Wretched little beggar

The Fish Tank

Madam Pomfrey and McGonagall walked off, and M waited until they were well out of sight to sink down against the wall in exhaustion, breathing shallowly. She had never felt this bad after a full moon, but she had never moved around so much either. She stared at her callused and sweating palms until they stopped trembling, and rested her head against the wall.

Some noise from inside Mara's room drew her attention barely two minutes later, and she barely had time to shoot to her feet before the surly nurse walked out. The woman threw her a contemptuous look; M responded with a glare and slipped back inside the hospital room.

Mara didn't look any better than when she had left her, but still forced a smile on her face. She had learned a long time ago that asking where the young girl disappeared off to rarely got you a straight answer.

M managed a tiny smile too, but quickly headed to the chair in the corner. Her legs wouldn't be able to hold her much longer, and her nausea kept rising. Mara, however, did not need to know that, and so the young girl distracted her the only way she could think of.

-"Why did you choose to come to Wales?"

She had aimed it to be an innocent question, and expected the answer to be something like better food, nicer nurses (though that one had already proven itself wrong), more comfortable beds, or something of the sort, but the woman's eyes immediately clouded over. Crap.

-"It's... It's stupid, but... I hung on to the hope that he'd be there." Mara whispered. "This is where we met, you know? I'd decided to take an internship in a muggle hospital to see how they did medicine. He was just finishing his."

M stilled. This was the first time, in the four months she had known the witch, she even evoked a former companion. The young girl had never found it necessary to ask, since there probably couldn't be any happy reason behind a pregnant woman living by herself in a small town where she had no close friends.

-"I really thought he loved me. We had plans together, so many plans. We were even talking about marriage." Her voice broke, but she breathed out slowly and started again. "I suppose it's my fault it ended like it did, really. I lied so much. Too much. But admitting that I was a witch, that I was... unnatural... It was so frightening. Subconsciously, I think I knew that the illusion of happiness I had created could shatter in an instant - which it did." She let out a dry chuckle.

By this point, Mara's eyes were glistening, but M didn't dare break the nostalgic bubble she'd fallen in. And, pulled by some sort of morbid fascination, she now wanted to hear the end of this story, though she could already guess at its large lines.

-"I was a coward until the end; I only told him because of Selwyn, because there was a chance our son would be magical too. And the next morning... he was gone. No address to contact him. Not even a note. He muted overseas, and I haven't heard from him since. I didn't even get to tell him we were expecting a child, I'd wanted... I'd wanted to ease him into it."

A real tear was now rolling on the woman's cheek, and there was nothing M could say to make her feel better. It was her fault she had even brought up the subject in the first place.

Someone started turning the handle, and Mara hastily wiped her eyes. M tensed up, her instincts inculcated from years on the streets flaring up due to her exhaustion; her hands balled up into fists, and if needed, she could have fought her way out of the room.

Thankfully, the lean and tall man who entered looked much more amiable than the nurse.

He barely wasted any time with banalities, and after presenting himself as Dr. Clayton, the neonatologist taking care of Selwyn, and asking Mara how she was feeling, he skipped to the reason for his presence.