Harry coughed. It was a pathetic cough, but he tried. "I'm sick," he mumbled.
"Is that so?" Hermione questioned from the other side of the door.
Harry looked through the peephole and noticed that the stubborn girl was still standing there. "Yeah. The doctor's said it was contagious, so you should probably get out of here before you catch something," he warned.
"Is that so?" Sadly, it didn't seem like the girl believed that Harry had contracted a mysterious yet deadly disease. "When did you go see a doctor?"
This was undoubtedly a trap, so Harry gave the best answer he could give – a vague one. "Just the other day."
"Really? So I take it you've been missing work?"
Hearing the word "work" made him almost violently ill. In fact, he could already feel a throbbing emerging from corner of his forehead. He'd actually been visiting the office everyday since the last STA meeting, including weekends. It's just that he only went after hours, hiding from the bank employees. But Hermione didn't know that.
"Yep. I've had a few sick days saved up, though," he said, adding in a few coughs here and there. "So it's not that bad."
"Oh, really? Because I spoke to Luna this evening…"
Harry cursed under her breath. On most days, Harry adored his secretary to no end. She was a quirky little blonde girl from Cornell University who helped him out with anything from ordering his coffee every morning to helping him make business presentations to their international partners. Honestly, he didn't know what he would do without her. The one and only flaw to Luna was her friendship with Hermione. Harry didn't even know how the two of them had met, but their camaraderie was nothing but trouble for him.
"Did you? What did she say?" Undoubtedly, it was nothing good.
"Well, I asked her if you were still in the office." She paused. "You know, because you didn't show up for today's STA meeting."
He could hear the aggravation in her voice and desperately fell back on his excuse as a last ditch shield against the pending lecture. "Oh, Hermione. The medicine my doctor prescribed me is making me a bit drowsy. I feel so exhausted. I'm not even sure if I'll make it to bed at this rate." He yawned. "How about you come back another day? " He closed his eyes and prayed that she'd let him off the hook (for once).
"Harry, you and I both know this is just some huge ruse to avoid some big issue you're trying to hide from me. I know you don't normally like to share these things with me, but I'm really worried about you. We're friends, and I get that you don't like talking to me about things but holding all of this inside won't help you, either. You need to start letting people in."
A speech like that was almost always accompanied with a pair of puppy eyes. To avoid feeling guilty, Harry focused on the little pun Hermione had (intentionally?) included at the end and wondered if he had any chance of convincing his friend to just go back home.
"I'm fine. I promise," he swore.
"I would believe you, Harry. I truly would. But Severus has been acting strange, too."
He chuckled. If there were any topic he wanted to avoid discussing more than work, it would be that particular grouchy man. And this was exactly why Harry didn't have "deep conversations" with Hermione anymore. She had this innate ability to hone in on every last subject Harry wanted to ignore and force him to discuss it, whether he wanted to or not.
"What does Severus have to do with me?"
This was a question Harry genuinely wanted to know the answer to. Until this moment, he hadn't thought that maybe Severus would go running to Hermione about his problems. How many times before had Hermione sided with Severus on something? The pub owner could have easily persuaded Hermione to come over and convince Harry to look at the loan contract. Well, Severus was out of luck.
"You had a lovers' quarrel last week, didn't you?"
Now the coughs were entirely authentic, and Harry yanked the door open to stare his wildly confused friend in the face. "I don't know what in God's name Severus told you, but we are. Not. Lovers."
Hermione smirked, filling Harry with the sickening feeling that he'd fallen for some sort of trap. "Then what did happen between the two of you?"
Sighing, the young man gestured towards the living room where Hermione quickly made herself comfortable in his favorite leather sofa. Harry sat opposite of her on his second favorite leather sofa (he had four or five in total) and scrubbed his face. Despite the fact that there were four bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms, one gigantic kitchen, a dining room, an office, and the living room they were currently in, Harry knew that Hermione had essentially boxed him in. There was no way he'd be able to escape from this conversation.
"We had a fight last week," he admitted. "He was mad because he'd gotten a loan from Godric's, but he's been struggling to make the monthly payments. According to his contract, if he fails to make the payments two more times, Godric's will own his bar and his house."
Hermione covered her mouth with her hands. "Harry, that's terrible! No wonder he's been so touchy lately." Harry thought "insane" was a better descriptor than "touchy" but let it slide. "So what are you going to do to help him?"
Harry scoffed. "Help him? There's nothing I can do to help him. He signed a contract." Harry would know. He'd read the damn thing at least twenty five times this week alone. It was a thirteen-page document full of the typical bank mumble jumble that he'd always hated. If it wasn't for the fact that Harry knew Severus wasn't the kind of guy to sign something without reading it first, Harry would feel bad for the guy. As it was, Severus had knowingly entered the deal, so there was nothing Harry could do about it.
"Yes, but I thought Godric's prided itself on being a bank that actually cared about their clients. Don't your commercials say something about loan repayment rates being ninety-five percent or something like that? Everybody loves you guys because you give make sure the people you give out loans to can actually pay the money back."
All of that was true. Or, at least, it had been. Harry's parents, James and Lily Potter, had watched as greedy banks and appaling interest rates ruined of their neighbors' plan, split up their friends' marriages, and made everyone's lives generally miserable. That's why they got together and created their own bank – one that worked to make sure everybody was happy. That meant reviewing each person's loan request thoroughly. Every board member had to look it over and decide whether or not the person was safe for a loan. "Safe" meant that the loaner would be able to pay back the loan and interest without having to sell an arm and a leg. Godric's didn't want to see their clients fail. They wanted their clients to get the money they deserved and be able to one day return it without any sort of hassle. That's why the people loved Godric's; people that went there were always treated fairly.
The problem was that it wasn't like that anymore, not since Dudley got in his mind that he wanted to take over the bank and run it by his own rules. Now everything was spiraling out of control.
"You don't understand, Hermione. Dudley has been going behind my back and got everyone else on the board to join his side."
Hermione wrinkled her nose in confusion. "Join his side?"
"Yes! He's staging a takeover!"
"Dudley?" she asked incredulously. "He's your cousin. He wouldn't do that!"
Harry shook his head. "That's what I thought. I mean, we've always had our differences…" They both knew that "differences" was a euphemism for years of torment (tight wedgies, stolen lunches, vandalized lockers, stolen college acceptance letters, and slashed tires). "But it turns out that he's the ringleader behind this entire thing. He's been working with the others to get me kicked out of the board. Me!" He pointed to his chest to emphasize the fact.
Hermione still looked bewildered. "Do you have any proof, Harry? Maybe you just misinterpreted a few things."
Harry wished it was a simple as that, but it wasn't. Ever since Severus had given him that stupid manila folder, he'd been doing some investigative work on what was going on. What he found was two or three dozen other cases of loan contracts he'd never seen that were signed by Dudley and his crew of traitors. All of the contracts had absurdly high interest rates and made the loaners put up their cars, houses, and businesses in case something "went wrong." Trusting that Godric's wouldn't try to cheat them out of their money, person after person had accepted the deals and signed their names on the dotted line. They never realized that they'd been handed loans Dudley-dick Arnold knew they couldn't possibly repay.
Why would Dudley do that? Because he was running a fairly simple scheme. The clients would sign the deal. They'd miss payment after payment and eventually default on the loan. That's when Dudley and his new best friends would sweep in take away their prized posessions. What would they do next? Pretend like they never touched a thing while the secretly sold off all the stuff online. It was despicable, and Harry was horrified to find that these shady deals had been going on for the past year and a half. To know that he was even associating with such thieves made him upset every time he thought about it.
"I have proof." He laughed humorlessly. "They tried to hide it from me, but I found it."
Only then did Hermione start to brighten back up. "So what are you going to do to help Severus?"
Harry frowned in confusion. Hadn't they already covered this? "I can't help Severus. His signature is written clearly on the contract, and there's no way out of it. That's not even the most important thing right now. I need to be trying to find a way to get control of my bank before Dudley runs it into the ground."
A look of disapproval. "Is that what you think your parents would be focusing on?"
He sighed. "Listen, even if there was some loophole in the contract, I wouldn't be able to do a single thing about it because I essentially don't exist at Godric's anymore. I'm no more than a puppet that sits there and smiles while they go off and prey on the next unsuspecting soul."
Hermione shook her head, obviously unimpressed with Harry's bout of self-pity. "That's not true, Harry. There's so much you can do, and you know it. You're the CFO! You just need to ask yourself what's really making you mad – the fact that Dudley and the others have gone behind your back or the fact that your bank is destroying people's lives."
Okay, yeah. When he found out about all the stuff that had been happening at Godric's, he'd been furious. It had really pissed Harry off that Dudley, his own cousin, was trying to run him out of the bank his own parents had started from scratch. He felt betrayed and disrespected. He didn't feel like he could trust anyone at work besides Luna, and he hated that he couldn't rely on the people he used to think of as family. And now he was starting to realize that what really irritated him was how they could betray and disrespect the clients like that. Those clients had put their trust in Godric's, and all the bank had done was (shamelessly) run off with their money.
What was worse was that he'd actually known someone that had gone through Dudley's scam. And what had he done? Nothing. Had even given a heart-felt apology? Nope. He'd done nothing but go on and on about how Dudley was ruining his life.
"Hermione, I've been so stupid," he grumbled, completely embarrassed by his earlier behavior. (When had he gotten so selfish?)
Hermione stood up and came to rub Harry's back. "You're not stupid, Harry. You were hurt by what your coworkers did. That's understandable."
"No wonder Severus hates me! He's the one sitting there afraid that his business is going to be taken away from him and all I've done was ignore him and whine about myself." He hung his head.
"So are you going to try to talk to him?"
Squinting, Harry looked to see for any signs of intoxication. "Is that a joke? Severus doesn't want to talk to me. Do you not remember what happened the last two times we were paired together? If you don't, I'll give you the Cliff Notes version. There was one self-absorbed banker and one rightfully outraged client. The bank gives the client a loan destined for the Land of Defaults. As the client approaches the Land of Defaults, he realizes that he's screwed. One day, a banker comes to his bar. The client gets mad. The ignorant banker gets mad. The client hates the banker, so they fight every time they're so happen to be in the same room. The end. Moral of the story? The client and the banker should probably just act like they don't even know each other."
Hermione rolled her eyes. "Maybe that's how it was before, but now things will be different. You understand that you should have been more sympathetic, and I'm sure he'd be willing to listen to you. Just apologize and maybe you two can work together to renegotiate his contract or something." She gave him a pleading look, but Harry was shaking his head. While he realized the man deserved an apology, Harry doubted that he'd be forgiven. Hermione was just being too optimistic if she thought Severus wasn't just going to throw a drink in his face.
She must have spotted Harry's skepticism. "Did I forget to mention that you owe me an hour of conversation after you skipped today's meeting?" she said with a fake grin.
Damn. He'd been hoping that they could just bypass that little fact. "Uh, about that..."
"I'm glad to hear we're on the same page!" She patted Harry on the shoulder as if the two had reached some kind of understanding. "Severus will be expecting you at Molly's Kitchen tomorrow at 1pm."
"What? How did you…?"
"Here's his phone number," she said, handing him a piece of scrap paper with black scribbles.
He squinted at the characters. "What does this even say?"
It was too late. Hermione was already out the door.
(It seemed like this was an emerging pattern – people walking out before he realized the conversation was even over…)
A/N: I actually started writing this chapter last week, but my flash drive with the file of it broke a few days ago. :(
I hope you guys are satisfied with this version...