No Going Back

Chapter Three: Don't Remember

Coming back to consciousness was like swimming up from the bottom of a dark pool. For a moment he felt caught between two worlds, staring at a distorted reflection on the underside of the water- a face that was his own and yet not. The waters tugged at Harry, luring him with their promise of a blissful void, a cool cradle and shelter. The waters rolled and the face disappeared. But he still shrugged them off stubbornly-for it was as much in his nature as throwing off the Imperius curse-- and gradually make his way back to the waking world.

He felt warm and comfortable, except for the persistent nagging of an ache in his side; it's sting most likely what had pulled him from sleep. Harry turned his face into the softness of the pillow under his cheek and muffled a quiet groan. Surely, there was a reason that he felt like he'd been jabbed in the hip with a fireplace poker. Surely, the memories would be returning soon.

Harry was well-versed in this routine. For three and a half years, he'd awakened every morning with a mind as blank as a wiped chalkboard; victim (or beneficiary) of temporary amnesia. Sometimes the feeling lasted for minutes, sometimes only a few seconds-- but it lasted, all the same. A few months ago he'd briefly toyed with the notion of becoming an insomniac, just to avoid the disquieting experience. Not the forgetting part, that wasn't necessarily so bad. No. The inevitable remembering was what made it difficult.

He sighed, inhaling the scent of mint and laundry soap from the pillow. Wait, hold on a minute. Harry's pillows didn't smell like mint. He was also pretty sure his pillows weren't full feather-down either.

He remembered everything now. Harry rolled onto his back, ignoring the painful tug at the muscles around his bullet wound-- and opened his eyes, blinking a little to clear his vision. He reached over to the nightstand and found his glasses, as if they'd been deliberately placed there to wait for him. A sleek little clock next to them proclaimed the hour to be around ten thirty in the morning. He put the glasses on, and got a clear view of his surroundings.

The mattress was a double, made up with clean linen sheets as well as a luxurious satin comforter, and possibly more pillows than a courtesan's boudoir.

Nope- this was definitely not Harry's bed.

The room was dim, gray from diffused morning light that filtered in through the gaps in the drawn curtains. Curtains- not old and dusty blinds. And the woodwork of all the furniture- the bedframe, the wardrobe, the nightstand-- it all matched, being the same tastefully stylized oak.

Also- most definitely not Harry's room. Which meant that this was most likely not his flat as well.

Fine. Then the two questions that remained were, firstly- why was he in some stranger's bed instead of a hospital's or his own; and secondly- who was the stranger?

Surely it couldn't be. . . .

Harry sat up, propping himself against the wooden headboard. This aggravated his injury further, and he winced, fingers automatically going to his side and encountering a well-wrapped bandage. Biting his lip, he tried to remember exactly what had happened before he'd passed out.

Malfoy. The confrontation with Malfoy, who had been the hostage of the thief Harry had been chasing. Could that astounding piece of bad luck and coincidence truly have happened? Harry was more than willing to chalk the whole jumbled incident up to bad dreams. . . except his surroundings and the hole in his side were testament to the dismaying, awful truth. Harry growled under his breath and pushed his fingers through his hair, trying to fight his way through the confusion.

Why, goddamn it, why? Out of all the people on the street, why did the thief have to reach for bloody Malfoy? Malfoy- who was quite probably the only person in several square kilometers from Harry's past? It was too much of a coincidence- too pat. Those blasted Fates must have engineered this in some way; they were forever trying to torment Harry. He could just picture them, sitting around on their cloudy high hill and pointing, "Oh look, Harry's getting the slightest bit comfortable with his life- let's toss a Malfoy into his path!"

He'd been trying so hard and for so long to put his past behind him- wading at the first through months in a perpetual haze, half-starved without knowing it and wandering from place to place without seeing anything, and hearing nothing but the hum of static in his ears. Survival instinct had been the only thing to save him- remembering now that Voldemort was finally dead, he was at last allowed to live. He'd then drifted from one odd job to another, finally joining the police force. It had taken him months to finagle his way into the Academy without proof of proper secondary-schooling, and even longer to get his Constable's badge with Scotland Yard. But he'd done it. To make progress.

That had been the goal for over three years now: making progress. Years of slow, slow progress, only to realize he hadn't really gone anywhere at all. It was becoming quite clear that he'd merely been deluding himself, if just seeing Malfoy again and speaking to him were fraying Harry this much. His new life was a carefully stitched hem-- pull one thread, and it would all start to unravel.

God, no. He couldn't let this happen. It just had to end, now. Harry just had to walk out of here, and trust that Malfoy would keep his mouth shut about what he'd seen. He was not ready to lose sight of that goal because of this.

But since when could Malfoy be trusted for anything?

A tiny voice spoke up in contradiction in the back of his mind. -And since when does he help you? He took you to safety, took care of the wound himself, didn't just dump you off at some hospital.

I don't know for sure that it was Malfoy who did all that, Harry argued back grouchily.

-Don't be a deliberately obtuse prat. You know it was him. Who else would have damask curtains in their bedroom?

I don't have time for this. Harry thought petulantly. I've got to get out of here.

-Running away again, are we? That's becoming your trademark tactic.

Harry didn't feel he should dignify such a grossly outrageous statement with an answer. He also didn't have the opportunity to- the bedroom door was swinging open and Malfoy was stepping through it. The two traded looks across the dimly-lit room. Malfoy's face was a blank page, and Harry was the first to drop his eyes in discomfort, pulling the sheet up to his chest like a child hiding from the monsters under the bed.

"I figured it out." Malfoy murmured, crossing his arms over his chest; Harry noticed he was wearing the same suit from yesterday, sans tie and jacket. He still looked rumpled, and slightly shell-shocked. The cut on his neck was a thread-thin line of pink. "It took me ten hours, but I finally figured it out."

Harry forced himself to stop clutching at the sheet. "Why you're such an insufferable git?"

Malfoy ignored this. "You're hiding." He stated simply, with no inflection.

Words deserted Harry for a minute. He felt bereft and angry at their abandonment, but of course couldn't voice such thoughts. Or perhaps it was Malfoy who was making him feel bereft and angry. Harry just glared at this slightly aged version of his old enemy, and remained silent.

Malfoy evidently took this silence as an invitation to go on. "I don't pretend to know what it must have taken for you to defeat Voldemort." He spoke softly, but in something of a rush, as if he wanted to say his piece before Harry could interrupt him.

"But whatever it was, it must have involved a lot of rage. And when you were done, you didn't know how to let go of that rage. So you disappeared. So you wouldn't have to show your friends and admirers what you'd become." Then Malfoy held up Harry's uniform shirt, with his constable's badge, the blood dried to a blackish colour that stood out against the slightly less dark material of the shirt. Harry felt his expression getting stonier and stonier with every word. But the other boy pressed on.

"I took Muggle Studies my seventh year," he informed Harry. "This Scotland Yard, it's like the Ministry wizards, enforcing the laws, investigating crimes. . . you didn't know what else you were good for but taking out bad guys. So you joined up. That way, you wouldn't ever have to go back. Wouldn't have to face what you'd done." Draco trailed off at that point, his silver eyes still trained on Harry's face, searching for a reaction. But something undefined in the tone of his voice gave him away. . . he wanted what he was saying to be true.

It was on the tip of Harry's tongue to snap, No, I joined up because they sacked me at the deli for pinching a bag of chips. Instead, he remained silent for another long, tense moment. "Are you done yet?" he finally said, his voice tight and unyielding.

Malfoy made a wordless sound of frustration, and angrily tossed Harry's shirt at him "Yes, I'm done."

"Good," Harry shrugged on the shirt with jerky movements, ignoring the twinges of pain from the bullet wound. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, found his shoes, and started jamming them on. "All that insight into my soul was starting to turn my stomach," he bit out.

"What the hell are you so afraid of, Potter?"

Harry's shoulders hunched a bit, as if taking a blow. "Don't call me that."

Draco had taken a few steps into the room, hands balling to fists at his side. "What, 'Potter'?" he said deliberately, with a sneer.

Harry finished the hasty lacing of his boots, and stood up faster than was advisable, pulling his injury and not caring. "Harry Potter is dead," he stated very slowly and clearly.

Malfoy faced him, jaw line set obstinately. "Harry Potter is standing right in. Front. Of. Me." He hissed, enunciating every word through clenched teeth.

But Harry just brushed past him, walking out of the room. He glanced around the flat only enough to locate the exit. "Yeah, well, you can't believe everything you see." He searched a bit for his belt and found it draped conveniently over the back of a nearby chair. He picked it up along with his bloodied jacket.

Malfoy followed Harry to the door, but didn't try to stop him as he twisted the knob and jerked the it open, revealing a deserted expanse of beige-coloured hallway. "You're such a stubborn, stupid--"

"You're wrong." Harry interrupted him, and the flames in his eyes had already burnt themselves to ashes. The fight was too familiar. He had different versions of it with himself every once in a while, and the outcome was always the same. He was too tired and too injured to go through that long and wrenching process now- especially with Malfoy trying to play the part of his conscience. It was simply too surreal for words. After all, this was his old school rival-- the boy who had always taunted Harry; who had always been able to aggravate him into annoyed rage, sometimes just with that haughty aristocratic sneer of his. It was Malfoy-- who had always insulted and disgusted and challenged and infuriated Harry.

All right. . . so maybe it wasn't that surreal.

"About which part, exactly?" Draco retorted, bitterness heavy in his words. He looked tired, too. There were dark circles under his eyes, a sharp contrast with the paleness of the rest of his face.

Harry met his gaze, too long resigned to echo that bitterness. "I have faced what I've done," he intoned dully, but then his eyes looked away, looking somewhere else, seeing someplace else. The beige hallway became a graveyard for a fleeting, chilling instant. And Harry shivered.

"I face it every goddamn day."

With that, he went out, and slammed the door behind himself.

Draco Malfoy cursed and fixed the door with a glare that surely could have burned it to cinders, had he been so inclined. "Oh no you don't, Potter," he murmured.

~*~

Harry didn't bother to swing by his flat for a clean shirt before heading over to work. For one, he didn't have the time; and two, he was hoping the sight of dried blood on his clothes might help to coax a bit of sympathy from his superior, Chief Inspector Thorpe. Harry was in for the chew-out of a lifetime and he knew it.

He walked as quickly as he could through the London police station, the linoleum under his shoes making soft echoing sounds that briefly took him back to the chase of the previous night. Getting up after that bastard had shot him had clearly been a mistake that he was going to regret for a long time. But Harry had other things to worry about at the moment. He compartmentalized his anxiety and doubt, preparing to slip into character.

Looking around himself as he walked, he noted that the normally drab headquarters were livened a bit with festive decorations, in preparation for the upcoming holiday. Red and green tinsel glittered at Harry from every angle, doing little to improve his mood. He disliked Christmas intensely. Statistics showed that the Christmas season had the highest rate of attempted suicide, and he was pretty sure he knew the reason why.

Memories. Now matter how well you managed to suppress them for the rest of the year, somehow they inevitably won out when the smell of snow and pine and gingerbread was in the air. This time of year, Harry tried to choose his memories- tried to choose memories of holidays spent with the Dursleys. Holidays where he got gifts of toothpicks and kleenex and indifference. Holidays before magic. Before Hogwarts. Before friends.

Harry tried to slip past his partner's desk unnoticed, but the old codger was too observant. "Evans!" he barked, and Harry froze with a sheepish look.

"Er, morning Raleigh." Cheerful salutations couldn't possibly incriminate him.

Didn't matter-- he was already in hot water. Raleigh's dark bushy eyebrows drew together in a menacing scowl, which he directed fiercely at his younger partner. "Where, in the name of Saint Sebastian, have you been?"

Harry waved a hand vaguely. "Unconscious, mostly." Going with the edited truth seemed like the best option.

"That incident with the thief last night has had me up to my bloomin' ears in paperwork all morning, Evans," the older man growled, jabbing a blunt finger onto the offensive pile of documents. His accent was especially thick when he was incensed. "You have some explaining to do, James, and it had better be good."

Harry opened his mouth to blurt out the first excuse that came to mind, when Raleigh interrupted him with a shake of his salt-and pepper head. "Not to me, you great gormless twat." He lifted a burly arm and pointed a finger at the door to the office of the Chief Inspector. "To Thorpe. He's out for yer blood, Evans."

Resigned already to his fate, Harry put on a show of bravado-- not because he needed it, but because it would both amuse and annoy his partner to no end. "Alright, I'm going in. No, don't try to stop me, Raleigh. . . I must face this evil alone," he announced in a theatrical tone. He could joke about strident Chief Inspectors because there were no Dark Wizards terrorizing the world. For the briefest of moments, he imagined this life became real and Evans' broad grin was his own.

For the briefest of moments.

Raleigh's mouth looked as if it were fighting between a smirk and a frown. "Get on with you. And don't come back till your hide is well and truly blistered, y'hear?"

Harry made the promise, and knocked of the Chief's door. He heard the bark of "Enter," and he did so, taking his usual stance in front of Thorpe's desk, his eyes wandering over the surface briefly. Thorpe had out some new pictures of his grandchildren, two girls with curly pale-yellow hair. It was an interesting colour. A few shades lighter, and it would almost match-

-Get a grip, Harry. The topic of Malfoy is closed- end of discussion.

After the first few sentences out of Thorpe's mouth, Harry realized he needn't have bothered showing up for this. It was the same lecture he'd been bludgeoned over the head with half a dozen times before. But he was almost glad of it, just the same, as it helped him take his mind off. . . other subjects.

As per usual, Chief Inspector Thorpe railed on him for his recklessness. ("You're a bloody thick-skulled fool, Evans! One day you're going to get yourself killed with these ridiculous stunts of yours. I won't stand for this sort of outlandish tomfoolery in my department!") Hard on the heels of that diatribe was the obligatory speech about regulations, which Harry could have recited in his sleep. ("Rules are made to be followed, Evans! They're there for a reason, you addle-brained sot!") And of course, about twenty minutes after he'd started, Thorpe wound himself down with the usual appeal to what he deemed as Evans' sense of ambition and pride. ("If you weren't such a blasted git, Evans, you could make Lieutenant within a year. You've got good instincts, but that doesn't mean you should obey every whim and impulse. You're an officer of the law, Evans. Now live up to that standard, or I'll have your neck on a chopping block!")

The man was so predictable, Harry could have chuckled. But instead he just nodded his assent and fixed an expression of mild ruefulness on his features, contriving to look chastised. It must have worked, because with a last flurry of insults pertaining to his lack of intelligence, the Chief Inspector dismissed him. Harry escaped to his desk, where he found a pile of paperwork already placed there by a thoroughly smug Raleigh. Harry shot his unsympathetic partner a glare from across the room. Why, the man's smirk looked almost exactly like Malfoy's after that time first year when Harry and Ron had--

Harry put pen to paper with more force than he'd intended, ending up tearing a hole in the document. Sighing, he got up to retrieve another copy of the form as well as a strong cup of coffee. He had a long day's work ahead of him.

~*~

Draco Malfoy wasn't a sulking sort of person. He didn't brood, either. And he was very vehemently against the cliche of sitting pensively across from a crackling fire, drowning his sorrows in expensive brandy. No-- if something was bothering or irritating him, Draco much preferred action to wallowing.

But even as much at he disdained himself for doing so, Draco spent the afternoon after Harry left curled up in an armchair by the bay window, thinking. Just thinking. If he had anywhere to be, any prior engagements, he didn't remember them. All the things he had learned yesterday from Mad-Eye, his case, his theories- they sat on the back-burner today. Today his mind was on Potter, and his thoughts wound themselves up as tightly as a fly caught in spider's web-- showing no signs of coming clear as the pale patch of feeble light from the window moved steadily across the floor.

Harry Potter. Harry fucking Potter. Half a night and half a day had already passed since the incident with the thief in front of The Leaky Cauldron, and Draco hadn't made much progress in wrapping his brain around the concept that Harry was even alive-- except that some hours later he could now conjure up the image of Potter's older, scarless face without a violent jolt of shock whipping down his spine. Those things he'd said to Harry this morning. . . and the things Potter had said back. . . God, had it really happened? Perhaps it had all been just a hallucination, except there was now a scent on Draco's pillows-- very faint, but still detectable. It smelled of men's aftershave, sweat, blood, and memory- and it had driven Draco off his bed, into this chair. He'd tried to banish them with a spell, but somehow the scents had lingered, clinging to the sheets as if branded there. Or maybe it was just his overactive imagination.

He'd had dreams about Harry before. Mostly the summer right after Voldemort's death- but every once in a while, they still came. They crept in like chill air-- nightmares of empty graves that somehow became filled, of worms that crawled through empty eye-sockets and gnawed at rotted flesh. Dreams of jet-black hair that dulled to ash, of skin that shrunk into shadow-filled hollows and split along sharp bones. Of hot red blood that coagulated inside shrinking veins, turning black and sticky like tar.

They'd said that Harry's body couldn't be found, that it must have been incinerated in the backlash of the Killing Curse. Draco had even seen the empty coffin for himself. But somehow his mind must have never believed his sight, for in the dark of night it would conjure up these images, these morbid nightmares that left Draco shivering, drenched in cold sweat with a sour taste on the back of his tongue.

Never found the body. . . well, now he knew why. Potter was very much alive. And in hiding. . . wasn't he? Draco had thought so this morning-- he'd felt so sure, sure enough to even confront Harry about it- except replaying the conversation over in his mind, mentally picturing Harry's reaction- Draco found he wasn't sure of anything. He shivered and firmly resisted the impulse to get himself a drink.

He was going to go see Potter tonight, and he wanted to be completely lucid and sober when he did so.

All six years that he'd attended Hogwarts with Potter, Draco had wanted nothing more than to prove him to be human; to drag Harry down off his pedestal into the dust of the common, the unremarkable, the normal. If Harry were human, then it would be all right that he'd turned Draco's friendship down, because humans make mistakes. But not the Boy Who Lived. People depended on that boy to be transcendent, preternatural- after all, he'd defeated He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, and everyone knew that the Dark Lord had taken himself somewhere a little beyond the limitations of his species. Draco had long considered himself above that dependence; had in fact scorned it on many occasions, and then thrown those taunts into Potter's face as well, enjoying watching the boy squirm under the discomfort of his mantle of Paragon of Virtue.

But now, seeing Harry alive, and seeing what had become of the Paragon. . . Draco was slowly coming to the sickening revelation that he'd bought into the propaganda as well, because Harry-the-Wreck just seemed like a complete stranger, someone Draco had never met or imagined, not even in his pettiest moments- he couldn't have. Like the rest of the world, he didn't know how to see Harry Potter as weak, with haunted shadows instead of eyes.

Abruptly, Draco got up from his chair, and moved to get his coat. He had already decided, and if he sat around much longer he would undoubtedly find a way to think the better of his decision. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wand- ten and half inches, cedar, dragon heartstring.

No time to go through the Muggle channels to locate Potter. It would have to be done with magic.

~*~