26 August 2009
11:13 pm

There was a warehouse in Southwark and it was locked up, shuttered and completely empty.  Vesta Baddrick made her way there in the middle of the night with a heavy bag and a stumbling gait.  The witch, already a woman dark-circled and sour in appearance, was desperately worse for wear tonight.  Her brown trench was singed at the arms, and from the look of her be-cowled face, there was something plaguing her.

She'd had to wait for cover of darkness to venture out, so paranoid was she about Aurors, Shang and anything else that might be coming for her.

Tawse - he was the only one she could turn to.  The word on the street since arriving in London was that a wizard by the name of Cinaed Tawse had been the bane of the Auror Corps and a champion for Wizarding Kind as well as Ex-Azzies. 

She laid a hand on the thick wooden barn-door.  "Tawse...!"  she hissed through it.  "Tawse, it's Baddrick.  I'm early.  Are you there? Open quick, yes?  Not too friendly out here."

Damn, she hoped he was inside.  Every hour that had passed and was threatening to pass made her feel terribly vulnerable. 

In the months since Cinaed had fled a trio of Aurors at his mother's swiftly collapsing house, Cinaed had adopted a whole new level of paranoid consciousness.  He'd always been aware of his vulnerability as an ex-Azzie, especially when he'd been wandless, but now with only one foolish, wrong move separating him from a lifetime's stay in Azkaban, he'd adopted a whole new level of caution. 

In the dark of night, a small, unassuming magpie flitted across Muggle London.  In the darkness, it gave a soundless flap of its wings and glided over the rooftops of the buildings surrounding the darkened warehouse, peering at rooftops and upper level windows as it moved by.  There was no sign of surveyors; no sign of Ministry officials or aurors lurking in the darkness of surrounding buildings.  No sign of anyone shadowing the woman either with or against her will.  On the third silent pass, the magpie spotted the young woman standing at the warehouse door, waiting to be let in. 

The magpie grazed over the top of the warehouse and dove through one of the roofline ventilation windows that had been left open for this very purpose.  Cinaed landed on the warehouse floor and, a moment later, tugged his black robes carefully around his human body and crossed the building to the door. 

Wand in hand, Cinaed opened the door and ushered the young woman inside, closing it once again behind her.  "Come in, come in," he waved her away from the door once it had been closed securely behind them.  There'd been few details offered in the invitation to meet.  Fewer details written down meant fewer details intercepted if the note fell in the wrong hands. 

"So, what do you have-" Cinaed started to ask, pausing when a crack of light seeping through a wall slid across the woman's face.  "What happened to you?"

Vesta scurried inside as if she were fleeing the very moonlight.  The normally brash and brave witch was harrowed and paranoid and not herself thanks to her injuries.  She was small in comparison to Cinaed Tawse, the Cinaed Tawse.  He was towering and had a magnificent forked beard and long hair - like a proper wizard ought to. 

If Vesta was relieved to see him, she couldn't really express it, most of her face occupied with displaying pain. 

"Aaaaaah!" she winced.  She'd dropped the bag onto the ground and immediately began to slowly peel off her outer layers.   She let her singed coat drop to the floor and her pale bare arms shone in the dim light.

Her back and left arm were alternately bright red, pussy, and burnt.  "Some idiot necromancer...!" she hissed by way of incomplete explanation.

"I'm sorry - I had no where else to go!"  It was an admission nearly as painful as the burns.  The admission that she needed help, but also that she had only Tawse to get it from.  "No where else is safe.  I'm dying here! I don't know this kind of Healing magic," she said.

All she knew was how to destroy things.  She'd played with fire and we all know where that gets you.  This was embarassing, but she was desperate.  "I'll pay anything.  Just help!"

The woman winced and Cinaed briefly threw caution to the wind and illuminated his wand just long enough to get a good look at Baddrick's condition.  "Bloody hell," he muttered, letting the wand fall dark only a moment later hopefully before any stray passerby's might have noticed the light through the cracks in the building's façade or the handful of un-boarded windows.   

"What?  He thought you'd be more interesting dead?"  What would have led Baddrick to be dealing with a necromancer wasn't Cinaed's business.  But...bloody hell.  "Hopefully, it wasn't one of the Ministry's necromancers?"

Cinaed shook his head, waving off her apology with a wave of his massive hand.  "No need.  Payment's not necessary.  If we can't trust the Ministry's Institutions and St. Mungo's, we got to rely on each other, right?" 

Glancing around the warehouse, Cinaed shook his head.  This was no place to try to do any healing.  He could barely risk enough light to see what he was doing, anyway.  "We should go someplace that's warm and dry.  This won't do.  Can you side along?"  It was bound to be painful but it would be undoubtedly safer and faster than limping through the streets.

Vesta wasn't present enough or polite enough to answer Cinaed Tawse's possibly rhetorical questions about why Vesta was tangling with a necromancer.  It'd come out soon enough.  But first, this blasted business of surviving.  With access to an honest witch's resources such as St. Mungo's, these burns would have been painful but easy enough to handle.  But a dishonest witch like Vesta didn't have the luxury of showing her face in such places and time was passing dangerously.

He was what everyone said, Cinaed Tawse.  She didn't believe him straight up when he said he didn't need payment, but it certainly was something for him to say so.  The things a wizard was willing to do for a sister witch...? Even among thieves...

"Yes!"  she agreed eagerly enough, and gritted her teeth for the Apparition even as she took hold of his arm and held herself vice-grip close.  "Do it." 

And she shut her eyes.

Cinaed winced, purely out of sympathy, as the witch grasped his arm, imagining the shot of pain the simple act of flexing the muscles in her arm and shoulder must have brought.  The next few moments, though, were going to bring a whole new level of pain and discomfort as they were yanked through time and space.   With an acknowledging nod of his head, Cinaed turned on the spot, pulling the woman with him.

In the next moment, Cinaed's feet touched ground, again, in the center of a simple, empty, single-car muggle garage.  He held his arm steady, giving Baddrick a moment to get her footing, catch her breath and curse, if needed, before leading the way through the garage's side door into a small laundry and mudroom just inside the house.  Once inside, he sealed the garage door with a flick of his wand before leading the way into a clean, though fairly floral, kitschy sitting room that looked as though it was better suited to a seventy-three-year-old widow than a wizard fugitive.

Cinaed helped Baddrick over to one of the overstuffed chairs.  He disappeared through peach-hued painted archway into the kitchen and returned a moment later with a potion flask and a glass.  "Any clue what he got you with?" Cinaed asked, pouring a measure of the potion into the glass and handing it out to Baddrick.  "Is it your back that got hit the worst?  Any place else?"

Vesta had felt more pain before today.  She had welcomed it in the past time and time again for a taste of the Dark Stuff.  Each time it was worth it, but each time it darkened her soul more and made her just all the more thirsty and willing to pay higher and higher costs to learn. 

But the comparison was no soothing balm and the woman was gritted teeth and tear-streaked face by the time she was sat is someone's pastel parlor.

Vesta knew better than to ask where Tawse had taken them.  Instead she focused on answering his questions so she could get sorted sooner than later.  Then she'd likely have plenty to ask of her own.

"It was my own bloody curse...!" she wailed.  "But fire was the only thing that worked against his - hell and shit - I've not a bloody clue what they were.  Nothing worked but that damned Vengeful Fire!"[1]

"They looked like skeletons, clean to the bone, rattling at me - agh!" she cut herself off as she peeled away her shirt.  She held it in front of her chest with her right arm, leaving her back and shoulders and their nasty burns exposed. 

"There.  That's all there is.  What is that? What are you going to do?"  Even this desperate, Baddrick was suspicious.

1.	I don't know - nasty magical fire spell she used at the time to create a ring around herself.

The house's backdoor slammed open and, in the next moment, a dark-haired toddler came dashing through the living room, the mud covering his bare legs and shorts visible even in the dimly light room.  A slim, silver-haired woman of about seventy-five followed closely on the heels of the toddler, a slightly vacant, blank look in her features. 

"I thought he was supposed to be in bed!" Cinaed barked at the woman who pursued the toddler up the stairs without any indication she'd heard the man.  "Keep Fionn upstairs!" he called after the woman before turning back to Baddrick. 

Cinaed nodded when Baddrick identified the culprit curse.  It was a nasty one; one that really would be better left to St. Mungo's.  If that were an option.

But, it wasn't.  Leaving Cinaed to improvise with whatever bits of information he could patch together from various other home remedies.  The burns along her exposed arms and back glistened and a faint, rank stench of burnt steak seeped from them.  "Shit.  That stuff usually leaves a residue.  Keeps burning even after the fire's gone.  Have you tried to bathe at all?  Wipe it off?" 

"Just drink it," Cinaed insisted, gesturing towards the bottle.  "Some ragged old warlock sold it to me as some cure all elixir.  I think it's nothing more than pepper mixed with heavy booze.  Generally useless, nasty as hell but it seems to dull some of the pain." 

What was he going to do?  Well, truth be told, he was going to wing it.  He was no trained healer and her condition wasn't so dire as to justify kidnapping a St Mungo's healer.  He'd save that option in the event one of his home-remedies made things unexpectedly worse.  "I think we're going to start with soaking in cool water.  I've got a mixture of herbs and such a friend got from St. Mungo's when a tentacle of fiendfyre got away from me."  By the time she was done, maybe he'd know his next step. 

And, Fionn would hopefully be, likewise, clean and in his own pajamas. 

They were interrupted by a little boy and an old witch coming through the house like they owned it.  The look of doubt and revulsion on Baddrick's face was plain and for a moment of sickening doubt, she wondered if they were at Cinead Tawse's gran's...!  He certainly barked like some domestic beast.  What the hell was she thinking? 

Oh right.  She had no where else.  And yes, of course.  She was with Cinead Tawse.  She relaxed a little - he was her best option and he was formidable.

She shook her head 'no' that she hadn't tried anything so far.  She'd toughed it gingerly with a sopping wet rag but it went no where - too painful and not a good reach.  But she did quickly take up the bottle as soon as some explanation to its contents were given.  It could turn her blue for all she cared, so long as there was some promise of dulling the pain or at least dimming out her mind.

She thumbed off the little stopper, and downed it.  It tasted like paint, rancid firewhisky and, as promised, black pepper.  It searched and abrated her throat as it went down, and knocked about in her stomach.  Felt like she'd swallowed a hedgehog!

"Ugh!" she emoted and cough.  She set the bottle down again and covered her mouth.  And her eyelids drooped.

It was only a second or three before her eyes opened again, one before the other, but for all Vesta knew, she'd just been to France and back.

"Bloody mixture..." she marveled from inside a fog.  "Let's do this fecking thing already."  One hand holding her shirt over her bare chest, she had only the other to push herself up from the chair, ready to make her way to some water - the tap in the kitchen.

Cinaed caught the tail end of Baddrick's expression when the child and older woman had passed through the living room and shook his head in what he hoped was a nonplussed and dismissive manner.  "Just a random muggle," he offered in brief explanation.  "She won't remember any of this.  She's just ... babysitting." 

Carrying on with life had been easy when he and Fionn had stayed at his mother's house.  He'd relied extensively on his mother and sisters for help with the lad.  But, since fleeing the Ministry those many months ago, Cinaed had quickly learned raising a child single-handedly was a monumental task.  Especially given his lifestyle.  He couldn't afford to hire a witch nanny and he could trust one even less.  So he'd taken what seemed to be the safest route: imperious some solitary muggle grandmother and let them play nanny. 

Cheap, trustworthy and, in a pinch, entirely disposable. 

Cinaed was grinning when Baddrick opened her eyes, again.  "Tastes like billywig crap, I know, but it's heaven in a bottle."  He'd have to get more of that stuff, somehow.  He only had a handful of flasks left and it was probably best to never run out. 

"There are two baths upstairs," Cinaed offered, pausing at the stairs as Baddrick started towards the kitchen.  He understood her hesitation, though.  Strange man.  Strange house.  Random old muggle.  "But, if you prefer-  I'll get the salt mixture from upstairs."  He started up the stairs towards one of the bedrooms, unsure whether Baddrick would follow or not. 

From inside a dresser in the master bedroom, he pulled out a patched shoulder bag and dumped the entire collection of flasks and jars and cloth sachets onto the bed.  He rummaged amongst them and grabbed a jar and two of the sachets along with a handful of small, cloth-wrapped sponges.  Supplies in hand, he turned to return to Baddrick.

Most of what Cinead Tawse told Baddrick was coming through like a scent more than words, wafting and making some vague sense, more like memory than understanding.  She had a daft kind of blank grin and far-away eyes as she walked after him, each step a deliberate command. 

She kept her shirt over her bare chest, and followed the wall with her other hand as she climbed the steps slowly after the great hulking wizard. 

"Mmm..." she said, very happy with the potion's effects.  The pain was dulled way down, and her mind was taken far out of her body to notice it anyway. 

She blinked and swallowed form the door way wherein Cinead was with his pile of jars and phials on the big bed.

"A muggle," she said slowly, flatly, inhibition and awe of Tawse gone for now. 

"I thought you were Cinaed Tawse," she said.  "I thought you were on our side.  Not their side.  I thought we had to stick together or else the Ministry would have their way and let them all in."

Despite the fogginess of her words, they were recognizably paraphrased from a leaflet that had gone out some months earlier.  It had made its way even to Leeds. 

"A muggle.  Okay," she shrugged.  "Fine.  Maybe you're not him then."

Cinaed considered Baddrick a moment, her questions resonating in his head as he looked from her to the hall behind her where a flat, monotone voice could just be heard over quiet splashes from the bathroom at the end of the hall. 

He supposed some muddling of his reputation was to be expected.  Gone were the days when it was easy for him to get to know someone in person - most would only know him through reputation.  Which left the source in considerable control over how that reputation manifested.  Knockturnites, the Daily Prophet, the Ministry - all were painting their own picture of him.  It all came down to which picture people saw first and which they believed.

But - the residue from the flames that had caught Baddrick in the back was still slowly burning away at her flesh.  The snake oil would dull the pain for only so long.  If they dallied much longer, the pain would come back - with a vengeance. 

Cinaed slipped into the bathroom just off the main bedroom and emptied to contents of the sachets into the bath and, with a flick of his wand, filled it with warm water.  He stepped back out of the room, gestured an invitation to Baddrick before plopping himself in a kitschy floral chair in the corner of the bathroom by the fireplace - well out of line of sight of the bathroom. 

"It's not ideal," Cinaed finally admitted.  "Unfortunately, given the circumstances, I needed someone whose memories could be readily disposable.  Muggles can have their use.  In every strong society, there's a noble class and a serfdom." 

"If the Ministry has their way, they'll continue to feed us lies about how their restrictions are intended for our safety.  That it is us that should fear muggles.  Did you know there's a professor at Hogwarts teaching young wizards that muggles are more advanced than us?  If it were up to the Ministry, they would have us all wearing nothing but blue jeans and hoodies so we blend in with them.  I want my son to have the freedom to be proud of who he is and to put any muggle in his place who denies him that right.  Muggles should fear us, if they step out of line.  But, the Ministry would have it be the other way around."

"Hmmm...." she mumbled as Tawse became articulate about the politics.  It sounded more familiar than the muggle in his house had seemed, and Vesta found herself comforted.  Finally, hearing real words that validated her own fears and concerns with the world today.

Vesta came into the room more when the tall wizard disappeared into the bathroom and began to fill the tub.  When he left it vacant, she shuffled past him and swung the door shut half way.

The water in the tub was moving and churning on its own and there was an iridescent slick on the top of it, reflecting many colors that rolled together.  Vesta hissed sharply as she began to move and undress.  Peeling clothing off and letting it drop onto the plush lavender rug.  She didn't know if she dreaded or yearned for the the potion in the tub.  Would it hurt more? Would it save her skin?

The thought of losing it hastened her pace.  The snake oil was wearing off and with it some of the fogginess of the initial hit.

"Those dogs," she said, her voice carrying enough to make it to the bedroom.  "I'm a witch, for sakes' alive.  Our world shrinks by the day, our old Arts are being lost... There's little to do but scrape by unless you go for supporting muggle-loving causes," she griped.

"They'll see though.  When the roof falls in on us all, they'll see what fools the were to break down the walls..."  She'd read that one too. 

"And, then if you're wandless..."  Cinaed trailed off, shaking his head.  Jobs for those not caught up with the Ministry's pro-muggle rhetoric were few and far between.  Employers were technically not supposed to require job seekers to produce their wand but many found a way to work the request in.  There were even fewer that were legitimately available to ex-Azzies like him.

Even before he'd become a fugitive. 

There was only so much a wizard could put up with, though.  "My son had been adopted to a blood traitor and her muggle husband.  Without my knowledge or consent.  They were convincing him a muggle was his father."  Now, he was a fugitive because he refused to let that happen.  "They're even willing to brainwash children to pursue their agenda."

And, blood was blood.  If he had it to do over, he was fairly certain he'd do the same thing. 

"What business did you have with a necromancer?" Cinaed asked, finally pushing himself out of the chair to rummage once more through the myriad of jars and flasks and bags of leafage.  He found a jar filled with a quivering, silvery gel, another with a thick, gooey, sticky mixture and a packet filled with white and black powder. 

Now nude of her tattered layers of clothing, Vesta stepped into the tub and braced herself as she lowered herself in.  She shut her eyes tight and gritted her teeth as the burns made contact with the liquid in the bath.  For a few moments, her mind and eyes were clouded by the buzzing of searing pain, like static.  But as soon as she was submerged, and there was no longer that advancing line of the liquid's surface traveling up, the pain abated.  And she breathed.

All the while listening to the absurd but typical story of Cinead Tawse's kidnapped son.  Kidnapped and won back properly by the sound of it.  And how he was being hunted for it?  Rubbish!  He was a hero.

The topic turned to Shang.

"None!" she insisted.  "I didn't know he was a bloody necromancer.  He had something I wanted and I planned to take it from him, but he seemed to know what I was going to do and ambushed me.  He's insane," said the thief.