I hear her voice in the other room, casting Charms. She uses them to make her hair soft and silky, to make her skin smooth and flawless. She says it's easier to use Charms than to buy potions that probably won't work nearly as well as the ones I used to make for her. She's certainly right about that, I suppose. I haven't brewed potions for her for half a decade.
She doesn't come into this room very often. My room, that was once our room. No more than duty demands. She brings me my meals and makes generally inane conversation while she feeds me. When I'm finished, she takes the dishes and vanishes and if I'm lucky, I'll see her again when it's time for the next meal. If not, the house-elf will bring me something.
That damned snake. Who would've guessed how potent her venom was? How could anyone have foreseen this? It started with tingling in my hands and feet two years after we married. I didn't pay it any mind. But it spread. Tingling became tremors, and I found myself unable to do what I'd made my life's work. I couldn't hold tools to prepare ingredients, couldn't hold my wand to cast spells. And wandless magic is far too unreliable to use in brewing.
We tried to find a cure as it worsened. I spent my nights bound to my bed so my thrashing wouldn't throw me onto the floor. The tremors stopped and we thought we were successful in treating them. It wasn't until my fingers and toes went numb that I realized the symptoms had merely changed. Numbness followed shortly by paralysis of the voluntary muscles from the neck down.
It's been hard for her, I know. She had planned a life for us of travel to exotic locations, research of new potions, and possibly children at some point. I'm sure she didn't even consider that she might end up taking care of me like this.
The first year, she was determined to find a cure. She spent hours researching and brewing. I couldn't help with the brewing, but we talked. She would read to me and we'd discuss options. I couldn't hold my wand, but she brought it to me. And she stayed with me in this room. We often had visitors in those days, and it was a rare week where we didn't have dinner guests two nights out of three.
The second year, she moved into the spare room to sleep. She said it had become uncomfortable sleeping next to me – like being with a corpse, she said. She still worked on a cure and she still read to me every night, but she put my wand away because it wasn't doing me any good. It's over in the top dresser drawer right now. Minerva, Potter, and Weasley still came to visit, but those visits had a way of being brief, and further between. Dinner guests became a rarity.
The third year, she warded this room against the use of wandless magic. She had grown tired of my attempts to master it, attempts that too often resulted in messes that she had to clean up. And that year began the occasional night where she would be too tired to read to me in the evening. She'd always apologize for it, and there would be a week or ten days where we'd spend the evenings together talking or reading. The Healers from St. Mungo's officially gave up on finding a cure for me that year also. And that was the year Minerva died. I don't think her friends have been here more than half a dozen times since then.
The fourth year, she went on a weekend jaunt with two of her old friends from Hogwarts. Girlfriends, she said. She hired a house-elf to take care of me until she returned. Only the weekend jaunt stretched somehow into almost five days, and she came back moody and irritable. It was over a week before she came in to read to me, and she cut that evening short. No apology for it. Just "I'm tired. I'll see you in the morning." That became a common refrain.
She's given up on finding a cure now. If I ask her about potions, she'll look at me as though I've grown a second head. If I persist, she gives me an exasperated look and tell me that she's got a headache. Or stomachache. Or something. And she's mentioned moving me permanently to St. Mungo's.
The front door just slammed. I know that sound. I've heard it all too often. She's leaving. She'll be back, maybe tonight but more likely sometime tomorrow. I wonder who it is she goes to, with her hair all soft and silky, and her skin so smooth and flawless. I wonder what I would do if I had my wand and could move.
I laugh softly at myself. I know the answer to that last question. "Avada Kedavra."