Chapter 3: True Things
Private Room Six. Patient: D. L. Malfoy. Sunday, 23:40. Written by H. J. Granger at the bedside. Reflection: absent. Shadow: absent. Temperature: hands and forearms cold, chest cooling. Voice: patient has not spoken since about three this afternoon. Next of kin: does not recall patient. Healer Smethwyck consulted. Recommendation: stay with him.
I got Narcissa to a chair in the corridor. I don't remember what I said to her. Something kind and meaningless about the Fourth Floor being confusing, which it is. She thanked me with perfect manners and asked if I knew where the tearoom was, and looked down at the ink on her hand with a small puzzled frown, and licked her thumb and rubbed at it, absently, until the D was gone.
Then I went into Room Six and shut the door.
He was sitting up against the pillows with his tea untouched on the bedside table and his hands folded on the blanket, the way he'd been sitting on my first day. He looked at me when I came in. He opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
He tried again. I watched his throat work. I watched him realise, and I watched him decide, in the space of a breath, not to let me see that he was frightened, and I have never in my life seen anyone do anything braver.
"It's all right," I said, which was a lie. "Don't try. Smethwyck said the voice goes in a day. Maybe less." I sat down on the edge of the bed instead of the chair. I'd never done that before. It wasn't allowed. "It's all right," I said again, uselessly.
He looked at me. Then he reached over, very slowly, and picked up the pen from the clipboard on the bedside table, and wrote on the back of his own chart in that small precise hand.
She didn't know me.
"I know."
She wrote it on her hand. Every week. So she'd remember.
"I know."
He looked at the words for a while. Then he wrote: How long?
I didn't lie to him. I'd never lied to him; it was the thing I had going for me. "Smethwyck thinks the last stage has started early. Because of your mother. Being forgotten by someone who loves you accelerates it. It's in Paracelsus, the footnote I came in about. He thinks tonight. Possibly tomorrow."
He nodded once, as though I'd told him it might rain.
Then he wrote, under it, slower: Go home, Granger. You don't have to watch this.
I took the pen out of his cold fingers and put it down on the bedside table, very deliberately, the way I had put my tea down the night I said his name.
"Draco," I said. "I'm not going anywhere."
The counter-charm in Paracelsus is not really a spell, Smethwyck had said, and he was right. There is no incantation. There is no wand movement. There is just a person, sitting next to another person, saying true things until one of them holds.
I had been doing it wrong for a month. I understood that by about one in the morning, sitting on the edge of his bed in the dark with the lamps turned down and his cold hand in both of mine. I had been saying true things about him. Facts. New facts, better facts, facts I'd gathered so carefully over twenty-eight evenings, but still facts, still a file. Smethwyck had told me on the first day: the curse can tell the difference.
The difference wasn't knowing him. It was what I knew him with.
So at one in the morning I stopped reciting, and started telling the truth.
"You returned four hundred and six objects," I said, "and I think about the teapot every time I make tea. That's true. That's been true for three weeks. I bought a blue and white one in a shop in Diagon Alley and I've never told anyone why."
His fingers twitched in mine.
"You play the piano on Thursdays when nobody's home, and I've started thinking about Thursdays. About what you're playing. I walked past a music shop on Charing Cross Road last week and stood outside it for ten minutes trying to guess what you'd like, and then I felt so ridiculous I bought biscuits instead."
In the mirror over the washbasin, something pale moved.
I didn't look at it. I looked at him.
"You lie about the Hippogriff scar," I said. "You let me have the last word. You noticed about the biscuits. You can always guess the murderer and you hate it. You've never cast a Patronus because you're afraid of what it'll be, and I think it'll be something small and ordinary and you'll be furious about it, and I'd give anything to see your face." My voice cracked. I let it. "You chose me because I paid attention to you out of loathing. You wrote that on the back of your intake form and then you wrote, Don't tell her. Well, I read it, Draco. On my first night. I read it, and I've read it every night since, and you were wrong."
His eyes were wet. He was holding very still.
"It stopped being loathing a long time ago," I said. "Somewhere in the last month, or before that, I don't even know when. I've never been able to forget anything about you, it's the most aggravating thing that's ever happened to me, and I would notice. Do you understand? If you were gone, I would notice every single day. I would walk past Room Six and know it was wrong. I'd look at Thursdays and know. I would never, ever stop noticing you."
His hand, in both of mine, was warm.
I didn't notice it happen. That was the strangest thing. One moment I was holding cold fingers and the next they were simply warm, ordinary, human, and his grip had tightened, and the lamplight was falling across the white sheet and leaving behind it, sharp and dark and complete, the shadow of a man.
I looked up at the mirror.
He was there. All of him. White-blond and hollow-eyed and furious about the pyjamas, sitting up in the bed in Room Six, holding the hand of a Healer in lime-green robes who was crying in a manner that was not remotely professional. His reflection looked exactly as stunned as he did.
"Granger," said Draco Malfoy.
His voice was hoarse and cracked and entirely his own. I made a sound I'm not proud of.
"That," he said, very carefully, as though testing each word for weight, "was the most humiliating forty minutes of my adult life."
I laughed so hard I nearly fell off the bed. He caught me. Of course he did. His hands were warm on my arms, and he was laughing too, shakily, his forehead dropping against mine. We stayed like that for a long time, breathing, and the lamp burned, and the mirror held us both.
"You read the intake form," he said eventually.
"On the first night."
"I told them not to tell you."
"Nobody told me. Nobody turns the intake form over. I turned it over." I pulled back far enough to look at him. "I pay attention."
"Unbearable," he said softly. His thumb moved along my jaw, wiping something away. His eyes went to my mouth, and stayed there, and came back up to mine, asking. "Hermione."
It was the first time he'd ever said it. I felt it all the way down.
"I can't," I said, and it nearly killed me. "You're my patient. There are rules, Draco. There are actual written rules, I've read them, I could recite them, I'd lose my licence before I'd even…"
"Then discharge me."
I stared at him.
"I'm cured," said Draco. "Aren't I? You cured me. I'd like to be discharged." He reached past me to the bedside table, picked up the chart and the pen, and held them out. "Healer Granger. Please."
I took the clipboard. My hands were shaking. I turned to the last page and wrote, in the space at the bottom, Curse resolved. Reflection, shadow, temperature and voice fully restored. Patient discharged at 01:52 on the authority of the Healer of record. And I signed it, H. J. Granger, and dated it, and set the clipboard face down on the blanket, and turned back to him.
"You're discharged," I said.
"Thank God," said Draco, and kissed me.
It was a very gentle kiss, at first. Careful. As though either of us might disappear. And then he made a small rough sound and his hand slid into my hair and I stopped being careful about anything at all. His mouth was warm and he tasted of cold tea and ginger biscuits, and I held on to the front of his ridiculous lime-green pyjamas with both fists and kissed him back, in the bed in Room Six, at two in the morning, with the door shut and the whole Fourth Floor asleep. I was absolutely certain that this was the single least professional thing I would ever do, and I didn't care.
At nine o'clock on Monday morning, there was a knock on the door of Room Six.
Narcissa Malfoy stood in the doorway with an armful of hothouse lilies. There was no ink on her hand. She looked at her son, sitting up in bed with his shadow on the sheets and his reflection in the glass, and her face crumpled for a moment before she pulled it back into order.
"Draco," she said. "Darling. I had the strangest dream." Then she looked at me, sitting in the chair by the bed in yesterday's lime-green robes with my hair a disaster and my hand, rather obviously, in his. "Healer Granger," she said, after a pause. "How lovely. I don't suppose you'd like to come for dinner on Thursday?"
Draco made a strangled noise.
"I'd love to," I said. "I hear there's a piano."