hands, files, and matters of national security // self-para
WORD COUNT: 1,009 SETTING: The streets of London CODE: The File Plot SUMMARY: Emma gets an unsolicited gift from an old ally and considers her loyalties.
It was one in the morning, and Emma was thinking about hands.
Hers were, unsurprisingly, the main focus of her train of thought; her hands, tapping absently on her leg as she walking alongside a low brick wall that lined someone’s garden, even though the world was relatively quiet around her and there was seemingly little to be fidgety about. Her hands, and what they would look like if she decided to throw all the eggs of her future into one basket and agreed to wear the token engagement ring she’d been offered by Noah—who was good and kind and steady, but didn’t get her heart pounding in the way she always assumed it would when she found everything that she claimed to want.
Her hands, currently closed tightly around a file of information that she was holding onto like a life raft, despite the thinness of it.
Edgar’s hands, and the way she couldn’t help but notice that they shook slightly as he had handed it over to her.
She was walking back from Hackney now, licensed to apparate but still not a fan of the sensation, clutching the manila fold to her chest like the London air was an ocean and she was depending on it to keep afloat. She wasn’t, but it had seemed that Edgar had thought differently; they hadn’t spoken in weeks, the two of them, and she couldn’t pretend to be thrilled when she’d heard from him that night. But she’d gone, at his request, against her better judgment…even though anyone who asked would hear from her that she had the most solid judgment imaginable.
Here she was, proving herself incorrect. Here she was, head bent low as she sped up her step slightly and turned her thoughts to home, the little two-bedroom she shared with Vincent where she could curl up in bed and not have to worry about things like hands or files or the curious noise that was being carried across the wind currently, as if to remind her it was too late to be out and about. She agreed that it was well past the time to be tucked away at home; she didn’t need reminding.
It had always been her policy that secrets weren’t worthwhile to keep; they only gave others something to hold over her head, and there was usually little worth in that. But she was holding a file of secrets now, and it seemed that secrets had been more ingrained in her life than ever anticipated. From the hushed whispers at parties to the dirty business her friends were getting up to when their day jobs were over to her own inability to start a family—she’d been getting more and more comfortable keeping secrets than she cared to admit, even to herself.
Tonight, she had agreed to keep another one…but even as she promised it, she knew she wouldn’t be able to. Did that make it another secret? Or just a lie?
The attacks –the ministry, the hospital, the two villages—had shaken the entire world, and Emma was no exception to that. People wanted answers, people wanted protection. Emma wanted protection and, wholly unsolicited, Edgar had dropped some in her hands tonight, intending to make her feel safer.
Plans from the Auror department, ones that weren’t meant to be seen by outside eyes. Escape routes. Emergency protocol. Evacuations. The worst things the people in that department were willing to do to keep the worst from happening.
Emma knew the gesture was supposed to bring her peace of mind, but it felt like a grenade in her hands as she carried it down the street…because she knew it didn’t just have to mean protection for herself. She could use it, if she chose to—she certainly owed her friends more than she owed Edgar at this point, even after the gesture of goodwill. It would only be leveling the playing field, wouldn’t it? Giving information to one side that the other one already had? It wouldn’t be destruction; it would be keeping people safer, potentially. People she had grown up with, people she saw every day and would like to continue to see every day.
For so long she’d been determined to not get involved, to not choose a side…and she wasn’t really, was she? If she passed it along, it wouldn’t be an act of war; it would hardly be an act. Edgar had given her this information because he (evidently, though she still didn’t believe him) cared. Wouldn’t she, then, be within her rights to pass it along to someone she cared about, for the same reasons?
It made logical sense to her, as she played it over in her head…but if there’s one thing that she’d learned in the past few years it was that the logic she’s so soundly relied on her entire life had a tendency to not be as reliable as she imagined. It wasn’t immune to leading her astray…but she needed it to be. Just this once, she needed to trust her gut instinct. Without that, she had no idea how to go forward from this point, to keep making decisions and trust that she wouldn’t walk right off the edge of the cliff. The fear in the world could belong to the rest of the world; it was pointless, as far as she was concerned, and she was done playing into it.
She’d wanted protection, and she got it—she just didn’t know what form it would take yet.
She dropped the file onto her bedside table and didn’t think about it again for the night, eager to take up the luxury of mentally checking out while she could still afford to.
In the morning, she reached for a spare piece of parchment and scrawled a message onto it, not sure yet who the recipient would be but having a pretty solid idea forming in the back of her mind of where she wanted it to go:
I have something that might interest you. -E