WHO: Dante Avery WHAT: Dante has a Very Bad Day WHEN: Today, immediately after this WHERE: Gringotts -> a Mystery Location WARNINGS: Some cussing.
“Sir --”The young assistant tapped on the door of his office.
“You’ve got mail.”
Dante looked up from his desk, where he’d been pouring over the bank records of known Wandless and known fugitives, looking for irregularities and upticks in usage. It was dull as a goblin’s bollocks, in all honesty. He hated every bloody second of the time he spent trapped inside the walls of Gringotts, running errands for the Dark Lord and waiting for a small thread to unravel a hole in some fugitive’s plan.
But it had to be done. It wasn’t his job to argue. He had a skill; it was useful, here.
He didn’t often receive mail here. Owls either found him at home, or his mates would send him a message first so he knew to expect something. A surprise was unusual.
It should have put him off-guard.
“Come on,” he answered, gesturing for the young man to step in. He might have left the box for later -- for well after he went home from work -- if he hadn’t been so curious about its contents.
He waited until the assistant left before opening the attached card. Inside was a familiar scrawl, albeit one he hadn’t seen in years. He’d lost track of so many classmates after his time in Azkaban, either because they wanted to keep their distance or simply because they’d run off to have their own lives. He remembered Lucy, however. She’d been abroad recently -- they hadn’t overlapped, but they’d shared letters back and forth over the years about what they’d been up to -- and he knew she was planning to come back soon.
He smiled.
He wasn’t quite up for the sort of catching up that the letter suggested, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to know what Lucy had sent.
The moment he touched the cigar box, he knew something was wrong.
He felt the familiar pull begin in his stomach, and then his surroundings blurred until the walls of Gringotts were gone. Portkeys weren’t horrible if one was expecting it, but this -- this he didn’t anticipate. He landed with a thud, his brain rattling inside his head from the impact. If he hadn’t already felt ill from the unexpected travel, the smell from wherever he landed would have done him in.
“Fuck.” His eyes were still clenched shut as he struggled to get a grip on his bearings. His stomach lurched again, and he was almost sick all over his hands.
This can’t be happening.
Slowly, he opened his eyes. Right in front of him was a wall of -- was that plastic? He smacked a hand against it and it reverberated throughout the container. The earlier nausea was still present, but Dante fought through it to look over his new surroundings. It was dark, save for a small gap above his head. There was a rectangular shape cut into the plastic below his hands -- a door? He assumed it was a door, since the other sides didn’t have one.
“Am I in a fucking port-a-loo?”
The rage bubbled up quickly, replacing every other emotion he was carrying with him. He tried to apparate -- once, twice, three times, to no avail. Whoever had done this had thought it through carefully, and he hated them for it. Whoever was responsible was going to pay -- with their bank account, first, to replace the soiled clothing he wore, and with their lives second.