Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter
AN: I had a writer's block so I went on the 'Prepare To Be Unstuck' thread on the 'Harry Potter Fanfiction Challenges' forum. I was given the prompts: broken, accusation, taste, family, restless, smirk, purity, fortune, slow, and hospital. I haven't written full chapters on each prompt, but each word is in this chapter, although some are in altered form. Obviously 'hospital' is incredibly easy to spot, but see if you can find the others. I'm pretty sure they are in there.
Chapter Nine: The Hospital Wing
Sirius may have been older than me, but being older didn't always mean being more sensible. I couldn't believe how much of an idiot he could be sometimes, and getting himself stuck as a half dog, half human was certainly not one of his brightest ideas. Other than the fact that it was against the rules, I had no idea why on earth Sirius had done it: if the teachers ever found out he might even be expelled for it and then what would happen? Hopefully he'd go to James or Remus's place because Mother certainly wouldn't be happy with him. As it was, I still had to come up with some decent explanation of what had happened to him.
What made it ten million times worse was that, even though people were still supposed to be in lessons, there were still people hanging around the corridors and staring at us as we walked past. I guessed they were sixth and seventh year students that were on "study periods", but it was still extremely rude and inconsiderate of them to be staring, pointing and laughing at us (though to an outsider, Sirius might have looked quite comical). Whether they meant harm or not, the outcome was that I hated it and wished they would all just go away.
I was thankful when we reached the relative safety of the hospital wing. There was only one other patient in there; unfortunately, of course, it just so happened to be Rosier. He was reading a book but looked up as we came in, a gleeful expression on his face as he spotted Sirius's condition.
"Bloody hell, how did you manage that, Sirius?" he sneered. Sirius glared him and I wanted to wipe the smirk off his face then and there – I was sure Sirius felt the same way too. In any case, it was pretty clear that he and Sirius hated one another a lot more than Evan and I did.
"I could say the same to you, Rosier. Shouldn't you be out of here by now?" snarled Sirius. It had been over a week since he'd been admitted to the hospital after the quidditch match but even people with injuries as bad as his had been were usually released after about three days or so. Maybe he'd been more hurt than I'd thought.
I left Sirius to his quarrelling and wandered off to find out where Madam Pomfrey was. I found her in a small side-chamber selecting a bottle marked 'skele-something-or-other' out of the cabinet.
"Excuse me," I started, "it's my brother Sirius, he, uh-" I had no idea what to say. How did one go about saying that their brother made a mess of turning into an animagus without saying that he was trying to turn into an animagus? Instead, I simply pointed – rather unhelpfully - in Sirius's direction.
Madam Pomfrey cut me off with a wave of her hand. She picked up the medicine bottle and hurried over to where I'd left Sirius. She looked extremely shocked when she saw him.
"What on earth have you done to yourself this time, young man?" she exclaimed, bending over to examine him. "I don't know what you and your friends think you're doing."
"I didn't do anything," said Sirius. "It just suddenly happened after we finished breakfast." It wasn't a very good cover story and Madam Pomfrey was never going to buy it.
"Sirius, people don't just sprout fur all over their faces! I can't help unless you tell me what happened," said Pomfrey.
"I'm not lying! I really don't know what happened," Sirius answered. Maybe Sirius was a bad liar or my face was giving it away, but the healer did not believe him. She looked down sternly at him.
"You know, I think he might be telling the truth, actually." Strangely, this comment came from Rosier. Pomfrey turned to look at him, and both Sirius and I gawped incredulously at him: it was common knowledge that Sirius and Rosier had about as much liking for each other as James and Severus did, so why in Merlin's name would he cover up for him? It made no sense and only furthered to my conclusion that Rosier had been hit in the head harder than I'd previously thought.
"And do you have any evidence for this?" Madam Pomfrey asked.
"Well I do know that the sixth years have been making polyjuice potion in class, and I know my brother well enough to know that he'd find it funny to spike Sirius's pumpkin juice with it. I've heard adding animal hairs can produce rather interesting results," he said. It actually wasn't too bad of an idea. I did remember Marcus saying something about the potion only working with human body parts – otherwise it would go horribly wrong. I still found it very strange that Rosier would be trying to get Sirius out of trouble, especially at the expense of accusing his own brother. Or maybe the whole plan was to get his brother into trouble as some sort of weird revenge for what happened on the Quidditch pitch. It was all very odd.
"Hmm, possibly," said Madam Pomfrey. She cast a few diagnostic spells before replying again. "I'll knock up some potion for you Sirius, which should get you back to normal in no time. And you," she said, looking pointedly at Rosier and then at the medicine that she'd placed on the table next to his bed, "need to drink that up unless your bones to stay broken forever."
"I think I'd rather stay like this than drink that. It tastes like vomit," he muttered. Madam Pomfrey looked like she wanted to argue with him, but didn't – likely as not, she'd been having the same argument with him all week. Instead, she huffed at him and went off to brew something for Sirius.
I turned back to Sirius. There wasn't really much to talk about in front of Rosier: we couldn't talk about the animagi, and I couldn't grill Sirius about his reasons for doing it either. If it was something Sirius was reluctant to tell me, he definitely wouldn't want Rosier to know. I settled for talking about family issues because I was pretty sure that everyone in Slytherin already knew about it anyway.
"Have you written to Andromeda recently?" I asked, ignoring the scowls coming from the side of the room at the mention of her name. After the ridiculous grilling I'd had from his brother Evan about Andromeda and 'Blood Purity', I wasn't in the mood for more criticism on that front.
"Yes, I wrote and told her about your quidditch, and about James and me being on the team again this year. She wrote back to tell me you'd already told her all that, and that she's really pleased we're talking to each other," said Sirius. "By the way, what's up with you and Cissy?"
I was glad that Sirius had chosen to bring that up: I'd wanted to talk to someone about it with someone for ages but most of my friends didn't really know how to sympathise with it. Sirius, however, had managed to spend almost three years thinking that I hated him so might actually have an idea of what was going on in my cousin's head.
"She found out about the letters and also about me being friends with you, and thinks that I've betrayed her or something," I explained. "And then her friends decided she was being stupid about it and sided with me even though I didn't ask them to."
"Have you tried talking with her about it?" asked Sirius, as if I hadn't already thought about it and as if it would actually do anything at all.
"Of course I have! But Sirius, she's as stubborn as you are, so she didn't listen for more than two milliseconds. Besides, she's got it into her head that you and Andromeda betrayed her, so anyone who talks to them has too."
"I think she's taking it a bit far with that, but I can sort of see what she means about Andromeda," said Sirius.
"What?" I asked, rather confused. Did Sirius believe all that rubbish Mother and Father said about Andromeda being an utter disgrace and a traitor to everything our family stood for? Did he think that Ted was a 'freak of nature' and an 'abomination which ought to be disposed of before society found out'? Surely not – Sirius was a Gryffindor and his Gryffindor friends would have grilled him alive if he thought any of that were true.
"I meant that she's probably feeling very confused and hurt because her sister's left her without telling her why and hasn't contacted her for weeks. Wouldn't you feel upset if I suddenly left home, and then you found out that I'd started a family all of my own with someone you'd never met or didn't like?"
"I guess I'd be angry with you," I said. I hadn't thought about it till then, but it hadn't just been Sirius that hadn't known about Andromeda's relationship with Ted and the pregnancy. Asides from Ted, I'd been the only one to know about Nymphadora before the summer, and Bella had been the only other person to even know that she'd been dating anyone. Maybe Cissy was upset that she'd been kept in the dark, but that still didn't explain why she hated me for not-hating her sister.
"Exactly. She already hates me for being in Gryffindor, and she's upset because of all that awful stuff Bella's been doing recently. So if you add in the fact that you're getting letters from both her sisters and you've made up with me, that makes her even more upset with you," said Sirius.
"Hmm, I suppose that makes some sense." I was surprised that Sirius had actually tried to come up with an explanation for her behaviour; the fact that he'd hit on something that seemed even the slightest bit plausible was something of a miracle. It made me feel a lot better to think there was some possibility that Cissy was just angry with Andromeda and that she hadn't just suddenly started hating her. That meant that it was possible that she might one day forgive her sister, even though it was extremely unlikely that any situation like what I'd seen in that mirror at Christmas would ever happen – there was just no way that Mother, Father, Bellatrix, Aunt Druella and Uncle Cygnus would ever be happy with Andromeda's marriage.
"Oh, Pomfrey's back," muttered Sirius. Indeed, the healer was back and was carrying with her a glass containing a potion that looked rather a lot like urine and smelled vile. She handed it to Sirius and I watched his facial expression turn to one of absolute disgust – it looked rather funny along with the dog face. He slowly put the glass to his lips and tilted it very slightly until the liquid touched his mouth. Then he tipped it back very suddenly and swallowed the entire thing in one gulp.
The potion worked. Sirius must have found it extremely annoying, but I watched him closely and didn't really take my eyes off him as he changed back. First the ears changed shape and position, then the muzzle, and then gradually, as the rest of the face changed shape, the black fur disappeared, leaving Sirius looking relatively normal if not a tad bit red in the face.
As soon as Sirius was human again, Madam Pomfrey handed him a glass of water, which had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. She then told us to head off to our next lesson and turned her attention back to her other patient: "See, Sirius drank his potion," she said in an excruciatingly patronising manner. I hurried Sirius off out of the door so that we wouldn't have to listen to them.
"Anyone would think that git actually wanted to be in the hospital wing," commented Sirius, as we walked as fast as possible in the opposite direction to the hospital wing.
"Maybe he does."
"Don't be daft, Reg. That place is hell – James and I have been in there enough to last a lifetime," said Sirius. I remembered what Andromeda had said about Sirius having to go there after his first proper flying lesson because of an 'accident' that was probably part of the reason why Sirius loathed Rosier so much. Eleven-year-old Sirius had been knocked off his broom, but luckily, after some intervention by his older cousin, Rosier had never actually done anything to physically harm him after that. Sirius's other injuries had been caused by other means.
"I don't like it much either," I said, "but then I don't really like my dormitory much. I told you before about having nightmares, and about how cold it gets in the winter didn't I? Then last week everyone woke up because someone was screaming in the middle of the night – that's why everyone looked dog-tired at the Quidditch try-outs." To be fair, that particular night had been worse than usual. A normal night in the dormitory was a lot better than in the hospital wing: I'd never stayed in there for long, but just knowing that I wasn't allowed to get up made me restless and wishing I could get out of there.
"Yeah, I noticed that. You had massive black circles round your eyes for the whole thing."
"Thanks Siri."
"Your welcome," said Sirius. We carried on talking until we came to the end of the corridor and had to go in opposite directions. I turned right to go to charms, while Sirius went left to whatever lesson he had next.
…..
AN: Thanks to everyone who's been reviewing. Sorry this took so long. I've had a lot of work and I've also spent a lot of time reading a very good fanfiction by 'Seirios Aster' called 'Light of A Fading Star'. (Yes I left that in from before and yes I did actually go and read it all again. Seirios Aster actually has a new story which is even better.)
Please review.
