Chapter 2: Sectumsempra
The sight of Draco Malfoy crying in the women's bathroom like a little girl was deeply disturbing to Moaning Myrtle.
It was a further sign that things were rapidly turning to shit at Hogwarts.
Living in a bathroom and having a sympathetic ear, as well as a major set of knockers and a willingness to get a bit kinky, a girl got to see a lot.
Lately, a lot of it had gone from bad to worse. Gone were the innocent days of when Harry mixed Polyjuice Potion or asked for Triwizard tips. Also the less innocent days when he came up to tell her about his adventures with his legions of Potter groupies, and they managed the best they could with what he had and she didn't.
Maybe it was a little sleazy, but it was fun, and it didn't do anybody any harm.
Now Harry used her bathroom to shoot up, staggered into the stall next to hers to toss his cookies when he was piss drunk, and often nodded out or passed out by the sinks.
Why her bathroom?
As he explained, he didn't want to die alone.
Now, if that wasn't bad enough, there was Draco Malfoy pushing dope to just about everybody in the school, it seemed.
He had to do that in her bathroom as well.
And now, here he was, crying hysterically.
Myrtle tried to comfort him.
"Don't cry, Draco. It's…unsettling. Just quit if you don't like it."
"Of course I don't like it! Do you think I enjoy hanging around in washrooms and distributing illicit substances? I'm a Malfoy, for fuck's sake, the heir to a great and noble Wizarding dynasty. And I'm reduced to pushing dope and haunting the bog like some kind of sad bathhouse glory hole queen. Pansy and Greg think I'm cheating on them, which I would never do, and I'm dragging the family name through the mud, peddling weed to fifth years. But I have to do it, if I ever want to extricate my family and myself from Voldemort's quagmire. It's a filthy world, Myrtle."
So complained Draco Malfoy, the most secret of Spymaster's Snape's net work of illicit operatives.
"So why don't you just tell Professor Snape that you've been selling Harry the hard stuff on the side?" Moaning Myrtle asked.
Draco was about to reply when the bathroom door swung open and Harry entered.
Myrtle noted that Harry looked sort of rough.
She had always liked the rough-looking ones, that was what got her into this mess, sweet sixteen forever, but there was something in the expression on Harry's unshaven face and in his shifty green eyes that scared Myrtle.
Even though she was dead.
She took refuge in one of the stalls, peering over the door.
"Hello, Potter." Draco began.
"Save it. Here's your fucking money. Let's have the shit." Harry said, curtly.
He had a black eye, and a scab on his lip, and two fingers taped together on his left hand. There was blood on his shirt, puke on his shoes and he smelled like ball sweat and cheap firewhiskey.
Even Draco was horrified.
"Listen, Potter, I'm not your mother, or anything, and I honestly don't gave a fuck what kind of gutter drunken junkie degenerate you become, but if Snape finds out I'm selling you the hard stuff, he'll kill me. Can't you just buy a little weed and the odd tab of acid and let that and smokes and beer do it for you?" Draco asked.
Apropos of nothing, Harry, who was now the taller and the stronger of the two, grabbed Draco by the front of his robes as he viciously slammed young Malfoy against the wall so hard that Draco's teeth clapped together.
Myrtle gasped, but no one heard her.
"Now you listen to me, you snot-nosed fairycake li'tle poofter cunt! Snape won't kill you, Malfoy. He can fuck up your spotless record and make it harder for you to become Head Boy and send a Howler or two to your old man, but he won't kill you. Mind, if you fuck with me, I'll send your head home to you old man, and he'll do the howling.I'll kill you soo as look at you, and you're not the first! So fork over the shit before I decide to do some massive amounts of GBH of your person. Slowly." Harry snarled.
"Just a suggestion, Potter. Here. Take it. Kill yourself. As long as you keep paying until you drop dead, what do I care?" Malfoy replied.
Harry took the bag that Draco held out of him, and looked at it, suspiciously.
Draco was still up to his old tricks; he'd laid off cheating Harry for a few months after Ginny's warning, but the previous week Harry had received more baking soda than coke, and an odd texture to his supposedly extremely pure bag of smack led Harry to believe that Draco was trying to give him a hot shot, or at least rip him off.
"These aren't rocks, Malfoy. I told you I wanted the smack in rocks." Harry insisted.
"Look, Potter, you get what I get. I don't make this shit, meself. I couldn't get rocks. In a fortnight, I'll get you rocks. Look, if it bothers you so much, I'll give you some of your money back."
Harry put his finger into the baggie, and placed it on his tongue.
What was in the bag was worse than heroin adulterated with strychnine.
Much, much, worse.
Harry tossed the bag to the ground and advanced on Draco.
"Baking soda and sugar! You fucking little prick! I'll do you for that!" he roared.
Draco drew his wand, and got the first syllable of "Crucio" out of his mouth before Harry had his wand out as well.
"Sectumsempra!" he bellowed.
To Myrtle's great horror, a huge, deep gash opened up on Draco's chest in a welter of blood and fine bits of destroyed flesh.
Draco gasped, his voice making a gurgling sound in his throat and sunk to the ground, trying to hold the jagged wound together with his hands.
Harry looked at his wand in disbelief, then looked at Myrtle, and then at Draco, lying in a spreading pool of bright red and spurting arterial blood on the floor.
His dead glassy eyes suddenly lit up with a diabolical passion.
He grinned.
"That'll teach you to cheat me, you Slytherin fuck! Sectumsempra!"
Draco screamed, and more bits of him sprayed in a fine cloud through the air.
"MURDER! MURDER IN THE GIRL'S LOO! HELP!" Myrtle screamed, flying out of her refuge in terror.
***
Hermione was hard at work manning her own cauldron when she noticed that the one Snape was supposed to be working on was bubbling over with some unknown and misbegotten substance.
She hastened to clean up his mess.
"Get away from that, Granger, I know what I'm fucking doing. See to your own work!" Snape snapped.
"You can't mean to tell me you done that on purpose." Hermione snorted.
"Why don't you do something novel, Granger, and shut the fuck up!" Snape replied, dourly.
Hermione tossed the rag she's used to clean up the mess right at Snape's head, clocking him right in the face.
"Right! There'll be no more of that! Fuck you, I'm going home! Fire me if you want to, you won't soon find somebody to put up with your shit, you greasy, ill-tempered manky old git!" Hermione shot back.
She took off her lab robe and goggles and threw them on the floor.
The Potions Master realised he might have been slightly out of line.
"I'm not going to fire you. I don't mean to be such a cunt, Granger. I'm just…preoccupied. You should go. See if you can find Mr. Potter, it would be nice, if he was still in a vertical position."
"Harry isn't your responsibility, Snape."
The Potions Master dumped the contents of his cauldron down the drain, and began to pace the floor, chain-smoking.
"The fuck he's not! Who else looks after that sad little shit? Not Dumbledore. He's so busy trying to groom Potter to be the last of the fucking Jedi that he ignores the little fact that the dozy bugger's just a lad, and an unstable one, at that. Not his piece of shit family. That cow, Petunia Evans! I was never good enough for her and now her own nephew isn't either. She likes to pretend her father isn't in Wandsworth Prison on murder and racketeering but she goes to see Artie just the same, doesn't she? Certainly not the Wizarding World. They want Potter to save their cowardly skins, but they neither know nor care how to keep him alive and sober long enough to do it. That only leaves me, don't it? Severus Snape and two detentions a day, that's all that separates your mate Potter from the gutter at best and the morgue at worst. When I find out where he's still getting his shit, someone in this school is going to be punished so fucking severely they won't be able to so much as think of me name without pissing their robes and crying."
Hermione was tired, she had class early the next morning, and she wanted to go home and get some sleep.
She was also at a loss for quite what she should do. It was times like these when she questioned her decision to have thrown in her lot with a grown man in his thirties, let alone a complicated bloke like Severus Snape. She had always been mature for her age, and since she was, Hermione knew that as 16 year old student she couldn't put herself in the place of her 35 year old professor who had more responsibilities than any wizard should.
"Something is really wrong, isn't it, Severus?"
"Yes. You've fucked that potion up a treat. Try and be as you are as intelligent as you act like you are, just for a moment, can't you, Granger!" Snape snapped.
Hermione swore, levelled her wand at the cauldron she was using and blasted it and its contents into blackish dust.
"You're next." She threatened Snape.
He would have tried to disarm her, but she knew a few nasty hexes she could do wandlessly, so Snape resorted to grabbing Hermione's wrist and attempting to physically disarm her.
He could, of course, have punched her in his face and then half twisted her arm off to wrest the wand from her but that was not Snape's style.
Hermione could have kneed him in the balls, or kicked him in the shins and then did her hex, but, similarly, that was not Hermione's style, so they ended up insulting one another viciously as Snape bent Hermione over the lab table in his attempted to get the wand away from her and she sort of peevishly swatted at his hands.
"Why do we always end up in this position, Granger?" Snape asked.
He had suddenly forgotten all about the wand, and Hermione could have hexed him into next week, but her intentions had suddenly changed, as well.
"Probably because there's something about me being an insufferable know-it-all and you being a ugly, snarky, greasy git that turns us both on." Hermione replied.
Of course Snape had his pants around his ankles and Hermione's knickers were dangling off the end of her right foot, which was closer to Snape's shoulders than the laws of physics would seem to actually permit when Myrtle barged into the lab.
The immediate effect of Myrtle's catching Snape actually giving Granger the old pork sword momentarily froze all three of them in a bizarre tableau.
Then, Myrtle snapped out of it and began hysterically narrating to Snape what was going on in her bathroom.
"I'm coming with you." Hermione insisted, sliding off the table.
"No. You stay here, Granger. You don't want any part of this."
Snape grabbed a flask as he zipped up his pants and followed Myrtle back to her bathroom.
***
To Harry's credit, when Draco's throat opened up like it had been torn apart by a dull handsaw in a veritable gusher of violently spurting blood, and Harry could actually see his larynx vibrating as he wetly screamed, it snapped him out of his strung-out rage and he came out of his drug-addled fog to find that he had effectively torn Draco Malfoy into screaming bloody bits.
Harry resisted the urge to puke his guts out and knelt down beside Draco with a wad of paper towels, trying vainly to stop up his horrible wounds.
"Oh fuck! I…I…Jesus Christ…I…I'll take you to the Infirmary! You hold your chest shut and I'll hold your throat shut. Fuck me, look at all this blood! Don't die, Malfoy, for fuck's sake, don't die!"
Harry was about to pick Draco up when Snape swept into the room, wearing his lab robes over his Levis.
He looked at the two frightened young men, and the bloody mess, and an expression of anguish briefly flitted across his face.
"Professor Snape, I didn't mean to! Honest!" Harry cried.
"I'm sure you didn't. Get out of the way, Potter."
To Harry's surprise, Snape knew a counterspell, which he cast in a singsong Elvish, in words that Harry couldn't understand.
The wounds shut, and Snape applied some kind of potion on a cloth to the scars the wounds left, and Draco appeared to be good as new.
"Am I dead?" Draco asked his godfather, weakly.
"No. Here, drink both of these vials of blood replenishing potion. I want you to do me a favour, Draco. Change your clothes and take the rest of the week off. Go home and stay with your parents until Monday. Have your medi-wizard take a look at you, and do like you would if you had flu. I'll make sure that you don't have to push any more dope. Nothing like this will ever happen to you, again." Snape promised.
"What about Potter?"
"I will take care of Potter."
Harry missed most of this conversation, as he was busy puking his guts out in one of the stalls.
The coppery smell of Draco's blood was making him sick, and the unspeakable feeling of being covered in same, still warm, was horrifying.
Harry held onto the toilet like it was a life preserver.
He hadn't slept in three days and he'd been drunk for a week, incredibly drunk, to try and stave off the withdrawal symptoms that were creeping up on him as he stretched his meagre supply of dope out further and further.
Harry was fairly surprised that he had so much puke in him; all he'd eaten in the past four days was three donuts, some soup and six Hershey bars.
That was why the appearance of the green stuff that burned out his mouth didn't surprise him.
He finally got done puking, but his stomach began to hurt and so did his mouth and he was feeling pretty dizzy.
Dizzy like he was going to black out.
He started to fall forward, but then the Good Samaritan showed up again.
Someone at Hogwarts was always collecting Harry when he was passed out, or sick, or hurting, someone who always carried him to bed, undressed him, even washed him up if it was necessary. Harry was usually either semi-conscious or knocked out at the time, so he had no idea who his patient friend was, only the idea that when the Good Samaritan came, he was safe.
This time, though, Harry wasn't so far out of it.
"Come on, Potter. Up you get."
Harry couldn't believe it.
"You, Snape? You?"
"Potter, who the fuck else that isn't dead has ever given a shit about you but me?"
***
Dumbledore knew that the way he kept shaking his head was infuriating Snape, but he couldn't help it.
"With all due respect, Albus, I went to the fucking dogs when I was Potter's age because you couldn't see it, and now Potter's doing the same because you can't see it happening to him, either. I was in this office earlier this year telling you about this, and you gave me that youthful high spirits bullshit. Potter tried to kill Malfoy in the loo last night because Malfoy tried to sell him baking soda instead of heroin. He's got tracks on his arms, and on the backs of his knees, and his school trunk is full of empty bottles of St. George's Dragon and Hell's Horntail. This has gone far beyond fucking high spirits. When I had him in close to permanent detention, he had his shit together. If you don't let me keep that boy in fucking lockdown every moment that he is not in class, he will die a horrible, degrading, painful death. And he may take a few punters with him." Snape finished.
"Severus, how did this happen?" Dumbledore asked.
"Quickly."
"Do what you have to." The Headmaster replied.
***
Harry knew that the jig was up; he had known it all night, and he was strangely not afraid when Snape came back from Dumbledore's office carrying a paper cup with a grim look on his face.
"Drink this, Potter."
"What is it?"
"Methadone."
Harry gulped the contents of the glass.
"How long do I get this for?" he asked.
"Until you're well enough to get clean. It's the end of the rainbow for you, Potter. And this time, there will be no mistakes. You and I are going to be room-mates. When you are not in class, or at meals, you're going to be on this couch. There will be no drugs, not even pot, and there will be no drinking. I don't care if you smoke as long as you don't smoke mine, the house-elves will provide you with coffee, and I'm not adverse to Miss Weasley visiting you. But you are going to study, and you are going to work, with Miss Granger and I, as our lab assistant."
"Because the Wizarding World needs me alive?" Harry sneered.
"No. Because your mother was my best friend in the world. She died protecting you; the least I can do is make sure she didn't do it for nothing, you spoilt little shit. And don't get mouthy with me. When we're not in class, I'm a man and you're a man, and if you get stroppy with me, I'll belt you. And you're not tougher than I am, Potter." Snape sneered back.
Harry almost smiled. One thing about the wicked old screw, Snape was a fucking vicious thug Scouser bastard and he never made any bones about it.
Maybe when he was feeling better he'd try the Slytherin bastard out, see who was tougher.
And it was only a year or so of sobriety, soon he and Voldemort would both be dead.
And Snape did have a telly, and Harry didn't have a choice.
"Can I have some more of that stuff?" Harry asked.
"No."
"Fuck."
"That'll take your mind off it, Potter. So will the telly. You'll be going back to classes tomorrow."
