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Sister Healer	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 2860 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Three—A Third in the Twosome

            Draco burst through the door into the room where he thought Healer Alto was and spent some time staring around. His first thought was that Healer Tella might have sent him wrong on purpose, since she knew he was Potter’s partner, and she hated Potter. But no, that would be stupid, when she had every reason to believe someone was after Alto.

            If you accept Potter’s visions. And why should someone who distrusts him accept Potter’s visions?

            Draco cursed himself for wasting time, and turned sharply in the direction of what he thought was an intruder, with his wand out. It was Healer Alto, who reared back when she saw him. She had some scissors in one hand and what looked like a sheet of cloth she was cutting into bandages in the other, and she stared at him as if he was the one who had come to murder her. Draco told himself to lower his wand and to make sure that his voice wasn’t very loud when he spoke.

            “Healer Alto? I know that you remember me. I’m Auror Malfoy.” He tried a cautious smile, but Alto only stared blankly at him and said nothing. Draco sighed. He had probably frightened her. “I’m sorry for coming in here like this, but my partner had a vision that you might be in danger, that a woman in Healer’s robes was coming to kill you.”

            “That’s—that would be quite a coincidence.” Alto’s voice was steady as she laid down the scissors and the bandages on a nearby table and stared at him, but Draco had the strong impression that it was only barely so. “Since the last person who threatened my life was also a Healer.”

            Draco stared at her. “Jerome? The one who had his knife to your throat? But twisted can’t use Healing magic. How could he have been a Healer?”

            Alto paused, and her eyebrows drew together. “It’s true that he had recently stopped coming to hospital,” she said slowly. “We thought it was because we could no longer challenge him. He was an extremely skilled Potions brewer. He could have become a Master on his own, not simply a Potions-using Healer.”

            Draco nodded, reassured. Potions required very little wand use. It was possible that a twisted could use them and still mask his lack of Healing magic. “Then you think that someone else might attack you?”

            “I don’t—know.” Alto’s hand fell on the table beside her, and her face went pale. Draco spun around, assuming at first that someone else had come through the door and frightened her, but there was no one there.

            “I remember,” Alto whispered.

            Draco turned back to her, and her face was still pale enough to make him fear that she was going to fall over. He came forwards, his hands held out, and took hers, bowing his head so he could kiss them. “My lady, what is it? What have you remembered?”

            He wondered for a hazy moment, like seeing something through a pane of glass, where Potter was. But doubtless he had found and controlled the twisted he had seen. He was a good fighter. Draco wasn’t worried for him, as long as he didn’t have to fight a long battle. And Potter was full of Dark magic and tricks that ensured no battle he faced would be long.

            “There’s another Healer who left not long after Jerome did,” Alto said, her head bowed and her hands trembling. Draco didn’t know if that came from fear or the effort to remember. “I hadn’t thought about her because she wasn’t a very good student, and I know that she would never have made it beyond mediwitch if she had completed the training. I assumed she would have gone home and found something else to do. But what if she quit because Jerome corrupted her somehow?” Her eyes flew open, and she stared at Draco with seriousness that made his hands tighten in spite of himself, holding on. “I never thought of that. Oh, I should have intervened, I should have made sure that she and Jerome were never alone—”

            “You couldn’t have known,” Draco told her sternly. “And it could be that something else happened, that she drank a potion that twisted her, or that she wanted to come and attack you in revenge for Jerome’s death.” He didn’t know if either was possible, since it still wasn’t known how twisted came into being, other than because of insanity from overuse of Dark Arts. “What’s her name, this woman who you think would have some reason to hate you?”

            “I don’t know if reason to hate me is enough,” Alto whispered, shaking her head. “But she’s called Janna Holinshead.”

            Draco kissed her hands again, and then whirled away and ran towards the door. He could hear Alto taking a step after him, calling with soft urgency, “Where are you going?”

            Draco paused and turned to flash her a smile over his shoulder. “Not far,” he told her reassuringly. “But I think that Holinshead may be nearby, and now that you’ve told me her name, I can try to find her.” It would be using Dark magic, of course, but he thought Alto would excuse him that if it could save her life. And Potter could probably use the help, wherever he was at the moment.

            “You must not!”

            A stone wall planted in his path couldn’t have stopped Draco any faster. He swung around, gaping at Alto, and found she had assumed a commanding stance, one hand braced on the table and one held out as if she would physically snatch his shoulder and touch him. Draco shook his head, confused. It had been a long time since anyone could make him stop that fast. He would give obedience to the Head Auror or other superiors if he was ordered to, but not that kind of instant, unthinking obedience.

            “My lady,” he said when he could, trying to keep his voice as gentle as possible while anger was rising up in him, “what—”

            “You are going to use Dark magic to find her.” Alto was standing with her head lifted up as though she had climbed a mountain and was looking down on the world from the summit. “You are going to put your life and sanity at risk to save me, when she hasn’t even appeared yet. I don’t want you to do something that stupid. You shall not.”

            Draco took a deep breath. For the first time, he could feel the anger severing the roots of his strange liking for the Healer, waking him up, reminding him that while he was standing safe here, Potter was probably in trouble. “This is the only way I might find her in time to prevent her from hurting my partner.”

            Alto shook her head. Her eyes were brilliant with tears, and she reached out one hand as though she would touch his arm, then took it back in time. Draco felt a faint pulse of regret. He had already held her hands, even kissed them, but it would have been something different, to feel her reaching out to touch him on her own.

            “There are other ways,” she murmured. “Other spells. I can show you, as long as you promise that you’ll let me cast it.”

            Looking at her, Draco didn’t know how he could deny her. She was trying so hard to protect everyone around her, including him. Although what Draco had done to earn that much consideration from her, especially when he disgusted her, he didn’t know. “Try, then.”

            Alto smiled at him, and then turned to stare at her wand as though it was her partner in some vast conspiracy. She whispered to it, caressing it, and Draco blinked as he watched the wand rise in the air and begin to circle, vibrating. Abruptly it pointed straight ahead, and then Alto reached up, clasped it, and dragged it down from its perch, nodding.

            “She is outside this building, in an alley behind it,” Alto said, with such a commanding note in her voice that Draco suspected it was probably the one she used for telling patients they should go to bed. “And I think that she is battling your partner. You should probably get on that.”

            As though released from a spell, Draco shook his head, turned, and began to run. He didn’t know why he had stayed there so long now, except that Alto’s voice was soft and low and fascinating, and he had accepted that he wanted to listen to her talk. Perhaps—

            He had to put the thought away when it occurred to him that he had been here for at least ten minutes already, and that Potter, especially if he was facing a twisted with a flaw as deadly as Larkin’s, was unlikely to survive for that long. Draco cursed under his breath and ran faster.

*

            Harry and the twisted woman were practically pressed up against each other now, dueling with small, sharp jabs of their wands, their bodies protected by flat, glittering shields that seemed to plaster the air in front of them. Harry could feel her breath on his face, and see her eyes. They were not, or no longer, the glittering blue in his vision. Arctic blue, the blue of the creature or person or twisted who had spoken through Okazes, a hard color to mistake.

            But had they been blue when he started the fight? Harry didn’t remember.

            He could feel sweat pouring into his eyes. He would have dearly liked to stop and wipe it, but he knew he would die if he did. He could feel the ache coiled and waiting in his muscles, the exhaustion that would overwhelm him if he let it, the panting rhythm that ran through him and made him want to drop to his knees. In some ways, everything would be easier if he let the woman stab him.

            Yes. That would end the fight, and it would mean that Healer Alto probably died, and that would mean Malfoy might die protecting her. The one thing Harry was determined to do was never fail another partner. He gritted his teeth and fought harder, blurring his own mind with his spells, responding so fast and so instinctively that he didn’t know half the names of those he cast.

            Even if he fails you? Even if he never comes?

            Harry shrugged a dismissive shoulder at those thoughts. They would only weaken him, and so he couldn’t afford to entertain them. What mattered was fighting, and surviving, and taking the twisted with him if there was no other way to kill her. There were spells that would do that, and he was more practiced with those spells than most other wizards, because he had accepted the necessity of making them part of his arsenal long before he joined the Socrates Corps.

            The woman abruptly flinched. Harry didn’t know why, and he didn’t dare glance over his shoulder just in case this was a trick and the stupidity killed him. He twisted to the side and cast a spell that required only a nonverbal incantation, he’d practiced so often on the dummies that the Aurors set up in their training rooms. Lupus!

            The woman cried out as her throat opened, apparently torn by invisible teeth, and she spilled on the ground. The shadowy wolves danced forwards and crowded around her, their mouths open in mournful howls. Harry turned to face them, his wand lifted aggressively. He would destroy them, too, if he had to.

            Instead, though, the wolves began to melt backwards, their heads lowered and their lips wrinkling back in what looked like defeated snarls. Harry watched them go, panting and shaking his head as he finally had a chance to clear the sweat from his eyes. He didn’t know if that was supposed to happen, but then, he had never heard of a twisted being killed before her companions. The companions would sometimes wake up, if they were spellbound wizards, or they would vanish completely because they depended on the twisted for their existence. Larkin’s ghosts had been like that.

            These wolves…Harry didn’t know. But as he stood there and watched, they faded, and the woman’s body twitched and let out the last of its blood. So Harry reckoned that, after all, they had depended on her for their existence and he didn’t have to worry about them anymore.

            He sighed and bent over to pick up the twisted’s wand. When possible, they were supposed to bring those back to the Auror Department, where the Unspeakables would take charge of them in their continuing effort to understand where the twisted came from and what produced them.

            “Potter?”

            Harry crouched and spun around, then sighed and shook his head. “Malfoy,” he said. “Ten minutes too late. Where were you?” That was a stupid and unfair question, he thought a minute later, seeing the way Malfoy’s face tightened up, but it was an honest one. He thought he could have taken the bloody twisted, whose name he still didn’t know, minutes earlier or maybe even alive if he’d had his partner with him.

            “I was busy making sure that she wasn’t in hospital,” Malfoy retorted, walking towards him. It looked as though his hair was ruffled from running, but not battle. Harry shrugged, trying to force away the aching resentment. Malfoy had killed the last twisted. It was Harry’s turn for the hard work. “Her name is Holinshead, by the way. Healer Alto told me.”

            Harry blinked. There was something in Malfoy’s voice when he said the Healer’s name, something thick and tortured and catching…

            Good God, he’s in love. Or in lust, maybe. Harry was sure, if he asked, Malfoy would tell him with a condescending smile that members of his family didn’t fall in love, and especially not with people who had a Gryffindor-like desire to save the public and might not even be pure-blood. Harry rolled his eyes. It wasn’t worth arguing over.

            “All right,” Harry said. “That makes things easier.” He stooped and picked up Holinshead’s wand, trying to find a place where it wouldn’t jab him. It had stopped being a sword when she died, but it was still longer and sharper than normal. “Why don’t you stay and interview her, then, while I go back to the Ministry?”

            Malfoy didn’t say anything. Harry turned and found that he was staring intently at Harry, his eyebrows bent down as though he had tried to decide what he should do and only found himself stuck between options that he didn’t like.

            “What?” Harry snapped. He tried to clear his throat and clear the anger out with it, but it was hard. He had done what he was supposed to do, and he was doing what he was supposed to do now, offering Malfoy a chance with the woman who could be the love of his life, for all Harry knew. He knew what had happened to Daphne Greengrass, Malfoy’s fiancée. This would be much better for him, if he could love someone who he seemed interested in and who was probably gentle, like most Healers.

            Healer Tella crossed his mind, and he almost smiled.

            I did say most Healers.

            “You think I’m useless,” Malfoy said then, destroying the neat train of thoughts Harry was gathering. “You want to send me away because I didn’t show up in time to help you with your stupid fight.” His voice hissed and scratched. If the voice was an animal, Harry thought, rubbing at his eyes and yawning, it would be a cat stuffed in a box, and letting the whole world know how angry it was as a result.

            “You’re not useless, but you might be better off talking to the witness that you protected and getting the right information from her,” Harry said. He was glad of the patience in his voice, although it only made Malfoy bristle more. If Malfoy tried to take this to Okazes or even higher, he would only sound stupid. Harry was offering him the chance to do something he wanted to do, and politely. It was Malfoy’s idiotic fault if he didn’t accept. “In the meantime, I’ll go back and start on the report about Holinshead. I’m the one who fought her, so it should be my words that go in that part of the report. I don’t need your help.”

            “Of course you don’t,” Malfoy said, and his voice was low and savage. “Who’s ever needed my help but Kellen and Healer Alto? And one of them is dead, and the other disapproves of me.”

            Harry eyed Malfoy. That sounded like a strange juxtaposition to him, but then again, he was coming to accept more and more that Malfoy was…stranger than he had thought. “Fine,” he said. “Then you can go back and do what’s good and right, for someone who needs your help, and I’ll go and start on the paperwork. That’s going to help you, too, since it spares you from having to do as much of the work.”

            Malfoy’s hand tightened on his wand. “I could have come here. I could have fought Holinshead, and I would have done it as well as you did.”

            Harry rolled his eyes. “I can’t deny that, after the way you handled Larkin and Jerome,” he said. “But you ought to know that you didn’t, and that I’m trying to be nice. You like Alto. Go spend time with her.”

            Malfoy flinched as though Harry had reached out and stuck a hot iron on his hand. “I’m not…that’s ridiculous. I don’t like her.”

            “You can interpret the word in whatever way you like,” Harry said, losing patience again. He turned his back and stumped into the distance, still juggling Holinshead’s wand. He tried to cast a charm on it that would surround the sharp edges without dulling them and changing the wand, but he didn’t manage; the edges parted the spell as though slicing through silk. Harry sighed in disgust and settled for walking with it by his side.

            “I can do just as much as you can. You didn’t have to kill her by yourself.”

            From the sound of it, Malfoy was standing behind him and watching him go. Harry gave him a rude gesture and continued walking. Idiot. So he was going to stay and talk to Healer Alto? Then why did he want to make it sound as though he wasn’t?

            A moment later, Harry shook his head. Who knew why Malfoy did anything?

*

            Draco leaned back against the wall and shook his head. “Then I don’t understand. If you acknowledge that Dark Arts have their place in the world, then I can understand your sympathy for a twisted like Jerome. But you were still angry that I killed him. Why?”

            Alto shook her head back. She had larger eyes than Draco had realized, and longer hair. She also could be more relaxed than most Aurors when she had the door of her office locked and the better part of a bottle of Firewhisky in her. She giggled at Draco’s question, swaying back and forth on her chair and staring off into the distance.

            “Did you know,” she whispered, “that I am a maze of contradictions? Sometimes, I surprise myself. I’m a Healer, but there are times I know that someone needs to die. I’m supposed to feel no sympathy for the Dark Arts, because I know they can drive people mad and cause the kind of wounds we can’t always cure, but at the same time, I know that longing for power. I know that sometimes, you think of how much you could do if you only had the right spell. Sometimes you know that that spell is one that the Ministry’s banned, and other times, it’s only that you might know a spell that could help you if only the Ministry hadn’t banned so many studies, and destroyed so many books.”

            Draco smiled at her in fascination. He had heard the theory that the Ministry had destroyed and banned books of Dark Arts and powerful spells from many people, most notably his father. But it had always seemed more like a conspiracy theory than anything else to him. The Ministry’s scare tactics when it came to the Dark Arts were far more effective than banning books would have been. With the number of private magical libraries in the world and the protective spells cast on valuable texts, the chances of them turning up again were too great to make the effort worthwhile.

            Draco had lost gambles on many things, but he had never lost when gambling on the laziness and inefficiency of Ministry officials.

            “All right, so you contradict yourself,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that you have to scold me for killing someone who would have killed you. Someone who used Dark Arts for good reasons, maybe, but was driven mad by them.”

            Alto shook her head until her hair fell into her eyes. “You don’t understand. The twisted…that’s a name that the Ministry came up with, a category they invented when they realized they didn’t know how else to name You-Know-Who. Those stories about them never being able to use Healing magic and always having symbols and companions are all based on You-Know-Who. I think they’re just taking one symptom and naming it twisted and refusing to investigate the disease. They’re telling you you can kill them. No justice. No trial.” She leaned forwards, and her eyes, Draco thought, were the same shade as his own, but far more beautiful. “Does that sound fair, Auror Malfoy?”

            Draco swallowed. He thought about the way his parents had exiled him without listening to his side of the story, without even considering why he wanted to be an Auror rather than make his way in politics, and shook his head. “I—I reckon it doesn’t.”

            Alto nodded. “So. I wanted to study the twisted and figure out some way to support them. We could have captured Jerome and tried to get him back to normal. The same with Holinshead.” She bowed her head and closed her eyes. “You didn’t tell me, but you didn’t have to. Your partner killed her, didn’t he?”

            Draco cleared his throat. “Yes. He did.”

            “Without trying to find out why she did what she did,” Alto whispered. “Without trying to find out what would heal her, what would cure her.”

            Draco opened his mouth to respond, but the Ministry’s dry regulations, their rules for defining who was a twisted and who could do what concerning them, stuck in his throat. They had nothing against the living words Alto was showing him, the contradictions that made Draco who he was.

            Because he was the same way. A pure-blood who still held many of the old beliefs but associated every day with Muggleborns, and protected them, and had a half-blood for a partner. A Malfoy who refused to do what his parents told him. A strong-willed man who had bowed his head to the Auror yoke.

            They discussed a few other things after that, but Draco knew that no other word they exchanged was as important. He walked forth from hospital into the darkness, slow and thoughtful.

            What if the word “twisted” really meant nothing at all, and was just an attempt to make new Dark Lords less terrifying, the way Alto had argued? Draco would have to think about his past and his future before he could decide.

            He Apparated to the Ministry and found the office deserted. Potter’s report was waiting, along with a snippy note about his lack of timeliness that Draco read only one line of before crumpling it up and throwing it away. He had other things to think about, things that included whether he would continue in Auror work at all.

            There were alternatives.

*

            unneeded: Thanks, I appreciate it.

            Harry and Draco should definitely have studied spells like that. It’s a deficiency in their preparations that they didn’t.

            SP777: Interesting theory, but that would have to account for the way that the twisted keep appearing around the hospital.
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Sister Healer