It is an Italian witch and a bottle of wine!

Felix thinks he should conjure two glasses and say hi. He can't really think of anything he feels less like doing at the moment, but -

- Timothy wouldn't find this difficult -

"Hi," he says, and makes the goblets pretty and shimmer-y and hands one to her and touches the rim of his to hers. "Do you know Elio?"

...she pours herself a glass and drinks it all, then fills both. "Do I ever," she mutters.

"Mmmm."

"He seems so nice! But it's all an act, he doesn't really like anybody - turned me down flat -"

"All an act? What a jerk."

"Mm-hm." She tops off her glass. "And now he's off to Brazil with some nobody of no family - sure, he says he's not seeing her -"

"Well, she has him Imperiused."

"What? That vile little - wait, how do you know -"

"Tried to do it to someone else I know, and then I put it together - why would someone like him be with an ugly boring nobody like her - when there are women like you around -"

"I knew something was up with that! I - have - no idea how to - somebody's got to save him -"

"Yeah. Do you know where in Brazil they went?"

"Oh, off to see the Queen about something, she's very close to the Queen."

"And do you know much about how they protect themselves - so we can make sure Elio isn't forced to fight to protect her and then killed in the crossfire -"

"She lets him alone when he's meeting new people - she's quick on the draw, I've seen her pull that fancy dueling wand of hers in a blink -"

"How do they source their food, does she eat with the Queen, do you know where they sleep -"

"She eats with the Queen, so does he, I think every meal. I don't know their lodging situation in Brazil but here they have separate rooms, she stays with that Turkish witch - went with them - might be Imperiused too -"

Nod. "When I get Elio out I'll tell him that you knew something was up and were a tremendous help."

"Thank you so much - I'm Erica -"

"Fredrick."

She swallows the last of the wine. "You're going to save him?"

"Yep."

Sniff. "Thank you."

Pat pat. "Of course." 

Timothy would like her, Timothy would mean all of this, sincerely and intensely and -

He leaves. He arranges to visit Brazil.

Brazil is all the way over there. Wizards can get there faster.

But transporting a prisoner back would be a hassle, so he needs to find a place to keep her here.

He talks to some goblins and arranges for a room accessible only by Apparition under several hundred feet of rock. It needs plants for air. There are spells for plants. 

He observes the Queen of Portugal and her new companions.

If eavesdropped upon, the Queen of Portugal is being persuaded to adopt Elio's... secretary.

Adopt her?

Okay. 

He takes Felix again and contemplates Stunning her from behind while she's walking with her companions in the palace.

Nah, bad idea. Better to trip her, summon the thing that will fall out of her pocket, and then stun her. And also Elio. She's really good at the Imperius Curse.

Thank you, Felix. He lets it pick the moment, too.

- now.

Defense was his best class. Trip, summon, two Stunners -

Alarmed Queen!

Somebody else can explain things to her. He takes her to the place under several hundred feet of rock - Vanishes her clothes and everything in them in case there's another of whatever fell out of her pocket - snaps the wand - takes Elio back to the Ministry.

He stops by the seam in the ground where the Ways used to be. 

He goes back to Brazil and waits for her to wake.

Eventually she does, although she's bright enough not to make this obvious by opening her eyes or anything.

Felix notices. 

"Where are the Ways?"

Still pretending to be asleep.

Quidditch is not the national fixation in Brazil that it is in Britain, but it's played.

He leaves.

He comes back with a Bludger. Lets it go.

She stops pretending to be asleep after it clonks her in the shin. "Ah!"

"If they're alive somewhere I'll stop - if they're dead I'll stop - but you'll tell me -"

She scrunches up, hands over the back of her head, knees to chin. "Io non parlo inglese!"

"French works too - where are they -"

"Io non parlo francese!"

"I had an uncle who was fluent in everything but looks like you fucking murdered him."

The bludger hits her in the shoulder. "Ah -"

They're probably dead. They're probably dead and it doesn't matter and it won't bring them back and there are kinder ways to remove her from the world than letting a 12-pound hunk of iron do it one bone at a time. 

But they might still be alive. 

He waits.

She attempts to protect her head. The bludger is just as happy to break everything else.

He wonders vaguely if he gets some credit in some cosmic accounting for not enjoying it in the slightest. "Where are they?"

She jabbers in Italian.

He stands up, catches the Bludger. "You spoke French with Timothy."

Headshake.

"Uh, yes. Look, you murdered my family, stop wasting my time."

"I no, I no, Elio -" she says.

"And you had no idea what was being said? Timothy would have noticed that."

"Elio," she insists.

He releases it again. 

He is overwhelmingly tempted to try to explain himself. It wouldn't be helpful. He doesn't. He imagines what he'd say to Timothy if Timothy did this - but Timothy wouldn't, wouldn't need to -

Back to protecting her head and chattering in rapid Italian.

She's lying. 

Being this conspicuously miserable is probably making it worse, she thinks he'll feel guilty enough to stop and so she thinks she can wait him out and so she's going to be hurt worse than necessary to find them - but the alternative is Azkaban and he can't kill her once he's handed her over to them -

She seems to maybe have a well-founded belief in her ability to wait him out.

"All right. I'm leaving. In case you miraculously remembered some English or something and have an opinion about whether I should ever come back."

"Per favore, signore -"

"Would you really rather Azkaban because that's the by-the-book way to do this. Trust me, I would be delighted if there were options within the bounds of the law here but, nope, it's vigilantism or fucking Azkaban and Timothy was going to change that but you murdered him, didn't you."

"Azkaban? Sono italiana -"

"Yeah, but we're the ones who are mad at you right now. Both Finis and Nell have parents on the Wizengamot, did you know that? You callous moron - you could have just left them alone -"

Feigned incomprehension.

He leaves. He leaves the Bludger with her.

He goes back to Britain. Finds Elio.

Vomiting periodically, shivering. Takes a moment to look at him.

"Hey. Are you okay? I have some questions but they can wait."

"I, I. Who are you -"

"Timothy's cousin. Do you know where they are-"

"- it's some kind of vanishing spell, I, they're gone -"

Nod. 

"Do you - was she doing this to anyone else -"

"- Yildiz maybe. I'm not sure."

"Is anything rigged to collapse when she dies -"

"Portugal? I think? I - I'm in no condition -"

"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.

Queen needs an heir. How about her bastard grandson, currently thirteen, forgotten in a corner of Braga.

He imagines it's Timothy telling him. He burns a few more transAtlantic Portkeys.

Why yes, this random kid who looks uncannily like the dead prince regent would love to be introduced to his probable grandmother and made heir to the throne of Portugal.

Probably it's more satisfying when Timothy does it. But he doesn't have Timothy. He has Felix.

...sip.

He should show up to the dungeon with a Bubblehead charm on.

What an obnoxious woman. What a lovely drug. 

- he should really stop that now.

He doesn't pour the rest out - can't bear to waste it - but he puts it away out of reach. And sleeps.

And shows up to the dungeon with a Bubblehead charm on.

This means he doesn't die when she drips blood from her scratched-open arm onto some horrible diagram she's drizzled all over the floor in his poison! She lunges for his wand anyway.

He steps back.

He vanishes the diagram and restrains her and hums a delighted little ode to Felix and - "I could be just a little bit of a jerk and say that I guess you chose Azkaban. But, you know, it's Azkaban. So I'll still kill you if you'd rather."

She hasn't got his wand in time. She is choking to death on the miasma that she was trying to kill him with.

Well. That works too.

Now she is dead.

...sip.

Timothy would probably be proud of him if he set up Elio with that Erica girl who was so concerned about him.

He leans against the wall and closes his eyes and then vanishes with a pop.

He has a better acceleration song. When Minor drops by for supplies he goes with him down south to sing it to Curufinwë, who will be able to reproduce it accurately. "Got it figured out?"

"Not yet. But we will."

"If you want me to stay here and sing the acceleration I can do that - Michael's close on recordings but they're not high-enough fidelity yet -"

"That'll improve on my humming it while I work. Yes, do - he's going to retaliate eventually, we need to be faster -"

"I've gotten a charm to interact with an artifact, now I just need to get it into a functional user interface for Quendi use."

"You're amazing."

"She is the best."

"I say that like the user interface is less than ninety percent of the work."

"Well, from here out we'll be able to think faster."

"I'm looking forward to that!"

Macalaurë sings.

So, he says to Timothy, ah, what's the story with Karen?

The same. Or, uh, flipped, she likes girls - we have not discussed it but she's probably despairing, there was a girl she liked back home and now Quendi by all appearances don't do that sort of thing at all -

After the war maybe Maitimo can -

Does the volitional control thing let you turn off your sex drives or something.

Not really, no.

And we're agreed the war might last decades.

I think they're presently optimistic about ending it faster.

Do I get to say 'that's dumb' or is that exclusively your line?

Do you want -

Um?

...I can think of half a dozen considerations but I don't think the war ought to be one. 

Maitimo'd be delighted, he feels badly about being traumatized. I don't think my alt would care. Karen?

Would probably like to be apprised, but I don't think she'd mind. I - if we were confident of finding a way back in a year, or even ten -

My understanding is that current prospects of finding a way back are 'uh, maybe someday the Valar will forgive us and then it'll turn out they can do it?'

Yeah.

I love him. This'd be - keeping company. 

He nods, remembers that Findekáno can't see him. I love him. I am not sure if he knew.

He did.

He tells Karen a few weeks later.

"- oh, okay. ...I didn't realize Quendi, um, had........ variety.....?"

"Apparently the Valar will fix it if you ask and most of them do since it's easier but if you'd rather just be very very discreet you can."

"I would wonder if I could get set up with one but on the one hand they are so very Quendi about the war and for another braids are all well and good for Miranda but I hate how my hair behaves without the potion, just absolutely hate it, and for some reason I imagine that would come up if I were set up with a Quendi and I'd be self-conscious and it would be awkward. Also Genevieve. Maybe. She probably thinks I am dead and has flirted her way into somebody else's - why did I set up that sentence to need a noun - by now."

Hug. "There are the brand new humans - they won't always be brand new -"

"Weird," pronounces Karen. "I don't know, maybe, ugh."

"We can still get married but we really don't have to, here - I don't care that much what my family thinks -"

"I would like to be ready to do it real fast if for some ridiculous reason I must possess a Silmaril for any length of time, other than that we can just say we're - being polite to Quendi social customs - since we are not in fact in a desperate wall-climbing hurry or anything."

"Works for me."

"Thanks for - keeping me up to date - on things -"

"If I hadn't both the Fredrick in my head and the alien one would have yelled at me."

Giggle.

Miranda takes a total of two and a half months before she kludges together a box that you can put an artifact in that allows precision editing.

They don't quite know what to write to the Silmarils in the first place yet but they're not far off. He hugs her and giggles delightedly.

She is very smug.

She is the best person in two universes and he is so in love.

Good. She loves him too. Anything she can help with on next steps?

Curufinwë had to bring the two of them up to speed on how artifact programming works so it's not far removed; he explains it to her. You can only do these few fundamental operations, but then you can build on them, and define whole categories of things with shortcuts so you can build on them further, and now they're at the tricky bit of instructing transfer of information between the Silmarils - "and then we're just going to try turning the anti-decay effect up to its peak and freezing him and his surroundings in place, it doesn't technically kill him but he'd be gone -"

"Does that tie up the Silmarils indefinitely?"

"Well, then we come up with something to kill him, on less desperate a deadline."

"Makes sense. Uh, I might be able to let the Silmarils access the box thing... I don't know how I'd do it but I don't know that I can't..."

"That'd be useful - so the messaging protocol they're written with -" takes three weeks to explain, even with compressed time, but in the course of the explanation he notices a flaw in their work in progress. 

Handy. She picks at the box idea. Slowly.

Michael tells Catherine and Kat the story of how he met Rebecca.

"Am I Jesus," says Catherine.

"Uh. No."

"What's a Jesus," says Kat.

"A Jesus is if somebody gets pregnant all by herself," says Catherine. "Are you sure I am not Jesus, Papa."

"I am actually really confused about how Jesus works but I don't think you are Jesus."

"Then you have to have met her before. Maybe you forgot." She pats his knee.

"Uh, somebody else met her, but he wasn't very nice, so she decided she didn't want to marry him and she didn't want him to be your Papa. - same thing for Kat's Mama, actually - and then when she met me she thought I was good enough to be your Papa. Which is why I am, even though you were already born."

"Or, I could be Jesus," says Catherine.

"I think I am not Jesus," Kat says. "I think there was a bad orc who did not get to be my papa, I think that sounds like something I remember."

"Well, you don't have to be Jesus."

"There was a bad person who did not get to be your papa. We don't know if it was the same bad person for both of you or not."

"I'm not supposed to talk to orcs I don't know already so I can't ask any," says Kat.

"If it's important to you I can ask for you."

Shrug.

"I think I'm probably Jesus," says Catherine.

"What does that mean?"

"It means... um... I don't remember. That there are songs about me?"

"Ooh."

He knows some! He can sing them!

Both girls appreciate this! So does Joanna, who has snuck in at some point.

She can be bounced on his knee while he sings; Catherine and Kat are getting too big for that. (They are small enough individually but rarely tolerate one of them getting something the other can't.)

(That would be terrible. It is okay if Joanna gets bounced.)

They think they have instructions for the Silmarils. They set to encoding them.

Miranda makes an exhaustive list of every data-handling spell she has in case any of it will help.

Minor describes things to her when he's stuck on them and between the two of them they usually figure it out. 

They get an instruction set. They write it to the Silmarils. They edit their mistakes.

"We should check if the Enemy's still in Angband -"

"...Point Me Melkor."

Seems to have gone to Utumno which has the virtue of not being a puddle.

"Good thing you thought to check, I had this persistent mental image of him being so very soggy."

"Would have been satisfying. We can aim there just as easily."

And Utumno - freezes.

Nothing crumbles. Nothing explodes. The sky does not shower them with confetti. Nothing within a sphere around the fortress moves.

.........yay?

"If there's nothing else worth keeping in Utumno we can just disintegrate the stasis field at a different rate molecule by molecule, rip him apart - then we'll know, the orcs sworn to him will know -"

"Do we have any of those?"

"Not with us. I think there were a few survivors, if someone cares to track them down while we work - well, while we sleep, first."

"Ooh. Sleep."

They sleep. They wake. They get back to work.

A few months ago Felix started primarily giving him advice on how he could acquire more Felix. That's probably a worrying sign, but on the other hand, Elio and Erica are living in peace and quiet in Italy and the other Imperiused witch is all right and James and Samuel are getting on well with his little brother Alexandros and Statute repeals are proceeding everywhere magic can take him and luck can carry them and it's almost like having Timothy at his shoulder, nudging, nudging -