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Harry hadn't slept more than forty minutes at a stretch in nine days.
He knew it was nine because he'd been marking them on the back of an envelope he kept on the kitchen counter, a single tally line each morning when the light through the window shifted from black to the particular shade of grey that meant it was raining again, which it had been, continuously, for all nine of those days.
The envelope had belonged to a letter from Gringotts about vault maintenance fees. He couldn't remember opening it. He couldn't remember most of the past week in anything sharper than a series of impressions: warm weight against his chest, the thin reedy sound of a cry starting in the dark, the click of the kettle at hours that shouldn't exist.
He was standing at the changing table at quarter past four in the morning, performing his sixth Scourgify of the night on a muslin cloth that had been clean twenty minutes ago.
The dark-haired baby, the loud one, the one who had come out screaming at 7:42 a.m. and hadn't meaningfully stopped since, was on his back on the padded mat, red-faced and furious, his legs pumping against nothing.
He'd soaked through his sleepsuit and the blanket beneath it and somehow got sick on the shoulder of Harry's t-shirt, which was already stained from an earlier incident that Harry had been too tired to deal with properly.
Harry vanished the mess, Summoned a fresh sleepsuit from the drawer, and began the process of getting a nine-day-old baby into it, which was roughly equivalent to dressing a very angry, very slippery eel. The baby's fists windmilled. His face scrunched tighter and he let out a howl that rang off the nursery walls and would, in approximately four seconds, wake his sister.
Four seconds later, the smallest baby's eyes opened. She didn't cry, not at first, just lay in the cot and stared at the ceiling with an expression of profound inconvenience, her mouth puckering into a shape that was entirely Draco's, the one he made when someone used the wrong fork at dinner or suggested that his hair looked fine without product.
Then she started.
The quiet one slept through it. He always slept through it. He'd sleep through a Quidditch match held directly above his head, and Harry loved him for it with a desperation that bordered on worship.
Harry picked her up with one arm, the freshly dressed baby tucked against his other shoulder, and walked them both around the nursery. The floorboards creaked under his bare feet. He'd done this walk eight times tonight. He knew the route by the creaks: three steps to the window, turn, five steps to the rocking chair Draco refused to use, turn, four steps to the door, turn again. He could do it with his eyes shut. He frequently did.
She quieted first, her cheek pressed hot against Harry's collarbone, her breathing stuttering into the shallow rhythm that meant she was dropping off. The loud one took longer. He always took longer.
Harry shifted him higher on his shoulder and pressed his mouth against the baby's skull, which was warm and smelled like milk and that particular newborn scent that sat somewhere between biscuit and clean cotton, and he made the low rumbling sound in his chest that Pansy had told him was an alpha thing, a settling frequency that worked on pups. He'd felt stupid about it the first time. Now he did it without thinking.
The baby's fists unclenched. His body went heavy.
Harry stood in the middle of the nursery, holding two sleeping babies, and tried to remember what day it was.
When he finally got them both down and crept back to the bedroom, Draco was awake. He was propped against the headboard with the nursing pillow strapped around his waist and the quiet one latched and feeding, and he looked up when Harry came through the door with eyes that were bloodshot and bruised underneath, sunk into a face that had gone angular in a way Harry didn't like, the cheekbones too defined, the jaw too sharp.
"How many times," Draco asked.
"Six." Harry leaned against the doorframe. His shoulder blades ached and his eyes burned and there was a damp patch on his collar that he'd stopped caring about around the fourth waking.
Draco's brow lifted. "Scourgify?"
"Also six."
Draco's mouth twitched. He adjusted the baby's position, thumb sweeping the small shoulder, and winced when the latch resettled. His free hand reached for the glass of water on the bedside table and his wrist shook when he lifted it. He'd lost weight. Harry had been counting that too, how Draco's collarbones had sharpened and his rings had started to slide and the t-shirts he stole from Harry's side of the wardrobe hung looser across his chest each day.
"Come sit," Draco murmured, and Harry crossed the room on legs that felt detached from the rest of him and sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand on Draco's ankle through the blanket and just breathed.
They stayed like that. The quiet one nursed steadily, his grey eyes half-open, his hand resting against Draco's chest with the fingers splayed in that starfish pattern newborns made, as if they were trying to hold as much of their mother as possible. Draco's head tipped back against the headboard and his eyes closed and he might have fallen asleep sitting up if the baby hadn't pulled off and let out a wet burp against the nursing pillow.
Draco lifted him to his shoulder. The motion was automatic now, one-handed, practised, his palm cupping the baby's skull while his other hand patted the small back in a rhythm Harry had watched him develop over nine days, a specific tempo that was faster than the books recommended and slower than Narcissa's and worked better than both.
"I've been thinking about names," Draco said into the quiet.
Harry turned his head. He'd been staring at the wall, which he realised only when he stopped, his vision swimming at the edges, the blur that came when exhaustion started to dissolve the line between awake and not.
"The list is on the counter," Draco continued. His chin rested on the baby's head. "I've gone through forty-seven options."
"I saw the list."
"You saw the first draft. I'm on the fourth." He shifted the baby to his other shoulder and the motion pulled the collar of his shirt aside, showing the bonding mark on his neck, the raised scar tissue that had gone silvery since the birth. "Scorpius. For this one."
Harry looked at the baby on Draco's shoulder. The quiet one. Long-limbed and watchful, grey-eyed, with that stillness about him that didn't belong to any nine-day-old baby Harry had ever seen.
"Scorpius," Harry repeated.
"It's a constellation. Malfoy naming tradition without being Abraxas, which Mother has campaigned for since the bonding." Draco's hand moved against the baby's back, slow circles. "Scorpius Hyperion."
"Scorpius Hyperion Potter-Malfoy."
"Obviously Potter-Malfoy." Draco's eyes were still closed. "I considered just Malfoy but I've decided to be generous."
Harry's thumb pressed into the bone of Draco's ankle. He could feel the tendons shifting under the skin, the faint knock of Draco's pulse. "It's good."
"It's perfect." Draco's voice had gone quieter. "I want it on the birth certificate by Friday."
Down the hall, the loud one started crying again.
They both went still. Draco's jaw tightened. Harry's hand was already leaving Draco's ankle, already pushing off the mattress, his body moving ahead of his brain because that was how the past nine days had worked, reaction before thought, his feet hitting the cold floorboards and carrying him down the hallway before he'd fully registered the sound.
The baby was on his back in the cot, face crumpled, fists shaking. Harry lifted him out and held him against his chest and performed another Scourgify on the muslin that had somehow already got damp again and walked the circuit. Window, chair, door. Window, chair, door. The baby screamed against his neck, hot breath and wet mouth and a fury that seemed impossible from a creature that weighed less than a bag of sugar.
Harry held him tighter. He pressed his nose into the baby's hair and breathed and made the low rumbling sound and the baby's cries hitched and stuttered and caught, like an engine misfiring, and then settled into a whimper, and then into silence.
Harry kept walking. Window, chair, door.
"Corvus," he said to the dark room.
The baby blinked up at him. Green eyes, dark hair, a mouth that curved down at the corners in a permanent scowl that was so precisely Harry's mother's mouth from the photographs in the album Hagrid had given him that it made his chest ache whenever he looked at it.
"Corvus," Harry said again, and the baby's hand found the collar of his t-shirt and gripped.
He carried him back to the bedroom. Draco was still upright, Scorpius asleep on his shoulder, his hand now resting on the open page of a book he clearly wasn't reading.
"Corvus," Harry told him.
Draco's eyes opened. He looked at Harry, then at the baby in Harry's arms, then back at Harry. "Where did you get that."
"I don't know." Harry sat on the bed. Corvus was still gripping his collar, his fingers white-knuckled around the fabric, his face pressed into Harry's chest. "It just came."
"You can't just name a child based on a feeling that came to you in the dark at half four in the morning, Harry."
"It's a constellation."
Draco's mouth opened and closed. His brow creased and Harry watched the argument build behind his eyes, the objections forming and then watched all of it drain away at once when Corvus made a small sound against Harry's chest, a sigh, content and finished, their baby who had decided where he was and found it acceptable.
"Corvus Altair," Draco said quietly.
Harry looked at him.
"If you're going to choose a name in the dark then I'm going to choose the middle name in the light. Altair. Another star." Draco's fingers found the edge of the blanket and adjusted it over Scorpius's legs, a precise gesture, exact. "Corvus Altair Potter-Malfoy. It's not terrible."
Harry's mouth pulled sideways. "High praise."
"Don't push it." Draco's gaze dropped to Corvus, who had curled his fist tighter into Harry's collar and tucked his face against Harry's sternum. "You look like you haven't slept in a month and I'm being kind because you're holding my son and he seems to like you."
The smallest one woke at six. Harry heard her first, the high rising note of it drifting down the hallway, and he extracted himself from the bed where he'd been lying on his side with Corvus in the crook of his arm and Draco asleep against his back with Scorpius between them.
He lifted the baby from the cot and she stared at him, grey eyes clear and focused, her mouth working in that puckered shape that meant she was hungry.
She was the smallest of the three. Blonde, fine-boned, her skull still soft at the fontanelle where Harry always put his lips, gently, feeling the pulse beneath the skin.
She had Draco's hair, color and Draco's hands, long fingers that wrapped around Harry's thumb with a grip that was firm and deliberate and not at all frantic, nothing like her brothers.
Harry carried her to the bedroom. Draco surfaced from sleep when Harry placed her against his chest, his hands coming up automatically, positioning her, shifting the shirt aside. His eyes didn't fully open.
"This little one," Draco mumbled, and his hands adjusted around her, settling her weight against his ribs.
Harry pulled the blanket higher over Draco's legs. "This little one."
"Lyra."
Harry's hand stilled on the blanket.
"Lyra," Draco said again. He was looking down at her now, his thumb tracing the curve of her ear, her jaw, the line of blonde fuzz at her temple. "The lyre. She's going to be underestimated. She's small and she's quiet and people will overlook her and she'll let them, because she'll have figured out before she can walk that being overlooked is a weapon."
Harry sat beside him. The mattress dipped and Draco leaned into the shift, his shoulder pressing against Harry's arm.
"Lyra Lily Narcissa," Draco added.
Harry's throat closed. His hand found Draco's knee under the blanket and pressed, hard, because he couldn't speak and Draco would understand the pressure better than words anyway.
"Your mother's going to cry," he managed after a moment. His voice came out wrecked.
"Which one," Draco murmured, and his mouth twitched, and Harry laughed once, short and wet, and pressed his forehead against Draco's temple.
Lyra nursed. Scorpius slept. Corvus had woken and was lying on his back on the mattress beside Harry's knee, staring at the ceiling with green eyes that matched Harry's, his mouth opening and closing around nothing, practising.
Three names. Scorpius Hyperion. Corvus Altair. Lyra Lily Narcissa. Stars woven through all of them because the Malfoys had always named their children after the sky, had always looked up, and Harry who had never had a family to inherit traditions from was glad, fiercely and quietly glad, to give his children this one.
Draco's head was on his shoulder. His breathing had gone deep and even and his hand had fallen away from Lyra, who was still latched but slowing, her eyes drifting shut, her jaw working in smaller and smaller movements.
Harry reached across and caught Draco's hand before it slid off the pillow, and held it, and felt the bones of it, the knuckles and the veins and the thin skin stretched over all of it, lighter than it should have been, worn down, and he held on tighter because that was all he knew how to do.
Fetch the crackers and perform the Scourgify and walk the room at four in the morning and hold on.
Lyra's mouth slipped free. She exhaled, a tiny sound, barely audible, and settled against Draco's chest.
Harry closed his eyes.
He was asleep in thirty seconds and he stayed that way for almost two hours, which was the longest stretch he'd managed in nine days, and when he woke up all three babies were crying at once and Draco was swearing at the ginger biscuit tin because the lid was stuck and Harry's wrist was numb from where Draco had been sleeping on it.