LOCATION: St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries
DATE: June 19, 1984
@healerrosier
Alice had almost gotten used to hiding her injuries. Not that as an Auror she had to -- at least, not those obtained in the course of her duty. The problem was the other injuries, the ones acquired through other duties. And even with as risky a profession as being an Auror was, she’d quickly learned that she was a lot more likely to get hurt when she was acting on behalf of the Order of the Phoenix than she was when on her sanctioned duties -- in part no doubt because the Ministry had more resources and its people were all properly trained, and while things could go pear-shaped very quickly missions didn’t generally start out already seven different ways of fucked. The difference in casualty rates, Alice had come to suspect, was because the Death Eaters were simply trying harder when they were fighting the Order. They didn’t want to push the Ministry too hard; didn’t necessarily want to kill everybody working in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement (some of those people, Alice was sure, were their people after all; they also wanted to control the Ministry, which meant that those people theoretically someday would be their people even if they weren’t already suborned). The Order, on the other hand...
It seemed like Curse on sight was their favored response to the Order.
And even as an Auror -- perhaps especially as an Auror -- Alice couldn’t just turn-up at St. Mungo’s with unexplained injuries. Injuries required paperwork. And while she had a lot of leeway in her duties for the law, there was only so far she could get away with fudging what she filed. So most of her injuries got treated off-the-clock by the Order’s unofficial medical wing instead. There were downsides to this of course, but Alice wouldn’t deny that the lack of paperwork was a definite upside.
Today, though, she’d actually been hurt on the clock, which meant she was here in St. Mungo’s waiting for official medical care for once. Unfortunately that meant paperwork, but Alice had survived worse. She could live through paperwork if she had to. And because said injury wasn’t life threatening -- although it was extremely inconvenient -- she had quaffed a pain potion to blunt the edge of the agony and finished the bulk of the required paperwork accompanying the arrest before setting out for the hospital. If she timed things right, she’d be able to finagle her appointment into a long lunch -- and if she was very lucky, she’d even have company for said lunch.
Alice’s eyes lit up when the door to her treatment room opened to admit exactly the familiar face she had been hoping to see. “Healer Rosier, good afternoon,” she said, smiling. “Just the wix I was hoping they would send me.” She indicated the sling holding her wounded wand-arm against her chest and explained, “Bugger caught me between a backfiring Caterwauling Charm and some kind of area-of-effect triggered Reducto. Pretty sure there’s not a single bone below my humerous that isn’t cracked into at least six different pieces.” There was definitely strain in her smile, Alice knew, and tightening the chipper tone of her voice, but she doubted Evan would take that personally. Even with the potion, her arm hurt and he was Healer enough to know it was the pain making her lips tighten and her temples sweat, not any dismay at seeing one of her oldest friends.
