HTML Testing

she can feel her slipping through her fingers; it’s like sand, ice water, fuck. it’s nothing like the way she can feel the magic slipping out of the patients she’s been working with at st. mungo’s; that hurts, it’s tangible, but there is something strange in tess as she brushes snowflakes away from her fluttering eyelashes that feels similar to it.

“stay with me tess,” her voice hasn’t sounded much like this before. she wonders, briefly, as she leans back on her haunches to rip her feet out from her board, where all the authority had come from. she sounds just like a doctor from an old american television show.

they’re not on a public slope, they’re backcountry, so it’s easy enough for her to take her wand out of her salopettes and cast a diagnostic. it’s harder for her to try and ignore the blood sinking into the fresh powder. she thinks of cherry snow cones. she thinks, for a minute, that she might be sick. it takes approximately ninety seconds for a successful diagnostic, so she quells her roiling stomach, takes two deep, shuddering breaths and focuses on the read out. it’s not as powerful as the charm she’d perfected in class six weeks ago; the same one she’d recreated on a dozen patients in the admittance ward in on-the-job training.

(how could it be?)

tess coughs, her body wracks under her hands as she tries to press her into the snow, lie still, don’t move, she’s muttering under her breath in bulgarian now even though she knows very well the sound of it can’t be comforting—her cousins understanding of the language is rudimentary at best. she whips her head around to get a better look at what the diagnostic is telling her, pushes her goggles up onto her forehead and with a cracked hiss the charm fizzles out, the letters scattering and seeping out into the frigid winter air above them. the curses that come out of her mouth would’ve made her grandfather blush to hear them.

“try to lie very, very still, tereza,” again she wonders where this voice has come from; probably from libya and bomb victims and so much more blood than this, blood covering everything, bodies and limbs torn apart so that they barely looked human. (this is almost worst: tereza’s lips bloodied and split and moving slowly like she’s trying to say something, but it’s only so that the blood in her throat can escape, bubble out onto her chin. the panic is the worst. her chest feels like it could explode and there’s only one place she would go one, one name branded into the recesses of her memories.)

she cracks into the room and doesn’t stop to think how; merely rests her cousins head down from where she’d been supporting it, thinking of saving her neck and spine and shouts: “emery fleet!” she hasn’t sounded so foreign for years now, for months and months of a slowly developed lazy canadian mountain drawl. she doesn’t care that tess in bleeding into the carpet. in fact, she’s quite calm as she hears doors slamming and raised voices because here comes salvation and perhaps she’s not quite as sore about it as she should be.

“everything’s going to be alright now, you’re safe,” she is murmuring, wracking her brains for painkilling spells that wouldn’t interfere with any other kind of magic but coming up blank. “i don’t know what happened,” she is staring blankly at the floor instead of turning to the presence she can feel in the room now, unbuttoning her cousins ski jacket with very steady fingers, “she’s one of the best off-piste skiers i know. why would she have fallen?”