The Marauders: Year Seven Part Two

The Collapsing Cave

As exciting as he'd dreamed of the Auror Training Center being, more than half of his daily work was processing paperwork for the Auror Majors. Specifically, his job was to process the paper work for the Edgar Bones, whose office he worked in. As an Auror Major, he was always up to something, it seemed, being one of the most active aurors in the department, right Fabian and Gideon. The difference being, of course, that Edgar Bones also had a second job as the lead trainer in the center, which was why the position as his assistant was open for aurors in training - processing his paperwork was often as exciting as reading a novel, or at a load of novels with only the epic action sequences taken out. There was scarcely a day that Frank arrived where his inbox wasn't already over flowing, with even more owls littering his desk with more paper work and their nasty droppings. There was talk of bewitching memos to fly about of their own accord and doing away with owls in the offices, and Frank was on board with the idea, seeing as it would easily save him a good deal of time every morning not having to scrape all the droppings off the papers in the inbox and his desk.

He was using his wand to clean a dropping off the glass of a framed photograph of him and Ali, which was waving happily at him despite the poo covering their faces, when the door opened and Ali herself walked in. Frank stared up at her in surprise. "Hi," he said stupidly.

"Hullo," she replied, though less reverently than he did, with a tinge of impatience.

Then his face dawned with realization of what her arrival meant for the Order and he dropped the photograph onto the desk, standing up. "Let me just leave a note for Mr. Bones so he knows that I --" Frank stopped talking as Edgar Bones himself came into the office.

"Sir," Frank said, surprised.

Edgar looked at Ali, then back to Frank, "Fallengunder has fallen, and we need to hurry to Hogsmeade, Mr. Longbottom," he said, and he turned, waving his wand to lock his office door from the inside, and took long strides across the room to the fireplace, and with a quick twist of his wrist, the fire there had been lit. He turned back to see the looks of surprise and shock on Frank and Ali's faces.

"Fallen?" Ali asked, "What does --"

"Voldemort and the Death Eaters have taken it over," he said bluntly. "Most of the Resistance is already there."

"Well so is the Order!" Ali said.

Edgar nodded, "So Minerva told me." He had taken a jar down from the top most shelf of his bookcase. "Which means that your plans are quite altered from what James Potter originally told you."

Ali and Frank looked at one another. "You know about the plan?" Frank asked.

Edgar nodded, "Yes, James Potter told Minerva and Dumbledore everything, and we're to hurry to your meeting place in Hogsmeade, as some of the plans you had will need to be changed..." He held up the jar. "Come along."

Frank abandoned the note he had been working on - seeing as Mr. Bones was going with them, he reckoned there was no need for leaving the notice - and he grabbed his cloak up from the stand by the door, putting an arm about Alice to urge her on. They each grabbed a fistful of the green floo powder from within and Edgar grabbed his own handful, returned the jar to the shelf, and announced, "The Hog's Head!"

The flames burst green as he spoke and threw the powder, then he stepped through and disappeared. "Go on, you next, love," Frank said, and Alice tossed her green powder in, following after Edgar, and then Frank followed, too.

They spun out of the floo in the Hog's Head and rushed out the door, the barman looking up in irritation and surprise as they ran out of his pub without more than a hurried, "'lo Abe," from Edgar. The path up the mountain was steep and luckily they didn't need to go too far along it before Edgar snapped out of sight - having disapparated up the rest of the way. Frank grabbed onto Ali's wrist and disapparated after Edgar.