InsaneJournal

No one who worked in the Department of Mysteries was a stranger to late nights. The Unspeakables, especially, were prone to them; the puzzles they sought to untangle and the problems they worked to solve were often demanding mistresses, and it was not uncommon for a person to lose track of time only to emerge hours later, blinking and confused to find how late it actually was.

Of course, loss of time to intellectual pursuits was a phenomenon that any Ravenclaw worth her salt was well accustomed to; and while support staff had, perhaps, less official excuse to linger past their official hours, it was rarely commented on if they did, especially if the support staff in question had a tendency to slip in unobtrusively and leave warm mugs of coffee or tea within easy reach of their hard-working superiors.

If Claire Macmillan’s log of overtime happened to coincide a little closer to Augustus Rookwood’s than could be considered mere chance, well, that was between her and HR, a body notorious for caring very little what anyone did so long as no official complaints were lodged. And from what Claire could tell, Rookwood was not complaining.

There was always work to be done- documents to be proofed or filed, correspondence to be sorted (Urgent, Necessary, Entertaining and Rubbish Bin,) experiments to be swept up after- but she kept one eye on the clock, because not even Claire could justify staying until midnight the way an Unspeakable could. At a few minutes til ten, she sighed a little to herself- if Rookwood hadn’t emerged from his intellectual fog by now, he very likely wouldn’t until the wee hours, and if she was still here then it would be both obvious and undeniable that she wasn’t lingering for the sake of work. Some modicum of subtlety was key, here; she mustn’t let the man think she was blatantly pursuing him. Developing a reluctant fondness for him, yes, that illusion- and it was an illusion, she told herself firmly as she began to pack up her things- was key to her plans, but she had to be the pursued, not the pursuer. That seemed the best way to keep the man’s interest from flagging.

One last offering of tea before she left for the night, then. Rookwood wasn’t the only Unspeakable still lingering, so she made a kettle, knocking softly on each office door and waiting for a grunt or mumble of recognition before slipping inside to place cups on desks before whisking back out again, quiet and unobtrusive as a shadow. Her target’s desk was her last stop, but she made no more attempt to catch his attention than she had anyone else’s. He’d notice her, or he wouldn’t. Regardless, she’d made herself indispensable in one more little way. Those ways would add up; all it took was time.

Augustus Rookwood was well adapted to the thick swaths of shadows that their offices were steeped in. It was intentionally kept dark, cool and infernally quiet, as if the environment of the department had to invoke the very aura of its name. As such, only the lights from their workstations made any attempt to battle back the darkness, and like moths to a flame, they had gathered. Sometimes, late at night, the Unspeakables would hash out particularly knotty subjects, bounce ideas and theories off each other as others would a quaffle. There was, after all, no one else to whom they could speak. This particular evening, it was his station that was to play the stage tonight.

“Love isn't a binary quantity, Fellows. Its antithesis isn't hate. It's...apathy. In as such the element exists on a spectrum. You don't love your dog more than your wife, or perhaps I've switched that one around -- " The table of his peers, the ones, at least who remained despite the advancing hour, erupted in muffled laughter. The man in question, Nathaniel Fellows lifted his hands as if to concede, the smile on his face meted out in good-natured acceptance to the joking all the same " -- That is to say, varying degrees, which makes Love a notoriously binding force and therefore a powerful disseminating one if we can unlock it.”

This last was said as his gaze immediately snapped up Claire’s entrance, and though she stayed well out of the circle of illumination, there might as well have been a spotlight aimed on her for how much of his attention she suddenly seemed to consume. “I think that will be all for now, ladies and gentlemen. I’ve got to call it an early night.” It was a polite dismissal, and his colleagues accepted it as much with only a mild ripple of curiosity brought about by the unexpected divergence in behaviour he didn’t deign to satisfy. They filed out, one by one, some even managing to give Claire a nod of greeting as they passed. And when the last furl of robe disappeared around the door, he could turn fully to the only one left in the room, “Hi, Claire.”

Love. They were talking about Love, capital L, trying their damnedest to pin it down like a butterfly against a card or a frog on a child's laboratory table. To dissect it, pull it apart, destroy all of its charm and all of its Mysteries (and wasn't that exactly the point of the Department, to ruin every Mystery, pick them all into easily understood pieces and ruin everything that made them tick.)

Merlin, Claire hated them: hated every body that filed by hers, acknowledgement or not, and the one that didn't most of all.

"Hello, Mr. Rookwood, " she said quietly, reaching to collect the tea things she'd just set down. "Can I get you anything before I go?"

By the time they were alone in his office, he had come around his station and found himself leaning against it, arms folded across his chest, chin tipped down in a moment of reflection. Still, though, he could see her on the periphery of his vision. She didn’t seem to be in any hurry, precise and purposeful. It was such a menial and yet kind thing to do, the tea, them, the hour. It wasn’t something one saw the secretaries going above and beyond their hours of operation to do unless they were angling for a promotion, but he had spoken to everyone in the department, and no one seemed to know anything about Claire’s ambitions or apparent lack thereof. She came in, deferentially performed her duties and did little in the way of selling herself otherwise, and then stayed long past the normal office hours to serve them tea.

When she turned back to him, he looked up at her, head leaned in a curious tilt. “Why do you stay so late?” he asked instead.

It startled her, the question; it wasn't the sort if thing men like Rookwood asked the menials. 'Can you fetch me that-,' certainly, and 'where is my-,' 'why isn't this done?' Nothing personal, though. Nothing that admitted the humanity of the one being questioned, nothing that you would not ask a House Elf.

The surprise in her expression was, then, unfeigned; or at least for several precious moments it was. And then she recovered herself enough to look down again, back to the kettle, grasping at her dignity and trying not to let it show.

"Someone has to make the tea," she offered after a moment to the accompaniment of china clinking. "I didn't mean mean to intrude."

“You don’t intrude,” he hastened to assure, nearly abrupt in his response. Then, softer, slower, “You could never intrude.” And maybe he held her gaze a little too long than was wise. He couldn’t seem to come up with a proper personage for her -- witless, scrambling for improvisation. Her gaze was always just a little too spearing. “Before you were here, there was no one.” After a beat, the realisation of what he said hit. “For tea. I mean. There was no one for tea.”

It took Claire aback, just a little: how easily and how deeply she seemed to be effecting a Rookwood, with nothing but her silence and her presence and her occasional glances. It was what she'd wanted, of course, what she'd planned and hoped for. More, even.

It was just that he seemed so very human in these moments.

She looked up at him, just for a beat when he said it, and then down again quickly, not having to feign shyness. "I've no idea how you got on, then. Poor, tealess souls."

A rueful smile creased his features. In that moment, he wished he had paid more care to his office’s lighting, wished he had left no corner unilluminated, for where there was a dark shadow or periphery, Claire Macmillan always seemed to find it, always only ever let herself be glimpsed in pieces so that the puzzle in his head was fleshed out in painstakingly slow increments.

He was, by his very nature, a patient man, temperament well suited to his work (both official and not). Yet he found himself curiously restless now -- once the mystery was laid across his path he couldn’t not attempt to unravel it any more than he could command his heart to stop beating. It shouldn’t have been this difficult; his greatest gift, after all, was to invite people to lay out their life stories in full for him to peruse and mine as necessary and walk away feeling all the richer for it.

Thus the sudden, artless, “Have dinner with me,” came as much a surprise to him as it might very well have for her.

That was a surprise; though Claire had hoped, and indeed expected, that it would come to that, and sooner rather than later, never had she imagined that Augustus Rookwood -- he of the legion subtleties and surprising charisma- would be so blunt about it. Light eyes flashed up, meeting his for one brief, charged moment; and then Claire caught herself and looked down again, back to the porcelain in her hand, and the uncertainty in her expression wasn’t entirely a show.

“It’s past dinner time, Mr. Rookwood,” she pointed out, turning toward him a little, just enough to imply more receptiveness than her words suggested. “I thought you wanted to call it an early night?”

Fully committed now, he found himself warming to the idea. It was only sensible: a face to face, with no easy avenue in which to escape -- he would have his thorough accounting of her and this, whatever this may be, could stop. But when his eyes met hers, whatever sensible phrasing he had meant to employ -- I like to know the people with whom I work or perhaps even the more formulaic, In small token of appreciation for your above and beyond service here -- stuck in his throat. “What if I wanted to call it an early night to spend dinner with you?”

"Then I suppose I'd owe it to all the mysteries that will go unsolved tonight because of me to say yes," Claire mused, a shy smile tugging at reluctant lips. "Not to mention the wasted tea."

Strange, it was, the feeling of incredible lightness expanding within his chest, as if there had been something so heavy burdened within it before, as if the his awareness of the world had been broadened, the shadows on the wall leading him to a bigger, brighter world. And yet, for however novel the sensation was, stranger still was the surprisingly lack of desire to pin it down and examine it critically, analyse and categorise it away. For once -- for once he simply let it be.

And yet how he wanted to know. How many nuances of thought and feeling flickered across her eyes when she dared to let anyone see them. If the colour of her hair shone differently beneath the sun. What her face looked like when finally, finally slipped free of its guardedness. He wanted to know.

“The world would be a duller place if it didn’t still hold some mysteries left.”

Claire inclined her head in concession, the movement economical and brief. It was not a point she cared to argue; on that point, if on no other, she agreed with Rookwood.

Tea things in hand, she retreated toward the door, back to the less-shadowy reaches beyond the office itself; the break room where kettle and mugs alike belonged would be practically fluorescent in comparison. In the doorway she paused, glancing back with a slightly arched brow and a nod toward her burden to indicate where she was going. “Five minutes.”

She didn’t wait for his reply before disappearing.