Healer Letham smiled at him again. "I'm on your side, and I'll fight for you—even against your own trauma that is keeping you from seeing how much you need healing." She held up a hand when Harry glared at her. "But any particular session that you want to end, we can end. Do you want to be done with this one?"
Harry fidgeted back and forth on the chair. He did and he didn't. He didn't like the thought of a Mind-Healer talking to him like he was some broken doll she was trying to piece back together, but on the other hand, this was the only time that he'd really got to talk to someone since finding out about Dobby.
He sighed. "I want to tell you about Dobby, and have you help me figure out how to help him."
"I can do that. Why don't you tell me more?"
...
Harry wandered slowly away from the Manor into the beautiful gardens, and sat down near a pond that had a curving, graceful fountain of white stone in the middle of it. It was shaped almost like a dolphin, but not completely. Not really. Harry sighed and shook his head. Sometimes he couldn't believe that he lived in a place so rich.
He looked out into the gardens, and watched darkness creeping up among the trees and the flowers. He kept turning over what had happened with Healer Letham this afternoon in his mind, and what he was going to do in the morning.
Healer Letham had agreed that it was a good idea to ask Dobby to be his personal elf. Freeing him was possible, but she thought it would lead to more tension between him and the Malfoys than it would solve, and Dobby would have a hard time finding another place that he could go or a job he could hold.
So Harry would have to talk to Mr. Malfoy in the morning and ask about having Dobby assigned to him. And never hurt by anyone else ever again, or ordered to hurt himself.
That was going to be a fun conversation.
He watched the sunlight sink further and further, and admitted to himself, finally, that he did feel better after talking with Healer Letham. She hadn't miraculously cured him of anything—and he didn't think there was any cure for thinking of himself as Harry Potter, and he wouldn't want it if there was—but at least she agreed with him about some things.
And she had told him some things he could do about the Malfoys other than just getting Dobby for his elf. Harry was going to try that.
One of the white peacocks squawked and fled across the garden with its tail trailing behind it, beating its wings frantically and flying maybe a meter before landing again. Harry snickered. They really were ridiculous creatures, something Draco got defensive about every time Harry mentioned it.
"Are you Harry? Or the other one?"
Harry spun around, grabbing his wand from his robe pocket even though he knew he wasn't supposed to use magic over the summer. But there was someone out here who wasn't a house-elf or a Malfoy, and he knew that meant they weren't supposed to be here.
"Who is it?" he asked, his eyes darting around, and wishing for once that it wasn't so dark.
"Lumos."
A wand lit up, and there was a man sitting on the grass maybe three meters away from him, a horribly thin man with black hair hanging around his face. He looked at Harry with a kind of desperate, crazed hunger that made Harry swallow. His first thought was Voldemort, but he didn't look anything like the red eyes Harry had seen on the back of Professor Quirrell's head.
"I think you have to be Harry," whispered the man. "The other one would have run screaming for his Mummy and Daddy by now." He spat the last words, and his grey eyes lit up with a terrible contempt. He looked exactly the way Uncle Vernon always had when talking about foreigners.
Harry didn't know why he made the jump to the right conclusion. Except, maybe, that the eyes looked like Draco and Mrs. Malfoy's, and his when he looked into the mirror and got taken by surprise, and he knew Mrs. Malfoy was a Black.
"Are you Sirius Black?" he asked.
The man leaped back and transformed, in the middle of the leap, into a giant black dog. He streaked away into the darkness before Harry could even close his mouth.
Harry stared at where he'd sat. So Sirius Black had somehow escaped from Azkaban and then come onto the Malfoy property—the one with wards that he wasn't supposed to be able to cross, except did they keep dogs out?—and he'd betrayed the Potters and kidnapped Harry in the first place and he was here.
Harry drew his breath in to yell.
Then, slowly, he closed his mouth again.
For someone who was mad, the man hadn't actually hurt him. And right now, Harry felt more like Harry Potter than he did a Malfoy.
Harry glanced back towards the Manor, and then got up and walked in that direction as he heard Mrs. Malfoy calling for him, but he kept his mouth shut and walked as though he hadn't just seen a crazed man turn into a dog and run away.
It had felt good to talk to Healer Letham and get some secrets out. But the Malfoys still hadn't apologized for keeping Dobby away from Harry, or lying to him about whatever the evil plot at Hogwarts had been.
Harry thought he was due a secret of his own.
....
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