Previously in the Darklyverse: Albert Runcorn won the election for Minister of Magic. Mary got injured trying to domesticate the basilisk she bred for its venom.

xx

April 19th, 1982: Alice Abbott

When it first comes up, she's at James and Lily's house after work, where she's brought Neville to play with Harry now that the Canadians are awake. Neville is delighted to see Harry, clapping his hands and spilling apple juice everywhere. Shy Harry scampers behind James—he hasn't spent as much time around Alice as Neville has around James—but he pokes his head out from around James's legs to watch Alice intently.

James sticks out a hand, and Harry grabs it, tentatively stepping forward. "Say hi to Auntie Alice!" he says in a high pitch.

"Hi," says Harry quietly, but he breaks into a smile and sticks out his free hand when Alice pulls lollipops out of her robe pocket and hands one to each of the boys.

"They're talking about taking away our paid lunches," says Alice, rolling her eyes and ruffling Neville's hair. "We all already work overtime, sometimes for hours, every day, but now they're saying it's a minimum of nine and a half hours instead of nine to get our base pay. You'd think that almost two million Galleons in aid we just started getting from Canada would be put to better use—and yes, they're bringing more new Aurors into the fast-tracked training program Moody's been working on—but they're still cutting corners."

"Under two million Galleons? I thought it was more than that," says James idly.

"Yeah, one point something million—eight hundred thousand Galleons are going to the Auror program, and they're using the rest to hire more Hit Wizards, Obliviators, that sort of thing."

"Yeah, but Britain just got over two million total from us. Lily was saying that some of her coworkers at the hospital were totally outraged about it. They seem to think Britain doesn't need our help—that the Voldemort problem isn't really a problem, as long as it doesn't affect them," says James, rolling his eyes.

"No, I'm telling you, it wasn't that much. Everyone in the Auror Office knows exactly how much money is being allocated to each office, believe me."

James grins. "Do you want me to dig up last week's paper? Because I will fight you on this."

"Oh, go on, then," says Alice, and then she looks down to where Neville is tugging on her robes with one hand and brandishing a stack of drawings he made today in the other.

She oohs and ahhs over the drawings for a minute, inviting Harry to show her his too, until James reenters the living room with a tattered copy of last Wednesday's Vancouver Veritaserum. "I had to dig it out of the rubbish bin," James admits sheepishly, meandering into the kitchen and spreading the paper out on top of the countertop. Alice bounces Neville up onto her hip, takes Harry's hand in her free one, and follows him in, peering over his shoulder at the paper.

The story appears maybe ten pages back, which goes to show how much Canadian wizards care about Dark rulers overseas. Alice figures it's only fair: it's not like she knows much from the Prophet about what's going on outside of Britain. Finally, James finds the article and points to the first paragraph below the headline, which clearly reads, The Canadian Ministry of Magic yesterday approved landmark legislation to donate 2.3 million Galleons in aid over the next six months to the British Ministry, making Canada the first country to aid Britain wizards in their war against the Dark ruler calling himself Lord Voldemort.

"They say his name in your papers?" mutters Alice, skimming the first few paragraphs of the article. This can't be right. Alice would know if that were right.

"Maybe it's a misprint?" says James, but Alice mutters, "Maybe… can I take this home with me, James?"

It keeps bugging her for the rest of the night and through the next day at work. Finally, the next night, she fishes all of last week's Prophets out of her own rubbish bin and lays Wednesday's edition on her kitchen table side-by-side with James's Veritaserum. Clear as day, the first paragraph of her paper's headline reads one point nine million Galleons to the British Ministry, just like everyone at work has been saying.

Alice frowns.

The next morning at work, she tracks down Moody first thing and asks him where she can find copies of the Ministry's financial records. "You'll want to talk to the Treasury on Level One—it's part of the Minister's Support Staff. What do you need financial documentation for, anyway?"

"Just a discrepancy I noticed in the paper," says Alice. "It was probably just a misprint, but I still wanted to look into it."

"Well, let me know if the misprint isn't a misprint," Moody growls.

It takes her a while to find the Treasury when she gets off the lift at Level One. It's buried way at the end of a back corridor; while Alice had been looking for more like a set of offices, or at least a room big enough to hold a few staffers in it, this room has got about the same energy as the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts office on Level Two—dark, small, and cramped. The door is half open when Alice finally finds it, and she can hear a witch inside muttering, "…would be so much easier to corroborate if we had double-entry bookkeeping, but no, the magicians don't think it's necessary to teach maths up at magic school, because accounting is beneath the likes of them—"

"Um—excuse me?" asks Alice, hovering in the doorway.

"Come on in," says the witch in a harried voice. Alice pushes the door the rest of the way open to find the witch sitting hunched at the only desk, stacks of loose parchment piled equally on her desk and the ground halfway up to the ceiling. "What do you want?"

"I, uh—I'm from the Auror Office. We just wanted to double-check the numbers from the deal with Canada—you know the one."

"It's in here somewhere," says the witch, tapping the side of a towering pile on the desk with her wand. It wobbles precariously. Alice is expecting her to sift through and find the record herself, but when the witch doesn't, she hesitantly reaches in and closes her thumb and forefinger around a few sheafs. The witch doesn't tell her off for it, so Alice pulls in the parchments and starts rifling through them.

"I'm Alice," she says. "Alice L—uh—Alice Abbott." She's still getting used to having her old last name back and feels a stab of pain go through her.

"Martine Miponia," says the witch. It's silent for a moment, save for the rifling of Alice's papers and the scratching of Miponia's quill, and then Miponia mutters, "You'd think that a four-year education in accounting would warrant a high enough salary to pay off all my student loans, or at the very least get me a window in this hellhole, wouldn't you?"

"Sorry?"

Miponia looks startled, as if she'd forgotten Alice is there at all. "I just started last month," she says curtly. "I'm a—what do your lot call us? A Muggle." Oh—so not a witch, then. "Apparently your Ministry couldn't find any one of themselves who was competent to fill the Treasurer position after they fired their last one, and I can see why not: you people clearly go through no financial education whatsoever. I was already aware of this place since my daughter is magical, so here I am. I keep telling the Senior Undersecretary that I need to hire somebody to handle the day-to-day runnings of the office while I reorganize everything, but does she listen? Of course not. Why would anyone listen to a Muggle's opinion?"

"The last Treasurer was fired?" Alice asks idly, her eyes lighting on a likely parchment.

"Right around the time your big deal with Canada went through," says Miponia. "You find what you needed there?"

"Uh… maybe," says Alice. Her eyes skim the record: she can see that just over eight hundred Galleons have gone to the Auror Department, which corroborates, but there's clearly more than one point nine million Galleons documented on this page. "What's, uh… what does this part right here mean? There are over four hundred thousand Galleons allocated to, uh—actually, I don't know what it's allocated to. There's a big ink splotch where the name should be."

Hissing, Miponia holds out her hand, and Alice passes her the parchment. Miponia scrutinizes it with squinty eyes for a moment and then roars, "Double-entry bookkeeping! I keep telling them! Not that it's any use to have a backside copy of where the money's going if I can't find the back record in this mess…"

"But—you'll look into it?" says Alice hesitantly.

Miponia gives Alice a look that equal parts guilts her and pisses her off. Here she is, a no-name Auror from Magical Law Enforcement telling some clearly overworked Muggle who's probably talked down to by everyone on this level how to do her job—but the records are Miponia's responsibility, and her ability to do her job reflects on the integrity of the whole Ministry of Magic. "Give me a week," says Miponia shortly, "and I'll get back to you. Abbott in the Auror Office, right?"

"That's right."

"And you're here on—whose authority, exactly?"

"My Head of Office, Alastor Moody." Her voice only shakes a little on the half-lie.

"Right. Well, we'll meet again in a week."

"Thanks, miss."

But a week passes, and Alice doesn't hear any more about it. She goes on three raids—Sturgis Podmore comes very close to getting himself killed on one of them, and it's only Lily's quick Healing work that barely saves him—and, with Remus, Alice kills Mary's basilisk when it reaches maturity. When they come home with an armful of excised fangs, Mary just huffs at them and retreats back into Emmeline's bedroom just as soon as Remus Vanishes the Undetectably Extended dome that they were using to house the basilisk in there. Alice knows Mary's not happy about their refusal to even attempt to rehabilitate the thing and find a home for it, but with her wand hand probably irreparably mangled and the spells she casts with her weak hand mostly failing, Mary's not really in any position to make demands, and she knows it. They all know Mary's got to go home and face her husband one of these days, but she seems content to keep hiding out in Alice's flat and avoiding it, and Alice and Remus let her, even if they shouldn't.

She sees Neville twice, picking him up from Frank's mum's house at the end of long workdays and dropping him back with Frank a few hours later each time, and wonders how long she has before her son figures out that Mum wouldn't have to leave at the end of the evening if she wanted to stay. Of course, that's assuming that Frank would even take her back at this point, which she seriously doubts.

Finally, when she's coming up on a week and a half without a word from Miponia, she nips over to Level One on her lunch break (her unpaid lunch break, she remembers with annoyance) and pokes her head inside the dingy Office of the Treasury. It's empty.

"You won't find the Muggle woman in there," calls a voice from behind her, and Alice whips around to find a wizard looking straight at her through the open door across the hall. "She got fired days ago. They're still looking for a replacement."

"Fired? Why?"

The wizard shrugs. "Stuck her nose where it didn't belong, didn't she? Serves them right, as far as I'm concerned, for bringing one of them in to work for us. She and her hoity-toity nonsense don't belong here. Honestly, the nerve of her."

But Alice doesn't think it's a coincidence that Miponia's predecessor got fired right around the timing of the Canadian deal and, now, that Miponia herself has gotten fired just as soon as Alice asked her to look into the corresponding records. She swallows hard. "Thanks," she says, and she barrels straight toward Moody's office.