Benjy "spoons werewolves" Fenwick (runbenjyrun) wrote in blurred_lines, @ 2008-07-18 14:51:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! [1979-07] july, benjy fenwick, gideon prewett |
Benjy and Gideon do crime
WHO: Benjy, Gideon and the Lestrange Library's security system
WHAT: Mission Impossible, Ravenclaw style
WHEN: Thursday 17th July
WHERE: Lestrange Library, Hogsmeade
RATING: For grown-ups, on account of Ravenclaw swearing, super awesomeness and grievous bodily harm
NOTE: Apologies for slight abruptness with the italicised section - Em was going to finish it but we decided her house was more important than our log.
It was getting close to 1am, but all the downstairs lights were on in the Prewett house in Screechsnap Square. For once this week, however, the conversation emanating from the dining room was not animated or punctuated with magical pops, snaps, or fizzles, so the neighbours weren't really too fussed.
Inside, the clutter of the week's preparation had been shoved to one end of the dining room table, books piled up precariously and the detritus of a dozen failed experiments falling onto the floor. On the cleared end of the table, the finalised equipment was waiting; magical lockpicks and ward-detector that Fabian had acquired and the boys had... enhanced, Gideon's keys to the library and the Möbius strips of braided electrical wire that were the prototype ward-bypassers that, Gideon told himself, were absolutely, entirely, totally going to work. They'd worked in practice. There was no conceivable reason why they shouldn't work in the real thing.
Those, and their wands, and their brains. There was nothing they couldn't get past.
Gideon took a deep breath, and let it out slowly, then looked up across the table at Benjy. "I think we're ready," he said quietly.
Ready was a dangerous word. It meant plunging in and no going back and all sorts of other adventurous catchphrases that the Gryffindors probably tossed around in their sleep. (Benjy probably oughtn't think that, with the problems House rivalry have been causing, but certainly, historically, Gryffindors have been more inclined towards things like this.) Still, considering they'd been sitting here looking at their toys and drinking coffee silently for several minutes now, there really didn't seem much else they could do except for leave. They'd done all the testing they could and ironed out all the kinks they could find and now they were ready, that oh so dangerous word, for the real thing.
"I'd suggest a moment of silence, but, well..." He forced a light-hearted grin, wondering how it was people could be so cavalier about these sorts of things. Sure, he'd gone into battle and cast cruciatus on a Death Eater, and thrown spoons at Fenrir Greyback, which people liked to remind him of ever so frequently, but they'd both been different, they'd been things that had needed to be done on the spur of the moment.
Possibly far too abruptly he stood up, picking up the lockpicks and ward-detector, leaving the keys and bypasser to Gideon. They were epic geniuses and if it wasn't for the necessary secrecy of the operation they'd go down in history next to the names of people who invented braking charms and Pepper-Up potion. Right. Ready.
Gideon drained the last mouthful of his coffee and set the mug aside as he stood up as well. When he took up the bypasser the wires seemed to want to writhe in his hand, but he was used to that by now and ignored it, slinging it into his satchel which already contained useful references like his journal and one of the curse-breaking books. He clutched the keys in one hand, the metal slightly cool against his skin, and took his wand in the other. A glance up at the clock (a regular one; Molly had got them a magical one but Gideon's hand had got stuck on "lost" and the cat had pounced on Fabian's hand and broken it off) told him it was three minutes to one. At one, or so their contacts on the inside had told them, the patrol shifts changed and old and new patrols rendezvoused at the apparition point near the town hall, conveniently behind the library.
With a nod, Gideon said, "Let's go." He stepped forward--
--and flattened himself against the outer wall of the library, in the shadow the hulking building cast. The street was silent and deserted in the moonlight.
Benjy appeared next to him a moment later and for a moment they stood quietly, eyes out for a patrol. Nothing was moving, their information on the schedules apparently correct. Well, naturally, as it would hardly do to come up with a fantastic plan to break into a library and then get caught for being out after eight. That would drop them from the coolest criminals ever to the most pathetic, unfortunately. When it became clear that nothing was going to happen, Benjy nodded at Gideon. They could get in easily before the next shift came around, which just strengthened the point that this curfew wasn't exactly the best use of manpower around. "Right, come on. Bloody typical that we'd be breaking into a library," he said in a soft voice, the grin coming easier now. It seemed that now that they'd actually begun, the adrenaline was coming, making him a little giddy with the recklessness of it and the knowledge that they were breaking quite an awful lot of laws right now - or would be very soon, at least. Still, he'd already cast an Unforgivable, and at least this would be more productive. A lot more productive, if they could bring down the Lestranges.
"Sshh," Gideon whispered, but through a bit of a giggle and really, this was not a laughing situation (except in the way that, yes, Ravenclaws breaking into a library) so it must be adrenaline. He led the way around the building towards the doors - only a couple of metres - while he fanned his keys out on his palm. He'd cast silencio on them back at home, so when he lifted the appropriate key, the others made no sound on their ring. One physical lock, one magical ward upon the door, and once they were dealt with and Gideon eased the door open - thank Merlin the Lestranges weren't the sort of ostentatious that favoured impressively creaking hinges - he gestured for Benjy to wait a moment on the threshold while he disabled the non-employees alarm. That done, he stuck his head back around the door - Benjy a shadowed silhouette - and whispered, "Yep."
At least the getting in part was easy enough when you had a possibly-reasonably-trusted-but-who-coul
The library stretched tall and wide before them, and though the darkness insinuated itself into every corner of the room, it was frighteningly large - and the usually warm mahogany bookcases were frigid and cold under curtain-filtered moonlight. From an intangible distance in the black echoed the dull whine of something living, and after several moments, a low thudding staccato introduced one of the wolfhounds, who seemed no more ferocious than a puppy with Gideon's smell strong in its nose. Rather than growl or even bark, the dog simply 'whuffed' and thrust its nose into Gideon's chest. Convinced of his identity, it trotted back into the abyss, content to patrol the bookshelves until its master returned in the morning. Gideon and Benjy were safe.
As for Ravenclaw ingenuity -- it was as effective as ever; the detector discovered what Gideon desired (the wards behind the wards) the moment he'd brought it into the building. Contrary to their worries - that it would not be able to locate the extra security - it seemed overzealous. Signal seemed to come from all direction, hints of wards lingering behind walls, from the ceilings, from the very floor beneath their feet. They seemed to be everywhere.
And they were.
From the day Rodolphus had begun building the library from the ground up, his special room - his seventh floor - had been an integral part of the structure.
It wasn't so much a route as... well, Gideon hadn't entirely known what to make of the things the detector had told him, and he'd spent a solid twenty-four hours cogitating about it before his subconscious jerked him awake at quarter-to-four one morning to point out to him that all they really needed for the bypasser was a point, a central or anchor point, for preference, but if the wards were everywhere, then just get in the middle of them.
So he led the way to the centre of the ground floor of the library, beneath the circular balcony cut away from the second floor. There was a rather spectacular carpet on the floor here, but Gideon hooked a toe beneath one edge and rolled it up and away, revealing some charming circular mosaic work, a few metres in diameter, in the floor tiles. "This is what I was telling you about," he said, quietly, pushing the carpet aside completely. "If we bridge the ward here, we should be able to unravel the entry charms and get through."
Benjy was quiet a moment, peering at the design on the floor. It was large, and indeed the detector in his hands was going quite mad over it as though there was some kind of magical pheromone business going on. It was more than going ding, it was vibrating and buzzing continuously. He set it down carefully, unneeded now but still cherished like a baby, and maybe that was a little geeky, caring so much about something that they hadn't even really invented but just modified a bit, but that was okay with him. "So we stretch the bypasser across it, one end on each side?" He was definitely feeling a buzz of excitement now, just waiting to see how it would go with all this around it. The plans had gone perfectly but they hadn't been this complex and it was bound to be fantastic to experience, actually using it at its full potential. It felt a little bit like they could go anywhere, which was possibly a bit of that whole "power corrupts" thing they talked about.
Unslinging the satchel from his shoulder, Gideon pulled out the wire twist of the bypasser before dropping the rest beside the detector. It really felt like it was undulating in his hand now, picking up on the ambient magic, but to the eye it was completely inert. Teasing one loop of wire out of the bundle - and he still didn't understand how this part could be blue and that part red, or green, or yellow, when the whole thing was, as far as he was aware, a single loop of wire; then again, this was magic - he held it out towards Benjy to grab and pull. One person could separate the ends, but it had worked better in trials when the ends were passed from hand to hand before being inserted. He was feeling that old bubbling, like they were back in school and about to set off something utterly spectacular. Weeks of detentions had always been worth that moment when it all just worked.
"I'll go over here," he said, pointing at a patch at the rim of the mosaic circle. "I don't know that it necessarily needs to be across, but a bit of symbolic ritual never went astray, right?"
God, Benjy loved this bit as much as Gideon did. He hadn't necessarily been involved in all the things the twins had been in school, but he had in some, probably more than he should have been, and it was even better now because they were older and smarter and doing something that meant something, something important. He'd been dreaming about schematics and wards and the bypasser for the last week.... and what might be in the room(s?) on the seventh floor. "All the old cultures have it," he agreed, and then bit back a small lecture on what exactly some of those old rituals were. This wasn't the time. This was just the time to feel. He tugged his end firmly to make sure they had it stretched out enough before pacing to his spot, across from his partner-in-crime. "Here." He crouched down and the end of the wire felt like it was writing in his hands, drawn towards the wards in the floor like strong magnets. It was possible that there was more active magic in this room, right now, than he'd ever experienced at once. "Count of three?"
"Right," Gideon agreed, crouching down. He mentally marked out his spot - there, between the brown and the green tiles just on the outer edge - and settled his grip on the wire. "One," he said, looking up and meeting Benjy's eyes across the circle. "Two," they said together. Gideon grinned, and they said, "three," and he was bringing the wire down, stabbing it like a knife into the floor--
--and having it wrenched out of his hand. He was flung backwards, he was blind, he was dizzy and shocked and hitting something heavy with his left shoulder, all the air crushed out of his lungs.
Benjy's hand was still on the wire, unlike Gideon's, but the pain, oh the pain. It felt like the wire was super-heated and whip-lashing through his body, cutting and slicing and lancing and he was full of it, pain and too much magic and none of it liked him, he wasn't welcome here, not in this realm of old blood, old magic, building up and howling through him. It hurt more than anything had the right to hurt, and it was red, and it was white, and it was a thousand degrees hot, and then it was nothing.
It took many moments of blinking for there to be anything other than star-dancing blackness in front of Gideon's eyes, and those were moments of ouch. At first, it was as though he'd gone deaf to everything, but then the pain came rushing in - his shoulder was screaming and his ribs were creaking and his fingers felt jangled loose and his head was ringing like a bell. He didn't even have the breath to swear - at least, not out loud.
Slumping over onto his side, Gideon managed to claw his way up onto hands and knees - well, hand and knee, he couldn't really put weight on his left shoulder but he shuffled back in the direction he thought the circle was, shaking his head to clear his vision. Not that he needed it to tell him that they hadn't got through. This... nothing like this had happened in the trials. There'd been a faint zap once, Benjy had said like a mild electric shock, but they'd streamlined the charm protocols and it hadn't recurred. This time, though, clearly, it hadn't worked. Gideon didn't know why, but there'd be time to figure that out later when they were back at home.
He stopped, dizzy and blinking, and began to make out shapes. The circle on the floor. The satchel just nearby; Gideon flailed at it, shoved the detector into it as well. They should get out of here; if things hadn't gone to plan, they might have set off some sort of alarm. Where was...? There. The end of the ward bypasser, twitching like the tip of an irritated cat's tail. A little further on, the still shape of fingers Gideon knew almost as well as his own. "Benjy," he said, reaching for his hand and nearly falling flat on his face, which was how he didn't notice until he touched the knuckles (still warm, he'd remember that later) before his vision clear further and he saw that the hand - Benjy's hand - wasn't attached to anything.
It wasn't...
"Benj!" Gideon shouted (wheezed, barely made any sound at all) and lunged forwards. He did fall then, heel of his palm skidding across the tiles in a smear of (oh Merlin) blood. His elbow bumped into something warm and pliant and he didn't look too closely; arm or leg or something else, it wasn't Benjy's, it wasn't, it couldn't be. Gideon pushed on, satchel knocking at his side, not looking, not getting distracted, because Benjy was here somewhere and he would need Gideon's help. He gathered up the bypasser with trembling hands, but once the ends were reattached the device lay quiescent; Gideon shoved it into the satchel and he couldn't see again, something blurring his vision. He stopped to scrub the back of his hand across his eyes, and blinked hard, and there was Benjy. Eyes wide, mouth slack, head tilted at a strange angle because... because...
Oh Merlin, oh fuck, oh Merlin and Circe and Hermes Trismegistus, no, he couldn't, it wasn't, NO. Gideon's vision was blurred again, he was crying, he was slipping across the floor slicked with blood and he didn't care, his fingers tangling in Benjy's hair, his hand against his cheek, and his head was so heavy and so abhorrently light with nothing else attached to it, and no, this just couldn't have happened, he couldn't be dead, they couldn't be here, no, no, no--
--and there was grass beneath Gideon's bloody knees. The wind in the trees and stars overhead and he didn't notice any of it, curled into a ball and sobbing his heart out and clutching the severed head of his best friend.