Regulus Black's fingers worried over the small gold pendant that hung around his neck as he sat in one of the empty stalls of the Care of Magical Creature stables, opposite Oni Lamm. Shafts of dust-speckled light cut through the stables from high windows. Oni had a bowtruckle climbing over her hands, and Regulus watched the tiny, twiggy legs as the creature moved along over her warm brown skin. His fingers felt the etched lettering on the pendant, and he took a deep breath.

You are brave.

"So why were your Aunt and Uncle murdered?" Regulus asked.

"For show," Oni answered.

"How do you mean?"

Oni stroked the bowtruckle's leaves and he wrapped his arms around her thumb as she caressed his twiggy body gently. Regulus watched how the bowtruckle's leaves curled and unfurled, obviously enjoying the attentions of the girl. Regulus could feel his walls crumbling, melting away in awe of the tenderness with which Oni treated the creatures. It was as gentle as Regulus had ever seen anyone else treat them besides himself.

"They chose to walk away from the path toward dark magic," Oni explained. She stroked the leaf atop the bowtruckle's tiny head and giggled softly when he clutched onto her hand and made a funny purring sort of sound, something between that of a cat and the sound that a breeze makes in the treetops on a particularly windy day. "So You Know Who murdered them. To show what happens to deserters of his cause. He killed them like it was nothing."

Regulus's eyes turned downward to the ground and he picked up a small rolling shell of a creature that unrolled like an armadillo and scrambled into his palm, a twitchy rodent-like appearance to its face. "My Dad died like that," Regulus admitted. "Voldemort killed him in cold blood on the kitchen floor, left him laying on the tile in his own mess. Made an example of him."

Oni shook her head in regret. "I'm very sorry, Regulus."

Regulus shrugged the apology off. His body was running icy cold, his breath shivering with pent up emotion. He drew a deep breath, not wanting to be seen as weak, but also not wanting to appear weak to Oni. The thing about Orion's death was that his father had once been his hero - a hero that he'd since learned was a terrible, terrible man. He felt equal parts guilty for mourning his father's death, and guilty if he stopped mourning him. How could one justify mourning an evil person? Did it make a difference if the person was not evil specifically to you? But he had been evil to others, people that Regulus loved, even... And then there was the fact that Orion Black had been an example. An example of what the Dark Lord would do to anyone he learned was a traitor. Like Regulus.

Oni was staring at Regulus, her eyes wide with concern. "Are you alright?"

Until she asked, Regulus didn't realize that the features of his face had rearranged themselves into a grimace. He took a deep breath, swallowing back the emotion that talking about Orion had stirred up within him. "Oh - yeah, yes I'm alright." He studied Oni for a moment as she raised her eyebrows, silently asking him if he was sure he was really alright. "Sometimes, it's a bit confusing," he explained, "What it is that I think about my folks and their... work."

Oni nodded, "I know what you mean exactly."

Regulus reckoned she did. He could hear it in her voice when she spoke about her family, could see it clearly on her face. Regulus thought that perhaps he may just have found someone who really might understand him - the first time someone had since Maryrose.

"So. Do you like Hogwarts?" Regulus asked.

Oni let the bowtruckle down to the ground between them, where he scrambled to rejoin his siblings in their habitat. She smiled as the bowtruckle clambored onto a small branch of the tree, then she looked at Regulus with a smile. "A lot more now that we've met than I did before."

Regulus smiled.

"Watch your head. The ceiling's just a wee bit low up ahead here and you're so... tall...." the witch's voice was dreamy.

James, for all his talk about what a nice name she had, had already forgotten her name. Louise? Lois? Lorraine? Did it even start with an L? He couldn't remember. But he followed along behind her though St. Mungo's, down long corridors and through several doors marked Employees Only. They'd ducked through a particularly heavy door, where the witch (Sarah? Rose? Margaret?) had cast several unlocking charms in order for them to pass through. Now, they were headed down a narrow staircase into a dark storage basement.

Unfortunately, James didn't heed her warning of the low ceiling quite well enough and he bonked his head on a low-hanging rafter.

"Lumos," he muttered, holding his wand up and rubbing his forehead.

The wand illuminated the storage room, revealing rows and rows of old-fashioned muggle filing cabinets. There were owl droppings scattered about the floor and over the tops of the cabinets and several feathers lay on the ground. He was about to ask why when an owl came sweeping in from a small chute in the wall. James watched with fascination as the owl pried open one of the drawers, expertly tucked a small folder into the drawer about halfway through a whole load of folders already inside, then flew back up the chute.

Bubo would never have done that, he thought.

The witch illuminated her own wand and walked through the rows of cabinets, her eyes sweeping over labels on the handles until she found what she was looking for. "Here we go," she said, kneeling down before the cabinet.

James clustered closer, ducking below another low-hanging beam, and squatted beside the witch. She pulled out a drawer marked Va-Vi, and her fingers flickered over the labeled folders until she came to one marked VEIGLER, ANNE, and drew it out from the lot, laying it across the top of the open drawer. "Let's see here..."

James looked over her shoulder at the opened folder. A plain, blonde woman with strong features stared up at him. Her skin wasn't as smooth as a lot of women kept theirs, but she had a friendly smile, despite a slight gap between her front two teeth. James thought she looked like the sort of woman who would love plants and gardening - her skin indicated a good deal of time spent out of doors in the sun. He could almost picture her wearing the straw hat that Professor Viridi had worn nearly everyday during his years spent in the Herbology greenhouses at Hogwarts.

"It says she was admitted for spell damages," the witch read quietly, her wand hovering over the page as she looked over the records in the file. "She required quite a lot of treatment, it seems, and they had her here for some time... She had a daughter and husband that visited her often..." She paused. "Interesting."

"What?" James's eyes scanned the page, trying to see what the girl had found.

"She was in the Janus Thickey ward for a bit."

"The ward for mad people?" James questioned.

"Yes. The spell damage was apparently to her head and her mind was in-and-out... They thought they'd fixed that lot, though, before the end, and she was transferred back to the spell damages wing." The girl turned the page. "Most of the visitors that came for her were her family, nothing out of the ordinary. Just her husband and daughter."

James frowned.

"Oh but wait."

"Yes?"

"There's one more visit listed here, but... there's no name recorded. They were authorized by the mediwitch on duty at 19:00. It simply says visitor and nothing more, though." She held up the sheet for James to see. "It was two days before she passed on."

James examined the hand written visitor authorization slip, the name line left blank. "Why wouldn't they take a name?"

The girl shook her head, "They're supposed to. Nobody is supposed to be authorized without identification. Even deliveries must be authorized with identification. The policy hasn't changed in years, I find it extremely unlikely that the mediwitch that authorized the visitation was unaware of the identification rule."

"Does it say who the mediwitch was?"

The girl nodded. Then, "Ms. Merriweather. She's retired now."

James asked, "Any chance I could get in contact with her?"

The girl considered the question, then got up and walked across the room. James glanced over his shoulder at where she'd gone 'round the bend to another row of records and he reached down, scooped up the folder and tucked it quickly into his rucksack, kicking the drawer closed before hurrying after the girl.

She'd gone 'round to a drawer labeled MEDIWITCHES, RETIRED and opened the drawer up to a folder labeled MERRIWEATHER, CONSTANCE and opened the folder up, flipping through the pages. "I don't know if she's still at the last address we had for her. She's retired, she might have moved anywhere." She shrugged and, with a flick of her wand produced a small note page with an address written on it. "But you can try."

James took it and looked at the address - it was out in Bath. "Thanks, love," he said, smiling. He tucked it into the breast pocket of his uniform. "You've been brilliant help."

She flushed. "I'm happy to help, honestly." Her eyes flashed with hopeful brightness.

Remus stared at James, aghast. "You don't think that St. Mungo's will notice that the file is missing, eventually?" His voice pitched with concern, "And you don't think that, when they do, they won't find it very, very concerning that there was a random bloke in asking about the very file that's gone missing? And when they find out that, you don't think they'll find it extremely interesting that said bloke called himself an auror when really he's only an auror in training? You don't think you'll get in rather a lot of trouble for this? Tampering with private files and impersonating a Ministry Official?"

James shrugged.

"Eh c'mon Moonshine, you've got to be more open-minded!"

"Open minded? Have you no idea how many laws were broken by the course of events James has just described to us?" Remus looked at Sirius with a frown, "Breaking rules as adults is quite a lot different than it was when we were kids mucking about at Hogwarts, you know. We're not just talking about detention with Minnie anymore, we're talking about doing real time, about real jails and --"

"I think you're fucking brilliant, Prongs," Sirius cut Remus off, grinning as James opened the folder on the kitchen table and revealed the medical record he'd taken from the storage basement the witch at Mungo's had brought him to.

Remus shook his head with disapproval.

James picked up the papers inside and divvied them up into three short stacks. "Here, each of you help me out with combing through this stuff. I need to figure out anything I can about this poor broad to see if there's anything here that could help me find her daughter."

Sirius saluted with a stiff arm, threw himself into one chair, feet up on the other, his thick black boots' laces flipping about as they'd come untied, and set to work, biting his tongue as he read the clump of papers that James had handed over to him.

"Are you really thinking that you'll find much of anything in here?" Remus asked, shuffling through his pages, "It's mostly copies of charts and medical nonsense." He looked up at James. "And what exactly are you going to do if they do figure out what you've done?"

"I reckon Underhill has my back in that case," James replied. "Don't worry so much, Moony. It's bad for your complexion."

"And your complexion is rather important to some of us - me being the some of us," Sirius said.

"And you're not even the one of us that's a plural," James said, smirking.

"That is true," Sirius replied. "A plural of me would probably be a... a Siri-i."

"One Sirius, two Siri-i!" James exclaimed.

Remus groaned. "Well thank the gods, that we don't have a Siri-i. One of you is plenty."

Sirius sighed, "Oh but it is a lonely existence being the only one of my species."

James smirked and reached over to ruffle Sirisu's hair, then turned back to Remus. "Really, though, I'll worry about that lot if it comes 'round to bite me. For now, I just want to find everything I can to help me find this girl. Whatever it takes. She's my priority. I don't know what's happened to her, but if it's bad, then I want to get her rescued as quickly as we possibly can."

Remus sighed. "Alright." He bent over the papers. James and Sirius did the same, and they sat there at the kitchen table, devouring every fact they could about Anne Veigler, searching for anything that might help in locating the missing girl.