The Basement kitchen they found themselves in was scarcely less gloomy than the Hall above. It was a cavernous, claustrophobic room with rough, damp stone walls that seemed to absorb what little warmth the house possessed.
Most of the light was coming from a large, roaring fire at the far end of the room, casting long, dancing shadows across the floor. A dense haze of pipe smoke hung in the air like heavy battle fumes, through which loomed the menacing, silhouette shapes of heavy iron pots and pans hanging from the dark timber ceiling.
Many mismatched wooden chairs had been crammed into the space for the meeting, and a long, battered wooden table stood in the middle of the room. It was heavily littered with rolls of parchment, silver goblets, empty wine bottles, and a heap of what appeared to be dark, unwashed rags.
Arthur and Bill Weasley were talking quietly with their heads together at the far end of the table, their faces tight with exhaustion.
Molly cleared her throat sharply.
Mr. Weasely, a thin, balding, red-haired man who wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses, looked around and instantly jumped to his feet, "Harry!" He said, hurrying forward to greet his son's friend, shaking his hand vigorously. "Good to see you, boy! Excellent to have you here!"
Lucifer's dark eyes scanned the table, watching as Bill hurriedly began rolling up the various parchments left exposed on the wooden surface. His jaw tightened. 'They think they can keep me playing the blind teenager,' he thought, a cold, dangerous amusement running through his mind. He was going to get answers about this little war, one way or another.
"Journey all right, Harry?" Bill called out over the clutter, trying to frantically gather up twelve scrolling parchments at once. "Mad-Eye didn't make you fly via Greenland, then?"
"He certainly tried," Tonks said, striding over to help Bill clear the table. In her enthusiasm, her elbow caught a tall brass candleholder, immediately sending a lit candle toppling onto the last open piece of parchment. "Oh no—sorry—!"
"Here, dear, let me," Molly said, her voice sounding deeply exasperated. With a swift wave of her wand, she mended and repaired the singed parchment.
In the sudden, sharp flash of magical light caused by the wand, Lucifer's advanced vision caught a crystal-clear image of the drawing beneath the soot. It looked exactly like the highly detailed architectural plan of a heavily fortified building. 'A vault? A fortress?' He calculated the dimensions instantly in his head.
Molly caught him staring at the paper. Her eyes widened slightly, and she aggressively snatched it off the table, stuffing it roughly into Bill's already heavily laden arms. "This sort of thing absolutely ought to be cleared away promptly at the very end of meetings!" She snapped, throwing a warning glance around the room.
"Why?" Lucifer asked, his voice carrying a flat, challenging resonance that cut through the kitchen clatter.
No one, however, answered him. The adults completely ignored his question, continuing to move items around as if he hadn't spoken at all. The blatant dismissiveness instantly ticked him off, a spark of heat flaring beneath his collar. Bill drew his wand quickly, pointed it at the stack of documents, and muttered, "Evanesco." The scrolls vanished into thin air.
"Sit down, Harry," Sirius said, gesturing to an empty chair next to him. "You've met Mundungus before, haven't you?"
"You mean the piece of shit who was supposed to be watching Harry's house when the Dementors showed up?" Lucifer asked, sitting down on the bench. The blunt profanity caused everyone in the kitchen to suddenly freeze, their eyes darting to him with expressions that looked as though they were frantically ready to calm him down before he took the room apart.
"Some'n say m' name?" Mundungus mumbled sleepily, shifting in his chair. "I 'gree with Sirius..." He raised a very grubby, dirt-caked hand in the air as though voting in a council meeting, his droopy, bloodshot eyes completely unfocused.
Ginny merely let out a quiet giggle from the corner at his sheer incompetence.
"The meeting's over, Dung," Sirius said, his voice laced with absolute contempt as they all settled down around the table. "Harry's finally arrived."
Lucifer glared at Mundungus the entire time, his red eyes narrowing into lethal slits.
"Eh?" Fletcher asked, blinking heavily as he peered balefully at Harry through a curtain of matted, ginger hair. "Blimey, so 'e 'as. Yeah... you all right, 'arry?"
"Yeah, I'm fine, except for getting into massive trouble with the Ministry because of you," Harry said, not holding back a single shred of how he felt about the thief's desertion. He clearly looked like he didn't want to bring up the details of the hearing, but Lucifer knew he was boiling inside.
Mundungus fidgeted nervously under the double glare of Harry and Lucifer. He reached into his coat and pulled out a grimy black clay pipe, sticking it between his chapped lips. He ignited the end of it with a lazy spark from his wand and took a deep, rattling pull. Great, billowing clouds of thick, greenish smoke entirely obscured his face in seconds.
"Yeah... owe you a bit of a 'pology..." his gravelly voice grunted from the dead center of the incredibly smelly cloud.
"For the absolute last time, Mundungus!" Molly yelled at him, her face turning red. "Will you please not smoke that disgusting thing in my kitchen? Especially not when we are literally about to sit down and eat!"
"Ah," Mundungus muttered, the cloud of smoke instantly vanishing as he stowed the hot pipe back into his coat pocket. "Right. Sorry, Molly." Despite the spell, an acrid, foul smell of burning socks lingered heavily in the damp air.
"And if anyone wants dinner before midnight, I'm going to need a hand," She announced to the large room, lifting a heavy pot. "No, you stay exactly where you are, Harry dear. You've had a long, exhausting journey."
Lucifer stood up from his chair, intending to help set the table, but Molly completely bypassed him, acting as though he hadn't just traveled across London alongside Harry too. He felt a sharp, cynical ripple through his chest. 'It's like I've stepped directly into the twilight zone,' he thought, watching how carefully the Order members avoided eye contact with him. He bounded forward toward the pantry at exact same time Tonks did, his tall frame towering over her.
"What can I do to help, Molly?" Tonks asked cheerfully.
"Er—no, it's quite alright, Tonks," Molly said quickly, her face looking deeply apprehensive as she eyed the girl's clumsy posture. "You have a rest too, dear. You've done more than enough today."
Lucifer decided to bypass Mrs. Weasely entirely, walking over to the wooden cupboard to get the heavy ceramic plates out instead. He remembered from Burrow that she liked to cook and serve exclusively with frantic bursts of household magic, whereas he preferred the quiet of doing things by hand. 'I didn't expect the last unmarried girl of the House of Black to be this spectacularly clumsy,' he thought to himself, stacking the side-plates. 'Her father is a Muggle-born, if I recall... whereas Andromeda graduated from Slytherin with perfect Black attire. Genetics are an erratic thing.'
"For the record," Hermione whispered, sliding up right next to him as they gathered the heavy plates and silverware, her hip brushing against his. "The food in this house has yet to taste anywhere near as good as that exquisite dinner you made for me at Lux." She gave him a brilliant, secretive wink, causing the dangerous tension in his jaw to instantly dissolve into a warm smile.
While they were busy arranging the cutlery along the long wooden table, a sharp, shrieking roar from Molly shattered the quiet. "Fred! George! NO! JUST CARRY THEM BY HAND!"
Both Hermione and Lucifer whipped their heads around just in time to see Harry, Sirius, and Mundungus violently dive away from the table. A large, bubbling iron cauldron of stew, a heavy flagon of butterbeer, and a massive wooden breadboard, complete with a long, sharp bread knife.... came hurtling through the air directly toward their heads under the twins' poorly aimed charms.
Lucifer didn't have the time to draw his wand, nor did he need to. He extended his right hand, his fingers clenching as internal power flared.
Instantly, the flying cauldron, iron flagon, and heavy breadboard froze dead in mid-air, hovering inches above the terrified wizards' heads. The loose stews and splashing butterbeer that had begun to spill over the rims stopped completely, the liquids defies gravity. With a fluid, casual twist of Lucifer's wrist, the stray drops of stew and alcohol drifted smoothly backward into their proper containers.
He lowered his hand, and the entire dinner assembly was set gently down onto the half of the wooden table that wasn't currently covered in a nasty, black burn mark from a previous experiment.
Harry and Sirius let out a collective burst of relieved laughter as Molly began furiously yelling at the twins.
"FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE! THERE WAS ABSOLUTELY NO NEED FOR THAT! I HAVE HAD TEARING ENOUGH OF THIS! JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE LEGALLY ALLOWED TO DO MAGIC NOW DOES NOT MEAN YOU NEED TO WHIP YOUR WANDS OUT FOR EVERY LITTLE SINGLE THING IN THIS HOUSE!"
"We were just trying to save a bit of time, Mum!" Fred said in a loud, defensive voice. He quickly apologized under her fiery glare before turning to owner of the house. "Sorry, Sirius, mate. Didn't mean to ruin the finish on your table..."
"Boys, your mother is entirely right," Arthur chimed in finally, trying to look stern behind his glasses. "You're supposed to show a proper sense of adult responsibility now that you've officially come of age."
"None of your older brothers ever caused this sort of ridiculous trouble!" Molly yelled, slamming a fresh, heavy flagon of butterbeer onto the wood, almost spilling half of it herself.
Lucifer casually flicked his fingers, keeping the liquid from flying everywhere.
"Bill didn't feel the sudden need to Apparate every few feet! Charlie didn't charm every single object he met! Percy—" She stopped yelling abruptly, her breath catching in her throat, and looked over at her husband, who had suddenly developed a completely wooden, stoic expression on his face at the mention of his estranged son.
"Let's just eat," Bill said quickly, slicing into the bread to break the suffocating silence.
"It looks absolutely wonderful, Molly," Lupin said kindly, immediately ladling a generous portion of the steaming stew onto a plate for her and placing it across the table to ground her.
For a few minutes, a heavy silence settled over the room, broken only by the sharp chink of ceramic plates, the clatter of cutlery, and heavy scraping of wooden chairs as everyone settled into their spots at the table.
Hermione sat closely on Lucifer's right side, who had purposefully selected a seat as far to the left end of the table as he could manage, ensuring he wouldn't have to turn his head very far to speak to anyone.
Under normal circumstances at Hogwarts, she liked sitting right near the crowded center of the Gryffindor table to stay close to the social loop, but whenever she was with him, they preferred quiet boundary of the edge.
Molly turned her head toward Sirius, breaking the quiet. "I've been meaning to tell you, Sirius. There is something dark trapped inside that old writing desk up in the drawing room. It keeps rattling and shaking violently every time someone walks past. Of course, it could easily just be a common Boggart, but I thought we ought to ask Alastor to have a proper look at it before we let it out."
"I can go take a look at it right now and get it out of the way for you," Lucifer offered smoothly, leaning back against his chair.
"Oh, don't be silly, Lucifer. I would never ask a schoolboy to go handle that," She said, shaking her head dismissively as she reached for the bread.
"Nonsense. I'll go take care of it," Lucifer said, his tone leaving absolutely no room for argument as he stood up from the table, his tall frame throwing a shadow over the bench. "My Boggart is only a creepy version of myself anyway. It's hardly a threat...."
"But—" Molly started to protest, her brow furrowing.
Lupin, however, cut in cleanly, his eyes meeting her across the steam. "Molly, if there is anyone currently sitting in this room whom I would trust implicitly to deal with a rogue Dementor or a dark entity, it would be Lucifer and Harry. But given what transpired in Surrey a few days ago... Lucifer should definitely be the one to handle this creature..."
"What if it isn't a Boggart at all?!" She asked exasperatedly, her hands gesturing tightly. "What if it's something dangerous?"
"Lucifer is easily the most capable wizard in this house right now to deal with hostile magical creatures," Lupin said with a small, knowing smirk directed at his former student. "From what Severus and Minerva told the staff last year, you... proved yourself exceptionally well, achieving top marks in every practical Defense class."
"Oh, fine," Molly relented, waving her hand in defeat. "Just be careful."
"I'll be back shortly," Lucifer said to Hermione, offering her a quick, reassuring squeeze of her shoulder before turning on his heel and leaving the basement kitchen.
Molly however continued talking the moment the door clicked shut behind him. "The heavy velvet curtains in that drawing room are completely full of venomous Doxies too. I thought we might try tackling that mess first thing tomorrow morning."
"I absolutely look forward to it," Sirius said in a dripping, sarcastic tone that Mrs. Weasley completely failed to pick up on as she ate.
Hermione looked across the table at Tonks, her attention caught as the Auror began playfully changing the physical shape of her nose using her abilities as a 'Metamorphmagus.' Fascinated by the display, she leaned forward, requesting her absolute favorite combination. "Do that one like a pig snout, Tonks! Please?"
Tonks grinned, scrunched up her face with a strained, concentrated expression, and in the next blink, her nose transformed into a perfect, pink pig's snout. Hermione broke out into a bright, musical laugh, having to quickly cover her mouth with her hand since she had just taken a large bite of her dinner. She had wanted to see that specific transfiguration ever since using 'Pig Snout' as the Fat Lady's password back in their first year, especially after seeing Hagrid's massive three-headed dog, Fluffy.
She swallowed her food, the laughter dying down as she heard Mundungus speaking loudly to Arthur further down the table. "---and then, if you'll actually believe me, the wizard says to me, he says, 'Here, Dung, where on earth did you get all them toads from? Because some son of a Bludger has gone and nicked every single one of mine!' And I says to him—"
Before the thief could finish the climax of his smuggling story, a deafening, cataclysmic explosion rattled down from upper levels of the house, shaking the stone walls of the kitchen.
"Lucifer!" Hermione gasped breathlessly, her fork dropping to her plate with a sharp clatter. She bolted toward the kitchen door in a panic, her heart hammering against her ribs, while Sirius, Harry, and rest of the Order scrambled out of their chairs to follow her up the dark stairs.
xxxxxx
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