7th September, 1895 — Asylum

In an ideal world he would be visiting his brother with better tidings - well, in an ideal world there would be no need for him to be visiting his brother in the fucking asylum in the first place but you worked with what you had. In that happier world he would bring sandwiches, a few bottles of beer and they would stroll aimlessly and perhaps his brother would finally tell him what had driven him to this place. Perhaps then Ari would be ready to leave?

With the news he had to tell him today he doubted his brother would ever recover. He didn't feel equal to it himself. He found Ari in a surprisingly comfortable room, plain but clean and with dappled sunshine coming through the windows. It felt like the setting of the other world where things were going to be okay, not this one where things were desperately wrong.

"Ari," he said by way of greeting, his voice strained. "Have..." he hesitated, taking a seat besides his brother. "Have you heard about Irvingly?"

Ari Fisk | Elias Grimstone

  

East Staple House, though a wizarding facility, was not only removed from society by its rural position on the Kent coast, but by intention also, to protect its residents’ sense of calm. (Whatever calm most of them possessed between themselves, at least – Ari’s own sense of inner peace, nowadays, was heavily supplemented by the strong dose of twice-daily Calming Draughts.)

So they never received the latest copy of the Prophet, or at least never on the proper day – and rarely without a few of the more distressing pages first removed, like Forsyte’s ink but a good degree further. Sometimes one could get away with being sent an article through the post for a while before it was confiscated, but none of Ari’s family had sent him anything that he could think of that related to Irvingly. He had been expecting a visit from another of his siblings yesterday, whilst it was the weekend, but no one had come – so he had been grateful to see Konstantin today. (Though this visit was oddly unscheduled, from a brother who was surely too overexerted with work and such things to bother dropping in on him, especially in a place like this.)

Ari frowned. “No,” he said – it had been long enough since his last dose that he was still capable of chewing numbly on the inside of his cheek, if he tried. “What’s happened in Irvingly?”

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There was no way to sugar-coat the news. He had taken his time in getting here – travelling on the Knight Bus because he had been unable to bring himself to apparate, the thought of vanishing into thin air at the moment left him chilled to the bone and he would rather have this conversation than ride a broomstick – and in all the time he had been travelling it had not occurred to him how to begin.

He had volunteered for this though. It had felt important that Ari should be told sooner rather than later – at least it had to Konstantin, however, now he had to consider whether he had instead simply wanted the time to himself, where he didn’t have to do anything or be anything and if he cried on the Knight Bus then it was no one’s business but his and the driver’s. (He was quite convinced the driver was blind, anyway.)

“There has been a- well, we are not quite sure what it is in fact. But a mist appeared, Merlin knows where from, and all the people it touched seemed to have…vanished.”

Was it worth talking about the rescue effort? About the Ministry’s response to another crisis being one of their best to date in terms of time-scale and lives lost? Did it matter?

“Katia…” He couldn’t stop himself from emitting a single, desperate sob, and that was his undoing. He couldn’t speak again, the words lost in his throat, as he pressed a fist to his mouth and tried to stifle the emotions that threatened to erupt.