Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, Hogwarts, Gringotts, the Leaky Cauldron or anything else in JKR's wonderful world. Except for the little pebble just in front of the front doors of Hogwarts. I put that there. I might own that. Maybe. But probably not.
A/N: To those of you who are confused about the title of these two chapters, it's about secret agents so of course I had to title them Double Oh nine and three quarters.
Chapter 24: 009¾ - Part 2
A young man on a bicycle rode up and stopped beside them. She looked up at him as he spoke to Abe. "Mister Fitch?"
He sat up, obviously expecting him. "Yes. You have something for me?"
"Yes sir." The bicyclist said as he reached over his shoulder into a bag on his back. He pulled out a yellow envelope and handed it to her companion. "If I can get you to sign for it, please." He handed a pad and pen to Abe, who took it and scribbled on it before handing it back. "Thank you, sir."
"Thank you." Abe replied as the young man rode away. Abe turned to her and held out the envelope. "Your picture, I believe."
She took it from him, marveling at how fast they had gotten it here. Getting it with magic couldn't have been any faster. "You are so ruining my image of the spy game." She told him with a smile.
He grinned. "Expecting someone in a black trench coat with a fedora who sits down with a briefcase, sits for five minutes before getting up and walking away, but forgetting the case?"
She smirked back at him as she opened the envelope. "Something like that."
"Messenger service is so much faster than vehicle transport in a cross-city situation." He explained. "A handy little service that the yanks thought up. I've had several dozen packages delivered to me before. They'll deliver to just about anywhere, even to a park on a sunny day. It happens all over the city to dozens or hundreds of places and people, which makes it totally inconspicuous. I'm a troubleshooter for several different companies so it's perfectly alright to be seen receiving something like this. Most of the time, it's even legitimate."
She met him grin for grin as she slid the picture out of its container. No, not a picture, five pictures. Why five, she wondered as she quickly fanned through them to see they were all different. Then it struck her: just because the mundanes could see through wards and therefore know where magicals lived, they didn't necessarily know which magicals lived there. Or, more sinisterly, they didn't know and wanted to find out if she would tell them who lived there. She stole a look at Abe's bland expression. "They gave me five pictures."
Abe's brow creased as his eyes rose. "Five? Are they all of the same house, maybe from different angles?"
"No, they're all different buildings."
"Huh. Maybe they don't know which one is Malfoy Manor and are just giving you their best guess. Personally, I wouldn't know the place if you portkeyed me to the front door."
She studied him for a few seconds as she remembered a lesson her mother had once given her: 'Always tell the truth, just not in a way the one you're talking to will believe it's the truth. Lies have a way of coming back and biting your arse.' Though he was a spy and could quite possibly lie very believably, she wanted to believe he was telling the truth. After all, there was no reason he would need to know what the Manor looked like, and the pictures might just be a way for his superiors to get some information. She had a good guess as to why they wanted to know, however.
It didn't matter. She looked at the first picture and was amazed at how detailed it was. Harry had said satellites more than one hundred and fifty miles over their heads could take pictures that looked like they were only several hundred feet away right through notice-me-not wards designed to prevent that very thing and here was the proof. It was looking almost straight down and showed a long building, most likely a large house or manor judging from the number of chimneys. A wide veranda was on one of the long sides, probably the back as it looked like a barn or carriage house with a large paddock was on that side. A large garden with several paths weaving through it was off to one side.
She didn't recognize it at all. Quite possibly it was a Light side home. There were several families that would have absolutely nothing to do with a Dark family, including inviting them to their home for any kind of event. "Well, this one certainly isn't the manor. I have no idea at all who it belongs to." She said as she held it out to Abe. He took it and glanced at it before handing it back. "It's almost scary how the camera can see right through the wards, even a fidelius."
"Who told you that? About the fidelius I mean."
She looked up sharply at him, suddenly wary. "Harry. He showed me pictures of a place under one and you could see it plain as day."
He gazed back at her for several seconds before he spoke…but not to her. "We want her to trust us."
As he stayed quiet, she thought she knew what was going on. One of those classified questions had come up and for whatever reason, Abe felt he needed to tell her something, something about the new kind of photography and the fidelius charm and somebody thought he was going too far. Maybe it couldn't see through the charm? Then how had she seen Grimmauld Place?
"Did he show it to you before or after you knew the secret?" He was back to talking to her now.
"After." She replied, seeing what he was getting at.
He nodded. "That charm isn't like the normal hiding charms. Those are mind magic; they make your mind not see what they're hiding. You showed that they can be worked around a little while ago when you waved at the support lorry. You obviously knew it was there. I know how you probably did it and it's a weakness of them, but if you don't know they're there, what they're hiding stays invisible because the charms make your mind not see it."
He shifted in his seat. "The fidelius though, is soul magic, a whole 'nother class of magic. We don't know how or why, but even digital cameras can't see through it. If you know the secret, you can see it in a picture; if you don't, you can't. The reflected light off any object is still there, even with a notice-me-not, which is why a camera can pick it up and record it: it has no mind to tell it it can't see the object hidden by the charm and there is no film to embed the magic in. But the fidelius doesn't work that way. Nobody knows why the camera can't see through it. The light has to be there; it gets recorded but you have to know the secret to see it. You can detect the magic in an old-fashioned film camera picture, that's why you can't see a charmed item. There is no magic whatsoever in a digital picture which is why you can. But not of something under a fidelius and nobody has yet figured out why."
"You weren't supposed to tell me that, were you?" She knew why: advantage. If magicals were to think the new cameras could see through any ward, they might think the same of the fidelius. It took a powerful witch or wizard to cast, so if they thought it wouldn't do any good to cast it, they wouldn't.
"No." he replied, still smiling. "I'm probably going to get a good talking to, but like I told them, if we're going to work together, we need to trust one another."
"What makes you think we're going to be working together?"
His grin widened. "Because of my charming personality."
She snorted, trying to hold in the laughter caused by that statement. To help, she turned to the second photograph. She recognized it immediately. Not from the house or outbuildings but from the three ponds at the back of the house.
They formed a curve and were three different sizes. The smallest was closest to the house, the second was noticeably bigger and the third even bigger. They formed the perimeter of the yard on that side of the house. "The Winston house." She announced, showing him the picture.
He raised an eyebrow. "You barely glanced at it and recognized it?"
She nodded. "It's the ponds. They're very distinctive." She explained. "The story goes when the house was built in the early 1700's it was less than half the size it is now. The then Lord had four ponds commissioned: a fish, and these three." She pointed at the picture. "They're supposed to be bubbles from the fish. He did it to entertain his children whose rooms were on that corner of the house. Sixty or seventy years later however, the house burnt to the ground. It was back before fire prevention charms. The next Lord rebuilt a new manor on the site, the size it is today but he had to fill in the fish pond to do it, leaving just these three. They're still referred to as the 'Bubble Ponds'."
She set that picture with the first one and looked at the third. Unlike the first two, this one was at an angle, from what looked like the right front corner looking back over the house. She could see the entire front of it as well as that of the wing on the near end that angled back from the corner, mirroring the wing at the other end of the manor forming a shallow U. Between the legs of the U she could make out a garden with meandering paths that…
It was Potter House she realized suddenly. She couldn't see the pool or patio because of the angle but the widow's walk on the roof and the front of a barn at the top edge of the picture confirmed it. The gamekeeper's house would be just off the top left edge.
She kept her look of interested curiosity as she studied the picture while she considered the implications of the picture being given to her. Did the powers that be know whose house this was and were testing her to see if she was being truthful about her identifications? Abe had stated they didn't know where she or Harry were when they'd been looking for them, or where he and Emma had disappeared to. If he was being truthful, then this was probably just an attempt to identify the manor's owner. He was, however, a spy, an information gatherer and was probably able to lie quite well. Or not lie but tell the truth in a way she might not believe. He'd said they couldn't find them then. He hadn't said whether or not they'd found them since.
But Harry had said the satellites could get so close as to be able to read a newspaper and the three of them had been outside often enough they should be able to be recognized if that were true. So, identify it truthfully, or lie and say she didn't recognize it? There were advantages to both…and disadvantages as well.
She shook her head. "I have this little niggling thought I should know this one, but I can't remember. It's one of those things right on the tip of your tongue but it just won't come." He chuckled as he nodded, obviously knowing exactly what she meant. She went to the next picture.
She knew this one immediately as well. She'd never quite put it together but with an aerial view the manor looked like a capital letter A. The main entrance area was where the pointed tip of the A would be, but it was truncated, making it the only flat area of the front of the house. From there the two wings angled back. There was no open area above where the crossbar between them would be. The bottom of the bar itself went halfway down the legs of the A, the wings of the manor. At the time of its construction the house had been a marvel for its architecture.
Breckinridge Manor. Truly a beautiful home, but even more beautiful than the house were the gardens in back of it. The remaining space between the legs of the house was a huge veranda, large enough to hold dances with tables along the sides for dinner. From the edge of the veranda were steps leading down to a white marble path running along the front of it. Two circular reflecting pools were set past the path and another marble path ran between them for a distance out to the gardens where it came to the base of a heart shaped fountain, again, brilliant white marble. From the angle of the picture, she could see the fountain as the water rose up between the curves at the top of the heart…
She broke out laughing, the hilarity of what she was seeing so great it broke through her occlumency shields and in seconds reduced her to laughter so hard she had tears running down her cheeks. She couldn't help herself. That image, at that house, left her helpless in the throes of uncontrollable amusement.
People in the park stared at her, some looking as if she'd lost her mind, others just smiling as they saw her laughing.
She couldn't stop. Her sides began to hurt she was laughing so hard. After several minutes she started to calm down but made the mistake of looking at the picture again. The laughter crashed over her like a tsunami once more.
She was vaguely aware as she felt Abe pull the pictures from her hand. She was doubled over with her head between her knees as she heard him say, "Oh yes, I've seen this one before. It made the rounds for quite a while and I'm sure there must be dozens of copies if not hundreds. It got named the 'John Thomas House" around the shop and quite a few people have commented on whether or not they'd want that in their back yard."
The name sent her into another paroxysm of laughter. It was getting to the point where it was getting hard to breathe and her sides absolutely ached, they hurt so bad.
It was another few minutes and concentrating on her husband before she finally got herself under control. Abe sat and watched, smiling widely the entire time, as she pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and wiped her eyes, the occasional outburst of giggles still wracking her as she inhaled deeply time after time in order to catch her breath.
"You know, I've seen a lot of people laugh when they saw that picture but that has to have been the most enthusiastic outburst I've ever seen." Said the man, still grinning.
She shook her head, still trying to control the laughter that was trying to bubble up from inside. "You don't understand." She said, finally looking at him as she brushed her hair back over her head with her hand. "That's the Breckinridge place. It's one of the most beautiful homes I know of, and the gardens are considered to be the most beautiful in all of magical England."
"Interesting to know, but I fail to see the humor."
Her cheeks were hurting she was grinning so much. "The humor is in the fact that Lady Breckinridge, Myra, is such a prude that she would have you believe she was still a virgin, despite being in her eighties and having had three children. You do not mention sex around her in any way, shape or form and she has that in her back yard!"
She couldn't stop it as she broke down laughing again, hiding her face in her hands as she brought herself to tears once more. She could hear him laughing as well but nothing like what gripped her.
It was only a minute or two before she managed to gain control again and sat up from where she'd had her head on her knees. She wiped her face again and turned to Abe with a grin. "Now do you see why I thought it was so hilarious?" He nodded, grinning widely as he looked at the photo. "Now to make it even funnier," she said, "that picture must have been taken in the early spring or late fall because there are no blooms on the flowers, which are mostly roses around the fountain. However, do you see how the bushes are arranged? Not circular around the fountain but in an elongated oval shape? With that little circular shape at the top where they come together, and the paths go around it?"
He was studying the picture avidly as she described it and he nodded. Her grin turned positively wicked. "The roses closest to the fountain are a dusky red, getting deeper and brighter red as they go outwards before they start turning pink and getting lighter and lighter till they're a blush by the time you get to the edge and that little circle of bushes is a pink as well."
His mouth had dropped open as he imagined the color scheme before guffawing loudly. "Oh, Lord!" he laughed with genuine amusement. "If she's as prudish as you say she is, why does she even have this?"
"Those gardens are famed throughout the magical world." She explained. "If she got rid of them people would want to know why." She leaned back against the bench. "About two hundred years ago the Lady of the house was caught in flagrante delicto by her husband with a much younger man. Fortunately for the young man he was a renowned horticultural architect, designing some of the grandest gardens in England and on the continent. In lieu of removing a certain, offending piece of his anatomy, the Lord demanded he design and build the most beautiful garden in Europe, one that would be considered his masterpiece, for free."
"Ouch!" Abe exclaimed, grinning.
She grinned back. "Exactly. Since the Lord had declared said removal would be with the dullest instruments he could find, the young man agreed and signed a magical contract binding him to the project and began. That," she pointed at the picture in his hand, "is what he came up with, naming it 'The Garden of Love'. The Lord approved, the wizarding world 'oohed' and 'ahhed' at the magnificent creation and the young architect was last seen boarding a ship for the colonies, never to return." She smirked. "Probably to be far, far away when the Lord realized just what was sitting in his back yard." She grew thoughtful for a moment. "I've heard a rumor there was an enchantment placed on the gardens, one that keeps them from being harmed. If that's true that might explain why Myra has never changed it."
She reached over and took the sheaf of pictures back from Abe, looking at the top one and almost laughing again. "You never notice this from ground level." She stated. "I've been there dozens of times and I never once suspected its true look. To see it like this though, Merlin! I imagine Myra never looks out the back windows from the upper floors!"
She grew quiet again, her finger tracing the path from the veranda out to the fountain. "Lord Breckinridge, Harlan, is such a sweet man and he's madly in love with his wife, even after all these years. He dotes on her, treats her like royalty and I've never once heard so much as a whisper that he even looked at another woman. So, when he sought me out about this time last year in Knockturn, I was rather surprised. What he told me was his reason for doing so didn't surprise me at all. There had always been jokes that Myra's prudishness was all show for the masses, that once she was in the bedroom, behind closed doors, she would do things that would make a Knockturn whore blush and have second thoughts about her profession. I mean, how could any man put up with a frigid woman like that for as long as he had otherwise?" She sighed. "It was because he does love her that much that he would give up what most men in our world would demand, or even take. Three children, three times. That was it, the extent of their sexual relations. They used fertility potions to ensure she got pregnant. And he didn't begrudge her at all. She had told him before she had agreed to his proposal, and he had accepted it. Not for what she could give him, but for her."
She sighed again, looking around the park. "He had only one regret: he had always wondered what a blow job felt like. Just once before he passed, he wanted to know. He didn't want it from just anyone, though. He wanted it from someone from the proper social status and breeding, even if she was broke, humiliated on a daily basis and desperate. If he was going to cheat on his wife, even for something as small as this, even for only one time, he wanted his helper to be worthy of her."
She gave him a wistful smile. "He had a dose of Polyjuice already keyed to her. I didn't even have to take my clothes off. That wasn't what he wanted. Just to see what it felt like. I tried to be as dignified as anyone can be doing that little act, and when he finished, he called me by her name. I asked him how he liked it and he replied she was worth giving it up for. I'm such a romantic fool, when he asked how much he owed me, I just told him she wouldn't charge him and would only take a kiss."
"It's nice to know there is true love in the world." Abe commented.
She looked over at him and smiled. "Yes, it is, and now that I'm all done being maudlin let's see the next picture." She moved the Breckinridge picture out of the way…and there it was.
She slumped into the bench as she looked at it, a feeling almost like despair and hopelessness coming over her, replacing the high she'd been on just moments before. She recognized the manor immediately, how could she not? She had lived there for over twenty years and knew its layout intimately. Once again, the view was off to the side, not straight down, though not as off center as Harry's place had been. The main part of the building was a hollow square, three stories high, with two short wings, only two stories high, coming off each side. The central court, where she used to grow orchids, was covered with a pyramidal structure of metal and glass. At the back of the house were the huge ornamental gardens, all in geometric patterns Lucius had insisted on, even though he ignored them unless it was to impress someone with them.
But there were changes. The northwest corner of the gardens was gone, replaced by a Quidditch pitch and under the glass pyramid she could see a large area of blue. Had the new owners installed a pool of some sort? Ornamental or even for swimming?
"Is everything alright, Narcissa?"
She snapped out of what she realized was a daze and turned her head to look at Abe. "Pardon?"
"You looked like you were sort of spacing out." He explained. "I just wondered if you were alright."
She sighed deeply, looking at the picture. "Have you ever known something was true, but deep in your heart you desperately wanted that knowledge to be a lie, only to be given evidence that proved, without a doubt, that what had been would never be again. To totally crush dreams you didn't even know you had?" She heard herself how depressed she sounded.
He seemed to understand. "That one is Malfoy Manor, isn't it?"
"Not anymore." The admission left a pressure in her chest, squeezing her lungs, compressing her heart. She realized she really had held out some form of hope that things might be different. Not back to the way they had been, but something more…comforting she guessed she should call it.
But the picture had destroyed that idea in two ways: she would never again walk the halls of the Manor, no matter how depressing she had sometimes found them, as Mistress of the house, with a power hers by right. Someone else owned it, and the lands, now.
But worse, because she had known the wards around it, what they could do, what they were capable of. The manor could not be seen except by those keyed into those wards.
Yet, there it was. A photograph, a muggle photograph, showing it as if taken from within the wards themselves. She could accept the pictures of the other houses because they weren't as personal as this one. They weren't proof.
Everything Harry said was true. Despite everything she had read, everything she had seen, there was still that niggling little thought in the back of her head: muggles can't be as good as wizards.
Here was the proof they could be… and were. Here was proof they could be better than wizards. Maybe not in everything, but many things. There were still many things magic could do that technology couldn't, but the lines were blurry now, muddled. But they would get better, push the boundaries because it was what the mundanes did. They studied everything. They wanted to understand everything, to duplicate it. Magic wasn't the answer to every question of how or why something worked. They sought the truth in everything, even if they didn't always believe it when they saw it.
Which begged the question, "Abe, when were your people going to get off their arses and do something about Riddle?"
She turned to look at him, saw that blank, unremarkable face of his looking back. "What do you mean?"
"Don't try to play me for a fool, Abe." She told him quietly. "Hundreds of people in the mundane world were being killed, disappearing, or doing acts and crimes they wouldn't have done otherwise…all caused by wizards and witches. In our world it was worse. Many more hundreds, or even thousands, were experiencing the same things, being terrorized, being sent to those damn camps. You knew this, your bosses knew this. How many years have you been spying on us? Ten? Twenty? World War Two when Grindelwald was rampaging across Europe? Do you honestly believe I would think your authorities, or even the Queen, would sit around and let a little thing like the Statute stand in the way of getting rid of a psychopathic terrorist with the kind of power he had? He as much as admitted in the Prophet he was going to conquer the muggle world, the idiot. There is no way in hell any sitting government is going to let itself be ousted by anybody without a fight. They like their soft comfortable lives just the way they are too much. So…when?"
He looked silently back at her for a few seconds, and she wondered if he were waiting for someone to tell him what to say or deciding for himself. "We were doing our final equipment checks for the assault when we received word to stand by." He suddenly said, voice calm and even. "We found out the higher ups had just received word he was attacking Hogwarts and Harry Potter had reappeared after missing for months."
"You had an agent in his army or inside Hogwarts." She surmised. The night Riddle was attacking Hogwarts? What kind of coincidence was that?
He nodded. "Yes, but he couldn't get word to us, and we had to wait. We knew about the prophecy and as long as they were both alive, we didn't want to give ourselves away as to how prepared we were to attack them. If Potter won, we wouldn't have done anything."
So, they could have someone in the Department of Mysteries as well. "You were going to attack the Ministry. If you were gathered and ready go, why couldn't you attack them inst…wait, no transport?"
He nodded. "We had no way to get there and not enough time to make portkeys for everyone. We had no intelligence at all on what was going on, where anybody was. The last thing we wanted to do was drop people right into the middle of Riddle's army." He cocked his head with a puzzled look. "How did you guess the Ministry?"
She chuckled. "No guess at all. It's the heart of our world; take it and you control just about everything. So, you infiltrate people in in the early morning hours, take the atrium, DMLE, Minister's office, floo control and department of magic detection, then rush in reinforcements, probably a mixture of magical and non-magical people, to hold everything."
He looked rather interested by her thinking. "Why those places specifically?"
"They have all the floos in or out of the building, so you especially want control of them. You want the department of magic detection because you can see where magic is happening anywhere in the country, and not just underage magic, either." She replied, remembering Harry saying much the same thing all those months ago.
"You certainly want to be able to shut the floo system down to keep any of the bad guys from sneaking in behind you." He said, admitting to her reasoning.
She gave him a look of exasperated condescension. "Really, Mister Fitch? Shut it down? Are you just trying to mislead me or are you fishing for information on how much I know?" She shook her finger at him playfully. "No, no, no. You don't shut it down; you use it to move your troops around while denying your enemies from doing the same. When you aren't doing that, you reroute it to a destination of your choice. Can you see the faces of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people when they step into the floo expecting to go to work and come out in a featureless room surrounded by soldiers and wizards demanding you drop your wands and surrender? How many places like that did you have prepared?"
He smiled back at her, a smile that said he wasn't going to answer that particular question. "What makes you think we'd have mixed magical and non-magical teams?" he asked instead.
She shrugged. "It only makes sense. Even though there are a lot of muggleborn who have left our world, not all of them are going to be suitable for fighting a war or would want to. You'd need numbers to give you an advantage and you'd need them mixed for protection. Mundanes can't see dementors, so you'd need magicals to be with them, also to dispel things like the imperious or compulsions, counteract curses, even banish fiendfyre if some idiot turned that pyrotechnic nightmare loose. But Emma proved quite conclusively not that long ago that mundanes can fight, and kill, wizards. Magicals defending the mundanes from hexes while they fight back. If you convinced the Unspeakables to help fight on your side, they would be a great asset as well. If they wouldn't, well, I bet your version of Unspeakable would have come up with something to fight them with as well."
He cocked his head. "What makes you think we have some kind of equivalent of the Unspeakables?"
She chuckled and gave him a lazy smile. "Operation Overlord; mulberry harbors; swimming tanks; things to help men get up ninety-foot cliffs; flail tanks to clear mine fields and those are just on the beachheads. I can go on about gliders, dummy paratroopers and other things the mundanes came up with to overcome any foreseeable obstacles inland. The mundanes excel at war, Abe, they fight to win and they're not going to attack anyone unless they think they can and that means having somebody think about what all those obstacles are and how to defeat them. Besides, you already said that nobody knows why digital cameras can't see through a fidelius. That right there implies you have somebody studying it, ergo, Unspeakables." She got a thoughtful look. "Just out of curiosity, how would you have handled dementors without magicals around?"
"Swing down cages on the helmets." The man replied promptly. "They locked in place and at the first sign of an unusual temperature drop you just pull them down, they lock in place to the helmet which is locked onto the head at that time and if a dementor can't kiss you it can't suck out your soul, even if you're laying helpless on the ground." He grinned. "Dementors aren't very good at opening locks."
It was his turn to look thoughtful. "How would you have handled wards?"
She grinned. "You really are on a fact-finding expedition, aren't you?"
"I'm a spy." He stated cheerfully. "It's my job."
She laughed. "Yes, you are. Well, the most common are simple mind-altering wards: notice-me-nots, muggle repelling, wizard repelling, that sort of thing, with detection and identification thrown in. Use the right kind of people and you can walk right through them. Anti-apparation and anti-portkey will stop those modes of travel, in or out, but you can still walk right through them. Intent based wards however will have some kind of barrier to prevent that: shock, stun, repel, even kill if you're willing to break the law and use them. They, and all of the others I've mentioned, have a flaw however: though they will stop spells, bullets, bombs, or even thrown grenades or rocks have no intent and will go right through them. If your intent is to make those inside those wards scurry through a floo you have redirected to a venue of your choice, then you don't need to get through them at all." She gathered her thoughts. "Shield wards will have a physical barrier so you can't just throw something through them. They have two drawbacks however: they take a lot of power and if they're not tied into a ley line you can beat them down with a sustained physical assault. Riddle showed that at Hogwarts and those are tied into a ley line. They were designed to be used against catapults and ballista's though, so I don't know if a two-and-a-half-ton bunker buster with an armor piercing nose moving at four to five hundred miles an hour would punch through them or not."
She saw his brows rise in surprise at her knowledge of modern weaponry. "The library has a very good audio-visual collection." She told him. "The videos of some of what went on during Desert Storm are quite impressive. Night vision goggles to see at night with, infra-red that makes smoke just seem to go away, targeting systems that let one bomb destroy targets in the middle of a city that a hundred airplanes dropping entire loads of bombs might still miss the target only sixty years ago."
She stared into his eyes. "I am no longer one of those magical people who think of war with muggles an easy win, releasing death and destruction on them with the flick of a wand. They know too much about us, where we are, who we are, what we can do. We don't know anything about their capabilities. I once heard someone say we could just kill their leaders or put them under the imperius. We don't even know who their leaders are, much less where they are, and they would be protected by other magicals besides. We don't know where any of their military bases are or what we would need to destroy to defeat them. We could hurt them, badly, by apparating into the middle of a city and releasing fiendfyre, hexing every person we saw, destroying buildings, but everything we could do to them, they could do to us, faster, deadlier, and more accurately. With control of the magic detection department, they could find us if we used anything more than a lumos and have soldiers apparate or be portkeyed there in seconds using their communication devices to tell them where to go."
"I told you Harry was going to destroy our society, but that was the destruction any society goes through as it advances, grows, changes. He is just going to accelerate the pace. A war with the muggles, however, will be a Carthage or Troy for us, complete and utter devastation. Even if we won, there would be no society left to grow or change. We could fight, maybe for years, but the ending would be foretold, we would lose, especially if the war started with a preemptive strike such as the one you were planning."
She sighed and leaned back into her seat before suddenly realizing she'd been ranting. "I'm sorry." She told him self-consciously. "I sort of got carried away."
He chuckled. "Quite alright. I was rather interested in your take on how something like that might have gone. Were those all your ideas?"
"Oh, no, a lot of it was Harry and it was Emma who thought of using the magic detection net to find magic users and send troops after them."
"Oh, well, my boss wants to know if you'd like a job." He grinned widely. "Your analysis was quite good."
She laughed, thinking of a disembodied voice talking in her ear. "No, I already have one, thank you."
He shrugged. "Ah, well. What was the second flaw?"
"I beg your pardon?" She honestly didn't know what he was talking about.
"With the shield wards. You said two flaws and one was power."
"Oh!" She remembered what she had said. "If you can't get in, those inside can't get out. You could walk your ward breakers right up to the wards and they couldn't do a thing to stop them. Unless someone uses a patronus to warn them not to use the floo they wouldn't know you had control of it and if they used it you wouldn't need to break the wards."
He smiled at her. "A very good ending to a sticky situation."
"Quite." She replied. "But such a war was never very likely." At a questioning look she explained. "There were never more than a couple of hundred Death Eaters at a time and they were terrorists, not trained fighters. They fought like a mob, without any tactics other than to show up, start hexing and cause as much trouble as they could before leaving. Fear and terror were their biggest weapons.
Riddle's army at the Final Battle at Hogwarts was mostly mercenaries. The dark creatures, the vampires, giants, hags, dementors and the like were there for something Riddle had promised them: territory, victims, money. The werewolves were there because he'd promised them a complete overhaul of the laws that oppressed them so greatly. A better life. There were a lot of them, an army, but they were fighters, brawlers, not warriors. Your people are probably trained soldiers, used to working as a team with a plan and the tactics to achieve their mission against greater odds. The sheeple, as Harry likes to call them, never rose up to fight back. They would have been happy just to live their lives and avoid the fighting and accept Riddle's rule until it was too late. I can't see them doing any differently if it was muggles and muggleborns."
"You don't see Potter trying to take over in the new world he's trying to create?"
She laughed out loud. "Harry? A Dark Lord? I'd worry more if Emma were to try to take over." She met his eyes. "Harry is not and never will be a dark lord. If you think he's starting a war it will be a socio-political one, out in the open where everyone can see. People have to see what's being done around them, so they can learn what the muggles truly are, what they can do, what they can be. We have to be able to adapt to their ways while staying true to ourselves when the Statute falls, and it will. Whether we can remain a distinct society will depend on how narrow the disparities between us are. To many times in the past societies have been wiped out, subsumed or just overwhelmed by contact with more advanced ones. We have to be able to compete with them socially and economically in order to do more than just survive. If we can't, if we become dependent on them, we'll lose more than just our society, we'll lose what it means to be magical."
He nodded in agreement. "The Yanks do fairly well."
"Harry has looked at their system, as well as the European Ministries, and the Far Eastern, African and South American. He still thinks we can modify ours to retain what we are as well as gain what we need to meet the muggles as equals when the inevitable happens and pictures of things that can't be seen start showing up."
"If he has time."
"There is that." She looked at him for a moment. "Would you like to meet him?"
His face stayed impassive at the offer, especially as it came out of the blue like that, but she saw it in his eyes, the excitement that the offer had been made, the possibility of meeting, working with, someone in a position of power in their world.
"Well, I…" he started, then suddenly scrunched his face into one of pain as his head jerked sideways and his hand rose to his ear.
She smirked at what she imagined had happened. "Someone a little enthusiastic at the offer?"
"As well as LOUD." He replied. She recognized the emphasized word had been directed at the speaker in his ear. "If you would, please, don't do that again."
He turned his eyes back to her. "If at all possible, a meeting with Lord Potter-Black would be most appreciated, under any conditions he may set. I can give you an owl or floo address if you need to speak with him about it first."
She smirked at him. "A phone number would be fine." She informed him. "We're not savages you know."
"You have a phone." Disbelief was evident in his voice.
"Doesn't everybody?" She replied, her left eyebrow quirking upwards in amusement. "It makes it ever so much easier to order pizza." Not that we ever have or any delivery people could even find the place to deliver it.
"I must say, Narcissa, you constantly surprise me."
She smiled at him. "Good. Now, if you'll let me have your number, it's been a real pleasure, but I really must be going. Oh, and tell your team members to not be so obvious in the future."
His eyes jumped to meet hers from where he'd been writing on a slip of paper. "I beg your pardon?"
"That bench across the way is the only one with a direct line of sight with this one, and while four different people have come and gone on it while we sat here chatting, I recognized two of them from the library." She explained. "I could be wrong, but I am a Black, and I have engaged in my own bits of skullduggery over the years. Our family had a lot of enemies, and we were taught nearly from birth to beware coincidences like that."
Abe looked over his shoulder at the indicated bench, then gave a quick jerk of his head. The young lady sitting there, the page turner who had practically ignored her in the library, casually gathered her things and without even looking their way strolled off past the fountain towards the opposite side of the park.
He turned back to her, again. "Well, surprised and caught out all in the same day." He said as he handed her a slip of paper. "Are you sure we couldn't get you to come work for us?"
Chuckling, she reached over and took the paper. "I assure you Abe, I have enough problems with stress I don't nee…"
She froze, her face one of concentration as she stared at him. Maybe… "In your line of work," she began, in a low and serious tone, "I would imagine it can get very stressful at times."
He noted her shift from light-heartedness to one of a more serious nature. "At times, yes, it can get very stressful. During the war, many of us had to be very careful simply because of our blood status."
"Then, you might have mind-healers available to you?"
"Yes." He nodded to her question. "When we're in the field a lot, we're required to have evaluations at least every six months, if at all possible, if not more if we, or our supervisors, feel we need it."
"You work with mundanes. I would presume they have a muggle mind-healer, a psy… a psy…"
"A psychiatrist, yes, we have those as well. We can go to either kind. Some magicals just want to talk to someone and a psychiatrist is better trained for that than a mind-healer." He stared at her for few seconds, then cocked his head. "Narcissa, do you know someone who might want to talk to someone, who might need to…"
She stared back at him, frozen in her seat, occlumency barriers raised and as strong as she could make them. Should I? She asked herself. Could I? Do I have the right to ask for them? Harry still has nightmares, still calls out for her, but can I just set him up with a healer? And Emma, she has such a rage in her! I saw it when she shot Nott, saw it in her eyes. It could destroy her if something wasn't done! Didn't she say she hadn't seen anyone because who could she talk to about Magic? Would she if there was someone? Could she herself, do it? Could she let someone inside her head, let them see what she had done? They were supposed to be confidential but this…after this morning, after her attack, could…
A young woman screamed, a cry of agony.
Her hands flew to her temples, applied pressure as she squeezed her eyes shut. "Not…now!"
From a distance she heard her name being called. "Narcissa? Lady Malfoy?" The screaming, the begging, started to grow louder even as she fought to force it back, to dampen it, to…
A touch.
She jerked upright, back straight, arms to her sides, eyes wide and staring at the man in front of her, who leaned back and withdrew his hand at her reaction, as she panted heavily, trying to catch her breath, the screams and cries receding.
"Abe." Almost calmly she said his name.
He looked concerned. "Narcissa, are you alright?"
She inhaled deeply, released it, inhaled again. "No, but I will be."
He still looked concerned but nodded at her reply.
She looked at him, her expression one of determination. "I will ask Harry about a meeting with you, but there's something I would like in return." She explained what she wanted.
A/N: Not my muse this time. Real life is intruding, and I have some projects I need to get done so it will be a while before my next post. I hope you enjoyed this one and I promise to get back to the story as soon as I can. Till then, TA! ER