lomonaaeren

Chapter Twenty-Four.

Title: The Dust of Water (25/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Warnings: Heavy angst, some violence, amnesia
Pairings: Harry/Ginny, Ron/Hermione, eventual Harry/Draco
Rating: R
Summary: As far as Harry’s concerned, he’s woken from a weirdly deep sleep the day after the Battle of Hogwarts. It’s his friends who tell him that it’s ten years later, that he’s an Auror who got cursed while chasing a Dark wizard—and that his memory isn’t going to come back.
Author’s Notes: This is going to be a heavily angsty fic, as you can see from the summary and warnings. There isn’t going to be a cure for Harry’s amnesia, either. Keep that in mind before you read.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Twenty-Five—Swing the Pendulum

Harry was hot.

He was sweating so much just rolling on the floor with Malfoy, and okay, also maybe from the duel, and he kept reaching up to tear at the collar of his shirt.

He would have taken it off already, but Malfoy wouldn’t stop kissing him.

Harry’s head spun. Probably lack of air. Malfoy’s mouth hadn’t left his yet, and his fingers were kneading into Harry’s shoulders, and he was sucking Harry’s lips, and he darted his tongue out and—

Harry had to meet it, because he refused to allow Malfoy the satisfaction of this beginning.

It made him leap inside his skin, just the sensation of touching tongues together like that. He’d done that before? How could he have forgotten?

He tried to claw the shirt off Malfoy’s shoulders in response, and Malfoy leaned on his knees above him, faltering as he tried to strike at Harry’s clothes with fingers crooked like claws. At least his face was red, too, and he was panting with such intensity that Harry couldn’t hear a moment when one pant ended and the next began.

“Why are clothes so difficult?” Malfoy hissed.

Harry smiled at him and leaned up to kiss him again. It was brilliant, and it let him roll Malfoy back under him, and that was really better. And because Malfoy still wouldn’t stay still and getting clothes off wasn’t going to happen any time soon, Harry pressed their groins together, because he had to see what would happen with that.

Malfoy went still, was what happened. His eyes widened and he lay there in stunned silence. Harry pressed down again.

It was like the jolting touch of their tongues to each other. Harry again wondered how in the world he could have forgotten something like this.

“Yeah,” said Malfoy, a long exhalation on a sigh. Some of his wildness seemed to have left him. By the time Harry looked at his face again, he had his head resting back on the floor and his hips rolling up, trying to touch Harry’s erection. Harry pressed down again in response.

This time, the pleasure was so much more intense and shooting that it felt painful. Harry braced his hands on either side of Malfoy so he could spend some more time really grinding. It was still painful, but even better. So much better. Harry closed his eyes and bowed his head, grunting with effort. Malfoy’s hands were playing with his hair, the edges of his shirt, and down over his shoulders as if Harry was an instrument he liked to stir music from.

“Come on,” Harry said, and didn’t know what he was asking for until Malfoy turned his head and kissed him again. Harry closed his eyes and lost himself in the kiss, ignoring the moment when Malfoy’s hand smoothed up his jaw and latched itself on there.

“No, like this,” Malfoy said, pulling back with a gasp and rolling them over again. This time, he got his hand in between them and grasped Harry’s cock. Harry opened his mouth, but ended up saying nothing because he was too busy feeling as though someone had sent fire up his spine and into his brain.

He’d never felt like this. Never.

Malfoy worked one hand on his cock and kissed Harry desperately, gropingly, turning his head from side to side. He couldn’t get his other hand up, or couldn’t do it without letting go of Harry, and Harry privately agreed that was a bad thing. He lifted his knees and shoved his groin forwards, as much as he could when his legs were colliding with Malfoy’s arm, and Malfoy gave an agreeing shout.

Harry rolled them both to the side in the next second. He was going to climb on top of Malfoy, he was, but Malfoy’s hand slipped, and Harry couldn’t bear to lose his touch. He reached down and grabbed Malfoy’s erection instead.

All he could feel was heat and the smooth shape of it against the cloth. He couldn’t hold onto it well; the angle was still wrong, and Malfoy was twisting, the collar of his shirt caught around his throat. But then they settled, and although things were still wrong and Harry’s shoulder ached, the important things were there.

Those important things were:

Harry’s cock in Malfoy’s hand.

Malfoy’s cock in his hand.

Malfoy swearing at him with a wide-open mouth, panting and filled with saliva, in the moments when Harry wasn’t kissing it. And him.

Harry kissing his chin sometimes, and then ramming himself into Malfoy’s hand when Malfoy’s touch became a little more hesitant.

Malfoy shuddering on an exhale and filling Harry’s hand with a mound of cooling wetness that somewhat obscured the shape of his cock in his pants where Harry could easily touch it.

And then Harry—

Harry coming in a way that outdid everything else he’d ever known by years and miles, his eyes wide open in wonder, his spine bowed, but his cock still safe and firmly-held by Malfoy’s hand pressed against him.

*

He fell limp and dazed afterwards. He knew Malfoy was still breathing only because he could feel the soft, regular puffs against his throat.

Harry lay there with his eyes shut. He didn’t see why he should have to open them and move. He could get everything he needed laying right here, his hands at Malfoy’s groin and ribs, and his mouth drying out as he kept it open.

“You—you acted wild.”

Harry blinked. That was Malfoy, he realized in surprise, instead of something he’d said himself. He turned his head, and Malfoy was looking back at him solemnly out of eyes that were the color of polished stone.

“Did I?” Harry shrugged a little and pushed his glasses up his nose. He was amazed they hadn’t fallen off. “I suppose it was—”

He stopped.

Then he grunted as Malfoy poked him under the ribs. “I’ve had it with mysterious silences, Potter. Tell me what you mean. Tell me what you’re thinking of. Always tell me what you’re thinking of.”

Harry swallowed back a huge gasp of air and then said quietly, “That’s the first time in my memory that I’ve had sex.”

He was thinking about how good it felt, how he kept thinking that he hadn’t felt anything like that before, but that was another thing the memory loss had stolen, wasn’t it? He could have felt something like that with Rob or Ginny. He just didn’t know.

From what he’d seen of Ginny’s memories and read of the journal he kept when he was dating Rob, at least one thing was different. He hadn’t slept with those other people until he loved them. But with Malfoy he felt—lust? Comradeship? He didn’t know.

I suppose I should have thought more about what it meant when I told other people I was a different person.

Malfoy’s hand on his hip broke his brooding. Harry looked up in time to see Malfoy staring at him with parted lips and such a storm of emotion in his eyes that Harry ducked his head. He wasn’t ready to see some of the things there. And not just because they were strong. Malfoy was feeling things again that—Harry didn’t know what to do with them. He knew perfectly well what they were, just not what to do with them.

“I’m your first,” Malfoy said. “You’ll remember this. And not them.”

“It’s not literally that I’m a virgin. It just feels like it.”

Harry knew he hadn’t succeeded when he felt Malfoy shake his head. “No. You’re going to remember this. They might have been his first lovers. I’m the one who was first with you. The person I actually want to get to know. The person who’s actually going to survive, instead of fade further and further away from the world with each year that passes.”

Harry picked up his wand and conjured a pillow. Then he used the pillow to hit Malfoy deliberately over the head.

Malfoy winced under the blow, but he was still grinning insanely when Harry looked up again. That had been what Harry found hard to face, he thought, as Malfoy lounged back and looked at him with some pride. That someone would be that thrilled to be with him and so proud of having had sex with him. It was—hard to face.

Harder to say why, so Harry didn’t focus on it. He sighed and said, “Anyway. I did defeat you. But that doesn’t mean I could defeat every person who might want to duel with me in the context of a class and try to take the Elder Wand. Do you think I should—”

“Shhh, Harry.”

Astonished, Harry shut up. Malfoy’s expression had changed again. He reached out and gently pinched Harry’s lips shut, as if to make sure he wouldn’t say something else that broke whatever mood Malfoy thought they had here, and then rolled himself onto Harry’s chest with a grunt of effort.

Malfoy lay there and gazed at him. Harry started squirming after less than ten seconds of that, and not because Malfoy had accidently pressed down on a sensitive spot. Malfoy only smiled and went on looking.

“Can we talk about something else, please?” Harry finally burst out, when he had come to the conclusion that Malfoy wasn’t going to move of his own free will.

“I wasn’t aware that we were talking.”

Harry shut his eyes and turned his head away. “I want—I want to know if you were using your full power in the duel,” he finally forced out. “Because if you weren’t, then it’s kind of useless as a test of whether I’d be able to face someone who was.”

“Of course it was my full power. I told you I wouldn’t try to hold back when it came to dueling you, and I meant it. Why did you think it wasn’t?”

Harry frowned and said nothing. But he was wondering if his body could remember things that his brain couldn’t. Because it didn’t make sense that someone like Malfoy, with ten years of experience on him, could actually lose a duel to Harry, who had forgotten all his Auror training and the like, unless Harry was somehow remembering the Auror training.

But he didn’t think so. He might remember a certain way he flicked his wand, or the sounds of a spell might raise echoes, the same way he felt he kind of knew what it was like to love Ron and Hermione’s children and Ginny, without actually knowing. But he didn’t think he could remember a spell.

“Something—spoke to me during the duel,” he said. “There was a spell in the back of my head when I thought I would turn into a tree. And I shouldn’t have been able to defeat you when you’re twenty-eight and I’m eighteen.”

“Mentally,” Malfoy said. “Physically there’s not that much difference between us. And I think you have an innate talent in Defense and dueling that’s always going to emerge in contests like this. Innate talent counts for a lot.”

But he was frowning, too. Harry reached up and grabbed his hair. “You have some idea about that spell, don’t you?” he demanded. “Tell me.”

Malfoy grasped Harry’s hand and brought it away from his hair. “If you promise me something.”

“What?”

“After I tell you, we’ll go upstairs and go to sleep. I’m tired, and I think that you need the rest a good nap in a soft bed can provide.”

“I promise,” Harry said instantly. He was willing to agree to anything, as long as Malfoy would tell him the truth.

“I think it’s the Elder Wand.”

Harry closed his eyes. That had been what he suspected, too, but he didn’t want to explain aloud why that was. Malfoy, lying on his chest and tracing Harry’s jawline with one finger, seemed perfectly happy to do it anyway.

“You never had the kind of bond with the Elder Wand that you did before now. You used it to repair your other wand and tried to ignore the Elder one. I think that’s why it’s refusing to repair your holly one now. It’s tired of lying in one place and going unused. It wants to make sure you triumph, and if giving you new spells in the middle of battle is the way to do it, then it’ll do that.”

“But I never heard about it doing anything like that for Dumbledore,” Harry whispered. “And doesn’t it want someone else to conquer me? It should have wanted you to win, because then the strongest wizard would own it.”

“Has anyone else ever been the Master of Death?”

Harry felt as though someone had jammed ice down his spine through his brain this time, instead of fire. He sat up, and he didn’t know what he was going to do. He wanted to leave. He wanted to argue back. He wanted to shout.

“Hush.” Malfoy’s face was calm and polished like granite. He watched Harry with a terrible kind of compassion, which actually upset Harry more than raging back would have done. “It’s a fact that’s more recent for you than most people. I think most of them have forgotten it since the war. I never did, of course.”

Harry sat slowly back down. “And it isn’t the kind of thing you and Old Harry discussed?”

Malfoy laughed. “Harry Potter discuss things like that with me?”

Harry paused once more, but he was certain, now. “He didn’t treat you well, did he?” he whispered. “He really didn’t.”

“Now you begin to see.” Malfoy turned to face him. Now his face was burning, and he breathed like a racehorse with the end of the race in sight. “No. It wasn’t lying to me, or taunting me with secrets he hinted at that I would never know, or making promises he didn’t keep. Or not only that. It was also knowing that I was that deeply invested in a man who would never return my investment.”

Harry nodded. He could see that. It made him feel a little sick, but he could.

“I remembered you were the Master of Death because I wanted to. Because I thought it a remarkable fact that the rest of the wizarding world was content to forget about and Old Harry was content to forget because it didn’t fit in with his glittering hero persona.” Malfoy grasped Harry’s wrist, raised his hand, and intertwined his own fingers with Harry’s. “I told you once why I felt this loss of your memory was a grand thing for me. I’m attracted to the new you, and I wasn’t to the old one. And I finally had the chance to learn certain things that I wanted to. You, from the inside.”

With a rippling feeling, Harry remembered that Malfoy knew from the inside, too, what his past sexual experiences had been like. And he would know how intense they had been compared to this one—well, at least his side of this one. It was odd.

“But,” Malfoy said, and pulled Harry’s attention back to him again, “I’m also happy because this might at last place us on an equal footing. I hated being obsessed with someone who would never be a tenth as interested in me. I despised it. I thought of myself in terms of the fans who read the newspaper articles about him and filled their world with him because they had nothing better to do.

“But now I’m the only one you can depend on. And I’m your lover. It’s hard for me to imagine being more important to you.”

Harry shook his head a little. “You don’t need to sound so proud of it.”

“But I also don’t need to lie about it. And I won’t.” This time, Malfoy pulled hard enough that Harry found himself standing up. “So come up to bed now. You promised you would, and I’ve explained far more than I originally promised. I’m not going to let you get away with lying to me, too.”

Harry winced a little as he saw the way Malfoy’s eyes had narrowed, and nodded. “I won’t try that.”

“Then we’ll have no problem,” Malfoy said, and wrapped an arm around Harry’s waist, and pulled Harry powerfully against him. Harry stumbled. Malfoy laughed softly and led him up the stairs to his bedroom.

*

Harry drifted in and out of sleep that night, and woke up near the morning, before Malfoy, to lie beside him and watch him. Malfoy was breathing with his mouth open, his head turned towards Harry.

As if he needs to keep an eye on me to make sure I don’t break my promises even now.

Harry closed his eyes. He wondered, for a second, why he wasn’t more offended by what Malfoy had said earlier. In a way, he was paying for Old Harry’s crimes against Malfoy just as much as if he got arrested by the Ministry. He didn’t owe Malfoy anything, if he was really a different person.

Except that Malfoy had helped him. He’d come into St. Mungo’s to comfort him. He’d offered Harry the shelter of his house and figuring out whether he needed to give in to the Ministry at all. He’d come up with ideas about what Harry could do in the future, which was something Harry didn’t think he could do by himself.

He had his price and things that he wanted because of that.

I’m the only one you can depend on. I’m your lover.

The first one wouldn’t always be true, Harry thought. As his friends got used to the idea that he was different and changed, they would come around or they wouldn’t, but Harry didn’t think they would all abandon him forever.

And for the second…

Harry looked at Malfoy where he sprawled on the bed, and smiled.

He’d wanted Malfoy, and he’d liked being wanted, and he’d liked the pleasure.

It wasn’t going to be such a hardship.