Who: Will Cadwallader, Dante Avery and Adrienna Jugson What: Someone needs a reminder. :( When: Tonight some time, January 19th Where: Will's home in Caerphilly Warnings: So much violence. No cats were harmed in the writing of this log, though. Status: Complete!
Finding Will Cadwallader’s schedule was easy: practice and match schedules weren’t irregular or secretive. They knew exactly when he’d be gone and for how long -- provided he wasn’t injured or ill, but Dante wasn’t too worried about that. He knew they’d be able to get the upperhand regardless.
Dismantling the wards wasn’t any more difficult for the two trained Cursebreakers. (If it had been, Dante wasn’t sure he would have been able to look anyone in their faces, especially not the Dark Lord. He was already facing an uphill battle there.) The cats were proving to be more of a nuisance than he’d anticipated, though. They followed him around, crying, rubbing on his legs -- like they wanted to be friends? Did cats even have friends?
“Does he not feed them?” he grunted, nudging one of them away with the toe of his shoe. “Will you --” He gestured towards the back patio. “Do something with them?”
"They're just trying to say hello," Adrienna replied, stooping down in all of her Death Eating regalia to scratch one of the cats behind the ears, with another two cats looking on from a safe distance. "Hi there, buddy. Who's a good kitty who's gender I don't want to assume? Are you hungry? Let's get you and your friends out of here, okay?"
She made her way to the kitchen, her robes billowing dramatically behind her as a procession of cats followed behind her attacking the fabric. An easy "accio Cat Food" spell had a bag of the stuff flying into her arms, which she shook to get the attention of any other cats that might be lurking around the house. Slicing open the bag, she levitated it out the back door, and kept it open so that the animals would run out and avoid being accessories to the dark arts.
"There we go. I think they liked you, but they like food more."
The only thing alerting Will that something might be wrong was Fiona the Cat being outside. Normally she refused to use the cat flap, insisting that humans were put on this earth to open doors for her, waiting until he came home to be let out.
Maybe she’d finally gotten over that one, Will thought as he cut across the garden up towards the door. Something was wrong there too, but the disturbance of the wards was slight enough that he didn’t stop. He walked through them instead, making a mental note to call the wardsmith about it later in the week. Or at least Rhys. He was good at that stuff.
And then he realised that he wasn’t alone.
As soon as Will was through the door, Dante locked it behind him. His voice wasn’t disguised -- there was no sense, not when he was already outed -- but he was fully clad in his mask and robes. “Hello, Will.” There was a flash of red light from his wand, intended to toss Will across the room and into whatever was there. He didn’t need to die this time, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t still have some fun.
Oh fuck was Will’s only thought as he dodged the spell as best he could. Quick reflexes. He did have quick reflexes, but not enough to make up for the element of surprise. He was knocked off his feet and skidded backwards across the floor, but was back on his feet in an instant. Finding his wand was a less automatic gesture, and he fumbled with it for a second before his fingers wrapped tightly around it.
Will had never learned how to protect himself against Death Eaters. He’d refused to even touch dueling – that was how his dad had died – and had always counted on not pissing them off enough to have to fight them.
It had worked, until now.
He pointed his wand at a chair, sending it towards the Death Eater at a very high speed, knowing that it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. But he didn’t even know where to start.
"It's very nice of you to offer us a chair, but I think we'll be standing," Aidy replied, a slash of her wand knocking the chair away casually. She considered adding commentary about how too much sitting is actually very bad for a person, but decided against it. "You, on the other hand…" she said, leaving the sentence hanging and throwing a knee-reversal hex his way.
The talking helped. Will was appreciative of that. He dodged it fairly easily, thanks to a career’s worth of close calls with Bludgers, wishing that he had any idea what to do. Where to go from here. Physically he should be able to overpower either of them – maybe even both – but how did you throw yourself at a Death Eater without dying? That part he hadn’t figured out yet.
“Why are you here?” he asked although he knew, following the words up with a decent blasting curse.
With two against one, Dante knew they had the upper hand, so he took the brunt of the curse with his own shield to give Aidy a better opening. “Shall we let him guess? Maybe we can spare him something if he gets it right.”
"I do enjoy when they try to guess," Aidy replied, the blasting curse knocking her a bit out of step, but her attention and wand remained focused on Will. "We could take a finger each time he gets it wrong, maybe. Or dunk him upside down into the sink? They did that in one of the Marvel movies. You're not a DC guy, are you, Will?" she asked, tossing an electrocution spell his way.
The spell hit Will slightly off kilter, coursing through his body through his shoulder. He fell to his knees, gasping as the current flashed through him for several long seconds, unable to do much more than hanging on to his wand.
This wasn’t going to work. He needed to get closer. Somehow. Gritting his teeth he did the only thing he could think of. He summoned the smaller of the two Death Eaters, hoping to wrap an arm around her neck, or maybe just use her as a shield. He really wasn’t sure.
It was fun, watching the way that spells ripped through another person's body. It was also extremely distracting, at times, which is how Aidy went from excitedly watching Will's electrocution one moment, and the next was flying across the room, summoned into his arms. "ExCUSE YOU," Adrienna yelled, slamming her fists into his already damaged shoulder. "You can't just ACCIO people without their permission!"
Will followed his instincts and swung her around and into the wall. “You started it!” he argued, slamming her back against the wall again. “Breaking into someone’s house is worse.” Punching a girl – a Death Eater, but a girl all the same – felt wrong but maybe he’d knock her out. One against one would be much better odds.
It all happened quickly -- the curse, banter, the electrocution, Adrienna flying across the room -- or maybe his reflexes were just slow from the other day. Though Dante knew that she could hold her own in a fight, he also knew he shouldn’t have let it get this far.
He shook his head, trying to shake off the stars that still flickered in his vision from the blasting curse, and he pointed his wand. “Crucio.”
Will let go of the Death Eater, the two of them hitting the floor for completely different reasons. One against one should’ve been better odds but it wasn’t. That much was clear the second the Cruciatus hit him. Time ceased to exist as the pain coursed through him, every nerve ending on fire as every bone in his body screaming. Or maybe that was him? Will really wasn’t sure.
He gasped when it was finally lifted, the absence of pain so sudden that it didn’t feel real. He still had his wand in his hand and quickly, before it begun again, slashed his wand out to send one of the weights sitting out on the floor straight at the Death Eater’s head.
"You're lucky your aim is good," Aidy said to Dante as he focused on crucioing their target, picking herself up off the floor. She was pretty sure her nose was broken underneath her mask from where she'd been punched, but wasn't about to take the mask off to double check. Noticing the pile of weights at about the same time that Will had, Aidy flicked her wand and oppugnoed a stack of loose weights at his back.
The weight that Will tossed was waved out of the way, and it smashed into something glass across the room. “Of course my aim is good,” he said, a bit incredulous. Aidy was right, though. He was lucky. If he’d hit Aidy instead… well, that might have still made Will drop his guard.
“We’re wasting time,” he continued, and then he turned to face Will again, “are you going to play nice yet? It’ll be easier for you if you do.”
The weights had hit Will badly; in the lower back, cracking something he could only hope was just a rib or two. “Nice?” he echoed, trying to push off the ground. It was harder than it should be. More than a rib, then. He’d done that before and this – this was different. “Nice about what?”
Dante rolled his eyes -- not that it would have been visible behind his mask. “Your family.” He paused for a moment to let that sink in. “I don’t see a way that this ends well for you if you continue to play stupid.”
Oh. Yes. That made sense. “I don’t know where my son is,” Will said, his eyes going from one Death Eater to the other and back again. Fighting Death Eaters. He was not equipped for this. Not in any way. “I’m not lying.”
“Hmm.” Of course he’d say that. Anyone in his shoes would. “I wonder what her family would say.” Whether it was true or not wasn’t really the point, of course. They wanted to make sure Will stayed in line while the Snatchers searched. Will had to understand the gravity of his son’s situation.
Dante’s next spell came quickly - a racking curse, meant to pull at Will’s arms until something popped. “We have ways of finding out, one way or another.”
A Protego might’ve saved him, but Will thought like a Quidditch player and not a duelist and dodged it. If it’d been a Bludger it would’ve grazed his right shoulder, missing the left completely. It wasn’t a Bludger. It was a curse meant to injure deeply and painfully, and although it missed most him it easily ripped his bad shoulder apart, rendering his wand arm all but unusable.
As much as it hurt, it told Will one thing. He could say just about anything. They’d keep going anyway. There was a weird kind of relief in that.
“Even if I knew where they were I wouldn’t tell you,” he said, quickly fumbling his wand over into his left hand. The shield he managed was weak, but the best he could do with his non-dominant hand. “This is not their war to fight.”
"It's funny how their stories always seem to start changing about this point, don't you think?" Aidy mused, glancing over at Dante. "First it's "I don't know anything," then it's "even if I knew, I wouldn't tell you." That's just rude. That makes us think that you're lying, Billy," she added, deciding to play off Dante's spell but instead going for a smaller target, aiming a spell that would break each of Will's fingers one by one.
“If – fuck,” he managed to get out of the way this time, but it sent intense stabbing pain up through his arm, “if I was lying I wouldn’t say that,” he argued, attempting to blast them backwards. It didn’t really work. Why had nobody told him how hard it was to cast with his left hand?
There was one thing he could do with it, he realised as he stumbled a little, the pain of his loose, unusable arm making him lightheaded. He could throw. Being able to use both hands to pass and shoot on the pitch was invaluable. He’d spent a lot of time learning how to do that.
Will put his wand down – stupid, perhaps, but what choice did he have? – and grabbed anything heavy he could reach; the weights the Death Eater had throw at him, books laying in a pile on the table, even an old coffee mug sitting out since last night.
He threw fast, accurately and hoped for the best.
"You're not--" Aidy began to reply, another taunt circulating in her brain, when a book smacked her right in the neck. "You're throwing things?" she scoffed, once she managed to catch her breath. "This is -- who throws a shoe????"
Refusing to be taken down by his one-sided game of catch, Aidy flicked her wand at the knife block and sent a barrage of blades flying in his direction, followed up by another blasting curse.
“I’m very good at that,” Will remarked, though his words were strained and –– yeah. He was out of things, more or less. Also, knives. So many knives. He wasn’t fast enough for all of them, and definitely not fast enough for the blasting curse.
He hit the wall hard, a couple of the knives slicing through flesh – his other shoulder, his chest, his upper arm – as he sunk back against the wall. His head was spinning, and sitting there he realised that there was literally nothing he could do. Just getting up seemed impossible, right now.
Are you done yet? he wanted to ask. But that was probably a bad idea.
Dante held up his hand once it looked like Will wasn’t getting up again. They didn’t need to kill him - yet. “I don’t think he’s catching on,” he said to his partner, “must’ve been one too many Bludgers to the head over the years. Maybe we need to skip the middleman.” Meaning Will, of course.
It was for the best that Dante had stopped her, because Aidy was about ready to go through several more kitchen drawers full of silverware and various appliances on Will. "I suppose you're right," Adrienna replied, letting the vegetable peeler she'd contemplating using next fall to the ground at Will's side. "I suppose it'd be much easier to go right to the source, now."
"I hope you learn to cooperate soon, Billy. Next time we might not be so nice."
Will watched them back away, their threats squeezing even more fear into him. He hadn’t thought that was possible, but somehow it twisted his insides even more. More than all the rest, really, though he should probably be more concerned with the blood pouring from the wound where the sharpest knife had embedded itself into his chest below his collar bone, or the fact that his shoulder was beyond recognition.
“Okay,” he managed. “Mess... age... Message received.”
“I’m going to take this,” a photo of father and son, taken earlier from Eurig’s bedroom, emerged from under Dante’s cloak, “as a token of good faith.” He’d probably dispose of it later; what he really wanted was for Will to think about where in his home they’d been while he’d been away.
There was a loud crack and a puff of smoke for show, and then they were gone.