Normalcy, Draco decided, was just one of those things destined never to cross his path. It had eluded him from birth, an event which, if his mother was to be believed, had been heralded by a string quartet who found themselves backing away from the business end of Lucius' wand shortly after they launched blithely into the first movement of Schubert's Death and the Maiden. It had given him a wide berth as he grew up, a ridiculously spoilt child whose birthday parties routinely put all coronations throughout history to shame, and it had run screaming when Draco was handpicked by a dark lord to murder one of the most powerful wizards of their time.
Now, as Draco heard himself being handed an absurdly easy job on a silver platter, he imagined Normalcy must have long ago given him up as a bad job and gone on permanent vacation. He had never had to go through a job interview before -- there was that sticky wicket of being imprisoned -- but Draco was fairly sure what he was sitting through currently bore very little resemblance to a job interview in anyone else's reality.
Of the two questions posed to him thus far, one of them had been, "How are you today?", and the other, technically not a question, went something along the lines of, "I understand you speak fluent French." Ms. Quigley, now outlining the responsibilities of the job while Draco nodded at the appropriate intervals, apparently did not care to hear about his strengths and weaknesses or what assets he could bring to the department, and certainly did not bother letting him bumble through an explanation of why he deserved the job when he had absolutely no work experience or qualifications.
He could see why the Unit had reserved this job in particular for him -- it involved a lot of travel to countries where no one knew him, and required very little actual work, but gave him a respectable cover. Specifically, he was to play assistant to one of the diplomatic ambassadors to the French-speaking countries with which the Ministry was mostly friendly. Said ambassador, however, had been installed in the position at approximately the turn of the twentieth century, had gone from occasionally amusing to officially dotty around the mid-'80s and retained no more than three of his original teeth. As Draco understood it, Cyrus Ogletree was such an institution that no one had the heart or courage to fire him from what for the last few decades amounted to nothing more than a very cushy sinecure in which he got to travel to exotic places, eat rich foods at somebody else's expense, natter on about how things were done "back in his day, when men were men" and retire to bed in a luxury hotel before the sun went down. Meanwhile, the Ministries visited often either had their own doddering version of Ogletree or needed the British Ministry's support too much to make a fuss, and so treated the man much like one would the eccentric, elderly granduncle who gets tipsy and longwinded at family functions. Draco's job, then, was to make sure the old codger got to where he was going in one piece, translate when necessary, cover up for any gaffes and bring along a spare set of teeth on every trip, after which he would generally be free to roam, spy and steal important government information. The last bit was really implied rather than stated, but implied so firmly that Draco didn't infer her meaning so much as felt it etched in his bones.
A neon pink piece of paper chose to squeeze itself into the office just then, flattening out and oozing inch by inch through a crevice in the doorframe as though going through a wringer. It fluttered exhaustedly on a nonexistent breeze and landed carefully on Ms. Quigley's desk, facing Draco. He pushed it towards the woman, who slid it right back.
"I think it's yours," she said meaningfully.
Draco, who was getting tired of meaningful, knowing looks that made not a lick of sense to him, glanced at the paper, on which was printed: Wanted: Manic unicorn seeks ideal companion. Floo 2733839 for a good time. His brow furrowed; it was clearly one of those useless, nonsense advertisements that only the most thick-headed of the population paid heed to, a persistent shill that somehow always managed to infiltrate even the most secure mail systems.
Tilting her head at an angle so she wouldn't have to read the message entirely upside-down, Ms. Quigley quirked a corner of her lips upwards. "Usually they don't make that much sense."
"I see," said Draco, glancing up at her. "Some kind of code, then?"
She smiled, pleased. "It's meant for you, so it will only respond to your magic. A simple revealing spell will do; no need for complicated messes when it's already guarded against everyone but you."
Draco did so, and the letters jumbled themselves, morphing into other characters and finally forming a coherent message. Once he'd read it, the letters then began to fade away, and the paper ripped itself into shreds so miniscule they might as well have been dust motes. Ms. Quigley, apparently well-seasoned to this kind of behaviour from mysterious notes, produced a rubbish bin from underneath her desk and swept the remnants in.
A thin, reedy sough filtered into the office -- someone trying to whistle nonchalantly and failing on both counts. One of the department's employees ambled by, strolling down the hallway and taking an occasional sip from a coffee cup. Ms. Quigley's was a corner office, and through the floor to ceiling glass panel that made up the wall between her office and the corridor, she and Draco watched the man try to listen in, tipping himself ever so slightly in their direction, and make an abrupt turn as he ran out of hallway through which to casually saunter. Realising he was being studied, the man, with the expression of a child caught with his hand in the biscuit tin etched all over his face, bounded out of view back to where he came from.
"Glass walls," Ms. Quigley lamented in a tone that said she would have the last word on it. "That was the fourth person to try and peek in, wasn't it?"
"Well, four and a half, if you count the little one with the glasses who lost his nerve halfway," Draco said.
"Not a shred of stealth between the lot of them," she said almost fondly, "but they're cut from a different cloth than we are, and normalcy suits some better than others, after all."
Draco's mouth tilted up as she gave voice to his earlier thoughts.
"Anyway, I trust you won't find babysitting Ogletree too strenuous of a task; he's a lamb, really. A sandwich short of a picnic these days, certainly, but he won't give you much trouble," Ms. Quigley said, and waved her wand. A light blue swirl emerged from the tip and bounced on the air before zipping out the office and down the hall with precision. "My secretary will be here shortly to help you with all the necessary paperwork and to give you a tour around the place. We'll see you back on Monday."
She stood and shook his hand, and Draco was left without a doubt that he had been officially dismissed.
The massive pile of redundant paperwork was the hallmark of a well-oiled government machine, while the frothy exuberance of Ms. Quigley's secretary proved decidedly less so. While she was helpful and, in her own spirited way, efficient, no less than three times did she ask to see -- or worse, touch -- his Dark Mark, and no less than four times did he seriously consider stabbing her with his quill to give her a dark mark of her own. Perhaps, at the very least, it would put a temporary halt to the "I can't believe you're really going to be working here!", followed by the "Eee!", which made fire alarms sound positively soothing in comparison.
There was no sense in getting fired just hours after getting hired, however. As he signed and dated his last piece of parchment and handed the stack to the girl, Draco managed to rein in the more satisfyingly violent thoughts and reminded himself of Dennis Creevey, for whom good cheer served as a mask for something much deeper. Draco himself preferred a shield laced with bitterness and cynicism, but perhaps he indulged in so much scowling on his own that bad humour might be in short supply for everyone else.
Not, of course, Draco thought to himself as he stepped into the lift and locked eyes with a familiar face, that there weren't a select few special snowflakes who seemed to have an endless well of their own to draw biliousness from. "Hello, Weasley."
The look of surprise on her face was quickly shoved away by that of scorn. "What are you doing here?" Ginny asked.
"I don't recall retaining your services as my keeper, Weasley," he said evenly, his eyes trained just above the lift doors on the pointer as it moved slowly from one floor number to the next.
"So you've something to hide, then, if you can't answer a simple question?"
"Are you always this suspicious?"
"Are you always this evasive?"
"What if I am?"
"Then it means I've a pretty good reason to be suspicious."
Draco smirked, but remained silent. She could jump to her own conclusions, which, if he knew Weasleys, were most likely highly improbable scenarios that involved complicated conspiracies and Draco laughing maniacally whilst stroking a white cat. Plus, the part of him that housed his sense of self-preservation told him it would be more beneficial for his health if he just let her take the time to sort her thoughts out rather than continuing to provoke her in a very small, enclosed space with no witnesses around.
The lift came to a halt with a polite 'ding!' on the Atrium floor, and Draco did a mocking half-bow, gesturing with one arm the primary rule of gallantry: ladies first. The laws of chivalry had been instilled in him ever since he had been old enough to push another baby over, and just because he was dealing with a Weasley didn't mean that he could put aside years of training; however, dealing with a Weasley also meant he didn't have to do it quite so properly.
Ginny swept past the doors with a haughty look on her face, and Draco noted, with some disappointment, that she hadn't swished her work robes dramatically as well. He followed her out of the lift, and headed for the visitor's entrance.
The two guards who had admitted him earlier that afternoon were still on duty. "Return your pass, please," said the quicker one.
Draco tossed the card to him, and as they let him pass through, he suddenly stopped and turned. "Oh, Weasley?" he called, as she made her way to the Floos. "See you on Monday."
"What?"
"I work here now. Did I not mention that?" he asked airily. Without waiting for a further response -- her mouth agape was quite good enough -- Draco spun on his heel and left the building. He, on the other hand, knew how to make an exit.
Dennis was waiting for him a few feet away from the telephone box, looking very engaged in working his thumbs on a small, black, rectangular object. He looked up as soon as Draco began his approach, and lobbed the item towards him. Snatching it out of the air handily, Draco looked it over.
"I got you a mobile phone," Dennis said, as they fell into step with one another. "It's not activated or anything; dead handy, though, when you're just standing around in a Muggle area and want to look busy. Everyone uses 'em nowadays instead of talking to one another, so you'll blend right in."
"Thanks," Draco said, still inspecting the phone. "And I know just what number I should call first. For a good time. Although, I can't say you're really my type, Creevey."
Dennis snickered. "They won't always be that, er, exciting. But now you know one of the ways we can get messages to you; it's important that they look rubbishy, so no one will pick them up. Like how we do Portkeys that won't attract Muggle attention."
"Fair enough, my manic unicorn. Now what?"
"Now you tell me what glamour I had on when I was following you today, and after that, we're going to switch roles, and I'm going to tell you everything you did wrong," Dennis said, sounding a little too cheerful at the prospect.
"Oh, will the fun never stop?"
Now, as Draco heard himself being handed an absurdly easy job on a silver platter, he imagined Normalcy must have long ago given him up as a bad job and gone on permanent vacation. He had never had to go through a job interview before -- there was that sticky wicket of being imprisoned -- but Draco was fairly sure what he was sitting through currently bore very little resemblance to a job interview in anyone else's reality.
Of the two questions posed to him thus far, one of them had been, "How are you today?", and the other, technically not a question, went something along the lines of, "I understand you speak fluent French." Ms. Quigley, now outlining the responsibilities of the job while Draco nodded at the appropriate intervals, apparently did not care to hear about his strengths and weaknesses or what assets he could bring to the department, and certainly did not bother letting him bumble through an explanation of why he deserved the job when he had absolutely no work experience or qualifications.
He could see why the Unit had reserved this job in particular for him -- it involved a lot of travel to countries where no one knew him, and required very little actual work, but gave him a respectable cover. Specifically, he was to play assistant to one of the diplomatic ambassadors to the French-speaking countries with which the Ministry was mostly friendly. Said ambassador, however, had been installed in the position at approximately the turn of the twentieth century, had gone from occasionally amusing to officially dotty around the mid-'80s and retained no more than three of his original teeth. As Draco understood it, Cyrus Ogletree was such an institution that no one had the heart or courage to fire him from what for the last few decades amounted to nothing more than a very cushy sinecure in which he got to travel to exotic places, eat rich foods at somebody else's expense, natter on about how things were done "back in his day, when men were men" and retire to bed in a luxury hotel before the sun went down. Meanwhile, the Ministries visited often either had their own doddering version of Ogletree or needed the British Ministry's support too much to make a fuss, and so treated the man much like one would the eccentric, elderly granduncle who gets tipsy and longwinded at family functions. Draco's job, then, was to make sure the old codger got to where he was going in one piece, translate when necessary, cover up for any gaffes and bring along a spare set of teeth on every trip, after which he would generally be free to roam, spy and steal important government information. The last bit was really implied rather than stated, but implied so firmly that Draco didn't infer her meaning so much as felt it etched in his bones.
A neon pink piece of paper chose to squeeze itself into the office just then, flattening out and oozing inch by inch through a crevice in the doorframe as though going through a wringer. It fluttered exhaustedly on a nonexistent breeze and landed carefully on Ms. Quigley's desk, facing Draco. He pushed it towards the woman, who slid it right back.
"I think it's yours," she said meaningfully.
Draco, who was getting tired of meaningful, knowing looks that made not a lick of sense to him, glanced at the paper, on which was printed: Wanted: Manic unicorn seeks ideal companion. Floo 2733839 for a good time. His brow furrowed; it was clearly one of those useless, nonsense advertisements that only the most thick-headed of the population paid heed to, a persistent shill that somehow always managed to infiltrate even the most secure mail systems.
Tilting her head at an angle so she wouldn't have to read the message entirely upside-down, Ms. Quigley quirked a corner of her lips upwards. "Usually they don't make that much sense."
"I see," said Draco, glancing up at her. "Some kind of code, then?"
She smiled, pleased. "It's meant for you, so it will only respond to your magic. A simple revealing spell will do; no need for complicated messes when it's already guarded against everyone but you."
Draco did so, and the letters jumbled themselves, morphing into other characters and finally forming a coherent message. Once he'd read it, the letters then began to fade away, and the paper ripped itself into shreds so miniscule they might as well have been dust motes. Ms. Quigley, apparently well-seasoned to this kind of behaviour from mysterious notes, produced a rubbish bin from underneath her desk and swept the remnants in.
A thin, reedy sough filtered into the office -- someone trying to whistle nonchalantly and failing on both counts. One of the department's employees ambled by, strolling down the hallway and taking an occasional sip from a coffee cup. Ms. Quigley's was a corner office, and through the floor to ceiling glass panel that made up the wall between her office and the corridor, she and Draco watched the man try to listen in, tipping himself ever so slightly in their direction, and make an abrupt turn as he ran out of hallway through which to casually saunter. Realising he was being studied, the man, with the expression of a child caught with his hand in the biscuit tin etched all over his face, bounded out of view back to where he came from.
"Glass walls," Ms. Quigley lamented in a tone that said she would have the last word on it. "That was the fourth person to try and peek in, wasn't it?"
"Well, four and a half, if you count the little one with the glasses who lost his nerve halfway," Draco said.
"Not a shred of stealth between the lot of them," she said almost fondly, "but they're cut from a different cloth than we are, and normalcy suits some better than others, after all."
Draco's mouth tilted up as she gave voice to his earlier thoughts.
"Anyway, I trust you won't find babysitting Ogletree too strenuous of a task; he's a lamb, really. A sandwich short of a picnic these days, certainly, but he won't give you much trouble," Ms. Quigley said, and waved her wand. A light blue swirl emerged from the tip and bounced on the air before zipping out the office and down the hall with precision. "My secretary will be here shortly to help you with all the necessary paperwork and to give you a tour around the place. We'll see you back on Monday."
She stood and shook his hand, and Draco was left without a doubt that he had been officially dismissed.
The massive pile of redundant paperwork was the hallmark of a well-oiled government machine, while the frothy exuberance of Ms. Quigley's secretary proved decidedly less so. While she was helpful and, in her own spirited way, efficient, no less than three times did she ask to see -- or worse, touch -- his Dark Mark, and no less than four times did he seriously consider stabbing her with his quill to give her a dark mark of her own. Perhaps, at the very least, it would put a temporary halt to the "I can't believe you're really going to be working here!", followed by the "Eee!", which made fire alarms sound positively soothing in comparison.
There was no sense in getting fired just hours after getting hired, however. As he signed and dated his last piece of parchment and handed the stack to the girl, Draco managed to rein in the more satisfyingly violent thoughts and reminded himself of Dennis Creevey, for whom good cheer served as a mask for something much deeper. Draco himself preferred a shield laced with bitterness and cynicism, but perhaps he indulged in so much scowling on his own that bad humour might be in short supply for everyone else.
Not, of course, Draco thought to himself as he stepped into the lift and locked eyes with a familiar face, that there weren't a select few special snowflakes who seemed to have an endless well of their own to draw biliousness from. "Hello, Weasley."
The look of surprise on her face was quickly shoved away by that of scorn. "What are you doing here?" Ginny asked.
"I don't recall retaining your services as my keeper, Weasley," he said evenly, his eyes trained just above the lift doors on the pointer as it moved slowly from one floor number to the next.
"So you've something to hide, then, if you can't answer a simple question?"
"Are you always this suspicious?"
"Are you always this evasive?"
"What if I am?"
"Then it means I've a pretty good reason to be suspicious."
Draco smirked, but remained silent. She could jump to her own conclusions, which, if he knew Weasleys, were most likely highly improbable scenarios that involved complicated conspiracies and Draco laughing maniacally whilst stroking a white cat. Plus, the part of him that housed his sense of self-preservation told him it would be more beneficial for his health if he just let her take the time to sort her thoughts out rather than continuing to provoke her in a very small, enclosed space with no witnesses around.
The lift came to a halt with a polite 'ding!' on the Atrium floor, and Draco did a mocking half-bow, gesturing with one arm the primary rule of gallantry: ladies first. The laws of chivalry had been instilled in him ever since he had been old enough to push another baby over, and just because he was dealing with a Weasley didn't mean that he could put aside years of training; however, dealing with a Weasley also meant he didn't have to do it quite so properly.
Ginny swept past the doors with a haughty look on her face, and Draco noted, with some disappointment, that she hadn't swished her work robes dramatically as well. He followed her out of the lift, and headed for the visitor's entrance.
The two guards who had admitted him earlier that afternoon were still on duty. "Return your pass, please," said the quicker one.
Draco tossed the card to him, and as they let him pass through, he suddenly stopped and turned. "Oh, Weasley?" he called, as she made her way to the Floos. "See you on Monday."
"What?"
"I work here now. Did I not mention that?" he asked airily. Without waiting for a further response -- her mouth agape was quite good enough -- Draco spun on his heel and left the building. He, on the other hand, knew how to make an exit.
Dennis was waiting for him a few feet away from the telephone box, looking very engaged in working his thumbs on a small, black, rectangular object. He looked up as soon as Draco began his approach, and lobbed the item towards him. Snatching it out of the air handily, Draco looked it over.
"I got you a mobile phone," Dennis said, as they fell into step with one another. "It's not activated or anything; dead handy, though, when you're just standing around in a Muggle area and want to look busy. Everyone uses 'em nowadays instead of talking to one another, so you'll blend right in."
"Thanks," Draco said, still inspecting the phone. "And I know just what number I should call first. For a good time. Although, I can't say you're really my type, Creevey."
Dennis snickered. "They won't always be that, er, exciting. But now you know one of the ways we can get messages to you; it's important that they look rubbishy, so no one will pick them up. Like how we do Portkeys that won't attract Muggle attention."
"Fair enough, my manic unicorn. Now what?"
"Now you tell me what glamour I had on when I was following you today, and after that, we're going to switch roles, and I'm going to tell you everything you did wrong," Dennis said, sounding a little too cheerful at the prospect.
"Oh, will the fun never stop?"
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