[Elaine Howell]

"I just... I couldn't figure out how to-" Elaine held up a hand, silencing the junior healer. She wasn't usually so ruthless with the less-experienced healers, but the sheer incompetence of the lad she was dealing with today, in addition to receiving a letter from her daughter's school about her behaviour, had put her in a very bad mood.

She snatched the chart from the junior healer and glanced down it. Realising she was being rather unprofessional, Elaine took a deep breath and stepped into the room. "Hello, sir. I'm Healer Howell. Can I get your name?" She wasn't convinced the junior healer had even got the right name, at this point.

[Nikau Harrison]

Nikau had been waiting for a long time in the waiting room with his arm bandaged, long enough for him to start bleeding through the clean cloth all over again. He'd vanished the blood from the floor, but he'd left his wound alone. He was not a Healer, he left that to the professionals. Several people in the Auror department were fairly competent when it came to healing spells, but they were not there right now, were they?

Being an Auror brought its fair share of danger and risk of injury, and the Chief Auror didn't mind. As long as the appropriate people were able to patch him up, everything was fine and dandy.

Looking up at the Healer who had just entered the room, Nikau gave her a perfunctory polite smile. 'Harrison. Nikau. Not Niko, please. Your other guy kept calling me Niko.'

[Elaine Howell]

After throwing one last scathing glance over her shoulder to the other healer, Elaine turned her full attention back to her patient. "Nikau," she confirmed, nodding. "Healer Lyle, I hope you're taking note of bedside manner?" she asked the junior healer.

Elaine took a step closer. "I'm just going to take a look. Are you able to straighten your arm for me?" Elaine could tell that it was deep, but Nikau was lucky - he hadn't hit any major arteries and the blood flow was steady, rather than pumping. "Can you tell me what happened?" It was important that Elaine understood what had caused the injury, for lots of reasons, but one rather serious one being safeguarding.

[Nikau Harrison]

'Bugger,' Nikau mumbled, but straightened his arm nonetheless. He winced as he did so. 'I can move it, it's not broken, but it bleeds heaps.' As if to show how right he was in his assessment, the movement of his arm immediately turned his bandage a deep burgundy colour.

Through his wincing, Nikau shrugged. Aurors often got into painful predicaments that, to many people, made their profession unappealing, but to them, were just the risks of, well, everyday. 'I was fighting off a suspect, trying to apprehend him, but he had an accomplice, and that guy just... threw a knife at me. We got them both, of course, but we waited to take the knife out until my colleague could make a proper tourniquet,' he explained.

[Elaine Howell]

Elaine threw a look towards the junior healer, who seemed to be swaying on his feet at the sight of the deep burgundy colour spreading across the bandage. Elaine rolled her eyes. "Healer Lyle, if you are unable to stay on your feet, I would rather you leave." Nodding his head, and turning a slightly darker shade of green, the junior healer scurried from the room. "I don't have time for incompetence today," she told the patient, perhaps a little unprofessionally.

Ah, an Auror. That made sense. There was a steady stream of aurors through the hospital on a day-to-day basis, and it didn't shock her that Nikau was one. Elaine's assessment of the arm made her think that Nikau would've been better off leaving the knife in. He'd already lost quite a lot of blood. Elaine stepped back. "So - here's what I'm going to do, I'm going to just do a quick scan of your arm and check there's no internal damage first, and if not, then I'm going to stitch your arm up and give you a blood replenishing potion. I'd like to monitor you for a little while, just to ensure everything's okay and the potion doesn't have any side-effects. Sound okay?"

[Nikau Harrison]

Nikau raised an eyebrow at both the pitiful performance of the trainee Healer and at the cut and dry attitude of the more senior one. Bloody hell, she was not wasting her time. He didn't comment, though. It was nobody's place to comment on how he ran his Auror department, and thus it wasn't his place to comment on how the Healer ran hers.

He continued to wince, as the stretching of his arm had proved to be quite painful. It had been a while since a knife had done him any damage, but the last time, he'd actually been stabbed. He wasn't sure in those circumstances if being hit by a flying knife counted as being lucky.

'That sounds good to me,' he replied, his accent still heavy after almost fifteen years of living in England. 'You're the Healer, you know what you're doing.'

[Elaine Howell]

Elaine noticed Nikau wincing as he'd stretched his arm. "What would you rate your pain from 1-10, with 10 being the worst pain you've ever felt?" she asked him gently.

The blonde raised her wand over his arm and muttered a short incantation. A flashing image, something akin to the colour and light of a patronus, flickered in the air above Nikau's head. With a flick, she moved the image closer to her to inspect. She perused it for a few moments, before turning it back to her patient. "Are you experiencing any tingling in your upper arm?" He had moved it, which Elaine took to mean that there was no long-lasting nerve damage, but she had to ask.

She waited for him to answer as she summoned a pain potion, and wrote out the prescription on his chart.

[Nikau Harrison]

'Ah, er, four?' Nikau replied. This hurt, for sure, but it was far from being the worst pain he'd experienced. He'd been stabbed, burned, had had the Cruciatus curse performed on him, had passed a kidney stone once... He'd lived through worse, and he was never the type to complain, anyway. So long as this didn't affect his biceps long term...

'A bit of tingling,' he confirmed. 'But nothing that hurts more than the wound itself.' He looked up at the light above him with some interest. 'Is that what you're scanning my arm with? What's the prognosis, then?' He wasn't normally quite this chatty, but he was feeling slightly light-headed, and what else was there to do, anyway?

[Elaine Howell]

The vial flew into Elaine's hand. "This is a pain potion. You've rated this quite low, but I know what you aurors are like." She smiled gently as she handed it to him.

Using her wand, in the same way that someone might pull their memories from their temples to add to a pensieve, Elaine dragged the scan from above Nikau's head so he could see it. Some patients liked being able to see it and others didn't, but she tried to explain as best as possible if they showed an interest. "You've described some light tingling and it looks like there might be some nerve damage here, but I'm not too concerned." She used her wand-free hand to point to the nerve damage on the scan. "If left untreated, it could become worse, but I'm going to give you a small dose of a potion which will take care of it. You should take the potion every morning for 3 days and I'll show you some exercises you can do to strengthen your arm in the meantime too. I'm confident that it should be back to normal in a couple of days."

[Nikau Harrison]

'Chur,' Nikau said as he accepted the vial, nodding. 'Should I take this now? All of it?'

The Auror watched with some interest as the Healer showed him his wound on a scan. Magic was quite something, wasn't it? For Muggles to do something like this required a lot of machinery, that much he knew.

'Nerve damage?' Nikau frowned. 'What do I do in the meantime? Do I need a bandage? I can still go back to work, eh?' He felt that he'd rather die than spend a week on his arse waiting for things to mend. Aurors needed action.

[Elaine Howell]

Elaine nodded. "All of it now. I'll draw up some vials for you to take home." She paused, thinking of the many aurors who had complained about not requiring such assistance, in the past. "For if you need them."

The blonde smiled gently. "No bandage. I'm going to stitch this up and give you the relevant potions. You should be... careful, but I don't see reason why you can't go back to work, as long as you're sensible." With another flick of her wand, Elaine sent the scans away. "I'm going to start stitching you up now, if that's okay? This might hurt."

[Nikau Harrison]

Nikau nodded obediently. His first instinct was to say he didn't need anything, that he would be fine, and that he would tough it out, but that wasn't the example he was trying to set for the other Aurors, and besides, he wasn't especially looking to impress the Healer. Not that he thought pig-headedness tended to impress medical professionals, really. He left the machismo for other occasions. And other people.

'Sweet as,' the Auror replied. Great, he was going to be able to start working straight away. None of those three weeks of bedrest that annoying Healer had prescribed him the time a perpetrator had had a hex go wrong and accidentally gutted him. That had been super inconvenient. If they were able to patch him up, why the hell did he have to spend all that time lazing about, when he could be out there in the field?

'Yeah nah, ma'am, I can take it. Piece of piss.' Nikau gave the Healer a slight, polite smile. He thought of Marigold Boartusk, who had had more stitches than probably the entire department combined. She was a tough old broad, that was for sure. She'd told him once that the nerve damage on her tibias and on her forearms was so extensive that she didn't feel it anymore when they sewed her up. She now had to be extra careful about fighting situations: she didn't automatically detect that she was injured anymore. Nikau thanked his lucky stars that he'd never been quite that maimed. And that he was still good-looking. That, that was nice.

[Elaine Howell]

Elaine nodded. She drew her wand again and placed it at the tip of Nikau's injury. As she murmured an incantation, she moved her wand in short zig-zag movements across the wound. As she did, the flesh appeared to sizzle for a second and then close, leaving behind a thin, red scar. Pocketing her wand, Elaine picked up a jar of salve from the tray next to her and began to rub it into his wound.

As she massaged the scar, she looked up at Nikau to see how he was fairing. "Any plans this evening?" she asked, breaking the silence between them. Her mind briefly wandered to her own evening's activities: a blind date. She wasn't entirely sure what had possessed her to accept this, but it was happening nonetheless. She could've cursed herself for it.

[Nikau Harrison]

Nikau looked, impressed, as his wound magically sealed itself shut. Nothing to show for all this pain and trouble but a really cool scar. Aurors always had a cool collection of scars. His ex hadn't really liked them, because she'd seen them appear on him one by one, and worried about him, but his first date since his divorce? Apparently some people were a fan of ruggedly handsome men with scars, and that was good for Nikau. Hopefully he would meet more. He really needed to meet someone, too. After the fiasco with Rian, Nikau really needed something easy, to bring back his confidence.

He winced again as the Healer massaged his newly minted scar. Couldn't she leave well enough alone? He looked up at her.

'I'm not sure, but I'm fairly convinced scars appeal to a certain demographic, so maybe I'll try my luck there,' Nikau replied. Why was he saying all this? He normally didn't say this much. He never gave out details of his dating life to anyone. Not to his family, not to his friends, not to his colleagues... so why then was he talking about dates to his Healer? In fairness, she had asked. But it still irked him some that he'd been able to throw it out so casually to this random woman when he hadn't even told his daughter he had started dating again, least of all who he was going on dates with.

'I'm rather new to the scene, so I don't really know the good hangouts,' he explained. But he'd find one. If he could get over himself, that was. 'How about you?' Clearly the blood loss was addling his brain.

[Elaine Howell]

Elaine chuckled, shaking her head. The aurors always were fans of their scars, for whatever reason Elaine didn't know. She placed the salve back on the tray and began pouring some potions into vials whilst she listened to him.

"Oh I don't know the good hangouts, I've been out of the dating game a little too long, I'm afraid." She chuckled nervously, pushing thoughts of Evelyn away from her mind as she slowly bottled up each potion, taking care not to spill any due to shaking hands. It was her own stupid fault for bringing up the question.

"Oh, you mean what are my evening plans," she realised. "Not a lot," she added, realising she didn't feel comfortable mentioning her blind date. "Dinner for one and write a letter to my daughter. She's at Beauxbatons." She puffed her chest proudly at the mention of Adelaide.