Because I have this one ready, I'm going ahead and uploading it now. Enjoy!

Chapter 12—The Terrible, No-Good, Awful Fourth Day

Harry spent a few minutes standing in front of the door to the room where Theresa waited, opening and closing his hand. He didn't want to go into that room. He really didn't want to go into that room.

But he knew what his choices were if he didn't. Trying to break free and go back to his old life, at which he would eventually falter, thanks to the numbers Draco had gathered about him slipping up on his hours of sleeping and eating. Staying here under compulsion rather than freely, without a right to refuse what he didn't like and the chance to fight back subtly. Or, perhaps, following up the offer that Theresa had given him yesterday, when he'd apologized to her and said he wanted to delay a more extensive conversation until today: that he come to St. Mungo's with her and endure the attentions of a few other Healers.

But he couldn't do that.

He even knew why. He just didn't know if he had the courage to say it to Theresa.

At last, he told himself that she wouldn't go away, and neither would Draco, standing behind the enchanted window next to the meeting room. Besides, he wasn't afraid. He couldn't be afraid to confront anything, and that had to include his own emotions, or how was he going to make a good Auror?

He opened the door and stepped in.

Theresa smiled at him from the furthest of the chairs. She already had a cup of tea, and was sipping it carefully, as if she feared it would singe her lips otherwise. She didn't refer to the conversation yesterday, but said, "Please come in and make yourself comfortable, Harry. Where would you like to start?"

Harry took his own chair, wishing he had his wand with him all the while. But it was true that, while accidental magic might cause more harm than spells in the long run, it was more likely to rattle around in a directionless manner first, and would give Theresa or Draco more time to get out of the way. So it made sense that he should talk to the Healer without his wand.

He still didn't like it. His body was convinced that this was a dangerous situation, and he should take every step possible to get away.

"I suppose that you should—that you should know—" Harry shook his head as his voice fell nerveless. He had to say this, or he wouldn't make any sense to Theresa. And he did accept that she wanted to help him, no matter what Draco's motives might be. If she'd only come here as a favor to the Malfoy family, she would have given up after yesterday, apology or no apology.

Theresa raised her eyebrows. "Yes?"

"I won't go to St. Mungo's." There, he'd said it.

She blinked. "Why not?"

And then here it came. Harry made himself look his fear in the face, the way that he had Dashwood even as he knew that this man was responsible for the murders of three small children. What lurked in his own heart was not as evil as a Dark wizard, and if he could face them, he could face this.

"Here, I still have some sense of control," he said quietly. "I have a chance of winning, of retaining the person I was and still want to be. At St. Mungo's, I don't have as much of a chance of that."

Theresa frowned and set the cup of tea aside, leaning forward to speak earnestly. "I assure you, Harry, the people there would have your best interests at heart. And though Mr. Malfoy is a family friend, I am not convinced he does."

She's bold, to speak like that when she knows he's watching. Or maybe just a Healer. Some of the ones who'd tried to tend him after he killed Voldemort, before he frightened them off, were like that. "I know," Harry said, shaking the memories away. "And that's the problem. With St. Mungo's, I mean."

Her frown deepened.

"I would feel I couldn't fight back against them," Harry explained, "since they really would be doing what they could to help me. Draco's own feelings towards me are all mixed up with what he wants." He knew Draco was probably stiffening indignantly at that, but he didn't care. It was true, after all. "So I don't feel bad when he says something stupid and I want to snap back, or when he makes an assumption about me and I want to correct it. I still have an amount of freedom. I control how much I change. I do better when I'm fighting something, Theresa, whether it's Dark wizards or him. And at the hospital, there wouldn't be enough people to fight. I could do some damage, but then I'd feel so guilty that I'd agree with whatever they proposed."

Theresa cleared her throat. "I am not convinced that fighting the whole world the way you wish to do is healthy, either, Harry."

"That part, I'm not willing to change," said Harry adamantly. "I'll do what I said: talk to you and try to go along with what Draco suggests when that's genuinely what I want. Otherwise, forget it."

"Do you agree, then, that talking about the death of your friends is healthy? Or genuinely what you want, now?" Theresa was watching him closely.

Harry fidgeted, looking several different directions before he turned back to her. Then he drew in a deep breath and said, "Yes and no. I don't want it, but—what I did and said yesterday frightened me. I should be able to deal with the grief better than that. I had thought I was dealing with it better than that. You've showed me that—maybe—I was ignoring things I shouldn't have ignored."

It was as gracious as he could be. He was still sure that everything would have been better if Draco and Theresa and everyone had left him alone. Better for him, anyway.

But then what might have happened the day that he was just a little too tired or slow to catch a Dark wizard, and an innocent person got hurt, or his partner did? The damage would miss him, of course, because fatal damage always did. He lived on and on and on. That might be the thing he most hated about himself.

So he would do this. But he was determined that he was doing it for his own reasons, and if he changed his mind about those reasons, it would be on his recognizance, and no one else's. Draco's chattering about this and that, his constant encroachments on Harry's personal space, were better for reminding Harry what was at stake than the calmness and empty spaces of St. Mungo's would be. There, he might change his mind about things before he was ready.

"Very well, Harry. It's a start." He ignored the disappointed tone in Theresa's voice. "Now, what would you like to talk about concerning your friends?"


Draco scowled at the enchanted window. Both Harry and Theresa seemed to have less than complimentary opinions of him. Well, Theresa perhaps didn't think as much of his methods as she had when he brought back Harry looking snogged yesterday. And Harry…

Unravel one layer of resistance, and there's only another one underneath it.

He could have worked himself up to a fine head of indignation by thinking that, damn it, he'd done his best and Harry still hated him for it even as he succumbed, but then he heard the rest of what Harry said.

And an emotion he didn't recognize at first rose in the center of his chest. Draco leaned back on the couch with his eyes half-closed, and tried to identify it, even as Harry started talking to Theresa.

It was delight.

He encouraged Harry to fight, didn't he? And that fighting part of Harry was the one that had captured him, not the calm passivity that Harry had buried his passion beneath.

If Harry wanted to stay with him because of that, then Draco won on two counts. First, Harry was staying. Second, he was amenable to expressing just the sorts of emotions that Draco wanted to see from him.

Draco folded his arms behind his head and congratulated himself on arranging the universe in the precise ways that would benefit him, even as he didn't know he was doing it.


Harry watched Theresa suspiciously. At her prompting, he'd talked about his friendship with Ron and Hermione in Hogwarts, his brief relationship with Ginny, how Remus taught him the Patronus Charm, and the way that he'd always felt welcomed and at home in the bosom of the Weasley family. She'd tried to ask about the Dursleys, but Harry had cut her off on that subject quickly enough. He hadn't seen them since the day he turned seventeen. He'd tried to say goodbye, figuring that Dumbledore would have wanted that, and had received only stares, as if he were a dog that had suddenly started talking. Harry had shaken his head and gone his way. The possibility of a reconciliation in that direction was as nonexistent as it had ever been.

And now Theresa had arrived at the question he dreaded most.

"What happened, that day they died?" she asked quietly.

Harry took a deep breath and shut his eyes. It was better if he spoke of this with them closed; that way, his memories were clearer, and he could be sure he wasn't leaving out a detail. Besides, it would keep back tears if any threatened to rise.

"We were at the Weasleys' house, the Burrow, for a celebration," he began quietly. "Bill, Ron's older brother, had just got married to his fiancée, Fleur Delacour, and I'd spent a few days with them after my birthday. Ron and Hermione and I were about to leave on the quest that would destroy Voldemort." Even so many years later, Harry wasn't sure it was a good idea to mention the Horcruxes to anyone.

"I went outside. It was an August evening, and it—it was just one of those beautiful days, you know, when the light is low and the gold seems like it's never going to end. I stood looking from the edge of the Weasleys' garden towards the fields. I was thinking of how happy I'd been with the Weasleys, and how much it would hurt to leave them all behind. I didn't want to, but we had to. There was no way that Molly and Arthur—Ron's parents—would have let us go if they knew what we were going to do.

"I heard this whistling sound behind me—"

Harry stopped. He had never told anyone else about this before. He'd lied when the reporters asked him how the Weasley house was destroyed, claiming that Voldemort had appeared with fifty Death Eaters and cast Killing Curses through the windows, then collapsed the Burrow inward, which caused so much damage to the bodies that no one could tell Harry was lying about the Killing Curses. He couldn't bear to talk about it. The reporters swarming him with eager questions and bright eyes and flashing cameras didn't deserve to know the truth. The best and most guarded tomb his friends could have was in his memory.

"Harry?"

You can do this. It wasn't as though he'd never thought about it again. He had, and for the first few years after it happened, he'd lived through it again in his nightmares.

"I can do this," he said, and if his voice was roughened with tears, so what? He went on quickly enough not to give Theresa a chance to comment on it. "I turned around, and I saw a piece of flaming stone heading straight for the Burrow. It was already there before I made it back up through the garden. It drove the house straight down, and there was an enormous flash of white light. I heard screams."

He sought desperately to drop into the flat, emotionless voice that he used when giving Auror reports, even about the most horrible atrocities that a Dark wizard could commit. This had only been another one of them, hadn't it? The atrocity that had set him on the path of hunting Dark wizards in the first place.

"When I could see again, the Burrow was this—this pancake of melted earth and stone. I came as near as I could, but the heat drove me back. It was burning, everything was afire, and I knew nothing could have got out alive, but I still wanted to go near, still wanted to see.

"And then the smoke from the house coiled green, and turned first into the Dark Mark, and then Voldemort's face. He—he was laughing at me. He said that now that I didn't have any friends left, any protectors, I might as well come and face him on my own, in a final duel to the death."

There had been more than that, and worse, but Harry would never share those words. They were branded into his brain. They haunted him still. That didn't mean anyone else had to know them.

"And why did he do that?" Theresa's voice was soft. Harry had the feeling that she might have asked the question more than once, but he had been lost, drifting somewhere in a trance. He shook his head, but couldn't yet bring himself to open his eyes. He knew the tears would fall.

"He was trying to bait me, make me rush off and confront him and die. Or he wanted to make me despair and give up. I didn't do that. I went off and completed the quest I needed to complete to kill him, and he died."

Harry bowed his head and buried his face in his arms. Talking about it hadn't made him feel better; so much for that sort of wisdom. It made him feel as if someone had forced broken glass down his throat instead, and his consciousness spun slowly, held on one thread over a darkening abyss.

"Can you talk about anything else today, Harry?" Theresa's voice had softened even more, to a hooting that reminded Harry of Hedwig. She'd been—lost, somewhere. He never knew for certain if she died in the Burrow, or thought he was dead there and flew off.

"No," he said. His voice was creaky, and raspy, and cracked in the middle. He stood and shook his head firmly, his eyes still closed. "I want to go back to my room, and I just want to not think for a while," he said. "Trippy?"

She appeared at once, he could tell from the crack, but he didn't open his eyes to see her. "Yes, Master Harry? Master Harry is wanting something?"

"Can you take me back to my room, and fetch me a Dreamless Sleep Potion?" Harry asked.

"Trippy is helping Master Harry!"

Harry had to look once, so that he could see her and follow her out of the room. His eyes were far too hazy, and brimmed with tears. He closed them again as soon as he could.


Draco slowly entered the meeting room when Harry had left it. His earlier delight had drained away, replaced by intense horror.

God, to have lived through that, to have carried it on his shoulders for eleven years, and to never have told anyone…

Draco had known the Weasleys died violently. He had never known precisely how, and the taunting message from Voldemort had never been a part of the stories he collected. He doubted anyone but Harry had heard it.

He wanted to wrap Harry in a blanket and keep him protected against all the woes of the world. He wanted, after all, to take Harry to St. Mungo's. Harry had said it would be too quiet and calm for him, but God, wasn't that what he needed now, to deal with and acknowledge what he'd just told Theresa?

He shook his head. He's said what he wanted, what he needs. At the least, I think we have to respect that.

"What do you think?" he asked, leaning against the door so he could look at Theresa.

"Worse than I expected." Theresa sighed. "He not only had to witness their deaths—which I hadn't thought was the case before—but he has to live with the knowledge that they were targeted because they were his friends and killed to make him react in a certain way. It's the only explanation as to why You-Know-Who didn't hit the Burrow while he was still in it. I think he is blaming himself for that. Perhaps he doesn't exactly think of them as dying because of him, but he'll be close to it."

Draco nodded.

"And we still have years of denial to get through, including this resistance to change." Theresa gave another sigh, then straightened up and nodded to Draco. "I'm willing to help him any way I can, but I wish I could do this in St. Mungo's."

"I'm not taking him there until he asks to go." Draco folded his arms.

For a moment, they glared at each other in silence, until Theresa glanced slightly to the side and nodded. "Perhaps you are right," she said. "I think it may be better to ignore his wishes in this case, but it is true that that edge of freedom seems to be essential for him. We may at least wait and see what happens."

She left, then, and Draco went to Harry's room to check up on him. He found him curled deeply into the middle of the blankets, shoulders hunched as if he were cold, now and then curling more and more deeply. He was grinding his teeth again, which shouldn't be possible with a Dreamless Sleep Potion.

Draco hesitated. He wanted to hold Harry, but Harry had said he wanted to be alone. So, in the end, he compromised and cast a spell that made the sensation of a pair of warm arms enfold Harry. Harry sighed. His shoulders slowly relaxed, and then he shifted backward, seeming to move deeper into the invisible embrace.

Draco shut the door quietly.