"Il est plus facile de paraitre digne des emplois qu'on n'a pas que de ceux que l'on exerce. – It is easier to appear worthy of a position one does not hold, than of the office which one fills." (François Duc de la Rochefoucauld)
Lucius Malfoy sighed and lowered his copy of the Daily Prophet to look out of the large enchanted window of his office at the Ministry where maintenance had arranged for the illusion of a disgustingly cheerful summer day. Little puffs of cotton-wool clouds sailed across a deep azure sky and one could even hear the fake chirping of birds outside. He shook his head. Someone felt way too happy for their own good today.
He took a sip of tea from a thin, delicate porcelain cup and rapped on his desk. Immediately a worried-looking witch with spiny salt and pepper hair poked her head around the door.
"Yes, sir?" she asked nervously.
"Close the window, will you," he said curtly, lifting up his newspaper again. After all, his new secretary really was nothing to look at. "Bloody birdsong is driving me crazy. Send a memo about it to Wilkins in maintenance to stop this nonsense."
"Certainly, sir." She scurried across the office and wrestled with the stiff fastenings. The racket diminished, but didn't cease. "Anything else, sir?"
Lucius stopped reading a completely moronic article about a quarrel between a Ministry subcommittee and two local wizarding families over a planning permission for a new quidditch stadium near Manchester, glanced up at the witch and blinked in shock. No one could be punished for ugliness, but anyone daring to pair mustard yellow and violet checkered robes with a lavender hat embroidered with red tulips ought to be forced at wandpoint to eat the entire ensemble.
"You have been my secretary for how long now?" he asked coolly.
"Two weeks and three days," she answered deadpan.
Obviously he wasn't the only one here counting the days.
"Have you considered at any point during this time to actually wear something that doesn't induce migraine headaches and projectile vomiting in anyone who is unfortunate enough to accidentally look at you?"
The woman stared mutely at him for a moment, and he saw crimson rising in her cheeks. He leaned back with a smirk watching her, certain that she was probably too embarrassed and flustered to reply. When she suddenly leaned forward over his desk he actually flinched for a moment in surprise.
"That's it! That just does it!" she yelled. "I've put up with your miserable pompous arrogance and your bullying and stupid pureblood nastiness day after day, merely because I was going to try and do Arthur Weasley a favor and keep an eye on you, but I've had enough! Do you know the secretary pool was going to draw lots over who would be assigned to you? If you got the short straw you got landed with Mr. Goddess'-Gift-to-Wizardkind-bloody-Malfoy. Well, let them draw straws! I resign! I'd rather join maintenance and clean the lavatories around here."
She stomped back over to the window and yanked the latch open.
"There! Get rid of the birds yourself! I'm not your fucking house-elf!"
He heard the slam of a door as she left the office and slowly exhaled. That certainly had been a rather spirited and unexpected surprise.
"Lavatories, eh?" he muttered softly under his breath. "Well, I should still have enough clout around here to have that arranged for you, my dear."
He got up, walked around the desk and shut the window again with more force than was strictly necessary. Still two hours to kill until his meeting with that damn muggle. He shook his head.
Fudge's harebrained plot to get him the job as muggle liaison had actually worked. The old Weasel had been furious at the appointment, but the process that had got him instated had been seemingly flawless and beyond reproach and the mudblood faction could raise no objections to have the decision overturned.
So two weeks and three days ago he had moved into his new office on level three of the Ministry building where the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes had been recently enlarged to include an Office for Muggle Cooperation. He had been assigned his eyesore of a secretary and been made to work under the general supervision of young Percy Weasly, which was an insult in and of itself.
The only redeeming element of the situation consisted in the fact that Weasly father and son were not exactly on speaking terms and Lucius enjoyed himself somewhat in playing one man against the other. Still it was meager compensation for his new duties. He wasn't sure what he hated more: the fact that he now had to work under Ministry orders and supervision, his regular meetings with his colleagues, all of them fervent muggle-lovers and many of them mere mudbloods to boot, his weekly courtesy visits with his actual muggle counterpart and assorted other officials in Downing Street or the man himself that had been paired up with him from the other side.
Lucius found himself pacing back and forth in front of his desk with nervous energy as he thought of the middle-aged skinny muggle he was seeing on a regular basis now.
"Alfred Sedgewick," he muttered angrily. "Professor Alfred Sedgewick…"
The man called himself a professor of parapsychology. Lucius still remembered the introductions. Arthur Weasley had been present, as had been the muggle Prime Minister. Everybody had been ridiculously polite and deferential. He had suppressed the strong urge to walk out of the room and thoroughly wash his hands after the initial greetings, he also refrained from hexing the muggle servant who had put milk in his tea by mistake, nor had he asked what in the name of the Triple Goddess muggles meant by parapsychology. He had merely kept silent and aloof trying to stay as far away from his hosts as humanly possible.
He had asked that question a few hours later, over dinner, at home. Eleanor had raised an eyebrow.
"Hm, interesting choice… They have picked someone who studies phenomena that muggles don't quite understand, such as legilimency which they call telepathy, divination that actually produces results, skrying, and just general magical occurrences. At least they have picked someone they consider a specialist. You know, your muggle contact may actually look at you as a rather fascinating specimen."
He had not been amused by the explanation.
"Specimen! What am I, some kind of bug or other monstrosity?"
Unfortunately his wife's assessment had proved rather accurate. He still remembered his first one-on-one meeting with the professor. They had talked about telepathy.
"Legilimency," Lucius explained, pronouncing the word very slowly, so the stupid idiot would get it. "Latin legere – to read, and Latin mens – mind. No one calls it telepathy around here."
The muggle seemed as ridiculously fascinated with the concept as Arthur Weasly was with muggles and their habits. He sat forward on his chair and stared at him.
"So?" he asked excitedly.
Lucius leaned back with a sneer.
"So what?"
"Well, can you do it? This legilimency?"
The wizard shrugged his shoulders.
"Of course I can, almost everyone can, unless you are a useless squib."
"What's a squib?"
He sighed. This would be a long and tedious conversation.
"A squib is someone born to wizarding parents, but who somehow has failed to inherit their magical abilities. It happens relatively rarely, fortunately, and is a rather embarrassing situation for everyone. Often squibs will elect to live among muggles. In the old families squibs are normally abandoned as soon as they fail to exhibit any magical abilities."
The muggle pushed back a pair of thick spectacles on his thin, long nose and stared at him in appalled horror.
"Abandoning their own children? But that's outrageous!"
"Better than watering down your bloodline," the wizard replied with a growl. "In any case, I believe we were talking about legilimency."
"Yes, yes," the man agreed, casting one last dubious glance at his host. "Well can you legilimens me, for example? What am I thinking right now?"
The wizard shook his head.
"It's 'to perform legilimency'," he drawled condescendingly. "'Legilimens' isn't a verb."
He captured the muggle's eyes and concentrated for a minute. The guy's mind was wide open and rather a jumble – no discipline, which was to be expected from someone like him. He took a few moments to look around then frowned and tilted his head.
"Well!"
The muggle was practically falling out of his chair with excitement now.
"And does your wife like it?" Lucius asked with some mild interest.
"Like what?" asked the man, obviously puzzled.
The wizard suddenly realized he would actually enjoy their conversation after all.
"Hm, you tried very hard just now not to think of the fact that you gave it to her in the ass earlier this morning before you left the house. Of course unless you know occlumency that sort of thing never works. You only leave the thoughts more noticeable. So I was merely curious. Does she like it?"
He watched the muggle's face assume a rather interesting shade of beet-red as the man tried not to choke during a sudden and violent coughing-fit. There was hardly the need to be delicate and polite with this kind of vermin, and obviously he had made his point.
Lucius never found out if Mrs. Sedgewick appreciated her husband's attentions, not that he had been really interested in the first place, but the professor did not voice any doubt as to his capacities as a legilimens and had become quite a bit more distanced, reserved and jumpy around him after that, all very positive developments.
Of course the whole liaison job had on the whole proved to be more trouble than it was worth. Lucius remembered one tedious session at the muggle university where Professor Sedgewick did his research. He had repeatedly performed the accio spell while hooked up to a strange electrical device called an EEG that spat out rolls of paper covered with unintelligible squiggles.
He had demurred at first when the professor had made his request, but Old Weasley had intervened and threatened him with suspension from his post if he didn't comply. They had put rubber bands around his head, and stuck tiny metal sticks with cables onto him, nothing painful, but decidedly uncomfortable and extremely undignified, especially when they had eventually unhooked him and the rubber bands had got snarled in his hair.
He had lost patience and finally vanished the whole lot causing an attending muggle nurse who wasn't in the know to faint and the professor to grow rather anguished at the prospect of finding "grant money" to get the cabling replaced. He had given the man two shiny new gold galleons which had shut him up in the end. Obviously this parapsychology thing did not pay well.
In return he had so far managed to stop an agreement to put in place a medical exchange program between St. Mungo's and Great Ormond Street Hospital and a by-law that would allow select muggles to attend quidditch games. Small victories, of course, but he shuddered to think what kind of damage a pro-muggle wizard or witch in his position could have already done.
Today they would be discussing a scheme to organize an exchange between Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and a muggle school for gifted children in Essex, which Lucius took to mean extraordinarily smart muggles with some borderline mudbloods thrown in for good measure. He pictured a whole horde of smart-aleck children with buck-teeth and bushy hair like that obnoxious Granger girl that had been in Draco's year at school and shuddered. Of course he would do everything in his power to dissuade his contact to go forward with the plan. He'd rather die than see his old school subjected to this outrage.
He already knew how he would manage to turn Sedgewick against the proposal. Feigning concern for the muggle spawn involved should do the trick. All he needed to do was show the professor some of the pranks he and his fellow Slytherins had played on unsuspecting Gryffindor and Hufflepuff first and second years during his time at Hogwarts and the idiot would come right off his crazy notions. Of course the poor muggles would be entirely defenseless before the magic of their fellow students and end up scarred for life by the experience. Such an outcome would not foster understanding and cooperation between the wizarding world and non-magical humans now, would it?
The stupid, gullible muggle just had to agree with him. Lucius paused, picked up his cane that leaned against the wall behind his desk and slowly and lovingly slipped his wand from the hollow wood. Unimaginable to eventually having to send his little Lavinia to a school where she would be forced to attend classes with actual muggles! It was bad enough that Hogwarts freely admitted mudbloods. Of course his girl would make Slytherin house, which would at least keep her somewhat protected. His mission of obstruction must not fail her.
For a moment he turned to the wall next to his desk and looked at a colorful crayon drawing that he had fixed there with a spell. It was a bit hard to make out, but Lavinia had crawled up onto his lap and explained it to him at breakfast the morning after he had accepted Fudge's proposal to take the post as muggle liaison.
The green blob in the middle with the huge eyes and yellow hair and little stick arms and legs was herself, and that frightfully scribbly, bristly thing she was perched on was supposed to be the little play broom Draco had brought back for her from a business trip to Prague. She had also drawn what was supposed to be a snitch, but which looked rather convincingly like Hermes, his eagle owl. Lucius had to admit that the picture would not exactly strike an outsider as a masterpiece, but he wouldn't have traded it for anything in the world.
He playfully flicked his wand. "Furunculus posterioris," he incanted, his lips curving in sadistic glee as he imagined the expression on Alfred Sedgewick's face when he told him – quite untruthfully, of course – that there existed no counterspell for the spectacular and exquisitely painful boil that had just erupted somewhere on his nether regions. Yes, the good old furunculus spell would be a suitably impressive demonstration of what might be in store for the muggle exchange students at Hogwarts. Lavinia's future school would be safe, and the day might not be a complete waste after all.
Now before all else he had to get in touch with that damn Percy Weasly and arrange for another secretary to be assigned to him – hopefully someone marginally better looking than that previous one. Then there were a few people to be invited to lunch over the next several days to arrange for his ex-secretary's next employment as a cleaning-woman. He would enjoy running across her in one of the lavatories one of these days and see the expression on her face.
"Be always careful what you wish for," he murmured, replaced his wand back in his cane, cast one last look at his daughter's drawing and strode out of the office.