Fic: a Different Kind of Friendship (HP/CSI:NY, gen)
Title: A Different Kind of Friendship
Author: loonie_lupin (ff. net)/nilitara (livejournal)
Fandom: HP, CSI :NY
Characters/pairing : Harry Potter, Adam Ross (friendship only)
Rating: PG
Summary: Adam comes home after being tortured ; his wounds are not only physical
For: crossovers100
Prompt: 016. Purple.
Disclaimer: The characters are the property of their respective creator. I own nothing.
016. Purple.
Harry had been expecting it. Since he had received Adam’s phone call, a few hours earlier, telling him all about the hostage situation he had gotten caught in, Harry had known his friend would come home in a right state. Adam had called him because he hadn’t wanted Harry to panic should anything about this filter on the news and the wizard could admit he was grateful for the head up. When he had received the news, he had barely been able to contain a sigh; he knew what torture looked like and he had never wanted Adam to learn about it too but, apparently, his wish hadn’t mattered at all.
Even knowing Adam would be in a hell of a state hadn’t prepared Harry for the sight that greeted him; Adam, purple with bruises, walked carefully into the apartment. Harry was hurting only by looking at him but, watching him more closely, Harry knew there was something else wrong with Adam, beyond his physical state. One single look at him and Harry knew something bothered him. The question was, what was it?
“Damn, they got you good!” Harry whistled because that had to be the understatement of the century. “Come on, sit down before you fall over.”
Adam obeyed mechanically, not wanting to argue. He took a seat beside Harry, grimacing as his back made contact with the sofa, and stayed mute. He didn’t feel like talking; he had talked more than enough for today.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” Harry asked gently. “Except from the obvious,” he added as an afterthought, signaling the copious amount of injuries covering Adam’s body.
Harry already knew something was wrong and the way Adam looked down at his laps when he asked just confirmed it. Harry really had to know what was going on in his friend’s mind.
“Come on, Adam. You know you can tell me everything.”
Harry meant it. There was nothing Adam could tell him that would make him judge him; he knew all too well how it felt like being critiqued for the things you did, or didn’t do, and he didn’t want to make Adam feel like that. He hated when it happened to him and he wasn’t going to stand for anyone he cared about being in this position.
“I talked, Harry. I talked. They were torturing us, Danny and I, and Danny wasn’t telling them anything but I just couldn’t take it anymore. I said things I shouldn’t have, things they wanted me to say and I know I should have kept my mouth shut but I couldn’t stand it and they could have killed someone and it would have been my fault.”
Harry closed his eyes. He did understand what Adam was feeling right now but he also knew he was wrong, nothing was his fault. Of course, it didn’t help to know something like that intellectually when you were in this position, but Harry still had to make his friend understand.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Adam.”
“But…”
“Anyone would have talked.”
“Danny didn’t.”
“Not yet,” Harry cut. “But he would have. In the end, he would have talked Adam. Everyone talk under torture because everyone has a breaking point. It may take more or less time to reach it but, at one point or another, it will happen. Trust me, if someone tells you they would never break under torture, then they’re lying. It’s impossible.”
Adam looked at him with something akin to hope in his eyes. Harry could see he really wanted to believe, to know it wasn’t just him being a wimp but that it was a normal human reaction.
“Really?”
Harry smiled reassuringly. He wasn’t lying just to give some comfort to Adam. No matter how much he sometimes wanted to, he knew lying was never the solution. Sometimes it may seem like a good idea, a little white lie to avoid hurting someone, but he knew more than anyone that people needed to know the truth, no matter how much it hurt, because in the end, a lie could backfire and hurt the person you were trying to protect even more.
“Yes, really. Eventually, Danny would have broken too. I won’t lie to you, it would probably have taken longer than with you but that’s because Danny is a cop. He has chosen a profession where he knew he could get in trouble, get injured, get attacked; he does have training, maybe not this exact scenario, but more than you. In the end, though, he would have told them exactly what they wanted to know and something told me they would have gone on torturing whoever they had in their grasp until they had the answer they were looking for.”
Adam closed his eyes but his face seemed to lose some of its tension; it was as if he had been granted forgiveness for a sin he had committed. He hadn’t but, in his eyes, it had been a sin and Harry had just given him absolution.
“Would you have?”
Harry frowned when he heard the question. Would he have what? Broken under torture? Yes, after a while, but not if he had been in Adam’s place because their attackers hadn’t been wizard and he could have gotten away.
“In this exact same situation, with these people, I would have gotten away, no problem. I’m a wizard, there was nothing they could have done to detain me. You can’t make a comparison like this. Now, if I was captured by wizards who wanted information, I would have talked after a while, if they even needed that. I’m not good at closing my mind, they could have broken through my mental barrier if they had the abilities, or they could have given me veritaserum. All in all, if a wizard wanted information from me and had the time to torture me as much as he wanted to, yes I would have talked in the end.”
Adam seemed to evaluate his answer. For someone who could talk ten miles a minute about a myriad of things that had nothing to do with the subject at hand, he could actually think quite a bit before saying something in some situations.
“Even you would have talked,” he repeated.
Harry nodded.
“Even I would have talked,” he confirmed.
And Adam finally accepted this as the complete truth. There was nothing he could have done to avoid it. He had been absolutely unable to get away and, apparently, they had all the time in the world to make him and Danny tell them all the information they wanted. The torture would have gone on and on until one of them broke. At least, with him talking, they had stopped hurting both him and Danny. Danny would have been able to take more before talking but in what state would he have been once they were finished with him? And for the same result in the end. He could see what Harry meant when he said that everyone ended up talking so he decided to try and not feel too bad about it. He was certain in would take a while but he would succeed in the end.
Prompt table
A Different Kind of Friendship - main entry