Dearest Harry - Eileen's Story

Thanks to Kim for betaing



Eleven

“I have a grandmother?” Harry said in a small voice.

“Yes Harry, you do.” Severus told him, “I think that you will like her immensely, and I know that she will like you.”

Harry turned a look on him that was so scathing, so sceptical that this time Severus flinched.

“It’s okay Professor,” Harry said coldly, “I will come and see your pensieve. I’ll defend you to the Aurors, but I was always going to do that anyway. You don’t have to lie to me. If my grandmother had wanted to know me she would have tried to find me before now, I think. Anyhow, I don’t want to talk anymore. I’m tired.” With that, he turned away from Severus and buried himself under the covers. Never, Severus thought to himself, had Harry seemed so young, so fragile. He wanted to touch the boy, to, of all things, give him a hug. And wasn’t that bizarre? Severus Snape wanting to hug someone. Severus Snape wanting to hug Harry Potter?

“Harry…” he began. He wanted to tell the boy how much his grandmother yearned to see him, how she had glowed with joy at the thought of meeting her only grandchild. How she kept the single photo that she owned of him close to her at all times. But he suspected that Harry would not believe him if he did share these things. The boy had latched onto to the fact that Eileen needed Harry to save Severus, and Severus thought that nothing that he could say would change the boy’s mind right now.

“Harry…” he tried again, but this time the boy answered thickly.

“Please, Professor, leave me alone. I’ll come tomorrow. I’ll meet her then but please leave me alone now.” Severus thought he heard a stifled sob and the boy’s shoulders started to shake under his covers. He stood, feeling more awkward than he could ever remember, possibly in his entire life. He clenched and unclenched his fists; aching to touch the boy, comfort him. But Harry had made it pretty clear that he did not want his relationship with Severus to change any more than it had already right now. Severus thought that the boy had probably had more than enough emotional upheaval for one day.

“I’ll see Molly about getting you fed,” he said gruffly, but Harry did not answer him. He just buried himself further into the covers and his shoulders shook a little more.




When Harry awoke, the house was dark. He felt completely drained, exhausted. The conversation that he had had with Professor Snape had probably been one of the hardest, the weirdest, that he ever had and he really didn’t know what the hell to make of it all. Severus Snape was his uncle?. Harry rolled his eyes to the heavens and decided that someone up there hated him. Either that, or he was the victim of some vast cosmic joke. He was sore again, his shoulder ached and his ribs, he thought that the Dursleys had really done a job on him this time. Perhaps his magic coming in meant that he was taking longer than normal to heal?

His eyes felt scratchy too. Harry could not believe that he had cried either. He hadn’t cried since he was about six, there had never been any point, had there? Nobody had ever cared when he cried so he had learned not to. But today? Today was just too much. Petunia was not his aunt, she was some sort of cousin, and Harry had a grandmother. He had had one all along. She had known about him but had never tried to see him, to find him. He wondered what she was like, whether she would like him. But only for a moment, and then he tried not to think about her at all, because Harry didn’t seem to have much luck with his relatives, did he?

All those years, he had wished, had prayed for there to be someone else, someone who would come and take him away from the Dursleys and now that he was seventeen and it was far too late, that someone had finally turned up and it was Severus Fucking Snape! Fucking cosmic joke, all right! Harry almost laughed, but he knew that once he began he would not stop, and then someone would turn up to cart him off to the secure ward at St Mungo’s where he could spend the rest of his days chatting to Gilderoy Lockhart and the Longbottoms.

Harry got out of bed. The torches were still lit so he could see well enough. Nothing was very clear without his glasses and he thought he should probably get something sorted out. He’d speak to Remus in the morning about what to do, or Hermione. They would know. There was a tray on the table by his bed. Mrs Weasley had left him something to drink and some muffins. They were still warm, Harry found. She must have put some kind of charm on them. On the chair, beside the food, there was a small pile of clean linen. Harry felt his eyes fill again. Bloody hell, he thought, he was turning into some sort of girl, crying all over the bloody place. Teary girls made him think of Cho Chang and he so did not want to go there. So instead, he carefully made his way out of his room towards the bathroom and, as he went, he wondered idly what had happened to the Dursleys. He must remember to ask about that tomorrow too.

He opened the door heading out on to the landing and fell over the large soft object lying in front of the entrance.

“Oof! What the fuck? Ouch.” The jolt had really hurt his shoulder and his ribs, but he pulled himself back up to a seated position in order to see what he had fallen over.

“Sorry,” said a small voice.

“Malfoy? What the fuck are you doing?” Harry hissed, “Have you decided to rejoin the Death Eaters? It’ll take more than that, you know, to kill me. ‘Death by tripping over a prone Malfoy,’ that would go down well with Voldemort, wouldn’t it?”

He heard the sharp intake of breath when he said the Dark Lord’s name and then Malfoy’s snarky voice said, “Look, you kicked me in the ribs, you great oaf. You should look where you are going.”
“Malfoy,” Harry said slowly, as if talking to a very small child, “You were on the floor, in the dark, outside my door. Oh yes, and I don’t have my glasses, so it would be practically impossible for me to see you! How the fuck am I supposed to look where I am going under those circumstances?”

“I was waiting for you.” Malfoy said, petulantly. “I have something to give you, and Professor Snape said he would talk to you tonight and he didn’t.”

Harry stared at the Malfoy-shaped lump in front of him in astonishment. He sighed deeply. “Look Malfoy, it is really late, so late that I don’t even know how late it is. I think that you should go back to bed; I’ll see you in the morning. Oh, and believe me, Professor Snape really did talk to me. At length, and in great detail, and about a whole lot of things, I promise you that he did.”

“But he didn’t talk to you about me, did he?” Malfoy asked in a sad, tight little voice. “He said he would.”

“Oh for Merlin’s sake!” Harry muttered, exasperated. “Go on in, I’ll be there in a minute. Have a muffin or something!”

When he re-entered the room, Malfoy was standing by the bed, his head down looking very dejected. He was holding something; clutching it against his chest as if it were precious and Harry felt a pang of sympathy for him.

“Oh bollocks, Malfoy,” he said shortly. “Sit down, why don’t you?”

“Can’t,” the other boy answered, “There is bedding or something on the chair.”

Harry huffed. If he was honest with himself, then he was quite grateful for Malfoy’s visit. The blonde boy was a useful distraction from the thoughts that were plaguing him. But Harry was not planning on being honest with himself, not tonight and not for the foreseeable future. It was just all too painful. He was just going to ignore everything and maybe it would just go away.

He walked over to the chair, lifted the sheets and gently deposited them at the foot of the bed. He thought he would have to have a word with Mrs Weasley in the morning; she probably had enough to do without washing sheets for him all the time. It had gone far enough, it had to stop.

Malfoy sat down, still with his eyes fixed on the floor.

Harry investigated the tray. There was only one cup, since Mrs Weasley could not have foreseen Malfoy’s visit, but there was a glass by his bed that had held water, so Harry poured some pumpkin juice into that and some into the cup, which he then handed to Malfoy. The other boy seemed to have forgotten that he was there.

“Malfoy,” he said. “What is it, what’s wrong?”

The other boy lifted his head. Harry could see his face quite well, but he was unable to make out the expression. Even without seeing him clearly though, Harry could tell that the other boy was deeply troubled.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “There is nobody else to turn to. Everybody hates me and I have nowhere else to go. My mother is missing, my father is in Azkaban, I am being hunted for being a Death Eater and even Snape hates me. I have no money. I am sleeping on a small camp bed in the library next to a leather armchair that I think is plotting my death. Oh yes, and I am filthy and dirty and my blood is tainted and, if my parents ever do come back, they won’t want me anymore. And I brought you this.” He shoved the object that he had been holding into Harry’s hands and then lifted his own hands to his face and began to cry openly. Harry was flummoxed. What the heck was he meant to do now?

He sat on the bed and looked at whatever it was that Malfoy had given him. It was a brown paper parcel, tied with string. Harry put that on the bed too. Then he stood up again and walked over to the blonde boy. He didn’t know what to do, how did you comfort someone anyway? It was completely outside Harry’s experience. Uncomfortable thoughts of Cho resurfaced and Harry fiercely tamped them down again. Uncertainly, he patted Malfoy on the back.

“Um…There, there Malfoy,” he said.

Malfoy snorted, “You really are crap at this, aren’t you?” he said, scathingly.

Harry felt insulted; he bristled at the other boy.

“Well, I haven’t had a lot of experience of comforting people,” he said crossly. “And nobody ever comforted me. I just had to get on with it. What the fuck do you want me to say?”

Malfoy shrugged, but he was crying again.

So Harry grabbed him, he hauled him up by his arms and, even though the other boy was several inches taller than him, he wrapped one arm around his waist and pulled the blond head down to his shoulder with his free hand. Then it seemed as if the floodgates opened and, this time, Malfoy dissolved into true sobs, issuing a desolate heart-wrenching sound and Harry just stood there and held him.

Harry didn’t know how much later it was, he seemed to have held Malfoy for hours. They were sitting side by side on Harry’s bed under the covers eating muffins. Harry thought that maybe Mrs Weasley had been right about the clean sheets after all. There wasn’t much space as it was not the largest of beds, so Malfoy was kind of snuggled up to him and a secret part of Harry rather liked it.

“Did Snape tell you why we are on the run?” Malfoy asked

“Um…No.” Harry said.

“So he didn’t tell you that he saved me then?”

“Erm nope, didn’t tell me that either.”

“Last year he swore an oath to my mother, an unbreakable oath.”

“Yeah, I knew that.”

The look that Malfoy threw at him was so scathing, that, even with out his glasses, Harry could not mistake it. So he shut up and just listened.

“So he protected me.” Malfoy continued. “You know what happened at Hogwarts, don’t you? You know I couldn’t kill Dumbledore, that I am a coward?”

“Hey don’t say that!” Harry exclaimed, “Just because you couldn’t kill a man in cold blood, just ’cause you lowered your wand, that doesn’t make you a coward! That makes you, I don’t know, saveable I guess!”

Malfoy sighed, “You really did see, didn’t you? I didn’t want to do it. Well I did at first; I thought it was a great adventure. And then, and then it all got so horrible and scary and I was lonely and frightened and there was no one to turn to but a sad little ghost. I was so scared that he would kill my parents and then kill me, he’s mad, the Dark Lord. Evil.”

Now it was Harry’s turn to be scathing. “Well, duh!” he said sharply.

Malfoy looked up at him, he had slipped down in the bed and he looked really comfortable. Harry thought it was probably the first time he had been comfortable for a while, he had slept on those camp beds himself and he rather thought that the floor was better. Hell, even his cupboard had been better than them.

“Voldemort decided to punish me.” The other boy was saying in a tremulous voice, and then, so quietly that he could barely be heard, “He gave me to Greyback.”

Harry was stunned.

“The fucker!” he said, “Oh Malfoy, you poor little sod. Are you okay? Did he scar you?”

“It was the full moon.” Malfoy whispered.

Then neither of them said anything for a very long time.

Finally Malfoy spoke again, “I suppose you think I deserve it, that it serves me right. You hate me now, don’t you?”

Harry sighed. “Malfoy,” he answered, “I have disliked you for years, but that is because you have always been a poisonous, jumped up little shit. I have never hated you, and I certainly don’t think that being turned into a werewolf is something that you deserved, I don’t that anyone deserves that, but I don’t hate you because of it.”

He looked down at the other boy, and this time he was quite glad that he did not have his glasses because the raw need that he could just about see in the other boy’s eyes was more than he could cope with right now.

“But what do I do?” Malfoy asked, “What do I do?”

“Well tomorrow,” Harry said, “we’ll speak to Remus. You haven’t done that yet, have you?” Malfoy shook his head. “And we’ll see about getting you some Wolfsbane brewed, Snape can do that; we need to set up a lab or something and get some ingredients.”

“But Potter,” Malfoy said, “I haven’t got any money.”

“S’alright, I’ve got plenty and we might as well get a lab set up. It could probably come in useful. Does every one else know?”

Malfoy nodded again, “Snape told them. He saved my life, he killed Greyback. That’s why we are on the run from the Dark Lord.”

Harry snorted, “Bloody hell,” he said, “Good for Snape. If he keeps doing things like that, I might end up liking him after all!”

“Thank you, Potter.” Malfoy said. It was so quiet that Harry barely heard him, but the other boy’s breathing had slowed and become even. He had fallen asleep. Harry thought he was probably exhausted. Having to throw yourself on the mercy of your former worst enemy could not be easy. Malfoy had had a tough time.

Harry wondered what was in the package. Carefully, he unwrapped it, only to find that it contained his Invisibility Cloak, which tumbled through his hand shimmering and silky, and his photograph album, the two most precious things in his life. Harry felt a lump in his throat. Malfoy must have rescued them before they left Privet Drive, because Harry thought it was not likely that he had been able to go back. Maybe the other boy had brought them along for leverage, but Harry didn’t think so.

He laid his special things aside. He would look at them tomorrow. For a moment he thought about getting out of bed and transfiguring the chair or something into another bed. He was tired and he had a busy day tomorrow. Harry was tired of being an invalid, he had things to do. Not the least of which was meet his grandmother. But he refused to think about that right now and instead just lay back down beside Malfoy. Within seconds he was fast asleep too, neither boy noticing that they had curled against each other and snuggled close, unconsciously seeking protection and comfort.