This Doesn't Feel Real [closed]
It had been a little less than a week since his mother was attacked. The best and most attentive Healers were at her side day and night, new Potions hooked up to her veins every two hours, keeping her stable but the wounds weren't yet close to fixing themselves. It was frustrating and terrifying, Jonah never this close to tragedy before. All of his
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Romilda Vane's fear-mongering article, however, had definitely been making the water cooler rounds.
And she had ignored it, for the most part, as best as she could. Compartmentalization was a useful skill, and so all talks of werewolves and potential attacks and eminent danger were shoved right alongside those lingering anxieties that had sprung up after that disastrously interrupted not-quite-a-birthday-party evening last month, locked away and blocked out and covered up with paperwork.
She had been halfway through the lengthy deciphering of a messily scribbled report from years ago which was apparently being called into question with relation to an upcoming case when her usual razor-sharp focus caught its edge on one particular attention-grabbing name being passed around a conversation being conducted two desks over.
"-heard about that Muggle woman Linney's married to? Brutal, that is. Vane's been perfectly giddy-"
As quiet as the incident had mostly been kept, it hadn't taken long for Ella to wrangle up the general details of what ended up being some twisted realization of some of her worst fears.
It had taken her another few days of alternatively battling nerves (too close to home, too helpless, too generally painful, can'tcan'tcan't) and guilt (too many days without a word, too many empty apologies, nothing to be done about it) before she found herself making her way across town to the hospital, tuned in to autopilot as she let her feet carry her to the street-side, (newly re-)charmed entrance, then to the assistants' station for directions and a room assignment.
She didn't quite feel herself settling back into her own bones (chilled as they were by both the continually conditioned air of the hospital and its eerie, numbing sort of quality) until she was peaking in through the crack of the slightly open door, then feeling her stomach drop far enough to seemingly knock against her heels at the sight she caught - Rowan's still, bandaged form laying between stiff patterned sheets, an array of potions dripping around her...and Jonah's hunched over figure, all frazzled hair and wrinkled clothes, a visible tension present in the slope of his shoulders and the angled profile she could see from her lingering spot at the door.
It took a few more moments of mustering up the nerve for it, but Ella finally, slowly padded inside, both somewhat glad and heartbroken over the fact that Jonah didn't bother to tear his attention away from his mother until she was carefully taking a seat next to him.
"Hey-" The word was low and quiet, somehow still too loud in the context of this room and heavy with apology, and it wasn't nearly enough, but it was all she could manage as she flicked a hesitant look up at Jonah.
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His voice was shaky, throat hoarse from crying, maybe or just sitting there in the over-conditioned hallways. He hadn't expected to see Ella here, knowing that her brother died in a fashion very similar to this, knowing that (as far as Ava explained), it wasn't something she was at all comfortable talking about. She still hadn't mentioned it to him. And that was something he was alright with, that he understood. Especially now, the burden of having to explain to people what happened, how tight his voice grew or how shaky his hands went whenever it happened.
But she was here. It didn't matter how long his mother had been in the hospital or how long it had been since he'd last seen her.
She was here.
He turned to face her, his hand reaching to brush back through her hair, his heart still pounding in his chest as he pressed his lips to her cheek.
"You didn't have to come," he told her, as he pulled back just slightly. "I mean- I know that it can't be easy-"
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"I should've come sooner- I didn't-" Didn't know, then didn't know when, didn't know how-
She pulled back just enough to catch his eye, fingers lightly curling through the disheveled curls at the back of his head. "Jonah, I'm so sorry- is she-?" She left the question hanging, flicking a quick look at the eerily still figure of the woman laid out across the bed, a stranger to her in nearly every way, yet the sight of those thickly wrapped bandages had her stomach uncomfortably twisting with dread and worry.
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He sounded frustrated. Well, he was. Of all the potions and all the antidotes, there was nothing that was really working. A few ointments kept the wounds clean and stopped the bleeding, herbal remedies. But he could hear the Healers when they talked to his father. "She's a Muggle, Mister Linney. She doesn't have the same magical ties that we do-" as if that was meant to help them feel better, as if that would at all ease their mind when their wife, their mother, their aunt was just laying there in some sort of strange slumber.
He tilted his head down, his hand reaching for hers. He didn't realize how much he needed her here with him until she came. Just the warmth of her hand was enough to make him catch his breath.
He didn't say anything for a moment.
He just sat there, comforted by her presence beside him, wondering when this whole nightmare was going to end, when he was going to wake up.
"Thank you-" he said, after a moment. "I can't sit here alone like this anymore-"
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There was something entirely too familiar about this - the sitting and the waiting and the silent hopes and prayers and pleading, the still stiffness of sheets and the slow drip of potions, and the dribble of news neither good nor bad as things simply hung in the balance, as likely to tip one way as they were the other.
She didn't actually remember the scales tipping the last time she been in a room like this. Time and shock and stubbornness had done a good job of wiping most of it from her memory, of burying it down where it wouldn't be a constant haunt or fear. But there was something entirely too familiar about the exhausted, drawn frustration she saw on Jonah's face, and she would have given anything to be able to assure him that everything would be fine-
But all she could do was tightly grip at his hand, and simply be there, and ignore that itching instinct that scratched at the back of her mind and pulled at those buried memories and emotions and needed to not be here-
"Are you-" No, Merlin, clearly, of course, he wasn't okay. "Have you- do you need anything? What can I do?"
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Marlow had taken an earlier shift in the morning before Jonah finally pushed her to go. She'd already been on the brink as it was before all this had happened, and it killed him to see it all come crashing back down on her when she was just starting to make some progress.
His dad hadn't left the hospital room.
His whole family was turned upside in a matter of a bloody minute.
"You're here-" he said. "Honestly, after everything, that's enough-"
He rested his forehead against her shoulder.
"I don't know what I'm doing, Ella."
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But this, the crack and desperation in his voice, and the way he all but sank into himself as he leaned in against her, had her chasing her breath and her heart clenching in completely different ways.
She reached up to curl a hand around the back of his neck, turning to softly press her lips to side of his head. "You're doing the only thing you can do- I'm so sorry- I know it's not- she'll be alright- if she's made it this far, it's just a matter of time, yeah?"
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But Jonah hadn't ever been able to properly say anything to her. Not really. Not unless he was in a group situation with Skylar, her prodding him to say something.
He never expected that the two of them would end up in this, this sort of mess of feelings and dizziness whenever he was around her.
"Yeah-"
He lingered there in the crook of her neck, the pressure that had buried on his head lifting slightly. His mother was tougher than anyone he knew, a Muggle living in a weird magical world and somehow always coming out on top. If anyone could survive what had happened, it was her.
It had to be her.
"Thank you for being here," he said, lifting his head up slowly, eyes blinking away the glistening pooling within them.
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She leaned in to press a soft brush of a kiss below his eye, swiping her thumb across the line of his cheekbone.
"Of course- I'll stay as long as you need-"
However reluctant she had been to step foot inside the hospital, to be trapped within walls that held nothing but heartache and buried memories, there was nothing now that could draw her back out so long as Jonah was here and his mother laid on that bed.
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He had broken nearly every bone in both of his legs and he dislocated his shoulder. But he had been in a daze, not a single tear falling the entire time. All the Healers had been shocked and surprised, Marlow in a huff that he was just playing tough in front of the cute ward.
But it wasn't an emotion that came to him very easily. He was awkward in even the most average of situations. Crying just didn't come naturally to him.
Not until he walked into St. Mungo's and saw the condition his mother was in.
And then he completely lost it.
"I'm sorry-" he said, then, sucking in a breath. "I can't imagine being here is easy for you-"
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No one in their right mind found hospitals particularly easy. But there was something more personal rather than general about the unnecessary apology, a more pointed acknowledgement, considering the particulars of this whole mess of a heartbreaking situation, than she really didn't know what to do with.
As far as she knew, there was no reason why Jonah should know. It had been a messy time when she had found herself in this sort of room, the pages of the Prophet filled with more casualties than headlines, panic and worry running rampant. Back then, little Atticus James would have been just another name on a long list-
Ella never talked about AJ for a variety of reasons. Because no one needed to know. Because talking wouldn't change or fix anything. Because everyone had suffered during, and before, and after, the war, and her family's grief deserved no particular attention nor pity. Because talking about it made it that much harder to generally ignore.
It had been years. And she had dealt with it, despite the fact that her preferred method of 'dealing' involved a very intensive and purposeful lack thereof.
And while no, there was nothing easy about finding herself in that same sort of stiff-backed seat she had curled up in all those years ago, it wasn't about to stop her from being here, in the present rather than the past, next to the one person whom she most desperately hoped would be spared from that kind of pain.
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And now- as they sat here outside of his mother's hospital room, Jonah's whole body and mind out of whack, he knew this was the exact last moment he should ever bring it up.
It could wait.
But something els couldn't. Not when his mother's life had fallen into danger in the blink of an eye.
"I love you," he said, the words catching in his throat.
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She didn't expect the way her heart seemed to stop altogether for an extended moment before picking up again at twice its normal speed, or the flush of warmth that started at the pit of her stomach and quickly rushed up to her cheeks.
Or the way the words so easily clicked in her mind and slipped right off her tongue in return. Without thinking about it, without mulling it over through a system of analytical considerations and rational reasonings, that unnamed flutter the sight or feel or thought of Jonah had taken to setting off in her suddenly figured itself out-
"Jonah- I love you-" She wasn't entirely sure she had said it out loud for a moment, hushed as it had been, drowned out by the pulsing sound of blood pounding in her ears.
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He never thought he'd end up with Ella in this way but he couldn't imagine being here with anyone else.
"Merlin-" he breathed, tears brimming in his eyes again. "I don't know what I'd do without you here-"
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However long it took, she had accumulated enough unspent vacation and personal days to practically be able to take a month off of work without repercussions. If Jonah planned on sitting vigil until his mother woke up, then she wasn't going to let him do it alone any longer than she already had.
Though, judging from the state of him, she was half considering dragging him away already for the sake of forcing him to sleep in something more comfortable than a hospital waiting room for at least a few hours-
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But he was exhausted and with Ella sitting here beside him now, it was taking all of his energy not to just rest his head on her shoulder and pass out right then and there.
He rubbed at his face, sucking in a breath. He had to keep himself together. Nothing was going to benefit from him falling apart all over his girlfriend in the middle of a bloody hallway waiting room.
"You um- you want coffee or something?" he said, then, offering her a sort of weak half smile. "I think I could go for a cup, myself-"
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