Keys

[graylor]

Title: Keys

Author: Graylor

Summary: Seers dream of the future: Draco keeps dreaming of someone else’s past.

Word Count: ~3,000

Warnings: Bad language, secondary character deaths, angst, addiction, very post-Hogwarts, not beta’d, capslock!Harry

Disclaimer: I don’t own Harry Potter or his world or associates and I’m making no money from this.

 

For rehsipus I hope you like this, my friend.

.

 

Keys

 

Chapter One:

 

Draco moved slowly, walking through the Manor’s silent halls. A heavy mist shrouded details, but the scarlet carpet led him unerringly forward.

 

What day is this? Who is here? At that thought, he heard crying. My child? It almost seemed as if... did he have a child? It was a child crying in the Manor, surely...

 

He stepped forward, the crimson stain filling his eyes. The walls shifted and merged—seamlessly, unquestionably. It was natural that the Manor became Hogwarts, the child was there where children should be, a river of blood flowing out the immense doors, washing up his legs...

 

His chest had been sliced in two, the blood was fire and—

 

“Draco!”

 

He lurched awake. For a moment he had no idea where he was—why was he not in his own bed at home?—or who this unkempt man in bed with him might be.

 

Then Harry was leaning close, tracing the line of his face. “Draco? You were having the nightmare again.”

 

Draco sat up and accepted Harry’s tight embrace. They did not speak of it. Life with Harry meant they did not speak of many things. There came a point when too much blood had been spilled for words to convey any meaning at all.

 

*

 

As always, the dream left Draco nervous the next day. He sent Scorpius an Owl, which his son, dutiful brat that he was, responded to promptly with only a limited amount of eye-rolling tone. Life on the continent, training as a wand-maker, seemed to suit the lout well. He had encountered no threats to his life, unless one counted the latest red-headed vixen who was trying to kill him with vases or sexual exhaustion, depending on her mood.

 

Draco was not one to think of himself as a Seer. Seers were frauds and fools. He just had his mother’s unfortunate tendency to dream important dreams whose full meanings were rarely clear until after the fact.

 

But I’m dreaming of things from the past... They’re not visions of the future. No reason to seek them, then.

 

I already know what happened.

 

Chapter Two:

 

Lucius’s long hand tore the veils of Dreamless Sleep and Draco was helpless to resist the beckons. In fact, swathed in the perfume of honeysuckle and wild roses, he couldn’t imagine why he should want to stay in this grey slumber.

 

Music seduced him as his father faded into the stones. His mother nodded before Time, in dress robes, swept her to the sea. Astoria, another lost mother, stared around herself, out of place and out of time. Too short her life at the Manor, too swift her death to linger as a spirit. Scorpius had never known her and he had not come to the Ball.

 

We the dead dance alone together, Draco mused as he neatly drew Ginevra Weasley from her brother’s arms. 

 

Had she been so young? She’d burned so bright, fought the curse long enough to bear three children and see then into Hogwarts, but in the end she had burned with blood or had her blood burned? She had gone, like Astoria, like Pansy, like even Millicent Bulstrode. Shells, burned from the inside out, skin like porcelain, hair like glass.

 

“The child is crying,” she whispered, and Draco heard, beneath the harmonies of the grave, the heartbroken sobs of the child.

 

What child? Draco had never cried like that, nor had Scorpius. What little ghost haunted his home and would not come to the Ball?

 

Without thinking, the Ball was gone, Ginevra’s cool weight gone... and he was walking along the red runner—The Manor’s halls are carpeted with blue—and then he walked into Hogwarts, where there was not supposed to be any carpet at all. 

 

Crying echoed faintly. Here was the bathroom where Harry had nearly murdered him: here was the Room of Requirement, where Harry had saved his life.

 

“Vince?” Draco forced himself to whisper, though Merlin himself would strike him down for thinking Vincent would ever cry like this. “Myrtle?” The crying seemed masculine to him, though he could not say why. Nor could he say why he might dream—I’m dreaming?—Myrtle would weep for him.

 

His feet took him into the Room. Amid the ashes—no ashes now, everything had been wiped away—there was a figure in a gray cloak. “Who are you?”

 

In answer, the figure help out a key, ugly and plain. A Muggle key. 

 

The person faded. 

 

Why did someone give him a Muggle key?  Is there a door and where does it lead?

 

He turned, stepping out of the cool earth toned world of his life to the pastel haze of a Muggle house. Alien. He stepped backwards, hoping he would return to the Manor’s grey stone, or even Hogwarts brown. Only beige met his eyes. The only sound was the muffled crying of the lost ghost.

 

The key was light, unmarked by time or use. Pristine. The very air smelled like it had been washed too often, then scented with chemicals meant to smell like strawberries rather than risk exposing it to the real thing.

 

The front door was locked. The key did not fit it. He stared and tried again in confusion. There was a door, he had a key; it was a dream, they had to fit together somehow.

 

And yet, against all logic, they did not.

 

What else had keys? 

 

He raced up the stairs, but the doors were only painted on the halls: he could not enter them to find the school trunks. He came to believe that if he could just find his trunk, he could find his wand and escape.

 

He ran, the halls twining into a fearsome amalgamation of every Muggle building he had ever seen. 

 

He woke, gasping, in an empty bed. Harry... He groped. Harry was on call at the hospital tonight. Relieved that his lover was not there to witness his flailing, Draco curled around a pillow and fought sleep.

 

Chapter Three

 

Draco leaned heavily on the wall. Nurses gave him sharp looks, but he wasn’t barring their path, so they just passed by in huffy silence. 

 

Days like this made him wonder why he was even here.

 

Such days made him think of the past.

 

It hadn’t been Astoria’s death—they had been dancing the very measured waltz of Pureblood courting then, Scorpius not even a gleam in his eye. The war. The death. He let the world assume he had chosen to become a Healer purely as a way to throw off suspicion. In truth, he had been so sickened by what he had seen and what he had done that devoting himself to healing seemed the only way to appease his conscience. But he wasn’t fool enough to tell anyone that—no one would believe him.

 

His family had been barred from the Manor pending sentencing—as far as they knew, they might never be allowed to go home again. In time the courts ruled in their favor, the Manor returning to Draco’s hands... but that had seemed an impossible dream in the quiet horror that was life after the war. His father was in Azkaban, his mother already falling into the genteel stupor of fairy dust addiction. He’d taken a flat, tiny because that was all his stipend would allow, and had still found himself in need of a roommate. Potter, wanting to step out of the many shadows darkening his life, wanted a space with no memories, paid with by his own labor. And Potter had been another medical student. 

 

Healing became a way to live—a way to embrace life. He looked on the horror without flinching so he could just as unflinchingly rejoice in the beauty.At some point he stopped wieghing his deeds, good and bad, on some invisible ledger and simply... did the best he could in every sense of the words. 

 

But with Harry, in those dark years... A match made in heaven it was not, but they both came to be thankful for it, as their careers progressed, as their lives expanded to include wives and children... and contracted so painfully as those wives died. 

 

“Bollocks.”

 

“Healer Malfoy?”

 

He shrugged off the concern in the nurse’s voice and went to find cold water enough to keep him on his feet, doing his best for others, for another five hours.

 

*

 

Disheveled, they sprawled on the living room carpet. They shagged whenever they were both home at the same time, because if they didn’t they’d spend much of their lives celibate. 

 

Draco poured them both whiskey, though he grimaced as he did. “Ever wonder how we came here?” he asked.

 

Harry snorted, then downed his shot and passed back his glass for another. “Well, you were born here and I moved in.”

 

Draco favored him with a hard look and ignored the empty glass. “We never talk—”

 

“Merlin, don’t be such a girl, Draco.”

 

Draco’s glare hardened. “I know I’m not a girl. I just... You drink too much.”

 

“You work too much.”

 

“So do you.”

 

Scowling, Harry took the bottle and drank straight from it. 

 

“Quality whiskey doesn’t deserve to be guzzled like goat’s piss.”

 

Harry silently snarled, set the bottle down with exaggerated care, and began to straighten his clothing. “Then I’ll go find some goat’s piss to guzzle.”

 

“Damn it, Harry, will you stop doing this! All we ever do together is fuck, sleep, and maybe catch a meal if we’re on the same schedule for once!”

 

“Yeah, that’s what I like about our relationship, too,” Harry replied as he walked out the door.

 

Feeling the urgent need for a shower, Draco cursed.

 

Chapter Four

 

The same dream kept pressing on him. It was almost funny: of the hundreds of things which could have been in his nightmares, he was dreaming of Muggle houses and Muggle keys. Not the pureblood women, like his wife and Harry’s, who were going to die if they ever got pregnant, thanks to some final curse of the Dark Lord’s. Not the children with what looked like Muggle cancer, caused by Dark Potions slipped into Soothing Salve for Teething Tots ten years ago. Not the Aurors who came in missing limbs, or all the terrible things a moment of anger and a muttered word could do to the human body.

 

He dreamed of a sterile house and a key for a lock he could not find, and a crying child hidden somewhere. 

 

Pansy had occasionally told him that life wasn’t supposed to be like this, but he couldn’t imagine any other way life could be.

 

*

 

When Harry came back—as he always did—Draco accepted him, as he always did. Harry might have thought it was penance on Draco’s part—so many other things in his life were. In truth... Draco loved the git. 

 

That didn’t keep him from pushing. He just decided against further frontal assaults.

 

“We’ll have guests for dinner tomorrow, as we’re both off,” Draco informed Harry over breakfast.

 

“Oh. Who?”

 

So suspicious. I suppose Granger is getting on you about your drinking again. “It’s a surprise. Not Granger and her pet weasel, though. The elves still haven’t recovered from her pamphlets.”

 

Harry relaxed and Draco hid a smile.

 

Muggle, Muggle, who’s got the Muggle?

 

*

 

Dudley Dursley kept his eyes fixed to his plate. His parents... glanced often at Harry, who was persistently ignoring them. 

 

“So, I know all about Harry’s exploits after he came to Hogwarts, but what did he get up to before then?” Draco asked brightly.

 

Dudley scratched the back of his neck, shooting an odd glance at his father. The older man scowled and pushed away his soup. It was the first of many questions on Draco’s list, a warning shot over the bow, so to speak. 

 

“I don’t think I’m feeling well,” Vernon muttered. His wife repeated the more loudly and made their apologies, her face tight with... fear? Shame? Draco kindly offered a carriage to take them home.

 

Dudley hesitated, then lay a hand on Harry’s tight shoulder. “It was good to see you, Harry. I’m glad... you’ve got somebody.” He glanced at Draco, then followed his parents.

 

Harry waited until the carriage clattered out of the drive before rounding on Draco. “What did you think you were doing, inviting them? I though this was our home, not—Fuck this, Malfoy. Fuck you.”

 

Draco gathered every shred of Slytherin skill and Malfoy arrogance—the qualities that had gotten him this far in life—and eyed his lover coldly. “I keep dreaming of a Muggle house in the past. I’ve told you that. No one else I know is so close to Muggles and so protective of his past. Merlin, I know Granger’s favorite dress when she was five had pink polka-dots. But you won’t talk to me, and I thought they would.”

 

“I’ve never talked to you, Draco—that’s not part of it,” Harry bit out. “That’s not how it works—”

 

“Because for over twenty goddamn years it’s worked your way. You don’t talk, not about anything important, not about the past. Even when you were holding me up after Astoria died, you never said anything about Ginny. You drink and work and keep me around as a body to screw and a mouth to order the house-elves about!”

 

“I don’t need you,” Harry hissed.

 

“I think you do,” Draco replied, the force of restrained rage giving his words strength. “I think you don’t really want to be alone—”

 

“You’re not a fucking mind-healer, so stop playing at it!”

 

Draco’s eyes narrowed. He’d hit something. Time would tell if it was a bloodstone or gravel. “I think,” Draco said slowly, “that you didn’t become a healer rather than an Auror for the reasons you want people to believe. I think losing yourself in the pain of your patients, in the bustle of St. Mungo’s, where advancement is limited and mostly only on paper, in working yourself to exhaustion is just a way to die without the gruesome details of suicide. I think—”

 

“SHUT UP!”

 

“I think,” Draco continued doggedly, “that you’ve felt like you were taking up too much space for so long you don’t even question it. I saw how you shrank away from your uncle, how you watched all of them like you’d bite if they moved a hand towards you.”

 

Harry’s face twisted with misery and fury. “You think I’m weak, is that it? Well—”

 

Draco snorted. “Weak? I’ve never thought you were weak. A bloody fool, but not... Damn it, Harry, do you honestly think I would judge you like that? Me?”

 

Harry stood, shuddering as if he wanted nothing more than to run.

 

“I’ve been dreaming of a Muggle key, and I don’t think the dream is for me. And if I had to make you angry so you’d pay attention, then so be it. Run off to Ron, run off the some pub, go hide at work. But I think the key is for you. You know how to use it—I don’t.”

 

With that, Draco stood. Walking out of his dining room was the hardest thing he’d ever done, even as something rejoiced that those dreams would not come for him again.

 

Epilogue:

 

Harry wasn’t there the next morning. Nor the day after, or the day after that. He wasn’t at work, either—emergency leave of absence. Draco wasn’t certain if that was a good sign or not. Granger said he’d moved back into the Black house and was angry. James stomped in and demanded to know what Draco had done to his father: Albus Severus had communed with him over tea. 

 

“He used to do this with Mum. He’s mad that you’re right about whatever, I think,” Al mused. “When he gets over that, he’ll do something about it.”

 

“Hopefully something that doesn’t involve pickling himself or girlfriends young enough to be his daughters.”

 

Al shrugged.

 

Then, six months later, with no warning, Harry reappeared.

 

The closet key tattooed on his shoulder tasted like life.