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The Dust of Water	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 20631 -:- 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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Title: The Dust of Water
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Warnings: Heavy angst, some violence, amnesia
Pairings: Harry/Ginny, Ron/Hermione, eventual Harry/Draco
Rating: R
Summary: As far as Harry’s concerned, he’s woken from a weirdly deep sleep the day after the Battle of Hogwarts. It’s his friends who tell him that it’s ten years later, that he’s an Auror who got cursed while chasing a Dark wizard—and that his memory isn’t going to come back.
Author’s Notes: This is going to be a heavily angsty fic, as you can see from the summary and warnings. There isn’t going to be a cure for Harry’s amnesia, either. Keep that in mind before you read.
The Dust of Water
  Chapter One—Burning Dust
Harry opened his eyes and rubbed at them slowly. They felt all gummed together, which he didn’t understand. He’d gone upstairs to take a nap, right? A nap, not a bloody coma.
He sat up, and stared. He wasn’t in his bedroom in Gryffindor Tower, either. The walls were white and pale green and blue, like the sea. There was a woman drowsing in the chair by his bed who he didn’t recognize. She was sitting with her chin on her chest and her brown hair clustered all around her face, and she wore the robes of a Healer.
“What is this?”
The woman shot to her feet at his words, her wand out and pointing at him. Harry glared back in silent outrage. He thought he was the one who ought to know why she was doing that, and it wasn’t like just waking up was dangerous!
“Harry,” the woman whispered. “Oh, Harry.” She sounded as if she was going to cry.
“Do I know you?” Harry nervously backed up towards his pillow. He supposed she did look sort of familiar, but he didn’t know her. Maybe she was related to another student at Hogwarts. “Why aren’t I at Hogwarts?”
The Healer closed her eyes, and whispered, “Yes, I knew this. No good putting it off.” She opened her eyes. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Being at Hogwarts,” Harry said, staring at her. Could it be possible that he’d stumbled across someone who didn’t know about Voldemort and the battle? Was he in France or something? But the woman was speaking English without a trace of an accent, and he still didn’t know how he’d got here. “Going upstairs to take a nap. I’d just defeated Voldemort, you know. I thought I deserved a rest.”
“Ten years,” the woman said to herself. “Ten years to the day. I ought to have known. I did know. I just didn’t want to believe—” She lifted her wand, slowly this time. “Can I cast a few diagnostic charms on you?”
Harry shrugged, keeping his eyes on the wand. He didn’t think diagnostic charms sounded bad, more like something Madam Pomfrey would do than anything else, but he did want to know what in the world she was doing here.
  Instead of Madam Pomfrey. Wouldn’t Madam Pomfrey be the natural one to take me to if I was sick?
He did feel sort of strange, now that he thought about it. As though he’d hit his head really hard, but there was no pain. More a sort of ringing echo, like he knew in some part of himself that he’d slammed his head hard into a wall without being able to feel it.
  But not all of me. There was a sensation like he was taller, too, although Harry knew that was ridiculous. Even if someone had cast a spell to make him fall asleep or hit his head on a wall, why would it also leave that sensation?
The Healer sighed quietly as red magic washed over Harry’s body and popped back with numbers and symbols he didn’t understand. “Yes,” she said. “Your body is healthy. The price of the attack all came out of your magical core. And the sacrifice it decided on from your brain.” She swallowed and looked at him again.
“What attack?” Harry started to ask, but then something about the way the Healer was standing, or the way she turned her head or focused on him or something else, made the light catch oddly on her face, and told him who she was.
“Hermione,” he whispered, and his hand ached from how hard he was clenching it.
Hermione jumped and then focused on him again. Her face was bright with hope. “Harry, you’re remembering?” She reached for him slowly, her arm trembling.
“I would always know who you are,” Harry said, and continued speaking, because he had to, because just keeping quiet and letting Hermione hug him was impossible. “But why do you look so old?”
Hermione stopped reaching for him. She covered her face with her hands for a second. Then she sat down in the chair beside the bed again and looked at him.
“Harry,” she whispered, “it’s 2008.”
Harry felt as though someone had stuck a spike through all his limbs now, holding him still. He could shake his head, but that was all.
“Yes,” Hermione continued, her eyes full of pity. “You’ve been—you’ve been an Auror for the past five years. You returned to Hogwarts after the battle so you could sit your NEWTS, the way we all did. Then you entered Auror training and did that for three years, and then you came out and were one of the Ministry’s most successful Aurors.” She closed her eyes. There was a click in her throat when she breathed. “You were chasing one of the Dark wizards who always likes to stir up trouble on the anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts when he hit you with the Killing Curse.”
Harry stared around. “This doesn’t look like King’s Cross.”
“Where you met Dumbledore?” Hermione only smiled sadly when Harry stared at her. “Yes, you told me and Ron all about that.” She gripped the side of his bed and stared at him intently. “The Killing Curse got pulled into your magical core, somehow. What happened was—something that’s not unknown, although most people we’ve studied performed this kind of sacrifice with spells of lesser strength.”
“Sacrifice.” It was all Harry could say, but something in the back of his head was screaming, Haven’t I sacrificed enough?
“They gave up something else to negate the curse’s effects,” Hermione said quietly. “Part of their magic. Or all of their magic. Or years of their lives. It’s instinctual, accidental. What you gave up was some of your magic, and your memories of the past ten years.”
Harry was the one to put his hands over his face this time.
Hermione let him sit there long enough to feel hopeless, and then continued gently, “I thought so because of the damage that the spells told us you’d done to your brain. It’s damage that—that Muggle researchers have seen sometimes in people with affected memories. And then you were talking in your sleep. Repeating some of the same things you said to me and Ron ten years ago, on the day of the Battle of Hogwarts.”
“Then that proves I must remember something,” Harry said. He believed her. His mouth was dry with terror, and he believed her. “If I was saying things like that, then I must have the memories somehow. What if they’re just hidden, or hard for Healers to get to? If you can come up with a spell that reaches them—”
“I’ll try,” said Hermione. Her eyes were brimming. This time, she reached out and caught his hand and held it tightly enough that Harry was a little uncomfortable. “But so far, your case fits all the parameters of cases where the sacrifice was permanent. Even the sleep you fell into does. It’s your body recovering from the trauma of the magic and losing so many memories.”
“I want a mirror.”
Hermione stared at him for a second, but then she nodded and conjured a mirror. Harry grabbed it. It was a second before he could look at it, though.
The face that stared back at him wasn’t the one he remembered, either. Maybe not that different, but his scar was more faded, and he wore round silver glasses that he didn’t remember seeing before, and he had a small scar on one cheek that looked as though someone had stitched the skin back together like a seam on a ball. He looked older, too.
There was no denying that.
Harry dropped the mirror. Hermione caught it before it could fall far and came back to croon comforting things at him that Harry didn’t bother listening to. He rolled over on the bed and pushed his face into the pillow.
He was—he wasn’t himself anymore. There were ten years gone and they weren’t coming back.
Or maybe they were. Harry rolled over again and looked at Hermione. If she’d become a Healer, then she would be the best Healer there ever was, and she could tell him. “Could you come up with a potion or a spell that might give me my memories back?”
Hermione nodded like she was a general getting ready to charge out on the field. “I’m trying to do that. No one’s ever done it before, and the brain damage is what most concerns me. I’m going to try really hard. But I don’t—I don’t know if it will work, Harry.”
Harry could translate that. Hermione hadn’t changed so much in ten years that he couldn’t read between the lines. She’s trying because I’m her friend. She doesn’t think she’ll succeed.
Harry curled up again and whispered, “What about Ginny? Where is she?” He wondered for a dreadful second if he was married to her, with kids that he wouldn’t remember how to love, but he had enough faith in Hermione to think she would have mentioned it right away if it was true.
“You’ve been dating her for five years,” said Hermione, and her voice was a little thick. “I think—I think you were going to propose to her next year.”
Harry curled in on himself harder.
Five years with Ginny. Five years when they didn’t have to worry about Voldemort and he didn’t have to worry about Ron being upset because Harry was dating his little sister, or he would never have started this relationship in the first place. And he’d lost all that.
He’d lost himself. The person he’d become. His jokes with Ron and Hermione, and any battles he had fought as an Auror, and any Quidditch games he’d played, and whatever he’d learned about being an adult. It was gone.
“Harry? Harry, are you all right?”
That was Hermione, speaking so fast and loudly that Harry knew he must have frightened her. Harry let her roll him back over, but he didn’t uncurl. It wasn’t worth it, he thought. Everything he had become, all the different things he had done, they were all gone now. Were his friends going to even want him around anymore? They probably didn’t like him, they liked the Harry who had disappeared.
He would rather have died. He wondered if he could reverse his magic’s sacrifice if he concentrated hard enough. Perhaps he would get his memories back right before he dropped down dead.
Hermione was sobbing and holding onto him, but Harry couldn’t even hug her back. He didn’t know her. This person she had become. He didn’t know Ron. He didn’t know Ginny. Would he even be able to fall in love with her again?
He didn’t know when Hermione’s wand touched his temple and pushed him gently into sleep, but he was grateful for it when it happened.
*
“Of course you’re still you, mate.”
Harry closed his eyes, Ron’s chiding hitting him in more ways than one. He shivered and held out a hand. Ron clasped it.
“We know you’ll be different.” Ron was the most different person Harry had seen yet, with his immense height and the shaggy red hair that he’d told Harry he’d given up on cutting a few years ago and his anxious, wide eyes. He showed his emotions a lot more openly than Harry was used to, too. “But that’s okay. We’ll make friends again, and we can show you Pensieve memories, and that ought to make a difference, right?”
Harry smiled back at Ron and squeezed harder. He hoped that would make a difference, yes. He didn’t want to be endlessly stuck in a limbo where he couldn’t make any new memories and couldn’t remember the old ones.
But he didn’t think, privately, that it would make enough of one. There was always going to be a gulf between him and his friends. They could show him memories of when they were there, but not private memories of when they weren’t, and they couldn’t tell him what he had thought, or learned, or believed.
“Harry?”
  I thought it would be a while before she visited, Harry thought then, numb, and turned around to face Ginny. I thought I would have some warning.
She shook her head when she saw him staring. “Don’t blame Hermione or the other Healers. I waited as long as I could.” She exhaled the last words, and moved forwards to sit down next to the bed as Ron backed hastily out of the room, the most familiar thing he’d done so far.
Ginny was so beautiful that it hurt Harry to look at her. She was nearly as tall as Harry himself was now—the way he’d grown, the way he didn’t remember. She’d brushed her hair back so it fell over her shoulders, and her freckles gleamed in a few new places, like the bridge of her nose.
  Not new. The power of that realization hit Harry again. The freckle could have been there for years, he thought. Since they got back together. He remembered the Ginny he’d kissed on his seventeenth birthday, the one who’d survived a dreadful year at Hogwarts. Nothing else. No one else.
Ginny was still there, too, in one form or another, looking at him with patient, anxious eyes. Harry pulled himself together. It wasn’t her fault he didn’t remember her, and he had to do something to erase the fear from her face.
“I suppose this isn’t the way you imagined we would meet again,” he muttered.
“No,” said Ginny at once, her voice direct and firm and strong, and deeper than Harry remembered. The voice of a woman, not the girl he’d known. Harry ached, and wasn’t sure if it was for himself, or the woman, or the girl. “I never thought you would forget everything from the past ten years.”
She stared down at her lap again, and then raised her eyes. “But I’m prepared to wait,” she whispered. “For as long as it takes.”
Harry felt his heart melt. He sat up and leaned forwards, and Ginny met him in the hug halfway. Harry still felt a little shock when he realized that he was her height. He should have been shorter, but so should she. It was just easier to notice when he was looking at someone else.
“No matter what we have to do,” Ginny breathed into his ear. “If we have to go hunting for the Mysterious Magical Artifact With No Name at the bottom of the Deepest Ocean There Ever Was. If we have to invent a spell. We’ll do it.”
Harry felt a smile coming to his face. Ginny had a keener sense of humor than he remembered, too, one not so focused on pranks. Was this part of what he’d fallen in love with her for? He hoped so.
“I’ll wait for you,” Ginny said, and pulled back and studied him. “No matter what. Because I know both people, the man I remember and the boy you remember, and I have memories to share, too.” She gave him a slight, wicked smile, one that made Harry flush as he thought about what some of those memories might be.
That hit him with an unexpected force, suddenly. I don’t remember having sex, either. With Ginny or anyone else. When did it happen for the first time? Does Ginny even know?
It was a question that he couldn’t consider asking the regal woman in front of him. He only nodded and muttered a “Yes,” and Ginny drew back and smiled at him. Her eyes were bright, but not as teary as Hermione’s.
“More Healers will want to visit you tomorrow,” she said. “And Kingsley. He understands what happened, but I think he hopes it will jog your memory if he talks about the case you were on.” She sniffed. “Plus, it doubles as an interrogation.”
Harry managed a smile. “I do remember him as a good Order of the Phoenix member. Is he a good Minister, too?” That was what Ron had told him, that Kingsley had been chosen as temporary Minister and become a permanent one.
“Yes,” said Ginny, and squeezed his hand. “I never—well, sometimes we argued about you being an Auror, because it was a dangerous job. So sometimes I disapproved of Kingsley and all the missions he sent you on. But now anything you need, anything that might help you remember.”
  Brain damage, Hermione’s voice whispered in the back of his head.
Harry shook his head. Hermione was a great Healer, something else Ron had told him, but she hadn’t been doing it as long as some of the other Healers who so far had only made brief visits to Harry. Maybe someone else would come up with something.
And Harry hoped they did. He couldn’t stay the boy he remembered being two days ago. He wasn’t. And he couldn’t build a new life when he didn’t understand a thing about how the world had changed in the past ten years, even if he had woken up around a bunch of new people he hadn’t spent those ten years with.
  I want my life back.
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The Dust of Water