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There was a minority of paperwork to be attended to, but it required some signatures, and for his countersignature as a witness. For once some of the papers were entirely above board, so he felt happy to commit his name to them. After all, he was Ira's tenant, he had witnessed the signing of hundreds of documents for clients, friends and family.

In Ira's Atreus office, that afternoon, there was a definite elephant. Johann could have avoided meeting her by instructing Layton or someone else to witness rather than work an early day at the Ministry and come visit her late afternoon. Linguist and client had seen precious little of each other in the past few months, not anything of significance since November really. It wasn't for purposeful avoidance - he had a feeling Ira would almost crop up by evil coincidence if he had tried to actively avoid her. It was more for a busy Christmas. It all seemed a long time ago now, mid-January, but early December was a recurring preoccupation.

The economic conversation paused, the scratching of a quill the only noise as Madam Almasy signed the last place marked. Stood obediently and respectfully at her left side as she signed, Johann fiddled with his own quill between his fingers, gaze unfocused, frowning. A small part of his attention watched her complete a signature so that he could receive the page as it slid to him to sign beside.

Ira Almasy did nothing without flourish and there was no reason for this not to be extended to her signature. The delicate Y trailed off smoothly in a wisp of dark red ink and she laid her eagle feather quill above the parchment, horizontal, before lifting the page to give the mark a cursory confirmation.

It had been some time since she was in the same private space as her friend’s new little toy. Johann Storm was an exemplary worker, obedient to a fault and so very efficient from what Layton had mentioned in passing. Nonetheless there were… suspicions. Always, she surmised that most in her employment possessed some inconvenient manner of scruples.

Seeing the wizard in-person served as a reminder, did it not? And she so enjoyed to be herself reminded of that business with his father. A shame about him. The boy was proving satisfactory but not quite so disagreeable to regular sensibilities.

“I take it this is the last?” Ira lowered the sheet, sliding it to her left without looking at him. The large desk in the centre of her office was reflected in front them in a mirror that ran the length of the long room.  She glanced up at this reflection to consider Johann in it, a wall of books and scrolls towering behind them.

"Yes Madam," Johann replied, scrawling his own rather less flamboyant signature in the recognisable blue he preferred to write with, printing his name beneath and his occupation before adding the date. "The last thing to sign, yes. I'll file those for you first thing on Monday morning." He preoccupied himself with crisp envelopes, glancing up as he felt a gaze land on him from the mirror ahead. One never could quite trust a mirror at Atreus, but that did make things a lot more interesting on a morning.

"I do have one query though, if you have a moment?" There was a tentative, polite tone to the query. The forms slid away cleanly and he set them down on the corner of her desk. His quill had found a home behind his ear without thinking, the pale feather poking out at a jaunty angle. "First of December, last year. I carried out a task for you." He took a step back with his right foot, turning ever so slightly towards her. If he had been more polite he might have returned to the other side of her desk, but he didn't want to pose this too formally - it was a silly notion, he was sure of it, but it would put his mind at rest.

"A shipment for Drammes. All to plan, but a few days later, what with the newspapers full of contamination, and us both falling ill, I had a notion. Quite ridiculous, I am sure," he gave a shrug and a hopeful smile, "but I did not ask the nature of my visit. They were entirely unrelated incidents, were they not, Madam?"

As she watched his twin in the mirror turn to her, Ira paralleled the movement and looked down at him with a faint smile. Charming. More manners than his predecessor. She rested her right hand on the desk, tilting her head much in the way of her niece, as if though considering a particularly toothsome entry in the à la carte

It had taken him long enough.

“Do you believe in coincidence, Mister Storm?” she met him in the eye, and then allowed her gaze to flicker to the quill at his ear. “Serendipity?” Ira lifted her hand and gracefully plucked the feather, to examine in an idle manner.

Her finger stroked its bendable spine, down to the metal tip where she made as if to prick herself on its inky edge. The sweet fragrance of perfume - floral, foreign - drifted between them as it had countless of times. With other men, other meetings. Distant lands and times. It tethered those memories together with the ongoing manifestation of this moment.

“I am, myself, an avid fan of intelligent design.” Ira looked up at her guest once more, pointedly. “There are no coincidences in our world."

He blinked in surprise as Ira pulled his quill from his ear, not anticipating such a motion. She had such grace for a tall lady, one who managed to make him feel small even when she leaned a hand on her desk as she did now. His eyes followed her hand's investigation of it. It was nothing particularly special, just a nice quill to sign with rather than one of the cheaper ones he rattled notes off with. It had less liability to blot. Still, it was a little informal of him to shove it behind his ear.

As she spoke again, he glanced up to meet her eyes and blinked slowly, his hands at his sides, fingertips pressing gently into the sides of his legs over his navy suit trousers. He was still dressed for the office, though no tie today to adorn his white shirt. Balfour would be disappointed if they arrived home together later, though there was still a faint mark from him just where white collar met neck.

There are no coincidences.

"But spurious correlations, Madam." Johann replied, ever hopeful. The words hung in the air between them. He knew exactly what she meant. Ira Almasy never wasted words on idle chatter when business was on the table. His lips attempted to form words, but the air had left his lungs. The smiles and meandering way he had asked fell away as his face dropped, the colour in his cheeks fading.

"Ho-" He had been about to ask how, but realised at once he knew exactly how. He had been the one to fill out all of those forms while the anonymous wizards had obliviated Werner[1]. The one to be so confident in his abilities to learn a signature to reproduce under pressure and accurately complete paperwork for a former client to benefit a present contract. Arrogant, so pleased to demonstrate how clever he was. He wet his lips, took a shallow breath.

"Why?"

Mm, voskhititel’nyy.[2] He must have held real hope to be so disappointed in the response.

Ira blinked slowly at this and in a quick motion slipped Johann’s quill behind her own ear, feathery elegance against ghostly tresses. They always wanted to know Why. Their conceptions of life revolved around it - rationality, reason. If a person is murdered there must be a motive. If many people are murdered there must be motivation. And perhaps they are not wrong to think so, for why would anyone go through such trouble at all?

“I was bored,” she held his gaze calmly but her hand had shifted every so slightly against the table surface. It eased down on the hilt of her wand, which she had left by the leather blotter. “And it is a terrible sin, you must agree, for a lady to be bored in these times.”

Worse even than being a source of boredom. Ira gleaned the little details of Johann’s countenance, genuine curiosity underneath her obvious satisfaction. This was a step up from attempted strangulation as far as reveals went. And most interesting of the wizard to be so contained.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy watching them dance, Little Wolfgang."

There was a dull thudding in his ears, his heart's adagio tempo affrettando as his stomach dropped. His voice echoed terrible but he did not consciously speak it, bright blue eyes not shifting from her face in alarm. When Ira Almasy was bored, she contaminated supplies for the national wizarding hospital, resulting in tens of deaths. She paid him good money to assist. To be clever and to see a way through the security and succeed where it was deemed impossible. A puzzle, a problem, even if the puzzle solver was subsequently in peril. No worse than a cursebreaker's risks one spoke within.

Dance? He felt like he was the one dancing, an uncoordinated marionette with Ira at the top of the strings. She meant the healers, she meant those who helped him achieve her goals.

He'd done it.
Him.
For her.

The rest of the room seemed to fade away, just a focus on the two of them. His mind's eye flitted to Werner's hat still stuck fast to his head even after he was stunned and the anxious need to get started on the work. Then to Arcturus bent over his young patient's bed across the ward after his gruff discharge, overworked, stressed, upset. Finally, Balfour's tears, though those were pushed roughly from his thoughts as if someone had punched him in the gut. He scrabbled back to the present, missing Almasy's subtle move with her hand. All the colour had drained from his face.

You did.
So powerful.
Little Wolfgang.

"No." Johann's response caught in his throat. It lacked commitment, conflicting with the feelings of achievement as well as disgust with himself. He took a shallow breath, lips apart, eyes wide. "No, not at all, not to watch them work out the puzzle. They were too slow… why I didn't want to believe it was … us." The moment the word slipped from his lips he clapped a hand to them, as if he might be sick, and turned away from her desk to his right, curling over.

1.	1st December, 2010 Fake, Forge, Fabricate
2.	Russian, “delightful” or “delicious”

Her chest was aflame with inquisitiveness, unable to help contemplating what must be running through that beautiful head of his. Ira had no need to limit her curiosity, and her eyes flashed  amber as she reached out with her mind to skim the thoughts beneath the black curls…

Images danced, nauseatingly fluid in their disorganisation, the surface of an ocean that demanded tempest upon tempest across its breaking waves. A restlessness that seemed to traverse up the narrow expanse of the wizard’s spine and right through to her own nervous system like indecisive lightning.

And faces, she recognised. Balfour. Darling Balfour, crying? It incited an odd feeling in her. A spark of irritation with her friend, for letting anything come so close to injuring him. But the irritation was mild, so mild as she picked up on the other thoughts speaking strongly through the tumult.

Little Wolfgang liked it.

Ira breathed, the air in her lungs hot, tilting her chin up as one might after emerging from water. It was the only sign of her Leglimency being at all used.

“Come, now…” she chided and clasped a spindly hand to his shoulder as soon as he turned away. “You don’t need to hide from me. Your conscience is a poor price. Look what good you arouse in this society. How insipid they would be, without tragedy.”

Why, she could hardly imagine a wizarding world without these events of late. Indescribably dull, simply going about their tedious lives. No storms. No flames. The witch squeezed his shoulder, nails digging in sharply.

“Our mutual acquaintance -" Ira thought again of the tears and she curled her fingers around the wand on the desk, behind her. “- has survived much worse. You have nothing to fear.” At least not for now, she knew.

Her clasp upon his shoulder made him look back to her, his right hand hanging in the air where his lips had been a moment before. His gaze was uneasy, his mouth pressed into a thin line, the corners turned down, his shoulders stooped. He didn't know what was worse at that moment, that they had done what he had feared, or that he now agreed with her over insipid society.

"But does he?" Johann asked, unblinking, quickly, statue still. The conflict cleared like a drop of soap in oil with the mention of the man he loved. Every death, every stupid, arrogant decision he had made to oblige Ira shoved clear. His gaze focused her angular face with absolute clarity, intently studying her as if she were a puzzle. "I know enough about the workings of your business, Ira."

There it was. That glint of something more than survival but not quite anger. Primal, though, in spite of what intellect brewed. Ira knew a thing or two about primal feeling - it was subtext in everything they did, these suppressed peoples. There was nothing suppressed here. No. Merely allude to a lover and the dying candle flared like the noon day sun.

A shortness of breath stirred in the pits of her stomach. Traces of nausea from her fleeting voyage into Johann’s mind, serving to only exacerbate her irritation.

“Do you threaten me?” she was smiling, teeth keen with amusement. Ira didn’t wait for a response, all at once in motion. Pleased to be in motion. Her body was made for this; for the swift and powerful left grasp that closed on Johann’s neck, for the severity with which her elbow dipped and then drove sharply upward - catching him with a sickening crunch as it fracture that dignified nose.

Her cheeks bloomed with colours of a younger woman’s exhilaration and she forced him back into the bookshelf, careful of the angle. He had to be able to see them in the mirror, for this, yes. Perfect.

“Courageous all of a sudden, are you.” Ira hissed and her armed hand, with surprising tenderness, slipped past his jacket to Johann's side. The wand pressed itself urgently by the small of his back. Blood trickled down the pale face, enchantingly striking in composition. “He was as well. Foolish man. What did Balfour Spectre ever say of me? I do wonder if he is so marvellous a keeper of secrets as he claims.”

Never had she trespassed that particular mind, out of some shared sense of courtesy. The secrets between them existed precariously and with only trust to sustain them.

Wrong. That was the wrong choice. Stupid, idiot mouth. He should have learned. The same mistake over and over. When he'd grown a conscience about this time a year ago, Vedir had instructed Landis to keep a close eye as they worked. Morgan had been less than impressed at his panic as their volunteer ended up a liquid mess on the floor[1]. The year before that, he'd tried to unsuccessfully inform on his client to the German Ministry, forcing his flight to Britain. The annual rise of conscience in and around Christmas would get him killed.

Her right elbow snapped his head back while her fingernails clawed into the sides of his throat, making new, angry welts above the marks Balfour had left with his teeth in an intense moment. His mouth came open and the blood began in an instant, fuelled by a hammering pulse. The cry was muffled, nose cavity suddenly filled and unavailable for resonance. It was warm, wet and light flashed before his eyes. He screwed them shut a moment as he reeled.

Such was his surprise that as he went to raise a hand to interact with her attack he was far too slow, thrown back into the bookcases behind them. They rattled and the edges met his ribs and spine with their narrow edges. Johann's head came forward, eyes wide though they watered. He gasped beneath the tension on his windpipe as Ira's face closed in, the quill miraculously still behind her ear. His lips formed no but without air in his lungs to form it audibly. Blood ran over his lips, into his mouth where he could taste the iron, and off the point of his chin, spattering his white shirt. Across the room he caught a glimpse of himself, crimson across his pale face over Ira's shoulder.

His right hand reached for her left wrist, gripping there briefly just as her wand found his left side beneath his jacket, pressing painfully into the flesh with only his shirt between it and the tip. His left arm instinctively tried to push it away, but Ira was physically stronger. For all his recovery and the good food over Christmas, he lacked the muscle to fight.

Breathlessly he attempted to hook his fingers between his throat and the crook of her thumb, pulling down to release enough burden to breathe.

"Nothing!" He gasped, sounding muffled, panic audible as well as conspicuous in his response, "Nothing! He has told me nothing of you, you're just his landlord, you're just my landlord!"

Ira snorted in disbelief. Without even trying to read that sickly brain, she flattened her wand against his side and whetted her nails so that they dug through the thin material. Just his landlord. Why, she didn’t think the dragon handler was capable of speaking about her in such uncomplicated terms.

“Nothing?” she purred as a smug, contented light entered her eye. He might be telling the truth. There was a possibility, though she still exerted  more force against his throat, through the fumbling. “So secretive around his German toy?”

The nails that arched and scratched along the small of his back suddenly froze, jutted deeper. Unnaturally so, like five fine daggers that grew slowly and painfully into his flesh. Claws. She felt him bleed, wet and warm.

But as it happened, her face took on a strange appearance. Colourless skin blushing tan and gentle, alien features sifting like desert sand, resembling a familiar physiognomy… not precisely that of Balfour. A younger version, the one she kept in her mind like a precious relic to examine with pleasure from time to time. His penetrating eyes stared intoxicatingly at Johann, licking his lips as she knew he did so often in excitement.

“I did so love to taste him.” Ira’s voice was deep now, and she leaned into the wizard’s blooded face and unhurriedly licked a dribble of blood from the side of his mouth. “Sweet. You must agree."

1.	23rd December, 2009 It is the Weight, Not Numbers

The tip of her wand replaced with her nails just married the pinprick pain to his neck as his lungs burned for lack of air, hand tugging to keep enough pressure off to inhale. His face grimaced with the grasp from both of her hands and he struggled, left hand moving from trying to brace away from her to joining his other at his neck instinctively. His waist contorted futilely away from her right hand, but the pain only increased.

Unable to stop himself he cried out in a broken tone as her nails became claws and pressed into him, puncturing skin, reaching nerves below.
"Please," he gasped, both hands now to hers at his neck, pulling down. The change in the face right in his made him believe at first he was hallucinating. Ira faded away before him and in her place was Balfour, loving, magnificent, Balfour. It wasn't him at all, despite the fact Balfour wore Ira's dress and heels that he could see between tears in the mirror, it was not the Balfour of today, but one he had seen in photographs.

Her tongue, as him, against his face induced a desperate writhe from the wizard pinned against the shelves. How dare she! How dare she make him deceive the hospital and let it kill all those people, how dare she be so proud, how dare she attack him, and how dare she take Balfour's face. All that ruddy anger pent up inside from September, the grotesque side, the side that never saw the light of day was here now. The voices were braying as they had done in the caliginous moments of withdrawal. Kill her, snap her, take her now.

His skin crawled with the touch of her tongue, and he made a split second decision, seeing red. Johann's right hand slid from Ira's thumb joint to the little finger of the hand which gripped his throat. He snapped it down forcefully, baring his teeth as he did with the effort. He hoped to give her enough pain to instinctively release, just to wrench it, but there was a strange give as he yanked. At the same moment, his left foot came up, slammed back hard against the books behind him to help him push his weight forwards. This sent his forehead crashing straight into hers. His left hand went to her clawed hand sinking into his back. For a horrible moment, balance was forced out of kilter, his head screamed and there was a terrible tearing of flesh behind him.

He would regret doing that.

As animalistic a response, Ira flashed her teeth back at the wizard and sharpened them - each tooth an ivory dagger set in deadly rows against one another. She didn’t need to see the reflection to know what it looked like: Spectre’s wolfish face and his feverish gaze, eyebrows arched angrily at the pain in her hand.

So infuriated she was with this trivial affliction that the suddenness of his head meeting hers nearly drove the witch all the way back.

But no, she deepened her claws into his side as they pulled to gain traction, and she felt all that beautiful red gushing beneath Johann’s jacket. Ira retracted her nails abruptly and gripped her wand with vehemence, releasing his throat altogether.

“And here I thought we were getting along prodigiously,” she snarled and brandished the wand[1]. An invisible hand seized a hold of him by the neck, and with another flick sent Johann ramming right into the desk so that he faced the mirror directly. Ira twisted around on her heels so that she could grab him from behind.

Her left hand went right around to the nape of his neck, sharp knee pressing into the wizard’s hip as she aimed the tip of her wand for the open wound at the small of his back. Ira hesitated. The dark blue eyes snapped to the one in the mirror to meet the expression there, savouring it. “A blessing, he called you.”

She forced the wand into his back, not with flames as she had done to his partner nearly a decade ago, but an effortless stinging hex. It penetrated the flesh - sizzling - and she wrenched it out before driving it in again, all the time staring at their reflection.

And then, almost like she’d been stung by a thought, Ira let go. Her right arm was bloodied, sore. She looked down at it with a vacant expression, indignation disappearing as quickly as it had come. No doubt he wouldn’t forgive her for killing the linguist. There had to be something to put back together, pathetic as it was. Ira left him slumped against the surface, strewn with papers and rich stationery, no longer paying mind.

They wrestled but momentarily as the claws dragging through the small of his back brought forth a yell of raw pain, his whole body arching away from the source as the pain shot through him. A glimpse of sharp white teeth as it happened mingling with memories of Balfour's wolf form launching for him and then Hannah at full moon, snapping her jaws and tearing into his father. His heart rattled in his ribs so hard it was a wonder it didn't give up. No sooner had they torn but they were gone, and amongst the sharp sting of flesh torn to ribbons came the same warm, wet feeling that smothered his face. The blood from his nose still came as thick and fast as before but it was smeared up his cheeks, over his hands and on his attacker's face in return. It wasn't Ira's face, nor was it truly Balfour's. It was one that would revisit him in darkest moments.

The desk met him with force he fell to his knees before it, the little air in his lungs knocked clean out, and ribs taking the brunt as he was forced over it. Ordinarily to be in the same position over a busy desk would mean for an entirely different, pleasurable situation. In the mirror he saw himself restrained, bright blue eyes fiercely burning from his battered face. Ira loomed over him in Balfour's form, her wand plunging down towards him like a knife. He saw it in just enough time to anticipate it, but not the pain. Blinding, paralysing pain. He howled, bloodied hands bracing against the paperwork blindly, trying to force himself up, only to be pinned down again as the pain came again, trapped.

Almasy's eyes did not leave his face in their reflection all the while, taking pleasure in his clamour. He lowered his face to her leather blotter and sobbed, feeling unable to fight back against it, beaten. This was not how he had ever dreamed this situation would play out, and he was seven leagues under the water he'd only just learned to keep afloat in. He did not want the last thing he saw to be his lover's face stolen by this revolting inhuman being.

At once, the weight lifted from him, and he gasped, expecting the final blow to come, to crack his skull open right there between her ornate ink pots. But it didn't come.

He lifted his head at once, head swinging left and right, the mirror, the room around him was empty. There was a gap ajar, the hallway leading into her floor was ever so slightly open, the air pressure pulling it to in her wake. He scrabbled to his feet, overbalancing and pitching over the corner of her desk, leaving a bloody handprint on the crisp envelopes he had only just filled before the assault had begun.

Like his life depended on it - and for all he knew, it did - Johann fled for the door back to the lift, leaving a wake of bloody smeared handprints as he passed back out through Ira's office door. He barrelled into the lift and crashed against the mirrored back wall of the lift. The doors slid shut behind him, closing on a trail of blood droplets on the floor revealing his escape route like Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumbs.

Alone in the gently descending lift, Johann collapsed in on himself, sobbing quietly. Above him, his repellent mirror images roared with silent laugher.


End

1.	Mobilicorpus