16th April, 1889 — Morwenna's Office
Elinor Goyle

Morwenna ought to have known this day was going to be hard one. She had grown accustomed to waking up on the floor of her cellar with the unspeakable ache of her bones having reformed themselves - as much as one could become accustomed to such a thing at any rate - but this morning she had opened her eyes to face the day and immediately thrown up. Actually being sick wasn’t new either, but propped up on her weak arms it hadn’t taken her long to notice that she was bringing up the remains of the flesh that had been torn from her own arms the night before.

It would teach her to not fill her stomach before a transformation again at any rate.

Bandaged and raw she had managed to make her way into the office, leaning on her cane as surreptitiously as she could as she passed people she was supposed to lead. Luckily most of them were inclined to mind their own business and she closed the door of her office the moment she could, quite sure that if she made it through this day then she would be forced to reconsider the faith of her youth she had abandoned many moons ago.

Within the first hour she had fallen asleep at her desk. When a knock came at her door she shot awake, filled with panic-fuelled adrenaline and almost indignant - she had taken to purposefully rescheduling meetings around the moon and hoping nobody noticed. Apparently somebody hadn’t gotten the memo.

“Come in!” She called, already feeling bile rise in her throat as wakefulness and pain reminded her of quite how broken she was.

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   Elinor Goyle

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MJ knows my soul rings to the rune of this iconic hat

It tugged at the back corners of her mind, a fact that she should know, did know in some respects, but had not quite brought to the forefront yet. It was much like the chill one got when their grave was stepped over, or the nagging sense that something of importance had been left at home. It was a fast moving target, one she just barely missed with each and every throw—not because she was no good at throwing, but because she was not aware the target was even there.

It was not a feeling that led her to her mentor's office but paperwork—understandable indeed, given their professional relationship. Still, the smile on Nora's features that often greeted the older witch fell into a frown of concern at how poorly Morwenna Skeeter looked.

"You don't look at all well, Mrs. Skeeter," she pointed out as kindly as the words could be said, the paperwork all but forgotten. "Can I get you a glass of water? Maybe some brandy?"

Swiftly, Nora's grey eyes surveyed the older woman—her pallor, how disoriented she appeared—and the appraisal was not a favorable one. Frankly, Morwenna Skeeter looked as though she had clawed herself from the crypt that morning, though a great deal cleaner, at least.

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   August Echelon-Arnost

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— MJ never ceases to impress ♡ —

Had it been anyone else Morwenna’s only retort would have been a brusque instruction to get out of her office but instead she managed a weak smile for her favourite protege, though she doubted either of the offered drinks would make any difference to her current state. She felt painfully weak, the extra effort it was taking to simply keep her head upright was rapidly beginning to drain what little strength she had been able to muster than morning.

“I don’t-”

Abruptly the room span, Elinor became little more than a blur, and Morwenna’s head became intimately acquainted with the surface of her own desk as she lost the battle with gravity.

She screwed her eyes up tightly - feeling rather childish as she did so - and prayed that the dizziness would soon pass. Apart from anything else she was quite sure she could feel blood begin to seep through the bandage on her left arm: dressing her own wounds had apparently not been as successful as she had hoped. Morwenna groaned quietly, feeling as pathetic as a newborn foal, wishing the earth would hurry up and swallow her whole.

  

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MJ knows my soul rings to the rune of this iconic hat

Merlin's beard!

The papers Nora had been holding fell to the ground as she rushed to her mentor's side. A sense of dread she hadn't expected washed over her as she realized how woefully unprepared she was to deal with anything of a medical nature. She was many things, but she was most assuredly not her brother!

"What's wrong?" Elinor asked urgently, one hand resting lightly on the woman's back and another more heavily upon Mrs. Skeeter's forearm.

  

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— MJ never ceases to impress ♡ —

The room continued to spin, at a marginally more tolerable pace, but not so much that Morwenna felt as though she could lift her head. She was reasonably sure she wasn’t going to be sick though so that was a small mercy – a very small mercy given that she doubted her favourite protégé would ever look at her quite the same again.

“I’m…” She blinked heavily, swallowed hard and kept very, very still; she wasn’t sure what she meant to say. There were any number of things wrong but she was still alert enough to focus on the most pertinent one. “I’m bleeding,” she twitched her arm underneath Elinor’s hand, the pressure neither hurting or helping the wound. “Quite a bit I fear.”

  

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MJ knows my soul rings to the rune of this iconic hat

A warm dampness reached the flesh of Elinor's palm as the words left Morwenna's mouth: I'm bleeding. Impossibly, she jerked her hand back with a start, eyes widening further—they must have looked like saucers by now, Nora thought—as she looked at her mentor with a mixture of surprise, concern, and just a hint of suspicion.

"Merlin's beard!" Nora exclaimed in spite of herself, in spite of the etiquette driven into her from her earliest years, in spite of the respect she bore Mrs. Skeeter—but then, Mrs. Skeeter did not come into the office inexplicably bleeding. No, this was an entirely different creature. "What's happened?!"

  

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— MJ never ceases to impress ♡ —

Elinor, I have bitten myself, no need to worry.

Elinor, I may have gnawed off half my arm as I didn’t sufficiently fill my stomach before I transformed into a wild beast last night, silly me.

Elinor, I have been a werewolf for some time now. Sorry not to have mentioned it…

“Elinor,” she said weakly, lifting her head from the desk with weariness but, thankfully, less nausea. “I would be much obliged if you would apparate me home.”

She certainly couldn’t stay here. Not like this. Potentially not at all if she was wrong about the young woman in front of her she had come to rely upon so much.

“I will explain, I promise.”

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   Elinor Goyle

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MJ knows my soul rings to the rune of this iconic hat

"No."

Elinor Goyle had never refused Mrs. Skeeter anything, and her refusal now surprised even her. Something kept her from explaining properly—that she needed medical attention instead—and so the word hung uncomfortably in the air between them, Nora uncertain what to do next.

  

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— MJ never ceases to impress ♡ —

The denial took her aback and Morwenna stared at the younger woman with an ever-deepening feeling of helplessness. She couldn’t explain herself here, not where the walls might have ears and any one of her employees might be hovering just outside the door. Merlin, if it got back to the Wizangamot she would be done for.

She wished, not for the first time, that the limits of magic were not so defined. How was it the Department of Mysteries could play with time itself and yet they were no closer to curing lycanthropy?

“Elinor,” she tried again, steeling herself as she looked her protégé in the eyes, forcing back the tears of pain and shame that threatened to fall. “I can’t stay here, if somebody other than you sees me…”

  

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MJ knows my soul rings to the rune of this iconic hat

Nora Goyle was not a woman prone to hysterics, and was ashamed to say she felt herself very much on the verge of them as she demanded, "Why should you be worried? What is going on?"

A sinking feeling in her stomach had formed and begun to grow.

  

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— MJ never ceases to impress ♡ —

It was the moment Morwenna had dreaded since she had first been bitten. The pain of her transformations and the fear that she might be found out were bad enough but she had always known the day would come when she had no choice but to come clean to somebody – how on earth was one expected to keep something like this a secret forever?

“I bit myself,” Morwenna admitted with strain in her voice. “Last night…I wasn’t quite me.”

  

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MJ knows my soul rings to the rune of this iconic hat

Realization crashed into her like a rage-laden dragon, ripping and burning away at the image of Morwenna Skeeter that Elinor had so long held. The things that had been niggling at her mind for eons, cast aside as irrelevant, were now wagging their fingers at her and saying I told you so in the harsh light of day.

Morwenna Skeeter, her mentor, was a werewolf.

Nora took an involuntary step back.

"We can't apparate in and out of the ministry offices," she reminded the woman, voice shaky. "We-we would need to get to a networked fireplace." The witch did all she could to remain normal, but tone, face, and wide-eyed stare all betrayed her.

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   August Echelon-Arnost

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— MJ never ceases to impress ♡ —

The step Nora took away felt like a crack through her heart and Morwenna turned her face away, tears of shame and regret brimming in her eyes. This precise moment was what she had always feared.

Elinor Goyle had been a grown woman when Morwenna met her and she didn’t hold any fanciful notions of her protégé being akin to a daughter…except for the fact that she held the young woman’s esteem in the same regard she did Mason’s. And God help her she hadn’t even realised it until now.

“I’ll understand if you’d prefer not to help me,” Morwenna croaked out, wondering how she could ever have thought that the pain in her body was difficult to bear. How was she to live with knowing she had lost Elinor’s respect?

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   Aldous Crouch

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MJ knows my soul rings to the rune of this iconic hat

Elinor was being torn asunder inside.

Her rational self knew she had to leave this office and report Morwenna Skeeter to—to whom? The woman ran the department responsible for her regulation! Nora supposed that, if she must, she could go to the Minister of Magic himself, but he did not know her. What if he thought she had known all along, had kept it a secret?

Her compassionate self ached to help the woman before her, ached for there to be something she could do—not only in this moment, but to ease the older woman's troubles in the years to come. But brighter women than Elinor Goyle had tried, and failed, to tackle the Lycanthropy Problem. What could she do to help?

And finally, her instincts of fight and flight both criticized her deeply for taking no action; for, while adrenaline flowed steadily through her as her mind tried to un-muddle the situation, she was not afraid and not angry. Nora simply was.

"I cannot be of any use if I cannot find us a fireplace," was her answer.

  

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— MJ never ceases to impress ♡ —

It was an entirely professional response, Morwenna noted with a pang of doleful pride in her protégé. The sort of calm, reasonable tones she had schooled the younger woman in during their years of working together and something she had always encouraged in all her staff, for all that some of them listened to her.

Elinor had listened. Morwenna would have expected nothing less though it pained to her think that the younger woman would probably never listen to her again: the worst part was that she couldn’t truly blame her for that.

“Please do whatever you feel you must,” she replied, finally feeling well enough to reach for her walking stick and push herself to her feet. She didn’t wobble, didn’t fall, and clung on tightly with the hand not attached to a bleeding wound, instead tucking that inside her robes. “It’s terribly unfair of me I know but I shall put myself in your hands.”

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   Aldous Crouch

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MJ knows my soul rings to the rune of this iconic hat

Unfair was something of an understatement, but any resentment that Nora might allow herself to feel was to be put on the back burner whilst she handled the delicate matter at hand.

She sighed heavily.

"Can you manage, you think, to get to my office without drawing an undue amount of attention?" the witch asked carefully. Though she knew she could get her own fireplace networked swiftly and without prompting too many questions—the perks of her position and of having an 'in' in the Network offices—she did not have the same sway regarding the hearths of her superiors.

  

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— MJ never ceases to impress ♡ —