InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "just a moment"

Dinner had been pub grub and now Florrie and Maggie were bundled up in one corner of the pub with a bottle of Quintin Black and two glasses. They were only two sheets to the wind so far, and Florrie had put up a privacy charm just in case Rita Skeeter was about somewhere listening for gossip. Nobody knew how she got her scoops.

"So I've got a personal question for you, Maggie. Sort of personal, sort of professional, and you're the only one I know I can ask. I won't tell anything about the answer, either. I just need to know for myself."

Always one to make herself at home, Maggie hooked her heel around the arm of the empty chair beside her and pulled it toward herself until she could prop her feet on the seat. Then she shook her head. "I'm not allowed to divulge Cavallero's hair secrets. I'd be hanged, drawn, and quartered."

Florrie giggled, which was a sign she was probably a little more soused than she wanted to let on. "If I want to know Bastian's hair secrets I'll ask him myself. He does have nice hair, though. Really nice hair."

"I need them." Maggie agreed, pulling a handful of her own (less ruly) curls in front of her face to frown at. "Gotta figure out how to sort this out."

It took her a couple seconds of pouting before she remembered that Florrie had a question—an actual one, and one that sounded life-related. She picked up the bottle and yanked out the cork, ready to pour volumes relative to exactly how much life-related information she would be expected to divulge. "But what else could you want to know?"

"This is all confidential, of course, and I won't breathe a word of it beyond this table. It's sort of about--" Florrie leaned in and lowered her voice a little "--well, Oighrig MacDonald's not coming back, is she? Not at all. She's taken one bludger too many."

Maggie's lips thinned and, true to form, she gave them each a generous helping of the liquor that she still couldn't define despite drinking it since she was a teenager. "I canna– Even confidential, you know what it's–" aaand a little more before she put the bottle down, her mouth working.

She furrowed her brow and seemed to glare at the glass. There were lines, she could draw them. She was capable. (Or was that the alcohol talking?) (Yes. It was.) "She's taken a few."

"Yeah, I mean I know you can't say, just--" Florrie paused and rethought the question, ending up with, "How do you come to terms with that kind of thing? We can't control it. We can't stop them from taking hits or from wanting to go out when it's ridiculously obvious they shouldn't, and--then something happens and it might be the end of their career." Florrie's face screwed up with some unhappy emotion. "And I know I should be grateful that it's not worse than it is, but it's still so hard to watch it. At least in the war there was something to blame. Someone to blame." Florrie was blinking more than she ought to be; she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand more fiercely and angrily than she ought to.

Maggie shrugged. Rather, her oversized sweater moved up and down a little in a way that might, maybe, be a shrug. Watching people destroy themselves in sport wasn't so much a problem for her — she's probably the only person that had ever been 'asked to leave' the Glasgow Recreational Quidditch League because it was a 'social league and not a blitzkrieg.' Not having the people above them listen to her when she wanted them to be taken off the roster earlier, though... that was a different matter.

She was too self-absorbed focused on swishing her drink around to notice Florrie's near-tears yet, but she was aware enough of her tone to push the other medic's glass toward her. "Never said I'd come to terms with it." She replied, frowning. Aaaand drink.

"Then it's not just me," Florrie said, and took another long sip of Quintin Black.

A wry smile spread across Maggie's face. "You mean Portree's not the only team droppin' like doxies?" Her brow knit again, although this time for an entirely different reason: she'd need to find a new cliché now that she knew how resilient doxies actually were.

"You know I can't say either. But between us, there's probably an announcement coming. I don't remember if you lot were there but if you were, you'll have no trouble figuring out who, either. And I don't know how to--" Florrie shrugged helplessly, because Maggie had to know what the rest of the sentence should be even if neither one of them could put words to it.

"Not going to a match," Maggie half-repeated as though it was downright unthinkable. She shook her head. "I think it's–", another drink, "We're not–", she half-sighed and ran her hand through her hair, which only made aforementioned curls even less ruly. Alcohol was fun. "We think we're helpin' prevent shit, and sometimes we do, but the players only see us as there to patch 'em up." To her credit she does bite her tongue before going on to say And the other admin.

"S'like the divide between 'Medic' and 'Healer' was before. It's still there. Don't have the H on your robes, then you're only there to clean up the middin." It was something she'd perhaps spent some time thinking about.

"We do good work," Florrie said, and it was also something she'd thought about. "We're here all the time, and we do get to help them every day. Not always in the obvious ways either. But there is no power in the world that can fix some of these injuries. Not a full Healer, not us, not--anything. So why do I feel like it's my fault?"

Maggie leaned a little over the table and jabbed a an accusing finger in Florrie's direction to make her next point. "Because you give a fuck. Maybe even a flyin' one." Then she sunk back into her chair and her sweater — she looked far too much like a petulant teenager for comfort, but luckily she couldn't see herself. "An' if they play like they're not responsible for stayin' alive, they think they can make the shot that'll win the fuckin' everything. But then someone has to be responsible for them. An' they think it's us because no one else'll do it, and we're..." another shrug, "us."

Florrie leaned back and thought about that, about Angus and his grim need to get back in the air after he'd had his fit, and how she knew she ought to have kept him grounded but how he'd needed to get back on the broom, and how she'd responded more to that need than the common-sense guidelines that should have kept his feet on solid earth and honestly inside the medical tent ...

... "Yeah," she agreed, and finished off her glass.

Pushing the bottle to Florrie, Maggie mumbled, "That 'heal, don't harm' principle would be a lot easier to follow if we could do tiny harms. Just sometimes. An Impedimenta to keep them off the pitch when they won't listen." It was mostly wishful thinking.

Florrie sat up enough to pour herself another couple of fingers of whiskey. "And sometimes you don't know what's worse. Letting them risk their bodies because it's harder on their spirit if you ground them. Versus doing what's best for them physically and watching it hurt their heart."

That earned a raised eyebrow from Maggie. She'd only really known the woman across from her for a few years, but she'd wondered at least half a dozen times in that span if Florrie was simply more capable of compassion than she was. Because: "Oh, fuck their spirit, McGonagall."

"Usually, yes, but sometimes you have special cases." Florrie sat the rest of the way up and set the bottle back down in Maggie's easy reach. "I'm glad we got rid of the Dementors most of the time, but sometimes I think it would only be just and right if the bastards who sicced them on people had to know from bitter personal experience what they'd done to good witches and wizards."

Maggie had already knocked back the rest of her glass and was halfway through pouring a new one when the second eyebrow shot up to join the first. She thought this was a conversation about professional athlete's inflated egos, not about… well. That. She put the bottle down (after pouring a serving and a half) and pursed her lips as she looked back at Florrie. "What the fuck happened?" Her tone had strong undercurrents of Do I need to fuck someone up? Because I'll fuck them up. To herself, anyway.

Florrie caught something in Maggie's tone even if it wasn't clear entirely what it was. "I can't really talk about it in detail but ... you know Montrose has a lot of people with war history. And the aftereffects are lingering. And it's hardest on them but it's not easy on people trying to take care of them. That's all. I shouldn't have brought it up. I'm sorry," she said, and picked up the bottle to refill Maggie by way of additional apology.

Immediately, Maggie said an indignant "No," and picked up her glass with both hands to nurse it. She corrected, "No, it's fine. Or, it's not, it's shite, but," she paused and it looked like she was thinking pretty intensely about her Quintin Black for a couple of seconds, "you can bring it up." Somewhere deep (deep) down she felt guilt for the 'fuck their spirit' comment, but she'd never been the type to think she was insensitive—or wrong—without some pretty intense introspection, so she let that discomfort slide.

As often happened when the war was brought up, a directionless anger began to simmer inside Maggie. She bit her lip, still looking at the drink, and nodded. "Trauma's bad enough when you're not flying two hundred klicks an hour."

"It is," Florrie agreed, "but it's worse when the two hundred klicks is the place you feel safest. And there's only so much we can do with the mysteries inside the human mind. It wouldn't be so hard if we didn't care so much."

Maggie snorted. She'd make some comment about that's our curse, isn't it? if they were talking about anything more inane than (actual) people still hurting in very real ways from from (actual) curses sustained during an (actual) war. She pulled the chair her feet were resting on further in so she could bend her knees, and sunk back into her own seat. "It's shit, but it's better they have he–" she coughed into her arm, "it's better they have medics who give a real shit about what happens to them, and aren't just there for the victory."

"I just want to make it better for them so badly," Florrie said, and found herself wiping her eyes because there was nothing she could do. Not for Angus, not for Jason, and not for George, who was probably at the end of his career.

Maggie fumbled at the clean napkin on the table—just because they ordered an entire bottle of alcohol to themselves didn't mean they were expecting anyone else, thankyouverymuch—until she got enough purchase to push it to Florrie. Crying adults were something she rarely had patience for but there was always room for an exception. She picked at the edge of her sleeve thoughtfully, irritated at nothing in particular, content to let Florrie have some time to calm down.

After only a couple of seconds, however, the picking paused. "Can you?" She asked, mostly at her sleeve. "Do somethin', I mean. Or help them find somethin' to do. Like a..." She waved her hand in the air; the psychiatric side of things was never her forté. "Support group?" And, finally, she shrugged, not even sure if that was a valid option. "Or whatever. Maybe it's overstepping our bounds, I dunno."

Florrie poured some more medicinal whiskey into her glass at Maggie's suggestion. Healer's orders, as it were. "If there was some way I could monitor--see what was going on--then I could--" her mind ran through the possibilities, and even with her current state of inebriation the possibility looked clear enough. She'd have to ask Angus but they ought to be able to craft something to do it.

A broad grin appeared on her face and she reached over the table to pull Maggie partway round and across it into a big hug. "You're a genius, Maggie MacDougal!" It wouldn't solve the problem with George, or Oighrig, but it might save Angus' career, and that was enough.

Maggie had no idea what the other medic was going on about but she was always ready to admit that she was very smart indeed. She muttered a bashful and yet somehow haughty at the same time, "Yeah, yeah, I fuckin' know it. I'm a right inspiration."

"You're the best, that's all." Florrie gave her a drunken celebratory smooch on the cheek. "I don't know what we'd do without you!"

"Wouldn't solve the wonders of the universe, is what." Maggie replied with the look of a schoolchild who'd just been praised by their favourite professor. She pulled her sleeves over her hands and took a drink before she asked, ever-so-casually, "So… exactly what did I inspire, just then?"

Florrie grinned like the cat who ate the canary. "I'll let you know when it works."