Who: Ciara Fawcett and her parents, sister Saoirse, uncle Mike, cousin John, a few snatchers. LOTS OF PEOPLE. What: I procrastinated a lot so this is pre and post-registration announcement. The exciting bits aren't until the end, fair warning. When: August 26th - September 6th. Where: Various. Mostly Dublin. Warnings: Swearing and a tiny bit of violence. Status: Complete!
August 26th
“I can’t just leave,” Dad protested.
“We’ll still be here when you come back,” Mum said. She didn’t look nearly as sure as Ciara had pictured when she thought about this Don’t Be An Idiot-intervention. She looked like Ciara felt. Torn. Hesitant. Unsure.
“Uncle Mike said he’d step in,” Saoirse added. She, at least, managed to look confident. Like she knew what she was talking about. It was an act, of course, but she was good at it. Always had been. “You’ll just go somewhere for a few weeks while we figure out how serious they are about this, and if the answer is ‘very’ we’ll figure out something more permanent.”
“Somewhere?” Dad said, looking to Mum for support. “I can’t just go ‘somewhere’. First of all, the money thing. Second of all –– Da would never forgive me.”
“Granda is dead,” Ciara said, rather unnecessarily. “And anyway, Uncle Mike is at least 90% reliable. He’ll do fine.”
“He hasn’t held down a job for more than three months in his life,” Dad pointed out. “Da left me the pub, I can’t just ––”
“A few weeks,” Saoirse said. “That’s all. After that we’ll re-evaluate.”
Dad looked from Saoirse, to Mum, to Ciara, and back again. “I’ll think about it,” he said finally. “Okay?”
* * *
August 29th
“They’re taking their wands,” Ciara said to her sister. “Their wands.”
“I know,” Saoirse said. “You’ve told me six times.”
“What’ll Dad do without a wand? I know he only uses it for cleaning, but…”
“He won’t register.” Ciara appreciated that her sister at least attempted to sound confident about this fact. That made one of them. Saoirse had always been that way, though. She knew how to convince the world to bend to her will. Ciara only hoped she’d be able to do it this time.
“He seems unsure.”
“You all do,” Saoirse pointed out. “Why do I always have to be the one telling people they’re being completely illogical?”
Ciara shrugged. “I’m a bad Ravenclaw, I guess.”
“I don’t have the energy for another round of ‘not all Ravenclaws are nerdy neatfreaks who never loses their keys’. Not today.”
“Sorry.”
They watched the TV for a while, although neither of them paid much attention. Ciara didn’t, at least. She just stared at a fixed spot, slowly working her up to saying it. It was a ludicrous suggestion. She knew what Saoirse would say. But she had to at least try.
“Can’t you take him with you?” she asked finally.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Saoirse finished her beer before looking up. “One: like he’d ever leave Ireland, two: he’ll go crazy having nothing to do, which will lead to three: he’ll wander off to poke something that bites back, because four: I don’t have time to babysit him, and five: I shouldn’t have to because he’s the parent, not me.”
“Ughhh.” Ciara sighed. “Why is he so stubborn?”
“Family trait?”
“Fuck this,” Ciara said, reaching over to turn the telly off. Reality TV was the worst.
“Yep,” Saoirse agreed. “Let’s do something fun.”
“Like what?”
“Like getting too drunk to remember that our dad is about to get hunted down like a fecking animal?”
“Okay,” Ciara said. “But you’re paying.”
“Dad’s paying,” Saoirse said, grabbing Ciara and apparating them both to the pub. “It’s the least he can do.”
* * *
August 31st
“What if they show up at the when Mike’s alone here?” Dad demanded. “Then what?”
“I’ll check on him right away,” Ciara promised. “Plus it’s not like he hasn’t made it out of a lot of weird situations before.”
“None of them involved werewolves.”
That was true. And this wasn’t normal werewolves. It was the Dark Army. Completely different. Fortunately (for Ciara), Saoirse was there. “I’ll stay another week,” she said. “I can take a werewolf or two.”
It was near midnight by the time Mum and Dad left. She had to go to work, of course, but she’d taken a few days off to get Dad installed in a B&B down south. The idea was that she’d make sure he’d stay put and not wander off. That was always a lot harder than it sounded with a father who had the attention span of a small child. But they had to try.
“Well,” Ciara said as their parents apparated out of the house to a place she’d asked not to be told the address off. Just to be safe. “It worked. Didn’t expect that.”
“For now.”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “For now.”
* * *
September 3rd
“What are you doing here?” Ciara said angrily. She’d stopped by the pub to see how Uncle Mike was doing and had found her dad wiping down the counter. “Don’t you realise...”
“Don’t lecture me, Ciara.” Dad folded his arms and looked down at her. He seemed impossibly tall, suddenly, just like he had when she was little. “This is my life we're talking about.”
“And I don’t want you to live the rest of it in Azkaban. That’s what they do with the people who didn’t register. I checked.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You won’t be ‘fine’,” Ciara argued. “Not if they ––”
“I can’t decide which one of you needs a drink more,” Mike interrupted, doing a pretty good job of pretending like he had no idea what they were arguing about. “Ciara?”
“I can’t. I’m on the night shift this week.”
“I’ll have one,” Dad said.
“Dad.”
“I’ll have one drink and then I’ll go back down and keep on being bored out of my skull.”
“Fine,” Ciara said, swallowing her protests. There was a lump of worry stuck in her throat, and she struggled to breathe around it. “Just… be safe?”
“I will,” Dad said. “I promise.”
* * *
September 6th, 12:35 pm
“Ciara?” John said, his voice shaky.
“What is it?” She jumped up from her desk at the sound of her younger cousin’s voice. Usually it was filled with the annoying confidence any twelve-year-old boy with above average football skills seemed to possess. There was none of that right now.
“Uncle Paddy said to call you if someone weird showed up.”
“What’s going on?” She grabbed her jacket off her chair and started walking, ducking out before someone asked her where she was going. “Put me on speaker.”
“Is this a fucking joke?” Uncle Mike’s voice was loud in her ear even though he was some distance away from the phone. “Sounds like a bad cover band to me. ‘The Dark Army’. Heavy metal, right? Do you do Led Zeppelin? I’ve always liked ––”
“Snatchers,” John said quietly as Mike kept talking. “They said they were snatchers.”
“Fuck.” Ciara started running towards the nearest Apparation Point. She wasn’t supposed to apparate in front of her extended family, of course. Her uncles knew about magic because they’d all been there when Dad accidentally transfigured his unwanted dinner into a rabbit back before any of them knew that sort of things were possible. Her cousins didn’t. “I’ll be there in a second. Ring Saoirse too.”
She apparated into the alley behind the pub and darted inside, her hand on the wand in her pocket. Only two regulars present. Mike. John. Three snatchers. That was it.
She could do this.
“Step away from him,” she said, using her Official DMLE Voice. “Right now.”
“Ciara?” Uncle Mike said. “What are you doing here?”
“I thought you needed some help,” she improvised.
“I can handle a few deadbeat blokes.”
“That’s not Patrick Fawcett,” Ciara said to the snatchers. “It’s Michael Fawcett. He hasn’t done anything.”
“We don’t have a M. Fawcett on this list,” the female werewolf said. “A muggle, then?”
“I hate that word,” Mike said, walking around the bar to face the snatchers up close. “But yeah, I am. Now get the fuck out of my pub.”
“Y’reckon we should come back tonight?” one of them said to his mates. “Might be fun.”
The full moon. She’d almost forgotten it was tonight.
“No,” Ciara said quickly. “You won’t. The DMLE will be here if you try. I bet the DRMC would be happy to take all three of you in.”
“We would,” Saoirse’s voice said behind her. She hadn’t worked for the DRMC many months before moving abroad, but Ciara doubted they’d ask for a badge. “I’ll take you in right now.”
The female wolf started laughing. “You two here to save the day?”
John didn’t know about magic. The two regulars definitely didn’t know about magic. She couldn’t pull her wand, no matter how much she wanted to. Not that she hadn’t already blown her cover, mentioning the DMLE.
“Leave,” she said firmly. “Patrick isn’t here. He moved away. Left the country.”
One of the males eyed Uncle Mike and then noticed John. He was standing behind the counter, clutching a cricket bat in one hand and his phone in the other.
“Who’s this then? Another useless muggle?”
“Take one more step and I’ll knock you out,” Uncle Mike said.
The werewolf laughed and kept going. It really wasn’t a surprise when Mike grabbed him and slammed his face against the bar. He went down heavily, the other two werewolves staring at his body flopping to the ground.
“Like I said,” Mike said. “You leave him out of whatever this is.”
One down, two to go. Ciara glanced over at Saoirse who nodded her head slightly towards the female were. Ciara backed away, leaving an opening for her sister.
Neither of them noticed the other one slipping a wand out of his sleeve. Not until the Blasting Curse threw Uncle Mike across the room, slamming him up against a wall. “There,” the were said. “Now we can bring him in, nice and easy.”
“Fuck this,” Ciara and Saoirse said at the same time, pulling their wands out. “Oppugno.”
A wine bottle broke across the female werewolf’s face. A chair knocked the male out.
“Well,” Saoirse said, looking down at the pile of bodies at their feet and then up at John, who stared at them with his mouth hanging open. “This is awkward.”
* * *
September 6th, 1:15 pm
“This is a mess,” Mum sighed some time later, as they furtively revived the two regulars whose memories had been carefully altered. They’d stunned them while getting rid of the werewolves and alerting Mum to the mess they’d created, and as far as either of them knew they’d passed out drunk. At noon. “My report is going to go on for days.”
“We’re not telling Dad,” Ciara said, carefully adding another name to the banned list. They were going to tell Uncle Mike that someone had become violent and knocked him out, which was more than enough to earn a lifetime ban. It was a bad lie, but a necessary one. At least that was what Ciara told herself. “He’ll come back and refuse to leave.”
“I hate this,” Saoirse said. “We shouldn’t have to alter our own relatives’ memories.”
“They’d tell Dad,” Mum said. “Maybe not on purpose, but it’d get back to him somehow.”
“That doesn’t make it okay.”
“No,” Mum said, removing all traces of the last hour from John’s head while Saoirse went through his phone to make sure he hadn’t contacted anyone but the two of them. “But it’s not like we have a choice.”
“Why are you all here?” John said after a few seconds, blinking up at them. “Don’t you have work?”
“We were going to have lunch before we went in,” Ciara said smoothly. “And wandered right into this.”
“Does this happen a lot?”
“I think he was on something,” Saoirse lied. “He was all, you know. Twitchy and weird.”
“It happens sometimes,” Ciara said. “Dad’s better at de-escalating, though. Uncle Mike did the opposite.”
There was a groan from the back, where Mike was propped up on an old couch. By the time they’d all made it there he was sitting up, a hand clasped to his forehead. “What the fuck just happened?”