For the second time in a couple of hours, Harry opened his bleary eyes to a bright, white light above his head. Blinking hard, he tried to push himself up but stopped as he felt a pounding in the side of his skull.
"Take it easy, Harry. You've taken quite a knock." The smooth voice was back and Harry turned his head towards the sound.
Doctor Cullen stood there looking just as perfect as before, except possibly slightly less at ease. His brow was lined with worry, looking very out of place on his youthful face. Hanging the folder he was holding over the railings of the bed, the doctor moved to stand beside Harry and gave him a calculating look, as though he were trying to figure something out.
Harry began to feel squeamish under the doctor's gaze. Had he seen what happened? Had someone else seen Harry stop the scaffolding and told Doctor Cullen as Harry's doctor? Deciding to be cautious, Harry once again played the 'I-can't-remember-a-thing' card.
"Um, what happened exactly?" he asked in his most innocent voice.
At his question, Doctor Cullen seemed to come out of a daze but the scrutinising look didn't waver.
"After you ran outside, you were so focused on the scaffolding that you didn't see a shard of metal that had fallen bounce and hit you in the head. It knocked you out cold." He repeated the story with conviction and something else. Was it… wariness?
There was no mention of Harry's involvement, and yet he still wasn't convinced the doctor had not seen anything. He decided to probe further.
"And the building site – are the people alright?" Harry of course had seen himself that everyone had made it safely off, but he needed to know the story that Doctor Cullen was following.
"Don't worry, Harry, everyone is perfectly fine. The structure ended up falling over onto the neighbouring building, allowing the people trapped on top to climb over to safety. It was incredibly lucky." As he said this, the smile that lit up Doctor Cullen's face was so genuine that Harry couldn't help but believe this was the events the doctor had noticed. He mentally sighed in relief. He had gotten away with it.
"I am curious though, Harry. What on earth did you think you could achieve by running outside?" Suddenly the friendly tone disappeared. "Surely you must admit it was a foolish thing to do, especially in your condition," the doctor accused, as he fixed his patient with a scolding look that reminded Harry of the face Mrs Weasley gave her children on a daily basis.
Despite feeling as though he were being told-off for misbehaving, Doctor Cullen's comment annoyed Harry to some degree. The doctor thought him foolish? He had to remind himself that Doctor Cullen had no idea of his magic and so simply saw him as an injured boy who had stupidly tried to play hero.
Instead of answering the question, Harry retorted with one of his own.
"Why didn't you do anything? Surely you could have called someone for help," he snapped back angrily. He was starting to get a headache.
Doctor Cullen looked as though he was about to counter with something else, but instead he just sighed and turned to head towards the door.
"I do not feel like arguing the subject, Harry. You should get some rest. If you need anything, just press the button beside you and someone will come. Oh, and try to stay put this time." And with that he walked out the door.
Harry continued to stare at the spot where Doctor Cullen had disappeared. The doctor confused him like nothing else. Not only did every conversation with him seem to come to an abrupt end, but he was like no other person Harry had ever come across. His appearance and the way he carried himself contrasted greatly from other people Harry had seen around the hospital. Doctor Cullen 'screamed' different.
He spoke with a refinement and sophistication that wasn't found in this day and age, certainly not in the Muggle world. The way he spoke reminded Harry of how the teachers at Hogwarts did. He was always polite, even when Harry wasn't cooperating with answers to his questions, and also seemed to hold a genuine concern for Harry's wellbeing unlike other Muggle doctors his uncle and aunt had grudgingly taken him to in the past.
There was definitely something not quite right with Doctor Cullen, and had Harry been an ordinary Muggle patient, he would have simply brushed him off as a kind-hearted, oddly good-looking doctor. However Harry was not an ordinary Muggle and so wasn't so quick to disregard what could only be magic. Though he did admit Doctor Cullen was a kind-hearted man.
How did Harry come to the conclusion of magical involvement? Taking into account the doctor's beauty, pale skin, musical voice and ice-cold touch, there was no other solution really. Harry just wasn't sure what he was. He started off by trying to think of any spells or potions he knew that could cause those effects. He quickly remembered though that he wasn't Hermione and therefore would have absolutely no idea about that subject. He decided on a different approach.
After seven years in the magical world, Harry had learned about an awfully large number of magical creatures. One of his favourite teachers and dearest friends had been one. Harry tried connecting what he knew about werewolves to Doctor Cullen and knew it didn't match up. Werewolves were no different in appearance, certainly not unnaturally beautiful (Fenrir Greyback was testament to this), and were no different in body temperature.
He could be part Veela. That would definitely explain the beauty, but again the cold body temperature proved that theory invalid.
Harry was stumped. He couldn't think of any other possibilities that were plausible. True the idea of half-giant had come to mind, but Harry quickly quashed the stupid suggestion. There had to be some element he was missing; something that would tie all the evidence together and give him an answer.
He went over everything he had noticed about Doctor Cullen once more: pale, freezing skin, striking features, melodious voice. Harry was certain he hadn't noticed something. He replayed both of his conversations with the doctor in his head, looking out for anything that seemed out of the ordinary. Nothing that he remembered struck Harry as particularly odd. Unless…
Harry turned to Doctor Cullen, hoping to see him going for help, but he stood there motionless. In his eyes was a look of deep indecision and conflict, as though he were having an internal debate on what to do. Looking out the window again, Harry had to admit he felt the same; should he risk doing magic?
Doctor Cullen's face when the scaffolding was starting to fall had reminded Harry of exactly what he was going through, debating with himself whether to risk revealing magic to save those people's lives. But that was it; his face was identical to Harry's own at the time, as though he was also questioning whether or not to reveal something about himself.
The doctor had a secret. Maybe he wasn't a magical creature. What if he was just a wizard like Harry? Maybe there really was some potion or strange magical condition that gave you really, really cold skin, though what on earth would be the point in that?
Harry knew, though, that Doctor Cullen simply couldn't be a wizard. His name had drawn no reaction from the doctor. As much as Harry hated the fact, no wizard could meet the famous Harry Potter without blinking in wonder and glancing at his forehead to look for his trademark scar. The man was definitely not a wizard.
But what could Doctor Cullen have done to help without magic? If Harry weren't a wizard, there would have been no way for him to do anything at all to save those people. Unless he had another sort of ability like telekinesis or super strength, Harry would have been useless.
…Super strength? Where had that idea come from? The strongest person he knew was Hagrid, and Harry didn't think that even he would have been able to hold all that metal upright. This would have needed to be super, super strength to do that, so unless Doctor Cullen was hiding an inhuman power he would not have been able to help.
Suddenly the gears in Harry's head began to whir as he expanded on his admittedly bizarre theory. Playing with the amusing thought that the average-sized Doctor Cullen was actually an incredibly powerful super-human, Harry thought of how he could have stopped the structure from falling.
The doctor would have needed to get there pretty fast. Harry had managed to get there just in time, but he didn't need to get right up close to use his magic. In fact he had purposely kept his distance to draw as little attention to himself as possible. If someone were to physically hold it up, they would have had to race right to the bottom of the construction site which was behind an 8 foot tall chain fence.
"Great, now I'm saying that he's incredibly fast too," Harry grumbled to himself. This was getting more ridiculous the more he thought about it. But since when were things in his life not ridiculous?
For amusement purposes, Harry added strength and speed to the list of unnatural features the doctor possessed. Running back through the mental list he had formed of magical creatures, he was disappointed to find that he still couldn't make a match.
Harry was just about to give up when he thought of one he had forgotten. The thought hit him like a steam train, and he almost fell out of his bed when he realised that everything matched. The skin, his good looks, the suspected strength and speed; there was only one thing Doctor Cullen could be.
Vampire.
The pain in his head and limbs forgotten, Harry jumped out of bed and began to pace the room. He'd only ever met a vampire once; Slughorn had invited one to his Christmas party in Harry's sixth year and he had been introduced. Now that he thought about it, Sanguini (as the vampire had been named) shared many similar features with Doctor Cullen: the pale skin, flawless features and an incredibly smooth voice. Though Harry could have sworn that Sanguini's eyes had been red.
A hospital seemed like an odd place for a vampire to work. In fact, it was quite odd for one to have an ordinary job among humans at all. In the wizarding world, vampires were subject to all sorts of prejudice, not dissimilar to that which werewolves faced. No one wants to hire vampires and they were, unsurprisingly, seen as untrustworthy. Not all vampires were a part of the wizarding world though and so Harry assumed that Doctor Cullen was one of the ones that lived among Muggles, oblivious to the world of magic.
As Harry pondered his discovery, his fingers aimlessly wandered toward the stitches on the side of his head. Tracing over the small bumps, his attention was drawn once again to the state of his body, or more specifically, his lack of cleanliness. Harry still had blood caked on his skin and he could see dark patches of blood through some of his bandages. Feeling his head again, he thought of the amount of blood that there must have been. This made him wonder…
Why was he still alive?
If Doctor Cullen was a vampire, which Harry was now confident he was, he surely couldn't have coped with the large amount of blood there must have been. What sort of vampire had that level of self-control to not suck dry a bleeding patient?
There was clearly a lot to Doctor Cullen that Harry still didn't know and perhaps never would. He decided that it was too dangerous to let the doctor learn of his discovery and had no intention of doing so.
Happy with this decision, Harry settled himself back down for a much needed rest.
A/N: Hello, and thank you so much for the positive feedback so far! I just want to let you know that I will be updating this story regularly on a weekly basis, so there should be a new chapter every weekend. I won't have many of these Author Notes except if it's needed, so otherwise you can just continue to enjoy as we go along!