Author's Note: I got nothin'.

Nothin' but this chapter!

Chapter Five

The Department of Malapropisms

"When are we going to go get lunch?" Malfoy asked.

Hermione looked at him. "In five minutes." She looked at the letter again.

Deer Ministry, I feel it is my civil duty to explain to you a gigantic fault in you're system—

"That's what you said…" Malfoy was looking critically at the placidly-ticking clock. "…six minutes ago."

Hermione put her pen down. "Fine," she said. "Let's go now." The less she had to think about deer running the Ministry, the better. Worst thing was, she was beginning to think that deer might do a better job of it.

As she led the way towards the cafeteria, Malfoy hummed to himself. It took her a moment to figure out what the song was, and then she had it—"Ride of the Valkyries."

"Why do you do this?" burst out of her mouth.

"Do what, darling?" he replied innocently.

"Act like a child with mind-numbing consistency," she answered crisply without breaking stride.

When he responded, his voice was so soft, so sad, and so horribly sincere that she stopped short.

"Because it's easier," he said. She turned, and on his face there was a sweet little smile that didn't touch his eyes. "What's for lunch?" he asked cheerfully.

"Um," Hermione said dumbly, "it depends on what the special is."

Turned out it was spaghetti. Which, if one might recall, was a considerable part of the improvised out-of-the-can-and-jar-and-box meal she'd fed Malfoy the night before.

"Good thing I love pasketti," Malfoy noted lightly.

Hermione gave him a look, but he just strolled past her and went to pile a tray high with a little bit of everything.

They sat down across from each other at one of the small steel tables, Malfoy with a mountain of edibles, Hermione with a serving of salad and a tiny container of low-fat dressing. She poked at a crouton as her companion dug in heartily. He had demolished a considerable pile of spaghetti before he glanced up and paused.

"That's it?" he asked, nodding at her plate.

Thinly Hermione smiled. "I have a slow metabolism and don't exercise much. Limits my choices a bit."

In that infuriatingly unconcerned way he had, Malfoy shrugged. "Never understood people eating like they want to prolong their suffering on this planet. No one lives forever. In fact, there's an Oingo Boingo song about it." Contentedly, with a pedantic finger raised and waving slightly in rhythm, Malfoy rattled off lyrics like a machine gun. "No one beats him at his game/For very long, but just the same/Who cares there's no place safe to hide/Nowhere to run, no time to cry/So celebrate, while you still can/'Cause any second it may end/And when it's all be said and done/Better that you had some fun/Instead of hiding in a shell/Why make your life a living Hell?/So have a toast and down the cup/And drink to bones that turn to dust/'Cause no one, no one, no one, no one, no one lives forever. Hey!"

Hermione blinked at him.

Sagely Malfoy nodded. "Pretty much sums up my philosophy. When I'm not relying on the charity of Ministry lackeys in hellhole apartment buildings, that is. Then my philosophy is 'Be good or get kicked out.'"

"That's quite right," Hermione said, glad to have something coherent to latch onto.

Pleasantly Malfoy returned to his quickly-disappearing continent of food, whittling down its shores like a tsunami armed with a fork. Of course, his table manners were nonetheless entirely impeccable. That wasn't surprising.

Glancing around, Hermione realized how this situation had to look. She and Malfoy were sitting across from each other, chatting animatedly over a leisurely (relatively speaking, in his case) lunch. It looked—ominous music started up in her brain—like a date.

She wasn't quite sure whether that idea was more unsettling or intriguing.

She was about halfway done poking uselessly at her salad—poking uselessly being a very important operation of many stages—when Malfoy finished. He went over to the frozen yogurt machine, created an astonishingly perfect spiral of chocolate-vanilla swirl in a cone, and returned to lay himself over his chair and lick at his masterpiece in that Draco Malfoy way he had.

Hermione was largely unsurprised when a few girls from the Department of Something-or-Other started watching him and giggling.

"Quite the exhibitionist," she remarked, spearing a tomato a bit more vindictively than was strictly necessary. The unfortunate vegetable—or was it a fruit? She couldn't remember how the debate had turned out—spurted forth pulpy orange innards all over the neighboring onion.

Malfoy grinned. "I try," he replied, feigning modesty. He gave another tremendous lick, and the girls "Ooooh"ed in unison.

Finding her appetite to be missing, presumed dead, Hermione ditched her salad and set her ugly red tray on the stack of them. She started to ask Malfoy if he was coming, but by then he was at her shoulder, still working away at his dessert.

"If I didn't know for a fact that you're twenty years old," she commented dryly, "I would be very concerned that someone's toddler had run away."

Malfoy chortled happily, and Hermione reproached herself for being pleased.

The letter, unfortunately, was still at her desk when she returned. She had been half-hoping that someone might have knocked it to the floor, where she could have pretended to ignore it, or even that some charitable extraterrestrials might have beamed it up into their ship.

No such luck.

Deer Ministry…

Hermione sat down, set her jaw, and started slogging through the rest of it.

She had just finished the part about how the "averse affects" of new laws were "a severe laps in judgment" when Malfoy finished his frozen yogurt and stood.

"Where's the little boys' room?" he wanted to know.

Glad for a reprieve but too proud to admit it, Hermione took to her feet as well to lead him there.

"You could just point," Malfoy noted.

She pointed, he went, and she sat down again, a little put out.

…Sleight problems abound as a result of the so-called 'reforms' you infect upon us…

…Its long-since thyme that someone stood up against this flagging injustice…

…Clearly, the existing procedure lax a certain, shall we say, intelligence…

Hermione blinked and then frowned. Her eyes narrowed. As if this cretin had any write to speak of intelligence.

"Whatcha doin'?" Malfoy demanded cheerily from right next to her ear.

Squeaking despite herself, Hermione gave a great start in surprise, collided with something, and clapped a hand over her heart. "What are you—" she started to squeal indignantly.

"Ouhm," Malfoy groaned. He had both hands over his mouth.

Like fluttering birds, Hermione's flew to hers. "What'dIdo, what'dIdo?" she gasped out between her fingers.

"Bit my lip," Malfoy explained tersely. A trickle of blood dribbled down his chin.

Hermione covered her eyes. "Oh, God," she said. Then she peeked again. "How is it?"

Malfoy whipped about sixteen paper tissues from the box on her desk and dabbed obsessively at his lip. "Eh," he replied.

"'Eh'?" she repeated timorously.

"Eh," he confirmed with a shrug.

"That's not very descriptive," she whispered.

He shrugged again, drew the latest tissue-victim away from his mouth, and frowned at the spreading red presence threatening to take it over. "I may have to reprise my recent voyage," he remarked.

Hermione stared at him blankly.

"I'm going back to the bathroom," Malfoy translated.

"Oh," Hermoine acceded meekly.

And off he went.

It was very difficult to focus on the vial accusations set forth oh-so horribly in the letter after that harrowing incident, but Hermione was still surprised when the girls from lunch clustered around her desk like a giggly, over-scented collection of flies descending upon an unattended sandwich.

Did that make her a sandwich?

"Where are they selling them?" the first girl cried.

Hermione blinked at her three times. "Pardon?" she hazarded.

"The bloody gorgeous guys!" a different girl cut in impatiently. "Where are they selling them?"

Hermione blinked four times. "Are you accusing me of trafficking in human beings?" she asked slowly.

There was a pause.

"Well, how else is someone like you going to get a guy?" The third girl shrugged dainty shoulders and pursed dainty lips. Then they parted as she grinned. "So where can we get ours? Or can we have yours?"

For a few moments, Hermione was preoccupied with suppressing the gag reflex. Then she shooed the flies with a clipped "Don't you have work to do?", glared at the letter, jammed it in her Out box, and went to fetch Malfoy.