Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).
ooo
It's morning in the waiting room, and various things have changed. For one thing, when Mary arrives for work, the sentinel in the black T-shirt and loose trousers of the DMLE is not Addie McConnell. There are two of them, a man and a woman.
The man is young, well under thirty, and his features are the sort that ought to add up to handsome but somehow fall short, somewhere in the region of comic; he has light-brown hair and hazel eyes and symmetrical, ordinary English looks that dispose themselves into a quizzical expression. The woman has darker brown hair, cut short in the sensible coiffure of doctors, nurses and athletes; this particular morning, it's ruffled as if she had been somewhere with restless winds just before dawn.
They introduce themselves as Octavian Diggory and Philippa Bones. Yes, Philippa confirms, kin to Jackie.
Of course, they would know about Jackie, wouldn't they.
Mary doesn't regret that she told McConnell—Addie—to resign her duties temporarily and seek help, but there's a twinge of nostalgia anyway, for those long afternoons with the strange patients coming and going, or awaiting their appointments among the accoutrements of their other lives. She has learned that all is not as it appears, and in fact those who wait in the anteroom are the very opposite of ordinary; they would call attention to themselves, in spite of their careful costumes. If she saw any of them on the street, they would be no more eccentric than any of the other oddities you see in a large city—the less so, particularly, because for the most part they are sane—but now that she knows some of the marks of the other world, she suspects she will recognize their kind...
… except for the sort like Granger, Thomas and Finnegan, Goldstein and Finch-Fletchley, who were born to ordinary parents and who look as if they might be students on holiday nervously awaiting their A-levels.
Arthur Weasley she did see the other day, in the queue at the British Museum. He was being discreet, but nonetheless he could not help looking pleased when he caught sight of her. She's crossed paths with him unexpectedly at various museums and libraries across London; he always has that delighted and bemused look, like a small boy at a magic show.
Diggory and Bones are brisk, and sensible, and she recognizes at once the professional manner. The morning arrivals are much the same, except that the Widow is not in evidence, and the last person to file in and check in with Granger and Longbottom is Addie McConnell, dressed this time in civilian clothes: inconspicuous black trousers, as before, but topped with a loose blouse in purplish-blue that makes her think of the faint glow of wildflowers in a meadow at dusk.
Things are altogether different, and yet the same; the new guards watch the arrivals and departures, occasionally exchanging low-toned small talk; Mary keeps her own vigil.
The Widow's son does not have the baby with him, and when Granger stops at the counter herself, Mary reads upside down the notation next to Narcissa Malfoy's name: "Appointment rescheduled due to Azkaban visit."
ooo
The Widow's son looks ill at ease, and at loose ends; Mary realizes that the baby has kept him occupied. He sits in a prim but wary posture, everything correct down to the last knife-crease in his light summer trousers and the ring—a signet?—on his pale, thin hand; he's wearing long sleeves as usual.
The others are not paying the slightest attention to him. The red-haired man and his blonde wife are reading. There's something about the shape of their books that makes her doubt that they are something she could find in a shop on her side of the border. The blonde girl with the radish earrings plays with a delicate arrangement of pale filament and glass beads, which she realizes belatedly is a molecular model, except it's alive, all the bright bits vibrating. Perhaps Arthur Weasley has shared some of his library books with her. Granger and Longbottom sit in their corner with the registers and talk in low voices; Longbottom has already seen to the rubber plant, which (if she credits such things) might almost seem to be beaming back at him.
The door opens, and this time the visitor is one of the Red-Headed League, and with him his girlfriend—there's no doubt of that from the way that she leans on his arm… except there is something as well, as Mary meets the girl's gaze, eyes bright and very old in a young face, and when she turns from three-quarter view Mary sees that the cheek is marred by three puckered parallel scars, like an old German dueling scar, but quite a bit rougher-edged; whatever tore her face open to the back teeth was not so thin or so sharp as a sword. She's wearing soft, faded blue jeans and a tunic that's shifting layers of translucent cloth, with a bit of shimmer to them, the sort of garment that calls attention to the body without revealing anything. From the way that she moves, slowly and with a cane, Mary would guess that the scarring winds all the way around her torso.
The red-headed brother (she sifts through her mental catalogue of Weasleys—the tall one, that would be Ron) greets Granger with a smile.
"So how did you like it?" she asks.
"Oh, mum wasn't sure what she thought, but…"
She laughs. "Your father had to be dragged out of there by main force." He nods and grins. His companion nudges him subtly, and he says, "But really, I brought Lavender…"
Granger is all business, glancing down the roster. "Yes." She checks something off with a flick of her pen, and looks up to meet the other girl's eyes. "I'm really glad you came."
"It wasn't a question before this," she says. Longbottom is on his feet before Mary even notices, inconspicuously taking the girl's arm, and asking after her health in properly general terms. She smiles up at him, with a flirtatious manner that seems to be her habitual stance to the world, and says, "As well as can be expected, I suppose."
That leaves Granger and Ron Weasley facing each other—rather awkwardly—with nothing to say now that official business has been conducted and the patient properly settled. Longbottom comes up to the desk and Mary hands him the forms and a clipboard with a pen on a dangling chain, which he takes to the girl as she sits, cradling her silver and lapis cane.
Kingsley had sent a note that there would be another wave, this the more grievously wounded or the ones who had held off seeking help. As well, they're expecting still more from the other side, some of them, like the Widow's son, with one or both parents in prison. There have been discreet inquiries about the treatment of addiction, as well. She wonders what manner of intoxicants the other world offers, or if they drown their sorrows in the ordinary fashion.
Addie is sitting in the far corner, as far as possible from Granger and Longbottom, she realizes. She's reading a magazine. From where she sits, Mary can't see the title, but it's something glossy and scandalous and very definitely this-worldly. There's definitely an echo of the Widow's son, in Addie's effortlessly erect posture and her proud, closed face.
Mary suspects that not one word of her reading is actually registering on her mind, however salacious the implications therein about actors, politicians or royals.
Granger says to her visitor, "You're looking quite well. And I'm glad you brought Lavender here."
There's a certain awkward silence, and Ron Weasley replies, "Well."
Granger says, "It's all right. It's quite all right."
He nods, a little too vigorously. "You're taking good care of them."
"Not so much me." She nods toward the doctors' office doors. "It's an excellent clinic."
He looks at the floor briefly, then says again, "Well." He adds, "Lavender told me Parvati finally persuaded Pansy to think about it." He makes a sour face. "I don't know."
Granger's manner stiffens a trifle. "We're all survivors, Ron." He's looking at the Widow's son with an expression of distaste she's seen on other faces.
He sighs, and says, "I suppose so." He's going to say something else, but Granger's quelling look apparently stops that.
He glances at the blond girl, who has done something discreetly to make the fantastical model in her hands hum, and says, "Luna did rather like that Muggle stuff."
For the first time, Granger smiles. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised she'd taken interest. Particle physics is even weirder than the stuff in the Quibbler." She smiles even more broadly. "Your father is well?"
"Oh, you know him. Cheerful ever since he got a gander at that Muggle stuff." He adds, "He even pronounces it correctly now: electricity."
Granger, like Mary, seems to have developed the knack of paying attention to more than one thing at a time, for she can't have seen the latest arrivals; nonetheless her face goes to all business and she says, "Ron. Talk to you later?"
It's the Patil sister, the one she'd mentally nicknamed the Giggler. Her twin is the sensible one; that's the thing with twins, especially identical ones: you think they look alike, until you pay attention. She's in a Weird Sisters t-shirt and jeans and trainers, her long braid swinging behind her, as ordinary a London girl as you could wish to find; she might be a university student, on her way from the lab to the bus… except that the girl she's accompanying is far from ordinary. If the others are trying to be inconspicuous about their origins, this one dares you to think it: witchy every inch of her, from her glossy black hair and kohl-lined eyes, to her jet jewelry (including a genuine Victorian hair bracelet with jet beads and silver fittings), and a dress all in black, with shifting layers of black lace, all of it provocatively diaphanous and yet, like the Lavender girl's tunic, revealing nothing even as it half-mocks you for looking.
The red-headed boy steps back with something between chivalry and distaste, leaving her a wide berth as she stops in front of the little desk attended by Granger and Longbottom.
"Not a lot to choose, is there?" she says, her lip lifting in an elegant sneer as she looks from Granger to Longbottom and back.
Parvati Patil whispers something in the girl's ear. Granger has put on her cool, professionally opaque manner, and bent her head over the register to find the name and mark it off. She indicates the front desk, and Mary has the forms ready.
The girl is young, and very striking: nothing's perfect in that face, but each feature has its charm, or rather its charisma: from the dark eyes to the short, tip-tilted nose to the lips archaically painted in a bee-stung scarlet cupid's bow that echoes the actual shape of her lips. The whole thing, from the Theda Bara bob to the black-lace-veiled decolletage to the enameled nails, screams Bad Girl. It's not a type Mary ever has found compelling, except from a safe distance. The kohl and the lip paint don't hide the pale, puffy look of a far too indoor life and drugs substituted for food, if the thinness of the hands didn't already give that away. The tattoo on the forearm of the Widow's son would look well with this girl's ensemble.
She finishes filling out her forms, holding the pen awkwardly and frowning—this must be another who's never crossed the border-and Mary sees the name: Pansy Parkinson.
In a way, this hard-edged adolescent does recall the flower with the small, intensely colored blossoms and velvety petals; well-named, she is, with her swinging curtain of glossy dark hair and her intensely red lips and a flash of green and silver satin on the shoulder of her dress, a ribbon rosette where a corsage would be. It's a badge of some sort, Mary would guess, though she has no hope of decoding its significance, not without Addie at her shoulder to interpret the other world for her.
Bones and Diggory have separated, while she wasn't looking, and they stand now, discreetly on alert, at opposite ends of the room; Addie has moved too. Is she on duty as well? Mary recognizes the configuration: they have disposed themselves to cover any part of the room, should firing commence… She has no idea what that might look like, and hopes she will not find out.
The girl looks at her, with an expression caught somewhere between defiance and contempt—the kind of adolescent attitude that usually masks something else—and then yields to her companion, who leads her to a seat carefully distant from anyone else in the room. As she passes the Widow's son, she looks him full in the face and Mary sees a look of intimate hatred blaze on her features, as if the white-hot incandescence of a blowtorch lit her whole face to passion hotter than the sun. Intimate it is, because there's a brief look of longing on his face before it closes up into his habitual look of proud self-sufficiency.
She wonders what they were to each other, before.
Once seated, Parkinson does exchange a look with the girl with the cane—Lavender Brown, by the forms that Longbotttom just returned to Mary's counter—who nods back; she's seen that look pass between veterans before, usually the ones with the more visible disfigurements.
Mary realizes now that the doubled guard is not on account of Addie McConnell, but for the new arrivals. The Parkinson girl is only the first. About twenty minutes later, the door opens to admit a tall, hulking fellow with blunt features and the slightly baggy look of a fat person who has lost a great deal of weight suddenly. He's also a confederate of the Widow's son, for they give each other an acknowledging nod as he goes to sit down, and behind the curtness of adolescent boys she recognizes an unspoken sadness.
The next group arrives together, and they're an odd assortment: a weedy, much-too-pale boy with dark hair and the stooped look of a scholar; a dark boy, with an Italian name and Moorish features and a silky, insinuating voice; a square-built one, with the hard look of an athlete and a manner that's simultaneously aristocratic and thuggish. The thing they all have in common is the look that they give her in passing: a sort of contemptuous curiosity, the way one might regard a monkey in a zoo.
Mary shivers, with the sense that some of Shakespeare's criminal supernumeraries, his Murderers and Assassins, have entered the room.
She checks their forms off against the register: Gregory Goyle, Theo Nott, Blaise Zabini, Marcus Flint. Their rather sad dossiers, forwarded by Kingsley, lie close at hand: fathers dead or imprisoned, mothers likewise (she shouldn't be surprised, she reminds herself, for men and women alike are combatants in their quarrels). One of the mothers is dead of poison by an unknown hand.
The second wave has arrived, or has begun to arrive.
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Author's note: Special thanks to Silver Sailor Ganymede for her wonderful characterizations of Draco's Slytherin contemporaries; her Blaise, Theo and Pansy are particularly marvelous and have irrevocably changed my understanding of those characters. See my Favorites for a link.