There was no other way to put it.
Severus had tried, though admittedly not very hard, to come up with a more intelligent way of wording how it felt to return to the hospital the night following a very satisfying duel. But try as he might, he could not find a better way to describe it, other than it flat out fucking sucked.
Leaving that field, which he could now appropriately call a 'battlefield', had been heart wrenching. How easy would it have been to simply build himself a home right there? To live his life in peace, watch the sun rise over the Pacific every morning, nearly on the other side of the Earth from where he had been born, raised, lived and died. And he could do Magic, whenever for whatever reason, with only an occasional Apparition to a town for groceries and whatnot.
But no.
He had left Britain, left his home and old life behind specifically to have a new one. He loathed himself for it but moving from one life of isolation to another, deeper life of isolation was not at all what he deemed smart or healthy for himself. He had wanted to feel better. And yes, while he hated that he could do so little Magic in the hospital any more and yes, while he hated that he had to use a cell phone and computers and all that nonsense, he was living the life he had wanted. He'd made it. Giving it all up now just to go live alone on some cliff in California seemed dumb and wasteful of all his hard work.
For this reason, he swung his car into the garage with particular savagery the night following the duel with Potter. He was already feeling some kind of way and his tires squealed in protest as he turned into a doctor's parking space near the doors, turned off the car and got out, stethoscope in hand, back teeth clenched. The slam of his car door echoed in the mostly empty parking garage.
Oh, Jasmine was going to love him tonight...
He began walking to the staff entrance, pulling his identification card from his pocket, but noticed through the 'pre-bad mood' haze that he was approaching the back end of a running car, the exhaust visible as gray, dense clouds on the frosty air. One eyebrow arched as he approached the source of the noise, smell and gray smoke. He allowed a very subtle turn of his head to glance in through the back window, to see if he would recognize the person inside it. However, the moment he rounded a mini-van and saw a bushy, blonde ponytail smashed against the headrest with a phone to her ear, he looked away, his stomach lurching as though he had missed a step going down stairs.
He continued on his way with a renewed speed in his step but his eyebrow arched further and he spared a glance at his watch. The time was very near eight o'clock and Jasmine was still in her car? On the phone? Hell, typically by the time he got there, she had already been clocked in for fifteen minutes, had a case for him, ready and raring to go.
Odd.
Also not his problem nor concern.
After a quick trip into the men's locker room to change into the navy scrubs he so hated, thinking fondly back on how it had felt to wear his black ensemble again to duel Potter, he arrived at his usual post at the back nurses' station. Dr. Oakes had already been there for two hours. It had apparently been a slow two hours, as he was leaned comfortably back in his chair, doing that idiotic zipping thing with his identification badge. He smirked when he saw Severus approaching, who rolled his eyes in return.
"Hey, buddy!"
"No."
Severus declined the conversation abruptly and sat down to type his password into the computer. There was a only a moment of silence from Oakes before he spoke again.
"So, you're in a great mood..." he commented slowly, sitting up in his chair. "Bad night off?"
Severus' broad shoulders lifted and dropped with the depth of his sigh, his eyes scanning patient intake notes. "I could not properly explain my night off to you if I had one hundred years," he replied in one very measured breath of air. "Suffice it to say-" He stood up, tucking his stethoscope into his back pocket. "-that I hate being here right now."
With that, he walked away, leaving Dr. Oakes with a bizarre sort of look on his face, one of surprise and something that looked rather impressed. Severus rolled his eyes as he walked into the triage area, to the massive central nurses' unit. Oakes probably thought he had been referring to a particularly excellent night off with a woman, locked in the throes of romance for a full twenty-four hours. Quite honestly, Severus preferred he think that versus knowing the truth- having a wand battle with a former student in the middle of fucking nowhere using mag-
"Dr. Prince, I'm so sorry-"
So caught up in his musings, Severus had to fight hard not to jump in startled surprise at Jasmine's voice so unexpectedly beside him. He blinked once instead and flipped open a chart, his expression completely unchanged.
"You're late," he stated baldly.
He felt rather than heard the long beat of silence that Jasmine let pass before she inhaled to reply. Looking at her was completely unnecessary; he could picture her polite but 'triggered', taken-back expression. Her left eyebrow always twitched upward and her upper lip did this unsettling snarl sort of thing.
"Yeah, I was dealing with some annoying bullshit and just couldn't get enough, so I came to work for some more."
She said it so smoothly.
Severus' eyes rose very slowly from the chart, which he slapped shut as he turned his head to glare down at her. Without warning, his stomach did that lurching thing again as he saw the true expression on her face; it was nothing like he had imagined it in his mind.
Jasmine looked exhausted, her hair rather larger than usual, her normally perfect posture somewhat slumped. Dark circles lay in shadows beneath her eyes, a vague touch of residual redness among her eyelashes, the whites of her eyes and her nose. Her lips seemed a bit swollen.
God damnit.
She had been crying.
Every ounce of his being, every last fiber of himself wanted to ask 'Are you alright?'. It was on the tip of his tongue, eager to be spoken, to show half an ounce of actual concern for her well-being. Because that was what he felt at that moment- true concern. The nurse standing before him was not at all the nurse he had become accustomed to working with. It barely even looked like her. It was truthfully a bit unsettling.
And yet he bit it back, denied himself the chance. Instead, he returned her glare, forcefully holding the eye contact as he spoke.
"Do mind your attitude and language, Miss. Taylor," His tone was perfectly level but silky and dangerous, hoping to convey that he was not at all in a good mood either. "If you are incapable of doing so, you are excused for the remainder of your shift."
It seemed Jasmine had no reply to this, as she merely nodded and gestured to the chart in his hand. "What do we have first?" she asked in a poor attempt and spectacular failure at her usual cheery voice.
Severus sniffed, handed the chart to her and began walking in the direction of the curtained exam room. Jasmine followed suit, fortunately keeping her usual pace a half-step behind him; if she had failed to do that, something would have been seriously wrong.
"Thirty-nine year old white male, presents with fever of-"
"A hundred and five point 6?" she interrupted him, her voice gaining a note of it's usual springiness. "And his wife thinks it's just the flu? I don't think so..." Severus listened, unable to suppress a smirk. There she is. She stopped just in time to avoid walking into him when he came to an abrupt halt outside the exam room. He turned to look down at her as her eyes slowly drifted up from the chart. She had just read the last line of notes.
Her eyes darted up to meet his, vibrant blue against the vague redness of her scleras. Both sadness and surprise were visible within them, along with something a bit defeated, as though she had been hoping desperately for a less upsetting case.
Honestly, so had Severus.
After a physical exam, during which Severus wore gloves and the young man and his wife explained his rapid weight loss, how tired he had been lately, the vomiting, the diarrhea, showing him the random sore spots on his tongue, he excused himself and Jasmine from the room, outside and away from the curtain. He stripped his gloves carefully and placed them in a biohazard container next to a hand-washing and disinfecting station.
Jasmine was writing notes diligently in the chart as she stood next to him. He glanced up at her profile as he washed his hands, at the determined look on her face, and also the intense heaviness about her eyes. He truly hated seeing her this way.
"You will wear a pair of N90 gloves to obtain his blood sample," he stated abruptly, removing his foot from the petal that operated the faucet and reaching for a clean drape towel in a bin overhead. As expected, Jasmine's ponytail bounced slightly as she turned her head quickly to look up at him. Her expression fell, if possible, even further.
"Do you really think it's-"
Severus interrupted. "I've no idea what he's got, but whatever it is, I'd rather you exercise caution, obviously," he said waspishly, distinctly not looking at her as he took the chart to write the orders for the battery of diagnostic tests to which he would be subjecting this man's blood. Every drop held an answer.
However, an hour later, this man's blood revealed that he had acquired a massive infection from an auto-immune disease and his body was unable to fight it. Jasmine had brought him the lab results but had not lingered long enough for him to see in her face whether she had perhaps read the slips of numbers for herself.
And he did not see her again until after he had spoken with the man privately, without the presence of his wife, by law, to inform him that he had tested positive for HIV and that his white blood cell count indicated that he was very likely in the early stages of acquired immune deficiency syndrome or AIDS. Severus informed him that he would be transferred shortly to the intensive care unit, under a doctor by the name of Singh, who would begin treatment immediately. He had then left the room after advising the man that he was required, by law, to inform his wife and any other sexual partners, past and-or present. Whether or not the man actually did so was solely down to him.
At that point, his job was done. Whether or not the man lived was now up to Dr. Singh and quite frankly, Severus was fine with that. He could spare no more emotion tonight, as he had already reached peak capacity effort in simply being present at the hospital. As a team of nurses bustled past, bearing the young, HIV positive man on a stretcher, wife in tow, he allowed himself a moment to take a deep breath in, and slowly exhale, watching them as they disappeared around a corner. This had not been a fantastic case for him to start off with. And it seemed to have crumpled Jasmine altogether. Glancing around, Severus found no sight of her bushy ponytail among the bustle near the central nursing unit nor anywhere else in triage.
It may have been that she had returned to the back nurses' station in search of him with another chart. So he decided he needed to go there regardless to computerize his notes on the previous case, and that perhaps, he would check and see if she was there while he did so. Only one case into the night and he was more than ready to go home. Perhaps Jasmine would be in better spirits by then and would help give him a boost of energy.
Whether or not she was aware of it, Jasmine's positive energy was infectious and Severus often found himself feeding off of it. He was a naturally negative person but something about her presence brought him comfort, much the same effect as she seemed to have on their patients. Earlier into their working relationship, he had thought it had been the bad coffee or tea she fetched him, but he was beginning to wonder if it had not perhaps been the gesture itself.
Wherever THAT Jasmine was, he would love to know, because the sulky, upset one from earlier was not very much to his taste in nurses. However, neither form of Jasmine, cheery or otherwise, was present at the back nurses' station when he arrived there. But Dr. Oakes was. Severus' forehead contracted in a frown as he stepped into the station, past the other doctor.
"Have you seen Jasmine?" he asked, despite how much he knew he was going to hate the way Oakes spun in his chair to look at him.
Had Severus been in any other kind of mood or perhaps bore even a slightly friendlier expression, Oakes would have likely commented teasingly on his use of her first name. Fortunately, he refrained but nodded his head toward the hallway on the far side of the nurses' station.
"She went that way about three minutes ago," he answered, turning back to the computer in front of him. "I think she had to take a phone call."
A phone call? In the middle of her shift?
Jasmine usually left her phone in her locker or in a drawer, and never so much as looked at it while she was clocked in, on the job. It was one of those things he had come to like about her, in fact; she was not so attached to the thing that she needed to check it every five minutes. Unlike Oakes, who was constantly on his phone-
"Dr. Oakes," Severus suddenly snapped, in such a tone that the younger doctor jumped, looking up quickly from the illuminated screen in his hands. "How many active cases are you attending currently?"
Oakes blinked, glancing down at the desk where three files lay jumbled. Severus did not give him time to reply verbally. "Put your damn phone away and go get three more cases. You will not attend less than five at a time tonight, do you understand? " His temper was getting away from him, quickly. He continued; it felt too good to siphon some of this off on Mark. "I'm sick of seeing you sitting around on your ass while the nurses do substandard work in their effort to make up for your slack."
For the longest moment, the expression on Dr. Oakes' face was remarkably similar to that of someone very close to hitting him. Without trying, Severus could practically hear him thinking how much he'd like to hit him, how tempting it was to tell him to go fuck himself. With great effort it seemed, he stood up calmly, dropped his phone onto the counter with a clatter, and walked away, stethoscope in hand. Severus watched him go for a moment before rolling his eyes. This was not their first 'conversation' concerning laziness and sitting around.
More importantly, he was still seeking Jasmine, not only to find out where she had gone for the remainder of their last case but also, if he was being honest with himself, to find out whether or not she was alright. Something was definitively off-color about her that night and despite himself, he found his curiosity stirred. He only knew a small portion of this woman, so he had only one or two guesses as to what could be affecting her this heavily. And neither option was favorable to the other.
Halfway down the hall, Severus' ears picked up the muffled sound of a voice, raised slightly, but only getting one or two words out at a time. Carefully, he focused his mind on the sound of her voice and allowed his hearing to hone in. He could suddenly hear Jasmine in his ears, as if through headphones.
"Jeremy! Listen to me-"
His heart sank.
Oh, no...
"I'm not coming ba-" She tried again to speak but apparently, the person on the other end of the line could not be bothered to pause long enough.
Severus had heard plenty. He was fast approaching the room in which she had taken her personal call and would be able to hear her either way, despite however much he would like not to. As he reached for the handle, he paused, glancing into the room through the small window in the door. Jasmine was standing with her profile to him, leaned against a counter, her head bowed with one hand bracing her forehead. It was difficult to see from the window whether or not she was crying, but Severus decided hastily that he would rather not know just yet. He pulled open the door.
As expected, Jasmine jumped away from the counter and slapped her phone shut, her eyes wide, but no longer red nor puffy. Severus felt a bit of surprise at this, mingled with a touch of respect. She had apparently been able to refrain from tears since before arriving at work and he felt there was something to be said for that. And whomever Jeremy was had just been hung up on.
Good.
As Severus stepped further into the room, Jasmine slid her phone into the pocket of her scrub top and took one slow, careful step backward away from him, just as she always did. A frustrated frown broke through his stony expression and he shook his head, still unsure why she felt the need to do this whenever he approached her, but nowhere near ready to ask. He felt her true answer might sicken him.
…...
Dr. Prince stopped walking about halfway between her and the door. Jasmine had felt her aching heart go flying into her throat at the sound of the door opening and the sight of his tall, somewhat menacing figure in the way. But as he had approached, his expression softened the tiniest of bits, as though he was just too tired to frown any longer. His hands slid into the pockets of his scrub pants and he shrugged, angular shoulders rising and dropping.
"Where have you been?" he asked simply.
His voice was gentler, quieter than it had been earlier, adjusted to account for the lack of noise from the bustling triage room around them. It was crisp and clear as a bell, reverberating slightly in the otherwise empty room. Goosebumps coated her forearms; she still hadn't gotten used to it.
She hesitated on her answer. How could she ever relay to him the text messages, the emails, the phone calls, all from the very last person she had ever wanted to hear from again in her life? How could she explain to him the thing her heart had done when she had answered the phone before work to hear the voice of the person she had once planned to spend the rest of her life with? The person who now disgusted her more than any other person on Earth? How could he possibly understand any of it? And why would she want him to?
She patted the phone in her scrub pocket with the most nonchalant shrug she could manage and began to walk toward the door beyond him. "Sorry, Doc, I had an important phone call," she replied in an equally casual tone.
As she passed him, he spoke again, so near to her that she could practically feel his voice inside her chest. "Family emergency by chance?"
Jasmine stopped mid-step, only a few feet from the door and turned back slowly to glare at him. It was a good attempt, she had to admit, using his dislike of her aunt to very cleverly tip toe around outright asking who had been so important that she had needed to disappear for almost an hour. She forced a weary smirk onto her face and shook her head.
"Nope, it was the Queen," she answered, raising and lowering one shoulder. "Just callin' to check in on ya."
Dr. Prince shook his head, exhaling a quiet laugh that sounded a bit more frustrated than amused. "Jasmine," he began. She blinked up at him. He so rarely used her first name that it always caught her attention. "If you need to be elsewhere-"
"No," She could not help but interrupt him. There was no way in hell Jeremy was going to keep her from doing her job and there was no way she was going to allow Dr. Prince to 'suffer' (she figured he'd probably prefer it, honestly) alone if she went home early. She continued, waving a hand in a wanna-be airy fashion. "No, seriously, I'm fine," she answered. When Dr. Prince's eyebrow merely arched more sharply in response, she let out a tired laugh. "I told you, it's just some annoying bullsh-..." She hesitated, remembering his warning about language and her eyes rolled. "Look, neither of us are in a great mood but-"
The phone in her pocket began vibrating again. She seized it through the scrub pocket and squeezed, pressing the button on the side to silence it. She had known he would not give up easily once released from jail to find that his ex-fiance had moved across the country, but this was getting ridiculous. Although how he had been surprised to find that she was now his ex remained a mystery to her. Had he seriously expected her to simply write off what had happened and continue planning their wedding without a hitch?
The urge to cry was overwhelming, but she fought it back down, virtually swallowing it to prevent Dr. Prince from seeing her tears. He seemed to have noticed that her phone had begun ringing again as he pointed lazily at her pocket. Jasmine glanced down quickly to see that a square of light was perfectly visible through the material of her scrubs. Great.
He moved toward her but she stayed put, her hand clamped over the phone, watching as he passed her in favor of the door. He had not looked down, his eyes had not moved at all and yet Jasmine still felt like he was looking directly at her. She felt her cheeks flush and her stomach dropped to her pelvic floor as the phone once again began to vibrate. She squeezed the device again to silence it but Dr. Prince's shoulders tensed visibly beneath the material of the back of his scrubs.
Without turning to look at her, he spoke. "Handle your business within the next fifteen minutes or you will be sent home," His voice was very level and calm, but Jasmine was not fool enough to believe for one moment that he was not completely and entirely fed up with her distraction that night. She knew his voice only took on that tone of evenness when he was feeling particularly annoyed.
"Yes, Dr. Prince."
It was all she could think to say. Her heart was pounding painfully, her head was splitting, her stomach was knotted and as she watched Dr. Prince's tall form disappear around the edge of the door, she exhaled a breath she did not realize she had been holding. She had never meant for any of her past to affect her job, to affect him. Her eyes burned again but she took a deep breath and closed them, pulling her phone from her pocket. Her thumb wedged between the edges and flipped it open. It vibrated two more times. Two text messages.
She would have to apologize to Dr. Prince later. The phone would be turned off and put away until after her shift and then she could deal with-
'Come outside NOW'
Her eyes had opened to read the first text message.
'I'm at your car. COME OUTSIDE.'
…...
Thus far, the shift was not at all what Severus had been hoping for. What he had wanted, what he had needed rather, was to come into work in a bad mood, have Jasmine cheer him up, attempt to overdose on caffeine then go home and sleep. That was all he had needed to bring him back to reality after the duel with Potter. The first case had been rather emotional, Jasmine was in a terrible mood and dealing with something he had absolutely no control over, Oakes was being a dick, he couldn't find his favorite pen, he was tired, his arm hurt-
And yet Jasmine was there, in a much worse situation, one with which he could somewhatidentify. A piece of her past had come back to haunt her at the one place she thought she was safe. Granted, her problem was only visible by phone; she could very easily power down the device. His problem had arrived there in the flesh. Powering that down would not have been so easy. He was not sure which was worse and it did not matter. Although he was certain that he had not looked nearly as broken and grief-stricken as Jasmine did.
As he approached the central nurses' station to fetch another chart for himself, he glanced at his watch. He had left the room seven minutes ago. Another eight and Jasmine would be going home. And for whatever reason, Severus sincerely did not want her leaving before him, without him. As he scanned the massive triage unit for a curly ponytail, a random vision of the back of her head swam within his mind, the fingers on his left hand tingling as the nerves there recalled the sensation of how she had shaken beneath his grip as he dug staples from her scalp. A surge of hatred and anger swelled inside him unexpectedly like sick and he snatched a chart at random to begin the case alone. She had seven minutes to join him.
Twenty minutes and one very long-winded, one-sided conversation with a man high on cocaine later, Severus emerged from the curtained exam room, positively seething. Junkies made him angry alone, but the fact that Jasmine still had not come to find him, over a half hour after he had instructed her to deal with her situation? His back teeth met together and clenched. The Muggle world had welcomed him back with open arms, only to drive a knife deep into his side, repaying him for his choice to remain there over the paradise he could create on the other side of the country.
As he passed through the emptying triage unit to the hallway toward the back nurses' station, he did not bother looking for Jasmine. Either she would be sitting at the station, waiting for his return or she would have gone home of her own volition; he somehow doubted she would linger long enough for him to excuse her face-to-face.
However, whatever control Severus felt he had exercised over himself that night vanished instantly as he rounded the corner to find only Dr. Oakes sitting in his usual place, making notes in a chart, the rest of the station empty.
"God-" He slapped the junkie's chart down on the counter with much more force than necessary. "-Damnit!"
Oakes jumped at the sudden motion and noise but threw his pen hard in anger at the back of the counter where it clattered and knocked several pinned notices from the cork board. "Jesus Christ, Prince! What is your deal-"
"Where is Jasmine?" Severus interrupted him without pretense.
Oakes blinked, his angry expression dissipating for a moment in surprise, before it returned quickly. His eyes narrowed and hardened as he fished his pen from behind the computer monitor. "How the fuck should I know? She's your nurse, right?"
Liar.
Severus waited for Oakes to look up at him again before he hastily focused his mind and forced entry through the black holes in the middle of the younger doctor's eyes. The Muggle would be none the wiser as Severus would only be watching his current thoughts.
Legilimens...
Jasmine was approaching the nurses' station, phone pressed to her ear. Oakes had looked up at the sound of her voice, though she fell silent as she passed him. Panic was written all over her face, but she had spoken very calmly to Mark.
"I gotta get something from my car. Tell Dr. Prince I'll be right back."
Severus emerged from the mind of his colleague hastily before he could stumble onto anything else or raise suspicion, his chest pounding with the force of his heartbeat. He could not ask about the memory he had seen, but this hardly mattered; the panic he had seen on her face through the eyes of another had said enough. Abandoning the chart on the counter, Severus immediately turned away toward the back of the triage unit, his stride lengthening. Alongside the anger that had flared up inside him, the concern he had felt earlier returned in full measure; he sincerely hoped her car would still be in the garage.
He could hear voices before he had even reached the door to the parking garage, faintly audible in the same hallway where he had first encountered Linda Sinclair. His heart gave several strong pangs as his ears picked up the sound of a deeper, male voice echoing in the concrete structure beyond. So that was why Jasmine had refused to turn off her phone or leave it behind; she had known he would come and wanted to make sure he would not make it inside the building.
Frigid, early December air bit at his exposed arms as the door to the garage opened, but he felt no desire for any sort of warmth; he did not need it. The blood rushing in his veins was keeping him plenty warm and the cold air did nothing but fuel him. Fortunately, Jasmine had parked somewhat close to the door. Perhaps on purpose.
At the sound of the door, both sides of the argument silenced immediately and Severus took a few steps out, until he could see both Jasmine and a young man at the end of her car, whose blotchy, reddening face turned quickly toward him.
Ah...
Jeremy, with the anger problem, he presumed.
Despite the surge of hatred, Severus could not help but smirk a bit at the sight of the scruffy, bearded, rather short, younger man.
Really? This guy?
Cold, calculating eyes moved calmly from Jeremy to Jasmine, who stood between her car and the next, looking distinctly upset and completely cornered. She was clutching her car keys, her eyes wide as they darted between Jeremy and himself. He slid his hands into his pockets, feeling the same sort of placid readiness fall over him as it had done the previous night in the field in California. He continued toward them. His eyes remained on Jasmine as he approached but he watched her ex-fiance from his periphery, whose face was growing steadily redder as he attempted to contain his rage.
Once within a distance that would not require him to raise his voice, Severus spoke, directly to Jasmine, his gaze trained on her massive, panicked, blue eyes. His stomach twisted but his voice was steady.
"Jasmine, is everything alright?" he asked gently, though it could not have been more clear that everything was not at all right. But he wanted to give her the chance to tell him to go back inside and mind his own business. He wanted her to decide for herself whether this was something she felt she could handle alone. He would not come to her aid unless she wanted or needed it. He had learned enough about Jasmine thus far to know that she would only ever ask for help if she really, truly needed it. This was yet another thing he had come to find both annoying and attractive about her.
As she stood between the two cars however, looking shorter than ever, he felt a bit of frustration well up behind the heavily confident mask he wore. She was too damn small to be so stubborn and independent.
Ex-fiance could apparently no longer contain his rage as Jasmine stammered wordlessly for an answer to his question. His voice exploded out of him, one tattooed hand rising to point a finger at Severus.
"Who the fuck is this asshole?" he demanded loudly, crassly of Jasmine, who looked very close to the point of fainting. She did not answer, which seemed to anger Jeremy even further. He took several quick steps toward Severus, who did not move, but instead watched coldly as Jasmine finally broke her silence to squeal, "Jeremy, don't!"
That was sweet. But Dr. Prince had been praying for this.
"I said who the FUCK are y-"
The moment Jeremy's fist made contact with Severus' already throbbing right arm, it was over. In one heartbeat, one blink, both hands had seized the front of the shorter man's shirt, whipped him around and slammed him with full strength against the back of the minivan to the right of Jasmine's car. His teeth bared in a snarl as the van's alarm began to howl through the empty garage. Jasmine had let out a scream but did not move from where she stood.
Jeremy's face blanched of color as Severus held him pinned to the van, lifted slightly to be more at his own eye level.
"I'm the asshole who dug four staples and thirty-two sutures out of the back of your ex-fiance's head," His voice was only loud enough for the two of them to hear, his tone venomous, his words drowned out to Jasmine by aid of the deafening car alarm. Severus' grip redoubled and Jeremy flinched, struggling to remain on his toes. "I'm also the assholewho knows how to kill you and get away with it."
He stopped struggling as those words reached him, what little color was left in his face draining.
Then without thinking about it, without so much as a thought to consider the consequences of doing so, he released Jeremy with a shove, took a step back and focused.
Imperio
In a beautifully natural movement, Jeremy righted himself, looking like an altogether different person as the Curse swept over him. His eyes softened and he merely looked at Severus, awaiting instruction. Jasmine was silent but he could not see whether or not she was noticing the change in his demeanor.
Hastily, Severus spoke within the Cursed mind of her ex-fiance.
You will leave here peacefully, go back to your home and never return.
It was very tempting to instruct this man to put a gun in his mouth at first chance but Severus refrained. Jasmine would not handle it well were she to hear of her ex-fiance's supposed 'suicide'.
In the most natural movement of an Imperiused Muggle Severus had yet seen, Jeremy turned away to walk toward a red, apparently rented car parked a few spaces down the row from where he stood. Severus watched him go for one moment before his lips moved silently, to form the word 'Obliviate'.
Jeremy would not remember the incident that had just occurred. He would fly home as planned originally with no recollection at all of the past twenty-four hours. His phone had already been fried and wiped instantly the moment he had put his hands on him.
Confident in his spellwork, Severus turned away from watching the back of the red car disappear, only to find that the place where Jasmine had stood, between her car and the next, was empty. But she had not gone far; she had already started walking and was nearly to the entrance back into the hospital. Panic washed over him as he noticed how determined her gait was, how her hands had balled into fists at her sides. Had she noticed the Curse? Or perhaps heard what he had said?
"Jasmine," he said her name gently, hoping she would stop and turn around, come back so he could see her into her car and out of the garage.
She did not. She flat-out ignored him as she continued toward the employee doors.
With a roll of his eyes, Severus trotted a few steps after her and spoke again.
"Jasmine, stop," He said this with a bit more urgency to his voice, praying that she would turn around on her own and he would not have to touch her with his hand to stop her.
Again, she ignored him but had picked up her pace. As she approached the employee door, however, she was forced to slow down, just enough that Severus caught up and was able to reach out one finger to rest on her arm. It was the least threatening thing he knew how to do at the moment. But even this one small touch was all it took for Jasmine to snap.
She yanked her arm away from him, taking several steps back, her admittedly pretty face turned horrible in her fury. "It's none of your business, okay?" she practically shouted, as much as her soft voice would allow her. Her words shook at around the same frequency as her hands as she pushed them both up into the front of her hair to both smooth her curls back and look insane simultaneously. "You shouldn't have come out here-" she continued. Severus watched, silent. "He's not-...I had it under control-"
His disagreement with her statement was so great that he could not stop himself from interrupting. "It certainly did not look that way to me. Seeing how you were literally cornered..." he stated rather more coldly than he head meant to. When Jasmine's eyes widened in fresh anger, he continued, softening his tone. "I understand that it is none of my business. I was merely going to ask if you would like to go home. It's late and I'll be fine without you for the remainder of the shift."
The cataclysmic manner in which Jasmine's expression fell told Severus that he had made a very poor choice of words indeed. Her clear, blue eyes hardened into ice as she glared with a look cold enough to pierce him. He could see the words 'fine without you' reflected painfully back to him.
"Sorry, Dr. Prince, but I'm not going anywhere until my shift is over," Her voice was so soft and so dangerously reminiscent of Sinclair's 'business-time' voice that Severus nearly flinched. "You'll have to put up with me for another hour and a half."
The door to the hospital closed behind her with an echoing clatter in the empty parking garage. If he had been exhausted earlier, it was nothing to what he felt now.
Upon returning to the nurses' station while Jasmine had disappeared off to God only knew where, Dr. Oakes, who was due to leave at two o'clock and had overstayed his shift by almost forty-five minutes, had some very choice words for Severus. He did finally relent and told him to go fuck himself over his five case minimum rule, go fuck himself for 'throwing a chart at him', go fuck himself for his shitty attitude, and lastly, go fuck himself for disappearing for twenty minutes after he was supposed to take over as attending physician.
Severus let it all in one ear and right out the other. He was just too drained after that last adrenaline rush to listen or even remotely care about what was being said to him. The following night, Oakes would come in and act as though nothing had happened and they would have another spat like this in another few weeks. More interesting to him was the sight of Jasmine headed full-tilt in his direction, chart in hand, sparing a sideways glare at the fuming Oakes as she passed him on his way out. Once within arm's distance, she handed the file to him, the same one he had slammed down earlier in her absence. She blinked up at him, eyes dry, clear and bright; she still had not shed a single tear.
"What are your orders for Mr. Roderick?"
The remaining hour and half of the shift seemed to last an eternity, with a heavy abundance of silence from Jasmine, whom normally Severus seemed unable to shut up. The lack of noise from her seemed to press upon his eardrums and he found himself incapable of looking at her. He was unsure why. It may have perhaps been the fact that he had just literally thrust himself between her and her ex-fiance, perhaps the fact that he had very briefly considered killing said ex-fiance, the fact that he had done blatant Magic directly in front of her. But deep down, Severus felt most deeply afraid that one of the times he glanced over at her, he would find tears sliding quietly down her cheeks.
And yet, as the end of the shift arrived and Jasmine finally shredded the meager one or two notes she had written for the night, Severus glanced over one last time and found her eyes dry. Relief washed through him but again, he was unsure why the sight of her crying bothered him so much.
Unsurprisingly, after practically throwing the ex-fiance into the back end corner of a minivan (He was sure it would bruise. Jeremy would be so confused. And sore. Good.) his mood had quieted a bit, the anger had gone but the frustration remained. Why had she not just gone home when he had asked her to? What was she trying to prove? That she could work through literally any situation? If that was the case, color Severus mildly impressed. But if it happened again, he would have to consider either another use of the Imperius Curse on Jasmine or simply stuff her physically into her car and demand that she leave, lest he call security.
And the weird feeling from earlier lingered, like heartburn, (It definitely might have been heartburn; Severus had been discovering the joys of aging lately.) A gut feeling deep enough to be an instinct was encouraging him to time it to where they would leave the hospital at the same time. He could not leave before her, and for the life of him, he had no idea why. The feeling was strong enough that Severus decided to follow it, see why he needed to stay. Or rather, why he felt he did anyway.
He did not rush through changing back into normal clothes, his jeans, his normal, long-sleeved thermal shirt, and he was just applying his coat in the hallway to the parking garage when he heard the telltale, depressing echo of a car engine attempting to turn over. A tired but amused smirk slid over his face as he draped a black scarf around his neck. What weather to be stranded in.
As he stepped outside, however, there was a distinct 'click' in his mind where things connected and he realized that the car attempting to start was the bent, ruined thing he had seen Jasmine sitting in what felt like years ago. His heart sank to somewhere around his navel as he continued toward the source of the sound, toward his own car...only a few spaces down from her. He had to pass her.
The urge to go Invisible was overwhelming.
But obviously, this had been the reason his mind and instincts had told him to wait, not rush off. His senses had known this was going to happen and that he needed to be there for it. He gave a shudder that had nothing to do with the cold; the only other person he had known to experience this sort of phenomenon was Albus Dumbledore. He would have to consider it later.
For this reason, he slowed to a halt as he reached the back end of her car, stethoscope and hands tucked into his coat pockets. Jasmine had seen him immediately, as she was sitting halfway out of the car, attempting to start it with the driver's side door open. Severus' eyebrows rose slightly but he remained silent as the loud engine tried its very hardest to start once more, before promptly clattering to a dead stop.
Without paying him the slightest bit of attention, she swung herself out of the car, to the front of it, where the hood had already been propped open. Ashamed at himself for how amusing he found this, Severus followed suit, simply to look at her face as she stared down into the engine and five million other car parts, clearly without even the faintest idea what she was looking at. He bet Jasmine would understand a human brain sooner than she would understand the workings of a vehicle.
Smirking, he took a deep breath in through his nose and exhaled, his breath leaving him on a dense cloud of condensation. It was quite cold and Jasmine had started to shiver. Yet there she stood, in the fucking freezing cold trying to fix what was clearly a dead car.
Despite himself, Severus finally spoke. "Any idea what's wrong with it?"
He dared not laugh, but damn did he want to. He felt terrible for her but her stubbornness was just staggering to him.
Abruptly, she brushed by him, toward the driver's seat and leaned into the car, where she attempted to start it. The vehicle gave three, sad clicks and was silent.
Her reaction was immediate, her bright eyes filling to the brim with tears, which overflowed her lower lids and cascaded in massive drops to land on the t-shirt beneath the edges of her coat. Severus was visited by a massive urge to look away, but for whatever reason, he ignored it. She looked much smaller than usual as she finally broke down into tears, turning away from him to fold her arms on the open door of the car. Once her face was hidden from him, buried in her arms, Jasmine let out the most pitiful sob Severus had ever heard in his life.
It tore through his chest like claws, like fingernails on a blackboard times one hundred and he cringed, removing his hands from his pockets, taking one step to cross the two or so feet between them. Without thinking, having apparently lost his mind, Severus reached out and placed both of his hands on her; one on her arm, the other on her opposite.
Almost the very moment he touched her, Jasmine melted and allowed him to pull her into a hug. Another of those awful sobs escaped her as her cheek made contact with his upper chest, but the sound was muffled by the material of his clothing. He felt her hands close around the edges of his coat between their chests and he wondered momentarily whether she could perhaps feel how quickly his heart was beating.
He had not at all expected this, but it seemed, as he stood there with his arms around her, leaned only slightly, it seemed this simple, human contact was all Jasmine had needed or wanted. She cried openly against his shirt, her sobs wracking her entire body within his embrace. His heart gave a pang, his throat tightened though he gave no outward indication of it at all. It seemed he'd had a bad night too.
Despite every effort to hold up his facade, his shoulders relaxed, his embrace deepened and Jasmine allowed herself to be enveloped by it, fitting right up against him. His chin rested on the top of her head and he could not help but roll his eyes at himself, at his pity toward her, at the true sadness he felt for her, at how much it hurt him to see, hear and now feel her cry.
Jasmine quieted quickly once the level of genuineness in his hug increased and after a few moments, she lifted her head, took a quick step away from him and began wiping her eyes hastily on the cuffs of her coat. If she had been at all embarrassed by it, Severus was positive if was nothing to the way he was feeling. If he could have Apparated at that very moment without her notice, he would have done it immediately. But he forced himself to stand his ground, too tired and mentally, emotionally drained to pretend her sorrow had not affected him to point of offering her actual comfort.
He shrugged at her lifeless, useless car as he straightened his shoulders. The corner of his lips curled into a smirk. "I suppose you'll need a ride home, then?" he asked in what he felt was a very easy transition from an awkward moment.
"Oh, no, that's okay," she answered in a forcefully airy voice, shaking her head as she pressed the cold backs of her hands to her pink cheeks. Severus' smirk dissolved just as quickly as it had appeared. Jasmine was attempting to look nonchalant about the fact that it was after four in the morning, she was freezing and her car was completely dead. She motioned toward the opposite side of the garage.
"I can go down to the bus stop. I think there's one that comes at around-..." Her voice trailed off as Severus' eyebrows arched more and more sharply until he finally rolled his eyes.
"Don't be stupid," he drawled a bit more lazily than he had intended.
But he did not continue. He knew Jasmine would understand that she was free to make whatever decision she liked, that he was not forcing her to take any favors from him. If she wanted to wait for the bus for an hour by herself in the cold and dark, she was welcome to do so.
For a long moment, she stood there staring back at him, looking years older than when he had last seen her, exhausted to her core, until she nodded at long last. It was a very defeated sort of movement and her eyes instantly filled with a fresh bout of tears but Severus was already moving toward her, to guide her out into the lane from between the cars.
As they walked toward his car a few spaces away, he noticed her shiver in the corner of his vision. He gave another shake of his head and a smirk tugged at his lips.
Silly, stubborn thing.
A/N: A VERY long chapter! But this one was important and needed a ton of attention. School is in full swing and I'm taking what little time I have extra to keep at this story! Because it's about to get so fun! I hope you guys enjoyed this chapter and are excited for another! Leave a review if you'd like to or feel free to private message me if you're shy! = ) - QoM
