Summer had finally arrived with a stifling heat wave that had left many weather(wo)men stumped as to where it had come from, most citing high pressure while others admitted they just, honestly, had no clue. The reality was that the heat wave was the result of high pressure but it wasn’t natural high pressure. It was caused when the Swedish and Norwegian national teams played Quidditch at ten thousand feet, something that only the Scandinavians did for reasons no one really liked to discuss. Impressively, they managed to move the winds and, for the fifth time since the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, they blighted Britain with a heat wave. Alistair wasn’t exactly about to complain. Four years spent in Azkaban really made you grateful for any sunshine you could get. Staying inside in the apothecary was the last thing Alistair wanted to do and today he was on his own, a side-effect of having hired teenage family members. Thanks, Lorcan. He thought, bitterly.
Honestly, Alistair was becoming restless. His father’s influence in the Death Eater faction had made it rather laborious and he felt all the more like he was part of a firm rather than a family he could waltz in an out of when he so pleased. He also really, really couldn’t stand the apothecary. Still, he had very little choice in the matter if he wanted to keep a job and a roof over his head. His release from Azkaban had been important for him in terms of being able to live his life but he was hardly someone people wanted to hire – unless of course you had a shop in Knockturn Alley which of course he couldn’t go to work in because the Ministry would flock to him if he even so much as stepped into the purportedly sinister area of London. Alistair had to play the white man for a while and though he had been doing it well enough, his patience was beginning to run thin, his desire for something more interesting to happen was beginning to drive him barmy.
His distraction was not beneficial to him in the slightest. That morning had been spent brewing potions in the back room of the apothecary, leaving one of his siblings out in the front of the shop to restack shelves and serve the customers when they decided to purchase their goods. Alistair had been brewing all sorts from Veritaserum to potions that helped with morning sickness – the latter of which was becoming increasingly popular though he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why as it was never any pregnant-looking women buying the potion, always men! Alistair’s mind was, regrettably, a million miles away and so it was only a matter of time before he made a mistake. It wasn’t in the potion though. No, the potion ended up fine but the same could not be said for his hand that was scalded as he’d been ladling the potion into vials. It had not hurt as much as it would have done had he not gained a slight addiction – though the use of it was not frequent enough for him to really refer to it as an addiction, he merely blamed the use of it on old duelling wounds – to pain relieving potions which certainly allowed him to function normally before the second degree of pain the potion did not cover set into his nerves.
At a quarter past one in the afternoon, Alistair D’Eath found himself waiting in the foyer of St. Mungo’s. The woman at the desk, Sadie, had eyed him curiously before telling him to sit down, promising to find him a Healer that could tend to him. Alistair reclined in the seat, his injured hand resting on his thigh. The moments he had to himself were moments that allowed him to eye the waiting room, taking in the people there. Some were healthy, some really, really weren’t. He noticed the overwhelming amount of mothers and irritating little children that were toddling around and their mother’s after them, there to receive their potions for protection against diseases that would have proved fatal without them, and elderly witch who had taken a seat next to him, complaining of arthritis in her joints, had thought to inform him. Alistair bit his lip, nodding a little, unable to quell the niggling in his stomach. They were four years old, at best. The age his child would have been had circumstances not played out the way they had. He could picture Emmaline among the mothers, their child seated on her lap, absorbed in a book coloured far too bright for the time of day. He couldn’t deny the ache in his chest at that thought but did well to push it from his mind. It wouldn’t do him any good to think of her now, or any time for that matter. It was better just to forget.
by Theodore Rookwood Thu Jul 26, 2012 9:33 pm
