Destinies Collide

Important Meetings

A/N: Time for the meetings that kept Merlin from going to fetch his magic on this particular weekend!

______________________________

December 3rd, 1988

The room he steps into the moment he's out of the floo isn't like others he's seen before. Gone are the modern touches of the Changs or the delicate furniture of Glacial Garden, instead in its place he finds dark hardwood floors that match the tone of the walls and ceiling, both equally lacking in colour and only revealing a purplish tone to their black hue due to the sun rays shining through the gothic-style windows. If he wasn't already dressed in one of his work suits and wearing a simple open wizarding robe on top of that, he might have felt underdressed for the location.

He had planned on being accompanied by Chang, but an emergency at her office left him to brave the meeting on his own. A small change of plans, but a significant one.

"Master Lord Black is waiting," a squeaky voice informs and he barely catches sight of an ancient-looking house elf – is it wearing a pillowcase? - before it starts leading the way out of the room.

The path to wherever the man is turns out to be no less opulent than the flooring room, spiralling pillars of dark wood and dark ceilings decorated with large candle chandeliers, furniture in dark woods with details in purple, blue or green, and a long flight of stairs leading to the meeting point, which is apparently the master bedroom.

He holds his judgement until the door opens and is glad for it when, stepping into the bedroom, his eyes meet the tired grey ones of the sickly man on the bed. "Lord Black," he greets with a polite bow.

The man in the bed is old, but not nearly as advanced in age as he knows wizards can be – for all that his hair and beard are completely white, his skin doesn't seem to show the years he would expect on someone bedridden for it – so Merlin has to attribute the sallow skin and seeming inability to get out of bed to some sort of sickness. Still, he chooses not to ask.

"Wright," the greeting is half sneered and he holds back a resigned sight, already starting to reap the issues sowed by Skeeter's article. "My solicitor looked into what you sent me. It would seem my House's Heir has been imprisoned for seven years without a trial," there's a short pause during which he can feel the man's eyes assessing him, "but you already knew that. What exactly do you expect to come from this?"

"Justice," he's quick to reply, earning a scoff from the bedridden wizard.

"Might want to come up with something more tangible," the man advises mockingly, "I refuse to owe a debt to a Squib ."

It takes a monumental effort for Merlin not to roll his eyes, "Was this the conversation we would have had before that article or does my supposed status entirely blind you?" he feels the need to ask, wondering if this delay to the retrieval of his magic would be a complete waste of time.

" Supposed status?" The man arches one brow imperiously as if waiting to be proved wrong, and he figures it would be impolite not to comply.

Merlin doesn't have his magic, not really, but he does have several years of experience living as a squib during certain previous lifetimes, and he's come up with ingenious ways to use magic in some of them, one of which is the wand he takes out of his robe's pocket at the silent taunt, a little tool he'd retrieved in the bank before making his way over. Something of a prototype instead of a true wand, lacking a being-based magical core of its own, but the wooden stick – dark, smooth and much better carved than his initial wand – is covered in runes for energy retention and precise means of redistribution.