Before he'd so much as registered that he was awake, Darcy knew one thing. His mother had arrived.

"Whatever you think's happening, it's all a mistake!" Colleen somehow managed to combine yelling, gasping, sobbing and hushing her voice all at once.

It hadn't taken much longer for his father to answer. "Yeah, it was. That we didn't know before."

Colleen huffed. Darcy could visualize in his mind how Colleen must've been leering, her left nostril inflaming as if someone had poured jalapeno juice inside of it. She'd swat a hand through the air, forcing Dudley back so she could keep flailing her points. "No. Before was fine! Now, now with all this, war of warlocks crap, with magical assassins. You really expect me to let him get dragged in?"

Darcy could also imagine the blankly steadfast if puzzled look on Dudley's face while he tried to follow Colleen's thoughts, and eventually settled on a shrug. "Yeah."

Colleen probably flung a wagging finger at Dudley next. "Oh, really? You mean that?"

"If I didn't, I wouldn't say yeah."

"Honest to goodness, swear on your grave, you expected me to just ship off my kid like it's nothing?" Colleen snapped

Dudley had the receptiveness of a brick wall, barely raising his frustration beyond a few stern, baffled words. "To boarding school."

It occurred to Darcy, momentarily, that he could stop his parents by sitting up. If they knew he was conscious, odds were good they'd turn their focus to him. That being the case, Darcy made the conscious decision not to move at all. His eyes stayed shut. His hands settled still. Not even his foot would rumple under the blanket. Whatever they had to say, his instincts said it'd tell him more than his parents willingly would.

"Run by people we never even met, doing lord knows what. These people tried to kill us, Dudley, and you're just gonna toss him in with madmen, freaks and lunatics!"

"We sent Atticus," Dudley could barely start saying Atticus' name before Colleen's words overtook his, slightly louder and twelve times more adamant.

"Atticus wasn't a choice! He's sick. He's always been sick, and we saw it happen! But this. How do you know this statue incident even happened?" Her hand—or at least something of a similar texture—hit against something—presumably Dudley—with a fleshy smack.

If she had hit him, Dudley's sole retaliation was with words. "'Cause Harry told us!"

Something flapped, fwacked and pounded. Were it not for the context, Darcy might've thought it a sail in a tsunami hitting sailors in the face. The sound looped so perfectly, it may have been pre-recorded.

"No! No us! You. He told you, like we wouldn't have noticed. Over fifteen years! Did they record it, maybe, take a moving picture? No! They didn't even make up fake evidence!"

"Of course not. It happened."

The cloth flapped harder, crumpling in what was likely Colleens' clutch. "If it did, it's a crime. You know. Those things that need to be proven to happen before they do something? Even these people don't laugh off attempted murder, do they? If they do, I'm sure there're some delightful gang members who'd like to join!"

For a moment, it seemed their verbal pong could go on forever.

"He's not lying."

"How the hell would you know? Can you pull your brain from your stomach for three seconds and think?"

"Yeah. If you were right, which you're not, why the hell would he want Darcy?"

"Maybe since you're dumb enough to hand him over!" Colleen's breath staggered, catching on rocks in her throat. "He's not like Atticus, Dudley. He won't handle it. People, they're not built for magic. It's unnatural. It's, a latent god complex in a stick. Men shouldn't make the world bow. Those that can, once they know they can, most of them don't think they're men anymore. Atticus, I knew what to teach him so that wouldn't happen. But Darcy?"

Darcy could think of a thousand ends to that sentence his mother meant to imply. "But Darcy's an entitled little shit stain. But Darcy's ego could fly around the world in eighty days, then rise into orbit as a second moon. But Darcy's so judgmental and vindictive, give him power and he's a future serial killer. We can't trust him." As much as Darcy knew he should want to argue against the imagined intent, the fact that he was implicitly lying by feigning sleep this whole time didn't exactly help.

"If Harry says Darcy has magic, he does. We don't choose."

"Then we treat it here. Here. It can be like having asthma. There must be some kind of incantation that negates other magic. Why don't you ask the great cousin Harry?" Colleen raised her pitch, mockingly sarcastic. She might've wigged her fingers to indicate magic. That sounded like something she would do.

"We're sending him to Hogwarts."

One piece of flesh smacked against another, practically a clap. "You don't get to use we! There's no we here, not except me and Darcy, and considering the last time you watched him, he got here," Colleen spat her words, barely conscientious enough of her volume to avoid a full-out yell.

Not to be outdone, Dudley spoke louder still. "He's going to Hogwarts!"

"The real we's going home, to my place. You, you're staying here. I'm signing him out!"

She meant it from a good place. Darcy tried to tell himself that. Still, as he lay by, he wasn't only hearing what his mother was saying. There were other words that followed, ones he thought she must have meant, but didn't have time to add. "Don't you understand? We can't trust Darcy how we trust Atticus!"

"I won't let you!" Dudley shouted back.

It was clear neither of them were mindful of being in a hospital, anymore. Colleen stopped bothering with hushing herself, too, just in case being the louder one meant getting her way. "For some reason, you're mad enough to think you've got a choice!"

"You're too sure you're right to see we don't!"

Colleen had to have heard, but chose not to listen. Metal rings clanked along another swoosh of fabric as she parted the privacy curtain as violently as one could shove away fabric. "Goodbye, Dudley!"

It would've been easier to let his mother leave. Darcy could talk to Dudley alone, when she was trying to release him from the hospital. Better yet, he could keep pretending to sleep forever. They were both right. There were no perfect options. What good would anything he had to say really do, here?

In spite of that, the facts loomed. Whether or not Darcy had control, he had magic. Without control, he'd caused multiple explosions and made a far more literal iron man than the world ever required.

With far more breathlessness than laying down should have caused, Darcy rose from his false sleep. His hands clutched his sweat-dampened sheets, grasping for the slightest bit of stability. He forced his half-open eyes straight ahead, at the back of his privacy curtains and his mother's heeled silhouette.

"Mum," Darcy's voice crumpled under him.

Colleen stopped in her tracks, her head flipping back to Darcy. Dudley's did, too, or Darcy assumed it must have, given that they were both silent.

"Darcy," Colleen's bottom lip drifted open slightly. Her hand raised towards her mouth, bracing to say something more substantial.

The words fell from his mouth first, cracking on impact. "I killed three people."

Darcy saw his mom lunging towards him, but he'd hardly had the time to react before she'd sprinted back to him. Her French-manicured fingers tapped the top of his shoulder, grasping tepidly for his attention. "Oh, no, no, Darcy, no. You didn't do a thing. Those monsters are more alive than they deserve to be," she tried to assure him.

Darcy paused, both to try and pull his concentration from his mother's hand, and also to register how that was possible.

"But I would've. Logically," the functions of a human body couldn't exactly be maintained if one was turned to metal, particularly breathing. Even if they had been turned back to their original, organic composition, they had stopped having a pulse for so long, the damage must have been severe. The fundamental flaw in that line of logic wouldn't occur to Darcy until it was explicitly pointed out to him.

"Don't say that. Don't even think about it. It was an accident."

"Before. It'll happen again."

"No, no, it won't. You'll be safe, we'll hide for just a little while. This isn't our problem, it's simply, one we're adjacent to for a little while. It'll pass," her fingers passed across his scalp as might a massager with dying batteries, without energy or conviction to make it more than an uncomfortable graze.

Dudley's voice cut over from the side of the room. A clear tint of annoyance snuck through. "Colleen, shut up. He's going."

Colleen lifted her hand from Darcy's head to swat it through the air, again. Her nostril flared, too. "Jesus Christ, Dudley, can't you see he's distraught? Wait, of course not, you don't even know what that word means."

Darcy could sense the argument coming, just as much as he knew it wasn't the real issue at hand. For once, the stereotypical 'it's not your fault we're fighting' was the exact opposite of true. This wouldn't stop until he picked a side. He had to speak.

"You're not delusional enough to trust me. That's fine. I'm not like Atticus. I'm not good—"

Colleen's arms wrapped around Darcy so forcefully, her hug felt like a slap. He flinched, starting to recoil, but her snaking grip entrapped him so securely, Darcy had no room to budge. Her fingernails trailed his neck, pressing at hair that had barely started growing. "No, baby. No, no, that's not." He imagined each rough edge as a spider's leg, poking along his pores.

"I heard. Earlier. The, insinuation of my instant God complex," Darcy somehow managed to state.

Colleen's tone stayed just as hushed, forcing a veneer of compassion over her frustrations."That's not what I meant."

Dudley hardly moved from the side of the room. He hadn't needed to. His words reached between them, the same level and tone as they'd been at when the conversation started. "What do you mean, good?"

Colleen sighed. She started to whisper an "ig—" which was in all likelihood intended to finish as "Ignore him", but wasn't given the chance to before Darcy interjected.

"Of positive societal impact."

Colleen sighed harder. Her grip loosened just enough for Darcy to manage a decent breath, but not so much that her exhale didn't ruffle his fringe along his forehead. She shifted an arm enough that she could brush the hair aside as she spoke. "Darcy, this isn't about good. Which you are, when you remember to try."

"And you're biologically predisposed to believe," he dismissed.

If she hadn't used up her sigh quota already, Darcy was sure she would've used another one, there. Instead, she coiled her head around, angling so that she could stare straight at him.

"This isn't about morals, it's who you are, what you love. Atticus, he's always kept his heart above his head, off without reason, with magic. Sure, you don't listen, but, you've always known what you wanted, here. Reasoning, rationalizing, chasing technology, to be the smartest person in the room. When you were nine, you told me you wanted to be a coroner, for Christ's sakes." Her hand stroked at his shoulder as she might've pet a cat through a blanket. Her voice followed the pattern, waning as her hand retracted. "A world without science, or all your coding and cracking, centuries removed from anything we have here… You're going to lose yourself. Do you want that? Really?"

It should've been an easy answer. Darcy didn't give one. Instead, he slouched in his mother's grasp, trying not to feel the pressure of her hands.

Darcy's head snapped upright at his father's voice, sending a blunt assertion across the air. "Changing isn't losing. Dying is. Don't die."

The point hit Darcy straight on, so obviously right, it might as well have smacked him.

Barely two seconds of awkward dwelling later, a stranger's voice called through the squirming silence, abrupt and choppy, with a mid-afternoon radio show host's enthusiasm. "Hey. I, hate to cut off totally unfollowable advice, but, are you the Dursleys? Also, did someone tell you this was a hospital? Because people not dying in here is, while the intended point, not really all that common, by the by."

Darcy started shifting to look, but the combined presence of his mother's arms and the privacy curtain kept the stranger obscured. He could barely see his dad move to stand defensively between the guy and the cloth. "What do you want?"

A hand so pale its skin looked almost like paper tried to stretch past Dudley, towards a packet of papers posted on the footboard. "Ah. The chart. There's a chart. Sorry. I'm Professor Carrow?"

The hand reached further still, grazing towards the papers. Dudley shifted to tower directly in their way, even more firmly and defensively than before.

The figure of the obscured Professor Carrow tilted even further from view more behind the looming Dudley. They spoke with enough strain to be squinting every organ in their body, eyes included. "I'm-was asked to bring a Darcy Dursley a letter to Hogwarts? Also, to the castle, as an escort, in the, more proper sense of it. Students and parents outside of our alumni base always get professor visits. Like most pointless things, it's tradition."

While Colleen had busied herself staring suspiciously at their intruder, Darcy slipped from her hug. He leaned further back in the bed, adopting a resting position because it was the only one he'd stand a chance of seeing the figure from.

As Darcy could've already inferred, this Carrow was much smaller than Dudley in every direction. His eyebrows were twice as long as his eyes, one of which seemed to be tilted at least ten degrees off from the other. His moderately firm jawline set an otherwise round face with slicked-back dark hair into a slightly confusing mix of pointed curves, and his jet black eyes ran wildly about the rest of him. Were it not for his tannish blue suit, he might as well have existed in monochrome.

With a considerable amount of craning his neck, the professor looked around Dudley's barricade, straight towards Darcy. On contact, the black eyes seemed less piercing than they were jumpy. "I assume you're Darcy?"

Unsure of what to do, Darcy settled for his instinct. He pointed back at his dad. "Incorrectly, then. He's Darcy."

Dudley stepped right back in the way with a flat "he's lying."

If the urge to roll one's eyes could make a sound, it snuck through Colleen's glare. "Dudley, stop it."

Tempted as Darcy was to ask why she, of all people, was the one who didn't take issue with this, Darcy couldn't find the time.

"Oh. Well." Carrow laughed like gift bag tissue paper, crinkling and strangely disruptive for such a soft sound. He tried to lean his entire body around Dudley. He smiled broadly—a salesman's smile, or perhaps a children's show host's. It was instantly unsettling. "You, ah, wouldn't by chance need an aging curse lifted, would you?"

"Only on my decrepit soul," Darcy quipped.

Whether by will or ignorance, Carrow stayed oblivious to the sarcasm. He reached for the sealed envelope tucked under his arm. "Wonderful. I'm terrible at those. Here's your official tentative Hogwarts acceptance letter." He promptly chucked the letter at Darcy's bed, hitting Colleen straight in the arm. He winced and uttered a "sorry" the second it happened. She glared back.

Darcy turned the envelope over. The parchment was thicker than any he'd felt before, and the scripted but not cursive emerald lettering on the front spelled both his name and current address as "St Mungo's Hospital, Third Floor, Bed Nine", this being the only way Darcy learned he evidently had a bed number.

"Acceptance tentative, or tentative that I'd accept?" Darcy murmured towards the letter. Carrow had a liar's face down flat, so it seemed pointless to keep watching him while both his parents had that covered. He occupied himself dislodging the seal while he listened along.

"Both. There's normally a year listed. But, normally you're short and've never heard of Algebra, so, you and staff with way more seniority than me can negotiate the details with Headmistress McGonagall. I'm just human-shaped transit. But not a bicycle. Definitely not a bicycle," Carrow stammered to explain.

It wasn't the first time Darcy had seen this letterhead, so there seemed little point in gawking. He could still remember when it was Atticus' name on the envelope, and the entire family had been gathered by Professor Longbottom, who'd seemed far less like a horror villain than the one they'd forced into explaining the school, this time. Darcy could still remember how Grandma Petunia had pulled him aside when everything else was done, how she'd made him promise at least three times that he would never hold what Atticus could do against him. She'd never quite explained why, only that it was important.

He wondered for a fraction of a second if his grandma was being held with his parents for safety as well, and then for another how she would react to hearing this. Any other seconds were cut off by the sound of his mother's sharpened question. "Did Harry send you?"

"Which Harry?"

If Darcy he wasn't so occupied reading, he would've answered 'Dresden'. Instead, he started skimming the letter for more details. The Hogwarts Express instructions had all been omitted, as had any mentions of a specific curriculum. In the place of referencing spell books, it instead stated those would be determined based upon reasonable need.

A spurt of a crinkly "a-ha" puffed out of Carrow. He snapped his fingers in front of himself and raced into a babble. "I can, sadly realistically believe I just got this. You're those Dursleys! Atticus' parents. Right?" He extended one hand towards each of the Dursley parents' shoulders, reaching to pat them. Colleen backed off before he could, leaving Carrow to pat Dudley with his cartoonish enthusiasm. "I'm dangerously close to heading straight to suck up with this, but, I actually mean, he is genuinely great to have in class. He asks tons of questions, and he's never thrown his rats at the other kids or anything."

Given the distaste puffing through her nose and chest, for the first time that day, Darcy could see himself whole-heartedly agreeing with his mother. "Does that happen often?" she asked.

"There're other Dursleys?" Dudley asked, less convinced.

Carrow's head bobbed to one side, as if pushed by an invisible breeze. His loose hand tucked under his chin, its knuckles tapping near his lips in the most stereotypical pondering pose possible. "I'd assume, somewhere. There're others with most names. It's even worse when you start including dogs, or towns. Most last names have towns..."

"Except maybe Hitler," Darcy countered, unenthused.

Finally sensing some of the hostility, Carrow lifted both of his hands upwards and clapped them together, snapping his thoughts in place. "Anyway, uh. The script suggests I display and rationalize magic, which, seems just as counter-intuitive as it is completely unnecessary, so, uh, do you have any questions?"

Colleen barely wasted a second before leaning straight in, her neck seemingly stretching so she could loom over from meters away. "Has the staff started discussing his curriculum? How will he get his textbooks? I don't want him losing four years of education."

"I don't know? We've got spare stuff on campus. He can borrow some until we get a Hogsmeade weekend. Oh, speaking of which, you'll need to sign this form here for him to be admitted off school grounds during the year. We can summon rain in a desert but, lawyers are forever." Another crinkly laugh masked what Darcy presumed might have, this time, genuinely been a piece of paper moving. He'd gone back to looking at the letter, so he couldn't quite tell.

Before anyone else could try to, Darcy spoke up, his tone pointed as his suspicions. "Who sent you to find us?"

"Oh, well," Carrow stuttered. It sounded suspicious, but, based on his demeanor, might just as easily be a habit. "That was, the headmistress. She would've come in person, but, our divination teacher was convinced a second year would fall through the stars, stairs, or the other stares. She sends apologies and me, I suppose, or infer. She didn't say, exactly."

"How do we know you're not impersonating a professor to kidnap me?"

"Because, I had the letter?"

"At one point possessed in similar format by every magic-user in the country."

Carrow's voice dipped meeker, quieter. "I could find a friend, or acquaintance."

"Who we'd also have no reason to trust."

Carrow smiled nervously, flashing most of his top teeth in the process. His hands twisted around each other. He was so obviously unnerved that all three Dursleys were on guard, now. "Maybe, did your brother ever tell you about counter-spells?"

"RPGs did."

Carrow shrugged so drastically, his shoulders nearly reached his ears. "Good enough." He pivoted and stepped in unison, past the curtain, away to the grounds of the third floor.

His voice traveled through the curtain, distorted only in the direction it was thrown in. Darcy thought he caught a peek of Carrow's hand stretching into the air, beckoning attention from, presumably, some kind of person. "Hey! Frida! So good to see you alive. If we're not all hallucinating, I'm alive, too. Would you mind stopping and sparing maybe eighty or a hundred seconds or so to explain how a counter-spell could undo a human's transfigured disguise?" he asked.

A healer stopped in her tracks, her words both bemused and exasperated."Icarus! Dear, Merlin, come to haunt me with eternal pop quizzes? Darn you."

"C'mon, it's for a student. I've got dinosaur stickers with realistic roars. Pretty please."

"Oh, fine."

The curtains drew apart, revealing one of the many healers in the floor. Frida's face seemed just familiar enough for Darcy to believe she'd been there the whole time, a genuine bystander—not that he'd ever be fully convinced after what he'd seen the night before. The healer looked straight towards Darcy, assuming, rightfully, based on the context that the answer was meant for him.

"It'd depend on the magic. If it's a polyjuice potion, then, the transformation back is done by time, but, the person's voice stays the same, so, finite might un-do any charms used to change that. If they used transfiguration, then, an incanted reversal would do it. What were the words? Reversare?"

Frida turned her neck back to Carrow, checking for a nod. Instead, he gave a semi-forced smile. "Right! Can you perform both on me? I need to prove I'm not a shape shifting crazy spy person."

"Are you sure?"

"That I don't have other ideas, totally completely," he nodded.

Frida drew a wand from the pocket of her robes. She aimed and swished both spells in quick succession. "Finite! Reversare deformo!"

The angle at which Darcy was sitting didn't give him the best view. Still, he could spot flickers of light sparking from the tip of Frida's wand and smacking across Professor Carrow. Both sets of shimmers burst across him. The first removed the slick from his hair, scattering the strands to flatten across his eyes and forehead. He brushed the fringe aside with the tip of his own wand, revealing basically no changes at all, not even to that uneasy grin. "Ta dah! Static me."

"Was there anything else you needed?" Frida asked, leaning further into the room without raising her feet.

Carrow flicked his wand-wielding hand dismissively. "I could use some grape toast, but, I'll get it. Thanks. That really helped way more than it looked like, in its not doing anything."

"Bye, professor. Enjoy today."

"As much as every other day. Except maybe the one for arbor."

Frida pocketed her wand. She waved shallowly back on her way out of the door, her posture relaxing with each step, as if to silently remark on how weird that was.

Carrow pivoted on his back right foot, turning so he could face all three Durlseys with a twinge more of false confidence. "There. Does that prove it?"

Darcy stared straight on, underwhelmed. "No."

Carrow's stagnant smile cracked ever so slightly. "Well. I'll need you to come anyway, at this point, if it's alright with your parents? The headmistress' not got much time. Schedule-wise, not, life-span, that was terrible phrasing," he checked from Colleen, then to Dudley. Neither seemed satisfied, but, they hadn't moved to strangle Carrow, which was something. "I'm so sorry for the rushing. We'll figure out a lesson plan first thing. Or, among our first seven things. You can have it mailed to you for final approval, if that helps?" Carrow pivoted again, this time to face Colleen, specifically.

Her formerly-unflappably-judgmental glower gave a bit of way. "It would."

"Send it to Harry. We're hiding," Dudley interjected.

"At the moment, more poorly than I'd prefer," Colleen didn't give him the courtesy of looking towards the interruption. She lifted her chin a bit, her pearls shifting along her collarbones, still scrounging for fragments of dignity. "You're sure there's no way we can go? Help him along?"

Carrow's wobbling smile finally seemed appropriate. The hesitance here looked less like self-doubt than it did concern. "We would, but, really, you'll help most of us most by being safe. Okay? Yeah."

Darcy meant to sit upright. He barely moved his hand before the sound of heels clicking across the hardwood called his attention away. His mother's arms wrapped around him, again replicating her snakelike grip.

Colleen's words blurred together, a mass of concern and rushed ideas, as if she'd had to cast them all out at once, or they'd burn away forever. "Take care of yourself. Listen to your teachers. Write to us. Stick close to Atticus if you start getting confused. I'll miss you so much. Be back for Christmas. I love you."

The words were so packed together, he could barely make out a segment from his dad, in near unison with his mother's last point. "We love you."

Darcy didn't have it in him to say the words. The gesture of speaking obvious truths seemed so pointless. He gave a shallow half-nod, a compromise with himself, instead

The paper-pale hands of Professor Carrow settled by Darcy's wrist, pulling him upwards. Darcy struggled not to shudder.

"Can you let go? Thanks," Carrow asked Colleen. She shot him a disapproving look at first, allowed it to fade, and then obliged, backing away. Somehow, she found the will in herself to stand beside Dudley without disemboweling him on the spot.

The icy fingers tingled on Darcy's arm, creeping up through his bone. He pushed away from the bed, willing himself to stand. An instant before he found his balance, Carrow set his opposite hand on Darcy's shoulder, positioning him at a literal arm's length.

"Keep still and don't move. We're going to apparate."

Given that the term 'apparate' was far from a word, Darcy's rush to ask what it implied was perfectly reasonable. He hadn't made it past the "What do—" before the hospital vanished from sight.