Chapter 23.2- Doom Days

“I guess when you put it that way, it does kind of make sense” I relented.

“Beyond that, I got it” I said.

“You got it? Where?”

“Well, I don’t have it right now. But I did get Fudge to weigh on the Department of Mysteries to return it. I just have to pick it up tomorrow” I said.

“I’m surprised those cagey fucks are going to let it go”

“Well, it is mine in the first place. I did invoke the rights of the Hunter back during the task”

“And then before you could leave with it, the Department invoked the Magical Creatures Act and took it off your hands”

“They could only keep it for 90 days either way, so I’d been planning on doing the ritual without it. But since I saw Fudge at the Ball and he was trying hard to seem chummy with me, I figured that there was nothing to lose from trying to get it out of him. He didn’t even resist. Just wrote back that he had instructed the Unspeakables to hand it over upon request.” I replied with a shrug.

“So when are you going to go?”

“I was thinking right now” I said, before I noticed the way his face fell.

“But you just got back” he tried to complain without seeming like he was, and a stronger man would have ignored it, but what was the harm?

“You’re right. Up for a duel?” I asked. I was bad with conversation, or all the traditional means of bonding, but I had found that if there was one thing both Sirius and I were always spoiling for, it was a good fight. And he was good at it.

After several duelling sessions, I could see why the Wizarding World had so readily believed him to be one of Voldemort’s inner circle. He fought like a demon with the mind of the devil. He used everything from transfiguration to dark arts, to schoolyard hexes and jinxes with almost no rhyme and reason. One second, you could be countering an organ-rupturing curse, and the next, you’d find that your underwear had begun to tighten against your will. That had actually happened. If there was any duel I was ticked off about losing, it was that one. What kind of man would mess with another’s bits?

This one began with a particularly testy blindness curse that I batted to the side before retaliating by tearing up the ground around him.

A/N: Wrote this yesterday but the internet decided to give up on me so you get two uploads today