Figments

Khaat was trying to return to work--without anyone knowing but an unavoidable handful of people. She was working at night--all night, in her office, trying to stay hidden. She never went anywhere without Marcus. The fact that James Blood was always out and about. She wasn't used to being afraid, but he did frighten her.

And, she was afraid now of being seen. Afraid of what people would say if they saw her hideously disfigured face. She had taken to wearing all manner of cloaks and translucent pashminas draped over her head and wrapped close around her face, or draping her hair to hide her face as much as possible. Whatever worked.

She hated how the press called her increasingly elusive. It was, of course, true. But it wasn't what she wanted. She didn't like it. She wanted to be free to go out in the open, to come and go as she pleased. Those days seemed gone forever.

One of the nurses knocked on her door. She looked at the clock. It was 2:17 am. What could they be looking here for? Marcus motioned to her to relax. He'd get rid of them. He answered the door.

"Is Khaat here? We need a healer," the nurse said.

"Who's on duty?" Marcus asked.

"Well, there's a problem..." the nurse stuttered.

"Is there another healer downstairs or not?"

"Well, there is, but they don't handle him well. He's blown out with everyone else. He's...well, difficult."

"What's the problem? Besides the fact that it sounds like he's annoying."

"Can't she come see him for even a moment? Please?"

The Healers had a sixth sense, didn’t you know, and that sixth sense was their uncanny ability to find James Sirius Potter every time he got his hands on something potentially damaging. They found him face down in a gutter in Knockturn Alley. He’d gotten his fix and then he’d gotten his ribs kicked in because a handful of Death Eater drop outs felt it would be poetic justice if they took out their anger on the son of the infamous Harry Potter. But of course, the joy of it waned somewhat when they realised the man neither cared nor really tried to fight back. There was only one thing that was better than beating a Potter half to death: letting him finish himself off. So that was what they did, only James didn’t get the chance.

The bright, luminous St. Mungo’s lights made him squint and lift his hands up underneath the frames of his glasses in a dull effort to protect his eyes. Outside the hospital, the cameras had flashed, dazzling him even more than he already was but once inside he regained some of his countenance – or, rather, enough to shrug himself forcibly out of the grasp of the Healer that had clung onto him, to keep him level and keep him from veering off. He pushed away though now, scrabbling across the foyer, opening his arms wide to both exhibit the fact that he was back and brace himself as he fell against the round desk behind which the secretaries sat.

The woman with red hair and bright green glasses looked up, taking them off of her nose, the chain on the ends of the glasses saving them, letting them fall against his chest. She arched a thin, over-plucked brow at him and he smiled cheekily. Slowly, Gina rose to her feet, smoothing a hand across her plum purple skirt idly as she measured James’ condition for herself.  The Healers that had picked him up, called in by, allegedly, a Malfoy in Slug’s and Jigger’s Apothecary, rushed forward and grasped James by the arms again, only serving to incense the Potter man who pushed himself out of their grasp again, fixing his glasses on his face, drawing his wand from his pocket after doing so.

“You didn’t think to disarm him before you brought him here?” Gina sighed, looking wearily at the Healers. They were young. She was sure these ones didn’t make a habit of finding James Potter in a ditch or drain somewhere. Their predecessors were very familiar with the procedure and, thankfully, so was Gina who turned to James, leaning over the desk and laying a gentle hand on his wand arm.

“Do you want to give that to me, love?” She asked gently, bringing her hand down to curl about his, loosening the wand from his grip. “We’re going to get you nice and sobered up, alrighty?”

James sighed wearily, a part of him seemingly conceding that it was a better idea than any of the ones he’d pursued after fleeing from the Potter household. He didn’t want to consider what Teddy would think when he went to Godric’s Hollow in the morning. He didn’t want to consider what Albus or Lily would think when they found out, either. Athena had done her best. She’d kept him busy. However, when communication broke down, when the siblings finally parted ways, no one could keep James tethered. No one could tell him where to go, what to do. He went to Knockturn Alley. He retraced old steps, found old friends. He got his fix.

“Don’t touch me,” James ground out as the Healers embarked upon stepping towards him once more. “Same room, Gina?” He grunted.

“James, are you sure you-”

But James, even when drunk, had an uncanny ability to look after himself when at St Mungo’s. Somehow, routine had given way to a familiarity with the place that existed outside of the obliviated mind he now possessed. He padded across the tiles, stopping to get rid of his shoes and pick them up, and opened the door to one of the triage rooms – the less dire patients. That was the one where he’d go and see Healer Macmillan but the man probably wouldn’t be in until the morning. He’d joked that James shouldn’t fall of the wagon without him around. James usually, strangely, bore that in mind. Not tonight though.

“Oh, piss off,” he exclaimed, rounding on the Healers that had dutifully followed him. “You’re not my shadows. Now get, will you?”

He’d sleep it off, he decided, if nothing else, and hopped on the treatment table, dragging the little table where all of the junk was piled up so he could have a little rifle through in search of a sobering up potion. He was far, far too familiar with this routine.

Khaat went downstairs with Marcus and, from the other end of the hallway, she saw the display that they were making in getting a rather headstrong drunk under some semblance of control.

"Where's the case you need me for?" Khaat asked the healer quietly.

"Um...that's him," she told Khaat. Khaat bristled.

"You did not, seriously, call me down here for a drunk, did you?" Khaat was angry. "Give him a bit to sober up and then let him go. What is it you need me for?"

"Well, he's a bit hostile when..."

"Well, that's what some of them do. You really haven't been here very long, have you?"

"Its just that everyone else, pretty much, has refused to work with him," she stammered.

"They don't really have an option," Khaat said. "Oh, for God's sake. Seriously?" She turned and looked at Marcus. "Let's find out what he's in the mood for, besides sarcasm, shall we? Let me see him alone. Stay within earshot but let me do this by myself."

She went first and got a bottle of firewhiskey and a bottle of sobering potion--and a couple of paper cups, not that she approved of drinking firewhiskey from a paper cup. She tucked the potion bottle in her pocket, and stacked the cups upside down over the neck of the firewhiskey bottle.She nervously tried to pull the hair around her face a bit more. Marcus reached over and helped her, for whatever it might do. There was only so much anything would do.

She walked down the hallway and took a breath. She wasn't sure she wanted to face anyone, but she had to walk out what she expected others to do. She watched Marcus take a position outside the door. She looked at him. He merely looked back at her reassuringly as someone handed her the chart. James. Harry's boy. Another trip down memory lane. She'd just recently caught up with Teddy again, and now here was James. She was quite sure this wasn't how Harry would have wanted his son to turn out, but she was well aware that Harry knew all about inner demons. So perhaps he might not have been all that hypercritical.

She went in the room alone. She could hear, by his breathing, that he wasn't asleep yet. Not yet anyway.

"You're getting quite the reputation, James," she said quietly, nonthreateningly. "It seems people have forgotten how stubborn our families can really be. So--I have two bottles with me. Which one are we using?" She set out both bottles--but deliberately out of his reach. She just really couldn't justify giving him more alcohol until they had at least talked.

The fact that St. Mungo’s had become a home away from home was maddening in itself let alone the fact that not for the first time – albeit the first time in a very long time – James Potter had been launched into the A&E department and no one upon no one could find a healer willing to get him sober. Healer Macmillan had gone home. Thus, in lieu of his personal healer who had come to understand James’ motivations, making it easier to get the root of why he’d elected to use again, he found himself in “the usual room” rifling through the drawers in search of, principally, a sobering up potion but, secondarily, also something to wrap around his palm and the cut that a vase of his mother’s had made as he’d slammed it from the mantelpiece which would do until he had the sense about him to heal it himself.

When the door to his room opened, he turned and found himself in the presence of a woman whom he hadn’t had the dubious joy of speaking to in more than a decade. He wasn’t entirely sure if Teddy had extended his hand awkwardly to his extended family but whatever their relationship, James still was considered “part of the family” in the same sort of strange way that Scorpius Malfoy was, given he was his brother’s best friend. You’re not my brother, Albus’ words shot through him and the nausea returned in full force but for the life of him he couldn’t bear to bring it up. No, he swallowed back sickness and stood, braced against the cupboards, wondering and waiting for her to say something.

“I’d say infamy is one of my less obtuse sins,” he commented dryly, lifting his hand to the sobering potion. “Getting plastered isn’t so fun when you stop doing it for fun and do it because you don’t know what else to do.”

James hopped back on the bed, lithely for someone so dizzied and confused, and he looked at Khaat curiously, tipping his head to the side as he took her in. She looked a little beat up. Better than Parkinson alleged she looked. Though, he supposed that given the space of time between now and prior interview, she would have changed. She would have healed.

“You should sue your plastic surgeon,” he quipped with a smirk.

She handed him the sobering potion rather than the whiskey. She had no issue with giving him what he wanted.

"Help yourself," she said. "I would fire my plastic surgeon had there been one. It didn't happen that way."

She sat down but banged her paralyzed shoulder into the corner of the back of the chair. She automatically winced because the shoulder hurt all the time, and banging it never helped.

"Damnit," she said under her breath before she'd gathered any decorum to stop herself. The shoulder never, never ever stopped hurting. It usually was only bearable under some measure of pain potion, which was definitely worn off now. That was another one of those things that her father hoped to be able to fix someday. Whenever the heck someday was.

Her kneejerk desire was to pick up the firewhiskey and take a healthy drink of it. A gulp or three and hope that it numbed the stab that ran up her neck and down her arm that she didn't have the luxury of even moving to try to see if a different position helped. She realized she had automatically looked at the bottle without intending to. Classy. Real classy.

"James," she said, puposely looking at him and hoping to redirect things in the room a bit. "Why are we here? Besides the obvious. Can you tell me how, somehow, you've been able to run off most of my staff? They're normally pretty resilient, but for some reason, you've managed to run them off and they sent me down here to deal with you--in whatever that means. Looks like you're fairly self sufficient. What'd you do to them?"

Good humour always seemed to mitigate the worst situations. James found his lips twitching as he unstopped the vial of potion. Knocking it back, he swallowed deeply and shook himself, willing the potion to work quickly and methodically. It soon alleviated some of the heavy headedness that had struck him and he set the vial down, popping the cork back into it just before it connected with the side table.

“Nobody likes a law suit,” he smiled. “Still, I’d batter whoever was charming enough to do the same to you. Someone’s mum clearly forgot to teach them manners.”

He observed Khaat idly as she sat back, as pain flashed across her features and as she elected to sober her pain with the juxtaposing bottle of firewhisky. He watched a smidgen of the amber liquid disappear from the bottle but he couldn’t find the desire within him to join in. He was coming down, he realised with a start, and all of the fatigue and the nausea of spice and sugar induced highs would enact soon. That of all things he wasn’t looking forward to.

“D’you want some pain potion?” He asked conversationally. “There’s a vial in the cupboard over there. It’s best with firewhisky, I find.”

Therein we see why addicts don’t really tend to have friends. Addicts turn everyone onto the same track and James found himself shaking his head, opening his mouth to recant the previous statement as he “didn’t want to be responsible for making the Chief Warlock a pain potion addict.” Nevertheless, it wasn’t such a far throw from the way he lived his life before. The pastel jumpers and the seemingly nose-to-the-grindstone job in the Ministry had done nothing to take him out of himself. He was still the failed Potter son, the one that they’d all looked to for guidance. There he was. Twenty-four years old. He used to be a Quidditch player. He used to be engaged. He used to be everything everyone had wanted him to be. Now what was he?

The best he had was that he was a caregiver for his dog who had more of a social life than him. Well done, James Potter, well done.

“Mac is the only one that wants to treat me,” he replied, reaching up to rub the back of his neck. “I stumbled in here wasted more often than not a year or so ago. Now they just tend to pick me up, drop me here and wait for Mac to do something. To be honest I reckon they’ve given up. Plus I’m … I’m not the nicest drunk in the world. Not nasty, really, but not kind I suppose.” He sighed.

“Plus it was … it was so often, like … every night they just didn’t want anything to do with me anymore. I’ve terrified more interns than I’d like to admit, I remember I made one new healer cry. Bless her. Yeah, my healer is the only one that will treat me and Mac is at home sleeping most likely so we’re buggered until the morning. I was on track. It was alright. AA meetings and all the rest of it.”

He eyed the bottle of Firewhisky warily.

“Fell of the wagon tonight,” he muttered the obvious, looking down at his hands. “I went to dinner with my brother and my sister and Teddy and Athena and it fell to pieces, basically. I don’t know… I guess I just needed to touch base with whatever made sense and the booze still does, the drugs still do. I don’t know how to stay sober. They don’t know how to treat me. I don’t know how to be a brother. I’ve messed everything up and I still can’t remember why.”

Ah, yes. The Obliviation. Seemingly the route of James’ current problems. His potential salvation. But nothing upon nothing had changed. Would it ever? He doubted it highly.

"This," she said, "was caused out of obsession. Pure barbaric obsession. If I thought there were any hope for redemption for this monster, I'd be more understanding. But, where he is concerned, I'm fresh out of warm fuzzies. He had a mum, but she was tail over teakettle for Fenrir Grayback, as I hear it. Deliberately had her own child infected out of 'love.'

"Now, this particular James can't decide if he wants me for love or for lunch. So he keeps trying for the latter. As for the pain potion, no thanks. It doesn't work for this. Most of the time, I try to just use the 'pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps' crap. Sometimes it works, and sometimes I'm just an ass about it." She looked up at him. "We're not so different, James," she finally said.

"Look," she said. "I'm glad you like Mac. She's a good healer. But, you've opted for the potion. Its a good first step. So, lets go to the next thing. May I heal that cut on your hand for you?"

She got the feeling as she looked at him that he had been emotionally beaten down by something. What it was she didn't know. She didn't know if it was something personally painful, or the alcohol, or setting his own personal bar too high for himself, but she knew he was capable of far more than he believed he was. What she couldn't do was to push it on him. That was the last thing anyone wanted to here when they were that depressed. Her own firsthand experience told her that.

To this James Potter, whose idea of a bad time was the disastrous dinner that had taken up and changed his evening, the tumult of the life that Khaat Lupin led was somewhat off putting. It seemed to James that her being in St. Mungo’s was tempting fate. Being in Britain at all, he felt, was tempting fate. Obsession wasn’t rational, hence the name, and he didn’t know that the shadow she had stood outside the door would really do the job if her stalker came calling.

“That’s why you put it in the whisky,” James replied gently, pulling down the cuff of the pale blue dress shirt he’d worn to dinner.

He looked at her, trying to decide whether there was anything in what she was saying. He couldn’t recall a time when similarities could’ve been drawn between her and himself. He did not harbour even a fifth of the bravery she must have. Yet, surely, there must’ve been a time when he did. When he had been a member of the Order, when butchering Death Eaters had been a trade he’d plied whilst not playing Quidditch. So much had changed. Now, the rush of magic was as much of an addiction as the alcohol or the drugs.

“If you want,” he returned, pulling off the bandage. “And don’t worry. I show an amazing strength and awareness of mind now but it’ll fall apart later when something goes awry. Bad days. Weak days. Every day.”

She got up and went over to him and gently laid her hand right on the cut in his hand. She paused a moment allowing the slight warmth of her own energies pass from herself to his hand, sealing the wound from the inside out. She left her hand there for a moment, knowing by experience what a wound felt like as it yielded to her. When the wound was finally closed, she used some astringent and a dressing to clean the traces of blood from his skin.

"Looks better," she said. The problem of an energy worker was that while she could heal others, she could not heal herself. Energy had to be transferred, and if an energy worker became wounded or ill, the energy was already impaired. She had to resort to traditional potions or to another energy worker. For her scars, the damage was too severe. They had been reduced, if one could actually call it that.

The healers had told her that , in her shoulder, the bones, the nerves, the cartilage that James had crushed and otherwise just disfigured or removed, could not be repaired any more than it was. It would take a Master Healer months to make any difference, if there were any Master Healers anywhere to be found with her father impaired.

It was maddening to have a Master Healer so close to her and to have him unable to help her right now. He had issues of his own. Thinking of her father, if he were here, he might well not have quite the desire she did of allowing him to escape the nausea that came from either over imbibing or from the sobering potion. He'd have thought that James should weather that out himself. She didn't agree. He'd suffered enough.

She opened the cabinet and looked for a moment and then mixed two lesser potions together. This tended to be a decent follow up for the sobering up business. Why her father didn't just add them to the sobering potion, she hadn't figured out, but it tended to make the whole experience less wretched. The bad thing was that this odd combination did tend to have a side effect of giving the user a case of the munchies for a short bit. There certainly were worse side effects, though.

"Here," she said, handing the potions cup to him. "Drink. It does help." She figured, if things went as they normally did, he might soon be feeling peckish. Then it occurred to her. She remembered he worked in the department of mysteries. James needed to be needed. And she certainly needed him. First things first though. He had to be in condition to listen.

Healing was always something that had interested James. The way it just seemed to work, the way the body wanted to heal itself and the way to do so meant that you had to be favoured by someone in order to do so – he loved all that. It was apt in a way given that in a testament to his father throughout both Hogwarts and his Quidditch career, and indeed into his adult life for more superfluous reasons, he found a home in St. Mungo’s. He didn’t think Harry would be surprised but he couldn’t say he remembered the man enough for the man he was in order to accurately presume upon whether he’d mind or not. James just didn’t know. He only recalled his mother marginally better – though even then that was her death. The thought made him sit up a little straighter as he winced.

“Do you remember my dad?” He asked suddenly, looking after Khaat as she took to the cupboards once more. “He wouldn’t have been proud of me, I know that, but … if he hadn’t have died. If mum hadn’t have died…” James took a breath. “Would we have been happier, do you think? Would it still be so messed up?”

The cynic in him – the part rather like Albus – wanted to assert that it would make no difference. The snake had always been in the garden, the writing on the wall and the poison in the veins. Yet, James wanted to be optimistic. Despite all the pain that crippled him he wanted to think that something would be different that somehow Albus would be happier and not hate him and Lily wouldn’t look so dashed ill and miserable and he would be clean. Truly, properly clean. And not an arsehole, too. That was a big one. Maybe he’d be someone worth being around.

“Thank you Khaat,” he took the potion from her, bringing it to the lips to sip at it. Then, finding it didn’t taste two horrific, he took the contents of the cup and handed it back to her with a grateful twitch upwards of his lips. “Is there any chocolate kicking around?” He asked, feeling the need to indulge in it, for the sake of irony. He was a Potter with a Lupin after all said and done.