who: Justin and Padma what: chance encounter? or not ... where: Ministry lifts when: saturday evening
Padma was frazzled, and it was showing. Morag was dead, and she and Pansy still hadn't met about the List, and work was stressing her out, and she liked George a lot more than she probably should, and her bossees could tell and had sent her up to HR to collect personnel files for some much needed 'mental evaluations' of everyone in the Department, and she was going to fail hers, and life was just not going anywhere good at the moment.
Not to mention, this was a lot of files. She didn't know why they bothered keeping HR files on anyone, since most of the stuff was blacked out anyway. Including any and all evaluations. So why bother keeping them six floor apart? She supposed there must be some rational reason for this, but it was lost on her; she entered the elevator juggling stacks of files, deeply annoyed with herself for being so emotionally vulnerable.
It was odd, how much she hated being so close to 'the surface' and how comfortable being deep on the second to last level of the Ministry was. They liked to call their department 'the Cave' and Padma was more than pleased with this description. She felt vampireish in the lift, giving people a cold eye as the lift stopped on every floor. Almost. She was almost there.