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“Auror Bones, you have a visitor.”
Susan’s eyes fluttered open at the sound of Healer Strout’s voice and she groaned at the glaring light in her eyes, raising a shaky arm to attempt to block it out.
“Who is it?” she rasped, feeling as though she had the worst hangover of her life. Her whole body ached something fierce, and there was a strange pressure in her skull which made her worry her head was going to split open. “You don't have any Pain Potions to give me, do you?”
“I’m afraid not, love,” Healer Strout replied – even with her hand over her eyes, Susan could practically hear the other woman's sympathetic frown. “Another half an hour before I'm allowed to administer anything else. Hopefully your visitor should help keep you occupied until then, though – Mr. Potter, if you'd come through?”
Susan dropped her hand upon hearing her visitor’s name, squinting through the blinding light to watch as a head of messy black hair poked through the curtains surrounding her bed, followed by a set of burgundy, standard-issue Auror robes.
“Hullo, Susan,” he said – his low voice rumbled in her ears, prompting her to close her eyes; there were only so many forms of sensory overload she could handle at once. “I tried to stop by earlier, but Robards wouldn't let me leave until I finished my paperwork – I brought chocolate,” he continued, placing something on her bedside table which was heavy enough to make a thunk as he set it down. “I don't know if you're allowed while you're recovering, but– “
“What kind?” she demanded, opening her eyes once again. She grunted in pain as she tried to sit up, falling ineffectually back against her pillow as a sharp pain went up her back. “Agh, bastard!”
“Don't strain yourself, Miss Bones,” Healer Strout reproved, bending down and tucking in the sheets as if to pin Susan down in bed. “You’re regrowing muscles as we speak, young lady – act like it.”
“Right,” Susan muttered, face colouring slightly at being referred to as ‘young lady' – it was as though she was back in bloody Hogwarts again! “What chocolate is it, Harry? I swear, if it's that dark shit you keep trying to push on me– “
“No, no – I gave up on that around about the time you told the office I was trying to poison you when I left a bar on your desk,” he said, rolling his eyes. “This is a slab of Honeydukes’ finest – has enough sugar to kill a Hippogriff, just the way you like it.”
Susan let out a contented sigh, allowing herself to sink indolently into the mattress – well, as much as was possible in her meagre hospital bed, anyway. Chocolate had a way of making everything better in her opinion, especially when it wasn't Harry's evil dark chocolate.
“Thanks, Harry,” she said, flashing him an appreciative smile. “If I knew you'd buy me snacks afterwards then I'd have gone rushing into a Death Eater hideout without backup ages ago.”
She laughed, but neither Healer Strout nor Harry seemed much amused by her joke – Strout tutted at her and rolled her eyes, while Harry’s slight smile flattened out into a grimace. He raised his hand to run it through his hair, and Susan’s own smile was wiped away as she realised that Harry was nervous about something – and, if she had to take a wild guess, that ‘something’ involved the consequences of her foolhardy decision to charge into a den of Death Eaters without the rest of her team.
“What? What is it?” she asked, wishing that these Potions would hurry up and sort out whatever was wrong with her back – it didn’t feel at all proper to be receiving the bad news Harry was surely about to bear whilst laying down in bed.
“Robards asked me to bring you this,” he said, procuring a purple letter from within his robes and setting it down on her bedside table. “You’ve not been sacked,” he hastened to add at her alarmed expression, “but– er, let’s just say you won’t be on field duty for quite a while after your little stunt.”
“Oh,” she said, feeling relieved – she had feared much worse from the expression on Harry’s face. “Well, that’s not too bad – about what I expected, really. Worth it for getting to take down Yaxley and his goons myself.”
Harry said nothing in response, rocking back and forth on his heels. For a moment, he looked as though he were going to speak – then she saw him visibly swallow his words and turn to address Healer Strout instead.
“Is she alright to eat on whatever Potions you’re giving her?” he asked.
“Hmm? Oh, yes, yes – tuck in, dear,” she urged, bending down to pat Susan’s hand. “I’m sure you’re famished – you’ve been out for quite some time. Mr. Potter, I’m afraid I need to go check up on Frank and Alice – can I trust you to ensure that Miss Bones doesn’t try to injure herself further while I’m gone?”
“I’m right here, thanks!” Susan said, colouring at Strout’s phrasing – she wasn’t some reckless child, looking to get herself in trouble the moment she was left unsupervised! Harry just nodded, and Strout gave his arm an affectionate squeeze before bustling off without acknowledging Susan’s outburst.
“The nerve of that woman! Like I’m made out of glass or something,” she grumbled, reaching for the Honeydukes bar. She was forced to lean in order to get to it, and she hissed at the unpleasant twang which went up her back at the movement, but she powered through for stubbornness’ sake, relaxing back into bed with chocolate in hand and a dull ache in her back.
“‘Made of glass’ is probably closer than you’d like to the truth – I was on bedrest for two weeks after we raided Crashaw Hall and fought the Lestranges,” Harry said, pulling up a chair and sitting down by her bed. “You feel like you’re ready to go after a day, but your body says otherwise; turns out it takes a while to recover from a Flesh-Eating Curse. Who’d have thought, eh?”
“I’m sure a week of that two week stay will have been because you kept trying to leave and injuring yourself,” she said fondly, shaking her head. Harry did not confirm, but his slight smile said enough – she sniggered at him before diverting her attention to her chocolate, tearing the wrapper and breaking off a row. “Want a piece?”
“I’m alright, thanks,” Harry declined. “You need it more than me.”
“I doubt that,” she scoffed, but still broke off a square and popped it into her mouth. “If you were any skinnier you’d be a broom, Harry – have some chocolate.”
“You sound like Mrs. Weasley,” he muttered, but he still leaned in and broke off a square. “Happy?”
“Not yet,” she said, before stuffing the rest of the row into her mouth. “Oh, that hits the spot – happy now,” she said through a mouthful of chocolate, letting out a satisfied moan as the stuff melted on her tongue.
To her side, Harry swallowed his square without chewing – his expression was troubled, and he hardly seemed to notice his throat bulging as the too-large piece made its way down.
“There’s– well, there was something else I wanted to talk to you about, besides Robards’ letter,” he said, leaning forward and resting his chin on his clasped hands. “About the raid.”
“Oh?” she asked, a sinking feeling forming in her gut – this couldn’t be good. “What is it?”
Harry looked about conspicuously before pointing his wand at the floor, which caused a dull buzzing to fill her ears – she made a mental note to ask him how to do that at a later date.
“Our intelligence indicated that there were six people staying at the hideout – Yaxley, Mulciber, Travers and three others, likely snatchers from the Second War,” he said, keeping his voice low despite the privacy charm. “When we cleared out the house after the fighting was over, Yaxley, Mulciber and Travers were all accounted for but we only had two of the snatchers. We left them in a holding cell and went to double-check the scene – when we got back, Yaxley was missing and we had three snatchers instead of two.”
“Polyjuice,” Susan muttered, horrified. She had thought Yaxley seemed an uncharacteristically poor dueller when she engaged him, but she had never imagined–
“Yeah,” Harry confirmed grimly. “Polyjuice. From what we can gather it looks like they were looking to spring a trap on us, using Yaxley to lure in as many Aurors as they were able to. You caught them off-guard by going in alone, by the looks of it – the house was filled with half-set traps. If we’d waited another hour, the whole lot of us would’ve been blown to smithereens.”
“Oh. That’s– that’s good, I suppose,” she mumbled, feeling very much off-kilter. On the one hand, yes, it was very good that her team hadn’t been blown up in a trap – but on the other, it hadn’t at all been her intention to thwart any traps; she had been reckless, and the fact that it was to their benefit had been pure chance.
The other, more pressing barrier to her finding a positive spin to this situation was the fact that Yaxley had, once again, slipped through the cracks; the man who had killed her grandparents and Uncle Edgar’s whole family was still at large.
She had charged into danger, placing her whole team at risk in her selfishness, for a man who wasn’t even in the house when she booted down the door.
“You alright, Susan?” he asked, brow furrowed. Wordlessly she shook her head.
“I feel like– like I’ve let everyone down. I could’ve gotten us all killed for no reason at all – just because I was being a child, and couldn’t control myself at the thought of taking down Yaxley myself,” she said, stomach curdling at the thought of it. All those people she respected – Savage, Proudfoot, Ernie, Michael; hell, even Harry himself – could have died because she was careless. “I should hand in my badge.”
“Nonsense,” Harry said immediately, face pulled into a deep frown. “I’m not going to pretend like you rushing in there on your own wasn’t stupid, because it was – it’s something I would’ve done, and that’s not a good thing. But that’s not because it could’ve killed us – it’s because it could’ve killed you. If that house really had been trapped, it would’ve been you getting blown to bits. You saved us, Suze – don’t for a second get that twisted.”
He reached out and grasped her hand within his own – it was bony, and not particularly warm, but it was solid enough to pull Susan back to reality from the imagined catastrophizing she had been doing in her head. She stared into his bright green eyes, which were shining with some emotion which she couldn’t name, and it registered with her for the first time that Harry cared.
He had always been so aloof at Hogwarts – he stuck with his friends and had very little to say to outsiders, even when he was running the DA. Then they had joined the Auror corps together, and still he kept everyone at arm’s length – he worked as hard as anyone else, and he wasn’t standoffish or anything like that, but he never exactly invited anyone into his confidence either.
The passion with which he had just spoken, though, and that look in his eyes – they were the first clues he had ever given that the work their team had done together made them more than just coworkers. Or, perhaps, made her more than just a coworker – perhaps she was being fanciful, but she couldn’t recall ever hearing that Harry had visited Michael when he was hospitalised last month.
“Maybe I did,” she murmured, “but that doesn’t change the fact that I let Yaxley get into my head. How do I know that won’t happen again?”
Harry entwined their fingers, giving her hand a squeeze – for a moment, he said nothing. Then-
“You don’t,” he replied. “You don’t know anything until it happens. Could you live with yourself if you let that chance stop you from doing what you love? If you let it stop you from going after Yaxley again, when you know more than anything that that’s what you need to do?”
Susan couldn’t answer that.
Harry seemed to understand – he let the question sit with her, releasing her hand and dispelling the privacy ward with a flick of his wand. Not a moment later and Healer Strout came bustling back in, an assortment of Potions floating in front of her.
“Sorry about that, loves – everything alright in here?” she asked, looking at Susan’s pensive expression curiously.
“Fine,” Harry confirmed, getting to his feet. “Afraid I have to get going now – duty calls, and all. Enjoy your chocolate, Suze – get well soon.”
With that he ducked through the curtains, and was gone before Susan could come up with a response.
“Such a kind young man,” Strout sighed in his wake, unstoppering a vial full of green liquid. “I don’t know how you kids manage it, after all the suffering you’ve been through… Anyway, enough of that. Let’s get you your Potions, Auror Bones.”
She fed Susan a series of foul-tasting brews, each purporting to regrow something or other inside her, before finally giving her a dose of Dreamless Sleep.
The last thing Susan was aware of as her world faded to black was Strout picking her chocolate up off her bed, setting it down on her bedside table with a gentle thunk.