Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all it's characters, ideas and places belong to JK Rowling.
This fan fiction is copyrighted to ChaoticL. This fan fiction may not be reproduced under any circumstance except for personal or private use. It may not be use for profit or by any commercial entity. It may not be placed on any web site, magazine or otherwise distributed publicly without fully crediting its author. Use of this work in such a way is a violation of copyright and is strictly prohibited.

Rating: M (for later chapters)

Summary: As Harry and Ron, now working for the Ministry as Aurors, try to stop corruption in the Ministry of Magic, they find themselves at the center of an international wizarding conspiracy.

Genre: Adventure/Mystery

Pairings: All pairings are true to cannon

Rules for Commenting: Please post what you think and what you want, but refrain from derogatory remarks about me, the story or others who may have commented. Feedback is greatly appreciated, and I will make every effort to directly answer questions posed to me. That said, I will keep to a strict policy of non-disclosure regarding any spoilers.

Chapter 1: Celebrity Specters

It was a breezy autumn day in London and Melissa Skeeter was nauseous at the thought of her first real reporting assignment. Melissa had applied to be an investigative reporter for the Daily Prophet the day she graduated from wizarding school. Her infamous mother, Rita Skeeter, had arranged an interview for her with Beaty Mackentire, the Prophet's newest head editor. Beaty was excited to meet the next Rita Skeeter, but his high expectations went unrealized. He was a lighthearted and jolly man with an excessive beer belly who was never known for having a temper, but Melissa's interview enough to give him one. Prior work experience was not expected from someone right out of school, but a passable resume containing at least basic academic achievements was. She had no such resume, instead presenting a rushed letter of intent without a providing a concrete reason that she ought to be hired. He decided to look past that mishap. Perhaps she did not know that a resume would be required, so instead he looked to the quality of her writing.

Her portfolio was shoddy; it contained a mess of unprofessional clutter of articles that she had written for the school newspaper. It was obvious to him that she had been attempting to emulate her mother's writing style, but without success. While she had chosen topics of importance, she had failed to draw out the minute details that her mother was so adept at finding. Altogether, her work was not bad, but he would not have chosen to publish any of it had it come to his desk. She had thrown some bits of poetry toward the end of her portfolio, but Beaty decided not to read them. He was running a newspaper after all, not a literary magazine, or worse, The Quibbler.

At the end of the interview when Melissa was asked if she had any questions about the job, she requested to be directed to the bathroom. Despite the failed interview, Melissa was gifted with a job at the prophet, but not as an investigative reporter. Rather, she was assigned as an assistant to the environment desk. The Prophet would have preferred not to hire such an unseasoned writer, but with a wink and a nudge from Rita Skeeter, Beaty had no choice but to bring Melissa on staff.

In her first few months working for the Prophet, Melissa wrote a couple of small environment columns; however, none of them were published. Many of her columns were about owl behavior, but those were deemed too technical for publication. Then she wrote an article titled: Mating Habits of the Venomous Venereal Pixies. It was the laughing stock of the Prophet staff for weeks, but the clamor subsided just as suddenly as it had come and the article was forgotten in the bottom of a waste basket in the office storage room. No one paid much mind to Melissa Skeeter after that.

It was Melissa's mother who came to her rescue, dragging her away from her work station into the head editor's office and convincing him to give Melissa an interview opportunity. She argued that Melissa's prestigious foreign education at the Beauxbatons Academy of Magic in France would make her the obvious choice to interview the French Minister for Magic when he came to London. Like everything else Rita Skeeter said, one quarter of her story was true and the other three quarters were absolute rubbish. The Beauxbatons Academy was indeed prestigious, but Melissa's education was not. She was a mediocre student, not receiving either the best grades or the worst, and she struggled in her more difficult classes. Instead of studying, she preferred to pass the time scribbling amateur poetry and diary entries in a small journal that she kept. Her teachers had such disdain for her lack of focus that many of them often refused often to assist her when she did decide to make an effort to study. The only classes where Melissa had shown any real effort were in her charms and transfiguration classes, but only because those subjects were of unique interest to her. The head editor was privy to none of this information and had no reason to deny Rita Skeeter. After all, it was an interview with the French Prime minister, and Beaty was not expecting any reporter to succeed in wangling a story out of him, and therefore he would have nothing to lose when Melissa failed.

Melissa sat waiting in the Ministry's reception hall skimming through a stack of notecards that her mother had prepared for her. Each notecard had a question that Melissa was supposed to memorize for her interview, but the questions were lengthy, and trying to remember them all was giving her a headache.

"Ms. Skeeter, the Auror office is ready for your screening," one of the receptionists said. Melissa jumped to her feet and jogged to the reception desk. The receptionist used her wand to gather three sheets of paper and fold them twice over. Melissa grabbed the papers and turned towards the Auror office.

"Ms. Skeeter, you forgot your bag," the receptionist said, pointing to an alligator skin bag that was lying on the floor in the waiting area. The bag had been a birthday gift from her mother. Melissa sighed, wondering how she could have forgotten it.

"Thanks," Melissa said.

"You're Rita Skeeter's daughter, aren't you?" the receptionist asked. Melissa nodded and smiled. "Same last names aside, the two of you look strikingly similar. You're much younger though, of course. I assume that since you're applying for a media permit that you will be following in your mother's footsteps?"

"Yes, I'm working with the Daily Prophet now," Melissa said. "It's been my dream to work there with my mother ever since I was a little girl."

"That's wonderful. Your mother must be a great role model for you. She writes such wonderful articles."

"Yeah, she's very talented," Melissa said, "I hope that I can be as good as she is one day."

"I'm sure that you will, sweetie," the receptionist said. "You'd better hurry along though, or you'll be late." Something in her phrasing had seemed demeaning and even patronizing. Melissa was used to those kinds of conversations, and all of them went the same way. People always brought up how great they thought her mother was, but they had never bothered to ask what Melissa had written. They did not seem to care. Everyone seemed to expect Rita's greatness in Melissa, but the only people that had ever indicated that they wanted it were her colleagues working at the Prophet.

The Auror office was not at all what Melissa expected. The main room was filled with a series of small cubicles surrounded by cool taupe walls that seemed to soothe the mood. Some of the cubicles contained newspaper clippings and maps, but there was no massive command center, no fancy displays or tracking devices that she would expect from the Ministry's mysterious dark wizard hunters. Even the Aurors themselves were boring, milling about their lives as if they were processing tax returns. She had heard of the eccentricities of Aurors like Mad-Eye Moody, but the men who filled this room appeared normal and perhaps even average. They were wizards and witches like everyone else and if not for the wanted posters adorning the walls, she thought that this could have been any other ministry department.

"Mrs. Skeeter, is that you?" a voice said when she entered. She turned to look for the voice and saw no one. "Down here Mrs. Skeeter." Melissa looked down next to her to find a small dwarf-like man. He was no taller than a chair and looked more like a garden gnome in his red cap and cape than a wizard.

"Hi," Melissa said, uncertain of whether to look down at him while she talked, or to avoid eye contact. "It's Ms. Skeeter by the way. I'm not married."

"Yes, of course. It's just that you and your mother are both so tall," the dwarf wizard said. "This way please." He led her into a cramped closet off of the main room. The room was bare other than an old, rotting wooden desk and two chairs, one on each side of the desk. The lighting was dim; provided by a single candelabra hanging from the back wall.

"Take a seat Ms. Skeeter," the dwarf said. He pulled out one of the chairs for her and it screeched along the floor like a banshee. Melissa could have sworn that she saw a family of termites run out of one of the legs of the chair and scurry under the desk, but she could not be sure in that lighting. She sat opposite the dwarf and put the papers the receptionist had given her on top of the desk.

"Shall I fill these out now?" Melissa asked. "And what is that smell?"

"No, those forms are for me, dear. Before you are permitted to meet a foreign dignitary you need to be screened, which is why you ended up here before they'd let you into the press room. And don't worry about the smell. This is just an older room. We've been meaning to replace the furniture for a long time." Melissa slid the forms over to the dwarf. He took out a quill and began to write. For some reason, the scratching of the quill on the paper irritated her. She could not figure out why, but the quill seemed even more annoying than the screech of the chair.

"Do you think that you might be able to write more quietly? The scratching of your quill on the paper is giving me a slight headache."

"If you say so, Ms. Skeeter." The Dwarf continued to fill out the paperwork but the sound of the quill hurt even more with each stroke, and the ink on the page seemed to her like blood streaming out of her ears.

"Um, sir. You're writing harder than before. Could you please keep it down?"

"I assure you, Ms. Skeeter, my writing hasn't changed since we started here." The walls began to pound against Melissa's ears. She could hear the footsteps of the Aurors outside, crashing into the floor, creating earpopping earthquakes with each step. Her nostrils were inflamed with the repugnant smell. Her eyes darted around the room looking for something. She didn't know what, but anything. The room was bare.

"I need to get out of here. I'm feeling dizzy," Melissa said. "Excuse me."

"One more second Ms. Skeeter." It was too much. Melissa could not take any more. She stood and staggered to the door. It was locked. She pounded her fist on the door in desperation, but each punch on the door felt like a blow to her face own face. She crumpled to the floor and began to slip out of consciousness. And then it stopped, as if someone had flipped a switch, calming the air around her.

"Finished, Ms. Skeeter," the dwarf said. He was sitting at the desk re-folding the paperwork as if nothing had happened.

"What just happened?" Melissa asked. "You know, don't you?"

"Screening, of course, Ms. Skeeter. You passed." He handed her the paperwork. "Take these to the secretary in the press room. I believe your interview is starting soon."

Melissa unfolded the paperwork to see what the Dwarf had written and saw her entire life transcribed in front of her eyes. It was all there: how she dreamed of being a reporter even as a child, her time at the academy, known associates, boyfriends, crimes, failings. "How did you know all of this?"

"Screening, Ms. Skeeter," the dwarf said. He stood to leave. "You may think our office drab and boring, but I assure you, Ms. Skeeter, that there is more to this place than meets the eye. How else would we keep you safe? Run along now or you'll be late." The dwarf left the room, leaving the door ajar.

Melissa felt violated, as if the dwarf had forced her onto a table, strapped her down, and then extracted her memories against her will. She felt anger and a passion steaming inside her like she had never experienced before. "You can't just do that to people!" The dwarf continued to walk, unfazed by her outburst. "That's an invasion of privacy. Where was the officer in charge of just treatment of persons during an interrogation? When did I give informed consent? How can you do this?"

"We can do it, I assure you," the dwarf said from down the hall. "We're the Aurors."

"Smug, arrogant little dwarf," Melissa said under her breath. The whole procedure was invasive and appalling. How did the Aurors get away with torture like that? And what about possible self-incrimination? That was illegal under wizarding law. Did the other Ministry departments condone that screening technique? If so, national security could not justify torture. She reasoned that it must be a secret program and the Ministry saw the ends but not the means. It disgusted her and she made a note in her head to write an editorial exposing the experience.

Melissa looked through the paperwork more thoroughly. After she was finished, she smiled and fixed her hair, laughing to herself as she left the room. They had not discovered everything. She slid the papers into her bag and walked to the press room.

"What in the world is this?" Ron Weasly asked. He held a pair of women's lederhosen up to the light to examine it more closely.

"Anonymous tip I suppose, Ron," Neville Longbottom responded. He continued sorting through the stack of paper sitting on the desk in front of him. Harry, Ron and Neville had been assigned to sort through all of the anonymous tips that had come through the Department of Magical Law Enforcement Office in the past six months. "That's supposedly what all of this is, but half of it I can't imagine how it got here."

"I never thought I would see something like this in the tip collection. What do you think, Harry?" Ron asked. Harry shrugged and continued sifting through evidence. The three of them had been offered positions at the Auror office after Voldemort's defeat at Harry's hands. Harry had imagined working with the Aurors would be exciting and brimming with intrigue, but since he and friends began working there, they had been doing all manner of menial tasks from sorting through anonymous tips to bringing coffee to the Head Auror, Hanson Isgar.

Kingsley Shacklebolt had been advanced to the position of acting Minister of Magic, because he was be the ideal person to lead a peaceful transition back into normal life. That meant that there were no potential candidates to lead the Auror office, as all of the senior Aurors at the time of Voldemort's demise were now either dead, retired or did not want the job. Therefore, the Ministry advanced Isgar to Head Auror. He was an experienced bureaucrat from within the Department of Magical Law Enforcement who knew how do delegate tasks, but he had little experience when it came to the affairs of Aurors.

"Oh well, I think its rubbish," Ron said. He put down the lederhosen and turned back towards the stack of tips.

"Hey!" a high pitched voice squawked. Neville stopped working and laughed as Ron eyed the room looking for the source of the voice. "Down here you nitwit!" The voice was coming from the lederhosen. Ron squealed and jumped up from the table, fumbling for his wand.

"Stupefy!" Ron aimed at the lederhosen, which fell limp on the table again.

"Do you think that was a little excessive, Ron?" Neville said.

"It startled me! It's not every day that you meet a pair of talking lederhosen after all," Ron said. He grabbed the lederhosen and rolled it into a ball. "What category do you reckon this goes in?"

"Weird, that's for sure." Neville laughed, but Ron was not amused. "Well, I guess you could stick it in miscellaneous. Someone else will have it from there."

"Good idea," Ron said. He stuffed the lederhosen into a large sack that denoted the tips that did not fit into any other category. There were seven categories of evidence that tips were sorted into: dark wizards, violent crime, theft, sexual offense, miscellaneous, rubbish, and mudblood sightings. Mudblood sightings were in a category to their own because of the system that the death eaters had implemented for sorting tips when they controlled the Ministry. Sorting tips occurred magically and automatically when a new tip was submitted, but while Yaxley controlled the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, he altered the sorting spell to only sort tips into two categories: mudblood sightings and other. At the time, such a sorting system reflected the priorities of the Ministry, but now the system was quite obsolete. The Ministry had still not gotten around to correcting Yaxley's curse, so sorting of his "other" category had to be done by hand.

"Harry, you haven't been very talkative lately. Is everything okay?" Neville asked. Neville worried too much and it had always gotten him into trouble, even though he had gotten more adept at wriggling out of it over the years.

"It's nothing. I've just been busy working, and I don't like to talk while I'm working," Harry said.

"Work goes by faster when you make it fun though, right?" Ron said. He nudged Harry with his elbow, a gesture to which Harry gave no response. "Come on, cheer up, we'll be done soon."

"Everything's alright with Ginny, isn't it?" Neville asked.

"Yes, Neville, everything is fine," Harry said, not looking up from his work.

"Then what is it? What's wrong, mate?" Ron asked. "We're your friends; we want to help if we can. That's how we've always done it, and it's always worked before?"

"You mean when you ran out on Hermione and me while we were searching for Horcruxes?" A slow fade of dissonance descended upon the room and Harry realized that he had gone too far. "Ron, I'm sorry, you know that I didn't mean that."

"That was a low blow, mate," Ron said. His eyes were burned and Harry knew that he had reopened an old wound.

"Ron, I'm sorry," Harry said. "I wasn't thinking. It's just this stuff Isgar has us doing. If I thought you could help me, I'd ask. But you can't. You're both stuck doing the same pointless thing that I am,"

"I know how you feel Harry," Neville said, "I'm considering resigning."

"Resigning?" Ron asked. "Why would you do that?"

"I didn't join the Ministry because I wanted to be an Auror," Neville said, "My parents were aurors and I suppose that had something to do with it too, but I joined the Aurors because they asked me to. I guess I killed the snake and stood up to Voldemort and the Aurors saw something in that. But I was just doing what needed to be done to protect my friends. I don't want to do that stuff for a living, especially if they treat us like they do now."

"If you weren't an Auror, what would you do?" Harry asked.

Neville shrugged and thought for a second. "I'd probably go into herbology and open up a business. Maybe I could even try and teach at Hogwarts. I'm not sure yet."

"I don't expect it will stay like this forever though," Ron said. "Once we learn the ropes and all, they'll put us to good use."

"But that's not what I want, Ron," Neville said. "I'll stay on here for a bit longer though until I figure out what to do." Harry stood up and walked to the door.

"Where are you going?" Ron asked.

"You're right, Ron. They can't treat us like this forever. I'm going to figure out when they're going to give us real jobs to do." Harry stormed out of the room and into the maze of cubicles in the main office. Ron followed Harry out and grabbed him by the shoulder.

"This is madness. You're going to get yourself fired, Harry," Ron said.

"I've got to try," Harry said, "or they'll just keep us in there forever sorting anonymous tips."

One of the Aurors shushed them from his cubical and Harry used that break to escape through the maze. He was afraid that Ron might be able to talk him out of his determination, but he also did not want Ron there when he talked to Isgar just in case Ron was right. He knew he could not let his best friend get fired because of him.

Harry knocked three times on the door to Isgar's office, and a reply came quickly, inviting Harry to enter. He found Isgar sitting at his long, oak wood desk smoking a pipe. Isgar was an eccentric and self-centered man in his late forties, balding with the steady pace of his age. He was not an imposing figure by any stretch of the imagination, but it was his demeanor and poise alone that kept his underlings in check.

"It's you, Potter. What do you want?" Isgar said. He snipped his pipe between his teeth and leered into Harry's eyes. The glare was like a fog light in the smoke filled room. It blinded Harry and caused the courage and determination that he had moments ago to retreat into the tips of his shoes and spill out onto the floor. "Well?"

"It's nothing, sir," Harry said. He cursed himself for correcting course. "I just wanted to keep you informed of our progress. We're about halfway done."

"Is that all?" Isgar said. He removed the pipe from his mouth and blew the smoke out into Harry's face. Harry nodded and turned to leave. "You wanted to know why you and your friends are sitting in a cramped closet sorting those anonymous tips like a secretary. I'm right, aren't I?"

Harry's legs turned to stone from Isgar's Gorgon stare and he stammered before responding. "Yes, sir, that is why I came."

"You haven't guessed it yet then, have you? It's real simple, Harry. I just don't like you. I despise what you stand for even more. Your celebrity privilege earned you this post, not your skills in the magical arts. Where are your N.E.W.T. scores? Where is your Hogwarts graduation certificate? What do you have to prove your worth to me and this office? If you ask me, the Minister was too hasty in granting you assignment here. I don't know whether you just got lucky with the Dark Lord or if you actually know what you're doing. I started behind a desk sorting papers just like you, and so did every other Auror out there in that room. You'll receive no special treatment and you will do what the rest of us did until you work your way up the ranks. Am I understood?"

"Yes, sir, but I can do more—"

"No buts, Mr. Potter, only hard work." Harry stared into the floor, hoping to avoid complete and total petrification. "Now that we've settled that issue, I have another assignment for you, young Potter."

"Sir?"

"I want you to come into the office early tomorrow morning. The Department of Mysteries has need of test subjects for time turners, and I volunteered you as you seem to be in need of more work to prove yourself."

"Time turners?" Harry asked. "I thought all of them were destroyed when the death eaters attacked the Ministry."

"They were, but the guys down in the Department of Mysteries have been trying to replicate the design ever since. They have a working prototype and were asking around in different departments for volunteers. Apparently no one else has applied, so I signed you up. You can thank me later."

"Do you think that's really a good use of my time?"

"What do I care about your time? Regardless, it's a time turner, Harry. If you waste too much time, just turn back the clock and make up for what you missed. I hope it isn't too buggy though, as I would hate to lose my star celebrity. Now run along, Mr. Potter. I have work to do." Isgar waved his hand, shooing Harry away. He left, beaten and broken like a child that had just been disciplined with a thick leather belt. Ron was waiting outside.

"Well, how did it go?" Ron asked.

"I don't want to talk about it," Harry said. He walked back through the cubicles to the office where Neville was still sorting meaningless tips. Harry joined him and remained silent for the rest of the day.