Arbitrary Jurisdiction Chapter 42: Consequences of Trauma, a harry potter fanfic

a/n1: Hello my dear readers and welcome to a new installment of How To Torture Your Characters. Kidding, mostly. As I said in the last chapter notes this story is going to get darker in terms of representing the consequences of severe (longtime) trauma. This chapter is one of the dark ones. There is hate speech that will remind you uncomfortably of reality. There is self-harm and disturbing nightmares. Stress induced anorexia nervosa. Paranoia. Developing medication addiction. Obsessive-compulsive behaviour. In that order - skip what you know isn't good for you.
All my betalove goes to reynardinepttr. I hope you enjoy this!

15th June 1998, 16:05

When Harry entered Diagon Alley through the courtyard behind the Leaky Cauldron he remembered the first time he saw the magical street. The sounds and colours had been nearly overwhelming with their difference to the muggle world he had then been used to.

A small smile played around Harry's lips when he set out for Gringotts, just like Hagrid and he had so many years ago. He passed shops with overflowing baskets presenting their goods to the passers-by, and properties with barred windows and 'Up for Rent - Floo Malloy's Real Estate' signs.

He was just past the boarded up windows of Weasleys' Wizarding Wheezes when someone called his name from the steps of Flourish and Blotts.

"George, Theo, good to see you!" Harry went over to the two of them with a smile.

"Likewise Harry, never mind that we saw you just yesterday," George said with a grin. "What are you up to on this lovely summer day?"

"I was going to Gringotts," Harry told them, stepping to the side to let someone past him and into the bookshop. "Arthur asked me yesterday if I ever found out what happened to Potter Manor, and Bill mentioned that my Gringotts representative should know."

George hmm'd thoughtfully but before any of them could react, they heard a hissed 'Death Eater scum' from a passing witch. Theo flinched and George turned around to look after the witch who was already hurrying away.

"Honestly, not even brave enough to say it to my face," Theo tried to joke, but even Harry could see that he was shaken.

"How often does that happen when you go out?" Harry asked, frowning.

"Let's just say she wasn't the first today and there are reasons why I prefer Owl Order," Theo answered nonchalantly, apparently having caught himself again.

"It's really annoying and he won't let me hex them," George said with a dark expression.

Harry sighed. "Well, violence shouldn't be the answer after all. But I know what you mean, Pansy's the same. She'd rather hide in the muggle world than fight this."

"We can't all be the Gryffindor hero," Theo said quietly.

"But you could have damn well tried, young man," a middle-aged witch suddenly materialising beside them said haughtily. "I don't believe this wish-wash about you being a child. Look at Mr Potter here, he was just as much a child and he fought You-Know-Who ever since he was eleven!"

Harry bristled. "So I was groomed to fight Voldemort. That doesn't exactly make it better."

"Nonsense, you just did what was right," a portly older man in robes of an eye-watering purple said, filled with self-importance. "This one should have done the same. It's not like he couldn't have fought back, I'm sure old Nott taught him enough."

"Eh, it's in his blood to be a mean little bully, he couldn't have done better," said a young man who seemed to be with Purple Robes with a sneer worthy of Draco Malfoy himself.

Harry would later say that it was that last comment that had him snap and cause a scene in the middle of Diagon Alley. But it really was the echo of Aunt Marge's voice, of the Dursleys' comments about him for so many years - and the way Theo just took it, a resigned look in his eyes. Because Harry remembered that look staring back at him many years and many a summer whenever his eyes fell on a reflective surface.

For now he turned on the small crowd in front of them.

"So you're so much better? Why? Did you fight in the Battle of Hogwarts? Because I don't remember seeing you there. Did you harbour fugitives in your home? Did you fight alongside the Order of the Phoenix? Did you step in front of a Death Eater and told them that they won't win this fight, this battle, this war? Or did you just look away when Snatchers came knocking on your neighbour's door? Did you look away when innocent people got rounded up and sent to Azkaban?"

Harry relished in the scared and scandalised looks on the faces of the crowd. He ignored the photographer, he couldn't care less if this ended up on the front page of the Daily Prophet. It had to be said.

"My boy, certainly you aren't saying that we supported them," the portly man said with a genial laugh. "Why would-"

Harry didn't let him finish. "No. I'm saying you didn't actively fight him. I don't care about your reasons. I don't even really care that you didn't fight. But your damn hypocrisy makes me sick. This is not what I fought for. This isn't what my friends and school mates and fellows in the Order fought and sometimes even died for." Harry silenced the middle-aged witch with a glare. "You don't even dare to speak his name and yet you judge those who didn't dare fight him."

"Harry, please, it's okay," Theo said quietly behind him.

"It really isn't," Harry said, deflating. "Let's go, I'm sick of these people."

Harry pushed his way through the stunned crowd, George and Theo following in his wake. He saw the familiar jet of light from the 'Petrificus Totalus' heading for Theo and while turning around cast 'Protego'.

He turned to the young man who still held his wand in his hand. Harry cast the Tickling Hex and his own Petrificus in quick succession, leaving the man unable to move. He then glared at the crowd and grabbed George and Theo to pull them away before someone could get the brilliant idea to use a more harmful curse on them.

16th June 1998, 8:36

Draco woke up to his mark stained deep black and writhing on his left arm. The snake uncurled and started to move up his arm, impossibly becoming bigger and longer. Draco tried to grab it, snatch it away from his arm because he knew. He knew it would kill him, strangle him in his own bed. But each time he grabbed at it, it slithered out of the way, wrapping tighter and tighter around his arm. Draco desperately raked his fingers over his own flesh trying to get a hold of the slippery animal. With each pass it got stronger, pressing on his arm until it started burning in sharp pain. The snake was still slithering up his arm, black eyes fixed on Draco's face.

Just as the snake closed around his neck his eyes flew open a second time, his own screams echoing in his ears.

Draco shot into a sitting position, looking down at himself and seeing…blood. No black snake was curling around his arm, but there were deep scratches all across his left arm going all the way up to his shoulder.

With shaking legs Draco got up out of his bed and to the mirror at the wardrobe door. His left arm was a bloody mess and there was a single line of red starting behind his left ear and going all the way down to his collarbone. His right hand was red with blood too but seemed unharmed beyond its usual bruises across the knuckles.

Sitting down happened too fast for Draco to notice and he laboured to get his breathing under control again. When he felt like he wasn't going to pass out on the way downstairs, Draco got up. He really hoped that Andromeda had Essence of Dittany in the medicine drawer. Because he wasn't sure whether the healing charm he knew would work on wounds this big.

Draco resolutely did not look at his arm until he was standing in the kitchen and rinsed it over the sink.

"Oh gods, Draco! What happened?"

Draco slowly turned around to see his aunt standing in the kitchen doorway, Teddy happily gurgling away in her arms. She turned sharply and left only to return with a raised wand, but without the baby, seconds later.

Hoping to cover up his flinch Draco turned back to the sink. "Had a nightmare."

Andromeda didn't say anything, but got to work helping him to clean the wounds. She worked a lot faster than he did so he left her to it. By the time he remembered that he hadn't glamoured his knuckles yet it was already too late.

"Draco, what's this?" Andromeda whispered sharply, raising his left hand into the sunlight streaming in through the kitchen window.

"Nothing."

"It looks more like three weeks of bruises in varying states of healing."

"Maybe."

"Draco, look at me."

Draco looked up into the grey eyes of his aunt, so different from her sisters'. They looked incredibly sad.

"Why don't you heal them? Why do you glamour them?"

Draco shrugged. "Feels right."

"This is why you keep brushing over your knuckles, isn't it? Is it to feel the pain or to reapply the glamour?"

"Both."

Andromeda sighed deeply, healing the bruises littering his hands with a gentle brush of her wand. "This isn't healthy."

"I know."

"Why?"

Draco didn't have an answer that wouldn't be too honest. Because it felt good. Because he deserved pain. Because it made his thoughts slow down. She wouldn't understand.

"It centres you, doesn't it? Gives you something to hold onto," Andromeda whispered while she gently healed the bruises on his right hand too.

Draco looked up at her, startled. "How?"

Andromeda smiled sadly. "I was young once, with too much pressure and too much guilt. Let me tell you something. Your brain lies. It doesn't make anything better. The problems are still there and the only thing to make them bearable is to work on making them go away."

"But I can't do anything," Draco whispered, his voice as weak as his knees.

"Yes, you can," Andromeda said with emphasis. She looked him in the eyes and smiled. "Yes, you can. You apologised to Hermione. That felt good, didn't it?" Draco nodded. "You can do more. You can learn to shut the bad thoughts up without hurting yourself. It takes practice, but I promise it works."

Draco felt tears build in his eyes. "I tried. I tried Occlumency, I tried not to listen, but they won't shut up!"

"Shoving them away only works for small things and never for long," Andromeda said as she applied the Dittany to his scratches. "This is about bringing logical arguments, looking at it from a different perspective or proving the bad thoughts wrong out of pure spite."

Draco flinched at the bite of the Dittany and watched as the cuts closed. "Can you show me?"

"I will," Andromeda promised with a kind smile.

17th June 1998, 9:23

Hermione honestly wondered whether she should cancel breakfast with her parents. They agreed to meet in St Pancras where their favourite breakfast spot had been whenever they were in London. Especially on September 1st.

When Hermione entered the small restaurant she was immediately assaulted by the smell of frying bacon, eggs and beans. By now she was somewhat prepared for the roll of nausea when she even thought about eating any of that, and she ignored it with practiced ease. Hermione had noticed that she could eat small portions of most food without throwing up, so she kept to that, hoping that nobody would notice.

"Minnie, over here," her mother called from a table in the back corner.

Hermione smiled hesitantly at them and went over. They looked at ease and were smiling a bit more readily than they had on Sunday.

"We already ordered your favourite," her father told Hermione.

"Thank you, dad," she said with a smile, hoping that the nausea at the thought of food didn't show on her face.

"So, we've been talking," Helen started when the food and tea had arrived. "We will return to Australia to put some things in order. Our patients will need to either get transferred or get their treatments before we close up. We'll have to sell the house and the car, and so on and so forth. It should take half a year at the absolute maximum. Two months are more likely."

Hermione nodded thoughtfully, carefully swallowing the bite of beans and chasing it with a sip of her tea. The beans were a bit too savoury but she didn't want to annoy her parents. "Should I prepare the house for late August then?"

"No, no," Richard said with a wave. "We'll come over for a week to prepare everything. We have a lot of new things that we'll need to make space for."

"Alright, but please tell me if I can help in any way," Hermione said earnestly, smiling in turn at her parents.

"Of course, love," her mum said, putting her hand on Hermione's. "So, what are you doing the rest of the week?"

Hermione squeezed her mother's hand gratefully. "I'll be working with a furniture restoration team to see which furniture in Grimmauld Place is salvageable and which isn't. They're coming over tomorrow morning and I want to clean a bit of the clutter away before they arrive."

"Oh, I hope that goes well," Richard said with surprise. "Friends of ours had their grandmother's armchair restored because she refused to have a new one bought - which would have been quite a lot cheaper."

Hermione snorted, cautiously taking a bite of her eggs. At least they were scrambled. "We'll probably get a pity discount when they see what we've been dealing with."

"That bad?" Hermione's mum asked with a smile.

"The only thing I actually really trust to survive the next five years is the kitchen table," Hermione explained, taking another sip of her tea to cover the taste of the eggs. "And that's only because that thing is solid oak and Kreacher assured me that it has been in the kitchen since the 1700s."

Richard outright laughed at that and Helen snorted like Hermione had. "Alright, I see your point."

"Maybe we could come visit you again before we leave?" Helen asked somewhat hesitantly.

Hermione nodded enthusiastically. "That would be wonderful. I'd really like to show you the house. We put so much work in it, you know."

"Maybe we could come by on Friday afternoon?" Richard asked, leaning forward. "We fly very early on Sunday, so it'd be best if we had most of Saturday to pack and sleep."

"Yes, that should work," Hermione said, taking what she felt would be her last bite, even if her plate was still halfway full. "How about two o'clock?"

"Yes, that's perfect," Hermione's mother said with a broad smile.

"Are you full already?" her father asked in surprise when she set down her cutlery.

"Yes, I don't eat as much in the morning," Hermione said easily, willing them to believe the lie.

"Noted," her father said with a smile and her mother nodded.

Hermione felt awful for lying to them, but they couldn't know the truth. Over the last weeks she had lost all appetite and she barely even felt hungry at all. Of course Hermione knew that it couldn't be healthy. She mostly blamed it on the stress of the trials and how busy she had been, working on the house and with the Malfoys. It also didn't help that she got nauseous even thinking about food and that she didn't like to eat strongly flavoured foods anymore.

17th June 1998, 20:04

Ron didn't understand why Concealment and Stealth had to start at six pm. Why couldn't it take place during the day like all the other courses? It was smack in the middle of dinner time and while Ron wasn't particularly hungry before the course began, he was starving by the end of it. He wasn't even the only who had inadvertently given away their position by the growling of their stomach.

Alice had caught a Stunner for a particularly loud request for food from her body. As if she had any control over that, seriously!

Suddenly Ron noticed a shadow out of the corner of his eye. He kept walking without faltering, but his awareness of his surroundings grew exponentially. Ron had taken the stairs because he didn't feel like standing squeezed in a lift with all his fellow Auror trainees.

A look over his shoulder as he was rounding a corner had the shadow melting away. But when Ron hesitated behind the corner he thought he heard soft footsteps approaching from the corridor he had just left.

Jumping from his hiding place, his wand drawn and in a perfect duel position, Ron turned to find the hall empty. He cast a Lumos Maxima, but it didn't reveal anyone crouching in the shadows.

With a shrug Ron turned to walk away. But he couldn't shake the feeling that someone was following him through the empty, echoing corridors.

Ron arrived at the lifts at a jog and slipped into the left one which was just leaving, only one older wizard on it. When he looked back into the empty room Ron wondered whether there really had been anyone. And why should they follow him? Maybe one of the other trainees trying out the skills they were learning? But Ron was pretty sure that everyone but him had gotten on the other lift.

Leaving the lift in the atrium, Ron cast a cursory glance around, but nobody caught his eye and he left for the floo with another shrug.

Later that night when he was just getting ready for bed, Ron thought of Alastor Moody and his paranoia. He shook his head to clear it of the disconcerting thought and went to sleep. When he woke up Ron decided to ask George if it would be possible to attach the Hominum Revelio Charm to a wrist band or something similar; that would certainly be helpful on missions.

18th June 1998, 11:43

Theo stared down at the fifteen vials on his bed spread. That was all that was left of his stash after George had decided to confiscate half of it so Theo wouldn't overdose one day.

It was probably fair. After all, Theo had made sure that George could only drink when he was with him and he didn't allow his friend more than two glasses at a time. But this…fifteen vials would barely get him through the next week and George had said he should be fine for two! Theo was aware that one was only supposed to take a vial per day at the maximum, but he hadn't survived with a vial a day since March.

Theo cursed under his breath. He could of course order more Calming Draught via owl, but what if George found it and took it too?

Maybe if he hid it? George surely wouldn't search his room and Theo knew a few subjects in the library that George wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. Yes, that could work. He'd order a new batch of thirty vials and hide it so he wouldn't have to rely on George.

He'd have to be careful so George wouldn't see him taking more than one vial a day. Maybe he could take it mid-morning so that George thought it would last most of the day. Maybe Theo would be able to convince him that he couldn't sleep without the Draught (which wasn't far from the truth). Maybe he'd understand then.

Resolve hardened, Theo began scouring his room for hiding places were the vials wouldn't be found by the elves (who were on George's side, the traitors) or by George himself. It was harder than he would have thought to find a proper place but in the end he had hidden all but three vials which would last him till his order arrived.

Theo was careful never to order from the same apothecary in too quick a succession, since that could get him banned from ordering Calming Draught at all and that would be a disaster. He doubted that Draco'd be happy to order for him and Pansy had to be careful too. Although Theo assumed that she didn't take as much as he did.

19th June 1998, 22:37