WHO: Draco and Susan WHAT: Hospital visit WHEN: Saturday, Dec 19; mid-afternoon WHERE: St. Mungo's Hospital RATING|STATUS: PG? | Completed
Draco was sleeping when Susan showed up to visit for the second time that week. She hovered in the doorway, hesitant about staying and waking him. He probably needed the rest, but something told her he’d be disappointed if he found out she was there and left without saying anything. At least, that’s how she would feel if their roles were reversed. And she needed to be certain it was him who had sent her the ballet tickets. It was the thing that prompted her to visit again. A thank you of sorts. Reassurance that he was healing. A moment with the only person who didn’t give her a headache or a crushing sense of anxiety.
Susan took a sip from the cup of coffee she’d bought along the way — thank Merlin that Costa Coffee already existed by 1980 and she could still treat herself to some of the normalcy she was slowly becoming homesick for. She set the coffee down on Draco’s bedside table and shrugged off her jacket. “Malfoy,” she murmured quietly, and when he didn’t stir, she sat down on the bed next to him and leaned in closer to his head. “Draco Malfoy,” she tried again in a soft sing-song.
Draco’s eyelids fluttered open, then he jolted up abruptly, hand flailing for the wand at his bedside table… only he wasn’t home, and the table here was to his left, not his right. He looked up, eyes wide with the uncertain panic and bewilderment of being woken unexpectedly. Susan. It was just Susan. The fight drained out of him just as sudden as its onset. The sharp movement left his chest and abdomen aching and he gingerly readjusted his position, bringing his arm back in towards his side. His cheek was creased from his hospital-grade pillow and his hair was uncommonly messy. He hadn’t been able to update the cosmetic charms he’d been using in the time since he’d been admitted, and the color had faded a shade closer to blond.
“Bones.” He greeted her, his voice still raspy from sleep. “What, did you want to give me a heart attack too?”
Susan smiled and let out a small chuckle. “I didn’t mean to. What sedatives do they have you on?” She elbowed him lightly as she swung her legs up onto the bed and made herself comfortable with her back against the pillows. A tiny part of her felt bad; he was clearly sleeping deeply until she’d woken him, and he looked — dare she think it — kind of cute, with his bed-head and wide-eyed confusion. She had to cross her arms across her stomach to keep herself from reaching out and touching his hair.
“You look better. There’s more color in your face today,” she noted. She had no idea what the rest of his injuries looked like. She imagined there was an ample amount of bruising. Her own face was still bruised, even though the swelling had gone down. She was awful about remembering to apply the bruise paste the mediwitch had given her, so the skin around her eye and cheekbone had turned from a dark purple to a greenish-blue.
She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Your hair is turning colors, though.”
Draco’s mind pushed through the hazy remnants of drugged sleep, soft edges slowly beginning to refocus. There was something intimate about the casual way she squeezed in to recline on the small hospital bed next to him, side by side. He shifted to try and give her some room, but it wasn’t much, and when he relaxed back into the pillows, having carefully propped himself upright to face Susan eye to eye, her arm still pressed firmly into his.
“I’ve washed.” He said, a dry joke. “But I do feel better.” And he did. The removal of his appendix and the slow but steady repair of his internal organs had taken the edge off from the pain, the unbearable stabbing sensation and nausea reduced to a medium-grade muscle ache that he’d almost grown accustomed to. Breathing was easier. Eating was unappealing, but tolerable. It was a start, at least.
At the mention of his hair, Draco lifted one hand up high enough in an attempt to brush through it, vanity outweighing the discomfort. “Is it? They don’t have a lot of mirrors around here.” The charm could probably use a touch up, when he was feeling up to it. Draco’s eyes caught on her bruise - lighter than it had been previously but still noticeable, a mottled stain against her skin. At this distance, he could see where the purplish blue turned to green, the yellowing edges near her cheek and above her eyelid. In contrast, her eyes appeared to be an almost ethereally pale green. “Speaking of turning colors, how’s the eye?”
Instinctively, Susan’s hand went to her face. She pressed her fingers lightly into the hollow just beneath her eye. “It doesn’t hurt when I blink anymore. It looked worse than it really was.” She reached for her coffee. “I could fix that for you. The glamour charm. If you want.”
She studied him over the rim of the cup. Sitting shoulder to shoulder, she didn’t have to look up to make eye contact, and they were close enough for Susan to see his natural gray bleeding out into his faux hazel eyes. She decided she didn’t like the dark hair on him, though she couldn’t really place the reason why. She had decided she didn’t like dark hair on herself either, and after she quit working at the Ministry, she’d lazily given up on glamour charms for the most part.
He hesitated briefly, then gave her a slight nod. The fact was, she’d had plenty of opportunities over the past few months to catch him unarmed. And the same went for him. What was one more? Whatever they were - were they friends? - they seemed to have landed on some sort of wary, unspoken truce. “People have always said I looked like my father. I haven’t run into him yet, but…” Draco trailed off. “It’s just easier.” He concluded, a little stiffly. He’d been doing his best to avoid thinking about them here - his parents, who would never know if he wound up dying in one of these battles. The guilt because for the briefest of moments - half-conscious, in pain, and unbelievably tired - he’d wished that he had. It had passed. It always did. If there was one thing the Malfoy family had always been good at, it was surviving. Adapting. Whatever it took.
The dark, roasted scent of coffee hit him and he eyed her cup wistfully. “I miss coffee.”
“Here,” Susan handed him her coffee after another quick sip. She pulled her wand from her pocket and pointed it at Draco’s hair, a light swish and flick motion, until his hair darkened to a deep espresso shade. She leaned back to inspect her work, eyes narrowing a bit as she wondered if she’d gone just a little too dark. It would fade out again in several days, so it was probably fine.
“You do,” she agreed to his comment about his father. “But I see a lot of your mum too.” Genetics were strange that way. She was a dead ringer for her mother, and yet her brother, who could easily pass as her twin, had the darker hair and coloring of the Bones family and often got comments about looking like their dad. There was something sad about the way Draco talked about his parents, and lately, she was feeling a similar sadness of missing her mother and brother. So she too tried to avoid thinking about it. She changed the subject. “Someone sent me a thoughtful gift.”
Draco accepted the coffee, clutching it in both hands. “The nurse confiscated my last cup. She’s a nightmare.” He explained, and surreptitiously glanced toward the door before taking a sip. He sat quietly, enjoying the comforting warmth from the coffee cup as Susan adjusted the charms on his hair. When she mentioned the gift, he didn’t look up. “Oh?” He asked blandly, the slightest suggestion of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
Susan twirled her wand between her fingers with a look of contemplation on her face. Another flick of the wrist, and Draco’s hair took on a neatly-combed appearance. Slicked-back with the slightest side part, not the harsh, douchey way he used to style it way back when they were eleven. Satisfied with her work, she smiled and tucked her wand away.
“Is that the one who just tried to stop me visiting? I got very short with her. Told her I was your girlfriend so she’d let me see you,” she said with a snicker. She rolled her eyes when he opted to play coy about the tickets. “Ballet tickets. Looks like I’ll be continuing my annual tradition of seeing the Nutcracker after all.” She held her hand out for another sip of coffee.
He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, I’ll bet she loved that. It’s tyranny, truly.” Still, he looked pleased - smug, even - as he passed the cup back without complaint.
“Hm.” He mused dramatically, considering this information… and pointedly ignoring Susan’s eye rolling. “That is a thoughtful gift.” It hadn’t been terribly difficult to arrange, even laid up in the hospital as he was. Easier than finding the words to thank her for visiting or to apologize for their last conversation over the journals. But if he was being honest with himself - something he hardly made a practice of doing - he’d planned on getting her the tickets from the moment he’d seen her drawing. “Someone must have wanted you to have something nice for Christmas.”
He patted his hair cautiously, double checking for any sort of prank or problem. It felt like his hair, at any rate. “So. Do I pass inspection, then?”
“You’re fine. I did the best I could, given what I had to work with,” she replied snarkily, hiding her grin behind the cup. And almost like instant karma, she took too big of a gulp too quickly, scalding her tongue and throat on the way down. She cringed slightly. “The question becomes...is that someone getting something nice for Christmas too?”
Susan supposed the nice thing to do would be to ask if he wanted to be her date. She assumed he’d be getting out of Mungo’s soon, perhaps next week if not within the next several days. The Nutcracker still had plenty of showings. But she was hoping to take Raleigh. Never had she imagined when they traveled back that she would meet her uncle face to face, let alone grow close enough to him to take her little (but actually older) cousin to the ballet. She wasn’t sure Cate would be comfortable with the idea, though, and so Susan wasn’t getting her hopes up.
Draco watched Susan take a large gulp of the hot coffee and wince, smirking in response. He didn’t have any expectations of an invite - on the contrary, if he’d planned on going, he would have sent her a single ticket. Maybe she’d take Ginny Weasley or one of her other DA friends. Or family - although Draco wasn’t entirely sure that she’d made contact with them yet. He’d taken note of a couple of journal comments here and there, but asking her about them felt taboo. A conversation-breaker. Something that would remind her that they were here for opposing reasons, and that his reasons would lead indirectly and rather unfortunately to the deaths of those same relatives.
It wasn’t that any of this felt normal. Nothing about Bones was normal - whether she was inviting him to break into a stranger’s home, telling him jokes about nuclear accidents, or stretched out next to him on a hospital bed, both of them battered and bruised. But he felt more normal when she was around. Lighter. Closer to himself. It was beyond idiotic and he knew that whatever this was would implode eventually, a line would be drawn and they would end up on opposite sides of it. Why had he sent her those tickets? Why had she come here to see him? Because he’d wanted to. Maybe she’d wanted to, as well.
“The gift of giving is nice enough.” He volleyed back. “Or so I’ve heard.”
A wide smile lit up Susan’s face. “I didn’t know that Slytherins were even capable of generosity,” she joked, though there was a hint of truth to her words. Draco Malfoy wasn’t exactly known for his friendly demeanor, but perhaps he was just one of those people who reserved any warmth for his closest orbit of friends and family, which she certainly had never been. She wasn’t even sure she could consider herself a friend now. The idea of him doling out Christmas presents to his Slytherin pals seemed far fetched to her; she could scarcely imagine a Christmas at Malfoy Manor that didn’t involve Mrs. Malfoy showering her son with mountains of gifts that he would only touch once and never use again. Standard rich kid stuff.
Susan handed the coffee back to Draco absentmindedly. She stared blankly at the laces on her worn high top sneakers, completely lost in thought.
It was Draco’s turn now to roll his eyes. “Salazar Slytherin was one of the greatest wizards of the time. He was clever. Determined. And I don’t know this for a fact, but I’d wager even he gave Christmas presents… to the people that mattered.” It was true that Draco wasn’t a particularly demonstrative individual, but at the same time, he was also a person who had always had plenty and who rarely thought twice about extending the benefits of that privilege to those he was close with. But this gift was different. While not extravagant, it had been purchased with his own money. Money that he’d earned. Money he’d worked for. It felt silly to point out - it probably wouldn’t mean as much to Susan as it did to him. Besides, it wasn’t a real job in the full sense of things. Or even really his - it was Sebastian Harper’s. But it felt significant in some way. This wasn’t a gift from the Malfoy family. It was a gift from him. For her.
She passed off the cup again. Draco took advantage of the quiet moment to observe her - the slight upturn of her nose, the curve of her mouth, the vacant way she was staring down at her shoes, like she was looking straight through them at something else entirely - before nudging her with a sharp elbow. “What is it? Are you thinking about whether you should wear those to the ballet? Because I wouldn’t.”
His lecture about Salazar Slytherin elicited a dramatic roll of the eyes before Susan had begun to zone out, and she made a sour face at his comment about giving gifts to those who mattered. Typical haughty Slytherin behavior, but as a Hufflepuff, maybe she was just too kind-hearted. By his own admission, or at the very least, by following his own logic, she had somehow become a person in his life that mattered enough to purchase a thoughtful gift for, and Susan didn’t know how she felt about it. A very faint outline of the Dark Mark on his inner arm was visible in her peripheral vision each time he brought her cup of coffee to his lips, and it made her stomach twist in a mix of rage and sadness.
It left her feeling choked up on the inside, like needing to cry and having to focus all her attention on holding back. She let out a soft gasp when he elbowed her. Her lips curled into a half smile. “These and a pair of boots are all I brought with me. I’ll have to transfigure them into something nicer,” she answered, wiggling her feet.
“You packed light. I didn’t. There isn’t exactly an established packing list for traveling back in… time…” He’d brought the cup to his mouth for another sip, then hesitated as her gaze drifted to his arm. He glanced down to see the pale pink burn mark just visible against his skin. He’d been overlapping Concealment Charms, so that the prior charm would be replaced before it even started to fade, but he’d been distracted. He’d forgotten. Draco had felt it a handful of times since arriving in the past, the sharp pain of the Dark Lord summoning a servant he didn’t even know he had, but he hadn’t seen it - really seen it - in months. The coffee cup was frozen halfway to his mouth, forgotten. Standing in front of the Dark Lord, his mother and aunt the only unmasked faces in the crowd. Clenching his jaw to keep from crying out as his arm was branded. Feeling scared. Determined. Proud.
His jaw clenched tight now like it had then and a flush traveled up from the neckline of his shirt to his cheeks and ears. He handed her back the coffee cup without saying a word.
When he caught her leering at his arm, Susan immediately averted her eyes, pretending she’d still been staring at her shoes. She only glanced up when he failed to finish his sentence and handed off the coffee. She noted the pronounced muscles in his jaw and neck and the way he was now avoiding eye contact. The sinking feeling in her stomach intensified, along with a strong sense of guilt. But she’d done nothing wrong, and she hated that he of all people made her feel that way. She could feel her temper beginning to flare. Torn between saying something snotty and trying to recalibrate the conversation, she sat in an uncomfortable moment’s silence.
“Keep it,” she finally muttered and swung her legs down off the bed. Running away seemed like a perfectly reasonable option. She set the coffee on his bedside table and stood to put her jacket on. “I should get going.” She flipped her hair out over the hood of her jacket, adjusted the long blonde locks, and tugged the fabric of her sleeves down over her palms. She moved toward the door. “Thanks for the tickets. It was thoughtful.” Her voice was monotone.
It was like conversational vertigo, an ice water shower pouring over him. Embarrassment shifted into hurt, then quickly turned to defensive anger. He was Draco Malfoy. His ancestor Armand Malfoy had arrived in Britain with William the Conqueror. His family meant something, there were obligations and responsibilities that came with that. He was a Pureblood. He was a Death Eater. These were facts, as inescapable as oxygen. And if Susan was trying to pretend otherwise, that was on her.
Maybe he’d wanted to pretend too. For awhile.
“Right.” He snapped. While Susan’s voice was flat, Draco’s was brittle - a thin string weighed down with emotion, a breath away from snapping. Draco knew that if he wanted to, he might be able to salvage this conversation. He could ask her to stay, tell her that he wanted her to. He could apologize. He could tell her that he never wanted this - not any of it. But he wouldn’t. “Well, then. You probably should.” He leaned back against the pillow again and looked up to stare fiercely at the ceiling tiles, waiting to hear the sound of the door closing shut.
Susan couldn’t leave fast enough and yet she found herself hovering, hand on the doorknob. She didn’t turn to face him, but her mind raced trying to think of something meaningful to say to him. She wanted to shake him, hold his face in her hands, scream at him. You are better than this. But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe Neville was wrong, and she had let her stupid Hufflepuff optimism take hold of her common sense and run with it. Maybe Draco really was just a scumbag Death Eater who would sell her and her friends down the river just to stay in Voldemort’s good graces for one more day. Couldn’t he try, though? For her? You don’t mean anything to him, she thought bitterly, furiously.
Susan swallowed the lump that was forming in her throat. Without a word, she left, closing the door behind her with a soft click.