Chapter Text
– 1 –
Return of a Bad Penny
It’s another grey day in a city full of secrets. A frozen rain had been needling my enchanted windowglass all afternoon, a steady tapping like a bad conscience that wouldn’t shut up. I sat bored, motionless in my dimly lit office with my boots kicked up against the bottom drawer of my desk. Nameplate on the door, instead of iron bars. Random Ministry aides in place of dementors sucking out my soul.
I was nursing a mug of now-cold tea that had given up the ghost hours ago. Next to it was a tumbler of Mandarin skins and cigarette butts… it preferred to be filled with Ogden’s. Somehow, London looked more grey and tired than normal through the rain-blurred glass, like it had seen too much and was still waiting for the punchline. I should have realised that it was a foreboding omen.
I set my mug down on the desk and gave my hand a flicking movement. The spell Professor Lupin had taught me always worked. Steam wafted upward as the remainder of my tea was returned to the proper drinking temperature. Smartest werewolf, best professor I have ever known. Damn shame that he and Tonks died during the battle. They did not deserve that end. At least their son, Teddy, is being raised properly by his grandmother, Andromeda Tonks. She is a fine Auror and the second-best person, next to Sirius, to ever come out of the Black family.
“I need to get out and visit Teddy more often." I thought. "I am his bloody godfather, after all.”
It had been three months since anything interesting had crossed my desk. Three months since I’d drawn my wand for something other than paperwork and petty crooks. They said I was the best of the best—tough, blunt, efficient. That’s what the brass likes to say when they want a job done without questions or apologies. Lately, though, all that reputation bought me was boredom and a stack of reports tall enough to bury a man alive.
Predictably, Ginny’s face floated in uninvited. Red hair, quick grin, eyes that had looked past me toward stadium lights and roaring crowds. Professional Quidditch had called her six months ago, and I was yesterday’s Chosen One. She’d chosen brooms and glory over dinners and quiet nights. I told myself I was fine with it. I told myself a lot of things. Being an Auror honed my skills at lying like sharpening a blade.
Suddenly, a short staccato of knocks sliced through my haze.
“Come in,” I grumbled just loud enough for them to hear, because it was easier than pretending I cared who it was. I was imagining that it would be another paper shuffler from the front office with more meaningless drivel to clutter up my desk.
The door opened with an anxious creak, and my first thought was that someone had taken a wrong turn. A woman entered my office, a real woman enveloped by an invisible shroud of jasmine, ylang-ylang, and roses... tea roses with thorns so sharp they could shred the unwary. I instantly knew that she didn’t belong to these drab Ministry corridors. She belonged in smoke and shadow, in a place where secrets were currency and everyone paid for them with blood or gold.
She closed my door behind her, slowly and deliberately, finishing with a clunk like the punctuation at the end of a dangerous sentence.
For a second, I didn’t recognise her at all. Women like her didn’t normally associate with mugs like me.
“Hello, Potter,” she said. Her voice was smooth, sultry, polished, with just enough edge to let you know it could cut your heart out, if necessary.
I paused for a second. Then she smiled, and the past came roaring back. I said, “Parkinson,” tasting the name like it might be poisoned. “Either I’ve been hexed, or Hell’s finally frozen over.”
She laughed softly, and it wasn’t the shrill, belittling sound I remembered coming from her at Hogwarts. This laugh had depth. Sophistication. Practice. Confidence.
“Still a charmer, I see.”
Pansy Parkinson—once Draco Malfoy’s shadow, his sneer with a pulse—stood in front of my desk in a dark green dress that fit her like a snakeskin balanced on silver stilettos sharp enough to pierce dragon scales. I was okay with that, as long as she didn’t try to shed. Even though she was Pansy, I could look past who she was and appreciate looking at a tasty piece of eye candy.
The years seemed to have been generous to her… almost too generous to be an accident. They had paid her dividends. They had not deducted interest. The pug nose I remembered being shoved up Draco’s arse most of the time was gone, reshaped into something elegant, almost Roman. Her lips were full, red as the fresh ink on a contract you probably shouldn’t sign. Her telltale pageboy haircut was the only thing about her that remained the same; however, now it was framing a face that knew exactly how to play the shadows in the light. If there’d been a scalpel involved, it would have had to have been wielded by a master—a regular Bernini or Titian.
“Bloody hell. What do you want?” I asked. No pleasantries. No nostalgia. I wasn’t in the mood for either.
She took the chair opposite me without asking. Crossed her legs. The room suddenly felt smaller to me. “Straight to business. I always admired that about you, Potter. Even when I hated you.”
“The feeling is mutual,” I said coldly. “And I don’t do charity work for old classmates—even ones I liked.”
“I’m not here to ask for charity.” Her eyes locked onto mine, dark and steady. “I’m here asking for help.”
“Help. You,” I snorted. “You picked the wrong Auror.”
“On the contrary,” she said. “I picked the only one who could do it.”
That got my attention, which annoyed me. I leaned back and folded my arms. “You vanished like a bad memory after the war. Five years without you tormenting my life. Five years of bliss. Now, Malfoy dumps you for that Greengrass skirt,” I said, cutting her short, like the falling blade of a guillotine, before she could finish opening her mouth. “Yes, I heard about that, not because of you, but because of him. It made me chuckle at the time. And now, here you are, all smiles and sweetness, tapping on my office door like a delivery of poisoned roses and chocolates. If you’re here to ask for my help in getting back at them, then you can pack up your smiles and saccharine and get out of here. I’m not in the revenge business. If I were, you, Draco, and several others would already know about it.”
“I’m not here about Draco and Astoria. It took me a while, but I finally figured it out. I am glad to be rid of him. I was never his girlfriend. I was just a toy dog for him to wind up and sic on people—a toy dog that was too stupid to realise it. He liked it that way, and my parents encouraged it because he was a Malfoy, and they were going to profit from it.”
“So, you’re trying to tell me you finally wised up. You’re some kind of all nice and shiny new Parkinson. Snakes can shed their skins, but they are still snakes. And I don’t want to get bitten.”
Her smile didn’t falter, but something flickered behind it. “People can change.”
“Some do,” I said. “Some just get better at hiding what they always were.”
She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, voice dropping. “Okay, enough of the sweet talk. I’m looking for something, Potter. Something old. Powerful. Dangerous in the wrong hands.”
Everything in my training told me to stand up, open the door, and kick her perfect lips and arse out into the hallway. Instead, I stayed put. Maybe it was the rain. Maybe it was the way she said my name, almost like it mattered. Maybe it was just the deadly undercurrent of my own boredom.
“What kind of something?” I asked, thinking I would probably regret it later, like petrol station sushi.
Her eyes glittered. “A relic. Fabled. A thing dreams, maybe nightmares, are made of. The sort of thing people kill for without blinking.”
I exhaled slowly. “You’re in the wrong department. Try Mysteries.”
“I already did,” she said as she straightened up and smoothed her dress. “They're scared to touch it. Too ‘po-li-ti-cal’. Too messy for them. It might upset the wrong people. But you—”
“Don’t,” I said. “I’m not your knight in tarnished armour.”
She stood up, turning toward the door, then paused. “I know you don’t trust me. You shouldn’t. But this matters. To all of us.”
She glanced back over her shoulder as a noise passed unseen in the corridor, and for just a second, the mask slipped. There was fear there. Real fear.
“I’ll be around,” she said softly, and then she was gone, leaving the room colder, more grey than before.
I stared at the closed door while the rain kept tapping away with its monotonous rhythm. I told myself I should forget her. Told myself this was none of my business.
The world outside did not believe me.