( magic !! )

The quiet, solemn tone in Brittany’s voice speaks of diaster, of them both being on the same page here. This boy and the terrible things that might have been building in his life were like a storm that passed overhead, they left trouble in their wake. Wands and fragmented peices of parchment, things that told a story Victor didn’t think his family wanted to be told. And he hated them, suddenly. Anyone who had known Luca and not helped him, this delicate child. He should have been protected, he should have had better in his life. He shouldn’t have had to suffer. No child should. That was one of the tenants he lived his life by, in this day and age.  

Victor walks with quiet footsteps, when he hears the voices in the hall, the way that they carry. His footsteps are always quiet things, delicate. He moves like a ghost, he always has. Being loud was a death sentance, for little boys like him. It was as if he had been surrounded by predators, one wrong step and a branch would crack, would leave him vulnerable and easy to hunt. So he moved like he was sneaking through the night, even when he didn’t really mean to. 

He slows, at the sound of it. Delieverances pleading voice, the sound of Jenette, clearly at some kind of breaking point. They’re still unnoticed, in the hallway. And he reaches out to take Brittany’s hand. He doesn’t want to startle Jenette, make her close herself off from Deliverance again when she may be about to open up, when her words tell them that she regrets everything that happened here. 

“Father Simon took him away,” She sniffles, tears pouring from her eyes. “To help him. To make him better again. To the old Church outside town. I didn’t think —” 

“Which way? How many of them are there?” Deliverance asks, and they’ve taken her hands in their own. Gentle, pleading eyes. They look like the kind of person you would trust to do anything, to climb mountains and do the impossible for you, just because they believed it was the right thing to do. There was a hint of their own heartbreak in their voice.

The directions come in fits and starts out of Jenette’s mouth. Across town and out of it. Down along the river and near the tree-line, with the old abandoned church and the old abandoned graveyard, relics of a bygone time and an old history. Father Smith was a travelling preacher with an ever-growing flock, and he had made a home there for the time being, until the evil that plagued this town could be rectified, purified through prayer — or fire, if it came to that. He was not the type of man who would suffer a witch to live. 

When Jenette has finished her tale, Deliverance ushers her away, up to bed and where she can’t get in their way. He gestures for Brittany to come closer, and Victor follows her. Deliverance’s eyes are wide and haunted by something. It is clear just from the way that they look, he has experience with this particular brand of monster. They lead the two aurors out of the house before they turn to speak to them, seeming less caged now that they can stand under the sun. “Okay. You should check out the church as soon as possible. Now. Actually, right now, if you can handle it. I’m going to have to go and grab back up for whatever’s going on in there.”

Victor grabs her hand to stop her from going any farther, and she finds herself, instinctively, squeezing his hand in return for the long moment as they listen to the tense conversation around the corner, as Jenette explains, if it can be called an explanation, as she gives directions to where she hopes—god, she hopes—they’ll be able to find Luca before any more harm is done. She’s already ready to rush down there when Deliverance tells them to do as much; she wishes she could say she was clear-headed enough to think about back-up, but she’s glad that they are.

     “We’ll get there as soon as we can, see if he’s in immediate danger, extract him if we can while we wait for you,” she confirms. “We’ll be fine, go ahead.”

They’ll be fine. She knows they will. Between her and Victor, she couldn’t feel more confident in that. It’s the fallout that will be messy—how many people are there, how much damage this Father Simon may have already done, because it sounds like Luca isn’t the first time this has happened. How many no-majs they’ll have to obliviate, if a fight or something breaks out. But their job is to get Luca to safety, and she trusts Victor more than almost anyone else to make sure it happens. 

They can’t apparate—Jenette’s directions were clear enough for someone walking, or driving, but it wouldn’t be safe to try to get there without knowing what it actually looks like, no designated apparation location. So the second she breaks from Deliverance, realizes she still has Victor’s hand in hers, she turns to him.

     “I saw keys, on the kitchen counter,” she says. “Probably for a car in the garage. It’ll be faster and safer to drive than any other option.” 

She grateful, sharply and suddenly, for her father’s insistence that she learn how to drive a car even if she’d be using mostly fancy magic to get from place to place. He’d insisted on teaching her, and on teaching Todd, in his old beat-up stick shift truck the year they both turned sixteen, and she’d spent weekends practicing all year until she got it down. She doesn’t drive much, now, but it’s not something you forget how to do. 

He’s not sure if he’ll be able to play it cool for much longer, especially as Brittany pulls out a blank piece of paper, and goes on like its some artist’s rendition or some shit. Bringing his hand up to cover the grin that threatened to reveal itself, he stares sternly at the blank image, shaking his head in contempt as if the very sight of this woman was enough to irritate him. 

When Goodfellow springs up, it’s no surprise at all at this point that he walks over to them with a slight limp to his leg, and Todd was willing to bet that somewhere in the mess of an apartment was a pair of blue jeans with a patch torn out in it that Brittany still held. 

Once Goodfellow makes it over to Brittany and sees the blank page in her hand, his shoulders immediately slump, clearly seeing the precarious position he was now in. 

“Aw, fuck me,” he groans, then looks between the two aurors as if he was some kid about to get pulled into detention, rather than get arrested for his part in a domestic terrorist attack. 

“I would go ahead and do the whole Agatha Christie/whodunit thing, and explain to you your own crime and how you did it, but we’re good here, right?” Todd asks, no longer trying to mask his smile now. “It’s just it’s kind of getting close to lunch and all, and I’d really rather take my wife here out for a much needed break, than sit in the stinky interrogation room for an hour and a half or whatever.” 

“Nah, nah you don’t have to do it,” Goodfellow replies with an eye roll, “but like… plea bargains… you guys do that shit right? Cause like… if you do, then I’m sayin’ I’m open is all.” 

Glancing over to Brittany he shrugs his shoulders. They’d have to get a hold of the district attorney, let them figure something out since that’s more their department, then do a whole interrogation room deal from there. But that would definitely take a couple hours while they waited for all of that to happen. 

“We could still get lunch,” he offers to her as he pulls out his handcuffs to put on Goodfellow, “maybe get some gyros at that place in Picquery Plaza. Celebrate arresting a blood purist and all.” 

“Yo, I’m no-” 

He has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep himself from laughing at the ridiculousness of Goodfellow, especially as Brittany makes the show of looking through her case file, as if she didn’t know already. The trap she’s laid for Goodfellow is a smart one though, and all he can do is wait with bated breath to see if Goodfellow would fall into it or not.

“A description of her?” He asks as he looks over towards Brittany, his brow creases in confusion at first, but then suddenly his mouth opens like he’d suddenly just remembered something. “Oh yeah, of course… her, how could I forget her.” 

Of course the problem is Goodfellow seems to have forgotten this reported “her” as he seems to be scrambling to think up a description before speaking again. 

“Well, she looked pretty plain, you know? Average height, average build… average hair color…. Nothing really stood out about her.” 

“And just what color would you describe as average?” Todd pipes up, his shoulders aching from trying so hard not to shake with laughter. If this guy wasn’t their Fool then he was ready to eat his own shoe, but the problem was they were going to have to catch him in enough lies to finally get him to crack. 

“Well, brown of course” Goodfellow replies with a shrug. “It was definitely brown”

“Interesting,” Todd nods, and pulls out a notepad from his coat pocket to scribble down ‘it can’t be this easy’, just for Brittany’s to see, but to make Goodfellow think he was writing down every detail he gave them. “And, forgive me,” he adds, feigning embarrassment as if he’d forgotten to write down the information from earlier, “but did you say this was before or after you visited your brother in Mesa?” 

“Before.” 

God, even after years of imagining the day she and Todd would get to work a case together as aurors, she’d somehow underestimated just how much fun it would be, how satisfying it would be to know that she could trust him, at every step, to know exactly what she was thinking, to back her up at every turn. And, as he jumps in to pick up where she left off, doubling down on their little trap of catching Goodfellow in any number of lies, his story all mixed up, it sounds like he’s having fun, too.

      “We have a picture of the person we believe to be responsible, here,” she says, pulling out a blank piece of paper for her case file. “Who we think may match that description.” The complete and utter non-description, but she’s just curious for one last piece of confirmation: whether or not Goodfellow has an injured leg, or if it’s just a coincidence.

     “You do?” he says, sounding surprised, and she nods.

      “One of the no-majs present gave a description of someone looking suspicious before they were obliviated but, of course, we wanted to confirm with someone whose testimony would be more trustworthy. Would you mind coming and taking a look at it, confirming whether or not this is the woman you saw?”

She’s almost afraid she’s laying it on too thick, but apparently it’s just thick enough, because he springs out of his seat—looking relieved, like he’s surprised by the ability to clear his own name so fully—and, sure enough, he’s limping slightly on one leg.

A chill spreads through him as Brittany reads the letter, half finished. It tells more of a story than Jenette had, downstairs. He can see it in his minds eye, this isolated boy trying in any way he can to reach out –– to get in contact with the brother he loved, the one who loved him back. It didn’t seem like he was getting much from his parents, in the last few days of being present here. Things had clearly been wrong, worse than anyone could have imagined. If things had been okay before, they had gotten bad quickly, and Luca knew that things were wrong. 

It hurts, because Luca was innocent. Because Luca was a child. Because he should have been free and happy and safe. But he was out there in the cold, if he was out there. He was probably alone and probably scared, and he didn’t have his brother to help him through it. Victor can’t help the way that he feels, like something terrible has happened, like this might be one of those awful worst case scenarios. He wants to be hopeful that Luca is safe out there, but his gut tells them that he probably isn’t, that something bad happened here. 

And he’d put money on it being that fucking church. Whatever mess that Luca’s parents had gotten into. It couldn’t be good, that much was certain.

Victor heaves out a sigh, ragged, and picks the wand box back up to hand to her. The box, with its wand still inside. If he was going to run away, he would take the wand with him, his one pathway back to magic that he had been kept from. Just using it out there in the world would have probably alerted people to his presence, would have gotten him found by the right people and hopefully taken back to school. “Betting that belongs to Luca.” He says. “Also betting it isn’t a good sign. If i was going to run away from home, that isn’t something I’d leave in the back of my closet.”

He shakes his head, and gets back to his feet properly, pacing around the room as he casts his gaze around. “Britt,” He says, sighing again, unable to hold it in. “What do you think the chances are that this kid actually ran away from home. Cause they’re not looking good from where I’m standing, here.” 

Her stomach sinks, at the sight of the wand, snug inside its box, any last hope that Luca had left this place voluntarily and gotten lots somewhere along the way disappearing as she sees it. Because Victor’s exactly right—there’s no way he would have left his wand behind, and if he did, the chances of them finding him were so much lower. Her original suspicious, her gut instinct from having met Jenette, feel all but confirmed now, and it’s almost certain from the letter that this anti-wix church is somehow involved.

Which means their ability to save Luca will be entirely dependent on just what kind of church this is: the kind that wants to pray the magic out of a kid, or the kind that would rather be rid of him altogether. 

      “We need to tell Deliverance,” she says, voice quiet and solemn, and she knows Victor will understand that what she means by that is, the chances he actually ran away are damn near zero. 

She takes a moment, gathers up the loose scrapes of paper, waving them into her case file with a wave of her wand and sticking them there, picks up a few of the other pieces of paper on his desk to confirm his handwriting in case they need to. She nods to Victor to take the wand, too, takes a moment to try to decide if there’s anything else in this room they might want to take with them.

There’s a sweatshirt, on the back of the chair that’s sitting at the desk. Soft and blue, the cuffs worried down almost to shreds. She’s always getting on Charlie’s case for biting at the cuffs of her long sleeved shirts like that, a familiar gesture: this is a sweatshirt that Luca loves. So she picks it up, shoves it in her bag. For when they find him. When, not if.

     “Let’s go,” she says to Victor, and then braces herself for just a moment, and leads him out of the room.

And from the sound of it, the sound of voices carrying down the hall, Deliverance has his hands full. She can hear Jenette’s voice, from here, tearful and congested, like she’s been crying for several minutes, can hear Deliverance’s quiet reassurances, quiet questions.

      “I never thought they would go that far. They told us they could help, that they would help him, but I never realized they meant—”

He nods to Brittany’s suggestion, not seeing any other option they had left at that point. Langer’s information certainly gave them at least something to think on, but it was clear why at this point she still hadn’t caught the Fool yet. Nodding his head in thanks to Langer, he leads Brittany out of the office, and outside the apparation wards where she can apparate the two of them to their next location. 

Goodfellow’s apartment wasn’t actually all that far away from the Pacific Headquarters building, in fact once they arrive outside of it, he can just barely make out the top of the building from a few streets away. “He flew on a broom from Merlinus City all the way to Mesquite?” He asks out loud, not fully intending for Brittany to be able to answer it. The notion seemed strange though, that flight seemed like an awfully long one, when using floo or apparation would have been far easier. 

Once they reach Goodfellow’s apartment, he knocks on the door, waiting for the wix to answer but is instead met with a- 

“Who the fuck is it?” Shouted from somewhere deeper inside the apartment. 

Glancing over at Brittany he shrugs his shoulders, before introducing the two of them, “Aurors from the Pacific Squad,” he shouts so that the wix could hear him from inside, “we’re here to ask you some questions about the erumpents.” 

“Ah, shit yeah, you guys can come in! Door’s unlocked!” The wix shouts back. 

Following the wix’s instruction, he opens the apartment’s front door to quickly see that the place was a complete sty. Take-out containers and various beer bottles littered almost every surface imaginable, and when he closes the door behind them he’s quickly greeted with a red lace bra hanging off the door knob. 

Goodfellow, he quickly finds, is sitting on his couch, both his legs propped up on it like they’d just interrupted a lazy afternoon of his. His TV is on mute, but when Todd looks to the screen he quickly recognizes it as one of those trashy talk shows that involves paternity tests and scandalous confessions. The words “My wife slept with a goblin- now I’m raising his baby” seemed to be the title of that particular segment, as its written across the bottom of the screen. 

“So the erumpents, right?” Goodfellow speaks up from his couch as he looks up to them, “some fuckin’ crazy shit. Pretty good thing I was flying over when I did and called, or else you all would have been fucked.” 

He tries not to jump to an immediate conclusion the moment his eyes catch Goodfellow’s neck tattoo. If having a neck tattoo automatically made someone a suspect than Caro could have just easily been one too, given the pair of heart-dotted dice on the auror’s neck. Instead, he stays quiet, and let’s Brittany handle the first bit of questioning. 

It’s impossible not to notice the neck tattoo, first thing, as she and Todd step into the apartment and she gets her first glimpse at Goodfellow. It’s not proof, but it’s enough to alert her to keep her guard up, enough to put into place the possibility that Goodfellow might not just be a witness, but might be the Fool that they’re looking for. 

She takes in the scene, as they make their way over to where Goodfellow’s sitting with his feet propped up—and that’s interesting, too, she thinks, thinking about the scrap of denim currently tucked away in her case file, which Medina had handed her from the erumpent horn, and the likelihood that the person they were looking for had an injured leg. He’s wearing sweatpants, she notices, which he was unlikely to have been wearing earlier, if he’d been flying to Mesquite all the way from here, a many hours-long flight, even if you took a break in the middle to go hiking, like he’d claimed to the Nevada aurors. 

Altogether it paints a certain picture of guilt, but they can’t be sure, not yet. And she still has to take into consideration the fact that he might not be the guy they’re looking for, but might have seen the guy they’re looking for after all. 

     “Pretty good thing,” she agrees, giving him a pleasant smile. “We were told you were planning on stopping in the park for a hike on your way to—” she makes a show of pulling the case file out, like she’s checking it for the information she clearly already has on hand. “To Mesquite. Awfully long way to fly.”

      “Well, you know, apparation makes me queasy,” he answers easily, smoothly—and maybe it’s just her imagination, but it sounds too smooth, almost rehearsed. “I played quodpot at school, I’m a big flier.” 

      “I see. Well, like I said, we’re really grateful that you managed to see something, call it in. How close were you, to the erumpents, when they were set loose? We’re hoping that someone will have seen the face of the person who did it, might be able to give us a description of her so we have a little more to work with.”

He takes the card offered to him, and gives himself a second to look at the information on it before glancing back over to the large board. There isn’t much detail there, but what is there includes a small list of possible other cases MACUSA has handled over the years that Langer had surmised had been The Fool’s work, and then a short description of the smuggler which read:

Not the most competent smuggler I’ve seen, but gets the job done. 

Perhaps related to someone else higher up the chain? Thus why NBO has stuck with them.

Eyewitness in previous case reports the wix has a tattoo on left side of neck, but couldn’t determine what it was of due to the brief nature of the encounter. They could give no further identifying features as the wix was clearly using some kind of concealment charm. 

It’s not a lot of information, but it certainly helped them to some degree. Setting the card down on Langer’s desk, he steals another glance at the board, and from what he can tell there’s at least eleven other NBO members she was on the trail of. 

“I do,” Langer responds to Brittany’s question, “the NBO wouldn’t have had the time, resources, or desire really to raise and breed erumpents themselves. My guess is that they employed this smuggler of their’s to purchase the erumpents, and extract the fluid to give to their explosives expert. To their credit, they didn’t resell the erumpents or dispose of them in a deadlier matter, it almost seems they hoped the erumpents would be found, releasing them in a national park like that.” 

Todd’s brows furrow at Langer’s comment as he thinks back to the erumpents, who were now settling into a peaceful life in the middle of the Wyoming prairie. He supposed he’d never thought of it before, why someone who’d committed such an awful act would them seem to give mercy to the poor creatures. 

“So it sounds like our perp has at least some kind of a conscious then,” he speaks up. That was as much credit as he was willing to give the terrorist though. They got lucky with that attack as far as he could tell, if it’d happened during a weekday Hattori and Yaxley would be dealing with a body count rather than a bunch of property damage. 

“I don’t admittedly have a lot on the smuggler,” Langer confesses to Brittany’s next question, “but with how quickly the erumpents were discovered, and how difficult it would have been to transport all five, I’m certain one of your eyewitnesses saw more of our ‘Fool’ than they realize. So far they’ve seemed to just slip through our fingers each run in we’ve had with them- but their days with the NBO are numbered, that I’m sure of.” 

It seems like a small mercy, given the context, that the erumpents hadn’t been killed—a small mercy that they were being housed somewhere safe, now, instead of whatever terrible circumstances this Fool had bought them from. A strange silver lining to a stranger case: between this and the attack on the Squib Relations Office, no one had been hurt, no one had been killed, and the erumpents were better off for it. She can’t help but wonder how much of that is coincidence and how much is intentional. It seems like the only way to find out will be to catch the Fool and get to the bottom of all of this, and to hope that Emmy and Hattori do the same with whoever attacked the office. 

But all of the no-maj witnesses had been obliviated already, which meant that even if one of them had seen the smuggler’s face, there’d be no recovering that information, which left them with only one witness who they could actually hope had happened to see their smuggler. One witness and a scrap of denim on an erumpent horn, plus the knowledge their smuggler might be injured and has some kind of neck tattoo, wasn’t very much to go on, even for her. Unless the obliviator had gotten a description or something else off one of the thirteen no-maj witnesses, it felt like they were wading through the dark, here, Langer’s information useful but not terribly helpful at this stage of things.

It’s almost a relief to let Brittany lead him out and away, down the hallway to the closed door of Luca’s bedroom. His feelings were clearly too strong, when it came to someone like Jenette, the way that she was acting as if nothing she had done was wrong here, as if she cared exactly as much as she should about this. It was bullshit, she was full of it, and he wished that Luca had someone better to look out for him, soneone like Brittany who never would have let this happen. He understands that people like Deliverance do everthing they can, but clearly they need to be doing more –– need more manpower, the permission to keep a closer eye on things as they develop. Assuming everything is going to be okay when you turn your back is bullshit.

He aches with a quiet kind of worry, as they step inside Luca’s room. Brittany directs him toward the closet, and Victor goes. It’s a good thing to look for. Signs of a packed bag, empty spaces, looking for things that a child would have taken. He opens it and looks, but he can’t see anything obviously missing. One singular empty hanger, shoes lined up at the bottom, in front of a more cluttered pile of belongings, some boxes tucked in the very back. He crouches down to look closer, flips one open, a wand box inside. Luca’s. A precious link to the magic that had been awoken in him and his brother, the thing that made them part of a seperate world to that of their parents. This was where the trouble had started for them, with a spark of something different. Their parents might have been perfect and loving and warm, if they hadn’t had magic. But then again, it was likely that they would have found something else to be disapointed about eventually. That was the way of things, after all. 

He opens the box, and finds the delicate wand inside. Not broken, just tucked away out of sight. His brow furrows in worry, at that, and he’s about to say something when Brittany calls him over. Her voice sounds serious, like she’s found something truly important. It makes his heart leap a little bit, a curious kind of excitememt, some kind of hope building up in his chest –– a wish that there will be a clear and easy answer to all of this. A hope that they can find Luca, for his brother, soon enough. He goes quickly, when she does, moves to look at what she’s showing him, setting the wand box down on the floor beside them both, 

“What is it?” He asks, shifting forward to read the words written on the paper, put back together by Brittany’s warm magic. 

     “It looks like a—a journal, or...” she starts, and then a few more pieces slot into place, and she realizes that’s not right. “A letter,” she corrects herself, as the pieces at the top align themselves: Dear Andrew, it starts. Luca’s handwriting from the rest of the drawings and notes up on the desk above. 

     “Dear Andrew,” she reads, going slowly as the letter finishes forming in the air, pages and pages of it. “I’m sorry I haven’t called you. Mom and Dad haven’t let me use the phone, even when I told them I was just calling to tell you that I’m okay. They’ve been acting really weird like that, especially when I mention you, and I didn’t know how else to talk to you if they won’t let me call, and they won’t let me go back to school where I can send you an owl...”

She trails off, horrified at the letter, feeling like her suspicious about Jenette Walker have been all but confirmed. She skims the rest—Luca mentions that his parents have some weird new friends who he thinks are scary, and... some of the letter isn’t there. It looks like he didn’t get to finish writing it before either he or someone else decided to rip it up and hide it in the trash can beneath some other garbage. 

He watches her with a content smile as she moves around this little space of their’s, away from the warm chaos that was the rest of the home. He almost has to pinch himself when he’s stuck in these quiet little moments, that somehow this is his life, a life he’s built beside his best friend, and somehow he hasn’t made a royal mess of it all. If this is his grand accomplishment in his life- not becoming an auror, or anything else, but this life with Brittany and the girls, then he couldn’t imagine a better outcome. 

When she returns back to him, he smiles as her lips brush his, resting his hand at the small of her back as she deepens the kiss. He almost didn’t want to go to the party that night, but rather find some private little getaway for them, a little B&B, maybe a fancy dinner, something where they didn’t have to mingle with a room full of people. But maybe that could be something he could plan for later, coordinate it with Brittany’s parents and make it a surprise for her. All this NBO stuff had certainly scared the crap out of him, but he’s sure she’s shouldering more of the burden, like she always had. 

“Sounds like a deal,” he says after she pulls away. It’s just as he does when he can hear the front door open paired with a strong couple knocks and the sound of Brittany’s father calling out to them. The girls must quickly rush down to him, because he can hear the thunderous noise of four small feet running down the stairs along with the excited squeals of Charlie and Sophie. 

“Pft, being a trophy husband is just part of the perks of being married to you,” he chuckles before leaning in to return her kiss. With how good she looks he has to stop himself from going in for more, remembering the girls were only a foot away. It’s only been a couple weeks since their last date night of sorts, back at Harbird’s, but he’s grateful for another chance to get away from the house for a little bit. At home the two of them were “mommy” and “daddy” roles they rarely got a break from given they had a three year old and a six year old to contend with. At work they at least got to slip back into themselves, but that was work. 

Standing up with Brittany, he shoots the girls a teasingly stern expression as Brittany instructs them to get in their pajamas before her dad gets there, clearly trying to avoid another party dress sleepover fiasco. When Brittany turns he points two fingers at his eyes, before directing them at the girls, wordlessly telling them he was keeping an eye on them, causing both to quicken their pace in a fit of giggles. 

Turning around to follow Brittany, he takes her shoes before leaning in to give her a quick kiss on her exposed shoulder. 

“I’ll leave that up to you,” he laughs, “you’re the one that will have to be looking at me all night. Everyone else though…” he trails off before leaning down to plant another kiss on her shoulder, “will be looking at you.” 

When they reach their bedroom he leans against the door frame, swinging her heels on his index and middle finger as she goes to return her make-up palette. When she does his eyes narrow at the height of the dresser it was on, and how it was unlikely Charlie grabbed it down on her own. 

“If she’s already doing this now, we’re going to be in big trouble when she really starts testing her limits,” he says with a sigh. It really was just a matter of time, and even though he couldn’t have been more proud of Charlie and her early developed abilities, he’d be lying if it also didn’t scare the shit out of him. “Which you know, I will completely blame on you, and those damn Zanetti genes of your’s,” he adds with a smirk. 

She moves to put the palette back, picks her wand up off the dresser and makes her way back over to him, waving it in a gentle sweeping motion to charm any lingering bits of eyeshadow off of his suit before moving to stand close enough that she can see what she needs to do to clean up the makeup around his eyes.

     “I know,” she agrees, glancing back at the dresser. It isn’t the first time Charlie’s floated something she wanted down from a high surface with magic—she’d had to magic-proof the cabinets in the kitchen after one too many cookies went missing, and the toy time-out spot that had served them well enough since the girls were old enough to occasionally bicker over who got to play with what had been moved countless times in the past few months to make sure it was still fair to Sophie, who couldn’t unlock doors all on her own. It’s all been harmless, so far, but Charile’s so young, still, even younger than Brittany was when she started showing signs of magic, young enough that it was hard to predict what she might try to do with it. 

She takes a second, does just a little bit of touch-up on the make up, evening it out, wiping away some that had strayed away from his eyelids, providing a little contrast and a little shadow, so it all looks a little more intentional. And then she leans in and gives him another kiss, deeper this time, her non-wand hand on his chest, straightening down the lapel of his jacket and lingering there.

He’s not sure how long it is until Brittany comes into the girls’ room, but it feels like a small millennia. Once she does he mouths a brief ‘help me’ as the girls’ faces are turned. To her credit, Charlie seemed to take the job of applying the makeup quite seriously, but his butt was beginning to get numb from sitting in the too small seat, and he was worried Charlie would soon use up all of Brittany’s silver eye shadow if they gave her the time to. 

After Brittany joins in, he’s fully resigned himself to whatever fate and face he ends up with that evening. Although he’s sure Brittany would make sure he at least didn’t look too ridiculous, seeing as how he’d be on her arm all night. 

“Pretty daddy! Pretty daddy!” Sophie exclaims once Brittany and Charlie have completed their task, and okay maybe he isn’t feeling as worried as he was if the look from Brittany’s face alone was anything to go by. 

“Alright, does someone have a mirror around here, I think I’m going to die of the anticipation,” he chuckles as he looks between the three. Sophie goes to her toy box immediately and pulls up a barbie sized mirror, Charlie though, bless her, managed to find a plastic hand mirror that only had a little bit of crayon drawn onto its surface. 

Once he looks at himself in the mirror he has to bite his lip from laughing because dear god- he looked like he was on his way home at 3am, stilettos in hand, as he tried to hail the nearest cab. 

“Oh, I’m going to give Crow a run for his money,” he chuckles finally, and just to make sure Charlie felt good about her work, he leans over and plants a kiss on the top of her head. “I look very pretty, thank you sweetie.” 

Looking back up at Brittany shoots her an ultra suave look before adding, “You better watch out babe, I think you might have to be swatting those handsy purebloods away from me all night.” 

He’s got more makeup on than she does, at this point, and he’s right about giving Crow a run for his money in that regard, but she’s not lying when she says he looks good. A little messy around the edges, but she can touch that up with a little bit of magic once Charlie isn’t looking and won’t get upset about all of her hard work being for nothing. So instead, she takes the palette out of Charlie’s hands, along with the brush, and closes them up so she can take them back to her own bedroom on her way downstairs. 

      “You know, I thought your trophy husband days were over when you got onto my Squad, but apparently I was wrong,” she jokes, reaching forward to brush a stray bit of silver powder off of the tip of his nose before leaning in and giving him a quick kiss. “Vesper will be mortified when you show up looking nicer than them.”

She gives his white suit a quick once over, too making sure it hasn’t fallen victim to the shower of eyeshadow as Charlie had put it on, and finds it to be pretty clean, which is honestly a small miracle given how much is on his face. 

     “Okay, I have to go put this away, and the two of you,” she adds, pointing the brush at Sophie and Charlie, “need to get into pajamas so that grandpa won’t have to go digging through your dressers when he gets here to put you to bed. Two minutes, and I’d better see those butts in jammies, alright?”

They’ve got ten minutes or so before her dad gets there to watch the girls for the evening, and she knows they’ll be up for hours still watching cartoons or whatever he’s decided to spoil them with, but the last time he watched them they convinced him to let them go to bed in party dresses because they wouldn’t tell him which drawer their pajamas were in, so it was better safe than sorry this time. The two of them hop up, scrambling over to pick their favorite pairs out of their drawers, and she hands her shoes to Todd before heading for the door.

There’s a part of Victor that wants to get caught up in the protocol of things, memorising the way that Brittany does things so he can pull it out later, when he needs to lead a case on his own someday. More than anything else, Britt is his role model. He wants to be like her, to make her proud. If he can be as good as her or Todd, he thinks he’ll be happy with himself, he thinks that he can actually make a change in his life. 

When they walk into the house, Victor does what he always does –– he casts his gaze around, tries to capture as much information as he can. The hallway, the living room, the door at the end of the hall that hangs open and leads to the well lit kitchen. There would be a back door out there, another means of entry and exit. His eyes flick up the stairs, no doubt the land of bedrooms and private life. There are lighter spots of paint, here and there, scattered around. Empty spaces where it seems like light has discoloured the space around them, hardly noticable at all, some half covered by other things. A slightly ill-matching painting there. A cross hanging here, that doesn’t cover the absence. Missing pictures, missing memories, and he averts his gaze back to Brittany and Deliverance, back to Jenette Walker, and whatever it is she might be hiding here.

Deliverance’s shoulders are relaxed, they’ve taken on a sort of non-confrontantional air, an aura aorund them that says they’re your friend more than anything else, that they have your best interest at heart. It’s clear as day that Deliverance has a lot of experience with this, the art of trying to set people at ease. They look at Jenette, gaze soft and almost pleading, and Victor is reminded of just how much time Deliverance has spent around this family, this woman in particular. It seems like they don’t want to believe that it could be her fault. 

“Talk to me, here, Jen.” They say, and their voice walks the line between comfortable and stern, pleading and authoritative. “I know you’ve got to be as worried about Luca as we are. Just tell us what happened.”

Jenette stays cold, where Deliverance had tried to edge toward warmth. “Like we told the others. He ran away. There isn’t more to it than that.” And as if she needs to explain more, as if because its Deliverance, she needs to offer a real explanation. “I thought maybe one of…your lot, had whisked him away to that damned school again.”  

It’s clear from the look on Liv’s face that they don’t believe it, that they see right through it. “Jen…” They start to say, again, and Victor’s eyes are drawn again to the cross, the faint outline of space that it doesn’t cover up. 

He doesn’t actually mean to interrupt, but he can’t help ask it, point it out. “You took down all your pictures.” He says, voice not too loud, finger grazing over the faint outline within reach. “Of the kids?” 

Her eyes flick to him, and she looks genuinely uncomfortable that hes there, so close to the gleaming gold of the cross on her wall. “Redecorating.” She supplies, cold and quick. 

He can’t help but shoot an eyebrow up. “Your kid is missing, and you’re redecorating?” Because as far as he’s concerned, that’s kind of fucked. It’s not what he would be doing, if he had no idea where Ileana was. He knows for sure its not what Brittany would be doing, if this was one of her children. Hell, even if it was just him, she’d probably be losing her mind looking for him. That was what you did when you were worried, that was what you did when you cared, when you really didn’t know where someone was. 

     “We were already redecorating when he left,” Jenette quips back, quick and sharp, casting a steely look at Victor, mouth pursed in displeasure. Brittany can see the spots on the wall, the missing pictures, now that Victor’s pointed them out—dozens of them, what must have once been family photos. She wonders if they’d taken them down since Luca left, or before—wonders how long things have been bad, here, and gone unnoticed. If maybe Luca had just run away, scared away by the coldness in his mother’s eyes. And then the woman looks back at Deliverance, adds, “Of course I’m worried. I’m his mother. But worrying isn’t going to do me any good, if he can hide himself with magic or something like that. How am I supposed to find him, like that?”

Brittany wants to correct her—a twelve year old was unlikely to be able to erase any trace of themself, the magic too advanced, and magic or not he’s still just a scared boy, or an angry boy, and not a criminal mastermind impossible to track down—but it’s all too clear that Jenette doesn’t understand magic, doesn’t want to understand it either. 

     “Well,” she says, trying to sound polite still, thinking back to the plan that Deliverance had outlined for them in the coffee shop, “we’re going to do our best to find him. Would it be okay if we took a look in his room, to see if he left anything behind that might help?” 

Jenette looks like she’s going to argue, looks like the words are halfway out of her mouth, when she looks at Victor again, his scarred face and his dark clothes, and seems to think better of it.

      “Fine,” she says. “It’s just down the hallway.”

Brittany looks at Deliverance, gives them a nod, silently communicating—we’ll take care of this, you keep talking to her—and then leads Victor back down the hallway, to the first closed door on the hall, a little finger-painted wooden sign that says Luca’s Room adorning the door, like something he’d made as a child and they’d never taken down. She wonders, briefly, how that had gotten missed when all the family photos had been taken down.

She opens the door, and isn’t entirely sure what they should be looking for. Signs that he had packed a bag, maybe, or something else. She points at the closet, tells Victor as much, and then moves over to a small desk, a stack of drawings and writing, a messy mish mash of art supplies and writing implements, a row of books stacked against the wall. She looks through it all for a moment—it’s clear that Luca loved to write, and to draw, and she wonders if maybe she’ll find a diary. And then she spies the trash can, tucked back under the desk, just out of sight, and gets down on the floor to pull it out, kneeling over it.

it’s filled with torn up pages, impossible to tell if Luca had torn them or if someone else had. So she waves her wand, and the scraps of paper start to float, to rearrange themselves in the air in front of her, a handful of pages slowly taking shape in front of her, Luca’s handwriting scribbled across it, piecing itself into words.

He’s expecting Brittany to take them to the obliviator next, figuring that was the next best place to go if they were going to learn more about how all of this happened. Instead though, her telekit goes off again, and half of him is hoping its a message from Hattori, confirming they were indeed right. Instead he finds it’s even better when that bureau agent of the task force is the one who reaches out to them next. 

“Damn that was fast,” he lets out a small chuckle, “I guess this task force isn’t as incompetent as everyone is making them out to be- or at least going off of that message anyhow.” There’s a certain excitement in the air surrounding them, a buzzing that makes everything now they do seem suddenly so much more important. 

Merlin, if he could really help take down a member of the NBO it’d make his whole damn week-hell his year. He was a bit bummed it was Yaxley that got the NBO case, but he’s happy for her, and hopefully if things go there way here today, he still might get the chance to throw a blood purist in jail. 

Shooting Brittany an excited grin, he holds out his arm for her to loop around it. Apparating with Brittany was by far one of the most pleasant of his ridealong experiences, probably because Brittany had become so well trained in the art of a smooth apparation with another by now, it was second nature. 

Once they get to Langer’s office, he falls back into the roll of assisting, walking in behind Brittany and letting her do a bit of the talking. Langer though, seems fairly interested in the both of them, as the gray-haired wix looks between the two aurors a small smile on her face growing as she does. 

“And you must be Cadet Duffy-Zanetti, I presume?” She asks as she looks over to him. It’s weird because Todd would swear the look she shoots the two of them is something akin to pride, even though he’s certain he never met the wix before in his life.  

“Uh, yeah, yeah I am,” he smiles in return as he holds his hand out for her to shake. 

With the introductions out of the way, she motions for the two of them to sit as she walks over to a whiteboard covered in notecards. He can barely read it from where he’s seated, but if he had to fashion a guess, he’d assume it’s intel on the NBO, seeing as how that was the whole reason they were there to begin with. 

“Your potions specialist is currently running tests on a piece of tile Sergeant Hattori pulled from the scene to test it for erumpent fluid,” she says as she pulls off one notecard from the top row. “Your chief sent down a copy of your case file just a little bit ago, and I can say I’m confident that the two of you are investigating a case involving the NBO’s smuggler.” 

Holding the card out towards Brittany he cranes his next to read it, and can see the words “The Fool” written in bold letters across the top. 

She takes the card from Langer, looking at it for a moment before passing it over to Todd so that he can get a look at it, too. The Fool. Honestly, she’s more interested in the board behind Langer than in the single notecard—it looks like a chart of some kind, a dozen notecards just like this one with different names, all the names of various tarot cards, lined up in rows, clearly some kind of order to them, though it’s hard to tell exactly what without a little more context to the whole thing.

But it looks like Langer seems to be charting out the... what, the structure of the NBO’s leadership, even if they don’t have the names of any of the individual people? It’s remarkable, that they could have that much detailed information and yet know so little about any individual person within the terrorist group’s larger machinery. 

     “You think this ‘fool’ was responsible for, what, buying the erumpents, extracting the fluid, and then letting them loose to get rid of them?” she asks, just trying to confirm the connection, confirm that what she and Todd had been assuming from the information they had was what Langer was assuming as well. 

She glances back at Tood, after a moment, checking in for a second. She knew he’d been hoping to investigate the attack on the squib relations office—who hadn’t been?—and now it seems like he really is, albeit from a different angle. They’ll still be able to take down some important member of the NBO by the end of the day if all of this goes well, which is huge, something that basically hasn’t happened in the two decades since the first NBO attacks in the late 90s, long before either of them were aurors.