Hermione shook her hand after copying out yet another memo about the Lestrange brothers. Both, it would seem, had become what the memo writer called 'unstable' after the fall of Voldemort and were prone to ranting at length about power, gods, and immortality. They were considered an embarrassment.
Now they were unstable. Hermione snorted at that distinction and cast the protean charm. The bastards had always been unstable. It was just that now they were unstable in ways the powers that be didn't like. Yaxley didn't seem to care for followers who considered his predecessor a god. Not that she blamed him. He had to be clever enough to realize that made him the heretic.
Draco knocked at her door and opened it without waiting for her to say anything. "You should lock that," he said.
She shrugged. She spent too much time hoping one of the local degenerates would try to push his – or her – way into her room. It would give her an excuse. She wanted to have an excuse. "Did you get it?" she asked.
He held up a bottle neatly labeled 'Polyjuice Potion.' "Fortunately for you and your nefarious and mysterious schemes, my mother was always a dab hand at potions and she likes to keep a good supply around."
"Don't suppose she has any Felix," Hermione muttered. "I'd like a little deux ex machina."
Draco just looked at her and she sighed. "No luck in a bottle, then?"
"If we had any," he said, "do you think we'd be stuck with that Ministry lot coming and going at all hours?"
That was a fair point, so she pulled out the hair she'd collected on the way home from the gallery. A quick bump into one witch, a side trip into a Muggle bookstore, and she had the means to copy two forgettable people: a short, mousy brown hair from a man who had been quarreling with his daughter in the bookstore and a long, blonde one from a witch with a hooked nose and bright pink fingernails. Draco had obligingly dressed in generic clothing and it was odd to see him in a pair of dull khaki trousers and an inexpensive oxford. He'd added a floppy hat that dropped over one eye to give himself a bit of proper wizarding color, and he'd tucked a green silk pocket square into the oxford where it peeked out, wholly wrong and hilarious.
"You look ridiculous," she said.
He eyed her. "So says the tramp with no taste."
Hermione's cheap robes looked like what every other witch had been wearing when they'd last gone out and she sniffed. She'd had to leave the bracelet off. No one who could afford diamonds like that would be caught in this. Her wrist felt naked without it. "I'm not a tramp," she said.
He handed over a witch's pointed hat with an enameled pin of a pink lotus flower jammed into the rim. The weight of the flower dragged the velveteen down and left the whole thing lopsided. She put it on. "No taste, however, I will grant you."
"Drink up here or outside?" he asked.
"On the edge of the property, I think," she said.
They wrapped themselves in black outer robes so voluminous the whole of their costumes were hidden, and slipped away, through her door, down the corridor, and out a side door. Hermione held her breath the whole of the walk along the gravel path. Trying to explain this would be difficult. Fortune favored the foolish, however, and for all that the Manor seemed to be an endless stream of Death Eaters and sycophants most days, this night there was no one. They shed the robes once they were clear, Draco mixed up the hairs, and they each downed the potion, tucking leftovers into pockets in case they needed more.
Draco shifted and was pulled into a hideous transformation that left him bland and forgettable. Where a young aristocrat in a costume had been now stood a dull man no one would remember. She'd done an excellent job with that hair selection.
"I prefer you brunette," he said.
"Is it that bad?" she asked. She touched the bleached blonde hair, suddenly self-conscious. No one likes to be plain.
"Common," was all he said as he gently pulled her hand down and laced his fingers through hers. "Not every witch can be quite as extraordinary as Hermione Granger."
Her fingers clenched around his. "I'm not extraordinary," she said.
He just looked at her for a long moment, shrugged, and then they apparated to the gallery. She pulled the brochure with information about the reception out of a pocket and they walked in.
Astoria Greengrass still manned the front desk. Her mouth still pursed into a disapproving frown when she saw them. This time, however, it was just dismissal of their unimportance. She didn't have opinions about these two strangers the way she might have had about Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger. A table had been set out and covered with a cloth that was probably supposed to look fancy. Already used to the casual elegance of Malfoy Manor, Hermione thought it looked like the sort of thing you saw at not very nice weddings. Who knew the wizarding world had embraced the polyester table linen?
"Food," she said.
She could see contemptuous way Draco eyed the plates laden with predictable starters. Giant bowls of shrimp sat floating in larger bowls of slowly melting ice. Sweaty cheese huddled next to crackers. There was hummus. Another table in the next room had been set up as a makeshift bar and she could see boxes of white wine next to rows of glasses. "It looks great," she said and hoped he'd pick up the warning. "Maybe you could get me some of that wine while I look at some of the work?"
"You want a headache tomorrow that badly?" he asked under his breath, but he went and did as she asked and she pretended to be fascinated by the art and strained her ear to listen.
" - this is so brilliant – "
" – incorporates modern Muggle ideas into – "
" – just stabbed him right in the back, tossed him in to Azkaban. And she'd been practically engaged to his little brother too."
There. That was what she had come for. Hermione took a casual step closer to that speaker and leaned in to the painting that left her in front of. It was terrible.
"Well, he was a fool. No idea what possessed him." She had no idea who the speaker was but, with the way the resistance had used Polyuice since the Battle of Hogwarts, that didn't mean anything. It could be Harry. It could be a total stranger. "But she did what she had to."
"To save her own neck."
"Whatever." The man, whoever he was, took a drink from his wine glass. "Who cares what Potter's Mudblood does?"
Well, it wasn't Harry.
"What we need is to get more people organized. If we can get the ordinary people in the streets to understand that Yaxley and his crew are slowly chipping away at their rights. The people need to rise."
"The people are complacent."
"And that's the problem."
"Your drink, madam."
She turned to take the glass of wine from Draco and found a somewhat shaky smile. Potter's Mudblood. Wasn't that nice. Wasn't that just precious. She took a long swallow of the wine and almost spit it out. It managed to be too sweet and too bitter at the same time. She looked at the glass. It was nearly the color of urine. How appropriate.
"I did warn you," Draco said.
"Is this your first time at an opening?" The man who'd called her Potter's Mudblood had approached them with a genial smile on his face. "The wine's never anything to write home about, but the cheese is usually decent." He put his hand out. "John Smythe."
That was a pseudonym if she'd ever heard one.
"Anne Jones," she said, picking an equally bland name. His brows went up and he began to look interested.
"Well, Anne," he said, "What drew you to this little event?"
"I was very interested in the artist's statement about the banality of evil and the fiery possibility of orderly narratives of rebirth," she said. She paused, decided to risk it, and said, "Has he ever done work with the classical symbolism of the phoenix?"
'John' took a long sip of the bad wine to give himself time to answer. "He might have," he said. "Nothing up here, of course. A dangerous symbol these days."
"When brave men are afraid to speak truth you know the worst is at hand," she said.
And just like that she was in. She didn't think too highly of their security. Moody would have nearly foamed at the mouth with how quickly this little rebel told her where they met, and how often, and what their goals were. He drew her – Draco too – into a smaller clutch of gallery goers in the back room. "We can speak more freely here," he said, as if he hadn't been speaking too damn freely already.
They didn't support Percy – they all thought he'd been a fool – but they didn't put much faith in Harry either. "If Potter was going to do something, he'd have done it by now," one of them said, dismissing the years of raids and battles they'd fought. He hadn't won anything recently so they were moving on. So much for the Chosen One.
She'd never thought she'd see the day where a loon like Rodolphus Lestrange had more faith in Harry Potter than the side of the Light though, given the way people had turned on him over and over again in school she shouldn't be surprised.
Didn't matter. She'd find a way. She would, and Draco, and Narcissa, and even Rodolphus if that was what it took. Molly and Moody too.
Not Amycus Carrow, though. She drew a line there. That torturing bitch could die in a fire.
She looked back down at the brochure while one of the men talked very earnestly about fascism and the free press and how could people be so blind. It wasn't that she didn't agree with him. She was already planning how to tell Molly and the rest about this little independent group so they could figure out how to best use them. Use them was the key. These people weren't thinkers. They weren't even doers. They might gather like this, they might whisper their sedition to one another over cocktails, but they wouldn't have the courage to do anything on their own.
That didn't mean they wouldn't do what they were told so long as the information was slipped to them the right way.
Doreen Ficus, the biography read. Doreen has been fascinated by the ephemeral nature of existence since the first wizarding war, when she began to paint. Much of her work can be seen as an examination of the outsider in our society and the eternal search for belonging. Unmarried, she lives with her many cats in Little Whinging.
"Is she here?" Hermione asked, interrupting what had surely been a fascinating take on authoritarianism and privilege. The man who had been talking gave her a most put out look and she smiled apologetically. "The artist, I mean. I'd love to meet her."
"No," he said. "She has trouble getting around wizarding spaces without help.
"Oh?" Draco asked. He took the brochure from Hermione and skimmed it. "Was she crippled in the war?"
One of the men sniggered. "You could say she's crippled," he said.
"That's too bad," Hermione said.
Draco tapped her on the shoulder. "We should get going, Anne," he said. "Time's running out."
She cast a quick tempus charm and saw he was right. It was leave or down more polyjuice, and she didn't think she'd learn anything more from this bunch. It was enough to know they existed. Enough to know they'd already condemned her.
"It was great meeting you all," she said. She put her best stupid smile on and, from how strained their answering smiles were, it was quite stupid indeed. "I'll see you at the next opening?"
They nodded and said all the right, banal things, and then she and Draco escaped back into the street, back onto the Malfoy property, back into their robes right as the polyjuice wore off and they became themselves again.
"I want a drink," she said.
He let out a snort. "Not the swill they were serving, I hope."
"No," she said. "Let's go get really pissed on the good stuff."
"My kind of girl," he said, and they walked through the darkness, over the gracious lawns and past the vain roses, toward the welcoming lights of the Manor.
. . . . . . . . . .
A/N - Many thanks to salazars for her tireless work finding my typos. Without her as a beta reader this would be a more painful read.
If vampires are your thing, you might like the new story I've started in the Lost Boys fandom. Drug of Choice is a soulmate insta-love tropey cliché fest, but also non-angsty vampires and gore. Hey, they don't all have to be an examination of the complexity of betrayal and political expediency. Some of them are, "OK, who wants to get in a hot spring with four aesthetically pleasing vampires, all of whom have ambiguous sexuality?"