Adrian (acrophile) wrote in whatprice, @ 2009-09-11 21:47:00 |
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Entry tags: | adrian pucey, janice grieve |
Who: Adrian Pucey and Janice Grieve
What: Not entirely idle chatter about their various Muggle connections
When: Friday morning, 11 September
Where: The Leaky, on the way to Diagon Alley
Warnings: None.
Status: Closed, completed.
Though it was becoming habit, Janice's trip to work in the mornings and the resultant crossing from the Muggle world to the wizarding one was still not ordinary to her. She slipped unobtrusively into the Leaky Cauldron, unnoticed by her fellow commuters on Charing Cross Street, and waited in the small courtyard out back to see whether it would be Gus or Adrian coming to let her into Diagon Alley this morning.
Adrian had decided to risk the Tube to get in early, so he was already waiting for Janice when she arrived. He looked for all the world like a graduate student with a pack full of books who'd come down to Charing Cross Road to shop for more research material. "Good morning, Janice. How are you?" He reached into his backpack and brought out a wax-paper wrapped package, which he offered to her. "Flitchy sent along breakfast." It was part of the benefits of working with Adrian and Gus: the house-elf kept them all well-fed.
"Just now I'm a little bit in love with your house elf," she replied with a grin, accepting the food gratefully. "I don't think I've eaten this well since I was growing up." It wasn't that she was a bad cook, she just didn't have the time or energy for anything elaborate, especially when cooking for one.
"Consider it an employment bonus. Besides, I think it makes him happy to make up extra breakfast since he's not going to have the satisfaction of seeing me eat before I go to Mass." Adrian had unwrapped a similar parcel of his own, which contained a bagel and lox sandwich identical to Janice's, complete with capers and tomato.
"Do you go to Mass every morning, then, or just occasionally?" For all that talk of religion could be dangerous territory in the Muggle world, it was a comfortably normal topic amongst the mention of house elves and magical injuries.
"I didn't for a long time, but my confessor, well, my spiritual director now, suggested I go daily at something of a crisis point a few months back. There's a church where I can hear the Mass in Latin every morning not that far from my home. It's a good habit to be in, for all that I think the occasional overruns of the homily annoy Gus sometimes." Adrian made a show of rolling his eyes. "I suppose I can go to the early Mass in English, but I do prefer the Latin Mass. More--magical, I daresay."
Janice accepted all this with a nod as she finished a bite of her sandwich. "I wouldn't know," she admitted. "For all that we were Presbyterian, we had to consider it a major accomplishment if we all made it to church on Sunday. At least after our parents died."
Adrian nodded. "My mother was the practicing Catholic, but my father agreed to raise me in the Church when they married and his word was good. I went every Sunday I was home as a boy. It was impossible to go at school, but I was at Sunday Mass every week during hols."
"Mary generally tried to get one of the neighbors or friends to take us, if only to get us out of her hair for a couple hours of peace and quiet. I think it backfired, mostly. Ask three little girls to sit still for over an hour and they're even louder when they get home again."
"I was an angel, of course." Adrian grinned. "Never made any trouble for anyone." He was making short work of his breakfast between quips, but he was a hearty eater, something that Janice could already tell in the short time they'd been working together. That he was so thin was something of a miracle, or a function of the work he was doing. "Of course, nobody was telling me not to climb on the roof after church, or if they were, I conveniently wasn't listening."
Janice laughed between bites of her own sandwich. "Brenda was the rambunctious one of the three of us. Mary may have been when she was a girl, but by the time I was old enough to be curious, hers was the only real testimony we had. So of course she claims to deserve sainthood," she said with a grin. "Not that she doesn't deserve it now. Raising three kids unexpectedly at the age of twenty-one and not bollocksing it up is enough to merit some serious attention from upstairs, if you ask me."
There was another nod from Adrian. "Having had the archetypical wicked stepmother myself, I certainly credit anyone who takes on the responsibility for someone else's children with a store of merit towards beatification, if nothing else."
"Should I call you Cinderella?" she asked teasingly. "Do you have your own fairy godmother, too, or does a house elf fill that niche in a wizard's life?"
"He keeps me fed and brings me in from the rain. What do I need a fairy godmother for after that? But seriously, Flitchy helped raise me. Maybe he's the one who should get the store of merit," Adrian said, as if he were only half-joking.
"I think if you haven't figured out to go inside when it starts raining on you, then you might be the one with a mind that needs healing," Janice noted with a grin.
"I like the rain!" Adrian protested. "Besides, I normally get caught climbing, or on top of something, and while I can always Apparate from the roof, I prefer not to do that while clinging to a cliff."
"Ah, yes. I forgot that you're at least a bit of an outdoor cat. Though I'm indifferent to rain, really. I'd have to move farther than London to escape it, if I wanted to."
Now Janice had caught Adrian's interest. They should be moving on, but instead Adrian dropped into one of the chairs by a table with his usual graceful sprawl, and gestured to Janice to do the same. "If you could go anywhere you wanted, then, where would you go?"
"Home," she replied immediately, even as she sat down. "Edinburgh," she clarified, "or back to St. Andrew's, even."
"That's not going to get you out of the rain," Adrian observed mildly. "But I understand the feeling. There's a part of me that wants to go back to Bath, too."
"France, then. Last time I talked to my younger sister, she was nannying in France." Her sisters were home just as much as the place, anyway.
After his conversation with Gus about the halfway house, Adrian had become increasingly interested in the idea as a long-term solution for people caught in the middle of the secrecy problem. He still wasn't sure how to implement it, but Janice was exactly the sort of person who might be interested. Or not. "Away from the wizarding world completely, or just getting back to the family you had to leave?"
"I don't know that I could get away from the wizarding world completely," Janice admitted. "Practically, there'd always be the chance that I'd get pulled back in since it wouldn't require further breaking your secrecy rules. Then there's the fact that I'm not sure I could just forget what I know and go back to how things were, even if I wanted to, especially knowing what I do about what my own government is getting up to behind everyone's backs." And right in front of their noses, in some cases.
Glancing around to be sure he wouldn't be overheard, Adrian dropped his voice and admitted, "One of the things I've realised is that the secrecy laws in their old form aren't going to work any more. In the old days--well, before the Ministry fell, you'd never have been dragged into our world like this. It would have been criminal." It still was, but the situation was different now. "It would have been considered a mercy to send you back to your own life none the wiser. But now--" Adrian shrugged. "Once it's over, I think there should be some way for people who are in both worlds to move between the two of them more easily."
"If there was more movement between the worlds, I think it would be a lot harder for either group to go around killing people or snatching them up without it being noticed, or something going on about it," she added. "If they'd gotten Oliver too and not just his wife and her brother, I'd never have heard a peep about it, I'm sure. We weren't even invited to his parents' funeral, if they had a proper one considering how crazy things were; he's never told me."
Adrian remembered that time. The horror hadn't been the few who'd come through the Floo to St Mungo's or even the Floo stopping. It had been when they'd realised that after that, no more would come, ever. He suppressed a shudder and gave a slight shake of his head. "Quite possibly not. So many died then, between the Ministry and Hogwarts, that we still don't even know who all the dead are. Were. But I think you're right. According to the mundane laws, I don't even exist, not really. It's easy to make people who don't really exist disappear." He thought of Sam, then, and added, "For mundane people too."
"It's easier than it should be to make people disappear who do exist in a very obvious way, let alone those that don't have that advantage." It certainly hadn't been hard to take her from her home and set her up with a new identity when it was clear she couldn't just be put back again. "The police didn't find me when they looked, and they aren't looking anymore. I'd hate to think how easy it would be to do the same to to Aileas Galbraith."
"That was one of the reasons why I offered you this job, to be honest. You're a valuable asset to the clinic, especially given the practice's interest in complementary medicine, but you're also part of our community now, whether you joined up voluntarily or not. We have to look after our own." It was heresy and blood treachery to extend that sense of community to a Muggle, but Adrian was over his fear of being accused of that now. There was only one person whose opinion he cared about that might think otherwise. "What I haven't quite figured out yet is why you accepted."
It was comforting to be included in a communal 'we', no matter how small or how many people might disagree with Adrian, and violently; something that was hard to fully value until it was missing. "I was wondering when you were going to ask me that," Janice replied. She'd never thought Adrian to be incurious.
"I had a boyfriend, before I got caught up in all this. His name was Graham," she began, gesturing to Diagon Alley around her. "If I hadn't been, I suppose we would have been married by now, but that's not the point. The point is that he's military - a Swimmer Canoeist, if you know anything about it. A frogman. Anyway. Not three days after you came by with your offer did a group of lads come over to Bangor from Anglesey and one of the RAF stations there, and I ran into a mate of Graham's that he'd trained with some time back, and who I'd met once or maybe twice back in Edinburgh. He started chatting me up, thought maybe I looked familiar, and I managed to escape on home before the look of something niggling at the back of his mind turned into the answer."
"Seeing as if he managed to recognize me and knew that I'd gone missing that Graham or my sisters would likely be tearing up Bangor looking for me in the span of a fortnight, I figured it was an excellent time to relocate," she finished. "Not that it wasn't a tempting offer on its own, but I hadn't made my mind up one way or the other until I ran into someone who could blow my cover."
Adrian nodded. It was a consideration for him as well, and why he'd never done as much with Dominic Cullen's identity as he might. Part of his trepidation about walking for Miranda during Fashion Week was that he might be recognised, especially after he'd helped Phil escape from MI7. His cover could be blown twice over: first as an illegal doctor who'd treated criminals at his clinic in Brixton and second, as an unregistered wizard. "How can we work to keep that from happening again in London?"
"I'm counting on the sheer difference in population to help a great deal here," she answered, only half joking. "It's easy enough to learn where the military boys are like to spend their time on leave and go somewhere else. I didn't meet that many of Graham's friends, either, or at least not more than once, and usually then they were pissed. The only ones I know well were the ones he'd likely still be serving with, and if they're around, so is he. Which would be a shitstorm and a half, if he found me, but I almost think that'd be easier than him getting reports that had him come looking." Not that it made her want it to happen.
"They know I'm alive, that I can't tell them where I am, and that I'm not coming home, and as far as they're concerned, that's by my choice. They may think I've snapped and just had to get away, which I've tried to let them go on thinking. But other than just staying out of the way, I don't know that there's any way to avoid such an accident again."
If a military man found Janice, they'd all be in a hell of a lot of trouble. "If worst comes to worst, get hold of me or Gus. There are things I can do as a last resort that won't hurt them, but will make whoever it is go away, none the wiser. I don't want to do that, but--I've seen what they do to people and I'm not willing to have it done to you."
Janice shook her head gently. "Graham wouldn't hurt me. Drag me off to Mary and Brenda who might, aye, but he'd not do more than yell at me for whatever pigheaded thing he thinks I've done and sit on me until the sisterly cavalry arrives. Assuming he doesn't just think I left because of him and has moved on entirely." Which wasn't all that pleasant to think about, for all that it would be the best thing for the both of them. "That's why I let them know I've not gone and gotten myself killed - otherwise the police would still be on it and they'd ask for explanations that I can't rightly give."
"Yes," Adrian pointed out, "and if the police report got back to MI7, you'd go missing faster than a quaffle goes through the middle hoop, whether you're called Janice Grieve or Aileas Galbraith. So let's not go that way, and we'll hope military intelligence remains unintelligent about you." He pondered a moment longer. "What we need is a safe way for you to see them that won't lead them back to your new life. A safe place."
She looked surprised; not at the point about MI7 - that she well understood - but about finding a safe place to see the people she cared about. "You actually think that's possible?"
"It's sufficiently difficult that I consider it a challenge appropriate to my abilities," Adrian replied seriously.
"You're a very strange man, Adrian Pucey," Janice replied, more fond than anything. "Alright, do you have any ideas? Or ideas about where to get ideas?"
"I'm still in the early stages of pondering. But the need is clear. There are too many wizarding families split between the worlds, and too many mundane families with relatives on this side. The only people who don't have some pull somewhere are people from the really old families like mine, and some of us have had to develop identities to get by. I have papers and an identity on the other side, and even a part-time job," Adrian explained, settling back into his chair and resting his elbows on the arms.
"You have time for a part-time job?" she asked curiously, eyebrows quirking upwards. "And a non-magical one at that?"
Adrian nodded. "It's more occasional than part-time, really. I'm a model."
Janice spluttered a laugh before she could stop herself with a hand over her mouth. "Are you serious?"
"Oh, quite. I'm a little short for it, but apparently I have a good carriage for runway modeling." Adrian laced his fingers across his midsection, unfussed by Janice's insufficiently-squelched amusement. "I work with Gus's sister. She's a designer for Aquascutum." The name was easy for Adrian to remember; it was, after all, in Latin.
"The laughing is surprise, not disbelief," she assured him, grinning as she tried to picture it in her head. "You don't often hear of doctors spending their free time on catwalks, especially for design houses one has actually heard of. Gus's sister designs there?"
There was another nod from Adrian. "I met her several years ago and she asked me to, and I thought 'why not?'. And it does prove useful. Nobody ever suspects a model of being a secret wizard. The rest of the people Miranda works with think I'm some well-off arse who inherited some money and models in his spare time for kicks. The fact that it's mostly true, for all that it doesn't account for how I spend the rest of my time, is what amuses me."
"Now this is something I need to see," Janice told him, emphatically. "Though it will be a hardship to look at you, I'll do it for the clothes," she lied, grinning.
Adrian was having a hard time suppressing his own smirk. "I'll see if I can't find a ticket for you, then. I'm walking for Fashion Week. Monday the twenty-first."
"Impressive. And yet not something you put on your wizarding resume, I'm guessing. If wizards even use resumes." She tilted her head to consider this. "I'll look forward to it either way."
"All right, then. I'll do that. We should probably get to the clinic, now, though, before Gus decides we've gone missing and reports us to the Ministry or something." Adrian came to his feet and offered Janice his arm, every inch the gentleman.
Janice stood and looped her arm through Adrian's. "Then I suppose we're off the see the wizard."