Randominity

Title: Implosion of the Time-Space Continuum (HP RPS)
Author: Randominity
Pairing: Daniel Radcliffe/Harry Potter (yes. you read that right.)
Rating: PG-13
Feedback: Probably even more appreciated here than usual, since I AM CRAZY.
Author's Notes: Dude, I don't even know. Title idea from misskittye, who said so eloquently:
dan and harry sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g,
first comes love, then comes marriage,
then comes the implosion of the time space continuum
Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to J.K. Rowling. Dan belongs to his parents until he's 18. I just took them out to play, officer. No harm intended.



Implosion of the Time-Space Continuum
by Randominity

Dan considers himself to be a pretty self-aware kind of person, pretty clear on who he is and where he stands and that, he thinks, is why he can play Harry Potter. He worries, in the back of his head, that Harry Potter will be the only role he'll ever really be able to play. Now that his name and face are inextricably linked with the character he runs the risk of doing comic conventions ten years down the line and writing books about his experiences.

But mostly, Dan thinks of Harry as separate, other; Harry is nothing like Dan except that they're the same age and look roughly similar. Harry's pretty mad, as well. Dan doesn't even reckon they'd be friends, if Harry were real. Harry, of course, is not real. Dan sometimes forgets this.

Sometimes Dan asks Harry questions, when he's in that fog before sleep. Sometimes they're serious ("if it wouldn't land you in Azkaban, you'd practice that Cruciatus curse and make Bellatrix scream, wouldn't you?") and sometimes not ("five years with an invisibility cloak and you expect me to believe you've never been in the girl's dormitory?"), and when Harry doesn't respond, Dan makes up the answers for him. Sometimes he wakes up with the answers at the front of his mind.

~*~

Dan dreams of Harry, who's floating in a dark space high above Scotland. Dan remains on solid ground, yet Harry floats just within Dan's grasp in that strange, dream-like way that bridges time and distance. Harry reaches out for him, wary. "Why do you try to understand?" Dream-Harry asks him, his expression closed off and untrusting in a way that Dan has never been.

Dream-Dan shakes his head, confused. He takes Dream-Harry's outstretched hand, and lifts off to join him. "I want to," he says. "I want to understand you. I want to know who you are."

"Nobody gets to find that out," Harry says, frowning, as they fly above the landscape. "Who are you?" he asks, as if seeing Dan for the first time, and lets go of Dan's hand. The ground beneath Dan - if it can be called that - seems to give way, and with one missed step, he begins to fall.

Dan manages to shake himself awake when he's a few inches from the inky black surface of whatever lay in the bottom of his dreams. "Whoa," he sighs, sitting up a bit, and pats himself down, a little shaken. It's 4:59 in the AM and he's got nowhere to be for well over an hour. Too worked up to rest, he reaches for the bottled water on his nightstand and starts to unscrew the cap.

There is someone sitting in the chair by the door.

"Oh, shi-" His voice seems too loud for the room, and he drops the bottle, clapping a hand over his mouth, feeling his eyes widen with panic. The person in the chair doesn't move, and for a moment Dan entertains the thought that they can't see him, or hear him, haven't noticed that he's awake. Maybe this person can't see at all, and maybe this is not a crazed fan who's snuck into his room to kill him in his sleep, or kill his waking self either. This fleeting hope soon passes, and Dan briefly considers throwing up. He chances another glance at the person, and then something startling clicks into place. He stares outright.

The person sitting quietly in the chair across the room is him. Rather, it's him, if he were a little older, and thinner in the face. Maybe him, if his hair were a little darker and a lot thicker, and if he wore glasses with round frames that were still too big for his face. There is a wand clutched tightly in the person's right hand, and Dan doesn't need to see a glimpse of forehead to know what to expect.

Dan immediately feels as though he's run a marathon, blood rushing to his head and making his temples throb. "Wait--" he says, too loud for the room again. "What--" he swallows. "You-- how-- whoa-- what?"

The him in the chair across the room (Harry, Dan knows, but that's just mad, there's no way this is possible) shrugs. "Sorry," he says, but doesn't look like he means it. He jerks his thumb over his shoulder at the door. "I just... woke up, and found myself here. And by the way, where is 'here'?"

"Hotel," Dan says automatically, knowing what a non-answer that is. "You--" He forces himself to breathe properly. He takes one deep breath in, until his lungs hurt, before trying to speak again. "You, um. how can I. you're. Harry. right? I mean, just checking."

An annoyed look crosses Harry's face, and - it's so strange - it's the one Dan uses to convey Harry's frustration over being recognized for his scar, and-- oh. "Yeah," Harry says. "I still don't know who you are, though." He frowns. "You know who I am," he says. "You. you can't be a Muggle, are you?"

"I'm--" Dan looks down at himself, still under the sheets, then at the water bottle that has rolled a few feet away on the floor. He gets out of bed, determined to be polite, at least - he's got the man's face, after all. "Well, yeah, I guess I am," he says. "I'm Dan," he adds. "Hi." He holds out his hand, and Harry stands, pocketing his wand, to shake it. He is as wary as he'd been when he offered his own hand in Dan's dream.

"Dan," Harry says. He's a bit taller than Dan, and doesn't stop looking around. His eyes are a vibrant, clear green. "How did this happen?"

Dan shakes his head. "I. I don't know. I-- just. dreamed about you, I guess. But," he protests, "I dream about you loads of times, and -- that doesn't sound very good, does it." Dan laughs a bit hysterically, and shuts up. The more awake he becomes, the more panicked he feels. There is a Harry Potter in his hotel room, and no logical way to explain it. Dan has tutoring in a couple of hours, and then filming the rest of the day; he wonders how he'll get rid of Harry by then. Then again, he thinks, Harry's the bloody wizard -- maybe he can figure out how to vanish himself by then.

A sudden thought crosses Dan's mind. If there's a Harry Potter in his hotel room, then Harry Potter must, somehow, be real. If Harry's real, then the rest of it -- Ron, Hermione, Sirius, even Voldemort -- there has to be something to it, right? There can't be a Boy Who Lived without somebody who tried to kill him, can there? "You don't think," Dan says, unsure of how much of this he can actually believe, "er- that... Voldemort had anything to do with this, do you?"

Harry narrows his eyes, but shakes his head. "My scar would have hurt," he mutters, his eyes still sweeping over the room behind Dan.

"Well, good," Dan breathes. "Um, that's good, uh. Listen, uh, Harry--"

"But I don't understand why," and Harry's face scrunches in confusion, looking at Dan as if Dan is speaking another language, "why do you look exactly like me?"

Dan holds his breath and sneaks a look at his alarm clock (how much time do you have, Harry?) before letting all the air in his lungs out at once. "Well," he begins, sitting back down on his bed, "I, uh. you're kind of. really famous, actually, here, with the Muggles. And I." He cringes. "Play you, in movies. about you. It's kind of funny...." Dan scratches the back of his neck self-consciously. Well, that went over well.

Harry stares for a while, then comes over and sits heavily next to Dan. "Movies," he says, dully. "There are. movies about me? But where-- I've never seen-- nobody's ever-- how--" he looks up. "Do you think the Dursleys know?"

"Uh, well," Dan says weakly. "I don't think-- maybe not everybody's heard of them." He does not say, by the way, the movies are based on books which were created in the mind of a woman and therefore must be entirely fictional. He is still having difficulty reconciling that with the fact that there is a warm, breathing, flesh-and-blood Harry sitting on his bed. "We're just filming the fourth movie now."

"Well, but. this is... this is awful," Harry turns to Dan, horrified. "I'm putting you in danger just by being here -- what if-- what if now that I'm not at the Dursleys, Voldemort decides to attack? This hotel's full of Muggles, it'd be a disaster!"

Dan had been thinking more along the lines of how he'd be able to go for tutoring and leave Harry in his room all day, but Harry's point is pressing enough to make him forget that. He pulls his knees up on the bed and hugs them, dropping his head and moaning into his arms. "What am I gonna do?" he says.

"It's not your problem alone." Harry pets Dan's back awkwardly. "And," he says thoughtfully, "at least I'll know a bit beforehand if something's happening. Not soon enough, likely, but." He sighs. "If Hermione were here, she'd probably know exactly what happened, from something she read in some great old dusty book or something. There's probably even a simple potion we could take for it. Doppleganger wossname."

Dan raises his head and stares hopelessly at this boy who looks exactly like him, acting exactly how Dan's been trying to act for the past three years. "Maybe there's a--" he sighs. "Maybe if we retraced our steps?"

"Be where we were when it happened," Harry murmurs to himself.

"Exactly."

"Well, I was--" Harry shakes his head "We can't do that," he explains, "because I was at the Dursleys'. I was in my room, and Aunt Petunia and Dudley were watching their program turned up loud - the one they always have to see at nine o'clock, and--" he frowns. "I went to sleep in my own bed, but woke up here."

Dan shrugs. "Maybe that's something." He doesn't think that's anything, but he's willing to hope. "Did you dream anything funny at all?"

Harry shakes his head again. "I can't remember," he says. "Just... flying. I dream about flying a lot, though, I'm a S--"

"Seeker, I know," Dan says. His nausea is starting to give way to hunger, but he still doesn't have any appetite, and his headache has gotten worse. "Listen, do you, um. Do you want something to eat?"

Harry gives him a grateful look. "I was getting too hungry to think," he admits.

~*~

"It's so weird," Harry says softly, his gaze flickering from Dan's eyes to his forehead uncertainly. He has made fast work of his sandwich and eggs from room service, and watches Dan finish up his own breakfast. He shakes his head, as if to gain some clarity. "I guess I should stay in here, then, when you go. Until we get this sorted?"

"Right -- sorry," Dan says. "And I need to shower, so..." he gestures to the bathroom. "Did you want to..." He raises a questioning eyebrow.

Harry shakes his head. "No, no, thanks, I'm fine." He looks down at his legs, his hands, the bedspread, and Dan gives a half-hearted wave before ducking into the bathroom for a shower.

Dan's read Order of the Phoenix four times and he figures that Harry looks about sixteen like he should be at the end, which says something about real-time and book continuity that Dan's sure would make more sense if he were a little less tired. He wonders if Book six were to come out right now, Harry would suddenly age a full year where he sits. He wonders if he's going to look like this version of Harry in a year's time; taller, thinner, more angry. He wonders if Harry shaves.

And that's the weirdest part, Dan thinks, tilting his head under the spray to rinse out his shampoo -- he can't help feeling like what he's going through physically is maybe something Harry can relate to on an intimate level, and vice-versa. Maybe that's not even true -- Dan doesn't know how this works -- but it's strange that he's even thinking of saying, "so, uh, I spotted a hair above my left nipple... are there gonna be any more, soon?"

The other thing, Dan thinks, is that Harry's sort of... well, sort of attractive. Dan's seen his own photo spreads and he's read what people say about him, and he doesn't think of himself as cute or handsome or anything, really. He's just awkward little Dan who's becoming terminally spotty and who isn't as tall as he hopes he'll be and whose lips disappear when he smiles. He's never really thought of himself as attractive, not even objectively; but Harry's, well. Older. And pretty, almost, maybe because he's thinner, or because his eyes are so green, or because he always looks like he's trying to see through you.

Dan leans his forehead against the tile and strokes himself with one soapy hand and thinks this is wrong, this is awful, but it's morning and he hasn't had a good night's sleep, and hey, if Voldemort decides that Dan looks enough like Harry to die, he might as well go out smiling. I'll bet his scar is tingling right now, Dan thinks, and comes, gasping, just out of the spray of the water.

~*~

Harry is propped up against Dan's pillows when Dan gets out of the shower, but now he has retrieved a few of Dan's books and has them spread out around him on the bed. "I'm sorry," he says, when Dan closes the bathroom door behind him with a towel over his shoulders. "I was just... looking for something that might help."

"'S okay," Dan says. "I don't mind." He feels strangely exposed, now, shirtless and wearing just underwear, but Harry doesn't seem to notice. Harry shifts Dan's script aside when Dan sets his suitcase down on the bed.

"So, I remembered my dream last night," Harry says. "You were in it."

Dan nods. "I thought maybe that's what happened," he says. "That we'd had the same dream or something."

"Yeah. Sorry for, you know. Letting you fall."

Dan pulls his jeans out of the suitcase and climbs into them with as much dignity as he can muster. "It's okay, really, it's fine," he insists.

"Maybe we do need to understand each other," Harry continues, "like you said. Maybe we just need to... talk, or something."

Dan shrugs and looks through his things for a clean shirt, avoiding Harry's gaze. "Yeah, I dunno," he says. "If you're okay with it, I guess."

"Not that I'm in a hurry to get back to the Dursleys," Harry says, poking thoughtfully at the script next to him. "They're okay this summer and all, but. Well, anyway, I've got to be there, in case anything happens. There's loads of things wrong in that script, by the way," he adds, with a half-smile.

It's the first time he's smiled since Dan first saw him, and Dan forgets himself for a moment, smiling back, relieved. Harry's smile is sweet, and breaks through the coldness on his face like, well. Dan's not about to start spouting poetry, but he thinks the sun makes for a good metaphor. "Well, we had to cut a lot out," Dan says. "Sorry. It's not my call."

"So you're... fourteen?" Harry guesses.

Dan squints. "Fifteen, actually. Just turned, though, in July. I know," he says, when Harry opens his mouth. "Like you."

"I'm sixteen," Harry says. "Fifteen wasn't..." and Harry's smile has completely vanished now, "...such a great year for me."

"I know... I. I'm sorry." Really, Dan wants to add, but there's nothing he can say that doesn't feel trite. He slips a long-sleeved tee over his head and leaves his hair mussed, climbing onto the bed next to Harry. Solidarity, he thinks, and now he's just being silly. "I have to go for tutoring now," he says, one hand carefully hovering over Harry's left shoulder. He lets it settle comfortingly, and Harry doesn't stop him.

"There's more sandwiches on the second tray," Dan continues, "so you don't have to go starving all day. And I..." he looks around his room helplessly. "You're welcome to look at anything while I'm gone. Really, it's fine, I don't care. And, um. Nobody should be coming by, 'cause I shouldn't be in here. So."

Harry nods. "Okay," he says. He reaches behind him and pulls his wand from his back pocket, looking at it forlornly. "Thanks," he says, glancing up. His gaze is uncomfortably direct. "For... for breakfast and everything." He opens his mouth as if to say something else, then his eyes drift to Dan's forehead again and he closes it.

Dan squeezes Harry's shoulder. "'S fine," he says again, and climbs off the bed.

~*~

They shoot the hospital scene today, and Dan's been dreading it all this time because he can't cry, not really anyway, and definitely not on cue. He's surprised, then, when his throat closes up and he feels tears wetting the hair at his temples. It's all so sad, he thinks. He can't even work up anger about it. It's just sad, and he wants to do some sort of justice to Harry, thin and sixteen and just plain unhappy Harry, and he doesn't think that he can. There's a moment of silence after Mike yells "cut," then Dan sniffles and Rupert giggles uncomfortably and things almost return to normal.

When Dan makes it back up to his floor, it's almost eleven, and Emma calls him twice in the hallway before he can get inside his room. He slumps tiredly against the door once he's in, and wonders briefly if he can make it to his bed without tripping on anything if he doesn't turn on the light. Deciding that's impossible, he turns it on.

Harry is curled up on Dan's bed, on top of the comforter and facing the door. He's still got his glasses on, but his eyes are closed. Dan doesn't know whether he's disappointed or relieved; if he expected Harry to be miraculously gone by nightfall or if he secretly hoped he was just dreaming. "Hey," he says softly, approaching the bed. "You awake?"

Harry opens his eyes. "Yeah, I couldn't sleep," he says, but he sounds tired. Weary. This does not bode well for the talking thing they were going to try, Dan thinks, toeing off his trainers and turning on the nightstand lamp.

"Well, maybe we should just--" Dan yawns, turning off the light at the wall. He shuffles around to the other side of the bed and climbs on, and Harry turns over, watching him. "Maybe we should turn in now, and talk more later, yeah?" He's so exhausted, from the emotional ups and downs and the lack of sleep and the worry above all. "I really like you," he adds suddenly, a bit desperate for the right words to say. "I would have liked to spend time with you if I could."

Harry reaches out and touches Dan tentatively, just above the eyebrow. It's the most intimate contact he's initiated, and Dan holds his breath without quite meaning to. "I think I would have liked to be you," Harry says. "For a day." His fingers trace the arch of Dan's eyebrow to the middle of his forehead, then traces the other one. "You seem... you're happy. I'm glad." He laughs breathily, an echo of Dan's own laughter. "At least one of us should be, right?"

So Dan kisses him. Thinks oh hell, leans forward, feeling Harry's palm rest against his cheek, and presses his lips to Harry's. He hears Harry's sharp intake of air and grips the front of Harry's shirt in his fist and prays, please, please, kiss me back. When Harry opens his mouth Dan slips his tongue inside and he's never done this, never gone quite this far, but somehow he feels this is something he knows. This is something he knows about Harry.

~*~

"You deserve some happiness," Dream-Dan tells Dream-Harry. They hold hands and float above Scotland together, surveying the land below them. "Maybe that's the answer."

Harry shakes his head. "I think it's better this way," he says. "Like, if you can be happy, then maybe there's hope for me." He raises their joined hands and touches his scar. "Even with this."

Dan has never really touched the scar make-up carefully traces onto his forehead for the films, too aware that any inadvertent brush against it could smudge or smear it even after it's set. Harry's scar is smooth and even beneath his fingers, strangely cool compared to the skin around it. Harry lets go of Dan's hand and shudders a little when Dan's fingers trace the scar more carefully, and Dan begins to sink down to earth, wondering how that must feel, to be on the other side of that scar.

Dan shakes himself awake a few inches from the ground in his dream, and rubs at his forehead, feeling a murky aftereffect like that of being kissed there. It's 5:59 in the AM, and the bed next to him is empty. He lets out a breath he didn't know he was holding, and grabs his water bottle on the way to the toilet.

On his way out, he checks his reflection and smiles, looking kissed and feeling happy.

The End