A Dream For The Dead

A Dream For The Dead

Chapter 8

The Razor To The Rosary

“Let me go, let me go!! I didn’t mean it, I swear! I’ll never do it again, please, just let me go!”

“My mum is going to skin me. What am I going to tell her? That I was drunk at a match and decided to set fire to some things? I need to get out of here. I wasn’t even the one who started it.”

“I don’t deserve to be locked up! I’m innocent! I was looking for justice! That match was a joke! It was a sham! Less than five seconds and they think that’s worth the hundred galleons I dropped for a ticket! I’m not the criminal here, the League is! The League and their bloody poster-boy Malfoy! He’s the one who should be locked up!”

Harry had heard all these excuses before, except perhaps the last one. The hordes of angry fans being filed into the Ministry holding cells were all crying out their cases, pleading and demanding things they had no rights to. None of them admitted any guilt. None of them expressed remorse for the danger and chaos they had caused.

They’re just spoiled kids with too much money. Spoiled, drunken kids. They wanted a good time watching Quidditch and felt they didn’t get their money’s worth, Harry thought as he leaned back against the doorframe, counting the heads passing by. These aren’t dark wizards. They wouldn’t know evil if it danced naked in front of them with a skull mask on sporting an ‘I heart Voldemort’ shirt. They never knew the war.

“Oi, shut it!” Seamus hollered over the raucous arguing. “Or I’ll put silencing spells on the lot of you!”

The din died down slowly as he walked out and towards Harry. He nodded and crossed his arms over his chest with a small smile.

“Been a while since we’ve had this much commotion around here, yeah?” Seamus mused, staring at the brooding lot of rioters. Their wands had all been taken from them and labeled before being placed into a warded locker in the evidence room. None of them dared make any threats they couldn’t back up with magic so they settled for glaring unpleasantly at one another.

“Yeah,” said Harry, his tone a mixture of sarcasm and disgust. “Bet this lot’ll leave enough paperwork for a month.”

Seamus’ face fell and he sighed, shaking his head at Harry.

“Don’t be that way,” he told him. Harry’s frown deepened.

“Look at them, Seamus!” He waved a hand towards the imprisoned rioters. “These are mostly kids. They aren’t evil, they aren’t Dark Wizards, they’re kids, They were upset about the match and, granted, they shouldn’t have set fire to the stadium, but still. This is not what I signed on for when I decided to become and Auror. If I’d have known that it would mean spending my days doing paperwork and waiting for a riot just so I could arrest teenagers I would’ve…”

“What?” Seamus asked him suddenly. He stood taller and shrugged his shoulders. “You would have what? Done something different? Taken a different career path? You would have given up on catching the remaining Death Eaters?”

“Maybe!” Harry cried before he could stop himself. It was now Seamus turn to frown.

“Please, Harry,” he said. “It’s not in you to give up. This is the job.” He motioned to the cells. “And you can’t go back in time, so you might as well accept it and move on.”

Harry gave Seamus a hard look and then turned to leave. He shook his head, washing his hands of it, of the conversation, perhaps of the notion entirely. His chest was tight and his face was hot. He was angry and frustrated with everything in that moment.

He went back to his office to collect his things before going home. As he picked up his cloak, a file slipped off his desk and onto the floor. He stared at it for a moment, trying to decide whether or not to pick it up and then groaned. He plucked it off the ground and flipped it open. The file that Boot had given him to think about.

His eyes scanned the summary page and he felt the tension leave him.

Routine threats to physical, mental and magical health both of individual as well as family.

Several attacks, generally minor, to note in medical and department file.

But surely those attacks cannot have been unprovoked. Surely Boot was taking things out of context, as was the Auror who had taken down the information.

Harry flipped through the small stack of photos provided to the file. He fingered the edges as the subjects of the pictures blinked and moved before him. They did not seem very happy, but then, no pictures included in Auror files involved smiling.

Just as Harry was trying to convince himself that the case was not worth his time, that it was probably nothing, a deep purple paper flew into his office and hit him in the head before landing directly on top of the open file in his hands.

Harry huffed as he laid the file down on his desk and opened the interdepartmental memo. His eyes scanned the letter quickly and as he read, his lips parted slightly in surprise.

There has been a violent attack in Diagon Alley at precisely 11:53 p.m. A group of men ambushed and attacked two Quidditch players using both magic and physical force. Both players are currently being held at St. Mungo’s.

Oliver Wood, one of the players in question, is conscious and suffered only minor wounds as a result of the fight.

Draco Malfoy, the other player in question, is unconscious and being held in intensive care until further notice.

Any Hit Wizard available should present themselves immediately to take statements.

Harry dropped the memo and bolted from the office in time to cut off two other wizards who were on their way out.

“Potter, did you hear about –” One of them began but Harry cut him off.

“Go back to the holding cells,” he said. “And deal with the rioters.” His voice was harsh and authoritative. The two wizards paused, apparently hesitant and questioning Harry’s state of mind, but with one hard look in their direction they nodded to him and doubled back.

Harry skidded into the Floo , grabbing some powder messily and dropping it everywhere.

“St. Mungo’s!”

+++++

There was darkness and there was light, not separate from one another, but rather together, fully blended and coexisting without paradox. It shifted and swelled, pulsing like a human heart and hollow like a skull.

There was a deafening silence and an overwhelming dread. It was pain and it was pleasure. It was pulling and pushing in one. The crushing power of air and the tugging, sucking pull of nothingness.

Somewhere in the distance there was a whistling sound. It grew louder and louder and soon there was nothing else, nothing but the whistling and the odd puff and wheeze of hydraulics. Steam.

There was heat and there was cold and the numbness that followed it was agony.

It couldn’t be now, it couldn’t be here. It shouldn’t be here. Not yet.

A raging fight tore through him and ripped him to shreds, pulverizing his bones and consuming his soul. There were whispers and calls, voices confiding in him their plans, their desires to consume him completely. He shivered and whimpered outside of himself, beyond his body, beyond his being. He felt lost and afraid. He felt terror and horror and confusion.

But more importantly, he felt.

+++++

Level Four of St Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries was not a comfortable place. It was like walking back into the most painful memories of the war. This floor, this place in its entirety, was a blur of grief and worry. It was, for Harry, a reminder of precisely why it was a good thing that no one had decided to try to take up Voldemort’s mantle after the end of the second war.

He walked along the paneled halls, breathing in the sterile air and saw himself as a seventeen year old boy, dressed in a hospital robe, barefoot and tired.

His teenaged self padded down the dimly lit halls to check every room. Each was filled with students, teachers and friends that had taken part in the final battle at Hogwarts. There were Healers walking by but they seemed only distant spectres now, when he looked back. He hadn’t believed, then, that he belonged there, that he needed any medical attention. In retrospect, he was glad he had received it.

The floor was cold underneath his toes. The wall was lightly textured as he ran his fingertips along it, as though tracking his movement through the halls. Light poured across the floor from the first open door. The Healers in that room had been frantically working for hours. There were two patients in this particular room.

He stopped in the doorway and watched them carefully from afar. He couldn’t bring himself to talk to anyone, to ask their status, to distract them from the task at hand.

In one bed, there lay the prone figure of a young wizard. Half his face had been cut to shreds and his arms and legs would not stop jerking. He had lost control of his limbs as a result of a curse and was later mauled by an untransformed Werewolf. The Healers would eventually manage to reconstruct his face and return control of his limbs to him, but he would forever have faint scarring over his nose, lips and eye. It would take him three months of constant attention in St Mungo’s for the Healers to decide he was able to leave.

Few people other than Harry knew the origins of the scars on Seamus Finnigan’s face.

In Harry’s memory, the wispy, smoky visual shifted in the room to the other bed. There was a boy Seamus’ age lying completely still, except for his head. He was perpetually shaking and rocking his skull back and forth, his eyes rolled back until all you could see was the white. His mouth lolled open and he was moaning softly in a very unnerving way. It was incomprehensible. There were rune markings drawn onto his forehead and temples.

Dean Thomas took a full year to recover from the spell damage he sustained during the battle.

He walked back out and on to the next room. Ron and Hermione were already out of hospital, along with Ginny, Molly and Arthur Weasley. The next room housed those who were not so fortunate.

George Weasley sat at the edge of his bed, facing the far wall. He was hunched over and refused to let any Healers near him. He hadn’t been allowed to leave until he could be checked. He would allow no one to talk to him and did little but stare at the empty chair next to his bed, gently running his hand over the wound on his head where his ear should have been.

It took him a month to let Healers in and perform their tests. He was perfectly fine, physically. But Harry knew he would never quite be the same without his twin. That was a wound beyond the talents of the Healers of St Mungo’s.

In the room with him was his brother, Percy. Percy spent much of the time in the room unconscious. He had been hit with dark magic so strong that he had fallen into a magical coma. According to the Healers, the assault on his magic was so powerful that it retreated into him and shut down his body in order to protect it. Until the curses could all be lifted, Percy would not wake up.

He did, eventually, wake. It took him six months of magical rehabilitation, however, to fully coax his magic back to its full potential.

Harry shuddered involuntarily. He moved to the next room to find a single patient sitting in a bed much too large. There were elaborate wards around the bed. There were no Healers tending this room.

Luna Lovegood sat completely still in the centre of the bed, staring wide-eyed at the wards around her. She might have looked completely herself if it weren’t for the lock-jawed grimace in place on her lips.

She had been improperly Imperiused. As a result she behaved much like a rabid wolf.

Once Alecto Carrow was caught, Luna’s curse subsided and the Healers could finish their jobs. She made a full recovery, but seeing Luna, usually so serene and calm, behaving like a wild and vicious animal still sometimes infiltrated his dreams and caused him fitful sleep.

These were only a small number of the friends that Harry had known at St Mungo’s during the first year after the war. Harry’s stay had been as long as it had because the Healers were not convinced that experiencing the Killing Curse twice in one lifetime would leave no mark on him.

Harry left St Mungo’s and tried to go back to visit his friends, to see them through to their recovery, but he could not. He relived the worst parts of the war every time he did.

So now, as Harry walked along, much older but not necessarily wiser, through the familiar hallways and past the old rooms, he felt a sense of dread overwhelm him.

Why had he come? Why did he insist the Hit Wizards return to the riot work? Why did he feel so compelled to be there? What was it that was calling to him?

Harry stopped dead roughly ten feet from the room number he was given. He lingered in the shadows and watched.

There were five figures standing in front of the doorway, apparently prepared to fight off anyone who might try to get past them. Harry observed them for a moment before realizing he recognized at least one of them.

Jimmy Peakes, who had once played Beater on the Gryffindor Quidditch team, was standing amidst the others, his wand in one hand, and his eyes sharp if not weary. Harry took a step forward and then realized who they all were.

These were the first line players for the Caerphilly Catapults. They were Malfoy’s team mates.

As he approached, their attention snapped directly to him and they all narrowed their eyes briefly before realizing who it was. The stood their ground but did not look so mistrusting.

“Harry Potter?” Peakes asked, somewhat surprised. As Harry got closer he could smell alcohol on Peakes’ breath and realized that they had probably all been drinking heavily. Their attentive stance was probably a result of adrenaline and pepper-up potions. “What are you doing here?”

Harry gave him an incredulous look and crossed his arms over his chest, mimicking their stance.

“The question is, what are you lot doing?” he shot back, not unkindly. He looked from one to the next and they all stood taller, as they could.

“We’re protecting our team mate,” a woman said suddenly. Harry glanced at her, trying to figure out if he had known her once. He couldn’t decide. “Since Hit Wizards are useless anyway and don’t seem to give a damn about him.”

“And you do?” Harry asked, genuinely shocked. He couldn’t stop the words escaping his lips. He was never very good at self-restraint. They glared indignantly at him.

“Of course we do!” A man with curly brown hair informed him. “We’re a team.” He glared at Harry. Harry was mildly amazed. Somehow Malfoy had managed to find himself an entirely new band of cronies. “So you’ll kindly leave before we have to hex you.”

“Threatening an Auror is a punishable offence,” Harry informed him evenly. His eyes were sharp but dark. He could feel the pull of the hallway and was not intent on lingering in it long. “You are going to let me pass. I have work to do that involves your precious team mate.”

“What work?” the woman asked. Harry took a deep breath and fought the urge to roll his eyes.

“What do you bloody well think?” he snapped. He was tired and uncomfortable and did not even know why he had bothered. “He has to give me his statement. As does Wood. So. Let. Me. Pass.”

Harry took a step forward, into Peakes and then pushed forcibly past him. The players made a move to stop him but he shot them one look and they stood down.

Apparently Malfoy’s cronies were no more loyal to him now than they had ever been in the past. One sign of danger against their own safety and they backed off.

Harry tried not to consider that they might be drunk and unable to truly fight him off, or think clearly. He didn’t want to care.

He pushed open the door to room 419 and stepped inside. He was somewhat surprised to see four people therein that he recognized, rather than two.

Wood was sitting up, his legs hanging over the end of his bed as he gazed anxiously at the bed opposite him. He was attempting to swat away the enchanted brush that was applying healing salve to his forehead. Harry could see the bruising and cuts all along his shoulders and face. He was sporting a black eye and his lip had swelled oddly. Otherwise, he seemed remarkably uninterested in his own pain. All his attention was focused on the other bed.

Harry could not actually see Malfoy at first. The two Healers tending to him were obscuring his view. The Healers, however, he knew.

A tall man with dark hair and a perpetually pensive expression was standing on one side of the bed, muttering incantations that caused shimmering lines to draw themselves over the body on the bed. Every so often a summary of the findings would write itself on the air in front of him.

He had grown a lot since Harry last saw him, but Theodore Nott looked very much like his late father.

On the other side of the bed, a witch with long hair, tied back in a messy knot, was mixing a potion while also padding gently at her patient with a thick square of gauze. Alicia Spinnet was so focused on her task that she did not look up when Harry walked in.

Nott, however, did turn his attention to Harry when his spell was completed. He sized Harry up for a moment before speaking.

“The Ministry sent you for this?” Nott asked, apparently wondering about the Ministry’s use of its funds. Harry frowned.

“Am I an objectionable choice in some way, Nott?” Harry asked coolly. Now that the door was closed the tug of the hallway had lessened. The world was still in this room. It was calm.

Nott’s expression did not change.

“Perhaps overqualified,” he muttered, turning to the table in the corner and walking over to fill out something on a slip of parchment. “The Ministry must like Draco better than he thinks to send Potter to his rescue.”

He was clearly talking to himself and so Harry ignored him. His eyes now fell on Malfoy, lying unconscious in the bed. The linens were rolled down to his waist and his chest was bare. All over it there were deep cuts, spreading in webs from his left shoulder upwards. There were bruises so dark they were black that bloomed over him like shadows at twilight. His knuckles were raw, red and bleeding.

His face was swollen to the point where he was almost unrecognizable in some places. His nose was clearly broken and his lips were split down the centre. There were deep wounds on his skull, bleeding into his white-blond hair and dying it crimson. There were rocks and pebbles scattered on the pillow around his head. As the spells that Nott and Alicia had surely been casting started to take effect, Harry watched as more pebbles and rocks popped out of his head wounds and fell to his pillow. The swelling slowly went down and his face was reshaping itself.


Alicia began to apply the salve she had been brewing to Malfoy’s chest, over the bruises. As it sank into the skin, the bruises lightened to paler and paler shades of blue.

The cuts on his chest and neck, however, were not closing. Harry recognized the wounds but said nothing.

Alicia looked up at him and gave him a small smile before returning to her work. Harry nodded and decided to let her finish before inquiring further about his state. Instead, he turned to Wood who had yet to acknowledge his presence.

“Wood?” Harry asked, carefully touching his hand to Wood’s good shoulder. He jerked away from Harry’s hand and looked up as though he was being attacked. When he realized who it was, and where he was, Wood’s face washed over with relief and he relaxed.

“Potter!” he cried. He got to his feet and shook off his strange trance. “How are you? Haven’t seen you in years.” He seemed genuinely happy to see Harry if it were not for the concern etched all over his face.

“I’m alright, Wood,” Harry answered, trying all the while to discern what odd investment Wood had in Malfoy. Harry couldn’t remember Wood ever being this concerned about Harry’s well-being when they played back at Hogwarts. Though, he reminded himself, Hogwarts was not the professional League and no one’s livelihood relied on winning a match. “But how are you? What happened?”

Wood’s eyes flashed oddly as the question was asked. He turned his attention to Malfoy and then nodded.

“Of course, that’s why you’re here,” he muttered to himself. “They sent for Hit Wizards, but, I suppose… well, anyway.” He turned back to Harry, his expression very different now. “We were celebrating at the Serpent’s Tooth. Dra-.. that is to say, Malfoy won the match for us against the Tornadoes.” His expression shifted briefly to ecstatic disbelief and the familiar Quidditch-related glint flashed in Oliver’s eye. “He broke the record too. Caught the Snitch –”

“In two seconds flat,” Harry repeated, annoyed. He had heard the review of the match before showing up to the riot. Wood nodded, laughing in amazement. He did not seem to notice Harry’s disinterest. Harry set out a Recorder Quill on a piece of parchment to take the full account.

“Yeah, well,” Wood went on, the seriousness of the matter coming back to him. The blue quill wrote as quickly as he spoke. “We were celebrating and having a laugh with the team and some fans. I told them we should all go for a walk and maybe hit another pub, to meet some other fans or just to get some air. I’m not sure why I said it, now.” He scratched his head for a moment before wincing from pain and dropping his arm. “So I took Malfoy outside and we walked along when some big bloke accused Malfoy of cheating. Honestly, cheating! Like anyone could get away with that in a League match!” Wood seemed so personally affronted by the accusation that Harry did not see fit to inquire as to the possibility that this ‘bloke’ was correct. Harry had known Malfoy to cheat back in school. What should stop him now?

“And then?” Harry asked, trying to keep Wood focused on the events and keep his attention off Quidditch. Wood nodded to him and looked back at Malfoy, his eyes hard.

“And then he started pitching insults at Malfoy,” Wood answered in a low voice. “He started calling him all sorts of names and… saying things you just don’t say. And Malfoy answered with his snide remarks, as he does when he feels attacked.” Harry almost snorted at the comment. He could hardly believe that throughout their entire time at Hogwarts Malfoy had felt ‘attacked’ every time they spoke. “And then the arsehole started saying horrible things about Malfoy’s family and… he just snapped.” Wood sat back down on the bed. “I don’t know what happened but all of a sudden a whole gang of men were holding Malfoy down, beating him with… with a rock and casting curses at him. They were fighting seven on one. I tried to intervene but two blokes turned on me and hit me. I fought them off and… and then the rest of the team got there and helped break up the fight.” His voice was nothing but a whisper now. “The bloody cowards Disapparated and left Malfoy on the ground, bleeding and unconscious. I… I thought he might be… but then we brought him to St Mungo’s and they said he was still alive.”

Harry turned his attention to Malfoy now as well. The bruises were now very faint on his chest and arms but blood still ran steadily, though slowly, from the wounds on his chest. They were closing themselves little by little and Alicia was fretfully adding dittany while Nott cast an interminable incantation that Harry thought he remembered. It sounded like a song.

“You don’t know the attackers?” Harry asked. He eyed the quill as it recorded his question. Wood shook his head.

“No bloody clue who they were,” he said harshly. “If I did, I wouldn’t be sitting here.” Harry made a note to himself to strike the last comment from his record. He had always liked Oliver.

“And you don’t think it’s possible at all that Malfoy may have actually cheated?” Harry asked finally, needing to ask the obvious question. It would be the first thing to come up in an inquiry.

Wood did not seem as affronted by the question as Harry had expected. He shook his head and gazed sadly at Harry.

“He’s not who he used to be,” Wood explained quietly. “Malfoy grew up, like the rest of us. He’s a good player and an honest one.” He shot Harry a look before he could actually snort. “I know you never liked him. I never did either.” The confession did not surprise Harry. What came after, however, did. “But then I got to play with him, instead of against him. He’s determined and ambitious. He’s got focus like I’ve never seen in any Seeker and he’s even more reckless than you were.” Harry felt his eyebrows reach for his hairline. “He’s a friend, now.”

Harry surveyed Wood carefully, wondering if his last comment was true or hiding something else. Harry decided to let it go for the time being.

“Being reckless doesn’t make him a good person,” Harry said, dimly aware that the ground was opening up beneath him, threatening to swallow him whole. “It doesn’t make him a good Quidditch player, either.”

Wood’s head snapped around to stare at Harry. It was a hard and admonishing look. Harry did not look away. He was ready to accept that Malfoy was not evil and that he had grown up. But he would need more compelling evidence to believe that he had grown into a good person.

“But he is a good player,” Wood shot. “In fact, a great player. And he’s a good person too.” Wood turned back to look at Malfoy, apparently waiting to see him open his eyes. “To those who matter to him,” he added as an afterthought. “He’s not the little shite he used to be, as I said.”

This time Harry laughed and shook his head.

“The Prophet seems to feel differently on the subject,” Harry murmured.

“You, of all people, should know, Potter,” Wood responded. “That the Prophet is less than truthful about those afflicted by fame.”

Harry shut his mouth and felt his jaw tighten. He tried to ignore both the comment and the hole in the world that attempted to consume him. He failed miserably at both. The black hole that seemed to be trying to swallow him was pooling beneath Malfoy’s bed and seemed to be attempting to eat him as well. Harry closed his eyes and began to count backwards in his head, down from fifty.

“What kind of spell damage does he have?” Harry asked Nott, suddenly. He tried to fight the downward pull Nott turned back to him and gave him a strange, piercing look. He seemed to have forgotten that Harry was in the room.

“He doesn’t seem to have much spell damage, other than the cuts on his chest,” he explained. Harry swallowed, glancing briefly at the wounds, a sense of biting guilt assaulting him. “But those seem to be old wounds that opened up again from the heavy attacks and curses. We’ve reversed most of those. He seems to be unconscious as a result of the pain, now.”

Harry’s brows knitted together and he looked around himself as though expecting the room to change. The ground gaped wider, but otherwise, the room remained unchanged.

“Then why is he on level Four? That’s spell damage,” Harry demanded. A shadow moved over Nott’s face for a moment and then was gone. Harry thought he saw the expression change briefly but couldn’t be sure.

“Because no one else in the hospital would agree to treat him.”

-----
A/N: So AFF, it turns out, doesn't alert me to all my reviews. Just some of them. Or something. Something was not quite working anyway. So that's stupid. I hope you enjoyed this chapter, anyway. :) Reviews please! I live off them. Seriously XD.