3am, Wednesday Night
February 18, 2009

A standard Diagon patrol.  The red-robed Zora Roh strode slowly through the pins-and-needles quiet of Diagon Alley. 

She had her wand in her hand: protocol.
She was tightly done up in by-the-book Aurors' robes: protocol. 
Go all the way to the end of the Alley, look in every window, sweep all corners with a lit wand: all protocol.

Like any street in any town of any size, 3am was graveyard still, and like any street in London tonight, it was frigid.  Her breath's cloud was colored orange by her wand light, and the wet lamps overhead.  Almost as a rule, patrols were uneventful.  All the kids were at Hogwarts, vagrants and loiterers found better cubby holes in Knockturn Ally (which was the job of a pair of Aurors, earlier in the night), and so if there was another living soul afoot, they were the sort to take comfort in the sight of Auror Roh.

And so Zora approached the figure near Gringotts without suspicion or even that Auror Mother tone in her voice.  He looked like a tall, broad wizard, cloaked in the same shadows that were covering her.  She wasn't ten paces away before she made her presence known with heavy bootfalls, made heavier deliberately.

"Aurors on duty," she called (protocol), "How are you this early in the morning.  Stuck working late like me?"

Josiah liked Diagon Alley. It was warm and alive and pleasantly lawful. Because it was all of these things, he couldn’t go there when it bustled with industry in the evening. Too many people, too many eyes. He made them uncomfortable, and he’d feel a tug of something that once upon a time might have been shame. So Josiah stayed away. Josiah stayed in Knockturn, where no one looked twice at monsters, until the decent streets uptown cleared of their decent people.

When Josiah went slinking back, he liked to linger near the bank. People worked late in the bank, people worked all the time. He pressed his gloveless hand to the cold marble wall and listened close to the voices murmuring from inside. Warm buttery light pressed against the high glass windows, but didn’t penetrate the darkness outside.

His cigarette burnt down to the filter and singed his lips, so he spat it out on the pavement and crushed it to dust under his boot. Josiah swiveled to the sound of footsteps before the voice even reached him. Distantly, he wished he hadn’t.

No surprise, nor shame, nor pleasure touched his features. He cocked his head to examine the familiar face, blunt and unquestioning as an animal. His blank eyes squinted against the faint wand light, stung, but he tried his best to conjure something like a smile. It showed more teeth than feeling.

Josiah dipped his head, and touched the brim of his hat.

“Lovely night, Roh. Lovely.”

She must have been but five paces in front of him when he turned and orangey light hit his face, reflecting coldly off his brown skin.  A sharp shadow cast by his hat covered his eyes like a mask.  His distinctive jaw line, his nose, his mouth, even the salt-and-pepper beard - it was Josiah Inkwood.

Except Josiah Inkwood was dead.

She hesitated, nearly stepped backwards before pride and training intervened and kept her firmly in place.  The wand, which she'd been holding only lightly, like a toy, she was now gripping tightly, straight at her side.  Aurors don't raise them until they intend to cast, until the situation called for something like that.

But how could she cast a spell at Josiah Inkwood.  They'd been colleagues.  He'd been good to her when she was coming up the ranks.  But then he'd been torn apart by vampires that night in the Ukraine and now he was dead.  His body magically cursed to become something other than a wizard. 

He faked warmth when he spoke to her.  A puppet's face manipulated by intellect, not emotion.  He knew her name, like Josiah knew it.  She squinted at him and the evidence of a stolen memory.

She swallowed hard.  "Do you still use his name?" she asked, faking confidence just as well as he faked human emotion.  Transparently.

"Inkwood!" Roh's voice had been a hushed, sharp whisper.  The Senior Auror had led the way into the little farmhouse, through the door - they both had to duck.  It was pitch black inside but stank of something dead.

“I still use my name, yes.” His voice was clean and sharp, like two polished stones clicking together. Another bird-like cock of his head. “Who else would I be?”

That was not a rhetorical question. What little those black button eyes could express perhaps spoke of inquiry. Please, go on. He wanted to know. Josiah rarely knew what questions to ask anymore aside from the ones ingrained into him by propriety – how are your children? Your wife? The house? The cat? – for he knew little of curiosity. Things simply were, and he did not wonder at them.

Josiah slid his hands out of his pockets, spread his fingers for her under the dim streetlight so she could see that they were truly empty. Not that he needed anything so trivial as a wand or a knife to hurt anymore. Perhaps it still may have been a small comfort.

“Don’t speak to me in such a way. I’m being cordial. There’s no need to be frightened.”

Spoken so simply it was as if Josiah couldn’t quite grasp the moral quandary or importance of crafting a lie at all. Perhaps he losing that, too.

He nearly said I was, but even now he still had enough sense about him to understand that may have been taken as a threat. She was a afraid. There was warmth to his tone that one like Josiah just couldn’t shake, soul ripped from body or not. It was merely how his flesh, bone, and sinew were arranged.

“How have you been, Roh?” Josiah removed his hat and pressed it over his heart. It was the polite thing to do. The other hand raked through the close cropped wool of his hair. “Holding up better than myself, I pray.”

He fished the bottled sunlight from the depths of his robes and held to the dark depths like a candle. It illuminated the thick black, showing broken muggle farming things and chains of bones strung from the ceiling. It stank of flesh and blood, but there were no physical bodies. Alive or otherwise. The hand holding the sun aloft fell to his side, and Josiah looked back.

“I believe,” he said softly, “they’ve moved on from this place.”

Zora was so upsetted by the figure in the lamplight that she hadn't remembered to account for his wand, to see his hands.  Part of her still saw who he'd been before...: An Auror.  Her boss.  She didn't know how to behave next to the man she'd seen die. 

Zora turned in a slow circle, taking in everything Inkwood said, casting her eyes over every surface.  The rough wood worn down by generations of farmers.  The packed earth floor, tamped and hardened by honest labor. 
She agreed with the wisdom of her superior.  The place was abandoned.  No trace of life or undeath at all.  She lowered her wand.

She raised her wand, casting more light on the being.  Her grip was steely, but hearing her name come out of his mouth jarred her; made him sound real.

"You're supposed to be dead.   Why are you parading yourself around like you're not?" she asked accusingly.  They'd mourned him.  There'd been a funeral.  His badge had been retired.  Josiah Inkwood was dead to everyone except, apparently, Josiah Inkwood.