I know I said I wasn't going to take this story further, but…

oooo

June 5, 2019
St. Mungo's Hospital

"'Darling,' replied Valentine, 'has not the count just told us that all human wisdom is summed up in two words? –'Wait and hope.''"

Madeleine Malfoy closed the giant book in her hands, running her fingers along the textured title on the cover. She sighed. "That's it, Dad," she said quietly. "We're done with The Count of Monte Cristo."

She looked up from her chair. Reaching out, she grabbed Draco Malfoy's limp hand with her own. "I thought maybe we could do Great Expectations next," she said conversationally. Her voice was full of forced cheer.

She deflated, and set her head down on the hospital bed that he lay in; the one that he'd been laying in for almost fifteen years. "It's my fourteenth birthday tomorrow, you know," she said. "I wish you could be here, Dad."

She let the inevitable tears leak from her eyes. The eyes of her father. She shared his hair, too. Everything else was her mother; delicate features, light golden skin that browned in the sun, a smattering of freckles on her nose. But her silver eyes and fine white-blonde hair were purely Malfoy, and she knew it was sometimes painful for her mother to look at her without being reminded of her former lover.

She listened to his steady breathing, watched the rise and fall of his breath, the flickering of his eyes beneath his closed lids. "I'll be in my fourth year at Hogwarts this year," she murmured quietly. "I'm glad I'm not the only one in our family to be in Slytherin anymore, though, since Albus was sorted last year," she said with a smile. "James will finally stop teasing me about it. I just try to keep reminding him that I'm a year older than he is, and more mature, and that he should shut his big, stupid, Gryffindor mouth." She grinned. "Although that really isn't very mature of me, is it?"

She sat in silence for a few minutes, her head still resting on the mattress of her father's bed. He was in the permanent ward here at St. Mungo's, and his room was really nice, with two extra beds for her mom and her to sleep on if they should want to stay overnight. Hermione Granger had spent less and less time there as the years had gone by; Madeleine thought that it was because she'd begun to accept that there was no hope.

He was never going to wake up.

Madeleine had known this for quite some time. Like her mother before her, she had been a rather precocious child, too smart for her own good; she'd grown into a perspicacious adolescent, and there wasn't much that the world (or her mother) could hide from her. Which was incredibly frustrating for her mom and all of her aunts and uncles, and highly amusing for Madeleine.

Still. Sometimes it was a burden to know things. She'd known since she was a child that her father had a one in a million chance of waking up from his coma, which had been caused by an unknown curse from Bellatrix Lestrange before he'd succeeded in killing her. Unfortunately the secret of her curse had died with her. When Uncle Harry and Uncle Sirius had gone back to look for him all those years ago, they'd found him next to his aunt's body. He'd muttered one last thing to the two men before he'd slipped into unconsciousness:

Take care of my daughter.

Those had been the last words he'd spoken – and were likely to be the last words he would ever speak.

Madeleine sighed tiredly, and sat up. She straightened the vase of flowers that she'd brought for him. Poppies – picked from the field behind the Burrow. Finding no more reasons to stay when she had a party to help decorate for (it was her own party, but still, she didn't trust other people to get everything right), she stood.

"Happy birthday, Dad," she said quietly, leaning down to kiss his cheek. "I'll come back to see you tomorrow night after my birthday party, all right?"

She squeezed his hand, and grabbed her book, and began to step away.

She froze. She thought she felt…but no. She'd imagined him squeezing her hand a million times before, and it always turned out to be nothing. It was stupid and irrational to delude herself with hope where there very obviously was none to be had –

There. There it was again. Madeleine dropped her book and turned, her heart pounding in her chest. She wasn't imagining it. He was squeezing her fingers. Almost painfully. It was real, she wasn't imagining things.

His body shuddered. Her eyes jumped to his face. His eyelids fluttered, and then two hazy grey eyes were blinking up at her. Madeleine sucked in a harsh, stuttering breath.

"Dad?"