Written for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry (Challenges & Assignments)
Assignment #4 - Extinct Languages
Task #2: Coptic - Write about something/someone that is destined to fail.
Warnings: unreliable narrator, canon discrimination & bigotry
Further prompts are at the end.
Word Count: 1,144
He enters the Ministry, as soon as he graduates from Hogwarts, and he rises quickly in the Department of Law Enforcement, because he's good at following orders, and that's how you become successful.
(He doesn't think about the fact that he's a pure-blood; doesn't realize that they passed over a dozen Muggle-borns and half-bloods to promote him; doesn't notice that there are two half-bloods and not a single Muggle-born at his level in the Ministry.)
He's not a kiss-up, and he hasn't got a single leader bone in his body, which is why he doesn't go higher, but he's high enough to make Malfoy's charges go away, when Cornelius Fudge slips him a message telling him to. And yeah, maybe it's unfair that people like Lucius Malfoy can buy their way out of prison, but it's not like there's anything he can do. If he refuses, they'll just fire him and give his job to someone who would do it, and then where would he be?
(He's never heard of something called the ripple effect, and even if he had, he'd never believe it could apply to him.)
When he walks through Diagon Alley, he doesn't meet the eyes of the few, straggling Mudblood beggars - looking at them only encourages them, or so his mother used to say. Scum, he thinks, once they're a safe distance away. We'd be better off without them polluting our streets. Lazy, worthless riff-raff.
(He doesn't dwell on why they don't have jobs, why they're on the streets.)
His daughter starts school, the same year as Harry Potter. She writes to him about the Boy-Who-Lived, about how he's a Gryffindor (as expected), about how small he looks, about his friends, about how he joins the Quidditch team as a first-year. Don't get too close to him, he tells her. You never know which way the wind will blow. Though he worries about her, all the same. She's always been withdrawn, friendless, unsocial, and now that she's hundreds of miles away and alone…
(He doesn't consider the Muggle-born students, who are even more alone than his daughter is, in this new world that scorns them for something they cannot control.)
He goes to work daily, doing the same things over and over again. Obeying orders, tasks, requests, messages slipped under the table. When Harry Potter wins the Triwizard Tournament with a dead body and a message that 'He's back', he listens as the Ministry decides that Potter's lying, and comes up with the documents that 'prove' it.
(He pushes away thoughts that maybe Potter's right, because thoughts like that are dangerous, and could get him fired, and he doesn't want his family in danger.)
When the Senior Undersecretary to the Minister, Dolores Umbridge, tell him to send Dementors to Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey, he goes to Azkaban bringing the orders and comes back, shuddering at the experience, his task fulfilled.
(He doesn't wonder why he listens to her, when he despised her like most everyone else, in school. He doesn't ponder why she wants Dementors sent to a Muggle neighborhood. He doesn't stop to ask whether she's got express instructions from the Minister.)
He slips by, half-hidden in the shadows and tumult of a change in administration, as the truth of the Dark Lord's return is revealed and Fudge resigns and Rufus Scrimgeour becomes Minister, and for that, he is relieved, but not surprised. There is a reason why he does not take the lead, and this is it: because he does not want to face the fallout that comes from being the face of any movement.
(He doesn't consider what he would do if that, staying neutral, no longer became an option. If staying hidden and following orders came at odds. Nor does he contemplate actually doing what is right. Morals do not last long in politics.)
When Scrimgeour dies and Pius Thicknesse becomes the Minister, he is suddenly promoted, to Deputy Head of the DMLE, directly under Corban Yaxley, he is terrified. He asks around, trying to find who promoted him, who tugged at the strings and got him this higher, yet too-visible and too-exposed position. It's not Yaxley, nor Thicknesse, neither of whom actually know who he is. He traces the promotion down to the poison-smiled, pink-dressed witch who is now Head of the Muggleborn Registration Commission.
"I like you, Albert," she tells him, still smiling, as he asks to be reassigned (demoted). "I can trust you to do what I tell you to, no questions asked. Should I not?"
He knows what she implies. He backs down and accepts his promotion. And when they tell him to research this wizard's family tree, to take in that suspected Mudblood, he does what he does best. He follows orders. Though he hates the notoriety that comes with his new position; hates the wizards who toady up to him and the wizards who shout at him for what he has done and the wizards who glare at him as he passes by.
(He doesn't linger over what happens to those he exposes, those he incarcerates.)
He still walks through Diagon Alley, whose streets seem so dark, so solemn, now. He still looks away from the now-overflowing masses of Mudblood beggars on the street. They're lucky they haven't been killed, or worse, he thinks as he reaches the doors of Gringotts.
(He doesn't register how lucky he is.)
When a witch and a wizard, both of whom he vaguely recognizes from work, and both of whom don't seem to realize who he is, half-force a sweet upon him, and he gets a terrible nosebleed, it isn't until he gets home and finds that the nosebleed doesn't seem to be stopping that he starts to get suspicious. He rushes back to the Ministry after drinking a healing potion and heads to Yaxley's office to tell him that there might be intruders in the Ministry.
"You think?" Yaxley snarls as he finally returns, his body trembling with the after-effects of the Cruciatus.
(He doesn't see anything unusual with the fact that he can recognize symptoms of the Cruciatus so easily. But he is incredibly grateful for the fact that he doesn't answer directly to the Dark Lord.)
When Harry Potter defeats the Dark Lord, when the Order of the Phoenix retakes the Ministry, he is one of the first to be arrested, after Thicknesse and Yaxley and Umbridge.
"I was just following orders," he denies as they try him in front of the suddenly unfamiliar and unfriendly Wizengamot.
"Ever heard of Nuremberg?" the judge asks drily. He shakes his head, though he's fairly certain her question is rhetorical. "Well, maybe you should've taken Muggle Studies. That's not an excuse anymore."
And for the first time, he finds that his following-orders, keeping-his-head-down strategy fails him.
(Perhaps it was destined to fail.)
Summer Seasonal Challenges
Days of the Year & Religious Events: 14th July - National Nude Day: Write about something or someone being exposed (in any sense)
Unlucky Month for Weddings: (word) Solemnly
National Indoor Plant Month: Chinese Money Plant: (setting) Gringotts
Crystals & Gemstones: Rainbow Moonstone: (word) Lucky
Writing Club: September
Record Collection: 24k Magic: Calling All My Lovelies: Write about casting blame on someone else for something they did
Time Machine: Profession: Auror
Book Club: Porfiry Petrovich: (occupation) Auror, (theme) justice, (plot point) a trial
Showtime: I Won't Say I'm in Love - (word) Deny
Adam Sandler: Click: Write about someone taking the easy way
Chessington World of Adventures: Cobra: Write about a Slytherin
Scamander's Case: (word) defeat
Film Festival: (word) witch
Marvel Appreciation: Yaxley
TV Spree: Eleanor - (trait) Selfish
Forecast: 28th. Sunny: Higher
EnTitled: The One Where Rachel Quits - Write about someone quitting their job/getting a better job
In Memoriam: Regulus Black - Write about making a decision too late
Pick a Wick: Silver Fir: (trait) ambitious