May 5th, 1982: Reginald Cattermole

At first, Reg isn't sure where to go. Where does anybody go when they've just walked out on their spouse? He knows he has friends who would take him in—for one thing, Gilderoy got back from Turkey two weeks ago and would probably be happy for the company—but staying with Gilderoy would involve Reg having to admit to Gilderoy what exactly happened between him and Mary, and he's got no desire to talk about her with literally anyone in his life. It's too raw, for one thing. For another, if he confides in the wrong person, Mary could end up in Azkaban just because Reg couldn't keep his trap shut about her illegal activities.

It's not like he hasn't known about or at least suspected this for months now, but it's still a shock that Mary is a criminal—that they've acknowledged it out in the open with each other. Before they were talking about it, he could pretend like it wasn't real, but it is real. It's real, and they can't ever go back to the way it was before.

It's not even six in the morning yet, but he's got nowhere else to go, so he goes to the Ministry and clocks in early. He's not supposed to work overtime—the Ministry is too stingy for that—but it won't kill his supervisor if he flexes his hours a little, arrives early and clocks out early, too. Reg has got bigger problems to worry about right now than getting a slap on the wrist for disobeying protocol.

Nobody's here, which means there isn't anyone to actually give Reg any jobs to do. He figures he can get a head start on enchanting the windows with today's weather. If he's got any time after that before his supervisor arrives, he can resume troubleshooting the interdepartmental memos, which have been going into the lifts and staying there even when they arrive on the correct floor.

Most days, Reg finds enchanting the windows relaxing, even meditative. The spell is moderately complex, but he's done it enough times in his career that it's easy to lose himself in the spellwork and let the unoccupied half of his mind drift wherever it wants to go. Today, though, he finds himself wishing that he'd chosen a task that required enough brainpower to keep his attention fully occupied and away from his own thoughts.

His wife is a vigilante. He knows he'd suspected it, but a bigger part of Reg than he'd realized must have been clinging to the vain hope that he had it all wrong—that what the Gryffindors had gotten Mary mixed up in wasn't anything nearly so dangerous.

He shouldn't have left. Reg knows he shouldn't have left. If he wants to convince Mary to get herself to safety and get away from the mess she's entrenched herself in, he's going to need to gain her trust, talk to her—at a bare minimum, spend time in the same flat as her. But they've been married and living together for years now; she's known all along how he feels about her Gryffindor friends, and it apparently wasn't enough to stop her. If Reg goes back, what could he possibly say to her that might have a shot at changing her mind? The only move he has left is to walk out—to pray to god that she'll listen to an ultimatum if he delivers her one. All he can hope is that she listen before he loses her to the Death Eaters.

Like he said, it's easy to get lost in his thoughts when he's enchanting windows—so he's startled when he rounds a corner and hears voices nearby. Reg is on the first level where Runcorn's and his support staff's offices are located. If he's not mistaken, the voice he's hearing right now can only belong to—

Look, Reg has always detested Dolores Umbridge. She was a year ahead of him at Hogwarts, and he doesn't just hate her because she's a power-hungry, soul-sucking monster of an asshole who treated Muggle-borns and non-Slytherins alike with the most cutting cruelty. He hates her because she stood by and did nothing, even with her prefect powers, anytime anybody hexed Mary in the corridors just for being Muggle-born.

In the few short years since she's graduated, she's managed to worm her way into an assistant post here at the Ministry. Though it's nothing too glamorous, it's still a position on Level One, just a few promotions away from putting her advice directly in the Minister's ear. Knowing Umbridge, she'll probably become Junior Assistant or even Senior Undersecretary to the Minister by the time she's thirty. Sure enough, Reg realizes as he glances at the placard outside the occupied office, she's talking to the current Junior Assistant to the Minister, Gwendolyn Bragge, right now—probably sucking up as best as she possibly can. Umbridge never was above bootlicking.

"I'm just suggesting," Umbridge is saying in an unctuous voice that sets Reg's teeth on edge, "that it might be prudent to leave the Treasurer position vacant for a few more weeks. If Runcorn really is being ousted—"

"We don't really know that, though," counters Bragge, but she doesn't sound pissed at Umbridge (unfortunately): she sounds nervous. "Just because Miponia started digging around for inconsistencies doesn't mean she would have found any or that that was why she was fired. Even if she had turned something up, the error might not have been deliberate. Even if it were, it might not have been Runcorn's error. Anyway, her position—and ours—aren't political: none of us is supposed to lose our jobs when there are transitions of leadership. We're hired, not elected or appointed."

"Come now, Gwendolyn. You and I and most of the rest of the support staff were hired fresh when Runcorn won the election and was no longer interim in the Minister post. Who's to say that his replacement, if there is one soon, won't do the same?"

"So you're saying—what?" Bragge asks carefully. "That there's no point hiring a Treasurer who'd just get fired from the post right along with me? That if I want to keep my job… I still don't see how that factors in."

"You need to make it clear, I think—I only think! I don't know much—"

Sure you don't, Reg is thinking—or, at least, Umbridge thinks she knows everything, even if she's claiming not to. But he digresses.

"—But I do believe that a new Minister will be more likely to see you as an asset—an ally—if you leave the door open for him to, ah, make changes to our offices more easily."

"'Him?'" asks Bragge with a hint of laughter in her voice. "Who's to say that another interim Minister, if we need one, would be a man? Bagnold was a woman, and so was Lily Potter."

"Bagnold didn't survive the position," says Umbridge delicately, "and Potter has made it rather clear that she's exited the political scene since her defeat two and a half years ago. She didn't even bother to run in the special election Runcorn won, did she?"

"What ever happened to Potter, anyway? I would have thought that she'd at least have given quotes to the Prophet or something when Bagnold was killed or during Runcorn's election, but it's like she's disappeared off the face of the earth. She's supposedly not Healing at St. Mungo's anymore, either. It's like she's just been gone ever since she lost the election. She did place second back in '79. She probably could have beaten Runcorn if she'd have run against him."

"A Muggle-born? With her stance on vigilante justice? Please. If Bagnold, a half-blood and a moderate, was murdered on the job, there's just no way the voters would have put their faith after that in Potter. They'd have expected her to get herself killed, too."

There's a short pause. "Bagnold didn't get herself killed. She didn't deserve or ask for what she got."

"Of course," tweets Umbridge.

But it gets Reg thinking as he continues to enchant the windows all the way down the corridor and around the corner. What did happen to the Potters? Mary's mentioned seeing them, even supposedly started that long vacation with Evans right before her injury, but Reg hasn't seen either of them in… a couple of years, probably. Mary's other Gryffindor friends all drop by the flat every now and then, even if mostly Mary goes to them and not the other way around, but Evans and Potter… Mary claimed once a while back that they were living off their fortune in order to spend more time with their baby, that that was why they'd quit their jobs, but that doesn't explain why Reg hasn't seen either of them in literally years.

He remembers abruptly and painfully that he can't go home tonight to even ask Mary about it. Then he remembers that, even if he could, she probably would lie to him in response.

Or would she? He knows now—has heard it straight from Mary herself—what Mary's involved in. Does she have any reason left to continue to lie to him about what she and her friends are mixed up in? Is she done with all the secrets or only the overarching one?

Of course, for Mary to start telling Reg the goddamn truth about anything in her life, he'd have to give her the opportunity—to go home. And he can't do that, not today, not when he's terrified that the next time he sees her will be the last before she ends up dead just like Bagnold.

He doesn't want to, but he goes to Gilderoy's new flat after work. By the time Reg clocks out, it's hardly two o'clock in the afternoon, since he started his shift today so early in the first place—but it's not like Gilderoy is away at his own job or anything. Rather, ever since Gilderoy got back from Turkey, he's foregone searching for employment in favor of staying home to write a book about his travels and the hag he supposedly saved some Muggle village from. As bad as this sounds, Reg is a little skeptical of what Gilderoy claims to have accomplished in Turkey—but he'll give Gilderoy this: he's a good writer. Reg has read the chapters Gilderoy's written so far, and they're an absolutely captivating read.

Seeing as Gilderoy's not expecting company, he looks more than happy to get a surprise visitor in the middle of the day, even when Reg sheepishly asks if it's all right that he stay longer than the afternoon—maybe a lot longer. "Of course, my friend," Gilderoy insists, putting an arm around Reg's shoulders and guiding him inside the flat. "But… how long are we talking, exactly? Will I have the pleasure of seeing Mary tonight as well?"

"Er, that's the thing. Mary and I are kind of… in a fight."

"Oh, no. What happened?"

And isn't that the damn question? Reg, however, doesn't have a clue how to answer it. Even if Gilderoy is one of their closest friends—or at least one of Reg's; he doesn't know if Mary is a real friend to any of them if she hasn't told them that she's a vigilante—how is Reg supposed to blab her secret like that? What she's doing isn't just dangerous: it's highly illegal and could get her landed in Azkaban in a heartbeat if the Ministry were to find out about it. Reg hopes he could trust Gilderoy not to spread the information around, but does he really want to risk Mary's safety on a chance?

The thought suddenly occurs to Reg that Mary might be safer in an Azkaban cell than she is out on the streets mixed up in vigilante justice. On the other hand, she did tell him it was too hard to hide it when she tried to go on raids, that she's mostly been doing, in her words, "soft stuff—spy stuff." On the other other hand, is she going to jump right back out onto the front lines now that she's not hiding the secret from Reg at home anymore? He knows, and he's not even home to know where she's going at night or have the opportunity to talk her out of any of it.

It's all the more reason he should leave Gilderoy and go back home—but he knows he won't. How can he? If going home is tantamount to giving Mary his approval, how can he?