Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.
A/N: There are little bits of medical chat in here, but I think mostly we can excuse away Teddy's recovery time by using magical remedies. Again, if you do find anything seriously ridiculous, medicine-wise, let me know! Thank you for reading!
Chapter Six
Lily left them in silence. Her hand was shaking as she dropped a glittering fistful of Floo Powder into the fire and her voice was unsteady as she asked her dad to please come home as soon as possible. And as she pulled her head from the fireplace, stepping back in anticipation of her father falling from it, she heard laughter from Teddy's room, and she breathed a bit easier.
Harry spun out a moment later, brushing ashes from his robes. "Lily, what's the matter?"
"I," she began, and then another laugh drifted down the hall, this one weak and soft and a bit wild with newness, and Harry's eyes widened.
"Teddy?" he asked.
"He's awake," Lily said, and before she could explain at all, Harry was out of the den.
Lily followed slowly, and by the time she got to Teddy's door Harry was kneeling beside the bed, holding his godson in a tight hug. Graham and Victoire had moved back a few feet, allowing Harry room. Everything was silent for a few moments, and when Harry released Teddy, carefully allowing him to fall back against the pillows Lily had placed there earlier, both men had tears in their eyes. Harry turned to look at the other three.
"How?" he managed.
Vic and Graham glanced at Lily. She straightened her back. "I worked out an antidote."
"You?" Harry began, stopped, stared. "Lil, you what?"
She reworded it. "I figured out a cure."
And then Harry had her in a hug that nearly strangled her, for just a few seconds, before he stepped back with his hands still on her shoulders and said, "How?"
She swallowed. "They've already heard it. Let's go into the den. We should probably call his healer. Can I just tell you both at once?"
"And Gran? And Ginny?" Teddy added from the bed.
"Yes, and them too?" Lily asked. Harry nodded, gave his godson one last look, and led Lily from the room.
The others came quickly, as soon as Harry sent off his Patronus, and Lily stood in the centre of the den, while the others sat around her, and told her story again. Slower this time, with more explanations of her thought processes, and fewer insults directed towards magical medics.
The healer, an older man named Digsby, still interrupted her frequently. "You got some of his blood? How?"
"A syringe, a needle."
"How did you learn to do that?"
"In my Muggle classes," Lily lied, knowing no one knew enough about Muggle lessons to be able to call her on it. Her father still narrowed his eyes at her, and her mum's lips thinned, but they didn't say anything.
"But that's dangerous," Digsby said.
"No one else was going to do it," Lily pointed out, before continuing, detailing her analysis of the blood and her discovery of the potion.
When she had finished, explaining about mouth to mouth resuscitation and CPR for the medic, Teddy's gran stood and hugged her, a long, soft hug that left Lily feeling awful and vulnerable. "Thank you, my dear, for being so brave."
Lily bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from responding, from explaining that saving Teddy had been driven by nothing more than a selfish cowardice.
"I'm going to go sit with my grandson now, if you don't mind," Andromeda said to Lily's parents. "And you," she said to Digsby, "need to come and check on him, and tell us what to do to make sure he recovers entirely." She winked at Lily as she led the medic from the room, and Lily turned to face her parents.
They sat on the couch, both staring at her. Ginny opened her mouth a few times. Harry didn't move. Lily had no idea what to say.
Finally, Ginny said, "You promised you would stay at school this year. No sneaking off, no breaking the rules, and now you're telling us that you were in London at least once a week, sometimes more."
Lily nodded.
"Why didn't you tell us what you were thinking, Lily?" Harry sounded more exasperated than she'd ever heard him.
"You wouldn't have thought I could do it." Harry and Ginny exchanged a glance and Lily hurried, "Not because you've ever been less than supportive, but—I didn't even think I could do it, a lot of the time. But I knew I had to try."
Her parents shook their heads, a quick synchronized movement. Lily felt tense. "I want to ground you for eternity and give you everything you've ever asked for at once," Ginny said. "You worked a miracle, Lily, and I don't want to punish you for that."
"Sometimes doing the right thing requires a lot of wrong things along the way," Harry said. "Merlin knows your mother and I are aware of that."
"However," Ginny continued, "you could have killed him. You very nearly did. And that would have messed up everyone's lives, yours more than anyone else's. You understand that?"
Lily wanted to say, "But I didn't," wanted to point out that Teddy was more alive than he'd been in nearly ten years. She didn't, though. She bit her now raw lower-lip and waited.
"So," Harry said, "we are going to punish you."
"But," Ginny cut in, "I don't think you will mind overly much."
"What?" Lily asked.
"We want you to look after Teddy. The healer will obviously check in, and we'll need to get him a physical therapist, but you'll be there to look after all of his needs. Every one. And when Vic or Graham need help, so they can visit him, you'll help out then, too. We'll give you a bit of a stipend for it, so you won't need to get another job straight off. All right?"
"Of course." But she wasn't so sure. Teddy had been easy, in his silence. But how would this newly awoken Teddy fit into Lily's very narrow existence?
:::
The first week was, to put it mildly, agonising. Vic and Graham and Teddy's gran were around constantly, and Lily felt like an interloper, coming in at odd hours to force soup and water down Teddy's throat, to remind him to do arm and abdominal exercises—legs were too much—and, if Digsby hadn't stopped by, to ensure that he was passing urine. Mortifying would have been an understatement.
It was worse because of the constant presence of the others; Lily could tell that Teddy was as uncomfortable as she was, and neither of them was going to loosen up under the constant—if nonjudgmental—gaze of Teddy's two best friends and his grandmother. And at night, when they weren't there, Lily's parents sat with Teddy. She found herself thinking almost longingly of the long nights she had spent alone with him—with him asleep, and her talking herself there.
But that was an awful thought, because that Teddy had been dying, and this Teddy, this awkward man, was alive.
But her conversations with him consisted entirely of questions and answer sessions about his health, and Lily's mind was crumbling under the very repetitive process of keeping Teddy physically well, or well enough. And she worried, that first week, worried about how he was doing mentally—the shock of the whole ordeal couldn't have settled in yet, but he didn't seem to be having problems adjusting. He was taking it all much too calmly, in Lily's opinion, and she cornered Graham and Victoire as they were about to leave on the Wednesday evening a week after Teddy had woken up.
They were standing beside the fireplace, Floo Powder already in their hands, and Lily slid in against the mantelpiece, blocking their access to the grate. "Do you guys think he's okay?"
Vic and Graham glanced at each other, and then over their shoulders towards the hallway. Graham spoke softly, "Is there some reason you think he's not?"
"The fact that he hasn't had a breakdown yet is a little worrisome, to me. I mean, Merlin, ten years and he accepts it?"
"You want him to get angry?"
"Yeah, yeah, I really want him to get angry. Or sad. Or something—show some emotion. I want it very badly."
Victoire sighed. "You didn't know Teddy very well, back before, but he never really showed emotion. It just wasn't his way."
"Okay," Lily drew the word out. "All right, I'm sure that's true. But for something this big? He's got to be feeling crazy—why isn't he showing any of that? And," she continued, before Graham or Vic could excuse Teddy's calmness as a personality quirk, "this is none of my business, really, but I need to know, so I don't slip up sometime—when are you going to tell him you're engaged?"
The two exchanged looks. "Soon," Graham explained, "it just seemed best not to blindside him with too many things at once."
"But now you think he's adjusted? Or as much as he's going to anyway. Don't you think it'll be more difficult, the longer you wait?"
"Well, yeah, but...fuck," Victoire said. "It's terrible, Lil, how strange this is. He's still eighteen, you know? In his head? And no matter what I say, I can't wrap my mind around that, around him being eighteen. But he is—and so, for him, in his head, we're still together. Even though rationally he seems to understand that we're not. But I know we need to tell him. I do. It's just very, very hard."
"How do we even bring it up?" Graham asked, taking a fistful of his hair in the hand not holding Floo Powder. "Hey, Teddy, this is a bit tough, but Vic and I are engaged? How do we do that, without hurting him?"
"I think that's exactly how you're going to need to do it. It's going to hurt him, but it would hurt a lot more to find out from someone else, or to find out later."
"What, you want us to do it now? Right before we leave?"
Lily stepped away from the fireplace. "Of course not. I'm just saying you should do it soon. For you, if not for him."
Graham and Vic exchanged a glance. "We know you're right. We do," Graham said, as Vic scattered her Floo Powder in the flames. "And we will tell him. Tomorrow," he promised, before he followed Vic into the fire.
Lily turned away. She didn't know what to do, really. She didn't know how to deal with Teddy, with this odd triangular friendship she'd somehow gotten caught in the centre of. She wanted to help all of them, but nothing that she was doing seemed to help at all. She thought it might have been true that she was only making things worse.
Her parents went to a function that night, the first time they'd left the house at night since Teddy had woken up, and Lily knocked on his door only ten minutes after they'd left. It would be her first chance to be truly alone with Teddy, and she felt nervous, terribly so.
"Come in." Teddy's voice had gotten stronger over the past week and a half, but at night it still sounded tired, like it wasn't used to being used.
"Hey." Lily stepped into the room, but lingered by the door. "Do you—do you mind if I sit in here for a while?"
Teddy raised his eyebrows, but all he said was, "No, of course not, it's fine."
Lily perched on the edge of the chair that Teddy's gran had left by his bed and looked around the room for a moment. Not much had changed—he had just gotten to sit up in bed the day before, completely on his own, and the healer said that this was excellent progress, but in Lily's head Teddy's recovery ought to have been instantaneous.
Because he was still bedridden, he hadn't had the chance to change a thing about the room, and so Lily asked, "Do you want me to do anything to this room? Dad did all this when they first moved you in here, so you wouldn't wake up to find unicorns all over the walls or whatever, but—do you like it?"
Teddy snorted. "It's fine. Much better than it was when you were little—no offence. There are more pictures around than I'd have put up, I guess, but," he sighed, "I guess those were probably more for the people who were visiting me than they were for me." Lily nodded. Teddy looked up at her, and then turned his head so he could see the pictures on the bedside table. "People did visit me, didn't they?"
"Are you mad? Of course they did!" Lily drew her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them. "Merlin, when I was little there was always a crowd in here. And then, as time moved on and everyone started losing hope, you still had people coming at least once a week to see you—your gran was in here every weeknight and Graham and Vic came most days and my parents and brothers were always around." Lily tilted her head. "And then there was me, too—anytime the others weren't around and I was home, I was in here, trying to sort out what had happened." And, before she'd decided to help him, feeling sorry for herself beside her comatose god-brother had been a bit of a habit. And, before that there had been people everywhere, hoping for a miracle. She wasn't about to admit to that, though. "So, yes, Teddy, you were very popular—you are very loved."
"I'm sorry," he shut his eyes, "I know that sounded a bit—needy, or whatever. It's just so hard to imagine what it was like here, living through the last ten years. I really can't picture it. I feel like I just dropped off to sleep, like no time passed at all."
Lily reached, unthinking, for his wrist, the reassuring familiarity of his strengthening pulse beneath her hand. He opened his eyes in surprise, and she let go, rushing to fill the silence, "Don't you dare apologise. You are allowed to feel angry or confused or lost. You are allowed to ask all the awkward questions. You are allowed, because you've missed out on ten years, and the fact that you have woken up doesn't change how much that sucks. Please, Ted, feel free to ask whatever questions you want to—you can say whatever you want."
He stared at her. "You're the first person to say that. I guess the others may be thinking it. But I asked Vic a question today—just a stupid question about what had happened to her friend Tiana—and she turned so pale. Like reminding her that I haven't been around these last ten years is a sin, or something. I don't want to hurt anyone more than I already have."
Tiana had slept with Graham just before he and Vic had gotten together—her friendship with Vic had been pushed beyond resolution by that point—and Lily imagined that hearing Teddy mention Tiana had reminded Vic of the secret she and Graham were keeping from him. To Teddy, of course, it was just another innocent topic that he was, evidently, not allowed to mention. "Well, it'll take time for everyone to adjust—you too, of course. But like I said, you can say whatever you want to me. I won't be offended."
He lay back to stare at the ceiling. "Why?" he finally asked.
"Why?" Lily repeated.
"Why you?" Teddy bit out, his tone explosive beneath the words. "Why do you seem to care—you didn't even know me."
Lily could feel the words she'd spoken in the empty air of his bedroom the year before, the confession-like force of, "I've done some stupid shit." Instead of repeating her selfish, karmic-based reasoning, however, she just shrugged and said, "My parents love you, my brothers worship you, I thought I might never have the chance to know you, and that seemed unfair, especially after I realised what had maybe caused the coma."
Teddy shut his eyes, and when he opened them again he looked at Lily and said, "Sometimes I am so grateful to you and other times I want to yell at you and ask you to—demand that you—put me back to sleep."
Lily remembered the feeling of him dying under her fingertips and the way that had hurt. But she also remembered that there had been the slightest frisson of relief in her chest, beneath the pain and fear the stopping of his heart had caused. So she nodded. "Yeah."
"Yeah? You don't think that's sick?"
"Fuck, no." He flinched at the expletive. Lily needed him to shake any memories of her eight year-old self that still clung in his mind. She was not that girl, and he needed to know, so she repeated it with increased vehemence, "Fuck, no. You're speaking rationally for the first time since you've woken up. This must be so difficult for you. So difficult. And you weren't even aware you were asleep—I'm sure that felt nice. After all, who doesn't wish for oblivion, sometimes? And when you're having to do what you're doing—of course you'd be pissed at me. I'm not going to apologise, though. I hope someday you'll be more grateful than angry."
He blinked at her in silence for several minutes, and then he said, softly, "I hope I will, too."
Teddy drifted to sleep soon after, and Lily left his room hopeful that their conversation had broken through the awkwardness between them.
The next morning, however, when she came in to give him his breakfast, he seemed even more reticent than he had before the previous night. He barely even mumbled, "Thank you," for the porridge she fed him, even though she knew that it had the perfect amount of brown sugar in it from the way his hair flushed scarlet when he tasted it.
But Lily had told him he could say whatever he wanted to her, and she supposed that included saying nothing. Soon after breakfast his physical therapist arrived, a middle aged wizard named Ryan. He was carrying some new strengthening potions that he wanted to try out, and he and Lily discussed the general merits of the various potions over Teddy's head as he began stretching his arms the way the physical therapist had instructed him to. And then, when the therapist left, Victoire and Graham arrived, and Lily left the three to themselves.
She had expected the kitchen to be empty when she returned with the breakfast dishes, as her parents had already left for work, but the chairs at the table were pulled out Ris and Hugo and Bea sat around it, talking in soft voices. They stopped when Lily froze in the doorway.
"So." Ris crossed her arms.
"You cured Teddy?" Hugo stood.
"And that's what you were doing all this year?" Bea asked, following him.
Lily nodded, leaned against the doorjamb.
"Why didn't you tell any of us?" Ris pushed away from the table and moved to stand beside Hugo. "After we started trying to talk to you again—why didn't you tell us?"
"I didn't think you'd believe I could do it." Lily's patented excuse for this question had served her fairly well so far; she didn't see any need to change it.
Apparently it did not work for them, though. Ris and Bea shook their heads and Hugo said, "Bullshit."
"Is it?"
"Yeah, yeah, it is. We've never acted as if you couldn't do something, Potter. Not ever." Bea kept her stare fastened on Lily's eyes. "Even when we weren't speaking to you, we never doubted you."
Lily couldn't think back beyond the not-speaking time, because the time before made her feel an ache somewhere around her heart, but she knew that the three of them at least believed what Bea was saying, so it didn't much matter whether Lily herself did—they wouldn't accept that as her reasoning for not letting them in on her attempt to cure Teddy.
"Maybe. Maybe I also wanted to prove that I could do something—this one thing—by myself. I mean, I ended up needing a little help, but it was—curing Teddy—it was something that I thought I really needed to do." Lily looked down at her feet, bare in the watery summer sun falling through the window behind her friends. "It was, it was sort of like atonement?"
"Atonement for..." Hugo trailed off.
"For fall of sixth year?" Ris sounded disbelieving. "Fuck, you really go all out, Potter. In case you hadn't noticed, we were ready to forgive you when you hadn't done a thing to atone for it."
"Yeah, I noticed. But did you notice that I hadn't quite forgiven myself? Still haven't, to be honest."
"Merlin fuck, Lily, let it go." Bea crossed the space between them and set her hands on Lily's shoulders. Lily tried not to flinch as the other girl's gaze accosted hers. "Let. It. Go. You were so stupid but we all were back then—it's dumb to pretend you were the only one making power plays. Yours were just a bit more destructive than ours, that's all." Bea released her, and stepped back a bit, giving Lily some space—she had always been liable to explode when her boundaries were threatened.
But Lily felt no urge to explode. She felt awful and honest, and so she said, "But how do I—how do I fit right back into the group again? After all this time, after all—everything?"
"I guess," Hugo said, "I guess it won't be immediate. But we can try, right, and it might go slowly but at least it'll be something?"
Ris squealed, leapt forward and threw herself on Lily. "You are an utter bitch and I hate you." But she was holding Lily so tightly that she could barely breathe, and so the words didn't mean anything aside from Ris saying, "I missed you."
"So," Hugo said, when Ris had released her, "are you coming out to lunch with us?"
Lily glanced over her shoulder, down the hall towards Teddy's room. "I'm meant to be looking after Teddy—that's my punishment for this whole thing, although obviously it's not a very bad punishment at all—but Vic and Graham should be here for a while. I'll check with them."
Graham and Vic and even Teddy had urged her to go take some time with her friends, and Vic had given her an odd look when she'd asked, as if she was proud of her, which made Lily feel uncomfortable, so she had fled without really checking to be sure that Teddy had enough water in the glass on his bedside table, of if he'd taken the strengthening potion Ryan had left for him. All through lunch, Lily tried to pay attention to what the others were saying, talking about some odd sort of drama that had separated the Gryffindors from the Ravenclaws at the end of term, which Lily had missed out on entirely, of course, but every time Lily's mind brushed the conversation something reminded her of another thing she may have forgotten and she felt a fierce need to be back in Teddy's bedroom.
When they parted outside the café Hugo paused before Disapparating and looked at Lily. "You all right?" he asked, his voice soft enough that Ris and Bea, who were discussing the relative merits of maxi dresses, did not hear him.
"Yeah, yeah, just worrying about Teddy."
Hugo gripped her shoulder. "I'm really proud of you, Lily. I didn't tell you that before. But I am. What you did for Teddy—it's really...it's really amazing."
Lily shrugged his hand off. "It was mostly common sense. And he's not really out of the woods yet."
"Which is why you're worried about him?"
Lily nodded. It was partly why. She was also worried that he would never be happy to be awake, which was, she knew, probably ridiculous. But people's minds got stuck sometimes, and if Teddy's did she'd never forgive herself.
"Well, better get back, then." Hugo stepped away. "We'll see you this weekend? We can all go to the Leaky or something?"
"Sure." Lily reached out for a quick hug, and waved at Bea and Ris, and then Disapparated, arriving in her empty living room moments later.
Soft voices came from Teddy's room, and Lily assumed that meant everything was fine. Still, she tapped against the partially open door and asked, "Need anything?" Vic glanced at her, smiled in a tense way, and shook her head. Teddy didn't even look at her, and Graham was staring at his hands, which were clasped between his knees.
That had looked as if Vic and Graham had decided to approach the difficult topic of their impending marriage. Lily felt as if her stomach had been squeezed—she hoped that pushing them to tell Teddy had not been a mistake. She thought of the way he had looked last night, of how he had said, "and other times I want to ask you to—demand that you—put me back to sleep," and she hoped that this didn't push him over a precarious edge.
Vic and Graham didn't leave until late that evening, and they came up to Lily's room before they used the Floo.
'How'd it go?" Lily asked, glancing up from the novel she'd been reading.
"Fine, I think. He sort of went quiet at first, and then everything seemed normal." Graham had one hand on his neck, as if he was trying to hold himself together.
"He said congratulations." Vic had her ring back on her finger, but her eyes were a bit wider than usual, making her look particularly ephemeral and a little shocked.
"Wow." Lily didn't quite know how she had expected Teddy to react, but for some reason calm acceptance hadn't been it. Although, she thought, as she stood to follow the others down the stairs, that's how he'd dealt with everything else, in front of everyone else. She wondered what she'd find when she brought him his dinner and nightly dose of potions.
"Yeah. So he's all right," Vic agreed from a few steps below Lily. "You'll be around tomorrow, right?"
"Of course." Lily left them by the fireplace and the Floo Powder and ducked into the kitchen. Her parents weren't home yet—she thought she remembered them saying something about getting dinner with Ron and Hermione—and so she began preparing a small dinner for herself and Teddy.
Teddy didn't respond when she knocked at his door, and she opened it slowly. "All decent?"
He didn't say anything, but he was sitting up in bed, his covers kicked off. He wore only boxer shorts and a t-shirt and his legs looked thin and fragile. He was staring at them, at his white knees and shins and thighs on his white sheets.
Lily thought that either Victoire and Graham were blind or that Teddy was a fantastic liar, better than all of Slytherin put together, for them to have thought that he was all right. She set the bowl of soup and plate of bread down on his desk, beside the various vials of potions that he had been subsisting on since he woke up—since she woke him up—and watched him watching his legs.
"This morning Ryan told me I'll be able to walk again. He said I'll be able to start trying soon." He sounded sad about this, and Lily tried to work her mind through all the loops in this miraculous news, tried to figure out why Teddy wasn't ecstatic. Nothing made sense to her, so she waited. "But," Teddy touched the top of his right thigh with his fingertips. He shivered. "But what will I be walking towards?"
Oh. Lily hopped up on the edge of the desk and drew her knees to her chin. She looked at Teddy. He looked at his legs, at his long, narrow, momentarily useless feet.
"Can you not say anything for a while?" he asked. "I mean, can I just talk. Can you not respond? Just for a little while. I just need—."
"Yeah, of course," she said, then rolled her lips together and waited. He needed her to be to him what he had been to her for the last several years, and she would willingly repay that debt until she died.
He still didn't look up. "When I stop thinking about all this, when I just think, I forget that I'm ten years older than the last time I remember—really remember anything—and in my head I am working in a pub and I am, I am dating Vic, and I'm thinking about marrying her someday, and I'm thinking about eventually getting into the Ministry for a steadier job, but that's all in the future, in my head, because in my head I am eighteen and I have time. There is no rush."
Lily waited several heartbeats.
"And then I remember—hey, I'm actually almost twenty-nine and I have to learn to fucking walk again, and then maybe I can get a job in the Ministry and I can settle down—to what, though? Because Vic and Graham are getting married, apparently," he jerked his head up to pin her with a glare, "which you knew about, which everyone knew about, and they're just telling me now. And on the one hand I get it, I get they couldn't tell me straight off. But on the other—it's all pretty damn unfair. And then I tell myself that I am being unfair because I was the one who fucked up, who messed everyone's lives up by messing around with potions and going into a fucking coma, and I should be happy that Graham and Vic got together—should be happy that they've been able to somehow get over what I did. But in my head I am only eighteen and all this just makes me want to hit things."
Not speaking was proving to be more difficult than Lily had expected. She wanted to comfort him somehow, but the bit on her lip so hard she felt the skin split and waited.
"And then there's you." He was looking at his feet again, his toes. "I still don't get it and I don't get why you're here listening to me and I do not understand who you are at all, because the Lily Potter in my head is eight years old and wild and you are not her, of course, because you're eighteen years old and you are so hard to figure out. And you have seen more of me than is bearable and I should be mortified, but you were here all throughout—through the last ten years, through everything, when I wasn't—and it makes me think, sometimes, it makes me think that maybe you know me better than I know myself. And all of this put together is so terrifying, you have no idea, no one has any idea, and my best friend is marrying my ex-girlfriend and I am meant to be happy about it, but," he had tears in his eyes, Lily could make out the way they were nearly spilling over from where she sat, "I never had the chance to stop loving her."
Lily didn't hesitate before sliding from the desk and moving to sit on the edge of Teddy's bed. She reached for his hand and pulled his head into her shoulder, and he stiffened for only a moment before letting go and crying against her t-shirt. She squeezed his hand so tightly it must have hurt, but he didn't pull away. She still didn't say anything; she didn't think he needed her to.
