Chapter 6: More pastries than answers

The day had started off relatively well, Draco reflected numbly as he watched Potter and the blonde slip out of the room. For fuck's sake, he had even gotten Steve to look halfway decent rather than the bottom-feeding troglodyte he truly was. But no amount of hair gel was going to be able to salvage this disaster and the worst of it was that he wouldn't even be able to tell his partner, roommate, and sometimes friend why.


As a creature of habit, Draco's rituals were sacred to him and never more so than on days when important things needed to be done.

Therefore, on the morning of the all-important pitch, he was up at 6:30 and walking through the gym at exactly 7:00. Cardio, then weights, then stretching, then caffeine (but not too much and none for Steve in order to avoid any jitters). Half an hour for answering the highest priority emails, two run throughs of the pitch (one with the slide deck in front of him and one with his eyes closed). Steve was a variable he couldn't control (Merlin, did he know that) but all that Draco could control he absolutely fucking would.

Uncharacteristically meek, Steve had allowed Draco to dress him and even make some attempt to help him with his grooming. That meekness only lasted until they were in the (hellish, smelly, unconscionably filthy) public transit and screaming their way through the dark tunnel towards San Francisco.

"Have I told you that public speaking makes me want to puke?" Steve moaned.

"Yes, repeatedly. Although that could also be the fact that riding BART sounds and feels like being teleported to hell."

"I'm going to say something stupid and lose us our funding."

"You won't, for two reasons. Firstly, if you say something wrong I'll be forced to correct you and your oversized ego would hardly allow you to be outdone by someone less technically accomplished than yourself. Secondly, if you fuck this up, I'll very cheerfully murder you."

"You're one to talk about egos," Steve grumbled, but he seemed to take heart at Draco's buried admission that Steve was the more skilled engineer.

Truthfully, Draco had some nerves of his own, not that he would ever admit that to the muggle next to him. He'd picked this firm to pitch to because there were actually relatively few funds that were investing in the gaming space; most billionaires seemed more interested in biotech inventions that might enable them to live forever. If Yorke and Ramsey passed on them there were a few more options, but none that had quite as much money or the technical knowledge to understand the appeal of what they were offering.

He was also struggling with his feelings about Steve. His roommate's technical skill was undeniable, but a lifetime of indoctrination against muggles was hard to shake. Even with the hard evidence he'd seen that Steve was something special in this world, Draco couldn't help his knee jerk reaction to dismiss the man because of his lack of magic. If something happened during this pitch, Draco was honest enough to admit that his latent bias - certainly diminished from the outright prejudice he had once felt, but still lurking under the surface - might cause him to resent his partner. He wasn't sure what he would do if that were to happen.

But as the train shrieked to a stop in the Financial District and they disembarked, Draco put thoughts of failure from his mind. Doubt, like prophecies, often became self-fulfilling and although Draco would be happy to be divested of some of his conditioning, he wore the Malfoy lessons in poise and planning for victory like armor as they rose out of the underground station.


The Yorke and Ramsey office was small and colorful. Life-sized images of the founders cavorting in business casual were hung behind the reception desk. The woman behind the desk offered them their selection of water, coffee, or beer (an odd choice, Draco thought) and they walked down a short hallway that had been emblazoned with typically Silicon Valley entrepreneur quotes.

"Disruption is created by those who are willing to pursue what others dismiss as foolish."

"Great founders are not held back by anyone else's reality because they create their own."

"There's no such thing as a safe bet, there is only opportunity and those too scared to believe in it."

Draco felt a frisson of discomfort as he noted that some of the Dark Lord's philosophy had been similar. He tried to shake off the ideological echo and instead calculated what that might mean about the investor he was about to encounter.

'Someone who appreciates boldness. Someone who prides themselves on thinking big and won't have any respect for someone offering a low-risk, low-reward idea. Better to be overconfident than to be measured, I think.'

It was laughable how people here - muggles who had never fought in a war, never lived with monsters, never felt certain that they would die in a horrible way - used the word 'disruption' as an ideal to aspire to. 'What an incredible privilege' Draco scoffed internally as they were led into a conference room titled SYNERGY. 'Although I suppose I'm the last person to be able to mock the privilege of others.'

Jack Yorke was already in the room, sipping from a mug and typing away on a laptop. Handshakes were given, Yorke waved a hand at a projector and Steve started getting their presentation set up.

"Could you direct me to the facilities?" Draco asked politely, playing up his posh accent. It seemed to inspire some sort of confidence in the Americans and he wanted every ounce of leverage he could win for their project. "I'm afraid that sixth cup of coffee is making demands of me." Based on the urn of coffee lurking in the back of the room, he was betting that this would be another note of resonance Yorke might feel.

He wasn't wrong. "Of course," Yorke laughed. "You're a better man than I am, I'm on my eighth cup myself, but don't tell my doctor. Down the hall and to your left."

He didn't actually need to go, but he did take a moment to study his face in the mirror one last time. Look patrician, but not haughty. Hair teased into some kind of order, but not stiff. A smile that was warm, inviting, but not obsequious. Mask firmly in place, Draco walked back into the room and was halfway to Steve before he realized that there were two more people in the room.

It took him thirty full seconds to realize that he was standing in front of Harry Potter and it took him thirty full years of Malfoy lessons to keep from giving voice to the scream of horror that he felt bubbling up in his throat.


Draco's grandfather had succumbed to Dragon Pox, which had never seemed like a serious threat to someone of Malfoy stature and power. However, it was the truth and so every time Draco had fallen ill, his mother had taken serious precautions that usually saw him swaddled in bed with broth poured down his gullet by a wide-eyed house elf every hour, on the hour. He had hated the feeling of being watched so minutely and had done everything in his power to squirm free and sneak out of his room.

Only once, had he felt really, truly ill and he could still remember the ache in his bones and the way the delirium had created phantasms of the shadows in his room. For three days, he was barely aware of the passing of time, floating in and out of consciousness and only dimly aware of the physical sensation of his mother touching his forehead or food passing between his lips.

The feeling of listening to Steve talk about the hardware specs of their virtual reality gaming device while a fully adult Potter tried to set Draco ablaze with his stare felt like being trapped in that fever dream once again and Draco struggled valiantly to float back into possession of his mind and body.

"-prototype ready for beta testing with our first game." Steve sounded like everything was clenched, but Draco wasn't sure what his own voice would sound like once it was his turn to talk. He had a brief, mad fantasy of scrambling out of the room and abandoning the whole scheme.

"My partner, Draco, is going to run through our valuation and the terms we're looking for, as well as our marketing rollout." Steve practically sagged in relief at having finished his part, which Draco thought he very well might do himself if he could make it through the rest of the deck.

But his meticulously planned deck might not matter if Potter had any say in the matter; Draco hadn't been able to figure out what Potter's role was here and how much say he had. He did know that Jack Yorke was a partner though and that it was to him that he needed to appeal.

He hoped he'd interpreted the quotes on the wall correctly, because he was about to go wildly off script.

"Listen, our numbers are solid and Steve's technical work is solid," he said, zeroing in on Yorke's face. "You can see our projections here, I don't need to read them to you." Steve stiffened out of his slump and looked faintly nauseated, Draco could see out of the corner of his eye. "I'm sure you get lots of people coming in here to beg for your money and telling you why they think you should invest. I believe we're different in that we're not just entrepreneurs, we're founders and I'm going to tell you why you can't afford not to invest."

Yorke's eye glinted and Draco knew that this was the right direction. He kept pushing.

"The difference between an entrepreneur and a founder is that the former comes up with an idea, but his attachment to that idea is probably superficial - entrepreneurs care about the action of brainstorming but they're perfectly happy to cut and run or sell out if the idea isn't strong enough. That's why you hear the term 'serial entrepreneur' but you never hear about serial founders." He paused for a moment to glance at Potter, who was still frozen in a portrait of agonized hatred. The woman next to him was also frozen, but her face wasn't as closed off.

"A founder commits to their creation because they're building an empire, something that will grow into something much larger." He nodded at Steve, who looked like he was fading away in ghostly terror, "Paradigm shift, as my partner calls it. That's what we want. And I've seen your portfolio and the types of risk that you're willing to assume and that's why we've come to you. Because I truly believe that we're the right people in the right place at the right time and with the right backing this could be the unicorn that everyone in this room has been hunting."

He talked about the numbers. He talked about the grassroots marketing campaigns. He talked about the future applications of their device - medical training, long distance conferencing, military drills - but he could see that Yorke had been affected by his earlier introduction.

And then, he suddenly remembered that they were about to show the trailer for their first game, and any confidence that he'd built up vanished.

When Potter stormed out of the room, Draco wondered if that might have been the best outcome he could have hoped for. The blonde went after him, and Draco wondered if he might have to worry about Potter outing him as a wizard. Merlin, he did not want to follow them, but he knew that some damage control would need to be done even if Potter managed to scuttle the deal. 'And realistically, with two of the three people in the room clearly not in favor,' he thought with a sort of numb despair, 'what hope could there be of the deal going through.'

The worst of it might be that he would owe Steve an apology - it wasn't the muggle who had fucked the deal, it was Draco. Specifically, it was that old prejudice (ironically, he could feel the last of that blood purity bias evaporating now, leaving a terribly cold void) that was responsible for their almost-certain failure.

Well, let it never be said that he went to his doom with his head bowed. They needed to wrap this disastrous meeting up and escape so they could go home and get degenerately drunk.

"So you've seen what we have to offer," he said simply, taking his seat at the table next to Steve after turning the lights back on. "What we have is good, but I truly believe it could be great with your support. We thank you for your consideration and are happy to clarify any questions you might have.

"I'll be honest, I really like this," Yorke said. "You're asking for four hundred thousand?"

He liked it.

He liked it.

What a fucking casual way to give someone four hundred thousand dollars. Draco wondered if he'd been as casual about spending his own wealth back in his other life. Probably, but it certainly felt different being on the other end of it.

Draco's brain did a hard restart and Steve let out an undignified whuff of air next to him. So it seemed that Yorke's voice was the only one that really mattered after all.

WTF why do u think the other 2 left Steve's message popped up onto his computer screen, thankfully out of Yorke's view. Draco forced his voice not to shake and his face to show only the supreme calm of a man who was assured he would achieve exactly this result as he answered Yorke.

"Yes, that would cover the initial production cost for our first wave of devices as well as enable us to hire one more content creator," Draco answered smoothly, ignoring Steve's message.

where the hell did all that stuff about founders come from Steve continued to ping him. souded hella dumb Draco kicked his ankle under the table, covering it up by shifting slightly in his chair.

"Would you be open to a member of our team to join you?" Yorke was asking. "We're always happy to collaborate with our portfolio companies to make sure we have our finger on the pulse of anything they might need."

"We're happy to bring anyone you might suggest on board," Draco answered smoothly. They'd known this was a possibility and to be honest, they didn't have anyone else in mind for their first hire. "We really want someone who has the right core competencies to synergize with us so we can be disruptive in this space."

gag me, could you sound any more like a tech bro? Draco didn't kick Steve this time because he happened to agree. But they were close to reeling Yorke in and Draco would make these sacrifices for the long term win.

"Well we like to make big moves here," Yorke said thoughtfully, "and I think we're all on the same page. Virginia, who just stepped out, would definitely be a good asset to any team but you'll have to sit down with her and see if it's a good culture fit."

"That sounds wonderful, we'd love to meet with her," Draco said. He'd wished he'd paid more attention to her reactions during the presentation.

Sweet, she was hottttt Steve's chat devolved into a series of uncouth descriptions that Draco refused to acknowledge.

They stood, more handshakes were rendered, and Yorke left them with the promise that his office manager would email them the paperwork for the next steps and Virginia's contact information.

Steve and Draco were quietly congratulating themselves for all of ten yards until they were confronted by a slender blonde radiating Do Not Fuck With Me energy.


"Malfoy."

Draco had been honestly surprised to hear his surname hissed with such poison and while he'd been comfortably anonymous for the past two years, he'd been a child at war (and, later, an adult at the mercy of a very angry wizarding public) for far longer. He dropped into a crouch, hand shooting to where his wand should be, and his head whipped to face the voice before he could stop himself.

"Draco, what the fuck," Steve gabbled next to him.

"Yes, Draco, my sentiment exactly," the blonde said with a vicious little smirk.

He was not used to being confused, but he was undeniably backfooted by this woman and tried to figure out how to address her. 'Fit,' he noted as he took his time resuming his normal posture and adjusting his shirt collar. 'Tailored clothes, designer shoes. Muggle designer shoes, but she knows who I am. A Squib, perhaps? Which bloodlines have hair that blonde?'

But Draco, who had lived a lifetime of petty digs and personal slights felt that the sneer she aimed at him was just a little too sharp for this to be some generalized dispassion felt by an ex-patriate Squib, even if they were related to someone he'd tormented at Hogwarts.

Shockingly, it was Steve who stepped into the awkward social breach.

"Er, sorry, did you two know one another?" Steve asked timidly.

"We went to school together," the blonde sniffed, tossing her long hair over her shoulder. "He was in the same year as my brother; they didn't get on, you might say."

"Really?" Steve was interested, of course. Draco had never really mentioned much about the particulars of his origins. "His Highness not playing well with the other children? I'm shocked to hear that…Ms.?"

"Weasley, Virginia Weasley." She smiled sweetly at Steve while angling her body so Draco was cut out of the conversation.

'No red hair or hand me down clothes for this Weasley,' Draco thought, back in the numb fever dream he'd been trapped in earlier. 'No wonder I didn't recognize her.'

Steve and the Weasley girl were chatting. Steve and the Weasley girl were chatting. This was suddenly a much bigger threat than the pitch had been and he didn't know what wizardry he was going to have to work to fix this.

"Steve," he said suddenly, interrupting whatever sad small talk Steve was attempting. "I hate to ask, but could you head back by yourself? If we want Virginia to join our team, I think the two of us should grab a coffee and see if we can resolve some of our old differences." Curse these casual American manners that forced him to use her first name (although surely he remembered a different name recorded in the old genealogy records) rather than keeping her at a polite distance.

"Malfoy," she had no problem keeping him at a distance, despite how rude it would have sounded to the American in the room, "I have no interest in drinking anything in your presence, as you may have poisoned it." Steve cackled, clearly delighted, the traitorous bastard.

"Miss Weasley, I acknowledge that ours is an unfortunate history," he said smoothly. "At the risk of intolerable presumption-"

"You've never been worried about being either intolerable or presumptuous before," she interrupted.

"Oooh!" Steve hooted.

"That's fair," Draco gritted out. "I'll concede that in the past I was both intolerable and presumptuous, as well as many other things. However, I would suggest that it's been many years since you knew me and we're clearly different people in a different place now." He eyed her hair pointedly and she flushed.

Steve opened his mouth and Draco honestly wasn't sure if the man was going to try to defend him or pile on some very ill-advised abuse. He silenced Steve with a cutting glare and then turned back to the Weasley.

"Look, let me buy you a coffee. An hour, that's it, and then you can decide whether you want to join us or not."

"Join you?"

"Yorke agreed to our terms," he said quietly, not trying to crow. "We're going to be orbiting the office anyway, and I do think we should talk about things and how we'll handle our mutual acquaintance before that happens, even if you don't decide to work with us more closely." How frustrating not to be able to speak openly in front of Steve!

Her eyes flicked to the door of the men's room and she flushed even darker, biting her lip. Yes, Potter was certainly going to be an issue.

"Okay," she said reluctantly. "But thirty minutes. And you're paying. And we're going somewhere hideously expensive and I'm not sorry about it."

"Agreed," he nodded.

"Great, I'll just see you later, I guess," Steve groused, upset because he wouldn't get to see any more of their argument or because Draco was going to have coffee with a woman Steve coveted.

'Believe me, mate, you'd have a better time with her than I'm about to.'

The little Weasley did, in fact, take him somewhere hideously expensive and as they settled into their table in the atrium of a beautiful hotel with two carafes of coffee (she refused to share with him) and a platter of pastries ($62.48 altogether), she perched on the edge of her seat and waved her hand to invite him to start talking.

"So how long have you and Potter been here?" he started in a conversational tone, trying to gauge which mask he should put on for her. The reformed aristocrat? The wizard excited to meet with a witch in this muggle wasteland? Something more sycophantic?

She gave him a tiny smile and nibbled at a croissant. He allowed himself to hope that small talk had been the right opening move.

"You can go fuck yourself if you think I'm going to tell you anything about my personal life," she sighed sweetly.

Okay, so maybe no more small talk.

He took a moment to regard her, noting the way she held herself straight but without any tension. She took tiny sips and used her teeth to nibble at her pastries (Merlin, she was taking one bite of each of them, how savage) without displacing any of her lipstick. She reminded him of the pureblood witches he had known. This was a woman who had power and knew it.

"What, exactly, is your role at Yorke and Ramsey?" he tried another tack.

"Associate," she said and there was a slight jangle of dissatisfaction there.

"And how long have you been there?"

She raised an eyebrow, but answered him. "Seven years."

That was a long time to be stalled at that level, Draco was pretty sure. It felt significant and like something he might be able to leverage.

"Look, I'm sorry, okay? I know there's a lot of bad blood between us." She snorted at that and he gave a rueful smile at his unintended blood reference. "Seriously though, there are things I care about far more than old prejudices and I would think that us meeting here, of all places, would demonstrate the truth of what I'm saying."

She seemed to contemplate this for a moment before grudgingly nodding. "Okay, I can accept that you've changed, on an intellectual level. But that doesn't mean that I don't have a very visceral urge to beat the shit out of you when I see your face." She must have seen the surprise on his face because she actually laughed. "Youngest of seven siblings, the only girl. You think I haven't been in a tussle before?"

There was something so outrageous about this woman holding a $7 pain au chocolate in one manicured hand and talking to him about physical violence. It was his turn to be startled into a laugh.

"What are you doing here?" she asked bluntly, checking her watch. He glanced at his own - eighteen minutes of his promised half hour remained.

He'd taken a bold gamble once today, it was time for another.

"Muggle technology is going to expose us eventually, sooner rather than later. I needed to learn about computer science so I could find a way to be part of the Ministry department that will most likely be formed to counteract any future muggle advancements. It would be the height of hubris and idiocy to pretend that we can just ignore muggles in the future now that they're developing at such a rate."

"But this foray into social anthropology is hardly altruistic, is it?" she challenged him. "You're not trying to save the world, you're just trying to dig yourself out of the hole your father dug for your family with his stupid choices."

"Can't it be both?" he fired back. "Of course I don't want to be spat on for the rest of my life. You're the same, aren't you?"

"What the fuck-"

"Come on, Weasley. You left the comfort of home for a reason. Don't you think I know, better than anyone, what it's like to leave everything you know behind and come here? Without much, if any, magic, I presume?" She gave a nod and he knew he'd been right. "We've given up a lot, but it's a short term sacrifice for a long term gain. It's an investment, and I know you know the value of a good investment at the right time."

She actually eased back into the chair by an inch or two and he knew she was becoming more invested in their conversation, an excellent sign. "What are your thoughts on blood purity these days?"

"I live and work with a muggle," he responded dryly. "I acknowledge the very real threat that muggles represent and respect their ingenuity and drive. Please consider that I was a literal child who was raised with one set of values and then spent a year with the Dark Lord living in my house terrorizing the people who instilled those values in me. If I was conditioned to be one during my childhood, my experiences during and after the war have conditioned me in the other direction. At thirty, I've spent almost as much time moving away from traditionalist ideology as I spent within it. Again, I think it's unfair to judge me as the sixteen year old I was rather than the thirty year old I am."

"You're still a stuffy git."

"Perhaps."

"That's exactly what a stuffy git would say." She checked her watch again.

"I don't have time to faff about with you, so I'll be very clear. I do not like you. I will never forgive your father for almost getting me killed in second year. I will never forgive your aunt for what she did to one of my friends. I will never forgive the Death Eaters for the way that we were tortured and hunted and killed during the war. And maybe you aren't that man now, but when I look at you I still feel all the rage and pain that your family and people like you caused."

She sipped more coffee. Ate another bite of pastry. He counted down two more minutes.

"That being said," she finally continued, "I have goals of my own I want to accomplish. And your startup might be useful to me. How much would I have to interact with you if I joined?"

"Not an insignificant amount," he admitted. "Although it helps that you're a witch because my plan was to use stories from recent history as the plotlines for future games."

"So I'd be a content creator and you would be…?"

"Business operations, marketing, and wrangling Steve. That's almost a full time job on its own."

"Yes, he seems…lovely."

"He looks better than he smells."

That was the wrong thing to say, he realized as the corner of her mouth turned down. "Can't even be nice to your only friend, can you?" she snarked. "What a raging tosser. Maybe you aren't a murdering terrorist anymore, but you're still an arsehole."

'I never actually killed anyone,' he corrected her in his head.

"I don't know," she huffed. "I want to make principal but I think I'd probably give up a lot to never have to see you again." He was grappling for what to say to smooth things over, but she checked her watch yet again and stood. "It's not that I need to go, I just don't want to stay and look at you any longer."

"Did you want to take-" he gestured at the half-eaten pastry carcasses still on her plate.

She laughed at him. "Oh no, I didn't actually want any of that, I just wanted to spend your money." She swept out, leaving him astonished - alright, impressed - with her pettiness and her ability to leave him with more questions than answers. It was only later as he boarded the train back to Berkeley that he realized he'd been so distracted with her that he'd never asked anything about Potter.

A/N: If you have ever had the misfortune to ride BART, then I hope those details resonate with you and that your eardrums will one day recover from what sounds like the shrieking of a thousand souls in torment.