if seeing is believing you might be in some trouble.

WHO: The Spirit Division ( @lepouxinfernal / @ofphantasms / @scvrredhearts​ )

WHERE:  Team bonding night / Michael’s welcome party / The Three Sheets

WHEN: 17th October, 2008

“Sorry I’m late!”

Padma slid into an open seat setting down her bag and looking towards her coworkers. She’d made a stop between work and the team outing dropping some things off with Parv and making sure her sister was eating meals that included all five members of the food pyramid. It hadn’t been an excuse exactly but Padma couldn’t say she wasn’t looking forward to the few minutes it would knock out of the outing tonight. Their department was vast and diverse which often meant a lot of awkward small talk and arguing whenever all of them were forced to sit together and decide on anything like food, drinks, team bonding activities, where the cameras all went. She wasn’t sure who actually looked forward to things, though she was sure someone had to if they kept partaking in these outings. Or maybe someone just wanted them to all suffer together.

Not letting her hopes up, she ordered a drink and then turned to the people sitting closest to her. “Have I missed the karaoke yet?”

.

When Roger had begun his journey with the Spirit Division, he’d come to the conclusion very early on that the people who inevitably washed up into the department were very rarely team players. Fostering a workplace community had seemed to him like the best way to rectify this problem, or at least foster some sense of unity, and having met Bob, the ancient bearded “official” Head of Department, the conclusion had been that the only bonding activity he had a hope of enticing him into attending had been drinks or a communal nap time. After some early experimentation and determining that Bob’s reputation as a cuddler made the former an inappropriate team bonding activity, drinks had been the decisive winner — and thus a tradition was born. 

Journalism, as it turned out, wasn’t all tracking down sources, clandestine meetings and uncovering deep-rooted government conspiracies. There was, apparently, a great deal of waiting involved, in uncomfortable Ministry-standard chairs while Mae from records tried to pretend she wasn’t acknowledging your presence but would, eventually, slide a discrete folder across the desk because you had an arrangement. That was a big part of the job, he’d soon discovered. Knowing people in the right places.

There was also a surprisingly frequent amount of getting punched in the face. 

And so, Fabian waited, a days old Prophet turned to the half-filled in crossword in his hands and his foot jiggling absently where it was balanced carelessly across one knee. The mundane drift of progress as people approached the desk, categorising the sum of life and death and all the quiet joys in between on little certificates until, as Fabian pencilled in Scamander into a 7-Across, a familiar voice caught his ear.

He glanced up over the top of the newspaper, tapping his pen against his lower lip as the familiar voice met up with a familiar face in perfect, twattish harmony. That absolute twat.

The soft crack of apparation disturbed the peace of the night, the crunch of gravel beneath boots tipping Roger’s head lazily up from his daze to enquire, politely, of the moonlight reflecting off of silver-blonde hair, “Alright, Malfoy?”

If the glow of his cigarette in the dark hadn’t given him away, the soft creaking of the swing Roger had perched upon to wait certainly had. The slow creep towards midnight only one of the many, time-swallowing events that made up Roger’s days and nights. Unlike so many of the day to day functions of the Spirit Department, investigations could rarely be carried out by daylight.

Roger sighed, leaning back into the swing and one last inhale of his cigarette, savouring it for a long moment before tossing it aside into the grass. The lazy sway of the swing was halted as he stepped upon the glowing butt, reaching down to hoist the satchel he had filled with provisions for the night ahead up into his arm as he lazily dropped back to his feet and eyed the respectable little townhouse, all stone and wood and home to a deeply restless spirit, towering over head. 

There had been no recorded deaths in the house for over fifty years, according to the Ministry’s records. Whatever this family had brought into their home, Roger doubted it would be a gentle separation. The spirits they were encountering of late seemed to be growing less and less amiable by the week.

Hence the back up — of sorts. At least it wasn’t Dennis.

Back tucked against the corner of the lift, arms crossed across his chest, Michael’s pout was prominent. The doom and gloom that surrounded him, lurking behind his eyes– the weight of his glower directed at one former quidditch captain he couldn’t peg. That wasn’t fucking Roger Prick Davies. Just like this– a transfer to the shittiest fucking department in the shittiest fucking ministry in the entire fucking world. Fuck England. Fuck this building full of backstabbing pricks.

Fuck Ludo Bagman. 

That cock-up of a department head was the reason he was in this fucking mess. Shoved off where he couldn’t muck up. The kid glove department of rejected losers and Michael Corner wasn’t a fucking loser. No matter what the assistant coach of Kenmare said. 

The glare, an expression Michael tried to avoid because these pillow lips and high cheekbones needed to be shown off in the best light and not marred with expressions of contempt was boring a hole Roger’s way. Nothing was alright about this situation, least of all Michael. “Wasps?” He tsk’d, wanting to deny having seen the hell of the match but quidditch was the unifying topic as ever. The surefire way to get Michael to launch into a tirade not about his latest annoyance. “Never stood a chance against Parkin. She’s a fucking animal.” His huffed, readjusting against the walls of the lift that took forever to fucking work as his gaze dropped to the box that Roger clutched onto like a goddamn lifeline. “When was the last time you were out on the pitch? Without any of your–” He gestured to the cardboard prop. “–fucking spirit pets bringing you there.”

Michael Corner was a tightly wound spring of aggression simmering just beneath the surface, waiting for an opportunity to release. Of all the many misfit toys that had washed up into their department, through misfortunes that were largely of their own making, Roger had yet to meet a single one he couldn’t somehow find a use for. Michael’s mourning period was still in full effect, if the sulky expression that was still affixed to his face at all times like a widow’s veil was any indication, but that didn’t mean that Roger had to acknowledge it. 

“Parkin dominated, for sure, but the Wasps are in good form, they could be the ones to beat this year,” he replied easily, laying out just a taste of bait as the elevator finally began to rattle and hum its way up a floor to their destination. The Improper Use of Magic office personnel may have come and gone over the last ten years, but there were still enough old codgers in the department who couldn’t meet his eyes that it would always be a viable break room destination. Roger bit back a yawn, turning his head to bury it into his shoulder rather than acknowledge the idea of getting out on the pitch.

When was the last time Roger had even thought about getting on a broom? 

“We don’t refer to them as pets,” he chided instead, with the same gentle disappointment he addressed most of the indignities directed their departments way. Respect for the dead seemed to end the moment that they decided to remind the living that they wouldn’t go quietly. “I haven’t played Quidditch since—,” his nose wrinkled faintly, trying to recall anything beyond a friendly game with the Prophet’s social team back when he was an intern. “Since I left the Prophet.” It all seemed a lifetime ago. He shuffled his arsenal of carefully assembled casefiles gently in his arms as the elevator crawled to a halt, doors sliding open with a cheerful ding and the soothing tones of the welcome witch announcing their arrival on level three. 

“Pen! Look at that, just who I wanted to see,” wasn’t precisely the truth of the matter, since the coincidence of their running into each other had been carefully orchestrated with Roger timing his ambush down to the second. Considering Penelope had developed something of a sixth sense for knowing when Roger was going to ask a favour of her that she wouldn’t want to do, he’d had to become wily about these things of late. Kicking off the brick wall hastily before she could take evasive manoeuvres to the next level he fell into step next to her, smile as broad and convincing as it ever had been as a wisp of smoke escaped his lips, “I need a touch of back up.”

Back up, in their line of work, could mean just about anything. It might mean midnight exorcisms or Witching Hour stake-outs. It might also mean copious amounts of research and trawling through ancient files in the records department or, worst of all, it could mean office politics. “There’s a meeting with Prickle,” he glanced down at his wrist, flicking ash from the tip of his cigarette with a grimace, “That starts in about ten minutes that could decide whether we get to keep our intern or not and Bob went down for his morning nap an hour ago, he closed his bloody door and everything. Anyway, Prickle seems to be under the impression we’re a bad influence on Creevey.”

If anything, Creevey was a bad influence upon himself. “And you know she’s always liked you best,” insomuch as Gethsemane Prickle ever really liked being reminded that the Spirit Department was still a functioning arm of the Ministry, let alone a part of her department. “So what do you say, Pen? Shall we put our best foot forward for the team?”

“Padma?”

Roger doesn’t exactly remember wedging himself underneath his desk, a long night spent surveilling activities for the case currently papering his desk (an unfortunate hazard of the profession was that their subjects quite frequently only revealed themselves at night) had left him yawning through his morning. Perhaps he had fallen asleep without meaning to? Staring up at the intricate symbols carved with pen-knife precision into the underside of his desk he blinked, once, then twice and called again, “Padma? Do we still have that—”

Dennis always had a camera on him, but Dennis had been assigned to follow Draco around until he stopped scowling at everything that moved. 

Wriggling awkwardly towards freedom like a rained-out earthworm, he frowned. He was sure Padma had been in the office when .. well, she’d been here before. “Camera,” he huffed out as he managed to shuffle his head out from beneath the shadow to blink up into the dripping ceiling. It was freezing in here today. “Either someone’s been messing around with my desk or we’ve got a hitchhiker in here.”

The cardboard box cradled ever-so-carefully in his arms was the most precious thing in the world to Roger, at that moment in time. It, like the many others like it that populated their over-crowded workspace, had been carefully, reverently, curated under his discerning eye, like a shattered vase gently glued back together, piece by piece. Eye-witness accounts and testimonies, newspaper clippings and duplicates of bookpages, all meticulously filed and stacked and labelled to form a greater picture that was currently serving as a nest for an empty, chipped mug in Caerphilly scarlet that declared him the, World’s Greatest Uncle. Roger nudged the button for Level Three with his elbow and shuffled over to lean back against the wall of the elevator, glancing sidelong over at the departments latest recruit.

Nobody ever seemed to take their entrance to the Spirit Division with particular grace (eager interns .. or intern, he supposed, since Dennis was the only one they’d ever had, notwithstanding). There was something about the persistent chill and flickering lights and the singular shiver that crawled up the back of your neck whenever you entered the office in the morning that people found off-putting. There had been a time when Roger would placate those fears with explanations about June, their most frequent escape artist, but he had found this did little to soothe his coworkers concerns about their new environment. Michael seemed even less pleased with his transfer than most.