In Auror training, there was always a frustrating, fearsome day for new recruits during which they were taken out into the woods by Alastor Moody himself and made to look. Some of it was aimless looking; observational skills honed by learning the difference between wind shaking through trees and muffling spells cast along the forest floor, suspiciously too-quiet and absent of broken twigs. Some of it was more targeted: learning to see a scrape of blood on bark, or figuring out where someone had lost the trail, whether it looked like they’d been chased. 

None of it was as difficult as finding one normal-sized blonde woman in this forest, today. 

“Adelaide,” Edgar called out, hand cupped around his mouth. Moody wasn’t here to scold him for shouting and, besides, the point of this little crash into the forest was to find her – not find her quietly. And an apparation-lesson-gone-wrong didn’t hold the same potent fear of tracking a suspect. Edgar didn’t sleep well most places anymore but – perhaps foolishly – felt very safe at the Barns. He had names for the things he feared now, and none of them lived in these woods. 

He was starting to get worried about possible splinching, but wouldn’t an injured Adelaide make more noise than less? It seemed impossible until Edgar remembered that pesky little thing called ‘pride’ and doubt came creeping in at last. “Adelaide!” 

Success came, at last, by the edge of the creek that gently wound through the shallower forest groves. “Found you!” he said with a grin. As though they’d been playing a game; as though he wasn’t very suddenly and very intently scanning her for signs of physical damage, of bleeding, of broken bones, of parts left behind. 

(She didn’t look good, granted – a secret he’d take to his grave – but she didn’t look dead, either. There was a lot of optimism to be found in the middle ground between the two, shockingly.) 

“You’re way far out here,” he added, more to fill the pause than anything else. “Did you hear me coming? I tried to be noisy so I wouldn’t creek you out.” 

The joke was bad, but it was allowed to be; the real reason he tried to be noisy was so that she could call for help if she was in much worse shape, and he would go on the record about how pale and sickly Adelaide looked right now before he’d willingly cop to the protection strategy to her face.