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lomonaaeren) wrote2007-09-29 08:41 pm
lomonaaeren) wrote2007-09-29 08:41 pm
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Chapter Twenty-Three of 'I Give You a Wondrous Mirror'- George
Remember, DH SPOILERS in this story!
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Warning: This chapter is upsetting in several ways, particularly in the scene where Harry is alone with George. Feel free to skim if you need to. The next few chapters are not much easier; currently, we’re in the nadir of the story.
Chapter Twenty-Three—George
Harry had never known St. Mungo’s could be so silent.
Maybe that was because he had only visited in the past with large groups of people, or with other Blood Reparations agents who had been injured, and the shouting and noise in the latter situations had rather muffled the presence of quiet. Or he had been unconscious, and that made him unable to detect the norm at all.
But now he stood alone in the corridor outside George’s room, staring at the wall, and he noticed. He had arrived after Ginny had—he had made arrangements for Luna to come and stay with the children, first—and when he’d peered through the door, the entire remaining Weasley family was clustered around the bed, including Hermione and Victoire, Bill and Fleur’s daughter. There wasn’t any room for him to slip in without crushing someone, and Ginny, crying silent, frantic tears in Charlie’s arms, didn’t look as if she needed him. He had winced and shut the door, waiting until the moment when he was needed, or when he had room to enter and pay his respects.
In the meantime, he stared, and thought, and tried to weigh up what all the attacks today said about their enemies. It was hard to think, but at least the attempt gave him something to focus on beyond George’s condition.
One thing Harry knew: this attack must have been long in the planning, for all that the execution of the plans had been swift and horrible. This was not something the Masked Lady could have commanded the moment she knew they were aware of and hunting her. If she could have, they had already lost the war. So Harry chose to believe in hope for the moment.
Could they do something as large again in the near future? Harry doubted it. At the very least, the places where the attack had fallen would be wary now, and they had sprung some traps that had to be long-standing; Draco had had time to tell him about the Blood Hydra and what he suspected of its origins in the moments before Harry shut the Floo connection. And Ron had said that a warning had come to them about the attack on Diagon Alley, which meant that a few of the Masked Lady’s followers might have become uneasy about her methods. If there was a way to persuade them to desert, Hermione would find it. Talking to discontented true believers was one of the usual ways that the Blood Reparations Department got information on the various supremacist groups.
What effect would these attacks have on the tense political climate Hermione had described?
Harry could only guess, but he thought nothing would happen for a day or so. The shock and the terror of the new war would hold people paralyzed that long. And he hoped that he and Hermione could work to alleviate some of that fear before it exploded into rage.
This was the crisis the Blood Reparations Department had been formed to deal with: another huge source of division that might attempt to part the two halves of the wizarding world. Harry had trained for it every minute of every day in the last ten years when he’d sought out self-exiled Muggleborns and asked them to return to the wizarding world, or gone to talk with haughty pure-bloods who couldn’t pass up the chance to have Harry Potter in their houses, or lent the power of his name to organizations and coalitions and speech-makers doing work that he believed in. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would have to be done.
For a moment, he quailed before the vision of all that work at a moment when he still sought to understand the life-debt magic and guard his children and balance his precarious relationship with Ginny. Then he dismissed his fears. He had made all these commitments of his own free will. If someone had sought to force him to take them up, it wouldn’t have worked anyway. Whinging now was out of the question.
So lost in his thoughts, he didn’t notice the door of George’s room had opened until he felt a warm weight against him. Harry wrapped his arms around Ginny and held her near, murmuring soundless words of comfort. She wasn’t crying now, but she rested on him as if she were utterly worn out. He thought she might fall asleep if he stood still long enough.
“Mate?”
Harry looked up with a blink. Ron had a face that seemed to have aged years in the time since he had come to fetch Harry and Ginny from the house.
“It’s George.” Ron flicked his head towards the room. “He’s asked to speak with you alone. The Healers will come back in a few minutes, but they said he could have one more visitor.”
“And what else do the Healers say?” Harry asked.
Ginny trembled in his embrace. Ron closed his eyes and turned his head away.
“We have a week to say goodbye to him,” he stated flatly.
Harry didn’t know how he found the strength to hand Ginny gently to Ron and walk into that room, but somehow, he found it.
*
At first, with George beneath blankets and his face turned to the wall, Harry could think he was almost fine, just a bit gashed about the shoulders and neck. Then, as he shut the door softly behind him, he realized that the whole shape of George’s body beneath the blankets was—wrong.
“George?” he asked quietly.
George turned to look at him. His eyes were wide and exhausted with pain, but he managed a smile. “Harry,” he said hoarsely, and extended his right arm. Harry came and took his hand. There were only three fingers to press on his five.
“What happened?” he asked, because it seemed possible to ask that in this moment, though he hadn’t had the will to press Ron about how bad George’s injuries were.
“Explosion that made the roof of the shop fall in on me,” said George, his eyes fluttering as if he were trying to blink back tears. But none crept down his face that Harry saw. “Then curses through the broken windows. They were aiming as if they knew exactly where I was. Maybe they did. I don’t know.”
Harry jerked his chin at the bed. “Can I?”
George nodded.
Harry tugged the blankets back.
He understood what Ron meant now. Medical magic could repair broken bones, grant new limbs on occasion, and close most wounds into scars, as long as they hadn’t been inflicted with Dark magic. But it could do nothing for this.
George’s legs were gone. What remained were stumps of bone fragile as the wings of a dead bird. There were so many bandages wrapped around his pelvis and spine that Harry couldn’t see the damage there, but he saw spots of blood and darker fluids already beginning to soak through the bandages. His chest was seamed with scars and burns and wounds like open mouths. Harry had a moment, glassy and distant with what he knew to be shock, to be outraged that the Healers hadn’t bothered to tend to those wounds, and then he realized they had. But the bandages had withered away. A faint, terrible smell of putrescence rose from the puckers.
“A week is how long they can keep you alive with magic,” he said.
“Yes.”
Something in the tone of George’s voice made Harry glance at his face again. There were still no tears, though Harry knew the pain from the curses which kept him bleeding and rotting alive must be terrible. He looked calm, serene, as if he were facing an illness that would pass over him and leave him as strong as before.
Harry thought he knew what George wanted of him. He gave a slight shake of his head. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and felt the reality choking him. “I’m a powerful wizard, but I can’t heal you.”
“I know that,” George said. “I wanted to ask you something else.” The press of his hand on Harry’s grew imperceptibly tighter. “They’ll keep me here for a week, Harry, dying from the inside out. They pretend it’s a kindness, because it’ll give me longer to spend with the family and ‘get my affairs in order,’ as the cheerful mediwizards put it.” His eyes did blink then, once, as if the horror had become too much. “I don’t want that to happen. I’ve seen the family, now, and the only person I would really regret leaving died ten years ago.”
Harry wished there was a chair nearby. He could have done with a place to sit down. “You want me to kill you.”
“Please,” George said, with a dignity that hurt.
“Why me?” Harry asked. He could weep and scream and rage—or refuse—but it seemed important that he get an answer to that question first. “Do you think I love you less than Ron and—and all the rest do?”
George snorted. “I think you understand me better,” he said. “I saw you the day of Fred’s funeral. You were the one who told the others to stop when they tried to take me away from the gravestone. You knew I wanted to stay there overnight, and staying there would do me no harm.” He caught his breath, lightly enough that he had started speaking again before Harry could fuss aloud. “You know what pain is.”
Harry looked carefully at his brother-in-law, more carefully than he’d bothered to look in ten years. If anyone had asked, he would have said that George had managed to get beyond the mourning for his twin. He still worked in the shop; he smiled, although he made fewer jokes; he was always happy to care for the children when Harry and Ginny couldn’t. But Harry remembered, now, that the smiles had never touched his eyes.
He had thought George needed time. But he knew now that forever would not have been long enough.
“And they won’t let you go,” he whispered.
George shook his head, eyes wide and clear and knowing. “They couldn’t after Fred’s death. They can’t now. I can understand. I mean, Mum almost panicked when I lost this ear, and losing Fred almost destroyed her, would she want to lose another son? And the others will think like Mum, or support her. But—“ He snorted lightly. “If there’s any time I should get to be selfish, I think it’s now.”
“It is selfish,” said Harry, but he wasn’t thinking about the Weasleys.
George smiled gently at him. “I know,” he said. “Not fair to you, to ask you to do this. But, Harry, there literally is no one else. If Mum even knew I was thinking it, she’d get them to sedate me for the week or something, just so she could sit with my body and have that much comfort left.
“Please. The best part of me died with the war. Let the rest go.”
Harry closed his eyes. He could easily imagine what Ginny would say, if she knew. Or Ron. This would destroy his friendships with them, or at the very least, cast a shadow between them that could never be lifted.
“If the Healers said you had a week to live,” he whispered, drawing his wand, “won’t they think it’s suspicious that I came in here and then you died?”
He opened his eyes, and saw George smiling at him—a smile that reached his eyes, this time. He knew, just as Harry did, that the drawing of the wand meant Harry had made his decision.
“No,” George said calmly. “The Healers warned Mum and the rest that the magic was chancy. They have to renew the spells every hour. And there’s always a small chance that they’ll go wrong. They’ll just think that they went wrong this time, or they waited too long—it’s been almost an hour already, I think—or that my nervous system finally gave up fighting.”
Harry licked his lips. Then he aimed his wand at George and said, “I’ll use Praefoco. I can’t be sure it’ll be painless—“
“It sounds perfect,” said George, and there was light that had nothing to do with the room’s windows in his face. “They’ll never know. And, mate? The pain I’m feeling now, chances are I’ll never notice the addition.”
Harry nodded. Then he twisted his fingers in George’s and laid the wand against his chest.
“Wanted you to know,” George whispered, “that we both thought you were great, Harry. The kind of little brother Ron really needed. And we never regretted that you married Ginny. You were what she needed, too.”
Bittersweetness graced Harry at the praise, as it had to, but then, George had used the past tense. Maybe he knew.
It wasn’t the right time to shove his problems to the forefront. He said, “Say hello to Fred for me?”
“I already have, mate,” George said. “Each and every day.”
Harry didn’t think he could take it anymore. And George seemed to have spoken his last words, anyway. He lay still, eyes shut, face expectant.
“Praefoco,” Harry said.
Lines of light that looked like sticky white webbing shot out of his wand and vanished into George’s chest. Harry could feel the tingle of the magic working its way downwards and into George’s lungs and what remained of his body. A much subtler cousin of the Suffocation Charm, this magic pressed the air out of every place it reached, mimicking a natural process that happened to every human body in death anyway.
Harry didn’t know how many people might have been murdered with this spell over the years. But now, if it had never happened before, Praefoco was serving a good purpose.
It had to be good, he thought, as he watched George’s features and saw the pain, both old and new, ease out of them at the same moment as his lungs ceased to labor.
The light in his face, on the other hand, did not depart.
*
Draco lingered a discreet distance down the corridor from George Weasley’s room. He hardly wanted to intrude on what seemed to be a private family affair. But he had noticed that they were all standing uselessly about, embracing and murmuring to one another, and that Harry was not with them. Draco thought he was alone with the wounded Weasley twin.
He had no reason to think that. Maybe the Healers were in the room and Harry was off tending to his children or making necessary arrangements, like the endlessly responsible person he had shown himself to be of late.
But he nevertheless unshakably believed it to be true. And as concern for Harry had brought him to the hospital in the first place, he stood there, watching, and now and then checking the monitoring spell affixed to his wrist, which let him know that Scorpius was still alive, physically healthy, and under the watchful care of Narcissa. Draco envisioned himself wearing that spell quite a lot in the near future.
The door opened. Sure enough, Harry stepped out. Draco gave a sharp little nod of congratulations to himself.
Then he stopped.
Harry’s head was bowed, and he said something that made the embracing, murmuring Weasleys turn to face him at once. Their voices stopped.
Then the Weasley mother screamed like nothing human and sagged to the floor. Her husband bent over her, his face gray, his hands wandering as if they could not quite find purchase on his wife’s body.
The Weasley twin was dead, then. Draco swallowed. Strange to think that the thought brought a distant sort of grief, perhaps for the death of someone he had known for a good portion of his life, perhaps just for the thought of what it would cost Harry.
Strange to realize that he still thought of George Weasley as a twin.
“I was with him in his last moments, yes,” Harry was saying when Draco paid attention again. “Holding his hand. He died peacefully. Just—just took a breath, and then he didn’t take the next one.”
Draco’s gaze narrowed and sharpened. He didn’t think anyone else noticed, distracted as they were by grief, but Harry’s voice had a mechanical precision to it that Draco had already learned to recognize.
The great git was lying.
And since Draco doubted that Harry Potter would either murder George Weasley in cold blood, or simply let him expire in pain without shouting for help, that left a mercy-killing. Which Harry would have the guts to do. Which he would also have the guts to lie about, so as not to cause George’s relatives to think he wanted to die and leave them. And which he would accept the burden of, to carry it in silence, because he was like that.
The great git.
Harry’s wife was sobbing in one of her older brothers’ arms. Granger huddled next to her husband, and then leaned fully against him, as though Harry’s announcement had taken the strength from her legs; her face looked as if she had been struck. The tallest Weasley son and his silver-haired wife and daughter embraced, while the third son—Percy?—joined his parents. Harry stood alone for a moment, his eyes cast down, his stance radiating discomfort and unhappiness. Then he murmured something about “making arrangements” that Draco doubted any of the others paid attention to, and slipped down the corridor.
Towards Draco.
Draco checked the monitoring spell one more time, then reached out and caught Harry’s wrist as he started to stride past the small alcove. Harry turned, a startled exclamation on his lips, one hand already raising his wand, but then he recognized Draco.
And his defenses dropped. For just one moment, one moment that made Draco believe in Harry’s acceptance of him as he never had before, he saw Harry’s yearning for comfort, for peace, for someone who could walk beside him and share all the responsibilities and secrets he was carrying, while he helped them with their responsibilities and secrets in turn.
“Draco,” Harry said, and the moment retreated as he blinked and retreated in turn, to the limit of Draco’s hold on his wrist. “What are you doing here? Was there another attack? Are Scorpius and your mother—“
“Hush, they’re fine,” Draco whispered, and pulled him close again, an easier task than he had expected. Harry seemed oddly strengthless. Well, if he had done what Draco suspected he had, that wasn’t surprising. “I came to see about you. And now I find that you need me more than I thought you did.”
Harry shut his eyes and bowed his head. Draco ran his free hand up the side of his cheek. The gesture had relaxed Harry and made him open up once before, when they discussed the life-debt magic; maybe it would again.
Harry sighed, and then stiffened his shoulders as though someone had told him he would only have help if he possessed the right posture. “I appreciate that,” he said. “Especially since you were just embattled yourself.” He blinked his eyes open and licked his lips. “But I should go tell the Healers about George’s—passing—“
The truth was so visible on his face that Draco couldn’t help saying it. “He asked you to help him leave, didn’t he?”
Harry shuddered, and a new line of tension formed between his brows. “How do you do that?” he whispered harshly. “You’re not supposed to know me that well. No one is except Ginny. Sometimes I think Hermione is right that—“
“Don’t try to change the subject,” Draco said calmly. For now, he was the strong one, and the feeling was oddly wonderful, grieved though he was for Harry. He was supporting someone else, and that hadn’t occurred, except sometimes with Scorpius, for a decade. Until now, he’d been the one Harry had to rescue, or his mother had to plan a future for. Even his reaching out to Blaise and Millicent didn’t count, didn’t matter, as much as this. “I don’t despise you for that. I think you’re stronger than all of us here, though if my mother asked for the same thing, I hope I could do it.”
Harry looked away. Draco gently altered the shape of his hand so that it cupped Harry’s jaw and turned his face back.
“Draco,” Harry breathed. His eyelids were quivering, and a moment later the same fine tremors racked his arms.
“What?” Draco asked softly. He splayed out his fingers, so that he was touching as much of Harry’s face as possible. No, not as much as possible; he lifted the other, letting Harry’s wrist fall, and cupped his left cheek.
“Please, let me go.”
“Why?” Draco barely needed to shape his lips around the word; Harry stood so close that he knew he would hear him no matter how softly he spoke.
“If you don’t,” Harry said, “I’ll start crying.” He glanced up, and Draco immediately hated the look in his eyes. It wasn’t real. It was just a mirror, just a temporary glass dam flung up in front of the devouring grief. “And I won’t be able to stop.”
“Do you not deserve to mourn, then?” Draco’s voice had grown a bit louder and harsher. “Are you just going to be the strong and silent type until the day when you break down and can’t pick up the pieces anymore?”
*
Harry shivered again. He didn’t understand how Draco could know him that well, down to picking up the metaphors that Harry had used to himself in those times outside Eaglethorpe’s office when he had thought he would collapse of his own too-much.
But one thing was absolutely clear. If Ginny found him here with Draco, it wouldn’t matter whether or not she knew that he’d killed George. She would still be hurt, and that was the last thing she needed now.
He grasped Draco’s wrists and slowly, carefully, took his hands from his face. Draco sneered at him, and leaned so close that their noses touched and Harry could make out every jagged twist and turn of the scar on his forehead.
“We’ve shared too much to go back now,” Draco snarled, and turned his hands over so that Harry could see the scars on them.
“I know,” Harry whispered. The horrible temptation assailed him again, to just collapse and let someone else handle things for a while. It was horrible because he was so close to giving in to it.
And if he did, what would happen then? He’d lose the delicate balance he’d fought so hard to achieve and maintain. He might gain Draco, but he’d lose Ginny and the children. To have them both, he needed to keep going for a while. Just for a little while. He would rest soon. Just a little longer. This wasn’t the time to ask Ginny to bear his burdens, when her brother had just died, and to ask Draco to bear them was unthinkable, too, when his family was in danger and he needed to devote his time to them.
“I know,” he repeated, since Draco was still staring at him and waiting for an answer. “I’d never deny our friendship or—or what you mean to me. But—I need to be with Ginny for right now. That’s all.” He licked his lips. “Do you understand?”
“If Scorpius died,” said Draco steadily, and Harry didn’t know how he could name that terrible possibility without a flinch, “I’d want you there. I’d let you help, because you’re my friend.”
“I know,” Harry said, “but you also don’t have a whole horde of relatives who hate me.”
Draco peered closely at him. Harry endured the sense of eyes peeling back layers of his mistakes like scalpels, because he had to.
“That’s it, then?” Draco asked, though it didn’t really seem like a question. “You’d let me help if there wasn’t a history of feuding between the Weasleys and Malfoys as long as a dragon’s tail?”
Harry smiled. His lips cracked when he did. “Yes,” he said. “Absolutely.”
Draco nodded, thoughtfully. “You’re really worried about hurting her. Or them.”
“Of course,” Harry said. “Is that a surprise? I’m worried about hurting you just as much.”
*
Oh, Harry.
Perhaps it wasn’t the wisest thing to say, but looking at the determination and misery battling for control in Harry’s eyes—and at least that was better than the façade of mere determination—Draco couldn’t help himself.
“Has it ever occurred to you,” he said, “that you can hurt someone and still be forgiven? That wounds aren’t forever?”
Harry just stared at him.
“Obviously not,” Draco whispered, and then clasped Harry’s shoulder and squeezed, once. It was much less than the embrace he wanted to give, but the embrace would be pushing right now, and he’d agreed not to push.
“When you need me,” he said, “or when you can get away for a moment and need help, I’ll be here.”
He slipped away down the St. Mungo’s corridors, though he felt as if he was leaving a piece of himself behind, and he knew Harry’s gaze trailed him the entire way.
Such a delicate balance. He hoped that he would be nearby when Harry finally lost his balance on the morality tightrope, so that he could catch him in time.
On the other hand, Harry did not want pushing, did not want care. Draco supposed he could understand, when Harry was so much more used to taking care of everyone else.
And he did have to respect the wishes of someone he cared for and wanted as much as he cared for and wanted Harry.
Hard as it is and will be. But then, neither of us is a stranger to suffering.
Chapter 24.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Warning: This chapter is upsetting in several ways, particularly in the scene where Harry is alone with George. Feel free to skim if you need to. The next few chapters are not much easier; currently, we’re in the nadir of the story.
Chapter Twenty-Three—George
Harry had never known St. Mungo’s could be so silent.
Maybe that was because he had only visited in the past with large groups of people, or with other Blood Reparations agents who had been injured, and the shouting and noise in the latter situations had rather muffled the presence of quiet. Or he had been unconscious, and that made him unable to detect the norm at all.
But now he stood alone in the corridor outside George’s room, staring at the wall, and he noticed. He had arrived after Ginny had—he had made arrangements for Luna to come and stay with the children, first—and when he’d peered through the door, the entire remaining Weasley family was clustered around the bed, including Hermione and Victoire, Bill and Fleur’s daughter. There wasn’t any room for him to slip in without crushing someone, and Ginny, crying silent, frantic tears in Charlie’s arms, didn’t look as if she needed him. He had winced and shut the door, waiting until the moment when he was needed, or when he had room to enter and pay his respects.
In the meantime, he stared, and thought, and tried to weigh up what all the attacks today said about their enemies. It was hard to think, but at least the attempt gave him something to focus on beyond George’s condition.
One thing Harry knew: this attack must have been long in the planning, for all that the execution of the plans had been swift and horrible. This was not something the Masked Lady could have commanded the moment she knew they were aware of and hunting her. If she could have, they had already lost the war. So Harry chose to believe in hope for the moment.
Could they do something as large again in the near future? Harry doubted it. At the very least, the places where the attack had fallen would be wary now, and they had sprung some traps that had to be long-standing; Draco had had time to tell him about the Blood Hydra and what he suspected of its origins in the moments before Harry shut the Floo connection. And Ron had said that a warning had come to them about the attack on Diagon Alley, which meant that a few of the Masked Lady’s followers might have become uneasy about her methods. If there was a way to persuade them to desert, Hermione would find it. Talking to discontented true believers was one of the usual ways that the Blood Reparations Department got information on the various supremacist groups.
What effect would these attacks have on the tense political climate Hermione had described?
Harry could only guess, but he thought nothing would happen for a day or so. The shock and the terror of the new war would hold people paralyzed that long. And he hoped that he and Hermione could work to alleviate some of that fear before it exploded into rage.
This was the crisis the Blood Reparations Department had been formed to deal with: another huge source of division that might attempt to part the two halves of the wizarding world. Harry had trained for it every minute of every day in the last ten years when he’d sought out self-exiled Muggleborns and asked them to return to the wizarding world, or gone to talk with haughty pure-bloods who couldn’t pass up the chance to have Harry Potter in their houses, or lent the power of his name to organizations and coalitions and speech-makers doing work that he believed in. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would have to be done.
For a moment, he quailed before the vision of all that work at a moment when he still sought to understand the life-debt magic and guard his children and balance his precarious relationship with Ginny. Then he dismissed his fears. He had made all these commitments of his own free will. If someone had sought to force him to take them up, it wouldn’t have worked anyway. Whinging now was out of the question.
So lost in his thoughts, he didn’t notice the door of George’s room had opened until he felt a warm weight against him. Harry wrapped his arms around Ginny and held her near, murmuring soundless words of comfort. She wasn’t crying now, but she rested on him as if she were utterly worn out. He thought she might fall asleep if he stood still long enough.
“Mate?”
Harry looked up with a blink. Ron had a face that seemed to have aged years in the time since he had come to fetch Harry and Ginny from the house.
“It’s George.” Ron flicked his head towards the room. “He’s asked to speak with you alone. The Healers will come back in a few minutes, but they said he could have one more visitor.”
“And what else do the Healers say?” Harry asked.
Ginny trembled in his embrace. Ron closed his eyes and turned his head away.
“We have a week to say goodbye to him,” he stated flatly.
Harry didn’t know how he found the strength to hand Ginny gently to Ron and walk into that room, but somehow, he found it.
*
At first, with George beneath blankets and his face turned to the wall, Harry could think he was almost fine, just a bit gashed about the shoulders and neck. Then, as he shut the door softly behind him, he realized that the whole shape of George’s body beneath the blankets was—wrong.
“George?” he asked quietly.
George turned to look at him. His eyes were wide and exhausted with pain, but he managed a smile. “Harry,” he said hoarsely, and extended his right arm. Harry came and took his hand. There were only three fingers to press on his five.
“What happened?” he asked, because it seemed possible to ask that in this moment, though he hadn’t had the will to press Ron about how bad George’s injuries were.
“Explosion that made the roof of the shop fall in on me,” said George, his eyes fluttering as if he were trying to blink back tears. But none crept down his face that Harry saw. “Then curses through the broken windows. They were aiming as if they knew exactly where I was. Maybe they did. I don’t know.”
Harry jerked his chin at the bed. “Can I?”
George nodded.
Harry tugged the blankets back.
He understood what Ron meant now. Medical magic could repair broken bones, grant new limbs on occasion, and close most wounds into scars, as long as they hadn’t been inflicted with Dark magic. But it could do nothing for this.
George’s legs were gone. What remained were stumps of bone fragile as the wings of a dead bird. There were so many bandages wrapped around his pelvis and spine that Harry couldn’t see the damage there, but he saw spots of blood and darker fluids already beginning to soak through the bandages. His chest was seamed with scars and burns and wounds like open mouths. Harry had a moment, glassy and distant with what he knew to be shock, to be outraged that the Healers hadn’t bothered to tend to those wounds, and then he realized they had. But the bandages had withered away. A faint, terrible smell of putrescence rose from the puckers.
“A week is how long they can keep you alive with magic,” he said.
“Yes.”
Something in the tone of George’s voice made Harry glance at his face again. There were still no tears, though Harry knew the pain from the curses which kept him bleeding and rotting alive must be terrible. He looked calm, serene, as if he were facing an illness that would pass over him and leave him as strong as before.
Harry thought he knew what George wanted of him. He gave a slight shake of his head. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and felt the reality choking him. “I’m a powerful wizard, but I can’t heal you.”
“I know that,” George said. “I wanted to ask you something else.” The press of his hand on Harry’s grew imperceptibly tighter. “They’ll keep me here for a week, Harry, dying from the inside out. They pretend it’s a kindness, because it’ll give me longer to spend with the family and ‘get my affairs in order,’ as the cheerful mediwizards put it.” His eyes did blink then, once, as if the horror had become too much. “I don’t want that to happen. I’ve seen the family, now, and the only person I would really regret leaving died ten years ago.”
Harry wished there was a chair nearby. He could have done with a place to sit down. “You want me to kill you.”
“Please,” George said, with a dignity that hurt.
“Why me?” Harry asked. He could weep and scream and rage—or refuse—but it seemed important that he get an answer to that question first. “Do you think I love you less than Ron and—and all the rest do?”
George snorted. “I think you understand me better,” he said. “I saw you the day of Fred’s funeral. You were the one who told the others to stop when they tried to take me away from the gravestone. You knew I wanted to stay there overnight, and staying there would do me no harm.” He caught his breath, lightly enough that he had started speaking again before Harry could fuss aloud. “You know what pain is.”
Harry looked carefully at his brother-in-law, more carefully than he’d bothered to look in ten years. If anyone had asked, he would have said that George had managed to get beyond the mourning for his twin. He still worked in the shop; he smiled, although he made fewer jokes; he was always happy to care for the children when Harry and Ginny couldn’t. But Harry remembered, now, that the smiles had never touched his eyes.
He had thought George needed time. But he knew now that forever would not have been long enough.
“And they won’t let you go,” he whispered.
George shook his head, eyes wide and clear and knowing. “They couldn’t after Fred’s death. They can’t now. I can understand. I mean, Mum almost panicked when I lost this ear, and losing Fred almost destroyed her, would she want to lose another son? And the others will think like Mum, or support her. But—“ He snorted lightly. “If there’s any time I should get to be selfish, I think it’s now.”
“It is selfish,” said Harry, but he wasn’t thinking about the Weasleys.
George smiled gently at him. “I know,” he said. “Not fair to you, to ask you to do this. But, Harry, there literally is no one else. If Mum even knew I was thinking it, she’d get them to sedate me for the week or something, just so she could sit with my body and have that much comfort left.
“Please. The best part of me died with the war. Let the rest go.”
Harry closed his eyes. He could easily imagine what Ginny would say, if she knew. Or Ron. This would destroy his friendships with them, or at the very least, cast a shadow between them that could never be lifted.
“If the Healers said you had a week to live,” he whispered, drawing his wand, “won’t they think it’s suspicious that I came in here and then you died?”
He opened his eyes, and saw George smiling at him—a smile that reached his eyes, this time. He knew, just as Harry did, that the drawing of the wand meant Harry had made his decision.
“No,” George said calmly. “The Healers warned Mum and the rest that the magic was chancy. They have to renew the spells every hour. And there’s always a small chance that they’ll go wrong. They’ll just think that they went wrong this time, or they waited too long—it’s been almost an hour already, I think—or that my nervous system finally gave up fighting.”
Harry licked his lips. Then he aimed his wand at George and said, “I’ll use Praefoco. I can’t be sure it’ll be painless—“
“It sounds perfect,” said George, and there was light that had nothing to do with the room’s windows in his face. “They’ll never know. And, mate? The pain I’m feeling now, chances are I’ll never notice the addition.”
Harry nodded. Then he twisted his fingers in George’s and laid the wand against his chest.
“Wanted you to know,” George whispered, “that we both thought you were great, Harry. The kind of little brother Ron really needed. And we never regretted that you married Ginny. You were what she needed, too.”
Bittersweetness graced Harry at the praise, as it had to, but then, George had used the past tense. Maybe he knew.
It wasn’t the right time to shove his problems to the forefront. He said, “Say hello to Fred for me?”
“I already have, mate,” George said. “Each and every day.”
Harry didn’t think he could take it anymore. And George seemed to have spoken his last words, anyway. He lay still, eyes shut, face expectant.
“Praefoco,” Harry said.
Lines of light that looked like sticky white webbing shot out of his wand and vanished into George’s chest. Harry could feel the tingle of the magic working its way downwards and into George’s lungs and what remained of his body. A much subtler cousin of the Suffocation Charm, this magic pressed the air out of every place it reached, mimicking a natural process that happened to every human body in death anyway.
Harry didn’t know how many people might have been murdered with this spell over the years. But now, if it had never happened before, Praefoco was serving a good purpose.
It had to be good, he thought, as he watched George’s features and saw the pain, both old and new, ease out of them at the same moment as his lungs ceased to labor.
The light in his face, on the other hand, did not depart.
*
Draco lingered a discreet distance down the corridor from George Weasley’s room. He hardly wanted to intrude on what seemed to be a private family affair. But he had noticed that they were all standing uselessly about, embracing and murmuring to one another, and that Harry was not with them. Draco thought he was alone with the wounded Weasley twin.
He had no reason to think that. Maybe the Healers were in the room and Harry was off tending to his children or making necessary arrangements, like the endlessly responsible person he had shown himself to be of late.
But he nevertheless unshakably believed it to be true. And as concern for Harry had brought him to the hospital in the first place, he stood there, watching, and now and then checking the monitoring spell affixed to his wrist, which let him know that Scorpius was still alive, physically healthy, and under the watchful care of Narcissa. Draco envisioned himself wearing that spell quite a lot in the near future.
The door opened. Sure enough, Harry stepped out. Draco gave a sharp little nod of congratulations to himself.
Then he stopped.
Harry’s head was bowed, and he said something that made the embracing, murmuring Weasleys turn to face him at once. Their voices stopped.
Then the Weasley mother screamed like nothing human and sagged to the floor. Her husband bent over her, his face gray, his hands wandering as if they could not quite find purchase on his wife’s body.
The Weasley twin was dead, then. Draco swallowed. Strange to think that the thought brought a distant sort of grief, perhaps for the death of someone he had known for a good portion of his life, perhaps just for the thought of what it would cost Harry.
Strange to realize that he still thought of George Weasley as a twin.
“I was with him in his last moments, yes,” Harry was saying when Draco paid attention again. “Holding his hand. He died peacefully. Just—just took a breath, and then he didn’t take the next one.”
Draco’s gaze narrowed and sharpened. He didn’t think anyone else noticed, distracted as they were by grief, but Harry’s voice had a mechanical precision to it that Draco had already learned to recognize.
The great git was lying.
And since Draco doubted that Harry Potter would either murder George Weasley in cold blood, or simply let him expire in pain without shouting for help, that left a mercy-killing. Which Harry would have the guts to do. Which he would also have the guts to lie about, so as not to cause George’s relatives to think he wanted to die and leave them. And which he would accept the burden of, to carry it in silence, because he was like that.
The great git.
Harry’s wife was sobbing in one of her older brothers’ arms. Granger huddled next to her husband, and then leaned fully against him, as though Harry’s announcement had taken the strength from her legs; her face looked as if she had been struck. The tallest Weasley son and his silver-haired wife and daughter embraced, while the third son—Percy?—joined his parents. Harry stood alone for a moment, his eyes cast down, his stance radiating discomfort and unhappiness. Then he murmured something about “making arrangements” that Draco doubted any of the others paid attention to, and slipped down the corridor.
Towards Draco.
Draco checked the monitoring spell one more time, then reached out and caught Harry’s wrist as he started to stride past the small alcove. Harry turned, a startled exclamation on his lips, one hand already raising his wand, but then he recognized Draco.
And his defenses dropped. For just one moment, one moment that made Draco believe in Harry’s acceptance of him as he never had before, he saw Harry’s yearning for comfort, for peace, for someone who could walk beside him and share all the responsibilities and secrets he was carrying, while he helped them with their responsibilities and secrets in turn.
“Draco,” Harry said, and the moment retreated as he blinked and retreated in turn, to the limit of Draco’s hold on his wrist. “What are you doing here? Was there another attack? Are Scorpius and your mother—“
“Hush, they’re fine,” Draco whispered, and pulled him close again, an easier task than he had expected. Harry seemed oddly strengthless. Well, if he had done what Draco suspected he had, that wasn’t surprising. “I came to see about you. And now I find that you need me more than I thought you did.”
Harry shut his eyes and bowed his head. Draco ran his free hand up the side of his cheek. The gesture had relaxed Harry and made him open up once before, when they discussed the life-debt magic; maybe it would again.
Harry sighed, and then stiffened his shoulders as though someone had told him he would only have help if he possessed the right posture. “I appreciate that,” he said. “Especially since you were just embattled yourself.” He blinked his eyes open and licked his lips. “But I should go tell the Healers about George’s—passing—“
The truth was so visible on his face that Draco couldn’t help saying it. “He asked you to help him leave, didn’t he?”
Harry shuddered, and a new line of tension formed between his brows. “How do you do that?” he whispered harshly. “You’re not supposed to know me that well. No one is except Ginny. Sometimes I think Hermione is right that—“
“Don’t try to change the subject,” Draco said calmly. For now, he was the strong one, and the feeling was oddly wonderful, grieved though he was for Harry. He was supporting someone else, and that hadn’t occurred, except sometimes with Scorpius, for a decade. Until now, he’d been the one Harry had to rescue, or his mother had to plan a future for. Even his reaching out to Blaise and Millicent didn’t count, didn’t matter, as much as this. “I don’t despise you for that. I think you’re stronger than all of us here, though if my mother asked for the same thing, I hope I could do it.”
Harry looked away. Draco gently altered the shape of his hand so that it cupped Harry’s jaw and turned his face back.
“Draco,” Harry breathed. His eyelids were quivering, and a moment later the same fine tremors racked his arms.
“What?” Draco asked softly. He splayed out his fingers, so that he was touching as much of Harry’s face as possible. No, not as much as possible; he lifted the other, letting Harry’s wrist fall, and cupped his left cheek.
“Please, let me go.”
“Why?” Draco barely needed to shape his lips around the word; Harry stood so close that he knew he would hear him no matter how softly he spoke.
“If you don’t,” Harry said, “I’ll start crying.” He glanced up, and Draco immediately hated the look in his eyes. It wasn’t real. It was just a mirror, just a temporary glass dam flung up in front of the devouring grief. “And I won’t be able to stop.”
“Do you not deserve to mourn, then?” Draco’s voice had grown a bit louder and harsher. “Are you just going to be the strong and silent type until the day when you break down and can’t pick up the pieces anymore?”
*
Harry shivered again. He didn’t understand how Draco could know him that well, down to picking up the metaphors that Harry had used to himself in those times outside Eaglethorpe’s office when he had thought he would collapse of his own too-much.
But one thing was absolutely clear. If Ginny found him here with Draco, it wouldn’t matter whether or not she knew that he’d killed George. She would still be hurt, and that was the last thing she needed now.
He grasped Draco’s wrists and slowly, carefully, took his hands from his face. Draco sneered at him, and leaned so close that their noses touched and Harry could make out every jagged twist and turn of the scar on his forehead.
“We’ve shared too much to go back now,” Draco snarled, and turned his hands over so that Harry could see the scars on them.
“I know,” Harry whispered. The horrible temptation assailed him again, to just collapse and let someone else handle things for a while. It was horrible because he was so close to giving in to it.
And if he did, what would happen then? He’d lose the delicate balance he’d fought so hard to achieve and maintain. He might gain Draco, but he’d lose Ginny and the children. To have them both, he needed to keep going for a while. Just for a little while. He would rest soon. Just a little longer. This wasn’t the time to ask Ginny to bear his burdens, when her brother had just died, and to ask Draco to bear them was unthinkable, too, when his family was in danger and he needed to devote his time to them.
“I know,” he repeated, since Draco was still staring at him and waiting for an answer. “I’d never deny our friendship or—or what you mean to me. But—I need to be with Ginny for right now. That’s all.” He licked his lips. “Do you understand?”
“If Scorpius died,” said Draco steadily, and Harry didn’t know how he could name that terrible possibility without a flinch, “I’d want you there. I’d let you help, because you’re my friend.”
“I know,” Harry said, “but you also don’t have a whole horde of relatives who hate me.”
Draco peered closely at him. Harry endured the sense of eyes peeling back layers of his mistakes like scalpels, because he had to.
“That’s it, then?” Draco asked, though it didn’t really seem like a question. “You’d let me help if there wasn’t a history of feuding between the Weasleys and Malfoys as long as a dragon’s tail?”
Harry smiled. His lips cracked when he did. “Yes,” he said. “Absolutely.”
Draco nodded, thoughtfully. “You’re really worried about hurting her. Or them.”
“Of course,” Harry said. “Is that a surprise? I’m worried about hurting you just as much.”
*
Oh, Harry.
Perhaps it wasn’t the wisest thing to say, but looking at the determination and misery battling for control in Harry’s eyes—and at least that was better than the façade of mere determination—Draco couldn’t help himself.
“Has it ever occurred to you,” he said, “that you can hurt someone and still be forgiven? That wounds aren’t forever?”
Harry just stared at him.
“Obviously not,” Draco whispered, and then clasped Harry’s shoulder and squeezed, once. It was much less than the embrace he wanted to give, but the embrace would be pushing right now, and he’d agreed not to push.
“When you need me,” he said, “or when you can get away for a moment and need help, I’ll be here.”
He slipped away down the St. Mungo’s corridors, though he felt as if he was leaving a piece of himself behind, and he knew Harry’s gaze trailed him the entire way.
Such a delicate balance. He hoped that he would be nearby when Harry finally lost his balance on the morality tightrope, so that he could catch him in time.
On the other hand, Harry did not want pushing, did not want care. Draco supposed he could understand, when Harry was so much more used to taking care of everyone else.
And he did have to respect the wishes of someone he cared for and wanted as much as he cared for and wanted Harry.
Hard as it is and will be. But then, neither of us is a stranger to suffering.
Chapter 24.