Hermione gasped when the nib of her quill suddenly broke, spattering ink across the parchment in front of her and up onto her nose and cheeks. She sat back, blinking and scowling, and inspected the document with a sinking heart. She could probably siphon most of the ink off, but it would still show that it had been stained, and that would not be professional. With a tired sigh of aggravation, Hermione set the ruined parchment to one side and the broken quill to the other. She massaged her temples; they ached. It was stuffy in her tiny cramped office (more a broom closet that had been stuffed with a desk, chairs, and battered set of filing cabinets that was so close to the desk half the drawers wouldn’t open the whole way) and the light was dim and it was late.
She had known, when she had come to work for the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures that she was in for a lot of work and late nights. She had known that they were under-funded, under-staffed, and almost solely responsible for fixing all of the terrible things that Voldemort’s bigoted regime had implemented during its brief reign (not to mention all the other horrible anti-everybody-who-wasn’t-a-pure-blood-person laws that had been pre-existing examples of wizarding bigotry). But she hadn’t expected it to be quite this hard. She hadn’t expected so many people to protest so strongly, to go out of their way to hinder their efforts in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, to be so committed to the idea that everybody who wasn’t at least pure-human and half-blooded was lesser. The attitude was as exhausting as the work itself, and Hermione was tired of fighting.
That didn’t mean she was going to give up though, so with another tired sigh she picked up her quill again. Squinting at its split nib she decided that it was repairable; she would just have to remember not to press so hard, even when she got frustrated. (This was the fourth quill she’d broken today, which was two less than yesterday, and let’s not even talk about Tuesday.) Drawing her wand she used a careful cutting-spell to trim the nib back into something usable, then set the wand aside and drew out a fresh sheet of parchment. She’d have to copy over everything she’d written on the now ink-stained one to start with, and then she could move on to new work. Hermione had forgotten that it wasn’t just the parchment that had been splattered with ink and she bent over her work again without taking the time to clean her face so when a knock sounded on her door and she looked up to invite her visitor in, there were still black specks scattered like very dark freckles across her nose and cheeks. “Come in!” Hermione called, expecting to see her manager Darshan Sing with his hands full of another set of laws for her to proof-read, but instead a familiar shock of red hair came through the door. Hermione blinked, even more startled by that sight than she had been by her quill breaking.
“Hello Percy,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
