Adios
“Tom.”
A familiar voice cut through the silence.
Tom didn’t move. There was little he wished to do these past few days. His life, for the first time since discovering he was an orphan, had lost its zeal.
“What is it?” He whispered, his voice raw and empty. It was hardly the voice of a man that often spoke with confidence and elegance. If, that confident and elegant man had ever existed at all. Tom wasn’t certain of this, having lost sight of that composed man whenever he caught his own reflection in the mirror.
“You can’t just let yourself waste away like this,” Hermione said, her voice interrupting the silence that blanketed the walls of the hospital room. There were the occasional beeps of the heart-rate monitors and the soft whirring of the machines providing unnamed support to the unfortunate soul strapped to the machine, but those noises were easily ignored. Tom was used to them now.
“Oh? Since when have you cared for what I do?” Tom replied without tearing his gaze away from the hospital bed. His hands grasped tightly around the railing of the bed, unable to do much more than that at that moment.
What he really wanted to do was grab onto his husband’s wrist and—
“Since you quit your job and let your house fall into total disrepair. Since you started holing yourself in Ha—”
“Do not—” Tom interrupted, tearing his gaze away from the hospital bed to level Hermione with a glare. “—speak his name. Do not test my patience today, Granger.”
Hermione’s hair was frazzled. Tom wanted to sneer at her appearance, taking great offense to her hair, her oversized sweater, and torn trousers. It was inappropriate. Tom didn’t know what it was that Harry saw in her, why Harry had even considered bringing her into their—
“I will do as I damn well please, Tom. Harry—” Tom’s brow twitched, lips pressing into a hard line when she raised a challenging brow at him, “—is my friend. He is not just your husband. I have just as much a right to be here as you do.”
If looks could kill, Tom would have had her killed three times over. He didn’t want her there to tell him what to do. He wanted to be left alone with Harry. He didn’t need others present to bear witness his own pathetic show of weakness.
“Fine,” Tom shot back, turning away from the girl’s face to look back to the source of his distress.
Harry was in the bed. He was strapped and littered with different tubes and cables. Nearly swallowed by the hospital equipment pressed almost at either side of Harry, Tom saw nothing of the man he’d married, had spent nearly two decades with. It was a horrible sight. His husband was pale—paler than he had ever been in his life. He was still, almost as if he was already at death’s doorstep.
And he just might be.
In all the time Tom had known Harry, in all the days he’d come to grow begrudging affection for him, Harry had always been dark skin and tan lines. His skin golden and brown from his days of playing football with his friends, of spiriting himself away to the park to drink in the sunlight after hours of being holed inside an office.
But now, he was a ghost. His shock of dark hair a sharp contrast from the skin Tom had taken years learning and memorizing in the time they’d been together.
A pang of anguish cut him down, but Tom did not make it know. He kept his face blank, biting down the grief until it was white static in the back of his mind.
“Tom—” Hermione started, but Tom ignored everything she said after his name. He didn’t need the lecture. He knew that he shouldn’t let himself waste away. It wasn’t what Harry would have wanted for him. It wasn’t what Tom, with his grand plans, would have wanted for himself.
And yet—
Tom couldn’t stand sleeping in his bed without Harry’s warmth at his side. He couldn’t stand knowing that his Harry was gone, that the man that laid on that bed with his eyes dead to the outside world, would never open his eyes again.
Harry Potter was brain dead. There was nothing any of the doctors could do.
“It’s not your fault.”
Tom stopped, his thoughts immediately stilling at just how near the girl’s voice had come. It was watery, as if she were on the verge of tears.
Sneering, Tom did not dare look at her. He didn’t need her pity.
“Don’t blame yourself.”
Tom locked his jaw, gaze intent at Harry’s prone form. His eyes burned, but he refused to acknowledge that he was near tears. He didn’t cry. Not when his mother passed when he was a young child, not when his precious pet snake passed many moons ago—
Tom was not a slave to his emotions. He was stronger than this, had to be stronger than this.
A warm hand pressed against his shoulder, and Tom nearly shattered when Hermione squeezed his shoulder affectionately. The way Harry would have, well aware of when Tom was in one of his moods and needed grounding.
It was too much.
“I should have just missed work—”
“There was no way for any of us to know what was happening, Tom.” Hermione interrupted, voice soft, and Tom released his tight hold on the railing to reach for his husband’s hand.
However, just as Tom’s fingers were about to graze Harry’s skin, he stopped. He’d been wanting to hold onto it since he’d arrived, since he’d learned of what had happened.
It’d been months since then. It was strange to think that it’d been months since he’d last seen Harry smile, since he’d last felt his skin against his.
Tom curled his fingers into a fist. He didn’t deserve to touch him. He should have been there. He should have been home, where his husband was, instead of at work charming some rich old man to hire his legal services.
“Tom. Stop it.” Hermione chided before she clasped onto his hand and forced it against Harry’s. It was cold and warm all at once. Familiar callouses brushed against him, and Tom flinched, making to tear his hand away, but Hermione’s grip was unyielding.
It was foolish of her to do this. They hadn’t been particularly close, always at each other’s throats. The only tie between them had been Harry, and now…
“You’re Harry’s only living family. You are everything he wanted, everything he loved and cherished. I will admit that I thought you were a complete arsehole, but once I saw just how you both were to each other... I knew you would treat him well.”
A single tear escaped Tom’s eye, his lungs protesting within his chest. Grief consumed him, shoulders tight with a desire to let go of everything he’d confined inside his mind since he’d learned of Harry’s—
“He did a lot of dangerous work, Tom. He was a police officer. Something was bound to happen one day.” Hermione’s voice was calm, but there were short hitches to her breath that were unmistakable. She was crying as well.
It was...certainly true that Harry had been involved in dangerous work. Tom himself had worked alongside him numerous times as a prosecutor. There were definitely instances where criminals did return to seek vengeance on the officer that had turned them in.
It was a risk that Tom had known well, but that didn’t stop his insides from hurting. It didn’t stop him from wanting to scream to the top of his lungs and seek out the scum that had taken Harry away from him.
“I know,” Tom replied after a moment, not trusting himself to say anything more, to be able to fight the wave of emotion crushing his windpipe. He refused to break in front of her, or anyone for that matter. His tears were Harry’s and no one else’s. All that he was, had become, belonged to Harry.
“You can’t keep living this way. You know this isn’t what Harry would have wanted for you.”
Tom nearly broke at that. He knew that. He knew that better than she did, he suspected. His Harry was selfless. A generous and genuinely kind human being. He was everything that Tom was not, everything that he’d needed when he was on the verge of traveling down a path he never would have scraped out of.
Harry was his everything.
“You have to let him go.”
The dam to his emotions broke. The cracks splintered and crumbled, giving way to heavy emotion that Tom had no means of curbing.
He squeezed onto Harry’s hand until his knuckles went white, uncaring of the fact that Hermione’s own fingers— cold and soft —were caught in his unyielding grip.
You have to let me go, Harry’s voice whispered into his mind, gentle and warm.
Tom could almost taste the words, almost see Harry’s brilliant green eyes gazing into his own with concern.
Please, let me go.
“I know,” Tom said after some time.
He knew what he needed to do. He had known this would be how it all would end before the doctors had come to tell him that his husband was gone.
Tom had to let Harry go.
“Can you please call the doctor?”
The girl did not answer, though she didn’t need to. This was the first time he’d ever willingly asked for a doctor since his confinement in Harry’s hospital room.
She removed her hand from his, fingers brushing familiarly along his shoulders one more time before departing.
Even good things must come to an end.
Tom only wished that it wasn’t his choice to make.