𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒 𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐍𝐆𝐄

Part 16

1.

Harry stays home, and when Lavender stops coming by after the third day, he still stays home, unwilling to so much as go to the grocer’s because Malfoy hasn’t woken up yet.

He sits on the bed at night between bouts of the baby crying, and he holds Malfoy’s cold, clammy hand, squeezing it gently. He wipes the sweat from Malfoy’s brow and watches his chest, to make sure he breathes, that the fever doesn’t strangle him.

Sometimes Malfoy will sigh or moan, but he never wakes. He’ll thrash sometimes, kick and flail, but he doesn’t wake. He’ll open cracked lips and a choked noise will come, Harry will try to wake him, to shake his shoulders, to try a glass of water at his lips, but it doesn’t work.

“Harry,” Hermione says, touching his shoulder. “Harry, come and have some supper.”

He shakes his head.

Hermione has come for the day, maybe more. He can hear her downstairs, cleaning things and talking with his other children, sometimes coming upstairs to help Harry with the baby. Malfoy lies there, limp and lifeless when Harry props him up against the headboard of the board so the baby will feed.

“If only you could see yourself now,” Harry mutters, holding the baby up to Malfoy’s chest. It’s a boy, and Harry looks at the baby, through his red, pinched face, and thinks James, but without Malfoy waking to confirm this, it’s no more than a thought, a hope.

Hermione stands in the doorway with a tray of supper. “I brought this up. Please eat something, Harry. Have a shower. I’ll watch the baby. It’ll be fine. Malfoy will be fine. Lavender said there’s nothing we can do right now- his…condition- he’ll be all right. He’s Malfoy. He always hangs on.”

Harry gives Malfoy a long, lingering look, smiling sadly at him, at his grey-tinged skin, beads of sweat forming on his forehead. His face is sunken and his belly still distended. His fingers curl into the sheets and his eyes are squeezed shut. Harry knows Malfoy’s in pain. He wants to do more than this, than this waiting.

He showers quickly, enough for the grime to wash away from his body, enough for his skin to cool under the chilly spray, before he returns. He eats his dinner, shoveling it down hungrily, then picks up the baby, who cries again for him. He walks into the hallway, never going far from Malfoy, lest something happen, but enough so Viola, Abraxas and Pyrrha know he hasn’t abandoned them. They’re all right, taking care of themselves with Hermione’s help, watching the telly and playing in the park and Pyrrha has started to pick up the laundry from around the house and wash some clothes and nappies, with Hermione’s help and Ginny’s, too, Harry suspects, when he sees several red-haired people come by over the next days, week, he doesn’t know anymore.

“I miss you,” Harry tells Malfoy every night. “I love you. Goddamn, get better, Malfoy,” he insists. He wants to kiss Malfoy, but he can’t bring himself to do anything more than leave chaste pecks on Malfoy’s brow, which tastes of salt, stale and hot. He rubs the balm on his lips that Hermione suggests, and changes his robes with a Levicorpus.

He smells awful, of blood and piss, sweat and other things.

“You should give him a bath, mate,” Ron says one day.

Harry can’t count the days anymore. The hours of wishing Malfoy would wake turn into days when the baby doesn’t stop crying turn into seemingly more days that he sees Hermione or Ron or a Weasley or two, or even Luna, and often Lavender, here, helping out. Abraxas and Pyrrha haven’t returned to Hogwarts yet, nor Viola to her Muggle school, so it can’t be more than a week, maybe two, but it seems an eternity.