SUMMARY: Harry and Draco did the best they could after the war. Two years later, the dust has settled. As they attempt to raise a child together, Harry feels strong enough to go after answers. When work for the Ministry leaves him picking up clues that hint of Snape's survival, he becomes determined to find him. The curse that he and Draco suffered at different times, may have destroyed their youthful, carefree abandon, but it has given them a reason to try harder for each other and for their family. *Note: Due to the complexity of their relationships, Harry will be intimately involved with Draco, Lucius and Snape at some point.

WARNING: AU, SLASH, BITS OF NON-CON/RAPE, PAST TRAUMA, PAST MPREG

Predawn hours. A muggle condominium. A new start.

Harry made it a point to keep his daughter in his arms all morning. After almost two years, he still had a problem believing she was his. Her white hair against his black, never lost its contrasting shock when he looked at the two of them in the bathroom mirror. She slumped, head down on his shoulder, so that their heads touched as she breathed warmly against him in her sleep. Mouth open, her dimpled arms dangled over his in her onesy. She lay as if she trusted him completely, and that was always amazing to him. After all the darkness in his life, that something so bright, happy, and perfect-magic, could need him and automatically accept him without question, without hesitation, was balm to his soul. It was almost as if everything he'd lost, he'd gotten back a hundred times over in her outstretched hands that reached for him every morning. He never got tired of it. It fed him life. If he hadn't carried her in his body, if he hadn't seen her come out of him, he would never have believed she was his. If he'd had to go through hell so that she could be there, then so be it.

He kissed the top of her head. Now that he had to leave her with her big brother, Draco, he wanted to drink in as much of her love as he could store in his heart for the trip ahead. Two weeks touring with the Ministry campaign wouldn't be very long. But without her, it would feel like a lifetime. He probably wouldn't be going at all except for the pressure put on him to be a role model for young wizards rebuilding their lives after the war. Fuck that. He was nobody's unrealistic expectation. The real reason was that the campaign gave him and Draco the opportunity to take a break. It had been a long time coming. They'd held it together this long because of Iece, who needed them both. They'd spent so much time running from Lucius' reach and recovering, they hadn't had to think of much else. The main priority was stability and safety for Iece. Once they achieved that, the ghosts caught up with them.

They thought it would feel so good to sit still in their own place and plan a future. Little did they know, the calm would only make their pain more obvious. Now that they weren't outrunning it, they spent long hours in separate rooms, getting irritable, and looking at each other like burdened strangers. Iece, was the one thing they still loved together. She should've been the most complicated element in the whole thing. But she was the simplest and the happiest. Still, it wasn't fair to ask her to save his and Draco's friendship. They'd been through too much, and she had to be isolated from that.

When Draco had asked him to accept the Ministry's offer to travel, Harry knew that Draco was asking for a break, for time to himself. Even though he would be keeping his baby sister in Harry's absence, it would still give him valuable time to himself. He could clear his mind better with Harry gone for a few weeks. Neither of them had wanted to say it, that a separation would be good. Hell, requesting separation meant admitting some sort of arrangement. They had no official partnership. They weren't married like Lucius thought. But Iece needed them both. It took both of them to take care of her. She probably wouldn't be alive if Draco hadn't been there to look after her when Harry couldn't so much as lift his head from the trauma of the entire experience. But now that they were sitting still in a nice, new place, they had to answer to some dark things that had caught up with them.

That first year after she was born, the three only really had each other. When everyone saw that Harry wasn't going to die, and his strength returned, he did his best to keep up with Ron and Hermione. It meant everything to hold up his end of the fight and to destroy all the horcruxes like he'd vowed. If they'd known his secret, that he wasn't fully recovered, he would never have gotten to the point of defeating Voldemort face to face, wand to wand. He'd had to keep the pregnancy a secret. Only Draco and Snape had known.

It was bad enough that Ron and Hermione had witnessed the savagery that caused it all. They knew about that and they no longer looked at him the same. They tried not to treat him any differently, but any eye contact immediately triggered wincing at the memory standing between them in all its blatant obviousness. He was the pink elephant they were pretending not to see out of compassion. Harry appreciated the gift of silence. They had their own wounds to nurse, he couldn't expect them to know what to do or say to render the topic neutral, or at least keep himself from being highly offended that they dare throw the matter in his face. There was absolutely no solution. Just get on with life. That was the only path ahead. Don't think about it. Don't think about the thing growing inside of him. It was too small to be significant. Too small to be real. He was alive and more important things needed his attention. He had to focus on that. Besides, at the time, Snape was working on it. Snape was going to come up with a potion or something to make it all go away. His body would return to normal.

That was before he'd found Snape dying in the boathouse. His heart still swelled to leaden weight and sunk to the bottom of that finality. Familiar anger flared. How could someone who scared him so much, who inspired so much hatred, so much command of Harry's focus, lay helpless like that? Snape had no right to be helpless, when he'd intimidated the shit out of Harry since childhood. Nothing could be more wrong than seeing a strong, fierce man, melting in his own tears and blood, as he turned pleading eyes to Harry. Why did Harry have to see that? Why had Snape's final moments become so valuable over time? Why was his aging, stoic and severe features revealed to be so beautiful by the loss of tension in the pristine lines of his mouth? How had that horrible good-bye become precious among all the good-byes Harry had suffered through? He had to see that, he knew, so that he could take the memories when Snape finally offered them. But they were tainted memories, scrambled. There were garbled bits that made no sense. He'd only seen what Snape had wanted him to see, and those were pieced together like some kind of hasty editing job. He'd made do with it, but questions that would never have answers boiled inside of him.

It had all taken its toll. After he defeated Voldemort, he knew that Draco wasn't going anywhere. Draco looked at Iece, the child produced by his father's damaged, sociopathic idea of revenge, like it fell to him entirely to protect her, and he was just glad that Harry had the sense to cooperate with him. Harry was pretty sure, if he ever decided to take her off on his own, he'd have to fight Draco to do it.
The way Draco had taken charge, volunteering his father's business and private information to the Ministry, and turning over the entire Malfoy Collection, a treasury of dark objects the aurors had no knowledge of, he'd won himself consultant status within the Ministry and accepted the offer to intern within the Department of Dangerous Artifacts. Between Snape's and Draco's memories, all the indictments against them both were dropped.

Since accepting the hire, Draco and Harry had to decide between a nanny for Iece, or their own house elf. Neither wanted to have to get used to a new presence in their home when they were just beginning to settle, so the need went unanswered while Harry counseled war-addled youth in Ministry sponsored programs and Draco worked nights.

Draco's face drew close on his decision. "It has to be a house elf. We can't consider anything less."

Harry tried not to see so much of his father in him. "But house elves come with old, wealthy families. And that comes with dark baggage. I don't want her exposed to that way of life."

"And you think giving her a muggle nanny will keep her safe?"

"No. I'm going to keep her safe. But maybe a magical nanny is what we need."

"Maybe? Are you putting your hopes on 'maybe'? How long before we feel we can give our complete trust to a nanny we don't know? Like it or not, Iece has a birth-father whose magic is never going to let him escape notice of the most observant wizards, and a brother practically indoctrinated in illegal arts. Not to mention her father, the one person we don't talk about. We don't know what kind of magic she has, she'll need an experienced house elf who can handle it without our worrying. The loyalty of a house elf is a family asset. We'll go to Gringotts and arrange a Service Contract in the old tradition. They know our blood, they'll find an elf who's right for us."

"That worries me. We'll be just as bound to the elf as it will be to us. I'm not trying to expand my family, I didn't even want this one!"

"Well you got it. Now you have to protect it. That takes magic."

"What if… what if they say that we have to bond? I don't want it to be out of safety or necessity."

Draco looked at him, refusing to be offended. "At the very least, I'll have to sign in blood for co-custody. We don't have to bond. But I would if that's what it took, without question."

What he didn't say, 'Why wouldn't you?' stood evaporating in the air between them.

They had been through too much. Priorities had changed. Draco's stare impaled him, reminding him who was there when Harry had to be screamed at to push. "If you don't push right now, you're going to fuck her up really bad. Her head is soft, Harry. I see it. Dammit, wake up and push!"

Back then, between seeing what Lucius was capable of, Harry's despondency, and an almost lifeless infant in his hands, still bloody and cord attached, Draco's maturity had to kick into high gear. They'd been in hiding for weeks in the seashore cottage Snape had arranged for them, knowing the baby would come. They weren't even sure of their location. There were no other cottages around and the surrounding horizon billowed with willowy grass stretching to woods on one side, and a rocky shore on the other.

Harry's public appearances had been aided by oversized jackets and the fact his male skeletal structure did not push his stomach out like a woman's. Male pelvises tilted back, allowing their abdomens to remain inconspicuous. His stomach remained mostly flat, which wasn't good for him or the child, who did not have enough room to grow without putting too much pressure and strain on Harry's heart and lungs. Professor Snape's last examination predicted she'd be premature and he instructed them where to go when the time came. He'd blasted Draco with a burst of severe and specific instructions on what to do immediately after she was born, as if he'd known it would fall to Draco to keep them safe. He'd certainly known that he wouldn't be there to help.

Snape had gotten Harry through the physical aftermath of Lucius' attack. On the night that it happened, Draco had his house elf apperate Ron, Hermione, and Harry, to an empty vacation home the Malfoys weren't currently using in Scotland. Hermione then risked detection wards at Hogwarts to try to get Madame Pompfrey's attention. Snape's modified wards as Headmaster, intercepted her and she'd come face to face with him. Whether it was the trial of seeing and enduring what had happened to Harry, being surprised by Snape, or the stress of holding herself together, her shock gave him two seconds of helpless desperation that had him looking into her mind and demanding of her, "Where is he?"

She'd told Ron and Draco afterwards, "He totally saw Harry in my mind. I couldn't stop him. But at the same time, I felt his alarm. I felt that he cared. It wasn't a lie, and I had to trust him."

At the time, Ron and Hermione were still clueless to most of Dumbledore's plans and did not know that he'd ordered his own death by Snape's hands. When they learned the truth, it seemed to take the last of the fight out of them. And by then, both Voldemort and Snape were gone.

Draco never forgot the look on Snape's face when confronted with Harry's injuries at the hands of his old friend. Draco could practically see the moment when Snape severed that friendship and hid his rage from them in order to tend to Harry's wounds. Confidence orchestrated his care and looked like gift box perfection on his closed expression. As he'd watched Snape's hands wring out water and run a cloth gently over Harry's skin, Draco waited for Snape to spin on his heels and scream at him, as if knowing he should bear the brunt of whatever punishment his father deserved. But that didn't happen. Snape had asked them all to step outside. When Draco refused to go, he permitted it. Draco had been allowed to stay in the room and watch over Harry, as if Snape didn't have to be told that Draco couldn't leave Harry's side even if he wanted to. His father had done this to Harry, and it was up to him to stay alert, present, and help where he could. Only a sharper snap to Snape's voice, tightly wound instructions, and a tell-tale tremor to otherwise expert hands, revealed the lava flowing beneath the surface.

Draco wondered why Snape bothered with water and cloths, and didn't just use spells to clean and heal everything. Then he realized, the way Snape repeatedly, methodically squeezed warm water between his fingers and let it stream Harry's blood clear, was part of a healing spell. He watched for the movement of Snape's lips, but saw instead, the penetration of his eyes as he infused some unspoken intention into Harry. It occurred to Draco that whatever this slow method was, it used the warmth of the water to soothe its way into Harry's body and mind. Harry's face was no longer scrunched in pain. He even opened his eyes, half-lidded, before letting them close again.

When Snape could do no more for him, he'd ordered Draco, "Keep yourselves here. Stay hidden. It isn't safe for him to apperate again right now. As soon as it is, I want you to take him to a very specific location. You'll be safe there. I'll look in on you when I can. You must not let him leave until I give him the clear."

Harry had recovered, but not like they'd hoped. It wasn't a full recovery and his friends could scarcely keep him from charging off to destroy the next horcrux as soon as he felt stronger. Snape had known that he wouldn't be there when Harry would need the greatest help. He made Draco repeat his own instructions to him.

"As soon as she comes out, what are you going to do?"

"Use the suction tube. Look at her coloring, her breathing, her reflexes."

"If her face is blue?"

"Use the suction tube again, to clean out her mouth and throat."

"If she needs oxygen, what instruments will you use and how much pressure?"

"The thread tube and the respirator. An eighth of pressure, twelve second intervals, or the line you've marked. Keep her on it, check every six hours to see if she can breathe normally on her own. The indention in her sternum will show if she's struggling."

"And if she appears to need greater help?"

"Go get the witch, 'Jackie,' working at the muggle chemist at Lumbers and Brimm intersection. Bring her here, don't try to apperate the baby. Jackie will have her medical room shrunken, but should not be contacted unless we have no other choice."

It was Draco who cleaned up the mess and made sure Harry had a clean bed at all times. Draco, who learned to change those first two weeks of diapers that Snape had stored for them? Draco, who made sure they were all fed, even when Harry refused to acknowledge that his flat chest was leaking something disgusting. Snape had left tonics and nutrient liquids, along with instructions on how to use them. But they went through them, and they had to leave their hiding place eventually. The infant's needs forced Draco to apperate, to enter a muggle grocery and to use actual muggle money to purchase formulaic substitutes for milk.

She took to them, as if her tiny presence was doing its best to help and not be a burden. Snape's instructions had said not to move her from the place for at least a month. The entire property contained incubation spells designed to assist her immune system and develop her lungs. After a while, the extra wards worked to calm them all and give them a sense of security. That sense, let Harry come to the decision that he would face whatever was going on, whether he knew how to deal with it or not. When he did, he realized that not only was Draco doing everything for the baby, Draco didn't trust Harry with it. When Harry asked for her, a surprise to them both, Draco refused. That's when it sunk in, how badly he must've been behaving. His attitude. His entire outlook. Before anger could right itself within him, he understood the wide, dark caution in Draco's eyes. Evidently, he'd behaved so dreadfully, Draco had reason to think he'd toss the baby against the wall the minute he got his hands on her.

Harry attempted to defend himself. "I don't hate her. I wouldn't hurt her."

Draco had shaken his head slowly. Gravely. "You haven't touched her. She was born two weeks ago and you're just now looking at her."

"If I wanted to hurt her, I could've ended it before she was born."

"Why didn't you?"

"You kept talking me out of it. Anybody else, you couldn't care less. Just another bin-baby. Happens all the time. But you guilted me into it. After Snape told us her gender, you kept calling her your sister and telling me you had to make this right. 'Don't punish her just because my father deserves to be punished,' you said."

"You didn't keep her for me. I need to hear that you didn't just keep her for me. If that's true, then sign her over to me. You don't need to hold her if the only reason she's here, is because I begged you to go through with it. She's better off without you."

Harry didn't know what to make of that, let alone what to say. That actually hurt. He thought he could get by with laughing out loud at the absurd idea of Draco taking on a baby, but when he opened his mouth, tears and screams came with it. "She's fucking mine and I'll deal with it! You don't get to decide that I'm crazy just because I can't simply bounce back from this. You don't get to decide that I should just be overcome with joy and ready to be a fucking father. Yes, father! I can't even begin to think in terms of the other. They're just fucking words, Draco. Snape said my body would go back to normal and I'm counting on that. She's mine, no matter what words we use and I gotta start thinking in a way I can cope with. If it's taking me two weeks to be able to look at what your father did to me, then so fucking be it! I'm wounded, I'm not crazy. At least let me look at my fucking daughter. And don't you ever accuse me of doing anything to hurt her ever again. I, of all people, know what it's like to be unwanted. I wouldn't have her, then put her through that fucking hell."

That, apparently, was the conviction Draco needed to hear. He'd gently handed his sister to him.

Harry tried not to flinch when the pink, scrawny, four pound thing squirmed against him. She was a thing to him, something he needed to face, like a tragic car accident. He might not have liked his circumstances, but he steeled himself not to take it out on her. He had no idea what he was supposed to do with her, and she represented the bleakest part of his life.

But her fingers were so tiny and perfect, even down to her fingernails. Her fists showed paper-thin, translucent blue veins, and made little knuckles. She was real. A real baby. A girl.

For a second, dread paused and amazement peeked in. He'd expected the worst. All the months he'd raged against changes and discomforts in his body, that he'd kept secret, even from Draco, he'd been pushing and running from the worst. He'd half expected something with wings and fangs, if his feelings had played any part in shaping it. Maybe it was because he'd set his expectations so low, that when he really looked at her, the sheer fact that she looked like a normal baby, astonished him.

His first instinct was to avoid peering too deeply into her face. But when it wasn't that bad, he stared, transfixed. Where did all that white hair come from? He knew, but it still seemed impossible. It felt bigger than just her hair. There was too much of it for a newborn, and it stood in patch tufts, curling over her soft spot. She already had Draco's coloring, but Harry supposed, by the tawny edge of her hairline, that might change. He tried not to focus on the hair, to make too much of it, because that was just the sort of thing he shouldn't do. Draco wasn't her father. The hair practically laughed at all kinds of irony. There were worse things that he could be looking at. At least she looked complete and what passed for healthy, as far as he could tell. New babies never looked right to him anyway. They didn't look right till they'd plumped up a bit. Her thin legs and balled toes told him she had a ways to go. All that glacier-colored hair wasn't her fault.

Draco stood over him, reading his mind. "It'll probably turn black." It sounded like an apology. "By the time she's school age, it'll go dark. That's what usually happens when the parents are…different."

Harry knew that Draco didn't mean 'different'. He meant less than pureblood.

"She's perfect," he assured Draco a little indignantly. It wasn't her fault her genetics screamed so boldly where everyone else's were subtle. He could either choose to see Lucius spitting in his face through her, or he could see how brilliant she was, in spite of being just as much a victim of the war as any of them were.

He counted the veins showing through her closed eyelids and decided she'd gotten more than her father's hair. And whose pristine little mouth was that, anyway? Not his, not his parents. In fact, she didn't look anything like him. That was amazing.

"Her eyebrows will be shaped like yours, they've got your lines."

Harry winced, and laughed in spite of himself. "I don't see it, but thanks for trying."

Draco smiled. "Sorry. My father is a very thorough asshole, I know."

The smile disappeared from Harry's face.

"Sorry." Draco shrugged.

Harry reached across the bed and took his hand. "It's okay."

It was. Kinda. Sometimes Harry cursed Lucius without holding back. Sometimes Draco joined him. This led to Draco thinking it might be okay to speak of his father around Harry, as long as he was insulting him. When Harry made a point to change the subject, that clued Draco that it was too much.

He blurted, "So, did you name her yet?"

Draco's mouth fell open, but not without widening into a grin. "I had to call her something. It's not official. You were asleep, so I started calling her… Nicee, for some god-awful reason."

Harry scrunched his face. "Nicee? Where'd that come from?"

"I don't know, look at her. When it's quiet and she's the only one you have to talk to, you just look at her and think cold, remote magic. She's going to be a total fucking princess, Harry. And not the kind that waits for rescuing in a tower. I'm sorry, but my father's magic is all over her. The best we can do is guide it. We'll make sure she's not the monster he is. But it's magic most people wouldn't be comfortable with. She makes me feel like, if magic were a thermostat, her setting has to be at a level that renders lesser magic dysfunctional. She'll thrive where others will be severely uncomfortable."

Harry wanted to remark on Draco's vivid imagination, but he found only one word popping out of his mouth. "Thermostat?"

"I'm having to take a few muggle courses as part of my internship. And yes. Look at her, there's nothing subtle about her. Why in the hell does she have such dark eyes? Nobody in my family has eyes like that. I kept waiting on them to turn grey, or green, or even hazel. But no, it's been two weeks and they're really dark. For a minute, I thought she might be blind, but if you hold something shiny in front of her, they'll focus and she gets all twitchy like she wants it. Everything about her, her birth, her appearance, her magic, is set to a different standard."

Harry sighed, "No, Draco. Please don't start with that superiority thing again."

"I didn't say it was superior. I said it was different. If you ignore that her magic might have specific needs and characteristics, and try to make her fit in with everything around her, you could do more harm than good. We'll not hold her back just because others might not be up to speed with her. And that's the cold part. That's going to be misunderstood because of her looks. She came here to do something, and she's not going to wait on anyone to understand her."

Harry squeezed his eyes shut. "Stop, stop, stop. Oh my god, I'm glad I'm awake now. You've spent way too much time conversing with an infant. Get out, get some fresh air. Apperate. Do something fun and just for you. I promise, I can take care of her today. You're driving yourself crazy."

Draco held his tongue, but folded his arms. "Okay then. I knew you'd react that way. If you're so practical and alert, what's her name?"

Harry shook his head. "I really haven't thought about it. But it's not Nicee."

Harry touched the soft skin between her barely formed eyebrows. A string of gentle 'ssssssss' whistled through his teeth. It sounded like Parsel tongue, and he saw Draco stiffen. "You're close. It wants to be that sound. It wants to be air straight through. It's a name we've never heard before, that's why it's not obvious. Look at her, it's silver ice and black eyes. It's ice. It's a whisper."

"We're not naming our daughter 'Ice'.

"Technically, she's not 'our' daughter."

"Technically, I will bash you over the head right now and take her, if you don't give her a decent name."

Harry sighed again. He wanted to show his gratefulness to Draco, but be fair to the baby. "What about a combination? Not 'Ni-cee', but 'I-eese'. Spelled I-e-c-e. Still has two syllables."

Draco considered it. "I suppose. I'm still going to call her Nicee."

Harry stroked her head and added, "Iece Lillian-Severus Potter."

The name stood in the air between them. Harry waited for Draco to ask the obvious. When Draco didn't, he breathed easier. They both new why Severus' name was in there. It was as logical as why the name 'Malfoy' was not. Where would they be without Snape?

From her blanket, shiny dark eyes squinted up at him. Harry hoped she wouldn't need glasses. He didn't want anything coming between him and those interested irises. White glacier hair, and black ice for eyes. It would be some time before he understood where those eyes came from.

A/N: Please review! :-)