Work Text:
It had taken six months after passing his mindhealer licensing boards for Draco to find himself his home outside of St Mungo’s. He’d used the memories that Hermione had seen to make the choice, and he’d moved in just after Christmas. She’d imagined them in this little cottage with the round green door, half inside the hill it rested in. There were windows all along the front, and a small tunnel led off the kitchen and ended in the back garden.
There were a series of rooms, pantries and closets off the main hallway. The kitchen looked just as it had from the memory he’d seen. He'd had to renovate it, but it had been worth every knut. Bright. Airy. Where the sunshine would pour in the windows and make the wood seem to glow in the mornings. With forest-green cupboards and butcher block countertops.
It also allowed Harry to spy on Draco easily. He would watch Draco from the treeline as he took tea in the garden. His thoughts a jumbled mess. There was a crabapple tree that sat in the front garden and, as Harry sat on the upper branches he could look right into his lounge with an excellent view of Draco’s reading chair. Passing the hot water over the leaves and just watching as the tea swirled into existence before pouring himself a cup. Draco would bring biscuits out, eating one, perhaps two, leaving the rest on the plate.
Waiting patiently for a guest and never receiving one.
The back garden was paved with river stones, tamped down, then with cement poured over them to make them flat. Draco loved the stones. River stones were proof that a hard craggy surface can be worn away to smooth and perfect with nothing more harmful than swiftly flowing water.
He’d tapped into his herbology classes when he’d chosen what to plant that summer. Tempered by the friendship he’d had with Neville in his memories. Echinacea, mint, and nettle jostled for space with mumbling mimbletonia and dittany. Draco had even had a pond dug so that he could grow gillyweed along the edges.
Harry would sometimes stand out on the street, watching as Draco went from room to room, dousing the lights before heading to bed. His attention was almost soothing. Draco knew that nothing could happen while Harry watched over him. The underlying current of hostility, though, he could do without.
He missed his friend.
And this was the best substitute he could expect.
It took almost a week after Draco’s 26th birthday for Harry to move.
Draco’s head shot up as Harry apparated down the lane, striding towards his hill home, confusion lacing his thoughts. He chuckled to himself. Still such a terrible occlumens in this timeline. Throwing his thoughts about without a care against legilimency. In the other he'd had Draco to practice with instead of Snape.
He moved quickly into the kitchen. Aiming a heating hex at the kettle and setting it to whistle, Draco quickly put together a tea tray. Filling the pot with a mix of bergamot from his garden and black tea. Adding the chocolate biscuits he knew Harry liked to the tray. An extra pitcher of cream. More sugar. Only a single slice of lemon rind for his own cup.
“He’s come then?” came the voice from the portrait by the window, and Draco looked up at Dilys and smiled.
“He has. She’s not with him, but he’s come.”
He quickly sifted the flour, adding salt, baking powder and baking soda, and then cut in the shortening. A quick cantrip to sour the milk and a cup of delicate ruby-red currants followed before he popped the scones into the oven to bake.
He’d been so excited that it took him a moment to realize that Harry was stopped at the edge of the lawn in indecision. Well, that just wouldn’t do. He’d finally come. Finally with purpose. Finally with questions.
Draco wasn’t going to let him stall out on the grass.
Draco stepped into his front hallway and jerked open the door, raising his voice into the seemingly empty garden. “Are you coming in, Potter, or not? I’ve made tea. And scones.”
If a person’s internal monologue could have been a single exclamation point at that moment Harry would have been the poster child. Draco left the door open, returning to the kitchen and staring blankly into the oven.
It took nearly five minutes for Draco to finally hear the front door close behind Harry. “Took you long enough,” he muttered under his breath. Louder he asked: “Tea in the back garden suitable for this conversation?”
He didn’t need to turn around to understand Harry’s yes. It was the work of but a moment to slide the hot scones out and onto a plate on the tea tray, adding on a pot of clotted cream. Levitating the tray above the flagstones he led the way outside.
He set up the tea tray, placing status charms over the hot items, and poured himself into his favourite seat. Sipping on his tea he heard Harry’s internal argument and smiled internally. Good to know that some things never changed. It was taking Harry an awfully long time to come to terms with tea, so Draco picked up the book he’d been reading before Harry’s apparition had cracked open his evening.
He could hear the faint curl of the argument Harry was having with Dilys in the kitchen. 105-year-old Healer Portraits could be very persuasive. He was sure Dilys would win whatever argument she was having and Harry would be out shortly.
Draco chuckled lowly into the twilight as the fading light caught the gold lettering of his book cover. Austen’s Persuasion. Perhaps he should have realized before that this would be when Harry would finally show up. The shuffling of trainers alerted him to Harry’s presence behind himself, but he was more in control of his thoughts, so that was something.
“Hullo, Potter.” He said, returning his bookmark to the crease. “Tea?”
“What are you doing, Malfoy?” Harry asked, nettled.
“Waiting for you to organize your thoughts”, came Draco’s sardonic response. He set his spoon to stir the lemon rind into his tea and Harry flushed slightly.
“Why?”
“Because it annoys you when I answer before you’ve figured out what you’d like to know,” Draco smirked, banishing the spoon back to the tea tray, just like he always had back in school in this timeline. He then set his mind to remembering and putting together Harry’s tea. Far too much sugar, far too much milk, then atop it a small raft of whipped cream and a quick dash of nutmeg.
Draco gestured to the empty chair across from him, then pressed the cup into Harry’s hand. Harry just frowned down at the cup. “What’s this?”
“Tea, I thought that that would be obvious,” responded Draco dryly. “If you’re going to question every one of my motives this will take all evening.” Draco’s eyes crinkled over his teacup as he lifted it to his lip. “Not sure the Slytherin in me can take it.”
“What’d you put on top?”
That gave Draco pause. He felt his face still as Harry kept looking at him suspiciously, and then sighed. The other timeline. Right. “Someone much like you found he liked whipped cream atop his tea. I’m happy to make you another cup if you don’t like it.”
Harry continued to look across the table suspiciously and Draco felt his heart sink. Still like this. Even a year later. Hermione would have pulled up Dilys’ case notes for his own use of the divergence stone already. She would have explained what had happened to her. Wouldn’t she? How different were the two of them? Draco found himself fiddling with his saucer, lost in thought, for at least a few moments before Harry finally raised the cup to his lips and took a sip, his eyes opening wide in appreciation before taking a second, longer sip.
“You should know that the aurors know where I am tonight." There was a pause before Harry continued. "And if you’ve put anything in here that you’d like to tell me about, now is the time.”
“I understand.” Draco picked up a plate. “Scone?”
It’s amazing how the formality of a tea service gives your hands something to do. Something to cling to aside from the awkwardness of whatever situation you’re in. Perhaps, thought Draco, that was the main purpose of tea. An empire build on empty phrases and full teapots.
“I assume you know why I’m here?” Harry had left his scone steaming in front of him. There was a final whirl of damp air still rising from it, but he hadn’t bothered to take a bite. It sat there taunting Draco with the absence of clotted cream atop it.
“I assume it’s because you’ve been watching me for the last four months, determined that I am entirely boring, see no one but through my work at St. Mungo’s and you want to ask me about the divergence stone incident from last year.” Draco pushed the pot of clotted cream towards Harry with a friendly gesture, which Harry ignored.
“Hermione said that Sirius lived in this alternate timeline.” Harry’s voice didn’t quiver, though his occlumency shields did, and the hurt seeped across the tea tray towards Draco.
Draco just nodded dumbly. “Try the clotted cream on the scone, Potter, I beg you.” He pointed to the pot.
“I’ve never had it on a scone.”
“Then you’re missing out.”
They were at an impasse. Harry knew it as well as Draco did, finally placing a small spoonful on top of his scone, and then returning to the business at hand. All the while ignoring the scone.
“I want to see Sirius. The memories you have of him. In the divergence stone. The Unspeakables ground them all to dust after Hermione got herself trapped in there.” Harry’s glared across the table. “Hermione refuses to go back into the memories. Says she can’t live in the past.”
“I know,” Draco held his chin up in his hand, balancing himself with an elbow on the table. His mother would have had a fit to see him sit like that. Let alone the crumbs under his scone. “But it would mean letting me into your head, and you don’t want to do that.”
“You could give me the memory.” Harry held out a hand with a jar he produced out of an interior pocket of his auror’s robe. “I could tip it into the pensieve and that would be that.”
“That’s not how it works,” Draco sniffed. “Because both memories exist simultaneously in my mind I have to untangle them before you could experience them. It requires legilimency, and again, you don’t want me in your head.”
“I want those memories, Malfoy.”
“I can understand that,” snapped Draco, shifting his body and placing a napkin across his lap. “But I can’t give them to you unless you’d like to experience both at the same time and that’s maddening. Get yourself a good mindhealer legilimens. Come back later. I’ll be here.”
“Why do you have to be like this, Malfoy?” Harry barked back.
“Who are we but our memories, Potter?” Draco took a bite of scone, munching petulantly before swallowing and continuing. “How would you feel to simply hand them over without even the courtesy of a please?”
Harry’s anger ran out of him like water, slumping against his chair, and Draco savoured the victory. “It’s been a year, Potter, why are you here without a plan?”
Harry looked up at the sky as the constellations started to wink in above them. “It’s been almost a decade since he went through the veil.”
Draco shivered. “Ah.”
“I don’t remember him very well. I saw him in the forest before I died, but…” he trailed off and started pushing his scone about on the plate, his tea still sitting untouched but for those first initial sips. “I don’t remember him well any more. Even the pensieve memories are fuzzy. My mindhealer says it’s because of trauma.”
Harry roused himself and leaned over the table. The expression on his face and the set of his shoulders told Draco that he knew who he was. He was the saviour of the world, the person who’d died to defeat Voldemort. Not his friend. This was a man unused to asking for favours and even more unused to being rejected for a favour he did ask for.
“Look, Malfoy, all I want is a memory to sit with next week when we mark ten years with him gone. Just one good memory. I barely have any with him, as Dumbledore and the rest of the world made sure to keep him from me.” Harry was breathing hard and Draco nearly forgot to breathe himself. "I want my godfather." Harry's voice cracked and took Draco's resolve with it.
“All right, Potter, but that means you’ll be coming into my mind with me.” Draco nodded this would be dangerous, but he owed Potter a life debt for saving him from fyndfire that Potter had never collected on. This wouldn’t put a dent in that debt. Not yet. But perhaps in time.
This, then, would only be moderately dangerous.
Harry sighed in contentment, nodding and relaxing into this acquiescence.
“Sit back on the chair, tip your head back and try to relax. When you feel a mental string in front of you, follow it. Try and empty your mind, please, it will help you remember later.” Draco rattled off. Draco did the same, dropping easily into his mental space. Looking over at Harry he was unsurprised to still see the heavy walls of occlumency ringing Harry’s mind. The walls were cracked and patched with thin plaster or grout that chipped away between the boulders.
With a chuckle, Draco pulled a long thread, attached a stone from the ground and tossed it over the wall. “Come on, Potter, a rolling stone and all that rot.”
He could hear Harry miss the rope. Once. Twice. Thrice. It was only on the fourth try that Harry put a finger on it and Draco made it sticky before pulling Harry over the wall.
Draco looked at Harry’s mental projection of self. It was cracked, papered over, and cracked again. Like kintsugi, the spaces were filled with the nearly pure liquid gold that was Harry’s true self. Draco had always taken the philosophy that breakage and repair were part of the history of an object, or soul in this case, and was beautiful in their repair. Draco was just glad that he had enough practice in this form that Harry wouldn’t see his own breakage. Dilys, bless her, had helped him learn to hide each and every crack. Can’t make a patient think that you are the one who needs fixing, can you?
“Come on, Potter, we’re wasting daylight.”
“When are we going?”
“Hush, Potter, and let me work.” Draco felt his eyes flutter closed as he set the memory behind the door ahead of them. His eyes popped back open and he gave Harry a wry smile that probably looked more like a smirk. “This way, saviour.” He indicated the door with a gesture and they both walked through.
The room they entered was opulent. The hand-carved hundreds of years young bed stood proudly against one wall, draperies pulled tight, and above it were five or six racing brooms neatly hung on their holsters. Large windows looked out over the manor grounds, bathed in moonlight and still in the night.
Harry raised one brow over his glasses and Draco nodded to the bed. “I’m asleep, you see. Now, because the past and the possible are threaded together in my memories someone has to go both ways. This is the first week of January in sixth year. I will be following myself in the regular time. You, however, are about to follow the other me. We are going ice skating. Do you skate, Potter?”
With a gulp, Harry shook his head no. Draco chuckled. “The charm to make it so you can skate on the ice and not fall over is paellabor.”
“Paellabor,” Harry repeated, just as the first pebble hit the window. Malfoy rolled out of bed, his platinum hair stiff and in all sorts of strange directions, behind him, he left a second version of himself, still resting on a pillow, one knee upright against the dark.
Malfoy gave a genuine smile at the window. His face creasing into a easy expression of happiness. Potter and Granger waved from a path that looped around a topiary. Harry looked over at Draco, but Draco was still looking at himself in the bed. “Go on, Potter. Follow him. I’ll be here when you get back.” Malfoy was rushing around the room, pulling on an extra warm cloak, finding his gloves, slinging his skates over his shoulders and then slipping quickly out of the window, ready to follow Hermione across the snow.
Draco knew where Harry was going. There was a small pond just inside the forest. Sirius knew where it was because he’d gone skating there as a boy with Narcissa. The Black cousins all together, red-cheeked and windswept going winder-shines around the pond. Hermione had come across the gardens with a handful of pebbles, ready to spend a few hours dancing across the ice with Draco.
He closed his eyes as he heard the last of their footsteps crunch against the snow. Harry would have almost two hours following his godfather around as they threw snowballs along the bank and played crack the whip with Ron. Draco shuddered, opening his eyes as a square of light opened into his room and Bellatrix entered.
lumos
The talent for legilimency, as a rule, tends to hit a wizard in their late teens. Just as the brain is set for its final maturation and setting down its neurological roots. Bellatrix, though, felt that any Black descendent should be chronically tested to see if they could be forced early, like a greenhouse flower. Destined to be cut and arranged for display before dying in a puddle by the vase.
“Wake up!” she hissed, as Draco saw himself roused out of a deep and peaceful sleep. “I have a muggle I’m dying for you to meet.”
As though sleepwalking Draco followed, still clad in pyjamas and slippers as his Aunt led him down to the library and taught him how to scoop someone’s mind out of their skull like ice cream from a carton.
This lesson only lasted for an hour, and, pale and shaking, Draco watched his younger self be sick in the ensuite for nearly twenty minutes, shaken and internally bruised. He’d watched her use the cruciatus that night for the first time. Draco wished he could go back and rub his own back as he sat next to the toilet, swirling the glass of cider he’d gotten from the house elves, spitting it out and trying to rid himself of the taste of bile.
Malfoy tottered back to bed, thankful that he was going back to Hogwarts soon, and rationalizing to himself that it had been a muggle, not a wizard that she’d tortured in the library. Not too long from now, this summer, in fact, all of his channels for legilimency would be ripped open by Voldemort himself and there would be nowhere left to hide.
A sound behind him pulled his focus. Malfoy came in, his forehead damp with hair stuck to it and bright red cheeks from the cold, smiling so hard that his face hurt. Harry was right behind him and Draco smoothed himself out, affecting a dismissive air. “Had a good time, Potter?”
Harry nodded vigorously, his eyes shining behind his glasses, before he looked thoughtfully at Draco. “You two seemed truly happy.”
“We were. You and Sirius too.” He took Harry by the elbow, following the string back to his back garden and the stars.
Harry’s brow furrowed as he came back to himself. Draco dumped Harry’s teacup into the rhododendron and started again. Cream, sugar, not enough tea, whipped cream and a sprinkle of nutmeg. He placed the cup before Harry again, and this time he took a long sip.
“We were friends.”
Draco nodded shortly.
Leaning forward, Harry stared at Draco with deep curiosity. “So why have you never…?” He gestured towards Draco, pulling a chuckle out of him.
“'A man does not recover from such devotion of the heart to such a woman! He ought not; he does not.'” Harry looked confused, so Draco elaborated. “It’s from Jane Austen’s Persuasion.”
Harry still looked confused, so Draco sighed and continued on.
“My friends don’t exist any more. My Hermione never heard me call her names.” Draco smiled, remembering. “I muttered it once under my breath around you in first year and you tried to feed me to the giant squid. Yes, I'll add that memory in when I untangle the ones from Sirius. I am never going to recover from loving her, but she died the second my hand released that stone.”
Draco picked up his scone, took another small bite and used the chewing time to organize his own thoughts. Lining them up like ducklings. “She’s not coming back, Harry. I have to measure everyone against her, including herself. Do you know how itchy it makes me even with you? To see someone who was my friend treat me as though I’m going to start spouting pureblood nonsense and is always on guard around me?”
Standing while trying to hide his shaking, Draco waved his wand, setting the tea tray back in motion towards the kitchen. “Leave your cup by the sink, Potter, on your way out. I’ll visit some of my colleagues and see if we can’t get you the rest of my memories without me having to chaperone you into them.”
With that, Draco turned away, retreating back into the kitchen, where Dilys almost tried to talk to him before pressing her lips into a line and disappearing back to her frame in St Mungo’s.