RP Log; Rufus and Millicent
Who: Rufus and Millicent What: Rufus gives copies of the reports to Her Hitwizardliness When: 5 May 1979 Where: Someone's office
Status: DONE Rating: PG Warnings: gingers
Rufus was curled up in the chair behind his desk. This was the desk in his office and he didn't like it. First of all, it was not as homey as his other desk. Oh it wasn't what you'd call 'clean' - assuming you were a normal human being - but the papers were more recent and most of them were actually white and there were no crumbs scattered everywhere or dents where he'd passed out on previous nights. It was all a bit too new. Bleah. Second of all, he couldn't glare imposingly over his minions employees. Third of all - well, there wasn't really a third, but he thought his displeasure ought to have three bullet points, so there we are.
Unfortunately, there were no other places he could go to be alone, unless he wanted to trade the Misuse of Muggle Objects "Office" areas and brood in a broom closet for the next week. Normally he might have been tickled slightly with amusement at the fact that his personal office was larger than their entire section, but today he just glowered, finding it absolutely typical that he had less chance of setting the door ablaze with his frown than he had for donuts to magically rain down upon his desk.
Luckily, people were a bit more adept and spontaneously combusting, and look - there was one now. "Yes." And it was the sort of tone that implied that the go-fer had somehow materialized unwanted into the wrong office and that he, Rufus, was in the middle of a Very Serious sort of departmental indecency. "Oh." The reports. Snatched out of the girl's hands, Rufus mulled over them for precisely 74 seconds before harumphing, throwing them off the desk, and returning to brooding.
Millicent, using elite investigative skills honed over decades of hitwizardry, was out of her office and across the floor about half a minute behind the go-fer; the girl actually squeaked as she came back out of Scrimgeour's office and almost ran into Millicent. "Ma'am," she trilled, but Millicent was already side-stepping, setting her hand on the handle of the door and shoving it open without so much as a backward glance.
"The wind'll change," she warned, kicking the door closed behind her with her heel (absolutely no time wastage in crossing the room to lean one hand against a desk that must be Rufus's because it was in his office, but didn't really have the right ambiance). "And your face will be stuck like that." She used to say that to her children; it hadn't really worked on them either. "You have the reports." It wasn't a question.
Rufus looked up (now that was a funny prospect) at Millicent from where he lounged in his chair - or what one had to assume was a chair since it wasn't quite visible beneath the mounds and mounds of papers. His eyes were tired, face worn from weeks and weeks of dedication culminating in this. This bloody, undeserved, utterly irreconcilable with reality debacle. What the hell'd he done to deserve this, he wondered.
"Yes." His vocabulary was bordering on 'uninspiring' today, but Rufus was angry, and typically when he was angry - which he hadn't been in a long time, well not really angry, anyway - he was silent, because he doubted most of these poor English could handle real Scottish fury. He'd only just accioed the reports off of the floor when there came a knock at the door. "Yes, what is it!" he growled out in the most uninviting manner he could dredge up. The door opened and Bill stuck his head in. "Hey boss. Oh, sorry ma'am." He tipped his head at Millicent. "Just wondering if those reports were rea--" and he caught a gobful of them, poor bastard, for Rufus had copied the ones in his hands and thrown them at the door. Bill had the good sense to leave after that.
"Here." Rufus thrust the other set at Millicent.
Well, she was hardly here for his scintillating conversation. The briefest glance around the room as she accepted the sheaf of parchment confirmed her suspicion that any other chairs that had once occupied the office had gone forever missing beneath continental drifts of paperwork. The concept of attempting excavation was untempting and could potentially prove fatal. Instead, Millicent stacked an empty coffee mug on top of some papers and nudged the entire pile just enough away from the edge of the desk to give herself sufficient room to perch. Which she then proceeded to do, hitching up her skirt a little to avoid tearing seams and flicking through the pages. She marked Edgar's report with a finger to be returned to, glanced over the first page of guard schedules, logs and interviews, and then turned to Pepper's official report to read it over quickly. She had a rough idea of what it was likely to say - the sorts of things that she would have said in relation to what really happened had she been in the position - but it was always a good idea to confirm before leaping to assumptions.
"Have you spoken to Edgar as well?" she asked, as she turned back to his report.
"Spoken?" Rufus looked up with some sharp curiosity intermixed into his insufferable grouchiness, as though her suggestion had been exceptionally insinuating, despite its rather neutral tones. "Why would I speak to him? I have his report right there." He jabbed his finger in the direction of the paper, but sudden, bitter worms of suspicion became working their way through him. Had something been left out of the report. Perhaps he ought to speak to Bones. He'd been more preoccupied examining the damned cell, and the body, and the guards to do something like bother himself about one of his most trusted and experienced officers.
Oh. Millicent took her time running her eyes down Edgar's report, not entirely pretending to be busy reading it (she was, just not with her full attention) as she considered. She knew, obviously, that the hitwizards had always been run differently from the aurors. They were different tools, made to fit different tasks, and therefore shaped differently. And she most certainly did not want to be responsible for Edgar receiving a dressing down from his boss about obfuscatory reports. "Hmm?" she said, looking up at Rufus. "Oh, yes, of course. Different management styles," she added, with a tight smile, as she flicked the report over to the second page. "I like to debrief my people in person. No doubt your aurors have better things to do with their time."
But his keen stare never left her as she shuffled through the reports, and as the danger of his stare burning a hole right through the papers reached an all time high, he reached out a hand and pushed them down, toward the desk. "And what have your personal debriefings with Pepper revealed?" he asked, voice low and devoid of all the typical humor that typically characterized him.
Millicent met his gaze blandly enough over the lowered papers, her face still but not unpleasantly so. Still, she hadn't reached this position by baking cupcakes and knitting mittens, and her gaze was unflinching. "Nothing that has any bearing on the case," she said steadily, and moved the bundle of reports out from under his hand. "Was there anything in the guard interviews of use?" she asked, but didn't look away from him to turn to the appropriate page.
Rufus hadn't expected her to flinch, he'd expected her to talk, dammit, and he'd heard 'nothing with any bearing on the case' before and knew precisely what it bloody meant, thanks. His hand lashed out again, pushing the papers back down as he completely ignored her question. "That isn't what I asked."
Since hanging onto the reports was obviously not an action with any short-term future, Millicent smacked them down on the desk (and then had a moment of misgiving; would she ever find them again or would they be subsumed into the substrata?) and stood up from her perch, leaning over the desk to rest her knuckles where she'd been sitting. "And yet," she said, her voice the sort of perfectly calm that her squad knew well, and walked carefully in the vicinty of, "it's the answer you're getting."
But Rufus was not her squad, and he did not tread carefully, for the more she refused to tell him, the more suspicious and angry he got, the latter probably covering up some emasculating emotion like 'hurt' or 'betrayal' for one that he was far more comfortable with. "What the hell is going on," he growled, "that you won't even bloody tell me what was said in a debriefing about an interrogation of MY. PRISONER." He barked this last bit out, ears going rather the same shade as his hair - a rather awkward ginger. He hadn't yet gotten up from his seat, but he was now ram-rod straight, posture screaming a severity and displeasure one did not ordinary associate with Rufus Scrimgeour.
"You don't need to know," Millicent said, perfectly calmly-- well, ok, no, she said it very emphatically, a few notches louder than usual speaking, and with her face growing stony. "In fact, it is in no one's interest, especially not yours, to know, and it's entirely not your business what was said between myself and one of my boys." She had both hands braced on the edge of his desk now, and her shoulders set. "You have the report. Don't get distracted, Scrimgeour. This is not the time."
A smear of momentary hurt flickered over Rufus's features and was then gone, replaced by something harder, colder - something removed and impersonal. His palm slid off of the papers he'd refused her access to and he pushed them instead toward her, mouth a sharp line. When he spoke it was the tremolo of anger repressed and shunted aside, of falsely contrite questioning. "Not in my interest despite this case being solely in my jurisdiction, is what you're telling me?" And once the words were out his mouth was again the line.
She shouldn't have mentioned it, shouldn't have fucking brought it up, but if wishes were horses they'd have to turn the ballroom at the Park into stables and Rufus would still be giving her that look. "Yes Rufus," she said, more moderately now, or at least more quietly. "That's what I'm telling you. You have your jurisdiction here--" She tapped a short, well-tended fingernail against the papers. "--and there's more than enough there to worry about. I'm not trying to get in your way and I will do everything I can to help you. So let me worry about my boys."
"What happened in that cell is my jurisdiction. What is happening on that street is my jurisdiction." His voice was cold still, but lackluster, that held back flat that was so very unnatural. "But it is quite clear where we stand, I think." He shuffled a minute into the chaotic diaspora of papers and realized he didn't have the report - his report - from yesterday. "On your way out you can ask Gladys for a copy of the guard report." Flat, flat, and though another swell of anger rose in him, he refused to let it enter his voice, too angry even to show any semblance of weakness. He put the nervous energy toward straightening papers - Merlin, what a pointless battle that was. "And let Pepper know I will have no further need for his collaboration on my cases." Emphasis on my, he wanted to say, but held his tongue.
Millicent wanted to say - to demand - that if he had a problem with her he should take it out on her, not her boys. But clearly arguing right now wasn't going to get her anywhere. "Fine," she said, crisp and curt, as she scooped up the papers from Rufus's desk. "Let me know if you need anything else." For all it sounded half like a threat, she meant it; this was a direly black mark for the department, and she'd help all she could. She was helping, dammit. Rufus bloody Scrimgeour; didn't he understand that there were things it was better he didn't even have an inkling about?
Clearly not.
She yanked his office door open and multiple pairs of eyes suddenly found the work laid out on their desks absolutely fascinating. A couple of hitwizards hurried back towards their own area as though they'd been heading that way all along. Mill smiled grimly and closed the door behind her, firmly but quietly. "Gladys," she said, perfectly politely, "a copy of the guard report, if you've one handy."