It was almost six before Mimi managed to extract herself from the Ministry, tired and generally annoyed at the world, but satisfied that the Muggleborn Registration Commission, at least, would continue on the path she'd set for it, assuming no one else interfered, which she didn't really expect they would. Yaxley certainly wouldn't dare. Milton Travers, who was apparently heading the Improper Use of Magic Office, seemed a bit more volatile, but she was fairly certain she'd managed to convince him to fall in line as well.
He'd demanded a meeting when he'd gotten her memo reminding him that muggleborns were still legally allowed to own and carry wands. But if his self-control and sense of proportion had been damaged by extensive dementor exposure (he'd been in Azkaban for the duration of the ceasefire, she gathered), his logical faculties had at least escaped largely unscathed. When she'd withstood his blustering fury — his "how dare you"s and "who do you think you are"s — uncowed and shown him her loyalty mark, he'd shut up long enough to let her explain (What do you have to say for yourself?!) that they were moving too quickly, that if the Commons as a whole started to fear that they might be stripped of their wands at any time, on the slightest of excuses, with no investigation to speak of — I remain unconvinced, given the laxity of her investigative protocols, that Dolores was capable of distinguishing proper wizards from goblins, much less mudbloods — they would have a rebellion of the masses on their hands, and then where would they be?
"Yes, yes, I'm sure we could easily crush any attempts to resist our rule, but what the fuck, Travers, is the point of ruling over an island of corpses? I do not care to see the Dark Lord's tenure as Lord Protector of Britain doomed to failure by the incompetence of underlings too infatuated by the nearness of success to realise that while fire is cleansing, the ruler of a kingdom of ashes is no king at all!
"If we lose too large a percentage of the population, we will be unable to sustain ourselves as a nation, and your idiotic push to confiscate wands on little more than hearsay, well-intentioned though it may be, is all but certain to spark widespread social unrest.
"Wizards are not muggles! They are not sheep, to be easily herded in this direction or that! We are a proud, strong-willed people, and every one of us is favoured by Magic! Think, you moron! What would you do, if you thought someone might threaten your right and ability to use magic? If I threatened to take your wand from you, right now? Even if you didn't stand a chance at defeating me, your first instinct would be to lash out at that threat to your fundamental rights! As it should be!
"Commoners are no different! If they believe that we mean to threaten their ability to practise magic freely, or at least as freely as the British government has been allowing them to do so for decades, they will rise up to prevent such an eventuality, even if their fears that the prohibition against wands will spread from mudbloods to commoners in general are entirely unfounded, at which point we would be obliged to subdue them by force, inevitably causing widespread casualties before the survivors were truly suppressed — if they ever truly could be.
"And for that matter, it must be acknowledged that commoners, on the whole, are far less fastidious than the more refined classes. They mix freely with the mudbloods, count them among their friends, even marry them, produce children with them— Don't pretend you don't know it, we all know it! There was a mudblood on trial today who was married to a Ministry employee! We're not marginalising werewolves, here, or vampires, or some other obviously other undesirable group! To attack a mudblood directly is to attack some commoner's wife, or their father, or the godparent of their children! Sullied though they may be by their contact with the mudbloods, they still retain proper wizarding feeling toward their families, and they will strike back against any open attempt to remove the mudbloods they have embraced from society!
"Moreover, if the Wizengamot believes that their rule is being undermined — and you may be assured, they do still believe that the ultimate decision over who is worthy to wield wands rests with their august body — they can and will appeal to outside forces to eject us from our newly-achieved position of power. The common rabble would be easily crushed, albeit with severe casualties likely leaving us no one to rule, certainly within a generation or two, but the Combined Security Forces of the I.C.W. outnumber us by an order of magnitude, even including the Aurors and Hit Wizards, not all of whom can be trusted to side with us in such an eventuality, given that their ranks are drawn from the Commons as well as the Nobility.
"If this endeavour is to be a success, we cannot be overeager in its implementation! No, galling as it is, we must take a lesson from the Light, and their circumscription of magical freedoms over the past fifty years — curtail the mudbloods' freedoms incrementally, slowly enough that no one step seems too difficult to swallow, that they and their 'families' may adjust to their circumstances before the next step is taken, understand? First we will normalise the recognition of mudbloods as a class distinct from the Commons, then we will begin increasing the distance between that filth and the heart of our fair nation. Deliberately and methodically, not rushing in and grabbing wands out of hands and throwing people to the dementors seemingly at random, causing chaos, fear, and unrest among those we wish to rule!
"So, unless you would like to answer to the Dark Lord when the time comes to explain why, exactly, we're facing a mass uprising of the Commons as well as an invasion from the I.C.W., you will rescind your confiscation policy, and you will do it today."
He had, of course.
Again, if Mimi didn't know this would all come crashing down in a few weeks, she wasn't sure whether it would be a good idea, preemptively undermining the major rebellion the Death Eaters were brewing, but since she did, it seemed worth it. Even if it did make her feel gross, embracing their rhetoric to make arguments they would accept. It was a sound strategy, but that didn't mean she enjoyed it.
Well, striding into the middle of an organisation and taking it over through blatant lies and force of personality was fun, but adopting the mindset of a pureblood supremacist was about as fun as talking to the bloody dementors.
Which was to say: not. Not that she'd really expected it to be, but she hadn't expected it to take the wind out of her sails quite as much as it had. She actually felt tired — not sleepy, per se, but terribly, miserably lethargic — and had caught herself thinking more than once, even after she'd stabilised Hermione's concussion and made her way up to Umbridge's (former) office, that she should just stop and take a break, she'd done more than enough in the past two days, everything else could wait, she owed it to herself to take a breather.
She hadn't, of course, she had more self-discipline than that, but everything from playing the role she'd written for herself as Death Eater Auditrix to fucking breathing felt like it was taking far more effort than it should. It wasn't quite as bad as Siri got when he was down (Mimi had, by the grace of the Dark, lucked out on that front — she wasn't nearly as prone to melancholy as Siri), but it still wasn't pleasant. And on top of the maybe I should just sit here and stare blankly off into space for a few hours feeling, dealing with Umbridge's staff had given her a headache.
Blowing up her office had greatly improved the aesthetic, in Mimi's opinion, but it had also left her people anxious and panicky. Several of them had been crying when she arrived, intimidated to tears by the Aurors interrogating them about whether they'd seen anything suspicious before the Minister entered the office and been murdered.
Personally, Mimi believed Harry that it had been an accident — he'd probably only survived unscathed himself because Death's Cloak made the wearer immune to mortal harm, getting blasted through a heavy, wooden door was no picnic — but that didn't change the fact Thicknesse was now very dead, and the Aurors were very intent on catching his killer.
Mimi, who sincerely couldn't care less, had 'suggested' — with enough mind-magic behind the suggestion that it wasn't actually a suggestion, as such — that the Aurors get an Obliviator up here to make pensieve-quality copies of a few memories, and use divination to investigate, because expecting traumatised office workers to remember details they'd considered insignificant and unworthy of notice at the time was an exercise in futility. This had the advantage of calming 'her' newly acquired staff significantly — making them think she was supporting them against the Aurors' persistent and belligerent questioning — and getting the Aurors out of her hair relatively quickly.
The scene was quickly documented and Thicknesse's body removed for further analysis of the magical traces which had survived the fire following the explosion. Mimi left Dolores's office, which was a complete shambles, cordoned off for the moment, instead bringing the staff to a nearby conference room to discuss the new direction of their project.
She did have to let several of the more sensitive among them have a lie-down on the (quickly duplicated) sofa in the break room — they couldn't go to Saint Mungo's, what with the lockdown, but they could at least take a Calming Potion (of which the office had a copious supply on hand) and try to pull themselves together in relative peace and quiet — but most of them responded reasonably well to her emotional manipulations inclining them to bury their upset under the familiar normality of getting back to work. Especially after she assured them that Dolores would be taking an indefinite leave of absence, effective immediately. It seemed most of her staff had been more terrified of the toad's wrath when she discovered they'd let someone sneak in and blow up all her decorative kitten plates than they were of whoever had just murdered the Minister, which was sort of hilarious.
Percival Weasley, in particular, had been all business once he realised his boss wouldn't be returning to the office, which was a not-insignificant part of the reason she'd picked him to head the Commission. Obviously she couldn't make him the Senior Undersecretary, the new Minister would have to fill that position, but she doubted anyone would question her authority to appoint a new Project Lead for Muggleborn Registration. Everyone knew that was a Death Eater project, not a normal Ministry position.
Once she'd sorted out the staff who needed a break and given the others an overview of the actual purpose of their project — ostensibly to keep track of muggleborns' geneologies and marriages, but actually, since the Commission had only ever been a front for Umbridge's extermination campaign and propaganda mill , to continue making pamphlets, promoting Voldemort and pureblood superiority instead of papering the streets with blatantly anti-muggleborn shite (because if they could convince enough people that he wasn't just a raving sadistic maniac, the tynged might let him recover enough intelligence not to countermand Mimi's very reasonable orders out of sheer petty spite the moment he found out about them) — and got them started recalling Umbridge's anti-muggleborn pamphlets, she'd brought Weasley in to interview, ostensibly to get a feel for how the Commission had been running, and what other measures were being taken throughout the Ministry to persecute muggleborns.
He'd been a Junior Assistant to the Minister before the Death Eaters had taken over, after which he was demoted to being the toad's bitch ("Personal Assistant to the Senior Undersecretary"), which meant that he had been in an excellent position to observe the formation of the MRC and the changes which had been enacted throughout the Ministry in the past month. He was also in an excellent position to administrate the office in Umbridge's sudden absence, given that he was intimately familiar with its day-to-day operations and management, as well as the staff and their variously assigned roles. Plus, he'd held no authority to speak of under the toad, which meant he hadn't been directly responsible for implementing any of her muggleborn extermination tactics, and was far more reasonable than most of the people Umbridge herself had promoted to their current positions, all of whom seemed to share her views on 'mudbloods'.
Mimi had known after about five minutes that she was going to tap him to take over, but she'd had to interview at least a few other "more qualified" candidates for the position first, just for the look of the thing, so she hadn't mentioned anything about promoting him, just sent him off with a memo for Improper Use of Magic (signed with the same charmed "stamp" she used in lieu of a signature at home: a simplified version of Thom and Bella's sigil, with the addition of a calytrix flower in the left eye-socket of the skull) while she talked to the most senior Ministry aide in the office, as well as the two Dolores had essentially deputised to keep the rest of them in line when she was out, and Miss Parkinson who covered the front desk, whose status in the office hierarchy was even lower than Weasley's. Parkinson, amusingly, had instantly suggested Weasley when Mimi asked her who would be the best person in the office to implement the changes she'd demanded. The other three had all nominated themselves.
Her "interviewing" process was cut short by Milton's arrival, which did nothing to improve her growing headache — after spending the better part of half an hour explaining the DAP situation to the dementors, blocking out the panic, anxiety, uncertainty, and hysterical relief of Dolly's staff was, like everything else, much more difficult than it ought to have been. Her attention kept wandering, and then her occlumency barriers would waver and she'd get hit with a wave of second-hand panic or heady relief and have to fight it off. That kind of emotional whiplash was just exhausting, disorienting, and did nothing to ameliorate her dementor-induced apathy. Plus, the stupid horcrux was trying to wear down her defences.
She hadn't noticed at first, but when she'd finally gotten some peace and quiet to write out her plan restructuring the Muggleborn Registration project and a short press release denouncing Umbridge's actions on behalf of the new administration (which would likely be buried under the buzz about the Minister's assassination, but that was just as well, really), it had slowly dawned on her that there was a low-grade constant annoyance tickling away at the edges of her mind. She had expected coercive compulsions, but. It was subtle enough she hadn't felt it against the pressure of the dementors and the ministry workers' conflicting emotions, but like a constant, droning buzz in the background, once she'd noticed it she couldn't ignore it. Very irritating.
She could really use a nap, was what she was saying. Actually, when was the last time she'd slept? Those few broken hours last night in Holding didn't really count, she'd been woken by the dementors or her cellmates thinking too loudly every time she'd started really drifting off. And it had already been well into the afternoon by the time Dru had sent her back from her own universe, so...yeah, actually, she could probably use a good night's sleep even if she weren't headachy and emotionally exhausted. And she should probably remember to eat at some point, too. (In her defence, there were usually other people around who reminded her to do both of those things periodically.)
But not yet.
Almost as soon as she got rid of Travers, she was handed a message from the Floo Office, requesting permission for the Hit Wizard she'd left in charge of extracting the muggleborns to override security protocols, breaching the lockdown to let them out.
Obviously they just wanted to be able to point their finger at someone later if they needed to cover their arses, but it had still been annoying, especially because whoever had sent it seemed to have still been under the impression that Umbridge was giving the orders surrounding Muggle Registration. She'd had to go all the way down to the Floo Office to find the right person to compel into believing that yes, her authority was legitimate, and they should follow her orders as they would those of the Senior Undersecretary.
And then she couldn't even tell them to let them out, because that would still be out of character. Instead, she'd ordered Hit Wizard Johnson to keep minding them until the Aurors relented and started clearing individuals and dismissing them from the building. None of them had been anywhere near the scene of the crime. No investigator in his right mind would waste more than a minute or two establishing their lack of involvement, at which point they would be free to leave. If the Aurors tried to detain them simply for being muggleborn, she'd come down and knock a few heads together for him, but in the meanwhile, they could wait just like everyone else.
She had sent a note to Yaxley reminding him that he couldn't keep people shut up in here forever, and if he couldn't keep the Ministry running smoothly in the absence of the Minister and the Senior Undersecretary, there would be Unfortunate Questions asked in the aftermath of this little kerfuffle. If she had to come find him and personally make him authorise a team to begin clearing and releasing bystanders, she was going to be very annoyed. She'd had no intention of spending all day trying to knock some sense into this decrepit, backward institution.
And of course he would be very annoyed if she came to find him and realised that he was trying to avoid sharing the credit for capturing Harry Potter, so he'd signed off on it immediately. He even ordered them to use evacuation protocols to hasten the process without raising muggle suspicions — allowing unlimited disapparation from particular designated spaces, rather than funnelling all of the unnecessary personnel and visitors out through the same secure channels they used to enter, which would result in endless streams of people who'd never entered a particular public loo suddenly leaving it.
After that, she'd summoned Arthur Weasley to talk to her (ostensibly to determine whether Percival was really as loyal to the Ministry as he seemed, or whether he was secretly still in contact with his family, in spite of his vehement denouncements of them), warned him that Ronald had been captured and escaped, if he had a way to contact his wife he should do so now and warn her to get into hiding. He'd been somewhat wary of this warning, coming from the Death Eater who was seemingly in (tenuous) control of the entire Ministry at the moment, but he couldn't ignore it, nor could he see any way it would put his family in even hotter water to warn Molly that she needed to get out of their house before Yaxley realised Ron was no longer in holding.
He'd used a communication mirror to call his wife, after which Mimi had obliviated him of having done so, planting a constructed memory of Ronald recovering sufficiently to go to school and being sent off to Hogwarts with his sister so that when he was inevitably questioned about his son's and wife's disappearances, he could honestly claim to have no idea what had happened to either of them. (Mind magic really was cheating.) Molly had been instructed before they closed the connection to explain what had happened when Arthur reached safety and called her again. He had been reluctant enough to do so in front of Mimi, even after she'd warned him that Molly's life might be in imminent danger, that she was confident he wouldn't risk exposing her by contacting her before he was certain he was safe and alone, regardless of how shaken he was left by the questioning he was certain to be subjected to.
And of course they'd had a very amusing conversation about Percy making his mother cry when he'd chosen the Ministry over his family, just for the look of the thing. Which Arthur didn't realise was just for the look of it, he was probably going to hate his middle son for getting himself promoted by the Death Eaters, but it couldn't be helped, he really was the only man for the job.
He was desperate to believe that his beloved Ministry was, at its heart, a good and necessary institution corrupted by a few bad apples (like Umbridge) who had managed to wrangle key positions through underhanded politicking and backstabbing so, given the opportunity to take a more sane and 'reasonable' approach to promoting blood purity and pureblood superiority (which he didn't actually disagree with in principle, but most British purebloods were the same, honestly), he was almost pathetically eager to make this new approach successful. (Though the fact that it was a major promotion didn't hurt, either.)
Mimi was confident that if it was at all possible to keep the Commission on the course she'd set for it — even after the Death Eaters realised that she wasn't actually one of them, much less a spy reporting directly to the Dark Lord — Weasley would do so.
She'd met with him one-on-one again after dismissing his father to discuss exactly what she wanted this Commission to do, with no ambiguity or room for confusion (Lucius), and then with the staff of the office en masse, to impress upon them that young Mister Weasley had her full confidence and she expected them to cooperate with him in every regard, whether they thought they were better suited to be running this place or not.
The very fact that they had had more experience and considerably more autonomy than Mister Weasley under the toad's reign, and yet had followed along blindly in the wake of Dolores's utterly psychotic interpretation of her instructions — not one of them so much as attempting to confirm that yes, the people in charge did actually want a fifth of the population of the country eliminated, when birthrates among purebloods and their population as a whole were still declining, never having fully recovered from the unrest of the Seventies — was one of the most compelling reasons not to allow any of them to take over the Commission. They should consider themselves lucky she wasn't sacking the lot of them, but instead giving them an opportunity to salvage this fucking mess they'd made.
She'd even gone so far as to sneer at the lot of them and tell them that she had been looking for someone with leadership potential, not a timid, weak-willed yes-man, which the rest of them clearly were.
...As evidenced by the fact that they were equally willing to fall in line for her as they had been for Umbridge — though to be fair, most of them recognised her from yesterday, when she'd looked a hell of a lot older and more intimidating, which helped. They seemed to be under the impression that she was currently using a de-aging potion as part of the disguise she'd assumed to audit Umbridge, which was convenient. She hadn't even planted that idea, they were just that eager to make sense of what was going on around here today.
She'd stuck around for a couple of hours after that to field any questions which might arise immediately and field inquiries from other departments, though she'd spent most of the time until Yaxley admitted that the intruder(s) must have escaped before the lockdown went fully into effect and called it off working on a list of priorities and potential resources to investigate. (And wishing she had a hangover potion on hand. Fucking dementors.) Weasley had the office itself well in hand — when she'd left at half-past five, he'd been holding a round-table meeting to discuss talking-points for a new pamphlet, after sending someone out to get take-away and coffee for the lot of them. Clearly he was one of those people who was just born for office management. He'd be fine.
Mimi, on the other hand, found everything to do with office work to be even more soul-sucking than speaking directly to the dementors. It was with great relief that she took her leave.