Chapter 11: No

It was a long, boring shift, and nothing came along to make Draco feel better. It was finally time to close, and he'd just finished washing the glasses, when he heard someone banging on the window.

“Oi, Drake!” called a voice. Draco turned around to see Will waving enthusiastically from outside, pointing at the door to indicate that he needed let in. Draco crossed the shop and unlocked it, and the man stepped inside, looking around curiously. “Hey, this place is a bit creepy at night.”

“It’s not that bad,” Draco said. “What are you doing here?”

“Bee said you’d been acting funny lately. Well, actually her exact wording was, ‘I think Draco is man-pregnant,’ but that’s not very nice. Anyway, I thought you might benefit from a night out on the town.”

Draco pretended he needed to think about it. “That sounds okay,” he said after a pause, trying to act casual, but actually he was pretty excited.

“That’s the spirit!” Will said, throwing an arm across Draco’s shoulders.

“I still have to close the shop,” Draco argued, trying unsuccessfully to extricate himself from the other man’s embrace.

“Did you wash the dishes?”

“Yes.”

“Then everything else will be fine. I’ll tell Bee it was all my fault, and she’ll shake her head in that cute way she does, because she has to fake like she’s mad for a minute. But really she knows that she’s the one who married me, and if I’m so irresponsible and whatever, then maybe she should’ve thought of that before,” Will explained joyfully. “Oh, how I do love her,” he added with a blissful smile.

“Where are we going?”

“We’re going to get drunk, my friend. Pissed, smashed, and completely incapacitated,” he explained, his eyebrows working overtime.

“Excellent idea,” Draco said.

“And, as a happily married bloke, I am the perfect wingman. Would you like me to get you laid?” he offered conversationally. Well, that was tempting. Will was so friendly and theatrical that Draco was certain he could attract women in droves.

“I’ll think about it,” Draco said.

“You’re not seeing anybody right now, are you?” Will asked, and Draco shook his head. “Just checking.” Will kept up a consistent stream of one-way conversation as he led Draco down the street to the Leaky Cauldron, talking at length about how excited he was to become a father.

When they arrived at the pub, though, he seemed to decide that he was more interested in furthering Draco’s genetic material. They claimed a table and ordered their first round, and the other man began to ask Draco’s opinion of various women in the pub. He informed Draco that they’d survey the room, then go say “hello” when they found his favourites. The waitress kept the drinks coming, and by the time Will had pointed out every petite brunette in the room, Draco was beginning to get suspicious. And drunk.

“Do you think I have a type or something?”

“What do you mean?” Will asked innocently.

“All the women you’ve asked me about so far have looked very similar.”

“Now, that’s not fair,” Will said, acting offended. “Each of those lovely women is her own individual, with her own personal sense of –”

“Knock that off. What are you playing at?”

“I was just trying to see what you like, mate, and you’ve liked them all so far, so I think I’m moving in the right direction. But if you want, we’ll branch out a bit. What about her?” he asked, indicating a curvaceous redhead.

“Pretty fit, but she looks like a Weasley.”

“All right. Her?” Will tilted his jaw to point out a tall, willowy blonde.

“She looks too much like my mum,” Draco said.

“See, we’re back where we started.” Will was getting pretty drunk by now, too, so his tongue was even looser than usual. “I’m just going to go back to my original plan of pointing out every woman who reminds me of Jane until you admit it.”

“Oh, come on,” Draco pleaded.

“No, you come on! Do you know what Meg and Bee talk about when you aren’t around? I’ll give you a hint: the answer is you. And do you want to know what they say about you?” Draco shook his head in the negative. “I’m going to tell you anyway. Now, don’t be offended, but they say that you’re all grey and gloomy, and the only time you look really happy is when you see Jane. When I was coming in to spy on you – sorry about that, by the way – I noticed it, too: most of the time, you just look really tense and serious. Then at the Phoenix Day dinner, it was this whole different Drake, glancing up every point-four seconds to search for the back of Jane’s head in the crowd. Tom asked me later if you two were dating. He thought the surname thing was an inside joke or whatever, but I got all the social skills in our family, so who knows what’s going on in that brain of his.”

Draco opened his mouth to reply, thought better of it, and instead lifted his glass to take a long drink.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Will continued. “We forget about meeting these new fantastic women, and work on hooking that one that we already know.”

Draco still didn’t feel like responding verbally.

“My wife thinks she’ll say yes if you ask her out.”

“That’s very unlikely,” he said at last.

“Why not? Bee knows her pretty well – they’re practically best friends these days.”

“They are? What happened to Harry Potter?” the alcohol asked, on Draco’s behalf.

“Good question. They're supposedly still best friends, but Jane doesn't see him as much anymore. From what I’ve heard, he says he’s busy with his new baby, but that didn’t happen with his first kid, and I don’t intend to avoid my best mates for a full six months after my son or daughter enters the world. The ladies think he’s avoiding her because he still hangs out with that Weasley bloke all the time, and that was a rather nasty break-up. But take this with a grain of salt, seeing as I’ve never personally met either of them. These are just things I hear, and I do hear a lot of things.”

“Well, Bianca’s a whole hell of a lot better than those two, so good for Granger. But either way, I don’t think she’d go out with me.”

“You think she just sees you as a friend?”

“What? No, she sees me as an enemy,” Draco explained.

“Oh, that’s a relief. You had me worried for a second there. If she thought you guys were best buddies, that would be a major issue, and I might have to set you up with one of those lookalikes in here. No, enemies is fine, we can get past that.” Draco started to interrupt him, because Will clearly didn’t know the seriousness of the situation, but he ignored Draco’s attempts and continued his monologue. “Let me tell you about the first conversation I ever had with my wife. You finished Hogwarts in ’98, right? I thought so. Anyway, I finished ’95, and Bianca was ’94. I’d seen her around, and I always thought she was just about the prettiest and most interesting girl in the whole school. Now, I knew some things about her because she was Head Girl, and one of the things that I knew was that she was in Ravenclaw, and those super-genius Ravenclaw ladies tend to be a bit exclusive about who they’ll see. I was in Gryffindor, but I was still afraid to talk to her – I was pretty sure she’d think I was completely an idiot, which she really actually does, but you’d never get her to admit it. I can just tell.

“Anyway, so I never thought I’d see her again until I got my internship at the Prophet. She was a staff writer at the time – now she writes books, which is how she first met Jane, by the way. They collaborated on this book about Transfiguration, and old McGonagall just about died of joy when they dedicated it to her. Two favourite students of all time, and all. Anyway, short story longer and longer, I was a bit nervous the first time I talked to Bee at the Prophet, and I made this awful joke about Hufflepuffs. She replied, ‘my mum was a Hufflepuff!’ and I just started talking and talking, as I tend to do, as you know, and by the time I finally shut up she pretty much hated my guts. So then I asked her out, and she asked for my full name, and I told her. Then she said: ‘William Gregory Ward, I will never go out with you,’ and that time she meant it.

“But I didn’t give up. I kept trying to talk to her, and she said that a few more times, but then I hatched a plan. You might think this feeling you’ve got about Jane is just a little crush, but I doubt it – nobody just has a crush on women like that. It’d be a waste of your time. You’ve got to get your mind set on it and really do your best. Anyway, my dad was Muggle-born, so he showed us movies when we were growing up, and something that Muggles almost always do when they love someone is show up at their house and play music. I thought that was a pretty sweet little trick, but I didn’t want to stalk my lady to her personal residence.

“So I got my guitar, and I showed up at her office one day when she was just about to leave for lunch, and I played “You Really Got Me” by a Muggle band called The Kinks. I didn’t want to hit her with something too heavy, like Peter Gabriel or something, because we didn’t really know each other that well, even though I knew she was the one. The whole office crowded around to watch, mostly because I told them to, and she was so embarrassed, but she was smiling. And she said it one more time – ‘William Gregory Ward, I will never go out with you’ – but that time she didn’t mean it. And now look what happened: she’s pregnant with my child and married to me for life. I think enemies is a better starting point than friends.”

Draco tried to process all that information in his inebriated brain, and one thing stood out above the rest. “Maggie was a Hufflepuff?”

“That’s what you got out of that?” Will asked incredulously.

“Well, most of it doesn’t really apply to me. Granger and I are serious enemies. I’ve made a bunch of offensive jokes to her and about her, on purpose, but that’s not the main reason. My family members have used Unforgivable Curses on her.”

“Have you?”

“No.”

“Well, then there you go. She can’t hold you accountable for what your crazy relatives did. And that was a long time ago – from seeing you two together, it looks like you’re about where I was with Bee the second or third time she said she’d never go out with me. That means you’ve only got a couple more rejections to go before she decides you’re determined enough to be worth some of her time.”

Thankfully, the waitress came over just then to tell them the place was closing, so Draco didn’t have to respond. The two men paid their tabs and headed over to the Floo.

“This was fun, Drake. Would you like to come out with Tom and me and a few of our mates this weekend?”

“That sounds like fun. Send me an owl about it.”

“Cool, and think about what I said.” Draco nodded and stepped into the Floo.

When he got home, there was an owl sitting on his windowsill, and he wondered how long the bird had been waiting for him. He disentangled the parchment from its leg and shooed it away as he read the short note:

Come to the place when it opens. Bring J.D., but keep a copy.

It was unsigned, but he knew it was from Hermione, and he assumed she was referring to the Dawlish photos. He’d hoped she wouldn’t come to him for this so soon, but he also realised that it would be advantageous for her to act on this information before his father managed to get hold of it. He prepared the duplicate file and collapsed onto his bed.

***

The next morning, he made himself a hangover potion, and it took the edge off. Then, he arrived at the Raven a few minutes after it opened, and Hermione was already waiting for him.

“Granger."

“Good morning, Malfoy. Did you bring me anything?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good,” she replied. “I’m going to visit an old associate, and it would be impolite to show up empty-handed.”

That didn’t sound good. “You’re going to visit him by yourself?”

“Actually, I was hoping you’d go with me.” He didn't want to do that, but he wanted even less for her to go alone.

“Won’t it look strange if we just walk in there together?” he pointed out.

“Nobody’s going to see us come in,” she said enigmatically, and he guessed she must have known some kind of secret way to Dawlish’s office, because otherwise he couldn’t think of a way to sneak into the Ministry.

“And if I don’t go, you’re going by yourself?” he confirmed.

“Correct,” she said, and he winced. She smiled at him, and he reckoned she knew what he was going to say.

“Fine, I’ll go,” he muttered.

“Wonderful. Let’s leave from the back room,” she suggested, and he followed her reluctantly through the shop.

As they approached the back room, Bianca stepped in front of the door and folded her arms. “You are not using this coffee shop for any more secret meetings until you tell me what is going on,” she declared.

Hermione stepped forward and placed a reassuring hand on Bianca’s arm. “It’s not that we want to keep you in the dark,” she began gently.

“He does,” Bianca snapped, indicating Draco with a jerk of her head. She was absolutely correct, so he didn’t try to argue or anything. Hermione gave him an admonishing look, and he shrugged.

“It’s just that we have to make sure that we have all the information before we tell anybody about anything,” Hermione explained. “Please, Bianca, just trust me on this. When the time is right, you’ll be the first to know.”

Bianca sighed and looked back and forth between the two of them, and Draco hoped that her trust for Hermione would outweigh her suspicions about his involvement. “If it’s that important, you may use this room today,” she relented. “But my dad comes in at ten, and mum’s here in the mornings on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. If you need to do this again, you have to make sure that neither of them finds out that anything is going on. Mum would worry herself sick about you two.”

“Thanks, Bianca. You won’t regret this,” Hermione said, and the other woman moved aside to let them pass.

Once they had locked the door and added a silencing charm, Hermione pulled an ancient-looking folded garment out of her bag, and Draco did a double take. It looked like an Invisibility Cloak, but those were so rare that he'd only ever seen drawings in books.

“Is that what I think it is?” he asked incredulously, and she nodded. “Where did you get one of those?”

“I borrowed it from a friend,” she said, and Draco thought he could guess which one she meant, that lucky bastard. He wondered how she got it, though, considering she and Potter weren't as close as they used to be, or maybe he was wrong and it was Longbottom's cloak or something. Ha, good one.

“All right, so here’s the plan. We enter the Ministry under the cloak and sneak into Dawlish’s office. Then, I’ll come out and ask him a few questions, but you stay hidden just in case he tries anything. Can I have the photos?”

He handed her the file, and she glanced at the first shot and pulled a face. “Ew,” she remarked insightfully. Yep, that about summed it up. She deactivated the spells on the door and looked at him expectantly. “Are you ready?”

Draco nodded, and she unfolded the cloak and wrapped it around herself, beckoning for him to join her. He stepped under it cautiously, and then they were very close together. He had to hunch down a little bit to keep his feet hidden, and his head was almost resting on her shoulder, her back nearly flush against his chest. He took a deep breath, and her back straightened when he let it out against her ear. He didn’t think she had breathed yet at all, and he reckoned this arrangement was probably making her pretty uncomfortable. He was getting a little bit uncomfortable, too, if you catch the drift. “All right,” she whispered, turning her head so that her lips came close to brushing his cheek. “I'll have to Apparate both of us together. They haven't deactivated my pass yet.”

The Ministry had finally gotten rid of the strange toilet system of entry, and now any individual with an authorized token could Apparate directly into the Atrium during business hours. She reached a hand out to her side, and he took it, and he was pretty sure he felt her squeeze his hand right before his world flipped, stretched, contracted, and spun. They landed unsteadily in the lobby, and he had to grab Hermione around the waist to stay upright under the cloak. She stumbled a half step forward, and then he held his breath for a second as they stood perfectly still, looking around to make sure no one had heard the scuffle. No one appeared to have taken a second glance at the spot they were standing, and he felt her relax against him.

“You can let go of me now,” she whispered, and he jerked his hands away like she was on fire, creeping backwards to place a few centimetres between them. Who knew invisibility cloaks were so warm? he wondered, tugging at his collar.

She started walking slowly and quietly, and they fell into step as she led him to Dawlish's office. It was a stressful walk, and there were a couple near-miss incidents, but he was pretty sure the sleepwalking early risers at the Ministry would have barely noticed if he reached out and punched them with an invisible fist. A precious few were so hopped up on Pepper-Up that their wide eyes twitched erratically in the direction of Draco and Hermione's muffled footsteps, but most of them were walking around with their eyes nearly closed.

Hermione was able to open the locked door when they reached the office, and they stepped quietly into the dark room and closed the door behind them. “Dawlish is always late,” she whispered disdainfully. “But he should be here soon. And he always closes the door, too, so nobody will see that he isn’t working.” They huddled into a corner to wait, and Draco used the time to reinvestigate that smell in her hair, but he still couldn’t figure out what it was.

After a few minutes, the man of the hour ambled leisurely into the room, closing the door behind him, just as Hermione had predicted. He hummed softly to himself as he raised his wand to turn on the lights. Well, at least he got to be in a good mood for a few minutes this morning, Draco thought deviously. When the man turned away from them to hang up his hat, Hermione slipped quietly out from under the cloak and disarmed him from behind. Dawlish froze in place as his wand flew out of his hand.

“Turn around,” Hermione instructed, keeping her own wand trained on her former boss as she pocketed the extra one. Draco had to admit he was impressed with that neat little display.

“Oh, not you - anyone but you,” Dawlish whined petulantly as he turned around to face her, holding his hands up on either side of his head. “I thought I was done dealing with you.”

Wow, Dawlish sure was a huge idiot if he really thought that for a minute. If he’d killed Hermione, she probably would’ve haunted him for all eternity – in Draco’s experience, Hermione was a person who never gave up on anything, even when quitting was a good idea.

“I’ve come across some interesting pictures of you, Dawlish. I’m certain you know which ones I mean,” she said authoritatively. He looked like he was about to deny it for a second, but then he caught sight of the file in her hands, and he panicked a little bit.

“Where did you get those?” he demanded. “For fuck’s sake, the two things that I thought were never going to bother me again. What a day!” he lamented.

“It doesn’t matter where I got these, but I do know who else has them. How about you tell me your side of the story,” she crooned. Her back was to Draco, but he could picture the smug smile on her face. Dawlish glanced around furtively, looking for an out, but he seemed to surmise correctly that he wouldn't have time to reach the door before a spell hit him. Instead, he gave Hermione an ingratiating look and began to grovel.

"I've made some mistakes in my life. So I love women, big deal - that doesn't make me a monster. I didn't want to work with the Death Eaters, but they came to me during the Second War, and they had these photos that would've put me in prison. I didn't know those girls were underage," he insisted, and Hermione made a disgusted noise.

"Anyway, I had no choice but to cooperate," Dawlish continued. "I thought that after You-Know-Who was defeated, it was going to end, but then it didn't. They said the photos would be released if they went to Azkaban, so I pardoned them, and then I was paying them off and passing legislation on their behalf. We got rid of all the Order members and complied with all their demands, but they still weren't satisfied. Then a few of us got together and realised that nobody had seen a photo for years, so we told them we weren't going to help anymore unless they showed us the pictures again. They still haven't. Believe me, if I'd known they didn't have access to what they said they did, I never would've pardoned them."

Well, that explained why Draco's father suddenly wanted that box: the blackmail targets had finally called his bluff, and to keep himself out of prison he’d need to prove that he really had evidence against them, which would be tricky because he didn’t. He also noted that Dawlish was lucky Hermione wasn't holding an empty folder, because he'd just given her everything she would've needed against him. Too bad she hadn't known he was so malleable, or she could've faked him out years ago.

"Has the Ministry been paying money to these individuals?" she asked.

"The Ministry hasn't, but we have out of our own pockets."

"Well, technically the Ministry has, if you count the pay raises you've given yourself over the years. Give me names." He waffled briefly, but eventually he caved under what Draco assumed was a pretty intense glare.

"Lucius Malfoy, Jarvis Nott, Hector Crabbe, and Oliver Goyle," he said. Well, Draco could've told her that: those were the only four known Death Eaters to escape prison after the Second War, so it was pretty obvious they had some tricks up their sleeves.

"Thank you, I'm glad we had this talk. Oh, and I'll do you one better than the Death Eaters, just so you know I’m serious." She took out the first photo and held it up for his viewing pleasure, and he cringed. "Now, turn around, get on your knees, and place your hands behind your head," she ordered. He complied immediately. Hermione motioned for Draco to follow her as she headed toward the door, placing Dawlish's wand behind his feet on the way out. She hurried back under the cloak as soon as they left the office, but Dawlish didn't follow them, and neither of them said a word until Hermione took his hand again in the Atrium and Apparated them to the Shrieking Shack.

***

She did a cute little victory dance once they'd taken off the cloak, but then she went back to the business at hand. "Why do you think only those four got in on the plan? Wouldn't they want as many people out of Azkaban as possible?"

"I thought about that, and I think it's because they're not well-known, with the exception of my father." He began to tick names off on his fingers as he spoke: "There were crowds of parents calling for the imprisonment of the Carrows after their stint at Hogwarts, and you can thank my aunt for making Lestrange a household name - all the blackmail in the world couldn't have kept Uncle Rodolphus on the streets. Most of the other ones in Azkaban attacked Order members or their families directly, which meant someone important showed up to testify against them. I heard that those lucky four 'defected,' but I was never sure why it really counted as defecting, since it happened in the last ten minutes of the War. I think my father probably organized the scheme and only invited the safer options." He deliberately avoided mentioning his own role in that battle.

"Yeah, I always thought that was just called 'knowing you're about to lose' - no offense," she admitted. "I guess I should've been thinking about this years ago," she added regretfully, shaking her head.

"At least you didn't lock yourself in a mansion for almost a decade," he pointed out dryly, and she smiled.

"That's true. But, hey - we're both doing something now, and I think it's going quite well," she observed. She looked at him strangely for a second, tilting her head as she considered something, and then she nodded once. "High five," she said, holding up her right hand as though she were being sworn in for office.

"What?"

"Give me a high five - it's when you slap my hand," she explained. "Sometimes you miss, so it helps to line your elbow up with mine."

"Why would we want to do that? It sounds ridiculous," he observed.

"You only think that because you haven't tried it. Muggles do it when they're excited, or they've accomplished something through teamwork." She moved her hand closer to him. Well, fine, if she wasn't giving up, he'd get it over with. He carefully lined his elbow up across from hers and concentrated on her hand, and then he slapped it, as she'd instructed. It felt funny, and he turned his hand around and looked at it like he'd never seen one before. She giggled at his reaction, and he couldn't keep the love puppies out of his eyes as he watched her try to hide it behind her hand. She was right: this was going quite well.

"Thanks for your help. I have to get this cloak back to my friend before he, er, notices it's gone," she said sheepishly. "I'll contact you soon." Draco realised he had either inadvertently signed up for her mailing list or added himself to the resistance movement, and no matter which one it was, his life was about to get full of extra junk. He kept thinking about what Will had said to him the previous night, though, and he figured he might as well get the first one over with now.

“Wait,” he said. It was actually surprisingly easy to do this, because he was fully expecting to get rejected, so there wasn’t that horrible “what if” factor. Plus the adrenaline was still coursing through his veins after their successful mission. “Would you like to go out with me?” She looked at him like he had six heads, one of them was a turkey, and all of them were on fire.

“What?”

“I asked if you would like to go out with me.”

“No!” she said. “Are you serious?”

“Yes, I’m serious.”

“Well… no!”

“Any chance you’ll change your mind?” he asked mildly.

“I don’t think so,” she said, but she didn’t sound that convinced.

She gave him another bewildered look and then Disapparated.

***

A/N: Sneak preview: at some point in the future of this fic, Blaise Zabini performs the “Smooth Criminal” lean (RIP MJ). I hope you're as excited as I am, which is to say very.

Oh, and if you caught it – somewhere in this chapter there lurks a reference to the movie Say Anything.