Magical Hogwarts

wrexham, wales | april 2005

Ari finished casting the Anti-Disapparition jinx with a last sweep of her wand, fingers stiff in the pre-dawn April air. The fact that Alwyn Priddy, a pureblood, had picked the basement of a Muggle building to centralize his dark artifact smuggling activities had drawn out both the processes of tracing the location and setting up this raid; Ari hastily finished Imperturbing the boundaries of the upper townhouse, with a Muggle-Repelling Charm for good measure, before giving Harry a nod, nervously anticipating some sign of impatience from the senior Auror.

It felt weird, as it had for the hour or two of prep, to be doing this with The Boy Who Lived; Ari's actual partner on this case, Lorraine McEachern, had suddenly claimed leave to caretake for a family illness, conveniently after one of the more disastrous of the recent operations. Harry seemed immune to burnout, for reasons she could only guess; gratitude, awe, pity, and resentment briefly swirled through Ariana before she stilled them into wary alertness, her fingers curving in sequence around the handle of her wand like a ritual. Today, she expected to wield it as a weapon, not only a tool. At least this place bore no resemblance to a castle.

Not that Priddy himself was supposed to be particularly dangerous, but certainly he would not be happy about being arrested; he must have heard about what happened to Bethan Craddock, knew that he'd been the one who'd imported the goblet that had leeched the runespoor venom into her wine. Hopefully he did not know yet that he was being investigated; they needed the contents of the basement to prove the extent of his trafficking of more dangerous goods. Ari closed her eyes, probing lightly at the wards on the place before opening them and rolling her shoulders back. This was no Hogwarts Castle, with thousand-year-old walls; actually, it was going to be fairly easy to get inside.

"Okay," she said, looking at Harry again to confirm his readiness. "Here goes. Reducto." The surety of a destructive curse lanced outward from her core through her wand arm. The door disintegrated.

Harry stifled a yawn, turning slightly away from his partner in today's raid to hide it further. This wasn't one of his cases -- by now a majority of his workload was terrorism-related; it'd been a while since he'd been given anything as simple as a poisoning. Not that this process had been simple at all; he'd had to be caught up to speed on the evidence McEachern and Laurier had been working on, and their plan for obtaining more, in the two hours leading up to this raid. Harry was a quick study where evidence was concerned but it was still about four in the morning.

It was Ariana Laurier's case more than his, so he stood implacably and rather unhelpfully as she blocked their target area off from interference -- magical or Muggle -- not trusting himself to know the boundaries anywhere near as well as she would. In the shadowy dusk, there wasn't much to look at even if he could see it clearly, but Harry kept a sharp eye out anyway, leaning against the brick building with his arms folded, almost entirely still but for his eyes darting around and his hand fidgeting on his wand.

Okay. He looked to his right at Ariana -- "Right."

Inside it was dim, though they'd checked for human presence -- if Priddy was here, he was -- upstairs? In the back storeroom? Asleep? There was a light on in the next room, visible only in the outline of the door -- Harry looked at Ariana, and started moving toward it, when --

"Huh?"

In the next moment there was nothing but complete darkness and two voices -- neither of them Ariana's -- shouting in discordant confusion. Lumos did nothing; Harry stumbled to the right, trying to find Ariana again. He shot off a Stunner -- uncanny when he could see neither his own wand nor the spell, could only feel it hum through the wood. He shot off another two Stunners and an Impediment Jinx, his ears straining to make any sense of the sudden cacaphony -- he gave up on nonverbal communication and magic, joining the clamour: "Stupefy -- Laurier, where are you?"

Just before the lights were swallowed up by darkness Ari thought she could hear a single panicked cry from a voice too young to be Priddy's, but as she lost the use one of her senses her attention was redirected to verifying the feel of her feet on the ground, her wand in her hand. A Stunning Spell of her own lanced from her wand almost simultaneously with Harry's, as a reflex, and she strained to corral her racing thoughts. Darkness Powder -- trying to escape, perhaps with the goods -- he couldn't Apparate, they had cut off the Floo connection -- she and Harry were probably in the way. 

"Petrificus Totalus!" she tried, despite that they were literally shooting in the dark. "I'm here -- the doorway --" She wheeled around and pointed her wand at the doorway, conjuring an admittedly thin stone wall to block it off. At that moment she heard another yell, the sound of something large heavy scraping against the floor, and an eerie whistling noise; some blunt object also smashed into her shoulder. Spinning in that direction, her "Stupefy!" was followed by an angry "Expulso!"

The exact sequence of causes and effects in the next moments would later be anyone's guess. All that Ariana could tell was that were several nearly simultaneous shattering sounds -- from different spells? a chain reaction? -- and then a larger boom, after which she heard very little. She was thrown backward against the wall she'd just made, a searing pain in her right thigh. For several seconds, she struggled to right herself before resorting to trying to resolve the ceiling in her sight -- for after a few moments, she found she could see something, somewhat doubled though it seemed to be.

"Laurier!" shouted Harry again, but this was swallowed in the boom of her Expulso. He slammed hard into a wall he hadn't even realized he'd had at his back, though the angle at which he hit it only jolted unpleasantly through his shoulder. He watched his glasses slide forward on his nose almost in slow-motion before the temples slipped off his ears, though naturally he did not see them shatter against Ariana's hastily-erected wall. He was suddenly, sharply, exploding in pain in his shoulder, along his ribcage; he let out a short, gasping breath through gritted teeth.

But somehow -- thankfully -- he had held onto his wand. He lit it, then -- when that had no effect, with the Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder still dispersed through the room -- swung it in a loop, conjured up a strong whirlwind, trying to blow the powder out of the air. "Laurier?" he said, again; with his free hand he groped at the wall, trying to pull back to his feet as his sense of hearing roared back into sharper resolution. Somebody -- neither him nor Ariana, and he suspected not Alwyn Priddy either -- was screaming. He felt for his glasses -- muttered, "Accio, Reparo" -- tried squintly to force the room to regain shape blurrily around him --

st. mungo's hospital for magical maladies and injuries

Harry hadn't asked if Ariana wanted something to drink -- had just gotten up, abruptly, and gone in search of something (anything) with which to distract himself for a few minutes. As he wove his way back through the Spell Damage corridor he spilled hot tea from one of the two cups he was carrying on his hand; he handed his partner the cup he hadn't spilt with an apologetic grimace -- "That's just plain, I didn't know if you'd want sugar or milk or anything," he said, before having a seat in the vacant chair beside her. He looked across the hallway at the ward door, with the handwritten label "Colwyn Priddy" tacked under the room number.

"So," was not the most extravagant or eloquent thing he could have said, in the moment, but it was all that came to mind; his voice was still hoarse around the dust that had gathered in Priddy's cellar operation. He cleared his throat, and had a sip of tea.

The gaze Ariana raised to Harry from where it fixated on her palms was blank, taking several seconds to resolve into some semblance of recognition. Both the gesture with which she took the tea and the "Thanks," she murmured were automatic, though she did not raise it to her lips, instead letting it replace her hands in her line of sight. The brown liquid did not invite quite the same muted horror, perhaps; after Harry's So she moved it to the top of her right thigh and allowed her forehead to drop into her left hand. Her sideways glance landed somewhere around the man's thighs. Even this was too much; her fingers moved to cover her eyes. "So," she managed herself, out of politeness.

Her fingers curled harder around the cup, as if a little more heat might join the residual stab in her leg, somehow start to bring the damage on the other side of the door into balance. Nineteen. "Have you ever...do you know how long..." Ari made a half-gesture towards the door, as if someone might suddenly materialize to give an update on Colwyn's prognosis, before lapsing into silence. Of course there was no such thing as a standard wait in Healing. Instead she reluctantly inched toward the moment in her memory, as though this were a normal mission requiring debriefing. Priddy senior's brain -- none of the spells she recalled casting could do that, it wasn't in Harry's style either, everyone knew how he fought -- but in her memory, in the darkness, there was just the unfathomable thrum of power in her hand. Who knew what it was capable of?

"What happened," she tried to seek his recollection, "--no, never mind. It doesn't matter." She exhaled hard. "Most of the evidence is charred. Priddy can't stand trial in the Craddock case. And --" her voice caught in her throat as she shifted her gaze to the door. Colwyn looked kind of like Prosper -- same curly hair, just a few shades darker; same long slim build, just less muscle. Same slumped posture after he'd been thrown to the wall. "It's too much power," she muttered, fingertips turning white as the cup walls gave a little.