Archive of Our Own ^beta

You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together

To make a creature that will do what I say

Or love me back

I’m not really sure why I do it,

But in this version you are not feeding yourself to a bad man

Against a black sky prickled with small lights

~Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out, Richard Siken

When Harry first tries to convince him that they’ve met before, Draco is tapping his knee with his fingers, looking for a nocturn.

That’s what he’ll tell Harry later, I was looking for a nocturn in my head, as if his mind is all cluttered rooms, sounds behind curtains and under beds like hide-and-seek.

“We’ve met? When?”

He looks like a snuffed-out candle, folded on the windowsill like something that grew there, a skeleton, a coral, all bones.

All eggshells.

Harry doesn’t know much anymore, but he knows that what’s firm and won’t bend, breaks.

The hostel they’re both staying at – the hostel Harry tracked Draco to – is perched on the cliff edge like an afterthought, as if added to the landscape by an unsatisfied painter who thought it too lonely. The wind makes sand whisper and grasses talk, and, at night, the moon is like a blind eye that doesn’t have to blink against the light anymore.

Harry waited three days before approaching Draco, watching him over toast with jam, over chess pieces, over tourists with badly folded roadmaps.

“We met a long time ago, actually,” Harry says, and stares at the bitemarks pressed red into Draco’s knuckles, from nightmares he must forget as soon as he wakes. “Nine years ago, can you believe it?”

Draco blinks at him, like he’s forgotten not only the war, but sarcasm and snide remarks, too. He seems tired, as if he’s waiting for Harry to leave, already imagining the tea he’ll make for himself – chamomile, weak and always in teacups – and the walks he’ll go on, the air all salt.

“Your nose was so much more pointy back then,” Harry says, and Draco’s hand moves up, fingers fluttering next to his cheek. Then he shakes his head and lets it drop.

“I’m looking for someone,” Draco tells him, staring out the window where there’s nothing but fields, no dark lords, no good stars. “She’s – important.”

Harry wants to hurt him for forgetting that, too, of all things.

“Fancy a walk?” he says instead, and pushes the chamomile tea that he pretended to make for himself Draco’s way on the coffee table. For a second, he thinks Draco will stay where he is, but he ends up sliding gracefully off the windowsill and reaching for the drink, even though it’s stronger than he likes it, even though it’s in a mug.

He thanks Harry, and Harry can’t help but miss the time when he’d have said “fuck you, Potter” and complained about china and soaked teabags and lumpy sugar.

*

After the war, Hermione would read books like it was a race, eyes still scanning the last page of one paperback and hands already reaching for another, but when you called her name, she’d look up and there’d be more in her eyes than just your reflection.

Draco kept tearing petals off roses, and when you called his name, he wouldn’t react. Harry knows, because he went to visit once, drunk, more firewhisky than blood in his veins, and a prayer for a past than never had been and never would be caught under his tongue like a coin for Charon the ferryman, only Harry still alive, against all odds.

Oh, but how he sometimes longed to be—

“Why would you do that?” he asked, thousands of browning rose petals scattered around Draco and no blood in sight, even though it called for it, this murder of colour.

“She wants to have a bath,” Draco explained, without looking up. “She’s always so cold, you know?”

For a moment, Harry wondered who that ‘she’ might have been. Pansy, or one of the Greengrass sisters, maybe.

“It’s too cold for her, under the glass,” Draco whispered, and Harry remembered Narcissa, how she’d died of grief after the war or maybe had let it kill her, just like that. Let death in when it knocked, like a wife would sneak a lover in, and her son cradled by nightmares somewhere in that empty, empty house, none the wiser.

“She hasn’t had a bath in ages,” Draco laughed, the sound broken like a dropped champagne flute. “Forever busy, busy, busy, but there’s nothing to do now, is there?”

When he finally looked up at Harry, his eyes were empty like something Harry had no choice but to look past to some stern winter.

*

They walk the narrow path stitched into the field, and Harry wonders at how enough people have walked it in this remote place for grass to give up on growing over it. Draco’s wearing a coat too thick for April, and the sky is the colour of unwashed blueberries, as if there’s a storm coming.

“I should have stayed in and played Scrabble,” Draco says, more to himself than to Harry, and Harry remembers him toying with the white bones of the letters every day, lining up words against himself and swiping them off the board sometimes with a discontent frown. “I never end up drawing enough of the letter ‘s.’”

He’s barely louder than the crash of the ocean into the cliffside, the roar of the suicide of it.

“We met nine years ago, did you say?”

“A year ago, too,” Harry tells him, and there are no roses here, but he smells them anyway. “You were cutting your father out of all the family photographs.”

“I think you’re mistaking me for someone,” Draco says, hands in pockets and words smuggled into that quiet before the next wave can hit the rocks. “I don’t have a father.”

Harry stifles a mean laugh, because how different everything would have been, were it true.

*

The second time he went to Malfoy Manor, he was sober, something Hermione insisted on as if she needed him to keep himself together in order to do so herself. Those days, she was still reading childrens’ books, frown deeper and deeper every time he visited.

“Actually, they’re all really sad,” she told Harry once, fingers bending the spine of her copy of Peter Pan as if she hoped it would break and all the pages would fly up like startled birds. “Oh Harry, they’re all so sad.”

Harry didn’t know why he decided to come back, but the thought itched as if he’d forgotten something at Malfoy’s house, a wallet, a hat, a self. He expected to find Malfoy in the garden yet again, but there was no boy between the bushes, no roses. When he tapped his fingers on the door, light, like the patter of rain, it swung open as if there was no lock, and when the floorboards creaked under his worn shoes – the ones he’d had since the war, blood long washed off rubber, shoelaces long replaced – the house sounded like something one hums at funerals.

In the kitchen, there were no elves, only melted butter, toast crumbs, and dead flies. When Harry climbed to the first floor, yelling Draco’s name until it started scaring him how it echoed, he heard a tap dripping behind an ajar door and shoved it open, curious. Inside, there were unrolled bandages on the bathroom tiles, and the full bathtub had a layer of rotting petals on the surface, the drip of the tap like some quiet, muffled crying. There was a candle, too, melted to a sad, small stub.

Harry went on opening doors, all the rooms like somewhere important guests could have slept, back when most of them had still been alive, only half the furniture gone and the floorboards darker where the carpets used to be.

When he finally found Draco, it was in a room too big for a boy his size – the way the most cruel cages are built. He was sitting in a pool of light like milk gone bad, scissors in hand and blood trickling down his hands to dirty the cuffs of his shirt – something old, covered in stains and no longer white. There were photographs around him, Narcissa trying to smile but always something sour about the curl of her mouth, Draco laughing, and Lucius gone but for the shape of him, as if the photos were but puzzles, and he was always part of the missing piece.

“Oh?” Draco said, voice mean and eyes cruel, so different from what he’d been like the last time Harry came here. “The Savior himself!”

“What are you doing?” Harry asked, and everything in the room smelled like dust and sweat and grief.

“I’d cut you out of photos, too, only there aren’t any of us together,” Draco said, lips stretched to something unpleasant, and Harry watched his blood ooze, Voldemort’s mouth at his ear as if he’d never been gone. After the war, he never went back to Hogwarts for his final year, because he remembered it red, and knew it hadn’t been sunset colouring it so.

Oh, how he hated it, all them kids forced into this war started by their fathers’ whim. Oh, how he hated that Hermione would plant flowers because picking them was too cruel and meant something.

“You know what’s funny, Malfoy?” he said before he could think of stopping himself, that Gryffindor hot-headedness that would kill him one day, that already had, once. “You were spewing bullshit the whole time at Madam Malkin’s that day we first met, but you talked to me, didn’t you? Right away, and you didn’t know who I was at all.”

Draco raised his eyebrow, reached for a photo of Lucius alone, and started folding it into a simple shape that Harry soon recognized to be a paper plane, the kind he himself used to make from his marked homework and send flying out the window and into Petunia’s flowerbeds, once. When it was done, all crooked wings and creases in wrong places, as if no one’d ever taught Draco to make one, he threw it and watched it fall to the floor mere feet away. He snapped his fingers, and the plane burst into flames, wandless magic just like that.

“That’s what happens to planes when they crash, isn’t it?” he said, smile widening and eyes like sand blown to glass. “Stupid Muggles! Why build something with wings if it can just fall and burn?”

Then Draco’s expression changed into something open and childish, like an egg hatching too soon, and he seemed to wake up, only, in a way, it felt as if he was falling asleep.

“Dad?” he croaked, the first time Harry had heard him call Lucius anything other than ‘father,’ and threw himself at the plane quickly turning to black flakes, fingers closing around the flame. Harry forgot all his spells, staring at the orange of it, and dove towards Draco, knocking his fingers away, covering them with his own two hands and wishing the fire away. When he opened his eyes – when had he closed them? – Draco’s nose was right there, and there was milk in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. They tangled together, all knees and elbows and ribs, but more folding chairs that toppled to the ground than anything alive, Draco’s hand the only exception, pulsing between Harry’s own like it was a trapped bird struggling against suffocation.

“Are we dead yet?” Draco asked quietly, some hope in it, like he was asking if they were safe instead. His breath smelled like yeast, and Harry wanted to pull him closer, this mess of angles. He let go of Draco’s hand and reached up, fingertip touching the wet of Draco’s eye, and as the eyelids closed around it, he hoped it would clean the mist away.

“Your hands,” he said, after, bringing Draco’s arms up by the wrists, the skin there burnt and cut open with scissors, blood everywhere and the smell of dirty galleons in his nose. “Your stupid, mommy’s-boy, aristocratic hands.”

They wouldn’t have tortured it out of him, how his voice broke on the words.

“No need for hands anymore,” Draco said, something dead about the words, like when Moody’s eye would fall out and thud to the floor. “She had to sell the piano, see.”

Harry remembered how Hermione once told him that houses should be built around instruments the way a ribcage is built around the heart, and listened to Draco’s breath because, right then, it was the only sound.

*

When they get back, it’s right before the cloudburst, and Draco says something about how raindrops must feel lonely before they fall into the ocean.

“I like the sound they make on the windows,” Harry tells him, and Draco’s fingers tighten on nothing at the word ‘sound.’

Years ago, Harry feared the after-the-war, because he knew it would be quiet like the settling of ash always is. The kind of quiet that falls, for a moment, after a Christmas bauble shutters, as if everyone is too shocked at the cruelty of it to make a sound.

“I know that you must have loved me,” Draco tells him, a frown between his eyebrows like he’s adding or subtracting in his head. “You stink of having felt something strong towards me.”

Harry doesn’t tell him about the hate, because it’s the one thing he hasn’t minded Draco forgetting.

*

The third time he went to Malfoy Manor, he brought shopping bags stuffed with food and didn’t bother to knock. Hermione had told him it was strange, a copy of The Lorax in her lap. Earlier, she’d asked him if he could think of anything sadder than a world without trees, and he looked away so she wouldn’t see his face, the yes all over it.

“I mean, it’s— it’s Malfoy,” she’d said, but Harry figured that if they were both lonely and crazy, him and Draco, why not be lonely and crazy together for a few days? There were stranger things in the world, surely – souls split into seven, someone losing first an ear and then a brother, a snowy owl killed even though the clouds should have hidden the white of its feathers.

Inside, he called out, but he didn’t have any hopes Draco would respond. He wasn’t unlike a ghost in that way – appearing when and where he wanted, ignoring you when you called but there when you didn’t expect him. Harry made tea, black and too much sugar, because he didn’t know what Draco liked, but tried to guess what he needed, and then he fried some eggs and dropped them on toast. He smiled at that, thinking how it would be like eating small suns.

As he climbed upstairs, he listened to every other step creak, and wondered if they’d have been spelled to silence, had the house elves been here. He went down the hall kicking the doors open, a tray in one hand and two plates balanced in the other, and when he found Draco in a room he hadn’t seen before, he almost dropped it all.

Draco was wearing a green, woollen coat, asleep in front of a dead fireplace, and there was smeared makeup all over his face, pink, indigo and teal blue. Harry set the plates down on the lone table left in the room that had scratches in the wood as if someone’d been tortured here – for all he knew, someone had been – and crouched over Draco, remembering that painting called The Nightmare that he’d seen in a library book once, back when he still lived with the Dursleys, only Draco was curled up like a premature foetus and not sprawled out, and Harry was not a demon but what he grew into in spite of having known one.

Draco’s eyes were rubbed red, the makeup smeared everywhere, one indigo tear dried on his cheek like he was Pierrot. Cosmetics were scattered around him, and he looked like a child that had grown tired and fell asleep amidst toys, no mother there to kiss his cheek and pull a blanket up to his shoulders, no father to carry him to bed.

Harry sat down next to him, spelled the food warm, and kept his wand pointed at the door just in case.

*

The war broke them in strange ways. Sometimes, Harry would be careful to not step on grass, and other times he’d want to destroy everything in sight, tearing those flowers Hermione had carefully planted out the ground and later staring at the wreckage of it as if it hadn’t been caused by his own hands.

Living with Draco was all about repair, even though something broke every day. Draco would throw china at Harry every morning, yelling, why are you still here, and Harry would break eggs and throw them away if they had blood spots, because he didn’t like the remainder that they could have had the potential to hatch, once. Draco would comb his hair but stay in his pyjamas, or wear button-up shirts but leave his hair messy, and he’d alternate between covering the Dark Mark on his forearm up with Narcissa’s eyeshadow, and tracing the edges of it with a knife and rolling up his sleeve, as if he relished the reminder it made for and was scared it would disappear.

“The one time she kissed me before the war, she did it right here,” he told Harry, tapping the skull.

“Back then, it was already the war,” Harry replied, because there had been no peace when Draco was forced into the Dark Mark.

“What do you want from me, anyway?” Draco would whine, complaining about the tea, complaining about the bread, complaining about everything. “Why are you here, Harry?”

All angry, but resigned, as if they’d grown out of last names.

Harry would visit Hermione, who wasn’t ready to move in with Ron just yet (“I don’t bloody get the two of you! Like keeping apart and lonely and sad will do you any good!” Ron had yelled at them once, a jar overturned on the Grimmauld Place table and jam trickling out of it), and every time a song would be playing, Joan Baez or Edith Piaf, something so happy that it always seemed sad. It made Harry think of how Malfoy Manor was quiet like coffins, how every sound there seemed like a sin one should apologize for. How, sometimes, Draco would yell nonsense, as if all he wanted was to hear someone scream.

After the war, Hermione worked at restoring her parents’ memory, and it worked out in the end, but she said it wasn’t the same, that there were things missing, that sometimes her mother would see a photograph and ask her who’d taken it, even though it had been her.

“They’re never relaxed when I visit, you know.”

So she wouldn’t visit, not often, anyway, only baked cakes to take home and then fed them to Harry and Ron whenever they went stale, whenever it was already too late.

“Can I borrow this?” Harry asked her once, holding up a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He thought Draco would like it, but Draco only yelled about how his mother would have hated Muggle things in the house and plucked the pages from the spine one by one, like cleaning a dead bird off feathers before dinner. Harry spent the rest of the afternoon lining the pages up in the correct order to fix the spine with a spell.

Later, Draco came to him, the fingers of one hand bending those of the other back, eyes on his socked feet.

“I’m sorry,” he said, sounding five years younger, only five years before, he’d never have apologized for anything. “I didn’t mean to.”

He sat down on the floor next to Harry, because they were in one of the rooms with no furniture left, and the sky outside seemed too heavy for it not to rain, but, stubbornly, there was no sound.

“I miss Swan Lake,” Draco said, putting his head on Harry’s shoulder, careful, like Harry was a house made of cards and couldn’t take it.

“Swan Lake? Isn’t that Muggle?”

“Some things are both, or neither, and sometimes it doesn’t matter, anyway,” Draco said. Draco Malfoy saying that, of all people! Harry wasn’t sure when, but, at some point, he’d realized that the green coat he’d slept in the other day had been Narcissa’s, and that Draco had never been loyal to Voldemort, only to the only family he’d ever known, cold as it’d been.

“I want the piano back,” he added, sad like a boy that had missed the first star on Christmas Eve. “I’d kill for it.”

Later, Harry couldn’t remember if he’d said ‘the piano’ or ‘her.’

*

He only had her for a year, but sometimes Harry could swear he remembers Lily’s fingers brushing through the first tufts of his hair.

There’s no alcohol in the hostel, only every kind of tea under the sun and no coffee – it’s a matter of national pride, the owner told him with a smile while showing him into his room, and Harry bit his tongue and didn’t say anything about colonialism – all the shops too faraway to bother on stormy weather.

“So you don’t remember Lucius,” Harry says, and thinks of how, once, Draco found old tomatoes with wrinkled skin in a cupboard, and threw them at his father’s portrait one by one, yelling that it was all his fault, and how he cried later, trying to wipe the gooey seeds off with his school shirt.

“Who’s Lucius?” Draco says, and Harry laughs quietly at how he drank, Hermione read, and Draco forgot.

“Someone you wouldn’t like, if you had the choice,” Harry tells Draco, and when Draco smiles at him, it’s like those fried eggs, all warm yellow, all sun.

*

Once, Harry woke up to Draco standing over his bed – a makeshift one, a few pillows and blankets thrown together on the kitchen floor, because there hadn’t been many beds left in the house, and, after the war, Harry could never spell something out of nothing – hands pressed over his ears and eyes wide like they must have been when they had reflected someone tortured. Harry took a moment to imagine that – someone bent on the tip of Voldemort’s wand like an exorcism gone wrong, the image held in Draco’s pupil, this coward of cowards having to watch, forced into being brave.

“I can’t stand it, Harry,” Draco said, pressing the hands harder over his ears. “I can’t stand the quiet anymore.”

As if quiet, like sound, was something one could shield their ears against.

“I just can’t stand it,” Draco choked out, the sound broken like plates after a fight, and Harry sat up and pulled him down, until Draco’s head was in Harry’s lap, and his body was curled like half a walnut inside a shell. Harry folded the blanket over his body and started singing the only thing he could remember, a song from primary school, twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are. He knew he sounded terrible, off-key and stilted, but Draco clutched his sleeve and closed his eyes, calm. It reminded Harry of how mice would sleep in cages, piled up one on top of the other, all in one corner, bodies pressed together for warmth, only Draco was alone, just one cold mouse.

“I hope there is Heaven out there,” Draco mumbled into Harry’s knee when Harry finished. “She was pregnant once, when I was small, only two months, and then the baby died. If there’s Heaven, she has the baby there to hold and love.”

Draco didn’t tell him about how he found Narcissa bleeding on the bathroom floor one winter holiday, but he didn’t have to – Harry knew that otherwise, he never would have learned about the baby, that Narcissa never would have said.

The next day, Draco still asleep and sunlight on his eyelashes, turning him to snow, Harry asked Hermione for an address – she found it in some Ministry papers for him, putting a finger to her lips and shaking her head – and walked to Pansy Parkinson’s flat. When he knocked, he had to wait three minutes for her to open the door, and when she did, a stained bathrobe was sliding off her shoulder, revealing a purple bra strap.

“Potter the Savior!” she exclaimed, and pretended to bow before inviting him inside. She shoved a pile of wrinkled clothes off a kitchen chair and told him to sit while she made coffee, black, no sugar. She sat down opposite to him and showed him her hands, palms up, as if there was something to see scratched into the skin there. “You have fifteen minutes. After, I need to get ready for work.”

“What do you do?” Harry asked, careful to sound interested and polite, and Pansy laughed at him like he was a small boy trying to trick her into turning around so he could steal a cookie off a plate.

“I work in a seedy bar that opens at noon,” she told him, pulling her hair – grown long now – into a ponytail. “They wouldn’t want me anywhere else.”

“I see,” Harry said, and wrapped his hands around the mug for warmth. “That’s not how we wanted it, you know.”

“It is what it is,” Pansy said, wrinkling his nose. “You don’t have to work, do you?”

After the war, Harry tried many things – gardening, coffee-making, Quidditch, newspaper articles, first aid in St Mungo’s – but everything felt pointless and empty, like being stuck in a snow globe and gawked at.

“I’m here about Draco,” Harry said, and Pansy licked coffee of her lip, watching him with hooded eyes.

“Of course,” she said, indifferent. “How is he?”

“He misses his mother, and his piano, and Swan Lake.”

“Ah,” Pansy sighed, reaching for a pack of cigarettes and shaking one out of it. She flicked her fingers instead of searching for a lighter, and smiled at him the way she used to at school, all malice. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that the smile was all pretend. “It was Narcissa’s piano, actually. She taught him how to play before he went to Hogwarts.”

Harry remembered how, years before, he’d been surprised to learn that wizards had pianos, too.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter, Draco had said.

“I think it was the physical contact he wanted most, at least at first,” Pansy said, blowing out rings of smoke and smirking when Harry coughed. “I visited once, and saw her grab his hands and direct his fingers to the keys. He looked happy enough to piss himself.”

She told him about it, Clair de Lune and Draco’s long fingers, Chopin’s nocturns and Narcissa, who couldn’t smile, smiling.

“Once, he told me that maybe the person who first came up with the idea of a piano thought of it because they’d heard glass break and thought it a lovely sound.”

“He never – he didn’t boast about it, at school.”

“Lucius didn’t like it, that’s why,” Pansy explained, choking on too much smoke. “He almost broke his fingers, once.”

“Christ,” Harry said, something he hadn’t heard in years. Pansy glanced at the old clock hang up crooked on the wall.

“Want some more coffee, or are you going?”

“Do you have whisky?”

She threw her head back and laughed.

*

Harry makes Draco’s tea every morning, every noon, and every afternoon, and sometimes Draco lets him join him for Scrabble.

The rule is that only happy words are allowed.

Draco lines up the letters of the word ‘good’ on the board, and Harry pretends not to notice how he could take his own letters and add a ‘bye’ to it.

“Soon, I have to go and try to find her,” Draco tells him, and looks sadder than ever, as if his soul hasn’t forgotten what his mind has. “I miss music, don’t you?”

“There’s a piano in the other room,” Harry tells him, and when Draco frowns at him, Harry wonders if that’s why he never goes there.

Harry knows that Draco hasn’t forgotten how to play.

“You’re so kind,” Draco tells him out of nowhere, and when they go out, they race each other for the cliffside, laughing louder than the wind, only when Draco is almost to the edge, for a moment it seems like he’s not going to stop.

*

Sometimes, Harry couldn’t stand touch, and when Draco curled into him one night, he remembered more than ever that he was scrawny and pale, that Aunt Petunia had always avoided touching him save for aggressive squeezes of fingers on his shoulders, that after Voldemort killed his parents, no one hugged Harry for ten years.

Touch, for him, was not unlike an earthquake, rare, unexpected, upturning everything and breaks to mend later, and he suspected it must have been similar for Draco, but Draco held on to him anyway.

“Hey,” Harry said when something wet dripped down Draco’s nose and to Harry’s neck. “Hey.”

“Shut up,” Draco whispered. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

“Will you play something for me?”

“There’s no piano.”

“We could get a new one.”

“I don’t want a new one,” Draco whined, and burrowed into him like an animal digging a hole in the ground, for warmth.

“Please.”

Draco sighed.

“I’ll play for you one day, but I need time,” he said, shaking like a fever.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Harry pressed his mouth to Draco’s temple, not in a kiss, just for the dry touch of it, and Draco shivered like his skin was painful and he had to crawl out of it.

“What would I be like if I didn’t have a father?” he said, eyes wide open. “What would I be like if I wasn’t bad?”

“You’re not bad,” Harry said, and Draco laughed, a scary sound. “You’re not bad at all.”

All they were was the aftermath of bad, the scraps of meat left clinging to the bones of the world.

Later, at night, they hit pots with cutlery to keep the quiet away, but they both knew that it would never tire, that it would always come back like a fox to a hen house.

“I think it will kill me,” Draco said, arms wrapped around his middle, and Harry wished for Voldemort to come back to life so he could kill him all over again.

*

“The woman I’m looking for,” Draco says after he first kisses Harry, only it’s not the first time at all, not really. “Who is she?”

“Your mother,” Harry tells him, merciless, because why did Draco have to forget him?

Draco frowns, like a tricked child.

“I wouldn’t forget my own mother. Why would anyone forget their own mother—”

“It was a spell,” Harry explains. “But I don’t know why, either.”

It’s a lie, but he wants it to be the truth, and that has to count for something.

*

Draco kept getting worse no matter how much Harry loved him – and when had that happened, anyway? – walking around with eyes wide open, banging the cupboard doors, filling the bathtub up and crawling inside, clothes on, head under the surface.

After a few weeks, Harry started an investigation of a sort, tracking sellers and stealing paperwork, smiling at middle-aged women and, sometimes, at middle-aged men, too.

“I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, get the fuck out of our house! She wouldn’t want you here, do you hear me?!” Draco yelled at him once, through tears. “I’ve let her down, letting you in here, I know I have,” he choked out through broken sobs, and Harry clung to him through the protests and the stinging hexes, clung to him like Draco was a horcrux.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he promised.

“When you sleep, it’s so quiet,” Draco mumbled, his eyes all milk again, so Harry stopped sleeping.

“When I sleep, it’s so quiet,” Draco whispered, so Harry lost his mind.

He borrowed records from Hermione and the music was always playing, except for when the record would have to be changed. In those moments, Draco looked like someone who’s just seen a boggart, and clung to Harry’s shirt like he wanted to rip it to shreds.

“It’s still quiet, in my dreams,” Draco said, and Harry told him he should start playing again. Draco threw their dinner at him, plate and cutlery and all, and then a kitchen chair, too, for good measure, only he wasn’t strong enough to have it reach Harry. “Sometimes it’s so quiet that I hear Him whisper how I’m a good boy, such a good boy, the Dark Lord is so proud of me.”

He would suck on the Dark Mark spelled into his skin as if he wanted to chew it away.

Sometimes, he would rub his fingertips into the tired skin under Harry’s eyes, or fold his glasses on the floor when Harry fell asleep wearing them, or try to make some fancy French dinner, escargots, white wine, and too much sauce. He would kiss Harry like he was trying to leave a piece of himself under his tongue like a gift, and Harry would count Draco’s ribs as he breathed, asleep, thinking everything would be alright.

He left flowers on Narcissa’s grave and didn’t cry. They were roses, and Harry had picked them himself.

“Soon,” he promised into Draco’s hair, but Draco, asleep and stuck inside some awful quiet, never heard him.

*

Draco loves the ocean – the sight, the taste, the sound – but he’s strangely wary of it, hardly ever going down to the rocky beach, as if he’s scared the water will take him the first chance it gets. On the day the lie ends, Harry convinces him to climb down there, and Draco shoves his hands deep into his pockets, staring at the waves.

“I want to remember my mother,” Draco says, and oh, Harry will kill him.

*

Once, when they were hidden in the night like worms inside a rotten fruit, Draco whispered to him about fermatas.

“Bird’s eye,” he explained. “It’s a symbol that signifies that you should hold the note for longer than normal.”

Harry smiled at him, even though in the dark Draco wouldn’t see, and kissed his pianist’s fingers, one by one.

“The note or the pause, anyway.”

*

“Surely there’s a way,” Draco says, confused, when Harry grabs him by the lapels of his coat and shakes him.

“You fucking prick!” Harry yells, too loud for the ocean to swallow the sound. “Do you know who fucked up your memory, huh?!

Draco frowns at him, confused, and Harry remembers kissing that frown.

“Who?” he asks, all innocence, and Harry will strangle him, will bleed him out like an animal after slaughter, will—

And Harry loves him, and hates him, and loves him, and hates him, and how dare Draco break his heart after the war stomped all over it?

“You did! You did it yourself, you fucking idiot!” Harry yells, and Draco catches his tears with his fingers as if he can’t bear to see them fall to the rocks, so close to the ocean, so close to not being lonely.

*

The day Harry finally tracked the piano down and bought it for half his parents’ money, Draco wasn’t there when he got back to Malfoy Manor. Instead, there was a piece of paper torn off a notebook and too many blots of red ink.

Gryffindor red, just for Harry, like a fucking farewell gift.

I won’t be here by the time you get back from wherever it is you went. I’m going away to try and obliviate all the bad away. Isn’t it nice, Harry? Aren’t you proud that I’m trying to be good?

Stay loud.

Love,

-D.

Harry fell apart, and all the whisky bottles in the world couldn’t save him, so, when winter ended, he stopped drinking and searched Malfoy Manor for maps.

*

Draco, one year ago, toying with obliviate the way others toy with razorblades and pill bottles, wanting to forget his father, wanting to forget the death of his mother, wanting to forget himself.

Wanting to forget the bad.

Wanting to forget the quiet.

Harry almost set the piano on fire, because even kids knew that obliviate couldn’t be reversed. He would watch the flames and then burn himself, his eyes not meant to hold anything else other than the blaze of it ever again.

He broke every plate in the house, and as they shattered, they made no sound.

He cried into Hermione’s shirt and into Ron’s sleeve, and he tore petals off roses – forgot me, forgot me not, forgot me, forgot me not – then got frustrated and ripped them to shreds.

What he doesn’t understand, Draco begging to help him remember his mother, his dead mother, is why Draco had to forget him too.

“So I wouldn’t come back,” Draco tells him, even though he shouldn’t know any better than Harry. “But I want to come back.”

“Even if it hurts?”

“Even if it kills me,” Draco says, all business, and Harry smiles, cruel.

“Well, too fucking late.”

*

When they get back, Hermione says it was multiple memory charms, not obliviate itself.

“Coward till the end,” she sighs. “Even in that.”

Harry thinks that it’s the most cruel thing in the world, flowers growing after the war, sound coming back after death, and yet he wants it, more than anything. He thinks of Draco, who forgot himself in order to be loud and good, but stayed quiet, fiddling with Scrabble tiles and leaving bread crusts uneaten, all aristocrat.

“Why do you think it’ll go any different now?” Hermione asks him, and Harry wonders when she grew out of hope.

“Now there’s the piano,” Harry tells her. “Now he’ll play me Clair de Lune, whether he wants to or not.”

“He won’t be quite the same,” she warns, and he doesn’t tell her that it doesn’t matter, because she already knows. What they all had to do after the war was to forget about counting the dead. What they have to do, over and over again, is take things minute by minute, one at a time, frying eggs without thinking of the birds that will never be.

They get to work, and days later, after Draco sleeps it off, Harry places his hands on the piano keys for him.

“I went bankrupt over this, so make sure to play well,” he tells him, and thinks that life is nothing like kintsugi. When something breaks, you can’t always glue it back together filling the cracks with gold.

Sometimes, you can’t even fill them with sound.

Draco smiles, his mother’s coat thrown across his shoulders. He presses one piano key and holds it, even though there’s no fermata in the score, a forever of sound, and Harry decides that they’ll just have to survive it somehow, once it ends.