bait_backup | Off with your head, dance ’til you’re dead, heads will roll on the floor

*There wasn’t anything spectacular in their methods. Nothing new or innovative or sneaky. The Minister hadn’t given her the benefit of a poetic demise, had done nothing in his power to streamline the process or to lend to it something transcendent of mindless brutality. In fact, brutality is the intent.

Rita Skeeter had covered stories like this before. Her Quick Quotes Quill, acid green and always in reach, knows what to write. A young woman, it starts, unsuspecting, perennially fashionable and the subject of much envy, sits in her living room. She isn’t doing anything interesting. In fact she's having a TV dinner without the TV, but the quill would ignore this. The quill would extrapolate instead on her dangerous career, the bold and daring directions she’s taken, the lives she’s changed (usually for the worse) and the political winds she’s directed. An agent of chaos manifest in the printed word - the quill is particularly proud of that one. It’s in this quiet moment of vulnerability that the door is kicked inwards - isn’t that always how it happens? - and men pour in. They wouldn’t be more than two in number, yet they have the quality of tomato sauce, thick and viscous yet runny, their bodies seeming to slip inside forever, as if there are hundreds of them instead of only a pair. Our heroine doesn’t have time to grab for her wand, isn’t able to comprehend the situation before it begins crashing down around her. She doesn’t have a clue what this is really about, two and two quite the stretch when two are barrelling forwards.

Predictably, she startles, leaping up only to be grabbed, a meat laced arm holding her firm by the neck, a warm chest beating heat into her spine. A hand tries to force something into her mouth but she resists, she kicks, but without her signature footwear all that makes contact with her captor’s genitalia is the soft flesh of her heel. Is it enough? The quill isn’t sure. Everything is blurry now, the vial is knocked to the floor and the other man is in sudden prominence. He’s stronger than his counterpart – faster, fitter and more corrupt. He isn’t here for monologues or to stage a hold up, he never demands for her Gringotts information. He does nothing she expects in her wild flurry of adrenalin-enabled physical strength. Nothing she can do can stop or prevent him. A brief flash of green is all it takes. The quill falls with her.

No one is left to record what happens next. How the men make no attempt to conceal their crime, how they simply pick up their vial and close the door. It had been Rita’s speciality, making mundane family dramas a matter of national importance - yet nothing is there to make her own crumpled and brief assassination anything more than an awful waste.*