Even Angels Fall Down: The Damage In Your Heart
Part One Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine
"Hello, Miss Brookes. How are you today?"
"Oh, fine, just fine." A pause. "Remind me, dear, what's your name?"
"Evangeline. Just call me Evan, Miss Brookes."
"Evangeline. That's a pretty name. If I had a daughter, that's what I'd name her."
"I know, Miss Brookes."
Evangeline Brookes sat back in the stiff wooden chair the hospital provided with a tired face no one should dawn. She was a younger, twenty-one year old carbon-copy of the woman who sat in front of her, her mother, Eliza Brookes. She had thick, beautiful wavy hair that was such a color of blonde it was pure white. Her eyes, a pale and striking blue which once would have twinkled with a hidden happiness that made others smile when they saw her, were much too sad, as if they now shone with oncoming tears. She was tall and willowy, like she should have swayed with the wind that accompanied the storm outside instead of sitting in an uncomfortable hospital chair.
"Do you need anything, Miss Brookes?" she asked politely in a voice that sounded like a smooth waterfall.
"Oh, no dear. Although," the woman leaned forward, looking around. "My daughter. Is she here? She said she'd be here at precisely four o' clock"—she tapped her silver watch for emphasis, "and it's almost five."
Evan smiled a melancholy smile and shook her head. "I don't think she's coming, Miss Eliza. Would you like to play something? I brought cards," she offered, holding up a pack of blue playing cards.
"No!" Eliza Brookes protested loudly, hitting the sides of her wheel chair. "I want my Angel! She said she'd be here, and I think you're keeping her from me, you wicked child!" Just as easily as her contentment had come, Eliza was enraged and hurt at the daughter whom she had forgotten, face contorted into anger. "Where's my Angel!" she screamed as nurses in clean, pressed outfits flooded the room to calm the patient, the pale girl backing out.
Evan stood, ten minutes later, outside in the hall that smelled sharp and fruity like cheap air freshener and sterile cleaning products. Arms locked behind her, she rested her chin on her chest, closing her sad eyes.
For the past few months, Evan's mother had forgotten her only living daughter, assuming that her Evangeline, her Angel, was always just around the corner, outside the hospital, standing in the hall, or simply at school, thinking the sorrow-carved Evan that she saw was a good citizen visiting terminal people in the Hospital.
Tapping of heavy feet made her look up to the doctor who attended her entire family, or what was left of it; Doctor Thomas.
"I'm sorry, Evangeline. Her medicine should have sustained her for another few hours. I'm afraid we'll have to increase the dosage." As if he had just thought of that, Thomas made a scratch on his clipboard, tucking it under his arm and looking back to the ghost of a girl.
"I've thought about what you proposed the other day," Evan said in a slow, thick voice, as if the words were painful for her to say. "And I've decided. If it will help her, and only under the circumstances that if I disagree with their methods, she's back here….Yes. I'll let her go to St.Mungo's in London, England."
Evan glanced at the paper in her hand, reading it three more times, and then turned back to the abandoned department store in front of her.
She looked at the street sign above her on the corner with the broken street light, and then back at the slip, and let her head drop, falling to a sitting position.
"Great!" she felt like screaming, but could only rest her head on the glass behind her, thick and cloudy with built up dust. Or, at least, she tried to put her head back. She wound up falling to hit the tip of a man's shoes with the back of her head, shrieking lightly, and arms flailing out.
The man stared down, a surprised look on his face. He had neck length back hair that twirled around his face as he stooped to help her up, and crystalloid blue eyes that twinkled with happiness.
"Ow!" exclaimed Evan as she tentatively touched the spot on her head. She gazed around, eyes wide. The cold street she had sat on only seconds before was traded in for pastel yellow linoleum and the dusty glass she assumed had been solid was now was a chartreuse and sage green waiting room, which was full to the brim, all eyes on her.
The waited were dressed in what looked like long, loose dresses of all colors, only a few in normal apparel.
"I'm sorry," she apologized to the man, blushing a pale pink.
"That's okay. Sirius Black," he smiled, radiating an ambience that, with closer inspection, everyone else carried.
"Evangeline Brookes," Evan answered, eyebrows wrinkled together. She turned, head cocked to the side, as she caught sight of a sign on the wall. It read:
For the Holidays, avoid family gatherings in which candy/walnuts/tree ornaments/turkey drum sticks/etc. may be shoved up your nose!
-Your Caring MediWizards
Evan's eyes widened. "Wizards?" she whispered, disbelievingly.
What kind of hospital is this? She thought shrilly as she fainted into black.
When she came to, Evan lay peacefully in a warm bed, head turned into a pillow to avoid the light, no matter how dim, that flooded from beside her.
She reached out to grab her wire-framed glasses, only to find that her case, which she laid popped open on her nightstand, were not there. She bit her lip, puzzled, and snapped up, memories flooding back to her.
"Oh, I see you're awake," a light voice said from her right, and Evan looked over to see a girl laying beside her, looking perfectly comfortable, though probably because of the almost-empty bottle of pain-killers beside her.
"My…mother, and glass, and walnuts, then turkey, and family, and….MediWizards!" Evan gasped in her beautiful voice, a hand over her mouth, and the girl laughed.
"It sounds like you're the one who just took half a bottle of Tylenol!" she smiled. "You're not a Muggle, are you?" She asked after closer inspection of the pale twentysomething.
"A what?" questioned Evan in a pained voice, looking frightful and jumpy.
"Non-magical folk," explained her room mate.
"So it's true!" gasped Evan, voice squeaky and breaking halfway through. "It's true?" she asked once again, voice lower, more frightened. At that point she felt like fainting again as the stranger, Lily Evans, she learned later, nodded solemnly.
Evangeline leapt out of bed after a few seconds of silence and wrenched back the curtain, grabbing her white skirt and form fitting long-sleeved shirt from the empty chair in the corner and changing out of the hospital gown, trying to sort things out in her mind.
First, she decided, she needed a pay phone to call Dr. Thomas, and then she needed to visit her mother, where ever in the hospital she might have been taken.
She grabbed the curtain once more, the gown balled against her chest, and for the second time that evening, slammed head on into someone.
This man was a little more ragged than the first, skin pale and clammy, hair falling in clumps around his thin face, and his golden eyes looked tired.
"I'm sorry," he apologized, helping, also for the second time, Evan back to her feet.
"Are you a wizard too?" she squeaked, and with a puzzled nod from him, she 'eep'ed and dashed from the room, looking for any way to get back to the receptionist desk.
'This is insane!' she tried to tell herself, shaking her head as if to knock her eyesight back into sync with reality. 'There's no way wizards can exist! Let alone live beside normal humans without…at…least…' she paused in thought as a man with the head of a lion and the hands and feet of a billy goat clacked by. (Incidentally, it made it increasingly difficult for the man to walk.)
She stared after him, eyes wide in disbelief, and shook her head even harder and faster, standing for support against a wall.
'It's not true, all of this. I'm just having a weird dream from jetlag, or something.'
"This is not a dream," said an exasperated voice, and, if possible, Evan's eyes grew wider as she screamed lightly and jumped, only to find a nurse guiding a half asleep man back through the halls.
She nodded confidently, deciding right there that if she ever got within arms' reach of Dr. Thomas, she was going to throttle him with her bare hands.