"You don't think he's got a job interview, do you?' Roberta "Bobbie" Pinn leaned over to talk in a hushed voice, coffee in hand. "He never wears those." She gestured to her own throat and made a face. "Looks like he's going to give a speech."

"Have you check his diary?" Amélie Kelly asked in a low voice, her quill poised over the top of a trade dispute response in Spanish. Everyone once again up in arms over dragons.

The two of them paused a moment, observing their colleague at his desk, surrounded by familiar piles of parchment, newspapers and books, and an in-tray full of pink memos. It was always an untidy, seemingly disorganised space, but ask him for a particular report and it would appear without search.

Johann was normally a scene of intense concentration and scribbling, or chivvying them along, claiming they were too slow. This morning he had been staring at the same page of a report for a good five minutes, and his quill was motionless in his hand.

Pinn sipped at her coffee, nodding.
"Eleven thirty with Flash Lockhart, a few bods from the Quidditch League - they're meeting the German Quidditch League on level eight." She recrossed her legs, "It's the one I had to do the other month." she explained, giving her colleague a knowing look over the top of her bright red coffee mug. She did not want to relive that.
"I recall your furious face." Amelie replied with raised eyebrow, the two of them had stuck together in their colleague's absence. "Have you been down to 'polish his broomstick' since?"

Pinn made to stick two fingers down her own throat in response to this request from Lockhart, but the two of them couldn't help but giggle. The flamboyant Head of Magical Games and Sports could be quite a riot at social events where he sought to be ridiculous and the source of attention and entertainment. He'd been on an attempt to seek the most column inches of the tournament last year, and the two departments had worked together very closely indeed. Unfortunately, Lockhart was not beyond making suggestive comments to young female colleagues he found attractive - which had been Pinn in late July, covering for Johann who had gone AWOL over the werewolf business.

Their eyes returned across the group of desks to the lanky wizard who hadn't even glanced up at their giggles. Kelly shifted uncomfortably, worried, wondering if they ought to have a quiet word with Ms Murray, but pushed the thoughts aside.

"No, he wouldn't dress like that for Lockhart. It all goes over his head. What else is he meant to be up to?" Amelie asked, re-inking her quill before replacing some missing punctuation in her translation. There would be a rational explanation for their senior's distraction. All they had to do was to be vigilant, or be boring and ask, of course.

"Transport, four o'clock, because I'm schmoozing with the Seychelles delegates over dinner." Pinn leaned an elbow on Kelly's desk and sighed, finishing her coffee. "Hoping I'll get the chance to go over there some day - it's always in the 20s over there and the beaches…"

A pink memo swooped over their heads and socked Johann on the side of the head, finally rousing their colleague from a more than pleasant daydream about the night before. It had been a first on quite a few levels, and not at all the night he'd expected, which had been Le Masque, trying to knock himself out enough to go home, crawl onto Elixa's sofa and fall sleep without having to take apothecary potion.

Instead, he'd never made it back to the sofa, or the flat, and had woken in a strange bed wrapped in blue sheets, quite alone with not a spot on him. The smell of coffee brewing had brought him round sharply, and a hand had extended to check for traces of heat from the other side of the bed. It had been later than he'd woken in some weeks, and from what he could recall, the exhaustion had come quite naturally after exerting himself. There had been hands everywhere, not to mention lips, tongue and more than he'd known what to do with. Certainly his confession of the night before was a thing of the past.

Thank goodness for spare suits in the office. He had one on standby - for crisis, and of late for the days he hadn't slept and not even bothered stopping for the night to try. Unfortunately, there was a telling sign upon his neck from Knockturn Alley the previous night, amongst others littered across his torso, so he'd had to button up, and put on a tie so as to hide it. For a Friday with two internal meetings he looked decidedly overdressed in a white shirt, black suit and pale blue tie. He looked more like he was ready to stand before the wizengamot.

Pinn and Kelly were looking at him oddly from Kelly's desk. He slid a finger in between his neck and his collar and pulled, feeling it was far too tight suddenly. Really, it was more that the thought of bracing himself on a mahogany headboard that was causing the creeping flush of colour.

No regrets. He was quite sure, even if he had wondered very much who had seen them in Knockturn Alley without their masks. The Ministry was an army of eyes and ears, raised on the Hogwarts grapevine. Balfour Spectre was a good looking wizard. Witch Weekly liked to speculate plenty about him, not that Johann could ever trust that magazine after it had voted Ignan the most eligible bachelor. It was trolling the wizarding population, unashamedly.

"Alrigh'?" Pinn asked him with bright eyes and her cheeky Telford accent. Merlin, had there been talk already? She looked mightily pleased. Kelly, the older of the two looked more suspicious, as if she was studying the shadows under his eyes.
"Get any sleep last night?"

Johann tried his best to deliver a look of 'mind your own business' and unfolded the newly arrived memo without a further word, trying really hard not to think about how the Head of Beast Division tasted and failing.