The Voices of the Hounds
He was at the circus. Animals paraded all around him, Technicolor tigers and dancing bears and butterflies with glittering wings. There were people, too, wearing bright green robes and bustling around amidst the animals, and some of the animals had human arms and legs and they said things to each other or to him.
The world moved around him suddenly, the circus rushing past him, and he was in a long white hallway and there were doors flying past on either side, and then he was in a new room and there were no animals inside the room. He blinked and Malfoy was there, wearing an unbuttoned white dress shirt and a loosely knotted dark green tie and his fluffy black cat ears, and he was screaming something, and two of the people in bright green robes were holding him back as he tried to reach Harry. Harry tried to tell them it was alright, the war was over, Malfoy could come to him now, but when he opened his mouth it wasn’t his voice that came out, it was the voice of the hounds that was many voices, and there was more screaming, and a door closed and Malfoy was gone.
He was in a bed, and he was alone, and on a table next to the bed was a vial. He picked it up and sniffed it: Draught of Peace.
And Snape always said he was pants at potions.
He drained the vial and curled up on his side and fell asleep shivering.
He was in a bed, and his arms weren’t working, and he was staring up at the ceiling again, and it wasn’t his kitchen ceiling. He tried to sit up to see it better, but he couldn’t get out of the bed. He looked down at himself: he was strapped to the bed, his arms and waist pinned in place. There was a bushy head of hair on the bed next to him, and as he struggled fruitlessly with the restraints, the head sat up and looked at him.
“Oh, Harry,” Hermione whispered, and there were tears in her eyes.
“Hi, Hermione,” he said, and smiled, because it felt like the right thing to do.
“We were so worried,” she sobbed, and Ron was there, and he stood next to Hermione and put his arms around her and she cried into his sweater.
“I’m fine,” Harry said.
“Mate, you got splinched bad,” Ron said, shaking his pale face. “The Healers said they’d never seen anything like it.”
The room swam into focus, and Harry understood he was at St. Mungo’s.
“Blaise brought me in?” he asked.
“Harry, what were you even doing with Blaise Zabini?” Hermione said, still crying.
“Did Baxter get him?” Harry asked desperately. “Is he okay? Blaise?”
“He’s fine, mate,” Ron said, stroking Hermione’s hair.
Harry relaxed a bit. “It’s just, I think he has fangs,” he told them.
Hermione was crying harder now. He wanted to reach for her hand, but he was strapped to the bed. “I don’t think he would come here,” he said in what he hoped was a reassuring tone.
“What?” Ron said. He shook his head. “Harry, you can’t pull this kind of stunt again. You could’ve died.”
“Oh.” They didn’t understand about Baxter, and his fangs. Harry looked around, but the bedside table was gone, and he wasn’t wearing his coat anymore.
“Harry, we love you,” Hermione told him, stroking his hand, her face glazed with tears.
“Yeah,” he said. “You too.” There was a pause. “So when are we leaving?”
Hermione’s face fell. “Harry, do you remember coming in?”
“Not really, I guess.”
She took a deep breath. “You were on a lot of drugs.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“It’s not funny,” Ron snapped.
Harry jumped. Hermione leant into Ron’s chest again.
“I’m so sorry, Harry. We had to check you in.”
He stared, confused. “You checked me into St. Mungo’s?”
“Harry—”
“I feel a lot better now. I think I can heal up at home.”
“We had to check you into the detoxification wing,” she sobbed, and Harry looked down at himself again, and there was a rubber bracelet on his wrist that said DETOX. His heart stopped.
“What did you do,” he said, his whole body trembling, “what the fuck did you do, Hermione—”
“Hey!” Ron snarled, and Harry flinched. “Lay off her, you’ve no idea—”
“Ron, no, please,” Hermione cried, and Ron put his arms around her again and Harry looked back up at the ceiling.
A Healer with short brown hair came in and told them that visiting hours were over, and Hermione kept saying “We love you,” over and over again, and Harry was looking at the ceiling, and the hounds were coming. He knew they were coming. He glared at the Healer whilst she unclipped his bed from the wall and started rolling him out of the room.
“Mr. Potter, I’m Healer Stroud,” she said. “I’ve been assigned your case. You’ll be with us for the next month.”
“I don’t need to detoxify,” he told her. “I’m only here because Baxter made me disapparate.”
“Yes, your chart notes a nasty splinch,” she said. “However, you also had potentially lethal doses of Indolor and oxycodone in your bloodstream, along with a significant amount of alcohol and at least one of the new synthetics. You’re quite lucky to be alive.”
Harry clenched his fists. “I’d like to leave now, please.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Potter, wizarding law is quite clear. In cases involving danger to the life of the patient—”
He stopped listening. She was rolling him down another hallway, and more doors were going by on either side.
“Malfoy was here,” he said suddenly, and got the sense that he’d interrupted her in the middle of saying something. “Where is he?”
“Unfortunately, visitors are not permitted in the detoxification wing,” she told him. “They may be allowed in to see you after you move into the next stage of treatment.”
“When will that be?”
She examined a chart hanging on his bed. “We expect your primary detox will last 8 to 10 days.”
Harry tried again to get up, but the restraints held. He tried sending a wordless alohomora at them, but nothing happened: they had incapacitated him somehow. He started to panic.
“I need to leave now,” he told her. “I left my shoes at the Manor.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Potter.”
She pushed through a set of double doors to a long ward. Along the walls, curtains hung down from the ceiling at periodic intervals, dividing the ward up into little cubes, most of them empty. She rolled his bed into one of the cubes and clipped it into place.
“I’ll be back to check on you regularly, Mr. Potter. Healer Smith is on duty in detox right now. Is there anything else you need before I go?”
“Yeah,” Harry said. “I need a drink.”
It was a poor attempt at a joke, really, and he wasn’t joking 12 hours later, when everything had left his system and he learned that by detoxification they’d just meant torment. He’d been afraid of the hounds, with their teeth and claws and voices, but he’d been a fool: the hounds were the least of his concerns. The hounds were in their clearing, far away from him, and he was lost in the forest, vomiting until it was only blood and bile, and then vomiting a little more somehow.
They’d undone the restraints on his arms, but his hands shook so much he couldn’t use them anyway, and he was going to be here forever, reclining in his own stench, a basin held up to his lips the only indication that time was passing at all. He shivered, and someone covered him with a blanket, and then he sweated through it, and someone removed it. The room was dark, or it wasn’t, and he thought that maybe days were passing, but they couldn’t be: it was impossible that he had been doing nothing but lying here vomiting for days on end. He was in a loo, and someone was pointing him at the toilet, and he just lay down on the cool floor and closed his eyes. He waited for the hounds to come and kill him, and they wouldn’t and he cried.
Finally, after months of this, or maybe minutes or days, he blinked, and a hand came into focus in front of his face. The hand was holding a spoon, and seemed to be feeding him soup. He had the disorienting sense that he had been awake for some time now, only he hadn’t been aware of it.
“Hello,” he croaked, his voice rusty.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Potter.”
The hand was attached to a face, and the face resolved slowly.
“I remember you,” Harry said to the face. “What’s your name?”
The face sighed, and Harry thought maybe they’d had this conversation before. “Zacharias Smith.”
It took him a moment to place the name.
“Pomfey’s here, then?”
“Mr. Potter, you’re in St. Mungo’s, you’ve—”
Harry waved him off. “I remember now.” He let Smith put a spoonful of soup into his mouth. “Your soup’s terrible.”
“You’ve mentioned.”
“You work at Hogwarts?” Harry squinted.
“St. Mungo’s.”
“Right, the other one.”
“How are you feeling, Mr. Potter?”
“I lost my shoes,” Harry told him. “I think Malfoy came to bring them to me.”
“Yes, Hannah mentioned she’d seen you at the Manor,” Smith said, bringing another spoonful of soup to his mouth. Harry tried to remember who Hannah was.
“I need my coat.”
“Your personal effects will be returned to you in the next stage of treatment. But, Mr. Potter, I must warn you, the drugs in your trouser pockets have been confiscated.”
Harry stared at him. “You don’t understand.”
“I’m very sorry, Mr. Potter.”
Stroud came back some time later, and he tried to explain to her that Baxter had fangs, and his shoes were at the Manor, and Malfoy was coming to get him, but she just kept saying things like The disorientation will wear off over the next few days, and You’re perfectly safe now, Mr. Potter, until he started laughing at her and she left.
The next stage of treatment was in a different wing, with a lounge area and a room he shared with two other wizards. The hounds were back and they were climbing all over him and spitting in his face and when the other two wizards spoke to him it was only with the voice that was many voices, and it screamed. Stroud kept showing up, and eventually he realised he was on a schedule: group activities recurred at regular intervals, the meals came at the same times every day, the lights went out when someone else decided they should. The other two wizards in his room complained because the hounds kept screaming in the middle of the night, and he got moved to another room, alone, and Stroud told him it was him who’d been doing all the screaming.
“It was just the hounds,” he told her, and she got a gleam in her eye and said “What hounds?” like she’d figured him out somehow, and then she started giving him little vials of potions.
“Why can’t I just have my Indolor?” he asked.
“Your recreational drug use was a way of escaping your life,” she said.
“And what am I doing here, then?”
She pursed her lips.
At first he thought the potions were working, that they had shut up the hounds. Then he realised the hounds were still screaming as loud as ever: the potions just made him into the sort of person who didn’t care.
He had a better grasp of time now, knew it had been nearly two weeks since he’d been moved into stage two, but what he’d actually spent those days doing, he couldn’t say. He would glance up, and Stroud would be there again, and he would wonder if he’d just been sat by the window in the lounge since breakfast. There were a few books around, but when he picked one up, the words didn’t mean anything anymore.
“I’m going to off myself,” he told Stroud, half-serious, and she moved him to yet another room, where he didn’t even get to use the loo without a healer lurking over his shoulder. He thought about telling her the new room made him want to off himself more, but it seemed like a bad strategy, all things considered.
Zacharias Smith was assigned to the stage two lounge one day. He sat down in front of the window with Harry like he was Stroud, and he was trying to get Harry to talk.
“I remember who Hannah is,” Harry told him.
“What?”
“She was dressed as a ghoul.”
Smith thought he was barking, and maybe he was. The hounds were still there, looking at him balefully, only when he tried to hear their voice of many voices it was like staring directly at a disillusionment charm: a nauseating lurch, an absence where he knew there was a presence.
When his last week arrived, Stroud told him he’d been very cooperative, and he thought about laughing at her again, but it felt like too much work.
“I want to see Malfoy,” he said instead. The circus hadn’t been real, he knew that now, but he was sure that Malfoy had been. Malfoy, shirt gaping open, tie coming undone, screaming for him with a voice that was only one voice.
Stroud consulted her notes. “We feel that visitors would be counterproductive to your healing.”
His brain was so cooked these days, it took him a moment to parse the sentence.
“We?”
“Your healing team in consultation with Mrs. Granger.”
“And what authority does she have?”
“Mr. Potter, in cases where a patient poses a clear danger to his own life—”
“You pose a clear danger to my own life,” he snapped, and she blanched.
When they finally released him, Ron and Hermione were waiting at reception.
“I forgot something upstairs,” he told them, and then he threw out the vials Stroud had given him and went out a side door. St. Mungo’s was in the heart of muggle London. He could get a cab.
Outside, the sunlight was blinding. He tried to buy a sandwich at a bodega, but the guy took one look at him—shoeless, blinking, dazzled by the existence of the outside world—and turned him away.
Just as well: he had no money.
He flagged down the Knight Bus, and told them he could pay them when they got to the Manor, and Stan sighed and took pity on him. The bus was a comfort because it was about the only place on earth where he was the least bedraggled person around, and he sank down on a bed gratefully. As he was getting settled a woman with dark hair and an offensively orange coat came up to him.
“Mr. Potter!” she exclaimed. “Where are you off to today?”
Press.
“Piss off,” he told her.
“Feisty,” she said, and sat down next to him.
“If I tell you, will you piss off?”
She already had a quill out.
The Manor seemed to have decayed even more in his absence, and Stan looked askance at him as he stood.
“I’ll be right back,” he promised, searching desperately for any sign of life in the second-storey windows. If they were gone, if he’d somehow missed them—
“Jesus Christ,” Malfoy said as soon as he’d got into the ballroom. “You look like shit.”
Harry walked over to them on the rug. Malfoy stunk of cigarettes and sweat.
“You smell like shit,” Harry told him.
“Welcome back to the land of the dead,” Blaise said from the floor.
“You came,” Harry said to Malfoy.
“What?”
“To St. Mungo’s. You were there.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, snog already,” Blaise said.
Harry flushed. “I have to pay the Knight Bus.”
“Blaise, go pay the Knight Bus,” Malfoy said.
“Make Pansy do it.”
“I don’t give a flying fuck who does it,” Malfoy said, and took Harry by the arm. “You really look like shit.”
“You need a shower,” Harry told him.
They went down the hall, and Harry stood in front of the bathroom mirror while Malfoy undressed him.
“Jesus,” he said when he took Harry’s shirt off.
Harry looked down. His fingers traced the outline of the rippled pink scar tissue that now covered half his torso. It was like the hounds had finally got their bite out of his side.
“I got splinched,” he reminded Malfoy.
“I’ll kill that bastard.”
“We match now, though.”
Malfoy paled and shook his head. When they got under the hot water, he stood behind Harry, and Harry tipped his head back onto Malfoy’s shoulder. Malfoy reached down for Harry’s cock.
“You don’t have to do that,” Harry told him.
“Oh.” Malfoy started to step away.
“Wait,” Harry said. He positioned Malfoy in front of him, their chests touching, all of their scars pressed together, and they stood like that for a long moment.
“Stay here,” Malfoy said, his voice low.
“What, in the shower?”
Malfoy looked at him, his grey eyes hard.
“Okay,” Harry said.