Arrival
It was any old wednesday morning in the wizarding world, it had been over two years now since the liberation front had reclaimed magical britain, three months since Ginevra Weasly had returned and killed Voldermort, and her efforts to shift the views of the new government from moving on to remembrance for those who had fallen were still undergoing.
That was until two people appeared with a crack in the centre of the atrium, apparating straight through the apparition wards. A shortish witch with flowing brown hair, wearing a set of muggle clothing, a t-shirt and jeans, though they more concealed her natural figure rather than enhancing it, a wand held loosely in her left hand. Her right hand was clasped tightly to the very metallic hand of the man standing next to her, a tall man with platinum blond hair, wearing trousers and a muggle hoodie with the words ‘Oxford University’ on it, a wand held loosely in his right hand.
The first thing they did was let go of their respective wands, and they two wooden sticks were already halfway to the floor when the alarms attached to the apparition wards and the dark magic alarm went off in unison with blaring intensity.
As people began to run screaming, the two wizards reached into their pockets with a practised motion, and drew out what looked to be a notebook, the man’s in green, with a clean elegant look, while the woman’s was in red, and looked scruffy, and stuffed to the brim with extra pieces of paper and notes. As they held those out in front of them in their unjoined hands, they sank to their knees in another fluid practised motion.
And that was how they were found when the Auror squad found them when they arrived a mere 57 seconds after the alarms were first tripped, it would have been 23 if they’d been able to apparate, kneeling on the floor in muggle clothing, wands discarded and notebooks held out straight, hands still joined in a desperate embrace.
A careful observer would notice how the woman kept her head tilted down and looked at the floor as the Aurors stuck wands in their faces and dragged them to their feet, carefully not looking up towards the caverning roof of the main atrium of the ministry of magic.
The Aurors weren’t looking that carefully.
The Aurors were too busy grabbing the shoulders, arms, and wrists of the two wizards who had somehow apparated through the most powerful apparition wards in the entirety of wizarding Britain. One Auror noticed with detachment as he grabbed the man’s left wrist, pulling it out of the witch’s grasp that the metallic hand appeared to be missing an index finger. ‘Awful Oversight’ the man thought to himself, not noticing that the hand had the correct number of joints, and that the finger looked like it had been detached, instead of overlooked.
They began to drag the witch and the wizard towards a set of holding cells, both of the two people walking along cooperatively with their captors, the woman’s head still bowed, and the man’s gaze still focused on the woman.
They didn’t clasp any magic dampening shackles around the prisoner’s wrists, Voldermort’s reign still too recent in everyone’s minds for that to be a good idea, especially in such a public space.
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The Auror department was in a panic.
They had a witch and a wizard in their holding cell strong enough to get through the most powerful anti-apparition wards in magical Britain, who set off the black magic alarms, and gave off an aura of power that suggested they could kill the entire Auror department in seconds.
And they had given up their wands and came willingly.
The two matched slightly older versions of descriptions of infamous death eater and high reeve Draco Malfoy, admittedly with a never before seen prosthetic arm, and known order of the phoenix healer Hermione Granger, even their notebooks had those names listed!
Yet both those people were confirmed to be dead.
Nobody had known that they were coming, nobody had even known that these two people were alive, nevermind that the two people who should by all rights be mortal enemies seemed to care about and even borderline depend on each other.
And yet Ginevra Weasly, a woman hailed as a hero in many places, not only for being the last surviving order of the phoenix member, but as the woman who killed Voldemort, had gone before the International Confederation in a meeting scheduled over a week in advance, and asked for a trial for the two prisoners. Two minutes after they had been arrested.
They even only ever said one of three things in the preliminary questioning the Aurors had done. They either confirmed that their names were what they were, or responded with either ‘It will come up in our trial’ or ‘we will not discuss that’ when questioned.
The top of the trial had only been brought up less than a minute before the preliminary questioning, while they were already in Auror custody.
The chief Auror had become frustrated with the vague answers they were getting, and had decided to bring in the Auror department's legillimancy specialist, who had been about to enter the interrogation room when a patronus had shown up from the International Confederation, demanding their immediate transfer to International Confederation custody.
The two prisoners acted as if they knew that that would happen all along.