Keeping it in the Family

Tonks led Keira through the open door. Keira stooped her head and entered a dingy, smelly, dusty shack- just what she had expected to see.

"This is the Sorcerers' Office?" she asked incredulously, as she inspected the hem of her robes and noticed that they had turned gray from the dust.

"Of course not... not the proper office at least," Tonks replied absentmindedly, her fingers running all over the walls, as if she was trying to feel something. "Where is it?" she breathed.

"What?"

"The entrance..." Tonks stood still and bit her lip. "Did I forget something?" She went back to the door and retraced her steps, muttering all the while. "No... What is it? I can't believe..." she stopped short as her eyes fell on Keira's badge. Then, she laughed.

"Of course... How could have I been so forgetful?" She pulled out the green lizard badge from her pocket and strung it around her neck.

"Alright, we've wasted enough time already... Follow me, okay?" And before Keira could even open her mouth to reply, Tonks had already walked straight through the wall, Platform Nine and Three Quarters style.

"Oh great." Keira said under her breath. Still, this was much more preferable to Snape's Potions class... She took a deep breath and concentrated. There's nothing to it. She walked through the wall, her eyes closed, and opened them to find herself in a place she had never imagined existed.

The shack had given way to what seemed a hall, with no doors to be seen leading out of it, made entirely out of the thinnest and finest glass. Keira stamped her foot on the floor, and it didn't break. Just the right amount of light streamed gently in through the see-through walls on sorcerers and sorceresses who were rushing around, carrying heavy tomes, stacks of paper, and official-looking brown envelopes. Some of them stopped at a reception desk in the middle of the hall, but most seemed to walk straight into any of the walls in the room. More people were walking right out of them like everything was perfectly ordinary. Keira's jaw dropped as Tonks chuckled. "Surprised? Wizards borrowed that one from us..."

Keira shut her mouth and looked around the hall. There was absolutely no decoration or ornament, not even a plant or the usual sculpture or fountain, yet it felt warm and inviting, not what one would expect from all the glass.

"It doesn't look too impressive in terms of security and all, but great enchantments have made it impossible for anyone who doesn't have a badge of sorcery get in. I'll show you one of the enchantments they use here. Take off your badge now please..." Keira was slightly puzzled, but she obediently followed, stuffing her red sorceress-in-training badge in her pocket.

"Now, touch the wall we just came through with the tip of your finger, very quickly mind you..."

Keira cautiously touched her finger to the wall. "Ow!" She pulled it back, horrified to see that the tip had started smoking and had actually turned black, as if it had been burned very badly. "Not to worry, not to worry..." Tonks cheerfully said as she pointed at Keira's finger. Immediately the pain went away and the tip turned back to its usual fleshy pink color.

"I guess someone would die instantly if they tried to walk through the thing," Keira remarked as she clutched her newly-healed finger. "Oh of course," Tonks replied nonchalantly as she looked around the hall. "Wouldn't stand a chance at all..."

"Tonks?"

"Hm?"

"Is everything here really made out of glass?" Keira asked, still awestruck at the beautiful hall. Tonks chuckled again, harder this time.

"It's not glass, Keira..." she rapped her knuckles against the wall. "This is diamond."

"What?!?"

"It's not just the hall, the whole Office is made of diamond, as well as the foundation," Tonks continued. "The whole thing is earthquake and fire-proof, with the help of a few enchantments of course..." She snuck a look at her watch and gasped. "Look at the time! Come on, come on!" She took Keira's wrist and half-dragged her across the hall.

"Where are you taking me?" Keira asked, forced to half-run in order to keep up.

"Somewhere you'll really like!" Tonks replied eagerly, oblivious to her very fast pace.

"How do you know where you're going?" Keira asked, half in exasperation and half because she wanted Tonks to slow down. "All the walls look the same!"

Thankfully, Tonks slowed down and looked at Keira puzzledly. "Keira Lestrange, are you a sorceress-in-training or not? Don't you remember what they taught you at Rosehill for five straight years?" Keira pretended to tug on her black hair ribbon as if she didn't know, but in her head she recited the now-familiar axiom along with Tonks:

"Never think that your first impression of something is correct and is just all that there is to it." She sighed, and looked up to see that they had come face to face with a wall. Tonks let go of her wrist.

"Now... look at this wall and tell me if this is the right one or not."

Keira looked at her master in disbelief. "But I don't even know where we're going...." Tonks raised her eyebrows. "....er... okay." she finished lamely. What am I going to do now? Her eyes traveled over the wall and found nothing extraordinary in the plain sheet of diamond that stood before her. No cracks, no secret handles, not even a secret symbol of some sorts... Keira tilted her head slightly and it was then that she saw it- a sort of etching on the wall that caught the light just enough for it to be faintly seen. She turned to Tonks. "Ummm.... I don't know if this is the right one, but I'm sure we could go through it!" she exclaimed confidently, pointing to the etching above.

Tonks burst out in laughter. "You could have just done this you know-" she immediately kicked the wall and watched her leg disappear through it.

"Oh." Keira shrugged and looked up at where she had seen the etchings. If she tilted her head completely to the side, she could see that they read faintly: Department of Time and Space Innovation and Official SSTACAV Headquarters.

Keira frowned slightly. "What's SSSTACAV?"

"You'll see." Tonks grinned and led Keira through the wall.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

They emerged into a short stone corridor, complete with flickering torches and forbidding statues of old sorcerers and sorceresses, all staring down their noses at her and Tonks. Keira shivered, reminded of Snape's dungeons. Thank goodness I'm not there. There were only two doors in the whole corridor, one large, ornate, and made of metal, and the other an exact copy of a Muggle wooden office door, complete with a small glass window near the top.

"This-" Tonks gestured to the metal door- "is the Department of Time and Space Innovation. They didn't make the door metal just for decoration, I heard the first one was made out of wood, like the SSSTACAV Headquarters one, but it cracked from all the enchantments they put on it."

"Enchantments?"

"You know- at first they put the usual anti-theft jinxes and all, but when the sorcerer and wizard....er... disagreements started popping up again and You-Know-Who started gaining power... You can't even touch the thing now if you have the slightest glimmer of bad intentions, you'd get blasted away! And you can only go inside if you're an authorized person or accompanied by one. I think it takes the people who work here about ten minutes to work the magic that enables them to actually open the door, and ten more minutes for every unauthorized person with them..."

Keira shook her head. "What's in here's that important, eh?"

"Of course!" Tonks nodded her head emphatically. "This whole office couldn't have been built without all the things discovered in this room- the walking through walls, how to compress the whole office into a tiny shack, and there's a door from the Chief Sorceress's room to the Ministry of Magic in London, that too I guess. But..." Tonks's voice suddenly lowered to a whisper.

"...more sorcerers have disappeared or died working here than all of the other departments combined! Many of the best and the brightest came to work here and were gone in half a year... Messing around with time and space is very dangerous of course, even for sorcerers..." Tonks shivered slightly, then her face brightened up. Keira noticed that her hair had suddenly turned a particularly shocking shade of pink.

"Well! Let's go, that's not what we're going to visit here anyway...."

"It's not?"

Tonks looked astounded. "Of course not! Do you think I'd let a sorceress-in-training go there!"

"Why not?" Keira raised her eyebrows sarcastically, but her eyes twinkled with fun.

"Oh come on!" Tonks evaded the question and pulled the office door open. "Let's go!" She disappeared inside, and Keira followed her with a chuckle.

"This," Tonks said grandly, complete with hand gestures, "is the headquarters of the Society of Sorcerers and Sorceresses Totally And Completely Against Voldemort!"

Keira let out a snort. "Sounds like the title of some bad Muggle teen movie if you ask me..."

"What?!?" Tonks looked highly affronted. "This is where it all happens, you know, look here-" She dragged Keira next to her. Various sorcerers and sorceresses were scurrying around, a few underlining some passages from the Daily Prophet, another scanning a stack of Muggle newspapers, another watching what seemed to be a Muggle news show on a small black and white television. The walls were plastered with photos of the breakouts from Azkaban and various other Death Eaters, all of whom were scowling and frowning menacingly, as well as a huge blow-up of Voldemort. A giant map was also tacked to the wall, next to a chart of equal size. Keira went forward and examined the chart, which turned out to be a

Master List of all Known Living Death Eaters (former and current)

Keira immediately located her aunt's name just below the center of the list. There was a silver star next to it. Lestrange, Bellatrix. Her finger underlined the name then moved right, skipping a short biography, list of her physical characteristics, a description of a few spells she was known to use, a list of her victims so far, and stopped under the last words in the row : Last Confirmed Sighting: Department of Mysteries, Ministry of Magic, London. Current whereabouts unknown.

"That used to be Azkaban just about a year ago." A steely, grim voice had suddenly materialized near Keira's ear, making her jump. She turned to find a short, stumpy sorceress, with iron-gray ringlets reaching to her waist. There was something about her eyes and mouth that made Keira think that this was not someone to be taken lightly.

Tonks looked very excited. "Keira, this is the President of the Society... Fidelis Kingston!"

Keira bowed slightly, and her something hanging around Fidelis's neck caught her eye- a gold sorcerer's badge, with a picture of a flying unicorn on it. She's one of the five sorcerers in the world to have a gold badge! A gold badge, she knew, was a sign of immense and extraordinary power, as well as a sign of having outstanding control over spells.

However, a closer look at the president's face revealed worry lines creeping up her forehead, as well as wrinkles starting to grow about her mouth. Dark shadows were also starting to appear under her eyes.

"Sit down you two," the president commanded, moving aside stacks of papers on a nearby bench. Keira followed, and found that a glass of ice-cold pumpkin juice had suddenly appeared in her hand. Fidelis Kingston sat down beside Tonks, sighing all the while.

"Well girl," she suddenly said, swinging around to face Keira, "Welcome to the Society Headquarters. We were founded in the early 1970s or so, I think, when Voldemort's killing and torturing first came out into the open. It was five years before the Sorcerers' Office gave us a room and all here in the building, and were authorized to work with the Ministry of Magic." She took a gulp of pumpkin juice and went on.

"I was the vice president back then, but the founding president was killed near the end of the war, so, when everyone realized that Voldemort wasn't dead, they insisted that I become the next one..." she laughed shortly.

"It was funny," she said as her mouth crooked up a little, "Really, it was. Why, when we heard that Voldemort had disappeared, we celebrated. Threw a huge party, right here in this very room. We had streamers all over there, and banners, and whatnot..." She pointed to a space filled with the grim visages of Death Eaters.

"We destroyed the old records." Keira noticed that a trace of bitterness had suddenly crept into her voice.

"Everything we had researched about the Death Eaters, every interview, every tidbit... gone. We set them all on fire in the middle of the room... We thought he was dead. Now of course, we're going back, interviewing everyone again, working every connection we've got, trying to recover even just one-fourth of what we lost..."

Her eyes strayed and settled upon a pair of sorceresses, gossiping and openly staring at the three seated on the bench. "You two. Get back to work, now." Her voice snapped out like a whip as the two took a few of the Muggle newspapers stacked up beside them, their faces turning red.

"Some people never learn, don't they, Tonks?" she remarked, which caused Tonks to hastily swallow her pumpkin juice while nodding.

"What do you mean?" Keira asked. The president laughed again.

"You see, most folks were angry when Tonks decided to apply for an Auror position at the Ministry of Magic. Said she was betraying the world of sorcery and Catherine the Insane and all that, but they themselves were all gab gab gab and gossip gossip gossip and never got any work done at all. I don't blame you dear-", here she laid a hand on Tonks' shoulder, "- I thought it was a clever move and all. You can be so much more effective and influence more people there than here. There are still people in the Ministry who think we're a front by the Office and that all sorcerers and sorceresses are secretly in cahoots with Voldemort, would you imagine?"

"I can," Keira muttered into her pumpkin juice.

Fidelis Kingston kept talking on. "And let's face it-" here she swept one of her ringlets off her face and sighed, "- The number of sorcerers are just too few. We're not taken seriously at all by anyone in the Ministry, not even the Minister himself... We knew that Voldemort was in Albania a few years ago, we knew the town, we knew his hideout! We wanted to capture him once and for all, but when we approached Cornelius Fudge-" she said the name with ill-disguised loathing,

"-he hemmed and hawed. He didn't believe us at all and thought we were a bunch of wackos. And when we told him that we were going to Albania to take the Dark Lord down, he wouldn't let us! Put a guard on me and my lieutenants and forbade us to take one step outside of England. Of course we could have ignored him, sorcerers are not under the jurisdiction of the Ministry, but none of us wanted to stir up the old disagreement again at that point... We thought he'd come to his senses soon enough and ask for our help. Big mistake." The president buried her face in her hands.

"Now the Dark Lord has a new body, the dementors and giants turned against the Ministry, and worst of all, Bellatrix Lestrange is out there running free," she said in a muffled voice.

Tonks suddenly turned away and bit her lip. Keira tried to catch Tonks' eye. Does she know I'm a Lestrange? she mouthed at her master, who shook her head slowly, as if in shock.

"Um, president?" she asked aloud cautiously. "Why is Bellatrix Lestrange the worst of it all?" Fidelis Kingston took her face from her hands and stared at Keira.

"You don't know, girl?" she asked in a hushed voice. "Aside from her undying loyalty to Voldemort, that woman has great power... She didn't need to use the Dark Lord to gain that, for certain. Do you know that representatives of academies of sorcery all over the world visited her at her house, asking, no, begging her to attend their schools?"

"No..." Keira was shocked. "Sorcery schools don't do that anymore! That's im-"

"They did it for her," the president butted in. "They did it for her. That's how strong her power was, no, is. And to think, she's roaming around, keeping a low profile, plotting something. I'm sure she whatever she thinks of will be-" she shook her head and took another gulp of pumpkin juice as Keira and Tonks stared at each other, both with wide-eyed looks on their faces.