"Ron!"
"Ronnie!"
"Ronnie-kins, oi!"
Draco bounced his shoulder off Ronald's as they walked toward the smell of dinner in the Great Hall. "Come on," Draco said, glancing back at the Weasley twins, the school's true Gemini. "You know ignoring them never works."
Ronald sighed. "Maybe not. But it does buy us a little time."
Draco snorted. "Time for what?"
"Time to come closer to death."
"Ronald Weasley Malfoy!" the twins called in unison.
He groaned but still wouldn't stop to face them.
As Draco said, they would not be ignored. They had overtaken Ronald by now, each of them clamping an overly large hand around his each of his elbows, crowding Draco out of the way. "Oh, there you are. Can you hear us now, Ron?" they shouted at him, steering him through the Entrance Hall, away from supper and toward the exit.
"Yeah, what is it you want today?" he said shuffling between them, not bothering to resist anymore.
Draco was shaking his head, keeping his course toward the Great Hall when the twins stopped, calling to him now. "Where do you think you're going, Slim?" Fred said.
"Yeah, Ronnie, invite your vampire to come along this time," George added.
Ronald clenched his eyes shut, rolled his shoulders. "He's not a - "
"Leave it, Ronald. I'm coming," Draco said, morbidly curious.
Uncomfortable as these exchanges between Ronald and the Weasley twins were, they were fascinating to Draco. He couldn't look away. It was unspeakably odd to see bold, brazen Ronald Malfoy subdued by his blood brothers, forced to the bottom of a pecking order he had no hope of subverting.
Was this what Ronald would have been like if he'd stayed with the Weasleys all through his childhood? What if Lucius Malfoy had gone to jail after the war and Ronald's 'real' mother, the one he shared with Draco, hadn't been presented with him to raise as her darling, and he had been left to grow up the full-time punching bag of these two brutes? From the looks of it, he still would have played quidditch. But maybe he'd have been the kind of nervous player who vomited before every match.
The four of them were outside the castle now, in a bracing wind and autumn twilight under the castle's outdoor lanterns. "This is for young master Draco," George began, handing him a stack of books.
He turned them over in his hands. They were potions books, expensive and rare, titles Draco had never seen anywhere except -
"Hey, these are from home," Draco said.
"That's right. Ron is coming along nicely in learning to share, like a good brother," Fred said. "Mummie and Daddy Malfoy probably buy two of everything for the pair of you, so how would Ron ever learn to share without us around?"
George grabbed Ronald by the face, squashing his cheeks. "You're welcome, Ronnie."
"Well, you can be sure of this," Draco began, speaking over George, unhappy that the Malfoy library had been violated, and fairly certain this wasn't the first time Ronald had lent the Weasleys books. "Our parents didn't buy us each our own fourteenth century first edition copy of The Arcane Arte of Amorous Alchemy."
Fred forced a laugh. "Don't be cross, Malfoy. We only came crawling to Ron out of desperation. Ran into a bit of a love potion emergency. We reckoned we had a line on a good one for our shop's opening inventory, and then our supplies were burned up all at once. Left us scrambling for a new recipe."
"And love potions are not the kind of formula they keep shelved here at the school library," George finished.
Ron gaped at Draco. "Amorous Alchemy - as in, love potions?"
"Yes, we can't have a full service joke shop without a reliable supply of short-acting love potions," Fred went on. "And we would have had the very best - premium, the kind that has to be kept under lock and key, every purchase registered in case there's an inquiry, no sales to anyone under-aged - "
"But then Mum had to go spare and blast the basic ingredient for it into dust," George said, still stinging. "Two sacks of Milletus root, a whole afternoon of digging through the mud, and she destroyed it all, right before our eyes, to punish us for skiving off to forage it at Aunt Muriel's."
Draco whistled. "Milletus. Wow. They say the pollen alone - "
"Right?" George said, batting Draco's arm.
"And you say it grows on Prewett land? Did you know this, Ronald?" he asked.
Ronald was speechless, barely able to shake his head 'no.'
"Can you imagine," Fred went on, "what the profits would've been once we announced Milletus-based love potions were back on the market, but only at Weasleys? We'd all be rich as Malfoys if we weren't too noble to sell off the Milletus to anyone but the Ministry."
George was tutting, shaking his head, his free enterprising business senses horribly offended by his ancestors' arrangement.
"But - but - " Ronald was sputtering, something Draco only ever saw him do in front of these Weasleys, and maybe Granger. "But love potions - they're not pranks. They're extremely dangerous. If you're lucky, the worst they do is humiliate people. If you're unlucky, they can ruin people's lives, their families, their health, start wars even - "
The twins had each thrown an arm over Ronald's shoulders, petting his head in a parody of calming him down. "Now, Ron," George was saying. "Listen to you. You're your mum's boy, you are. Every bit as hysterical as she was when she caught us moving Milletus."
"But we knew you'd be like this," Fred said. "And we still need some help with the final stages of the love potion we ended up settling on. And that's why we asked you to bring your little mate along for this conference." He nodded at Draco. "He's not the only Slytherin we plan to approach but he is the first to have that honour since his family is well-known for ruthless business acumen and not so much for their - what's the word I want?"
He was asking George, but it was Draco himself who answered. "Scruples."
"Yes, that's it," Fred beamed, stepping closer to Draco, not daring to take him under his arm but inclining his head toward him as if he had. "Now Malfoy, our new love potion - well, we had to modify it from the old formulas. It needs testing, but we've taken that as far as we can without - erm - volunteers. And since we can't bribe first-years for this one - "
Ronald jumped as if electrocuted. "We're not volunteering."
George snagged him by the back of his robes. "Of course you're not. Just stop and listen."
Fred went on. "Malfoy, I've seen you boss your cronies into all sorts of trouble. It's eerie - sick. Aren't there a pair of them, maybe on the cusp of dating, who need a little push that you could boss into testing our potion? Or maybe there's some girl who likes you but who you'd only like to snog for a day and then blame it all on a love potion accident. We could definitely arrange that. Think of it. No strings attached and a potion to blame it on in the end."
"Yeah, blame us," George added. "Blame us and our (hopefully) irresistible potion far and wide. Can't buy advertising better than a scandal, isn't that right Freddie?"
"Too right," Fred said. "So what do you say, Malfoy? Who do you have? For yourself or someone else. We'd offer you money but we thought you'd appreciate the social value more than gold."
Ronald sprung to life, taking Draco by the elbow. "He's not serving up someone to assault someone with your love potion."
"It's not assault if they agree to it or if he doses himself," Fred hurried to say.
"It's still not ethical," Ronald shouted back at him. "Love potions - you don't understand what you're dealing with."
"And you think you do?" Fred said, folding his arms, crowing with sarcasm. "You've been affected by a love potion, have you, little brother? Cursed? How was it? Do tell?"
"Maybe I have!" Ronald snapped. "Ask yourselves, you idiots, why your mother would have reacted so violently and burned all that Milletus on sight. It's not about skiving. It's about me, isn't it? It's about why she was up for it, why she was up the duff already when the pair of you were still bratty babies."
Draco stood watching, his eyes wide, partly with pride at Ronald for finally talking back to the twins after all these years, partly with shock for what he dared to say to them about their mother.
Fred and George were standing taller, aligning themselves shoulder to shoulder. Fred spoke. "What do you have to say about our mother?"
Ronald was squaring up as well. "Nothing. I hardly know her, truth be told. They force me to spend some of every holiday with you lot, but when I get there the pair of you keep the place such a madhouse I can barely speak to her. So you tell me what there is to say about her. If you don't know, go on and ask her. I wish you would. Who knows? We might be surprised by what she's really been up to."
That was the moment the twins fell on Ronald, beating him. No one produced a wand - it was a family row, after all - but Ronald was letting out a lifetime of hurt as he flailed his arms to keep from getting pinned down by one twin, and kicked at the other. When Fred closed a fist and managed to connect it with Ronald's eyebrow, making it bleed, Draco dropped The Arcane Arte of Amorous Alchemy to the ground and flew into the fray. At first he was trying to restrain the Weasleys to give Ronald a chance, but soon he was hit and kicked enough to be throwing punches himself.
It might have stayed a family fight between four loosely connected not-quite brothers if Harry Potter hadn't arrived and upgraded the fight to a brawl. He'd been coming back from trying to show the thestrals to Hermione when he saw Draco swinging at the Weasleys. He was always more inclined to see Ronald as a Weasley than a Malfoy, and he needed nothing more to send him charging in to defend him from Draco, ignoring Hermione as she called him back.
Even Ronald, with his head crushed in the crook of George's arm, managed to cough out a muffled, "Harry, no. Umbridge…"
Harry fought anyway, sweating and swearing, more relieved than any of them, perhaps, to have an outlet for the weeks and weeks of rage he'd felt since coming back to school, to his slandered reputation, and to the Ministry masquerading as a teacher, Umbridge fighting him every step he took.
Harry was on the ground, his knee in Draco Malfoy's stomach, when Professor McGonagall sailed through the castle doors, casting petrifying spells, bringing the fighting to a halt.
The aftermath was awful. There was an immediate, angry meeting in Professor McGonagall's office where the bulk of her energy was focused on Potter who kept insisting he was rescuing Ronald from Draco. When asked to confirm Potter's version, the twins shifted on their feet, grumbling vaguely about a private family matter.
"Oh, it will be a family matter," said McGonagall. "Your parents have been notified as have the Malfoys."
"What about mine?" Harry asked.
Fred whistled softly.
McGonagall stared across her desk at Harry. "As your head of house, I am trying my best to nurture and protect you, Harry Potter. And that includes affixing consequences to your bad judgment so it can be refined into better judgment. And I am doing all of that while attempting to insulate you from the vindictive harassment of certain - "
She interrupted herself as Ronald was let into the office by Madam Pomfrey, who had just mended the cut on his eyebrow. "Mister Ronald," McGonagall said. "Come, I want no more foolish dithering. Answer me plainly. Did your brother attack you?"
Ronald looked at the four other boys standing before McGonagall's desk, each one of them someone he could call a brother. How in the stars could he answer plainly? He did his best. "Fred and George and I went at each other first, then Draco came in to even up the sides. Harry was only there by accident."
McGonagall was just releasing a breath of relief when, "hem-hem," someone cleared their throat from her doorway.
"We do not have accidents at Hogwarts." It was Umbridge, intruding without a knock and with a glazed, hungry look like a shark smelling blood in the water. "No, no. We do not have accidents. We have choices."
That was when Harry knew he was done for.
By the end of the meeting, Umbridge had come to the conclusion that the Weasley twins, as students from the oldest year at school, must take the lead in settling differences without violence. Harry, in turn, needed to mind his own business and stop trawling around the school looking for fights. With that, she declared that all three of them would be punished with a lifetime ban of playing quidditch at the school.
She ruled that the remaining boys, the Malfoy brothers, would be turned over to their parents for discipline.
To prevent further scuffles in the corridors, the boys were not dismissed together. After Umbridge left, Harry was sent away, fuming and stomping, then a sulking George, followed by a brooding Fred.
Draco was the first of the Malfoy brothers to be allowed to leave. He stepped out into the corridor, sighing heavily, rubbing hard at his temples before turning to find Hermione Granger bounding toward him, her face upturned and wide open with worry.
His heart gave the same thud it always did on catching sight of her. With the thud, a little of the anger and dread clenched in his chest loosened, and the scowl on his face softened to a question, ready to hear what she had to say.
But when she spoke, it was with a quietly livid voice. "What did you do to them?" she demanded.
Draco staggered backward, the darkness falling on him. "What did I do to THEM?" he repeated.
She tossed her head, pushing his copy of Amorous Alchemy and the rest of the books he'd been forced to abandon outside the castle against his chest. "Yes. Harry deserves an explanation for what that was all about. A lifetime ban - this has cost him so much and he still doesn't even know what the fight was all about."
Draco took the books just to let them fall to the floor at his feet. They landed with a louder slam than he intended but he didn't cringe. He stepped forward until the toe of his shiny leather shoe butted up against Granger's. At this distance, he towered over her, glaring down into her face. "Yeah? Potter doesn't know why he was punching at me, but he does know it was the right thing to do? How does that work?"
She took a step away, still frowning at him. "If it's not how it went, then just say - "
He followed her, backing each other away from the door to McGonagall's office, to where they wouldn't be so easily overheard. As he interrupted her, his voice was angry but not loud. "And Potter's not the only one clever enough to have figured it out, yeah? You too, Granger. You're also dead sure I deserved that beating."
She stopped, stamping her foot on the stone floor, holding her ground, snatching at his hand, his knuckles still bloody. "Oh, so you're innocent, are you Malfoy?"
"Malfoy, yes," he said, shaking off her hold, but closing his hands around her wrists, moving his grip up her arms to hold her just above each elbow. Her mouth was still set in something like a snarl but her eyelids were drifting shut as his palms slid along the fabric of her blouse. "The Malfoy brothers have managed to fool Umbridge and keep their spots in the quidditch rosters. But that's just proof positive they're on the wrong side of all this. Well-spotted, Granger."
He had spoken the last part with his head bent low over her face, in a hoarse whisper. She stood still, no longer accusing or arguing. Was it just her attraction to him jamming the signals to her brain, or could she sense his hurt, his bitter disappointment? Did she know how sad it made him to think that even after the intimacy they'd shared, the good will he'd tried to show her, the lifetime of affection anyone could see he had for Ronald, her first impulse was still to think the worst of him.
A part of Draco knew he should have been thinking of Ronald - Ronald who, in a few hours, would be in the arms of their mother, lavished with comforting reassurances that he was loved and loving and no potion accident could ever change that, while Draco would be turned over to their father to be upbraided for his lack of poise and decorum, for sinking to the level of a schoolyard spat with a bunch of blood-traitors. What would Father say if he knew what he'd done to Muggle-born Granger?
It was true that he lost sight of everything his father wanted for him when it came to Granger. He knew that, and maybe he should be relieved that she was standing here now, saying all the wrong things, reminding him she did not actually like him and he needed to forget her and keep his hands off her. But in this moment of hurt, he wanted nothing more than to feel better, to feel the way he felt with her. And if her attraction to him - if it was all there was, he would take it.
Her eyes were closed. Gently, he settled the end of his nose against the bridge of hers, over her tear duct, and traced the length of her eyelid. Her breath shuddered slightly but she kept still as he completed the slow, smooth movement, first on her right eyelid, and then on her left. When he had finished and straightened away from her, she stepped forward, standing carefully on the ends of his shoes with the balls of her feet. On tiptoe, she was higher and closer to him, opening her eyes, inhaling to speak but also to take in his smell, heightened from the strain and sweat of the fight.
"I've got it wrong. So tell me." She said it in a whisper.
"Miss Granger," Professor McGonagall was calling from her office doorway.
Draco and Hermione broke away from each other, red-faced and breathless, both of them stooping to gather up the dropped books.
"Miss Granger, your assistance in this matter is most unwelcome," McGonagall said. "Both of you, back to your houses at once. Mr. Malfoy, your parents will call for you when they arrive."
They fled into separate directions as McGonagall turned to speak to Ronald, hidden behind her and her tall pointed hat. She stepped aside and let him pass into the hall where he caught sight of the back of Draco's white head, disappearing down the stairs to the dungeons.
And then he saw nothing but a pair of bright dark eyes blinking up at him. Pansy Parkinson had sprung out from behind a column in the Entrance Hall, as if she'd been waiting for him and couldn't hang back any longer.
"Ronald, are you alright?" she said, gasping at the sight of the freshly mended cut still red on his eyebrow. "Someone hit you? How could anyone hit you?"
He smiled, almost a laugh. "What are you doing, lurking around out here while everyone else is having their tea?"
"How can I eat?" she began, "How could I, when I'm sat in there thinking that fighting with your brothers and being caught and getting sent to the hospital wing and then having Umbridge stick her oar in - it must be awful."
He scoffed, but not unkindly. "Yeah, that's what it is."
Her fingers were tugging at the hem of his sleeve.
His eyes were drawn down to watch them. "You know, Parkinson, you're getting better and better at acting as if you actually like me," he said.
She smirked. "I already told you I like you. But wait until you hear this next part. Prepare yourself."
He smirked right back at her. "What? Are you advancing me to full-on snogging, right here in the Entrance Hall with my face still healing?" He tested his lip, tapping gingerly at a hard lump in one side of it.
She shook her head, the tips of her bobbed hair bouncing sweetly against her cheeks. "Of course not. But I was thinking you might feel better, after what you've been through today, if you had someone's hand to hold. I know I would, if I was you right now. And since we're in the middle of our experiment, I thought I'd better present myself - to keep our data uncontaminated. It only makes - "
Her words died away as Ronald took her hand, his punch-swollen fingers folding gently over hers. He needed no further persuasion.
Though they had spent close to an hour earlier in the week roaming around the less traveled reaches of the school grounds holding hands as Ronald tried to learn how to connect to girls, Pansy still wasn't used to how it made her feel.
Honestly, she wondered sometimes if she didn't prefer hand-holding to kissing. Ronald's hands were large, roughen by quidditch broom handles, with a coarseness in his fingerprints that must have set off thousands of tiny pressure points in her palms and fingertips. He'd even known, without any coaching, to put her hand inside of the pocket of his cloak along with his own when it started to get cold. If Draco and Granger hadn't been in the vanished room already by the time they got there, breaking up the moment with the need to spin a ridiculous cover story about an imaginary Bulgarian boyfriend - stars only know what might have happened.
The fact was, this whole exercise with Ronald Malfoy was probably destroying her heart. What would become of her if, at the end of it, Ronald was still thick enough to think he had anything with Hermione Granger - with anyone but her?
It was nothing that could be answered today, so for now, here in the Entrance Hall, Pansy kept on her collision course with heartbreak, hoping Ronald didn't hear it when her breath hitched at his touch.
"You thought I wanted a hand to hold?" he said. "Well, you thought right. You got everything right. Thanks for this," he held their hands up and laid them on his sternum "Thank you."