sayshazam | For Hermione

Billy had been struggling what to do with the magical crown and trident he had ever since he got them after helping defeat the giant sea witch. He'd just been keeping them under his bed, which probably wasn't the safest place for them to be. The only problem was that he wasn't sure he trust his own magic to keep them safe. Maybe some day he could do that but not today. Which meant talking to someone else about it and that wasn't really something he was comfortable doing.

But when he found the other staff, the one that had belonged to Jack, he knew he had to do something. Fortunately he knew someone that was something of an expert on magic. It would be even harder to deny to Hermoine that there was anything magical about him if he showed up at the shop with magical artifacts needing some sort of special container, but there wasn't anything to be done for it.

Billy stuffed the trident, crown, and staff into a golf bag- careful to not let them touch- before heading off to the magic shop. The entire way there he tried to come up with a convincing lie to tell Hermione before deciding that she was his friend and so he wasn't going to lie to her. He just wasn't going to tell her the truth.

When he got to the shop he took a deep breath, glanced around, and then ducked inside.

"Hermione, are you here?"

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"Which... may be appropriate considering the fact that your objects don't exactly follow the rules of Newtonian physics, correct?" Hermione pointed out gently. It was yet another example of what made her so hesitant with letting Billy manage all aspects of his exposure to magic on his own. Hermione knew that she had greater experience and was probably at least good enough for that type of advisory role.

But some people didn't want to be helped, and trust was a difficult thing to build. She had to be patient.

"A large space will help prevent the objects from reacting to one another. You can store them on opposite ends of the expanded space."

"Wait, there's more than one type of physics?" Billy said. Ugh, this was a mess. This was a huge mess. Magic was already crazy enough he didn't need to be thinking about all the weird stuff science could do. There should be some sort of universal law where you only had to worry about one or the other.

"But yeah, I guess a large space is good. They've been under my bed for a while and haven't reacted. I think you have to touch them but probably safer to keep them apart."

Hemrione opened her mouth, as though to start detailing all the different sub-fields of mechanics, before pressing her lips shut when Billy moved on. She wasn't quite as well-versed in the subjects as she'd want to be to teach someone else, after all, and she was pretty sure that his question had been more of a rhetorical one than a true expression of curiosity.

"Let's go with larger, just in case," she said with a nod, rubbing her cheek briefly. "Did you want help transporting this back to your apartment? I can Apparate with it if you let me know your address — or I can get movers to ship it through more traditional means. Whatever your preference."

"Apparate there? Umm, we should probably do it outside of the apartment if we do that. My roommate is pretty, um, security conscious and that would freak her out," Billy said. It would freak Alex out bigtime if her super spy training didn't just kick in right away and she shot them or something. The idea that someone could just appear in their apartment was freaky.

"But if you could do that I'd really appreciate it. And I can show you where I live and where it goes so you'll know where it is. Just in case."

"I'll Apparate it there, then. Perhaps you could go ahead first and text me once you're there? That way, we won't alarm your roommate," Hermione suggested, understanding well how protective people could be about their homes. Hermione had a number of different spells cast on her own house, and wouldn't take kindly to someone trying to come onto her property without asking first.

"And I would be truly grateful to be entrusted with knowing where the chest is being kept. Just in case. Any of us could disappear from the city, after all."

Billy stared at the items for a moment, biting his lip thoughtfully. Going home first meant leaving them here. What if this was just a trick for her to get him to leave so she could keep them here?

No, Hermoine wouldn't do that. She probably thought if she wanted to keep them here against his will she didn't need to be tricky about it. She might feel strongly about the fact that Billy shouldn't be keeping them himself but he was pretty sure she was honest. If she was going to keep them she would just tell him so.

"Okay," he said with a nod before looking back at her. "I'll text you soon, okay? Do you- do you need my address or anything?"

"Your address would be helpful. Or if you have a GPS function on your phone, that would be even more accurate for me," admitted Hermione, who had long since familiarized herself with the many applications available for her smartphone. (The breadth of technology was quite remarkable, actually, and her phone had become almost as integral a part of her life as her wand.)

"I'll close up shop here early as well, to make sure I don't miss your text," she said, waving her wand to turn the sign on the front door. Sometimes she wondered if her customers were ever displeased by her increasingly odd hours, but if they were, no one had been that vocal about it yet.

"Oh, yeah, sure, I have my home location set it," he said, thumbing through the different screens on his phone before showing it to her. It was kind of freaky to think that she could just show up in his apartment with that information.

"And- and thank you. I really appreciate you doing this. It means a lot. Really."

Hermione leaned closer to Billy's phone screen, taking down the numbers on her own phone so that she could easily find his apartment later that day to return his trunk and items to him. She was heavily invested in making sure that Billy had them delivered as soon as possible — all the better for forging trust between the two of them.

"I'm glad that you felt that you could come to me," Hermione said solemnly with a small smile. "I'll get these items safely back to you, I promise."

For Hermione

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