Broken Things [One-Shot]

[Bianca Alia Rivera]

February 2026

Bianca had never considered being Muggleborn to be an important aspect of her identity – at least, not before she’d first started her long stint at the Ministry. So she had come from a Muggle background…so what? She wasn’t fundamentally different from any homegrown witch who had spent her whole life around magic, at least not in any way that mattered. There were some subjects she excelled at, some she didn’t, and a few that had sounded like gibberish until receiving a proper explanation. But that didn’t mean anything – English had also sounded like nonsense until she had learned, and, for that matter, so did any other thing that didn’t come automatically installed at birth. Unfortunately, the wizarding world was not particularly talented at identifying problem areas, and it was even worse at admitting that something needed to change. Until recently, magical society seemed to have changed very little from what it looked like in medieval times – until it had all suddenly started to transform at once. As usual, it was easy enough to identify which elements were open to it, and which weren’t. Which groups suddenly found themselves enjoying unprecedented rights – consider your werewolves or vampires, even your long-marginalized house-elves – and which suddenly found themselves as average as anyone else, no longer enshrined in some special status above it all (three guesses who).

As an outside observer, Bianca had spent her school years reserving judgment – she hadn’t known much beyond Castelobruxo’s walls, isolated as it was from most of the magical community. But school hadn’t been about deciding to keep everything exactly as it was, or even more insane – to burn it all down and simply start over. No, school had been a learning experience in every sense of the word. Bianca had left Castelobruxo feeling like she knew it all – the training she needed to become an Auror, every curse and poison and Dark mischief someone might throw her way. It…had taken her a long time to learn that knowing your magic, being good at your job…it mattered very little in the grand scheme of things. And so, enter the worst crucible she had ever faced, the harshest teacher, the most unforgiving arena meant to challenge anything you thought you knew…the Ministry.

The Ministry, like anything else in life, had its three main elements – the good, the bad, and the ugly. The key to succeeding was to understand all three and how each could be conquered in turn. The good? The Ministry did fill important functions, and there were people who legitimately wanted nothing more than for wizarding society to be safe and happy. Wizengamot members that met regularly with the public they were charged with representing, Aurors that worked long hours away from their families to bring in Dark wizards, even the employees responsible for organizing the Quidditch matches that never failed to fire up British society. The bad? As the centralized authority for Britain’s magical community, the Ministry was big, a sprawling mass of bureaucracy and tangled red tape that could be impossible to navigate with any kind of speed or dexterity. All one could hope to do in these situations was meet the right person that was in the right mood to help. Otherwise you could wait for weeks or months for even the simplest thing.

And the ugly? The ugly was a beast with multiple heads, the crushing reality that life wasn’t all unicorns and rainbows. The ugly was corruption, deeply embedded in every echelon of the Ministry that favored certain individuals or groups for no better reason than the weakness of humans. The ugly was being a cog in a machine that didn’t care about you, that would do its absolute best to crush you every single day – and the day you stopped fighting, the day you accepted that your dreams were unrealistic and this reality was all there was…well, it was easy enough to spot which employees had reached that point. And the ugly was the simple fact that the Ministry didn’t really care about many of the people it was sworn to protect. That justice didn’t exist in many cases, and you had to settle for vengeance where you could, and being unsatisfied the rest of the time.

Bianca had learned those lessons– and for a long time, she had stopped fighting. What else was there to do when so much had been taken from you, and the worst part – when you had willingly given it for years. She had spent most of her years as an Auror being hopelessly naïve about how the world worked, and when those lofty ideals had been Cursed out of her in a dark alley in south London…well, then she’d spent her years at Interpol safely behind a desk, pretending the world couldn’t touch her. So she was Muggleborn, so what? Nobody needed to know, nobody needed to expect anything special from her. She’d tried, and it had led to absolutely nothing. Worse than nothing, because it had led to deep loss. A sense that once something was gone, it could never come back – and, well maybe it was better that way. It was impossible to get hurt if you just didn’t care. She had felt the ice begin to melt, only a fraction, the smallest bit, after reading about that first murder on the train. And then again, and again, the names of Muggleborns littering the obituaries, a few small lines of black text being the last indication they had ever existed at all before the world forgot about them. Something pulled at her heart, screaming at her to see, to observe, to bear witness, after the events of the Triwizard Tournament and its tragic end. Ilvermorny, Hogsmeade, Azkaban, Quidditch. Every newspaper headline was another piece of straw on her back, another pebble added to the imminent avalanche. Oh, the wizarding world was paying attention, no doubt about that. But Bianca felt the glacier sliding away, melting into nothing at every meaningful omission in the midst of investigations, every time a certain fact was overlooked in discussions about the Purifiers. There was outcry about magical casualties – every single magical race, wizards included, was too proud and self-absorbed to allow that to go unmentioned. But there were voices being ignored, helpless, at the mercy of magical beings with more power.

Eventually she couldn’t bear it anymore. Eventually it was going to need to come out. The day was like any other. Arriving at the office before the sun had risen, sitting down for her morning briefing with all the senior members of her staff and the Auror and Hit Wizard offices. “The escaped inmate, identified at the scene as Derek Alton, was chased into a Muggle library. My squad was able to cut him off before he could enter the Chief Warlock’s meet-and-greet,” the head of the Hit Wizard office droned on, shuffling papers in front of him. Bianca leaned back in her chair, listening disinterestedly to his account – the head of the Aurors was much more obvious in his boredom as he stifled a yawn and failed to do the same with his eye roll. “On with it, man, before I start wishing Alton had run into this meeting instead,” he finally complained. The Hit Wizard flushed and continued. “Well anyway, after a brief firefight in which two Muggles were killed and one of my squad injured, we finally brought Alton into custody. All in all a relatively positive outcome, one more convict off the streets and only minimal impact on the squad,” he finished hastily, shuffling his papers again with a satisfied smile. It quickly slid off his face and he quailed at the hard expression that had settled on Bianca’s face. She finally sat up, leaning forward to place her elbows on the table and fix the Head Hit Wizard with a glare only a few degrees below an icy fury. “A relatively positive outcome?” Bianca repeated slowly, enunciating every word carefully. The Hit Wizard gulped but didn’t say anything, so Bianca fixed him with a heavy gaze.

“What procedures has your office developed to clear the area of Muggles before an operation?”

“I…I don’t understand.”

“You knew that Alton intended to target the Chief Warlock, yes?”

“Yes, we did, thanks to an overhead conversation at-”

“One word answers. You knew that Alton would attempt to attack the Chief Warlock, and that his meeting was located in a densely populated Muggle area?”

“Y-yes.”

“And were there procedures in place to evacuate Muggles from the surrounding buildings, or enchant the immediate area to keep Muggles away?”

“…no.”

“So there were no additional procedures in place, despite knowing exactly when and where Alton would be, to minimize loss of life?”

“…no, but-”

“I remember the name. He was in Azkaban for, let’s see…curse-enchanting, selling illegal cursed products in London, and Muggle-hunting. Isn’t that right? You tracked a known Muggle-abuser to a densely crowded Muggle area, but had no additional procedures to protect these Muggles from him?”

The Hit Wizard gulped, his face pale as he stammered out his next answer in a whisper. “Our focus was on the Chief Warlock. We considered whether Alton might try to flee into another building, but we had to prioritize the mission. Of course it’s tragic when these things happen…but they were only Muggles, weren’t they?”

Bianca felt her temper boil over, and she slammed the table in anger as she rose suddenly. “Get out! she snapped, glaring at the occupants in the room until they began to file out hurriedly. Finally, only the Deputy Head remained, and he leaned back in his chair to consider her. “Well, you’re never going to get anything done if you decide to keep losing your temper like that. This isn’t the Auror break room, you know, you can’t settle disputes with your wand anymore.” Bianca was still too angry to process the logic, or cold pragmatism, behind his words, so she nodded curtly at the door and turned her back until she heard it click shut behind him. Only once she was alone did she allow herself to slap the table in anger again, leaning against the edge as she felt her breathing speed up.

The bigotry. She was never going to escape wizarding bigotry, and the impossible choice every Muggleborn had to make – hide and join them, or speak up and be left out? She had worked in the Statute of Secrecy Task Force for years, she knew how strict the divide between Muggle and magical was. And how necessary it could be – for the protection of both. If one group was suffering at the hands of the other, it was a cruel system that needed to be changed. Once it had been wizards hunted by Muggles, now it was the other way around. And there was no degree of outrage, or more importantly action, to address this issue. And Merlin, it couldn’t be ignored. Isn’t this what the Order was meant to address against the Purifier threat, what the Ministry was supposed to safeguard?

No, something had to be done. And the more time that passed, the more Bianca could dispassionately think through the subject. A task force. That had to be the answer – a dedicated task force to addressing the rise in ideology, and therefore attacks, against Muggles and the subsequent breaches of the Statute of Secrecy. There was a need for it – the Ministry had always been too lax about identifying, investigating, and prosecuting these kinds of crimes. So many witches and wizards had grown too comfortable with the idea of using magic around, or on, Muggles. They had grown too used to seeing them as toys, rather than human beings that were helpless to defend themselves against magic. That had to stop. There needed to be dedicated resources, time, and attention to stopping wizards from taking advantage.

Over the following weeks, Bianca began to put together her proposal for the Minister. Naturally the task force would be led by Magical Law Enforcement, because this was ultimately the sort of caseload handled by the Aurors, and it had a domestic focus above all. This had always been the Aurors’ and Hit Wizards’ jurisdiction, but with more specialized attention and resources it would be easier to handle the caseload and identify and capture transgressors. Make it harder to get away with it. But there would need to be other offices represented. A natural candidate was Magical Interpol – they held the task force that focused on the Statute of Secrecy, after all, and they also processed all cross-border cases. And then of course Magical Accidents and Catastrophes – there would need to be representatives from the Obliviators and Muggle-Worthy Excuse Committee, since they worked most closely with this subject matter and would have plenty of valuable knowledge to contribute. To that end, there were other magical communities that had begun to explore this topic, and pulling agents from the Foreign Aid Office would be a wise choice. It would be prudent to bring an international perspective to the topic, with knowledge from their home communities, and besides – many of the Azkaban escapees had been rounded up, or were in the process, so there wasn’t quite such a desperate need anymore for the Foreign Aid Office as it was currently structured. And, let’s see…naturally, representatives from the Wizengamot to rule on the legislative protections that could be enacted and to bring a long-term perspective to the issue of how Muggles were treated by wizards, and the Minister’s Office since he would need to be kept aware of any key developments.

The more thought that Bianca put into this project, the more it began to look like a real thing. Such an endeavor from the Ministry would naturally take time to set up, and to find the rhythm of so many representatives with different styles working together. But in the long run, Bianca was certain, it would be the start they needed to talk about this long-ignored topic. They had a duty to protect Muggles from wizards that wanted to harm them, and just as bad the wizards that didn’t see the same value to Muggle lives as wizard ones. They weren’t toys to be played with as one got bored, they weren’t a ‘good bit of fun’ for wizards to prove themselves, and they certainly weren’t the stain on society that some thought them to be.

As emotionless as she could normally accomplish being at work, Bianca couldn’t help the heat in her tone as she introduced the Muggle Protection Task Force to the Minister. “This problem isn’t going away, sir, and it’s our responsibility to address it. We’ve been so focused on reacting to what’s immediately in front of us that we’ve forgotten about the people who don’t have a voice in the conversation. But we can’t leave Muggles to fend for themselves against Dark wizards, Purifier or otherwise. This task force isn’t the full answer, but it’s a start.”