In the year she'd been an Unspeakable, Rose had spent time in every room of the Department of Mysteries. She'd listened to lectures and taken notes in Thought, staring at the floating brains that had once attacked her father. She'd wandered the corridors of Time, studying the instruments and actually spending over a month with two other witches as they tried to reconstruct the time turners her parents had destroyed on that same visit. She'd floated through Space, staring at the universe and marveling at its vast expanse and interconnectivity. She'd gone into Love and come out feeling a wonder in her heart that she would never fully forget. She'd recorded prophecies and catalogued them, a process far more complicated than she'd imagined when her Uncle had told her of the small glass globe containing his. To her very great surprise, though, she spent most of her time in Death.
Her training hadn't been anything like she'd imagined it would be. The first week had been the hardest. The most surprisingly difficult part of the transition had been adjusting to the lack of structure. The first six months she'd been left to simply wander and question. After seven years of regimented class schedules, color coded study charts, and carefully coordinated prefects meetings and duties, having total control of every aspect of her day left her feeling lost and a little helpless.
She slept in her tiny office. Every night, she'd wave her wand and her neatly organized desk and books would be replaced by a bed, a fat, squat armchair, and the few items she had designated to keep with her. The mantle of her fireplace never changed, filled to the brim with photos of her family and Scorpius.
A month into her training, she realized she'd written enough to fill the volume. She'd planned to put it away with the rest of her keepsakes, but when she went to do so, the pages were blank again and there was a second inscription.
I told you that you think too much. Love, Scorpius
Then, she'd found the veil. The voices were louder for her than for others, she knew, but their presence soothed her. The murmurings were peaceful, and the knowledge that they were there made Rose feel inexplicably safe in a time of otherwise chaos in her life. And so she often sat and listened and after a few weeks her brain began to work again.
For eight months Rose never left the department, and she spoke to no one who was not an Unspeakable. Once, she'd almost caught a glimpse of a wizard she was sure was her Uncle Harry in an office, but the door had closed and she was never sure. When she was finally allowed to leave the department, she accompanied Moon to strange sites of intense magic all over first England, then Scotland, then Europe, Africa, and, twice, Japan. She stared at runes and sat in fields and observed, and all the while her brain questioned. Every thought she had, every memory she made, went into her little diary. A few weeks into her travels and the little book was full again.
I wish I was there to tell you how jealous I am of the adventure you must be on. Love, Scorpius
That had been a hard night, and she'd spent an embarrassing amount of time running her fingers over the neat script as she sat in her chair and missed him. Through it all, she'd missed Scorpius and Al so much that it was a constant, nervous ache in her chest. The joy of every new discovery or experience was colored by her inability to share it with her best friends.
Now, at the year mark, her testing was to begin in earnest. Rose knew that if she did not pass these tests - and she still had no idea what to expect - that the last year of her memory would disappear and she'd start over as plain old Rose Weasley once more.
She was sitting in front of the veil, contemplating what the tests might be, when Moon slipped silently onto the bench next to her.
"Miss Weasley," he said politely.
Turning to face him with a smile, she replied, "Moon, you really can call me Rose."
It was a game she played, trying to get Moon to treat her like a friend. It was lonely work, being an Unspeakable. The department was a small one, and her Uncle Harry hadn't lied when he'd said she was the first Unspeakable to be selected in eleven years. It meant that everyone was older than her, not that the rest of her coworkers were particularly sociable anyway. Moon had started Hogwarts with her parents, but was a Ravenclaw. For a while she thought that connection might get him to open up, but no matter how hard she tried or how crafty she was, he never warmed past professional courtesy.
"I have your assignment."
Rose sucked in a breath. "Yes?"
He handed her a parchment, and she unrolled it with trembling hands. She read it and stared in confusion before looking questioningly at Moon.
"I'm to go to a pub?" She couldn't quite keep the incredulity out of her tone.
"Yes," Moon said simply.
"I'm to go to a Muggle pub as myself, sit for forty minutes, and observe?"
"Yes."
"And I'm not to use magic?"
"Well, it is a muggle pub, Miss Weasley."
It was the closest thing to a joke she'd ever gotten from Moon and she couldn't help beaming at him.
"But there has to be more to it than that."
"There often is," he said, and this time his voice was almost sad. "Remember. You may acknowledge no one. You are to observe and report back on every detail that you see."
Rose nodded and Moon slipped away as quietly as he had arrived. She sat, parchment clenched in her hand, and listened to the voices call out to her. Sighing, she picked up her bag and headed to her room to change.
When she apparated around the corner from the pub, she frowned. Something about the place seemed familiar, but she couldn't quite place what that something was. The evening was balmy and warm, and it felt good to be free of her robes, to let her hair float down past her shoulders and slip back into the world.
As soon as the door opened, someone called out to her. "Rose! Hey, Rose, over here!"
Immediately she knew why she had recognized this particular pub. With a deep breath, she walked to the bar, ignoring James's repeated shouts to her. As far as most of her family knew, she was taking a gap year to have a tour. As far as four members of her family - James, Fred, Victoire, and Ted - knew, she was walking right past them and deliberately refusing to look their way.
As she ordered a pint - she had to drink something or people would surely notice her - she heard their confused murmurings. Her whole body flushed in embarrassment, and tears threatened as James approached the bar.
"Rose! Didn't you hear us? We're over - "
Willing herself not to cry, she slid her muggle money across the counter, collected her pint, and headed to a small booth in a corner.
"What the hell?" James demanded. "What the bloody hell. I'm standing right here. I know you can hear me!"
Ducking her head, she slid into her booth and took stock of her surroundings. As James pleaded with her, she counted the number of people in the room. She counted chairs and tables and memorized the pattern in the carpet. She focused on anything but the fact that her cousins were standing there, their begging becoming more and more belligerent, as she refused to acknowledge their existence.
"Is she ok?" Victoire was whispering to Ted.
Rose wanted to throw up. Still, she forced herself to keep drinking. As Fred slid in across from her, staring at her hard, she catalogued the songs that had played on the radio. She memorized the menu. She listened to the bartender's conversations.
For thirty-six minutes she sat there, taking in every detail she could as one by one her cousins peeled away from her. She had four minutes left when James started yelling.
"It's bad enough you don't sodding write - Lily's been moping around all summer - but now what? We're not good enough for you anymore? You bloody leave without saying goodbye and - "
As soon as the second hand indicated that her forty minutes were up she stood, collected her bag, and headed for the door. Behind her, her cousins called out to her again but she walked deliberately forward, stepped out into the evening, and barely made it around the corner before she was apparating back to the department.
Moon was waiting for her, arms crossed as he leaned against a wall. "Tell me everything."
Implicitly she knew that he didn't mean what had happened with her family, so she just started talking. Every tiny detail she'd used to distract herself, from the people to the conversations to the number of beers on tap, poured out of her. When she was finished she stood, chest heaving, and glared at Moon.
"Well done, Miss Weasley," he said quietly before turning and leaving her in the corridor.
Alone, she slid down the wall and let her tears flow.
For the first five days after she'd ignored her family, she sat anxiously in her room, waiting for her next assignment. When it didn't come, she spent two solid days in Love, looking for anything to fill the hole she'd had to dig inside of herself in order to turn her back on her cousins. Never before had she felt more selfish nor more unworthy of being a Weasley than she did in those days remembering those moments. Luckily, the second and third tasks came in quick succession, and neither, thankfully, involved seeing anyone she knew.
The second task was a series of puzzles that had to be put together, each of which formed the word in a riddle. Rose found it a relief after the emotional punch of her first task to do something so mindless and, frankly, easy. Moon looked over her work, gave a curt nod, and disappeared again. The third task involved the tracing of a myth to its source and uncovering the magic at its root. It took her six weeks and a trip to Wales, but she managed it. Moon again looked over her work, gave her a curt nod, and disappeared.
The fourth task was almost bizarre. Moon popped out from between the shelves one day as she was sorting prophecies, handed her a piece of paper, and told her to start writing down questions. The first thing she wrote was Why am I writing questions? Then, for an hour, she sat on the floor, quill scratching, as she filled the rest of the parchment. When Moon snatched the parchment away from her, she looked up at him and wondered if her questions would be answered. He gestured for her to follow him, and together they went to Thought. With a wave of his wand, the words lifted off the parchment and flowed into the tank of brains, sinking into the eerie green liquid. Rose watched, fascinated, as her questions shimmered and faded away.
"Do I pass?" she asked, eyebrows raised as she continued to stare at the brains.
"Yes." Moon walked out of the room, and Rose watched him go with a shake of her head.
Her next assignment came almost four agonizing months later. It was Christmas day and she was in Time repairing a time-turner. An elderly witch, appeared, dropped off the parchment, and walked silently away without even a hello. Rose clutched the task in her hand and hurried to her room, wanting to read what she was sure would be her final task in private.
When she finally sat at her desk and unrolled the parchment, she frowned. It was the most straightforward of all her assignments, but also seemed the most technically difficult, but then, she couldn't imagine a more emotionally difficult task than her first.
Moon appeared as she was closing her bag.
"Miss Weasley."
"Moon, come on. We've known each other a year. You're my mentor - not that I think any of you understand what the word actually means sometimes. Call me Rose."
"Miss Weasley," he said again, ignoring her. "I've come to ensure you have no questions about this final task?"
"What?" she asked, confused that he would offer help but relieved to know that this was in fact her final challenge. "No. I mean, it's all in the assignment, isn't it? Go to Dalby Forest and stop another ministry official from finding an artifact by finding it first myself."
"Yes," Moon said. "Another department is investigating a series of strange occurrences and disappearances. You must find the source before that department and return it to here for study."
Rose frowned. "But what about the disappearances?"
"Once the object is removed, there will not be any more disappearances," Moon said simply.
"I understand," she said, shouldering her bag, retrieving her wand, and disappearing into the wilderness.