Chapter Text
1
"Harry?"
The voice that accompanied the knock at the front door was familiar, and yet Harry couldn't say who it belonged to. He looked over at the blond man that he apparently lived with, but this Malfoy character only shrugged, a unrepentant grin still playing on his lips like this was all some sort of game.
"Harry, are you at home?"
There was a slight rattle as the front door was opened, followed by a hesitant set of footsteps.
"You just leave your front door unlocked, do you?" Malfoy asked, eyebrows creeping up beneath his long hair.
"It's the countryside," Harry shot back, able to remember that much at least. "It's not like there are roaming gangs of criminals out here."
A woman who looked about their age leaned around the doorframe, one hand on the wall as if she were unsure about coming in further. Her thick brown hair was a curly mess, caught up in a haphazard bun, and she was dressed in a knee-length skirt and a chunky knit sweater. Her dark brown eyes moved anxiously between the two men sitting side-by-side on the couch.
"Hello," Harry said, sounding uncertain even in his own ears. He knew her, in the same way he'd felt he knew Malfoy, but in just the same way, he couldn't say how or who she was. It was like recognizing an actor who you were certain you'd seen in something before, but you couldn't remember what film it might have been. You only knew, beyond a doubt, that you knew this person's face from something.
"You don't recognize me, do you?" the woman said. She didn't sound surprised but rather resigned in a soft sort of way. A sad sort of way.
"I-I'm sorry," Harry stumbled. "I do. I know that I know you from someplace, but everything's a bit, er, muddled at the moment."
"No, that's fine. It's all to be expected, really." The woman took another step into the room, stopping several feet from them. "There was an...accident, you see. The doctors said your memory might be faulty. Hopefully things might start to seem a bit clearer soon, though."
Malfoy propped his sharp chin on the heel of one hand, eying the strange woman as he asked, "And is it contagious? Because it seems to be catching."
The woman's lips tightened slightly when she turned her gaze onto the blond. Harry got the impression that she might not be Malfoy's greatest fan. Perhaps that should have been obvious. It had been Harry's name she had called out, after all. "You were in the same accident," she explained, her tone a few degrees cooler when she was speaking to Malfoy.
"Uh-huh," the blond said, sounding decidedly unconvinced. Harry couldn't blame him. It was hard to believe that they'd both been in some sort of accident—and presumably hit their heads so hard that they both were experiencing memory loss, unlikely enough on its own—when they both looked perfectly fine. Harry couldn't complain of a single ache or pain. But then what other explanation was there for all the fuzzy gaps in his memory that he couldn't account for?
"You know us, though?" Harry asked, since the woman certainly didn't act like a stranger.
She softened. "Yes. I do. We all went to school together, though I suppose you must not remember much of that if you don't recognize me?"
In his mind, he could see a much younger version of this woman in a school uniform: a striped tie tucked into her gray sweater, a neat skirt over knobby knees. It was all too easy to imagine her hand shooting up in a classroom, with such enthusiasm that she nearly rose from her seat. It felt so familiar that he supposed the memories must be his, but he still couldn't quite recall her name.
"So then Potter and I are...a pair of old school mates?" Malfoy said, turning to Harry and looking him up and down. He sounded nonplussed as he muttered, "Huh."
"Something wrong with that?" Harry asked, bristling slightly.
"No, just..." The blond shrugged. "I figured we were hooking up."
Harry's eyes nearly popped out of his head, while the woman standing nearby seemed to choke, face reddening as she cleared her throat.
"Whatever gave you that impression?!" Harry exclaimed. "We have separate bloody rooms!"
Malfoy shrugged. "Maybe you snore?" Then he thought for a moment. "Maybe I snore. Do I snore? Did you kick me out of your bedroom because I snore like a freight train? That would be distressingly unattractive of me. Surely it can be that. Surely you're the one who snores, and I choose to sleep in another room so that you don't bother me with your god-awful snoring at nights."
"I didn't kick you out of my bedroom, because I'm sure you were never in it!" Harry snapped, knowing his face was getting flushed. He felt off-balance, pulse rocketing from the suggestion that he might possibly have been shagging the man beside him. The very attractive man who seemed to have no problem at all with the idea that their relationship might have been anything but platonic. Oh, lord.
# # #
"What's the average age that schizophrenia kicks in? It's around this age, isn't it?" Harry looked into his beer glass with a hopeless expression, then lifted it to take a drink.
Hermione and Neville shot one another a wary look. Not again . The Muggle pub was noisy enough that they could have tried to pretend they hadn't heard the question, but they both knew from experience that they wouldn't be able to fob Harry off forever. They were going to have to fix this. Again. But they couldn't exactly whip their wands out in the middle of a crush, so they would have to limp things along until they were someplace a bit less crowded.
"I'm sure you're not losing your mind, Harry," Neville said, chortling and trying to make it all sound like a joke. He knocked his glass against Harry's pint. "I mean, assuming you hadn't already lost it when you thought that shacking up with Draco here was a good idea."
The blond man saluted Neville with his own drink, a ridiculous pink cocktail that most men would feel embarrassed to order and that Malfoy seemed to relish swishing about. " Not shacking up with me when he had the chance would've been the real proof he was losing his mind," Draco declared as he wrapped an arm around the shoulders of the man beside him, pressing a playful kiss against Harry's temple even though it mostly got him a face full of messy black hair. But there was a hint of actual concern in his sharp gray eyes as he leaned into his boyfriend. "I told you that you were getting worked up over nothing, Potter. Just too much time out in the sun."
But Harry was shaking his head, ignoring both his friends' attempts to soothe his worries and the dishes that sat on the table in the middle of the foursome. "I swear, you guys—I heard a voice in the garden. And when I called out to it, the voice answered. "
"Some kid from the village playing tricks then," Draco said with a shrug. "What else is there to do in Godric's bleeding Hollow? Yet another reason to pull up our stakes and move ."
Hermione eagerly latched onto the new topic, though it might be a headache for Neville and his fellow Aurors if Harry did actually move house, considering the work they'd put into trying to keep anyone in the Wizarding world from finding him and Draco since they'd accepted the Ministry's deal and given up most their memories to keep Malfoy out of Azkaban.
"Are you still thinking of moving into Bath then?" Hermione asked, leaning forward and taking one of the soggy chips from the basket they were sharing. It had gone cold, but at least the action helped provide some kind of distraction. Neville was relieved to see it work on Harry, who began absently picking at the chips again while Draco looked on.
"I've never stopped thinking of it," Draco responded, heaving a long-suffering sigh. "Of all the million things I can't remember, not being able to remember how in the world Harry managed to convince me to move to that boring little village is the one that bothers me the most. It must have taken either a miracle or some god-damned mind-blowing sexual favors. And if it were the latter, I really would prefer to remember it."
" That's what bothers you the most?" Neville asked, wisely choosing to ignore the provocative mention of the other men's sex life. "Not the fact that you can't remember even half your schooling? Seems a bit of a problem for someone thinking to go into education."
Although he and Draco got on perfectly fine now (helped along quite a bit by the fact that Draco had forgotten every part of his upbringing that had once inclined him to bully Neville Longbottom mercilessly when they were at school), Neville did still enjoy the mundane revenge of needling the former Slytherin whenever he got the chance. It probably didn't even count as revenge, since this Draco seemed to enjoy the banter.
"More than that even!" Draco insisted. He gave a delicate shudder as he told them, "Godric's Hollow. Even the name irritates me. There's something so unbearably... twee about it."
Neville looked down into his beer and mumbled, "Yes, completely mystifying why you wouldn't love a place named Godric's anything." Hermione kicked him under the table.
Draco frowned sulkily at his old classmates, recognizing all the signs that they were making some joke at his expense about a memory he couldn't recall. But he was too accustomed to it to bother getting angry about it. He and Harry both were. It had been over 20 months now, and they had still never got back most of the missing years of their lives, so there had been little choice but to accept it was likely permanent. At least they had Neville and Hermione—who they met up with quite regularly—to reassure them that they really had once lived a life that they couldn't remember and that they weren't utterly mad. Hermione didn't make it down to meet as often (living up in Scotland as she did), but with Neville living only a couple hours away in London, the three lads met up at least a couple times most months—whenever Draco managed to drag Harry into the city for some show or event, basically.
"It's a bloody hour into Bath every day," Draco complained. "Each way!"
Harry grimaced, seeming to have forgotten about strange voices in the garden for the moment. "Oh, enough of that. You like going for long rides on that motorbike of yours. You could be thanking me for giving you the opportunity for so much time racing across the countryside." Even Harry had admitted to enjoying the motorbike, once Draco had finally persuaded him to climb up behind him a couple months into their relationship. He hadn't got to the point of wanting to drive the contraption himself, but he certainly seemed to see the appeal. Roaring through the curving hills, the wind whipping in their faces, it felt like the closest a human being could get to flying. That was what he'd said once over drinks, and Neville had kept his lips firmly sealed.
"But wait," Hermione pointed out, scrunching up her face as she tried to remember the details. "I thought that you'd rented a place in Bath last year. Or did you end up letting it go?"
Draco flapped a hand, not concerned about such a minor detail as paying two-thousand pounds a month for a flat he hardly used. "Harry never wants to stay over more than a day or two, so it mostly just sits there empty while I'm commuting to and from Wiltshire daily. Couldn't possibly interrupt his thrilling routine of puttering about the house and pissing away the day doing absolutely nothing." Draco didn't acknowledge the fact that he was perfectly free to stay in Bath during the week without Harry, and no one else chose to comment on it either. As much as Draco moaned about Harry's homebody tendencies, he gravitated around the dark-haired man like a temperamental moon, wandering off only to come slinging right back home to him before much more than a day could pass.
Harry jabbed an elbow in Draco's lean side as he shot back, "Doing absolutely nothing, am I? As I sit here with you in London, after spending the whole day wandering about the V&A today, because we ran out of time to visit it yesterday when we spent the entire day at the British Museum. For some exhibits you wanted to see. Yet all I do is putter around in Wiltshire making you suffer."
"I'm only saying that Bath could be better," Draco said, his voice unusually free from mockery for once. "For both of us." That hint of concern was back again. Teasing over the fact that Harry had turned twenty-five that summer and still had never held a job was usual fodder for their joking arguments, but this was different. Neville took a small sip from his drink, watching the two of them closely. Harry must have been really spooked by the voices this time, enough to make Malfoy worried that maybe there was something to it. Enough to make Malfoy perhaps worried about the thought of leaving Harry home alone all day in the small house in Wiltshire when his fall term began. And the Auror tried to hide his sigh behind his glass.
# # #
Harry looked to the woman. If she knew who they were, hopefully she also knew the nature of their relationship. This Malfoy fellow had also turned to peer up at her, his gray eyes narrowing as he searched her face while she did nothing to immediately deny the possibility that the two of them could possibly be sleeping together, and Harry looked back and forth between the two near strangers. If it weren't true, wouldn't she have dismissed the idea at once and set this Malfoy straight?
"Oh, we're definitely bonking," Malfoy grinned, studying the woman's pained expression. She only rolled her eyes heavenward, heaving a sigh that spoke of long familiarity.
"I would never sleep with someone who said bonking," Harry spluttered, getting hung up on entirely the wrong point because he wasn't as certain that he could claim he would never sleep with someone like the man sat beside him, especially when that man looked as appealing as Malfoy did while he was measuring Harry up with an appreciative gleam in his eyes.
"Evidence suggests that you would."
"I don't even know you!"
"Ah, but I think you do know me. Biblically speaking."
There was another choked sound from the woman, and Harry's gaze shot up to her. She seemed to be trying to keep a straight face, though he couldn't tell if it were a laugh or outrage that she was fighting to contain. "Maybe," Harry insisted, still scrambling for other explanations, "maybe we just live together to save on expenses."
"Hard luck, mate, because there'd be no need for that. I'm richer than King Solomon."
"You don't even know who you are!" Harry hissed back.
"But I know I'm rich." Draco grinned up at the woman standing opposite them. "Right, Granger? Tell me I'm rich. Better yet, tell him I'm rich." Then he paused, blinking in surprise. "Hey! Granger! I remembered your name! Look at that."
She also seemed taken aback. But the name sparked some recognition in Harry's brain.
"Granger... Hermione Granger?" he murmured, the syllables falling from his lips though he couldn't recall ever hearing the old-fashioned name before in his life. He searched her oddly familiar face. Hermione Granger. He knew her name, just like he knew her face, just like he somehow knew that she was clever as anything and a loyal friend and that both her parents had been dentists. He did know her. Even if he couldn't remember entirely how.
There seemed to be tears in her eyes as she smiled at him, though. "Yes, Harry," she reassured him, one hand at her mouth as though to keep that relieved expression trapped where it was. "I'm Hermione. That's right."
# # #
"We can't keep doing this every summer when the damn snakes return!" Hermione hissed, shoving her hands into the pockets of her light jacket as she and Neville strode away from the tube station. They'd parted ways with Harry and Draco after memory charming them for the fourth time in 17 months. It had worked as well as it ever did—and the men had walked away happy and laughing again, without any inkling they'd ever been troubled over Harry's mental state—but only until the next time it happened. No one had thought to consider the possible implications of Harry being a Parselmouth, which led to him regularly questioning his own sanity when he heard garden snakes talking to him and couldn't remember it was no particular cause for alarm.
"Well, it would hardly be kinder to let him go on thinking he's going mad. So, what else do you propose we can do at the moment?" Neville weaved his way through the crowd, looking slightly uncomfortable as usual among the mostly Muggle inhabitants of London. They were on their way back to Charing Cross Road so that Neville could slip back into Diagon Alley and Hermione could Floo back up to Hogwarts. He was always more at ease once they were back on their own turf. "Want to ask him to kindly move to Ireland? We can't drive out every last snake from Wiltshire. I have their minders cast repelling charms whenever they check in on the two of them, but they live in the countryside. Of course there are snakes, Hermione."
Hermione looked down at her feet as she strode along the pavement, probably putting herself at risk of a collision. "Maybe we really should encourage them to move to Bath," she murmured. "There can hardly be many snakes in the city." She sighed, looking around at all the people of London going about their lives. "And perhaps Harry would finally find something to do with himself there."
It had been something of a surprise to her when Malfoy had been the first of the two to start formulating a new life for himself, or at least a life that extended beyond just Harry. When she'd mentioned, carefully offhand, that he'd seemed interested in teaching after hearing her talk about her work, he'd quickly latched onto the idea—even if it had been for the wrong reasons.
"Oh, I could torture so many shitty little teenagers with impossible standards and ridiculous essay topics," is what he'd actually said at the time, with an unholy look of pleasure. Hermione had tried to remind him that there was a lot more to teaching than that—and she'd bit down on the urge to make some snide comment about how you could take a person out of Slytherin but still never take all the Slytherin out of a person.
After all, this Malfoy was hardly the Slytherin she’d gone to school with. He was different from both the hateful boy she'd known growing up and from the madcap man who had accompanied Harry to Hogwarts nearly two years ago, his unpredictable sense of humor sharp edged and as likely to cut himself as it was anyone around him, gleaming as brilliant and dangerous as a knife blade. This Malfoy had a sort of blunted wistfulness at times about all the memories he'd lost, but for the most part, he joked and acted frivolous and threw himself with abandon into the things that caught his interest. He was catty and sarcastic but not particularly cruel. He seemed to enjoy being outrageous only for the sake of making other people react to him—and there was no one he liked to get a reaction from more than Harry.
And Harry—
Every time she saw Harry, Hermione found it a little harder to face another meeting—and felt her determination to overturn the Ministry's ruling burn even stronger—because Harry wasn't getting better. Malfoy tried to get him out of his shell, dragging him from the house they shared, teasing and prodding him to make something of himself, but whatever reckless passion had spurred Harry to action the autumn that he'd returned to Hogwarts, it was buried somewhere under the ashes of his memories now. It wasn't that he seemed unhappy. He did seem happy, especially with Draco in his life. She was glad he was happy. But it was a smaller happiness, and like everything about Harry now, it was somehow less than what it had once been.
Hermione had to wonder if, while they might have succeeded in taking away the very worst parts of Harry's life, they'd also taken away any part that had been good. The only life this version of Harry could remember was one in which he'd grown up in a dark cupboard, abused and neglected and never daring to love a thing because it would only give his relatives more to hurt him with. He remembered living in self-imposed confinement for the past five years, never sharing anything with anyone and never wandering outside the box he'd framed around himself. But he didn't remember the years that he hadn't been alone. Even if he'd been able to forget all he'd lost in the war, he didn't remember ever having had friends. He didn't remember that someday he would have had adults who would love him the way his aunt and uncle never had. He didn't remember that one day he would have had allies and people who cared about him so much they would be willing to put their lives on the line for him.
He'd fallen back into the small, faded existence that Malfoy had somehow enticed him out of once, but this time with no idea that there could ever be anything else for him. And the Malfoy who had managed to drag him back to life once before—well, he was long gone as well now.
They were happy. They were happy with each other. It was easy to see that Harry still loved this Malfoy, in whatever way that he could. But it wasn't the way he had loved the old Malfoy. This Harry didn't seem to know how to love like that. Or perhaps it was simply the fact that they weren't the same Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy any longer. And while this Malfoy loved him in return, it was also a different thing: less wild, less consuming, less dazzling.
And in an odd, mundane way, it was heartbreaking to watch from the sidelines, knowing how things had once been. Harry had given up so much so that they might both survive, and he had succeeded. They were alive. They were together. They were still in love.
Even if it might never be as good as what they'd let go of, all so that they might hold onto even this much of one another.
# # #
Hermione had stayed for over an hour, cautiously answering questions as the two men teased through the confused memories that they were trying to piece together. Harry found that he could remember most his early childhood—the aunt and uncle who had raised him in Surrey after his parents' death in a car accident, his awful cousin who had bullied him until he'd luckily been whisked off to boarding school at age eleven thanks to an inheritance from his father's side. That was where they'd all met, Hermione had assured them, but Harry could hardly remember more than flickering glimpses.
But at least he seemed to have it better than Malfoy, who had to take Hermione's word for who in the world he might be. He only had odd flashes here and there, completely out of context: a palatial home full of antique furniture, the grim faces of a mother and father who both had the same pale blond hair as that which fell in his own eyes, the sight of a scarlet steam train that somehow filled him with hope. In general, it was a mess: faces he had no names for and that he couldn't seem to pull into focus, unable to see what the people were wearing or where they were standing; random images with no memories attached to them, no better than looking at someone else's photos, with no ability to say where or when they'd been taken.
Hermione warned them not to push too hard, saying that the doctor's advice had been to simply try to limit their stress and take it one day at a time. "Having someone else tell you your own history won't actually help you recall it yourself, they say. And straining to remember things can make your mind come up with scenes that seem to connect the fragments together, but they may not be real. It's best to just let things come to you, the way my name did. If you don't force it, you may find that some things come back when you aren't even looking for them."
And it did seem true. As they spoke, Harry found that, while he didn't remember when exactly Malfoy had moved in, he did recall some bits of how he'd run into Malfoy that summer—or nearly run into him, while actually running into a tree with his car. He remembered driving through the countryside with Malfoy sitting in the seat beside him, clutching a thermos of coffee. He remembered wandering together through some town he didn't recognize. He remembered lying across a large bed with the blond as they both played with their mobile phones and laughed, and he remembered tossing back drinks with him in a crowded club as music played too loud to hear his own thoughts, and a dozen other small moments that perhaps explained why it didn't seem odd to be sitting side by side on a couch with the other man close enough that Harry could feel the warmth of his body hardly a foot away.
# # #
Harry and Draco rode up the escalator in Knightsbridge station, the fluorescent lights painting everything in the tunnel with an unhealthy tinge. Harry was leaning into Draco, the slight buzz of alcohol enough to make him really feel the exhaustion from two long days spent on his feet, trailing after his boyfriend through museums and parks. He was happy to let some of his weight fall into Draco's hold, as the blond kept one arm around his waist, his right hand tucked into the back pocket of Harry's jeans.
This part at least was always a relief when Draco dragged them to London. No one tended to care much about public displays of affection between two grown men in the city, as long as they weren't breaking any rules of public decency. Maybe no one would care that much in Godric's Hollow either, but it was still much easier when surrounded by people you would never have to see again in your life, in case they did choose to make some rude remark or spare you a filthy look.
Harry let his eyelids drift nearly shut, fantasizing about reaching the hotel they were staying at—stupidly posh and overpriced, right on the edge of Hyde Garden, because of course that was what Draco would pick if left to his own devices, all so he could saunter through the lobby like he owned the place while wearing £300 jeans paired with a tee he'd bought at Primark for £3. He was utterly ridiculous, and Harry still couldn't explain how he'd ended up with the other man a seemingly permanent fixture in his life, and all he could do was try to keep himself braced to survive it if the day should ever come when Draco also realized how ludicrous it was and moved on.
A familiar scrawl of letters caught his attention through the dark filter of his downcast lashes, and Harry blinked his eyes open to focus on the graffiti that was painted across one of the poster adverts that lined the wall leading up to the street level.
Free Harry .
That was what the green letters said. The tail of the Y was drawn out long and had an odd little hitch in it, notching back up once before carrying on in its downward stroke. Almost like a lightning bolt.
Harry straightened up slightly, eyes roving over the words. "What do you reckon that's all about?"
Draco had followed his eyes when he noticed Harry's attention, and he cocked his head to the side, leaning over to stare at the graffiti as it slid away while they continued their inexorable journey to the surface, propelled upward by the escalator. "No idea," Draco said with a shrug. "Maybe just some inside joke about someone's mate? Or some celebrity thing that we're too old and uncool to get now?" He waggled his eyebrows at Harry. Since they'd both turned 25, he'd taken to constantly reminding Harry that every passing day tipped them closer to 30 now than 20.
"Is there someone famous named Harry?" Harry asked, brow furrowed. Then he bit out a surprised curse when Draco reached up and flicked him in the head with his free hand.
"It's miraculous how ignorant you are sometimes." But the clear gray eyes inches from his were warm with amusement, as Draco tugged him off the escalator. They'd reached steady ground again and easily fell in step together as they made their way out toward the fresh night air. "How about the bloody prince of England, for one, who seems to be doing a fine job getting his name in the tabloids with all his youthful excesses? Maybe his fellow young people feel sorry for him always ending up locked up in some palace for doing something idiotic and embarrassing his dear old gran."
Now that they were out of the flow of traffic, no longer needing to dodge the other passengers spilling from the tube station, Draco spun Harry around, crowding him up against the side of a building so he could bring their bodies and lips together for a moment. "What is it about blokes named Harry having a proclivity towards acting like silly knobs?"
"Well, you love this knob," Harry countered, not stopping to think about the actual words he was saying.
Draco threw back his head and laughed aloud, drawing more than a few looks before he dropped his forehead on Harry's shoulder. His own shoulders were shaking as he snorted into the weave of Harry's thin jacket. "Do I ever," he agreed. Harry knew his face was flushed red, but he didn't mind all that much, because it was dark and then Draco was kissing him and no one knew them anyway. And if he was trapped in Draco's arms, pressed up against the cool stone at his back, this Harry at least had no desire for freedom.