Sweet Tooth [HS]

EIGHTY SIX

Three days later.

Max did not move from Harry's side for three days.

Three.

Whole.

Days.

It was endless, like the world itself was spinning in slow-motion, a sadistic torture that time was inflicting directly on her. They were maybe the longest, darkest, most colourless days of Max's life.

Three days of waiting.

Three days of hoping.

All of that time Harry was unconscious. He just laid there so still that if it wasn't for the rise and fall of his chest and the echoing beeps of the heart monitor, Max could have thought he'd stopped breathing altogether. It was just that he looked so lifeless. His whole face was sunken in. His eye sockets had deepened and darkened, his cheeks had hollowed out and his bones were protruding out of the skin that looked paper-thin. So pale it was almost see-through, she thought. She could see the spidery blue veins beneath it, could see the tendons in his arms.

It was three days of having her mangled heart wrecked all over again, each time she looked at him.

It was heartbreaking. And once she'd gotten over her shock and hysteria, it made Max utterly furious. Because this couldn't have just happened overnight. No one could just wither away like this all at once. No. When Max wasn't terrified for his life, she found herself seething at how nobody had done anything to stop this. How had it come to this? How had nobody helped him? She just didn't understand it.

She couldn't wrap her head around how he was still going to events, how he was supposed to start touring - when he looked the way he did and he had so fucking obviously needed help.

He was a person. He was a fucking person. But he clearly hadn't been treated like one until now, when his very human and perishable heart was nearly ready to give up on him.

Harry's mother, Anne, seemed to feel the same.

When she and Harry's father had first arrived at the hospital, it was her scream that had made Max realise she was in the room. Anne was completely disheveled, her green eyes wide in panic and stress - and Max caught how it had melted away, how her expression had cracked and fallen in on itself as she saw him for the first time.

She had sobbed and cried and wailed, "I can't believe what's happened to my boy," and Max excused herself to give her privacy.

She had stepped out into the waiting room, sobbed over her lap for what could have been hours before she felt a tap on her shoulder. Through her tears Max saw it was Anne. She was crying too, but she leaned forwards and wiped Max's tears. "You must be Max," she had said softly, hugging her to her chest and Max had collapsed into it, dissolving in tears as Anne stroked her back gently.

When she finally recovered and pulled back, Anne, somehow, was smiling. It was a sad smile, but a smile all the same.

"He's told me about you," she said, "I wish we weren't meeting like this."

Max didn't have the energy to worry about what she knew, and what she didn't. It seemed so small and insignificant to what was happening now.

"Me too," was all she managed, her voice hoarse from crying.

Anne squeezed her hand, "I know you want to be with him. Come on."

And then they'd both walked back into his hospital room, sitting down on either side of him, each of them taking a hand. And that was where they had stayed.

It was not the way Max had ever envisioned meeting Harry's mother. The usual, mundane space for small-talk vanished in those endless hours in the hospital room, and instead they got to know one another in their shared grief. In their anger that somehow it had come to this. In their desperate willing for him to wake up.