Chapter 59: Nevermore
The very last thing Rabastan expected was a personal letter to him from the Minister herself arriving at breakfast the next day.
"A pity she isn't my type," he drawled, smirking at Rod and Bella as he tore it open. "Apparently she doesn't wish to speak to either of you."
He wondered if she was going to give him his crack at talking to Merlin and Nimue. While the prospect was vaguely interesting, it was more for bragging rights than anything else. He didn't see how he could improve the limited dealings their lot had established with the old druids.
Bellatrix bit into a slice of toast, a mild look of curiosity in her eyes.
"Well?" Rodolphus prodded. "What's it say?"
Rabastan took his time scanning the letter just to be a prick. After nearly a minute, Rod finally broke and reached a muscular arm across the table to snatch it away.
"She wants me to go raven and fly around to spy out what the Muggles are doing," Rabastan said. "I get a day off from Azkaban while you two sods get to go into work!"
"I see that," Rod said, tossing the letter down onto the center of the dining room table. "Took me an entire five seconds to read it, prat."
Rabastan snickered. "It was fun making you wait."
After breakfast, Rabastan went upstairs to his bedroom while Bella and Rod headed to the Ministry. He opened the window above his bed, then promptly stripped off his clothes. Once naked, he transformed into his Animagus form, that of a raven, and flew out the window.
The air was cold and crisp, and the streets of London were teaming with Muggles. Though this would've annoyed him on any normal day, because Muggles, today it was pleasing. He'd been sent out to spy on the activities of the Muggles, so having a ton of them out in droves as usual made his fucking job doable. Not to mention it appeared normal.
Muggles were always out in droves, there were so damned many of them, so seeing this today gave him a much needed sense of normality. It was the concern of the Minister and Grindelwald that Delphini was tampering with the Muggles, so the more normal they appeared, the better... Unless their normality was merely a guise under which they hid the really weird shit. There he went being paranoid, but wasn't that healthy to a degree?
Rabastan was distracted from his musings by a flash of light that nearly hurt his eyes. It was the sun bouncing off a flat little thing with a screen that one of the Muggles walking in the street held in his hand. After spotting that one, he noticed that more and more Muggles had these little flat devices. They either held them against their ear and talked into them like a phone, or read from them like a book, all while walking. Some even ran into one another or, in a particularly astounding case, caused cars to blast their obnoxious horns when one walked into the middle of the road while reading the thing in her hand.
He wondered idly if Delphini could be using the flat things to somehow control or command the Muggles. He'd have liked to swoop down and have a read of what was on the screens that every Muggle found so fascinating, but the one time he tried, the Muggle in question screamed and nearly shit herself. Apparently, she feared he was about to peck her eyes out... Which, frankly, didn't seem like a bad idea. Her screaming was shrill and hurt his ears!
After that incident, he didn't try again, assuming the little Minister wouldn't want him to draw untoward attention to himself. Eventually he landed on the ground beside a trash can, pretending to peck about for fallen scraps outside a restaurant where a group of Muggles clustered to talk.
If he was fortunate, they'd say something interesting or useful. Sadly, fortune did not see fit to smile on a poor raven that day, for the Muggles were only bickering about politics. It appeared the tendency to bitch about politics was one thing Muggles and wizards had in common. With a caw of disgust, Rabastan flapped his wings and launched into the air.
Though he diligently flew around London all day, he didn't see anything else that he considered noteworthy. From time to time, he'd rest high in the branches of a tree to better watch the Muggles pass, and at one point, even on the sill of an open window, to listen to a Muggle news broadcast but nothing. To his annoyance, not even the news spoke of what was on the little flat screen things that had the Muggles reading them so avidly.
His day among the Muggles did teach him that their taste in music and fashion was getting worse and worse. Their children were little wild animals with no discipline or social graces. What would such little savages grow up to be but big savages? By the time the sun began to set he was more than happy to wing his way back the hell home to Raven's Nest. His bedroom window was still open. Fortunately, Harold hadn't closed it. If the elf had, it would've been Rabastan's fault for not telling him to leave it alone.
Once inside with the window shut, Rabastan took his human form again and got dressed for dinner. Flying around all day had given him a huge appetite to go right along with his huge Muggle-induced headache. As he headed downstairs to look for Rod and Bella in the library, he noted how sore the muscles in his arms were from all the damned flying when they'd been wings. He was in shape, because working Shadow Ops made being in shape a must, but flying activated a different group of muscles entirely and those bastards were out of shape.
"How was it," Bella asked as soon as he walked in. "Anything interesting?"
Sighing, he flopped into his favorite chair and told them of his day. When he was finished, Bellatrix smirked.
"So was it preferable to working with us at Azkaban, then?"
"Fuck off," Rabastan growled and Rodolphus chuckled.
"We take that as a no." Grinning happily at his brother, Rodolphus lounged back in his chair as if it was a throne. "Looks like Baby Bro will be happy to join us sods at work tomorrow, Bella," he observed. "He may have discovered a new appreciation for our work after slumming among the Muggles all day."
"I should think so," Bellatrix drawled.
With a sigh, Rabastan hauled himself up out of his chair and went over to the large oak desk in the corner of the library. "I'm going to get my report to the Minister over with while it's all still fresh in my mind," he muttered as he started writing. He concluded by saying that if anyone at the Ministry knew what the Muggles read on the flat things on which they also seemed to talk, he'd love to know.
His answer came the next morning at breakfast. When Harold handed him the letter, he hoped it wasn't another request from the bloody Minister that he fly around bloody London all day again bloody Muggle watching! He breathed easier when he saw that it was just a reply, thanking him and answering his question about the Muggle device that had so perplexed him.
"The Minister says that little flat thing is one of those Muggle telephones," he told Bella and Rod incredulously. "The blasted thing didn't look a bit like a telephone to me. I do recall those from Muggle studies, they had two bits and a curly cord thing."
Rod nodded. "Yeah, I remember that."
"Well, she says now they show written text as well, like the news or personal correspondences, but I can't for the life of me grasp how that'd work," Rabastan complained.
"It's a stupid Muggle thing. We truly would not understand," Bella said.
"She says she has no idea what they all could've been reading so intently that they weren't even looking up or watching where they were going enmasse like that. She considers that a useful observation, so my day was not a waste at least," Rabastan concluded.
"And now, it's off to Azkaban, where you can release the frustrations of yesterday by torturing a prisoner or three," Rodolphus said, giving him a cheerful smile.