Amelia Bones stared. She shut her eyes tight for a second, then stared again when the scene before her didn't change. When she had been informed that Greyback had been captured and brought in for his bounty, she was expecting either another innocent werewolf off the streets brought in by some wanna-be vigilante, or a clean, successful capture by one of the Hit Wizard teams; the first one being the more likely.
She did not expect a post-torture Fenrir Greyback, tied with muggle ropes to a furniture moving dolly, with duct tape over his mouth to prevent biting. The two individuals who had wheeled the convict in were just as unexpected.
All the Department Heads had received a memo about the latest dimension travellers, so to keep an eye on their actions and movements. She had two of her Aurors 'escorting' three of them and the Potter boy to a Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures appointment right at this minute.
And now two of those same dimension travellers stood before her, two with a significantly lower Threat Level Index than the others currently in the building, and yet these were the ones who apparently apprehended the insane and highly dangerous Azkaban escapee.
"Harry said you have some Truth Juice or something you use for interrogating criminals." The shorter, blonder one stated. According to the memo, this one was a squib.
"Veriaserum." The taller corrected. And this one wasn't much more powerful.
"How did you manage to find and capture this man, when he's got the best of our Aurors and Hit Wizards running in circles?" Amelia enquired, raising a steel coloured eyebrow.
"Just happened to spot him out in London." Dean shrugged. "Just like our old job back home, we couldn't let him go around savaging innocents."
"You two were Hit Wizards; Magical bounty hunters?" The Head of the DMLE asked doubtfully. "Despite having such limited magic?"
"Magical ability isn't everything." Sam argued, unimpressed with the witch's narrow mindedness. "You might just want to get on with the questioning though. Before the silver poisoning kills him."
Amelia's eyes narrowed, but she did summon Shacklebolt, Moody, Dawlish and Scrimgeour to take the prisoner to Interrogation.
"Wait here until we have confirmation of the capture. If it really was you who apprehended Greyback, your sponsor Mr Potter, will need to come in to collect the bounty on your behalf, since you're not yet recognised as Citizens of Magical Britain." Bones informed the two. "Please take a seat in the waiting room."
Elsewhere in the Ministry building:
"Is your conjuration a charm or transfiguration?" The DRCMC worker asked Gabriel of his fresh produce skill. At least this ministry employee wasn't creepily cheerful, nor was attempting to hit on Crowley in the mistaken belief that he was an incubus.
"What's the difference?" Castiel asked, breaking away from staring unblinkingly at their Auror escort. The Aurors breathed a silent sigh of relief.
"A conjuration charm is essentially a type of illusion. It is magic manifested into the shape, appearance, taste, smell, etc. of the object, but at the end is just that, a manifestation of magic. It has no substance." Harry rattled off boredly. He remembered taking endless notes on this way back in first year. "A transfiguration based conjuration however, is taking the matter from one object, be that wood, glass, stone, paper, the air, and re-arranging the molecular structure to turn the original matter into the desired object. However, just like charms, all transfigurations are temporary and require continued magical input from the caster, or else the object will return to its original state. Like the chairs from yesterday returned to being air molecules."
Gabriel concentrated intently on his hand while he materialised a tomato.
"Neither. I'm growing it." The man informed the room at large, tossing the tomato casually at Crowley, who flambéed it mid-air with a spark of hellfire. The now crispy skinned, well-cooked fruit landed on the floor with a wet splat. Two workers from neighbouring cubicles peered over the dividers at the tomato. When it did nothing further of interest, they returned to their own tasks.
As the woman turned to Castiel to ask if he had the same plant creation and growth ability, Gabriel pinched the jar of hard candies from her desk. Harry dropped his face into his hands, mortified.
"Do we even want to know?" Sam's voice snapped Dean out of his middle-distance stare. He turned to see who his brother was taking to, and badly suppressed his amusement.
Castiel had speed-walked right up to the Winchesters and was making a failed attempt at being unnoticeable behind Sam. Considering the Angel's wings, while intangible, were still visible around the hunter's sides, his success was rather limited. Crowley looked distinctly ruffled, highly disturbed and twitched every time a passing witch or wizard caught his eye. Gabriel was happily juggling two overstuffed jars of candy and a rose patterned bowl of assorted cookies, while looking far too pleased with himself.
Harry brought up the rear, feet shuffling and face down. The teen ignored everyone else, placed his nose to a blank stretch of wall, and then started rhythmically bashing his forehead into it. Dean snickered as he reached out grabbing Harry's shirt, and pulled the unresisting teen into the seat next to him.
"Alright, out with it kid. What happened?" The hunter asked in his patented Big Brother voice.
"Oh Merlin!" Harry groaned theatrically at his ratty trainers. "I can't believe these guys!"
"Cas stared at the Aurors watching over us until one has a psychotic break, and ran screaming down a stairwell, and I didn't know this place had stairwells! I thought there were just the elevators, you know?" Harry began his tale, waving and pointing his arms erratically. Dean nodded as stoically as he could manage. "Then Crowley keeps getting hit on, like every two minutes! Which is disturbing enough, considering some of the people. But the six-foot-two, 300 pound Merlin impersonator was just wrong on so many levels!" Dean coughed to hide his struggle not to laugh.
"And then, to make it all even worse, Gabe tries to materialise animals instead just fruit and whatnot, without warning anyone first. And grows and entire cow out of this guy's beef sandwich by accident! And the angry Again-Cow then starts a stampede with half the department's desks! So while everyone's running around trying to catch their desks, Gabe's sneaking about stealing everyone's sweets and biscuits!" Harry finished his rant and Dean tried his best not to laugh, hiding his grin behind a hand. Sam was leaning right forward in his seat, head on his knees, actually giggling.
An auror pair walked by at that point, the man winking saucily and the woman licked her lips and blew a kiss in Crowley's direction.
"Why are they all doing this? I'm not a bleeding Incubus!" The demon broke and shouted after the two. Sam's laughter caused him to fall out of his chair. Even Castiel left some of his personal embarrassment behind to be amused at Crowley's misfortune.
"It's the horns." Harry explained through his ever deepening blush. "They look similar enough for most people to get confused." He shrugged at the Winchesters' curiosity.
"The Demonic races here are all sort of psychic vampires, feeding off emotion. Incubi, and Succubi, feed on lust and the magic expelled when, well, you know." Harry mumbled, wishing today would turn out to be just a bad dream. "So they're supposed to be really good at, uhm, acquiring their food, so to speak."
Dean lost it at the wizard's uncomfortable explanation, and started laughing. Harry groaned and folded himself up in the chair as small as he could. Maybe if he curled himself up small enough, he'd compress all the way into a black hole.
"Oi, you lot!" Barked Alastor Moody as he approached, breaking the laughing men from the depths of their hilarity, and making Harry uncurl from his ball of mortification.
"Professor Moody." The boy greeted.
"Didn't get to much teaching, did I?" The man grumbled, turning his mismatched eyes to the Winchester brothers. "Getting' Greyback right where it hurts; unexpected and effective. Keep up the good work lads." The brothers tried unsuccessfully to hide their grins at the reminder of where they'd shot the werewolf. Auror Dawlish finally caught up to his newly re-instated superior, and dropped a bag of galleons into an un-expecting Harry's arms.
"What's this?" The bewildered teen asked.
"Greyback's bounty." The serious faced Auror answered, before also turning to the Winchesters. "Madame Bones would request that you leave interrogation to the DMLE in future." The group overheard Moody muttering about 'namby-pamby policies' and 'handling Death Eater scum with kid-gloves' as he and the other man departed. Harry turned to Sam and dumped the bag of gold into his hands.
"Let's get home." He sighed.
Madame Amelia Bones watched the unusual group leaving the Ministry via the Security System Window in her office.
"Mark up their TLI's to C-9." She ordered her assistant, Rufus Scrimgeour.
"Which ones?" The lion-like man asked, pulling up the paperwork.
"All of them."
"All of them? Even the old man that wasn't here?" Rufus sought clarification.
"If today's messes are what those five can do, imagine what chaos the one they left locked away can achieve." The woman reasoned.
In the library of number 12 Grimmauld Place, Bobby Singer continued to snore in the armchair he'd claimed as his own.
Ummm... Well, it amused me, at any rate.
Thanks for the wonderful reviews on the last chapter!
-Vengeance
