Clock Don’t Stop

@hank | Outfit

Olivia knew that this wasn’t going to be the easiest of springs, and she knew that they had a lot of firsts that they still had to get through. It was Ellanora’s birthday, and she had sent the girl a gift. Even if she didn’t know her well enough to send something personal, she had sent flowers. And the intent had been clear. They had not been from her alone. Whether or not it would be appreciated or it would hurt she supposed only time would tell for that part. April wasn’t going to be easy, and she didn’t know if she was about to make it better or worse. When Beckett had finally agreed to try, and Olivia had thrown her birth control out, she hadn’t thought that anything was going to come of it. Not that fast. It had been faster than that with the last three, it had been one missed potion and they had ended up with Anderson... But that had years ago now. Things had been different then, she had been younger then. That could have made all the difference in the world. Except, apparently, it hadn’t. 

She was pregnant, and she hadn’t told him yet. That was where she was stuck. She knew that she needed to tell him, it was his baby too. They were having a baby, but figuring out how to tell him that was the key right now. Figuring out how to tell him that what she wanted was happening. This was now real, this was everything that she had wanted... Now it was just a matter of making sure that she took care of them, both of them. She had to make this right, she had to tell him. She wouldn’t know until she just did it. Olivia thought that was going to have to wait though. At least for a little while, because right now there were other things that they needed to worry about. That she needed to worry about. And keeping her personal life out of the office was a big part of that. It was no secret that she and Beckett had been together for years, but they did their absolute best not to let that effect their work in any way. They weren’t those people and the red headed witch had every intention of keeping it that way. 

They were two of the highest ranking half bloods in this regime, and she knew that she had fought for her position with every Minister since Fudge. Olivia was the best, and she had proved time and again that she was. She had made it her job to make sure that anything that came her way, she had handled. And being named chief as young as she had been, as a woman, was proof of how good she was. This was her life, and aside from her family, it was the one thing that she was dedicated to the most. It just so happened that sometimes she had to venture out of her corner office to deal with the things that were being handed to her now. Issues involving this particular department made it to her desk a little more often than others, but that was to be expected. When they were dealing with the accidents, the mishaps, and more importantly when it involved the muggles, they could never be too careful. Olivia thought that her father had trained her well for this, and she figured that they were going to do what they could about working all of this out just as they always had. 

She he had a staff, and she had people that normally got assigned to things like this, but Olivia had been interested enough in this particular case to come down here and hover in the back of the board room as she listened to them debate around the table about what to do. There were a couple of her lawyers in here. The Head of the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophies seemed to have sent his best people as well, and she thought that they were making significant progress. No one was going to deny that. Pushing off from the wall as the meeting dispersed she caught Davis’s eye and tilted her head towards the door. They could talk as they made their way through the department and back upstairs, though Olivia had every faith that the resolutions that they were going to come to were the best ones that they had, her goal was a,ways to protect the Ministry, and the Minister, no matter who sat in that chair. That was what had allowed her to excel, she didn’t care who the Minister was, so long as legally, the country came first.

Work was well, work. He didn’t mind it, in face he found himself there probably more than he should have. Becky worried about him constantly and told him that he was at work far too often, as did Robbie. They helped out and watched Parker and Tara when he was busy, but he knew that he couldn’t expect them to always do it, he needed a Nanny or a sitter or something and it wasn’t going to go well if he kept this up. It wasn’t going to be something that he repeated so he kept his feelings to himself, Charlotte had done a number on him and looking at the beautiful faces of his children he knew that he would forever be lost to them. They were too good for him and he missed Diane more and more each day. Becky was nothing like him and everything like her mother. She was beauty and grace. Robbie was a strong man, like Hank, but full of pride and vanity, like his mother. Jonathan was very much a mirror image of himself, but had the spirit of his mother. They made him miss her so very much.

He had been thinking about breaking down and actually asking Isolde out on a date, maybe doing something about this long standing crush that had his children mocking him. She was great, and he had liked her for a long time, but he also knew that she hadn’t had the easiest time with love, and he didn’t want to fuck that up. He liked the way that their relationship (if you could even call it that) was. They worked together a great deal, and he had lost and won to her more than he could count. They were some of the more popular lawyers, but she was fortunate enough to belong to a firm. He had once thought about opening his own, and working his own cases, but he knew that the Ministry meant steady pay, and with five mouths to feed that was the most important thing.

Diane used to keep him grounded, kept him from making mistakes, or just being a huge ass. Charlotte had kept him from quitting his job, told him that the income was the most important thing, and that politics didn’t matter. His job would need to be done either way and as long as he was loyal to those that he needed to be loyal to, then he would have no problems. He didn’t rightly agree either one, but he knew how to avoid fight. He loved his job, he loved the legal battles. The cerebralness of it all. Of course, he knew that in America things would have been different for them, that his life would have been so very different, but the life that he would have dad there would not have been the same kind that he had in England. He wouldn’t have things that he did now, like his children.

He might not always be happy, or be proud of the choices that he made in his life, but he knew that above all else, he was a good father. He did what he thought was best, and that included doing his job, even when he wanted to spend time with his kids, even when things were hard. Because he had a lot of fight in him. Which was why he paid attention, it was why he kept his head down and his nose clean. The more you were noticed and the more you stood out the harder things could be. He didn’t need that, so he sat in the meeting, nodding his head and speaking when he needed to. Mrs. Graves was giving out assignments and talking about things, once the meeting let out he noticed that she was trying to catch his eye, so he took his time packing his things up and sat on the tables edge as everyone filed out.

As the last one left he offered the last one a smile and nodded to her. ”Yes, Ma’am?”

They were going to make it through whatever came their way now, and she thought that that was important. She thought that working through everything that was going to come from April, was important. Because April wasn't going to be easy, and she thought that she was going to make it worse. That the secret that she was still keeping was going to make it worse. Because he had agreed to her not taking the potions anymore. He had agreed to try, but trying had ended up working, and that was where Olivia thought that they were stuck. That things were going to catch, that they were going to figure this out. Together. They were going to have to work on it together, and that meant that she was going to have to tell him. Telling him was what she was worried about though. They were having another baby, and she didn't think that Beckett was going to be as happy as she was with the news. Olivia was already attached to the little life that was growing inside of her. She was already protective, even if that meant that she had to protect the baby from its father's mood.

Beckett wouldn't hate a child for existing, but until he could see it, she didn't know what he was going to think. She didn't know much of anything right now, and that was both good and bad. She thought that it had the potential to go either way, and Olivia wasn't convinced which way she wanted things to end up. The one thing that she did know, was that he wouldn't leave. He wasn't going to go anywhere over this, and as far as she was going to get was maybe the bedroom down the hall, if she got to the point she was sick in the night. She wouldn't want to wake him, and that was about as far as either of them were going to get. She didn't think that they'd even get there. She wasn't sick yet, and by this point she thought that if it was going to hit her hard, it would have by now. The red head was more tired than anything, and she knew that if she didn't start moving she was going to half fall asleep right here next to the wall. She supposed if she had to have one worse than the other, being exhausted was the better option.

Olivia wanted to eat just about anything that you put in front of her, and she thought that there was a good chance that meant that things were okay. Going to see her healer was important, and she had an appointment, but she wanted everything to go smoothly. She wanted this to be the easiest of all four, and she thought that that would be tough to do. She had never been a particularly needy pregnant woman. She had been pretty self-sufficient for the most part. At one point, with Anderson, things had been going so smoothly that she had considered delivering at home. She hadn't, her mother had convinced her that the safest place to have babies was the hospital, and so she had had all three of them in the hospital, but this time was different. Everything about this pregnancy was different than the other three. Everything about his child was different, and Olivia would love him or her no more or less than she loved their siblings, but things were indeed different. This was the only birth certificate that was going to say Olivia Graves. This was the only child they had had in wedlock.

And it didn't matter. They had been just as devoted to one another without rings, and vows, and everything else, but they had that now. She was Madam Olivia Graves in this Ministry, and she liked that. She very much liked finally being a Graves. Which was ridiculous, really, when she knew that she could have very well been one all along if she just would have gotten around to it. The way that they had done it though, a year ago now, was perfect. A big wedding wouldn't have been them. Back room dealings, and a paper signed in the night. That was more the style that someone would have seen the Graves' get married in. Not that anyone had actually seen them get married at all, but that was circumstantial. When the other Department Head rounded out the meeting, Olivia waited for her own people to stand up before she caught their eyes from the back of the room, and she smiled a little bit when Davis stopped next o her. "Walk with me back to our department, and tell me what they are proposing to do about the situation in Wales…" They had had a couple of Welsh Green dragons get loose, and now they were trying to deal with the public in the aftermath, and the muggle public on top of that. "Have the obliviators gotten all of the muggles cleaned up?"

Clock Don't Stop

I'm ready for my bed

- @olivia -

If there was ever anyone that he never wanted to be called aside to talk to, it was Olivia Graves. Being pulled aside from the boss, usually meant bad things and he didn’t need to have bad things right now. His job was what supported his family and with Charlotte gone, he had no other income to help with the kids. Becky and Robbie had their own places and their own bills to worry about. He couldn’t ask them to come home if this was him losing his job. He wasn’t going to stress about it though. He knew that there was no way of knowing what she wanted until she opened her mouth.

He was a stranger, a foreigner in this land and not always welcome to play in the sandbox He didn’t belong and he knew it, his methods were that of Americans, he liked to do low blows and convince people that he was right even when he was wrong. It was fun and it was hard, but with Death Eaters all around it could also be dangerous as fuck and he knew it all too well. He wasn’t about to end up like so many others who had died in the Ministry in the last few years. He was fully prepared to live his life until he died of old age, not from his own stupidity. So he tried to stay calm, to look like he was calm in front of the woman and he gave a smirk of confidence for a moment before leaning into the table beside him.

Relief washed over him and he picked up his paperwork, moving the file to the top with a small smile. This was a part of the job that he was good at. This was something that he could handle. He did, after all love this kind of shit. Had he stayed in Seattle he knew that he would have fought for the rights of those small coffee shops to not be killed by those large chains with Star in the name.

He allowed her to go out first, motioning with his hand and a polite bow of his head. ”The story we are feeding the muggles is a sudden wild fire brought on by a less then typical wet season. Which would explain a lack of crop activity in the are where they escaped from as well. We have reached out to a few independent groups of Keepers to come as well as a few of the Dragonologists and their students from Lufkin. Offering them course study cross programing for their aide as it is hands on activity.” He held out the paperwork for her to take and give the once over.

”They have gotten almost everyone, a few have eluded them by leaving the country in their fear, but we are workng on tracking them down, and paperwork for Portkeys have been filed, just awaiting locations and signatures then they will be away to handle it all. “ He nodded to a few people they passed and chuckled to himself as an aide blushed.

”The only concern that I have seen in their correspondence with us is why they were able to break out, the restraints and borders were supposed to be renewed and wards updated daily but from the reports I have been given it seems as if that might have been severely neglected. Possibly because of understaffing.”

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template by punki of adoxography

Clock Don't
Stop

Whatever it was that came from this month was just going to have to be. She could keep her chin up, she could make it to her nephew’s birthday, and then they could be done with April, and they could ring in May with Lyla’s birthday, and they would all be good to go. Of course, there was the matter of the secret. The one that she hadn’t shared with anyone yet. She wanted to tell Beckett. But she wasn’t sure that it was going to be the best of times to tell him anything. She was already emotional right now, plus now the added hormones that came with a pregnancy were likely to make her cry at the drop of a hate. She didn’t really think that there was an easy way to do this. There wasn’t a foolproof plan for telling him that they were going to have another baby. And she knew that it was just something that she was going to have to accept. She was going to have to learn to live with it. And she was going to have to try and understand that he wasn’t going to be as happy as she was. When she was happy.

Olivia had never had super bad pregnancy symptoms. On that front she had been lucky with the first three. It was just her mood that tended to do her in. Most of the time Olivia could handle herself in a manner that made her seem cold, and stoic, and so incredibly put together, and strong. But when she was pregnant she had less of a handle on her emotions. She had less control over what it was that she was going to be able to do. And she knew that there were occasions when she wasn’t going to be able to pull that off. When she wasn’t going to be able to remain emotionless, and impassive. When she wasn’t going to be strong. And Olivia didn’t like weakness. Not in herself. She was good at what she did, and she was good at it for a reason. Olivia Graves was a shark, and she made sure that she was always the biggest one in the ocean when she was swimming around. The Ministry had bene her ocean for a long time, and she had worked her way up. From interning while she had been in Lufkin, and working in the legal department as an aide, and a paralegal, she had worked her way up to the top.

Her corner office sat directly across the floor from Lord Yaxley’s. Head of her own Department. She liked that, she had worked for that. And she wasn’t about to let something like a pregnancy, and her lack of control on her emotions, have any of them questioning her ability to do her job. Olivia was very good at what she did. She was very good at making sure that deals stuck. And she could get anyone into, or out of, whatever situation that she wanted. She had learned from her father, even if her father’s philosophy in life had been to never, under any circumstances, involve lawyers. For her part, Olivia couldn’t help but wonder if that hadn’t been what had driven her to want to be a lawyer for her entire life. The fact that it was so ironic? Because she loved her father, and she thought that she, and maybe Lyla, if she stayed the course she was on, would be the only two people in the world that he broke that rule for. Family trumped lawyer.

Today she wasn’t trying to be scary. She wasn’t worried about her emotions, she just wanted to know what the plan was for the situation in Wales. Dragons were never an easy thing to deal with, and she was so very glad that she hadn’t married someone, or had a child, that was obsessed with the creatures. They made her nervous, and she had to wonder if they were like horses, and dogs, and if they could smell fear? Stepping out into the hallway she listened to him as he fell into step beside her. Letting children go and help made her nervous, but if they were above age, and signed up by choice, there was no legal reason that they couldn’t go. Her maternal instincts were just firing on all cylinders right now. Taking the paperwork from him she nodded for him to continue as she flipped through the pages that he had handed her. “Do we know how wide spread they’ve gotten at all? Are they still on the continent or did they get further than that?” If they had muggles all over the world talking about seeing dragons in Wales they were going to have International issues and she was going to have to consult Rowle. “Understaffing, on the part of the reserve?”

@ hank - 816 - olivia's outfit

MADE BY VEL OF GS + ADOXOGRPHY 2.0

He loved his job and sometimes he was great at it. Sometimes he was really bad at it. He let personal feelings and stress get in his way and his children kept him from being there when he needed to be, but as a single father he could only do so much. He had a Nanny who helped him keep the house clean and kept the children fed, but that was when he wasn’t there. Keeping the balance between love and money was never an easy thing. It was never going to be, but she knew that and Hank heard it from the older woman all the damned time nagging away in his ear when she was there.

He just needed his eldest two to actually pitch in and freaking help him. He supposed that threatening to kick his son out wouldn’t change things, so bribery was going to have to work when it came to them helping. Maybe that was the key to it all. He missed his wife, she would know what to do, and how to handle them. She had been so good with them and he just still felt so lost without her there to help She would have loved to see them like they were, see them growing to be such handsome lasses and lads.

He wondered what they would do with their lives, would they want to go work with the dragons? He knew that every single person who was out there was someone’s son, someone’s daughter, and they were at just as much risk as the others, no matter their background, it was bloody dangerous.

”I think the furthest they have gotten was to France, Ma’am. But she was contained easily and transported back this afternoon. There might have been some hatchlings, which is what they are most concerned with, getting them back to their mothers, but they have that well under control. “ The reports had not given him that information but an adorable little witch in the Magical Creatures division had.

”Yes. They had had some loses. Retirements mostly it seems, and they have been having a hard time recovering those numbers. Might I suggest reevaluating the budget and seeing if there can be a shift in their pay scale, see if that would bring people in?”

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Clock Don't

Stop

April was hard. December had been hard. Next December… Well… She didn’t want to think about next December. Olivia’s hand twitched towards her still perfectly flat stomach, but she couldn’t help but worry. She was going to have a baby, and her due date was three days after Aurora’s birthday had been. That was… Scary. It was a scary thought. But she was trying to hold it together. She was trying to not worry the things that she didn’t need to worry about just yet. She was sure that there would be plenty of time for worrying about things like that in the future. She was sure that she would spend a good portion of the next nine months worrying about that. Right now, she didn’t have the time to worry about things like that. Right now, she had to worry about what was going on around her, in this Ministry. She had to worry about the things that depended on her decisions. She changed her mind, and she could change the world. That’s how powerful she was.

And she knew it. Olivia knew that she was powerful enough to influence the world. She knew they type of pull that she had. And she didn’t think that she was going to be wasting it on something like this. This was something that seemed pretty handled. There wasn’t going to be any sleep lost over this one, though she knew that what he was suggesting was not their department. If he wanted to talk about things like that he needed to go upstairs and talk to Pansy Burke. She was the one that made those decision. Well, Pansy Parkinson. But it would be Burke, soon enough. She was the one that had the ear of the Minister for things like budgets. And Olivia didn’t think that a reserve not having enough funding was truly a government issue at all. They were privately owned, after all. They only reason that the Ministry was involved at all was because of the muggles.

When it came to dragons things got messy, and they often did. Olivia had been a National Security lawyer long enough to know that when dragons were in the picture things were going to take longer. Importing them twenty years ago had been a nightmare. Anything that had to do with them now was just something that she would have liked to pass off to nearly anyone else in the department. She didn’t exactly have the time to do things herself. She didn’t lead legal teams unless they needed the biggest guns that they had, and there was really no need for Olivia to find herself in a courtroom all that often. Which was partially why she and Isolde hid out in them so often. They could do their paperwork and listen to the endless droning on of the most mundane cases in the background. It was good for the soul. Or at least it was good for her soul.

It had been a while since they had done something like that though. Snuck off and played hooky in the basement while they were supposed to be upstairs working on something. They were working. They just weren’t doing it at their desks. Which she supposed was problematic if someone were to come looking for them, but she didn’t think that they did that all that often. Not enough for anyone to really need them both for whatever time they were gone. It wasn’t like were abandoning their Minister in the middle of a crisis or anything. “That’s good. Dragons are always worrisome.” And they were, she had never been, and didn’t think that she ever would be, a fan. “You can if you’d like, but that’s not really our department. You can suggest that they look into it, but since it’s not a Ministry reserve, there’s not much we can do about that part. And even if it were, you’d have to talk to Lady Parkinson about speaking to the Minister, and then talking to Lord Parkinson about his department budget. Which is probably already stretched thin.”

@ henry - 686 - olivia's outfit

MADE BY VEL OF GS + ADOXOGRPHY 2.0