taking another child on top of the two you have hardly falls in the trying to rest more section. Why did Hermione let you take Rose tonight anyway?"

"Harry," her voice is very serious. "When did you last see Hermione?"

He stares at her. "Before that trip to Bulgaria, five or six weeks ago. Why?"

"I think… well, she didn't say anything about it but she had that grey-tinged look about her, and she's visibly lost weight like she did with Rose, and well. I think she's pregnant again."

"What?" Harry blinks stupidly. "So soon?"

Ginny nods. "After the nightmare Rose was, I thought she'd at least give it more time, too. I'm not sure of course, but… that explains why she's so frantic to get that internship now, before it starts showing and they turn her down because of all the time off she'll be taking."

James is asleep on the floor, clutching the rabbit; the music box has fallen silent with Harry's focus on something else.

He stands up and bends to pick up James. The child snuggles closer and mumbles something.

"I'll strangle Ron," Harry whispers on their way up the stairs. His worry is only halfway about Hermione, though – what Ginny tells him is an odd echo of what the two of them are currently going through, and the words further his anxiety about Ginny’s unexpectedly problematic pregnancy.

"I am not certain he knows yet," Ginny answers quietly in the darkness, and Harry struggles to recall what he has said before that.

20. Draco isn't quite sure what makes him go to the flat.

It's mid-December. Miriam's birthday is precisely in a week, Christmas – Scorpius’ seventh, a special number – is less than a fortnight away, and he really ought to be using the last Saturday of term to clear his For Marking tray. Hogwarts is snowed in, a misshapen, overgrown cake, and he would actually love to play a little one on one Quidditch. The mere thought makes his hands itch. But the bloke teaching Potions is clueless on a broom and Miriam, even if home, won't be persuaded out in the cold no matter what.

Draco spends the time it takes to walk to Hogsmeade trying to dissuade himself, but ends up going anyway. It's not his first planned and conscious visit, but they are certainly rare.

The Apparition from biting cold to a warm room is startling, and he spends a second letting confused receptors settle. He then turns and notices the tea kettle in the middle of the kitchen table: it's full, untouched, and has singed a ringlet on the table cloth. Draco banishes the whole mess and slowly enters the living room.

Potter, sitting on the floor, is emitting an almost constant litany of hisses; it sounds rather like crystal grinding into sand. The wyvern, mostly uncaring, shifts her wings every other second, more to capture as much light as possible than to react in any way. Potter has an unkempt look about himself, ragged and gaunt, and Draco realises he hasn't seen him since before the beginning of term.

Draco moves closer, Potter shows no reaction. As the distance melts, the lisp breaks down into more discernible sounds, sharp but melodic, oddly sinuous, slithering like a shiver down Draco's spine.

Up close, Draco can see Potter's hands, thumbnails bitten into stubs and continuously picked at, body rocking slowly back and forth.

"Dear God, Potter, what has happened to you?"

Potter starts so bad he disturbs the tank and Draco finds himself at wandtip before the sound of his words has died down.

Ten seconds pass.

"I think I'll take that," Draco ventures eventually, and makes to pull the wand away from Potter’s unmoving fingers. Potter grabs at his arm and the wand clatters to the floor; thin gist of unconsciously released power gutters the candles and whispers against Draco's ears.

He finds himself dragged to the ground and almost completely naked in record time: Potter wears a strange, focused expression and between them the air crackles with static. Draco shivers. Soon, he can feels nothing but the carpet under his back, lips on his neck and hands on his chest – and he's forced to admit, in that tiny strip of time he'll later remember as sensation only, that this is what he's come for.

Potter is crouching above him, clothes tickling Draco's naked skin, and is making a mess of his neck and chest. Draco gasps, silences the sound into his out skin, and arches up as nails trace the even silvery line across his torso. He tried, once, with great reluctance and after much persuasion, to explain that state of mind to Miriam; the one in which you begin to shout Crucio! faster than get out, the one in which the first answering spell on your tongue is a deadly one, the one in which you try to bite a scar open and lick it back into nothingness in the same breath.

It's not exactly easily understandable.

Potter, though? Potter needs no explanation at all.

He flicks his tongue briefly into Draco's belly button and then continues downward with a focused determination Draco is less and less capable to be worried about.

Potter pinches a nipple and Draco, tense for weeks and already ready, lets his body go, lets it drown in whatever Potter dishes out.

Potter seems to recognise the surrender. He traces warm breath along Draco's cock and fits his lips, tight, just on the tip of it. And sucks, hard. Draco squeezes his eyes shut and feels himself try to squirm away: Potter holds him in place, relentless, and continues.

It's uncomfortable and too much, and Draco writhes, and then, somehow, it isn't. Draco feels light and floaty, anchored by nothing but Potter's lips, and his limbs are tingly. Potter pushes his tongue against Draco's slit, flicks across it, and it's not a delicate gesture. Then sucks again and moves away. His exhalation rakes coldness across Draco's wet skin, and he realises, dimly, from afar, that he's been a second away from coming, abdomen still tight.

Draco's mouth protests on its own accord: a soft, low sound. Potter pays it no heed and with shaking hands pushes Draco's body back onto itself, legs splayed apart. Potter, Draco has managed to discover many times in the past, has smart nimble fingers and a yet smarter mouth, both of which he applies with typical single-mindedness over the now-exposed hidden recesses of Draco's body.

Draco feels himself sink deeper and deeper, pushed into a dark warm place full of glitter and tingle. He is only peripherally aware, later, of Potter's low, husky tones bidding him to come and of someone’s mewling, needy keens.

The world shivers and Draco's mind skids to a full stop.

Draco comes back to a normal state slowly, with steadily fainter eddies of after-pleasure, like a fiery oak leaf twirling slowly to the ground in autumn.

Draco is splayed supine on the floor, staring at Potter's plain white ceiling, no ornaments. Potter is curled up like a child by Draco's side, eyes closed, breathing even. Draco knows he's not asleep. There's a speck of come on his chin, already drying, and it makes Draco's fingers twitch.

This is the first time their meeting has ended in sex and no one has left, horrified, in a swirl of Apparition the second it's over.

"What the hell was that about?" Draco asks. In the quiet, his voice is unaccountably loud.

Potter starts, then blinks a couple of times, as if he's forgotten Draco to be there.

It's curious how easily that alone gets Draco furious. Potter's focus when Draco is near is not to be on anything else. It has been like that all their lives and won't change now.

"I..." Potter begins and shudders softly. "My daughter disappeared last night," he closes his eyes and Draco sees him swallow. "She had gone out by herself. She’s only five, for Merlin’s sake. She was... I found her in the broomshed."

Draco vividly recalls Potter ordering him come for me now, now! not five minutes previously.

"Well, well," he drawls, mocking. "Harry Potter, the control freak. How very... trivial."

Potter looks sharply at him, eyes hard and bright, now focused solely on Draco.

Draco gives him a tight, pretended smile. Now it's just how he likes it.

21. "And you need to go see Rupert from Culture and Education about the application form regulations..."

"I know, Gin, really. You even wrote it down for me. Don't worry." He grins and leans to kiss her nose. "Your irresponsible, forgetful husband will do his best not to forget why he's at the Ministry."

"Oh, Harry, I'm sorry," she hugs him and squeezes tight for a moment. "You'll do it, of course, but I am just so nervous, and it's usually Jack who..."

"It's all right, love. I'll be home for tea," he lets her go and taps her nose, once. "You just sit home and take care of yourself. If anything happens, you know..."

"I know, Harry," she cuts him off with exasperation. "I am perfectly capable..."

She pauses and they laugh together at the ridiculous conversation.

"Bye," he says and is off.

Rupert from CAE is, it turns out, just as Ginny has raved at least twice, a stout self-important nuisance of a man who apparently takes great personal satisfaction at being able to grate on Harry Potter's wife's nerves.

Harry finds it much less amusing.

After he's stood waiting for an hour and a half in front of the man's office door, because I have some urgent business, Mr Potter, would you wait outside, please? Thank you, Harry is quite through with this. He marches up the corridor to the door proclaiming Head of Department, and pointedly knocks twice.

He rarely does something of the sort. But when the circumstances necessitate it, it works like a charm.

Ms Young, a severe looking witch half-buried under stacks of parchment, acquires an amazed expression when Harry Potter walks in her office, and then, quickly, an affronted one.

"Oh, you should have seen his face when the two of us walked in!" Harry later tells Ron over excellent chicken with rice at a pub across the Ministry building. "The jerk. You'd say we are trying to raise the taxes or something."

Ron laughs and signals for the waiter.

"Tell me now," Harry prompts afterwards, "how you passed your second appraisal."

Ron's face lights up like the sun.

"I'm telling you, mate, this job was meant for me. I almost finished on top of the entire group... Have I told you about that moron Abercrombie? He beat me again by that tiny bit," he shows with a thumb and forefinger, "and it was because of the stupid Potions task, you know how awful the stuff it. Well, I swear the idiot has the handy books studied by heart! He's grating on everyone's nerves all the time. But he's utter crap at practice. I guess, dunno, no one told him that to be Head of Department he needs to be a field Auror first." Ron waves his fork to stress the words. "Can you imagine, yesterday I heard him complain how ugly and barbarian the charms we use are!"

Harry snorts. "He can always try and do the job with tea and cucumber sandwiches. Someone might see reason like that, you never know."

Ron laughs heartily at that. "Please, Mr Villain, Sir," he chirps in a mock, "don't you see that what you’re doing is wrong? We should all be good people – more cake? No? Are you sure? – and raise fluffy bunnies!"

The man at the nearby table shoots them an annoyed look; Harry is under the table with mirth.

"So how's my activist sister?" Ron asks as they pay.

"Rounder by the day," Harry beams. "Don't ask how much it takes me to keep her home, she's brimming with energy. I've been persuading her to leave James with your Mum once in a while, but it's no use." He rolls his eyes. "Jack's been sick this past week and guess who is running the circus she call an organisation."

Ron affects a solemn expression, pats Harry on the shoulder and utters with dead seriousness. "I warned you, mate. Once you give them the slightest chance, they are up on your head, riding herd on you."

Harry chortles.

"Aren't you going home?" Ron questions when Harry heads back with him to the staff entrance alley.

"I'll drop by Property and Revenue for a second first," Harry tries for nonchalance and fails miserably.

"About Malfoy Manor again? Harry!" Ron is silent for a moment. "When you first breached the subject with Property I almost thought you wanted the house for yourself. Merlin knows it'd be far saner than handing it back to Malfoy."

"You must be joking," Harry laughs with voice at that. "And do what, exactly, with the house once I take it? Simply own it? Ginny won't say the name if she has any choice, if I even suggest a visit to the place she'll take my head off. Speaking of which..." Harry glances meaningfully.

Ron nods. "Not a word."

"I saw Malfoy here last week," he continues after a pause. "He didn't look particularly pleased."

"Imagine that," Harry twists his lips in dark amusement. "How shall I rephrase his words for propriety's sake? Yes, he is mightily disgruntled at my intrusion." He winks, and Ron gives a not very flattering chortle.

"Oh, I like it already. You are annoying the hell out of the git by doing him a favour. How did he know it was you, though?"

"No idea. But he was apoplectic when he found me, oh his face!"

Ron wistfully imagines for a moment. "Damn," he says slowly. "I'd pay lots to see that. Why does he object anyway? I wouldn't, Merlin knows," he finishes slowly.

"Not sure," Harry tells him, suddenly serious. "I think he really believed that if he atoned enough, he’d earn it back for himself.

"Atone? He's never looked the sort." Ron pauses, eyes focused ten years into the past. "Bloody hell, Harry, I bet he doesn't even know the word!"

Harry makes to say something, then stops. "Well." He speaks eventually. It's nearly time for them to split. "Let’s say then that I like annoying Malfoy more than I like our moron of a Minister, who has some intriguing proprietary ideas about that house."

22. Draco's face is impassive. He is standing between the two tables where the Transfiguration OWL exam is taking place, hands clasped loosely behind his back. He's been through the ordeal three times already, enough for him to be able to see that sadly, this year will mark his first failed student.

A pity.

He knows, with the certainty of one who's done it, how easily focus lapses in the stressful conditions of an exam. He also knows now, with the viewpoint of an adult, that examiners recognise magical nervous shaking, and don’t punish it too severely. But they can see from twenty paces insufficient study, and there's no leniency for that.

He's tried, through terror and forced tuition and additional homework, all the means available to him, to ensure that some study takes place. And yet he's failed. It's almost amusing how much visceral shame he feels.

The boy gets up and chances a glance towards Draco's unmoving profile before scampering away: it's clear, in the defensive hunch of teenage shoulders they both know what the result will be.

He leaves for home late. Save for the single smudge on his record book, he expects an excellent array of results, and a full NEWT course. It fills him with ridiculous amount of self-satisfaction to know that these children, who've whispered and pointed during his first months on campus, have overcome their parents' prejudice to an extent and taken him and the subject seriously.

He's stood up the whole day, fifty-three students trembling their way through the examination, and now he sits gratefully in the waiting carriage. The Thestrals look uncharacteristically subdued, and Draco fleetingly recalls that the current game keeper leaves the school once the exams are over.

He opens the Evening Prophet. The carriage moves at a slow pace he doesn't mind. The front page screams about a charity the Minister is very actively involved in now, two months pre-voting. Draco knows he'll lose just looking at his forced, terrified grin. Second page digs extensively into a corruption scandal within the DMLE, which Draco skips with a snort. Page six bemoans the failings of contemporary education, and Draco whistles softly with amusement while skimming it. Page nine informs him of the ground breaking fact Harry Potter has started work as a Curse-Breaker for a private bureau, something Draco's known for at least a couple of months now. The carriage stops and Draco folds the paper; the anti-Apparition ward is no longer around him. He says the word to send the Thestrals back, and Apparates home.

A shower and a change of clothes later Draco starts looking for Miriam. She's been in Greece these past three weeks, and he secretly hopes she'll grant him a few days of undivided attention – a faint plan involving Scorpius, Pansy's twins and a play visit begins to form in his mind.

He finds her in her bathroom, in the tub, hair done up, short curls forming around her face with the damp.

"Hello, stranger," he whispers from behind her and lays a kiss on the spot where neck and shoulder connect. "How was your trip?"

She tells him, with an even tone and no unnecessary detail, while he hums at the appropriate places and tests if all the skin of throat and collar tastes the same. He begins to rub her neck and she makes a soft noise of approval. He laughs quietly and teases the lobe of her ear with his tongue.

"I know you are having an affair," she says.

Draco freezes on the spot. It's a horrible mix of shame because he's cheated, a sensation he's revisited thousands of times, and terror at being found out, a feeling he hasn't thought probable.

If she knows...

"I don't know who she is..." Miriam continues calmly, and Draco knows the added shame of profound relief. "And I don't want false words. But if your son," she stresses the words, "ever even suspects of it, that will be the end of us."

Five seconds of ringing silence. She talks with the tone of someone who's known of adultery before she has known of the birds and the bees, someone who's been expected to marry politically and has been brought up to fit the role and not resent the particularities, someone who's lived the pain as a child and now sets down the safeguard rules for her own.

Draco hates himself.

Then the moment of tenseness dissipates, and she presses her head back into his frozen hand. Her form has relaxed and she asks, with a wholly different tone, "How were the exams?"

Draco needs several moments before he can either make his shaking hands comply and continue the backrub, or move his lips to answer.

He wonders how long she's felt it, how long she's known. She hasn't entered a political marriage. The fact he has caused her to remember the accepted truths of one, woven into her upbringing, makes him nauseous.

It's many minutes afterwards, when they are lying tangled in their bed, heavy with sleepiness. When Draco lays a reverent kiss on her shoulder tip and says, very seriously:

"I have never, ever lied to you. Never." He searches her eyes, dark in the candle light, and repeats the words soundlessly. "Do you understand that?"

She nods, and smiles, but the gesture carries a weight it never has, before.

I love you, Draco thinks helplessly, and even though it's true, Draco daren't say it aloud.

23. "That'd be a bloody hard thing to do," Ron notes with his mouth full of scone and blueberry jam.

Hermione rolls her eyes, "As if anything good is ever easy. It's a brilliant idea, Ginny."

It's a fine autumn Sunday, and the linden in the yard is already a vibrant, bright yellow all the way through.

"Actually," Hermione continues, sipping from her coffee, "I've had some ideas along the same line myself, only I don't think I'll have the time to."

Ron laughs. "What did you say?" He curls a hand around his ear and leans towards Hermione. "Could you repeat, please? I don't think I got that right."

They all laugh, most of all Hermione, and then she smacks his hand away.

"Hermione, dear." Ron speaks solemnly. "I think you've defected."

"If I have, it's all your fault, Ron Weasley!" Hermione declares among fresh peals of laughter. "It's a serious thing we are talking about and you are turning it into a circus!"

Ron affects an attentive look. Hermione jabs a finger to his side and he dissolves into giggles. She turns to Ginny again. "At any rate, I will always find the time if you need any help."

"Phew." Ron imitates swiping sweat off his brow. "That's the Hermione we all know and love. I am so relieved."

This, of course, gives way to another bout of antics, and it's a while before they return to Ginny's plan to get a governmental subsidy in order to expand the projects of her organisation.

Ron and Hermione have been married a little more than three years, and Harry has just bought the gift for Ginny and his first anniversary – when they are all together, though, it doesn't show one bit that adolescence is long in the past.

It feels good. Safe and warm and familiar, and Harry takes special care to nurture their weekly Sunday breakfasts into a tradition.

"We plan to see a law advisor, of course," Harry puts in eventually, "because we all know how stingy the Ministry is, especially on low publicity projects."

"You know," Ron waves his fork, chewing, "it might have been easier if you named the thing something with Potter in it."

"But it wouldn't have been mine then," Ginny answers with voice brooking no opposition. "And besides, it would have been as trite as naming your teddy bear after a music star. We weren't even dating at the time."

"I think," Hermione says slowly, "that you should talk to Zacharias Smith about the legislative part. He has an impressive reputation and ruthless daring."

Ron makes a face and picks a third scone.

"Ron, put that scone down. What are you, a starved stray dog?" Hermione reaches impatiently and takes it for herself.

"Hey, I’m a growing boy!" Ron whines.

Harry, who's tossed with nightmares all night, has almost dozed off in the warm cocoon of their collected presence.

"Oh, yes," Hermione notes with affectionate irony. "And if you grow any further we'll need a new bed."

"What are you, a tyrant?" Ron grumbles with no real rancour.

Harry slips into thoughts about the bad dreams. It's almost stronger than him, this urge to analyse them come morning, to prove to himself they are merely figments of a bleak imagination. He likes to believe they might go away if he dismantles them image by image, if he figures out the reason.

They never do.

And the reason is pretty obvious, anyway – what with the incessant images of fire and woods and searching for people he can never find. Harry is beginning to fear he will never move beyond these constant reminders of the war that everyone around him seems to have already buried deep. It's a utterly depressing experience, waking up to Ginny's concerned, uncomprehending face, and needing more than anything to clutch her close and make sure she never goes away, only to have her protest in puzzlement.

"Look!" Ron exclaims minutes later, among the rustle of paper. "Narcissa Malfoy has kicked the bucket."

"Ron!" Hermione chides and leans towards him to read over his shoulder.

This pulls Harry abruptly out of his reverie. "What?" he says, voice a little rough from silence. "When?"

"Last night," Hermione answers, eyes running along the article. "Hasn't been sick before that... 'Cause of death is unclear as of this morning, but an inside informant denies Mediwazards from St. Mungos's to have been called. ... The deceased has been living on family property in London for the past five years, with her notorious Death Eater husband, Lucius Malfoy, 53, and her never properly convicted son, Draco, 25,'" Hermione reads aloud. "I didn't know they were in London. What about the...?"

She doesn't say the word and she doesn't need to. The mood in the room gets substantially colder, and her voice is brittle underneath the effort.

"Malfoy lost most of his land and money during the post-war trials," Harry explains calmly. His pulse is very heavy in his throat. "I think it's a flat somewhere in Belgravia they live in."

"It beats me why you remember this," Ginny says, and even though she's smiling, her tones are steely and stilted.

Harry mutters something meaningless and looks down at the Prophet. Narcissa Malfoy's face is younger than he has ever seen it before, beautiful and composed; he remembers it tense, grime-streaked and painfully focused, as she lies for him.

The funeral will be on Tuesday.

Harry hasn't told Ginny he will come here today. It would have been nothing but pointless nerve-grating, a fight to drag up countless unpleasant memories better left buried, and he would have come anyway. He feels like it’s an odd form of duty, to be here and see off a person who has saved his life. Intellectually, he tells himself it was an act of sheer self-preservation, but the sense he owes something is nevertheless strong in him.

Of all the things Harry might have chosen not to know at twenty-five, the burial chant would have been an absolute first. But here he is, capable of performing the circuitous ritual all by himself: he knows the steps, the words, the emptiness.

It's a bleak realisation.

He has skipped the oppressive gathering before ceremony itself and come directly to the cemetery. It's a beautiful place, willow trees and the last of the autumn flowers, and Harry thinks with a morbid yearning that he wants to be laid at a peaceful place like this.

There are pops of Apparition and chatter, and Harry stares a little, eyebrows high: it is a certainly an upbeat procession, to the point of indecency. He's not sure...

Then he stops. Malfoy, clad in black from top to bottom, white as a sheet and stone-faced, Apparates directly to where the others have already gathered. The sermon begins.

Harry's throat closes up, but it's not the words. Malfoy looks about to topple over, hands clasped in front of him – Harry is sure they shake, that all of the man shakes.

The chant sounds high and crisp and final, and at some point people fall abruptly silent, visibly uncomfortable and maybe ashamed. When the ritual is over, they obviously wait the shortest possible time before beginning to leave.

Malfoy stands there, eyes shut tight, and now, close up, Harry can clearly see the tears streaking down his face.

Harry forces himself to be calmly, although the sight makes his throat close up.

"I am sorry for your loss, Malfoy," he says.

Malfoy looks up sharply, too fast to cover up the vulnerability. After a second, though, the expression is changed by one of utter fury.

Harry knows how easy it is to hide grief with rage.

24. Draco is lying on the couch in Potter's flat. The windows are wide open and the breeze, passing through the cooling ward is pure decadency.

Potter himself, sitting cross-legged on the floor, is stringing together unintelligible hisses with the unfocused stare of someone mentally far away.

Draco, who's been listening to Potter calm himself with the wyvern for a decade now, can't say what any of it means. But he always recognises when Potter's got it right. It's not just that the wyvern reacts then; it's something in the sound itself, the pitch and weave of it, suddenly sinuous and teasing and full, like a wet satin ribbon over flushed naked skin.

It takes Potter longer today to get it right.

"You are ridiculous," Draco speaks with his eyes closed; he can tell without peeping that Potter has looked up.

"I’m persistent," Potter answers.

"No, you’re stupid."

"And you are blond. Life's hard, no one is perfect."

Potter's voice is amused, calm, and the next hiss is the right timbre: it slips directly under Draco's skin. They are silent for a while, and Draco revels in the first stirrings of lust in his body. It's so perfectly familiar, this situation; the hisses, the bicker, the sex that will inevitably follow. It all helps Draco focus, tones down the unease and soothes away the anxiety.

How fast the years have passed, unnoticed. He announced he's taking the year off at the last faculty meeting, and now the summer is already half-over and his son begins Hogwarts in September. He doesn't feel old enough to have a child of eleven. Four years have gone in teaching, twelve years of marriage, nineteen since...

Silent terror grips him anew.

"You'll never teach yourself to speak it again," he says aloud.

"I've been talking with the wyvern for years now," Potter says cheerfully.

"Oh, yes," Draco sneers, "once in a blue moon and if it's not raining."

"We are in a great mood, aren't we?" Potter asks and leaves the beast alone for the moment. "Chirpy and optimistic, my very favourite. Is there an occasion or is it just for me?"

Draco shrugs. Maybe he will be able to persuade Miriam for a holiday, somewhere beautiful and sunny, just the two of them for a while.

"Could it be..." Potter is near now; Draco feels himself beginning to harden. "That one Miriam Malfoy has finally warred her way into a certain government-supported project about a Muggleborns summer camp?"

Draco makes a derogatory noise at the back of his throat. "She's a professor on Muggle-Wizard relations for Merlin's sake. Do you know how many such projects she’s involved in? Your wife's is just the next on the list."

A hand has slipped between under his belt, and he inhales slowly, deeply, to allow further access; another is working his buttons open. Draco lets Potter proceed and doesn't move. Potter undresses him gradually, knowingly, and doles out caresses freely. Draco feels progressively floatier, disconnected, safe. There are fingers around his cock and teeth on his nipple, and he knows he can let go all the way and never fall.

It's sheer irony how much he's come to trust Potter. Potter, with his smart fingers now digging deep, his unsophisticated mouth whispering random filth in Draco's ear, his cock feeling so good in him.

When Draco finally comes, it's like a controlled train wreck.

He opens his eyes to the last flickers of afterglow in his belly. Potter is lying by his side, head propped on his bent arm.

"Miriam knows I am cheating on her," Draco hears himself say.

Surprise flashes through Potter's eyes, along with faint but evident amazement, and Draco abruptly pulls away.

"Dear God, Potter." His voice is oddly bitter. "You are so shallow. So full of yourself," he spits out and begins dressing.

Why did he think they've reached some sort of understanding? They are still speaking different languages, poles apart as night and day, twenty years and counting. The image of Potter's surprise that Draco cares for his wife flashes through Draco's mind anew and makes him angrier. He moves to leave the room.

"Malfoy! Malfoy, wait!" Potter calls behind him, following, and then, "Draco!"

He stops. And turns.

This is the first time Potter has said his name aloud. Aloud and purposeful and in a clear head.

"I’m sorry," Potter says, still naked. "I..." he continues, then stops. "I was just surprised you told me," he lies lamely after a moment. Draco laughs with derision.

"You lie like a child," he says, because he can read Potter like a book, and has been able to, all their lives.

"I know," Potter speaks quietly, looking down. "How... When did she tell you?"

"A year ago," Draco answers, not certain why he’s breached the subject at all.

Potter looks at him with sharp, suddenly knowing eyes, having figured out on his own the reason for Draco’s unease.

"Malfoy..." he begins, with the quiet comprehension of someone who's been there. But that's not what Draco needs. He springs forward and takes a brutal kiss, all teeth and the faint shame of being found so transparently sentimental. Potter lets him with only a half-swallowed sound at the back of his throat.

Only much later Draco hears a wistful, barely audible:

"They come back to you, after they grow up." Fingers thread through Draco's hair, delicate and unrealised. "Or so the saying goes".

25. "It wasn't that bad," Harry says the moment they appear in the dark back alley.

"Wasn't that bad?" Ginny laugh and gives him a sharp jab into the ribs; he hardly feels it beneath the thick winter robes. "Wasn't that bad? Harry James Potter, you are a horrible, shameless liar!"

He stops suddenly and she, carried by inertia, pulls him forward. They stumble and slip on the ice, and remain standing only thanks to the helpful lamp post.

"Well," Harry says when they are stable again. "The pie was almost edible."

She giggles helplessly until they have to stop again. He keeps her upright, she's laughing so bad.

"A bolt from the skies... any moment now," she pants eventually and flings her arms around his neck. "Oh, Harry. I can't make a passable dinner to save my life but you are bravely defending each failure."

She tiptoes closer, her breath sweet with chocolate.

"The pie really was better this time," he whispers. "Almost..."

They kiss. It's a slow, delicate caress, and she sighs softly before opening wider under his lips. Her small warm body in his arms is a pointed contrast to the bitter winter evening. Someone calls at them, jeers and whistles, and they break apart. She smiles up at him, lips moist and eyes sparkling.

"Almost edible, yeah," she winks, and he needs a moment to recall the conversation. "But you brought chocolate anyway."

"It was excellent desert." He defends himself with pretended fastidiousness. "And I was eyeing that brandy of yours ever since you showed it to me."

"Oh, you scheming knave!" she cries with very convincing indignation, and swats him playfully on the shoulder, nearly slipping again.

He holds her upright, their misted breaths mingling together in a puff of warmth between them.

"You, sir, shamelessly deceived this poor girl into giving you her last brandy bottle! Oh, I have nothing, how shall I pay the rent?" she continues the theme, and he affects a villainy cackle.

"You are all mine now, little match girl, to do with as I please, or I shall leave you and your old, sick uncle out in the snow." He twirls an imaginary moustache, and they smile together afterwards.

"No one who's come to me this year will spend the winter homeless," she tells him with the quiet pride of a job well-done and snuggles closer, arms around his waist.

"Hermione will receive the results of her application to St. Mungos' programme of Applied Mediwizardry tomorrow," Harry says in a moment. "Has Ron told you?" "Yeah. Lest she chews through her fingers." She laughs. "Even though we all know she's made it."

She looks up at him and his heart skitters for a moment. The brightness of her smile, the easy idealistic faith in the future, the magical glow of the streetlamp in her hair. The steady, focused notion that life goes on, stronger and happy and better.

She glances at the sky. It has started to snow. He looks up with her and they stand like that, together, watching the white snowflakes brought to brightness by the city lights, coming silent and pure from the endless darkness beyond.

Harry thinks for an unwanted second how hard it is to talk under an Invisibility cloak in the snow.

"It's so beautiful," she sighs, and he snaps out of the hole he's fallen in.

They stand like that, the snow falling in their faces; Harry forbids himself to think it's cold and wet.

Suddenly, he wants nothing more than to absorb her persistent ability to put one foot in front of the other and move forward. To not look back. To Apparate into a dark back alley and ask what's wrong when he looks around himself twice. To hear her say she's going to see her parents and not wince because she'll see George there. To enjoy the first December snow like the inner child she still hasn’t fully outgrown.

He wants to be able, like her, to live.

"Marry me," he speaks aloud before he's fully realised what he's about to do.

She looks sharply at him, laughing, living, glowing, and so, so beautiful in her vibrancy, and for longer than a moment a frozen, terrified part of him screams what the hell is he doing, why on earth he thinks he deserves, what right does he have... vertigo hits him like a freight train.

And it's her holding him upright now, even without realising it.

"Of course," she smiles, quiet, content and certain. "In the spring, when everything is green and alive."

26. The fact that Draco misses his intended point of Apparition doesn't improve his mood one iota. He glares ominously at the ordinary hallway and barges into the sitting room, where Potter is already pacing by the window.

That they have got their notifying letters and immediately done the same thing only pushes Draco further north of reason. He slams the door behind himself, Potter doesn't even flinch.

"If any of your sons ever touches mine again," Draco's voice is hardly more than a hiss through clenched teeth, "McGonagall won't be fast enough to stop me from making them very sorry myself."

Potter has stopped and is leaning back on the windowsill, arms crossed, wand dangling with pretended nonchalance from his fingers. A spark leaks from the tip at Draco's words, nothing more than twitch of fingers at the height of tension.

Draco's eyes flicker to it for a second, registering. The air begins to gather the faintly ozone feel of Potter's anger, and the wyvern hides in its artificial cave with the hiss of scales over glass.

Potter's expression is stony and Draco can practically her him count breaths in his head – he's got better at pushing his heart away from the sleeve, but Draco knew him when he was nothing but emotion, woven from hot blood and foolhardiness.

"So mature," Potter says very quietly and pushes himself off the window with an abrupt gesture bellying the calm. "To threaten to beat a child."

"My son has a broken arm and nose," Draco spits. His arms have begun to shake.

"Your perfect son cast a hex he should never have heard of." Potter's composure is quickly cracking; Draco can see a vein pulsing at his temple. "Over Quidditch match scores," he continues. "Is this in your blood, Malfoy? Petty vengeance when you can't admit defeat?"

"Only there was nothing to be defeated about, was there?" Draco sneers. "My son had just won his first match as the Seeker of his team. It was hardly him who leaped to physical maiming even before they had properly landed. Maybe your Chaser brat is the one covering defeat?"

"Oh, please!" Potter growls. "I know best of all how insufferable you get during a match! Only, they’re on the same team for god's sake!"

Draco’s laugh rings with derision. "Same team, my arse! Being accidentally in the same house doesn’t make them on the same team, Potter! Your son lost the Seeker's trials if memory serves – loss a bit hard to take? Chaser spot too low for his tender ego?"

Potter swings, just when Draco expects him to.

"You are so utterly predictable," he sneers. The window rattles behind Potter; nothing's touched it. Draco suppresses the small spark in his belly and answers the blow. They land on the floor eventually, and like always, Potter is the one to land a successful punch first. Draco's vision goes grey for a moment.

Next thing he knows Potter's hand is in his trousers, bringing his cock to hardness with brutal fingers. Draco gasps and squirms, closer or away even he can't tell.

He's panted out a spell even before the idea is solid in his head: his wand, in its holder along his thigh, reacts more feebly than it would otherwise, but the effect on Potter is enough for Draco to flip them over. By the time Potter has shaken the mind debilitating spell off, he's far too gone into other sensations to fight Draco's dominance.

They've had sex of all ways and forms, in all the permutations of power balance, in all states of mind. Draco can practically tell Potter's every thought by the tightening of his lips, the colour of his eyes, the delicate shift of static in the air.

Of all the emotions, he knows the finer points of anger best. And maybe, sometimes, desperation.

By the time he penetrates Potter, Draco's rage has been almost fully transformed and expended. He relishes the sensation, the opportunity he is given to let go and feed all the negativity to someone else, someone who'll balance him out and take it all and not break.

He is arching back, hands on Potter's shoulders, barely moving at all. Eyes closed, the feeling just builds in him, a tingle in his nipples and stomach and head, a tightness, a pressure, complete and encompassing and giddy freedom. Fucking Potter, making him say Draco's name without really meaning to, making himself wait until the very last second – it’s almost as good as letting Potter fuck him until there is nothing left for him to offer.

Draco's nails sink into Potter's skin, and Potter is not entirely successfully struggling underneath him. Neither of their sons will stop being who he is, and this is the first major fight they’re stupid enough to have in public. The boys will become better-versed at stealth as they grow, and Draco, maybe Potter too, can silently reassure himself that the two of them haven’t entirely changed. That the past – what part of it matters – isn’t lost in their present.

The windows rattle and a candle is lit; it's not Draco's doing. He shivers, silently, and comes undone.

27. Harry waits by the fountain in the middle of Diagon Alley. The sunlight is spinning a dome of rainbows out of the drops, and a child is trying to float a boat in the rapidly rippling surface. Ginny is already ten minutes late, but it's a fine day and he doesn't mind: in the busy street he can be safe from the endless fawning of the last two weeks. Three years since the war... it seems like a horribly long time.

There's a crack, much louder than an Apparition should rightly be, and in the middle of the stream of people Draco Malfoy appears. He looks like Harry has only seen him once during all the school years he's spent keeping an eye on the git – white as old bones, chest heaving, irises so light they make the bloodshot stare terrifying.

People jostle him, exasperated, hurrying, but he doesn't move; Harry, twenty feet away stands up and makes a step forward without meaning to. Malfoy is rocking to and fro, slowly, or maybe shaking very badly, and Harry suddenly recalls today was the appeal hearing on the matter of the Malfoy property.

The result is perfectly clear.

Just then Malfoy looks up, straight at Harry, and his face twists into an expression too complex to be discernible, a flash of bitter, utter defeat and sharp anger. He Apparates with forcefulness that leaves only sparks in his wake.

"Harry! There you are," a voice calls, excited, behind Harry, and he turns to a flushed Ginny. "Sorry I'm late," she continues with a wrinkled nose, "but Jack's been having a lot on his plate lately, and you know how work eats up your time..."

Actually, he doesn't. But he smiles; the smile of one who hasn't talked to a sane, familiar person in days, and lets her chatter about Jack – the first person she ever helped to, who follows her like a dog and is more productive in his adoration than the two dozen other volunteers Ginny's charity organisation relies on, combined.

They've talked about a stroll and a late lunch, but he swallows the instinctive opposition and gives her his arm when she suggests to Side-Along them.

Harry appears a bit dazed and needs to remind himself all is well, twice, before he can focus and see they are in the middle of a perfectly green meadow.

"Ginny!"

She laughs: there is faint breeze in her hair and the sun makes it pure fire. "I bet we'll be safe from nosy people."

He can't argue with that.

They walk a track Harry wouldn't be able to identify by himself, but obviously one Ginny goes down often. It's a golden summer day, one of those so picture perfect it inevitably looks surreal. Harry, prepared for a pub, soon sheds his robes, as light as they are, and Shrinks them in his pocket. Ginny, he only now notices, is in cuffed shorts just up her knees and sandals.

The way she walks up the hill in front of him only adds to the view.

"Harry Potter! Are you staring at my arse?" she throws behind her shoulder, amused, and he feels himself colour.

"Not at all," he lies bravely anyway, but the tone admits defeat. "I was just wondering where you got those ...erm, shoes from."

She stops, hands on her waist. "You walk first then."

"So that you can ogle me?" He fakes indignation, and she pretends to be affronted. They laugh together afterwards. It’s a curiously satisfying experience.

After an hour or so they reach what has apparently been the destination. Harry has already shared the high points of his driving lessons, and a few anecdotes about the exam itself. Ginny, who's decidedly unlike her father when it comes to Muggles, listens with amusement but not much understanding.

They settle under the shadow of an oak tree alone atop a slight rise in the endless field of grass. It's one of those places that seems plucked from a picture postcard and amaze with sheer substantial reality. She takes out a miniature basket from her pocket, and it's not long before a picnic is all settled.

"Wow, I didn’t know you could cook," Harry says, impressed, and she gives him a sardonic glance as she sits down.

"Um," he lets out. "Not you, then?"

"I wouldn't eat something I've cooked," she grins.

He laughs. "It can't be that bad, now, can it? There are some pretty basic things you can't not know."

"Oh, Harry, you utter optimist," she tells him, popping a cube of melon into her mouth. "You just haven't seen how wrong I can make even the simplest things turn."

Harry raises an eyebrow in disbelief. Then he reminds himself that she's still living with Molly, and really, why learn to cook then?

They talk and eat and joke together. Afterwards, when all the food has been eaten, and Harry is gripped by the drowsy laziness of the summer afternoon, they lie on their backs and gaze up at the rare clouds pushed about the skies by a wind they can't feel on the ground. It's pleasant and quiet and so different from the last two weeks of obtrusive festivities Harry has just gone through.

"The sun will set soon," Ginny notes; Harry hasn't felt the time pass at all.

"I don't like sunsets," he admits, keeping focused on the here and now, on the pleasant mood of the afternoon.

She rolls on her stomach, chin propped on her hand, and looks at him curiously. "Really? More of a sunrise person, then? Well, it figures," she ends thoughtfully. Locks spill down her shoulder and catch the light. Harry breathes calm and controlled and collects them carefully.

"Actually, I am not much into the sun thing," he says slowly and continues playing with her hair: it's silky soft. She inclines her head to the side to allow him better angle.

"No?" she purrs.

"No," he confirms. "It's... too much fire?"

She laughs. "Harry Potter, lover of all things calm and secure, staying well away from heat and blaze."

"Yeah." The warmth in his chest is easy and comfortable, and he barely breathes lest it go away. How does he explain to her about flames and boiling hell and fiery dragons breathing the acrid smell of burnt books and flesh? "I never asked where we are," he says instead, to turn her mind away from the topic.

"Wiltshire," she answers after the smallest pause, and his ears perk up.

"Isn't this where..." he begins before his mind catches up with his mouth, and then stops abruptly.

"Does it matter?" she evades the question with the bright cheer he's come to recognise as the single discernible part of her protective shell.

They gaze up, silent, a little longer, and Harry can't help but remember Malfoy's grey-tinged look of defeat from earlier today, the stricken expression of reality finally ramming home in full.

"I hope they take his all," Ginny burst unexpectedly, with vindictiveness sharp as glass. "The icy spineless bastard. All the land, all the money, the clothes off his back, seeing as how this is the sole thing he cares about."

"I've never seen the house on the outside," Harry hears himself say, in the need to share some part of the past he still carries and in a bout of sheer masochism.

"Who cares what the house looks like!" she exclaims, closing up, denying him access, and sits up, chin on her knees. "It's a horrible, empty place."

Harry looks up at her determined, stubborn face, and suddenly knows with utter certainty that she's seen the place. And that it's beautiful.

By the time she's cheered up again, and he's resolved to go see this place he keeps on dreaming about, this place where horrible things have happened to him, the sun has set without either of them noticing.

28. Draco has been listening to the beast hiss for so long and to Potter trying to regain control of a language he's forgotten the mechanics of, that he can almost, almost taste the meaning of the sounds at the back of his mind.

The wyvern is unaccountably sociable today, the gentle, soothing sound of her one-sided conversation twining incessantly around Draco, trying to make him understand. He doesn't. It's peculiar how the snake's usage of the language doesn't have quite the same effect on him as Potter's does. Yet more so is how secretly relieved Draco is of the fact.

He stands by the window, a fraction of an inch away from the edge of the wyvern's table. The enchantments on it, identification and warning spells triggered by touch, are both Potter's and his. They are so familiar, comfortable, Draco barely notices them anymore. He is certain he can meander through the room under a Confundus and never touch the table. It's perfectly clear, to both of them, that any silent calls are at this point of time nothing but fully conscious.

Who would have thought.

Draco is as often alone in the flat as he is with Potter. It's a calm place, chosen and furnished with the idea of a sanctuary, something Draco can well understand. It's come to be the same to him, too; the small ironies of fate.

The noise of someone unlocking the door sets Draco on edge for a moment, before he relaxes: he smiles a little. The fact that they both come here when they feel like it, and still manage to coincide more often than not oughtn't be that amusing, but it is.

Potter opens the door, he's carrying a grocery bag and a look that puts Draco on red alert. Potter pushes the door closed with his foot, and simply leans on it for a second, eyes closed.

"You’re here," he speaks after a minute, voice hollow, not all that surprised.

"Yes," Draco answers anyway. It's a painful, gravelly sound, followed by the need to cough up a lung.

A complicated expression flutters over Potter's features, misery or shame Draco can't say that fast.

"I was hungry," Draco continues after a pause, and Potter nods, once, appreciating the words for the invitation they are. That's when Draco loses the fight and dissolves into wet hacking. He feels queasy, afterwards, it's so awful, and Potter has somewhat pulled himself together and is regarding him with searching eyes, noting the full winter attire Draco is still huddled in.

"You haven't undressed," Potter says, voice lifeless.

"I'm..." Draco begins, then closes hot, prickling eyes for a moment and inhales through his mouth. The urge to sneeze subsides. "It's cold," he finishes lamely.

Potter's gaze flickers to the fireplace and the flames that burst into existence are rather more forceful than the circumstances necessitate.

Potter disappears in the kitchen, and Draco follows silently several minutes later.

"Take the robes off," Potter says, even. "I've put a warming ward."

Draco does, and yes, it's warm. That doesn't mean he doesn't sneeze.

"I've got Pepper-Up, you know," Potter says neutrally, watching closely, knowing perfectly well Draco could have taken it at home too. Draco, despite trying very hard, doesn't fully manage to suppress the shiver at the name.

"No," he denies, a tad too quickly. "I ... don't abide the stuff."

Potter regards him intently, then realisation surfaces, slow and brief and bleak in his eyes. "Oh." The tone is flat and scarily controlled, and Draco stares, eyes widening, astonished. Potter looks away.

Draco doesn't think it's common knowledge Pepper-Up makes the post-Cruciatus tremor go away. They are silent for the longest instant.

Potter spells the French bread into even, thin slices, and that's all the magic he uses. Draco has seen him calm himself with cookery and manual labour enough times before and just watches.

Cream cheese of a brand Draco has never heard gets spread on the bread, and on top of it – the sliced rolls out of a box labelled crab sticks. The smell of fish is tangible in the air, but not too sharp. Then Potter cuts open – a what was the word, plastic? – film over something white.

"What's that?" Draco asks. The label as inscriptions in several languages, one of them claiming 'fresh cheese'. It doesn't look like any cheese Draco has seen.

"Bulgarian fresh cheese," Potter answers, less rigid than five minutes ago. "The traditional version sits in brine and is salty, this here is the unripe version."

Draco has barely looked up with question when Potter shrugs: "Hermione discovered it during her exchange programme there."

Draco nicks a slice. It's... intriguing.

Potter tears open a bag of green olives with almonds stuffed in them – Draco finds the idea of Potter liking olives oddly incongruent – and carefully extricates the almond from each before slicing the soft green flesh over his sandwich. More cream cheese on top of that, and a tiny squirt of something so red as no natural food can possibly be, out of a bottle claiming to be chilli.

"Dear God, Potter," Draco says with a face when Potter divides the sandwiches into two plates and pushes one across the kitchen table. "Did your wife show you this monstrosity?"

Potter tenses up infinitesimally – so that’s where the problem is, Draco realises – and says "Shut up," before biting into his first.

Draco watches him chew. Potter melts with each successive bite to an extent that persuades Draco to taste it – only the tiniest bite – with barely curbed disgust. The taste of the olive blooms on his tongue, tangy and rich, followed by the understated mushy background of something bland, and then the unfamiliar taste of the cheeses with the twist of chilli, turning the bread into a sweet delight.

Draco won't even admit it's good. But he keeps silent and doesn't lie, either, and Potter gives him a glance of tired amusement.

It's much later, food demolished, bellies full, when Potter says, twirling a knife in his hands, "Ginny told me she's pregnant again."

Draco keeps silent and goes to pour them both some water. For someone who's so clearly longed for a family all the time Draco has been mocking him at school, Potter takes the news of each subsequent child with growing terror and anxiety.

Draco, who’s lost people closer to him than Potter has, thinks he can understand the fear behind that. This doesn't stop the tiniest voice of envy in his head.

"I reacted all wrong," Potter adds when Draco puts a glass of water in front of him.

Draco has read about the barely saved late pregnancy miscarriage of the last one in the papers. God alone knows what Potter has said.

Silence stretches familiar, and Potter's eyes go slightly unfocused. Draco feels himself slip into the cocoon of the heating spell.

"I think I know of a spell to take care of that cold you have," Potter says much, much later.

29. Harry wakes up gasping. He's tangled in bedclothes and has managed somehow to crash his way to the floor. The sun is shining directly into his face, and all he can see is brightness, all he can smell is the ripe acrid smell of blood and smoke. His body is clenched in a rigour that doesn't let up, as if every muscle has gone to sleep contracted. Harry forces himself to breathe; it's harder than it should be. Each exhale ends in a tiny, high keen. Eventually, when recalcitrant muscles relent and obey the commands to relax, to move, anything, they hurt with vengeance that steals his breath anew.

It's a lifetime before he's dragged himself to the bathroom, with its cool, tender artificial light and smell of fresh soap, and he's almost managed to stop his breathing from sounding like a beaten child's.

The first jet of heat to hit his back nearly makes him fall down with relief, melt with the down after an adrenaline rush. He holds on to a rack probably meant for something else, and focuses on staying upright. The stream of water is scalding, merciful, cleansing, and he stands without moving until every memory of the dream is washed away, until all he can feel is tasteless hot water, until he's persuaded himself his eyes prickle from the steam. The blend of images and memories, spells and pains is gone, for the moment, and he is thankful beyond expression.

He is late meeting Hermione.

When he finally turns up to the appointed bench, she's let her head fall back and is basking in the bright sunlight.

Harry winces, despite the attempts not to.

"Been waiting for long?" he manages, his voice still retaining some small trace of roughness.

"I knew I should have brought you a clock for your birthday," she jokes in an answer, but otherwise remains unmoving. Her voice is calm and collected in a way he hasn't heard it in months.

He sits down, careful not to cast shadow over her upturned face. "Maybe next year," he says, and she smiles.

"So?" he prompts in a few minutes, and she sits up straight:

"Do you mind if we go for a walk? I think my bottom has gained the shape of a hospital chair."

Harry says okay, though he'd much prefer a quiet shadowy place, and maybe a double whiskey.

So they walk; it's a workday and the park is mostly empty. It's a perfect autumn day, maybe the last of them: the sky is brightest blue and impossibly high, and the last of the unfallen leaves put a striking contrast to it. It's a day like a diamond, sparkling and shiny but cold, and Hermione puts her mittens on when she stands.

"They've come to the best possible state," Hermione talks. Harry, so relieved to be in human company and so focused on the familiarity of her voice, needs to force himself to really listen to the words about her parents.

"I can't have hoped for a better solution, or so the doctor tells me." Her smile is a bit wistful. She, quite like Harry himself, hasn't been able to fully eradicate the Muggle terms from her speech. "I guess it was foolish of me to hope everything would be as if the charms never happened."

He puts an arm around her shoulders and they walk like that for a while; it's as much to offer her his silent support as it is to remind Harry himself the war is well and truly done with.

"They have accepted what has happened," Hermione continues. "Mother is even talking the other day how she'd like return to her practice." Hermione smiles with a slight effort. "It's much better than the things the doctor said on the first visit, about how done by an unqualified caster such as me the spell had probably messed up their minds beyond repair, how horribly irresponsible I had been... not that I hadn't."

A glint from a dewdrop in the grass flashes in Harry's eye just as he says she's always been good at medical magic.

"You know what," she tells him immediately, and thus misses the way Harry has paled at the sharp glitter of light. "He said something about talent, too, and that I should apply for a course."

White puffs of cloud are hanging in the skies like trails of cotton candy after a four-year-old, and Harry can barely breathe in the bright sunlight. So cheerful, so sharp, so unbearably happy.

"Hermione, are you hungry?" he asks with the barest note of desperation.

"I..." she begins and then looks at him. "Okay, then."

When ten minutes later they enter a Muggle pub Harry has grown comfortable with, she is already in full motherly mode.

"Harry, you should really move out of that horrible house. There are plenty of airy, spacious places you can buy for yourself, you know."

Harry nearly says, I already have, but the words, like each time before, stick at his tongue and move no further. He's had the flat for months now, a safe, isolated place he can always run to, and at that moment, when Hermione fusses over him, he realises he'll never tell any of them about it. About that small extension of the safety of his mind, where the past doesn't necessarily need to be ignored but where it can't hurt him.

He is twenty years old and has been keeping secrets from his best friends, the people who've risked their lives and families for him, so that he can have a place where not moving on is not a sin.

"Oh, Harry," he hears her say, as if through a great distance. "Have you been sleeping at all?"

"Like a baby," he lies, and realises he is shaking.

30. Miriam, who's been spending inordinate amounts of time compensating for the absence of the Weasleyette, comes home early.

Draco has just begun on the pile of essays gathered since the start of his first term back at Hogwarts after his sabbatical when she barges in, pale and tense.

"I think Potter's dead." Draco stares at her a full minute, meaningless buzz in his ears. Surely he's heard wrong...? There’s no way... he needs more than a minute to form an intelligent sound.

"What?!" he says. It's barely a whisper, but Miriam is too shaken herself to notice the oddity.

"Jack hasn't been in today, and no one at her house answers to Floo. If word is true, she's been at hospital this past week, not at home, and with pregnancy complications."

It takes Draco the longest time to comprehend that she is talking about Ginny Weasley. The relief that floods him at once is so strong, so unexpected, that is leaves his joints weak and tastes almost like exhilaration. He's never noticed Miriam to refer to her as 'Potter' before, in the rare occasions she mentions her at all, but it makes sense for the chit to have changed her name.

"Are you sure?" he asks, slow, and dread starts seeping into his chest. He hasn't seen his Potter in three days, and last time he did, the man was a terrified mess.

"Stupid, stupid girl," Draco hers himself utter. He’s never imagined Potter’s irrational terror of losing people would turn real quite so literally, so brutally. But if what Miriam says is true, Draco can only shudder in visceral horror.

"Come here," he says, and Miriam slips into his arms, shaking.

When he Apparates into Potter's flat, everything is quiet. If Draco didn't feel the slightest vertigo of magical energy swirling aimless, he'd be likely to assume the place empty.

He pushes the slightly open door of the sitting room and enters.

There isn't a stick of furniture left whole in the place. All there is are debris, barely discernible in origin. Miriam has been fascinated with Muggle weaponry for years, but Draco can't dig up the memory of something that will wreak that much havoc and leave the walls intact. The only thing standing, really, is the table with the wyvern's tank, and Draco knows there is protective magic on that.

Through the open curtains the day is almost over, an average, mild day – but Draco has buried both his parents on beautiful days: it is just the next twist of the knife in the wound.

Potter is in a heap in the middle of the room, motionless. Bottom lip bitten halfway through, arms hugging himself, he is standing there, frozen, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

They both have, already.

"Potter?" Draco whispers, barely, and the figure begins rocking to and fro, silent.

Draco makes a step forward, then stops. He has no idea what he is supposed to do, if he is supposed to do anything. He remembers, vividly at this very moment, how he's cried and raved and ached about his mother in this very room, so many years ago.

Maybe he shouldn't have come, after all. This thing Potter and he have shared over the years, no matter how labelled, has no place here now, no purpose. Draco has no place. The Potter he's known all these years, stupid, oblivious Potter, who knew right away, infallibly, what Draco needed and gave it to him, who took whatever was thrown at him and gave back as good as he got, is not here. Not now.

The man broken on the floor along with his sanctuary is not someone Draco knows.

Yet he makes another step forward.

He has seen Potter in all states of mind, grimy and tense and fighting, sad, angry, happy, still with exhaustion, curled sleeping like a child after a nightmare; has seen him at high highest and at his lowest, at the hardest middle part – but never, never like this. If there's one thing Harry Potter can't wear well, shouldn't wear, it's defeat branded across his face.

There's a high, animal keen, almost fully suppressed, and Draco feels his chest constrict. Is this what Potter saw him like, at that cemetery? Is that what changed things for them, at the beginning? There isn't rage left in Potter now, no energy left to spend, and Draco doesn't know what to do.

But he is here. And he can stay.

He kneels down, slowly, and awkwardly stretches an arm towards Potter's shoulders. With the first touch Potter shudders and takes a breath; it's as good as a sob. Then he comes into Draco's arms, easily, as if he done it many times, and it's like a dam breaking.

The first word is cried out and the next and the next, until they meld together, falling hard and fast, into a continuous wail of terror and desperation. Draco doesn't say anything. All he can offer is the silent comfort of touch, and they rock together, back and forth. Back and forth.

Draco hasn't consoled anyone like this before. Never like that, vocal and close and misery palpable in the air, never a pain Draco himself knows so intimately. He can taste – suddenly fresh – quiet, sympathetic grief at the back of his throat.

Going forward, changing; one step at a time, one pain at a time – Draco knows all about living. He's wished he was dead, long ago, but he has lived. And Potter has also, and the bleeding... the bleeding will stop.

It always does.

Much, much later, the crying subsides, slowly, unwilling to go, to be put aside. All that remains are Potter's lips bitten to blood, his eyes a vivid green against the blotchy skin, and the quiet, pained breathing of someone who'd go on sobbing if he had any energy, any liquid left.

When Draco finally persuades him into bed, he goes with the guileless lucidity of a child. Draco undresses him like a doll, no pretence, nothing left, helpless and open. It’s a frightening sight. Draco sheds his own clothes with shaky fingers and sees with surprise that he’s forgotten his watch on the nightstand, the last time he was here. He hasn’t noticed it missing.

It's the first night Draco doesn’t just fall asleep totally exhausted, but consciously chooses to spend here, in this bed on which they have, over the years, possessed each other in innumerable ways. It's a bed they've never made love on, only sex: each of them has made love with another person, on another bed; each has built another life – one functioning and real, cherished and looking forward to the future. And each has known the past is there for him to fall back on, to scream at, to kick him back forwards, in an ordinary flat looking out to a park.

Draco's throat is full and he shuts his lids tight, denying the moisture seeping into his hair. It's easier like that, in the dark – it always is – to remember his dead, feeling Potter hold on to him as if he too will disappear.

Draco is almost asleep when he hears Potter say, with a throat raw from grief and a voice shaking with exhaustion:

"I have a son."

Draco closes his eyes, and holds Potter near. Life goes on, eternal.

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