[Wednesday one-shots]: Opening Salvo, S/H/D, PG-13, 3/5

[lomonaaeren]

Part Two.

Title: Opening Salvo (3/5)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Snape/Harry/Draco, established Snape/Draco, mentions of past Harry/Ginny
Warnings: Angst, suicidal thoughts, AU in that Snape survives
Summary: Harry, consumed by his memories after the war, finds himself guided by Luna to Severus and Draco, who have lived in seclusion since the end of the Death Eater trials. Now Harry is face-to-face with old enemies he testified for and a place of peace where he has no choice but to think.
Author’s Notes: Another one of my Wednesday one-shots, written for an anonymous prompt that asked for: Harry living in the Muggle world, struggling with PTSD, and being brought by Luna to Draco and Severus, who owe her and Harry debts; angst with a happy ending. This will probably have three parts.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

"I'm not hungry."

"I want you to try to eat anyway," said Malfoy, putting a piled plate in front of Harry. He serenely ignored the way Harry stared at him. Either Harry had lost the power to intimidate or Malfoy had changed enough since the war not to mind him. "Luna said you usually forget to eat."

"I remember eating something," Harry muttered. He poked the omelette on the plate. It was a perfectly good omelette, as far as he could tell from looking, but looking was all he intended to do. "Half the time that's more real than the food I swallow when I wake up."

He didn't think he'd said anything remarkable, but he looked up in time to see Malfoy's eyes stretched wide. "What?" Harry demanded, and moved his fork around. That might fool Malfoy into thinking he was eating if Harry was lucky. "I told you the truth."

"I'm surprised these memory-trances of yours extend to taste." Malfoy looked as if he wanted to get up and find a parchment right now. "Most of the time, it's sight and sound only."

"Mine are all five senses. Lucky me."

"You might be, Potter. More than you think."

"Why?"

"Because that means it is probably magic left by the absence of the Horcrux," Malfoy said, and stood to study him. "Not ordinary trauma, but more like the spirit-wounds that Severus and I treat in unicorns. Which means that we have experience in this, and more chance of curing you."

Harry swallowed. He had almost forgotten what it was like to have hope for that, since he was either lying around in despair or suffering through memories that had no hope in them. But he did have to know one thing before he really availed himself of the hope.

"Why are you doing this, Malfoy?" The Crup that was never far from him since yesterday wandered up, and Harry bent over and petted him to hide his expression. "Just because Luna asked you to? It's an awful lot of trouble to put yourself to, simply because she asked."

“That she asked is enough. What we owe her--” Malfoy shook his head a little, as though reading invisible writing on the wall about what they owed Luna and then deciding there was too much to recite it all to Harry. “I’d try to heal a dragon if she asked, and I’d probably still get burned to death. But it would be in a good cause.”

Harry sat there and tried to imagine the Malfoy who was friends with Luna and who did things for good causes. He couldn’t. But then, the man was standing right in front of him, so maybe he didn’t have to imagine him. He just had to get used to him.

“One of the things I wanted to ask,” Malfoy continued, voice low, “was whether you really want to get better.”

Harry stared at him and blinked once, twice. “Of course I do.”

“Then you’ll need to work with us,” said Malfoy. “And I think Snape wants you out in the front garden to help weed it. Come, William.”

The Crup standing at Harry’s side wagged his tail, but still wouldn’t move until Harry moved. Harry peered down at him in confusion. Wasn’t the Crup Snape and Malfoy’s pet? Shouldn’t he be concerned about what they wanted?

William only gave him a simple look, as though warning him not to be so foolish, and trotted beside them both along the corridor that apparently led to the garden.

*

Repetitive physical work can put him in a trance of its own. I doubt his memories are provoked by anything so simple as mere physical stimuli. Otherwise, seeing those Mandrakes would have triggered something.

Severus knew Potter would probably think he was in the throes of doing something deathly important as he chopped up and minced weeds on the garden wall--they would serve as the prime ingredient in a potion to douse the earth and prevent that particular kind of weed from coming back--but in reality, Severus had spent more of the morning paying attention to Potter than the plants. This was the sort of potion he’d brewed a hundred times, and by now, his hands mostly moved on their own.

Potter needed his attention far more, enigma that he was.

He weeded with the same ease of long experience that Severus possessed, although Severus had never thought him particularly adept in Herbology. He moved his hands, and stared into the distance with his eyes. His breathing had quieted, enough that Severus became aware of how loud it was most of the time.

Not the panicked breathing of a creature on the verge of flight, but someone who had to breathe as a duty, who had to remind himself to breathe.

Draco was with the goats and unicorns, and would be a good deal longer. Severus lashed the final touch of magic into the potion on the wall, setting it to boil over a small fire burning on air for half an hour, and stepped back long enough to watch a few bubbles before he addressed Potter.

“What is the most powerful memory you experience?”

Potter shook himself slowly back to reality. His breathing picked up its labored pace again, and he turned around and said, “I don’t know. They all feel pretty much the same as each other, really. All equally horrible,” he added, when he saw Severus raise his eyebrows.

“There is no change among the ones most distant in time? In space?”

Potter gave a weak snort. “The one you saw yesterday was one of the older ones. Did it feel like it was lesser because it was older?”

Severus paused. He hadn’t expected Potter to say that, and not because he had a particular theory that older memories would be either worse or weaker. “That was only six years ago,” he said slowly. “You have none older than that.”

Potter paused in turn. “Not about Hogwarts,” he said.

“You have the memory of your parents dying,” Severus said with difficulty. “Or so the were- Lupin told me once.”

“Yes, I do. Well, my mum really. I don’t have any memories of my dad.”

Severus shook his head a little. Yes, it was sad, but he was not going to be drawn into talking about that. He found it hard to talk about Lily even now--not impossible, but it would leave him with a little ache of sorrow in his throat, and he didn’t want that. Instead, he murmured, “And after that? Before the basilisk?”

“The memory of when Quirrell went after the Stone, and I killed him.”

But Potter had tensed, and he only seemed to realize at the last moment that the thing beneath his hand was a flower and not a weed. He stared, blinked, pulled his hand back. He sat there with his head bowed and dangling, and Severus leaned more heavily against the stone wall.

“We cannot help you if you lie to us.”

“It’s not lying in the sense of telling you false things. Just hiding them. Do--do you need to know everything? I thought Luna brought me here so you could help with memories of the war.”

“Miss Lovegood, with the best will in the world,” said Severus slowly, trying to feel his way, “may not have realized that you had more than your memories of the war plaguing you. I doubted it myself until I was in your head last night. Do you want to be helped, Potter?” he added, and he was proud of himself then, because he didn’t snap those words in the way he might have done once. “I cannot tell.”

Potter said nothing, but waited. His head hung. Severus waited, too. Potter was the one who had to make the decision in the end, or their interactions would be worth nothing.

*

What frightens you more? Telling Snape and Malfoy about the Dursleys, or being this way for the rest of your life?

And when he put it like that, Harry did think he knew. Because his fear of telling Snape and Malfoy came from his fear of telling two men who might be dead, or might be changed, and either way, he didn’t think they would make fun of him to his face even if they hadn’t died or changed.

He stood up and turned around to face Snape, who was still watching with motionless eyes. The scars on his throat from Nagini’s bite were brighter than his eyes. Harry cleared his throat a little. “Can I get Malfoy, too? I’d rather tell you both at once.”

“No need to get Malfoy. I’m here.”

Harry started. He hadn’t heard Malfoy walking up behind him, and he hadn’t realized how much time had passed while he was weeding the garden. Now even the angle of the shadows had the power to make him jump.

“All right,” he said, and sat down on the earth. Snape and Malfoy both took seats on the stone wall, near each other in a way that made envy stir in Harry. He’d felt the same kind of envy when he looked at Ron and Hermione, and if he’d never expected to feel it for anyone other than them, well, life did all kinds of unexpected things in his vicinity recently.

“Some of my bad memories come from my Muggle family,” he said. “Living with them, I mean.” I’m not graceful. He swallowed and went on. “If you look into my head while I’m going through those memories, you’ll probably see fear and anger and hunger.”

“Hunger?”

Harry wasn’t sure which one of them said it. He was looking away. “Yes,” he said. “They sometimes didn’t give me enough to eat. Or I only ate what my cousin ate when he was on a diet, and that wasn’t much. So…”

“I see.”

That was definitely Snape’s voice, and Harry felt himself relax as he listened. That was, without a doubt, the best way they could have taken it. They weren’t raging. They weren’t derisive. They were simply listening.

“But I think what you said about part of the Horcrux or the void being left behind makes sense,” Harry told Malfoy, who was also sitting silently. “Because these memories haven’t tormented me like this in years. If it’s the magic making them worse…”

“I don’t know exactly what kind of magic would affect memories that old,” said Malfoy, and exchanged a frowning glance with Snape. “But with your permission, I’d like to try a spell on you that might tell me.” He drew his wand.

Harry waited for a second.

“Do you agree?” Malfoy asked, his wand held high and beginning to glow at the end with a blue light that was calming to look at.

“I do,” Harry said, and laughed at himself. “I was just waiting for the panic to come, and it’s--not there.”

Malfoy relaxed from a tension Harry hadn’t even realized he possessed, and smiled at him. “A good beginning,” he agreed, and then he reached out and swirled the wand over Harry’s head, murmuring an incantation that sounded so much like song that Harry couldn’t make out the words. The way Snape had chanted over Malfoy’s chest after Harry cast the Sectumsempra at him, Harry thought drowsily.

He realized suddenly that he didn’t think he’d ever apologized to Malfoy for that. He opened his mouth to do it.

But the spell was there, swirling around him, drawing him deeper, and then he was drifting into the blue, and gone.

*

“Spirit-wounded,” Severus whispered.

Draco didn’t bother to say anything. Severus would know he agreed just by the way Draco shifted and breathed. Besides, he was busy watching the image of Potter change to a transparent one as he collapsed slowly to the grass, making him look like a glass sculpture with nothing inside it.

The nothingness only lasted a minute, though. Then suddenly Potter did light up, and there was a blue glow like Draco’s spell within his outline, although darker, the color of sapphires. And striking all through it was a deep, jagged crack, shaped a little like Potter’s lightning bolt but incredibly darker and bigger.

Draco winced. That spirit-wound went so deep he wouldn’t be surprised if it had carved Potter’s soul in two.

Then again, he had had a piece of the Dark Lord’s soul attached to his. Who knew what that might do to the one left behind?

Draco cast the spell that restored Potter to looking like himself again and studied his snoring figure for a second, shaking his head. “That was a simple spell to send him straight to sleep. Especially since Luna said he’d been doing nothing but sleep for the last few months.”

“Lying on one’s bed and staring up at the ceiling is not sleep.”

Draco gave Severus a faint smile. That was yet another experience they had in common, and yet another one that had made them agree to try to heal Potter instead of merely ignore him.

“The more we can give him natural sleep, the better.”

Draco gestured with his wand at Potter, and then went over and pulled him gently into a more comfortable position. He was going to end up with his neck angled like a fish on a line if he kept sleeping that way. “I wouldn’t call this natural.”

“His reaction to the stress of the spell was to go to sleep. I’ll brew a few potions that have components that can encourage rest as well. It will be the best thing to do, to make sure that Potter actually is sleeping instead of having nightmares.”

Draco paused. “You heard him last night, too.”

“I only did not go in to him because William was with him.”

Draco smiled. William had done better at healing some of their other patients than he and Severus could, simply because he lay beside them and slept and provided them with a kind of example of how to rest.

“The nightmares stopped after a time.” Severus studied Potter with eyes that saw things Draco’s never would. Even though Draco was the one more experienced in caring for spirit-wounds, this was one reason he appreciated working with Severus. “I waited to see if he would talk about them this morning. But he did not.”

Draco whistled softly under his breath. “Do you think it’s because of who we used to be? Or has he got used to taking all his troubles as normal and doesn’t think about them at all anymore?” If that was the case, it would be hard to persuade Potter to confront them. Draco knew well from his studies and experience that you had to make any magical creature--wizards included--acknowledge a wound, not simply lick around it.

“Both, I think.” Severus crouched beside Potter and frowned at him. “I can hardly believe that he did not go to someone else before it became this bad, and yet…”

“His best friends are in Australia. Who else would he go to?”

“Minerva?”

It always took Draco a moment, still, to work his head around what Severus was talking about and realize he meant Professor McGonagall. “Would he? They never struck me as that close.”

“The rest of the Weasleys?”

“With his best friend out of the country? And the Weasleys dealing with their own losses from the war?” Draco had read in the Prophet, before they moved here and he stopped reading it at all, that the surviving Weasley twin had become morose and sullen, almost catatonic, and his father had taken a temporary leave of absence from the Ministry to help care for him. “I wonder.”

Severus opened his mouth as if to suggest someone else, and stopped. Draco nodded at him.

“It’s surprisingly hard to think of any other friends Potter made. There are people who might have helped him, but most of those he wouldn’t ask, and most of the ones who would push themselves on him are just the sort to publish his secrets or glory in being close to the Great Harry Potter without actually doing anything to help. Luna was right to bring him here.”

Severus nodded, and then waved his wand and floated Potter off the dirt. “Let’s get him inside and into a real bed. I have the feeling that he has too often slept on the floor or somewhere else that does not resemble one.”

Draco hid a smile as he followed. Severus might claim that he didn’t know what tenderness was, but he always managed to find a way to express it.

“I see you grinning back there, Draco,” Severus said, without turning.

Not see it, but feel it. Which is much the same thing. But Draco didn’t intend to stop grinning, and Severus was too busy floating Potter along and gently pushing aside a fussing William to scold him again.

Part Four.

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