Time to Face the Music
Draco and Harry are still in their pajamas when they make their way down the main level. This early, the manor is still a slumbering creature made of dreaming guests, but Draco and Harry hold too many bad memories to make them good sleepers.
Harry hasn’t spoken a word the whole time, trailing slowly behind Draco in the soft morning light and fighting desperate desires to reach out to graze the nape of his neck or catch the hand that occasionally knocks against his. Their silence, if broken, means the arrival of Reality, who is an angry scornful man who demands no one receive happiness. This drifting they perform—this slow meandering of a home that is both theirs and not theirs—is a stolen moment on dwindling time.
Harry wants to speak, though. Hasn’t it always been his words that get him in trouble? He wants to bring it into sound anyways, this new and tremulous thing that’s come into existence between them.
But Draco hasn’t, and so Harry won’t either, because he knows that he promised Draco the wrong sort of tomorrow and that now that wrong-tomorrow is here.
So they move in silence. They don’t acknowledge the way they woke up (a tangle of limbs). They don’t discuss the rings on their fingers (which Draco has come to twist when nervous). They do not, in any capacity, mention the implications of this world (and all the little happy things in it).
And they wait for the problem to solve itself.
***
Draco is thinking that even if Harry is considered the savior of the Wizarding world, that they’d all be dead if it weren’t for Hermione. Hermione, who seems to notice the shift in mood the moment that Draco and Harry enter the kitchen to interrupt her and her husband’s soft-spoken breakfast. Like a hound, she must seem to smell it: that somehow universal occurrence of Harry landing himself into trouble.
The work begins quickly, efficiently. In this reality, Hermione is an a well-to-do Unspeakable—a status that is supposed to be secret but that everyone in their circle of friends already knows. Hermione’s hands come down onto his shoulders, push him into a seat. Repeats the same mothering steps to Harry.
Like a well-oiled machine, Ron, who has already read the cues, has moved to give them both a cup which Harry leaves but Draco grabs eagerly. They sit there, exactly like a pair of children braving the headmaster’s office and nothing like two grown men who have survived a war and a half.
Hermione has gone to wake the house. It (someone else’s Harry and Draco being their Harry and Draco) is apparently a problem that requires all hands on deck. That leaves only Ron, who grins at them in a boyish, almost conspiratorial way and says, like an adult, “you two are definitely in trouble.”
Draco looks at the ring on his left hand. Tries not to look at the man who owns its pair. The man whose ring contains the other half of the engravement. He’s thinking about he has always been in trouble where Harry is considered, and then he’s trying not to think about it at all.
The house rouses at a slow pace, but Hermione must have briefed everyone before they came down to the dining room for a cup and a meal, because the looks that greet them are full of questions that are dying to be asked but have been warned against doing so.
It’s natural, then, that Pansy is the first to break this instruction. “So what are you two, shapeshifters?”
Beside her, Ginny slaps her shoulder lightly. “Don’t be rude,” she says, reaching out again in a way that makes Pansy move in a half hearted dodge.
“What?” She asks defensively. “This is Draco. I’ve known the boy since we were in nappies.” Then her head swivels, her eyes narrowing. “Or have I?” She manages another dodge when Ginny smacks at her.
Draco finds himself grinning, though the situation isn’t the least bit funny. “I’m Draco but not yours,” he says, hoping that it seems to make more sense than how it sounds. “But I’ve also known my Pansy just as long.”
“Tell me,” says Blaise. “Is your Pansy just as insufferable?”
Pansy lobs a breakfast roll at him. Well adjusted to years of childish back forth as their repertoire, Blaise makes swift work of catching the roll and adding it onto his plate.
“I fear that Pansy is very much Pansy in both our worlds.” The look they share after his response seems to say more than enough about what each of their Pansies are like.
“Oh that’s Brilliant,” says Luna from further down the table. Her hair, so Malfoy blonde that Draco has wondered if they don’t share some lost ancestry, is still spelled to twist and retwist itself into different hairstyles for the wedding, and he senses Harry watching it to avoid catching eyes with others. “So we’re all friends in your world as well, I gather?”
Harry, whose brilliant plan to exchange eye contact with Luna’s hair and Luna’s hair only, is therefore the one who falls prey to Luna’s eyes. Who must then answer her question, as the table watches in half intrigue and half distrust of the two half-strangers in their midst.
Harry’s throat clears. His palms trace tracks up and down his legs in a nervous movement. “We are,” he says, nodding. But his face screws sligntly, a brow going awry and a lip corner twisting downwards. “But it’s… different.”
Whose face are you seeing? Draco wonders. How many ghosts do we share?
“Different,” Ginny echoes, somehow politely unconvinced. Harry grins at her, soft and easy in a way that makes Draco’s heart twist so oddly that he has to look away. Draco knows that he must be comforted by these small shows of familiarity in the same way that Draco is. That Harry must hear Ginny’s teasing and be as soothed as Draco is hearing Pansy’s ribbing. Draco’s bitter anyways.
“Yeah,” Harry says, ever so eloquently. His eyes dart to Draco, a panicked movement that Draco catches in his peripheral. I won’t help you, Draco is thinking. I don’t know what to say, either. “There was a war, where we’re from. It made…” His brows furrow, words failing him where memories come in abundance. Draco’s arm itches, the phantom of an insignia he has never come to bear in this happy life. “It made everyone different, is all.”
The table doesn’t quiet, but the volume goes soft, each person in turn wondering about the existence in which war has reconstructed their happiness. Draco is too interested in his now-empty mug, and wishes briefly that it was secretly a cursed Malfoy object that sucked him into it forever.
It’s Hermione who rescues them, her tone gone no-nonsense, her food long since finished on her empty plate. “And how’d you get here?” She asks. “How’d you come to us?”
Harry answers.
***
Hermione closes in on him in the Malfoy library, while Draco is busy trying to find rare and banned books that might help them. Only a few hours have passed, but already, Hermione has set to work on meeting with two experts and asked three co-workers about relevant artifacts in the Unspeakable vaults.
Draco jumps when she approaches, but Hermione neither apologizes nor notices, her gaze too intent on Draco’s form. She’s studying him, searching him for visible clues. “Did you perform any magic right before you two traveled? Anything that might have interacted with Harry’s magic at the time?”
He shakes his head. “There were the Malfoy wards, maybe. I can feel them, and I can sense where they end. Our fall should have put us just outside the wards’ perimeter, but I didn’t cast any magic of my own.”
“You were fighting.”
Not a question, Draco notices. He stares at her, watching her watch him. His mind races, wondering why this might matter—why personal grudges might lead to the answer of their inter-dimensional travel.
“What,” Draco says, hitching a brow. “We don’t fight here, your Harry and Draco?”
Hermione’s eyes roll, her body going lax with what must be an outlandish question. “You two fight like cats and dogs, if you let yourselves,” she says. She is using the long-suffering voice of a friend who has been caught up in such squabbles. But then her eyes are back on him, all soft around the edges. “But you two love just as fiercely.”
Draco feels suddenly embarrassed. Tries to look away and refocus on the task of finding books, but his eyes merely swim, drowning across titles he can’t manage to red.
What does it mean, to love Harry Potter? To be loved by him?
“We do all the fighting and none of the camaraderie where we’re from.”
Hermione’s hum hitches, a disbelieving hmm that says, notice how you did not say love? Notice how you avoided it? Draco remembers, almost absently, why he hated the brightest witch of their age throughout his childhood.
“You certainly had us fooled,” she says, shrugging. Draco thinks about last night, all leg against leg and fingers intertwined with fingers. He tries not to think of it
Draco makes a wave of his hand, a movement to disregard her comments. “A Slytherin game.”
“Not for a Gryffindor.”
Draco takes a deep inhale, his control wavering. He doesn’t understand what Hermione gains by coming here to remind him of a reality that isn’t his but he has pretended to be. Is she angry at him, for taking the place of someone she actually knows? With whom she is actually a friend?
“Are we good friends in your world?” Hermione asks, her tone lighter, more flippant. “We’re quite good ones here, though competitive.”
Draco thinks about Hermione, standing at Harry’s side to make fluttering, motherly motions as her eyes turned back to him in half apology. Hermione and Draco, like Draco and many others, have a tumultuous history consumed by ugly disasters. Still, the war has been over, the lines not redrawn but smudged. Whatever Draco and Hermione are—friends or no—is delicate and tentative but not uncomfortable. Not entirely.
“We’re not close,” Draco answers honestly. “But I value your opinion and I respect you as a witch, and a brilliant one at that.”
Hermione’s eyes shine, her full grin hiding but its traces there, in the corner of her lips. No matter what universe, it seems, Hermione Granger is a glutton for praise.
“Not much different than here, then,” she tells him, jokingly smug. Draco smiles despite himself. It’s easy to be here, with Hermione, in a room filled with material they both worship profusely. Home, where they circle in mixed friend groups but never seek the other out, Draco realizes that they’ve never been alone together for more than a few morsels of moments at a time.
“Aren’t you wary of us?” Hermione’s head turns, unconcerned but curious. “That we’ve done something terrible to the people you love?”
Hermione gives him a small wide-eyed look that says you’re ridiculous. “You are the people that I love,” Hermione says easily, and for a moment Draco is floored, untethered. Love is a word scarcely mentioned in his world, even between the Slytherins he has grown up with. Its weight is immense, uneasy, unflippant. “I’m not wary of you Draco Malfoy,” she says, reaching out a hand to pat his arm consolingly, over the forearm that would have held his shame for others to see. Over the place that denotes him as an origin of one of her miseries. “I have no reason to be.”
“I could be a terrible person,” he says suddenly, unaware entirely of why he has chosen to deconstruct her faith in him. “I was a terrible person. To you. To everyone.”
Hermione’s gaze goes soft, bordering on pitiful, and Draco rankles even though this is the consequences of his own actions. “Harry told me a bit of it,” she says. “And I can’t offer you an answer for the Hermione that you’ve lived with. But I can say that what I’m seeing is still a Draco with good in him.”
Draco’s gapes at her, full mouth open, sputtering nonsense. No words come to him but the uselessly flat-tongued, empty-voweled noises of refutation. You can’t mean that, is what he’s thinking. It’s an empty thing to say.
But she’s already taking the books from his hands, unconcerned in her mannerisms, sure in her words. This easiness they have here—it wrenches something in him. In his world, where everything is hard-fought, he imagine that this conversation could not have ended without venom.
But this is not his world.
Or maybe it is. Just for a moment.
***
Harry and Ron, dubbed largely without utility to the ongoing investigation—Hermione having wrung everything from Harry that she can manage already—resign themselves to their uselessness with ease. They move on to Wizarding chess, which they play with the aid of sandwiches and tea given to them by one of the house elves.
“So you’re telling me that you two really aren’t involved there?”
Harry glances up at him through the rim of his glasses, nonplussed but also not entertained. Harry has already explained this point, and at length. Ron’s weird fixation on it has lost its humor by now.
“Yes,” Harry says, sighing. “I believe it’s the same answer as the last time you asked, ten minutes ago.”
Ron shakes his head, his expression full of confounded disbelief. “I can’t imagine it, mate. Truly, it’s impossible for me that you two aren’t tied to the hip all of the time.”
“Well, believe it,” Harry says, moving one of his pawns. He’s wondering about their version of him, and what he must be like. Though they share the same scar—the same origin—this version of Harry has a world that is unravaged. His wedding photos sit in a Malfoy study. His ex girlfriend (if that’s what she was here as well) has married the woman who tried to sell him out to Voldemort.
Harry sits back on his chair, considering. His eyes, settled on Ron, make him perk up in suspense. “Oh, come on with it,” Ron says, only half goading. “I know you’re dying to ask me things. I know you’re dying to know.”
“Was I raised by the Dudleys?”
Ron’s expression goes sour at the mention of them. “For a little while, but not for long, thank Merlin. When Sirius was released after he got a trial, he came to you right away. You were raised by him and Remus since you were nine.” Harry’s eyebrows raise in surprise, trying to imagine a world in which Sirius plays responsible parent. Remus must have had his work cut out for him raising two children.
“And Teddy?”
Ron’s expression twists with confused. “Teddy?”
So it must be a no, then, which would make sense. Harry mourns a little anyway, for this odd non-loss of his godson.
“Nevermind,” Harry says. “How did Draco and I meet?”
“Hogwarts,” Ron says quickly. “Same car on the train, same boat on the ride over. Swear I even saw you shed a few tears when you two got separated into different houses.” Ron laughs at the piece of lettuce Harry throws at him, adds it to his sandwich before continuing his words. “But the two houses thing never really stopped either of you. Made a fair bit of trouble, actually, what with the password sharing and shenanigans. But you’ve always been inseparable, really. A two-man act.” Ron gives him a considering look. “Would still say you are, in fact.”
Harry’s cheeks burn hot, suddenly embarrassed at the cheeky insinuation at his romantic life. He thinks about falling asleep next to Draco and waking up next to him, too. He thinks about spending the whole evening together, clinging desperately to one another like sailors overboard clinging to the same floating wreckage for safety.
“We hate each other, back in our world.”
Ron turns a disbelieving brow. Harry thinks about how he’s seen Hermione wear this sort of expression towards both of them before, and finds himself laughing. “It’s complicated,” Harry amends.
“It’s always complicated. Can’t say it’s ever stopped the two of you before.”
“It’s different over there. And it’s not just us, either. Our whole world is different.”
Ron shrugs but it’s a soft apology instead of refusal to see his point. Ron can’t imagine a world that isn’t his, because his has mostly been incredible. A series of ups and downs but never bottoms of the barrel. They lived a normal life here. The way Harry might have if he hadn’t been the savior of prophecy.
“When did I get married?” Harry asks, the words soft and timid. He doesn’t know why, but he’s somehow afraid to dig too deep into this—this deep history that he shares with someone who has traveled with him. That exists in this world but not necessarily between the two of them.
“A few years ago,” Ron answers easily. His eyes go up to the ceiling, counting something intangible. “I think it’s been five now.”
“Merlin.”
“Merlin,” Ron echoes, the word coming through a laugh. “You got married first out of all of us, he says. You two were being overachievers.”
“Draco,” they both say simultaneously, sharing a grin. Harry thinks of him and what a life must be like when competition is not about survival.
“But it made sense, too,” Ron says. “No one was surprised when you announced it. We’d all been waiting for when you’d finally pop the question and then you did, and you got married, and you remain sickeningly in love to this day.”
Harry stares at the chess board, trying to imagine this world that this version of his best friend has lived in. Tries to imagine a world in which Draco is the natural choice, easy and sure and incredible. He tries to imagine loving him, in the world that they have now, with all its broken pieces.
Loving is easy for Harry. He loves each of his friends, and expects nothing out of them in return, only that they put up with him from time to time. Being in love is, however, an entirely different matter. It may be a thing too foreign to them now. A luxury.
Blaise arrives in the sitting room, the sound of his entrance slicing through Harry’s half-imagined past. “Our Hermione may have found you your expert,” he says, grinning. Like Hermione, he’s been working to find an answer for them all day. “Let’s get you home, little savior.”