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Harry stares at the twenty-centimeter gash on his abdomen. He can see some of his organs. Gross. And he is maybe feeling a little light headed. “Overlord, I don’t think I’ll be making it back from this one,” he says and coughs up a little blood.
Tom’s voice comes in through his ear piece. “Shut up, Ghost. It’s just a scratch. Put pressure on it.”
“Really? Those are the last words you want to say to me?” Harry coughs harder. Ow, breathing hurt.
“You have nine bloody lives, Ghost. What, are you going to get done in by a measly sword?”
“Rapier, actually,” Harry corrects. “Thought you were smart, Overlord.”
“I’m not a bloody weapons enthusiast like you. Now shut up. Med evac is on its way. You’re not allowed to die on me.”
His vision is starting to darken. Harry loses feeling in his fingers and his breaths come in short, heavy pants. “I don’t take orders from you.”
Heaven is made up of a soft bed and an annoying beeping machine. Harry lifts a hand to rub his eyes, but the arm gets tangled up. He forces his eyes to open despite the lead weights someone managed to hang on his eyelashes. “Ow,” he manages to say.
“Stop moving, you idiot,” Tom says and moves to untangle the IV lines from his arm. “Honestly, you’re a child.”
“Am not.” Great response. Way to show wittiness. “What happened?”
“Hermione saved your life again, Snape’s yelling at his minions because he can’t yell at you for breaking equipment worth dozens of galleons, Malfoy’s crying over the budget, and Voldemort is soothing Dumbledore’s fears about losing the Boy Wonder.”
“Don’t call me that,” Harry says automatically. “Have you been sitting by my bedside the entire time I’ve been asleep just waiting for me to wake up? Aww, Tom, I didn’t know you cared.”
Tom scoffs. “Don’t be ridiculous. I inserted a VAS chip into you that let me know you were waking.”
What? “You didn’t. You wouldn’t. Wait, who am I talking to, of course you would. Where is it, you arsehole?” Harry starts patting himself down for strange lumps inside him.
Tom draws his wand and points it at Harry. “If you don’t stop moving, I’m going to knock you out until Hermione clears you fit for field duty.”
“You’re a bully.” Harry pouts but lies back down in the bed because Tom does not bluff.
“I thought we established that years ago.”
Then, Hermione arrives and they go through the whole usual questions to make sure he knows where he is, when he is, and so on. The entire time, Tom stays by his side.
Medical releases Harry three days later, but Voldemort doesn’t assign him any more jobs. In between going to the gym, Harry stays in TSS to watch Tom the handlers run missions. When Tom grows exasperated with his hovering, he kicks Harry out, and it’s back to the gym.
Finally, a week later, Voldemort calls Harry to his office. “The package is located in a muggle Russian village, but they’ve hired magical protection. R&D has your kit, and TSS will brief you. Try not to break anything, this time, if only to stop Malfoy from quitting. We do have a budget, you realize. Dismissed.”
“Yes, sir,” Harry says and leaves Voldemort’s office. Sometimes he wonders if Voldemort ever gets stressed from running MI6 and MI13 simultaneously, but he never looks anything but put together in his suits. The day Voldemort raises his voice is the day the world is probably ending.
He stops by R&D first. Snape glowers at him even as he hands over an SOS signal for emergencies, a gun magically altered to be able to fire in the presence of magic, and a lightweight bullet proof body suit. “Try to bring everything back in one piece this time, Potter. I put in too much over time just to have your kit ready.”
“No promises,” Harry says cheerfully and leaves before Snape curses him.
Tom hands Harry his ear piece and brings up the blueprints of the residence on the screen. “We’re going to try for a nice, quiet retrieval. Just do what I say and we’ll be fine.”
Harry changes into the body suit and apparates to an MI13 safe house in Russia. He finds clothes about his size to blend in and borrows a car to get to the target.
“Jump the fence and run straight for the door on my count. Three, two, one, go. Turn left and go through the window. The door on your left will lead you to a hallway with three men. You’ll need to be fast.”
Harry follows Tom’s instructions and draws his gun. He goes through the door and fires three shots.
“Good. Now take the stairs on your right to the third floor. I don’t have eyes in the stairwell but there are five guards right outside on the third floor.”
Harry kills the two men in the stairwell and continues. He steps out and shoots the five of them before they can react. He changes clips and moves down the hallway.
“The door is right in front of you. I’ve unlocked the keypad. I don’t have eyes behind the door.”
Harry readies his gun and opens the door, bracing for guards to attack him. Instead, an enormous snake comes flying at his face. He tries to move out of the way but he’s too slow and it sinks its teeth into his chest through the bodysuit. Why is it always the chest? He shoots the snake and it explodes over him. “Oh bugger,” he says faintly.
“Med evac is on its way. Sit down and don’t move. The more you move, the more the venom spreads through your body,” Tom says urgently in his ear.
“But the package.” Harry tries to brush the remains of the snake off him and moves to get the Nightmare Scroll. His hands are bloody and he might just have destroyed a priceless artefact, but he can’t really bring himself to care.
“This is just blatant disregard for your life, now. Sit down and wait for the Dragon.”
Harry starts to black out again and thinks that this happens to him all too often. The last thing he hears is Tom’s voice in his ear. “Why can’t you ever value your own life over the job?”
Tom identifies the snake because he really is a fountain of knowledge and Hermione saves him because she’s the best at what she does. This time, Harry is awake and Tom still sits at his bedside, waiting for him to recover. Tom is the genius, not Harry, but Harry doesn’t need Tom’s brain to know he’s mad. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“No, you’re not. Sorry means you would do things differently if you had a chance, and no matter what, you would always go for the package. That’s just the way you’re wired.” Tom looks exhausted.
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I want you to live.”
“Tom,” Harry says softly because he doesn’t have anything else to say. He rips the IV needles out of his arm, and when Tom rushes over to stop him, Harry kisses him lightly.
Tom freezes and looks hopelessly lost, so unlike him that Harry would do anything to get rid of that look. “That’s not going to stop me from yelling at you.”
“I don’t need you to stop yelling at me. I just need your voice in my ear no matter where I am.” They lean in to kiss each other again when Draco Malfoy storms into the hospital room, waving a pile of paper.
“Do you have any idea how much an ampoule of antivenom costs? We’re on a budget here!”