#babelstarter

All Atticus really wanted to do was go home, have a drink, and sleep for about twelve hours, but the world wasn’t really into giving him even the smallest of mercies lately. Instead, here he was in Diagon Alley, just coming out of Amanuensis Quills with a stack of too-expensive leather notebooks for the members of the Wizengamot, which was annoying in and of itself, given the number of supply closets he himself had found in the Ministry stocked with perfectly acceptable notebooks. But the Wizengamot was full of a bunch of pricks, and of course they wanted nothing but the most beautiful and expensive leather-bound notebooks for their notes, especially for the Crouch trial.

The Crouch trial. On one hand, it was a good thing they kept sending him on ridiculous errands, because it was a good distraction from listening to all of the information, but on the other hand, the work he was doing was for the very thing that was worrying him the most at the moment, so no amount of distraction was really helpful. He had known Barty, he’d spent his first year at Hogwarts looking up to him, had heard his father talk about how much promise he had, and now he was going to have to watch him get executed. At least he wasn’t naive enough anymore to think that wasn’t what was coming for Barty. It felt a lot like a warning, though, especially with how keen everyone seemed on forcing him to do work for the case.

He was so distracted with his thoughts that he didn’t notice the person very deliberately walking in his path. Someone forcibly knocked into his shoulder, sending the notebooks flying across the cobblestone street.

“Really cool, mate. Maybe at least try to make it seem like an accident next time,” he sighed, bending down to pick up the stack of notebooks that had been scattered to the wind in the collision. 

The coffee shop was always busy at lunch, and most days she tried her best to avoid it -- packing a lunch that she could eat somewhere nice, on the steps of Gringotts or in a park somewhere -- but she needed another coffee today if she was going to make it through the stack of paperwork that had somehow accumulated on her desk.

She hadn’t signed up to be a curse breaker to do paperwork, but right now it felt like nothing in her life was going to plan, so it was no real surprise that this wasn’t, either.  And neither was the get in-get out strategy for picking up a drink and a toastie at her favorite coffee shop and still having time on her lunch break to have a nice walk outside and get a bit of fresh air. 

She was in a rush, headed out, once her drink was finally in hand, her sandwich between her teeth, but the sight of the headline on the Daily Prophet in someone’s hands as she passed distracted her, for just a moment, stalling her on her way out the door.

     ‘Sorry, is that--’ she paused, taking the sandwich out of her mouth and trying again. ‘Is that today’s Prophet? Everyone’s talking about it and I’ve not been able to get my hands on a copy all day--’

This wasn’t a new situation. No, there had been plenty of other similar situations in the year since Lily had been elected Minister. Somehow, though, this was a thousand times worse, so polarizing that it seemed everyone and their brother had an opinion on the matter, and everyone and their brother wanted to give said opinion to them. It was hard for them to fathom how anyone could think anything but what they thought when it came to Barty Crouch Jr., given what he had done. 

But then again, it was personal to Ted. 

Crouch was one of the last pieces left that they needed to destroy. They hadn’t even realized it before, just how much it felt like there was no possible way to start to move forward until everyone who had been involved in destroying the happiness they had had before was dead and in the ground. When the news had come from the Auror’s that he had been found, hiding as a muggle––the fucking boldness for someone like him––they had immediately felt a weight lift from their shoulders, one they hadn’t realized they had been carrying, so caught up in the weight of all their own sins.

To say they wanted him dead as soon as possible was an understatement, and it wasn’t a secret they were trying to hide. Unfortunately, though, it seemed that half the population disagreed to the point of hatred, saying there wasn’t enough evidence to execute him, and so a trial had to happen. 

So today, it seemed, would be a day for dodging questions and holding their temper back instead of getting any real work done. Part of that meant frequent cigarette breaks outside of the Ministry, in an attempt to keep away from anyone in the Ministry who had an opinion to share. An attempt that was apparently not working as they heard someone approaching them now.

“The cigarette in my hand means I’m on a break. And being on a break means I’m not going to be humoring any questions about Crouch, so it’s pointless to try,” they said flatly, not bothering to look at whoever was approaching.

It had been over a year since Lily Evans had stepped into office, a year since he’d taken on the impossible task of rebuilding the new Werewolf Support Services, and in turn revealing his dark secret to all the world. No more did he need to fabricate stories of his suspicious monthly  disappearances, or the array of thin faded scars that littered his body, the last remnants of a time when hiding meant surviving. There were many things he enjoyed about finally having that bit of freedom, although there were just as many things he’d come to detest about it. The main one being the newfound attention it had garnered him. 

Being one of the few publicly known werewolves, meant there were few places he could go where he didn’t attract stares of curiosity and fear. And while it had been some time since he’d found himself caring what humans had thought of him, the utter nuisance of his celebrity had become quite annoying as time wore on. Eventually he’d come to find ways around it, often going out at odd hours, avoiding popular hot-spots, and the muggle world almost entirely. For instance, that evening, when he felt the sudden desire to dive back into his old reading habits, it was not the doors of the ever lively Flourish and Blotts he graced, but instead the quiet dwellings of the junk shop that lay further down the street. Tucked away from the busier parts of the shopping district, the shop was thankfully almost completely empty when Remus first enters it, the only dwellers being the elderly shop keeper and a young couple debating over how much they wanted an old curio cabinet. 

Climbing the rickety steps to the shop’s second floor, Remus finds himself smiling faintly as he looks on at the welcoming scene of a room filled to the brim with a vast assortment of leather-bound books, each title more peculiar and odd than the last. It was some time later, as he was skimming through the autobiography of a witch who claimed to be Godric Gryffindor’s chambermaid and third cousin, when Remus’s heightened senses pick up the presence of another. When he can hear their footsteps stop short he holds still, hoping they’ll move on, but finds no such luck. Letting out a sigh, he snaps the book shut before turning towards the intruder.  

“Did you want through here?”

It took Alice a hot second to realise exactly where she was when she opened her eyes, the light of day sneaking through the window. For a moment she feared her brain was going to play her a bad trick again and made her forget about everything that had happened the night before. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case, and within a minute she remembered everything. The embraces, the promises, the pancakes, the rose tea, the sweet words Ted had whispered in her ear while they were falling asleep together, and the feeling of finally getting some sleep in their arms. The same arms that were around her right now, as she rested half her body on top of theirs, legs entangled. She also recalled the offering of friendship she had given, and smiled softly to herself noticing the way they were sleeping right now. Not really friendly at all, but neither of them was able to control their unconscious bodies; and apparently they had needed to be close to each other. 

“Tedward-”, she whispered, moving up their body so she could be face to face with them. “I think it’s time to wake up. We have to go to work.” Alice beamed fondly as she watched them sleep so peacefully. Everything felt like before, so comfortable and loving, even though they both knew the world outside was never going to be the same. Her fingers travelled to their cheek, and she caressed their cheekbones gently before noticing she wasn’t wearing the same clothes as last night. Apparently before falling asleep, she had changed into one of Ted’s t-shirts. Just the feeling of their clothes on her made her heart race in a way only they could manage to. “Come on sleepy.”, she whispered once more, lips closer this time, and a little giggle hiding behind her words. “If you wake up now I’ll have the time to make you some breakfast. How does that sound?” 

Almost an entire week had gone by since the news about Crouch had been published but the excitement and the general buzz didn’t seem to quiet down. Alice was trying really hard to focus exclusively on her work; and that didn’t prove to be any simpler. As expected, the Aurors were going absolutely crazy, setting up the security for the trial and avoiding the press in general. It seemed like both Moody and most of her work mates had realised it wasn’t really the best idea for her to go outside, so she had been pretty much buried in old paperwork and evidence. 

She was grateful for it, if she was being completely honest. Reading piles and piles of documents and sorting them out was a good distraction for her brain, that was still trying to process everything that had happened those last couple of days. After some years of a relative dullness, so many things seemed to have been set in motion once again and she wasn’t sure how she was going to cope with them. 

She was dusting off a stack of old parchments when she heard the door of her office opening. “Morning.”, she said absentmindedly without really looking at the newcomer. “I’m really sorry about the mess. I have been spending a lot of time inside the archives lately and I had to pull out some equally interesting and filthy stuff.”

No matter how many times he used polyjuice potion to disguise himself and get out of the house, he never got used to the feeling of looking like someone else. Even Marlene, whose hair littered the back of his couch comfortably enough that he could feasibly disguise himself as them every day for the rest of his life -- it still felt wrong, his limbs too thin, his perspective seventeen or eighteen centimetres lower. The long hair, resting heavily against his back. 

But it was a necessary evil. He would’ve gone mad, confined to that basement forever, almost did even with his brief occasional outings while Marlene was at work. He’d been leaving more than they knew, lately, increasingly restless, and while he usually asked them to get him the potion ingredients he needed, he didn’t want them knowing how much polyjuice potion he’d gone through since the last time he asked.

Another jar of lacewing flies, a few hundred grams of ground horn of bicorn, he’d be able to tide himself over for another few weeks without them ever knowing he’d used everything they’d brought him. 

He pulled the jar down from the shelf, but, still unused to movement of Marlene’s long limbs, their bony elbows, he found himself bumping into the person next to him, his elbow digging into their back--

     ‘Shite.’

Thus far it had been… a rough morning, to say the least. It was due in part to their ill-advised drinking binge the previous day, and on top of that, the horrid sleep they had as a result. It had been feverish and painfully full of dreams they couldn’t string together upon waking. It had been the kind of night that Marlene woke up more exhausted from, as if they had been physically fighting off the demons conjured by their own mind. They felt worse than when they had just been sleep-deprived and stone cold drunk, now they felt... pulled apart, and stuck back together with certain pieces in the wrong places. 

The draught they’d whipped up earlier to alleviate some of their worse symptoms was producing some unforeseen side effects- namely, an abundance of light halos; which succeeded in softening the glare of sunlight pouring in golden through the shop windows, but had the tendency of obscuring important features such as faces and their expressions... And Marlene’s letters were also getting mixed up somehow, scrambling before their very eyes into gibberish and even into marks that hardly resembled human language at all... It had been difficult to navigate the incessant talk of Crouch’s upcoming trial without being able to gauge someone’s emotions on the topic, and things were doubly confusing after they acknowledged that they didn’t quite know how to feel about it themself...

Marlene had taken to working in one of the divergent rooms off of the main shop, carefully etching a small glass disk with a Forget-Me-Not charm which would later be set into one of the various enchanted items they crafted for sale. The focus they applied to their spellwork, and the intention behind it, served them well... up to the moment the uncommonly jarring sound of the bell on the front door shattered their concentration, and with it cracked the talisman completely in half with a sudden snap. They jumped back, startled, and then quickly recovered as they pulled their usual aura of otherness around them like a protective shroud for the sake of greeting their new customer.

“Bienvenue!” they called out in as pleasant a voice they could muster, with the lilt of a fluent accent. “I’ll be right out!” Leaving their work aside, they stowed their wand away in a harness they were still in the habit of wearing, concealed among layers of flowing robes of deep turquoise and cobalt that complimented them but hardly suited their own tastes anymore. They gathered their wits about them as best they could as they stepped out into the unassuming skin of Vivienne Cielborne, the innocuous French expatriate persona by which they ran the shop. It was a role they had perfected by now, layered with the secondary character of Madame Lazare, the mysterious owner; both nothing more than a facade meant to obscure the reality of their true identity and divert attention from all the secrets and awful memories that came with it.

But it seemed the powers that be had something else in mind for them today, for from the first moment they set foot into that room again Marlene realized that the person that had entered was someone they recognized instinctively. A shower of stars and moons rocketed through their vision at the renewed brightness, preventing them from seeing exactly who it was right away, but the feeling of familiarity pooled almost like dread in their stomach. “Something tells me you’re not here for the two for one special on Doxy Detox Tea...” they said, managing to maintain the accent for appearance’s sake, if only for a moment longer. “Is there something I can help you find?”