34. I Read Your Diary
Ted Tonks: "I Read Your Diary"
Lucius spent perhaps more time at the Ministry of Magic than he needed to; it wasn’t as though the Apothecary required a lot of licenses (well it did, since so many toxic, fatal, and downright illicit plants and potions were sold there, but a little gold and a lot of influence with the right people took care of that sort of thing easily enough). Lucius just liked the halls of power, and he especially liked what he could learn there.
He hadn’t expected to find the shoe on the other foot, but there was a young man clad in the blue robes of Magical Maintenance pawing through his personal possessions.
The wizard had plenty of ridiculous excuses, like, “Well I was cleaning up, wasn’t I?” and “It was in the bin, I was just pulling it out because it didn’t actually look like rubbish,” but Lucius knew better. Oh, he smiled and thanked the man for saving his papers for him—but he knew better. Obviously the fellow was spying on him, whether for some distant master (or not-so-distant; this was the Ministry after all) or just for his own potential advancement. Everyone knew Lucius Malfoy after all, so of course people wanted to know his secrets!
And perhaps there hadn’t been much of import in that sheaf of papers—he had left it just sitting on the desk in Badger’s outer office while they shared some friendly words and a glass or two after all—he was too flustered by the incident to remember. It didn’t matter. Regardless of what the man’s motivation had been, regardless of what he had or hadn’t discovered in those papers, one thing was certain: Lucius wasn’t ever going to trust Edward Tonks after this, not for anything.