Rubbing Alcohol by Jan_AQ
Summary: Hogwarts has been under siege for some time. The supplies are dwindling, food is running low and most of the potions have been spent... Harry is injured and Snape is the only one able to help at the moment. There are no potions left, and no correct ingredients to make any so they’ll have to bind it Muggle Style.
Categories: Healer Snape Main Characters: .Snape and Harry (required)
Snape Flavour: Snape Comforts, Snape is Stern
Genres: Angst, Hurt/Comfort
Media Type: None
Tags: Injured!Harry
Takes Place: 6th Year
Warnings: Character Death
Prompts: Rubbing Alcohol
Challenges: Rubbing Alcohol
Series: None
Chapters: 1 Completed: Yes Word count: 2042 Read: 6715 Published: 25 Nov 2006 Updated: 25 Nov 2006
Story Notes:
This is a response to the Rubbing Alcohol challenge. I wrote it trying to mimic some of the injury/healing LoTR fics. XD I'm not sure how good it is, but enjoy! :)

1. Rubbing Alcohol by Jan_AQ

Rubbing Alcohol by Jan_AQ

"Harry!"

The stones fell...

--

Harry groggily woke up in the hospital wing, feeling weak but that had been the norm for awhile, feeling weak. It was because he hadn't eaten anything for awhile. He also hurt.

Badly.

Especially his head.

What happened?

He closed his eyes against the pain as he remembered... he had gone after one of the younger students. Sarah, a second year. The little girl had been adamant that an owl was coming for her, it was her birthday. When the Owl didn't come she had been determined to find it.

The Owlery had already been decimated, the Gryffindor tower had been relocated. Most of the Owls had resettled themselves in what remained of the Owlery as well as the surrounding towers.

The stonework there had been unstable...

"Harry!" She had screamed it out in fear, in fright, maybe in warning.

They had been told not to go up there, it had been forbidden! With the hospital supplies so low they couldn't afford any more injuries, especially with the Death Eaters camped out around the school, taking any opportunity to attack anyone they could.

But she had been adamant, saying that her mum would pack enough cakes her and her friends to eat for a whole week. With the food supplies so low that they barely existed it was a wonderful promise.

But everyone knew that it was a false promise. Very few post owls had managed to get through to Hogwarts without being shot down by the camping Death Eaters. One of the last owls that got through had been booby trapped.

There was no food in the Wizarding world except what the Death Eaters controlled and Hogwarts was nowhere near a Muggle food market.

They had been told not to go up there!

A bowl was placed with a bang at Harry's head, the sound ringing painfully.

Harry opened his eyes. Snape was there, looking drawn and tired and thin. He was holding a white cloth. Harry tried to sit up.

"Lie still," Snape directed.

Harry ignored him and tried to sit, he gasped at a sudden awful pain in his arm.

"Lie still!" Snape snarled as he pushed him back down with one hand. Harry was so weak, he practically collapsed under Snape's hand. He looked down and distractedly realized that his arm was a mess, blood covering the torn sleeve and skin underneath.

Still dazed, he looked up to see Snape leaning over the bed, his head down, hair hiding his face. Harry took in his professor's defeated, emaciated posture and closed his eyes against the nausea. "Is she..."

"She is dead."

"Harry!" Her last cry echoed in his head.

Snape stood up and busied himself, setting out supplies slowly. "Madame Pomfrey is attending to her body and the ones who helped extradite you."

"Do you know if she..."

"Suffered?" Snape turned his black eyes on Harry. They were so large in his sunken face. "She was found alive but unconscious... her rib cage was crushed. She did not live long."

"I'm sorry," Harry said quietly. She had been one of the last Slytherins left in the school. He closed his eyes and tried to forget her scream of his name, her laughter and smiles when she had been alive.

Her scream kept ringing in his ears.

He opened his eyes and felt his words pouring out, like a confession, "She snuck out. I was in the Great Hall, Hermione ran up to me to help find her. I did but she was already on her way up to the Owlry- It was my fault. I should have been faster! I should have taken a faster shortcut, I should have saved her!"

Snape was looking away; the cloth in his hands was gripped tightly in his bony fingers. "Perhaps it is better she is dead."

Harry swallowed. "No," he whispered. He refused to believe that. "I should have saved her, I should have found a way out for her before-"

"Stop that," Snape commanded harshly. "You do not have the energy to waste." He re-dipped the cloth into the bowl and wrung it out. "Hogwarts is the safest place right now, you are aware of that. Those who are here chose to be here."

Right, like Harry.

"No one would have left before. Even now I believe no one would choose to leave unless on a mission, save the children, but their parents want them to be here." He spoke the truth, as if teaching a lesson in Potions as he prepared the cloth. It was little solace to Harry who still heard the little girl's screams.

The cloth was ready again.

"This is going to hurt and you've lost a lot of blood. It is better if you cooperate and do not struggle. You do not have the energy."

Harry tried to put his mind on the now, and not the then. He was injured and Snape was apparently the one who was going to see to his injuries. In another time, he might have had a cheeky thought about how that was not a very safe place to be, but the necessity of their condition prevented such now. Snape had said that Harry could not waste the energy, but looking at Snape it seemed as if Snape did not have the energy to spare either fighting him.

Moving slowly, Snape helped Harry off with his robes and outer clothes; they revealed many injuries and a pad of cloth that was attached to his lower right thigh. Blood was seeping though the top of the make shift bandage. No wonder it had hurt to move that. The shirt he wore under his robes stuck to his many cuts and clung to one on his arm. Harry could not help a gasp that was let out as the sleeve was carefully torn away from that one. Harry let the pain try to chase the thoughts and memories of what just happened.

Snape moved the bowl a little closer and then washed out Harry's wounds with hot soapy water. It hurt, it stung and Harry tensed and gulped air before giving up and wiping his eyes discreetly with the sleeve of his robes nearby. Unfortunately, they did not have much in the way of healing supplies, but they had plenty of soap and bandages and with their bodies so weak, they had to do everything they could to avoid infection. No cut on Harry's torso went unnoticed by Snape and his stinging care.

His arm was washed out, and Snape was inspecting it. Harry wondered why.

"This needs help to close. Can you stay still or do I need to call over someone to hold you?"

"I'll stay still."

Snape eyed Harry as if measuring him up, then turned to a tray of implements and pulled out a needle and some thread out of a small box.

There was a bottle and Snape poured a tiny amount out into a tiny bowl before using a pair of tweezers to dip the needle in the liquid. He waited, standing there with the needle in the tweezers.

"Did you know, that alcohol only disinfects when the liquid has completely evaporated?" Snape remarked casually as he studied the needle.

"No. Good to know." Harry breathed.

Snape stated plainly as he threaded the needle, "If you move, I will call someone."

Harry hissed as Snape bundled the edges of the deep cut and sewed them together. It hurt and it did not help his empty stomach.

Harry forcibly told his arm not to move, it was hard, but only his fingers twitched. When it was done, Snape wrapped a white bandage around the arm and down to the hand, tucking the ends in under a layer of the cloth. They were out of sticking charms, it seemed.

"Do not move this for awhile," was his only instruction.

"What's wrong with my hand?" Harry asked faintly.

"It is likely sprained, you were found with it reached out towards the falling masonry."

"Oh." Harry wondered what he must have looked like when the rescue team found him.

Next Snape moved on to his head feeling for any bumps or cuts. He found one large one near the back that made Harry suck in his breath and almost throw up from the pain.

"This must be why you were unconscious," Snape said as he picked up that wicked soaped cloth.

Harry tried to keep his stomach as Snape worked, not that there was anything in it. When he was done, Harry was reeling and the cloth was bloody once more. Snape dabbed at the cut with a clean pad of gauze before stopping and telling Harry to hold the pad in place.

"I believe that it will stop bleeding on its own, it is a small cut."

Harry wondered why there was so much blood then.

Snape tossed the cloth onto a nearby table and picked up a clean one. Then he seemed to prepare himself before going back to work on Harry. Perhaps he was.

He wrapped a hospital blanket around Harry's upper half even though it was warm in the hospital wing, muttering something about shock despite the weather. "You should either lie down or sit back," Snape said and waited until Harry complied.

Harry watched tiredly and a little fearfully as Snape moved on to his leg and carefully pried up the edges of the pad of cloth. With several gentle tugs it revealed a ghastly wound and Harry looked at it, fascinated. There was something sticking out of it too.

"You are fortunate your leg was not broken," Snape remarked. Harry wondered at how that something got into his leg, wasn't most stone block shaped or crumbly? Not this... small, thin slab...

Hot, soapy water was poured over the wound and Harry jumped in pain, Snape's hands clamped around the leg, keeping it still and he gently cleaned the wound out.

One hand still clamped down, Snape picked up a large pair of tweezers and pried out the something that was in Harry's leg, it turned out to be a long bit of stone. He tossed that away in the same direction as the dirty cloth.

"I am sorry that we do not have any healing potions," Snape said as he dabbed at the deep wound on Harry's leg. "Perhaps later after Poppy has rested and had something to eat she may have enough energy to cast a healing spell on you."

"Another owl?" Harry asked, knowing that Owls were drawn on as a last resort when someone needed energy. Once, the House Elves had tried to serve themselves after weeks of substandard meals. Harry felt his stomach shuddering at the memory of that one. They hadn't known until they had finished eating, they had all felt ill but Hermione was the only one who actually threw up. Dumbledore had immediately forbid the House Elves to do that again.

Snape nodded. "Only if the hunting team comes back with nothing other than spiders." Which was likely. For some reason, the spiders did little for restoring their magical energy. "They will draw lots in the Great Hall to see who else will be able to have some.”

Snape picked up the small bowl and Harry wondered what he was doing. Before he could say anything, Snape quickly poured the alcohol into Harry’s leg wound. Harry blinked at Snape disbelievingly before the alcohol started burning. He hissed and blinked back tears.

Finally he lay back, sticking a bit of the blanket in his mouth.

“You cannot risk infection on such a wound as this,” Snape said almost apologetically as he put another gauze pad on Harry’s leg wound and then slowly wrapped it all in clean bandages.

The pain had receded a little by now and Harry cast about for something else to keep his mind off of it. “Has there been any word from or about Charlie?”

“No announcements have been made yet,” Snape said slowly.

Charlie was due to come by Hogwarts any day now with several dragons, carrying large crates of food. Where the Owls had failed, dragons should be able to succeed with their tough flanks and magical resiliently. Sometimes the knowledge of that was all that got Harry out of bed in the morning.

“He should be here soon,” Snape said, looking into Harry’s eyes as if thinking on the same thing.

“Rest,” Snape said as he closed the curtains. “I’ll be back in several hours to see how you’re healing.”

The End.


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