Pepper is the sword-arm of crazy (pickledpepper) wrote in blurred_lines, @ 2008-07-22 11:28:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! [1979-07] july, millicent bagnold (née macfusty), octavius pepper |
Who: Pepper and Mill
Where: Arkfith Park in Dorset
When: Monday afternoon
What: Mill is really drugged up and it's funny needs tending to.
Rating: PG-13
Status: Incomplete
It actually felt strange to be back at work on Monday, and considering that typically Pepper worked 70 hours a week, that was really saying something quite odd. He was glad to leave, grabbing up one of the newspapers that littered the office as he went, not bothering to offer anyone a parting nod or wave (particularly not Alice Longbottom, who he'd been avoiding quite desperately, though that was rather easy considering their paths rarely crossed anyway). No one followed him as he left this time. It didn't take long to swing by his flat, checking on the various animals, making sure his spare room hadn't been set on fire and collecting the bottle of whiskey he'd left on the bench. Shrugging off his work robes, he left them draped over a chair before jogging back down the stairs, into the alley beside the building and Apparating neatly to Dorset. He wasn't sure whether or not Gulliver was home, but he didn't particularly care either way. Mill's marriage had very little bearing on him. The bottle wrapped in the newspaper, he headed up the path to the front door, knocking firmly and waiting for someone to answer.
It was a little bit of a wait, which wasn't so unexpected; it was a reasonably large house. But eventually there were heavy steps approaching the door, and it was yanked unceremoniously open to reveal a shaggy-haired, five-o'clock-shadowed, late-middle-aged man with his shirtsleeves rolled up: Gulliver Bagnold. "Yes?" Door still in one hand, he snapped the fingers of the other and pointed. "Wait. Pepper, isn't it? Thank Merlin." It was spoken with relieved emphasis, and when he stepped back from the door to give room to enter, he was rolling his sleeves back down. "My sweet angelic wife is just about to drive me completely insane. Think you could take care of her for half an hour or so?" He was already reaching for his coat. "She's in the drawing room," a handwave down the corridor, "back there, on your right, don't let her get up; you are," he clapped a hand on Pepper's shoulder, "a life-saver." After a moment's thought, he added, "Probably mine."
"Oh, I'm much more annoying than she is," Pepper assured him, quite honestly and with actually some small hint of pride. It took work to be that much of a bastardly bastard and still be genuinely liked by so many people, after all. Not just anyone could pull it off. It was perfectly fine with him for Guppy to get the hell out of dodge, though, and he actually managed a half-wave this time, feeling no particular animosity towards the man (which could be considered strange, given his somewhat peculiar relationship with Mill and the rumours that periodically circled the DMLE offices) as he headed down the hall to find the drawing room. It wasn't very hard, and Mill was very evident when he entered, settled in on a settee looking just as irritable as Gulliver had implied. "I have whiskey and the newspaper." He held up the items as proof, hooking his ankle around the leg of a chair and dragging it over. "Apparently the wizarding world can breathe again. It's very inspiring."
"Good," Millicent declared tersely, jiggling her blanket-covered knee and turfing a book off its precarious position on her lap and onto the floor. "I am utterly fed up with fiction." The concepts were all ridiculous and the heroines... well, don't even get her started. And actually, the list of what she was fed up with only started there, and stretched for miles, including (but most definitely not limited to) this couch, the view from the window (formerly one of her favourites but there were weeds in amongst the azaleas and she was dying to get out there and pull them out), lying down, not being allowed to get dressed properly, this confounded itch from the healing scratches, falling asleep unexpectedly after taking the pain medication, the pain before taking the medication, tea, toast with jam and Guppy saying, "Yes dear," and not doing anything about anything.
Speaking of which...
Still holding out her hand imperiously for the newspaper (or the whiskey, she wasn't picky), Millicent's eyes narrowed. "What did you do with my husband?"
The imperious hand got the newspaper, largely because Pepper couldn't see any glasses present and it was easier to hand the Prophet off to her so he could conjure a couple himself. He didn't particularly fancy seeing what her wandwork was like at present, remembering how he'd been after the Diagon Alley attack, and admittedly she hadn't exactly been gutted but it had still looked pretty damn painful. "He's locked in the kitchen," he replied breezily, sloshing drinks practicedly into the glasses. "Or gone down the pub. Probably the pub. I hope you know how ironic it is to say you're fed up with fiction and then ask for the newspaper." And face it, the line about how she'd singlehandedly killed two werewolves had given him a bit of a laugh, though it did take some of the pressure off of him. As much as the body looked like it had been knifed, now there definitely wouldn't be any Avada Kedavra-related problems for him, and that was always preferable. He didn't need public adulation so really it had all worked out very well for him. He set her glass down where she could reach it, the bottle moving to the floor and took a sip of his own, appreciative of the burn in his throat.
Millicent lowered the newspaper from her quick scan of the front page - yes, she was very aware of the irony, but at least the Prophet wasn't melodramatic or purple-prosed about it - to send another suspicious glance Pepper's way. But she did realise that at this point, Guppy would probably happily have been locked in the kitchen, and she wasn't really surprise that he'd taken the opportunity of Pepper's arrival to escape for a while. She was, actually, well aware of how bad a patient she was. She was fed up with that as well.
Turning the page of the paper, she picked up the whiskey glass - oh, yes, now that was entirely welcome; maybe she didn't hate Pepper quite so much right now. (Not that she ever particularly hated him, drat the man, but...) She'd fortunately swallowed her first blessed sip and was lifting the glass for a second when her eyes found her own name amongst the headlines. Fortunate, because coughing whiskey all over newsprint really was a waste. "What the hell?" she declared, sitting up a little more on the settee and then subsiding again with a pained wince.
The smirk wasn't quite a laugh, but it could well have been if Pepper hadn't smothered it. Cranky patients didn't appreciate being laughed at, he'd found, even if her reaction was highly amusing. "I told you it was inspiring. My favourite part is where they spell Gummy's name wrong, though the bit about single-handedly killing two werewolves is pretty good as well. I feel like I should be asking for your autograph." He watched her scanning the page with an entertained expression, stretching one leg out lazily. This Betty Braithwaite should get some kind of owl, really, with a pretty happy note and possibly some kind of baked good. Well, no, no one smarter than a Mongoloid would actually eat something that came in the post, maybe just a nice card.
"Good grief," Mill said faintly, a little pale but regaining her colour as she read the article. Single-handedly? Oh dear. She'd have to get Gumboil something nice; at the moment the head of that Pryce woman (using the term loosely) was seeming appropriate. "Gosh," she said, lowering the paper to smirk across at Pepper, "I'm brilliant. Are you supposed to be my crowd of admirers?" Toasting herself would be completely ridiculous; she just took a more hefty swig of her whiskey.
"Yes," he replied seriously, raising his glass in a vague 'cheers' before taking another drink; Crouch's 'no alcohol in the office' rule was really very inconvenient sometimes. "I'd get down on my knees and worship you, but last time I tried that in these jeans it turned out to be rather hard to get up again." Well, technically that time he'd just been getting down on his knees, but that was completely beside the point and not exactly the conversation he wanted to be having right now. "Makes a nice change from screaming for our blood, anyway. Though if you did get promoted and left me with Higgs I'd be very cross."
Yes, those jeans. Millicent had been doing her best to ignore those jeans, which was never very successful but probably good for her immortal soul or her karma or whatever it was about her that was so metaphorically tarnished as to have brought the trial of Pepper upon her in the first place.
Gosh, they were really nice jeans.
Millicent gave her whiskey some serious consideration. "There's nowhere I could be promoted to," she noted, "that wouldn't require the removal of a moderate idiot, so I suspect we're all safe from your ire." Utter idiots the Ministry was pretty good at identifying and removing with alacrity, it was the almost-passable idiots who tinkered away and got promoted and congregated in the upper echelons driving their juniors to drink. "I'll settle for getting my investigative taskforce into this dark-creature army of You-Know-Who's. After this, surely even Bartemius 'more consideration' Crouch has to see the need."
Pepper had quite a few suggestions for what Bartemius 'more consideration' Crouch could do other than seeing needs, none of which were even nearly appropriate for the office, and he outlined one of them in vague, yet colourful, terms. It was entirely plausible that the idea was not even anatomically possible; certainly he'd never managed it, though admittedly he hadn't spent so very much time trying. "He'd better," he added darkly. "We only killed two. It's like chopping heads off a hydra." Never mind that they were people with lives 29 days a month and all that tosh. That went out the window when you refused to come in to a Ministry lock up and deliberately set yourself up to harm innocents. As far as he was concerned they were monsters when they acted like this, and had no right to complain about how they were treated and then turn around and orchestrate a massacre.
Personally, Millicent didn't give a damn if they were furry creatures of the night or cross-dressing fetishist clowns, they'd associated with a known and wanted murderer, gathered together for the purpose of violence and - and this was the bottom line - they'd broken the law. Her job was just to arrest them all and let the wizengamot sort them out.