“Watch out, young lady!” hissed Great Great Uncle Erick from his portrait as it fell from the wall and clattered down the stairs. Beck, the young lady in question (although she was nothing of the sort) casually thumped behind him, stomping carelessly as she did so. She held her wand lazily aloft and was following a floating mass of seemingly random objects that she was carrying down to the ground floor - carelessly clattering a stray suitcase or errant quaffle into the walls, hence the distress of the portraits.

“Schwoop doo-doo doo!” she trilled as though to herself but was really for the benefit of her mother, who was now furiously sitting in the lounge. Beck had absolutely insisted that she didn’t want her mum’s help with the packing to the declaration that, fine, Beck could do it [i]all[/i] by herself. Like a vulture with a bad temper, as Beck’s mother always was on special occasions, she was now circling, just waiting for her daughter to do something entirely abstract or brainless as a pretext for seizing the reins. And not without good reason - Beck was the kind to walk onto the quidditch pitch only to realise she had entirely neglected to bring her own broom.

“You nearly done, kiddo?” asked her father, a rather more relaxed creature than his shrill wife, as he joined her in the kitchen. It was apparent that Beck was not remotely done, but she refused to admit it: with a haphazard flick of her wand, her assorted but [i]un[/i]sorted belongings slurped into her trunk like water down a plughole.

“Err, yup.”

The lie was not convincing. They both supposed it would be about a week before she found out that she’d forgotten something utterly crucial, but, at the same time, they knew that it would make at the very least for a funny story. The big clue was how she’d accidentally summoned half the contents of a kitchen drawer, the tinkling cutlery utterly unmistakable. Neither seemed to notice, daring the other to mention it. They didn’t.

“So,” her dad’s eye twinkled, “We’re nearly ready to go?”

Hmmn. Now, Beck loved her father dearly - the two got on like a house on fire in a way that Beck and her mother never had. Only the day before, he had given her six bottles of barely-legal firewhisky to take on the trip with her on the strict proviso that it be consumed irresponsibly (she solemnly promised that it would cause much hilarity). Still, it hadn’t occurred to her that he might wish to drop her off, meaning that her plan to catch muggle transport was rather out of the question. Beck had managed to pass for a muggle several times, but her father was the most wizardly wizard she had ever met; she had once tried to explain the muggle sport, football, to him.

[indent][i]“So, it’s kinda quidditch but without the broomsticks.”

“... how do they fly?”[/i][/indent]

The very thought of her dad on a muggle bus was enough to terrify the statute of secrecy, even though she suspected she could probably coax him. Nope. Nope. Nope. [i]Darren[/i] would probably be taking a bus. The little shit would probably end up whining about it, too, just to piss her off. God, he could be a bellend. That’s probably why they got on so well.

[hr]

“Can I not give my daughter a lift, one last time?” said Edgarius Rowle, pretending to blink back tears, when his daughter threatened to apparate to Aberdyfi Passage on her own and see him there.

Beck pulled a face but didn’t mean it - if she had not wanted him to link arms with her father, there was no force on earth that could force her. And then, suddenly, with a crack, Aberdyfi Passage appeared before them. It was a dumpy streak of nothing in comparison with Diagon Alley, but both Beck and her father tended to avoid the hustle and bustle of that street, along with other wizarding hotspots. Thanks to avoidance of more obvious magical settlements, they now knew this one like the backs of their hands, although that wasn’t really saying much at all. After all, how long did it take to learn where an ice cream parlour, three dilapidated inns and what claimed to be the world’s best cauldron emporium were, anyway?

“Sooo, I’m after a…” Beck pulled O’Lustrum’s letter from her pocket and double-checked, “Ergh. An empty bottle of sherry.”

“Classy man, this O’Lustrum?” deadpanned her father.

“You’d at least hope for a rack of full Gorian Mead.”

“I raised you well,” the pride in Edgarius’ voice was supposed to be sarcastic. Beck knew it wasn’t, but decided not to notice.

[hr]

“Yo yo yo; look what I found.”

In polite company, a young woman running through a grungey street brandishing an empty bottle of sherry at a young man might have meant one thing, but when one of them was Beck Routledge and the other was Darren Hughes, it was probably safe. Then again, it didn’t promise that they wouldn’t end up hitting one another with it.