Chapter Text
It starts because Percy runs into her with his car.
Look, it’s-- it’s not his fault, okay? It’s dark, well into the evening, and he’s minding his own business and driving home from the city, a news talk show that he’s only half listening to playing on the radio to keep him awake, when something flies through the air towards him and crashes directly into his windshield.
It happens very quickly; the shattering of glass, the squeal of the breaks as he stomps on them, and the dull clattering as something rolls across the roof of his car. Percy, mostly on numb instinct, shifts the car into park and stares, wide-eyed, at the long, thin shaft of wood that had collided with his windshield with so much force that it had punched a hole through it, just missing impaling him through the face by less than half a foot.
“What the fuck?” he asks.
With shaking hands he undoes his seatbelt and gets out of the car, which dings at him irritably for leaving the door open, and stumbles to his feet right outside the driver’s side door, taking a couple numb steps back to survey the damage.
There’s a broom sticking out of his car.
Not one of those cheap dollar store brooms, either, but the old-fashioned kind, the wooden shaft knobbly and warped, with twigs for bristles that smolder slightly, tiny little red lights sticking out about two feet from his windshield. A broom crashed into his car. A broom crashed into his fucking car.
There’s a groan behind him, and Percy whips around in surprise to find the source of it.
Four or five yards down the road behind him, illuminated by his tail lights, a dark figure shifts against the asphalt, pushing themselves up with one arm.
“You alright?” he calls out, eyes darting back to the broom. His mind is still having a bit of trouble wrapping around that part. Broom. In his car. What the fuck.
The figure seems to agree, because it groans again, “What the fuck.”
Percy trips over his feet slightly as he walks towards them, and by the time he crouches down beside them they’ve already pulled themselves up into a sitting position, head cradled in their hands. Well, her hands; it’s definitely a woman who’s just crashed into his car and is now sitting in the middle of the road. Except she’s wearing what can only be the world’s largest bathrobe, and she smells like alcohol and wood fire, which is. Which is just fucking great. Flying homeless women are crashing into Percy’s car.
“I should call an ambulance, or- or the police,” Percy realizes suddenly, his shock-numbed brain starting to kick back up to speed, but when he makes to move away the woman reaches out and grabs his arm, halting him.
“No! No police.”
Crazy flying homeless women.
“Yes police,” he argues, the whole thing striking him as exceedly ridiculous, when the woman pulls him in closer. Her other hand shifts within her bathrobe, and suddenly there is something poking into his side, just below his ribcage. A gun? The butt of a knife? Something.
Crazy armed flying homeless women.
“No police,” she hisses quietly, her grip tightening on his arm.
Percy nods agreeably, and says, voice cracking, “No police.”
Using him the woman hauls herself up to her feet, her breathing heavy, and when she shifts away Percy gets a good look at what she’d threatened him with.
It’s a stick. Thin, with a slight curve, and a great crack that’s caused the bottom end to dangle by a thread of bark. A stick. A goddamn stick.
“Oh, come on,” he says, a little helplessly.
She follows his gaze and then sucks in a shuddering gasp. “Shit,” she breathes, dropping her hold on him to gingerly touch the end that’s dangling. At the merest press of her fingers, it snaps off and drops, rolling across the asphalt. “Shit!”
“That’s it,” he says decisively, “I’m definitely calling the police.”
He turns back towards his car, putting his back to her, which he will later think that in hindsight was probably not the smartest idea, and so he doesn’t see her move, only hears her voice as she cries, “Obliviate!”
Everything goes a little wonky after that.
There’s a popping sound and a sudden rush of pressure, the heavy smell of ozone thick in the air, but Percy barely hears it over the abrupt sense of vertigo that overcomes him, blinking rapidly to try and focus his eyes.
After the moment passes, he pauses and looks around. He’s alone in the road, in the middle of the night, outside of his car.
“Why am I here?” he asks his car. (The car, predictably, doesn’t respond.)
When he doesn’t find an answer, he decides that it would probably be prudent to just get back in his car and continue home. It isn’t until he slides into his driver’s seat that he notices the broom that’s impaled the windshield.
“Huh,” he says, thoughtfully, and then puts on his seatbelt, shifts the car into drive, and putters on down the road without putting much further attention towards it.
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And in fact, Percy doesn’t think about it at all until the next morning, when there’s a knock on his door and he opens it, bleary-eyed and still half-asleep because he is not a morning person, to find a woman in the world’s largest bathrobe standing on his doorstep and glaring at him.
He stares at her incomprehensibly for about five seconds before something in his brain seems to shift and he thinks to himself suddenly, A homeless lady crashed into my car last night.
“You!” he cries, pointing at her, and her eyebrow raises.
“Well, I was hoping the charm would hold up, but I suppose you can’t expect too much from a cracked wand,” she says nonsensically, then barges past him and into his house. “I need my broom back, if you please.”
“You crashed into me!” he yelps, too startled to stop her as she starts snooping around his front hallway and into the kitchen, as if maybe he’s just got it mounted somewhere as a trophy. “And I forgot! How’d I forget! What the fuck!”
“Don’t worry about it.” She sniffs about his kettle, still warm from his first brew of the morning, then helps herself to one of the mugs hanging from the rack on the wall and pours herself some tea. Percy gives an offended sputter. “And technically you ran into me. Where’s my broom, then?” She sips loudly and gives him an expectant stare.
“Who the fuck are you!”
“It’s probably better that you don’t know,” she tells him, a little more sympathetically. “The less you know in general the better, actually. Otherwise I’d have to call the Ministry in to do a charm that’d stick, and that’s just too much paperwork.”
Percy stares at her, mouth agape, before turning on his heel and sprinting for the stairs that lead up to his bedroom. His pistol’s in there, for all the good it’s doing him now, but he barely makes it up a few steps before there’s a crack, like a small condensed thunderclap, and the woman just fucking appears in front of him on the stairs, a couple steps up. He freezes, hand shooting out to clutch at the guard rail to steady him; oddly, the woman does the same, giving her head a shake and looking slightly disoriented.
“Oh, I hate doing that, I’m garbage at it,” she mumbles to herself. “‘S why I fly. Which is why I need my broom.” She reaches into her bathrobe again (but it’s not a bathrobe, is it? Now that he’s looking it’s just a regular robe, but one of those old fashioned ones, the ones you never see nowadays.) and pulls out the stick from last night. Hilariously, the piece that had broken off appears to have been stuck back on with masking tape. She raises it to point at him, looking unhappy but determined.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” she tells him, brows furrowed, “but I need it back.”
Percy stares at her, then turns tail and books it back down the stairs.
“Petrificus totalus!” the woman cries behind him, and Percy has a split second to think to himself what the fuck what the fucking fuck before every muscle in his body locks up and, for a moment of sheer horror, he begins to fall, stiff as a board, down the last two steps. “Shit!” the woman then says, and before he can pitch over head-first she grabs the neck of his shirt and braces herself on the steps, huffing as she struggles to keep him from going end over end.
Percy, in his head, is screaming.
It takes nearly a minute, but after some shuffling and a few terrifying instances where she nearly drops him, the woman manages to barge her way in front of him and gently pull him down the stairs instead of just letting him fall. He can’t move, he can’t even twitch, even his eyes stuck facing forwards, but sweat beads up on his forehead nervously and his breathing escalates.
Magic. Magic? Magic!
What the fuck.
This is not possible.
With some difficulty, the woman drags him into his living room and dumps him onto his couch, then leans against it with a heavy breath. “I should have brought Grog,” she wheezes, stretching to crack her back. Then she puts her hands on her hips and stares down at him. “If I unfreeze you, are you going to freak out on me? Because believe it or not, but I’m actually trying to be nice here.”
Percy has just enough muscle control left to wheeze at her scathingly.
“I’m going to take that as a yes,” she says, magnanimously, and then points her-- her wand at him again. Maybe the broom actually did impale him last night. Maybe he’s dead and this is just some weird fantasy that his brain has concocted in his last moments. “Finite Incantatem,” she says, flicking her wand as she does so, and Percy immediately feels the locking of his muscles loosen.
Well, most of them do anyway.
“I can’t feel my legs,” he tells her, as reasonably as he can giving the circumstances, which is to say he’s half-paralyzed and has had his entire view of the world turned topsy-turvy, and so it’s not very reasonable at all.
“Oh, fuck,” she says, lifting her wand to glare at it. “Let me try that again, it was supposed to go the whole way. Finite Incantatem,” she tries again, but this time the only thing that happens is that blue sparks shoot out the end of the stick and singe her hand, causing her to drop it with a hiss. “Balls!”
“Do you even know how to use that thing?” he asks, using his hands to push himself up. It’s not even that he can’t feel his legs, it’s that they refuse to move; he feels like he’s got iron shoved into his skeleton, keeping his lower limbs locked in place.
“Shut up, you,” she snaps, glaring at him and as she bends down to pick up the stick again. “Fucking muggle. I’m the one with the wand here.”
“And a grand show you’re putting on with it,” Percy says, disbelief loosening his tongue to dangerously sassy levels. It’s just, there’s no way this can be real. This has to be some sort of fever dream. “Are you going to turn me into a frog next?”
“I could, you know,” the woman threatens, putting her hands on her hips.
“Well if you do, I’d appreciate being turned into a whole frog and not just half of one.”
“Look here, muggle,” she says, voice lowering dangerously, “tell me where my broom is before I seriously hex you.”
He gestures around his living room helplessly. “I don’t fucking know, do you see it in here? It’s probably still through my goddamn windshield. The car’s in the garage, unless I parked it somewhere stupid because you decided to scramble my brain. Who the fuck are you, anyway?”
“The less you know the better,” she tells him again. She stows her wand back in her robe, then leaves him alone in his living room, muttering as she goes. “Of course it’s in the garage. Probably has electric locks too. Alohomora has a hard time with those.”
Percy grabs his television remote from the table beside his couch and chucks it at her back as she disappears down the hall. The throw goes wide and instead of hitting her the remote punches through the drywall beside the doorframe and sticks halfway inside his wall tauntingly. “Hey! You come back and fix this!”
“Just a tick, darling!” she calls back at him, the faintest hint of a cackle in her voice.
Percy drops back down against the couch and stares up at his ceiling. “This is not possible,” he tells it. “This is absolutely not possible.”
Magic. What the fuck. What the fuck. He’d blame it on his imagination, except he’s been pretty dutiful about taking his medication. It’s just-- it’s just if magic existed, he’d have known about it by now.
After about two minutes of him having a silent panic attack, the woman reappears in the doorway to his living room. She looks at the television remote that’s stuck in the wall and starts laughing. “Wow. You’re just having awful luck aren’t you.”
When he twists his upper body towards her, he sees that she’s got her fucking broom with her, held protectively against her side. He must look as harried as he feels, because her faces tightens sympathetically. “You alright?”
“You’re not real,” he tells her, a little desperately. “Magic doesn’t exist.”
“Oh, dear,” she sighs, planting her broom upright and leaning against it. “This is why we stay separated. You muggles can’t handle it.”
“What,” he hisses, “is a muggle?”
“Don’t you worry your pretty head over it,” she tells him in a gently patronizing voice. “I’ll make you forget all of this happened and then be on my way.”
“Fat lot of good that did you last time,” Percy says, once more staring up at the ceiling. He can’t look at her. It’s too fucking weird.
“Finite Incantatem,” she tries again, and this time the painfully clenched muscles of his legs loosen abruptly; he gasps and leans up immediately to rub at his calves, the phantom ache of them already beginning to subside. “There we go,” she says, putting her hands on her hips and sounding pleased with herself.
After a few seconds Percy looks up and meets her eyes, and they stare at each other.
A witch. A real, live witch. In his house. She looks so… normal. Brown eyes, dark hair. A pleasant, if angular, face. Admittedly, she’s in a giant bathrobe or something of the like, but when Percy was a child he’d always imagined witches as bent and crooked, with beak-like noses and warts. And when he became an adult he didn’t have time to consider what he thought witches looked like, and so in the back of his mind in the quiet parts he’s doesn’t think to ponder over he’d never really changed his childhood impression of them.
….is it bad that he sort of wants to dissect her?
Apparently this thought makes his expression darken or his eyes narrow, because the woman winces suddenly and then says, reluctantly, “Um, sorry. About last night. I was sort of drinking.”
“Drinking and flying,” Percy says, mouth moving too fast for his sense to stop it. “Don’t you people have laws against that?”
“Err,” she says. “Yes.” Then she draws herself up, hands on her hips again, and says, “Well, if I’m going to make you forget anyway, then I might as well introduce myself. You can call me Vex.”
“Vex,” he repeats, deadpan.
“Vex,” she confirms.
Great. A witch named Vex. How fucking appropriate.
The woman --Vex-- doesn’t seem to notice his disbelief; she moves instead towards one of his windows and peeks through the curtain, glancing at him briefly when he gets up to pry the remote out of the wall. “Don’t you have neighbors?” she asks curiously.
“No,” he says shortly, and he doesn’t. He got a little house out in the country to be alone in on purpose. “Just me for miles.”
“No one to hear you scream,” she tells him, throwing a smirk over her shoulder. His eyes widen and he clutches the remote in both hands, holding it in front of him like he might throw it at her again. “It was a joke,” she clarifies after a moment.
“You just paralyzed me and keep threatening me,” he says, voice cracking. “It was in very poor taste!”
“Admittedly not the best timing,” she agrees, then levels her wand at him once more. “But you won’t remember that. It was nice meeting you, angry muggle. Obliviate!”
Percy experiences another sudden rush of vertigo that causes his eyes to cross and his head to spin, and when he regains his balance, one hand braced on the couch to hold himself upright and ears popping with the familiar sound of a thunderclap, Vex is nowhere to be seen.
But he remembers.
It takes him a couple seconds, mind whirling rapidly, but once his thoughts catch back up to him he turns and charges up the stairs to his bedroom, throwing the door open and diving across the bed to grab his phone, punching in one of the few numbers he has on speed dial.
After a few rings, Keyleth picks up, her voice groggy, “What? Percy? Hello?”
“I met a witch,” he hisses into the phone, “she flew her broom into my car last night and she came back this morning to get it. She-- she cast a spell on me. Keyleth, magic is real.”
A few moments of silence, and then, “Percy, are you snorting your Adderall again?”
“No, Keyleth! Jesus Christ. Look, just-- just come over to my place, and I’ll-- I’ll tell you everything.”
Hesitantly, sounding a bit more awake, his best friend says, “Okay, Percy. I’ll be over in a bit and we can talk about this.”
“I’m not crazy,” he assures her, crazily.
“Of course not,” Keyleth says soothingly. “Just don’t drink any more caffeine until I get there.”
“Goddammit,” Percy huffs after the line disconnects. Then he gets up and paces, fingers twitching. What was it she’d said? The-- the spells? What were they? Obliviate? Alohomora?
Percy unlocks his phone once more, and opens up Google.
----------------
“So let’s say, hypothetically,” Vex says, opening her chocolate frog and not looking at Vax as he sips at his pumpkin juice. “What if, hypothetically, I accidentally used magic in front of a muggle?”
Vax pauses, goblet still raised to his lips, and blinks at her. “Well. In this… hypothetical situation, you’d call the Ministry in and they’d wipe the muggle’s mind.”
“Let’s say, hypothetically,” Vex continues, eyes still cast downward (and he couldn’t even blame her for it, these chocolate bastards are hard to catch if you let them get away from you), “that I couldn’t call the Ministry because I was hypothetically, ah, mildly intoxicated while flying.”
Vax, who is a damn good Auror even if he pretends like he isn’t, pauses even further. Vex’s eyes skirt up to his and then dart away almost immediately; she hates that disappointed look.
“Then it would, hypothetically, be my job to arrest you,” he tells her, voice deceptively even. “Hypothetically.”
“Hypothetically,” she agrees. He holds her gaze for another long moment before she cracks, throwing her hands up with a sigh. The chocolate frog, who she’d just finagled out of its package, immediately leaps to freedom, only to be plucked up by Trinket, who is an opportunistic little shit that swoops down from his perch to snatch the frog up in his talons. “Oh, piss,” she curses quietly, then cries to Vax, “It’s all Grog’s fault! We were still riding the high from that Vipertooth catch last week, remember that?”
“Yes,” Vax says, patiently, his eyes still narrowed at her. “It was all over the Prophet. You sent me like six copies of the article. I have one pinned on my wall at work.”
“You do?” she asks, touched, then continues one when his frown visibly deeps around the rim of his goblet. “Well, me and the other keepers were out night before last, since Zahra finally got released from Mungo’s for her burn and it was the first opportunity she had to celebrate with us, and Grog and I were the last ones and he just kept buying drinks--”
“And you just kept drinking them,” Vax guesses with a sigh.
“--yeah! See! His fault! And then he left and I was out of floo powder and even I know better than to try and Apparate drunk, that’s just asking for a splinch--”
“So you flew,” Vax guesses again.
“So I flew,” she agrees miserably, watching as Trinket tears apart the chocolate frog with his beak. “Directly into a windshield. Hypothetically.”
Vax snorts into his drink, inhaling pumpkin juice and causing it to dribble out of his nose. “Oh my god,” he says catching taking a minute to catch his breath. “And then what?”
“I memory charmed him,” Vex says, guiltily. “So he probably won’t remember any of it.”
“Probably?” Vax asks, eyes narrowing as he mops at his nose.
“Definitely,” Vex corrects, conveniently forgetting to mention her cracked wand-- and doesn’t that suck? Ollivander tan her tide when she goes to have it repaired; thankfully the dragon heartstring core is still intact, it’s just the end that snapped off, but willow is too soft a wood to work with reliably. Vax would have a field day with that knowledge.
“Well,” Vax says, a hint of unhappiness in his voice as he shuffles his copy of the Prophet, “if you, hypothetically, handled it, then I see no reason why, hypothetically, the Ministry would have to get involved.”
This is why she trusts Vax with this kind of stuff. He’s a damn good Auror, but he knows when to bend the rules.
“I did handle it,” Vex says, trying to restrain herself from swallowing nervously. Her broken wand seems to grow heavier in the pocket of her robe. “What’s the worst that could happen?”