In the alleyway behind Calaveras
Diagon Alley
Close to midnight

It was a cold, rainy night, and an icy wind was whipping through the back alleys of Diagon, lending a bite to the air. He'd gotten off work late, pinned between the paperwork from the prior full moon, a lack of sleep, and the upcoming trial on Friday, but it hadn't really mattered.  Kurby suspected that he wouldn't be able to execute his intended plan until close to the end of the evening, anyway. 

It had taken some arm-twisting and reminders of familial obligation to convince his cousin Nathan to abuse his Auror privileges and peek into a certain convict's case file.  But Nate Whitman had finally given in, arming Kurby with the information he needed to track his quarry down.

Nathan Briggs -- the other Nathan -- worked at Calaveras several nights each week.  From what Kurby could suss out, the former errands boy was now a line cook in the kitchen. That meant that his ability to corner the other wizard alone was limited to a few moments in transit:  arriving in the afternoon for his shift, leaving at the end of the night, possibly relaxing on a break.

Taking out the rubbish.

Kurby had staked out an area near the big skip bins behind Calaveras.  He'd spent the past couple of hours lounging at his shadowy post, the hood of his cloak up to cover his head so that the rain drops would bounce off the dark material.  Either this night would go according to plan, or he'd wind up in a worse mood in the morning with nothing to show for his time.

It wasn't until nearly midnight that the back door to Calaveras finally open and a figure came out, large black bags loaded with rubbish floating in the air behind him.  Kurby squinted, trying to get a sense of who it was in the darkness.  He'd never known Briggs well, wasn't even really sure he'd ever talked to him, but he'd seen the former dogsbody in the background when he'd dropped by the Sellaphix Apothecary every now and then to visit Rafe and Zelda. 

As far as Kurby was concerned, when Briggs had turned on Rafe to save his own skin, that had been the wizard's first and second strikes with a bludger.  And now, with his name as the last entry in the strange ledger at Grimshaw's, that was strike three.

The figure that was now loading the bags of rubbish into the skip bin looked like Briggs as much as much as anyone could.  The rain had conveniently let up enough that he wasn't going to need to shout.

Kurby flicked his wand at the back door to the restaurant, causing it to silently swing shut and lock.  He waited a beat -- enough time for Briggs to finish depositing the bags in the bin and turn back towards the kitchen -- and then decided to make himself known.

"Nice night," he said conversationally, stepping out of the shadows.

Mature Language

Nate had drawn the short straw as one of the two cooks to stay behind and help the busboys clean up after dinner service. He didn't mind, not the hours, not the mess. It was boring but everything was. There was a spot of excitement a few weeks ago. The new guy in the kitchen, Cad, inept at everything, had collapsed. There'd been a Healer in the house, but the chap bolted. The rumor went around that Cad was an unregistered werewolf.[1] Sucks to be him. Sucked for Nate, too - they were down a kitchen wench.

Taking out the trash was one of the last things to do before lock up, so Nate had sent the others home. The alley was dark so he left the kitchen door open - the warm light spilled out into the grimy passage. A lit cigarette hung on his lip, thoughts of booze on his mind.

As he was loading the rubbish, the light narrowed to darkness, and he heard the door shut and lock. Then, a voice.

Nate looked up without urgency to see a hooded figure.

"If you're looking for Handrow, come back tomorrow."

Tam Handrow dealt gillyweed and stronger stuff from the alley and her junkies were always tapping at the door. Nate waved his hand. "Fuck thee gone, now."

1.	Nov 16 - Nightfall Heals All

Briggs was tall and lean, and even in the darkness, he looked about as shabby now as he has when he’d been a regular at the Sellaphix Apothecary.  Kurby sized him up silently as he stepped forward.  The younger wizard had always struck him as more of a lazy, toothless flobberworm than a fighter, but it was always better to be safe than sorry.  After all, this particular flobberworm had put one of his best mates in Azkaban, and then had had something to do with the strange black magic of Grimshaw’s.

He shifted to the side — not coming at Briggs directly now, but circling, still closing the distance between them.  If the other wizard made a move to apparate, he’d have to cross the remaining space more quickly, but Briggs didn’t seem bothered yet.  Kurby estimated that he probably had at least another few seconds.

“Too bad,” he said mildly.  He kept his hands tucked in his pockets, his wand out of sight, as he circled closer, his gaze shifting to examine the rubbish bins behind Briggs. They were large enough to hide a body inside, but someone would have to heave the corpse up and over. 

“Here I was hopin’ Handrow could help me out with somethin’,” he continued, flashing the cook a wolfish grin.  “Don’t suppose you’ve got a minute to chat instead, then, mate?”

His words were friendly but his movement was not. Nate groaned almost inaudibly as he prepared himself for whatever this prick wanted. A likely scenario was a mugging which Nate could cope with. Another possibility is this person was just insane, a half-wit leaked out of Knockturn Alley's dipshit spigot, in which case the situation was more unpredictable but again, easy as cake.

Briggs still didn't recognize Bagnold getting too close in the shadows, not the voice either. He was still just some knob trying to pick a fight. Nate reached behind his back as casually as he could to put his hand on his wand. As he did, he used his other hand to ash the cigarette.

"Oh, yeah, absolutely, because I regularly palaver with junkies by the bin at midnight," he said with extra sincerity. He switched mode then, turned to move towards the door, and stuck the cigarette in his mouth again.

"Bugger off."

Nate was trying to ignore the third option (the one other than mugger or dipshit) which was a fellow underworld asshole with a bone to pick. Heck, it could be bloody Cinead Tawse again, this time Polyjuiced in a less matronly skin. But Cinead wasn't the end or beginning of Nate's fanclub. Whoever it might be, the third scenario was far less negotiable.

Briggs mouthed off at him, demonstrating a vocabulary far too advanced for some lowlife lackey stuck working a nowhere job in the back kitchen of an overly-ritzy Diagon restaurant.  If Kurby hadn't already been disinclined to be civil, the proper usage of the word palaver in a sentence would have sealed the cook's fate.  But then Briggs also made the fatal mistake of starting to turn towards the door, just as Kurby's circling brought him around to the side of the other wizard's vision. 

Kurby was on him in an instant.  Briggs had several inches on him in height, but that made it even easier to go low and use his center of gravity as leverage against the taller wizard.  In an instant, he'd charged at the other man, grabbing hold of his waist and arm and yanking hard.  A moment later, he'd flipped Briggs over his shoulder and dumped him neatly into the rubbish bin.

The werewolf hunter grinned, tugging out his wand again as he stepped over to the side of the bin.  "Accio wand," he said almost lazily, leaning an elbow against the bin's rim as he aimed his own wand into it.

"Reckon you've got a minute to chat after all, then," he said cheerfully, grinning down at the other wizard.  "Good thing, too.  Turns out you were the one I was hopin' to find tonight after all, Briggs."

It happened too fast for Nate to react with any clarity. He made an attempt to grab at his attacker, he flung out his arms to stop himself. He braced himself to get thrown into brick or cobble, but it was to be the rubbish. It was difficult to get any kind of stability in the pile of trashbags, but he managed to roll onto his back with a loud groan. In his life, he'd been blown up, hexed cursed, strangled, and punched, but this was new. Nate thought to himself he ought to take up boxing. Or dueling. Or something.

He paused his attempts to get up when he saw a wand trained on him, courtesy of the grinning idiot looking down at him. Nate grimaced as he pulled something long and slimy out of his mouth. A diatribe was queuing up on his fouled tongue but the way the wizard said his name - he knew him! The realization flashed on his face for only a moment, one of anxiety and doom, but he washed it off quickly. His eyebrows lifted, he smiled wide.

He opened his mouth a few times before saying, "Kurby Bagnold! Holy shit, mate, great to see you! Aw, that's great, great, just great. You look good. Merlin, what's it been?"

A lifetime ago.

There were exactly two things and two things only that would make Kurby Bagnold come out of the woodwork. Nate rolling on Kurby's substitute father figure Rafe Sellaphix. Or he figured out that Nate had used Kurby to steal that bloody fecking shoe[1]. Nate couldn't decide which he preferred.

Nate found some purchase and found the back of the bin, so at least he wasn't totally horizontal when he patted at his pockets for his pack of cigarettes.

1.	Nov 20 - On the Wrong Foot

The werewolf hunter examined the other wizard's wand for a moment, making a show of turning it in his hands.  It was long, over a foot, and looked to be made of a hard wood like oak. He slipped it into his back pocket.

"I dunno."  Kurby returned his attention to Briggs with a sharp intensity, shooting the younger man a hard, quick grin that was all teeth.  "What's it been since you opened your big feckin' mouth and landed Rafe in Azkaban?  Three, four years?"

It had been in October or November.  He knew because he'd dropped in to check on Zelda after he'd heard about it, and continued to keep an eye on the shop over the next three years.  Rafe was finally out now, but his early release didn't change the fact that the idiot going off in the rubbish bin in front of him had stolen three years of his friend's life, three years with his wife and family. 

As a former Azkaban inmate, Rafe couldn't afford to be openly vindictive now that he was out on parole, but there was nothing stopping Kurby from enjoying a little pettiness.

"How's the new job been, then?"  He arched his eyebrows, smirking at Briggs.  "I'm surprised the owners here still let you bring anything at all out to the rubbish bin.  You'd be shocked at what you can find in there sometimes."

Nate kept on a cursory smile, but at the mention of Rafe Sellaphix, Azkaban, and the very clever allusion to initial cause of all their problems[1] he faded to solemn. He nodded slowly. Alright, that's what this was about. Kurby Bagnold was here on some kind of delayed revenge or something. Or maybe it was just going to be leverage. There really was no telling because this wasn't the Kurby that Nate remembered.

He found the pack and bought himself some time digging a cigarette out and putting it in his mouth. Of course he didn't have a light - arsehole had his wand - so he held it back between his fingers. Speaking of wands and who had them and who didn't, Nate draped his arm over the back edge of the dumpster as if it were a sifa. He didn't figure on going anywhere at the moment.

"What do you want, Kurby? You want to what, re-litigate all that? Old Sellaphix is out now, and you want to be their hero or whatever. Fine with me." He waved a hand and shrugged.

"I'm not proud of what I did. Not my part in it, anyway."

Sure. Nate had rolled on Rafe after hours of questioning and threats of Azkaban. But Rafe and Zelda - they had the venom. They'd left Nate holding the bag. But that kind of discussion required critical thinking, which didn't really seem like Kurby Bagnold's strong suit.

1.	14 Oct o8 - Cat Out of the Bag in which Nathan at the request of Rafe Sellaphix, attempts to hide illegal Runespoor venom in a dumpster.

Nate Briggs was a tearjerker.  He'd clearly missed his calling when he'd taken the job in some back kitchen instead of trying out for Stardust Theatre.  All of the demonstrative feeling and plaintive, swelling emotion...-- Kurby rolled his eyes.  He didn't give a bleeding damn if Briggs sobbed himself to sleep every night, driven to madness by the wrongs he'd done the Sellaphix family.  The smart-arsed stock boy didn't deserve the chance that Rafe and Zelda had given him. He didn't deserve to mouth off about them now.

But he wasn't going to let Briggs distract him from the real reason he came.

"Naw," he said nicely, giving a shake of his head.  "That's not what I'm after."

His gaze was fixed on Briggs now, dark eyes focused on the younger wizard's face.  He'd seen his name, inscribed in the ancient-looking ledger that he'd found in Grimshaw Tailoring.  Briggs had gone there for some purpose, and someone or something had recorded his presence as a result.

"Word on the street is that the new job hasn't been enough to keep you busy after all.  I hear you went adventurin' in November."  Eyebrows raising, he held the other wizard's gaze, and then let a slow, predatory smirk spread across his face.  "Did you end up somewhere you weren't supposed to be, Briggs?"

Nate froze. He was still in his wandless rubbish lounge, his unlit cigarette unmoving in his unmoving fingers. His face the same flat arrogance he felt towards most people most of the time. It concealed a bit of a panic.

Kurby was having a laugh, being coy, messing about with another wizard's wand. Nate was thumbing through his diary. November had been a busy month. He'd continued his one-wand crime wave, quietly knocking off one or two burglaries. That and the shoe thing. The shoe thing that was now a murder thing. He grit his teeth resentful of Kurby's blase affect, like they were chatting about what they did over summer holiday in Ibiza.

He quickly worked out the calculus. If Kurby knew about the shoe, this was either a prelude to violence. Or Aurors. If Kurby knew about 'Hermes' then it was leaning more towards blackmail. Or Aurors. Or both.

After too long not speaking, Nate took a deep breath and made that noise that every uncle makes when they're through with dinner. Cig back between his lips, Nate hoisted himself up on the back of the dumpster and swung a leg over the side.

"Well, it's been fun. You keep it," he said indicating his own wand. "My love to Zelda."

Briggs went as still as a statue.  Kurby stayed silent, his eyebrows raised, as he let the other wizard think it through.  Clearly, they both knew what point he was getting at.  Whatever had brought Briggs to Grimshaw's on the 11th of November, it must have stood out in the younger man's mind.

The silence stretched on and on.  Whatever this was, it had to be something illegal, the sort of dark trading that he'd always heard took place out of the tailor shop.  Either that, or Briggs had had an eerie experience at Grimshaw's similar to what Kurby and the American musician kid had suffered through, and he didn't want to describe it to someone else.

Finally, the younger man picked himself up and started to climb out of the dumpster. 

"Well, it's been fun..."

Kurby was on him in an instant, grabbing him and hauling him up by the front of his shirt.  He raised his wand in his right hand, out of Briggs' reach but well within his sight.

"Answer the question," he said icily.

Nate had a few inches on the other wizard, but Kurby - the sodding werewolf hunter - had a mite more experience and both the wands. They weren't good odds. Oh, Nate could cope with a beating but it had to be worth something. He relaxed as best he could in the hold and sighed away the knot in his stomach. He raised his hands and spoke through the cigarette.

"Hey, hey, c'mon," he said, hoping to slow the escalation, show Kurby a hex wasn't necessary.

See, getting caught thieving, it was always a risk which is why he was careful. Which is why he had a system. No names, no repeat clients, no violence, nothing too valuable. Which is why it wasn't possible that Kurby knew about the moonlighting. Unless that psycho Cinead Tawse was waxing verbose or that absolute nutter 'Lucy' was spreading his name around; Nate estimated that at a zero. There just wasn't a grapevine that existed that would connect either of them with Kurby Bagnold.

It had to be the other thing. And only two people knew about that. The tongueless ghost haunting the bartop at the Shodding Arms and Atticus Roark. He wouldn't have guessed Roark a snitch and if the Aurors had figured it out, well, he and Kurby wouldn't be in this alley together.

He moved a hand to his mouth to switch the cig to his fingers again. So who the hell talked?

"It's not a very good question, though, is it," he said putting on a smile. "I go a lot of places, Kurby. Have to be more specific."

There was a lump in his throat. It was one thing to be a mouthy bastard at arm's length, quote another face-to-face. But he wasn't going to give anything away until Kurby showed his hand or otherwise loosened his tongue for him, unhappy thought though it was.

Briggs was too focused on his unlit cigarette, moving it from his mouth to his hand.  He was nervous.  He was talking too much, too, which was never a good sign for the person being questioned.  Trying to suss him out, either to buy himself time to think or to find a way to weasel himself out of this.

Kurby didn't really care what Briggs wanted to do, though.  Next to the worst of the werewolves -- the ones from back in the '90s when they'd really been running feral, and more recently with some of the direwolves like Dugan MacDuff -- a mouthy traitor like Briggs barely registered a mark.  Either he'd talk and share what he knew, or they'd get to the part of this game where Kurby started threatening to break bones.  He half-hoped they'd get to the part where he'd actually get to break them.

He had a hunch as to what Briggs wasn't saying, though.  That hadn't just been a book sitting on the counter in Grimshaw's.  Shops used ledgers to record transactions, the economic give and take that made up their business.  If Briggs' name had been recorded in the Grimshaw ledger, it was because he'd come to the tailor shop and made a purchase.

"Better refresh your memory, then," Kurby said coolly, his grip still tight on the other wizard's shirt.  "You break in.  Find yourself in a place full of ladies' garments."  He met Briggs' gaze straight on, his eyebrows raised.  "And you left with something then, didn't you?"

"What?"

Nate's immediate response was genuine. That didn't help at all - instead it muddied the waters even more. Who spoke like that? If this was about the shoe and the chic yet simple flat of Genevieve Garcia-Gamp it was a strange way to describe it! Kurby was ninety-degrees off his nut, his manic intensity mingled bizarrely with a total ease and comfort in coercion. The way he'd taken his time, the way he was dancing around with vague questions and implicit threats, it didn't leave Nate anywhere to stand.

He adjusted his footing, something from the dumpster digging into his back. Nate put his hand on Kurby's wrist.  Maybe he could be reasoned with.

"I just got out, Bagnold," he said matching the steadiness if not the viciousness of Kurby's glare. "You're talking about a break-in - I can't be doing that. You're Ministry, I know you know this. If you're trying to hang me out, this is a pretty stupid way to go about it."

Was the implication clear enough for this thickhead? Nate knew very well now that this wasn't about his parole or the MLE, but the framing could add some much-needed context for Nate's obstinance. Or maybe he'd hit his head. His nerves tightened his grip on Kurby's arm.

Now Briggs was gripping his arm, and the situation felt like it was in danger of escalating quickly.  The other wizard had several inches on him in height, but Kurby had both wands and he doubted that the cook could match him as a brawler.  Nathan Briggs got into the sort of fights that could be won or lost with his mouth, not with his fists.

Briggs was still talking, as his hand tightened around Kurby's wrist.  The werewolf hunter regarded him coolly, keeping his own grip tight on the other man's shirt, his wand leveled at the wizard's face.  If Briggs wanted to turn this into a scrapping match, he'd happily seize the opportunity to swing a punch back at him.

But being indirect wasn't helping.  Briggs danced around every question in his smug, smarmy way, as if he'd deemed himself smarter than half the planet and was delighted to make sure everyone knew it.  Kurby set his jaw, determined not to get sucked into an argument about Briggs' moral judgement.  The other wizard might have just gotten out of Azkaban, but unlike Rafe, Kurby had no doubt that he'd find himself back in the magical prison very soon.

"The 11th of November."  He tried to keep his tone indifferent, his voice calm, but there was a hard edge underneath his words.  He smirked slightly, his gaze still locked on Briggs' face.  "You were in Grimshaw Tailoring in Knockturn Alley, Nathan.  What were you doin' there?"