A/N: After a very long slump, I've finally decided to start writing again on a completely unrelated tangent to my previous stories. Anyhow, please r/r!!
Modern Knights
But don't judge us by distance
Or the difference between us
Try to look at it with an open mind
For where there is one room, you'll always find another
Two rooms at the end of the world
Well we've both ridden the wagon bit the tail off the dragon
Borne our swords like steel knights on the highway
Washing down the dirt roads
Hosing off our dirty clothes
Coming to terms with the times that we couldn't but we tried
-Elton John, Two Rooms at the End of the World
Paris, France
April 14, 2000
8:00 PM
The moon cast shadows over the city on the cool spring night, shadows that danced throughout the streets to play with lovers and to haunt thieves.
Their meeting place was a little French café on Rouge Boulevard, snug and quaint and entirely romantic. There were only five or six tables inside and another half a dozen outside, which was perfect for the private, intimate discussion that had been planned between the two parties.
Cho sighed happily as she looked down on it from her position across the street. The quaint café invoked tender thoughts of her beloved boyfriend, whom she was to meet later that night. She and Harry had been going out for almost six months now. Cho's smile broadened furthur as she recalled the first time he had asked her out. She had been nearly two years out of Hogwarts and hadn't seen him since she graduated, but a random twist of fate had landed them in the same pub in the back streets of Berlin. She was there on business of course; Harry had never really explained what he happened to be doing there, but Cho didn't care overly much. After all, she hadn't been able to explain her reason to him.
Harry had seemed surprisingly glad to see her, and had stumbled through aconservation for nearly an hour before finally getting up the nerve to ask her to dinner. Their first date had been at a wonderful castle-turned-restaurant in Northern Scotland. Harry had known the owners through his connections in the miniscule world of Scottish archeology, and they had had wonderful seats looking over the sea cliffs and the spray as the ocean collided with the earth. Cho wondered fleetingly whether she had fallen in love with Harry or with his job; as an archeologist, he seemed to have connections all over the world. But then Cho remembered how he would drone on about some ancient runes his team had uncovered, confirming that her love for Harry was definitely not about his job.
Cho looked at the café again, and wiped all thought of Harry from her mind. Despite appearances, she was not here to meet her boyfriend but instead perched on the top of a roof across the stree to try and scout out the slightly more sinister figure that she was supposed to deal with first.
A small, dark figure coming out of the alley caught the corner of her eye. Of all things to wear, the second party had picked a bright red trench coat, which Cho thought was hideously out of season. Cho peered closer into her state of the art omniglass, revealing a tall women, dark sunglasses covering her eyes and a flowered scarf concealing the color of her hair. Switch the omniglass's mode to subimago, Cho found things far more important than the color of the women's hair. A large file folder was hidden in the left side of her jacket, her wand hidden in the right. Cho could just make out a small, magical earpiece. This was definitely who she was supposed to meet.
"Reservation under Pace?" She asked the man lying on the roof next to her. He nodded, not moving his eyes from the women.
"Ron?" Cho asked, looking concerned at the scowl that covered his face.
"Does that agent look familiar?" Ron Weasley asked, frowning in concentration. Ron had been her partner since she had become Auror, and despite a few tensions between them he had become her good friend. Now he ran his hands through his hair in frustration. "I feel like I've seen her before, but I just can't put my finger on where."
Cho shrugged. "Not really, but I'll try and get a closer look when I'm talking to her." She slipped her wand inside the pocket of her jacket. This was supposedly just a trade, but one could never be too careful when dealing with the Dragons. As of yet they hadn't seriously harmed any Aurors, but their organization was of the kind that would kill their own mothers to make a profit.
In point of fact, actually, that was exactly what they had been doing. Founded by some eccentric millionaire that nobody could identify or even catch a glimpse of, the Dragons were a group that was playing off the Undeclared War to make money by selling and buying from both sides and the black market. They'd been making sickening profits too, as they were the only link between the other three espionage groups vying for power. The Death Eaters, of course, were at war with everyone else and would have not direct contact with other agents (unless they were killing them, which meant that the contact usually didn't last that long), and the Corps refused to talk to the Aurors for fear of being betrayed and arrested, while the Aurors didn't want to officially admit the existence of the Corps.
Cho checked her watch. Green lights flashed that it was 8:14. "She's a minute early." She gave a cursory glance of the other roofs. "Where's their backup man?"
Ron pointed to another flat roof a block down. "There's the one the terms declared. But knowing them, they'll have another one somewhere else." He scowled again. If possible, Ron took his job almost more seriously than it was meant to be taken, and espionage was a pretty serious job to begin with.
Cho patted him on the back. "Just give me heads up if something comes down." With that, she disapparated.
She reemerged into their normal dimension a second later, in the small side alley where the enemy agent had come out of a few minutes earlier. Cho had lost her regular dark hair and medium skin tone and replaced them with a much deeper tan and fake blonde tresses. She, too, placed a magical earpiece in her ear. Her hands shook slightly performing these perfunctory, regulatory operations. Despite all that she'd been taught, all her agent training, she couldn't help but feel a bit nervous for this current operation. Whatever Lupin might say, Cho knew that the Aurors were not winning this undercover war with the Death Eaters and Voldemort in the slightest. In the past year alone nearly one third of their agents had been killed, and the number of volunteers for the Auror's job was rapidly declining. Meanwhile, they'd only managed to kill one Death Eater in that entire time period, and even that mission had been a botch because they'd meant to take him hostage.
With the present circumstances as they were, Cho knew that they really needed whatever leads they could get, even if it meant dealing with the devil. Which, in essence, was what she was doing here tonight. Taking a deep breath and making a mental prayer, she stepped out of the alley.
The Dragon's representative was already seated, coolly sipping a glass of wine. From the earpiece her backup was chatting away nonchalantly. "So you think they're ever going to show… oh, here we go…she's coming out of the alley wearing jeans and a black leather jacket. Short with blonde hair. The radiate's in her left pocket." The young woman at the table smiled at the last bit, enjoying how much the magicists have achieved in the field of technology and how that information was being put to use.
Her blonde appointment whispered something to the host and pointed to the table. The host nodded and allowed the woman to pass.
"Just water, please," Cho told the waitress as she sat down, not yet looking across the table. Even sitting down, the difference in the two women's heights was almost humorous. The Dragon agent was supposed to meet tapped her foot impatiently.
"Can we get this over with, please?" she asked when the waitress left, with to voice of someone clearly native to France but who had lost most indications of her accent. Cho, however, had been trained to pick up on small vocal details.
Cho smiled sourly. "Let me see the information."
"Let me see the radiate," the woman retorted. Slowly, Cho drew a small, glowing red stone out of her pocket as the women produced a small folder. Each representative snatched the other's presentation simultaneously, matching looks of distrust on their faces.
The women held up the radiate, looking carefully at its glow. Slowly, she produced a small piece of silver and touched it to the gem. The silver evaporated.
"By Merlin, I think they've actually given it to us." The voice in her ear chuckled. "Idiots." The first agent smiled in satisfaction
Meanwhile, Cho was flipping through the contents of the folder. Frozen, dated pictures of an old magic shop in Berlin met her eye. Figures she recognized as Death Eaters appeared coming and going from the shop. The pictures were sixth months old, but it could have been worse.
"How are you sure this is one of their buildings?" she asked without looking up. No answer came.
"She apparated," Ron's disappointed voice came to her ear. "But it looks like we got something out of this whole mission. Nice work on the silver." Cho smiled. True radiate was supposed to do exactly what it appeared to do; that is, melt silver. But Ministry Magicists had spent four years developing it as an alternative source of power and there was no way they were just going to hand it over to the black market. Cho had given away only a small, worthless ruby disguised to look like the radium and muttered the spell herself to melt the silver. With a smile of success, Cho disapparated.
The Dragon's representative had already reappeared on the roof next to her partner. She tossed the gem lightly to him with a grin. "Stupid fools, to actually give us that." She glanced down the street and saw their two enemy agents. Wanting to avoid a second confrontation, she motioned that they should move out of sight.
"We gave them real pictures, remember?" her partner reminded her with a grin. "Just pictures of a Death Eater's location that was evacuated six months ago." He put the gem in a small pouch. Each agent disapparated with a small pop, reappearing instantaneously on a miniscule terrace of an ancient Scottish Castle. A shabby looking brown door stood at one end of the terrace, guarded by a boorish looking troll.
"Hey Teddy," the woman said to him with a grin. "Crimson Tide." The troll nodded at the password and watched them pass into the Dragon Headquarters, Flanders Castle.
"So got any plans for tonight?" the male agent asked his partner as they walked down a long stone hallway.
"Gabriella and I figured we'd go clubbing in England and try and pick up hot guys," she told him, removing her scarf and revealing the long, silver hair of someone who was part veela. "I don't get to hang out with my younger sis often these days, because one or the other of us is always off on some mission." She paused for a moment. "Now that I think about it, I don't get to hang out with hot guys very much either."
"What, hanging out with me doesn't count as picking up a hot guy?" her partner asked, offended.
"Not when it involves me having go undercover as a spy and actually work," she retorted. "And besides, you have a girlfriend."
He smiled at the mention of her and dropped his voice to a whisper. "I'm only telling you this because I know you haven't talked to her in three years so the chances are pretty slim that you'll run in to her before I go out with her tonight-"
"Are you implying that I'm not trustworthy?" the tall woman demanded, hands on her hips. Small, round objects lifted up by an invisible force scanned each of their eyes, then flashed a green light that dissolved part of the stone wall in front of them.
"-but I'm going to propose to her tonight." The agent grinned foolishly, his face in no way resembling his previous, businesslike visage.
"Good for you!" she exclaimed. "But… your not going to tell her about…"
"Of course not," he replied without even a pause. "Not that I care what our all-powerful boss wants, but that's one action I really wouldn't want to stay around for the ramifications of." He pushed open another door to reveal a large, circular room with images of places and people floating close to the ceiling and a single man standing exactly in the center of the room. His back was to them, and his hands were tensely clasped behind his back. The figure was tall and slender, with silvery blonde hair that shimmered despite the darkness of the room. He always managed to come across as a powerful figure simply from his natural bearing and looks, but now he emphasized it with the look of annoyance that flirted across his face as he turned slowly to face them.
"I wouldn't really want to see what I would do in that instance either, Potter, so I would highly recommend that you don't tell her." Draco Malfoy tapped his foot impatiently, but still managed to maintain a sort of cat-like grace even with such an ungraceful motion. "As for you, Delacour, did you not pause to think that they might put a glamour spell on the object?" Draco's face was even paler than usual in anger. Muttering a few words under his breath, he lifted the gem out of its pouch, which was still in Harry's coat pocket.
"Finite Imago!" he shouted, blue eyes blazing. True to his guess, the eerie brightness of the radiate immediately disappeared to be replaced with the dull sheen of an ordinary gem. Fleur and Harry both spoke simultaneously, Fleur in fear, Harry in defense of his pride.
"I did to the silver test…"
"That's really not the kind of thing you expect for the ministry…"
Draco waved his hands impatiently, his mood slightly better now that he had proven his judgment infallible as usual. "Well, this mission was made partially to see what exactly the ministry was willing to do. We'll just take more careful precautions next time." He looked them both in the eyes with a long, unwavering glance. Harry met his look with one of his own, but Fleur quickly cast her eyes downward. For whatever reason, Harry and Draco had always been among the few men that were somehow entirely unaffected by Fleur's veela ancestry, which was why Draco was able to win a staring contest with her and why Harry, instead of any of the other men in the Dragons, was her partner.
His current task finished, Draco waved one of the screens down from the ceiling and looked at it for a few minutes, supposedly forgetting the existence of others within the room.
"Draco…?" Fleur said questioningly, bringing him back to reality with a jolt that was unusual to his normal smoothness. Because the screen had been facing away from them, Harry and Fleur were unable to see what he had been staring so intently at.
"You can go," he said, waving his hand dismissively. "Try not to get rejected, Potter." Harry smiled slightly, realizing that that was as much of a good luck wish anyone would ever get from Draco. Then his smile grew, because he knew, beyond a doubt, that Cho would say yes. They were in love. What he didn't know, and wouldn't know for some time, was that he would not be the only one entering the marriage with in an encompassing lie.
Modern Knights
But don't judge us by distance
Or the difference between us
Try to look at it with an open mind
For where there is one room, you'll always find another
Two rooms at the end of the world
Well we've both ridden the wagon bit the tail off the dragon
Borne our swords like steel knights on the highway
Washing down the dirt roads
Hosing off our dirty clothes
Coming to terms with the times that we couldn't but we tried
-Elton John, Two Rooms at the End of the World
Paris, France
April 14, 2000
8:00 PM
The moon cast shadows over the city on the cool spring night, shadows that danced throughout the streets to play with lovers and to haunt thieves.
Their meeting place was a little French café on Rouge Boulevard, snug and quaint and entirely romantic. There were only five or six tables inside and another half a dozen outside, which was perfect for the private, intimate discussion that had been planned between the two parties.
Cho sighed happily as she looked down on it from her position across the street. The quaint café invoked tender thoughts of her beloved boyfriend, whom she was to meet later that night. She and Harry had been going out for almost six months now. Cho's smile broadened furthur as she recalled the first time he had asked her out. She had been nearly two years out of Hogwarts and hadn't seen him since she graduated, but a random twist of fate had landed them in the same pub in the back streets of Berlin. She was there on business of course; Harry had never really explained what he happened to be doing there, but Cho didn't care overly much. After all, she hadn't been able to explain her reason to him.
Harry had seemed surprisingly glad to see her, and had stumbled through aconservation for nearly an hour before finally getting up the nerve to ask her to dinner. Their first date had been at a wonderful castle-turned-restaurant in Northern Scotland. Harry had known the owners through his connections in the miniscule world of Scottish archeology, and they had had wonderful seats looking over the sea cliffs and the spray as the ocean collided with the earth. Cho wondered fleetingly whether she had fallen in love with Harry or with his job; as an archeologist, he seemed to have connections all over the world. But then Cho remembered how he would drone on about some ancient runes his team had uncovered, confirming that her love for Harry was definitely not about his job.
Cho looked at the café again, and wiped all thought of Harry from her mind. Despite appearances, she was not here to meet her boyfriend but instead perched on the top of a roof across the stree to try and scout out the slightly more sinister figure that she was supposed to deal with first.
A small, dark figure coming out of the alley caught the corner of her eye. Of all things to wear, the second party had picked a bright red trench coat, which Cho thought was hideously out of season. Cho peered closer into her state of the art omniglass, revealing a tall women, dark sunglasses covering her eyes and a flowered scarf concealing the color of her hair. Switch the omniglass's mode to subimago, Cho found things far more important than the color of the women's hair. A large file folder was hidden in the left side of her jacket, her wand hidden in the right. Cho could just make out a small, magical earpiece. This was definitely who she was supposed to meet.
"Reservation under Pace?" She asked the man lying on the roof next to her. He nodded, not moving his eyes from the women.
"Ron?" Cho asked, looking concerned at the scowl that covered his face.
"Does that agent look familiar?" Ron Weasley asked, frowning in concentration. Ron had been her partner since she had become Auror, and despite a few tensions between them he had become her good friend. Now he ran his hands through his hair in frustration. "I feel like I've seen her before, but I just can't put my finger on where."
Cho shrugged. "Not really, but I'll try and get a closer look when I'm talking to her." She slipped her wand inside the pocket of her jacket. This was supposedly just a trade, but one could never be too careful when dealing with the Dragons. As of yet they hadn't seriously harmed any Aurors, but their organization was of the kind that would kill their own mothers to make a profit.
In point of fact, actually, that was exactly what they had been doing. Founded by some eccentric millionaire that nobody could identify or even catch a glimpse of, the Dragons were a group that was playing off the Undeclared War to make money by selling and buying from both sides and the black market. They'd been making sickening profits too, as they were the only link between the other three espionage groups vying for power. The Death Eaters, of course, were at war with everyone else and would have not direct contact with other agents (unless they were killing them, which meant that the contact usually didn't last that long), and the Corps refused to talk to the Aurors for fear of being betrayed and arrested, while the Aurors didn't want to officially admit the existence of the Corps.
Cho checked her watch. Green lights flashed that it was 8:14. "She's a minute early." She gave a cursory glance of the other roofs. "Where's their backup man?"
Ron pointed to another flat roof a block down. "There's the one the terms declared. But knowing them, they'll have another one somewhere else." He scowled again. If possible, Ron took his job almost more seriously than it was meant to be taken, and espionage was a pretty serious job to begin with.
Cho patted him on the back. "Just give me heads up if something comes down." With that, she disapparated.
She reemerged into their normal dimension a second later, in the small side alley where the enemy agent had come out of a few minutes earlier. Cho had lost her regular dark hair and medium skin tone and replaced them with a much deeper tan and fake blonde tresses. She, too, placed a magical earpiece in her ear. Her hands shook slightly performing these perfunctory, regulatory operations. Despite all that she'd been taught, all her agent training, she couldn't help but feel a bit nervous for this current operation. Whatever Lupin might say, Cho knew that the Aurors were not winning this undercover war with the Death Eaters and Voldemort in the slightest. In the past year alone nearly one third of their agents had been killed, and the number of volunteers for the Auror's job was rapidly declining. Meanwhile, they'd only managed to kill one Death Eater in that entire time period, and even that mission had been a botch because they'd meant to take him hostage.
With the present circumstances as they were, Cho knew that they really needed whatever leads they could get, even if it meant dealing with the devil. Which, in essence, was what she was doing here tonight. Taking a deep breath and making a mental prayer, she stepped out of the alley.
The Dragon's representative was already seated, coolly sipping a glass of wine. From the earpiece her backup was chatting away nonchalantly. "So you think they're ever going to show… oh, here we go…she's coming out of the alley wearing jeans and a black leather jacket. Short with blonde hair. The radiate's in her left pocket." The young woman at the table smiled at the last bit, enjoying how much the magicists have achieved in the field of technology and how that information was being put to use.
Her blonde appointment whispered something to the host and pointed to the table. The host nodded and allowed the woman to pass.
"Just water, please," Cho told the waitress as she sat down, not yet looking across the table. Even sitting down, the difference in the two women's heights was almost humorous. The Dragon agent was supposed to meet tapped her foot impatiently.
"Can we get this over with, please?" she asked when the waitress left, with to voice of someone clearly native to France but who had lost most indications of her accent. Cho, however, had been trained to pick up on small vocal details.
Cho smiled sourly. "Let me see the information."
"Let me see the radiate," the woman retorted. Slowly, Cho drew a small, glowing red stone out of her pocket as the women produced a small folder. Each representative snatched the other's presentation simultaneously, matching looks of distrust on their faces.
The women held up the radiate, looking carefully at its glow. Slowly, she produced a small piece of silver and touched it to the gem. The silver evaporated.
"By Merlin, I think they've actually given it to us." The voice in her ear chuckled. "Idiots." The first agent smiled in satisfaction
Meanwhile, Cho was flipping through the contents of the folder. Frozen, dated pictures of an old magic shop in Berlin met her eye. Figures she recognized as Death Eaters appeared coming and going from the shop. The pictures were sixth months old, but it could have been worse.
"How are you sure this is one of their buildings?" she asked without looking up. No answer came.
"She apparated," Ron's disappointed voice came to her ear. "But it looks like we got something out of this whole mission. Nice work on the silver." Cho smiled. True radiate was supposed to do exactly what it appeared to do; that is, melt silver. But Ministry Magicists had spent four years developing it as an alternative source of power and there was no way they were just going to hand it over to the black market. Cho had given away only a small, worthless ruby disguised to look like the radium and muttered the spell herself to melt the silver. With a smile of success, Cho disapparated.
The Dragon's representative had already reappeared on the roof next to her partner. She tossed the gem lightly to him with a grin. "Stupid fools, to actually give us that." She glanced down the street and saw their two enemy agents. Wanting to avoid a second confrontation, she motioned that they should move out of sight.
"We gave them real pictures, remember?" her partner reminded her with a grin. "Just pictures of a Death Eater's location that was evacuated six months ago." He put the gem in a small pouch. Each agent disapparated with a small pop, reappearing instantaneously on a miniscule terrace of an ancient Scottish Castle. A shabby looking brown door stood at one end of the terrace, guarded by a boorish looking troll.
"Hey Teddy," the woman said to him with a grin. "Crimson Tide." The troll nodded at the password and watched them pass into the Dragon Headquarters, Flanders Castle.
"So got any plans for tonight?" the male agent asked his partner as they walked down a long stone hallway.
"Gabriella and I figured we'd go clubbing in England and try and pick up hot guys," she told him, removing her scarf and revealing the long, silver hair of someone who was part veela. "I don't get to hang out with my younger sis often these days, because one or the other of us is always off on some mission." She paused for a moment. "Now that I think about it, I don't get to hang out with hot guys very much either."
"What, hanging out with me doesn't count as picking up a hot guy?" her partner asked, offended.
"Not when it involves me having go undercover as a spy and actually work," she retorted. "And besides, you have a girlfriend."
He smiled at the mention of her and dropped his voice to a whisper. "I'm only telling you this because I know you haven't talked to her in three years so the chances are pretty slim that you'll run in to her before I go out with her tonight-"
"Are you implying that I'm not trustworthy?" the tall woman demanded, hands on her hips. Small, round objects lifted up by an invisible force scanned each of their eyes, then flashed a green light that dissolved part of the stone wall in front of them.
"-but I'm going to propose to her tonight." The agent grinned foolishly, his face in no way resembling his previous, businesslike visage.
"Good for you!" she exclaimed. "But… your not going to tell her about…"
"Of course not," he replied without even a pause. "Not that I care what our all-powerful boss wants, but that's one action I really wouldn't want to stay around for the ramifications of." He pushed open another door to reveal a large, circular room with images of places and people floating close to the ceiling and a single man standing exactly in the center of the room. His back was to them, and his hands were tensely clasped behind his back. The figure was tall and slender, with silvery blonde hair that shimmered despite the darkness of the room. He always managed to come across as a powerful figure simply from his natural bearing and looks, but now he emphasized it with the look of annoyance that flirted across his face as he turned slowly to face them.
"I wouldn't really want to see what I would do in that instance either, Potter, so I would highly recommend that you don't tell her." Draco Malfoy tapped his foot impatiently, but still managed to maintain a sort of cat-like grace even with such an ungraceful motion. "As for you, Delacour, did you not pause to think that they might put a glamour spell on the object?" Draco's face was even paler than usual in anger. Muttering a few words under his breath, he lifted the gem out of its pouch, which was still in Harry's coat pocket.
"Finite Imago!" he shouted, blue eyes blazing. True to his guess, the eerie brightness of the radiate immediately disappeared to be replaced with the dull sheen of an ordinary gem. Fleur and Harry both spoke simultaneously, Fleur in fear, Harry in defense of his pride.
"I did to the silver test…"
"That's really not the kind of thing you expect for the ministry…"
Draco waved his hands impatiently, his mood slightly better now that he had proven his judgment infallible as usual. "Well, this mission was made partially to see what exactly the ministry was willing to do. We'll just take more careful precautions next time." He looked them both in the eyes with a long, unwavering glance. Harry met his look with one of his own, but Fleur quickly cast her eyes downward. For whatever reason, Harry and Draco had always been among the few men that were somehow entirely unaffected by Fleur's veela ancestry, which was why Draco was able to win a staring contest with her and why Harry, instead of any of the other men in the Dragons, was her partner.
His current task finished, Draco waved one of the screens down from the ceiling and looked at it for a few minutes, supposedly forgetting the existence of others within the room.
"Draco…?" Fleur said questioningly, bringing him back to reality with a jolt that was unusual to his normal smoothness. Because the screen had been facing away from them, Harry and Fleur were unable to see what he had been staring so intently at.
"You can go," he said, waving his hand dismissively. "Try not to get rejected, Potter." Harry smiled slightly, realizing that that was as much of a good luck wish anyone would ever get from Draco. Then his smile grew, because he knew, beyond a doubt, that Cho would say yes. They were in love. What he didn't know, and wouldn't know for some time, was that he would not be the only one entering the marriage with in an encompassing lie.