November 4, 1995

I found myself unable to go to the Egregious Erumpent as soon as I wanted too, Lucinda needed me at her house for various tasks related to sprucing up the place as it was too much for Barry to do alone. I spent the days after work helping Barry air out the old rooms and checking furniture for cracks, dents and fraying cloth while a tender, eager anticipation stirred in my soul. Lucinda wanted to host a tea and open up an older part of the house for the novelty of it, to have a view of the grounds and not be blinded by the sun in the afternoon. She said it was some kind of business deal for her house, that the orchards and the sheep pastures in the back had been moderately productive this year and someone wanted to ask to rent space in the garden for a wedding after seeing pictures in a magazine of Tavish's work.

Now that that was finished, I was going to go after work today. I hoped Alex enjoyed his alone time, because I had five years of little sister annoyance to make up for!

The full action tackle hug that I used to do to him was off the table, we were both to big for that. Plus he's almost thirty, I was sure he was starting to get back problems or something he could complain about. He used to pick me up and swing me around whenever he came back from school, Alex was never as grim and dour as he acted, he was most of the time but he never really turned that in my direction. He did it with Annette a bit, but I think for him, Annette was really a symbol of how the family fell apart in his eyes.

I clearly had too much time to mull over my dysfunctional relatives.

My anticipation for a family reunion on this beautiful cloudy day would not be dimmed. I stepped out of the lift and walked down the hallway towards the Minister's Office with a three day old copy of the New York Ghost tucked under my arm that I had obtained from a recycling bin by the International Trade Office. I was a few minutes early and would have plenty of time to read that devastating headline.

Candidates Announced for Primary Election

This did not bode well at all.

I opened the door to the office to find an unusual scene for such an early morning.

The Minister was outside his office with next to Eddie's desk, holding a letter in front of him as if he were preparing to make a great speech.

"Potter's done it now!" He waved a paper about with a glee that reminded me of a Depression Era paperboy. His robes billowed out behind him as he began to pace about the room. Eddie looked up from his paper and Percy from his quick revision of the Minister's itinerary.

"What's happened now? Did he curse someone?" Eddie's vaguely lazy tone was unmistakable.

"No, no, got involved in a fistfight over a Quidditch match with some other students. Dolores has banned him for life!" He gave the paper to Percy who skimmed it quickly, Fudge's tone was giddy or something close to it. "Leading the pack no doubt!"

"Absolutely, Minister! He always was a horrible influence on the other students."

Toady.

Minister Fudge had always been nice to me, but he from the obvious pleasure he took in this he was not a kind person. I don't expect kindness from political leaders, I knew better. Elihu Weathers was a kind man during his tenure as a senator, he would not have made it onto the public stage so quickly if he was not kind enough to righteous. I shook my head, getting off the thoughts of the chain of events that had led to Weathers election. It was too close to home, too heavy to think about, instead turning my attention to a manageable present.

If these people wanted to start their day bullying a child, that was on them. I sat down at my desk and opened the New York Ghost with a knitted brow and a sick feeling in my stomach.

Candidates Announced for Primary Election

The Virtus Party has announced their primary candidates in Senator Ismelda Wolf of Georgia and Senator Jack Graves of New York have both announced their intentions to run for party representative, the winner will take on President Astrid Cunningham of the Populi Party in the July 7th Election next year.

"I eagerly anticipate the opportunity to debate with fellow party members and representatives over the next several weeks as the people decide who best represents their interests on the national and global stage." Senator Wolf spoke Thursday at a Town Hall meeting in her home town of Atlanta. "The world is changing and new threats to the Statute of Secrecy emerge every day, we must be ready to meet these changes to preserve our way of life."

"I look forward to debating with my friend and colleague Senator Wolf over the coming weeks, we have both been preparing for this election and wish to see changes for the magical community of the United States." Senator Graves said at a press conference outside of his Senate Office on Friday. "With all of these threats, both foreign and domestic knocking on our door, the people need a President who can offer them security and while representing American interests abroad and security for our allies."

The Primary election will be held on March 3rd. The first primary debate between Senators Wolf and Graves will be held next week on all news stations at 7pm eastern time.

Okay. It was happening.

I was not sure who my father or Senator Wolf would pick for a vice president, they were old friends and may just ask the other to help secure support. President Cunningham was from California, her vice president, Martin Howard was from Michigan for the Midwest representation she needed to secure her victory seven years ago. Geographically, the Graves/Wolf ticket in either order would work, but father may pick an old ally of his from Oklahoma, Miguel Martinez. Martinez taking the vice presidential position would leave the governor position to Vice Governor, Asha Hart to finish the term. That would make her the first Cheyenne Governor in the US and maybe secure sizable support from the indigenous community by proxy.

Yeah. I think father was already talking to Miguel Martinez and helping prepare Asha Hart for what could be her new role. Good for her! Though I could feel my blood pressure rising the more I thought about my father's real chance of winning this election.

I flipped the page to the full page spread about Ismelda Wolf and her family. She was a blonde woman in her early sixties, tall and professional looking with a warm, grandmotherly smile. Her husband ran a roofing business, they had two sons and five grandchildren aged four to fifteen. I read about their values of family and how the family business was enjoying the generational experience of the two sons coming onboard, how close Ismelda was to her daughters-in-law and how much she enjoyed being a grandmother when she was not tied up in New York taking part in running the country.

I set the paper down for a minute, I was scared to turn the page. I knew my father's spread and history was next and I was not sure I wanted to see it.

But I had too. It was like a train wreck, I couldn't bring myself to look away.

The mens chatter about the politics of Harry Potter faded to a low hum in my ears as I took a deep breath and turned to the proper page of the paper.

I felt my eyes skim the article.

It was the usual trite. Jack Graves was a good, devoted family man. A father of four. Married to Vanessa Graves nee Smythe, a known volunteer and philanthropist, for over ten years.

I finished the introduction turn the page to be treated to a recent picture of the family. Vanessa was sitting down in a chair while holding baby Aldridge who was wearing little pinstripe robes. His blond hair parted to the side like a little politician and looking like a smaller, blonder, image of his father. Annette and my father were both standing, Jack Graves was straight backed and resting his hand on the back of Vanessa's chair looking very much a distinguished political figure.

Annette was smiling off on the other side of our father, dressed in deep blue robes that offset her dishwater blonde hair and fair complexion. Her lips were pressed together in a tight, awkward smile.

I remembered Annette grasping our father's arm to stop him from coming around the table to get in range of me.

The article continued.

Annette Graves had been sorted into Wampus House, like her father, on the first of September to begin her education at Ilvermorny where she was already proving to be a standout student.

Aldridge was beginning to speak full sentences and had just displayed his first bit of magic, summoning cookies off the counter and into his playpen.

My father had claimed that Alex was working overseas for a foreign paper and would say no more about it out of respect for his privacy. A claim that made me want to laugh.

When asked about me, Jack claimed that I was visiting family abroad while doing an internship and requested privacy. He made it sound like I got pregnant and was sent away to hide the shame of it like it was the forties. The excuse was good, I wondered which of his advisors had come up with that one? Probably Rhodes, he was a weasel of a man with connections to Wand Way, a pseudo religious group that encouraged extensive procreation to eventually outnumber the No-Majs. Therefore the girls were solely educated in household spells at home while the boys learned a trade to eventually support their own large families.

I met Rhodes in my father's office a few times and before I left he started bringing his eldest son with him to talk with me for an hour while Rhodes dealt with my father. The son was as dumb and self-righteous as the father, looking back I'm pretty sure they thought I would be malleable enough to bring into the fold through marriage. Giving the son political connections that Rhodes could not make on his own for his fundamentalist views.

If I married at all, I was not going to offer connections, I wanted someone who could get where he wanted to go without using me as a crutch or collateral. Even estranged from my father, my family name was enough to find anything I needed back in the states. At least here I had a chance of living a quiet life.

I turned my attention back to the article.

Vanessa looked every bit the part of a political wife. Beautiful and smiley clad in beautiful robes and jewelry. She spoke of promotions for the charity group she ran for children's literacy and library access. That the ability to read would always be of value to help the less fortunate rise from poverty or hard circumstances.

I had never seen Vanessa pick up a book, let alone read one.

Annette seemed to have grown a couple of inches in my absence, I remembered her as being shorter than this picture implied. Always following me about and talking about famous duels and the powerful, evil wix who necessitated those conflicts. Annette also had an interest in serial killers who used elaborate rituals in their crimes. She once told me she wanted to be an Auror. I hoped that her parents had not crushed that interest in the name of image and politics.

I kind of missed the little ghoul.

If I leaned away from the picture and did not focus on it too hard it became more of a picture of the perfect American family with Alex and I finally out of the picture.

Maybe I should have stuck it out just to make Vanessa angry and blow up the whole campaign? No, I would not have lasted that long.

My father discussed his plans to lower taxes, and improve our separation from No-Majs through improved security. I was not sure what the logic of that was, though magic and spells were not a finite resource. He spoke of more support for the schools, more elaborate spells to help hide them from wandering No-Majs, as something called backpacking was on the rise and deep wood hunters who kept encountering or actively trying to find an elusive, escaped Bigfoot who remained a security issue. Referencing that MACUSA did not need yet another Sasquatch sighting or a repeat of the Mothman incident from 1966.

I needed more details on my fake family.

A thought came over me like a shower of cold water. How long could I keep this up? How long before somebody noticed? How long did I have of being a nameless nobody before somebody found me out?

I closed the newspaper, placing it on the desk as the rest of the office fell to a low hum of noise around me as I sunk into my thoughts.

My father had announced his run for MACUSA president. It was official. I heaved a heavy sigh of defeat. I was going to have to make some decisions. If they ran my picture as part of a more detailed family expose, I would have to get ahead of that. Thankfully, my most recent public photo was from my father's senate run from when I was about 13 and Vanessa had dressed me like a grieving matron in black with an itchy lacy collar. With my long black hair that photo made me look… Well… Dead. I doubted Vanessa would give them a more recent photo like my graduation picture.

I loathed the idea of cutting my hair off, if any recent pictures of me left the family home for the sake of my father's image I would cut it. Keeping it pulled back away from my face would do for now. I was getting better at emulating the local accent. If I was ever confronted by a particularly nosy journalist, I would do my best impression of Percy at his most pretentious.

In a moment of self interest, I turned the newspaper into a pack of tissues and shoved them into a desk drawer. Nothing I could do now but wait and hope for a crushing defeat.

Oo0Oo0

The Egregious Erumphet was situated in a small building off the Thames River. The air was cold and seemed to go straight through my bones. I double checked the address before walking up to the oak door with an Erumphet knocker.

"I'm looking for one of your reporters called Alex Ainsley, is he in?"

The door knocker blinked twice and opened the door with a creak. I slipped inside as a group of No-Majs walked by, entirely unaware of the building's presence in the world. The door clicked shut behind me as the roar of an active newspaper assaulted my senses with the smell of warm paper, the continuous hooting of owls and the reporters yelling at each other from across the room as they fixed and edited their stories.

I looked at the reporters in my line of sight trying to see if any of them could be my brother. I saw a man with blond hair arguing with a redheaded woman. A man with black hair caused me to start before he turned his face towards me curiously. No. My brother had a different nose, less hawkish.

"Can I help you?" I turned to find a young Asian man with a ponytail and a silver stud in his left ear. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up revealing a detailed tattoo of a tiger on his right arm and a dragon on his left. Both were swirling around his arms in an elaborate dance, moving up under his shirt sleeves and back into view.

"I'm looking for Alex Graves," the man raised an eyebrow, "he wrote articles for this paper a few months ago under the name Alex Ainsley."

"Oh, Graves? Yeah he was here but he's moved on."

Oh.

The man stuck out his hand. "I'm Duri Park, owner and editor of this paper."

"Audrey Graves." We shook hands quickly and the editor quickly invited me to the back of the building away from the bustle at the front, leading me into a room that seemed to be his office.

"What brings you here for Graves?" Duri Park summoned a chair for me while he half sat, half leaned against his desk.

"He's my brother, we lost touch a few years ago and I'm here trying to track him down."

"Really? He mentioned a sister but I thought you would be older."

"Yeah, I'm nine years younger."

I think I only existed as the result of my parents trying to fix a marriage that was already coming apart.

"You were really the only person he talked about from the U.S. and even then it was not much. He was very focused on his work and spent most of his time out of the office tracking stories."

"I see," I drummed my fingers on the arm of the chair. "How long did he write for your paper?"

"About five years, not consistently thought. Graves is a bit of a jumper, too independent to tie himself down for too long but he's a damn good reporter. My paper does a lot of deep investigating work, political news needs some background for people to understand what they are reading in the present or why a decision was made. If Alex got an itch or a lead on something that could be interesting between here and Germany he'd ask if I thought it had legs. Usually he was right on the money."

"What kinds of things did he investigate for you?"

"Underground dueling rings, cults, political scandals and financial fraud and general big interest pieces. He did a great piece on the Triwizard Tournament last year, even interviewed Dumbledore before he lost his marbles. Very versatile, I like that in a journalist."

I allowed myself a smile. That sounded like Alex.

"Do you know where he lives?"

Duri exhaled, resting his chin on his hand for a moment as he thought. "To be honest, I really don't know, he was incredibly private. I think he lives here in London, but he could be in the city proper or got a place in the suburbs outside of town."

"I see… Could I have copies of the articles he wrote for the paper?"

"Sure! We have an archive at the end of the hall. I'll take you there myself." Duri stood up and motioned for me to follow him, leading me down the hall to a room with a large door and another Erumpent door knocker.

"Password?"

"Changes everyday."

The door knocker nodded and opened the door with a creak allowing Duri and I to step into a room full of filing cabinets.

"I keep copies of everything this paper has published by the reporter's penname. I plan to hold them in an archive for thirty years, just in case anyone needs them for law drafts or something." He played with his earring and smiled at me. I was too fixated on watching his tattoo's dance along his arms. "Use a copy charm on whatever you want to take. Lemme know if you need anything!" He waved and stepped out the door with a grin.

I looked at the row of filing cabinets ahead of me and heaved a sigh. Alright. This was it. If I could find some kind of lead on my brother it would be here. If not a lead to his home, then at least places where he would have met people, maybe one of them would remember him if it was a recent article.

I pulled open the Ainsley file cabinet and got to work.

Oo0Oo0

I left the room an hour later with an astounding number of articles in my arms. My brother had clearly been very busy with topics as varied as werewolf rights and policies around the world, the overreach of supposed superpower states, the political scandal of a Ministry employee named Barty Crouch, and more recently an American diplomat who had gotten into bar fight after a history of drunken shenanigans. There were other articles about other topics.

Though, the article I was most interested in was from the Triwizard Tournament that Alex had covered over the course of year as a series about the history of the event, its reinstatement and the tragic conclusion of its more recent iteration. I had read sections of the series while I was working for MACUSA, but the whole piece was so well done I would have to read it as a whole. The interview with Dumbledore was long and engaging about the history of the tournament and the matter of its reinstatement. My brother had interviewed one of the greatest wizards of the century about a school tournament! That was really amazing!

I popped my head into Duri Park's office, he was hunched over his desk apparently editing one of his reporter's pieces.

"Duri," he sat up in his chair and gave me a smile. "Thank you so much for letting me into your archive room! I didn't know Alex was so versatile or that he did so much writing for your paper."

"Glad to help, if you need any more copies just let me know and I'll have the researcher pull them for you."

I agreed to the proposition and Duri escorted me to the front door leaving me with a bundle of papers and my own thoughts.

The most recent article was from the final task of the Triwizard Tournament, which improved my timeline. From his early writings with the Egregious Erumpent, Alex would write two to four small articles a week, though he would disappear and not publish with the paper for a few months and come back with a very long research piece or suddenly write smaller pieces again. I assumed that he would write for other small papers during this period. Though, his last article was published on July third a few days after the disastrous Third Task of the Triwizard Tournament. I did not get to read this originally, it did not seem to make it stateside, but one of his articles for the Modernist was published a couple of weeks later about an issue of financial fraud and overseas banking.

The more I examined the articles I had collected, more of a pattern emerged. Alex was a pot stirrer. He liked to focus on topics that would make people angry or where he could do a lot of investigating and undercover work. His topics were more liberal than what was ever discussed at the kitchen table at the Byrgen House. These were at heart, the kind of articles designed to make enemies. Rich, powerful enemies.

It was like he was still a teenage boy rebelling against our father.

I had a flash of memory from when Alex left home five years ago and quickly pushed it back down along with the wave of nausea that came with it. The memory still leaving a bitter, acidic taste in my mouth. A memory worsened by time and understanding of the accusations.

With all of these things happening in the world, where was Alex working now?

I could not ignore the idea of him being censored, maybe blacklisted for being unwilling to play by the rules of a country who had more direct control over their press the way I had seen in the Minister's office over the last couple of weeks. I could not ignore the idea of Alex retreating to a country where there was a value on the free press, where he could keep an eye on things in Britain but not potentially be arrested for dissent and radicalism.

If Alex had done all of those investigations of dangerous organizations abroad, then that put a wench in my idea of him running off to hide. He would want to be close to a place where a young boy was claiming a dark wizard had returned from the dead. Any reporter worth their salt would want to at least be nearby and wait for the storm to break that would either prove Potter correct or see a teenage boy sent to the insane asylum.

AN: I'm posting this early because I'm doing a house sit next week and may have some other tasks related to that. I got a lot done during NaNo. Not as much as I wanted, but stuff got done, the part one outline was finalized, I drafted scenes and put them with the right chapter or section. Chapters 7-9 are finished or in a final draft. So the next posting will be the weekend of the 12th.

Reviews will always be appreciated and I wish to thank you all for the support on this weird, pulpy story. :)