WHO: Maddie Savage and Birdie Proudfoot WHAT: Maddie and Birdie make a discovery. WHEN: Early Feb WHERE: The Williamson house WARNINGS: Some swearing.
"This is everything I had on me at the pub."
Maddie had taken over Jasper's dining table, taking advantage of the fact that he was on the night shift and Luca was with Flick. She and Birdie had the house to themselves.
The clothes she'd worn that day were spread across the table, blood from the injured Muggles splattered over it. She wasn't going to be wearing them again. The contents of her purse had been dumped out, her planner and wallet and other detritus neatly lined up.
"The tracking charm has got to be here somewhere."
Birdie stood before the table and watched as Maddie organized everything, mentally taking inventory of every item and sorting them into little boxes in her head. Once she was sure she had every item memorized she clapped her hands together and turned to face the other woman.
"Alright, we'll start on the most obvious first and work our way out."
“My coat and my purse is probably the most likely. Lestrange could have easily put something on them in the office without people really noticing.”
Maddie wasn’t too sure, but it didn’t seem unlikely that the Head Obliviator would drop by to talk to the DMLE. They worked together closely when incidents involved Muggles. She shuffled around the table, her wand out as she started working through a variety of detection spells.
"Yeah, or imperiused someone to do it for him. Or maybe Yaxley did it for him, wouldn't take any convincing or Unforgivables then."
She got to work on the items nearest to her, methodically going through all of the detection and anti-concealment charms she knew. Perhaps she was being a bit too paranoid but in times like these being overly paranoid meant being safe.
"We should probably start doing checks to make sure that everyone in the office isn't under Imperius. Just to be safe, constant vigilance and all that."
“Honestly we probably should have started it as soon as Yaxley became head. Moody would be so disappointed in us.”
Maddie paused in her checking for a moment, before taking another sweep over her coat. It already had an assortment of protective charms, but there was something buried in them she couldn’t quite recognise.
"Moody would probably be disappointed in us for a lot of things."
Hell, she was disappointed in them for a lot of things and her standards were notoriously low. She could think of a few more people who would be disappointed in her, but it was best not to think about it too much. Instead, she kept on checking and rechecking the items in front of her.
"Find anything interesting yet?"
"Just a very well done warming charm. The makers must have built it in when they made the coat." Maddie wrinkled her nose and tossed it aside, looking over what was left.
“I can’t believe I let a Death Eater get the drop on me. Moody would have kicked my ass. Scrimgeour too.”
Birdie gave the coat a look of suspicion before concentrating on what she had left. She didn't trust anything that came pre-charmed no matter how innocuous it seemed to be.
"Nah, I think they would've understood. We all know that had there been no muggles about you would've kicked that greasy bastard's ass." She hesitated for a second before continuing, "Sometimes I wish we could just say "fuck it" to being professional and fight fire with fire."
Maddie leaned over to pick up her wallet, frowning as she realised there were some irregularities in the magic protections. She flicked it open, starting to pull out all of the cards and stray coins tucked away.
"At least then we'd finally be doing something." Birdie would be lying if she said that she'd never once considered joining the group of vigilantes as well. She was tired of biding her time and waiting for the tides to turn without doing something and every grisly Death Eater murder scene she had to attend to only made her hatred burn brighter.
She was pulled from her thoughts when she noticed Maddie frowning at her wallet, "What, what's wrong?"
"There's something…" Maddie's frown deepened as she shuffled through all of the cards she'd just dumped on the table. Most of them were benign, loyalty cards to her favourite stores and a muggle credit card. She plucked the newest addition to her wallet out of the pile, her Ministry ID.
She cleared a space on the table, running her wand over the card and examining the spells that were woven into it.
"Motherfuckers! It's in the ID card."
As soon as she heard Maddie, Birdie was pulling her own ID out of her wallet, slamming it down on the table and running her wand over the card. She cursed under her breath when she came across the same set of spells as the ones that were on Maddie's card.
"The bastards are fucking tracking us." She growled out, slamming her hand down on the table.
"I can't believe I didn't think to check the card. I knew it was spelled but I didn't think—" Maddie shook her head, honestly wanting to smack herself.
"Constant vigilance. We never should have trusted anything that came out of the Ministry."
"Just another thing Moody would've been disappointed in us for." Birdie snorted, pacing back and forth in front of the table. "This whole time we've been sitting ducks, waiting to be picked off."
They had to do something about this. "We need to tell people, we can't just sit on information like this, not when the Death Eaters are probably using it to their advantage."
"We can leak it. I'm sure the Order or that rogue Ministry hooter would publish it. Or we can set up our own version." Maddie straightened, staring over at Birdie.
"How did we not think of that before? We could start a rogue Auror Office hooter. We can publish this, we can reach out to the general public. We might not be able to arrest the Death Eaters, but we can still try and protect people from them."
Birdie nodded, thinking about the information they could spread.
"Yeah, yeah we could do that. I've never actually used hooter before so you'd have to teach me, but I'm a fast learner."
“It’s a piece of cake.” Maddie flashed a grin at Birdie, feeling energised for the first time in a long time. This was something they could do, finally.