Chapter Twenty-Six of 'Forgive Those Who Trespass'- Trouble Shared
Thank you for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Six-Trouble Shared
“Ennervate!”
The spell sputtered and fizzed out. Draco didn’t move. Harry clapped a hand across his eyes and breathed for a long moment. If he could see Draco just then, he’d probably start crying and not stop.
He had to concentrate. He had to avoid panicking. He had to help Draco, and he wasn’t going to do that by moping around and wailing. What he was suffering at the moment, as he tried to make sure Draco didn’t die here, was nothing to what Draco would suffer if Harry couldn’t wake him, or the pain that Draco had fled into his mind in the first place to avoid.
His breathing calmed, and the darkness behind his eyelids began to be darkness instead of the vision of Draco’s unsleeping, unmoving face.
And then words crawled across it. Harry stiffened, wondering for a moment if a trap had sprung at last, or if Richard had come in through the far door of the Pensieve room and cast a spell on him.
But no, they were only the remembered pages of a book. He’d once read a spell that could work in circumstances like these, he was certain, a spell that Healers used to help with deep catatonia. But he didn’t have Hermione’s memory, and of course he couldn’t remember the incantation.
On the other hand, he did have the notebook he’d brought with him, filled with notes on his Auror training. The chance that it contained a helpful spell was very low, but he could at least look; he had absolutely nothing to lose, considering he’d tried all the other things he could think of.
Harry dropped his hand from his face and reached into the satchel that hung from his shoulder. His gaze focused again on Draco, making sure the small, faint motions of his chest still endured. He was breathing, wasn’t he? Yes? Good.
If he does nothing more than breathe…
Harry’s hands shook so badly that he dropped the notebook back into the satchel when he found it at first. Again, he forced himself to sit with head bowed and eyes shut, thinking of nothing, until he felt calm enough to pick it up again. He flipped through the pages, turning at once past what he felt would be useless but lingering over any slightly unusual spell.
Nothing, and nothing, and nothing. How would casting one of the twelve variations of the Blasting Curse or the spell that revealed an animal as an Animagus help now? But there were sections he’d copied from Hermione’s notes on the days he’d been too ill or injured to attend class. He didn’t know them as well as the rest of the material. Perhaps he should read those.
Damn, what did those abbreviations mean? If they ever got back to the surface in one piece, Harry was taking time to write out the words in full, instead of abbreviating them a.p. and o.y. They could mean anything. They could contain the seed of an answer, but how in the world was he to know that when he scribbled them down carelessly and forgot the meaning the next night?
And he’d kept no key, of course.
A sudden, gunmetal-gray wave of self-loathing rose up in Harry, and he ground his teeth and held back the impulse to simply scream curses at his past self. Screaming would feel good, but if he started now, he wasn’t sure he’d stop. And he would miss the moment when Draco stopped breathing, as Harry expected to happen any moment now, or if some creature or Unspeakable started sneaking up on them.
Go back to it. Concentrate. Try to figure out the abbreviations from context. Can you do that?
With a lot of squinting and trying to think like his past pissed, maudlin, or impatient self, Harry puzzled out a few of the abbreviations. a. was almost always “application,” a note Hermione used often to designate the spell’s usefulness from its effects. c. was curse. v. meant a variant of a spell that usually had a broader reach, and j. was jinx, of course.
But some letters seemed to be used for multiple words. Harry leaned back and checked on Draco again.
He was breathing. He was staring. That was all that could be said for him, really.
For a moment, Harry imagined him being like that for the rest of his life, lying in bed at St. Mungo’s, never seeing anything but the ceiling, never having visitors he could hear or speak with, never having the chance to experience the sunlight and happiness denied to him for the past year…
He’d started to hyperventilate before he noticed and stopped himself. Every instinct urged him to go faster, to find a cure now now now, but this was exactly the kind of situation where rushing would mean he was likely to overlook a cure.
Ron, Hermione, I wish you were here right now. Draco, I wish you were awake. I’d even welcome Richard, since there’s the chance he’d want to save Draco to suffer more than he can when he’s asleep like this.
Not asleep. If he were asleep, then I could count on his waking up when he was rested enough. Gone. Unreachable.
Harry reached out and ran a hand over Draco’s forehead. It felt like slick marble under his fingers. Blood had left Draco’s face, and he looked not attractively pale but nearly dead. Harry turned away with a short shake of his head.
He couldn’t lose Draco. He couldn’t. Draco had become frantic when he thought Harry was fading into shadow, but Harry had been able to accept that calmly. He didn’t care about losing his life as long as he was the only one who died.
Draco had joined Ron and Hermione in the select group of those whom he couldn’t bear to see die, even as he would die to save them, Harry realized dimly.
He wrapped his arms around himself, shivering. He stood to lose a friend, not to distant torturers or unseen Unspeakables, but right in front of him, if he didn’t do something. What good was it if the wizarding world hailed you as its savior, if you couldn’t save one person when it really counted?
Stop that. Self-pity and self-loathing won’t work, either. If you wallow in guilt, then the next thing you know, you could look up and Draco could be dead. He’ll need to eat fairly soon, and what will you do about that? You really don’t think you can break the catatonia that grips him? Then think about something else productive.
Harry felt his stubbornness flare. Perhaps that was what he had really needed: a challenge from the part of himself that didn’t believe he could do this. And he wanted to save Draco.
That was all the more reason to show that, yeah, he could.
He reached out and picked up the notebook again. This time, he tapped the pages with his wand and cast a spell that Hermione had taught him to pick out all the various references to a certain subject. “Spells relating to mind,” he said aloud, when the light from the spell swirled up into a green question mark, asking him what he wanted to look for.
The notebook flipped open, each pertinent page turning green. There weren’t many of them, and most of them were in the sections taken from Hermione’s notes, crowded with abbreviations he hadn’t understood. Harry grimaced, took a deep breath, and picked up the book.
*
Forty-five minutes later, he was near despair again. He’d tried, and still most of the spells were locked in abbreviations he couldn’t figure out or variants on Legilimency, which he knew he was pants at.
Are you? How long has it been since you tried?
“Not that long,” Harry whispered, but he knew he was lying. It had been the better part of a year. He lowered the notebook to his lap and stared unseeing at its pages a moment more, then turned to look at Draco again. By now, he thought he could have created a perfect drawing of the other man without one glance during the process of painting-assuming he had any artistic talent in the first place, which he didn’t.
But what about damage? You’ve never even heard of Legilimency being used on an unconscious person. What if you hurt him worse? The way he is now, there’s at least the chance that someone from St. Mungo’s could help him. Without that-
Harry hesitated, caught in the horrible temptation of stealing away to the center of the maze, confronting the man he suspected waited there, and enacting the plan that would unbind Draco from the maze whilst Draco was unconscious and unable to oppose him. Surely, he would wake up physically whole and able to walk away, and then-
Then? Harry shook his head, disgusted with himself again. There’s no guarantee that he would wake up even if you sacrificed yourself. And there’s no guarantee that someone would be around to help him. Richard certainly wouldn’t. And even if he could get back to the surface, if, say, your sacrifice freed Ron and Hermione as well and they carried him, no one would know why he’d gone unconscious.
The longer Harry sat there and pondered, the longer his fears and worries pushed him towards Legilimency. And the more he worried over it, wondering what would happen. Draco had his life now, at least. If Harry pressed further, if Draco felt the protective shell that surrounded him cracking, could he pull away and will himself to die, perhaps?
Harry had no idea. He just didn’t know enough about this.
And did he have the right to push on, in his longing for a quick solution? Wouldn’t that be just like listening to Draco’s demands that Harry stay by his side no matter what, when Harry knew the best idea was to give Draco everything else he deserved?
He didn’t know. He had no idea.
And if he made the wrong decision, the only one he had to blame was himself.
Draco twitched a moment, and Harry lifted his head hopefully. But Draco’s bladder had just let go. He continued to lie in the same position as before, his hands sprawled uselessly to the sides of his body.
Harry winced in intense pity and banished the urine with a wave of his wand, then stared at Draco some more. He could feel resolve building up in him like a head of steam, but this time he wasn’t so sure what he would decide to do.
His stubbornness flared again.
He wasn’t a Healer. He wasn’t a master Legilimens in the way that Dumbledore had been. Maybe he should have been; maybe those would be good traits for someone who wanted to become an Auror, too. Maybe he could learn them when they got out of here-
Harry snorted and reminded himself of his future sharply. No, like it or not, he would have to heal Draco, if he could, with his own set of present skills, and he would face Richard the same way. As long as he could learn the spell that bound a person to the maze, then he didn’t think that second part was beyond his abilities.
He had to do what he had to do, and the consequences be damned, because there was no better choice.
He turned back to the notebook and the particular incantation he’d spotted which announced that a wizard could show his own thoughts to another person, as a way of securing trust-a very gentle and non-invasive contact between minds, an elementary telepathy. Hermione’s notes said that the spell wasn’t much use because no one had ever been able to develop it further than that. Legilimency was still needed to read minds.
Harry’s opinion was that, if he could use it to show his thoughts to Draco, then it would work just fine. Draco lay in darkness right now, non-responsive to anything around him. Harry’s plan was to show him something interesting enough to make him respond.
*
Harry glanced at the notebook one more time, then moistened his lips and the inside of his mouth with his tongue. Just one mispronunciation could cause this to be a disaster.
More than it already probably will be-
Harry turned away from his own doubt. He had no time for it.
“Lux in mente mei,” he said, and the confidence in his own voice impressed him. He held the wand halfway between himself and Draco, as the notes on the spell had instructed, and wobbled it back and forth, so that the ends tilted up and down like seesaws.
A cocoon of warm, brilliant white light enwrapped him. Harry blinked. If Legilimency with Snape had been like this, he might have paid more attention to the bastard’s efforts to teach him.
Then the light shot forwards. Harry was borne helplessly along with it, and for a moment he thought he knew what it was like for a sunbeam to fly through the atmosphere. He was dissolved, burned to ashes, and reborn again, and the process continued over and over, until abruptly he was lost in darkness, and the light scattered to the farthest corners of a large, empty room.
Harry stared around. He thought he recognized the sensation of being in someone else’s mind from his brief trips into Voldemort’s thoughts, and his even briefer experience of pushing back into Snape’s head, but there was no living presence to confront him, no push the way he’d sensed before. Only darkness, and the feeling of deadness. He might have made this an extension of his own mind, if he were a master Legilimens, and no one else would have opposed him.
Harry shivered, but by then the light had spread out, and it had begun to show certain memories he remembered well from various vivid parts of his life.
He had thought about trying to confine the spell to happy memories, so he wouldn’t alarm Draco into further flight, or ones that showed him in a bad light, so Draco would laugh. But, according to the description of the spell, because its purpose was to let another person get to know the one casting it, Harry couldn’t actually choose the memories. The spell would choose the ones that made him who he was, and narrate them as a story, informative but not invasive, for the audience.
If there was an audience in this case, Harry thought miserably, and then turned to face the stream of images.
Of course, the first one was of the flying green light of the Killing Curse, and his mother’s scream ringing in his ears. Harry shivered, and hoped Draco, if he could sense this, had no complementary memories of his own that would make him decide hiding was best.
After that came glimpses of the Dursleys, mostly the times he’d used accidental magic or discovered, with varying degrees of pain, that they really didn’t love or care for him in the same way they did for Dudley. He raced across the playground away from Dudley’s gang; he flew into the air without meaning to; Aunt Petunia cut off his hair and screamed as it grew back. And then came the memory of Hagrid knocking down the door that separated him from Harry, telling him he was a wizard and revealing another, special, sunlit world Harry hadn’t known anything about.
Harry smiled, though the joy in his heart was torn with pain. The eleven-year-old staring up at the half-giant with awe hadn’t known a thing about what his life would turn into. He’d envisioned a special school for people like him, and people who were, well, like him, not conceited pure-bloods or Muggleborns who understood their place in wizarding society better than he did or the children of Death Eaters who sulked and smirked at him.
But there could no be leaving this world once he knew about it, and, in a way, Harry was grateful for that. He didn’t belong here completely, but he belonged here more than he did anywhere else, and so deeply that anyone trying to drive him out would have a hard fight. That was probably the best he could hope for.
He rose on a broom for the first time, and felt the deep thrill in his heart as he realized he had one natural talent that had nothing to do with the scar on his forehead and which no one could take away from him. He helped Ron rescue Hermione from the troll and cemented a friendship. He rescued the Philosopher’s Stone, and cowered as he heard and smelled Quirrell burning above him, and caught a glimpse, for the first time, of how terrible his destiny really was.
Second year, and Draco, if he was watching, could have seen Harry ride in the flying car and gradually work his way up to facing the basilisk. Was he watching? Harry turned away from the memories that, after all, he knew perfectly well, and cocked his head, trying to reach into the darkness with whatever senses a master Legilimens would have had in this situation.
“Draco?” he called.
A spark. A flicker. Harry caught his breath. Probably it was only a reflection of light from the spell he had cast, and he told himself not to hope. What were the chances that flinging himself into Draco’s mind like an idiot had actually yielded anything, after all?
But, on the other hand, taking wild chances had sometimes worked out well for him in the past. He edged deeper, trying to make his entire presence welcoming and calm, so Draco wouldn’t think he needed to run away just to stay sane.
Definitely a spark and a flicker this time. Harry stopped where he was and glanced over his shoulder; the memory now at play was his capture of the Snitch in the final game of his third year. He winced, because Draco would probably remember how that game had meant Slytherin wouldn’t win the House Cup, but he had to trust their bond forged by the maze was stronger than the childhood rivalry.
“Draco?” he called again, into that realm of darkness where no one seemed to wait to push back and force him out. “Can you hear me?”
He felt the first brief, tentative push. Harry spread his hands and backed away. “I’ll go if you want me to,” he said. “I’ll take the memories away if you want me to.”
The darkness around him quivered. Harry paused. Was that eagerness for him to be gone, or was that desperation at the thought that he might leave?
He decided to wait for an unequivocal sign. He settled on what, for lack of a better word, he had to call the floor, and watched as the stillness around him came slowly and pulsingly alive.
The memories appeared to have lured Draco out of his self-imposed seclusion with simple curiosity. Harry could feel the very edges of what seemed like an active mind staring, taking note of his presence and the memories, and then growing stronger, as if the fact that the memories were not Draco’s own had finally become clear. Odd crackles like heat lightning shot past Harry and towards the images. He tensed. Does he want me to go?
And the next moment, he knew the answer, as the presence wrapped around him like one of Draco’s hugs.
No.
Harry spread his arms, unsure what he could embrace here, if anything, and felt heavy, soft coils drape over him. He hissed in relief and held tight. More and more coils went on falling; the darkness around him came more and more to life with shadowy figures that Harry suspected were parts of Draco’s imagination and past, like actors filing in for one last rehearsal before the play began.
All at once, the darkness started and jerked. Harry saw white light flare, and suspected that Draco had remembered the pain that had driven him away in the first place. The presence tried to flee.
Harry grabbed on and didn’t let it go.
But he knew persuasion wouldn’t work right now, not in a situation this primal and this agonizing, and merely showing his memories was no longer enough. He tried to show more, to widen the pathway into his mind. He delved deep into his feelings and draped them in front of Draco like brightly-colored cloths.
Draco mattered to him. For all his own reluctance and dithering about his sexual issues, Harry knew he could not lose him. The panic that had taken him when Draco fell down in a coma was the same as Draco’s when he had thought Harry might fade with the shadow plague.
So important. You are the most important person in the world to me.
Ordinarily, Harry might have qualified the words with right now, or with some reference to Ron and Hermione, but there was nothing ordinary about this. Draco needed the true depth of his feelings, needed to know their clarity, even if their passage blistered Harry himself. He gulped in air and let all his barriers down.
He showed Draco how the physical attraction bypassed all the missing pieces of Draco’s body, growing as a natural consequence of their spending more time together. Harry could adjust himself to the quirks and rough edges of Draco’s personality he would once have found unbearable. Draco’s needs were not matters for resistance or regret on Harry’s part, but (mostly) matters for acceptance and accommodation. And if Harry thought a need was truly unbearable, he could always argue against it.
Harry could no longer imagine a life where he simply shared his time with Ron and Hermione and ignored Draco. The imagined, longed-for, dreamed-of girlfriend was far less important than he was, real and solid and there. Harry still wanted to be normal, but that had dropped from number three or four on his list of wants to number ten. Various desires to make Draco happy occupied many places now, just below the desire to save his life.
This flight into his mind was horrible, not only for Draco but in what it implied for Harry. He could not stand this, could not bear it, if Draco went away. He simply could not-
A sudden shove sent Harry sailing free. He gasped, and found himself falling backwards. His body had remained in an upright position all this while, aiming his wand at Draco’s chest, but a sudden exile from another person’s mind made him react in the same way he had with Snape years ago.
He scrambled back to his feet, and stared at Draco. A little color had returned to his cheeks, but there seemed to have been no other positive impact. Harry fought the temptation to close his eyes and weep.
And then Draco’s eyes fluttered open.
Harry didn’t remember crossing the space between them. It was enough that he had crossed it, and now cradled Draco’s head in his lap, and whispered endearments, and the tears were falling after all, whilst Draco traced his cheeks with one finger and mouthed over and over again, in wonder, Mine.
Harry knew iron bands of friendship and longing circled both their chests, linking them together more effectively than any set of manacles. He was exquisitely aware of Draco’s breathing, of his heartbeat, of the slide of callused fingers against his face.
How can I ever give this up? How?
But if his real priority was to save Draco’s life, not merely make him happy…
Harry closed his eyes, drowned in the embrace he had offered Draco and the other man had hungrily returned, and refused to think beyond the moment.
Chapter 27.