This Time, Last Time (A Harry Potter Universe Fanfiction)

15.

When I broke into your heart

Oh, I threw away the key

So tell me what you see,

Oh, a lover or a thief?

And when I think about it now

Oh, I really let you down

So tell me what you see

Oh, a lover or a thief?

-"Night Before the Morning After," Hudson Taylor

July 2018

By Wednesday of that week, keeping up to date with the damage control had grown into an insurmountable task. James had barely been home all week, but he felt he didn't deserve to complain about his late hours when the poor obliviators had been out all week trying to locate anyone who had seen the ads before Muggle Artifacts had managed to get it all taken down. It must have been an impossible job.

The aurors, though, hadn't had a much easier time of it. They had been in cahoots with greater Magical Law Enforcement for the past two days trying to convince them that premature trials were necessary, especially given the list of definitely-involved names they had acquired at this point, but there happened to be some highly inconvenient law about not charging anyone with planning an illegal event before that illegal event actually manifested itself.

James and Elise had taken it upon themselves to find out who had been responsible for creating the advertisements, but the designer of the billboard so far remained undiscovered and the commercial - though it had obviously been heavily influenced by company marketers, some of which they had managed to identify - had actually been written, shot, and produced by a muggle film company, likely imperiused. As the only appropriately identified culprits were muggles, and muggles could not be charged in wizard court, they'd gotten nowhere. They'd been obliviated anyway.

It was half past nine when James was finally ready to leave the office that night. He stopped by Elise's on his way out, only remembering when he saw her, head down on her desk amidst the biggest mess he had ever seen from her (meaning, absolutely nothing compared to Gillespie's pigsty) that he had, before everything blew up, asked her out for the evening.

"Hey," he said. She lifted her head from her hands slowly. Her ponytail looked much more frazzled than usual and her skin had a purplish pallor to it like she had not been sleeping. He knew she'd probably stayed at the office the whole night previous or close to it trying to sort things out.

"Hi," she said. "Sorry, I was just giving myself a minute to get it together." She gave him a weak smile, straightened up and reached back to yank her ponytail holder out of her hair.

"You need more than a minute," said James, crossing to the desk. She smirked, and her eyes flickered up to the ceiling, falling past him as they returned to normal, but she did not make anything close to a promise that she was taking adequate care of herself. "You still want to get a drink?" James asked.

He knew she would probably refuse, knew she would want to stay and see what else she could get done, but something about the flat look in her gray eyes made him ask anyway.

Her response surprised him. She smiled, shut her eyes for a moment, and said, "God, yes."

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