A Little Knowledge: Missing Scenes

He stood at the doors for a long while with his hand against the smooth wood, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to open the door and go inside. Not yet, at any rate. If he went inside, he would have to acknowledge Reynard and, worse still, his feelings for him: all of the anguish, fear, regret, concern.... Everything he had experienced since those first moments when he had learned that Reynard had been seriously injured by the vampire. He wouldn’t be able to push it away, tuck it into the deeper recesses of his mind or soul, anymore.

Cyrus was many things, but he was not fool enough to think he could calmly walk into that hospital wing and feel nothing.

“Was this how he felt when he came to see me?” Cyrus wondered aloud, running his hand over the door before giving it a shove and taking a step forward into the hospital wing. He could acknowledge that the trepidation he knew Reynard had felt that autumn when he had come to visit him was not without cause. He now felt it too.

With his cane, recovered for him by the headmaster from the scene of Miss Howard’s near-duel with the vampire, to sweep before him as he walked, Cyrus found his way rather easily to the only occupied bed in the wing. Reynard wasn’t quite snoring, but his breathing was heavy enough to guide Cyrus in his search for him. Not only helpful, but also comforting. The sound seemed, by his estimation, to be quite healthy.

He propped the cane against the foot of the hospital bed and hesitated for a moment before taking a seat next to Reynard, sliding forward a bit and marveling that the bed was even sufficient to accommodate his friend’s long frame. A soft sigh escaped his lips as he just sat there for a moment, collecting himself and trying not to let the strange prickle in the back of his throat bother him.

“You great sodding bastard, I can’t believe you tried to stop that monster alone,” he finally said. The words tumbled from his lips without any will, nor malice, behind them, as Cyrus felt for Reynard’s shoulder, and having learned through eavesdropping of his companion’s heavily sedated state, gave it a fierce squeeze, not worrying about the possibility of waking him. “You’re bloody lucky to be alive,” he murmured.

Of course, Cyrus received no response to those words; he would not have wanted one either. He just needed to express those sentiments aloud. It felt as though he had been holding in the words, or ones that were very similar, for days on end. It was good to get them off his chest, if for no other reason than preventing him from exploding at Reynard when he was better able to defend his actions.

“Bloody brave of you too,” he muttered more begrudgingly, relaxing his grip and using his other hand to find his friend’s face. “Didn’t know you had it in you,” he confessed. Cyrus closed his eyes for a moment. “Don’t know why. Maybe after all this time, after everything else that’s happened, I thought you ... I still thought you were just a great hulking coward. Stupid of me,” he continued as the initial fear, more anger than apprehension, faded away to a tired sort of worried and regretful feeling.

Brushing his thumb gently over Reynard’s cheek, he could feel stubble there, no doubt from Reynard not getting a good shave at the hospital or since leaving it. The prickling sensation nearly matched the one behind his closed eyelids. He caressed Reynard’s face and tried to get a hold of himself.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Merlin, I’m sorry for this, Reynard. I should never have left you that night. I should have stayed with you, even though you didn’t want me to, and taken you bed, and ...”

He stopped realizing what might have happened if Reynard had not been between the vampire and Ravenclaw Tower, between it and all of those children, what it could have done. Cyrus choked back a half-sob, knowing that Reynard had been just where he was needed, and would have wanted, to be, regardless of the consequences.

“I’ll take you to bed later,” he vowed through gritted teeth, “and I’ll find a way to make all of this up to you.”

Reaching with careful fingertips to smooth Reynard’s hair, tears seeped from beneath his eyelids as the realization hit him that the soft blond strands had been shorn close to the scalp by the Healers. Cyrus could scarcely picture Reynard in his mind without the pale curtain that hung about his face. He stroked the side of Reynard’s face again instead as he tried to reign in his emotions, tried and failed to be the stern and stoic wizard that he always believed himself to be, not the half-angry, half-regretful, completely emotional, lover of an injured man.

“But everything’s going to be all right now,” he whispered, forcing himself to remember that, and to believe it.

Reynard was recovering, only sleeping now, and would soon, he hoped, be well again. He had overheard as much earlier that evening, long before making his midnight trek to sit with his friend. Above all else, the mercurial professor of potions was that, a friend, to him. Cyrus opened his eyes and blinked away the tears, releasing Reynard’s shoulder briefly to wipe his eyes with the back of his hand.

“All right,” he said again, “though if you ever pull a stunt like leaving the hospital again...” He didn’t bother to finish the threat.

Cyrus merely sniffed quietly, and finding that he had no more that he needed to say, made himself more comfortable, intending to remain there and keep a vigil over his friend until exhaustion drove him to bed during the wee hours of the morning.

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