⊠ WHERE ⊠ a small pub; diagon alley ⊠ & WHO ⊠ edgar and OPEN
It wasn’t that Edgar minded having to work on a Saturday. In fact, it was almost welcome. Since the war ended, everything had been either gruesomely silent—like his still flat at night, while he neglected sleep and waited for a foe’s footfall that would never come; or the inside of his head, blessedly, while he kept his hands and schedule full all day with distractions—or else blindingly loud with small talk and forced smiles and forced normalcy and forced calm.
What was it he minded? All the options, all the apparation powers, all the Floo-ready fireplaces in all the world—he could not find one that would allow him to concentrate. He’d started in his flat, working at the kitchen table. (Too quiet.) His backup option, the Ministry, proved too full of others like him, working overtime on their part-time busy work, crammed into cubicles like it was any old Monday. (Too loud, small talk too probable.)
Going back home wasn’t an option. And at this early hour, even The Leaky Cauldron was likely to be overflowing with the late breakfast rush: tourists and sleepers-in; teenagers and weekend retail shift workers. It felt foolish to spend even more time searching for some perfect place to get started...
...so Edgar went with the closest thing to a happy medium, or at least the nearest-by version of it he could think of.
The pub was four doors down from the far-more-famous Leaky Cauldron and, for all Edgar knew, it didn’t have a name.
Whatever was left of the sign over the door—which looked like it had once taken the brunt of a blasting curse, or at least several violently-bad paint jobs—was unreadable; the glasses were mostly clean, but definitely unbranded. It lacked polish and shine and homeyness, sure...but it was well-lit without being bright, and lived-in without being loud. The only other patron was an elderly wizard, slumped over pleasantly on his stool at the bar, his head rocking gently along to a throwback song crooning from the charmed jukebox.
Edgar slid into his choice of a booth—tucked into the room’s far corner, topped by a copper reading lamp. He accepted a water when a dreamy waitress passed by and made the offer. But he held off on ordering anything else; he did fine these days creating reasons to procrastinate, without the help of day-drinking.
Finally settled enough to concentrate, Edgar put his head down and did just that. The next minutes—or hours, or seconds, he wasn’t paying attention—lurched by. Edgar was in his own little world, surrounded by fileboxes and portfolio pages; half-scribbled memos and painfully-detailed to-do-later lists. His water became a tea became an espresso, but otherwise Edgar accelerated on auto-pilot, finding speedy comfort in the repetitive red tape of the DMLE’s paperwork.
By the time he finally blinked and re-encountered reality, Edgar wasn’t sure how much time had passed; just that he’d gotten three extremely painful things off of his to-do list and was feeling cautiously optimistic about the rest of the day.
“Let me guess,” he said, flashing a smile when he realized that someone now stood at the end of his table. “You’re here to kick me out of your best booth unless I order a drink that isn’t water or water-based?”
