Author's Note: My brain goes on strike a lot. With picket lines and everything. Sometimes I have to call in the riot police.
And sorry about the blatant racism. It passed the Eltea Incredulous Laughter Test (EILT, not to be confused with BLT), so it made the cut.
I also have not attempted the insanity within, so I have no personal experience. Please, please, please, for the love of ALL THAT IS HOLY, don't try this at home. Draco is a trained and professional idiot. He's got a framed certificate on his wall.
Chapter Seven
Foolproof
Hermione was indulging. Draco kind of absently wished she would indulge in something normal, like peanut-butter-chunk ice cream. Or even, you know, chick flick marathons.
No, Hermione Granger indulged in intense sessions of freaking out.
"They hate me!" She had her hands over he face, then buried in her hair, then over her face again. "They want to kill me! They'll track me down and beat me to death with the cane with the snake head on it!"
"As impressed as I am with your creativity," Draco remarked, "they won't."
Hermione gave a sound that seemed to combine all the worst parts of a sigh, a cry, a scream, and a howl. "They will! I showed up, got offended by their traditions, spent four hours unconscious, got soot all over your bed, and then choked on that—stuff—that we were eating and almost died—"
"You thought that mush was poisonous, too?" Draco mused. "Maybe the Elves are on strike…"
Hermione plunked down in one of the kitchen chairs and put her face down on the table. "Maybe my brain is on strike."
Draco, who had been loitering in the doorway watching the freak-out take place in all its slightly-insane glory, joined her at the table. "Hermione," he said, "let me tell you something."
She looked up. There was still a smudge of soot on her forehead, and what looked to be a trace of the whatever-it-was they'd been served for lunch had perched on her cheekbone. Draco did not know how it had come to be there, and he wasn't sure he wanted to find out.
"If it came down to you or them," he informed her, "I would choose you eight days a week."
Forlornly Hermione blinked at him. "Three hundred and sixty-six days a year?" she asked hesitantly.
Draco smirked. "And three hundred sixty-seven on leap years." When Hermione blinked a little more, he set his hands flat on the table and met her eyes. "Look, I'll make an analogy my parents would understand. Would you pick the shiny, new Galleon, or the chipped old Knut someone's stuck to the ground with bubble gum?" He paused. "I'll also make an analogy I would understand—would you pick the Triple Bacon Supreme from Cleon's, or that mint-flavored goopy crap we ate earlier?" He paused, considered the empty air to his right, and then corrected himself. "Pardon me, tried to eat earlier, to little apparent success." That done, he focused on Hermione again, looking intently into the dark brown of her eyes, drinking in the soot and the goop and her wild hair and the little bit of fluff clinging to one of her eyelashes. "To me, Hermione Granger," he told her, "you are a shiny, new Galleon and no less than four slices of Triple Bacon Supreme."
A bit faintly, Hermione smiled. "Galleons and pizza really shouldn't be romantic," she decided, "but they are now."
Draco smirked a bit more. He liked smirks. They were like normal smiles, conveying the same amusement and reigning in the same glee, but they were more cautious somehow. Protected. "Well, O Romanced One," he drawled, "what's for dinner?"
Hermione pursed her lips. "You did kind of give me a craving for the Triple Bacon," she divulged ruefully.
Draco grinned.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
That night, as he lay quietly, the bacon and his stomach duking it out emphatically, Draco Malfoy employed his capable brain to the task of wondering. He had a lot of things to wonder about, a few more to chew on his fingernails over, and a few that would probably require beating his head against a solid wall.
He could at least get some wondering done now.
He wondered if Sparky was going to stop sniffing his leg and get the shredding it over with. He wondered if there actually was a chance, however remote, that his father's pimp cane would be colliding with any craniums in the near future.
Mostly, he wondered why someone had tried to blow up Malfoy Manor.
That question didn't seem to have an answer, however, so he turned to one that might.
If the time came, if the final hand was dealt, if it whittled down to an ultimatum, would he really be able to drop it all, to let it all go, to leave it all to fall behind him—all the grandness and the grace and the affluence—if it came down to Hermione Granger or everything he'd ever known?
He looked at her where she lay, curled up by his arm, her cheek against his shoulder, the faint moonlight casting black silk shadows on her face. A spark of gold like a shiny, new Galleon winked in her hair for just a moment, and then it was gone.
Yes. He would.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Monday morning came with a bang—the bang of Draco's brain exploding.
The Aurors wanted more funding, more training programs, and cushier chairs in their offices. Draco had to agree with the training program bit. It was quite apparent to him that their current programs were severely lacking in instruction in basic mathematics, as they failed to teach the simple fact that money, contrary to popular belief, did not grow on trees.
Unless you were talking, very literally, about paper money, in which case it sort of did.
Draco's phone beeped the special beep it had for when Hermione was connecting their lines.
"Draco?" she prompted. "Do you think you could run and get me some coffee?"
"And how would you like your coffee today, Granger Goddess?"
"How are you having yours?"
"Black," Draco answered cheerfully, "like my heart. For you?"
"Black," she responded, "like my men."
Draco shortly found his desk right up in his face as he bent double, laughing hysterically.
"Was that racist?" Hermione asked sheepishly. The sheepishness rapidly became panic. "That was racist, wasn't it? It just came out… Oh, God. Oh, God, I'm racist. They're going to fire me. You won't tell anyone, will you? Will you, Draco? Draco?"
It took him about twenty seconds to catch his breath, after which point he sat up straight, took a deep breath, remembered what Hermione had said, and promptly dissolved into howling laughter again.
He was still wiping tears from the corners of his eyes when he stumbled into the break room.
There, in all his spotlight-smile-flashing, hideous-tie-wearing, slicked-wavy-hair-having glory, leaning against the counter and sipping from a Styrofoam cup, was Jonas Schaeffer.
"Draco!" the other man—if he even counted as a man—greeted him cheerily. "I was just thinking about you."
This was roughly akin to being informed that the Devil had you in particular on his mind. Draco looked at the jelly donuts in a pink box on the counter, not far from Jonas's silk-shirt-sleeved elbow. He wished that one of them was Jonas's head, so that he could slam his fist down on it and watch the jelly squirt out all over the place and splatter on the grammatically sacrilegious "Pleas dont leave food overnite" sign.
Or was it jam?
To Hell with it.
"Hermione in a good mood?" Jonas was asking jovially. "I've got a meeting with her in a few minutes."
That put a hook right through the lip of Draco's attention. "Have you?" he said slowly. Jonas nodded and then beamed, and Draco tried not to wince and squint. "Excuse me, won't you?" he managed. Again Jonas nodded obligingly, and Draco sidled out.
He was getting very bad images—pry your brain out with a pair of tongs and scour the sides of your skull with a jack-o-lantern spoon and then clean up with a sponge images. Images of Jonas Schaeffer seducing Hermione right across her desk, whipping off his criminally unattractive tie and dropping it on the line of defenseless origami cranes by her lamp.
He ducked into the men's bathroom, feeling distinctly nauseous. When the door fell closed behind him, he sucked in a huge breath to release as a scream of primal rage and deep-seated anguish, but as he tilted his head back for better acoustics, he saw…
…the air vent.
Thank you, Higher Powers, Draco thought. All he had to do was climb into the air vent and crawl to the branch over Hermione's office, where he would be able to see and hear all that went on, and where he would have an excellent angle for spitting onto Jonas Schaeffer's fat head. It was exceedingly simple.
Not to mention foolproof.
Less-than-gracefully, he clambered up onto the bank of sinks, gripped the steel bar that ran between the lights over the mirror, and reached out for the grille that covered the ventilation shaft. Felicitously, there was a tiny latch on his side of it, which, with some stretching and some flailing, he managed to undo, letting gravity pull the whole grille downward and leaving one Draco Malfoy a passage right into the duct.
Well,sort of right into the duct.
He put his latch-undoing right hand against the opposite side of the hole to brace himself and then let go of the lights with his left hand and, in one precarious, toes-on-the-edge-of-the-counter swing, managed to grab onto the nearer side of the hole. With a hand on either side, he gritted his teeth and jumped off the counter.
Oh, his fingers hated him for that one. But they held.
Hanging now from the open vent, he had only to do a slightly unusual sort of pull-up, and then he could throw his torso into the duct, scramble the rest of the way in, and be off.
Easy, peasy, puddin', and pie. He'd done pull-ups on the shower curtain bar all the time over the summers in the olden days, as much to alleviate his boredom as anything else.
Unfortunately, it was more like, Sleazy, queasy, envy, and failure. It summarized the whole story, from Jonas Schaeffer, to his effect on Draco's gastrointestinal tract, to his effect on Draco's emotions, to the ultimate result as Draco, arms quaking, levered himself up with a sudden burst of energy, slammed his head against the top of the duct to a tinny crash that probably echoed all through the Ministry, lost his grip, landed on his right foot, twisted his ankle, and crumpled dazedly to the floor.
He pointed one shaky finger at the gaping open panel, which seemed to be laughing at him—or was that the ringing in his ears?
"I hate you," he informed it. "You are a worthless, no-good, back-stabbing son of a bitch, and I hate you and everything you stand for."
The door opened, and Dynesy Cranot came in.
"'Morning." Draco didn't move as he offered the greeting, and Dynesy knelt next to him cautiously.
"'Morning…" Cranot began uncertainly.
Draco propped himself up on his elbows and looked intently at the newcomer. "Dynesy," he said urgently, "what do you think of Jonas Schaeffer?"
Pausing, Cranot examined the empty air in that perpetually-pensive way that he had. "I… don't… really like his ties," he decided at last. "But overall, he's a good sor—"
Draco sat up abruptly and threw his arms around the one sane man in all of the Ministry of Magic. "I love you, Dynesy," he announced into his new best friend's shoulder.
Tentatively, Dynesy patted his back.