"This was merely a well-intentioned reminder—"
The German Minister for Magic, facing continued questioning from the podium below, snapped back with genuine fury plain in his voice.
Vipor made no comment either way in response, letting the accusation remain unanswered in the tense air.
"Then let's not forget that the exact location of Erkstag Prison is classified at the highest possible security level—known, by design, to only a small handful of wizards across the entire international community. And yet this mob of rioters found their way to it, without apparent difficulty, in a single night. What do you make of that particular fact, Minister Adenauer?"
More than a few attendees turned sharply to look at Oronkos at that specific question, their gazes were suddenly filled with unmistakable suspicion.
"I strongly object to the question you've just put to me, Deputy Chairman Dreghorn!"
Minister Adenauer went off like a lit firecracker, the volume of his response was filling the entire chamber.
"As everyone gathered here well knows, Erkstag Prison holds convicted criminals from every single country across Europe, without exception. The German Ministry of Magic has stood guard over that facility on behalf of the entire European magical world for generations—and we have already paid an unimaginably heavy price for that responsibility, in blood, only last night!
We are deeply, genuinely sorry that Erkstag fell under our watch. But our conscience on this matter remains entirely clear!
What the international magical community ought to be asking tonight is who is truly, ultimately responsible for this atrocity in the first place—rather than sitting here in comfort, insinuating without evidence that someone within the German Ministry leaked Erkstag's location to these criminals!"
"Please, calm yourself, Minister Adenauer. Like everyone gathered in this room tonight, I genuinely mourn for those the German Ministry lost defending that facility."
Vipor's own tone remained just as unyielding as before, refusing to be drawn into matching Adenauer's rising emotion.
"But it is my duty, as Deputy Chairman, to get properly to the bottom of every unresolved question surrounding this act of terrorism, however uncomfortable those questions prove to be. Are you prepared, here and now, to guarantee to the international magical community that no one within the German Ministry of Magic—"
"Slander!"
Adenauer roared, the single word was tearing through the chamber.
"This is outright slander, Dreghorn. How laughable. The International Confederation of Wizards has abandoned all pretence of fairness and objectivity tonight. The German Ministry of Magic will never contribute so much as a single further Galleon to this Confederation's operation again, mark my words!"
The chamber, silent to the point of suffocation only moments before, erupted at once with noise pouring in from every corner simultaneously.
Everyone present with a stake in the matter turned immediately to the delegates beside them to air their own competing views and opinions, the careful diplomatic hush was shattering entirely into overlapping conversation.
Dumbledore struck the table with his gavel again and again in quick succession, but it did nothing to properly quiet the hall, and Vipor's own repeated, increasingly frustrated calls for order fared little better—no small number of the various jeers rising from the crowd, in fact, were now aimed directly at him specifically for his earlier line of questioning.
For this one chaotic moment, the Confederation's assembly hall had reverted entirely to the disorganised, undisciplined style it had kept for the better part of the last half-century.
Everyone was shouting over everyone else at once, with no one present sparing a genuine thought for order or diplomatic decorum.
Bryan turned to look back over the chamber behind him during the chaos, and his gaze landed briefly on two old friends seated among the American Congress of Magic's delegation—Chairman Quahog and Director White.
The two exchanged a brief smile with him across the distance, and Bryan turned his attention smoothly back to the front of the room.
He curled his own hand loosely into a fist, raised it briefly before his lips, and gave a soft, unremarkable cough. No one present paid him the slightest attention amid the ongoing noise.
Thock—
Bryan gave his sleeve a small shake, and his wand slid soundlessly free into his waiting palm before he set it down gently, almost casually, on the table before him.
"What do you think you're doing, Watson!"
Minister Nash, seated among the same seven-member central delegation, sprang up from his chair, pointing at Bryan with a visibly trembling hand, with outrage and something closer to alarm both plainly across his face.
Up on the podium, Minister Adenauer who had been trading heated barbs with Vipor moments earlier without pause shut his own mouth at once, as though an invisible hand had closed around his throat.
An invisible pressure swept out through the entire chamber at that. The surrounding noise died away with remarkable speed. Up in the highest tiers of the circular hall, a few individuals slipped quietly from their seats, began hunching low to avoid notice, crept toward the doors.
"Bryan?"
Dumbledore, who had been trying without success to restore some measure of order, turned to look at him. His wrinkled face showed no trace of concern at the gesture—only a certain, familiar weariness that he'd seen this particular move before.
"What?" Bryan arched one eyebrow in an picture of innocence.
"The wand was just digging uncomfortably into my sleeve, that's all. Rather irritating, really—"
It was, meant as a small joke to diffuse the moment. But no one in the entire chamber so much as smiled at it. The many cautious, watching eyes now fixed steadily on Bryan Watson were full of genuine, unmistakable wariness instead.
Around the world, whenever people spoke of Bryan Watson's considerable power, they never failed to mention, in the same breath, his rather thin regard for established order and formal law when it suited his purposes.
There are, after all, no absolute secrets in this world, and the ripples from Bryan's forceful push to install Amelia Bones as British Minister for Magic had run considerably far and wide across international circles.
"Ahem, well then—"
Finding no one willing to laugh along with him this time, Bryan cleared his throat once more, appearing a little embarrassed by the room's cold reception.
Then he composed his own expression fully, and, for the first time since the whole session had properly opened, looked directly at the podium.
"Minister Adenauer, you mentioned a moment ago—the person truly responsible for Erkstag's fall?"
That night, on the outskirts of Oranienburg, a blaze bright enough to light the entire sky flickered briefly before his own eyes once more.
A long, uncomfortable silence followed his simple question. The corners of the German Minister's mouth twisted.
"It was the Death Eaters who breached Erkstag. Everyone in this chamber already knows that much, Deputy Chairman Watson. They, and the dark wizard who leads them, represent a British terrorist organisation, plain and simple."
"So, what you're actually saying is—"
Bryan laced his own fingers together atop the table before him, his thumbs turning slowly against one another in a slow contemplative motion, his deep eyes giving away nothing of what he felt beneath the surface.
"—that the British Ministry of Magic itself orchestrated this entire atrocity?"
It was, without any question, meant as a jest. No reasonable person in the chamber could possibly entertain so genuinely ridiculous a notion.
"I believe what Minister Adenauer actually means to say—"
The French Minister for Magic, seated two positions down from Bryan on the dais, spoke up in a deliberately trifling, dismissive tone.
"—is that where the prevention of terrorist activity is concerned, the British Ministry of Magic ought to take the whole matter considerably more seriously, and step up its own domestic efforts accordingly, rather than continuing to let such an organisation keep growing largely unchecked and putting even more innocent lives and property at risk from these rioters."
Dumbledore's own silver brows and beard trembled slightly at that framing, and something distinctly cold flickered through his deep blue eyes for the briefest moment.
"That is precisely, exactly what I mean."
Adenauer gave Nash a quick nod of agreement.
"Ah, I see—"
A faintly mocking smile appeared at the corner of Bryan's own mouth.
If Harry had been present in that chamber, watching this unfold, he surely would have cried out in astonishment that Professor Watson had been possessed by the spirit of Snape himself, so precisely did the expression match.
There was no point in dwelling in depth, before this particular room, on just how many British witches and wizards, over nearly thirty years, had thrown themselves one after another into the exhausting, costly fight against Voldemort and his Death Eaters on behalf of the entire wizarding world, only to fall in that struggle without recognition.
Even if such a full accounting were laid out plainly and honestly before this assembly, his opponents tonight would only drag out the memory of Fudge's tenure to stop his mouth on the subject.
After all, in the final, disgraceful stretch of his time in office, Fudge had spent his energy frantically assuring the wider public that the Dark Lord had never actually returned to the magical world at all.
Not only had he actively kept that truth from his own people during that crucial period, he had also gone out of his way to actively obstruct Dumbledore's own attempts to tell it, undermining the very warnings that might have prevented tonight's atrocity from ever reaching this scale.
In the internal political landscape of the British magical world, Bryan and Fudge had always stood on clearly opposing sides.
But here, within this international Confederation chamber, there were far more delegates present tonight content to conveniently play dumb about the whole history than there were delegates willing to reason honestly about where the true responsibility actually lay.
Bryan gave a slow nod toward the German Minister for Magic standing behind the podium.
"The German Ministry of Magic has always led rather admirably by example when it comes to suppressing terrorist organisations operating within its own borders, hasn't it, Minister?"
Adenauer's face flushed a deep, instant red at that specific question, and he pressed his lips together hard, suddenly, unable to properly speak.
For the moment, at least, whatever crimes Voldemort and his Death Eaters had committed against the magical world outside Britain's own borders paled, in scope and in duration, beside those already committed by the surviving Purists still hiding in Oranienburg.
Before Bryan Watson had personally torn their organisation out root and branch, the group had spent the better part of half a century lying patiently in wait across various nations, using unsuspecting Muggles as their own private test subjects for dark rituals and experiments, they'd been pursuing in the shadows.
More than a few of the attendees present tonight—Minister Nash of France distinctly among them, could not quite hide a fresh flicker of unease at the direction this line of implication was now taking.
As the old saying goes, one should never put all their eggs into a single basket.
The largest known stronghold of the surviving Purist Party sat, as it had for decades, in Oranienburg but the organisation had maintained active outposts scattered across many other nations besides Germany, a fact that every delegate in this chamber privately knew and preferred not to discuss aloud.
If the underlying argument tonight was going to be that the Death Eaters had been free to cross international borders and wreak havoc purely because the British Ministry of Magic had failed to properly contain domestic terrorism at its source, then someone in this chamber was eventually going to have to explain with equal candour, what exactly Grindelwald's old Army originally called The Alliance, later renamed The Purists as decades passed had actually been doing this entire time.
————————————
For More Chapters; [email protected]/FicFrenzy