But my hands remember hers
Rolling around the shaded ferns
Naked arms, her secrets still like songs I'd never learned

It had been almost two weeks now since he had become rather intimately acquainted with the infamous Rabastan Lestrange. But he was still not doing well. There were several wounds on his back that were clearly caused by dark magic that just weren’t getting better. He had avoided to going to St. Mungo’s but when he had winced when his supervisor clapped him on the back—and the man had subsequently seen the lingering damage hidden beneath his shirt, Devin had been ordered to go to the hospital. So, here he was…waiting for someone to check him out…and waiting…and waiting…

Being seated on the observation bed with the curtain pulled closed around him put Devin on edge. He had a lot of bad memories of being in places like this as a child. His mother had injured him regularly to get pain medicine for herself. Anything to get pills she did without thought or reservation—it really was better for the world that she was dead now. She had been a blight on humanity. He didn’t miss her at all. If anything, he really wished she had died sooner. Maybe then, his sister would still be alive.

The waiting was the worst. Had it been three hours or fifteen minutes? Devin had no idea. There was no clock—and his poor arse, obviously, had no watch. He was terrible at waiting. He could have patience in other areas of his life, but just sitting and waiting, nah, he was rubbish at that. The idea of actually laying down on the little bed and having a nap was growing more tempting every passing second. He hadn’t lain in a bed in like a year or something like that. Would it even still be comfortable? Or had his body adjusted to sleeping on the floor again? He remember really struggling his first year at Hogwarts to get comfortable in the bed. It had been so soft—and that had been so foreign to him. He had never had a bed his entire life before coming to the school. His mum, most of the time, had managed to get herself a mattress that just laid on the floor of whatever slum they were living in, but she never bothered to get one for him.

The boy shifted and rested his elbows and forearms against his knees as he leaned forward a bit. His head hung down as he let out a long, sorrowful sigh. He was exhausted. He had been that way since the torture. His muscles still ached even this long after. He didn’t know how long the pain would linger. It sucked. The Torture Curse had caused all his muscles to seize up very tense—it felt like some still were. He could not get them to relax. It made walking all day suck badly. He moved a lot slower the last two weeks than he had before. It was obvious that something had happened to him, but no one really asked about it. Everyone probably expected something very close to the truth—and understood that no one wanted to talk about something like that happening to them.

A cloud of depression hung over him, too. His eyes were dead most of the time. He would try to be his old self when he was around mates—or Sasha, in particular—but he was not his old self. Devin was not sure he even really remembered who that guy had been.

While Mungo's still at times treated Mudbloods, gone was the time that Healers were expected to much more than patch them together. Even with Jocelyn's own views on them, it seemed counterproductive. As a head of department, it wouldn't do for her to see how much effort was given, and be labeled as a Circe-damned sympathizer, nor instruct for more to be given. That would be for the Head of Mungo's, for the Minister of Magic, for all that hospitals were not truly supposed to be political. She'd taken the oath in Innocenti, after all, to Heal all that came through the doors who she could. If Mungo's had a similar oath, she didn't question. She'd held to that oath, even when being informed to treat Muggles-- oaths held in hospitals, after all, and what she practiced outside of them was no business but her own. And who too, she supposed. She'd done her duty to the Kvothes, married as she'd been told, gave a son to continue some sort of line. What pleasure she took in her own sheets with Jared was little of their business until it took a turn for something more.

Her knee gave little trouble as of yet, and the visit was to be routine. There was expected to be little issue of extended standing, from what she knew of the situation; she would be good with her cane and a chair that could rise and lower her. Her stander was able to be kept shrunken and tucked in her robes pocket, only to be brought off if there were further complications, taking perhaps a handful seconds to situate herself in should a true emergency come. Other than that, Vale and Goldstein were competent to handle with one or two of the medi-witches at their side. A test, of sorts, she decided.

Jocelyn's office was located near the places she needed to be on short notice; that had been the only further accommodation she had required when she became Head Healer. The walk wasn't bad-- flat, level ground, no stairs. It was early still in the day-- her gait was not yet overly pronounced, still able to be somewhat cloaked by the skirt of her robes. The cane of course was obvious, and Jocelyn appreciated that. In her first few months working, there had been some Healers who saw Jocelyn as more able-bodied than she was, and Jocelyn had since then been careful to have it be obvious that she was a Healer who was not fully able-bodied.

She opened the curtains, tsking. "That's no way to wait, depressed as anything. You're in Mungo's and you'll receive care." Sharper than she might usually be, with less of a bedside manner? She supposed so. He was a Mudblood, after all-- that much was clear. "Find a comfortable position on the bed where you can talk without your voice being muffled. I'd like to hear precisely what happened, and there's no need for you to be straining yourself as you do so."

The sharp scolding drew Devin from his morose thoughts. His Gryffindor pride forced the boy up into a tall sitting position, his shoulders back and head lifted up. There was still a bit of fire of him. That had not been completely destroyed by Rabastan Lestrange. Somehow…there were still slivers of who he had once been buried down inside the Wright. Sitting so tall did cause him pain, though—so when the healer spoke again, after a brief pause, Devin adjusted himself to lean a bit to the left. It was too tiring to sit up so straight. Every part of him ached—the wounds on his skin were the least of it. The longest lasting damage was in his mind.

He would have been a smartarse to the woman in years past. That had been just who he was. Even now, he was tempted to make some remark—but his mind was too sluggish to come up with something clever. That disappointed him more than it should have. She had said he would receive care, but the boy still did not really believe that he would. He half expected to get tortured again for even thinking he deserved to come into this place. But it hadn’t been his choice. He hadn’t wanted to come here. His supervisor had mandated it—and that bloke was a halfblood or something. Devin was not really sure—he just knew the bloke had say over him and did not live in any of the Kolna buildings.

Not being able to come up with something smart aleck to say, he answered her flatly: “I was punished.” The words were a gross understatement of what had happened to him, but Devin felt it was answer enough to begin the discussion. He hung his head for a moment, before lifting it back up til his eyes met hers and he went on: “Crucio mostly--” The confession of the torture curse was softly made--the words carried tremendous weight, though, in the way they were spoken. Shadows and pain twisted in the boy's eyes, betraying some sliver of what had been done to him. “-for a bloody long time….then some other shit-- I don’t really know what all did this.” He made a half-arse motion to his body and his back, frowning all the while.

“Better to just show you, I guess…” As he finished his last words, he slipped down off the table and pulled his shirt up over his head as he turned away from the healer. This revealed his back to her---it along with his arms and a small bit on his chest and ribs were covered with magical burns and wounds. The signs of dark magic were evident. His wounds had festered terribly. But he could do nothing to heal them—and had done his very best to hide them from anyone else.

She tsked her tongue. "Crucio? Nasty curse, truly. Effective for punishments, but carried on too long and it snaps something vital. If you can recall, when did this take place, and is a 'bloody long time' longer or shorter than. . " She'd had the Curse on her before, and it was near-impossible to tell time. "I'll have the name of the Ministers, both magical and Muggle." Facilities so far seemed responsive, though the longer it had been since the consequence, the more she felt comfortable in the decision that his mind had recovered.

The festering on the boy's back (and what a practiced movement of show, as if for compensation) was indeed a bi. . . overkill, really, in Jocelyn's mind. Wounds like that, unless treated competently and quickly, were like to cause difficulty in labor, more likely to result in further punishment.

The skin was angry, and the infections looked to run deep. Muggle medicine would have difficulty, but fortunately, the boy was a Mudblood and thus able to receive medical care of some sort. She never quite understood why some mages played with hollow needles when potions worked much better. Doubtless some would be wailing that needles with some sort of clear liquid were necessary at this stage, but Jocelyn was far more confident with wand and potions.

"Some of these look as if they might have been shallow once, and the general angle and shape-- Cutting curses, do you remember?" It wasn't quite a leading question, as there were many types of such. Her guess was perhaps Diffendo or Abiungero, though the latter tended to cut into muscle.

Devin had tried his best to act like things were not so bad. But he was not the same person as he had been when he stepped out of the bloody flat building that night. Rabastan Lestrange had placed a weight on him that he struggled to carry. Nightmares plagued him. No one had commented on his screams, though. It still embarrassed him terribly.

The healer asked for more details about the experience. One question was easy enough to answer: "It happened like two weeks ago," he explained. "How long is harder...Time is funny when you are under that curse. Felt like a life time....but total could not have been more than two hours--but probably about one total. It was on and off. Not like the whole time. I dunno..." Devin realized he was rambling and shut his mouth. He was not sure how long that Rabastan had used the curse on him, but by the time and he and Sasha had gotten back inside, it had been over two hours since that he had stormed out after their fight.

Her next command confused him. "Huh?" His brow furrowed and his mind was sluggish in putting the pieces together of what he was being asked. He had never been one to follow politics. But he knew of the woman that ran the Ministry of Magic now. "Lestrange-" A fear of the name flashed in his eyes. Rabastan had instilled that him--bloody mad lunatic that wizard was. Devin assumed the Lady Minister was just as bad as her brother-in-law. "-Iunno the muggle."

It was a terrible struggle to get his shirt off. The motions pained him--and he bit his lip to suppress a groan of pain. Lack of medical treatment had caused the wounds to grow far worse than they had been that first night. The magic that the Lestrange had cast chaotically in Devin's general direction when the man had started to lose connection with reality had done plenty of damage to the mudblood.

Devin's natural reaction to give a shrug of his shoulders to the woman's commentary was cut short as he froze with his shoulders slightly raised before slowly lowering them back down. The action had bloody hurt. This all sucked. "Not sure what it was--most the time, he didn't say any spells. There was one I didn't know--Ab something maybe?" Devin was flat in his tone. There was none of his usual animated tendencies in his speech. This woman would not know any difference, but if one of his old Hogwarts professors bore witness to the conversation, they would believe he was a completely different person. Rabastan had broken him in--the man had unearthed all the horrible memories that Devin had suppressed, but was now tortured by. The horrible lies that Rabastan had Sasha feed him still mucked up his mind. He had always had a will to live, but that was not the case so much any more.