gawain robards (embattle) wrote in disorderic, @ 2018-02-05 16:38:00 |
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Entry tags: | !!! group: death eaters, bellatrix lestrange, chelsea corner, gawain robards, hugo nott, ignatius travers, jasper williamson |
WHO: Gawain Robards, Bellatrix Lestrange, Hugo Nott, Ignatius Travers, Chelsea Corner, and Jasper Williamson.
WHAT: The Death Eaters confront Gawain Robards.
WHEN: 5 February, evening.
WHERE: The Ministry of Magic, Wizengamot level.
WARNINGS: Violence. Death.
Gawain was working late which wasn’t out of the ordinary. His office on the Wizengamot level was much more spacious than the one he’d had as Head Auror, but he definitely missed the latter. Still, here in the governing body he knew he had a better chance to redirect the flow of how things had gone. He couldn’t do that in the DMLE, not hampered by the likes of Yaxley having him under heel. The only way to do this legally was to remove Thicknesse by the power of the Wizengamot, and so here he was. Dealing with bloody paperwork into the evening. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought of hiring Rhys as an assistant to organize this new aspect of his life. Despite what some people thought about him having a potential death wish, Gawain wasn’t taking chances. He’d put some monitoring wards on the hallway to his office, and when they triggered he looked up from his paperwork, and set down his quill. Three people. Odd for this hour. Gawain stood up, and held his wand near the magical sensor that served as all Wizengamot representatives’ panic buttons to the DMLE. Before he had a chance to raise the alarm, Bellatrix and two of her cohorts appeared in his doorway, having blasted the door itself cleanly off its hinges. “Good evening, Robards,” she said from behind her mask, her voice dripping with feigned sincerity. “I do hope we’re not interrupting.” “Of course not, Bellatrix,” Gawain said tightly, although keeping the air of pleasantries between them. His wand tapped the alarm given how outnumbered he was, but that didn’t mean help was instant. He’d have to delay this. “How are you this evening?” He gestured with his free hand towards the chairs in front of his desk while bringing up his wand in defensive posture. “Please do have a seat, you can help with the paperwork if you’d like.” “Oh, I’m afraid we don’t have time for any of that,” she said, advancing on his desk. But with a flick of her wand, she sent the papers on his desk fluttering through the air, landing in every corner of his office. Her hidden smirk was obvious when she said, “Oops,” and swept the chairs in front of his desk out of their way. The former Auror clicked his tongue in annoyance as if he were dealing with a petulant child and not a notorious — if not the most notorious — Death Eater known to them. “There’s no need for that,” he said, not that he made a move otherwise. “What do I owe the pleasure of your visit? Come to discuss itchy-rears?” Delaying was the name of the game. “You noticed that, did you?” Her tone grew ever more self-satisfied. “It was the least I could do, seeing as I never gave you a proper congratulations.” Gawain gave her a scathing look. “You’re hardly subtle,” he reminded her as he listened as best he could for his reinforcements. “I don’t suppose this is respectable congratulations either, is it?” “No, it’s not,” she answered, but a noise from the hallway caught her attention, and she cast a glance at Ignatius and Hugo before they disappeared through the doorway behind her. Another flick of her wand replaced the door in its frame and muted the sound of explosions outside. She turned her attention back to Robards. “You know what this is.” “I’m never updating about night shifts ever again,” Jasper said as he and Chelsea arrived and quickly assessed the scene. He hurtled down the corridor to apprehend one Death Eater, firing a knee-reversal spell after them. “Halt!” Though he had no aspirations whatsoever that this command would be followed through. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, buddy. Don’t your lot remember what happened the last time you were dueling in a Ministry? Should I call up some teenagers, jog your memory?” Knowing he needed to draw attention away from Robards, Hugo engaged with the younger man who was already shouting at him to halt. “Do you enjoy being on the wrong side?” Hugo called out to him, starting down the hallway and showing no intention of stopping. “Expelliarmus!” Jasper shouted back in return and when that didn’t work, he continued to follow the other man towards the stairs. “Uh, no, my side isn’t a cult full of murderers?” Hugo’s laugh in response was deep and taunting, and while trying to lose Jasper on the stairs probably wasn’t going to work (Jasper, of course, having the advantage of youth over Hugo’s slight headstart) he saw there was a fair amount of good alternative options. “You should try it, young man,” he laughed, taking the steps two at a time. Opening the first door he came across on the next floor, he ran through and left it open for Jasper to follow him. Jasper — pumped full of coffee to cope with his night shifts — was raring to go, not stopping to think about the Death Eater leading him up the stairs instead of just dueling him like he’d expected. But Robards could handle himself. And Corner wasn’t a trained (Former) Auror, sure, but she was a Hitwizard, right? It would be fine. He entered the office the Death Eater had headed straight into. It was dark, with the faint hum and squeaks of magical pests abound. Bollocks. The Magical Pest Control Office. Jasper had never been fond of this place during the day, at night it was even creepier. “Lumos,” Jasper whispered. A small beam of light illuminated the way. Screech! Jasper spun, shining his light to his left. And then sighed. It was just a pair of biting fairies hissing at him crankily in their cage. “Yeah, yeah, fuck off,” he muttered and kept walking further in, still on high alert. “Hey, knock knock?” Crouched down behind a large filing cabinet, Hugo didn’t make a sound at the sudden light that his opponent had conjured. What he couldn’t resist, however, was a low laugh at the younger man’s reaction to the cage of fairies. “Who’s there?” Hugo grinned, still in his hiding spot and lazily trying to pick out the words and labels on cages that lined the corner of the room nearest to him. Relieved that his opponent couldn’t resist the childish bait, Jasper turned towards the sound of his voice, alternating between flashing his wand light towards his path and under the desks as he passed them. “Déjà,” he called out. The light was getting closer, and Hugo had ascertained only the contents of the large fish tank closest to him. “Déjà who?” Hugo tapped his wand softly against the tank, creating a small hole in the surface and catching a glimpse of the flesh-eating slugs inside in the dim light. He waited for his opponent to finish the joke before flicking his wand and launching one of the slugs in Jasper’s direction. “Knock kno—-argh!” Something slimy slapped against Jasper’s arm, ruining the last syllable of his joke. He looked down. A fat flesh-eating slug nestled its razor sharp teeth into him. “Oppungo!” He aimed the assault curse at the filing cabinet shielding the Death Eater, and its draws began opening and shutting rapidly, files pulling themselves out of the drawers and flapping in Hugo’s direction, trying to use the time he’d just won to free himself of the slug before it took a chunk out of his arm. Hugo yelled out as the files started flying around and hitting him in the mask and one nearly knocked his wand from his hand. New tactic; he launched another slug at Jasper but aimed a blasting charm at the creature so it'd explode before reaching him. Hoping to create a distraction, Hugo ducked down again and closed in on another filing cabinet. The slug exploded mid-air, covering Jasper in small spray of hot, gooey flesh. And he thought the man-eating fly trap was bad. "Stupefy!" Jasper's spell hit a cage of gnomes instead, already roused from their slumber, the lot of them screaming bloody murder as the cage toppled over onto the ground and the latch came undone. A troupe of pissed off garden gnomes tumbled out of the cage and went straight for Jasper's ankles. "Not me, you bastards, him!" Jasper instructed. A couple of gnomes seemed to take that instruction to heart and headed for Hugo as Jasper scrambled over a desk trying to reach the Death Eater. Honestly, one of them really ought to have gotten the lights, this whole duel would have been much less chaotic. "Face me, you piss-bag with a spotted dick," he called out, having lost track of the Death Eater. Even the gnomes didn't seem to know where he was and were now taking to attacking an empty rubbish bin. Hugo kicked out as one of the gnomes approached where he was crouched, the noise of the creature likely giving away his position. “Here I am!” Hugo taunted him loudly, and he sent the filing cabinet flying towards Jasper before stumbling over the group of gnomes. Beastly creatures, he usually tended to massacre the lot of them if they ever tried to cross his lawn. "Expelli—fffffffuck" The corner of a filing cabinet drawer scraped across Jasper's upper arm as it sailed past, his reflexes kicking in just in time to dive mostly out of the way. He changed tactics, shooting out a trip jinx from his position low on the ground before rising and firing a leg-lock, hoping to keep Hugo from running long enough for him to arrest him. Of course, what he was planning to do with Hugo if he managed to arrest him was a question Jasper could deal with later. He couldn't imagine Number 1 Death Eating Suspect Corban Yaxley and His Man Bun would be overly pleased with the result. But the Death Eater was already gone. A panic rose in Jasper’s gut, quite distinct from the adrenaline rush and the underlying guilt that one wrong move could land him six feet under the ground and his son fatherless. He increased the span of wandlight and shone it all around the room. No one was there. Abandoning his pursuit, he rushed back to the Wizengamot offices. When Gawain had signaled them, Chelsea had, at first, unwisely believed it was a mistake. They never had actual work to do these days so working evenings usually just meant catching up on a lot of reading. But then she remembered that it was Gawain who had called for them and he wouldn't waste it on a mistake. With the Death Eaters outnumbering him, Chelsea wanted to distract one of them away from Gawain. "Incendio!" It was annoying to be dragged away from the reason he was there. Ignatius had waited so very long for this, when it came to Gawain. But the nuisance was a nuisance that could be dealt with, and he supposed he couldn’t ignore her. Not while she was aiming fire at him. His shield blocked the fire with ease as he aimed a ball of acid in her direction. “You should go back to your desk,” he advised. One of the (thankfully empty) portrait frames on the wall was summoned forth to block the acid, although some of it splashed onto the sleeve of her robes and seeped through to the skin. It stung painfully, but Chelsea had no time to look at it. "I can't," she said, aiming a Blasting Curse at the Death Eater before adding, "this is my job!" “I believe your job is rescuing kittens from trees,” Ignatius yelled against the sound of the blast. He couldn’t remember if the woman was a hit or a former auror but he didn’t suppose it really mattered. Besides he was too busy throwing himself out of the way, although stone from the blast slammed into his arm with a sickening crack. Increasingly annoyed, he aimed a flaying curse. She'd wanted to say that rescuing kittens was more Jasper's job, but then the flaying curse was coming her way and her shield charm was just quick enough to block it, though it was immediately dismantled with the force of the spell. The tail end of the curse hit Chelsea's shoulder and forced her to stumble, holding onto the wall for support as she felt it — or rather, the pain — of the curse's intended effects. She wanted to stop this, but then she remembered Gawain's urgent call and it brought her back up, her wand pointed at the floor in front of the Death Eater so a wall from the tiles could build itself up and act as a blockade. The blockade was unexpected, coming up into place with surprising quickness. Ignatius blasted it down, exploded tiles going in every direction. A moment later he gathered the tiles into a cyclone, sending it in Chelsea’s direction. He didn’t particularly care if he hurt her or not. He just wanted to get back to the reason he was there. Chelsea couldn't let him get to that reason, but it was getting increasingly harder to do so the more the Death Eater came back with something else. She began blasting the incoming tiles apart, disintegrating them in loud flashes that she had to hide her face from. When it was over, the hallway was a mess. "This is Ministry property," she called out, unsure of why she was even saying it in the first place. "I don't think you should be destroying something that you've invested so much time in!" Maybe, she thought, she could just distract him long enough for Gawain to — do whatever he needed to do. “Nothing’s broken that can’t be fixed,” Ignatius replied easily. The statement applied for far more than just the tiles from the floor, although all of this was taking far longer than he’d anticipated. He supposed perhaps he wouldn’t get the chance to see Bellatrix finish Gawain. It was a disappointing prospect. He almost sighed as he aimed a fireball at Chelsea. "You're right," she said, as her jet of water dissipated the fireball. She immediately regretted the words; even if they weren't serious, she'd actually said that to a Death Eater. "That's why you should just leave now before enough things are broken that it can't be fixed." Glancing up quickly, Chelsea sent the lights hanging in the ceiling towards Ignatius. His shield managed to block the lights but for a moment Ignatius wondered if they’d managed to get through anyway. There had been a peculiar feeling on his arm — an itchy, tingling feeling that took a moment for him to understand. Then he did, the recognition of the casting of a Dark Mark and the knowledge that the reason they were here was done. There was a twinge of something, but Ignatius ignored it. “Do enjoy cleaning up,” he said before activating his portkey. A moment later he was gone. “No, it’s not,” Bellatrix answered, but a noise from the hallway caught her attention, and she cast a glance at Ignatius and Hugo before they disappeared through the doorway behind her. Another flick of her wand replaced the door in its frame and muted the sound of explosions outside. She turned her attention back to Robards. “You know what this is.” The hope that there were several members of the DMLE ready to pincer the Death Eaters in the Ministry, where one couldn’t apparate as a form of escape, was what Gawain held onto. “Yes, I do, and yet you’ve blundered, Bellatrix,” he said pointedly. “Have I?” Her voice was still cleanly smug, unperturbed. “This is all going according to plan.” She raised her wand level with his, pointing it at his chest. “Shall I make this quick or would you like me to draw it out a bit, make it more dramatic for you?” The only reply came from Gawain banishing the large wooden desk outward towards the Death Eater. And with that, Bellatrix had her answer. A blasting curse met the desk, scattering splinters of wood throughout the room as she took a step back to shield herself from the fallout. A sweep of her wand sent the splinters piercing through the air, aimed straight at her opponent. “I suppose we’ll do this the hard way.” “Would you have had it the other way?” Gawain parried the splinters with a sweep of his wand having them drop to the floor in front of him. His motion continued, catching a pair of filing cabinets from the side wall and having them lunge at his opponent. A smirk pulled at the corners of Bellatrix’ lips as she raised a hand, stopping the cabinets in mid-motion and grounding them with a crash that drowned out the noises from beyond the former Auror’s office. “Of course not,” she said. “There wouldn’t have been any fun in that.” A twist of her wand sent a flaming rope lashing out toward Gawain and a final push banished the cabinets, sending them hurtling across the office at him. A shield shimmered in front of him to catch the brunt of burning lash, heat radiating through the magical shield even if it protected him from the blow itself. The flash of flames clouded his vision just as the Death Eater magically heaved the cabinets, sending them hurtling through the air. A rushed, off-kilter side-step saved Gawain from being flattened by a mere inch. The wall was not so lucky; the cabinets impacted hard, breaking and splintering the wall between offices and pushing on through entirely. Overtop of the raucous racket the sound of dozens of breaking glass jars could be heard. Gawain didn’t stop moving. He pivoted, casting a tear-gas spell towards Lestrange, and then ducked through the hole to get some extra distance. Such close quarters fighting was dangerous, especially with his opponent’s favouring of knives. A bubble-head charm allowed Bellatrix to evade the effects of the teargas and muffled her voice as she shouted at Robards’ retreating form. “Coward! Running away so soon?” But as she stepped toward the hole, a Nick Diamondback bobblehead came shooting through it and burst her bubble. She squinted her eyes and held her breath until she made it to the adjacent office, her wand at the ready. But what she found inside stopped her abruptly in her tracks. “What in Salazar’s name is this?” ‘This’ was Mildred Thymblethorpe’s office. Thymblethorpe, a long-serving member in the Wizengamot, was known for her unorthodox hobbies including collecting bobble-heads of noir crime radio dramas, and also pickled objects. Both collections had fallen to the floor, the jars shattering and contents spilling. Having entered first, Gawain had nearly slipped on a pickled unicorn spleen as he traversed the room littered with glass and preservative slime. “Thymblethorpe,” Gawain stated as if it explained everything, and then he shot a pair of arresting chains as Bellatrix traversed the breach between offices. The chain caught around one of her wrists, snapping her out of her morbid fascination. “Who the fuck is Thymblethorpe?” she asked while performing some hasty transfiguration on the metal and sending a comparatively measly serpent hissing its way through the slime on the floor. Bellatrix took a step forward and grimaced at the squelch beneath her shoe. “I’m not even going to ask what I just stepped in.” “One of my beloved colleagues.” The serpent was picked up magically and flung back at Bellatrix, but sailed harmlessly into his own office, now in shambles. His own shoes squeaked and splooshed in the slimy muck covering the floor. “I believe it was toad testicles. Perhaps hundreds of years old.” That was following by a powerful blasting curse; if Bellatrix were distracted enough he’d owe Mildred a medal. But Bellatrix hadn’t forgotten who was across the room for her, as tempting as it was to indulge her macabre curiosity. The smell of vinegar and formaldehyde hit her nostrils, already lightly coated with the peppery gas Gawain had released in his office. As she caught his blasting curse against her shield, it was all she could do not to retch. She, too, could use the office’s fixtures to her advantage. Pointing her wand over her shoulder, she collected what was left of Mildred Thymblethorpe’s collection and hurled it toward her opponent. The odour was cloying and permeating everything. Gawain didn’t even have a bubble-head charm, or any sort of spellwork on a mask to save him from the overpowering stench. All he had was an iron stomach from a lifetime of grisly crime scenes from individuals like Lestrange, and so he kept his supper down. Barely. That was before all the broken shards, odd esoteric organs, and annoyingly cheerful bobble-heads can rushing towards him, forcing a shield. Bellatrix took a note out of Gawain’s book and sent Mildred’s desk tumbling toward him, even knowing his shield would hold the worst of it off. But her idea was to weaken it for her next offensive move — a bone shattering curse that she hoped would bring him to his knees with the whatever strange entrails this strange woman had been fermenting in her office. The desk collided as predicted with Gawain’s shield, straining and then splintering down the middle as both halves broke around the proverbial rock in the sea. There was no time for reinforcing; the Death Eater’s bone-breaking curse smashed and broke through the shield, weakening though it was, and hit the former Auror’s arm. Bones twisted and snapped under the spell, and Gawain sucked in a sharp breath. Without letting it slow him down, Robards swapped his wand to his offhand, and set a blasting cursing against the wall behind him. Now that he was injured and on the defensive the second office had become too small for comfort. Next, he knew, was the two-tiered Wizengamot chamber itself. Stepping out through his hole, the Auror summoned another shelf loaded with Thymblethorpe’s prizes from directly behind Bellatrix. Groaning internally, Bellatrix ducked and held her hands over her head as a wave of whatever the hell Mildred kept in her office crashed over her shoulders. Drenched in a foul-smelling liquid, Bellatrix followed Gawain through the newest hole in the wall. She preemptively cast a blasting curse to clear her own path and but the former Auror off the thought of another offensive attack. On the upper mezzanine of the Wizengamot’s chamber, where they’d exited into, Gawain’s snap shield caught Bellatrix’s blasting curse, but he couldn’t simply play defense the entire time or he’d surely and steadily lose. This wasn’t some rookie. He raised his wand, first turning the floor near the hole to ice before sending a flock of knives with a sharp “Lamina!” And that’s when the portrait of Wigglesby Woodburn began hollering: “Representative Robards you have no right to ruin these hallowed halls, you’ve only been here a month!” Gawain’s attack resulted in its desired effect and Bellatrix slipped as she stepped onto the mezzanine, pitching forward and straight into two of the former Autor’s knives. They embedded themselves in her leg and shoulder, leaving her howling internally — both in pain and at the fact that her favoured tactic had been turned against her. Had she had the ability, her eyes would’ve burned red when she turned them on him, but the portraits’ protests would have to stand in for the murderous gaze she hadn’t quite mastered yet. Wilhelmina Gorsuch chimed in from behind her, “Shame on you! Have you no respect?” Straightening up, Bellatrix flung a lightning curse at Gawain. No, was the answer to the elder woman. She had no reverence for the Wizengamot, or the idiotic rulings that had trapped her in Azkaban for more than a decade. The halls meant nothing to her, which was why she felt no regret when she tore off a portion of banister and threw it at her yearmate. “You’re never going to get re-elected if you lose to this Death Eater!” Beatrice Poppycock uttered, high voice shrill in the air despite the destruction being wrought. The lightning curse rebounded off a hasty shield from the ex-Auror, ricocheted off a wall leaving a black scorch, and then smacked into a chandelier in the middle of room. It dropped to the floor with a resounding crash, but Gawain didn’t notice. His attention was on the bannister that the ferocious Death Eater had ripped up. It smacked him in the side, sending him spinning a couple steps back although he held his balance, barely. With another weave the bannister straightened up, turned, and made a lunge for Bellatrix having been animated by Robards. A blasting curse met the banister mid-air and splintered it among the seats of the peanut gallery. “He doesn’t deserve a seat here,” Bellatrix snapped at the gasping portraits before she cast her spell of choice, “Crucio!” “Young lady, you have no right to talk to a storied former member of the Wizengamot—” Betina Rowle complained before she screamed and ducked into a neighbouring frame to avoid the remains of the bannister. At the mention of his seat, Gawain’s growing ire had turned into frustration. He couldn’t always be calm and level-headed; despite how silly it was his wand shifted to the lower part, and ripped up a few seats, including his own, to hurl at the Death Eater. “Take it with you, then—” But his emotions had cost him as he saw the red flash of Cruciatus, and he was falling to his knees as his nerves burned. Bellatrix put everything she had into the curse — every frustration she’d had over things that hadn’t gone her way, from her marriage to Gawain’s obnoxious victory over Hugo Nott. But her spell was cut short by the very seat in which her enemy had sat. It collided with her, ending the curse and sending her tumbling backwards into yet more chairs. When she recovered, standing to face him again, she gave a rueful scratch at her bottom. “Fuck you, Robards,” she muttered, gritting her teeth through the pain of the knives in her limbs, and sent another furious blast in his direction. Gawain had felt the Cruciatus curse before, back over a decade and a half in the first war. He’d been younger then, inexperienced and a Death Eater had caught him with his guard down. But that experience was nothing compared to the wrath of Bellatrix Lestrange. In the seconds he was under it he’d collapsed to his knees, and barely kept himself from writhing on the floor with his one good hand, palm spread, bracing himself. He wasn’t sure if he screamed or not, but his nerves burned, felt as if they were knifing through his skin. And in the blink of an eye it was over, the man’s eyes staring up through hazy vision as Bellatrix extradited herself from where she’d fallen. Trembling hand closed around his wand, and he pushed himself to his knees to cast a blasting curse straight at the woman’s chest. Even as he managed to snap another shield to catch the brunt of Lestrange’s attack, he was no longer on his feet, unable to keep himself from being shoved backwards until he collided with the bannister. With another flash, his spell diminished against her shield, and Bellatrix, even more than before, was on a warpath. She ignored the heckling from the portraits beside them and took purposeful steps toward her opponent. With a sneer behind her mask, she said, “So much for making a difference, Robards. You may as well have thrown your entire life away.” And with that, she gave a jerk of her wand and dragged the man’s body across the mezzanine. A punch from her wand and he was gone, over the edge of the mezzanine where she’d torn away the banister. There was nothing to protect him now. There was no time to retort about how he was certainly making a difference before Bellatrix hurled him over the edge. It wasn’t graceful or controlled, Gawain’s body twisting as he falling in a manner that would surely end very poorly when he collided with the marble floor below. But Robards wasn’t finished, and in the split second as the floor rushed to meet him he aimed a spell at himself, a Surgo charm. Suddenly Gawain was flying upwards, the sudden change in directions causing a sharp, painful jerk. In a split second he was level with the mezzanine, and then in the next above it, wand aiming downwards at the black-robed figure. “Bombarda maxima!” he cried, putting every ounce he had left into the curse. There was no time to see the outcome of his handiwork as he reached his apex and then began to fall, but he heard it: several thunderous impacts. Gawain hit the edge of the mezzanine hard, nearly winding himself, and scrambled to grab hold of something, anything. As he began to slip backwards his one good hand grabbed ahold of a small piece of the remaining bannister as the rest of his body dangled over the side. Bellatrix had almost been ready to congratulate herself on a job well done, but the unexpected blasts from the end of Gawain’s wand shattered the illusion that her work was over and done. A cannonball hit her square in the chest, sending her careening into another row of seats and cracking her ribs with its impact. As the Auror dangled from the balcony, she slowly recovered, shoving a cannonball away from her chest and rising to her feet. Her breathing was labored, her lungs struggling to fill themselves with air, but she needed to make sure this job was finished — Robards couldn’t go unpunished. Eschewing her mask, she stepped toward the brink of the mezzanine, where Gawain dangled from the tips of his fingers. With a shallow breath, she leaned over the edge to look him in the eye, one last time. “Long live the Dark Lord,” she rasped before bringing her heel down on his fingertips. Defiant to the last, Gawain glared back up at Bellatrix. The moment was calm, serene, despite the fierce fighting and destruction they’d caused around the chamber. There was no naivety, Gawain Robards knew he was finished. Rather than speak and waste his last moments on the likes of Bellatrix Lestrange, he thought of all those he cared about, and how they’d carry on making him proud even when he was gone. The Death Eater’s heel slammed into his fingers, breaking them along the knuckles, and then Gawain was falling, twisting until he landed on a bank of seats just below with an unnatural crack, his neck having broken with the impact. Peering down at him from the level above, Bellatrix regarded the broken body of her foe with a broad smirk — one cut short by a cough that left the metallic taste of blood on her tongue. She made quick work of it thereafter, levitating his chair to the center of the Wizengamot floor and placing his body upon it. Though her shortness of breath left her with little time to appreciate it, she felt a surge of satisfaction at the thought that in death, he could do nothing to stop the curse she’d left him when his bottom had first filled that itch-inducing chair. But her own time was short, and with a strong message left for the Wizengamot he’d been forced to abandon, she left the chamber and the horrified portraits behind. As she boarded the lift, she aimed her wand to the sky and spoke the word that made it official, “Morsmordre.” |