Remus Lupin (nihowlist) wrote in disorderic, @ 2017-11-18 17:31:00 |
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With Leon and Ted gone, safely back to their homes and hiding places, Remus was no longer at death's door. With his friends around him and several doses of antidote from Molly and others, he plucked the tracker from his arm and dropped it on the floor, grinding it with his heel. A minute flash of panic rose through him - they could be wrong, this could still kill him, he could be done and they'd given up a property to the Death Eaters - but there was no time left for fear. If it was his time, he was taking as much of them with him as he could. The tracker made a delightfully electronic sound as it broke and he put the remainder in his pocket. Walking out into the yard, he looked at his friends. "Unmask them, catch them and drag them to the fountain basin where the apparition nets are set. Dedalus has the signal for retreat. If it isn't working, he'll set the place alight. Get to your safe place, and check in." He took a deep breath. "Now let them come." STURGIS V. GRAHAM *** “Flipendo!” Graham threw the jinx at the first Order member he could confront, his voice oddly muffled by the mask he still felt weird about wearing. But it felt so good to actually be out dealing with these stupid idiots. He grinned to himself, throwing a wild stinging hex in the general direction of the older man. The shield charm Sturgis threw up was hasty, but it was enough so he didn’t have to endure the full force of the Death Eaters jinx. With blue sparks flying, he stumbled back, but was able to catch his balance before his back hit the wall. Quickly, he aimed his wand at the Death Eater’s feet and cast a Bombarding Charm in the hopes of knocking the man off his feet. Graham stumbled back a few steps and crashed to the ground, almost going ass over tit with momentum from the explosion. His wand went skittering out of his hand, and he scrambled to right himself, his feet instead getting tangled in his robe. “Fuck you!” He yelled at the Order member as he continued to struggle, trying to find his wand so he could send a curse back at him. “Have to buy me dinner first,” Sturgis answered with entirely too much laughter in his voice. With a flick of his wand, the Death Eater’s own wand scooted across the floor farther away from its owner. “In your dreams,” Graham snapped, finally untangling himself and snatching up his wand. He flicked his wand and sent a blast of purple fire at his opponent before getting to his feet. The flame hit his casting arm, instantly burning his robes and the skin beneath him. Sturgis couldn’t help but yelp at the pain, though his concentration barely wavered. As pain shot up his arm, he raised his arm and cast the blasting curse directly at the Death Eater’s arm. Graham yelled as he felt the bone in his arm crack, nearly dropping his wand again in shock. He snarled and flung his favourite curse, a ghostly skull wreathed in green smoke straight at the vigilante. Time for this to be over. Though he cast a shield charm, it was done too late. The curse hit Sturgis in the head and he was immediately overcome with severe vertigo. Teetering to the side, he cast one last glance in the Death Eater’s direction before activating the portkey tucked under his shirt as he was no use to the Order in this condition. ADRIENNA V. TONKS *** Tonks knew that coming to this brawl wasn’t the smartest nor healthiest thing she could have done; she also knew there hadn’t been even the remotest possibility that she wouldn’t have come for Remus. Still, she was eager for this to be over in more ways than one, so when she caught sight of a masked figure in the dark, Tonks wasn’t in the mood to play any games. They had three objectives: unmask, detain, and burn the house down. Tonks intended to see them done. With a murmured incantation, Tonks sent a drone jinx hurtling right near the Death Eater’s ear, and a thundering boom resounded through the cold night air; a distraction. Swiftly behind the first spell, Tonks aimed a stinging jinx directly at the mask. The distraction had worked -- Adrienna was momentarily preoccupied with trying to figure out who the hell had brought a cannon to a wand fight, when the stinging hex zapped her in the face. The mask, thankfully, took the brunt of the damage, but her face still felt like she was going through some sort of experimental electrolysis session. "Merlin, you could buy a girl dinner first before you start getting dirty," she huffed, firing an angry slicing spell back at the other woman's neck. Hopefully she'd just decapitate her and get it over with. It took every ounce of self-discipline Tonks possessed not to roll her eyes at the jab, but she didn’t contain herself out of courtesy; an eyeroll would require taking her eye off the target. Though, she scoffed and smirked--chattiness was more often than not a tell-tale sign of a less skilled dueler. “Protego,” murmured Tonks, easily deflecting the would-be decapitation as the shield charm had been on the tip of her tongue the moment the Death Eater had opened her mouth. The talking had made it predictable--it was always the quip and then the spell with the chatters. Tonks wasted no time and sent a blasting curse and knockback jinx at the Death Eater’s chest in quick succession. If Tonks could keep knocking her around and pushing her backwards towards the anti-apparition nets, she could perhaps knock that mask off and see the criminal detained. Or, Tonks considered, she could always just stun her and see to those last two tasks herself...that would probably be more efficient, but there was a part of her that wanted this Death Eater and all the rest to suffer first for what they did. Adrienna would've been annoyed had she been able to hear Tonks's assumption that she wasn't great at dueling. She wasn't wrong, of course -- Aidy was the sort who liked to take her time, and to meticulously spend time with her opponents when they weren't in a position to fight back -- but she never would have admitted that. While her dueling skills weren't the best, though, Aidy was extremely spry and flexible, with lightning fast reflexes thanks to her daily yoga and gymnastic practices. The blasting curse was blocked with a protego of her own, and a backflip kept her out of the path of the second attack. A jab of her wand had a punching curse fired off at Tonks, followed by a freezing spell shot at the ground to hopefully cause her opponent to stumble. "Are you just shy then?" she asked. "You sure are quiet!" “Well, shit,” Tonks said, gaping slightly. No strength of mind could stop her from being distracted by that display. She’d never in her life seen a Death Eater do a backflip. Having not quite regained her focus, Tonks could only deflect the worst of the curse by turning her face and letting the punch catch her cheek rather than square in the face. Tonks stumbled backwards from the impact and her breath caught as she felt the ground slip out from underneath her as the friction she expected from the soil was replaced by smooth ice. Tonks fell and with it came an acute sense of panic--falling wasn’t good, she didn’t think, and neither was duelling Death Eaters, really. But instead of allowing herself to be crippled by the fear and vague sense of guilt, she channeled it into a furious anger that she buried, at least for the moment, keeping her expression relaxed as she rose. Keeping her wand pointed at Adrienna, Tonks twisted her face into a wry sort of smirk and relaxed her posture, parting her lips as if a retort was to follow, but instead, she uttered, “Confringo,” turning her wand away from Adrienna at the last moment and up at a thick tree branch above her. Her eyes lit up in excitement as her spells landed, always feeling a deep sense of pride and self-appreciation at recognizing that she'd done a good job. She almost wanted to take a break in the fighting to look around to see if anyone else had witnessed her awesome move, but knew that they were there with a very specific job to do. ...Although that job was going to have to wait a minute. Another shield spell blocked what Aidy thought was a confringo coming her way, but that didn't stop the physical tree branch from being blasted off the tree she was fighting under and cracking her on the head. Adrienna stumbled and soon she was on the ground just like Tonks had been moments earlier. "Why are you wasting your time on this werewolf?" she asked, oppugnoing a cloud of rocks she'd raised off the ground in Tonks's direction. "You have so much talent. Your life could be so much better." Tonks’ expression twisted into a look of disgust and anger, but it’s not like insults of that nature were something she hadn’t heard before, especially in recent days. She wasn’t foolish enough to be provoked into giving something of her identity away, so instead of responding, Tonks threw up a shield that blocked the full blast of the debris, though with a slight wince, some of the splinters nicked her face and arms. Once her wand cooled, Tonks readied it for a vicious confringo curse, followed directly by a stinging curse--she didn’t have to get into a shouting match with a Death Eater to fight back, after all, not in this context, anyway. “Says the woman doing the bidding of a maniacal warlord to whom she’s, at best, disposable,” Tonks said finally, her tone cool and even. The confringo curse blasted Adrienne off her feet and back into the tree trunk. (If anything positive could be taken away from this, it was that the first spell knocked her out of the path of the second.) This wind was also knocked out of her lungs, leaving any retorts about how she ABSOLUTELY was not disposable to the Dark Lord (he'd have to do his OWN bidding then, thank you very much!) unsaid. The impact also left one of Aidy's shoulders crunching under the pressure. "You really shouldn't tear down other women for doing what they need to do to get themselves ahead! We should be lifting each other up!" she yelled, casting the Cruciatus curse at Tonks to try to hypocritically knock her down. Aidy’s warped version of female empowerment went in one ear--briefly made Tonks think lol wtf--and then right out the other, because the Cruciatus curse was definitely the more pressing issue of the two. Tonks knew she couldn’t let that thing hit her, but she didn’t trust a shield charm to block a spell so powerful, especially not when her heart was already pounding and panic was throwing Tonks off her game. So she did the only thing she could really think of in three seconds; she hurled herself in the opposite direction of the curse. It was not a graceful backflip or even a particularly good dodge, since she had no clue how to ease her landing. Tonks was a natural at falling, but not so much at proper dodging; her full body weight collapsed painfully on her knees as she hit the ground on top of that stupid ice she forgot to do something about. Falling a second time intensified the panic something awful, but at least the curse missed her, hurtling off into the night to hopefully hit a Death Eater and not one of her friends. One thing Tonks was good at, though, was getting back up, since getting hurt was a regular part of most days. She whipped her wand back at Aidy and cried, “Stupefy!” Though she didn’t think her knees were anything more than bruised and aching, Tonks knew she wouldn’t be running around as easily and wanted this over. Biting the inside of her cheek, Tonks pushed herself back to her feet and was about to make one last go for the mask whether the stunning spell hit or not, when she noticed a furious eruption of purple flames in the distance. Tonks stared, dazed for a moment as the burst of purple light illuminated her false face. Tonks knew this was her signal to go, since it was difficult to say whether or not Dedalus had an explosion following the flames. Either way, Tonks knew she wasn’t supposed to be here anymore, and with a pop, she disapparated. Adrienna didn't have time to be disappointed that the cruciatus hadn't hit its mark when a Stupify was heading her way -- after her father had gone to Azkaban two years ago, she didn't want to worry about what sort of rogue justice the Order would enact on her now that the courts weren't in their favour. She tumbled out of the way in a perfect somersault, her wand ready and aimed at Tonks when the burst of purple flames exploded and her opponent vanished. "Well that can't be good," Adrienna said to herself, drawing out her phone to snap a quick photo of the fire to analyze later before apparating away herself. DANTE V. REMUS *** With the snare laid, they need only wait for the Death Eaters to arrive. And as they did, the Order was ready. Remus himself, reacquainted with his wand, could not help but lash out and let a curse go flying at a very broad set of shoulders which did not belong to his set. “Incarcerous!” He’d happily drag the Death Eater into their anti-apparition net. This wouldn’t have been his plan if he’d been the one in charge. That thought had crossed Dante’s mind several times, well before they discovered a gaggle of the wolf’s friends had arrived. They couldn’t let anyone get away, least of all Lupin. He hadn’t spotted Lupin at first - a mistake - and he felt the spell hit, the first tendrils of ropes snaking around to trap him. He severed it, stumbling only a little. “Is that the best you’ve got? Confringo!” He aimed not at Lupin himself, but at the ground directly in front of him. In reality, it was close to Remus’ best. Drained of energy, of health and blood, he was a sweating and pallid as he stumbled away from Dante’s blasting curse. This Death Eater liked to talk, did he? He had spent so much time talking about nothing, it was nice to give into it. “Bombarda!” That was aimed at the Death Eater’s face. He took a breath and smiled wanly. “Evanesco! That’s for your mask, you mouthy git.” Dante was able to deflect a direct hit from the first, but the blast sent him reeling anyway, and he hit a nearby wall with a thud. He let his mask vanish, not bothering to waste time on protecting an identity that didn’t need concealment anymore. “Hello, Remus.” He knew Remus would remember him. Maybe he should try harder to not kill him yet… “Petrificus totalus!” Evelyn’s favorite. And for a moment, Remus hesitated. That moment was enough to freeze his leg and his opposite arm. He growled — “Finite Incantem!” And then, back to Dante bloody Avery. Of course he wouldn't be a bit worried. “Long time, Avery.” His arm gestured, sending a slashing hex toward Dante. The hex grazed his left side as Dante focused more on sending rubble flying at Remus’s head instead, not wanting to waste time with a shield. He grimaced. It wasn’t bad, but it hurt like hell. His father would be angry, and that alone was enough to make him angry. “Did you miss me?” He aimed another blasting curse at Remus, just because now he was frustrated. Remus was thrown back several feet by the force of the blast. Avery had always been known for his anger; that brute force had been his to withstand more than once. Remus too had his moments of wanting -- desiring -- that destruction. Gaining his feet once again, Remus let one knee stay upon the ground as he pressed his fist into the earth and it began to rumble. “You know, I did. I remember this dance.” Then, a shower of sparks and fire aimed in Dante’s direction. “I didn’t miss you.” It was a lie, of course. Dante had missed this song and dance. That time, he was a little more prepared, and his shield sent most of the fire flying away from him. Some of it licked his head and filled his nostrils with the smell of burnt hair. He took a few steps to the right, circling the crouched Remus. “It doesn’t have to be like this, Lupin.” He shot a boil hex at the other man. “They don’t have to get hurt. You could stop this.” Remus slashed the hex away with his wand and rose to his feet. “You’re not getting his location, Avery. You’re not getting anything --” from the corner of his eye, he saw lilac flames begin to lick at the house’s roof. That was Dedalus, then. He wasn’t exactly done with his friend Dante, though. “You’re not getting anything but a pile of rubble.” He turned, aiming a blasting curse through the window. Then, gesturing with his wand, he gathered the shards of glass and sent them plummeting toward Dante in a cloud. “Oh, you could give us so much more than-” Dante scrambled away from the glass as best he could, waving his wand to redirect some - though he wasn’t as lucky as he would’ve hoped. He sent some of the rubble Lupin’s way again, followed by another fireball, and out of his periphery, noted that the purple flames were growing larger. Was that one of his, or one of Lupin’s? Remus managed to deflect the glass, though the fireball singed his arm and his shoulder. He hissed through the pain and now, the fire beyond in the house had grown more spectacular. It danced and sparkled as it consumed the stone house behind them. It was the sign to go. “You and I can continue this another day,” Remus said. And he meant it. Avery’s physical style managed to fill him with the vitality he knew he’d miss just as soon as the adrenaline left him. He smiled briefly, and disapparated with a soft pop. Dante knew in his gut what was about to happen before it did. The empty space where Remus has been confirmed that. He’d had one job here - one - and it disappeared. “Fuck.” He turned on his heel, fuming, in search of one of his colleagues. He wasn’t going to let everything go up in flames, not today. VIC V. HESTIA *** Waiting in the darkness, Hestia was aware of every movement and noise around her, including those she produced. Her breathing was quiet and slow, while tips she had learned from an old colleague regarding regulating one’s heartbeat were keeping her pulse just above its resting rate, though she noticed that annoyingly, it would skip every so often. Glamoured as a redheaded woman with green eyes and a face not quite as rotund as her real one, Hestia continued to scan the room, waiting for any trespassers. She twisted her wand around in her fingers, one nervous tic that she couldn’t control, and felt herself start to breathe more naturally; her logic being that if no one had shown up by now, no one would. Of course, she was wrong. Someone made an entrance -- someone with a mask on. Her guard hadn’t dropped completely, so she was able to force her walls back up quickly, keeping herself in the dark but holding out her wand in front of her. “Friend or foe?” she asked gruffly, despite knowing the answer. Vic froze in the doorway. She could hear her fellow Death Eaters in the room beside this one starting to move. They were expecting, hoping for a considerable, if not surprised group of Phoenixes on the defensive. Apparently, those idiotic little birds weren’t quite as surprised. Thank Merlin her wand was already out. “Do all your friends come to murder and maim you?” Vic retorted scathingly. “It explains so much, Candidus Ignus!” Hestia’s shield went up fast as lightning (no pun intended), deflecting the spell elsewhere, cringing as it slammed into a wooden cabinet, splintering it. Annoyed that her new dueling partner had started with such a rude spell, she lowered her wand toward the floor right in front of the Death Eater, aiming a blasting curse with a massive dose of power at her feet. “I think it’s your friends who do the murdering and maiming,” she retorted, stepping out of the shadows at last. A cursory, disdainful glance told Vic that she didn't know the redheaded woman, but she could easily be fighting a glamoured man for all she knew. The darkness was a problem, Vic didn't see the blasting curse aimed for her feet until she was rocketed back into the door frame, slamming into it with a force that tore something in her shoulder. Her wand arm. Fuck. Teeth barred, she righted herself. “They definitely do, the best friends a gal could have,” she sniped. The wooden pieces of the cabinet lurched into the air suddenly and then flew at the other woman. In true athletic form, Hestia ducked and tumbled away from the shards of wood, rolling back onto her knees and springing up, wand pointed at her foe in an instant. “You,” she said, stepping forward, “need a Mind Healer if you think murderers are good company.” Done with the chit chat, she suddenly roared “Depulso!,” banishing the Death Eater across the room, hoping it would incapacitate them. Whatever damage she’d suffered to her shoulder, Vic couldn’t lift her arm up in time to send the spell harmlessly away. This time she hit the wall beside the door, cracking her head against it with an audible sound. “Fuck,” she muttered blearily, head throbbing, vision swimming. She slumped down onto the ground, feeling something thick and sticky behind her hood. “Get off the soap box. You talk too much,” she laughed meanly, weakly. Perhaps it was her head injury but something smelled distinctly like smoke. Hestia restrained herself from making a quip about the Death Eater’s own villainous monologuing, instead crossing the room quickly, tucking her wand in her back pocket. She leaned over Vic’s limp form and grasped her by the collar, dragging her back up and supporting the other woman with a knee. She balled her free hand into a fist and raised it, ready to pummel Vic to get her point across, when suddenly she started to smell the smoke too. Distracted, she dropped her hand and let the middle Mulciber slump back down, head turning quickly in the direction the smell was coming from. Remembering she was in a fight, she fumbled for her wand to get control of the situation again. There was something familiar about the way the other witch instinctively went for the physical, a pinprick of awareness in Vic’s already screaming head. She dismissed it, taking advantage of the woman’s mistake to lean back and kick the woman hard enough in the stomach to force her stumbling back and away. It fucking hurt. The smoke was visible now, wafting into the room. “Cheers, bitch,” Vic drawled, and apparated away. EVELYN V. DEDALUS *** Pleased at least that the tracking device had served its purpose, Evelyn stayed to the back of the fray, waiting to see where she was most needed before embarking on a duel of her own. The werewolf would be dead soon enough anyway, so she felt no compulsion to seek him out. When she did finally decide where she would do the most good, she made no hesitation getting there. Killing an extra Order member or two was one way to sweeten what was risking becoming a bitter day. She raised her wand to aim her deadly curse at one of the fools. Evelyn wasn't one to mess with banter or to prolong a duel just for fun. Dedalus didn't have time to think. He aimed his own wand at the ground beneath her, conjuring the illusion of a gaping hellmouth—complete with ominous tentacles attempting to drag her down—in hope of distracting her. He'd never been a banterer or a duel-prolongerer either, but what seemed to be a practical response to Dedalus didn't always necessarily always seem that way to others. “You're very impolite!” was the only thing he could think of to shout off the top of his head. Evelyn frowned slightly at the new development. It was, she had to admit, not what she was expecting. She incinerated the tentacles before they could get too close, then turned her focus on the man who called out to her. Though there was now a large hole between them (an impressive feat of magic, that), if he wanted her attention, he could have it. It didn't matter much to her which of these little Orderlings she killed. She threw back a magnetic curse to pull him down into his own creation. Dedalus let out a startled yelp as the curse dragged him toward—and into—the hole. Fortunately, he managed to grab hold of the edge before he'd completely fallen in; his hat, however, was not so lucky. “That was an heirloom!” he snapped, as the piece plummeted downward to wherever a fake abyss led to. He hurled a horn-growing hex in the Death Eater’s direction as he scrambled back onto solid ground. Evelyn watched the hat tumble, still intrigued by the hole and its magic. She was distracted enough, then, to find herself growing horns from the man's hex. Her expression soured. This strange man who thought her 'impolite' and fretted over a lost heirloom had very strange priorities. "Then don't wear an heirloom to a duel." The horns curled around her head like a ram, heavy and imposing. She flung back a flaying curse. It was hard to go wrong with the classics. Dedalus was about to snippily retort that anywhere worth going was worth wearing an heirloom, but he was cut short by the flaying curse, which hit him in the arm just as he awkwardly clambered back onto the floor. His skin peeled back in ribbons, exposing the bones beneath. He eyed his semi-skeletal hand with a look of disgust. “Gross,” he said, firing back by flicking his wand sharply upward, and drawing with it some conjured—and very pointy—stalagmites from the floor beneath the horned Death Eater’s feet, which threatened to impale her. And Evelyn's advance was once again interrupted. One caught a thread of her robe and another scraped against the side of her leg, and whatever patience she had for this man was gone. She laced the stalagmites with a vibrating spell until they cracked and broke apart from their bases and flung the newly-freed shards of rock back at their maker. Dedalus was hit with several bits of shattered stalagmites—including a good-sized chunk to the head—before he raised his wand, freezing them in mid-flight before vanishing them back into non-existence. Now, he too was losing patience. No more Mr Nice Wizard. He angrily transfigured some of the remaining rocks into a very angry cast of coconut crabs, which advanced on the Death Eater, snapping their claws hungrily. Evelyn set a spark in the nearest crab, glowing at each joint and crevice until it smouldered and burst from the inside out. She did the same to the next, and the next, furious at the distracting man. "You don't have anywhere to go, vigilante," she taunted coldly. "Even if you escape here tonight, I will dig that little heirloom out of the bowels of this house and track down every living descendent of every person who has ever worn it. And that"--another crab popped at her feet--"Is what I'll do to them." She straightened her back. "Or you could just die here. It's up to you. Avada Kedavra." Dedalus summoned a particularly large coconut crab to block the spell; it froze in a flash of garish green and dropped, motionless, to the floor. The short wizard winced. Well, that had escalated quickly. He glanced around—she was right, unfortunately. There wasn’t anywhere to go. And if she was planning on making inappropriate use of heirlooms, well… perhaps it was time. “I would prefer neither, thank you very much!” he squeaked, looking around to ensure his cohorts would be ready to escape. Then, he cast a very large, and very purple ball of flames, not at his opponent, but the tapestry behind her, which looked exceptionally old and flammable. The flames spread with astonishing speed, devouring the tapestry and the wall behind it in seconds. It would take the whole house if Evelyn didn't stop it, but the jet of water she sent bounced harmlessly back. "No," she said softly. They needed this house. There would be information in here, identities, clues about the Order. If the house burned up, she would have released Lupin for nothing. All but ignoring the vigilante now, she threw everything she could at the ever-growing wall of purple flames, but nothing worked. Dedalus watched the flames spread with an expression of vague regret before conjuring a new hat just to tip it at her. He bid farewell with a slightly acerbic “Cheerio!” before reaching for the portkey in his pocket. With a crack, he was gone. The new hat just fueled the anger in Evelyn's chest, but the room was half purple now, and she couldn't stay safely inside it any longer. She popped outside to the lawn and watched as what should have been such a good plan went up in flames. |