Author's Note: This chapter was revised to include canon established in Order of the Phoenix, so there are SPOILERS for the fifth book within. If you haven't read it, then, consider yourelf duly warned to stay away until you have. Further, a brief reference to the chess scene in the movie version of PS/SS is included, as it is somewhat more specific than JKR's original.
Thank you, drive through.
CHAPTER NINE
+Mens mea cupit cantare formas versas in nova corpora.+
(Ovid)
CHAPTER NINE
Harry ignored Malleus' rusty protests, and his own wrenching fear of the dementors, and stepped closer. Draco met him halfway. A frigid whirlpool sucked at Harry's thoughts, tried to distract him with despair - /hold on to Draco, hold on tight, we'll take him from you soon enough, he'll die, your friend will die, and you will live - but he fought against it, made himself ask, "Where?"
"The lake." Draco's breath was chill against Harry's ear. The translucent skin was so close, shuddering not inches from Harry's face. "There is... a tunnel. Just fall - it's that easy."
He barely had time to nod before Malleus' hand closed around his arm in a formidable grip, pulling him back. The soft, furious remonstrations slipped through one ear and out the other as the dementors surrounded Draco once more and pulled him away with such swiftness that they seemed to vanish into the dark hallway.
Harry stared blindly at the blank place for a moment, not feeling Malleus' touch upon his arm.
"It's time we were off," the man said in his ear. His breath was colder than the dank air of the prison hallway, and Harry shivered. But he did not move.
"I..." He licked his lips and tried to speak. His throat had gone dry, and something lodged, an uncomfortable and heavy weight, inside his chest. "He looks..." /Finish your sentences!/ Harry searched his memory of Draco's face, and realized that he had never once seen it so pale and drawn, or so defeated. Casting back through the years, he found he could not remember one time when that arrogant, infuriating fire hadn't been in Draco's eyes. The absence frightened him more than he could say.
"No one looks at their best here," Malleus said briskly, and with a certain amount of satisfaction that did not escape Harry. The light touch on Harry's arm became a commanding grip, and before Harry quite knew what was happening, Malleus was towing him along.
Irritably, he shook off Malleus' hand and demanded to know what had been done to Draco, to make him look like that.
Malleus stared down the hallway, and the silence between them became so absolute that Harry thought the man was not going to answer him. After a moment, however, the reply came: "He has a Dementor nearby at all times, which is of course standard procedure, but I have not had him questioned, or had anything much to do with him."
"*You* haven't questioned him," Harry muttered blackly.
The warden must have heard it, for the look he gave Harry was at once irritated and faintly self-deprecating. "True, I have not - but then, I am only the warden. There are others who come here for information... How they get it is not my concern, or my business."
"They're your responsibility."
"They're prisoners," Malleus said flatly. His stride became longer and Harry had to double-time it to keep up. "You would do well to remember this in the future - and you would also do well to remember that while you're here, there is very little you can do to help him. Should you even be helping him?" The expression on Malleus' face was unexpectedly shrewd, and the old hunger was back, probing and seeking. "Naturally, I couldn't help but be informed of events during the last bit of trouble and from all I've gathered..."
"You know absolutely nothing about it," Harry said stiffly. He reached past his headache for anger and found it, enough to bolster his pride. /When did you ever like walking small?/ The thought made more fuel for his anger, but he kept it back. Hoarding it, he thought - that sounded appropriate. "Would you take me to Ron, please?"
Malleus must have caught the hint that Harry was not requesting anything. Wordlessly, he quickened his step until Harry had to hustle to keep up, and the effort told very swiftly on his bad leg. Harry gritted his teeth and forced himself to stay in step with Malleus, determined that the man would not wrench any more satisfaction out of him.
/It seems like that's what he's doing./ Harry glanced covertly at Malleus, probing the blank face for any sign of satisfaction. It was perfectly straight, and revealing of absolutely nothing, yet Harry had the distinct sense that the man was gloating just as Fudge had been back in London. He had that aura to him, Harry thought, the air of a person who had everything going the way he wanted it to go - and had his victims there, right where he wanted them. If Fudge had been a fat, self-satisfied cat toying with mice, though, then Malleus seemed much more dangerous, a tiger watching its prey.
The silence between the two of them grew, fed by Malleus' pleasure and the anger and tension that built in Harry with each passing moment. /Something needs to happen, or I'll explode./ The walk stretched on interminably, the walls slid by with infuriating monotony, their anonymous surface unchanging no matter how hard Harry searched for a landmark. And all the while... He bit back a growl as Malleus strode unconcernedly alongside him.
Finally, after one last sharp turn, they reached a set of stairs. Harry gazed despairingly up them, but Malleus did not pause; instead, he grunted something about a shortcut and began to climb up, leaving Harry to toil in his wake. The stairs wound around in a tight, tortuous knot, like the one rapidly building in Harry's leg. Sweat, unpleasant and clammy, broke out and beaded on his flesh where it raised gooseflesh and trickled down his neck.
He became genuinely worried as the climb continued with no signs of ending, and his hand began to shake as he slid it along the railing. Malleus was glancing periodically back at him, which Harry was trying to anticipate and react to, but with his mind wandering feverishly over possibilities, he couldn't react to swiftly enough. The satisfaction wafting back from Malleus became nearly palpable, a thin thread of acridity in the damp despair of the prison.
/Please,/ Harry thought in time with the breaths he could no longer keep normal - he was panting and wheezing like an old man -- /Please let this end soon./ The walls closed in ever more tightly, and he'd lost all sense of direction except for up and down, and both of those stretched interminably. He would never stop climbing, but if he fell, he would fall forever.
It took a moment for the sound of Malleus unlocking a door to penetrate through the fog surrounding his brain. Keys jangled loudly in the silence, covering up the breaths Harry couldn't keep himself from gulping.
"This is the... ah," Malleus paused, glancing down at Harry who waited a few steps below, "the hospital ward."
"The *what*?" Shock drove the breath from Harry again.
"You heard me." Malleus' grip on the door handle tightened. "Mr. Weasley did not make his trip here very willingly, according to what I was told... I've been having him kept up here until the trial." The warden shrugged and fiddled with the keys some more.
There was a disturbing undercurrent to those words, one that caught at Harry's conscience like a hook. /Don't think about it, don't think about it./ He squared his shoulders, fought down the thoughts and the pain and made himself walk evenly past Malleus as the door swung open.
The first thing that hit Harry was the smell. It was thick and sharp, made of centuries of healing herbs and disgusting concoctions that had marinated with blood and pain, and over it lay the general bitterness of hopelessness of Azkaban itself. A few beds were lined up along the wall and separated by curtains, with tables here and there, jars stacked in cabinets, but there was a patchwork quality to it, something that said the healing done here was only temporary - if healing was ever done at all. This was not a place one went to get better... Death was more easily expected, and probably welcomed.
/Ron./ Curtains were drawn around one bed, and Harry could discern some movement behind it. There was a rustling, a thud of glass on wood, and then an unexpected voice tentatively asking Ron to drink up.
"Neville?"
There was a gasp and liquid splutter, the sound of a spoon hitting the floor.
"Harry?" Neville's disheveled, round head poked through the curtains. "Harry!" Neville vanished a moment to the sound of scraping and muttered comments before he reappeared again, straightening his robes. The effort did not help, but it rarely ever did. Neville always looked as though he had stepped out of a hurricane, and acted it too; even after several years of difficult work, he had kept the wide-eyed expression of perpetual bewilderment that Harry remembered from so long ago. It had been one of the few things that had survived from Before; the hand that shook Harry's even now was steady, the same hand that had splinted Harry's ruined leg and helped carry him to safety.
A sudden jolt of memory from his fifth year came to him: Neville *fighting* the Death Eaters, not cowering in fear or impotence, but *fighting.*
"Neville," Harry mumbled, peering around Neville's shoulder to the curtained bed. Fear spiked sharply inside him. "What... what happened?"
"Come on." Neville turned around and ducked behind the curtain, gesturing for Harry to follow. Harry obeyed, looking back briefly at Malleus, who offered him a thin smile. Harry had time to briefly wonder at the expression before he heard Neville's voice, very low but insistent, saying, "Ron... Ron, come on... Harry's here."
The words drew his wavering attention back to the still figure on the bed. For a moment he was pleasantly numb and distant, very far removed from the sight of his best friend, deathly pale and lifeless on the bed.
"Oh, *Ron*..." As Ron's name creaked from his lips, reality hit him, a staggering blow to the heart.
"Do I... look that bad?" First one eyelid and then the other cracked open to peer at Harry with pained and weary humor.
"Worse," Harry said faintly. He fell more than sat into a chair Neville had pushed up behind him. He tried to remember all the times Ron had gotten into some scrape or other. /When he broke his arm back in the Whomping Willow,/ a frantic little voice supplied. He had had the same desperate whiteness then, his freckles standing out in violent relief against his skin. He remembered with awful clarity when he had pulled Ron from the lake and the clutches of the mer-people. The brightness of his red hair was almost an obscenity. /So much like Draco.../ Like Draco, Ron was missing some vital property, pulled from him by this place.
Stiffly, he moved his chair closer to Ron's bedside. The red head flopped listlessly over to track his movements. Ron's eyes slid shut again when Harry settled himself. Neville was hovering directly behind Harry now, making soft and concerned noises.
"What happened, Ron?" Harry whispered, bending close.
For a moment he thought Ron had fallen asleep - /Don't think about him dying/ - and he was about to turn around to ask Neville when Ron's whispered, "Cru-" froze him.
"Don't say anything, Ron," Neville broke in, glancing nervously at the place beyond the curtain where Malleus Ironhand waited. He turned aside, picked up a quill and a piece of paper, scribbled something, and handed it to Harry.
"Oh." Harry's fingers knotted around the parchment. It was an effort to unwind them; as soon as he did, they fell to shredding the parchment, crumbling it so that small pieces of it littered the lap of his robe. He searched through himself, trying to find anger, horror, despair, murderous rage, guilt, righteous conviction... Nothing. Deep inside he found absolutely nothing.
The day had drained everything from him; any normal reactions he could have had lay utterly beyond him. It was like injuring his leg had been, pain piled upon pain until the sensation ceased to have any meaning. Once, halfway along that terrible trek back home, he had fallen and sprained his ankle - and had not realized it until Neville had gotten him into a bed in Hogwarts' sick ward. He simply hadn't felt it.
Dealing with Ron was like this, another part of Harry's life that had been tortured and twisted beyond all endurance. And so when he gazed at his best friend it was through that screen of strange detachment, letting the pain wash over and around him, but never go through him.
"Who was it?" he asked calmly. His fingers worried at the dwindling scrap of parchment.
"He doesn't remember," Neville said before Ron could get his mouth open, but loud enough to cover anything Ron might have said. He turned to Harry and said in a softer voice, "We've been over this with Professor McGonagall already - she's got all his testimony and everything, but I don't want him to say anything that could get him in trouble."
"I'm already in trouble," Ron mumbled half into his pillow. He had opened his eyes again, red-rimmed but curiously intent.
"You shouldn't have done this, Ron," Harry told him. There was something deep in his throat now, a small tickle. His fingers redoubled their efforts on the parchment, peeling away tiny bits of it with his nails.
"I should have done it sooner." The words were little more than a sigh, but were audible enough. "Dragged it out too long."
"You shouldn't have done it at all," Harry replied tightly. "I... you've told me why so many times why, but I can't believe it. This - " his gesture took in the tiny curtained space, the sick ward, the entire prison - "isn't worth what happened to you. Nothing is."
Ron's eyes slid shut. "You're always worth it."
/"Of course you would," Hermione whispered sadly. The smile she turned on him was so deeply grief-ridden it snarled around his heart and made it difficult to think past the ache in it. "To Ron, you're always worth it... And that's why he did it."/
/Oh, no, no.../ Harry thought now, despairingly.
/ "That's why... I don't know why I didn't see it."/
Ron's words, and the memory of Hermione's, stripped the fog away. The length of the day stretched cruelly before him, the weight of revelation oppressed him: Draco had been imprisoned and slowly drained of life by dementors, Ron had been tortured, suffered under Cruciatus... /because of you, Harry Potter. *Because of you*./
/You're always worth it./
"Ron, I'm not." Oh, God, he was going to start crying. /Don't cry, you'll make an ass out of yourself in front of Neville./ Neville, who, was hanging tactfully back - he had probably seen hundreds of people blubbering helplessly over the body of some family member or other, watching Harry have a breakdown would be just another one to add to the list. "Ron, I'm *not*."
Ron wasn't arguing, but through the thin haze of confusion and denial, Harry saw this was because he had dozed off. The slack, exhausted face was an accusation - and, too, it was a denial of the words Ron had just said moments earlier. /Could anything be worth *this*? Not likely... especially not you, Harry Potter./
Wearily, he slumped back in his chair. Had he ever been this tired? He remembered visits to St. Mungo's, to the closed wards that always seemed to have sleeping potions piped through the air. But people got better at St. Mungo's...
Neville sighed loudly. "He's really a mess, Harry, I can't lie to you... I tried to, to Mrs. Weasley, and I think she would have hexed me if Mr. Weasley hadn't stopped her."
Harry had no difficulty accepting this. Mrs. Weasley had a tigerish temper, fierce enough to match any three of her children, and he could easily see her lashing out at Neville in the fear of the moment. Attacking Malleus would have done no good... it would have landed her in a cell right next to Draco. "Will he get better?" he asked softly, wondering if this time his answer would be different.
"I don't know," Neville muttered. He fussed with his wand, then turned to rearrange the vials and bottles arranged on the bedside table. "Maybe."
There had never before been any 'maybe' about Ron. He thought about their school days, their steady divergence from each other, when he'd thought it best to rely on himself instead of on friends loaded down with new, important responsibilities that seemed to have no real importance at all. Friendship had been a kind of tyranny back then; he'd both loved Ron and Hermione, and resented them, because when it was all said and done, and they'd made it through the war alive... they had been there.
"Ron... I can't. I can't do it," Harry whispered fervently, blinking a bit to keep back tears. "Not alone."
Ron stirred at the words, shook his head, and turned to face Harry.
"You're going to have to." The hazel eyes were uncompromising despite the pain. "Harry... you've already faced down You-Know - I mean, Voldemort... alone.. .and you're going to have to do this alone, too. I can't do it, Hermione can't do it, Draco can't - you're going to have to save the day." Ron paused thoughtfully. "Again."
"Not... I can't do it by myself, Ron!" He didn't know how he kept his voice from breaking into a wail.
"You can... you have." Ron's voice was now very low, and Harry had to lean forward to hear him. There were dark marks under his eyes, and as he spoke, his lids slid shut. "Fudge has to be stopped, Harry. It's as bad - as bad as the last time, when he didn't believe Voldemort was coming back."
It had been fifth year... Harry could not think of Umbridge without a wave of loathing. The inquisition had had its own peculiar, evil flavor back then, with the truth squelched underneath Fudge and Umbridge's demands for order. Now, under the guise of Draco's trial, Fudge wanted to once again remind the world who was in charge. He, Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, would make an example to those who thought to start Voldemort's crusade again, and Draco Malfoy was his example. Ron Weasley was his example, as Harry Potter had once been.
/You're only The Boy Who Lived when times are good... Otherwise, you're just an attention-seeking, angsting teenager./ He wondered obliquely what the headlines would be this time around.
BOY WHO LIVED, DEATH EATER, AUROR FOUND IN COMPROMISING POSITION
Ministry suspects subversion of war heroes, unnatural sexual acts
He giggled involuntarily. Ron, who had been dozing off, came to with a start.
"Glad you think it's funny," Ron grunted.
"Sorry."
The parchment was gone now, and its scraps now littered the floor at Harry's feet. He wanted to latch onto something else and expend his frustration on that - it had been so long since he'd found himself trapped and helpless, with nothing to do. Coming at the end of several days of incarceration, the thought was intolerable. A sudden restlessness, despite the difficulty of the day, seized him. There was no room, though, to move in the tiny cubicle, not with the bed taking up most of the space and Neville occupying it.
His fingers switched to kneading the loose drapery of his robe.
"I shouldn't keep him awake much longer," Neville said abruptly, hovering on the side of the bed opposite Harry. "He's had a pretty rough time of it, Harry, and he needs his rest."
Harry could only nod. He tried not to think of the times he had seen people under Cruciatus. There were shadows in Neville's eyes that said he remembered all too well other, less fortunate people - his parents, tortured into mindlessness by the pain - but overlaying the fear and uncertainty was his kind of bravery, and maybe the confidence of a mediwizard. /Some things can't be fixed,/ he told Neville silently.
/So what? It's worth a try, at least. Right, Harry?/ would be Neville's answer.
"Is there anything you need before I go?" he asked Ron.
The red head shook weakly on the pillow. "No... no, not really." Ron coughed, a dry and rasping wheeze. Neville was by his head immediately with a cup of water, but Ron ignored it. "Just... I need to tell you, but I couldn't tell McGonagall. Or, I tried, but she thought I was delirious... Well, maybe I was... but..."
"What is it, Ron?"
Ron's lips curved in a slight smile. There was a long, weary silence; for a moment, Harry thought Ron had dozed off, but then the hazel eyes flickered open and Ron whispered, "Knight to H3."
Later, at dinner, Minerva would ask Harry later what this comment meant, saying that she had always known Ron liked chess, but what did it have to do with the present situation? Ignoring Hermione's gasp of horrified comprehension, he would look steadfastly at his napkin and say that he didn't know. Ron must have been delirious, he would say. Delirious people say all sorts of things.
TBC.
Thank you, drive through.
CHAPTER NINE
+Mens mea cupit cantare formas versas in nova corpora.+
(Ovid)
CHAPTER NINE
Harry ignored Malleus' rusty protests, and his own wrenching fear of the dementors, and stepped closer. Draco met him halfway. A frigid whirlpool sucked at Harry's thoughts, tried to distract him with despair - /hold on to Draco, hold on tight, we'll take him from you soon enough, he'll die, your friend will die, and you will live - but he fought against it, made himself ask, "Where?"
"The lake." Draco's breath was chill against Harry's ear. The translucent skin was so close, shuddering not inches from Harry's face. "There is... a tunnel. Just fall - it's that easy."
He barely had time to nod before Malleus' hand closed around his arm in a formidable grip, pulling him back. The soft, furious remonstrations slipped through one ear and out the other as the dementors surrounded Draco once more and pulled him away with such swiftness that they seemed to vanish into the dark hallway.
Harry stared blindly at the blank place for a moment, not feeling Malleus' touch upon his arm.
"It's time we were off," the man said in his ear. His breath was colder than the dank air of the prison hallway, and Harry shivered. But he did not move.
"I..." He licked his lips and tried to speak. His throat had gone dry, and something lodged, an uncomfortable and heavy weight, inside his chest. "He looks..." /Finish your sentences!/ Harry searched his memory of Draco's face, and realized that he had never once seen it so pale and drawn, or so defeated. Casting back through the years, he found he could not remember one time when that arrogant, infuriating fire hadn't been in Draco's eyes. The absence frightened him more than he could say.
"No one looks at their best here," Malleus said briskly, and with a certain amount of satisfaction that did not escape Harry. The light touch on Harry's arm became a commanding grip, and before Harry quite knew what was happening, Malleus was towing him along.
Irritably, he shook off Malleus' hand and demanded to know what had been done to Draco, to make him look like that.
Malleus stared down the hallway, and the silence between them became so absolute that Harry thought the man was not going to answer him. After a moment, however, the reply came: "He has a Dementor nearby at all times, which is of course standard procedure, but I have not had him questioned, or had anything much to do with him."
"*You* haven't questioned him," Harry muttered blackly.
The warden must have heard it, for the look he gave Harry was at once irritated and faintly self-deprecating. "True, I have not - but then, I am only the warden. There are others who come here for information... How they get it is not my concern, or my business."
"They're your responsibility."
"They're prisoners," Malleus said flatly. His stride became longer and Harry had to double-time it to keep up. "You would do well to remember this in the future - and you would also do well to remember that while you're here, there is very little you can do to help him. Should you even be helping him?" The expression on Malleus' face was unexpectedly shrewd, and the old hunger was back, probing and seeking. "Naturally, I couldn't help but be informed of events during the last bit of trouble and from all I've gathered..."
"You know absolutely nothing about it," Harry said stiffly. He reached past his headache for anger and found it, enough to bolster his pride. /When did you ever like walking small?/ The thought made more fuel for his anger, but he kept it back. Hoarding it, he thought - that sounded appropriate. "Would you take me to Ron, please?"
Malleus must have caught the hint that Harry was not requesting anything. Wordlessly, he quickened his step until Harry had to hustle to keep up, and the effort told very swiftly on his bad leg. Harry gritted his teeth and forced himself to stay in step with Malleus, determined that the man would not wrench any more satisfaction out of him.
/It seems like that's what he's doing./ Harry glanced covertly at Malleus, probing the blank face for any sign of satisfaction. It was perfectly straight, and revealing of absolutely nothing, yet Harry had the distinct sense that the man was gloating just as Fudge had been back in London. He had that aura to him, Harry thought, the air of a person who had everything going the way he wanted it to go - and had his victims there, right where he wanted them. If Fudge had been a fat, self-satisfied cat toying with mice, though, then Malleus seemed much more dangerous, a tiger watching its prey.
The silence between the two of them grew, fed by Malleus' pleasure and the anger and tension that built in Harry with each passing moment. /Something needs to happen, or I'll explode./ The walk stretched on interminably, the walls slid by with infuriating monotony, their anonymous surface unchanging no matter how hard Harry searched for a landmark. And all the while... He bit back a growl as Malleus strode unconcernedly alongside him.
Finally, after one last sharp turn, they reached a set of stairs. Harry gazed despairingly up them, but Malleus did not pause; instead, he grunted something about a shortcut and began to climb up, leaving Harry to toil in his wake. The stairs wound around in a tight, tortuous knot, like the one rapidly building in Harry's leg. Sweat, unpleasant and clammy, broke out and beaded on his flesh where it raised gooseflesh and trickled down his neck.
He became genuinely worried as the climb continued with no signs of ending, and his hand began to shake as he slid it along the railing. Malleus was glancing periodically back at him, which Harry was trying to anticipate and react to, but with his mind wandering feverishly over possibilities, he couldn't react to swiftly enough. The satisfaction wafting back from Malleus became nearly palpable, a thin thread of acridity in the damp despair of the prison.
/Please,/ Harry thought in time with the breaths he could no longer keep normal - he was panting and wheezing like an old man -- /Please let this end soon./ The walls closed in ever more tightly, and he'd lost all sense of direction except for up and down, and both of those stretched interminably. He would never stop climbing, but if he fell, he would fall forever.
It took a moment for the sound of Malleus unlocking a door to penetrate through the fog surrounding his brain. Keys jangled loudly in the silence, covering up the breaths Harry couldn't keep himself from gulping.
"This is the... ah," Malleus paused, glancing down at Harry who waited a few steps below, "the hospital ward."
"The *what*?" Shock drove the breath from Harry again.
"You heard me." Malleus' grip on the door handle tightened. "Mr. Weasley did not make his trip here very willingly, according to what I was told... I've been having him kept up here until the trial." The warden shrugged and fiddled with the keys some more.
There was a disturbing undercurrent to those words, one that caught at Harry's conscience like a hook. /Don't think about it, don't think about it./ He squared his shoulders, fought down the thoughts and the pain and made himself walk evenly past Malleus as the door swung open.
The first thing that hit Harry was the smell. It was thick and sharp, made of centuries of healing herbs and disgusting concoctions that had marinated with blood and pain, and over it lay the general bitterness of hopelessness of Azkaban itself. A few beds were lined up along the wall and separated by curtains, with tables here and there, jars stacked in cabinets, but there was a patchwork quality to it, something that said the healing done here was only temporary - if healing was ever done at all. This was not a place one went to get better... Death was more easily expected, and probably welcomed.
/Ron./ Curtains were drawn around one bed, and Harry could discern some movement behind it. There was a rustling, a thud of glass on wood, and then an unexpected voice tentatively asking Ron to drink up.
"Neville?"
There was a gasp and liquid splutter, the sound of a spoon hitting the floor.
"Harry?" Neville's disheveled, round head poked through the curtains. "Harry!" Neville vanished a moment to the sound of scraping and muttered comments before he reappeared again, straightening his robes. The effort did not help, but it rarely ever did. Neville always looked as though he had stepped out of a hurricane, and acted it too; even after several years of difficult work, he had kept the wide-eyed expression of perpetual bewilderment that Harry remembered from so long ago. It had been one of the few things that had survived from Before; the hand that shook Harry's even now was steady, the same hand that had splinted Harry's ruined leg and helped carry him to safety.
A sudden jolt of memory from his fifth year came to him: Neville *fighting* the Death Eaters, not cowering in fear or impotence, but *fighting.*
"Neville," Harry mumbled, peering around Neville's shoulder to the curtained bed. Fear spiked sharply inside him. "What... what happened?"
"Come on." Neville turned around and ducked behind the curtain, gesturing for Harry to follow. Harry obeyed, looking back briefly at Malleus, who offered him a thin smile. Harry had time to briefly wonder at the expression before he heard Neville's voice, very low but insistent, saying, "Ron... Ron, come on... Harry's here."
The words drew his wavering attention back to the still figure on the bed. For a moment he was pleasantly numb and distant, very far removed from the sight of his best friend, deathly pale and lifeless on the bed.
"Oh, *Ron*..." As Ron's name creaked from his lips, reality hit him, a staggering blow to the heart.
"Do I... look that bad?" First one eyelid and then the other cracked open to peer at Harry with pained and weary humor.
"Worse," Harry said faintly. He fell more than sat into a chair Neville had pushed up behind him. He tried to remember all the times Ron had gotten into some scrape or other. /When he broke his arm back in the Whomping Willow,/ a frantic little voice supplied. He had had the same desperate whiteness then, his freckles standing out in violent relief against his skin. He remembered with awful clarity when he had pulled Ron from the lake and the clutches of the mer-people. The brightness of his red hair was almost an obscenity. /So much like Draco.../ Like Draco, Ron was missing some vital property, pulled from him by this place.
Stiffly, he moved his chair closer to Ron's bedside. The red head flopped listlessly over to track his movements. Ron's eyes slid shut again when Harry settled himself. Neville was hovering directly behind Harry now, making soft and concerned noises.
"What happened, Ron?" Harry whispered, bending close.
For a moment he thought Ron had fallen asleep - /Don't think about him dying/ - and he was about to turn around to ask Neville when Ron's whispered, "Cru-" froze him.
"Don't say anything, Ron," Neville broke in, glancing nervously at the place beyond the curtain where Malleus Ironhand waited. He turned aside, picked up a quill and a piece of paper, scribbled something, and handed it to Harry.
"Oh." Harry's fingers knotted around the parchment. It was an effort to unwind them; as soon as he did, they fell to shredding the parchment, crumbling it so that small pieces of it littered the lap of his robe. He searched through himself, trying to find anger, horror, despair, murderous rage, guilt, righteous conviction... Nothing. Deep inside he found absolutely nothing.
The day had drained everything from him; any normal reactions he could have had lay utterly beyond him. It was like injuring his leg had been, pain piled upon pain until the sensation ceased to have any meaning. Once, halfway along that terrible trek back home, he had fallen and sprained his ankle - and had not realized it until Neville had gotten him into a bed in Hogwarts' sick ward. He simply hadn't felt it.
Dealing with Ron was like this, another part of Harry's life that had been tortured and twisted beyond all endurance. And so when he gazed at his best friend it was through that screen of strange detachment, letting the pain wash over and around him, but never go through him.
"Who was it?" he asked calmly. His fingers worried at the dwindling scrap of parchment.
"He doesn't remember," Neville said before Ron could get his mouth open, but loud enough to cover anything Ron might have said. He turned to Harry and said in a softer voice, "We've been over this with Professor McGonagall already - she's got all his testimony and everything, but I don't want him to say anything that could get him in trouble."
"I'm already in trouble," Ron mumbled half into his pillow. He had opened his eyes again, red-rimmed but curiously intent.
"You shouldn't have done this, Ron," Harry told him. There was something deep in his throat now, a small tickle. His fingers redoubled their efforts on the parchment, peeling away tiny bits of it with his nails.
"I should have done it sooner." The words were little more than a sigh, but were audible enough. "Dragged it out too long."
"You shouldn't have done it at all," Harry replied tightly. "I... you've told me why so many times why, but I can't believe it. This - " his gesture took in the tiny curtained space, the sick ward, the entire prison - "isn't worth what happened to you. Nothing is."
Ron's eyes slid shut. "You're always worth it."
/"Of course you would," Hermione whispered sadly. The smile she turned on him was so deeply grief-ridden it snarled around his heart and made it difficult to think past the ache in it. "To Ron, you're always worth it... And that's why he did it."/
/Oh, no, no.../ Harry thought now, despairingly.
/ "That's why... I don't know why I didn't see it."/
Ron's words, and the memory of Hermione's, stripped the fog away. The length of the day stretched cruelly before him, the weight of revelation oppressed him: Draco had been imprisoned and slowly drained of life by dementors, Ron had been tortured, suffered under Cruciatus... /because of you, Harry Potter. *Because of you*./
/You're always worth it./
"Ron, I'm not." Oh, God, he was going to start crying. /Don't cry, you'll make an ass out of yourself in front of Neville./ Neville, who, was hanging tactfully back - he had probably seen hundreds of people blubbering helplessly over the body of some family member or other, watching Harry have a breakdown would be just another one to add to the list. "Ron, I'm *not*."
Ron wasn't arguing, but through the thin haze of confusion and denial, Harry saw this was because he had dozed off. The slack, exhausted face was an accusation - and, too, it was a denial of the words Ron had just said moments earlier. /Could anything be worth *this*? Not likely... especially not you, Harry Potter./
Wearily, he slumped back in his chair. Had he ever been this tired? He remembered visits to St. Mungo's, to the closed wards that always seemed to have sleeping potions piped through the air. But people got better at St. Mungo's...
Neville sighed loudly. "He's really a mess, Harry, I can't lie to you... I tried to, to Mrs. Weasley, and I think she would have hexed me if Mr. Weasley hadn't stopped her."
Harry had no difficulty accepting this. Mrs. Weasley had a tigerish temper, fierce enough to match any three of her children, and he could easily see her lashing out at Neville in the fear of the moment. Attacking Malleus would have done no good... it would have landed her in a cell right next to Draco. "Will he get better?" he asked softly, wondering if this time his answer would be different.
"I don't know," Neville muttered. He fussed with his wand, then turned to rearrange the vials and bottles arranged on the bedside table. "Maybe."
There had never before been any 'maybe' about Ron. He thought about their school days, their steady divergence from each other, when he'd thought it best to rely on himself instead of on friends loaded down with new, important responsibilities that seemed to have no real importance at all. Friendship had been a kind of tyranny back then; he'd both loved Ron and Hermione, and resented them, because when it was all said and done, and they'd made it through the war alive... they had been there.
"Ron... I can't. I can't do it," Harry whispered fervently, blinking a bit to keep back tears. "Not alone."
Ron stirred at the words, shook his head, and turned to face Harry.
"You're going to have to." The hazel eyes were uncompromising despite the pain. "Harry... you've already faced down You-Know - I mean, Voldemort... alone.. .and you're going to have to do this alone, too. I can't do it, Hermione can't do it, Draco can't - you're going to have to save the day." Ron paused thoughtfully. "Again."
"Not... I can't do it by myself, Ron!" He didn't know how he kept his voice from breaking into a wail.
"You can... you have." Ron's voice was now very low, and Harry had to lean forward to hear him. There were dark marks under his eyes, and as he spoke, his lids slid shut. "Fudge has to be stopped, Harry. It's as bad - as bad as the last time, when he didn't believe Voldemort was coming back."
It had been fifth year... Harry could not think of Umbridge without a wave of loathing. The inquisition had had its own peculiar, evil flavor back then, with the truth squelched underneath Fudge and Umbridge's demands for order. Now, under the guise of Draco's trial, Fudge wanted to once again remind the world who was in charge. He, Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, would make an example to those who thought to start Voldemort's crusade again, and Draco Malfoy was his example. Ron Weasley was his example, as Harry Potter had once been.
/You're only The Boy Who Lived when times are good... Otherwise, you're just an attention-seeking, angsting teenager./ He wondered obliquely what the headlines would be this time around.
BOY WHO LIVED, DEATH EATER, AUROR FOUND IN COMPROMISING POSITION
Ministry suspects subversion of war heroes, unnatural sexual acts
He giggled involuntarily. Ron, who had been dozing off, came to with a start.
"Glad you think it's funny," Ron grunted.
"Sorry."
The parchment was gone now, and its scraps now littered the floor at Harry's feet. He wanted to latch onto something else and expend his frustration on that - it had been so long since he'd found himself trapped and helpless, with nothing to do. Coming at the end of several days of incarceration, the thought was intolerable. A sudden restlessness, despite the difficulty of the day, seized him. There was no room, though, to move in the tiny cubicle, not with the bed taking up most of the space and Neville occupying it.
His fingers switched to kneading the loose drapery of his robe.
"I shouldn't keep him awake much longer," Neville said abruptly, hovering on the side of the bed opposite Harry. "He's had a pretty rough time of it, Harry, and he needs his rest."
Harry could only nod. He tried not to think of the times he had seen people under Cruciatus. There were shadows in Neville's eyes that said he remembered all too well other, less fortunate people - his parents, tortured into mindlessness by the pain - but overlaying the fear and uncertainty was his kind of bravery, and maybe the confidence of a mediwizard. /Some things can't be fixed,/ he told Neville silently.
/So what? It's worth a try, at least. Right, Harry?/ would be Neville's answer.
"Is there anything you need before I go?" he asked Ron.
The red head shook weakly on the pillow. "No... no, not really." Ron coughed, a dry and rasping wheeze. Neville was by his head immediately with a cup of water, but Ron ignored it. "Just... I need to tell you, but I couldn't tell McGonagall. Or, I tried, but she thought I was delirious... Well, maybe I was... but..."
"What is it, Ron?"
Ron's lips curved in a slight smile. There was a long, weary silence; for a moment, Harry thought Ron had dozed off, but then the hazel eyes flickered open and Ron whispered, "Knight to H3."
Later, at dinner, Minerva would ask Harry later what this comment meant, saying that she had always known Ron liked chess, but what did it have to do with the present situation? Ignoring Hermione's gasp of horrified comprehension, he would look steadfastly at his napkin and say that he didn't know. Ron must have been delirious, he would say. Delirious people say all sorts of things.
TBC.