"Budge over, Blondie."

I looked up at the gruff order, resigned to my much-disliked nickname. For Merlin's sake, I wasn't even a natural blonde! It had been Smith's fault- he should have known better than to experiment with combining volatile potions and charms in a public office space. Had he been the one to suffer for it, though? Of course not. I was the poor sap that had to walk around the office with platinum locks.

"What for, Lark?" I snipped back at my superior. Lark's real name was Larsson but no one called him that. He took his name from his animagus form, a little mottled brown songbird. His animagus form wasn't good for much in our line of work but he was occasionally pulled out for recon.

Lark wasn't too remarkable a man, something that made him a bit more valuable in the force. His dark brown hair was unremarkable, his dark brown eyes almost plain behind his undecorated glasses; he wasn't too attractive but not ugly. He was neither short nor tall. He was, in a word, average. An average target seemed like a weaker target, though, and Lark was particularly vicious to anyone who underestimated him. That tendency to violence let him rise through the ranks quickly, making him the second or third youngest Head in decades at the ripe age of 34.

Instead of answering me, Lark looped an arm under my ankles and hefted my feet off of the other half of the couch I'd been occupying. As I repositioned my feet onto the stout and water-ringed coffee table, Lark fell into place beside me and began shuffling through the papers in his ever present messenger bag.

"I've got something... You've been requested." The way he drew out the last word made me certain that he wasn't fond of the request. After a few moments of silence broken only by the rustling papers, Lark brandished a manilla folder in my face. "For you."

I grasped it and narrowed my eyes when he didn't immediately let go. Scowling, I wrestled the file from him. I flipped it open with a flick of my wrist and a small photograph fell out, landing face down on the floor.

My hand froze as I reached out to pick the picture up, noticing that Harry James Potter was written on the back of the square of paper. Even in the United States, Harry Potter was a famous name. While he was more famous for his general survival of the killing curse, his name could still be heard in Modern Era History of Magic and Advanced Defensive Spellwork classes.

I recovered, taking the picture in hand and flipping it over to reveal a boy's face. He was probably ten or eleven with bright green eyes and messy dark hair. The hair was almost long enough that I couldn't see the faint scar etched onto his forehead, but not quite.

Putting the picture to the side, I returned my attention to the file itself.

"Mission duration?" I asked, fearing the worst. Lark scowled.

"The whole ride."

"I'm being shipped out for seven years?" I asked, appalled. While there wasn't any sort of rule against such a long mission duration, even the longest missions usually ran under six months. The longest missions I'd ever personally taken had only been four months long.

"It's more than just a protection job, Blondie. Read it."

There was a few minutes of silence as the scope of what I was being hired out to do washed over me. I wasn't just being babysitting some kid. I was being totally uprooted.

"How much is the mission cost?" I wanted to know. I wanted to know what sort of price the office was putting on something like this.

I knew when I first decided that I wanted to be a Hit Wizard that what I wanted wouldn't mean too much. I knew that the odds of me dying in the line of duty were very high. But I had never thought that I'd have to live with the consequences.

Lark grimaced. We weren't supposed to know what the client was giving the office. The system had been crippled eighty-something years ago when an op felt he wasn't getting a reasonable cut of the profits. In a field where each operative was trained so thoroughly, even one AWOL worker could wreck havoc with ease.

"Astronomical."

"How. High?" I asked tightly. Lark lowered his eyes.

"Fourteen thousand for each month of service."

"Dollars?"

"Galleons," Lark corrected.

Fourteen thousand galleons a month. Ten months of service in a year. Seven years of service.

They were paying the office nine hundred and eighty thousand galleons for the mission!

"Your cut is being negotiated by the Council sometime this week. If this was just a protection job, it'd be easy but your task has... facets."

"You know I don't care too much about that; but I was requested? By who?"

"The headmaster himself. Seems he heard about you through the grapevine. You'd be offered this even if you weren't requested. You're the only one in the office even qualified for the job."

"Then I don't have much of a choice, do I?" I grumbled half-heartedly. When someone was requested for a mission, it was an unspoken rule that they took it or they left the force. An unreliable op isn't something the Hit Wizards had the time or energy to flush out. It was our job to deal with the rest of the country's- and occasionally a few other countries'- messes; we didn't have time to micromanage within our own organization.

Lark looked at me with a calculating light in his eyes.

"Can I give you advice?"

"You always do," I grumbled.

"Take the job. Dumbledore made it very clear that this mission needs doing. If you can't do it, I need to know ASAP. If, after a month or two, you can't handle it, I can start grooming someone to take over. But this needs to get started."

I sighed, mulling things over.

In retrospect, I probably should have handed over my badge then and there. I worked hard to get to where I was; all of the Hit Wizards did. The Magical Congress of the United States of America didn't work like Great Britain or other countries, where the kids were babied and coddled through their education. We started earlier, around age eight, and everyone roughly decided what they wanted to do with their life after six years of primary school. At that point, they'd prepare for four years of secondary, which was structured more like Muggle universities.

Becoming a Hit Wizard was arguably the hardest career path to take. The force only took the best of the best, trained thoroughly so that its operatives could work efficiently in almost any scenario. If an operative reached retiring age- usually in mid-thirties due to the high stress nature of the job- they usually picked their favorite aspect of their job and went with that. Some went in the less dangerous private sector of protection, others became master healers, others still pursued a career in education and passed on what they learned to the next generations.

I was only twenty-nine but this was a job that would end my career. After seven years in the relative safety of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, I wouldn't be fit for service anymore. This assignment, if I took it, would be my last.