Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

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
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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Eight—Pain
            Harry was so buried in a book that had promised to tell him about the kinds of potions Malfoy wanted to use, he almost didn’t hear the Floo chime. In the end, Kreacher was the one who came up to tell him he had a visitor. Harry sighed and laid the book on the chair next to him. He reckoned it was Hermione, come to ask him how he was after his breakup with Ginny, or Ron, come to ask him why they’d broken up.
            But he didn’t expect a stranger’s face in the Floo when he went into the sitting room where it was. Harry froze at once, his hand on his wand. Had someone pierced his defenses? The last thing he needed was a nosy reporter or fellow Auror.
            “Harry.” The man was leaning forwards so far that he looked as if he’d fall through the fire and onto the carpet. “I need to know what this means.”
            Harry shook his head. “I don’t know who you are,” he said. “If I knew you when I was a—an Auror, then I don’t recognize you now. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is,” he added, when he saw how the stranger was trying to stare him down.
            He’d almost said, when I was a blackmailer. He would have to watch that. Yes, he wanted to be honest and make up for his mistakes, but the time for that to happen wasn’t yet.
            “I should have realized.” The man touched his hair as though he was in the habit of tugging on it, like Harry, when he was agitated. But he lowered his hand without touching it. Instead, keeping one eye on Harry all the time as if he would run away, he said, “My name is Rob Haynes. I see at least that much is familiar to you.”
            Harry cursed himself for jumping. If he’d acted cool and sorry and nothing else, maybe Haynes would have gone away.
            I half want to call him Rob, with all the mentions he got in that stupid journal.
            But Harry wasn’t going to have any kind of conversation with the man who he might have had a relationship with, and who he might have betrayed his wife with, and who he had almost begun to hope was dead. He managed a tight, probably unconvincing smile. “I saw your face in some photographs.”
            “Then you know why it’s important we talk.”
            Harry shook his head violently. “No, I don’t. I know that we were friends in Auror training, and we must have been friends for a while after that, or I wouldn’t have photographs of you. But I don’t know what happened. What happened to end it, or why it happened in the first place, or why it continued.”
            He was about to go further, to say that he couldn’t afford to make his heart vulnerable right now, when he was in the middle of all this reconnection with his memories, but Rob cut into his words. “It continued because we fell in love.”
            Harry closed his eyes.
            “Both of us,” said Rob, his voice steady now. Maybe he had great courage, Harry thought. It would explain some of the reasons Harry had admired him. “You don’t want to hear this, I know. I’m sorry. I think you have to. It won’t be any easier if you keep putting things off and don’t ever hear the full story from someone who knew it well.”
            “My friends could tell me, if I asked about you,” Harry whispered. “They must know who you are. I wouldn’t have hidden something this important from them.”
            Then he thought about the names with amounts of money ticked against them in the ledger, and felt a sick surge of self-distrust even as Rob made a little disbelieving sound that might have been laughter. “You’re the most secretive person I’ve ever known, Harry. There’s a lot that can be said about that, in praise and scorn, but it’s true.”
            Harry opened his eyes again and looked at him. He wished he knew what to feel, what to do. Once again, he was alone and no one could really tell him what was the best thing to do.
            But he thought about all the secrets, and tried to lift his chin. It was better to know than not to know. He couldn’t make apologies if he didn’t know who he had hurt or what they’d done.
            Besides, Rob looked as if he was settling into the Floo and perfectly willing to tell the story in endless detail right then and there. Harry didn’t know what had happened, but he was sure he wasn’t without fault in it. And the least he could do was be polite.
            “Why don’t you come in?” he added, before Rob could say anything else. “Have a cup of tea and a place to sit down.”
            Rob passed a hand across his face as if he was in a dream and trying to check on whether his vision was blurred. “Well, that’s a nice offer, I must say,” he murmured. “Maybe you’ve changed in more ways than the obvious.”
            Harry chose to say nothing. He had no idea whether it was just his memories that Rob was including in the “obvious,” or something else. Regardless, Rob whirled out of the Floo a second later, perfectly familiar with the address of Number Twelve, and swatted at his robes while his gaze devoured Harry.
            Harry couldn’t look at him the same way. He was a stranger no matter how long they stared into each other’s eyes, like the older Harry in the Pensieve memories. Harry tried to tell himself this was the man he’d been in love with, but other than noting that Rob had sleek dark hair and deep eyes, he couldn’t see why he would have thought him handsome.
            Rob finally shifted his weight, and Harry nodded and waved his hand towards the library, then started walking that direction. Rob promptly followed.
            Harry noticed that Rob didn’t seem to have any trouble getting around the house, and he went immediately towards the chair Harry sat in most often, as if that had been his chair. Harry dropped into the one across from him and said, “Okay. You have to understand I don’t remember anything about you. I thought I learned something from the journals and photographs my older self hid, but I only really know enough to get me in trouble.”
            Rob’s eyebrows went up, and stayed up while Harry called in Kreacher and asked him to bring tea. Kreacher only stared stonily at Rob the entire time. If he recognized him, Harry thought, it wasn’t a happy recognition.
            But he had more to worry about right now than Kreacher. He looked at Rob and said, “So what did you want to tell me?”
            Rob sat back with his hands on his knees. He wore fine robes, Harry thought, which might show he was rich or something like it. The journal hadn’t mentioned him being pure-blood, but then, Harry hadn’t read the journal very closely.
            “I want you to know that I would never have given you up if not for your obsession,” said Rob.
            “What obsession?”
            “Even that’s gone?”
            Rob was gaping at him, and Harry wondered how many times he would have to repeat that, yes, all his memories were gone, and people who had known him but who he didn’t remember would have to treat him like that. Luckily, Rob went on before Harry could yell at him.
            “Another nice change,” Rob muttered. “Fine. You were obsessed with proving to yourself that you were a nice and normal person.”
            “Okay,” Harry said slowly. “I mean, I always wanted to be normal. But why would that entail giving you up?”
            A second later, Harry had to look away from Rob’s smile.
            “Because you didn’t think it was normal to be dating a man,” Rob said, very softly. “Not when you could be dating a woman instead, and the woman everyone expected you to marry.”
            Harry just looked at the floor. The hurt in Rob’s voice wasn’t something he was well-equipped to deal with, and he knew it.
            But he would have to deal with it somehow if he wanted to know what in the world Rob was talking about. So he looked up and asked, “Why wouldn’t I just have gone and dated her from the beginning, if I was in love with her?”
            Rob shook his head. “You weren’t in love with her. You were in love with me.”
            Harry sat up. “You seem fairly certain about that.”
            “Fairly, yes.” Rob crossed his legs. “Considering that you swore to me that you loved me when you were under Veritaserum.”
            “Fuck.” Harry rubbed his mouth and wanted to apologize for the word a second later, but Rob was watching him with something that seemed like approval. “Okay. Why would I have been under Veritaserum?”
            “Because I doubted that you loved me, when you wanted to hide me away and treat me like such a nasty secret. So you took Veritaserum and told me you loved me so I would stop worrying about it.”
            Harry stared into the fireplace. He wanted to see some pattern among the flames that would make sense, considering that his whole world was full of nonsense right now, but nothing came clear when he looked at them.
            “I didn’t think I was gay,” Harry finally said, when Kreacher had come and given them the tea and sniffed and left again. “The main thought I had when I read this journal I kept about you was surprise.” He looked up. “Is that why I wanted to hide you away? Because I never fully admitted that I was gay?”
            “You were never gay.” Rob’s eyes were hard. “Bisexual. Which I could accept. But you couldn’t. Every time you told me you loved me, you seemed to mean it. But a few hours or days later, you would be telling me how the wizarding world wouldn’t be able to accept that side of you, not when you were supposed to marry Ginny Weasley and have babies and live happily ever after.”
            “I never cared about what the press thought, from what I can remember,” Harry said. The same blank surprise that had overcome him when he first saw the mentions of Rob’s name in the journal was filling him up again. “Why would I this time?”
            Rob cocked his head. “Because you thought that loving me was part of some descent into darkness that you also said you were making elsewhere in your life. You had violent impulses, I know that. And you were involved in something. Something that you once told me involved threats, but that was all I ever knew about it. You told me that you were two people, one good, one evil. One Light, one Dark.” Rob sucked in enough air that Harry was surprised there was any left in the room for him. “And loving me was part of the evil, Dark side of you.”
            “Oh, Merlin,” Harry said, and put his head in his hands. He knew, objectively, that this wasn’t the worst thing his old self had done. The blackmail was worse, and probably whatever memories Harry would find in the Pensieve, which Malfoy had instructed him not to look into yet, in case it interfered with the success of the potion.
            But it sounded horrible, for him to accuse another person of making him Dark by loving him. Of dragging him into the Dark because that love existed.
            Harry braced himself and looked up. Rob was looking back at him without any expression, other than a small, precise curl of his lip.
            “I know it won’t mean much, because I’m not him and I don’t remember being him at all,” Harry said. “But I’m sorry.”
            Rob waited long enough that Harry wondered why he wasn’t just getting up and storming out of the room. But in the end, he nodded, long and slow.
            “He’s gone, then.” Rob turned his head as if he would study the steam rising from the teapot. Harry didn’t know him well enough to say what he was really avoiding, though. “The man I fell in love with.”
            “Yes,” Harry said quietly. “And not coming back. I don’t want to be an Auror again and stuck in a class full of trainees and instructors who will revere me for things I didn’t do. So I won’t ever train as an Auror again, either.”
            Rob’s hands tightened for a second on his knee. Then he turned around. “Did you find out how we fell in love?” he asked.
            Harry felt his throat tighten. He swallowed and said hoarsely, “No. There was some stuff in the journal about spending a lot of time sparring with you, but—no.”
            “That was the beginning,” said Rob, and he smiled faintly. “Fighting together. You said that you’d never had someone who complemented you so well. No disrespect to Weasley, but he wasn’t as good at casting quick spells.”
            “I know,” said Harry, because that was one of the things he did know, and felt privileged to remember. “His strength was strategy.”
            Rob looked him dead in the eye. “And you said that you wanted someone who could keep up with you, and invited me out for drinks. It took me a long time realize that when you said you wanted someone, you meant as more than a sparring partner. Or an Auror partner.”
            Harry just shook his head. The way he could imagine it, it sounded like the kind of relationship he would have wanted. Someone who could fight beside him, run beside him, be his equal. He wondered why in the world he would have wanted to give it up.
            Or conceal it.
            “What made it end?” he asked. “I mean, besides what you already told me. Was there one decisive moment?”
            Rob tapped his fingers in a rhythmic pattern on his knee, then sighed. “There was one moment when you came and told me that you’d decided you’d wasted enough time. You wanted to date Weasley’s sister. You wanted to have cute ginger babies with her.”
            “As if there was any guarantee they would be ginger,” Harry muttered.
            Rob looked up with a surprised, flashing smile. “You really are different, aren’t you,” he whispered. “He would never have said something like that. He had no sense of humor about it at all. Never did, not about things that didn’t go the way he imagined them.”
            Harry smiled wanly back. It didn’t escape him that someone who had once been his lover seemed to know and accept the demise of Old Harry better than his friends and Ginny had.
            Then again, Rob hadn’t been in contact with Old Harry for at least five years. That suggested he might have forgotten some features of the man Harry was.
            “He gave me a deadline,” said Rob, and his face was distant now. “He said that we could make love one last time, and spend a few months ‘cooling things down’ so that everything would be ‘normal’ between us by the time he went back to Ginny.” He looked at Harry, and his forehead wrinkled. “Or by the time you did. Merlin, this is confusing.”
            “It is,” said Harry, and tried to strengthen his smile. “He sounds like an insufferable arsehole.”
            “I think he was, at that point.” Rob sighed. “And I’d let him get away with it for too long in the name of being in love with him.” He grimaced and sat up. “I told him where he could put his deadline, and then I walked out of there. He sent me letters for a while, telling me that he kept a photograph of me and him on his desk. He could do that much without risking exposure, he said. The Weasleys knew us as friends.” Rob glanced at Harry and shook his head quietly. “I wasn’t going to stand being relegated to the shadows, and I wasn’t going to stand being wooed.”
            Harry only nodded. He couldn’t say that he felt bisexual now, or as if he could so easily fall in love with a man, but he could understand what Rob was saying.
            “I still think I made the right decision,” Rob said.
            “Of course you did,” Harry said. “I can’t tell you exactly what was going on in his mind, but you didn’t deserve to be treated that way by someone you loved. And who loved you. If he did, he should have ignored what the press was saying and his desire for cute ginger babies, and stayed with you.”
            Rob glanced at him again. His mouth was set and bloodless this time, and Harry wondered if he’d accidentally used some phrase that reminded Rob of bad old times. He opened his mouth to apologize.
            “You’re so different,” Rob said abruptly. “I thought you might be more like you were—like he was when I first met him, because you’d been flung back in time so far, but you’re different even from that.”
            “Myself, yes,” said Harry quietly. “I only—I feel like I’m the only Harry that ever was, of course. But I know it must be confusing. For someone who knew my old self, I mean.”
            Rob shut his eyes. This time, the set of his mouth actually looked painful. Harry shook his head. “This looks hard for you,” he said. “Do you want me to get a healing potion? You look pretty bad.”
            Rob abruptly snapped to his feet and held out a hand. Confused, Harry let Rob pull him up, and found himself just as abruptly pressed close, while Rob searched his eyes with piercing ones.
            “I didn’t believe it,” Rob whispered. “I haven’t believed in second chances since the day I walked away from him. But—would you let me court you, Harry Potter?”
            There was an eloquent response there somewhere. But Harry ended up blinking and saying only, “Huh?”
            “You’re so different from him that it’s like meeting someone new.” Rob was speaking fast enough that that sounded painful, too. “But you look like him, and I just—I know it’s probably unhealthy. I know that I should move on and accept your apology and just not look back.” He gave Harry another strained smile, but this one was more open and relaxed than the last, if only by a touch. “But I’m not good at that, either.
“Would you give me the chance to get to know you, and see if that works out for both of us?”
            Harry blinked dazedly. He did have to say, “I can’t remember being attracted to men at all. I haven’t been since I—woke up. I don’t think it would work if I wasn’t like that.”
            “That’s why I’m asking for a chance. Not saying you have to. Do you want to try?”
            Harry stared up into Rob’s face, and wondered. Would something like being bisexual, or gay, or whatever, come back if he waited long enough? Could the destruction of his memories destroy that, too?
            He didn’t know, but he did open his mouth to give an answer, because Rob’s closeness and pleading eyes demanded that, at least.
            And that was when Draco Malfoy walked in, and spoiled it all.
*
Severus1snape: Sorry I started making you read another story!
I’m in my thirties, a woman, and I just write really, really fast. I usually write chapters the day I post them. I wouldn’t have time to do that if I wrote (as in typed) more slowly.
Harry is 17 mentally, yes. I’m using 18 at this point mostly because it’s moving into the summer and will be his 28^th birthday shortly. But he did lose ten years of memories; he’s 27 now.
moon: Thank you!
starr: Hermione might suspect some of what Harry did, but no one knew about his relationship with Rob, as Rob explains here.
moodysavage: Yes, there is a lot that’s worse to come. As Harry thinks, what he did to Rob is objectively not worse, but still paints him in a worse light than Harry thought of him before.
SP777: Not cocaine, but it was a drug.
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The Dust of Water