on opposite ends | vsoo

ANOTHER NAME ON THE PAPER

CHAPTER SEVEN. 

It's difficult to tell where the destruction starts and where it ends. The aftermath of the battle clearly tells a tale of lives lost to the triumph of evil. The wreckage is far more worse than she had imagined or seen in the newspapers; this is like a bloodbath but without the actual blood splattered along the cobblestone streets. Large rocks and rubble that was once Gringotts scatter around her in a pile of wasted effort and devastating defeat.

Jisoo clenches her fists by her side. She stands in the middle of the carnage. Gringotts was situated in the heart of Diagon Alley but the Ministry made sure to evacuate everyone out of the area before the Death Eaters had arrived so there were no civilian casualties, or at least that's what she had read in the paper. She looks around and only two shops are open, the rest have either been closed down or damaged from the battle here. There's not a single soul in sight, just Kim Jisoo trying to figure out how to make this feeling of helplessness and hopelessness from inside her disappear.

But there was something else bothering her. It's a strange sensation that she's felt ever since she arrived in the Ministry and it didn't seem to be in tune with her current turmoil of emotions.

Jisoo knew what it was like being tracked because that's what made her a good tracker herself.

She walks over chunks of stone, eyes scanning her surroundings for anything out of the ordinary that she might have missed on her first perimeter check when she arrived just a minute ago.

She sees him standing in the shadows of the dilapidating buildings a few meters away and Jisoo bravely trudges forward without hesitation, wand at the ready. Her feet carry her to a secluded alleyway where the Confedaration spy stood, standing before her with a smug look on his face that Jisoo wants to wipe away with a hex.

"Bold of you to put a tracking spell on me." She's not sure if she should be angry or annoyed or impressed at the fact that she hadn't noticed she was being tracked right when the spell had hit her, it must've been because she was so rattled back at Dedham to have realized it sooner.

The man pushes the sleeves of his robes back to reveal a gold watch and bare, smooth skin with no Dark Mark in sight. "That took you thirty-four minutes to realize." He's here in Diagon Alley because he had followed her.

"Shorter," Jisoo says rather defensively. "I had to talk with my superior."

The man, whose name she still doesn't know but she'll find out soon one way or another, regards her with a raised eyebrow. "Why are you here though?" Again, he talks to her as if they were talking about the most mundane things and worse, as if they knew each other.

"Why are you talking so casually to me?" She decides that this spy is annoying her but she doesn't want to show it too much because he seems like the type of person who would revel at the thought of pushing Jisoo's buttons too far. "What's your mission exactly? Why are you following me? I thought you'd be just a messenger, like a sort of warning signal for the Ministry." Apparently she thought wrong because he was still sticking around and poking his nose in other people's business.