Neville's Sacrifice

Chapter Sixteen

Family and friends crept with cat-like feet across the cold paleness of Ginny's hospital room floor. Their voices were low, reverential whispers as if anything louder would disturb the pale Sleeping Beauty before them.

Ginny lay still upon the starched white linen, the rising and falling of her chest almost imperceptible beneath them. She lay as she had lain since the day Neville brought her in. Her outer wounds had healed--the ligature marks around her throat, the scrapes and bruises that the plant had inflicted upon her. But the deeper wounds were slower to heal.

She lay comatose, trapped as surely as any prisonalized criminal in an immovable, immobile prison of flesh and blood, although unlike such a prisoner it might be a life sentence with no possibility of parole.

Molly sat near Ginny's bedside day after day, feeling helpless and afraid. She'd always been there to spell away her children's bumps and bruises, to kiss away their tears, and now that her daughter was hurt and needed her, she could do nothing to help her.

The powerlessness she felt filled her body with a restless energy to do something, anything, to make things better.

She paced around the room, back and forth, back and forth, her mind clicking over with ideas of something, anything, she could to help.

I wish there was something I could do...this is horrible...not knowing if she's going to make it...And the baby...Is the baby okay? Or because of the accident...Did it cut off oxygen to the baby?

Unable to change Ginny's condition, she focused on what she could change.

This hospital room is so bleak...it's awful...I could brighten the place up a little, make it more homey for her...

"Neville, Arthur...will you stand up for a bit? I want to make things around here a bit cosier. The chairs they have in here are like sitting on a pile of bricks."

Arthur, used to taking directions from his wife, stood up immediately. Neville remained sitting in his hard wooden chair, lost in his own world, Molly's directions to him remaining unheard and unanswered.

"Neville. Neville. NEVILLE," Molly repeated, until finally Neville turned his head away from where he had been staring at Ginny's chest, willing her heart to keep beating, willing her to stay alive.

He saw Molly standing across the room from where he sat, her ruby coloured wand gleaming dully in the half-light.

She gave an encouraging smile, then said, "Neville dear, you wouldn't mind standing up for a bit, so I can transform these chairs, would you? It's just that they're so hard and...ugly....I just want to make them nicer for her."

He rose reluctantly from the rigid wooden chair, his body stiff and sore from sitting for so long.

He didn't want the hard backed chairs changed. He felt like telling Molly to leave at least one of them, but he knew it would be too hard to explain to her why he wanted her to do it.

The more uncomfortable the chair was, the more Neville liked it, in a perverse, punishing way.

The chair he liked most was a cheap one, carelessly made long ago. Instead of the spindles laying flatly, they warped outwards, jabbing him cruelly if he tried to lean his back against them.

Being unable to lean back against the back of the chair benefited him in two ways. For one, if he couldn't lean back then he definitely couldn't get too comfortable, and if he wasn't comfortable then it would be easier to stay awake.

He had an irrational fear that if he fell asleep, if he didn't keep watch on her every second, every minute of everyday, then something bad would happen. Last time he hadn't been paying attention she had almost died. It was his fault and he deserved to be punished to pay for what he'd done to her, so he'd implemented a twenty-four hour a day, seven day a week, self-imposed martyrdom of sleeplessness.

The longer he went without sleep, the harder it became to keep his eyes open, to follow a conversation, to think straight. He'd begun seeing black shapes flicking across the walls, but when he'd mentioned the bug problem at St. Mungo's to Molly, she had just given him a motherly look of concern and patted his back. Then she told him to go get some rest.

The second benefit the chair gave was it made the 'what ifs' go away.

When the 'what ifs' got too much, when he felt like he just couldn't bear the pressing weight of the guilt any longer, he would push his back into the scratched, raised spindles along the back of the chair.

The hard wood of the chair dug brutally into the soft skin of his back, pressing into the multi-colored bruises already there. Neville winced as the chair bit into his back, but the physical pain the chair caused him seemed to...push down, push back, the mental pain that he was feeling.

And it felt good...really good...not to have that unbearable feeling of despair and fear and guilt, at least for a little while.

With a wave of her wand, his coping mechanism would be gone...and then the pain would re-emerge, re-intensify, and he didn't know what he would do then, because he was barely coping now...a fragile bridge of almost-allrightness that would collapse if so much as a feather of not-okayness landed on it.

He stood, propping himself against the windowsill, almost too tired to stay upright.

"A hollow shell...might be a hollow shell."

The Healer's words reverberated in Neville's mind, almost extinguishing his last bit of hope that somehow Ginny would be alright.

Before the Healer had come in, he could pretend that she was just sleeping, that her injuries were minor, that she would wake up one day and they could be together again. But ever since the Healer had been there and he had seen the fiery red above her head, he couldn't pretend anymore and he hated the Healer for taking away even that bit of consolation from him.

He felt a sudden overwhelming need to sit in his chair again, to press his back against it and make the voices in his head just shut up for a while.

Neville closed his eyes. He gripped his hands hard upon the windowsill as Molly pointed her wand at the hard backed oak chairs that stood like ancient wooden soldiers around the bed.

He opened his eyes again, feeling the panic bubbling up inside him as his chair vanished, the only thing that made life almost bearable.

Instead of the scratched wood and torn seats of the hospital room chairs, there sat fat green, orange and yellow pouffles rainbowing attendance around the outer edge of Ginny's hospital bed.

He stared at the comfy, overstuffed chairs, their smooth edges and soft covering, and knew they would be no help, none at all, in releasing the pent-up misery and fear that he had bottled up inside of him.

Arthur walked over to one of the chairs and sat down.

As he relaxed back into one of the overstuffed pouffles he said, "Molly, these chairs are a treat! So much better than the other ones."

Molly blushed with pleasure and said, "I'm glad you like them. I don't know why I didn't change them earlier!"

She turned and her eyes caught sight of the dead-looking curtains that framed the window.

"Look at these ghastly grey curtains! How can they expect anyone to get better with those dingy, depressing things hanging there?"

With a flick of her wand, the dull grey curtains in the room transformed into a vibrant, cheerful yellow (because Molly believed, dull colors make for a dull mind and yellow was so happy and bright).

She stared out at the window at the grey, overcast day, as feeble sunlight crawled weakly into the room.

Shaking her head, she exclaimed, "And this weather! Rainy, cold, dull grey....horrible! I'll change that too!"

She used the same spell that had been used at Hogwarts to enchant the windows to show a perpetual bright summer's day so bright, so blue that you could almost feel the sun baking down upon your skin.

The day-glo cheerfulness of the pouffles, and the sunshine yellow of the curtains, created a tumultuous mix with the garishly colored get-well cards that covered the walls and nightstands. Walking into Ginny's hospital room was like walking into a room where a pack of Crayola crayons had exploded.

The bed was the only part of the room that still looked like what it was--a hospital bed all firm, firm mattress and steel railings that not even the cheerfulist of quilts could disguise.

Once Molly had redecorated the room to a more eye-watering color scheme, she sank down contentedly into one of the renovated chairs, her fear temporarily tamped down by her action.

Arthur sat stretched out in the orange pouffles beside her. At first, when the accident had happened, he had taken off large chunks of time from his job so that he could be with Ginny. But as the hours grew to days and the days into months he had had to go back to his job in the Ministry of Magic Misuse of Muggle Artefacts department.

As he sat at his desk at the Ministry filling out paperwork, he tried to concentrate but couldn't. This was his youngest child, his only daughter laying there hurt. The anxiety that she might not make it, that she might die, made his stomach ache, made him lay awake night after night staring up at the crumbling plaster of the bedroom ceiling.

His tension, his anxiety, only eased when he was there with her; when he could touch her, and see her, and know that, at least for now, she was alright.

"Neville, did we tell you? Charlie should be here soon."

Neville slumped tiredly in one of the lime-green pouffles. His bloodshot eyes ached dully as he forced himself to turn away from Ginny so that he could focus on Arthur.

"He would have been here sooner," Molly explained, "Only he's had a bit of dragon trouble."

"Three Muggle houses burnt down in less than a week!" Arthur exclaimed, his eyes wide with excitement. "The Muggles called those things out, what are they called? Fliermen..?"

Arthur continued talking about the fires, but Neville stopped listening. He preferred to be left to be in his own little world, as dank and depressing as it was.

Neville slumped forward, reaching across the steel bars of the railing to take Ginny's small ashen-coloured hand into his own.

The skin felt cold beneath his fingers. The lack of warmth scared him, reminding him of the razor thin cord that tethered Ginny to this life. The cold from her hands wound itself through his body, penetrating his heart as he thought about how, at any moment, that cord could be severed, taking Ginny from him forever.

Since the day he had found her body, terrifyingly lifeless within its devil-snare tomb, a deep ache, a heaviness, had settled over him.

Part of the ache was pure despair--that this could be happening when they had already gone through so much, when they almost had what they had always dreamed of--a family full of children. The other part was helplessness at not being able to help her now as she lay there, both parts being mixed together with a big, big dollop of guilt.

Just seeing her lying in her hospital bed day after day, night after night, kept the wound of his guilt torn open and bleeding.

He had promised to love, honor and protect her and he hadn't. He hadn't protected her. He hadn't been there when she needed him most and now she was lying there, a waxen doll replica of her former self.

Yet he couldn't stay away. He hadn't left her bedside except for quick bathroom breaks for the entire time that she'd been at St. Mungo's.

As he rubbed her hand in his, he began to cry. Hot tears of shame and misery fell upon her hands.

Neville leaned forward and kissed Ginny's cold lips.

"Come back to me Ginny. Come back to me. I love you. I love you," he whispered to her as the black things crawled up the wall and the room spun round and round.