bait_backup | while you were looking the other way, while you had your eyes closed (Reply)

*Esmerelda has been, by her own measure, remarkably patient with Dearborn throughout their thirty-something years of marriage. He is gone nine months out of the year, sometimes disappearing totally from her radar only to pop back into the manor itself spattered with blood or with some ridiculous and obscure wound and some beast's carcass to match. Of course, these bits of plunder do the best of their business; heaven knows someone has to kill unicorns, as dutiful virgins for plucking tail hairs are in awfully short supply and they are in steady an unrelenting demand for wand construction. And the blood goes for hundreds of galleons a pint, and goblins are unsurprisingly fond of the meat itself, and--well, he doesn't go gallivanting off to various foreign backwaters for no good reason.

But now is not the time. The various cut-rate wandmakers and shady potioneers can go emptyhanded for now; their son honestly thinks he's going to be wed to that thing--that girlshaped beast--that horrible succubus--she will suck him dry and that will be the very end, the final and terrible period at the bottom of the Rosier name. It's not something she takes lightly and it's something he shouldn't either, but all of her owls have gotten in response has been silence and, on the occasion of the third howler, an only slightly bloody chest full of goblin-made jewelry.

She has him now, though. She keeps a close eye on his itineraries and knows that he'll finally be passing through a real town with inns this morning if he hasn't slept in it the previous night. If he doesn't floo her from one of the inns, the last howler threatened, he may suddenly find himself removed from his genitals late some evening should he choose to return to the Estate.

When the fire in the hearth finally--finally--turns green, she rises from behind her desk, leaving her correspondence behind to stand, unamused and arms crossed, before it.*

It's about time.