6:30 pm - 4 November 2011
Virgil, Nicholas, and Ariadne's Flat
Diagon Alley
London
Directly following [Nov 4] Cinnamon and Cloves, Seek Ye the Door

Nemo was curled up in the corner of the couch, her face blank. The whole ordeal had lasted less than an hour, but she was exhausted. Weary from the strangeness of it, weary from hazy concern for Abby, and from being well out of her depth. And worried, certainly, for her part in it. If she hadn't insisted, would they have followed the man? If they hadn't followed him, would this have happened to Abby?

From that cold little street that Nemo never knew existed, with row houses packed in tight, Nemo had Side-Along Apparated with Abby the short distance to Virgil, Nick, and Ariadne's building. She knew where it was from when she crashed there in October, when most of the residents had been some percent naked. But the place was very different now. Abby and Nemo hadn't spoken on the way up the stairs, and when the door opened to them, Nemo had walked directly to the couch without saying anything to Virgil.

She was trying to decide how to describe it. Abby said Virgil would know what was 'wrong with her'.

"Something just happened," she said finally. "We were following this guy from Alohomocha because Abby thought she recognized him, and then Abby, like..."

Nemo made a wiping motion in front of her face, as if pull on a mask. "She dissociated or something. Like she was there, but wasn't there. And she said you'd know what to do."

She glanced at Abby, apologetic that she'd just been speaking about her like she wasn't in the room.

Abby followed Nemo, almost on her heels, her hand resting against the front door as it closed behind them. Thank Merlin, light and warmth and safety. She remained standing, hugging her arms, looking down at her shoes, bright against her dark robe.

When Nemo spoke, she looked at Nemo for a long moment, then looked at Virgil, blinking in surprise to see him there. They were in his flat though, weren't they. His and Nicholas' and Ari's. The place smelled faintly of fresh bread and smoke. A tiny tuft of white cat fur had attached itself to her shoe. They weren't at her own flat. It took her a moment to remember why.

She was so tired. It felt like she'd been running for a long time. And the silence was so heavy. Her head felt light, somehow. It didn't hurt her at all. It just made everything else loud. There were clocks ticking somewhere. Footsteps from people in other flats. The sound of herself. Her heart beating fast, her breath, still shallow in her chest. Did they hear that? Could they hear her?

She looked at the door. Closed. She looked at Virgil. There. Nemo was there, quiet but there on the couch. Why was Nemo looking sorry? Abby felt sorry. She looked at the door again. Closed.

Abby looked at Virgil.

"She's... gone now," she said quietly, her throat feeling raw. "Not gone-gone. Hiding. Nemo helped me here."

Abby looked around the flat, shame and anxiety burning bright in her. Flower girl was gone. Gone but not totally gone. She and Nemo were here, in Virgil's flat. She glanced at him, swallowing.

He had been home for a couple of hours when the girls had knocked on the door. His hair was still wet from the bath; he smelled of cigarettes, coffee, and the slightest trace of a vanilla cologne. The flat was nice and cosy, blankets spread out in their haphazard living room. It had begun to rain outside.

At first, Virgil felt confused. He had been sent home from level nine earlier than usual after a tiring day in the Death Chamber and everything was beginning to feel like one thing after another.

            "And she said you'd know what to do."

Did she? She trusted him like that? His countenance was blank, indifferent, but he watched Abby as she roused herself from a daze. So. Flower Girl had come out again and caused mischief. Even poor Nemo looked exhausted. "Not gone-gone. Hiding," the squib clarified. "Nemo helped me here."

Virgil went to her without a word, taking her hand and leading her to their one armchair closest to the kitchen.

"Sit. I'll make more coffee," he turned and drew his wand to tap against the cafetiere on the kitchen table - the water inside rose higher, bubbling hot. "What happened exactly? What did..." Virgil took down two  enamel mugs, looking over his shoulder at Nemo. "I mean, what was said in the dissociative state?"

This was trouble. Abby should have gone to see Yavin ages ago. Just because she was managing to live her life, that didn't mean there wasn't something wrong beneath the surface.

He poured two cups before sending them towards each of the visitors, floating slowly to avoid spillage. Virgil leaned back against the kitchen counter with his own mug in his hands. "Abby has a pentral problem. Someone's trying to set up camp in her head," he glanced at Abby with a dry smile.

"Nice to have you back."

Nemo caught to coffee and held it, warm in her hands.

What was said? Nemo noted the question was in the passive voice, which she wouldn't have if the evening hadn't been an out of body experience.

What was said? She furrowed her brow. It had been so gradual, and Abby'd been a little spacey for all the short while Nemo'd known her. She had to retrace her thoughts almost to the end of their path to spot an utterance from behind Abby's eyes.

"She called him 'dad'," Nemo replied, another awkward glance at Abby. Did she really not remember any of it?

"The man we followed. But he didn't know us. She was talking about a lake house. And mittens."

Virgil said a word Nemo hadn't heard.

"Did you say pentral? What's that? She's possessed?"

The only possessions Nemo had ever heard of were demonic, so why was Virgil so chill about it.

Abby slipped her shoes off and curled her legs in on the seat of the armchair, trying to relax. She pulled at the collar of her dark red robes. Her red, braided hair coiled cold against her neck. Nothing really felt like hers, except for her bright shoes.

The coffee cup warmed her cold fingers. Virgil told Nemo she had a pentral problem. She didn't care, she didn't mind. She glanced at Nemo, then at Virgil, offering him a slight, relieved smile. He was helping. She knew he would.

Abby blinked at Nemo. Her dad? She'd called that old guy dad? What in the world?

Wow, and still nothing from the pentral.

"Did you say pentral? What's that? She's possessed?"

"It's like possession," she said after a long moment, still reeling. She should be an expert at explaining by now, but she didn't always have the energy. "It's- she's one of the souls who was killed at the lakehouse," She looked at Nemo with a touch of nervousness, gauging her reaction. Was killed. Lori and Lee had done that, but she didn't want to think about them now. Was she making sense? Maybe Virgil could explain better.

Abby rubbed her hand over her face, out of habit. Her face, her head felt fine. She blew on the coffee, and held it close to her mouth, distracted by the tumult of her thoughts.

"I don't understand why she- it can't be possible? That he's her dad? He's so much older. He didn't see me - her," she fumbled over her words. She remembered the word 'squib'. "He was just upset that I - we followed..."

She trailed off. Shit! They'd followed someone, stalked someone. She stared into space, numbly horrified, and finally took a sip of her coffee.

From outside their exchange and what must have been a very confusing incident, Virgil could draw a sense of coherency. Flower Girl had taken over Abby because she had recognised somebody who was either her father or who looked very similar to her father. But why bring up the Lake House, or mittens for that matter?

            "Did you say pentral? What's that? She's possessed?" Nemo clearly hadn't been reading the papers.
"It's like possession," the other girl tried to explain.

"Pentrals are souls taken from murdered people, and then trapped." Virgil interjected when Abby failed to elaborate any further. "It's not exactly possession... more like an awful sort of timeshare, two souls and one body." People were basically real estate to the disembodied souls.

He sipped his coffee and joined them properly in the living room, perched on the arm of the couch whilst facing Abby. Virgil lowered the walls in his mind, reaching out to feel the anxiousness emanating off her while she spoke.

"I think it could be her father, depending on how long ago your pentral was murdered and kept. Souls don't age do they?" his mouth turned down into a skeptical grimace. "Don't worry about him. Nobody was hurt."

Virgil glanced at Nemo, who wasn't exactly in a complacent mood either, and he wondered if it would be better if they would relax. In his mind, he wound together as much calmness as he could, like winding up a ball of wool, and then carefully let it drop into both of their heads.

"Things got out of hand but you're both safe," he reminded them at the same time, "or, I mean, all three of you are. Do you think you would recognise this man if you saw him again, by the way?"

Nemo looked at the mug in her hands rather than make any eye contact with Abby or Virgil as they explained the inexplicable. It was more than a year ago that Nemo had come on her own to London, taking a massive risk, and since arriving had been in too many perilous scrapes. It didn't do math that tonight would have her as shaken up as this. Nothing had happened. Virgil was calm. Abby was fine. So why did she feel so tense?

As Virgil joined them, Nemo was too distracted to notice the sudden onset of calmness because she'd just remembered something.

"Once a time, of bone and flesh..." she whispered the tune slowly. It was a song she didn't know she knew, and even in the singing of it, she only remembered one word at a time, as if the preceding word summoned the next from thin air.

"Severed now, ne'er to rest, these broken folk, once warm and gentle..."

Even as the words came back, she was trying to remember where she'd first heard them. The sense memory was scratchy and tinny, and something smelled bad.

"...are now Wraith's Feast, a pity, a Pentral."

Nemo stopped and almost smiled, still searching herself for the memory but also a little enchanted to have remembered something she didn't know she'd forgotten, a song even.

She chanced a glance at Abby. "I mean, yeah. I've seen him before. And, uh, we know where he lives now," she added with a cringey giggle.

"But Virgil, he was old," she glanced at him, bringing her hand to her mouth to bite on a nail.

Not old wizard-old, but at least in his seventies. Much older than her own father. She found it hard to relate the two, to reconcile the ages. How old was Flower Girl? At times, Abby thought of her as precisely that - girl. Angry, vulnerable. Confused about the simplest of interactions, surprised by the smallest of kindnesses, unsure how to react. The girl felt safe with people like Moira and Raine. Nemo too. Other times, the pentral acted like an adult, someone mature and confident about her decisions. The pentral related to Aileen more than she did Abby, then.

Virgil was right, it could be possible, depending on how long ago Flower Girl died. Abby hated to think of anyone dead and trapped for so many years. That had to have a damaging effect. That might explain the pentral's strange shifts in behavior.

Her thoughts settled and calmed enough for her to sip at her coffee. How long had the Lilly siblings been killing people? The question bothered her, but she let it go. A whispered, singing voice interrupted her thoughts, and Abby listened, cocooned safely in her chair, tracing it back to Nemo, who was taking the news so well.

Abby looked at her for a long moment, the pentral's steady gaze flickering under Abby's sad one. It lasted just a moment before the pentral retreated again.

"We do," Abby nodded, hiding a grimace behind her coffee mug. "You do," she smiled a bit at Nemo, but it didn't reach her eyes. "I remember a shop with a crow on it, and brightly painted doors. A blue door?"

The door the old man had been walking towards.

She looked at Virgil, needing to voice something important before she forgot it. "I spotted him weeks ago, or she did, and," Abby paused, expecting resistance in her head and feeling none. "I think she kept heading back to the coffee shop thinking she'd see him again."

He fell silent, watching Nemo sing and glad for the momentary distraction. It gave him time to think - but where in Merlin's name had she picked up that song? She didn't even seem aware of the pentrals in the papers until just now. Virgil drank his coffee absently, forcing the frown off his pale brow.

Abby was still processing and when she started speaking again, he turned his full attention back to her. "You should try to talk her out of doing that again. It could go badly if it's just you and Flower Girl..."

Virgil glanced at Nemo and smiled very slightly, grateful that she had been there to help their squib friend. The wizarding world is a dangerous place if you're wandless; even more dangerous if you're friendless.

"You need to see Yavin," he told Abby with a matter-of-fact tone and put his mug aside. "This can't keep going on. Do you want me to find out who the man is? If one of you could picture him in your minds, I'll do the rest when I have time. I promise," the wizard raised one solemn hand and arched a single eyebrow, "I won't do anything dangerous or lead him back to either of you. Thespian's honour."

It was a eerie feeling, wondering who she'd been talking to over coffee and tea these past couple months: Abby or 'Flower Girl'. Abby or the Pentral, a poor murdered soul of who? The young-dead daughter of a cranky old wizard, maybe. As bizarre as it had all been, now the haze was clearing Nemo didn't think they'd been in any real danger.

'I coulda took him,' Nemo thought and stood up from the couch, certain she wouldn't have let things escalate that far.

Dante claimed her recently warmed and vacated seat. Nemo scritched his neck. Virgil was recommending the peculiar Yavin Morgenthau as the next step for Abby's predicament. She scoffed and supplied Virgil's inner eye with as clear a memory as she could of a very short, round older gentleman with a half-head of wild black hair and an infectiously manic cat-grin.

"It's up to you, Abby," Nemo found herself saying. There was a little part of Nemo that was gently protective of Abby, bristling for her. Whatever was happening to her, it was happening to her. And whatever came next, certainly if someone from Virgil's work was going to be involved, Nemo had to hope Abby went in with her own feet under her.

Talk Flower Girl out of it. Abby wasn't sure Virgil understood how hard it was to wrest her will back from the stubborn spirit once she'd set her mind on something. She'd given up earlier that evening. It had felt freeing, but frightening. 

Maybe he did understand. She did need to see Yavin. Abby nodded, then shook her head at his offer.

"No, you don't have to, Virgil," she said worriedly, hearing Nemo echo her thoughts. He didn't have to investigate, and he shouldn't - the last thing she wanted was for her friends to get further caught up in this strange mystery. It was the only way she could really protect them and protect what remained of her own privacy. Perhaps once she'd spoken to Yavin, she'd feel better about it, but for now, she wasn't sure she wanted to know.

Abby straightened and sipped at her coffee, gathering her courage. "Is your boss free next week?"

She spoke with the teasing tone of a personal assistant who had memorized Solomon Carstairs' schedule.

"I'll send him a note first thing when I get into the office on Monday. How surprised he'll be, watching the memo zip over your desk and land on his."

Abby met Virgil's eyes, totally intending to do this, meaning it completely when she spoke. She wasn't sure why she hadn't, yet.

A smile tugged at her mouth. "Does he even have a desk? Or an office? Nemo, he's Head of Mysteries," she told her friend in an aside, in case she didn't know, and looked at Virgil. "So, does he step into a bubble that floats through the walls and the various chambers of Level Nine - Virgil, don't tell me, I want to be surprised," she held up her hand. "Or does he turtle into his sweater," Abby lifted the collar of her robes and snuggled in, "and flit through a portal of whatever is stitched on that day?"

Aileen had mentioned, with disdain, skeletons in his office! Wearing top hats.

"Floating skulls?" Her voice was slightly muffled until she straightened again. "Dancing tigers?"

She glanced at Nemo with a flicker of a grin.

The image in Nemo's head was not one he expected - surely he would have remembered seeing a face like that in Diagon? Virgil grinned at her, because he could sense in her mind that she was teasing. Merlin knew who the person was but he was definitely not the man they'd seen at the coffee shop.

Abby didn't want him to do anything, anyway. He crossed his long legs, balancing precariously on the arm of the couch, and nodded once. If she didn't want him to than he wouldn't.

            "Is your boss free next week?"
"Week after," he clarified, "we've something going on next week."

It wasn't necessary to explain that he meant level nine business.

This was certainly Abby speaking. Flower Girl couldn't possibly be this endearing. Virgil laughed at her imaginings of Yavin's office, a flush in his cheeks as she retreated into her robes like a diffident little hermit crab. "Floating skulls?" she continued. "Dancing tigers?"

"He has an office. There may be skeletons but you're going to be terribly disappointed by how normal he is," Virgil reached for his coffee and shook his head at her teasingly. "Nemo knows. We went for tea with Yavin, didn't we?" he glanced at the musical vagabond.

Nemo didn't work at the Ministry so he had felt comfortable introducing the department head as a family friend and Legilimency tutor.

"He cares. Just remember that," Virgil added in a softer voice. "It might not seem like he does but Yavin cares and he'd never hurt either of you."

Nemo scoffed with a little grin and raised eyebrows. Sure, Yavin Morgenthau might be more normal than the strange expectations Abby was describing, but he was certainly less normal than the average. A funny, fidgeting fellow. Unpredictable. He seemed, to Nemo who was familiar with a similar strategy, to be expert in managing others' estimation of him, raising or lowering it as needed.

Virgil could be trusted. Therefore, Nemo could but warily trust he wouldn't put his friend in the company of someone who'd harm her.

She set the coffee down, leaving most of it undrunk. Nemo didn't know Abby well, and felt now she knew her less. She moved around to Abby's side of the couch and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

"Good luck, Abbers. It'll be fine."

She picked up her bag, truthfully feeling better but ready to find some time alone and see if she could remember the Pentral song.

"I'm out. Thanks, Virgil."

Abby met Virgil's eyes, and nodded.

"I know," she said simply, but with feeling. She knew that she and the pentral could trust Yavin Morgenthau. As she'd told him before (had she?) she trusted Virgil and therefore she trusted Yavin. Perhaps she put people into basic good or bad categories, like Nicholas worried she did (had he? She thought he had) but it wasn't so different from living with wixes in a magical world. Right or wrong, she trusted most wixes, or trusted them enough to be around them, and she accepted most magic, because if she didn't, she'd never get through the day.

Abbers. She smiled at the farewell peck Nemo left on her cheek.

The unflappable, unshakable, unbreakable Nemo was on the move like she usually was, with a song in her head and a half cup of coffee left on the table behind her. Bless her. Tonight, her acquaintance from the coffee shop had proved to be a friend, a real friend, though to whom, her or the pentral, Abby wasn't sure. It didn't matter at the moment. What mattered was that Nemo had been there, and Virgil now, too.

"Nemo, thank you," she offered, swallowing the apology in her throat. Sorry we put you through this. Sorry we pushed you. Her eyes said she was sorry, at least a little, and she remembered to look grateful, at least a little, though she mostly felt jittery and calm and tired at the same time.

As soon as the door closed, Abby glanced at Virgil, eyebrows raised, a slight sparkle in her eye. "I had no idea you and Nemo were friends!"

For a second, it was as if they were gossiping at work. Worlds colliding, Department Heads out for tea. Abby sipped at her coffee, intending to stay for a bit until she'd warmed up.