A/N: This story is canon compliant. All the departments listed are actual departments in Harry Potter. Where there was no information provided I made it up. This story is set in the future, around the same year Scorpius graduated.
Disclaimer: It's JK's world, I'm just living in it.
"Isla! Where are you?"
A small, stout woman of around fifty poked her head around the door of Draco Malfoy's office. Her greying hair swung with the motion and settled itself back onto her shoulders as she replied,
"Isla was switched to the Minister for Magic's office. I've been trying to tell you this every day for the past week now - we need to hire new intern."
Draco looked up from the memo he was reading - some legal dribble about a case involving black market gillyweed he really couldn't care less about - and adjusted his reading glasses.
"Was she?" He looked puzzled for a moment, trying to remember when and why that change was made. It was a shame, he thought. She had been capable and efficient, and also rather pretty. "Well, why haven't we hired a new intern yet? Bring me a shortlist by the end of the day. This office is understaffed as it is."
The woman, Clare, sighed heavily and stalked over to his desk, pulling a file from underneath the mess of loose pages, interdepartmental memos and folders on his desk. "I already put one here two days ago, sir." With that, she briskly walked back out his office and to her own desk in the next room.
Draco rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses and put the other memo out of his mind for a second. With a long-suffering sigh, he set to work on weeding through the dozen or so applicants chosen by Clare. Interning for Draco Malfoy, head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, was a highly competitive position which meant everybody on the short list was either overqualified or hopelessly useless but well connected. He flipped through the pages, glancing at the names. Nott, Crabbe, Montague - old school friends of Draco's who were probably hoping that their former gang leader would give their child a nice, cushy start at the Ministry. After all, what better way to wipe out your past indiscretions by ensuring your child had a respectable job in law enforcement? Draco dismissed these applications quickly, as he preferred quality to connections, though there were certainly many other Heads whose staff lists read as a Who's Who of ancient wizarding families.
The following two applicants were actually qualified and had impressive grades, though the first was perhaps slightly too old for a temporary internship. The next name on the list made Draco stop and read for a minute. A Weasley. Rose Weasley. It took Draco a second to place her in the ever expanding Weasley clan. Daughter of Ron and Hermione, graduated Hogwarts last month. He vaguely remembered Scorpius mentioning her, as she had been in his year. Her transcripts were impressive - all O's in her O.W.L.s, and the same for her N.E.W.T.s. Joined various clubs in her time at Hogwarts, started something called the Society for the Better Understanding of Merpeople and their Culture. Why anyone would want to better understand Merpeople was a mystery to Draco, but the rest of her resume read like a completed checklist of all the requirements for this job, or even one several rungs higher, and after glancing at the other resumes he had to concede that she was the most qualified candidate. He felt a rush of joy in imagining Weasley's face when he found out his daughter would be working for his (ex-)archenemy, and then wrote a short note to the effect of 'Hire Rose Weasley' which he left on Clare's desk on his way out to lunch.
Lunch was a mind-numbing affair. Draco had to listen to a man named Piers Gatley, a junior staffer in the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office, who tried to lobby him to allocate more resources to their new project creatively titled 'Operation Remove-Bewitched-Kettles-From-Muggle-Homes.' The fact that any funds had been allocated to this endeavour was a worry to Draco which he would surely rectify, but other than that he had no interest in anything to do with the MMAO. More than once he had tried to scrap the branch altogether, but the Minister had come back with some spiel about how it was necessary, not just to keep wizards and muggles out of harm's way but also to uphold the Statute etc. etc.
After assuring Gatley he would look into cutting the budget of another department to fund his ridiculous operation (read: he would never think about it again and would actively try to avoid these meetings in the future even if it meant never eating on Ministry premises again) Draco finally returned to his office - to find a young witch with bushy red hair, purple robes, a visitor's badge and more than a passing resemblance to Hermione Granger rifling through his documents. Draco stopped short and stared at the woman in surprise.
"Good afternoon, Mister Malfoy. I was just sorting some of the documents on your desk. The woman at your reception said I should take those papers and memos which seem too trivial for you, and deal with them myself."
She grabbed a final folder from his desk and stood up straight, brushing her bushy hair back from her face. She gave him a perfunctory smile and determinedly walked past him out of the door to find the cubicle formerly occupied by Isla.
Draco snapped out of his surprise as it dawned on him that a virtual stranger had just grabbed official government documents off his desk and was now going to reply to and sort them.
"Excuse me!" He hurried after Rose (Miss Weasley? No, Rose, he had called Isla Isla, though that was probably because he had no idea what her last name was. In fact, her first name might not even have been Isla. Maybe that's why she left.) and caught up with her just as she was about to enter her cubicle. "What do you think you're doing? Those are official department documents, regarding issues far beyond your understanding and experience!" He held out his hand as a clear sign for her to hand them back and go back to doing whatever interns usually did. Like getting coffee and running around the Ministry trying to find people for Draco to meet with/shout at/fire.
"Let's see, shall we?" Rose replied. She deposited the stack of documents onto her desk and grabbed the one on top. It was a fat file, emblazoned with the logo of the Administrative Registration Department. She skimmed the first page quickly. "This is a report on the fact that there has been a notable rise in Muggleborn witches and wizards in the past decade, and an extensive look into reason why." She looked him straight in the eye and sarcastically continued, "You're right, this is completely beyond my level of understanding."
Draco had to admit, a lot of the paperwork he had to deal with just seemed like busy work, reading pages and pages of departmental reports about studies and projects. It would be nice to have someone to go through that for him. However, he'd started this fight, and he wasn't going to admit defeat to a Weasley.
After ten minutes of lecturing her about her exactly how to deal with every single document she had grabbed, and another five minutes explaining to her (in detail) that she was to stick to departmental policy in her reply, and that what she wrote or did reflected on the Department of Magical Law Enforcement and by extension the Ministry itself, Draco returned to his desk satisfied that he had reasserted his position as Head of the department and that Rose Weasley knew exactly who was boss.
Until two minutes later, when he spilled tea all over his desk and had to ask her to help dry everything.
"How did she even get here this fast? I hired her this morning, and this afternoon she was already subverting the hierarchical structure of this office and doing my job for me," Draco grumbled. He was half-sitting on Clare's and staring in the direction of Rose's cubicle in a disgruntled way.
"Well, you told me to hire her and she was already in the building visiting her mother, so she came here immediately. I'm drafting her contract now, which would be a lot easier if you weren't sitting on it." She swatted at him with a file until he stood up so she could retrieve a stack of papers from under him.
"Might I ask what you are doing at my desk? You're the Head of Magical Law Enforcement, I imagine that job still has some importance, despite the fact that it's apparently easy enough for even you to handle."
Draco turned to glare at her half-heartedly but he couldn't muster a full Malfoy-esque scowl. Clare was simply too old and nice. She was the only who could get away with speaking to him like that, but only because she'd known him for about ten years, back before he was a Head. She'd been working a clerical job at the Investigation Department when he'd joined as a junior staffer, and Draco had highly enjoyed her dry humour and how rude she was to other people. She was a great secretary, able to keep most of the nonsense issues and people out of Draco's office.
"I have very little left to do, except respond to idiotic interdepartmental memos, and you know how much I enjoy those," he snarled, turning around to look at the rest of the office working in their cubicles again. "I wonder how much Kraks had to pay to get that position, considering the fact he has the mental facilities of a troll-"
"When I asked you why you were here, I didn't really want an answer. At least go be unproductive in your own office - you're scaring the junior staffers."
With a sigh, he heaved himself off her desk and trudged back into his office. Hopefully writing Kraks a memo detailing every single way Draco was superior to him would be enough to cheer him up.