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The banner had taken Luna four hours to charm, and it showed — the letters kept drifting out of formation like they'd lost interest in their own slogan, so that STOP THE CULL OF THE THAMES-BASIN KELPIES occasionally rearranged itself into something closer to STOP THE KELP, which was not the message they were going for, but Ginny had stopped correcting it around noon.
"They're not even looking at the sign," she said. "They're looking at the sign not staying still. It's basically a magic trick at this point."
"Free entertainment," Luna agreed. "That's good. People remember entertainment."
There were nine of them outside the Ministry's Beast Division annex, which had seemed like plenty that morning and now, wedged between a dawdling crowd of shoppers and a bored-looking pretzel cart, felt more like a book club that had wandered outside by accident. Ginny had a placard in one hand and, in the other, a cup of coffee she'd been nursing since ten, mostly because it gave her something to do with the hand that wasn't holding the sign.
She saw the Aurors before anyone else did — three of them, cutting through the crowd with the particular unhurried walk of people who already know how this ends. She recognized the middle one from the papers, dark hair doing its usual impression of a bird's nest, glasses a little crooked, looking more charming than the typical disgruntled auror Ginny, frankly, had been expecting.
"Oh, brilliant," she said. "They sent the young one."
"I did tell you the permit mattered," said a voice behind her — Romilda, who had said no such thing, but who liked to imply she had once things went badly.
The young auror, Harry Potter, his name tag read, stopped a few feet from the banner, read STOP THE KELP with visible confusion, then seemed to decide not to ask.
"Afternoon," he said. "This the kelpie thing?"
"This is the kelpie thing," Ginny confirmed. "Very much still the kelpie thing. Are you here to save the kelpies?"
"I'm here because you don't have a permit."
"That's a technicality."
"It's the whole law, actually." He had a notebook out now, which struck her as faintly absurd — as if any of them were going to give false names. "I'm going to need everyone to come with us. Nobody's under arrest, this is just—"
"A very polite kidnapping," Ginny offered.
"—a formal caution," he said, over her, in the tone of someone who had clearly had this exact conversation many times and had a script he intended to keep to. "A detainment"
She let him finish reciting the script. Rights, procedure, the bit about how anything they said could be used, which seemed like a strange thing to warn nine placard-holders about. When he got to her, notebook poised, he asked her name without quite looking up, and something about that — being catalogued instead of noticed — made her want to be noticed.
"Ginny Weasley," she said. “Journalist, technically. Troublemaker, more accurately."
That got him to look up.
"Right," he said, and wrote something down that was almost certainly not "troublemaker."
***
Harry had expected the walk back to the Ministry to be the easy part.
It was not the easy part. The redhead — Weasley, he reminded himself, there were about nine of them and he'd only ever kept the Ginny straight because his colleague Dawlish complained about her name showing up in his paperwork twice a year — had apparently decided that being escorted through the Atrium in handcuff-adjacent custody was an occasion for conversation.
"So do you get a badge for this," she said, "or is the outfit the badge?"
"There's a badge."
"Can I see it?"
"No."
"Very mysterious. I respect that." She glanced sideways at him, sizing something up. "You know kelpies are basically endangered because of habitat loss and nobody in that building's read the report."
"I've read the report."
That stopped her, briefly, which he counted as a small personal victory.
"Have you."
"Population's down forty percent on the Thames basin stretch. I read a lot of reports. It's most of the job, actually, contrary to what the picture in the Prophet suggests." He steered her gently by the elbow around a fountain that was doing something unnecessarily elaborate with its water. "Doesn't mean you get to block a street without a permit."
"I didn't block a street. I blocked, at most, forty percent of a street."
"That's still a street."
"That's very literal of you."
"It's the job."
By the time they reached the Auror department, he'd catalogued the following: she talked when she was nervous, except she didn't seem nervous, which meant she just talked; she'd used the word "technically" four times in ten minutes, each time to excuse something that was not, in fact, technical; and she smelled like coffee and rain, which he noticed and then firmly filed away as an irrelevant observation, the way you'd file away the weather.
The processing room was standard — grey walls, a long bench, a clerk named Wilson who had the enthusiasm of a man doing his hundredth crossword of the week. Harry took her statement himself, mostly because nobody else on the team seemed eager to, and possibly because he told himself it was efficient.
"Full name," he said, quill ready.
"You already have it."
"Full name, for the form."
"Ginevra Molly Weasley." She said it like a dare, like she expected him to laugh. He didn't. "Go on, then. Say something about it."
"I wasn't going to say anything about it."
"Everyone says something about it."
"It's a fine name."
She looked, briefly, thrown by that — like she'd had a joke loaded and he'd disarmed it by just answering the question. It didn't last; she recovered fast, chin up, eyes bright with the next thing.
"Occupation."
"Journalist. Quidditch, mostly. I write the bit in the Prophet nobody reads until Sunday."
"I read it."
"You read the Quidditch column."
"I read most things."
"That's either very flattering or you're required to as part of processing me, and I can't tell which."
He looked up from the form. She was leaning back against the bench, arms crossed, entirely unbothered by the room, by the caution, by any of it — and there was something underneath the performance that he couldn't quite name yet, something that made the banter feel less like deflection and more like a language she was fluent in and enjoyed speaking.
"For the record," he said, "you're not being charged. It's a caution. You'll get a letter."
"A letter. How romantic."
"It's Ministry procedure."
She spread her hands. "But for the record — I am, generally speaking, a good girl, Auror. Ask anyone. Well. Ask anyone who wasn't at Diagon Alley today."
"I don't know anyone to ask."
"Then you'll have to take my word for it."
"You were arrested for an illegal protest an hour ago."
"Detained," she corrected. "You said it yourself. Very polite. Barely a kidnapping."
He put the quill down. Not because he'd finished — he hadn't — but because he needed a second where he wasn't writing anything down, where he could just look at her without it going on a form. She noticed the pause. Of course she noticed.
"You're going to lecture me now," she said. "I can see it building."
"I'm not going to lecture you."
"You've got a lecture face."
"I don't have a lecture face."
"You've absolutely got a lecture face, it's very similar to your normal face, but the eyebrows do something."
He almost laughed — caught it, mostly, turned it into a exhale through the nose that she clocked anyway, smiling like she'd won something. He picked the quill back up, finished the form, stamped it harder than strictly necessary.
"Get the permit next time," he said. "That's the whole lecture. Get the permit, and we don't have to do this."
"And if I don't?"
"Then I have to arrest the same journalist twice in one month, and my paperwork gets very repetitive."
She stood, unhurried, gathering the coat she'd had draped over her arm since the Atrium, and for a moment there was nothing to say — the form was signed, the caution was logged, there was no more procedure left to hide inside. She should have walked out then. She didn't, quite yet.
"Well," she said, at the door, half-turned back toward him. "Wouldn't want to miss meeting you again, Auror."
And she winked — quick, unbothered, gone before he could decide what to do with it — and let the door swing shut behind her.
Harry sat there a moment longer than the paperwork required, looking at the space where she'd been, and thought, with some irritation at himself, that he hoped the kelpies stayed exactly as endangered as they currently were.