VISITING HOURS, [Tag: Tori]

It was a fact of life that Aurors got hurt. As inevitable as the tides, the dawn and for Sirius Black to land himself in detention. Luckily Horace had drawn that duty and while she was quite certain that he would curse her until the day she died she couldn't find it in herself to feel bad about it. She had put up with Sirius Black day in and day out by virtue of his being a member of her house. Horace was getting off lightly, usually he got all the Blacks. Alastor was not so lucky and while the extent of his injuries had not been reported in the paper she'd got word of that through the Order, still it had taken her the full three days till Saturday and she'd even heard he was due to be released, if he hadn't made a break for it already.

Min greeted the desk nurse with a polite nod and scrawled her name neatly on the register before making her way to the lifts that would take her to the fourth floor. It had not changed much since the days she'd worked here as a healer when she was seventeen--and the days that followed when she'd been laid out, near death on a cot. The paint color changed, the floor tiles were replaced, but it still smelled the same, sounded the same and that faint aura of fear and death was unavoidable. There was hope as well, flittering up near the bright lights on the ceiling, and it was for that which she came.

She stopped at reception, confirming both that he was still in residence and hadn't been moved to a room with locks. Confirmed she made her way down the hall, her boot heels clack clacking on the polished tile. She pulled her gloves off one finger at a time and stuffed them in her pockets. Hat too was removed, and scarf unwound to hang over her shoulders instead of being wrapped tightly around her neck. It was bloody cold outside, winter was setting in though it would not be officially declared till December. She did not put much stock in calendars, the weather seldom cared what day it was.

Min paused very briefly outside of his door, wondering why exactly she was here but such idle thoughts were pointless. She'd made a mission of it, coming here, having a brief meeting with some Order members, but she knew it had just been an excuse. Stupid to get worked up over such an unconscionable young man as Alastor Moody, but for all his many faults she did like him. She went in to find him half out of bed and the left corner of her mouth quirked up in amusement at his own look of obvious innocence.

"I should have known you couldn't follow the rules, I thought you might have got over it since you wheedled your way out from under my thumb but I see the Aurors haven't beaten it out of you yet," she remarked and crossed the distance quickly and oh so helpfully helped him back into bed. He was to be released today, but trust Alastor to try and circumvent the system, even by a minute. She restrained herself from reaching out to settle his mussed hair and instead contented herself for watching him closely, "You know I would still think well of you even if you settled for being the second best auror in all of Britain."

TROUBLE IS A FRIEND BUT TROUBLE IS A FOE, OH OH
and no matter what i feed him he always seems to grow,
HE SEES WHAT I SEE AND HE KNOWS WHAT I KNOW, OH OH
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Alastor was about as grumpy as he could be. Which was pretty grumpy. He hated having to spend time in St. Mungos. It wasn't that he didn't think the mediwitches and wizards were bad at their jobs. It's just that, well, if he wasn't dying right that instant then he really had better things to be doing. He didn't mind the first day. No, that was a lie. He didn't mind the first half an hour of bed rest. But after that it got old. They told him to rest, and there wasn't actually a whole lot else for him to do, but since he wasn't doing anything, he wasn't tired.

He'd already tried to escape more times than he could count. But first Poppy had showed up and dragged him back into bed, then he'd heard her lecturing all the naive mediwitches he was planning to flirt with and escape. Then Hadley had inexplicably ended up on his case the following day and he hadn't managed to get much past the door -- and then he'd been herded back into bed by puppets more times than he cared to admit. His injuries hadn't even been that bad! Okay, there had been some trauma and he was still having chills and shaking occasionally and feeling still hadn't returned to the tips of his fingers on his left hand -- but he was fine. A little Crucius and slicing charms weren't enough to keep Alastor Moody down for long!

Except that no one else seemed on the same page about it not keeping him down. Luckily he had kept his mouth shut about the chills and the lack of feeling and the shaking, and they'd told him he was getting released in just a few hours. But for how long he'd already been there, a few hours seemed like a very long time. So, he was again attempting to get out of bed and get on his way.

He had his wand in his hand, though still behind his back, as soon as he heard the door opening. But then it was Minerva and he tucked it back up his sleeve with a sigh and let her help him back into bed. Though he gave her a slight glare the whole while. "I'm fine, Minacious. I don't need to be here any longer. They should keep the beds free for people who actually need them." And next time he got cursed he was so just going to bug Poppy, since he could escape from her easier than he could from a whole fleet of medical staff.

Sighing and settling back he attempted to work himself into a slightly better mood. After all, he was getting out that day and Minerva was visiting him! Plus they were alone and there was a bed there. Good mood restored. Grinning, or really leering, he wiggled his eyebrows. "Of course, I wouldn't mind keeping this bed occupied if I had company." He scooted over slightly and patted the surface, "Care to join me?" His tongue clicked and he shook his head in faux sadness, "I can't be anything but what I am. So I guess I'll always be the best."

"And your assertion that you don't need a bed is according to who . . . you?" Minerva asked with raised brow. He was like a child, you told him one thing and he wanted to do the other, utterly convinced that what he thought and felt was correct and everyone else could go hang. If there happened to be two people in the room with a similar arrogance about their rightness this author chooses not to mention it. "You know they train for years to be healers, all so they can say whether a person is well enough to be up and about. They also tend to get a great deal of experience dealing with Aurors who are absolutely convinced that if they aren't out there fighting that the world will collapse around their ears. Lie down, Tori, you are not the center of the universe."

She smiled to gentle the scolding but knew that little would convince him that he was not being unjustly treated. The least she could do was distract him a little. If staying in bed would ease his healing then he would do better with having something to think about that wasn't darting out the nearest exit and making a break for it. He wouldn't make it very far and he'd just annoy the healers by taking up their time to drag him back again. It seemed though that she did not even have to voice this thought as he had come to it by himself. Whatever poor mood he'd been in was replaced with that playful . . . well smirk was the politest way she could put it.

Minerva looked at him. She looked at the spot he had indicated. She glanced at the closed door. Then, knowing that he would expect her to reject the invitation she climbed onto the bed with him. It really wasn't big enough for two but if she lay on her side it was a little better and so she did so and found herself facing him rather closer than she usual. "It is a wonder to me that you haven't convinced them that they would be better off if you just left knowing how many of them you've probably invited to 'join you'. Does that help with your healing? Propositioning all the women within a mile radius or do you just do that for fun?" She smirked a little herself and did not mention how worrying it was to read papers and find your friends got hurt, that he was out risking his neck without a how do you do. She knew it wasn't her place to complain they were just friends but she did worry all the same.

Minerva looked around then, looking for distraction, not wanting to address why Alastor mattered. "It has been awhile since I was in one of these beds. Tell me, is the food still as awful as I remember?" She looked back at him and wondered if he'd even been eating it. He looked pale and even a bit wane. This was not the man she knew, he didn't seem healthy at all--at least not to his usual standards. It was really unsettling.

TROUBLE IS A FRIEND BUT TROUBLE IS A FOE, OH OH
and no matter what i feed him he always seems to grow,
HE SEES WHAT I SEE AND HE KNOWS WHAT I KNOW, OH OH
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He waved a hand through the air lazily, and wasn't the fact that he didn't have to exert any effort to do so -- and that it didn't cause him any pain -- exactly the sort of thing that meant he was, of course, correct and could be freed from the prison known as health care? "I am an expert, Minacious. Been here far more times than most patients, I'm pretty sure I can tell when I can move around." His voice held a bit more arrogance than usual, but it was one surefire way to hide any annoyance or pain. And he was an expert, after all, at escaping at least.

But not when he was faced with stubborn women. Oh sure, he could tell when it would be possible to charm his way out, but that wasn't always an option. And judging by the look on Minerva's face, today was one of the days it was best for him to cut his losses and follow instructions. So with a sigh he lay back. And to distract himself from the frustration, wiggled his eyebrows and smirked, "But I could make you the center of mine."

Had he been skilled at mind reading, he would've taken great offense to the idea that he wouldn't have managed to make it very far out of the hospital. There had been numerous times previously when he'd managed to make it safely away, and it wasn't until the next time he got shipped in that he got dragged back. Maybe the lot were getting smarter? Since he hadn't been able to escape so far...or maybe he was actually worse off than he thought. No, he was probably just having a string of bad luck. That was the most likely explanation.

The amount of shock that Alastor experienced when Minerva climbed into his bed was impossible to measure, and he actually found himself staring at her, mouth open just a bit for a few seconds before he got himself under control, and grinned -- as charming as he could. "I tried to convince them I'd heal better in fresh air, they didn't seem to believe me." He shifted on his side and draped his arm over her waist, watching all the while for any indication that she wanted to pull back. For whatever else may have been said about Alastor Moody in the past, he never pressured seriously. "Well, it does keep me entertained. And I am awfully bored in here. Though if some of them actually joined me I'd probably just make a run for it." Not all nurses were of the shapelier variety. Unless you considered "lump" or "huge" a shape.

He made a slight face at the thought, then focused on the much nicer shape his arm was over, and he shifted his arm again so he could run his hand, oh so lightly, up and down her back in slightly semi-circular motions. "You should know better than that, Minacious, I don't eat food whose origins I don't know. And you can rarely tell that what's served here was even from something edible at any point in it's past." There was another very good reason Alastor tried to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible. He didn't trust the food he was given when he didn't see it made. Which meant he ended up hiding enough of the food for the staff to think he was eating, while he nibbled up whatever emergency supplies he could find in his coat and tried to get out as quickly as possible.