Chapter 4: Building a better tomorrow, today!
The hour – almost two, David informed Graham as he led him up the stairs – which had passed while Graham had caught up on his sleep appeared to have done Dave a power of good. The confusion and hurt which he'd been radiating when he'd asked Graham to leave had transitioned to an almost child-like excitement, a grin etched onto his face.
"So, Jess has been showing me a few bits of magic, though mostly just telling me about your world – but I've got to say, I'm more excited to see a few of these gadgets that you've brought along!"
Graham nodded as he followed his friend into the room, before reaching down to retrieve the satchel he'd snatched from his room a few hours before. Although he'd never really been the kind to go for Zonko's, he'd always had a fascination for contraptions (his father worked as an electrician, and Graham had grown up with ready access to a modern tinkerer's workshop), and he'd taken every opportunity he could to pick up the magical equivalent insofar as his allowance permitted.
Jessica smiled up at him from her perch on the bed, which, Graham noticed, had remade and enlarged itself in the time he'd been gone. "Show him your globe, Graham, I can't think of a better one to start with." She had composed herself since he'd last seen her, but there were still slight tear-tracks; it had clearly not been the easiest of conversations.
"Great idea!" Graham grinned, and spent a couple of moments rummaging before he retrieved the memento of his NEWT project, setting it down on the table.
"A snow-globe – which is different to a Christmas memento how, exactly?" David was squinting at the globe, though, mercifully, he hadn't tried to give it a shake yet. Graham quickly directed his attention to the set of dials which he'd affixed to the bottom.
"NEWTs are a bit like A levels – there's an examinable bit, but there's also a coursework module for some of the exams, and this was my effort for transfiguration and charms." Graham leant over to David, handing him the globe. "You see that village in the snowglobe? Try twiddling the middle knob, there you go -"
David gasped in shock as the snowglobe magnified its view twenty times over, leaving him staring at a lively farm-yard being tended to by a pair of children as their mother milked a goat nearby. Graham showed him the other two gears, which controlled direction, and let him play with it for a minute.
"So, none of those people are actually real, don't worry." Jessica supplied, leaning over to peer into the sphere. "I actually helped David out a bit on this. We found an unused classroom, cut the legs off a round table, and morphed the landscape out of that – and all the little people were simulacrums he made to populate the world he'd made."
David smiled, and tapped the glass – only to recoil in surprise as the farmer's market he was watching was thrown to the ground by a shockwave, sending its inhabitants scuttling for cover. Graham cringed, and tugged it out of his friend's hands.
"Yep, uh, it's a little bit alive, I should probably have mentioned that. They'll calm down in a minute and get back into their previous patterns – but it's only a bit of animation magic, nothing to worry about – they're not really scared. Something else?"
"Aha!" Jessica had been riffling through Graham's satchel, and triumphantly withdrew a slightly ageing paper packet. "Can we give a few of these a try, Gray?" At his nod, she tore open the packet, and withdrew a few sweets, handing one to each of her friends and taking what looked like a flying saucer for herself.
"And what do these do, exactly?" Asked David, dubiously eyeing what looked like a gobstopper, as Graham squinted to read the writing on the losenge he'd been given, before turning to reply.
"Basically, there's a magical sweetshop – Honeydukes – which sells really good sweets, but it also has a line in enchanted ones. I always brought a mixed mystery bag, because it was just much more fun to see the things that they could do. Bottoms up?"
As one, the three popped the sweet they'd been given into their mouths, and waited a moment for the effects to kick in -
"Alors! Je n'ai pensé pas qu'il serait une lozenge du language – j'ai oublié comment parler Anglais!" Graham laughed, before watching his friends for their own reactions.
Jessica giggled in delight as she was borne aloft by the whirligig powder which had replaced the sherbert in her flying saucer, lying back to relax on thin air – but David's reaction to his own sweet was less relaxed, and he swore in shock as his skin transitioned from its habitual brown through to blue and began to cycle through a range of entirely un-natural colours.
Seeing David's shock, Graham blushed at the realisation that he was entirely unable to offer comprehensible reassurance to his friend, but Jessica gracefully kicked off from the wall, latched onto her boyfriend's shoulder, and tugged herself down into a hug.
"Dave, don't worry, love – it's just a temporary thing, it'll wear off once you're done with the sweet. Besides -" she grinned, pinching his cheek - "I think you're pretty dashing in aquamarine!"
The rest of the evening passed pleasantly, until David remembered with a start that his parents were due to return from their excursion to the theatre shortly, and Graham and Jessica hurriedly reversed any of the spell-work which they'd carried out. Graham wished them congratulations and good luck with breaking the news of their engagement to David's parents, before making his way back to his apartment for some well-earned rest.
About a hundred and fifty miles away, on the other hand, James Potter and Sirius Black were on a very different sleep schedule, as they lounged in a late-night café in Soho, preparing themselves for a strictly less-than-legal caper.
"I tell you, mate – I've really been missing a trick, not coming here before. This place is incredible!" Sirius giggled into his coffee, watching the street outside, which was hosting a veritable carnival of night-life, not all of it strictly or indeed slightly legal. An excitingly accoutred woman caught his eye from across the street, and gave him a wink which was only literally above the belt; Sirius grinned back, before James cuffed him around the head, not without laughing a little himself.
"You can work your charms later, Padfoot – for now, it's about time for us to head off. Do you trust yourself to pay the bill?"
Although he feigned offence at the implication, it nevertheless took Sirius five minutes to count out the change for the coffee and cakes that he'd spent the past hour indulging in, before he joined James outside to make their way to the ministry's backup entrance, a disused bathroom a few hundred meters away. As they walked, James filled his friend in on the rest of their plan.
"So, you know most of the plan, but just to be clear: all we actually want from the Department of Education is the magic detecting stuff – the newborn registry, that is. Anything else you need to know, Padfoot?"
The two of them – having donned a pair of robes apiece – walked in silence for a moment, before Sirius responded, uncharacteristically subdued.
"I just need to know that this is worth it, James. If we get caught at this, it'll drop the whole order in the sink, and you and I'll probably get carted off to Azkaban, whether it's for the graveyard shift or for the cells."
James turned to look at his friend, a wild grin crossing his face.
"Of course it's worth it, my furry friend! The registry's going for a bloody good cause – I'm sure you'll end up neck-deep in it, but it's not my place to tell." He thought for a moment, before continuing, a little more sombrely. "More importantly, though, if you-know-who takes over the ministry, he'll get access to all the muggleborns and their families, and I doubt he'll be sending them gift-baskets."
Sirius snorted at the thought, before sobering up a little as they reached the derelict (and mysteriously undeveloped) WC they'd been heading to.
"Shall we, then?" He asked, grinning at James. As one, they cast a suite of silencing and scent-masking spells, before entering the bathroom which served as the ministry's evacuation point in case of attack – one of Harold Minchum's more sensible policies, although its presence was a well-kept secret within the higher echelons of the DMLE. Sirius and James squeezed into the farthest stall on the left of the men's bathroom, before pulling the flush.
A quiet, matching flush marked their entry to the ministry, and even this was quickly silenced by James' gesture, before he and Sirius cautiously emerged from the bathroom, which lay just a few feet away from the minister's office.
As anybody who has worked all night at an office can tell you, a public building becomes a very different place at night. It ticks, groans, and creaks; even the most ordinary noises can become sinister. James and Sirius peeked over the gilded balcony which overlooked the atrium to check for any additional presences that they hadn't anticipated; but, aside from the night-watchman, accompanied at the front desk by the distant drone of his wizarding wireless, there was nothing but the ticking of a hundred office clocks and the gentle swoosh of interdepartmental memos drifting across the atrium, waiting for morning and the return of their intended recipients. From long, tiresome nights doing it himself, James knew that the duty-force of aurors never left their ready-room in the DMLE, a floor below them, unless they an alarm was triggered or they were called out on a report. After a moment listening with animagus-enhanced hearing, Sirius signalled the all-clear, and the two of them began to work.
James laid the tip of his wand onto the balcony, concentrating furiously, while Sirius carefully cast a disillusionment charm on himself; after a moment, the balcony seemed to melt, silently pooling at James' feet, before flowing down to form a ladder, and solidifying again; another tap from James, and the ladder took on the colour of the brick beneath it.
"Smooth work, Prongs." Sirius muttered, before carefully lowering himself off the edge and beginning to climb; James donned his invisibility cloak, before joining his friend in climbing the three floors down to the offices of the department of education.
Some distance below, Sirius was carefully manipulating the latch on the other side of the window he'd reached; after a few moments, he hissed in satisfaction at his success, and carefully began to open the window. As he shimmied through, however, he heard a distant chime, and turned to peer back out of the window.
"James!" He hissed, as loudly as he dared. "There's a bloody watchman on the top floor!"
Eyes widening, James slid down the rest of the ladder, grabbing onto the window-ledge to slow himself, before ramming his legs through.
"Hold onto my legs, Padfoot!" He whispered back, before letting the ladder go, swinging back and away from it as Sirius kept him from tumbling to an untimely demise six floors below.
"Reparifarge!" James muttered, as loud as he dared, tapping his wand against the makeshift ladder. He flinched as it rushed back upward, regaining its colour as it went, and flowed back to the balcony it had been not a minute before. Sirius dragged him through the window, and the two of them crouched, frozen, for a minute, ears straining for any sign that they'd been noticed – but there was no cry of shock, and – having made his rounds – the guard in question stepped back into the lift.
"I thought they didn't do patrols!" Sirius growled, still a little breathless. "D'you think he's going to check every floor?"
Sirius' question was answered for him a moment later, however, as the lift re-opened on the ground floor, and the patrolman slouched across the floor to join his co-worker at the reception.
"I think we might have caught the tail end of his route," whispered James, relief suffusing his voice. "But we need to move faster – I don't want to bring the whole department down on our heads if he does another round in a bit."
The Department of Magical Education was a collection of slightly aberrant objectives united by the virtue of being too unattractive for one of the higher-budgeted departments to take on. Sports and recreation had been consolidated into the Department of Magical Games and Sports; Accidental magic fell under the jurisdiction of the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes; and the minister's office, of course, had taken over the scholarship program which was meant to fund promising students' post-Hogwarts educational ventures; its official use having lapsed, it had proved an excellent slush-fund which facilitated the ministry's policy efforts as a technically legal source of bribes for recalcitrant members of the Wizengamot.
What was left was supremely unglamorous and a hell of a lot of work for the few employees responsible for the department: an annual rejigging of the curriculum under the heavy scrutiny and influence of the various interests in the ministry (the key reason for the sluggish advancement of the muggle studies exam), the pre-Hogwarts educational committee (which managed the placement and safety of families who decided to outsource the education of their wizarding child and provided educational packages for those who wished to homeschool), and the squib integration initiative, which nominally helped squibs to find lives outside the wizarding world – or, more accurately, forcibly removed them from their families upon request and dumped them at an orphanage with a few choice memory alterations to ensure they wouldn't come back.
Unsurprisingly, this meant a lot of work and even more paperwork, leaving James and Sirius to pick their way through the overflowing folders and papers covering every surface of the office they'd infiltrated before letting themselves into the department proper – which, albeit with a slightly more organised filing system, was just as cluttered. What the two were looking for, however, was the unassuming door at the back of the office.
"Right," said James, pausing for a moment. "Shall we? I've got the door."
From his casual gossip with the overworked secretary of the department, James had learned that the department's only really magical function – maintaining the registry which recorded the first time each wizard or witch used accidental magic in Britain – lay behind that door. The Register was one of several irreplaceable artefacts in the ministry's possession – indeed, only Hogwarts' own system for sending invitations functioned similarly, and predictably, its management had been outsourced to the Unspeakables. The secretary had no idea what they did in the office, though she'd spent a happy five minutes complaining about the hours they kept.
Sirius drew his wand, and began casting a series of diagnostic spells, as James carefully carried out a controlled transfiguration, slowly melting the back of the entrance doors together until they seamlessly melded with the walls on all sides. Wizards were rarely imaginative enough to try something more than an unlocking spell when they couldn't get through a door, and certainly wouldn't assume the door had become a wall – the reinforcing spells he added to the quasi-wall would ensure it held for at least a few minutes if needed.
"I think that's most of the surface protections – all the standard DMLE monitoring charms, and a few extra alarms, but not much more than that, I think." Sirius supplied, as James rejoined him.
The chamber within was a little larger than either had anticipated, and the slight haze separating them from the thick book lying on a podium at the back of the room betrayed the layers of protections they needed to breach. Another minute passed as the two wizards analysed the wards they needed to breach, before James let out a breath and grinned, reaching for the satchel he'd prepared earlier that day.
"Unless you have some secret Black ward-busting technique you've not told me about yet, we're going to need to pull a Wormtail like we discussed, yeah?"
"I've got nothing you don't, Prongs – dear old mum was even less forthcoming on secret family techniques than she was on maternal affection." Sirius replied, smirking at James. "You're sure that you can disable the offensive components for long enough?"
"Such doubt you cast upon Hogwarts' most big-headed head boy!" James chided, as he rummaged through the bag he'd prepared. "Besides, you know I'd never let my faithful mutt burn to a crisp from the conflagration configuration they have running at the back there."
Sirius rolled his eyes, before muttering a few words and pressing his wand to the base of the wall, chiselling out a hole at ground-level which led to nowhere but had a striking resemblance to a mouse-hole.
"Right, then – let's get illegal!" Sirius grinned, and transformed into his canine counterpart. From his bag, James withdrew the facsimile which he and Lily had prepared a few days earlier; Sirius gripped it carefully in his mouth, and James turned to the wards.
"Wait ten seconds, and you're good to go, Padfoot!" And with that, he began a stream of spells, twitching his wand with each incantation as he pushed the wards back. On his mark, Sirius leapt forwards, rushing to the podium, and shifted back to his human form. Distantly, an alarm blared to life; Sirius quickly swapped books, rushed a transformation onto the replacement to give it a more-than-passing resemblance to the original, before reverting to a dog, grabbing the original, and rushing back to join James at the entrance.
Time was too short to acknowledge their success, and James ran back to the office they'd entered from, leaning out the department window and restoring the ladder he'd created before. Meanwhile, Sirius grabbed the stunned mouse which James had carefully transfigured earlier that day, and tossed it into the wards, wincing as they incinerated the facsimile, leaving a tiny charred corpse behind.
A ding signalled the lift reaching that floor, and Sirius ran full-pelt across the office, slamming the door behind him, as James reverted the transfiguration on the doors – the two of them bundled into the office they'd entered from, locking it from inside.
A distant "Alohamora!" heralded the arrival of the aurors on-shift above; as James and Sirius climbed back out the window, concealments safely back in place, they heard the lead auror begin the chain of spells (which changed every night) that unlocked the room they'd just left. But by that time, the two of them were already reaching the minister's office, and – as James undid his transfiguration for the last time – were home and dry, splashes from their lavatorial exit aside.
"So, what are the wards telling you?" asked Rufus Scrimgeour over his shoulder, leaving his junior partner to do their analysis as he investigated the rest of the office.
"Well, something living went through but it's not showing as human, which is a bit weird – oh, hold on a second." Scrimgeour's counterpart muttered a levitation charm, and grimaced at the smell as the mouse's burnt body floated closer. "I think I might have found our intruder, Rufus."
Scrimgeour came over, and confirmed his partner's suspicions; nothing had been taken, after all, and they didn't have the authority or information to lift the wards for closer inspection. The mouse-hole was quickly identified and sealed, the body vanished, and the door locked once more; by the time the book's replacement was noticed, some two weeks later, the short incident report which Scrimgeour made in the aurors' log would prove entirely unhelpful to the investigating Unspeakable.
Although Graham was delighted to receive the Register, both he and Lily had too much on their plates to put it to any good use in the following months (although Graham was amused to discover as he flipped through the book that his first piece of accidental magic – recorded alongside the location, his name, and the time of its manifestation – had been the detonation of a bowl of unappealing baby-food which had evidently violated the sanctity of his taste-buds).
Elsewhere, Voldemort launched an attack on Vindolanum (Magical York, and the last Roman magical settlement) and razed it to the ground, forcing a full-scale Order fight-back that captured seven death-eaters at the cost of the Prewett twins ("Not even slightly worth it – I wish we just killed the bastards." James confided in Graham, five drinks after he broke the news). Minchum's ministry launched an enquiry into the failure of the Aurors to come to the aid of their constituents, before canning it as soon as public attention shifted away; and Graham felt powerless as he struggled through the batch of coursework he needed to complete ahead of his finals work. His focus left him feeling confident enough that he was set to pass in every subject, but it did nothing to fix the dissatisfaction which his life at university had started to bring.
The problem, Graham thought, was that he'd thrived in university while he had thought that the magical world simply wasn't willing to accept him. Indeed, he hadn't had a choice except to thrive, and put magic behind him. But – for all that he was forcing it to do so every inch of the way – that world was reopening itself, and he'd decided what he wanted to do in it – indeed, what he wanted to d o to it. All this meant that – emboldened by the few days of relaxation which he'd enjoyed after his last exam – Graham made a very big decision.
"You're doing what?" Predictably, Jessica did not react well to the news when he broke it to her when they were punting that afternoon.
"No, I really have told the the faculty supervisor I'm stopping at the Bachelor's degree – I don't want to carry on and finish my doctorate, Jess. And I know, it's crazy, but..." Jessica was not interested in this attempt at an explanation, but she let Graham babble on for another minute before interrupting him.
"I get your plan and I know that it matters to you, Graham – but how the hell are you going to survive if you don't have a real job to go with it?" Her eyes softened, and she punched him gently in the shoulder. "Are you really, really sure about this? I know you usually land on your feet, but I would really miss you if you weren't here with me."
Graham smiled, and pulled his friend into a hug. "I'll miss living with you too, Jess – but in all honesty you're going to be thinking about moving in with Dave soon enough, and I'd just end up getting in your hair, which would be a huge waste given all the time you spend keeping it so silky." He turned away to grab the punt, deftly pushing the two of them clear of another boat, before twisting back to face Jessica, smiling mischievously. "Besides, I think that I've sourced a lovely little mansion in the country for my plans – don't you think I'd make an excellent magical Professor X?"
The idiocy of the image was enough to get a laugh from Jessica, and she turned the conversation to happier topics – above all, the spectacle of Lily and James' upcoming wedding, and how David might react to his first properly magical event.
As it turned out, a few weeks and a patient interviewee in Jessica had relaxed David's new-found enthusiasm for the magical world. In particular, his excitement had been tempered by the sombre fact of the state which the Wizarding world was in; although Jessica had reassured him that there were people fighting against Voldemort, and that they were in no imminent danger, unmitigated wonder proved rather more difficult to maintain in the face of the bigotry and hostility with which much of the wizarding world regarded Jessica (let alone what they thought of him).
Nevertheless, magic itself was still hugely exciting to David, and Jessica had reassured him that there was nothing to worry about – this was to be a gathering of friends, and there would be a fair few muggles which Lily had invited as well.
"Are you finally ready?" he hollered at Jessica's door from his seat in her flat's living room; having discovered that she had a suite of spells to help her prepare for a formal occasion, his patience had worn thinner than he'd expected. A moment later, though, the door opened to reveal his fiancé, resplendent in a shimmering navy dress, and his breath caught.
"You see? Not a bad result for a little time in front of the mirror!" Jessica smiled at him, before giggling and tugging him up for a kiss. "Shall we? Graham's gone ahead to pick up our portkey, but he should be back any second -" The sharp crack of apparition punctuated her point, and a cheerful Graham appeared, holding up a heavily gilted invitation.
"You're in for a real treat, guys – Lily's managed something properly special. Dave, do you remember what I told you about Portkeys?"
"Yeah, yeah. Keep my arms and legs loose, but don't let them go crazy, and let go when you tell me or get a faceful of ground. Do I just hold onto the card like this?"
He grabbed the corner to demonstrate, and Jessica quickly copied him. He was not expecting Graham to tap the card, however, and a wave of sudden terror crossed his face.
"Wait wait wait I'm not ready I'm not -" but his protests came too late, and the three of them were yanked off their feet and into nothing too quickly for the ensuing scream to confuse the neighbours.
AN: Sorry for the extra wait on this! As happens rather too often, I've been quite caught up in exams. I hope you've enjoyed this over-belated next instalment!