"The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history." - O.W, holly and couch doze, The House That Dripped Blood - Mountain Goats

EPILOGUE

The Place

He didn't know why he Apparated to the front, a proper introduction, like a guest.

The empty square was just as familiar and stale. Distantly, he heard the scrape of rubbish, unsettled by flat wind between tall buildings. The shabbiness – broken windows and chimneys, the street grime and gutter trash – met him, and he led across dull grass.

He turned to Draco. "Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place."

"Pardon?"

He watched Draco turn, face rapt at what Harry could already see.

Harry pulled at his jumper,

"I haven't been here in a while."

Draco looked, almost patiently - at the window scum, the peeled black paint - and Harry felt something uneasy, like regret. But - Draco moved, and picked something from the broken gate. Climbing ivy, grown in sparse ropes and crispy, dead.

He pocketed it. "Okay."

Harry climbed the stone steps and touched the silver serpent doorknocker - clicks and chains rang behind the door, in a metallic clang, and Draco looked at him. He passed the threshold, and was plunged into a sudden, unnatural closet darkness. Harry grabbed his wrist,

"Close your mouth and hold your breath."

"I'm sorry?"

"Severus Snape?"

Harry moved forward slightly at the bodiless whisper, "I didn't kill you," he said in a loose murmur, and was shot in the mouth, as his tongue clamped up. Something at the end of the hall exploded in a puff, indistinct and sudden but Draco was still stiff behind him and exhaled,

"The fuck."

"It's – from the war," Harry said, and turned around to see Draco's wide eyes, taking it in. "The Order, you know."

Draco looked at him. "This is –"

Harry nodded and looked around, at the dank, tight hallway. Everything papery and peeling, withering and wrinkled like an old book made of human skin. The damn troll's leg, still knocked over at the end with the lingering dust cloud –

And for a moment, he completely forgot why he wanted to come here.

"Grimmauld Place."

"Oh," Draco said after a moment, breathily. "I get it. It's all grime and mould."

"Not quite."

He felt Draco shadow him down the hallway, the portraits breathing on either side, and stopped at the staircase. He touched the chipped banister.

"Your," Draco said. "House."

"Hmm?"

"Ancestral House," and he sounded like someone else.

Harry saw the small, uneasy downward curl of his lip. "I inherited it. Sirius."

Draco nodded in slow slopes, regarding him. "Of course," he whispered.

Harry peered up at the climbing blocks of staircases. Moth-eaten curtains hid doors around him. Some he hadn't been through.

Back at the flat, Draco had asked - not really, but he poured Harry's coffee in a slow, slow clattering drip and held his gaze steadily in an empty kitchen - so Harry said, "The next place is heavier" - like a warning, because he didn't know what else to say.

He left Draco there, walking slowly and touching nothing, while things watched him on the walls. It wasn't entirely unoccupied since the war. But it hadn't lost that feeling of belonging to dying, or dead, people. A waiting room.

It still felt like he was breaking into it.

He found Draco in the drawing room, walking slowly along the wall, and peering up at the connective tree.

"I could never stay here, too long," and Draco turned around to him quickly, as if caught.

He looked thinner, face more hollowed, against the dark high ceilings and shadows.

"I spent most of the summer at the Burrow – the Weasley's."

"Yes," Draco said, unfocused, and Harry wasn't sure if he was listening. "There's one like this in the Manor."

Harry looked as well, and the Black tapestry was just as heavy and morbid and final – with long script of languages around the horizontal stretch of olive green, the magical beasts perched in the corners, Gryffins and Sphynx' and serpents, and the many people looking back at him, in their regal clothes and gold banner Names and straight-back posture. He wondered how many were still alive.

"Why are there holes?" Draco touched one, the raggedy burnt edges and black puncture, with a single finger, before jerking back at the name – 'Sirius Black'.

Harry moved closer. "It's whoever's been disowned."

"Ah," Draco whispered. "Of course."

He sounded wistful, like an older man and Harry touched his elbow. Draco turned to him, eyes lidded and blank.

"Preserve the pristine prestige."

X

Grimmauld was an antiquity.

It was a monarch with a stoic face, looking down on him as he toured inside. Harry felt like a different person from any other time he'd been here; he felt slipped into the skin of his past self, too.

The inhabitants – the threadbare carpet, gas lamps, lit and flickering, the cobwebbed chandeliers, watermarks and peeling wallpaper – felt compressed between the pages of a Great book, thrown into his lap.

He walked around, and kept his hands to himself.

Draco grew confident and curious, and withdrew the shelf secrets in bolted cupboards and in plain sight. He found an opal-encrusted silver snuffbox, bronzed fruit and a chest of ebony engraved with Runes and centaurs, sheaths of lime green silk and plum chiffon. Glass cut perfume bottles, lilac oils and candles impaled in skull enamel; he smoked from cigarettes sticks and pipes, emitting chimney soot over his fingers. All the pigeonholed treasure and trash – sapphire tiaras and black lace veils, scarlet rouge and Turkish delight, getting white powder over his lips and fingertips. Fire-pokers and umbrellas sharpened like knifes, mouldy ancestry books and white doilies, canes with snakeheads. He treated things with delicate fingers and worship, made nests in corners of things he liked, or flippancy – he hissed at the things scuttling behind velvet curtains, and dropped statuettes and long instruments of reeds and brass over the banisters.

The buffer was Harry, who didn't know how to treat anything.

He found Draco sitting at a vanity, looking at himself in the three doors of mirrors. The room was slightly feminized – the hostile, stale must had a dark glamour.

Harry watched him for a while, at the wooden curls coming off the doors, like plump, ugly roses. Draco put on lipstick in gentle strokes, unblinkingly, and there were scraped hard curls of dark red paste on the floor around him.

Harry notched onto his shoulder blade briefly. The ruby bloodied his lips, and softened, paled his face, and threw off balance his sharp collarbones, broad shoulders.

Draco felt part of the vanity, so Harry looked for familiar.

"What do people say about your scars?"

"Men didn't mind," Draco was utterly still, painting slowly with a dark gold tube. "Added to the mystique of me."

"Mystique."

"Yes," Draco turned to smile up at him. "I am beautiful."

Harry touched the hair by his face. "You are."

Draco turned back, his thumbnail scraping at his lower lip, to sharpen the red edge.

"What would you say?"

"You could guess," Draco said, and he probably could. He'd make up a different story every time.

Soon, Draco was licking and biting off the lipstick. "It would make every time a threesome," he said. He met his eyes in the mirror, and Harry frowned. "You were there every time."

Harry went to bed with a crick in his neck. And he realised he had memorized the floor, he could visualize where carpet would seam uglily to another pattern, in his circular route. He found he didn't really want to look up, during the evening.

Because Draco fit at Grimmauld too well. The fine boned, blue-blood angles of his face, the regal, long lines of his neck, the fall of his hair, moonstone eyes; it fit the high ceilings, the classical woodwork and rosettes, the ivory embroidery – it blended like portraiture. Harry curled his nose at the bad smell of his marble legs hanging off an antique couch, at the elegant hollows of his thumb and wrist perching a china teacup. It was effortless.

He also didn't fit at all. Draco seemed to sense this too – so took off all his clothes in a slow strip throughout the night, he spat disgusting, cheap swears at the portraits and left a slime behind him, of ash and smoke and knocking things over, letting them smash.

Harry let him.

The orange streetlamps outside made the rooms colder, falser. Harry woke up gasping and – the Place was heavy with ghosts and murk, so he went to find Draco, with his nudity and lipstick, at dawn.

Draco sipped from a champagne flute, stretched out, feline, on a royal blue velvet loveseat in the powder room. He wore an eggshell lace eye mask on his forehead, and tasselled earplugs, at one with the décor.

"Did you sleep," Harry said, climbing over him. "You look ridiculous."

"I slept in dust," he swung his legs over Harry daintily. "Like the rest of the spawn here."

X

Harry woke in a black den, curled in heavy silk and shadows in the small room. Draco opened the door and plush curtains to let the eyelet lace breathe, over the grimy window. Pipes dripped around him, with a sliver of breeze, and Harry eventually climbed out.

He found Draco back at the tapestry, drawn there like a centrepiece. He carried a crystal bottle loosely, like an orb with a jewel stopper. Harry came up behind him.

"I don't know family trees."

"I know too much of family trees."

Draco moved voyeuristically, the orb dangling at a tilt between fingers, and took a sip.

"Are we cousins or something?"

"I used to know," Draco stopped at his name. "I looked it up when I was really young. It seemed important."

"Yes," Harry nodded, his hands on hips. "I seemed important."

Draco bent to peer at his name, murmuring – and Harry was sure he was going to close up or spiral out – but all he said, primly, was, "I would never wear that colour."

Harry stopped at the usual pothole in the map, and felt a small curl of fingers at his lower back, gentle.

"Would I have liked Sirius?" Draco said, in a small murmur, and an old pang hit his throat.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, he was chaotic too."

Draco stayed, but Harry left – to do, move – to clean and organise his shoulder bag, with the bric-a-brac of the flat shrunk into it.

When he came back, Draco had a hand pressed to a particular spot, and didn't seem to notice him. Harry hesitated, watching his finger trace a gold thread.

He came up close, almost close enough to press into him, and thumbed at the hair near his neck. "She loved you," he whispered.

"Don't," Draco whispered, harsh, and tilted his head away a bit.

Harry climbed under his shirt, hands flat against his ribs. "Okay," he kissed his neck, exploring his stomach. "Come here –" he sucked lightly, his fingers crawling, skimming under his pants, to find hair. "Take – feel better."

Draco shook his head, and stepped out of him. He touched the dirty tapestry, quiet for a while. "I want to smoke."

"Okay."

"I want –"

"I'll light it."

It got a little darker, on the floor in silence, smoking and drinking the dusty brandy, the green curtains swaying next to them like mossy lungs. Before Harry thought about food, and took Draco's hand.

The basement kitchen was cavernous, a deep belly, of rough stone walls and a roaring fire – before he saw her. He dropped Draco's hand, moving forward with a quicker step, and Andromeda turned around.

She looked older, her brown hair wispier, but her smile so soft against the hard, worn lines of the Place, her hand on Teddy's hair so gentle, that Harry leaned down to kiss her forehead.

"Dromeda," he smiled.

"I thought I heard something," she said, familiar and soft spoken, and stood up. "Harry," her arms came around him briefly, and Harry pulled back to smile at Teddy.

"Look!" he crouched to see him better, his pumpkin orange hair and bright mouth. "You're so big," he whispered, and trailed fingers to Teddy's mouth, so he could suck them in.

"Do I smell brandy?" Andromeda said.

Harry mumbled, indistinct – then straightened and spun quickly, to see Draco's expression. "Oh," he said, static. "I forgot."

Draco was frozen by the doorframe, arms outstretched a little beside him, as if ready to take flight.

"Draco," Andromeda breathed, unfamiliarly like a question, and Draco took a staggered step back, his eyes wider. He clutched the frame, and swept back up the stairs in quick, unsteady feet.

They looked at each other. "I forgot," Harry repeated.

Andromeda hummed gently, and looked down at Teddy. "I understand. He wouldn't have seen – anyone since last May."

"Yeah." Teddy made fists to get his attention, but Harry was chewing his cheek.

"I heard, the rumours," she said, quieter, "with you two – I didn't believe …"

"Yeah," he repeated, dumb. "It's – you don't have to – understand –"

Andromeda stared at him. "His mother – we're in contact," she sat down lightly, "remember that, if he –"

Harry nodded quickly. "Yeah, yeah I –" he turned. "I'm going to find him."

"Sure," she said, baby soft, to Teddy.

Harry felt knit, into the circle of them, before walking out the room. He remembered the rootless summer he spent, what he came home to – drifting between places, bleary and lost, like something leftover, out to dry – as if he was unable to wake up fully, or place himself fully. He remembered Andromeda's patience, her gentle hand and Teddy wide open, newborn expression. He looked at Harry with something like awe. Kreacher got too used to days off, and Harry took over the cooking, and Andromeda took over the cleaning, her household magic well-practiced. One night stuck out in his pinwheel summer, when they fell asleep in the twin bedroom after hot chocolate, and Teddy curled into his neck, with his hot breath and chocolate hair, with Andromeda snuffling in the other. He remembered Ron's eager return to normal, and Hermione's concern and helping hand, and how he wanted to ask to join whenever they went to bed, but they kissed now and other new shiny couple things, locked away. Ginny didn't like coming, and Harry stopped inviting her, and the Burrow become his second couch-surf home; he woke up in a different room every morning. People stopped feeding him, asking how and where he slept, and Harry drifted into the independence people thought he had.

Harry found him at the first landing, in a bathroom, and closed the door behind him. Draco sat in the black basin, fiddling idly with the silver serpent taps, the brandy orb sitting between his legs. Harry climbed in.

"Draco –" he started, and pulled himself between his long legs. "I'm sorry."

"She looks too much like," Draco whispered, the room lightless and his eyes wide and glassy.

"I know," Harry mumbled, rubbing his arms. "I thought that too, the first time."

When Draco finally looked at him, Harry curled his hands in his.

"Come downstairs."

Draco pressed his lips together.

"Come downstairs."

"Okay," Draco whispered. "I'm cold."

Andromeda cut and fed them bread in the kitchen, warm and crusty, and the big fire flickered over Draco's pallor, with a blanket around his shoulders, hunched into it. The copper pots and pans hanging from the dark roof shined, glowed rosy, and Harry served tea in inappropriately lavish goblets. Draco's eyes were bright, rimmed – but it was Teddy he was watching. "Do you want to meet him," Harry said, distinct and quiet.

It took a while for Draco to look over. "What," he murmured.

Andromeda looked away politely. "Come on," Harry took his hand in one finger and led him to the other side of the table. "It's alright." He knelt down. "This is Draco, Teddy."

Teddy blinked at him, in gentle awe, and then studied Draco with soft, violet eyes – his hair went white paper blond. "Do you like his hair," Harry touched it gently. "I do too."

Teddy looked delighted, and Draco was blinking, as if to clear his vision. Harry smiled swiftly at him, before picking up Teddy under the arms, and jostling him against his hip. "Explore?" he said, and Teddy was grabby at his shirt.

He made off, and Teddy tried to touch the walls, leaning dangerously, as they walked. "Draco," he said behind him, and Draco shrugged out of the blanket.

In the hallway, Teddy reached out, making grabby fists at Draco.

"Take it," Harry said, and Teddy gurgled with Draco did, but Harry was watching Draco.

"Oh," he breathed, as little pudgy fingers wrapped around a couple of his. "Harry."

They walked up and down stairs, disturbing the low sleep of the Place and peering behind doors, and Teddy's head bobbed in Harry's arm, mouth open as he looked.

"He has my hair."

"He likes it," Harry said, and Teddy looked at Draco as much as the house.

In Sirius' room, Teddy huffed at the posters and Draco came close behind him.

"I'm a little drunk."

"That's okay," Harry reached over and drew him in, kissing under his jaw, because Draco never cared if he was drunk.

Draco stared at him. "You have a kid," he whispered.

"Sort of," Teddy watched Harry's face as he listened. "I share him."

"He's sweet," Draco murmured.

Harry smiled at him. "Tell him that, he loves being loved." He did – and he was, universally. At the Burrow, and Andromeda's place, Bill and Fleur's, with George at the shop; he was something bright.

"So this is your body," Draco's stare was wide and strange, and Harry took a moment to understand.

"Yeah, I –" he looked around as if it could tell him something. "I'm dislocated."

"Yes," Draco looped hair at his ear so it curled over his glasses. "We're messy."

"I love you," Harry said.

Draco made an odd frown, a twist, and then a stiff noise in his throat when Teddy reached to pluck loosely at his chin, his eyes softening to something young, so Harry wrapped around his waist and kissed him hard on the mouth.

"Harry," Draco pulled him off. "Christ –"

"I'll put him down," he murmured, pulling Draco back in. "I want –"

Draco looked around, so Harry got his jaw instead. "This place – do you actually want to –"

Harry glanced at the dark room, the gold and crimson layers, over the grime. "Black's only black if you make it so," and Draco scoffed. "Come on, let me –"

"You're so strange."

"Let – I'll suck –"

"You're holding a baby."

It wasn't the first time he'd had sex in Sirius' bed, but there was something a little different about how the almost naked girls on the wall posters watched. He loved the sounds Draco made, low surprise and high things, caught at his teeth like he couldn't help himself.

"He's your cousin," Harry said, "you know." He was fully dressed and indulgent, at Draco's body, bare and spread luxuriously.

"Everyone's my cousin."

"But he's, like, close to you."

Draco clapped his thighs around his face. "You're close to me."

Harry grinned and got free. He watched a spider construct a web on the dresser for a while.

"She won't – your parents," he said.

"Don't – stop that -" And Draco's eyes flashed, when he caught them. "Don't – don't ever – fucking go there, Potter," his face stone stoic, as if he hadn't just fucked the inside of his cheek.

"Okay," he kissed his inner thigh.

Draco hesitated. "I treat you like shit."

"No," he trailed up, licking. "Sometimes."

"Sometimes."

"I don't care," Harry licked his scars close, "I don't care," and Draco watched with an old expression.

Andromeda and Teddy left before it got dark, and Draco smoked in the attic, Harry's jumper rolled at his thin wrists, leaning at a dingy window instead of saying goodbye.

"I've been here," Draco said, low like a confession, when Harry found him and looked down at the cigarette. "It's just – last time I was here – I was …"

Harry watched him, but he just looked tentatively at his smoke.

It made too much sense to him – and Harry wanted inarticulate Draco – so he shook the attic structure in loud stomps, the rotted wood that swelled and shrank, the pipes that groaned, until dust fell like butterflies – and Draco laughed soon, and got in a swearing match with something in the corner, the dust decorating his hair to rose white.

"We're here," Harry said. "We're here now."

I may return to this but I wanted to put a bookend to it, and I imagined that this recircling back to the past would ultimately start their future: leaving, travelling, discovering. So, it's a bookmark as well as a bookend.

Also, look out for something new in the works. visit my tumblr if u want to chat

"The first role in life is to assume a pose. What the next is, no one has figured out." O.W