♥ "Let’s Go There" (Part 1) for eustacia_vye28♥
Title: Let’s Go There
Rating: NC-17
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: Sex, maybe half a second of non-con if you squint.
Summary: It’s amazing what a week’s worth of shifts at the General Healing clinic can bring.
A/N: To my recipient, thank you for the fabulous prompt! I enjoyed working with it. Believe it or not, I was hoping for a story of no more than 4,000 words, but of course that did not happen. To S, my beta, thank you for being so fantastic and beta-ing this monster with your usual skill and aplomb.
Happy reading!
Let’s Go There
~*~
Monday
Of one thing, Ginny was absolutely certain. This was going to be a long week.
As she stood in front of the mirror of her tiny bathroom and pulled her hair into its trademark messy ponytail, she wondered which spunk-chump thought it would be a good idea to give her day-shifts seven days in a row. She knew that she was a good General Healer (‘surprisingly good’, according to her mother - a statement that Ginny couldn’t help but be mildly offended by), and that good Healers, due to their above-average ability to save people’s lives, tended to get more shifts. But seven days in a row? The most days Ginny had had to do in a row before was five, and that was when St Mungo’s had been so understaffed that people were bringing in their House Elves to help out with cleaning and replenishing potions. She assumed that somebody had said that they couldn’t work on Wednesday, or something, and that no other Healer had been available to do the shift, so the afore-mentioned anonymous spunk-chump had volunteered her for the job.
It would have been nice of them to let her know that a seven-day work week was on the horizon. As it was, the roster for that week had only been posted a few days ago, and anybody who noticed Ginny’s schedule in the intervening time had given her a pat on the back and a heartfelt “good luck!” She appreciated the sympathy of her colleagues, but noticed that none of them were leaping forward and declaring that they would be the hero of the hour and take one of the mid-week shifts for her. Perhaps they’d give her a spectacular obituary if she died of exhaustion at some point, instead?
As Ginny grabbed her work robe, her wand and her purse, and prepared for the morning Apparition, the only thought she had was that next Sunday evening could not come quickly enough.
It wasn’t that Ginny didn’t love her job, because she certainly did. After she finished at Hogwarts, surprising everybody with her Outstandings in Potions and Herbology, she surprised everybody further by saying that she wanted to be a Healer. She trained for three long years at St Mungo’s, and when it came to having to choose what area of Healing she would like to specialise in, she could not make a decision. As such, she chose what she dubbed the most logical path in that situation, and went for General Healing. The very idea of General Healing was to, after all, know a bit of everything.
And she was a natural at it. Patients liked her, because she had an air of patience, sincerity and generosity about her that many General Healers sorely lacked. She was able to make her patients feel comfortable enough to tell her exactly what was wrong, which, when magic is involved, is crucial. Ginny had seen it all, from women with spatulas that refused to stop hitting them, to men who have been hexed by their wives to turn green and throw up termites (that had not been the nicest afternoon she’d ever had), to children who had stolen their older siblings’ supplies of Nosebleed Nougat and not realised that the purple end was not merely for decoration (an incident that had made her owl George and order him to put very clear warnings on the Skiving Snackboxes from that point onwards). She was now into her fourth year of being a full-time General Healer, and she was already considered one of the best in St Mungo’s; a reputation she normally strove to maintain.
But the last couple of months had been pretty hard on Ginny, and as a result she was not performing her work duties with her usual enthusiasm. Whilst before she had been quite a people person, and eager to stay and talk to her work colleagues long after her shifts had ended, nowadays she only ever had the energy to go straight home and spend her evenings with a plate of pasta and a few glasses of wine. She was constantly tired, although she never managed to sleep for more than a few hours a night. Her work clothes (or at least, the clothes she wore under the trademark St Mungo’s robe) had gone from being lively, colourful, and sometimes risqué, to being simple blacks and blues and boring pastels. The quality of her work had not changed, but her regular patients had noticed her change in demeanour. They never brought it up, however, because they knew as well as anybody why Ginny had changed. How could they not have known? The Daily Prophet had had themselves a field day that day three months ago, when Harry Potter, former saviour of the Wizarding World and current Auror extraordinaire, had stood before his people and announced that he and his high-school sweetheart were officially breaking up.
Again, it would have been nice of him to have let her know. That he was going to break up with her, in public, without her present, that is.
Despite how much everybody loved Harry (and not without good reason), those who had had relatively close interactions with Ginny before the announcement continued to love her and want to spend time with her. They gave her space, and despite the excruciating number of Daily Prophet gossip articles declaring that she was utterly miserable and unable to carry on without the love of her life by her side, or whatever rubbish it was they printed, most were sure that she was just adjusting to single life after having been in such a high-profile relationship for so long, and that eventually she would be the same extroverted, enthusiastic, enormous spirit of a young woman that everybody knew and loved.
However, some people were starting to lose their patience. It had been three months, after all.
As Ginny appeared in General Healing reception that morning, she was met with the scream of a very loud and evidently very unhappy baby.
“Morning, Jack,” she greeted the young, smart-mouthed Monday receptionist, raising her voice a not-insignificant amount.
“I’m glad you didn’t say ‘good morning’, because it certainly isn’t one,” Jack shouted back. He thrust a clipboard into her hand. “Your first patient’s in room 2. He got clobbered by some drunk bloke last night, and didn’t gather up the balls to come and see us until this morning.”
“Fine, fine,” Ginny said, covering her mouth with the back of her hand as she yawned. “No chance of a cup of tea, is there?”
“Seriously?” Jack asked, now juggling a huge stack of medical supplies in his arms and pushing past her. “You know I love you, Gin, but I’ve been flat-out since 9. If anyone’s getting a cup of tea in the next hour, it’s definitely me.”
“Selfish arse,” Ginny said, smiling. “I’ll try to get patients out of my room as quickly as possible. That’ll help you out a bit.”
“Cheers,” Jack said, before running towards the other rooms.
Ginny covered another yawn, and blinked the resulting tears out of her eyes as she headed toward her room. Last night had been particularly bad for her on the sleep front, with her only managing to get about one and a half hours. Her body was exhausted, but it seemed as though her mind was always awake, alert, and buzzing with thoughts, whether they were about recipes her mother had taught her, or about some stupid customer at the shop George had mentioned to her, or about some problematic patient of hers.
At any rate, Ginny couldn’t sleep, and for the last few months it normally took her a morning Pepper-Up Potion and many cups of sugar-laden tea during the day to keep her alert enough to do her job. She was fairly sure that neither tea nor Pepper-Up Potion were addictive substances, but she supposed she should get around to checking that at some point.
Despite the yawning, that morning Ginny had imbibed the day’s Pepper-Up less than an hour ago, so she felt fairly alert as she opened the door to her examination room.
Upon seeing her patient, however, she had to wonder if she was, perhaps, asleep. Asleep, and having a nightmare.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said.
Sitting on her doctor’s bed, gazing idly out of the window, one leg crossed elegantly over the other, was Draco Malfoy. As far as Ginny could tell, his appearance had not changed one bit since she had last seen him, all of seven years ago. He still had the same insanely blond hair, the same skin of such a degree of paleness that Ginny would be prepared to bet that he had some vampire blood in him, the same ironed, pressed, and probably very expensive clothing, and, above all else, the same aristocratic expression of arrogance that had always made Ginny want to punch him, whenever she had accidentally caught his eye.
And now, it seemed, somebody had taken that liberty last night, and Draco was hoping for her assistance in the recovery process. If Ginny was having a nightmare, this was probably one of the worst she’d had in quite some time.
Upon hearing Ginny’s expression of disbelief, Draco looked away from the window and saw that it was she who had spoken. Far from appearing surprised at who his Healer that day was, or intrigued by how much she had changed in the past seven years (which she undoubtedly had, although her pictures were so often in the Prophet that most of Wizarding Britain would not have noticed the change), he instead raised one immaculately-plucked eyebrow.
“That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think, She-Weasel?” he asked. “I thought Healers were supposed to be nice to their patients.”
Ginny could not quite believe her ears. The two of them had not seen hide or hair of each other for seven years, and yet he still thought it acceptable to call her by that horrible nickname? Ginny had no idea how she was going to be able to treat Malfoy without accidentally hexing him. Not the greatest sign, when you’ve only been observing the patient for about thirty seconds.
“Well, you just addressed me using that beyond-offensive nickname,” Ginny said, by way of answering his question, “so I reserve the right to treat you with disdain.”
“You’re offended by the name ‘She-Weasel’?” Draco asked, uncrossing his legs. “How very pedestrian of you.”
“I doubt that there is much about me you wouldn’t find pedestrian, Malfoy.” Ginny strode over to her supply cupboard and pulled out a fresh pair of medical gloves. “So, I hear someone beat the living crap out of you. Would you be able to forward them my congratulations?”
“Very funny,” Draco answered. “From what I’ve heard around the traps, most seem to be of the opinion that you’re one of the kindest, most sympathetic General Healers out there. Clearly my sources are the most mistaken anyone has ever been since that bloke who thought chocolate cauldrons were the latest and greatest in magical enterprise.”
“Are you always this snippy? Or is it just because you’re in a lot of pain?” Ginny pulled her swivel chair over to him. “I notice that you were too proud to leave the house without Concealing your face first.”
“I absolutely was. But believe me, She-Weasel, when I say that even the most bogan-y of bogans would have Concealed this bruise.”
“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what a ‘bogan’ is, are you?” Ginny waved her wand in front of Draco’s face, feeling for the magic surrounding it. She was not detecting anything other than the slight block from the Concealment Charm. This was good. Non-magical injuries were far easier to deal with than magical ones.
“A bogan is an Australian,” Draco answered her.
“I see.” Ginny waved her wand again, silently chanting the counter-charm for Concealment magic as she did so. “Does this undoubtedly offensive term refer to all Australians, or a small subset that you find particularly unfavourable?”
Draco opened his mouth to answer, but was cut off by Ginny gasping in surprise.
“We’ll need to send an owl to Her Majesty’s Theatre,” she said, in an attempt to keep herself from wincing. “Because I think they might be missing their Phantom of the Opera.”
“I was hoping for a small amount of professionalism on your part,” Draco retorted, attempting to cover his face with his hand.
Ginny could certainly understand why he’d Concealed his face now. The entire left side of it, from forehead to chin, looked like one massive bruise. The skin was purple and black and red all over, his lips seemed to be quite badly swollen, and he appeared unable to open his left eye. He looked to be in so much pain that Ginny actually felt an ounce of sympathy for him. Feeling sympathy for Malfoy. Who would have thought?
Fortunately for him, he’d come to the perfect Healer. After years of mending every physical injury imaginable on Harry, she was nothing short of an expert on fixing broken bones, mending cuts, bringing down swellings and, thanks to one particularly memorable case, regrowing obliterated muscle tissue. Even with bruising as severe as this, it would take her less than two minutes to send Draco on his way.
“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to tell me,” Ginny said, resting her wand against Draco’s temple as carefully as possible (she did not like the man, but she was not so vindictive as to want to push hard against his bruised and swollen skin), “how you got beaten up in the first place?”
“Well,” Draco said, “if you must know, I was at the pub last night with my mates, and I said a few things that I suppose many would find … controversial.”
“Bloody hell,” Ginny uttered, removing her wand. “’Controversial’? Were you openly declaring that you believe Muggleborns should be sold into slavery, or something? I’m not really sure I should bother mending this.”
“Calm down, She-Weasel. I was saying nothing of the sort. All I was saying was that the Falcons have a serious chance of winning the Cup this year.”
“Seriously? You got beaten up like this over Quidditch? That’s so… wait. The Falcons?” The Quidditch fan in Ginny caught up with the rest of her. “You honestly think the Falcons could win? But half of their squad is under suspension for unnecessary violence during play.”
“Yeah, but it’s the crappier half of the squad that’s down. With only the good players able to play, they stand a chance, in my opinion. Anyway, some very obvious Prides fans heard what I was saying, and the most troll-like of the pack indicated, fairly loudly and aggressively, that he did not much like what I was saying.”
“I can’t imagine many Prides fans would have enjoyed what you were saying.”
“Indeed. Anyway, I figured that, since I had my wand and this bloke did not look as though he could magic his way out of a wet paper bag, I was safe to taunt him a little. I don’t think he understood exactly what I was saying, but he understood that I was trying to offend him. He ran towards me and I confidently patted my pocket for my wand, only to remember that I had left it in the restroom. He grabbed me by the collar of my designer-label shirt (now ruined, of course), and the next half an hour is something of a blur. The next thing I knew, my friends were holding me upright and dragging me out of the pub, and my face felt as though I’d put it through a mincer.”
“Blimey,” Ginny said, and she meant it. Dickhead though Malfoy was, it didn’t sound as though he’d deserved to be beaten up so badly. “That bloke must have had one hell of a short temper.”
“He certainly did,” Draco agreed, “but it’s not as if you can talk, She-Weasel. You’re hardly the pinnacle of maturity and restraint yourself. I remember reading a story in the Prophet a few years ago about you. You and Potter were on a date, and the press decided to follow along, or something, and to cut a long story short you threw a glass of wine, glass and all, at one of the cameramen.”
Ginny couldn’t help but groan at Draco’s mentioning of that particular story. She had written a letter of apology to the cameraman in question the next day, but the Prophet had, most unsurprisingly, not seen fit to publish the letter, preferring to let the public think she was an out-of-control She-Demon for the several months following that. She did feel genuine regret for her actions, particularly because she had not actually been remotely angry at the cameramen. The truth was, Harry had spent the previous half-hour telling Ginny, who had started her current job at St Mungo’s, that she probably shouldn’t get too comfortable in the job since she’d hopefully be going on Maternity Leave soon. He’d really had some nerve, that day. It was not as if Ginny had not wanted kids. Rather, it was the implication that she would be the one to go on Maternity Leave, especially when he was the one always talking about wanting a break from work. For somebody who was all about promoting equality for all, he had been rather reluctant to execute it in his own household.
But, whatever. It was in the past now, and it wasn’t as if Draco needed to know the story behind her rage that day, or anything.
“Right,” she instead said, putting her wand away. “You’re done.”
“Already?” Draco asked, tentatively touching his face. “Where’s the mirror? I want to see if you’ve skewed my nose or something.”
Ginny rolled her eyes, but pointed towards the small sink toward the back of the room.
“You’d know if I’d altered your nose,” she told him, as he glanced in the mirror and she saw his shoulders slump with what she had to assume was relief. “You have to break a person’s nose to alter it. It’s possible to make the break painless, but you can still feel it.”
“Right.” Draco was clearly not listening. He’d already strode back to the bed and picked up his man-purse (for that was definitely what it was, and it suited him disturbingly well), and was now heading towards the door.
“And feel free to show yourself out,” Ginny said. “We’re done here.”
Draco turned around, one hand on the door handle. “Thanks for your help, She-Weasel. Believe it or not, I found your inability to be professional quite endearing.” He might have said more, but the next thing that came out of his mouth was a loud cough.
“Coughing, Malfoy?” Ginny asked. “You should see a Healer about that.”
“Do you write your own material, She-Weasel?” Malfoy asked. Ginny would have answered, but he was out the door before she had a chance.
Well, Ginny thought, exiting the room to grab the next patient chart, there’s somebody who has not changed at all since Hogwarts days.
~*~
Tuesday
“What’s for lunch, Cheryl?” Ginny addressed the Tuesday receptionist as she pulled off her fake Muggle Doctor robe. Some young magical lads, who had clearly just turned seventeen, had decided to put a Jumping Jinx on an entire commuter train. Over a hundred passengers had suffered unbelievable injuries, and many more had witnessed the bizarre event. Ginny had been woken up (two hours sleep, that night) at 6am and called to the Muggle train station to mend cuts, bruises and a few broken wrists, as well as erase quite a few memories. She’d been running around non-stop for the past seven hours and had only just made it into her technical place of work. The only redeeming factor from that morning was the owl she’d received from Ron at around 10am, informing her that the young miscreants who had caused the whole commotion had been detained and were now in Auror custody. Comforting news indeed, and it left Ginny wondering how many years a wizard or witch can be sentenced for ‘general dickheadedness’.
“For you and I, a wing and a prayer, dear,” Cheryl, the Tuesday receptionist (and the one that reminded Ginny to an almost frightening extent of her mother) answered. “We need to tend to some of these patients. The other Healers have been here since nine, and they’re desperate for a break.”
“You can’t be serious,” Ginny said. “I’ve been working since six, in another location! Surely I deserve the break more than them?”
“You do, dear,” Cheryl answered, pushing her large spectacles back into place. “And we all wanted to let you have an hour to yourself first, but your next patient requested you specifically.”
“Well that’s just brilliant, isn’t it?” Ginny asked, snatching the file from the top of the stack on the desk. “This person had better have something really serious.”
“I don’t know about ‘serious’,” Cheryl said, and Ginny noticed that her eyes were twinkling in that same mischievous way her mother’s eyes tended to twinkle, sometimes, “but he’s certainly quite a good-looking young lad.”
Ginny grumbled, but headed for her room without further comment. She’d be lying if she had told Cheryl that the patient being good-looking hardly sweetened the deal. Because it sort of did.
That was, of course, until she opened the door, and saw none other than Draco-sodding-Malfoy, this time lying on her bed.
“Geez, She-Weasel,” he said, looking over at her. “You sure took your sweet time, didn’t you? I feel as though I’ve been lying here, slowly dying, for the past half-hour.” As he finished speaking, his voice was suddenly overcome by a stream of violent coughs. Ginny watched his body jolt with every cough, and when the coughs subsided and he was again lying down, she tried her best to hide a smirk of pleasure at his obvious pain.
She failed. Dismally.
“Why exactly are you here, Malfoy?” she asked, pulling out her swivel chair. “It didn’t seem to me, when you were here yesterday, that the Healer’s office is a place that you like to spend a lot of your time. I’m sure you know perfectly well that minor illnesses heal perfectly well with nothing but bed-rest and plenty of fluids?”
“I don’t like spending time in St Mungo’s, and I do know how to treat minor illnesses,” Draco agreed. “But I was told by a trained medical professional that I should see a Healer about this. It would be ungentlemanly of me to disagree.” He let out another string of coughs, and Ginny debated putting on a face mask.
“I didn’t mean that you should see me,” she instead said, abandoning her swivel chair and heading for her potion cabinet. “What I don’t get is why you requested to see me in particular. Surely you’d have preferred to see someone … anyone … else?”
“Oh, don’t underestimate yourself, She-Weasel. It doesn’t suit you.” He coughed twice before continuing. “And I figured you’d be the better Healer to see, because you know the most about my recent medical history.”
“Your recent medical history?” Ginny selected a bottle, and brought it and her swivel chair towards him. “As in, you got treatment for the territorial markings of an angry Prides fan yesterday, and for the past several years before that you’ve not seen any Healer at all, due to what I am is assuming is a pathological fear of anybody other than you touching your sacred area? Again, I must ask why you didn’t request to instead see any of the other Healers.”
“Well, maybe it was also because I knew you’d be the most likely to mention my ‘sacred area’, as you call it. Other Healers are probably a bit more polite than that. And by that I mean, other Healers are probably polite at all.”
“Oh, I’m polite to most people, Malfoy, I assure you,” Ginny said, drawing circles in the air between them with her wand. “You just bring out my ruder side.”
A small beep to her left signalled that she should look at the board above her desk. She turned around and considered the numbers now written on it.
“That’s nifty,” Draco remarked, looking at it. “Where’d you get that from?”
“Not that it’s any of your business,” Ginny answered, “but my brother made it for me. Traditionally when you check a patient’s vitals, the numbers will form from smoke that comes out of your wand, and you’re supposed to read the numbers in the short time that they hang there before the smoke diffuses. I was having trouble reading the numbers, and I mentioned it to my brother, and he whipped up this little invention. When I drew the circles in the air, my wand picked up your vitals and sent the numbers to this board. The numbers will stay there until I clear the board. He got the idea from some of the bits of Muggle technology my dad keeps in his shed.”
“I see.” If Draco was surprised about the idea coming from Muggle technology, he didn’t show it. “So what do my vitals say?”
“That you have a cold. Something that I’m sure you knew already.” Ginny placed the bottle from the cabinet into his hand. “This is a Pepper-Up potion. Have you ever taken one before?”
Draco pulled a face. “Not for years. My mother used to make me drink it when I was a child. It’s revolting. I hate pepper flavour.”
“Yes, well, harden up,” Ginny replied, giving Malfoy just about the amount of sympathy she felt he deserved. “It’s brilliant stuff. Take a spoonful after every major meal, and I can pretty much guarantee that by tomorrow or the next day you’ll be walking around looking down your nose at people like a champ once more.”
“You’re quite touchy today, aren’t you, She-Weasel?” Draco remarked, tucking the bottle carefully into his man-purse. “What’s the matter? Has it been a while for you? Do you need to get laid?”
“Oh my …” Ginny would have loved to have thrown something at him. Sadly all she had within reach was her wand, and she was not about to throw that. “Get the bloody hell out of here, Malfoy, before I make like a Prides fan and beat you to death.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes’, then?”
“You’ll take it as nothing, thank you. Now bugger off.”
“All right, I’m gone. Thanks for the potion.”
“I’d say ‘you’re welcome’, but you’re really, really not.”
Draco exited without further comment, and Ginny shut the door behind him, before leaning on it and closing her eyes for a brief moment. It would be downright deceitful for her to pretend like she had been the most civil Healer in the world to Malfoy for these previous two visits, but that comment was really pushing it.
The sad thing was that Ginny knew she had only been offended by it because it was as true as it was indecent.
And to put the icing on the shit-cake, Ginny had given him the last Pepper-Up potion in her cabinet. She’d been looking forward to taking some herself. Without it she was not sure how she was going to stay upright for the next six hours. Maybe she could ask one of the other Healers for some?
~*~
Wednesday
Ginny was in her room, drinking a cup of tea and reading through her patient files. She had managed an almost decadent four hours of sleep last night, and as such she was feeling unusually refreshed.
Her tea still needed three sugars, though.
She was just about done with her reading when Bella, the Wednesday receptionist, stuck her head in the door.
“Oh, Ginny!” she exclaimed. “Thank Merlin you’re here. There’s a patient out here with one hell of an allergic reaction. He needs treatment, urgently.”
“Bring him in,” Ginny responded immediately. As she waited for the door of her room to open, she went to a supply cupboard she rarely used, but kept well-stocked for emergencies such as these. It was well-known among the magical medical community that few witches and wizards have allergies. The magic in their blood generally prevents such things from happening. As such, the magical method for dealing with the odd individual who does have an allergy was pathetic. It required a potion that was on the stupid side of difficult to perfect, and its effects were often not particularly potent. As a result, Ginny decided to investigate Muggle methods for treating allergies, and came across a most marvellous invention, called an epinephrine auto-injector. If a patient was having an allergic reaction, all she had to do was stab them in the leg with the injector, and a burst of hormone would shoot into their bloodstream, immediately calming down the allergic reaction. It was one of those more-than-occasional times where Ginny had to stop and admire just how amazing Muggle innovations often are.
The door opened, and Ginny turned, injector in hand…
…to see Draco Malfoy stumbling into the room. His whole face was now as swollen as the left side of it had been two days ago. He was clutching at his neck with panicked fingers, possibly trying to massage his throat to get it to open a bit more for him, and not having much luck. Seeing Draco Malfoy, who was normally so calm, dignified and downright snooty, all swollen up and gasping desperately for air, was a truly terrifying sight. Ginny just knew that she was going to have nightmares about it that night.
But there was no time to think about that now. Ginny’s priority, right then, was to save his life. She ordered Draco to sit down, and ripped the cap off the injector. Once he was seated she approached him, clutching the injector in her fist. Draco, hands still around his throat, was staring at the injector, clearly with no idea in the slightest as to what it was. As she knelt down next to him, their eyes met. He looked absolutely terrified.
“I’m so sorry,” she said to him, taking aim. Before Draco had any chance to give any sort of reaction, she had thrust the injector into his thigh. He reacted sharply at the pain, trying to jerk his thigh away, but Ginny’s grip remained strong. She held him there for ten seconds, and then gently removed the now-spent injector. Again, he tried to move, but Ginny continued to keep him there as she massaged his thigh for another ten seconds.
“You were having an allergic reaction,” she explained to him as she massaged. “Magical methods of dealing with allergies are pathetic, so I used a far-superior Muggle treatment. I couldn’t tell you it was Muggle, or that it was going to hurt, because you would have refused to let me do it, and less than five minutes from now you would have been dead.”
She let go of his thigh, and stood up. A quick look at his face informed her that the swelling was already going down. She’d used the injectors on patients a few times, but it still amazed her to see just how quickly they worked.
Draco cleared his throat, and Ginny glanced over at him.
“Thanks, Weasley,” he mumbled. “You saved my life there.”
Ginny couldn’t have hidden her surprise if she’d tried. Malfoy was grateful to her? This was probably the most she’d been surprised since that time a few years ago when Ron had admitted to her that he could occasionally look at other men and think them attractive, without feeling the need to question his sexuality. Ron’s maturity had stunned her then, and Draco’s was stunning her now.
She must have stared at him for a good ten seconds before Draco looked up and said ‘I hope you’re not waiting for me to give you a standing ovation, because it’s not going to happen’.
There was not much that was going to shake her out of her shock faster than a smarmy comment from someone who had been on the edge of death not two minutes previously.
She rolled her eyes and took a seat on her swivel chair. “That is one hell of an allergy you’ve got,” she said to him. “As I said, the magical treatment for allergies is pathetic, so I’m going to recommend you to a Muggle doctor I know. He’ll be able to set you up with a healthy supply of the injectors I used on you, just in case something like this happens again. This doctor’s mother is a witch and I’ve sent other patients to him, so you do not need to exercise discretion. Get him to instruct you on how to use them.”
Draco nodded. “So is this really the best treatment for this there is?” he asked, eyeing the yellow box into which Ginny had previously discarded the used injector. “There isn’t a less … painful, method?”
“I’m told that dying can sometimes be painless,” Ginny offered.
Draco sighed. “Never mind.”
“No, no, I’ll answer your question seriously,” Ginny rebutted. “The magical way is relatively painless, but it’s crap. The potion’s fiddly, it doesn’t always work, and if your throat’s constricted there is not much chance of the potion getting into your system in the first place, is there? This method is more effective by far.”
Another sigh, but at least this one sounded somewhat less exasperated. “All right.”
“Of course,” Ginny added, “if you avoid the thing that you’re allergic to, you will very rarely have to use those injectors at all. What is it that you are allergic to?”
“I have no idea,” Draco answered. “If I had, I would have avoided it.”
“Well, what were you doing when your throat started closing up?” Ginny asked.
Draco shrugged. “Getting dressed. I took the rest of the day off yesterday and had a lie-in this morning, to try and get rid of my cold without having to drink any of that disgusting potion you gave me. It didn’t quite work, unfortunately, so I had to take a dose before leaving. It was revolting, just as I thought it would be. I finished getting dressed, and as I did, it started to get harder and harder to breathe.”
“Really?” Ginny asked, surprised. “In that case, it must be the potion that you’re allergic to. But that’s really weird, because you said you were fed it as a kid and you didn’t tell me you had any troub-“ A sudden thought occurred to her. She wheeled herself over to her rubbish bin, picked out her bottle of Pepper-Up Potion from this morning (store-bought, to her chagrin. Normally she liked to make her own), and squinted at the ingredients.
“What are you looking for, She-Weasel?” Draco asked.
“An ingredient… yeah. Just as I thought.” She threw the bottle back in the bin. “Store-bought Pepper-up potion doesn’t have real pepper in it. That’s why I don’t like it as much - it’s not as effective. But the potions we keep here are all home-made, and our Pepper-ups have actual pepper in them. That must be what it is. It looks like you’re allergic to pepper, Malfoy.”
“Huh.” Draco raised an intrigued eyebrow. “So you’re telling me that if I ever eat pepper again, I could die?”
“I think so, yes,” Ginny answered. She scribbled a recommendation on a piece of paper for him. “You should get an allergy test done, but I think you’ll find that pepper is the culprit here.” She handed the slip of paper over to him.
“Well, I have to say,” Draco said, taking the paper from her, “that the news of me never being able to eat pepper again, has to be the best news I’ve had in a long, long time.”
It was Ginny’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Always look on the bright side, hey, Malfoy?”
“I try.”
With that, Draco left the room, and Ginny resumed her lunchtime work for about half an hour, before realising that he had not made one comment about the treatment she was suggesting being somehow beneath him, because it was Muggle.
She then also realised that he had been in her room for a good ten minutes, and that that ten minutes had consisted of them having a conversation that could, if you squinted hard enough, be considered vaguely civil.
Wow, she thought. If any day is a day of miracles, surely, it’s this one. She then checked her handbag to see if her wallet had somehow managed to fill up with more money.
~*~
Thursday
“Ginny?”
Ginny turned away from restocking her potion cabinet, to see Eric, the gentle, fatherly, 55-year-old Thursday receptionist, standing at the door.
“What can I do for you, Eric?” she asked.
“Nothing, right now. I brought you your tea. Two sugars, I think you asked for?”
“Yeah, thanks.” She claimed the cup from him and took a long sip. It was the nicest tea she had tried in quite some time. It was nice to be able to taste the actual tea, rather than having it be overpowered by excessive amounts of sugar.
“Nice brew, Eric. Thank you.”
“No problem.” He smiled at her. “So how’s your big week of shifts been going? It must be pretty exhausting, knowing you still have three days to go after today?”
Ginny nodded. “It is a bit. But I suppose you need to press on, don’t you?”
“Indeed you do. I have to say though, Ginny, I don’t think I’ve seen you looking so well for a while. Have you been sleeping better?”
“I have, actually,” she admitted. Last night she had gotten a full six hours of dreamless sleep. Even more surprising was that, before she had entered the land of nod, the thoughts in her head had only persisted for a few hours, rather than the six or seven it normally would. Hence why she felt equipped to have her tea with a somewhat reasonable amount of sugar in it, for once. It made for a fantastic change, and Ginny could not for the life of her understand why it was happening. All she could hope for was that it would continue.
The bell rang in reception, and Eric smiled at Ginny and excused himself. Ginny returned to her chair and had another sip of tea. She was considering closing her eyes for a moment when Eric stuck his head back into the room.
“I have a patient asking for you specifically. Should I send him in?”
“Yeah, that’s fine,” Ginny answered. A few seconds later Draco Malfoy walked in, and Ginny rolled her eyes.
“This really is getting ridiculous, Malfoy,” she said. “Actually, no, it was ridiculous yesterday, but yesterday was too serious for me to make the remark. I’m going to have to recommend that you start putting on armour before you leave the house in the morning. What, pray tell, is wrong with you this time?”
Malfoy turned to her, and Ginny immediately regretted being a smart-arse to him. He didn’t look particularly dishevelled or anything, but the energy he was giving off was completely different. Normally Draco gave off an aristocratic, obnoxious, I-am-the-king-of-the-world-and-don’t-you-forget-it type of energy, but today he was anxious, sad, worried, and more than a little frightened. Ginny could not say she liked Draco as he normally was, but this Draco was enough of a character reversal to creep her out.
“It’s not me, this time,” he said. “It’s him.”
He gestured vaguely to the door, and Ginny looked to see Eric entering the room again, only now he was carrying a little boy.
It was Draco’s son. It had to be. Ginny did not know that Draco had a son, but the little boy’s appearance was so similar to Draco’s that the chances of their not being related were minimal at best. Ginny placed the child at around four or five, with that characteristic blond hair and pale complexion. The only indicators that he was not in fact a strange clone made using Draco’s DNA, were a very slight wave to his hair and eyes of pale blue, rather than Draco’s grey. And of course, eye colour often changes during childhood.
As Eric placed the little boy on the bed, Ginny could see that he looked to be quite badly beaten up. He had a few scratches and bruises on his face, his arms and his legs, as well as some marks that almost looked as though some person or large-ish animal had come up and bitten him. Eric eased him carefully onto the bed, and Ginny saw his tiny face scrunch up for a brief moment before relaxing again. He was clearly in more than a little pain, and it struck Ginny as being nothing short of miraculous that he wasn’t crying.
Eric gave the boy a pat on the head and left the room. Ginny looked at Malfoy, who was watching his son. She could see that he was grinding his teeth slightly, which to most would seem like aggressive behaviour. But Ginny had seen other concerned parents with faces like that, and she now knew well that he was not angry. He was scared.
“What happened?” Ginny asked, pulling her swivel chair towards the boy.
“He,” Draco croaked out, before clearing his throat and trying again. “He fell down the stairs. But when he got to the bottom, he crashed into a cupboard full of fairly, er, aggressive, household utensils. I don’t know much about the items in there, but I’m sure that some of them incorporate dark magic, so I thought that I should come and see you rather than try to mend them all myself. I might miss something, you see?”
“Right.” Ginny considered the child. He also looked scared, but it was the fear of a young child not yet impeded by the social pressures of being an adult, who is not supposed to show that he is afraid. His eyes were wide open and staring at her, and his brow was knitted, either from the aforementioned fear, or from pain. But still, he made no sound.
“He’s mute.”
“What?” Ginny turned away from the boy, to look back at Draco.
“Scorpius. My son. He’s mute.” Draco ran a hand through his hair. “There were problems during the pregnancy, and the Maternity Healer warned us that there was a very good chance that some part of him would not have developed properly. As it turns out, it was his vocal chords. He doesn’t have them.”
“I see.” That certainly explained young Scorpius’ (an unusual to the point of ridiculous name, but she supposed it was not as though Draco had much to go from, with the names his family tended to sport) silence. But even mute babies could cry. A cry that makes no sound is still a cry, and Scorpius was showing no signs of crying.
“He’s not crying,” Ginny decided to mention after a brief pause. “He must be a brave kid.”
“He is,” Draco said, and as Ginny looked back over at Draco, she could see a soft smile on his lips. “He’s a brave boy, but that’s not why he’s not crying now. He just doesn’t cry, period. He doesn’t laugh very much either.”
“Is that right?” Ginny turned back to Scorpius and started looking more closely at the cuts on his arms. “So how do you know when he’s happy or sad, or anything else?”
“I feel it,” Draco answered simply.
“…right,” Ginny said, and thought it probably best not to probe further into his strange answer. She supposed that, if she were a parent, she would understand what Draco meant. There was probably a sort of essential bond that was needed, for that brand of magic.
“Okay,” Ginny said, clapping her hands together. “Scorpius is your name, is it?”
Scorpius nodded, just once.
“I’m Ginny,” she told him. “Now, I know that it probably hurts a lot right now, but I’m going to make the pain go away very soon. You just need to sit there and be brave for a little bit longer. Is that okay?”
Scorpius nodded again, and Ginny smiled as well as she could. There was something special about this child. When Ginny looked into his scared eyes, it was like his fear, and his sadness, was permeating into her, making her feel as scared and sad as he felt. It was an alarming sensation - one that made Ginny question her sanity - but she had to pull herself together. She wanted to help him, and she couldn’t do that if she was letting herself be scared.
“What I’m going to do,” Ginny said softly, taking her wand out of her coat pocket, “is run my wand over you. I’ll be able to see what has attacked you, and from that I’ll be able to Heal you. All right?”
Scorpius, again, nodded, and Ginny instructed him to lie down on the bed. As he did so, she could see his right hand balling into a fist, then flexing out again. She watched the hand with curiosity for a few moments, until Draco came over and took the moving hand in his long fingers.
“He wants me to be nearby,” he explained.
“Oh!” Ginny said, a sense of relief she would not have deemed entirely fitting in this situation nevertheless relaxing her slightly. “Right. Well, that’s fine. You can watch what I do, if you like.”
“I would, yeah,” Draco said. Ginny offered him her swivel chair, and he took a seat.
It took Ginny a long time to mend all of Scorpius’ injuries. He had a lot of them, and it seemed as though the magic in each of his cuts was slightly different. The bite-like marks he had had on his arm had come from kitchen utensils, like tongs, grabbing at him. Some of the marks were downright nasty. He had a large bruise on his tummy, which Draco told him was from a spherical paperweight repeatedly rising up, then coming down and smacking his stomach. Ginny was vaguely reminded of a certain rogue Bludger. That incident had been no laughing matter and neither was this. She had to assume that the items in that cabinet had some sort of magic in them that kept them in that particular cupboard, or something. There was no way that Draco would have purposely kept the items there. Say what you like about the man (and in the past few days Ginny had certainly been doing a lot of that), but it was clear from how he was sitting beside Scorpius, stroking his hair and telling him that everything was going to be all right, that he was an excellent father.
Or if not an excellent father, then at least a very caring one.
About an hour and a half after she started, Ginny was finally able to throw her last cotton swab into the rubbish bin with a flourish, and say, “All done!”
Scorpius looked up at her, his eyes asking for confirmation.
“Yes, you’re all better now. You can get off the bed.” Ginny told him.
Scorpius turned his gaze to his father, who stroked his hair again and asked him if he felt better. Scorpius nodded, and then, suddenly, his face broke into a huge smile, and Ginny had to grab hold of the bed. They talk about people having smiles that light up rooms, and Ginny had met a few people in her time with fabulous smiles, but Scorpius Malfoy’s smile was something else. It was definitely one of the cutest things she had ever seen. But more than that, it was literally as though he was releasing happiness into the room. Ginny could feel the last of the tension, the feeling of sadness and fear that she’d been carrying for the last hour and a half, start to dissipate. It seemed that she, as well, could feel what Scorpius Malfoy was feeling.
That’s when it occurred to her. She had read about this phenomenon in her Healer’s Training days, about magical children. It was well-known that some witches and wizards are more powerful, more magically infused, than others. This was one of the reasons why the Purebloods were able to hold their elevated status for so long and not have it questioned - people assumed that pureness of blood was what made a witch or wizard strong. It had only been proved quite recently, in fact, that that was not the case.
And then occasionally a witch or wizard would come along who was particularly powerful. Witches and wizards like this are magical to such a magnitude that many of them are able to master doing even the most powerful of spells without a wand. Such witches and wizards are so rare that little research has been done on them, but one factor that many of them seem to have is an ability to influence the very atmosphere around them. This could be in the form of making it rain, creating sunshine, or even projecting yourself - your ideas, your thoughts, and your emotions - from yourself to the space around you. Ginny suspected that young Scorpius Malfoy was one such wizard.
She had been right; he was special.
Draco now picked Scorpius up, and gently lowered him to the floor. Scorpius stood on his little legs, and then promptly ran for the door. Draco let him go, turning instead to face Ginny.
Ginny was excited beyond belief. She could not quite believe that she had just treated a super-magical young wizard. She had to tell Draco about this. Surely, he would be just as excited as she.
“Malfoy,” she began, “I have-“
“Weasley,” he interrupted her, “I know we don’t get along very well, unless it’s a serious medical emergency, so this might seem like a weird thing for me to say. But I just have to tell you, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Thank you so much for what you did today.”
Any thought Ginny had about telling Draco about super-wizards, and his son being one, flew out the window, passing the baton to shock along the way. Draco had said thanks yesterday, sure, but he’d been fairly reluctant about it. Today he was saying it so sincerely, his eyes looking into hers so intensely, that Ginny wondered for a brief second if Draco was actually a super-wizard too.
“I realise I probably seem overly sentimental,” he continued. “And I’m not usually into over-sentimentality, but with something like this I’ll be as overly sentimental as I want. Scorpius is … he’s my whole world, and when he’s unhappy, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I would do without him in my life. So thank you, for saving my son’s life. I truly mean that.”
With that, he promptly left the room, leaving Ginny to collapse into her swivel chair. She still had four hours’ of shift left to go, and already it felt as though she’d worked for 24 hours straight, plus run a marathon or two.
And yet, despite the tiredness, she felt pretty good.
~*~
Friday
Ginny couldn’t believe her luck that morning as she Apparated into the office. She had managed a full seven hours of sleep that night. That was almost a full night. To top that off, she had decided to forego her daily Pepper-up this morning, because she felt pepped-up enough for work as she was. She felt so good that morning that even the sight of Celeste, the craggly, mean old lady who occupied reception on Fridays, did not phase her. She gave Celeste a merry wave, told her to send in her first patient, and practically skipped to her room.
At this stage, she was half-expecting Draco Malfoy to come in to her room at some stage. Why, after all, would he break the pattern he seemed to have made? Happy though Ginny was feeling that day, she couldn’t help but be slightly nervous about Draco coming in. The last time they had parted ways, they had done so on a very serious note. The kind of note that, were yesterday’s visit a musical, would leave you frowning and considering the deep, stirring messages within it. It was nice, she supposed, that he had not hurled any insults at her for the past two days, but Ginny had to wonder if any subsequent visits he made to her room were going to be awkward.
Ginny certainly did not want that. She got enough awkwardness these days from Weasley family get-togethers, where she had to act civilly towards Harry for at least two hours. Receiving any more awkwardness in her life than that would have been diametrically unfair.
As it turned out, she needn’t have worried. True to form, Malfoy made an appearance in her room some time after lunch. Celeste grunted something about a new patient coming in, and Ginny nodded and threw out the last few wet wipes from her previous patient. The door opened, she turned and saw Malfoy staring there…
…and immediately felt the most insane desire to laugh in his face. In fact she would have done, had said face not looked as though it had spent a few minutes on a sizzling barbeque. Any tension she had felt until that moment was immediately gone.
“Of all of the things you’ve seen me for this week, Malfoy,” she said, waving vaguely in the direction of the bed, “I’m sure the story behind this one is going to be far and away the most stupid.”
Draco looked surprised for about two seconds, and Ginny wondered if he had been feeling nervous about this meeting too. But then his face hardened into as good a grimace he could muster, and snark-mode was back in full force. “Geez, She-Weasel. If I’d known that burn victims were treated with this much disdain in General Healing, I would have cut the crap, set myself on fire, and made the journey long ago.”
“Well you probably deserve the disdain,” Ginny said, “and I’m freely able to give it to you this time because you’re not about to die, like you were on Wednesday. What the hell did you do? Did you see a resting dragon while going about your daily business, and thought it might be fun to see how long it would take to be bothered if you kept flicking its ears?”
“Do you really think me that stupid, She-Weasel?”
“Well, this is YOU we’re talking about.”
“Hmph. Well, I’ll have you know it was not me trying to tickle a sleeping dragon. If I’ve learned nothing else from Hogwarts days, I have at least remembered the school motto. No, I was actually mixing potions for work, and some highly reactive substances happened to combine less co-operatively than what I was hoping for.”
“Oh, right,” Ginny said, again pointing to the bed, as he had made no move to sit down. “So it wasn’t you knocking over a cauldron?”
“You insult me with the insinuation. I’m the pinnacle of grace,” Draco answered, not looking at where he was going as he tried to sit down. He missed the bed, and landed, loudly and clumsily, on the floor.
“Yeah,” Ginny said, looking at him. “The pinnacle of grace. Definitely.”
“Oh, shut up. I’m an injured patient here. Shouldn’t you be treating me?”
“I suppose,” Ginny said, letting out the most exasperated-sounding sigh she could muster. If she was being honest with herself, though, she didn’t mind treating him at all. Perhaps she’d got used to him. Or maybe it was that she’d found out enough about him over the past few days to not dislike him as much as she had done during school. At any rate, even their snark felt more playful today than it did sarcastic and annoying.
Draco repositioned himself on the bed, and Ginny told him to remove what was left of his shirt. He did, wincing slightly as he pulled it free from his arms, and she took a moment to analyse the extent of the damage. It wasn’t the worst burning she had ever seen, but certainly some of them looked second-degree. She opened her supply cabinet and pulled her entire supply of magical skin-healing salves. She brought them to him, activated them with a wave of her wand, and started to carefully apply them to his shoulders.
“Ohh, my…” Draco said, when she laid the first one down. The magical coolant started its work immediately, worming its way into the burns and removing the heat from his skin.
“It’s good, isn’t it?” Ginny remarked. “These things work really well with sunburn too.”
“Would it be a bit cheeky of me to ask reception to order them in bulk for me?”
“Patients have done it before. I wouldn’t recommend ordering them from the receptionist out there at the moment, though. She’s a crabby wench.”
“Bit like you, then?”
“Do you want me to stop applying these?”
“Oh, Merlin, please, no.”
“Right. Well behave yourself, then.” It was probably a good thing that Draco was currently facing away from her, or else he would have seen Ginny’s smile.
After she’d applied salves to his face and shoulders, it was time for her to work on his neck and chest. She had worked with burn victims before, and the first time she had used salves on another person’s chest, it had been more than a little awkward. Staring at any chest for a prolonged amount of time couldn’t help but be awkward. Now that she was a bit more used to it, she normally felt no awkwardness, only professional concern. But as she applied the salves to Draco’s chest, she felt some of the childish awkwardness return.
To be fair, most of the people she had worked with had had fairly average-looking torsos. Nothing worth writing home about in terms of flawlessness of skin and muscle tone. Draco’s chest, on the other hand, was a surprisingly nice one. Surprising, because it was not particularly muscular and Draco himself was quite weedy. But it was fairly nicely toned, all the same. His skin (the skin not currently red and raw, at any rate), sported nothing that even vaguely resembled a freckle, and it was so pale that light seemed to bounce off it. Ginny would not have minded a pair of sunglasses at that moment, truth be told.
“Like what you see?”
“Huh?” Ginny looked up to find Draco smirking one of his finest smirks ever at her.
“You were looking at my torso,” he said.
“Well, yeah,” Ginny said. “I’m currently treating it for burns. Of course I’m looking like it. Unless you want me to miss your chest and accidently stick the salve to your hair, or something?”
“Well, there’s looking at something,” Draco said, “and then there’s full-on staring at it. You were definitely doing the latter. I bet you’re enjoying having to touch it right now, aren’t you?”
“Oh, tremendously,” Ginny said, heaving shovelfuls of sarcasm into the statement. “So much so that I can feel my hands itching to be disinfected with the strongest acids on standby.”
Draco’s smirk softened into a smile, but it wasn’t a smile that Ginny found particularly warm or comforting. This smile was borderline creepy.
“See, I’d believe that,” he said, “if you weren’t currently blushing redder than your hair. An impressive feat, I must say.”
Ginny’s hands automatically flew to her face, where she did feel unmistakable heat. Draco’s smile turned into a Cheshire-cat-style grin, and she smacked the last salve on with a bit more force than was strictly necessary. She couldn’t say she felt particularly sorry about his resulting wince.
“Those will need replacing tomorrow,” she informed him. “Come back here whenever you’re free, although I’m sure that you would have figured out some way to see me tomorrow anyway.”
“I can’t say I like what you’re implying, She-Weasel,” Draco said, shrugging back into his shirt. “Let me remind you, you were the one ogling me.”
“In your dreams, Malfoy,” she said, turning away from him lest her face turn red again.
“Well, actually, apparently, in yours.”
“Please leave my room before I make the receptionist get out her poking broom.”
~*~
Part two.
Original Prompt that we sent you:
30 Briefly describe what you'd like to receive in your fic: Snark,
snark and snark. Maybe with a side of smut. ;) The tone/mood of the fic: can be either lighthearted or downright moody. It's all good to me.
An element/line of dialogue/object you would specifically like in your
fic: "What do you mean you can't go there?"
Preferred rating of the the fic you want: Sky's the limit. :) Canon or AU? Canon (tho my canon ends without the Epilogue of DH) Deal Breakers (anything you don't want?): Do NOT want Epilogue compliant stuff, infidelity, gross OOC-ness, hardcore kinks if you go the route of sexytimes.
Art prompt: Anything is good to me, really.
Rating: NC-17
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: Sex, maybe half a second of non-con if you squint.
Summary: It’s amazing what a week’s worth of shifts at the General Healing clinic can bring.
A/N: To my recipient, thank you for the fabulous prompt! I enjoyed working with it. Believe it or not, I was hoping for a story of no more than 4,000 words, but of course that did not happen. To S, my beta, thank you for being so fantastic and beta-ing this monster with your usual skill and aplomb.
Happy reading!
Let’s Go There
~*~
Monday
Of one thing, Ginny was absolutely certain. This was going to be a long week.
As she stood in front of the mirror of her tiny bathroom and pulled her hair into its trademark messy ponytail, she wondered which spunk-chump thought it would be a good idea to give her day-shifts seven days in a row. She knew that she was a good General Healer (‘surprisingly good’, according to her mother - a statement that Ginny couldn’t help but be mildly offended by), and that good Healers, due to their above-average ability to save people’s lives, tended to get more shifts. But seven days in a row? The most days Ginny had had to do in a row before was five, and that was when St Mungo’s had been so understaffed that people were bringing in their House Elves to help out with cleaning and replenishing potions. She assumed that somebody had said that they couldn’t work on Wednesday, or something, and that no other Healer had been available to do the shift, so the afore-mentioned anonymous spunk-chump had volunteered her for the job.
It would have been nice of them to let her know that a seven-day work week was on the horizon. As it was, the roster for that week had only been posted a few days ago, and anybody who noticed Ginny’s schedule in the intervening time had given her a pat on the back and a heartfelt “good luck!” She appreciated the sympathy of her colleagues, but noticed that none of them were leaping forward and declaring that they would be the hero of the hour and take one of the mid-week shifts for her. Perhaps they’d give her a spectacular obituary if she died of exhaustion at some point, instead?
As Ginny grabbed her work robe, her wand and her purse, and prepared for the morning Apparition, the only thought she had was that next Sunday evening could not come quickly enough.
It wasn’t that Ginny didn’t love her job, because she certainly did. After she finished at Hogwarts, surprising everybody with her Outstandings in Potions and Herbology, she surprised everybody further by saying that she wanted to be a Healer. She trained for three long years at St Mungo’s, and when it came to having to choose what area of Healing she would like to specialise in, she could not make a decision. As such, she chose what she dubbed the most logical path in that situation, and went for General Healing. The very idea of General Healing was to, after all, know a bit of everything.
And she was a natural at it. Patients liked her, because she had an air of patience, sincerity and generosity about her that many General Healers sorely lacked. She was able to make her patients feel comfortable enough to tell her exactly what was wrong, which, when magic is involved, is crucial. Ginny had seen it all, from women with spatulas that refused to stop hitting them, to men who have been hexed by their wives to turn green and throw up termites (that had not been the nicest afternoon she’d ever had), to children who had stolen their older siblings’ supplies of Nosebleed Nougat and not realised that the purple end was not merely for decoration (an incident that had made her owl George and order him to put very clear warnings on the Skiving Snackboxes from that point onwards). She was now into her fourth year of being a full-time General Healer, and she was already considered one of the best in St Mungo’s; a reputation she normally strove to maintain.
But the last couple of months had been pretty hard on Ginny, and as a result she was not performing her work duties with her usual enthusiasm. Whilst before she had been quite a people person, and eager to stay and talk to her work colleagues long after her shifts had ended, nowadays she only ever had the energy to go straight home and spend her evenings with a plate of pasta and a few glasses of wine. She was constantly tired, although she never managed to sleep for more than a few hours a night. Her work clothes (or at least, the clothes she wore under the trademark St Mungo’s robe) had gone from being lively, colourful, and sometimes risqué, to being simple blacks and blues and boring pastels. The quality of her work had not changed, but her regular patients had noticed her change in demeanour. They never brought it up, however, because they knew as well as anybody why Ginny had changed. How could they not have known? The Daily Prophet had had themselves a field day that day three months ago, when Harry Potter, former saviour of the Wizarding World and current Auror extraordinaire, had stood before his people and announced that he and his high-school sweetheart were officially breaking up.
Again, it would have been nice of him to have let her know. That he was going to break up with her, in public, without her present, that is.
Despite how much everybody loved Harry (and not without good reason), those who had had relatively close interactions with Ginny before the announcement continued to love her and want to spend time with her. They gave her space, and despite the excruciating number of Daily Prophet gossip articles declaring that she was utterly miserable and unable to carry on without the love of her life by her side, or whatever rubbish it was they printed, most were sure that she was just adjusting to single life after having been in such a high-profile relationship for so long, and that eventually she would be the same extroverted, enthusiastic, enormous spirit of a young woman that everybody knew and loved.
However, some people were starting to lose their patience. It had been three months, after all.
As Ginny appeared in General Healing reception that morning, she was met with the scream of a very loud and evidently very unhappy baby.
“Morning, Jack,” she greeted the young, smart-mouthed Monday receptionist, raising her voice a not-insignificant amount.
“I’m glad you didn’t say ‘good morning’, because it certainly isn’t one,” Jack shouted back. He thrust a clipboard into her hand. “Your first patient’s in room 2. He got clobbered by some drunk bloke last night, and didn’t gather up the balls to come and see us until this morning.”
“Fine, fine,” Ginny said, covering her mouth with the back of her hand as she yawned. “No chance of a cup of tea, is there?”
“Seriously?” Jack asked, now juggling a huge stack of medical supplies in his arms and pushing past her. “You know I love you, Gin, but I’ve been flat-out since 9. If anyone’s getting a cup of tea in the next hour, it’s definitely me.”
“Selfish arse,” Ginny said, smiling. “I’ll try to get patients out of my room as quickly as possible. That’ll help you out a bit.”
“Cheers,” Jack said, before running towards the other rooms.
Ginny covered another yawn, and blinked the resulting tears out of her eyes as she headed toward her room. Last night had been particularly bad for her on the sleep front, with her only managing to get about one and a half hours. Her body was exhausted, but it seemed as though her mind was always awake, alert, and buzzing with thoughts, whether they were about recipes her mother had taught her, or about some stupid customer at the shop George had mentioned to her, or about some problematic patient of hers.
At any rate, Ginny couldn’t sleep, and for the last few months it normally took her a morning Pepper-Up Potion and many cups of sugar-laden tea during the day to keep her alert enough to do her job. She was fairly sure that neither tea nor Pepper-Up Potion were addictive substances, but she supposed she should get around to checking that at some point.
Despite the yawning, that morning Ginny had imbibed the day’s Pepper-Up less than an hour ago, so she felt fairly alert as she opened the door to her examination room.
Upon seeing her patient, however, she had to wonder if she was, perhaps, asleep. Asleep, and having a nightmare.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said.
Sitting on her doctor’s bed, gazing idly out of the window, one leg crossed elegantly over the other, was Draco Malfoy. As far as Ginny could tell, his appearance had not changed one bit since she had last seen him, all of seven years ago. He still had the same insanely blond hair, the same skin of such a degree of paleness that Ginny would be prepared to bet that he had some vampire blood in him, the same ironed, pressed, and probably very expensive clothing, and, above all else, the same aristocratic expression of arrogance that had always made Ginny want to punch him, whenever she had accidentally caught his eye.
And now, it seemed, somebody had taken that liberty last night, and Draco was hoping for her assistance in the recovery process. If Ginny was having a nightmare, this was probably one of the worst she’d had in quite some time.
Upon hearing Ginny’s expression of disbelief, Draco looked away from the window and saw that it was she who had spoken. Far from appearing surprised at who his Healer that day was, or intrigued by how much she had changed in the past seven years (which she undoubtedly had, although her pictures were so often in the Prophet that most of Wizarding Britain would not have noticed the change), he instead raised one immaculately-plucked eyebrow.
“That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think, She-Weasel?” he asked. “I thought Healers were supposed to be nice to their patients.”
Ginny could not quite believe her ears. The two of them had not seen hide or hair of each other for seven years, and yet he still thought it acceptable to call her by that horrible nickname? Ginny had no idea how she was going to be able to treat Malfoy without accidentally hexing him. Not the greatest sign, when you’ve only been observing the patient for about thirty seconds.
“Well, you just addressed me using that beyond-offensive nickname,” Ginny said, by way of answering his question, “so I reserve the right to treat you with disdain.”
“You’re offended by the name ‘She-Weasel’?” Draco asked, uncrossing his legs. “How very pedestrian of you.”
“I doubt that there is much about me you wouldn’t find pedestrian, Malfoy.” Ginny strode over to her supply cupboard and pulled out a fresh pair of medical gloves. “So, I hear someone beat the living crap out of you. Would you be able to forward them my congratulations?”
“Very funny,” Draco answered. “From what I’ve heard around the traps, most seem to be of the opinion that you’re one of the kindest, most sympathetic General Healers out there. Clearly my sources are the most mistaken anyone has ever been since that bloke who thought chocolate cauldrons were the latest and greatest in magical enterprise.”
“Are you always this snippy? Or is it just because you’re in a lot of pain?” Ginny pulled her swivel chair over to him. “I notice that you were too proud to leave the house without Concealing your face first.”
“I absolutely was. But believe me, She-Weasel, when I say that even the most bogan-y of bogans would have Concealed this bruise.”
“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what a ‘bogan’ is, are you?” Ginny waved her wand in front of Draco’s face, feeling for the magic surrounding it. She was not detecting anything other than the slight block from the Concealment Charm. This was good. Non-magical injuries were far easier to deal with than magical ones.
“A bogan is an Australian,” Draco answered her.
“I see.” Ginny waved her wand again, silently chanting the counter-charm for Concealment magic as she did so. “Does this undoubtedly offensive term refer to all Australians, or a small subset that you find particularly unfavourable?”
Draco opened his mouth to answer, but was cut off by Ginny gasping in surprise.
“We’ll need to send an owl to Her Majesty’s Theatre,” she said, in an attempt to keep herself from wincing. “Because I think they might be missing their Phantom of the Opera.”
“I was hoping for a small amount of professionalism on your part,” Draco retorted, attempting to cover his face with his hand.
Ginny could certainly understand why he’d Concealed his face now. The entire left side of it, from forehead to chin, looked like one massive bruise. The skin was purple and black and red all over, his lips seemed to be quite badly swollen, and he appeared unable to open his left eye. He looked to be in so much pain that Ginny actually felt an ounce of sympathy for him. Feeling sympathy for Malfoy. Who would have thought?
Fortunately for him, he’d come to the perfect Healer. After years of mending every physical injury imaginable on Harry, she was nothing short of an expert on fixing broken bones, mending cuts, bringing down swellings and, thanks to one particularly memorable case, regrowing obliterated muscle tissue. Even with bruising as severe as this, it would take her less than two minutes to send Draco on his way.
“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to tell me,” Ginny said, resting her wand against Draco’s temple as carefully as possible (she did not like the man, but she was not so vindictive as to want to push hard against his bruised and swollen skin), “how you got beaten up in the first place?”
“Well,” Draco said, “if you must know, I was at the pub last night with my mates, and I said a few things that I suppose many would find … controversial.”
“Bloody hell,” Ginny uttered, removing her wand. “’Controversial’? Were you openly declaring that you believe Muggleborns should be sold into slavery, or something? I’m not really sure I should bother mending this.”
“Calm down, She-Weasel. I was saying nothing of the sort. All I was saying was that the Falcons have a serious chance of winning the Cup this year.”
“Seriously? You got beaten up like this over Quidditch? That’s so… wait. The Falcons?” The Quidditch fan in Ginny caught up with the rest of her. “You honestly think the Falcons could win? But half of their squad is under suspension for unnecessary violence during play.”
“Yeah, but it’s the crappier half of the squad that’s down. With only the good players able to play, they stand a chance, in my opinion. Anyway, some very obvious Prides fans heard what I was saying, and the most troll-like of the pack indicated, fairly loudly and aggressively, that he did not much like what I was saying.”
“I can’t imagine many Prides fans would have enjoyed what you were saying.”
“Indeed. Anyway, I figured that, since I had my wand and this bloke did not look as though he could magic his way out of a wet paper bag, I was safe to taunt him a little. I don’t think he understood exactly what I was saying, but he understood that I was trying to offend him. He ran towards me and I confidently patted my pocket for my wand, only to remember that I had left it in the restroom. He grabbed me by the collar of my designer-label shirt (now ruined, of course), and the next half an hour is something of a blur. The next thing I knew, my friends were holding me upright and dragging me out of the pub, and my face felt as though I’d put it through a mincer.”
“Blimey,” Ginny said, and she meant it. Dickhead though Malfoy was, it didn’t sound as though he’d deserved to be beaten up so badly. “That bloke must have had one hell of a short temper.”
“He certainly did,” Draco agreed, “but it’s not as if you can talk, She-Weasel. You’re hardly the pinnacle of maturity and restraint yourself. I remember reading a story in the Prophet a few years ago about you. You and Potter were on a date, and the press decided to follow along, or something, and to cut a long story short you threw a glass of wine, glass and all, at one of the cameramen.”
Ginny couldn’t help but groan at Draco’s mentioning of that particular story. She had written a letter of apology to the cameraman in question the next day, but the Prophet had, most unsurprisingly, not seen fit to publish the letter, preferring to let the public think she was an out-of-control She-Demon for the several months following that. She did feel genuine regret for her actions, particularly because she had not actually been remotely angry at the cameramen. The truth was, Harry had spent the previous half-hour telling Ginny, who had started her current job at St Mungo’s, that she probably shouldn’t get too comfortable in the job since she’d hopefully be going on Maternity Leave soon. He’d really had some nerve, that day. It was not as if Ginny had not wanted kids. Rather, it was the implication that she would be the one to go on Maternity Leave, especially when he was the one always talking about wanting a break from work. For somebody who was all about promoting equality for all, he had been rather reluctant to execute it in his own household.
But, whatever. It was in the past now, and it wasn’t as if Draco needed to know the story behind her rage that day, or anything.
“Right,” she instead said, putting her wand away. “You’re done.”
“Already?” Draco asked, tentatively touching his face. “Where’s the mirror? I want to see if you’ve skewed my nose or something.”
Ginny rolled her eyes, but pointed towards the small sink toward the back of the room.
“You’d know if I’d altered your nose,” she told him, as he glanced in the mirror and she saw his shoulders slump with what she had to assume was relief. “You have to break a person’s nose to alter it. It’s possible to make the break painless, but you can still feel it.”
“Right.” Draco was clearly not listening. He’d already strode back to the bed and picked up his man-purse (for that was definitely what it was, and it suited him disturbingly well), and was now heading towards the door.
“And feel free to show yourself out,” Ginny said. “We’re done here.”
Draco turned around, one hand on the door handle. “Thanks for your help, She-Weasel. Believe it or not, I found your inability to be professional quite endearing.” He might have said more, but the next thing that came out of his mouth was a loud cough.
“Coughing, Malfoy?” Ginny asked. “You should see a Healer about that.”
“Do you write your own material, She-Weasel?” Malfoy asked. Ginny would have answered, but he was out the door before she had a chance.
Well, Ginny thought, exiting the room to grab the next patient chart, there’s somebody who has not changed at all since Hogwarts days.
~*~
Tuesday
“What’s for lunch, Cheryl?” Ginny addressed the Tuesday receptionist as she pulled off her fake Muggle Doctor robe. Some young magical lads, who had clearly just turned seventeen, had decided to put a Jumping Jinx on an entire commuter train. Over a hundred passengers had suffered unbelievable injuries, and many more had witnessed the bizarre event. Ginny had been woken up (two hours sleep, that night) at 6am and called to the Muggle train station to mend cuts, bruises and a few broken wrists, as well as erase quite a few memories. She’d been running around non-stop for the past seven hours and had only just made it into her technical place of work. The only redeeming factor from that morning was the owl she’d received from Ron at around 10am, informing her that the young miscreants who had caused the whole commotion had been detained and were now in Auror custody. Comforting news indeed, and it left Ginny wondering how many years a wizard or witch can be sentenced for ‘general dickheadedness’.
“For you and I, a wing and a prayer, dear,” Cheryl, the Tuesday receptionist (and the one that reminded Ginny to an almost frightening extent of her mother) answered. “We need to tend to some of these patients. The other Healers have been here since nine, and they’re desperate for a break.”
“You can’t be serious,” Ginny said. “I’ve been working since six, in another location! Surely I deserve the break more than them?”
“You do, dear,” Cheryl answered, pushing her large spectacles back into place. “And we all wanted to let you have an hour to yourself first, but your next patient requested you specifically.”
“Well that’s just brilliant, isn’t it?” Ginny asked, snatching the file from the top of the stack on the desk. “This person had better have something really serious.”
“I don’t know about ‘serious’,” Cheryl said, and Ginny noticed that her eyes were twinkling in that same mischievous way her mother’s eyes tended to twinkle, sometimes, “but he’s certainly quite a good-looking young lad.”
Ginny grumbled, but headed for her room without further comment. She’d be lying if she had told Cheryl that the patient being good-looking hardly sweetened the deal. Because it sort of did.
That was, of course, until she opened the door, and saw none other than Draco-sodding-Malfoy, this time lying on her bed.
“Geez, She-Weasel,” he said, looking over at her. “You sure took your sweet time, didn’t you? I feel as though I’ve been lying here, slowly dying, for the past half-hour.” As he finished speaking, his voice was suddenly overcome by a stream of violent coughs. Ginny watched his body jolt with every cough, and when the coughs subsided and he was again lying down, she tried her best to hide a smirk of pleasure at his obvious pain.
She failed. Dismally.
“Why exactly are you here, Malfoy?” she asked, pulling out her swivel chair. “It didn’t seem to me, when you were here yesterday, that the Healer’s office is a place that you like to spend a lot of your time. I’m sure you know perfectly well that minor illnesses heal perfectly well with nothing but bed-rest and plenty of fluids?”
“I don’t like spending time in St Mungo’s, and I do know how to treat minor illnesses,” Draco agreed. “But I was told by a trained medical professional that I should see a Healer about this. It would be ungentlemanly of me to disagree.” He let out another string of coughs, and Ginny debated putting on a face mask.
“I didn’t mean that you should see me,” she instead said, abandoning her swivel chair and heading for her potion cabinet. “What I don’t get is why you requested to see me in particular. Surely you’d have preferred to see someone … anyone … else?”
“Oh, don’t underestimate yourself, She-Weasel. It doesn’t suit you.” He coughed twice before continuing. “And I figured you’d be the better Healer to see, because you know the most about my recent medical history.”
“Your recent medical history?” Ginny selected a bottle, and brought it and her swivel chair towards him. “As in, you got treatment for the territorial markings of an angry Prides fan yesterday, and for the past several years before that you’ve not seen any Healer at all, due to what I am is assuming is a pathological fear of anybody other than you touching your sacred area? Again, I must ask why you didn’t request to instead see any of the other Healers.”
“Well, maybe it was also because I knew you’d be the most likely to mention my ‘sacred area’, as you call it. Other Healers are probably a bit more polite than that. And by that I mean, other Healers are probably polite at all.”
“Oh, I’m polite to most people, Malfoy, I assure you,” Ginny said, drawing circles in the air between them with her wand. “You just bring out my ruder side.”
A small beep to her left signalled that she should look at the board above her desk. She turned around and considered the numbers now written on it.
“That’s nifty,” Draco remarked, looking at it. “Where’d you get that from?”
“Not that it’s any of your business,” Ginny answered, “but my brother made it for me. Traditionally when you check a patient’s vitals, the numbers will form from smoke that comes out of your wand, and you’re supposed to read the numbers in the short time that they hang there before the smoke diffuses. I was having trouble reading the numbers, and I mentioned it to my brother, and he whipped up this little invention. When I drew the circles in the air, my wand picked up your vitals and sent the numbers to this board. The numbers will stay there until I clear the board. He got the idea from some of the bits of Muggle technology my dad keeps in his shed.”
“I see.” If Draco was surprised about the idea coming from Muggle technology, he didn’t show it. “So what do my vitals say?”
“That you have a cold. Something that I’m sure you knew already.” Ginny placed the bottle from the cabinet into his hand. “This is a Pepper-Up potion. Have you ever taken one before?”
Draco pulled a face. “Not for years. My mother used to make me drink it when I was a child. It’s revolting. I hate pepper flavour.”
“Yes, well, harden up,” Ginny replied, giving Malfoy just about the amount of sympathy she felt he deserved. “It’s brilliant stuff. Take a spoonful after every major meal, and I can pretty much guarantee that by tomorrow or the next day you’ll be walking around looking down your nose at people like a champ once more.”
“You’re quite touchy today, aren’t you, She-Weasel?” Draco remarked, tucking the bottle carefully into his man-purse. “What’s the matter? Has it been a while for you? Do you need to get laid?”
“Oh my …” Ginny would have loved to have thrown something at him. Sadly all she had within reach was her wand, and she was not about to throw that. “Get the bloody hell out of here, Malfoy, before I make like a Prides fan and beat you to death.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes’, then?”
“You’ll take it as nothing, thank you. Now bugger off.”
“All right, I’m gone. Thanks for the potion.”
“I’d say ‘you’re welcome’, but you’re really, really not.”
Draco exited without further comment, and Ginny shut the door behind him, before leaning on it and closing her eyes for a brief moment. It would be downright deceitful for her to pretend like she had been the most civil Healer in the world to Malfoy for these previous two visits, but that comment was really pushing it.
The sad thing was that Ginny knew she had only been offended by it because it was as true as it was indecent.
And to put the icing on the shit-cake, Ginny had given him the last Pepper-Up potion in her cabinet. She’d been looking forward to taking some herself. Without it she was not sure how she was going to stay upright for the next six hours. Maybe she could ask one of the other Healers for some?
~*~
Wednesday
Ginny was in her room, drinking a cup of tea and reading through her patient files. She had managed an almost decadent four hours of sleep last night, and as such she was feeling unusually refreshed.
Her tea still needed three sugars, though.
She was just about done with her reading when Bella, the Wednesday receptionist, stuck her head in the door.
“Oh, Ginny!” she exclaimed. “Thank Merlin you’re here. There’s a patient out here with one hell of an allergic reaction. He needs treatment, urgently.”
“Bring him in,” Ginny responded immediately. As she waited for the door of her room to open, she went to a supply cupboard she rarely used, but kept well-stocked for emergencies such as these. It was well-known among the magical medical community that few witches and wizards have allergies. The magic in their blood generally prevents such things from happening. As such, the magical method for dealing with the odd individual who does have an allergy was pathetic. It required a potion that was on the stupid side of difficult to perfect, and its effects were often not particularly potent. As a result, Ginny decided to investigate Muggle methods for treating allergies, and came across a most marvellous invention, called an epinephrine auto-injector. If a patient was having an allergic reaction, all she had to do was stab them in the leg with the injector, and a burst of hormone would shoot into their bloodstream, immediately calming down the allergic reaction. It was one of those more-than-occasional times where Ginny had to stop and admire just how amazing Muggle innovations often are.
The door opened, and Ginny turned, injector in hand…
…to see Draco Malfoy stumbling into the room. His whole face was now as swollen as the left side of it had been two days ago. He was clutching at his neck with panicked fingers, possibly trying to massage his throat to get it to open a bit more for him, and not having much luck. Seeing Draco Malfoy, who was normally so calm, dignified and downright snooty, all swollen up and gasping desperately for air, was a truly terrifying sight. Ginny just knew that she was going to have nightmares about it that night.
But there was no time to think about that now. Ginny’s priority, right then, was to save his life. She ordered Draco to sit down, and ripped the cap off the injector. Once he was seated she approached him, clutching the injector in her fist. Draco, hands still around his throat, was staring at the injector, clearly with no idea in the slightest as to what it was. As she knelt down next to him, their eyes met. He looked absolutely terrified.
“I’m so sorry,” she said to him, taking aim. Before Draco had any chance to give any sort of reaction, she had thrust the injector into his thigh. He reacted sharply at the pain, trying to jerk his thigh away, but Ginny’s grip remained strong. She held him there for ten seconds, and then gently removed the now-spent injector. Again, he tried to move, but Ginny continued to keep him there as she massaged his thigh for another ten seconds.
“You were having an allergic reaction,” she explained to him as she massaged. “Magical methods of dealing with allergies are pathetic, so I used a far-superior Muggle treatment. I couldn’t tell you it was Muggle, or that it was going to hurt, because you would have refused to let me do it, and less than five minutes from now you would have been dead.”
She let go of his thigh, and stood up. A quick look at his face informed her that the swelling was already going down. She’d used the injectors on patients a few times, but it still amazed her to see just how quickly they worked.
Draco cleared his throat, and Ginny glanced over at him.
“Thanks, Weasley,” he mumbled. “You saved my life there.”
Ginny couldn’t have hidden her surprise if she’d tried. Malfoy was grateful to her? This was probably the most she’d been surprised since that time a few years ago when Ron had admitted to her that he could occasionally look at other men and think them attractive, without feeling the need to question his sexuality. Ron’s maturity had stunned her then, and Draco’s was stunning her now.
She must have stared at him for a good ten seconds before Draco looked up and said ‘I hope you’re not waiting for me to give you a standing ovation, because it’s not going to happen’.
There was not much that was going to shake her out of her shock faster than a smarmy comment from someone who had been on the edge of death not two minutes previously.
She rolled her eyes and took a seat on her swivel chair. “That is one hell of an allergy you’ve got,” she said to him. “As I said, the magical treatment for allergies is pathetic, so I’m going to recommend you to a Muggle doctor I know. He’ll be able to set you up with a healthy supply of the injectors I used on you, just in case something like this happens again. This doctor’s mother is a witch and I’ve sent other patients to him, so you do not need to exercise discretion. Get him to instruct you on how to use them.”
Draco nodded. “So is this really the best treatment for this there is?” he asked, eyeing the yellow box into which Ginny had previously discarded the used injector. “There isn’t a less … painful, method?”
“I’m told that dying can sometimes be painless,” Ginny offered.
Draco sighed. “Never mind.”
“No, no, I’ll answer your question seriously,” Ginny rebutted. “The magical way is relatively painless, but it’s crap. The potion’s fiddly, it doesn’t always work, and if your throat’s constricted there is not much chance of the potion getting into your system in the first place, is there? This method is more effective by far.”
Another sigh, but at least this one sounded somewhat less exasperated. “All right.”
“Of course,” Ginny added, “if you avoid the thing that you’re allergic to, you will very rarely have to use those injectors at all. What is it that you are allergic to?”
“I have no idea,” Draco answered. “If I had, I would have avoided it.”
“Well, what were you doing when your throat started closing up?” Ginny asked.
Draco shrugged. “Getting dressed. I took the rest of the day off yesterday and had a lie-in this morning, to try and get rid of my cold without having to drink any of that disgusting potion you gave me. It didn’t quite work, unfortunately, so I had to take a dose before leaving. It was revolting, just as I thought it would be. I finished getting dressed, and as I did, it started to get harder and harder to breathe.”
“Really?” Ginny asked, surprised. “In that case, it must be the potion that you’re allergic to. But that’s really weird, because you said you were fed it as a kid and you didn’t tell me you had any troub-“ A sudden thought occurred to her. She wheeled herself over to her rubbish bin, picked out her bottle of Pepper-Up Potion from this morning (store-bought, to her chagrin. Normally she liked to make her own), and squinted at the ingredients.
“What are you looking for, She-Weasel?” Draco asked.
“An ingredient… yeah. Just as I thought.” She threw the bottle back in the bin. “Store-bought Pepper-up potion doesn’t have real pepper in it. That’s why I don’t like it as much - it’s not as effective. But the potions we keep here are all home-made, and our Pepper-ups have actual pepper in them. That must be what it is. It looks like you’re allergic to pepper, Malfoy.”
“Huh.” Draco raised an intrigued eyebrow. “So you’re telling me that if I ever eat pepper again, I could die?”
“I think so, yes,” Ginny answered. She scribbled a recommendation on a piece of paper for him. “You should get an allergy test done, but I think you’ll find that pepper is the culprit here.” She handed the slip of paper over to him.
“Well, I have to say,” Draco said, taking the paper from her, “that the news of me never being able to eat pepper again, has to be the best news I’ve had in a long, long time.”
It was Ginny’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “Always look on the bright side, hey, Malfoy?”
“I try.”
With that, Draco left the room, and Ginny resumed her lunchtime work for about half an hour, before realising that he had not made one comment about the treatment she was suggesting being somehow beneath him, because it was Muggle.
She then also realised that he had been in her room for a good ten minutes, and that that ten minutes had consisted of them having a conversation that could, if you squinted hard enough, be considered vaguely civil.
Wow, she thought. If any day is a day of miracles, surely, it’s this one. She then checked her handbag to see if her wallet had somehow managed to fill up with more money.
~*~
Thursday
“Ginny?”
Ginny turned away from restocking her potion cabinet, to see Eric, the gentle, fatherly, 55-year-old Thursday receptionist, standing at the door.
“What can I do for you, Eric?” she asked.
“Nothing, right now. I brought you your tea. Two sugars, I think you asked for?”
“Yeah, thanks.” She claimed the cup from him and took a long sip. It was the nicest tea she had tried in quite some time. It was nice to be able to taste the actual tea, rather than having it be overpowered by excessive amounts of sugar.
“Nice brew, Eric. Thank you.”
“No problem.” He smiled at her. “So how’s your big week of shifts been going? It must be pretty exhausting, knowing you still have three days to go after today?”
Ginny nodded. “It is a bit. But I suppose you need to press on, don’t you?”
“Indeed you do. I have to say though, Ginny, I don’t think I’ve seen you looking so well for a while. Have you been sleeping better?”
“I have, actually,” she admitted. Last night she had gotten a full six hours of dreamless sleep. Even more surprising was that, before she had entered the land of nod, the thoughts in her head had only persisted for a few hours, rather than the six or seven it normally would. Hence why she felt equipped to have her tea with a somewhat reasonable amount of sugar in it, for once. It made for a fantastic change, and Ginny could not for the life of her understand why it was happening. All she could hope for was that it would continue.
The bell rang in reception, and Eric smiled at Ginny and excused himself. Ginny returned to her chair and had another sip of tea. She was considering closing her eyes for a moment when Eric stuck his head back into the room.
“I have a patient asking for you specifically. Should I send him in?”
“Yeah, that’s fine,” Ginny answered. A few seconds later Draco Malfoy walked in, and Ginny rolled her eyes.
“This really is getting ridiculous, Malfoy,” she said. “Actually, no, it was ridiculous yesterday, but yesterday was too serious for me to make the remark. I’m going to have to recommend that you start putting on armour before you leave the house in the morning. What, pray tell, is wrong with you this time?”
Malfoy turned to her, and Ginny immediately regretted being a smart-arse to him. He didn’t look particularly dishevelled or anything, but the energy he was giving off was completely different. Normally Draco gave off an aristocratic, obnoxious, I-am-the-king-of-the-world-and-don’t-you-forget-it type of energy, but today he was anxious, sad, worried, and more than a little frightened. Ginny could not say she liked Draco as he normally was, but this Draco was enough of a character reversal to creep her out.
“It’s not me, this time,” he said. “It’s him.”
He gestured vaguely to the door, and Ginny looked to see Eric entering the room again, only now he was carrying a little boy.
It was Draco’s son. It had to be. Ginny did not know that Draco had a son, but the little boy’s appearance was so similar to Draco’s that the chances of their not being related were minimal at best. Ginny placed the child at around four or five, with that characteristic blond hair and pale complexion. The only indicators that he was not in fact a strange clone made using Draco’s DNA, were a very slight wave to his hair and eyes of pale blue, rather than Draco’s grey. And of course, eye colour often changes during childhood.
As Eric placed the little boy on the bed, Ginny could see that he looked to be quite badly beaten up. He had a few scratches and bruises on his face, his arms and his legs, as well as some marks that almost looked as though some person or large-ish animal had come up and bitten him. Eric eased him carefully onto the bed, and Ginny saw his tiny face scrunch up for a brief moment before relaxing again. He was clearly in more than a little pain, and it struck Ginny as being nothing short of miraculous that he wasn’t crying.
Eric gave the boy a pat on the head and left the room. Ginny looked at Malfoy, who was watching his son. She could see that he was grinding his teeth slightly, which to most would seem like aggressive behaviour. But Ginny had seen other concerned parents with faces like that, and she now knew well that he was not angry. He was scared.
“What happened?” Ginny asked, pulling her swivel chair towards the boy.
“He,” Draco croaked out, before clearing his throat and trying again. “He fell down the stairs. But when he got to the bottom, he crashed into a cupboard full of fairly, er, aggressive, household utensils. I don’t know much about the items in there, but I’m sure that some of them incorporate dark magic, so I thought that I should come and see you rather than try to mend them all myself. I might miss something, you see?”
“Right.” Ginny considered the child. He also looked scared, but it was the fear of a young child not yet impeded by the social pressures of being an adult, who is not supposed to show that he is afraid. His eyes were wide open and staring at her, and his brow was knitted, either from the aforementioned fear, or from pain. But still, he made no sound.
“He’s mute.”
“What?” Ginny turned away from the boy, to look back at Draco.
“Scorpius. My son. He’s mute.” Draco ran a hand through his hair. “There were problems during the pregnancy, and the Maternity Healer warned us that there was a very good chance that some part of him would not have developed properly. As it turns out, it was his vocal chords. He doesn’t have them.”
“I see.” That certainly explained young Scorpius’ (an unusual to the point of ridiculous name, but she supposed it was not as though Draco had much to go from, with the names his family tended to sport) silence. But even mute babies could cry. A cry that makes no sound is still a cry, and Scorpius was showing no signs of crying.
“He’s not crying,” Ginny decided to mention after a brief pause. “He must be a brave kid.”
“He is,” Draco said, and as Ginny looked back over at Draco, she could see a soft smile on his lips. “He’s a brave boy, but that’s not why he’s not crying now. He just doesn’t cry, period. He doesn’t laugh very much either.”
“Is that right?” Ginny turned back to Scorpius and started looking more closely at the cuts on his arms. “So how do you know when he’s happy or sad, or anything else?”
“I feel it,” Draco answered simply.
“…right,” Ginny said, and thought it probably best not to probe further into his strange answer. She supposed that, if she were a parent, she would understand what Draco meant. There was probably a sort of essential bond that was needed, for that brand of magic.
“Okay,” Ginny said, clapping her hands together. “Scorpius is your name, is it?”
Scorpius nodded, just once.
“I’m Ginny,” she told him. “Now, I know that it probably hurts a lot right now, but I’m going to make the pain go away very soon. You just need to sit there and be brave for a little bit longer. Is that okay?”
Scorpius nodded again, and Ginny smiled as well as she could. There was something special about this child. When Ginny looked into his scared eyes, it was like his fear, and his sadness, was permeating into her, making her feel as scared and sad as he felt. It was an alarming sensation - one that made Ginny question her sanity - but she had to pull herself together. She wanted to help him, and she couldn’t do that if she was letting herself be scared.
“What I’m going to do,” Ginny said softly, taking her wand out of her coat pocket, “is run my wand over you. I’ll be able to see what has attacked you, and from that I’ll be able to Heal you. All right?”
Scorpius, again, nodded, and Ginny instructed him to lie down on the bed. As he did so, she could see his right hand balling into a fist, then flexing out again. She watched the hand with curiosity for a few moments, until Draco came over and took the moving hand in his long fingers.
“He wants me to be nearby,” he explained.
“Oh!” Ginny said, a sense of relief she would not have deemed entirely fitting in this situation nevertheless relaxing her slightly. “Right. Well, that’s fine. You can watch what I do, if you like.”
“I would, yeah,” Draco said. Ginny offered him her swivel chair, and he took a seat.
It took Ginny a long time to mend all of Scorpius’ injuries. He had a lot of them, and it seemed as though the magic in each of his cuts was slightly different. The bite-like marks he had had on his arm had come from kitchen utensils, like tongs, grabbing at him. Some of the marks were downright nasty. He had a large bruise on his tummy, which Draco told him was from a spherical paperweight repeatedly rising up, then coming down and smacking his stomach. Ginny was vaguely reminded of a certain rogue Bludger. That incident had been no laughing matter and neither was this. She had to assume that the items in that cabinet had some sort of magic in them that kept them in that particular cupboard, or something. There was no way that Draco would have purposely kept the items there. Say what you like about the man (and in the past few days Ginny had certainly been doing a lot of that), but it was clear from how he was sitting beside Scorpius, stroking his hair and telling him that everything was going to be all right, that he was an excellent father.
Or if not an excellent father, then at least a very caring one.
About an hour and a half after she started, Ginny was finally able to throw her last cotton swab into the rubbish bin with a flourish, and say, “All done!”
Scorpius looked up at her, his eyes asking for confirmation.
“Yes, you’re all better now. You can get off the bed.” Ginny told him.
Scorpius turned his gaze to his father, who stroked his hair again and asked him if he felt better. Scorpius nodded, and then, suddenly, his face broke into a huge smile, and Ginny had to grab hold of the bed. They talk about people having smiles that light up rooms, and Ginny had met a few people in her time with fabulous smiles, but Scorpius Malfoy’s smile was something else. It was definitely one of the cutest things she had ever seen. But more than that, it was literally as though he was releasing happiness into the room. Ginny could feel the last of the tension, the feeling of sadness and fear that she’d been carrying for the last hour and a half, start to dissipate. It seemed that she, as well, could feel what Scorpius Malfoy was feeling.
That’s when it occurred to her. She had read about this phenomenon in her Healer’s Training days, about magical children. It was well-known that some witches and wizards are more powerful, more magically infused, than others. This was one of the reasons why the Purebloods were able to hold their elevated status for so long and not have it questioned - people assumed that pureness of blood was what made a witch or wizard strong. It had only been proved quite recently, in fact, that that was not the case.
And then occasionally a witch or wizard would come along who was particularly powerful. Witches and wizards like this are magical to such a magnitude that many of them are able to master doing even the most powerful of spells without a wand. Such witches and wizards are so rare that little research has been done on them, but one factor that many of them seem to have is an ability to influence the very atmosphere around them. This could be in the form of making it rain, creating sunshine, or even projecting yourself - your ideas, your thoughts, and your emotions - from yourself to the space around you. Ginny suspected that young Scorpius Malfoy was one such wizard.
She had been right; he was special.
Draco now picked Scorpius up, and gently lowered him to the floor. Scorpius stood on his little legs, and then promptly ran for the door. Draco let him go, turning instead to face Ginny.
Ginny was excited beyond belief. She could not quite believe that she had just treated a super-magical young wizard. She had to tell Draco about this. Surely, he would be just as excited as she.
“Malfoy,” she began, “I have-“
“Weasley,” he interrupted her, “I know we don’t get along very well, unless it’s a serious medical emergency, so this might seem like a weird thing for me to say. But I just have to tell you, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Thank you so much for what you did today.”
Any thought Ginny had about telling Draco about super-wizards, and his son being one, flew out the window, passing the baton to shock along the way. Draco had said thanks yesterday, sure, but he’d been fairly reluctant about it. Today he was saying it so sincerely, his eyes looking into hers so intensely, that Ginny wondered for a brief second if Draco was actually a super-wizard too.
“I realise I probably seem overly sentimental,” he continued. “And I’m not usually into over-sentimentality, but with something like this I’ll be as overly sentimental as I want. Scorpius is … he’s my whole world, and when he’s unhappy, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I would do without him in my life. So thank you, for saving my son’s life. I truly mean that.”
With that, he promptly left the room, leaving Ginny to collapse into her swivel chair. She still had four hours’ of shift left to go, and already it felt as though she’d worked for 24 hours straight, plus run a marathon or two.
And yet, despite the tiredness, she felt pretty good.
~*~
Friday
Ginny couldn’t believe her luck that morning as she Apparated into the office. She had managed a full seven hours of sleep that night. That was almost a full night. To top that off, she had decided to forego her daily Pepper-up this morning, because she felt pepped-up enough for work as she was. She felt so good that morning that even the sight of Celeste, the craggly, mean old lady who occupied reception on Fridays, did not phase her. She gave Celeste a merry wave, told her to send in her first patient, and practically skipped to her room.
At this stage, she was half-expecting Draco Malfoy to come in to her room at some stage. Why, after all, would he break the pattern he seemed to have made? Happy though Ginny was feeling that day, she couldn’t help but be slightly nervous about Draco coming in. The last time they had parted ways, they had done so on a very serious note. The kind of note that, were yesterday’s visit a musical, would leave you frowning and considering the deep, stirring messages within it. It was nice, she supposed, that he had not hurled any insults at her for the past two days, but Ginny had to wonder if any subsequent visits he made to her room were going to be awkward.
Ginny certainly did not want that. She got enough awkwardness these days from Weasley family get-togethers, where she had to act civilly towards Harry for at least two hours. Receiving any more awkwardness in her life than that would have been diametrically unfair.
As it turned out, she needn’t have worried. True to form, Malfoy made an appearance in her room some time after lunch. Celeste grunted something about a new patient coming in, and Ginny nodded and threw out the last few wet wipes from her previous patient. The door opened, she turned and saw Malfoy staring there…
…and immediately felt the most insane desire to laugh in his face. In fact she would have done, had said face not looked as though it had spent a few minutes on a sizzling barbeque. Any tension she had felt until that moment was immediately gone.
“Of all of the things you’ve seen me for this week, Malfoy,” she said, waving vaguely in the direction of the bed, “I’m sure the story behind this one is going to be far and away the most stupid.”
Draco looked surprised for about two seconds, and Ginny wondered if he had been feeling nervous about this meeting too. But then his face hardened into as good a grimace he could muster, and snark-mode was back in full force. “Geez, She-Weasel. If I’d known that burn victims were treated with this much disdain in General Healing, I would have cut the crap, set myself on fire, and made the journey long ago.”
“Well you probably deserve the disdain,” Ginny said, “and I’m freely able to give it to you this time because you’re not about to die, like you were on Wednesday. What the hell did you do? Did you see a resting dragon while going about your daily business, and thought it might be fun to see how long it would take to be bothered if you kept flicking its ears?”
“Do you really think me that stupid, She-Weasel?”
“Well, this is YOU we’re talking about.”
“Hmph. Well, I’ll have you know it was not me trying to tickle a sleeping dragon. If I’ve learned nothing else from Hogwarts days, I have at least remembered the school motto. No, I was actually mixing potions for work, and some highly reactive substances happened to combine less co-operatively than what I was hoping for.”
“Oh, right,” Ginny said, again pointing to the bed, as he had made no move to sit down. “So it wasn’t you knocking over a cauldron?”
“You insult me with the insinuation. I’m the pinnacle of grace,” Draco answered, not looking at where he was going as he tried to sit down. He missed the bed, and landed, loudly and clumsily, on the floor.
“Yeah,” Ginny said, looking at him. “The pinnacle of grace. Definitely.”
“Oh, shut up. I’m an injured patient here. Shouldn’t you be treating me?”
“I suppose,” Ginny said, letting out the most exasperated-sounding sigh she could muster. If she was being honest with herself, though, she didn’t mind treating him at all. Perhaps she’d got used to him. Or maybe it was that she’d found out enough about him over the past few days to not dislike him as much as she had done during school. At any rate, even their snark felt more playful today than it did sarcastic and annoying.
Draco repositioned himself on the bed, and Ginny told him to remove what was left of his shirt. He did, wincing slightly as he pulled it free from his arms, and she took a moment to analyse the extent of the damage. It wasn’t the worst burning she had ever seen, but certainly some of them looked second-degree. She opened her supply cabinet and pulled her entire supply of magical skin-healing salves. She brought them to him, activated them with a wave of her wand, and started to carefully apply them to his shoulders.
“Ohh, my…” Draco said, when she laid the first one down. The magical coolant started its work immediately, worming its way into the burns and removing the heat from his skin.
“It’s good, isn’t it?” Ginny remarked. “These things work really well with sunburn too.”
“Would it be a bit cheeky of me to ask reception to order them in bulk for me?”
“Patients have done it before. I wouldn’t recommend ordering them from the receptionist out there at the moment, though. She’s a crabby wench.”
“Bit like you, then?”
“Do you want me to stop applying these?”
“Oh, Merlin, please, no.”
“Right. Well behave yourself, then.” It was probably a good thing that Draco was currently facing away from her, or else he would have seen Ginny’s smile.
After she’d applied salves to his face and shoulders, it was time for her to work on his neck and chest. She had worked with burn victims before, and the first time she had used salves on another person’s chest, it had been more than a little awkward. Staring at any chest for a prolonged amount of time couldn’t help but be awkward. Now that she was a bit more used to it, she normally felt no awkwardness, only professional concern. But as she applied the salves to Draco’s chest, she felt some of the childish awkwardness return.
To be fair, most of the people she had worked with had had fairly average-looking torsos. Nothing worth writing home about in terms of flawlessness of skin and muscle tone. Draco’s chest, on the other hand, was a surprisingly nice one. Surprising, because it was not particularly muscular and Draco himself was quite weedy. But it was fairly nicely toned, all the same. His skin (the skin not currently red and raw, at any rate), sported nothing that even vaguely resembled a freckle, and it was so pale that light seemed to bounce off it. Ginny would not have minded a pair of sunglasses at that moment, truth be told.
“Like what you see?”
“Huh?” Ginny looked up to find Draco smirking one of his finest smirks ever at her.
“You were looking at my torso,” he said.
“Well, yeah,” Ginny said. “I’m currently treating it for burns. Of course I’m looking like it. Unless you want me to miss your chest and accidently stick the salve to your hair, or something?”
“Well, there’s looking at something,” Draco said, “and then there’s full-on staring at it. You were definitely doing the latter. I bet you’re enjoying having to touch it right now, aren’t you?”
“Oh, tremendously,” Ginny said, heaving shovelfuls of sarcasm into the statement. “So much so that I can feel my hands itching to be disinfected with the strongest acids on standby.”
Draco’s smirk softened into a smile, but it wasn’t a smile that Ginny found particularly warm or comforting. This smile was borderline creepy.
“See, I’d believe that,” he said, “if you weren’t currently blushing redder than your hair. An impressive feat, I must say.”
Ginny’s hands automatically flew to her face, where she did feel unmistakable heat. Draco’s smile turned into a Cheshire-cat-style grin, and she smacked the last salve on with a bit more force than was strictly necessary. She couldn’t say she felt particularly sorry about his resulting wince.
“Those will need replacing tomorrow,” she informed him. “Come back here whenever you’re free, although I’m sure that you would have figured out some way to see me tomorrow anyway.”
“I can’t say I like what you’re implying, She-Weasel,” Draco said, shrugging back into his shirt. “Let me remind you, you were the one ogling me.”
“In your dreams, Malfoy,” she said, turning away from him lest her face turn red again.
“Well, actually, apparently, in yours.”
“Please leave my room before I make the receptionist get out her poking broom.”
~*~
Part two.
Original Prompt that we sent you:
30 Briefly describe what you'd like to receive in your fic: Snark,
snark and snark. Maybe with a side of smut. ;) The tone/mood of the fic: can be either lighthearted or downright moody. It's all good to me.
An element/line of dialogue/object you would specifically like in your
fic: "What do you mean you can't go there?"
Preferred rating of the the fic you want: Sky's the limit. :) Canon or AU? Canon (tho my canon ends without the Epilogue of DH) Deal Breakers (anything you don't want?): Do NOT want Epilogue compliant stuff, infidelity, gross OOC-ness, hardcore kinks if you go the route of sexytimes.
Art prompt: Anything is good to me, really.