Deeper Than Uncertainty

If there was something else that could have been done Draco Malfoy would have done it; he told himself that he could have done it and didn't miss the irony: might have been damn good at doing it too (and didn't miss the irony again). But he was becoming a little too used to the floor disappearing under his feet and a little too comfortable with jungle vines choking the bathroom and a little too ready to hear the fractured music that played over in his mind with a sobbing certainty just when he thought that quiet was a desirable reward for his hope and his afterwards.

And he tidied his desk and read all the scholarly articles in Wizarding Historiography Quarterly - over again. And didn't read the newspapers - still.

And he was - drawn thin as a knife-blade - a little too used to this forlorn stepping dance where they talked (he talked mostly and Harry listened mostly) as though they'd been friends once. Talked and listened as though they knew each other well, and they held each other closer than poison after the quiet-spelled impossible agony of memory tried to conjure anything more or anything less between them.

That would be too easy. That would be some kind of admission; perhaps a kind of courting and acknowledging sweet looks back and forth but there was none of that even if Draco wished for it. There was none of that even though he hoped for it when they shuddered together. There was nothing like love between them - only need.

As though Draco could do anything other than be what he could not deny when the magic battered him; as if the nightmares were other than memories and not his own; unless Narcissa's letters were more than an elegant scrawl on creamy parchment and Lucius was less than his father . . . as though there was a hoary book of rules that might apply in cases such as these.

And if escape was an option Draco Malfoy might have chosen it except that he seemed to have grown past running away - and raised a thin eyebrow in self-deprecation whenever he dared to think around that particular corner - during the uncounted months since St Mungo's. And so he brewed coffee instead and remembered that Snape had promised - threatened - to visit them tomorrow because . . . 'anything's better than correcting second year essays and I need a drink'.

And Harry was curled inside his own possessive embrace every morning, murmuring oblivious sweetness into the parched aftermath of ecstasy and it might have been phoenix song and silver tears or it might have been a good shag and no one should be held responsible after that: especially when reality visited less than once a week and Dumbledore (despite his frequently lamented death on the eve . . . threshold . . . moment . . . edge of victory) still beat that count by two or three or four or a dozen.

Draco was falling into sleep and the magic was curled into a muted span of colours just beyond the margin of any escape clause. And he thought he should do something about this half-life where they were content to burn out against one another; except that Dumbledore kept offering lemon drops and kept smiling and smirking and being obscure and inscrutable.

He was becoming too used to memory that disappeared and magic that didn't; and too used to spilled coffee on the carpet.

* * *

Father, I have to congratulate you - please assume (try not to gloat) some kind of filial obligation here - for having eluded the spells, aurors, and all that (you lucked something with the Dementors banished - creepy things; hate them and no, I can't manage a Patronus yet . . . but I'm working on it). So congratulations for being so daring and escaping like the Count of Monte Whatsit, or something (well, not in a sack into the sea but I hope you know what I mean.

And I do wish you well and bon voyage (I'd say "Fuck Off', loudly but you might be a little offended) regarding your bid for freedom and if you try contact Mother in person I might have to hurt you.

Perhaps you could do worse than talk to Albus about desperate last attempts - he's awkward (fucking driving me insane!!!) still . . . despite his convenient demise - but I like him better than I hate you. I thought you should know that. Don't you think vengeance could be considered passé and not even tasty served cold - the classics lied . . . and they were written by muggles after all, Dad.

And - just in case you were wondering - Harry Potter could fry your liver from a distance anytime I suggested that he would be doing the world a favour by twitching his little finger. Thought you might like to know that too. Talk to Albus because I can't hate you enough after all, you bastard.

Australia's quite pleasant by all accounts. Harry is reading this letter and he's laughing . . . and,

Lucius, the world held its breath for a moment just now, so I think he might have sent you a little 'note'. He smiled. I think you need to talk to Severus too - all the help you can get: Ha! Ha!

Dutiful love to you, (well, love in spite of everything because I do).

Draco.

* * *

"Have you finished that yet?" There was a golden flame licking over Draco's quill and curling around his wrist.

"Yes." He leant forward and kissed Harry a little too quickly to reassure him before the flame turned red and the floor started to roll like waves . . . Draco was a poor sailor.

"Good." Harry never seemed to notice what his magic was doing. "Severus is coming isn't he? I'll cook." He was breathing softly at the corner of Draco's mouth. "What time's he coming? I can't remember what time he said." The golden flame shimmered around them both.

"We don't need to hurry." Draco congratulated himself when the flame turned white and warm and a dozen long-stemmed red roses fell across the drying parchment. "I'll just send this along then . . ."

Draco knew better than to let his guard down.

* * *

Harry cooked well most of the time using a disconcerting blend of Muggle methodology and rather messy magic that he called intuition. Sometimes he stood in the middle of the kitchen and things exploded: that wasn't so often lately.

Granger Apparated into the flat to invite them to a party on Saturday week because she suspected that they incinerated their mail without reading it, and they grinned like idiots when she said that. Then she mentioned a few others who'd be there. And something did explode in the kitchen, but it wasn't a loud explosion and Draco said they'd think about it and let her know.

Hermione stayed longer than she meant to and allowed herself to be persuaded that Severus wouldn't mind at all and please don't worry about the impressive cobra in the study because it was sleeping right now, wasn't more than half real anyway and Harry would unimagine it very soon. The kitchen glowed and pulsed but didn't explode this time.

Draco thought that he'd done very well.

* * *

Severus took one look at Granger and demanded immediate alcoholic compensation for the shock.

The two of them argued energetically and didn't notice how Draco grinned at Harry and didn't notice that Harry grinned back at Draco just before he took them all to Stonehenge and back again between dessert and coffee.

Granger and the potions master had argued through three courses (and Stonehenge) before Harry climbed into Draco's lap, between his first and second brandy, and fell asleep there.

"I think you need to put your foot down, Draco." Granger tried to frown but Severus was stroking her wrist with his potions-stained thumb so it wasn't particularly intimidating after all. And Harry murmured something sweet that he wouldn't remember when he was awake. And Draco was more than contented because Harry smelled like autumn after rain, and he almost didn't answer her. But . . .

"You're letting him do this . . ." She waved a vague hand and hissed quietly when Severus whispered something in her ear that Draco couldn't hear . . . and blushed.

"I do put my foot down, Granger, but since it keeps landing in the seventh dimension I haven't found that tactic very helpful so far." And an armful of Harry Potter was always apt to break down any reasoned resolution that he might have reached yesterday or might reach tomorrow.

And he had thought that no one would notice the small volcano behind the bathroom door.

"I'm serious, Draco." Except that her glass was empty and Severus was whispering in her ear again and making her blush again while he refilled it.

The volcano was quite pretty - quite like something a Muggle cinematographer might have imagined, and Harry was snuffling into the soft skin of Draco's throat and dignity had walked out of this scenario two hours earlier.

"Me too."

"What?"

"I'm serious too."

He stroked the wild-dark hair under his fingers and Severus drained his glass with a flourish that deserved a wider audience . . . and recording by a Muggle cinematographer.

* * *

It had been a good evening and the flat stayed more or less in place if one ignored the thunderstorm just beside the kitchen window to the right of pantry. And the volcano. And the snake that was still sleeping in the study.

Things turned a little difficult when Harry woke up suddenly and set fire to the antique dresser. But Draco hugged his lover closer and their guests made small talk with impressive aplomb until the snake wandered in from the study and coiled itself around Granger's thin ankles. Then she squeaked and Severus snickered and Harry apologised several times when he'd finished shaking.

* * *

"Do you think I'm mad?"

"Well . . . I'm sure you appreciate honesty, Harry; being a Gryffindor and all that. So I'll tell you." Draco wished that Granger and Severus had stayed a little longer. And the words withered in his mouth.

"Tell me, Draco." Now the windows were doing that unsettling melting thing that looked like congealing toffee across the sashes.

"I think you're a little, maybe a lot, mad but I . . . I'm not . . ." What? Angry, Upset? Disappointed? Pleased because you need me? "Sorry. Yes, Harry. I think you are a little mad."

"That's . . ." Harry breathed out and shuddered under him; "that's . . . alright . . . "

"Love you." He hadn't meant to say that but . . .

"Need you, Draco." Sometimes the whispers of the dead were never loud enough to disturb them.

Evening was an emptying: evening was created to remind them all that the world was finite. Muggles called it entropy. Draco called it anything that made Harry cry out just like that.

What wasn't said and what was always interrupted in these moments spoke between them like the serpent-lick of inevitability; Draco could put it all back together in the morning.

"Love you, Harry."

* * *

"Er . . . Lucius? I thought you'd gone to Australia." Draco was more unnerved than he cared to admit. "Have you come to make a last pathetic move in the power game? I have to tell you that I'm not playing anymore. No one's playing anymore."

Lucius seemed a little surprised to find himself in a cramped Muggle apartment somewhere in London.

"I came to say goodbye." The older wizard looked just a little untidy and just a little discomposed.

"I think you should leave before . . ."

Oops!

The walls had disappeared and they were floating somewhere and they could see everything that wasn't and feel everything that was, and there were red flames licking all around them. Then Draco tried to tell himself that a sense of humour counted for everything when nothing else was guaranteed.

"I think I should leave, Draco."

"Yes, Father, I said that before."

Harry walked out of the bedroom and into this moment; a sense of humour might not be enough when Harry looked tousled and helpless and wasn't . . . and sparks ran across a floor that wasn't there and built into other more disturbing pictures under their feet.

"I thought . . . I dreamed . . . Is Lucius here, Draco? Everything feels like him but . . ."

Harry was tangled early morning with his hair straggling into his short sighted gaze. Then things started boiling and burning and Draco forgot to be casual . . . and there were hissings behind him so that he cringed forward away from them despite his understanding.

"Yes, Harry." Draco breathed and thought he could taste the depths of his lungs.

"I thought I should say goodbye to my son."

"Yes, Harry. It's Lucius. He wants to say goodbye."

And there wasn't any floor but it was undulating anyway and Draco thought that throwing up might be a good option except that Harry was leaning in what would have been a doorway several days out of seven and except that Lucius was still standing a few feet away and his father was looking more afraid than he'd looked surprised before.

There was burned spent pain in every corner of the room. Away! Gods, please get away . . . Help me! Draco choked and shut his eyes against the unrestrained whiplash of a magic that carved invisible promises of damnation into his skin. "No! Harry! Please . . . don't hurt me like this. He came to say goodbye."

"Draco . . ." Lights bursting against his eyelids. "Draco . . . I'm counting so that . . . I'm afraid of this. Do I have to hurt someone else so that you all can feel forgiven . . . forgiving?" And if there was any meaning to blood after the last battle it had to be the desolation in Harry's eyes and the nauseating shambles and Harry collapsing before Severus gathered him into shaking arms, and Granger pulling Draco away from it all and Weasley fighting behind them. "I never thought there'd be so much blood." Harry had lost his wand that day when Voldemort shrieked into his ending. Entropy . . .

"Potter, Harry . . . He's . . ." Lucius bent before the relentless onslaught; driven to his knees and a thin trail of blood dripping over his lips and onto the invisible floor. "I just came to say goodbye. Severus told me not to come but . . ." The man spat and wrapped his arms around himself as though to deny the way he shuddered and quaked, and thought that this might be his last mistake.

"You . . ." Harry passed a hand over his eyes and looked at Draco, quivered under every burning moment, and looked back at Lucius. "I ought to kill you for what you did. I need to kill you for what you did. So much blood . . ."

"Please, Harry. Let him say goodbye. Please . . ."

There was nothing that could speak to Harry Potter now when all of him hurt and buckled and broke and never came back together. They ought to allow him this pain. And the echoes of memory played back and forth between his stretched fingers like tiny flames . . . pretty, after all.

"No! I'm not letting this go! You shouldn't ask for that . . . I don't have any more to give. Draco!"

"Harry! He's my father; I love him."

"I know . . ."

Red into ivory and a mirror shattering in the bathroom.

Harry's magic was like a spilled candle catching onto a neglected parchment and burning away, and catching everything they'd forgotten to live in its spit-spatter, and brighter than desolation across the room.

They were all going to die after all. Here in a rather undistinguished two-bedroom flat on the edge of the Muggle and magical worlds.

"Help me, Draco . . . I can't stop this."

"You can. You can stop it. Let him go. Let us go. Harry, I need you to stop this."

Draco Malfoy excelled in the subtle lift of an elegant eyebrow and the provocative curl of a disdainful lip. He failed miserably at pleading and begging and believing in something beyond expediency. And it didn't help that he was nauseous and it didn't help that Lucius was bleeding and it would never help that Harry Potter looked as though the world was waiting for him to reach out and end it.

Lucius laughed and the discordant sound broke into a thousand splintered moments against the slick displaced time around them. Laughed and admitted with a glance at Draco to a more profound defeat than Voldemort could have imagined when he melted into blessed oblivion . . . and sighed and wiped his mouth with one shaking hand.

They sighed . . .

That was . . . too much . . . Draco dared to breathe.

* * *

"Write to me, Draco."

"I might . . . when I'm bored and feel the need to inflict myself on you."

"Belief is dangerous, my son." Lucius walked carefully and sat on the couch carefully and Draco knew that his father wouldn't have paused for this moment of intimacy if Harry was still conscious. "Belief makes us slaves. Bitter experience . . . you know?"

The wildspell was still crackling but subdued now.

"I know."

Draco thought that he might have won another little victory over his destiny but he wasn't sure about anything anymore. Hadn't been sure for longer than that.

Lucius stayed long enough to finish his brandy. Quite brave, thought Draco, since Harry was stirring and muttering and the room was stirring and muttering with him.

* * *

It wasn't so bad being here. Draco kept reminding himself of that. It was better than being somewhere that wasn't here.

Severus had a new experimental potion. Harry was too unsettled to take it. He blasted Severus against the wall that still wasn't there. Apologised afterwards and cooked a very good dinner. And told them that Granger liked chocolate frogs and schnapps when she could get it.

Dumbledore started singing or chanting or some bloody thing whenever he did that creepy ghost trick through the walls that weren't there. Harry sang an unexpectedly sweet counterpoint to it.

The snake hadn't gone away and it was very Slytherin after all. Draco was starting to like the snake just a little bit.

And the fireplace was choked with all the ashes that couldn't be answered. They had to leave soon.

We can walk a little way at a time, a step further, every day into tomorrow . . . .

And Draco still didn't read the newspapers and Harry still did, and burned them with a glance afterwards.

And they didn't make it to Granger's party.

* * *

Dear Mother,

I thought you might have tried to contact me before now. After Father left. But please don't think that I expect anything.

Do I have to say more?

Write to me . . . Harry doesn't have family - well, he does have family . . . but they don't care and they hurt him. You're meant to be my family.

He has some good friends but they were tired (or dead) before I really got know them. They're still friends . . . almost my friends now . . .

Mother, I remember what you said to me once about being a Malfoy? I think I was eight then . . . visit us soon so that I can remember better.

I think I'm writing gibberish so forgive me for that - I haven't slept for three days (nights included) and help me if you can.

Your son, Draco

* * *

Things got worse around Halloween. A year since the Dark Lord realised that he'd underestimated Harry Potter. A year since the wizarding world realised that simple arithmetic would never pay the price of liberation. Not quite a year since Draco Malfoy walked into St Mungo's that first time.

Halloween was predictable but no less difficult for all that.

"Talk to me, Harry."

Pulsing walls and the slow vertigo that waited here.

"I can't talk to you."

"You have to talk to me. We're not safe here anymore."

"I can't talk to you." Harry didn't look at him.

Draco Malfoy never pretended that he was good at being brave.

And Narcissa didn't write back, hadn't written back since Lucius, and Neville brought a packet of camomile tea and a defeated handshake.

* * *

"Talk to me . .

If there was a symmetry working here, sandbags and stone and puttered steps and waiting spoke louder than eyes across rooms with invisible walls.

Draco packed everything and prayed to whatever higher powers might possibly exist and felt all the stretched possibilities draining him and couldn't help it. And cried into Granger's pointy shoulder because he could. And she allowed it because she had to.

Dumbledore suggested Hogwarts and Draco thanked him and thought about butterbeer in Hogsmeade when none of this had happened yet.

"I think you need to wash the floor again; I'll get more water." Harry was all the way back to very scary and very mad and Draco was all the way down onto his knees (sometimes literal and more often metaphorical) because he didn't believe in any of this.

"What?"

Except that Harry was curled into a corner and Severus would be here soon and then they could start all over . . . new beginnings were something he could hope for.

"Sorry." Harry hadn't eaten for five days and Draco hadn't eaten with him.

"Sorry." Maybe there was something in that sins-of-the-fathers stuff after all.

"Are we going somewhere?" Harry hadn't moved from his corner for two days.

"Yes."

"Can we take the snake?"

"Yes."

* * *

There wasn't anywhere to hide Harry after that destructive burst of magic the morning Lucius came to say goodbye and afterwards. They would have taken Harry away if they could. The reality where they hadn't was something to do with keeping up public morale (imagine the Daily Prophet headlines) and all about washing the bloody utensils of victory somewhere private, and Harry still had a few friends at the Ministry after all. But it was everything about how they couldn't do it if they even if they tried. Write to Lucius in case you don't believe it.

It had taken two weeks to arrange things.

Severus would be here soon.

Severus had a portkey. That might bring them back to yesterday.

* * *

Mother,

I thought - hoped - you might have forgiven me by now or wanted to tell me about your latest trip to Paris.

Please write to me.

I sent Pansy a book for her birthday.

I had a letter from Lucius . . . he's well. I'm sure you've heard from him too. I told him to leave you alone - I'm sorry . . .

We're going back to Hogwarts.

Talk to me.

Your son, Draco

Severus had a portkey and they were going back to Hogwarts. That had to mean something. And he was almost fond of the snake now.

TBC in Part 2