(0) - 'The Fool'

Ron was about to give up on the mass of papers strew about on his desk as a bad job and take a break for lunch to clear his head a little when the note flew onto his desk. He very briefly considered ignoring it and leaving the office anyway, but decided he could be optimistic about things. It might say, 'Big break, go to the 9th floor.' Or maybe it would read, 'Have a lead, meet by the phone,' - that would be acceptable. Or even, 'Target acquired, return to normal duty.' He could be optimistic, sure.

He unfolded the paper airplane and read it. 'Eliott is on his way, don't go anywhere.'

"Shite," he exhaled, and balled up the note. Eliott was a fine person but his sense of timing was horrible. Whenever he needed to speak with him, it was at the worst possible times – during meals, in the middle of the night, and, without fail, whenever Ron had settled into a fine groove of working. He wondered if it was something all Unspeakables were capable of, or if it was just the unique gift of his contact.

When Eliott came into Ron's office, he found Ron leaning back in his chair, hands folded in his lap and deliberately twiddling his thumbs. He was a stocky man of about thirty, with intense eyes, short bristly hair, and a neat goatee. To Ron, he gave the impression of knowing dozens of little secrets and shortcuts about his line of work (whatever it was), but would only be willing to divulge them one at a time.

"Weasley," he said with a dip of his head. Ron didn't return the greeting, but did unclasp his hands. He thought he would have found it hard to return it, not knowing Eliott's last name – or his first, for that matter. All the Unspeakables went by generic code names when on assignment.

"We might have a break on our subject," he said, laying some paperwork on Ron's desk.

"Brilliant," Ron said, his mood instantly brightening. He looked at the sheet of paper – it was a table, with circles drawn hastily around several of the entries – and forgot about taking a break for lunch. "What have we got?"

Eliott circled around the desk to stand beside Ron. "I ran the lists by my potions man again, and he picked something out of them we might have missed the first time. He's a good doublethinker, that one."

"A good what?" Ron asked. Eliott waved his hand to indicate it wasn't important, and continued with the table drawn on the paper.

"So our rogue, they use their different codenames to stock up on the components for a list of every class-A potion. Huge security threat when they disappear, right? We're supposed to go right to the Aurors and start a manhunt for a dangerous nutter with a grudge against the Ministry. But think about this – why would you need three different kinds of highly unstable explosive potions, when each one needs to be transported in a different way?"

Ron caught the meaning almost immediately and scanned the list. "Or why you would need Veritaserum when you can make the Puppeteer Draught... You think our rouge isn't going to use any of this stuff?"

"Bullseye," Eliott said, and tapped the paper for emphasis. "It's to throw us off. I thought maybe their plan was they were going to use just one of the class-As, and I asked if there was more of any one of the potions, and there's not, but there is a whole bunch of this." He pointed to the circled ingredients on the list of potion recipes that had come from the personal notes of the Unspeakable gone rogue – within each circle were two words.

"Crushed adventurine? What's that even restricted for? It's not in the class-As, surely." Ron's potions knowledge was not exactly comprehensive, but in the past couple of days he had become intimately familiar with a specific class of them: the class-A restricted potions. These were the most dangerous potions wizards were capable of brewing, encompassing of an array of malicious and deadly effects, and the sale of their key ingredients was closely monitored by the Ministry of Magic.

"It's not, it's in the Cs. You need a license if you're going to stock it by the pound, but that's nothing more than a formality. Usually junk-merchants put it in their good fortune amulets, but there is one potion it's based on – Felix Felicis."

This was a potion Ron had heard of. "Liquid luck? So our rogue isn't going to blow up half of London, they just want to, what... win big in some goblin gambling den?"

"How well do you think you'd do trying to catch someone with a solid year's supply of excellent luck?" Eliott asked. This Ron considered. He had a brief image of trying to run down a ghost, being unable to bind them, stunning spells drifting right through them.

"But," Eliott said, his tone full of a cheery false chipperness, "I have here a list of all the potion merchants registered to sell pure adventurine, crushed or no." He flipped over the first page, the one with the lists of ingredients. On the second page was what seemed like an endless list of names and addresses.

Ron looked up at Eliott. "This is still looking for a needle in a haystack, you know."

"Maybe," Eliott said, "But at least now we're looking for the needle instead of some straw."

--------------------------

While this was happening, Harry was in his own office. It sat beside Ron's. Both had two windows that looked out over London, as did the other seven in their department. Harry had spent his first couple of months here trying to figure out which windows really faced outwards (into the ground) and which faced inwards (to another office), but had eventually given up, since the views from each window changed from time to time. He did still occasionally wonder exactly what shade of purple his uncle's face would have become and how many lines would have appeared in his forehead, if he knew his nephew had his own corner office with a view of St. Paul's Cathedral before his twenty-fifth birthday.

Well, a corner office of sorts, anyway.

He was going over the reports for his last batch of assignments – they had a tendency to build up, as Harry put off the reports on small jobs until they absolutely had to be written up – when a note landed in the rock fern that now sat on his desk. Usually the paper planes could be counted on to touch down neatly in his inbox, but the plant was a new addition to his office and whatever magic ran the internal message network hadn't learned to deal with this particular obstacle yet. Give it a couple more crashes, Harry thought. It might have even learned by the end of the day.

'Draco Malfoy to see you,' the note read. Harry barely had enough time to register how out of place that name was when the actual Draco Malfoy entered his office, followed by the department receptionist.

"You can't just go in there," she was lecturing. Draco was paying her no notice. "There's a protocol to be followed, Mister Malfoy, and-"

"It's alright, Astoria," Harry said, looking at Draco, who was currently well dressed but poorly groomed. Something about his robes looked out of place – perhaps it was the way they had been tailored to crop the sleeves short. "I've got time to see someone."

Astoria looked from Harry to Draco and back to Harry, and exited with a barely audible, "Harrumph." If Draco had noticed, Harry couldn't see him reacting. For a very long moment after the door was closed, he didn't react at all. Harry had a brief thought that there might be some form of pride keeping him silent, so he spoke first.

"What brings you to the Ministry, Malfoy?" he asked. He tried to keep his tone neutral, but wasn't sure how good a job of it he did. The image he had in his head - the one of Ron threatening him with something if they died saving Draco while the Room of Requirement burned around them - was very strong in his mind.

"Business." He paused, and then clarified: "My father's business. He was making regular donations to the Ministry. I want to know what they were."

Harry thought on this very briefly. As he did, his office seemed very silent. "I'm sure I'd love to tell you all about them," he began, "but the exact nature of the donations could only be viewed by the executor of the Malfoy Estate. And-"

"I am the executor of the Malfoy Estate." He had obviously read something in Harry's face he didn't like, because he scowled and said, "And spare me any condolences. I've heard enough of them today." Harry then realised what it was about his robes: they were the kind worn to formal events – balls, weddings, official functions.

Funerals.

"What do you want this for, anyway?" he asked. "And why ask me? Doesn't... didn't your father have-"

"If I tell you," Draco said abruptly, and then left a long pause before he spoke again, "you cannot repeat it anywhere else."

Harry saw the seriousness with which Draco was possessed. "I won't, Draco."

Draco's explanation came in a much lower voice, as if he expected that someone might be lurking nearby, eavesdropping. "We're leaking money. My father sold a number of his holdings and was looking to sell off the rest. He kept ploughing gold into the Ministry, and he refused to listen to anything I had to say on the subject, and it did no good."

"What did?"

Another long pause. "The Malfoy name is tainted," Draco said at last. "We were branded with the blood loyalists even though my father was trying to get out – you know, towards the end – and no matter how much gold he threw around to show what side he was on, nobody who matters in the Ministry is buying it. Then from the other side, the actual loyalists – what little there are left – know he was deserting and actively shut him out at every turn. Since the fall, the Malfoys have been pariahs on both sides."

"Is it such a problem for you? You're not your father – you don't even have the Mark."

Draco's eyes went bright. "I know I don't have the Mark. Nobody does. No Dark Lord, no Dark Mark." He scowled again, and then added as an afterthought, "Idiot."

The room was in silence once more, until Draco broke it. "But this is where you can help me. If you made mention of the money I was giving to the Ministry, and if it went to the right places, if the right people knew." Harry was about to raise some objection, on the grounds that he had very little knowledge and even less skill of the kind of politicking Draco was talking about, when Draco spoke again. "Of course, this information wouldn't be free, you understand. I'd have to give you something in return." Draco had an expression on his face that suggested conspiracy. Skulduggery. It made him look much more confident than he had moments before.

"What kind of information?"

"Things I remember. Which wizards had the Mark, for example." He paused again, but this time Harry didn't think it was because he was searching for the right words. "And which ones didn't want to forget about it ever existing, like my father did."

Harry's eyes went wide. The continuing existence of a small cadre of loyalists – to blood purity, to the Death Eaters, and to Voldemort – had been a bugbear of the Ministry for years. Most of them had been put to trial following the fall. The slightly more careful but still mostly thuggish supporters – the ones that had been in Voldemort's cause not because they believed in some higher ideal of preserving wizard blood but only saw an excuse to curse some Muggles – had made mistakes and been caught, but all the Aurors knew a number of blood loyalists remained. Many were suspected on holding Dark Artefacts. Some were accused of attacks on Muggles and Muggle-borns. Mostly there was never enough evidence for either for a formal trial. But with insider information, with a solid witness...

"So you see," Draco said, "why how I plan to donate to the Ministry has to be kept in confidence."

Harry took his meaning clearly. "I'll get you the donation paperwork," he said, and went for his wand, when he remembered it wasn't with him today, but sitting on a dresser in his apartment, and he found the staff propped by his desk instead.

"Accio," he commanded, thinking about the rolls of blank parchment in the shelves behind him, thinking about making one leap from the shelf and land on his desk. A roll of parchment did leap from the shelf, but jumped so violently it skimmed off the top of the desk, ploughed into the ceramic pot the northern rock fern sat in, and flew through the air until it connected with Harry's office door with a loud thud. Pot shards, soil, and rock fern fronds spilled all over Harry's desk, handily ruining a solid two hours of paperwork.

Draco stared blankly at the chaos and the mess and then burst out laughing. The laughter was so strong he had to place a hand on Harry's desk to steady himself. He was waving his other hand in the air, signalling that he was trying to catch his breath for something in between gales.

"You don't understand... a staff... a staff! Merlin's beard, Potter... oh, I haven't slept in days..."

--------------------------

Harry crossed the lobby and glanced out one of the big windows, seeing how low the sun was by the light outside. Nobody else was around. Of course nobody else was around, they would have gone home hours ago. He had gotten his desk clean and the paperwork rewritten, but it had taken the rest of the day and then some. He had made a vow that he'd have his wand with him tomorrow. Just in case.

He was thinking about Draco, about his slightly hysterical laughter. Had he ever seen Draco laugh, while they were in school? He couldn't remember if he had. Sneering plenty, yes, but a sneer wasn't the same as-

"Harry! Hey, Harry!"

Harry stopped, his hand inches from the Floo Powder. Ron was calling him from across the lobby. He took his foot out of the fireplace, and waited for him to catch up.

"Missed you at dinner last night," Harry said. "You're still on that Scottish job, yeah?"

Ron nodded, which was all the confirmation Harry had expected. "Hermione tells me there was some woman asking for you last night," he said, going to scoop up some of the Floo Powder.

"Darcy something," Harry said, "From R and D. She has this theory she was asking me about, about Felix Felicis and my... Ron?"

Ron had gone a pale shade. The handful of Floo Powder he had held was spilled on the marble lobby floor. "Darcy what?" he asked in a queer flat tone.

"Ron, what's-"

"Darcy what?" he repeated, and there was urgency and something else (Panic, Harry thought, It's panic) in his voice.

"Mac-something... McIntyre," he said, and could feel the panic starting to spread, "Why does it-"

"Because she's...!" Ron started, and the words died in his mouth. He tried again, failed again, swore, and hit his fist against his leg. Harry was about to ask a third time, when Ron grabbed his shoulders, and said in a voice that was bordering on shouting, "Great Birnam Wood, Harry! The forest is moving!"