The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix Part Three

C: Kissing a Fool

Declan Aletrick sat at his desk in the Daily Prophet, squeezing a small rubber duck, which squeaked with each squeeze of his fist. He had a whole rainbow of rubber ducks lined up along the back of his desk behind his muggle Word Processor, which was what he used to write, preferring the keyboard over the quill any day. Quills ached his hand and made the muscle in his thumb twitch funny and he hated them, even though he had a good many decorative ones  crowded in an old mug printed with George Michael's face on the desk next to his monitor. Oliver had given him that mug. It was a picture from the Kissing a Fool music video, arguably George Michael at his hottest, and Declan found himself thinking the lyrics.

People
You can never change the way they feel
Better let them do just what they will

For they will

If you let them
Steal your heart
And people

Will always make a lover feel a fool

But you knew I loved you

We could have shown them all...

Declan turned the mug around so George Michael was looking at the wall. "Shut up George," Declan whispered and he sighed and looked at the blinking cursor on his screen, looked at the pile of notes from the night at the field outside of the Quidditch World Cup. He'd been right there, of course he had the byline for the cover. It was a huge story,  possibly even bigger than the escape of Sirius Black just last year, and certainly bigger than anything else other than Black's escape that had run on the front page since 1981, when the Potters were killed and Voldemort defeated. An uprising of his followers at the World Cup was huge, it was huge and he'd gotten the byline and it would advance his career - his actual journalistic career, not the rubbish rag stuff he wrote under a pseudonym in the gossip column, but the actual good stuff that he could brag about and be proud of...

He should be writing it, not squeezing a rubber ducky and putting George Michael in time out while flashes Oliver Kent's words echoed in his mind and his brain spun about how in the hell he was going to convince Rita Skeeter not to publish that stuff in the gossip column. His shaky plan at the moment was to get this written, then nip in to deliver it to the paste team and pretend to be perusing and just literally steal her article off the paste board and hope they didn't have time to replace it before the paper got duplicated and sent out for early morning edition and he'd have to figure out what to do about the afternoon edition.

But it wouldn't stop going through his head.

He stared at the blinking cursor.

"Fuck," he hissed and he chucked the ducky onto the desk and got up, hurrying out of his cubicle. He got about three steps before he turned back, picked up the duck and put him in his proper color-ordered place in the row on the back of his desk. Declan was nothing if not thoroughly tidy. He turned and rushed off through the rows of cubicles that filled the newsroom.

Rits Skeeter's cube was easy enough to find. It was all flashy and bejeweled and she had loads of moving photographs all over the walls of the space, copies of her articles with surprised looking famous witches and wizards grinning at her from every nook and cranny, photos from her articles, of course, which was what she was actually displaying - all the dirty news she'd dug up over the years of writing, all the scandals and lies and what have you.

Declan leaned against the cubical wall and looked over it at the desk, where Rita's Quick Quotes Quill was hard at work, scrawling out poison-green ink across a parchment, Rita's eyes closed, dictating to it silently. He felt his stomach knot up when he spotted the photograph on the desk beside the parchment - Oliver Kent melting into Wally Grant, their mouths desperate and sincere against one another. Declan stared at it the way people stare at automobile accidents as they drive past, horrified by the carnage but unable to tear themselves away.