Just Stand Here
Outfit | @olivia

Date: October 1994
Location: Ministry of Magic

The World Cup had been eventful in more ways than one. While he was glad to see it go off without a hitch, and with an Irish win at that, he had known that the plans after the match would likely make his life a little bit more complicated in the coming months. Donning the mask and the hood he hadn’t worn in years, taunting some Muggles and entertaining himself, it had been worth it. The papers had read ‘Terror at the Quidditch World Cup,’ and that was all that anyone would remember from the match for a while. But that was fine. That was Bagman’s failure, not his, and a little rousting had been in order. But he hadn’t been wrong about the amount of work he’d given himself after the fact. He had been stuck in meeting after meeting about what had happened for the past month and however many bloody weeks it had been at this point. Meetings with his colleagues, with Bagman, with other departments… it was never-ending, and while it would eventually die down, for now they weren’t done dealing with it. Some meetings were slightly more tolerable than others, depending on who he had to be around.

Meetings that involved lawyers—that was something that he would have normally considered rather boring, but recently his opinion had changed on that score. When there was one particular lawyer there, Beckett found that his attention could more easily be held, and that was Olivia Drake. He hadn’t known her name at first. The first time he had actually met her had been at the Cup, when Eliza had apparently decided that she couldn’t be bothered to attend the match. He couldn’t say that he had actually missed having his wife there; she didn’t like Quidditch, and undoubtedly would have chatted his ear off the entire match, about her friends, and who was having babies, and what parties were coming up, and it would have been impolite to tell her to shut up and watch the match. No, he couldn’t pretend he’d been torn up when she had decided not to come, but it was a damn shame to have an empty seat when they were some of the best seats in the house. It had been Bagman that had solved that problem, and that was the first time that he’d come face to face with Ms. Drake. He hadn’t talked to her all that much during the match, because she surprisingly seemed just as invested in actually watching it as he was, but it had been her reaction to Ireland’s win that had surprised him.

She had kissed him, and Merlin, he had been tempted to kiss her back. If they weren’t in front of dozens of people, all of which were well aware that he was married, he might have. Instead he had pulled away from her, had politely told her that he had a wife but he appreciated the enthusiasm, and that had been that. He’d left the match, he’d put on that mask and that hood, and he hadn’t figured he would see the woman ever again. Until that first meeting, and then the second one. And he knew that she would be here today, so he found himself heading down into the meeting room a little bit earlier than he might have usually. Beckett pulled open the door, and stepping inside, he noticed that the woman on his mind was already there—and was the only one that was there. “Ms. Drake,” he greeted, with an easy grin, as he let the door close behind him. A glance on his watch proved that he was as early as he’d thought he’d be, but he hadn’t expected anyone else would be here as well. Let alone the witch that he’d been thinking about, because he found himself far too curious about Olivia Drake—more than he should be, especially since he was married, especially since the one random kiss had been… an intriguing surprise, but not something that was going to happen more than that one time, obviously.

Just Stand Here
Outfit

It was easy to ignore what had happened in the summer at the World Cup where there were so many other things going on. The Ministry seemed to have set aside a startling amount of time for people to think about the Tournament that was going on at Hogwarts, and all of that, and yet there were still those that were trying to clean up the Death Eaters’ mess from the summer. Olivia didn’t know how much of this they were actually trying to figure out and how much the Ministry just wanted to try and cover up. This was her problem to fix though, and so she was going to fix it. All she ever seemed to do was sit in these meetings and hope beyond hoping that there was something that would come out of it. That they would decide how they wanted her to handle the rest of the situation, that they were going to have to try and clean up from. Having the world go to hell right now was not what they needed, and she knew that she was going to have to try and fix it, because Bagman sure as hell wasn’t the one that was going to get around to it. Olivia couldn’t stand the Head of the Department of Magical Games and Sports, and she thought that he could seriously have been just about anything else on the planet and she would have hated him less.

It wasn’t that there was anything seriously wrong with the man, aside from his gambling habits and his notorious wandering hands. Olivia could handle that though, it wasn’t like there weren’t a hundred other men in this place that did the same thing every time that she wore a tight dress and bent over. That had been one of the first things that Olivia had learned working in the Ministry. Never bend over, it wasn’t worth letting them have that view. She knew that her looks had gotten her plenty far in this place. There was a reason that she was taking point on this particular project after all, and she dressed the part. If she could get the men in the room to focus on her assets, instead of what she was actually asking of them at the table Olivia could get her way through a lot faster, and handle the situations in about half the time that it took when she was dealing with women. The Ministry, or the government in general, was full of a bunch of men that thought that they were entitled to whatever it was that they wanted, and Olivia knew how to work that. She knew how to use that in her favor to get her way. Her looks had gotten her into the Top Box at the Quidditch World Cup.

She hadn’t thought too much about her actions that night in the aftermath of everything that had been happening. She hadn’t wanted to think about the fact that she had accidentally kissed a married man, but that was the least of Olivia’s problems then. She had had a crisis to handle from a legal perspective, and then she had walked into the first of these meetings for the outcomes of what they could do to get some control over this storm, and he had been there. Right there next to Ludo Bagman had been the man that she had kissed, embarrassed herself in front of, and had hoped that she was never going to see again. The end of that first meeting couldn’t have come fast enough, and Olivia had escaped like her life depended on it. Since then there had been a second meeting, and now today was the third. Olivia was nothing if not punctual, and so she had gotten here early. A habit she had had nearly her entire life, the former Ravenclaw was organized and on top of things. She gave herself a five minute window for all of her appointments and meetings to be there plenty early. The last thing that she had expected when the door had opened though, was for it to have been him of all people coming in early. “Mr. Graves.” She nodded once to him, but she didn’t move from where she was standing on the opposite side of the conference table, instead simply going back to reorganizing the papers she had brought for them all to look over.

These meetings were a necessary evil. He knew that. He had known what he was getting into the moment the idea of a little rousting had come up. But he’d also known that he wasn’t going to turn down the opportunity to put that mask and that hood back on, even if it wasn’t for good. Even if it was just one day, a tiny bit of amusement, before life had to go back to normal. The Dark Lord was gone, after all. They could put on their masks and torment some Muggles, but at the end of the day, they all had different lives to lead now. They had gotten away from the last war unscathed, and he’d been pretty damn glad to avoid Azkaban. It hadn’t been hard to do. He was fresh out of Hogwarts—no one was looking for many followers that young, and his family was known for their high positions in the Ministry. They were hardly known for delving into the dark arts, even though that was also a family… tradition, he supposed. It meant that no one had been looking for him, and he could continue his job and trying to move up in the department. He had made himself invaluable, had become Bagman’s right hand, for lack of a better term, because he knew that it would make it easier for him to eventually take his job.

It meant that he had to come to these meetings and take them seriously. It certainly wasn’t hard to take them more seriously than Bagman did, but keeping a straight face was amusing to him, in light of what he knew and no one else did. They didn’t know that they were talking about strategies and paperwork and legalities with a man that had caused some of the chaos to begin with. They didn’t know that he was helping them now when he had hurt them and the success of the World Cup to begin with. As much work as he’d put into making sure it went off without a hitch, he didn’t deem what happened afterward as his failure. If anything, it made Bagman look bad, and that was fine with him. It would make his later plans easier. He just had to get through these meetings without laughing, and he had found that rather easy to do in light of other distractions. Olivia Drake had been unexpected. Everything about her was… different than anything he’d ever dealt with before. She was different—and it was intriguing to him. Kissing him at the World Cup… that had caught him off guard, for obvious reasons. It was part of why he was so interested in her now, but a part of him felt like she still would have been captivating to him, even if he had met her for the first time in these meetings.

But that wasn’t the case. Instead, she had kissed him, and now they had to deal with each other on a regular basis until these meetings were through—and then there were still the Triwizard meetings that they would have throughout the year as well. She wouldn’t be going away any time soon, and even though he was married, he didn’t think there was any harm in looking. It wasn’t as if he stared at her throughout entire meetings… he was there to do his job, and he was good at his job. But if she spoke, sometimes he looked at her for a second too long, before turning to look at whomever had answered her. There wasn’t anything wrong with that, especially not with what she wore in these meetings. The reason behind the outfits was clear, and he had seen firsthand how easily she got her way—it was almost rather funny to witness. When he stepped into the room today, it was impossible to stop his gaze from moving over her briefly, though his regard was entirely appropriate by the time she responded to him. Instead of taking a seat, he headed around to the other side of the table next to her. “What drudgery is on the agenda today?” He asked her, glancing down at her for a moment before looking at all of the paperwork on the table.

There were problems when it came to any governing body, that much was for certain, but when it came to the Ministry of Magic there were things that were more difficult to make work than other places. She had been studying law, wizarding law, since before she was out of Hogwarts, and she knew that Aurora had been giving her crap about it for years, but it had worked. It had landed her the job that she had now. It had been something that she was more than capable of figuring out, something that she was sure would benefit her in the future, and if she couldn’t get them to keep their eyes off of her long enough to get anything accomplished then she would use that to her advantage. She would make them look at her, and make them agree with her, and they would at least get something accomplished. There was plenty that she didn’t think that she could do on her own, but she did think that there would be all that much that they hashed out in these meetings anyway. There were too many people, from too many departments, and Olivia didn’t think that there was anyone that could make them all see eye to eye on anything really.

Meetings like these really wouldn’t have been that big of a deal, except for the fact that she didn’t know how they were ever going to fix the stir that the Death Eaters had caused, and still deny all plausibility that it was the Death Eaters at all. People weren’t stupid, they had seen the mark in the sky, they knew what it had meant, but Olivia still knew that the Ministry’s official position on the matter was that the incident at the Quidditch World Cup was one of isolated interest. There was no reason to believe that the Death Eaters were rising once again, and that there was nothing more out of the ordinary going on. She had to hope that all of that could still be said as the events unfolding over the course of the school year at Hogwarts were unfolding. Olivia knew as well as anyone that there were times when it was better to keep your mouth shut and hope for the best, and this truly seemed to be one of those times. It was easier to pretend that she believed the party line, that there was nothing that was going to cause anyone to think twice about what was going on behind her eyes. She didn’t believe that it was an isolated incident but she couldn’t prove otherwise, and so Olivia kept quiet.

She had talked to her father about it, and if there was one thing that Reginald Drake had instilled in his only child, it was that it was better to keep your eyes forward, and your ears open if you wanted to learn something. And so that was what she had done. She listened to everything, and she was forming opinions on her own. Beckett Graves was not someone that she was expecting, and Olivia knew that after what she had done in the box that night at the match things could have been even worse than they had been over the past couple of meetings. She knew that they were colleagues, and working together, and she knew that there had been a few people in each of these meetings that had born witness to her kissing a very married man. The witch had been embarrassed, and she had been good at keeping her distance from him since then. When he came around her side of the table though, instead of keeping the large piece of furniture between them, Olivia didn’t quite know what to do. She didn’t move, instead she just continued to focus on what she was doing as she answered his question. “I believe they want to discuss the damages done to all of the personal property that people want the Ministry to make right.” It was ridiculous really, that they thought the Ministry was going to be able to pay damages for every little thing at the same time that they were trying to take care of the situation as a whole, and balance a Triwizard Tournament…

When this had all come about, when the Death Eaters had decided that the World Cup was the place for them to have a bit of fun, Beck had known that he was going to be a part of it. It had been a long time… and he had missed it. As much of him that was real here, in the way the world was now, he had missed being able to put that mask on and everything that it meant. He knew that he had to be careful, because the last thing he wanted was to get caught when they were just having a bit of… fun, but there was no reason to think that was going to happen. The people celebrating at the cup would be caught off guard, there would be nothing for them to really try to do except to get away, and that was part of the fun—the chase. He had known that it would give him a headache to deal with later at work, and some of his… comrades had found that rather amusing, but he knew that it was certainly worth it. There was no way that he could pass up that opportunity, no matter what he had to deal with later. And honestly, he thought that it had all worked out quite well. After all, it meant plenty of meetings with a witch that he had met at the Cup, and he wasn’t going to complain about that.

Olivia Drake intrigued him. He wasn’t in the business of denial, when it came to his own thoughts at least, so he knew there was no reason for him to try to convince himself that she was nothing to him and that she didn’t interest him in the slightest. It wasn’t the truth, because he did find her to be rather… interesting, and it wasn’t just because she had kissed him after the match had ended and Ireland had won. That had surprised him, and got his attention, but it had been in these meetings that he had started to find her more fascinating than he ever could have anticipated. She was unlike anyone that he had ever met before, and so much different than his wife, which was definitely a good thing. Eliza was… fine. She had been a decent pick, and she knew how to play the game—she charmed his colleagues in a way that proved to be useful, and she wanted him to have power nearly as much as he did, which worked out. It meant that she wasn’t too aggravating when he had a late night, because she knew that it came with the territory. It all worked out, even if she was a little more high-maintenance than he would have liked. Even if she continued to bother him about having children when he just didn’t want to deal with that. He thought that she really needed to get used to the fact that she was never going to win that argument.

The reasons that his wife annoyed him were the reasons that Olivia intrigued him, because they felt like night and bloody day in most respects. In some ways, he knew they were similar. There was no denying that Olivia knew how to work a room just as well as Eliza did, if not better. That was proof even just from the outfits that she wore to these meetings. She knew how to use what she had to get her way, and there usually wasn’t a man in the room that could stop looking at her, apart from him. He didn’t have any plans to fall prey to such tactics, but hell, everyone else did. He was sure that today would go the same way as always, and he would be a mix of amused and irritated that everyone listened to her, and would argue with her about things he disagreed with just because it entertained him and annoyed her. And someone had to do it, after all. No other bloke in the room could look past her cleavage to even attempt it. His gaze didn’t move from the paperwork on the table, but he was perhaps a bit closer to him than he probably should have been. A small smirk curved up the corners of his lips as he chuckled. “That’s a hell of a lot of damage.” More than the Ministry would ever agree to pay for, since it was pretty absurd to think that they were going to deal with all of that.

Nothing was ever perfect, and there was no one that really expected a government to be that way, but Olivia had to think that the Ministry wasn’t doing a completely terrible job in the aftermath of what had happened. There were for sure things that they could have done differently. They could have handled some situations a lot better for sure, but when it came down to it they weren’t doing all that bad. Olivia thought that it could have been so much worse right now. There were a handful of things that she thought that she would have done differently if she was the one making the final decisions, but she wasn’t. Olivia knew that she wasn’t. And that was what had gotten them here. They were stuck in this endless cycle of meetings because the men in the room couldn’t all seem to agree on what the best could of action really was. It wasn’t that hard, not really. There were only a few things that they could do, everything was really out of their control now, it had been out of their control the moment that the Death Eaters had taken to the camp site. They had lost control then and no matter what they did in these meetings there was no getting it back. Not really… She didn’t think that the men that sat in these meetings were likely to get that through their heads any time soon though, and so she wondered if there were some way to make sure that things didn’t go too far astray. That she had a way to get them to focus on her, and make sure that they at least got something accomplished in these meetings, and so she had taken to working certain assets that she had at her disposal to get them all to focus on her instead. And it had done it’s job. They listened to her…

She knew that that wouldn’t always work though. They could only stare so long before something happened and then she would have to deal with that. There were a few of them that she would rather not have anywhere near her, and there were a few that had had wandering hands already. If there was any chance that she made it through the rest of these meetings without someone grabbing her ass, or trying to put their hand in her dress she’d be surprised. Some of them really were pigs, and they were men, so naturally they thought that they could just take what they wanted, and no one was going to be the wiser, but Olivia wasn’t about to give them everything. They could learn what it meant to look and not touch, so long as something actually got accomplished in these meetings. She thought that there was always the chance that nothing was going to go the way that it should have. That there were a million things going on right now that they didn’t exactly have the man power to cover, but they did them anyway. They were spread thin, and Olivia thought that they would figure it out in the end, but right now she knew that she planned her entire schedule five minutes ahead of where it really needed to be, just so that she knew that she had time for anything unexpected to crop up.

That was what had gotten her here this early. She kept her wits about herself, and she made sure that she was efficient, and effective. Olivia thought that if there was anyone that was going to question what it was that she was going to have to deal with it would have been her father, and he had given her sound advice, eyes forward, ears open. That was what she was trying to do right now. It was harder to focus on what she had been doing when he was talking to her, but Olivia thought that she was managing well enough. At least until he had gotten that close to her. He was the one person in these meetings that didn’t seem fazed by her. He was the only person that she thought that she really had no effect whatsoever on, and she was a bit put off by that. He was the one that she had accidentally kissed after all… He was the only one that she had ever gotten that close to of her own accord, and she thought that he should at least look at her or something, but no. He treated her as if her clothes made no difference, the only person in these stupid meetings that had enough coherence to argue with her and he did. He argued with her enough to annoy her at least, though she thought that when it came to him that really hadn’t ended up being all that hard to do. “It is.” She answered simply, “More than we could ever afford to pay, though they likely aren’t going to like that.” It was the truth though. The Ministry couldn’t afford to take a hit like that. They couldn’t replace the damage done by a group of people that they liked to go around pretending didn’t exist anymore…

Beck hadn’t thought much about marrying Eliza. In his family, that was just sort of how it worked. He had ambitions, he wanted to move up in the Ministry, and that was much easier to do if a person was likeable. Already he was pretty damn likeable, he wasn’t worried about that, but being married and having a family… that helped. Of course, they hadn’t gotten around to the actual having a family part. Eliza had wanted to, she had thought that it would help—though he thought that she didn’t have a maternal bone in her body, but he hadn’t wanted to go there yet. There was plenty of time for that, and he had been more focused on his work than wanting to deal with all of what having a kid with Eliza would bring up. She wasn’t exactly low maintenance, after all, and he had to figure that she would be an absolute nightmare when she was pregnant. No, he thought that he would avoid that for a little bit longer. Not forever, just for now. But marrying her had been a decision that had come easily to him. It was what he had needed at the time, and he had never second-guessed that. He didn’t think that he ever would. Marriage wasn’t… well, he supposed he just wasn’t a romantic about it. Love wasn’t in the cards for him… but power? Power certainly could be.

That was what he would get from this job, once he continued to climb the ladder, once he finally got Bagman’s job. It was what he got from the Death Eaters as well. It was why he hadn’t hesitated to get involved, it was why he didn’t mind that he would have to deal with the aftermath in the Ministry, because he was due to have a bit of fun… it had been worth it. All of these meetings, as tedious as they were, were absolutely worth it. It had been what they had hoped for—had caused a bit of chaos, some damage, stirred up some trouble. Sure, he had been stuck in meetings for ages because of it, and still was, but that was fine. It caused everyone to be even more wary about the Triwizard Tournament, because well… this was an event that brought up a bit of a fuss and a lot of meetings, and now people worried that there were Death Eaters around causing trouble. It was at least a little amusing, but it certainly did add extra work for all of them. Beck would just be relieved when they were done with all of this World Cup nonsense. It might have been worth all of the fun that they’d had, but these meetings were getting a little bit dull. The most interesting part of them at this point was watching Olivia Drake get her way every time she flipped her hair in the right man’s direction. She knew how to work a room, there was no denying that.

He made it a little bit harder on her, because it was fun. Beck thought she had to get used to not getting her way all of the time, and so he had put it upon himself to make sure that happened. In a room full of people, it was easy to do that, and otherwise keep his gaze off of her unless she was speaking. Everyone liked to look at her a bit longer than necessary, some in places that their gazes shouldn’t be wandering, but she seemed to work that to her advantage, so he made sure never to look too long. It was also just the polite thing to do—Merlin, any man could be a lecherous pig at some point in their lives, but he didn’t think work was the place for that. Being in a room alone with her, though, was a lot different than across the table from her, and he found that temptation was getting the better of him. He was certainly at least a step or two closer to her than he really should be, and he knew that he should move away. But he didn’t. Instead, he found himself humming in agreement to her words. They would never end up paying off all of the damages for this… people would have to do without their tents or whatever else they had lost that was so important. “You know what I really find myself thinking about in these meetings…” He said, after a few moments of saying nothing at all. “Something else that happened that day that I find more interesting than reparations and press releases…” He thought what had happened at the end of the match was much more intriguing than what went on in these meetings.

The last thing that the Ministry had needed was what had come from the World Cup, but there was no changing the fact that the Death Eaters had decided to make their reappearance at one of the most inconvenient times in the history of pretty much ever. There wouldn’t have been a good time for them to show up at all, but on the night that Ireland had won the World Cup, and the time right before they had the other schools coming into the country for the Triwizard Tournament… Olivia was not naïve… There had to be Death Eaters in this Ministry, they had known what they were doing, they had had to have known that they were going to cause an uproar, and that they were going to have all of this crap to deal with, but she had a feeling that they didn’t care. Fudge was doing a great just of trying to say that they weren’t back, that the Death Eaters were not completely responsible, that they had the situation under control, but everyone knew that it was a lie. They didn’t have anything under control, and the public had to know it. She was surprised that the Beauxbatons Headmistress hadn’t reneged on the deal to show up to the Tournament. The Headmaster from Durmstrang was a Death Eater himself, so really that didn’t surprise her that they had still been all for it, but the others… Olivia never knew what Dumbledore was thinking in that school, no one ever seemed to really, but that didn’t change the fact that they were still hosting a Tournament that they weren’t prepared for.

They hadn’t exactly been prepared before, but Crouch and Bagman had insisted that it would all work itself out, and Olivia hadn’t heard Fudge give a real opinion on anything since she had started working here right out of school, and so she thought that there was a good chance that she would never find out what he actually thought about all of this. They were too busy trying to make sure that the public was satisfied to address the real problem. And the problem in front of them right now was that they were about 3 million galleons short of covering all of the damage that the public wanted compensation for from the World Cup, and Olivia knew that that was never going to have happened in the first place, but they didn’t seem to want to let it go, and now on top of the World Cup, the Triwizard Tournament was officially about to begin. The Champion selection was set for Halloween night, and she didn’t think that any of them were going to be ready for everything that would come after that, but there was no way of knowing until it happened. They had stopped having the Tournament all together because people were killed so often, and now they thought that having it again in the midst of a break out from Azkaban, a serial killer that they still hadn’t found, rumors swirling that the Dark Lord was rising again, and his supposed followers terrorizing the World Cup. It all just seemed like a lawsuit nightmare that she was going to have to deal with.

There were advantages and disadvantages of being her right now, and the fact that her assets got her what she wanted most of the time was an advantage. The disadvantage to that was that sometimes she was requested for assignments that she would much rather not have. This case, with all of the things that were sure to come from it could make or break a career, and this time it was her career on the line. She had to come up with a way to keep the Ministry from going so far in the hole that they would never recover, and therefore cripple the economy, while simultaneously making sure that the public was satisfied with the results. The man standing next to her was one of the main reasons that things were taking so long. If he would stop pushing back on little things that she could easily slide past the others then it wouldn’t have been so frustrating, but he didn’t let her sneak things by the way that she could do to the rest of them. It made her frustrated, but she didn’t know who she was most frustrated with, him, or herself for being this irrationally angry with him. At his comment though it took everyone in her not to look over at him. She thought that she knew what he was talking about, but Olivia didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to acknowledge that she had indeed kissed him. Because then her irritation at him was something more than she wanted it to be as well. “I don’t know what you’re talking about Mr. Graves.” She didn’t look at him, because she knew that her eyes would give her away, and so she kept trying to focus on what she was doing with the paperwork in front of her.

Being around Olivia Drake was difficult when all he thought about was what had happened at the match. Eliza hadn’t been there. She had decided that she had better ways to spend her time than going to the Quidditch World Cup—and it had ended up being shopping, of course, because there were only a couple of ways that she liked to spend her time… shopping and designing. Neither one of those pastimes, though, were good enough reasons not to come to something that only happened every four years. In his opinion, at least, and in the opinion of probably thousands of other people that would have killed to have a seat in the Top Box at the World Cup. But she hadn’t been there, and so Olivia had gotten her seat. It had resulted in her kissing him, in the heat of the moment at the end of the game, and he thought that he’d just laugh it off and not think about it ever again. It just happened. She had been excited about Ireland winning the game, and he had been right there. But it hadn’t been all that easy for him to forget, because she’d been everywhere. Absolutely everywhere he turned, it seemed like Olivia Drake was there, because they had meeting after meeting to deal with, trying to do damage control because of what had happened.

The funny thing was that he had done that to himself. He had done it to himself, because he’d been among the masked Death Eaters that had wreaked havoc at the World Cup. Beckett had known then that he would be causing himself to have more work to do at his actual job, but he had thought that the fun would be worth his while. And it had been. It had been an amusing way to end the Cup, but he hadn’t realized that it meant he would have to see Olivia Drake this much. He hadn’t thought it would be a big deal, either, but it had proven to be a problem—because he couldn’t get her out of his mind. It was rather inconvenient, but he had been doing his best to ignore it. In some ways, it wasn’t all that hard. It was easy enough not to react the way that she was used to men reacting to her. Olivia clearly had no problem using her wiles to get her way at work, and most blokes that came into this room absolutely fell for it. It worked like a charm for her, and he had seen that happen time and time again. It was actually kind of annoying, really, when he was arguing one point, and everyone started to stop siding with him after a while. Sometimes, though, he pushed enough that people did see that he was right.

He wasn’t going to let her always get her way, and let it be that easy for her. Beckett figured that might frustrate her, and that was half of the fun. But he was good at his job. When he argued for something, and it wasn’t what she wanted, it was because he knew his department better than she did. It might not be his department, per say, but he still knew what worked for this department arguably better than she did. So he wasn’t going to let her get her way without making absolutely certain that her idea was the best idea. He wasn’t going to make it that easy on her. This had been the first time that he’d been in the meeting room this early, though, and seeing just her there meant that this was going to be slightly more challenging. He decided to keep his focus on work, and what she was doing, and what the meeting was about… but he found himself standing a little closer to her than was strictly necessary. Beckett didn’t know what had made him bring up the Cup, and what else had happened that day, but he had wanted to see what she would say. “I think you know what I’m talking about…” He answered, his voice quiet. He didn’t think it had been all that easy for her to forget either.

The chaos that had become of the World Cup was something that they were tucking in their belt and moving on from. They didn’t have time to continue to dwell on it, and as much as these meetings dragged on, she knew that there were other more important matters to discuss. Things that had to do with a certain Tournament that they weren’t quite ready for. If anything she thought that getting ready for the Tournament that was going to be officially underway as of Halloween, Olivia thought that they needed to get their acts together a little more than they already were. Bagman and Crouch needed to get on the same team, and though she knew that that wasn’t likely to happen any time soon, they needed to get a little more on the same page than they were currently. After everything that had happened at the World Cup Crouch was having a field day, and Bagman was taking it in stride like his normal, carpe diem, je ne sais quoi, manner that didn’t do anyone one bit of good. No, Olivia was determined that no matter what it was that they thought that they were going to do to make all of this a little better, a little neater, a little more to their style, she was certain that there were too many things that they didn’t know. They didn’t have control, as much as they wanted to pretend they did, and she knew that Crouch was right about that. That they didn’t have control of those that had once been Death Eaters, because there was no controlling them. There was no taking all of that back… Death Eaters were Death Eaters, plain and simple.

It wasn’t that Olivia completely disagreed with them, that there were those that were of higher born status, that there were those that agreed and disagreed with them, and she knew that she would have never have done what her best friend had done and gotten tied up in a pureblood family, but she didn’t think that they were wrong either. You didn’t mix classes, at least not permanently. Recreationally, sure, but purebloods didn’t marry halfbloods, and no one married muggleborns. That was just how it was. She had grown up thinking that muggles were indeed the enemy, and when she had been old enough to find out what it was that her father did for a living, she had thought much the same. He was an assassin, he was assigned to hunt down and kill people that no longer needed to be alive, and sometimes that meant muggles. She knew that it was muggle hunts that often kept him away from her mother for long periods of time. It was muggle hunts that had made him miss Christmas more than once, miss her graduation from Hogwarts, nearly miss her graduation from Lufkin… No, muggles were not to be tolerated and Olivia had learned that from a very young age. No one liked muggles. No one needed muggles around, and they were just simply better off without them. Turning them upside and parading them through a burning camp though, that just caused a lot of unnecessary chaos that she now had to deal with in the form of paperwork.

At least it was simple enough to convince most of the men in these meetings to do things her way. She was one of few witches that had been granted counsel positions here in the Ministry, and she knew that it hadn’t been their brains that had set them above the men that had applied for the same posts. She knew, because take one look at them and there was no telling that they were all hired for the same reason. That very reason though, was enough to get her way most of the time. She had to bend over in the right spot, lean to the side and brush someone’s arm… It wasn’t hard, it had become something of an art form, but it didn’t seem to work on Beckett Graves, and that irritated Olivia. She had kissed him, and then he had seemed perpetually unaffected by her. No matter what she did she found it hard to use her physical assets to get his attention long enough to distract him. He made her work for it, actually debate with him, and then sometimes he could convince her that she was actually wrong. She didn’t know what irritated her more, the fact that it didn’t work, that he got her convinced he was right sometimes, or the fact that he was standing this close to her and all she could think about was how nice he smelled. She shouldn’t think anything like that, he was annoying, and he was arrogant, and he was a pain in her arse… But she did know what he was talking about, and the recollection played in her eyes when she finally turned to look at him. “An accident…” It had been, an accident, when she had kissed him. And he was married, and everyone knew that. And he hadn’t kissed her back in any case, so what was the point of bringing it up now?