lomonaaeren (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lomonaaeren) wrote2023-05-10 09:07 pm
lomonaaeren) wrote2023-05-10 09:07 pm
Chapter One of 'The Willing'- In a Corridor
Title: The Willing
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: Hogwarts “eighth year,” ignores the epilogue, attempted rape, love potioning, graphic violence, heavy angst, present tense, self-injury
Rating: R
Summary: During his eighth year, Harry discovers Theo Nott under the influence of Amortentia. He manages to stop anything from happening, but he can’t help feeling a little protective of him. It doesn’t help that Nott feels he owes Harry something, no matter how much Harry insists that there’s no debt between them.
Author’s Notes: This is a new WiP. Please take note of the content warnings; this is a very heavy, dark fic.
The Willing
Chapter One—In a Corridor
“No…”
Harry pauses at the end of the dungeon corridor and makes sure his wand is ready. He knows he shouldn’t really be wandering through Slytherin territory without his Invisibility Cloak, even if most of the Slytherins have been quiet and subdued since their repeated seventh year began. But he’s felt differently about wearing the Cloak ever since he discovered it’s a Deathly Hallow.
“No!”
The voice sounds angry, desperate. Harry doesn’t recognize it. He peers around the corner, keeping his body low to the ground the way he did when sneaking around during the war.
A student his own age is sitting in a little dead-end corridor with his back against the wall. He’s raking his nails down his face. Harry stares for a second as blood courses down his skin, too stunned to move.
“No!”
Harry springs forwards, casting a spell that pulls the boy’s hands behind his back. The boy spins towards him without rising from the floor, his eyes glazed and his lip lifting in an animalistic snarl that shows all his teeth.
“Nott?” Harry didn’t recognize him at first with his hands in front of his face, but there’s no doubt it’s him.
“Potter! Go away, Potter!”
Nott screams the words. He sounds mad, unhinged. But the glazed look in his eyes stirs some kind of memory that makes Harry stand there instead of retreating or raising a shield. He prods his brain again and again, while Nott subsides into panting and leaning back against the wall.
He looks like Ron.
Harry nearly rejects the thought for making no sense, but then it returns to him. Nott looks like Ron did when he was under the influence of Amortentia in their sixth year.
Something’s wrong, though. The potion must have been brewed incorrectly or something. Nott should have been panting at the feet of whoever fed it to him, otherwise. Instead, it seems like he’s fighting it.
“Listen,” Harry says softly, dropping to one knee without coming any closer to Nott, “I’m going to get Professor Slughorn, all right? He can make sure that you get the antidote to the potion—”
“No!”
Magic blows out from Nott with shattering force and sends Harry spinning a good distance down the corridor. Harry rolls with the blow and stands up to see Nott already starting to rake at his face again, going for his eyes this time. The bonds Harry put on him are gone, too. And it seems that his response to the potion is so conflicted that he can’t be coherent about the damage to himself.
“Nott.”
Harry speaks as softly as he can when his heart is bounding up into his throat. He doesn’t know what about his voice makes Nott pause and bring his hands down from his face. Maybe he never will know. But he recognizes the break in the storm that the potion seems to have stirred up in Nott, and he speaks as quickly as he can.
“If you don’t want me to go get Professor Slughorn, that’s fine, I won’t. I won’t come any nearer to you or cast any spells on you, either. But can I sit here and talk to you? Is that all right? Is there anything you’d like to hear about?”
Nott pants, staring at him. His face is pale in a way that Harry doesn’t think he even saw Malfoy’s during his visions of his old rival acting like a Death Eater. Nott’s eyes seem to have cracked down the middle with light. Harry notices they’re a very pale grey, and an old memory of Sirius nearly blinds him with grief.
He shoves it away. What he needs to concentrate on is the person in front of him, and while Nott hasn’t answered yet, he hasn’t shouted or started attacking himself again, either.
“Yes,” Nott says abruptly.
Harry nods encouragingly. “All right. What do you want to hear about?”
“Why did you have to fight the Dark Lord?”
Huh. Harry wouldn’t have thought that would be something Nott would want to hear about, but he begins talking, slowly settling back into a sitting position as Nott listens like he could devour the words. “There was a prophecy made about me—well, about someone born at the same time as I was—being able to defeat Vol—You-Know-Who.” Harry can see the beginning of a flinch in Nott’s body, and right now, the last thing he wants to do is hurt him further. “He believed it even though he didn’t hear the whole thing, God knows why. So he came hunting my parents and me. That’s why he tried to kill me as well as them.
“And after that, it was like he just kept coming. He targeted me specifically during the Tri-Wizard Tournament so he could use my blood to resurrect himself. Before that, there was an—imprint of him possessing a student during our second year. The Chamber of Secrets, remember? He got obsessed with me because of what—the student—said about me to him, and he wanted to know how I had defeated his older self.”
“Older self?”
“The imprint of him was a teenager, for whatever reason.”
Nott laughs. It’s a crackling sound like someone walking across burned flesh, but Harry takes it as a sign that he should keep talking.
“Maybe after he got resurrected, he was too mad or obsessed to ever stop. He lured me to the Department of Mysteries during our fifth year to try and get his hands on the full prophecy. He chased me around and tried to get me to surrender to him last year. There was probably nothing all that fated about it until he tried to kill me the first time, but after that, there was.”
“Not…what I asked, Potter.” Nott closes his eyes and lets his head slump back against the wall. Harry watches his hands, but he keeps them in place, not reaching for his eyes again. “I meant, why did you keep fighting him? You could have fucked off out of Britain and left us to our fate.”
“What else should I have done?” Harry asks, truly astonished. “There were people I wanted to protect. Who else was going to protect them?”
Nott just shakes his head and keeps his eyes closed. “Keep talking, Potter. Talk about whatever you want. Just—don’t leave.”
Harry can hear the sound of all sorts of words that Nott doesn’t want to speak behind the ones he has. But that’s all right. Harry isn’t going to make him speak them. He shifts around a little to make himself more comfortable, and Nott’s eyes immediately spring open again, watching him.
Harry gives him a faint smile. “Did you ever hear about the time that Ron and I used Polyjuice Potion to sneak into the Slytherin common room?”
*
It’s two hours later, Harry’s voice is hoarse, and he’s wondering again if he ought to go for Professor Slughorn. But Nott is breathing more calmly now, and he hasn’t tried to claw his face again.
Harry is in the middle of the story about Nearly Headless Nick’s Deathday Party when Nott takes a sudden, huge breath. Harry looks at him in alarm, but he can see something that looks like silver smoke puffing out of Nott’s mouth. When he opens his eyes again, he looks sane.
“It’s gone,” Nott whispers, and smiles. “I beat it.”
Harry gives him a tentative smile. He doesn’t want to stand up and leave yet, in case Nott needs him, but he has to conjure a glass and pour water into it with the Aguamenti charm before he can speak again. “Do you want me to take you to Slughorn? Or Madam Pomfrey?”
Nott tilts his head at Harry. His eyes are filling up with some emotion that Harry doesn’t know how to define. “You aren’t going to ask me how I defeated Amortentia, a potion that’s supposed to be impossible to resist?”
Harry blinks. “You seem like a private person. I wasn’t sure that you would want to tell me.”
Nott laughs, a weak, rasping sound, and spends a moment clenching his hand on his stomach as though the laughter hurts. Harry hesitates, but doesn’t move. He doesn’t know for sure what’s going on.
Nott coughs, steadies himself by leaning back against the wall, and shakes his head. “I take a potion every month that’s supposed to help me in resisting the effects of others that might be used on me against my will. But I didn’t take into account that an ingredient in that potion could mix badly with an ingredient from Amortentia. It channeled the obsession that the love potion creates and the strength of will that the resistance potion gives me into an obsession with harming myself.” Nott takes another deep breath and suddenly pins Harry with a shifting, dark, murky gaze. “I owe you my sanity. Or at least my eyes. Maybe my freedom, if I would have tried to track down and kill the person who gave me the potion.”
“Do you know who gave it to you?” Harry asks quietly. He can feel a cold anger stirring in him. This seems like an attempt to hurt Nott at the very least.
Maybe rape him.
Harry is gladder than ever that he got Ron to Slughorn in time for the antidote in sixth year.
“I have several suspects, but no answer, since my reaction to the potion means I didn’t feel an obsession for anyone in particular,” Nott says flatly. “I didn’t side with the resistance against the Carrows last year, but I also didn’t become a Death Eater. It’s left me without allies in Slytherin this year. And I obviously haven’t been as careful about guarding my food and drink as I thought I was. When I find the person who did this…” His eyes glitter.
Harry supposes he should give some kind of lecture on violence, but he just nods. “Do you know why my talking to you helped?”
“It gave me something else to focus on besides my desire to hurt myself.”
Harry remembers what Nott said about the obsession that Amortentia creates, and frowns. He hopes that doesn’t mean Nott was forced to feel that way about Harry. But he can’t see a polite way to ask, so he asks something else instead. “Slughorn or Pomfrey?”
“I don’t need the antidote now that the love potion has burned out of my system. And Pomfrey can’t do anything for me.”
“The scratches on your face—”
Nott draws his wand in a fluid snap of motion, and heals the scratches on his face with a single flick and swish. Not even verbal magic. Impressive. Harry gives him another tentative smile and stands. “All right. Let me at least escort you back to your common room, though.”
“I can’t sleep there.”
Sobering, Harry nods. At least he knows that Romilda Vane gave him those potioned chocolates two years ago just because she was obsessed with his fame. Nott doesn’t know but that someone tried to rape him. Or humiliate him really badly.
“Right,” he agrees. “You can’t stay there.”
Nott glances at him sideways. “What are you thinking, Potter?”
“That unfortunately, one of the best places I could have taken you burned in the war,” Harry mutters, and steps back as Nott gets slowly to his feet. “But we have to find someplace to hide you.”
“If you’re about to invite me into Gryffindor Tower—”
“No, we’d never get past the portrait without her raising the alarm. And you should keep what happened to you private if you want.”
Nott pauses, his eyes searching Harry’s face. “Nothing happened.”
“Of course it did,” Harry snaps. “And more to the point, whoever gave you the potion intended for worse to happen. But what they did was bad enough.”
Nott just stares at him.
Harry thinks about it for a moment, and then nods and turns around. “Come on, Nott.”
Nott follows him without question, but he makes a little protesting sound when Harry comes to a halt outside the portrait that allows entrance to the kitchens. “You’re not seriously going to insist that I sleep there, Potter?”
“Why not? It’s warm, and safe, and the house-elves would never allow anyone to harm you.”
Nott closes his eyes for a long moment. Harry waits patiently. He supposes it would be kind of humiliating for a pureblood to sleep under the care of house-elves. And it’s Nott’s decision. But he doesn’t have any better advice to offer.
“I don’t know if I can conjure a pallet,” Nott whispers finally.
“That’s all right. I’ll do it.”
Harry tickles the pear, and the portrait opens. House-elves squeak at them, but they agree immediately when Harry asks if Nott can spend the night, and fetch blankets for him. Harry Transfigures one of the benches into a pallet and steps back so that Nott can get to it without passing too close to Harry.
“You’re…very good at this,” Nott says slowly, when he’s sat down on the pallet, then lain down, and Harry’s spread a blanket over him. “Have you comforted someone in the aftermath of Amortentia before?”
“I mean, just Ron.”
“Someone potioned Weasley?”
It’s hard for Harry to keep from rolling his eyes. Trust a Slytherin to think no one could want to date a Weasley. But Nott doesn’t need Harry saying that right now, so he just shakes his head and says, “He ate some chocolates that he didn’t know had a love potion in them. Someone in Gryffindor intended the potion for me.”
Nott opens his mouth, but nothing comes out.
“I don’t have a lot of practice,” Harry continues quietly, meeting Nott’s eyes. He looks more tired than Harry felt last year after the Battle of Hogwarts. “I’m just trying to do the right thing for people who need it.”
Nott closes his eyes with a slight grimace. “And now I owe you a debt.”
“There’s no debt between us.”
“Potter, no one would do for me what you did—”
Harry finds that hard to believe, since there are loads of decent people around, but he just says, “If you really feel that you owe me something, what about letting me punish the person who did this to you?”
Nott snarls at him without opening his eyes.
“Okay,” Harry says, doing his best to keep his smile out of his voice. “Then there’s no debt between us.”
Nott makes a movement as though he wants to dispute that, but falls back against the pallet. Harry waits for a moment until he sinks into what looks like blank slumber, and then draws his wand and carefully sets up wards around the pallet that will resist anything short of a crazed Bludger.
Then he goes back to Gryffindor Tower, silently seething.
Nott wasn’t raped. He wasn’t humiliated in front of the whole school, or lured into a corner of the Slytherin dormitory and hurt or killed. He didn’t claw his eyes out. But only because of the random coincidence of him drinking a resistance potion and Harry happening to find him in the corridor.
Harry hates the thought of whoever did this to Nott getting away with it.
If I do happen to find them before he does…
I’m going to punish them. I’ll leave enough for Nott to tear apart, though.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Theo
Content Notes: Hogwarts “eighth year,” ignores the epilogue, attempted rape, love potioning, graphic violence, heavy angst, present tense, self-injury
Rating: R
Summary: During his eighth year, Harry discovers Theo Nott under the influence of Amortentia. He manages to stop anything from happening, but he can’t help feeling a little protective of him. It doesn’t help that Nott feels he owes Harry something, no matter how much Harry insists that there’s no debt between them.
Author’s Notes: This is a new WiP. Please take note of the content warnings; this is a very heavy, dark fic.
The Willing
Chapter One—In a Corridor
“No…”
Harry pauses at the end of the dungeon corridor and makes sure his wand is ready. He knows he shouldn’t really be wandering through Slytherin territory without his Invisibility Cloak, even if most of the Slytherins have been quiet and subdued since their repeated seventh year began. But he’s felt differently about wearing the Cloak ever since he discovered it’s a Deathly Hallow.
“No!”
The voice sounds angry, desperate. Harry doesn’t recognize it. He peers around the corner, keeping his body low to the ground the way he did when sneaking around during the war.
A student his own age is sitting in a little dead-end corridor with his back against the wall. He’s raking his nails down his face. Harry stares for a second as blood courses down his skin, too stunned to move.
“No!”
Harry springs forwards, casting a spell that pulls the boy’s hands behind his back. The boy spins towards him without rising from the floor, his eyes glazed and his lip lifting in an animalistic snarl that shows all his teeth.
“Nott?” Harry didn’t recognize him at first with his hands in front of his face, but there’s no doubt it’s him.
“Potter! Go away, Potter!”
Nott screams the words. He sounds mad, unhinged. But the glazed look in his eyes stirs some kind of memory that makes Harry stand there instead of retreating or raising a shield. He prods his brain again and again, while Nott subsides into panting and leaning back against the wall.
He looks like Ron.
Harry nearly rejects the thought for making no sense, but then it returns to him. Nott looks like Ron did when he was under the influence of Amortentia in their sixth year.
Something’s wrong, though. The potion must have been brewed incorrectly or something. Nott should have been panting at the feet of whoever fed it to him, otherwise. Instead, it seems like he’s fighting it.
“Listen,” Harry says softly, dropping to one knee without coming any closer to Nott, “I’m going to get Professor Slughorn, all right? He can make sure that you get the antidote to the potion—”
“No!”
Magic blows out from Nott with shattering force and sends Harry spinning a good distance down the corridor. Harry rolls with the blow and stands up to see Nott already starting to rake at his face again, going for his eyes this time. The bonds Harry put on him are gone, too. And it seems that his response to the potion is so conflicted that he can’t be coherent about the damage to himself.
“Nott.”
Harry speaks as softly as he can when his heart is bounding up into his throat. He doesn’t know what about his voice makes Nott pause and bring his hands down from his face. Maybe he never will know. But he recognizes the break in the storm that the potion seems to have stirred up in Nott, and he speaks as quickly as he can.
“If you don’t want me to go get Professor Slughorn, that’s fine, I won’t. I won’t come any nearer to you or cast any spells on you, either. But can I sit here and talk to you? Is that all right? Is there anything you’d like to hear about?”
Nott pants, staring at him. His face is pale in a way that Harry doesn’t think he even saw Malfoy’s during his visions of his old rival acting like a Death Eater. Nott’s eyes seem to have cracked down the middle with light. Harry notices they’re a very pale grey, and an old memory of Sirius nearly blinds him with grief.
He shoves it away. What he needs to concentrate on is the person in front of him, and while Nott hasn’t answered yet, he hasn’t shouted or started attacking himself again, either.
“Yes,” Nott says abruptly.
Harry nods encouragingly. “All right. What do you want to hear about?”
“Why did you have to fight the Dark Lord?”
Huh. Harry wouldn’t have thought that would be something Nott would want to hear about, but he begins talking, slowly settling back into a sitting position as Nott listens like he could devour the words. “There was a prophecy made about me—well, about someone born at the same time as I was—being able to defeat Vol—You-Know-Who.” Harry can see the beginning of a flinch in Nott’s body, and right now, the last thing he wants to do is hurt him further. “He believed it even though he didn’t hear the whole thing, God knows why. So he came hunting my parents and me. That’s why he tried to kill me as well as them.
“And after that, it was like he just kept coming. He targeted me specifically during the Tri-Wizard Tournament so he could use my blood to resurrect himself. Before that, there was an—imprint of him possessing a student during our second year. The Chamber of Secrets, remember? He got obsessed with me because of what—the student—said about me to him, and he wanted to know how I had defeated his older self.”
“Older self?”
“The imprint of him was a teenager, for whatever reason.”
Nott laughs. It’s a crackling sound like someone walking across burned flesh, but Harry takes it as a sign that he should keep talking.
“Maybe after he got resurrected, he was too mad or obsessed to ever stop. He lured me to the Department of Mysteries during our fifth year to try and get his hands on the full prophecy. He chased me around and tried to get me to surrender to him last year. There was probably nothing all that fated about it until he tried to kill me the first time, but after that, there was.”
“Not…what I asked, Potter.” Nott closes his eyes and lets his head slump back against the wall. Harry watches his hands, but he keeps them in place, not reaching for his eyes again. “I meant, why did you keep fighting him? You could have fucked off out of Britain and left us to our fate.”
“What else should I have done?” Harry asks, truly astonished. “There were people I wanted to protect. Who else was going to protect them?”
Nott just shakes his head and keeps his eyes closed. “Keep talking, Potter. Talk about whatever you want. Just—don’t leave.”
Harry can hear the sound of all sorts of words that Nott doesn’t want to speak behind the ones he has. But that’s all right. Harry isn’t going to make him speak them. He shifts around a little to make himself more comfortable, and Nott’s eyes immediately spring open again, watching him.
Harry gives him a faint smile. “Did you ever hear about the time that Ron and I used Polyjuice Potion to sneak into the Slytherin common room?”
*
It’s two hours later, Harry’s voice is hoarse, and he’s wondering again if he ought to go for Professor Slughorn. But Nott is breathing more calmly now, and he hasn’t tried to claw his face again.
Harry is in the middle of the story about Nearly Headless Nick’s Deathday Party when Nott takes a sudden, huge breath. Harry looks at him in alarm, but he can see something that looks like silver smoke puffing out of Nott’s mouth. When he opens his eyes again, he looks sane.
“It’s gone,” Nott whispers, and smiles. “I beat it.”
Harry gives him a tentative smile. He doesn’t want to stand up and leave yet, in case Nott needs him, but he has to conjure a glass and pour water into it with the Aguamenti charm before he can speak again. “Do you want me to take you to Slughorn? Or Madam Pomfrey?”
Nott tilts his head at Harry. His eyes are filling up with some emotion that Harry doesn’t know how to define. “You aren’t going to ask me how I defeated Amortentia, a potion that’s supposed to be impossible to resist?”
Harry blinks. “You seem like a private person. I wasn’t sure that you would want to tell me.”
Nott laughs, a weak, rasping sound, and spends a moment clenching his hand on his stomach as though the laughter hurts. Harry hesitates, but doesn’t move. He doesn’t know for sure what’s going on.
Nott coughs, steadies himself by leaning back against the wall, and shakes his head. “I take a potion every month that’s supposed to help me in resisting the effects of others that might be used on me against my will. But I didn’t take into account that an ingredient in that potion could mix badly with an ingredient from Amortentia. It channeled the obsession that the love potion creates and the strength of will that the resistance potion gives me into an obsession with harming myself.” Nott takes another deep breath and suddenly pins Harry with a shifting, dark, murky gaze. “I owe you my sanity. Or at least my eyes. Maybe my freedom, if I would have tried to track down and kill the person who gave me the potion.”
“Do you know who gave it to you?” Harry asks quietly. He can feel a cold anger stirring in him. This seems like an attempt to hurt Nott at the very least.
Maybe rape him.
Harry is gladder than ever that he got Ron to Slughorn in time for the antidote in sixth year.
“I have several suspects, but no answer, since my reaction to the potion means I didn’t feel an obsession for anyone in particular,” Nott says flatly. “I didn’t side with the resistance against the Carrows last year, but I also didn’t become a Death Eater. It’s left me without allies in Slytherin this year. And I obviously haven’t been as careful about guarding my food and drink as I thought I was. When I find the person who did this…” His eyes glitter.
Harry supposes he should give some kind of lecture on violence, but he just nods. “Do you know why my talking to you helped?”
“It gave me something else to focus on besides my desire to hurt myself.”
Harry remembers what Nott said about the obsession that Amortentia creates, and frowns. He hopes that doesn’t mean Nott was forced to feel that way about Harry. But he can’t see a polite way to ask, so he asks something else instead. “Slughorn or Pomfrey?”
“I don’t need the antidote now that the love potion has burned out of my system. And Pomfrey can’t do anything for me.”
“The scratches on your face—”
Nott draws his wand in a fluid snap of motion, and heals the scratches on his face with a single flick and swish. Not even verbal magic. Impressive. Harry gives him another tentative smile and stands. “All right. Let me at least escort you back to your common room, though.”
“I can’t sleep there.”
Sobering, Harry nods. At least he knows that Romilda Vane gave him those potioned chocolates two years ago just because she was obsessed with his fame. Nott doesn’t know but that someone tried to rape him. Or humiliate him really badly.
“Right,” he agrees. “You can’t stay there.”
Nott glances at him sideways. “What are you thinking, Potter?”
“That unfortunately, one of the best places I could have taken you burned in the war,” Harry mutters, and steps back as Nott gets slowly to his feet. “But we have to find someplace to hide you.”
“If you’re about to invite me into Gryffindor Tower—”
“No, we’d never get past the portrait without her raising the alarm. And you should keep what happened to you private if you want.”
Nott pauses, his eyes searching Harry’s face. “Nothing happened.”
“Of course it did,” Harry snaps. “And more to the point, whoever gave you the potion intended for worse to happen. But what they did was bad enough.”
Nott just stares at him.
Harry thinks about it for a moment, and then nods and turns around. “Come on, Nott.”
Nott follows him without question, but he makes a little protesting sound when Harry comes to a halt outside the portrait that allows entrance to the kitchens. “You’re not seriously going to insist that I sleep there, Potter?”
“Why not? It’s warm, and safe, and the house-elves would never allow anyone to harm you.”
Nott closes his eyes for a long moment. Harry waits patiently. He supposes it would be kind of humiliating for a pureblood to sleep under the care of house-elves. And it’s Nott’s decision. But he doesn’t have any better advice to offer.
“I don’t know if I can conjure a pallet,” Nott whispers finally.
“That’s all right. I’ll do it.”
Harry tickles the pear, and the portrait opens. House-elves squeak at them, but they agree immediately when Harry asks if Nott can spend the night, and fetch blankets for him. Harry Transfigures one of the benches into a pallet and steps back so that Nott can get to it without passing too close to Harry.
“You’re…very good at this,” Nott says slowly, when he’s sat down on the pallet, then lain down, and Harry’s spread a blanket over him. “Have you comforted someone in the aftermath of Amortentia before?”
“I mean, just Ron.”
“Someone potioned Weasley?”
It’s hard for Harry to keep from rolling his eyes. Trust a Slytherin to think no one could want to date a Weasley. But Nott doesn’t need Harry saying that right now, so he just shakes his head and says, “He ate some chocolates that he didn’t know had a love potion in them. Someone in Gryffindor intended the potion for me.”
Nott opens his mouth, but nothing comes out.
“I don’t have a lot of practice,” Harry continues quietly, meeting Nott’s eyes. He looks more tired than Harry felt last year after the Battle of Hogwarts. “I’m just trying to do the right thing for people who need it.”
Nott closes his eyes with a slight grimace. “And now I owe you a debt.”
“There’s no debt between us.”
“Potter, no one would do for me what you did—”
Harry finds that hard to believe, since there are loads of decent people around, but he just says, “If you really feel that you owe me something, what about letting me punish the person who did this to you?”
Nott snarls at him without opening his eyes.
“Okay,” Harry says, doing his best to keep his smile out of his voice. “Then there’s no debt between us.”
Nott makes a movement as though he wants to dispute that, but falls back against the pallet. Harry waits for a moment until he sinks into what looks like blank slumber, and then draws his wand and carefully sets up wards around the pallet that will resist anything short of a crazed Bludger.
Then he goes back to Gryffindor Tower, silently seething.
Nott wasn’t raped. He wasn’t humiliated in front of the whole school, or lured into a corner of the Slytherin dormitory and hurt or killed. He didn’t claw his eyes out. But only because of the random coincidence of him drinking a resistance potion and Harry happening to find him in the corridor.
Harry hates the thought of whoever did this to Nott getting away with it.
If I do happen to find them before he does…
I’m going to punish them. I’ll leave enough for Nott to tear apart, though.