Approx. 10.45am. Wild & Bramble.


He put his cigarette out against the brick wall outside Wild & Bramble, glancing at his reflection in its window. Virgil had thrown on some of his less dramatic clothes for this little errand.

From what he remembered of Cassiopiea Collins from their time as classmates, she wasn't exactly his biggest fan and he didn't want to put her off him. His banishment from the Brain Chamber[1] was only being lifted on the condition that he agreed to get into Cassie's good graces. Yavin helpfully pointed out that he didn't even need to sleep with this one.

V tugged off his gloves as he ducked into the shop, welcoming the warmth inside. The air was humid and carried many scents - a touch more medicinal than a regular florist.

The shop wasn't very busy at this hour on a weekday. He spotted the witch in question behind the counter but dawdled a bit to observe the flowers by the entrance. Cassie did not seem like her late parents[2] - they were the kind of people who wore a multitude of masks. His kind of people.

They were also traitors. Yavin had explained what went down in December - how Unspeakable Atkinson had gone to confront and warn the Collins over informing to CAWW. How it resulted in their deaths.

"Collins," Virgil greeted in a drawl once he had wandered over in her direction. "Don't tell on me to Floriblunders. Could fix me up some blossoms for Stardust? Opening weekend, Valentine's."

Edgar's new play would be starting its run, which gave him reasonable pretext to approach.

1.	23rd Jan - Let's Try That Again
2.	Unspeakables Saoirse and Lawrence

The edges of the parchment Cassie gripped in her hands quivered ever so slightly, her aquamarine eyes fixated on the big bold “DENIED!” that was stamped in blood red ink across the top of the records request she had sent to The Ministry asking, for the seventh time, that she be allowed access to the investigation report, as well as the death records for her parents that they had on file. An uneven breath passed between her lips. February marked two months since the day Uncle Nickie had burst through the doors of her shop rambling like a mad man, two months since she had obeyed her parent’s requests that she ignore him if she encountered him, two months since she aparated to her family home only to find herself standing in front of the blackened smoldering remains of the place she grew up. As if the grief from losing the people she loved most wasn’t already all consuming, the unanswered questions that remained had taken root, encroaching on her thoughts like parasitic vines, choking out any hope she had of getting closure. She just wanted to know, to understand, was that really too much to ask for? Apparently, in the eyes of The Ministry, it was.

The little bells above her shop door jingling their happy tune pulled Cassie back to present and quickly she tucked the document under her counter as she took a deep breath and cleared her mind, refocusing her thoughts to the customer approaching the counter….Merlin, of all the Wizards in London….

“Virgil Carstairs…it’s nice to see you.”

No it wasn’t.

“I’d be happy to put something together for you”

If she had to.

“Are you looking for something fairly traditional for the holiday, or did you have something else in mind?” Cassie asked in her most polite customer service voice as she pulled over a leather bound ledger she used to keep track of her customer’s orders and any specific requests they made. Smoothing her hands over her skirt for a moment, Cassie reminded herself that, despite the unadulterated distaste she had for Virgil Carstairs, he was just another customer. All she had to do was take his order, do her job, and he’d be out of her life just as quickly as he had entered it, even if it took everything in her not to remember all their not so pleasant encounters during their shared time at Hogwarts, all the times he so casually pushed her buttons to the point that she had wanted to turn around and whip a hex his way.

"The full name treatment..." he quipped mildly as he leaned against the counter to glance past her at the plants in the back. "You remembered, I'm touched."

Of course she remembered - Virgil was not unaware of his reputation at school, nor of the one onstage. But Hogwarts felt like more than a lifetime ago and he had gone his separate ways from many of the social circles he once called friends.

"It isn't truly a holiday is it?" the wizard remarked, tapping the cover of the ledger she had brought out. "For the hopeless romantics, perhaps. This is for Edgar[1] anyway."

He pulled a thinking face, eyes on Cassiopeia now. She looked more mature than she was, as some witches did. But her manners gave her away, reticent and contained.

Virgil glanced over his shoulder to point at some of the more elaborate arrangements. "Something in that vein? Without the orchids," he turned back to Cassie with a supercilious smile. "And are you still delivering on Valentine's day itself? I've smaller bouquets to send. Say, half a dozen roses each? Yellow and pink."

While he was here he might as well have flowers done for everyone else. Yavin had given him a ridiculous stipend.

1.	Virgil's father who is debuting a new play

“ I suppose…” Cassie remarked as she flipped open her ledger, not really caring to launch into a debate about the types of people who may or may not consider Valentine’s Day a legitimate holiday. Following his eyes to the ornate display behind him she nodded in understanding and began to jot down some notes in her swirly cursive handwriting.

“No orchids, easy enough…pink and yellow roses. I can have my delivery man drop them off wherever you like, just let me know where you want them to go.” she explained, her tone calm and even, trying not to let his smug smirk irritate her too much. It may have been years since she had seen him, or even thought of him, but he still seemed very much like the same Virgil she had known back then. Always so effortlessly looking like he was so much better than everyone else. It had annoyed her then just as it annoyed her now.

Grabbing her notepad with “Bramble and Wild” decoratively embossed on the top of each page, Cassie wrote out a summary of his order, as well as the price, and slid it across the countertop to him.

“Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

Internally Cassie was praying he was done, that this was over. She’d add this order to the countless Mark, the man she hired part time to help make deliveries during busy times, was already planning on bringing to people, and that’d be that. Virgil would go back to going to Floriblunders, and she could continue picking up the pieces of her freshly shattered life.

He rattled off his order of flowers unthinkingly. Bouquets of pink and yellow roses for his mother and sister and all the other witches in his life. Nick, too, he couldn't get flowers for Ariadne and not get any for Nick.

True to expectation, Cassie took it all down and spoke from the sacred texts of customer service.

"There is," V answered in the same devil-may-care manner. "I'd like a bouquet for now, if you can manage it? I'm sure you can, you seem so efficient. None of that small talk or charm, hm?"

That was always the case with purebloods of course. And who would know better than him? Most of them were dullards who mistook privilege for personality.

Virgil continued without pause, counting out on his fingers: "Let's see. White lilies to feature prominently, a skirt of pale pink carnations and.... shall we say some forget-me-nots? White rosebuds, fernleaf accents."

He knew his flowers and his arrangements - he'd been all about that kind of thing when he was wooing Ceph. It was no problem naming funeral flowers off the top of his head.

Stifling a displeased sigh, Cassie forced a small smile. “If she could manage it”. For the love. They were the only two in the store, of course she could manage it. Hearing him say she seemed efficient pushed her buttons just enough to make her break her perfectly composed facade and raise an unamused eyebrow.

Cassie was about to ask what she could whip up for him, but Virgil beat her to it, rattling off a list of his preferred blooms. It took everything in her to bite her tongue and not make a smart remark or ask if he wanted to just make it himself since he seemed to have such a clear vision of what he wanted. Why did it feel like he was playing some sort of game here?

“I’d be glad to.” she managed instead of something sassy. Pulling out her wand, she gave it a graceful swoosh, summoning the flowers he mentioned from various spots in the room, one or two floating lazily in from the back room. As each reached her she plucked them from the air, effortlessly bundling them together in an aesthetically pleasing arrangement. In the silence that hung between them, curiosity nipped at her thoughts. Why had he come here anyway? She had been open in Diagon Alley for years now, and not once had their paths crossed. Not to mention he had implied he was a regular elsewhere.

“Did Floriblunders not have what you were looking for?” she asked, feigning innocence as if she was just trying to be polite. “They must be just as busy as I am this time of year. I’ve had to order at least three times the amount of roses I normally do, and I can’t tell you how many witches and wizards have come in for the ingredients for love potions.” Truthfully she found it a bit sad when people came in for something so obviously needed to make a potion like that. Love wasn’t supposed to be forced, or tricked into being given. Having grown up watching her parents be so in love with each other, it made her wish for others to have faith that true love, without the help of a potion, could exist.

He was having a good time - it was difficult not to have a good time around flowers - and he could tell that Cassiopeia felt differently about the interaction. Funny. If only he could spend the rest of the day ordering bouquet after bouquet for increasingly vague reasons.

At last, as she was binding the flowers together, Cassie broke away from her shopkeeper script.

"I'm sure they do," Virgil replied of Floriblunders whilst languidly counting out galleons from his coat pocket. "But it felt like something of a faux pas to send you condolences from a competitor, don't you think?"

Glancing back up, he nodded at the bouquet she had just arranged to indicate it was meant for her. "I'm sorry to hear about your parents," V smiled faintly. "I've been away, only just heard the other day. I didn't know them well but it's never easy losing good people."

He had of course not 'just heard the other day'. Nor were the Collins 'good people'. What Cassiopeia didn't know wouldn't hurt her.

“A faux pas? I don’t…” Cassie trailed off as Virgil nodded in the direction of the bouquet she held in her hand, realization washing over her, immediately followed by a flood of annoyance. Seriously?! Had he honestly just made her make herself a bouquet as a way to say sorry for the death of her own parents. What kind of sick joke was this supposed to be? Did he actually find this entertaining? And here she had assumed he’d at least have the decency to have some respect for someone in mourning.

“My…how thoughtful of you.” she remarked, sarcasm dripping from every word as she set the arrangement aside. With a quick tap of her wand, the flowers within the fresh bundle released themselves from the wrapping and drifted back to where she had initially summoned them from. Virgil had been a cruel teenager, and now was a cruel man. She wasn’t sure why she had expected anything different from him. Cassie had to bite back her want to scoff at his condolences. Good people….like they had been some random aunt or uncle Cassie only occasionally ran into at family gatherings.

“Have you had your fill, Virgil, or is there anything else you’d like me to make for my deceased parents?” She asked, an unamused look pulling her eyebrows together.

He made a disappointed sound, watching as the beautifully arranged bouquet dispersed. Shame! And he had imagined it so well.

"You think I'm teasing? How you've changed, Collins..." Virgil brought a hand to his chest as if he were the one rightfully wronged. "Here I am trying to be nice. And you, cold as a fish."

One always associated warmer personalities with the cultivation of plants but Cassie did just fine without that. Who could blame her, though? The Collins had brought their little girl up to build walls and learn Occlumency, had afforded her a dream career she didn't need to earn.

"Tell you what, though," he folded up the receipt she had written up, his expression somewhat more grounded as he looked her over. "I'll give you some good advice anyway."

V leaned in slightly, over the counter, speaking in a mock-whisper. "You're wasting your time writing requests. They'll never tell."

Cassie sighed as Virgil played the victim here. Merlin’s beard why was he insisting on lingering so long. He had what he wanted, got to get under her skin as well. Wasn’t that enough? Apparently not. Great, now he wanted to give her advice, as if she really needed any. As Virgil leaned in, Cassie rolled her eyes, her gaze drifting off to the side. This ought to be rich. However, no amount of schoolyard pestering could have prepared her for what he said. The weight of his words causing her to let out a short sharp gasp as she whipped her attention back to him, a look of confusion replacing the frustration that had settled in her eyes.

“Requests?! What-how do you-” Cassie started to ask, caught of guard by his statement, but catching herself before she admitted to having done precisely what he was saying. How did he know? Glancing down she checked to see if her recently denied request had slipped from its spot under the counter where she had tucked it away, it hadn’t. How did he know? A lucky guess? He couldn’t have seen into her thoughts, had he? She would have sensed someone intruding into her mind….right? What weren’t they going to tell her. It dawned on her that she had heard Virgil was an Unspeakable, just like her parents. Cassie’s mind raced, trying to sort out if this was just another trick out of his playbook, or something to actually take seriously.  “If this is some game you’re playing it’s beyond cruel, even for you!”

Apparently she had no gameface whatsoever. Or she was a gifted actress. One of the things they had been worried about was whether Cassie was in on it with her parents but it really did not seem like it. If anything she seemed entirely out of the loop.

Virgil leaned back to give her a searching look as she spoke.

"I'm not trying to be cruel," he spoke softly and quite seriously. "You don't know us, Cass. If I died on Mysteries tomorrow, the only thing my mother and father would hear is that I had a terribly tragic accident."

This was at least the truth. If he had never returned from the Death Chamber, those two times he crossed over, what else could Yavin have told his parents? If he had never returned from America, it would have only been a tragedy.

A mystery.

He pulled on his gloves, sighing. "Requests won't get you anywhere," Virgil pushed on in a more pragmatic tone. "I've no idea what happened to your parents but I can tell you that much. Don't waste your efforts."

Cassie searched Virgil’s face for some sign she could trust what he was saying, but doubt and apprehension swirled in her chest, feeling like a vice grip tightening on her ribcage. He was right…she didn’t know them…she couldn’t even say what her parent’s job titles were, or which area of the Department of Mysteries they had worked in. She had been left completely in the dark, and now, here Virgil stood, preaching his cryptic warning of sorts when she had spent the last two months being trailed and watched by people she couldn’t identify. Did he know about them, those people watching her?

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked, her eyes narrowing slightly in suspicion. “We haven’t spoken in years. The last time we did we were teenagers in school. We’ve only ever been like oil and water, and possibly still are. Why are you trying to be helpful all of a sudden?”

She didn’t trust him as far as she could physically throw him, but if he had anything to do with what her life had become, constantly watching over her shoulder, feeling trapped in her own home, she had to at least try and find out.

He buttoned his gloves into place and looked back up at Cassiopeia. She was right, they were hardly natural friends at Hogwarts - it would have been easier if they could use someone already close to her. But this approach had its charms.

"I don't know," Virgil shrugged. "It just seemed... wrong, I suppose. When I heard you'd been sending in all those requests."

Cassie was persistent if nothing else. It was admirable, in a way. The kind of person you would want to know if you disappeared off the face of the earth without explanation.

His smile softened, a little sad. "I wouldn't wish for my loved ones to hang on to hope like that, waiting for an explanation that will never come. If you want answers you won't get them through official recourse, and you deserve to know that."

There were some realities everyone was entitled to. Virgil didn't feel kindly towards the Collins for protecting Cass from that truth instead of preparing her - even if that ignorance was working in his favour now.

Cassie looked Virgil up and down as he spoke, the words he was saying seemed genuine, but she couldn’t allow herself to be sure in the moment there wasn’t some trick up his sleeve.

“Thank you…” she said softly, accepting his words of wisdom. Still, questions tumbled through her mind, ones she wasn’t sure it was safe to ask him. He still hadn’t told her how he knew about her requests, or who may have told him. And if “official recourse” wasn’t going to get her what she was looking for, what was he suggesting she do? She couldn’t very well barge into the Department of Mysteries and demand to speak to the head of the department. For a moment she considered asking him to clarify what he’d meant, what sort of thing she could do to actually get answers.

“Virgil, what-” the twinkle of the bells over her door interrupted her thought, and gently tilting her head to one side she could see Mrs. Medina entering the shop. She was a kind, but nosey, old witch who always stopped in at every week to buy some flowers for her kitchen table, recount the latest stories of her grandchildren’s schooling, and attempt to pry into Cassie’s life to get to the bottom of why she hadn’t managed to find a ‘nice handsome wizard’ to sweep her off her feet. Looking back to Virgil, she quickly changed what she had been planning to say, knowing the old woman would immediately insert herself if she overheard. “-uh-thank you, again…it was nice to see you. I’ll make sure those flowers get delivered on time next week.”

Their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of another customer - not a moment too soon! He couldn't possibly order anymore bouquets to prolong the exchange.

And Cassie seemed on the verge of asking questions that would be harder for him to answer so casually. He smirked, amused by the abrupt change in tone. So now it was nice to see you? A step in the right direction, even if it was perfunctory.

"Good of you, Cass," V affected an effete little bow, playful. "Come see the new play[1] why don't you? I'll buy you a drink after and we can catch up."

He turned up the collar of his suede jacket and made to leave, checking the time on his watch. It had only been the work of a half hour but Virgil was pleased with his progress.

1.	Beyond the Front Page - Jan 6th, Aloysius Threepwood Returns