Chapter 3
The morning after, Malfoy stalks right into his room and tosses him a wand.
"To show good faith," he says, leaning up against the wall with his hands in his trouser pockets. "But there's a conditional lock on it, which means no spells directed at me. You don't trust me enough right now, which is fair but I'm not keen on you trying to murder me with it. Bit of a hassle as it is." His tone is dry, throwing him a quick, thin smirk. He's thinking about Harry trying to choke him out.
Harry is still sat up in bed with the duvet around his waist, bleary-eyed from sleep as he slowly picks up the wand from the sheets.
"It's mine," Malfoy tells him, his voice lighter. "but it's always worked perfectly for you."
The wand is cool, and it feels ready and right in his hands, the thrum of its magic in his chest and hands and arms. He can shape it into any spell he knows and he is, somehow, viscerally certain it will obey him, and Harry doesn't look up at Malfoy; this piece of knowledge hinting at a history that he doesn't remember being a part of, that he is not sure he can try and accept right now.
He can only assume his wand was lost somewhere sometime years ago. He'd much prefer having his own but there's a small problem with him going to a wand shop in these times.
In his periphery, Malfoy is still lounging against the wall, easy and loose and wolf-like.
And only then, Harry can feel the burn of his gaze on him, which is uncomfortable considering the state he is in; his hair likely ridiculously stuck up all over and in the pyjamas that aren't even his own and not yet fully out of his sound, dead, lassitude-induced slumber. He chances a glance up at him, feeling vulnerable and exposed, shifting uneasily when they meet eyes, a split-second of that same bright, liquid emotion Harry saw just before we were lovers, is perhaps the word.
Malfoy's head darts away almost instantly, and he clears his throat, pushing off with his arms unfolding. "Get freshened up and come down for breakfast," he mutters, already turning around neatly.
Harry understands what that look means only then. He didn't before, but he does now.
He thought it had been a thing of the past, long over from both sides. It has been seven years, after all, if the war was what had ended it; four years of it, and then three after Voldemort's (false) victory.
But Draco Malfoy is still in love with him.
Why, then, did he join the side that wanted Harry dead?
In the shower, he tries not to think about Malfoy being in love with him but he ends up thinking about it anyway. By then, the memory has become warped by time, and he begins to doubt if this is even true or just his own misinterpretation, a figment of his imagination. But the skipping of his own heart upon seeing it, he remembers that much with clarity, and something in him must have instinctually caught something from it.
He thinks of the wild joy on Malfoy's face at his awakening; laughing even under Harry's hands around his throat, looking closely into his own eyes as he whispered his name like a prayer answered. Well, hello to you, Harry James Potter.
But that can just as easily be for what Harry can give him. Malfoy wants to overthrow Voldemort. He needs Harry for it, though he is yet to find out why Malfoy needs him for it and what he stands to gain from this (to be the next Dark Lord himself? Or is it something else? Vengeance for a wrongdoing?) but for whatever reason Malfoy does not think he can do it himself.
By the time he gets out, the mirror has fogged up. He hesitates, a second, two, before he swipes a hand over it. It is unsettling, to look at his own eyes and nose and mouth and only see a stranger, this blank canvas mind of his.
On his shoulder, there is a birthmark, shaped like an oval burn.
On his hand; I must not tell lies, carved into the edge of its back.
On his arm, the injury the basilisk left him, the cut on his palm that took his blood to bring back Voldemort.
On his temple, the lightning scar.
All of it comes together to make him. These are the markers of his story. If only he could remember living it.
At breakfast, Harry, once again, took all the food from the same pots and plates that Malfoy did. Malfoy pushes him to eat more than he does, regarding him with that sharp, assessing gaze, but does not push further when Harry begins to feel sick.
After every meal that day, he gives Harry moderate doses of memory-restoring potions, healing potions, fortifying and nourishing potions. True to his word, he drinks a bit of each one to prove they are safe, seeing Harry's guarded and wary face.
He spends many of the first few days with the door locked except for meals, sleeping, resting. He is so tired all the time. His muscles seem wasted and weak. He is bony, unhealthily thin, and when he tries to move or walk, it's as if he isn't fully in control and coordinated.
Malfoy is rolling on a black cloak over his shoulders, seeing Harry's face when he lifts his head; visibly distressed and drained after making his way down to the drawing room, despite trying very hard not to show it. He is getting so sick of laying around. The first day, he didn't think much of it. He'd awoken and known nothing else, felt weak and lightheaded and hungry, fueled still by adrenaline and survival. It was understandable. Now it's been a week and he is still the same.
"How long will it take before I'm, um... you know. Back to normal?"
"Weeks, hopefully, if you keep taking your potions with consistency."
"I was sort of hoping it'd be within days."
"Yes, well. You've always been a terrible patient." Malfoy is clasping his cloak at his throat with a silver brooch, snug against the sharp line of it. He is wearing fancy, embroidered robes under the cloak, fitted by a pretty belt at the dips of his waist. Something midnight blue. He looks like a prince, as handsome as Harry wishes he wasn't, picking up a white, silken glove from the side table. "You know, in the muggle world, you wouldn't have been able to even walk."
Harry watches him put his glove on. "Yeah. That's great to know."
Malfoy huffs, amused, so faint as to be nearly soundless. "I only mean that years in a coma has its impacts on your body. Without magic, you would have had blood clots, atrophied muscles, damaged joints. A lot of other awful things. Severus and I managed to stave off most of it, but even then it doesn't erase what it can do to a body to remain unmoving for such a long time. It's not abnormal. So you can stop feeling like you're weak or whatever ridiculous thing is going through your head."
Three years is a very long time. He knows a bit about coma curses; how nobody can revert it or awaken someone from it forcibly. Voldemort was a powerful wizard, strong enough to make it last so long.
It's the first time Harry has really thought about it, and he feels truly grateful, to a man he does not remember knowing and the man before him. Even though things are unclear and he is not entirely certain of Malfoy's motives, it means something to him right now.
"Thank you," he says quietly.
Malfoy throws him a slight smirk, or maybe it's a smile — something in-between, faint and one side more crooked than the other.
"Where are you going?"
"Wouldn't you like to know."
Harry's brows raise.
"Ministry ball," Malfoy relents, a dry squinch at a corner of his mouth. He does not sound very eager or excited about it. "I expect to be very bored."
"At least you'll be bored somewhere decorative," Harry says, somewhat absently. He wonders who else will be there, what other Death-Eaters... all the people at the top of the adminstration, and the top is so populated with them now.
"Are you saying my house is not well-decorated?"
Malfoy. Malfoy seems to be quite high-up. Harry does not think he'd be entrusted with such a task, holding proof of Voldemort's false victory in his house, if he wasn't important. He is clever enough, dangerously so, to be able to work out the deep extrication of a horcrux from a soul, even if it was one third of the work.
And then back to square one.
Harry is once again uncertain and wary of him, thinking of this. He has all this power and status now. Why would he give it up for anything unless he is seeking something even greater; to have the world at his feet? He has made it this far doing Merlin knows what. Why turn back now? For either vengeance or a stale, years old love?
(Why keep Harry safe and so well-taken care of in his house for a year?)
Malfoy seems to sense the change in mood, his face having smoothed.
"I should be going," he says.
"You do that."
*
It turns out Harry knows a fair amount about Occlumency; the pre-requisites, the theory and practice, though he can't say from where. It's still a laborious learning procedure, agonising and violating, but important.
He feared at first that Malfoy may be seeking out some secret information from his subconscious mind, but it turns out a Legilimens can only access what the person himself knows or remembers, so things are fine there.
It takes him as many weeks to master it as it does to physically recover enough to walk without growing sweaty and out of breath. Harry heals and takes his potions and begins to eat better, and the rest of the time, he tries to regain his magical and bodily coordination as much as possible.
Malfoy has a training room slash gym for it, with animated dummies and unmoving targets and just about anything else they can practice. Harry likes it. He likes to be in there, casting every spell he can remember until it's nearly effortless to use magic again. It's about the only time he is so engrossed he doesn't have to think about anything else.
He spends nearly half day in the room, except for mornings when Malfoy is working out in it or training; lean and swift, all gleaming sweat and dark tanktops and mussed up hair. Flushed skin. Heavy breaths.
He is dizzyingly attractive, is the thing. Harry doesn't quite like to think about that either.
There are many times more that he notices Malfoy's lingering gaze on him, that same one. By now, he's begun to read different things out of them.
There are times Malfoy still looks at him like he can't believe Harry is here, like he thinks Harry might vanish any second. Once, he reached out for Harry, a little out of nowhere, as if to touch him, and then, stuttering back when he saw Harry flinch, fingers closing slowly, perhaps remembering himself after having forgotten the way things are now.
On that day, Harry's distrust swelled so great that he began to wonder if this was a dangerous and obsessive thing, if they were ever anything at all because Malfoy can say something and there will be no one else to tell Harry that it's not true.
But Malfoy had kept a respectful distance ever since. That, in itself, became proof that maybe it is not so.
Now there are times it seems to be a coccoon of safety, a guarantee and promise that Malfoy might try to do right by him in the end out of whatever he felt for him. Sometimes.
Other times Harry pities him for it, when he wonders of the Harry of before. Had he died loving Malfoy too? (False as it was, but it would have seemed true to him then). Or had he long moved on sometime in the war? Had he died being sad? Disappointed? Hating him?
If Harry remembers everything now, what will he feel for Malfoy then? Memories and experiences create feelings. Knowing the whole story makes all the difference. Having been there for it. Was he there for it?
What will he feel for Malfoy then?
He doesn't know. He thinks about seven years, and how in all those seven years Malfoy spent his time on the dark side of the war. How many chances would he have had to join the other side in all that time? If he stayed in the last year for Harry, perhaps, then what about the years before? Why has it taken Malfoy so long? Has he been taking other secretive measures that Harry doesn't know of to actively oppose this regime? Espionage during the war until Voldemort won?
"You've never told me why you're doing any of this, you know," Harry says over lunch.
Malfoy smirks, all glinting mischief. "Why, I'm trying to help save wizarding Britain, of course. Bring about world peace. All out of the goodness of my little Death-Eater heart."
There isn't anyone else to tell Harry it's not true. But Harry can tell he's being coy.
"Were you a spy in the war? For our side?"
"A spy. Yes. Why not."
"Okay. Not a spy then." So it sounds, from the way he's saying that. Harry frowns. "Then what?"
Something to do with me?
But Harry can't bring himself to ask it. For all he thinks about it, and how afar it seems, it's hard to speak of it; something so intimate and vulnerable. It also just feels weird and presumptuous in general to think it has anything to do with him.
"Be the next Dark Lord?"
"The next Dark Lord," Malfoy says in surprised disgust. "Heavens no. Have you seen the throneroom? The decor is atrocious..." Then, thoughtfully, "On second thought, maybe I should become the next Dark Lord only to fix that. I can't believe he's wasted so much time passing anti-muggleborn legislations when the first thing he should have done was hire an interior designer."
All avoidant, non-answers like that.
"I'm sure he'll take your suggestions, considering you're his right-hand." It comes out somewhat unkindly.
Malfoy laughs, short and hollow. "My suggestions? Oh no. The Dark Lord only listens to his own. Shame. I could have revamped that throneroom with my taste."
"How am I supposed to believe you won't fuck me over if you won't even tell me why you've changed your mind about slaving after your Dark Lord for seven years?"
Malfoy's face has gone blank and cold. Harry's mouth clamps shut. He has not seen him this way in all these weeks.
It's then that it occurs to Harry that the answer may be sinister in an entirely different way.
Did they hurt him?
The guilt that wells up is unbidden, sudden.
"I'm sorry. I'm not... I'm not trying to be a dick. I just..." But Harry doesn't really know how he'll explain the way he feels, as if any second the ground might slip out from under his feet.
Malfoy stands up. His face is still set. "Whatever you have to know," he says, his voice deliberately calm, "you will remember. But as of now, you're not entitled to knowing every possible thing about me if it doesn't directly involve you."
How will Harry know?
Maybe it has nothing to do with him or maybe it's impossible that they were once something and there was a war and nothing was ever interlinked together, feeding into each other.
Malfoy leaves, Harry staring after him.
So if he wants to find out anything, it has to be by other means.
Harry sneaks one day into Malfoy's bedroom and study room, when he is out somewhere.
There is nothing.
Harry checks for hiding spells, secret compartments or a tile out of place. There is nothing. Malfoy hides himself well.
*
Harry restores his first memory by the fourth week. It happens in a vague, short dream, and it makes no actual sense but it feels as if it had happened.
"It's not much," Harry tells Malfoy. "I mean, I might have just imagined it, I don't know..."
"What was it?" Malfoy asks, somewhat impatient. "What was the memory?"
"A girl. She had... she had really bushy hair." Malfoy's eyes flash with something, delighted. He is leaning forward in his anticipation. "A boy with ginger hair. They were children, just laughing with me, said my name at some point I think. That's all. Do you, um... do you know who they are?"
"They're your friends."
Present tense. Alive.
What kind of a person had Harry been, so cut off, not wondering if anyone has ever loved him? If he has ever loved anyone himself?
Not wondered about them, Harry adds softly in thought, seeing the picture Malfoy has handed him: a grainy, sepia picture of himself, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger as children in school uniform robes. It's a candid shot, the three of them just talking. Hermione has her head tipped back over Harry's shoulder to look up at him, Ron leaned back on his hands and against Harry's other shoulder to listen to her. Harry wonders know who took this, how Malfoy got it. In the picture, they look so comfortable, so safe and careless of anything around them.
It turns out Harry has had many people that were a part of his life — Luna, Neville, the Weasley family, Remus, a godfather named Sirius whom he lost when he was fifteen, Blaise Zabini, Pansy Parkinson, Theodore Nott, many others.
It's a kind thing, the way Malfoy sits with him and tells him everything he knows about each one, what they were all like, what they've all done for Harry. But all this personal knowledge tapers off by the timeline of war.
"What happened to them all after?"
Luna Lovegood passed away in the dungeons of the Lestrange Manor in the midst of war, where she was captured and kept, along with a schoolmate of Harry's named Dean Thomas, the goblin Griphook. Remus and Nymphadora died in war. Molly and Arthur were captured and killed, like most people of the older generations that sided against Voldemort. No one knows anything of Andromeda Black and Teddy Lupin's whereabouts. Some people were out of the country, like Pansy Parkinson, Fleur Delacour, Bill and Charlie Weasley. Others, like George Weasley, Blaise Zabini and Theodore Nott, were put into rehabilitation programs. Some integrated into the bloodpurist society. Others died in the program. Few endured and found ways to fool them into thinking they've been rehabiliated, and supposedly joined the deep underground organisation of the Blood Traitors, or the Resistance, some might call it.
"They cropped up sometime in the last two years. Initially, it was believed Hermione and Ron had fled to Australia, or died. But then witnesses, surveillance... they've always been around, and they've been planning, despite being endlessly on the run. Hermione is the brains of the operation. She's very intelligent, you see. Scarily so. Desirable No. 1 in all of Dark Wizarding Britain, in fact. Neville's second. Ronald's third. And so it goes."
"You talk about them like you're all friends."
Malfoy smirks at him, his eyes bright and intense. "I should hope we are. We're working together, after all. I give them all the intel and resources they need. They'll give me an army when the time is right."
Harry swallows hard. His heart is throbbing, fast. "Do you know where they are?"
"I know about Hermione and Ronald, yes, since my correspondence is only with them. Can't have too many people in on it. Who knows who might get caught by whom, where it might go. Unfortunately, they got separated from the rest of their faction of the Resistance about a month back. Now the Death-Eaters are looking."
Harry doesn't sleep well that night. He can't stop thinking about them all; the ones that died and the ones that live but never get to rest and the ones that never got to rest until they died.
This is the first time he finds himself fearing his memories.