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Objectively speaking, worse things had happened to Tina Goldstein—much worse in the whole scope of her life, but also plenty worse just recently. She’d lost her job trying to do the right thing, she’d made two new friends and lost, them, too, one to the inconvenient fact he was a No-Maj and the other to distance and circumstance. She’d had to watch Queenie mope about for ages until Tina finally suggested, loudly, that someone ought to go down to that new bakery and see if it was as good as all the No-Maj’s seemed to think.
And worse still the things she didn’t like to think about, all the pain and death that were naturally part of an Auror’s job but never got much easier.
So really, in the whole grand scheme of things, the fact that she’d been accidentally and very much jokingly flirting with Gellert Grindelwald since just about the beginning of his time spent posing as Percival Graves wasn’t even in the top ten worst things that had happened to her in the last few weeks.
And like all of life’s train wrecks, it had started off so simply. She’d noticed Mr. Graves seemed a little preoccupied with something other than the reports they’d been filing together.
“Got some pretty little witch waiting on you tonight or something?” Tina had joked.
Graves had given her a flat stare. “No.”
“Well, if you want one, you know where to find me.” It had slipped out entirely by accident. She’d meant to say her first comment was a joke, but her brain skittered in the wrong direction due to mild panic and she’d only made it worse.
“I’ll pass.” The look of mild disgust and affront on Graves’s face should have been insulting, but—
But she hadn’t laughed quite so hard in a long time, once he’d left the room.
After that there was nothing left but to double-down on the whole disastrous exchange. Things around work had been grim, she’d needed the laughs. So Tina started slipping little innuendos into her conversations with Graves just to watch his deadpan reactions. It became a game to see if she could ruffle his feathers.
Tina never did manage to make him blush, but in retrospect that made sense. He was a mass murderer without a conscience, a few winks around the office wasn’t much stacked against all that.
And, really, the whole mix-up was pretty funny if viewed through the lens of humor rather than mute horror, her flirting with a wanted criminal on accident. It wasn’t like she coulda known better, anyway. Grindelwald had fooled everyone, even the President.
So, no, flirting with Grindelwald wasn’t the worst thing that had happened to Tina. That dubious honor went to the moment when, after the real Mr. Graves had been back at work a few days, Tina had forgotten herself and continued her harmless flirtations with him as if he were the same person he’d been the past several weeks.
They’d been discussing a raid of a local speakeasy to search for dark artifacts rumored to be stored there.
“You’ve gotten your wand inspected?” Madam Picquery asked Graves. “There’s no telling what Grindelwald might have done to it.”
“Beasley cleared it yesterday.”
“You trust Beasley with your wand?” Tina said, “Well, if you can’t get a spell off later, don’t worry, it happens to every guy.”
“If you’re so concerned with the state of my wand, perhaps you’d like to inspect it yourself?” Graves asked, a playful note to his words.
In that moment Tina wondered what it might be like to be shoved in a Vanishing Cabinet. She allowed herself to daydream about it for a few blissful seconds. Woulda been nice to just, poof, not exist anymore. She couldn’t believe she’d made such a lewd joke in front of the President, and she couldn’t believe Graves had gone along with it.
“If you two are done,” Madam Picquery said, “could we get back to the matter at hand?”
Things had snowballed from there. Tina couldn’t help throwing quips at Graves that varied from vaguely insulting to outright flirtatious. And the real Mr. Graves seemed more than willing to shoot them right back. Messing with Grindelwald had been amusing, but her banter with Graves quickly became something she looked forward to during her workday. She’d always thought he hadn’t had much of a sense of humor. Now she considered him the funniest guy at the office.
And Tina began to enjoy more than just lobbing innuendos back and forth with Mr. Graves. She loved the soft sound of his laugh, and the way he’d run his hand through his hair when he was thinking about ten things at once, and the way his mouth would quirk in a little smile when she’d said something particularly daring, and how at the end of a long day he’d loosen his tie and undo the top button of his shirt to reveal the hollow of his throat and—
“Oh, Teenie. Isn’t a workplace romance a little inappropriate?”
“Don’t read my mind,” Tina said, frowning. She and Queenie had been having a quiet dinner in until Queenie had decided to be nosy. “There’s no romance. We’re just joking around. Besides, you’re in love with a No-Maj, so I don’t wanna hear about inappropriate from you.”
“Whatever you say.”
After Queenie went and put ideas in Tina’s head, she couldn’t help but admit maybe her sister had a point. She’d grown fonder of Mr. Graves than she intended. Maybe it was time to put a stop to it all before she went and got herself hurt and embarrassed, because there was no way Graves felt anything for her.
The next morning Tina did her best to avoid Graves, but she couldn’t keep it up forever. They worked in the same department. And he went on flirting with her as always, and she was too weak to resist keeping up with him.
This is real bad, Tina thought as she tried not to laugh at one of Mr. Graves’s understated jokes.
Abernathy marched into the room, a bee in his bonnet about something. “Oh, good, you’re both here,” he said, crossing his arms like he was about to deliver a lecture. He glanced at Mr. Graves and cleared his throat. “With all due respect—”
Graves had been sitting on his desk, but he stood. Abernathy faltered, looking nearly ill.
“Well?” Graves asked. “Out with it, Abernathy.”
“Sir, well, we’ve all been talking and—and this has gone on long enough.”
“What has?” A hint of danger crept into Graves’s voice.
With courage Tina hadn’t known Abernathy possessed, he pressed on. “You two. All this will-they-won’t-they nonsense. There was an office pool for when you two finally stopped dancing around the issue, but everyone lost, it’s gone on weeks longer than it should have and—we all took the money from the pool and got you dinner reservations for tonight, eight o’clock. The bill’s paid in advance, just—stop all this. It’s driving us up the wall.”
Tina thought fondly of that theoretical Vanishing Cabinet again and how nice it would be to not exist. The entire office—and Abernathy, no less—meddling in their affairs, as if Graves would ever agree to go to dinner with her—
“Well?” Mr. Graves asked. “How about it? Are you free this evening?”
“Hm, no, sorry,” Tina said, automatically assuming an indifferent tone, “I’ve gotta wash my hair.”
And really, the wordless scream of frustration from Abernathy was worth it.
(And so was Queenie’s I-told-you-so, when Tina finally got home after the most charming night of her life.)