The Price of Love
It wasn't exactly a full-proof plan, staying up the entire night long, but it was effective.
It seemed like the moment he resolved to stay up the entire night, his eyelids gained ten pounds. He lay on the couch as always, waiting for Sirius to arrive, and he did.
"Goddamn piece of shit!" Just as he had suspected, the anger that had been aimed at him that morning came back with alarming speed as it transferred itself into violence. "Disobedient little bitch!"
As far as injuries go, it was an extremely bad night. He was almost positive he had sprained his wrist. Cuts and lacerations were deeper then usual. A slash on his shoulder blade took an alarming amount of time to stop bleeding.
A frequent fear of his that night was that he was going to become anemic due to the blood loss. That happened some times on bad nights where he bled a lot.
Sometimes – after nights like that one – he worried terribly that he was going to get Sirius so mad that one night he beat him really bad. Not only beat him… but maybe rape him as well.
It had never happened before, but he swore to himself that if it ever did, he was going to confess about what had been happening.
It was often what he dreamed about to his distress. He often cried himself back to sleep every night after having to endure one of those dreams. It took a lot of effort to keep himself from coming clean, but he had to keep telling himself that it hadn't actually happened, and that Sirius would never do something like that. And what's more, that Sirius would be mortified to find out Harry had been worried about it happening. Imagine finding out that your godson is in fear that you're going to rape him one day.
After getting himself bandaged, his first order of business was, of course, to clean everything up. He feared that a coffee table had reached its end. He must have glued it about five times all ready, so he might as well take the heat for it, and maybe Sirius could repair it with magic.
He was in constant fear that he was making too much noise that night, and that he was going to wake Sirius up and everything would be out of the bag.
He had once read somewhere that you could stay awake for 10 straight days, but that by the 5th day, he would start hallucinating. He hoped that he would be able to get some sleep before the point where he was seeing things.
After cleaning, the next thing he did was drinking about five consecutive cups of coffee, and loading up on chocolate. If Sirius thought he was fooling anyone with the hoard of chocolate he was hiding in the box at the top of the closet, he was wrong. Maybe he should try hiding it where he hid his vodka and whiskey bottles, he thought bitterly.
He couldn't stop moving for more then two seconds at a time. His foot moved like a dog having its stomach rubbed.
As he was bored after very little time, needing to be very active with the caffeine that ran through his bloodstream, he took a jog to the 24 hour pharmacy in the little muggle town near his house. He tried to purchase some caffeine pills, but the lady behind the counter refused to sell them to him, as he had suspected. He could, however, buy two bottles of Excedrin, which had a lot of caffeine in it as well.
By the time Sirius woke up the next day, Harry was still pretty hyper, but he was also pretty exhausted. It was a strange combination.
When Sirius came down the stairs, groggy as ever, he found a huge breakfast, with a table cloth, placemats, and shiny silverware. The table was set for five.
"I didn't know we owned placemats."
"Oh, you didn't, but I went out and bought you some." His voice was fast.
Sirius sat down, drained his cup of coffee, got up, and left the table. "I'm going back to bed."
Harry looked at his perfect table, and the stack of dishes that had acquired in the sink. He shrugged, and began attacking the dishes until they sparkled, and then he polished all the rest of the silverware, and put away the rest of it in the neatly organized drawer.
By the time Sirius woke up again, it was 12:00, and the entire living room was sparkling.
"Where did this junk come from?" he asked, looking down into a jar of multicolored leaves.
"I found it in the back of the closet, which I reorganized fifteen minutes ago. It was in the box with all the other stuff your Mom bought for you for the new house."
"You went through the care package?" Sirius deadpanned.
"Yes, why?"
"Did you ever think there was a reason that I put it in the back of the closet?"
"Not really."
"My Mom means well, she really does… she just has this knack for forgetting things." He sneezed "Like the fact that I'm allergic to potpourri." He sniffed.
"You might not want to go into the upstairs hall closet for a little while. Or the bathroom, either." He was still hopping from foot to foot, shaking a little bit.
"Harry, go to sleep." Sirius told him, with a hand on his shoulder.
"I don't know what you're talking about. I got plenty of sleep. Like, almost nine hours of sleep last night. Maybe even ten hours! Or it could have been twelve, I was so fast asleep that I couldn't even tell what time I went to sleep at. I am so completely rested that I'm almost tired from too much sleep. Are you tired, Sirius? If you want to go back to sleep I can I clean up all this junk." He paused to look around the spotless room. "I can be done in about fifteen minutes if you want me to do the upstairs too. Maybe I can start working on a gazebo out in the backyard. All I'd have to do is chop down some trees. It can't be too hard because I was watching this show on TV one day when I lived with the Dursleys, and they were building a gazebo on a roof, only they didn't know that they had to secure it to the top of the roof so there was a huge hurricane this one day and it flipped off the top and fell on these three guys and it squashed them."
"Are you doing drugs?" Sirius asked him. He had been trying unsuccessfully to cut him off during his monologue. But could make himself heard past all the sneezing.
"No, of course I haven't been doing drugs, I was watching this one show on TV about this guy who did heroin and he lived out on this street and looked a lot like you did when you first got out of Azkaban, and so my Uncle was like, "See, Dudley, this is what happens to people when they do drugs." And I was like, "Then why do they do drugs at all?" and he was like, "Because they're freaks" and I was like, "But I'm a freak, and I don't do drugs." And he was like, "Go to your cupboard, you insolent little brat." And I was like, "Alright."
Sirius looked like he was going to burst from restraining his laughter. "How much coffee have you had, Harry?" He then made a noise somewhere between a chuckle and sneeze.
"Oh, not all that much. Only around ten, maybe fifteen cups. But coffee is the best thing in the world for you. I don't see how anyone can live without it! Coffee is amazing. I don't understand why tea is such a big British thing, we should all be drinking coffee!"
Sirius sighed. "So you're going to be up for like, the next twenty-four hours, jumping off the wall, aren't you?"
"I've never tried jumping off the walls. Is that cool? I was watching this one movie where these guys were all doing karate, and this one guy walked up the entire wall and then he did a back flip off of it. Can I try that? Maybe if I get a head start, maybe from here." Sirius grabbed him by the scruff of his neck to his pain as he tried to lunge himself at the wall.
"What do I do with a kid who has drank way too much coffee, and can't sleep?" Another sneeze.
"Are you talking to yourself?"
"Yes, Harry, I am." He wiped away a couple of tears, and he looked a bit red in the face.
"I'm going to go throw away the potpourri in the trash, and then I'm going to go take out the trash, then maybe I'll take all the trash to the dump. That's only about two miles away, isn't it?"
When he had dumped all the bowls of flowers into the garbage, he put them in pile quite a ways away from the house. He hadn't planned on being discovered this early on, but it wasn't exactly like Sirius wasn't going to be able to tell if he was shaking with caffeine.
"Harry." Sirius ambushed him in the living room, his eyes still pretty red. "Look, you're pretty brained right now, so I'll spare you the lecture as you probably won't hear half of it anyway, but I'm not going to have you jumping around the entire day. I've got some potion in the cabinet that you can take that will make you go to sleep."
"Seriously! I got plenty of sleep last night. If I get anymore sleep, I could die! You don't want me to die do you? Do you want that on your conscience that you killed your godson? I'll stop talking, really, Sirius. I'll stop right now."
Sirius rose his eyebrows in amusement.
"Just this one thing, and then I'll be quite for the rest of the day. If you object so much to me taking sleeping potion, why do you have it in the house?"
"It's for emergencies, and sleeping potion isn't half as addictive as dreamless sleep potion."
"Oh, okay. So, I'll be quite now? Seriously, I won't say another word for the rest of the day."
There was silence for about fifteen seconds, during which time, he tapped his foot with the speed of a rabbit, he wrung his hands, and his eye twitched horribly.
"Harry, go to bed."
"But I-"
"I said to go to bed." His voice was a bit forceful now. He couldn't remember, but he was pretty sure this was the first time he could he remember Sirius making him do something without asking him first.
"You're not the boss of me. I don't have to go to bed if I don't want to."
"Oh, you don't do you? Well, you can walk, or I can carry you there, force the potion down your throat and tie you to bed."
"You're not that insane. You wouldn't do that." His voice did not hold the air of someone who felt sure of themselves."
"Oh, I hadn't been planning on doing it, but now that you've questioned my authority now."
"But Sirius! I'm going to have those dreams again!"
"Well, its quite obvious that the only reason you drank ten effing cups of coffee was so that you wouldn't have to sleep, so you wouldn't have to experience those dreams. That may actually be the stupidest plan I've ever heard of, but be that as it may, you're going to have those dreams regardless of when you sleep unless you stop doing shit like this, and start believing what I'm telling you."
"Who's the one loaded up on coffee and chocolate here?" he asked cockily. He wondered if Sirius would be such a prick about this if he realized he was inadvertently doing this for him.
Instead of responding with an equally brash comment, he swung Harry up over his head, and did exactly what he had threatened to do.
After making a pit stop in Sirius's own privet bathroom, he dropped him on top of his bed hastily, and Harry's sore back moaned in protest. "Are you going to drink this, or am I going to have to make you?"
"But Sirius! I- please? Don't make me sleep." But he was all ready really tired. The caffeine high was wearing off fast, and it was leaving him falling asleep where he sat.
"Harry, come on now. You can't honestly stay up for the rest of your life. I mean, sure, the coffee was a quick fix, but how long were you expecting to stay up?"
"Maybe until I figured out a better idea?"
"And how long before you figure that one out? If you would just start believing that you aren't responsible for half of the stuff you think you are, you wouldn't be in this mess."
But it wouldn't. He like the dreams with Cedric a hell of a lot more then the dreams with Sirius abusing him, even though he made less noise with the abusive ones. He looked up at Sirius, pleading him with his eyes. Even on the super small chance he would actually be allowed to stay up for the rest of the day, or even for the next five minutes, what was he supposed to do? He was falling asleep as Sirius talked to him.
"Oh, come on, Harry. I can tell you're tired. I'm still giving you the potion, so you'll sleep through the night, though, because I don't need you up at three in the morning making another fifteen course breakfast that we'll be eating until the end of summer.
"The night! You can't, Sirius! Yueah-" The small bottled was shoved down his throat, and he almost choked on it. He was going to have to rely on Sirius beating him to wake him up if he got drunk that night.