InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "it unscrews the other way."

Lily and Florrie crept silently along the halls of the Spell Damage floor toward Healer Mulciber's office. It seemed like the best place to start for evidence of whatever Mulciber was getting up to. Peter's suggestion notwithstanding, the more she dealt with Mulciber, the more Florrie thought he was unpleasant and nasty and quite possibly the sort to do something terrible to someone, far beyond the usual mild prejudices mediwizards had about the theory-mindedness of Healers versus their own practicalities.

"What did you bring for the door?" she asked Lily. Lily had volunteered to have something ready to get them past the locks and wards. Given what James and the rest of them got up to, Florrie didn't want to know in advance and certainly didn't want to know where they got it.

Lily wrinkled her nose a bit as she pulled something out of her pocket, cradled in her palm. It looked a bit like a dead spider, and when she tapped it with her wand it certainly twitched and flexed its limbs like one. She shuddered, and muttered, "I really hate these," but when she lowered it to the door handle, with Florrie leaning against the wall to block the view of any casual passers-by, it scuttled eagerly into the lock. Lily wiped her palm down the side of her trousers as the lock--or the thing within it--clicked and chirped and finally clanked.

It was just as well that neither of them were touching the lock with spells. Florrie was concerned enough that this was a trap given what her aunt had said. She pushed the door open and they looked in, and, finding nothing obviously out of place, stepped in, gesturing to Lily to join her.

Past the large mahogany desk was a bookshelf filled with an assortment of tomes and notebooks. Many of them common to Arlo’s area of healing, but a few outdated and perhaps more controversial. At the corner of his desk was a wiggentree shaped meticulously, while the rest of the desk was better suited to chaos. In between an uneven stack of papers awaiting his signature were three charts — including a copy of Connor Hansen’s, who had passed away just yesterday, that seemed to have a few notations added more recently.

Lily's attention went first to the tree--she hadn't heard he had one, and they tended to keep track of who had useful ingredients on hand. She kept her hands innocently raised and well away from the leaves as she tilted to look for signs of harvesting. She couldn't see a bowtruckle, but she also hadn't anything with her to offer as distraction and--oh, there it was, levering away from the trunk to glare at her. "I'm not touching your tree," Lily murmured, straightening up again. Florrie looked up from the charts on the desk. "Anything in there?" Lily asked, already looking up to the shelves instead. They might have been back in the common room, dividing and conquering this week's pile of homework, except the stakes here were rather higher.

Florrie was flipping through the chart, ignoring the bowtruckle shenanigans. "Patient chart. He died yesterday." But there was something in her tone that was unpleasant, even a little shaken. "L--" and she bit back on the name, just in case "--I don't think Mulciber was finished with him because he died."

Lily turned her frown from the bookcase--she must be misremembering what some of these books were--to Florrie. "What do you mean?" she asked, stepping across to look over Florrie's shoulder at the charts. By long habit, her gaze went automatically to the administered potions section, and it was hardly surprising to see Wiggenweld varient at the bottom of the list (in Mulciber's cramped handwriting, but the entire apothecary division were well-versed in deciphering the illegible scrawls of the Healers). "Is he actually dead?" Lily asked, because that was what you used Wiggentree for, waking from things like the Draught of Living Death, but as she looked across the rest of the chart, she had to swallow hard against a sudden bad taste. "What was he doing?"

Then the door opened.

Arlo tossed the file he was flipping through onto the desk, bumping against the tree. “Now, I don’t believe I had any meetings on my schedule.” He shut the door behind him, blocking the point of egress.

Florrie snatched up the file Mulciber had tossed onto the desk as if she could somehow protect the patient it represented from whatever the healer was doing to people. Her heart was thumping so loudly she expected he could hear it, never mind Lily who was standing even closer. She moved to put herself between Lily and Mulciber. "I was looking for the file for George Grimblehawk and the shift witch told me it might be in here." She glanced down at the one she had in her hand as if she expected it to be the one she was nominally trying to find.

"And may I just say," Lily added, with the sort of casual earnestness she'd perfected since she'd first had to lie about the likely actions of her nearest and dearest, "what a magnificent Wiggentree you have, Healer Mulciber. I've never seen a specimen so perfectly formed as--" As she shifted her hand up as though to reach out and touch the tree (never mind the spiky and short-tempered occupant) the sleeve of her coat caught at the corner of one of the haphazard piles of paperwork on the desk, tipping them to spill over the other files on the desk. "Oh my goodness, I'm so sorry!" Lily cried, laying a hand over her heart.

Arlo locked the door. He didn’t care about the papers on the floor. If they stayed on his desk longer than a day they weren’t that important. What was important were two medling women inside of his office. He shifted the grip on his wand. “Sit down.” There was a time for restraint. Perhaps literal in a moment, but first to assess the situation. “And please tell me how you gained access to my secure office or why you didn’t go through the file clerk? Are you even assigned to my service today?”

One of the guest chairs in the room slid up behind Florrie and bumped her in the knees. She sat down with a slightly surprised noise. It occurred to her to wonder whether Lily had retrieved the lock-spider. "Maintenance has keys to everything," Florrie reminded him, taking a slightly indignant tone, as if he had wronged her by asking. "Also it's a late shift and the file clerk is always busy this time of night catching up on the day files."

Lily winced as the leg of her chair clipped her ankle, and sat as well. "I just wanted to finish up and get home before my husband calls the hitwizards," she said, even managing a little laugh. "What a day. For you too, obviously," she added with a smile to Mulciber. "If we'd known you were still here we could have asked direct."

“You two speak a great deal.” Arlo was unimpressed. Apparently giving them space to speak wasn’t as entertaining as possible. “Especially for women snooping through my office. Now perhaps I should allow you to find something.” The one benefit of being the senior healer in artifact accidents was he had quite the collection. “I believe you were interested in the Grimblehawk case?” He walked around his desk, to pull open the bottom drawer.

As soon as Mulciber's attention shifted to his drawer, Lily was on her feet, grabbing at Florrie, the charts still in her friend’s hand, as though she could pull her towards the door faster than Florrie's own nerves were propelling her. "We really don't want to interrupt your very important work," she said, barely breathless at all, and reached for the door handle.

They were running. This made things less fun. It also gave him less time to plan. Arlo grabbed a large orange crystal tucked just under a little cloth dolly. He threw it at his office door.

Then the door exploded.

Splinters of the door flew everywhere, some still smouldering. The bowtruckle tried valiantly to protect the wiggentree, and all the loose folders and files were scattered around the room or blown out through the remains of the window.

In the doorway, there was a silhouette of a figure, cloaked and covering their face to protect against the smoke and flaming debris. Whatever the new arrival had been intending, it wasn't going to plan.

In the distance, people were shouting and running. An alarm was sounding and the lights took on a reddish sheen. Saint Mungo's had a protocol for explosions and attacks, and it was being implemented around them.

The debris settled and there were only a few small fires on the desk and the floor and the figure stopped coughing and aimed a wand vaguely into the small office.

Florrie, who had dropped the files as she threw up arm to protect her face, dug her heels in and stopped Lily by main force. Whoever this was, friend or foe, and whatever was going on in the hallways, which suggested foe, Lily didn’t need to smack right into them. She drew her wand, asking in her best impression of her aunt, “What in Merlin’s name is going on here?” as if she could get an answer and take ten points from whichever house this was.

Lily shook her head, like the ringing in her ears could be dislodged, and dragged breath back into her lungs. Her eyes were streaming; when she dragged her sleeve across her face a dozen tiny cuts stung. Her other hand fumbled at her own wand, finally managing to get it out of its inner-coat pocket, and she set her shoulder against Florrie's, turning enough that she could see what Mulciber was up to as well.

That was not what he intended. And he doubted the meddlesome women had planned this. Even with the ringing and the limited visibility, instinct won out and he activated the containment wards on his office. Protocol really, oddly enough insisted upon by him, but now it trapped them in his office with the orange mist in the air.

Now they were well and truly in trouble. The key to survival here was other people stopping Mulciber from doing whatever he was going to do, so Florrie cast a Sonorus spell on herself and yelled into the hall at full across-the-Great-Hall blast, "INTRUDER IN MULCIBER'S OFFICE! HELP!" which could get out of the room even if Florrie and Lily couldn't.

The intruder's mask was in tatters, but it had taken the brunt of the shower of flaming splinters that had hit the women by the door. Few people had seen a death-eater in a mask at this range and lived, and fewer still without a mask. Her face, for it was a woman, was aristocratic and cruel, twisted in a fit of rage. "Stupid, stupid, stupid!", she said. It wasn't clear if she was talking to, Lily, Arlo, or herself. She cast Ventus and a spiral of wind blew Mulciber off-balance, fanning the flames and working against the containment gas.

The Death Eater turned to Lily. "Prepare to die, mudblood!"

Lily didn't waste time or breath on the Death Eater or her threats; she wrapped an arm around Florrie, pulling her friend tight against her side, and jabbed her wand toward the floor between their feet. Lily's "Expulso" was tight and controlled and punched a narrow, jagged-edged chunk of the floor out from beneath them. Her blind and somewhat less focused "Levios--" was cut short by collision with a table that had risen a foot or two off the floor below, and slammed back down again.

The Death Eater screamed and fired off several more blasting curses, destroying the rest of the office and sending the office furniture and bookcases raining down at Lily. The hardwood kindling which used to be expensive furniture, the rows of neatly made beds and the dry, leatherbound books made the plant damage ward a fertile ground for the growing fire, now on two floors.

Looking down amidst the rapidly kindling fire, Arlo howled in despair. He quickly Accio'ed Tom Riddle's Notebook towards him, reaching for it as it came through the hole in the ruins of his office. It didn't quite make it to his grasp when a gloved hand snatched it away. "You stole that!" shouted the Death Eater angrily. She blasted the floor in front of him and Arlo Mulciber fell into the Plant Ward with the last bits of his office.

One daring security officer had just made it to Healer Muliciber’s office. He took one look and turned right around. “Death Eater! We have an actual Death Eater in the hospital!” The time for calm was over.

Bellatrix jumped down, using a slowing spell to fall gracefully into the smoky room. She looked around for her intended victim, amidst the chaos and confusion.

The flaming debris of Mulciber's office set off still more alarms and the anti-fire enchantments on the Potions and Plants Ward they had plummeted or floated into. Florrie had landed hard on her ankle and was convinced it was sprained, if not broken. When Florrie rolled off Lily and got a good look at her, which took a moment between the smoke, the dissipating orange mist, and the dust from the collapsed ceiling, she screamed. Lily lay unmoving, with a bloody gash along her forehead. "Murderer! You've killed her!"

Arlo pushed himself to his feet, his robes tattered, covered in debris and blood. He was pretty sure he was partially on fire at some point. “Bellatrix!” Maybe he should have killed Rodolphus when he had the chance. Her as well. But there was time to make such a correction. “What do you think you are doing?” He fired off a stupefy. There was just a small thread of his cover to maintain. Maybe he’d even make sure the McGonagall child was killed as well.

The stupefy hit Bella, who was more shocked to have her name revealed than to be cursed by Mulciber. She went down behind the pile of debris and tinder from Arlo's office. She breathed in and out, taking the moment of isolation to gather her wits. Arlo would appear shortly, there to check on her. She was ready. She had the Notebook he'd stolen from Cissy. She'd killed the Mudblood, and Arlo was her third target. She smiled. It didn't matter that he'd exposed her; she wasn't going to let him get away now.

With Lily unconscious and the ward filled with patients, for all that the mobile ones were doing their damnedest to flee from the duel between what Florrie was sure was two Death Eaters, Florrie couldn't leave. Instead she glanced round for shelter and, finding none close to hand, stood her ground, ready to defend Lily and her patients. She had an eye on one of the patient screens that Healers and mediwizards used for privacy; it might make a missile against one or the other of the combatants.

Single minded as he was to get that journal back, Arlo was still aware he had an audience. He might yet want to walk away from all this. Arlo cast a shield charm on the ceiling above him to stop the rain of debris and fire. There were far too many dangerous things in his office. “Don’t worry, the aurors will be here soon.” He walked around to where she lay prone. “But first…”

Bella waited, lying still and waiting for Arlo to walk into her line of fire. "Bombarda!" she shouted, making the appropriate gesture and pouring all her frustration, anger, and hate into blowing up the fool who dared to steal from a Black. Without looking to see if she'd taken him down, she rolled to her feet and closed, ready to follow up on her spell.

At that range Arlo didn’t have a chance. His chest exploded as if he'd been hit by a shotgun at close range. It was hard to tell if his last expression was shock, fear, or just disbelief. Perhaps someone could ask his ghost, if he bothered to haunt the plant injury ward.

Bella breathed in the chaos and enjoyed the screams of the weaklings who were wearing the remains of her dead enemy. She considered leaving a mark, to tell all the world that the Dark Lord was still to be feared, but Rodolphus hadn't wanted her to. She pouted. The precious heart of the Dark Lord needed protection, and the Aurors would be here soon. Bella fired a Confringo spell at the doors and blew out this ward's windows, and decided it was time for her favorite trick.

She ran as fast as she could towards the window and leaped out. When she cleared the building, she apparated away, her laugh lingering amidst the flames, sobs, and ringing alarms.

With Bellatrix Lestrange--Bellatrix Lestrange!--gone, Florrie let loose her spell-grip on the edge of the patient screen. For all that she was a witness to a murder and to another attempted murder, she had work to do. She sank to one knee and checked Lily--still breathing, thank Merlin, and only quick thinking had kept Bellatrix from finishing Lily--and as soon as she was sure Lily was stable, moved to put out the fires nearest to her

Aurors and hospital staff were already flooding the ward, putting out the fires and preparing to move the patients to other wards. It was going to be a long night, and a longer morning.