Harry Potter and the Junior Year Abroad
The Royal Surrey County Hospital
By Ishtar
Chapter Four
The Royal Surrey County Hospital
Harry came awake in the middle of the night, quite suddenly. He wasn't sure if it was still Wednesday night, or Thursday morning. He lay still in his bed, listening intently for any sound that might have disturbed him. Hedwig was out hunting, and the only sound he could hear was the sighing of the night breeze past his window. Then he heard a groan, a sound of pain and anguish, issuing from somewhere on the upstairs floor of the Dursley house. Harry got up and padded over to his door, opening it silently. He stuck his head out into the hall. There was a moment of silence, and then the moan came again. It was coming from Dudley's room. He padded across the landing, and paused before Dudley's door. Dared he open it and try to wake his cousin from whatever nightmare beset him? Or should he try to awaken Aunt Petunia so she could help Dudley? That would, unfortunately, result in waking Uncle Vernon as well, and he decided against it. Before he could decide whether to open Dudley's door, however, he heard a loud yell from inside the room, followed by Dudley's feet hitting the floor. Harry backed away from the door just before it was yanked open, crashing against the bedroom wall. In the darkness, Harry could just barely see Dudley's hulking form filling the door, but Dudley could apparently see Harry well enough by the moonlight coming in from the stairwell window. "YOU!" Dudley roared. "It was YOU!! YOU BETRAYED HIM!!!" He charged across the landing at Harry.
Harry leapt backwards into his own room, slamming the door and locking it. The door creaked under the impact of Dudley hitting it. A second blow came, and the centre panel split and the upper hinge started to tear away from the frame. Harry tried to drag his wardrobe against the door to brace it, but was only successful in moving it a few inches before Dudley's third blow smashed the door in entirely.
By now, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia were awake, and Harry could hear Vernon yelling from the neighbouring bedroom, "What in the name of God is going on out there?"
Dudley, now incoherent with rage, was forcing himself through the shattered door. Harry was trapped in the small bedroom with not enough space to use his Quidditch-trained agility to get out of Dudley's way entirely. He darted over to the desk and grabbed his wand in one hand and Hedwig's cage in the other. Turning to face Dudley, he blocked his cousin's ham-like fist with the cage, which bent and wrapped around it, trapping it. Dudley roared and paused to rip the bent metal from his fist, giving Harry the chance to jump up on his bed and get past him, making for the door. The doorframe, however, was now filled with Uncle Vernon. Vernon's heavy hand slammed against Harry's bare chest, propelling him backwards, and Harry's wand went spinning off into the dark wreckage of his room. "Where do you think you're going, BOY?!" he shouted. "I want an explanation for this!" Harry ducked as Dudley grabbed the lamp from his desk and threw it at him; it crashed against the wardrobe and covered the floor with broken glass. Caught between Dudley and Vernon, and wandless, there was only one way for Harry to get away. Nimbly he jumped onto his trunk, spun and leaped straight for the square of moonlight over the dresser that marked his open bedroom window.
Harry made it through the opening, but struck his knee painfully against the frame as he slithered through. He had trained in Quidditch practice to be able to fall from a height and roll out, but those lessons assumed that one had momentum from a speeding broom, and enough height to position oneself. Here, Harry plunged almost straight down into the garden, head first. He managed to protect his head with his arms as he landed, but the shock made his shoulder scream with pain. Probably the only thing that saved him from a broken neck was the extreme softness of the garden soil. He rolled out and lay flat on his back with his head in the marigolds and his body on the lawn for a second, trying to see if all his body parts were connected and remembering how to breathe. From inside the house, he heard continued shouting from both Vernon and Dudley, crashing noises, and a scream from Aunt Petunia. Lights were going on in houses all up and down the street as people were awakened by the noise. He hauled himself painfully to his feet and staggered across the lawn to the sidewalk. He had to get to Mrs. Figg's house. It was the only place of safety that he knew.
The front door of number four burst open before he was more than past the neighbour's house, and Dudley charged off after him in a berserker rage. Harry fled, but his banged-up knee betrayed him, and he fell trying to make the turn from Privet Drive onto Wisteria Walk. Dudley was almost upon him. He scrambled to his feet again, but that only put him where he could be hit, and Dudley's meaty fist struck him along the side of the face, knocking him down again. Then once Harry was down, Dudley kicked him, knocking his breath out of him again. The only thing that saved Harry then was that Dudley was not wearing shoes. Barefoot, he kicked Harry again and tried to stomp on him. Harry curled up to try to protect his face and stomach as best he could and tried to roll away. His hands came across something with a remembered feel, slim and hard … a wand? The feel of it gave him courage, and he shouted, "STUPEFY!" even as Dudley aimed another blow at him. The red beam of the spell revealed the demonic hatred twisting Dudley's face in the split second before he collapsed on top of Harry, knocking Harry's head back onto the pavement. Harry tried feebly to push him off, but hadn't the strength. He thought he heard sirens in the far distance, and saw flashing lights, before he went down into welcoming darkness.
0o0o0o0o0o0
He woke briefly to motion, the sirens louder now. Someone cried, "He's awake!" and flashed lights in his eyes. "Pupils equally responsive." He struggled to sit up, and found he was strapped to a rigid surface and unable to move. "Please try to be still," said the unknown voice. "We've got you immobilized until we get you to hospital."
"Dudley?" gasped Harry.
"The big brute that did this to you? Don't you worry, the police have him safely in custody."
The ambulance hit a bump, and the unknown voice cursed as Harry spiralled down into the dark again.
0o0o0o0o0o0
Harry had never been in a hospital other than St. Mungo's or the Hogwarts infirmary before, and was unprepared for the bustle and rush of a Muggle casualty ward. By the time he regained consciousness, he had been transferred to a sort of rolling bed and was surrounded by people. Some of them were touching him in various places and then calling out numbers to someone else who wrote them down on a clipboard, and a very nice-looking young lady was attempting to remove his pyjama bottoms. He grabbed at the waistband before she managed to get them over his hips. "Wups! He's awake," she said. "Come along now, let me get them off so we can check that leg out. This is no time to worry about your modesty." Expertly, she got him to release his grip on the pants and covered him with a sheet as she removed the tattered, blood-stained pyjamas. Then the person with the clipboard started asking questions, such as his name, age, and address. While he was distracted by the questions, there was a stab of pain in one hand, and Harry realized there was now a needle in his hand connected to a thin tube which was in turn connected to a bottle of fluid hanging over his bed. The nursing sisters cleaned the blood off the side of his face and swabbed something brown over the scrapes and abrasions he had received from the sidewalk. A young man wearing a white coat came in and looked at him briefly.
"Send him up to X-Ray. Head and neck, chest, left shoulder and right knee." The man, a doctor, Harry presumed, scribbled something on the clipboard, then requested that Harry answer a series of simple questions, track movements of the doctor's fingers with his eyes, and wiggle his fingers and toes. "He seems alert enough now, but call Neuro and alert them so they'll be ready if he crumps out. If he doesn't show neurological symptoms in, say, an hour, transfer him to Ortho instead."
"My glasses? Did they break?" Harry asked the room in general. "Can't see."
"Your glasses are OK, but you can't wear them until we check your face and head out. We'll keep them safe, just relax."
Another man and an older sister steered his bed out of the examination room and into the hall. A police officer had stopped the doctor and was trying to find out when he could talk to "the victim." The doctor was insisting that they had to finish their diagnostics, and they'd let the officer know. As the orderlies steered Harry's bed down the hall, they passed an open cubicle; another team was working frantically on Dudley, who was handcuffed to the bed. Two more police officers were standing by the bed. "Wait, wait," Harry raised his hand to try to get the orderlies to stop. "My cousin. What's wrong with my cousin?"
"The big brute is your cousin? They can't wake him up. Think he hit his head when he went down. Don't you be concerned with that, though. That's the doctor's problem."
Harry was rather puzzled by the place they called X-Ray, where they made him lie down on a cold hard table and pointed a large device that looked rather like a giant version of Colin Creevey's camera at him. They draped Harry's groin with a large heavy apron. The attendant would do something under the table, scurry out, there would be a brief buzzing noise, and then he'd come back in again to point the camera somewhere else. After several rounds of this, the orderlies transferred Harry back onto his rolling bed and pushed it out back into the hall. Here he waited for a time until the attendant came out with a large envelope which he put in the bed with Harry, and the orderlies pushed his bed back to the emergency room. It was, by now, even more crowded than it had been they left. They seemed to be having a special on assaults tonight; the place was filled with bloodied bodies, raving assailants, and harried police.
Dudley's gurney was now out in the hall, with Dudley still unconscious and the police guard looking bored. By now Harry had a clearer memory of what had happened, and knew his cousin wouldn't come out of his Stupefication until somebody administered the countercharm, but he was damned if it was going to be him.
"What, is it a full moon tonight?" one of Harry's orderlies asked the other, just before they pushed him back into his examination room and left to whisk another patient off to somewhere.
The harried doctor came back in and put a series of very interesting pictures up on light panels on the wall. As far as Harry could tell, they showed the bones inside various parts of his body, though he couldn't see clearly because he still didn't have his glasses on. The doctor pulled a small device out of his pocket and started talking into it. "Patient Potter comma Harry. Subject is a white male, approximately sixteen years of age, victim of assault. Injuries include trauma to face and head with contusion, possible soft tissue damage to the neck, dislocated left shoulder, two cracked ribs, abdominal bruising, blow to the exterior right knee with possible damage to the ligament. Patient is conscious and coherent. No indication of closed-skull injuries; evaluation required for spinal involvement. No immediate indication of internal injuries, but monitor urine and stool for occult blood. Transfer to Ortho indicated for treatment of shoulder and knee." The doctor pulled the pictures down, put them back in their envelope, wrote something more on the clipboard, and left again. A few minutes later, a nursing sister came into the room and briskly announced that Doctor had ordered pain medication for Harry, by which time he was most grateful for it indeed. Muggle medicine didn't seem to be as efficient as Wizard medicine, but it did well enough for pain relief. Harry was just starting to drift off into a drug-induced fog when the police officers finally made it into the cubicle and started asking questions.
"Son, I know you've had a bad night, but we need to ask you some questions about what happened. Can you talk to us for a few minutes?"
"Don't know what they gave me, but I'll try. Keep wanting to go to sleep."
"We'll make it fast, then, and finish in the morning."
Harry heard the second officer, the one who was taking notes, mutter to himself, "Why do they always medicate them before we get to take the report?"
"What's your name, son?"
"Harry Potter."
"Middle name?"
"James."
"Address?"
"Number four, Privet Drive, Little Whinging."
"You live there with your parents?"
"Parents're dead. Live with my aunt and uncle. And cousin."
"Their names?"
"Vernon and Petunia Dursley. Cousin's Dudley."
"What happened tonight, Harry?"
Slowly, with many pauses, Harry talked through the events of the night, starting with waking up to hear Dudley's nightmare. He didn't tell them about casting the Stupefy spell, though … he made his description of the fight as vague as possible.
"Do you know why your cousin fell, Harry?"
"Dunno. Maybe kicked his foot out fr'm under'm. Don' 'member."
"And do you know why he attacked you? You said he said, 'You betrayed him.' Do you have any idea who he was talking about?"
Harry had a very good idea, but it wouldn't do to tell the police that. Let them dig up the O'Dwyer connection themselves. "No 'dea." He let his eyes close, tired of keeping them open for so long. "Lemme sleep."
"All right, son. Sleep now." The officers left, and Harry began to drift off.
His respite from pain was short-lived. A squadron of nursing sisters and orderlies arrived, and a heavy-set sister briskly roused him from the grey place where he had been floating happily. "Now, Mr. Potter, I'm afraid we have to do something about that shoulder. It's badly dislocated, and we have to put it back where it belongs. There's only one way to do this, and I'm not going to lie to you, it's going to hurt, even with the pain killers we've given you. But after it's done, we'll bandage you up and get you up to a room so you can sleep. Do you understand me?"
Harry nodded. Hurt a little more, then sleep. He could deal with that. He doubted anything these Muggles could do would come near what he'd experienced only six weeks ago when Voldemort possessed him at the Ministry. Or a Cruciatus Curse. Two of the nurses grabbed him across the chest, and the two orderlies seized his injured arm. The third nurse held his legs. "Wait a sec … what …?" The orderlies pulled hard on the arm, and it felt to Harry like they were trying to pull it off. The nurses grimly held him still on the gurney as he arched his back and tried to fling them off. Somewhat fuddled by the drugs, Harry lashed out with power, but with no control. Bolts of rainbow energy coursed around his body, then leaped to all the light fixtures in the room. The fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling, the portable examination lights, and the wall mounted X-Ray panels exploded, sending glass flying everywhere. The nurse holding his legs screamed and ducked away, but the older nurse flung herself across him, shielding his face from the glass. A rainbow bolt struck one of the orderlies full in the chest and he fell to the ground, yanking Harry's arm even more painfully, and then there was a pop as his arm bone slid back into the shoulder joint. The orderly let go of his arm, the pain lessened almost immediately, and Harry lapsed gratefully into unconsciousness, unaware of the chaos around him.