Vanguard

by kitsunerei88

[Sequel to Liar Liar and From America With Love] Revolutions don't begin with spellfire and flying Molotov Potions. Revolutions begin with people. This revolution begins with a pureblood boy standing trial for a ruse he and his halfblood cousin have perpetrated, and a halfblood bastard with a gift for uncovering secrets.

6. Chapter 6

Aldon woke up.

The ceiling was white. His sheets, his blankets were white and textured, and his pillows were too big. He was still in his robes, heavily wrinkled, and his underclothes did not match this particular robe. His mouth tasted like something had died in it. He felt weak, exhausted, as if he had recently gotten over a long sickness. A quick look inside at his core showed that it was half-empty, still regenerating.

But he was himself. He didn't know how much time had passed, but he was blessedly, blessedly himself. He was in full control of everything, his thoughts were his own again, the horrifying distance between himself and the world was gone. He lifted an arm, and he was so relieved that it worked – it worked, without any strange heaviness, any resistance from the presence with whom he had been sharing his body. He wasn't helpless anymore – he could do things, he could speak and the words would be his, he could move at his own will. He was awake, and he was Aldon Étienne Rosier, once again.

Or, well. Not Rosier. Blake.

The reality of the last few weeks slammed into him. He groaned, sitting up and pulling his knees to his chest, resting his head on them. He remembered. He remembered goddamn fucking everything, he just hadn't been able to do anything about it. He was too trapped in Justice, too wrapped up in the trial – he had known what was happening, he had watched his life collapse around him, but he had done nothing about it. He could do nothing about it. He hadn't even cared to do anything about it. Shit. Well, goddamn fucking shit in a fucking shitstorm in a fucking hellhole of shit.

He wasn't Aldon Étienne Rosier anymore. He was Aldon Étienne Blake. He was living with his biological mother, Christina Blake, who said he could just call her Christie. He had been disowned, he was now persona non grata in Wizarding Britain; he was non-noble, a known halfblood, a Truth-Speaker. Fuck. Fucking goat-fucking shit and fuck. He didn't know enough swear words for this, and if he was the sort of person who got up and threw or kicked things, he would be doing so now. Fuck. He needed a drink.

The door to his room slammed open, and he jumped a little. Archie stood in the doorway, and there was a brief moment of pause, which was when Aldon knew that Archie knew that he was awake. Then, the Black Heir, quite indecorously, made a noise like a whoop and threw himself onto the bed on top of Aldon, whose reaction time was just a little too slow to roll out of the way or otherwise defend himself.

"Thank god you're awake, Aldon!" Archie chattered, throwing his arms around him. Pulling back, a little groggily, Aldon could see the happy light dancing in Archie's grey eyes. At least someone was happy. "It's my birthday today, you know, and John's going to Germany tomorrow to visit his boyfriend and won't be back for three weeks, so now you have to come, you just have to, and that means we have to give you a makeover!"

There were words, and Aldon didn't understand them. Or rather, he understood most of them, makeover being an obvious exception, but they didn't make sense all together. He glanced over at the doorway, where John was leaning against one side, dressed casually in a thin t-shirt and short pants with what looked like a half-dozen pockets. Cargo shorts, he remembered they were called.

One word stuck out in his brain. It wasn't a word he typically used, and it was in the new dialect of words he had had to learn to keep up with Archie and his friends. He even knew what it meant. "Boyfriend?"

Boyfriend: a romantic entanglement with someone of the male gender.

"Oh, yeah," John replied, entirely nonchalant, though he had a slight smirk. "Gerhart Riemann. He was the spokesperson for the Schwarzenstein team during the Triwizard Tournament."

Aldon's brain stuttered, fixed on his words, and he knew that John was speaking truth. He even vaguely remembered who Gerhardt Riemann was – blonde hair, a patrician nose stood out in his memory. "The handsome one," he said slowly, and John smirked a little deeper. "Er, and Francesca doesn't mind…?"

"The monster?" John shrugged carelessly, though his brown eyes looked as though he was hiding some secret laughter. "Why would she? She encouraged me to go, said she was tired of my moping."

"You and Francesca are not…" He hesitated. Betrothals were not usually something that one asked about – they were either announced formally, or people learned about them when told by one of the parties, or they were read in the parties' behaviour. He had assumed that John and Francesca had a longstanding arrangement, and there was no reason he would have paid attention to American announcements.

"Are not what?" John's face was a study in innocence, very badly so, and Archie looked between the two of them, confused. Aldon scowled slightly; John knew exactly what Aldon was asking, but he was going to force him to say it anyway. That was right, he remembered; the arse had been reading his mind for weeks before saying anything. That was... somewhat embarrassing. John's expression slipped into a smirk, evidently catching the last thought.

"Involved?" He said eventually. It wasn't as odd of a word as a betrothal for this … this liberal group of people.

"Oh, gods, no." John made a face, even as Archie burst into laughter. "Eugh, Chess is like my little sister. I love her to pieces, but she drives me insane, her and her precious experiments and incomprehensible inventions and never-ending research."

Aldon scowled a little deeper. Those inventions – he hadn't even had a chance to ask her about her ACD yet, even though he had signed the non-disclosure forms for her, and she had seemed so skittish he hadn't wanted to ask her so soon after handing them off to her. He didn't know much about the ACD yet, but it was obviously remarkable, and not deserving of such a dismissive attitude. Still, he ignored it for the moment – there was a more important point of note. "So, she is not..."

"If you're asking me if she's single, I'm telling you that I will wreck you if you put one finger on her," John replied immediately, the smirk dropping off his face. His voice was mild, compared to what he said, but he was being perfectly honest. "I already have enough wannabe suitors to deal with at AIM."

"Isn't it mostly Faleron, though?" Archie raised an eyebrow. "And she's only six months younger than you – she's older than me! She can date whoever she wants, John."

John scowled at him, crossing his arms over his chest. "Faleron is only first in line, and the only reason I haven't managed to deal with him yet is that he beats me in the duelling arena once in a blue moon. You're starting to sound like Hermione."

Archie rolled his eyes, and Aldon let it go. He had just connected it with his present circumstances anyway – he wasn't Aldon Étienne Rosier, wealthy scion of House Rosier anymore. He was just Aldon Blake, and he was pretty sure that, other than the bag of savings he had in his trunk, which he had carried in his pocket to the first day of trial and had to be around here somewhere, he was penniless. He wasn't in any position to think about anything like courting someone, even without an annoying Natural Legilimens that saw himself as the person in question's bodyguard.

"Anyway, let's go, let's go!" Archie bounced a little on the bed beside him. "Get up, we have to give you a makeover. Wear these!" He shoved a set of clothes at him, which he had picked up off a chair near his bed – a t-shirt, something that Aldon recognized as jeans. He made a face.

"No, thank you," he said, trying to hand them back, but Archie held his hands up and wouldn't take them. "I have my own clothing, and I do not need a … makeover. Whatever that may be."

"No, you definitely need new clothes." Archie shook his head, undeterred. "And a haircut, it'll make you feel better, and if you don't, how can you come to my birthday party?"

"Why would I need new clothes?" Aldon frowned. There was something else going on here, and he didn't think he liked it. He looked down at the t-shirt and jeans – it was a plain black shirt, where the collar formed a V, and the jeans were darker than the ones he had seen in the few shops in Diagon Alley that sold Muggle clothes. Not that he had ever gone into them. "And why would I even go to your birthday party?"

Archie placed one hand on his chest, leaning back, his face an abject mix of shock and sadness. "You wouldn't want to come to my birthday party?"

His voice pitched upwards, thick with tears, and he sniffled dramatically. To Aldon's horror, there were even tears forming at the corners of his eyes. Even if Aldon knew it was faked, his gift and his common sense in complete accord, he still found himself caving, just a little. It was the same look that Harriett had used, now and then in her first few years at school, to get what she wanted, morphed onto another face.

"I'm not sure why I should," Aldon retorted, pushing the boy gently off his bed with a soft thud. "And even if I did, why would I need new clothes? Why couldn't I just wear my robes?"

"First, I think all your robes need to be washed, or mended – Justice was not particularly kind to them," John started, but Archie interrupted, all hint of his faked tears gone.

"And my birthday party is in No-Maj London." Archie beamed, picking himself off the ground easily. "All you can eat dim sum and sushi at a place Chess found in Chinatown! Come on, we need to get you No-Maj clothes you actually like, and your hair is hopelessly out of style in the No-Maj world. You have to blend in!"

Aldon blinked at him, a blunt, angry refusal on his lips, and then he paused.

He wasn't Aldon Rosier anymore. He was Aldon Blake. It didn't matter what he goddamn well did, it didn't matter if he went out to the Muggle world. He had, admittedly, not given much thought to it before – when he was at Hogwarts, or before, it simply hadn't occurred to him. What else was there, but the Wizarding world? Nothing they had could possibly measure up to magic, he would have thought. Nothing worth knowing, nothing worth seeing. Nothing he had to trouble himself over, nothing worth his time or attention, nothing he couldn't get, better, in the Wizarding world. Even knowing he was a halfblood, he had given no thought whatsoever to the Muggle world.

But moments stuck out, in the last two months, and he couldn't help but be a little curious. Little things, here and there – forget the clothes, all the clothes that Archie or John or Hermione wore were ugly as sin, but the music pouring out of Archie's book, or the songs he sang. Not Grease, which he still thought was horrendously inappropriate, but some of the snatches of the other things he had heard were interesting. The dance, that he had walked into Francesca doing in the backyard – he hadn't seen magic done in that way, he hadn't recognized the box that she had playing the music, or the music itself. It hadn't been his taste, the music, but she had taken it and made something beautiful out of it, all grace and elegance in the air. The myriad things that Archie and his friends talked about: telephones, which let them talk to people across the ocean, without need for a blood-magic based communication orb. Televisions, streaming the Muggle news and more, audio and visual, into people's home every night. The Internet which let Francesca send work to her father in California.

Archie was a dreamer. He always talked about the fantastical nature of it all, where it was all going next – robots and spaceships and the tales of tomorrow. Archie loved the science fiction. Aldon was less interested in the stories Muggles told about the future, and more interested in what they had now, what they could do now. He knew next to nothing about Muggle science and technology, but he knew enough to know that it was not nothing. Muggles had been to the moon, and wizards hadn't. Francesca had even said, more than a month ago, that the ACD took a lot of No-Maj science to understand.

No one would judge him if he just… went and took a look at the Muggle world. He wasn't Aldon Rosier, noble heir anymore. He might be poor, he might have no political power, he might have been disowned, but he had a sense of freedom, of opportunity that was never there before. He was Aldon Blake, and he could be whoever he damn well wanted to be.

A change of style, of clothes, that didn't seem all that bad. It would be good, marking a change, marking himself as Aldon Blake and not Aldon Rosier. It would show he wasn't ashamed of who he was – fine, the money and power that came with being Aldon Rosier was nice, but Aldon was smart. He had a job lined up, in the field he was interested in. Christie supported him, and he even had a sense that his family, whatever they might be saying publicly, had not abandoned him. He still had a half-dozen good things, and this day would have come eventually. Aldon was a halfblood bastard – that was true. But he was also so much more than that.

He had nothing to be ashamed of, and a new look would go a long way to showing it. Wearing his old clothes, keeping his old hairstyle, all of that would be like telling the world that he couldn't let go of his past. It would be like pretending nothing had changed, acting as though he was still publicly the Rosier Heir, when everyone and their mother knew that that was not the case.

Fuck that. He didn't know what the Muggle world entailed, or what Archie had in mind, but he refused to cling to a noble title and position he didn't have anymore. That was pathetic, screaming of weakness, and Aldon was not weak.

He was Aldon fucking Blake, and he wasn't fucking ashamed of himself.

"Ugh, fine," he snapped, throwing his covers off and waving the two of them out of his room. "But you're paying for the wardrobe and hair."

It turned out that Christie Blake lived in Muggle London anyway – a penthouse, John called it, in what Archie said was a wealthy area of town called Marylebone. The two of them had taken the train, the Underground, to him, after having gotten directions from Christie. It had apparently taken some days for them to find him, because Christie had been unsure whether she should be replying to Lord Black's owls. In the end, Lord Black had tracked her, in Animagus form, from one of her meetings at the Rosier Investment Trust where she had been finalizing documents, then terrified her by reappearing closer to her penthouse for a "friendly chat".

"Apparently, your mum tried to hex him, but Dad's still got his Auror instincts." Archie chuckled, leading him down quaint, beautiful streets that, in all honesty, didn't seem all that different from Diagon Alley. "Dad apologized a lot, explained things, and she told us where we could find you. You're not connected to Floo, by the way – no fireplace. A lot of foreign-trained Muggleborns and halfbloods don't, and there's an extra layer of security to keeping your house in the Muggle world. Most pureblood supremacists just don't know how to navigate the No-Maj world to find them, plus it means you get to have telephones and televisions and things! Can you imagine – having something to play movies inside your house? I would watch so many movies if I could."

"Your workplace is going to be in No-Maj London, too," John added, off-hand. "Christie asked us to outfit you for that too – she's worried that they're going to get blowback in the Wizarding world or be attacked by extremists, so even if they have a post-box for owls in Diagon Alley, your offices themselves are in the City. Twenty-fourth floor, very fancy. You're going to have an amazing view of the Thames."

That made an odd sort of sense, Aldon thought, looking around curiously. So far, the Muggle world really didn't seem that different from the Wizarding one. Fine, there were no flashing illusions, fantastic things, but there were other things that were just as new. There were lights on the roads, green, yellow, and red, where Archie and John stopped automatically to let the large, animal-like machines pass by them. Cars, Aldon thought – those had to be cars. He hadn't seen one close up, before. The cars stopped on the red light, and Aldon noticed another sign turn white, the shape of a man appearing, and people started crossing the road. Ah – red for the vehicles to stop, to allow pedestrians to cross, and the green signal meant they could go. Yellow must be some sort of transition point between the two.

His clothes were weird, though they seemed to fit in very well, even a little more casual than most of the passersby. He liked the t-shirt, sort of – if only it covered more of his skin, he would be quite happy with it. Many of the people around him had covering sweaters, or jackets or things, and he did wish he had something equally light and airy to cover his arms. He didn't like the jeans at all, but they seemed to be extremely common, so he wasn't sure how he would get around them, if this was how he was to dress to blend in. He would have to look into it farther, because the jeans were really very stiff and uncomfortable. Not a single person on the street was dressed in robes, or anything like robes, unfortunately.

At least he could wear his own boots. John and Archie had deemed as being inappropriate for the season, but not out of place, which he hoped meant he could keep wearing them. But very few people on the streets around him were wearing boots, mainly wearing the things like Archie called trainers and John called running shoes. He thought those were ugly, too, but would there be any way of avoiding them, if he needed to live in the Muggle world? He desperately hoped so.

"You actually live pretty close to Oxford Street, which is one of the better shopping areas in London," Archie remarked, looking around. "We'll show you the Underground later – John says we're close enough to walk everywhere today, but I get lost less on the Underground. I don't really have much of a sense of direction."

"A lot of mages don't – too used to Apparating and Flooing anywhere they want to go." John shook his head. "Less common in America, because we're too big for Apparating to be reasonable for a lot of places, and we don't have a centralized Floo Regulatory Authority to connect different areas. The person you're Flooing to has to be on the same network as you, and there are about three networks in New York City alone, it's awful."

Aldon didn't reply, too busy observing the people around them and following. How was he going to get home? That wasn't a thought that had occurred to him before. They had better guide him home, or he would have to find a quiet place to cast a Point Me spell to get him there.

They stopped at a hairstylist first, to lop off Aldon's long hair. It had been, in typical Wizarding male fashion, thick and shoulder-length. It was a little wavy, and Aldon had always taken at least a half-hour of time every morning to fix it, pushing it back from his face in the artless, somewhat tousled look he had always favoured.

In court, Justice had made fun of him for it, adding a crown to her appearance. As if it wasn't humiliating enough putting him in a dress, she had somehow considered that, for this trial, she needed the crown. That was just her amusing herself, he was fairly certain – it was decidedly not a typical look of the capricious Incarnation. He had flashes of three thousand years of history, here and there, and the crown showed up only rarely. It was the dress, the golden armbands, the sword and scales that came up, over and over again. And the blindfold, but Aldon was absurdly grateful that she not chosen that particular signifier for him.

Now, it was short – shorter than anything he could ever remember sporting before. He had taken a glance through one of the glossy magazines on the table, ignoring Archie while he chattered endlessly about his plans for Aldon's new look, and then he had picked one and gone with it.

It wasn't the near shaven look, the buzz-cut that John sported, or the short, curly locks that Archie had. It wasn't the mohawk that Archie insisted would be awesome, or the frankly boring style that John had pointed out, almost a shorter version of what he already had. No, if Aldon was going for a visual change, he was going for a major change – it had to be a look where anyone who saw him would be struck, speechless, for a few minutes.

He liked the look of one of the models – his hair was short on both the sides and the back, almost shaven, but the top was left longer, fixed to part on one side, a wave to the other. A bit of excess would fall over his forehead, a little comma, and that would be good and different. A different perspective showed that he could also push it back, away from his face, and it would hold, a little puffed from the top of his head. He liked it.

"That one," he said to the Muggle woman who seated him in her chair, throwing a white, strangely glossy cloth over him like a blanket.

She raised an eyebrow, looking between the picture and him. Her hair was blonde, but turned to brown close to her head, an odd shadow. "Big change."

"I got myself disowned," Aldon replied, waving a hand dismissively. "It's warranted, believe me."

"Er," the woman said, a little uncertain. "I'm sorry?"

"Don't be." Aldon smirked a little. "As I said – it's warranted."

"And of course, he has to pick the douchiest hairstyle in the whole bloody catalogue," John muttered behind him. "Bastard."

"That I am, John."

His head felt about five pounds lighter without his hair, and he had to fight not to fidget with it when it was done. There was barely enough left for him to fidget with, really, and it left his face so much more open. It was enough that the hairdresser had looked between him and Archie for a second, frowning.

"Cousins," Archie explained cheerfully. "I'm from the progressive half. It's okay to be gay, on my side of the family."

"Oh," the woman said, a sympathetic look crossing her face, as she rang them out. "I see. Well, I hope it gets better!"

"Thanks," Archie replied with a grin, shepherding John and Aldon out the door.

"What was that about?" Aldon couldn't help but ask, a little way down the street, eyebrow raised. "For the record, I'm not gay. I don't have a preference – and I'm aware most witches and wizards say that, but really. I am equally attracted to both men and women."

"Yeah, I know." Archie shrugged, then grinned a little. "But she was a little too curious, so I gave her a cute story that she'll match up with her preconceptions, and it'll be fine! Statute of Secrecy, and all that. No-Majs aren't as forward as we are about sexual orientation, though that's changing."

"Did you see Philadelphia?" John asked, redirecting them to turn down another street. "My sister took Chess and I to see it after I came out to my family, Christmas in our third year. I fucking bawled, and then because I was bawling, Chess was bawling, so we're holding each other and bawling and you know what? Tina has the fucking nerve to give us a lecture on safe sex. That was a heavy movie, but you'd like it – it's about AIDS, and Tom Hanks won the Academy Award for Best Actor that year for it."

Archie winced. "No, I didn't catch it – third year, you said? I watched a lot of movies at the drive-in that year, but not that one. Then I usually catch up on more movies over the summer, but I was in the Darien Gap that summer…"

Aldon tuned the two of them out, going back to looking around. The world looked different, felt different to him. The light breeze, ruffling his hair, wasn't throwing it out of shape – the gel the Muggle woman had run through it near the end seemed to be holding, not that he had enough hair left for the wind to do much to disturb it anymore. The sun was out, for once, and while the air felt a little damp, it wasn't bad.

The streets were filled with Muggles, out and about for the day. Aldon caught snatches of conversation here and there, and it was all so peaceful, so banal: talk about the weather, arguments about where to eat for lunch, chatter about work, about family. He spotted families out for the day, groups of people his age standing and talking, people ducking and dodging the crowds as they made a beeline for wherever they were going.

It really was so much like Diagon Alley, but it wasn't, at the same time. People here didn't have magic, and he didn't see any sign of magic on them, around them, but there were other things he didn't recognize. Everyday technology – there were red telephone booths, here and there, there were televisions playing in the windows of some shops, there were the never-ending streams of cars, meeting at angles and veering off in honking, screeching, semi-organized chaos. John led them past a few more streets, until they were on a huge thoroughfare, lined with shops on both sides.

"Oxford Street." Archie smiled, not as brightly as he did in Aldon's room, a softer, more genuine one. "Come on – let's get you some clothes."

The first shop was completely hopeless. They were clothes that Archie apparently liked, a lot of what Archie called basics: jeans, t-shirts, sweatshirts, knit cardigans, all in simple colours and patterns. Jeans, Aldon might have no choice but to capitulate at some point, but he was not prepared for that yet – surely there had to be Muggles that didn't like the feel of the thick fabric? And Aldon he would never be caught dead in a sweatshirt. Even the name sounded unattractive – what were they for, sweating? And they were oversize, they didn't fit or flatter him at all. T-shirts, especially the long-sleeved ones, were slightly better, but they were just so – so informal. They looked even less formal than his sleeping clothes, and that said something. Out of desperation, he picked up two knit cardigans, one navy blue and the other black, not that he knew what he would wear them with yet. They were close enough to what he was comfortable with that he thought he could adjust to them, with time. If there was nothing else he could wear in this new world, knit cardigans it would have to be.

The next shop was even worse. There were even more t-shirts there, a lot of cargo pants and cargo shorts that John liked, and clothes made of an odd, slippery sort of fabric that he had never felt before. There was something else there that Archie identified for him as fleece, the mysterious fabric that he had testified about in his trial, and while he thought it felt very nice, Archie shook his head when he picked up a fleece sweater.

"No Warming Charm," he said, voice lowered and with a quick look around later. "Wizarding America does this better – you want the integrated Warming Charm. Like anything else, here?"

Aldon shook his head, putting the sweater down. He hadn't even liked it, really, he had just been curious about another aspect of Muggle technology. The fabric had felt very warm, quite soft, and it had a sort of springiness to it that he was unfamiliar with. He could pull it in one direction, and it would stretch, but less so in the other direction, but it was subtle, and the texture was plush, instead of bulky, like nothing he had ever felt before. He had no idea how they made something so warm and yet so light, and he would have only wanted it to throw spells at so he could figure it out.

This shop had a lot of other gear, for outdoor activity – the awful shoes called trainers, light shirts that John said were made for sweating in (Aldon had robes for that, and they were bad enough), rucksacks and water bottles and hats that looked like nothing Aldon had ever seen before, with a wide brim in the front and a buttoned closure, made out of a hard material, in the back. This was a store made for those who enjoyed athletic activity, going outside, and that was not Aldon.

The third store and fourth stores seemed to be no better. It was more t-shirts, more jeans, more sweatshirts. John and Archie could apparently pick out the differences in styles, but Aldon was at a total loss. So what if one place had more holes in their jeans, and why did one want holes in their jeans anyway? What did the picture on one of the other shirts specify, and why was that important? Why did it matter that the shirts in one of the stores were heavily patterned and colourful, and not in the other? The two of them then exchanged looks, and took him to a shop where everything was in black, where there was a big display of chains and little, tiny spikes, lip rings and nose rings and he didn't even want to know where else Muggles had deemed it appropriate to pierce. He was fairly certain that one of the saleswomen was wearing a dog collar.

"It's very, uh, avant-garde," Archie invented, when Aldon turned to glare at him.

Unbelievably, that was where Francesca caught up with them, two bags of her own shopping on one arm. Aldon stopped, struck – she always looked so well put together. She had put her hair up in deference to the heat, in a long ponytail that still fell halfway down her back. A pale blue dress fell just past her knees, held in place by a careless bow provocatively tied at her neck. Her shoes were silver, with high heels, open-toed, and Aldon could see that her toenails were painted a light, delicate pink. He swallowed, a little embarrassed by simply having looked.

Aldon Blake, he reminded himself sharply. Not Rosier. Even if he had a thousand freedoms he had never had before, he didn't have anything to offer to this sparkling gem of a girl. No wealth to care for her with, no manor to put her in. No power to protect her in need. He looked away, looking at the display of piercings beside him instead. Ugh, there was something there for someone's tongue? He shuddered.

Francesca took one look at him, considering, then glanced at John, a question in her dark eyes.

John shrugged. "He doesn't like anything! We've taken him to The Gap, Columbia Sportswear, Vans, and H&M already."

She looked over at Archie, who also shrugged, a little helplessly. She sighed. "And you thought that Hot Topic would be the, um, logical next stop?"

"It was worth a try?" Archie's voice was a little strangled, filled with smothered mirth.

Francesca shook her head and took a few, tiny, mincing steps towards Aldon. "Um, I'm sorry. Do you mind?"

"Mind what?"

But she took a few more steps closer to him, looking up to study his face, then a few steps back to run her eyes down the rest of his body. He swallowed again, feeling like nothing so much as an insect under her focused gaze. She was so beautiful. She was so beautiful, and apparently not attached to anyone, and he was absolutely no one at all.

She tilted her head one way, then the other, then she nodded, once, twice. "Marks and Spencer," she said, taking a few steps back and turning away from him, heading for the doors to the awful, black shop. "I think he wants something more formal than either of you wear."

She was right. From the moment they walked into the huge department store, ignoring the furniture, housewares and casual clothes for the more formal selection in the back, he immediately felt more comfortable. This was more like what he was used to – not robes, but things that were neat, clean lines pressed into defined structures, tailored closely to his body. The fabrics felt right, not the odd, new, glossy fabrics that so many Muggle clothes used, but they were the linen, wool, and cotton blends that he was used to feeling. Even some of the styling looked the same – buttoned up, collared and long-sleeved shirts, silk ties, even waistcoats.

He was drawn to the waistcoats. Unlike wizarding waistcoats, most of them were sleeveless, made to be worn over a light shirt, but the tie at the back tightened to emphasize his slim waist, his willowy form. He stood in front of the long, upright mirror, in black linen trousers, polished black shoes, a white shirt textured ever so slightly with little white, sewn, dots, and a grey waistcoat, while Francesca hesitantly fiddled with one of his cuffs. He didn't put on a tie, leaving the top button of his shirt undone instead.

"They're called French cuffs," she said, showing him the way that the cloth folded over, the lack of buttons to hold the shape together. She slipped in a little silver pin, showing him how the back of the pin twisted and folded out, holding the cuff in place. "You'll need cufflinks, like this."

"I see," Aldon murmured, lifting his arm up to examine it, the spot where she had brushed against his skin unusually warm. He was not avoiding looking at her, and he was blatantly ignoring the sweet, strawberry scent coming off her hair. The cuffs were interesting. He liked them.

She nodded, having apparently fixed his other cuff to her satisfaction, and stepped away to look him over. "Huh."

"What is it?"

"Nothing." She shook her head, but Aldon's core rang with a half-lie, and he raised an eyebrow. She flushed slightly. "Just, um. You clean up nicely, I think."

"Oh." It rang as truth, and he ignored the tight, swelling balloon in his middle, looking instead at his reflection in the mirror. He looked … different. There was enough of him there, in the mirror, that he didn't feel like he was pretending to be someone else. He didn't feel awkward, out of place, as he did in Archie's t-shirt and jeans. These clothes felt so much more comfortable, so much more like him. This was him – this was Aldon Blake. Enough of Aldon Rosier was still there, but there was something else too, a sharp grace, a cold, hard elegance, that he had never achieved in his robes. He liked it. He liked this look.

"But monster, he doesn't look modern," John complained behind him, and Aldon knew that he was purposely leaving out the word No-Maj or Muggle or anything else suspicious. "He looks like he stepped out of the 1920s. It's 1995, can't we put him in real clothes? Like anyone else would wear?"

"People do wear these, John," he heard Francesca retort, behind him. "That's why they sell them? He needs clothes for work anyway – if he's working in the City, he'll fit in better in this than in anything you were thinking."

Archie laughed, delighted. "And just look at the expression on his face – it works. Who cares if it's not what anyone else would choose to wear casually? He can be weird and wear formalwear all the time if he wants."

Aldon left the shop with four pairs of Muggle trousers, six new shirts, five new waistcoats, two pairs of Muggle dress shoes, and a set of delicate silver cufflinks. Some of his Wizarding clothes, too, matched with his new style if he just left off the robes, so he still had a decent wardrobe. John and Chess both winced a little at the price tag as Archie helped him at the desk, but Archie only grinned, laughed, and paid for everything. Aldon had no idea how the pounds translated into Galleons, and he frowned a little, looking at the green numbers flashing up on the strange cash box. He had never seen the like, but they were everywhere in the Muggle world. The person tapped the numbers in, and the machine added it all up automatically and even printed a little white slip at the end, showing the arithmetic for them.

"Hey, Al," Archie nudged him on the shoulder as he watched. "Don't worry about it, okay? Dad and I, we got it."

That wasn't really what he was thinking, but he accepted it anyway, with only a slightly embarrassed look towards Francesca. As far as Aldon was concerned, having invoked Justice and being possessed for some three weeks for him, a new wardrobe was only just recompense. But there was also in it an implicit admission that he probably couldn't have afforded this for himself, and that was a hard reality for him to swallow.

They had enough time for Aldon to return to Christie's penthouse, for John and Archie to show him patiently how to take the Muggle Underground. Archie seemed to be fascinated with it, but it was only a sleeker, hotter, more crowded, and smellier and worse appointed Hogwarts Express. There weren't enough seats for everyone, and the one seat they found went to Francesca, who dropped into it with a small sigh as John glared at anyone who tried to interfere. The only good thing about the ride was that it was thankfully, blissfully short. Archie let him in, pulling out a key from his back pocket.

"Aldon." Christie was at home, and she hesitated a little, looking him over. She didn't comment on his new hairstyle, or his clothes, and he wasn't sure what to say to her in reply.

He knew her, but he didn't really know her. He had worked under her for a summer, he knew, and that had been fine – but he had been so far her subordinate, the lowest of all her employees, and he had only rarely talked to her. First, he had guessed who she had to be, then he had known who she had to be, but he had never mentioned it, just as she hadn't.

Then the trial, and he remembered their conversation. He remembered every stupid, idiotic thing he had said in that conversation. He remembered her telling him her life story, how he had come to be, and he remembered barely paying attention to it. He remembered swiping a bowl of rice with butter chicken out from under her.

He remembered asking her about sex. With his father.

He cleared his throat, looking away in embarrassment.

"Hi, Christie!" Archie interrupted, holding up the key. "Thanks for letting us in this morning. We took him shopping, showed him the Underground."

"Thank you," she replied, waving a hand and refusing it. "It's, er, Aldon's key. I had it made for you, sweetheart, when … well, I don't know how much you remember?"

"All of it," Aldon said, his voice flat, as he accepted the key. "I was there, I was just… not able to respond."

They had only had a few more conversations, after the one they had the very first night, thankfully devoid of any truly humiliating moments. She had always been careful to take him home after court, but she had been busy setting up her new company, Blake & Associates, working out the details of the split from the Rosier Investment Trust, handling the media attention her new company had received. She would make sure something was on the table for him or that something was on its way, and then she would disappear to do more work, and he would sleep. He felt awkward – the last few weeks had happened, but he hadn't been himself, and this was his mother, and he had no idea how he was supposed to treat her.

And he had a job with her, too, at Blake & Associates. He supposed he should ask about that, about his start date and salary and everything. It was the ideal job he would have picked for himself, in a world of choices, so he was fine with that. It was just – it would be awkward. All his co-workers had known him as Aldon Rosier, and showing up now, as Aldon Blake, bastard son of the Director… well. He would deal with it when it came to it.

"I see." Christie smiled, a tremulous smile, turning back to Archie. "How much do I owe you and your father?"

"Don't worry about it. Least we could do, after the trial, right?" Archie shrugged. John and Francesca had elected to wait outside, in a little park nearby, since Aldon was only supposed to be dropping off his new clothing and changing before they went to Archie's birthday celebration. It was a nice day outside. Archie glanced over to Aldon. "Al, are you going to change, before we're late? New Muggle clothes, remember? Unless you've decided that you've seen the error of your ways, and you like the jeans and t-shirt after all?"

Aldon scowled, disappearing down the hallway to the second bedroom. His bedroom, he guessed, now. It wasn't like he had anywhere else to go.

"No, no, I couldn't possibly," he heard Christie protesting behind him. "Not just today, but yesterday, too, you waited and checked in on him all day, and I couldn't have taken him to St. Mungo's…"

Aldon shut the door firmly behind him, leaning against it with a sigh. It was a new world, and as much as it was freeing, as much as it was interesting, it was also overwhelming. He would have to find a way to interact with his mother later, he knew, but between an evening with Christie and an evening with Archie at his mysterious Muggle birthday celebration, he would put off the awkwardness of the former to another time. At least, as exhausting as he and his friends were, Archie was easy, always ready with a smile or a joke, ready to smooth things over.

He had his regrets, soon after arriving at the Muggle restaurant that Archie had chosen. He had said it was all you can eat dim sum and sushi earlier, and Aldon had largely ignored it, chalking it up to Archie being overly enthusiastic about something or other. He didn't know what dim sum or sushi were, and all you can eat sounded somehow vulgar, ridiculous. Surely, he had thought, nowhere would actually give people all they could eat. Probably just a marketing gimmick, to show off their large portion sizes.

He was wrong. He didn't even know where to begin with how wrong he was. First, the all you can eat menu, spreading over two newspaper-sized pages, had to have at least a hundred options on it. Archie had had no idea what to order, and with a table of eight (including the Lord Black, Archie's Uncle Remus, and Derrick, one of his older friends from AIM that Aldon had never formally met), had simply asked Francesca to order for everyone. And her order!

"I think we'll take, um, two orders of har gow, two orders of siu mai, three orders of the shrimp chang fen, four sticky rice, three orders of the crystal shrimp and vegetable dumplings, three orders of the pan-fried pork and pickled cabbage dumplings, eight deep-fried scallops, a basket of deep fried squid tentacles, with hot sauce please, an order of chicken karaage, an order of the beef short-ribs, and," she took a deep breath, flipping the menu over, "thirty-two salmon sushi, twenty-four salmon sashimi, twenty-four tuna sashimi, twenty-four salmon tataki, twenty-four tuna tataki, thirty-two beef tataki, four mackerel sushi, four ebi sushi, two inari sushi, a spicy salmon maki roll, and spicy tuna maki roll. And we'll keep one of the menus, thank you."

The waitress nodded, taking down everything she said quickly in some sort of code, then she disappeared.

He stared at the petite girl, wide-eyed in shock, while she turned to speak to John, who was complaining (rather properly, Aldon thought), about how she had definitely ordered too much food. She only shrugged, shooting John a look, and he groaned.

"I'm not eating all the leftovers again this time, I swear," he groused, reaching for his glass of water. "Not again, not after last time."

"We have eight people, it's not that much." Francesca sniffed a little. "And the beef tataki is mostly for me, anyway."

That was about when Aldon realized that none of them had any utensils. Instead of any proper utensils, they each had two thin, wooden sticks, which everyone at the table except for him seemed to treat as completely normal. Archie and John were already pulling theirs out of the paper packaging, while Francesca was using the little paper cover to fold some sort of stand on which to prop her own set of wooden sticks. He stared at the way the others were holding the chopsticks in their hands – one on top of the other, in a sort of pointed V. This is what they would eat with?

"Not good with chopsticks? I'm sure we could get you a fork, if you prefer," Derrick Holden, the young man sitting beside him, said, catching a glimpse of his confusion. Derrick was his age, one of the AIM Triwizard team strategists, Archie had mentioned. He studied how Derrick held his chopsticks, watching as Derrick lifted the top stick separately from the bottom, showing how he could pick things up.

No one else had a fork. He looked down, trying to arrange the stupid sticks in his hands. "I'll be fine."

"Well, if you change your mind," Derrick said agreeably, turning back to his conversation with Hermione.

Then the food started arriving, and that was when Aldon realized that half the food that Francesca had ordered was raw. There were platters of raw fish – it seemed like most of what Francesca had ordered were variations on raw fish, some of it just pieces and others thin slices covering little shaped ovals of rice. There was a green paste, called wasabi, to be put on them, and then apparently people dipped it in tiny dishes of soy sauce and just … ate them?

He stuck to the obviously-cooked foods, for awhile, struggling with the chopsticks – there were dumplings of several varieties, none of which he had ever eaten before, in his admittedly limited experience. They were all good, if a little oily, and the rice rolls that came with those plates were delicious, and the rice was savoury, wrapped in a giant leaf and with a pocket of pork and vegetables on the inside. The fried chicken and the beef short-ribs, too, those were fine, but the squid tentacles looked strange, almost still alive, reaching out of the basket. He avoided those, as well.

"Aren't you going to have any sushi?" John frowned at him, his own plate stacked with several pieces of raw fish. "It's pretty good, for an all you can eat place. Usually the quality at these places is shit, but this one is on the better end."

"I – I don't think so," Aldon tried, but John just snorted, leaning over to grab the platter of raw fish and offering it to him pointedly.

"Just because you haven't tried it doesn't mean it's bad, and besides – if you don't help us eat it all, we'll get charged extra, and Chess will be upset because she'll think we didn't like the food she ordered." He kept his voice quiet, but there was an iron tone under it. "And if you don't help us finish it, I'll have to eat it all, and then when I inevitably throw up, I will go out of my way to do it on you."

It was only a half-lie. Aldon couldn't figure out which part was the lie – the part where he would have to eat it all, the part where he would throw up, or the part where he would throw up on Aldon. He didn't want to chance it – even if there were cleaning spells, there would also be the disgusting feeling of someone having vomited on him, crawling on his skin, so he reached out, hesitant, and picked a couple of the bright orange salmon sushi off the platter.

"That's the spirit," John said, setting the platter in easy reach of Aldon. "Keep eating – until you can't eat anymore, that's the point of these places."

It was pretty good at the time, Aldon thought to himself, leaning against one wall of the train in the Underground, on the way home. He would need to work out a safe Apparition point later, but for the moment, the train it would have to be. Derrick, who turned out to be quite friendly, had volunteered to go with him, make sure he got there, since he could just Apparate home afterwards, though Aldon wasn't sure he needed it. In any case, Derrick was just slumped in a seat in a corner, looking about as poorly as Aldon felt.

There was such a thing as eating too much – as soon as they had finished the first round, Aldon would have been prepared to move on, but Archie had insisted on seconds. Francesca had ordered less,the second time, saying that whatever she ordered people had to eat, which meant that she only ordered about two dozen pieces of sushi, this time a mix of different rolls, and a giant basket of tempura, and Aldon had had, along with most of the table, to choke down a few pieces of both. Then the four pieces of mackerel sushi arrived, late, they had all looked at each other, and despite much protest, Aldon had been tricked into taking one. It had been too strong, too sour, and he had immediately wanted to throw up the minute it was in his mouth, but instead he swallowed it as fast as he could and reached for the water to clean the taste out of his mouth. Then there had been a dessert round, where Archie had said that since it was all you can eat, he wanted everyone to try one of every kind of dessert.

The good part about the desserts, aside from the fact that they were given tiny spoons to use instead of having to struggle along with their chopsticks, was that they were tiny, only a couple bites each. There were a lot of them – a mango pudding, a coconut pudding, green tea ice cream, black sesame ice cream, a miniature chocolate mousse that tasted nothing like chocolate mousse, and a poor crème brule without the caramelized top. But on top of everything else, it was… a little much. Too much.

But it had still been good. It wasn't that the food was good, because while Archie had loved it, everyone else had agreed that the food itself wasn't that good. It was oily, the wasabi wasn't real wasabi, the soy sauce was weak. The rice wasn't the perfect almost-sweet and almost-sour that would set it off perfectly with the fish, and the desserts had been too one-note, overwhelmingly sweet. It had been good because of the people he had been with, he thought – it wasn't like being at Hogwarts, with just Ed by his side, his best friend that he kept so many secrets from, and it wasn't like anywhere else, either. It had been loud, and he hadn't spoken much, but he had still felt like he was part of something. They let him just sit there, soaking it in, and he hadn't felt too out of place. He could participate or not, as he wanted, or he could just stare at the never-ending array of food arriving at the table. He could watch Francesca, on the other side of John, as she giggled, as she smiled, as she delicately used her chopsticks to eat more food than he had ever thought someone her size could eat, occasionally flipping her long hair back, over her shoulder and out of her face. He could laugh along at whatever new, over-the-top reaction Archie was having to some other, new, food that he had never tried before. It had been good, and even if the food wasn't good, Aldon thought it wouldn't be too hard to convince him to go back.

He hoped – or, maybe he wished – that the rest of the summer would go so easy.

XXX

It had been a week since John had left for Germany, and Francesca was, despite herself, a little lonely. It wasn't that Sirius and Archie weren't the perfect hosts; to the contrary, they both seemed to go out of their way to make her feel comfortable, though Sirius was almost as bad a mother hen as John. It wasn't that Archie and Hermione were too lost in each other and ignoring her or anything; no, they both invited her out with them every day, but Francesca had no interest in being a third wheel to their dates. It wasn't even that John hadn't, apparently, asked his cousin Rolf to check in on her every few days, offering to take her out.

Francesca had made the mistake of agreeing, five days ago, and Rolf had decided that the very best place to take her was a magical menagerie. One where the creatures roamed free, and Nifflers bit and grabbed at her jewellery with sharp claws and teeth, and she had bolted when Rolf tried to bring her baby Nifflers.

"They're just playing!" he had called after her, as if that made it better.

Since then, despite multiple efforts from her cousin-by-John, she had been avoiding him. She had work to do anyway – she had given up, for the moment, on active experimentation, so it was back to the books to try to figure out more on the nature of magic. But both the Black and Potter Libraries seemed to be light on magical theory, and what was there was shockingly inaccurate. She didn't recognize half the texts she found, and some of the information blatantly contradicted her first three years of magical theory classes at AIM, so she suspected that they were being censored. She had tossed the magical theory books she had found, four books in, and was now approaching it from a wandlore angle instead. Not that she had any idea whether this would be helpful at all for her problems.

Magical frequencies, and resonance. The relationship between magical frequencies and the electromagnetic spectrum. There was nothing – there seemed to be absolutely nothing. Even the wandlore books were so entranced with the mystic magic of it all, unwilling to look at things more analytically. Magic worked, because it was magic! Wasn't it just so magical?!

Please. Magic still followed rules. Francesca would work out those rules, or enough of them for her ACD to revolutionize spellcasting as they knew it.

She heard the clearing of a voice at the entrance to the library and sighed. Rolf, again – whatever John had made him promise, he was trying to keep to it. Or show her creatures. She didn't know. Creatures were scary, they had teeth and claws, and they got their fur and slobber all over her and her clothes. "Just because you promised John doesn't mean you—oh."

It wasn't Rolf.

Aldon Blake, formerly Rosier, smiled very slightly, shifting on his feet in the doorway. He looked very different in proper clothing – this was why robes were stupid. No one looked particularly good in robes, but someone with his slim frame would always be swallowed by them, no matter how well they were tailored. "Is this a good time, Francesca? You had promised, weeks ago, to walk me through your invention. We signed a non-disclosure agreement – on charmed parchment, too."

Francesca frowned. They had. She had hoped he had forgotten, between being possessed and losing his position in society and everything else that had happened.

"I start work in a week," he tried again. He sounded nice, but Francesca had long since learned not to trust people just because they sounded nice. "I was hoping you might be able to show me now, or if not now, perhaps tomorrow?"

Francesca studied him for a moment. She didn't really want to, in the sense that she never really wanted to deal with people she didn't really know, but on the other hand, it wasn't as if he had done anything to her, either. He had done something very nice for Archie, in being possessed, and she did like Archie. John had vouched for him too, even if Francesca was pretty sure that was only so she would have someone to talk to about her invention that wasn't him.

And they did have an agreement. Francesca did like to follow through on her agreements. And in this case, if she simply overwhelmed Aldon with the scientific principles he no doubt didn't understand, maybe he would leave her and her research alone.

"Fine," she said abruptly, closing her book with a snap, tucking it under her arm and heading for the door. He was in the way, but she brushed by him as though he weren't there. "Let's go. Public library. I'll ask for a study room."

"The public library?" Aldon's voice was surprised, as he quickly stepped out of her way, then fell into line a little behind her. "Er – why?"

"Because the technology within it is too delicate to work in magical environments without shielding." Francesca hopped up the stairs to her room, then she paused halfway, seeing that he was still behind her. "You, um, don't need to follow me to my room?"

He flushed, falling back immediately. "Of course. My apologies. I will wait here."

It was the work of a second to grab her experimental ACD, kept in its protective case, along with a sweater, and only a fifteen minute walk to the public library. They did have an empty study room, which Francesca promptly took, shutting the door behind her. Aldon cast a concerned look at the closed door, but she ignored it.

"The Assistive Casting Device," Francesca started briskly, taking her device out of its protective case and laying it out on the table. "It works on magical frequencies. Um, every mage has a unique magical frequency, which I believe falls on a spectrum – you may see some effect of this in wandlore, but I won't go into detail on that now. Suffice it to say, there is a relationship between magical frequency and electromagnetic frequency, which leads to resonance – if the right magical frequency and the right electromagnetic frequency meet, they amplify each other and it leads to other effects."

Based on Aldon's expression, Francesca was pretty sure she had lost him. He had followed into magical frequency, she thought, then gotten lost around electromagnetic frequency. She scowled and pointed upwards at the fluorescent lights above them. "Fluorescent lights. Not magic. Electricity."

"Ah, you're saying there's a connection, somewhere, between Muggle electricity and magic," Aldon said, and to his credit, he didn't say the words Muggle or electricity with any hint of scorn. Instead, his whole tone was one of interest, as he leaned forward to touch the delicate circuitry that made up the inside of an ACD. "I do not follow, exactly, but go on, please."

"The ACD is built on the concept of resonance. I discovered, the summer after my first year, that John's magical frequency reacts with the electromagnetic frequency of blue gallium-nitride lights." Francesca's magic, unfortunately, did not react with the same – that was a problem that she would need to deal with another time, if she didn't find another base mechanism for the ACD to work on eventually. "Then, um, I read this paper."

She reached into her bag, pulling out a photocopy and tossing it to Aldon, who skimmed it with some interest. It was a rather dated paper, now – a very experimental paper in Runes, which she had found largely by chance. Master Geoffrey Blayways had proposed breaking down the Western runes that already existed into smaller runes, proto-runes, that in theory could be standardized – an alphabet, or, better yet, a programming language, instead of the half-syllabary, half-character-based runes that currently existed. It was fascinating, but Francesca's runic studies were mainly in the Chinese style, so she had only a surface understanding.

"Master Blayways argues is that all runic spells can be broken down farther into proto-runic sequences, which improves casting efficiency and decreases necessary power by a considerable margin. His research is sound, but the reason his techniques haven't been adopted is twofold: first, he breaks it down too much – the proto-runic sequence, between fifteen and thirty symbols for every basic spell, is too much for any mage to hold in his or her head at any given time. Second, the proto-runes are inherently unstable – they don't channel magic very well, in the sense that magic destroys them."

She paused, looking up. Aldon was a wand-user, just like most people in the West. He wouldn't know the importance of those two facts. "That's, um, important for runic spell-casters – either the rune must be easily pictured and memorisable, or—"

"Or you need to be able to put them into reusable paper charms, which you can't do if the runes will be destroyed." Aldon nodded, flashing a quick smile at her. "I use runes too, Francesca. I'll read the paper later, at my leisure."

"Oh." She didn't really know what to say to that, so she looked back down at the ACD, and moved on. "Um, well, the paper showed Fortis as an example, so I merely lined up the gallium-nitride lights in the right pattern in the circuit, which is entirely No-Maj – it's just a basic electric circuit, powered off batteries."

She stopped again, tilting her head as she looked down at her device. Even on the inside, it was quite pretty, though she didn't think Aldon would see it.

"But John couldn't run his magic through the circuit – you said it's too delicate to work in magical environments without shielding." Aldon hesitated, looking up from the circuit. "Will you tell me what you mean by shielding? You… worked out a way for Muggle electronic devices to work in magical environments. That's … one of biggest problems in modern magical theory."

Francesca looked away. "Not really. They already knew how to do it – I just made it usable, that's all. The Obex potion, developed in the 1950s, is inert and opaque to all forms of magical contact, but since electronics don't take well to any liquids, potioneers moved on from it by the 1960s. All I did was put the Obex potion in a form that could actually be used for shielding electronic devices."

She pushed away the circuit, in favour of showing him the plastic box that she kept it in, keeping it from magical influence. "Aerogels are the answer – it's a No-Maj material, where all the liquid has been removed from a gel in a way that preserves the structure of the gel. The pockets left in the gel can then be filled with magical blocking potion, and the whole thing is bonded between two layers of polycarbonate."

Aldon leaned down, examining the box with his odd, hawk-like eyes, poking at it with long, thin fingers. There was a long pause, as she let him examine it all he wanted – there was nothing he could do with it, and as far as she was concerned, it was one of the least interesting parts of her device. She needed it to make the ACD work, but when compared to all her other problems with the ACD, it was really the least problematic. It would be nice, of course, to make a lighter version of it or another version that would integrate better with her boombox, but that wasn't necessary.

"Aerogels and polycarbonates can be made clear, so the lights in the runic sequence still shine through," Francesca said, finishing her explanation. "All John has to do is send his magic to the ACD – his magic resonates with the light shining out of ACD, which is the proto-runic sequence, and casts the spell. But since his magic never touches the lights themselves, it's reusable."

There was a long moment of silence, as Aldon finished examining the box and turned his attention back to the ACD itself. He picked it up, examining the LED sequence on top, the circuit board behind it, the batteries powering everything, running his fingers over every component.

"Fascinating," he murmured finally, looking up to examine her with those odd eyes. A little like gemstones, she realized suddenly. Like glowing amber, or crystallized wildflower honey. "Have you published?"

Francesca looked down, at the plastic table in the public library's study room, shifting a little uncomfortably. Why did it always come down to publishing? Why did people always ask her that?

She didn't want to publish – or, at least, not now. Publishing was a distraction – publishing meant that people would come and ask her too many questions, make her waste time defending her ideas. Publishing would take time away from her goal, from what she needed to do. Francesca didn't want to waste time and energy arguing with every academic under the sun. She didn't want to deal with people who would tell her that she was wrong, that she was just a child, that she was just a weird Wandless excuse for a mage, a paper-caster born on the wrong side of the world, and that she couldn't possibly know anything.

Francesca wanted to drop the ACD, a complete, perfect, functioning ACD on the world, and have it break everything. She wanted studies on how much better it was than wand-casting, how much faster it was to learn, how much more efficient it was with magic. She wanted ACD-users to take the Duelling circuits and the Triwizard Tournament by storm. She wanted people to forget a time when they didn't have ACDs on their arms, alongside a secondary casting method like a wand or a sword or paper spells. She wanted her device, hers, to revolutionize spellcasting as they knew it.

She didn't want to waste time publishing.

"No," she said finally, looking away. "It's not really – well, there's so much No-Maj science in it, no one would understand it. It's not worth publishing, anyway."

Aldon studied her for a long moment. "Even if were true, that's not why you haven't published. And you know that it isn't true. It's a remarkable invention, Francesca."

She blinked at him, then picked up the model ACD and put it away in its box, safe and sound, putting everything into her shoulder bag. Her hands moved quickly, and she saw that her nail polish was coming off. She needed to have her nails redone. Pink, as always. "It's just – I mean – I—" She cleared her throat, standing up. "There you have it. A walkthrough of my ACD. Please remember the non-disclosure agreement, Aldon."

She turned away, heading out. There was a nail salon not too far away, and she did bring her wallet with her, so she may as well get her nails done now. Maybe she would ask for some nail art, this time. Tiny cherry blossoms, or something like that.

"Francesca." Aldon's voice was soft, and despite herself, Francesca stopped. She wasn't rude. "I'm sorry if I've upset you, and it's fine if you don't want to publish. The sort of advances that could be made… I understand. Please, let me help you. Point me to some books on Muggle electricity and electromagnetic frequency for background reading. Let me show you how I can be of assistance."

She didn't look back at him. "You're in a library, Aldon," she said finally, then she walked out.

The next day, he found her in the formal sitting room at Grimmauld Place, whiling away some hours rereading Stardust of Yesterday, and put six magical theory texts in front of her.

"These are censored in Wizarding Britain," he said, as Francesca looked at the titles. "They're from my personal library. I had them imported from America."

Three of them were in the AIM library, so she had already read them, but they were excellent reference guides. The other three were new to her, more specialist texts on the theory of magic itself, particularly as it related to wizarding genetics and bloodlines. She hesitated for a moment, before reaching out to open one of them. Maybe they would have something about magical frequencies, at least as it related to inheritances? Or something about the nature of wild magic?

"I stayed in the library for hours, yesterday." Aldon's voice was quiet. "I started in the encyclopaedias by looking up resonance, then the electromagnetic spectrum, and then I worked through some of the mathematics. I'd like to read some more generalised texts though, now, for a broader context."

Francesca raised an eyebrow, looking up at him. His expression was open, earnest. He had worked through some of the mathematics? Granted, it wasn't like the basic wavelength and frequency formulae were difficult, but if he had gone through some of Maxwell's equations, then perhaps he was more intelligent, or at least more willing to learn, than Francesca had given him credit for. John and Archie practically ran when they heard the word math, and Francesca remembered well the year that she had practically had to drag them through the quadratic equation. And Francesca had long since stopped talking to Hermione about any of her work – Hermione spent all her time challenging every single one of Francesca's assumptions, instead of looking at the big picture and seeing that the ACD worked.

She would like someone to help her with the ACD. Someone intelligent, someone who didn't run at mathematics or No-Maj technology, someone who was willing to see her big picture, who didn't waste all her time questioning her base assumptions. Her dad had colleagues, and post-docs, and grad students, and even a few undergrads for collaboration, and they always solved problems together that he couldn't do alone. Aldon seemed to have strengths in both magical theory and runes. And he wasn't afraid of math, he hadn't insulted the No-Maj technology her ACD ran on. In fact, he had gone so far as to try reading more on his own when Francesca had abandoned him in a No-Maj public library.

He looked so pleading, staring at her with those glowing amber eyes.

She wavered a minute, looking at the stack of books, then she closed her romance novel and stood up. "Okay," she muttered. "Go get a pen and meet me in the kitchen."

He blinked his surprise at her, but before she could even consider what textbooks he would need, she needed to know where his math skills were. Did he already know calculus? If so, single variable or multivariable? Please, let him already know some calculus – not that she would be teaching him any if he didn't, but it would be an extra two textbooks that he would need to work through if he didn't.

It was the work of maybe twenty minutes before she had a basic test written out, on two sheets of paper ripped out of one of her notebooks. She stole questions from the stupid IB test prep books her parents had started sending her this year, as well as from the advanced homeschooling math curriculum she was following, then added a couple questions from her dad's last exam for his second-year undergrads. Her makeshift test covered algebra, the sort that even Archie and John could do, linear algebra, matrices, systems of equations, calculus (both single variable and multivariable) and just because she felt a little cruel, some ordinary and partial differential equations (she couldn't solve any of those, so she doubted he could, but she rather wanted to know how he would react).

He was waiting for her in the kitchen, as promised, fiddling a little with the pen he had no doubt found somewhere in Grimmauld Place. Archie had said once that mages in Britain still wrote with quills, which just seemed messy and inconvenient, and Francesca wondered for a moment if she should offer Aldon one of her mechanical pencils.

She didn't, though.

"Here," she said, sliding the test across the table, with a notebook – not quite empty, but there was nothing in it that would help him. "Take your time. You can stop when the questions get too hard for you."

She promptly curled up in the seat across from him and returned to her romance novel. Genevieve Buchanan. Kendrick of Artane. Seakirk. Castles, and a romance with a ghostly knight. Good writing.

It was everything she loved in a romance, and she should be lost in it. She wasn't. Somehow, she couldn't help but look over at Aldon, every now and then, watching as his eyebrows furrowed and he concentrated on the paper in front of him, biting his lower lip every now and then. He didn't look up from the makeshift test, and she caught him crossing out more than one answer. He was fine through most of the algebra, it seemed, even through the quadratics, then he hit the calculus.

He seemed to be all right through the differentiations, but then he was stymied by the integrations. She saw the minute that he knew he was lost, and watched as he frowned and kept at it, trying one thing after another. She wondered how long that would persist – Archie wasn't bad, he tended to struggle for twenty to thirty minutes before throwing his arms up and asking for help, whereas John would be in her dorm, not even ten minutes later, begging for help with his eyes.

Ten minutes passed, then twenty. Then thirty, and Francesca was barely reading anymore, being far too entertained by the scowl that Aldon had on his face, the stabbing of his pen as he crossed out one effort, then another, as he drew out the function in a tiny square in a corner of the notebook and plugged away at it.

He got it. Seventy-one minutes later, he figured it out – differentiations and integrations were only the reverse of each other, and Francesca saw the moment that he found the fundamental theorem of calculus. His amber-gold eyes lit up, and she didn't even think he knew that he was smiling, wider than anything that Francesca had ever seen on him before. A pure smile of happiness and excitement and discovery that she knew that she, too, sometimes wore when something made sense, finally, and it worked, it worked, her ACD was working.

It was only the first fundamental theorem of calculus. She watched him complete the rest of that section, then she took pity on him when he slammed into the multivariable questions. She was working through some of those now, and they could be hard.

"You can stop, now," she said, reaching over to grab the test and notebook. "I can tell when you're done. You've been at it two hours."

"You didn't mention a time limit." Aldon's voice was mild, but he was frowning a little at her. "I can keep going."

She stared at him, eyebrow raised, and he blushed. Point made.

His notation was terrible, like nothing she had ever seen before, almost coming right out of the Ancient Greeks, but his answers were by and large correct. He would need to learn some better notation, but the basics of it were there, through single-variable calculus. An introductory physics textbook, possibly an intermediate physics textbook as well, something for oscillations and waves. Maybe an introduction to electromagnetic theory? Single variable and multi-variable calculus textbooks, definitely. That should be more than enough for him to be working with for now.

"University bookstore," she said, and she hoped they had the books that she liked the best. There were certain classic textbooks for these, and she would prefer them if she could get them.

Aldon Blake went home that night with five used textbooks, and Francesca was somehow unsurprised when he showed up at Grimmauld Place the next day, introductory physics textbook under one arm, just in case he had any questions. He showed up every day the rest of that week, and most of the next, one or another of the textbooks in hand. He brought her more books too, borrowed from his mother's library or from work, and Francesca let him sit across from her, wherever she was, and she let him read, or run through problem sets, in silence. She was working too usually, sneaking glances at him every between taking notes on magical theory and considering how she might approach her next set of experiments. Something to fix on a mage's magical frequency, she thought. Or wavelength, if magical frequencies obeyed the same mathematical formulae as electromagnetic frequencies. She didn't know if they did, or maybe Planck's constant would be different for magic. She would need to test and find out. Maybe Aldon would be agreeable to throwing some magic at a line of multi-coloured LED lights, to see if his magic would resonate with anything.

Sometimes, but only sometimes, and only if she was making some for herself, she made Aldon tea.

XXX

Neal Queenscove stood on a hill, a backpack on his back, his sword alerting him to the weird sense of magic tingling in the air. His sword wasn't present, of course – being in the No-Maj world, he had placed it into non-being, where he usually kept it, but it was still there, an ethereal warning signal alerting him to the fact that there were wards here.

Chinese heirloom-casting had many advantages. First and foremost, heirloom-casters were never unarmed. Unlike wands, which were an actual, separate, implement and which could be broken or separated from their users, a Chinese heirloom was a literal part of its user. Their cores were their ancestors – his, he remembered, was a finger bone from his three-times-great grandfather, a notable general in the Imperial Chinese Army. Cores were gifted to heirloom-caster children almost as soon as they were born, and they were never apart from them. Most heirloom-caster children started weapons training before they were five. Their blood, their sweat, their tears, their effort and their magic made the heirloom take shape, in accordance with the old spells carved on the cores, and over a period of between five to eight years, they would bond permanently and irrevocably with their heirlooms.

Neal's sword was a part of him, a specially tuned and magically-sensitive part of him, or the physical part of himself that existed in the world of magic. It would read magic in the air, it was a faster attack and defensive weapon than his wand, and he could not be parted from it. Even the heirloom's core didn't really exist, anymore – his weapon was more magic, in many ways, than it was physical.

The disadvantages, though, were many. It was specially tuned for attack and defense – even in China, most Charms, all Transfigurations, almost all Healing were within the purview of runic paper-casters. It was what had made Chinese mages strike an uneasy balance between the two groups, millennia-old: heirloom casters were the brawn, the soldiers and fighters and warriors, but runic paper-casters were the brains, the politicians and scholars and academics. Being born in an heirloom-caster family was both an honour and a curse – there was only one path, and it was that of the sword. There was no other future for an heirloom-caster son, and heirloom-caster daughters, the guardians of the line, had it even worse, adding in pressure to choose the right husband, the right unique elemental affinity to introduce into their lines.

Neal was infinitely grateful that his mother had met his father, then betrayed a million conventions by eloping with him to the frozen shores of Québec. Neal was, as a result, a Queenscove and not just a Song, a wand-user and Healer as well as an heirloom-caster and fighter.

His sword was telling him that there was a ward there, but that he could cross it with no difficulty. He looked around – there was no one in sight, so he called his sword out of non-being and probed the wards a little more.

No-Maj Repelling Charms were woven in, an Anti-Apparition ward, as well as several different layers of protective charms. Neal didn't recognize them, but then, he had never been much into warding. He wouldn't know how a ward like this should be constructed, or what to expect anyway. He knew, from more probing, that the ward would let him pass because he was of Queenscove blood, and that these were Queenscove lands. But there was something off about this whole thing, and he wasn't sure he liked it.

The wards were new, far newer than they should be considering that the British Queenscoves had died out almost a century ago, before the Great War. There shouldn't have been anyone, or anything, here to refresh the wards. He had expected to arrive to find fraying wards, or non-existent ones, or… well, he just didn't know.

He had just been out for an adventure, really. A last hurrah, before he settled to the rather pedestrian life of an Emergency Healer at L'Hôpital de la Francomagie in Montréal. A ten-week backpacking tour around Europe, including a couple weeks spent with his brother Will and his brother's girlfriend, Tina, in Geneva. He had met up with Yukimi for a week or so, her conservative parents being appeased as long as they were chaperoned, a role that Will and Tina had taken on with, in Neal's opinion, far too much eye-rolling and teasing. He had shown Yukimi around Geneva, feeding her too many macarons, then when she had returned to Japan, he had moped around another week before going off to bounce around Belgium and France and Switzerland, both magical and non-magical. He had spent too much time eating all the best food and drinking the best wine, then he had headed to Germany for a week or so, checking out an endless stream of castles, hitting up a few acquaintances. He was now on the last leg of his journey, just a quick run through Britain – No-Maj Britain, to be clear, because he hadn't wanted to chance an entry into the notoriously discriminatory land that was Wizarding Britain.

The ancient Queenscove lands were the exception. He was curious – this was where his family had come from, after all, and after Archie's invitation, he had only become more interested in seeing it, at least. Most of what he had said to Archie, about talking to his family about returning to the family seat in Britain, had been a lie – he had never expected that they would return, no matter that he had said that they would consider it.

He had mentioned something to his family, about how the seat was still there. Just an offhand comment over dinner, one evening when they were discussing the Rigel Black scandal.

"Archie said that if we wanted to go back, his family and the Potters would help," he had said – in English, since both his mother and father were there. Language was an interesting thing, in his household. If it was just any of his siblings and his mother, they would speak Mandarin, even if Mom constantly bemoaned their butchering of her native language. If it was any of his siblings and his father, they generally preferred French, and Neal had to admit that he was partial to French. He liked the way it rolled off his tongue the best. If it was just the siblings, they spoke whatever language they felt like at that precise moment, jumping languages without reservation. And if it was the whole family, together, plus Graeme or Will's various girlfriends (well, it was Graeme who had the various girlfriends, Will had only had eyes for Tina Kowalski ever since he had met her), then it was English.

"And you said…?" His father's voice was mild, only curious.

"I said we'd think about it." Neal shrugged.

"Are you insane, little bro?" That was Graeme, his emerald-green eyes opening wide. They all had them – it was a trait of the Queenscoves generally, along with their wind cores. The fire came from the Songs, and Mom had been happy that, at least, Will and Jessa had taken after her a little in their looks, and Graeme and Jessa had inherited her elemental affinity.

"It's been a long time, Graeme," Neal had replied, a little defensively. "I mean…"

"You mean you're thinking of sticking your neck on the line for one of your underclassmen in a political situation that we have nothing to do with and of which we have only a limited understanding." That was Will, home for the week, Tina at his side, and Neal would fly back to Geneva with them. Will had a small smile on his face, teasing. "Tell me otherwise, Neal. Please."

Neal hadn't really known what to say. He wasn't thinking of going back, not really, but maybe they should just look at the old lands. Just a look, before making any big decisions. "No, well, maybe—"

"No, Neal." Graeme had shaken his head. "You've always been a dreamer, but don't – the fact that we're descended from Wizarding British nobility is just weird family history, something to whip out to get girls out on a date with you. Don't go back, eh? We're Canadian, we're Québecois, we're Montréalais – we don't belong in Wizarding Britain. Their problems aren't ours, little bro."

"Wish it were so simple to tell my brother the same," Tina had grumbled, beside Will, face deep in a plate of pie. "John's going to be neck deep before he knows it, and I don't even think there's anything I can do about it. He insists he's just going over this summer to provide support to his best friend, and of course Francesca is going with him – Dad's freaking out, already talking about extraction plans for them if it all goes south."

Neal had sighed, and let it go. He really wasn't thinking of anything weird, or crazy, or anything. He just thought maybe he should go see the lands, see what was left of them. He wasn't going to claim the seat or anything. Chances were, he thought, he would just find a pile of old mouldering ruins, and no one needed to know he had even come by to see it.

But the wards were fresh and powerful, and he kept his sword out and wary as he crossed over the barrier, alive to anything. Maybe he should have left, but he had already travelled so far to get here, taking a No-Maj train to the closest town, then a daylong trek on foot, cross-country, to where he knew the Queenscove lands had been.

He should have rented a car and driven it, but they drove on the wrong side of the road here, and somehow, he had doubted that the roads went out to Queenscove. Not much by way of roads were necessary when there was Apparition, when there was the Floo, when there were broomsticks. He'd have Apparated, but he didn't have the coordinates for it, and no use risking the Statute of Secrecy – he didn't want to accidentally appear in the middle of a No-Maj highway, for example.

He crept over the next hill. There was nothing – nothing but the breeze, running through his hair, the salt tang of the air as it blew in from the sea. Queenscove was on the sea, and if he listened very carefully, he could hear the rush of the waves, the crash as they hit the shoreline. He couldn't see it yet, but it had to be close. Another careful look around, and there was still nothing, still no one.

Cresting the hill, he could see that it was really more of a cliff. He looked down, and there was the ocean, waves slamming into the hard stone beneath him, launching an enormous salt spray. To his left, just a little way beyond, was an inlet – it was tiny, big enough for a handful of boats to come in and out, but not much more than that. No ship could fit in the narrow inlet – ships would need to anchor off-coast, running a shuttle. And on the opposite side of the inlet, he saw it.

Queenscove.

It looked… better than he could have imagined. It wasn't a mouldering ruin, for one thing. It was intact – there were two circles of curtain walls, he could see already, as well as a main keep, peeking out over the second curtain wall. It wasn't a big castle, not compared to the Renaissance glory of Heidelberg, or the No-Maj fortress at Marienberg, but it was solid. Defensive, with the crashing seas at its back. And the hill would force any attacker to climb for an attack. It was pretty, a postcard castle on a hill, its back to the seas.

A chill ran down Neal's back. It was wrong, all wrong. Queenscove shouldn't look like this – this was a medieval fortified castle, maybe with a few Renaissance-or-later elements. This wasn't a castle left to rot for almost a hundred years – this was a storybook castle, dumped into the present. Beautiful, but made to withstand a war.

Neal kept a tighter grip on his sword as he picked his way around the cliff. At the inlet, he looked down the steep slope – it was a manageable slope, but it would be a deadly trap for attackers from the sea. No ship could get in close enough to provide support, the inlet was too small for enemies to congregate and attack en masse, and the rocky path upwards provided no cover against any defenders. Neal's long-ago ancestors had known what they were doing, when they had picked the spot to build Queenscove.

If this was the Queenscove they built. It couldn't be – it just couldn't be. Queenscove had been a fortress once, that much he knew. The Queenscoves had been one of the few pre-Conquest Houses to survive, and they hadn't done that by being weak. Once, House Queenscove had been strong, known for the prowess of their knights, but that hadn't been for centuries. As the centuries turned, Queenscove had moved on. Their Lords had changed, putting down their swords in favour of hunting and gambling and playing politics, or whatever else noble lords did. Neal wasn't actually sure what noble lords did nowadays, other than enjoy a seat on the Wizengamot.

Queenscove should have changed with its Lords. And yet, by the castle staring down at him, imposing, from the clifftop, it hadn't. And that was really fucking weird.

It was another hour of cautious trekking before he reached the front gates. They were open, inviting, and Neal didn't like it one bit. For a moment, he paused – he could leave here, now, go tell Will or Graeme or someone, come back with some backup. Mom would come with him, if he asked. But there was nothing around him, no one around him, only the sound of the wind and the waves.

He walked through the gates, looking up to see the portcullis, its points sharp and silver, pointed downwards at him. It didn't look even a little rusted, and that didn't make any sense. He hurried forward, into the space between the two curtain walls.

It was lush, green, between the walls. Almost peaceful parkland, but Neal knew better. There were two curtain walls because the space between them was a killing field. The Lord Queenscove could man both walls with fighters, and even when the first curtain wall was breached, they would be able to rain spells and more on those below before they made the second curtain wall. There were two bridges, solid wood, that he could see running between the two walls – solid enough that the fighters manning the first wall could fall back, but wood, so that they would burn.

He swallowed thickly, the creepy feeling all over his shoulders intensifying. This was too new. This was not a castle a century abandoned. This was not even the castle that the last Lord Queenscove had left behind.

This was the castle of his dreams. This was the castle, or something like it, that he had always pictured, daydreaming between school and sword practices and whatever else he had. He had pictured these walls, these bridges, for an assignment the tutor Mom had hired to teach him and his brothers the sword, to teach them the traditional lessons of every heirloom-caster child, had made them do. The double curtain walls, the bridges – these was parts of his ideal fortress design. If he had had a castle, if he had ever wanted a castle, if he had ever designed a castle – it would have been this one.

He crossed through the second wall, this one held by thick, wooden gates, a triple portcullis, under a tower that Neal was sure had another trap within in, probably one involving cursed fire. The second curtain wall was twelve feet thick, a bit wider than the first wall, but both walls were meant to withstand force. The first wall was not meant to be sacrificed, but the second wall was there in case it fell. There was the main courtyard – there were the lists, a wide space for training with weapons and magic, there were the barracks, there was the keep. It was larger than it had first appeared, since only a small part of the keep poked above the curtain walls.

There were steps up to the doors, a half-dozen of them, giving any defenders a bit of an advantage as they fell back. The heavy wooden doors were shut, and Neal put one hesitant hand forward, pulling on the large, iron ring. The door opened into the hall – the centre, the grand hearth, of every medieval keep.

It wasn't as dark as he would have expected – there were windows carved above, and the evening light streamed in. The hall was dominated by the Queenscove coat of arms, huge, over a high table, with crossed swords underneath. Tapestries lined the walls, warm, new tapestries, and Neal stopped hard because he saw himself.

Or – not himself, surely. Someone a lot like himself, he thought. Wizarding genetics were weird, but emerald eyes, brown hair, a long nose, those had always been the hallmarks of the Queenscove line. His sword was there, too, but tapestries came from a time when everyone wielded a sword. This was one of his Queenscove forebears, no doubt, with the castle picturesque in the background. It looked a bit like Graeme, too, not just him, so it had to be one of his ancestors.

It was still a creepy resemblance, especially when it was so new, when it should have been faded and moth-eaten and nearly gone. Neal turned away, and a stone caught his attention.

It wasn't an important stone, not architecturally. It wasn't even a part of any notable features – it was just a random stone, along the bottom row, about six to the left of a stairwell that Neal knew would lead to the upper levels, to bedrooms and parlours, comfortable living spaces that, in his imagination, would be full of soft fleece, deep armchairs, cushions pattered with maple leaves and fleur-de-lis, stacked full of books. The stone called to him magically, though, a flare of power so strong in his magical senses that his sword was nearly vibrating. What was that? And why was it so important?

He walked over to it, examining it carefully, but it didn't look any different. To his hands, it didn't even feel any different – it was just a stone. It was magic, though, that much was certain. Neal leaned back, studied it for a moment, then he reached out and tapped it with his sword.

A blinding flash of light, and Neal swore, leaping backwards, sword in hand as he whirled around. Câlisse! He should have left and come back with someone, osti de câlisse de tabernak! He was alone, and for all he knew, he had triggered some sort of ambush – who cared if this was his dream castle, this was fucked up to all hell and he was even swearing in English, il est absolument idiot, il aurait dû inviter ses frères ou sa mère ou Kel ou quelqu'un d'autre! Then he wouldn't be alone, miles away from civilization, without basic backup.

When the light cleared, however, all he saw were three little creatures, about two feet tall. Their skins were tinted green, just slightly, and each of them had wide, bat-like ears, one of them with rings. They were wearing, oddly, towels – clean, pressed, tea-towels, with the Queenscove coat of arms printed on them, folded like a toga.

Each and every one of them was beaming at him like he had brought home the sun.

"My Lord Queenscove," squeaked one, stepping forward to stand a little ahead of the other two. He was the oldest, Neal guessed, since he had clouds of clean, white hair coming from his ears. "Welcome home! We is hoping that everything is to your liking, as we is working long and hard on this over many, many decades!"

Neal staggered backwards two steps, glancing warily around himself. It spoke English – weird English. What it was, he had no idea. "Euh – um – what are you, and what the fuck are you talking about?"

He had an accent. Câlisse, he only had an accent when he was flustered and jumping between languages mentally. One of the bizarre little creatures squealed, gripping its ears and shaking its head violently.

"Language, young master," it scolded, and its voice was even higher pitched than the leader. "Language! The legend never said that you swore."

"What legend?" Neal choked, looking around him frantically again. At the tapestry along one wall of the Hall, at the huge fireplace, at the giant coat of arms hanging at what he thought of as the head of the room, directly across from the front doors. "What fucking legend?"

His own voice was scaling in pitch, and there was a wind blowing through the Hall, his magic reacting to his panic. He tamped down on it, a little, though the towels the three little creatures were wearing were flapping in the wind. They nodded, though the first one was starting to look a little concerned.

"Er, young master…" the leader started, taking a step closer. "My lord Queenscove? The legend is saying that Queenscove would decline, over many years, that the knights of Queenscove would be dying out, and that then, and only then, a new Lord of Queenscove is returning and setting the House to rights once more?"

Neal was only half paying attention, because he had realized something else.

He was in control of the castle wards. He knew, without having to walk them, how far the wards extended, he could feel any fluctuations in them as they happened. He knew that each of the windows were protected by an additional ward-layer instead of glass, each fuelled by its own keystone of power. He knew that the stone he had prodded was the primal keystone for Queenscove, the base one on which the entire castle was based, and he knew there were eighteen secondary keystones hidden throughout the grounds.

Your castle, Queencove told him, practically purring in delight. You're the Lord Queenscove. I missed you. I missed having a master. Won't you look around, see what I have made for you? Everything is comfortable, I promise, and if it isn't, I'll fix it for you. You want fleece blankets with maple leaves and fleur-de-lis? I'll make it happen!

No. Osti de crisse, this was not happening. He was dreaming – why was a castle talking to him? He was either dreaming, or he had officially, completely lost it. Rest in peace, Neal Queenscove.

"Er – young master…" the creature in front of him said slowly. "Is you needing some help?"

"I've just gone completely insane," Neal announced. He was dreaming, so talking to a castle and to this creature didn't seem like it would be much of a problem. He would wake up, and he would find that he hadn't even left his youth hostel in Edinburgh yet, he was sure. Any time now, and until then, he supposed he might as well play along. "Um, what exactly are you?"

"Butler is being a house-elf!" the leader squeaked, his chest swelling with pride. "And with Butler is the remaining Queenscove house-elves: Ditty and Octa! There is being … not very many of us left." The elf's ears drooped in sorrow. "The past ninety years is being difficult, carrying out the sacred trust."

"Sacred trust?" Neal looked around, took a few steps to one side, sinking into the chair at the end of the high table. He didn't feel so good. When was he supposed to wake up? He had to wake up. And when he did, he would tell himself that his planned adventure to the Queenscove lands was a fucking stupid idea, and he would instead wander around some proper No-Maj historical sites for the day. "Tell me more."

Butler looked at him, a little bit of worry on his face, and Neal wondered how he could know that. The creature was not human, he didn't, couldn't, know. "My lord Queenscove…"

"Neal," Neal corrected, a little too sharp. "Just Neal, thanks. Neal Queenscove, nice to meet you. I'm not lord of anything."

But you're my Lord, the castle whimpered to him, and Neal had the bizarre sense of something tugging at him, at his sleeve, wanting him to go explore the castle, the lands, his lands. No. He was not listening to that voice, he was not, this was not happening.

"Neal," Butler said agreeably. "Erm… should Butler, Ditty and Octa be explaining the legend to you?"

"Please," Neal croaked, rested the point of his sword on the ground, his hands on the hilt. He really didn't feel so good right now.

Maybe you should come lie down, the castle suggested, prodding him towards the upper levels. I have some very nice bedrooms. You can take your pick! There's a lovely masculine one on the third floor, I did it all in dark colours and wood, and there's a pretty bedroom on the second floor that gets all the evening sunlight in the summer, and everything is polished so brightly that it glows! Or, if you don't like those ones, I'll make something nicer, to your tastes, I just need to get to know you better.

Neal shook his head, trying to dislodge the voice. If it was even a voice. It was more like knowledge, being funnelled directly into his brain – it didn't have a language, it was just there. The castle liked him. The castle wanted him to look around, see how nice it was. The castle wanted him to stay. Why the fuck was a castle talking to him?

The house-elves were looking at him with some concern, but they evidently decided to ignore how he sounded. "A very long time ago," Butler started, his voice high-pitched but slow.

"At the Conquest." The third elf, who hadn't spoken before yet, interrupted. This one seemed to be a little younger than the others.

"Not at the Conquest," Butler snapped, turning on his fellow creature. "It is being a little after the Conquest, during the Harrying of the North. Queenscove is the last – Peverell falls through treachery, end of 1069, and Ollivander surrenders after a siege. Lord Gershom Queenscove is seeing the Conqueror's men, Muggles and wizards alike, burning and destroying the country, and he is knowing there is nothing left. He is calling on the centaurs, on Queenscove lands, and is requesting their aid.

"Centaurs is not helping. But one centaur, Torvus, is feeling bad for him, so he reads the stars for Queenscove. He is saying Queenscove lives for centuries more, that there will be many difficult and troubling centuries. Gershom's descendants is falling away from their noble obligations, from the knightly code of conduct that Queenscove prides, and there is coming a time when the House dies, when the House is being empty, for years and years. But it is at that time that Gershom's true heir, and the true Lords of Queenscove, is returning." Butler paused, and the house-elf's big eyes looked down at Neal's sword.

Neal swallowed. He knew what they were thinking, looking at his sword, the sword that he knew perfectly well how to use. Was there a more knightly weapon than a sword? But he wasn't – it wasn't—

He wasn't a knight. He wasn't a Lord. He was just an heirloom-caster!

"I'm not – I'm—" he croaked. "I'm just Neal Queenscove. Third son. Healer!"

My new Lord and master, the castle whispered to him, a note of joy in its spectral voice.

"Lord Gershom Queenscove is surrendering to the Conqueror's men." Ditty picked up the story, her tiny voice quiet. "He is going to his execution quietly, and the Queenscoves is holding the lands and the title. But before he goes, he is giving to us, the house-elves of Queenscove, our sacred duty."

"We is serving the current Lord, but we is always having the duty to the House first," the third house-elf added, twisting his ears a little – in nervousness or embarrassment, Neal wasn't sure. "Lord Gershom is setting up a second trust for Queenscove, is setting money aside, for the day when the true Lords is returning. House-elves is caring for it, alongside our duties to the sitting Lord of Queenscove, is making the second trust grow. Through centuries, house-elves is passing the legend down, we is keeping the secrets of the future, we is holding Gershom's trust."

"Then Lord Cathal Queenscove dies, in 1903." Butler's huge eyes trailed up from Neal's sword, to Neal's face, where he almost seemed to be memorizing it. The house-elf smiled, a huge, happy smile, tears starting to brim in his eyes. "And the castle isn't disappearing, the wards isn't falling. Queenscove is waiting, because there is an heir coming, and house-elves is staying. The castle is shifting back slowly, is turning back to what it was during the eleventh century but is keeping some of the better defenses added later. House-elves is cleaning. House-elves is using the trust to buy the newest things, so that the true Lord can be comfortable and happy when he is coming. House-elves is caring for the wards, is putting in a Floo connection, is making sure everything is perfect for the true Lord's arrival. And here you is! Butler is not knowing if he would be living to meet you."

The old house-elf burst into tears, sobbing violently as he wiped his tears from his face, using his tea-towel dress. The other two rushed forwards, putting their arms around him, casting surreptitious glances of their own towards Neal.

Neal felt dizzy, a sick, and the castle's calling was becoming stronger. It was a nice castle, it insisted, and he should look around. He wasn't dreaming, or if he was, it was a hell of a persistent dream, because he wasn't waking up. He needed to do something, he needed to get up and move, and he needed help. Someone. If he woke up, all would be well, and he would just go see some No-Maj sights, but if he wasn't, then câlisse, he needed help.

I'll help you, if only you'll stay, the castle sang to him. Don't leave me. I'll provide you all the help I can. We'll be great together, you and me.

Will and Tina were in Geneva.

But Archie was in Britain, and he was a noble. Twelve Grimmauld Place, he remembered. There was a Floo connection. He said he would help. He said he and his family would help.

"Floo," Neal croaked. "I'll – I need to talk to a friend. I – please."

"Floo powder," Octa said, and a box of it appeared with a pop on the table where he pointed, while Ditty turned to the fireplace and a fire roared into existence. "Here is being Floo powder, my lord."

"Neal," Neal corrected again, feeling light-headed as he grabbed a fistful of powder and staggered to the fireplace. "I'll – I'll—"

No, don't leave me! The castle was wailing at him, and it was digging into his magical core, wanting him to stay, to look around upstairs, to rearrange everything to be perfect for him and for his family and for the future of Queenscove to come. He could barely breathe, but he ignored it, throwing the Floo Powder into the fire. The fire roared upwards, green, and he jumped in.

He had taken the Floo maybe twice in his life before, but he knew how it worked.

"Twelve Grimmauld Place," he yelled, and he spun, he spun, he spun in the fire, wanting to throw up. His core was pulling him backwards, tied to the castle, and he kept that awful, all-encompassing awareness of his lands, of the castle. It wanted him back, it was lonely, and it wanted him to come home and live in it and care for it. Osti de crisse.

He slammed into an unfamiliar room, done in comforting woods and green, and he fell out of the fire, coughing, his sword in his hands. This better be Archie's place, and Archie better be home, or – or he didn't know. The next closest help was Will in Geneva, and Neal didn't have the power for an international Apparition or enough money for a Portkey. And he needed help now.

"Neal! Dad, no, put your wand away!" That was a familiar voice, Archie, thank god. Thank all the gods. "That's my friend Neal – Neal Queenscove!"

There was a hand on his shoulder, tiny black heels and a skirt, and Neal knew who that was without having to look. Francesca Lam, close friend of Archie Black, and it was with a sigh of relief that he rolled over, death-grip still on his sword. Archie was there, leaning over him, his own wand out in a Healing diagnostic pattern.

"Shock," he heard Archie say, looking up towards someone who looked so much like him that he had to be Archie's father. "Shock and panic, headache, and his magic is tied to something up north, I can't tell what. If it's magical contamination, it's beyond my abilities – we would need to get him to St. Mungo's. But if it's contamination, it's like none I've ever seen before, it's more of a link than anything else."

"To the castle," Neal choked out, sitting up, and he felt Archie and Francesca supporting him. He did have a headache, now, a hell of a headache. Oh, crisse, he was not dreaming, he couldn't dream a headache this bad. Odd, he hadn't had one at Queenscove. "To Queenscove, to the castle, why the fuck is the castle talking to me?! Câlisse, I should have listened to my brothers, they all said going back to Queenscove was a bad idea, and did I listen? No, I wanted a fucking adventure, so I didn't. And now I've got a castle in my head telling me I'm its new Lord, and three house-elves who look at me like I'm the fucking second coming of Christ, and I was just there to look!"

His voice was scaling up in pitch, in panic, he hadn't let go of his sword, and Archie was in front of him. "Neal, breathe. It's okay, we're Healers. Match my breathing, okay? Calm down, tell us what happened. We'll help."

It was something that all Healers knew how to do, calm a patient down, and Neal focused, hard, though a pounding headache. He realized that Francesca was rubbing his back, as he listened for Archie's breathing, worked on matching his own breathing to it. It took some minutes, a few minutes, before he was calm enough that Archie could help him get up, to take a seat at the wooden table, and to Archie's credit, he didn't try to take Neal's sword away from him. His sword made him feel better, so he would keep on holding it instead of dismissing it into non-being, as he normally would for others' comfort. It felt better to be armed, it always had. That was a trait of all heirloom-caster children – after having carried their heirlooms constantly for years on end, they would always been a little more comfortable having it, physical, in their hands.

"Should I extend my congratulations?" That was a voice that Neal didn't recognize, and he squinted upwards. The young man was leaning across the counter, arms crossed, with a somewhat amused expression on his face. His hair was short, brushed up out of the way, away from his face, which was much like Archie's. They had the same small, elegant nose, the same high cheekbones, enough for a general resemblance, but his eyes were orange-yellow, hawk-like, and his accent was far sharper than Archie's. "My lord Queenscove." He bowed, very properly, very seriously – on occasion, he had seen Archie pull something like this in theatre.

"Aldon, please," Archie snapped, and Neal raised an eyebrow. So that was Aldon Rosier, the Truth-Speaker who had summoned and channelled Justice for Archie's trial – or, well, former Rosier. He had followed the trial, mostly through La Presse Magique, but the Aldon Rosier scandal had only been a footnote, two lines in a longer article about the trial itself. Neal had been relieved to see that Archie, even if he hadn't gotten off, had at least avoided any more serious consequences.

The young man shrugged. "Congratulations, Lord Queenscove."

"I'm – I'm not—" Neal blew out a sick, heavy breath, putting one hand to his temple. Gods, his head was hurting.

"Ignore him." That was Francesca, standing up. "I'll make some tea. Archie, a Headache Relief Potion?"

"I'll go get one—" Archie started, but he was interrupted.

"No, there's no point." The older man, the one that had to be Archie's father, shook his head grimly. "It's not that kind of headache, not if it's what I'm thinking – what Aldon's thinking, too, no doubt."

"Something with willow, then," Francesca said, filling a teapot with water. "Do we have a tea with willow? Should I, um, go out to get some? I can run out to at Tesco's, find some tea with willow, some acetaminophen or ibuprofen…"

"At this hour?" Aldon Rosier's eyes widened, and he uncrossed his arms. "It's getting dark. If you must go out, Francesca, then allow me to escort you."

Ah, another one. Neal laughed, a weird, sick-sounding, hysterical laugh. The world might have completely tilted on its axis, but some things never changed. It was a familiar scene – someone with hearts in his eyes, staring at Francesca Lam. The number of times John had tried to rope him to having some stern discussions with someone or another – well, it wasn't like Neal usually went along with it, only once or twice, and only if he thought it would turn into a problem if he didn't. Where was John, anyway? Francesca was never far apart from him.

"I don't think those will work either, Francesca, dearest." That was Archie's father, again, voice filled with pity. "If he's the new Lord of Queenscove, then it's probably a magical backlash – it'll only disappear when he returns to his castle. I'm shocked he was even able to get away from his lands, tonight. But it's a kind thought. Just some regular tea, I think."

"It's fine," Neal gasped, lifting his head from his arms. "Or, not fine, but… where's John, Francesca? You're never far apart from him. And Hermione?"

"John's in Germany, visiting Gerhardt." She hummed a little, bringing the teapot to the table, tracing a casual rune on top to set the thing to boiling. "His moping was driving me crazy."

Neal nodded, taking a deep breath and staring at the teapot as it started steaming. That made sense. He wanted to throw up, and some tea would help. Maybe. Yuki also thought that tea helped with everything. "Good on him."

"And Hermione's at home, with her family." Archie's brow was creased in worry, his grey eyes focused as he sat down on Neal's other side. "So? What happened, Neal? You look awful."

"I went to Queenscove," Neal said softly, looking down at the wooden table. "It was – I wasn't going to do anything. I was just curious, I just wanted to see what was left of the old place. I'm a Queenscove, sure, but I'm – I'm Canadian, I'm Québecois, I'm Montréalais. It's just – it's family history. I just wanted to see it, then I'd go on my merry way. I took a No-Maj train to the closest town, then I hiked cross-country to get there. Found the wards – they were fresh, new, kind of strange, but they let me pass. Found the castle – it's new, but too old—"

"New, but too old." Rosier's voice was dry, amused, and Neal scowled at him. "Descriptive."

"Ignore him." That was Archie, this time. "Aldon has a bit of a problem where he's a chronic bastard. The literal part of that only came out recently, so he's being even more of a bastard than he usually is. His bark is worse than his bite."

"It isn't," Rosier muttered, but he came and sat down at the table anyway. "New, but too old. Explain."

"The castle looks new, but it's built in an older style. Medieval fortifications, with a double curtain wall, linking wooden bridges, killing field between the walls. Some outer defenses, too – there are six ravelins, three of them in the sea—"

How did he know that? Oh, crisse de câlisse de tabernak, how did he know that? He could picture them so perfectly in his mind, too, the triangular outer fortifications, and he had only seen two of them coming into Queenscove. How did he know there were six of them? The castle was in his mind, he could picture them perfectly, he could still feel the wards, especially powerful on the ravelins.

Francesca poured a mug of tea and put it in front of him, and Neal picked it up and threw it back. It was too hot, scorching on the way down, but Neal didn't care. Tea was supposed to help.

Tea didn't help.

"You didn't know you knew that," Archie's father said, filling in the blanks. "Go on, Neal. You found the castle, and I'm guessing you went inside?"

"Yes," Neal replied, setting the mug down. Francesca leaned over and refilled it, and he wrapped his hands around the warm mug. "I went inside. The grounds are well-kept, there are lists for training, there are barracks. The keep is, like the rest of the castle, too new and too old at the same time. I went inside – went inside the great hall. New tapestries on the walls, giant fireplace, Queenscove coat of arms on the back wall, high table. There was a stone, behind the high table – the primal keystone to Queenscove, but I didn't know it at the time. My sword called to it, because it's magically powerful, so I went closer to look at it further, and then…"

Neal spread his hands, a little helplessly. "Then I had a castle in my head, control of the wards, and three house-elves calling me Lord Queenscove and telling me family legends."

"Hmm." That was Rosier, leaning forward in interest, resting his head in one hand. He had left off the biting sarcasm, this time, and there seemed to be nothing in his face but academic curiosity. "You said you went closer to the keystone and looked at it. What do you mean by looking at it?"

"I poked at it a bit with my hands, then I decided to touch my sword to it, because magic calls to magic, then there was a flash of light, and boom. Castle, wards, house-elves." Neal shook his head, lifting his mug for another drink of tea. Gods, his head hurt. It seemed like it hurt more now than it did when he arrived.

"Did you have any open cuts, wounds, on your hands?" Rosier exchanged a look with Archie's father, whose name Neal still didn't know. The Lord Black, he supposed he would have to call him for now, but it seemed weird to call someone Lord Black. Almost as bizarrely weird as being called Lord Queenscove. "The claiming of a noble seat normally involves a gift of blood on the primal keystone – otherwise, you ought to have been able to visit and leave, as you had planned. Only a drop will do. There are some traditional words that go along with the rite, but in my opinion, they are symbolic and magically unnecessary. It is the blood that forms the claim."

Who was Rosier? He talked like an upper-class, overly academic, snob.

A gift of blood, though…

"Tabernak," Neal whispered, realizing what must have happened. He glanced down at his sword. "Oh, crisse. I touched my sword to it. Heirloom-caster swords are made of us – our magic, our effort, our sweat and tears. Our blood."

"Well, then." Rosier nodded, leaning back, apparently satisfied with a tiny, amused, smile on his face, and a curious eye on Neal's sword. "Congratulations again, Lord Queenscove. I am eager to see the reaction of Wizarding British Society when you take your seat on the Wizengamot."

Neal glared at him. "Fuck off, Rosier. I'm not taking any seat on the Wizengamot. I'm going back to Canada in a week, back to Montreal, I have a job lined up."

"Blake," Rosier corrected, leaning back casually, eyebrow raised. "Aldon Blake. I was disowned weeks ago and no longer have the right to the family name."

"Whatever. I was in Europe weeks ago. I'm going home, I just need…" He didn't know. His head was pounding, and his core was tugging him back north. "I don't know. I just need my magic untangled from whatever this is, I need to not have a castle in my head."

"Dad…" Archie looked at his father, grey eyes pleading, but the Lord Black shook his head slowly.

"It's not magical contamination," he said. "He's, magically speaking, the Lord of Queenscove. Aldon, I think you might have the more classic education on this – the Blacks no longer have our ancestral seat, and while Grimmauld Place obeys me much as a noble manor does, the usual rules don't apply to us."

Blake nodded, a little stiff, but when he spoke, he again left off the sarcasm. "The simplest way to put it is that noble Lords are their lands. As the Lord of Queenscove, having claimed the seat, you are Queenscove – that is why you can control the wards, why you're aware of everything at Queenscove from miles away. It is said that a Lord, bound to his lands, is nearly untouchable. I am – or I was, I should say – only in the Book of Copper, so my ancestral seat is not as responsive, but I have heard that Book of Gold family seats can be… difficult."

"What he means is that, like Hogwarts, the manors develop a bit of a personality over time," the Lord Black picked up, voice dry. "I remember when James claimed Peverell Hall – it took him weeks to figure out how to put the walls away and keep the stone knights from patrolling the grounds and terrifying visitors, and it was a month before he could leave the grounds without triggering a backlash headache. You have to develop a bit of a relationship with your grounds before they trust you enough to leave, I think."

"Harry never mentioned this," Archie piped up, frowning. "Harry never said anything about this to me."

The Lord Black shrugged. "I'm not sure that Harry knows, yet. It's up to each family to choose when to tell their Heirs about the procedures for claiming their seat. Grimmauld doesn't require a gift of blood, nor does it fight me at all, so for you, the wards will just fall to you when I pass. I didn't see the need for a big speech on it. Aldon, though, was probably younger."

Blake shrugged uncomfortably. "Six. My … adoptive mother insisted. Were the wards to fall to me, I was to issue my claim immediately, and prepare for challenges." He paused. "Obviously, she knew more than she said about me."

"Backlash headache," Neal interrupted, feeling the room spin a little through the blinding pain that was in his head. "Yeah, have that. How do I make it stop? How do I unclaim the seat? I want to go home – I want to speak French and eat all the fucking poutine and smoked meat. I want to romance Yuki, convince her to come see me in Montreal. I want to go to Kyoto to see her. I don't want to be stuck here, I don't want to be tied to this stupid discriminatory country."

Blake and the Lord Black exchanged looks.

"Someone of the bloodline would have to challenge you for Lordship," Blake said finally. "Someone of the same consanguinity or higher. The lands will obey the winner. Or you have to die."

There was a moment of silence, filled only by the sound of Francesca refilling the teapot to make more tea for everyone. Neal stared down at the table, into his tea mug – he knew perfectly well that no one in his bloodline would be coming to Britain to challenge him for a Lordship he did not want. Dad was Head Healer at the hospital in Montreal; Graeme was an up and coming Auror. Will had his whole life in Geneva. Dom was of the bloodline, but one or two removed from Neal by consanguinity. Nor was he particularly willing to die.

"Tabernak," Neal whispered. His head was aching like no one's business, and he wanted to throw up.

"I think you probably need to go back to your castle for the night," the Lord Black said decisively, clapping one hand on his shoulder. "The Wizengamot won't sit again until mid-September, so we have time to figure this out, decide what to do. I'll check the Book of Gold, tomorrow at the Ministry – it'll have updated itself if you're the new Lord Queenscove. This isn't the end of the world, Neal, and you can leave the country – you just need Queenscove to trust you, then you can arrange for a steward to care for the lands. Do you want one of us to come with you tonight, stay with you?"

Neal shook his head, feeling like his brains were sloshing around in his skull. "No – no, I – I don't know."

He was of age. He was eighteen years old; he didn't need a minder. He had just backpacked through half of Europe by himself. But hell, he didn't really want to be alone in what was, apparently, his castle all night, with only the house-elves and the castle itself in his head for company. Osti. He didn't know what the hell he was going to do about this. How did one make a castle trust them? Especially a castle with what sounded like abandonment issues?

It was a fucking castle.

"I'll go with you," Archie stood up. "Dad, you don't mind, do you? I wouldn't mind seeing a real castle, and I'm worried about that headache. Let me go get an overnight bag."

The headache stopped almost immediately when Neal landed back in his hall, Archie on his heels, but Neal was exhausted, drained. The house-elves were still there, whispering quietly among themselves; Neal smiled weakly at them, and asked if there were rooms available. All three of them gasped, bowing at Archie, then ran off, presumably to prepare bedrooms for them both.

There are lots of rooms, the castle whispered to him, delighted, and Neal felt that odd sense of something tugging at him, wanting to show off. Come and see. I even managed to magic up some maple leaf and fleur-de-lis patterns for you, because you said you wanted them!

Fine, Neal snapped mentally at his castle. I just want a bed now. Something comfortable, for both me and Archie, and I'll figure out how to deal with all of this in the morning.

The castle was all too happy to oblige. It even put books on his bedside table for him.

XXX

AN: Look, everyone, it's a fun chapter! I had so much fun writing this one, all the tiny details. Really, Aldon would have lost his head a lot more if Archie wasn't there to give him something immediate and annoying to focus on, and quietly gave him a primer on Muggle society without seeming to do it and without embarrassing him. And then Aldon can focus on Francesca, who decided to abandon him in a Muggle library and then give him a math test to prove his worth. And Neal! Welcome back to Neal, and I had way too much fun writing Queenscove. For those who are not French (specifically: not Quebecois), most of the French is just Quebecois cursing. Câlisse means chalice, osti means host, crisse means Christ and tabernak is tabernacle - the Quebecois still curse using church words, and stringing them together is an art that many Quebecois pride themselves on (none of those mean much, it's just "christ of the host of the tabernacle" and stuff like that). As for the long sentence in the middle of Neal freaking out, he's really just repeating what he said in English: "He was an absolute idiot, and he should have invited his brothers or his mother or Kel or someone else." Thanks go to mercuryandglass this time for breaking down how house-elves talk so I could write house-elf speech, and to meek_bookworm as usual for the beta! meek advises that the Queenscove Castle is her favourite character. Please leave me a review and let me know how happy or not you are that Neal has reappeared!

Next Chapter: Raise a glass to the four of us / Tomorrow there'll be more of us / Telling the story of tonight / They'll tell the story of tonight. (The Story of Tonight, from the Hamilton musical)