Anomie

Chapter Six: Observations

Sixteen Days Before the Second to Last Day in August, 2007:

Yellowing memories of the Quidditch locker room as a place of anticipation, trepidation, and celebration rallied most viciously when it was squarely the opposite. Though Harry counted on the shouts of the coach and the hot glares of his teammates after practice, his reflexive recollections of laugher and pats on the back stuck him like pins.

There was talk of being traded. There didn't need to be - Harry knew the cost of failure as his name alone failed to draw the old crowds - but the whispers were growing in volume as the Prophet's criticism stormed.

The locker room was an isolated place for Harry now; he dressed silently in a corner, because he was unwelcome around the rest of the team. He used to try pretending he was somewhere else, but no place in his life, past or present, could be thought of joyfully. Memories of Hogwarts, the Quidditch pitch, and the Burrow only added to his sense of displacement and pointlessness.

The coach got the team's attention with a booming call to order. He told them that the Doctor was there to see them, and before he could continue, the team shouted out a blistering protest. 'I don't give a damn about your bloody whining! Ministry orders! Nothing you can do about it if you don't want our team license revoked!'

Harry didn't protest. It would do him no good. He shuddered unnoticed in his corner and shut his locker with a shaking hand. His teammates fought to get to the front of the line - to get the Doctor's prodding over with - or to the back of the line - to delay their fate. Harry let himself be shuffled into the middle, not caring one way or the other.

'Potter, what d'you reckon?' asked Brookes. It didn't matter that Harry was out of favour; at this moment, they were all equally screwed, and some, like Brookes, would persistently carry on conversation to stave off nervousness.

'Could be worse,' said Harry. A brief fantasy of his own death from medical malpractice flashed in his eyes, and he smiled a little. It would solve a lot of problems, and it took all the fear out of death when you weren't expecting it to happen.

Brookes persisted. 'Think it'll be blood or tissue?'

'Maybe both,' Harry replied with disinterest. He hoped Brookes would stop bothering him with questions if he failed to commiserate. But for his part, Harry hoped for a tissue sample. That was always done by the Doctor's assistant, who was more pleasant than the Doctor himself. And nothing good had ever come of Harry's blood.

'Worst part is that creepy Muggle,' Brookes concluded quietly.

The Doctor was a Muggle, and Harry kept telling himself this. Samples went into phials that went into some lab miles away. The Prophet never reported a word about it even despite the oddness of a Muggle doctor even knowing about the magical world, let alone practicing in it. Muggle doctors were only slightly above morticians on the list of people wizards liked to avoid, and this particular doctor didn't improve on that impression. But the players were told to keep their mouths shut. And Harry did, because he had no particular reason to care what the Ministry was up to.

The coach came back - Harry hadn't realized he was even gone - and the first question from the first person in line was, 'Tissue?'

The coach nodded.

'Blood?'

The coach nodded again, and Brookes grabbed Harry's arm in fear.

***

The Doctor was an old man. He stood unnaturally straight, as though fighting the hunch of the elderly, and his wrinkled red-rimmed eyes were obscured by large glasses with precisely circular lenses. His silver hair was parted exactly down the middle morning, noon, and night, and he checked it often, not out of vanity, but because he hated disorder in all forms.

His sampling and measurement procedures were faultless - due to compulsion, not pride. He had rarely spoken since the end of his childhood. 'Speech lacks symmetry,' he said coldly to a particularly gabby Quidditch player. That was all he said throughout the repetitive procedures until Harry Potter's turn came. Silence was always symmetric; the beginning had been silent and so would the end.

Then Potter sat on the bed covered in thin paper in the makeshift doctor's office, which only the Doctor ever used. Wizards, he understood, practiced medicine differently; the Doctor was indifferent to this.

He peppered Harry with queries like, 'Have you experienced discomfort in the past month?' and, 'List your main dietary intake for the past month,' and, 'Have your magical abilities been consistent in the past month?' Potter's responses were as brief as possible, which the Doctor didn't mind, because the questions were of interest to the Ministry for Magic, not to him. The Doctor cared only for samples.

The Doctor took short but complete notes, always filling each line from the leftmost side to the rightmost. Even if he had to squeeze a word in, the lines were of consistent length - he was stringent about this, and insisted that his assistants take notes in the same way. Otherwise he could not read them.

When a line ended, the Doctor wrote the next with his other hand. Doing so was instinct to him. Potter stared as he switched hands, and the Doctor added this observation to his notes, because he did not see his own behaviour as unusual at all.

When the questions were over, the Doctor proceeded with his sampling. He took the blood sample first, as that required no magical intervention from his assistant. The Ministry insisted that the tissue sampling be done magically, as the magical procedures were less invasive and caused less pain. The Doctor did not like leaving his sampling to others, but at least it would get done. He paced with his eyes on the floor to ensure perfect steps while he waited.

His assistant waved his wand cheerily, and Potter chuckled at a joke. 'This is a medical procedure,' said the Doctor scornfully. Jokes were wasteful. The assistant's face fell, and he was quiet for the rest of the extraction.

He would not see his favourite patient for another sixteen days; the thought of him brought what passed for a smile to the Doctor's face. By the end of the month, he would have everything he needed to begin the next round of experimentation. The Doctor did not like to speculate on feelings, but he was unusually confident about the upcoming seventh round.

'Show Mr Potter out,' said the Doctor to his assistant, 'and bring the samples to Lab 13 this afternoon.' As he left, he glanced at the waste bin, where the samples from the other Quidditch players had been thrown.

They were of no interest to him. Riddle and Potter were the only ones who mattered, couldn't the magic Ministry see? 'And take out the trash.'

***

Hermione twiddled the folded scrap of paper in her hand and tried to determine where it fit - if anywhere at all - into the slow but accelerating degeneration of affairs in the wizarding world. Hardly anyone seemed to have noticed the slide - least of all Ron - and she hadn't yet spoken of it to anyone. Truth be told, she was a little afraid to.

Someone in the Ministry must have noticed by now. She really thought they must have. How could she be the only one to see it? Hermione acknowledged her own cleverness, but she was not the only clever person with her eyes open.

Maybe this time she was grasping for straws. She opened up the scrap of paper and looked again at the drawing inside. It was a very rough sketch of an audio cassette, as Hermione had informed Ron over dinner the night before.

She was bursting to know what was on it, and though she knew Ron couldn't tell her without breaking some rules, no one would really notice, would they. Mr Weasley had told his wife things he shouldn't have, and she would likely have scolded him if she'd known. The thought of them - the in-laws she'd never thought of as less than family, the ones who hadn't lived to see her wedding - cued a pang of loss, and Hermione put them out of her mind.

When had it started? When had she begun to notice? Her enquiries had taken the form of several owls to the Ministry and several informal inquiries through old friends. What she'd got back was a Ministry owl stuffily telling her to mind her own business and a much more interesting note days later written in cramped handwriting that struck her as familiar. She hadn't yet identified the writer, but as he had specifically asked her not to seek him out, she hadn't tried very hard.

Something is coming. You have until the 20^th of May to stop it. No one else will try. Further information would result in my death and probably yours.

Do not try to find me. Look for tapes.

The twentieth of May was far away. He hadn't even said the year, but Hermione assumed that he meant 2008. The date itself had meaning - too much - already; it was the anniversary of Harry's final duel with Voldemort, and every year came the old debate. Even he could not live forever, some brave and insightful person would say, so we may as well off him now and deal with the consequences. Others, the majority, would feel a tiredness that hadn't ever gone away after years of peace, and they would tell the brave and insightful to sod off until next year. Each time it happened the result was the same: divisions, bitterness, and the scabs on old wounds getting picked off again, never healing.

The final sentence of the letter had mystified her until now, but finding a Muggle audio tape on a corpse couldn't be a coincidence (she hoped). There would be a clue on it, and Hermione would solve the mystery, as always.

'Will I be too late?' she blurted out, staring blankly at her hands. She took out her wand, pointed it at a quill on her desk, and said, 'Wingardium Leviosa.'

The quill lifted obediently, but Hermione did not feel relieved. She flicked her wand and allowed the quill to fall.

'Wingardium Leviosa,' she said again. The quill lifted up just as before. Hermione repeated her actions many times, and anyone who might have seen her then would have wondered if she was entirely sane.

On the forty-fourth try, the feather refused to lift. Hermione took out a piece of paper from the top drawer of her desk and jotted down the date and the number. On the paper were more dates and numbers in a column; some were smaller, but most were larger. She had been taking notes for four months now; the first time it had taken seventy-seven spells before failure, and she chalked that up to being tired of casting by that point. But she hadn't reached such a high number since May.

More complicated spells had higher rates of failure. The secretary in the outer office had replaced her wand twice in three months, each time claiming it had gone bust and blaming Ollivander's always advancing years. And some people were being affected faster than others - but Hermione couldn't bring herself to speculate where she herself fit on the curve.

The only related event that had hit the Daily Prophet was the decrease in the size of the entering classes at Hogwarts and the corresponding increase in Squib rates. This alone was enough to worry wizarding parents with small children; now, whenever a child showed his or her first sign of magic, such a fuss was raised that the fireworks could be seen for miles. The Ministry was hesitant to crack down on the practice with elections on the horizon, even if the Muggles might notice.

There was another more worrying story the Prophet had not reported. Hermione made mental note to take up the cause of media independence as soon as all this was over. McGonagall had told her all about it over tea. There had been a protest incident at Hogwarts as wizarding parents with children who hadn't received Hogwarts letters shouted and pounded at the gates, demanding to speak to the Headmistress, insisting that a mistake had been made. But there had been no mistake, to McGonagall's sincere regret.

'And,' McGonagall had whispered quietly, 'there were two students who seemed to have become Squibs over the summer, and one was going into her fourth year. Nothing of the like has ever happened in all my years at the school. I tried to get the Ministry's attention, but they only said they were working on the problem.'

Loudly, the Headmistress had said, 'Working on it! What am I supposed to tell that poor girl?'

Hermione peered at her wand. She knew she was losing her magic - but maybe it would be years or decades before it happened. Maybe the decline would stop entirely. Maybe - she cringed at her own grasping desperation - maybe the planets were in some nasty alignment and everything would return to normal once Saturn left the sixth house or the Moon entered Scorpio or some nonsense like that.

Or maybe it would all be lost by the next horrible twentieth of May.

***

Rue was struggling to find a proper rhythm for herself in her new work. When Voldemort was made to run a 'constitutional', as Ajit called it, on the fifth floor, she and Aeron were left outside with little to do but clean. Fairfax said she wasn't missing anything, but Rue couldn't help but wonder what he looked like running around. It didn't seem like an activity he would enjoy.

Fairfax told her that he and Ajit always took Voldemort for his run. 'He's not a morning person, and he hates being ordered around. Add those together, and he can be pretty pissy. Ajit's a basketful of patience, so he's all right with it - even likes to run around with him. I just keep my wand trained on the bugger the whole time so he doesn't try anything.'

'So why do you make him run in the mornings if he's not a morning person?' Rue asked him, wondering why Fairfax would borrow trouble that way.

Fairfax made a displeased face as though he'd smelled a skunk. 'I prefer to get it over with. Exercising him is the worst part of the job - among others.'

Rue smirked. Fairfax was awfully negative about guard duty. Rue was already feeling the monotony set in, but not when she was near him. He was the most interesting person she'd ever met, and if what he'd said the day before was true, he was willing to talk to her.

After his constitutional, Voldemort showered. The place never seemed so dull to Rue as it did then; they were just a handful of magical folk doing absolutely nothing in the middle of Muggle London. She made conversation with Ajit while Fairfax made the rounds to check the doors. The talk was pleasant enough - Ajit didn't seem to know how to be unpleasant - but she felt disjointed and out of place like a planet without a star to orbit.

'It's odd without him, isn't it?' Ajit said quietly, noticing Rue's malaise and accurately guessing the cause. 'It's like we have no purpose here.' Then he smiled a little wryly. 'He'll be back to make trouble soon enough. Chin up. If anyone knew we were missing him...'

Aeron kept to himself. He didn't seem to know how to do anything else. Ajit tried to draw him into conversation, and Aeron laughed a little at a tale about Ajit's boy jumping onto the roof to escape bedtime, but overall he was reserved and, in Rue's opinion, creepy. But sometimes he looked like he wanted to join in their conversation, opening his mouth a little and then closing it before sound could get out, so maybe he was only very shy.

Rue was glad when Voldemort walked in and took his customary seat in his armchair. She wondered what he did for entertainment; surely he didn't sit in that chair all day? But Ajit and Aeron didn't seem to expect anything else from him. Ajit went into the bathroom to clean up - Rue volunteered, but Ajit shook his head and smiled. 'Never know what sort of mess you'll find in there,' he said cheerfully. 'He likes to write on the wall with shampoo.'

'I haven't done that in ages,' said Voldemort with a fake pout.

Ajit chuckled. 'If by ages you mean last week.' He turned to Rue and explained, with some self-deprecation, 'I'm kept around for my cooking and my cleaning charms! It'll only take me a minute!'

Ajit left, but was back almost immediately. He looked uncharacteristically stern. 'What did you plug the toilet with?' he demanded. Rue looked down the hall and noticed that water was seeping into the carpet near the bathroom door.

'Toothpicks stuck together with toothpaste,' Voldemort replied in a flippant manner.

'We took the toothpicks away months ago. Where did you get them from?' Voldemort's only response was a challenging little smile. 'Either tell me on your own, or I'll have to drag it out of you.' Ajit sounded reluctant to use Legilimency, but his eyes started to shine.

'I hid a few handfuls in the vent,' Voldemort answered smoothly mere moments before Ajit could make good on his threat.

'Oh.' Ajit looked surprised. 'I thought I cleaned out the vent in there last week.'

'Where else would I get them?' asked Voldemort, sounding innocently curious. On the other side of the room, Aeron had a superior smirk on his face, but his expression turned dour again when he noticed Rue staring at him.

Fairfax banged the door open and stormed in. 'We've got water leaking down two floors! What did that bastard do this time?!'

'Toothpicks in the toilet,' Ajit replied. He moved back to the bathroom with Fairfax, who glared daggers at Voldemort as he passed. Down the hall, Rue heard Ajit say, 'I can clean up the water easily enough, but the toothpicks will take a while.'

'I'll help,' said Fairfax immediately, though with a note of resignation. 'I'll start off with the water damage on the lower floors.'

He moved toward the door to leave the room, but before he made his exit, Fairfax walked toward Voldemort's chair and, hands resting triumphantly on his hips, said, 'You've just won yourself an escort to the bathroom for the next month! How d'you like that, eh?'

Fairfax's twisted smirk made it clear he expected Voldemort to be angry at this. Voldemort, however, only replied in monotone, 'There's a comb and an old toothbrush down there too.'

Fairfax furiously stomped to the door and slammed it behind him as he left. Ajit came out of the bathroom soon after and gave Voldemort a very disappointed look. 'I don't know why you did that. It took you months to earn back bathroom privileges after last time.'

Voldemort threw up his hands as if to discard responsibility. With a little smirk, he said, 'It was an uncontrollable urge. Naughty little voices in my head made me do it.'

Ajit ignored the silly response. 'I know you're bored, but that's no excuse for bad behaviour. We'll talk about this later after I've calmed down.' With that, Ajit went back to the bathroom and shut the door.

'He seems perfectly calm to me,' Rue couldn't help saying. Her father wouldn't have been so calm a month after the fact.

Voldemort looked up at her dryly. 'Oh, he's furious. He might even give me a stern scolding and put me in time out.' After a few moment's contemplation, a grumpy look came over his face, and he added, 'I suppose he'll be too busy to make me pudding today. Aeron!'

Aeron stood a little straighter as his name was called. 'Go.' Aeron unquestioningly obeyed, walking out of the room with only a moment's jealous glance at Rue, and Rue's mouth fell open as she wondered just who was supposed to be in charge here.

As soon as Aeron was out of sight, Voldemort shifted in his chair, and Rue felt again, keenly, how quickly the situation changed here and how hopeless she was to keep up. Should she go get Ajit or run after Aeron? But she wasn't supposed to leave Voldemort alone, was she? Rue was sure that anyone else would know what to do, but she was left standing like an idiot waiting to be chopped into pieces and shoved in an oven.

Rue held tightly onto her wand as he made himself more comfortable and at the same time more threatening, his eyes sharp and his fingers intertwined. 'I hope I didn't give up my bathroom privileges and my pudding in vain. You have questions; I have answers. Ajit's become an expert plumber over the years, so do be quick about it.'