The early morning hours of October 14, nearly 4am.  The moon is only one night away from being full.  The rent is due for Room 73 on the 7th Floor of the Shodding Arms Hotel at 333 Knockturn Ally.

And Mr. Briggs is finally home from work.

"Honey! I'm home!" 

Nathan Briggs barged into the round-walled one-room apartment.  There was a bed. A table. A few chairs. Several cauldrons.  There was only one other door and it led to the toilet.  There's wasn't a kitchen proper of course, but there was a hearth.  And it smelled like dinner was ready.  Something was bubbling in a small kettle.  Where could the little wife be? Nate had had a hard day at work and had even had to work over time.

"Honey?" Nathan's tone was a bit more plaintive this time as he slumped down into a chair at the table and pulled the chain for the bulb.  It swung over Nate and the table, casting swinging shadows all over Room 73.

He quickly began to shuck his boots and peel off his shirt.  There were holes in the shirt, some big as a hand print, others as small as pencil points.  But beneath each one was a searing, blistering burn with a blue, pussy tinge.  He was also very scraped up at the elbows, hands and knees, and his eyebrow was cut dramatically.  But these wounds were mundane and common and not nearly as worrisome as the burns.

It had been a very stressful day at the office.  He'd been interrupted by Margaret Groust and that idiot werewolf Ambrosio Dimas and then, most unfortunately, Cinaed Tawse's mastiff.  A very quick chain of events followed that lead to an explosion Nate could only assume the immediate parts of London had heard.  And then, of course, property damage, yelling, angry pub owners and the burns.  Nate had gotten out of there as soon as he was able.  Groust and Dimas had done the same.  And while most witches and wizards might find themselves Apparating or Flooing to St. Mungo's, Nate Briggs didn't want to explain why he was handling cured Runespoor venom when every Auror in the country was looking for it.  That, and his wife was a master potion-maker and must know a thing or two about first aid, right?

"Dazmond!" he yelled again, seeing the most grievous of his burns mouthing over his shoulder and down to his elbow.  "Daddy's had a hard day and could use a bit of wifely comfort right about now!"

Only a few hours before, Dazmond had crawled into bed, leaving her supper -- a beef stew -- simmering on the stove for Nate and the Wolfsbane to cool in the cauldron by the hearth.  His absence late into the night was not so unsettling to Dazmond; on the contrary, she was simply steeped in his gorgeous presence by merely existing at the Shodding Arms all the nights since her return.  It had been a long time away, and Nathan Briggs had been fused with the whole apartment in Daz's mind; she was happy and still absorbing all the Nate she'd been missing out on for the last... however long.  And it was a good feeling for once, this settling in.  She'd danced around the flat earlier, cooking and brewing in multiple cauldrons, then sang as she diced and slivered plants and pounded out roots with a mortar and pestle.  How homey!

Technically though -- really -- Daz didn't Live Here.  Or so it went, usually.  A testament to the strength of her super-human defense mechanism skills:  Her couch hopping and the still unexplained three month disappearance.  Daz had said practically zip about it.  Seemed a touchy subject....

Now Dazmond's tiny frame was but a bump on the bed under a thick, pillowy blue comforter, and she was dreaming of mandrakes who socialized -- with giant saucers of tea -- over their shared love of dragon dung and bumble bees.  As Nate's barks and yelps filtered through the warm room, they reached Daz languidly till he pulled the light.  His summons slowly roused her, first through quiet mumbling and next through a slight rustling on the bed.  Daz's head popped up from beneath the tangled mass of blanket, where she lay elbow-propped, her hair tossled and eyes half-squinting as she peered Nate-ward.  "Uuh?"

Poor Nate was covered in something -- something... blue -- blue and oozing? -- oozing blue puss? -- Blue puss-oozing cured Runespoor venom burns?!

"Shit!"

Daz scrambled out of her roost so quickly that she nearly tumbled over herself in a front flip.  Her limbs went this way and that as she struggled to pull on Nate's tattered boxers and a tank top from the pile of clothes on the floor (saying "Shit shit shit!").  She was still struggling into the garments as she crossed the small room toward Nate.  She rubbed at her face, then pawed at her wounded husband to get a good look at the damage he'd done.  "Merlin's balls, Nathan!  How did you --"  That was Cured Runespoor Venom alright, all over him and still eating at his flesh as it tried to squirrel its way down into Nathan's veins.  "Hoh-kay," she said.  "Well!  Just -- sit tight pet."  She pressed a kiss to the corner of his forehead and got to moving.

Daz was soon rummaging through drawers in the hutch, throwing open cupboards, tossing bundles of herbs on the floor by the hearth and piling potions bottles, jars and cheese cloth into her arms.  She dumped them all on the dinner table and sifted through them, extracting one large green bottle with a particularly small spout.  Dazmond popped the cork off with her teeth and spat it out on the floor, but she paused.  "I think this'll hurt, mate.  I'm just saying."

"I'm guessing the Old Man's stash went up in a magical hellfire, yeah?"  Daz said to distract as she splashed the contents of the bottle onto Nate's burns -- a process which instantly caused them to swell and sizzle violently.  It sounded like snakes hissing angrily and it must have been awfully painful, but it would begin to break down the toxins and sterilize the sites.  Much more barbaric medicine than what he'd get at Mungo's.  She muttered a small sorry and watched him as she went to put a cauldron on, switching out the cast-iron that held the stew for a pot of water.  "What's happened, then?  Who saw?"

Nate nearly melted with relief when his spouse emerged from his cozy bed.  Her dark hair was wild about her face, but she moved like a woman made all of elbows and pink knees.  As she scrambled around the house to find whatever stuff she was going smear on him, inject him with or make him drink (stuff that was likely only a few steps less dangerous than what she was treating), he was beginning to feel a bit dreamy.  Most likely some of the stuff was starting to get into his system.

Old Sellaphix had told him a million times to leave the crate under the broken, dry sink in the cellar and not to go anywhere near it with a wand.  Not that Nate needed to be told twice.  He wasn't an idiot.  In fact, he knew a great deal about how gnarly the cured venom was, and all the trade restrictions on it and how much Sellaphix was selling it for and how much time in prison they'd both get if they were caught.  So yeah - he might wipe down counters and count beetle eyes to pay the Sodding Arms, but he absolutely was no idiot.

Dazmond was really good under pressure and from experience he knew he was just supposed to sit still and take it.  If he wanted cuddles and a lolly with his antidotes he could go to St. Mungo's. But he needed fixed and hidden fast.

He was about to be impish and ask how her day was when her warning came along with a nasty green bottle.  They all tended to look nasty when she was aiming them at you though.

It hurt like a mother.  It hurt like a tooth ache drenched in lemon and habanero. He stifled a yell and bit his left fist.

The sizzling of Dazmond's lollypop juice in his burns felt like his skin was boiling.  As the juice did its work, he lolled his head back over the back of the chair to watch her at the hearth. 

"Ambrosio Dimas, that's who. Your lovely client with the homicidal streak? And Maggie Groust - from school, y'remember.  And Cinaed Tawse and his fecking dog," he said, rattling off the litany of witnesses who'd only complicated this little disaster.

"Neither Dimas or Maggie knows what they were looking at.  But if Tawse's got any thinking tucked away in that criminal mind than he knows exactly what blew up in his ally."

 

Dazmond managed to increase the flame beneath her cauldron -- using the flashy new wand that really didn't like her so much.  But what can one expect, purchasing a wand from a nomadic independent?  For a moment she had wayward voltaic currents coming out of its end; they lit the darkened hearth a brilliant blue, but were benign.  She left the slender rod to rest on the floor and footed through the herbs to make a quick mental catalog.  The perk of being an expert poisons maker, was that you had to know a thing or two about antidotes.  It also meant that the medicines you made usually had to have a bit of a bite.

Padding barefoot back to Nathan, Dazmond pulled out a chair so she could sit close.  She was already lining up the next dosage and had with her a towel dunked in warm water.  His burns were now greatly swollen and oozing more of a bubbly green, acidic liquid. 

"Wait -- it blew up at Cin's?"  Daz pressed his wounds with the warm cloth.  She didn't much fancy going out to help cover evidence, what with the streets maybe swarming with Aurors, but it could be quite the bad omen for the Briggs family if  Cináed Tawse somehow got pinned for the smuggling.  "Tawse is alright, but, he can't be psyched to have that Auror Attractant sprayed all over his pub.  We might be lucky if he doesn't go for some aggro."

Dazmond slid the old bottle of Ogden's Fire Whiskey in front of Nate.  "Here, have some of this," she said consolingly.  It was about as close to a lolly as he was gonna get at the hands of this tattoo-fitted, back-door doctor. 

"And don't worry about Ambrosio.  S' long as we Bolt Up and Stay In -- evening next -- he's not about to get on My bad side."  She paused, shifting the cloth.  Dazmond knew that Ambrosio would never go after her own -- in his right mind.  Glancing sidelong at the smoking copper cauldron of Wolfsbane, she figured that this close to the Full Moon, he may have been able to smell the snake's breath in all that venom.  But then Brosio was in the business of swapping highly illegal merchandise, and he knew about honor among thieves. 

She splashed the acrid potion on his burns again and waited as the bright yellow melded with the blue ooze.

"Nah, it's Maggie's the one to be worrying 'bout.  Doesn't she like -- get paid to be a pain in the arse snoop?"  Dazmond twitched a little as she made reference to the vinegary Hufflepuff and padded at his skin again with the cloth.  It was no secret that she found the Witch had quite the unpleasant personality.  And even if she was sort of snuggly with Briggs back in the day, if she blabbed to her Prophet friends, someone was bound to smell a Runespoor.  Which, these days, meant big shiny round galleons in a poor reporter's eye.  Or so it went in Mrs. Brigg's mind.

She set aside the now festering green rag (which had been white, if not a little dingy with stains), and started prepping two more bottles.  The first was slid in front of Nate to drink, and the stench it carried didn't bode a pleasant taste.  The second was a purple liquid meant for further flushing.  With this, Dazmond continued splashing her husband with caustic reagents at the dinner table.  His wounds were smoking, but he was getting cleaner by the minute.


 

"If Mags had any inclination to do a book report on what happened down there, I think Cinaed's wrath may have changed her mind for her.  He's going to skin me the next time he sees me."

He flinched and clenched his teeth for a moment as Dazmond's toxins hit a deep nerve.  He let his air out and finished his thought.

"He promised."  Truth be told, it was a threat Nate took seriously.  He'd never seen anyone quite that angry before who had the history of violence to say something of that nature and mean it.

For the next few moments, Nate kept silent while Dazmond worked.  He was eyeballing the 8oz bottle she'd placed pointedly on the table near his hand.  He knew better than to ask what it was.  Whenever he did he'd find out it was some sort of pus from some rotten organ from some half-dead animal.  Or some terrible essance of a nasty vegetable. Like asparagus.  It was better just to shoot it like Odgen's Old.

Or with Odgen's Old.  He used his free left hand to thumb the cork out of the whiskey bottle and  the little bottled.  He one-twoed the potion and the whiskey straight away.  The pain in his mouth and throat was familiar with the faint essance of zuccini farts.

"Oaky," he commented.

The sizzling, bubbling pain continued as she worked over his major arm burn, and the smaller ones on his torso and back.  There were a couple on his neck.  He kept his hands over his eyes most of the time, trying to focus on the smells.  When he was on his own, as he'd been all summer, the smell of the apartment was mostly a heavy, wet sort of smell.  Clothes. Old food. Sweaty bed sheets.  But when Daz was around (she was never really home) the smells changed constantly.  Every hour a different smell.

Sometimes herbs drying, with crisp autumn smells, or thicker insence aromas.  Sometimes, if something was on the hearth, it was a potent, nose-burning steam.  Or a smell so rich it was like inhaling soup.  The smells were acrid, savory, floral, herbal, meaty and acidic.  And they were always different.  And they always meant Daz was there.

So even though the current smell was curing wolfsbane, mushroom stew, and his own arm fat simmering under magical cleansing, it all meant Daz was back.

He opened a slit in his fingers to look at her and grinned.  "I'm glad you're back, you know.  Sort of missed you."

His recollections of Tawse's threats bred a miasmal atmosphere within Dazmond's heart.  It bothered her more than she would let on, this prospect of being on the ex-azzie's bad side.  It wasn't a place anyone wanted to be, for sure, but Daz was sorry she might be losing a potential ally.  At the very least, he was someone she fancied growing closer to, the type she wanted to gravitate toward.  Another big brother, she thought.  Not that she had ever said so. 

A natural silence fell upon them, allowing Dazmond to continue her work methodically.  She was as quick and efficient as she could have possibly been.  You might think her life depended on it with how she was going.  The lurid hour of the morning did nothing to deter her energy.

The acrimonious bright-yellow solution she had used was actually a poison in itself, which she had formulated some time ago for the purpose of attacking caustic venin.  It worked by battling for control over the flesh wound, pulling up the offending toxic substance and preventing further damage.  If both were swabbed off at the right juncture, it would leave the skin raw and puss-ridden, the person worse for wear, but the venom would be stopped in its tracks. 

She smirked at Oaky -- Nathan was so cute.  Smuggling the most notorious item on the market and escaping Aurors by a hair... only to make an astute remark on the taste of her homemade anti-venin toxin remover....  Ahh, it was romantic. 

Completing her work with the violet wound-flushing concoction, Dazmond sprinkled him with a deflating draught, watching as the burns shrunk back to their original size.  They were now raw pink and mostly dry, but shiny and exposed.  She was opening a jar of bright orange burn-treating paste when Nate peeked at her from behind his fingers with a Cheshire grin.

"I'm glad you're back, you know.  Sort of missed you."

Given pause, Daz felt her heart increase, not able to recall all the times this Summer that she had begged the Gods for her release -- to stroke his sweet head again.  Pressing herbs to her heart, squinting out toward sea, thinking on him and how -- how she would take his name.  She would.  But all of it was lost and gone.  All the thoughts she tried to deny every day for several years.  They were wrapped up, indistinct, in this new feeling of being home.  It was wonderful and terrible and something that she couldn't at all place within the realm of reason.  According to her memory, it was just like every other time she scurried off.  So why did she feel like this?  Why did she not know how to respond to this admission?  Had she missed him? 

In truth, Dazmond always missed Nathan.  But she hardly ever let on, attempting instead to find ways to not think about it.  For a moment, she just smiled and applied the orange paste to his burns, though her movements had slowed with intention and her eyes had brightened and bloomed into two full moons.  When hers met his, she was dotting a spot on the side of his neck with a single digit.

"I've been thinking about that," she said.  She paused.  All she knew really, was that she couldn't get enough of him.  And she was about to take a Big Step that seemed to her completely nonsensical and compulsive.  And yet somehow necessary. 

More orange goo across his torso, all the speckles and the shallow blasts alike.  She rubbed her hand off on the corner of the towel and -- the immediate work done -- sat back in her chair, grabbing first the bottle of Ogden's and then her cigarette case.  She took a swig of the heavy stuff and extracted a fag, which she held unlit as she spoke.  "I think I want to -- aahh -- stay."

As Dazmond stopped with the acids and poisons and moved onto more theraputic treatments, Nate tried to relax.  The orange paste felt ice cold in the smoking burns, but that ice-hot feeling was slowly fading into a sort of nuetral dull ache.  He tested out the mobility of that shoulder with the smallest movement, and every centimeter he felt the skin stretching against the wound, the burn flexing painfully.  He put his elbow back on the table.

Dazmond suddenly went soft on him.  It wasn't the tone of her voice, dreamy or anything.  It was the same solid, fluent lilt she always had.  It wasn't her posture.  She was still pointy shoulders and the best-looking wrists on the block.  Head still held high.  But something had tendered up and he sensed it.

He looked at her sidelong.  He didn't know what to think.  What they had, it always worked.  They'd gotten hitched because they both knew they were a natural complement.  Together the yins and yangs were in balance.  Dazmond was the only person he could tolerate on a long-term basis.  He enjoyed her company in every moment.  She never annoyed him. She was never dense or defensive.  And she didn't play games.  He knew her and what her life meant when they married.  He knew he lived in one spot, and she didn't. 

But this summer had been the longest.  And no word the entire time. He hadn't been able to help pining.  But like Daz, he didn't admit it to himself. 

But what was this new game?

He raised his eyebrows as if to say, 'oh, have you now?' as he took one of her cigarettes.  He used his good arm to get his wand off the table and light both cigs.

"Mi casa es su casa," he said non-chalantly.  "You know that.  You always make this place smell good.  Is my hunter-gatherer nomad going agrarian on me?"

Dazmond leaned into his wand light, feeling the usual warm pull of the walnut wood like a sturdy hand on her shoulder.

"Hmm."  Dazmond looked amused as she pondered his question, but with the distinct air of one who was not at all comfortable with being termed 'agrarian'.  "Not quite," she said.  "But.  Let's just call it 'Setting Up Camp'.  For permanent, like, Head Quarters."  The bottle of booze was corked and went clunk on the tabletop.  Daz was unable to prevent the subtle smile written all over her face, betraying any bit of insouciance that typically framed their affections.  "Don't get any ideas, though," she threw in for good measure.  "You're still the housewife."  Dazmond grinned. 

She hopped up to return to the hearth, where the water was boiling and the fire, blustering.  To the cauldron she added some prickly ash, devil's claw, bayberry, yerba santa, echinacea, ginseng, and berries of hawthorne and juniper.  The air was quickly filled with a sagey, earthy smell as Dazmond flash boiled the herbage that would constitute her crude decoction for blood replenishment and energy boosting goodness.  It would continue to work out any of the remaining toxins and to purify Nathan's body so it could begin to heal itself.  He would probably always have the scars, and he'd be a little worse for wear a week or two, but his burns were already starting to grow new skin.

Dazmond worked with one hand, enjoying her cigarette with the other, and thought again on how strange this desire of hers really was.  What the hell happened out there on the Isle of Lewis?  She'd gotten back feeling like a beaten up sack of potatoes, and with a certain feeling of fear that still clung to her psyche.

She had hardly been able to pull off 'normal' since her return, and finding Nate in the condition he was in tonight had honestly startled Daz right out of her skin.  Say she hadn't gotten back for three weeks yet?  Say she came back to London to a schizophrenic Nathan?  Or to no Nathan at all?  It would be awfully difficult to hide behind a veil of indifference, then.  And somehow the usually flight-happy Witch was one of those, 'Mommy, it's safe at home' types.  Clinging to her safety blanket.  Suckling her thumb.  And why?

Dazmond sighed deeply, pulling the cauldron off the flame and pouring the liquid through a sieve, where it was caught in a bowl below.  She carried the steaming bitters over to Nathan, and set it down in front of him.  "Sip on this," she said.  "You should drink it all, but -- let it last.  Do you want some soup?"  There was poor-man's stew with a side of day-old bread on the menu, and Dazmond started fixing it up for him before he even had a chance to answer.

Nate gave his darling the middle finger when she denoted him the default domestic.  And while compared to the typical stay-at-home, Nate was a festering pile of clutter, armpit stains and sleeping-in-late, he was ceratinly more home-wifey than Dazmond who was well, never home.  Even now, she was cooking, but that was because her soup was never really just soup.  And Nate didn't have the get up to fix his own supper.

But all of this, while very classically Dazmond and Nate, a condition of strangeness they took great pride in, while it was a marriage they could feel smug and smarter-than-thou about - all of it had been off this time around.  Dazmond was off. 

He sipped the earthy drink and he knew from the first bit that it would help scads.  Despite the near torture she'd put him through to shock-and-awe the bite out of the burns, she always fixed him up with the best gorram tea in all of England and its tea-loving history.

And while she had only offered him soup, there was no mistaking it wasn't just an offer for soup. 

"So where you been, Daz." he asked to her backside. He'd asked once before - early on, before they were married.  It did not go well, and he hadn't asked since.  They both liked it better that way. Dazmond seemed to feel better that Nate would never be able to give her up if the screws were twisted just right.  And Nate felt the same security - he'd have his thumbs off before he betrayed his favorite.

So the question landed hard on the scuffed hardwood floor.  It landed with a heavy period.  It landed with a firm, low tone that was not from a man who'd just been nursed from the brink of death. 

Those words were like a hex in the back!  And if Daz had fur, it'd be standing on end.  As it was, she'd stopped mid-ladle, very aware of her calescent face.   She cocked her head in a little twitch.  The sieve was nestled atop the hot cauldron and it went drip drip drip, hissing against the heat. 

She resumed her scooping of soup, only to realize that it was as appealing to her now as was the muddy polyjuice boiling in the kettle.  No, no, no, she thought.  No!

They had themselves a wonderfully enigmatic and nontraditional marriage, all monogamous components intact.  So why'd he have to ask after her?  What was she, a mail-order bride?  She knew Nate wasn't the patriarchal type.  But these fears of hers ran deep.  It was an automatic correlation.  Especially so, since they had established pre-alchemic-wedding that questions of whereabouts were a big no-no.  Random disappearances were supposed to be as normal as spooning on Valentine's.  And their mutual adoration would keep them tight.  None of this responsible co-dependent leash-keeping.  None of that!

There were days Daz'd get back and talk his ear off all night.  Over the years, there were plenty of times that his asking wouldn't have caused such a fervor.  It wasn't every time that she felt they had to be hush-hush about their times apart, to keep the winds of the heavens dancing 'tween them.  That wasn't always necessary.  But it was pretty straight-forward that directly asking was not alright.  Nate had figured that out when Daz was still fighting off his playful proposals.  He'd asked, and she'd raged.  Nathan was smart and congenial, and it'd always worked out.  But three and a half months was, really, pushing it.  Dazmond knew this, and she knew as well that she really should explain.  Only, she didn't know what happened this Summer.  And that was the kicker.

That was an awfully long time to just go poof.  And, well, she couldn't have any of that.  She set the bowl of soup before him a bit too civilly, flicked her ash in an empty bottle, and climbed back into the chair opposite.

"I was making money," she said.  Sweet and succinct.  She was looking at him, unwavering, as though daring him to push against the force of her gaze.  Though still, Daz was watered down.  Something in her was just unable to give the cold hard stare she would've like to.  It made her dare seem like little more than a peep.

Whoa. There she was.  There was the old lady he'd married.  Her hackles stood up and for a moment, Nate was certain she would slit his throat from ear to ear, take back her soup and slam the door on the way out.  Luckly, the bonds of love are binding and smell of elderberry and his life was spared. 

Not that it wasn't still tense.  Nate took up his spoon like it was the utensil that would feed him his last meal.  But he grinned back just as sweetly.  Don't behave like prey unless you want to be hunted.  There was something very wrong going on.  And the anger throbbing between was hotter than any of the yelling  matches they'd had since they met.  But Nate couldn't help but feel very pleasent indeed at this chess match, this dance, this round of wizards' poker - trying to find out what rules were in play.

"Making money," he said and then paused for soup.  He nodded.  "That's nice, innit? Well done, love.  I know how you enjoy that part."\

And then he dropped his face back into a grey business gaze.  "How much." He punctuated with a supercilious raise of his left eyebrow.

Game on.

Daz squinted at her opponent over her crackling cigarette.  The lamplight was swirling in smoke and their little round room took on the guise of a shady betting parlor.  Even as the tensity of the air thickened and every little word was compounded with a thousand meanings, there was something comforting in all of this.  A dangerous battle of the wits it was, that had to be played with greatly calculated skill.

"Nine hundred ninety-three galleons, sixty sickles, and twenty-three knuts," she said.  Stated as a matter-of-fact.

And, as a matter of fact, she had counted.  Six times. 

Call it obsessive, but Dazmond had rooted through the things she'd brought back over and over.  Trying to piece together what had happened.  Unfortunately all she had as evidence was her potions bag, stuffed with nothing but coins, and an unmarked vial containing some unknown substance that had been tucked into her boot.

Daz's eyes were stuck on Nate and his soup slurping.  She tapped her ash off without looking away and blew two smoke rings in fast succession.  They warbled and warped into two concentric hearts and floated over to the orange-speckled Nathan.

"Was all for you, pet," said Daz.  "What more could you want to know?"

Again she was trying to stub the conversation out, to avoid the gruesome but honest, 'I dunno'.  In truth there was plenty more Daz would have asked herself, not the least of which was where in the hell did she get all that money.  It was a fortune, is what it was. 

Bother.  Daz was getting old.  She was going to have to start keeping a ledger or someat.

Nate kept his eyes locked into Dazmonds as she did exactly the same thing.  For many people, eye contact was an aggressive behavior, an embarassing feaux pas to linger to long gaze to gaze.  It made people blush, giggle or try and settle their beating heart.  And for people like Nate and Dazmond, it was a symbol of complete openness.  Nothing to hide.

But at the moment, it was a psych out.  He'd watch her and press her until her gaze and resolve flinched.  He slurped his soup eyes on.  She blew smoke rings eyes on. Her smoke rings were a masterful thing.  And she knew he had the ones to match.  There were times on the stillest summer nights, with no breeze to muddy their vessels, they'd pass a hooka back and forth watching themselves in a mirror set on the floor, honing the ancient craft.  Passed down from granddads to granddaughters.  And seventh years to sixth years.

But yes, Dazmond's smoke-shapes were always lovely.

"All for me?" he echoed with a soft smile and another slurp of soup.  His heart had nearly stopped itself upon hearing that Dazmond had a near fortune sitting around somewhere.  But he had to keep calm.  Show no surprise.

"That's a sum, isn't it? Can't say I'm up on my reading as far as market prices for your particular talents.  Not to offend, but its a shade above my own occupational interests." (Which was working as little as possible.)

"So do, tell me, love: what does nine hundred ninety-three galleons, sixty sickles, and twenty-two knuts buy from someone as talented as you?  And tell me Dazmond: what job could possibly cost that much and take so long?"

Something started to squirm below the surface of Daz's skin.  Her own curiosities and frustrations were rattled by his questions, all of which she had of course been obsessing over silently since her return. 

She was cornered.

"Twenty-three knuts," said Dazmond.  Precision quickly became a preferred technique for... stalling.  This was followed by an extended pause, their scrutinous gazes unparted and now developing a philosophical air.  She simmered over her cigarette and Nathan's penetrant eyes. 

Dazmond was a dead good liar, but she drew the line with Nathan.  It was in their 'contract'.  So she would resort to all sorts of spins, usually, but this dynamic called for more in the way of fine-tuning the truths she had at her disposal.  Which, at the moment, were few and far between.  Salazar knew she'd try for pride's sake.

"A cold, wet, troublesome potion's order," was what she finally settled on.  Every word was punctuated.  It was a valuable guess. 

But her answer, though true to the parts that were palpable enough to have been ingrained in what was left of her recent memory, were just as theoretical as Nate's questions.  And, because she hadn't severed the energetic bond that pierced the air between, it became suddenly apparent in Daz's voice that she was theorizing.  Realizing this, she took a quick breath in as if fixing to speak -- but stopped short.  A single-syllabled and breathy ghost of a laugh was all she could manage to expel. 

Shite on her, he'd won.

She put up her arms and cocked her head down and away to signal surrender.  Her white-flag resignation lasted but a moment.  Dazmond partook of one last, deep drag before stubbing out her smoke on the jar lid of her burns-treating ointment, and leaned back to talk to the cracked white ceiling.

"Alright!  Alright," she said.  Her exasperation was evident.  "What could I have possibly been doing -- in a cave," she paused, settling her gaze again on Nate, pointedly.  "For the whole, entire fecking Summer, in the wet and cold, on an island, in Scotland, for nine-hundred ninety-three galleons, sixty sickles, twenty-three knuts -- and an unmarked vial! filled with scentless, colorless sap?  What could I have possibly done! -- to completely fecking vanish my memory of the whole fecking thing!?  Nathan, I don't know.  I don't.  Know!" 

Her last word was punctuated with the dull thud of her head falling 'gainst the tabletop. 

The game continued for a few more minutes, perfectly predictable.  Dazmond was unwavering and had noticed his slip on the exact sum.  She was in rare form and his concern for her was garnished with admiration and the thrill of the game.  Once the conversation was over, he imagined they'd put each other to sleep with the flushing fatigue of a naked romp.

But then, a crack. A tiny chink.  And then it shot through the pane of her resolve and his firey wife was an explosion of emotion, gesticulation and exasperation. 

Nate watched her, wide-eyed and worried.  What what she talking about? A cave? Unmarked vial?  Any sense of joviality had faded.  The insurmountable Dazmond had been bested somehow and that was enough to rattle them both.  They were smarter and prettier than all the other kids at school - who but some titan could crack at their foundations.

The scene played out with shouting and and finally it was down curtain as her head and its black hair collapsed on the table.  She was limp from exhaustion and there were a few moments of silence.  (Little did Nate know, that Knockturn Ally was now buzzing with activity, and if he'd been more attuned, his ears would be burning.)  But in the Shodding Arms #76, the drapes had been cast open to reveal a much bigger mystery.

She'd come back from a dangerously long foray with more gold than either of them had ever seen, wandless, disoriented and with some newfound love of home and hearth and staying-put.  And no memory of what had happened.  And it wasn't as if she kept a diary or transaction records and a client list. 

He put his spoon down into his bowl leaned over the table.  He whispered at her: "So is that were you left your wand? Scotland? Shall we go have a look around, see if we can't find it?"