Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Five—Life Goes On

Draco gave his mother a slow smile. "Because I want to know."

"I cannot conceive why you would want to know something so ridiculous."

Patience, Draco reminded himself. She still doesn't believe the mirror magic is real. She wasn't there to witness both Potter and I fading.

It seemed typical of his luck that his wife, who cared only to make his life miserable, was the one who had seen. But Draco was not in the mood to rant at the unfairness of fate right now. He wanted his mother to give him any hints that Potter might have dropped about his symptoms, so that Draco could begin his research in a broader arena than merely relying on his own perceptions.

He therefore raised an eyebrow at his mother and arranged his face in a subtly pleading look, and, as it usually had since he mastered it at the age of six, that expression worked on his mother. Narcissa sighed loudly and put her quill down. She'd been writing a letter to the Ministry, probably another explanation of why they couldn't simply lower the wards and let Aurors into the Manor.

"Potter mentioned mirrors," she said. "He asked if you were having visions. And that is all he said, Draco Lucius." She gave him a stare that might have been intimidating if Draco hadn't been long accustomed to seeing its elder and darker cousin on his father's face. "I would rather that you applied yourself to the study of rhetoric than worried about magic that does not exist."

Draco gave her a faint smile and turned away without answering. His mother still thought he could become a formidable speaker, and win election to the Wizengamot. He had tried to explain that the name of Malfoy no longer carried the weight it had in the past, and she had immediately snapped that it could, if he would just work at it.

He had the knowledge he had come for. He could afford to smile.

He entered his study and locked the door behind him with a Knot Spell that tied in to the wards of the house. The only one who might possibly be able to undo it was his mother, and even she would take enough time for the wards to vibrate and warn him. Draco crossed to the desk in the center of the study—large and made of gleaming walnut wood, it had once been his father's—and sat down in the chair behind it, which was black and had carved silver dragons climbing the legs.

He laid out a fresh sheet of parchment in front of him, and arranged an inkwell and quill next to it with precise movements. He felt an alien emotion sweeping through his chest, and paused.

No, not alien. Like the feeling of freedom he had discovered on Potter's leaving, it had merely been a long time since he experienced it. This was the same mixture of mischief and clear thought that had occupied him when he devised the SUPPORT CEDRIC DIGGORY badges, or the song that proclaimed "Weasley is Our King," before the Gryffindors twisted his magnificent creation to their own purposes. He had a wonderful, marvelous idea, and he only needed to go through a few steps to produce it.

Smiling, Draco dipped his quill in the ink and began to write down everything he knew about the mirror magic he and Potter had experienced.

We both reacted strongly to seeing each other again.

This suggests that Potter has been seeing me in mirrors, even as I have seen him.

We both began to fade. Potter won't admit it, but I see no reason his reaction should be dissimilar to mine, and in any case he grabbed hold of me and shouted that thinking of my family was the way to stop "it." How would he know what "it" was, or how to stop it, unless he had experienced it himself?

Thinking of Scorpius stopped the shaking, the fading, and the tilting. Potter must have thought of his family, too, or perhaps his children. He can be anchored in the same way I can.

This suggests he was fading for the same reason.

Conclusion: Magic through the mirrors is affecting us in the same ways.

Draco had to pause to wet his quill again, and then he began the list of differences between them.

1. I see detailed visions of what look like us embracing, arguing, and sleeping together in the mirrors. Perhaps Potter's visions are not as detailed.

2. He wishes to run away from this. I wish to face it. (Strange that a Gryffindor should be such a coward).

3. I am imprisoned in my home by my inability to look at reflections or escape their haunting. Potter appears to have led a relatively normal life.

4. My scars he inflicted on me burn. His scars from the Dark Lord burn.

Another pause to wet the quill.

I can't come to certain conclusions yet—for example, that Potter has escaped the worst of the mirror-haunting because he wants to ignore it—because I don't know enough details.

Nor can I say for certain what those differences mean.

But I do know I want my life back, and it seems reasonable enough to suggest that I should be able to attain it whether or not Potter is willing to help me.

We're connected in some way; the magic suggests that. I don't know the source of the connection, but I can research it.

We are tied by:

Being born in the same year.

Experiences as schoolmates.

Mutual hatred.

Having once used the same wand.

Life-debts.

The last word sheared off into a smear of ink as Draco looked up, wide-eyed, at the far wall of the study. His breath was coming fast, and his mind was tracing out a path that felt unfamiliar. Of course, he had always avoided thinking about that last year of the war—the year that had proven him a useless weakling in the most pointed of ways—as much as possible.

He'd once written an essay on life-debts for History of Magic. He couldn't remember most of what he'd learned, he'd have to look it up again, but one sentence still stood out in his mind, probably because it had been the one interesting fact he'd collected from an otherwise dusty tome.

Multiple life-debts tying a pair can make for strange circumstances.

Couldn't they just? And he and Potter had mutual life-debts. Potter had saved him from the burning Room of Hidden Things. He'd Stunned a Death Eater a short time later who had been about to curse Draco; Draco would not have admitted it at the time if someone pressed him, but he knew that sudden bolt of red light out of nowhere had been Potter.

But there were also life-debts the other way around. His mother had saved Potter's life, as he'd told Scorpius, and that was the very bond she'd called on to ensure that Potter helped them with Draco's murder accusation. True, that was not a debt owed to Draco directly, but it was owed to his family. When members of a pure-blood family considered themselves as a single unit, the way that Narcissa tended to do when thinking of the Malfoys, then the debt could still tie a child of that family and the person who owed it together.

And…

Draco rapped his quill thoughtfully against his hand. He could not hurry the thought forming in his mind right now, and he knew better than to ignore it. Something was bubbling towards the surface. He merely had to wait until it burst.

And then it did.

He remembered Greyback bringing Potter and his friends to the Manor. (And why was the memory so clear? Had he really done so little with himself since the war that it was the most exciting thing his mind could think of to detail?) Potter's face had been swollen, but Granger was still recognizable. He had waffled, refusing to identify any of them. It had not been the bravest stand he could have taken, but it would have been so easy to speak the exact words, and condemn the Savior to death. He'd held Potter's life in his power, even if only for a few moments.

And he'd given it back to him.

It might count as a fourth debt.

And even if it didn't, Draco thought, standing and moving about the room as excitement tore through him, the magic connecting them might actually be more powerful that way. It was an uncertain debt, a wavering circumstance that could be a channel for the connection or might not be.

Under such conditions, might the power binding them behave, well, erratically? Might it not seek outlets that would seem strange and would not match the natural symptoms of a life-debt?

Draco thought it might.

He cast a spell that would reveal to him which books on his shelves concerned life-debts, and a soft blue glow wreathed ten or fifteen of them. He set about pulling them down, a small, fixed smile on his lips.

He told himself not to be too excited. He told himself that, after all, the answer might be something else entirely, and he couldn't expect to solve a mystery of ten years' duration in the course of one morning.

But he thought he might be on the correct track. And if he was, then all he and Potter had to do to sever the connections between them was fulfill the life-debts. Draco could name the payments if Potter refused to, and once he knew the truth, Potter would probably be most anxious to accept whatever he offered.

Draco would then be the brave one in this mess, the strong one, the one who had faced what their connections meant while Potter preferred to cower and turn his face away.

He would have proved he could do something, other than sit at home and brood on the waste his life had become.

His mouth watered at the thought of it, and at the thought of determining the course of his own life after this—not being what his mother or wife wanted but what he wanted to be, without his own faults to hold him back any longer.

Uninterrupted. Free.

Whole.

"You don't think it's funny?" Teddy grinned up at Harry through a mask of half-melted ice cream. "I think it's funny."

"And since when do you get to have an opinion?" Harry growled, but the growl was half-hearted and he knew it. When Teddy grinned, he saw Tonks looking out of his godson's face. It was the same reason he found it so much harder to get angry at Albus than at James. For all that Al had Harry's coloring and looked nothing like the late Headmaster, he had a way of appearing downcast and pitiful that reminded Harry of Dumbledore as he'd learned to see him ten years ago.

"Since you take me out in public, and then blush like Victoire does when I joke with her," said Teddy promptly, leaning back against the seat of Florean Fortescue's and devouring half his remaining ice cream without a pause for breath. Harry shook his head as chocolate dripped down Teddy's cheeks and crawled across his arms like a host of breeding snakes. Andromeda would yell at him for that one, Harry was certain, unless he gave Teddy a quick shower with Aquamenti before he took him home. "They're just looking at you, Uncle Harry. Why the long face?"

Harry shook his head again. He couldn't explain to Teddy how much the stares and murmurs when they went out in public embarrassed him, even years later. Teddy thought it was rather wonderful that Harry had defeated Voldemort, and had demanded story after story about Uncle Harry in the Chamber of Secrets and Uncle Harry in the Triwizard Tournament. He had, however, declared that his version of defeating Voldemort would have involved more of the Sword of Gryffindor and less of dying to save everybody.

Harry hoped Teddy would understand it from his perspective someday, but, in the meantime, he loved the boy too much to refuse when he asked to go to Diagon Alley and eat ice cream. A few stares were a small price to pay to watch Teddy grin like Tonks, and make sweeping gestures of his arm in which Harry saw Remus in the mad enthusiasm of teaching, and imitate others' voices with a sarcastic touch that was all his own.

Of course, someone ended up pulling on his sleeve and murmuring in awed tones, "Mr. Potter, sir?" Harry mustered a smile and turned around to see a small witch bobbing up and down so fast that her pointed hat seemed to be beneath the level of the table more often than above it.

"Yes?" he asked, keeping the smile intact even when she thrust a quill and a roll of parchment towards him.

"Could you—" She sniffled and rubbed at her face with a bright yellow handkerchief for a moment, then peered at him shyly above it. "Could you just write, 'To Aminta, from Harry Potter'? My daughter—Aminta—she was crippled when they tortured her during the war, and she doesn't get out much, but she just adores you. Reads all the articles the Prophet prints about you. And she'd never be so bold as to approach you herself—oh, she'll be so embarrassed when she finds out I did, I can just hear her saying, 'Mother'! now—but she'd treasure your signature all her born days. I know she will."

Harry supposed his smile was wan, but he couldn't help flinching as he thought that Aminta had probably been Muggleborn, or one of the brave pure-bloods who tried to look past differences and help those the wizarding world was persecuting, if she'd been crippled for her efforts. "Of course," he said, and signed as she requested. The witch uttered a soft little sound of rapture and took the parchment and quill from him when he was done, cradling them like babies.

"Thank you, oh thank you!" she cried, and hesitated. Before Harry knew what she was doing, she swooped in, kissed his cheek, and then ran away into the crowd in the middle of the Alley, now and then kicking up her heels beneath her robes. Said crowd took that as their cue to applaud.

Harry picked up his ice cream dish and held it against his face. It still retained a faint hint of the spells that had kept the sweet intact until it reached him, and that might help to cool his burning cheeks.

"See," Teddy said complacently, eyeing his last scoop of chocolate like an Auror planning how to best attack a Death Eater stronghold, "if that were me, I would have asked if her daughter's pretty."

"I'll have you know I'm married," Harry retorted lightly. "Remember Aunt Ginny?"

"Just asking if a girl's pretty doesn't count," Teddy said, and then appeared to inhale the chocolate. "Not enough to hurt, anyway." He looked up at his godfather and shook his head in ten-year-old disapproval. "I would use my fame for all sorts of great things. I can't think why you don't."

Harry shrugged. It was simpler than trying to explain how each little glance seemed to cut a piece of his soul out of him, remove parts that should be private and reserved for Ginny and his family. Harry hated being a public figure more than he had ever known he would for precisely that reason. He should be able to choose who he shared himself with, and it didn't seem he could.

And, of course, there was the fact that he'd done steady but not noteworthy work in the Blood Reparations Department ever since the war. It was good work, needed work, and he was proud to be doing it, but there was a difference between it and the heroics that had gone on during the war and which the wizarding public seemed to think were the only kinds of deeds worth their reverence. Harry had done his last "heroic" act ten years ago. Why did they feel the need to keep avidly staring at him, as if it were only yesterday?

"Done!" Teddy announced.

Harry looked at his godson, and had to laugh. Teddy had turned his hair the exact color of the ice cream spattered all over him, so that it looked as if he were much messier than he really was.

"Done, indeed," Harry said, drawing his wand, reaching for his godson's arm, and preparing to Apparate. "But we're coming in near the pond, so that you can have a short swim first."

Teddy's squeal of pretended outrage and real delight was cut off as they disappeared.

Draco blew the dust off the page he was examining, and leaned forwards to make sure the relevant paragraph was written the way he thought it was written. He chuckled when he made it out.

Life-debts are one of the least understood forms of magic that connects wizard and wizard, less researched (because less common) than doubled spells or the use of Time-Turners (see Why Time Does Not Like Wizarding-Kind for more on the use of Time-Turners). However, all experts agree that they linger in the lives of those who owe them and those they are owed to until something is done to fulfill them. If one member of the pair dies before fulfillment comes, the burden of the debt is passed on to their surviving children, heirs, or siblings. Multiple debts increase the obligation and the amount of magic that surrounds the pair, sometimes resulting in truly strange effects not unlike those seen when unusual weather prevails (for example, the combination of a full moon and an Aurora Borealis). However, the fulfillment of the obligation will diminish these effects and eventually remove them altogether—as long as both parties are willing to offer full effort, one into giving and the other into accepting the gift.

Draco sat back and smiled at the bookshelf, then marked his place with a scrap of parchment and shut the tome gently. It was obvious that Potter wouldn't be able to ignore the bonds tying them together much longer, not if he liked living.

He would have to accept two gifts from Draco, and offer him one in return, as well as continuing with his investigation of the threats against the Malfoys from their unknown enemies.

Draco spent the rest of the evening playing with Scorpius and entertaining himself with thoughts of what "gifts" he could give Potter. It was the most fun he'd had in ages, and he went to sleep that night with a smile on his face for the first time in—forever, actually.

"I don't really care that you're sleeping with him," Ron growled. "Not for Ginny's sake, I mean. She's given up on you. But—Harry, you can't expect me to accept a Malfoy into my house!"

This isn't real, this isn't real, I'm in love with Ginny and have kids with her, I would never date Draco—

But the ponderous force of the dream descended on him, and swept away his objections. The Harry he was in the dream, nineteen and stubborn and proud as a hippogriff, stepped forwards and took over from the rational voice of his actual self. The adult Harry could only watch helplessly from the back of his own head.

"You'll accept him into your house, Ron," he said, "because if I'm going to hold my birthday celebration here, then I want Draco able to attend. You don't have to get along with him or praise him to his face. But you'll be marginally polite to him, and you'll let him in here."

Ron rubbed a hand over his face. Hermione sighed and pushed a quill back behind her ear. She agreed with Harry, but she had already said that she wouldn't try to make peace between them over Malfoy, that it was something Harry and Ron needed to work out for themselves.

Harry wished it wouldn't be so hard. Ron and Hermione's kitchen was a pleasant place, decorated with the various awards Hermione had already started earning as she began to set up the Blood Reparations Department and the Order of Merlin a grateful Ministry had awarded Ron for his part in destroying the locket Horcrux—though the number of people in the know was still rather small, and so they'd vaguely stated it was for "services to the wizarding community." Light came in through a tiny window, but Hermione's spells enhanced it so that they practically seemed to be standing outdoors. He could imagine Draco here so easily, light glinting off his hair, exchanging amicable sneers with Ron while he argued with Hermione over how much certain pure-blood families should pay to the Muggleborns they'd tortured. He didn't know why Ron's imagination worked more slowly.

"You know I love you, Harry," Ron said lowly. "But if it means having him here…I don't know, maybe you should have your party in the Manor after all."

Hermione cut in before Harry could speak, and in a way that Harry had never expected. In one smooth movement, she pulled her quill from behind her ear and stuck the sharpened tip in Ron's hand.

"OW!" Ron howled, holding his bleeding hand to his mouth. His words emerged muffled from around it, but recognizable. "Hermione! You stabbed me!"

"I've been patient, Ron," Hermione said, disregarding this entirely. "But this is ridiculous. Harry's just asking for the possible, not the miraculous. You know you can get along with Malfoy if you just try. So we are inviting our best friend and his partner here for Harry's birthday, and that is final." She turned primly away from her husband and nodded to Harry. "I hope that—Draco—" she only grimaced slightly before she said his name, which Harry thought was impressive "—will understand this bargain applies to him too, mind," she said warningly. "If Ron makes an effort and Draco doesn't, I will be very upset."

Harry smiled. No one wanted to make Hermione upset; Draco had already confessed to Harry how scared he was of her. "Thanks, Hermione. I'll tell him."

Harry opened his eyes. He spent some time reassuring himself that the sheets beneath him were the plain cotton Ginny had always favored, not silk, and that the figure beside him was definitely female, with red hair, not male with blond.

But his scars burned, and his breathing came short, and the sense of the incredible reality of the dream lingered with him still. He could feel, like a ghost of sensation, his happiness that Hermione had intervened and told Ron off, and his glee at the thought of going back to Draco and telling him of the bargain.

He passed a hand across his eyes, and grimaced. I'm almost to the point of agreeing with Malfoy about doing what we can to end this. I don't want to be unfaithful to Ginny, even in my dreams.

When he heard a tapping on the window, for a moment he wondered if time had looped back and somehow he was living, again, the night when Narcissa had owled him to demand payment for the life-debt. But the burning in his scars continued to fade, instead of flaring up again. He opened the window and let the owl in with a certain wariness anyway; he couldn't help it.

This owl wasn't the same one that had carried Narcissa's message. She was smaller, black, with bright cold eyes. She held out her leg to him with dainty precision, and Harry again took the letter and entered the corridor to read it. He thought he heard Ginny sigh as he went, but when he glanced back, she hadn't moved.

The letter was as small as the owl, and as to the point.

Mr. Potter:

I have information to convey to you, information that my mother-in-law and husband would not want to reach you, but which I feel you should know.

Marian Malfoy.