Silent Night - Part I
- Sherry
A/N : This is just about the strangest thing I've ever written if you ask me. Come on, tell me what you thought... it's late-night and I've been listening to guess what?
Dedication : Er, well, Angela and Jeffrey, here's to you!
Explanation : They're *supposed* to be undercover agents against the Death Eaters and such.
Disclaimer : All these belong to Miss Joanne Kathleen Rowling, God bless her. (Ha ha!) Well, except for Muldoon, who just walked in to say hi... I kidnapped him, you see, so now he belongs to me... Any buyers?
Hermione Granger let herself into her office, shivering. It was close to zero degrees outside, or maybe less - her breath was freezing and clearly visible in the air. There was a mug of steaming cocoa on the faded mahogany table - she gulped it down gratefully. Whoever put it there must be close by.
Sure enough, her colleague Ron Weasley came sauntering in, his red hair in disarray. He held files in his hands, an empty mug dangling from one finger. Hermione relieved him of the mug, setting it in the tray with hers, and sat down at the desk as he took his familiar seat by the shuttered window. 'Where've you been?' he commented. 'Made you a drink. Here, these are yours.'
'Yeah, thanks,' Hermione replied gratefully, leafing through the reports. 'Traffic jam. The west road's snowed in. What's this, Ron?' She indicated the report on the very top of the file. 'Draco Malfoy? Since when was he included in my - er, missions?' Ron suppressed a snort at her description of her job, putting his feet up on her previous work, oblivious to her yelps of protest.
'He's a wanted man, Hermione,' Ron said with a hint of surprise in his voice, crossing his ankles. Hermione shoved his feet off her papers and right off the table so that they landed in the waste-basket placed so neatly by the side of the desk. 'My shoes!' he wailed, pretending to be devastated. 'And they were my new pair!'
'Serves you right for shoving them on my nicely-arranged papers,' Hermione snorted, grinning, as Ron lifted his feet out of the waste-basket. 'Any news of Harry, by the way?'
'I'm coming to that,' Ron grumbled as he settled down. 'As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted -'
'Shut up!'
'- As I was saying,' Ron continued, his grin matching Hermione's, 'Malfoy's a wanted man. He's joined them - I always knew he would. Harry's working on getting his father and him, and you're included.' His grin widened. 'You and me, that is. I've waited for this for years!'
'Waited for what? Working with me?' Hermione teased, feeling her cheeks go slightly red.
'Ha!' retorted the red-haired boy, also flushing a little. 'I've wanted to catch him for years, Hermione, wanted to get revenge.' Hermione felt her heart beat faster at the intensity in his voice. 'I've had word from Harry, yes, he's in Little Whinging with Muldoon. Draco must have about twenty different disguises. They nearly caught him under the alias Simon Juniper, but the little git managed to get away.' He laughed at Hermione's face. 'Yes, I know it's a stupid name. Bet Goyle came up with it...'
'Harry's with Muldoon?' Hermione said. 'But...' Her voice trailed off. 'But I saw him yesterday, I had - I had lunch with him in the Three Broomsticks.'
'...Oh,' Ron said, frowning a little. 'You had lunch with Muldoon? I mean - that's not the point, er, you can't have, because he's with Harry in Little Whinging. Has been, in fact, since last week. Are you sure it was Muldoon and not - someone else?'
'Of course it was Muldoon, Ron, who else would have known me?' said Hermione irritably. 'Something's wrong. Perhaps you'd better owl Harry and ask him. I know Muldoon. He might not talk a lot, but no one else talks just like he does.' Muldoon was another of their colleagues, a dark-haired young undercover worker who was close-mouthed and swathed in mystery. No one knew his real name or where he came from. Hermione found him vaguely intriguing, certainly more so than Ron, who was always so straightforward, unable to hide anything from her. This last she usually turned to her advantage.
'Yes,' Ron agreed. 'Remember the day he embarrassed us in the square?' Hermione nodded fervently - Muldoon's innocent silence and a few careless words had gotten them all into trouble. 'Yes, I'll owl Harry. Do you know where he is now?'
'Apartment?' Hermione suggested. 'He told me he was going home.' She mimicked Muldoon's light voice. '"Going home" was all he said. Then "Good luck".' Ron snickered, reaching for the telephone, punching in the numbers. Hermione watched the restless movement of his long legs, her fingers twisting together in her lap. 'Still, he talked a lot more than usual today.'
Ron listened, but there was no reply. The beeping click told him that there was no one home; hanging up, he turned back to his friend. 'Not home,' he said. 'What are we going to do?'
'Owl Harry now,' Hermione insisted, pushing a piece of parchment and a quill towards him. 'Now.'
'All right, Mother,' Ron said, grinning at her. He leant towards her desk and began to write, dipping the quill in an ink bottle.
'Ron, that's green ink...'
'Oops, never mind.' He scribbled rapidly, tongue between his teeth, a smear of green on the back of one of his rather large hands, an oddly familiar yet infinitely amusing figure. Hermione sighed and went back to looking over her reports. She and Ron had helped in the capture of Nott, a Death Eater, and the League had promoted them both. Draco Malfoy, her report said, neatly typed by the latest Muggle technology. Currently suspected of working with the Dark Lord as a Death Eater with Lucius Malfoy - refer to -
Sighing again, she drained the mug of cocoa. This was going to take a long while.
'Could you run that by me again - about Malfoy?' Harry said impatiently. Muldoon's roundabout, concise way of talking made him feel as though he was trying to solve a puzzling riddle.
'Alias unknown, he's bad to the bone,' Muldoon said boredly.
'Come on, Muldoon - please?'
'Perhaps staking out Hogwarts,' said Muldoon. 'Most probably disguised. He's not what he seems; wanted for treachery and working with the Dark One.' His longish dark hair was dishevelled, reminding Harry of Ron. Long white fingers tapped the dashboard; Harry's smaller, narrower hands gripped the steering wheel in annoyance. Muldoon had never seemed this irritating to him before. They drove slowly through Little Whinging, Muldoon staring out of the window.
'We nearly had him,' Harry said thoughtfully after a pause. 'Nearly. But that idiot Goyle interfered; he isn't involved in this, but he's stupid anyway - and now he's somewhere else, under a different name. He could be anyone.' He pushed the horn delicately, reminding a careless driver to *move*; and glanced at Muldoon. His grey eyes were blank, a brooding darkness enshrouding him. Harry wondered again where the man got it from.
'I suspect the ones of the Dark are massed,' Muldoon said painfully - it always seemed to pain him to speak too freely. 'He is moving alone to join them.'
'That may be,' said Harry grimly, 'but we're going to find him no matter what the bloody hell he's doing.'
Muldoon nodded, and they drove along.
Back at the little house they shared in Little Whinging the pair of them shared a quiet dinner, the cold winter wind getting in at the chinks in the door. Muldoon ate very slowly; Harry ate much faster, finishing with a gulp and pausing as he drank a glass of warm water to ponder over Malfoy's situation. The entire tangled mess seemed suspicious to Harry - Draco Malfoy, embarking on his own, for the Dark Lord? Perhaps he had just enough backbone to attempt it, but Harry would've thought he was far too concerned with his own welfare to care about Voldemort's lone assassination missions.
He hoped Ron and Hermione were doing OK back at the base... he really hoped so. He smiled at the thought of his two best friends. The last time he had been with them Hermione and Muldoon had seemed a little taken with each other, and Ron had seemed a little jealous... There was nothing like his two friends to make him smile.
As he was thinking this, an owl tapped on the window; Harry let it in hurriedly - it was one of the League owls, and it carried a letter... for him. He thanked it and let it in to drink a little water, then returned to the table, slitting the envelope open. Ron's scrawl, this time in green ink, confronted him. Probably something on the case, he thought. As he read past the usual formalities, his brow furrowed in a frown. What was Ron talking about?
Muldoon looked up at him, a hint of amusement on his face. 'Bad news?'
'No,' Harry said slowly, looking at him, his eyes roaming over his colleague's face. 'Nothing at all.'
A/N : Short and rather silly, I know - but please review anyway...