A much needed respite

[Tatum MacNamara]

There had been a period of time where Tatum had nothing but her own thoughts. It was just after tragedy had struck, wripped its wicked fingers around her life and yanked free the things it wished to steal. She had sat in the rocking chair in the room painted light pink with the lovely flowered curtains that she had agonized over picking and stared out the window that looked out over the sea. Hour upon hour she sat from the moment the sun rose until the moment it crept back down over the horizon, getting up only to use the loo and eat something when someone insisted that she must. Apart from those few breaks, her life was only the thinking. The thinking of where everything had gone so horribly wrong.

And then one day, suddenly and without warning, she had not gone into the room, not gone to sit in the chair and drown herself in the thoughts that did no one any good. Instead, she had retrieved her trunk from the attic, filled it with her things, and left her cottage forever. And since that time, she had been in motion, a constant and perpetual state of flux meant to outrun the thoughts, outrun her life, outrun everything and everyone until she was just Tatum. Tatum the witch with no past and no future. Just this day and this second and this moment.

When she came to Mungo's, it had been hard to get into the routine of staying and not going. It made her move from flat to flat, never keeping one for more than a month, and it made her throw herself into the job that really did nothing to fulfill her. She volunteered to work double shifts, stayed on even longer when people called off, used the job to fill the times when the pubs were not open and she could not drink away the malaise of a sedentary life in London.

She had been going on this way for quite sometime, and it was catching up to her. Earlier, when she had been dressing the wounds of a man whose wand had backfired, and she found herself fighting to stay awake. Before she could be sent home, she had excused herself to the tea room, where she proceeded to fill herself full of coffee in a last hope to stay awake, to keep going, to keep the motion constant.

And so she sat at a table in the corner, uncertain of exactly what time it was or how long she had been there, concentrating instead on waking up, on staying in the game.

{eww}

[Jason]

Posting ASAP

[Ben Jones]

Something was wrong. Ben had been able to feel it, making his hair stand on end, charging him with tension like static electricity. The flat he slept in, his home, felt as if there was a bomb wrapped up in a corner somewhere, under a floorboard, and any one of them could easily step on it and set it off. Things had been quieter than he had ever remembered them, especially with Carrie in the house. He had come home late, but not late enough for everyone to already have been asleep. They all stayed up pretty late and got up very early. He had seen Darcy, just as he was disappearing into his room to sleep, and he had heard Carrie in the bathroom, but he had not seen Aimee. Ben had gone to bed as soon as he could and woke up a few hours later, in the early hours of the morning: it was three AM, that in-between time where you didn’t know if it was morning yet, or if it was still nighttime. Early enough to sneak out of his increasingly uncomfortable house unnoticed, two hours before everyone else awoke.

Ben received a shock when he crept past the couch–a shock that solidified his suspicions of something being very wrong. On the couch, restlessly asleep, was Aimee. She looked like hell, her hair tangled in a very party-esque way, like a teenager who had stumbled home embarrassingly drunk. She had the lingering scent of vomit about her. Had she been out drinking, without Carrie? He could only imagine the trouble she had gotten herself into for someone to drag her home, probably passed out, and throw her like a doll onto the couch.

Needless to say, he had been relieved when he was able to leave the flat. He arrived at St. Mungo’s the usual way: Appirition. He usually had a mug of coffee in his hand (usually the second), but he had been in too much of a haste to leave to remember. Now, though, if there were no emergencies, he could just check around at the patients and go get a mug.

Everything was fine with each one of his patients. He had made special care to check on Hayley, Damita’s daughter, whom he, Dollface, and Carrie had treated the other day. She had been getting progressively better ever since, and so had Damita’s mood. He had never seen her so frayed, but he supposed he would be too if his kid had dipped so close to death.

The near-silence in the hospital was far more comforting than the all-consuming, china-delicate silence that enveloped his home. The only sounds were the sounds of his patients, snoring softly, and the general murmur that echoed around St. Mungo’s at all times. A few tired-looking Healers were dodging around, working the graveyard shift. He remembered having to work the night shift, waking up at two in the afternoon and going to bed at six in the morning. He had hated it. There were hardly ever any serious cases, with real life-and-death situations, and when there were, he had to immediately stabalize the person and call in a more experienced Healer, who would be disgruntled and cranky from having to wake up. Other than that, the night shift was mainly checking on patients, delivering meals and medication and changing chamber pots and things. Which was why Ben only worked the night shift when there was something seriously wrong to drive him out of his own home.

He made his way up to the Tearoom, looking forward to a hot cup of coffee. The Tearoom was a popular spot for staff and visitors alike, especially at three AM. Predictably, a few dedicated, all-nighting spouses and adult children were huddled in their robes, making themselves tea and coffee or asleep in chairs. Ben nodded at those who were awake and went straight to get some coffee. The instant he picked up a mug, it filled itself with steaming hot, black coffee, just the way he liked it. After his first fortifying gulp, he was able to look around better at who was crazy enough to be here at this time. The only other Healer present was Tatum MacNamara, from Artifacts Accidents. She looked more than tired. Ben quietly moved over to her, closing his back to all other visitors, as if he were discussing some important medical information.

“Morning,” he grumbled. “What brings you here so early this morning?”

Although chances were slim, maybe she knew something about Aimee, about what had caused such extreme tension. He wasn’t usually one to promote gossip, especially in the workplace, but when there was no work to be done, or when the gossip affected one of his flatmates, he had a right to bend the rules.

[Gahhh]

[Tatum MacNamara]

With nothing better to do, Tatum found herself listening in on a nearby conversation between a pale woman with a high-pitched whiny voice and an older woman who seemed to be her mother. They were discussing the younger woman's husband who was apparently a long term patient in the spell damage ward with brain damage from a ill-applied confundus charm. The woman was going on about how hard it was to go and see him when he did not know who she was and the mother was busily trying to hint that she should find another man now that this one was ruined. It was the stuff of human tragedy, and it was so compelling that Tatum didn't once feel badly for eavesdropping.

She knew what she would do, of course. But then again, she was not a nice girl.

Just when the daughter was beginning to develop a clue and get wise to what mummy dearest was saying, there was a distraction in the form of Ben Jones, a healer Tatum knew vaguely.

"Is it mornin already?" she asked with a weak smile. "I've been workin since . . . this time yesterday."

She motioned politely to the chair across from her, though inwardly she wished he'd bugger of so she could go back to the listening.

"If ye like ye can sit a spell. Help me te stay awake fer 15 more minutes so I can head home and die."

Tucking a piece of hair behind her ear, she sipped at her tea just as the witch behind her broke into tears. Leaning forward, she whispered more lowly, "As long as ye dinna mind a bit o'a floor show, mhuirin" she said nodding toward the assemblage behind them.

[Ben Jones]

You could say that, by definition, coffee was a drug. It was an addictive substance (for some) that caused changes in behavior and was taken for the effects. The way Ben’s hands were wrapped around his mug for love or money made him, by definition, an addict. He hated the taste of coffee, and always would, but relied on it to survive every day on little or no sleep. He had decided, long ago when he began drinking coffee, that he wouldn’t be pusillanimous and load his coffee with milk and sugar and caramel and whatever else people put in their coffee. Straight up, black coffee was the only coffee Hard Core Healer-In-Charge Ben would drink.

Ben gave a sympathetic groan. They had all done the twenty-four hour shift, when things weren’t going so well at home, or when there was an emergency at the wrong time, or when you just never got around to leaving. Ben wasn’t sure how the day was going to end up for him; he would either dodge home sometime during the day when his flatmates weren’t around and sleep for a bit, or else just take that twenty-four hour shift. The thought of it called for another mug of coffee.

Tatum motioned for him to sit down near her, which he did, carefully holding his mug like the Holy Grail. Behind him, he could hear a woman quietly begin to cry. Oh, the humanity of working at a hospital. The tearoom was often the worst place to be, although Ben felt least comfortable up in the weirdly quiet long-term ward. It was heartbreaking, to see all the kids and adults who were spending their lives in a hospital, breaking their family’s hearts every day, when they couldn’t recognize a familiar face.

Ben had no heartfelt motive for becoming a Healer. He had never had to sit through a long, life-changing night for someone he knew, and he had never received a bite from some poisonous bug himself. He hadn’t just woken up one morning and decided he wanted to do good for others, and save lives and be a hero. It was just something he had always wanted to do, somewhere deep inside him. So far, it had rewarded him, despite the long hours.

Apparently, the two witches behind him were discussing remarriage. Ben was savvy enough to fill in the details; her husband had some illness that he was either not going to come out of, or he was in the long-term ward, and now she was faced with prospect of Trying Again. Ben had no experience with that, either. His parents were still married, going old and grey together. As a teenager, he had fought with them and fought with them, and only enjoyed the company of his younger sister, who was now twenty-seven and newly married with a kid on the way. His parents had contacted him recently, politely hinting that he should get a move on, like his sister. If only they knew how close they had come to grandparenthood all those years ago.

“Well, that’ll keep you awake better than me,” he said, nodding behind him at the two women. “But I’ll do my best. I have a feeling I’m on that track today…” he paused, wondering how much he should tell her without it being weird or too much information. “I think there’s something going on, you know, with Aimee or someone?” his voice was low. “Everyone was pretty quiet, and I got up this morning and Aimee was…passed out on the couch or something.” Ben shrugged, trying to play it off as if it was more casual, but really begging Tatum for any scrap of information she possessed.

[Tatum MacNamara]

It was odd the things that flashed through a person's mind during conversation, incredible the way the mind could suddenly decide to work, particularly when it was sleep deprived. Sometimes it was outright comical, like when someone spoke of a grave matter and Tatumn found her mind wandering to what the speaker would be like in the sack. But as she didn't allow herself such thoughts about colleagues, preferring to keep her messy personal life separate from her professional one, that was not what occurred to her as Ben spoke on the subject of Aimee.

What did pop into her mind was that nowhere on the entire planet was there a conversation like this on the subject of her. She could come home and pass out on her sofa every night, day after day, week after week, and it would cause no one to furrow their brow with concern, give no one cause to murmur over coffee. Her life had been constructed that way, to ward off attachments, to rebuff any one's caring. She had chosen the road herself, but that didn't mean that every now and then it did not sting to realize how little she mattered to the world.

And this was one of those moments.

This was not helped any by the thought that she knew exactly what it was that was troubling the witch. She had broken that afforementioned cardinal rule of the Irish witch. Don't eat in the place your shite. Shaggining co-workers, and married ones like that, was like pointing our wand at your own eye. There was no sense in it, and it didn't surprise Tatum that it was having such an ill effect upon Aimee.

What puzzled her was Ben's concern, more than anything. He didn't strike her as the deep as an ocean type, of a man who wore his feelings on his sleeve, and the fact that he was discussing this with her either meant that he was really bothered or he was digging for dirt. But which was it, she could not be sure. Not yet at any rate.

Smiling sweetly at her companion she, reached a hand to pat his, "Yer a good friend te her te worry as y'are. But ye ken she was probably jus out late with that other one," frowning slightly she tried to conjure the name of the blonde that she had seen Aimee with at the Bar not too long ago, "Ye ken the one I mean. I think she lives with ye too, aye? It always seemed te me that the two o'them like findin the bottom o'a bottle tegether. That's probably all it was."