STARDUST

CHAPTER TWO

There isn’t much about her life Pansy appreciates as of now, but she is proud of where she works.

St. Mungo’s stands like a towering mantle of hope. Well, when you get through the broken glass of Purge and Drows Ltd. it is. The shabby department store adequately hides the amplitude of the place, and the contrast is stark. Inside the sanatorium, its walls have centuries of stories locked inside the stony, hard seventeenth century facade. There are corridors dated back to the Goblin rebellion. The walls saw it all - stories of loss, rejuvenation, rebellion. And it still stands, unchanged, but somehow managing to surprise her all the same. Pansy has learned at one point that St. Mungo’s has a secret passage, that during the war of the wolves it used to work as a lighthouse, of sorts. Sending aids across the country if any young wizard wanted safety, transporting them, giving them medical care. During the last wizarding war, it served the same purpose again. Serving as the hub of supplies, working discreetly to assist injured wizards at the height of the war in the same, secret chamber.

Pansy imagines that sometimes. A young wizard, hiding and hoping in some corner of the hospital, unbeknownst except for a few people. Pansy wonders if she is hiding as well.

According to her mother she is doing just that and trying to fight an enemy that isn’t there.

The thought of her mother makes her cringe involuntarily. She takes a small useless breath and gets back to her task of rectifying the Doxie venom she collected yesterday. Straining the pus-like liquid through the distillator, going up and down. It’s a tedious process, and the only noise in the room is the muted gurgle of the greenish liquid. The silence in her chamber always unnerves people, and today it is almost deafening to her with all the meaningless thoughts in her head.

Her workplace, otherwise, is immaculate. Like most parts of her life, it was shabby and lifeless when she first came here. Unlike most parts of her life, she’d fixed it into something that spells comfort to her now, even if the flashy white of her room gets to her sometimes. Her things are carefully catalogued, everything serves a purpose. She can trace her hands on the labeled vials on the shelves attached to the bleached wall, and tell, without looking, what they are. She knows when and how she collected them, brewed them, fixed them and listed their uses. She knows It is a silly thing to ravish in such a small achievement, but Pansy cannot help herself. It’s probably the only place that’s entirely hers as of now.

And it’s practically empty of people. Which is not something you would expect at a hospital like St. Mungo’s, but she contents herself with what she has. Her affiliations don’t allow her to work in the general ward, where her presence could bring unwanted dispute.

Labels, labels.

So she stays at the almost reclusive area in the hospital, brews and rehashes potions, ointments, and helps with the most desperate cases. 

In a way she too is categorized like her vials, shoved into the corner like an unwanted, but viable accessory. The way Harry Potter is forced out in the front, bright and optimistic face of the wizarding world.

Potter .

His name brings a torrent of other things to her mind. And unfortunately she has time to indulge.There is nothing else to do but wait on and check if the poison changes in color in the apparatus. Because in earlier life she must have pissed off a god, or something similar that now she is having a lazy day. The few hours of last night are playing in her head, start to finish, pausing at a moment that can be deciphered in a hundred deceitful ways, then again retracting. 

And on the back of her head a song is playing low, she thinks. And although she can’t recall what exactly, she is sure it’s the same tune they played at the ceremony.