Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.
A/N: There are some things about medicine/biology/phlebotomy in this chapter, and my knowledge in this area is mostly limited to high school biology classes and skimming Wikipedia articles, so I apologize if I made any mistakes. Please do let me know if you spot any serious discrepancies. Thank you for reading!
Chapter Three
The papers on Teddy were detailed. They listed thousands (well, perhaps not thousands—dozens would be a more accurate approximation) of magical remedies that various healers had administered to Teddy over the years. They listed zero responses to these supposed fixes. They listed hundreds (actually) of conjectures over what had caused the coma. Some touched on his father's lycanthropy, most on his potions-use, some on his potion-brewing. None dipped below his physical state. None involved the admittedly vulgar—but often, Lily thought, effective—process of examining blood or excrement or mucus.
Lily flipped the folder shut at five in the morning, locked it back in its drawer, took her notes in her hands, and stood by Teddy's bed. "They've fucked you over, is my personal opinion," she told her sleeping god-brother. "I mean, honestly, Ted. Not even looking at your blood. How ridiculous that they expected to save you."
Ridiculous, that everyone had believed that they—the innumerable healers Harry had called in—could possibly revive this beautiful skeleton of a man. Lily, though. She didn't have the knowledge for it, not quite yet, but when she got it; well, he would either die or wake up.
She returned to her bedroom, slipping her notes beneath her robes in her bag and curling exhausted on her covers. She slept until her mum tapped on her door, sometime past noon, with a cup of coffee and some toast, and later Lily was treated to an afternoon tea that involved her parents looking at her over the chipped rims of mugs, waiting for her to say something appropriately earth-shattering. A weekend home in the middle of term surely meant disaster.
But Lily just repeated what she had told them the night before and her parents nodded slowly. "So you're just going to stay in tonight?" her mum asked. "Write your essays?"
"That's the plan." Lily shoved a scone around her plate—the one with a chip along the rim from the time Albus had attempted using it as a discus, and ended up hitting Lily in the forehead. She still had a scar from it, white and raised above her left eyebrow.
"There's a Ministry fundraiser, with dinner and dancing and an orchestra, tonight, if you'd like to take a break," her dad said, and Lily smiled across the small table at him. She'd loved those, when she was little. They'd given her the chance to dress up, to be seen at her very best, when the papers were always looking for her at her worst; she'd loved it all. And the food, the dancing, the music, she'd hungered to get lost among the gem-coloured dress robes and had adored being pampered by her father's co-workers.
At seventeen, though, the idea of spending an evening among the very richest of wizarding society left her feeling slightly panicky. So she smiled at her father, but she also shook her head and said, "Thanks, Daddy, but I think I'd really better stay in tonight."
"Of course." Harry turned to Ginny. "Please say you'll come? It'll be miserable."
"Really selling it, Harry." Ginny smiled, and set her teacup down on an empty plate, said, "But I suppose I'll come. I'd hate for you to go mad without me."
Lily took the dishes to the sink and washed them, and then she locked herself in her room, where she worked on a paper for Potions for barely fifteen minutes before delving into one of the textbooks for her Anatomy class.
It didn't help much, and she Apparated from her bedroom to London almost the moment her parents departed for their party. The University library required an ID card to enter, but Lily managed to Charm her way in, and then she was free to peruse their nearly-overwhelming collection of medical textbooks. She found one on the circulatory and lymphatic systems, which included a dense chapter on phlebotomy, and snuck out a side exit with the book under her arm.
She read it sitting beside Teddy, his sleeping form a stabilizing feature in the whirl of diagrams of veins and needles, of all the important rhythms that occurred, or were meant to occur, beneath any given person's skin. Beneath Teddy's skin, although she was beginning to doubt whether all of the blood vessels were getting carried in the proper way, through beautifully red arteries and blue veins, bringing in oxygen and all of that. According to the healers, Teddy was perfectly healthy, except he wasn't waking up. According to Lily's research, Teddy was dying.
Lily slid the book into her bag that night and returned to school with it the next day. She knew that somehow she needed to learn more than any textbook could tell her, but if she'd learned anything from her aunt Hermione, she'd learned that books usually made reasonable beginnings.
For the rest of that term, Lily abused herself. She stopped going out with Connor on Mondays after class, she existed on coffee and toast, and she practically lived in an abandoned Charms classroom, textbooks spread around her and papers piled in front of her. She gained a permanent smudge of ink in the very corner of her lip, from chewing on her quill, and she spent stolen Saturdays in London, sunk among books and computers in the University library, sorting out exactly how one would go about identifying problems in the blood.
Hugo, Ris, and Beatrice still said hi to her when they passed her in the corridors. They still sat beside her in classes they shared, and Ris and Bea frequently lingered by the end of Lily's bed in the Slytherin dormitory, chatting and casting glances toward Lily as she feigned sleep. She refused to respond: She was not good for friendship, and she hadn't even atoned for her lies. Not yet, anyway.
Ris found her in the Charms classroom at the very end of term, when she was hurriedly finishing up a terrible essay for Potions, thankfully, and her Muggle textbooks were hidden beneath several stained Potions ones.
Ris leaned against the door, not quite stepping inside the classroom, and Lily turned in her seat, looking at her from across the quiet room.
"Are you ever going to give in?" Ris asked, as if Lily had been trying to prove a point, all these months.
Lily twisted a red curl around her finger; she bit her lip so the ink stain on her face became more pronounced. "I'm not being stubborn," she said, even though she admitted to herself that maybe she was, "I just think you all should be through with me."
"That's what you told Hugo, too, but Lily, we don't want to be 'through' with you." Her pale fingers made hasty air quotes.
How had she made such an utter mess of things? Lily could have listed off the reasons that her old friends ought to sever all ties with her—some of which she was sure Ris was not even aware of—she could have told Ris that she, Lily, was through with them, Hugo and Ris and Bea, she could have said that she was happy alone, happy in this silent world she'd made for herself: Lily and books, Lily and blood, Lily and medicine, Lily and a sleeping patient.
Instead of saying any of that, Lily shook her head and said, "And like I told Hugo, you should," and then she turned back to her essay and ignored Ris until the other girl left.
It truly seemed pointless to her, to try to atone something her friends didn't even seem to think about anymore, but Lily could not push aside the things that she had done, could not imagine being herself around Ris and Hugo and Bea, and so she barricaded herself behind her textbooks and plans, and was unsurprised but surprisingly unhappy when her friends stopped trying after Ris found her in the Charms classroom.
Christmas holidays came and ended Lily's foray into Muggle schooling. She wanted to take Intro to Biology, the next term, but it had a lab course attached to it, which included extra fees, which meant that Lily would have had to make herself an official student—an impossibility if she remained at Hogwarts for her final term. Instead, she signed up for a first aid course, which met every other Saturday throughout the months of February through April, and she told Connor that she might spend a few weekends camped on his sofa, so she could study in the University library on Sundays, too.
But before all that began Lily had a glorious two weeks at home, and her Aunt Hermione and Uncle Ron had taken Hugo and Rose off to visit their grandparents at their retirement home in Australia, and so Lily did not even need to worry about an awful Christmas akin to the one before, where she had needed to avoid Hugo while trying not to alert her family that they'd had a falling-out—a largely unsuccessful endeavour, as it turned out.
Albus and James were returning from Scotland and India, respectively, on Christmas Eve, and Lily's parents were going mad trying to repair the various leaks and cracks that had sprung up in the boys' bedrooms over the year. The holidays began in a soft flurry of snow, and Lily spent her first evening going throughout her house, patching up areas where the wind blew vicious through cracks in the roof and windows, because her mother wanted the house snug.
The next night Lily avoided her mother, poured a mug of spiced cider from the pot her father had set on the stove, and slipped into Teddy's bedroom. He was breathing but not moving, as always. As always—Lily hated that thought, the idea of always, of a forever (a finite forever, though, one whose end seemed to be approaching more rapidly every time she saw Teddy) involving the man asleep, quiet.
She tugged back the covers and felt for his wrist, her fingers settling against the pulse while he breathed steady but shallowly. Her hand was warm from the cider, and his skin felt all the cooler for it. But his pulse hadn't slowed from the last time she'd been home, and Lily thought that maybe he'd make it until she knew exactly how to help him.
Lily wanted two things: She wanted a stethoscope and she wanted some of Teddy's blood.
The first she could obtain fairly easily; in fact, that was her plan for the second full day of her holidays, a trip into Muggle London and a stop at the Blackwell's near the University—they had that awkward cubby full of newly white lab coats and file folders, and Lily remembered seeing the black rubber y-shaped tree of a stethoscope there the last time she'd stopped by, at the beginning of the autumn term.
The blood would be more difficult, of course, more difficult and more important. She wanted a vial of Teddy's (most likely poisoned) blood so she could look at it through a microscope (or, actually, through a spell she'd learned from a particularly terrible book she'd found in the Restricted Section at the end of the term, but it would do the same thing as a microscope) and decipher what had happened to Teddy's supposedly circular, donut-shaped, healthy red blood cells. She highly doubted that they were circular, donut-shaped, or healthy.
Lily did not envy the idea of obtaining a needle and slipping it beneath Teddy's skin, between the two walls of one of the faint violet-blue veins just below the pale crease of his elbow. She did not want to do that, because she wasn't entirely sure she knew how to do such a thing, and because she did not want her parents to walk in on her while she had a needle in Teddy's arm, and because the thought of it made her vaguely nauseous. But she did not know how else to get blood from him; the book with the spell for simulating a microscope had included a spell for removing blood, but it seemed both messier and riskier than the Muggle route.
She desperately wished she could take him to a Muggle hospital and have them run tests on him, but she knew that whatever was wrong with his blood could cause an uproar in Muggle hospitals, and so she pressed her fingers against the skin where she imagined she'd eventually need to slip a needle, and apologised to him as best she could, in silence.
:::
Connor met Lily for dinner the next evening, after she'd picked up a stethoscope and a new book on phlebotomy (with the terrifying subtitle: "Vein Cutting for the Modern Medic"), both of which she slid into her bag before arriving at the pub where Connor was waiting.
He stood when Lily arrived, gripped her gloved hand in one of his, and kissed her on the very top of her red head.
"Happy Christmas," he said as they both sat down. "I tried to order you a drink, but they're being difficult about IDs. Do you have yours?" By which he meant Molly's.
Lily nodded. "Obviously." She glanced through the menu and looked up to find Connor watching her. "What's up, Connor? I haven't seen you in weeks."
"Whose fault is that?" He shook his head. "Sorry, I don't mean to accuse you. It's just, what happened this term? You seemed all right at the beginning, but now," he gestured at her, and she knew she looked a little messy. The ink stain by her mouth seemed as if it had turned permanent, and she'd lost weight in the last few weeks—she'd had weight to lose, but not that much, and she knew she looked a little as if she could be blown away—and her hair was more tangled than curly.
"Honest?" Lily glanced around, then leaned across the table. "You know my god-brother?"
"Teddy Lupin? Of course I know him. We were at Hogwarts together, remember?"
"For one year," Lily ceded; Connor was six years younger than Teddy, four years older than Lily, and seemingly caught in a stage of perpetual university attendance.
"Yeah, well, he was dating Victoire at the time, so everyone was sort of obsessed with them. They were like celebrities, you know?" Of course she did, because she was, herself. Connor caught the implication in her hard stare and hurried, "Of course you know. And Lupin was so good at everything—the whole school was jealous of him. And then he went off and got mixed up in all those hallucinatory potions, took a bad one, and fell off the face of the planet. Or that's the story I heard," he added, because Lily's eyes had shut briefly.
"We're still not really sure what caused it," probably one of the potions, but no one knew, except according to the case notes there'd been a cut on his hand and fairly noxious smelling fumes in the kitchen of Grimmauld Place, "but he's been in a coma for the past nine years. He lives," never the right word, "in my parents' house."
"Oh, fuck," Connor's hands fisted around each other on the table, and Lily wanted, at that moment, to never need to leave the warmth of that pub and the compassion in his curse, "that's a rough deal."
"It is," Lily sipped water from the dripping glass on the table and forged on, "anyway, no one's been able to help, but I think no one's been looking in the right places, or at the right things, and so that's what I've been trying to do."
"You're trying to bring Lupin back to life?" Connor's voice relayed his incredulity.
"I'm trying to wake Teddy up," Lily corrected.
"Well," Connor paused, his lower lip caught between his teeth, and Lily wished for a moment that she hadn't told him, "have you had any luck yet?"
"I'm getting closer. The thing is," Lily leaned across the table, lowering her voice, "I think it's something to do with his blood. The healers never even looked at his blood, which is such a terrible omission, you can't even…but, anyway, the problem is, I can't just get at his blood, you know?"
Connor pressed his hands together in front of his face. "You don't know how to use a needle, you mean?"
"Exactly that." Lily stared at him, noticed the way his eyes glanced at her hands folded in front of her, at their glasses of water, and then up at her face. "You don't, do you?"
"Not…well, sort of." He shrugged. "There was a period after Hogwarts, when I got into some shady stuff—Muggle stuff, you know? And I learned about using needles then. I've only drawn blood once, but…I think I could manage it again. If you're sure—are you sure? Do you think you can save him?"
Lily sipped her water while digesting the idea of Connor taking Muggle drugs, shooting up, doing terrible things to his mind, and then she realised that that really wasn't too different from what Teddy and Graham (and, allegedly, Victoire) had gotten up to, at the end. And so she set down her water glass, reached one cold hand for one of Connor's, and said, "I really think I can, if I can get a look at his blood."
"Well, then," Connor squeezed her hand, "I think I can help you out."
:::
Lily's parents went out Christmas shopping late on the night before Christmas Eve, and Lily flooed Connor immediately. He fell into her parents' living room, glanced around, and then smiled at Lily, looking a little wide-eyed with shock.
"So, you have a needle and a syringe, right? And they're clean?"
"Never been used before." He pulled the sealed bag from his pocket and handed to Lily, who glanced at it and then returned it to him, saying, "Come with me."
Teddy's door was open, and Connor stopped in the doorway, staring for a moment before entering the room. "Christ, he looks like hell."
"I know," Lily murmured, crossing the room and brushing some of Teddy's dull hair from his forehead. "But he can get better." Or die, she thought, which she still would have considered an improvement, had she been in Teddy's place.
"Well, all right." Connor's hands were shaking, and Lily reached out and snagged his right wrist in one of hers.
"Thank you so much for this, Connor. I swear, I will never tell anyone that you helped me."
"It's funny," he said, as he tugged some rubber gloves and a small rubber strip from his pocket, laying that on the cover beside Teddy's arm and slipping the gloves over his hands, "that I feel worse about this than I ever did about injecting heroin into my own veins, or my friends'."
Lily bit the inside of her cheek and picked up a glass vial from the desk. It was already prepared with a Refrigeration Charm, which the book from the Restricted Section had informed her was essential. Lily didn't know what to say to Connor, so she didn't say anything.
He glanced at her, smiled, and secured the rubber band around Teddy's arm, gesturing for Lily to lift Teddy up by his shoulders—he was too light, too light—so his arm bent and the vein on the underside swelled blue. "Shouldn't be too hard," he said, and Lily knew he was reassuring himself more than her.
Connor asked her for disinfectant, and she handed him Muggle alcohol from the bedside table, a requisite solution from her childhood, and he swabbed Teddy's arm, and then he shut his eyes for the barest moment, undid the knot of the tourniquet, pressed his thumb against Teddy's skin, and in a quick motion slid the needle into the blueish line. He drew the syringe out, and the plastic tube filled with blood.
Lily had seen blood before, of course. Bright and falling from scrapes on her legs, hands, fast and into her eyes from the cut on her forehead. She'd seen it drip from brothers' split lips and cousins' elbows and friends' skinned knees; but it had never looked as dark and purple-ish red as the tube of Teddy's blood that Connor handed her, after pulling the needle from Teddy's arm and dabbing at the dot of blood still on his skin with an antiseptic wipe.
Lily transferred his blood to the glass vial, and it filled the clear jar completely. She sealed it with a stopper and a charm, and placed it on Teddy's desk. Connor and she Banished all evidence—Lily had never been certain where Banished items went, but she was fairly certain it was somewhere no person could follow—and then they washed Teddy's arm, which had stopped bleeding, and Lily cast a Hydration Charm on him, which she was not supposed to know how to do, but she had seen enough healers cast them on Teddy over the years that she wasn't entirely sure how she was meant to have avoided picking it up. His skin looked healthy—or healthy for Teddy—and there was no way that anyone, not Teddy's healer, nor Lily's parents, nor Vic and Graham, who were sure to stop by the next day—no one, would know that Lily and Connor had stolen some of Teddy's blood.
"Where are you going to experiment on it?" Connor asked as Lily fixed him some tea in her parents' kitchen. "Not at Hogwarts?"
"No, not at Hogwarts." Lily stirred some sugar into Connor's cup and glanced at the vial of blood sitting on the table. "I'm going to break into Grimmauld Place—my father inherited from his godfather, and Teddy and Graham lived there for a bit. I don't think anyone's been there since Graham moved out after the—after whatever happened to Teddy, but I know technically it still belongs to my parents. I know all of their security Charms, so it shouldn't be terribly difficult to get in."
Connor caught the mug from where she sent it floating towards him, and he shook his head. "Fuck, that's brave. You don't think your parents have some sort of surveillance on the place?"
"Honestly, not really. It's protected—you know, Secret-Keeper and all that. If you went to Grimmauld Place, you wouldn't see it. Only a few of Teddy and Graham's friends were even allowed to know the address." Lily shrugged. "I don't think my parents feel it needs surveillance, which is good for me."
"So you'll, what, turn it into your laboratory?"
"What better place, really?" Lily snagged the blood from the table and turned toward the stairs. "I'll be back down in a minute, I just want to grab a bag."
"Are you coming home with me?" Connor called after her.
Lily reappeared a moment later, wearing a wool jacket and with a bag slung across her chest, one which Connor assumed held the vial of Teddy's blood, and she shook her head. "I'm coming to London with you, but I want to make it over to Grimmauld Place and back before my parents get home, so I won't be able to stay. Finish up your tea, doll."
"Why make it for me if you won't give me the chance to drink it?" Connor winked at her.
Grimmauld Place had all of her parents' typical defences in place, and it was as dark and dusty as Lily could ever remember it being. There were still things of Teddy's strewn around the living room and hallway, and she caught sight of an old stuffed owl that she thought had belonged to her when she was little. No one, it seemed, had had the courage to face clearing out Teddy's things after the accident, and so they had locked them up, a hidden memorial for the sleeper.
There were still photographs decorating the walls, too, pictures of Teddy with a young-looking Victoire and Graham, with the other cousins, as a baby with Harry and Ginny and his grandmother. Lily felt as if she'd stepped years back in time, as if she had turned a Time-Turner.
But no, she reminded herself, as she descended into the kitchen, the place where Teddy had collapsed, this place may have stopped, but Teddy himself was certainly continuing on, and not well, not well, at all.
In addition to the vial of his blood, Lily had taken the best of her textbook collection. She lined them up on the dusty counter to the right of the sink, and set the blood beside them, double-checked to ensure that its Refrigeration and Protective Charms were still in place, set a few security spells of her own around the kitchen and the entrance to the house, and then Apparated home.
Her parents returned about ten minutes after she did, and she helped them wrap their gifts, and then, after they'd gone to bed, Lily crept into Teddy's room, checked his arm—the puncture wasn't even visible—and blew her hot breath onto the flat diaphragm of the stethoscope, warming it up before she slid it beneath Teddy's cotton shirt, against his pale skin.
His heartbeat was steady, a rhythm that matched the pulse she felt daily in his wrist and neck. She sat cross-legged on the bed beside him, breathing quietly as his heart thrummed in her ears. He was so very alive. She couldn't bear it, how alive he was, and how still.