hp fic: Office Space
Title: Office Space
Pairing: Ron/Draco
Rating: NC-17
Words: ~22,500
Summary: It's all in a day's work.
A/N: A gift for![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tarie, at ![[personal profile]](https://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif?v=88)
merry_smutmas 2006.
Office Space
::
"Level five, Department of International Magical Cooperation, incorporating the International Magical Trading Standards Body, The International Magical Office of Law, and the International Confederation of Wizards, British Seats."
The lift jerked to a halt, and the grille jangled open. A squat, elderly witch bustled out, armed with a dented cauldron and an over-large handbag. Her pointed hat was a faded, charcoal grey, and it sat crookedly on what Ron suspected was a rather bad wig. As she disappeared down the hallway, Ron caught a glimpse of ancient wood panelling, a badly-hung poster detailing the odd things used for wand cores in different countries, and a world atlas stuck with multi-coloured push-pins. A paper aeroplane darted inside at the last moment, sneaking between the slats of the grille just as the lift lurched upward. It was pale violet and it circled Ron's head like a vulture waiting for its prey to drop dead.
Ron sighed. He was tempted to oblige it.
"Level four. Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, incorporating Beast, Being, and Spirit Divisions, Goblin Liaison Office, and the Pest Advisory Bureau."
"Well, this is me," Ron mumbled. The aeroplane flapped in reply, wings quivering. It made one more circuit above his head before escaping the lift and zooming away to the right.
Off the lift, Ron was greeted by more wood panelling and tan carpet that was balding along the beaten path. He smoothed the front of his robes and tugged irritably at his collar. He hadn't worn dress robes in years. He hadn't worn any kind of robes since his sixth year at Hogwarts. In the last six months, he hadn't got off his couch if it wasn't absolutely necessary, and in his opinion, shuffling between the kitchen and the loo didn't really warrant trousers. This set was deep blue, brand new -- purchased just yesterday, and he'd gone by himself, thank you very much, since the whole Yule Ball catastrophe proved his mother couldn't be trusted to dress a kneazle -- and plain. He'd managed to talk Madam Malkin out of the ruffles, ribbons, and lace that mad women seemed to be so fond of, but she apparently hadn't been listening when he'd said he wanted something comfortable.
The directory on the wall was bright blue, and the flashing white letters informed him that he needed to go left, which was fine by him, because the Pest Advisory Bureau was to the right. He secretly wished that paper aeroplane the best of luck. He wasn't sure what Pest Advisory did -- his dad would rabbit on about the Ministry until he was blue in the face, but there were three things he didn't talk about: the Department of Mysteries, the Ludicrous Patents Office, and Pest Advisory -- but Ron figured it was better that way. He could only imagine they dealt with acromantula infestations or bloody giant snakes bent on taking over the world, and there were some things Ron just didn't want to know about.
He went left. He passed through Regulation and Control, which was a long hallway dotted with offices and pictures of different magical creatures. The people inside the offices looked barely awake, bored to tears, or a combination of the two. The pictures were encased in identical black frames and arranged on the wall with the sort of randomness that suggested they were hiding cosmetic damage on the panelling. He stepped wide of a box stuffed with crumpled, still-twitching memos, and avoided a collection of strange, off-coloured stains on the carpet that looked suspiciously like Odin's Wain. The hallway veered suddenly and violently to the right, and Ron followed it until he was confronted with a dead end and a large door marked Goblin Liaison Office.
Behind the door was a short hallway with more offices and a room at the end that looked like a common area where two young women chatted quietly at the coffee pot. The office to his left appeared to be some kind of waiting room -- a handful of goblins sat in undersized chairs with rolls of parchment tucked in their laps. The office to his right belonged to a Eugene Cadawaller, which was who Ron needed to speak to.
He didn't want to do this.
Eugene Cadawaller was tall, thin, and roughly the same age as Stonehenge. He was bald, aside from a strange tuft of white hair that sprouted from the centre of his head like a tail-feather, and his wire-rimmed spectacles clung precariously to the end of his long nose. Parchments and scrolls were piled into two mountains that towered on either side of his desk, and he glared at Ron through the valley between them while Ron was still waffling in the doorway.
"What is it, then?"
"I've an appointment, sir," Ron said. His voice cracked. He cleared his throat and tried again. "At nine o'clock."
Cadawaller snorted. "It's seven after."
"Sorry," Ron said. "The lifts--"
"--are not my problem," Cadawaller finished, setting his quill aside. "Well, come closer. My eyes aren't what they once were." Ron walked inside, took two steps toward the desk, and Cadawaller studied him from top to bottom. "I suppose you'd be Weasley's brother," he said, after he catalogued Ron's hair and freckles. "Richard, is it?"
"Ronald." He cleared his throat again and pulled at his collar. "Ron's fine."
"Had a letter from Bill, just last week," Cadawaller said, brandishing a small roll of parchment. There was a gilt perch behind the desk; the spotted owl sleeping on it was probably, in owl-years, as old as Cadawaller. "Says you need a job."
"I do, sir."
"Good man, your brother," Cadawaller continued. "He didn't always work for Gringotts, you know. Came here first. Took an internship with me right out of Hogwarts. He was a good worker, and he got on well with the goblins. Funny creatures, goblins. Don't always know their own heads. But your brother understood them, if you follow me." He laughed, but it was a dry, brittle sound. "I should have kept a closer eye on him. Recruiter from the bank snapped him up when I wasn't looking, and I've not had his like in this office since. So, what do you do?"
"Sorry?"
"What do you do, son?" Cadawaller asked. "Can you file? Answer the floo? Write business correspondence?"
Ron stared at the old man in growing horror. "Business correspondence?"
"Letters, and that. Memos. Can you do a type-setter spell?" Cadawaller paused long enough refuel from a large mug of tea. "I understand your father likes the Muggles. Do you know anything about their blasted copy papering machines? Every time I put a roll of parchment in the tray it tells me I'm making jam."
Ron's mouth opened, but nothing came out. His silence was noted. Cadawaller's eyes narrowed, and in that gesture, Ron pictured another six months at the Burrow, sitting on the couch until his arse threatened to sprout roots while his mum railed at him for being a lay-about. At least they had a telly, now. His father had brought it home after a recent raid. Apparently, misusing Muggle artefacts included charming a telly to show everyone in the nude. Put a whole new spin on the evening news, Ron supposed. His father had reversed the spell before he brought it in the house, which was fine by Ron; there were too many blokes in the afternoon serial for people to be doing it starkers.
"You ever worked in an office before?" Cadawaller asked.
"No, sir," Ron admitted. "This'll be my first job."
Cadawaller paused at that. He set his tea down with a thump, and the elderly owl almost stirred. "How old are you?"
"Nineteen."
"Nineteen?" Cadawaller yelped. A portrait of a much younger Cadawaller watched the proceedings from the wall behind the desk; when he caught Ron looking, he returned to shaking hands with a goblin outside the Gringotts in Diagon Alley. "What have you been doing since Hogwarts?"
"Well, sir, there was the war--"
Cadawaller snorted. "Ah yes, the war. Wossname started stirring up trouble, and everyone with more bollocks than sense ran off to be a hero." His tone suggested in Cadawaller-speak, 'hero' meant 'someone who stood outside the Leaky Cauldron and played the harp for spare change'. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk, and fixed Ron with a level stare. "Are you a hero, son?"
"No, sir," Ron said. His robes were trying to choke him, he was sure of it.
Cadawaller made the sort of noise elderly people favoured when they discovered a cup of tea didn't cost what it had fifty years ago. "How'd you do, then, at school? No trouble? Good marks?"
"No trouble," Ron said. A harmless fib. McGonagall was busy putting Hogwarts back together; she wasn't like to sprout out of the floor and make a liar out of him. "Seven OWLs."
"What about NEWTs?"
Bugger. Nothing for it.
"Dintakthm."
"Sorry. Not sure I caught that," Cadawaller said. "You're not a mumbler, are you? My ears aren't what they once were, either. I can't be having with mumblers."
Ron studied the carpet. It was tan and balding, just like in the hallway. "I didn't take them, sir."
"Why not?"
"The war--"
"The war, again," Cadawaller cut in. "I was around the last time Wossname got uppity. Was around for Grindewald, too. And both times, the kids stayed in school as they should have, and left the messy business to their elders." He seized Bill's letter and wielded it like a sword. "If you're as smart as your brother says you are, why'd you leave school and take up with Potter?"
"Harry's my best friend, sir," Ron said.
Cadawaller sat up, sucking in a sharp breath, and Ron belatedly remembered where he was. Public opinion of Harry was favourable, but since Voldemort's death -- and he could say the name now, because he'd watched him die -- had in some ways, resulted in Scrimgeour's resignation, Ministry opinion of Harry was divided.
"Harry's my best friend," Ron said again. It was the truth, and Cadawaller could rot if he didn't like it. He could always ask the twins if they needed a box-boy. "Has been, since our first year at Hogwarts." Gormless bastards would probably try to pay him two knuts an hour, and he'd likely spend random intervals as a canary. "When Dumbledore died, he left school. He said he wanted to put an end to it, and I went with him."
Cadawaller considered this for a moment. "Would you do it again?" he asked finally. "If you had to do it over, would you do the same?"
He'd get some exercise, working as a box-boy, and that certainly wouldn't kill him. He'd gained about a stone since the war ended.
"Yes."
"End of the hall, last door on your right," Cadawaller said. "It's small, but you have a desk and your own head-only floo. And I want you in at nine, not seven after. If the lifts are acting up, you can take the stairs."
"Yes, sir," Ron said. "Thank you, sir."
"Fiona can show you the type-setter spell when she gets a moment," Cadawaller continued, waving Ron out the door. "Until then, see if you can't catch up on some of the filing. Not much to filing, if you stayed in Hogwarts long enough to learn the alphabet. And have a look at that copy papering machine. When I want jam, I'll talk to my wife, not some bucket of bolts."
:: :: ::
Ron's office wasn't quite an office. It only pretended to be an office, when in all actuality, it was Eugene Cadawaller's box room. It was airless, windowless, and approximately the size of a Hogwarts four-poster. Aside from a few instances of damp, the walls and ceiling were the same tan as the carpet, and boxes full of all sorts of rubbish were stacked like children's blocks in most of the available space. And Ron's desk wasn't properly a desk. It was a table. It lacked drawers, forcing Ron to keep his things in yet another box on which he constantly stubbed his toe. It also had a short leg, which politely ignored Ron's full catalogue of repair and maintenance spells. On his third day -- after the sixth time a sudden change in the table's centre of gravity spilled tea all over his filing -- Ron gave up and evened things out with an ancient copy of Local Ordinances for Goblin Behaviour (with Appendices).
He blamed Voldemort, really.
Picked an inconvenient time for his war, Voldemort had. Decided to have his messy confrontation with Harry when Ron was meant to be in school. Had to hide little bits of his soul everywhere, so Ron spent what should have been his seventh year following Harry all over the British countryside. The south of England, as it turned out, was as boggy and wet as the north of Scotland, only with more humidity. Not that Ron had cared either way about school -- he wasn't Hermione, or anything -- and it had seemed like a good idea at the time. And he'd told Cadawaller the truth; he'd do the same again. It's not like he'd have left Harry to faff about on his own.
Of course, if he had to do the war over again, he would reschedule things a bit, so he could sit his NEWTs.
He hadn't planned on a six-month sentence on his mum's couch. He'd planned on getting a job. They had talked about it sometimes, right before the end, during that sliver of peace that came before things really got bad -- when it was just the three of them, bunked down in the crumbling husk of Harry's parents' house at Godrics Hollow, not really sleeping, and eating whatever could be transfigured into food. Harry had been thin back then, even thinner than he was when Ron met him on the Hogwarts Express, and the circles under Hermione's eyes had been so dark and wide Ron had worried they'd swallow her whole. On the long nights, through the strained black stretches that brought a sudden silence that left them afraid to close their eyes, they had curled together around a jar of bluebell flames and talked about what they wanted to do after.
Ron had fancied being an Auror, but he wasn't Harry Potter -- Moody managed to convince the admissions board that killing Voldemort qualified as independent study -- and without NEWTs in the seven required subjects, Ron's application had been denied. He'd thought about joining Charlie in Romania, but the Dragon Reserve wanted NEWTs in Charms, Transfigurations, and Defence. He got the same story from Bill when he mentioned Gringotts; Bill had pointed him to Cadawaller instead, because the bank wasn't going to consider him without NEWTs. Gringotts was a wash anyway, since they wanted NEWTS in classes he never took: Arithmancy, Ancient Runes, and -- of all things -- Muggle Studies, but the point remained.
After was never meant to include this.
Cadawaller was Ron's boss, in that Cadawaller arrived at Ron's table-desk before his first cup of tea kicked in and turned over a veritable mire of parchments, scrolls, forms, and the occasional picture into his custody. The upside was that Cadawaller didn't much care what Ron did with the paperwork, as long as Ron got it well out of his sight, and after that initial, early-morning exchange of all-right-there's and carry-on-then's, Cadawaller usually retreated to his office and wasn't seen again until it was time to head home. There was a downside, of course; if Cadawaller needed any of that paperwork, at any time or for any reason, he expected Ron to produce it with all haste. After two weeks, Ron had mastered the art of making paperwork disappear. Making it reappear was another story entirely, and really, Accio boiled down to luck, particularly when it came to forms.
This morning's paper-dump was mostly sheets of parchment, for which Ron was grateful. Forms were the easiest, because they didn't have to be rolled or folded in any way, but parchment was better than scrolls. Scrolls liked to open themselves randomly, scrolls usually had to be shrunk, and more often than not, they were too fat to properly fit inside a folder. There was a lot of parchment, though. A lot. More than Ron could possibly carry in his arms. Sighing, he grabbed the closest box -- which already held a couple of books, but empty boxes were quickly becoming a commodity -- dumped all the parchments inside it, and treated it to a healthy dose of Wingardium Leviosa.
Levi-oh-sah, he thought. Eight years later, he could still hear Hermione correcting his pronunciation whenever he used that spell.
The topmost parchment was for a Griphook. Ron took a deep breath and opened the drawer marked G.
The first problem with goblins was that they didn't have surnames. The second problem with goblins was that goblin-parents weren't very inventive when it came to naming their children, in general. From what Ron could tell, every goblin in the Wizarding world had one of eleven names -- six for males and five for females -- so beyond that, Ron had to sort the paperwork inside the eleven names by Goblin Identification Number. The third problem had less to do with goblins and more to do with the office. The filing cabinets were in such a state that Ron spent more time fixing the mess he inherited than adding to it. Whoever had previously been assigned to the filing had used an alphabet that was wholly their own.
"Griphook," Ron said. "Griphook, Griphook, Griphook." G was a popular letter, as it also included Gormlach and Gutrund. Griphook should have been somewhere in the middle, according to the laws of nature and common sense, but in this office, all bets were off. "Griphook. 6X33-F590:21."
The door creaked like someone was hanging on the handle. He smelled blueberry scones and too much jasmine perfume. "Morning, Fiona," he said, without bothering to look.
"Hallo, Ronnie." He heard footsteps, which stopped in the general vicinity of his desk, and the sound of paper being shuffled about.
"It's in my box," Ron offered. For some reason, the Goblin Liaison Office only had two staplers; one for Cadawaller, and one for everyone else.
"Ta," she replied. "If I don't bring it back, come get it."
"Griphook," he muttered, as she let herself out. Between Griphook 4F98-H422:88 and Griphook 5C29-D234:00 was a folder marked Aomlerd. Sighing, Ron freed it from its unalphabetical prison and tossed it on top of the cabinet for A-F. "Bloody Hell. Where've you gone off to, then?"
"I've heard that talking to yourself is one of the first signs of madness."
Ron turned. Harry's head was sitting on his desk, inside a half-hearted swirl of green flames. "Sod off." Ron abandoned Griphook's parchment to its own devices inside the box of unsorted-paperwork-doom, and sunk into his chair. "Where've you gone off to, then?"
"Aberdeen," Harry said, and Ron tried not to squint at him. He hated head-only floos; they made a person look a third their normal size. Ron always felt like he was talking to one of the shrunken heads in Trelawney's classroom, only it was trapped inside a lantern. "We found Macnair."
"Bastard," Ron snapped. He had good reason to hate Macnair. "Where?"
"Muggle church," Harry said, rolling his tiny eyes. "Original, that." Voldemort had hidden one of his horcruxes in a Muggle church, the church where his father had been christened. "He's been telling the priests he's a political refugee."
Ron sipped his tea. It was cold, and he tapped his mug with his wand. "You lot planning something big?"
"Nah. It's just me and Shacklebolt," Harry replied. "I figure the two of us can get it sorted quietly. If my whole squad comes up, someone might notice. We'll have to call in the Obliviators and Muggle-Worthy Excuse, and I'll have to do three hours of paperwork to send him to his fifteen-minute trial."
"Yeah," Ron said. Fifteen minutes was pushing it. Scrimgeour's replacement, Hortence Ploughshot, had little patience for leftover Death Eaters. With one exception -- an exception that had required testimony from Harry and a posthumous letter of exoneration from Dumbledore -- anyone found with a Dark Mark could expect to be shipped off to the North Sea before they had time to pack a bag. "You talk to Neville?"
Harry wobbled in a way that suggested that over in Aberdeen, he was shaking his head. "His floo's closed. Down with the plants, I guess." Neville worked at St Mungos, in the greenhouses that supplied its apothecary. "If you talk to him, I'll be back Friday, latest."
"And by 'if you talk to him', you mean 'floo him immediately'." Ron leaned back in his chair and propped his feet up on the box that moonlighted as his desk-drawer.
"He usually finds his way back to his office by noon," Harry said, smiling. "And I was thinking--"
"--careful with that--"
"--wanker." Harry laughed. "How about the Broomsticks on Sunday?"
"Yeah, all right," Ron said. With this job, he could do with a drink. If he had an actual desk with actual drawers, he'd be tempted to bring a bottle to work.
Harry paused. "Um," he said uncertainly, "you mind if I invite Hermione?"
Ron retreated behind his tea. "No."
"Ron."
"No really. It's fine."
"Ron."
"Weasley?"
"That's Cadawaller," Ron said, sitting up straight. "I gotta go."
"All right," Harry said. "See you Saturday."
"Weasley? Come look at this copy papering machine, will you? It says it doesn't like my tone, and bugger if I know why. I haven't said a word to it!"
:: :: ::
Ron was on his fourth cup of tea, and it was barely elevensies.
It was Friday, and the Goblin Liaison Office was quiet. They didn't take petitions or firecalls on Friday, which meant the waiting room at the end of the hall was blessedly goblin-free, and Ron didn't have to entertain a string of green, undersized heads while he was trying to get some work done. Cadawaller had disappeared shortly before ten -- a development his co-workers seemed to find distressing: most days, Cadawaller gave the impression he wouldn't leave his office before time if the Ministry was on fire -- under the ominous threat of 'having to sort something out with the bastards down the hall'. Ron figured Cadawaller meant Regulation and Control, but he didn't know what Cadawaller had been on about. He did know Cadawaller had left in as close to a strop as a man his age could get; Ron almost felt bad for whoever would be on the receiving end of it.
The silence felt strange and thick. The only sound was the muted click and whir of the much abused and malagined photocopier, and the soft buzz of Ron's co-workers chatting in the kitchen. His eyes seemed heavy, four cups of tea or not. He set his teacup aside, and leaned back in his chair. He could rest for a moment. The filing was caught up -- or, as caught up as was humanly possible in this place. Cadawaller could be gone for hours, and when did come back, he'd probably go straight to his office.
Ron's thoughts drifted to Harry. He wondered how things had turned out in Aberdeen, and if they'd managed to deal with Macnair.
The second attack on Hogwarts had come right before Voldemort died, and it played out similar to the first. It had been a disorganised coup orchestrated by someone on the inside -- Ron blamed Pansy Parkinson to this day, though she was no longer alive to argue her case -- and Voldemort had failed to put in an appearance. A few dementors had, which showed whoever was in charge had given the whole mess more than six minutes of thought, but it was only an excuse to make things go off bang. It was bait, an attempt to distract Harry from his plans and lure him out in the open.
Harry had received the insta-message spell from McGonagall thirty minutes before he pulled Voldemort's fifth horcrux out of the corpse of Merope Gaunt, and he simply closed his eyes. It was the locket, the locket Regulus Black had tried to steal for himself, and Harry had curled it in his fist until it sliced the palm of his hand. When the spell came again, McGonagall's voice was hoarse and desperate. A boggy Muggle graveyard in the south of London had echoed with the sound of Ginny screaming, and over and over, Harry muttered this wasn't supposed to happen, this is why I left her behind in a way that said he needed Ron to believe it.
The locket had been the only horcrux Harry didn't destroy himself. Ron did it, with Harry's head tucked under his chin and Hermione's fingers cold against his wrist, because Harry's hands were shaking so badly he couldn't hold his wand.
The Order arrived at Hogwarts in time to turn the tide, but too late to stop Ginny from running into Macnair on the stairs. When they found her, crumpled in a heap at the foot of the North Tower, she was missing all the bones on the right side of her body. The bones grew back over the course of a week, but the nerve damage was so extensive she had to learn how to walk again.
Ron's eyes fluttered open, and yawning, he unlocked the shutter on his head-only floo. It hissed softly at the pinch of powder he tossed in, and the ashes in the bottom stirred a the slight whisper of green flames. Friday or not, he wanted to be available, in case Harry called. In case Harry needed him, he thought sleepily. That was ridiculous, of course; Harry had killed Voldemort, and after that, there wasn't much to a misplaced Death Eater. They weren't eleven, any more. Harry was a fully-trained Auror. Harry was with Shacklebolt, and Ron learned first-hand during the war that Shacklebolt was the sort of fellow you wanted on your side.
If Ron was being honest, he'd admit he wanted Harry to need him. But right now, Ron wasn't trying to be honest. He was trying to have a quick kip before Cadawaller came back.
"Weasley?"
No such luck.
"Yes, sir," Ron said. He sat up straight and tried to look awake.
"What about the copy papering machine, then?" Cadawaller asked.
"It's fine, sir," Ron said. "I think it just wants to be left alone."
"Right," Cadawaller said. He glanced around the office from where he'd perched along the door jamb like he expected something to pop out at him. "I suppose I might, at that. Blasted thing's more trouble than it's worth."
"Why do you have it?" Ron asked. He realised he was dangerously close to engaging Cadawaller in conversation, but he couldn't help but wonder. It was a Muggle machine, in a Ministry office. Many wizards considered their ignorance of Muggles a point of pride, and no one could accuse the Ministry of being technologically advanced.
"Myrtle brought it in," Cadawaller said, invoking the name of Fiona's aider, abetter, and general accomplice. "She has a Squib brother, works in a Muggle office." He pulled away from the door jamb to take a sip from his trusty green, oversized mug. Ron wondered if he'd taken it down the hall with him, when he went to sort out whatever it was that had needed sorting. "How are you about change?"
"Sorry?"
"Change," Cadawaller repeated. "Are you adaptable, or are you one of those fellows that goes round the twist? Like that one bloke from the Owl Post Office, who went into work one day and started shooting off his wand at anything that moved?"
"Bloody Hell," Ron said, his stomach sinking into the floor. "I'm getting sacked."
Cadawaller sighed. "You're not getting sacked," he said shortly. "You're useful enough. You don't quite have your brother's gift, but you do all right. And you certainly make that blasted paper disappear. I was telling my brother, Elmer -- he's upstairs with the Trading Standards Body -- that you must be burning it, the way you put paid to it so fast."
Ron smiled thinly and tucked his wand in his lap.
"What do we do here?" Cadawaller asked suddenly.
"Um," Ron floundered. Since he arrived this morning, he talked to Neville on the floo, return-owled the envelope of Niffler dung the twins had sent him-- postage due, of course, and flipped through an elderly copy of Witch Weekly he found in the loo. He also had a sharp talk with the potted palm in the kitchen because really, it had no business goosing him that way, and Fiona tried to teach him to juggle with some of the scones the Ministry provided for breakfast. "Goblin petitions?"
"Right," Cadawaller said. "Goblin petitions. But do you know why, son? Do you know the history of this place?"
Ron knew the best answer would be yes, but if there turned out to be a quiz later, he'd certainly fail. He shook his head.
"Ministry's been around a long time, but it wasn't always this big," Cadawaller said, brandishing his wand from somewhere inside his sleeve. It was short and weathered, and it produced a ladder-backed chair similar to those in the goblin waiting room, only properly sized. "Once, it was just a handful of old codgers making up rules about how much ankle a witch could show in public, and what to do when you caught someone else's sprogs playing in your vegetable garden. But once, we didn't need it to be more, you understand?"
Ron didn't have the foggiest, but it seemed safest to nod.
"Take your father's office, for example. Was a time we didn't need it," Cadawaller explained. "Now, we can't move for tripping over Muggle things, what with Squibs faffing off to join their workforce, and London sprouting up around Diagon Alley without so much as a by-your-leave." He snorted, and it was a dry and papery as his laugh. "A hundred years ago, if you married a Muggle, the Ministry snapped your wand. And a hundred years before that, if a Muggle got a letter from Hogwarts, they never saw their relatives again. The Obliviators came and sorted the lot, and the Headmaster found a Wizarding family to take them in until they turned seventeen. As separate as we were then, we didn't need an office to tell us not to Charm motorbikes to fly, and that, but now, with all the intermixing, and the way we're living on top of one another, we do. People run on to their smell-phones and eclectic hair-flyers all the time."
Inside Ron's head, Hermione was shouting. She was saying things like 'prejudice' and 'separatism' and 'antiquated cultural ideals'.
"Regulation and Control, now, they've been around forever," Cadawaller continued, blissfully unaware of Hermione's silent tirade. "Split up into Beast, Being, and Spirit in 1706, but the office itself is older than that. Turns out, wizards have always been a nervous lot. Found creatures that could do magic and think for themselves unsettling from the off. They started out small -- banshees, and that. Poltergeists. Dementors. But over time, they stuck their fingers in every pie within reach, until everything that wasn't a wizard needed permission to eat and breathe."
Ron sipped his tea. It was a hair above tepid, and it had somehow lost half the sugar he remembered spooning into it.
"Goblins are Regulation and Control's business. Have been since goblins lost their rights in the rebellion of 1894," Cadawaller said. Ron thought the spark of that uprising had been about housing grants and health-care for goblin elderly, but he couldn't be sure. He'd always found History of Magic dreadfully boring. "After that, goblins had to ask for permission to change their minds, which brings me to this office. Started in 1906, because there were more goblins than Regulation and Control realised, and they already had their hands full with vampires, werewolves, and house-elves." Cadawaller leaned forward a bit and squinted. "You still with me, son? You need another spot of tea?"
"Yes," Ron said. "No."
"When a goblin wants to petition, he comes to us," Cadawaller said. "Fiona and Myrtle fill out the forms, and I read the case and make a report. My report has suggestions, mind, but that's all they are. At the end of the day, the decision is up to the bastards down the hall. And now they want to change that."
The pause was tight and pointed, and Ron realised it was his turn to participate. "How?" he ventured. "Why?"
"Apparently, they're busy, or some rubbish," Cadawaller barked. "Spirit doesn't say much, but they haven't done much but sit around and eat scones since your friend got the dementors sorted during the war. But Beast and Being, that's another matter. Talk to any one of those lay-abouts, and they'll swear they're up to their eyeballs. They'll start going on about the House-Elf Workers Union, or the Werewolf Protection League, or how the centaurs are rebelling again." He shook his head, and made the tea-costs-too-much-these-days sound that was becoming all too familiar. "What they want, is for us to take the goblins off their hands. Want us to deal with the petitions, ourselves."
"Oh," Ron said. It was the best he could do.
"I supposed they'll want to have an opinion if it's something big -- say, a goblin comes in and wants to marry a human -- but they don't want to be bothered with goblins who just want to move house or visit their aged grandmother on the Continent."
Ron thought better of it, but he couldn't help himself. "Does that happen often? Goblins wanting to marry humans?"
"Once or twice a year," Cadawaller replied. "I told you, goblins don't always know their own heads. And humans should stay off the liquor. Muggle women, in particular."
"Right," Ron said, shuddering. "What about me, then?"
"Oh," Cadawaller said. "You. Well, like I said, they want us to deal with the petitions. But they don't want me making the final decisions; they think sixty years in this office has made me soft. So they've hired a fellow. Mallard, I think his name is. Malloy, maybe. I'll do my reports, same as I always have, but I'll give them to this Mallard, instead of sending them on to Regulation and Control. Problem is, I've no place to put him. Well, I do, but you're already in it, so I'll need you to move your desk."
:: :: ::
After a stint in the hallway and a brief internment in what Ron suspected was actually a supply cupboard -- a supply cupboard with spiders, no less -- Ron and his table were shoehorned into the office of Fiona and Myrtle.
Fiona Applewaith and Myrtle Mimbleton were hopelessly cheerful women in their early thirties. Fiona had black hair and Myrtle had brown, but they sported similar, chin-length bobs, as well as similar horn-rimmed spectacles. They drank the same kind of tea, preferred the same kind of scones, and their desks were pushed together and arranged facing each other, so they could pass the stapler back and forth as they worked. Their office was slightly larger than Ron's first, and it had a window, but the extra space was rendered void by more clutter than Ron had ever seen, half the window was blocked by a potted plant that Ron thought looked carnivorous, and the damp creeping across the walls was covered by cut-outs from Quidditch Hunks Monthly.
And really, Ron had hoped after Hogwarts that he'd never have to see Oliver Wood in his pants again.
Fiona and Myrtle were best friends who grew up across the street from each other. They attended Hogwarts together, where they were Sorted in to Hufflepuff together, played Quidditch together -- Seeker and Chaser, respectively -- and competed on the Gobstones team together. They now worked together -- landing here only after being shuffled everywhere from the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes to the Department of Magical Games and Sports because this was the only office that didn't insist they be split up -- and they also shared a flat together, in the new residential development off Diagon Alley. Fiona's boyfriend was Myrtle's boyfriend's second cousin, and from what Ron had gathered from the last ten minutes of their conversation, they often went on double-dates together.
"Well, what do you think, then?" Fiona asked, holding her hand out for the stapler. Their desks were arranged in eerie mirror-images of each other; Myrtle passed it over without looking up from her stack of parchment. "Should I wear the blue or the red?"
"Oh, I don't know," Myrtle replied. Her quill moved with a persistent scratching sound. "You should be careful with red, because of you hair. If it's too dark, it makes you look like a ghost. Where are you going, again?"
Ron took a swipe at the inter-office memo hovering over his shoulder. Unsurprisingly, it ignored him.
"Oh, that one place, over in Tinderblast Row," Fiona replied. "I can't think of the name."
"Um... the Jolly Roger?" Myrtle asked. Ron took Hermione there once; it was their first proper date after the war. It was also horribly overpriced and the unfortunate victim of a decorator who had seen too many old Muggle films about pirates.
"No." Fiona set the stapler on Myrtle's side of their collective desk and aimed her wand at her fingernails.
Ron sighed and did his best to ignore the instinctual urge to hex the pair of them with laryngitis. Three hours ago -- when Cadawaller pulled him out of the supply cupboard and threw him into the lion's den -- he found their chatter fascinating, because he didn't understand how two people who had lived in each other's pockets for almost thirty years could still have something to talk about. Now, he found it irritating, and he didn't understand how they had not -- after all this time -- learned to communicate through some kind of telepathy, since they quite obviously shared a brain. His ears were not happy, and he was just sure they'd be bleeding by five o'clock.
"The Time-Turner?" Myrtle offered. This was a dance club that played Wizarding rock from the 80's. Of course, Wizarding rock from the 80's didn't have much in the way of diversity, so the selection was mostly limited to Hobgoblins songs recorded before Stubby Boardman got fat and interested in Muggle drugs.
"No," Fiona said, examining her nails. She switched wand-hands and started on the other side. "I'll think of it. Just give me a moment."
"Kneazle Ugly?" Myrtle said.
"Yes, that's it!" Fiona said, and Ron winced. He'd never been there, but from what he'd heard, it was the sort of place that had lots of flashing lights and drinks that exploded on contact. Local pub gossip suggested the secret, anonymous owners were actually Fred and George. For his part, Ron wouldn't put it past them. "Kneazle Ugly. I don't know why, though."
"He probably knows you've lost interest," Myrtle said. "They can usually tell, even if they don't mention it."
"I suppose," Fiona said. "Stapler? Ta." She twirled it in her hand before attacking a pile of forms. "So, blue or red?"
"I already told you, you have to be careful with red," Myrtle said. "Shame, that. It's a nice dress."
"What do you think, Ronnie?"
Ron looked up warily, and the memo pecked at the side of his head like some kind of demented bird. "What?"
"Does red make me look like a ghost?"
Ron paused. He'd wanted silence for the last three hours, and now that he had it, it was sudden and strangely foreign. Myrtle tilted her head, and there was a dangerous gleam in Fiona's eye. His experience with women was limited to living with his sister and almost-dating Hermione, and while neither of them worried over-much about things like hair or make-up or clothes, he knew damn good and well this was one of those questions -- the type that didn't have a correct answer. It was right up there with 'do these robes make me look fat?'.
"I don't know," Ron said slowly. As if he didn't already know he was treading dangerous water, Oliver Wood looked down at him expectantly from where he was pinned to the wall. Ron made a mental note to tell Wood to find the rest of his kit. "Ghosts don't wear red, usually."
Fiona laughed, and Myrtle pursed her lips, then nodded, as if running some private tally in her head. The memo applauded his discretion by pecking him right in the ear.
"Geroff!" Ron shouted, beating at the air. The memo avoided his blows with the kind of fluid grace that should not belong to a folded bit of parchment.
"It's best just to open them," Myrtle advised. "They're like Howlers, really. They just keep at it until something explodes."
Ron growled. "It's not mine." He wondered if setting it on fire would cause undue comment. If he still had his own office, he would have rendered it to ash as soon as it flew in.
"Oh, who's is it?" Fiona asked.
"It's for a Penelope Boot," Ron replied. "Department of Birth, Death, Inheritance, Marriage, and Magical Taxes."
"Cor, that's not even on this floor," Myrtle said.
"That's not even in this building!" Ron replied. Due to size constraints, the Department of Birth, Death, Inheritance, Marriage, and Magical Taxes was annexed to a new location some five years ago. According to his dad, it was now in an abandoned Underground station two blocks from the Ministry proper. To get there, you had to take the main lifts to the level seven and catch a strange, sideways lift on the other side of Games and Sports, or use the Visitor's Entrance, which was a portkey charmed to look like a ticket machine. "Do you hear me?" he asked, turning to face the memo. "Go down to Games and Sports and catch a ride over on the Birth Canal."
"I hate it when people call it that," Fiona said with a sniff. "It's so tasteless."
"Says the woman with Oliver bloody Wood tacked on the wall above my bloody desk," Ron muttered. Wood drew himself up and favoured Ron with the two-fingered salute, and Ron repaid it in kind.
continued
Pairing: Ron/Draco
Rating: NC-17
Words: ~22,500
Summary: It's all in a day's work.
A/N: A gift for
tarie, at merry_smutmas 2006.::
"Level five, Department of International Magical Cooperation, incorporating the International Magical Trading Standards Body, The International Magical Office of Law, and the International Confederation of Wizards, British Seats."
The lift jerked to a halt, and the grille jangled open. A squat, elderly witch bustled out, armed with a dented cauldron and an over-large handbag. Her pointed hat was a faded, charcoal grey, and it sat crookedly on what Ron suspected was a rather bad wig. As she disappeared down the hallway, Ron caught a glimpse of ancient wood panelling, a badly-hung poster detailing the odd things used for wand cores in different countries, and a world atlas stuck with multi-coloured push-pins. A paper aeroplane darted inside at the last moment, sneaking between the slats of the grille just as the lift lurched upward. It was pale violet and it circled Ron's head like a vulture waiting for its prey to drop dead.
Ron sighed. He was tempted to oblige it.
"Level four. Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, incorporating Beast, Being, and Spirit Divisions, Goblin Liaison Office, and the Pest Advisory Bureau."
"Well, this is me," Ron mumbled. The aeroplane flapped in reply, wings quivering. It made one more circuit above his head before escaping the lift and zooming away to the right.
Off the lift, Ron was greeted by more wood panelling and tan carpet that was balding along the beaten path. He smoothed the front of his robes and tugged irritably at his collar. He hadn't worn dress robes in years. He hadn't worn any kind of robes since his sixth year at Hogwarts. In the last six months, he hadn't got off his couch if it wasn't absolutely necessary, and in his opinion, shuffling between the kitchen and the loo didn't really warrant trousers. This set was deep blue, brand new -- purchased just yesterday, and he'd gone by himself, thank you very much, since the whole Yule Ball catastrophe proved his mother couldn't be trusted to dress a kneazle -- and plain. He'd managed to talk Madam Malkin out of the ruffles, ribbons, and lace that mad women seemed to be so fond of, but she apparently hadn't been listening when he'd said he wanted something comfortable.
The directory on the wall was bright blue, and the flashing white letters informed him that he needed to go left, which was fine by him, because the Pest Advisory Bureau was to the right. He secretly wished that paper aeroplane the best of luck. He wasn't sure what Pest Advisory did -- his dad would rabbit on about the Ministry until he was blue in the face, but there were three things he didn't talk about: the Department of Mysteries, the Ludicrous Patents Office, and Pest Advisory -- but Ron figured it was better that way. He could only imagine they dealt with acromantula infestations or bloody giant snakes bent on taking over the world, and there were some things Ron just didn't want to know about.
He went left. He passed through Regulation and Control, which was a long hallway dotted with offices and pictures of different magical creatures. The people inside the offices looked barely awake, bored to tears, or a combination of the two. The pictures were encased in identical black frames and arranged on the wall with the sort of randomness that suggested they were hiding cosmetic damage on the panelling. He stepped wide of a box stuffed with crumpled, still-twitching memos, and avoided a collection of strange, off-coloured stains on the carpet that looked suspiciously like Odin's Wain. The hallway veered suddenly and violently to the right, and Ron followed it until he was confronted with a dead end and a large door marked Goblin Liaison Office.
Behind the door was a short hallway with more offices and a room at the end that looked like a common area where two young women chatted quietly at the coffee pot. The office to his left appeared to be some kind of waiting room -- a handful of goblins sat in undersized chairs with rolls of parchment tucked in their laps. The office to his right belonged to a Eugene Cadawaller, which was who Ron needed to speak to.
He didn't want to do this.
Eugene Cadawaller was tall, thin, and roughly the same age as Stonehenge. He was bald, aside from a strange tuft of white hair that sprouted from the centre of his head like a tail-feather, and his wire-rimmed spectacles clung precariously to the end of his long nose. Parchments and scrolls were piled into two mountains that towered on either side of his desk, and he glared at Ron through the valley between them while Ron was still waffling in the doorway.
"What is it, then?"
"I've an appointment, sir," Ron said. His voice cracked. He cleared his throat and tried again. "At nine o'clock."
Cadawaller snorted. "It's seven after."
"Sorry," Ron said. "The lifts--"
"--are not my problem," Cadawaller finished, setting his quill aside. "Well, come closer. My eyes aren't what they once were." Ron walked inside, took two steps toward the desk, and Cadawaller studied him from top to bottom. "I suppose you'd be Weasley's brother," he said, after he catalogued Ron's hair and freckles. "Richard, is it?"
"Ronald." He cleared his throat again and pulled at his collar. "Ron's fine."
"Had a letter from Bill, just last week," Cadawaller said, brandishing a small roll of parchment. There was a gilt perch behind the desk; the spotted owl sleeping on it was probably, in owl-years, as old as Cadawaller. "Says you need a job."
"I do, sir."
"Good man, your brother," Cadawaller continued. "He didn't always work for Gringotts, you know. Came here first. Took an internship with me right out of Hogwarts. He was a good worker, and he got on well with the goblins. Funny creatures, goblins. Don't always know their own heads. But your brother understood them, if you follow me." He laughed, but it was a dry, brittle sound. "I should have kept a closer eye on him. Recruiter from the bank snapped him up when I wasn't looking, and I've not had his like in this office since. So, what do you do?"
"Sorry?"
"What do you do, son?" Cadawaller asked. "Can you file? Answer the floo? Write business correspondence?"
Ron stared at the old man in growing horror. "Business correspondence?"
"Letters, and that. Memos. Can you do a type-setter spell?" Cadawaller paused long enough refuel from a large mug of tea. "I understand your father likes the Muggles. Do you know anything about their blasted copy papering machines? Every time I put a roll of parchment in the tray it tells me I'm making jam."
Ron's mouth opened, but nothing came out. His silence was noted. Cadawaller's eyes narrowed, and in that gesture, Ron pictured another six months at the Burrow, sitting on the couch until his arse threatened to sprout roots while his mum railed at him for being a lay-about. At least they had a telly, now. His father had brought it home after a recent raid. Apparently, misusing Muggle artefacts included charming a telly to show everyone in the nude. Put a whole new spin on the evening news, Ron supposed. His father had reversed the spell before he brought it in the house, which was fine by Ron; there were too many blokes in the afternoon serial for people to be doing it starkers.
"You ever worked in an office before?" Cadawaller asked.
"No, sir," Ron admitted. "This'll be my first job."
Cadawaller paused at that. He set his tea down with a thump, and the elderly owl almost stirred. "How old are you?"
"Nineteen."
"Nineteen?" Cadawaller yelped. A portrait of a much younger Cadawaller watched the proceedings from the wall behind the desk; when he caught Ron looking, he returned to shaking hands with a goblin outside the Gringotts in Diagon Alley. "What have you been doing since Hogwarts?"
"Well, sir, there was the war--"
Cadawaller snorted. "Ah yes, the war. Wossname started stirring up trouble, and everyone with more bollocks than sense ran off to be a hero." His tone suggested in Cadawaller-speak, 'hero' meant 'someone who stood outside the Leaky Cauldron and played the harp for spare change'. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk, and fixed Ron with a level stare. "Are you a hero, son?"
"No, sir," Ron said. His robes were trying to choke him, he was sure of it.
Cadawaller made the sort of noise elderly people favoured when they discovered a cup of tea didn't cost what it had fifty years ago. "How'd you do, then, at school? No trouble? Good marks?"
"No trouble," Ron said. A harmless fib. McGonagall was busy putting Hogwarts back together; she wasn't like to sprout out of the floor and make a liar out of him. "Seven OWLs."
"What about NEWTs?"
Bugger. Nothing for it.
"Dintakthm."
"Sorry. Not sure I caught that," Cadawaller said. "You're not a mumbler, are you? My ears aren't what they once were, either. I can't be having with mumblers."
Ron studied the carpet. It was tan and balding, just like in the hallway. "I didn't take them, sir."
"Why not?"
"The war--"
"The war, again," Cadawaller cut in. "I was around the last time Wossname got uppity. Was around for Grindewald, too. And both times, the kids stayed in school as they should have, and left the messy business to their elders." He seized Bill's letter and wielded it like a sword. "If you're as smart as your brother says you are, why'd you leave school and take up with Potter?"
"Harry's my best friend, sir," Ron said.
Cadawaller sat up, sucking in a sharp breath, and Ron belatedly remembered where he was. Public opinion of Harry was favourable, but since Voldemort's death -- and he could say the name now, because he'd watched him die -- had in some ways, resulted in Scrimgeour's resignation, Ministry opinion of Harry was divided.
"Harry's my best friend," Ron said again. It was the truth, and Cadawaller could rot if he didn't like it. He could always ask the twins if they needed a box-boy. "Has been, since our first year at Hogwarts." Gormless bastards would probably try to pay him two knuts an hour, and he'd likely spend random intervals as a canary. "When Dumbledore died, he left school. He said he wanted to put an end to it, and I went with him."
Cadawaller considered this for a moment. "Would you do it again?" he asked finally. "If you had to do it over, would you do the same?"
He'd get some exercise, working as a box-boy, and that certainly wouldn't kill him. He'd gained about a stone since the war ended.
"Yes."
"End of the hall, last door on your right," Cadawaller said. "It's small, but you have a desk and your own head-only floo. And I want you in at nine, not seven after. If the lifts are acting up, you can take the stairs."
"Yes, sir," Ron said. "Thank you, sir."
"Fiona can show you the type-setter spell when she gets a moment," Cadawaller continued, waving Ron out the door. "Until then, see if you can't catch up on some of the filing. Not much to filing, if you stayed in Hogwarts long enough to learn the alphabet. And have a look at that copy papering machine. When I want jam, I'll talk to my wife, not some bucket of bolts."
Ron's office wasn't quite an office. It only pretended to be an office, when in all actuality, it was Eugene Cadawaller's box room. It was airless, windowless, and approximately the size of a Hogwarts four-poster. Aside from a few instances of damp, the walls and ceiling were the same tan as the carpet, and boxes full of all sorts of rubbish were stacked like children's blocks in most of the available space. And Ron's desk wasn't properly a desk. It was a table. It lacked drawers, forcing Ron to keep his things in yet another box on which he constantly stubbed his toe. It also had a short leg, which politely ignored Ron's full catalogue of repair and maintenance spells. On his third day -- after the sixth time a sudden change in the table's centre of gravity spilled tea all over his filing -- Ron gave up and evened things out with an ancient copy of Local Ordinances for Goblin Behaviour (with Appendices).
He blamed Voldemort, really.
Picked an inconvenient time for his war, Voldemort had. Decided to have his messy confrontation with Harry when Ron was meant to be in school. Had to hide little bits of his soul everywhere, so Ron spent what should have been his seventh year following Harry all over the British countryside. The south of England, as it turned out, was as boggy and wet as the north of Scotland, only with more humidity. Not that Ron had cared either way about school -- he wasn't Hermione, or anything -- and it had seemed like a good idea at the time. And he'd told Cadawaller the truth; he'd do the same again. It's not like he'd have left Harry to faff about on his own.
Of course, if he had to do the war over again, he would reschedule things a bit, so he could sit his NEWTs.
He hadn't planned on a six-month sentence on his mum's couch. He'd planned on getting a job. They had talked about it sometimes, right before the end, during that sliver of peace that came before things really got bad -- when it was just the three of them, bunked down in the crumbling husk of Harry's parents' house at Godrics Hollow, not really sleeping, and eating whatever could be transfigured into food. Harry had been thin back then, even thinner than he was when Ron met him on the Hogwarts Express, and the circles under Hermione's eyes had been so dark and wide Ron had worried they'd swallow her whole. On the long nights, through the strained black stretches that brought a sudden silence that left them afraid to close their eyes, they had curled together around a jar of bluebell flames and talked about what they wanted to do after.
Ron had fancied being an Auror, but he wasn't Harry Potter -- Moody managed to convince the admissions board that killing Voldemort qualified as independent study -- and without NEWTs in the seven required subjects, Ron's application had been denied. He'd thought about joining Charlie in Romania, but the Dragon Reserve wanted NEWTs in Charms, Transfigurations, and Defence. He got the same story from Bill when he mentioned Gringotts; Bill had pointed him to Cadawaller instead, because the bank wasn't going to consider him without NEWTs. Gringotts was a wash anyway, since they wanted NEWTS in classes he never took: Arithmancy, Ancient Runes, and -- of all things -- Muggle Studies, but the point remained.
After was never meant to include this.
Cadawaller was Ron's boss, in that Cadawaller arrived at Ron's table-desk before his first cup of tea kicked in and turned over a veritable mire of parchments, scrolls, forms, and the occasional picture into his custody. The upside was that Cadawaller didn't much care what Ron did with the paperwork, as long as Ron got it well out of his sight, and after that initial, early-morning exchange of all-right-there's and carry-on-then's, Cadawaller usually retreated to his office and wasn't seen again until it was time to head home. There was a downside, of course; if Cadawaller needed any of that paperwork, at any time or for any reason, he expected Ron to produce it with all haste. After two weeks, Ron had mastered the art of making paperwork disappear. Making it reappear was another story entirely, and really, Accio boiled down to luck, particularly when it came to forms.
This morning's paper-dump was mostly sheets of parchment, for which Ron was grateful. Forms were the easiest, because they didn't have to be rolled or folded in any way, but parchment was better than scrolls. Scrolls liked to open themselves randomly, scrolls usually had to be shrunk, and more often than not, they were too fat to properly fit inside a folder. There was a lot of parchment, though. A lot. More than Ron could possibly carry in his arms. Sighing, he grabbed the closest box -- which already held a couple of books, but empty boxes were quickly becoming a commodity -- dumped all the parchments inside it, and treated it to a healthy dose of Wingardium Leviosa.
Levi-oh-sah, he thought. Eight years later, he could still hear Hermione correcting his pronunciation whenever he used that spell.
The topmost parchment was for a Griphook. Ron took a deep breath and opened the drawer marked G.
The first problem with goblins was that they didn't have surnames. The second problem with goblins was that goblin-parents weren't very inventive when it came to naming their children, in general. From what Ron could tell, every goblin in the Wizarding world had one of eleven names -- six for males and five for females -- so beyond that, Ron had to sort the paperwork inside the eleven names by Goblin Identification Number. The third problem had less to do with goblins and more to do with the office. The filing cabinets were in such a state that Ron spent more time fixing the mess he inherited than adding to it. Whoever had previously been assigned to the filing had used an alphabet that was wholly their own.
"Griphook," Ron said. "Griphook, Griphook, Griphook." G was a popular letter, as it also included Gormlach and Gutrund. Griphook should have been somewhere in the middle, according to the laws of nature and common sense, but in this office, all bets were off. "Griphook. 6X33-F590:21."
The door creaked like someone was hanging on the handle. He smelled blueberry scones and too much jasmine perfume. "Morning, Fiona," he said, without bothering to look.
"Hallo, Ronnie." He heard footsteps, which stopped in the general vicinity of his desk, and the sound of paper being shuffled about.
"It's in my box," Ron offered. For some reason, the Goblin Liaison Office only had two staplers; one for Cadawaller, and one for everyone else.
"Ta," she replied. "If I don't bring it back, come get it."
"Griphook," he muttered, as she let herself out. Between Griphook 4F98-H422:88 and Griphook 5C29-D234:00 was a folder marked Aomlerd. Sighing, Ron freed it from its unalphabetical prison and tossed it on top of the cabinet for A-F. "Bloody Hell. Where've you gone off to, then?"
"I've heard that talking to yourself is one of the first signs of madness."
Ron turned. Harry's head was sitting on his desk, inside a half-hearted swirl of green flames. "Sod off." Ron abandoned Griphook's parchment to its own devices inside the box of unsorted-paperwork-doom, and sunk into his chair. "Where've you gone off to, then?"
"Aberdeen," Harry said, and Ron tried not to squint at him. He hated head-only floos; they made a person look a third their normal size. Ron always felt like he was talking to one of the shrunken heads in Trelawney's classroom, only it was trapped inside a lantern. "We found Macnair."
"Bastard," Ron snapped. He had good reason to hate Macnair. "Where?"
"Muggle church," Harry said, rolling his tiny eyes. "Original, that." Voldemort had hidden one of his horcruxes in a Muggle church, the church where his father had been christened. "He's been telling the priests he's a political refugee."
Ron sipped his tea. It was cold, and he tapped his mug with his wand. "You lot planning something big?"
"Nah. It's just me and Shacklebolt," Harry replied. "I figure the two of us can get it sorted quietly. If my whole squad comes up, someone might notice. We'll have to call in the Obliviators and Muggle-Worthy Excuse, and I'll have to do three hours of paperwork to send him to his fifteen-minute trial."
"Yeah," Ron said. Fifteen minutes was pushing it. Scrimgeour's replacement, Hortence Ploughshot, had little patience for leftover Death Eaters. With one exception -- an exception that had required testimony from Harry and a posthumous letter of exoneration from Dumbledore -- anyone found with a Dark Mark could expect to be shipped off to the North Sea before they had time to pack a bag. "You talk to Neville?"
Harry wobbled in a way that suggested that over in Aberdeen, he was shaking his head. "His floo's closed. Down with the plants, I guess." Neville worked at St Mungos, in the greenhouses that supplied its apothecary. "If you talk to him, I'll be back Friday, latest."
"And by 'if you talk to him', you mean 'floo him immediately'." Ron leaned back in his chair and propped his feet up on the box that moonlighted as his desk-drawer.
"He usually finds his way back to his office by noon," Harry said, smiling. "And I was thinking--"
"--careful with that--"
"--wanker." Harry laughed. "How about the Broomsticks on Sunday?"
"Yeah, all right," Ron said. With this job, he could do with a drink. If he had an actual desk with actual drawers, he'd be tempted to bring a bottle to work.
Harry paused. "Um," he said uncertainly, "you mind if I invite Hermione?"
Ron retreated behind his tea. "No."
"Ron."
"No really. It's fine."
"Ron."
"Weasley?"
"That's Cadawaller," Ron said, sitting up straight. "I gotta go."
"All right," Harry said. "See you Saturday."
"Weasley? Come look at this copy papering machine, will you? It says it doesn't like my tone, and bugger if I know why. I haven't said a word to it!"
Ron was on his fourth cup of tea, and it was barely elevensies.
It was Friday, and the Goblin Liaison Office was quiet. They didn't take petitions or firecalls on Friday, which meant the waiting room at the end of the hall was blessedly goblin-free, and Ron didn't have to entertain a string of green, undersized heads while he was trying to get some work done. Cadawaller had disappeared shortly before ten -- a development his co-workers seemed to find distressing: most days, Cadawaller gave the impression he wouldn't leave his office before time if the Ministry was on fire -- under the ominous threat of 'having to sort something out with the bastards down the hall'. Ron figured Cadawaller meant Regulation and Control, but he didn't know what Cadawaller had been on about. He did know Cadawaller had left in as close to a strop as a man his age could get; Ron almost felt bad for whoever would be on the receiving end of it.
The silence felt strange and thick. The only sound was the muted click and whir of the much abused and malagined photocopier, and the soft buzz of Ron's co-workers chatting in the kitchen. His eyes seemed heavy, four cups of tea or not. He set his teacup aside, and leaned back in his chair. He could rest for a moment. The filing was caught up -- or, as caught up as was humanly possible in this place. Cadawaller could be gone for hours, and when did come back, he'd probably go straight to his office.
Ron's thoughts drifted to Harry. He wondered how things had turned out in Aberdeen, and if they'd managed to deal with Macnair.
The second attack on Hogwarts had come right before Voldemort died, and it played out similar to the first. It had been a disorganised coup orchestrated by someone on the inside -- Ron blamed Pansy Parkinson to this day, though she was no longer alive to argue her case -- and Voldemort had failed to put in an appearance. A few dementors had, which showed whoever was in charge had given the whole mess more than six minutes of thought, but it was only an excuse to make things go off bang. It was bait, an attempt to distract Harry from his plans and lure him out in the open.
Harry had received the insta-message spell from McGonagall thirty minutes before he pulled Voldemort's fifth horcrux out of the corpse of Merope Gaunt, and he simply closed his eyes. It was the locket, the locket Regulus Black had tried to steal for himself, and Harry had curled it in his fist until it sliced the palm of his hand. When the spell came again, McGonagall's voice was hoarse and desperate. A boggy Muggle graveyard in the south of London had echoed with the sound of Ginny screaming, and over and over, Harry muttered this wasn't supposed to happen, this is why I left her behind in a way that said he needed Ron to believe it.
The locket had been the only horcrux Harry didn't destroy himself. Ron did it, with Harry's head tucked under his chin and Hermione's fingers cold against his wrist, because Harry's hands were shaking so badly he couldn't hold his wand.
The Order arrived at Hogwarts in time to turn the tide, but too late to stop Ginny from running into Macnair on the stairs. When they found her, crumpled in a heap at the foot of the North Tower, she was missing all the bones on the right side of her body. The bones grew back over the course of a week, but the nerve damage was so extensive she had to learn how to walk again.
Ron's eyes fluttered open, and yawning, he unlocked the shutter on his head-only floo. It hissed softly at the pinch of powder he tossed in, and the ashes in the bottom stirred a the slight whisper of green flames. Friday or not, he wanted to be available, in case Harry called. In case Harry needed him, he thought sleepily. That was ridiculous, of course; Harry had killed Voldemort, and after that, there wasn't much to a misplaced Death Eater. They weren't eleven, any more. Harry was a fully-trained Auror. Harry was with Shacklebolt, and Ron learned first-hand during the war that Shacklebolt was the sort of fellow you wanted on your side.
If Ron was being honest, he'd admit he wanted Harry to need him. But right now, Ron wasn't trying to be honest. He was trying to have a quick kip before Cadawaller came back.
"Weasley?"
No such luck.
"Yes, sir," Ron said. He sat up straight and tried to look awake.
"What about the copy papering machine, then?" Cadawaller asked.
"It's fine, sir," Ron said. "I think it just wants to be left alone."
"Right," Cadawaller said. He glanced around the office from where he'd perched along the door jamb like he expected something to pop out at him. "I suppose I might, at that. Blasted thing's more trouble than it's worth."
"Why do you have it?" Ron asked. He realised he was dangerously close to engaging Cadawaller in conversation, but he couldn't help but wonder. It was a Muggle machine, in a Ministry office. Many wizards considered their ignorance of Muggles a point of pride, and no one could accuse the Ministry of being technologically advanced.
"Myrtle brought it in," Cadawaller said, invoking the name of Fiona's aider, abetter, and general accomplice. "She has a Squib brother, works in a Muggle office." He pulled away from the door jamb to take a sip from his trusty green, oversized mug. Ron wondered if he'd taken it down the hall with him, when he went to sort out whatever it was that had needed sorting. "How are you about change?"
"Sorry?"
"Change," Cadawaller repeated. "Are you adaptable, or are you one of those fellows that goes round the twist? Like that one bloke from the Owl Post Office, who went into work one day and started shooting off his wand at anything that moved?"
"Bloody Hell," Ron said, his stomach sinking into the floor. "I'm getting sacked."
Cadawaller sighed. "You're not getting sacked," he said shortly. "You're useful enough. You don't quite have your brother's gift, but you do all right. And you certainly make that blasted paper disappear. I was telling my brother, Elmer -- he's upstairs with the Trading Standards Body -- that you must be burning it, the way you put paid to it so fast."
Ron smiled thinly and tucked his wand in his lap.
"What do we do here?" Cadawaller asked suddenly.
"Um," Ron floundered. Since he arrived this morning, he talked to Neville on the floo, return-owled the envelope of Niffler dung the twins had sent him-- postage due, of course, and flipped through an elderly copy of Witch Weekly he found in the loo. He also had a sharp talk with the potted palm in the kitchen because really, it had no business goosing him that way, and Fiona tried to teach him to juggle with some of the scones the Ministry provided for breakfast. "Goblin petitions?"
"Right," Cadawaller said. "Goblin petitions. But do you know why, son? Do you know the history of this place?"
Ron knew the best answer would be yes, but if there turned out to be a quiz later, he'd certainly fail. He shook his head.
"Ministry's been around a long time, but it wasn't always this big," Cadawaller said, brandishing his wand from somewhere inside his sleeve. It was short and weathered, and it produced a ladder-backed chair similar to those in the goblin waiting room, only properly sized. "Once, it was just a handful of old codgers making up rules about how much ankle a witch could show in public, and what to do when you caught someone else's sprogs playing in your vegetable garden. But once, we didn't need it to be more, you understand?"
Ron didn't have the foggiest, but it seemed safest to nod.
"Take your father's office, for example. Was a time we didn't need it," Cadawaller explained. "Now, we can't move for tripping over Muggle things, what with Squibs faffing off to join their workforce, and London sprouting up around Diagon Alley without so much as a by-your-leave." He snorted, and it was a dry and papery as his laugh. "A hundred years ago, if you married a Muggle, the Ministry snapped your wand. And a hundred years before that, if a Muggle got a letter from Hogwarts, they never saw their relatives again. The Obliviators came and sorted the lot, and the Headmaster found a Wizarding family to take them in until they turned seventeen. As separate as we were then, we didn't need an office to tell us not to Charm motorbikes to fly, and that, but now, with all the intermixing, and the way we're living on top of one another, we do. People run on to their smell-phones and eclectic hair-flyers all the time."
Inside Ron's head, Hermione was shouting. She was saying things like 'prejudice' and 'separatism' and 'antiquated cultural ideals'.
"Regulation and Control, now, they've been around forever," Cadawaller continued, blissfully unaware of Hermione's silent tirade. "Split up into Beast, Being, and Spirit in 1706, but the office itself is older than that. Turns out, wizards have always been a nervous lot. Found creatures that could do magic and think for themselves unsettling from the off. They started out small -- banshees, and that. Poltergeists. Dementors. But over time, they stuck their fingers in every pie within reach, until everything that wasn't a wizard needed permission to eat and breathe."
Ron sipped his tea. It was a hair above tepid, and it had somehow lost half the sugar he remembered spooning into it.
"Goblins are Regulation and Control's business. Have been since goblins lost their rights in the rebellion of 1894," Cadawaller said. Ron thought the spark of that uprising had been about housing grants and health-care for goblin elderly, but he couldn't be sure. He'd always found History of Magic dreadfully boring. "After that, goblins had to ask for permission to change their minds, which brings me to this office. Started in 1906, because there were more goblins than Regulation and Control realised, and they already had their hands full with vampires, werewolves, and house-elves." Cadawaller leaned forward a bit and squinted. "You still with me, son? You need another spot of tea?"
"Yes," Ron said. "No."
"When a goblin wants to petition, he comes to us," Cadawaller said. "Fiona and Myrtle fill out the forms, and I read the case and make a report. My report has suggestions, mind, but that's all they are. At the end of the day, the decision is up to the bastards down the hall. And now they want to change that."
The pause was tight and pointed, and Ron realised it was his turn to participate. "How?" he ventured. "Why?"
"Apparently, they're busy, or some rubbish," Cadawaller barked. "Spirit doesn't say much, but they haven't done much but sit around and eat scones since your friend got the dementors sorted during the war. But Beast and Being, that's another matter. Talk to any one of those lay-abouts, and they'll swear they're up to their eyeballs. They'll start going on about the House-Elf Workers Union, or the Werewolf Protection League, or how the centaurs are rebelling again." He shook his head, and made the tea-costs-too-much-these-days sound that was becoming all too familiar. "What they want, is for us to take the goblins off their hands. Want us to deal with the petitions, ourselves."
"Oh," Ron said. It was the best he could do.
"I supposed they'll want to have an opinion if it's something big -- say, a goblin comes in and wants to marry a human -- but they don't want to be bothered with goblins who just want to move house or visit their aged grandmother on the Continent."
Ron thought better of it, but he couldn't help himself. "Does that happen often? Goblins wanting to marry humans?"
"Once or twice a year," Cadawaller replied. "I told you, goblins don't always know their own heads. And humans should stay off the liquor. Muggle women, in particular."
"Right," Ron said, shuddering. "What about me, then?"
"Oh," Cadawaller said. "You. Well, like I said, they want us to deal with the petitions. But they don't want me making the final decisions; they think sixty years in this office has made me soft. So they've hired a fellow. Mallard, I think his name is. Malloy, maybe. I'll do my reports, same as I always have, but I'll give them to this Mallard, instead of sending them on to Regulation and Control. Problem is, I've no place to put him. Well, I do, but you're already in it, so I'll need you to move your desk."
After a stint in the hallway and a brief internment in what Ron suspected was actually a supply cupboard -- a supply cupboard with spiders, no less -- Ron and his table were shoehorned into the office of Fiona and Myrtle.
Fiona Applewaith and Myrtle Mimbleton were hopelessly cheerful women in their early thirties. Fiona had black hair and Myrtle had brown, but they sported similar, chin-length bobs, as well as similar horn-rimmed spectacles. They drank the same kind of tea, preferred the same kind of scones, and their desks were pushed together and arranged facing each other, so they could pass the stapler back and forth as they worked. Their office was slightly larger than Ron's first, and it had a window, but the extra space was rendered void by more clutter than Ron had ever seen, half the window was blocked by a potted plant that Ron thought looked carnivorous, and the damp creeping across the walls was covered by cut-outs from Quidditch Hunks Monthly.
And really, Ron had hoped after Hogwarts that he'd never have to see Oliver Wood in his pants again.
Fiona and Myrtle were best friends who grew up across the street from each other. They attended Hogwarts together, where they were Sorted in to Hufflepuff together, played Quidditch together -- Seeker and Chaser, respectively -- and competed on the Gobstones team together. They now worked together -- landing here only after being shuffled everywhere from the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes to the Department of Magical Games and Sports because this was the only office that didn't insist they be split up -- and they also shared a flat together, in the new residential development off Diagon Alley. Fiona's boyfriend was Myrtle's boyfriend's second cousin, and from what Ron had gathered from the last ten minutes of their conversation, they often went on double-dates together.
"Well, what do you think, then?" Fiona asked, holding her hand out for the stapler. Their desks were arranged in eerie mirror-images of each other; Myrtle passed it over without looking up from her stack of parchment. "Should I wear the blue or the red?"
"Oh, I don't know," Myrtle replied. Her quill moved with a persistent scratching sound. "You should be careful with red, because of you hair. If it's too dark, it makes you look like a ghost. Where are you going, again?"
Ron took a swipe at the inter-office memo hovering over his shoulder. Unsurprisingly, it ignored him.
"Oh, that one place, over in Tinderblast Row," Fiona replied. "I can't think of the name."
"Um... the Jolly Roger?" Myrtle asked. Ron took Hermione there once; it was their first proper date after the war. It was also horribly overpriced and the unfortunate victim of a decorator who had seen too many old Muggle films about pirates.
"No." Fiona set the stapler on Myrtle's side of their collective desk and aimed her wand at her fingernails.
Ron sighed and did his best to ignore the instinctual urge to hex the pair of them with laryngitis. Three hours ago -- when Cadawaller pulled him out of the supply cupboard and threw him into the lion's den -- he found their chatter fascinating, because he didn't understand how two people who had lived in each other's pockets for almost thirty years could still have something to talk about. Now, he found it irritating, and he didn't understand how they had not -- after all this time -- learned to communicate through some kind of telepathy, since they quite obviously shared a brain. His ears were not happy, and he was just sure they'd be bleeding by five o'clock.
"The Time-Turner?" Myrtle offered. This was a dance club that played Wizarding rock from the 80's. Of course, Wizarding rock from the 80's didn't have much in the way of diversity, so the selection was mostly limited to Hobgoblins songs recorded before Stubby Boardman got fat and interested in Muggle drugs.
"No," Fiona said, examining her nails. She switched wand-hands and started on the other side. "I'll think of it. Just give me a moment."
"Kneazle Ugly?" Myrtle said.
"Yes, that's it!" Fiona said, and Ron winced. He'd never been there, but from what he'd heard, it was the sort of place that had lots of flashing lights and drinks that exploded on contact. Local pub gossip suggested the secret, anonymous owners were actually Fred and George. For his part, Ron wouldn't put it past them. "Kneazle Ugly. I don't know why, though."
"He probably knows you've lost interest," Myrtle said. "They can usually tell, even if they don't mention it."
"I suppose," Fiona said. "Stapler? Ta." She twirled it in her hand before attacking a pile of forms. "So, blue or red?"
"I already told you, you have to be careful with red," Myrtle said. "Shame, that. It's a nice dress."
"What do you think, Ronnie?"
Ron looked up warily, and the memo pecked at the side of his head like some kind of demented bird. "What?"
"Does red make me look like a ghost?"
Ron paused. He'd wanted silence for the last three hours, and now that he had it, it was sudden and strangely foreign. Myrtle tilted her head, and there was a dangerous gleam in Fiona's eye. His experience with women was limited to living with his sister and almost-dating Hermione, and while neither of them worried over-much about things like hair or make-up or clothes, he knew damn good and well this was one of those questions -- the type that didn't have a correct answer. It was right up there with 'do these robes make me look fat?'.
"I don't know," Ron said slowly. As if he didn't already know he was treading dangerous water, Oliver Wood looked down at him expectantly from where he was pinned to the wall. Ron made a mental note to tell Wood to find the rest of his kit. "Ghosts don't wear red, usually."
Fiona laughed, and Myrtle pursed her lips, then nodded, as if running some private tally in her head. The memo applauded his discretion by pecking him right in the ear.
"Geroff!" Ron shouted, beating at the air. The memo avoided his blows with the kind of fluid grace that should not belong to a folded bit of parchment.
"It's best just to open them," Myrtle advised. "They're like Howlers, really. They just keep at it until something explodes."
Ron growled. "It's not mine." He wondered if setting it on fire would cause undue comment. If he still had his own office, he would have rendered it to ash as soon as it flew in.
"Oh, who's is it?" Fiona asked.
"It's for a Penelope Boot," Ron replied. "Department of Birth, Death, Inheritance, Marriage, and Magical Taxes."
"Cor, that's not even on this floor," Myrtle said.
"That's not even in this building!" Ron replied. Due to size constraints, the Department of Birth, Death, Inheritance, Marriage, and Magical Taxes was annexed to a new location some five years ago. According to his dad, it was now in an abandoned Underground station two blocks from the Ministry proper. To get there, you had to take the main lifts to the level seven and catch a strange, sideways lift on the other side of Games and Sports, or use the Visitor's Entrance, which was a portkey charmed to look like a ticket machine. "Do you hear me?" he asked, turning to face the memo. "Go down to Games and Sports and catch a ride over on the Birth Canal."
"I hate it when people call it that," Fiona said with a sniff. "It's so tasteless."
"Says the woman with Oliver bloody Wood tacked on the wall above my bloody desk," Ron muttered. Wood drew himself up and favoured Ron with the two-fingered salute, and Ron repaid it in kind.