Emma rolled her hair into a bun on the top of her head, hands shaking as she was approaching the end of her second week of work at the Ministry. She'd already pulled on her robes and she realized vaguely that she would need another set so that she wasn't washing so often, because it was exhausting and Fred wasn't half as good at it as she was.

"You look lovely this morning, my love," Fred cooed, kissing her cheek. "Hope you're not cheating with old Perkins."

She stuck her tongue out at him.

"You're looking fairly dapper yourself," she teased. "Been running around with Tien?"

Fred shuddered and winced.

"If I ever even joked about something like that darling," he said solemnly, "have me taken to St. Mungo's, because it means something is terribly, horribly wrong."

"Noted," she sighed, dabbing on a bit of lip gloss. "Was it George's morning to make breakfast?"

Fred nodded, stretching a bit as he looked for his shoes.

"Yeah, so you may want to grab something on your way to work."

"Be nice," she chastised playfully.

George's breakfasts weren't as bad as all that, but they certainly left something to be desired. She probably would grab something on the way.

Emma kicked the missing shoe out from under the little table she'd set up under the mirror so she could put on her makeup in their room and Fred yelped when it hit him in the leg.

"Thanks, darling," he said dryly, "but next time try not to assault me, would you?"

"I'll do my best, dear," she said with a playful sigh. "I've got to get going if I'm going to pick up food to go or I'll be late. How do I look?"

"Excellent."

"You're not even looking."

"I don't have to, you're always excellent."

Emma was torn between being flattered and being annoyed, so she just kissed his cheek when he straightened from putting his shoe on and said, "I'll see you for lunch if there's no raids, love. Don't have too much fun without me, okay?"

"I'll do my very best," he teased, realizing his fly was undone and doing it up, straightening out his hair as she backed toward the door. "I do work in a joke shop, though, so it might be a bit difficult."

"Don't do anything I wouldn't do?"

He sighed.

"Emma, you know I would have to find another line of work for that," he said with a small smirk.

She just shook her head, kissed his cheek again, and took off to work, deciding to walk so she could find breakfast along the way.

"Are you leaving already?" George whined as she grabbed her bag, which she had left by the couch. "I made breakfast."

"And it smells lovely," Emma lied, "but I'm going to be late if I don't get going now, and you know Perkins. He'll be late no matter what! So I've got to go, but I'm sure it's a lovely breakfast, sorry!"

She rushed out the door and made her way down Diagon Alley to the Leaky Cauldron, through the Pub, which was very much empty at this time of the morning except for Tom the bartender, who waved at her as she went through. When she found herself in Muggle London, she followed the familiar bath toward the Ministry worker's entrance, keeping her eyes peeled for the cafe she sometimes stopped at on the way to work.

When she pushed open the door, she saw the familiar face of Porter, the son of the owners who always worked mornings while his parents slept in. He was a couple of years older than Emma, and he always brightened up when he saw her.

"Hey, Emma!" he said happily. "Breakfast?"

"Yes, please," she sighed. "To go. I've got work."

"You've not said what you do," he said, getting some tea brewing for her and starting a breakfast sandwich. "Something for the government?"

"Yeah," she said awkwardly. "I can't really talk about it... It's sort of in the diplomacy and public relations sector. It's... complicated."

"You're so smart," he said, grinning at her. "I never could have pulled that off, especially so young."

Emma shrugged, tapping her fingers on the counter slightly impatiently. She'd told Porter that she'd skipped a few years in school because it was easier than explaining that she'd not been to university and somehow had a fabulous government job.

"So, what are you doing after work?" he asked.

Shrugging, Emma said, "I dunno, probably just relax a bit. They've been making a lot of changes in the last week or so and it's been really stressful."

He hesitated a moment, putting a bit of honey in her tea like she liked and stirring.

"If... if you want I know this great place... we could get dinner..."

Emma blinked.

"I, um... Porter, I'm married," she said sheepishly, wondering how she could have completely missed that this sweet boy had been flirting with her for weeks. It suddenly made perfect sense that she and Fred had spent years not realizing that their crushes were mutual. They were pathetic.

"Oh," Porter said, visibly dampened by this news, but his eyes slightly suspicious. "You... you don't wear a ring and you haven't ever mentioned..."

"We married recently," Emma explained nervously, trying not to seem rushed as he put a lid on her tea and began putting her sandwich together. "And we've not decided how we're breaking the news to his mother yet, so there's no ring at the moment. And I never mentioned because you never asked and I didn't think... I mean, it never came up." She bit her lip as he put the sandwich in a to-go bag. "Look, I'm sorry if-"

"Don't worry about it," Porter sighed. "He's a lucky guy, whoever he is. Hope work's okay."

"Thanks," she muttered awkwardly, feeling like there was something else she should say, but she couldn't think of it so she just took her food and tea and left, wondering if she should make a point to find another breakfast place on her route to work.

On the job, Emma dealt primarily with Perkins and a few other offices that dealt with catastrophes and accidents. Due to the war, most of the crimes that she was dealing with had a bit of a sinister tinge, so she didn't talk about her work with Fred, who worried far too much already. She'd never had to do more than write reports to anyone above her in the Ministry, but that morning she had a surprise visitor.

"Percy?" she gasped, seeing the familiar ginger standing in her office when she arrived, drinking the last of her tea. "What are you doing here?"

Surely he wasn't looking for his father. He would have known that his father had been promoted to a different department.

"Miss Norwick," Percy said sharply. "The Minister wishes me to fetch you."

The Minister? Scrimgeour? What had she done?

"What for?"

Percy said nothing and began leading her down the hall. She hadn't spoken to him since he graduated, she realized, and since before he'd fallen out with his family, before she'd started dating Fred.

Did Percy know that she was with Fred? Did he suspect that she was an Order member? She could certainly lose her job for that, if nothing worse, but then she would lose her usefulness to the Order, her chance to save lives. Emma could feel her stomach churning at the thought, her hands clenching and unclenching nervously as she walked.

Rufus Scrimgeour was sitting at his desk when Percy led her into his office, a solemn look on his face, which was surrounded by a mess of hair that made him look a bit like a lion. But he'd been in Slytherin, not Gryffindor. Somehow, in light of recent events, that didn't make Emma feel any more secure about standing in his office.

"Miss Norwick," he rumbled. "Have a seat. Leave us, Weasley."

Percy bowed his head slightly and left, closing the door and enclosing Emma in with her boss, the man she was meeting for the first time. It took everything in her to keep her face neutral and not completely tense up. She sat down as requested and looked up at him, forcing herself to breathe as smoothly as possible.

"Would you care for something to drink, Miss Norwick?"

In her mind she was suddenly back in Umbridge's office, about to be interrogated for the dozenth time. She shook her head.

"I've just had a cuppa," she said softly.

"Are you quite sure?"

"Yes, sir," she nodded. He didn't seem the type to force her to have something to drink, unlike Umbridge. "Was there something you needed me for?"

"I see that you're acquainted with Percy Weasley," Scrimgeour said, watching her for a reaction which didn't come.

"We were in school together for several years, sir," she explained.

"And the rest of his family?"

"I'm friends with his brothers, who were in my year," she offered, trying not to shift in her seat. There was no secret at all that the Weasleys were in Dumbledore's inner circle, a place that Scrimgeour seemed to want to infiltrate badly. According to the papers, things hadn't been going well between the two of them at all.

"I see," he said, tapping his fingers on his desk. "You were a Gryffindor, were you not?"

"Yes, sir," Emma said slowly, wondering where this was going.

"So you knew Harry Potter."

And that's where it was going. Scrimgeour's infamous 'falling out' with Dumbledore supposedly had something to do with Harry. He would want to use her to convince Harry of something, or to pass on some sort of message. But obviously whatever Scrimgeour wanted wasn't what Dumbledore wanted, so it probably wasn't what was good for Harry or the war.

"Not very well, sir," Emma said, not exactly lying. "It was only ever proximal. I could count our brief conversations on my fingers."

"I see," he said, obviously masking his disappointment. "And Albus Dumbledore? Did you have a particularly close relationship with him?"

"No, I wouldn't say so, sir," Emma said honestly. "I must have spoken with him all of three times in school, and it was all logistical concerns."

"I see," Scrimgeour said, and from the look on his face Emma would have guessed that he didn't entirely believe her. "And now that you are out of Hogwarts? Have you had contact with him since then?"

Had she had contact with him? Not exactly. Had she seen him? Absolutely, but she'd not said a word at Order meetings yet, and she certainly hadn't been spoken to directly by Albus Dumbledore, when he was at the meetings anyway. So that didn't count, did it?

"No, I have not, sir," Emma said softly. "May I ask what exactly you want from me, sir? I have quite a few reports to finish filling out, sir, and I am not certain of what I am here for."

Perhaps he had hesitated for a moment, wondering if he could actually tell Emma whatever the reason for bringing her had been, but she knew that it would be something about the Order, something about Dumbledore, and telling an employee who claimed to know nothing would be dangerous for him. Either it would be an admittance of his own inadequacy in dealing with those forces to someone who had been oblivious, or it would be a tipoff to Dumbledore if she were lying.

"Well," Scrimgeour then said, "I suppose you can go now, Miss Norwick. See that your work on those reports is thorough. You have been given quite a lot of responsibility right away, and I would hate for that to swallow you up."

My heart pounded as I nodded, thanked him, and left his office to go back to my place.

He might not have been able to prove anything, but if that wasn't a warning to watch my back, I didn't know what was.

What happened that day, though, was a disaster. Emma got a memo that told her that she needed to go check out a bridge that had been collapsed by the Death Eaters.

"I'm sorry, what?" she asked the man from the Muggle Liaison office. "Is this really my department?"

"The bridge was a Muggle artifact, was it not?"

Emma tried to explain that bridges were architectural structures, not artifacts, but she was still very new, so nobody really wanted to listen to her, despite the fact that she was Muggle-born.

When she got to the bridge, she looked around, trying to find the Ministry representatives.

"Muggle Artifacts?"

She turned to find a man watching her with a raised eyebrow.

"Yeah," she said. "Emma W-Norwick. You?"

"Oscar Felix, Accidents and Catastrophes. We've got Jordan Rodier out of Muggle Liaison, Angus Leriche as our Obliviator, and Callum Barta and Nymphadora Tonks out of the Aurors Office."

"Right," Emma said nervously. At least there would be a familiar face in all the mess. "Why am I hear, Oscar? This doesn't have anything to do with my department."

Oscar shrugged.

"We were told specifically from the Minister's office to get you in on it. I'm not sure why. It's not standard."

Ah, so that's what the game was. Scrimgeour was making her workload ridiculously heavy trying to get her out of the Ministry because he didn't trust her. Whether he knew she was Dumbledore's agent or not, he certainly didn't want to take a risk on it.

Well, that just meant that she would have to make sure that she got everything done and to even better quality than was expected of her, because she wasn't going to lose her job.

"What's happened, then?" she asked, checking her watch and wondering how many memos were piling up on her desk while she was gone.

She got a brief description of what they thought had happened at the bridge and she was wondering why there was even a taskforce on it other than for show. The damage couldn't be reversed with such a small taskforce, and it would be harder to deal with the Muggles that way, anyway. And there would be no hope of catching the culprits at this point. They were Death Eaters. Telling one from another with such a non-specific crime would be impossible.

"All right, I want to see Nymphadora Tonks," she said, and Oscar nodded, leading the way to where Tonks was arguing with a young man Emma assumed must be Callum.

"Emma?" Tonks asked. "Why are you on this? I thought you had Arthur's old job."

"I do," Emma said with a snort. "Scrimgeour doesn't like me and is looking for excuses to fire me. I believe the latest is sending me on ridiculous irrelevant things like this in hopes that I'll get behind on my paperwork."

Tonks snorted.

"Clever," she said. "I would have thought he'd have enough legitimate stuff to throw at you that he wouldn't need to be so obvious about it. Well, as you can see, it's pretty straightforward. Go ahead and do you write-up, Oscar and I will sign off on it-"

"Why are you signing off on it?" Callum whined.

"Because you're still in training and I'm in charge," Tonks said sassily. "Anyway, we'll take care of it, Emma, don't worry. Oscar will probably give somebody an earful and we'll see what we can do so you aren't dragged along on wild goose chases like this again. Merlin knows you've got enough work to do."

Emma sighed heavily with relief.

"Thanks, Tonks," she said eagerly. "I'm sure Fred would thank you, too, if I told him about this. I would have been working through half the night otherwise."

"Yeah, yeah," Tonks waved her off teasingly. "You go off and write so you can spend the night with your lover."

Emma smiled, laughed, and went back to her office right away, but when she sat down at her desk and pulled out everything she needed to work on the various reports she was writing up, Emma realized there was something off about Tonks's demeanor.

She hadn't noticed at first because she'd subconsciously attributed it to Tonks being at work and not in an Order meeting, but then Emma realized that she hadn't really noticed it until the end of the conversation, until Tonks was talking about her and Fred. In fact, the most markedly strange bit was the almost bitter way Tonks had said the word 'lover'.

Could Tonks be in love with someone?

Well, of course she could be, Emma chastised herself. After all, she was young, vibrant, pretty. Sure, she was a part of a top-secret organization and had one of the most time-consuming jobs on the planet, but who said that couldn't work? After all, the same could be said of Emma and Fred's relationship.

But what made their relationship easier was that they were both in that top-secret organization.

And then Emma thought that perhaps the person Tonks was in love with was a part of the Order as well. Who could that be? There wasn't anyone Tonks's age but Charlie and Bill, and Bill was engaged and Charlie on the other end of the continent. So it would have to be someone older. Kingsley? Dedalus? Remus?

Each of them had their plusses and minuses and it didn't take Emma long to decide it would almost have to be Kingsley or Remus.

She didn't have a lot of time to dwell on the consideration of which of the two it was, but she made a mental note to consider it later, to watch Tonks closer at meetings. After all, it wasn't enough to simply have a job, a husband, and fight a war. Emma needed a hobby as well.

And with that she turned back to the pile of paperwork on her desk, determined not to give Scrimgeour any purpose to fire her.