NINETEEN
(Still Somehow Saturday)
Ernestine Hibbins was in a fowl mood. Canary, to be exact. Aside from her general state of morphic dissociation, however, she generally considered herself to be having the time of her life – though she'd never felt quite this way before. The feathers, for one thing, were distracting. The beak was awkward. Flying, however, was bloody amazing.
She dodged a floating candle as she flitted around the enchanted ceiling of the Great Hall. Far below she spotted Josephus Elkins in conference with a cadre of his cronies. If a bird could grin, she would have been grinning madly. The champagne toast had done a proper job, and where that hadn't been entirely effective, she'd discreetly cast a few Jelly-Brain Jinxes. Their efforts appeared to have been rewarded. By and large, the guests were too befuddled for it to occur to them that they should do anything about the state of pandemonium that they found themselves in. The ante-Marriage Law Ernestine might have felt that there was something morally repugnant about taking advantage of the deliberately incapacitated. The anti-Marriage Law Ernestine aimed for the group below and let loose her ballast.
Alas, the effects of the improved recurring canary cream were only temporary, so she madea hurried landing when she felt herself beginning to molt. Moments later, she straightened her hideous dress and made a beeline for what was more or less the dance floor. They were playing her song. She didn't have the slightest clue what the song was – though the lead singer of the band was drunkenly confessing that he'd written it for the bride, so it was bound to be brilliant, as far as she was concerned. The bride, garbed in her groom's dress robes and sporting a spiked Mohawk hairstyle, seemed to think so too. She cheered loudly. The groom, who had at some point acquired the bridal gown, was only slightly less enthusiastic.
"To our marriage!" Tonks toasted, raising a flask. "And to everyone who had a hand in bringing us all together!" She drank deeply and then pulled a confounded-looking Percy Weasley – whose head had somehow swelled to several times its original size – over to her for a lingering kiss. By the time she eventually let go, she was somehow Snape and Percy looked even more confounded.
Ernestine grinned as a slight, bespectacled young man snapped a photograph of the pair. He had been at it all night, and she had already gotten him to promise to give her copies. If they didn't all end up in Azkaban, she'd have blackmail material for years. While she was momentarily distracted with thoughts of her meteoric rise in the Ministry – perhaps even to the position of Minister itself – the other Snape echoed the toast and transformed into Tonks.
"Miss Hibbins!" Elkins had spotted her, although it did not appear that he recognized her as the canary which had, er, spotted him. He dragged Henry Ibister across the dance floor. "Here she is! Told you we'd find her here, Hank, my lad. She'll put it right, just like she always does."
"How are you enjoying the party, sir?" she shouted back. Given his booming voice, Ernestine suspected he'd forgotten his hearing augmentation charm again.
"Eh? What?"
Ernestine repeated herself in a slightly louder tone of voice, with what she hoped were helpful gestures.
"Oh marvelous, marvelous!" Elkins crowed. "Lovely gathering! Reminds me of the time we put on a pantomime of The Fountain of Fair Fortune! Ah, now that brings me back. I was Sir Luckless, you know..." He trailed off happily. Then, immediately upon seeing Percy Weasley, he exclaimed something about a Professor Beery and wandered away.
That left Ernestine with the hitherto annoyingly abstemious Mr. Ibister. While she couldn't totally fault him his teetotaling ways, as a result of his refusal to even sip in celebration of the happy couple, his was the first brain she'd elected to jinx into a bowl of Hartley's jelly, sans bowl. The effect appeared to be wearing off, and, short of jinxing him again, she wasn't sure what else she could do.
"Miss Hibbins," he said, wibbling only slightly. "It has come to my conclusion I think there is something somewhat vastly wrong with the other invitees."
"Really, Mr. Ibister?" She pasted a look of polite interest on her face to cover her sudden panic. This could be it, the thing that landed them all in Azkaban, all because they couldn't get one spell-blasted man to ingest anything remotely curse-like. "Whatever gave you that idea?"
"I confess it was the canaries. I suspect-" he probably intended to lean in conspiratorially, but the effect was rather more like a dramatic reenactment of the Titanic's last moments. "-a conspiracy!"
"Even that?" She tried to nudge him into a more vertical position, the end result was a twenty-degree tilt off axis in the other direction. "Have you told anyone else?"
"Only Josephus, but he said it was a rollicking good event in any event and I should turn into a candid... candy... canary if felt so inclined." Ernestine was rather worried about his incline. It seemed to be declining. "I don't know who else is at hand that we can trust not to be a foot. I know the bride was an Auror..."
She breathed a tiny sigh of relief. At least Ibister's suspicions were no less askew than the rest of him was. Perhaps they might avoid Azkaban after all. "Retired, though it seems hardly appropriate to be pestering her with such things on the happiest day of her life." Frankly, she was entirely uncertain who the bride was, or where she was... or at what momentum she was traveling from whencever she was or wasn't. She also wasn't entirely certain 'whencever' was a word, but she rather liked the sound of it.
"One would think there would be more Aurors presently present, considering," Ibister continued crossly.
"Something came up."
"More important than this?"
"If you can believe it." An idea occurred to her. "I know just who we should tell."
"Whom?"
"The mother of the bride."
"She would want the wedding to be a success," Ibister said somewhat dubiously.
"Exactly." She started edging him over toward Mrs. Tonks as quickly as she could. Every time he said something coherent, she worried a bit more. And so long as she had his undivided attention she couldn't safely jinx him again. And if she didn't do something very soon, she suspected all his suspicions would shortly be confirmed.
"But can she be trusted with something of this amplitude?"
"Oh I think so." She flapped her arms desperately in the other witch's direction, trying to beckon her over before it was too late. Blessed Morgana, it worked.
"Ah, Mrs. Tonks, may I present Henry Ibister of the Matrimonial Office at the Ministry? Mr. Ibister, this is the mother of the bride. Mr. Ibister has some concerns to confidentially confide."
"Is that so?" She saw recognition and understanding, respectively, cross Andromeda Tonks' countenance. Despite their admittedly short acquaintance, Ernestine was certain that she could – and would – handle Mr. Ibister. There was something about a rumor and a Howler. She wasn't quite clear on the details, but Ernestine was a good enough judge of people to feel confident in her choice. Anyway, her recurring curse was curtailing her time.
Andromeda Tonks linked arms with Henry Ibister. "Why don't you get me a drink and you can tell me all about it?" She turned him away just before the recurring curse recurred. A second later, Ernestine had transformed into a canary again. She chirped something rude at Ibister's retreating form, then flipped him the bird.
When she'd molted again, she shimmied over to the bride and groom.
"Who are you?" she asked the one who looked like Tonks.
"Professor Snape," she answered promptly, then laughed oddly. "Actually, the name's Weasley."
"Percy wishes!" Professor Snape slapped his knee and howled in laughter.
Ernestine could figure this out. Given the way they'd been changing back and forth, she knew Polyjuice potion was in play. So the question became: Who hadn't she seen recently? "Fred?"
The party masquerading as Tonks rolled her eyes. "Honestly, Fred, why can't anyone ever tell us apart?"
"George, then," Ernestine corrected.
"No, just kidding. I'm Fred. That's George. At least for the moment, anyway."
"Where are the bride and groom?"
Fred shrugged. "Didn't ask."
George echoed the gesture. "Didn't tell."
"Can I help with anything?"
"Everything's mostly in hand. How're you at hexes?"
"Enthusiastic, but generally lousy." It was probably her Muggle upbringing that didn't lend itself to hexing with abandon. Wizarding children seemed to be deeply familiar with nasty spells from the first time they set foot on the Hogwarts Express. It was as if they had all grown up hexing and jinxing their siblings. Ernestine, on the other hand, had been crushed to learn that the Bedazzling Hex didn't involve any rhinestones or metal studs. She was still rather disappointed about it. "What sort of hexes are you jinxing people with?"
George narrowed Professor Snape's eyes at her. "How much champagne have you had?"
"Just a sip."
"That was probably a sip too much. When Snape wants to poison someone, he makes sure the job's done properly – I'll give 'em that much."
"Mostly just horribly embarrassing recurring conditions, at this point in the evening. Custom curses of the sort that people will agree to anything so long as we help them clear it up. I'm particularly fond of the modified Shriveling Curse." Fred waggled Tonks' eyebrows suggestively. "You can guess what it shrivels."
"The flagrante delicto hex was also rather brilliant," George said with blatantly false modesty.
"If you do say so yourself," Fred supplied.
"I do say so Snape's self!"
Ernestine was rapidly coming to the conclusion that they did not need her help and it came as something of an enormous relief. "So that's it?"
"Just about," George confirmed. "Just the grand finale left."
"A demonstration of our new line: Miraculous Mystic Mayhem Makers Pyrotechnics Compendium incl. Demon Dung."
"Demon Dung?"
"You brought your brolly, right?"
"I must've missed the memo." She grabbed another canape off of a floating tray and snagged a seat beside Fred. She rather figured it was the safest seat in the house. "What's this one do?"
Fred inspected it then leaned back for George to do the same. "Flirting Fancy?" George hazarded. "Oh, no, that's got a Perverted Daydream Charm. Some nasty work, there. We're quite proud of that one."
"Though we're still not sure of the market."
She ate it anyway. "So now we just sit back and wait for the fireworks show?"
Fred grinned. "It's going to be a blast."
AN: No update next week. Alas, I will be far away from anything even remotely resembling internet. I'll see you back here on the 26th!