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"...you'll get better soon 'cause you have to"
['soon you'll get better', taylor swift]
xxx
The cool air brushed her cheeks, and she watched as the willow's feeble branches and slender leaves swayed in its liberty, slow dancing above the ground, as he watched the never-ending small ripples develop and disappear in the black lake before them. The sun was still lowering, though enough light remained.
She didn't know whether Madame Pomfrey had come back yet or not, whether it had been a half-hour or just two minutes, and whether or not she'd figured out that the windows of the hospital wing were perfect to climb out of and wander down to the shore of the black lake.
He'd brought her down, of course; her arms around his neck, and him carrying her 'bridal style', but she didn't really feel like a bride at all. It was more like she'd been pulled out of a fire and was being brought to safety, with smoke in her lungs and ashes in her hair in the arms of someone who could save her—or at least, someone who could hold her as the blistering burns and gashes and bruises and heat became all too much for her body. Or maybe like a drowning victim pulled from the water, her skin too pale and limbs too limp and cold and lungs too full of water—helpless; vulnerable; dying; too far gone, though remaining in the arms of her soaked savior just to have that human touch as her eyes became empty and she drifted away.
He knew everything, now. Everything. He knew that she'd been in the herbology greenhouse late after school, a place so crowded with overgrown plants. She'd been working on a detailed diagram due the next day, sitting on the table—but the lamps along the glass walls had extinguished, and suddenly everything was a silhouette, her wand annoyingly on the other side of the room—and that was when she stood on them; two massive thorns, and they went right through the sole of her shoes to her skin.
To this day, she doesn't know what plant it was—no one does. Maybe it was a type of plant that spread its thorns as darkness touched its stems; a self-defense mechanism, maybe; something undiscovered, something mysterious and unknown. But as professors inspected the greenhouse after word from Madame Pomfrey, they found no trace of any loose thorn plant. And so came her diagnosis—which was barely a diagnosis, and basically just a 'hey we don't know what plant did this and the thorns we took out of your feet don't match any records or samples in the world and it's kind of killing your feet and spreading up your body.'
She could almost feel the ache of his bruised, broken heart from where her head rested on his shoulder; their backs against the willow's trunk, his arm around her, holding her—like if he didn't, she'd fall to the ground and smash into pieces before his eyes. She looked up at him, and he refused to meet her eyes; his gaze trained on the horizon—of the sun nearly set; so close to the horizon; the light nearly gone, but not quite gone just yet.
