RP: Corrie and Lorcan Date: August 6 Characters: Corrie Pye, Lorcan Scamander Location: Cornwall Private/Public: Private Rating: PG-13 for (mild) blood and splinching Summary: The first long test for the seven league broom doesn't go as planned.
Lorcan watched as Corrie got on the broom, took it up and flew it around a little, and then -- broom! -- she was gone. That's what was supposed to happen, of course. This was the first real test of the seven league broom, and while it was a beautiful day, Lorcan couldn't help but be a little nervous.
It was Lorcan's first day back at work after the break for the comprehensive safety inspection, and in a way it had felt like the first day at a new job. Everything had that uncertain, delicate feeling; nothing could be taken for granted.
It wasn't just the pieces of parchment posted all over, detailing all the new safety recommendations; or the monitor charm in his office, to detect if something went wrong; or the other equipment that was supposed to help in the labs and common areas -- imported from Germany. It was also the way everyone fumbled and hesitated, years of expertise negated by loss of confidence. It seemed like a different place.
It had been was almost a relief for Lorcan to head out in the afternoon for a trip to Comet for another testing run of the seven league broom. He was missing a meeting about how to use some of the new equipment, but even today, clients came first.
Lorcan watched the sky where Corrie had disappeared, trying to feel confident. They'd checked out the broom at least a dozen times before letting her on it -- of course it would be okay.
Time passed. Lorcan made desultory conversation with Susan and a couple of other people from Comet who had come along.
"Shouldn't she be back by now?" Lorcan said after a while.
Susan checked her watch. "It would be premature to begin worrying now," she said crisply, and added something about the weather in Spain, which had been the previous topic of conversation.
Lorcan joined in, conscious of a rising tension. He was sure she ought to be back by now. Finally he just had to say it. "Don't you think--" he began.
Susan raised her arm to check her watch, but then turned the gesture into pointing at the sky. She was back.
Back, but not as expected - and not only because she’d been out much longer than they’d planned. Corrie flew slower than usual, crouched low and one side curled into the broom. When she did finally reach the ground she tumbled off without any of her typical confidence and grace, sitting heavily on the springy grass and wincing as she clutched her side. Her face was very pale and strained.
“Medic,” she croaked. “Quick, please, I think I’m splinched - I’m sorry, I couldn’t help-” her voice broke off in a little gasp, God, it hurt! Either she’d badly splinched herself or the bastards had hexed her after all. It felt like splinching, from what she remembered. It had been years, but the feeling of something being missing was hard to forget. So was the pain. She carefully moved her hand from her side and grimaced at this sight of it, covered in blood. She knew, based on extensive experience that amounted to Quidditch injuries and having a Healer for a dad, that that was never a good sign. “This is not a drill or a joke, I’m serious here!” she said weakly.
Even before Corrie's call, one of the other people waiting with Lorcan rushed forward. Test flights were sort of like duels -- or sporting events -- if you can, you always want to have a healer on hand. Lorcan hung back as everyone else moved forward after the healer; he could hear that a lot of people were saying something, but he wasn't listening to what they were saying. Questions, probably. Or exclamations. And Susan to one side taking charge, calling for silence as the healer worked.
But Lorcan was already silent. Part of him was horrified that Corrie was hurt, and wanted nothing more than to rush to her side as if it were five years ago, and part of him was numbly cataloguing this as another accident. As the others bunched up around the broom that someone had fetched from where it had landed, Lorcan drifted around to the other side. He'd be able to see what the healer was doing from there, and whether Corrie was okay.
The healer had gently pushed her so she was resting on her side with her arm out of the way and across her face, and torn open the side of her shirt to better work on her. Now he was moving his wand carefully but competently above a nasty wound on her abdomen - very, very carefully, not wanting to make it worse and very conscious of the possibility of doing just that. Corrie was dizzily grateful for his insistence that she lie down. She hadn’t wanted to, out of some stupid sense of pride, but she was pretty sure she would have just fallen over if she’d tried to stay upright. The way the world was swimming even from this position was a strong hint.
“I think I bled on the broom,” she said vaguely, blinking around her arm and through the grass at someone’s feet. The healer shushed her, and she remained silent after that, thinking about the wind in her hair and the grass underneath her, and the tiny, circular motions the healer made that cooled her pain.
“All right,” said the healer finally. “That’s as much as I can safely heal it, considering...” He didn’t finish the sentence, but everyone knew what he meant. It was hard enough to be sure about simple spells. Anything complicated and you couldn’t guarantee you’d be able to control it. “You’ll have to take it easy for a day or two or risk aggravating it, and you’ll be weak for the rest of the day. But you should be fine aside from that, Ms. Pye.”
Corrie thanked him, and tried cautiously to ease herself back into a sitting position - and grit her teeth against the pain, which was much less than it had been, but still stabbed if she moved too suddenly. Breathe. Nothing she couldn’t handle. She went through worse every month or so. And at least she could sit up, that was a good first step.
Lorcan winced in sympathy with Corrie, and moved forward a little to offer her help if she wanted any as the healer moved away. "What happened?" he asked.
But Susan noticed Lorcan hovering by Corrie and gestured him over to the broom with wide impatient gestures. "Tell me what you think of this," she said, handing Lorcan the spell analyzing charm (in the shape of a monocle) that he had brought along and she had immediately commandeered. Lorcan hesitated, and Susan frowned mightily. Lorcan gave her a quizzical look and went to join the two others around the broom.
Susan went over to sit down next to Corrie. "Splinched?" she asked, not entirely friendly, a contrast to Lorcan's demeanor. She wasn't sympathetic, though she did have an air of reserving judgement -- just barely. Apparition wasn't good for a seven league broom when all its spells were still unshielded to allow modifications.
Corrie gave her a wary look, clearly wishing that Susan had let Lorcan do the interrogating. “I couldn’t help it,” she said, but her voice had a guilty tinge to it. She knew she wasn’t supposed to Apparate with the seven league broom, they’d gone over that with her right at the start - in the event that she got lost or the broom was malfunctioning, she was supposed to find some other way to get back or contact them.
But there really wasn’t any other choice. She set her jaw and tried to look determined but not defiant. “I was being chased,” she said. “It worked fine at first, I made two jumps and it was handling all right, but after the second there were suddenly all these people coming at me - I thought I’d run into a Quidditch match by mistake, or some afternoon fun-flight, but I jumped away again, and then I was back in the middle of them somehow. I didn’t even see them in the goggles! And I wasn’t facing their direction at all - but every time I tried to seven-league it away from them I was in the same place, no matter how I steered.” Her breath was coming quicker, both in remembrance of the shock she’d felt and in her need to explain that she’d done what she had to. “And they weren’t trying to hex me at the time, but they kept grabbing - it was all I could do to dodge them with how slow the thing is right after a jump! So I ended up just making a break for it flying normally, but they came after me...”
She hesitated. “...and I may have broken the Statute of Secrecy a bit, we ended up flying over a Muggle city somewhere, I’m not sure which, but honestly Susan, after awhile of it there wasn’t anything else I could do but apparate back! I had to get away somehow!” As she spoke, Corrie leaned toward Susan - she had to see that it had been necessary, she had to agree - but found herself suddenly buckling over, hand over her side as the wound stabbed at her. Ow! God - had she really avoided splinching any major organs away? It sure as hell didn’t feel like it, but the healer had said she was basically done.
Lorcan finished examining the broom. There wasn't a whole lot to examine, the seven league spells were in tatters from the pressures of apparition -- they'd probably made it even harder for Corrie to apparate, like dragging a parachute behind her, and it was going to be hard to tell what might have gone wrong. Nevertheless, Lorcan itched to cast more revealing analysis spells, but the new regulations absolutely forbid it in the field. He'd have to wait.
He sighed and handed off the monocle to someone else and headed back to where Susan and Corrie were talking. She'd certainly made a mess of things -- but oddly, Susan wasn't frowning quite so ferociously -- at least, not at Corrie. Just as Lorcan got close enough to overhear something about a muggle city, Corrie clutched her side and collapsed.
Susan was already gesturing for the healer; Lorcan slid in next to Corrie to try to give her some support so her muscles wouldn't have to strain around the injury. It just seemed natural, then suddenly it seemed completely unnatural. "If the broom worked, we'd probably make a fortune from people who just wanted to fly away from all this magic mess," he muttered as distraction.
“Ha!” Corrie laughed weakly - she had instantly relaxed as she felt him close, then tensed up as she realized she was relaxing, which made her flare up with pain and embarrassment again. Now, of necessity, she rested her unhurt side gingerly against Lorcan as the healer hurried back. “You’d have a waiting list seven leagues long. This keeps up, no one’ll stick around.” It was maddening - you couldn’t even apparate without hurting yourself!
This wouldn’t have happened to her if she’d stayed in Saskatoon, Corrie thought. It was just Britain - just bloody Britain. It made you wonder what the point of coming back had even been. “I guess some people can still leave if they need to though, though, even without a broom,” she added, trying to sound cheerful. The healer had reached them, and was peeling away the flap of shirt to look at her injury again, and talking was a welcome distraction - it kept her from thinking about the fact that she was hurt and acting like a complete wuss about it. Of all the people to screw up in front of, and of all the situations to screw up in... and of all the things to screw up. It was just her luck she’d spend the first real test run wreaking absolute havoc with the thing she was testing.
“Did I mess it up too much?” she asked quietly. She’d thought she had no other choice, but maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe she could’ve lost them by flying into a forest or signaling the Knight Bus. But it had seemed like the only option at the time.
"It's in pretty bad shape," Lorcan said regretfully. He glanced at Susan, then back to Corrie, "It'll take a while to get it back together, but I'm sure you had some reason for apparating." He seemed doubtful though; even if she'd ended up above a muggle city, there were other options. Less dangerous options, even.
"It seems someone is interested in snatching our prototype," Susan said crisply. Lorcan looked surprised, but Susan just shrugged: bothersome, but not completely unexpected. "I will give you all fair warning," she added, raising her voice to include the others by the broom, "that the question of how anyone knew so much about the broom will be closely investigated." She looked at each of them as if trying to discover a guilty conscience.
Lorcan was thinking about something else, though. "Maybe we should take the broom to France to put it back together," he said. "It might be quicker."
Corrie, ever attentive to Lorcan’s tone of voice, caught his doubt and wasn’t happy about it. Of course, he hadn’t heard her story. He had no reason to believe that she’d done the right thing, especially when she’d ruined all his hard work in doing it. His helping prop her up was just a show of sympathy, not trust, and he was a good person, he hated to see people hurt, so of course he’d be sympathetic. But it still hurt that he’d think she would jeopardize or hold back the project by apparating for no reason, even if he only thought it a little.
So it was a relief when the healer, kneeling next to her, spoke up in a voice just loud enough for her and took her attention away from plans that she had nothing to do with anyway. “It’s a bit worse than I thought, but not by much... but there really isn’t much I can do right now,” he said, his frown making it clear that he wasn’t happy about the situation. “You’d do well to get some dittany on this, but I don’t have any on hand... I’d recommend going to an apothecary as soon as you leave today, or any good healer might be better. It’s expensive, but well worth it - and more importantly, the magic problem shouldn’t have affected it.”
She sighed and nodded. “My dad’s a healer, he might have some.” It might be a good idea to go visit her parents anyway - they’d be sympathetic and would care in a more personal way than she was going to find here. “I’ll go as soon as we’re finished.” Which might be any minute now - they couldn’t do much with both the broom and the rider out of commission.
Lorcan and Susan, meanwhile, had got into a a discussion about whether France was likely to remain unaffected, if it was indeed unaffected now. Susan thought the problems involved in taking the broom to France were likely to outweigh the benefits. She paused, though, to tell Corrie, "We'll want a complete report on everything you can remember about the people chasing you, and about the behaviour of the broom, especially when it kept coming back to the same place. That sounds like a hex, but the technical people might want to know more just in case."
Lorcan, as a technical person, nodded in agreement. If he was giving instructions, he'd have asked a whole stream of more specific questions, but that would probably all be in the report anyway. Or maybe he could track down Corrie and ask her some other time. It sounded like she'd had quite an adventure. He frowned thoughtfully. Or maybe he'd better just stick with the report.
"But we don't need that right away, if you feel you need to attend to your health first," Susan continued smoothly. She raised an eyebrow at Lorcan, since he'd been in the middle of saying something in the France conversation when Susan had interrupted him.
Lorcan spoke to Corrie instead. "Do you need any help?" he asked.
Need? Yes. Want?
Well, also yes, technically. She wanted help too if it would get her out of there quickly and with minimal pain. She wasn’t entirely stupid - she couldn’t even sit upright for long without leaning against someone. There was no way she’d be able to walk off unassisted. But the benefits of getting healed and out of here did far outweigh any mild discomfort she might feel in being assisted, and wasn’t that a wonderfully mature and adult thing to think? Maybe she really would grow up someday.
“I should probably take care of this right away,” she said apologetically, looking at Susan, then she flicked her gaze sideways and up to Lorcan, trying not to feel awkward that he was sitting so near. When he spoke, it was practically right in her ear, and if she turned her head...
She didn’t turn her head. “I just need to get to a floo. I can take it from there, I have plenty of powder in my purse.”
"Okay," Lorcan agreed, though he still seemed concerned. He turned his head to look at Corrie; he could see and feel her awkwardness, which made him feel awkward. "Your dad will be able to help you," he said, answering his own doubts very firmly. Then he hesitated. "I'll be right back?" he said to Susan, and slid sideways so that he could get up without jarring Corrie, and then helped her up. He gave her a quick quirking half-grin, acknowledging the awkwardness. So close physically, and yet still so far away. But what could they do?
Her lips twitched reluctantly upward, and she turned her head to give Susan another apologetic look. “I’ll get you that report as soon as I can,” she promised, trying to sound professional, responsible. Like the kind of person who never let people down. Then they were off, Corrie leaning more heavily on Lorcan now that they were standing, bloody hand over the torn, blood-soaked patch of shirt that barely hid her injury. Back to the office and the floo as fast as they could go, which given her injury wasn’t particularly. Corrie didn’t speak except to let out the occasional little exclamation of pain. She tried to hold that in as much as she could - she wasn’t that badly hurt, she couldn’t be if she could walk - but Lorcan had already seen she was injured, so after awhile it seemed pointless to pretend nothing was wrong. Who was she trying to fool?
And there wasn’t much to talk about. She wasn’t in the mood to apologize for the broom, or to justify herself again. She’d inconvenienced him, and he didn’t have to believe her that it had been for good reason. It wasn’t like she’d ever been a paragon of responsibility when they were together, so he had every reason to think she was still a flake.
But despite being sure that Lorcan was regretting his offer to help every step of the way, lurching along with and sometimes into him was strangely comforting. She’d just been nearly kidnapped (maybe), gone on a high-speed broom chase over a muggle town, and escaped her pursuers by disapparating in about the most difficult apparation conditions she could think of outside of a hurricane - and potentially ruined or at least significantly set back the project, and hurt herself, and bled all over her shirt. And she’d have to explain a nasty injury to her dad pretty soon. She had every reason to be freaking out or at least a little perturbed, but she found herself inexplicably relaxing again as they walked. Or maybe it wasn’t so inexplicable. Lorcan had always been able to calm her down.
He shouldn’t still be able to do that, but she’d take it for now. She could use a little calming at the moment.
When they got to the floo he asked, "You'll be okay?"
Corrie smiled despite herself. He actually seemed concerned. “Are you asking or reassuring me?” She brushed some hair out of her face and pulled carefully away from him, holding her arms out to keep her balance. “I’ll be okay,” she said. “Even if I fall down once I get there, I can crawl to a sofa or something.” She looked up at him around her tilted head and added gently, “That was a joke.” It wasn’t like he could do much to help her at this point anyway. He couldn’t floo with her - her dad would be upset enough to see her hurt, but if he saw her hurt and with Lorcan he’d be livid. Lorcan wasn’t exactly on her family’s list of favourite people.
“Thanks for being my crutch,” she said. Even if he was only doing it to be kind - and there was no other reason he would be - it was good of him to help.
Lorcan straightened as Corrie detached herself, and took a step away so that he wasn't right next to her -- but he stayed close enough that he could step in if she suddenly collapsed again. She looked oddly precarious with her arms outstretched, and precarious wasn't a position he was used to seeing her in -- or at least, he wasn't used to seeing her admitting such a the way her body so eloquently admitted to hurt right now.
He grimaced at her and her joke, then turned it into a polite smile. He didn't really think it was funny, but he understood the impulse. "It's always good to have options," he said solemnly, and added, "I'm glad I could help. Take care of yourself?"
“I will,” she said, her eyes meeting his. For a moment she had the strongest urge to say ‘You too,’ but that didn’t make any sense. Of course he’d take care of himself. So instead she said, “See you later,” and steeling herself against the pain, she hobbled to the fireplace, threw in the floo powder, and - with one glance and half-smile over her shoulder at Lorcan before she left, spoke her parents’ names and the address of their home aloud.