Fic: Pains of the Past (Harry/Lance)
Title: Pain of the Past, Be Healed
Author: loonie_lupin (ff. net)/nilitara (livejournal)
Fandom: HP, Bones
Rating: PG
Summary: Lance wakes Harry from a nightmare.
For: crossovers100
Prompt: 096. Nightmares
Disclaimer: The characters are the property of their respective creator. I own nothing
096. Nightmares.
Harry had stopped living at his hotel a little while ago. It had seemed pretty ridiculous to keep on paying for a room when he spent most of his night with Lance anyway. He wasn’t usually inside during the day so if he wasn’t during the night either, what good did it do him to have one? Lance had let him move in in his apartment, had actually asked him to.
It was only temporary, just the time to find out a flat of his own. Or, at least, it was supposed to be. Harry was thinking more and more about staying. He had told Lance that he was going to say yes when they asked him again at the end of the month he had been allowed. Of course, Lance had been ecstatic about it; he really hadn’t wanted to think about Harry leaving the country and, quite frankly, neither had Harry.
Of course, with Harry coming to stay with him, he had been able to learn quite a bit more about the young man, more than he ever knew before. There were quite a lot of things about people you could learn when you stayed in close quarter with them but the most crucial thing happened about a week into their cohabitation.
Lance had been startled awake in the middle of the night by a scream, a scream that seemed to come straight from his spare room, scaring the hell out of him in the process. It must have been a deformation from the job, he was so used to crime that a robbery had been the first thing to come to his mind.
He recognized Harry’s voice the second time around and, taking the baseball bat he always kept under his bed - and there was no way he was ever telling Booth and Brennan that because they would never let him live it down - and went there only to find Harry trashing on the bed, fighting an invisible opponent.
He let the bat fall on the ground and went to wake his boyfriend up. He knew how it was when you were caught in the middle of a horrifying dream and he knew that you just wanted to wake up in these situations.
As he approached the bed, he could hear bribes of conversation, of pleading on Harry’s part. It seemed to be names, mostly, but he couldn’t be really sure. He had no idea what it was all about but from the little he could hear that made sense to him, it was an awful situation, a life or death situation, that seemed to end badly for someone close to Harry but he just couldn’t know. Of course, he knew that Harry’s parents were dead but who else? Because Harry didn’t seem to be calling his parents, after all he wouldn’t use their names. Who else had the boy seen die?
Yet, it wasn’t the right time to muse about it, to ask himself questions he had no answer to. It wasn0t the time to lose precious minutes pondering things he could ask Harry later on, when his friend wasn’t trapped into his own mind. He shook Harry slightly, aware that he could frighten him even more by being forceful.
Harry shot up in his bed, having some difficult time getting his breath back, as if he had been running a marathon. It had been a very bad nightmare, one of those he didn’t have very often anymore. Yet, the emotional scarring of the war would not disappear entirely so soon, probably not ever.
He regained his breath and realized that he wasn’t on his own in the room. Of course, he was now sleeping at Lance’s and, even if they weren’t sharing a bed yet, knowing the strength of his nightmares, the way they made him scream sometimes, it was no wonder the psychologist had been woken up. Damn, he had really hoped he would not need to have this conversation, at least not so soon, not before Harry was ready to reveal more of himself.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up,” he apologized, weakly, meeting Lance’s eyes.
Lance blinked.
“You don’t need to apologize for having nightmares, Harry. You can’t control your dreams, it’s not your fault. Do you want to talk about it?”
Lance was nothing if not good at human psychology. It was his job after all. He knew that Harry probably needed to talk about it, more than anything. It was after all the only way to really get over whatever was bothering him. Yet, he also knew that being too forceful, that forcing someone to talk was never a good idea, at least not in a case like this. Usually, the more you pushed, the more people retreated. He would have to wait until Harry was ready and it was probably too soon still.
As he had expected, Harry shook his head.
“No, it’s alright. It’s… it’s my past. I will probably never be free of it, not totally but… it’s getting better, especially since I’m here. I just… I don’t want to talk about it at the moment. Don’t worry, I’m fine.”
He was fine, not really. He knew it and he knew that Lance knew it too. He supposed it was the price to pay for getting involved with someone who knew so intimately psychology and the human mind. Yet, he could not bring himself to regret it.
“Are you sure?” Lance still asked.
Harry smiled, his heartbeat having slowly returned to normal during the little chat.
“Yeah…. My past isn’t all sunshine and daisies but I’m not going to break down because of it. I’ll…. I’ll probably tell you one day just… not yet.”
Lance nodded, having expected something like that, even if he didn’t like it at all. At least, Harry hadn’t denied the probability of talking to him one day, which was already something. After all, he too had a past he hadn’t shared with Harry yet. Maybe the time would come soon.
He really hoped so.
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