All he can do is wait. Watch and wait and listen to her breathe.<\/p>\n
It’s unacceptable, of course, but then, none of the alternatives are better.<\/p>\n
That’s not completely true–or, it is true, but it is incomplete. All of the alternatives are miles worse, is what.<\/p>\n
Charlie shifts on the chair, annoyed by the way his arse is numb from sitting. Really, if they want family to stay quiet and not roam the halls, and they have been most<\/em> plain on this point, he thinks the least they could do is charm the chairs so they don’t do that. That he’s been sitting in this one for three damn days is irrelevant.<\/p>\n Her heartbeat is steady on the monitor, slow, but strong, thump, thump, and that’s something. He likes it faster, when her pulse crashes against his chest as she slumps down on him, sweaty-damp and gasping, her body still contracting around his cock, her breasts squashed flat between them as they recover. For now, the fact it beats is enough, but that doesn’t mean it’s not just wrong like this.<\/p>\n He tilts his head as he looks at her again, not just at breathing and horrid absence of motion, but at her skin and position and hair. He stops there. Her hair is a disaster, wild and tangled, and that, he can fix. He transfigures the glass she isn’t drinking from anyway into a hairbrush and eases up onto the bed next to her, careful not to disturb any of the monitoring charms, so he can set about untangling it in bits. There are times for it to be wild, times that flit into his head before he can push them away as entirely inappropriate for this place, times that it falls down past her face to tickle his as she rocks forward and back on him, as she throws her head back and orders him to come with her and what can he do but comply–but this is not one of those times. He knows if she were to wake now, the tangle of it would bother her, hanging all wrong and pulling where it’s knotted.<\/p>\n Her pulse speeds as he works, just a bit, and but it’s not the crazy irregular mess it was before, when they first got here. She’s still breathing evenly, in and out, so it’s nothing to worry about, and he keeps smoothing and unknotting, then ties it all up on top of her head where it won’t pull. When he’s done, he lets the hairbrush go back to being a glass, washing it out in the little sink just in case she comes to want it soon.<\/p>\n He can always hope.<\/p>\n He stands there, now, hands at loose ends until he sets them on his hips, first fingers tucked into belt-loops in his jeans that he doesn’t ever put a belt through. He can’t stand the thought of going back to the chair, so he decides to say the hell with the rules. He toes off his shoes and carefully arranges himself on the bed beside her, head propped up on one hand. This is better.<\/p>\n Her lips quirk in the sleep that today seems to finally be just sleep, and he lifts his free hand to trace with one finger, willing her to open her mouth and draw that finger in, as she does when he wakes her like this sometimes, sucking at him and pretending she has no idea what it does to him to watch her suck until he growls and rolls onto her and she laughs and opens her legs and pulls him forward into her, rocking her hips up and making him forget to growl as he gasps and moans and whines into her shoulder and spills inside her again.<\/p>\n It isn’t that he wants the sex. Not now; for one thing, he’s nearly sure the healer in charge of her care would suffer a seriously unfortunate pulmonary disaster if anything like that were to go on in her hospital. It’s that he wants her to stop being impossibly still, impossibly silent. Hermione is never silent like this, and she doesn’t even sleep this still; he frequently has to bodily get up and go ’round to pick her up and unwind her as she sleeps in order to recover some sense of blanketary order.<\/p>\n Her lips quirk again under his finger, then her tongue comes out, just a little, and he stills, watching her eyelashes flutter, just a bit, as if she’s dreaming in there.<\/p>\n And then, she’s not. The lashes come up, and she blinks. And blinks again, and turns toward him, away from the finger she was nearly sucking on.<\/p>\n He’s about to jump up, go get the nurse, possibly leap about because she’s awake and they haven’t really been sure\u2026 enough of that. But she opens her lips and frowns, and he stays because this is Hermione and she certainly has questions.<\/p>\n “Charlie?”<\/p>\n He’s startled to find his voice raspy–she sounds better than he does, and it takes him a moment to gather himself to answer. “Hi. Good of you to come back.” He grins goofily even though he knows she’ll see right through that because he’s pretty sure his eyes show how relieved he is.<\/p>\n “You look like hell.”<\/p>\n “Uh. Sorry.”<\/p>\n She pauses. “No, it’s okay, just \u2026what day is it, anyway? You didn’t get that scruffy overnight.”<\/p>\n He drops his forehead down on her shoulder and laughs. “Always the analyst, aren’t you? Sunday, incidentally.” He’s muffled against her thin hospital pyjamas, and isn’t sure she can hear him, but he doesn’t want to move away from her.<\/p>\n The nurse can just wait a few minutes to come check on things. Her heartbeat is faster and still steady, and her arm is around him, and screw the rules; he’s staying here.<\/p>\n Watching her breathe is a lot more interesting when she’s talking, too, when he’s touching her and planning for when he takes her home.<\/p>\n\n\n