#and anyone sent probably got to Hi I'm here on behalf of the Dark Lor--

[calleo-bricriu]

Business as Usual.

(( This was some Discord RP and conversation with @directoryandle & Calleo that I decided to clean up months later.

Most of the RP that lead to it took place off of Tumblr as well but the gist of it comes down to:

1. Calleo did, as he usually does by virture of the kind of magic he works with, end up attracting attention he didn't want in the form of  @absintheabsence ‘s Grindelwald.

2. He avoided most of it for the better part of a decade by either refusing to see anyone that was sent to try and convince him to go willingly using his, "Get on my calendar, which is packed full for the foreseeable future" deflection method, not answering owls, or occasionally answering the more interesting owls that might have come wrapped in complicated spell work with what can be most succinctly described as, "Thanks, that was fun! But, also, still not interested."

3. Eventually, the grandfather on his mother's side, who is an amazing person that helped design and at least begin execution of a couple of different genocide plans, was sent to talk to Calleo's mother who would then (it was assumed) talk to Calleo, which didn't work out well as she interpreted it as a threat toward her only kid and cut contact.

4. By that point, it was late 1939, and there was a shift in tactics requesting one of the Ministry's archivists visit for Perfectly Benign Work Related Reasons, nobody else in their right mind wanted to set foot anywhere near continental Europe, Calleo drew the short straw in the department, and was told to "just go and get it over with, they're not going to kill you."

5. They didn't kill him, but it was clearly one of those things that was planned out well enough that they'd been banking on the Department of Mysteries making Calleo go and he was pretty quickly snapped up and thrown into a cell in Nurmengard to sit for a few days while the building temporarily stripped him of the ability to use magic to make sure he couldn't fight back in a way that might have been dangerous to anyone.

6. And he was given two ultimatums by @absintheabsence  after he decided he was done fucking Calleo up enough over the whole 10+ years of daring to not be super interested and eager to jump ship--and also over a lot of really terrible puns and Calleo still being more than happy to still run his mouth because if you’re probably going to die anyway you might as well:

#1. Stay, and everything will be nice or be let go and have everyone who might have meant anything to him be targeted in retribution for the rudeness of not being impressed enough to want to voluntarily stay. Possibly safe to say that Grindelwald had no concept of what the word "voluntarily" meant but, there you go.

AND

#2. Be a glorified, but typically caged, house pet more or less, or go back and spend the next however long it takes you to die down there sitting in one of the prisoner cells that keeps you from using magic and is staffed by people who have no business being in charge of other people.

He chose the "stay 'voluntarily' as a glorified house pet" option with the negotiated aspect of, "Fine, but you have to make it look like a kidnapping so I can go back to work at the Ministry later," (which was accepted because, of course, Grindelwald was of the opinion that there was no conceivable way he could lose the war) and spent the next five or so years confined to one of about three rooms in the Not Prison areas of Nurmengard.

By 1945, it was "later". Once occupying forces had both decided to check the towers to see if anyone was up there and verified he was who he said he was (which was, above all else, “property of the Department of Mysteries”; nobody typically wants to keep the Department of Mysteries from getting its stolen things back in a timely manner), got what amounted to, "Either go to his office and get my card deck and runes out of the top right drawer or let me go and get them, then I'm going back to London", got his two things back, and...went immediately back to work. ))

Calleo briefly paused after stepping out of the lift, mostly out of amazement that it was working properly and not broken down again; a quick glance at the magic still--not quite humming, but not exactly falling to pieces just yet--going around them told him they'd been recently propped back up in a way that clearly stated it hadn't been Maintenance's work.

Director must have done it at some point in the recent past.

The three offices directly off of the lift, Calleo noticed, were still empty and looked to have been empty since he'd left. Even before he'd left, they'd been empty since mid-1926.  Trying to get the Director to either hire three new people or let him do it had been a losing, uphill battle as the Director's main focus had been keeping attention off of the Archvies due to the political climate and hiring anyone would have swiveled attention down that way.

He figured he'd find out just how far behind the department had fallen sooner rather than later as it'd likely be one of the first few things the Director would say to him.

He also wasn't about to stop in to the Director's office for a chat as chances were the answer the Director would have about how far behind the department was would have the word 'years' tacked on behind the number so Calleo opted for the same, deadpan, automatic, "'Morning, Director," he'd been using since 1912, kept walking, and settled back at his desk to figure out what (if anything) had been left just sitting there for the last five years and what was inexplicably newer.

Wouldn't have been the first time Director Yandle had either simply left old work there for Calleo or dropped something newer off, assuming he'd be in eventually.

Director Yandle heard the lift doors open and shut and didn't think all that much of it at first. People did still come down to the Archives, after all. Not often, but they did still come down now and again. For the most part, it was nearly always someone from Magical Law Enforcement wanting him to look up some tidbit of information here and there, but nothing that took too much of his time.

This morning, however, his routine of quiet was shattered by the old routine of anything but quiet starting up again.

If he'd been anyone else, Calleo might have had someone apparate directly into his office if only out of complete and utter surprise that he'd just--turned back up without any explanation after having been gone for half a decade without any explanation.

The Director had a better grip on himself and despite that being his first inclination, he instead finished the paperwork he'd been working on, sent it off, and very calmly stood and walked into Calleo's office, stopping directly in front of his Archivist's desk.

He gave Calleo a good minute to stop what he was doing and acknowledge that someone else was there and when that didn't happen, the Director laid his hands on the desk and leaned partway across it, and spoke.

"Where the HELL have you been?" That wasn't strictly what he'd meant to say, and he surprised himself with how venomous it came out. He had meant to ask where Calleo had been just...not quite that aggressively.

"Up a tower."

Calleo had noticed that Director Yandle had entered the room and that he was standing on the other side of the desk; he was also not necessarily in the mood for conversation, especially conversation liable to spin him off on an entire rant about where he'd been and what he'd been doing for the last few years.

While he hadn't been doing anything horrible or even questionable, and couldn't even say that it had been all that unpleasant. Still, it was something he'd done because non-compliance would have made everything markedly worse and it certainly wasn't something he wanted to chat with his department director about.

The noise Calleo received as a response could best be described as derisive disbelief with the repeating of what he'd just said confirming it. Up a tower indeed; what kind of answer was that? He'd been gone for years! The only things that might have spent years "up a tower" were bats and pigeons and Calleo was neither of those things as far as the Director was aware.

"You can't possibly expect me to believe you've spent five years in a tower somewhere! Why didn't you just leave?"

"The door was locked from the outside." Calleo shrugged matter-of-factly.

"And not one hundred percent of the time, no," the first part of his response was more a sigh than words, "but it was where I spent the majority of my time. In that regard, I do expect you to believe it."

"You ought to be grateful I know what year it is as anyone else walking into this office and looking at the papers on my desk might assume time stopped in--" Calleo paused briefly to leaf through the papers, "--early autumn of 1939, which I'm certain," he purposely did not miss smacking Director Yandle's hands with a rolled up copy of that morning's Daily Prophet, with the date showing the year to be 1945 facing up, "it did not."

"It's been five years. You've been gone for five years without a single word!" Director Yandle snatched his hands back after having them swatted, not at all under the impression that it had been done accidentally, and idly rubbed the back of one of them.

"Yes, and that's largely your fault, isn't it?" Calleo still hadn't looked up from what he was working on, a fact that both did not escape the Director and did nothing to de-escalate the building argument. Also not helping to de-escalate anything was the fact that Calleo's rhetorical question was spat back at Director Yandle with the same venom as the Director's initial greeting of Calleo contained.

"You are, after all, the one who decided granting that request was a good idea. If you'd had a bit more sense, you'd have ignored it the same way I ignored it for over a decade; I'll be expecting back pay, including weekends and holidays, as an aside," he continued as a long overdue piece of paperwork folded itself and flew out of the room to finally be delivered, "since I was technically sent 'on Ministry business' on your orders."

In an instant, the Director was on the other side of the desk and Calleo had found his chair (with him in it) whipped around to face the other Wizard. Calleo had managed to move his arms out of the way before Director Yandle could pin them against the chair arms when his own hands slammed down onto them and it didn't help matters at all that Calleo casually reached over one of the Director's arms to pick up the paperwork he'd been reading to continue reading it.

When his idiot subordinate didn't have the courtesy to put the paperwork down, Director Yandle snatched it out of his hands and threw it back onto the desk while, in the same motion, grabbing Calleo's jaw to force the other man to look at him.

It struck the Director that the look he initially received from Calleo reminded him more of a teenager annoyed at being lectured for having missed curfew than it did of a Wizard only a few months shy of sixty who had (allegedly) been what would have technically amounted to a prisoner of war at this point.

Still, Calleo didn't make any move to pull away and instead only slipped a hand up between himself and Director Yandle to remove his glasses, after which he simply sat there and waited for the Director to finish looking for whatever it was he was looking for in his mind.

"The next time one of these Dark Lords pops up, Calleo," slowly the grip he had on Calleo released, and he was now leaning on the chair arms again and passively watching, "do both of us a favour and just keep your head down."

"And how is it you imagined I survived this one?" Calleo's mostly neutral expression split into a sharp grin as Director Yandle drew back from the statement alone, allowing Calleo to turn back toward his desk and pick up the paperwork that had been rudely all but smacked from his hands a few minutes prior.

For what seemed much longer than only a few seconds, the Director stood there trying to decide whether or not he wanted to think too much about the answer to that question and eventually decided that he absolutely did not. He did, however, fish a book of matches with a particularly clever illustration of a cat and some pun he couldn't seem to fully recall offhand out of one of his pockets.

The book of matches he dropped directly in front of Calleo before Director Yandle turned to head back to his own office, "Light yourself back up and get to work; we're three years behind."

A few minutes later, through the thin wall separating his office from the Director's came muffled-by-a-layer-of-books-on-each-side, "Good morning to you as well."