Contrary to popular opinion, the Wallington had nothing to do with beef. The Wallington Arms was a pub nestled off the train stop for the town of the same name. It'd hardly taken more than half an hour for Darcy to sneak from home in Little Whinging, past the painted black panels of the Wallington's storefront and to its significantly shadier side door. The moment he'd nestled himself between a dumpster and a wall, he texted Liv a single word. 'Here'.

Darcy wasn't quite sure how long he'd been waiting for her to open that door, but one sound of her voice made it worth it.

"Hey, the—oh my god," Liv squeaked.

There was a certain hypocrisy in the shock, Darcy supposed. Liv had opened the door in a ripped, stud-covered kilt and a t-shirt with a googly-eyed cheeseburger on it, and yet she was gaping at him over fake glasses and a floppy blonde wig.

Darcy pointed a finger and his phone towards his own temple as dramatically as one could. "What do you think? I lose ten IQ points?"

"Is your plan to attract baby birds? If so, A plus."

"To pretend I can't use hair gel."

"Ok, that's. Whatever. So," Liv stepped back, holding the door open enough so that Darcy could pass by. Her eyebrows crinkled, wiggling in a distractingly caterpillar-like fashion. "Can you tell me what the plan is before I go onstage? I'll sing better knowing you're handing George his butt back."

Yes." Darcy tugged down one side of the wig, adjusting it to hide his own hairline. He waited for Liv to ask a more specific question, but she kept quiet. He returned the stare. "Not telepathically?"

Liv crossed her arms, strangling her guitar's neck in the process. "With words is nice, yeah."

Darcy took a step away from the door and towards what he presumed was the stage. As most back corridors were, the lighting was plain, the walls were dreary and the passages winding. As far as Darcy could see, there were three paths—one to the stage, one to the main dining area and one towards nowhere obvious.

Darcy turned towards nowhere. Liv trailed along. He could hear her footsteps well enough to know she was listening, and explained accordingly. "I'll link to his PIN, BTcrack his mobile and transfer-wipe his data to my netbook. Then use the findings to crack and corrupt any backups on PC."

Liv's footsteps hastened, rushing after him. "Excuse me, what?"

Darcy shrugged. "I'll hack his phone with his internet connection, take his data and crash his systems." He slowed his pace, allowing Liv to catch up.

"Through his phone?"

"Bluetooth accessibility's an unsecured micro-network. No one locks them. Same philosophy plus fifty for equipment, I could hijack and crash a ruddy car."

Darcy turned a corner and immediately was confronted by a door. He pressed his ear against the crack, checking for anything worth listening to. A few sets of footsteps and a couple of boiling pots crept their way through, but by far the loudest noise Darcy heard was Liv's voice. "Will he see you with the hacking stuff?"

Darcy raised a finger to his lips. "Doubt it."

"And you'll know the phone's his?"

"George Davis. I've got a photo and number reference. So, yeah."

Liv took a step backwards to check where Darcy was pointing. Her lips rolled inwards, and a sort of confused acceptance came over her. She glimpsed down to her wrist, checking a rose gold men's watch dangling limply over it. "Ok, I have no clue how any of that means stuff, so, you mind doing it first and telling me nothing later? I think I'm on in ten? Fifteen?"

"Wonderful. I prefer nothing."

Liv squinted at the watch's face, as if she wasn't used to reading it. She half-waved the hand still clutching her guitar. "Great. Go."

Unusual as it was, Darcy opted not to think too much about it. As far as he'd noticed of Liv, her sole consistence was in being deliberately unusual.

Darcy started to step back, but stopped when he caught sight of the kitchen window. The sanded glass circle pointing through to the dining room showed no silhouettes, but they did give a peek at an idea.

"Wait. One question. Your psycho. Are there people sitting at each table around him?"

"Pretty sure, yeah. Someone might've left? I don't know..." Liv answered.

In that case, Darcy could assume the easy version of the plan wouldn't work. Sitting down next to George and hacking in plain sight was only logical if he wasn't stealing someone else's chair. He'd have to catch him elsewhere.

"Then, at restaurants, what would he order?" Darcy asked towards the window just in time for Liv to look up from her watch.

"Chips, pizza or nachos. Does this really matter? I think I have to go, like, now?"

Darcy nudged the edge of the kitchen door. He tilted his head to peer through the new crevice, checking where the workers were standing.

"Uh, okay?" Liv glimpsed over Darcy's shoulder, struggling to see whatever he was. She gave up three seconds later and headed towards the stage.

Darcy hardly noticed. He was too absorbed watching the workers buzz around the kitchen. There was bound to be a chance to sneak in when so few people were in such a large room. All he had to do was see when no one else would see him. He could narrowly make out the waiters' attire when they picked up their orders. The uniform half-aprons were hanging in the back right corner, beside a work computer.

Darcy swung his messenger bag over his shoulder. He pulled off just enough of his shirt to tuck the strap under and pull the bag back, so it would only be visible from directly behind him. The entire time, he kept his focus ahead, staring straight through the crack by the door. He rummaged through his pocket for a small cardboard box, ensuring it was, indeed, there.

Hardly four minutes into his extended staring, Darcy heard a familiar voice muffled through multiple walls. Her words crackled through a set of speakers she'd been standing far too close to. It took a few words before her voice stopped distorting. "Hey, there, girls and otherwise. I'm Liv Hollender. This first song, I wrote to speak to the second most shared feeling among people, and that's how badly we'd really like our ex to gain seventy pounds and never talk to us again. Unless they're giving back that disc with the three action movies on it. Like, seriously, dude. Buy your own."

Whether it was fortuitously or by sheer coincidence, a few seconds after, the one chef left in the kitchen stepped out into the dining area.

The instant the opposite doors shut, Darcy pushed his way through, barging in somewhere he didn't belong as if he knew precisely why he was there. He snatched an apron from the uniform station and tied it loosely around his waist. He rushed forward towards the finished order counter, checking his pocket for a name tag on the way. No such luck. He'd deal with that, later.

A few cords passed through the swinging doors. Liv's voice called out, accompanied by the unsteady strings of her impassioned few, repetitive cords of accompaniment. "You're so jelly I could push you into a mold. You really think I should put my life on hold? I'm not a goddamn mourner, but if I…" she sang with considerably more enthusiasm than appropriate for the acoustic accompaniment, the lyrics, or the state of humanity in general.

Still walking, Darcy reached into his pocket for the box of laxatives he'd brought. He tore the paper off the box, then the paper satchel inside, and then tucked the open pouch up his sleeve. Just as he was finishing the slip, the circle-windowed doors swung open, and the chef plodded back inside. Darcy raised the hand he'd just been using with a needlessly pleasant "hey." He grabbed a plate of nachos with salsa off the prepared food counter, and casually pushed ahead into the restaurant.

The room lit up with its uniform brightness, as if the whole place had been covered by a golden photo filter. From chairs to couches to the curtain-bordered stage, the building radiated the comforts of a family room lost fifty years ago in a time machine accident. Darcy didn't have long to stand around without arousing suspicion, so he paced slowly onwards with the nachos in both hands. He angled the plate to hide his lack of a name tag.

The man Darcy had seen in the picture was scraggly, gaunt, and put little effort into not appearing that he'd recently swam through a sewer. In what was otherwise a family-friendly establishment proper enough to be described with the word 'establishment', Greg and his compatriots clearly stood out. A table of two men towards the farther end of the room had both angled their heads towards Liv. They weren't speaking. One wore an oversized letterman jacket and black lipstick, and was generally proportioned like a clean-shaven garden gnome. His presumed friend, the scraggly-faced man, was even more like a skeleton with hair in person than his picture implied.

Darcy intentionally walked straight past the crowd, until he could get himself lost behind a piece of décor—namely, a wide, standing lamp. He bent over as if going to fix his shoe. Instead, he tilted his sleeve down to pour the powder in the salsa. He stirred it quickly with his finger while keeping his angle low enough to hide it, then popped back up.

Darcy put on his best lying grin and strode quickly towards the table of two, particularly the presumed George. He shifted the tray of nachos in his grasp, tilting them just enough to hide his non-existent name tag. "Sorry! Missed you, there. Seeing you, I mean, sorry I didn't see you!" he called for their attention, consciously altering his pattern of speech.

The gnome-like man lifted his head immediately, watching the food tray. Darcy slid it gently to the center of the table and gave him another, fake smile. "Your waitress'll be back with the entrées as soon as they're up. In the meanwhile, enjoy! If you need anything else, I'm Carl!" He clasped his hands by his chest with more pretend enthusiasm. "And if you don't, still Carl."

Only now did the gaunt man look from the stage to see what had happened. The bridge of presumed George's nose wrinkled with what might've been suspicion, or possibly an itch. In either case, it seemed best to go.

"Oi, Carl, where's my beer?" the gaunt man questioned, teetering between plain irritable and full-out hostility.

Darcy's smile faded an intimidate smidge. He pointed to one side, rushing his excuse. "At the bar. I mean. Your waitress' getting it. From the bar. Should be here shortly!"

The gaunt man grunted, dissatisfied, and turned back towards the stage. Darcy accepted the opportunity and strode briskly away, feigning an extra, obnoxious spring in his step to cement the impression he was totally oblivious. He had no clue if they'd ordered the food, but, if he acted dumb enough, even if they hadn't, he hoped they'd assume it a lucky mistake and eat it regardless.

Darcy passed by the stage, some tables, the bar, more tables, and, at one point, a family raising their hands that likely needed a waiter. Darcy pretended not to see. He walked straight out the front door to the pavement, around a corner, then another corner, and, once he was sure he'd seen no one for the entire stroll, doubled back to sneak into a shrub by the men's restroom window.

Once successfully crouched down, Darcy untied his apron. He pulled his messenger bag around, fished out his netbook and propped it up on his knees. He clicked through the loading screen and into the detection program.

All things considered, finding George's phone was a lot easier than it should have been. One check at Darcy's Bluetooth radar later, he could see eleven Bluetooth-accessible devices in the restaurant's radius. Based on where George was sitting, towards the back of the restaurant, Darcy could infer which of the device dots belonged to him. Darcy noted the randomized name of that particular connection '90895428697', just in case he were to lose track of it. He propped his mobile against his lower leg, balancing it near the keyboard, and kept one finger by his touchpad.

The trickiest part of this was the timing. George's connection was temporarily offline, so to turn it on, Darcy would have to call. He'd also have to be in a close enough radius for the phone to mistake his netbook's application for a Bluetooth accessory to establish the connection. In the more immediate sense, this left Darcy with one thing he could do and another that he could hope for. Wait, and believe those strangers would eat those nachos.

One thing most people neglected to consider when contemplating radar devices was that they weren't especially entertaining. It was a bit like watching a live stream of a dartboard no drunk people were using—thoroughly boring. It didn't help matters that, about five minutes in, someone opened a bathroom window so they could smoke.

Darcy covered his mouth with his sleeve and huddled towards the screen, ignoring the pungent, bitter smell as best he could, which happened to be not at all. He gagged silently on the air, hoping in vain that, perhaps he could simply spit out the flavor of eating wood and sour, rotting flowers that kept sneaking through his nose.

The monotony of waiting by a blue screen and smelling a terrible smell weighed down on Darcy. For such an uncomfortable place, he was becoming strangely tempted to lie down. He blinked in rapid succession, struggling to motivate his eyes into cooperation. Whatever illicit thing was drifting out the window, maybe it was getting to him.

With that idea as loosely in mind, Darcy gripped his netbook and swayed to his knees, angling away from the window. He hobbled to stand, but, before he could move, something else moved first. George's radar blip inched across the target field, drifting into range.

Darcy's fingers drifted across his mobile screen accordingly, retrieving the text message of George's number he had Liv send to his burner phone. His joints stiffened sorely around the phone's plastic shell. He meant to click the number and press call, but his thumb locked in place. His muscles seared, as if he'd just finished a triathlon and was as under-prepared as he would genuinely have been to complete one.

Again, Darcy tried to consider what could possibly have been happening. These were less symptoms of a drug than of a poison, yet he couldn't think of an instance where he could've absorbed one that didn't involve this window. He'd have considered it for longer had he not heard a thick, rapid bubbling through his increasingly muffled ears.

The rising smoke intensified, streaming out in a pillar from a widening gap. When Darcy turned to look, he could hardly make out a scene through the faintly lilac-tinted cloud. The glass on the bathroom window was literally boiling. Leaves crinkled overhead, crisping, drying and dissolving away at the smoke's intensifying touch. Darcy's mind told him to duck, turn, cover his nose, or do anything he possibly could to move away. His feet managed little more than a shuffled stumbling towards the trunk of a now-barren tree. His eyes, which should have snapped shut, lagged even in flinching.

By the time his eyelids fell, Darcy felt something else pushing up his sleeve. Bark scraped the back of his neck, scratching him forward into consciousness. When he finally managed to look, his hands had frozen against the base of his keyboard. The screen had turned black, and the power button glowed with the faint orange of sleep mode. More importantly, a red cloaked figure was squeezing his throat.

The bump of the figure's nose, covered by the tattered fabric, was so close to Darcy's eyes that it formed a splotchy, scarlet blob in the center of his view. They turned to peer at two, smaller red blobs in the short distance behind them. What he was saying, Darcy wasn't sure. Each syllable may as well have been screamed through a cardboard tube stuffed with cotton balls. "Where, hrm mrhmhm port and key!" was the closest it translated to.

"I throw out you hrm hit, hipr mit," a slightly higher pitch squealed back.

It may have been less disorienting to hear nothing at all. Granted, it would also have been less disorienting to not have been quite possibly hallucinating a gang of sheet ghosts who'd lost their most recent brawl with the laundry.

"Prhrm you mores hut, I doom my sand," the first figure couldn't possibly have said, yet that was what Darcy's brain decided to hear.

In spite of all of the confusion, there remained two parts of the circumstance Darcy could comprehend. He needed to leave. Also, the slight bump under the upright sphere of fabric was clearly this person's nose.

As quickly as he could, Darcy raised two aching fingers to plunge slightly above and to each side of the bump. What he meant was to strike the figure's eyes. What he felt was a tighter pull on his larynx and the absence air he was no longer breathing.

Darcy wheezed against the force at his throat. His eyelids sank against his will once more. Rather than strain to open them, he jerked forward, smacking his forehead against the closest cloaked figure's face. The muted pain shot through him.

When he'd opened his eyes again, the sky seemed white, the stars absorbed in black, and every color inverted with them. A blurry, blue tattered cloak billowed on each side of him. The third figure's hood fell crooked from their face. They raised a small, thin stick towards the center of his forehead and screamed. "Stupefy!"

Suddenly, even in Darcy's drowsy, weighted mind, a fraction of the situation clicked. Of course this made no sense. It was magic.

In spite of this, Darcy still tried to duck in what would usually be a logical way. Given how he was most of the way to sleepwalking with minimal walking involved, he barely budged, and the inverted blue beam from the figure's wand sent him slamming against the bricks.

For a moment, the muffling in Darcy's ears broke away to hear a snap in his bones. The spell melted the back of his netbook, cracking the screen and knocking it even further from his grasp. He and the broken screen crumpled to the ground, flickering in and out of functioning. His mobile blinked a few feet away.

"You div! They'll find us," a familiar voice shouted angrily. The thin figure beneath the robes which was Liv, or, more likely, whatever witch or wizard must have pretended to be her all day, snapped at her fellow cloak-wearer.

Even from this warped angle, Darcy could see the spell caster flailing their wand at Darcy. "But he's—"

The fake Liv kicked up dirt to the spell caster's cloak, knocking him back. "You think aurors won't track you in this spellhole? Wait for the bleeding potion. It isn't like muggles fight back!" She snapped her head towards the other cloak in a huff. "Gainsley?"

Darcy breathed on the back of his phone. The display stared tauntingly back at him, blinking with the possibility of calling help, if only he could move. He concentrated on his right hand, willing it to at least twitch. Unfortunately, it took the majority of Darcy's concentration to so much as keep breathing.

As the blades of orange glass drifted by that pale white sky, the lack of a life flashing past Darcy's eyes felt appropriately futile. It was the way of the world, or at least of the world he knew of, but never understood. Not a single part of his reality could ever be a whole truth. He was surrounded by magicians who could destroy everything he held dear with one enchanted word. There was a schism of power between the seen and unseen, and he was far from favored.

Still, Darcy tried to move his still hand. He wheezed through the strain, his throat tensing as he tried to gather any energy at all. The noise of breathing gave him away.

"Seriously?" The Liv impersonator turned back to Darcy, impatient as she was irate. "Screw it. Gainsley, portkey me."

Darcy stared not directly at the fake Liv or her cloak, but at the tip of that wand, wondering if he could break it. If his hands couldn't move, perhaps he could at least roll towards her feet at the last minute and knock her to his level. He tried to angle his foot, yet barely flopped a centimeter.

The dead eyes of a stranger wearing the shell of someone he almost knew dug in with an escalating rage. She directed her wand to the center of his forehead, the point at point blank range.

Before the words could come out, Darcy tried, again, to move. He knew he'd failed when she called one, unknown word. "Imperius!"

Another, almost colorless jet of light flashed ahead of him, this one so bright a black, it was essentially a firework across his entire range of sight, blinding him. He could hardly hear her agonized shriek over the echoed ringing in his eardrums. The shifts in pitch made the strangers' voices blur so thoroughly, he could barely distinguish their words.

"Oh my god, oh my god, bleeding little—My hand! My—"

"What the hell?"

"Buckley, aim!"

"You just said—"

"I said better, now!"

Something smashed against Darcy's side, smacking him face-first against the wall. What little air was left in him deflated from his lungs. Blood rushed to his head. Time stopped existing. In its place was a choir of spinning screams and a void of no senses nor feeling.

And then, contrary to his every expectation, he woke up.

The pitch-black sky full of faint white stars shone across the browned grass field. The haze of drowsiness was so thick that the next bright light in his face barely drew his eyes half-open. A stranger's wand shone three feet from his face, waving past as would an EMT's torch.

"Sir? Can you hear me?" someone started to ask. Their words echoed.

Darcy closed his eyes and turned away. His hand shook as it drifted upwards and his spine angled down, allowing him to press the back of his hand to his mouth. He meant to explain, yet struggled to stagger half of his intended word, "poor-," before gagging on his tongue.

"Your parents are safe. They know you're alive. We'll keep them protected. We'll need to escort you to the hospital?" the voice questioned slowly.

Darcy's instinct was to ask this blurry blob to elaborate, particularly in identifying their pronouns. He tried, yet the most he could do was sputter.

The blur set a hand on Darcy's shoulder, likely meaning to comfort him. He recoiled, wobbled, and flopped back against something large behind him. From the inconsistent texture, he suspected it was a tree, though he couldn't quite tell through his nausea.

"Potter!" the blob called out, their words wobbling in such a way that they seemed to be shaking something. "He's awake!"

"I'm on my way! Don't let the oblivators near him!" the distorted yet familiar voice shouted from what must have been a distance.

It took a moment of the light fading from his view for Darcy to place the familiarity outside of an awkward dinner party. "Uncle Harry? So. This what, takes for to, visit before Christmas?" his question slurred with the struggle to command the English language.

"Please, sir, don't push yourself. You're in shock," the medic cooed.

Darcy started to turn his head, both to avoid eye contact and to see what lie ahead. A few innocuous figures with silver badges and raised wands were attending to the scenery. One kept her wand pointed at the tree, coaxing its leaves to bloom anew. A second kept theirs towards the pavement, to ensure no muggles saw. A third kept the lit tip of their wand towards a trio of iron statues resting between the tree while the fourth and last, Uncle Harry, raised a spell of some sort, which flickered in midair, then fizzled to nothing.

The statues' hands and open scowls crouched over a bare patch of dried grass, their metal wands directed at something which was no longer there. A glimmer of red flashed through their eyes when the spell whirred past, yet they stayed completely still.

A sudden question rose to Darcy's mind, and fled before he heard confirmation of something he already knew. Those statues had once been a witch and two wizards, and they'd been frozen while about to attack him.

Had he one more wit about him, Darcy might have thought to ask what had happened and who had saved his life. Even he, in this state, knew enough about courtesy to realize he should have thanked them. Instead, he threw up and passed out.