Chapter 12: The Unspeakable
It was Saturday before she left Hogwarts again, but true to his word, Snape had an errand ready for her. A quick glance over the shopping list showed that there were several items she could find in the forest, which would buy her time out of sight. She doubted that Dumbledore would go to the trouble of tracking her every move or counting her every minute off-campus, but she liked leaving as few chances as possible.

Crimson Fell was an early-riser and married to her work, so Meli thought that there was probably a fairly good chance of catching her at the office, even on a weekend. Granted, Avallach had given her Crim's home address, but given the woman's innate paranoia, turning up at her most-likely unlisted front door would be a bad move—to say the very least.

She Apparated to an alley near the nondescript building that housed the Edinburgh branch of the Department of Mysteries. Why that department might need a satellite in addition to what was in the Ministry of Magic was as much a mystery as the department itself was, but Meli was happy to take advantage of it. She had never liked the rigmarole and hassle of getting into the Ministry, and if she could dispense with at least some of it, so much the better.

The office itself looked like a painfully normal, even generic, Muggle office; it could have been a law firm or a travel agency, but no one in their right mind would ever consider that it might be in any way extraordinary. The only doorkeeper, apparently, was a nail-painting, gum-chewing receptionist with disco globes for earrings, who called Meli "honey" and had a permanent look to her, as if she never slept, never took a lunch break, and just plain never left. She wrote out a note, flicked her wand, and went back to painting her nails hot pink while it assembled itself into a paper airplane and zipped out of the lobby area.

"You sure are an early bird," she commented. "Unspeakable Fell's up with the sun, and she only got in ten minutes ago!"

Meli nodded gravely, unsure what to make of this or how to respond to it. She would have expected better security than a chattery receptionist from such a secrecy-shrouded organization—indeed, she still did. The fact that she couldn't see it concerned her more than the bouncy blonde in front of her did.

Far sooner than she would have expected a reply memo, she saw movement to her right and looked—

To find Crimson Fell herself, in the flesh, very alive and very grim on top of it. She cut straight through Meli with her hard, gray eyes, and the set of her jaw showed that, while her curiosity was piqued, so was her characteristic paranoia.

"Thanks, Misty," Crim said, her Scottish accent every bit as pronounced as Meli remembered it. "I'll take it from here."

Misty shrugged and smiled. "M'kay."

Meli knew she had paled, knew that she probably looked faint; she saw the confirmation of it in Crim's eyes. As much as she had tried to prepare herself for this, it still knocked the wind out of her to see her old friend acting normal. The last time she'd seen this face…

She resisted the urge to squeeze her eyes shut against the grisly, bloody memory while Crim was watching her so closely.

"Miss Sable, I think you said?"

Meli nodded as naturally as she could. "Yes, ma'am."

"Walk with me."

Crim waited until Meli was next to her to turn around; she wasn't about to have her back to an unknown quantity—painful to realize, but quite expected. She led by gesture rather than position, and Meli was shortly ushered into a small, Spartan office at the back. There was a faint buzzing sensation when she passed through the doorway—sign of a nonstandard ward of some sort, she thought.

Crim moved around her desk to face Meli and motioned to a chair. "Pray, take a seat, Miss Sable," she said. "I have a feeling we'll be talking for awhile."

Meli raised her eyebrows but complied, wondering what exactly had been in Misty's memo and how it had ended up there.

"I was just about to take my morning tea," Crim went on. "Will you partake?"

Meli nodded once. "Please. And," she added, clearing her throat, "I am not opposed to the addition of a Truth Potion if you are not—and if you happen to have one handy on short notice, of course."

Knowing Crim, she not only had it handy but had already laced a cup with it before going out to the lobby. The Unspeakable's eyebrows hovered somewhere just below her hairline, though, and she stared at Meli.

"That seems rather an extreme course," she said, her voice very even.

"I have a very peculiar story to tell you," Meli replied, "and I want you to know that you have every assurance of its being true."

Crim looked at her a moment longer before nodding and turning to the tea, but even then she had one eye on Meli. If she did take the opportunity to add anything in her guest's presence, Meli didn't see it, but after two or three sips of tea, she felt something taking effect.

"Now," Crim said, setting down her own cup and saucer, "the cross-reference on Misty's memo indicated that until a week ago, no person with your name and physical description existed. It also mentioned that the wand you're carrying registers as rightfully purchased and yet there is no record of its ever being bought; in fact, it's still in stock at Ollivander's, ever though you have it with you." She raised her eyebrows. "That, coupled with the fact that you knew how to find this place, to say nothing of finding me, tells me that you've made a horrendous understatement when you call your story merely peculiar."

Now it was Meli's turn to stare. How Misty had divined any of that in the space of about a minute and a half—

No. Misty couldn't have managed that without at least some help. She had been right, then: There was far more to this office than met even a fully trained witch's eye.

To judge by the evaluative look Crim had leveled at her, the Unspeakable was following her thoughts step by step.

"Well," Meli said after a moment. "That may save me a bit of breath in convincing you." She took a deep breath. "A little over a week ago, I was brought, by convoluted process, through a magical gateway from a world similar to this one. In my timeline, You-Know-Who had returned to life, and the resulting war was coming to an end. I came from there at the moment of his death, and it doesn't appear that my coming was entirely accidental."

"Someone brought you, then?"

She nodded. "They meant to bring someone else, but they got me instead. Since I'm here, though, they still assigned me a task."

"'They' referring to whom?"

"A magical race known as The Watchers." Meli cleared her throat. "They like to watch various worlds develop, but some of them apparently decided to meddle; the results have been flaws in several of the timelines, which the other Watchers bring in outsiders to fix."

"Outsiders like you?"

"Outsiders like my brother," Meli said, narrowing her eyes and thinking venomous thoughts in Avallach's direction. "I came instead of him by accident and so inherited his task."

Crim pursed her lips thoughtfully. "That accounts for the oddities of your name and wand, I suppose… but not for your coming here."

Meli sighed and took another sip of her laced tea. "I know what's going to go wrong and what's meant to be fixed," she replied. "I also know that I can't do it by myself, so I'm trying to form a coalition of people willing to pursue the goal with me." She looked Crim straight in the eye. "You-Know-Who is coming back, and soon."

Crim knit her brows. "Does Dumbledore know?"

"He does." Meli bit her lip. "But I don't trust him entirely… and unless I'm much mistaken, neither does Professor Snape."

"And that matters to you?" Crim gave her a thin smile. "Or to me?"

"In my own timeline, Professor Snape saved my life when I was a child," Meli said. "I owe everything to him, and I haven't found his counterpart here to be any different from him in that respect." She raised her eyebrows. "And as for you, your counterpart and Collum's were my closest friends at Hogwarts and afterward. Collum shilly-shallied a bit between fear and admiration of Professor Snape, but the Crimson I knew shared with me a profound respect for him as a favorite teacher."

Crim was silent a moment, examining her with narrowed eyes. When she finally spoke again, her tone was musing. "If you were a school friend of mine, you'll have heard about the infamous Father Morris."

Meli smiled. "He was Father Moore in my world, but yes, I've heard about him. In later years, he earned the nickname Father Fake-Bake, and he was very fond of making you recite the catechism—which was always followed by his house being toilet-papered." Her smile broadened to a grin. "And I also know about Mrs. Holland's poodle."

A slow grin crept its way across Crim's face. "His name was Father Moore," she said. "And I had nearly forgotten about the poodle." She leaned back in her seat and looked Meli over as if seeing her for the first time. "I do have one more question."

Only one? "Yes?"

"If we were such very good friends, why were you so alarmed to see me?"

Meli swallowed and silently berated herself for not hiding her reaction better. "To own the truth… the Crimson Fell I knew has been dead two and a half years. The last time I saw her, I was in a Muggle morgue—identifying her."

Crim went pale. "How did—she—die?"

Meli shook her head. "The circumstances surrounding her death are in no danger of repeating themselves here—"

"How, Miss Sable?" There was a sharpness in Crim's voice that Meli recognized as, of all things, fear.

She took a deep breath and deliberately met the Unspeakable's eye. "Another friend turned Death Eater and betrayed her. He murdered her because—" Meli swallowed again as her throat tightened painfully. "Because she was my friend, and You-Know-Who wanted to punish me."

Crim was wide-eyed and pale. "Why?"

Meli closed her eyes. She had half-expected this to come out in her first interview with Andrea, and since it hadn't, she had hoped that it wouldn't come out with Crim, either; this was not something she wanted everyone knowing about, but there was no avoiding it now. Not with Crimson, and possibly Collum, at any rate. "He wanted me to become a Death Eater, but I refused in a way that publicly humiliated him." She cleared her throat and opened her eyes again to meet Crim's gaze. "He was… my grandfather."

A long, dark silence fell between them as Crim processed this and Meli wondered what was going through her mind. Even having known the woman's counterpart so well, she had no ability at mind-reading, particularly when nothing was betrayed in Crim's eyes or expression.

The Unspeakable at last stirred, taking a long sip of her tea, her eyes never leaving Meli's. "So. Lord Voldemort is coming back." Her voice was as deadly calm as Robert the Bruce's must have been after learning of William Wallace's execution. "What do you have in mind?"

And over the next two hours, Meli gave her a very precise answer.

ooo

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Aaagh! It hurts us, precious, it does, when they says such things about our friend Meli! Please allow me to assure you, excessivelyperky, that Meli has no known blood connection to the Sirius Black of any timeline. I do see, to some extent, what you mean about the boredom leading to Severely Stupid actions, and I'll grant that Meli is still more of a Gryffindor than she'd like to admit, even to herself. However, she's just come fresh from three years in another war in which she suffered for other people's lethal Severe Stupidity (alas, the story stopped before those chapters were posted, but suffice it to say that Sirius met with a very bad end, and Meli was left having to cope with it). She would never forgive herself if she "pulled a Sirius", so to speak, and there are plenty of people in her life, even in this timeline, who will nail her to the floor if she steps too far out of intelligent line.

That said, however, yes, Meli would get along famously with Kreacher; Snarky and I have tried at different times to determine the likelihood of those two ever meeting, and unfortunately, the chances are slim. There are other house elves in her world, though, and Kwippy's only the first she'll encounter.

And as far as the slow build goes, sorry things aren't moving quite as fast as I'd hoped, but don't worry—Meli will see action soon, courtesy of a skrewt, a spider, and two very confused ducks (among other lethal things).

Also of note: "The Selkirk Grace" has been getting on my nerves for years because I wrote it while immersed in Dickens, and it therefore reads like a really awful Dickens spiel, diction-wise. There are also some irritating little inconsistencies that Snarky and I have been working to smooth over. Consequently, in case anyone cares about the earlier adventures of Meli, I am about to begin reposting the, hm, remastered version--story intact, but a bit less annoying to read (one hopes). Chapter the First has already been posted, and more should follow soon.
AE