#i don't know why it needed to be prefaced by 1k words of that but eh

[hephaestiions]

flood.

for the @drarrymicrofic prompt: flood. this is decidedly not a microfic, i am an embarrassment to the community. it is also once again, 3.08 am, so i have no idea how much sense this makes and no patience to wait till morning to post. here goes.  

TW: parent death, hospitals, seizures (non-graphic). 

The day Mother dies, things keep happening one after another.

Draco has a vague understanding— distant and loose, sand through his fingers in Santorini— that things happen one after another everyday. But knowing something all your life doesn’t really compare to the brutal moment of understanding it, really understanding it, for the first time.

For one, Mother died. Her heart gave out after one last seizure that Draco wasn’t there to see. He’d gone down to the cafeteria for a breakfast muffin, which in retrospect didn’t taste good enough for the price he paid. But then again, the last seizure couldn’t have looked very much different from the first or the twenty seventh or the one before the last, by which point Draco had lost count and sensitivity to the vision of his mother’s body curling in on itself over and over. Repeat a word enough times and it stops making sense and all that. The Mediwitches arranged her to look peaceful— possible finally— folding her hands and shutting her eyelids, stretching the skirt of the paper thin Mungo’s gown across the width of the bed like massive butterfly wings in an exhibit, polka dots and all.  

Within three hours, the solicitor sends a letter so oily that Draco compulsively washes his hands after reading it, the curling letters of venerated father’s dutiful wife aftereffects he can’t blink enough to rid himself of. The Mediwitches bring him document after document, three separate Healers pop by to offer their effusive condolences and the patient in the room next to Mother’s comes in to tell him that he had been a very good son indeed, to be so patient in his her dying days. She says it with a trembling lower lip and too-bright eyes and Draco gets the distinct feeling there is someone out there who ignores the memories of a sweet old lady with a walker she can’t quite wrangle into submission while going about their business. There’s a part of him that sneers. There’s a part of him that says fair. A third part says, I wish and Draco has to physically grip the armrests of his uncomfortable chair to not smack himself in the temple.

He smiles at the old lady, kisses her hand and signals behind her back for a passing Mediwitch to take her away.

Pansy pops up at noon in a navy suit Draco suspects she borrowed from Blaise. “I have a conference in the evening,” she says, and Draco nods. “I’ll cancel it,” she adds, and Draco shakes his head.

“It’s all under control, I assure you,” he tells her and she snorts, loud and rude and comforting, in his face.

“I assure you,” she repeats, mimicking him. “Draco, I am not your supervisor.” A few seconds of staring ensues before she tacks on, “I just don’t want you to have to do this alone.”

“I’m not—” he blurts out, before realising he is, he very much is, he has been for a week and a half, and cuts himself off. “It’s under control,” he repeats.

“So he hasn’t been around?” she asks, looking about as though expecting someone to spring from the aggressively artificial bushes in the lobby. “The bloody arsehole.”

“It really isn’t—” his chest feels tight with the intercrossing wires of too many aches, “—his place anymore.”

“Is that what you’re telling yourself?” she asks because she’s a cow without manners.

“My mother just died. I haven’t been telling myself much, I didn’t have the time.”

Pansy doesn’t have the grace to look chastened. “How long have you been here?”

“Not for very— oh.”

“Draco?”

He blinks at her. “Four days, I believe. That’s, oh. That’s quite a while, isn’t it? I thought— I hadn’t— realised.”

“Oh, for fuck’s—!”

He looks down at himself, clothes he can’t remember changing into, hands that won’t stop shaking though he can’t feel them, feet that feel swollen and raw.

“Go home,” Pansy says. Her palm against his cheek is warm and smooth and Draco notices, for the first time in a long time, how much he wants it to be large and calloused. “Darling, Draco, go home.”

“It’ll be empty.”

He hates it when her face goes that pinched. “I’m cancelling the conference.”

For a moment, Draco wants to give in. Go home with her, let her fuss and make him soup and peel him an orange and stay up the night with him, pouring out glasses of red. But he can’t.

“It’s under control,” he says again, and hopes she won’t push. She doesn’t, because she’s Pansy.

—

The first thing he notices is that the wireless is on, something about the Glasgow Cathcart by-election turnouts crackling through the speaker. Draco spends a prolonged moment wondering if four days of sleeping around pain potions has done osmotic damage to his brain. Labour holds, Draco hears before the rest is cut of in a sputter of static. The silence in the room is oppressively heavy. Harry’s hair looks messier than ever.

“Who told you?” Draco asks.

Harry’s brow crinkles. “Told me?”

“My mother—” Harry looks concerned. Draco feels wrong-footed. “No one told you? Why are you here?”

“Narcissa—?”

“She’s— No one told you. You’re— she died this morning. Heart failure. I was at Mungo’s.”

Harry’s expression goes from concern to shock to horror to a sort of complicated blankness so pathetically fake that Draco wants to shake it off. He doesn’t, standing by the Floo instead, awkward and uncertain. Harry’s here. Harry didn’t know Mother died but he’s here. Which brings him back to—

“Why are you here?”

“Because I couldn’t stay away,” Harry says, like it’s simple. He shrugs. “I tried and I couldn’t, so I came here, but you weren’t there. And I thought I’d leave, but then it looked like you hadn’t been here in a while, so I—” he breaks off. “I, well. I cleaned up. There was dust everywhere, and the post was piling up and I looked in the kitchen and you didn’t have any food, so I— Oh, God, Draco, God, are you crying?”

Draco blinks, and yes, he is in fact crying, that is what the burning in his eyes was all this while, his face is wet with it. Once the tears start, they don’t stop, soaking the skin of his throat with rivulets of salt water. Harry couldn’t stay away. Harry checked his post. He’s here.

His knees buckle and Harry’s over in a flash, holding him up and close, whispering sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry in his ear.

“I didn’t see her,” Draco says, muffled into the fist clenched in Harry’s shirt. “When she died, I was— I wasn’t there. I didn’t see her, she died alone. Merlin, I spent four days in Mungo’s and she still— she still died alone. Harry, I—”

And there, there’s the hand threading through his hair, curving around the side of his face. He’s missed this, fuck, every lonely moment sitting in uncomfortable chairs while his mother wasted away before him, he’s missed this. He allows himself to remember her now, pale and still and small, remembers the old forgotten lady in the room next to hers, remembers the terrible breakfast muffin that left crumbs all down his front and the Healer’s drawn face when she told him. Harry pulls him closer still.

Mother’s dead. Mother’s dead. The dam breaks.