When I saw your face,
I instantly knew I was
totally screwed.
-"Immune to It," Natalie Holmes
---
Late June, 2018
The ministry had changed since James had worked there. When he had left, it was still partly under construction. Post the second wizarding war, the minister had decided not only to revert many of the unfortunate changes made by You-Know-Who's regime, but to take the opportunity to redesign much of the office space. The plans for the remodel had taken the better part of the three years he'd worked in the auror's office, and had only just gone underway when he left. It was all complete now and looking more impressive than ever with six evenly-spaced glass elevators running straight through the middle of the black tiled floors, cord-free of course, and run on magic. From the main floor, he could look straight up at the gold, domed ceiling three floors above him.
He also noticed, as he crossed past the myriad of fireplaces connecting to the floo network, the addition of many more windows. Though obviously none of the picturesque scenes they looked out on were real, it was nevertheless much more inviting. Overall, James had very much enjoyed his years as an auror, but one of the things he'd liked least about his job had been the suffocating feeling of knowing he was underground all day. His classroom at Hogwarts, with its natural light and high, airy ceilings, had been a literal breath of fresh air after three years holed up in his tiny office.
As much as he'd liked his job, he just wasn't sure how anyone did it for as long as they did. It was exhausting.
He strolled up to the elevator at the far right which seemed least populous and stuck his thumbs in his pockets while he waited for it to arrive. He felt a little giddy, actually, to be doing something different. The fact that it was only temporary made it all the better.
"James Mason?" said a voice to his left. James turned to the speaker, a pretty blonde woman in a set of off-white robes with dark blue eyes. She wore her hair sleek and neat, cut in exactly straight lines at chin length. It was none other than his ex-girlfriend Anna Brown. He had spoken to her occasionally since he'd started working at Hogwarts, but it had been at least a year.
"Anna," he said, surprised. "Hi, nice to see you." Anna worked in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement as a member of the Wizengamot. She'd been one of the first people he'd met when he took the job as an auror, only a secretary back then. He'd asked her out almost immediately, because she was blonde and confident. They didn't last long, but stayed on good terms after the break-up because, in all honesty, neither one of them had been invested beyond the physical perks of the relationship.
"What are you doing at the ministry?" she asked.
"Oh- I'm just helping out a little for the summer," he said. "My old office."
They stepped into the elevator and it began to move so seamlessly he could almost not feel it, except for the entirely disorienting sensation of being encased in a box of glass. He felt a little like he was flying, but had somehow misplaced his broom since he left the ground.
"Elise put your name in?" she asked, digging in her shoulder bag for something.
"No-" James began, but then her words sunk in and took him off guard.
How had he been so entirely idiotic as to not think even one time that he would be spending two months working side by side with Elise?
"Oh my god," he said, his stomach sinking like he'd just swallowed lead.
"Oh no."
The doors opened at their floor, and she preceded him out, saying, "Good luck with that."
"Crap. Anna, no, what'd you have to say that for?" he asked, raking his hand through his hair as she strode out, heels clicking on the black, tile floor. "We haven't- I haven't spoken to her in eleven years," he said in a low voice. Anna just kept walking.
She glanced over her shoulder at him. "You'd have realized in about five minutes anyway," she said, heading further down the hall to where the court officials worked.
"Crap!" he said again, though no one was there. "Crap, what am I s'posed to-"
Anna just wiggled her fingers at him without turning around and turned the corner leaving him face to face with the door which lead to the auror's department. He shook his head slowly from left to right and pulled out his wand to scan at the door. Too late now. He'd already accepted.
Inside the door, James took his time heading down the hallway, reading over the name plates on each of the offices. Back when he had worked here, Elise's office had been a small closet of a space, the second door on the left as soon as you entered the auror's department. He checked immediately, heart pounding, for her name on the door, but it now read "Carston Finster," one of his students from his very first class of first years. James was both relieved and a little sad. He'd spent a lot of time in that office. He could picture her so well there. He'd come up to the open door, knocking twice on the wall next to it and she'd have her blonde hair tied up in a ponytail, as she always did - neat and sleek at work, but wispy and a little loose after. And she'd be curled up in her swivel chair - which he'd always joked could have swallowed her little frame if it was alive - with her legs twisted up in some impossible position. She never sat with both feet on the floor. Never.
He could still have listed, in order, all the books she had stacked along the back of her desk. He could even picture the last state of the corkboard to the right of the door, constantly evolving with Elise's most recent assignments and her own personal leads. She had liked to dig around on her own. She was always talking about work. Even at home.
His stomach felt all twisted up already. He thought about Elise all the time, but never this specifically. He always stopped himself before he got sucked in too deeply. And he never talked about her. After everything with Dawson had begun to quiet down, he had thought about telling Raigan what had happened, but he never did and she knew better than to ask.
And Dawson was a whole other story. James passed his old office a little farther down the hall, a decent sized room next to one of the larger conference rooms and, conveniently, located just past the old muggle vending machine which someone had refurbished as a hobby and brought in to work. Dawson could be found fishing out Chocolate Frogs and Licorice Wands probably twelve times a day. Piper had inherited his sweet tooth.
Thinking about it made him sad, so James stopped himself.
His own office had been right at the end of the hall, but it too now bore a different nameplate: Regina Taylor.
Gillespie's office, at least, hadn't changed. He found it, as always, at the end of the hall, just to the right of Potter's. The two senior executives bookended the department head. The door stood halfway open so James just knocked to announce his arrival and pushed it open the rest of the way and poked his head in. "Hey there, Steve," he said pleasantly, pushing away his rather morose train of thought.
"James Mason," he boomed, turning around. "Or should I call you Professor?" he joked. "Welcome back, son." Gillespie was a rather rotund man with an impressive moustache. He sported a nasty scar on his forehead which he was forever seeking out excuses to tell the story of. For someone who'd been an auror as long as he had, nearly forty years now, he was frankly jolly. Just now he wore a wide grin that crinkled his blue eyes.
"Thanks," James said, grinning back. "James is fine. I get enough of Professor at school." And that was when someone moved on the other side of the desk that he hadn't seen before behind the door. A certain blonde someone in navy robes, sitting with her legs crossed.
"I'll leave you to it," she said quietly to Steve. She pushed an envelope across the desk to him. "Just look it over before the meeting this afternoon." James stomach twisted into knots at the sound of her voice.
"Certainly, certainly, see you Elise," he said, taking no note, as usual, of the change of atmosphere in the room. Gillespie was whip smart and incredibly friendly, but his radar for people was almost non-existent. James imagined he could have thrown a tantrum, feisty two year old style, flying limbs included, right there on the office floor, and Gillespie would carry on talking business, completely unaware. He would have made a terrible parent.
James took a step to the side as Elise walked past him. She was careful not to make eye contact as she passed. He watched her leave to the left, and then listened to her footsteps passing Potter's office next door. He heard another door open and shut only seconds later and knew immediately which office she'd entered. She had been promoted to senior executive then. He wasn't surprised.
"Well, have a seat, have a seat," said Steve, leaning back in his chair. James pulled up one of two chairs opposite his desk, all too aware that it was the one Elise had only just vacated, not to mention the fact that it was seated in these very chairs in this very office that he had first met Elise.
On second thought, maybe it wasn't such a relief that Gillespie's office had not changed.
"We'll just get you up to date briefly. Afraid we don't have any spare offices at the moment, but you're welcome in here any time, of course. And I'm sure Miss Walsh would be happy to share as well." James doubted this very much. By the looks of it, Elise didn't want much to do with him. "And then any time the conference rooms aren't being used, feel free to spread out, you know. But anyway, that's not important." He passed over a manila folder with one hand, scratching his generous moustache with the other. "Obviously you've been following in the papers and we've corresponded a bit regarding the muggle-baiting attacks of the last several months, so I won't waste your time with the what's-what of the situation. What I'd like to discuss is the who, because we've really gotten a better list of suspects that the Prophet wants to admit. You know how they are about a scandal. A ministry shortcoming is right up their alley."
James nodded his head to one side, conceding. It would have almost seemed odd if the Prophet began reporting an unbiased and true version of events. He was not sure he would have believed it anymore than he believed the crap they wrote now. Everyone knew that if you wanted any real information you had to read between the lines or luck into being a witness in real-time.
"Well, I've got all their profiles in there for you," he said. James opened it up and paged through the documents. "We've been tracking anyone who's exhibited any sort of anti-muggle sentiment in the last year or so. Also got a few tips off the people at Gringotts, since you know they're interested in teaming up with the Goblins. Guess some of the big shots up there had been contacted. And here's something else for you. This is interesting. Another reason we were interested in having you back actually. Most of them are parents, Hogwarts age kids. Lots of half-blood or pure-blood families. No muggle-borns obviously."
James nodded slowly, flipping the file back to the beginning. Even in the first few profiles, he found several names he recognized. The Anniston's had a daughter who would graduate in the spring. The Briggs' had two boys in Slytherin. And there were a few others whose last names he was almost sure he'd seen on his class list of incoming first years.
"Yeah, I know some of the kids," he said.
"Excellent, excellent," said Gillespie.
"So now," James began. "What exactly is it you'll want me working on? Am I just around the office or-"
"May have you do a bit of tailing if you're up for it. Bit of undercover. You were always good at that. And no one really knows you're back so it's ideal if it's you, just in case you're spotted. At this point, we're really more concerned with getting a healthy sampling of what they'd probably call "proof" up in greater Magical Law Enforcement. Not really trying to make any arrests or catch anyone until we're sure, because backtracking is a waste of time, and quite frankly, the community outlook on us isn't so good right now given we haven't let much out to the public. That's on purpose, but they don't know it, and we don't want our first official news to be a mistake."
"Right," said James. He still felt a little like he'd been thrown into the middle of the ocean with only a measly liferaft. There was a what and a why, sure, but one thing Gillespie had never been good at was coming up with a specific plan. He was a great wizard, no question about it, but James was pretty sure he left most of the organizing up to Elise.Truthfully, if he had wanted a real briefing with useful information and a plan of attack, she would have been the one to go to. Under the circumstances however...
"Well, don't worry about any of that today. You can just spend some time looking those over in depth, ask any questions you like. Feel free to knock around and introduce yourself. The departments shifted around a lot since you left. Great to see Elise up in here in the big offices isn't it? Always knew she'd be something. Had that spark, you know."
He gave James a knowing look. James forced a little smile, because clearly Gillespie was one of many people who hadn't ever realized that anything had happened between him and Elise except his starting a new job. Popular opinion was that they had simply decided to end it for practicality's sake. James certainly hadn't bothered to correct anyone. It was a much easier and much neater answer than the real one.
More than not realizing they had not ended things on good terms, though, Gillespie seemed to be under the impression that James and Elise still spoke. For someone who could be so effective at eliminating dark wizards, he was a little goofy about personal lives, a hopeless romantic. James thought he and his wife were disgusting in public, and they were always picking out young people they knew from their various social circles and trying to set them up. It was because of Gillespie actually that he and Elise had escalated from coworkers to living together so quickly.
"Well... great," said James after an awkward pause. "Yeah, I'll just.. I'll go look these over. Thanks."
"Yep. Well. Let us know if- yep," said Gillespie.
James wasn't too keen on sitting around in Gillespie's office all morning so he excused himself and headed for a conference room that he remembered to be little used to look things over.
He remembered the beginning of all this like it was yesterday. The very first incident had involved a couple of wizards - as yet unidentified - who had hijacked a muggle school bus, murdered the driver, and led the children inside towards a dangerous quarry, with what intent, no one was quite sure, because the moment aurors arrived on the scene, the culprits disapparated.
The article in the paper had been surprisingly brief for an event that, even a few years earlier would have sparked serious concern. There was no question anymore that You-Know-Who was long gone, but it taken years of disproving the theories of the many, many skeptics who had not witnessed the Battle of Hogwarts. James had only been fourteen at the time, but he remembered it well. The moment he'd read that the wizards in question had been masked, it had sent a chill right through him. He'd been at Hogwarts that last year. He'd perhaps experienced more of what the death eaters could and would do than most adults had.
James had spent the days following the article dashing back and forth between the school and the ministry between his classes, trying to convince Gillespie of what he thought was an essential point in the investigation. He might have had better luck with Potter, who had his own kids, or even Elise who he suspected would have put aside personal differences for the sake of a dangerous investigation. But neither auror had been in the office all that week. Almost no one remained but Gillespie, who had been left in charge of collecting everyone's reports and taking owls and tips from the wizarding community.
James had forced himself on Gillespie every chance he got to the point of inviting himself to his home when he finally left his office at nine o'clock that first night. And all of it because the article had insinuated that the children had been put under the imperius curse and James didn't believe - no, he knew that wasn't true. He didn't have to witness it to know that. He worked with kids. He'd helped raise one.
He remembered telling his seventh years his same theory, that children responded to fear the same way they responded to pleasure, with docility. Those children had just seen their bus driver murdered, and he would have been shocked if any of them hadn't thought following orders would be the only way to prevent or postpone their own deaths.
Gillespie had argued that it didn't matter whether they'd used the imperius curse or not, but James assured him it mattered very much, because magic left traces. It was easy to track. Especially dark magic. Not to mention there were all sorts of charms set up to alert the aurors of the use of unforgivable curses. These very charms had brought them to the scene in the first place after the driver had been killed.
It made what these wizards were doing even more worrying, because they'd managed to go virtually untraced, excepting a few public demonstrations which had made the papers. But these, even, seemed to be controlled experiments. No one had managed to be caught. When they showed themselves, it was on their terms. Like when they had infiltrated a muggle concert, immersed themselves in the crowd, and disapparated, just to scare people. Just to make a statement. There had been nothing dangerous about the action itself, except that it so obviously violated the International Statute of Secrecy.
Then shortly after, there had been the incident where they'd managed to hijack the front page of the Prophet, and broadcast their manifesto. Their main goal had been to overthrow the secrecy act. James could still quote parts of it, for example that they were tired of wizards being 'relegated to small areas while muggles are allowed the world.' They had gone on to list the many, many supposed benefits of such a law reversal, for example, their plan to "liberate" magical creatures of "near human intelligence," by which he was sure they really meant "let's pretend to be friends while we benefit from your power and then when we've dominated the muggles together, we'll rule you too." That list included werewolves, merpeople, giants, centaurs, and goblins, the latter of which James thought the aurors seemed to be putting a lot of stock in, based on their list of suspects. At least of third of them worked for or alongside Gringotts, more than one in the goblin-relations office.
James was glad the aurors department had garnered a list of suspects at all, but without proof... without catching them in the act, no one would ever make any real progress.
The scariest thing was, James could see their ideals catching on. Anti-muggle sympathy still existed in large portions and it certainly wasn't on a downward slope. Neither was the age-old pureblood desire to purify bloodlines and cut out muggle-wizard marriage, not to mention the acceptance of muggle-born witches and wizards. James still encountered these ideas with his students regularly. What they heard at home became what they believed.
It all circled back to how impressionable children could be, and that's why James had put so much stock in his strong-held belief that the wizards in question had not used the imperius curse, nor had they ever thought they might need to.
The fact that many of the suspects had school-aged children only bolstered his theory. If they were indeed the culprits, they, like him, knew what children were like, unlike Gillespie, who'd never had kids.
An hour passed uninterrupted before the door opened and Elise walked in. She looked startled and they made awkward eye contact for about .3 seconds. "We're meeting in here in twenty minutes," she said and she walked back out.
"Okay," said James, even though the door had already closed. He couldn't focus on perusing the profiles after that so he closed it and put his face in his hands. It was proof of the power of the human brain that he had been able to enforce a mental block of such strength and proportion that it had not occurred to him once that if he was around the auror's department, he would be around Elise. He didn't even know how to be in the same room as her.
He had a flashback to the day he'd told Raigan about the offer and the funny look on her face. Course she'd known. She was probably the most insightful person he knew, and, more importantly, full to bursting with common sense. James just didn't think he was particularly great at looking out for himself, mind or body. Raigan could attest to that as she had mended his broken arm probably fifty times in the time he'd known her. The most recent occasion had involved an impromptu quidditch match with some of the seventh years in the week before their graduation. Raigan had performed the spell without even landing her broom, and she had never felt particularly comfortable flying. He should've known what he was getting into when he agreed to play against the Finnegan kid. He was the one going straight to the pros who'd caused Raigan so much extra paperwork at the end of the school year.
James collected his things to go, figuring he'd better get out before the twenty minutes were up and Elise came back. He wasn't sure his morning could handle a third awkward encounter.
Just as he pushed through the door, someone rounded the counter. James almost didn't recognize him at first, with his teenage mop of hair now cut neat, and not wearing his school robes. It was Carston Finster.
"Professor Mason," he said, striding over with a grin on his face and his hand outstretched.
"Mr. Finster," said James, shaking his hand. "Good to see you. How're you holding up?"
"Pretty well," he said. "I got this job a couple months ago so it's been... exciting." He still had this boyish look about him, even though he'd clearly taken steps to look less like a kid. It reminded James a lot of himself. He had once been the young one in the department, not yet jaded.
"Yeah I heard that," James smiled. "I was glad to hear it. Starting to settle in a bit? Not an easy job to jump into."
"No," he admitted. "But yeah, starting to get the hang of things I think. They haven't had anyone new for a while so it's been a little funny. I've actually-" He paused, hiking his bag up on his shoulder. "I've got a meeting with uhm-" He glanced back down the hall towards the door of Elise's office. "I should probably get going..."
James nodded his understanding. "She's not in there yet, don't worry."
"Oh," he said, looking relieved. "Good. She scares me a little."
This made James laugh. "Yeah, I could see that," he said. "Used to know her very well."
Carston nodded.
"Well, I'll let you get going," said James. "Good to see you though. We'll have to catch up while I'm around." He clapped Carston on the shoulder as they traded places, Carston heading for the room James had just vacated.
"Yeah, see you Professor. You'll have to tell me about the Triwizard Tournament and stuff when you get a chance. Must've been cool to see it."
"Yeah, it's been an exciting year," James nodded. "You can call me James now, by the way. As we're co-workers."
"Okay," said Carston, taking another step backwards. "Actually- I don't know. I think I'll stick to Professor."
James laughed again and nodded his goodbye before turning to go.
At least one thing about his day had been pleasant. He didn't often get to see his old students and Carston had been - though he wasn't supposed to have them - something of a favorite.