September 21, 2009
9:00 pm
Courtroom 5

Nate had had a very long time to think about this day.  Before today he'd been in Auror custody for 3 months.  And then he'd been in and out of these courtrooms for another month and a half as his case was heard by Wizengamot.  It was a a shit pile to be handed to have been caught in the act, and if there was anything that filled him with more shame it wasn't having committed the crime he had, but in getting so roundly defeated.

The Elder who'd presided over his case began to speak.  Briggs stood even before he was asked, chin listlessly on his chest. 

"Mr. Nathan Briggs, stand and hear your sentence.   The findings of this court are inescapable and indelible. The Wizengamot accepts your plea of guilty in the charges of Magical Burgling and Wandfiring Upon Ministry Law Enforcement Agents.  Your wand shall be surrendered and you shall be confined in Azkaban for a sentence of  three hundred and thirty-three  days."

He shook his head.  He felt cold and numb and hard.  A year.  A year in Azkaban.  This future stretched ahead of him solidly and without escape.  He wouldn't get to go back home to the Sodding Arms.  Or see Dazmond again.  Oh god.  He'd cried over Dazmond many times in these last months as his fate became more and more inescapable.  And he swallowed hard now so that he wouldn't do it again here.

The solicitor standing next to him stood stiffly, awkwardly.  She hadn't been able to do very much.  She had been able to get the charges from the Department of Mysteries dropped.  And the sentence could have, should have been for, but the deal he'd pulled in the shadowy dark with Jonas Trevelyan had apparently bought in a year or two off the sentence.   The solicitor had been startled when Nate had insisted on a guilty plea, but ultimately she'd had to agree - the Aurors had all they needed anyway. 

Nate wasn't some hard-ass thug who could just pretend this all away, just stalwartly suffer through.  If there was a thing in his life that made Nate real it was his freedom.  His autonomy.  And now he'd thrown it away.  In trying to keep it, he'd lost it.

"Guards, take him.  A hearing has been scheduled for three-hundred and thirty-three days from now." The Wizengamot wishes you well, Mr. Briggs.