Ivy Fortescue (brontide) wrote in triumphic, @ 2014-08-24 21:21:00 |
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Entry tags: | !scene, 1991 : 08, fortescue ivy, meadowes dorcas |
who: Dorcas Meadowes, Ivy Fortescue, and a few officers of the law.
what: Leave-takings & new starts. (i/ii)
where: Ivy's cottage in Cumbria
when: Mid-August.
The evening was cool enough. The rain had come heavy that afternoon, half an hour of downpour cooling the earth and soaking the overgrown tangle of her garden. Or just the garden, now -- Ivy wasn't fool enough to think she would be returning to this place, hers for all she hadn’t laid stone upon stone, for a long time (if ever: the Ministry would take it, more likely than not). She hadn't been green-fingered in the slightest; it was almost funny how the strangest things smarted now, and how futile that was. What use did wolves have for flower beds?
As little use as for photographs, surely, but there were still three of those slipped into the pack light against her back, and a ring threaded upon the chain about her neck. Whether Dorcas Meadowes carried her own tokens was considered for a moment and then discarded as irrelevant: Dorcas, if this was Dorcas, had moved far beyond the woman she had known and considered friend, whose marker she’d seen set over an empty grave. But she was nevertheless coming, helping, and that would be a debt as well as a gift.
A sound from beyond the perimeter of the wards drew Ivy to sharp awareness once more. Time.
The woman who Apparated before the two officers on watch was a hastily-thrown together semblance of Rosalind Bungs, if one didn't peer too closely. The nose was a shade too thin, hair perhaps just slightly too coarse and overall she was just a bit too tall, but Dorcas wagered not many people risked staring at Bungs for too long, lest they incur a sharp verbal lashing.
"Seems there's been a mistake in some reports you two idiots filed for last watch and Shacklebolt needs you to get back to the Ministry right now to sort it out. I'm to cover until you get back."
This was, as expected, met with a great deal of confusion. "But--"
So Dorcas stepped forward and stared him down. "The DMU is breathing down our necks, looking for any chance to cut more off the DMLE's budget and you're going to argue with me over your fuck up? Any more reductions and he'll be demanding your jobs to make up the difference. Now go!"
Some things hadn't changed after all.
And when the two officers hastily fumbled for their wands and disappeared, Dorcas turned her wrist up to note the time on her muggle watch. How long for two low-rung, terrified officers to stumble their way cluelessly through the bureaucracy of the Ministry, earnest to rectify their perceived mistakes, only to be confused as they encountered blank face after blank face, for the dawning realisation to come, the alarm to ring out, and for other officers to assemble en masse?
Ten minutes, give or take.
The wards licked over her skin like a flame but did not stop her progress along the narrow pathways up to the house itself. Shedding Rosalind's countenance like yesterday's clothes, Dorcas gazed up at the house as if she had only heretofore seen it in a photograph, familiar and strange at once.
There were no lights on inside the house (all was left still and dark, as though she lay in bed asleep) but there was light enough to roughly give shape to Ivy’s figure as she appeared upon the porch, drawing the door carefully closed behind her. She had seen the appearance of Rosalind Bungs -- the woman herself, from the distance of the window; Ivy was not sure she would have seen through the disguise, in similar conditions -- and the way that presence shifted as it passed through the old wards surrounding the property.
Who else but the newly alive Dorcas Meadowes?
Trust was a difficult thing, but what could this woman do beyond that which had already been done? That was the certainty which helped Ivy smile, small and wry, as the not-forgotten face was assessed.
So low as to almost be mouthed rather than spoken: “You’ll know how to find me, I daresay, when you want to call it in. Black market’ll doubtless be kind for a pretty penny.” A moment of stillness, whilst it could still (just-barely) be afforded.
“Thank you.”
Ten years had swept over their faces, carving faint lines into places a smile would not reach not reach, hardening eyes, firming jaws. Dorcas knew her own story well enough, but she could read a summary of Ivy's in a glance.
"For whatever it's worth now, and I suspect not very much at all, I had my reasons."
A stray thought for before, when they were colleagues and times could be even called dire, there had still been the low notes of humour exchanged, the security and comfort in standing beside someone and knowing they fought with you and for you--but it was just as swiftly batted away as a waste of time and energy now when there was little to waste.
"Give me your wand, and use this." Here she held it out -- maple, 10 and a half inches, unicorn core, but most important of all, procured outside Great Britain and therefore untagged. She had no particular attachment to it, after all -- her very first wand lay somewhere at the bottom of the Thames if it hadn't already been washed out to sea by now. "It would be wisest of all to leave Britain all together and forget her rotted insides, but if not, I trust you the most to be sensible about it. You can thank me by not getting caught, yeah?"
“Doubtless you did.” There was no judgement in Ivy’s voice; who was she to judge Dorcas Meadowes, and how indeed could she? In truth she hardly cared, except as an echo of comradeship a long time ago. It was clear she had not truly known this woman, but then recent months had reinforced well the lesson that impressions were merely facets and rarely ever the truth of a person.
Ivy’s wand was withdrawn from her pocket and offered even as she accepted Dorcas’ own, with little regret. “Not that this is the time for a crisis of identity, but Britain’s my home; I haven’t much of value left, but I do know that. I’ll be sensible though. And you should be too, I think,” she continued, checking that the back on her back was properly secured and raising the hood of her jacket. “They’ll not be long, and Rosie Bungs’ll not be happy.”
"No, I imagine not." A nearly unwilling smile graced her wide mouth at the thought. Bungs -- there, a touch of Dorcas's more challenging nature may have slipped out in taunting that particular personality, however strategic she could justify it otherwise.
But with the reminder that she was here to finish a job, Dorcas stepped even closer. "Here, let me take a good long look at you now. I promise it won't take but a minute, and then you can be off."
“Oh goodness.” The hood was flicked back once more to allow Dorcas the best of the scant light to take in her features, commit them to memory. “There you go, then.”
After a moment giving the woman before her equal consideration: “You be careful. For what you want to do, whatever that may be, if not for yourself.”
"I fully intend..." Dorcas said in her own pitch and tenor, but as she scrutinised the face and body of the woman before her -- pale skin, paler from the lack of sun, scrupulous neatness, staid expression, resolute yet non-aggressive stance -- a gradual swing in the notes, deeper, rounder, richer emerged.
She was aware of where she began and ended, how the lines of her physicality changed, contracted, and merged until she was more dense and compact, shorter, sturdier. Unconcerned how Ivy could now stare into her own face speaking back to her in her own voice. "...on it. I still have so much to do. You may regret that favour yet, though I can promise you it would not be more than what you could bear."
“I think we both know what human beings are capable of bearing when they need to; not much of a promise.” But there was no criticism in Ivy’s words, only acceptance. “I may, but there it is between us nonetheless.”
It was disconcerting, to suddenly be speaking to herself and not the form she had always known as Dorcas, but not so much so that Ivy looked away -- a truer way to catch the changes wrought in her face and body these past months than the mirror set into the bathroom wall, though only a fleeting glimpse. “Do you believe in luck, Dorcas?”
“Considering how we have come to stand before each other now, you and I, would you think it wise?” And if there was such a thing that ebbed and flowed outside a bottle of Felix Felicis, then it had never been particularly fond of Dorcas.
A smile, grim but true enough. “Then I won’t wish you that. So --” the irony not at all lost upon her “-- good hunting it is.”
One last moment of shared gaze, and then Ivy turned (drawing her hood up as she) and slipped away into the darkness, the wards feeling like nothing so much as a sigh as she passed through them and into the night.
Hunting. More fitting a word then Ivy knew (or perhaps she knew somehow exactly). Dorcas waited, unmoving, watching her current progenitor, as it were, finally walk away from a place that had served as both solace and prison. Some part of her was deeply satisfied with the act -- to have nothing in the entire world, after all, was to be truly free. Dorcas knew it well.
A moment more after that lonely figure had disappeared and Dorcas checked the time. Eight minutes, 20 seconds. For good measure, she tested Ivy’s wand on herself -- a bit of transfiguration to alter her clothing to better fit her new form (it would not do to trip over her own two feet when trying to make an entrance) -- and then nearly marched up to the wards single mindedly to wait.
The young watch-officers, when they returned, were bolstered by four others (though Rosalind Bungs herself was not on duty that night), all veterans, and all highly unamused by the impersonation of an officer by... someone. It was easy enough to spot the figure standing -- not standing but waiting, actually -- just inside the gate where the wards took effect.
“You’ve had it now, wolf bitch. Where the fuck’s your friend?”
“Wolf bitch?” Dorcas echoed with more incredulousness than a more restrained Ivy would have shown. “Merlin, they really do let anyone into the DMLE these days, don’t they?” She eyed the six of them. Most were young and round-faced, their eyes laced with a kind of zeal, giving them a wet-behind-the-ears impression. Two of the older men, however, dour-faced and heavily lined, were far more experienced, less likely to act first without thinking. “Now what does a bitch have to do around here to get arrested these days?”
A stupefy spell directed towards those first two young officers with Ivy’s wand (which felt, to Dorcas, a bit like the owner herself: precise, staid, efficient) might do, and they fell heavily like downed trees, their faces set in expressions of, well, stupification. “Clearly I have no need for friends if this is what the Ministry is going to throw at me.”
The remaining young officers, rather than applying critical thought to Dorcas’ stated desire for arrest, duly obliged with their own spells; bodybind and a stupify of their own, as well as a rather off-kilter jellylegs (the young officer with rather patchy beard perhaps remembering Hogwarts brawls).
The most senior, Azazael Summerbee, stepped apart and withdrew a set of silver cuffs from his sash. “Time to go, Fortescue.”
Well that seems a bit overmuch--, Dorcas thought briefly before the three spells found their target and this time it was she who fell to the ground rather gracelessly. The stunning spell hadn’t been hard enough to knock her straight into unconsciousness (next time, a little more intent, perhaps, and a cleaner swish of the hand), but Ivy’s features might’ve come a bit unmoored at the seams if it hadn’t been for the added binding spell paralysing them into place, ironically enough.
Unable to reply, Dorcas had to settle for a resentful glare, which she hoped did not look at all a bit pleased with the whole affair.
The cuffs were swiftly fixed, with a satisfied grunt, and both Dorcas-Ivy and the squad of officers disappeared into the night with a pop.