Of the thousands of questions still abuzz in Darcy's mind, at least one of them got a quick answer. The word apparate meant teleport.

The last words of his intended question "—es that mean—" spurted from Darcy's mouth while he was already processing the explanation. Mercifully to the circumstance, Carrow was too occupied to notice. In the fraction of a second it had taken for both of their bodies to solidify on the grassy forest grounds, Carrow had taken to tapping his wand into what, at first glance, appeared to be thin air.

"Headmistress! Headmistress! Lover of faces and assorted appendages," Carrow skimmed the tip of his wand along an invisible curve. Under the pressure, the space behind it started to ripple, transparent yet distorted.

A castle stood in the distance, radiating the orange light of burning flames from each window. Its spire and peaks stood tall, the one unnatural object in the wilderness, casting its majesty over everything else. It was far too distant to touch, yet, it beckoned every being towards it, the light lording over its domain just beyond the barrier's reach.

Darcy pointed his own wand against the rippling surface. A literal spark sprouted up, angrily yellow, and skipped upwards along the barrier. He poked it again a few steps down, ignoring whatever the teacher was saying in favor of testing the force field. He could picture this invisible net stretching around the school. If the curve was any indication, the barrier was round and all-encompassing, sizable enough so that the arch of the sphere wasn't immediately apparent until he'd been looking for it.

He'd barely pulled himself from the analysis long enough to hear Carrow half-mutter, half-exclaim "oh gormy," which was neither a spell in Latin nor a word in general. He raised his wand over his head and shot out a series of three, smoking flares. Each popped loud enough to make Darcy's feet bounce up involuntarily.

Carrow's head jostled up with the sound, his attention springing from sparks to Darcy's face. The awe of watching a firework still settled in his sunken, near-black eyes, the enthusiasm clashing with his features. "How are you?" he chirped.

It threw Darcy's eyes to blink that he was willing to describe a grown man's voice as chirping. He raised his own hand towards his neck, ruffling the back of his hair in the hope of looking less awkward than he felt. "Conscious."

"I'd hope so, since you're talking and all that. Sleep-talking, like sleep-walking, that's pretty useless for accomplishing stuff, aside from making noise. It does do that," Carrow babbled. His head tilted back, his chin pointing up towards the smoke in the sky.

The intensity of that focus should've drawn Darcy to look in that direction. Instead, he looked only at the teacher, discomfort taking a stranglehold. He hadn't seen a face that entranced since Atticus on Christmas morning. To have that look on a grown man was just wrong.

"Freud might argue otherwise," Darcy mumbled.

Carrow shrugged back. "Sure, yeah."

"You know Freud?" Darcy muttered, his nose shifting to the left.

Carrow's shoulders had never dropped far enough for the shrug to stop. "Well, not really. Whatsoever. It's more, well, in my experience, anyone might do anything. It's a beautiful word, might; ambiguous, superfluous and generally useless."

In spite of himself and his reason, Darcy's attention did start to slip from Carrow alone. The all-consuming darkness of the countryside sky invaded his view. The smoke of the spells had faded out, leaving only the glimmering contrast of far-away fires fighting the abyss of worlds beyond reach, of the probable nothing and possible everything.

It was so beautiful here, it practically forced Darcy to tarnish it somehow.

"I might transform into a giant mechanical lizard monster, that could happen," Darcy countered, a lemony bitterness trailing from him.

Again, Carrow stayed blasé. "Go for it. As long as you're not in class. I wouldn't know where to put that size of desk." Instead of questioning how, exactly, this would come about, or what the benefit would be to such an act in the first place, Carrow settled on slipping his hands into his pockets and leaning further to the sky, his back bending at an angle that couldn't possibly have been comfortable. "Should I know Freud?"

"Not if you want to hold your wand without nightmares," Darcy quipped.

"So, yes, then. I love nightmares."

"You, what?"

Carrow's chuckle crinkled against the stars. "All the thrill of danger, none of the risk. It's training for terrible things."

Perhaps, Darcy considered briefly, he legitimately had been left in the company of a madman.

The force field holding them back was as invisible as the rest of it, so Darcy couldn't exactly see what occurred, but that didn't stop him from feeling the shift. A sudden burst of warmth tickled his eyelashes and through his hospital gown—which it only now occurred to him he had yet to change out of.

A typically childish "yes!" spurted from Carrow. He hardly wasted two seconds before reaching through the now-accessible space. His foot parted the grass, then another, treading closer to the light. He cupped a hand around his mouth and called up to the stars "Thank you, we'll be right up. No lefts at all."

Who, exactly, he believed he could continue to be contacting in this wilderness would be another entry in Darcy's ever-growing collection of unanswered questions. The point fell out of focus as soon as Carrow waved his hand towards himself, either ineffectively fanning himself or, as was far more likely to the context, beckoning Darcy ahead. "Come on, this way. Into the only castle in the whole area."

Darcy raised his wand overhead once more, checking that the barrier was indeed not in range. No sooner did he step to the other side, the grass reaching over his ankle socks to tickle his skin, did he see his wand spark again, the barrier setting into place once more.

He forced his attention from the shooting gold spark, over to check his tour guide. Carrow marched ahead, each stride longer than the last by force of will alone, down the long and winding meadow to the school. Darcy's feet paused, momentarily confused. "We're not teleporting again?"

Carrow didn't stop to speak. Instead, he shook his wand as one might a torch without batteries, prompting it until it had a glow of its own. Carrow cast the beam ahead, illuminating the path in front of them. Only then did he bother to look back. "What'd you mean?"

Darcy struggled to recall the word. He kept thinking teleport, yet, there was some other way they'd said it. "Vanishing. The, appearing—"

Carrow snapped the fingers of his one free hand at the realization. "Oh. Apparating! Yes. No. We aren't. Not on school grounds. Against policy, you see, or, rather, don't see, but, you sort of have to know regardless. Come, come. Might not be bad to have you on your feet, anyway, with the, generally needing to walk to your classes tomorrow and so. You think you can handle it, right?"

As unsteady as his legs felt, if he measured them, Darcy thought he could do it. More influentially, he was much too stubborn to admit he couldn't, so he bobbed his head and continued.

The grounds were silent, and not in the peaceful way. The wind didn't so much as howl but swirl, echo and twirl again. The gust kept whipping the end of his gown. As mercifully abandoned as the area was, so Darcy could avoid making his first impression at school in what was essentially a paper dress, the isolation was just as much a danger. Anything could happen here, and the lone witness would be the kind of man who snapped at his ideas and loved nightmares. Worse yet, the silence let Darcy think.

That was far more a danger lately than he preferred.

The tension stepped in his mind, building to a boil. He wasn't sure how long they'd been walking. The castle seemed far closer than it had before, about halfway so. He'd managed to catch up to the professor, who, it seemed, had also slowed down to allow that to be the case. Darcy's occasional limping wasn't exactly hasty. He'd managed to find enough stability, however, that he allowed himself to speak.

"Professor Carrow," Darcy called.

Carrow turned his head, but not his wand. The angle cast half of his face in indistinguishable shadows, concealed with black. His answer was almost a hum. "Mhm?"

"Do you know the conditions of me being accepted?"

Carrow's steps slowed slightly, again allowing Darcy to catch up. He waited until Darcy was back at his side to answer up.

Only now, when Darcy was this close to Carrow and explicitly trying to pay attention to him, had Darcy realized his eyes were level with Carrow's forehead.

"That you're not a beast pretending to be a wizard, and you don't plan to destroy us all. Other than 'no mass murders', not really, no," Carrow's hands shifted up in his pockets while he shrugged.

"So it's contingent on the survival of the people who attacked me?" Darcy struggled to understand.

"And other things. The other things're more relevant, considering. They're fine, already, those people, I'm sure." Carrow sounded dismissive as ever. His attention remained set ahead, admiring the building and the golden aura of candlelight around it.

"Those people were turned to iron," Darcy stressed the last words, trying to insert all of his implications in there. Sure, his mother had said they survived, Harry had said they survived, but Darcy had read Ender's Game often enough to know that might not be true.

Carrow and his dishonest smile, in their own way, might seemed more trustworthy in their dismissal. "And they got turned back. What magic does, magic undoes. Anything but death."

"But, if their organs stopped working, became inanimate, if the matter reversed to its original chemical composition, even at once, the electric signals for thought, to make organs work, those would've been stopped, at least initially. How do those start up again?"

"Because they're healed with magic?" Carrow questioned his own explanation, likely because he had some difficulty understanding the question.

Darcy hunched and pressed forward, trying to angle himself to a better view of Carrow's face in this darkness. "Was there a healing spell mimicking electricity? Magic defribulators?"

Carrow's eyebrows wrinkled at their slightly different angles. "Maybe. Probably not, given I don't know what it means, but, maybe, given, me not knowing what you mean and all."

Darcy slid back to a standard walk. "Then how does it work?"

"Complicatedly."

"The castle's over two km away. There's time," Darcy guessed, being far more definitive about things he had no way to know.

As tended to be the case, Carrow hadn't bothered to correct him. Whether this was because magical people had no sense of the metric system, or Darcy was correct, he'd not bother asking. He was far more concerned with getting someone to explain to him how in the world he wasn't currently guilty of some variant of manslaughter.

"It's a function of transfiguration, I guess, what's there to start is what's there to end, long as you do it right. Or appropriately wrong. Turning something living to something non-living, it's not a full switch. What makes up the object, it's all still in there. It's merely squished down in the casing the spell put over it."

Carrow paused. He put his hand on Darcy's shoulder, ensuring his attention and, less intentionally, his momentary discomfort. "All those bits and pieces are so blocked out from anything else, to them, it's like, time and change aren't working. They freeze. Then, when the spell stops, that shell unlocks, and the object gets to know, hey, it's a new second, we should do what we were doing before, and it all starts up again, unaware anything passed."

"So, transfiguration initiates suspended animation?"

Carrow seemed doubtful enough that it was entirely possible Darcy hadn't understood a word of it. His left hand dislodged from his pocket to press under his chin. "In at they're all inanimate for now and now only, if that's what that's getting to."

"So someone could find them a decade later, un-do the spell, and the cursed person'd have come out as old as they were when it happened?" Like Han Solo frozen in the carbonite could be unfrozen and he'd also be alive, Darcy supposed, but couldn't articulate as the reference would be lost.

Carrow bobbed back. "In body, yes, that's right. For a person, in spirit, not exactly. They'd have sensed a little something or possibly even everything, but, that's to do with souls and I don't know enough about those to pretend I know about them, so, assume the second half's only half right."

Dismissing how confusing that concept was, there was another question that left unaddressed, one that involved substantially less death, yet was just as perplexing. "Then why's acceptance tentative?"

"Don't know."

"To ensure I'm not a psychopath?"

"Probably not. We've taught many psychopaths. Might be due for some re-evaluation on that, come to mention it, and uncomfortably dwell on it," Carrow silenced his laugh to a light, rustling chuckle at the back of his hand. He let his hand slip towards his neck. "I think it's more, the last record of magic starting after an eleventh birthday was a Belgian nun in 1987."

"Wonderful," Darcy noted sarcastically.

As usual, Carrow missed the sarcasm. He was so good at not noticing, Darcy might have to wonder if he was doing so not from ignorance, but to mess with him.

"Her sisters didn't think so. The whole place called three droves of exorcists. Any clue how many exorcists are in a drove? I don't know, either, I'm guessing maybe six? Do muggle droves involve those motorable vehicles?" he guessed. "I don't speak about droves, much. Here, they're more, an unidentifiable unquantified lump of indeterminate number. I usually think of it as at least five, no more than forty, though that might be more because I never see more than forty people in one place at a time that doesn't involve sports or food. What do you think?"

"You should buy a dictionary for recreational reading," Darcy snarked.

Again, Carrow missed the implication, instead moving straight to surprise. "Muggles have dictionaries?"

Carrow's meandering ideas continued on with his body, both of them weaving across the way. The longer they trailed, the simpler the steps became, and the further Darcy's own ideas started to stray. He realized that, in all this walking, Carrow had neglected to mention exactly what he was a professor of aside from his own terrible ideas.

The eerie calm of the long walk in gave Darcy some time to find both a stride and his bearings. Beneath all the panic, for a fraction of a second, he might've dared to identify a shake or two in his chest as exhilaration.

By the point Carrow started pounding on the drum of Darcy's shoulder, Darcy had to remind himself he was supposed to be unsettled, again.

"Oh, would you look at that? Or not. It's still there if you don't, so, doesn't really matter that much, unless you care about walking into walls," Carrow immediately lost confidence in his own assertion. The light had disappeared from the tip of his wand, the beam no longer necessary when enshrouded in the castle's glow. He pointed at the wooden door, uttered a spell just garbled enough for Darcy not to identify the syllables, and pushed his palm against it, propping the hallway open.

Carrow's coal-tinted, googly eyes rattled up to the ceiling. He addressed the castle not with awe, but as if he was talking straight to a person. He very well might have been, considering. "Headmistress! Headmistress McGonagall! We're here! And about to stop shouting for you, now." Carrow glanced down, checking at the still-stationary Darcy. He nudged his back, pushing him towards the corridor ahead.

As desperately as Darcy wished to stop being amazed, when his eyes drifted off the ground to the portrait-cluttered walls, he was crushed by the knowledge it would take a while. The overwhelming warm tones of the exterior were even more oppressively orange and cozy from the inside. His imagination dashed far ahead of him, reluctantly identifying it as the most comfortable version of a Dungeons and Dragons setting he'd ever hope to encounter, fictional or otherwise.

Darcy had hardly managed a first footstep before someone else tread into view.

"Carrow," a voice tread over a staircase, traveling down to the pair below. A woman stood above them, dressed in a dark green tartan cloak. A stack of books was nestled between her arms, each them thicker than the last. Darcy could see gold lettering along the spines, but, in spite of widening his stare up at her, could not hope to make out the words.

Professor Carrow stomped one foot to an immediate stop at her call. He shifted closer to upright, his stance still wobbling, though not consciously so. "Headmistress. A person at this time of night, how nice."

"I should hope you don't mind leaving Dursley in my care. If you hurry, there may be some food left in the kitchens," she suggested.

The headmistress set one hand away from the books and onto the railing, tracing her future path on the way down. Carrow firmed an uncomfortable grip on Darcy's shoulder, anchoring him in place. His smile broadened back to salesman-mode at his boss. "For sake of breakfast, there'd best be. Biscuit stash in my desk won't feed a school—"

She cleared her throat. "Food from this evening."

He managed an "hm," with no clear indication of positivity or otherwise.

Darcy tried to catch a closer glimpse of his surroundings. The staircase started to shift while the headmistress was mid-step, pivoting from one starting point to the next. She continued without a second's pause. It hadn't mattered to her, as the point where the stairs lead to hadn't changed, only where they'd come from. He'd been too transfixed by the transient architecture to notice anything else.

The moment that Headmistress McGonagall had reached the base of the stairs, Carrow backed off. He lifted his hand from Darcy to clap it against his opposite, entrapping his wand between his palms while he did so. His false smile gleamed. "Have a wonderful bureaucratic negotiation."

Darcy had very little opportunity to watch Carrow's back, as well. No sooner had the professor finished talking had the headmistress filled in the gap. She didn't bother with any waves, instead stepping onwards in the intended direction. "Dursley, follow me."

A part of Darcy's brain was tempted to add 'to the depths of hell'. His imagination kept saying this would end the way it had begun—with countless unspeakable mistakes and questions with no good responses. Instead, he settled on something far more vague and reasonable. "Where and why?"

"To my office. I presume you'd prefer not discussing your future in a crowded corridor." A safe enough assumption that Darcy bobbed his head to agree.

Only from this angle could Darcy finally see the spines of the headmistress' books. The closer he looked to the scrawl, the less they seemed like books at all. There were no names listed on them. Ribbons attached to the binding marked various pages in the plain leather-bound tomes. His instincts supposed they were journals.

In that brief moment of silence, Darcy couldn't help indulging the thought that they had something to do with him, too.

"I understand that your younger brother has already told you about Hogwarts," the headmistress asked, forcing Darcy back to attention.

He uttered a quick "affirmative," at the wall, struggling to sound less distant than he kept thinking he must have been.

Whatever the headmistress kept thinking about him, it couldn't have been that far from the truth. He hadn't even had to ask her for her words to answer him. "I assure you, though the circumstances of your acceptance may be unorthodox, we aren't questioning your eligibility. No matter what you might hear later, you have as much of a right to study here as any other student. What we need to determine are your house and your curriculum."

"So, I'm staying?"

"Provided you give the staff no reasons to change their minds, yes. You should thank your uncle for that. Few people alive today possess the strength of will to tell him no. Be aware that I'm very much one of them."

As challenging as it was to take most adults seriously, in this case, Darcy was willing to assume that wasn't a lie. He'd reluctantly put on some respect to answer stiffly. "Yes, ma'am." Even he had the sense not to cross someone who, at this moment, controlled the next three to seven years of his life.