A/N: Sorry about the long delay between chapters. I have had a LOT going on in my life lately! When I started this story I had all day to sit around and write - those were the days. I've written a few chapters ahead but I will need to edit them and make sure they're consistent before I publish them. Happy reading!
CHAPTER TWELVE
The next morning is a blur of Mother waking us all up ridiculously early, Father looking rather sulky at the breakfast table, and me not being able to speak because of nerves.
At seven fifty-eight I find myself back on Level Two at the Ministry and am just about to go into the Auror Headquarters when the door starts swinging towards me instead and a scruffy ginger blur comes out, then stops in astonishment.
"Malfoy? What the bloody hell are you doing here? Have you been arrested?"
It's Weasley. He's balancing a steaming coffee, two croissants and a large pile of rolled parchments. I feel a surge of hatred just from his stupid speckled face, but I try to quell it.
"I'm here for Auror training, actually." I say, putting my chest out slightly. "What are you doing here?"
"Well, blimey." Weasley looks somewhat stumped. "My training started two months ago but I just got off my honeymoon so I'm a bit - wait a minute… You're-"
His belated shock seems to cause his armful of things to want to tumble, so I step forward automatically and grab his coffee, which was tipping dangerously to one side.
"Yes, training to be an Auror." I clarify. "Now if you don't mind, I'm late."
I sidestep him swiftly to avoid what looks like his building anger, and push through the still-swinging door to the office Headquarters, taking a sip of coffee that tastes even more delicious since I got it through sleight of hand. Plus, Weasley must be a four-sugars sort of guy as well.
"Malfoy." Barks a man with a clipboard, and my mind snaps back to business. "Here's a couple of things you'll need to know about your work, duties, and training schedule."
He hands me a roll of parchment so thick that it must be at least twelve feet long. "We're over capacity at the moment so we aren't doing an orientation, and we've waived the entrance requirements for now since most applicants didn't get to do their N.E. , but they're still eager and I think everyone's ready to prove themselves – or not, as the case may be."
After giving me a look suggesting that I'm one of the people who won't be able to prove myself, he turns and walks away, and I'm left in the middle of the office without an idea where to go next. I gingerly sit down at the nearest unoccupied desk and unfurl my parchment to start reading.
Auror Training Guidelines
Training will consist of on-the-job duties from 8.30am – 6pm supplemented with evening classes three times a week for two hours a session. Job duties consist of the following, at a minimum:
Assisting the Auror Department in any capacity asked of you, including any tasks within your scope and abilities regardless of experience if under supervision by a qualified individual.
Maintaining and updating the department's records as necessary for accuracy and within the law's guidelines.
Aiding in communication of sensitive information between departments and maintaining its confidentiality.
General duties for other departments as and when given leave to do so by the Auror department.
On-the-job training is designed to give you real experience of what working in any Auror department in the country is like and provides the qualified Aurors with some relief when it comes to paperwork, general chores, and dealing with the rest of the Ministry. Doing YOUR job allows them to do THEIR job and rid this country of the Dark Criminals that are still threatening the safety of our families and values.
Evening classes are designed to safely replicate experiences of an Auror on a day-to-day basis and the first hour is dedicated to the necessary technique – i.e Stealth and Tracking – and the second hour is dedicated to putting this into practice either in groups, individually, or in pairs. Every technique must be mastered fully before the class ends or a failing mark will be given, and you will be dropped from the training program.
Rules governing behaviour are stricter in this department than any other in the Ministry. Integrity is paramount to our operations, so all behaviour inside and outside of this building must be professional, courteous, and law-abiding.
Your training schedule will be based on a 46-hour week with a 15 minute break in the morning, an hour lunch, and a 15 minute break in the afternoon. Days off will be on a rotating basis depending upon the needs of the department and the rest of the staff. Requests for time off are restricted to one request per month and must be coupled with-
My head is spinning and I've only read six inches of parchment. There's even more rules, restrictions, guidelines and whatnot further down, and every class is listed and explained in detail, so I'll have to give this thing a thorough reading, if I want to-
"Malfoy?" I jump out of my seat as my reverie is broken, and I almost spill my coffee. It's Potter, and he's not looking happy to see me.
"Ron told me he saw you, but I thought he was hallucinating from sleep deprivation. What are you actually doing here?"
I'm starting to get impatient with the fact that no one seems to believe in me. "I started my Auror training. Or I'm supposed to start. Look, here's my guidelines."
Potter snatches them off me and inspects them as though for authenticity. "But Malfoy, why? What are you trying to prove?"
"Nothing!" I lie, and snatch the parchment back. "I haven't got anything to prove. You don't have to be a Golden Boy to be an Auror, you know, some of us can do it based on our own merit."
Potter's eyes narrow and I see his annoyance, but he manages to stifle it. "Well, Ron doesn't trust you, and he thinks you made Skeeter write all those things for your own benefit to get out of Azkaban, so if I were you I'd try to keep away from him."
"I'll cancel the romantic date I was planning then, shall I?" I quip sarcastically, and Potter has the audacity to crack a smile and shake his head in a patronising way. But then he's all business again.
"Look, it does seem fishy, you being here. We had a backlog of ninety applicants when the rules were waived, but you're the first ex-Death Eater to apply, cleared by the courts or not. So if you're serious, we can get started, but if you don't show more than a hundred percent effort then you'll be out of here in two weeks."
"Well if you keep waffling on I'll never get a chance to prove myself, so how about we get on with it?" I gulp the rest of the coffee and follow Potter as he rolls his eyes and leads me away.
Potter leads us to a window-less room off a corridor past the Headquarters, and explains this is the training room. It's a large space, very poorly decorated, but the walls are at least lined with things we might need, like targets, mats, protective gear, and boxes of magical implements.
There's about a hundred people milling around in there, including Weasley who is glaring suspiciously at me from the front, standing with a couple of Ravenclaws I don't recognize and a tall, broad, sandy-haired boy I believe was in our year but in Gryffindor. Sean something, maybe?
"Right we've taken attendance, now we're just waiting for…" Potter checks his unorganised stack of parchments.
Weasley unfurls one of his parchment bundles and reads. "Vanessa."
I wish everyone would stop with this first-name-only nonsense. How am I supposed to know who anybody is?
After a few minutes, a rather fetching-looking girl arrives, looking flushed and apologetic. "Sorry, it's a nightmare upstairs. What are the press doing in the atrium?"
"Oh, they followed Malfoy in." Potter says off-handedly. "I was bombarded with questions too, just ignore them."
My heart thuds as people glance at me, but I put on an unruffled air. As if I'm used to the paparazzi following me around without me realising. Happens all the time.
"So, when is the instructor supposed to get here? Or is it meant to be a free-for-all?" I drawl, casually flicking my wand.
"Um, Ron and me are the instructors, Malfoy." Potter says awkwardly.
"What? But you haven't even finished your own training, have you?" I reply in disbelief.
"Not quite, but we're having to lead some of the beginner classes to get the new starters up to scratch because we're short staffed. Don't worry, we think we know what we're doing." Potter half-smiles, and everyone else seems appeased.
But just because somebody defeated the Dark Lord doesn't mean they're automatically bloody qualified. I don't say anything, but I can't help the sour look that comes over my face.
"Now, before we start, I want to let everyone know that Auror training is absolutely serious business." Potter says, looking sternly throughout the crowd. "I know a lot of you are here because you think it'll make you famous, but you won't be. The point is, no one should have heard of you, or know who you are. I'm at a disadvantage because people do know me. I can't go on missions undisguised without endangering my whole team. The point is to fade into the background, not to stand out. I hope you're all okay with never getting an ounce of recognition outside this department for putting your life at risk every day."
Some people shuffle around, and look at the ground. Others lose their excited expressions really quickly.
"So, everyone," Weasley steps in, "turn to the person to your right."
Being the second-to-last one to arrive, the only person to my right is the last person to arrive, that Vanessa girl. I turn to her and she flashes me a smile.
"Make sure you have a few feet around you, and you're about ten feet apart." Weasley instructs.
I start to get nervous. I hope they don't want us to start duelling right away! The room gets loud as people shuffle around, waving people away from them, organising themselves and their partner.
"This exercise is a simple pass-or-fail exercise. You will both cast the Disarming Charm, and the one who loses their wand goes home, and fails the course. The half that remain will continue on with today's itinerary. Now, you may begin."
I feel a crushing sensation in my lungs, but I flick my wand as quickly as I can. So does Vanessa, and our spells pulse against each other like two gusts of wind. I grip my wand tight, it feels like it wants to wriggle away from me. I cast a basic Shield Charm and hit her with expelliarmus again. Her face is twisted into anger and determination, and I'm sure mine is similar. We hit back and forth for a while, either we're both too terrible or too good to outwit each other.
After a couple of minutes, reality comes back to me. We're the only ones left fighting, everyone else – about half of the people we started out with – is circled around us, watching silently.
I step forward to cast my spell and Vanessa is immediately defensive, then she steps sideways and tries to get around my Shield Charm, but I block her. We're twisting, moving forward and backwards, practically dancing with one another. I'm starting to sweat, not sure how long I can hold out.
Eventually, Potter steps between us and calls a draw. "You both performed admirably, so I'll give you both passing marks for this one." Weasley jots this information down on his parchment, with a face like thunder. Vanessa elbows me with a grin and we step back into the rest of the crowd. I keep my face impassive, and try not to breathe too loudly.
"So now we can really get going. We're going to start with some of the ground rules." Weasley says, stepping in front of everyone and looking around. "We don't talk to the press, for one, not about Potter, not about being an Auror, not even about your granny's colon problems."
Am I paranoid or is Weasley specifically glaring at me when he says this? He carries on for a while, mostly re-iterating the rules in the guidelines, and I start getting bored and gazing off into the distance for a bit before a loud bang snaps me back to attention.
Potter and Weasley are standing face to face, about twelve feet apart, and both grinning at each other.
"We've decided we can't be bothered with lectures, actually." Says Weasley. "So we're going to show you some basic spells we should all know off-by-heart before training can really start."
The pair pull out their wands, and start rapidly firing spells at one another and ducking, dodging or shielding them as necessary. The audience is captivated and in awe, but they must have practiced this whole routine hundreds of times. It looks so choreographed. Potter even starts narrating the spells he's been using, including the Shield Charm, Confundus Charm, The Knockback Jinx, the Freezing Charm, and more rapid-fire, low-damage spells.
"Protego! Some spells cut straight through a Shield Charm so you want to duck and dive as well, and when dueling you absolutely never want to stand still – uff, flipendo!"
Weasley staggers back but recovers, and a red spark shoots from his wand and hits Potter's hand, causing Potter to drop his wand. Potter immediately puts both his hands up, signaling forfeit, and the audience starts applauding. Weasley takes a bow.
"Of course, a real enemy won't abide by the rules and just quit when you drop your wand, that's when they'll want to kill you." Potter says casually, rubbing the mark on his hand. "But practicing dueling with a partner increases your speed and accuracy, and it'll help you think of the right spell you need quickly when the time comes to apprehend a Dark suspect."
"Um, excuse me, but how did you learn how to duel?" An extremely tall girl puts her hand up nervously after she asked.
Potter waves her hand down. "Actually my first duel was with Malfoy here. He was a sneaky bugger, and he taught me that you can never really predict what the other person will do, or even how your own instincts will react."
The rest of the class seems to look over at me with appreciation, and I can feel myself going pink.
We spend a while pairing off and practicing dueling, which everyone else just seems awful at, especially after my disarming duel with Vanessa. Potter and Weasley are going around correcting people, but they don't seem to learn. The blond Gryffindor sends spells so slowly that I don't even need to block them; I can just take my time sidestepping out of the way. I, however, am a natural, and they hardly have to correct me at all. Actually, I think Weasley is just avoiding me.
Eventually, Potter comes up to me. "Malfoy, you don't want to lunge forward when you cast a spell. The small impact on the spell's distance isn't worth it, and it just alerts the other person and gives them more time to react. Use your arm to throw the spell and keep your whole body reactive to what they do, not what you're doing."
"Right." I say, fully concentrating. It's difficult to keep my hair tidy while casting and dodging spells but I think I'm pulling it off.
"Good job everyone." Weasley says as we start to wrap up the session. "You'll want to keep practicing of course, but it's ten o'clock now so there'll be a pile of paperwork for us to sort out."
We troop out of the training room, looking slightly worse for wear. Vanessa's hair has turned into a horrible sweaty nest and the tall girl is clutching her elbow as though it's about to fall off.
Apparently the fully qualified Aurors have designated times where they stop in at the office, barring emergencies, and report back what's going on. And those times are all hands on deck for the rest of us, because they pile us with information, dictations, paperwork and want coffee and sandwiches prepared for them before going back out again.
The day is split between mad flurries of activity when all I can do is follow the orders that are barked at me, fetch this, record that, take note of this, fill that out, where are my biscuits, lend me your wand, and then the moments of peace and quiet where we all try to re-organise everything, file the records away again, destroy the old memos, and try to regain order. Even with forty of us trainees around at any given time, we're still struggling to keep up. I didn't know there were still so many Dark Wizards out there; I thought Potter got rid of them all.
We stagger the lunch breaks so we don't all disappear at once, and mine is one of the very last groups to go, at almost 3 o'clock. I'm absolutely starving, so ten of us all troop to the cafeteria and sit around with sandwiches. Everyone starts to relax and chit-chat, something I'd be wonderful at if this place wasn't crawling with Gryffindors. So I just keep quiet and concentrate on cutting my sandwich into perfectly equal-sized squares and putting enough sugars in my tea.
"So Malfoy, are you really back with Harry Potter?" Says Vanessa. She's leaned forward to talk to me but obviously everyone at the table has heard her, and they're interested too.
"I've never been with Potter, the Prophet just made it up." I say shortly, hoping the knut will drop and they'll realise everything in the papers is a massive lie without much more effort on my part.
"Those photos all looked real to me." Vanessa replies with a gleam in her eye. "You know I didn't fully believe it until I saw them, I thought Harry would have to be mad to be attracted to you. But you're not that bad, are you?"
Not that bad? Is she kidding me? "Darling, Potter would be lucky to have me."
"I didn't even realise he was gay." Someone beside me says.
"He told me you two are just friends." Another boy chimes in. Friends?
"Where did he go today, anyway?" Says Vanessa. "I saw him last at around twelve and assumed he went to lunch, but I haven't seen him since then."
Come to think of it, neither have I. He probably does get to go on missions with the other Aurors. I thought he was just boasting about that. Will there ever be an end to his special treatment? The conversation drifts to Harry Potter's whereabouts, his skill with a broomstick, other 'skills' he may have, gag, and then everyone starts talking about their own boyfriends, girlfriends, reasons for wanting to be an Auror, and all those boring things. So I start tuning them out again. Being social isn't really that difficult after all, is it? I think I'm a natural.