Whoosh!
Jasnah flung back the covers and sprang up from the bed, raising her wand cold and genuinely ready to kill, fully prepared to strike down the German Ministry Aurors who had, in her waking certainty, come finally to hunt her down.
Only as her blurred vision snapped rapidly into proper focus, Jasnah found, to her considerable astonishment, no Ministry Aurors standing before her at all. There were no explosions, neither flames.
Only an old Muggle, watching her strange, sudden behaviour with the same cloudy, unbothered eyes he'd worn since she first woke.
'A dream, then?'
Jasnah blinked hard, working to properly settle herself, then turned simultaneously toward the window.
The hazy grey light that had earlier diffused softly through the fogged glass was gone completely. Now, behind the grimy panes, lay a deep and thoroughly settled darkness, the day had fully passed her by.
Night had fallen. And yet the howl of wind and snow had not.
'I had fallen asleep, then?'
Slowly, Jasnah sat herself back up properly, wiped away the sweat at her temple, and buried her face entirely in her open hands, working to steady her racing heart.
She had been trying, for what felt like hours, to think of some way out of her current predicament, but for all her racking of her mind, she'd found nothing remotely workable to hold onto.
Without meaning to, she had drifted off into sleep again, her body's exhaustion was overriding her mind's careful vigilance.
A heavy sigh rose from somewhere deep inside her chest, and the face hidden behind her hands grew only more lost.
In all the years since she had left her own grandfather behind to follow her father across the scattered wizarding communities of Europe, chasing after that lofty, genuinely noble ideal—that wizards might live openly in the world with their heads properly held high, and never again need to hide themselves away from ordinary Muggles—
—she had come through more brushes with death than she could easily count on both hands and had failed, in all that time, only once: the single occasion she was captured by Bryan Watson.
Every one of those past crises, if she were being genuinely honest with herself had been objectively more dangerous than her current situation. And yet none of them had left her feeling quite this thoroughly lost.
Was her father even still alive?
Her father—the man who had pulled her free from cold, hunger, and humiliation as a child, who had given her a proper home when she had none, who had taught her magic with his own two hands. The brilliant, formidable man she'd built her life around.
Hope stirred somewhere in her chest at the thought: if she herself could survive, then surely her father, considerably wiser and more experienced than herself, could survive it too.
But her reason coldly told her that her own survival had been nothing but luck.
And luck was a thing with no logic to it at all.
A faint, rhythmic rustling sound reached Jasnah's ears from across the room—she recognised it as the old Muggle, sitting quietly in his corner with a needle held in hand, stitching small pieces of fur together, evidently now busy with some other small task to fill the evening.
Wary of him even in her own grief, Jasnah slowly lowered the hands still covering her face.
She had let her head hang low for a while; now she raised it properly and opened her eyes fully, then went completely still.
'My right leg—'
She remembered clearly, from earlier: in her own unconscious thrashing while she'd been fully out cold, the splint on her leg had gone crooked, and the wound beneath had started seeping fresh blood through the bandage.
But now, she noticed with a small jolt, two proper splints held her calf in place, and there was not a single trace of blood remaining anywhere on the clean bandages wrapped around it.
In a sudden flash of further realisation, Jasnah noticed something else.
Earlier, while she'd been trying to think of some way to escape, exhausted past her own limits, she had simply collapsed onto the bed. But now that she'd woken again, the covers had been pulled back up over her sleeping form.
"Try it—"
Through Jasnah's still-hazy, adjusting eyes, the old Muggle approached her slowly, his own face was entirely expressionless throughout, carrying a small wooden bowl held in both hands.
A bowl of milky-white soup, with small bits floating on its surface—likely, she realised, the very potatoes she'd disdainfully ignored earlier, boiled through and roughly chopped, now tossed together into a simmering broth.
Her nose twitched at the rising scent. Jasnah stared at the old Muggle's wooden, unreadable face in surprise, something subtle was beginning to shift in her own expression.
'Fish soup. So—'
In the dim, flickering lamplight, something flickered correspondingly in Jasnah's own eyes as understanding arrived.
'Earlier—when the old Muggle had gone outside that second time, it hadn't been to chop more wood at all. He'd been breaking through the ice, hadn't he, on a river that was freezing fast in the bitter cold?'
Her own gaze dropped sharply. Jasnah looked carefully at the Muggle's legs and feet, and sure enough, found the marks left by river water there, dried into the fabric of his trousers.
The Muggle lifted the bowl slightly toward her again, and Jasnah took it from him without thinking the motion through.
Watching the pale chunks of fish and softened potato drift in the steaming broth, Jasnah slipped once more into a daze.
'Fish and potato stew.'
'What a wretchedly ill-conceived combination.'
Under any other conceivable circumstance, she would genuinely never have touched this particular kind of distasteful cuisine in her life. And yet now, the broth before her, faintly encrusted with a few drops of oil floating at its surface held a fatal pull over her exhausted senses.
Nearly every cell in her own body seemed to be shouting at once, ordering her with urgenc, to simply wipe out the whole bowl without further hesitation!
Glug—
Without meaning to, Jasnah swallowed a first, testing mouthful.
She shot a faintly guilty glance toward the old Muggle, who had already brought her the soup and then returned slowly to his corner, stitching fur again by the dim, steady glow of the oil lamp, and pressed her own lips together against the shame of it.
Slurp—
And then, there was no holding back at all.
Hearing the slurping sounds coming from her side of the small room, the old Muggle turned his head and looked calmly toward the young woman with her face now buried in the bowl.
He blinked once, slowly, then, without much apparent thought given to the sight, wiped his own needle-pricked finger absently against the dull-coloured fur in his lap, and went back calmly to his stitching.
'So delicious!'
Having devoured the soup, the fish, and the boiled bits of potato in an entire whirlwind of appetite, Jasnah felt a wave of satisfaction wash steadily through her whole body. Her eyes went a little unfocused as she silently, privately sang the meal's praises to herself though her actual face, as ever throughout, revealed nothing of this internal reaction.
'It's hard to imagine that deep in these mountains, a solitary old Muggle, living entirely apart from the wider world, could manage to make a bowl of fish soup this genuinely good.'
Staring down at the empty bottom of the bowl, Jasnah, straining hard to keep her own face properly composed, let her lips move slightly all the same.
'If only there were another bowl available.'
The thought had barely finished rising before Jasnah snuffed it out hard with force.
To be infatuated with food a mere Muggle had made—the very idea filled her with shame. Besides, the soup probably wasn't even that good, objectively speaking. It was only that she'd been injured, and gone too long without proper food, and the combination had simply gone to her head momentarily!
With that reassuring thought settled, something in Jasnah eased slightly.
On tiptoe, careful of her splinted leg, she set the empty bowl back down properly on the table.
"The fish soup wasn't bad—"
Sitting back down on the bed, she watched the old Muggle at his continued work for a moment longer, then spoke suddenly into the quiet.
She lifted her own chin slightly as she said it, though the earlier disdain in her eyes had faded considerably from where it had originally sat.
"When I'm properly back in Berlin, I'll give you more gold, beyond what I already promised—"
Just as she'd resignedly expected, the old Muggle said nothing in response.
'Damn it—'
Jasnah's breath came quick for a brief moment; she felt a fresh wave of suffocating frustration rise in her chest at the continued silence.
Outside, the howling wind and driving snow showed no sign of letting up any time soon, the storm was evidently settling in for the full night.
Jasnah gave up hoping for an immediate change, her hollow, drifting gaze began to wander slowly around the small room.
Time crept by, second by agonising second, and felt endless in its passage.
When she'd been locked away in Azkaban previously, confined to a narrow stone cell, the cold of that particular place had been unlike anything found anywhere else in the world—that dreadful prison had brought her a despair she'd never properly known before or since.
But for sheer torment, her current situation genuinely surpassed even that remembered horror.
It was as if she'd been completely cast out of the world. She had no idea what was actually happening outside these walls, no idea whether her father had escaped the collapse, no idea whether Aurors might come knocking at the door at any moment without warning and could do genuinely nothing about any of it but sit here, trapped in this single room with a strange, eccentric old Muggle who offered her nothing but silence and, apparently, soup.
Ding, ding, ding—
The kettle's lid resting on the mantel was pushed steadily up by rising steam, and the sound finally made the old Muggle set down his own stitching work at last.
"What's your name?"
Jasnah asked suddenly into the quiet, watching coldly as the old Muggle rose and began brewing fresh tea at the fire.
Silence.
The question went entirely unanswered, hanging in the air.
"Aren't you curious how I ended up falling in the river in the first place?"
Silence again, just as before.
But this time, notably, the old Muggle shook his own head slowly in a clear signal that he had no interest in hearing her story.
A cup of black tea was set down before her without further comment. Jasnah hesitated a moment, then took the offered cup properly in hand.
The old Muggle, it seemed, hadn't genuinely registered or acknowledged the small goodwill she'd extended toward him.
Once she'd accepted the tea, he simply turned straight back around, poured himself his own cup in turn, then drew the fur he'd been stitching back toward the warmth of the hearth, warming his own bare feet by the fire as he went on steadily with his unfinished work.
"Actually—"
The old man's blank, entirely unreadable expression unexpectedly stirred something competitive somewhere in Jasnah—she found herself genuinely wanting to see this half-dead old Muggle show some kind of "reaction,".
"I'm a witch."
Jasnah said, her sharp eyes were still fixed intently on the old Muggle's unmoving profile, watching for any flicker of response.
"I know."
After a brief silence, before Jasnah's thoroughly stunned gaze, the old Muggle who had left her only his quiet profile this entire time, sitting there before the hearth—said it calmly.
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