Summary: The power of the prophecy had deprived him of the chance to rest a single moment. The stress of the war and relationships clouds Harry's judgement, and one mistake leads him to an adventure even more complicated than his own life. HPDM, AU, challenge response, multiple eras, Harry goes to Azkaban, parents alive, temporary Female!Harry, abusive Dursleys, Severitus, Independant!Harry, MultiAnimagus!Harry, plus many more.
Set during OotP, not after.

a/n: For now, the rating is back down to T, but later the fic will be rated R (M on here) because of serious harm and the disturbing thoughts that come with the part about Dumbledore's illegitimate daughter. ;-) The requirements for the challenge are listed in the HP forums -- Topic Count-- Writing Challenges. There's around 37 clichés to fulfill in the challenge. This chapter covers blindness and, somewhat, substance abuse. Overall, this is a Harry/Draco piece. Also found on Fiction Alley under Naycit.

Symbiosis
By Naycit and Tilly

Challenge Response: The Challenge to End All Challenges
Challenge By: Eine Kleine Katze
Chapter 2 " The Nightly Visitor"

HPDM

DMHP

HPDM

The Minister called for a vote. "All those in favor?"

Nearly every hand of the assembly was up in the air. This was definitely not his lucky day. Harry's gaze traveled from the Minister in the center and over to Umbridge on the left.

"Against?"

There were two votes from people he didn't even know. Harry hung his head in defeat.

"Well, that's settled," drawled the Minister with a familiar sneer in his tone. "You, Harry James Potter, on this morning of the twelfth of August, are convicted of underage wizardry in the presence of a Muggle. As punishment for your actions... there will be no meals for a week."

Harry's head shot up. No meals? Surely the Minister for Magic didn't have the power to deny him food. Harry leaned forward in his chair, preparing to protest his sentence, when he caught sight of the Minister's face. It wasn't Fudge. It wasn't even a Ministry official.

Sitting upon the high seat in the center of the front row was none other than Draco Malfoy.

Silvery eyes reflected the fire of the torches in the courtroom, and for a moment, Harry could not look away.

Malfoy sneered at him. "You're dead, Potter."

Harry jumped up from his seat, but he didn't get very far before the chains were curling around his arms and legs. Harry struggled, but it was no use. He kicked and pulled and growled in fury, but none of it helped.

"You're dead, Potter," he taunted again. "Snap out of it, Potter."

Harry continued to fight his bonds. He couldn't let Malfoy win! He wouldn't let himself be beaten. He had to fight! The darkness was enveloping him. He couldn't breathe...

"Snap out of it, Potter!"

"Snap out of it, Potter!"

Harry felt his eyelids dart open, but he was still engulfed by his childish fear of the darkness around him. He still couldn't see an inch in front of his face, and he panicked. Somebody was breathing raggedly somewhere above him.

He was being held down by a strong pair of hands curled around his wrists, keeping him firmly pinned down with cold fingers.

"Who...?" Harry attempted to reduce the maddening speed of his own heartbeat while trying to speak out the words at the same time. He only managed to choke. Bringing his knees up to his stomach and turning to lie on his right side, he coughed roughly, searing his already sore throat.

The grip on his left wrist ebbed away, and he felt a person's weight press against his chest gently. Harry curled into himself more as his coughs turned into gasps for air. The burden on his chest started to rub his chest sinuously, trying to calm him down.

"Slow down," a voice whispered into his ear. "Take a breath and hold it," it instructed soothingly.

Harry pressed his eyelids together once more and took in a tiny amount of air. He closed his mouth to keep it in, his face creased in concentration. Something inside him protested and tried its utmost to make him take a breath. Harry held it off, though, until he heard the quiet voice again.

"Slowly... let it out..."

The air rushed out between his clenched teeth. The load on Harry's chest was still rubbing against him in soothing circles. He felt his upper body muscles unclench, and he leaned into the gentle pressure, even as he took in one long breath after the other and let each out slowly.

"That's it," came the low whisper.

Harry twisted his wrist, but the strong grip didn't budge. Finding the courage to speak again, Harry unevenly uttered, "W-who...?"

"A Healer," was the quick, yet still whispered reply. "You're very ill. I... I've just come to... er, check on you."

"Oh… W-where am I?"

"At St. Mungo's, Po— Mr. Potter."

Harry couldn't see a thing, but his ears were working perfectly fine. The voice belonged to a young male, and by the sounds— and feels— of it, he was lying on top of him. It unsettled him somehow, but he had greater worries at the moment than all those his distorted mind had come up with.

"Can you remove the bandages from my eyes?"

"Er…"

Harry personally thought that St. Mungo's didn't put much time into the training of bedside manner. The man he was speaking with – who was still lying on top of him – did not sound very encouraging about the state of his condition. A small shiver of fear ran down his spine at his lack of sight.

"What?" he demanded a little impatiently.

"Well… P— Mr. Potter."

There was the stuttering again. Perhaps his condition was so horrible that even a qualified Mungo's Healer was falling to pieces over him.

"What?" Harry's voice raised to a tone with equal amounts of anger and panic.

"We can't remove them yet," the man said in a somewhat steadier voice.

"What do you mean you can't remove them?" Harry's heart was hammering in his chest. It's bad... it's bad... "What happened to me?"

He'd managed to shout straight into the ear of the man, and he gave a startled twitch above him. From the slight bit of air blowing on his face, the man had also shaken his head, probably in an attempt to get Harry's ringing voice to disappear.

"You drank some kind of poison, Mr. Potter. We suspect it was the Draught of Living Dead with a higher amount of hellebore than necessary." The Healer spoke quickly, most likely afraid that Harry would continue shouting at him.

Harry, in the meantime, was trying to remember back to his Potions lessons. He could just hear Snape's sneering voice in his head telling him how incompetent he was. "A higher amount of what?"

"Hellebore. It is a plant that is usually medicinal, but it can be fatal in higher doses."

"F-fatal?"

"Yes, fatal," the Healer's voice confirmed. "Aconite and hellebore undergo a specific chemical process when mixed. They impair the senses. In higher doses, it has been known to kill the drinker after impairing the senses. Since you only drank a few drops, you have only had minor side affects. Mr. Potter... it is my duty to inform you that the potion you sampled has resulted in blindness—"

"BLIND?" he nearly screamed the word.

Harry tried to sit up while fighting another bout of coughing, but the stranger put his hands on his chest and kept him down.

"Calm down. It may not be permanent," the Healer told him in what, Harry guessed, was supposed to be a soothing tone.

"May?" Harry asked, not sure whether to feel relieved or not.

"It will, most likely, fade along with the Drought's other minor effects. You're awake now, so it should be just a matter of hours before you recover your sight."

Harry didn't want to ask, but he felt he had to for his own sake. "And if I don't recover?"

"The Healers— I mean, we expect you will. Unless the hag that gave it to you had added something else to the—"

"Hag?" Harry cut him off. He braced himself for what he was sure would be a long explanation of potion ingredients, which he would not understand as usual.

The man sighed in an impatient sort of way.

"This particular mixture is often used by hags to kill the children they eat. It seems inoffensive at first, since they usually manage to make it taste sweet."

"It didn't," Harry hurried to point out.

"I said usually," the Healer said quite calmly. Harry was fidgeting beneath him. Sensing his restlessness, the man finally got off him. Harry heard his feet hitting the floor as he got off the bed. "There… Feels better?"

Harry nodded nervously. If it wasn't for his complete ignorance of St. Mungo's Healers' demeanors, he might have protested. Muggle doctors usually left the soothing the patients to nurses.

Now that the man had moved away from him, Harry was more aware of his blindness as he hadn't been before. He could not tell where the man was standing and, therefore, couldn't be sure which way to turn his head.

It was strange to feel the firm bed below him and not being able to see it. It was as if everything was only half there.

His arms felt heavier, the sheets of the bed felt more slippery than he was used to, and every movement of his arms, hands, fingers, head, and toes… He was more conscious of everything... more than usual, and then... not. It was as if his mind couldn't decide whether it was satisfied with only being able to hear and speak, unable to see the objects he was touching.

Harry shook himself from this crazy new way of feel-not-see and asked the first question that came to his head.

"What's your name?"

The man's voice came from somewhere not too far in front of him and to the right side of his bed. The hesitance was back again, though. "Er… I'm the trainee Healer… Jason Usher…"

"Oh…"

The man cleared his throat as if just remembering himself. "Good night, Mr. Potter. I think you are quite well for the moment, so we'll just keep you under observation for the time being."

"Er… is it night already?" Harry wasn't exactly able to check for himself, and he was curious of how long he'd been here already, or why no one had come to see him besides a Healer.

"Yes."

"But I'm not tired."

"That can be fixed," the man replied curtly, as if asking for permission.

After a somewhat hesitant nod, Harry heard the swooshing of the man's wand being waved. Harry was asleep not ten seconds after that.

The stranger pocketed his wand after casting the Pax Dormiens Charm. He quickly muttered the incantation to Disillusion himself and left the room hastily, almost breaking into a full race.

Two St. Mungo's young trainee Healers had both fallen asleep despite the Head Healer's strict orders to patrol the ward from time to time. The stranger reached the corridor, and making sure nobody was around with a quick glance, he turned on the spot and Disapparated with the characteristic soft 'pop' of a skilled Apparition.

HPDM

DMHP

HPDM

"Mr. Potter… Mr. Potter!"

Harry opened his eyes, and then closed them again in dismay. His world was still dark.

"Mr. Potter, can you hear me?"

"H-healer Usher?"

"Usher? No, this is Healer Nightingale." The voice was a female this time.

"Where's Healer Usher?" Harry asked sleepily.

"There's no Healer Usher here," she said in a tone that suggested what she thought of Harry's mental state. "How are you feeling?"

"I can't see."

To add to Harry's irritation, the woman was clinical and straight-to-the-point. She reminded him of the bossy Hermione he had known before… "I didn't expect you would," her voice interrupted his thoughts. "The results of your blood analysis are not very optimistic. Apparently, you drank Hag Draught."

"Hag Draught?"

"The Hogwarts nurse told us you had drunk something. We preformed a meticulous analysis of your blood components with Scarpin's Revelaspell and found traces of asphodel and wormwood along with high levels of hellebore. This last is not used for the common Draught of Living Dead, which your school's nurse thought you had drunk given your symptoms. Hellebore is added to create the Hag Draught. It has that name because the hags use it in the potions they give to the children before taking them away."

"Yes, Healer Usher told me that," Harry said with even higher levels of irritation.

"Of course he did," she comforted his supposedly-insane self, and then attempted to reason with him. "But the results arrived just this morning… How could he know?"

Harry frowned, both angry and embarrassed, although the bandages in his face concealed a bit of his flushed face.

The Healer seemed to take his silence as a mutual agreement of his half-wittedness, and continued with her explanation. "This Hag Draught usually impairs their senses for a while. Hags like to kill their victims by roasting them in the oven while they're still alive."

Harry winced in sympathy for the imaginary victims.

"Very few hags have been caught at it in the past. On a different note…" The woman's voice turned curious. "The nurse at Hogwarts told us that you were found in the corridor outside of their hospital wing. Can you tell us where you got that Draught?"

"From an ugly, old lady in the Hog's Head," he replied. Right then he wasn't overly worried about others knowing what he'd been up to. He'd confess anything if it helped him to recover his sight faster.

"According to the register, the only known hag in that area is Babayaga, the hag that haunts Hogsmeade. You're the third one this year that she's lured into drinking her Draught. The Ministry's been really worked up because they just can't catch her," Healer Nightingale said.

"Er…" Harry wondered what page of the Prophet they dedicated to hag tales. He'd certainly never heard of an old children-eating, ugly hag hanging around the village before now.

"As a matter of interest, how much did she give you?"

"Er… a flask. Wasn't bigger than a perfume flask, actually." Just like the one he'd given Hermione for their two-month... Harry sighed in renewed heartache.

"What?" She evidently had a hard time swallowing this information, since she coughed uncomfortably for a few moments. "Good Cliodna! Please tell me you didn't drink it all!"

Slumping down a little on the bed, Harry replied, "No… I only got to drink one gulp."

Healer Nightingale let out a relieved breath with a comforting pat on his leg. "Mr. Potter, you were very lucky. If you had drunk it all, it would've probably killed you!"

"Yeah…"

How horrible, he groused to himself.

"How did you get to the hospital wing?" she prodded, seemingly unaware of Harry's gloomy thoughts.

He just shrugged in reply. What did he care how he got there? Unfortunately, this woman was not one to be ignored, and just prompted him again.

"Mr. Potter?"

"I… don't know…" He was tempted to yell, Magic, how else?, right where he thought her head to be on his right side.

"What do you mean you don't know?"

Don't snap, don't snap...

Harry settled for ignoring her last question while he privately racked his brain for an answer. He remembered rowing with Hermione and going to the Hog's Head. Then he'd met the ugly lady and took the flask with him.

But what then? Harry narrowed his sightless eyes in thought. Oh, that's right…

After the first gulp, he had heard somebody yell behind him and had dropped the flask to the ground. Then he'd passed out. But nothing else remained...

Much good that does me.

Curious though, he had the strange feeling that he had seen something silvery shine above him before he'd blacked out.

Probably the moon... he thought.

"Mr. Potter? Are you listening?" the persistent Healer Nightingale demanded.

He didn't respond.

HPDM

DMHP

HPDM

Notes: The next bit will be up sooner than this one was. Check my profile page some time after Wednesday for the posting date of the new chapter.
Never fear, there will be more than blindness in Harry's future, if you didn't want it to be "blind" that we picked... wink, wink. The next chapter Hermione and Ron come for a visit, there's some Ron-bashing (required, mind), and this silvery-eyed stranger's true motives and plea for help.
So... worth waiting for a new bit? Should Harry actually find out that it's Draco? Let us know, then! Review!