Date: June 24th, 1984, an hour-ish after the blast Location: York, UK @wila-travers
Ted had been deployed to the scene of the London explosion with a small group of coworkers from his department. Most days, his job wasn’t that exciting. It was a lot of talking on the phone - they were the only department with a handful of telephones and, despite everything, only a couple of people within the department understood how to use them - or writing fake reports for Muggle authorities or being dispatched to towns to give excuses to random Muggles about what they saw. He worked with Obliviators often. But, mainly, it was just a lot of paperwork. Ted typically spent his days at a desk in a cubicle with his hand cramping around a quill.
But then came the other, more rare part. The fieldwork. There were times where the Statute of Secrecy was broken to a larger scale. When he and other employees of his department had to don a disguise to smooth things over. Sometimes, it was Quidditch-gone-wrong incidents. Other times, a muggleborn child at a school had let out their magic in a very serious way. Ted had a variety of disguises all equipped with magically-forged badges of every level of Muggle authority.
That was necessary today. It was a planned attack - You-Know-Who and his followers at it again - in multiple locations. Death Eaters in Liverpool, Dementors (seriously, how the fuck did that happen?) in York... and an explosion in London. He’d been prepped to assume numerous injuries and, likely, deaths. What his workplace didn’t know is that these three locations were familiar to him. The Order of the Phoenix had planned to counterattack the Death Eaters and, from the looks of it, it had all gone terribly wrong.
He was wearing Muggle clothing to fit in - part of the disguise the Ministry had given him for this particular ruse. Black trousers, a white button up shirt with a black tie. He had a badge in his pocket that stated he was MI6 and would surpass any Muggle authority that was currently already there. He held his head high when he approached a group of police with one of his co-workers also in disguise, showing his badge with a flip of his wrist. “Official word is a pipe burst,” he told them and they glanced him up and down.
“We heard terrorists... sir.” One of the bobbies said that final word with an air of sarcasm, looking Ted up and down as though he would know about these so-called ‘terrorists.’ Ted gave him a knowing, unfriendly smirk in return.
“If you have better intel than I do, please inform me,” he said, his voice level, a cool chill in the tone. “Otherwise, I think I’ll go with what I’ve discovered from the Prime Minister.” That made the bobbie pale slightly as Ted looked around the rubble, his heart dropping at the number of injured Muggles, the blood. He wondered where the Order was - Wila was leading this team now, he remembered from the final meeting. This was the hardest part - pretending he didn’t care. Pretending he did this often. Pretending he didn’t know that, somewhere, people he knew were here trying to stave off what didn’t turn out to be the attack they were expecting.
“No, Sir,” the policeman said. “I - “ Ted held up a hand to stop him from talking as his gaze caught someone familiar. Wila. Ted turned to look at his co-worker, nodding his head slightly so they could take over, and excused himself from the group, making his way as quickly as possible without looking too rushed to Wila.
“Travers,” he greeted. “Tell me what happened.”
