cover you in silver - nerys

As Kit Emberton continued deeper into the white-washed maze that was St. Mungos, he fought the sensation of breathlessness that came with every reluctant visit. It wasn't often that the Healer paid visit to said establishment but whenever he did he couldn't help but regret it. Something about the the stiff, clinically charged air around him made the wizard uncomfortable, and he wasn't even a patient.

This particular Friday night he was in search of Nerys Blevins, an old friend from school who had chosen the to go down the Mungos path after her secondary education. He couldn't blame her, to be fair. Any smart Healer did just that and made a comfortable life for themselves and their growing families. Kit, however, was not as keen to find a sense of job security. Being his own boss was a lot more appealing despite how hard he had to work to get to that stage.

Intense blue eyes flicked from either side of the never-ending hallway he walked down catching glimpses of life, a few seconds of time, in each room. He searched desperately for some sort of injustice he could bring to light but everything seemed standard for a hospital on a Friday night. Almost every room was quiet and dark, sometimes even closed off to the outside world, but a few had signs of life with various doctors and nurses tending to a patient. Kit took an extra step in these instances, fully prepared to catch some sort of mistreatment, but instead saw a scene similar to his own office.

Before he knew it the Healer was in the familiar place where Nerys' office was tucked into, a shared space with a handful of other colleagues beyond the patient rooms. Ignoring the confused stares from the tired eyes around him, he plopped himself down in her wheeled chair and gave it a quick spin before kicking his heels up, waiting for someone to challenge him. Until now, his night had been quiet, and he was ready for an argument however it came to be.

Much to Kit's chagrin, the accusatory eyes around him refocused on their work without any protest to the stranger who had so obviously made himself at home in the work space. He waited impatiently for his friend to make her way back to her desk despite the fact that she was not expecting him. His intention was to get her opinion on a particular case that required potions of which he was not well versed, but presently her colour coordinated filing system had captured his attention.

Kit was so busy rearranging the files, stopping to absentmindedly read through a few of the more interesting ones, that he didn't even hear the approaching footsteps behind him. It wasn't until he felt the presence of someone watching him that he spun around in the chair, caught. "Nerys!" He held up a folder innocently with a smile.

Nerys Blevins loved her job, but there was only so much she could take. It was late on Friday night, hours after she was meant to have been home, but two more wizards had shown up right as her shift had ended needing care. She had really hoped that a month after the recall of the Evergrow hair-thickening potion, the magical community would have stopped using the product, but the Potions department had still seen many more of the idiots that week. The healing was simple enough, but the process of checking the patient in, evaluating their unique situation, administering the solution, monitoring their recovery, and then checking them back out was quite an ordeal.

Nerys had been forced to stop by Eric's office to let him know that she wouldn't be able to pick Niall up from the day care and was tense from the conversation, the extra hours, and the anger about her sister that she was doing her best to keep at the back of her mind. It wasn't until a few minutes short of 10 that Nerys finally signed off on the exit forms from the last patient and made her way back to the office. The halls were fairly quiet, as the only patients usually receiving visitors or being seen by healers at this time of night would be the emergency cases; everyone who was checked in for a longer-term stay would have been seen to already earlier in the evening.

She moved into her office, the door already ajar, and nodded to the other two employees who happened to be there. She was too exhausted for any more of a greeting, but knew that her fellow healers wouldn't take offense; it was hardly unusual for any of them to be in a quiet mood by the end of the day. What was strange were the disgruntled expressions on their faces. She turned her head to the left, following their gaze, and saw that her own desk was already occupied.

It took her a second to understand what she was seeing, her brain exhausted from the extra hours of work. Kit Emberton, an old colleague turned half-friend, was buried in her desk drawers, pulling files out and completely disrupting her system. The drawer he was shuffling through wasn't particularly classified - it really only held relevant articles and notes from her lab work - but she was thoroughly annoyed all the same. This was her place of work, not a playground, and he had no right to be showing up without announcement, disrupting her officemates, and wreaking chaos on her files.

He looked up at her as she started to move forward, but she didn't return his smile. Nerys snatched the folder out of his hands and started to put it back in the drawer, but its proper place was no longer clear. What had once been a series of folders first organized by year of publication and then by author name was now a visually appealing but completely useless set of colored folders, their various stickers and labels completely out of order. At least it looked as though he had left the stickers in the right place - that would be the biggest hastle to redo.

"Get out of my seat," she told him, pointing her wand at the chair so that it spun around and tipped him onto the ground. She seated herself where he had been moments before, ignoring him, and began refiling the folders. There was no way she could go home and sleep until they were back in the right position. "Did you actually want something, or did you just stop by to make my life even more difficult?"

"Hey!" The healer was only just able to get out a verbal protest before he was sent flying from the chair he had been so casually reclined in just a moment beforehand. Nerys had never been one for forgiveness but this was a new extreme entirely. Kit cursed under his breath, leant up on his elbows from his new seat on the faux carpeted floor that felt more like concrete during his fall. "Well hello to you too," He pushed a handful of tussled waves of hair off of his forehead, his electric coloured eyes nearly rolling to the back of his head for emphasis.  "It's been a few months, I too hope you've been well," He gave a shake of his head.

"As a matter of fact, I did have something to discuss with you, but you made it quite clear you had no interest in that when you threw me from your chair," Kit spat back, his chest now rising and falling and deep with the breath of a potential argument. "You need to chill out, Blevins," He got to his feet and propped himself up against her desk, half-sitting to face her with his arms crossed over his chest that was partially exposed under a dirtied denim button up.

The wizard watched as she pretended to busy herself with rearranging the coloured filing system he had so carelessly taken apart, taking note of the tension in her grip. "Riveting stuff going on here.. by the way," He motioned to the handful of paper in reference to the minimal amount of information he had gathered in his rushed investigation. Nerys had long known about his disdain for St. Mungos, so his proclamation likely did not come as any surprise to her.

"Let's get a drink," Kit demanded. "You've got to be wrapping up by now, yeah?" He looked at the leather watch that sat atop the skin of his left wrist, recently tanned from a week spent in Sri Lanka. It was past 10PM and he could have guessed she was scheduled to be home by now. "We can just as easily discuss work over a beer," He continued convincingly, waiting for her to give up her charade and agree with him. He had never been one to accept no for an answer. "Besides, you look like you need one," He confessed as a smile tugged at the corners of his lips with a twinge of mischief.

Refiling the folders was a simpler task than Nerys had initially expected when she had seen what Kit had been up to. He seemed not to have gotten past the first drawer, something she was deeply thankful for, and she knew her system well enough to be able to place things back where they went quickly. That was the point of having a system, after all. As nice as it would have been to have a good excuse to get into an argument with him, it was easier in the end to just do the work and move on.

Nerys ignored Kit as he complained, focusing instead on the work at hand. The sooner she got done with this one last task, the sooner she could get out of the hospital and get to bed. When she had finally returned the final article to its correct place, she slammed the door shut, a bit more aggressively than was strictly necessary, and met Kit’s gaze. “If you want a warm welcome, try a different approach next time,” she suggested, raising an eyebrow at his defensive posture. He was the one who had come in looking to cause trouble, after all -- what was he doing being upset at her for reacting to his behavior?

Standing up, Nerys turned to the file cabinet behind her desk and opened the appropriate drawer where she could deposit her copies of the forms from her two last-minute patients. His suggestion of going for a drink was tempting. As annoyed as she was with him and as tired as she was, Nerys couldn’t deny that she was stressed. Niall was at his father’s apartment for the night and she didn’t need to be back at St. Mungo’s until the afternoon. Having a drink before bed would probably calm some of her nerves and make it easier to sleep anyway.

“Alright,” she agreed without turning to face him. “As long as we don’t have to talk about work the whole time.” Her nerves were stretched thin as it was. Offering advice on some patient of his was one thing, but spending an extra hour going over the stress from the day was likely to only make it worse. Nerys grabbed her coat from the hook on the wall and pulled it on, carefully tying the belt in a neat bow on the side. “Shall we?” She pulled her purse over her shoulder and led them out of the office, offering a combined apology-good-night wave to her colleagues as they left. Nerys led the way toward the exit, walking quickly through the quiet halls. “Where are you taking us?”