The Mother Who Cried Werewolf

Chapter Seven

This Chapter Is In Arrest

Arthur had been annoyed at Percy that whole night. It was Christmas Eve and Percy was ruining it for everyone. He kept complaining about how tired he felt and kept whining about how much he wanted to go home. He'd thought that all the attention that Molly had been giving him over the past few years had turned him into a spoiled little narcissistic twat. And more than anything, he wished that he'd been right. He'd wished all that hyperventilating and sweating that Percy had been doing that night—and maybe that was his clue, the fact that Percy was sweating in the middle of the English cold—was just because he was anxious or wanted to go home.

Not because he was dying.

When they'd come home from the Chinese restaurant, Arthur felt overwhelmed with guilt at how bad the night had been for Percy. That was why he made the tea and brought it up to his room. He thought he'd smooth things over with a few nice words. Percy's 'barely eating' was everyone else's regular day of eating really. It wasn't like he was about to succumb to his death because he'd had one or two eggs with his toast and sausage breakfast instead of four, but this was the story that he told Charlie, nonetheless. He didn't want any of his other children to feel like Arthur was just like Molly, that she would spend more time with Percy than the rest of them.

Never in his life did he envision that his fifteen-year-old child would go into cardiac arrest that same night. That was what the nurses outside had said when he'd taken Percy to St Mungo's. They'd immediately taken him to the resuscitation room and started CPR. As they did this, Arthur's mind was whirling with thoughts.

Percy had been genuinely ill when he'd been begging him to go home. And it wasn't like he had a bout of the sniffles either. There was something there that had been bad enough to kill him.

Arthur watched a massive bloke with a hand that was about the size of Percy's face start to do chest compressions on him. There was a woman on the edge of the bed, giving him oxygen through a bag mask. His bright green shirt—Charlie's actually—had been cut off. Magical pads were kept on him. There were wires attached all over Percy's chest. Blood reports were whizzing around. Another healer had connected him to a machine that whirred to live, calibrating magically to find out the proper oxygenation and breathing pattern. Arthur had seen that once when Percy was dangerously ill as a five-year-old. Just seeing it again had knocked the air out of his lungs.

"Dad," Bill's voice broke Arthur out of his thoughts. Charlie had been standing beside him, as speechless as him.

"Bill?" Arthur turned around to see Bill catch the sight of Percy on the bed. "What are you doing here? What about Ron? Ginny? The twins?" as he asked about them, he could see them forming a line behind Bill. They were all in their pyjamas. Merlin, Ginny was only ten years old. How traumatising would it be for her to see Percy like this?

Ron and the twins suddenly looked very much like their age. They were just little boys. They drank butterbeer and played Quidditch and card games most of the time that they were at home. How dare Bill bring them here?

"Why did you bring them here?" Arthur asked. He was fuming.

"Dad, it's okay," Fred insisted. He looked like he'd just been slapped in the face. "We asked him to."

"Dad, how is he? How's Percy? Charlie said that he…he stopped breathing?" even Bill said the last part in disbelief.

"Percy went into cardiac arrest," Charlie reiterated the words that Arthur had heard just an hour back. "His heart stopped." Natural when you were in your hundreds, not natural when you've just barely taken your O.W.L's.

Fred and George let out audible gasps. Ginny let out a whimper. She looked ten years younger.

"Is Percy going to die?" Bill's question made Arthur shiver.

"I don't know," Arthur didn't know if they could help Percy this time. He didn't know how long Percy had been like that when he'd come in and see him. Did he wait too long to bring him there? Did it take too long for them to bring him over from the triage to the resuscitation room? They'd only been doing this for minutes, but it felt like hours.

"You don't know?" Bill reiterated in shock. "How can you not know, dad? How could you?"

"Percy could die?" Ron asked in a quiet voice.

Arthur felt his heart being crushed. "Yes, Percy, he could…" he tried to regain composure. "He could die."

"He kept saying he always felt breathless," George mentioned. Arthur could remember that. He'd been complaining about that for ages. Every time he walked or ate a little, he complained about being breathless. Arthur just thought he was so sedentary that walking a little was too much for him and he blew things out of proportion. "Something serious was happening to him? When he said that he was? Dad, that was weeks ago."

"I don't know," Arthur honestly answered.

"Oh," George looked grief-stricken. "But if…if it was related to his breathing, does that mean that he really was sick all this time and we've been telling him off for blowing things out of proportion?"

"Dad, he can't die," Fred's hands were shaking. "We made fun of him. If he dies, then… dad, I don't know."

"I know, son," Arthur reached in to hold Fred into his arms. Ginny ran straight to him and held him so tight as she cried. This was so unfair. When you were ten, all you should care about was whether or not you were allowed to have an extra scoop of ice cream after your dinner and what it would be like when you went to Hogwarts. "All we can do is hope that he pulls through."

"If he gets better, I'll never say a bad thing about him again," Ron promised.

"He's going to get better," Charlie said firmly. Bill squeezed Charlie's hand. "This is Percy we're talking about. He was really ill before once. He's tough. He'll make it out."

"How do you know?" Ginny asked hotly.

During the CPR, they'd shocked him with something and then had stopped doing their compressions and bag-mask ventilation. He didn't know if that meant that he was back to breathing or if they decided to call it quits and that he was a lost cause. The healers were gesturing toward each other. They put a blanket on top of him, as one of them was listening to his chest. Arthur wouldn't get his hopes up, but it looked like Percy was alive. Please, he thought.

Arthur was filled with fear and dread as a young woman walked out. She couldn't be any older than Bill.

"Mr Weasley, your son went into…"

"A cardiac arrest," Arthur cut her off. Because he had to say it loud himself.

"Yes," she confirmed. "He went into a specific rhythm we call ventricular fibrillation. This is an abnormal heart rhythm. We usually see it in people that have heart disease."

"Percy doesn't have that," Ron said very sternly. He was right.

She looked at Arthur as if waiting for him to tell him off, but Arthur remained blank. "What happened today?"

"He said he's been breathless the past few weeks," Arthur winced when he'd said weeks. It made him sound like he didn't care and let his child suffer for weeks. And he supposed that he did. "He's also complained about his legs being heavy. I don't know how it's possible but he's a little bottom-heavy compared to…" he gestured to Percy's top.

"I see," she didn't look like she appreciated Arthur's gesture. "How has his sleeping been?"

"He says he can't sleep on the bed. He feels breathless," Charlie answered that. "He's been forcing himself to sleep on his wheelchair. It's not a comfortable place to fall asleep so I don't think he's been sleeping much lately."

"Does he wake up in the middle of the night, saying that he's breathless?"

Arthur had heard him say that before. That he didn't feel comfortable sleeping on his bed anymore. It didn't make much sense to him why Percy would feel breathless lying flat on the bed.

"If he did, he hasn't told us," Arthur admitted. He bet that if Percy did feel like that, he felt ashamed of telling them. He wished he'd listened to his gut telling him that this was all Molly's doing. And if Percy himself thought he was sick, he probably was sick and not at all feigning his illnesses like everyone else thought. "My son is almost bedridden. He can be a little neurotic at times, so I just thought that…that he was a little anxious or that he's just not used to walking around the house anymore. Because he has been walking more—around the house that is."

"Your son is in heart failure," the healer was giving Arthur a look like he was the dumbest moron on the planet.

Arthur was taken back. "Heart failure?" Percy? "How did he…?"

"The heart healer had a look at him just a few minutes back. He said that it looks like he had a hole in his heart that was untreated for a very long time," she said. Arthur was taken back. He'd never heard of this hole in Percy's heart. "It's harmless when he's young, but over time, it can lead to some serious complications if left untreated."

"I don't understand," Arthur didn't just 'not understand.' He was furious. "My wife takes him to hospitals all the time. How come nobody's ever told her about this…this problem?"

"Yes, your wife," the healer looked like she was well-acquainted with Molly. "She brings him in often with vague complaints and what look like inflicted injuries. She looks like she shops for healers. I've seen a few reports on our database that our healers got the impression that your wife is making your son sick on purpose."

Arthur could practically feel his children's eyes on him. You were right, he could feel them telling him. He didn't want to be right. Who wanted to be right about something like this?

"Yes. I had my suspicions," Arthur said. "I'm…I'm divorcing her."

"I think when she's confronted with this idea, she goes and looks for another healer so…well, if you're not always following with the same healer, it's hard to actually follow up a case properly," she explained. Arthur couldn't believe it. All this time, he'd been investigated by all these different healers and Percy had a genuine medical condition that was missed because Molly was too busy trying to create problems in him that he didn't have. "Sometimes, you need a good relationship with a healer for a long time for them to think about these things. Because in the early stages, a hole in the heart like Percy had could come without any complaints at all. Maybe they'd have noticed something else about him if he was following with one person regularly for a long time."

"I see," Arthur suddenly didn't care anymore.

He found it strange to hear his suspicions come out of another person's throat. And it was true. Everyone knew that Molly had been going to a healer for one or two visits and then hopping to another one.

"Is…is my son going to be okay?" Arthur suddenly asked. That was all he really cared about.

"Your son is in a critical condition," she stiffly said. Well, that was lovely. Exactly what you wanted to hear. About your son being in a critical condition. Just the thought of it was enough to make Arthur wish he was dead. "He had no oxygen to his brain for five minutes. He is in heart failure. He needs to be admitted into intensive care and needs proper treatment. Even if he makes it out of this, he may not be the same again, Mr Weasley."

Then another bombshell. "We have to get Child Protective Services involved, love."

"Oh," Arthur's heart dropped in his chest. "I…I understand."

"Dad, you didn't do anything wrong!" Ron yelled.

"I know, love, but this is the right thing that they're doing," Arthur insisted. But he felt very much in the wrong. How come he didn't stop this sooner? How come he didn't know? How come he just blindly accepted the fact that Percy couldn't get out of bed, couldn't go out of school and couldn't eat anymore? How could he make that right?

Too far gone. Arthur thought about the weeks that Percy had been panting as he was walking. When Fred and George mentioned his disproportionate body, Percy waived it off and said his body had looked like that for months.

Arthur's voice was barely a whisper when he asked. "Can…can I see him?"

They let him through to the resuscitation room. Percy was still unconscious—probably sedated. His tracheostomy was connected to a ventilator. He had more lines coming out of him than he'd ever remembered. There was one massive one in his neck that looked horrifying. What did they want that for?

"Percy?" Ginny shook his arm. It was like trying to move a corpse. He was completely listless.

He wondered how badly Percy must've been suffering in the past few weeks. He'd been placed in a hospital gown, and his legs looked horrific. They looked like they were hard and swollen and painful. Compared to his arms, it looked like they belonged to a completely different person.

In another part of Arthur's brain, he was inventing a new night, where everything had gone smoothly. Where he'd have brought Percy that mug of tea, he wouldn't drunken it and then gone to sleep and everything was fine. They'd have rebuilt that long-lost relationship. They'd have been a family again.

But now, he wasn't so sure about any of those things anymore.

Arthur was extremely burned out. Fortunately, he had Charlie to help him look after everyone whilst he was at work. Bill had a job in Gringott's and was just as exhausted as Arthur was by the time that he'd come home.

Arthur had taken to eating horrifically out-of-date cheap toasties from hospital vendors and drinking watered down coffee on his lunch breaks. He'd inhale them faster each time and try to spend as much time as possible with Percy during his lunch break. Arthur didn't know much about Percy other than he was extremely academically gifted, so he tried to bring something to read to him when he was in intensive care. Advanced Potion-Making. Defensive Magical Theory. Advanced Rune Translation. A Guide to Advanced Transfiguration. Prefects Who Gained Power. And for the days, he was too tired to read him anything, he read him The Adventures of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle.

This was his favourite and least favourite time of the day. This was the time of the day when he could think to himself, but the time when he also saw the devastating outcome of his life, his marriage, his child.

When he'd come home that evening, his whole family would be ready and dressed to make their second round to the hospital. They would stay there for hours, with Arthur watching Percy's blood pressure fluctuate and his breathing become automated by a magical machine that was pumping air into him. Every now and then, they would take in bits of information about his progress like starved vultures. It was all the same.

Trachoestomised. SIM-V. CPAP. T-piece. On FiO2 of 80-70-60-40… sedated with…previously on inotropic potions, not on inotropic potions… PEG tube intact…dietician came by and suggested feeds of… every four hourly…

Child Protection had gotten ahold of him. They'd said that as long as Molly was out of the picture, it was decided that they were going to closely monitor the family at the hospital and at home—if Percy was going home. Arthur didn't care if they wanted to monitor him for the rest of eternity as long as he got to bring Percy back home.

A few days into his stay, the healers had started to wean him off his sedation. The less sedation that he had, the more nervous Arthur felt. Every few minutes off the sedation, Percy would make a strangled, painful sound. The sounds echoed into his mind at night. They were painful? Sad? Scared? Would he remember them? They suctioned him off his secretions and fed him loads of potions through the ten-thousand lines that were taped to his body.

Molly had been relentless since she found out that Percy was in the hospital. She'd been trying to send him owls, insisting that she had a right to see her child and Arthur was enthralled just thinking about the content of those letters. Who did this woman think she was? She nearly killed his son after giving him such a debilitating life and now, she wanted to come around like everything was fine? Arthur had gone to the Wizengamot after he'd received the first owl and despite him hating paperwork, filled in large restraining orders packed up by hospital staff testimonies and CPS involvement.

As they reduced the sedation, Arthur could see Percy blinking and snoring, his body a little laxer.

Just under a week after they'd put him on the ventilator, they took Percy off the sedation and removed the magical machine from pumping air into him. He had been there when they'd done it in the morning and had practically left Perkins alone to attend it. The relief that he had that Percy was awake and conscious was short-lived. Somehow, it was even worse to see Percy awake. His secretions were so thick from his tracheostomy that there were sounds coming out of his chest that made Arthur feel like he was constantly choking. Even when he tried to speak, you couldn't hear a single word because he was so mute. It was like someone had taken off his speech valve, even when it was still intact.

Percy breathed and laboured heavily, spending most of his time changing positions so that he could try to sleep.

He hadn't returned to work that day and spent the rest of the day staring at Percy even when he did eventually fall asleep. When the nurse came to take blood from him, Arthur looked at her with a pleading eye. They were only going to draw it from one of the lines in his neck, but Arthur still thought it unnecessary for the time being.

As she left, he kept mulling over the events of the last few weeks. Discovering that Percy was being mercilessly abused by Molly, the fights between Percy and the rest of the siblings, his neglected sons and daughter that barely had their mother's attention, the ones that looked at him with warm eyes and gave him bright beams and words of gratitude when he did so little as ask them how they were. He couldn't believe that Percy had been shamelessly abused under his roof by his own mother and Arthur had done nothing to stop it.

The family came together again that very same night. Bill, Charlie, Fred, George, Ron and Ginny had come in at around six. Arthur was still in his work robes, and probably smelled of sweat and body odour but he didn't care. He still hadn't eaten anything that day, not that he'd wanted to. Not that he felt hungry because of the knots in his stomach. Percy was awake-asleep-awake-asleep, but not a single word had come out of his mouth since he'd been awake.

At the time that they'd come in, Percy was still asleep, passed out, but he was no longer hooked to mechanical devices or oxygen cylinders. He was the same as he always was, in theory at least.