Please Be There If I Remember

Chapter Fifty-Seven: After

Draco watched in numb shock as the Dark Lord got sucked into the veil. He had to blink, make sure that he wasn't still losing it from blood loss, then blink again as the entire room practically erupted in cheers. He tried to stand up to get to Harry, to make sure he was alright, but his side was still singing out with pain, and he had to stay down, despite the part of him that was screaming at him to run forward.

Hordes of people with flashing cameras and awestruck faces pushed their way through the hole in the wall from where they had just arrived on the scene, and Draco, after making sure that they weren't about to trample Harry, stared at the burnt face of Bellatrix Lestrange. His aunt.

Merlin, he had—

Draco shook his head. He couldn't go down this path. Not right now.

Instead, he slowly turned his gaze away from the streak of black across marred cheekbones to the sharp angles of Lucius Malfoy's face as he was dragged away by Aurors. He was still stunned, unconscious to the world, and Draco had never been more thankful for that fact because he knew that if he hadn't been, Lucius would already have claimed innocence and walked away a free man. Now, though, the Aurors had taken one look at the unmoving dark mark shrouding his pale skin and bound him up, his Father's expensive shoes dragging along the ground as they pulled the Death Eaters away from the scene.

The flashing cameras continued to shutter, and Draco's vision started to blacken after every flash of light, the sound making his ears hurt.

He watched as Father's shoes disappeared behind the hole in the wall.

"Hey, you get away from my godson!" Someone shouted, and he turned his attention back to the commotion in the middle of the room where Harry was still being bombarded, everyone else crowding around him in a mob as Sirius stood in front of the group, his arms thrown wide against the mass of reporters as they tried to shout questions at him.

"Is it true that you defeated the Dark Lord?" Someone yelled, and another joined in.

"Is You-know-Who really gone?" Another added.

"How did you manage to do it?"

"What were your thoughts in his final moments?

"What is Lucius Malfoy's son doing at the scene—"

And oh, this was going to be a very long day. Draco sighed, shut his eyes, and leaned his head back against the wall at the sound of heads shifting to look at him.

A very long day indeed.

~*"*~

Harry slipped his hand into his, and the movement made awareness slowly seep into Draco as he came back into himself.

"You zoned out for a minute there," he said, forcefully but not unkindly. Draco was pretty sure Harry couldn't be unkind if he tried.

"Another memory," Draco sighed, rubbing his hand over his face. While he had gotten most of them back in the Department of Mysteries, he still got flashes of his life from before, and it would cause him to space out. Harry always brought him back, and he shook his head. "Madam Pomphrey said it will probably happen periodically over the next few months. Apparently, losing all of your memories and then getting most of them back in the span of a few seconds does some damage."

Harry snorted softly, rubbing continuous circles over the back of Draco's hand.

"You'll tell me if something changes though, right? I know that before the whole..." he waved his hand about.

"Memory Catastrophe?"

"Ya, that," Harry laughed again. "We weren't exactly friends before. I don't want you to, like, see anything in from the past and realise that you still hate me or—"