---

“Please…”

He'd heard the words a dozen times; a dozen times over and more.  The dark, wet alleyway in London felt as familiar as any street he'd ever walked.  The men who stood there: he knew them well, as well as he could ever know their faces.  They held their wands steady, as the girl laying on the pavement stirred, her eyelids fluttering.

"Please."

Tait Aldridge slumped between two of them, his arms twisted back, his face a grayish white.  In these, his last few moments of life, his voice was flat, his eyes as dead as Jonas had ever seen them in over a decade of friendship.  But he wasn't watching his friend now.  He'd seen him die; seen the man he now knew as Richard Burke pass the death sentence; seen Tamis lay there broken on the ground.  No -- he was looking past them now, ignoring the drama as it played out. 

"No more."

"Ye heard 'im, lads."

Sirens were already blaring in the distance.  Twenty, thirty seconds away.  Jonas had plotted out the route they must have taken, for all the good it did.  Whatever was rotten in the Ministry didn't seem to extend to the Muggle police service; it didn't need to, not when it could end its business with such finality here on a cold, wet night.

Behind him, the two thugs were dropping Tait's arms and stepping back.  To his side, Burke raised his wand.  Green light flashed across the narrow alleyway, and in that instant of illumination, Jonas strained to see -- fought to focus on the features of the man who stood behind Burke to the right, whose face was shrouded in shadows and lost to the haze of Tamis's memory, except for the brief --

It wasn't him.  Frustrated, the red-haired Auror let out an angry sound from deep in his throat, crushing the piece of paper he held in his hand.  Behind him, a triumphant Burke was finally revealing himself as his hood fell away.  In front of him, at the entrance to the alleyway, the flashing lights were getting brighter, concomitant to the blaring sirens.  Soon, Burke and his men would apparate away. Soon, the police would arrive -- and then, soon after, the Ministry would appear as well.  But the rest of this didn't matter now.  Jerking his wand, Jonas stepped away, wishing he could kick something as --

-- the streets of London faded away into to the dull gray walls of the interrogation room, lit only by the silvery light coming from the Pensieve.

"Lumos," Jonas muttered.  The lamp overhead burst into luminescence; squaring his shoulders, the Auror closed his eyes and tried to force away the tight feeling in his throat.  It didn't matter.  It might take him another ten years of late nights and quiet detective work; sooner or later, one way or another, something would give.

It had to give.

Sighing, he looked down at the crumpled piece of paper in his hand, the only remnant that had left the memory with him.  Picking up his pen -- he still couldn't get used to quills again, even after over a year back in the Corps -- he bent to scratch another name off the list --

-- and nearly jumped out of his chair when someone cleared their throat behind him.

1.	From the poem by Dylan Thomas.

Making headway was often time consuming and tiresome.  Cases were not in the habit of solving themselves, Archer knew that all too well, and having hit roadblocks in many of his most recent investigations, Archer was frustrated.  The movement of muggle baitings and acts of terrorism had cooled, at the very least, so any progress on that seemed to just bring them nearer to what they suspected, but had little evidence to prove.  Archer still maintained an open file on it, but it wasn’t the most pressing. 

This harvest mask investigation was truly what concerned him, but it had seemed to run cold as well.  The last victim had been targeted well over a month ago.  He felt as though they had either gotten close enough that the person they were looking for was laying low, or the person the perpetrator had been looking for was disposed of.  It was just a lot of going over information, reaching out, making contacts… Archer was frustrated.

Even more concerning though was his partner’s recent… shift.  They were working the harvest mask together, and frequently met to go over the information and trace back what they’d already covered, but Jonas seemed sullen: withdrawn, which wasn’t… well, it wasn’t like him recently.

Breathing out of his nose, Archer pushed his chair back from the desk in what felt like his comically small cubicle, stretching his legs as he stood and picked up the file that had been sitting in front of him for the past hour.  He needed to just put it away for the time being, maybe swap it with another.  He felt saturated with facts about Rippringham-Gomfrey – another victim might prove more engaging at the moment. 

As he walked back to the file where it was kept, Archer passed the interrogation room and raised a dark eyebrow.  Head deep in the pensieve, Jonas was easy to recognize.  Operation deliver file back to its place was diverted momentarily, and Archer walked to the door of the room, twisting the knob, very quietly and stepped in. 

Whatever Jonas was doing, he removed his head and then was immediately scribbling something out on a piece of paper, and that was even stranger.  Lifting his fist to his mouth, Archer cleared his throat. 

“Putting in another late night?” he asked, slightly more gruffly than he intended.  It wasn’t a secret that Jonas had been putting in a lot of time, even less of a secret to Archer, his current partner, that whatever he was doing didn’t always serve their joint investigation either.  Archer crossed the floor quickly and with long strides and frowned – what was his partner working on? 

Jonas's head whipped around, and it was only through sheer force of willpower -- and perhaps the fact that he was biting his tongue as hard as he could -- that he managed to stop himself from letting out a string of swears.  Radley. 

Bloody hell.  Of course it was Radley.  The man seemed to enjoy popping up wherever he was least expected.  And now here he was, eyeing Jonas as if he'd done something wrong, as if sitting here in the empty interrogation room late at night with the Pensieve in front of him, letting off a soft, incriminating glow, was some sort of crime.

He forced out a breath, and then rolled his shoulder in an easy shrug.  If Archer was already suspicious, acting startled or defensive was only going to make the situation worse.  "Yeah," he said easily.  "You know."  Smoothly, he turned back around in his chair.  There was no inconspicuous way to remove memories from a Pensieve; his best bet was going to be changing the subject and hoping that he could wait the other Auror out.

"It's been hard sleeping sometimes," he said, shrugging his shoulders again.  He wasn't facing Radley now; he ran his hands over his face.  "You know.  All the Dementors about."  For all of the turmoil with the dark creatures, none of the Aurors had really talked about what they represented; what long-repressed memories they evoked.  For the most part, Jonas tried not to think about it; but sitting here between a rock and a hard place, he was perfectly happy to play that card.  He'd come to terms with 1997, more or less.  Judging by the way that his partner changed the subject on the rare occasions when he'd brought up the war, Radley hadn't.

He breathed out again, slow and steady, and did his best to slump in a resignedly dejected way. "So I reckoned that if I was going to be up half the night, I might as well come down here to mull things over.  Less likely to keep Anna up that way."  Arching his eyebrows, he raised his gaze to meet the other man's.  "What about you, mate?  Night shift?"

Alright, Archer knew a few things, and Jonas usually had no problem looking at him when he talked.  In fact, he often looked at him and talked when Archer wanted it least.  Sitting there, staring at the wall while he put out some ridiculousness about dementors: that was a crock if he’d ever heard one.  They all knew what dementors were, all realized what they symbolized to most people, but in the last year, out of all of the things that Archer had seen or experienced, dementors fell fairly low on his list of the worst things.

He was fairly sure, for what he knew of Jonas, a dementor wasn’t the most horrifying of things.  “Right,” he commented, a little less than convinced at the whole story.  But, it was his way in and he walked further into the room, trying to get a good grip on what he was really doing.

Archer couldn’t see the paper he’d been previously writing on – annoying, he thought in his head, but moved on to a much better vantage point and tried to look as non-judgmental as possible.  Clearly there was something going on here, and it wasn’t like an auror to let this kind of sleeping dog lie. 

“Going back over the Gomfrey facts,” he held up the file and then put it on the table, pulling out the chair usually reserved for suspects and dropped himself into it.  Just because it was the suspect chair didn’t mean Archer was going to treat it that way.  “Trying to find anything we haven’t found going over it a thousand times before,” he added with a little amused shrug. 

Jonas had to know that feeling.  “But if the dementors are keeping you up,” Archer easily shifted the conversation back, “what are you doing back here?  Even if you didn’t want to wake up Anna, you don’t need to go playing around with a pensieve to remember the last time you ran into one.”   He raised both of his eyebrows at Jonas and clasped his hands together on the metal of the table, resting his elbows to take up as much space as humanly possible.  “You look like shite, mate, but not shite enough to have just relived a demetor attack.” 

"Yeah.  I was just --"  The lie came easily enough to him, as Archer tossed the case file onto the table and dropped into the opposite chair.  Radley had provided him with enough of a lead-in.  He couldn't sleep, so he'd come back in to work to think about something different.  He'd been going over his memory of the Tower of London crime scene again.  But he wasn't finding anything, which would lead to them venting their mutual frustration at the case, and then perhaps they'd spend the next half hour tossing ideas back and forth, mulling things over out loud until they gave up or realized something new.

It was so simple, slipping back into old habits.  He'd spent the better part of a decade playing the same game with Anna, changing the subject whenever she asked him a question that he didn't want to answer.  Ever since he'd confessed the truth of things to her, told her about his double life and the secret magical world, Jonas had done his best to be honest with his wife.  But that didn't meant that his newfound honesty extended other places.

It would be so easy to play the same game here.  There were a million and one reasons not to tell Archer the truth:  because he knew there was a mole in the Ministry, because he'd put the other Auror in danger, because Tamis would probably kill him.  For all he knew, Archer himself could be the leak.  Someone in Level Two had certainly been in on the conspiracy; had helped Tait's badge to disappear, and who better than one of the Auror's young friends?

He might never admit it out loud, but there were times when he was as bad as Tamis.  Jonas met the other man's gaze for a long moment, and then sighed.  When he'd first come back, he'd avoided seeing Radley for longer than anyone else.  His old partner -- his current partner -- deserved better than to be kept at arm's length, whatever Tamis Raynor might want.

"Reckon I was doing the same thing," he said, giving a shrug.  The Runespoor case file wasn't here -- the official copy was locked away on file, and his own private copy was safely hidden away in his office -- but he turned his notebook around, slid it across the table so that Archer could see it.  "Not about the Corpus case, though."

Being involved with Tamis Raynor taught Archer Radley a couple of things about people who were not always the most inclusive in things.  Archer was fairly decent at detecting when people were lying, and more than that, when he could actually push for and what he couldn’t. 

Tamis was an infinitely more difficult nut to crack, and Archer had the patience of a saint to deal with that.  Jonas, on the other hand, he wanted to be patient, but it seemed counter productive to working with him.  At least with Tamis, everything she didn’t really talk about was personal.  He could deal with that, she had her secrets and that was her thing, but when you worked with somebody who was supposed to be your backup in case someone was going to cast an unforgivable on you, it was different:  if they were involved in something that could put you in a sticky situation, you had to know.

Weird late night investigations into a pensieve with a non-standard issue notebook were enough to make Archer at least a little concerned.   Jonas was quiet for several moments before he finally said he was up to a similar – ignoring the quip about how he looked, meaning that he really was busy – or onto something – because Jonas rarely missed an opportunity to fire shots. 

His birthday (less than a month ago) was evidence of that: not that he could ever talk about it unless he wanted to suffer dire consequences.  But, back to the issue at hand, Jonas turned the notebook toward him and Archer raised his eyebrows.  It certainly wasn’t the corpus case he wasn’t looking into. 

Weird he should think to compare Jonas to Tamis in this moment.  The murder of Tait had been something that had impacted the entire department, it was the reason Tamis Raynor became an auror – he was familiar with the whole thing.  “A bit odd this would come up now,” he didn’t look up from the notebook, recognizing some of the names, the dates, and the information that was here.  Leaks in the ministry weren’t something to joke about, it’d been part of this case.  Archer was aware of the threat now. 

“Think it’s related to a current leak?” he asked, jumping straight to the point.  Archer wasn’t involved in the Runespoor investigation, it hadn’t crossed his desk (possibly on purpose from Tamis), but they were a team.  He could ask. 

That was always the question.  Was this relevant today?  Could he, could Tamis justify committing all of this time, all of this energy to solving a case that had long since been declared unsolvable?  There was no doubt in his mind that the covert late nights and the endless secrets were worth it solely for Tait's sake; but other times, he wondered if the demons that he was trying to put to rest really belonged to his friend after all.

Jonas pressed his mouth shut, and then gave a shrug.  "That bloke who killed Tait -- the one who showed up at the book fair[1] -- he's been back around again."  That wasn't really addressed to the question that Archer had asked, but it was still an answer.  He wouldn't let this drop.  "Came by me office on Garrick Street a month ago.  Wanted to chat."

In front of him, the Pensieve was sitting patiently.  Silently.  The silver threads of memories swirled inside it, enticing any observer to dive into its secrets.  His badge was still sitting on the table in front of it, its reflection distorted in the curve of the bowl's silver body.

"So I think it's related to something."  That was more of an answer.  Old ghosts, old orders, old conspiracies haunted this place.  In 1994, his friend had died, and fifteen years later, it sometimes seemed as if he were no closer to understanding the why of it.  Murdering Burke wouldn't have helped.  It wasn't vengeance that he wanted; it wasn't revenge that kept him up at night.

It was answers.

He squared himself, and then leveled a look at Archer.  "I've been poking around a bit, seeing what else I can piece together from back then.  There was a bit," he said carefully, "that I think we didn't notice.  If you want to help --..."  He trailed off, and then left it.  "Just don't put it on your timecard."  Just don't tell Tamis, he might have said.

1.	Judgement By Covers

Archer raised his eyebrows at the declaration, so coolly delivered that Archer had to think twice on what he just said.  The idea that the man who had killed Tait, a shadow Archer was all too familiar he came into contact with on a regular basis, just waltzed into Jonas’ office to chat about something. “A friendly visit,” Archer commented dryly, obviously lacking in humor about it, and frowned.

He did not like that his current partner had something like that happen and he didn’t know about it.  There was an importance in partners knowing these sorts of things.  Archer wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he had to go to Anna, Gwenna, and Artie to give them news that he didn’t even want to think about. 

Looking at the pensieve, Archer’s mouth was a thin line.  He didn’t want to ask the obvious question: why not kill him? There had to be a reason for it, and even more than that, it didn’t seem like the time to ask.  He assumed Tamis couldn’t know either, but then again… maybe that was part of what was going on with her. 

She wasn’t exactly the most talkative of women, he couldn’t get to the core of it with her anymore than he was really getting to the core of issues with Jonas here.  Though, it seemed like he was getting closer here.  A little after hours, off the record work wasn’t going to kill anyone, and Archer couldn’t say he wasn’t intrigued. 

Much of the previous investigation had been kept from him, and even now, he didn’t get into it.  It wasn’t under his jurisdiction in the office.  “O’course I’ll help,” Archer said, “you don’t even have to mention it: hell, I won’t,” he smirked a little and shifted his chair to look at the pensieve. 

“Where are we headed?” he asked, bracing his hands on the table and pushing himself up out of his chair to look into the swirling bowl.