Rosemary Like Weeds

1.

It was one of the most unremarkable detentions Harry had ever served. Filch would have been very disappointed to learn that however much he scowled, he'd never be a fraction as terrifying as the sight of Lord Voldemort drinking the blood of a unicorn had been. He'd have been extremely irritated to hear that having a rag and a can of polish shoved at you didn't compare to being handed a quill cursed to write in your own blood. And it just might have sent the foul-tempered caretaker round the bend to know that being led to a storeroom, no matter how coated in dust, and ordered to tidy up wasn't even as upsetting as being made to answer Gilderoy Lockhart's fan mail.

Mentioning any one of these details might have inspired Filch to come up with a far nastier punishment, so Harry hadn't. He'd simply accepted the cleaning supplies, started dusting and shining his way along the nearest shelf, and kept up a stream of grumbling and sighing until he'd convinced the old Squib he was miserable enough to be left unsupervised. Harry'd breathed a true sigh of relief once the man was gone, then silently picked up the next item on the shelf.

"Finally done moaning, Potter? Bet there'd be a lot of broken hearts out there if all the witchy wenches knew what a sniveler their hero really is."

Oh yes, the single remarkable thing about the night was that it made the first time since that horrible trip to the Forbidden Forest that the person actually to blame for the detention was sharing it with Harry. Draco Malfoy was working at the opposite end of the room, until a moment ago in sullen silence.

"Don't start, Malfoy," Harry refused to turn around to answer the insult, "He doesn't go away unless you complain."

"My, how devious. But I suppose even an idiot Gryffindor can come up with a few tricks when they've had as much practice getting in trouble as you have."

"As much practice being framed you mean."

"I suppose I do," Malfoy's voice was disgustingly smug, and Harry knew if he did turn around – which he wouldn't – he'd see an all-too-common smirk on the other boy's face. "Just proves what I saying about your being an idiot, Potter; you'd think the old tricks would stop working after a while…"

"Do you think you could just keep quiet? I mean, unless you want to be here 'til dawn, I'm pretty sure working's going to do us more good than fighting."

"I don't want to be any place with you in it a second longer than I have to."

"Good."

"Good."

Even without fighting the storeroom was grimy enough to provide several hours of work. Harry thought it would a fascinating place to explore under other circumstances. The shelves were full of the strangest variety of magical objects. Some looked like wares from Zonko's, confiscated from students who really shouldn't have been playing with them during lessons. Some might have been classroom supplies from centuries ago, long since replaced with more current models. And a few were completely mysterious, peculiar things that looked valuable and felt powerful. Harry suspected they might be the sorts of magical tools made especially for witches and wizards with rare talents and were kept just in case such students ever wandered through Hogwarts. He was wondering if there was anything there for Parselmouths, stepping idly away from a freshly buffed bronze goblet filled with curious, unspillable blue liquid, when he bumped into someone.

"Watch it, Potter," Malfoy's voice snapped. "Keep to your side of the room if you don't want to fight."

"I am on…" Harry began, his head jerking up in annoyance. "Oh…well, we're in the middle. Good, almost done."

"You can just finish up then."

"How the hell do you figure that?"

"You bumped into me."

"Oh, right. How'll I ever make that up to you, Malfoy? I think if anyone ought to finish up, it's you for getting us both into this in the first place."

"I told you before, if you'd stop falling for stupid tricks…" Malfoy tossed his rag and polish onto the shelf beside them.

"You're saying it's my fault you set me up?"

"So you do catch on eventually. It just takes a very…long…time."

Harry snatched the other boy's rag from the shelf. "Get back to work – before the polish does your brain any more damage." He threw the rag at Draco's head.

It might have been the silliest argument they'd ever had. It certainly wasn't one of the bitter, violent, curse-casting sort, but it didn't matter. Draco tried to dodge the rag, despite the fact that Harry'd been standing too close to miss, and he bumped the shelves – not even very hard. Something on the highest shelf teetered and tipped and smashed on the floor between the boys' feet. They stared down at the remains of a Pensieve.

Slowly, silvery threads of vapor began to seep out of the fragments and float toward the ceiling in twisting patterns. The threads thickened into ropes, and then clouds of magic were pouring from the broken basin, filling the room with silver. Harry noted with surprised detachment that Pensieves must be more powerful than he'd realized if they held this much magic. They'd probably be in quite a bit of tro… Then suddenly he was finding it quite difficult to think. The strangest feeling had started in his head, the feeling that all his memories were being flipped through like the pages of a book. At first he could catch glimpses of scenes as they passed; then everything began getting faster and faster until it was like someone had put a thumb to edge of the pages and was zipping through so quickly his fourth birthday was blurring with things he wouldn't remember until they happened ten years from tomorrow.

The mist began to clear and Harry found that he was on the floor beside the Pensieve with no idea at what point he'd given up standing. There was an almost pleasant fuzzy feeling in his head and a decidedly less pleasant dizzy feeling all over that convinced him it wasn't time to try moving yet. Malfoy was beside him. "I thought they were practically indestructible," was the first thing it came to his mind to say. He suspected he sounded rather dazed and stupid.

"They are. Like a human mind – only something totally catastrophic or so trivial no one could predict it will break one." It seemed Malfoy was off his game as well; ordinarily he wouldn't be caught dead saying anything unsnarky much less remotely helpful to Harry.

The two boys sat quietly after that, pulling themselves back together. At last Harry decided to give standing a try and discovered that it worked. "I'll finish up the shelves, if you'll sweep that up and hide it?" he suggested with a nod to the Pensieve.

Mafoy's head jerked – a little too quickly – to look up at Harry, and the blond swayed where he sat. "Hide it?" he echoed when he'd regained his balance.

"You don't really think Filch'll notice it's gone? I counted six broken scrying glasses on my side of the room. No one's got a clue what's really in this room."

"Is this a Gryffindor's idea of a cunning trap?" Malfoy's face was all derision. "Get the Slytherin to agree to a cover-up so you can run to Filch crying how I didn't want to tell?"

Harry stared at him as if he were one of the odder types of herbivorous mantis Professor Sprout had been including in their lessons this year. "Exactly how paranoid are you? Why would I do that?"

"I think the obvious answer would be 'to get me in trouble.'"

"And get myself in it with you?"

"Oh, come on, Saint Potter, surely your martyr complex allows for things like that. And confessing should even put an extra shine on that sparkly red and gold halo of yours."

"Which would so impress you and Filch. Malfoy, you do realize that all your brilliant scheming is scheming us into more detention time – which we would have to spend together?"

Malfoy peered up at Harry appraisingly for a moment. Then he snorted and shrugged as though there was something almost beneath his contempt that was just a tiny bit funny. "For once, Potter, I can acknowledge your point." He pulled himself carefully to his feet and brushed past Harry to fetch a broom without another word.

They went about their respective tasks then – still moving rather slowly. Harry thought he'd given himself the longer job, but Malfoy was gone for a good while before he returned without the shards of Pensieve.

"Where'd you put them?" Harry asked curiously and instantly regretted it.

"Inside the giant lapis urn on the fifth landing of the west staircase." Harry relaxed; the other boy's snark had not yet fully returned. He considered asking Malfoy more questions, just to see how many answers he could get before the Slytherin snapped something typically nasty about Gryffindors needing to have everything explained to them. But that would only have dragged the night out longer. He settled on just one question: "Ready to go find Filch?"

Malfoy nodded; the boys tracked the caretaker down; and the dour old man examined the storeroom. He didn't notice the missing Pensieve.

As Harry fell gratefully into bed that night, he reflected that, overall, it was still one of his least impressive detentions ever.

At breakfast the next morning, Harry's friends checked him over for signs of trauma and looked not a little incredulous when he told them he'd only been cleaning out a storeroom the night before. He decided not to mention the broken Pensieve – Hermione had been known to treat smaller things as full-scale disasters. Instead, he described a few of the most interesting curiosities in the storeroom. Hermione immediately began mentally sifting her too-vast-to-be-allowed collection of facts and tidbits to see if she could remember reading about any of them, but she was thrown off track by Ron's suggestion that it would be fun to sneak back to the storeroom and acquire one or two of the items. "Ronald Weasley!" she exclaimed, and Harry zoned out. His best friends' arguments were often good entertainment, but he knew them all by heart.

Harry glanced up and caught sight of Malfoy across the room, sneering at his two goons who'd almost certainly just said something stupid. "Prat," the thought darted across Harry's mind, "he should smile more." There was a beat of silence in his head before Harry asked himself what the hell he'd just thought. The image of Malfoy's smile rose in his mind – cold and condescending; it was version two of his sneer, really. There definitely shouldn't be more of that. "Not that one," sounded from the same mental corner as the original thought, and Harry confusedly tried to think what other smile Malfoy had. Oh, there was the wide, delighted one, the very, very loud smile that came with a torrent of laughter to announce something crazy and hilarious had happened and with just enough of his regular smirk to hint that he might have had something to do with it…

Except Malfoy never looked like that. Harry shook his head and wondered where the image had come from. It had been – was, since it was refusing to go away – painstakingly clear; if he wasn't so positive it had never happened, Harry would have sworn he remembered seeing that look on Malfoy's face. "Oy, Harry, you've got too much time on your brain," he told himself, shook his head again, and quickly focused in on the conversation at his table. Somehow his friends' latest argument had turned into Hermione giving Ron tips for that day's Charms quiz. The cramming did the trick perfectly as Harry was soon just as baffled as Ron, the only thought in his head wonder at how Hermione managed to be quite so clever.

But things refused to stay that way. The bizarre of image of Malfoy smiling kept resurfacing whenever Harry passed the Slytherin in the halls or caught sight of him during lunch. It plagued him straight through double Care of Magical Creatures until he couldn't get the picture out of his head even when Malfoy wasn't around to remind him. By dinner he was convinced he did remember seeing the smile somewhere before and was wracking his brain to recall the occasion. It made him an oddly distracted dinner companion, and Ron had to poke Harry twice to get his attention when he realized his friend was staring into space – rather in the direction of the Slytherin table, but Ron didn't pick up on that – instead of following the Gryffindors' conversation on Quidditch.

"OK, mate?" the redhead asked, and Harry came to to realize Hermione was also giving him a concerned look.

"Fine, it's just – do either of you remember seeing Malfoy smiling?" If he'd known how to kick himself while sitting on a bench filled with other Gryffindors, Harry would have for even thinking about asking such a thing. "Yeah, I'm just trying to remember something," he said instead.

"Right, then. What is it, and we'll give you a hand." Ron shifted down in his seat, and a fierce, problem-tackling look appeared on his face. Hermione looked attentive. It was warming though a bit presumptuous, Harry thought, for his friends to assume that what with the countless things the three of them had been through together Harry couldn't possibly be trying to remember something that didn't involve them. And at least ten times in the course of all their adventures, the thought continued, he'd given them good reason to think he was crazy. No reason to make eleven for something as worthless as Draco Malfoy.

"It's, uh, something Dudley said to me once," Harry improvised with just about the only thing he could think of that his friends wouldn't know about him.

"Cor, Harry, why's that so important?"

"It was a bully thing; I thought if I could remember, it might give us an advantage over Malfoy."

"Ah," Ron grinned in understanding, while Hermione rolled her eyes in a good-natured way and Harry thought with irritation that even his excuses were coming back to Malfoy today. Malfoy and his blasted smile. Something that shouldn't be important at all – and wouldn't be if he could just remember one way or the other whether it had ever happened.

A flash of inspiration hit Harry when he stepped into the dormitory that night. He'd been hanging about in the common room, determinedly trying to keep his mind on the conversations buzzing around him and offering a few not-very-helpful hints to Seamus, who'd been quickly learning why most of the other Gryffindors refused to play chess with Ron. But the pretense had been too much bother to keep up, and he'd headed for the stairs, muttering something about turning in early. Then the sight of the dorm window and his bed… Of course the smile was from the time Malfoy had flown to that window after all the other Gryffindors were asleep and crawled inside. He'd jerked open the curtains around Harry's bed, grinning like a madman, saying, "This is the book I was talking about, Potter." The laughter had come when he'd climbed onto the bed, twitched the drapes shut again, and the two of them had spent more than an hour pouring over the book, hooting and plotting…

It was after the Gryffindor-Slytherin match in their third year. Harry'd caught the Snitch, of course, and as the two boys spiraled slowly back to earth, Draco let out an exaggerated sigh and moaned, "Sure, you're a hell of a Quidditch player, Potter, but that's all you'll ever manage to do with that broom."

"That is what brooms are for, you know," Harry returned smugly.

Draco's expression was one of pure mock horror. "Gah, your ignorance!" he exclaimed. "I'll have you know I've got a book of 2,000 other things to do with brooms, none of which you'll ever be any good at."

"You're completely failing to spoil my victory. You're making this up, and if you weren't I'd be able to do just as many stupid stunts as you."

"Idiot Muggle-raised sod," Draco grinned as they touched earth. He left Harry to be swallowed by the jubilant throng of his teammates and strutted off the pitch just as arrogantly as if he'd won the game.

And that night he brought the book, which truly was titled 2,000 Things to Do With Brooms Besides Quidditch. There was a chapter insisting that brooms were not outdated as a mode of transportation since the discovery of Apparition and, as Harry had guessed, a chapter on stunt flying. But there was also a chapter on "Dumbest Things Ever Attempted with Brooms," which included a blurb on a (shamefully wealthy) wizard who'd had a thing for matchstick models and decided to construct a life-sized, hovering Big Ben out of Nimbus 1080s. Aberforth Dumbledore had been granted a number of pages for his invention of a goat-drawn broom chariot and the goat saddle that allowed his favorite creatures to ride (though not steer) brooms.

"You think it'd actually be a good thing if I did stuff like this?" Harry laughed incredulously.

Their eyes had widened at the several chapters in the "Bedroom Uses of Brooms" section, which were filled with unspeakable things they were only just beginning to understand.

And there was a chapter on broom-based practical jokes.

"We're so doing this to Snape!" Harry said.

"Not Snape."

"Oh, come on, you have to admit it sooner or later."

"Not Snape."

"Fine, Filch then."

"Of course."

The prank in question involved shrinking a broomstick to half its normal length and charming it to fly about for a day in incredibly close proximity to someone's nether regions. You could then shout out at any time you happened to see them that day, "Someone's got a broomstick up his arse!" Harry couldn't remember if they'd really gone through with it…

Because none of it had ever happened. That wasn't the way the third year Quidditch match had ended. Not to mention that the entire situation was completely impossible…

Impossible, but also perfectly clear in Harry's mind. He stared in horror at the window and wondered if he'd actually be able to sleep in his bed tonight. What the hell was he thinking? Remembering things that had never…oh. Oh.

Harry hurried through the snow with Ron and Hermione beside him. No one spoke, but they all wore secretive grins, and Harry knew his friends were doing the same thing he was – brewing fantastic plans of Christmas cheer and presents, especially presents. It was an unofficial sort of tradition at Hogwarts – the November Hogsmeade visit was for browsing through all the shops, storing up gift ideas and noticing things to drop hints about for the next month. The December visit was for actually picking up all the goodies.

Personally, he was pretty sure he'd order Ron and Ginny the best Keeper's and Chaser's gloves Quality Quidditch Supplies had to offer, but something brilliant might jump out at him. The town bookstore didn't hold a single volume that Hermione would find boring; in fact, the safest bet would probably be to get whatever the newest release was come December, just to be sure she hadn't already read it. Hagrid would be embarrassed to receive more than a holiday visit. It looked like it wouldn't be too difficult a day – even if it took an hour or two to hit on something Remus would like there'd still be plenty of time left over to find an 'appropriate' gift for Draco. That would be a bit of a challenge since he had to repay the prat for last year…

The gift came in a deceptively lovely package – silver ribbon curled around a smallish box covered with shiny green paper. "Forget who this was for when you were wrapping?" Harry asked wryly.

"I'll have you know I took pains to get your present exactly right."

"I'll bet you did." Harry ripped the trimmings away, opened the box, and pulled out a pair of garishly pink fuzzy handcuffs. Charmed into the fuzz were purple sequins spelling out 'Weasley Is My King.' For a moment, Harry merely blinked at the fluorescent horror. "I'll never be able to use these," he stated.

The other boy grinned. "Damn, and I thought I'd gotten you something really practical."

"Ron and I don't have that sort of relationship, Draco."

"But…but I was so sure! You don't!"

"Of course not. I'm the dom." Harry reflected that Draco was a very bad influence on him.

It was much more entertaining than the bag of coal Harry left at the foot of Draco's bed.

"Harry? Harry!"

"Huh?" Harry snapped back to reality to find Ron and Hermione a good few paces ahead of him in the snow.

"What are you doing back there, mate? Are you all right?"

"Yeah, yeah fine. Just forgot how to walk for a minute, I guess." It didn't really work as an explanation, but Harry was busy shaking his head, trying to cast out the lingering traces of the horrible memory.

Hermione was looking at him with concern. "You look kind of like you saw a – well, not a ghost, obviously, since you get along perfectly well with Nick, but something…"

"No, I'm fine, really." Or he would be. He hurried to catch up with his friends. It was only a few incidents – that first thing about the book a few days ago, something about making Hedwig and Malfoy's eagle owl race ten laps around the inside of Honeydukes, and something else about skiving off a day of classes last winter. Plus this Christmas thing. Surely it would stop sometime soon. Spells weakened over time, didn't they…usually?

Well, anyway, even if they didn't, he had plenty of real memories to block out these stupid fake ones. And Malfoy seemed fine. Harry'd been watching the Slytherin ever since his first realization about the Pensieve, and the bastard seemed completely, bloody fine. Probably got out of having any side effects at all, Harry thought sourly, just like he gets out of all the detentions. Except that one… Well, side effects or no side effects, Malfoy wasn't showing any signs of trouble, and Harry could be at least that strong. Especially since it would all go away in a little while. Of course it would. And he had Christmas presents to think about. Which were not for Malfoy. Really, he was fine.

But after 'recalling' the Dursleys' Linen Closet Incident made him start chuckling in Transfiguration of all places; after he started feeling paranoid around Colin, wondering if the boy suspected him of perpetrating half of Creevey's Cursing Camera Caper; after he woke up one night from a nightmare about the spiders…oh, the spiders. Oh gods…and Merlin…and swear words, he needed more swear words – Draco would know…fuck Draco! Well, gods and Merlin at least, Ron would kill him if he had any idea there was something in Harry's head like the thing with the spiders. Harry knew for a fact that in the Forbidden Forest the cowardly little wankstain fled from danger like a snitch from a seeker, but now, in his head, Malfoy was in, in Ron's place…

The whole mess definitely seemed to be doing the opposite of going away. And unless 'fine' could be taken to mean 'getting crazier by the day,' Harry was the opposite of fine.

The memories themselves were bad enough – they were disorienting – and nauseating – and they came upon him at unpredictable, difficult times. Far worse, though, were the strange tricks the memories played – disturbing little episodes that weren't memories themselves but seemed to be what happened when his brain forgot to remember what was real and what wasn't. He'd get fleeting urges to laugh at a joke he overheard Malfoy telling – as if the bastard were funny – or to shrug off something appalling he'd done with a ruefully amused 'he's so good at acting like a prat.' Acting. Malfoy was the most sincere prat he knew. It was the only sincere thing about him. Harry found it very upsetting that his brain was so easily confused.