P/N: Here is the wonderful part 5. College has claimed my friend as its own for now. Hopefully, however, this is well-worth the wait, and hopefully not too many typos. I know that this story keeps getting more and more enjoyable for me. Reviews are always appreciated! I would love to hear what people think about Lily's POV in particular. And also, would there be interest in reading a little side story that alludes to future events? Leave comments! I forward them to the author so they are always read and enjoyed.
Lily woke slowly. She was aware that she was moving, that the blankets were hugging her tight like a cocoon, that the violently orange walls of Rose's room (which she always borrowed now that Rose was in school) had changed to tope and now to blue. But it was the warm that really woke her, made her understand that she had been lifted from her bed and was being carried down the stairs. It was the warm, the tide of assured breaths, the steady thrust of a heartbeat against her cheek. But mostly it was the warm that came from someone else holding her up.
For a moment, Lily thought it must be her father because he was usually the one to carry her when she couldn't walk. But he was away carrying Al, so it must be Ron. But she wasn't close enough to the ceiling for it to be Ron… they didn't have to duck under the hall chandelier. And anyway, she thought as they negotiated the steps and she was jostled enough to make her teeth click, Ron was better at carrying people.
"You need practice," she complained in a mumble, hiding from the glowing light of the kitchen in the flannel shirt of her captor.
"Hey, pumpkin. Didn't think you were awake."
Lily caught a flash of turquoise and sparkling tawny eyes. " 'm not, really."
She could hear the laughter in Teddy's breath, even if he was quiet.
"Where we goin'?"
"Home."
"How come?"
"Aw, come on. You know."
"'m tired, Teddy."
"Al's coming home today, squirt, remember?"
And suddenly Lily was awake. She lay just as limply in Teddy's arms, let her eyes flutter as if she still slept, but energy seeped through her, made her skin hum. Al was coming home today.
XxXxX
"Oy, Malfoy! Had a row with your girlfriend, did ya?"
A pillow smacked into Scorpius's face.
"She's not my girlfriend," he muttered sleepily, shoving the pillow away.
"Well she's definitely your problem. She's camped outside the common room! How're we supposed to keep our password secret, huh? You want her and Potter creeping in here with half of Gryffindor? Not to mention how many people'll go blind if that's the first thing they gotta see in the morning."
"Stuff it, Montague," Scorpius snapped, already scrambling out of bed.
The other boy shot Scorpius a sneer. "Just get her off our doorstep."
Scorpius was out of the dormitory in three seconds flat, barely stopping to grab his wand. The dungeons were always freezing this time of year and the icy stone bit into his bare feet, but it was worth it to get away from Montague quicker. What on earth was Rose doing down here this early? Causing him problems, he thought. That was usually what she was doing, stubborn and uppity and –
"What's wrong?"
The moment the stone wall opened, it was the most obvious question in the world. Because she wasn't pacing or fuming or red-faced or ranting or even looking impatient. She was huddled against the opposite wall, and when she raised her face from her knees, her eyes were red, her skin pale and blotchy, and when she looked at him, her lip trembled. A page torn from a magazine was clutched in her hand.
XxXxX
Dominique waited on the edge of the Quidditch pitch. She didn't know what else to do but wait. The Slytherin team was shooting warm-ups as the rest of the student body crammed itself into the stands. Fry and Bell waited silently in the locker room, brooms over their shoulders. They didn't ask questions, but their silent conversation drilled into Dominique's skull. They'd no doubt heard she'd kicked James off the team yesterday, and Al's absence had buzzed around the school all week, but Rose was never even late for practice and Fred looked forward to games like Christmas.
She didn't know what she was doing down here. She'd come because when she forced her thoughts away from that article, from that practice exactly a week ago, from James by the lake yesterday, all there was was getting ready for the match. But there would be no match, Dominique knew. How could there be a match when Albus was in some Muggle hospital somewhere?
But the rest of the school was expecting a match, so what else could she do but wait?
XxXxX
"James?"
He should have picked a better hiding spot, James thought, pulling his sheets over his head. The rasp of his four-poster's curtains dragged against his ears. He felt Fred sit down on the foot of his bed. Then there was silence. James could practically feel Fred wrestling with the air for words, but there was nothing left to say. He'd figured that out last night. Molly had half-dragged him back to the castle, nattering on about advancements in healing and half a dozen other things that didn't even make a dent in the looming darkness. There was just nothing left to say.
Eventually Fred seemed to realize this, too. Or maybe he just gave up. James felt his weight vanish from the end of the bed. Beneath the rasp of the curtains blocking out the day again, he thought he might have heard, "I'm sorry."
James rolled over to stare at the chink of sunlight that still boldly pushed its way into the gloom. Well, maybe there had been just that one last thing.
XxXxX
Ginny leaned against the bed rail as a nurse carefully pulled the last of the tubes from her son's arms and chest. He lay very still, eyes open, gazing at nothing over her head. Over the past week, there had been an IV poking into his elbow, getting in the way when he tried to grab something with his left hand, knocking over his orange juice as he tried to eat what passed for food in this place. There had been stickers on his chest, irritating him as he tried to get comfortable, feeding his heartbeat and breathing back to monitors that beeped a constant rhythm. He had more than once threatened to rip them away himself out of sheer annoyance, but now that he was free of his bondage, he didn't move at all.
"You're all set, then," the nurse said cheerfully, gathering Albus's chart. "You've got your homework?"
Ginny waved the thick packet of information they'd equipped her with, outlining all the dos and don'ts for chemo patients, what things were normal and what should incite panic, etc. Everything they'd told her but anticipated and excused her lack of attention given the chemicals they had been pouring into her child's veins at the time.
"Alright, then we'll see you next Friday for round two of this party," the nurse said, smiling at Al. He just blinked slowly at her. She patted his shoulder sympathetically, surprised Ginny with a one-armed hug, and left them for Al to get changed.
Harry had gone to pull the car around, so Ginny was left on her own to negotiate the departure procedure.
"Come on, then. Let's get you out of that gown and into some real clothes," she said, coming around the bed and automatically parroting the nurse's chipper voice.
Albus didn't move. Ginny bent and gathered the fresh change of clothes she'd grabbed out of his closet the day before. She sat on the edge of the bed and tugged gently at the papery garment Albus had so loathed the first few days. By yesterday, he'd been too nauseous to care what they put him in.
"Come on, darling," she coaxed, beginning to unfold the Chudley Cannons sweatshirt Ron had given him for his birthday in August.
Slowly, as if testing to see if his bones and muscles would hold, Albus sat up and slid his arms out of the gown, diving into the sweatshirt. It seems to swallow him. Ginny let him do the rest, politely looking up at the ceiling, but keeping her hands on his shoulders to steady him. She watched him look around the bleached hospital room, then toward the door he was now allowed to walk through on the condition that he would be back in a week for more. She heard him heave a sigh and then he started for the corridor.
XxXxX
The stands were nearly overflowing. The Slytherin team had landed and was waiting expectantly for them across the field. Anna Colter, the usual commentator, was listing off player stats for the crowd as they waited more and more impatiently for a team Dominique knew was not on its way. She looked over her shoulder at Bell and Fry in the empty locker room, the missing players suddenly seeming ghostly in their absence.
It was her first game as captain. It was her chance to prove herself. But a forfeit wouldn't crush her today. She wouldn't even feel it under the ten tons of pressure that already seemed to be squeezing Dominique's lungs.
She loved flying more than anything else, but she knew if she kicked off today, she would do something she never did and despised on principal; she would burst into tears. Cataclysmic events were about the only things that could cancel a Quidditch match, and to ask to reschedule now, the world would need to be ending. She took a breath and squared her shoulders, preparing to plead her case.
XxXxX
"I don't understand," Scorpius mumbled, rubbing his forehead as he stared down at the book Rose had found in the library. She held it on her knees, clutching the covers as if it were a life raft keeping her afloat, a blanket of comfort.
Apparently she hadn't slept at all last night. She'd borrowed Al's invisibility cloak, which was still in his trunk in his dormitory, and done the one thing Rose Weasley believed could solve any problem: scoured the library. She'd found one book in the Muggle Studies section titled A Comparison of Medicine and Healing. There was one slim chapter discussing cancer, which before half an hour ago, Scorpius had barely even heard of.
Rose pulled the book closer to her, chewing her lip. "I don't really either. There isn't much about leukemia…."
But the truth was, Scorpius didn't want to understand. This wasn't supposed to happen. People didn't just get sick like this. Not kids anyway. There were fifty-seven trained Healers at St. Mungo's. No one could tell him that not one of them knew how to fix this.
His insides felt hollow. There was something – a truth at the edge of his brain – that he was refusing to acknowledge. He and Rose stared down at the book together, gazing blankly at the black-and-white pages. The answers were not there.
Abruptly, Scorpius jumped to his feet.
Rose blinked up at him, confused and for some reason looking a little hurt. "Where are you going?"
"There's a letter I've got to send. Promised my dad," Scorpius mumbled.
Actually, he hadn't promised his father anything. In fact, it had been a long time since they'd had anything more than superficial conversation. Scorpius tried not to assign blame for that, to decide which one had pulled away first. But this transcended old family rivalries and petty embarrassments. He needed his father's advice and reassurance, and this time, he was ready to listen.
XxXxX
"What do you think? How does that look?"
Teddy shook his long mane of purple hair out, flipping it over his shoulder for Lily's amusement.
"Nearly perfect," she declared, climbing up on the sofa behind him and gathering the locks into a ponytail. She clipped a flower onto the end and loosed a few strands to fall about his face in what he imagined she thought looked like the blokes on the covers of her mother's sappy romance novels. Then she leaned over his shoulder for her silver mirror, nearly falling face-first into the carpet.
Teddy grinned when she held it up, smirking.
"Lovely," he laughed, reaching back to pull her upside-down over his shoulder. She tumbled into his lap, luminous flowered skirt pooling around her and clashing loudly with her orange-stripped sweater.
He had pulled out all the stops that morning. They'd made chocolate cake for breakfast and finger painted on the walls. He'd even flipped her up on his shoulders so she could leave blue footprints along the kitchen ceiling. He'd read from her illustrated collection of Muggle fairytales, changing his features to resemble those of the characters and even doing the voices. And now he was letting her play make-over. He was spoiling her – which, admittedly, he'd always been inclined to do – because it kept them both from thinking about what they were waiting for.
But just as Lily settled on his knees, armed with eye-shadow and glitter, they heard the swish of a car in the drive. They both froze, heads swiveling toward the kitchen.
"Lily –"
But she was up in a bound, makeup forgotten on the living room rug. Teddy scrambled up to follow her, wiping the lip gloss off his mouth and pulling the flower pin out of his hair as he changed it back to short and turquoise. Lily had jumped up on the counter and was peering cautiously through the curtained window, a rabbit spying from its burrow. Teddy went to look over her shoulder.
The Potters' clunky blue automobile (the opposite of what Harry's uncle had driven in his youth) had stopped alongside the freestanding garage. The front doors opened, and Harry and Ginny got out. They looked tired and worn, and Teddy fancied he could see new wrinkles on their faces. Harry retrieved a couple of bags from the trunk as Ginny opened the back door and leaned down.
Teddy hadn't seen Albus since his twelfth birthday back in August, just before school started. He and James and Albus had spent the afternoon playing a rough game of footie. They'd forgone the rules and tackled each other into the soft grass with sheer force, kicking the ball hard enough to leave welts against each other's shins and chasing breathlessly from one end of the yard to the other. It had left them sore and gasping and laughing in a heap by the end of it with no idea who won or even who was on whose team.
That was barely two and a half months ago, but the kid carefully sliding out of the backseat now could not have been more different from the summer-browned, lightning-fast whirl of energy that had managed to knock Teddy to the ground with wild shouts of victory. This kid was white and unsteady on his feet, leaning heavily on his mother as they made their way to the house. This kid seemed to swim in clothes that hung off him. His usually-wild hair was matted to his forehead, and he looked exhausted. This kid had a half-healed bruise painted on his face.
Harry reached the backdoor first, pulled it open, and dropped the bags inside. Without a word, Lily jumped off the counter and flew into her father's arms. He hugged her fiercely and kissed the crown of her head, but gently disentangled himself to help Ginny with Al.
Teddy didn't know what to do with himself. He felt like a gawking audience watching them settle Al into a chair at the table, handling him carefully. Albus immediately buried his face in his folded arms, and only then did Ginny turn to Lily.
"Hey, baby girl," she said, offering her daughter a smile that seemed strung too tightly as she scooped Lily into a tight embrace. Lily's eyes did not leave her brother.
Harry noticed Teddy. "Hey, mate," he said, stepping forward to clap Teddy's shoulder. "Thanks for picking her up…."
Teddy nodded. He didn't want to stare, but he felt like if he looked away from Albus, he might vanish. He realized that since Harry and Ginny had first explained what was happening to him on Sunday night, Albus had haunted his thoughts. To have him solidly in the same room had become a strange experience. A thick silence settled among them. Albus sat up and leaned back in his chair, shifting his back against the bars and staring down at his fingers. A tinge of pink had crept into his cheeks and Teddy was sure he could feel them all looking.
Harry cleared his throat, taking the situation in hand. "Well, I dunno about you, but I'm starved," he said, turning to rummage in a cupboard. "What d'you suppose we'll have for lunch? Al? Anything you're hungry for?"
Albus shook his head quickly, looking queasy.
"Alright, Lil, guess it's up to you."
But Lily had climbed into her mother's lap and was too busy gazing at Albus to answer. Harry pulled out the first thing his hand touched and began clanging dishes, pulling down bowls and a kettle, filling the room with noise. Teddy drifted out of his way and came to join the rest at the table, deciding to take Harry's lead.
"Hey, kiddo," he said, pulling up a chair beside Al and resting a hand on his shoulder. He didn't know what to say next. He couldn't ask if Albus was alright. He couldn't ask what he'd been up to, how his friends were, what James's last detention had been for. He didn't know how to talk to him.
"Hey, Teddy," Albus murmured, glancing at him out of the corners of his eyes. He fidgeted a little bit more, then looked up at his mother. "Think I'll go up to bed. Kinda tired."
"Alright," Ginny said, getting up at once and sliding Lily to the floor.
"I can do it," Al told her when she tried to help him, sounding just a little like the belligerent preteen he should have been as he pushed her hands away. Ginny watched him slowly mount the stairs with an anxious expression.
The moment they heard his bedroom door close, Teddy breathed a sigh of relief. Harry dropped the pretenses of cooking, sagging against the counter. Lily had retreated under the table and peered out at them like a cat that had been made skittish. Teddy looked from Harry to Ginny to the stairs.
"How –" he faltered. "How is he?"
Instead of answering, Harry knelt down and pulled Lily gently out from her hiding place.
"Hey, bud," he murmured. "Why don't you go upstairs and paint us a picture, hm?"
"I don't want to," Lily told him. Her brown eyes were wide, earnest pools.
"What about your stretches? Don't you need to practice for dance class?"
Lily threw herself into his shoulder, wrapping her arms around his neck in a Devil's Snare grip. Harry closed his eyes, but pulled free and nudged Lily toward the stairs.
"Go on to your room, love. I'll come get you for lunch. It'll be something you like."
Lily ducked her head and padded silently after Albus, shutting her door with hardly a noise.
Teddy felt his stomach twist as Harry dropped into a chair beside Ginny, dropped like he physically could not keep himself up any longer.
"It's not as bad as it could be," he began, looking at somberly at Teddy. "But it's not as good either."
XxXxX
Albus rolled onto his bed and stared at yet another ceiling. He was sick of lying in bed, but he felt too rotten to do much else. In a small show of rebellion, he didn't crawl under the covers. He'd just rest for a minute or two, let his stomach settle from the long car ride, and then get up and… do what? Go back downstairs and make everybody move as if the room were made of china?
He rolled over and pounded a frustrated fist into the mattress. He understood why his parents treated him like glass, why Teddy and Lily couldn't find words, couldn't stop ogling him like some foreign creature had come back in his place. But he hated it. He hated feeling fragile, hated every gesture being too gentle to be normal and every voice too soft around the edges. He hated knowing that they were talking about him in hushed, somber tones. He hated knowing that this had only just begun.
XxXxX
They tried to keep them tied down in the kitchen, but their whispers snuck up the stairs anyway. By the time they reached the cupboard where all the extra blankets made a nest to hide in, the words were blurred and faint, but they were still painted black. Lily wished they'd go away. She burrowed into the comforters and wished the whispers would just leave her alone. If she couldn't hear the real words, she didn't want to see their shadows circling like dark birds around her.
They would trap her in here, Lily realized with a sudden jolt. They were already gathering in the hall, flapping their wings against the door. A few had slid in through the cracks and were batting at her hair. If she stayed here, they would trap her, a dark mass keeping the door stuck fast. Suddenly the air seemed to stifling. She was afraid of them, afraid of tumbling out into their midst, but if she did not do it now, she would be lost forever here in the blankets.
So Lily took a great breath and flung the door open. She rolled onto the carpet, hiding her face from their scratching claws, but they just flapped at her with their wings, fluttering around her like a swarm of butterflies. She could feel the whispers lighting on her spine, crawling up her neck, and she scrambled away, squeezing through the first exit she could find.
Albus jerked upright when she snapped his door shut, like he was a marionette whose strings had been tied to the knob. Lily froze, caught in the beam of his gaze. She was not allowed to be in here. She was sure of it, even though no one had said so. She could feel the way the Silence had wrapped around this room. That must be why it couldn't keep the whispers away any longer, she realized. But she'd slipped through its defenses.
"What are you doing?" Albus asked, raising his eyebrows. He looked like Albus, but he was different. Everyone was different.
Lily pulled her knees into her skirt and rolled along the floor slowly, jerkily, rocking back and forth to gain enough momentum for each new turn. She knew the bedpost was coming, but didn't stop until she'd smacked into it and bounced back. She lay like turtle on its shell, gazing up at Al. Her brother stared down at her, completely bemused.
"You are so weird," he told her irritably, shaking his head.
In a flurry of skirts, Lily scrambled up onto his bed, looking quickly to the door to be sure the whispers hadn't found their way under it. She perched on the bedpost, deciding to keep watch, just in case they tried to get in. She didn't know if Al could fight them off himself.
He looked sick, now. That wasn't how it was supposed to work. People went to the hospital looking terrible and came back looking better. It was backwards with Al. She wondered why her parents had let him go in the first place.
"Lily," Albus began, sliding down the bed to look at her. "What do you want?"
Lily snuck a glance out of the corner of her eyes, but said nothing. She wanted lots of things. So many that they got caught in her throat, pebbles that cut into her esophagus and scraped it raw, made it hard to drag breath in. Albus poked her in the side.
"Come on, out with it," he said impatiently.
Lily batted away his hand and squinted. A black wing had flicked like the tongue of a snake under the door. Then another along the top. They were coming through. They must be after her. She'd led them here. And suppose Albus couldn't fight them away? Suppose they landed on his bruise and in the dark bags under his eyes and covered him all the way? She was only a small girl, after all, a squirt, like Teddy called her. What if –
But suddenly she was being pulled backwards off her precarious perch, landing against a soft sweatshirt, and Albus's fingers scrabbled over her belly, light, gentle wings. She couldn't help the laugh that bubbled up, clearing its way through her windpipe and bursting out of her mouth like bubbles. She gasped, marveling at how easy it was to breathe, suddenly.
"You're such a weirdo," Albus told her again, but he grinned down at her.
And suddenly Lily realized what had been off. The world wasn't altogether changed, it had just been tilted. And if she tilted with it, it was just like she remembered. She turned her head into Al's chest and felt a hard bump that wasn't a bone press against her cheek. But if she pretended she didn't, like she sometimes pretended the neighbor was an alien or that the apple tree in the back garden went up to the moon, if she pretended nothing was wrong, than nothing would be wrong anymore.
XxXxX
Nausea rolled over him like a sea. Albus lay perfectly still in his dark bedroom, eyes closed, willing the world not to spin. In a half-dazed stupor, the beach at Shell Cottage came back to him. When he was nine, Louis and Dominique had taught him how to body surf. The cold, salty water washed over him, pushing him up and plunging him down between swelling walls of turquoise water. He slipped on the slick rocks littering the sea floor and suddenly he wasn't high enough. The wave crashed over him, rolling back in confused tumble of limbs and bubbles, and before he could do much more than find the surface and spit out water, another wave slammed him back. Again and again, the sheer strength of a great, powerful force he'd been foolish enough to think he understood and could navigate twisted him in its grasp.
Albus rolled out of bed and stumbled to the door. There was no time to call for his mother, to even turn on a light. He slid on his knees across the bathroom tiles and began to heave and choke, bile burning his throat and still feeling as if the sea were tumbling him.
XxXxX
"Morning," Ginny said, jumping up the moment she spotted Al in the doorway.
He gave her a wary look as he took the chair beside Lily, who was finger-painting her toast with raspberry jam. To cover her movement, Ginny swept to the stove and heaped a bowl with oatmeal. As she set it down in front of him, she ran her hand through his hair. In a few weeks, it would be gone.
"How did you sleep?" she asked, trying not to sound anxious.
He shrugged, dragging the spoon unenthusiastically through his breakfast.
"Do you feel alright? The nurses told me it's very common to have nausea –"
"I'm fine,"Albus interrupted and bent low over his bowl as he began to eat. "Where's Dad?"
"He went to talk to Ron and Hermione," Ginny explained, reluctantly returning to her own chair.
Silence fell. The l: ast week had been a study of silences for Ginny. There were heavy, black silences in which bad news coiled like a serpent. There were fragile silences holding back all the torrents of things that shouldn't be said. The silence of a sleeping child was like velvet, soft, thick, hushed, and the silence of a waking child was cotton in the wind, too cold and insubstantial. There were silences for moments words could not fill: Is he…? How will we…? What did I…? And then there are the places silence arches because ordinary words aren't where they should be.
For the first time, Ginny noticed the absence of Lily's continual chatter.
XxXxX
The Burrow had rarely been so full, yet so quiet. As they each appeared in the back garden and began making their way to the door, everyone seemed to feel the somberness gathered like snow on the roof and porch railings, drifting against the doors and windows. Even the frosted grass forewent crunching beneath their shoes.
Sunday lunch, a weekly habit going back nearly twenty years to the time they had needed to see each other's faces every seven days at least to assure themselves everything was truly alright, had become significantly less chaotic as each new school year claimed more grandchildren. But this kind of order was unheard of. Plates and glasses sat empty, food untouched. Mr. and Mrs. Weasley sat at either end of the table, and between them, side by side, heads bent like children expecting reprimands, were Bill and Fleur, Percy and Audrey, George and Angelina, and Ron.
Murmurs skirted the table, ripples on water. Ron could feel every eye darting to him and kept his gaze on his spoon, as if fascinated by the shrunk, upside-down reflection of the room. He could hear Hermione settling Hugo upstairs, both knowing he'd sneak down to eavesdrop the moment she left. He wished she'd hurry and also wished she'd stay up there all afternoon, forestalling the moment another week or two or three.
But he'd promised Harry this morning that they would handle this, promised because in all the time he'd known him – in all the variations of Hell they'd gone through – he had never seen a look like that on his best friend's face. For once, he could do the difficult task. Harry was asking it of him. So he would.
Hermione slid into the chair beside him, and it was like a circuit had been completed, a charge of energy pulsing through them. Every head – his parents' along with all the rest – turned toward them.
Ron took a moment to gather the words, wondering what they already knew. His mother looked like a sleep walker sitting at her own table. His father was grim-faced. Fleur was blinking furiously. Yes, she had definitely read the magazine, knew something of what was coming. Bill frowned, pulling the scars across his face into deep ruts. The other four, though, shared the same nervous awareness, perched on the edge of a chasm they knew was there but couldn't see.
Percy, who had never been good with silence, broke it first. "Where're Ginny and Harry? And Lily?"
A few eyes flicked to the empty chairs standing against the wall. They'd all been acutely aware of them, but no one had asked. Ron took a breath, clutching at the starting point Percy had offered him.
"They… they're at home," he began unclimatically. "I expect they'll be missing the next few Sundays, too. Something's… happened."
Good lord, he was dreadful at this. All the sentences he'd carefully pieced together as he'd waited had disintegrated in the hot rush of his breath. His chest felt too tight to speak, and he looked at Hermione for help, but she was carefully stacking her silverware. He cleared his throat and leaned forward, bracing his elbows on the table.
"You know Harry and Ginny got called up to the school last Sunday? It was because Al… he's sick."
In a low, methodic sort of voice, Ron recounted an edited summary of what he knew had happened in the last week. He skimmed over the medical details that he himself barely grasped after being submerged in them for days, carefully not looking at any of them lest he lose his thread and not be able to find it again.
"Basically," he found himself saying at last, hoarse from talking. "There's good news and there's bad news. The cancer hasn't spread to other systems, which is good, but it's progressed fairly quickly, which is… not so good. They've classified him as a moderate-risk case. Which means…." And here, Ron paused, still reeling from this last statistic. "His chances of survival are just over fifty percent."
And after that, he couldn't have spoken another word if he'd wanted to. His voice had just stopped. Cautiously, he looked up at his family. Apparently, he wasn't the only one rendered mute.
XxXxX
James lay on his back, feeling the freezing cold of the astronomy tower stones seeping through his cloak. One hand was behind his head, and in the other rested a heavy coin. There was a metallic ching as he flipped it skyward, a glint of gold as it spun. He did it again and again, counting the number of times it landed showing the profile of some famous politician or the triple M insignia of the Ministry. After close to a hundred tosses, he paused, weighing the coin in his palm.
Heads, Al lives.
He snapped his wrist and the coin flew skyward, then plummeted, striking his hand sharply on landing. His fingers closed over it. He closed his eyes, feeling the metal burning through his skin. Then he flung the coin over the lip of the stone wall with all his might.