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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 Seven—Not a Lucky Number

            “I see. Thank you for telling me.” Healer Tella spoke with a grim set to her mouth, half-turning away to call over her shoulder towards someone Draco couldn’t see. He had caught her in the middle of a delicate procedure on a patient on the Spell Damage Ward. She looked back at him, started to say something, and then shook her head and slammed the door.

            Draco leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. He wanted to hasten right back to Miranda, of course he did, but his breath was coming fast, and he also wanted to rest so he didn’t do something embarrassing like collapse on the stairs on the way back to her.

            His head hurt.

            Of course, he thought it had hurt more or less continually since he fought with Potter. That was an odd thing, he decided, that a partner he didn’t care much about—he didn’t care enough that he could easily wound him, in fact—should cause him enough stress and tension for his head to hurt.

            Miranda was the important one. Of course she was. He had thought he couldn’t ever fall in love with anyone again, he had thought he would never have someone who understood him, and now he had someone.

            It had—it had to matter.

            Why wouldn’t it matter? Draco heard the question in his head as clearly as though someone had asked it of him. He shook his head, frowning, and opened his eyes so he could make his way back up the stairs. He thought the world had stopped spinning enough that at least he wouldn’t fall flat on his arse.

            He discovered two Healers in bright green robes standing in front of him, one raising a monocle as if he would peer more closely at Draco’s face. Draco scowled at them, but neither of them blushed at having been caught about to provide totally unnecessary care. In fact, the woman nodded in a familiar manner and reached out as if she would lay her fingers on his wrist and take his pulse that way. “Have you seen a Healer before that you like?” she asked. “We’ll take your name to her, if you wish.”

            “I’m not here as a patient,” Draco snapped, pulling his arm quickly back to his side. His left arm already hurt enough as it was, with the way he had cradled Miranda all the way to hospital, and if they saw the Dark Mark there, he didn’t like to imagine what this lot might do. “I came in with someone who needs watching.”

            The Healers just nodded again, infuriatingly, as though that made sense but didn’t deter them from their purpose. “It can be difficult,” said the man with the monocle, “watching someone you love taken ill. But that doesn’t mean you should neglect your own health. I’d say that you need to sit down and have a hearty meal and a rest. Gave blood, did you? That’s always a tiresome procedure, and most wizards think they can be up and running around the corridors two minutes after it ends, heaven knows why.”

            “What?” Draco roared, and would have surged towards them, except his left arm pained him. He sighed and reminded himself, as the Healers stared at him, that he couldn’t help Miranda if he got himself thrown out of hospital for bad behavior, the way Potter had. Of all the examples not to imitate…

            “I’ll be fine,” he said, and tried to give the Healers a temperate smile that would make him seem responsible but stressed, not a nutter. “The woman I’m visiting is out of danger. Thank you for your concern.”

            The woman turned away with a sniff, but the man lingered, looking at him with a frown. Then he shook his head and said, “You still need to sit down and have something to eat, mate. You’re far too pale.”

            Draco ground his teeth, and didn’t care if the Healer heard the noise. “I didn’t give anyone blood,” he said. “I’ll be fine. Thank you.” The female Healer had paused up the corridor, waiting for her partner, but still the man lingered with that bloody idiotic frown wrinkling his blow, as if Draco would collapse without his support.

            Finally, the man sighed and nodded, then followed the woman. Draco waited a short while to be sure they were gone, then sought out a bathroom where he could splash some water on his face and take a look in the mirror. If he looked that bad, then he might need to use a glamour. He couldn’t chance being cast out of hospital or made to rest before Miranda stopped needing him.

            He did look bad, he had to concede, his face pale and his eyes almost starting from his face in the midst of the pallor, or looking as if they might. He hesitated, then chose a glamour that would add just a touch of ruddy color to his cheeks. Most of the Healers in hospital were busy. They wouldn’t look too closely if he seemed relatively healthy, but too-red cheeks might make them think of fever.

            Potter. I was going to firecall Potter.

            But no, he wasn’t. He sighed and turned towards the stairs that led to Miranda’s room. No, he had come down to seek out Healer Tella on Miranda’s instructions and warn her about Potter. It was easy to confuse orders when he was confused on that point.

            Soon he was back in Miranda’s room, listening to the soothing sounds of her voice and feeling the way that she poured out her attention on him like a waterfall. Draco listened, and touched, and kissed her hands when they were offered, and absorbed. It didn’t matter what Miranda said, as long as Draco was there for her saying it.

            And yet. He couldn’t help wondering. Lewin had turned against her. It was obvious they had not gone overnight from lovers to enemies.

            Who was to say that she wouldn’t stop paying attention to Draco, too, if someone better came along, someone more sympathetic, who could offer her more of what she craved? She was all full of easy tenderness, but that would make it easy for her to befriend someone else, too. And Draco, all gratitude for Miranda’s attention, knew he was no prize for people to plot to catch in return. Perhaps he had been once, when Daphne was still anxious to marry him, but not now.

            How was he to keep hold of Miranda?

            No answer presented itself to him, only the pain in his left arm, and the conviction that he had meant to firecall Potter, though both died in the wake of his happiness that Miranda was talking to him, his great happiness.

*

            Later that night, because he was an idiot and could never leave well enough alone even when he had a partner who injured and hated him, Harry went back to the Ministry.

            He had to handle the files carefully. The two wounds, one on either arm, made him weaker. His hands shook several times, and each time, Harry gritted his teeth and worked his way through the pain. This wasn’t like compiling reports or sorting through files in search of some elusive fact. It wasn’t work at all, not like the research on the people who had become twisted and attacked Healer Alto. It ought to be fun.

            He dragged out all the files on the twisted that the Socrates Corps housed—mostly in long cabinets against the far wall where no one had a desk—and began to look through them for any sign of blue eyes, or twisted with dog-like companions, or a plague of twisted all at once, or anything else that seemed familiar from this case.

            This case. You’re thinking of it like it was a single case, like these aren’t separate attacks motivated by different things.

            Harry frowned and shook his head. He did have to think of it that way, if only because of the blue eyes in Holinshead’s and Lewin’s faces, and the fact that they may have been on Jerome, too; he hadn’t been the one who killed Jerome, and Malfoy had done it from behind, unable to see his eyes. Something out there, some great twisted or some powerful one, wanted Healer Alto dead.

            Why, though?

            Know that and I wouldn’t have to be doing this, Harry thought, and turned to yet another report that said nothing about blue eyes.

            There was an older report clipped to the back of that one, though, and more because he was reading everything in these files than because he expected it to have something useful, Harry turned it idly over.

            He snorted a moment later. It was a list of the characteristics of the twisted, as if he didn’t know them well enough by now. He scanned them idly anyway, nodding as he read them. Yes, the companions appeared, the dogs and the wolves and the foxes. The flaws—all of these twisted had those. The use of Dark Arts and no Healing magic. Unusual, since these had all been Healers, but not completely unheard of. The report speculated that sometimes Healers could go mad like everyone else, perhaps even more often, since they were more likely to deceive themselves into thinking they were using Dark Arts with the best of intentions.

            The symbol…

            Harry paused, and narrowed his eyes. He had learned the list of twisted characteristics as five, all based closely on Voldemort. Because Voldemort had had the Dark Mark, it was assumed that all twisted had a particular symbol that meant a lot to them. And he had companions, who for him were his Death Eaters, and the use of Dark Arts, and he had done no Healing except to cause more pain that Harry ever saw, and his flaw was probably his ability to create multiple Horcruxes—there was debate about that.

            But the symbol wasn’t listed on this particular report. Even though it had been on all the other lists Harry consulted, even though the other twisted they had confronted had symbols.

            Harry flipped rapidly through other reports. All of them were conveniently and meticulously organized, in the way that Warren and Jenkins had patiently taught Harry and Malfoy, with their twisted characteristics listed on top.

            And yes. There were a few without symbols. Each time, the deficiency was noted, and it was speculated that the twisted had probably had a symbol that the Aurors who had killed them simply didn’t have time to see. Normally, their Dark Arts and their flaws and their companions were the things that most marked them, since a lack of Healing magic was also difficult to prove. Since all the wizards and witches who died because of the Socrates Corps had caused extreme damage and suffering, it wasn’t a problem if they didn’t fit the classical definition of a twisted or not.

            But it told Harry something he hadn’t known before, that there was wiggle room in the definition. Enough, perhaps, that a twisted whose flaw was striking from a distance and taking over other twisted might be able to manifest without a visible symbol.

            And he would use the flaws and the magic and the companions of the twisted he took over, Harry thought, nodding rapidly as he reasoned it through. And he wouldn’t be able to Heal anymore than they could.

            What if Jerome and Holinshead and Lewin all became twisted because this other twisted took them over? And that would mean—

            Here, though, Harry’s own logic hanged him. At least two of those twisted had had symbols. And the blue eyes were a sort of symbol of their own. If anything, the twisted he was theorizing about here had a bigger lack, and that was the companions. He had his symbol. He had his flaw.

            Harry leaned back in his chair, chewing his lip. He knew the information about the symbols was important. He knew it. He just didn’t know how yet.

            Well. The wounds on his arms were throbbing, and he at least had one piece of knowledge he hadn’t known before hovering in his head. All in all, not bad for an evening’s work. He nodded decisively and started to put the files back. He might figure out what was important about not having symbols if he slept on it.

*

            Draco stumbled back into hospital after a night of blind, blank rest. He had closed his eyes and opened them, and he knew he had slept, but it didn’t feel like that, not when he had been away from Miranda all that time.

            I should have stayed here, he thought, as he ran his tongue around the inside of his teeth and felt the fuzziness there. I would have rested better, and I know that Miranda would have been happy to have me.

            The Healers in the lift stared at him oddly, probably because he had dark circles under his eyes and hadn’t been able to indulge in his usual impeccable grooming. Draco willed the flush on his cheeks away and stared straight ahead. So they would look at him. What did that matter next to the way Miranda looked at him?

            So long as she continues to look.

            That suspicion returned, banging up and down in his head the way the lift doors banged open and shut whenever someone got off at another floor. Draco began to wonder why he had taken the lift instead of the stairs. Walking would have gone faster than this endless, endless travel.

            She might look at someone else. She might offer her sympathy to someone else. She had opened up to him easily, but Draco knew that he didn’t have a career or looks or a life philosophy that she found attractive enough to account for that.

            So her heart was open to everyone. And perhaps he ought to rejoice in that, but he couldn’t, not when he wanted to be the only one occupying it.

            The lift finally reached the right floor. Draco waited for the Healers to stream off, because he would probably curse someone if they stepped on his foot or elbowed him in the ribs right now, and hurried down the corridor that he knew would lead him to Miranda’s room. One more bend, one more corner, and he could see the door.

            The door with a guard in front of it.

            Draco jerked to a stop, staring. He had seen at once that the guard was not in the red robes of an Auror, but it took him longer than it should have—no, he had not rested well—to place the rusty-dark robe the man was wearing. The Hit Wizards. Of course. The Hit Wizards had placed a guard on her.

            Well, and about time, too. When twisted keep attacking her.

            But a guard to keep Miranda safe from twisted should still have come from the Aurors, because they were the ones who dealt with Dark wizards. (Draco did picture them asking Potter to do it, and the Healers’ reaction to that, and managed a small, grim smile). Not every member of every Corps could be busy. So he walked towards the guard with what he could acknowledge was an aggressive stride, ready to reason the matter out if the man would give him the chance to do so.

            “What’s your name?” he asked, with an assumption of authority that he knew would probably work. People deferred more to Potter than to Draco, but they also and always deferred to someone who told them what to do in a confident tone.

            The Hit Wizard, a tall, balding man with a hooked nose that could have rivaled Professor Snape’s, seemed determined to be an exception to the pattern. He eyed Draco with disfavor, then snorted. “Hit Wizard Archibald Kensington, if it so please Your Majesty,” he said.

            Draco paused, running the name through his mind. No, he knew no Kensington, and that meant the man should have no reason to be hostile to him. He hadn’t even had relatives among the Death Eaters, which was the way Draco explained the hostility of those people he knew hadn’t been on the side of the Light.

            “What are you doing here?” Draco demanded at last, when he could wrestle his thoughts into some kind of order. “I’m the one who’s been guarding her.”

            “No, you’ve been weeping over her,” Kensington corrected smartly. “Which is fine, and I’ll let you through to do it some more. But you can’t guard her when all you do is sit there holding her hands and staring into her eyes.”

            Draco stared at him, and wondered. He knew few Healers had come by yesterday after he had said that he would remain with Miranda. They had attempted to persuade him to leave hospital, but they hadn’t stayed when he said he wouldn’t. He had thought they respected his devotion to her and the shaking, pathetic response he had in his legs when she almost died.

            His left arm hurt. He rubbed at the Mark, and watched Kensington’s eyes promptly narrow in that direction.

            He had thought the Healers were like that. But possibly they had spies among them, and he couldn’t trust them.

            Possibly.

            His body burned and stung, his blood foaming in his veins, as he thought of another possibility.

            Potter had come to the room. Potter had seen him weeping, and might have stood there watching for hours, for all Draco knew, thanks to that bloody Invisibility Cloak of his. He could have avoided the Healers. Miranda had said that none of them knew he was there, or they would have done something to banish them from hospital.

            Potter could have gone back to the Ministry—in fact, he probably had when he couldn’t get Draco to sign that sodding parchment—and told them that Draco was “weeping” over Miranda. Draco could hear the tone of voice he would use to do it, too. After all, how many times had he heard Potter’s scorn directed at himself?

            And Miranda…she might have known. What if the next rival he had to worry about losing her to was Potter? She hadn’t seen him kill except with Lewin, and it was possible that shock kept her from remembering the true extent of that, since she had never mentioned it when she was talking over Lewin’s death. She knew Potter had used Dark Arts and violence, but she had been away from Holinshead’s death, and Draco had killed Jerome. She might think of him as someone else she could turn to in Draco’s wake, someone who would protect her but who she hadn’t persuaded into reconsidering the importance of twisted and Dark Arts yet.

            “Malfoy.” Kensington’s voice was somewhere on the far side of the haze, the haze caused by the steady drum of his heart in his ears and the way his fingers curled. “Are you all right? You don’t look it.”

            “I’m fine,” Draco said, and turned away. He needed to go. He needed to seek. He needed to find. He didn’t know exactly what he would do when he found it, but he knew he needed to go. He threw one quick smile over his shoulder at Kensington, who he couldn’t see through the haze possessing him, but that was all right. He knew he could do something that would make the haze go.

            Find Potter. He had to find Potter.

            He ran through the corridors of hospital, and no one stopped him. Once he thought he saw Healer Tella staring after him, but it didn’t matter, because she didn’t get in his way. Another time, the two Healers who had confronted him last night called his name, or something that sounded like his name. Draco couldn’t be sure, because the sound warped and blurred and wouldn’t travel correctly. And he didn’t want it to, not when he was sure it would be an attempt to talk him out of what he knew he had to do. He bent his head and continued to run.

            After a while, he became aware of something running beside him. No, not things, creatures, and there were several of them. He looked ahead and back, and yes, there they were. They had upright ears and long, lean bodies, and he knew them from the memory of a picture book he had read when he was a child. Jackals. They were jackals, and they were made of sparkling mist like the kind that filled his mind.

            Draco smiled. He knew it was a good sign they were there, that Miranda had sent them to protect him.

            He would find Potter. He knew what he had to do once he had the confession. He was an Auror, and good Aurors always got a confession first.

            He drew his wand. The roaring haze still filled his mind, but that was all right. In a short time, he could share it.

*

            Another day, another eight hours among the files. Grumbling, Harry dragged out and looked at report after report, and he did locate more and more twisted who didn’t have the symbol on their arms or painted on the walls of their cells—the way Latham, their last twisted before the Alto case, had done—or anywhere on their bodies at all.

            But there was no consistent pattern between them that he could find.

            Some had no symbol because they died so quickly and their bodies burned so thoroughly that any symbol would have been destroyed. Some were only historical cases, Socrates Aurors theorizing that Dark wizards defeated years ago would actually have been twisted, only that definition didn’t exist at the time. And some had no symbol, definitely, but seemed as destructive and dangerous as the ones that did.

            The only things Harry knew for certain were that the definition of twisted was nowhere near as firm as he’d been led to believe, and that he had a headache. He leaned back in his chair, rubbed his head, and sighed.

            Abruptly, a silvery figure formed in front of him. Harry blinked and sat up. A sleek creature with a slim tail—he thought it was a weasel—gave him a brisker nod than he’d ever got from a Patronus and said, in Healer Tella’s voice, “I saw Auror Malfoy rush past me a few moments ago, probably bound for the Ministry. Whatever has distressed him, I thought you should know about it, as he has watched over our Miranda Alto most of the night.”

            The Patronus dissolved. Harry blinked at where it had been, and rubbed his chin. Why in the world would she think me worthy of warning?

            Something slammed into the office door. Harry whirled around, his nostrils flaring, and rose to his feet as he gripped his wand. If Malfoy had got word of another twisted heading his way and come to help, the twisted might have come before he could.

            The door flew open. Malfoy stood there, silhouetted against the light from the corridor beyond, smiling at him. Dog-like shapes of shine and shadow crowded around him, crouched and snarling.

            “Potter,” Malfoy said pleasantly. “I knew it was you. I thought I would give you something to remember me by.”

            He didn’t point his wand, and he didn’t cast a curse. Instead, confusion flooded Harry’s head. Had he really gone to hospital yesterday to get Malfoy’s signature on the parchment that would end their partnership? But why? Could it be that he wanted to destroy Malfoy more than he wanted to work alone? Did he bear resentment towards him because Malfoy had wounded him? But that was understandable, he was under a lot of stress—

            The dog-like shapes leaped for him, and behind him came Malfoy, eyes never wavering from Harry’s face, on fire with darkness.

*

            SP777: I suppose I should be glad that you can’t actually go into the story and kill Alto, then?

            Sharae: No, that’s absolutely fine. I’ll email you, too.
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Sister Healer