Sawing Off the Limb Behind Me

Robert couldn't honestly say he liked the Ministry's temporary digs, but they'd been generously loaned by the muggle Prime Minister. Some old ancient underground cavernous spaces under Whitehall that the muggles had deemed far too easy a target. Wizards, however, had better protection spells. There had been one proviso, though. "Please down blow this one up, Robert..."

Yeah, yeah.  Well, the spaces were yawningly enormous.  Ugly brick and concrete cinder block, left over from the first muggle world war. He'd gone in, with a handful of trusted staff and had erected some offices for those who needed them.  Most of the workers would work in the large common area with old surplus desks and chairs that were solid and functional, albeit ugly, separated by still rather uglier partitions. He had decided the workers could cosmetically transfigure them to meet their own tastes.

For some of the department heads, brick spaces had been added, with doors of wood and glass. Lighting was warehouse industrial.  He was working on that part.  His own desk looked a great deal like it had been dug up out of an old schoolhouse, and the deskchair was an ancient wooden swivel chair.  Not a frill about it.  

He'd given Millie a partitioned off space--wood, and some spectacularly intricate leaded glass windows that brought color and light into her space. He'd found the windows in a muggle architectural salvage and had bought them himself for her. He'd give her a better desk and chair than he had for himself.  And he had give her a lovely new beta in an art glass bowl.  

And already there was more annoyance than he'd expected. The few things he'd brought back in that were necessary were, for some reason, running amuck with untold numbers of those damned rainbow pygmy puffs.  There were a few annoyed workers--including himself.  But most were delighted to see something colorful and living and friendly.  Delighted enough that work had slowed a bit while pygmy puffs were getting excessive attention. That, and in the dust of the old massive space, some of the puffs were starting to look more softball sized than puff sized.  He wasn't sure where the puffs had come from but he had had a notion to blast them.  

He'd not done it, because he'd made a mumbling remark about wanting to make them all into pieces of lint instead, and Millie had forbade him from doing it.  He'd rolled his eyes at her, and let her have her way--for now.  

He'd been in his office since about 2 am. He'd gone up to the street during the night in search of cigarettes and the best he could find was some weedy muggle brand that smelled a lot like torched up paper bags. And didn't taste any better.  Millie hadn't gotten in yet, so he felt no remorse in making a tobacco haze in his office. Or, as he was starting to think of it, his "cell."  His tea was cold, bitterly brewed orange pekoe that was now lingering in a somewhat soggy paper cup on his desk, brewed by a bleery eyed teenage clerk in the same place he'd gotten the foul cigarettes.  This was London, for God's sake. Couldn't anybody make tea? He had intended now for hours to go out for something better, but it hadn't happened yet.  

Some of the very early risers were starting to drag in and were either petting puffs or enchanting their spaces to be more human friendly. And someone had thought bringing food would warm things up, because he was smelling warm pastries and cinnamon and sugar--somewhere on the other side of his tobacco cloud.  

He picked up the old worn out quill he'd dug out of some box, and as he went to start writing, the quill spit up a blob of black ink on his parchment.  

"Buggar," he sighed, replacing the quill into the stand.  Well, he wondered, what else could go sideways?

“Oh, Merlin.”

A spotty, teenaged intern stalled mid-stride and upon his ejaculation of surprise, the sound of parchment and files slamming with a juxtaposing flutter of sheets upon the stone floor reckoned against their eardrums. Falling to his knees, the intern scrabbled about, attempting to pull everything back into some semblance of order. White magic tumbled around his hands and stole everything up into the air all of a sudden, a memo shooting out belatedly from beneath his knee. The boy took a breath and looked up, blinking through the lenses of his glasses, watching half in awe, as everything was put to rights once with the man who had left them all to the dogs – or, rather, one dog.

“He won’t help you now,” a wry voice interjected as, with the end of his wand, he lowered the files back into the embrace of the young man who had managed to drag himself to his feet. “I trust you know who I am,” he added half-sardonically, eyeing the boy curiously as he nodded to excess, his lips forming words that were not quite vocalised in his internal panic. He swallowed and gathered himself together once more, blinking rapidly before finally beginning to form a vocalised sentence.

“You… what are you … how did you get in?” He asked.

“I opened the front door,” was the bored reply. “Where’s the Minister?”

“In his office making Indian smoke signals.” The teenager replied snappily, causing the lips of the man before him to lift up into a smirk.

Thanks was offered and the wizard breezed easily past the intern, his dark green robes swishing around his ankles. Further into the catacomb-like structures walked the tall, lithe creature that was Elijah Krum. Freshly shaven and his hair cut back to shoulder length, he looked and walked around as though he’d never left in the first place when in a strange sort of way he was coming to the call of the smoke signals and, soon enough, found them, also. A few secretaries and even more interns skittered out of the way and Elijah looked around himself, wondering whether he’d always cleared a room quite in the way he seemed to be doing at that moment in time.

Swinging his head around the door to the office in question, Elijah’s eyebrows rose at the sight of the Minister. Back in the driving seat once again, it seemed. Elijah was relieved for it, too. At least despite blowing up the Ministry and reconvening underground they could all at least pretend to have some shred of sense about them. Indeed, they could also all now pretend that there was work to be done. But, given the pygmy puffs that ran under Elijah’s feet on the way out of the office, he doubted that there was much of that really going on – not that he could blame anyone for it.

“Morning,” he enthused jovially, stepping inside. “How the devil are you, Robert?”

Robert had been momentarily looking at the inkblob on the parchment that had formerly been so important to the reform of national security.  He was reeling in frustration.  Not cleaning up the blob.  Just reeling in frustration from having to rebuild the whole bloody country.  It was a weighty thing that now, he was feeling the weight of more fully because of a damned inkblob.

He took another puff off the foulest muggle cigarette on the market and exhaled its trashy odor into the air in his office. Millie was going to kill him.  Flat out.  

"Morning.  How the devil are you, Robert?" the voice hailed him.  He looked up to see Eli there.  

"Wonderful," he said wryly.  "Come sit down.  I'm hoping Millie is early today and can rescue me from myself. Well,..." he gave a cursory look around. Millie expected better from him.  "Given the state of things in here, maybe I should rethink that."  

Annoyed with the document and the worn out quill, he flicked his wand at them and sent them to go spin in circles above Millie's desk to let her deal with it.  Just one more thing she would not probably thank him for. Oh, yeah.  And he hadn't remembered to feed her new fish. Somehow she would know. She would just know. Lovely.

But what was bringing the wayward Krum back to Ministry offices, he wondered.  He'd been barely seen at all in the last couple of years. He'd been, well, simply not there, even when Robert still had him on the payroll. And when the lad had been there, he'd been using his office to shag everything that moved.

Robert had been intending to deal with that somehow before Pierce made a mess out of Robert's life.  Robert hadn't been able to get back to deal with Elijah, and then Elijah had merely walked off the job.  Pierce had taken it for his own, unable to unseat Robert, and then had attempted to go the long way round to unseat Robert by making him look incompetent.  

"Welcome to the new digs, such as they are," he said. "Well, hopefully not for very long or everyone is liable to go on strike. You really are probably one of the last people I expected to see down here.  What brings you here, Eli?"

The drama which had circulated the Ministry was, in Elijah’s opinion, heinously unnecessary. Blowing it up had been ridiculously dramatic and allowing Gideon to get away was an oversight that really should have seen half of the Auror division sacked. Elijah clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth thoughtfully as he considered the room in which he stood. It wasn’t pleasant and didn’t particularly give him any encouragement. He didn’t desire to return to the Ministry, after all said and done. What he wanted to do was make sense of what it had become. It seemed to be scraping at the bottom of the barrel. Living underground was about as bad as it got.

“Just checking in,” Elijah replied, sitting himself down in the chair Robert had indicated to. “I felt it was worthwhile given the Prophet won’t shut up about everything that has been going on.”

Elijah folded on leg over the other and opened up his blazer, idly wondering when he would be able to return home and get back into sweat pants and a t-shirt so that he could continue painting or indulge the children in some games. He wasn’t quite the political animal he once was. It hadn’t all been hedonistic pursuits, though he doubted Robert would ever believe as much. No, he had done his job, shockingly enough. Everything he was ‘famed’ for had long since fallen out of favour with the Bulgarian wizard. The one reason for his leaving was and always would be his family. Curiosity brought him back but it wasn’t enough to make him stay.

“I don’t intend to stay long,” he added. “I prefer the sunshine. I feel much too much like a rat down here,” and after all said and done he was a tiger by trade.

"Let them talk," Robert said. "They've got a right to be upset. Pierce had a lot of lives turned upside down. At least if its in the Prophet, its fairly harmless unless its news coming from a reporter of some repute. Otherwise, folks tend to blow them off like the Quibbler. So far, no one has asked me to make a statement, so until I get time to talk to them, they'll have to just do what they always do and gossip.

"Pierce isn't going to be easy at all to stop," Robert sighed. "Not now, anyway. If our intel is right, he's working harder than he was when he was here. We've made things as difficult for him as we can, but it certainly hasn't stopped him. Its slowed him down, but that's about all."

"The reconstruction is a bit ahead of schedule, so hopefully we won't be underground much longer. I can't say I like it much either. The reconstruction has incorporated a lot more protections. I plan on making things more difficult for him to come back into the government."

"At least right now, there isn't anything for Pierce to want to take here. He'll bloody never find that. You really could have taken all those pygmy puffs when you left--before they multiplied.

"When we catch Pierce, I'm tempted to load his cell full, from top to bottom with those damned things." He saw a blue one with pink and yellow markings coming back into his office. That particular puff seemed to have an unusual attachment for Robert.

One of the young clerks from the owl room came to the doorway. To Robert, the thin young intern looked like he was about fourteen. He knew the application said he was seventeen but he certainly didn't look like it. And Kate would have wanted to take him home to the dinner table to have him tuck in to a good meal--or four.

"Sir?" the boy asked.

"Yes, Tim?" Robert looked up.

"Um...we..we're sending out to Sparks for tea, Sir. Would you like some?"

"Please," Robert said. "Buy a round for everyone, and bring a few extras. Have them put it on my account."

"Yes, Sir," the boy nodded, looking at Eli for a moment. "Tea, Sir?" the boy asked.

Robert got up, picked up the blue puff and dropped it into Eli's lap.

"Merry Christmas."