WHO: Nora Peakes and Howard Aubrey
WHAT: She stumbles into one of his extracurricular activities
WHERE: Some forest. Somewhere.
WHEN: Today?!
Nora had been tracking the migration habits of some of the wild winged horses in Northern Ireland when she’d noticed some strange activity with the animal and plant life. Birds were soaring away in large, erratic flocks, she’d spotted a few deer acting frightened and panicked but there were no predators in sight, and there were strange patches of plants that were withered and dried up in the middle of full fields of flora. It looked as if the forest was having an anxiety attack, and Nora’s natural curiosity caused her to delve deeper.
“You’re a bloody idiot,” Kenneth spat from his position in a tree above her. Nora frowned, stepping over a fallen log as they neared what appeared to be the edge of the forest. The jarvey continued to mutter, and Nora took his rather jittery antics as another sign that something was disrupting the nature in the area.
“Maybe,” she said, coming upon a clearing. The forest ended abruptly, and in the center of the field was a lone barn, old and worn down.
“Fuck that place!” Kenneth yelped, hair going up on end. Nora looked up at her companion in surprise. Whatever was in that barn was causing the wildlife to go nuts, and she needed to find out what it was.
“Right, stay here then,” she said, and started toward the barn. Kenneth shouted after her, but stayed in his tree. With her wand out, Nora walked along the backside of the barn, listening for any sort of sounds. She thought that maybe a dangerous beast had taken residence inside, but she would reckon she’d hear something more than just the creaking of wood. She slid inside through a loose plank and let out a gasp at the sight of three seemingly glowing unicorns, locked behind bars.
Nora flattened herself against the wall of the barn, hidden away in the shadows, “Bloody hell.”
Illegal creatures was a very lucrative business, so long as you had no real moral scruples about slaughtering ‘precious, innocent’ things. Howard had become very adept at doing exactly that during the war, and now -- well, now he just had another outlet for it that was making him more coin than he knew what to do with. Housing the creatures was becoming an increasingly difficult endeavour, however, especially when things as high-profile as unicorns were involved.
Howard sighed, kicking the door of the barn open a little more and wrinkling his nose in distaste. Merlin, it smelled like his mother’s cooking in here (whenever she killed off too many house elves at once, in the interim period between getting replacements -- eesh). From the look of it, the creatures were apparently either resigned to their fate or too stupid to realize they were going to be pieced up.
“Hello, cash-cows.” He slipped his hand into his wand-pocket and muttered up some charms to light the place more than with just the eerie glow of the hooved creatures and looked around, seeing a plank bent out-of-place. Hadn’t he paid people to make sure this place was secure?
“Lazy gits,” he muttered, stepping toward the corner where the board had come loose with the intent of pounding it back into place.
Nora held her breath as she ducked behind a crate at the sound of the voice. Shit, shit! She needed to get out of here before she was spotted. If this wizard had managed to wrangle up three unicorns, if he was in the business of doing whatever he intended to these majestic creature, then she did not want to interrupt his daily schedule. Nora’s eyes shut tightly as he hammered the plank back into place, securely locking her into this makeshift prison.
She opened her eyes, her stomach galloping like gargoyles. Nora could deal with animals, she’d been expecting something large and with teeth, but this man was---Nora peeked a look around the crate, getting a look through the bars of the unicorns’ cage at their captor. He looked like some fairytale prince, which made this all more unnerving. Humans had the potential to be deliberately cruel, and Nora wasn’t sure she could handle that.
Nora gave her bleak surroundings a look; if she waited him out, she could follow his exit route. But should she really wait? Could she? A low, miserable whine broke through her thoughts and her eyes dropped down the the baby unicorn. It looked on the brink of death, and her heart sank.
“Shh,” she murmured, her wand going out. Nora focused her magic on the lock, muttering a relatively quiet unlocking spell that she’d picked up from one of Nico’s curse-breaking stories. Hopefully her shaky hands didn’t affect her accuracy.
Please, Nora. Nobody wanted to buy anything valuable from someone who looked like a homeless vagrant -- being intimidating was something that could come from more than just being a thug. It was in the way he carried himself even now - the belief that he was inherently better than all the law-abiding citizens letting their small-mindedness keep them from being successful. Those people deserved to be subjugated, really, and he was just doing them a favour.
Did her shaky hands have any bearing on the accuracy of the spell? Perhaps not, but the locks were heavy enough that the sound of them clicking open did not fall on deaf ears. Howard scowled briefly, lifting his wand and pointing it toward the cages levelly.
“Homenum revelio,” he muttered, keen eyes searching in the shadows for anyone that might be there.
“Come, now,” he kept his voice deliberately pleasant, patient, “you really don’t want to try and keep hiding from me.”
Nora bit back a curse, freezing in place. She needed to get out of here, now, but the unicorns! She didn’t have time to think, she didn’t have time to sort out a plan, all she could do was think that if she didn’t make it out of here, the least she could do was to go out rescuing a family of unicorns.
Merlin, what an optimist. Or was it sad that she valued these animals more than she did her own skin? Something to ponder over, if she made it out of here alive.
Feeling a bubble of Gryffindor courage burst in her chest, Nora flung a curse at the door, knocking it off its hinges. Hopefully the unicorns were clever enough to escape on their own because she didn’t waste a second before sprinting away, hopefully towards an exit of any sort. Maybe she could just blow a hole in wall, that could be useful, right?
Right. She was so screwed.
Howard clicked his teeth, annoyed. He saw her form clear as day in the form of that little blinking light in his vision, like a candle -- what point was there in running? In causing that fuss?
He threw a flurry of leg-locking curses at the unicorns, unhurried by their startled whinnies and shrieks. He’d heard worse things in his life than this, and he was far too focused on the woman who was daring to raise his ire to spend much more time than that on them.
“All right, then -- let’s do this the fun way!” He bellowed, breaking into a quick sprint toward the direction that he’d seen her little light flowing out. Now the time for spells was over, at least temporarily -- throwing them in such confined quarters was not going to be a good idea. He lunged out for her, hoping to grab an arm, a leg -- anything he could use to pull her off-balance.
Nora let out a shout as she slammed to the ground. Her face planted into the dirt, and if she wasn’t so used to falling on her face (in her occupation, it was a normal hazard), she would’ve been knocked out cold. Instead, her forearms saved her from cracking her head open and she rolled onto her back to kick out at her attacker.
The glow of the unicorns zoomed past her and for a brief second Nora was relieved that the spells he’d thrown at them had not stuck in place. Unicorn magic was powerful magic, and she hoped that they sent a bit of it her way.
Her elbows locked as she jammed her wand forward, “GET OFF!”
He grabbed immediately for the wrist holding the wand, aiming to shove her hand upward and prevent any spells she might’ve been thinking about throwing at him from landing. He was a large man, a strong man -- and from the looks of it, she wasn’t a very intimidating lady.
“You, missy, were trespassing.” He did technically own the land, although it was under a subsidiary-of-a-subsidiary’s name and not connected to his Gringott’s account. “So I don’t think you’re in much of a position to tell me what to do.” His fingers tightened around her wrist, grinding the delicate bones together.
He didn’t like getting his hands dirty, but he needed to protect his investment.
Nora let out a pained groan, trying to rip her hand free. His entire weight pinned her to the ground and she tried her best to get free but her own strength wouldn’t be enough. Nora tried to subdue her panic, but it was hard, it was very, very---She gritted her teeth. She was a bloody Gryffindor! She was a Gryffindor, damn it! There was no time to be scared!
She snapped her head forward and conked their foreheads together. It gave her some wiggle room and she scrambled back, letting out some screams for help. Her wrist throbbed terribly under the pressure of her weight and her arm buckled, causing Nora to tip to the side. She reached for her wand, but it had been left behind in the short struggle.
“You’re the unicorn slayer!” she gasped, her mind reeling from the situation and from the throbbing she’d inflicted on herself. They’d been trying to capture this man for ages, and his last brazen attack in the Forbidden Forest had her offices in a frenzy. Nora let out another scream, though somewhere in her mind she knew it was pointless.
Oh, she was stubborn. So accustomed he was to doing this sort of thing in his Death Eater mask that it hadn’t even occurred to him to throw the thing up, and it was rapidly dawning on him that this girl had seen his face -- that was something that he couldn’t abide by.
Ugh, how he hated murder. So messy, so much less efficient than cowing someone into obeying you because they were terrified out of their minds. He lifted his free hand to hit her across the face after their foreheads clashed together and he stepped back, scrambling to his feet and pointing his wand at her. A quick moment of thinking brought up memories of a jelly-brain jinx, hurtling it at the girl in hopes of muddling her mind a little. The less she remembered of this, the better.
“And you are not making any friends right now running your mouth.” This girl had no sense, from the look of it. He moved forward again to make a grab for her, twisting her arm in what he hoped would be an easy way to break it and render her a little less … flaily.
Nora lied limp on the ground, every part of her body aching and throbbing from the brutal attack. While her mind was garbled, there was still a voice with some sort of consciousness telling her that she was going to die here at the hands of this beast. Maybe it was irony that the beast that brought her down was of the human variety.
Her scream echoed off the barn walls as the bones in her arm cracked, the searing pain jolting through her entire body. Nora couldn’t see straight, she couldn’t see at all except for the shadows that bounced around the barn’s poor lighting, but after a moment of dangling limply in her attacker’s grasp she could’ve sworn she’d seen something moving up on the crates---
“FUCK OFF YOU LOUSY PIECE OF-----”
Her eyes widened at the sound of the foulest string of language she’d ever heard from anyone, let alone her jarvey, Kenneth. Nora dropped to the ground as the jarvey speared himself at her attacker, snarling and clawing ferociously. She somehow managed to sit herself up against a crate and cried out,
“Kenneth----come!”
For the first time since she’d met the jarvey he listened to her command, and propelled himself away from the unicorn slayer and into Nora’s lap. She gulped, holding tight to the wand she’d somehow found in the dark. Nora pulled Kenneth close with the arm that wasn’t hanging limply at her side and using all of her strength disapparated out of the barn.
