Chapter Text
I. What Neither of Them Explained
Nobody at Hogwarts noticed anything different about Harry Potter and Dracona Malfoy over the summer between second and third year, mostly because there wasn't anything to notice yet. They still fought. They fought loudly, publicly, with real venom some days — Dracona had not, in fact, let the House Cup go, and brought it up twice more before September had even properly started, on principle, because some injustices deserved to be aired regularly rather than quietly buried.
But something had shifted underneath it all the same, the way something shifts underground long before it shows on the surface. Neither of them mentioned the cottage. Neither of them mentioned the little boy pulling up fistfuls of grass, or the way older Harry's voice had gone soft admitting he'd once found her unbearably cute mid-tantrum. It sat between them instead — unspoken, patient, waiting for either of them to be brave enough to bring it up first.
Neither of them were. Not yet.
Third year opened with a mass murderer loose in Britain, Dementors patrolling the train, and Dracona going out of her way, within the first week, to inform the entire Great Hall that Harry Potter had fainted like a delicate little girl at the mere idea of one.
"Didn't even need it near him," she said, loud, perfectly timed for maximum carrying distance. "Extraordinary, really, that they let someone that fragile anywhere near a war."
Harry didn't rise to it, which annoyed her more than if he had. He'd caught her eye at the end of the sentence, and instead of her usual satisfaction at landing a hit, something had passed between them that felt closer to habit than malice — a fight kept up out of momentum, the way you keep walking a path through a garden long after the destination's stopped mattering.
II. Buckbeak
The lesson went wrong the way lessons involving Dracona and dangerous creatures tended to go wrong that year, which was: entirely her own fault, and she would never once admit it.
Hagrid had been perfectly clear about the bowing. Dracona hadn't bowed so much as sneered in the general direction of the Hippogriff's beak, muttering something about overgrown chickens loud enough for the whole class to hear, and Buckbeak had taken exception to that with a speed nobody quite anticipated, talon catching her arm before Hagrid could get between them.
It wasn't serious. Madam Pomfrey said so several times, with the specific weary patience of someone who'd already said it to a room of hysterical Slytherins twice that hour. A deep scratch, cleaned and mended inside ten minutes, no lasting damage beyond a thin white line that would probably never fully fade. But Dracona had screamed like she was dying, and her father had sent three furious letters to the school within a day, and by the time Harry came to visit the hospital wing — he told himself, later, that he genuinely didn't know why he'd come — half the castle believed she'd nearly lost the arm entirely.
She was sitting up in bed, bandaged, looking considerably less dramatic than the rumors suggested and considerably more irritated about it.
"Come to gloat, Potter?"
"Came to see if you'd actually died. Bit anticlimactic." He sat on the end of the next bed over without being invited, which she noted and didn't comment on. "Everyone's saying you lost the whole arm."
"I did not lose the whole arm."
"I can see that."
"My father's going to have that creature destroyed."
"It scratched you because you insulted it to its face."
"It's an animal, Potter, it doesn't understand insults."
"Clearly it understood something." He was almost smiling, which annoyed her more than the actual injury had. "You're fine. You're being ridiculous, and you're fine."
"I am not being ridiculous, I was attacked —"
"You were scratched." He said it plainly, no cruelty in it, the way she'd once told him he wasn't the kind of idiot who'd open the Chamber. "You'll live. Probably keep the scar, if you're lucky. Very dramatic. Very you."
Something about the word you — easy, almost fond, entirely unlike anything either of them usually let past their own teeth — made the argument stall out before it could properly start. She looked at him a long moment, arm throbbing dully under the bandage, and found she didn't have anything sharp left to say.
"Why did you actually come here," she said instead, quieter.
Harry didn't answer right away. He was looking at the thin white line already forming along her forearm, and something about it snagged at the memory of a small boy in the grass pulling up fistfuls of it, of a hand resting flat over a belly that didn't exist yet, of a version of himself who'd apparently spent years being unbearably fond of exactly this — her, furious, bandaged, entirely unrepentant.
"Don't know," he admitted. "Seemed like the thing to do."
Neither of them mentioned the glass. But her hand drifted, without her quite noticing, to the collar of her robes, where the chain sat hidden under the hospital gown, and his eyes followed the movement, and something passed between them that neither of them had words for yet.
III. What the Bandage Started
She took it out that night, back in her own dormitory, curtains drawn, wand-light low. It had been quiet since the corridor in October — cold and dark every time she'd checked, as if it had said what it needed to say and was waiting for something else before it said any more.
The sand moved before she'd even properly closed her fist around it.
She should have called for someone. She should have at least put it down. Instead she sat there and let the light build behind her eyelids, warm and then hot and then blinding, because some part of her — the part that had been carrying this thing around for two years without fully understanding why — recognized the pull this time, and didn't fight it.
It dragged Harry out of Gryffindor tower without either of them planning it, without either of them understanding how, until he was standing in the middle of the Slytherin girls' dormitory at eleven at night with no memory of the walk there, and Dracona was on her feet in front of him, glass blazing white-gold between her fingers, both of them too startled to be embarrassed yet.
"You did this."
"I didn't do anything, it just —"
She reached for him before she finished the sentence. It happened too fast for either of them to name it properly — her hand closing hard around his wrist, fingers digging in, the same thing she'd done in the greenhouse a year ago and every time since, and Harry had never once asked her why, because some part of him had already worked it out without being told. She was frightened. Every single time, underneath the ice, underneath the sharp, controlled voice she used for everything, she was frightened of the falling, of the not-knowing where they'd land, and she never once said so out loud, and he never once made her.
He let her hold on. He always did.
The room went white before she could finish her sentence.
IV. Before Any of It
The room that resolved around them wasn't the cottage. It was smaller — a cramped little kitchen with a single narrow window, grey London light coming through it, a table too small for the space around it, two chairs that didn't quite match. No woodpile. No garden. No small boy pulling up fistfuls of grass. Dracona's grip on Harry's wrist didn't loosen even once the world stopped moving.
Older Harry looked barely out of Hogwarts himself, early twenties at most, hair exactly as hopeless as it had always been, a set of plain Auror trainee robes slung over the back of his chair rather than anything with a proper badge on it. He was halfway through buttering a piece of toast when older Dracona came in from the next room, a Healer's trainee pin on her collar instead of the full lime green, hair scraped back in a knot that looked far less practiced than the one Harry half remembered from somewhere he couldn't place. She stood in the doorway a second too long, both hands wrapped around something small and white, before she said anything at all.
"Harry." Her voice came out steadier than her hands did. "I'm pregnant."
He set the toast down very carefully, like the table might not be trustworthy anymore. "You're — sorry, what?"
"I'm pregnant." She said it again, like saying it twice would make it feel real instead of just true. "I took the test twice. It's not wrong."
"Say something," she added, when he didn't. "You've gone very quiet, which is unlike you."
"I'm processing."
"Process faster, you're frightening me."
"I'm not — I'm not frightened, I just—" Older Harry dragged a hand back through his hair, the exact same helpless gesture the younger Harry standing invisible by the door recognized as his own, and looked at her like the floor had tilted under him in the best possible way. "We're having a baby."
"We're having a baby," she confirmed, and her voice cracked slightly on the second word, and then she was half laughing, half something closer to tears, and he was up out of his chair so fast it nearly went over, pulling her into him, both arms wrapped tight around her like he could hold the whole moment still by force alone.
They stood there a long while, longer than any of the moments before it — long enough that the younger versions of them, watching, started to understand this wasn't a flash they were meant to glimpse and move past. It was something meant to be sat in.
"You're sure. The spell's sure."
"The spell doesn't lie, Potter, it's not one of your Quidditch commentators."
"I just want this to be real."
"It's real." She pulled back only far enough to frame his face with both hands, thumbs brushing his jaw with a gentleness that looked entirely new, entirely unpracticed. "It's real, and it's ours, and you're going to be an absolute mess about it for the next seven months, aren't you."
"Complete mess. I've already thought of forty names and none of them are right."
"Forty."
"I've had a very long two minutes."
She kissed him for that, unhurried, nothing habitual in it yet, still all new edges, and he kissed her back like he was trying to memorize it, one hand coming to rest over the hand she still had pressed flat against her own middle. When they finally broke apart, older Dracona laughed again, wetter this time, and pressed her forehead to his shoulder, and he held the back of her head like she might come apart if he let go.
"I'm scared," she admitted, muffled against his shirt, quieter than anything she'd said yet. "Is that stupid. To be this happy and this frightened at exactly the same time."
"It's not stupid." His voice had gone rough. "I think that's just what it is. Being happy about something big enough to lose."
"When did you get wise."
"I've had a very long two minutes," he said again, and she laughed properly this time, and the sound of it filled the small kitchen all the way to the corners.
The younger Dracona standing by the door had both hands pressed over her own mouth, and her grip on Harry's wrist had gone tight enough to leave a mark that would still be faintly there in the morning. She was shaking, he realized. Not from the fall this time. From something closer to grief, though nothing had actually been lost, and something closer to longing, though she wouldn't have called it that even to herself.
"She's scared in there," young Dracona said, barely a whisper. "Even when she's happy. Even when she's got — got him, got everything, she's still scared underneath it."
"Yeah," Harry said, watching his older self rock her gently side to side in the grey morning light, saying nothing at all now, just holding on. He understood, with a certainty that startled him, exactly what she meant, exactly why she'd said it, and exactly what it cost her to admit it out loud even to a room only the two of them could hear. "I don't think that ever really goes away. Being scared and happy at the same time. I think you just learn to hold onto someone through it."
"That's a very grown-up thing to say for someone who's thirteen."
"Feels like I've had a very long two minutes as well," he said, and for once she didn't have a sharp answer waiting.
"That's not the cottage," she said instead, voice muffled behind her hands, quieter now, almost lost. "That's not the kitchen with the little boy. This is — this is before all of it. Before any of it existed at all."
"Feels like it," Harry said, his own voice gone strange and thick.
"It keeps getting earlier. First the full house, then James and the second one on the way, and now — now there's nothing yet. Not even him."
"Maybe that's the order it means to show us," Harry said slowly, still watching the two of them at the table, older Harry's forehead resting against hers, both of them just breathing together in the grey morning light. "Working backward. Getting closer every time we see it."
"Closer to what."
"I don't know." He looked at her properly then, for the first time since the light had swallowed them, and found her still shaking, still holding his wrist like it was the only solid thing left in the world. "Maybe closer to now."
Dracona didn't have an answer for that. The light took them before she needed one, swallowing the small kitchen and the small table and the sound of that laugh, and they hit the dormitory floor hard, both gasping, glass gone dark between them, the whole castle silent and unaware that anything at all had happened.
V. What She Wouldn't Let Herself Feel
For a long moment, neither of them moved. Dracona still hadn't let go of his wrist.
Then, all at once, she did — shoved his hand away like it had burned her, and scrambled backward across the stone floor, putting distance between them that hadn't been there a second ago.
"Get out."
Harry blinked. "What?"
"Get out, Harry, you shouldn't even be down here, if a prefect finds you —"
"You're shaking."
"I'm cold. It's a cold floor." She was on her feet now, arms wrapped tight around herself, chin lifted in the exact rigid line he'd once, apparently, found unbearably cute, except there was nothing soft about it tonight. Nothing at all. "This is exactly the problem. This — whatever this is, whatever it keeps showing us, it doesn't mean anything, and I am sick of you standing there looking at me like it does."
"I didn't say anything."
"You didn't have to. You've got that face on. That stupid, soft, understanding face, like you know something about me I haven't told you, and I hate it, I actually hate it, so stop."
"Dracona —"
"Don't say my name like that." Her voice cracked, and she hated that it cracked, and pushed harder because of it. "You don't get to look at me like you know what I'm thinking. You don't know anything. We're thirteen. We hate each other. That's the entire arrangement, that's how this is supposed to work, and I would like it very much if you stopped ruining it by being kind to me every time something inconvenient happens."
"I'm not trying to ruin anything."
"Well, you are. You keep doing it. You did it in the hospital wing, you did it just now, standing there like you understood something about being scared and happy at the same time, like you had any right to say that to me —" She stopped herself, too late, hearing what she'd just admitted, and her face went white and then furious in quick succession. "Get out, Potter."
"You're doing it again," Harry said, quiet, not moving.
"Doing what."
"Picking a fight so you don't have to feel whatever that was." He said it gently, which made it worse, which she could tell made it worse by the way her jaw tightened. "You do it every time. Something gets too real and you find something to be angry about instead, because angry's easier than whatever the other thing is."
"You don't know me."
"I think I might, a bit. I think that's rather the point of all this." He held her gaze, steady, not backing down the way she clearly wanted him to. "I'm not trying to ruin anything. I just don't think you have to be furious with me right now. I think you're allowed to just be scared instead, and I'd stay, if you wanted me to."
Something in her face nearly broke at that, a single unguarded second before the ice slammed back down, faster and colder than before, like she'd caught herself right at the edge of something and yanked herself back with both hands.
"I don't want you to stay," she said, very quietly, very evenly, and it cost her more to say than either of them let on. "Get out."
He went. He didn't argue, didn't push, just picked himself up off the floor and left without another word, because he'd learned, somewhere in the last two years without quite noticing when, that some doors only opened if you stopped knocking on them.
Dracona sat alone on the dormitory floor a long while after, the glass gone dark and cold in her open palm, and did not cry, because crying would have meant admitting there was something worth crying about, and she was not, under any circumstances, prepared to do that. Not tonight. Maybe not for a long time yet.
I think you're allowed to just be scared instead, he'd said. She turned that over in the dark long after the wand-light had burned to nothing, hating him a little for being right, and hating herself more for how badly, in that moment, she'd wanted to say yes.