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It all starts because Harry makes a mistake.
A singular, minor error: for most people, this wouldn’t have the power to become anything memorable. Mistakes happen all the time and tend to become a blip in people’s days, easily forgotten with the passage of time.
Unfortunately, Harry had inherited the Potter luck. He’s slightly late back from lunch on the first day of his internship at Walpurgis Pty Ltd and he knows, even before anything else happens, that his tardiness is going to be reflected on his resumé, in one form or another.
For starters, Walpurgis is a contract development and enchantment organisation, CDEO for short. This is a complicated way of saying that the company is paid by wealthy clients to perform magical services, whether that be to develop new spells or to perform large-scale warding. As these activities have a great potential to go wrong, the industry is highly regulated. In fact, it’s one of the only industries in the magical world that is regulated. From what Harry has seen thus far, Walpurgis’ internal policy reflects this.
Therefore, he really doesn’t think his tardiness will be excused.
Especially not by his supervisor. His supervisor hates him.
A sour-faced, greasy-haired man, Snape had not hesitated to inform him that they would not be having any sort of amicable working relationship. In fact, the more Harry could make himself invisible and convince the man that he didn’t exist, the better everything would be for him.
Harry honestly expects to get fired. He thinks that the lift will arrive, finally, after being stuck on level six for the last several minutes, only for him to get dismissed the moment he gets to his own department’s level. He can imagine it all quite well, really: he’ll get fired, then he’ll spend the next several months tight on finances, hopping from couch-to-couch and bothering his best friends all too much, until he eventually finds another role that doesn’t secretly require ten years of experience.
That is the sort of luck he expects. That is what he expects his already-sad resumé to reflect.
Instead, smart business shoes clack from behind him in the lobby. Instead, he’s questioned in tone of forced politeness.
“Visitor?”
Harry turns so fast that he nearly gives himself whiplash.
Standing behind him, in a crisp three-piece suit and a stiff tie, is a distantly familiar man that looks like he should never have landed a corporate job in the first place, but could never move somewhere else now that he’s here.
He’s handsome. His cheeks are hollow and his jawline could cut glass, and the wave of his hair is combed neatly to the side. He could appear on the front page of Vogue, if it weren’t for the peppering of grey on his head. He could probably still appear on the front page of Vogue in spite of this, because the frown lines on his forehead only serve to make him appear more handsome, not less. He’s one of those men that age gracefully, like fine wine.
Dry, full-bodied red wine with tannins, the sort Harry has never quite acquired a taste for, that is; it’s obvious why the man had chosen the corporate world over some modelling gig, because his gaze sweeps over Harry like he’s worth less than dirt.
“You appear to be in possession of an employee access card, yet you also possess enough idiocy to stand by the lift on a Monday afternoon.”
Harry hasn’t a clue what that’s supposed to mean. He’s also shit at respecting authority on the best of days; he feels even less generous when he’s as good as fired.
“What?” is the politest he can manage.
He thinks the man could give Snape a run for his money. That cold, intelligent gaze somehow becomes more scathing.
“As one of our employees, you should be aware of the phenomenon: all buildings which host magic at large scale, or have been exposed to magic over a long period of time, are sentient to some degree.”
Right, thinks Harry.
He had majored in Duelling magic for a reason; he was practically-orientated. His acquaintance with theory started and ended magic that had offensive or defensive capabilities.
Sentient, temperamental buildings were a little outside of that scope.
Now that he’s thinking about it, he’s not entirely sure why he had even been accepted as an intern here. Sure, the position had been open to graduates from any degree—‘seeking high-performing problem solvers good at working under pressure’ had been the requirement in the job advertisement. Sure, his interviewer, Barty Crouch, had seem pleased with his enthusiasm.
But, Harry doesn’t have any experience or knowledge that might actually be relevant to the company. He doesn’t know how to develop spells, nor does he have the slightest inkling about warding. He hadn’t even taken Ancient Runes as an elective at Hogwarts.
He isn’t half-bad at most branches of magic, but he only really knows how to duel. It’s his passion; it’s what he’s always been captivated by, what he’s always wanted to major in, what he’s always wanted to do as a career.
At least, it used to be.
“So, what? The lift chooses not to operate after lunch on Mondays, or something?” he asks incredulously, shaking himself out of his reverie. An inoperable lift seemed like an issue on so many levels.
What if someone got stuck inside? What about the goods lift—was it the same story?
“Surely,” he adds, “if the building’s sentient, you can coax it to be nice.”
It’s rather like staring at a brick wall, Harry thinks. There’s no discernible emotion on the man’s face whatsoever, no telling micro-expressions. He can’t determine if he’s being regarded as someone with quaint but unrealistic ideas, or the stupidest person alive. The man only blinks at him, slowly.
“You didn’t go to the EHS induction, did you?”
Harry has no idea what that acronym means. “It’s my first day,” he answers instead, wondering if he should have clarified this from the beginning.
He just didn’t think it would garner him much sympathy; it certainly hadn’t allowed him any lenience from Snape.
His intuition appears correct:
“Obviously,” the man drawls, sounding more like Snape than ever. “I was enquiring for your name and department. Your supervisor’s too, come to think of it.”
That was not what had been enquired, not in the slightest, Harry thinks.
Unfortunately, he’s managed to glean enough from this conversation to realise that he’s not talking to some handsome but stereotypical middle-manager who thrives on making everybody miserable: he’s talking to some arsehole from upper management who thrives on making everybody miserable. Harry, wisely, decides to keep his irritation to himself.
(Not that it really matters who he gets fired by, of course. It’ll look the same on his resumé either way: a detractingly missing employment history, because he can’t very well write ‘Walpurgis Pty Ltd, Intern, 3.5 hours’ as his sole experience.)
“Harry Potter,” he manages. “Enchantment Department, under Severus Snape.”
The man, who had started directing him somewhere, presumably in the direction of the stairwell, pauses abruptly. He turns around and stares at Harry with a gaze that’s suddenly far less cold.
“Are you really?” he asks, his tone pleasant.
Far too pleasant; Harry registers that this man is definitely one of those people who say everything but what they actually mean.
It’s probably something to do with his parents. James and Lily Potter had spent several years in Azkaban. They had been exonerated before Harry’s eighth birthday, but he found that a lot of people reacted oddly to his name, as though his parents were still labelled as criminals, enemies of the state.
“I am,” Harry responds, if only because he’s stubborn. He’ll be damned if he lets some silver fox arsehole-guy from the executive board or whatever intimidate him. “And who’re you?”
A flicker of a smile appears on the man’s face. “I suppose you can call me Tom.”
He doesn’t offer a surname. He doesn’t need to; Harry suddenly realises why the man had looked distantly familiar to him.
He only has enough time to register that his face is overheating before he suddenly, unceremoniously, finds himself alone in the lobby of the ground floor.
Bastard, Harry thinks.
At least this answers one question: the frequently broken lift is never fixed because all the important people are keyed into the wards, allowed to Apparate directly from the bottom floor.
Lucky them. Harry still has two flights of stairs to climb.
Yes—a mere two flights. That’s what all this fuss had been for. Harry had indeed spent ten minutes waiting for a lift that would never come because he didn’t want to climb a mere two flights of stairs. He can hear the silent questions already—is he lazy, or perhaps woefully unathletic?
Neither. There were just some things that magic couldn’t fix, not completely: Dark curses that turned nerves to bone were one of them. His Healer had done a good job at restoring feeling and function to his right leg, but his knee was simply fucked.
Sighing to himself, Harry mentally prepares himself before he begins the slow, agonising climb to the third floor.
*
It takes Harry almost ten minutes to climb the two flights of stairs. In other words, it takes him just under one minute to ascend every step on average, and this fact has him feeling sorry for himself.
He used to run half-marathons for training.
Still. It is what it is. It doesn’t do well to dwell in the past and forget to live, or whatever it was that his old mentor used to tell him. Besides, Harry’s always subscribed to the mentality of ‘ripping the band-aid off’.
He’s going to get fired either way; might as well get the whole ordeal over-and-done with.
However, Snape isn’t sneering in front of the fire escape stairs, like Harry had expected. He’s not sitting at his desk either. In fact, his sour-faced supervisor appears to be absent from the third floor entirely.
Harry feels himself relax, but only marginally.
The whole office floor is eerily silent. It had been silent in the morning, too, but Harry had put that down to Snape’s presence. As the Head of the Enchantment Department, he probably enforced a strict ‘no talking’ rule, never mind that the office was open-planned and therefore (probably, presumably, potentially) supposed to be conducive to collaboration.
But it’s still deathly silent, even in their supervisor’s absence. Everyone is sitting upright, in stiff-backed chairs and jotting away on scrolls of parchment with tension strung so tightly in their shoulders that Harry wonders how they haven’t fallen apart yet, like marionettes pulled a little too hard.
Harry seems to have miraculously escaped Snape’s ire but, once again, he wonders if getting fired would be the better choice. This environment is stifling. Twelve months here would kill him, in spirit at least.
Unsure of what he’s supposed to do—he’s not trained in anything yet, unless bestowing one thousand and one insults upon new hires is actually a normal part of the onboarding process—Harry sits down on the same chair he’d suffered in all morning, and waits.
Unfortunately, unlike with the lifts, he isn’t kept waiting for long. Snape appears with a crack of Apparition at precisely half-past one.
Harry isn’t the only one that startles, although he is the sole recipient of Snape’s scornful gaze.
Really, what is the man’s problem?
“Have you read the SEPs I gave you?”
Harry swallows.
He isn’t quite sure what the acronym means, but he had, mistakenly it seems, assumed that the stack of files halfway between their chairs was Snape’s paperwork.
A look of disgust passes over the man’s face as he takes in Harry’s silence.
“Indolent and incompetent, just as I suspected,” the man begins, as though he had not placed the stack in such a confusing position on purpose. “I would fire you, Potter, if it would enable anything to rattle within the void of your skull; if it would do any good for your insolent manner at all.”
Again: Harry must impress that they had met this morning. He’s probably spoken a total of fifty words to the man, all of which had been perfectly polite. He has no idea what Snape’s problem is. Did Harry have an evil doppelganger that went around burning bridges before they’d even been constructed, or is Snape just this lovely to everyone?
“Unfortunately,” the man is still spitting, “there’s nothing much to be done for a boy who’ll know nothing of hard work and only the wealth of his parents’ connections. Fortunately, you aren’t my problem anymore.”
Harry blinks.
“You are firing me,” he surmises flatly. “On what grounds?”
“Take your pick, Potter. But what does it matter? You’ve been rehired, for reasons beyond my comprehension.”
Ah, thinks Harry, cheered somewhat. He’s been moved departments. Snape doesn’t actually have the authority to fire him anymore, however much he is clearly wishing—and pretending—he does.
“Where?”
Snape’s mouth curls.
“You’ve been requested as an assistant,” the man responds gleefully, and Harry can’t imagine why this news is making the man the happiest he’s been all day, at least not until the sentence is finished: “an assistant to the CEO.”
Well, Harry thinks weakly.
The CEO, whose reputation of an overlord precedes him, whom his parents and even his friends had warned him against—"Darling, you don’t want to work under him,” Lily had said, “Something isn’t quite right with his record,” Hermione, an aspiring lawyer, had added later—the CEO who happens to bear the name Riddle.
Tom Riddle.
Surely this can’t be worse than being supervised by Snape.
“He wishes to meet with you right now,” the man in question adds.
“On what floor?”
“Sixth.”
Never mind, thinks Harry. The climb alone is going to be worse than Snape.
*
It one hundred percent is. Harry arrives at the sixth floor wishing he’d taken his prescribed pain management potions that morning. He could probably conjure up some narcotics right now, but that isn’t exactly legal.
Then Tom Riddle greets him, again, and Harry regrets his commitment to being an upstanding citizen.
For whatever reason, the man seems hell-bent on being nice to him. He doesn’t start inducting Harry via one-thousand-and-one insults, doesn’t glare at him, doesn’t even berate him for dawdling in the stairwell. He’s perfectly charming and full of wide, white smiles, going so far as to offer him some tea before they get to quote-unquote “business”.
The issue with this is that Tom Riddle’s reputation speaks nothing of kindness. Harry would usually be more than willing to put rumours to bed, but he can hardly forget the derisive way the man had looked up and down at him initially, before names had been exchanged. He declines politely.
“I read over your application,” the man says to him, when it’s clear Harry can’t be convinced into some coffee either. “You graduated as valedictorian from the highly-acclaimed Institute of Magical Sciences in Bayeux, receiving honours and several letters of recommendation from your professors. I imagine, as a Duelling magic major, you also received multiple offers of patronage.”
Harry nods. This is true, though he doesn’t like where the conversation appears to be heading. His injury wasn’t publicised; even the most fanatical followers of the sport wouldn’t know he had been a serious contender for the British line-up of wizards competing in the international duelling circuit earlier this year.
To his surprise, however, the subject isn’t pushed.
“From his notes, it seems Bartemius was most pleased with your interview, although he added that you don’t have any experience in our field of work. Take it as the highest compliment—he’s not usually the sort to hire people for potential.”
“Thank you. Sir,” says Harry.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been involved with any sort of hiring process,” thin lips twist at this, “and I realise that this is not the role you applied for. However, I think we’ll work well together, and I really am in dire need of an assistant.”
The latter statement, at least, appears to be true. There’s paperwork strewn all over his desk and his calendar isn’t turned to the current month, although all the dates appear to be crossed off. The former, however, Harry isn’t so sure about.
“I should give you the rest of the week to think over it; four days is our usual timeframe for accepting or rejecting offers, as you would know. However, I admit myself an impatient man. If you are amenable, I’d appreciate an answer by end-of-day tomorrow.”
There’s nothing else to be said: “Alright,” Harry agrees.
He receives a smile. The small sort, though whether this makes it any more honest than the flashy expressions he’s received thus far, Harry doesn’t know.
“See you then, Harry.”
His name rolls off the man’s silver tongue.
*
In the end, there isn’t any question about it. The situation with the lifts is concerning, as is the whole matter of preceding reputations and the man's one-eighty degree change in attitude towards him, but when it comes down to it, Harry needs the money.
He shows up just before five o'clock the following day, breathes a sigh of relief when lift arrives and delivers him to level six, then knocks on the large mahogany door that entrances the corner office.
“I’d like to accept your proposal,” Harry says a couple of minutes later when the door opens, speaking quickly so as to not get interrupted. “I just have one condition.”
“And what might that be?”
Harry ignores the purring sound in the man’s voice, just as he ignores the appraising look he’s receiving. Yes, he had made the effort to put on a suit, no, that was not an invitation, especially not from a man who’s probably fifty years older than him.
“Whenever I leave this position, I want an glowing letter of recommendation, regardless of what you actually think of me.”
Amusement shines in those dark eyes.
“Deal.”
That had been far too easy.
Harry’s not to be defeated, though. He sticks out his hand. “Deal. And nice to meet you,” he adds, as though this isn’t their third conversation at this point.
“Lovely to meet you,” his new boss responds, and to Harry’s utter disbelief, the apparently-dexterous seventy year-old man bends at the waist to kiss his hand, rather than shake it.
Harry thinks he may be in over his head.