She sat, head down, in the same seat she always took at dinner. Her hands were folded in a steeple on the table. If she were anyone but Alecto Carrow, she might have been mistaken for someone mid-prayer. Instead her eyes were wide and fixated on the stained lace of the tablecloth, and her lips frozen in a straight line. She was unmoving, breathing so shallow that she might have been mistaken for a wax statue rather than a person at all. And she waited.
From the kitchen the tell-tale signs of dinner clanged out in an off beat chorus of chaos, and from the hall concealed behind the dining room doors she could hear her father enter the house. Alecto closed her eyes and smiled. Years of watching her father’s routines silently, and from behind walls and through cracks, had trained her to envision his every move now, even as she sat a room apart and with nothing but her ears trained on the sounds of the house. Finally, the moment she had imagined almost nightly since she was old enough to imagine at all was unfurling before her. If everything went as planned her brother would soon enter the dining room with her father, the latter unknowingly wandless, and the true fun would begin. She would be repaid for her patience.
Upon his father’s return, Amycus was waiting in the home’s dingy threshold. His skin prickled, excitement built, anger flickered, and muscles swelled. The time was here. The instructions formed in his mind, his sister’s voice drowning his brain once more. As carefully she instructed him, Amycus removed the wand from his father’s pocket and discarded it. The next action was clear: move father into the dining room.
“I’m hungry,” he roared, careful to not let his smirk curl any further. Patience. The word rang nearly unfamiliar to Amycus Carrow. He loathed the act, and despised every moment it pulled him away from those instantaneous and dark thoughts. Unpredictable, sudden, and rash were sensations better suited for his brutish tendencies. He relished in rage boiling his blood thick and warm. Patience, it was nearly unfamiliar, almost foreign, if not for her.
As they entered the dining room, Alecto remained calm, everything about her quiet, except her eyes. Orbs fixated, and Amycus basked in her frozen solidarity. Their moment was now; all remaining was her cue.