Author's note: Enjoy!

Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns the canon, world, and characters portrayed below and you can tell I'm not J.K. Rowling because #transrights

Hogwarts: Assignment #1, Egyptology Task #5 Write about an illicit affair

Content Warnings: Hospital setting; serious injury; near-death experience


Every Stitch in You is Mine

It wasn't her name, the sound that came out of his mouth, but it was enough for Poppy to turn around and for her heart to leap out of her throat when she realised that Alastor was awake.

"Shh," she said. "Shh, shh, shh. Yes, it's me."

"It's… you," he said.

"It's me," she promised. He believed her, and his head sunk into his pillow every so slightly. Unfortunately, Poppy couldn't let him rest quite yet. It took every ounce of composure and professionalism in her not to collapse with a week's worth of exhaustion as well.

She cast her own feelings aside and cast a quick lumos to shine a light in his… well, his remaining eye, to make sure that his pupil would follow the light and was responding to stimulation properly. They hadn't been able to save his left eye, since the curse had sunk in far too deep by the time he had been found and brought to St. Mungo's, but the way his right eye tracked her light was encouraging. They would have to see exactly how much was left of his vision later, when he had been lucid for more than a moment, and see how much they could help build up again.

She took his pulse, listened to his heart, checked the reflexes of his knee, and asked him to tell her his name.

"Alastor Moody," he croaked.

"Good," she said.

"You're Poppy," he added.

"Save your breath," she said as she scribbled in his chart. "I didn't ask you that."

"I want you to know I know," he said. It was extraordinarily sweet of him but the effort did cost him. He closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath that made panic rise up in her chest. "How long..?" He didn't finish the question, but they had been here enough times, and she knew the man well enough, to finish it for him.

"A week," she said–trying to keep her voice as neutral as she could.

"Sorry… 'bout that."

"No need," she said as she scribbled on. She didn't need to take such detailed notes–not since she was now the Aurors' Head Healer and didn't have anybody to report to other than herself and the Head Auror who, truth be told, may as well be illiterate. But she knew her hands wouldn't shake if she was holding a quill and that her voice wouldn't break if she was working on something.

"And… and Ro… Rosemeyer?" Alastor croaked.

Poppy took a deep breath. She knew he would ask. He always asked. They had, after all, been here before.

She supposed she couldn't blame him–she always asked about her patients when she came into work, after all. She always wanted to know that her stitches or antidotes had held, that she had done well. But she was fraying at the seams–had been, for the last week, and didn't have her usual patience or the grace to pretend she did.

"The spell you cast before losing consciousness held," she told him. "He's in Azkaban right now, awaiting trial for a whole litany of other things he confessed to."

She remembered how scared the dark wizard had been when they'd brought him to her, so she could patch up a gash in his leg before sending him off. She had been as gentle with him as she would have been with any other patient, but it had killed her a little bit. He had looked so scared and she wanted to show him, tell him, exactly how afraid she was too. But nobody could know that, so she didn't.

Alastor sunk into his pillows a tad more, content.

"I lost the eye, didn't I?" he asked her.

He turned his head so that his remaining eye, such a bright hazel that it was almost amber, turned to her. Even that one had a scratch next to it–so close to the corner that he was lucky it wasn't hurt.

"I'm sorry," she said, her voice almost cracking. She had checked under the eyepatch every day, trying to find new ways to save his eye, but… well, some things couldn't be saved. She should know that as a Healer, but Alastor made her forget sometimes.

"No need," he said, repeating her word. "If you couldn't… nobody could save it."

She knew that he genuinely believed that, because he always saw the best in her, but she couldn't be quite as sure. That haunted her more than the first look she'd gotten of him after they'd dragged him in–closer to dead than all the other times she'd seen him almost dead, ribs sunken, bones cracked, face beaten in…

"I hope they let me work without it," he mumbled.

Poppy's quill froze on the chart, in the middle of a phrase. Patient's cognitive functions almost miraculously intact and seems to–

"What?" she asked meekly.

"A one-eyed Auror…" he mused, the corner of his lips tugging upwards at his own joke. "That would be something."

"You… you want to go back to work," Poppy repeated.

"Got to," Alastor mumbled.

"You… after what he did to you, you want to go back?" Poppy repeated. She wanted to scratch out what she'd just written on the man's chart since he was oh so clearly out of his Merlin-given mind.

"It'll… take more than that to scare me off," he said. The corner of his lip tugged up again, in that half-smile which was the most anyone got from him (something that she knew best), but she barely noticed because she slammed the clipboard and his chart down at the table at the foot of his bed.

"What about me?" Poppy asked, harsher than she wanted. "What about how badly that scared me?"

Alastor seemed taken away by that, but Poppy had been fraying for too long now to keep it together. There was nothing left in her strong enough to do that, and that–the idea that she had lost her fight–made her angry.

"You came in," she said, voice shaking as she recited his case as if she was going over it with the Head Auror, "with a broken femur, a shattered pelvic bone, three broken ribs, a complex cranial injury, three broken fingers, and a missing eye, Alastor. You were so covered in blood that it took days for me to scrub you clean. You were hurt so badly that I have been sleeping at the hospital because if I was more than thirty feet from you when something went wrong, you wouldn't have made it. I poured so many potions and serums into you that I had to get special permission from the Head Healer and the National Association of Potion Registration and Legalisation to give them all to you at once–permission which I only got because you were in such bad shape that the risk that you would die one way or another made you fit–fit, Alastor–for human experimentation."

She could feel her hands shaking as she gripped the table.

"And if you had died," she said. She let the words hang for a moment because she couldn't bear to add more to it. "And if you had died, nobody in the world would know that I was grieving the love of my life. Nobody."

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

She thought that she had known what she was getting into, when she took the position with the Auror Office. They needed a Healer on call for their staff, she needed to get away from her terrible, woman-hating, pig of a supervisor. It had seemed like a stroke of good luck to get away while landing such a prestigious position.

But then the Aurors had started coming in, bloody and bruised from the fight against Grindelwald–which they were fighting overseas and at home, amongst his recruits in the country. And Alastor had come in. Brave Alastor, bold Alastor–who was the quickest and best one of all, but who was so bold and brave that he got hurt more than the rest of them to make the saves and catch the wizards that the rest of them never would. And he was so bold and brave that he got hurt again, and again, and again. So he came to her again, and again, and again.

"I'm going to start thinking you were doing this on purpose," she had teased him one day–as she brought him a pain-controlling potion that he insisted he didn't need, although she was about to pop his shoulder back into its socket.

"Could you blame me?" he asked, looking at her–really looking at her. Aurors were charming, but Alastor wasn't. He was brave, though, brave enough to tell the Healer who was certainly off-limits that he fancied her.

And Poppy liked bravery. What could she say?

Could you blame her?

It had only grown from there. One day, when he'd been withdrawing from a particularly terrible Imperius curse that had been cast on him, his hand had closed around her arm as he'd shaken and sweated out the curse in his hospital bed. She had stayed with him all night. Another time, she had spent a week helping him learn to walk again after a dark wizard hexed the bones out from both of his legs. That had been the first time they had walked arm in arm. Another time, she had been checking his heartbeat one last time before discharging him from the hospital wing. When she'd pulled back from his chest, he had pulled her to his lips.

Oh, it was wrong. It was the only rule in the Auror's handbook that Alastor had ever broken, and it was the most unprofessional and frankly scandalous thing that Poppy had ever done. But it was theirs, in the nooks and cracks where they had built it. There was a drawer in her bedroom that was only his, a cup in his sparse kitchen cupboards that was hers. His letters were tucked under pillows, they were all over each other's sheets, and her hair ribbon was sewn into his leather work cloak. It was all theirs.

But if Alastor died, nobody in the world but Poppy would know about any of it.

She had spent a week shouldering that loneliness and wondering how much worse it would be if her balms and spells weren't strong enough to keep him from slipping away this time.

"I'm sorry I scared you," he said–his breath coming back to him and his speaking easier. "I didn't die."

"Because I'm good at what I do," Poppy said, level-headed once more.

"You certainly are," he said.

"I'm not asking to be flattered."

"You don't need to ask."

"Alastor, every scar you have was once a cut I mended," she said. "Almost every stitch in your body is mine. I am good at what I do–I certainly am. But one day, I won't be able to add more. And I can't… I can't keep wondering when that time will be. I can't, Alastor. It is making me a weaker woman, a more fearful woman, and a worse Healer."

He was quiet for a second.

"You want me to stop," he said.

"You have been in the department for ten years," she said. "You are a decorated Auror. You are a veteran of the War with Grindelwald. You have given more than anyone could possibly ask…"

"Nobody asked," Alastor said. "I volunteered. I chose this."

"Then choose me, now," Poppy said. She hated herself as soon as she said it–as soon as she said the words. It is making me a weaker woman. "Damn it, Alastor…"

"Are you asking me to stop?" he asked.

"I…" it hit her now, how sleep-deprived and dehydrated and hungry and exhausted she was, and how sick he still was even if she'd managed to wrestle him back to lucidity. She shouldn't be doing this now. They shouldn't be doing this now.

"Are you asking me to stop?" he repeated.

Her shoulders dropped and she took a deep breath. "I don't want to. But…"

"You are," he said. "You are asking me to stop."

She stopped and chewed on her lip. She was. What use was there to denying it? She was.

"You could stop too," he said.

"So you could go on and I could be your widow?" Poppy asked. "I think not."

"I can't stop. Something is coming," he said.

"There always is," she said. "There's always something else–but never someone else who can handle it, is there?"

"Dumbledore gave me a tip," he said. "A wizard to watch out for–still young, only a few years out of Hogwarts, but going dark…"

"Dumbledore gave me a job offer," she said quietly.

Alastor frowned.

"The Hogwarts Infirmary," Poppy said. "Their Healer's retiring, they need a new one–quickly. There's a… a student, starting this September, who will require special care and discretion. He offered me the position."

She didn't want to tell Alastor more than that; the werewolf boy deserved as much discretion as any other patient–even if he wasn't hers yet. The fact that she thought of it that way, that she thought that he wasn't hers"yet," made her stomach clench. She had learned, while she was working on a patient, to let her mind jump as quickly as it could from injury to injury and treatment to treatment–that trusting her instincts and the decisions she made by gut, before thinking them through, would give her patients the best chance. Maybe it was time to give herself the best chances she could. Maybe it was time to take care of herself.

"If you don't leave the Auror Department, I will," she said.

"Poppy…"

"This is how we met, but this is not how I am going to lose you," she said. "I am not going to sneak out of your bed every morning so I can come to work and wait until I watch you die, and grieve you all by myself."

Alastor looked at her.

"I can't think of a single good relationship," he said–although the word sounded unfamiliar and strange in his mouth, especially since he paused there to catch his breath, "made up of ultimatums."

"I know," Poppy said sadly. She knew and she'd said it anyway. She let that sink into her bones, into Alastor, who sunk into bed once more.

"The students deserve you," Alastor said finally.

Poppy nodded and went back to scribbling in his chart.


WC: 2420