Dark Dissension

Invitations for the following (plus 1 guest)

Ms Hannah Abbott
Mr Jude Alderton
Mr Laetus Chambers
Ms Seren Fawcett
Mr Justin Finch-Fletchley
Mr Seamus Finnigan
Ms Daphne Greengrass
Ms Ainsley Innis
Mr Neville Longbottom
Ms Morag MacDougal
Mr Harry Potter
Ms Demelza Robins
Mr Zacharias Smith
Ms Nephthys Spinks
Mr Dean Thomas

( Invitations by express owl post )

Who: Seren Fawcett and Jude Alderton
What: He’s going to take her to dinner, because he’s a soppy sort of puppy.
Where: Her house, and then La Lanterna, because Jude wants to shock her with muggle culture.
When: 1 March, evening
Rating: PG-13
Status: Closed; incomplete

Flowers were always tricky. Different girls like different flowers, and they all found different things romantic. Seren, he thought, was a strange girl. Not strange in the way that every Unspeakable was strange, or even strange in that typical Pureblood strange way, but her own kind of strange. She was smart – too smart, maybe, and somehow he thought that she would see roses as an easy way out. They were pretty, but they didn’t really require thought when it came to buying them for a girl, they were just the first flowers most people went for. He had considered bringing her a set of working lungs (not human, those were too hard to find, but maybe rabbit), but that reminded him of work and the whole point of going out was to talk to her outside of work. So, in the end, he settled for a small bouquet of crocuses, which meant gladness – because he really was glad to see her, and daffodils, which meant respect and also that the sun always shined when she was near. And if she didn’t understand their meanings, they still looked pretty.

Unspeakable in Love were usually unromantic, which most people outside the department found ironic. They saw love as something to be studied, and learned from, and most of them were so wary of it that they avoided relationships. But Jude was a hopeless romantic, and he always had been. He liked dating – being close to someone, making them smile – and ever since he started dating again about three years ago, he felt a lot like a teenager. None of his relationships seemed to fit like his marriage had. They all took too much work, or they found each other impossible to understand, and they always left him feeling more discouraged. Discouraged, because he was getting old. His thirty-second birthday had just passed, which was depressing enough, but spending it alone was downright sad. He wanted to be back in love, and more than that he wanted to love someone.

He knew that it wasn’t that simple, and he wasn’t expecting fireworks when he stood on Seren’s doorstep, but it was nice to try again. And he did like her, a lot. He liked having someone to argue with, someone who understood what he was talking about when even he didn’t know what he meant half the time. He liked her – the little things, like how her right foot always seemed to shuffle a little when she walked, or how her nose scrunched up slightly just before she smiled, and how she slipped into other languages when she started cursing.

He hoped he hadn’t scared her off when he mentioned Jeanine and Lucas, and the moment he remembered that he tried to push them out of his head. It wasn’t fair to her to think about them while they were out together, although he did think it was only right that she knew.

Jude took another second to compose himself, to check and make sure he had his wallet, and to try and bring his hair into some sort of order (pointless), and then he rang the doorbell and waited.

Who: Seren Fawcett & Harry Potter
What: Waxing philosophical about the way paint peels off the walls in the DoM. Perhaps not, but you never know.
Where: The Death Chamber, Department of Mysteries
When: 29th February, night. Assuming late because it's Seren.
Rating: PG-13/R for language
Status: Open within reason; incomplete

The Death chamber had an odd pull to it, Harry thought. It wasn't something he'd expected when he'd started here; then again he couldn't have said what he had expected. The Unspeakables were hidden deep in the bowels of the Ministry, not talked much about in the other departments within the building and for the most part people went out of their way to avoid them. Their purpose was unknown to nearly everyone else outside of the department and Harry thought, shoulder pressing against the stone of one of the archways surrounding the chamber, that it was perhaps a good thing.

Even Unspeakables shuddered walking past this room.

Pushing himself off from the wall, he walked further into the chamber, his steps loud on stone ground loud in the silence of the room, the sound hitting off the walls and bouncing back at him, filling his ears. The closer he got to the centre, the more the echo of his footsteps faded in his mind, instead replaced by the sound of soft rustling, like velvet passing over velvet. A hand lifted, thumb rubbing across his nose and Harry's head turned slightly, glancing at the long shadows in the room, searching for another person. He was almost sure he heard breathing other than his own but no one seemed to be there and he was grateful. He supposed it could be seen as rather odd that he was here.

Finally stopping in front of the veil, his eyes lifted to see the gauzy layers passing over one another and here the sound of velvet passing over velvet was louder than it had been before. Harry had known it would be. His eyes remained on them even as his hands groped through thin air and then rested on the stone of one of the benches that surrounded the veil. It was tall and higher off the ground than he'd expected and his arms hoisted him up onto it, feet sliding against the wall almost blindly. When he managed to sit and not fall off, Harry breathed a sigh of relief.

It was eerily calm here, he thought, dark and yet not at the same time. The glow from the veil made the shadows seem longer, darker, and far less threatening for some odd reason and from where he sat he could swear he could see straight into it. His breath caught slightly just staring.

"Do all dead things go there?" he muttered and then shook his head. "What a silly question." Fingers closing around a loose stone next to him, Harry turned it over and over in his palm, thumb tracing the sharp edge of it as teeth gnawed on his bottom lip, eyes remaining firmly fixed on the veil.

Who: Seren Fawcett & Jude Alderton
What: Poking, prodding, the usual
Where: Department of Mysteries, Love Division
When: Earl afternoon, Wednesday, 27th February, 2005
Rating: PG
Status: Closed; Complete

Seren was pouting. Not only was she pouting but she was mildly whining. Dwyre was trying to act all superior, as if she wasn't just as confused if not more so. She and Seren weren't that far off in age which was rare in a single division and it meant Dwyre was always trying to prove she was better than Seren at the job. It was really annoying because Seren had not only been at it longer but she'd spent the beginning of her career in Romania. Dealing with death in Romania was not like dealing with it in Britain. It clung to everything there, the energy of it vibrating. Dwyre always assumed Seren was lying. Stupid bint. "This is pointless!" Seren announced loud enough that Dwyre jumped and nearly fell off her chair. The redhead gathered up a few bits of parchment and turned on her heel.

"You're just going to abandon me?" Her colleague's voice was shrill and high with panic. Serves her right.

"No, I'm going to find someone else that might make sense of it. What would I do, just go out for an extended lunch and never come back?" The sarcasm was still faintly echoing in the air between them when Seren headed for the door, suddenly reminded that she hadn't eaten in two days. Once she entered the main hub chamber with its spinning doors, though, all thoughts of food had already vanished.

The Love division was distracting. There were always hearts floating about, actual hearts, and Seren always wanted to pluck one out of the air and dissect it. She'd never been able to dissect a human heart before. It was like waving sweets in front of a child, really, and it wasn't fair at all. With a slight pout on her face she went in search of the person she'd come for. He may not prove to necessarily be the most useful of all the people in the division, but the truth of it was most of the people who worked in Love were women who even Seren found creepy. She didn't generally get on famously with women anyway, never mind old, haggard women experimenting on people's loved ones. At least Seren experimented on a single person, never pairs or groups.

Finding her desired bloke at his desk, Seren made a beeline for him. "Hey Jude, love," she greeted with a bright smile before dropping one of the pieces of parchment on his desk in front of him. "You've any experience reading a soul map from your department's perspective?" If he told her she had to go talk to his head she would wither away and send Iollan to deal with her when he was done trying to shove that damn soul back in its body.

The map looked just like a silhouette of a person, a mere outline, but various parts of the body were coloured in different colours and some of the spots had patterns. The colours and designs shifted and seemed to vibrate on the paper. A large portion of the chest and part of the head kept shifting back and forth between a fuzzy purple, a zig zagged grey and a hazy blue. While the rest of the map kept fairly consistent, those two areas were blinking in and out rapidly. Death hadn't been able to figure out why because the human heart wasn't really their domain in anything more than a physiological or anatomical way. "I've been staring at that thing for hours and I can't figure out why it's all wonky. And it was like that before we ripped his soul out, so that's not it."

Who: Seren Fawcett & Seamus Finnigan
What: Curiosity killed the cat, you know
Where: Knockturn Alley
When: Early Afternoon, Sunday, 3rd February, 2005
Rating: PG
Status: Open; Complete

It really was the most peculiar thing. It looked like a caterpillar. Only it had one eye and it stared at her, reminding Seren oddly of a spider, actually. It was lazy and crept along and then it would stop and suddenly all this vaguely yellow ooze would just seep from it's skin and form a gelatinous orb around it. Then the haggard witch who also only had one eye would come along and scoop up the orb using tools made from the bones of a Chinese Fireball. She extracted the cycloptic caterpillar and then set him down to do it all over again.

After a few attempts to question the old, haunched witch she'd finally been told it was a Clariscop and that ooze that turned gelatinous could be used to make a potion that could be poured onto things to eat away at them, even magically protected objects, just like acid. It could also be made into an edible form that could be fed to a person and they would have their insides eaten away as it got into the blood stream. "Huh." The lady didn't know how to make the potions, which saddened Seren because she wanted to witness this for herself. What she did manage, however, was to convince the woman to sell her some of the Clariscop goo. She wanted to experiment with it, and it could maybe end up being useful to the Death division at some point if it really did what the woman claimed it did.

The jar was made of Chinese Fireball bones, supposedly the only thing that could hold the stuff. Seren paid the woman and nodded to her before wandering down the street, thinking aloud. "There've got to be books on the creature somewhere. Even if she gave me the incorrect name how many things look like caterpillars and ooze like that? If it eats away wards and through solid material what about the Fireball bones is immune? How can it be made to be ingested without eating away at your throat even as you swallow? A delaying agent, perhaps. Something that can neutralise it but that cannot stave off effect forever. Perhaps it becomes more potent when mixed with human blood so a delaying agent works until the blood is introduced into the equation, at which time the delaying agent is nullified by it's introduction. Hmm, but how can it eat through magical wards? Doesn't make sense. Like a niffler eating through a tree trunk or something. It's just not done. Unless, maybe, being a magical creature the goo has magic imbued into it as well," Seren rambled on to herself as she wove around the people in Knockturn alley, not entirely paying attention to where she was going but things looked oddly unfamiliar. Seren was, in effect, going away from Diagon Alley rather than toward it, but she was too busy rattling on to herself about how the goo works and what use it could be.