Chapter Text
The first thought that ran through Draco’s mind was not one for polite company.
His head pounded, scraps of light and colour, flashes of memory flickered rapidly behind his eyelids. Fear, heat and pain - lots of pain. Something cool and white, with the scent of lilacs that reminded him of his mum. Joy, confusion, followed by deep, well-worn grief and resignation. A bright, vivid, green light that overwhelmed the senses.
Draco cracked open his eyes, blinking rapidly against the light that stabbed straight through his brain stem before giving up and squeezing them shut. He felt weak and loose-limbed, like he’d slept funny and woken up having deadened his entire body. A groan tumbled from his lips as his head drooped against his chest, his skull weighing a thousand tonnes inside his head.
“Urgh,” he mumbled around the feeling of his tongue laying thick and heavy in his mouth. “Th’ fuck?”
A rustle of fabric sounded to his right. Draco cracked one silvery eye open. Squinting against the glare, he was able to make out a Potter-like shape sitting in a chair next to him.
“Potter?”
Potter groaned, sounding just as hard up as Draco. Good, this was all his fault anyway. Probably. It usually was.
Draco blinked furiously, willing his vision to clear. “Gods, Potter, what the fuck have you gotten us into now?” he moaned.
There was a dull thunk of a head hitting the back of a chair, followed by a heavy sigh. “Urgh, shuddup will you, ‘m head’s bloody pounding,” mumbled Potter.
Draco’s head gave a particularly vicious throb. His voice came out a needy whine, but he was in too much pain to be embarrassed. “What did you do , Potter? Merlin’s bloody bollocks, I feel like I’ve been run over by a hippogriff.”
“Wha?” said Potter, his voice thick and just oozing with his usual standard of eloquence.
Draco reached up to check that his brains were not, in fact, leaking from his skull, and froze as the move was aborted by the handcuffs encircling his wrist. His stomach dropped out from under him, ice flooding his veins. Oh, this was not good.
“Potter!” he hissed urgently, yanking frantically at the cuffs holding him in place. Potter continued to stare gormlessly at the ceiling, so he tried a swift kick instead. Metal bit into his shins, and he had to bite his lip to stop himself from crying out.
Oh, shit, shit, shit.
Draco wracked his mind, trying to remember how exactly they’d ended up there. But the memories were fuzzy, incomplete. It was like - like there was a void, somehow. He ran his tongue over his teeth, surprised at the lack of fuzz that would have followed a rowdy night out. He didn’t think he’d been obliviated - as sure as one could ever be, anyway. Nor did it feel like someone had rummaged through his brains with legilimency. It was like he’d just… stopped existing for a bit, in between flashes of colour and sensation.
Potter jerked in his seat, suddenly awake and in full Auror mode, his head swivelling rapidly as he scanned their surroundings. They were in some kind of interrogation room, it seemed, but unlike any he’d ever had the misfortune of experiencing. Something about it struck him as very - mugglish.
Potter turned to face him, and Draco’s heart just about stopped dead.
“What? Malfoy? Where are we?”
This… was not Potter. At least, not the Potter from recent memory. It was like someone had dunked him in a vat of reverse-aging potion. Somehow simultaneously his older and younger self. This Potter looked like some sick fuck had reached into Draco’s mind and plucked 17-year-old Potter directly from his memories and sprinkled him with bits of his old-man body like a horrifying garnish.
The effect was deeply unsettling, and the hair on the back of Draco’s neck prickled.
Not-Potter - whoever he was - had the clothes right, with Potter’s trademark round glasses and leather jacket that had once been his godfather’s, a stupid Gryffindor-themed shirt, and faded jeans. They’d even managed to snag the dragon-leather boots Draco had bought for him when he’d finally had enough of Potter turning up to the manor in those synthetic muggle monstrosities. At first glance, it was a good effort. But it was the little things that gave it away - the scars he’d collected over the years during his work as an Auror, the surety with which he carried himself, the way he’d lost that starved, emaciated look and filled out with muscle.
Draco liked to think he knew Harry Potter quite well. He knew when he’d started up with Granger that the three of them were a package deal, but he had significantly underestimated what that meant. Potty and the Weasel had grown on him much like a fungus - but alas growth was growth, and so the fact that someone dared to attempt to manipulate him with a poorly-made simulacrum of one of Draco’s oldest and most annoying friends flooded him with pure rage .
“Who the fuck are you,” he spat, venom dripping from every word.
Not-Potter had the gall to do a double take. “Me?” sputtered Not-Potter, affronted. “Who the fuck are you! ”
“ I am Draco Malfoy,” scoffed Draco Malfoy, looking down his nose at the impostor and pretending the world wasn’t still spinning slightly. “Which the real Harry Potter would know, you know. But you don’t know, because you’re not the real Potter. And I know you're not the real Potter, and you know you know that I know you know, because the real Potter doesn’t look all… all…”
“All what?” said Not-Potter.
“Like a bloody twelve-year-old! ”
That seemed to shut him up, mouth flapping open in closed in what was admittedly a very Potter-like manner. He flushed bright red, and ducked his head to the side, mumbling something under his breath.
Not-Potter squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth. “I am Harry Potter.”
“Piss off,”
“I am!” he insisted. “If anyone’s the imposter here it's you! ”
“What!” squawked Draco.
“You think I look like a twelve-year-old?!” laughed Not-Potter bitterly, ”I at least have a reason to look like this. Have you looked in the mirror lately? Because you're doing a bloody fantastic impression of a fetus.”
Draco gaped at him, absolutely outraged. The audacity of his man, to kidnap him, impersonate his friend, and then speak to him like this?! It was the last straw.
“I don’t know who you think you are, or why I’m here. But you can take all this-” he flicked his fingers in his best attempt to gesture up and down the man’s body “-and fuck right off .”
It seemed Not-Potter had nothing to say to that, snarling wordlessly and wrenching at his cuffs hard enough to scoot his chair across the floor with a screech of metal on metal. Draco studiously avoided his gaze, seething silently and trying to suppress his rising panic.
He was so painfully alone and so absolutely, completely fucked.