["If you say in the twenty-fifth chapter that there is a broom hanging on the wall, in the twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh chapter it absolutely must sweep something. If it's not going to clean house, it shouldn't be hanging there."
— Definitely Not Anton Chekhov (Mangled from S. Shchukin, Memoirs. 1911.)]
In a small flat in the less disreputable part of Knockturn Alley, a man with sandy brown hair and scars he didn't deserve put on some cheap brown robes, picked up his Sophronia Scunthorpe's Stupendous Sweeper-Brand magical broom, and reported for his third night shift at the Ministry of Magic as a janitor. He wasn't going to let not having been hired for the job stop him and, as it turned out, neither was the night watchwizard, Eric Munch. The forty-something wizard merely registered Remus's wand on the first night and used a probity probe to ask him what his business was. Remus explained he was there to help the night cleaning staff, the probe accepted it, and Munch waved him on through.
That had been one of the riskiest parts of the mission, and Remus had been fully prepared to subtly Obliviate Munch, steal the registration of his wand, and flee, but he had a hunch he could pass the Probe. The key was that Remus genuinely intended to clean the building…it's just he also planned to clean, among other places, the Department of Mysteries.
Whether they wanted him to or not.
Initially, he'd been worried about being caught out by the actual janitorial staff. However, he'd discovered that, as long as he kept to cleaning and stayed away from the break room and other natural spots to shirk, he didn't have to worry about being spotted by them. This meant the rest of the building desperately needed cleaning, so had a great excuse to spend time tidying up the Courtrooms on Level 10…just one level from the Department of Mysteries and only reachable by taking the elevator to the same floor as the DoM.
He'd originally purchased the broom just to look the part of a professional wizarding janitor, but it was proving truly stupendous in this endeavour. He left it cleaning by itself in the Courtrooms each night while he mapped out the wards and alerts in the Department of Mysteries. He didn't know what he might find there or what kind of traps they'd have in place, so he moved carefully.
That night started normally, with Watchwizard Munch lazily waving him on through security again. He spent an hour or so cleaning up part of the Department of International Magical Cooperation, both so no one would notice him making a beeline for the DoM and because it really needed the cleaning. He wondered if Barty Crouch had annoyed the janitorial staff somehow…or whether Sirius had paid them off to annoy the man who locked him in Azkaban without a trial. Regardless, Barty deserved it, but his staff probably didn't.
After Remus put a dent in the dirt in the DIMC, he headed down to the Courtrooms. Once there, he set his broom to automatic cleaning, focusing on the dirtiest spots first, and then headed back up the stairs to the Ninth Floor. He put subtle Tripwire Charms across the elevator door, the stairs down to the Courtrooms, and the door to the DoM. That way, he'd know if anyone came down and where they headed.
It was normally pretty quiet down there at night, but after about two hours his elevator Tripwire Charm alerted him to motion. He immediately Disillusioned himself and silenced his footsteps, but whoever it was tripped the stair alert next, not the DoM alert.
Remus hurried out of the DoM, carefully avoiding the wards and alerts he'd mapped out thus far. By the time he made it down to the Courtroom floor, a tall witch in Auror robes was cautiously looking around and asking, "Is someone down here?" Something about her very long, dark brown hair seemed familiar, but he didn't have time to ponder that just then.
Not for nothing had Remus been one of the Marauders in school. He jumped behind a desk, lay down, and cancelled the charms hiding himself. No sooner had he done so than the soothing gold light of a Human-presence-revealing Spell washed over him.
"Hello, Miss," he shouted, doing his best to sound sleepy as he stood. "I was just letting my broom clean up a few things while I took a bit of a kip."
"Good eve—Remus Lupin?"
His jaw dropped as he saw the witch's face. Her elegant cheekbones and dark eyes had a few more wrinkles around them than they did when he'd last seen her, but the face he saw in the mirror every morning had aged far less gracefully. "Emmeline Vance?"
"Sweet Circe! I'd always wondered what became of you after…" she trailed off. "Well…after. So you're at the Ministry now?"
He nodded. "I just started a little while ago. Congratulations on becoming an Auror! I know you always wanted to."
"Thank you. It was easy to join up after the War, since they had a lot of…well, openings. What have you been up to?"
"I wandered around the Continent for awhile, then made my way back here when it didn't hurt so much anymore. I've been working at Oldknowe Books for a couple of years now and decided to pick this up as a second job. I'm sorry I was napping."
She chuckled. "Don't worry about it. At least you set your broom up to clean before you went to sleep. Most of the janitors don't even bother doing that. Amelia threatened them sufficiently that the DMLE offices get cleaned regularly, but I think that's the only work they do in the entire building. Sadly, that still probably puts them in the top half of Ministry employees in terms of productivity."
"I noticed." Remus smiled ruefully. "I do my best to hold myself to a higher standard."
"I appreciate that." Emmeline reached down and picked up a manilla folder. "I should probably get back upstairs in case a call comes in. Send me an owl sometime, alright? We should catch up."
"Sure," Remus lied. She wanted to catch up with the man she thought she knew, not the werewolf he really was.
He spent the rest of that shift cleaning normally, just in case she came looking for him again. The next day he came in, he made sure to be working in the Courtrooms at that time in case she came down, but after a couple of hours he decided it was safe and continued his exploration of the Department of Mysteries. The Room of Doors was continuing to flummox him, especially because he didn't know what kind of traps might be on the doors. He considered marking them with magic as he tested them, but worried that would trigger an alarm. The problem was that the room was featureless otherwise. The doors were featureless; there was precisely one identical candle between each door, and the black marble of the doors, walls, floors, and ceiling was all flawlessly black, with no imperfections he could use as reference points. To top it off, the whole room was spotless, and even his attempts to mark the floor with ink failed as complex automated cleaning magic whisked it away within seconds. He needed a new plan.
Sam Proudfoot idly animated an old memo and directed it to fly onto his partner's head. After a full minute without a reaction from her, he spoke up. "Something on your mind, Emma?"
She jumped a little and her eyes, which until then had been lost in some far distance, refocused on him. "I suppose, Sam. Why do you ask?"
"Mostly because you haven't noticed your new hat." He gestured with his off hand at her head.
She put her off hand up on her head and brought it back down with a delicate memo butterfly resting on the back of her hand.
"Awww, she likes you," Proudfoot said.
Vance rolled her eyes. "Very funny, Sam."
"Really, though, what's going on?" he asked as the butterfly wilted back into an ordinary memo.
"Nothing, really. I ran into an old friend yesterday who's apparently working as a janitor here now," she said.
"Seems pretty normal," Proudfoot said. "So why are you giving it a second thought?"
"Well…he was actually working," she replied.
Proudfoot raised his eyebrows. "There's no way the other janitors would let him get away with that, especially old Head Janitor Brumby."
"Exactly." She sighed. "As much as I don't want to believe it, I think he's up to something."
"That's as may be," Proudfoot said, "but there's no way we could get a warrant to investigate him. I mean, what would the suspicious behaviour be? Actually doing his job? Just because he's the only one in the building putting in an honest day's work doesn't mean we could get a warrant."
Vance chuckled. "True, true. He's probably just trying to make a good impression and doesn't realise yet that he needs to be making Brumby happy, not the rest of us."
"More's the pity," Proudfoot said.
"Indeed." Vance settled back into her chair and, once again, her eyes lost focus on her surroundings. Proudfoot thought about making fun of her, but it was nice to see her relaxing and not thinking about work for once.
The pale man stood over the twitching siblings and sighed. "The Dark Lord d…does not like to be k…kept waiting," he told them. "Why have you not yet obtained th…the prophecy?"
"We still don't understand the precautions around it," the brother wheezed.
"And we only have time to map a little each night if we're going to get in and out without getting caught," his sister added.
"Map faster," said another voice from the pale man's head.
Remus took a fortnight off from his janitorial "work" after that, both to see if he could find any relevant books at his day job and to wait out the Full Moon. Unspeakables were generally unwilling to write about their work even after retirement, so he instead used a library Indexing Charm on books by other government officials. It was exhausting, but still easier than reading each one.
It was a sleepy Sunday afternoon in the bookstore when he ran across a five-volume memoir by former Minister of Magic Hortensia Milliphutt entitled "If Only You'd Listened To Me." He vaguely remembered her as a prolific legislator whose ideas had initially been sound, but had eventually degenerated into insanity as she ran out of more reasonable topics on which to legislate. The memoir went into exhaustive detail on all of her proposed legislation and why each law was absolutely vital to Wizarding Britain.
In between a proposed regulation on the heights of pointed witches' hats ("Between sixteen inches and four-and-twenty inches should be our standard. Too short and the wearer can scarcely be distinguished as a witch, and too tall and the hat starts interfering with the passage of low-flying memos in the Ministry.") and a proposed destruction of the entire Kerguelen Archipelago with Fiendfyre to eradicate the Night-Hunting Cabbage ("That vicious bastard of a Brassica is too dangerous to be allowed to survive even on the far side of the world from our great island. Kerguelen delenda est!"), Remus finally found what he'd been searching for.
In July of 1848, Minister Milliphutt had proposed a law restricting the spinning of the Room of Doors. She'd been concerned about the potential for employees passing through the room to become forever lost and unable to complete their work for the Ministry. ("It would be a terrible loss if a Deputy Undersecretary became lost in the room for several years and failed to timely complete a critical report on the thickness of cauldron bottoms.") The Unspeakables had apparently pushed back on this proposal by saying that anyone too stupid to magically mark the doors as they tried each one was too stupid to produce any useful work, anyway. Eventually, they won over the Wizengamot (but not the indefatigable Minister Milliphutt) with a compromise that the exit door would always be accessible with a simple request.
Remus grinned and shut the book, thanking Milliphutt for both her compulsive documentation and for indirectly creating the exit strategy that had gotten him out of the room the first time he stumbled into it. His eyes fell upon his broom in the corner and he found himself compelled to nod to it. It was time to go further into the Department of Mysteries, and a Sunday night was about as quiet a night there as he could possibly hope for.
The fact a broom was now his closest confidante was probably a bad sign for his mental state, but he ignored that. Harry might be in trouble and he would not fail James' son again.
Everything seemed normal as Remus made his way into the Ministry, but he still moved as carefully as ever. He cleaned up the Department of Magical Transportation until well past midnight before sneaking down to the Courtrooms and setting his broom to work. He didn't detect any new monitoring charms or wards at the Department of Mysteries, but he still had a weird feeling about the evening and resolved to be extra-cautious. He Disillusioned himself, silenced his footsteps, suppressed his scent, and slipped into the DoM.
Moving through the featureless black tile of the entrance hallway was disorienting when he couldn't see himself, so Remus closed his eyes and made his way forward using his other senses, enhanced as they were due to his lycanthropy. Every few steps, he stopped and checked for new traps and the like, but there was nothing besides what he'd already discovered. In fact…
He paused and recast his detection charm. There was nothing at all precisely two-thirds of the way down the hall where his notes said there was an Intent Ward to catch would-be thieves. It seemed unlikely that the Unspeakables would reduce their already unimpressive security, but he had no idea who else could have done it. Remus resolved to be extra-cautious and continued.
The Room of Doors took him some trial and error to work through and it was probably after one o'clock by the time he finally made it into the Time Room. Clocks of all sizes and shapes lined the walls and hung in mid-air in the spare spaces between desks and cabinets, each one ticking in perfect synchronisation. The sound hammered into his ears just like the beautiful, terrible diamond-like light stabbed into his eyes.
A quick Muffling Charm brought the noise down to manageable levels, and Remus conjured a pair of sunglasses to shield his eyes from the worst of that glorious light. A normal human might have found the light beautiful and the clocks charming, but it was too much for his enhanced senses to bear.
He threaded his way through desks and past a bell jar that seemed to contain a bird of some sort in a permanent time loop. The mere existence of such a thing made his brain hurt, so he tried not to think about it too much. A large glass case of Time-Turners stood against one wall, which Remus also tried to ignore. Having one could be awfully useful, but that sort of theft would certainly be noticed and he was trying to keep a low profile.
The Hall of Prophecy was surprisingly easy to get into after that, with no monitoring charms or wards in place at all. The cold of the place seeped into his bones, helped along no doubt by the cool blue light of the magical candles placed at intervals among all of the rows of prophecy orbs. A magically updating index by the door allowed him to search by either the name of an interested party (seer, hearers, or subjects) or the date of the prophecy, and sure enough, there was one about Harry. Remus considered heading back at that point, but he was curious who else might have been involved.
After a short walk to Row 97, he had his answer. The prophecy was delivered from "S.P.T." to "A.P.W.B.D." on Saturday, January 26th, 1980, and was about a Dark Lord and (probably) Harry Potter.
"Albus…knew?" Remus asked the chilly darkness. He had far more questions now than he'd anticipated, but before he could think about them more, his Tripwire Charm at the elevator went off.
[A/N: Yep, cliffhanger. I'll resolve it in less than a week, on Hermione's birthday. Also, I just discovered that direct copying from Google Docs to FFN was stripping all of the italics from each chapter. I apologize for any degradation in the readability of the previous chapters. I'm going to go back and fix them in a bit.
Here's a random bonus story for you all that I swear is 100% true. After my senior year of undergrad, my girlfriend and I both hung out at our university over the summer so we could see more of our friends and each other. At one point, we went with some friends to a very good cajun restaurant about a forty-five minute drive away. It was a popular place and even had its own gift shop. We had a reservation, but it still took a bit to seat us 'cause there were about ten of us, so we chilled out in the gift shop for a bit.
Important context for the next bit: this was just after the first Harry Potter movie came out. I had pretty much the same glasses and similar facial structure to young Daniel Radcliffe, but obviously looked a bit older. I also have a faded, jagged, vertical scar above my left eye from a bike accident when I was 18. My girlfriend, OTOH, had pale skin, glasses, and extremely frizzy hair.
Anyway, a waitress came up to my girlfriend and me while we were checking out some t-shirts. She said I looked just like Harry Potter and was going to tell her daughter that she saw Harry Potter on a date with Hermione, and asked if she could have my autograph for her daughter.
I pretty much always have a pen and paper on me, so I pulled out a notepad and pen and wrote, "To one cool muggle. Sincerely, Harry Potter" and gave it to the waitress. She seemed really happy about it, and my girlfriend thought it was hysterical and sweet.
Oh, and if you're wondering how things ended up with that girlfriend, it's been about twenty years since that night and she's sitting in the room with me as I type this, streaming old episodes of Castle, and wearing a ring I gave her two years later.]