Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

The Dust of Water	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 20634 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 8
- 9
- 10
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Nine—Blood
            “What is going on here?”
            Harry flinched and jumped back from Rob, and only a second later thought how stupid that was. He’d reacted as if Malfoy was a prefect at Hogwarts who’d caught him snogging someone in the corridors.
            Rob had stepped back, too, but not leaped back. And his eyebrows were coming down in a way that Harry couldn’t remember, but thought meant he was probably angry. Harry swallowed, to make sure his voice wouldn’t come out squeakily, and said, “This is Rob Haynes, who was my lover at one point early on in the life I’ve forgotten.”
            He’d thought that might work to distract Rob, because it meant he was saying something aloud that Old Harry had apparently never said. And it did work, as far as that went. Rob’s eyebrows went back up, his jaw fell open, and he reached out a hand. Harry shook it instead of taking it and gave him a nervous smile.
            Malfoy had come to a halt and was staring at Harry in incredulity. Then he shook his head rapidly and said, “I would have known about something like that.”
            “Would you have?” Harry shrugged. “My old self was apparently an arsehole and wanted to be ‘normal’ and keep it from everybody.”
            Malfoy turned to Rob, lowering his voice. “How long were you his lover?”
“Three years, in the physical sense.” Rob’s voice sounded like a trumpet, and Harry knew why. It must stun him to be able to speak openly about being in Harry’s life, after so long. “We knew each other and were attracted longer than that, but it took me some time to convince him to give it a try.” He shot Harry a look.
Harry raised his hands. “I did apologize for that. But since I don’t remember it, it’s like it happened to another person.”
“Then why apologize?”
Rob and Malfoy asked that at the same time, and then glared at each other. Harry shook his head. Maybe Malfoy just thought Rob would spread word around about Malfoy being in Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, and knowing Malfoy was a Potions brewer, someone else would draw worrying conclusions from that.
“I apologized because you still deserved to have someone say how sorry he was for that,” Harry told Rob. “But I don’t want you to think I remember any of what you’re talking about. I don’t.” He swallowed and continued, “That’s what you have to keep in mind if I—if I give you a second chance. You’re not wooing someone who can respond to any private jokes and references you had. And maybe it’s not worth it for you, anyway. I can only look like him. I can’t be him.”
“Exactly.” Malfoy looked paler than normal, but his voice had snapped back to sounding like what it had when Harry first visited him. “And at the moment, this is another distraction you don’t need, Potter. Dismiss him for now. Roll around in the sheets with him later, if you want.”
“It went deeper than that,” Rob snapped.
“It must have,” Harry told Malfoy. “I can see that from his eyes and voice.”
Malfoy rolled his eyes. “And you need to be as calm as possible for the potion we’re about to make, but please, go ahead with this ill-advised sexual relationship that’s already agitating you if you want to.” He cast Harry a critical glance.
“Potion?” Rob asked.
Well, at least Malfoy can’t be angry at me for revealing the potion’s existence. He was the one who did that. Harry nodded. “There’s a potion that might let me recover some of my memories.” He left it at that, since the details would do no one any good. “Not all of them, but a few.”
“That’s great news, Harry.” Rob studied him for a moment, then smiled tentatively. “But you don’t seem that happy about it?”
“Why should he, when he was an arsehole and he’ll have to watch himself behaving that way?” Malfoy asked.
Rob glanced at Malfoy as if he didn’t know what to do with him. Harry intervened hastily. “I don’t even know if it’s going to work yet. But Malfoy’s the expert. That means I need to listen to him.” Harry held out his hand and made sure he was staring straight into Rob’s eyes. That was something that wasn’t beyond him, at least. “If I need to stay calm right now to brew the potion, then I’ll do that, and bid you farewell.”
Rob paused as if he would argue the point for a moment, then nodded and touched his fingertips to the center of Harry’s palm. “Think about what I said,” he whispered. “We were good together once. Or could have been. I think we could be again.”
Harry just shrugged. “I want you to realize I’m not him,” he said. “And it really might be for the best to let things go so you can move on.”
Rob nodded, but not in a way that suggested he believed it. Harry sighed as he watched him walk out of the room. From the squeaky voice in the corridor, Kreacher had met him and would escort him to the Floo.
“You trust him.”
Harry turned to Malfoy. “I don’t know. What he says sounds convincing. I don’t think I’d trust him enough to become his lover or anything like that.” The words still stuck in his throat. Harry just couldn’t see himself as gay, or as someone who would be want to be normal so badly that he would abandon someone he was in love with.
But on the other hand, he had no reason to think Rob was lying. He shrugged again and said, “What part of the potion do I have to do first?”
Malfoy examined him the way a Healer might, Harry thought, and finally nodded. “Here.” He held out what looked like a hollow needle. “You need to stick yourself. An enchantment will draw the blood up and to the end of the needle.”
Harry nodded. He wondered why he didn’t feel more upset, but in the end, he shrugged. Rob had been unexpected, but he was only one part of the past, and Harry didn’t know if he would ever end up dating him again.
Maybe he would never end up dating anyone again, he thought with dark humor as his blood began to work its way up the needle. Would he want to, when he had ten years of acting stupid behind him and he didn’t remember so many of the important political events and songs and minor, everyday things that people would expect to talk about?
Malfoy’s hand fell on his arm. Harry blinked into his gaze, and Malfoy frowned at him. “You do need to be calm for the potion to work,” he said, and nodded at the needle, which Harry had avoided looking at too closely. “Your blood is the wrong color. Too dark. Think about whatever peaceful thing you can, and relax.”
“Why not just give me a Calming Draught, then?” Harry muttered, watching as the thin scarlet thread rose to the end of the needle.
“Another potion would also taint the blood,” Malfoy said coolly. “But I can cast a spell that would relax you if you wish.”
“Maybe you’d better,” Harry whispered. He wasn’t upset, or he thought he wasn’t, but his head was far away, swirling with clouds of thoughts that wouldn’t let him rest.
Malfoy eyed him the way he would probably look at a potion that wasn’t heating right, Harry thought, and then held out his wand and tapped it on top of Harry’s head in an impersonal way. “Tranquillitas,” he said, voice utterly calm.
Harry closed his eyes. For the first time since he woke up without a memory, he thought, he could feel true, deep calm flooding him. He felt as if he could lie down and melt into the floor. He began to take smooth, deep breaths, and heard Malfoy murmur something that sounded like a compliment from above his head.
When the pull of the needle on his blood stopped, Harry urged his eyes open. “Did you get the blood the color you needed?” he asked. His voice was a monotone, gentle and unconcerned. He would have shaken his head, but he was feeling too good for that.
“Yes.” Malfoy set aside a vial of the blood and appraised him for a few seconds in silence. Harry would have objected, but he had forgotten what he was supposed to object to. All he could do was look back in dull quietude. If Malfoy left the room, he would probably close his eyes and forget all about him, Harry thought.
Maybe that would be a good thing. Harry didn’t know how much he could rely on Malfoy to help him. Maybe the potion wouldn’t work. Maybe he would turn around and betray Harry at the last minute. He was looking at Harry with something close to disgust right now.
“Why did you date a man if you only wanted to keep it secret?” Malfoy asked abruptly.
Harry closed his eyes and shrugged. Even the motion of his shoulders was soothing, he thought, as soothing as breathing was. “I don’t know. I’m not the man who made that decision. But Rob kept saying Old Harry was in love with him, and really meant it, but didn’t want anyone to think badly of him.”
“Why would they think badly of their hero?” Something odd and jagged in Malfoy’s voice now, Harry thought, but it couldn’t pierce through the sea of his calm.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”
“You keep talking as if you weren’t,” said Malfoy, and his face had gone inscrutable again when Harry opened his eyes. Harry decided that he must have imagined the look of disgust. For one thing, this didn’t seem like it would have any impact on how the potion worked. “And talking about the man who made those decisions as ‘Old Harry.’ Do you really think of him as a different person?”
“Why not?” Harry wanted to sway back and forth, but that would probably lead to him falling. He groped his way over to the couch and sat down, swinging his legs back and forth just to watch them. “He made all these decisions I’ll never know the reason of. I can’t answer your questions when I don’t know those answers.” He blinked up at Malfoy. “And should you be asking me questions under this spell? It’s kind of like Veritaserum.”
“It wouldn’t be, to normal people,” Malfoy muttered.
Harry shrugged. “That’s the only reason I can tell you, the only reason Rob told me. He just wanted to be normal. And finally that was marrying Ginny and having some kids.” Harry looked out the window. There was only a smudge of grey sky. He tried to imagine the kids he and Ginny would have had.
He couldn’t, though. Every attempt to imagine green eyes or freckles or what he would have named them dissolved back into images of those lists and numbers and names in those ledgers. Or Rob’s desperate, pleading looks. Harry shook his head. “I have to clean up Old Harry’s messes,” he muttered. “I have to understand them. I don’t want to try and understand him.”
“It’s strange,” Malfoy mused. “There are some things I didn’t know about, obviously.” He threw Harry a scathing glance for some reason and started pacing back and forth. “But you also trusted me with a lot of your secrets. Why would you tell me about forcing people to work for you and not trust me with the secret of Haynes?”
“What else can I tell you except I don’t know?” Harry muttered, and closed his eyes. “I didn’t even know that I was forcing people to work for me. What was I making them do?”
“Pass information on to you, as I understood it.” Malfoy’s voice had moved further away, and when Harry looked, he found him standing on the other side of the room, studying Harry with his head cocked on one side. “I wondered if that was why you became so successful as an Auror. You knew about some crimes before they happened.”
“Oh,” Harry said, blinking, with a terrible hope rising in his head, one that managed to pierce even through the spell Malfoy had cast. “So I was—using them for a good reason? I managed to blackmail them but make sure that they served the wizarding world?”
“Consider this, Potter.” Malfoy was smiling now, and he flipped a hand at Harry. “Your rivals in the Auror Department also had a turn for falling in line with what you wanted, or else leaving the training program. An interesting result, if you were using the blackmail only for good things.”
Harry sighed and looked down at the floor. “You’re right. And even if I did manage to protect people with this, I was doing it for my own glory at the same time. That’s not a pure motive.”
There was a quick, graceful motion Harry saw mostly out of the corner of his eye. He started. He thought the spell must be wearing off.
But the motion was only Malfoy kneeling before him, his eyes flitting over Harry’s face and his forehead creased. He shook his head once and murmured, “You are so different that I wonder if the brain damage changed your personality as well as erased some of your memories. Why are you lamenting working for your personal glory? I know for a fact that you didn’t have a problem with that even right after the war.”
“Then tell me how you know that,” Harry said. He leaned his head into his hands and sighed. No one knew the whole truth, he thought, except the man he’d once been. Everyone only knew bits and pieces of his life. Perhaps he ought to have been happy about that, or he would have been arrested a long time ago.
But he didn’t feel happy. He felt as if he could have gone to sleep and not woken up again. Or maybe he should wake as the charming bastard he’d been, who had fooled Ginny and even his friends, and worked with Malfoy, and been the Auror Department’s top Auror.
“Potter? Listen to me.”
One way Malfoy hasn’t changed, either, Harry thought, and shook his head a little as he focused. He still hates being ignored.
“You and I met a month after the war,” Malfoy began in a quiet voice. “You wanted to return my wand, but you said that you didn’t want to do it with a lot of fanfare. That was the period when the press was following you everywhere you went.”
Harry blinked and focused. Maybe this would give him something to be proud of, he thought. A few years after the war, Old Harry would probably have been too horrible a person to return the wand even if it didn’t hurt him. “All right. Then what happened?”
Malfoy shook his head, and for a minute Harry thought he’d given up on the memory and wasn’t going to tell him. Then he stood and murmured, “I opened the door of the Manor to what I thought would be you. Instead, it was you and an entourage.”
Harry blinked several times. In spite of the evidence that seemed to be staring him in the face, it still took him a moment to realize what Malfoy was saying. “I brought the press with me?”
Malfoy nodded, his eyes distant. “And your friends, so that they could witness you ‘forgiving’ me. And several Aurors, who supposedly wanted to make sure that I hadn’t been doing anything too terrible while I was under house arrest, awaiting my trial. And I don’t know how many dozens of fans.”
He turned his head and watched Harry with a cynical eye. “You gave me back my wand, wrapped with a huge bow, in front of all those people. Then you made a speech about forgiveness and how that was what the wizarding world needed most of all, to remember that it wasn’t about sides, but about people.”
Harry had nothing to say to that. He couldn’t remember ever thinking something like that. Well, not in those words. It was like asking Ginny to date him in public. He would have asked her, but not the way he had.
Yet the memories of everyone else in the world hadn’t been changed. Harry swallowed and asked, “Did I want to humiliate you?”
Malfoy’s gaze snapped back to him, sharp and alive again. “I doubt you thought about it at all,” he said. “You wanted to show off in front of your fans and get that adulation you craved. If I was humiliated, it was a side effect and not the goal.”
“I’m amazed that you agreed to work with me on developing a potion to suppress my Dark side, after that,” Harry said in a numb voice. He could too easily imagine Dudley doing something like that to him, if he’d had the power, and if it had happened when they were still kids. His skin crawled.
“You were paying well,” Malfoy said. “And like I said, I never thought that you were trying on purpose to humiliate me. But it did mean that I wanted the potion to succeed. Because it meant you would never do something like that to me again.”
“Did I ever apologize to you?” Harry blurted.
Malfoy moved slowly away from him, to stand looking out the window where Harry had been able to see only greyness. He moved his head a little.
“I don’t think you apologized to your lover, either,” he added a second later. “So I shouldn’t have been surprised, because it was stupid to think that I mattered to you at all except as a press opportunity.”
“Then I’ll apologize to you now,” Harry said firmly, standing up. “The way I did him. You deserved better. I’m sorry.”
Malfoy turned to watch him and look at him in silence for so long that Harry was sure he’d messed up again. But then, slowly, Malfoy inclined his head, and his smile was present, if cynical.
“Apology accepted,” he said, and swooped to pick up the vial of blood. “Now. The future is more important the past, I’m sure you’ll agree. And we need to start working on it.”
Harry followed Malfoy down the stairs in silence. The calmness spell seemed to have worn off. But he had even more to think about.
So whatever happened to change things must have been early, within a month after the war. That was before I knew Rob, and I probably hadn’t started blackmailing people or spending much time with Ginny, yet.
I’m going to have to ask Ron and Hermione for memories. It’s the only way.
*
SP777: Harry’s not at that level of distrust yet. Plus, he would have had to go get it and ask Rob to come back later, since it’s not like he has any lying around the house (probably).
moodysavage: Thanks! And I think you were right about Harry.
starr: No, Draco and Harry were never lovers. More than that I can’t tell you because it would ruin some of the surprises I have in store.
- 8
- 9
- 10
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

The Dust of Water