Disclaimer: I do not own the characters used in this story, but that doesn't mean that I can't play with their emotions. The idea is mine, the words are mine – but the people and places belong to their creator, J.K. Rowling.
To Maggie and Rowena, without whom I would never even have dreamed of writing any fanfic, let alone a D/G.
Holding On
Act I
To Save A Life
'And I would have stayed up with you all night,
Had I known how to save a life.'
(The Fray)
I sat perfectly still in the chair by the bed, hoping desperately that if I made no noise the Healer would let me stay for longer. I watched his face carefully for any sign of movement, for anything that might allow me to believe that he was coming back to me. He had been lying like this for far too long. The battle had been lost and won for weeks, and still he lay unconscious, his fair hair curling over his pale brow. His usually shining silver eyes were tight shut, mere slits in his uncannily flawless face.
He was too still. If I could not see the feeble movements of his chest I would have assumed him dead. I could not yet bring myself to accept the fact that I might lose him. The torture that had left his body unmarked but unmoving might still claim him. I didn't want to think of that. It was too cruel. I thought I had lost him once already; when I had been roaming the grounds of the Manor along with the others, searching ever more urgently for what we were all convinced would be a body.
He had been alive, but only just. And he was still that way. He hadn't stirred since the day I had found him, and even the Healers no longer knew whether to have hope or not. They would just look at me sympathetically and tell me that a lot of the effects of the Cruciatus curse were still unknown. It always made me want to scream. I didn't want to hear that they didn't know. I wanted to know if he was ever going to wake up, if I was ever going to be able to talk to him, to go places with him, even to argue with him again. I knew that I was getting desperate when I realised that I would rather be having a full scale fight with him than sitting by his bedside watching his impossibly quiet breathing.
Too much had happened already. I had lost too much to face losing him. I wanted to cry, but I had no more tears left. There was nothing left in me but a deep and hollow sadness. Half my family were dead and the rest were barely speaking to me. And he, the reason for my family's alienation, lay as if dead, in a private bed at St. Mungo's, with everyone except me waiting for him to die.
I wanted to hurt them for it. Why couldn't people forgive? Couldn't they see that even a bad man can change for the woman he loves? And he had changed for me. He would not be here in the hospital if he had not changed. He had been struck down while fighting alongside his former enemies. He didn't deserve this. The Healers checked his notes in disbelief sometimes, as if doubting which side he had been on when injured. His name still made people think evil. And yet he was one of the few left alive that I would happily trust my life to. He was not the same as he had once been, and he was suffering for his change of heart.
I felt a deep longing in my heart. I needed to get him back. He was still alive; there was still hope. The emotion startled me with its intensity. I had never thought to feel this way about anyone. Before this had happened, the last time I had seen him truly alive, I had kissed him almost frantically, telling him that I loved him. I had said it with false conviction then, unsure if it was true. But with this feeling, this deep and terrible desire to have him alive and well, in my arms, I knew. Although I could not cry, I could hurt, and the pain told me that this was indeed love.
But the man that I had realised that I loved was still unchanged and unchanging. Could he lay like that forever? Would he do it, just to torment me? He had always been good at tormenting. Not that he had ever tormented me; before we were together, I had not been worth the effort, and after… he would turn the tables sneeringly on anyone who dared say a harsh word to me. I smiled fondly, remembering how cruelly sarcastic my Draco could be when it came to defending me. If only he would wake up, I would not care if he turned his caustic, mocking tongue on me.
I felt despair assailing my mind, the dark despair of someone who has long been denying the truth. The longer he stayed unconscious, the less likely it became that he would ever awake. And I would have lost my family for nothing. No, not nothing, for the months we had spent together were not and could never be called nothing. But I would have to live without him, and without them, and I didn't know if I was strong enough to survive.
Rising to leave as I felt the presence of the Healer at my back, I leant down and stroked the ice-white, lukewarm skin of his face, and murmured, "Hold on, Draco. I need you to come back." And then I turned from the patient's bedside and walked away, leaving the hospital with its haunting reminders of death and suffering behind me. I would return, though. I would have to return, each and every day until he woke up or until he… died.
The last glow of sunset caught the platinum blond hair, which actually appeared bronze for that split second. I almost smiled. He did look beautiful sometimes. But it was a pale imitation of his normal beauty, which was magnified by the force of his personality, his vanity and his arrogance. It almost made me sad to look at this shadow of my Draco, the one I remembered, the one that I longed to have back.
He was still not getting any better. True, he wasn't dead, but I still felt as if he was lying there dying in front of me. Nothing moved. Apart from his breathing the whole room was still. I looked about the room. Nothing but the best for a Malfoy, I thought, cynically. The Healers probably wanted him there as long as possible, so they could continue to drain the Malfoy vaults at Gringott's. There was an expensive-looking vase on the little table next to the bed, containing yesterday's flowers. The flowers had been expensive. This was not a good time of year to buy fresh flowers, and my hateful subconscious had tried to talk me out of getting them on the grounds that he would probably never see them.
I walked over to the vase and stroked the red petals of the beautiful camellia flowers, trying to avoid having to look at his exquisite etched features, as still as a marble statue. The flowers were his favourites. It seemed odd to think of Draco Malfoy having a favourite flower – altogether too soft and undignified of him. It was almost like a minute act of rebellion against his rigidly disciplinarian father. I had teased him for it. Lavender had told me that a gift of such a flower signified excellence, which certainly summed my Draco up – for me, anyway.
I glanced over at him from where I stood with my face framed by red blooms, and saw that his eyes were still closed. The washed out skin was still drawn taut over his delicate bone structure, and his cheek muscle was only slightly twitching. No change there then, except… that twitching… surely he hadn't been doing that before?
I abandoned the flowers and sank to my lover's side. I looked at him carefully, trying to discern if it was possible that he could be waking. I didn't want to give myself false hope, but any change, any movement could be a sign that he was coming back. It was a very tiny change, but it was movement. He was no longer deathly still; there was a sign other than his hushed breathing to show me that he was alive. How could I be so callous as not to hope?
I was barely breathing myself as I watched him. He didn't wake up, but then, I would have been a fool to expect him to. But he looked much more human, much more alive now, although unconsciousness still claimed his senses. When the Healer came in to ask me to leave, she looked strangely at Draco, and if I was not very much mistaken, I had seen the ghost of a smile on the other woman's face.
Looking at him, I felt an emotion that I had thought I had forgotten how to feel. Hope. The Healer had told me that he was no longer in a coma. He was unconscious, yes, but he was just asleep. Apparently he had woken up for a few minutes during the night. He was coming back. I felt sweet relief coursing through my veins, relaxing muscles that I had never even realised were tensed. My Draco was coming back. Once he woke up, he'd get better and I could take him away. All of the hope that I had refused to acknowledge in the weeks since the battle came flooding in at once, now that I knew that it was not in vain, that he was going to live.
Draco stirred. I felt a sort of apprehensive expectancy, watching him, waiting for him to give some further sign, anxious to know whether he was going to wake up for me today. His pale features seemed more relaxed than they had done over the past few weeks, as if he had been contracting them since the curse in a silent scream. I sat there, waiting, on edge. If someone had touched me then I would have screamed, so focused was I on the young man lying in the bed in front of me.
He blinked. I almost missed it the first time, so intent was my gaze. But he had opened his eyes. Even momentary consciousness was progress. And then he blinked again, opening the pale, opalescent grey eyes for longer. The look on his face was pure confusion. His gaze travelled over the room, taking in its institutional cleanliness, the red flowers and my shape by his bedside, blinking all the while.
He sat silent for a couple of minutes, and I could practically see his mind whirring creakily into motion.
Finally, after what seemed like hours, he turned to me, and asked, evidently baffled, "What happened?"
The voice – his voice! – jerked me out of my trance-like state. I had been imagining it all; taking him home, finally having the life with him that I had almost despaired of for so long. I looked up at him, a genuinely happy smile taking over my freckled face for the first time in over two months. "You got hit by the Cruciatus curse, Draco," I said, softly. "It was quite a while ago now. You've been unconscious for nearly nine weeks. I was worried about you; I thought you were never going to wake up."
Draco's cool silver eyes widened, but he said nothing. He looked at me, his brow furrowing slightly as he took in my face. He looked over at the camellias, and his lips formed a thin, tight smile, as if something finally made sense to him. Then he looked back at me, and pure puzzlement descended once again on his features.
"But who are you?" he asked.
I stared at him, startled, willing it not to be true. But I could read the honesty in his features, and the fear in his wide eyes, and I knew that this could be no joke. Draco Malfoy did not remember me. The forgetting frightened me as much as it frightened him. It had all been in vain. Everything had been for nothing. I could no longer take the pain. I broke down, crying the tears I had been suppressing for months. I lowered my head into my hands and sobbed my heart out, while Draco looked on in bewilderment.
