Evan and Andromeda had started a new tradition this summer: dinner overlooking the water. Once Evan had found out about her position at St. Mungo’s it only made too much sense to use her job as an excuse to explore a new culinary area of London. They found a nice restaurant overlooking the river on their first evening stroll. Dinner-by-walking-around was verifiably the best way of discovering restaurants. The restaurant they found that first night was discrete, classically beautiful, and, most importantly, wizarding-run.
So, as Evan had done nearly every week since school got out, he arrived at St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries sometime after 8:00pm to pick his cousin up from work. Andromeda and he had a longstanding reservation for a late dinner. Now Evan had to wait for her to finish up, just as he did every other week.
While waiting patiently wasn’t Evan’s forte, time that particular evening seemed to tick by more slowly than usual. The portrait inhabitants were uninteresting, sleeping, or both, and the available reading material was uninspired, to say the least. waited for Andromeda to finish. He could actually hear his watch ticking. It was mocking him.
He would have taken his watch out to check the time, but the darned thing was being so stubbornly slow that he refused to check it out of principle.
Then all hell broke loose, delivering Evan from boredom. Spells, hexes, and curses flew every which way. It didn’t take long for him to recognize the dark robes adorning the perpetrators of the beautiful chaos enveloping the hospital. The infernal tick of his watch was drowned out by the sound of objects breaking and people screaming. It was just the symphony he needed to boost his spirits.
The hexes and curses sailing through the air beckoned Evan to join in. The world had cried havoc and Evan was all too happy to oblige. Besides, it wasn’t as though he were the only one in civilian clothing joining the fray. A cloud of dust enveloped the hall as plaster exploded, providing Evan with just enough visual cover to get a few spells off. Even he wasn’t brazen enough to join the chaos in full view of anyone who might happen by. He was in a smaller hallway in a lesser traveled part of the hospital, but Evan didn’t want to end up locked up again. Last summer was a waste. He was in no rush to repeat the experience. It was hard to tell through the dust, but if he was where he thought he was, he was near where he usually picked Andromeda up.
A hand yanked him away from the chaos.
