Snapshots: Maternity
Dec. 20th, 2008 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
“Well, when can I take him home?” The Healer refuses to meet her eyes. Good. He should be ashamed of his clumsy bungling. She’s been waiting all day for an answer and Rigel hadn’t even been cut up all that badly. She’s seen much worse on Lucius and Sirius and they’ve always pulled through without a trip to St. Mungo’s. But Rigel has lain on her bed, so white and still and the Healer still won’t answer. “Well?”
“Mrs. Lestrange, I’m afraid…”
“What? What is it, fool? Speak up!”
“Bella, dearest, you’re scaring the poor man.” Dorea Potter emerges from the ward her son is in. They haven’t let her through the door all day. Not once.
“How did you get in there?”
“Dearest, you know I’ve volunteered here ever since they healed Charlus after he nearly lost his leg.” Dorea loosens the fingers of her pristine white gloves, infuriatingly, maddeningly calm. No more than usual, really, she knows that. But her son’s lying in there. Her son, damn it.
“How… how’s my Rigel?”
“I’m so sorry, dearest.” The elegant face crumples momentarily and she knows she’d be fooled by it if she hadn’t learnt to replicate it by the time she was ten. “So very sorry, my Bella. He’s dead.”
For a moment, just one, she freezes and there’s nothing in world except her beautiful son’s face. Then the quiet glance that passes between Dorea and the Healer registers, as does the way the man slips away. “You hag! You old crone! You had my son killed! How could you? How dare you!” Her wand. Where in all hells is her wand? A knife would do. Anything sharp. She’s going to tear her apart. Her son…
“Bella, calm yourself.” The mild voice snaps her back to reality and, oh, Dorea Potter is still alive, still perfect, still talking to her in a tone reserved for ill-mannered children. “Of course I did not have Rigel killed. I only came to this ward ten minutes ago. He was already half-dead by then. I promise you I had nothing to do with it.”
Shrivelled-up old hag, spouting lies when she can see her son’s blood on those snowy gloves. But she’s not sure Dorea’s lying. And cannot make sure the way she wants to, because her son’s in the next room and Rigel scares easy. He didn’t, doesn’t, have Sirius brash strength or Lucius’ high pain threshold. And he’s so much younger than they had been. He’s still just a baby. But she’d been careful. So careful. “Wha… how?”
“He succumbed to his injuries, dearest.” She knows. Dorea knows. But there’s nothing she can prove. “And what intriguing injuries, too.”
“What do you mean?” She can play this game. She can. “How are my son’s injuries in any way intriguing?”
“Only that it’s very liberal of you to let him wander around naked. Is it something young people are doing at the moment? James and Sirius quite forsook robes and shirts over the summer. They said it made them feel liberated, but I daresay they did it to show off for the local girls. Well, James, at any…” Stops, the prune, peers at her face, then changes tone. “I’m truly sorry, dearest; it’s so insensitive of me to talk of my boys when you’ve just… lost yours.” Pitches that word in a way that makes her itch, all over again, to hold a wand to the white throat.
“I love my son,” she snarls. “If you think…”
“Dearest, I know you did. You always were such an affectionate girl. How you doted on Lucius and Sirius. I can hardly imagine how much you loved Rigel.”
She did. She did. Her darling Rigel, still unsteady on his feet, always bumping in to things, far more, she’s sure, than she had at almost-three. “Let me pass. I want to see him. Let me in!”
“Not until you compose yourself. You simply cannot go in there this furious, dearest. There are other children in there.”
“Bella!” A light, quick step, rounding the corner. “Bella how is he?”
“Cissy.” She turns to her baby sister, half-mad with rage and sorrow. “Cissy, he’s dead and Dorea killed him and she won’t even let me see him.”
“Oh, my Bella. Sshh, come here, love.” Cissy puts a hand on her shoulder and she stumbles into the circle of arms that closes around her. “I’m here now. I’ll take care of everything. You’ll get to see Rigel. They’ll let you in. I promise you.” She can feel the inquiring look Cissy flicks at Dorea, but the body embracing her is pliant and warm and full of slender strength and she can’t move away. She burrows closer, instead, mouthing the slight rise of exposed collar-bone. Cissy stiffens, but almost immediately relaxes and she’s tired enough to excuse the minute flinch.
“It’s nothing, Cissa. Bella is distraught. Only to be expected, I suppose.” A slight rustle, probably Dorea wrapping her cloak around herself. “I’m glad you here, Cissy. Someone should be with her.” As though she hasn’t been alone all day. As though she didn’t Apparate here with her wounded child in her arms. As though she’s a weakling. “I would stay, but Charlus isn’t home and the boys went shopping in Diagon, so they’re sure to have found new and inventive ways to wreck my house and peace of mind.”
“It’s alright, Dorea. Go home. I’ll manage.” Cissy’s muscles twitch in a way that means she’s smiling. Then Dorea Disapparates with a crack. “Come on, Bella. Let’s go see Rigel.”
“They wouldn’t let me in,” she says, pulling away reluctantly. “Thrice bedamned sons of Squibs won’t let me see my son.”
“They’ll let you in now. I promise you, love.”
They do. They do, and Cissy leads her in by the hand, past children whose parents can take them home, and to the bed Rigel is in.
Her son lies flat on his back, a thin sheet covering his tiny, beautiful body, those lithe limbs still. Rigel will never move again, never squirm under her hands and mouth, never weakly push her away when she strokes inside him.
Her son lies dead and she is half-certain that she is the murderess.