Why Do You Love Me?

The door to Harry’s room creaked open slowly and two figures crept in silently. Shadows swept over the room quickly as the figures swept towards Harry’s bed. The figures hovered over Harry’s prone body and stared at him in eerie silence.

Harry could feel eyes on him that sent chills down his spine, and he struggled against all of the potions that had been forced into his body to open his eyes to see whom it was. He opened them just in time to see a third figure sweeping out from under some type of cloak that hindered people from seeing him.

Someone muttered a soft spell and immediately, a wand lit up with a soft blue light. “Harry, are you awake?” a feminine voice from somewhere to his right made Harry struggle against the many restraints that held him to the bed.

A second voice joined the first, this one more scornful. “Of course he’s awake, you prat. He’s moving, isn’t he?”

The voices sounded familiar, but Harry couldn’t place them through the haze he was floating in because of all of the potions and other healing remedies that were flooding through his blood system.

A third voice joined the others, this one much snappier. “Shut up, the both of you. Do you want to be caught? You know we’re not supposed to be here.”

A shadow loomed directly over Harry’s face, so dark that Harry couldn’t make out the face that belonged to the tall body. A scoff was breathed directly in his face, the breath smelling like old, rotten onions, and Harry struggled to hold his breath. “They’re doing it all wrong. That IV goes there, and they’re using a completely wrong potion to restore his healing abilities.

“Honestly, they must be using trainees for this job. Do they not understand how crucial it is that they restore his magic as quickly and precisely as possible?”

There was a rough tugging somewhere in Harry’s arm area, though Harry could barely feel it because of the numbing potion he had been forced to take earlier that afternoon. Suddenly, there was a sharp prod somewhere near his hipbone as a needle was thrust into his skin, and Harry moaned at the new pain, arching into the soft, cold touch of long, bony fingers.

The fingers lingered for a few extra moments, before quickly drawing away. A sharp intake of breath from the female could be heard as Harry slowly regained the feeling in his body. Fingers were whispering across his body quickly, repairing screwed up IV’s here and forcing more potions down Harry’s relaxed throat.

“Do you think he knows we’re here?” the feminine voice asked as she approached Harry’s bedside and clasped on to his hand tightly.

“Shut up, Granger,” the second voice hissed as the third person flicked a switch connected to one of the machines that were connected to Harry. The magical power that was flowing through a thin clear tube into Harry’s mouth turned immediately from red to green.

The first person - Hermione? - gasped as the color changed, and Harry struggled against the restraints on his wrists that held him tightly to the bed to keep him from yanking the machinery from his body as he choked slightly as the magic that was being pumped into him began to flow down his throat more easily.

“What does that do?” The girl hissed, and the second person sighed.

The third man, the snappy one, stepped away from Harry, hands on his hips. “It makes his magical shield stronger. Considering the emotional damage that Potter has taken, he won’t be released until he is completely healed; I cannot guarantee that there won’t be emotional scars, but he should be released in at least two weeks.”

The girl’s hand tightened around Harry’s, and she sighed. “At least he‘ll be better soon,” she said after a few moments.

The warmth encircling Harry’s hand went away moments later, and the three figures retreated towards the door. The girl and the tall figure left first, but the second stood there in the doorway, staring at Harry silently.

After a few moments, Harry’s eyes began to focus on bright, blonde hair and worried grey eyes before the figure flung the cloak over himself and disappeared into the darkness. “Draco?” Harry croaked, before he was once again pulled into unconsciousness.

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…

Draco held his breath as he watched Harry drift back to sleep, then let it out in a slow, soft whoosh. He crept out of the room and pulled the door shut behind him. He was greeted with the sight of Hermione standing there with her hands on her hips and Snape with his lips pursed into a thin, almost non-visible line.

“He’s doing okay, right?” Hermione asked, gnawing on her lower lip slightly as she worried over Harry’s well-being.

Snape shook his head. “He was doing a lot better, but he’s going to be much better off after our modifications,” he said, trying to console her as much as he dared without showing any of his own emotion.

Hermione sighed in relief and she nodded. “What was so wrong about what they were doing?” she asked.

Snape gave her a condescending look, and he rolled his eyes.

“Are you mad?” Draco asked softly as he approached them. “The IV that was in his wrist would have completely shut down his nervous system if it had stayed there for too long.”

“But why?”

At times, despite her vast knowledge, Hermione reminded Draco of a young child. He sighed and grasped her arm tightly as he began to lead her down the long corridor.

“Because,” he said in exasperation. “The particular IV they were using was to restore his barriers to full health. If the potion that was being used was put directly in his blood stream for too long, he would surely become worse. Severus was following procedure, Granger. If you don’t appreciate that, I suppose you’d like for your precious Potter to die then, would you?”

Hermione stopped where she was and sighed. “No. It’s just that we still haven’t quite gotten over the whole ‘blame Snape’ thing since first year.”

Snape snorted and brushed past Hermione, and she sighed again. “Well, he did kill Dumbledore,” she said in defence after a few moments of uncomfortable silence.

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“How did everything go?” Mrs. Weasley greeted them at the door, her brow furrowed in worry. Everyone crowded in behind her and glanced over her shoulder, straining to hear every word that was said.

Snape gave a swift nod and swept past Mrs. Weasley and into the kitchen. “Tea,” he demanded of the two house elves who were listening at the door. They shrieked and scrambled away before anyone else followed in after him.

Mrs. Weasley gave a sigh of relief as she followed Snape, the rest of the residents crowding in after her. “No one found out?” she asked, her eyes pleading with him.

Snape shook his head and downed the tea that was handed to him in one gulp. “Everything went as planned. They were doing it completely wrong; I believe that we‘ve knocked off at least two weeks of his hospital stay. You were completely right, Molly.”

Molly’s breath hissed through her teeth as she collapsed onto a straight-backed, hard wooden chair. “I told them they were doing it wrong. Of course, trust the people at St. Mungo’s to put trainees in charge of Harry’s health. What if they had killed him?” She asked, her face weary with worry and her hands fretting over a wrinkle in her apron.

Hermione sighed and sat down beside Molly. “He’ll be fine, Molly.” she reassured, placing a hand on Molly’s shoulder comfortingly.

Molly looked up at Hermione, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. “What has put him in this position, though?” she asked. She had some ideas, but she didn’t want to place blame where blame was undeserved.

Hermione drew her hand away and clamped her hands together in her lap underneath the table. Her cheeks flushed and she averted her eyes. “Uh…it…it was my fault.”

All eyes fell on her, prodding her to explain without saying a word.

“You see…Harry wrote to me this summer. His uncle…his uncle had abused him. And I, uh…I didn’t believe him. So he put up a glamour, and uh…well…yeah.”

Hermione was beet red now, and her hands went up to her face to cover her embarrassed features.

“I just…I should have believed him,” she sobbed.

Everyone was silent as they stared at Hermione. This time, Molly placed a consoling hand on Hermione’s shoulder. “You can’t blame yourself,” she said, her voice a mere murmur.

Molly glared up at everyone in the room, telling them to leave without saying anything at all. She pulled Hermione into a tight hug, and together, they both shared a cry for what should have been, and the struggles that were yet to come.

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Harry’s eyes cracked open to the sight of many bunches of flowers, balloons, and get well cards covering every square inch of his room. He groaned as his eyes were prodded violently into by the sunlight the morning bore. He tried to roll over, but a sharp, harsh pain in his left hip and the restraints that were holding him down hindered his movement.

He groaned and closed his eyes once more, trying to shake off the feeling that something was wrong. Why was he in the hospital, again? He couldn’t quite remember. Maybe he had gotten hurt during Quidditch? Yes, that had to be it.

He opened his eyes once more, but the surroundings didn’t become any more familiar than they had been the first time he had opened them. He knew that he was in a hospital, but which hospital? The hospital wasn’t at all familiar. Obviously, Harry wasn’t in the hospital wing in Hogwarts. His heart sank in his chest as memories began to come back to him.

The last thing Harry had been able to remember was writing to Hermione. But Hermione hadn’t believed him. Harry scowled bitterly as he remembered the light-hearted letter that he had received in return; but wait! Harry would be going to the Weasley’s soon! He would be out of here soon!

Any minute now, the Weasleys would come bursting through the hospital doors, demanding that they release Harry; they might even substitute some of the nurses’ memories of Harry arriving to the hospital to memories of them enjoying a nice evening off.

Taking a deep breath, Harry mustered his voice to shout for the nurse in charge, but all he could manage was a pained grunt. “Ugh,”

The position he was in was rather uncomfortable; Harry had never quite been able to understand people who could sleep on their backs. He found it much more comfortable to sleep on his side; he had grown so accustomed to sleeping on his side that most nights he found it difficult for him to fall asleep otherwise.

Once more, he tried to summon his voice to call the nurse, but to no avail. Harry growled in the back of his throat angrily, and that was when he noticed that something was shoved the whole way down it. Well, perhaps that was why he couldn’t talk, then.

His eye twitched in frustration, and he looked around the room, suddenly feeling very small and lost in all the clutter. Once again he closed his eyes and imagined that he was back a the burrow. Molly was in the kitchen, making a large feast for her large family, and Harry and Ron were up in Ron’s room, playing a rather competitive game of Exploding Snap.

Hermione was relaxed on Ron’s bed, reading a book, and Ginny was writing a letter to her current boyfriend; Harry had lost count after her fifth, but he was sure that she was probably up to at least her tenth by now, despite the summer season interfering with the way she and her boyfriend-of-the-moment communicated.

Harry smiled softly at his little imaginary world, but he knew that things weren’t the way that he wanted them to be. With a groan, Harry opened his eyes, giving up on his fantasy.

“Well hello there, dearie. You’re doing much better, I assume? Sorry about the mix up with your potions last night; Mrs. Weasley pointed it out to us and everything is righted now. Of course, you probably wouldn’t remember any of this because you’ve been out for quite a while,”

Harry gazed at the peculiar woman bustling around the room curiously. He couldn’t speak, so the woman continued to bustle about, righting some of the cords that were connected to his body, checking the tube that was pumping peculiar tasting air into his lungs.

The woman stopped bustling about and stopped for a few moments to stare intently at Harry. “Hmmm,” she began, watching a monitor as it flickered. Harry had no idea what the screen was showing her, because he couldn’t understand it, but apparently, she did, because she turned to him with a soft smile. “Much better than when you first came in. If we leave you connected to this for a couple more days, you should be up to nearly full health,”

The woman smiled warmly at him; actually, the smile never seemed to leave her face. With a wave of a wand that she seemed to have pulled from thin air, the restraints around Harry’s wrists disappeared. Harry stared at her in awe.

‘She’s a witch!’ he thought in confusion.

“How do you feel there, sweetie?” she asked kindly as she moved some of the balloons, flowers and sweets with her wand to clear the room up a little. “Okay?”

Harry nodded and she smiled. “A special visitor should be coming up to visit you later on in the day. She’s going to help you out with any problems that you may have. Your breakfast will be sent up in a few minutes; you must be starving!”

With that, the happy little Mediwitch bustled out of the room, the door closing swiftly and softly behind her.

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“Hello, Harry.”

Harry pried his eyes open to stare into the doorway, where a short, redheaded something witch was standing. She looked to be about twenty-something; her hair was sleek and straight, pulled back into a business-like bun, long bangs hanging into her eyes. She wore a pair of thick-framed glasses, which she was looking over the rim of, and her brown eyes shone with a knowing light. She was dressed in very business-like attire that consisted of a kohl-colored pencil skirt that fell to her knees with a slit up the side that led to just before mid thigh, a white dress shirt that was covered by a kohl-colored suit jacket. She looked very lawyer-ish.

Her skin was a perfect, flawless creamy white color, her makeup applied just so - barely there. She held a clipboard in her left hand, and she was holding a quill in her right, the tip of which she was sucking on gently.

“I hear you’ve been doing much better,” she said as she took a seat beside Harry’s bedside. “Is this so?”

Harry nodded and she smiled softly. “I see. Let’s get rid of that, shall we? Just for now, mind you,” With a quick wave of the woman’s hand, the tube that was stuck halfway down Harry’s throat was gone. “Much better. Now then, my name’s Alicia. I’m here to help you. What is the first thing you remember before coming here?”

Harry averted his eyes and kept silent, and Alicia raised her eyebrows and jotted down something with her quill. “I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me,” she said, her voice soft and consoling. “Do you want me to help you?”

Harry looked at her, his throat sore, and he shook his head.

“No?”

His voice, when he attempted to use it, was hoarse and it was hard to determine what he was saying, though somehow, Alicia managed. “No,”

“Why not?” Alicia’s eyebrows were scrunched together thoughtfully as the quill she was writing with quickly flew across the piece of parchment that was held in place by her clipboard.

“I don’t need your help,”

Alicia nodded in understanding. Her quill stopped racing across her parchment, and she glanced up at Harry. “I see,” she said, the quill tip finding itself back between her lips once again.

Harry thought that she was going to leave, but Alicia remained in the chair that she had seated herself in. “Well then, I won’t help you. But we still need to talk.”

“What about?” Harry glared at her, then looked away, feeling very vulnerable in the bed, unable to leave it.

“Anything, really. Allow me to start; I’m a councilor. I’m here for your emotional pain; I understand that you’ve been raped?”

Harry’s eyes widened and he sat up swiftly, his heart and head pounding. “No! I wasn’t raped! Who told you that?” his voice was panicked, his eyes wide and fearful.

Alicia breathed in deeply, her eyes closing temporarily as she thought over what she wanted to say, then exhaled slowly. “Harry, why do you think you’re here?”

Harry’s mouth fell open, and he began to pant slightly as he scoured his mind for memories that just weren’t there.

The door to Harry’s hospital room swept open silently and someone in the doorway cleared their throat. “Are you almost done here, Alicia?” A feminine voice asked, and Harry’s head jerked towards the familiar voice. Mrs. Weasley stood in the doorframe, an angry expression plastered on her face.