Note: This story is a somewhat re-write of Forever by BluebellMoon. For information on the state of that story, head to the profile of BluebellMoon.
Disclaimer: This story is set in the world of J. K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer, and as such none of it is owned by me, excepting the story-line.
Charlotte held her mother's hand tightly as they weaved their way through the crowded street. Before leaving home, her mother had told her in a tone that brooked no argument, "Do not let go of my hand Charlotte, no matter what you want to look at, you must hold on to Mummy." Charlotte had nodded her assent, although she knew that meant they wouldn't go to any of the fun shops like Florean Fortescue's or Weasley's. Mummy always wanted to go to the shops with lots of robes in them, or shoes, or hats.
Today was a special day though, so Charlotte gripped her mother's soft hand and let herself be led into the thronging crowds lining the street, her father following close behind. They came to a halt just as a deafening cheer went up around them and Charlotte let go of her mother's hand to shield her ears from the raucous cries and shouts. In one disorienting second, she was lifted and settled, blinking in bewilderment, on her father's shoulders.
Now she could see everything! There were rows and rows of pointed hats like her mother's one, and people of all kinds wearing odd robes that told Charlotte they definitely weren't from Puddlemere maybe not even England. The crowd started cheering again, louder than before, and Charlotte could see Him. He was short, shorter than the posters showed, but he was wearing his round glasses and – Charlotte squinted – there was that lightning bolt scar!
"Daddy, daddy I see him! It's him!" Charlotte shrieked, pointing towards him. He turned slightly, and Charlotte was certain he had heard her, he was smiling at her, surely. He raised his arm and waved, and all around Charlotte the crowd surged as people threw their hands up in the air, the mostly female teenage presence screaming shrilly. Charlotte waved and shouted with all the other witches and wizards as her father held her securely in place. Her mother may not have let her go to the fun shops, but she just knew Jessica and Rosie would be jealous of her anyway – she had seen him! Harry Potter! The Boy Who Lived!
In a decrepit café with a savagely wheezy sandwich board taking customer's orders, Harry, Ron and Hermione sat down at a table, fatigued and quiet. The other patrons of the café were almost oblivious to the young celebrities in their midst, but for them it was an ordinary occasion to bump shoulders with Harry Potter as he ordered a round of pumpkin pasties for his table. This particular café was known only to a select few of the wizarding population – those people who would rather eat a sandwich without a gaggle of witches pressing their noses against the glass, trying to decide if it was ham or sliced beef that The Chosen One was eating. Today, Celestina Warbeck and her mother were arguing – as usual – over coffee and cake, the latter speaking loud enough that Harry could hear her berating her daughter's choice in outfits. Minister Kingsley left not long after Harry's order arrived at the table, a brisk nod all that the Trio received.
For Harry, such indifference and positively lacklustre service was simply wonderful. While fame and notoriety had followed him at Hogwarts, in large part he had remained sheltered by his status as a younger student, and overshadowed by the horrific events that Tom Riddle set in motion. In the wild world of wizarding press and gossip, it was nigh on impossible for The Boy Who Lived to go anywhere in public without being mobbed by a group of fans. Harry's assumption that it would eventually die down proved false over the past few years, and had induced him to become almost hermit-like – a fact which, as his secretary at the Ministry Miss Bates told him, only fuelled the public's curiosity and demand for a glimpse of Harry Potter. As such, cafes like the aptly named 'Hole-in-the-Wall' were a blessing for the man of such fame and intrigue.
Hermione sighed, Ron reaching out and rubbing her arm while simultaneously shovelling two pumpkin pasties into his mouth at once. Harry raised his eyebrows.
"What, not quite ready for another round of screaming parades quite yet Hermione?" He joked.
"Not quite is an understatement." She replied, raising her eyebrows.
"I couldn't believe those chicks at the end mate, thought that blonde one was going to get cursed off her bloody feet by Pierce." Ron mumbled, shaking his head. Harry glanced over at Pierce, the tall wizard stooping slightly in the cramped quarters of the café corner.
"So did I." He admitted. "Nearly thought about doing it myself to be honest." The desperate blonde witch had somehow leapt through the swarm of wizards guarding the line of enchanted Ministry cars they had departed in, and caught him around the neck in a stroke of utter luck – on her part. Harry's glasses flew off, and he had nearly been deafened by her ecstatic scream as she found herself in the reflexive grip of The Boy Who Lived. The entire situation had probably lasted less than five seconds, but it was enough for Pierce's temper which, never mild at the best of times, had exploded in a rather impressive display of wandwork where he managed to Stun the girl, missing Harry by less than an inch. The gruff wizard had been furious, snarling at Harry to get in the car, before rounding on the line of startled wizarding security.
"She deserved to." Hermione sniffed. "You can't just maul people like that for God's sake. She probably didn't even care if you had a girlfriend waiting in the car for you!" Harry blanched, and Hermione quickly backtracked. "Oh no – I didn't mean you Harry – I meant…oh never mind what I meant." She said apologetically. Ron looked at Harry with a torn expression, but remained silent.
"S'okay Hermione," Harry shrugged. A ripple of mutters around the room broke into their conversation and drove Pierce to stand beside Harry, his rangy frame looming over the table. A subdued silence fell, and Harry glanced up at the bodyguard, perturbed, who in turn nodded towards the doorway he had been watching. Harry twisted in his seat, ready to question Pierce's intense proximity – and was shocked into silence.
A sharply muttered swear word and Hermione's hissed "Ron" told him they had seen the figure in the doorway as well. Unwilling or unable to draw his eyes away from the wizard in the doorway, Harry wasn't sure, but he didn't break his gaze, even when he heard Pierce's urgently murmured suggestion to leave immediately.
Not even Harry could silence the élite patrons of Hole-in-the-Wall with his mere appearance, though guests of the usuals sometimes made a fuss. The ripple of chatter and excited whispers that usually followed him were infinitely preferable to the deafening silence that now reigned over the small café. Everyone sat, looking at their plates or fidgeting with something under the table, all eyes averted from both Harry, and the wizard in the doorway – a wizard Harry hadn't seen in more than five years.
Draco Malfoy stepped into the café, and though no one made a sound, it was as if the room itself inhaled a gasp, the tension racketing ever higher. Harry distantly noted Pierce standing directly beside him, the man standing taut and tall. And ready to fight, Harry realised with a jolt. He looked around, seeing Hermione's worried gaze darting between himself and Malfoy, and Ron's wand fisted in his hand. It dawned on Harry that they thought he was going to fight Draco Malfoy. It was an unsettling realisation, and he wondered when Ron and Hermione – the two people who knew him best in the world – had developed this belief that he would attack Draco Malfoy, of all people. Taking a deep breath to dispel the irritation that knowledge brought, Harry rose from his seat. If he had thought the silence was tense before, now it positively bristled with a tangible sense of anticipation.
For the past three months – ever since the rumours of Malfoy's return to England had grown from whispers to murmurs to veritable shouts – the press had been insistent on bringing up the subject in any public appearance Harry had made, driving him to total silence on the subject. What they expected him to say, he had no idea, and now that the moment was upon him, the sight of his old school enemy brought with it none of the heightened emotion everyone had speculated on.
Draco Malfoy had always been slender, but the lean frame he now inhabited was bordering on unfashionably thin. His hair had grown out slightly, the white blonde now gently curling at the ends. However it was his eyes that struck Harry. Emotionless, showing none of the disdain or enmity he had often looked at everyone with, they were blank and weary. Far from the casual arrogance Malfoy had worn like a second skin, he now looked worn, and much like Harry felt – exhausted. Malfoy had received almost as much publicity as Harry after the downfall of Tom Riddle and the Death Eaters, a fact which had annoyed Ron to no end. The only redeeming fact about that situation had been the unequivocally negative view the media – and therefore wizarding Britain – had taken towards the once popular wizarding family. The years after the Battle of Hogwarts had not been kind to Malfoy. He seemed aged, a weight on his shoulders which had once only ever borne a fierce pride in his family name.
Harry walked towards Draco, who stood motionless, just out of the path that Harry intended to take out the door. He had a look of grim determination on his face as though braced to bear the brunt of a fearsome attack. The submissive, and deeply foreign stance for Malfoy took Harry aback, so much so that he faltered in his step, Pierce's long stride catching his heels. He drew level with the blonde-haired wizard, neither of them breaking their gaze from each other. Harry stopped, and Pierce muttered something not fit for public ears as he walked into the back of Harry.
"Malfoy." Harry nodded once and stuck out his hand. Malfoy's eyes widened slightly and flickered down to the hand and back up. Slowly, he brought his hand up to grasp Harry's. Malfoy's hand was cool, and Harry could feel his bones protruding under his skin. They shook once, twice, and then Draco quickly released his hand, an unidentifiable but vaguely familiar look in his eyes. Harry turned on his heel and strode out the door of the café, a unanimous sigh breaking out across the room, cut off by the door shutting quietly behind him.
Harry kept up his quick stride, Pierce now falling to his usual few paces behind Harry. Harry was glad. He wanted to think, and think alone. He headed further up the dingy alley Hole-in-the-Wall was hidden in and stopped at an ambiguous carving in the side of a wall that vaguely resembled a mantelpiece, absolutely covered in soot and ashes.
"I'm going to Grimmauld Place Pierce, take the rest of the day off – hell, take the weekend off." Pierce didn't respond to Harry's remark, merely blinking slowly, once again as impassive as usual. Harry shrugged. He knew the wizard would show up on his doorstep not a minute after he had arrived, and only once he had satisfied his own rigorous standards that Harry was a safe from prying eyes and screaming fans as could be, would he leave.
Harry pulled out a pinch of Floo Powder from a small bag stashed inside his robes and dashed it under the mantelpiece, the bright green flames bursting into life and illuminating what was now a full outdoor fireplace halfway down the alley.
"13 Grimmauld Place," he shouted, and stepped into the warm flames that carried him home.
Pierce had been long gone when Harry finally roused himself from the green velvet couch in the parlour. Hermione and Ron had visited earlier in the afternoon, appearing in his fireplace briefly, before he assured them he was fine. Countless owls had delivered hastily scribbled notes from various people, questioning the meeting between himself and Malfoy. Harry had answered none. Kreacher had come shuffling in at periodic intervals under the premise of dusting some inane object, asking if Harry needed anything repeatedly. Oftentimes Kreacher's earnest if somewhat overly formal requests to help provoked Harry's memories of the grubby house elf's disgust and open hatred towards him when he had first come to Grimmauld Place. A lot had changed in the intervening years, and Draco Malfoy's reappearance in Harry's life had brought up the memories of the past in a rush of mixed feelings.
Strangely, it gave Harry no pleasure to see Malfoy looking worse off than himself. They had both been to hell and back in the reign of Voldemort over the wizarding world, albeit in very different ways, and for different reasons. Still, Riddle had fixed his attention on them both, and they had barely escaped with their lives. Harry knew the threat of death to his family was what drove Malfoy to his desperate actions. The year after the Battle of Hogwarts had given him a lot of time for thinking – too much, Hermione and Mrs Weasley had thought. It had been at their insistence and the reluctantly expressed concern of Ron that Harry had given in and returned to the wizarding world, assuming Grimmauld Place as his known residence in London, and an Unplottable house in the Scottish countryside as his escape.
Draco Malfoy had in a strange way done the same thing Harry had, disappearing from everyone's knowledge in the aftermath of the Battle of Hogwarts. Harry had agonized for months over the choices he had made on that night – on some of his darker nights blaming himself for things done or not done in his earliest years at school. Malfoy's appearance suggested that he bore similar nightmarish mental scars from that year that Harry did.
Harry strode in the kitchen, itching for something to do – but unable to pinpoint exactly what that itch demanded. When he had aimlessly circled the breakfast table in the middle of the dim room for the fourth time, it struck Harry in a moment of clarity. It was the long-forgotten urge to escape. That crawling sensation on his skin that drove him to distraction was dimly familiar, as was the pricking of his hairs on the back of his neck. His scar, as ever, remained unresponsive, as normal a scar as any other he had acquired over the years. The way he felt wasn't a grave sense of foreboding like he often had when his scar used to prickle, but it was something less discernible – a feeling of being uncomfortable and on edge.
Harry stared out of the window, unseeing and motionless. Flashes of the past came to him. That terrible day he had used Sectumsempra on Draco and seen the thin lines of blood immediate criss-crossing the pale boy's arms. Sirius's revelation of his place as Harry's godfather, and the painful knife-twist in Harry's heart as he saw his father's best friend fade into the darkness of the Veil. Those long nights of the hunt for Horcruxes, and the violently sickening feeling of discovering himself as one.
That night he had died, and made the choice to come back to this world, to live out the rest of his days with the knowledge he could have given up the screaming fans and the buzzing paparazzi. He could have given up the shadow that was Pierce, the long nights that followed that last, terrible fight between himself and Ginny.
But that would have meant giving up Ron and Hermione. Giving up the fight and letting Voldemort win. Giving up the lives of those who had stood and fought – Neville and Professor McGonagall and the Weasleys. He had made the right decision, Harry knew. He had never truly regretted the decision he had made to live. It was only with a sort of morbid curiosity that he entertained the thought of his meeting with Albus Dumbledore in the train station ending differently.
It was nearly dark before Harry stirred from his stance in front of the window. He meandered to the stairs, and finding Kreacher nowhere, set about extinguishing the lamps in the downstairs rooms and hallways. He went up to his room, the freshly painted white walls nearly making it unrecognisable as the austere Victorian room it had been when Sirius had lived in it. The rebellious posters a teenaged Sirius had put up with a Permanent Sticking Charm still waved and shuffled about as Harry entered, their movements now a familiar comfort to him. The Muggle ones Harry had covered with his own pictures from the photo album Hagrid had given him all those years ago.
Harry flopped down on his bed fully clothed and stared at shadows cast on the ceiling by the last embers of the sun as it set over London. He stared and thought, eventually falling into a fitful sleep broken by dreams that morphed to nightmares as all the people Harry loved most grew old and grey and clambered aboard the train, bound for the on that Dumbledore had alluded to. Harry tried again and again the board the train with them, but an obstinate conductor told him that he had chosen to stay behind, that he wasn't allowed on.
The dream ended with the train leaving the pure white station of King's Cross, Harry seized by a choking fear that he would never be allowed on the train. He had chosen to stay behind.
"But I didn't know!" He cried. "I didn't know what it would mean!"
Harry wrenched himself up and out of his dream, fisting his hands in his hair and tugging sharply. The pain brought him back from the edge of sleep and into the waking world. He panted in the darkness, his hoarse shout still echoing in his ears. I didn't know.
I didn't know what I was giving up.
Note: If you have read Forever you will know I am not likely to post frequently or on a steady schedule as I both work and study a double Major full-time, though I really try to! Please let me know if you enjoyed where this is heading - I for one am super excited to share this with you guys!