Alfred glanced up briefly at the question, not sure what to make of it. He imagined there was some other meaning and not just a casual inquiry into what sort of company Alfred kept, but he couldn’t figure out exactly what he could have meant. There was nothing overtly scandalous about having friends in the Ministry, was there? And Alfred would much prefer to talk about other people who worked in the Ministry than to continue talking about Zelda. He wasn’t sure if Evander would be the sort to try and figure out who it was he meant, if he were given enough information, but having his brother and his sometimes-lover meet while he wasn’t around wasn’t an appetizing proposition at all.

“A few, I guess,” he said noncommittally. He wouldn’t really have called many of them friends, at this point in his life. Really the only close friend he had was Pablo, though there were people he had been friends with before the Sycorax expedition who had taken a mild interest in renewing their old connections now that he had been proven to be alive. Mostly Alfred thought they liked the novelty of the situation, not him personally, but it was what it was. The rest of his old classmates, the ones who hadn’t made any sort of contact with him since his return to England, were probably fixated on the novelty of the situation, as well, but saw it in a more scandalous light.

“I used to know a lot of people in the Ministry,” he added a bit vaguely. “Some of them didn’t really... uh, weren’t that enthused about the whole ‘coming back from the dead’ thing.”