Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
cw; use of homophobic language, implied torture, rain not knowing how to deal with people caring for him.
★彡
─
St Mungo’s, February 14th 1974
── ✦𝐑𝐀𝐈𝐍 𝐃𝐄𝐂𝐈𝐃𝐄𝐒 𝐇𝐄 hates St Mungo’s.
It’s completely bleak and miserable. The healers that come and go all regard him matching looks of pity, muttering apologies and sympathies about how ‘such a thing shouldn’t have happened to someone as young as you are.’
He doesn’t have much to do except lie in his hospital bed all day because his legs are still too injured and weak to function properly—courtesy of the cursed shackles that wanker used to chain him down— or stare at the pallid ceiling until his eyes hurt. River brought him a few books a day ago, but he has yet to read even a single one because his mind feels too heavy and full and absurdly tired. And he thinks it’s strange because he hardly does anything at all.
It’s still a bit early, and visiting hours are yet to be allowed, so he just lies there in the awful silence. Sometimes, if he concentrates hard enough, he thinks he can remember hearing himself scream in agony. He thinks he can remember a man, a silhouette of his lanky form to be exact, standing above him and crooning at him in a gentle voice to calm down, to stop struggling so much, to stop being so terrified of him because there’s nothing to be scared of, and then he feels a horrible chill washing over him, and so he immediately stops thinking about it.
His first visit of the day is from River. He opens the door and lingers on the doorway, looking every bit weary as he had been the previous day. Rain frowns at him. “Did you even sleep?” he hears himself ask. “You look horrible.”
River manages a shaky smile as he steps in to the room. He looks like he’s on the verge of laughing at Rain’s ridiculousness, or perhaps breakdown into tears at the sight of his little brother, pale and haggard, lying in a hospital bed. He does neither. “Ah. Well, you know. Auror training is even more difficult than imagined it would be.”
Liar, Rain immediately thinks, but he says nothing of it. He knows exactly why his older brother looks like he hasn’t slept in a week. He probably didn’t actually, now that he thinks about it. He throws an arm over his stomach and lifts his eyes to the ceiling, willing the thoughts away. “Well, don’t just stand there,” he says. “Come in or whatever.”
A beat passes and he hears the door shut softly. River shuffles around the room until Rain finally hears the chair next to his bed creak quietly. The silence lingers on for a while, and at some point, Rain’s eyes shift to his brother, and he finds him gazing at him with an agonized look in his eyes. Now Rain is sure that he’s about to cry and he doesn’t know what to feel about that. So he instead asks, “What?”
