Chapter Text
James breathed hard, too focused on the gameplay to notice the sweat in his eyes. It was bloody hot for April in the north, but football would go on, rain or shine. Or oppressive fucking humid heat.
It was a hell of a game too—dead tied in the last three minutes, with none too much sportsmanship on either side. The other team’s striker, a creep named Mulciber, flopped every time the Lion’s defense got within half a meter of him; Rosier and Podmore had gotten a yellow card apiece for each team, and Lestrange had actually gotten a red for kicking their goalie, Frank, while he was down with the ball. Their trainer had diagnosed at least two bruised ribs, maybe broken, and Diggory had forced him to sit out this half, which only drove the stakes up for the rest of them.
“Potter!” their center mid shouted. James sprinted up for the pass, catching it on his chest and neatly dodging a defender. He grinned, it was just him and the goal now, his hair blowing back as he ran. The game was theirs if he made this shot. He waited a few steps longer than he normally would to give the keeper even less reaction time.
The defender slide tackled him just as the ball left his cleat.
Sirius swore as he saw James nearly flip over Regulus’s outstretched leg and regain his footing only to run headlong into the goal post and collapse.
His stomach jumped into his throat, which was inconvenient, because that was where his larynx was doing its best to scream every swearword he knew in the direction of his younger—well, brother was a strong word for it.
“Fucking tosser, you bloody little prick!” It had to be karma, punishing him for ignoring Regulus—he hadn’t even looked towards the Snake’s half of the field after seeing the little R. Black on their roster, but he certainly had Sirius’s attention now.
“Sirius,” Lily barked. Her face was pale—paler than normal, at any rate—but her eyes flashed. She hadn’t looked away from James.
“There’s a back entrance to the locker rooms,” Sirius leaned down to say it into her ear, keeping his voice measured though he could feel the adrenaline pumping through his system. She looked at him just long enough to nod once; he squeezed in front of her, unfortunately knocking his knees into some of the poor saps sitting in front of them, and led the way to the maintenance stairs.
“The upside of how shitily they pay Prongs is it means they don’t have the cash to fix their alarms,” he said as they walked through the door without fuss, despite its insistence that it was an Emergency Exit Only and Alarm will Sound.
The locker room wasn’t locked either, but there were enough people milling about—including some EMTs with a stretcher fucking fuck—that they couldn’t get close to the trainers’ room where James had to be. At least, not without making a big fucking deal and probably getting themselves kicked out.
“Padfoot, which of us is his emergency contact for the club?” Lily whispered. Sirius grabbed her hand because he knew the nickname reminded them both of James, and he knew James would probably be fine, there was no reason to assume the worst, except if that was true, why was there and ambulance siren blaring outside, and why hadn’t he gotten up off the field oh fuck—
“Padfoot. Sirius, breathe. We’ll find him, and I’ll be his fiancée and you’ll be his brother, and he’ll be fine because if his dumb ass went and got hurt, I’ll murder him.”
Sirius nodded and squeezed her hand tighter, probably to the point that it hurt, but Lily was a rock in times of crisis. She didn’t let go when her mobile went off, just answered one-handed.
“Yes, this is she. Yes I was at the game, I’m actually downstairs already is there any way—Yes. Yes, okay. You’re sure I can’t get in to see him now. Yes. I—we can, um, we can meet them at the hospital.” Lily brought the phone down from her ear, and Sirius could see the indent her teeth left in her lower lip when she opened her mouth to fill him in, though the picture was already painfully clear.
“That was the club trainer. They said—they said time was of the essence. And we should meet him at the hospital.”
All of the hard work Sirius had done not to fixate on the worst case scenario went out the fucking window and as they half ran out to the car, it was hard enough to breathe, let alone think optimistically. James was in the hospital and running out of time and Sirius wasn’t there for him, even though they’d both swore up and down they’d always have each other’s back and he was going to lose James like he’d lost every other person he’d ever considered family and anything he ever did for the rest of his goddamn godforsaken life was going to be too little too late.
“Sirius, list the conjugations of ir.” Lily spoke through gritted teeth, and Sirius knew she was just as stressed as he was, and he was making it harder for her, but self-hatred wasn’t going to help anyone right now, so he closed his eyes and forced his shrieking brain to start thinking in Spanish.
“Voy, vas, va, vamos, vatis, van,” he listed carefully. Present indicative. Now the imperfect. Lily didn’t interrupt him.
He got all the way through perfect subjunctive when they pulled up at the hospital, and Lily threw the car into park. She was probably going to get a ticket, not that Sirius gave a damn, comparatively. He’d gotten a lot worse than tickets for far lesser causes.
They ran into the lobby, and the triage nurse raised her eyebrows.
“James Potter,” he demanded. “We need to see James Potter.”
“I’m his fiancée, he has me listed as emergency contact,” Lily followed up, slightly more polite but with no more sign of accepting a refusal than Sirius himself had given. The half-truths tripped lightly out of her mouth. “This is his brother. Please, we know he came in by ambulance, it can’t have been ten minutes ago.”
“James Potter is still receiving emergency treatment in Wing C. You’ll have to wait to see him.”
“Can you tell us—is he stable? What’s wrong with him?”
“They’re following protocol for dangerous head trauma, and that’s all the information I have here, sweetheart.” The nurse could not have sounded less kindly, and Sirius really thought he could punch her.
“Thank you for your help.” Lily spoke with more saccharine venom than she used when talking to her bitch sister, and turned on the spot to face him.
“Let’s go find fucking Wing fucking C.”
They found Wing C, which was a fancy name for hell. If Sirius had known eternal damnation would be remotely this bad, he would have listened a lot more closely when his mother insisted God hated him.
His watch insisted he had not been here for an eternity, just three hours. He could see the adrenaline drain out of Lily from minute to minute as she sagged in on herself and he sat here jittering his leg or pacing the tiny grey waiting room and not doing a damned useful thing for anyone.
Periodically they would be approached by somebody with a clipboard to be given updates that were a lot of technical mumbo jumbo. Sirius gathered that James’s life probably wasn’t in danger, but they’d had to operate or some shit because his brain was bleeding and the pressure could have killed him, but it didn’t, and Sirius could still be totally misunderstanding between his stress amping up into a nightmare of executive dysfunction and the doctor using more abbreviations and fucking Latin than he was English.
Lily actually fell asleep against his shoulder before anyone came out to tell them they could see James. He held her hand as they walked in to see their boyfriend, scarily pale under his dark complexion, half his head shaved and hair sticking out every which way from a clinically clean white bandage, looking even more a mess than it ever did first thing in the mornings.
Lily was sobbing quietly. It was the first sound he’d heard her make in hours.
“He’s probably going to be out for a while,” the nurse who had brought them in whispered. “But you can stay with him. If you’re quiet no one will bother you about visiting hours.”
It was the first good thing they’d heard since the Lion’s goal ten minutes into the match. Sirius half collapsed into the chair by the bed, grabbing hold of James’s hand that didn’t have the IV in. Lily clambered up onto the end of the bed, careful not to jostle James, and curled up with her head resting on his thigh and fingers tangled with Sirius’s other hand.
They were all here, they were all together, they were all going to be okay. For now it was enough. It had to be.