Much to his annoyance, Harry Potter was, as proclaimed by the media, successful, attractive and charming.
He'd learnt the hard way that people of that type always had secrets, maybe a family member they were ashamed of, or some sort of kink that they hid to the point of paranoia. After all, growing up with Dursley's, he was constantly exposed to people who were of a similar breed; all having some impossible image they tried to uphold for the sake of…
Well, if he knew their reasons, maybe he would have more (read: any) sympathy for them.
As it was, he had grown up starved, neglected, and abused for the sake of whatever ideals those types upheld (even if the "attractive" aspect was somewhat lacking in his particular examples), and as such, had very little patience for that type of thing.
So naturally, he hated these mandatory seasonal Ministry Events with a burning passion.
He felt a bit Snape-like, swooshing around the pretentious ballroom fighting off an expression of disgust as people approached him offering all sorts of things in exchange for endorsement for this product or support in their campaign for such-and-such (generally a trickily worded regressive policy that would subtly but negatively affect whichever demographic was being discriminated against this week. So sue him, after the third time he’d gotten cynical) or, most often, marriage contracts.
Harry was rather fond of siccing Hermione on those particular folks for attempting to "sell of their children like chattel for the sake of social and/or political advancement" and wandering off to sip at whatever drink he was carrying as he watched the ensuing chaos in amusement.
In this particular case, Harry found himself hovering near one of the fountains peppered randomly throughout the room as he watched on as Hermione verbally eviscerated some old pureblood patriarch who had been bothering Harry for several months now about setting up a marriage contract between Harry and his two-year-old granddaughter when he heard a familiar voice from somewhere near his shoulder.
"Rather mean, don't you think? Leaving poor old Ogden to fend for himself against Hurricane Granger?" Draco Malfoy snarked without venom. They had developed a rather less than antagonistic relationship since attending their "eighth year" at Hogwarts together, then realizing that if Andromeda died young that they would be coparenting a child with the aforementioned Hurricane.
Apparently, given a common goal (i.e. keeping Andromeda alive and happy for as long as magically possible in order to avoid full-time responsibility for the kid until he was at least five or six), they could work quite well together; Hermione's ridiculous encyclopedia brain plus Draco's political knowledge and natural ability to Plot complimented by Harry's well-honed sneakiness and the inherent trustworthiness that came with being the Savior of the Wizarding World.
They also just liked to be assholes at each other without repercussions.
"About as mean as his not taking no for an answer and trying to marry me off to a literal fetus in exchange for endorsing a law that would have made it impossible for Teddy to attend Hogwarts, I should think. I'm considering offering to adopt her instead, next time he approaches, see if that makes him back off, and if not, Teddy gets a new little godsister!" Harry sarcastically enthused.
Draco snorted. "Honestly, that's not the worst idea you've ever had, which isn't saying much, now that I think about it."
Harry nodded reluctantly in acknowledgment of the point. He had, after all, willingly walked into dangerous situations more times than he could accurately recount (mostly because his and Hermione's and everyone else’s ideas of "dangerous" clashed rather spectacularly, and he was rather inclined to believe her, though even she wasn't privy to all of the ridiculous things he had done, even just over the course of his Hogwarts education) generally with little to no information on what he was facing, and with only his wand, wits, and rather limited understanding of how magic was supposed to work, resulting in all sorts of unorthodox situations.
“Not sure I’d do well as a full-time parent, anyway.” Harry mused, idly swirling whatever drink he’d taken off a waiter to fidget with.
“Oh?” Draco asked, intrigued, “What makes you say that? You’ve always been good with Teddy.”
Harry shrugged. “No experience with parental figures. Or responsible adults, for the most part.”
“Who raised you then? I’d always assumed you had some relatives from a cadet branch or something adopt you.”
Harry shook his head. “No, all the cadet branches died out during the last war. I had to stay with my muggle relatives, since my godfather was chucked in Azkaban without a trial.”
“You mean Sirius Black? My cousin, the mass-murderer?” Draco asked incredulously. “You think that would have been better than your muggle relatives? I didn’t take you for a bigot.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “He was innocent. Peter Pettigrew only died in ‘99–in your house actually, he was also called Wormtail—and he was the one who actually betrayed my parents, Sirius was a decoy. Regardless, he was never given a trial.” Harry cast a few wandless detection charms on his glass, then sniffed it, and, not finding anything unusual, sipped a bit of it, tilting his head as he considered the taste and ignoring Draco’s sputtering at the new information he’d just been given.
“Let me make sure I’ve understood this correctly…Sirius Black was framed, Peter Pettigrew faked his own death—“
“He was the Weasley’s rat for twelve years.”
Draco stared at him blankly in the wake of this interruption, then continued as if he hadn’t heard it, “ —and you were raised by muggles?”
“Sounds about right.”
“So when you snubbed me on the train in first year—“
“I hadn’t even read the muggleborn introduction books. Nobody told me they even existed until I was on the run with Ron and Hermione in ‘97. By then it was half a decade too late to do anything about it.”
Draco stared at him, as close to slack-jawed as he would ever allow himself to be seen.
“Yeah, that’s about how I reacted.”
“Merlin.”
Harry inclined his head slightly as he let his eyes roam the room as he had done about every five minutes since entering the massive ballroom a few hours before. He checked his watch. Forty-five minutes until he could leave and burrow into his big, comfy bed at 12 Grimauld Place. That would be nice. He hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep in years, but the comfy bed at least made him happy, even if he spent most of his nights making his way through the Black Library, a la Hermione. At least there wasn’t anything likely to kill him in the house anymore.
That had been the first thing he’d done upon getting back to the house after his year on the run. A complete remodel, or at least brightening up, of most of the house. A deep-clean and fresh coats of paint, along with fixing up the floors and windows, had gone a long way to making Grimauld look more like a place that could actually be lived in. He’d figured, if he was to need to live somewhere, he might as well fix up the rather nice set up he already had, even if it had taken months. It had been good for him, having a project while he worked through the trauma of the past several years (or a lot longer, if he was honest with himself). Hermione and Ron had gone to retrieve Hermione’s parents from Australia, at his insistence, so he had been mostly alone (except for when George would come over to take a crowbar to something) and it had been nice. To feel mostly safe in a place where he could just be himself. That wasn’t really an opportunity that he had had before.
(Then, of course, Teddy had moved in, and he’d hired an entire team of cursebreakers to make sure there wasn’t anything terrible he could get into. Kid was a handful and a half already, didn’t need to go adding cursed objects into the mix.)
He was brought back from thoughts of his comfy bed by Draco raining down a barrage of questions on him, barely waiting for answers before cursing under his breath and moving on. Harry watched in amusement before glancing at his watch again.
Fuck it.
Without bothering to explain himself, Harry took Draco’s arm and marched him toward the Floos in the Atrium. If they were going to have this conversation, they were going to do it comfortably, Kingsley be damned.
“What—what the fuck, Potter!” Draco spluttered as Harry dragged him away.
“If we’re having this conversation, it’s going to be with firewhiskey or not at all. My place probably has less breakable bits and bobs lying around.”
“Alright, fine, quit pulling me!”
“Walk faster then!”
Several hours and two or three too many shots of firewhiskey found the pair of them sitting at opposite ends of the couch, facing each other with their legs up, occasionally poking the other with a colorfully-socked toe (Dobby and his horrendous socks had been brought up, and in his honor they had each put on a pair of garishly colored socks, hand-knitted by Harry, Ron, and Hermione during their year hunting horcruxes) and taking sips from the glasses of water that Kreacher had threatened to stick to their hands if they didn’t try to sober up a little.
“I call bullshit!” Draco announced.
Harry stared at him when he didn’t elaborate. “…On what?”
“All of it!” Draco replied, waving his arms for emphasis.
“All of what?” Harry asked, nudging a button of Draco’s shirt with his toe. He had been doing this for the five minutes after he had finished explaining what all had happened to and around him in his Hogwarts years, during which Draco had stared blankly and dead-eyed at the space off to Harry’s left, and the button had almost managed to get free of its hole.
“Your life! It’s shit!” Draco informed him, gesturing with his glass of water and only barely managing not to spill it. “You should do something!”
Harry shrugged. “Time travel that far back is illegal by international law, with several exploitable loopholes that may actually be applicable in my case, but even if they weren’t, that law didn’t come into effect until after the disaster back in 2003. Unfortunately, tragically, we managed to destroy every single time turner in the ministry that hadn’t been loaned out, which allegedly included every single one in existence that would allow the user to travel back further than twenty-four hours. Every other method of time travel is either too risky, too disgusting, or magic black enough to drive the user insane during the trip.”
Draco stared at him. “You’ve actually considered it. And researched it?”
“Cedric Diggory didn’t deserve to die.” Harry said, flatly at first, then gaining momentum. “Neither did any of the other student casualties of the war, nor Remus, Tonks, Fred, or bloody Snape! It was an utterly pointless conflict, and nothing has changed because of it! If Remus were alive, he still wouldn’t be able to get a job because he was a werewolf, Colin would probably never get that job at the profit he wanted despite being a fucking fantastic photographer, and there’s still no way in hell that Hermione will ever be elected Minister, and even if she gets that fifth Mastery, it’ll just end up hanging on the wall unused like the Order of Merlin Second Class, because as implied, the most powerful three percent of the population of magical Britain with seats on the Wizengamot will only ever view her as a second-class citizen despite her being the best of us all, and little Baby Ogden will probably end up essentially sold off to the highest bidder before she can even string together a fucking sentence!”
There was another long silence, Harry breathing hard after the impromptu tirade, Draco staring back at him, eyes wide, and Hermione sighing and leaning against the doorway.
Wait.
“Hermione?” Harry asked, startled, “When did you get here?”
“When Draco called bullshit.” She made her way over to the couch and flopped across his lap, taking a swig from the near-empty bottle of fire whiskey and leaning against the back of the couch. “I wish you would’ve mentioned feeling that way sooner, Harry. It would’ve made me feel a lot less guilty.”
Harry and Draco blinked at her in confusion.
“What—?”
“I snagged a few of the time-turners during the battle and had to do some discreet digging in the DoM to figure out which ones did what, but figured it out about a year ago. It would take some careful planning, but if you really wanted to, we could.”
The men stared at her, slack-jawed, as Hermione continued.
“The best time to travel back to would probably be the night of the fourth task, or maybe a night or two before. Get to Little Hangleton, capture Wormtail and kill Riddle’s homunculus, wait for little you and Cedric to arrive, take the portkey back with them under disillusionment charms, get Wormtail and Crouch Jr to Madam Bones before Fudge gets wind, and maybe we can get Sirius cleared and end that plot for a bit, at least. Give us some breathing room to collect and destroy the horcruxes before anyone knows what’s happening.” She shrugged.
“It wouldn’t fix everything, but it would give us a solid place to start where everyone we love is still alive. And with the pair of you helping, I might actually have a chance at succeeding.”
Harry and Draco exchanged a look.
“Let’s sleep on it,” Harry eventually decided, “And we can have this conversation when we’re not a bottle deep, yeah?”