Alone in the Corner [Liz/open]

[Logan Greyson Smith]

Logan had just finished a job in which he had chased down a wanted man, handcuffed him and released him in the Ministry branch in Diagon Alley.  He was apparently wanted for doing some dark magic and hurting some other wizards.  Some sort of Neo-Death Eater type without a master, a freelance Death Eater, of a sort.  Logan had quite a bit of difficulty tracking him down, a fool proof disguise.  Hiding in plain sight.  While it was something Logan considered, he had assumed that if that were the case, he would be turned in at some point before Logan had to find him.  He didn't like the thought of that.  Logan preferred figuring everything out himself over someone else beating him to the punch.

The fairly fresh knowledge of Logan's actual survival and faking of his death had just begun to spread really, even though he had come back almost a year ago to the general public.  It just took a little while to spread the word of his actual return.  And many people didn't seem to like it very much.  Well, him.  In his time as a mercenary before he was sent after his brother, he had made a lot of enemies, and almost no friends.  Then again, Logan was never good at making friends.  Not that he cared.

So, anyways, Logan collected the reward on the man's head and made his way to the Leaky Cauldron where he ordered a drink and a plate of food, taking a booth in the corner of the pub.  It annoyed him that his body needed food.  He didn't not enjoy eating food, but he almost never enjoyed actually eating food either.  He only ate because he had to or his body would not support his lifestyle.  Logan took his seat and observed the entire pub as he slowly ate, seeing if he could learn something new (that didn't happen very often) or if he could see a possible new job opportunity.  Logan was good at spotting job opportunities, as he had done for the past... well couple of decades.  Ever since he faked his death in early 1998 he had been doing things like this, though normally he would disguise himself.  Actually, it felt good not to have to disguise himself anymore, like a burden was lifted off of him. 

[Lisette Magdelene Weasley]

Liz had just gotten off of her first solo shift as an Auror. It was true that Aurors weren't as needed with the Dark Lord gone, but she was pretty new at the game and still needed help. That day hadn't been too hard. They picked up another of those neo-Death Eater types that made her blood boil, and then she clocked out. It seemed like she did more paperwork than anything else.

She ducked inside the pub and ordered her customary plate of chips and butterbeer before looking around for a place to sit. She didn't notice anyone sitting at her usual table in the corner, so she headed back there. She liked to be able to watch everyone moving around and talking.

...she may have been a little paranoid.

She slid into the booth across from Logan and looked up. That was around the time that she finally figured out that Logan was sitting there.

"Oh! I'm sorry, mate, I'll move," she offered.

[Logan Greyson Smith]

Logan had been enjoying a nice study, in which he recognized a couple that was going to break up in a week.  If he saw them again, he could prove his theory.  However, no one seemed like they would be a good client to approach right now.  And then he spotted a curious young woman.  Red hair, obviously a Weasley.  Words appeared around her.  Auror, as shown by the way she carried herself and her wand.  Twenties, by the looks of her, probably lower twenties to mid twenties.  And for some reason he was zeroing in on her.  And she was heading his way.  Luckily she hadn't noticed he was paying an awful amount of his brain power that was being focused on her.  He didn't know why, even though he could probably tell much more about her by just looking at her, probably her entire life. 

And then she sat next to him.  Logan took a sip of his butterbeer and raised an eyebrow at her. 

"It's alright.  You can stay," Logan replied setting his glass on the table.  He continued to scan the crowd, but he kept a thought staying on this woman.  Perhaps by talking with the girl, he could understand what it was that made his mind commit this much brain power to figuring her out.  Perhaps it was the fact that she didn't wear everything on her face, and he actually had to pay attention to read her.  Occlumens, perhaps?  He always had more trouble with them.

[Lisette Magdelene Weasley]

She glanced around herself on instinct as she sat down. Call it instinct, call it paranoid twitch. Her father was crushed by a wall, and her mother caught unawares by a Death Eater. When Liz died, nobody would be able to say that she was too distracted to fight. She preferred to think that she'd go down swinging. Considering how peaceful things were, that was unlikely.

She raised an eyebrow at him and took a sip of her own butterbeer. He seemed. Weird. Off. She wasn't sure what the word she was aiming for was, but there was something about him that put her on edge. Then again, all strangers tended to put her on edge. She shrugged it off and smiled a little.
"You sure?" she asked.

[Logan Greyson Smith]

Logan glanced at moment back at the Weasley and shrugged.  Not like he cared if she sat there anyways, except the fact he had a wish to figure more out about her.  "As long as you don't distract me."  Now, which Weasley was she?  A woman, younger, so it wasn't the ones that had gone to school a couple years older than him, so it was one of their children, and an auror.  Thing was, with the Weasleys, they all seemed to want to be some sort of Auror or Dark wizard catcher... well a good handful.

"Which Weasley are you, auror?" Logan asked.  He subconsciously had put the two biggest pieces of information into the question, as a sort of gloat of how smart he was, though consciously if the idea had occurred to him, he would have done the same anyways.  Always nice when the two agree with each other.  Obviously she was of the same nature as he, going to the corner of the room to eat instead of elsewhere.  Though her purpose, Logan was sure, was probably quite different than his. 

[Lisette Magdelene Weasley]

She sipped her butterbeer,ate a chip and looked around. When she'd gotten her bangs cut, Uncle Harry had warned her that they would make seeing hard and put her in danger, but they'd proven useful for people watching. It was hard to tell if her eyes had moved when her bangs shielded them. Uncle Harry was just a spoilsport.

She smiled at him briefly after he said that she could sit there and jumped a little when he addressed her again. He hadn't come off as much of a conversationalist.

His question made her frown a little and mentally take better stock of the guy. Older, probably in his late thirties. She still thought that he looked shifty, and how did he know that she was an Auror...? She wasn't wearing anything that distinguished her as one; she wasn't even wearing robes! She left those at work.

She smiled and laughed off her discomfort.

"Lisette, m'friends call me Liz. And you?"

[Logan Greyson Smith]

Lisette Weasley, eh? Logan actually chuckled a little at the thought. She was the dead twin’s daughter then. The one who occasionally worked at her father’s store. No wonder she wanted to sit in the corner where Logan preferred to sit as well. Her father had died in battle and her mother was dead as well. Logan made it his mission to know about anyone of any sort of interest, and Lisette Weasley was one of those people he knew very little about, as he hadn’t ever thought the Weasley was that important. There were the Potters that Logan kept an eye on and the children of Ronald Weasley and Hermione Granger, but the others weren’t very important to him. Perhaps he should’ve paid more attention to the other Weasleys. However, he did already have some knowledge of her.

“Logan Smith,” Logan answered continuing to scan the crowd, trying to look busy, though his mind seemed to focus on Lisette Weasley. That was something he hated. When he began to focus on something he couldn’t stop focusing until he figured it out. And when that focusing was on a person, it was difficult to stop focusing. Such as his brother. It took him four years to stop focusing on figuring out his brother. It was one of the only mysteries that he had given up on.

[Lisette Magdelene Weasley]

She didn't like to talk about her parents. She never got to know them, and it became more than just a little bit of a raw subject with her as she was growing up. If she heard one more person (that wasn't her grandma in one of her more emotional moments) comment on how much like Fred she looked, Liz was going to lose her mind. She loved working at her dad's joke store, but it wasn't a feasible full-time job. She tended to remind her uncle George too much of Fred, and that made her feel bad. She would be sort of happy to not be considered a person of interest, what with being an Auror and all. A lot of people knowing who she was would be a bit of a problem, and she really didn't need to give her family more fuel for their constant arguments that she needed to pick a safer career, God bless them. She appreciated their concern, but she knew what she was doing. At least, she had a pretty solid idea of what she was doing. At twenty-two years-old, though, she would hope that she had a pretty solid idea of what she was doing.

She continued to watch the crowd. Truthfully, she was hoping to see one of her old friends from school. His name was Octavian McKellen; she hadn't heard much from him since they graduated, and she was starting to get concerned. It wasn't like Tavi to just fall off the face of the Earth like he had. She didn't know where he lived, or she would have already looked, so that left her looking around in concern and trying to find him.

She hummed in acknowledgement of his name, trying to match it up with a name in the veritable database of wanted names in her head. Not wanted, but...

"You don't seem very dead," she commented offhandedly.

[Logan Greyson Smith]

Logan couldn't help but smile at the thought that Lisette had heard of him. He hadn't actually known just how much he had been watched during that year and it was always a nice sight to see the surprise of how he was still remember even this long afterwards. However, she was an auror, and she was probably trained to learn about people like him and the possibility of them coming back. Logan didn't smile normally, even when there was the surprise, but he smiled because of her seeming lack thereof. It was a nice different sort of reaction. He even wondered if she was used rose as people rising. Again, probably because she was an auror and hey faced that situation occasionally.

"No, I'm not," Logan replied plainly before turning his attention towards her, finding the crowd quite boring.

There was something that made the word 'missing someone' appear around her. Perhaps the way she was looking around, or something else that he was subconsciously picking up. Odd. Aurors didn't usually give him the impression that they had a mystery for him to solve.  At least it was worth an ask, but first he needed to gauge whether or not she would even consider hiring him, though he didn't much care for the pay, but the mystery... He still had to make a living and be able to avoid boring cases, which he wouldn't if he was focused on earning money more than the enjoyment of the mystery.

[Lisette Magdelene Weasley]

She observed him out of the corner of her eye as she continued to look around. She only heard of Logan because of her work with the Ministry, and hadn't really been that interested at the time. She didn't have much time for taking in every detail of someone's life that she wasn't trying to arrest. She didn't have much time for the details of people's lives who she was trying to arrest, but she made time for those. They could be beneficial sometimes.

She did, of course, miss Tavi. He'd been her best friend in school, and she hadn't had a lot of those. Liz wasn't the social butterfly that her parents were. She'd been shy and awkward while she went to Hogwarts and hadn't become comfortable in her own skin until relatively recently. Adulthood had helped her self-confidence a lot.

She finally looked directly at Logan and, mentally, took note of his defining features, in case she had to arrest him. It was always a possibility.

"Neat trick, that."

[Logan Greyson Smith]

Neat?  Neat?  NEAT?  Logan told his mind to calm the heck down.

Logan's first thought that came to mind when she called it a neat trick that he had done was to snap back with a bitter 'You try being the 17 year old squib, in a wizard's war, who has to fake his death so he didn't have to kill his brother'.  Regardless of what some people thought, Logan had feelings.  He just didn't show them often.  Nor did people normally get to see him get angry.  The only time that happened was when someone insulted his brother.  Insults to him were not as bad to him, though he may get angry on the inside. 

People never understood the sort of things he had to go through, and that was what made him dislike everyone else.  There were so few who could understand.  He had lost his parents, like Lisette had, then lost his adoptive parents, and then he was sent to a terrible orphanage where he was surrounded by idiots and then Hogwarts came, and yet again people there did not seem to understand him, being the squib that he was.  And so, he had set out to prove that he could be just as good as any wizard out there without magic. 

However, even then, people didn't understand him when they didn't know he wasn't magical.  Because he was incredibly intelligent and his mind could sense things that he didn't even know how his mind sensed them, though sometimes he could figure out a reason why, other people just seem boring to him.  He had yet to meet anyone quite like himself, if he might say so himself.

So instead of commenting on the 'neat trick' statement, Logan decided he would go the route of, 'oh yeah, I'll show you how neat I am route'.  "So, who's gone missing?"  A simple sentence that conveyed that he noticed she was looking for someone, to give her another taste of his neatness. 

[Lisette Magdelene Weasley]

She'd been referring to his disappearing act, but it wasn't the first time that Liz had phrased things badly. She said what came to mind at a given moment; that wasn't always a good thing. Then again, doing it was partially intentional on her part. She was training to be an interrogator, and the ability to get under people's skin was definitely useful.

Right now, for example, he seemed agitated. She took note of that in the back of her mind for later. She might have to arrest him someday, and knowing his berserk button would help her do her job. Better that than having to hit him or something. She found physical violence distasteful.

When Liz was in primary school, she'd been picked on a lot by the other students. She didn't have parents, and she had a hard time reading, and, in hindsight, that made her a pretty prime target for it. She'd be damned if she just took it, though. She'd gotten into a lot of fights, leading all the way up to her time in Hogwarts.

She smiled wryly when he asked about Tavi. She wasn't going to just spill her guts to a stranger in a pub. Ever.

"Nobody. Funny that you'd get that impression."

[Logan Greyson Smith]

More words appeared around her.  Liar.  Liar.  Liar.  They were all the same word.  Logan raised an eyebrow when she had said there was no one missing.  Which meant that it was something she'd like to keep close.  Given she was sitting in the corner, she was probably paranoid (which he was as well, he just wouldn't admit it or at least not call it paranoia), and everything could be a secret.  But he knew that she was lying.  Logan studied her for a moment before he looked away like he had become bored, when it was far from it.  Someone important, those words popped up in his vision. 

"You know the kind of work I do," Logan said his eyes darting around the room with words popping up around the people.  Cheater.  Thief.  Homeless.  Freloader.  It was all becoming a little too much.  He shouldn't have let his blood pressure get up, his sensitivity tended to increase when that happened.  Logan began tapping a finger against his leg so Liz wouldn't see it.  He blinked and quickly turned back so he could see her again, allowing his brain to relax and simply focus on her, which helped, as he was starting to get a headache from looking at the crowd now.

"I could find... this person," Logan suggested, "For the right price, of course."  Unless it was a boring mystery, but the more he looked at her, the more he was convinced that even if the missing person thing wasn't interesting, she was more mystery than he required to take a job.

[Lisette Magdelene Weasley]

She peered around the room one more time before just giving up on that entirely. She didn't even know why she ever thought that Tavi might come to a place like this to start with. He was always a bit of a stick in the mud. He'd probably be hanging around somewhere boring. Like a library.

She tried really hard to come across as calm and in-control, but it got hard sometimes. That didn't mean that she would ever bother with dropping the act. It helped ease her paranoia, like very little else ever did. One day, she would do something about that problem of hers. One day.

She raised an eyebrow at him when he brought up what he did for a living. She waited until he was done talking to shake her head and laugh.

"Whatever your price is, mate, I can't afford it."

[Logan Greyson Smith]

Logan stopping tapping on his leg and folding his hands together in front of him on the table, his elbows propping his hands up so they were close to his face.  He smiled with a grin that he usually wore when something had occurred to him that he found amusing.  However, this time the reason he wore the grin was because he had an idea of keeping this mystery around.  Sure, she seemed to a normal person like she was just some other auror, which usually tended to be very boring people, but there was something about Liz that Logan found just so interesting, like something about her that he couldn't figure out by just a look. 

"All I need in payment is the mystery," Logan stated.  He normally wouldn't have even offered to do a job for free, but his mind would not get off of this girl, and he knew it, unless he solved the mystery of what was so... different about her.  What made his mind stick on her.  Logan took a sip of his almost empty butterbeer.  If anyone knew that when a mystery was presented to him he wouldn't stop until he solved it, he would be broke quite quickly, which is why he has had to hide the weakness of his.