Disclaimer: I don't own anything copyrighted by anyone, especially Harry Potter stuff or anything from the OC.
Author Note: So sorry about the wait. I am getting slammed with university stuff. But this is the second to last chapter, and I have most of that written out so it should definitely be out within good time. Also, if you can pick up the OC reference (hint: it's from the episode 2-12: The Lonely Hearts Club), you'll get my eternal love and fanfiction points (though, those don't exist, so you'll just get the love.)
Chapter 4
'When were you going to tell me that my healer was Lily Evans?' James demanded as a nurse first stepped inside the room the next morning.
'Good morning to you too, Mr. Smith. And in regards to your healer, we thought you knew who she was. What kind of patient doesn't know the name of the person taking care of them?'
'Clearly, a patient like me,' James replied, obviously annoyed. 'She told me to call her V, and didn't give me any other name.'
The nurse opened the blinds to reveal a tropical beach, the day's choice for scenery. 'Wow. That means she must be comfortable with you.'
'Who must be comfortable with you?' the person in question asked as she bustled into the room, a large cup of coffee in one hand and charts in the other.
'I was just telling Mr. Smith how comfortable you must be with him, because you only let a few people call you V.'
'Is that true, V?' James asked, quite intrigued.
'I, uh, well…that is to say,' Lily stammered.
The nurse shot an incomprehensible look at the pair, and backed out of the room saying, 'I'll just leave you two alone.'
Lily puttered around the room, hoping that James would just forget about the matter, but when she turned back he was clearly waiting for an answer.
'Can't we just forget about this? Just put it in the past?' she pleaded.
'I don't think so,' James said, a cocky tone slipping into his voice. 'Just how comfortable are you with me?'
'Don't raise your eyebrows like that at me, J.'
'Why not? Don't I have a right? I mean, after all I am one of the few people you let call you V. I feel I should feel very good about myself right now.'
'If you're going to act like that all day, I'm just going to take my work and do it in my office. It'll serve you right if you only get to deal with brassed off nurses all day,' Lily shot back. She turned from the bed to leave, but James caught her wrist and pulled her back to face him, startling her.
'Please just tell me V. We've always been honest before. Why do you let me call you V, and don't give me "I like to keep it casual with patients" or that it's just a hospital nickname. Tell me the truth.'
'I don't know!' Lily cried, for it was true. Deep down, she knew that she had been strangely comfortable with J the minute she had looked down at him in the stretcher. She really couldn't ignore that fact any longer. 'It just feels right. I haven't had someone call me a nickname in a long time, and I miss it. It's better than my real name.'
'Which is?' James was dying to let her know that he knew who she was, but wanted Lily to fess up.
'Ah ah,' she waved her finger. 'We're not at the name stage of the game. We still have a ways to go.'
James sighed heavily and sat back. 'This is not a normal patient-healer relationship.'
Lily laughed. 'True, but think of how boring it would be if it were.'
James could only grin, knowing that he never really dealt well with normal. Like his healer had said, normal was just too boring.
'But all stuff about me aside, I actually came here with some good news. If everything goes as well as it has, and you don't do anything stupid, the stomach wound will be healed in about 2 days and you'll be able to go home.'
'I won't do anything stupid!' he cried.
Lily just looked pointedly at him.
'Fine. I'll try not to do anything stupid. And hey, I haven't done anything like that yet.'
'I'll try to keep my expectations high, though I'm not as optimistic as you seem to be.'
'Ye of little faith.' James grinned up at her, and Lily felt herself pulled to him by the pure magnetism of that smile.
Suddenly, her mouth was dry. She previously underestimated just how attractive her patient was, and just how much she was affected by him.
James noted how his healer was slowly edging closer. Soon, she was right by the bed, and he found himself staring into her emerald green eyes. James heard a pounding in his ears and realized that it was his own heartbeat. He wondered if it was loud enough for Lily to hear.
Lily wondered what had come over her when she found herself leaning over him and saying, 'your blanket's become untucked. Let me help you.'
Her hair hung in front of James' face as she leant over him, enveloping him in the scent of vanilla. Acting purely out of instinct, James grasped one of Lily's hands. Startled, she looked at him and realized just how close their faces were.
Putting his other hand behind Lily's neck, James started to slowly pull her towards him. Their lips were almost touching when the pair heard a noise from the doorway.
'Good morning!' came the voice of James' agent.
Lily sprang apart from James and whirled around to face the agent. He stood there smiling at James and Lily, who were very shocked.
Lily shook herself out of her stupor, and quickly reached the chair where she had left her parchment. 'I'm just going to do that work in my office now.' She hurried out of the room, face flaming.
James suddenly found his lap very interesting, and his eyes rested everywhere but the door.
'What's going on here, James? Did I just see what I think I saw?'
'Really depends on what you think you saw,' he mumbled.
Dan Donahue laughed. 'I'm pretty sure I saw you and your mediwizard about to do some very personal one-on-one healing.'
'That was very creative of you, Dan.'
'But seriously James, how did you manage that? Isn't she off limits, being your Mediwizard?'
James straightened up. 'Turns out that my healer 'V' is really Lily Evans, a girl I went to Hogwarts with. A girl who I was half in love with since the moment I met her, though I often annoyed her to no end.'
His agent lit up. 'That's great! I'll just go write the press release about you finding the love of your life. The papers are going to have a field day!'
'Don't do that.' James was adamant. 'I haven't gotten to that stage yet. Plus, it wasn't even a real kiss. More of a nose graze. But it was the most sexually charged nose graze in the history of nose grazes.'
The agent just gave James a look but continued on. 'But I at least get to stop with the whole fake name of yours in front of her.'
'No, that has to stay. She doesn't seem to remember me, and I don't want you to remind her either.'
'Why not?'
James sighed and fidgeted with his blanket. 'Well, we weren't exactly always on the best terms back in school, and now I can see that she's getting interested in me. I want Lily to get to know the real me, without her past negative feelings clouding her judgment.'
'Sounds like a viable plan.'
'But it's also a blackmail thing,' the Marauder grinned. 'I want to see how long it'll take her before she recognizes me. And no telling her! That would ruin it.'
Dan shook his head again. 'You are cruel, James. However, I just stopped by to check in on you. Now that I've maintained that you are still alive and able to make me money, I'll be on my way back to the office.' Reaching the door, the agent turned back with one last question. 'You said you used to be in love with her. What about now?'
The goofy grin that appeared on James' face said it all. 'Ooh, your female fans are not going to be happy about this.'
James sat there with that silly grin for a long time after his agent left the room. Now that Dan was gone, he anxiously waited for Lily to return. But when it was apparent that she wouldn't be back for a while, James quickly got bored.
Seeing a stack of Quidditch magazines on a table across the room, James wondered how he would get them. He remembered Lily saying something about not getting up without her permission and not doing anything stupid, but he was feeling much better. Plus, Lily said that the stomach wound was almost completely healed, and so James was sure he'd be fine. After all, he'd only be walking around his room; nothing could go wrong.
James moved to the side of his bed, and feeling no pain, slid his legs down onto the floor. Standing up, he took a few ginger steps, bare feet quickly absorbing the cold from the floor, holding onto things as he went. Gaining strength, James decided to forego getting his magazines for a while and decided to take a few turns around the room to get used to this type of movement again. He was very proud of himself, but he took a quick corner around the bed and felt a very sharp pain from his stomach. Alarmed, James looked down and saw a huge red spot on his gown that was rapidly growing.
'Shit,' he thought, and turned back towards the bed in order to summon a nurse with the button. But halfway across the room, his steps started to falter and his head start to spin. As his vision started to go, James felt for something to hold onto, but only managed to pull down an end table as he landed on the floor with a loud crash.
Right before he blacked out, James heard a nurse rush into his room. 'Mr. Smith, are you alright? Mr. Smith? Shit, I need a healer in here! Mr. Smith is code blue! Healer!'
Lily sat at her desk doing paperwork after the embarrassing almost kiss with J. She was pretty set on avoiding him for the rest of the day, unless she absolutely had to tend to him. She couldn't believe how brazen she had been, leaning over him to tuck his blankets in. Groaning, she buried her head in her hands. Lily saw that she was clearly in over her head with J.
But her attention was drawn to the magical stone flashing on her desk, signaling that she was needed immediately for one of her patients. The flashing stone was followed by a magnified announcement that echoed through her office. 'Code Blue, rm 107 Morris wing. I repeat, code blue in rm 107, Morris Wing.'
Shocked, Lily jumped up from her chair with such force that she knocked it over. 'That's J's room!'
Lily bolted from the room and sprinted down the hall towards J's room, absolutely terrified. She knew that her feelings went far beyond the normal anxiety of potentially losing a patient.
She burst into J's room, and pushed through the crowd of personnel around the bed, not failing to notice the puddle of blood that still remained on the floor.
'What the hell happened here?' Lily barked out, hiding her fear behind a mask of irritation. 'He was fine when I left him, not bleeding.'
A short, blonde nurse stepped forward as Lily started to examine J's reopened wound.
'I heard a loud crash coming from this room, and I rushed in to see Mr. Smith collapsed on the floor, bleeding heavily from his stomach wound. I'm thinking that he got up to retrieve some magazines that were across the room.'
'What an idiot!' Lily exclaimed. 'I told him not to do anything stupid, which should've included not getting up without specific consent from me. Now he's taken several steps back in his healing.' The wound was still heavily bleeding, the flow not staunched by the spells that Lily was using, which extremely worried her. The edges of the gash were also ragged and bright red, indicating that it had been ripped apart.
'Heart rate and blood pressure are dropping. What should we do, Healer?'
All her fear for James rose up into Lily's throat and threatened to choke her. She froze for the first time in her medical career, realizing the exact reason one wasn't supposed to heal or work on family or people they extremely cared about; the emotions were far too high and got in the way.
'Healer Evans, the patient is going to crash. What should we do?'
Those simple sentences scared Lily out of her frozen state and into action. For the next minute she furiously worked to close the wound which seemed to be resistant to spells, and to raise J's blood pressure and heart rate. Every time she looked down at his deathly pale face, she dug inside herself for more strength to save him.
And then, as if by a miracle, everything clicked. The wound remained stitched, his heart rate and blood pressure returned to normal and colour started to return to his face.
One by one, the other mediwizards and nurses turned to leave and congratulate her on the save. But Lily didn't hear them as she stared down at her patient, not even noticing the tear that had sprung unbidden to her eyes.
However, the nurse Jane did notice, and put a reassuring hand on Lily's arm. 'I'll make sure everyone leaves you along with Mr. Smith. You did well, V.'
She registered the nurse leaving and placing a ward around the room, but all Lily could do was sink into the chair by J's bed before she was blinded by her tears. She grasped J's hand and started to talk to him as the tears continued to flow.
'You are so stupid, do you know that? Always have to do things for yourself, never asking for help though you know it isn't safe to be that thoughtless. I warned you not to do anything stupid, you bloody jerk!' Now a bit angry, Lily took a quick swipe at her tears. 'I was absolutely terrified when I heard the code for this room, because I had left you perfectly fine. I had never really thought about how things change so drastically in an instant. I was terrified that I would lose you before I even got to really know you.'
A small groan came from the unconscious J, but when Lily saw that he wasn't waking up, she continued. 'It was only when I thought I might lose you that I realized how deep my feelings were for you, beyond our patient-healer relationship. But I'm really scared and confused about this because I don't even know your real name or anything concrete about you but I still feel like I've known you forever. What is going on? I don't even known why I'm telling you while you're unconscious, like the coward I am because I know you can't hear me and then reject me.'
By now, Lily's tears had dried, only leaving her with a small case of the sniffles, and she felt strangely liberated now that she made her feelings known though her listener was unconscious. Now that she was done ranting, Lily let herself wonder for the first time what it would've been like if she and her patient had not been interrupted. Were his lips warm? Would the kiss have been brief? She realized that she had been absently stroking J's hand as she held it, and decided that she had to get out of the room.
However, before she left the room, Lily did one last check on J. She made sure the wound stitches were still secure and that his breathing was normal, things she regularly did for any patient. But the soft kiss she put on his head before leaving the room was anything but regular healer behaviour.
Lily sat in the staff break room by the window, sipping on a cup tea. She was again thinking about her almost kiss with J, when Jane walked into the room. The nurse made her own cup of tea and then took a seat next Lily. They chatted about little things for a few minutes, but then Jane fixed the redhead with a sly look.
'You have feelings for that patient Smith, don't you?'
Surprised, Lily sat straight up in her chair. "No, I don't.'
'C'mon Lily, I'm not blind. I saw how you were after that code. You were so relieved that you were almost in tears. You never get that close to your patients, and that's how I know this one is special. You do like him, don't you?'
Lily blushed and looked down to avoid the inquisitive gaze. 'Yes.'
The blonde smiled. 'So what's the problem? You seem a bit gloomy.'
'It'll never work. You know we're not supposed to get involved with patients. It's a conflict of interest.'
'Yeah,' the nurse said, getting up and dumping out her tea cup, 'but he won't be a patient forever.'
The words echoed in Lily's head. He wouldn't be a patient forever.
A/N: Lame ending I know and here come the apologies about how overdue this is. Whatever, it's here, and the next chapter (like I said) will be the last. But, I like this chapter because lots of cool things happened. Man, I'm a loser. And I have a reference to my dorm room in there. When that happens, you know you have no good material.
Love you for feedback.
