It is decided, with considerable owling and eagling, that Bella should visit Tony and Sherlock at home, and vice versa, in July - first all of them at Charlie's house, then all at the Stark house, then all at Renée's, with Mrs. Stark providing transportation.
Term comes to an end.
Bella steps out of the bus, all her possessions plus her animal in tow, and the bus pulls away, and she tromps toward Charlie's door. (ACAAM admitted her on the basis of this residency, so this is where she is let off.)
And then she hears someone say, "Stupefy," and that's the last thing she knows for a while.
----
When she wakes up, she's in some kind of mostly white room, her eyes are dry like they've been open for much too long to the point where it's hard to see and hard to blink, and she can't move.
"Did you bring her around?"
"Yes, see?"
"All right, let's re-run the tests with her awake, follow the checklist -"
"I would've followed the checklist -"
"I know, I know. Go on."
"Open your eyes, girl."
She has them closed; she's crying moisture back into them. When she doesn't obey, there's the sound of a wand swishing through the air and they open again. It's still hard to see, but there's someone leaning over her; a man, judging by the voice.
"Legilimens," he says.
It's not wholly dissimilar from the attempted Memory Charm, but more piercing, and she can see it coming. She chucks him out of her head, almost without effort but not without pain - like she's deflecting a gently tossed beach ball, a big easy target, that happens to be covered in spines. It feels like her thoughts sting. "Stop it!" she shrieks. "You can't!"
"Yes, that's the curiosity," says the man, and he tries it again: "Legilimens."
She never stops batting him away, and he goes down a long, long list of spells, most of which she doesn't recognize, all of which fail, all of which hurt in their own unique ways. The Confundus burns, and when she howls at the attempt, they seem to be done for the day.
They leave her awake, paralyzed in the chair she's propped up in, and she still can't move.
Questions. She has questions. Somewhere in her aching, battered head are questions.
She wants to get out.
She has - her eyes, her voice, her mind.
She whispers doggerel, trying poem after poem to free her limbs so she can try to get more things; nothing takes. Doggerel is weak and the paralysis was cast with a wand.
What else?
She swallows - they could have given her water, couldn't they? - and says:
"Mith?"
The library elf pops into place, round-eyed and confused. "Miss Bella needs a library elf in the summer time?"
"Mith. I need help," says Bella desperately, "I'm stuck here, I got kidnapped, can you get me out?"
Mith peers at Bella. "...Mith is not allowed to fuss with wizard magic, Miss. Very very not allowed."
"Could Kay - or a kitchen elf?"
"No, Miss," apologizes Mith.
"Could you get me one of my wands?"
"Mith is not knowing where they is, Miss Bella," says Mith, wringing her hands, and if Bella doesn't come up with a way for this elf to help her soon she's going to start peeling the skin off her ears or something.
"I need help - a teacher?"
"Mith wishes she could, Miss Bella, but elves is not allowed to be bothering teachers in the summer time."
Bella swallows. "Can you bring someone else here? Mrs. Stark maybe - or - Healer Song's not a teacher -"
Mith shakes her head, eyes watering. "Mith is not knowing where to find them unless they call her."
"Feral?" tries Bella, and Mith lights up.
"Mith can bring Miss Bella Feral Orphan," she agrees, and she pops out again, and she goes looking for Feral.
"Feral - some guys kidnapped me - they've been experimenting on me," she says in a hush, "I'm sorry but Mith couldn't get me any grownup wizards -"
Bella swallows. "If you could stay - they don't seem to have heard us, you can still surprise them that way - do you know how to do water, is there anything to put water in here that can't catch fire? -" Her eyes are moving around, but they're kind of unfocused.
"Incendio."
The pudgy man goes up in flames with such violent force that a wash of heat smacks into Bella and Feral halfway across the room, and when the column of fire dies down a few seconds later, there is nothing left of him but a few drifting flakes of ash and a large char mark splashed onto the ceiling.
"Is there a phone in the house you could call regular nine one one with? He doesn't have a wand and I bet wizards have some way to notice and take wizards who wind up with Muggle police - and the police could probably call the Starks for me, their dad is a Muggle, I bet they have a phone? And maybe Mrs. Stark could come get me and take me home?"
Seeing as this is Bella's stuff, he assumes there will be notebooks. He tears a page out of the back of one and writes:
Bella got kidnapped and she's stuck to a chair. I took care of the kidnappers, but I can't unspell her without risking setting her on fire. We're in Nashville. Bring your mom.Then he rolls it up, addresses it to Tony Stark, and opens Euterpe's cage.
Feral
"Hi, Mrs. Stark!" says Feral. "Bella's down the hall, can you Finite her out of the chair?"
"Yes I can," says Maria, and with a last glance at Preston she heads for the room with Bella in it.
She can't help looking at the scorch mark on her way in.
"Oh, Miss Lalonde," says the healer. "What have you brought me today?"
"She had her eyes open for a while and now she can't see very well," says Maria.
"Mm, hm," hums the healer, and she putters behind her large oak desk and retrieves her wand, then putters back out.
"Close your eyes, dear," she says to Bella.
"I think I could find the house from my broom if I were any place in Forks, but not from Port Angeles, and also I'd be seen," Bella muses. "But I could call him and ask him to come get me from the station, maybe? Except that guy said they Confunded him, I don't know what that will have done. I don't know if there's a bus and taxis are expensive."
For the most part they just say things that were already pretty obvious: Bella is a natural Occlumens, she automatically deflects a long list of mind-affecting spells even when unconscious, she is aware of such intrusions as they happen, and she complains a lot more than a learned Occlumens doing the same thing.
"Yes, really. He killed one person, maimed another, and then killed him too. And he has no family to speak of. In magical society, that matters a lot more than it should. The fact that he did all this while also being twelve will just make people more scared of him, and the fact that he did it in defense of his Muggle-born friend won't help much. Although it could end up putting the spotlight on your unusual abilities."
Bella goes home, and tells her father she's home now, and apparently he was well and thoroughly Confunded, because he doesn't ask why she's home past dinner when she was supposed to arrive in time for lunch.
She unpacks, and starts on her summer homework.
"I got off the bus, and I got Stunned, and when I woke up I was in their place in Nashville paralyzed and stuck to a chair and they were talking about re-running the experiments with me awake and they tried lots and lots of mind-affecting spells and none of them worked like they're supposed to but it hurt all different ways - the Confundus is the worst. And then they left me alone but I was still awake and they had me able to talk, I don't know why, and I tried doggerel but it didn't work, and then I tried calling one of the school elves."
"And she came, but she's not allowed to interfere with wizard magic, or bother teachers, and she didn't know where any of the other faculty or your mom were, but I know Feral stays at school over the holidays and I thought maybe he could do something, so she went and got him."
"So after the first one was gone the other was really scared of Feral, and Feral burned his hand so he dropped his wand and then he answered all our questions, and your mom came and she unstuck me and took me to a healer and Feral killed the second one. Your mom says he could get in a lot of trouble if people knew, though, even though he's just twelve and they were hurting me - so - don't tell."
Bella is immune to quite a lot of things, invariably "responds in a manner consistent with awareness of intrusion, including spells cast silently and out of sight", and appears to "instantly and instinctively, but with more negative affect, respond to mind-affecting magic in the way the most highly trained Occlumenses might".
"...Maybe. All the spells were definitely the same every time, I'd recognize them if someone did them again. I don't know enough about most of these spells. I'm going to look them all up when I get back to school. They didn't write down anything I said about how they felt but I did, so I have all of that, here -" She produces a separate page of notes, which has a brief paragraph of recollections about the synaesthetic sensations corresponding to each attack, including the spiderweb Imperius, burning Confundus, spiky-stinging Legilimency, and battering Memory Charm.
"I didn't see them very clearly because by the time my eyes were all better they were both dead. One of them said his name was Preston and the other one was Martinez. He could've been lying, but he seemed really scared of Feral. And the house was in Nashville and they were both white people with brown hair. Feral got a better look at their faces."
"It was one story, and the medicine cabinet had wizard eye drops in it that I thought about trying before your mom offered to take me to a healer. The room I was in was mostly white, even the furniture, kind of like an interior decorating magazine room, but the rest of it looked pretty normal. Uh, there was a glass on a table in the white room, Feral charmed water into it to give me when I asked him, before Martinez came back. Preston said something about Martinez having a car phone but we didn't wind up using it and I don't think there was another phone in the house."
Bella closes her eyes and tries to remember. "The chair probably would've been comfy if I hadn't been stuck to it - there were carpets everywhere I saw except the bathroom - it must've been pretty well soundproof because they didn't hear me and Feral talking."
"And we can't practice magic either. Uuuum. There are... board games and playing cards? And movies, and... this is a really boring town, we'd have to go to Port Angeles to find anything worth doing outside the house unless you want to go fishing with Charlie."