sirry prompt: amnesia fic 👀 harry wakes up with no memory, and there's a handsome, older, very affectionate man at his bedside. obviously, who else could he be??
When he woke up and looked around, half-interested, the first person he saw was the older man half-sprawled over the foot of his bed, not unlike a dog.
The first feeling he had was a jolt of animal attraction to the clearly-drawn features, the lean curve of his upper back and the shape of the spare muscles in his forearms. He had long dark eyelashes with the slightest curl, the skin beneath his eyes thin and bruised from exhaustion. He seemed deeply asleep; his lips were slightly parted.
He looked down at himself, then, not knowing what to expect. He knew he was male, so the blunt fingertips and bitten nails were no surprise, nor the soft weight between his legs. But he hadn’t expected the hairless hands of a boy, a chest narrow and thin to the point of concavity, or the smooth chin.
The man on the bed opened his eyes, and blinked groggily a half-moment. His eyes were the wet grey color of moonshine. He jerked upright, his hands braced on the thin mattress an inch from the unfamiliar blanketed shins. “Harry?”
“Am I?” he asked, and touched his throat, surprised by the sound of his own voice for an instant. Then, it felt familiar. In fact, as each moment passed, his body felt more comfortable. More right. Even the name settled in and seemed to fit. “Yes,” he decided. Harry noticed that the man’s forehead was creased with distress. He thought with a pang that he was a little too young to be this man’s lover. Too bad.
“What’s wrong, Harry?” he slid a hand slowly over Harry’s blanket-covered knee, and the light pressure made Harry shudder pleasantly.
In that blank, slightly-inhuman mind, all that occurred to Harry was honesty. Or maybe that was leftover from whatever personality he’d forgotten along with everything else. “I don’t remember anything.”
On the first day, aside from his name, Harry learned that he was a wizard, rather than a Muggle, when he picked up the wand on the bedside table. He learned he had been recovering in a safehouse of some sort which was largely hostile, particularly its house-elf. A tall bearded man named Dumbledore came to say kind things to him and promise to heal his empty head, and a more practical mediwitch thought he might recover his memory slowly over time without intervention.
The handsome older man was Sirius, and Harry became increasingly unsure about the nature of their relationship in the past. However, it was quite evident that Sirius felt so deeply guilty about something he could hardly look Harry in the eye.
On the second day, Harry learned quite a bit more from a teary but determinedly-cheerful girl called Hermione. Harry had apparently been in a coma for some time after following Sirius into something called the Veil of Death in some place called the Department of Mysteries. It was obvious after that that everyone Harry had met so far (the handsome Sirius; the bearded Dumbledore; the matter-of-fact Pomfrey; and the steadfast Hermione) suspected Harry had died, at least a little, before the Veil seemed to spit him out, dragging Sirius along by the hand.
He didn’t ask her what Sirius and Harry were to each other. Somehow, just as he knew about the basics of magic and British culture, he also knew that Sirius was too old for Harry. But Harry’s body, which felt very little, and his mind, which felt even less, both lit up when Sirius entered a room.
A sweet but shy dog slipped in to curl in the corner of the room whenever Harry was left alone. He tried to coax it closer, but it only thumped its tail in acknowledgement and stared at him mournfully from a safe distance.
On the third day, the mediwitch permitted Harry to get out of bed. They’d been feeding him a potion to stave off the restlessness, and without it Harry found that he was eager to explore the house, and anxious to be outdoors, though Dumbledore had forbade it without explanation. Harry might have gone out anyway—apparently he wasn’t particularly biddable—but the doors were locked and seemed to delight in launching a little volley of Stinging Hexes when he tried to force the handles.
The dog followed him from room to room. Harry wished he’d asked the mediwitch whose dog it was. Harry didn’t think there was anyone in the house but the elf, and he could only hope the unpleasant little creature was feeding it for its absent owner.
At night, Harry dreamed his empty dreams.
On the fourth day, appealing smells drew Harry down to the kitchen. He’d only encountered the elf’s cooking so far, which was largely cold, congealed and unidentifiable, but today it was Sirius at the hob. He shot Harry a strained smile before he looked away. An improvement, Harry thought, slowly straddling a chair.
He heard Dumbledore and Sirius arguing once, their voices wafting through the walls like the house wanted Harry to know.
“It’s imperative he spend time there each summer—that it remain a place his magic considers his home.”
“Lily,” Sirius snarled with a vehemence that surprised Harry, raised the hair on his arms, “was more my sister than that vicious bitch’s.”
There was a beat of silence.
“That may well be,” Dumbledore said dubiously. “But we can’t know for sure.”
“I know for sure. And if you send him there, he—he’ll know something is wrong. Even if he thought it was normal before. You can’t—please.”
Harry stepped away from the wall. He had a troubling itching sensation in his forehead that he hadn’t had before. And then the hazy memory of a woman’s sharp voice, the thud of a door, a musty odor and darkness.
He didn’t try to eavesdrop again after that. Maybe there wasn’t much of this life he cared to remember.
When Sirius was late to rise—which was often—Harry began making breakfast instead. He knew how, to his surprise. Not that cracking eggs and scrambling them with a whisk took much skill, but he applied the unlabeled seasonings with an instinctive confidence as well. The first morning that Sirius came in to find the old, scarred table set and his plate steaming, he smiled at Harry with startled pleasure. Harry’s chest swelled like his heart had just doubled in size.
“Were we ever … ?” he began to ask, but Sirius just looked at him with a distracted smile.
Dumbledore decided Harry couldn’t start the term at Hogwarts. Not until they knew “it was safe,” though from whom or what Harry didn’t know. He pretended not to notice Dumbledore’s Legilimency. He literally had nothing to hide but a few impure thoughts about Sirius, and if Dumbledore was bothered by those it would serve him right for trespassing.
“I’m sorry, Harry,” Sirius muttered, looking distraught. He gave the walls a caged glare like the prison was to blame for the sentence. “It’s not right to keep someone locked up here.”
“I’d rather stay with you anyway,” Harry said with a shrug.
Sirius looked sharply at him, expression caught somewhere between bafflement and disbelief. “You won’t say that when you remember.”
Harry smiled back at him. “I’m pretty sure I would.”
The Weasley twins set up a Muggle TV and something called a Nintendo. They demonstrated how to navigate the game with the handheld controllers while Sirius looked on in horrified fascination.
“Looks like dark magic to me,” he muttered, but he and Harry played off and on for hours over the next few days until they were sick of it.
“I have an idea,” Sirius suggested later, and took Harry up to the rooftop terrace and showed him all the constellations he knew, throwing in personal details about his relatives when the names lined up. At some point Harry wound up sitting tucked against his side, little echoes of each Star inside his glasses so it made the vast sky seemed twice as full.
Harry fell asleep like that. His dreams were slowly turning into clearer sounds and shapes. He remembered green light, but vaguely, and someone shouting his name. But vaguely, vaguely, like a memory of a memory.
He fell asleep next to Sirius a lot, and each time he woke in his own bed. Until the time he woke up sprawled over Sirius’ chest, the film they’d been watching long over, the screen fuzzy blue. Sirius breathed softly under Harry’s cheek. He sat up carefully to lean over Sirius and study his sleeping face.
His cheeks were a bit fuller than when Harry had woken up, but they were still prominent beneath his eyes. His brows drew a severe but elegant line over his pale forehead. Harry reached forward to touch that brow, and it felt natural, so natural. Like holding his wand or dicing an onion; he had no memory of the past experience but knew it was there just the same.
That’s how this felt. Harry wondered just what else would feel familiar. He wondered so intensely that before he knew it, he was lowering his face to Sirius’, so their chests pressed together, so he felt Sirius’ soft sleeping breath on his lips, faintly sour but somehow no less fascinating for that. So he could kiss Sirius’ slack mouth, startled by the faint sweetness of the taste.
Sirius’ eyes opened and he stared at Harry from a centimeter away, gaze wide, grey and shocked.
“Haven’t we?” Harry breathed. “We’ve been like this. I know it.” In demonstration, he rolled his hips so their entire bodies were flush, Harry lying across Sirius, their hips nestled together.
Sirius groaned. “No.” But he didn’t move or resist, just kept staring into Harry’s face in frozen disbelief.
“But we could,” Harry suggested, and kissed Sirius again.
For another moment Sirius didn’t move, but then a hand stroked its way slowly up Harry’s back, encouraging him. Then it tangled in his hair, and Harry felt his cock leap against Sirius’ growing hardness in the tight space between their bodies. Then Sirius bit Harry’s lower lip, and locked an arm over the small of Harry’s back, gentleness gone in a moment.
Later, they were tangled together, clothes cast aside, blanketed by the darkness.
“Where’s your dog?” Harry asked, breaking the strained silence. Sirius looked incredulous, then barked out a laugh.
“Merlin,” he murmured, sounding pained, and pulled Harry’s face toward his chest by the back of his neck. Harry rubbed his cheek against the springy hair there, felt the thudding of Sirus’ heart. “I’ve got so much to teach you, still.”
“Yeah?” Harry breathed, shifting his thighs so he straddled Sirius’ narrow hips. His hand moved from Sirius’ hip and inward, slow and deliberate. He smiled when Sirius’ breath hitched. “Can we start about … ” he closed his hand and squeezed “ … here?”
Sirius rocked against his hand and huffed out a breath. “When you remember, are you going to hate me?”
Harry bit his lip, meeting Sirius’ eyes, still holding his cock but his hand still. “If I never remember, are you going to hate me?”
Sirius’ eyes narrowed. He reached up and cupped Harry’s face in both of his hands. “I couldn’t hate you.”
Harry lowered his face and they kissed, a firm press of closed mouths that became hungrier, sloppier, as Harry stroked Sirius. He pulled away so he could ask, his lips on the corner of Sirius’ mouth, “How is this?”
“It’s good. Fuck. But … you could … “
“Your—fingernails, but—just a bit.”
Harry’s cock leapt at the thought, and, wonderingly, he grazed the hot silk of Sirius’ shaft firmly with his thumbnail. Sure enough, Sirius whimpered and his cock pulsed in Harry’s grip, like he could come just at that.
Harry repeated it again, and again, until Sirius was bucking helplessly, jarring Harry’s body each time, a feeling that seemed to echo deep in Harry’s groin. He was fascinated at the thought of what this could feel like, if he was in Sirius or if Sirius was in him.
“Would you like it if I used my teeth?” Harry wondered aloud. Sirius’ eyes had been tightly closed for several moments, but now they flew open as he swore, grasping Harry’s wrist hard enough to bruise.
“Fuck, the things you say … “
Harry smiled. “I would, you know,” he said, then leaned down to graze Sirius’ collarbone with his teeth in demonstration. Sirius came, hot and sticky and messy. It was the most gratifying moment Harry could remember.
Which wasn’t saying much, but still.
