Title: The Sketchbook, the grump and the wheelchair
Written for: meeee
Ratings and Warnings: Mentions of genitalia, also strong language at times
Word Count: Around 33k all together
Summary: The Boy Who Lived had grown up to be The Man Who Lived in a Wheelchair, and although he's quite happy with a life of solitude and sketching - everyone else seem to think they know better. Will the reappearance of Professor Severus Snape in his life change things for the better, or will it end in aggravation like always?
Author notes: I don't have a beta so I apologise for pacing issues or grammar mistakes. This is a story I started like three years ago. The first 10k words are from then, and I've only changed them a little bit. The next 10k words are from about a year ago, and the final 10k are from the last week or two, so there's bound to be continuity errors also. It's not some masterpiece or anything, just a fic I finally finished haha.
**THIS WORLD AND ITS CHARACTERS ARE NOT MY PROPERTY AND I MAKE NO MONEY FROM THEM. I JUST LOVE THEM AND ALSO WANT THEM TO LOVE EACH OTHER**
The treatment that night had been two potions drank in quick succession and an examination of his eyes to check against any unwanted reactions, then a ten minute wait before a large goblet of steaming purple liquid that Snape had warned he'd have to down as quickly as he could as it would make him very drowsy.
He woke up the next morning in his own bed, still in the same clothes he had been wearing last night and most definitely had pissed himself in the night. It wasn't the most pleasant smell to wake up to, but at least he couldn't feel it down there. The pads were unpleasantly wet, despite their claims to be able to absorb and gel-ify large quantities of fluid.
Thankfully, he had thought up an alternative to drowning in the bath, in the form of a measuring jug and a flannel. He still needed to sit in the cold bathtub, but he kept the warm water running over his feet between filling up the jug to pour elsewhere. It wasn't so bad, once he was actually successfully in the bathtub.
The bed was another matter. He already had a mattress protector in place under the sheets so the mattress itself was fine was fine, but manually stripping a bed from a wheelchair was a mighty pain in the arse. He was glad for once that he's opted for a day bed, slightly narrower than a single, instead of the gigantic double bed he'd originally planned. He took the dirty sheets and hid them behind some wood pallets in the garage, then replaced them with equal pains. He only had two more clean sheets in the linen cupboard.
When he finally made it to the kitchen, Snape was waiting for him although he tried to look for all the world as if he had only just arrived himself. It was an hour later than Harry usually turned up for breakfast.
"Did you sleep well?" Snape asked.
Harry wheeled himself to the table, where Snape must have placed his sketchbook after his treatment. He opened to the latest page and remembered the disappointing sketches of the night before. He tried to remember what he could of the moment in which Snape had half-smiled, and began a rough sketch.
"Harry? Did you sleep well?"
Oh, right. Snape had been talking to him. "Yeah, fine. No side effects or pain," he replied. The eyes had been something like this… Or had they been half closed? His memory was fuzzy. He looked up to get a reference for the shape of Snape's eyes, but he had just turned away. His clean hair swished over a shoulder.
There was a nice texture difference between the black robe shirt and his hair, though the colour was near identical.
"No memory loss, headache, loss of vision or shaking?" Snape listed.
Should he tell the man about his bed wetting? A bit of leakage was only to be expected though, hardly relevant. And the shaking was because he was cold and tired, a condition that predated the potions. "I'm a bit foggy on the details from last night, nothing else. Are you expecting me to lose my vision?" That was a terrifying thought.
Snape placed a plate in front of him on the table. "I'm not expecting anything. This is uncharted territory, therefore the effects could manifest in any number of ways and it would be unwise to assume that we have all the information we need. Do you remember what we talked about?"
Harry looked at the plate, but the thought of eating even toast made him queasy. He nibbled a corner just because Snape was watching. "Uh, black clothes. You're going to show me a dragon scale vest, and you're making potions for the Hogwarts infirmary."
"Good, that's fine. And what do you remember after the purple potion?"
Harry shook his head. "Nothing until I woke up this morning. Did you carry me to my room?" He wanted to thank the man for not undressing him, although care-wise it wasn't a particularly good choice.
"I pushed you in your chair. You kept asking for your cigarettes, and for something called a 'grabby stick', but I was afraid you'd leave one lit and burn the house down."
Speaking of which, he found and lit one now.
It was harder talking to Snape now that the treatment had begun. It felt like everything he said would be studied, that he was being studied for weakness. For ways he was struggling, when he wasn't good enough or strong enough on his own. Even knowing how silly and infantile it was didn't prevent him from feeling it, or from avoiding the awkwardness of trying to hold a conversation. He went back to his drawings, forced himself to draw something other than Snape. Window light reflected on his untouched fork.
Snape didn't take his plate away when he stood, probably hoping that Harry would eat something more given time. "I will be in the laboratory if you need anything," he said. A long minute stretched between them as Harry continued to draw the fork, four or five quick sketches alongside one another, each capturing the light differently. He didn't look up until the door clicked softly behind the professor. Had he been waiting to see if Harry would follow him?
He had intended to get moving as soon as Snape was gone, but he decided just to finish this one page first. One page turned into several more, and he forgot about everything outside of the soft, thick paper until he suddenly started to feel nauseous. He snapped the sketchbook closed and reached quickly for a large bowl he kept on the window sill to his left. It had been a fruit bowl at one point, but he didn't eat enough fruit to merit keeping it as one and it was far more interesting as a vessel for catching dawn sunlight anyway.
He was only a little bit sick, two short splashes into the bowl and the nausea faded. He studied the liquid, checking for signs it was the bad kind. That was something he'd learned from the last time he'd been under Snape's treatment. If he went to the man every single time he was sick, they'd never be apart.
He went through the checklist. Was it the same colour as the last potion he'd drank? No. Did it contain any bits he was sure he hadn't eaten? No. Was it coming out in copious, uncontrollable amounts? No. Was it accompanied by stomach cramps, or an acidic or burning feeling? No. It was just ordinary sick that left nothing behind except an ordinary bad taste, and the bad feeling that accompanied it had disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. He put the bowl on the table next to his uneaten toast and decided to get going. He'd wash up in a bit.
Back in his bedroom, he found his muggle mobile phone in a drawer and powered it up. It made an obnoxiously loud sound and the words "Hello Harry" scrolled across the screen. He hated how it knew his name. When it turned on, he had to wait a minute for the torrent of new message pings to quiet. Hermione and Dudley both assumed that he kept it on at all times of night and day, and texted him easily a hundred times a month between them despite the fact that he never replied.
He ignored the existing messages and texted Hermione, asking if she could come over this afternoon. He had not sent the note of the night before, for two reasons. The first was that he'd planned to send it last thing, and had been forced unexpectedly to sleep instead. And the second was that he didn't know who might be able to intercept or see Hermione's messages if they went to her at the Ministry. Even if he didn't read the papers, he wanted to keep as much information about himself out of them as possible. He lit a fag while waiting for a reply. Even after so many years in and out of the wizarding world, muggle phones seemed more like magic than owls.
A few minutes later, her reply pinged through. Sort it out between you, I don't have time to play diplomat between two full-grown adults.
He huffed. Should he be annoyed that she automatically assumed that he and Snape were at each other's throats right off the bat? He could hardly blame her, based on past experience, but still...
It's not anything like that, he typed. I need to order some stuff off Amazon.
Amazon was like a delivery service by owl, except for muggle items, delivered by muggles in vans. The next day delivery was nice though, and he'd use it more often if he could work out all this muggle technology stuff that Hermione took in her stride. Even though they both came from muggle backgrounds, she'd had access to fancy gadgets growing up that Harry would never have been bought. The internet was something he'd had no experience of until moving to his muggle flat after fleeing Hogwarts, and even then it had been supervised times in the local library with an assistance volunteer doing everything for him so he could access his Government Gateway Account.
Okay. I can do 3, but I'll be working overtime later so you better not be lying.
He sent a quick thanks and turned the phone back off so that he wouldn't have to find the charger any time soon. He hadn't seen it in at least six months, so Merlin knew where it might be. Conserving the battery for as long as possible was his only option.
He went back and emptied the sick bowl and his toast into the bin, then put the dishes in the sink. The countertop here was awkwardly high, something he'd never noticed when he could spell the dishes to do themselves. As it was, it wasn't worth spending one of his few daily spells on this, so he left them in the sink and went back to drawing for another while. He'd already spent one of his three spells on levitating himself onto the toilet this morning, so he was holding on to the other two like precious gems.
He sketched his own hand drawing in the sketchbook, inside of which he drew the same image of hand and sketchbook getting smaller and smaller like some weird mirror illusion. When he was done, he decided it would look better if he rotated each iteration of the sketchbook so that his hand made a spiral through the page. He made it a double page spread.
At two o'clock, he realised that Snape still hadn't returned to make lunch. Probably engrossed in his work. He felt guilty enough about the man's workload to make him a ham sandwich. It would also help him think that Harry had eaten. He'd probably assume the lack of appetite was a side-effect of the treatment, whereas in reality Harry had just gotten out of the habit of eating often while living in his muggle flat. He'd never really got an appetite back after that, no matter how much Molly had tried in that first year to force one into him.
He put the sandwich on a plate and took it into the lab without knocking. Snape didn't notice him enter, busy as he was crushing kernels with one hand while stirring a cauldron with the other, so he put the plate somewhere obvious and left. He didn't want to get drawn into conversation, with Hermione arriving soon.
He tidied up a bit and went to the bathroom to check the pad in his underpants. It was dry, but he didn't know how often they were supposed to be changed. It was probably fine. There was no sign of a rash or anything, so he gave his legs a rub down with a warm towel from the heated rack on the wall and headed back. Maybe he should get some thermal leggings or something.
At five to three, he gave the kitchen surfaces the best wipe down he could, brushing bread crumbs onto the floor where he could do nothing about them like an idiot. Hermione floo'd in through the old hearth, striding out with the same ease she did everything else. Since starting at the Ministry, she'd learned the trick to using the network without getting disorientated or covered in ash.
She smiled brightly at Harry, something which he always found irritating. There wasn't anything so great that she should need to grin that widely every time she came into the house, like some demented doll. Without so much as a by-your-leave, she banished the bread crumbs from the floor and started the tea train. "How're you doing? Getting along okay?"
She reminded him of a social worker sometimes, with her forced gaiety and repetitive questions. He forced down a snappy reply, reminding himself that she was only doing her best, and he should really be grateful that she was still willing to hang around with him after the things he'd said to her in the past. He was grateful that she didn't mention his black eye, anyway. He'd half expected her to assume he and Snape had gotten into a fist fight, but then it wasn't the first time he'd slipped and injured himself. "Yeah, fine. No side-effects so far."
They followed the tea train to the dining table, where Hermione moved a chair beside him and took out her laptop. It fired up slower than his phone had, probably because it was bigger. He didn't know how this stuff worked. "You two getting along?" she asked again.
He shrugged. "Yeah. Why wouldn't we?"
She nudged him with her elbow and grinned as if he'd made a joke. "What do you need? Other than some new shampoo."
He frowned at her and ran a hand through his hair. Oh shit, he'd forgotten to wash it. So much for his new improved bathing method. "Uh yeah, I ran out yesterday," he lied. "I need some socks too, warm ones. A blanket for my legs, I thought I had one but I can't find it. Sorry, I should have made a list. Some thermal leggings or something would be good."
"Hang on a sec, Harry. I can only do one thing at a time. Let me get a text editor up so we can make a list now, and if you're okay with it, I can order them when I get home later. Unless you have particular brands in mind?" She already knew he would have left any brand choices to her, since she had a knack for researching the best options on - ah, what were they called? Review forums. Places where people on the internet got together to complain about stuff they bought.
He nodded, watching her type out the items he had already listed before going on. "I can't use any charms at the moment so I was wondering if there's some kind of caddy I can attach to the arm of my chair or something like that. Big enough to put my sketchbook and some other bits in, but not as bulky as my bag." He didn't mention the cigarettes, one of the few things that still drove her into a rant.
She frowned. "No charms at all?" Unlike Snape, she knew just how much Harry relied on spells for day to day tasks and self-care. She glanced again at his unclean hair, and gave him a pitying look she probably thought was understanding. "Do you need me to come over in the mornings to help? I can be discrete." She looked pointedly at the lab door, as if he wouldn't know what she was talking about otherwise.
He shook his head and then rubbed his left elbow as if it ached, just to do something with his hands and have an excuse to cross his arms. He'd have to ask her about the… other things. It grated to need help or advice, but it was better that she knew than Snape. "Actually, uh. There's some things I need. But it's…"
"Embarrassing?" She guessed, putting an unwanted hand on his knee in a gesture she probably thought was comforting. "Don't worry, Harry. I'm not going to think any less of you. I already think you're so brave and so strong."
Ugh, there they were. Brave and strong, or BS as he liked to call them, hah! Like he was some kind of saint just for being alive - oh look at how hard he's trying, battling adversity like a right little champion, isn't that such an inspiration to us all. He was almost sick again from thinking it.
She took his discomfort the wrong way, and gave his leg an encouraging squeeze. "I need something to put on the bed," he said quickly, before he could talk himself out of it, or into throwing Hermione's hand all the way back to the Ministry of Magic headquarters. "A washable topper. For when I, uh… can't control… it." He motioned vaguely, but she nodded understanding and added Waterproof Sheet Topper to the list.
"Do you need incontinence pads as well?" She asked. Oof, she could at least have chosen her words carefully. He shook his head, though the pads he'd bought were almost definitely not up for the job. There were only so many hits his pride could take in one day. "Okay, anything else?" She clearly didn't believe him and was adding the pads to the list mentally.
"I don't really know, anything you think might be useful. You've researched this more than I have. I need... Something. I don't know, to help in the - with the - bathroom situation." He whispered the last two words, even though he knew Snape couldn't hear them through the thick door unless he was intentionally spying. Hermione nodded, and knew enough of Harry not to make any more of a conversation out of it. She could have gone through options with him, trying to get him to choose one or think about the pros and cons of each solution, but they both knew from experience that he didn't have a big enough pool of dignity to take that much draining. "And one of those grabby sticks," he added, just in case she changed her mind. He'd seen Uncle Vernon use one once, showing off how it could be used to take the tv remote from the table without getting out of his chair. There hadn't been much need of it though, as Aunt Petunia tended to keep everything he might need in easy reach. Dudders had taken it outside to play and left it there.
"Any groceries?" Hermione continued.
"I get a weekly bundle delivered from the co-op," he told her. He hadn't needed to increase the amount since Snape's arrival, since he'd been throwing out more than he ate every week before anyway. "Sorry, I guess it wasn't worth a trip out here. I should have thought about it more first."
"It's fine. You have no idea how happy I am that you asked." She tried to catch his eye, but he stared at his lap. She took one of his hands to force him into sharing the moment with her. "You can always ask me. Whatever you need. I want you to know that, Harry. I know you sometimes feel like you have to do everything on your own, but you're not alone."
He gritted his teeth. This was more of that BS sentiment. Trying to reach him through some fictional, superficial understanding of his living experience and feelings. He waited for her to let go of his hand, but she didn't. She evidently expected a reply. "Thanks," he said. For a moment, he thought it wouldn't be enough and she'd want him to share some deep emotions or be stuck in this situation forever. Thankfully, she gave him one last squeeze and then let go.
She packed up in a flurry, spewed out a few more nuggets of positivity and then gave him a hug, the awkwardness of which she ignored completely. She took his Gringotts key off the mantel, though he strongly believed that she undercharged him every time - despite the fact that he had more money than he could use, and she never had quite enough. It was a pity thing, and he despised it - she felt she owed him something for the times she'd "let him down", no matter how many times he explained that he was immensely grateful for the periods when she had gotten so angry and frustrated that she'd left him alone to suffer in peace.
When she was gone, a mere thirty minutes after arriving, he decided to have a quick nap. He'd used a lot of energy today, though he was loath to admit he was tired.