Trauma [OPEN]

Tests would always be the bane of Peter Howard’s life.

Tests. Tests. Do you think we ought to do some more tests, Healer Jones?

No, I don’t think you should do any more tests. I don’t think I have any blood left to take, thanks.

Not for the first time in his thirty-odd years, Peter found himself sat on a medical table, swinging his feet idly as two Healers bickered over what to do with him. He couldn’t sympathise, really, when they’d had three decades to sort out what they were going to do with him. There had been a few hiccups along the way of course like how he stopped being who he was first treated as because he’d done the foolish thing and run away. That had somewhat put a hole in everything the Healers knew about him. At times like these he almost wanted to tell them to go and look up Conall Hayes. He kept quiet though. He didn’t want that jar of worms to be opened up just because he was feeling grumpy.

Thankfully, his son was keeping his temper fairly even. Finley was sat on one of the plastic chairs across the room, swinging his legs in time with his father as he enthusiastically dug into a bowl of ice cream which one of the interns had taken him off to get from the food hall. He’d come back with a flake stuck in the midst of some Neapolitan scoops and Peter knew without having to wait for his son to eat it that Finley would be intolerable by the day’s end and the only thing to do with him would be to try and run him ragged somehow. They’d have to go to the park, he decided. Or perhaps he’d inflict the boy on the cat for a few hours. That would have them both asleep by eight o’clock hopefully.

Some more discussion went on in the background meanwhile and in the end, the healers decided to send Peter out and get him to wait. He smiled gratefully, tugging his t-shirt over his head. He was thankful to get the Azkaban tattoos out of their eyesight. He didn’t miss the somewhat sheepish looks the lady was giving him even though Peter was more or less certain they had a version of his record on their clipboards. He felt like saying he was only done for trespassing and theft but that wasn’t something he wanted to express in front of his son. Moreover, he didn’t feel comfortable with Finley seeing the runic numeric numbers anyway even if there was a version of it always constantly on his neck – though that one he tended to keep glamoured up and out of sight.

It was out into the waiting room that they went on that floor and Peter dropped himself down into one of the arm chairs, Finley hopping up onto his lap to continue eating the sweet treat. Sighing heavily, Peter rubbed at his arm and glared at the pinpricks in his arm that were beginning to bruise an ugly purple against the porcelain of his skin. He gritted his teeth in impatience and threw up a hand to thread his fingers through his hair, content to do nothing but wait given how he’d taken the whole day off to sit in St. Mungo’s with them anyway. He’d been getting a bit of spotting again – little magical drips and drabs popping up here and there. They were quick to remove it and change his stabilising potion prescription but he still didn’t feel exactly well. That was what the tests were for, he guessed. Just to check he wasn’t going to pop his clogs.

Merlin, he hated hospitals.

Damnit, Marcus thought. He was better than this normally, or he wanted to think so. This was not how his day was to have gone.  He was battered, barely on his feet, and leaning on the woman he was supposed to have been protecting.  Well, he was grateful that he had taken the hits and not her. That was, actually, how it was supposed to work.

He wasn't sure why she had brought him here and not gone home. There were healers there and she was far safer there, actually.

"What the hell are we doing here?" he hissed at her, aggravated. "Are you trying to unleash them in here? What were you thinking?"

"It was closer," the cloaked figure beside him whispered back. She deposited him into a chair in the waiting room. Actually, it looked more like pouring him into the chair out of sight of the child that was in the room. The right side of Marcus's face had taken a hard hit from the gigantic werewolf and was now bruised and bleeding.

That didn't hurt like the huge shard of the broken board that was lodged in his upper arm. That one was what was causing the most problem, the most loss of blood, some setting in of traumatic shock, and just honestly looked probably rather revolting.

"Stay here," his companion whispered. "I'll be back. You'll just fall on your face if you get up."  Marcus was already angry with her. He didn't reply. The black cloaked figure whirled around, stepped into the floo and vanished. Bloody hell. She was gone, and she'd left him here. That was grounds for a serious arse chewing when he caught up with her.

Alone now, he glanced up and saw a bloke not far away who just generally appeared bored.  Boredom had not been a problem thus far today.  He made a very lame attempt to look as if he had it all under control and merely flashed him an illusion of a composed smile.

He hadn't been there long when a white haired, grandmotherly woman pushing a tea trolley came through the waiting room. She saw him and seemed shocked.

"Oh, my!" she said, "What happened to you? You look like you need a cup of tea." She poured him tea into a paper cup and handed it forward to him. Tea? He needed tea? A shot of firewhiskey perhaps, but tea was about the farthest from his thoughts.

"Woodworking," Marcus said, improvising. The woman looked at him blankly.

All was quiet but the gentle bustle of nurses and healers around the area and for the clink of spoon and bowl as Finley continued to eat his ice cream. It allowed Peter the time to recollect himself. Had it been that long, truly, since he’d been in St. Mungo’s? He still felt like he knew every ward off by heart. He hadn’t been so young that he couldn’t remember his second home. He could barely remember the place he should have called home. He doubted he’d be able to even recall the façade in his mind but St. Mungo’s? He could tell you everything about it if you were so inclined to ask and that was dreadful, really, truly sad.

“Hey, look at that man, daddy!” Finley exclaimed beside him all of a sudden.

Peter turned with all intentions of scolding the boy for being so loud, for a start, but his eyes caught sight with whom his son was referring and every protestation died in Peter’s mouth because he shared the sudden alarm. Reflexively, Peter lifted his arm behind their chairs and put his hand on Finley’s head, as though doing so would somehow protect the boy. Both stared unabashedly, however, as the man trooped in with the figure of a woman whose face was well concealed. And as though that wasn’t enough, the woman then left and the man was sat as though that was the most reasonably thing to do.

“You alright, mate?” Peter asked after a moment, leaning over to the man. “You sure as hell didn’t get that kind of mark from woodworking.”

Finley peaked out from behind Peter and stretched an arm out across his father, holding out the bowl of ice cream to the man.

“Are you hungry, mister?” Finley asked gently. “This’ll make you feel better. Ice cream makes me and my daddy feel better so it’s bound to make you feel better, too!”

Smooth, Belby, Marcus thought. The normally classy, professional bodyguard found fitness made the whole thing look even more absurd. He glanced down that the cup of tea the trolley lady had thought he needed. He hadn't seen any firewhiskey on that trolley, but it certainly was a better thought.

The man with the boy addressed him. Not woodworking. He wasn't buying it.  The kid was offering him ice cream. He had a momentary visual of taking the bowl and dumping it on his wound to see if it numbed it any. He was quite certain that would add an additional layer of class to the whole business.  

"Fairly lame, wasn't it?" Marcus gave the man a half smile. It wasn't as if Marcus was dressed for woodworking anyway. Black, tailored designer suit, white shirt with black onyx cufflinks, black tie, black dress shoes. And the only speck of sawdust was directly related to the projectile in his upper arm.  

He made a mental note to chew Khaat a new orifice or two for dumping him here and simply popping out through the floo to who knew where.  And he knew she was right. If he intended to go follow her, he might well need to do so sitting down at least until he was patched.  Surely she wasn't stupid enough to go back after James one more time, was she? In all the time he'd worked for her, despite the fact that he had been duly warned that she could and did often ditch her bodyguards, she had never attempted it, had always wanted him close to her, even at home, like a security blanket. This had caught him offguard and had just been insanely easy for her. She had just dumped him and poofed. This didn't even rank as a rookie error. He was irked with himself, but he was more irked with her.

Yes. She was, he decided.  Hell, maybe he'd add a few more extra orifices to her for sheer decoration.

"The other bloke was about the size of a tree, and about as wooden headed, but, yeah, well, not entirely a vegetable.  If I had been woodworking, it might well have turned out not so far from this anyway. Not my strong suit."

He looked at the boy and smiled. "No thank you," he said. "Now, wait, are you sure its ice cream?  My mum always said it was cookies that fixed everything.  You made a good choice, though. They've got great ice cream here.  My daughter likes the strawberry ice cream here better than anybody else's. What's your favorite flavor?