Part VII – Fire and Broken Stones

For a moment, Harry could believe that there was absolutely nothing underhanded or selfish about repeating a charm invented by Fred and George, because it achieved his goal. It was intent to make it through the corridors, unfettered and not followed, and up to the Hospital Wing that let him overlook the Slytherin tactic of casting a Cherry Bombard Charm. It was vivid memories of ice and falling that let him slip off without grief, leaving the unfortunate Gryffindor who had nearly spotted him drenched in bright red cherry gunk, which was unbearably spicy if tasted. He turned and dashed up the winding stairwell that would lead to the Hospital Wing, brushing a speck of sticky red goop out of his hair as he went.

Harry ducked behind a column as Madam Pomfrey scuttled down the stairs a few moments later, responding to the cries for water and relief from the students below. He glanced down after her shrinking figure for a moment, then steeled himself and quickly put the rest of the stairs behind him.

The door was left open, allowing Harry to see the rows of empty and pristine beds. The only exception to those snowy white sheets and perfectly centered pillows was the furthest bed to the left. Sunlight poured in almost singularly on that bed, creating a golden circle on the stone floor below it, so hot and concentrated Harry could see trails of heated steam rising up from the edges. The figure in the bed did not move, or acknowledge his presence at the door. Harry couldn't help but pull his mouth backward in a frown, but he looked over his shoulder once more before crossing the room.

The next thing Harry noticed was the smell. Something like paper burning—no, it was the smell of burning fabric. With a small gulp of apprehension, Harry drew closer still. He saw within seconds the white sheets laid over Draco Malfoy catch flame, orange and red and hungry, and eat away at the bed. He let out a noise of surprise and jumped forward to put it out. Without thinking, he slapped his hand against the flames, hoping to thump them out of existence before they ate away at the Slytherin's flesh.

Unfortunately, it was in vain. His skin screamed and he pulled sharply away. He'd burnt his fingertips, and carefully nursed them in his mouth as he looked down. The flames crept closer, on all edges of the bed, superheated by the charmed window overlooking it. His heart swelled up until it was blocking his throat and he fumbled for his wand in his robes.

"Shit, shit, shit," Harry muttered, flustered by the smell of burning fabric, hindered by his burnt fingers.

And, as suddenly as the flames had burst into life, they sputtered out, leaving a black, eaten edge on the blankets but not a scratch on the patient at all. A pulse of white-green magic rippled out from the center, smelling distinctly like Madam Pomfrey's magic and splitting into thousands of white needles that knitted the sheets back to perfection. Harry watched, surprised, fingers stuck in his mouth as they stung and burned.

And it was finally now that Harry realized that Draco was still soundly unconscious. He was lying motionless in the bed. Not a wrinkle was out of place, not one body part misplaced or splayed out in the throws of sleep. He was as Madam Pomfrey had arranged him when she'd whisked him into bed, frozen into place. Harry felt guilty, looking down on that whitened face, lined like a canvas with the soft blue lines of his veins, half-frozen and struggling to keep free the deadly ice spreading through his body.

His hair had been gently patted back into place, no doubt while Madam Pomfrey had sat and administered to him the needed potions to keep the poison from spreading. His shoulder was wrapped tightly with bandages, though Harry could see the vestiges of snowy crystals trying to reestablish themselves on his moon-white skin.

He wrinkled his nose and reached down to brush them away, though internally he doubted such as simple gesture could help in the least. The sun concentrated on the bed was near blistering hot, but his skin cold, but not frozen anymore. It gave way timidly beneath his skin, like thawing meat, and the ice crumbled between his stinging fingers. He frowned at the ice as it flaked and disappeared in his hand, then looked back down at the statue that had once been a sneering, moving, skulking Draco Malfoy. Nothing lessened—not the growing, whining guilt nor the petulant voice that raged over the Slytherin's condition—but he found it easier to stand if he at least confirmed to himself a heartbeat.

Harry gently lifted Draco's arm by the wrist. He was careful not to snap any veins that may have turned fragile in their icy grip, and gently pressed just below his thumb. He listened with his eyes glued on the white face, the thawed eyelashes, the peaceful, un-sneering mouth. And finally, it thumped. And a little wait later, another sounded. It was no where near what it should be, but it was, and that was enough for now. He smiled weakly at the motionless body, noticing the faint dip of his chest and the delicate steam of his breath rising from his nose.

He was in good hands, anyway. There was nothing to worry about in the way of Madam Pomfrey's medical skills. She had nursed Harry back from some ridiculous and grievous wounds alike.

So stop worrying and—

"Get back to the dungeons immediately, Mr. Potter."

Harry lowered his head and swore with enough weight to turn a first-year sallow.

Snape did not hesitate to allow Harry to turn around and face him properly to begin the angry castigation, and the Gryffindor sighed and let go of Draco's arm. Before his least favorite Professor could reach him on the other side of the room, he poked the inert wizard in the side.

"You'd better wake up soon. The game is in a few days," he whispered, then turned to face his punishment, whatever it might be that Snape's dark stare might inflict, whatever length of time he had spend scratching out inane essays in the dingy Potions room. It couldn't be that bad, anyway.

Snape halted before him and his robes drifted around him from his momentum, as if snap at Harry themselves, adopting their owner's fury. But suddenly, not even his height or his snarled expression struck fear into Harry anymore. Snape looked flustered, almost. Worried? About his Slytherin student, he must be. Hell, he was too, and he and Draco had signed a wordless contract to hate each other years ago.

Snape narrowed his eyes sharply at him. "Next time," he drawled, "I would ask you to actually go to the bathrooms to relieve yourself, Potter." He only gave Harry one more moment's bother before levitating the fiery bezoar stones over to Malfoy's bed and turning his back on him. "Three more weeks of detention for blatant disobedience to be administered under myself," he grunted. "Now return to the dungeons, Mr. Potter."

"Wait, what are those for?"

Snape turned a hawkish look on him. "It's time to leave, Mr. Potter."

Harry stole one last glance at the broken crescent in the bed, before he reciprocated the sour look and stalked back toward the low, dark classrooms of Hogwarts where he would be spending a great deal of time in the near future.


Harry told Ron and Hermione the truth when he was finally released back into the outer world and no longer subjected to the cold, clammy air and slick walls of the dungeons late at night. He'd spent the entire night trapped beneath Snape's razor sharp stare and lashed by his oily voice, just to trudge to the common room to collapse to the couch, unable to even accommodate the thought of doing his homework.

The day had been equally populous with sources of stress. By now the Ravenclaw story had Harry and Draco nearly killing each other in a jealous rage over the same pretty Hufflepuff girl. Slytherins insisted that Harry had harassed and hexed the Malfoy heir and laughed and left him in the woods for Professor Snape to rescue like a white knight. Harry was rather sure Snape didn't own a single article of white, but it was not those stories that upset him. It was his very own House. Gryffindors insisted that Draco, freshly branded with the Dark Mark, had threatened a hapless first-year with death if Harry didn't hand himself over, and Harry had cleverly led him straight into the claws of an icy demise.

And he just didn't have the energy at the moment to defend him against their enthusiastic slander.

Harry told them the truth because he wanted at least someone to know it, rather than simply conjure some vicious fiction in its place. He wanted someone to know he had not, in a thousand years, ever wished something as heinous as Draco's wounds on any one Voldemort himself. And, as surprised and skeptical as Hermione and Ron might have appeared as he recounted the tale—carefully edited and revised, of course—it felt good to finally speak the truth.

Harry had been careful to leave as many incriminating details out as possible because even the slightest apparition of a friendship with a Slytherin constituted an unwritten crime in Gryffindor. Those who had started friendships or relationships despite the Snake and Lion rivalry had found themselves becoming shunned and looked-down-upon by their fellow housemates. And, if you didn't want to become an outcast, you broke off the relationship.

Ron and Hermione had never done any such thing, and Harry knew it was ridiculous to think they'd be anywhere but at his side in full support. But he still didn't want to suffer further over Malfoy's icy body and all the problems it left boiling in its wake. He felt bad enough about it. Rather predictably, Ron began to inquire as to why he was out at that hour of night—with ferret-faced Malfoy, no less.

"I was just going flying, and he was already out there. It was an accident."

"But why did you have to—?"

"Ron!" Hermione squinted unhappily at him and he puckered a frown back at her. "You're being ridiculous. Don't you believe what Harry told you?"

"I was only wondering, you don't have to get so steamed," he muttered back, then turned to Harry. "Sorry, mate. It's just so strange, y'know."

Harry could completely commiserate with Ron in this instance. "Yeah," he nodded, rubbing at his head and further ruffling his black hair. "It is really strange."

They fell into an unusual silence, sitting and lying on the couch and chair gathered around the fire in the Common Room, looking at each other with differing expressions: Ron with muffled curiosity and apology, Hermione with careful, analyzing eyes and a temperate smile, and Harry with exhaustion, barely waning guilt, and longing towards the door. But that didn't last long. Hermione indulged herself a slight smirk Draco himself might have approved of and stood up from the chair, clapping the book she'd kept for company firmly shut in one hand. That caught Ron's attention and mildly shook Harry from his stupor, so that he tilted his head backwards on the couch to look at her.

"Stop being so mopey, the both of you," she told them. "Why don't you go practice some more? You know the game's in only two days, right? There should be a free pitch right now."

Harry groaned at the thought. Internally, he never wanted to look at another broomstick, lest throw his leg over it and feel the wind between his toes. That opened up a lane in his mind that led to uncertain and painful ideas and memories. But he opened his mouth and said instead, "I don't know. I'm kind of tired, 'Mione."

"No, you're not, not really," she said, strolling over to him to look down at him. His green eyes blinked back up at her, the lines of worry and sleep-lacking nights barely concealed by the rims of his glasses. "You're feeling sorry for yourself about what happened out in the forest. You need to take your mind of it for a while."

"Yeah, Harry," Ron chimed in. "A good fly cheers anybody up."

"Excluding me, of course," Hermione reminded them with a smile, despite the pained expression she adopted upon thinking about careening through the air on little more than a carved and charmed stick. Ron clamored off the chair and leaned on the back of the couch, looking down at Harry with much the same look as an excited puppy beneath his thick red hair and between his prominent freckles.

"I'd like to practice my goal-keeping, anyway," Ron told him. "And there's no harm in a little more training when it comes to the Slytherin match."

Harry wanted to tell them Draco was the only challenge about that game anymore these days, but he was to tired to say the name and invoke the screaming and ice in his mind. So he agreed and was led out of the Common Room, his body aching, though Harry couldn't tell anymore if from want to fly or bone-piercing exhaustion.


The days came and went; Monday and the Quidditch match of the school year came without Draco Malfoy, trumpeting on without him as he froze and burned in the furthest bed in the hospital wing. Inside the dark, crowded atrium that housed the anxious Gryffindor team on the edge of the pitch, Harry Potter paced, white-knuckling his Firebolt. Slivers of light poured in through the crooked boards, and his eyes fixated on them, as if he could see through them, staring decidedly in the direction of the North Tower. Sweat was already crawling down the back of his neck, steam rising up from his short-tempered breath into the bottom of his glasses, fogging in a crescent shape.

With the other pale faces of his teammates at his back and watching him carefully, he continued to pace at the doors like a panther at the bars of its cage. This is where Oliver Wood would have been solemnly injecting his team with the hunger to win with carefully placed words and a flurry of insights, but Harry had never been that eloquent, even about Quidditch. And today, he was riding on two days' worth of anxiety and anger and worry. There would be no speech.

Ron stood the closest to him, being little more than worried by Harry's display. Some of the younger teammates, having heard some wild and slanderous stories in the halls of how he'd slain his rival Seeker, hung decidedly back and hid themselves behind their brooms. He grimaced and whispered to Harry, who was still pacing and watching the North side, "Hey, mate, are you okay?"

Harry hesitated for a moment and worked up a gentle smile for his friend's sake. "Yeah," he answered, an edge of wind to his voice, "I'm just ready to get this over with."

Ron was about to open his mouth and inquire further—for Harry never spoke like that about a Quidditch game, least of all about the Snake and Lion match. But he didn't get the chance, for the doors flung themselves open at the beckon of the announcer and they spilled forth out onto the pitch. Harry strode slightly ahead of them out to the middle where Madam Hooch stood with the Golden Snitch bouncing in her hand.

Across the pitch, the Slytherin team emerged in tandem and they met at the center, robes as emerald green as the grass beneath their feet. The captain who came to meet him was a fourth-year Harry barely recognized, but his eyes wandered over the rest. He knew that Draco still lay in a white bed that periodically burned and that his broom was lost to the fangs of the Forbidden Forest, but he looked.

And disappointment welled anew.

"Alright, everyone. You know the rules—play clean, have fun, and—" Madam Hooch's standard fare continued in the background as the two teams came face to face for the coin toss automatically. They blocked out the sound of her voice to stare each other down, Serpents hissing at Lions who hissed willingly back.

Harry looked to the replacement who stood to the right of the mean-faced Captain, a short, lithe-looking third year who, by his knavish grin, couldn't believe his good luck. He caught Harry's gaze upon him, and flashed a wide smile at him. "Hey," he whispered. "I just wanted to thank you for what you did in the forest. You know, to Malfoy. Now I'm finally getting a chance to play. Thanks a lot, Potter."

Harry did not move except for the flaring of his nostrils.

Madam Hooch raised her voice, throwing her hand out to catch a glinting silver coin. "Call it, boys. Heads or tails."

"Heads."

"Tails," Harry gritted out, eyes still trained cold on the Seeker.

Madam Hooch lifted her other hand, showing the coin to turn possession over to the Slytherins for the first play of the game. But it did not matter. For when she sounded her whistle, released the Snitch, and the players mounted their brooms, the game was already decided.

Harry turned and attacked.

The announcer screamed a few moments later in stunned incredulity. "Unbelievable! Just unbelieveable! Harry Potter has caught the Golden Snitch just one minute into the game of the year! Gryffindor wins, one-hundred and fifty to zero! That's definitely a record!" And the gold and maroon stands burst into a roar audible to every corner of Hogwarts.

Even the Hospital Wing, where Professor Snape stood and stared out the window, grimacing as the words drifted up to his ears.

"It seems Potter is sorely missing his competition," he muttered to himself, squinting sourly in the sunlight. Seeing that the game was already over and there was little more to observe, the Potions master turned away from the window to see his young charge sitting up weakly in bed, death-white face turned toward the echoing words of the announcer. "Draco. You're awake."

He was, however, strong enough to flash his godparent a flinty, displeased, childish look that nearly turned his eyes black. His voice was still recovering from the icy grip and his throat was raw like the earth after the spring thaw. "I missed the game," he croaked out.

"Yes," Snape told him without any sympathy, just a cold acceptance of the fact. After all, it was only a game. There should be no need to be so upset over such a trivial thing, after barely pulling away from the snap of Death's jaws. "You're lucky to have survived such a severe infection," he informed him solemnly, still standing at the window.

Draco's angry gaze had settle safely in the middle distance and Snape could see him listening intently to the announcer and coming to emotional conclusions. He watched disappointment flare up as he finally realized Slytherin's loss—an astounding one at that—and a grimace etch itself into his face. Had it been any other student, he would have advised them against an overly emotional reaction in such a condition, where the infection was still a threat, but to tell Draco to smother his emotions was to build up a much stronger ones, his anger and fear.

Without lifting his eyes from his sheets, Draco asked, feigning coolness of spirit and composure, "So, how did you cure me?"

Snape considered him for a moment, gauging his odd reaction. Usually, there was more fire to be spat from his mouth, more sour looks and sneers to bestow and exercise his frustration, but he'd smothered it. He was slightly disappointed in a way, not to see that defiance to which he was accustomed. He moved silently to stand at the end of the bed and explained. "There has been no potion discovered to cure Ice-Poisoning, so I used a bezoar stone which was split into three separate pieces and ignited. If given the chance, the infection will recover and reinvest areas that have been cleared by the bezoar. It is useless to simply force them down one's throat. It takes hours and hours to make sure the fire and antidote can seek out each patch of infection until each is completely eradicated."

Draco continued watching the sheets, the dark circles beneath his eyes beginning to take on a great and noticeable weight. It was then that he adopted a much more familiar grimace and lifted his head to stare just short of Snape's face. "How long have I been here?"

"Three days."

"Does anybody know?"

"Aside from the entire school?" Snape drawled, furrowing his brow slightly. Draco lifted his eyes completely now but dismay cowered in them yet. It was then that Snape understood to whom his godson was referring. "No. There's been no letters sent." He paused. "But, if you would like me to, I could—"

"No," he quickly interrupted in a croak of a voice. "That's not necessary." His anger boiled up again, spilling over into his emotions and muddling them like tainted water. His slate gray eyes remained on his sheets, which no longer burned in order to preserve his freezing body. The thaw had released him back into the grips of his sentiments. "You may leave now."

Snape didn't waste time. There was little to be gained by hovering over such a temperamental child, especially when he felt so inclined to compensate for his condition with hostility. So he obliged him his childish demand and, with full intention of slinking back to the dungeons to do some researching—perhaps he might be able to brew a potion-based antidote for Ice Poisoning, with time and luck—headed for the door.

He met Harry Potter there as he came swinging around the corner, still half-dressed in his rich red and gold Quidditch robes. His glasses were slightly askew, Snape noticed, which did little to disguise the anxiety in the green of his eyes, or the agitated flush of his scar beneath his tousled hair. He appeared to have enough composure to at least leave his broom behind before rushing into the school and traversing all the staircases leading to the Hospital Wing. Snape watched his face drop when he registered just who he'd run into with a certain pleasure.

"Oh, shit," he muttered, eyes wide.

Snape's mouth curled. "Ten points from Gryffindor," he decreed with relish.

Harry's impatient flash of a gaze growled at him, but gave him no real resistance. That nervous energy that had driven him there quickly urged him back into motion, and he rolled to the side and tensed to continue his dash inside, but Snape's magic was just as fast as his young reflexes, if Snape's own were not. Harry grunted as a Wingardium Leviosa forcefully nudged him back into place, view of the doorway blocked by his body. "Now, Mr. Potter, shouldn't you be celebrating your…triumphant win with your House and teammates?" he drawled in an oily voice.

Harry again flashed him that knife-like look and surged forward, rolling to the other side. Another flash of sharp, acrid magic replaced him again, just feet from the doorway. He was sick of this.

"I came to see if Malfoy is alright," he grit out. "Is that a crime?"

Snape stared down back into that fiery green stare without fear. "Return to your House, Potter. Mr. Malfoy is in perfectly capable hands."

Harry glowered at him. "Sure, but is he all right, I asked?" he hissed out in frustration.

Unfazed, the Potions Master continued on, ignoring his question. "You are on fragile standings as it is, Potter. It is only on Professor McGonagall's fervent intervention that your broomstick was not confiscated and your Captain's badge revoked. Now, if you would," Snape drawled delicately and reached his hand out, gesturing towards the empty corridor leading away.

Harry hated him so intensely in that moment he wanted to light that oily hair on fire and watch him screech and jump in fright—but could not. His stinging, smoke-smelling magic still barricaded the doorway from entering, but it could not bar his eyes from travelling across. Before Snape shoved him away, he saw Draco, a pale figure too distant to distinguish any ice in his blood, sitting in bed and watching them.

He so hated Snape. He indulged himself a sneer as he stalked begrudgingly away.