Deeper Than Uncertainty

Harry Potter returned to Hogwarts something more than two years after he'd left to finish what other people had started before he was born. Returned to the place that was the only home he'd known after a lot of words were half-spoken and painfully inadequate and when everything had twisted into nightmare.

He thought he remembered the Dark Lord, Voldemort, withering into oblivion. And Hermione being cool and competent under the curses raining about them and Ron biting his lip and standing between death and tomorrow with a smile curving his lips. He thought he remembered Severus looking at him and nodding. He thought he remembered someone else standing there where the ruin and blood was everything. And Dumbledore stepping between his end and his fate.

Harry thought he remembered Lucius talking to him and wiping blood from his lips; he thought that Neville might have been sitting on the floor with him yesterday and he thought Neville might have hugged him. He though that he might have died after all.

Harry Potter was confused again and lost . . . again.

* * *

There was a sweet forgetting on his lips . . . again.

Draco Malfoy said that they should leave here - leave this place where he felt safe . . . almost, and he wasn't quite sure what he was agreeing to when he smiled and asked if they could take the snake that was curled against his hip in the corner between now and then.

He thought he remembered talking to the snake and feeling its smooth reassuring coils under his hand when Draco was packing all their belongings into trunks and neat boxes and shrinking them with a flick of his wand.

* * *

Harry had wondered whether he should have been expecting Severus this evening but he didn't move out of his corner: he knew that he forgot things sometimes.

A sudden tug and an involuntary whimper before he could react and counter it. Portkey . . . memories spilling through his fingers . . . other times . . . other voices . . . voices that were familiar and should have been safe . . . something smothering him so that he had to fight before there was breath in him again . . . arms around him . . . old stone around him . . . telling a story he'd fallen out of one day.

He wanted to tell the voices that he wasn't listening anymore.

Two years and something more since Harry Potter left the Great Hall in the middle of Halloween celebrations - and grinning pumpkins with candles burning in them - to fulfil his obligation to the Wizarding World; with Ron and Hermione starting to ask what was wrong and dread creeping under his skin. He came back; he'd never thought to come back.

* * *

When Draco boarded the train at the start of his seventh year at Hogwarts he wondered why he was bothering with the charade. He might as well stay home and wait for destiny to finish him.

He ought to feel proud and excited. He ought to be swaggering through the corridors up and down the train and relishing the prospect of baiting Gryffindors and flirting with Pansy. He slid into a worn seat in the prefects' compartment and his stomach clenched and he was full of nothing. This was someone else: this was a doubt and a shrugged shoulder in the shadow. And this was Draco Malfoy looking at his own hands as though they belonged to someone else.

Granger and the Weasel walked into the close compartment together, holding hands. Barely glanced in his direction.

Later, alone in another dim empty place near the back of the train, he pushed his hot forehead against the cool window and thought about Quidditch and thought that he might lose himself before he could feel that again: racing knee-to-knee and hands reaching together and disappointed expectation burning into anger again.

Draco stepped down onto the platform with Crabbe and Goyle beside him and a smell of burned coal in his nostrils, and winced a little at Hagrid's voice calling the First-Years - loud and confident and weighted with years of certainty and all the years he wondered at and spat against. He walked towards the carriages that would carry them to the castle and he saw the Thestrals for the first time.

* * *

Harry shook, convulsed in Draco's arms and then sagged there with mumbled spells spilling out of his mouth, and a thin dribble of saliva, and Severus was already pouring something between pale lips and the walls around them glowed and shivered and came back again.

"I suppose we're here then." Draco couldn't push the sweaty hair out of his eyes because Harry was unconscious and heavy and needing against him, and even if nothing had disappeared for very long and even though nothing had melted or exploded he dropped to his knees trying not to remember that this was his last chance.

Strong hands taking his own: "Let go, Draco; I've got him."

"I'm . . . a bit tired, Severus. It's been a ride, y'know . . . Sorry; did you say something?"

"Let go, Draco."

"I . . ." He couldn't let go; would never let go. There was nothing that could make him let go because something even worse might happen then and he might lose everything he'd won. He wondered about where he'd come to. He watched Harry fighting the potion and felt the wild magic surging through him. "He's going to hate me . . ."

"Let go, Draco." The warm-dark voice was surprisingly gentle.

"No. Can't do that, Severus." Darkness felt like velvet and smelled like chocolate.

* * *

This last year should have been splendid: should have been triumphant with the Dark Lord's Mark pulsing warm promises through him but he had refused the Mark in the end. And now everything was thin. Everything was full of doubt and some kind of miserable shame.

He had wondered before he saw the Thestrals . . . after that he knew beyond doubt that he couldn't do what was expected of him. Draco knew it all when the white eyes looked at him and through him. And he scrubbed at his arm as though the Mark was burning into him after all: invisible and malevolent.

He lied his way through half a dozen classes with the Gryffindors and then lied his way through half a dozen weeks before the first Hogsmeade weekend. Crabbe and Goyle merely grunted and looked puzzled when he walked away from them at Zonko's. They waved.

He found Potter alone in the Three Broomsticks and knew that his life was a regrettable - Malfoys regretted nothing - mistake . . . Sat down and crooked a casual finger towards the bar. "Let me buy you a drink, Harry."

Potter smiled hesitantly and brushed the hair out of his eyes and out of those ugly Muggle spectacles, and dropped his hand onto his wand. Burned the air around them just a litle. "I'll thank you later. Don't mean to be rude." He looked tired: dark shadows smudged under bright eyes.

"I want to show you something." Draco breathed hard through his nose and thanked someone or something when his hand curled around a smooth bottle and he finally dared to look at Potter . . . at Harry with his ill-fitting robes and his defiance.

There was something more here than he'd expected. A moment that he'd never anticipated when Harry . . . Potter looked back at him with an imagined hope in his green eyes.

"Show me then."

"Can I trust you?" Malfoys didn't ask for trust: demanded it, expected it . . . "I'm not sure . . ."

"I'm not sure either . . . Can I trust you?" Green eyes watching him as closely as he watched back.

* * *

Three days after they'd been dragged back to the castle Draco thought sadly that mistakes should be mended now or sooner whether or not patience was virtuous - virtue wasn't something with which he'd much familiarity - nor patience. "This isn't . . ."isn't working . . . "

"Wait a while, Draco." Severus looked tired now too. The snake spread its hood and hissed at them and curled into the blankets and hissed again..

Albus had stayed away. Weasley, unexpectedly courteous, never haunted them and Draco thought the vague memory of him might have gone wherever ghosts go when they've finished what they were staying for. Granger came to visit and let Severus touch her arm and whisper in her ear; Neville sent something that looked poisonous with bright green leaves and cream dull flowers.

Harry tossed on the matress they'd conjured on the floor that first day and sweat broke over his forehead again and Draco dropped to his knees; words without substance feathered between them again.

"Talk to me . . ."

* * *

Draco held Harry's twitching fingers and thought that he might regret his choices more than once before he was done. And burned in doubt when the candles guttered in the sconces and the walls closed in about him.

"Am I a fool, Severus?"

"Of course you are, Draco. We're all fools now."

Albus sat beside them in the long nights and frowned at their indecision . . . raised a grey, lost eyebrow and a twinkle of hope at them - and melted away before the pink shard of dawn woke them and warmed them.

Later, Harry almost spoke and Draco almost wished that he that he would.

* * *

"I thought I knew you . . . where you'd decided to be . . ." Harry Potter was an open vulnerable hesitation and a powerful question . . . nothing more.

"If you didn't - know me - I'd be . . . disappointed."

Granger and the red-haired irritant never turned up that day at the inn and Harry never looked for them in the doorway that day, and blew gently across the top of the bottle clutched in his thin, strong fingers.

"Let me walk back with you." Draco finished his fourth butterbeer and dropped a handful of sickles onto the scrubbed table. "You probably shouldn't go back on your own."

"Why are you doing this, Malfoy?"

"I thought I could choose."

"I'm glad I'm not a fool alone."

Understanding then . . . "Fools are always alone, Potter."

"I think you might be right about that."

The green eyes were less wary and sadder then.

* * *

"I'm sick of this, Severus." His head was aching and Harry was burning into ruin and Harry was less than he had been before they'd come here.

A curl of fumes between them. "Let me try again . . ."

"I'm . . . not sure . . . This isn't what I meant to happen."

He wanted to write to Lucius and tell him that he was wrong about belief except that Lucius was never wrong: belief enslaved them all. He hadn't read Narcissa's letter in case he broke over it. He'd read it tomorrow.

"So you'd rather walk away?"

"I'd far rather walk - even run - away, Severus; I'd rather run away from this than endure it."

There was an unexpected pause and an unexpected hand on his shoulder.

"Let me try again, Draco.".

Granger brought a bottle of Firewhiskey and they drank it together.

* * *

"I thought you could help me with this, Potter." Disappointment felt like sand under his skin.

"If I could help you I would, but . . . I'm not who you all think I am. . Do you want . . ." Eyes that were suddenly vulnerable again looked into his. "Walk a little way with me." And Hogsmeade was blown and shadowed in the promise of winter and cold with it.

Their hands together against the cold evening and the wary doubt between them. A moment that could have turned into a kiss just inside the gates, just before Filch blundered into their fragile moment. A half-laughed goodbye, after all.

Not long before tomorrow and a sleek eagle owl turning against the lightened clouds of the enchanted ceiling and dropping a folded parchment into his lap.

* * *

The potions were keeping Harry quiet, binding the wild magic. Draco touched his lover's cold face with his own cold fingers. He didn't know what to hope for anymore.

He ate in the Great Hall that night and nodded at Flitwick and Sprout and raised his glass. Sat at the high table and accepted another goblet of wine. Watched the young hopeful faces along the tables and remembered when he'd been one of them not so very long ago and already faded.

* * *

"I hoped . . ." Harry looked at him and leaned closer with his Gryffindor heart in his eyes and with his pulse fluttering under Draco's fingers. It was cold here where the night bled around them just before sunrise . . . fluttered around shared breath and shared touches . . .

"Hope isn't enough."

But hope pulsed between them anyway.

"No, it's not enough, Draco." A sweat-sour tasted moment between them.

""I'm not brave, Harry. I'm not like you."

"You might be brave, Draco."

* * *

Draco Malfoy had thought he knew what he wanted from life long before he walked into Madam Malkin's shop those years ago to be measured for his school robes while his mother drew her haughty disdain around her and into the Wand Shop and matched her wits with Ollivander.

Thought he knew what he wanted when he measured his taunting against Harry Potter's innocent, hardly-angry response.

Thought he wanted something more than victory in the quiet dark of the nights that followed the biting, bitter days when he stalked the dungeon corridors with Greg and Vincent behind him. And the small dark, quiet dark of his enemy talked to him in dreams.

He knew a little more now - had lived a little more now: watching certainty turn into doubt, and watching Harry Potter pay the price for all of them.

* * *

Narcissa had forgiven him for his interference and was leaving for 'the colonies' as soon as Draco could 'sign these, dear' and she'd hoped 'that boy' would be better soon so that Draco could 'relinquish your imagined responsibilities' and join them here soon. And she'd apologised again; and Draco folded the words away until he could bear to look at them again.

Harry tossed and sweated on the conjured matress and Draco sat watching because Severus had stopped the potions yesterday after dinner. And there were hours left before sunrise.

* * *

Draco watched dark lashes fluttering on hectic cheeks and remembered that he'd been brave once . . . perhaps twice.

Dumbledore visited again between night and morning and looked more smokey than ever but twinkled anyway.

Severus was sitting with his legs stretched out towards the fireplace and Granger perched on the arm of his chair with a broken frown on her face and a glass in her hand.

Draco swirled a drop of golden hope in his own glass and watched this darker magic coming back to life again around him; wanted it even while he feared it; wished that Severus would say something or leave and take the Mudblood with him.

"Draco?"

Remembered his long conversations with the tentacula between indecision and a portkey; remembered that he had more letters to read and to write later on.

Held sweating fingers between his own: "I'm here, Harry."

* * *

Draco wondered why he felt empty. That was for other people after all. Harry Potter had fulfilled his destiny and the world was saved and Voldemort was gone; and Draco Malfoy was saved . . . and life turned back into the ordinary.

Albus Dumbledore whisped and whispered through the corridors and NEWTs were just around the corner, and no one said anything about what they'd seen or what they dreamed about at night.No one said anything about the nights . . .

Students walked quiet in the dark afterwards.

There was no more time and no more space for playing at being enemies and no more reason to be friends except that Neville Longbottom lent his Herbology notes to Blaise Zabini and Granger, the Mudblood, offered to coach Greg in Charms. And Draco Malfoy won the House Cup for Slytherin with a downward fall and a night of oblivion.

And new ghosts wandered in the stillness of Hogwarts.

And old enemies refused to play.

Draco Malfoy walked along the damp edge of the lake and looked at the green almost frozen moments under his feet and wondered what was there in the rippling morning when the world was new.

* * *

Severus was dozing in his high-backed chair when Harry woke.

The walls of the small chamber shuddered and skittered like a drop of mercury on a glass. And hummed as though another song was shivering and silken against the still dark morning.

Cold fingers curled around Draco's wrist.

"Are you there?"

"Yes, Harry, I'm here."

Cold fingers stroked and curled into his and stayed there.

"Did we bring the snake?"

Walls dissolved and Severus sat up, blinked twice and reached for his wand.

Draco pulled Harry into his arms and touched his pale face with trembling fingers and sighed into something uncertain; "Yes, we brought the snake."

"Thank you."

The walls shuddered and Draco breathed into a damp tangled mat of hair. And Severus shrugged his robes about him and walked away with a grim smile on his thin lips.

" . . . love you, Harry . . ."

"Stay with me, Draco."

Fin