White Horses

DRACO WAS STARING AT HERMIONE with an expression that was surprisingly free from outrage. Of course, that was only because he couldn't yet comprehend what Hermione had just said. While his brain tried to process the fact that Granger had just told him he was going to America, Harry was the one to exclaim in shock, "What!"

The Head Girl looked between the two boys and explained in a deceptively easy tone of voice, "Draco will be going with us." As the Slytherin's eyes began to narrow angrily, she continued, "I've already sent in his application and I would think he is quite the shoo-in; I mean, his marks are almost as good as mine, plus all of his extracurricular work in sport and as Head Boy ought to boost his application to the top of the pile."

She could see that Draco was getting ready to make a scene and said in a warning, jocular tone, "What? It's not like you'll have a problem with funding or anything." She gave him a hard look before turning to Harry. The girl addressed her sickly friend and told him, "So now you'll positively have to get better, because there is no way that I can handle a Malfoy in the middle of Muggle America by myself!"

Draco realized what Hermione was doing and that realization quailed the protestations that were clawing up his throat even before her sharp look could. Looking like he had been forced to swallow sour milk, he clamped his mouth shut against the harsh words he wanted to say and smiled weakly at Harry. Playing along with Granger's game, he said blandly, "Well, if you're better by next year..." But in his mind he was thinking, And if Hell freezes over and Snape actually bathes...

Harry's green eyes searched the Slytherin's noncommittal face and he smiled slowly. "That would be nice," was all he said, in his small, quiet voice. He then had to cover a staggering yawn with one childish hand and Draco suggested softly, "Get some rest. Hermione and I will go get some new books from the library and let you sleep for a bit."

The dark-haired boy might have protested if he'd been able to, but the cloying exhaustion that kept dragging him into unconsciousness was fully upon him again - pulling him swiftly and unexpectedly into fitful sleep.

As soon as those brilliant green eyes were shut, Draco whirled on Hermione with a furious glare. He grabbed her firmly, his long, white fingers digging into her thin arm as he dragged her out the door. His words poured out of him in an angry burst of air, no louder than the faintest whisper, "What the hell are you playing at, Granger? No one asked you to decide my future for me! I can't believe that you just trampled all over my privacy and forged a bloody application which I'd never even heard of!"

The girl jerked herself free of his hold and crossed her arms tightly as they walked away from the room where Harry lay unconscious. They brazenly walked straight through the Slytherin common room, since not a single other Slytherin student was still at the school during the holidays. Her words were tossed coolly over her shoulder as she accused him, "As I recall, you were precisely the one who asked me to decide your future for you. Or don't you remember?"

Glaring furiously but unable to deny it, the blonde muttered resentfully, "That was about Potter. I didn't give you free license to traipse around my life and change anything you bloody well felt like!"

"Well, then, this is about 'Potter,' as well," the girl threw back at him with a faintly scornful flick of her head. "Did you think that I just did this for your own benefit and personal growth?"

Malfoy's thin lips twisted into a grimace as she confirmed his suspicion: she'd gotten him embroiled in this dodgy university business for Harry - and thus there was no way for him to fight it, at least not while the boy was so fragile.

His Head Girl continued spitefully, "You wouldn't have even considered it, even if I had told you about it! I know better than anyone how you feel about Muggles - of course you would have refused on the spot and then where would Harry have been? At least now he has something to fight for - at least he has hope!"

She turned back to him and asked incredulously, "Did you even have any plan for after Hogwarts? Were you just thinking that you would do the long-distance thing for four bloody years?" Looking at the Slytherin's blank face, Hermione knew that he hadn't once given thought to how he and Harry would continue their relationship after Hogwarts. She said in a more reasonable tone of voice, "Look, at least this way you would have a visa to get into America. This way you could be together - and maybe you could have some hope, too."

Draco continued his silence, his mind too full for words. He'd been so consumed with his visions and Harry's affliction for so long that he hadn't thought about what would happen if they made it till graduation. He'd promised Harry forever, but hadn't quite remembered that Hogwarts didn't last forever.

Four years...?

These Muggle universities lasted for four years? How would they carry on? Perhaps there was something to what Granger was saying, but it was inconceivable that he would go to some Muggle school, halfway across the world. It won't even matter, a cold voice in his head whispered, if you don't figure out soon how to save Harry.

"Do you really believe what you said?"

Hermione looked back at him in surprise, his unexpected question startling her. She continued on their path to the library and said, "What? That you could get in - that the two of you could be together? Yes, I do believe it."

Draco felt a slight warmth suffuse his face, but the girl wouldn't be able to see it in the shadowy corridors. He corrected her, "No, not about that. I mean what you said about that prophecy. You really don't believe it's to blame?"

The Head Girl paused for a moment, allowing Draco to catch up to her. As they resumed their walk side by side, she began speaking. "Don't you? You seemed just as opposed to it as I did. And, for my part, I really cannot believe that it is wholly to blame. After all, if the reason for Harry's current situation is because the Killing curse was triggered by Voldemort's power being transferred to him by their connection... then how can we say that the same thing wouldn't have happened even if Harry had been the one to physically kill him? Wouldn't he have ended up like this either way, then?"

"But what if he wouldn't have?"

Hermione stopped the taller blonde with a firm hand. She told him forcefully, "I don't know, Malfoy. I can't say what might have happened differently, but I can say - with certainty - that debating the possible scenarios will not help Harry right now. What's done is done and if you are trying to heap the blame on yourself, that is entirely your decision to make. But I will not spend another minute arguing it with you when we could be finding a solution." With that the Gryffindor girl strode ahead of the boy again, leaving him to catch up if he chose to.

Draco stared after the determined girl. After a few moments, he took a step and continued following her toward the library and possible salvation.

WHEN THEY ARRIVED BACK AT the empty Slytherin dorms, their arms sagging under a new load of books to sieve through, they found Harry still asleep. Unusually, though, the boy's sleep was deep and calm.

Letting their piles fall to the floor with a set of soft thumps, they began silently sorting through their newest yield of archaic texts. They were officially scraping the bottom of the cauldron. No longer could they simply walk into a section on counter-curses or Unforgivables and expect to walk out with a stack of books to go through. They'd exhausted every book in any obvious section. Now they were forced to pick through the rest of the entire library and pull anything off the shelves that looked even remotely likely to mention curse scars, counter curses, or Avada Kedavra.

Starting with the small number of books that they had sorted into their "most-likely" pile, each of the Heads took up their regular spots - Hermione sitting at Draco's desk, Draco himself sitting next to the window, leaning against the wall - and began reading. And reading. And reading.

Every now and then one of them would break the silence, but it was never because of any breakthrough they'd found. No, more often it was a discouraged sigh or the sound of hopelessly flipping through dry pages of parchment. But late in the afternoon, Draco began to notice that he hadn't heard any paper-rustling from Hermione's side of the room in quite a while. He looked up, expecting to find her passed out on top of an open book, but was surprised to see her books closed and her very much open eyes fixed upon Harry.

He couldn't help the faint tinge of desperate hope in his voice as he asked tiredly, "What is it? Did you find something?"

"No... It's just..."

Closing his own book, knowing that he wasn't going to find anything in it, he prodded her, "It's just what?"

She gave him that testing look that he was beginning to recognize - it meant she was about to say something that he wasn't going to like. "Well, an idea just occurred to me. A back-up plan, you could say."

Draco narrowed his eyes predictably and, already expecting the worse, asked in a cold voice, "A 'back-up' plan?"

The Head Girl glanced at the bed, but Harry was still completely unconscious. He wasn't going to hear anything they had to say. Hermione looked Draco straight in the face and said boldly, "If he has to die-"

The blonde twitched and interrupted her with a dangerous voice, "I do not like where this is going, Granger."

"Neither do I, Malfoy."

He continued to glare at her resentfully, but then had to look away because his eyes were inexplicably watering. Blinking furiously, he ground out, "I thought you said you didn't believe in any of this prophecy crap."

"I don't," she started, and then her words spilt out of her quickly when she could see Draco wanting to protest again. "It's not the prophecy. It's Avada Kedavra. It will kill him, prophesized or not, and we have found no way to lift the curse before it does so."

Jumping up from his seat on the floor, Draco began to walk restlessly around the room. He dug his hands into his softly spiky hair, now grown out for nearly a month, and asked impatiently, "And how does your reminding me of all this help anything?"

Hermione stood up as well and walked over to the tense Slytherin. Standing close to him, she suggested softly, "But what if we brought him back?"

"What?"

"What if," the girl repeated, glancing at the still boy on the bed, "if he died, we revived him right afterwards?"

Draco looked at her like she'd gone mad. "But there is no spell to bring someone back from the dead. Not even in the Darkest of magic."

Hermione grabbed him around his elbows and squeezed tightly, saying forcefully, "I'm not talking about magic. I'm talking about medicine."

"Muggle... medicine...?"

The Gryffindor girl shook him as she spoke, "Yes! If he died, then the curse would be fulfilled. But if we brought him back right afterwards..." She searched his eyes and said expectantly, "It should be possible. He should be able to live after the curse has been completed."

Draco was shaking his head, "But..." He looked at her in bewilderment, "Muggles can do this? They can bring people back from the dead?"

Hermione's fierce look dimmed a little and she admitted, "It's not a perfect science. But if doctors start trying to resuscitate him immediately, then it's possible that he could come back, without any harm."

The blonde boy pulled himself free of her grasp and walked over to his bed, where his boyfriend lay as if already dead, cocooned in black, funereal silk. "So you're saying that if... if we let him die, and then brought him back to life... then the curse would be completed and he'd be fine...?"

Hermione took a deep breath and said, "I think so, yes."

No.

Draco didn't realize he'd said the word aloud until he saw Hermione open her mouth, her eyes desperate. He spoke up, more firmly, "No! I will not let him die!"

"You think that I want to?" Hermione snapped back at him, just as angrily, "You think that I want to watch him die and do nothing about it?" She strode over to the boy and, unthinkingly, punched him in the shoulder. "But that's all we can do! Nothing!" She struck him again, crying out, "At least this is a possibility! And it's the only thing we've got, so don't you fucking just say 'no' to me!"

The girl collapsed to the ground, her head dropped hopelessly into her hands, and Draco watched helplessly for a moment. His mouth worked as he tried to think of something to say, but his mind was completely blank. Instead he dropped to the carpet next to her and put one light arm around her shoulders, patting her awkwardly on the back.

Still unable to respond to her outburst, he just said quietly, "Shh. We'll wake Harry."

But the boy on the bed hadn't batted an eyelash, even with Hermione screaming right next to him. Draco realized it and stood up quickly, leaving the Head Girl alone on the floor. Leaning over the bed, he nudged the sleeping boy on the shoulder and called softly, "Harry."

There was no response and so Draco shook the boy more forcefully, holding him by both shoulders. "Harry! Harry, wake up now!"

Hermione had noticed what he was doing and pulled herself up to the bed as well, her face suddenly white. She pulled out her wand and, pointing it at her best friend, whispered, "Ennervate." Nothing happened. The Gryffindor boy didn't even move or sigh. Hermione tried again, then tried another spell, and another. But none of them worked. Harry wouldn't wake up again.

"SO HOW DOES IT WORK?"

Hermione turned toward Draco from where she sat next to Harry on the bed. Her face was full of mute question, her dry lips pressed tightly together.

"How do Muggles bring people back?"

Draco was sitting at the far end of the room, nearly hidden by the blinding evening sun. His soft hair formed a ragged halo around his shadowed face and his shoulders were hunched up around his ears. Hermione looked at him in that moment and tried to understand him - what he must be going through.

"Well," she spoke slowly, reaching back into the reserves of her Muggle knowledge, "the first step always is to perform CPR - which is a form of artificial respiration. Someone compresses the patient's chest and breaths into their mouth alternatively, as I recall, to force oxygen back into their blood."

She could see that the young wizard's knowledge of anatomy and physiology was a bit lacking, by the doubtful expression on his face, and so she gave him a brief rundown of the workings of the human body: "Oxygen is necessary to the body to keep functioning. If you lose your source of oxygen, your brain won't be able to work - it will starve to death. But the oxygen is carried around your body by your blood, and if your heart isn't pumping, then your blood isn't moving and the oxygen can't get anywhere - especially to your brain. If you leave the brain without oxygen for more than a couple minutes, it will be so damaged that even if you brought the person back, they'd be nothing more than a vegetable."

Draco was frowning slightly and she said bluntly, "Even if you brought Harry back, Harry wouldn't be in there. It'd just be a body - the personality, the mind, the soul, whatever you want to call it, would be gone. That is why we use CPR. It forces some oxygen into a person, and then by pumping on their chest, we try to manually force the blood to move and to disperse that oxygen."

Draco's eyes dropped as he considered this. Finally he asked, "But that alone won't bring them back. ...Right?"

Hermione nodded seriously, "Right. CPR will only keep someone from going brain dead. Then they need real medical attention." She harkened back to all the medical shows on the telly and hazarded, "I'm sure there are different methods to bring people back. I'm not a doctor, so I can't say for certain, but I think that the most common method is to shock them."

"Shock them? You'll have a tough time surprising a dead person, Hermione."

She frowned at his flat voice and quickly said, "No, no. An electric shock. An electric shock will stop the heart - but it can also restart the heart again. If you perform some sort of artificial respiration, so that the brain isn't damaged, and then you can shock the heart back into restarting... then they can come back, without any real damage." Hermione looked back at the boy on the bed, who hadn't wakened or moved for hours, and murmured, "Usually."

"How usually?"

The Muggle-born girl didn't answer immediately. Draco asked again, seriously, "Hermione, how often does it work?"

Still looking down at her best friend, she whispered, "I'm not sure. Not always."

Draco sighed. He mentally reviewed their options. They no longer had any choice but to take Harry somewhere - they couldn't let him continue to waste away down here in the Slytherin dungeons. They could take him back to Pomfrey, though she probably couldn't do anything more for him than they were. More than likely, she would just have him sent to Saint Mungo's, which was their second option anyway. Saint Mungo's had a huge staff and a deep pool of talented mediwitches and mediwizards - but he knew what magic could do for Harry at this point and that was nothing at all. Together with Hermione, and with a bit of help from the Weasels, he'd exhausted everything ever written about the subject and their was nothing there for Harry.

That left him faced with his third option, the one which Hermione was championing: Muggle help. What could the Muggles really do? At least with magic, if you had a skilled wizard or witch, you knew the spell would do what it was supposed to. How could he depend on this strange method that "usually" worked? How could he bet Harry's life on it? His future on it?

But what other choice did he have?

"Let's go."

Hermione turned to look at him questioningly. He pushed himself up from the floor and clarified, "Let's go to your Muggle hospital."

THE TWO APPARATED BACK TO Hermione's London home, with Harry supported between the them. Luckily no one was there, as both of her dentist parents were in the office on weekdays like this. They laid Harry carefully down on one of the comfy, floral-print sofas and Draco couldn't help glancing around the living room of the very Muggle house.

"We can't exactly just walk down the street like this, of course," Hermione said unexpectedly, speaking aloud to herself. Draco chose to ignore the strange machines in the room and focused on the Gryffindor girl as she continued, "I suppose we could call a cab. Or..."

She trailed off, thinking to herself. Before she could come up with any other ideas, though, the sound of light footsteps coming down the stairs reached them in the living room. Hermione's brows came down over her eyes and she started toward the door to the hall. Almost unconsciously, Draco pushed himself in front of her protectively, his wand already drawn and at the ready.

The thin blond woman coming down the stairs froze when she saw the strange wizard, slightly raising her empty hands in a gesture of harmlessness. Hermione peeked around the Slytherin and exclaimed, "Mum!"

Helen Granger let out a relieved gasp when she saw her daughter step in front of the stranger and push his wand away. She spoke in her usual unflappable tone, "Hermione, dear, what's going on?"

"I thought you were working!"

Mrs Granger came down the last few steps and said gently, "Its Christmas Day, Hermione. No one comes to the dentist's on Christmas." Then she looked curiously at Draco.

Hermione and Draco exchanged surprised looks - neither of them had remembered that this was Christmas. Shrugging it off, Hermione explained shortly, "I'm sorry, I didn't even realize, Mum. This is my classmate and fellow Head Boy, Draco Malfoy." They had backed up into the living room and Mrs Granger saw the dark-haired boy on the couch. Her daughter said in a sadly wry tone of voice, "And you'll remember Harry, of course."

"Yes, of course. Is everything... all right?" The older woman took a half-step toward Harry's limp figure.

Hermione's eyes filled unexpectedly with tears and she had to swallow several times before she could explain, "Not quite. But we're trying to make it right." She searched her mother's eyes for a moment, then asked flatly, "Could I ask you to take us to hospital, Mum, without you asking any questions?"

Helen opened her mouth to show rows of perfectly straight, white teeth, and hesitated. She looked her daughter, now eighteen and quite grown up, and gave in softly, "Of course, Hermione."

THEY WALKED INTO THE EMERGENCY room entrance with Harry draped bonelessly over Draco's back. There was quite the crowd in the waiting room, and the young students went nervously up to the reception counter. The nurse stationed there looked up at them tiredly and said, "Yes, how may I help you?"

Hermione promptly responded, "I think we have an emergency."

The nurse glanced at Draco and at the boy on his back and asked, "What's happened?"

Glancing back at Harry's pale face and limp limbs hanging off of Draco, Hermione explained, "It's my best friend, Harry Potter. He's been sick the last couple days and then he collapsed this morning and we haven't been able to wake him up since, no matter what we've done."

The nurse raised her thin eyebrows speculatively but started clacking away at her computer nonetheless.

Hermione had to give the woman all of Harry's information and history, since Draco was quite patently useless in the Muggle world. As she spoke with the charge nurse, he looked around the room, staring unabashedly at the hurt, sick and miserable Muggles. They were sitting and standing despondently in the bland room, some coughing, a couple even bleeding, several whimpering or crying in some way. He knew that if Madame Pomfrey were here, she could empty the whole room and have everyone healed in less than five minutes. Their waiting here for some doctor seemed so primitive and barbaric. And this was what he was entrusting Harry's life to?

The nurse waived the threesome toward the hard plastic seats and Hermione walked over and dropped into one of the few empty ones. Draco followed only a moment later and, standing over the Gryffindor girl, asked Hermione in a low voice, "What?"

"What what?"

Draco jerked his head to indicate the boy on his back and asked, "What now?"

Hermione patted the uncomfortable-looking seat next to hers and said, "Now we wait."

OF COURSE IT WAS ONLY a few minutes before Draco started asking questions again. He didn't understand why Harry wasn't being helped immediately, and so Hermione was forced to explain the triage system to him.

"Even... " she hesitated to say 'wizards,' with so many people nearby, "...non-Muggles should understand the triage system. The name comes from the French trier, meaning-"

"'To sort,' yes, of course. Spare me the language lesson," Draco interrupted her irritably.

Hermione grimaced to herself, trying to be patient with the clearly worried boy. She continued in a forced sort of voice, "Yes, exactly. It is a method of sorting patients by the severity of their conditions and the immediacy of their need for medical attention."

Draco nodded half-heartedly, not really interested, just needing something to focus on, other than the lifeless boy in his arms.

"There are four levels in the triage system. They are black, red, yellow and red - or deceased, immediate, delayed and minor. People who are sorted into black are already past help. Red is for those who need immediate help. Harry, since he is in no apparently immediate danger, is only in the yellow category. He needs help, but not as much as someone who has been stabbed, for example, or who is having a heart attack. Once they have space for him, they will call us back."

Glancing again at the dark-haired boy cradled in his lap, Draco asked, "And all hospitals are like this? You don't think we should try some place else?"

"They'll all be the same. We'll just have to start from the bottom of the list again, each new place we go to."

Draco fell silent, no more questions left to ask. It seemed that everything was out of his hands now. He waited with Hermione, listening to other people's names being called, until - finally, nearly an hour later - there was a strident call for, "Mr Potter. Mr Harry Potter."

THEY FOUND THEMSELVES TAKEN INTO a wide corridor, divided into rough rooms with nothing more than curtains, each one surrounding a bed. It reminded Draco of the main hall of the Hogwarts' hospital wing, but looked so much more crowded and miserable with all the strange machines and people bustling about.

An orderly had taken Harry from them and laid the boy down on the bed. The attending doctor held a clipboard in front of his chest and started impatiently asking Hermione the same questions that the nurse had, once again. And once again, Draco sat by mutely, not taking his eyes off of Harry for a moment.

They had hooked the Boy Who Lived up to a number of the strange machines, which were beeping and humming regularly, strange lines and numbers marching across their screens. They were vaguely familiar - Draco could still half-remember when he had met with a mediwizard trained in Muggle medicine as a child. He had been tethered to machines like these, as the man had tried to figure out what was wrong with the Malfoy heir's heart.

The doctor had stepped up to Harry's side and picked up the boy's small hand. He squeezed down hard on the fingernail bed of Harry's right index finger and then frowned, pressing harder and looking expectantly to Harry's face. But there was no change to the calm expression he found there. He spoke over his shoulder to the nurse, "No eye response."

The nurse obligingly scribbled something down on the chart and they all watched as the doctor continued to circle the boy on the bed. He muttered to himself, "No abnormal posturing, but.. no motor responses whatsoever." Turning back to the nurse, he said seriously, "And obviously no verbal response. We've got a GCS of 3 here. We need to keep him under observation, while we still have spontaneous respiration. Let's get him up to the ICU."

The nurse nodded matter-of-factly, snapping the clipboard shut and tossing it onto Harry's bed. She went around to the head of the bed and started pushing it toward the bank of elevators they'd passed earlier, while the doctor hurried off to another patient.

Draco looked around wildly for a moment, then rushed after Hermione, who was following Harry's bed down the hall. "Hermione!" he hissed in an angry whisper, "What the hell is going on? Where is the doctor going?"

The girl paused slightly, waiting for him to catch up, then explained as they continued after the nurse, "He has to see his other patients as well, Draco. They are going to take Harry up to the intensive care unit, where there will be other doctors and staff to take care of him. Then-"

They had arrived at the elevator, but the nurse was blocking there way. She shook her head apologetically and said, "I'm sorry, but you can't come up with us. This elevator is only for transporting patients. You must go back to the main lobby and take the elevators there to get to the ICU. Then you'll have to check with the staff, but it will probably be quite some time before you can visit your friend again."

Hermione could see that Draco was looking ready to kill and she dragged him away as quickly as she could, calling back to the nurse a hasty thanks. Holding tightly enough to bruise the blonde's tense arm, she commanded him, "You will not make a scene, Draco Malfoy. If you do, we will be kicked out of the hospital and may never see Harry again. Do you understand me?"

The boy didn't say a single thing in response as she led him to the main elevator bank, only continued to stare ahead furiously and breathe heavily through his nose. His lips were pressed together so tightly that they had turned white with the pressure. He followed her into the elevator and waited for her to operate the Muggle machine. As soon as the doors opened again into the ICU, he strode out ahead of her and walked right up to the nurse's desk, demanding, "You will show me to Harry Potter's room."

"Draco!" Hermione's outraged voice preceded her as she caught up with him. "I'm so sorry," she apologized in mortification to the shocked-looking staff, "you'll have to excuse him. He's a complete ass."

The Slytherin turned on him and spat, "And you're a cold bitch, Granger. Don't you even care about-"

"Don't even finish that statement, Malfoy." Hermione was just as angry, worried and desperate as Draco, and her voice quickly rose, "Harry has been my best friend since before you even cared if he lived or died, so don't you dare finish that statement."

Their silent showdown continued for a few moments, until a new angry voice interrupted them and an elderly nurse told them to either get over it or get out of her department. Hermione quickly got herself under some semblance of control, though her chocolaty eyes were still burning furiously. "I apologize again. But we are looking for our friend, Harry Potter. He was just brought up from the ER."

The nurse continued to frown at them imperiously but did finally turn away to examine the charts which were hanging on the wall behind her. She glanced over them quickly once and then again more carefully, before turning back to the two young adults and telling them stiffly, "His chart is not up yet, which means that he is still probably getting set up in a room. It will take a while for the doctors to get the patient stable and start ordering tests. If you can contain yourselves until then, you may wait in the chairs behind you. If you have another outburst, then I will have escorted out by security."

She couldn't have put a much finer point on it and Hermione swallowed hard, before apologizing again, "Of course, we will wait quietly. I'm sorry for before. And thank you." She dragged Draco away again, but the boy put up no fight this time. His lean body was still humming with tension, but despite that, his face had gone blank. Silvery-grey eyes burned in his pale countenance and his skin looked tight, as if it were straining just to cover the sharp bones of his face.

Something in that expression worried Hermione. She pushed the taller boy down into a chair and then asked in a muted voice, "Are you all right, Malfoy?"

After a moment, the Slytherin looked up at her with those desperate eyes and Hermione realized what she'd seen - it was grief. Malfoy didn't believe that he would ever see Harry alive again; he'd given up on Hermione's plan and given up on hope. The wild pain and grief was so powerful, so animalistic that Hermione actually took a step away from the boy before she realized what she was doing.

She forced herself to step back towards him and spoke in a voice barely more than whisper. She had nothing more to offer than that. "You will see him again, Malfoy. Nothing is over yet."

She continued to look into his face for a minute longer, but then had to walk down to the other end of the row of chairs to drop into a chair. She couldn't bear to look at those disparaging eyes. There were magazines scattered on small tables around the waiting room, but she didn't bother to look any of them either. The two students from Hogwarts sat silently, each lost in their thoughts. The bursts of conversation and occasional laughter from the nurses and staff echoed tauntingly around them in the tense ICU.

After what felt like hours, like days, they were called back up to the nurse's station. The same head nurse looked up at them coolly from her desk. She told them reluctantly, "You can go in to see Mr Potter now. He's in room number 417A -"

That was as far as she got, then Draco shot past the nurse's station and down the hall without waiting for further instructions. Shooting an apologetic look at the nurses, Hermione ran after him. She saw him checking out the room numbers posted on the doors that he flew by, and then come to a screeching halt before slamming into a room on their left. She heard a small scream come from the room and arrived just moments after the blonde, unsure what she'd see.

A young woman in scrubs was standing in the room, one hand over her chest and a pile of papers at her feet. It seemed that she had been a bit shocked by the beautiful and desperate Malfoy bursting into her patient's room. She quickly recovered her cool, though, and shot a demanding glance between Draco and Hermione. "Excuse me..." she started out in a slightly snotty voice.

Once again, Hermione was forced to stand in between Draco and an angry official. She placated the young doctor and tried to apologize for her companion's behaviour. Draco was already leaning over Harry's unconscious body on the bed, his hands hesitating over the small body, held back by the swarm of wires and tubes that were connected to a dizzying array of machines, all humming and beeping and respirating and measuring.

The woman frowned at the two of them but swooped down to pick up her papers from the floor. She jotted down a couple more numbers onto her chart, and then left in a huff. The door swung shut after her and Hermione sighed, then finally turned to the bed in the middle of the room. Seeing Harry lying among the hard plastic machines was too much to bear and she went around to the other side of Harry's bed to run a soft hand over his forehead. She glanced around the room and found a cheap chair to pull over to the bedside, where she sat herself down. Draco continued to stand tensely next to the bed.

Harry was lying drawn out on a starkly white hospital bed. His earlier clothes had been removed by someone and he was now clad in a thin and rough-looking hospital gown. He didn't seem improved at all, and his brilliantly green eyes were still hidden by his heavy lids.

They continued to their silent watch, each never looking away from Harry's still figure, as the sun set outside the one small window in the room. On the screen of one of the strange machines that stood over Harry, something was happening. Draco noticed and watched blankly as the blinking numbers displayed there began to climb. There was a weird squiggly line going across that screen and that seemed to be speeding up as well, rushing across the machine's front. The numbers suddenly changed from a cool green to a startling red. And that was when the alarms started.