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The Dust of Water	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 20632 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 11
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- 13
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twelve—Showing Up
            Harry twitched and came awake so suddenly that he hurt his neck. He’d been dozing in the chair in front of the fire in the Black library, and now his back ached—and his neck, it hadn’t just been waking up that hurt it. He grimaced and turned his head to the side.
            Kreacher was standing there, staring at him with huge eyes. Harry looked back at him, numb.
            “Master is to be going to bed now!” Kreacher whispered hard, and frowned at Harry as if it was a terrible crime for him to be sleeping in the library.
            Considering some of the other things I got up to, I really don’t think this is the worst, Harry thought, managing to control his hysteria with an effort. His mind had unfocused, and he didn’t want to think about Malfoy’s creepy museum or anything else that would be hard to deal with. He asked instead, “Kreacher, why don’t you approve of Rob?”
            If anything, that made Kreacher puff up bigger and more disapproving than Harry had ever seen him. He stared at Harry and stared past him at the same moment. “It is not for elves to be disapproving of Master’s friends,” he said.
            “Oh, I know you wouldn’t do anything like spit in his tea or anything.” Now Kreacher looked shocked enough to faint. Harry shook his head. He can probably deal better with me smoking illegal potions and plotting blackmail than he can a sense of humor. Malfoy seemed pretty surprised, too. “But what do you think of him?’
            “It is not for elves—”
            “If I order you to, will you tell me?”
            “It is a different thing if Master orders Kreacher, of course,” said Kreacher, and he looked homicidally happy, as if Harry had told him that he could cuddle some ancient Black artifact. “And Kreacher is not liking Rob Haynes. Kreacher never did. He is wanting things.” He shot a suspicious look into the corners of the library, as if he thought Rob was lurking in them to leap out on him.
            “Um.” Harry stretched a little and shook his head. “Do you mean he wanted to steal things from me?”
            “No.” Kreacher swiveled back to stare at him again. “Rob is wanting Master to be different.”
            “Oh,” Harry sighed. That wasn’t news. “I already know he wanted me to announce that we were lovers. But thanks, Kreacher.”
            “No,” said Kreacher. Now that he’d started speaking, it seemed he was going to do it even when Harry wasn’t commanding him. He came forwards so that he could put his hands on the very edge of the chair, and whispered as Harry stared at him. “He was wanting Master to not spend as much time here. Not to read the Dark books. Not to spend as much time finding out the secrets of others.”
            Harry felt a heavy shudder pass through him. Maybe his old self should have stayed with Rob, even if Harry still couldn’t imagine feeling any attraction to a man. Maybe Rob would have persuaded Old Harry to eventually abandon his Dark side and become a good, productive citizen of the wizarding world after all.
            “But Master is independent!” Kreacher’s eyes were burning. “Master told him no!” He pointed a finger at the ceiling. Then he slumped back and stared at Harry with a dullness returning to his face.
            “But new Master might be having him back,” he whispered. “And it would be being terrible for Kreacher.”
            Harry shook his head a little. “No, I won’t have him back,” he said. “You can rest easy about that. But I’d like to be friends with him and talk to him some more about what he remembers about me.”
            “Master is making a mistake,” Kreacher said, and turned and stumped out of the room. “It is going to be like it was being before.”
            Harry called for him, but Kreacher wouldn’t answer. Harry tried going down to the kitchen and speaking to him. Kreacher just stood there with his head turned away. His magic washed the dishes in the sink. But he wouldn’t look at Harry.
            In the end, Harry gave up and went to bed. If he was making a mistake in talking to Rob at all, then it was a mistake. And he had made his share of those. He would doubtless flail around making a few more before he started doing things right.
*
            The next morning brought a visitor and an owl. Harry was finishing breakfast when the fire flared, and Ron called, “Hey, mate. Can I come visit?”
            Harry was just opening his mouth to answer when an aggressive owl surged through the window and towards him. “Just a minute, Ron,” Harry said, ducking and swearing as the owl tried to peck him on the head. “Bloody bird!”
            The owl landed on the table and regarded him with such a jaundiced eye that Harry cast a Stone Glove spell on his fingers before he reached out. It was usually used only with new, young owls who didn’t realize human fingers were not delicious owl treats, but in this case, Harry felt justified when the bird darted its beak out and recoiled with a screech from Harry’s hardened skin. Harry couldn’t feel bad about the sparks that fell from the owl’s beak as it skidded off his hand. Serves the damn thing right.
            The letter was on thick, soft paper that felt as if it was woven from rags, and said only, What are you doing? Kelvin.
            Harry stared at it. Then he shook his head and put the letter down on the table. Without any more incentive than that—and the owl had already flown through the window again, so Harry couldn’t even reply—Harry wouldn’t try to figure it out at this time in the morning.
            “Come on,” he told Ron, and opened the Floo. Ron stumbled through almost immediately and moved over to the other side of the table, where he sat down and studied Harry mournfully.
            “Has something happened to Hermione?” Harry asked, as he nodded at Kreacher and the little elf brought over food to slap down in front of Ron. He braced himself to speak the name, then added, “Or Ginny?”
            Ron closed his eyes. “She said yesterday that she was going to go on the road with the Wasps. I knew they’d been courting her for a little while, but she wouldn’t agree to be anything other than reserve Seeker. She was building a future with you here, and now it’s all gone.”
            Harry sighed. At this point, it just felt like another burden being placed on his shoulders when he couldn’t do anything about it anyway. “What do you want me to say, Ron?” he asked. “It’s not like I got cursed on purpose. I wanted to have a future with her just as much as she wanted to have one with me. But it didn’t work out.”
            Ron opened his eyes. “But you could have tried harder since then. It’s like you don’t even really care. What you should do is—”
            “Model myself after the Pensieve memories and try to be exactly like that?” Harry asked coldly. “Even though I can’t be in love with Ginny if I don’t remember falling in love with her? Even though I can’t be an Auror if I don’t remember the training? What exactly am I supposed to do, Ron?”
            Ron blinked, but didn’t retreat. “You were always in love with Ginny, mate. That part ought to be easy.”
            “No,” Harry said. “Otherwise, why would I have waited five years to get together with her?” He would try to avoid mentioning Rob, but he also won’t going to roll over and pretend Ron was right about everything.
            “But—you were in love with her at Hogwarts.”
            Harry touched his scar for a moment. “No, I liked her,” he said. “But then we broke up pretty easily when you and Hermione and I went on the hunt for Horcruxes. If I didn’t want to protect her so much, I would have brought her along. I think it just proves that I cared more about you and Hermione at the time than I did about her.”
            Ron stared at him. Then he said, “But if you wanted to protect her, that means you cared about her.”
            “Not enough to bring her with me.” Harry charged on when Ron opened his mouth to say something else, because he really didn’t think he would manage to bring it home to Ron otherwise. “You brought Hermione with you, right? You never thought she should stay behind to be protected even though you loved her.”
            Ron flushed deeply. Then he picked at his fingernails. “I don’t know exactly what my feelings for her were during that year,” he muttered.
            “But you still came with her,” Harry said. “I’m not—Old Harry was the one who had the time to know her and fall in love with Ginny. I’m not him, Ron. I can’t be.”
            “But the potential for all of the things he was are still somewhere in you.” Ron glanced up at Harry with a flash of his eyes so keen that Harry froze. “Unless you’re going to pretend that you don’t love our kids, and you’re not our friend, and you’re not capable of being a good Auror.”
            “I’m sure I’ll love your kids when I get to know them again,” Harry muttered softly. “And I was your friend before I lost my memory. I still—Ron, the strongest memories I have of you and Hermione are from seventh year. It was a few months ago that we were all in the Forest of Dean. It was a few weeks ago that we rode the dragon out of Gringotts. Or that’s what it seems like to me, anyway. And I already answered you about the Auror thing.”
            Ron was silent. Harry started slightly when another owl came winging through the window. It wasn’t the same one as before, but the paper it slapped down in front of him seemed to be from the same person.
            I need some answers. The peasants are getting restless. Kelvin.
            Again the owl took off. Harry shook his head at the letter, and then realized Ron had moved around the table and was trying to read it over his shoulder. Harry let him. He had no idea who Kelvin was, anyway, and no idea whether it would be a good idea or not to let Ron read the letter, but it would be more suspicious to act like he couldn’t.
            “You know Kelvin?”
            “No, I don’t, because he must have been someone I met before I lost my memory,” Harry said, and turned hopefully towards Ron. “Do you?”
            Ron’s face looked awful, paler than it had been when he was telling Harry about Ginny going back to her Quidditch career. “Yes,” he said in a choked voice. “He’s—he’s a Potions brewer who came up with a poison that killed a whole bunch of people in Diagon Alley three years ago. He fled to France when we tried to catch him, and then further on. We have no idea where he is now.” He divided his unbelieving gaze between the letter and Harry.
            Harry closed his eyes. He had somehow decided, with realizing he had, that all the people Old Harry was blackmailing must be good ones, simply because Old Harry himself was so awful. But of course there was the chance that people who had secrets Old Harry could blackmail them with wouldn’t be good.
            “Then take these letters, for what good it’ll do,” he said, and held the second one out to Ron along with the one he’d got earlier. “Maybe you can track it down by his magical signature.” He had no idea if Aurors could do that, but he’d thought something in one of the memories Ginny showed him implied they could. Then he looked around for the owl, but it had flown away already.
            “Harry.” Ron’s hand was on the letter, twisting and crumpling it, not handling it carefully like Harry thought he should handle evidence. “How did you know Kelvin?”
            Harry felt as though someone had been plucking on a string that stretched around his heart, and the plucking went down and down and became vibrations in his bones. His breathing was coming short. The room filled with swimming colors.
            “Harry? I need to know.”
            “I don’t fucking remember!” Harry roared, and Ron stumbled back from the force of that roar. Harry leaped to his feet and stared as hard as he could at Ron, willing him to understand. “Will you grasp that? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!”
            Ron stared at him with his mouth open.
            “I found a whole bunch of letters and papers and ledgers in a hidden compartment in the bedroom that Ginny had no idea was there,” Harry said, and began to pace back and forth. “And in a drawer in the desk that she didn’t know was there. And it implied I was blackmailing people.” He began to laugh hysterically, at the same moment as the vibrations traveled into his lungs and made him short of breath. He sounded horrible, leaning against the wall and wheezing. “Maybe Kelvin was one of them. Maybe I was working with him to catch other criminals, or on some illegal potion. I don’t know, Ron. He’s dead, your friend is dead, and I don’t remember anything!”
            Ron shook his head slowly back and forth. “You’ll have to testify,” he whispered. “To receiving these letters, and knowing him. And you’ll have to turn all the papers over to the Aurors as evidence.”
            “Then I’ll only be able to testify to receiving the letters.” Harry slumped back in his chair. He’d stopped laughing, but his chest ached so badly that he would have been almost better if he’d still been, he thought. “I don’t remember any of the rest.”
            “You found the papers. You must have remembered what the compartments were, and where they were.”
            Harry shook his head. “I got suspicious because one of the drawers had a handle shaped like a snake. I tried Parseltongue, and that opened it. I only found the other compartments because I was on the lookout after that. I didn’t remember where they were.”
            “You told us that you couldn’t speak Parseltongue anymore.” Ron’s freckles looked like small dots on a piece of utterly white parchment.
            “I don’t remember what I told you and didn’t tell you. I don’t remember what he told you and didn’t tell you.” Harry pulled at his hair. The slight sting grounded him and made him remember—ha—that he had already said that and Ron hadn’t listened.
            Well, this time he was going to. Harry stood up and said, “Take those letters and go do what you have to do. Tell me what it’s going to come to. In the meantime, I’d like to be alone.”
            “You’ll have to testify—”
            “Yeah, tell me when you find out what laws I’m supposed to obey, as a man who has no memories of his crimes,” Harry told him tiredly, and sat down again.
            The silence between them stretched and lengthened, and Ron finally went to the Floo, holding out his hand as if he thought the powder would deposit itself in his palm. Then he shook his head and reached into the bowl, but it still took him long seconds because he didn’t take his eyes from Harry.
            “You ought to be more careful, Harry,” he whispered. “The memories that you lost? Well, they—they were the real you. I don’t know this you at all.” He threw the powder into the fire and was gone.
            Harry let his head sink into his arms. Kreacher went about cleaning up the kitchen, and once or twice he might have said something, but Harry only grunted in return. His stomach was filled with the cold, useless lump of his breakfast, and he wanted to swear and groan.
            But he sat there, silent, and let conclusions tumble through his head like falling stars.
            Old Harry had been a criminal, had probably conspired to shield Kelvin from the other Aurors, and might have done worse than that. And no matter how much he watched the memories that Malfoy’s potion would bring up, Harry doubted that he would ever really understand the man.
            Understand himself. Ron seemed to think the Ministry might decide Old Harry and Harry himself were one and the same, and try him for his crimes even if he couldn’t remember the whole thing.
            Harry sighed out, long and slow. He had known what he was doing when he talked about the hidden compartments to Ron, and he had decided to do it anyway. And he was serious about the process of atonement. If he ended up going to prison for Old Harry’s crimes, well, that might be what was necessary to atone.
            But he thought he could understand, at the moment, why Old Harry had sometimes sought out Malfoy’s company. There might be complexities there, but nothing like the web that had exploded around Harry now and estranged him from his friends.
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The Dust of Water