Fic: Pepper Spray and Puppet Masters
Mar. 23rd, 2010 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starrikaFandom: Twilight/Harry Potter
Pairing: Bella/George
Rating: PG-13
Summary: AU/Harry Potter. Bella's abroad in London to recover from the divorce
and stumbles into Weasley Wizard Wheezes. Georges discovers pepper spray.
Bella makes a disturbing discovery about the Volturi. Bella/George. [Jacob and
Edward sympathetic]
Disclaimer: This crack is definitely not mine.
A/N: This might be a bit confusing at first, but the plotbunny wouldn’t let go. This is post Deathly Hallows and using some of Breaking Dawn’s canon, although this is obviously AU. I promise, some backstory for Bella and how she ended up in London will appear, but I didn’t want eight paragraphs of exposition to begin. She will come across as a bit OC from the Twilight series, but she’s grown and matured before this fic starts. I promise, all will be explained in good time. I figured you all would rather dive right in. :)
****
Bella first realized that things had gone pear shaped when she saw a kid pop a sweet into his mouth and turn into an oversized bird. The fact that no one around her batted an eye was her second clue that she’d managed to stumble into one of those situations again.
She took a step back and promptly bumped into someone else.
“Steady, love.” He’d gripped her upper arm tight, coming around to note the odd look on her face. “You all right?” He was fingering a long stick of wood and Bella looked from him to the toys buzzing around the shop, and then to the still-a-bird boy.
“I’m fairly certain I’ve stumbled into something I shouldn’t,” she said bluntly, fighting the urge to laugh at the situation. She’d come from London to avoid the unbelievable and supernatural, and this place reeked of it. “Although I’m in a toy shop this time, so hopefully you aren’t going to kill me. The Volturi could never manage to come off this benign.”
He cursed under his breath, muttering something about a mugging or a muggle – whatever British slang that was, although he stopped short at her mention of the Volturi. “Oi! Verity? Can you watch the front for a tic?” he yelled, tugging Bella by the arm towards a door behind the counter.
Bella dug in her heels. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” she said stubbornly, her hand inching its way towards her pocket and the pepper spray Charlie had given her before she left.
He grabbed her wrist with one hand, fishing into her pocket with the other. “No going for your wand,” he muttered, but his face when he pulled out the canister was one of confusion. He tossed it back at her, not that Bella could have caught it even at close range, and it clattered to the floor – letting its contents out with a hiss.
“Shit!” Bella hissed, throwing up her arm in a futile attempt to keep it from getting in her eyes. Others in the store scattered, coughing and exclaiming about a new product.
The redhead who’d been talking to her was reacting too, but his reaction was just as puzzling. “Merlin! That’s brilliant! Where’d you get that? I’ll have to contact the American shop?”
This time, she let him pull her towards the door, her eyes burning and watering too much to make her way out. He pointed that stick behind him after her shut the door and she heard a squelching sound. Then he turned that stick on her and the burning sensation disappeared.
He’d brought her into some sort of office, with a few chairs and a couch, a desk, and a couple of bookshelves with ancient looking ledgers. He perched himself on the edge of the desk, leaning forward in interest. “Seriously, where’d you get that? It was brilliant!”
Bella wrinkled her brow in confusion, fairly sure they had pepper spray in the UK. “Uh, it’s pepper spray. You can get it anywhere…?” she trailed off.
His brow wrinkled, and he was fingering that stick again. “Say, I get that things are different in America, but are you a Muggle or a Squib or what?”
“Say what?” Bella asked. While she was fairly certain she had stumbled into something again, the entire situation had been too absurd to be anything other than benign. If this had been a plot of the Volturi, she’d already been dead.
“Oh, the Americans call them Mundanes and Magically-Challenged, I think. Dad says they change the terms every ten years to try and make people feel better about themselves or some rot,” he explained, letting his legs swing and twirling that stick in his hands. He was grinning in a friendly manner.
Bella had to give him credit – if he was going to kill her, he was one of the best actors she’d ever seen. “I’m sorry, I still don’t follow.”
He wiggled his fingers and shot a few sparks out of that stick. “You know, magic?” he said, using a duh tone of voice.
Bella let out a sigh and rolled her eyes upward. If she hadn’t already had to deal with mindreading vampires, imprinting werewolves, and the vampire mafia, it might have been shocking. Instead, it was another irritation the Cullens hadn’t thought to warn her about. “Non-magical, then. Whichever term that’s supposed to be,” she said with a shrug. “Might be why I got some weird looks at the pub before. Kept asking me for Galleons and whatnot when I was trying to pay with Pounds. Don’t see what the problem was with being able to see the place. It was as plain as day on the street,” she said, irritated.
He rocked back, legs stilling. “You could see the place? And how’d you know about the
Volturi?”
Bella could tell she was going to be here a while, so she let herself flop back onto the couch with a sigh. “My ex-husband was a vampire. We had a few run-ins. And yes, I could see the place. I don’t see what the big deal is,” she snapped.
“Your ex-husband is a vampire,” he repeated slowly, after a moment with his mouth hung open. “They marry?”
Bella rolled her eyes again, reminded a bit of Jacob. “Yes, they marry.” She crossed her arms and arched an eyebrow, doing her best impression of Rosalie. “Explain.”
He let out a long sigh and went over to the fireplace – who had a fire in July, anyway? – and threw some powder into it. “Hermione Granger,” he called, and Bella wondered if he had gone mad.
Then a woman’s head appeared in the fire, and Bella’s mouth dropped open.
“Look, she’s Muggle-raised, I think, because she can see the Leaky, but her ex-husband was a vampire and she knows the effing Volturi,” he was saying, and the woman’s head was nodding. It was almost too much, even for Bella.
The woman turned her gaze towards Bella, lips pursed. “Go ahead. This could be an international incident if you tried to Obliviate her anyway. You know how touchy the Americans can be with their citizens overseas. Particularly since they view the Statutes of Secrecy as some sort of pick-and-choose buffet.”
Her head vanished, leaving the redhead man laughing softly. “All right. This husband of yours-“
“Ex-husband,” Bella correctly crisply.
He threw his head back with a laugh, putting his hands up in surrender. “Ex-husband,” he corrected himself. “What’d he tell you about stuff you’d never had believed if you didn’t know he was a vampire?”
It was an odd starting place, and Bella kept her arms crossed. “Not much. Found out more from my werewolf ex, honestly,” she said, a bit of bitterness in her voice.
His eyebrows rose in shock. “And you’ve dated a werewolf. Got a thing for magical creatures? Going for a Centaur next?” he asked with a snicker.
Bella just quirked an eyebrow, again trying her best to imitate Rosalie’s cool contempt.
He laughed again at her expression, and settled himself back on the edge of the desk. “Right. So. There’s a small part of the population which can do magic. We do magic with wands – these things,” he said, waving that stick in his hand, which emitted another spray of sparks. “Based on a whole bunch of outdated bullshit, which the Americans mostly don’t follow, as Hermione said, we keep this a secret from the rest of society.”
Bella nodded. “Go on.”
“There’s all sorts of things you can do with magic – change something into something else, fly, clean your dishes, whatever. There’s this stuff called Charms which is basically enchanting things to make them do stuff. Or protecting things.” He paused and shrugged. “Whatever. Basically, there’s a charm on that pub you went into that was supposed to keep people who didn’t have magic from seeing it. So either you’ve got magic and the Americans forgot to find you and tell you about it, or the Charms aren’t working. Or something freaky,” he said with a grin and another shrug.
“Probably freaky,” Bella said drily. “It’s rather how things go for me.”
He laughed again, then stuck out his hand. “George Weasley.”
“Bella Swan,” she said, shaking his hand with a smile. “And most people were acting as if the pub didn’t exist. I thought that meant it was cheap and shitty,” she admitted.
That made his laugh harder. “Well, it’s not exactly the most up to date inside,” Bella protested.
“Anyway,” he said, still grinning. “You can do pretty much anything with magic, but not many people can do it. So we keep it secret and have our own shops, schools, and things. Our own Ministry, too.”
“Ah, government. The same everywhere,” Bella said, her lips quirking upward.
“You’re taking this remarkably well,” he commented, letting his legs swing again.
“Rather benign discovery,” Bella quipped. “You’re not trying to kill me and I’m in a children’s toy shop. Now, if there were clowns…”
He snorted. “Bloody creepy, clowns. We’ve got a no clown policy here,” he said, grinning.
Bella flashed him smile. “Now. How do you know about the Volturi?” she asked. From what she understood, they killed everyone who knew about them. From the sounds of it, these people knew all about them – if George and the Hermione woman were any indication.
He sobered, and Bella noted how the emotion practically slid off his face. “We had a war here, not that long ago. Magical,” he clarified. “Some fellow – Hermione says you Muggles would think he was like Adolph Hitler, whoever that is – tried to kill a whole bunch of magical people based on their blood. Their ancestry,” he clarified.
Bella felt a chill go down her spine at that. The magical equivalent of Hitler? It wasn’t a reassuring though, particularly with the extent o f magic an unknown. “Go on,” she said quietly, seeing him struggle at finding words.
“He recruited a lot of marginalized people in wizarding society like werewolves and vampires to fight and started killing anyone who wasn’t a pureblood. The final battle was about a year and a half ago.” His voice trailed off.
Bella frowned. “But what does this have to do with the Volturi?”
The question seemed to pull him back. “Oh. Well they found with Voldemort, of course. The bad guy. Wiped most of ‘em out, although the Ministry let a few over in Italy that didn’t join in stay, since some semblance of rules and leadership’s better than letting it descend into anarchy. It’s the reason we don’t have many vampires in England – the treaty with them.”
“What?” Bella shouted. He rocked back in his place on the desk again, eyebrows up at her reaction. “You people negotiate with them? Do you know how many fucking people they kill? Innocent people in Italy to see the sights? Your government approved of this?!” she nearly shrieked.
George threw up his hands. “Hey, hey. I don’t work for the Ministry. I’m only telling you what I know, which isn’t much. And how do you know what they do?” he asked.
“Because I’ve been to Volterra, you ass. As far as I know, they still have a fucking mandate out for my death!” Bella snapped. Even if this magical world or whatever it wanted to call itself seemed harmless enough, she wasn’t going to stick around if they did deals with the Volturi. She’d end up dead in one of the back alleys fairly quick, she’d guess. She lurched to her feet, intending to get the hell out of London and on the next flight back to the States, just to be safe.
He was quicker, the grip on her upper arms just firm enough to keep her in place. “Hey, hey,” he said again, this time a bit softer. “Look, I know a few good people in the Ministry. I could be wrong about the whole thing with the Volturi. Let me Floo a few people and I’ll get all the facts.” She let him push her back into her seat on the couch. “If it’s as bad as you say, I don’t blame you for running off.”
She sat back, drumming her fingers on the arm of the couch as he threw more of that powder into the fire. It had only taken her three weeks in London to stumble into something she shouldn’t have. She was going to kill Alice.
Pairing: Bella/George
Rating: PG-13
Summary: AU/Harry Potter. Bella's abroad in London to recover from the divorce
and stumbles into Weasley Wizard Wheezes. Georges discovers pepper spray.
Bella makes a disturbing discovery about the Volturi. Bella/George. [Jacob and
Edward sympathetic]
Disclaimer: This crack is definitely not mine.
A/N: This might be a bit confusing at first, but the plotbunny wouldn’t let go. This is post Deathly Hallows and using some of Breaking Dawn’s canon, although this is obviously AU. I promise, some backstory for Bella and how she ended up in London will appear, but I didn’t want eight paragraphs of exposition to begin. She will come across as a bit OC from the Twilight series, but she’s grown and matured before this fic starts. I promise, all will be explained in good time. I figured you all would rather dive right in. :)
****
Bella first realized that things had gone pear shaped when she saw a kid pop a sweet into his mouth and turn into an oversized bird. The fact that no one around her batted an eye was her second clue that she’d managed to stumble into one of those situations again.
She took a step back and promptly bumped into someone else.
“Steady, love.” He’d gripped her upper arm tight, coming around to note the odd look on her face. “You all right?” He was fingering a long stick of wood and Bella looked from him to the toys buzzing around the shop, and then to the still-a-bird boy.
“I’m fairly certain I’ve stumbled into something I shouldn’t,” she said bluntly, fighting the urge to laugh at the situation. She’d come from London to avoid the unbelievable and supernatural, and this place reeked of it. “Although I’m in a toy shop this time, so hopefully you aren’t going to kill me. The Volturi could never manage to come off this benign.”
He cursed under his breath, muttering something about a mugging or a muggle – whatever British slang that was, although he stopped short at her mention of the Volturi. “Oi! Verity? Can you watch the front for a tic?” he yelled, tugging Bella by the arm towards a door behind the counter.
Bella dug in her heels. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” she said stubbornly, her hand inching its way towards her pocket and the pepper spray Charlie had given her before she left.
He grabbed her wrist with one hand, fishing into her pocket with the other. “No going for your wand,” he muttered, but his face when he pulled out the canister was one of confusion. He tossed it back at her, not that Bella could have caught it even at close range, and it clattered to the floor – letting its contents out with a hiss.
“Shit!” Bella hissed, throwing up her arm in a futile attempt to keep it from getting in her eyes. Others in the store scattered, coughing and exclaiming about a new product.
The redhead who’d been talking to her was reacting too, but his reaction was just as puzzling. “Merlin! That’s brilliant! Where’d you get that? I’ll have to contact the American shop?”
This time, she let him pull her towards the door, her eyes burning and watering too much to make her way out. He pointed that stick behind him after her shut the door and she heard a squelching sound. Then he turned that stick on her and the burning sensation disappeared.
He’d brought her into some sort of office, with a few chairs and a couch, a desk, and a couple of bookshelves with ancient looking ledgers. He perched himself on the edge of the desk, leaning forward in interest. “Seriously, where’d you get that? It was brilliant!”
Bella wrinkled her brow in confusion, fairly sure they had pepper spray in the UK. “Uh, it’s pepper spray. You can get it anywhere…?” she trailed off.
His brow wrinkled, and he was fingering that stick again. “Say, I get that things are different in America, but are you a Muggle or a Squib or what?”
“Say what?” Bella asked. While she was fairly certain she had stumbled into something again, the entire situation had been too absurd to be anything other than benign. If this had been a plot of the Volturi, she’d already been dead.
“Oh, the Americans call them Mundanes and Magically-Challenged, I think. Dad says they change the terms every ten years to try and make people feel better about themselves or some rot,” he explained, letting his legs swing and twirling that stick in his hands. He was grinning in a friendly manner.
Bella had to give him credit – if he was going to kill her, he was one of the best actors she’d ever seen. “I’m sorry, I still don’t follow.”
He wiggled his fingers and shot a few sparks out of that stick. “You know, magic?” he said, using a duh tone of voice.
Bella let out a sigh and rolled her eyes upward. If she hadn’t already had to deal with mindreading vampires, imprinting werewolves, and the vampire mafia, it might have been shocking. Instead, it was another irritation the Cullens hadn’t thought to warn her about. “Non-magical, then. Whichever term that’s supposed to be,” she said with a shrug. “Might be why I got some weird looks at the pub before. Kept asking me for Galleons and whatnot when I was trying to pay with Pounds. Don’t see what the problem was with being able to see the place. It was as plain as day on the street,” she said, irritated.
He rocked back, legs stilling. “You could see the place? And how’d you know about the
Volturi?”
Bella could tell she was going to be here a while, so she let herself flop back onto the couch with a sigh. “My ex-husband was a vampire. We had a few run-ins. And yes, I could see the place. I don’t see what the big deal is,” she snapped.
“Your ex-husband is a vampire,” he repeated slowly, after a moment with his mouth hung open. “They marry?”
Bella rolled her eyes again, reminded a bit of Jacob. “Yes, they marry.” She crossed her arms and arched an eyebrow, doing her best impression of Rosalie. “Explain.”
He let out a long sigh and went over to the fireplace – who had a fire in July, anyway? – and threw some powder into it. “Hermione Granger,” he called, and Bella wondered if he had gone mad.
Then a woman’s head appeared in the fire, and Bella’s mouth dropped open.
“Look, she’s Muggle-raised, I think, because she can see the Leaky, but her ex-husband was a vampire and she knows the effing Volturi,” he was saying, and the woman’s head was nodding. It was almost too much, even for Bella.
The woman turned her gaze towards Bella, lips pursed. “Go ahead. This could be an international incident if you tried to Obliviate her anyway. You know how touchy the Americans can be with their citizens overseas. Particularly since they view the Statutes of Secrecy as some sort of pick-and-choose buffet.”
Her head vanished, leaving the redhead man laughing softly. “All right. This husband of yours-“
“Ex-husband,” Bella correctly crisply.
He threw his head back with a laugh, putting his hands up in surrender. “Ex-husband,” he corrected himself. “What’d he tell you about stuff you’d never had believed if you didn’t know he was a vampire?”
It was an odd starting place, and Bella kept her arms crossed. “Not much. Found out more from my werewolf ex, honestly,” she said, a bit of bitterness in her voice.
His eyebrows rose in shock. “And you’ve dated a werewolf. Got a thing for magical creatures? Going for a Centaur next?” he asked with a snicker.
Bella just quirked an eyebrow, again trying her best to imitate Rosalie’s cool contempt.
He laughed again at her expression, and settled himself back on the edge of the desk. “Right. So. There’s a small part of the population which can do magic. We do magic with wands – these things,” he said, waving that stick in his hand, which emitted another spray of sparks. “Based on a whole bunch of outdated bullshit, which the Americans mostly don’t follow, as Hermione said, we keep this a secret from the rest of society.”
Bella nodded. “Go on.”
“There’s all sorts of things you can do with magic – change something into something else, fly, clean your dishes, whatever. There’s this stuff called Charms which is basically enchanting things to make them do stuff. Or protecting things.” He paused and shrugged. “Whatever. Basically, there’s a charm on that pub you went into that was supposed to keep people who didn’t have magic from seeing it. So either you’ve got magic and the Americans forgot to find you and tell you about it, or the Charms aren’t working. Or something freaky,” he said with a grin and another shrug.
“Probably freaky,” Bella said drily. “It’s rather how things go for me.”
He laughed again, then stuck out his hand. “George Weasley.”
“Bella Swan,” she said, shaking his hand with a smile. “And most people were acting as if the pub didn’t exist. I thought that meant it was cheap and shitty,” she admitted.
That made his laugh harder. “Well, it’s not exactly the most up to date inside,” Bella protested.
“Anyway,” he said, still grinning. “You can do pretty much anything with magic, but not many people can do it. So we keep it secret and have our own shops, schools, and things. Our own Ministry, too.”
“Ah, government. The same everywhere,” Bella said, her lips quirking upward.
“You’re taking this remarkably well,” he commented, letting his legs swing again.
“Rather benign discovery,” Bella quipped. “You’re not trying to kill me and I’m in a children’s toy shop. Now, if there were clowns…”
He snorted. “Bloody creepy, clowns. We’ve got a no clown policy here,” he said, grinning.
Bella flashed him smile. “Now. How do you know about the Volturi?” she asked. From what she understood, they killed everyone who knew about them. From the sounds of it, these people knew all about them – if George and the Hermione woman were any indication.
He sobered, and Bella noted how the emotion practically slid off his face. “We had a war here, not that long ago. Magical,” he clarified. “Some fellow – Hermione says you Muggles would think he was like Adolph Hitler, whoever that is – tried to kill a whole bunch of magical people based on their blood. Their ancestry,” he clarified.
Bella felt a chill go down her spine at that. The magical equivalent of Hitler? It wasn’t a reassuring though, particularly with the extent o f magic an unknown. “Go on,” she said quietly, seeing him struggle at finding words.
“He recruited a lot of marginalized people in wizarding society like werewolves and vampires to fight and started killing anyone who wasn’t a pureblood. The final battle was about a year and a half ago.” His voice trailed off.
Bella frowned. “But what does this have to do with the Volturi?”
The question seemed to pull him back. “Oh. Well they found with Voldemort, of course. The bad guy. Wiped most of ‘em out, although the Ministry let a few over in Italy that didn’t join in stay, since some semblance of rules and leadership’s better than letting it descend into anarchy. It’s the reason we don’t have many vampires in England – the treaty with them.”
“What?” Bella shouted. He rocked back in his place on the desk again, eyebrows up at her reaction. “You people negotiate with them? Do you know how many fucking people they kill? Innocent people in Italy to see the sights? Your government approved of this?!” she nearly shrieked.
George threw up his hands. “Hey, hey. I don’t work for the Ministry. I’m only telling you what I know, which isn’t much. And how do you know what they do?” he asked.
“Because I’ve been to Volterra, you ass. As far as I know, they still have a fucking mandate out for my death!” Bella snapped. Even if this magical world or whatever it wanted to call itself seemed harmless enough, she wasn’t going to stick around if they did deals with the Volturi. She’d end up dead in one of the back alleys fairly quick, she’d guess. She lurched to her feet, intending to get the hell out of London and on the next flight back to the States, just to be safe.
He was quicker, the grip on her upper arms just firm enough to keep her in place. “Hey, hey,” he said again, this time a bit softer. “Look, I know a few good people in the Ministry. I could be wrong about the whole thing with the Volturi. Let me Floo a few people and I’ll get all the facts.” She let him push her back into her seat on the couch. “If it’s as bad as you say, I don’t blame you for running off.”
She sat back, drumming her fingers on the arm of the couch as he threw more of that powder into the fire. It had only taken her three weeks in London to stumble into something she shouldn’t have. She was going to kill Alice.