I Give You a Wondrous Mirror | By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 17806 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1 |
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story. |
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Warning: This
chapter is upsetting in several ways, particularly in the scene where Harry is
alone with George. Feel free to skim if you need to. The next few chapters are
not much easier; currently, we’re in the nadir of the story.
Chapter Twenty-Three—George
Harry had
never known St. Mungo’s could be so silent.
Maybe that
was because he had only visited in the past with large groups of people, or
with other Blood Reparations agents who had been injured, and the shouting and
noise in the latter situations had rather muffled the presence of quiet. Or he
had been unconscious, and that made him unable to detect the norm at all.
But now he
stood alone in the corridor outside George’s room, staring at the wall, and he
noticed. He had arrived after Ginny had—he had made arrangements for Luna to
come and stay with the children, first—and when he’d peered through the door,
the entire remaining Weasley family was clustered around the bed, including Hermione
and Victoire, Bill and Fleur’s daughter. There wasn’t any room for him to slip
in without crushing someone, and Ginny, crying silent, frantic tears in Charlie’s
arms, didn’t look as if she needed him. He had winced and shut the door,
waiting until the moment when he was
needed, or when he had room to enter and pay his respects.
In the
meantime, he stared, and thought, and tried to weigh up what all the attacks today
said about their enemies. It was hard to think, but at least the attempt gave
him something to focus on beyond George’s condition.
One thing
Harry knew: this attack must have been long in the planning, for all that the
execution of the plans had been swift and horrible. This was not something the
Masked Lady could have commanded the moment she knew they were aware of and
hunting her. If she could have, they had already lost the war. So Harry chose
to believe in hope for the moment.
Could they
do something as large again in the near future? Harry doubted it. At the very
least, the places where the attack had fallen would be wary now, and they had
sprung some traps that had to be long-standing; Draco had had time to tell him
about the Blood Hydra and what he suspected of its origins in the moments
before Harry shut the Floo connection. And Ron had said that a warning had come
to them about the attack on Diagon Alley, which meant that a few of the Masked
Lady’s followers might have become uneasy about her methods. If there was a way
to persuade them to desert, Hermione would find it. Talking to discontented
true believers was one of the usual ways that the Blood Reparations Department
got information on the various supremacist groups.
What effect
would these attacks have on the tense political climate Hermione had described?
Harry could
only guess, but he thought nothing would happen for a day or so. The shock and
the terror of the new war would hold people paralyzed that long. And he hoped
that he and Hermione could work to alleviate some of that fear before it
exploded into rage.
This was
the crisis the Blood Reparations Department had been formed to deal with:
another huge source of division that might attempt to part the two halves of
the wizarding world. Harry had trained for it every minute of every day in the
last ten years when he’d sought out self-exiled Muggleborns and asked them to
return to the wizarding world, or gone to talk with haughty pure-bloods who
couldn’t pass up the chance to have Harry
Potter in their houses, or lent the power of his name to organizations and coalitions
and speech-makers doing work that he believed in. It wouldn’t be easy, but it
would have to be done.
For a
moment, he quailed before the vision of all that work at a moment when he still
sought to understand the life-debt magic and guard his children and balance his
precarious relationship with Ginny. Then he dismissed his fears. He had made
all these commitments of his own free will. If someone had sought to force him
to take them up, it wouldn’t have worked anyway. Whinging now was out of the
question.
So lost in
his thoughts, he didn’t notice the door of George’s room had opened until he
felt a warm weight against him. Harry wrapped his arms around Ginny and held
her near, murmuring soundless words of comfort. She wasn’t crying now, but she
rested on him as if she were utterly worn out. He thought she might fall asleep
if he stood still long enough.
“Mate?”
Harry
looked up with a blink. Ron had a face that seemed to have aged years in the
time since he had come to fetch Harry and Ginny from the house.
“It’s
George.” Ron flicked his head towards the room. “He’s asked to speak with you
alone. The Healers will come back in a few minutes, but they said he could have
one more visitor.”
“And what else
do the Healers say?” Harry asked.
Ginny
trembled in his embrace. Ron closed his eyes and turned his head away.
“We have a
week to say goodbye to him,” he stated flatly.
Harry didn’t
know how he found the strength to hand Ginny gently to Ron and walk into that
room, but somehow, he found it.
*
At first,
with George beneath blankets and his face turned to the wall, Harry could think
he was almost fine, just a bit gashed about the shoulders and neck. Then, as he
shut the door softly behind him, he realized that the whole shape of George’s
body beneath the blankets was—wrong.
“George?”
he asked quietly.
George
turned to look at him. His eyes were wide and exhausted with pain, but he
managed a smile. “Harry,” he said hoarsely, and extended his right arm. Harry
came and took his hand. There were only three fingers to press on his five.
“What
happened?” he asked, because it seemed possible to ask that in this moment,
though he hadn’t had the will to press Ron about how bad George’s injuries
were.
“Explosion
that made the roof of the shop fall in on me,” said George, his eyes fluttering
as if he were trying to blink back tears. But none crept down his face that
Harry saw. “Then curses through the broken windows. They were aiming as if they
knew exactly where I was. Maybe they did. I don’t know.”
Harry
jerked his chin at the bed. “Can I?”
George
nodded.
Harry
tugged the blankets back.
He
understood what Ron meant now. Medical magic could repair broken bones, grant
new limbs on occasion, and close most wounds into scars, as long as they hadn’t
been inflicted with Dark magic. But it could do nothing for this.
George’s
legs were gone. What remained were stumps of bone fragile as the wings of a
dead bird. There were so many bandages wrapped around his pelvis and spine that
Harry couldn’t see the damage there, but he saw spots of blood and darker
fluids already beginning to soak through the bandages. His chest was seamed
with scars and burns and wounds like open mouths. Harry had a moment, glassy
and distant with what he knew to be shock, to be outraged that the Healers hadn’t
bothered to tend to those wounds, and then he realized they had. But the
bandages had withered away. A faint, terrible smell of putrescence rose from
the puckers.
“A week is
how long they can keep you alive with magic,” he said.
“Yes.”
Something
in the tone of George’s voice made Harry glance at his face again. There were
still no tears, though Harry knew the pain from the curses which kept him bleeding
and rotting alive must be terrible. He looked calm, serene, as if he were
facing an illness that would pass over him and leave him as strong as before.
Harry
thought he knew what George wanted of him. He gave a slight shake of his head. “I’m
sorry,” he whispered, and felt the reality choking him. “I’m a powerful wizard,
but I can’t heal you.”
“I know
that,” George said. “I wanted to ask you something else.” The press of his hand
on Harry’s grew imperceptibly tighter. “They’ll keep me here for a week, Harry,
dying from the inside out. They pretend it’s a kindness, because it’ll give me
longer to spend with the family and ‘get my affairs in order,’ as the cheerful mediwizards
put it.” His eyes did blink then, once, as if the horror had become too much. “I
don’t want that to happen. I’ve seen the family, now, and the only person I
would really regret leaving died ten years ago.”
Harry
wished there was a chair nearby. He could have done with a place to sit down. “You
want me to kill you.”
“Please,”
George said, with a dignity that hurt.
“Why me?” Harry asked. He could weep and
scream and rage—or refuse—but it seemed important that he get an answer to that
question first. “Do you think I love you less than Ron and—and all the rest do?”
George
snorted. “I think you understand me better,” he said. “I saw you the day of
Fred’s funeral. You were the one who told the others to stop when they tried to
take me away from the gravestone. You knew I wanted to stay there overnight,
and staying there would do me no harm.” He caught his breath, lightly enough
that he had started speaking again before Harry could fuss aloud. “You know
what pain is.”
Harry
looked carefully at his brother-in-law, more carefully than he’d bothered to
look in ten years. If anyone had asked, he would have said that George had
managed to get beyond the mourning for his twin. He still worked in the shop;
he smiled, although he made fewer jokes; he was always happy to care for the
children when Harry and Ginny couldn’t. But Harry remembered, now, that the
smiles had never touched his eyes.
He had
thought George needed time. But he knew now that forever would not have been
long enough.
“And they
won’t let you go,” he whispered.
George
shook his head, eyes wide and clear and knowing. “They couldn’t after Fred’s
death. They can’t now. I can understand. I
mean, Mum almost panicked when I lost this ear, and losing Fred almost
destroyed her, would she want to lose another son? And the others will think
like Mum, or support her. But—“ He snorted lightly. “If there’s any time I
should get to be selfish, I think it’s now.”
“It is selfish,” said Harry, but he wasn’t
thinking about the Weasleys.
George
smiled gently at him. “I know,” he said. “Not fair to you, to ask you to do
this. But, Harry, there literally is
no one else. If Mum even knew I was thinking it, she’d get them to sedate me
for the week or something, just so she could sit with my body and have that
much comfort left.
“Please.
The best part of me died with the war. Let the rest go.”
Harry
closed his eyes. He could easily imagine what Ginny would say, if she knew. Or
Ron. This would destroy his friendships with them, or at the very least, cast a
shadow between them that could never be lifted.
“If the
Healers said you had a week to live,” he whispered, drawing his wand, “won’t
they think it’s suspicious that I came in here and then you died?”
He opened
his eyes, and saw George smiling at him—a smile that reached his eyes, this
time. He knew, just as Harry did, that the drawing of the wand meant Harry had
made his decision.
“No,”
George said calmly. “The Healers warned Mum and the rest that the magic was
chancy. They have to renew the spells every hour. And there’s always a small
chance that they’ll go wrong. They’ll just think that they went wrong this
time, or they waited too long—it’s been almost an hour already, I think—or that
my nervous system finally gave up fighting.”
Harry licked
his lips. Then he aimed his wand at George and said, “I’ll use Praefoco. I can’t be sure it’ll be
painless—“
“It sounds
perfect,” said George, and there was light that had nothing to do with the room’s
windows in his face. “They’ll never know. And, mate? The pain I’m feeling now,
chances are I’ll never notice the addition.”
Harry
nodded. Then he twisted his fingers in George’s and laid the wand against his
chest.
“Wanted you
to know,” George whispered, “that we both thought you were great, Harry. The
kind of little brother Ron really needed. And we never regretted that you
married Ginny. You were what she needed, too.”
Bittersweetness
graced Harry at the praise, as it had to, but then, George had used the past tense. Maybe he knew.
It wasn’t
the right time to shove his problems to the forefront. He said, “Say hello to
Fred for me?”
“I already
have, mate,” George said. “Each and every day.”
Harry didn’t
think he could take it anymore. And George seemed to have spoken his last
words, anyway. He lay still, eyes shut, face expectant.
“Praefoco,” Harry said.
Lines of
light that looked like sticky white webbing shot out of his wand and vanished
into George’s chest. Harry could feel the tingle of the magic working its way
downwards and into George’s lungs and what remained of his body. A much subtler
cousin of the Suffocation Charm, this magic pressed the air out of every place
it reached, mimicking a natural process that happened to every human body in
death anyway.
Harry didn’t
know how many people might have been murdered with this spell over the years.
But now, if it had never happened before, Praefoco
was serving a good purpose.
It had to
be good, he thought, as he watched George’s features and saw the pain, both old
and new, ease out of them at the same moment as his lungs ceased to labor.
The light
in his face, on the other hand, did not depart.
*
Draco
lingered a discreet distance down the corridor from George Weasley’s room. He
hardly wanted to intrude on what seemed to be a private family affair. But he had noticed that they were all standing
uselessly about, embracing and murmuring to one another, and that Harry was not
with them. Draco thought he was alone with the wounded Weasley twin.
He had no
reason to think that. Maybe the Healers were in the room and Harry was off
tending to his children or making necessary arrangements, like the endlessly
responsible person he had shown himself to be of late.
But he
nevertheless unshakably believed it to be true. And as concern for Harry had
brought him to the hospital in the first place, he stood there, watching, and
now and then checking the monitoring spell affixed to his wrist, which let him
know that Scorpius was still alive, physically healthy, and under the watchful
care of Narcissa. Draco envisioned himself wearing that spell quite a lot in
the near future.
The door
opened. Sure enough, Harry stepped out. Draco gave a sharp little nod of
congratulations to himself.
Then he
stopped.
Harry’s
head was bowed, and he said something that made the embracing, murmuring Weasleys
turn to face him at once. Their voices stopped.
Then the
Weasley mother screamed like nothing human and sagged to the floor. Her husband
bent over her, his face gray, his hands wandering as if they could not quite
find purchase on his wife’s body.
The Weasley
twin was dead, then. Draco swallowed. Strange to think that the thought brought
a distant sort of grief, perhaps for the death of someone he had known for a
good portion of his life, perhaps just for the thought of what it would cost
Harry.
Strange to
realize that he still thought of George Weasley as a twin.
“I was with
him in his last moments, yes,” Harry was saying when Draco paid attention again.
“Holding his hand. He died peacefully. Just—just took a breath, and then he
didn’t take the next one.”
Draco’s
gaze narrowed and sharpened. He didn’t think anyone else noticed, distracted as
they were by grief, but Harry’s voice had a mechanical precision to it that
Draco had already learned to recognize.
The great
git was lying.
And since
Draco doubted that Harry Potter would either murder George Weasley in cold
blood, or simply let him expire in pain without shouting for help, that left a
mercy-killing. Which Harry would have the guts to do. Which he would also have
the guts to lie about, so as not to cause George’s relatives to think he wanted
to die and leave them. And which he would accept the burden of, to carry it in
silence, because he was like that.
The great
git.
Harry’s
wife was sobbing in one of her older brothers’ arms. Granger huddled next to
her husband, and then leaned fully against him, as though Harry’s announcement
had taken the strength from her legs; her face looked as if she had been
struck. The tallest Weasley son and his silver-haired wife and daughter
embraced, while the third son—Percy?—joined his parents. Harry stood alone for
a moment, his eyes cast down, his stance radiating discomfort and unhappiness.
Then he murmured something about “making arrangements” that Draco doubted any
of the others paid attention to, and slipped down the corridor.
Towards
Draco.
Draco
checked the monitoring spell one more time, then reached out and caught Harry’s
wrist as he started to stride past the small alcove. Harry turned, a startled
exclamation on his lips, one hand already raising his wand, but then he
recognized Draco.
And his
defenses dropped. For just one moment, one moment that made Draco believe in
Harry’s acceptance of him as he never had before, he saw Harry’s yearning for
comfort, for peace, for someone who could walk beside him and share all the
responsibilities and secrets he was carrying, while he helped them with their
responsibilities and secrets in turn.
“Draco,”
Harry said, and the moment retreated as he blinked and retreated in turn, to
the limit of Draco’s hold on his wrist. “What are you doing here? Was there
another attack? Are Scorpius and your mother—“
“Hush, they’re
fine,” Draco whispered, and pulled him close again, an easier task than he had
expected. Harry seemed oddly strengthless. Well, if he had done what Draco
suspected he had, that wasn’t surprising. “I came to see about you. And now I
find that you need me more than I thought you did.”
Harry shut
his eyes and bowed his head. Draco ran his free hand up the side of his cheek.
The gesture had relaxed Harry and made him open up once before, when they discussed
the life-debt magic; maybe it would again.
Harry
sighed, and then stiffened his shoulders as though someone had told him he
would only have help if he possessed the right posture. “I appreciate that,” he
said. “Especially since you were just embattled yourself.” He blinked his eyes
open and licked his lips. “But I should go tell the Healers about George’s—passing—“
The truth
was so visible on his face that Draco couldn’t help saying it. “He asked you to
help him leave, didn’t he?”
Harry
shuddered, and a new line of tension formed between his brows. “How do you do that?” he whispered harshly. “You’re
not supposed to know me that well. No one is except Ginny. Sometimes I think
Hermione is right that—“
“Don’t try
to change the subject,” Draco said calmly. For now, he was the strong one, and
the feeling was oddly wonderful, grieved though he was for Harry. He was
supporting someone else, and that hadn’t occurred, except sometimes with Scorpius,
for a decade. Until now, he’d been the one Harry had to rescue, or his mother
had to plan a future for. Even his reaching out to Blaise and Millicent didn’t
count, didn’t matter, as much as this. “I don’t despise you for that. I think
you’re stronger than all of us here, though if my mother asked for the same
thing, I hope I could do it.”
Harry
looked away. Draco gently altered the shape of his hand so that it cupped Harry’s
jaw and turned his face back.
“Draco,”
Harry breathed. His eyelids were quivering, and a moment later the same fine
tremors racked his arms.
“What?”
Draco asked softly. He splayed out his fingers, so that he was touching as much
of Harry’s face as possible. No, not as much as possible; he lifted the other,
letting Harry’s wrist fall, and cupped his left cheek.
“Please,
let me go.”
“Why?”
Draco barely needed to shape his lips around the word; Harry stood so close
that he knew he would hear him no matter how softly he spoke.
“If you don’t,”
Harry said, “I’ll start crying.” He glanced up, and Draco immediately hated the
look in his eyes. It wasn’t real. It
was just a mirror, just a temporary glass dam flung up in front of the
devouring grief. “And I won’t be able to stop.”
“Do you not
deserve to mourn, then?” Draco’s voice had grown a bit louder and harsher. “Are
you just going to be the strong and silent type until the day when you break
down and can’t pick up the pieces anymore?”
*
Harry
shivered again. He didn’t understand how Draco could know him that well, down to picking up the metaphors that Harry had
used to himself in those times outside Eaglethorpe’s office when he had thought
he would collapse of his own too-much.
But one
thing was absolutely clear. If Ginny found him here with Draco, it wouldn’t
matter whether or not she knew that he’d killed George. She would still be
hurt, and that was the last thing she needed now.
He grasped
Draco’s wrists and slowly, carefully, took his hands from his face. Draco
sneered at him, and leaned so close that their noses touched and Harry could
make out every jagged twist and turn of the scar on his forehead.
“We’ve
shared too much to go back now,” Draco snarled, and turned his hands over so
that Harry could see the scars on them.
“I know,”
Harry whispered. The horrible temptation assailed him again, to just collapse
and let someone else handle things for a while. It was horrible because he was
so close to giving in to it.
And if he
did, what would happen then? He’d lose the delicate balance he’d fought so hard
to achieve and maintain. He might gain Draco, but he’d lose Ginny and the children.
To have them both, he needed to keep going for a while. Just for a little
while. He would rest soon. Just a little longer. This wasn’t the time to ask
Ginny to bear his burdens, when her brother had just died, and to ask Draco to
bear them was unthinkable, too, when his family was in danger and he needed to
devote his time to them.
“I know,”
he repeated, since Draco was still staring at him and waiting for an answer. “I’d
never deny our friendship or—or what you mean to me. But—I need to be with
Ginny for right now. That’s all.” He licked his lips. “Do you understand?”
“If
Scorpius died,” said Draco steadily, and Harry didn’t know how he could name
that terrible possibility without a flinch, “I’d want you there. I’d let you
help, because you’re my friend.”
“I know,”
Harry said, “but you also don’t have a whole horde of relatives who hate me.”
Draco
peered closely at him. Harry endured the sense of eyes peeling back layers of
his mistakes like scalpels, because he had to.
“That’s it,
then?” Draco asked, though it didn’t really seem like a question. “You’d let me
help if there wasn’t a history of feuding between the Weasleys and Malfoys as
long as a dragon’s tail?”
Harry smiled.
His lips cracked when he did. “Yes,” he said. “Absolutely.”
Draco
nodded, thoughtfully. “You’re really worried about hurting her. Or them.”
“Of course,”
Harry said. “Is that a surprise? I’m
worried about hurting you just as much.”
*
Oh, Harry.
Perhaps it
wasn’t the wisest thing to say, but looking at the determination and misery
battling for control in Harry’s eyes—and at least that was better than the façade
of mere determination—Draco couldn’t help himself.
“Has it
ever occurred to you,” he said, “that you can hurt someone and still be
forgiven? That wounds aren’t forever?”
Harry just
stared at him.
“Obviously
not,” Draco whispered, and then clasped Harry’s shoulder and squeezed, once. It
was much less than the embrace he wanted to give, but the embrace would be
pushing right now, and he’d agreed not to push.
“When you
need me,” he said, “or when you can get away for a moment and need help, I’ll
be here.”
He slipped
away down the St. Mungo’s corridors, though he felt as if he was leaving a
piece of himself behind, and he knew Harry’s gaze trailed him the entire way.
Such a
delicate balance. He hoped that he would be nearby when Harry finally lost his
balance on the morality tightrope, so that he could catch him in time.
On the
other hand, Harry did not want pushing, did not want care. Draco supposed he
could understand, when Harry was so much more used to taking care of everyone else.
And he did
have to respect the wishes of someone he cared for and wanted as much as he
cared for and wanted Harry.
Hard as it is and will be. But then, neither
of us is a stranger to suffering.
*
Amiyom,
Ramandu: Thanks for reviewing!
Thrnbrooke:
Harry thinks the marriage vows are stronger than the life-debt bonds with
Draco.
Mangacat:
Well, I think this chapter illustrates what I did to George. In gruesome
detail, in fact.
Chills and
Thrills: Thanks! I’m very glad you enjoyed the action in this chapter.
Your guesses
about the Masked Lady’s identity are very entertaining.
Harry has
his own ideas a few chapters hence about whether Draco should move on. Draco
has his own ideas, needless to say.
Darquiel:
Yes to both your questions; another session with Eaglethorpe is coming up, and
so is a situation where someone else observes Harry and Draco’s interaction.
A
retraction and Keyboarding: Well, Ginny would undoubtedly say that she’s the victim here, and blaming her
is blaming the victim. She’s not the one under the curse; she’s not the one
being tempted and going along with it. Harry
is still married to her, and that’s not a commitment lightly entered into in
the wizarding world. He should at least try to trust her before letting a
little miscommunication disrupt their entire marriage. And he should stop
putting someone else first.
Arealdeal:
Thanks! I do try to spend a lot of time on characterization.
Myra: More
information about Marian is coming up later.
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