P/N: So here it is. Part four. I love this-my friend's stories continue to get better and better. Thanks again SO MUCH for all of your reviews-I can't explain how much they mean to us! A shout-out to Rodrigo DeMolay for being strong enough to read this fanfiction after a terrible personal loss of a friend to Leukemia. Everybody, please continue to review, and don't hesitate to critique! Thanks again! :D
Reeling in the Wake: Part Four
The call came near midnight. The buzz of Hermione's small, red cell phone vibrating on the counter hummed loudly in the silent kitchen, throbbing like a bass drum at the base of their spines and making them both jump. Hermione abandoned the thick folder of proposed laws she had only been pretending to peruse for the past hour and lunged for the rattling device. Ron's chair bounced off the wall as he leapt up to put his head close to hers to hear, too.
"Hello?" Hermione answered breathlessly.
"Hey," Harry's hushed voice barely pushed its way past the speaker Hermione was crushing against her ear. "Did I wake you up?"
"Hardly. We've been waiting to hear from you for ages. What's been going on?"
The rush of a heavy sigh came through the speaker. "Things have just been…."
He trailed off. Ron and Hermione exchanged looks. It was Friday, five days since Albus had become a patient at the Cancer Center in London. It was only about four miles from Ron and Hermione's house, but it might as well have been on the other side of the world. Harry had come to tuck Lily in the first night, and Ginny had come for a few minutes Wednesday evening, but since then they had heard nothing from the hospital.
"What's going on?" Ron mouthed, prodding Hermione to speak.
In the only phone booth the New London Cancer Center had left intact since the wide-spread mobile-phone revolution a decade before, Harry stirred, thinking of his son upstairs, sleeping off a cocktail of drugs to the lullaby of a monitor bleated his heartbeat in soft, high notes.
"Well, they started with a CT scan," he told them. "That was Tuesday morning. It's like a whole load of x-rays put together so they can get an image of organs and joints and stuff, see if the cancer's spread. You should have seen it…."
Albus held his breath as the machine began to buzz and click around him. He lay on his back this time, on a cold metal table attached to the mouth of a tunnel-like machine.
"We're going to take a few preliminary scans, now, Al," the radiologist's voice said scratchily over the speaker on the ceiling.
Albus was completely alone except for that voice. There was a window on the other side of the machine where he knew his parents and the doctors were watching, but he couldn't see them, and all he could hear were the radiologist's instructions. He swallowed and tried to say "Okay," but it came out as a whisper.
The table jerked into motion with a loud hum. Lights flared inside the tunnel and Albus lay perfectly still, rigid, as he began to slide backward into the machine. It was like a scene out of one of Hugo's alien films, he thought. A whirring filled his ears as something began to spin rapidly around his midsection. There were a lot of creaks and mechanical noises, and Albus closed his eyes, hoping the whole thing wasn't about to explode or collapse on top of him.
His eyes snapped open as the table gave a shudder. Was the light supposed to flicker like that, or was it his imagination? The noises seemed louder in his ears, the tunnel narrower. Albus had never felt claustrophobic before, but inside that glowing, metal trap his blood began to rush in his ears, and he could barely keep himself from clawing his way out of that tunnel.
"Albus? Is everything alright? You're breathing a little bit fast," the radiologist said from behind his window.
Albus listened to his breath, loud in his ears. "I'm…" he tried to say he was fine, because a part of him knew he was being stupid, knew the doctors knew what they were doing and needed this scan done. "No. C-c-can I come out? Please?" He winced at the panic cracking in his voice.
"Yes, of course."
A second later, Albus was sliding out into the bare, gray room that housed the scanner. He gasped, sitting up and taking deep breaths. The door opened and his audience flooded in, his parents in the lead. One look at their worried faces and his insides squirmed in embarrassment.
"I'm fine," he tried to tell them all, twisting the seam of his gown.
Dr. Norton was firing a barrage of questions at him, inquiring if he was in pain, felt any odd sensations, was short of breath, etc. There wasn't even time in between to give a proper answer.
Albus looked up, and his eyes caught his father's. And just like that Harry knew what was wrong. Albus had given him that look often enough, although the last time had been on a train platform more than a year ago. Back when the matter of school houses had seemed like the biggest thing in the world.
"A bit claustrophobic?" Harry asked, cutting across Dr. Norton's assault of rapid-fire questions.
Albus nodded, feeling himself blush, and swallowed with difficulty. The radiologist gave him a sympathetic look.
"You're not the first," he assured him. "Don't worry. It's quick and easy, and you'll be out in no time. Do you think you can try again?"
Albus nodded, but the wide-eyed look he had seemed to say otherwise.
Harry stayed with him as they laid him down again, this time preparing to hook up an IV. A contrast medium would flow into his blood stream, making the images clearer and easier to study. It was like highlighting the important parts, Dr. Norton had explained.
Albus barely flinched this time when the needle pierced his skin. After the bone marrow aspiration yesterday, it felt like little more than a mosquito bite. He stared at the bag of dye dripping down its long, clear tube into his elbow as the radiologist repeated his instructions to stay still and breathe normally.
"Alright?" Harry asked, squeezing Albus' shoulder.
Albus rolled his head to look at his father. His eyes were still round as galleons. Harry knelt down so that they were on a level.
"Dad, I can't go back in there," Albus said in a low, almost panicked voice.
"I know all this electronic stuff is a little… jarring coming straight from Hogwarts, but loads of people have this done every day. It'll be fine," Harry promised.
"Do you know what it's like in there?" Albus asked, voice rising an octave at the end. "I can't do it, okay?"
"Al, they need to do this so they know how to help you –"
"If they put me back in there, I'll go mad. I'll start ripping the metal apart with my bare hands. Then they'll have to subdue me with those dart-gun things Hugo wants for Christmas and lock me in a padded cell, and you'll only be able to visit me every other Sunday, and I'll have to eat those nasty protein drinks Dudley likes for some unfathomable reason through a straw for the rest of my life because my hands'll be cuffed to the bed…"
He paused to take a great shuddering breath, already feeling like the world was closing in around him again, and Harry took the opportunity to interrupt.
"Hey, easy. No one's going to lock you up in a padded cell. Look, I know you're scared. And you know what? I would be too, if they were putting me in that thing." Albus gave him a disbelieving look. His father had skewered a Basilisk and taken on a mother dragon, not to mention the whole Darkest-Wizard-in-a-century thing. He highly doubted a metal tube would faze him. "But you're a Gryffindor, remember?"
"Yeah right," Albus mumbled. "James's right, I'm a bloody coward."
"Hey," Harry said sternly, and the uncharacteristic snap in his voice got Albus' attention. "Being scared doesn't make you a coward. Refusing to face your fears does. Now, you're going to get through this scan so the doctors can start getting you healthy again because you are not a coward. Okay?"
Albus didn't think it really counted if you faced your fears strapped down and screaming, but it seemed like a waste of time to try explaining that to his father. "Okay," he agreed at last, licking his lips. When there's no other way out, you might as well go forward.
"Good man," Harry said, nodding approvingly and ruffling his hair.
Then he stood up and slipped out of the room to join the rest behind the window.
"Ready, Al?" The radiologist asked over the speaker.
No.
"Yeah."
Albus held his breath as the machine began to buzz and click around him.
"Merlin, I'd be a little more than jumpy too if they were going to shoot me full of x-rays," Ron said with a low whistle when Harry tapered into silence. "Isn't that what made that superhero Hugo's always going on about mutate into a giant green monster?"
"Those are gamma rays, dear," Hermione corrected. "And they don't actually do that, you know. It's just an old science fiction story."
"Still, wouldn't want to risk it. Anyway," he went on, serious once more. "How's the kid holding up? Did they tell you if they found anything after all that?"
A short, hollow laugh came through the receiver. "That was only the start of it," Harry told them.
He had started talking, and now he couldn't stop. Maybe because it was Ron and Hermione and he had always told them everything, or maybe it was simply because it was the first time in a week he'd had a chance to speak to anybody outside of this entirely separate world of hospitals and cancer he'd been plunged into, but everything came spilling out. From the nearly-inedible food to the constant taste of bad news close at hand, to everything he had had to watch his son be put through while he stood around helplessly and watched.
Harry sagged in the plastic chair he'd managed to doze off in for all of five minutes that night. Hospitals never slept. It was never entirely dark; the lights in the corridor dimmed but never went off, monitors flashed, and above the beds there was always a strip glowing so nurses could check up on patients without disturbing them. People were always coming up and down the hallway, murmuring in low voices about everything that was going wrong. It seemed like everything went wrong at night.
Albus was whimpering again. Ginny sat on the edge of his mattress, messaging his forehead with the palm of her hand, but still he tossed and moaned in an exhausted stupor. It was from the spinal tap they'd done earlier in the afternoon. Twelve hours ago, Harry thought, glancing at the luminescent clock beside the bed. It was almost two in the morning. That meant at least another twelve hours before the headache pulsing through Albus' skull as a result of the needle they'd shoved between his vertebrae to remove a sample of spinal fluid would dissipate.
Harry muffled a groan, rubbing out the crick in his neck, feeling that he had no right to voice his own discomfort.
"He's still running a fever," Ginny murmured anxiously, running the back of her hand along Al's cheek.
"Not a high one?" Harry asked, straightening up in alarm. Ginny shook her head and a bit of the tension went out of his shoulders. "Dr. Norton says he's probably had that for two weeks."
"How come nobody noticed?" Ginny asked. "If he's been ill for weeks, how is it that none of his teachers spotted it? Why didn't James or Rose or Dominique or somebody cotton on and bring him to Madam Pomfrey ages ago? If we'd caught it sooner –"
But of course what she was really wondering was why she hadn't picked up on it. She ought to have realized there was a droop to his handwriting lately, or that the letters were just a bit shorter than usual, that he'd mentioned being tired or how rough Quidditch practices had become. There must have been something that spoke a warning. She was his mother. Why hadn't she felt there was something wrong?
"Don't do that," Harry said, leaning forward to rub her shoulders. "We don't know if it would have mattered at all. And you saw him last weekend. You couldn't have guessed by looking at him that he was this ill."
Ginny sucked in her lower lip, but said nothing. Harry moved over to the bed beside her, slipping an arm around her waist and resting his chin on her shoulder. For a while they watched Albus stir restlessly. Harry's mind wondered back to that afternoon, to that brief moment of OK they had managed to steal.
Because Albus had had to lie almost perfectly still for hours after the spinal tap, Harry had retrieved a pack of muggle cards from the gift shop and amused his son by trying to teach him and Ginny how to play crazy eights. Albus had laughed and grinned and had a ball giving Ginny instructions on which cards to lay in code as she sat on the floor beside the bed so that he could see the hand, so as not to tip Harry off about what they had up their sleeves. And for a second everything seemed fine. But then that second popped like a soap bubble and Harry realized that was how they would be living for a while: hopping from soap bubble to soap bubble and trying not to drown in between.
"That's it," Harry declared finally, jumping up as Albus rolled away from them, his breath coming out in a pained hiss. "This is ridiculous. There's got to be something they can do."
"Pain medicine won't work, they told us that," Ginny reminded him, not taking her eyes off Albus' hunched form.
"I don't care," Harry snapped, already storming out into the corridor.
The nurses' station at the end of the hall was dark and abandoned. So were the next two Harry found. By the time he happened upon the small coffee clutch of exhausted, night staff interns gathered around the front desk, waited for Julie, the new receptionist to look up Al's chart ("Can you spell the first name one more time, please?") and listened to her repeat the same explanation they'd gotten earlier, he was beginning to lose it.
Harry closed his eyes, trying to find the patience he had cultivated in raising four small children. "Look," he said, leaning forward and planting his palms on the desk. "My son is in pain. We are in a hospital. Don't stand there and tell me there's absolutely nothing you can do about it."
The interns all looked at one another skittishly. Julie went back to scanning the chart, winding a strand of hair around her finger.
"I'm sorry, sir," she said with sincere apology. "It's just that in situations like this, the procedure is to –"
"Do you think I give a damn about the procedure?" Harry demanded and Julie flinched. A few hours earlier he might have taken this as a cue to dial back, but it was past two in the morning, he had not slept in days, and the very terrifying reality of his child lying in a hospital bed had left him frayed. "Why don't you go sit in there and listen to him whimper for twelve hours and then tell me what the procedure is!"
Julie took a step back, mouth gaping.
"Excuse me, Mr. Potter?"
Harry looked around. A nurse had appeared around the corner, probably to see what the commotion was. He thought that he might recognize her, but all the scrub-clad medical professionals were blurring together.
"You're son's a Leukemia patient, isn't he? I prepped him for the spinal tap. I'll come with you. We can give him something to sleep through the pain, at least."
She took Harry's elbow and guided him back in the direction of Al's room, giving quiet instructions over her shoulder for the interns to get back to work.
"He's just been diagnosed, hasn't he?" she asked gently as they walked side by side. Harry nodded numbly. "How are you holding up?"
He looked at her. "How would you be?"
Nothing more passed between them on their journey through the dim hallways.
"Dad?" Albus groaned blearily when Harry pushed open the door. "Where'd you go?"
"To get me," the nurse said in a quiet, amiable voice, moving over to check the monitors. "Hi, Al. I'm Sadie, remember me?"
To Harry's surprise, Albus mumbled affirmation. "You gave me a Spiderman bandage."
"If you have to have a bandage, might as well have a cool one," Sadie smiled.
Albus didn't so much as flinch as she took his arm, began probing at his bruised elbow with her gloved hands. In a minute she had pushed an IV into place and fastened it with surgical tape, hung a bag of some clear liquid beside the bed. Albus had yelped the first time he'd been stuck with a needle, bit down on his lip and cringed his way through every blood drawing. Now he lay limply, completely unfazed. Harry didn't know if it was better or not.
"Might as well start him on an IV now," Sadie said to Harry and Ginny as Albus' eyes drooped closed. "He'll need it for the anesthesia in a few hours anyway."
"The what?" Ginny asked sharply.
"For the surgery," Sadie answered, glancing down at the chart attached to Al's bed. "Dr. Norton scheduled it for this morning. To insert a catheter for chemo treatments… he has discussed this with you?" she added, a bit uncertainly.
Ginny looked blank. Harry rubbed his forehead. "I think he has, but we've been a bit… preoccupied today. What exactly is it they're doing?"
Nurses were better at explaining things than doctors, Harry thought as Sadie pulled up a rolling chair and began to walk them through the procedure planned for the next morning. Ginny looked faintly green by the time she'd finished, and Sadie said hastily, "I know it sounds painful, but it will save Al a lot of needles when it comes to treatments. And more importantly, it could very well save his life. In emergency situations, we'll be able to get what we need immediately and he'll be able to get what he needs."
As one, they all looked over at the bed beside them where Albus had not stirred or made a sound since he'd gotten the IV.
Sadie left them with the instructions to get some rest too, but four hours later, when Dr. Norton, the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, and half a dozen other medical people swarmed into the room to wheel Albus into surgery, neither of them had slept a wink.
They lifted Albus from his bed onto a gurney without waking him, tucked a clean, heated blanket around his scrawny chest, and hooked up a new bag to the tube going into his arm. Ginny pressed a kiss to the back of Al's hand as they started pulling the gurney toward the door. When his fingers slid out of hers, she pressed her hand over her mouth and stared down at her knees, trembling slightly.
Harry stood, somewhat unsteadily, and moved to the door to watch his son – surrounded by a mob of masked strangers – disappear behind the metal doors of the elevator at the end of the hall.
He turned away from the door. All there was left to do now was wait. To wait around for someone else to fix this. He'd never been good at that.
Harry sagged in the plastic chair he'd managed to doze off in for all of five minutes that night.
There was silence at the other end of the line.
"Are you still there?" Harry asked uncertainly. He'd been talking so long, he would have never noticed the call dropping.
"Yes, we're here," Hermione's voice answered quickly, and he felt a surge of relief to find that he had not been talking into nothingness. "It's just…" she took a deep breath. "Wow."
"Yeah. I know." Harry breathed out slow and long. "How's Lily doing?"
In the kitchen, Ron and Hermione exchanged another look.
Lily spun faster and faster. The ribbons of her pink ballet slippers – the very special color-changing ribbons that her godmother Luna had made just for her all the way in Mongolia – whipped the polished wood floor of the dance studio. The long, marching wall of mirrors, the other girls lined up at the bar, the mothers watching from the bench – they all blurred together in a stream of colors. All Lily saw as she whipped round and round was the spotting point. The spot was painted bright yellow so they wouldn't lose it as they turned, and as long as she held that blot of color, she would hold control no matter how fast she spun.
"Lily," Miss Angela said far away in the whirling world. "We've finished with floor exercises. Time to cool off at the bar."
The periwinkle taffeta of her costume fluttered like gossamer wings. With each turn she l-e-a-p-t, legs straight, toes pointed, perfect form. And in the split second before she landed, bending like a willow to spring into the next twirling leap, it felt like she could fly. F-l-y away. But then, of course, she'd have to come back down to carry away everybody that she loved. Easiest just to let the earth fly through space with all of them on it. And then she'd land anyway and the point was moot. M-o-o-t.
"Lily," Esther the blond girl with sparkly slippers and sisters who came to pick her up from class said. "It's time for suckers. Don't you want one?"
Her hair had come out of its bun. It whipped in her face and filled her vision with dancing red tendrils. But she kept her spot. It was 'cause Mummy wasn't here to do it properly and twist the elastic just right. Hermione tried her best, but Rose liked books, not dancing. Ron tried his best, but he didn't know the rhyme about bedbugs. And Hugo tried his best, but he was her friend, not her brother, and couldn't be mean to her.
"Lily," Hermione said. "Sweetie, it's time to go."
It was like holding a bubble. If she kept her arms aloft in that perfect gentle curve, if she didn't hold on too hard or too loose, kept a perfect balance, it was like floating. And floating was better than flying because you didn't go so far away.
"That's all she's done all lesson. I haven't been able to get her attention."
"Did something happen?"
"Not that I saw. Where's her mother, today?"
"At the hospital with her brother."
"Oh no! what… sh-sh-sh."
"Well, they're still doing tests, but… sh-sh-sh."
Push off, turn, land. Push off, turn-land. Swish-thud. Swish-thud.
Lily spun faster and faster.
Harry let his head fall back against the glass cubicle with a thud, feeling like an awful father because he couldn't be in two places at once. "You'll tell her we're sorry, yeah? We'll be home soon. We've tried to get away to come see her, it's just something's always happening…."
Ginny gripped the rail until her knuckles turned white. The noise of the hospital cafeteria washed around her like a current, buffeting her where she stood. She couldn't do it. If she let go, she would slip under that current. She couldn't do it. She couldn't –
Tubes sprouted from Albus' bear chest. There was a bulge beside his heart now. She had been able to see it through the hospital gown when they'd wheeled him back into his room. Albus had asked if it would hurt this time when they put the needle in. Sadie had dropped a dollop of EMLA cream into his hands and shown him how to roll it like putty and warm it up. She promised it would stop him from feeling a thing.
Ginny had sat next to him on the narrow mattress, arm around his shoulders, waiting the hour it took the EMLA to numb him completely. She had played the old game she and Harry and Ron had done back before any of them were married and Hermione's parents' TV was still a novelty: hitting mute and doing the voices themselves. She would be here next to him for his first chemo session. She was his mother. If he had to sit through it, so did she.
But then they'd come with their tubes and needles. They'd bared his thin torso and covered him with wires and stickers and she could see that bulge where they'd jammed a tube right under his flesh and she'd bolted. Now she was two floors beneath where her son was having poison pumped almost directly into his heart.
She couldn't stay here.
Ginny took a steadying breath and let go of the railing. She turned and tried not to run through the maze of halls, feeling like a canary in a coal mine, not stopping until she saw the light.
Out on the road, she felt like she could breathe again. There were cars rumbling past, people shuffling along in their perfectly normal lives, nobody to look at her and wonder why she wasn't with whomever she'd come to the hospital for. She closed her eyes and turned her face to the weak November sun, melting into its distant heat.
A shadow moved in front of her. Out of long-learned instinct, Ginny had her wand at the person's chest in an instant, before she could even think about what she was doing. A weedy, dark-haired man stood before her, hands raised in surrender and both his violet eyes on the wand point dug into his ribs.
"Oh God, I'm –" Ginny stammered, quickly drawing her weapon back, trying to pass it off as an ordinary twig she'd picked up off the ground. In the middle of a car park surrounded by miles of pavement.
"Careful, there, Mrs. Potter," the man said with a smirk. "Wouldn't want to breach any codes of secrecy, now would you?"
"You're a wizard?" Ginny gasped, glancing around to make sure no one else had seen.
"Certainly," the man grinned. "Don't you recognize me?"
Ginny narrowed her eyes, slipping her wand carefully back into her jeans. Now that she was looking at him properly, she was stunned she hadn't smelt the oil he used to slick back his hair and had a heads-up.
"Mr. Menoy," she said coolly, stepping back.
"Mrs. Potter," Menoy crooned in a voice as oily as his hair. "You know, as colleagues, we never seem to find chances to chat."
He tried to slip an arm around her shoulders, but she caught his wrist and twisted his arm back to his side. He grinned through the grimace, rubbing his wrist.
"If you don't mind, Clyde, I'm needed elsewhere."
She turned and made to stride back into the Cancer Center, but Clyde Menoy slunk along next to her, tutting sadly.
"I did hear about your little boy, Ginevra. Terribly sad. My condolences. I do hope he'll be alright."
Ginny juddered to a halt, spinning to face him. "What exactly did you hear?" she demanded tightly. As far as she knew, Madam Pomfrey, Healer Heart, and Neville were the only people outside of her family who knew anything about their situation. Two of them she trusted with her life and the third she had trusted with something even more important – her son's life.
"Sis works in the records department at St. Mungo's, you know. She comes to me with the most heart-wrenching stories, sometimes. And knowing you and I work together, she was wondering how you were all coping."
"Don't pretend I can't see past that ferret face of yours, Menoy," Ginny snapped, feeling her blood pressure rising. "I work at The Prophet. I've had a front row seat to your campaign for the front page. There are confidentiality rules. You can't make my son's cancer your ticket to a byline without getting you and your sister fired for breach of privacy."
"Ah, how right you are," Menoy nodded, whipping out a quill and notepad. "But a press release from his mother is perfectly printable."
"I didn't give you –"
"'My son's cancer'," Menoy muttered as he scribbled. "Mm-hm, that ought to do nicely for a quote line."
"You bastard," Ginny breathed, fury beginning to ring in her ears.
She whipped out her wand again and in a second the notepad and quill were flaming. Menoy yelped and dropped them, stamping them out against the pavement.
"Nice try," he grinned, nudging the ashes with his toe. "But I think that's a quote I can remember verbatim."
"You have no right," Ginny began in a low, dangerous voice.
"But see, I do," Menoy cut in with his slick smile. But then he grew solemn, almost genuinely sympathetic. "I hate to do it to somebody I know, but you're a public figure, Ginny. Like it or not, your lives belong to the public. I'll do a good job. I won't exaggerate things. I'll tell it like it is. It can't hurt to have the entire Wizarding world behind Albus Potter's fight against cancer, can it?"
"You –"
But he was already gone, disapparated with a crack before she could get even a sentence out. Ginny stood rooted to the spot for several seconds, anger washing over her, building with each tide. Then she whirled on her heel and made for the fifth floor.
She spent the elevator ride contemplating what she would like to do to Clyde Menoy's office at The Prophet, and by the time the little ding signaled the doors opening, had come up with several satisfyingly violent scenarios. He might be able to run, but he couldn't hide forever.
She strode out into the waiting room and past the receptionist, barely even noticing the wary look Julie gave her. But several paces from Al's room she stopped short.
She could see him through the half-open door. He was leaning forward, a sheen of sweat glazing his pale face, choking and retching into the basin Harry held under his chin. Sadie the nurse was there again, ready with an empty basin that Harry switched out quickly, murmuring something as he rubbed circles into Albus' back. The poison-filled tube still snaked its way under Al's gown.
She turned away, began making her way quickly back the way she'd come. They didn't need to know about the reporter right now. Hopefully they never would. She bypassed the elevator and made for the stairs, which, she'd learned, were usually deserted. In the solitude of the stairwell, she closed her eyes. There was a different battle she could fight right now. Ginny gripped the rail until her knuckles turned white.
"I guess she raised some hell at the Prophet office," Harry told them, a faint chuckle coming into his voice. "I don't think they'll be printing so much as the name 'Potter' in anything for quite some time."
"Well, at least they won't be," Ron muttered.
"What d'you mean?"
"You, er, haven't been reading much, have you?" Hermione asked tentatively.
"Not exactly. Why, what's happened?" Harry asked with a familiar sense of trepidation.
"Well, Rose wrote to us today…." Hermione began.
James stared vacantly across the lake. He had not had lunch in the Great Hall all week. In fact, he'd avoided any situation where he might be cornered and forced to interact with people he knew. Admittedly, this was not a tall order since he'd stopped going to half his classes, and very few people were still speaking to him anyway.
Dominique, who had thus far been unfazed by the snarled insults, snide comments, and swift jinxes that had one by one alienated the rest of his friends and cousins, had finally lost her temper with him this morning.
"Potter!" she'd barked, snatching the back of his robes as he slunk out of the boys' staircase just after dawn, before the rest of his dorm was awake.
"Can I help you?" he'd growled back, yanking himself free and scowling at her.
"Yes, as a matter of fact you can," she'd told him, but not anything close to sweetly. "You could maybe show up for practice once or twice in the week before our FIRST MATCH! That's FIVE practices you've missed. Where the hell have you been, James?"
"None of your business," he'd sneered, his typical response to that question lately. Then he'd made to storm away, but Dominique had seized his collar again.
"What, I don't even dignify a famous James Potter excuse anymore?" she'd asked. "We play at eleven o'clock tomorrow. If you're not on the pitch at five-thirty tonight, don't bother showing up for the match."
"Then I hope you get your sorry arses thrashed tomorrow," James had spat back.
That was when Dominique had flung him away from her with enough force to make him stumble. "I don't know what your problem is, James, but it's not on my team anymore."
And she'd stalked away.
"My brother might have cancer!" James had wanted to scream after her, but he hadn't. Just like he hadn't told Molly that he wasn't going to class because he didn't hear the teachers anyway. And he hadn't told Louis that he was picking fights because the longer he went without a letter from home, the angrier he got at everybody. And he hadn't told Fred he couldn't look at him anymore because all he saw was the sinisterly black bruise that had started this whole spiral.
So he sat alone on the cold, barren grounds letting the misty drizzle soak through his clothes, and waited for an owl that seemed less and less likely to come.
"Would you quit moping, Dom?" Louis sighed, looking up to find his sister frowning at her cauliflower. He shoved a heaping spoonful of mashed potatoes into his mouth and went on, "I's no' like you 'id anyfing wrong."
Molly, who sat beside Dominique, pulled her head out of her advanced transfiguration book to give Louis a disgusted look, which he ignored.
Dominique snorted. "The little twerp might have had it coming, but I still feel bad. Obviously something's going on."
She and Molly exchanged a meaningful look.
"Talking about James?" Fred had joined them, swinging himself onto the bench beside Louis and looking dejected. The other three nodded.
"I'm beginning to be seriously concerned about him," Molly said, wiping her glasses on her sleeve.
"I think we all are," Dominique intoned. "And not just about him, either." She glanced significantly down the table to where Rose sat alone, staring into her soup.
"I think Neville knows," said Fred abruptly, gazing up at the staff table.
"What d'you think happened?" Louis wondered for the hundredth time.
They spent a few minutes going over the same theories – that Albus had taken the fall for James and been suspended, that Harry's cousin Dudley had been in a fatal car wreck and James had refused to go home for the funeral, that Albus had witnessed something over the summer when he'd gone into work with Harry and was now being kept to give evidence at the Ministry. But they had gone over the ideas so many times that the circular conversation quickly fell into silence. After a time, Louis brought up Quidditch stats, Molly took it as her cue to return to her book, and they all did their best to ignore the obvious absences at the long, Gryffindor table.
Lunch was nearly over when Lucy appeared, Roxanne at her side. Fred gave his little sister a strange look. It was not often that Roxanne was seen trailing anybody, much less Lucy. Despite being in the same year, the two of them had never clicked quite like he and James had.
"Um, Molly?" Lucy murmured, approaching her sister with an anxious expression.
"What's up, Lu?" Molly asked distractedly, hardly looking up from her book.
"I think you ought to read something," she said nervously, tugging on one of her short red braids.
"Luce, you know that's a counterproductive remark," said Fred sternly. "We've only just gotten her out of the library, and remember how long and painful that procedure was?"
"Shut up," Roxanne told him, which was another rarity. The two of them got along better than nearly any siblings in the school. Fred clapped a hand to her forehead, checking for fever, but Roxanne swatted it away, a serious look on her face. "I mean it, Fred. Not the time."
Molly slowly put her book down, now giving the girls her full attention. Lucy handed her the magazine she'd been twisting in her hands.
"Witch Weekly?" Molly asked with a raised eyebrow. "You know what a gossip rag this is, Lu. Honestly, why waste your time?"
Silently, Lucy pointed to something on the front cover. Molly's eyes widened. She rifled quickly through the pages until she found the article and began to read so fast her eyes blurred. By the time she'd finished, she'd gone very white under her freckles. Every eye was on her when she looked up. Even Rose had slid down the table to see what was happening.
"Now, L-Lucy, this is a tabloid. They run crazy stories in it all the time. Probably what's happened is this Menoy's kid or nephew or something goes to Hogwarts and happened to write home that Al hasn't been in classes lately, and he came out with this to make a little money."
"What's it say?" Rose demanded.
"Well –" Molly coughed, looking deeply unsettled.
Fred grabbed the magazine from her. "'Potter's New Battlefront,'" he read. "'In a recent, gut-wrenching discovery, it seems that the legacy of fighting for life has now passed on to the next generation. Albus Potter (age 9) is being treated for a chronic illness, and what is more, this is happening not at St. Mungo's, but at a Muggle hospital. Many may raise eyebrows at Harry Potter's choices when it comes to the well-being of his children, and some even wonder if he wants his son to recover at all…' Okay, who writes this shite?" Fred broke off in a disgusted tone.
"Obviously it's a load of dragon dung," Louis put in, pointing his fork at the magazine Fred had flung away from himself. "They didn't even get his age right. Molly's right. Just tabloid rubbish."
There was a beat in which the seven of them looked at each other. Then, almost as one, they leapt up from the benches and joined the swarm heading out of the Great Hall.
"The nosebleed –" Dominique said faintly as they pushed their way out the oak front doors, Fred several paces ahead, leading the way to where he knew James went to hide. " – there really was something wrong with him –"
"It was just a nosebleed," Molly tried to reason. "People don't get chronically ill from nosebleeds."
"People don't just disappear for no good reason, either," Rose said shortly. And now she was remembering the pained grimace she'd caught on Albus' face several time in the couple weeks before he'd vanished, the drawn look she'd attributed to juggling homework and Quidditch practice, and oh God what if Witch Weekly was right?
James was surrounded before he even knew what was happening. Very suddenly a magazine was being thrust in his face, and when he'd clawed it away it was to find his cousins ringed around his rock. Fred stood over him, Dominique and Rose on either side with the same hard, determined gaze.
"Is it true?" Fred asked simply, pointing to the magazine.
"Is what true?" James snarled, pushing himself to his feet.
"Cut the attitude, James," Rose snapped. "You've been a git all week. Al's been gone all week. And now this. We want some answers. What is going on?"
Shooting them all venomous looks, James stooped and snatched up the magazine. And right there, in permanent black and white, was the news he'd been dreading all week. Suddenly the cold air seemed to freeze in his lungs.
"Is it true?" Fred asked again, but this time his voice came out hushed.
His father had promised to write. He'd promised to let James know what was happening.
"James?" Dominique prompted cautiously.
With an angry shout, James hurled the magazine over their heads into the lake's frigid gray waters. "Fine, you want the truth? Mum and Dad took Al home because he's sick! He's got cancer, and he could die while we're sitting here taking notes and playing Quidditch! My problem is that my little brother might not see his thirteenth birthday. Are you happy to be in the loop? Does it make you feel better now that you know?"
James choked. His vision blurred. Dominique steeped forward, making to put her arm around his shoulders, but he pushed her away. And he did what he did best: he ran, leaving the rest to stare at each other with stricken faces.
James kept going, pushing against the ground, gasping for breath, wet cheeks stinging in the cold. It was a long time before he stumbled, fell forward onto his hands. It was cold, and dark clouds churned overhead, letting the occasional snowflake flutter loose.
On the opposite bank he could see the seven figures he knew were his cousins still grouped around the rock he had come to think of as his. Eventually, as the flurries thickened, they made their way back up to the castle in a straggling line. Molly appeared at James's side, pulling on his cloak, telling him he had to come in or he'd freeze. But now they knew, and they'd probably want to know more. They'd want him to explain, and he couldn't do that.
James stared vacantly across the lake.
"Perfect, that's… that's great news," Harry groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I was going to write to James tomorrow when we got home… I suppose everyone else will have seen that article as well?"
"Mum was over here this afternoon," Ron admitted, wincing at the memory. "She's pretty torn up. We didn't really know what to tell her. I reckon Fleur'll have seen it, too."
Harry swore under his breath.
"That reporter ought to be taken in for slander," Hermione bit out angrily, already pulling out a legal pad and quill to scribble on. "He probably had to fabricate a good deal of that article to get Witch Weekly interested. I'll see if I can pull an investigation, maybe get a retraction printed at the very least."
Harry murmured his thanks, and there was a pause during which Hermione rapidly filled two pages in her legal pad.
"How'd Rose take it?" Harry asked at last.
"Pretty hard, I think," Hermione said heavily.
"And James… that's not something he needs right now. This is just… how did we get here in less than a week?"
Neither of them had an answer.
"I should go back upstairs," Harry said after a moment. "I don't suppose Lily's still awake? I didn't realize it was so late. I wanted to talk to her."
"We could wake her up," Ron suggested, but Harry said not to. "Better let her sleep. We'll be home in the morning," he told them.
"Well, give Al our love," said Hermione.
"Hang in there, mate," Ron added.
"Thanks. For everything. I'll see you… sometime soon."
There was a click, and the line went dead.