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
The day outside is raw and grey, with rain that constantly threatens to turn to sleet. Once more the waiting room is taken up by the visitors from the other world. Mary has a wait of her own, no, not the interval in the condemned cell but the interval outside the surgery. But that's to come. For the time, she is the one supervising those who wait, and timing their entry into the inner sanctum, singly or in groups.
Meanwhile, they wait. Pansy Parkinson, with her black lace and blacker hair and kohl-lined eyes, sits across a low table from red-haired Ron Weasley. They have swept the magazines off the table and moved them to another, where they lie in a disordered heap, and have substituted a chessboard. Someone has brought an ordinary kitchen timer, by way of tournament clock, and they are playing, in the silence of grandmasters.
Pansy had explained the rules, and Ron disbelieved her, until his friend Sergeant Granger intervened, and said that was indeed how the game was played in the other world (which is to say Mary's world), in silence and with clocks. Ron frowned, as if someone had betrayed him with a bad practical joke, and then his face brightened a bit, "You mean they don't talk."
"No, Ron," Granger said, "they don't talk."
He hummed speculatively to himself, and then replied that this could be interesting, because he'd always found that part of chess a bit disconcerting, and second-guessed himself, in that clamor of advice, more often than he'd like …
The Red-Headed League is watching the preparation of the game, with various degrees of interest. Certainly the ones who have bets on it, including the brother with the distractingly bright prosthetic ear, and then from the other side of the aisle, Blaise Zabini has taken an interest, as have Nott (the basset hound, she thinks of him) and his fiancée. The fiancee has a perfectly ordinary name (Davis, Tracey Davis), and ordinary brown hair and an ordinary face, open and friendly except when it's opaque and politely neutral.
Blaise chaffs Pansy's ex-fiance. "Come on, Draco, have a look." The boy in question looks at him with cold narrowed eyes, and Mary thinks once more that his parents' choice of a name was completely wrong; there's nothing dragon-like about that cold, quiescent face. He gestures to the makeshift bassinet in which his baby sister sleeps, her chubby fist shoved in her mouth.
"Oh, don't be such a wet blanket. You're letting down the side. Do you want us outnumbered by a lot of Gryffs and Claws?" (The pale girl with the abstracted look has wandered over to join the Red-Headed League.) "Anyway, Granger didn't say anything about babies being banned from Muggle chess matches. So long as they're quiet, I suppose, and your sister is particularly quiet. Especially for a Malfoy." Draco sneers at Blaise, and then glances at Pansy with some apprehension before he relaxes his posture. "There's the chap, now come along." Blaise crosses the room, picks up the bassinet and carries it across the room, where a half-circle of spectators is forming behind Pansy, in mirror to the one behind Ron. Draco follows him, or rather, follows his sister.
Blaise turns back to Mary and winks, as if it's all terribly great fun, annoying Draco (annoyed Draco certainly is, with his mouth set in a thin line, and that pale-eyed glower aimed at Blaise like a science-fiction death ray).
Granger shushes them. The game has begun.
ooo
Mary doesn't know whether it was Pansy or Ron who won that first game of what was looking to be a series, as she has to leave before it concludes. Her relief takes her place behind the counter, minutes before Kingsley Shacklebolt himself arrives to take her on her way. Curiously small world it must be, when the counterpart to the Prime Minister can take half an hour out of his afternoon to escort a patient to the surgery… or whatever they call it in their world.
By the time that Minister Shacklebolt arrives, the chess game has altered the atmosphere in the waiting room. Once or twice there have been protests from Ron Weasley about one point or another of the game, or the use of the clock, to which Granger has replied with rulings; while no chess player herself, apparently she does know the rules. Each time, Pansy has nodded in satisfaction, and looked at Granger with an expression of cautious assessment, that sits oddly in her naturally satirical face.
Outside the doors of the clinic, Kingsley offers her his arm like an old-fashioned gentleman, and says, "It's much quicker than a taxicab."
She takes the proffered arm, bracing herself for what she knows is to come—that sense of compression, being squeezed into an infinitely narrow tube (like a local wormhole, she thinks, remembering the science-fiction stories she read as a girl).
It's in front of telephone call-box that they materialize, and Kinsley sees her in… perhaps the last one of the old kind left in London, she would suppose. It turns out to be a lift that descends to the underworld, hundreds of feet below the London streets. They emerge in a vast hall or cavern, with great fireplaces, flaring with unnatural green flame, out of which or into which robed figures occasionally step. Robed, most of them, or else some very old-fashioned suits, always with an odd note; there's at least one fellow in a bowler, except that it's a saturated magenta-pink, and there's another wearing a fez of the sort htat Percy Weasley sports…
They step into a more conventional lift, in which they are joined by a small flotilla of multicolored paper airplanes, of the sort that Addie sent her, which hover courteously about the Minister's head and shoulders. "My inter-office mail," he explains, and as they get off the lift, accompanied now by a pair of red-robed guardians, Kingsley's ceremonial escort, she would guess, who hold their batons very much in evidence. No, wands. Though she still can't say that, even mentally, without feeling a bit silly: magic wands.
They enter an office, or something she recognizes as an office, with mullioned windows open to a diffuse undifferentiated grey light, and a tall fireplace of its own. "Direct to St. Mungo's," Kingsley says, and he takes Mary's arm once more. He throws a handful of sparkling powder into the flames, steps in with her into the fireplace — and to her surprise the flamers turn green, and if anything they are cold as they flare and flutter around her - as he announces, "St. Mungo's Spell Damage, Healer Derwent's office," and they see a whirl of darkness, flaming hearths going by in the blackness like frames in a film, until they're stepping through once more, into a warm well-lighted space.
The motherly-looking Derwent greets them. (Whence that judgment? Round face, rosy cheeks, brown hair silvering into white like a winter field: but the bearing is that of a world-class surgeon.)
It's very simple, apparently: Mary is to lie down on a couch, what looks like an Empire chaise, as Derwent and one of her colleagues, in eye-searing green robes (not for the witches and wizards the restful whites of an ordinary hospital) raise their wands and summon… a velvety darkness. Not for them, either, the glaring lights of the operating theater.
And that's her last conscious thought.
ooo
She's in dream once more, and is even lucid enough to recognize that it's dream. She's on the street, entering the square where Jackie Bones lived, only a few doors down from her Aunt Amelia. An expensive neighborhood. "Not far from the Ministry, either," a voice says in her mind, directly behind her right shoulder, as if she were in a film but could hear the voice-over.
She doesn't know if the voice is answering her thoughts. It would appear to be so, although she didn't speak aloud.
The street noises come up, lights and the hiss of tires on pavement. Lights, though not so many in the windows. Most would be asleep at this hour.
There's a blank at her side, a moving place where something is missing, and another in her peripheral vision.
"This is the place, I think." The voice is unfamiliar.
"Yes." The assurance alone tells her that can be none other than Senior Healer Derwent.
Time slows.
A silhouette, another human-shaped nothing there, takes shape out of nothing, outlined in the reflected lights on the street, streetlamps and neon and passing cars, though not so many at this hour.
And then a voice she hasn't heard in months, no years: "It's four o'clock in the morning." A rich laugh, and a bit of a giggle at the end: Jackie, only somewhat tipsy.
Then — very slowly now, because surely it doesn't happen like this in nature -, that lightning, forking green lightning, forms a will-o-the-wisp ball and then crawls toward them, brightening as it approaches her companion (dark blank at her side) and wraps her round. What would read, at normal speed, as a blinding flash, has its own complex and not uninteresting structure…
Mary knows that something has been applied to her feelings about the scene, as her companion falls, and someone else lunges from the side, toward the man-shaped source of the slow green light.
Just as swiftly, it's gone, that silhouette in front of her, and others ring them round, silhouettes as well, with a dim reddish glow to them. Red-robed, like the ones with Kingsley just now. Flame-red, cardinal-red, though it's a sort of residual smudge on the darkness, a glow on the film…
One of them points to the sky, and she turns, and suddenly the picture is sharp and clear and real: the raw rainy air on her face, and the dim architecture of the square, and the writhing green firework above the block where Aunt Amelia's flat is… was… the skull leers, the snake writhes out of the yawning jaw and opens its mouth to show glowing fangs. A head that far decomposed wouldn't have any connective tissue to hinge the jaw, she thinks. They are terrorists, but no anatomists. Another thought muses how persistent is one's training, and how odd nonetheless the thoughts that will arise.
The affect is quite flattened now: adrenalin, she would imagine, but there may be something additional they apply in this operating theater of the mind.
This is the part that Addie restored, she thinks, remembering the flick of the wand just out of her peripheral vision, as that boy's thin pale forearm lay on the counter, with its two-dimensional emblem shifting as the flexors of the forearm tensed. The three-dimensional version floating over Amelia's flat is much more terrifying: it has a smoky translucency and motion: surfaces shift in front of other surfaces; the empty sockets of the skull seem to be made of a deeper darkness, like windows onto Void, and the teeth in the dead jaw have a shifting ambiguity as if they might be canine or vulpine rather than human. Altogether, things that are neither one nor the other have more horror than those of definite character.
"The nameless horrors in the back of the fridge," Jackie used to joke. She'd go on: as opposed to the ones that step forward with cheery red and yellow adhesive tags on their lapels, to say, "Hello, my name is Pestilence."
The Four Horsemen step forward at a hotel convention. Hello, my name is War. My name is Famine. Jackie had a whole patter routine about that; they'd done it in one of her New York workshops, and she'd been thinking of trying her hand at comedy on her return to London.
I am become Death, and the Destroyer of Worlds. The ghostly firework hovers over the flat in the fashion of a mushroom-cloud, for that's the first thing, really, that popped into her head when she saw that green glow, that high in the sky.
The red-robed figures close about her in slow motion, and one of them gathers up her fallen companion, and disappears soundlessly. It's like a film with missing frames: now you see it; now you don't. Disappeared into thin air, but it's all done with editing. Take out the frames where the actor walked away…
There's no sound, that's the other uncanny thing. From the way they're moving, they must have been talking, to each other and likely to her. It's as eerie as a film with no sound, more so, because she can feel and smell the air on her skin, petrol fumes and city rain, and see the shifting light that's too well-rendered to be anything but reality, or physical phenomena, filtered through her retina and visual cortex.
There's another voice in the voice-over. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." Addie.
"No, it's quite in order." Derwent, crisp and cool, the sort of voice that would still even a fever-dream.
"Quite in order." Kingsley now. "Though it always helps to have a donated memory from the Obliviator."
There's a shift, back into blackness, and then the scene replays itself from ninety degrees away.
Eerily, she sees herself, her own pale ordinary face, and Jackie walking hand-in-hand, laughing; she hears the street noises, and their conversation as well.
"Do be discreet." It's her own voice, heard as she's heard it on tape, with less of the resonance of her own personal echo-vaults in the sinuses, thin and a bit higher than she imagines it to be when speaking.
"Oh, do be discreet, yourself. It's four o'clock in the morning," Jackie is laughing; they've been to an opening-night party and come back late, far too late. Jackie got more unbuttoned when she drank, and Mary became more anxious.
That must have been the very last time she had alcohol of any description, Mary knows, before this summer's excursion to Shakespeare's Globe.
What had worried her? Random hateful strangers, skinheads, who knows. Living in the city, you read, and know, of all sorts of horrors.
Jackie tipped a wink, not at Mary but at the bodyguard, yes, she's seeing this now through Addie's eyes, and then there's he, taking shape out of nothing, and it's Addie who sees him first, and in peripheral vision, Mary sees the wand out, but too late as the forked green lightning flashes around Jackie and she drops, as if she's been released from volition and now, only a thing of bones and meat, left to the pure influence of gravity. Not a twitch of any involuntary muscle, she notices with her trained eye, but all systems extinguished as if someone had turned off the power.
"Excellent form, McConnell," Kingsley says. "Except there's no defense against the Killing Curse, and you know that."
Addie again, sounding more like a sulky student reciting a lesson, "Defense Against the Dark Arts, year four. I know. But I could have taken out Lestrange before he killed her."
There's a hitch into darkness, and the attack replays: the assassin takes shape soundlessly out of the city night, raises his wand, and envelops Jackie in that killing green light. Kingsley says, "Lestrange had extraordinary form at Apparition. Not a sound. And he already knew what he was about, and you didn't."
"Even so," McConnell says.
"Even so, you proceeded per regulations." There's a silvery nimbus taking shape around the wand-tip in her peripheral vision, and coalescing into a falcon, whose powerful wings unfurl as it turns in midair and then vanishing. "You summoned reinforcements—exactly right. Excellent Patronus, by the way."
Mary hasn't had a glass of wine since that night, no, since her dinner date with Addie, and now, she feels the last fumes of alcohol and the faintly anxious fogginess, and the picture shifts ninety degrees, once more—odd to cross-cut memories like scenes in a film—and now it's clear. There's Jackie's face, laughing under the streetlamps, laughing at danger because after all, she's under guard by a highly trained operative who's a witch, and then the threat materializes: the assassin who's a wizard.
Now Mary can see his face, lit in the green flash of spell-fire: pale wolfish eyes, sharp cheekbones, long red-brown hair, well-trimmed and rakish mustache and beard, a figure from a swashbuckling film, robes blowing about him in their own wind, long fingers wrapping around the wand, white teeth flashing as he shouts.
No, he didn't just say, "Abracadabra." Though it's hard to say what he did say, because it was rapid, all run together…
"Avada Kedavra." Derwent, and there's something odd in the way she says the nonsense syllables, as if she were treating them as a pronunciation exercise, with no meaning or personality or intent, as if she'd withdrawn and turned her voice into a robot voice on the radio…
Jackie falls once more, and Mary sees the light leave her eyes: there's nothing and no one there, as she falls to the pavement. She died instantly, there's no doubt of that, and in all of her years in training, in hospital or in clinic, she's never seen a death so swift. The love of her life went from laughing to nothing, gone without a trace, in the matter of a split-second. She can feel her emotions protesting, behind the screen of no-feeling.
"Yes, we've put an inhibitor on that," Derwent says. "Nature does that for you, and we're just helping it along a bit."
ooo
And then she is sitting up, and the inhibitor is lifted, and there's a moment of shock as she hears a voice lifted in heartbroken keening, an atavistic howl of loss, and then realizes to her shame that it's herself, all of that long-suppressed feeling crashing down like Niagara. The tears are unstoppable, too, and her chest hurts as the animal part of her tries to remember how to breathe, so that this three-years-forestalled grief does not destroy the muscle and bone that must channel it.
There is a strong, capable arm around her as she sits up, and a warm voice saying, "It's all right, love. It's normal. It's all right." Addie's voice, though Addie has never called her love, and anyway that's wrong, because her love is Jackie Bones, and Jackie Bones is dead.
ooo
Author's note: "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds." What Mary is (mostly accurately) recalling is J. Robert Oppenheimer's remark, on witnessing the first atomic bomb test, which in turn is his translation of a verse from the Bhagavad Gita.