Movie-verse
Would the cheerful Auror fall in love with the quiet Healer? Does real life resemble that in movies?
A St. Mungo's romance from the first Voldemort war, with guest appearance by Mad-Eye Moody as Cupid's messenger.
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It first happens at the end of a very long night. All night shifts are twelve hours long, of course. But the nights when the Death Eaters are out, with attacks up and down the country sending a ceaseless stream of casualties and fatalities into St Mungo's Hospital, always seem to be very long. Or at least they do to Healer Rainy MacDonald of the muggle ward.
The muggles have a separate ward. It keeps them safe from seeing too much that they will have to have Obliviated afterwards. It also makes it all the more clear that it is permanently under-staffed, so much so that when there is a rush, the Healer on duty is left hoping wildly for someone, anyone, to come in and help.
Not everyone will come and help, on the muggle ward. Some because they're like Healer Lestrange, who isn't a Death Eater or anything, but isn't afraid to say that he thinks muggles are inferior creatures who shouldn't be in St Mungo's. (Even when she's busiest, Rainy is kind of glad that Healer Lestrange won't come and help. She wouldn't like – quite – to be alone with him, overnight.)
But those are only a minority. Everyone else doesn't like to help in the muggle ward because they don't want to get mixed up with muggles, don't want anyone to think anything about them that might attract – trouble. It's the war, after all.
Rainy doesn't have that option. Her granny was a muggle, and it was Granny Philpott who helped bring her up after her dad died in a broom crash. Granny, mum, they're all dead now and Rainy lives alone in St Mungo's Trained Staff Residence (it's safer than a flat, St Mungo's pays for a security troll on the door), but that doesn't change the fact that her mum was a muggle-born witch and her granny was a muggle – and that Rainy is more confident using a telephone and driving a car than she is making a Floo call and riding a broom.
It must show, too, since the St Mungo's Board of Administrators so readily assigned her to the muggle ward. She had applied for the post, and it's a nice job, and rather higher ranking (officially, at least) than a quite newly qualified Healer might expect to get – but sometimes Rainy wonders why else the Board didn't even interview her first. She can't, surely, have been the only applicant?
She does her best for her patients, anyway, and sometimes on the long night shifts, the sneers and the feeble excuses of other Healers come in handy after all, as the extra drive that keeps Rainy's head up and her feet moving. They are her patients, and she is going to look after them! No matter how long or hard or bad the night!
The very long night turns out to be quite a good night, for one of the muggles has an eye injury and the senior Oculist Healer comes down to treat it, and stays on to help. When Rainy protests now and then through the night that he, as a skilled and senior Healer, should be elsewhere, not mopping wounds and strapping bandages, he just shakes his head. "If I'm needed, they'll come find me."
It's almost morning before anyone other than the Porter wizards bearing injured muggles come through the door, and even then it isn't anyone wanting to call her assistant away. It's an Auror, in his bright red robes and a decidedly battered hat.
Rainy straightens up from checking a sleeping patient fast. If an Auror needs medical attention-!
But the Auror isn't visibly injured and he doesn't come in, any further than just stepping clear of the door. He waves his hat. "Eyes two, nose one, limbs four, none broken!" he calls, in a loud and cheery voice. With this cryptic announcement, he vanishes once more.
Is she dreaming? Imagining things? Confunded? Rainy looks round to the other Healer in open-mouthed bewilderment, only to find him chuckling gently. "My son," he says in tones of kindly apologetic explanation. "He likes to look me up and say he's all right if I'm on night duty and he's been called out. So his mother and I don't worry." The Healer smiles again, a touch of fatherly pride to it this time. "It's a dangerous business, being an Auror these days."
"Yes" is all Rainy can manage to find to say. "Er, yes."
At this point, the muggle woman she had been checking stirs, and Rainy hauls her mind back to where it belongs, utters a few soothing words and pours a fresh dose of sleeping potion. "Just like taking an aspirin," she says, holding the glass steady. "You'll be just fine in the morning, and going right on home."
"I'd best be going too," says the Oculist Healer as Rainy steps away from the bed. "I don't want to be in the way for your morning report." He pauses, apparently weighing his next words. "You really need more than one Healer in here, overnight," he says eventually.
"The muggle ward is always a bit under-staffed," says Rainy, trying to be tactful as well as truthful.
The Oculist Healer frowns and shakes his head. "We shouldn't be fighting this war to practise the same bigotry ourselves," he says, looking down the long ward, forty now-tidy beds of muggles, all injured in a wizard's war. "People are people." Then he looks back at Rainy and smiles kindly. "You do a good job with them. See you tomorrow night."
He's gone before she has time to realise what he means, let alone protest that he shouldn't, really – not a Healer of his rank. She does protest it, tomorrow night, but he brushes it aside again. "If I'm needed, they'll come find me."
Late in the shift, dawn breaking, the door opens again. It's the Auror, and he waves his hat again. "Eyes two, nose one, limbs four, none broken!"
He only does it, of course, to reassure his dad. But somehow, it seems to make everybody feel better. Even one or two of the muggles sit up and chuckle.
"Is that from the expression in Parliament, the muggle Parliament, after a vote?" Rainy manages to ask after the fourth night the door has clicked merrily shut after the still-intact Auror. (He's Auror Faringdon, she's discovered, because the Oculist Healer is Healer Faringdon.) "Eyes two, nose one?"
They're strapping up a muggle with a hex-snapped leg, Rainy holding the leg steady, Healer Faringdon bandaging. He pauses, bandage half pulled through. "Merlin! I suppose it is." He nods reminiscently. "I used to say it when he was little and always getting injured in mischief. Just nonsense to reassure him. Now it's the other way round."
He doesn't ask how Rainy knows the phrase. Of course, it's obvious – or so she's just starting to think when she realises, of course, thathe knew it, a wizard of wizards with a neat grey beard that places him well before Muggle Studies as a subject at Hogwarts, and a fully qualified Auror for a son. So maybe it's not obvious, and Rainy is suddenly very grateful to Healer Faringdon and his Auror son, for fighting a war they don't have to fight and knowing about muggles they don't have to know about.
If life was a film, Rainy thinks, as she goes off duty one morning after another long night and another appearance by Auror Faringdon, they'd fall in love. He is, after all, fairly good looking, and doesn't have vast scarred chunks missing out of his nose like some Aurors do. He has a laugh that makes people laugh and a smile that goes right through Rainy and makes her heart sort of get tight and beat oddly – and those make the basis for a really good romantic film.
He'd be injured and get brought in on a stretcher one night just when she was beginning to wonder why he hadn't dropped by to announce "None broken." He'd probably still be protesting that he had Eyes Two, Nose One, even if he couldn't say nothing was broken. She'd clean the wounds and nurse him back to health – no, that wouldn't do. She's the Healer on the muggle ward; she'd barely know he'd come in as a casualty, let alone get to nurse him.
She'd be injured, on one of her off-duty nights. He'd be in the Auror team assigned to the attack, pull her out of the rubble or fight off the Death Eaters, and be the one who took her into St Mungo's. Something about her face being familiar, even under the bruises from the rubble and the great, bleeding gash which will leave a fine white scar for ever across her forehead, would touch his heart. He'd drop by the ward she was in every night to say "Limbs four and how are yours?" – except Aurors are too busy for things like that, these days. Neither are they supposed to go traipsing around in St Mungo's: that's the reason he pops so quickly in and out of even the muggle ward. If she was injured, she just wouldn't see him at all for weeks.
Rainy feels cold at the very thought of that.
No, they must both be injured! She would be injured in the attack, and he would be rescuing her from the rubble and fighting off the Death Eater when more rubble is blasted at them, and they both get trapped. The rubble, Rainy's imagination specifies carefully, would not damage his un-scarred nose. Rubble in films is obliging like that. It would cut the gash across her forehead, because while they are lying there waiting to be rescued, he would just be able to reach across and press his hand against the gash to try and stop the bleeding. Aurors study first aid things like that. He'd keep his hand there until the world goes dim and faint around her, just when the first sounds of rescuers reach them – and the warm, reassuring, heart-throbbing pressure of his hand would be the last thing she'd know for hours, until she woke up in St Mungo's.
It would be a lonely awakening, Rainy concedes. The stiff, sad sort where rain is trickling down the windows just like the tears on her cheeks. But then, right then, just when the violin music is getting to its saddest and wailingest, there'd be –
Rainy pauses, uncertain. Should it be a note, slipped to her by another Healer? Or should it be Oculist Healer Faringdon, dropping in somewhat puzzled to say that his son won't rest like he ought to be doing, because he wants to know if Rainy's come round and going to be all right yet.
She settles on Healer Faringdon, because his smile is warm and kind, too, and he'd also tell her about her patients on the muggle ward. But a proper hospital romance can't be conducted through the hero's father, no matter how nice and kind he is. They'd take up sending each other notes, very brief at first and then getting longer, and they'd pass them not via the Healers, but by Auror Moody.
He is, Rainy concedes, the most unlikely of any unlikely Cupid's messenger – but that is what makes him so exactly appropriate. A gruff, forthright, no-nonsense exterior like that simply has to hide a soft heart inside it! And no-one – within the storyline of the film, that is – will suspect. They'll think he's coming to Rainy's ward to interview her about the attack; they'll think he's dropping in on Auror Faringdon to keep an injured colleague up to date with events outside.
The first time, of course, Auror Moody will come and see her to ask questions about the attack. It will be hard, because he'll be gruff, extra gruff, and she won't be feeling too well, and it will be hard to remember every detail Auror Moody demands. The whole attack will replay in her mind, Rainy elaborates, as individual scenes with drifting fog to show where she can't remember. And then, in straining to remember, she'll put her hand to her forehead and feel the ridge of the gash through the bandages, and remember Auror Faringdon's hand pressing onto it while they were trapped under the rubble, and how it felt, and how he looked at her … and she'll break off, trying not to cry.
"Never mind," Moody will growl. "I'll let you rest now. Got something for you, anyway." And he'll get up, and toss a crumpled note onto the bedcovers by her hand, then stump out of the room, muttering something about always checking letters for trigger-hexes before opening them.
She won't think about trigger-hexes, she'll be too puzzled by the strange note and the strange handwriting on it.
Will it be addressed? Rainy isn't sure, she doesn't know if he knows her name – except he would, by that point, because people like Auror Moody will have told him who he rescued, so perhaps the note would be addressed. 'R.M.', probably, and inside it will just say 'Eyes two, nose one, limbs four, two injured. What's your tally?'
Cheeky, she admits, but given that Aurors aren't supposed to go popping into St Mungo's wards to speak to members of their family, it isn't a stretch to assume that Auror Faringdon is fairly cheeky. Cheekier than she is, anyway, for Rainy doesn't see how she'll get a note back to him. She'll want to, she'll even write it, but it'll lie in the drawer of her bedside table for a day or two, while she agonises over who to ask to take it, and fret because she doesn't even know which ward he's in.
And then – Rainy smiles at her imagination – Auror Moody will show up again, a few more questions and another note, that he tosses down on the bed again but goes and looks out of the window while she reads it.
'Is there an answer? Ask Alastor to bring it. Did you get bacon-and-eggs for breakfast?'
No, she won't have had bacon-and-eggs, she'll still be on the various pale slops St Mungo's serve up as invalid food for the barely out-of-danger patients. But yes, there's an answer – Rainy will almost snatch the previous note out of her drawer and scribble an addendum regarding breakfast with a bluntish pencil that won't write well leaning only on the bedcover, before getting embarrassed at such haste and stammering a bit when she hands it to Auror Moody to take back.
But the violin music as he stumps out of the ward again will take on a much more hopeful, uplifting sort of tempo, the sort that marks the beginning of a sequence of quickly swapping scenes without dialogue, of note after note passing between them.
Just trivial stuff, really. But he'd put kisses on the foot of his notes long before she feels bold enough to do so.
And then, there would come one morning – unless it would be one afternoon, which might be better because she'd have been sitting up in bed, feeling a lot better and waiting for his note to come – when Auror Moody comes in with barely more than a grumble and goes away without waiting to take anything back. He'd throw the note down on the bedcover and just go – and she'd open it alone, with cold feelings around her heart.
Due for release 11am! That's all it will say, with maybe a couple of kisses below.
And Rainy's hands, still holding the note, will drop with a little sad 'thump' onto the bedcover, just like her heart has dropped. He's gone! Hours before, so she doesn't even have the hope he might drop by to see her before going! And a little cold twist of fear and upset and doubt will creep into her heart, as her eyes fill with tears – a cold twist of doubt that will have to be portrayed with a single wail of violin music, Rainy concludes, as she can't think of any better way.
He didn't drop by to see her. Not even to say goodbye. Was it – was it because he didn't want to?
It's such a sad scene that Rainy finds her eyes have filled with tears right here and now, and she has to whisk out a hanky to hide how silly she's been. Making herself cry over an imaginary film!
But it's the point at which all the audience will get out their hankies too. The next few scenes will allow for this: another sequence of quick scenes without dialogue, showing Rainy convalescing in St Mungo's. Just by herself – no notes, no visitors, not even Healer Faringdon or Alastor Moody. Then will the come the day the Healer comes in and tells her she's ready to go home now. And Rainy will slowly pack up her few things, and the little bundle of notes, which she'll pause and look at as a bundle for a long time, and look at the rubbish bin, and then put them in her bag anyway. And she'll go slowly out of the ward door, which will squeal shut behind her, and down the stairs and through the lobby, all alone.
Silly or not, Rainy has to resort to her hanky again at this point, for at least some of her fellow Healers should have come out to see her off. But they don't – for the sake of the film, you understand – although a small part of Rainy suspects they mightn't in real life either. She is Healer MacDonald of the muggle ward, after all, which makes her almost dangerous to associate with.
Still, in the film she will come out through the glass doors and look round the street and the crowds of passers-by, all alone and knowing no-one. It might even be a wet day, or overcast, so that everyone is hurrying past under hats and umbrellas. And then he'll be there, slipping off his hat with a flourish as he does in the ward. A startling, completely impossible, heart-stopping, wonderful, actual figure in the middle of the street. And she'll open her mouth to try and speak, but not a word will come out – except perhaps a funny little squeak. And then-
Here, Rainy's imagination decides to be discrete. Another way of saying it gets stuck. There's something lacking from the scene.
They must say something. He must say something, in fact. But any of the obvious things, like "I've missed you" or "I knew you'd be let out today" or even just her name – Rainy sighs. They're all too obvious and too unsuitable and much too out of character. But what would Auror Faringdon say – to her – that would be in character? He's never actually spoken to her directly.
Rainy files the whole film away in her mind with a fresh sigh or two, and gets on with her life and her ward and her night shifts. And Healer Faringdon keeps coming down to help her, and Auror Faringdon keeps dropping in to see him … and Rainy can't manage to forget the film and the stuck ending as readily as she hoped she would. Neither can she ask Healer Faringdon to stop coming down to help, because it's such a stupid reason to give, and because there are so many injured muggles just at present that his help is, really, desperately necessary.
Healer Faringdon seems to realise this, for he comes every night, whether or not he has patients in his own oculist ward, back up on the sixth floor. When there's a lull in the muggle casualties, he excuses himself to pop back and check on them. Six flights of stairs up, six flights of stairs down again – Rainy cannot find the words to dissuade that quiet, gentle determination. She would imagine him a film, set years ago in the Blitz and Grindelwald's war, but he already seems to have had a romantic story of his own, complete with happy ending, if Auror Faringdon's existence and the occasional mentions of 'my wife' are anything to judge from.
All she can do is say thank you. It's pathetically small, but since it's all she can do, Rainy resolves that that is what she will do. So she says 'thank you,' each time Healer Faringdon comes and goes. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It's just after a leaving 'thank you' one night that the door of the ward bangs open again.
Auror Faringdon. Bright red robes and bright, heart-throbbing smile. His eyes scan rapidly down the ward, but Healer Faringdon isn't there, so he doesn't call out. He doesn't go either, for his scanning gaze comes to rest on Rainy, standing stock still at the end of the bed nearest the door.
For the first time, he speaks, actually speaks, to her. If this was a film, it would have to be the comic point in the romantic comedy, for his first words are hardly that of the romantic point.
"What," he says, "have you done with Dad?"
"H-h-he w-we-went-" Rainy steadies her voice before she stammers any more. People might do that in films, but this isn't a film right now. She's a Healer and Healers don't stammer. Even if their hearts do take odd beats.
"He went up to check on an ulcerated cornea," she says, very firmly and precisely. It comes out so firm and precise it's almost cold, so she adds hastily: "He said he wouldn't be long, if you want to wait?"
She should, of course, have said 'Healer Faringdon', not 'he', but Auror Faringdon doesn't seem to notice, let alone care, about this impropriety. He just shakes his head, and a little bit of Rainy, somewhere inside, sinks with disappointment.
"Nope, I haven't time to wait. Tell him his Gryffindor stopped by in one piece, when he gets back, would you?"
"You're a Gryffindor?" The words blurt out in surprise, without Rainy even thinking about them. Healer Faringdon, she knows, is a Slytherin; the kind of nice, decent Slytherin whose House she knows because he complains rather bitterly about – You-know-who – and all the Death Eaters taking over and ruining his House. She'd taken it for granted that his son would be the same.
But he's not?
He's not. He pops his battered hat back on and then doffs it to her with a grin. "'Gryffindor, where dwell the brave at heart!' Why?"
Oh dear. This is going to be embarrassing. Rainy looks down at her hands, knuckles twisting together, and can't find any words for a few, horribly long seconds, before she remembers that she, too, counts among the brave at heart. So she looks up. "I am too."
He doesn't say 'Really?' He doesn't look surprised. He doesn't do any of the things that people so often do if she mentions her House, that always make her feel as if she must have been a Sorting mistake. He simply grins yet wider, and claps his hat back on again. "Lairy Fights!"
With that, he's gone. But his script has changed, when he comes back the next night, and the next, and the next, and even after her few days shift-break when she doesn't work nights. If his dad's there, he still calls out about 'Eyes two, nose one'. But if Rainy's there alone, he waves his hat and calls "Lairy Fights!"
A private catch phrase! That, Rainy realises, is what was missing from the final scene on the pavement outside St Mungo's! She will come out through the glass doors and look round the street and the crowds of passers-by, all alone and knowing no-one, and then he'll be there, slipping off his hat with a flourish as he does in the ward. And she'll open her mouth to try and speak, but not a word will come out – except perhaps a funny little squeak. And then – and the scene is fixed now, for he'll come right up in front of her, and take her hand very gently, and smile that smile which goes right through her, and say: "Lairy Fights?"
A nonsense phrase, a question with no meaning ... and an absolute world of meaning in the words and the light in his eyes and the heart-throbbing pressure of his hands holding hers – even though the last, obviously, wouldn't be apparent in a film.
Will she manage to say anything? Yes, Rainy decides.
What? That's a harder question.
"Nothing broken now"? Much too prosaic. And the whole 'Eyes two, nose one' is too long for a final scene, so that won't do either. Nor 'Gryffindor, where dwell the brave at heart,' nor-
Rainy is just running through the whole repertoire of (unsuitable) catchphrases, when the truth strikes her. The catchphrases are his. Her role, throughout, is the simple.
The end of film must match the rest. She will say, quite simply: "I didn't send you a note." He did when he left; she didn't get to.
And he will smile, still smile, and take a step closer as the crowds flow past them. "No," he'll say. "I made Alastor come in and bully them every day to find when you'd be let out." There'll be a pause, and then he'll say, much softer: "They wouldn't tell me, I'm not a senior Auror. But I couldn't bear to miss you."
Another pause. They might step closer. And then he'll say – and she'll say – so they'll say it together, very soft indeed – "I've missed you every day..."
And then...
Rainy decides to let her imagination be discrete at this point, after all. It is a romantic comedy. The end of the scene is obvious.
But London in this wizarding war is not a romance or a comedy. It is a more of a heroic tragedy. It is Rainy on duty the night two drunk Death Eaters with a troll attempt to attack the muggle ward at St Mungo's.
One fragment of her film does happen. Auror Faringdon is among the Aurors called to the incident. Once all is quiet, he leaves his fellow Aurors to drag out the bodies of the one dead Death Eater and the troll, while he carries Healer MacDonald's body down the stairs to the morgue.
The faded little wizard who runs the morgue groans as the door opens. "Death Eaters in the 'ospital, I 'ear? This the first body?"
The Auror lays his burden gently down on the nearest trolley. "The only body."
"Eh?" The little wizard comes over and looks. "'Ow's that?"
"She stopped them. Long enough for us to get here." For a long, long moment, Auror Faringdon looks at the still body on the trolley. Then he takes off his hat, as if in a gesture of farewell, and turns back to the other man. There's a touch of pride as he smiles. "She was a Gryffindor, you know."
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