Angelina Johnson (maps_angelina) wrote in greatergood_rpg, @ 2010-08-13 12:31:00 |
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Entry tags: | adult, character: angelina johnson, date: august 2000, place: diagon alley, place: st. mungo's |
RP: I'm on an island in a busy intersection; I can't go forward, now I can't turn back
Date: Friday, August 13, 2000 (Afternoon, around 5:30pm)
Characters: Angelina Johnson, Fred Weasley
Location: St. Mungo's, Diagon Alley, then the Puddlemere United pitch
Warnings: Nudity/making out
Public/Private: Private
Summary: Angelina visits the healer about her injured shoulder and goes for a walk to take her mind off the results. She runs into one Fred Weasley. Bad ideas mixed with a little liquid courage and a couple of brooms follow.
Status: Complete!
The entire concept of a hospital was disturbing to Angelina, and yet she found herself sitting inside St. Mungo's with disconcerting frequency lately. The smelly, hyper-sanitary and decidedly stressful building was one in which people went to die. Yes, sometimes they were healed, but the fact that more people died inside these walls than in any other building she was aware of in Wizarding London was not comforting to the young Quidditch player. Her arm was in a sling as she sat in the exam room, long legs dangling off the side of the exam table, the paper sheet wrinkling under her bum with every move she made. She was moving a lot, fidgeting, especially with the sling. It felt unfamiliar, which was probably a bad thing. She had been told by the very stern healer that she should wear it the entire time she was awake for at least three weeks. Unfortunately, slings got in the way of important activities. Like running. And flying. And doing weights to strengthen the injured shoulder she was supposed to keep immobile. Even sitting in the exam room, she had slid her arm out of the restrictive cloth to move it around a bit. All of these things could be easily lied about, but the problem was, the pain wasn't getting any better. Maybe she was actually getting to a point where she was desperate enough to do as the healer said – as far as the sling was concerned. For three weeks. But that would be it.
Yes, a lot of people died in St. Mungo's, but every time Angelina saw her healer she became more and more concerned that her career would join the list of fatalities attributed to these creepily sparkly-clean halls. She knew what the healer would say before he even walked in. Blah blah, take it easy, no flying, no lifting, no fun, no life for at least a week while we see if the new treatment will work. Perhaps that plan would be perfectly fitting for another patient, but Angelina had a life that required full and un-slinged use of her arm.
Or she had, before the coach had benched her earlier in the week, ordering her to go back to the healer. That was why she was sitting here in one of her least favorite places on Earth, after all. It certainly wasn't for her health - in fact, she felt it rather likely she had contracted something from all of the sick people in the waiting room. If the coach wanted her to go to the healer, she would go. But she didn't have to listen when he told her, again, that his recommendation would be to consider an early retirement from Quidditch. That he felt the likelihood that she could continue her career much longer, even with her stubborn determination, was incredibly slim if not completely nonexistent. She couldn't listen to that kind of talk. Negativity wasn't allowed. She had to play, and she was going to play, and nothing a man in a lab coat with a stack of charts could say would change that.
She slid her arm back into the sling properly when she heard the doorknob turn. She would play nice as long as the man whose report would go back to the team doctor who would share it with the coach was looking. After that, she would do whatever it took to make sure her career didn't wind up in the Pro Quidditch equivalent of St. Mungos' morgue.
Anger was bubbling just beneath Angelina's skin when she walked out of the hospital. She was benched at least another week, and that was conservative. He had given her a prescription for a pain potion she didn't plan on taking. Painkillers dulled the senses, which was not a good thing on the pitch. She wasn't going to be playing, but she didn't want to start getting used to living in a world where her arm didn't hurt. It had hurt since she was a fifth year and took that nasty fall in a school match, and she had done just fine since then. Sure, it was worse now, but that was just reality. She wasn't going to try and alter that reality by masking it with medication. Still, the team healer would want to see evidence that she was following the specialists' orders, so she stopped in the apothecary in Diagon to drop off the slip of paper marked with the healer's illegible scrawl before heading back into Diagon.
She didn't have anywhere to be or any errands to run, but she wasn't ready to go home. Instead, she wandered along the alley, peering into shop windows, fidgeting with the sling her arm was in as she tried to keep her mind on anything but the future of her career.