Friday, August 3
Just past four in the morning
Two hours to moonset
Werewolf Wing, Level Four

It had been a long night, and even though they were close to the end of it, the Head of the Werewolf Capture Unit was feeling the weight of it in the very core of his bones. Summer full moons were always the worst: even though the nights were considerably shorter, there were so many more people out and about, wixes and Muggles alike, that everything felt as if they faced much higher stakes.

After a couple of false calls earlier in the evening, they had finally gotten a report of the real thing: a werewolf attack near a tiny Muggle village in the Gwydir forest. It should have been routine, but one could never count on that in practice. Difficult terrain had fouled up the first team to arrive on the scene and a couple of their members had gone down, though luckily with what seemed to be scratches and a twisted ankle instead of bites. Their second team had managed to subdue the werewolf, but it had been on a riverbank within spitting distance of a popular bridge. Their usual practice of waiting for moonset, so that the 'wolf would transform back into its less dangerous human form before they tried to transport it, would have put them at risk of getting spotted by Muggles.

And so here Kurby was: tired and sore after the scuffle by the river, trying not to think about the fact that two of his teammates were in St. Mungo's, and having to supervise as a potions-drugged, magically-bound werewolf was levitated unsteadily down the corridor of Level Four so that they could secure it a holding cell.

Unfortunately, his very-young teammates were expressing their exhaustion in another way.

"Goodnight, paws and goodnight, claws," Charlie Harris was reciting to a chorus of punch drunk giggles. "Goodnight hairy, scary jaws. Goodnight, wolf with lolling tongue. Goodnight, prints and goodnight, dung."

Someone let out too loud of a laugh at that last one. As their wand drifted, the unconscious werewolf took a sharp dip towards the floor.

"Watch it!" Kurby barked, his voice cutting sharply through the singsong.

That was enough to get them re-focused on their task for the moment. Irritated, the werewolf hunter crossed his arms, glowering as he watched the floating werewolf stabilize and resume its slow forward progress once more. He understood the desire to release some of the tension -- hell, he'd been the overconfident, snarky young kid on the team at one point -- but the thing still had the potential to be dangerous until they got it secured in the cell. The last thing he wanted was to have to deal with the nightmare of another werewolf loose inside the Ministry.

He heard footsteps in the hallway behind him, and Kurby cast a glance over his shoulder. When he spotted the source of the sound, he didn't try very hard to conceal the enormous eye roll that resulted.

On second thought, dealing with a werewolf loose inside the Ministry was only the second-most annoying thing that he might still have to face tonight.

As during the full moons preceding tonight's, he wasn't certain what he was doing here. Balfour thought - just as he did in July, June, May - of home. He could have been home with his husband and son all evening instead. With Feliks  around in the summer, it had become a priority to avoid overtime where he could.

For all those years missed, Bal wanted to be a present father and devoted partner. But he was here tonight anyway.

Officially, he was filling in for Bruce Ballentyne; he had been doing so since returning from his honeymoon in April. The act was demonstrative - under Bagnold, the Werewolf Wing ran itself without interference and according to Bruce's plans. Balfour was here just in case. At least that was what he told himself - just in case something unusually explosive happened, much as it had the night Alec Carter died.

He grimaced at that thought as he left the Remus Lupin library, where he'd just passed time reading old werewolf case studies. Restlessness had set in and he was headed to Bruce's office to let her secretary know that he was retiring to his office.

A clamour of drunken singing distracted him. The wizard slowed down as he crossed an intersecting passage and was surprised to see a living, breathing werewolf. It was surreal; the equivalent of seeing a Chimaera casually drifting about Beasts Division, he had to check an instinct to draw his wand.

Balfour couldn't resist approaching the procession from behind. He glanced briefly at the weary wizards he had initially missed - Bagnold was recognisable from most angles.

The head of the WCU had told him to the face that Alec Carter would head home by seven, on a full moon. Balfour was learning to live with Kurby's abrasive nature by simply pretending it wasn't. The eye roll brought out a dry smile in him.

"What a fantastic creature," he said as he slipped his hands into his pockets, reassured by the feel of his wand. "Been a good while since I've seen one this close up. Live, anyway."

His eyes were drawn irresistibly to the head and snout of the unconscious beast. Balfour thought of the mounted werewolf heads in Ira's apartments. He looked back at Kurby with less of a smile. "Difficult night?"

Kurby cast a sidelong look at the other wizard. A while since he'd seen one live? It was hard to imagine foppish Balfour Spectre tangling with a (air quotes, "fantastic," air quotes) werewolf, even if he'd once done the same thing with dragons. Then again, Spectre had also spoken openly about his involvement with Ira Almasy[1] not so long ago. The mother of his son had been deeply entangled in the werewolf fights of a couple of years prior, and while Spectre's involvement in that disaster didn't seem possible...

The other wizard's question immediately put an end to the werewolf hunter's wary inspection. Kurby gave an irritated roll of his eyes, his expression instantly set in stone.

"Oh, it's been grand," he retorted, unwilling to give an inch.

The generally disheveled look of the group ahead of them didn't entirely support the certainty in his words. Kurby pressed his mouth into a tight line as he kept his gaze locked on them, his jaw set. Gervais Bellingham's absence was perhaps the biggest giveaway, although he wasn't about to let his thoughts linger on the status of his longtime teammate and friend. But there were plenty of other details -- Sasaki's slight limp, the messiness of Fennken's hair after she'd shifted from human to fox to human and back again, the wobbliness of the floating werewolf, the fact that it was floating down the hallway at all -- that made it clear that not everything tonight had been routine.

"You want to step up and help out, though, there's a stack of paperwork back in the Capture Unit office that you can get started on," he added sardonically, crossing his arms against his chest. At this point of the full moon watch, even a reprimand for insolence was preferable to having to pretend to be chummy with Balfour Spectre. "Just leave it on Bruce's desk by the mornin'."

1.	February 19, 2012 - The Gift That Keeps On Giving

He found that it was nearly impossible to tear one's eyes away from the beast - and that's what werewolves were, on a full moon, they were beasts. Balfour clocked the unsteadiness with which it was being levitated and he took off his reading glasses as he glanced at Bagnold.

             "Oh, it's been grand," the hunter wasn't amused, focused more on his task.

The whole lot of them looked worse for wear and he felt a twinge of sympathy for the pressure placed on the Werewolf Wing. Dragons and Sphinxes didn't turn back to human, after all. And some of these poor things were little more than cursed bairns... to say nothing of the headlines should Bruce's division slip up.

Kurby suggested paperwork. Balfour's mouth twitched into the kind of amused, supercilious smile that used to get him into bar fights as a transient young man. It couldn't help itself; the product of someone accustomed to the protection of his station in life.

"Some of us don't need hours to sign off on reports," he replied lightly. "Though maybe you could use an extra wand?" Balfour offered in a more grounded, serious voice.

Anyone else and he'd already have drawn his to join the effort - but this was Bagnold's dance. It would be rude to cut in without asking first.

There was something about the other wizard's cocksure smile that made Kurby immediately wish he could just punch him. For all that he was a bit of a fop, Spectre reminded him all too well of the things he hated most about other pureblooded wizards: the self-assured ambition, the offhanded disregard for the rules, the fact that he'd conveniently 'been abroad' during the war and that he saw no problem in casually associating with dark wixes like Ira Almasy.

As tempting as it was to tell the Department Head just what he could do with his extra wand, Spectre was also hard to get a read on. Kurby preferred to know the exact length of someone's wick; he'd spent years egregiously pushing the buttons of everyone around him and consequently, he was usually a pretty good judge of what it might take to set a particular individual off. (It hadn't, for instance, taken him very long to get a sense of Spectre's extremely irritating now-husband.) But for all of Spectre's usual foppish charm, Bruce was right that neither of them knew exactly what he might do when pushed. The same ambition that had seen the Scottish wizard rise in Level Four's ranks so quickly could easily hint at something darker.

That meant avoiding outright war, but it didn't mean that he had to be nice.

"Why, were you lookin' for somewhere to put it?" Kurby inquired politely, his attention mostly focused on his team further down the corridor.

They were coming up on the bend in the hallway now. Kurby watched them for a moment, his mouth pressed tightly shut. They'd have to navigate the sharp corner carefully to keep the wobbling werewolf suspended in the air without knocking it on the walls or dropping it -- which would at best earn them all an earful from the Registry team in the morning and at worst cause a horrific nightmare if the thumping roused the werewolf from its slumber.

"You know, Spectre," he remarked steadily, not bothering to glance in the other wizard's direction, "sometimes it's better to let a team struggle through things on their own. If they don't get a chance to puzzle through things when the stakes are low, they'll go to pieces when everything falls apart while they're out on patrol."

             "Why, were you lookin' for somewhere to put it?"

Merciful gods reward him for not immediately asking if Bagnold was offering. Balfour grinned a little, twirling his wand in one hand as he watched the group negotiate the sharp turn of the passageway. It was stunning and precarious. His blood sang a little, this close to anything that could easily kill him.

"You give me too much credit," he replied in that easy way of his, "I'm hardly a paternalistic hand holder. Not enough hands for it."

Though he did see level four as a kind of extended family of its own, full of eccentrics and big personalities and an undercurrent of drama. Balfour was silent for a second while he watched them tackle the trickiest bit of the turn; eyeing their wrist motions with a kind of professional admiration.

"You can just tell me to fuck off," he said abruptly, tone still light and carrying a note of humour. "You know, if you were thinking about it. Always an option."

Everything in Bagnold's bearing screamed it anyway - at all times but especially tonight. Balfour couldn't put his finger on what it was exactly about him that irked the other man. It seemed to run deeper than accusations of opportunism.

Sometimes, it was a little funny. But perhaps it was better to be frank on a full moon.