The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix Part Three

New Trainers

Oliver opened his eyes and found himself staring at a different ceiling than he'd expected.

There were brown wooden exposed rafters and against one wall a stack of crates marked ROCK SALT in big painted-on letters. Boxes labelled other things too were laying all about, big and small, in teetering piles. The light coming in strewn over the natural wood floor and Oliver rolled out of the bed carefully, padding barefoot to peer through the small round port-hole like window. There wasn't any curtains covering it, and instead of pushing up like a regular window, it swung outward and he leaned out, the circle of glass above his head like a ceiling, his elbows on the round sill, looking down over Diagon Alley's bustling morning crowd.

Shops on Diagon Alley were only just opening, propping open their doors and pushing displays onto the cobbled stone lane to entice folks to come inside. The Cauldron shop rolled out big fat cauldrons and stacked them up, one atop the other, and he could just see Madam Malkin and Marlene McKinnon rolling a rack of dress robes out front of Malkin's shop, waving to Mr. Blott outside of his... Already people were gathered outside of Quality Quidditch Supplies, looking at the featured broom of the day, and there were witches and wizards setting up booths with home made goods - jams and pickles, widdled wood toys, talismans, and stacks upon stacks of uniquely patterned teacups for collectors.

Oliver ducked back into the room and startled when he realized he wasn't utterly alone any longer - Meg Johnson was there, her face flush. "Morning, Ollie," she said.

He stood there, back to the window. "Mornin'," he murmured.

She smiled.

She held a small tray with some potion bottles on it. "May I heal you up?"

Oliver nodded.

She patted the edge of the bed and he went over and sat down. He'd very gingerly washed his face the night before, but it hurt to touch and he hadn't gotten all the blood off his face, and there was a lot of bruising behind his eyes, typical for a broken nose, plus the original shiner had darkened across his cheekbone. Plus his lip was swollen on one side, a tooth chipped... He could feel bruising in his side and abdomen, too, that ached every time he shifted his torso.

Meg drew her wand out of her sleeve and stuck it through her thick ginger bun at the top of her head. A couple tendrils of extremely curly red hair hung over her temples. She held out her hands, palm up, like someone greeting a dog, hesitating a moment. "It might hurt just a second, but it'll feel better right when the magic's done setting in."

"Are you a healer?"

"I'm studying," she answered, her voice was so calming, he thought she would be rather good at it. "This particular method I'm about to fix your bruises with - it's something they taught rudimentary at Ilvermorny, but I've studied a more of since..." She rubbed her palms together, using a mixture of the potions and balms she'd stacked up on her trays, and a smell like mint rose up to his nose. Her palms moved against one another, quickly creating friction, until they were warm and she held her palms up to his face. "They teach a lot of Native American magic at Ilvermorny, which is a wee different than the sort taught at Hogwarts. There are some different, more hands-on wandless type magical methods they teach." Her hands seemed to radiate heat as she brought them up, hovering over his skin, and closed her eyes.

Oliver could feel the heat of her skin and the coolness of the balms she'd applied on them followed that warmth. At first, he thought that was all she was going to do, but then he felt a funny sensation, like the blood in his body was responding to her, as though she were some sort of conductor of a symphony and his bloody vessels were instruments and she twiddled her right ring finger and there was a tingling in the skin below the pad of that finger and he gasped as it felt like his blood and muscles were responding specifically in that spot... Both of her thumbs came down over the bridge of his nose, sensitive he flinched at first, but the bones were moving, responding as she gently brought them along the line of the curve of his nose and there were quiet popping noises as she framed the shape of his nose and everything realigned itself, the cartilage coming together.