Work in the Ministry was chaos incarnate.
Tonks swore it was like hell had broken loose and decided to pitch a tent in the Atrium. Everyone ran in frantic circles, memos fluttered like panicked birds, and Fudge himself was practically drowning under his own failures.
He barked orders at anyone within earshot, his face a mask of frantic, sweating desperation, demanding Aurors be sent on missions left and right. His voice was high-pitched and strained, a testament to his fraying nerves as he tried frantically to plug the holes in the sinking ship that was his campaign, but all he was doing was driving his staff into the ground.
It didn't matter if it was a senior or a trainee, if a shopkeeper claimed a neighbor was acting strange, an Auror was dispatched. If a suspicious owl was spotted, another Auror was dispatched. It was absurd, reckless, and exhausting.
Tonks herself had been sent to investigate a gnome disturbance in Wiltshire that turned out to be a single, lost garden gnome. She felt the Ministry's panic like a tangible weight, a crushing pressure that sapped her magical core and left her feeling hollowed out.
He was trying to find something, anything, he could use to protect himself, something to prove his competence, but all he was doing was driving his staff into the ground, and the public's trust in his administration was plummeting faster than a Bludger, hell, it was already grounded.
Tonks was beyond fed up. She'd been running herself ragged all week, sent on one pointless mission after another. If there was even a small complaint, an Auror would be sent out as if it were a full-blown war.
The reason was clear enough. The Dark Lord had not only returned, but he had done so in the Ministry itself, and now everyone had seen him in the papers.
Fudge was a fool and a failure as a leader for not listening to Harry and Dumbledore, that was what everyone was now saying, as if they themselves hadn't denied and called both Harry and the Headmaster fools, attention seekers, and some had even called Harry a murderer, saying he killed the other boy.
That one had pissed her off when one of her coworkers had said it in front of her just a few days before the Dark Lord appeared. She had, of course, punched him in the face and broke his nose.
Tonks sighed as she finally got a break, and she was going to enjoy it. She collapsed onto her parents' sofa, yanking her Auror jacket off and tossing it aside. The silence of the empty house was bliss, her mum and dad were out, so she had the place to herself for a while.
She sighed again as she relaxed and finally allowed her mind to wander to the issues of her love life. She couldn't believe that bloody mutt had come and tried to make excuses as if everything would just go back to them flirting and so on.
From what she had managed to catch, Remus had apparently been forced by Sirius or something like that, but she really wasn't listening. She had just brushed him off and gone on with her work.
She was busy and she didn't have the time to stand and hear him out or even the care to, to be honest. He had run away, and he hadn't just pushed her away, he had used his wolf problem as a shield for his own cowardice, and that was something she couldn't forgive.
She wanted someone who would stand beside her, not hide behind her and run with his tail between his legs at the first sign of trouble.
Besides, after the talk with her mum and a few days to think about it, she had made up her mind that she was going to try things with Harry and see where it goes.
She knew he was interested, but at the same time, she had heard news that there was another girl. How did she hear about that? Well, gossip really did travel fast and far.
A girl had apparently seen him with some girl on a date or something and had written to her sister, who blabbed to her friend, who told their friends, and so on. Now, this really wasn't an issue in the Wizarding world, it wasn't uncommon for powerful, wealthy, or important men, or even women, to have multiple partners.
It was a centuries-old tradition, an unspoken rule that those with great power were not meant to be confined by the restrictive laws of the mundane. Magical ability was a force of nature, and to those who wielded it, conventional relationships often felt like a cage.
The important thing was honesty and communication between all parties. Though it depended on the individual and their partner, after all, if one didn't agree, things could fall apart and make life difficult for them.
That's why she wanted to reach out to Harry and talk to him, to see if they could try to make things work with him and his other partner. And as luck would have it, she was dropping by Hogwarts tomorrow for an assignment given the recent things that have happened in Hogwarts.
Meanwhile, back in Hogwarts, rumors about Harry and Daphne's lakeside date had started to circulate, and House Slytherin had not taken things well. Daphne knew this would happen when she had decided to just ignore the norms, but she wasn't really the type to care about things like this.
She cared about herself and her things before anything else. If she liked something, she'd get it, if she liked someone, she'd go for it, regardless of house. The whispers were like a physical presence in the common room, a hissing that followed her everywhere. She could feel the stares, feel the weight of their judgment as they looked at her like she was some prized horse who had chosen the wrong stable.
Sure, she kept to the rules of Slytherin, but that was because a lot of these were rules she agreed with, to be cunning, smart, powerful, elegant, not brash or reckless like the Gryffindors. She was not some bookworm that obsessed like the Ravenclaws, and while she didn't have a problem with hard work, after all, her skills were from her hard work she wasn't some happy-go-lucky fool of a Hufflepuff.
Her dismissal of the other houses was not born of malice, but of her biased observation. She saw the Gryffindors as children playing at war, the Ravenclaws as academics too lost in their books to see the world, and the Hufflepuffs as simple-minded idealists.
That's why when she had started to get interested in Potter, she just went for it, and after meeting a few times, talking and teasing, she found that she liked him. It wasn't some grand thing like she was falling in love, but she could see it happening.
Right now, she liked him, and nobody was going to stop her from getting what she wanted.
So it was annoying as she sat in the common room trying to read, with these fools looking at her. It really was annoying, but it got worse when her peers, curiosity overcoming their cowardice, started to approach her.
"Greengrass?" a Slytherin girl named Pansy Parkinson said, her voice dripping with affected casualness as she and her friends stopped by Daphne's table. "We heard a few... things today. You shamming Slytherin."
Daphne didn't look up from her book. "Then you heard wrong. I'm having a quiet afternoon."
Another girl, Millicent Bulstrode, spoke, her voice lower. "No, we heard you were with Potter. The Boy-Who-Lived. Is it a ruse? Are you trying to get information for the Dark Lord? It would be a shrewd move."
The girl leaned in conspiratorially, her eyes gleaming with genuine curiosity. The thought of a political and strategic move was far more interesting to her than a simple romantic entanglement.
Daphne finally sighed, her eyes still on the page. "No, Millicent, it's not a ruse. And I wouldn't tell you if it was."
"But why?" asked Vincent Crabbe, his voice a low grunt. "He's a Gryffindor. He's always fighting with us."
"That's because you're always fighting with him," Daphne said, her tone flat and dismissive. "I have no quarrel with him." She paused, turning a page. "And perhaps he's not what you think. Perhaps he's far more interesting." She still didn't look up, but her words were laced with a cold challenge.
"You're not serious," Pansy said, her voice rising in a squeak. "You're saying you're actually... dating him?" The word seemed to leave a bad taste in her mouth. "A halfblood, blood traitor, a Gryffindor."
She looked at Pansy with a bored expression. "I'm not saying anything. But if you have a problem with it, you can take it up with me. I'm sure we can find a quiet corridor somewhere to discuss it."
Her tone was polite, but the veiled threat was clear. Pansy paled and took a step back. It really was annoying, but it got worse when Draco decided that, unlike others, he wanted to be vocal about his grievances.
"Greengrass!" he called out, his voice sharp and demanding, as he came to her table. He slammed his hands down on the table, a pathetic attempt to assert dominance. "Everyone saw you. You can't deny it. You were with Potter by the Black Lake," he shouted out, no doubt trying to draw more attention to them.
"And, I never denied it. So?" she said, not looking up as she flipped a page of her book. That seemed to sputter him before he caught himself and continued speaking, "What do you mean 'and'? Potter is a Gryffindor, he's the enemy!" he shouted, his face turning red.
"Since when was he my enemy?" she replied again. "I never had problems with Potter; that was you and your goons." She finally looked up from her book, her cool gaze cutting through him like a blade.
"So why should I not have a nice afternoon with Potter just because you hate him? If anything, that adds points to his charm." She knew that one of the reasons Draco was angry was because he had asked her out before, and she had shut him down hard.
She wasn't interested in Malfoy, she would never be interested in Malfoy. He was a fool, a bloody git that felt he was entitled to anything that shone under the sun, and he was whiny, weak, and downright annoying as hell.
Malfoy stood there for a while as if not expecting her to answer him like that before he started shouting that Slytherin and Gryffindor were not supposed to be hanging out, and that's why the hell was she wasting her time with him. Daphne could hear the jealousy in his voice and decided she wanted to see him more pissed off. She stood, closing her book with deliberate calm.
"What I do outside this common room is my concern. Not yours. Not theirs." Her eyes swept the room. "Potter is my boyfriend. And if anyone here thinks they can dictate my choices…" her lips curved into a cold smile, "…I'll make sure their bits snap off one by one. Frozen solid."
The room went silent, so quiet you could hear a pin drop. A few boys visibly winced, their hands drifting protectively downward. They knew she wasn't bluffing. Daphne smoothed her robes and strode to her dorm without another word. Tracy hurried after, trying not to laugh at the stunned faces left in their wake.
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