“Dad, I’m fine!” Scorpius whined as Draco straightened his pillow. “I really don’t need to be in bed! The Healer said-”

“That you had to take it easy,” Draco said sharply.

“But that doesn’t mean you have to put me to bed the second I get home,” Scorpius grumbled. He furrowed his brow, giving Draco a thoughtful look. “I bet Ginny would let me go outside.”

Draco paused, his head spinning slightly. He straightened up, staring at his son intently. “Well Ginny’s not here. So you’ll stay in bed, where you belong.”

He ignored the look of fierce rebellion churning in his son’s eyes and excused himself from the room.

He felt as if the floor were tilting beneath him as he stumbled down the corridor, hand slapping against the wall to keep his balance. He shoved open a door and collapsed onto something soft and solid and red.

His head swimming dangerously with visions of both his mother and his son sprawled across the floor, Draco forced himself to sit up.

The room seemed to be even more blindingly crimson than he remembered. He blinked rapidly as his vision blurred for a moment. He hadn’t meant to stumble into this room. He hadn’t wanted to ever see it again. He hadn’t meant to, he hadn’t meant to…

Draco felt as if he might throw up just sitting in the room, but somehow, he couldn’t leave. He slid from the bed into the armchair and leaned back, taking in the entire room until it seemed to be taking him in. Like it was swallowing him up.

His gaze fell to the floor, where the red stain still stretched across the carpet like a gaping wound. No one had bothered to remove it in the rush to get Scorpius to the hospital, and he couldn’t bring himself to lift it now. He couldn’t even summon the will.

The stain had spread like a giant red rose blooming across the floor. Draco shuddered, aware of how familiar that stain looked. How terrible her long blond hair had looked, tangled and soiled with her own blood.

And then all he could see were those flashing green eyes, and then the overwhelming lacerations digging into every inch of his body. The cold, white hardness of the bathroom tiles was pressed up against his cheek, and consciousness was nothing but a fluttering dream.

His thoughts were just as incoherent, jumping from memory to memory with sickening speed. All the while he could hear Ginny sobbing – could feel her shaking in his arms.

He could see Potter lifting his wand deliberately, and for a moment, his memory shifted and it was the man’s redheaded son standing in his place. Draco blinked.

Lily was standing before him, tilting her head uncertainly.

“Daddy?”

He shook his head from side to side, like a dog clearing his ears of water, and sat up a little straighter in the chair. “Yes?”

She was still staring at him, and Draco wondered how long he had been sitting there. “When’s Mum coming home?”

Draco forced a half-hearted little smile and stood up, ruffling Lily’s hair. “Tomorrow, dragon. She’ll be home tomorrow.” He paused, looking down at her as something unreadable stirred in her eyes. “Oh! I have a belated package for you,” he blurted quickly.

“Another present?” Lily squealed, her face momentarily wiped clean of worry.

“Sure thing.” As he motioned her to follow, walking around the giant stain into the corridor, Draco fought the urge to give the room one last look.

He dug the long package out from the bottom of his and Ginny’s closet and handed it to a waiting Lily, who was shuffling from foot to foot excitedly.

She peeled the blue wrapping back carefully from the corners, unfolding the paper neatly from the box. Draco could see an eager flush creeping across her cheeks as she removed the lid.

“Dad!” she screamed, lifting the broomstick from the box. “It’s a broom! A broom!”

He grinned. “I noticed your old one was getting a little too small for you.”

“But this is a Sterling Streak! Leonard Jewkes hasn’t released a new broom since the Silver Arrow, and that was the fastest of its time!” Draco felt as if his face might split in half from smiling as his daughter rattled off Quidditch stats about the Silver Arrow. Maybe she would be as good a flyer as her mother had been. His heart jerked painfully at that.

“Thanks, Dad!” she blurted after finally taking a breath. “Can I go fly it?”

He nodded, his heart still caught in his throat, and managed to smile at her. She grinned and darted off, carrying the broom out in front of her as if it were made of gold.

Draco stared after her, his thoughts circling back around to Ginny. He hadn’t seen her since yesterday, when she gathered her sons up and Apparated them home.

Home. She still called it home. Potter’s home, the Burrow, George’s flat above his shop – everywhere else was home to her. But when she came home – really home, to their home – what could he say to her?

He couldn’t explain, even to himself, the anger that had boiled hot beneath his skin in the hospital. She had been unreasonable in asking him to be rational about James when his son was lying unconscious in a hospital bed. He wasn’t sorry for that. Sometimes Ginny was the one at fault. He knew it didn’t happen often, but in that case he was sure he had been more in the right.

But as much as he saw Potter in his son and hated the boy for it, Draco knew Ginny couldn’t stand how he looked at James. He wasn’t sorry the little shit was gone – he wasn’t, damn it – but he was sorry that it broke Ginny’s heart to see him go.

Maybe I could ask her to bring them back in a couple of weeks, he thought desperately. But the very idea made his blood boil and his head spin. That little monster in his house? With his children! No, he wouldn’t allow it. He couldn’t.

But then he saw Ginny’s face again, her trembling lower lip and her tear-filled, heartbroken eyes, and his chest ached. What could he do to make it up to her? What could he-

“Dad!” Scorpius’ voice broke through his thoughts, and Draco was running down the corridor even while his mind struggled to crash back to reality.

“What?” he gasped, staggering into the doorway of his son’s room. “What’s wrong?”

The boy was propped up against his pillows, an indignant, angered look upon his face, but as far as Draco could tell, completely unharmed.

“You bought Lily a Sterling Streak?” he howled.

Draco blew out a breath he hadn’t know he was holding. “Don’t do that! I thought you were in pain!” he scowled.

“I am in pain,” Scorpius insisted. “You bought Lily the newest, most popular broom on the market! How could you do this to me? My little sister has a better broom than me! And I’m going to be on the Slytherin Quidditch team, Dad!”

“Stop whining,” Draco growled. “You seemed perfectly content with your broom until I bought Lily a new one.”

“Yes, but hers is better!”

“Go to sleep, Scorpius.”

“But, Dad!”

Draco shut the door behind him, smiling in spite of himself, and decided to go outside to watch his daughter fly.

His nightmares were worse than ever as he tossed and turned in the giant bed, alone. They were vivid, bright with flashes of green curses and spurts of red blood. The sounds were louder than ever, and echoed long after they should have ceased. He woke up sweating, with every inch of skin pouring out perspiration like tears, and with his hand reaching across her side of the bed. But she wasn’t just out of reach. She wasn’t there at all.

Even after he woke up, checked on Scorpius, and fixed Lily some toast, the nightmares played over and over in his head. He felt like they might spill from his head and into his real life. It was as if there were just so many memories replaying in his mind that he head simply couldn’t hold them any more. He had to literally bite his tongue to keep from snapping at Lily, and it was then that he knew he wasn’t himself. In this state of torment, he was practically his father.

When Ginny finally arrived home, Draco felt the weight of his inadequacies begin to crush him. Ginny smiled at Lily’s shout of joy and stooped down to scoop the little girl up in her arms. He could sense her pain and anger as if they were radiating from her, and yet she seemed to hide her struggles effortlessly, laughing with their daughter and his son as if nothing had ever happened. He wished he could be that brave.

She looked up at him slowly, with eyebrows raised almost to her hairline, and he saw anger smoldering in her eyes. He cringed, feeling as if that resentful glare was actually burning through him. But he took in her whole face also, and there – in her jaw line – he saw her son.

She hadn’t really been angry when they’d parted at the hospital. But Potter’s sons had looked like they had been through a shipwreck, and they clung to her with pain and terror and remorse. There was something else about her, both in the hospital and now as she glared at him, that seemed to flash in her eyes when he looked at her. He felt his heart sink, realizing the boldness of his own anger must have driven her from sadness to resentment.

“Hello, Ginny,” he choked out.

“Hullo,” she returned tersely, rising from her hug with Lily. She rested her hands on the girl’s shoulders.

“The – the boys all right?”

She nodded. “Yes. They’re fine.”

Lily looked up at her mother questioningly, and Ginny smiled down at her. “Why don’t you go get your new broomstick to show me, love?”

“Okay,” Lily readily agreed, skipping off to retrieve her broom.

Ginny smiled after her, but then turned her steely gaze back to Draco. He swallowed.

“I’m…” he began, and she raised her eyebrows expectantly again.

He really was sorry. He knew that was what she needed to hear. He was sorry that he hated her son, he was sorry that her ex-husband was just one of the demons he was struggling with, and he was sorry that being married to him seemed to make her unhappy.

But the words wouldn’t come out. He just couldn’t make them.

“I’ll be in my study.”

Draco circled his desk, staring down at the Pensieve. He almost couldn’t remember the last time he had used it, it had been so long ago. He hadn’t had nearly as many things to forget back then.

He glanced at the picture of him and Lily on his desk, and clenched his fists determinedly. He placed his wand at his temple and gently tugged a memory free. It swirled in the basin, brightly colored for a moment, before sinking in.

“No one can help me…I can’t do it…I can’t…” his younger self moaned as the memory whirled in the basin.

Draco sighed again, looking down as the face of his sixteen-year-old self swam across the surface of the liquid, and began to draw another memory.

“Your father is just under a lot of stress right now, Draco. He has his trial hearing tomorrow. Just promise me you’ll stay out of his way.”

Draco winced as his mother’s crooning voice echoed in the Pensieve. “I didn’t actually promise you, Mother,” he whispered.

Draco leaned over the basin, watching different things float to the surface from time to time, his stomach clenching unpleasantly.

The tip of his wand was at his temple again, pulling at his mind, when the door to the study swung open and Ginny stormed in.

“I wish you would just bloody tell me what’s wrong!” she exclaimed, her face reddened and her hair wild. “Because I care about Scorpius too! But damn it, Draco, if you’re going to…” she trailed off, catching sight of the Pensieve. “What is that?”

“Nothing,” Draco blurted, sidestepping in front of it.

“No, what is it?”

“I said it’s nothing.”

She marched across the study, hands on her hips, becoming more enraged with each passing second. “Draco, why can’t you just bloody tell me? What could be so horrible that you can’t even tell your wife about?”

“It’s nothing!” he bellowed, matching her tone.

“It’s not! I see you in your nightmares, how you scream in your sleep! Why don’t you just tell me!” she screamed, tears collecting at the corners of her eyes.

He stopped, breathing hard, and grabbed her wrist. She looked startled for a moment, but still blindly angry. She looked so terrible and beautiful at the same time, flushed brilliantly in anger, that he was torn between kissing her and just giving her what she had asked for. Despite his efforts to shield her from them, Ginny had demanded to share his demons. He was trapped between his present and his past, and there was nowhere to run to. There was nowhere to hide.

“If you really want it, I’ll do you one better. I’ll show you,” he growled.

She was breathing so fiercely through her nose that her nostrils flared, but he saw her nod ever so slightly.

“Just don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.” His voice came out like gravel as he dipped a finger into the basin.

Author notes: Reviews, please!