#dec 80

“Alright,” Dawn replied from her spot in the kitchen where she was currently mixing green food colouring into the largest bowl of icing anyone could ever have made. Christmas eve was tomorrow, and poor Benjy had somehow been roped into helping Dawn decorate enough Christmas biscuits to drop off to everyone she considered a friend, and to have left over for friendsmas. A number that was way too high when doing a DIY gift. Yet here they were. “Get over here.”

Three weeks. It had been three weeks of desk duty, and Frank was drawing closer and closer to insanity. Three weeks of working next to the biggest idiots *coughemersoncough* in the department, and nothing exciting had yet to cross his desk. Until that day.

He recognised the case immediately, including the note to inform the person who filed it of the recent uncovering. Usually, that would involve an owl, or calling someone in for a meeting, but Frank was going to use any excuse he could get to get up from his desk.

He moved slower than he liked, rebuilding the strength in his legs taking longer than first though, much to his annoyance. But he eventually arrived in the obliviators department. 

“Dearborn, a word?”

The Low Street home wasn’t different, and neither was she, not really, but when she stepped through the door Dorcas still expected everything to have changed. After all, the world couldn’t be the same, with what she’d seen. 

Nearly a month after she and James had managed to escape their Muggle captors, but it hadn’t yet been set right. How could it be, when James was still in hospital, and there was nothing in her pocket where the comfortable, familiar weight of her wand should’ve been?

Dorcas angled a halfhearted smile at Zoe. “Did the sofa move, or something?”

Dawn had never been one for mundane situations. Meetings bored her, talk of business bored her, but right then and there in Emma’s office, talking over contracts and deals, she welcomed it. Because it was something else to focus on. Dawn had something weighing on her mind, though, that she wanted to talk about, but it felt too heavy. She just hoped, with Emma’s help, they could keep it light. Mundane.

She was scrolling through the messages and accounts on her iFlown, looking at different brands in the list Emma had handed her when she piped up, “Does this all feel a bit --” she couldn’t even find the words to describe, other than useless.

Whoever had decided to assign Frank and John opposite desks had done something really wrong, or really right, depending on who you were asking. If you were asking John, in that moment, it was most like wrong, given the way Frank was regularly poking him across the way with his walking stick.

It had been a month of desk duty and Frank was going insane. It was a stubborn pride, an insistence that he didn’t need the stick to walk, that left its only use to get the attention of his best friend. “Oi,” he said, poking him again.

11th November 1980

It had, perhaps, been the biggest test of trust the young couple could have gone through. Any couple, really. The days had blurred into one long awful one. Their captors somehow got worse once Maeve escaped, hammering up the window. They were crueller when they were there, fed them less. It was a sick kind of psychological torture, just waiting for the shoe, or the bullets, to drop. The only solace was that they hadn’t been alone. They had each other. To lean on, to fight the cold, to pass the time. But as time went on, even that became difficult. Because at the core of it all, they were simply two terrified twenty-year-olds.

But it had been trust that had saved them. Not magic. Not the downfall of their muggle captors. None of the ridiculous plans they’d discussed. No. During a critical moment, when they heard the doors opening, James had turned to Dorcas and asked maybe the most important question he’d ever asked her -- “Do you trust me?”

The response had come in the form of a yes, and then there wasn’t much more time to think. James was telling her to jump on his back when the time was right, absolutely leaving more confusion than was necessary, and then the door was open. Two muggles, holding two wands, pointed at the face of a fully grown stag, and one shell shocked witch who was frozen to the spot. 

No longer able to use his words, James had to stamp his hoof to snap Dorcas out of it, and she was soon pulling herself up onto his back. It all happened so quickly, and the muggles were too stunned to react as James charged at them, Dorcas hanging onto his neck for dear life. But the wands. They’d need the wands if they had a chance against the guns. 

Giant horns steered towards the first one, knocking him back and causing the wand to fly into the air. Just like he’d asked her to trust him, James trusted Dorcas to catch it, and she did. The second muggle though began to run, snapping the wand clean in half in the process. If a stag could wince, he would’ve, but they couldn’t dwell on the lost wand in the moment. Not when this was probably their only shot.

That was how it went, getting out of there. Through a few tunnels and into the glaring light of day. They’d had the element of surprise at the start, but the muggles still had their guns, and those at the exit had been warned, guns drawn. It was all James could do to continue on his way and run through them, hoping Dorcas had the sense to stick low.

He thought they had made it. The shots that had been ringing around them, bouncing off trees, were dying down, and they hadn’t been hit. Soon they would be far enough away that the muggles would need time to catch up, and they’d be able to apparate safely away, until he felt a sharp pain in his side, the ringing of a final bullet echoing around them.

He staggered, letting out a roar of pain, but he didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. He was lucky he was so large, the bullet wedged in the muscle of his side, inches from his heart. Lucky until they reached a spot James deemed safe and he sunk to the ground with exhaustion, Dorcas sliding off his back. Lucky, until he shrunk back down to his human form and all of a sudden the bullet wasn’t inches from his heart anymore, it was mere millimeters, grazing his aorta and starting a flood of internal bleeding that would soon plummet him into unconsciousness. 

Not before he got the chance to look up at Dorcas with a weak smile and get out, “Pretty cool, huh?”

28 days later...

He’d been awake for a few hours now, when Dorcas came in the room. Of course, the boys had gotten the whole story, but to the doctors James pretended it was all too blurry still -- he needed some time. He couldn’t exactly admit he was an unregistered, and therefore illegal, animagus. It was a shock he’d been able to transform so well at all. 

Really though, he just wanted to see her. To make sure she was okay before they were forced into all the bureaucracies that came with a crime -- especially a crime in this new world where muggles had been involved. The smile he gave her when she came in was akin to the last one he gave her, although he felt a lot stronger this time around. Surgery and a whole month of rest would do that to you, despite the fact his body had deteriorated to a state that would take months of rehab. “Hey you.” 

“This -- this is delicious,” she said, swallowing down a bite of the dish Hattie had brought.

“I can’t believe she’s already one.” Dawn was more than happy to let the conversation flow to the goings on and lives of all her friends, lest she have to talk about herself.