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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.

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Chapter Six—The Waters of Parting
            The dinner hadn’t gone well. Harry knew that as much from his friends’ expressive faces as from the irritated glances Ginny kept sending him, and the awkward pauses in the conversation, and how Ron and Hermione would sometimes turn aside to whisper to each other.
            He was sorry. But his heart was almost solid, it was so heavy. This was only one more sorrow on top of all of them.
            He stood in Hermione and Ron’s unfamiliar kitchen, staring at an unfamiliar photograph of the three of them on the wall. Hermione had said it was when they went on holiday to Switzerland. To Harry, it just looked like there were high mountains in the background.
            He had never been to Switzerland.
            And maybe I never will, Harry thought, numb in a way that felt like shock. Ron and Hermione might not want to go back if they’ve been once.
            “It’s hard, isn’t it?”
            Harry blinked and turned back to face Hermione, who was splashing the plates under water. Harry thought she could have cleaned them in an instant with a charm, and then told himself not to be a fool. Obviously she’d come in here to talk to him, and he thought he heard Ron and Ginny’s voices rise as if they were arguing.
            Or filling up artificial holes in the conversation, Harry thought as he moved towards Hermione and reached out silently with a towel. Hermione handed him a plate, and Harry started drying it, staring intently down at his hands. At least this was something he still remembered how to do.
            He remembered how to do it from Privet Drive, not from his friends’ house, and that was a fact that had to sting. But it had a lot of competition at the moment, so Harry wasn’t sure it actually managed.
            “Yeah, it is,” Harry finally said, when he realized that he didn’t have anywhere to go to escape the conversation, and Hermione had paused with a soapy cup in her hand. “I don’t know who I am anymore.” He started to say something else, but his throat was choked with all sorts of emotions, as thick as the suds. And hadn’t he said enough? He ended up shaking his head.
            “You’re our friend,” Hermione said quietly. Her hands returned to scrubbing.
            “And what does that mean?” Harry asked her roughly. “I don’t remember proposing to Ginny.” And I’m starting to be afraid that the old me only did it to cover something up, or because everyone expected him to. That was the kind of thing he couldn’t say, though. “I don’t remember anything about your kids. Merlin, Hermione. That’s a huge part of your life. How can you want to share it with someone who should remember being Uncle Harry, and doesn’t?”
            Belatedly, he realized she was holding out a cup to him and wouldn’t move it. He took it and wiped roughly along the rim. The glass sipped from his hold and shattered on the floor. Harry cursed and leaned on the sink, eyes closed.
            Ron and Ginny’s conversation had stopped, but Hermione called out, “It’s okay,” and they went back to talking. Hermione kept her eyes on Harry as she bent down and cast a Reparo on the glass. “You know that it can’t be exactly the way it used to be,” she said. “Even if you got all your memories back, you would still have been changed by losing them.”
            Harry spun on her. “Then what’s the point of having me look at so many Pensieves and bringing me here and pretending everything’s going to be all right?”
            “‘All right’ and ‘just the same’ are different.” Hermione’s eyes were disconcertingly direct as she brushed hair out of them. “If you think you can’t be the man Ginny loves anymore, you should tell her. That’s the only thing I think you utterly have to do. Ron and I, we’ll get used to the new Harry and love him, too.”
            Harry looked down at the floor. “Even if I’m the same person he was ten years ago, and you have ten years’ worth of experience?”
            “Yes.” Hermione’s hand came into view holding out another glass. Harry accepted it and dried it more carefully this time and put it down on the counter. “Because friendship is different from the kind of love you shared with Ginny.” Harry opened his mouth, but Hermione added, “And I do think that you and him are the same person, Harry. You need to start thinking of him that way. It’s unhealthy to do otherwise.”
            Harry flushed and wished he had a shell like a turtle he could retreat into. “I don’t—Hermione, I’m not sure that I’ll ever go back to being what I was.”
            “I just said that was okay. Except for Ginny.” Hermione moved her head towards the dining room again. “Are you going to tell her?”
            “How can I?” Harry whispered. He wanted to ask if Hermione knew about Rob and the relationship he’d apparently had with him, but he did think she would have told him if she knew when he was still in hospital. It was exactly the kind of secret Hermione would have thought he should still have the option of keeping from Ginny if he wanted to. “She’s already waited five years for me, and then we had five years together. Wouldn’t telling her that I can’t turn into the old Harry again be like tossing her out on her ear and telling her that she’s wasted a decade?”
            “No,” said Hermione at one. “It would be adapting to bad circumstances the best way you can.” She reached out and squeezed Harry’s hand again. “Listen. I care about both of you. You’re my friend. Ginny’s my sister-in-law. You should both be happy.”
            Harry nodded, listening, because he could sense a “but” coming up.
            “But,” said Hermione, and Harry allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction, “that happiness won’t come from you trying to force yourself into a role you don’t fit. Ginny might think she would be happy if you acted exactly like your old self, even if you hated it, but she wouldn’t. She’s a better person than that. She’d notice eventually, and you’d resent her for making the deception necessary, and it would all come out in the end anyway.”
            “Probably true,” Harry whispered. His head and heart still ached. He had hoped Hermione would give him advice, something he could do, but it didn’t sound like she would.
            Or could. Harry was left in the same position of deciding on his own whether he should tell Ginny about things like his hidden ledger and papers and life.
            “So tell her.” Hermione reached out and rested her hand on his shoulder, and her eyes were kind. “I can see one way that you’re already changing.”
            “Yeah?” Harry looked at her.
            “You don’t talk about Auror training,” said Hermione. “That ambition doesn’t exist for you anymore, does it? That’s something you ought to tell Kingsley.” She hesitated, and then added, “Please don’t answer if it makes you uncomfortable, but…where did it go? I know that you were anxious to be an Auror right after the Battle of Hogwarts, and I thought that was the way you woke up.”
            “I did it already,” said Harry. “I lived through that part of my past and achieved what I wanted to achieve, even if I don’t remember it. I know that doesn’t make much sense,” he added hastily, when he saw the way Hermione blinked and stared at him. “But that’s the way it feels.”
            “No, that makes perfect sense,” said Hermione fiercely, and hugged him. “Now you need to find something else to do with your life.”
            “Something,” Harry echoed.
            “You’ll find it.” Hermione nodded, stepped back, and patted him firmly on the shoulder. “Now, go tell Ginny and Kingsley.”
*
            Kingsley’s office was shut until tomorrow, and Harry knew he wouldn’t be able to talk to him for a while, anyway. He’d have to go through secretaries and the like. That was the reason he gave himself for telling Ginny first.
            And it wasn’t a bad idea, until the spit dried up in his mouth as he stood facing her across their kitchen, and Ginny’s voice got quieter and quieter the way it had in that Pensieve memory of their argument she’d shown him, and Harry realized he didn’t know if he had the courage to do this, after all. He tried to picture Hermione’s face and hear her encouraging words, but that was less powerful than real disappointment.
            “You had no right to pretend that you would try to be the man who loved me, and then stop trying.” Ginny moved forwards a fluid step, and Harry tensed. But there was nothing within reach that she could throw, and she didn’t have her wand drawn, either. Harry thought those things were positive. “You knew all along that you wouldn’t do it. Didn’t you?”
            “I told you I was different,” said Harry. He wanted to sound rational, but he just sounded defensive. He felt like an eighteen-year-old kid arguing with—a woman. Even seeing the memories couldn’t tell him how his old self used to do it.
            Then again, he didn’t know how his old self had committed blackmail and maybe infidelity, either. Being a different person might be a good thing.
            That thought gave Harry courage. He looked at Ginny and continued, “I really wanted to be the man who loved you. But I can’t be.”
            “Why not?” Ginny was suddenly staring at him appealingly, and Harry wondered if he’d imagined the danger in her a minute before. Not that she wasn’t dangerous, but she might not be actually getting ready to attack him. “You’re as gentle and dignified as he is, when you aren’t thinking about it. I know you have the same ambitions about taking care of people.”
            Oh, really? Harry wanted to howl with laughter. But laughter wouldn’t solve anything for either of them. It wouldn’t even ease his feelings, not really.
            He had to press through this.
            “I can’t remember being like that,” Harry admitted. “I don’t know how I got to be like that. But it must have something to do with those five years you waited for me.” This was the best chance he would get to ask Ginny about those years, he thought. “Do you know if I—dated anyone else during then?”
            “There were always rumors,” said Ginny. “But you know that. You read the papers.”
            Harry stared at her and spread his hands. “But I don’t remember how much of that was rumors, Gin. That’s why I’m asking you.”
            Ginny closed her eyes. “It’s a bloody impertinent question to ask, if you think about it.”
            Harry winced. “Fine. I just—fine.” It had seemed that Ginny was the one he was closest to, the one who knew him best, even better than Ron and Hermione. But it was all too obvious that she didn’t know all of him. Rob and the business with Malfoy and the collecting money angle.
            Harry thought again of the memory of her whispering to him in bed. He wondered how much Ginny had felt shut out of his life over the first five years, and how much she’d resented him for it.
            Harry felt another surge of irritation towards the stranger. If he’d been less bloody reserved with Ginny, Harry could have benefited from it right now.
            “But I know you didn’t go out much,” Ginny continued reluctantly. “You spent more time with your fellow Auror trainees than anything, and then with Ron and Hermione. Ron told me once that half your dates got interrupted because of missions, anyway.” She glanced at Harry with fiery eyes. “That’s something I want to change when you go back for Auror training. I know it’s intense, but you have to learn to make time for us. The way he did.”
            Here it comes. He would have to tell someone before Kingsley, after all. Harry braced himself. “I’m not going back to Auror training, Gin.”
            Ginny stared at him, then closed her mouth without answering. She turned her back, though, and looked out the wide window in the kitchen that usually showed a view of Hogwarts. Harry wondered, wearily as always and with no way of knowing, why his old self had chosen that view. Ginny said that he’d been the one to install that enchanted window.
            It was a view of Hogwarts as if seen from the branches of trees in the Forbidden Forest, in a dark, brooding, moonless night with hardly any stars. Harry suspected his old self had his reasons.
            And I might or might not find them sympathetic.
            “If you’re not an Auror anymore,” Ginny finally said, voice low and final, “what are you going to be?”
            “For now? Calm. Trying to get my head in order.” Harry took a deep breath. “There’s too many things that I can’t reconcile myself to. I either have to try, or I have to try and give up hopes of the reconciliation. And right now—there’s too many parties and dinners and celebrations and meetings, Gin. I can’t get my feet back under me that way. I need to think.”
            “I would have let you have that,” said Ginny, “if you’d let me know you needed it.”
            Harry nodded and reached over to pat her arm. She let him do it, although she was still turned to look out the window. “I know. But I thought I was going to be able to take up my old life again. I can’t. There’s too much I don’t know.”
            “And some things you just don’t want to take up again.”
            “That’s right. Like Auror training.”
            Ginny turned around and asked the one thing Harry had hoped she wouldn’t ask. “And me?”
            Harry looked at her and finally spoke the words that he should have spoken first out, flat out, the way Hermione had told him he should. “The man you loved is dead. I don’t—I feel more about you the way I did at the end of the Battle of Hogwarts than anything else. And kind of intimidated.”
            From the way she blinked and pursed her lips, that hadn’t been what Ginny had expected to hear, but she didn’t look entirely upset, either. “Why intimidated?”
            “You’re an adult,” Harry said. “You have ten years’ worth of memories on me, like Ron and Hermione do. And you’ve grown up and found a career you enjoyed and one you can still do.” He closed his eyes and shook his head, hoping she didn’t hear the envy in his voice. There were some things it still wouldn’t do him any good to admit. “You seem so much more mature than I do. I can’t—live up to that.”
            “And the expectations I had of you as my partner?”
            Harry nodded and opened his eyes. “Partner, lover, potential fiancé. There’s so much that’s gone. So much you need from me and aren’t going to get.”
            Ginny faced him now, and she looked as indomitable as a stone pillar in a sandstorm. “I meant it when I said that I’d wait for you, Harry. To get your head in order along with everything else. I did it once, for five years. I can do it again.”
            “How can you?” That was the most bewildering thing to Harry, he thought. Probably more bewildering than how he had become the person it seemed he had been, or why he had taken five years to decide he was in love with Ginny. “What let you kept hoping for five years instead of giving up on him—me and finding someone else?”
            Ginny shut her eyes. “Because I’m that much in love with you.”
            Harry shook for a second, and then closed his hands into fists. Along with everything else, the curse had stolen his chance for a family from him, he thought. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that he would have married Ginny.
            He couldn’t have changed so much that he would have given up on the ideal of someone who loved him for himself.
            “This time,” Harry forced himself to say, “it might not be five years. It might be forever. Can you live with that?”
            Ginny opened her eyes, and there was a second of the most intense gaze that Harry thought he’d ever exchanged with anyone, counting Voldemort. Then Ginny said, “For right now, I’ll wait. We’ll see what happens with later.”
            Harry hugged her, as silent and intense as the gaze had been. Then he turned away and began packing to leave.
            He would go to Number Twelve Grimmauld Place. He knew from Ginny and Hermione’s memories that it was still his, although shut up for a long time, and Kreacher still took care of it. He would have to explain things to Kreacher more than once, probably. Hermione said he was old now, and should have been retired, except to Kreacher “retirement” had meant having his head hung on the wall. Harry—the old Harry—had refused that supposed solution to the problem, Hermione had said.
            I don’t know why, as capable of shitty stuff as he was the rest of the time, Harry thought, and then managed to close his eyes for a second and choose what clothes he was going to take with him, and which other accessories. He had to deal with the fact that Number Twelve probably didn’t have shampoo and a toothbrush waiting for him.
            By the time he was done, Ginny was watching him from the door of the bedroom. Harry came into her arms, and she kissed his cheek.
            “Go and find out what you need to find out,” she said. “I’ll wait.”
            Harry touched her shoulder one more time, and then turned and tossed Floo powder into the fireplace. “Number Twelve Grimmauld Place!” he called clearly.
            The last thing he saw before he left was Ginny standing in one place, as clear-eyed and straight-backed as a soldier.
*
moodysavage: Yes, but they wouldn’t know how much he had changed at the same time, because of how much Harry hid his past life from them.
I think it is very interesting!
starr: Thank you!
SP777: Which aspect of it? How bad the old Harry was?
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The Dust of Water