November 22 – 25, 1997

My brother...

The Death Eater...

I could not believe it. Even days later the images would not leave my mind of our fight in the woods. Coming home to a stressed and fussy Percy made it difficult to hide or minimize my wounds, the slight electrical burns from the lightening and the blood from my head wound from where Alex had ripped my hood free of its spells and effectively tried to scalp me. Hiding all of that from Percy with those recent events whirling through my mind was a difficult endeavor as he fussed and panicked over the obvious state of me that I was unable to hide upon my return despite the late hour.

Percy had left the bed when he heard me come into the flat and caught me in the bathroom trying to tend my wounds, a scene reminiscent of what I now knew to be his own encounter with Alex. He made a strangled sort of noise and made me sit on the edge of the bathtub, wheezing and coughing periodically as he tried to interrogate me about what exactly had happened as he worked a healing charm into my head wound – something I knew would leave a scar as magic always left remnants, but my hair would hide it once it grew back in place. I would grow my own hair back enough to hide it, but it would take time to become healthy again.

I winced as the burn potion was applied to my hands and arms, it smelled like mint and cooled the heated, blistered skin while Percy muttered soothing words.

"Who did this?"

"Dunno," I mumbled, feeling like a child again trying to stay out of trouble and out of the way of the things I barely understood happening in the house. "Death Eater. Duelled him to draw and got out of there."

"What kind of mask?"

"It was a bit of a blur; I didn't get a good look."

Lying came far to naturally to me.

Stating the truth would hurt too much.

Percy left the matter there, something in his eyes telling me that he might have put some pieces together as he squeezed my knee and he got to his feet to help me to bed, until I protested that he was probably contagious and I was going to sleep on the couch. Which left me dealing with irritated, but understanding noises, his hand lingering in mine as we parted ways.

The following day, Percy seemed to being on the path to recovering quite well from his cold, once I started shoving stronger medications on him. He was coherent and his cough sounded less terrible. Once he was accustomed to the idea that I was committed to ensuring he was going to rest, and quit trying to escape to go work in his office, like the lunatic he is. He decided that demanding my attentions was appropriate payback for interfering with his schedule. Regularly asking me to come as discuss something he read in the newspaper, or to come hang around in his sick room when he should have been resting or doing something quiet instead of trying to goad me into a debate about political philosophy.

Whining. Essentially.

I felt like a dancing monkey every time he read something interesting in the paper.

Of course, once I officially got his cold strain on that afternoon, the series of aches and obnoxious there was nowhere to hide and Percy got all of the (now gross and snotty) company he desired – once we were both infected, I had to let him out of the bedroom. If I was sick too, it was no longer quarantine, it would be classified as a hostage situation.

At least I could now give up the couch (well, I found the floor with a pillow more comfortable – I just told Percy that I was sleeping on the horrible couch) and go back to sleeping in the bed. I intend to replace the couch at some point in the future under the guise of a woman's touch.

Surprisingly, he was less bothersome when we were both in the living room under a collection of blankets, half listening to the radio or trying to read something. Hm, most animals want to be alone when they're ill, Percy just wants company.

He's a bit incorrectly concocted, but I like him.

Even lying next to Percy for close to two days in our diseased state, I could not find it in me to tell him the truth of that night. I should talk to Percy. I needed too. I needed someone to react to this in a way I was incapable of doing. Able to emote and be horrified and angry in a way I could not because I was just too sad and confused to manage it. Percy would not have taken the news that the vulture Death Eater being my brother well, quickly giving into anger born of love for me in one universe and potentially going after Alex to beat him back to decency – a fight which I assumed Alex would win – Alex just, to use a phrase my grandfather liked, had that dog in him. Though, I could say Percy did too, and maybe that would be enough to put Alex on the backfoot, but Percy had a softness to him that I liked, I didn't believe killing to be something he had in him. In another universe, I manage to talk Percy down from his initial anger and he would not fight Alex as hard as he had in whatever masked encounter they had in the future and Alex deals a final blow that I would never recover from.

I had no good endings for sharing this.

My chest felt like there was a boulder sitting on my heart, thoroughly crushing me under the burden of my... No. He was just Alex now. I... I needed the distance. Alex represented everything I was fighting against now, to see the face of my enemy no longer as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and now to see the face of Alex in his filthy vulture mask.

I was angry. I laid awake at night, my mind fighting the effect of the medication I was taking to quell the cough and help me sleep. I was too anxious, too angry, too... confused about what had been the final straw to put Alex on this path. Thalia would never support this. She hated Greyback, I knew that much. She had a clear vision for the future of werewolves and Greyback did not feature in it. I did not understand the extent of Thalia's plans to achieve her vision, but I had a feeling the undertaking was an underhanded, political sort that I could not be privy too in any case because of my Ministry affiliations, but I knew Thalia's idea was a less radical than teaming up with a fascist regime.

This would break Thalia's heart. I... I don't think I can tell her. I can't tell her that Alex is doing this for her out of a warped sense of pursuing a better world for someone he loves! Isolt's wand, I can't do this. I can't continue to be this harbinger of bad news and terrible stories.

Alex is still communicating with Thalia. If I tell her, what if Alex stops entirely? We could lose a viable link to Alex and he could severe it out of pride and then I have to start looking for him all over again and that is not fair to Thalia, Valencia, myself or Percy. I can't continue to look for someone who is too proud and too independent and has a habit of disappearing. If we leave those avenues of communication open, it becomes a way to keep track of him. Alex loves Thalia far too much to disappear entirely from her life the way he did from mine... Even if he goes quiet for a while, I think he will always come back to her.

I put a pillow over my face as Percy snored loudly next to me, his arm reaching out for me in sleep and finding my hip before I slipped my hand down to entwine our fingers. I let the comfort of his presence wash over me and help remove the worry from my mind.

I am just a creature of lies. My skin is composed of scales. My tongue forked and my lies move between my teeth in a low hiss as I half live in a fictional creation of a world I can bear to tolerate, crafted of better circumstances.

It was so much safer to pretend that night had never happened.

The decision had been made by the pair of us to go to work as soon as possible, Percy returning to work on Monday had managed to run off his second office secretary so far since I had been removed from the office. Percy claimed this one happened to be competent, but also turned out to be a severe germophobe. I was somewhat amused by the irony of the situation.

My short break from work gave me a sort of heroic return to the office on Tuesday, a return where people left me alone or kindly older women slipped me tea while I clutched my growing collection of used tissues and the small collection of medication I had hidden in my purse. Pepper-up potion, cough suppressant potions, congestion and throat relief potion that tasted like honey... All of which I had bought and paid for- I refused to get involved in Percy's cheapskate schemes, even after I showed him the revised household budget.

Losing myself in my stupid, pointless little job was a relief. My tasks were stupid and repetitive, the pleasant low hum of noise from my fellow, lowly filing clerks were intermingled with loud clanks of filing cabinet drawers closing periodically. It gave me the space to think clearly over everything that had happened when I was out in the little hamlet where I had encountered my brother. Now that my mind was clearing and everything had fully sunk in, I was fully able to slip into this knowledge as part of my reality.

No. None of that. I had dwelled on this long enough. Alex had made his choices. I could no longer make them for him and I could not control the outcome.

I needed a new topic.

My skin itched from the healing potions applied to my wounds. I just needed to focus on not scratching them as they continued to heal.

Quadpot scores were in. One of the players from the Montana Mongooses had lost his ring finger when the ball exploded, along with his wedding ring. His wife had apparently not been pleased.

Thalia would not be pleased with these Alex developments...

No. Focus on something else.

The news from MACUSA was fairly quiet, aside from an unusual rise in Anti-Seed propaganda from sections outside of the usual suspects of the deeply isolationist sects like WandWay and similar sister oragnizations. Now, according to Elihu, the sentiment was spreading to disenfranchised groups who had been convinced that Seeds were taking the jobs of proper wix. People who seemed to agree with the radical new policies of Britain and were now asking why their sitting president was a textbook half-blood when there were legitimate purebloods in the government. Jack's response was they should have run a better campaign and they had six years to reorganize if that's how they really felt about it.

My father is a menace.

MACUSA was reportedly still having periodic debates about if they had grounds to interfere in the Anti-Seed stance in Britain as more rhetoric made it to American shores. The debates apparently only coming back whenever something like a news article escaped the borders of the United Kingdom. Jack was still crowing for intervention, subtly, to keep the matter under attention by the public and reminding more astute members of the British Ministry that they were being watched by the international community. Jack had also managed to leverage America's superpower status to end more trade with Britain and Europe by proxy with countries on the greater American continent. Mexico and Brazil had closed their borders to travellers from Britain, and closed the supply of magical goods from their countries, primarily rare plants and animal materials for potions, instead taking more lucrative trade deals with MACUSA as part of the arrangement for support. Jack had also managed to close British and European access to the Panama Canal after what I was willing to guess was a lot of concessions and political maneuvering due to the shared control of the canal with the nation of Panama.

The beginning of sanctions with Europe was a punishment to Britain's trade partners by proximity for failure to admonish their neighbor publicly and continuing to treat Britain as the same partner they were before the second rise of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. MACUSA had money to leverage small, but important, international trade and shipping partners for a magical supply goods and more money to move resources away from Europe and Britain. Elihu did not know the details, but he implied enough for me to fill in the gaps. There seemed to be trouble brewing back in America of some sort and Jack saw an opportunity to kill a flock of birds with one stone.

Alex would have loved to tear that apart for the news.

Ugh! Try again.

Um... I really need to learn how to cook. Percy trusts me to cut vegetables, which is a major accomplishment, but I fed him oatmeal during his quarantine period and frankly he did not look impressed. I put sugar and some jam in it, I thought it was passable.

Wherever Alex is, I hope he is eating out of the garbage.

Nope. I'm done. It's clearly not working.

I needed to focus on my work. The sheer mindlessness of sorting files would free me from this dread and rage for a time. My job today was to destroy old files that were due to be pulled for destruction for being over ten years old at least. Apparently, this was something various departments had been putting off for a decade and now it was about to become my job.

Thankfully, there were other people in here. Other undesirables for the upper echelons of the Ministry offices. Gertrude Havensby had suspicious ancestry, but it was not enough to fire her over. She had been replaced in her position in the Beast, Being and Spirit division by a young woman with the right credentials and no ring on her finger. She was pleasant to me; we made regular eye contact and made the quiet acknowledgments that we knew the position we were in. It was a quiet kind of alliance where we worked side by side until someone would see fit to pull me out to cover for somebody, Gertrude had decided she was going to hide in this room until the war ended and frankly, that seemed the smarter option.

The clock chimed twelve times for lunch and I found myself closing the file drawers with several loud clangs before leaving the file room and disappearing into the throng of equally lifeless workers on their way to the cafeteria. The Ministry no longer allowed anyone below the Deputy Head position to leave the Ministry for lunch, now we were all jammed together in the cafeteria, to drown in the ongoing misery the Dementors under our feet oozed even several floors away in the dungeons. I had seen one wizard from Magical Maintenance who caressed a mouse patronus in his lap for himself and his coworkers over lunch as they sat at the same table, the mouse carefully hidden in the sleeve of his robe. This was the only table that seemed mostly normal, but they also went all over the Ministry doing various repair tasks and it made sense to me that the ability to cast a patronus would be highly valued on that team, particularly a small one, anything larger would just get someone labelled a troublemaker and potential threat.

In short, the cafeteria was enlarged and full, the workers divided into different lunch shifts to accommodate. People who seemed to fall in line with the resume and had a higher rank ate on the first shift, support staff and suspected troublemakers ate on second shift to try and encourage us to turn on each other for more power down the road. It was safer not to trust anyone, but there was no way to sit alone, there were too many people.

I knew Percy's father took lunch in his office, a man who clearly knew exactly what was going on here and just refused to play ball.

I could respect that.

There were far too many people to tell one man to leave his lunch at home and be social with the rank and file.

I fell in line food line with the rest and heaved a sigh at the ongoing noise and the pressing of bodies as we all moved forward in a coordinated, militarist, manner. It never used to be this busy. I could barely see the tables through the crowd. It took five minutes before I could get some food, sliding a galleon to the elderly witch handling the service and the seeing a House Elf behind her for the barest moment before it disappeared through a doorway. The bread and soup combination was all that was left and working in the Ministry generally killed my appetite these days.

Going through the crowd to find a place to sit took effort, lots of promises to Hecate to do stupid things in order to not spill my lunch on someone. That if I had to spill my soup, I wanted it to be spilled on a low-ranking manager who was waving a copy of the Daily Prophet around as he crowed about how that 'Thieving Mudblood deserved it!'

I finally made it to a recently vacated table in the back and tried to sink into the sea of noise around me that made me feel like I was back in Ilvermorny as I began sipping my soup before taking a bite of my buttered roll. I could see Percy across the room trying to blend in with a group of young men who, from what Percy had told me, were qualified for the jobs they had, but also supportive of this new regime. If he was trying to give them what remained of his disease, I was fully supportive of his efforts. I could see a group of women from my department not too far away who I recognized from the wedding I had attended recently, whispering and making moon eyes at the young men in the room.

I wonder how Eden is doing...

Jasmine dropped her tray on the table across from me with a roguish grin, her long blonde hair swishing and swaying behind her. "Hello there!"

"Hi," I gave her a smile and reminded myself that liking Jasmine was a horrible idea. We were allies, it did not mean we were going to be friends. Bonds founded on desperation for human connection were not sustainable. I cleared some of the extra papers I had put on the table for the moment. I would accept company.

Jasmine began to speak of the new book she was reading and mentioned that Eden seemed to be happy with her new husband Augustus, who seemed absolutely besotted with her, much to my surprise in some ways. Eden was a nice person – as nice as one could expect someone who grew up in a cult to be, and she was also a very pretty girl, which I was sure helped endear her to Augustus, a rather homely fellow.

It gave me some relief that Eden was clearly not the weeping mess I would have expected her to be in this sort of situation, but I still felt awful for laying the groundwork for everything that happened to that poor girl.

I gave Jasmine the extra bread the buffet witch had slipped me and we settled into meaningless conversation. Casual and not dangerous talks about upcoming parties and the health of Lucinda in the changing weather.

It felt almost normal, but it left me feeling ill at ease for how easy all of this was becoming to push away from the forefront of my mind as this new administration fully became my new normal.

Oo0Oo0

Author's Note: Sorry about the delay in update, I've found myself unemployed and had to hustle. I have stuff in the pipeline and a holdover job in place.