Just Breathe

n i n e t e e n

Remus

I was sick. I caught a cold from the funeral and I was determined to hide it. Sirius had enough on his plate without worrying about me. It almost worked in my favor that he was so distracted, because he didn't notice how out of it I was.

But Lily did. I was able to hide it from her for three days. That was it. I swear she has a sixth sense for whenever something was bothering me.

It was that third day, after I'd spent the previous night with Sirius, that I bid him farewell for awhile, planning to head over to my own apartment for an hour or two to get my pills and shower and such.

After getting out of the shower and getting a fresh change of clothes, I sat down at the counter and pulled the basket of my meds towards me and sorted through them, finding the ones I needed to take. I fell asleep at the counter not too long after that.

Lily found me there twenty minutes later. She shook me awake, James standing behind her.

"Rey, you're hardly ever this tired, are you alright?"

I sniffled. "Yeah I'm fine," I said, voice sounding nasally.

Lily frowned. "You've got a cold."

"I don't," I said too quickly.

Lily cocked an eyebrow. "You're breathing's sounding awfully wheezy, your nose is stuffed up, you fell asleep on the counter, you've definitely got a cold."

"Don't tell Sirius," I begged.

Lily's eyebrows knit in concern. "Why not? Shouldn't he know for like, safety reasons?"

"He's got enough to worry about right now, I don't want to bother him with taking care of me on top of everything. Please, you two."

James pursed his lips, waiting for Lily's verdict. She obviously wasn't too keen on the idea, but she sighed, anyway.

"Fine. But be careful. You're stubborn, I know you. But if think it's getting worse and you need help, you need to ask for it."

I nodded, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.

"We are going to the hospital though, Remus. Just to make sure you're fine."

I groaned loudly, sending myself into a coughing fit.

Lily raised an eyebrow and grabbed my arm, pulling me up from the stool.

"Up you go," she said. I begrudgingly followed James and Lily out of the apartment building.

"I've told Peter to distract Sirius while we're gone, so they're playing Minecraft," James informed us, looking up from his phone.

"Ah, perfect," Lily said, getting into James's van. I crawled into the backseat, listening to the lull of James and Lily talking, my head on the window. It was only a fifteen minute drive to the hospital in London, but I managed to fall asleep anyway.

Lily shook me awake when we got to the hospital. I'd been to this hospital before, back in December when I stayed for a week and a half, but my usual doctor, the one I'd been seeing since I was little, was in Oxford, where Lily and I grew up. It was also an hour drive, and fifteen minutes was much more reasonable for a quick check up.

Once we got checked in and waited for a little while, a nurse came back to get me. Lily came with because she said 'she needed to make sure she got all the information because she knew I wouldn't tell her the whole story'.

The doctor listened to my breathing for awhile and determined that I was a bit wheezy and that I did have a cold, both things I already knew. She prescribed me some meds and told me to come back if it were to get worse.