( Hermione is thin, bird-boned, fragile. Reduced to charcoal, smear and silhouette. But then, they are all gaunt pale things, debris of themselves in this weathered tower-home. His lungs feel at half-fill, spoiled. Air cloyed, breath clumsy, the stench of herbs and antiseptic astringent. Prickling his skin.
He does not ask what healers have combined into paltry approximations of cures to present to small bodies burning with the fevers of endless, petty sicknesses. Grief burdens orphans like sagging mantles. Malnutrition. Fatigue. Outside, catapults boom and howl and the clamor sets off the hungry wails of a toddler barely three years to his name, if those.
( But then, the traitor's voice whispers in earns too knowing, Perhaps older, if he were long ill fed. )
They do not speak of it, the grim, haunting toll of war at large. They imagine it secluded to battlefields, to men and their gilded cause. Hermione whispers — he knows the game of the land, whispers horror to appease them, and he slips to his knees, one and the next, and the boy who'd barely started his weeping fumbles to crawl to his thighs' side. It's the white of him, ghostly, the cleanliness of his pallor. It ever draws children.
He lifts his hand, palm outward, to stay Hermione's progression before her wilting voice becomes their communal anguish. Then calmly, he collects the boy in his arms, one fettered on his back, and slings him on his chest, steady when he sways him each way. )
Like this.
( Better than stories, when the boy hiccups and sobs and starts to quiet between shivers, murmuring whatever half-truths fascinate children. Butterflies, spiders. The story of a rock.
And he nods, gently, to where another child lingers near Hermione, mouth slack, gaze cold. She too wants comfort. )
the wards | pls respond in prose, I just find this easier
( Hermione is thin, bird-boned, fragile. Reduced to charcoal, smear and silhouette. But then, they are all gaunt pale things, debris of themselves in this weathered tower-home. His lungs feel at half-fill, spoiled. Air cloyed, breath clumsy, the stench of herbs and antiseptic astringent. Prickling his skin.
He does not ask what healers have combined into paltry approximations of cures to present to small bodies burning with the fevers of endless, petty sicknesses. Grief burdens orphans like sagging mantles. Malnutrition. Fatigue. Outside, catapults boom and howl and the clamor sets off the hungry wails of a toddler barely three years to his name, if those.
( But then, the traitor's voice whispers in earns too knowing, Perhaps older, if he were long ill fed. )
They do not speak of it, the grim, haunting toll of war at large. They imagine it secluded to battlefields, to men and their gilded cause. Hermione whispers — he knows the game of the land, whispers horror to appease them, and he slips to his knees, one and the next, and the boy who'd barely started his weeping fumbles to crawl to his thighs' side. It's the white of him, ghostly, the cleanliness of his pallor. It ever draws children.
He lifts his hand, palm outward, to stay Hermione's progression before her wilting voice becomes their communal anguish. Then calmly, he collects the boy in his arms, one fettered on his back, and slings him on his chest, steady when he sways him each way. )
Like this.
( Better than stories, when the boy hiccups and sobs and starts to quiet between shivers, murmuring whatever half-truths fascinate children. Butterflies, spiders. The story of a rock.
And he nods, gently, to where another child lingers near Hermione, mouth slack, gaze cold. She too wants comfort. )