Survivor

The days since Daphne’s incapacitation had gone by like a blur. He’d tunneled in on Quirrell’s lessons so much that everything else faded into the backdrop. With his teacher bodily pulling him from the pit he’d fallen in and showing him how far he could go, even quidditch was feeling more like a barrier than a thrill. With all of that on the table, Harry wasn’t too shocked that Daphne’s reawakening was what eventually made things come back into focus.

Instead of rushing past him like a freight train, his classes were flowing like freshly spilled tree sap. Listening to Binns drone on about whatever fucking goblin rebellion he fancied that day had never been more painful to go through. Even Quirrell’s class, which was something he’d begun paying attention to much more often now, just barely crawled by. His teacher didn’t look very happy about his inattention either. 

Harry was pretty certain he’d managed to grind a hole into the Great Hall floor with the tapping of his heel during lunch. A million things he needed to say ran through his head, each with at least a thousand ways to say it in the hopes of coming out with his friendship intact. Standing here like he was now, though, waiting for some kind of sign that it was time to make his move, no words were coming to mind. He was pulling a blank.

Harry desperately wanted to reach out with his magic as he had the day before, but he was too wary of being noticed now that things had settled in the hospital wing. If there was somebody in there who was skilled with occlumency, then trying to read the room would be a monumentally stupid decision. That was why he reluctantly kept to himself and settled in for a long wait with Jason wrapped around his torso. In a way, the extra time spent out here was a blessing because the words still weren’t coming.

But the passing time didn’t seem to help much... 

The sun had long since set when a group of three left the hospital wing. It was Daphne’s father, a man he couldn’t forget if he tried, walking along with a woman and a little girl who both looked nearly identical to his friend. They huddled close together, seemingly drawing comfort from one another, not that he could tell for sure without using his magic. 

Harry watched them turn about halfway down the corridor to descend the staircase and exit the school. Her family leaving meant that visiting time was officially over. If ever there was a time, it was now, and he couldn’t afford to leave things as they were. Slowly drawing his wand, he approached the door and let his magic leak through the wooden blockade. Nobody should be in there besides the nurse, and he was pretty damn certain he would’ve been caught by now if she were capable of sensing his magic. 

He could vaguely feel the nurse, but she was currently bustling around a room that was an offshoot from the hospital wing. The nurse’s room was warded to hell and back, and the runes were so strong that he had a hell of a time even feeling her presence through them. She probably had a ton of extraordinarily dangerous potions in there. He wasn’t surprised that it was so heavily protected.

Luckily for him, those protections didn’t extend to the actual hospital door because it would look pretty bad if a student needed urgent medical attention and couldn’t enter the hospital wing because the teachers blocked it off. Upon looking closer, though, Harry realized that he wasn’t quite on the money. There was something on the door, a piece of magic he hadn’t seen before and couldn’t properly identify.

It felt… exuberant… for lack of a better word. He stared at it for a second, wetting his lips as he tried to decipher what the feelings meant. It didn’t come across as dangerous, but that also didn’t mean he could just ignore it. Times like these were when he missed the stranger the most. It was really just lucky for him that the man had given him a crash course on spells and counterspells before disappearing, or he’d be completely useless. 

Deciding that there was too much ambiguity for him to make a solid deduction about the magic, he instead looked at it in a different way. It was the stranger who’d taught him to broaden his mind when it came to spells. There was more to magic than the effects it had. There were intentions behind them, goals and targets. If he couldn’t find out what it did, then he just had to find out what made it tick, exactly like the stranger was initially trying to do with their own door problem. The only difference was that Dumbledore wasn’t behind this magic.

He hoped.

When he looked at it a little deeper, trying to approach it from a different angle, he felt a little something extra to the excited nature of the spell. It was more than that, something approaching the realm of edginess, as though it could go off at the slightest movement, just waiting for something to… open it up. That had to be it. Opening it was the trigger, which made sense considering the nurse probably wanted to know if someone was entering the ward with an emergency of some sort. That meant all he had to do was get past it without opening the door.

Holding his breath, he transfigured the door into a wooden plank, somewhat smugly thinking about what Professor Quirrell would think about his "useless" transfigurations now, not that he wasn’t thankful for everything the man had given him so far. When nothing flew out to bust him after crossing the threshold, he canceled the transfiguration and watched the plank return to its existence as a warded door. 

Not quite able to help himself, he took a look at the rune carved into the back of it. He filed it away for later, determined to research it on his own time. Harry couldn’t stall forever, though, and forced his feet to shuffle toward the presence he could feel at the end of the room. It was faint, tired, like it was either completely wiped out or was about to be in the next few moments. Pulling back the curtains to her bed, he saw that she was getting damn close to dozing off when he scared the living shit out of her. 

“Harry!” she squeaked, shocked and frightened until the passing seconds turned her feelings into something resembling wariness. “What’re you doing here?”

He tried to meet her gaze, but he found himself incapable of even doing that, so he let his eyes drop to her legs. They were under the covers, but he suspected they were wrapped in bandages. He could still feel the sickeningly dark magic stuck underneath her skin. Harry wanted to believe that she was okay with a desperation he couldn't properly display with words, but he wasn’t able to trick himself into it. 

“Checking on you,” he softly admitted as he took a seat in the chair that might as well have been declared his property after so many weeks spent plastered to it. 

“Why?”

“You took a curse for me,” was his answer because, despite everything he wanted to say, that explanation was the simplest.

“Yeah, but you did just as much to get me here.”

“Your Dad told you about all of that, huh?”

“Oh, he made sure to tell me every single detail,” she said with a humorless chuckle. “Is your arm okay?”

“Eh.” He pulled up his sleeve to show her the arm that was still healing. It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it was before, but damn if those scabs didn’t look ghastly. “Pomfrey said that some of them will scar, but it was worth it.”

And it was the truth too. The most brutal of the gashes were going to leave their mark, but his body was filled with them. It was liberating, in a way, to have some on his skin for all to see. The scars from that stone were ones he’d chosen to take on, and they stood as proof of just how far he could go for something that mattered. They weren’t a source of pride, not when Daphne still paid so much on his behalf, but they weren’t shameful either, and that was a fucking win.

“How're your legs?”

Pulling the bed sheet to the side, she showed her bandaged lower limbs. They looked the same as they had the day before, but he would be lying if he said that there wasn’t a small, naive part of him hoping that they’d magically be better when she woke up. His eyes were frozen on them, and he didn’t look up despite the fact that she was definitely searching for his gaze. 

“They still hurt pretty bad,” she said when she couldn’t get him to look back at her. “The pain will apparently fade most of the way with time. Madam Pomfrey said she managed to filter out a lot of the magic by repeatedly vanishing and regrowing the bones, but the curse was too strong and she got to me far too late to save them completely… my chances of walking aren’t too good at this point.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You're the only reason I'm not dead-"

" Not!” he interrupted before going quiet, afraid, after everything, damn him, to say what he knew she deserved to hear. “Not for that.”

"... then for what?" She asked, a hint of softness finally coming back to her tone.

"I grew up in a place where trust was punished," he finally forced out, and he saw the way her eyes subtly widened. Trying to ignore how easily this could tear him down if it went wrong, he pushed forward. "I couldn't rely on others, so I learned to rely on myself, and I stopped caring how it affected people who hated me either way. When I came here, I continued that with you, and it wasn't fair. It’s not an excuse… I’m just telling you why..."

Daphne was a clever girl, and he was very much aware of just how many clues and bits of knowledge were building in her head. His vague mention of living with muggles, their argument after his quidditch game with the Hufflepuffs, and the way he got so invested in making them pay created a complicated image that was succinctly finished by his final admission here. The realization, he assumed, struck her speechless. 

A huff of unamused laughter left him at the look on her face. “And then you went and ruined your legs for me. Why would you do that?”

“I don’t know. I just moved.”

“Of course,” he scoffed. “I somehow made friends with the only selfless Slytherin in the castle.”

“Somehow? You practically latched onto me. I was too busy trying to save my reputation while you ran around acting however you pleased.”

“You're acting like you weren't the one who sat in my compartment.”

Their conversation died just a little when it became apparent to the both of them that they were joking around like they used to. Harry’s eyes fell to his lap as his hands absentmindedly clenched the smooth fabric of his robes. He’d said all he could. What happened next was up to Daphne.

The stranger would’ve been berating him right now.

Hell, he was berating himself. What he’d just put out on the table couldn’t be taken back, and Vernon’s words were echoing around his head. Was he going to be alone again after she knew? Was he ruining her right now just like he did with everything else? This kind of shit was exactly what used to kill him at Privet Drive, and he was voluntarily making the same mistake again like a fucking idio-

“Never again, Harry, and I really mean it,” was what she said, and his eyes snapped up to meet her violet ones. He wasn’t quite sure if he believed it, but he wasn’t about to interrupt. “You aren’t with them anymore, and if this happens again after I broke my legs for you, I'm done.”

“... Your legs were a bit more than broken.”

"Yeah, well, they felt a bit more than broken too."

Harry gave a small, soft smile, knowing that the joke was her way of letting things fade. Her expectations were laid out, and she apparently saw no more need to make things unpleasant. In Harry's opinion, she was far too forgiving, and the fact that he was the one benefiting from it only made it worse.

Nevertheless, he kept talking and accepted her undeserved kindness. Professor Quirrell had been his only support for so many weeks on end, and having his friend back was something he wasn't willing to give up just because he felt like he was taking advantage of her better nature. He was stronger now, better, and Professor Quirrell had shown him a path to become more than he used to be. He wouldn't fail her like that again, so he took solace in the knowledge that her almost sickening propensity for not kicking him to the curb wouldn't come back to bite her.

And if, in their mutual enjoyment of regaining a friend, neither of them noticed Harry's mentor silently canceling the alerting ward on the hospital wing door as he slipped into the hallway with an indiscernible look on his disillusioned face, then the blame didn't rest on them.

The consistent, messy scratching of Snape grading papers filled Harry’s room once again that night. He’d spent so much time with Daphne that it was actually closer to morning, but he knew that there couldn’t be too much left on the recording. His head felt fuzzy, and he was half asleep at this point, but he was determined to get through all of it soon, even if he didn’t get anything useful from it in the end.

Harry’s blinking eyes were staying closed longer every time he shut them, and he was struggling infinitely more to pry them back open too. His consciousness was barely present when a strong, ethereal, swishing noise violently broke him from his trance. Practically jumping into a sitting position, he looked wildly around his room for the noise’s origin only to realize that there was nothing to hear.

… Not even Snape’s quill.

His eyes widened as they fell to the rune on his bed, and his ears shifted into those of the zouwu to get a better read on the sound. Calling it a hum or a buzz seemed criminally insulting to whatever it was his ears were picking up. It was more like a gentle, wavering shimmer somehow converted into sound, and whatever it was brought Snape’s work to a standstill. Holding his breath, he waited for something to happen, and the words that came next might as well have arrived with the accompaniment of an explosion. 

“He’s making a pass at the stone, Severus! We must hurry!”

Like he was running from the devil himself, the man sent his chair clattering onto its back as he jumped to his feet and rushed for the door. The sound of Snape wrenching the handle shot around the room, and the man threw it open with truly shocking force. The door then slammed behind him, muffling the sound of his travel, and as his footsteps tapped down the hallway, getting quieter by the second, a gigantic, absolutely demonic grin stretched across the entirety of Harry’s face, his eyes burning with a ferocity that matched even the mightiest of dragons.

God damn, it felt good to get a win.