A/N: My god, it's Thursday and I almost forgot to post. I have the memory of a gnat.
Also, I got my very first review, which caused a lot more Feelings than I was anticipating and was nonetheless very exciting for me! The gist of it was that there's no way Ginny would ever end up with Draco and that she'd rip his balls off first; I just have to say that there is actually nothing in this world that I love more than a good ballbusting and that I'm really, really looking forward to illustrating all of the ways in which Ginny shreds Draco before their romance starts. And maybe during the romance, too.
As she watched Harry slam the door to the men's bathroom slam shut in her face, Ginny wondered how the day had gone to shit quite so badly and also why so many of the disasters in her life were linked to the bloody Malfoys.
Ginny Weasley liked to win. Whether it was the natural instinct that developed from being one of a family with seven children and one income or whether it was born from a desperate clutch on life after surviving the horcrux possession or something that was simply part of her makeup, Ginny Weasley really liked to fucking win.
All things being equal (and one could argue that they weren't, given that Harry was male and also a whole year older and also a war hero), Ginny and Harry should have progressed similarly at the venture capital firm they Confunded their way into. And yet, while they had both started out fetching coffee and booking reservations and silently observing the occasional pitch, it was Ginny who was first asked to attend a conference in New York and Ginny was the first to make the leap from 'college associate' to 'associate' (she celebrated by making Harry fetch her coffee four times on her first day in her new role).
The flip side of being a winner was that she had very little patience for losers. Not that she would ever be unkind to someone who was doing their best and made an honest mistake or someone who was just a little quirky (hadn't she been friends with Neville and Luna?), but she had absolutely no patience for forty year old men who couldn't be arsed to be prepared for a meeting when he was the one asking her for money. Or a condescending man who dismissed her to fetch him a laptop cord (he'd forgotten his) because he assumed she was an office assistant; when she corrected him, he told the woman who was supposed to be his business partner to go do it.
One of the greatest joys of Ginny's new life was informing men like that exactly what she thought of them. Loudly. After the Ethan Stacks incident, the receptionist started to introduce Ginny by name and title when new people arrived at the office to meet her, just so there wouldn't be any further confusion. Or yelling.
There was both confusion and yelling (although not until she got home) when her boss pulled her into a meeting on what had otherwise been a perfectly productive Thursday and told her that he couldn't make her a principal.
"Jack, I swear to God, if this is some kind of misogynistic bullshit, I'm going to take this to TechCrunch and ValleyWag and you're not cute enough for your pictures to win you any sympathy when they start blogging about you."
Jack laughed off her threat. "Hardly, and I'm going for more of a distinguished look than a cute one." She had to grant him that. Somewhere between fifty and sixty, Jack Yorke had something of Albus Dumbledore's twinkle to his eye; she had thought it was a sign of particularly strong magic in her old headmaster, but she was starting to realize it was something exhibited by many men who had the confidence inspired by so frequently making the right moves.
"Okay…" she racked her brain, trying to figure out what she was lacking. Surely there wasn't anyone else who would be promoted over her?
"I'm going to speak very honestly with you, Ginny, because I think you deserve my honest opinion," Jack said in a rare moment of seriousness. She appreciated his sense of humor but also the way that he was very direct when he needed to be. "If I was going to hire a new principal, I'd want to pick you. You have good instincts, you don't miss deadlines, and you, ah, encourage our founders to keep on top of their push dates."
She'd encouraged some of those founders to shed a few tears too, but Jack cared less about that than the deadlines being met.
"But you're very young and that's going to be a problem when you're a principal and you have to do deals with other firms. They won't take you seriously enough and you won't be able to represent our interests as effectively."
"I'm twenty-nine, Jack, hardly an infant," Ginny said dryly, doing her best not to sound like she was whining.
"Goddamn, are you really? My daughter's only a few years younger than you. I'm getting old." Jack shook his head. "But I wasn't really talking about that, I was talking about your lack of business experience. You started working here right out of college, but as far as I know you've never been in a startup yourself."
She was forced to concede that he was correct.
"See, I think that in order to really progress as a VC you need to know what it's like on the other side. I don't need you to agree with me," he cut her off when her mouth opened to try to argue her case, "but just in case you were thinking of jumping ship to some other firm, I can tell you that my philosophy is pretty common."
"So what are my options, then?" she asked.
"I'd like you to pick one of our portfolio companies to join so you can get some experience," Jack said. "Spend a year with them and then we can talk."
"Six months."
"A year," he laughed, refusing to relent. "But if you do something really big then I'll reconsider. Take the afternoon to think it over and set up whatever meetings you need."
She'd had to be satisfied with that, although she couldn't say she was excited. But Ginny Weasley was a winner, no matter the game, and she was already calculating which companies had the biggest potential to rocket her into that principal office.
It was a good thing that the dim sum was good because this first meeting was trash.
She'd reached out to Damian because his team was young and hungry, like her, and their product was something she understood (some muggle things remained a mystery to her and she couldn't risk exposing her ignorance by working on something highly technical like a robotic exoskeleton, even if it was very cool). Even better, she knew that there were communication issues on the team and that gave her the opportunity to achieve her objective of Making Big Improvements.
But as she watched Damian fumble with his napkin and almost knock over his tea cup, she realized that this wasn't going to work out because the biggest improvement she could think of would be fucking murdering him.
"So you said that you're about halfway through a sprint right now?" she asked doggedly, trying one last time to turn this into a decent conversation.
As he had for the entire time they'd been in the restaurant, Damian refused to make eye contact and grunted his answer in the fewest words possible.
"Yeah. Version two will be live in eight days."
"Lovely," she smiled, trying to catch a waiter's attention so she could get the hell out of there. "Any changes in your revenue stream? You have a marketing intern trying to get some traction in the mommy blogging groups, right?"
He nodded. That was it.
"For fuck's sake," she said aloud, finally losing her patience. At this, he was startled into peering at her and she leaned forward to capture that gaze. "Are you like this all the time or is there some problem with me?"
"Like what?" he asked, genuinely confused. So this was his normal, then.
She ignored his question. "Jack asked me to join a portfolio company," she told him. "I was thinking about yours as an option."
A less confident woman might have been offended by the way Damian recoiled in obvious horror, but since she had already decided she couldn't join his team she really didn't care.
"Oh my god, why?" he blurted. "Who are they replacing?"
"Oh, no one, this is really more about me than about you," she said, then added "I think." She recognized that, like Fred and George, she took pleasure in the emotional discomfort of others, especially when they deserved it like this tosser did. She knew very well that he didn't act like this when he talked to Jack or Harry. She didn't think he actually had a problem with women in the workplace, but he was so unforgivably awkward that it brought out the worst in her.
As he stuttered and spiraled, she felt a frisson of guilt - hadn't Neville been similarly nervous and awkward when he was out of his element? It wasn't enough for her to be kind of Damian, but she did unbend enough to pay the bill (well, Jack paid since she expensed it) and she was out the door and on her way to her next meeting not ten minutes later.
Getting a coffee with Don Green was better and worse.
It was better because Don was a solid guy, even if he used the word 'synergize' non-ironically, and the guys in his office were working steadily and well. If there weren't any obvious issues she could exploit to earn her promotion faster, there also weren't any pitfalls that would prevent her from fitting in with the team.
However, it was an issue that they worked completely inhuman hours.
"I'm sorry, you've put what in the office?"
"Oh, the snooze room," Don said as if this was a perfectly sane thing to say. "There was a long kind of storage space under the stairs and we put some blankets and pillows down and we rotate taking naps so we don't have to go home and we can get more work done. I think Andy's actually been in the office for two weeks now," he said proudly.
They'd made a cupboard under the stairs. Merlin. What would Harry think about that?
"That's pretty devoted," she said, reluctantly admiring the drive that she could see herself mirroring. "Do any of you have kids?"
"Nope, Kinfo is our baby."
"Right," she sighed. Her heart sank when she thought about how she could work at Kinfo and also help Harry with James. Although it pained her to admit it, she didn't think that she could maintain any kind of work-life balance and she and Harry had promised that their little family came first. She chatted with Don for a while longer, looking for an angle that might allow her to join, but she left the coffee shop knowing that it wasn't going to work out. Those two companies had seemed like the best fit and she was starting to worry she would have to settle for something less optimal to meet Jack's condition.
"Look Auntie Ginny," James gurgled happily. "A pink castle!" The little boy had drawn a fairly decent castle, although the towers did look unfortunately like a bunch of dicks. "It's pink 'cus Auntie's a girl and girls like pink," he continued shyly, holding the picture out to Harry. Harry chuckled at the way Ginny swallowed the lecture on not reinforcing gender roles.
She got revenge by muttering "I bet he drew those dick-towers for Daddy," as she brushed by Harry to grab another glass of wine and was rewarded by the sound of him choking. "That's very nice, James," she called to her adopted nephew. Although he probably wasn't going to grow up to be an artist, she loved spending time around him. He was a sweet kid and often made little gifts for her and Harry when he was with his babysitter.
Said babysitter was frantically typing away from his seat on the couch, but he paused when he heard the cork popping out of the wine bottle. "Dearest, is that a white or a red? If it's a red, I demand a glass. If it's a white, I demand you develop better taste."
"You're lucky you're so useful to me, Jae," she sniped back, although she poured him a glass. "And my taste in wine is better than your taste in partners."
"Hey! I resent that," Harry protested. Harry had met Jaesung at a behavioral economics conference and the two had hit it off. After dating for a month, Jae had realized that his favorite member of the little family wasn't Harry, but James. The relationship ended, but Uncle Jae had stayed firmly in place as James's babysitter, since he was a software consultant who mostly worked from home.
"And I resent that you insist on wearing polos with the collar popped, but I'm noble enough to still be seen with you," Jaesung fired back.
"One time. One time!" Harry moaned, a refrain in a longstanding argument.
"One time too many," Ginny said. Jae raised his glass to her.
"Well if we're going to be catty tonight, you might as well bring me a glass too, Ginny."
Later, after they'd finished the bottle and bundled a very rosy-cheeked Jae into a taxi to take him home, Ginny was putting James to bed.
"Auntie Gin?"
"Yes baby?"
"Uncle Jae said we're going to go flying kites tomorrow when you and Daddy are at work. Can you tell him no?"
"What?"
"Oh, sorry, tell him no thank you," James said, misunderstanding the question.
"Oh, that's fine, baby, but," Ginny's brow wrinkled, "why don't you want to go play with the kites? I thought you liked the octopus one you picked out."
"I do," James said, eyes wide. He was a thoughtful child and had spent days looking at every kite in the shop until he finally made his choice. Ginny hadn't met very many small children, but she thought that James was an incredibly good one: quiet and sweet, he rarely got angry and didn't seem lonely although he spent most of his time around adults. "I just don't feel like playing outside so much, that's all."
"Alright then, sweetheart. Do you feel okay?"
"Yes, just kind of tired."
"Alright, I'll ask Uncle Jae if you can go to the museum instead, does that sound good?"
James nodded, his little face lighting up. "Yes, and it will be very good because Uncle Jae never remembers anything, so maybe this time he can try really hard and learn something."
Ginny fought a valiant battle not to laugh as she remembered Jaesung's dismissal of the "historical blah-blahs" as he called them. He had accused Harry of some kind of witchcraft because what else could explain a five year old's obsession with art museums? Ginny's wild laughter had been difficult to explain, but Harry told Jaesung that it was female hysteria and then ran for his life as Ginny attacked.
Ginny and Harry were late leaving for work because of all of the whining the next morning.
"I don't want to go to the museum!"
"I know, but you'll feel better once you're actually there."
"No I won't, I never do! It is so incredibly boring and the wine list at the restaurant is appalling."
"What does 'appalling' mean, Uncle Jae?"
Jaesung knelt down to fix a beady eye on his charge. "It means terrible, bad, completely unforgivable."
"It's not very nice to say such rude things about the museum. I think your behavior this morning is appalling," James said patiently. Harry howled at that and even an un-caffeinated Ginny cracked a smile.
"This is your fault, you little hellion," Jae sniffed, straightening up and lifting his nose in the air. "Don't think that this will go unpunished; I'm going to make you memorize everything in that museum so we never have to go back."
In the car on the way to the office, Harry and Ginny talked about their schedules for the day and put their game faces on.
"Calypto, based out of-"
"Somewhere on the peninsula, runs an online secondhand clothing service, needs capital to build up their inventory. What do you think?"
"Could be cool, but I don't know much about the shipping logistics. Where did they want to set up their warehouse?"
"Dunno, add that to the notes. Next, Greylock is sending someone over. They passed but they thought we might be interested."
"The Friend Group," Harry snorted, rolling his eyes.
"Oh, you don't think a social network for senior citizens is going to be the next hot thing?" Ginny asked sarcastically.
"Considering that most people over sixty don't even know what social media is, I don't think this is going anywhere. Can you imagine trying to run a focus group?"
Ginny suppressed a shudder. "Yeah, no thanks. Okay, so we'll give them half an hour out of courtesy to Greylock, but if they keep sending us this shit I'm going to ask Jack to have a word with them."
"I'll be out of the office for a few hours for a meeting in FiDi, but I'll be back for the pitch later this afternoon, something about video games?"
"I don't remember that," Ginny frowned. "Am I scheduled for that?"
"Maybe? You should come, it sounds like it could be cool and I think Jack is interested."
"In a video game? I didn't think he was interested in that space."
"It's not really about the game itself, they're working on some kind of virtual reality device. The game is like a proof of concept for the platform they're building."
This caught Ginny's attention. She wasn't as into video games as Harry was, true, but she'd never heard of technology like that. Her sixth sense for winning started to tingle. Something like this could be really big and if Jack was already leaning toward investing this might give her a third option for a company to join.
The pudgy man wearing black jeans and a Berkeley t-shirt looked flustered as he fiddled with his laptop. She shot him a smile to try to ease his nerves - if she wanted to be able to form an accurate opinion of how much potential he had, she'd like him to be comfortable enough to perform at his best.
"We're almost ready to start, my partner just stepped out to use the bathroom," the guy - Steve Keller - said for the second time. Just then, the door opened and someone else stepped in.
She actually didn't recognize him at first, not because he had changed much since the last time she saw him but because he was so out of context that her brain refused to accept that Draco Malfoy could exist here, in this board room, wearing crisp muggle attire with a Blackberry clipped to his belt.
For a crazy second she wondered if this was merely a really convincing doppelganger, until Harry's strangled gasp and his hand clamping down on her thigh underneath the table forced her to acknowledge that this was really happening.
And the most shocking thing that was happening was that the pitch was good.
Really good.
Good enough for her to overcome her prejudice against Malfoy.
Good enough for her to realize that she was going to have to figure out what to do about Harry.
Because even though she couldn't see anything objectionable in the projections Malfoy had put into the deck and even though Jack was clearly nodding at Steve's answers to all the technical questions he was asked, Harry hadn't unclenched.
And then it got worse.
"Our hardware prototype is still in production, but we actually have the trailer for our first game, Rise of the Dark Lord, ready for you to view today," Steve was saying as he minimized the PowerPoint window and pulled up a video file. Ginny had been watching Malfoy's face, which had been smooth and professional for the entire meeting, but as his partner said the title of the game Malfoy blanched very slightly and his eyes flicked over to Harry.
It got so much worse when Ginny realized that the protagonist of the game was clearly Harry Potter. That was Very Bad.
As she watched the opening scenes and realized with a dawning sense of horror that, yes, they were really about to watch an animated version of the Potters' murders, she was dimly aware of Harry staggering to his feet and lurching out the door. Malfoy's eyes closed and he looked like he'd be sick himself, but Ginny wasn't sure that anyone else in the darkened room noticed.
"Is Harry okay," Jack leaned over and whispered.
"I don't know, I'll go check on him," Ginny muttered and slipped out before Jack could tell her not to. She found Harry crouched down outside the men's room, breathing as if he'd run a marathon.
"Harry-"
"What the fuck," he barked in a ragged voice. "What the fuck is happening right now?"
"I know," she murmured, trying to figure out what to say.
"This is completely fucked," Harry said, his vocabulary completely abandoning him. "I can't believe this. And it's not even his own idea," he added, somewhat mutinously. "I mean, he's just exploiting my shitty life for a stupid game."
"Maybe you can collect royalties?"
"Ginny, it isn't funny," Harry practically screamed. "I've got to get out of here until he's gone."
"Harry…" Ginny wasn't sure if Harry had been able to pay attention to everything that had gone on in the room or if he'd (understandably) been distracted. "Jack's going to go for this one."
"No fucking way."
"He is," Ginny insisted. "The numbers look good, their rollout timeframe is short, the terms they're asking for aren't-" she stopped when she saw Harry gag.
"Tell him not to. He'll listen to you."
She didn't want to say it, Merlin knew she didn't, but she had to. "I don't think he would, and I don't think he should. I think this could have a huge payout, Harry." His look of betrayal hurt, but the rage didn't rise until he heard her say, "And I think this is my ticket to principal."
"You- you can't be serious!"
"I can," she said, closing her eyes rather than look at his flashing, accusatory glare. "I don't have any other options!" She started to run through all the irrefutably strong points of the presentation, but Harry had reached his breaking point.
"Fuck you." The end of the conversation was quiet, but absolute. Harry pushed himself off the ground and went lurching through the door to the bathroom, not looking back at her, and she drowned in that rarely felt but always despised feeling of loss.
