Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
This was bloody Belarus.
What fucked up reason did Jupiter Potter-Lewis have for being in Minsk? It's not like Minsk was a hot-spot for wizarding travel or a world tourism centre for muggles either.
She'd walked in like usual - sashayed really - with those bright tawny eyes of hers and that sort of feather growing from the back of her head and a bit of brown catching her adorable nose and those incredibly luscious pink lips. Then, her eyes met mine. I think it hurt most how she just glanced over me like I wasn't even there. She turned to bloody Randall and began laughing like he was an amazing comedian and she'd spent all her life waiting for one of his bigoted jokes.
Randall the randy bigot. Not a name I came up with but fitting.
"Checking out the new girl, eh?" Aleski chuckled. He might have been native, but he spoke even better English than a lot of the English volunteers here.
"New girl?" I craned my neck around to look at the bloke. He seemed to have all the information all the time. Probably 'cause he was shagging one or all of the girls in Employee Relations.
"Yeah, she's setting up this Pro-Life thing around eastern Europe. Trying to get a lot of the accepted practices in wizarding society termed as 'murder of freedom and living rights'. Pretty fucked up if you ask me. Heard she's not even human, so I'd watch out for that one."
So Potter-Lewis had really made something of herself, then. I could barely hear my reply over my heart yammering in my chest. Potter-Lewis was making her way right through the cubicles and getting closer every second.
"She's not," I shrugged.
"Blin," he swore, "How do you know?"
"I went to school with her. She praised the ground I walked on, pretty impossible to live with considering how in love with me she was. You hear things," I shrugged. Aleski looked between her and me and broke out in laughter. I scowled.
"Right, right, she's so in love and hasn't sent a look your way?" he scoffed. I kicked his chair and he went right to the ground with a loud thump. If not for the anti-wand rule in the office, he would've been hexed a long while back. Of course, the noise brought a lot of attention to us and the office manager Darya a frigid bitch if ever there were, dragged Potter-Lewis our way, and that would've been all well and good if I'd managed to do anything else than be insanely attracted to her.
After she'd puckered up and laid one on me in my last year, there was just something indescribable about that particular Potter off-spring. I was only there from February onwards, but she drove me crazy.
First, she pretended nothing happened and got on with life. Without focusing on me, her grades went up and she even made a few friends who I hated for the sole fact that they spent a lot of time cussing about me in front of her, but I ignored them with only a few hexes sent their way. Then, I let it slip what happened, her kissing me and all, and she had the gall to deny it. Even got herself one of those Ravenclaw boyfriends like they were going out of style. While I was there, not a week went by that Damien Wood didn't get sent to the hospital wing. Finally, I couldn't take it any more. A month before graduation I cornered her in a hallway and snogged her right then and there, and she just bloody pushed me away and left me there like I was some worthless ghost who'd been commenting on the soundness of the architecture. Then, school was over, I was out and summer arrived with a whole bunch of drama that I didn't want or need, but she was my siren and hell if I was gonna let some Ravenclaw twat dirty my girl after all she put me through. Got so bad her dad and her boyfriend set a hippogriff on me and I ran around her front lawn for a good half-hour as it swooped me from above. Then I remembered I was a wizard and I got the fuck outta there before that bitch embarrassed me any more. That was nine years ago, and besides her last two years at Hogwarts when I turned up for Hogsmeade visits and owled her every week just waiting for her to give in, I hadn't heard from her since. And now, coming towards me, she acted like I was a total stranger with nothing going on. Course I rearranged my desk so the deck of Exploding Snap was hidden, but other than that I had 'nuthing to hide.
"Joop," the office cyka spat as she pointed to Aleski and me, "these are some of the boys who work here. They work at finding the lost children who run away from the magic schools across Europa and return them to where they are found."
"She means," Aleski smiled charmingly at my...whatever Potter-Lewis was to me, "Your lover and I here find the children abused in school and return them to an institution where they'll be happy at, sometimes that means giving them back to where they came from, most times it means sourcing new schools and getting a feel for them."
Potter-Lewis beamed at the two of us, her eyes never even touching my face. "Wow, that's really sweet, actually. So you snatch children from unfavourable circumstances and deposit them somewhere safer?"
Oh yeah, she'd definitely recognised me.
"Um, that is what I just said, yes," Aleski nodded. He seemed bored, probably deciding she was insane, and turned back to his desk in disinterest.
"Guess I can't get mad at that?" I mumbled. Last time my owl was sent back unopened, I sent her a rather rude howler during one of her exams which explicitly yelled at her using words like "filthy half-breed", "circus side-show accident" and "teasing tramp of a freak". From the cease and desist letter her Great Uncle Percy and the bloody Minister of Magic sent me in legal representation of the Potter-Weasley-Lewis family, I gathered it had been pretty traumatic for her.
"No," she shook her head with that dumb giant smile on her face. "I didn't recognise you, Gaspard," she cooed sweetly, "You seem so...like an officer worker now."
"I am an officer worker now," I said stupidly. What was that supposed to mean anyhow?
"I just mean," she laughed, "no green, no snarl, you seem to be contributing to a cause that you really care about, you're wearing a vest. And you just seem...mature. It's a good to hear about." My hands went up to my hair self-consciously. Part of the job was a strict dress code. Probably because they didn't want kids wandering off with people who looked like perverts. Pretty hard to prove you aren't one, you see?
"That 'spose to make me feel good?" I snarled right up at her.
"Gaspard!" Darya gasped, "Language like that is not good, especially for an office like ours."
"Oh, it's okay," Potter-Lewis laughed. She put a hand on Darya's elbow and pushed her off. "We go way back." Darya looked worried but left us to talk. I tried to ruffle my hair a bit to look more like the bad boy she was completely enamoured with all those years back, but it seemed to only want to behave now.
"Last I heard you were Potter-Lewis-Wood," I sneered. Seeing that marriage announcement in the paper wasn't my bed day. I'd stayed home from work and drank myself until Aleski and Ruslan from the floor below took me out to party the rest of the week. Potter-Lewis lowered her head until it was in line with mine.
"I'm home now," she cooed. Then, she leant forwards and laid a kiss right down on my lips, better than the one all those years ago and I completely crumbled. Didn't matter what she did or where she went, I'd be her anything any time she wanted. Life was so unfair.
If I was entirely honest with myself, it hadn't been a surprise at all to see Gaspard Scabior swinging around in an office chair when I got off the lift at the seventh floor. He stopped and his eyes found mine for all of two seconds, which wasn't surprising either. I had a built up Gaspard detection system deep within me, and since my sixth year, I knew he'd tuned in to me as well. It had just always been that way with us, whenever the other walked in the room it stopped for all of a heart-wrenching, gut-thrusting, vomit-inducing moment before the spinning stopped and the lights came on again. If I was even more honest with myself, I'd spotted his picture helping Latvian orphans find shelter and food in some stupid Graduates Helping After Hogwarts leaflet in my cousin Harry's education department while I waited for him to finish up so we could go get some lunch. It was crazy, but my Pro-Life campaign had only got the support of a few witches and wizards in England and I was going through a divorce after Damien's great-grandfather introduced him to Quidditch and he'd decided to quit his life and focus everything on that, so I decided what the heck? and got up and visited Belarus for a fortnight. There, I found Gaspard and saw he didn't have a girlfriend, he had a steady job and just like I'd always suspected, after school he'd really come into himself. He knew who he was, and he was a damn attractive adult who came to the rescue of eastern European children every day. I'd gotten married too young once, I really wouldn't mind doing it again with someone I'd loved since I was eleven.
Grandma Ginny had a hell of a lot to say about me chasing after an old flame as she called it, especially one who'd given our family so much grief. Should've seen them all when I got that rather disturbing howler in my seventh year Herbology exam. Failed spectacularly, of course, left in tears and the amount of fuss my family and the students of the school kicked up on my behalf was not only entertaining but gave me a lot of comfort. I never knew I was so appreciated until then. But, it wasn't her decision. It wasn't dad's decision who ordered a fleet of hippogriff from around Europe. It wasn't even cousin Harry's decision who told me quite clearly that if I took Gaspard's name he'd no longer consider me part of the family. Well, stow your worries, I told him, because I'm not being named Jupiter Gwendally Potter-Lewis-Wood-Scabior because that would just be ridiculous. He didn't know what to make of that, and neither did I. Still don't.
So, I stormed right in to that office and pretended like I hadn't seen him. I'd been stalking him for a month and had no idea how to approach it. First time, he wasn't there. I pretended like I had an interview and worked my way in to see the office manager, a middle-aged woman named Darya. She seemed alright, but she liked cats and so I guess I subconsciously charmed her over maybe with my feline likeness. Second time, he wasn't there either. I was getting pretty annoyed as I set up my office and began to wonder if he actually did work here or maybe I'd been totally delusional this entire time. Third and fourth time, nothing. I came in, worked, set up a plan to really get my campaign out there and even went on a coffee run for the entire floor, but nothing. An entire week passed, I was miserable, and it was only when Darya and a few other girls told me the entire floor was back did we have a welcoming party. About time, I caught a glimpse of my love completely horrified that I was closing in on his desk, let alone in his office, let alone in his country, let alone in his continent. And yeah, I know, England is part of Europe whatever, but it's also part of the UK and Europe is not apart of the UK and so does that technically still make it European? But whatever, you know, I was finally there and he was glancing up at me with those beautiful blue-grey eyes and I was eleven all over again. So, I went over. I made a snatchers joke to try my luck and not for the first time did I see adoration in his eyes.
And that was it. He still loved me. So, I went for it. I kissed him. All those years came swarming back into my head and I knew this was right. We were going to settle down in Belarus of all places, buy a house, have a few children who would not be sent to Hogwarts but rather some other place, and then my mother and father would expand Potter Lewis Pet, Vet and Supplies out to eastern Europe, Gaspard would continue to set children up with the education they deserved and people would finally stop laughing at me for thinking all living things - plants included! - deserved to have fair, compassionate lives of their own and out children would be an inventor, a treasure finder and a muggle actor and Gaspard and I would retire in the Bahamas and he didn't have a say in any of it, because life wasn't fair. But you know what? I loved this one to bits.