I Give You a Wondrous Mirror | By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 17806 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1 |
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story. |
Thanks again for all the reviews!
This is the last chapter of I Give You a Wondrous Mirror,
and, as promised in the story’s summary, is fully compliant with the epilogue
of DH—in one world. Thank you to everyone who read and reviewed. This is the
longest story I’ve written to date, but not, I hope, the only one of this
length. I’ll probably start a new WiP in a week or so.
“Come on,
Al.”
Harry hid a
smile behind his hand. Despite James’s tone of voice, he was Levitating his little
brother’s trunk with an expression of extreme patience. Harry couldn’t be sure
that James would ever be as calm and polite as Al was—there was a reason his
eldest son was in Gryffindor, after all—but he had certainly improved from the
spoiled bully he had once seemed set to grow into.
Or maybe
it’s just that he’s been at Hogwarts one year already and is enjoying the
chance to play tour guide, Harry thought, as he listened to James telling
Al about the Sorting and how he mustn’t expect to have a parent nearby every
time he got into trouble. Al nodded, absorbing some of it and rejecting the
rest. It helped, Harry thought, that he had Scorpius beside him, who tended to
squeeze his hand every time James lied outrageously.
Arms
slipped around Harry’s waist. He leaned briefly back into Draco’s embrace and
squeezed his lover’s hand the way Scorpius was doing for Al.
“I thought
it would be easier the third time,” Draco muttered into his ear. “It isn’t.”
Harry
chuckled and turned his head to steal a kiss. “There was too long a break
between James and Teddy,” he said, when they came up for air. “If they’d gone
one after another, we’d be old hands at this by now.”
“No, you
wouldn’t,” said Lily, who was walking behind them at a sedate pace. Narcissa
followed her, keeping one eye on her granddaughter so that Lily wouldn’t get
dirt on her new, formal blue robes. Harry thought it highly unlikely that she
would anyway. Narcissa had raised Lily “properly,” which meant Lily tended to
wash her hands obsessively after touching a post-owl and come out of mock duels
with her brothers lacking any wrinkle in her clothing. But Narcissa hadn’t
counteracted, or maybe she had encouraged, a perceptiveness and directness that
Harry thought made his daughter a sure candidate for Gryffindor House when it
was her turn to board the Hogwarts Express. She eyed him now and said calmly,
“You’ll always mourn when one of us leaves home, because you love us so much.”
She turned her head towards Narcissa. “They’ll be wrecks when we get married,
won’t they?”
“I prefer
to think of that day as occurring a long time from now, dear,” Narcissa said,
with a fastidious little shudder.
Draco
rolled his eyes and drew Harry along faster, until they were halfway between
the boys and the women of the family. “We’ll have to make sure to keep her
entertained,” he said in a low voice to Harry. “Otherwise, our sons are likely
to come home and find that she’s terrified us into obedience.”
“She’s not
that bad,” Harry said automatically.
“Harry,
she’s a demon in human form.”
Harry
laughed under his breath. He was sure Hermione or Ron would have heard fervent
disdain for Lily in Draco’s voice. But Harry, after nine years—or nineteen,
depending on which view one took—of constant and close companionship, could
hear the affection breathing, guarded, under the surface. Draco simply didn’t
see why he should express himself openly around strangers.
“Harry!”
Ron’s voice
called from the other side of the platform. Harry turned his head, searching,
and then waved as he caught a glimpse of Ron and Hermione herding Rose
forwards. Hugo strolled along behind them, hands in his robe pockets, his face
moody. Harry made a mental note to offer to take Hugo to Flourish and Blotts
when they went back to Diagon Alley. Ron’s son had never become reconciled to
the fact that his sister was older than he was and therefore would be attending
Hogwarts first.
“Rose!”
Scorpius yelled. “Catch!” His hand flashed out, tossing a practice Snitch in
her direction.
Unsurprisingly,
Rose snatched the little golden ball out of the air without half trying and
gave Scorpius a superior look. She and Scorpius had an interest in Quidditch
unmatched by the rest of the children. James preferred pranks and hanging out
with his friends; Al preferred books; Hugo had already taken a shine to
experimental magic of the kind his uncles had used to create Weasleys’ Wizard
Wheezes. Lily did a great number of things perfectly, but Harry suspected her
main interest was world domination.
“You’ll
have to do better than that if you want a place on the Slytherin team as
Seeker,” Rose said now.
Ron rolled
his eyes and gave Harry a long-suffering look, the same one he used whenever
his daughter talked about being in Slytherin House. Harry just looked back unsympathetically.
One of his sons was certain to end up there, Scorpius if not Al. And if Lily
didn’t become a Gryffindor, Slytherin was the House for her.
“They’ll
all be so impressed with me that they won’t look twice at you,” Scorpius
was telling Rose. “I can ride a broom faster than you can any day.”
“There’s
the little matter of staying on it,” Rose said smugly, referring to an period
earlier in the summer where Scorpius seemed to have fallen off his broom every
time Harry and Draco’s family saw Ron and Hermione’s. Predictably, Scorpius’s
ears turned pink, and he began some scathing retort.
Harry
didn’t listen to it. Draco had tapped his shoulder and was murmuring, “Look
there.”
Harry
glanced up. Opposite him and Draco stood a very large wizarding family Harry
didn’t recognize. The parents were gathered around what looked like triplet
witches, hugging them tearfully and making them promise to write; their
daughters looked torn between tears of their own and fearsome embarrassment.
But the
important thing was the conjured mirror—for what purpose the family had brought
it Harry didn’t know—hovering behind the photograph-snapping grandfather. The
surface started to boil with shadows, just from the one glance.
“Shall we?”
Draco asked, his hand tightening on Harry’s shoulder.
Harry
hesitated for a long moment. It had been years since he and Draco had looked
into the other world through the mirrors. For one thing, it was too depressing
for Harry to watch what his own cowardice had wrought—his other self falling
steadily back in love with Ginny, reconciling to her by forgetting what she had
done rather than forgiving her, and persuading himself that his brief love
affair with that Draco had been a deadly mistake.
But now…
He did want
to know what that other Harry looked like on the morning of letting one of his
children go to Hogwarts. He and Draco hadn’t bothered to look when they saw
Teddy or James off.
“Just for a
moment,” he said, and he joined hands with his lover and leaned forwards, staring
intently.
*
Draco saw
it all.
He saw the
way the Harry of the other world—who looked under considerably more strain and
stress than his lover—hovered near his children, staring intently and
protectively at a quietly terrified Al, but ignoring his wife. There was no
physical contact between them, no gentle touches. It was the same situation as
the last time Draco and Harry had looked into the mirror, three years ago.
Harry had confessed to finding his double’s imperfect relationship with Ginny
extremely sad. Draco thought it was all that the reckless idiot of the mirror
world deserved.
He saw the
moment when the steam cleared and that Harry caught sight of his other self.
Draco felt
a surge of quiet but fierce pride when he saw the expression in the eyes of
that Draco. Standing beside Marian and a Scorpius who obviously had no memory
of Al’s friendship, he stared at Harry for a moment, then jerked his head down
into a curt nod. Then he turned away.
The
reflected Harry kept staring. The angle of the mirror didn’t allow Draco to be
certain about the expression in his eyes. It could have been regret, desire, or
fear. He could have curled his lip or been ready to spring across the platform
and catch the other Draco’s hand between his.
But he
didn’t offer any acknowledgement of the nod he’d got. Instead, he turned away
and continued to speak with his friends and his children, the people he’d
chosen to share his life with.
Shadows
covered the images. Harry must have stopped concentrating. Draco glanced down
at him to find his face transfixed in an expression of disgust and
consternation.
“All
right?” Draco whispered.
“That idiot,”
Harry said. “The unmitigated prat. Of all the ways it could have gone.
Of all the choices he could have made.” He shook his head and turned sharply
away, striding the few steps that still separated them from Al and Scorpius. He
knelt down to fuss with their sons’ robes, answering a few of Al’s questions.
Draco was sure they were about the size of the library at Hogwarts. The boy
would make a fine Ravenclaw—if the Hat could persuade him to be Sorted
separately from Scorpius, at least.
Draco
glanced back one more time at the mirror. He would have been more inclined to
place the blame on Ginny Potter. But he could see Harry’s point. It was the way
that other Harry had hidden from reality that created the rift between him and
the mirror world’s Draco. They could at least have remained friends. They could
have continued meeting in dreams as lovers. But the second Harry had chosen,
and chosen not wisely but thoroughly, and this was the result.
Strange,
that in that world it was Harry’s choice which decided it all, and in this one
it was both of ours.
Of course,
to Draco, that was just another sign that their new world was better than the
one they’d come from, and that the life-debts knew what they were doing when
they arranged for him and Harry to be bound together.
“Dad!”
Scorpius’s
imperious voice summoned him from ahead. Draco smiled and lengthened his
stride. Scorpius probably wanted to demand one more recital of the List for
Survival in Slytherin.
Harry
glanced up at him. His left hand rested lightly on Al’s shoulder, and Al still
had hold of Scorpius’s wrist. As Draco came up, he had to find places for both
Harry’s and Scorpius’s hands, and then the four of them were bound into a
tightly joined circle.
To Draco,
it was appropriate. His and Harry’s first connection had come about through
Scorpius, and then through the friendship of their sons.
From the
way Harry caught his eye, he was thinking the same thing.
Draco gave
a smile that he knew was thoroughly self-satisfied, and began to recite the
well-worn advice that Scorpius, Rose, and maybe even Al could use—but quickly,
because they had a train to catch.
Finite.
*
Myra:
Thanks! As you can see, James isn’t really a gentleman, but he’s not spoiled,
either.
Mephistedes:
Unfortunately, since I assumed from the beginning that I would comply with JKR’s
epilogue, Harry and Draco’s lives in the mirror world follow canon.
Thrnbrooke:
Thanks! I promise I’ll write other long stories, though.
Listener:
Thank you! As you can see, I chose to leave a lot of details unmentioned even in
the epilogue, because there was just no way to fit them all in.
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