cautiously into the dark, a harry potter fanfic

Warnings: character death (it's a wartime fic), implied OCD, child abuse, spousal abuse, torture, slash... nothing explicit. If you think i should add more warnings let me know.

This fic is about Seamus, and how he grows through the years, and how he copes with changes in his life. I tried to make the narration a little more mature as it progressed, because he grows older. Let me know what you think of it, if I succeeded.

ETA: This won the February 2016 fan-fave one-shot awards! Thanks to all :) Your reviews give me life.

but often it happens you know
that the things you don't trust are the ones you need most
so it's cautiously into the dark
but you see before long that your eyes will adjust

- psalm by hey rosetta!

Seamus is seven years old and he doesn't want to take a bath, Mam, so he counts off the little cat figurines lining the bookshelf in the living room as they catch fire – one, two, three, oh that one burned a little bluer than the others so that makes four, five, six. It's just a tantrum, really, and his mother knows it, but his father still hates magic after all these years, so she spells away the damage before he sees, and lets him get to bed without a wash. The cat, the real one named Murphy, has a fluffy orange tail that flits between Seamus' legs when his father notices anyway, the next day.

Seamus' greasy, unwashed hair falls between his eyes when his father bends him over on his knee and spanks him: one, two, three, oh that one burned a little redder than the others so that makes four, five, six...

Seamus is eleven and ecstatic when he receives his letter.

After he reads it through and hands it to his mother (Da is asleep on the couch again), he counts off the empty beer bottles in the sink. One, two, seven, is that ten? It's hard to tell, as some are broken, with brown-amber shards glinting in the early morning sun like the stained glass did at mass yesterday.

His mother has two twinkling, laughing eyes as she reads it, four freckles on her right cheek, and one purple bruise on her arm.

Eleven again, and there are four other people in the train compartment with him, each with one trunk. Their names are deanthomas lavenderbrown susanbones terryboot, and he is seamusfinnigan and now he has four new friends, eight in total, well really nine if you include his cousin Fergus, but Seamus isn't sure if he does because Fergus is sixteen and has a girlfriend and is his cousin, not his friend. He tells them all about Ireland and about fishing and about how sometimes, he lights things on fire, not on purpose or anything, but it happens, so be careful.

Dean Thomas (is that all one name? or a first name and then a last name?) says "Wow, you talk fast, Seamus," and it's a nice feeling when someone uses your name for the first time, isn't it?

He decides then that Dean Thomas will be his best friend, even if later in Gryffindor Tower, there are five beds for five boys (that brings his total to twelve, well, thirteen if you count Fergus). Ron says he has five brothers and one sister, and that they can all meet some of his brothers later. Dean has two sisters, Seamus remembers, with another on the way, and ten fingers covered in ink, because Dean draws things, pretty things, in thick sketchbooks and on napkins and on anything he can find, really.

There are four windows with ten panes and two red curtains each, one stove in the middle of the room, forty-two steps to get to their dorm, and Seamus and his new friends spend five hours talking and laughing after the feast.

Seamus is twelve now, and knows three dirty jokes that make Dean and the others laugh. He doesn't really understand them, and he suspects neither do they, but he likes making them laugh. Neville's gran gave him seven chocolate frogs and three liquorice wands in his Christmas stocking, which they share in January over exaggerated stories and whispered swear words Fred and George taught them. Dean has one sketchbook in his lap and thirteen charcoal pencils next to him (Dean says they're all different thicknesses) and they take turns making funny poses for him to draw. They hang them up on the wall by Ron's bed. Five.

Harry has one scar which Seamus suspects gives him more grief than all his eight combined (nine after Christmas), and now Harry knows two languages too, which is cool because between the five of them they know four (English, Parseltongue, Irish and Senegalese French from Dean), which Seamus reckons is an alright average.

It was difficult, over Christmas, to keep counting his mam's bruises, because sometimes there were four and then they melded together to become three, and anyway, Seamus thinks there might be more she's hiding in places he can't see. It's getting hard to keep track of friends too, because there are so many now, but that's not so bad, not at all.

Thirteen brings relief from some things (Seamus and his mam's new flat is tiny, something like five hundred square feet, with four rooms including a bathroom and two windows), but it also brings fear and paranoia. That's not new, not really, not when you have Harry Potter as a dormmate and a father like Seamus', but now that he's older, it feels more real.

Dean's voice is the first to change, and the first to tell them what wanking really feels like, which is good because Fred and George were never reliable sources anyway.

Seamus has counted nearly everything in their room at least one hundred times over, so he decides to count the portraits in the common room (eight), then on the seventh floor (thirty-seven), then on all the other floors. After that, he'll probably move on to the suits of armour, then the staircases, then maybe the freckles on his body, which he inherited from his mam. It's too bad, really, that Dean doesn't have any freckles, because Seamus would like to count them too.

Fourteen, and the clover-green of Quidditch robes is breathtaking against the starry night sky, so much so that, when Ireland wins, Seamus stops breathing for a delicious split second before bursting out into cheers and hollers and okay, maybe a few tears, but don't tell Ron. Dean hugs him once, twice, and Seamus' mam kisses them both, on the top of his head and on Dean's cheek (because he has gotten so tall now, Seamus wonders how many inches of height Dean's gained over the summer). Dean laughs and Seamus wipes away a joyful Irish tear, and Dean kisses him too, a celebratory kiss, on the lips, before turning to his mam to do the same. Four kisses, one hundred and seventy points against one hundred and sixty, two pocketfuls of fool's gold and God, one unforgettable day.

Night, though, brings riots and Death Eaters (Seamus doesn't know how many, it's impossible to count and they all look to same so he would lose track anyway and fuck, one dark mark floating in the sky, terrifying and cold), and the stark realization that Dean has three sisters now, two and a half parents, and that that half could be either Muggle or Wizard; one possibility is infinitely more dangerous than the other.

Three more kisses when they get home safely. Same as before: forehead and cheek from Mam, then lips. Seamus, Dean, SeamusandDean.

(That last one happens after, in Seamus' little room with space for one bed and two boys, and "Don't tell Ron about that either, okay? Actually, don't tell anyone. Not a single word.")

Fourteen still, fifteen in three months, and there's been six refills of Firewhisky in his cup in the past two hours, thanks to Fred and George and Lee. It goes down his throat like getting drunk feels, Seamus learns later, which is to say great at first, but then really quite bad. The Christmas gifts he opened this morning sit at the foot of his bed (three: a new bag for his books which Seamus suspects cost more than his mother can afford, a scratchy but warm jumper from his grandparents and a book on Quidditch, with Love, Dean written on the inside cover), and he looks down in the midnight blue robes he borrowed from Fergus seventeen days ago. The room spins as Dean grins at him, holding him steady, tall and powerful-looking in his brick-red boubou trimmed with ochre, which was chosen from an African catalogue by Lavender especially to compliment Susan Bones' soft yellow gown.

And speaking of, there they are: one, two, three, four, five with Ginny and the twins, coming up the forty-two stairs, all bright bubbling laughter and flashes of colour: pink lips, orange hair, sky-blue chiffon, and red cheeks (makeup on the girls, alcohol on Seamus, nervousness on Neville). The smell of flowers mingle with the whisky, and it is perfect.

"Seamus, you are drunk!" One kiss on her cheek, like his Mam told him to do, and she laughs. Neville and Dean hurry to copy him with their own dates, so that makes three kisses and more chiming peals of giggles, the likes of which Seamus has never heard in this room. He loves the sound, so he plants his lips on Neville's blush (four), then slings his arm around Dean's waist. Dean understands, of course, tilting his face out and leaning down so Seamus can tiptoe up to press number five onto his skin.

They stumble out, laughter and whisky thickening the air, and Seamus is so drunk he forgets to count his steps on the way down.

Seamus is fifteen years old, and things are falling down around him. Or he's pushing them down. Pulling them, maybe. He's not sure, and that's mostly fine, to be uncertain like that, because there are some things that he can be certain of. Four windows, ten panes each. One stove. Five beds. Five boys, most nights. Forty-two steps.

The stack of sketchbooks sitting next to Dean's bed has reached twenty seven (five new this year and it's only November). The night he counts them, when it is cold and blustery outside and the fire from the stove heats the room, he is sitting on Dean's bed, and shows Dean his scars for the first time. One round blemish, the size and shape of a cigarette burn, on his left palm. A pinkish dent on his chin, like he'd fallen on something hard, the corner of a table maybe. Four short, jagged lines on his right calf, with thirteen little raised white speckles dusted between them, reminiscent of glass maybe, like an amber bottle being thrown and broken. There's more like those on his back, and he asks Dean to count them for him, as he's never been able to. Nine, and then two spots that could be freckles or scars, depending on the light.

"Why do you always count everything, Shay?" Dean's ink-blackened hands are longer, more beautiful than any he's ever seen before (he's never kept track really, but even if he had counted, they'd still be at the top of the list), and there is nothing unknowing in the way they trace the nine-maybe-eleven marks on his shoulderblade.

"Same reason you always draw everything."

He tries to count the deep brown lines in Dean's pale palm, but when he falls asleep before he can finish, the numbers slip away. Dean's hand doesn't.

At sixteen, there is one Ginny with one Dean, one GinnyandDean where there used to be a SeamusandDean.

So Seamus finds six boys and four girls, and he kisses them one hundred and seventy two times in all, in five different classrooms and three broom cupboards and even one greenhouse. He touches four breasts, and sucks one cock. For once, he has bruises he's proud of (or at least, not completely ashamed of), and they paint his collarbone like beautiful purple-yellow necklaces all throughout the year. Dean says nothing about it and Ron says plenty. Neville says too much. The paintings he counts always have something to say too, and so do the students who mutter behind him in corridors and classes. And Harry, well, Harry's silences speak one hundred volumes, and Seamus hears them all and more when he meets green eyes over breakfast on Sundays or across the dorm when Dean returns late at night, chest heaving, smile lingering, shirt askew.

Five boys, four windows, five red curtains drawn tightly around five old beds.

They are seventeen, just seventeen. Seventeen years is not enough time to learn how to live on your own, and certainly not enough to know how to survive, spending countless days alone in the woods or on cliffsides or God knows where, in God knows what kind of conditions.

Dean leaves his home in London on August thirty-first. He Apparates nine times to finally reach Seamus' little room, which has space for one bed and two boys, if Dean lays diagonally and lets his feet hang off the edge, and if Seamus curls his body just so. There is one window with four panes and the moon shines onto their faces (seventeen is too old to be afraid of the dark, isn't it?) as they whisper about everything and nothing, as long as it's absolutely not the thing they need to be talking about.

In the morning they wake at the same moment and the clock ticks three minutes and twenty-two seconds before either says anything.

Seamus, of course, is the first to speak, even if he would need much more than three minutes twenty-two seconds to find the right words.

"Take me with you." Four words.

Silence. A thousand words.

"You can't leave," he says. "What about your family? What about school? What about me?"

Dean can't leave. Seamus hasn't even finished counting the lines in his palms and around his brown-black eyes yet. There are five beds, and there are supposed to be five boys.

"Seamus… You know it's too dangerous for you to come with me."

Seamus remembers when Dean's voice first dropped, before all the others of their age, and Jesus, he was amazed then, and he is still amazed today. He could listen to it forever.

"I could help you Dean, you know I'm better than you at healing spells, and I can fish, you're from the city, you don't know how, and I–"

After Dean leaves, and Seamus regains his ability to think, he'll debate whether the kiss should count as their third, or their first, or their second. He thinks of arguments for each: third, because physically, it is the third time their lips touch; first, because it is the first time Seamus is certain it won't be the last one; second, because it is the second one that was… meaningful, or something.

But that is all after Dean leaves, after he hitches his old worn brown rucksack on his back and twists away with a pop while Seamus is in the bathroom, leaving a teetering stack of filled sketchbooks where his head lay the previous night. Before Dean leaves, before the leaving, they are kissing. Their lips slide together, almost instinctively knowing what to do, and their chests touch, white freckles against black silk, and there is no counting here, no need to control anything.

"Does that mean you want me to come with you?" Seamus foolishly says, but Dean only answers with another kiss (number four, or two, or three), which means no, of course, but Christ, it almost makes up for it.

Seamus read once that a person can live thirteen days without food and three without water. There have never been any studies done on how long a man can live without Dean Thomas, but Seamus reckons it's about five days.

After that, he begins to crack.

Five beds. Two boys. Most nights, two or three or four others, too. Not for sex or anything like that, but for comfort, healing spells and company. Luna and Ginny in Harry's bed more often than not. Lavender with Seamus (in Dean's, which doesn't smell like him anymore but God, Seamus can pretend), Hannah or Parvati or Fay or Susan, even Anthony and Ernie sometimes, Padma, younger Gryffindors whom Seamus barely knows. Somehow, their dormitory becomes a refuge, a place removed from the rest of the castle, and Seamus doesn't know whether to blame or thank Neville, whose kindness probably caused it all.

Thirty-seven eerily silent portraits on the seventh floor. Twelve steps on the moving staircase between the third and fourth floor. Eight classrooms on the sixth floor, with twenty-nine desks in two and thirty-five in the rest. Three detentions a week, if he's lucky (because sometimes, there are more).

D.A. meetings every other night. Twenty-five hopeful faces at first, but that number grows as the scars on Seamus' back and chest do. One leader: Neville Longbottom. Three deputies: Ginny Weasley, Luna Lovegood, Seamus Finnigan. Two spies: Blaise Zabini and Astoria Greengrass. Lavender teaches charms, Ginny hexes, Padma and Luna run mandatory study nights with the younger students. Michael Corner tends to schedules and watch rotations. Parvati trains with Madam Pomfrey Saturday nights and Neville tends to a garden full of healing herbs, the location of which he won't divulge. Seamus is Communications Liaison, as Luna calls it, and he stays in contact with the spies and the few professors who are brave enough to help.

He has never liked chaos, has always preferred order and numbers, but fear and paranoia have become part of a routine, which is, at least, somehow better than nothing at all.

By March, he is eighteen, and he has cast the Cruciatus curse fourteen times. He has said he's sorry three hundred and seventy three times, and has cried seven nights this week.

Between desperate apologies, he is angry. He is angry at himself, at the Carrows, at You-Know-Who, at Snape, at fucking God, who was supposed to look out for him, if Seamus' grandmother is to be believed. He rages at them all but at Ginny mostly, because he knows she can take it, and because he doesn't know who else would.

"Don't you fucking miss him? Why aren't you angrier?" he screams at her once, because on bad days he feels like a goddamn masochist, picking fights to feel something more than despair, and on good days… Well, there are none.

"They'll both come home, Seamus. Dean will be fine. We'll all be fine." Except the whip marks on his back say otherwise, and the little Hufflepuff girl who wasn't allowed to eat at dinner would say otherwise, and Luna would say otherwise too, but she can't because she's not here anymore and no one knows where she's gone.

The heat from the stove is stifling, and the cut on his lip stings when the salty tears hit it. God, he can't breathe. These days it's so damn hard to breathe. The only things worth counting anymore are the sketchbooks (thirty-eight) and the drawings (four hundred and fifty-five, two hundred and nine of which are of Seamus).

There is one letter, not from the person that matters, but from their mother, who must have borrowed an owl from someone, somehow. The letter is sitting on the bedside table of Dean's bed, and Seamus knows the contents of it so well he might as well throw it in the crackling fire. Still, he sits and reads it again, and Ginny says nothing as the tears hit the paper and the ink runs. Dear Seamus, if you hear from him please tell him we miss him and love him, it begins. Seamus remembers that there once was a GinnyandDean, but not before there was a SeamusandDean, and before that there was just a Dean whose mother and stepfather loved and who had three sisters, and a grandmother and a dog too.

"I'm sorry," he says, which is number three hundred and seventy four. It isn't enough.

Once, he hears Dean's name on Lee's radio programme. They normally all listen together in the dorm, it's become a comforting part of the routine, but tonight Seamus is holed away in Dean's bed, curtains closed tightly around him, books and half-empty bottles of whisky spread out over the musty covers. He can't bear to look at their hopeful listening faces anymore, and Colin had taken out his camera, which usually means having to smile, and Neville is holding Hannah's hand. The radio is perched on the stove in the middle of the room, and there are maybe a dozen Gryffindors crammed around it, whispering softly, but Seamus isn't with them.

Until he hears it: Muggle-born Dean Thomas... Seamus leaps out to startled cries, and lunges to grab the radio, a book falling to the floor behind him. Christ: …may have escaped.

He clutches the apparatus to his chest, his heart beating as if he's just ran from the Carrows, only somewhat aware of the others staring at him. Never has he put so much trust in a single word before: may. May have escaped. It means two things: first, that Dean is (probably) alive. Secondly, and almost more importantly, that Dean is real – Seamus had almost convinced himself that it was all an illusion, a product of his desperate imagination.

It's the most beautiful word he's ever heard.

Then Ginny is gone too, so that leaves Neville and Seamus to care for all these frightened child soldiers (which is what they are, every single one of them, and they are fooling themselves if they think that heirloom watches on their wrist and eighteenth birthdays are true markers of adulthood).

Seven was too young for bruises the shape of handprints.

Eleven was too young for broken bottles in the kitchen sink.

Twelve was too young to be counting wounds like tiny battles on your mother's hands.

Thirteen was too young for anything, really.

Fourteen was too young to feel lucky to be alive.

Fifteen may be old enough for some things, like hand-holding and daydreaming about more, but it was too young to feel anything but lucky to be alive.

Sixteen was too young for bruises the shape of lipprints cultivated like trophies.

Seventeen was too young to become a victim in a hidden war, and it's sure as hell too young to be fighting in one.

He thinks, one night as Death Eater fists are falling down upon him like acid rain, that he is nearing his end. He was born here, six years, six months and twenty-seven days ago, and soon he is going to die here.

And eighteen, well, eighteen is too young to die.

Seamus is the last to leave Gryffindor Tower after all the others have gone into the safe room, where they rest in hammocks softened by charms and warmed by constant adrenaline. He doesn't want to leave his room, where the fire in the stove flickers comfort and heat like a womb. These beds were made for boys to sleep in. What is the use of a bed if it is empty?

But he has to go; he's heard from Blaise that the Death Eaters will be searching Gryffindor and Ravenclaw Towers and Hufflepuff Basement tonight for straggling rebels, and his cut-open body cannot afford more torture.

Five beds. One stove, now empty. Four windows, ten panes each. No more boys.

Dean is alive.

It doesn't matter how old you are when you are running through crumbling corridors, curses tumbling from your lips and green flashes shooting from your wand at faceless enemies. It doesn't matter how old you are when you are deciding between helping your friend escape the blood-hungry clutches of a werewolves or another from falling off a burning bridge. It doesn't matter how old you are when you see a boy, whose camera captured photos of you countless times, lying on a staircase with a vermillion gash in his head and eyes that will never see a photograph again, and you must choose whether to pull his body away and grieve or fight and kill.

It doesn't matter, because no matter how old you are, your choices will haunt you every single day of the rest of your goddamn life.

Dean is alive, and so is Seamus. But there are so many who aren't, and as much as Seamus wants to stop himself from counting them, he does it anyway, compulsively: twenty-five at first, then thirty-eight by nightfall (which doesn't even include the Death Eaters and Snatchers, of which there are over a dozen). By week's end, the number will be even higher - too high. And their names, too, flit through his mind like fire: Colin. Professor Lupin. Nymphadora Tonks, who Dean mourns like a sister. Fred, who the whole castle mourns like a brother. Lisa Turpin, the quiet Ravenclaw who was the first of the new recruits to produce a corporeal Patronus, a beautiful, graceful owl with a meter-long wingspan. Susan Bones, whose whole family was already dead at the hands of Death Eaters, now joined them, and who was one of Seamus' first friends at Hogwarts. And then, Lavender. Lavender. Lavender.

Dawn is twinkling on the horizon by the time Seamus' adrenaline runs out and exhaustion hits him like a freight train. Dean had gone off with Luna to brew potions for healing earlier, and now Seamus doesn't know where else to go but Gryffindor Tower. Hermione had told him that McGonagall had lifted the Anti-Apparition charms to allow help to arrive faster, and Seamus is incredibly grateful for it. The seventh floor has never seemed so far away.

He arrives with a pop outside the door, and when he lifts his left hand to turn the old knob, he notices for the first time that he is missing a finger, his pinky. It seems to have been healed by someone, as there is raised pink skin covering where he assumes the hole would be, but he doesn't remember when or by whom. In any case, it doesn't hurt, so he files it away for later, adds it to the growing pile of questions he does not want to ask.

The room, miraculously, is untouched by spellfire and curses. It looks as he left it two weeks earlier – there are Neville and Hannah, and there is Luna and Parvati and Padma and Dennis and Michael, and even Harry with Ginny, and Ron and Hermione in the next bed over. And there is Dean, curled up in Seamus' old bed, which hasn't been slept in in a year.

No one is sleeping, yet all are silent. Five beds with five men.

Seamus walks to the four-poster, Neville clasping his hand quickly as he passes by. Seamus sheds as much ash- and blood-stained clothes as he can before crawling in. Dean's eyes are wide and bloodshot, but whether it's from lack of sleep, from smoke, or from crying, Seamus can't know. Probably all three.

"Whose wand is that?" he asks, because Dean is holding one tightly to his chest. Seamus reckons every single person in the room won't let go of their wand tonight.

"Mulciber's, I think. Or Rowle. I don't know." He looks at it with disgust. Seamus guesses it to be around nine inches and thick, very different from Dean's graceful twelve-and-a-half inch red oak.

"We'll get you a new one as soon as we can. We could probably even get the Ministry to pay for it," Seamus says. Christ, Dean is right there. Alive. So close, he can touch him.

He does touch him, right on the chest, and his skin is hot and sooty.

"Seamus?"

"Yes, Dean?" He lies back, wincing. The whip marks on his back have reopened it seems, and are probably oozing pus.

"Sleep."

Seamus smiles. A strange thing, a smile. Luna is watching them from Dean's bed with a knowing one on her face as she slowly rubs circles on Parvati's back while Padma runs her fingers through her sister's hair. (Lavender, Lavender, Lavender.)

"You too. Come here."

Seamus knows it's not over. There's barely anything left to count anymore, and there's Death Eaters to round up and walls to mend and scars to heal and bodies to bury. But there's some hope left, and work to be done – Kingsley had approached him between clean-up shifts to ask him to work as spymaster for the Ministry, which had taken him by such surprise that he couldn't say anything but yes – and eighteen is too young to want to die.

"Don't tell Ron," Dean says, and if Seamus didn't know better, he'd say there was a twinkle in Dean's deep black eyes.

"I think he knows," Seamus says. They hear a snort from somewhere near.

Day one.

and the air goes into your lungs
and around in your heart and on through your blood
it goes cautiously into the dark
and you see before long that we all have a part