It wasn’t the fact that it was long and light and had a bit of spring to it. It wasn’t the way it curled cruelly at one end or the fact that the other tapered into what was unmistakeably supposed to be a cat’s paw. It was the fact that it was pink.
As the two pudgy hands that gripped the object flexed the wood to show the amount of give it had and, to someone who had felt one before, just how much it would sting, Harry tried not to laugh at the fact that he was about to be beaten with a pink cane. Oh, but this was just sad. Even for him. Growing up in a cupboard, which had never been something to brag about before, would always be on another level entirely to this. This was humiliating in the extreme. The woman certainly knew how to keep him quiet. As if he would ever tell anyone about this.
Having experienced all kinds of punishment from the Dursleys for the greater portion of his life, he felt suddenly at ease. He didn’t think he was masochistic and he certainly didn’t welcome any kind of punishment but compared to the blood quill – a magical artefact when it was magic that had rescued him; liberating him at eleven from a mundane muggle existence with his family and bringing him to Hogwarts and friends; punished by what had saved him as if to show him just whose mercy he was at and how much – a cane he could handle.
It was something he had faced before and no doubt would again; it didn’t play mind games, it didn’t leave any long-lasting, tell-tale scars in places they would be seen and commented on – not usually anyway – and he didn’t doubt that this time at least it wouldn’t be the worst punishment he’d ever had. Umbridge couldn’t possibly have more strength than his uncle and even if she came close, Harry knew that this was something he could handle. He could handle this. He could handle her.
Nevertheless he felt he had to say something. He wasn’t sure how a blood quill would be received by the other professors but he knew caning wasn’t allowed. That was why Filch was in his constant state of depression. That and whipping and chains and any number of other banned, sadomasochistic crap the twisted bugger could think of.
Harry watched Umbridge approach somewhat warily, though without the fear of the unknown that had possessed him earlier. Would she go for his hands or the seat of his trousers? How many would she be satisfied with? How much strength did she have?
“Robe off. Hands against the wall I think dear.” It made Harry want to retch that she would call him dear and hit him at the same time. He didn’t move.
“I didn’t know caning was allowed professor?” He made it sound as much like a polite inquiry as he could. There was no need to rile her when she held all the cards. And a cane. Even if it was pink.
“We will no doubt be adjusting what you do and do not know many times this week so you may consider this your first lesson.” That’s a no. “Though you do raise an excellent point,” she said as she stopped and lowered the cane in her hand marginally. Harry was astounded; that was all it would take?
“I- I do?”
“Yes dear, I’d almost forgotten,” she continued as she swept back behind her desk again, opening the top draw to withdraw something else before closing it softly, leaving Harry to wonder what he’d brought on himself now. As she made her way towards him again he fought not to shrink back against the wall and was surprised when she raised the hand that wasn’t holding the pink cane to reveal a vial of malevolently glinting, blood-red potion that reminded him too much of a pair of eyes from his nightmares and one too many encounters in his comparatively short lifetime.
She held it up to his eye level and a swirl of black curled lazily through the liquid. “This,” she murmured from a few feet before him, “will also be necessary.” He looked at her uncomprehending for a very long moment before his brain clicked from denial to horror. He shook his head quickly back and forth soundlessly and she tutted, taking a step closer. “Mr Potter, the longer you dillydally, the more time you will spend with this,” and she held the cane up. She thrust the vial into his hand and stepped so close he couldn’t not recoil, though it did him no good as she followed with a small smirk. “You will drink it Harry, do not make this more difficult on yourself.”
“What- what it is?” He inwardly cursed himself for wavering.
“A surprise. You will know when you’ve taken it. And if you do not do so in the next ten seconds you will find me most... displeased.”
He unstoppered the vial and sniffed the potion, wondering absently if Snape had brewed it with him in mind even as he ran over his options several times, coming to the same conclusion over and over. He had no choice. This woman basically ran the school and would only make things worse for everyone if he couldn’t handle this. He could handle this. He had handled worse, this he could do. Besides, what was this in comparison to the things he would have to do in the future? Umbridge, for all her insanity had nothing on Voldemort in the end and if he couldn’t handle her he would be dead before it could possibly matter anyway. The potion in his hand clearly wasn’t Veritaserum and if taking it risked nothing except his health then it was the same as a caning really, wasn’t it?
Nevertheless, the smallest, weakest part of him made a vow in the confines of his head. He shuddered and tipped his head back, swallowing the potion as quickly as possible and grimacing when he distinctly felt the small black thing in it slithering down his throat like it was alive and couldn’t get inside him fast enough. Even as he felt it settle he vowed that if things got too bad, if he really couldn’t handle it, if she went too far; he would tell someone.
But he was strong. He’d been trained for this for years – all those things he’d accomplished, all the reasons he was called the boy-who-lived, all those legends people told that held the slightest grains of truth to them. He was powerful; he was able to handle himself. And he would. She wouldn’t break him.
He didn’t fail to notice that despite her words he didn’t feel any different for having taken the potion – besides a bit of nausea due to its texture – and could only hope that it meant it hadn’t worked. Maybe... maybe since Snape was supposed to be on their side and it would have had to have been his potion... maybe he had done something? Made it wrong on purpose – made it ineffective somehow.
“Now, your first lesson, changing perceptions...” she trailed off, apparently in anticipation as she took back the empty vial, putting it on her desk with a soft clink and running an affectionate hand down the cane as she turned back to him.
“I thought that was punctuality,” he muttered before he could stop himself as he turned towards the wall. He wouldn’t argue this. He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of thinking that he could handle having his hand torn open night after night and yet would complain over a couple lashes with a pink cane. He just wouldn’t.
“What was that dear?”
“Nothing, Professor.”
“Dear dear, punctuality and elocution, we do have our work cut out for us don’t we Harry? Never mind, I happen to be a very good teacher.”
Harry scoffed silently, thankful he was facing the wall. He supposed it would be his legs and bum that would get it then. He wondered if any of the older professors at Hogwarts had doled out this kind of punishment before, back before it was banned. He should ask McGonagall. He leant forward, bowing his back as he put his palms to the wall and readied himself, waiting to be told how many he would be getting for his ‘transgression’. Therefore he was not expecting the swish, thwack of the cane and the pain that blossomed seconds after the sound broke the silence of the room, not where he had expected but in a sharp line across the bottom of his back. The pain seemed to culminate where the cane had hit the unforgiving ridge of his tailbone and he gasped, his legs buckling slightly under the weight, which was considerably heavier than he’d been expecting because of where the blow had landed and the force behind it.
He looked back over his shoulder to see Umbridge contemplating his back and circling him where he stood before, without warning, she raised the cane high above her head. He turned his head away swiftly when he realised what she was doing. It smacked hard against the ridges of his spine, landing at a diagonal angle down his back and creating a lopsided cross on his lower back if the feel of it was anything to go by. The second blow had hit his tailbone as well and he felt the pain radiate like white flame from that one spot, blinding him so much to the state of the rest of his back that the long lines did no more than tingle. He’d learned something new about Delores Umbridge he realised as he fought not to let any sounds escape his bitten lips. She had excellent aim.
He still had his shirt on but considering the piercing stare she was levelling at his back he guessed it did very little to stop her from seeing her handiwork as she continued applying well-placed strokes on his back from different angles. The vertical ones were the worst as his knees wobbled beneath the extra weight she put into her handiwork. He hadn’t known before tonight that a cane could be applied this way and the vicious sheen to Umbridge’s eyes made it so much worse. For some reason he thought he might prefer Uncle Vernon’s belt and blind rage. It was over much quicker as it was fuelled largely by his emotion-driven adrenaline. This was cold and calculated and she was enjoying herself far more than his uncle ever had. He did it to release frustration; she was doing it for enjoyment. Amusement. Dragging it out. Planning for it to cause maximum pain.
That and the fact that she wasn’t tiring anywhere near as fast. Each time she brought the cane to his back, the force went straight through his body, making his legs ache fiercely as they supported the abused area and his feet quickly became sore as they absorbed the shockwaves against the stone beneath him. She twirled her weapon occasionally around her hands like a wand while she considered, giving him too much time to think of the pain and to become apprehensive of the next stroke. And when she brought it down again whilst standing beside him with the cane in her pudgy fist lining up against his back as though she was playing golf backwards, he saw the way she held it – the back of her hand facing down – and it reminded him of the way his uncle had backhanded him in the past.
When the cane made contact he noticed the difference and hissed at the increased power from the adjustment. Welts were crisscrossing his back and he could feel the flaring stars of pain where each one intersected another. The entire punishment took far too long and he had lost count completely by the time the lashes stopped coming and there was a noticeably longer pause. The feel of her breath on his neck and the sound of her quiet voice from right beside his ear made him flinch and then curse himself for his noticeable show of weakness.
“So Harry, do you think this lesson has been learned or must we continue?” Faced with no other possible reply and feeling something suddenly curling and writhing deep at the bottom of his stomach as though in response, Harry gritted his teeth against the impending nausea and replied.
“I’ve learned.” And he had, hadn’t he...?
He did recoil, though not far when he felt his back flare at the movement, as she brushed the back of her hand across his cheek. The caress left his throat working in an effort to keep from vomiting.
“Good. Very good. Then let’s end this session.” Harry almost agreed when he saw her lift the cane again. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her readjust her hold on the cane until she was grasping it by its curve before lifting the moulded cat’s paw end to the top of his back, resting it on one shoulder as a grandmother might to nudge forward a hesitating toddler. It was incredibly strange and for a moment it simply sat there.
Harry gasped again as he suddenly felt a sharp sting like a ton of tiny needles were sinking into his shoulder as the skin was pierced in one quick motion. The cane hadn’t yet moved and he had to bite his lip until blood filled his mouth to keep from making noise as that pain increased before travelling slowly down his back, bumping over and slicing through his welts from his right shoulder to his left hip.
“There,” He heard her mutter with satisfaction when she’d finished the long rake of her cane across his skin and he saw out of the corner of his eye as five sharp, bloodied claws receded back into the paw. He dreaded to think what his back would look like now with the five long, continuous and clearly bloody lines trailing down his back, not to mention the damage it must have done to the raised skin of every welt. He could feel hot trickles of blood curling sticky warmth around his ribcage and pooling in the dip at the small of his back, causing his soggy shirt to stick to his skin and to sit too heavily against his abused flesh.
Straightening slowly, he felt the newly torn and abused skin shift as his bowed back curved naturally, stretching and pulling skin that screamed its complaint. He clenched his teeth resolutely against any noise of pain.
“Considering it is quite late already, I think I’ll dismiss you now and we’ll just have to begin properly tomorrow. I assume you will not be late again?” Harry knew she was baiting him. They both knew he still had detention with Snape tomorrow night and that he would still be late. But then, what was the worst Snape could do to him? Certainly he would be mad – furious, insane with anger at Harry’s arrogance – but he wouldn’t cane him. Umbridge would. And, if this was how they spent every night this week, Harry’s back would be a mess of bloodied torn flesh by the end of it and they wouldn’t have covered everything Umbridge clearly wanted to which would result in more detentions... or whatever the hell this was. Snape was bad but Umbridge was worse. Knowing that, all he could do was nod.
“Excellent, I see this message sunk in much faster than the last. We’ll have those delusions of yours broken in no time.” Harry turned slowly, trying not to aggravate his back and saw Umbridge tapping a pink fingernail against her pursed lips in thought. “We didn’t make quite as much progress as I would have liked, but then you did learn this particular lesson rather thoroughly so perhaps a reprieve is in order. I’ll save your surprise for tomorrow evening.” Surprise? What new hell had she thought of now? “Run along Harry, I’ll see you tomorrow. Remember, don’t be late.” Her simpering laugh rang in his head, unable or unwilling to echo into nothingness.
He almost bolted out of the room once she’d given permission, dragging his bag on the ground behind him as he knew simply from moving that adding the extra weight to his shoulder would be unbearable. He was still a little shell-shocked but there was a numb, disconnected part of his mind that reasoned that as far as punishments went, it wasn’t the worst he’d ever had. His life was fraught with danger and he’d seen his share of violence, he could handle this. That was the most logical, least emotional part of his mind.
The part that would have had him sticking up for himself and realising not only the injustice but the sheer wrongness of her actions; that part of him was strangely absent. He didn’t think he deserved the punishment – he knew in a weird, abstract kind of way that that wasn’t it precisely. More it was the slightly fatalistic, objective viewpoint that it could be worse so he shouldn’t expect better.
He was the boy-who-lived. A caning from one extra person wouldn’t change that. He was one student in a school overrun with them. Not only that; he was one of the older ones of the school and if he complained he would be risking those few students older than himself and the many younger ones, because they needed Dumbledore and Harry forcing an earlier confrontation between the Headmaster and the ministry over a caning wouldn’t just be selfish, it would be irresponsible.
But then... what if Dumbledore didn’t do anything anyway? The thought had Harry stopping where he was, alone in the middle of the silent corridor, standing in the shadow just beyond the pooling moonlight. Looking absently out the window with his thoughts so abruptly halted, he found he could see the moon – not quite full, Remus had a few more days – and the starlight that couldn’t be completely obscured by the low-lying clouds, lit from behind by translucent silver. What if Dumbledore didn’t disagree with what Umbridge had just done? Harry doubted that the grandfatherly old wizard would support such punishment, but he was the same man who had left him with the Dursleys. Surely, if he thought it was for the greater good, for the ultimate protection of the wizarding world – or at least for Hogwarts – surely he would turn the same blind eye he had been turning since Harry’s parents had been killed.
The thought had him swallowing hard against the lump that had formed in his throat, threatening to choke him. He welcomed back the numbing blanket, pushing the rest of his emotions back. He was being ridiculous, a week of this and it would be over. And anyway, she wouldn’t do this every night. She said he’d learnt this lesson; whatever surprise she had for him tomorrow might not be so bad. He didn’t know if his train of thought proved his optimism or sarcastic pessimism... perhaps Snape had it right and it was just another sign of his idiocy. Or insanity.
Whatever it was, it was enough for now if it allowed him to stop thinking. Carefully, Harry made his way back towards Gryffindor tower, taking his time to stop in one of the boys toilets on the way to cast a quick scourgify on his clothes. He didn’t know any healing spells but that was alright; he couldn’t do magic in the holidays either and he got by well enough then.
Wetting a bundle of paper towel, he made quick work of cleaning some of the blood off his back and the trail it had made around his torso to his chest and stomach. The red stood out starkly against his moonlit skin; new enough to still be wet and bright red and glistening but with sticky globs of crimson where the blood had already coagulated and clung persistently in the hollows between his ribs; the force necessary to remove them made Harry sore and need to stop to retch every so often.
He would have been lying if he’d said that seeing himself in the mirror, seeing his back and what it had become over the course of the night hadn’t fascinated him. There was a lot more blood than he’d thought.
He worked quickly and after another scourgify he looked normal. Normal enough to pass cursory inspection from his friends at least. They didn’t know he’d had the meeting with Umbridge so they wouldn’t suspect anything anyway. It wasn’t such a stretch to believe that Snape would have kept him this long and for once Harry was pleased with the man’s reputation for being a snarky bastard; it definitely worked in his favour now.
__________________________________________________________________________________
When he stepped through the portrait hole ten minutes later, pulling his bag laboriously behind him while trying to make the action look as natural as possible, he was surprised enough to take a step back when he was accosted by his friends the second he was seen.
“Are you okay? Where were you? It’s nearly midnight; surely Professor Snape didn’t keep you in detention this whole time!”
“’Mione give him some space to breathe.” Harry could only agree with Ron as Hermione had been on him as soon as she’d seen him, jumping from the couch in front of the fire where the two of them had clearly been waiting and latching onto his neck. Harry couldn’t have been happier that she hadn’t touched his back but it still strained under her slight weight and the sudden change in position and he couldn’t help hissing a little. Hermione immediately released him and looked at his face carefully.
“What’s wrong, did I hurt you?” Harry shook his head and tried for a smile though he didn’t know how successful he’d been.
“It’s fine, I’ve just been cleaning cauldrons and my back’s hurting a bit.”
“But you disappeared at dinner; you can’t possibly have been cleaning cauldrons for over four hours.”
Despite looking worried as well, Ron smiled a little, “You did something else to piss him off didn’t you?” When Harry didn’t answer immediately, not sure what to say as it was always true but not the way his friend had meant it, Ron nodded knowingly and his smile turned rueful, “Mate, I know he’s... well, Snape, but maybe you shouldn’t rise to it every time. He only says the stuff he does to get you in trouble.”
Harry felt the slightest twinge of betrayal that his friends assumed it was his fault and the irrational feeling in him rose like bile and coiled in his chest that they thought he deserved what had happened that night. Of course neither of them knew, and he suspected that wasn’t even really what Ron was saying but his nerves and emotions were overwrought and he wasn’t entirely rational at that point. He could feel the air of despondency that settled over him like a cloying cloak and wondered if his friends could feel it as palpably as a Dementor’s chill the way he could. It was as though a physical weight settled on him and he could feel his back prickling with the implications. Instead of the usual self-defences he might have come back with, Harry just nodded slowly.
“Yeah, I guess.” He missed the look that passed between Ron and Hermione who were both at a loss as to the reason for his sudden shift in mood. “Thanks for waiting up for me but I’m exhausted, I might just head to bed.”
He didn’t look up as he passed them without another word, trying not to look too much as though he was dragging his feet. He heard Ron call out that he would be up in a minute but he didn’t have the brain space to think up a reply so he didn’t try to.
More glad than ever for the silencing charms on the curtains of the other beds and similarly happy that Dean, Seamus and Neville had apparently decided on an early night – sort of, it was getting rather late for a school night – Harry flopped tiredly onto his bed, sprawling face down and hissing again into his pillow when the move pulled the skin on his battered back taut.
Using the least energy possible he rolled to the side until he could manoeuvre himself beneath the heavy quilt, not caring as the weight settled on his back. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew he would regret not seeing to his back again before sleeping, or at the very least not taking off his shirt, but he was so tired. Surely it couldn’t be so bad to just let his eyes slip closed for a little while.