At least there was a way out of this place; that put Fudge at ease a little bit. He was about to protest that no, his ex hadn’t tried to murder him but Calleo continued and instead, Cornelius listened in almost horror about the terrible encounters Calleo had had. How was it possible that this man had been with so many people? Fudge supposed it was to do with his downright confidence. Calleo didn’t seem to care what anybody thought of him, and Cornelius was a little envious about that.
‘Merlin, Calleo!’ He explained when he was shown the scar, his eyes wider and lips parted. It sounded like the other wizard had dated some terrible people, considering one was in Azkaban now. Fudge hated that place; it always left him feeling a little worse for wear and it took time to get over just how depressed he felt after a visit. He couldn’t imagine living there permanently.
‘She has a point,’ Fudge teases - Fudge actually teased! - with a small laugh. ‘Although I guess my question is how aren’t you dead yet, not why, considering what you’re telling me right now.’
‘It’s difficult to not confuse the two. I’ve basically become my job these past few years. Before I was Minister, it was a lot easier to separate them but even then I was always the first person in the office in the morning and the last to leave at night. Sometimes I didn’t leave at all. I rarely go home, even now, and that’s only to get a spare change of clothes so it doesn’t look like I’ve slept in mine. There’s not much point in going home when you’ve not got anybody to go home to.’
Cornelius didn’t realise how truly pathetic that sounded until he’d said it, and he hoped that Calleo wouldn’t judge him too much but he was feeling a little better from opening up more. Fudge couldn’t recall if he’d ever told that to anybody before. He essentially lived in his office.
‘And Al–… my, I suppose we’ll call him my ex, he didn’t physically hurt me although I’m surprised he didn’t try to, or hasn’t tried to considering how I behave around him now. It was more of a – you’re too concerned for how people perceive you, type thing. A ‘people have too much power over you because you let them’ thing – which I can’t even deny because look at the two of us.’ Fudge pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. If Calleo could be so open about who he was sleeping with (at least with telling him who some of the people were), he supposed he could share his own. ‘Imagine what the Prophet would say if they found out that Albus Dumbledore broke the Minister’s heart?’
‘I’m 52.’ Fudge continued, glad to be changing the subject. ‘So it’s good to know I’m not the oldest person you’ll have been with.’ Considering Percival Graves was a lot older than that. ‘And the last time someone touched me other than when they shook my hand was…’ He let out a breath. ‘I can’t even remember.’
Cornelius moved closer to Calleo when he’s beckoned, and can’t help but smile at the idea of making his Muggle father turn in his grave. Forgetting about work would be a nice change too.
‘Yeah that sounds good.’ And since Calleo had motioned for him to come closer, Cornelius decided to close the final gap between them by nervously pressing his lips against the other’s. He let out a shaky breath through his nose and placed a hand on Calleo’s shoulder to steady himself and tried to focus on the kissing and not the way his stomach was in knots or how his heart was thumping far too hard in his chest he could feel it in his ears.
‘I hope that was okay,’ he mumbled shyly once he’d pulled away, suddenly feeling like a schoolboy again and not like he actually ran an entire wizarding community. Calleo had experience under his belt.
“Oh, I like this one,” Calleo tapped his neck, “rest of it was done with a lit cigarette; couldn’t really turn my head for a few days and found I definitely prefer healing magical burns to traditional ones.” Again, he didn’t elaborate on something that probably warranted a lot more elaboration.
“Your guess on that one is as good as mine as to why I’m not dead; luck, skill, or both and I’m not sure how. It’s a slow week if someone doesn’t take a shot at me in my office at least two or three times by Friday. Technically allowed to use lethal force in those situations but lethal force comes with an almost lethal amount of paperwork, and injuring them only has marginally less paperwork involved.”
“They all have dreadful aim too; you don’t aim at someone’s head if you’re trying to hit them, you aim at whichever part of them is widest, which is usually the shoulder or chest area. It’s not hard to tell where someone is aiming and to just–tilt your head to the opposite side.”
The way he spoke made it seem almost as if he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary about any part of what he’d just said. It simply was what it was.
“You know that’s not a problem if all of your clothes look the same, right? Though I suppose it matters less for someone who’s only ever really seen by the same four people on a daily basis than it does for someone that has to deal with the public all day. I think,” Calleo absently scratched the side of his head, “after the last two quit, and it was just me and the Director, and you know damn well he didn’t do a single thing that would have counted as actual work–meetings, he did meetings and not much else–when I did leave, I took work with me.”
“We were–to say we were behind would be an understatement. When I started in 1983, I think the department had a backlog dating to the mid-1950s, by 1990 we were up to 1981, and between 1990 and 1991 managed to get mostly caught up; that was all processing, for the most part, things that had been dragged in by the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Now that we’ve been fully staffed with competent people for a few years, we stay caught up unless Law Enforcement drags their feet on bringing things down.”
“If I wasn’t working here, I was working at home. Or while out. Never really an issue until sometime in autumn 1991; details there aren’t all that relevant but I did cut my own hours and stopped taking so much work home with me as it wasn’t even necessary to do that anymore. That took care of a lot of near chaos on the personal side of my life, if nothing else, which let me put the professional one back in order. Stability is much nicer and less dull than I remember it being.”
Not many things sounded so bizarrely outlandish that they could stun Calleo into silence for more than a split second. What the Minister had just said did exactly that, however. Truthfully, the initial, “HA! What?” reaction had itself swiftly and harshly tempered by the second thought that crossed his mind: The Ministry, as far as Calleo could recall, either had generally positive relations with Hogwarts and its Headmaster or simply no interest at all, allowing him to run the school as he saw fit.
When the man sitting across from him was put into the position of Minister for Magic.
Anyone who’d been keeping up with the more unpleasant side of Wizarding politics immediately (and gleefully) noted the shift in tone that began almost the same day Fudge’s administration took full control. Calleo had largely written it off as some sort of bizarre paranoia, likely being fed to him by those in the Ministry who had worked for the Still Officially Dead Dark Lord, but now–he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was simply being done out of personal spite and little more.
That sort of behaviour would have been ill-advised (not to mention petty) just in a general sense, but with things the way they were now it was less ill-advised and more incredibly, recklessly dangerous; something that ran the very real risk of handing the entire Ministry over to, if not Voldemort, at least people highly sympathetic to Voldemort just to be spiteful toward an ex.
Perhaps that was an unfair line of thinking to have, even if the most simple explanations are the most likely. Certainly made it seem like the Ministry’s shift in attitude wasn’t out of nowhere, though and even the implication that it might be true raised a whole hell of a lot of red flags.
“I’d imagine,” Calleo began slowly and evenly, giving no indication either way what he personally thought and sticking to the most likely outcomes to the invitation to imagine what the Prophet would do, “the gossip columns would, after they’d pieced themselves back together after exploding from sheer excitement, have some of their most memorable pieces written for weeks on end and I’d imagine the rest of the Prophet would depend on whose money is going where. With the way it stands now, it’d likely be twisted to make Professor Dumbledore look maliciously predatory, unstable, and dangerous and now they’d have what they could plaster all over the pages as concrete proof that he should be removed from his position as Headmaster at Hogwarts and possibly jailed.”
“And you’d have people in your ear telling you exactly what to say to which reporter for making sure the effectiveness of it was maximised and targeted as narrowly and specifically as possible, because he’s what they feel is the last obstacle keeping them from moving freely.”
“He’s not wrong, though. I doubt there’s anyone in the Department of Mysteries that hasn’t either seen Lucius Malfoy with his face in your ear–or heard of it spoken in that sort of smug, arrogant way you’d expect from people who were convinced they were lining everything up for an easy shot. Even that Undersecretary seems to have you an a pretty short leash. It’s less that you care too much about what people think of you, it’s that you’ve decided to focus on caring what the wrong sorts of people think of you.”
Calleo raised an eyebrow, giving the Minister a shrewd, calculating look. “I don’t think you should be doing what it is I suspect you’re doing and am also acutely aware that it may be far too late to stop it. He isn’t dangerous, he isn’t insane, and you know that.”
“HA!” That look all but evaporated with his oddly bird-like laugh, “But, there you go, it’s almost impossible for me not to talk about work; really, all I need to keep an eye on is making sure I don’t get some bizarre thing tacked onto my reputation along the lines of ‘picks up things Professor Dumbledore drops’. That’ll just get pretty weird pretty fast unless he just starts leaving interesting books laying around which would be entirely acceptable.”
“And it was about fifteen minutes ago on level six; do you want me to give your mind a quick once over?” There was, before Calleo realised that it had been a rhetorical question, a note of genuine concern. Some of what was on those levels could very easily pick through someone’s mind if not stopped and would be capable of causing temporary short term memory problems, after all.
“You’re not being graded, you know, or compared to anyone else,” He had, for a change, remembered to make sure what he was saying matched his tone, his expression and his overall body language; occasionally he’d leave one of those things out and come off a bit hostile instead of playfully chiding. “There aren’t N.E.W.T.s at the end. That’d be odd even for me.”
“I did tell you that I’d make you forget about work for awhile and I still intend to do that; I cannot, however, forget about the entire previous conversation. Fortunately for you, one of my many useful talents includes redirecting energy from where I don’t want it to where I do so–keep up, you’re only 52! If you’re lucky, you’ll forget how English works for awhile.”
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