"Of course. Sorry. Do you need anything?"

...Elio pauses to turn away and puke again into the designated corner.

"It's been so long," murmurs Elio, "I don't even know."

He nods.

"Does she speak English?"

"- I didn't hear her speak very much - she understands it at least -"

"Thank you."

He puts in a request for more international Portkeys. His father makes a face at him.

He goes back to her.

Being bludgeoned. Not happy about it.

"Elio says you speak English fine. Where are they."

"Nowhere."

He's been watching her lie for several hours. 

He believes her.

He catches the Bludger. "Okay. You wanna die or go to Azkaban?"

"I am Italian, it is the Torre del Perduto." Her accent is terrible.

"You murdered a four-month-old baby among a dozen other innocent people in Britain. If Italy wants to string up your corpse once we're done with it I am sure we'll cooperate, but I hear Portugal is rigged to fall apart and so I do not care to use my time jurisdiction-shopping for some place that will humanely keep you from ever hurting another human being. Do you want to go to Azkaban or do you want to die."

She spits at him.

He sets a vial of poison down next to her. "I'll come back tomorrow, how about that?"

She looks at it, chews her lip.

"Questions?"

"What is it?" she asks, nodding her head at the poison.

"Painless. Do you want the recipe?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"You might be lying."

"If I wanted to torture you to death I don't actually observe any barriers to doing that."

Silence.

He leaves. 

He has the excuse of the cost of Portkeys to explain not going home at once.

He goes out flying. There's an old Muggle myth about flying too close to the sun; when he was little he'd taken it at face value, warned his little sister off of soaring too high. He goes out flying until the air gets too thin and everything hurts. It's not true that wings would melt closer to the sun. When you go up it gets colder and colder and colder.

And colder and colder -

And colder and colder -

He lands, windswept and exhausted, in dizzying pain and feeling better for it. 

What would Timothy do -

Timothy would probably torture her to death, it was that trait of Finis's which ran through all his children like an invisible, dangerously powerful thread. 'if you hurt us you will lose, no matter what it costs us to make it so'.

Finis is dead. Timothy is dead. It is not fair to hold the horrible little witch to account for all the lives they would have saved, would have changed, would have made possible, but he can't help doing it anyway. Timothy would probably torture her to death and then he would fix Portugal and then he would fix the whole world -

- he's taken Felix twice in the last twenty-four hours. He is flirting with trouble. He doesn't really care. He takes another sip. He wonders the best way to fix Portugal.