By the Jugular

Interested, as ever, in things that were a little bit technological but with no clue as to how to use them, Millie had hopped onto a treadmill as soon as Robert entered the room after her. Fiddling with a few of the dials, she failed to notice the slight chill that came over the room. It wasn’t the same as the chill of a Dementor’s presence, or so she’d read. No, it was worse, somehow. The hackles came up, her shoulders lifting up around her ears. Slowly but surely, Millie turned.

The young woman slammed herself backwards against the control panel of the treadmill when she caught sight of the creature before her. The cynic in her knew that it was only a Boggart, that there was nothing to be afraid of but it wasn’t just a Boggart. She knew fear. What the Boggart was to her was the manifestation of all she stood to lose. Her husband. Stood in the same manner he’d been a few weeks before, cut up, barely conscious, pale and unable to keep his head level, his eyes lolled in their sockets. Beside him stood their children, in a similar state.

It was the sight of them that cut her deepest and she found herself in the captivity of Felix Barker. Worse still, waking to find the matron telling her gently that she’d been pregnant, that she’d lost the baby entirely. It was that feeling inside of her once more, the total and irrevocable emptiness that she could feel freezing the blood in her veins. And then him. Without him, she was nothing. There was nothing left. Without the three of them, she had no clue what on earth she would do with herself.

But it was only a Boggart. That she had to remind herself. They might have been her family but they weren’t at the same time. It was a mirage. And she was in that gym for a reason. It was to make sure they’d never end up like that.

“Riddikulus…” She gasped out, staring at the Boggart.

At once, stitches flew to them and trussed them up. Colour returned to their cheeks and the blood that had pulled at their feet turned to grass and she watched as Keiran lifted Liam up into the air, tossing him around before throwing up Kelly, too. She stumbled over her laugh, her hand coming to her mouth. The children screamed delightedly, her husband’s warm laughter lifting from his chest. His fingers roved over their sides, tickling them mercilessly. Only then did she truly laugh, the tears that had risen so forcefully in her eyes subsiding.

The Boggart disappeared with a pop, then, disappearing back into the storage room and Millie exhaled, sagging down onto the base of the treadmill as her legs gave out under her. She sighed and rubbed her hand across her forehead, wishing desperately she could have done better there. But she hadn’t expected it. The last time she had seen a Boggart it had been her mother’s disdain. Exploding her face got too easy. Priorities had changed though – and it only made sense.

The more you have, the more you love, the more you stand to lose.

Robert really did wish he could be two places at once. Millie hadn't been ready. Well, Robert hadn't either, actually. He was just more accustomed to having to draw faster. He saw her use the countercurse to dismiss the boggart and watched the thing disappear back into its box. It was intending to rise up again, heading for him, screaming in Khaat's voice, and he was out of patience with it. He slammed shut the lid on the box and fired a locking charm on the box. He motioned out the training dummy and closed the closet door.

"Sorry about that," he said to Millie, going over to her. "Well done, though. You alright?" He hadn't intended to test her. Not straight off, but she had risen to the occasion, and that impressed him.

"That thing belongs to a friend of mine, and somehow it keeps turning up in all sorts of odd places," Robert said, knowing she'd get his sarcasm. "Sometime, if you get a need to do something mischievous, you let me know. I think I might soon need to return this to my very dear friend, don't you?"

He thought a moment. He wasn't sure how Millie would take to Michael's dogs or Snidely either one. Although, he suspected she might get along with them just fine--if she didn't want one of Otto's puppies from their next litter.

He hadn't the heart to tell Michael he'd recently seen Snidely flirting the mailbox. Robert wasn't sure how that would resolve itself. He wasn't sure he wanted to know, really.

On second thought, he wasn't sure whether or not Millie was up to Robert's breaking and entering and boggart hiding. Maybe she wasn't the mischief type.

Perhaps he needed to redirect her to target practice with the dummy.

Coming back up onto her feet, Millie took a breath and shook the image of the Boggart out of her head. She rubbed at her forehead again, nodding to Robert’s question. She found a smile for him and swallowed back the bubble of fear that was still rumbling around in her belly. She’d remembered how to deal with it, though, and that was what she’d taken from the meeting between herself and the Boggart. She had remembered.

“I’m alright,” she assured him gently with a smile. “I just wasn’t expecting the children to be there, too.”

She should have known really. There was nothing else she was terrified to lose. It was that all-consuming fear that brought her to Robert. Guarding them was all that mattered. The Boggart had served to show that. It only acted as motivating agent to Millie, however, who gritted her teeth and managed to laugh through a small expulsion of air through her nose.

“Put it under his mattress,” Millie offered as an option with a laugh. “Or in the kitchen cupboards, perhaps.”

Mischief she could do, at any time, but she was determined to get some knowledge under her belt before she helped Robert punish Michael.

“We’ll sort him out after we’re done here,” she said decisively.

He wasn't at all surprised that her boggart had been fear of something happening to her children.  

"I'd have wondered about you if that hadn't been your boggart," he said. "Welcome to parenthood. It changes the way you think forever. All of a sudden life isn't about you anymore. Its about your children.  Its the first thing in your heart in the morning and the last thought that passes through your mind as you doze off--no matter how old they are.  My boggart is a memory of Khaat--a scream that I heard from her once--one I don't know if I could bear to hear from her again."  He paused a moment to give them both a chance to get a grip.

He laughed when she said they could put the boggart under Michael's bed. "Good thought," Robert said.  "Either that, or he needs to go in Michael's sideboard--where he keeps his firewhiskey and his port and his imported cigarettes.   Seems like that boggart might fit nicely in that little supply of vices he has.  Maybe.  Depends on whether  we want the thing to root him out of a dead sleep, or scare him away from the bar. Or if we can think of something more devious."

He turned and fired a spell at the training dummy to set it for the exercise.  

"Right, then," Robert said.  "The goal for you is simple. Fire some sort of offensive spell, your choice, and hit inside the circle on the target.  If you hit the dummy but miss the target, it will return fire.  It is set only to slightly sting but not stun.  You hit the target, you disable it. In this exercise, it will not move. That might not always be the case, though." He had no intention of letting the training dummy get the best of her. If she missed too many times, he wasn't going to have the dummy hammering her with wand fire. He would step in if he needed to, to keep her from being overwhelmed by it.

It was easy to nod and listen as Robert spoke to her. The image of Keiran and the children dead though, stung the back of her eyelids and being distracted by it would invariably help her go on to forget it – not that she was sure she could. It wasn’t a sight she could ever un-see. She was sure that it would taunt her at different junctures but she recognised, again, that there was a need to remind herself that it wasn’t real and that the whole purpose of her being there. She wasn’t going to let it happen.

Refocusing, Millie stepped forward as Robert set up the training dummy, the end of her wand beginning to burn again with colour as it anticipated its impending use. She cleared her throat carefully and then took up position, standing to the side and streamlining her body so that there was less of a target in turn for the training dummy if she missed. She threw up her wand hand to counterbalance herself and held out the other in the direction of the dummy.

Clearing her throat, Millie flipped her wand up and down a few times, feeling the speed of it. Then, reaffirming her stance, she took a breath, tightened her fist around the wand flipped herself forward, throwing the spell at the dummy.

“Tarantallegra!”

It was close, beyond close. It was just inside the target, as wanted, but not near enough to disable the dummy so the spell returned and Millie hastily threw up a shield charm, remembering it from her Potter’s Army meetings of so long ago. The spell bounced away again but still managed to burn through the shield, stinging her reproachfully for missing. She took a breath and took her stance once more. She flipped the wand up and down again and turned, throwing the spell again.

This time she got it and the dummy sagged slightly. Millie threw up her hands happily and looked at Robert with a broad grin.

“Definitely put the Boggart in the sideboard,” she affirmed his choice finally, with a laugh.

Robert smiled, pleased. He had seen her fire, miss the target, toss up a fairly decent shield and then return fire, coming acceptably within the target.

"Good!" he said. "Let me show you something." He walked over beside her, facing the dummy. "You have a clear advantage that a great many wizards do not. Use it. You are a seer. That means you are a type of an energy worker. You have the ability to use your own body's energy source to produce magic, not just to breathe and keep your blood flowing.

"For an energy worker, your magic functions, well, in many ways, like an electrical system--you can take energy in, as in when you are using your seer's energy to see things, or you can also put energy out. Its the same sort of energy that I use and Khaat uses for healing. It can also be used offensively or defensively. It depends largely upon your intent and how much you mean it. For you, it means you have the capability of never being unarmed, if you know how to tap into your own energies.

"For example, it takes a great deal less energy for me to heal a simple cut by touch than it does to heal a sword wound. It depends upon what I'm up against and, usually, how serious I am about what I'm doing.

"Your shield is a good one, but its tentative. Shows your insecurity. When you throw up your shield, get a determination in your head that whoever it is that is firing the spell at you simply cannot pass. You must decide, irrevocably, that they cannot touch you. Do not let yourself be intimidated by how much bigger or more powerful you believe they are. No wizard is good at everything, and their energies are finite. They do not hold up at full power forever.

"Watch and learn," he said. He deliberately fired a powerful spell at the dummy and missed the target to get it to return fire. It blasted a spell back at him that sizzled and fired sparks and flame when it left the dummy's wand.

"Protego!" Robert bellowed fiercely, firing his wand. The dummy's spell struck Robert's shield and crackled and dissipated. "It was one of the things Tom Riddle knew well. In his own sinister words, 'you have to mean it.'"

Her chest heaving, Millie took her eyes off of the dummy and recollected herself. Her magic was a little bit rusty and had leapt within her excitably at the prospect of being used for something other than household spells. The feeling was ever so slightly electrifying and as she put her wand behind her ear a bit of static stung at her ear. She bit her lip and shook out her hands, trying to convince herself that it hadn’t been that long since she’d duelled with someone. But of course, it had. It had been years.

Her attention returned to Robert intently when he spoke but his words took her by utter surprise. For a moment she stood there, her mouth agog as she absorbed what he said. A seer. As in, Divination. If she hadn’t have been so shocked by his openness, she perhaps would have agreed. She was good at predicting things. She liked to call it a show of her cynicism but she’d always known it was more than that. She liked to joke that she could do palm reading. Other times, when she was younger, catching Trent’s hand she’d get snippets of what looked like him when he was older; the same with Elliot.

She was a seer. Having it spoken aloud, it made sense all of a sudden. Millie brought her lips back together and she took heed of his words once more as he spoke on. She didn’t know if she was aware of herself enough to find that strength but her magic still hummed around her excitedly, making her think that perhaps he was right, she didn’t trust herself and didn’t want it enough to explore that. She could do it though, the probing magic and the thrill of those spells reminded her of all of that.

The point about the shield was well illustrated but Millie couldn’t help but return to the point he’d raised. She nodded in acquiescence to his words, agreeing and making a mental note to change it, but when she opened her mouth to reply, only concerns about his earlier comment made it through.

“H-how do you know I’m a seer?” She stuttered out. “Like … how… how can you tell?”

Her questions were fair ones.  He hadn't considered that she either didn't know she was a seer or that she hadn't owned that part of her skills.  He wasn't sure why that thought hadn't occurred to him. Where Millie had been living her life with such youthful impulsivity and sparkle, Robert had loved all of that, but he had also seen something gentle within her spirit. Something he liked beyond her bits of quirkiness. He had eventually brushed up his hand against hers one day as they talked concerning some wording in a letter. The brief, unintentional touch had identified it for him, but there had been no reason for him to bring it up. He had just taken it as a given, much like he knew she had blond hair but saw no reason to mention it.

"Millie," he smiled.  "You have always seemed to me to be much more than what you wanted to appear to be.  I saw it from the first moment I met you. Don't ask me how.  I just...knew.

"There was the very obvious and necessary sharing of some of your school information with me when you started to work for me. After all, you were a student then, and due to the very classified nature of the work you'd be doing, your getting your post as my assistant needed to be done very carefully. It could not go to just anyone.

"Aside from that, I am a healer, after all. And I diagnose and heal by touch. My wife and my daughter are also seers. We all have magical energy signatures that, when I touch someone, I can recognize certain consistencies. Healers, seers--their signatures have some strong commonalities.

"A dark arts practitioner, to me, feels very much like I'm touching someone who has been out in the winter cold a bit too long. It feels cold to me."  He didn't want to use the reference of a corpse, but there was always a bit of a similarity to death that was attached to a dark arts lover.  

"But a seer?" he said, "That feels entirely different. It has an electrical feel to it, a charge, that has a certain rhythm to it.  When its in line and appropriate, it feels rather like the ebb and flow of a tide.  If the seer is ill or spent or injured, that energy signal gets muddled or scrambled or perhaps a bit weakened.  

"You have that same smooth ebb and flow pattern to your magical energies that my wife and my daughter do.  Its not like I haven't accidently brushed my hand against yours at the office or touched you in some other way.

"Millie--when I was cursed, my magical energies became scrambled. Took away my ability to control my emotions and my physical responses to those emotions.  Took away my voice.  Took away a great deal of what made me feel sane.  And, I discovered, the curse was transferrable. I didn't dare touch anyone who had any sort of energy working abilities.  Not Kate, not Khaat, not Brian--not you. If I had done so, it would have been catastrophic for anyone I touched. Or for any energy worker you touched after that.  I sealed myself away to prevent an epidemic.  

"And that's one thing our Mr. Pierce does not know. He does not know that I found a remedy to it. He does not know I am myself again.  I mean to keep it that way.  We need to make sure we have irrefutable proof that he is behind all this, and we need to know if he has anyone working with him.  When we expose him, he needs to be done with such deeds--permanently. And--if you didn't know already, in order to get him out of our offices, I shall definitely need your help--if you're up for it."