Author's Note: Go to my website; it will bring joy to your soul. Actually, it will mostly make me puff up like a blowfish. A very happy blowfish. Plus there will be a picture of a Cars Bar and possibly eventually an origami tutorial. And you can be my LiveJournal friend!
And Eltea—OMG LOOK IT'S TYRUS AHAHAHA. And "alacrity"!!! (giggles uncontrollably)
Everyone else: Sorry about that. I'm afraid I succumb to temporary insanity with some frequency. Your reward for putting up with me is a fairly long chapter.
All due apologies to the Tolkien Estate.
Chapter Three
Quite Another Thing
Draco had slept on a lot of things in his twenty-one years: trash bags, feather beds, park benches, moth-eaten youth hostel mattresses, Hermione's orange couch, and, once upon an infancy, his mother's shoulder, upon which he had then proceeded to throw up with gusto. But he had never slept on an idea, or at least not one quite as insane as this one was shaping up to be.
It was one thing to say, "Let's go to the manor and see what happens," and it was quite another thing to go to the manor and see what happened.
Draco tapped the end of his quill against his Ministry stationery. Tiny drops of indigo ink splashed onto the paper and splattered on his hand like freckles—freckles in need of a bit of an explanation about the color spectrum. He set his quill down, pushed his latest scheduling notes aside, and pulled out a pack of sticky notes and the origami book he had borrowed from the library.
He was fairly proud of his origami accomplishments. He could make little boxes and hats now to go with his cranes, which he created in flocks and fleets, and he was slowly filling an entire drawer of his desk with his sticky note brainchildren.
After contributing to the desk-drawer-filling quest a bit, he retrieved the schedules again and filled in a few things. Hermione liked her schedules color-coded, and rather than risking the Wrath of the Granger-Tyrant-Boss-Lady, Draco tended to oblige, which meant that he soon had some green, red, and purple ink-spot decorations on his hand as well. Considering this advent, he reflected that he looked a bit like a Christmas tree, or perhaps someone with a very confused case of chicken pox.
Whatever the circumstances, the morning was crawling by. He looked at where his writing had trailed off into a bit of a hurricane-ish-looking muddle all over the twenty-first of January, put the pen down, and weighed his options.
Chocolate. Need. Sugar? Mine. Verbs? Syntax? No. Bad. Structure? Unh.
He heaved himself up from his desk chair, strode down the hall, and faced his latest nemesis: the vending machine.
The endless rows of diabetes and death in their bright, shiny packages lay there innocently, as they always did, cradled by those fascinating spiral contraptions that held them fast, and Draco had to fold his hands tightly behind his back lest he press his palms excitedly to the glass. They were so… pretty… so…tasty… so… wonderful…
Unable to suppress his desperate urge any longer, he jammed a few Sickles into the slot, pressed in the code, and watched raptly as the machine released the specimen he had selected. He retrieved his prize from the slot at the bottom and clutched it to his chest, glancing suspiciously around him.
Mine. My… Precioussssss…
Upon return to his workstation, he set his Precious on his desktop and took a moment merely to admire it. It was his favorite: the Cars Bar. For about an eighteenth of a second, he thought about things like cholesterol and saturated fat, and then he shoved that madness from his mind, tussled with the wrapper, and freed his Precious.
The twelve rectangular sections sat gleaming, waiting to be broken from the whole or devoured all at once, and Draco gazed at them reverently. They looked almost like…
…caskets to hold a man dead by twenty-five because he ate half his weight in candy on a daily basis.
Living with Hermione and her Health Nut Complex (sometimes Draco wished Freud had had the grace to live nowadays instead of when he had) was really hurting Draco's eating habits. And by "hurting," he meant "drastically improving," but it was still an extremely painful process, separating him from his sugar.
Ergo he would simply carry on his illicit love affair with chocolate in secret, if need be.
He broke off the top row and crammed it in his mouth, then followed it up with the second and third rows. Chocolate was basically like richer air, anyway, and traditional breathing was pretty overrated in the first place.
Hermione chose that moment to emerge from her office, pausing as she saw him doing his best Chocoholic Chipmunk impression.
"Is that a Cars Bar?" she inquired.
He nodded.
An eyebrow flicked up. "It's ten in the morning," she noted.
He nodded again.
"And you're eating chocolate," she concluded.
He nodded a third time, and then he offered her the last quarter of the bar, which was roughly akin to offering her a quarter of his soul.
"Oh," she said, "thank you." She took it and nibbled on the end a bit, setting a manila folder on his desk as she did. She opened the folder and tapped a fingertip on its contents, which included a few very melodramatic mug-shots paper-clipped to a series of papers. The ugly man in the foremost picture scowled and leered at Draco, who was very tempted to make some faces in return. "This is Perry Simons's report on the latest Auror targets. If you could give it a look and see if there's anything I omitted in my notes, that'd be excellent." She put another folder down on top of its predecessor. "And if you could clean this one up a little—there's some extra copies, I think, and it'll just take a minute or two." Another folder joined its folder brethren. "This one needs to go to Improper Use—" And another; Draco was beginning to think that Hermione should enter a folder-stacking contest. "—and this one to Equipment Control. I've got to take this to Tyrus." She waved a different folder, smiling.
Draco found that slightly odd; he wouldn't have been smiling at the prospect of facing the craggy-faced, chain-smoking Minister of Magic. Then again, perhaps Hermione was prepared for things like that. Perhaps when you were the Minister—Ministress? Draco wasn't sure, and he was kind of embarrassed to ask—of Magical Law Enforcement, you were ready to approach even the sketchiest of head honchos with alacrity. "If I'm not back in time to meet whoever it is that's scheduled for ten-thirty," Hermione added, winking broadly, "entertain them with your many charms."
Draco smiled slowly and evilly, and he was rewarded with a laugh.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Not long later, Draco found himself strolling down the hall to deliver one stackable manila folder or another. Hermione's notes had been impeccable, and Perry Simons's report had been highly disturbing, so everything was pretty much in order.
Ha, Order.
Dynesy Cranot, head of the Department of Magical Catastrophes, was coming the other way, and he smiled that slightly-bemused smile of his upon seeing Draco. "Do something with your hair?" he asked.
"Slept on it funny," Draco answered truthfully.
"Looks good," Dynesy decided.
"Thanks," Draco replied.
He hummed the 1812 Overture to himself a little, mostly on-key. Working here wasn't too bad, most of the time.
He'd have to teach Dynesy how to make origami cranes.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
It was just after midnight, and Hermione was still sitting up against the headboard, reading the contents of some new manila folder she had acquired. Draco was pretty sure the damn things reproduced while you weren't looking.
"Sleep is good," he noted for the eight-billionth time. "Sleep is your friend. Look at Sparky; he sleeps for about three-quarters of the day. Have you ever seen a happier cat?"
"I'm almost done," Hermione insisted, as she had insisted every one of the other eight billion times.
"Fine," he acceded. He scooped Sparky up and set the cat upon his chest, then proceeded to ruffle his feline friend's fur suggestively. "Oh, Sparky," he moaned. "Your lack of a leg is such a turn-on. Get away, you sexy beast, before I die of lust." The cat blinked, and Draco hissed conspiratorially, "Play along."
When Sparky tilted his head and then immediately moved to nuzzle Draco's neck persistently, Draco began to suspect that Sparky was, in some horrifying, twisted way, distantly related to Albert Einstein.
Or maybe he was just hungry.
Probably just hungry.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Despite all that he'd said about the virtues of sleep and rest and calm and other such things that were easier described than attained, Draco found himself lying awake long after Hermione's breathing had evened out, long after she'd settled against him, her forehead touching his shoulder, his right arm firmly in her possession, Sparky a ball of gently purring gray fuzz between them. He looked at her, with her wild hair around her face like a blurry halo, and the words stirred a little.
There were a great many words he wanted to say, and a few that were more important still than the others. Those ones, the important ones, rose then, rose in his throat, gathered, swelled, roared—
—subsided, slipped back down, and sank and settled in the pit of his stomach again, tugging the walls of it in towards them and spurring a bout of nausea.
Or maybe that was a result of all of the chocolate he'd inhaled today.
It was one thing to know something, know it with the kind of certainty that could knock you right off your feet in the middle of crossing a busy street and get you splattered on the asphalt, and it was quite another thing to say it.