Fic: Travel Companions - Chapters 7 - 9 - PG
Just updated my HP/BtVS/AtS fic:
by pari
Disclaimers: Draco and Hermione and all their lot belong to J.K. The Sunnyville crew belong to Joss. I’ve got nothing. This is simply for fun, not profit.
Feedback: please.
Archive: ask and you shall receive.
Thanks: to Methaya for letting me know I was being naughty in Chapter 6 without knowing it.
Apologies: to any German-speaking readers who read the last chapter and probably now think I am a great, big pervert :D I might sorta be one. But I like my perversion to be the result of a conscious effort, usually, so… Yeah.
~+[]+~
Hermione wasn’t vain when it came to her intellectual prowess, regardless of what some of her past acquaintances might say. She did, however, maintain certain expectations where her performance as an Auror and as a researcher for the Ministry of Magic were concerned.
That is to say, when Hermione made a decision, she expected it to be the right one. Always. She never acted upon her decisions rashly, and was always careful to keep an open mind when making important choices, so this should not have been a difficult goal to achieve. And yet, every now and then, Hermione chose wrong.
“Wrong” as in ‘That Gilderoy Lockhart is such a great professor!’ Wrong as in ‘I’m sure Ernie’s much less a prat outside of school. I’ll date him.’
The kind of wrong that ended with Hermione sitting atop a bound Slayer and looking like she’d just battled a Troll. Malfoy sat nearby, on the floor with his back to the motel room’s door. The motel manager had been yelling from the other side of it before Malfoy had cast an obliviate at him through the room’s now broken window.
Malfoy sported a nasty looking bump over one temple and a bloody nose. Hermione could hardly understand him when he spoke - the Break-Away Broken Nose Balm he‘d just applied not quite having gone into effect.
“O, dob be silly, Mowfoy. Wha’s se goin to do? Ruh away? We’b warded te door,” Malfoy grumbled from beneath the scrap of ruined curtain he was using to staunch the bloodflow from his nose. “Se din ruh away, Grager. I gib you dat.”
No, the Slayer most certainly had not run away. And, to be honest, Hermione hadn’t even considered the possibility that they’d face an alternative problem with her once they’d removed her from her body bind. Hermione had only agreed to putting her in one in the first place to simplify the process of getting her back to their motel room. Hermione knew all about Slayers, of course - she realized that they could be very aggressive and didn’t trust easily. But surely a woman who had been fighting demons and vampires since she was a teenager, sans magic, would have to be patient and rational, as well? Hermione hadn’t thought the woman would attack the second she’d regained the power to blink, much less knock Hermione across the room and pin Malfoy to the wall.
Malfoy had insisted that she would. “It’s what I would do,” he’d rationalized at the time.
Hermione hadn’t listened. And she got the feeling she’d be hearing about it now for the rest of her days.
“Nope, I’m still here,” the Slayer said, glaring up at Hermione from the floor. Hermione had put another bind on her, this time casting just at her shoulders and below, so that they could talk with her. Granted, that might take a little work. All Hermione had heard coming out of the Slayer’s mouth thus far had been a variety of colorful curses and threats so imaginative they had piqued Draco’s interest. “And you’re cute and all…” Faith continued. “But if I’d wanted a lap dance, I probably would have let Blond and Sniffly over there do the honors.”
Hermione - already flushed from their unexpected confrontation - turned an even brighter pink at the Slayer’s comment and unstraddled her slowly. She half expected the bind she’d cast to miraculously fail, and for the woman to jump up and try to thrash them again.
Malfoy had still been muttering under his breath, his words more clear now when they were loud enough to make out. Hermione made a mental note to ask what he’d added to the Balm he used to make it work so quickly.
“You know, under other circumstances I might have enjoyed that,” Malfoy was saying as he stood, tossing the bloodied bit of curtain in his hand in the wastebasket by the bureau. Ironically, it was perhaps the only bit of furniture left standing as it had been before Hermione had unleashed the Slayer upon everything around them. “But now I’m thinking…”
Malfoy withdrew his wand, his eyes locked with those of the Slayer. With a swish and flick a vial had removed itself from the potions chest he’d left sitting open on the now lopsided table in the corner. The vial flew into Malfoy’s hand, and he wiggled it at the Slayer.
“…let’s get this over with, so we can pay a little visit to that Watcher’s Council of yours and see what they have to say about the situation.”
Hermione threw him a measuring look. Draco might be bluffing, but then again - despite their orders - he might not. The Slayer had broken his nose. Getting bested by a girl had never sat well with Malfoy - Hermione should know. She’d bested him in their classes at Hogwarts for years, and she’d even slapped him in the face in their fourth year. Two years later, Malfoy had still been angry enough about it to hex the joints out of Hermione fingers. Ron had retaliated by giving Malfoy a concussion, and both boys had gotten their prefects’ status temporarily revoked a week later - for busting one another’s kneecaps in the midst of an after-hours duel.
“The Watcher’s Council, huh?” the Slayer said from her spot on the floor. She looked unperturbed by the wand in Malfoy’s right hand, although she’d seen what it could do, and the Veritaserum in his left; for all she knew, they could be about to feed her poison. If anything, the Slayer just looked angrier than she had when their little skirmish had begun - a fact which made Hermione’s hair stand on end. And she obviously found Malfoy’s mention of the Watcher’s Council darkly amusing, although Hermione wasn’t to know why until she said: “Figures. If you’re talking WC, the new and improved, I’m thinking the G-man’ll back me up. If it’s old school Watching you’re looking for, you’re sorta out of luck. That Watcher’s Council went boom about a year ago.”
Hermione blinked.
“Pardon me?” Draco asked.
“Boom,” said the Slayer, patronizingly. “As in their sneaky, British asses needed kicking, and someone gave it to them good. The new crew set up shop in Cleveland after B shut down the Hellmouth.”
She could very well have been speaking a different language, but Hermione and Malfoy got the gist of what she’d said.
Malfoy hesitated, and then threw up his hands.
“Well. You wouldn’t happen to have a manual that tells us what to do about that, do you, Granger?”
Dazed, Hermione glanced around them at the piles of disheveled books that littered the room. Her Goblin psyche text, sadly, had not survived the Slayer’s wrath so well as Malfoy and Hermione herself. It was now a smoldering stain on a patch of carpet in the corner.
“Bloody hell,” Hermione whispered.
She couldn’t think of anything else to say.
~+[]+~
“Well, it isn’t like we’ve misplaced them, Justin…”
The second time they needed to use the telephone, Hermione made the call.
Actually, she made two of them. One to the dispatch in their department, to leave a message, and one on the Emergency Communications line. The latter was going about as well as Draco might have expected.
“No, I don’t see how that… Of course! But…No! I can‘t wa…”
Hermione was pacing about their side of the room - opposite the one that held a partially-bound Slayer sitting in the corner, glaring darkly at the wall. She was having another of those frantic moments that had led her, before, to make strange gestures out the car window, and plow their Volvo into a road-side ditch.
Hermione sighed as she was put on hold, the sound containing much less anger than something else for Draco’s comfort.
Draco didn’t even think as he did it - clutched Hermione’s wrist on her seventh pass by him. His thumb lightly brushed over the pulse point there, bringing Hermione as effectively to a halt as if he’d grabbed her and ordered her to stop. It was just something Draco had done when he was younger, whenever Lucius was away on “business”. Draco’s mother would work herself into (what constituted, for her) an outright panic, waiting for news of Draco’s father, and Draco would calm her down with a touch - to her shoulder, her hand. He’d never been good with the sort of words that would have served the same purpose, so he’d stopped trying to give them.
Now he wasn’t sure what had sparked such a reaction from him. Draco had never felt the need to console someone outside his mother and the small circle of friends he considered family.
And Hermione was obviously as shocked by Draco’s behavior as he felt. She stopped in front of him, where he sat on the corner of the motel room’s dresser, eyes wide, and just blinked at him. Draco heard Finch-Fletchley talking on the other end of the telephone line before she did.
Then Hermione snapped to, with an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Draco half expected her to snatch her hand away, and wasn’t sure what to do when she didn’t. He waited until she was involved in conversation again to withdraw his own hand and make the issue a moot point.
“Yes? Oh, yes, I’m still here,” Hermione was saying. “What?” She began to pace again. “But… Yes, yes, I do realize that…” There was a pause, and then a displeased sigh that Draco would not want to have been the recipient of. “Fine! Yes, we’ll wait for the call back!”
Hermione slammed down the phone receiver with much more force than was necessary.
“They’re taking the news that well, are they?” Draco innocently asked.
“You’d think we’d bloody well been trying to make the Ministry look bad. Honestly! As if they can blame us for making a Hellmouth and the Watcher’s Council disappear!”
Actually, the Ministry couldn’t blame the two of them for this - or, more to the point, they couldn’t blame Draco. Draco seriously doubted Hermione would have found herself faced with any pointed fingers, even if the Ministry could have pointed one at her.
But, unfortunately, the Ministry could - and most likely would - try and blame the Aurory for all of this. Nevermind that the Aurors weren’t responsible for keeping track of Hellmouths - nor that they’d all been a bit busy, the past nine years, battling Death Eaters and dark lords, to be taking on extracurriculars. Cornelius Fudge was no longer Minister of Magic as he had been when Draco and Hermione were children, but the Ministry hadn’t changed so much since Fudge’s day that they were above passing the buck and letting others pay the price. And who better to take the fall, for the sake of PR, than the one department in all of Magical Britain that openly hired former Death Eaters and Slytherins as more than mail boys and secretaries?
“Hmm. Beaurocracy’s a bitch all over. There’s a shocker.” Hermione looked almost surprised at the reminder that the Slayer was in the room with them. She and Draco looked over at the woman as she cocked an eyebrow at them. “And fun as it’s been, sitting here on my ass, listening to you two get all angry and British… If you’re gonna keep me here much longer, you could at least make with some of that grub you got ‘round here somewhere. Girl’s gotta eat.”
Draco and Hermione exchanged a look. The Chinese Hermione had brought in with them earlier was not in plain sight - and was most likely unsalvageable, wherever it had ended up in the wreckage of their motel room.
“Right. I’ll just grab my cloak.”
Hermione grabbed her cloak and her coin purse, half-conscious of her own movements. Her mind was still obviously on her conversation with Finch-Fletchley. She cast a wary glance in the Slayer’s direction, and a questioning one at Draco, but Draco waved her on with a look of his own.
When Hermione had gone, silence settled over the room anew.
“So…” Draco began, shifting into a more comfortable position on top of the dresser. He decided conversation was as good a way to pass the time til Hermione returned as any. “Inhumanly strong and charming, as well. How’s that working out for you?”
The Slayer gave him a look that made the use of her fingers unnecessary.
Draco shrugged.
“Or we could just sit here and glare at each other some more. That’s good, too.”
The Slayer snorted and rolled her eyes.
[ tbc ]
by pari
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimers: Draco and Hermione and all their lot belong to J.K. The Sunnyville crew belong to Joss. I’ve got nothing. This is simply for fun, not profit.
Feedback: please.
A/N: Still no real bunnies :p Forgive me.
~+[]+~
“Okay, okay, okay… Let’s just pretend you didn’t lose me back at the sweet and sour chicken.”
Hermione, Draco, and the Slayer - Faith, she said her name was, making Hermione wish, for not the first time, that she’d studied current events in the Watcher’s Council before she and Draco had first gone out - were sitting around the motel room’s lopsided table. Faith had been relatively behaved (i.e. nonviolent) so Draco had removed her partial bodybind. This arrangement worked for all of them, as Faith didn’t seem the type to sit there and be fed, and Hermione would have been awkward helping feed her, after the straddling incident of earlier.
Malfoy, no doubt, would not have been awkward at all. But Hermione was strangely reluctant to watch Malfoy help the Slayer with the Chinese Hermione had bought to replace their first order.
This order was more than twice as big as the last one. Hermione hadn’t known what the Slayer might eat, and she’d been too flustered and preoccupied, at the time, to give it much thought - so she’d ordered a little bit of everything on the Chinese restaurant’s menu.
Still, the Slayer had already made her way through two helpings of chicken, much of the mushu pork, and half of the noodles. She was now working on the rice and egg rolls, while Hermione watched in fascination, and Draco fought Faith for the last of the shrimp and dumplings.
“I mean, what’s the big deal. So you didn’t know the Hellmouth went bye-bye. Now you do. What are you gonna do? Track down everybody who doesn‘t know how to pick up a phone and tell their mommies?”
Faith spoke around a mouthful of rice and then slurped down a couple of long noodles.
Hermione tried to stay focused on their conversation. She’d only ever seen Seamus Finnigan eat like that.
Draco scoffed at the mention of a telephone, still sore at his failures in using the ECS.
“It isn’t really about the Hellmouth. It’s politics, partly. The Ministry’s been hoping to strengthen its relations with the other Magical communities for some time now. And this doesn’t make our chances for doing that look good.”
Not good at all. Hermione knew that Minister McGurren had been planning on a series of good-will gestures towards the Conference, in a show of appreciation for their limited support throughout The War with Voldemort. And in an attempt at forging ties that would ensure more than limited support from Magical America in the future. Having his similar intentions towards the Council nullified by the Council’s silence on the matter of the closed Hellmouth (or, if what Faith said was true, by the destruction of the Council) would no doubt discourage the Minister personally. But if the Conference knew about what had happened with the Council, and had chosen not to alert the Ministry… Or if, worse, the Conference hadn’t known about it either…
“Then there’s the little issue of a Hellmouth having closed without anyone at the Ministry having noticed,” Draco contributed. While Faith attacked her meal with gusto, and Hermione picked at hers, Draco ate in proper-sized portions, holding his chopsticks with perfect ease and poise. Faith had tossed hers aside when Hermione had handed them to her. “It isn’t like the Ministry should have to be told these sorts of things. Closing a Hellmouth is no small feat. There should have been buzz about it all the way across the Atlantic. But there was nothing.”
This was the first time Hermione had ever seen Draco speak so openly with someone about which he knew so little. Actually, until recently, Hermione had rarely seen Draco speak openly. As they had been giving Faith the explanations she’d asked for, Draco’s sudden loquaciousness had begun to nettle Hermione, although she wasn’t sure why.
Then she’d realized. Draco was as nervous about the recent developments as she was. She’d seen it before - how casual Draco behaved under pressure. He didn’t flitter around the room, as Hermione sometimes did, or become so lost in thought he nearly ended up buying an entire buffet bar. He strutted, and snarked, and showed off just as he always did. But if you watched him closely, he held himself unusually still; his eyes never mimicked his mouth when he smirked. And he spoke with the straightforwardness of someone aware that something “bad” was coming, and that soon it might not matter what anyone said in the meantime.
“We need to know as much about what happened as possible,” Hermione explained, taking up where Draco left off. “So that, if there are…outside forces…affecting our communications with the other communities, they can be dealt with before something unfortunate happens.”
Such as an entire Watcher’s Council getting itself blown up, without (supposedly) anyone to come to their survivors’ aide. Hermione was just beginning to think of what Faith had told them in terms of what it meant for the Council members, and she balked at her own short-sightedness, not having thought of it sooner. All those lives lost, that - perhaps? - could have been prevented. And the families of the Watchers that had died…
…the men and women who’d lost their spouses; their lovers. The children who’d lost their parents…
“Cool. So make a trip to Cleveland. I’m sure Giles can give you the 411. Me, I was just there for the slayage. Not the person to talk to about politics.”
Hermione nodded. She’d told Justin everything Faith had told them - about the closing of the Hellmouth, and about where Mr. Giles and his Slayer could be located. As it turns out, Faith was not the Slayer Hermione and Draco had come to America to find. Hermione still thought of her as the Slayer, although - really - a Buffy Summers was reported to be the Council’s Chosen One. Faith, and a number of younger girls, as well, had all been activated through a series of strange events - the retelling of which had given Hermione just one more reason to stir the soup in her hands without actually sipping much of it.
“No hard feelings, then?” Draco asked.
Faith shrugged. She and Draco seemed to have come to some sort of understanding while Hermione was out at the restaurant. Hermione could not imagine how.
“Eh. I made you bleed, you fed me. Gave me boots.” Faith grinned, wiggling her feet, which were propped up on the sloping side of their table. Draco had given her a pair of vintage army boots to replace the Doc Martens Hermione’s book had damaged. “We’re cool,” Faith said.
“Excellent. Because I’m exhausted,” Draco said, dropping his chopsticks into one of the empty paper containers littering the tabletop.
Hermione silently agreed. But wondered if she would get any sleep tonight. Or - technically - this morning. They were supposed to get a final call back at eight a.m., telling them what they were to do next, or if they were simply to return to the Ministry.
The Slayer stood and stretched, arms held high above her head and back arched like a cat’s.
“Well. Am I good to go, or what? ‘Coz I get kinda cranky when I have to sleep in a chair.” She cast a meaningful glance at the chair Hermione and Draco had put her in while she’d been in her bodybind.
“Yes. Yes, of course,” Hermione agreed, standing, as well. It wasn’t as though she could do anything to stop her, if Faith decided at that moment that she wanted to leave. She had made Hermione and Draco place their wands on the opposite side of the room before unbinding her, to prove that they meant her no harm.
“You’re playing us, aren’t you?” Draco had said.
Faith had just smiled. “Depends. Are you gonna let me?”
Neither of them had mentioned that Draco could cast a summoning spell wandless. Or that Hermione carried a spare wand. The spare wasn’t very accessible, and so wouldn’t pose a threat to the Slayer if she tried to flee, anyway.
“Then it’s been real. But I’ve gotta catch some zees. You crazy kids have fun in Cleveland. Give B my best.”
Hermione and Draco took Faith’s last words to them with as much aplomb as they had her first, at least knowing this time what - or rather, who - the B referred to.
When Faith left, Hermione felt a number of conflicting emotions. Uncertainty, as perhaps they shouldn’t have let the Slayer out of their sight so quickly - they couldn’t even verify any of her stories; disappointment because Hermione had been in the presence of a Slayer. And the experience had not been as educational as Hermione might have hoped, except in the most surprising ways.
And, finally, Hermione felt relief. She’d been on edge with the Slayer there. When it was just she and Draco again (and didn’t that seem strange, to think of it that way) Hermione felt as though she could let down a bit of her guard, and speak more freely.
Then she turned to see what had captured Draco’s attention about as soon as they had said their goodbyes to Faith.
He was looking at one of the motel room’s beds. The motel room’s bed, as the broken frame and ruined mattress nearly blocking the entrance to the bathroom resembled a proper bed no longer.
Hermione couldn’t dredge up a response to Draco’s querying gaze.
This was just the perfect end to her eveni-… To her early morning.
“Flip you for it?” Draco offered.
Hermione sighed.
“Get some sleep, Malfoy,” she said, and lay down on the left side of the bed.
~+[]+~
As soon as Faith left the motel room, she found a payphone. She dialled in a number she’d only used once since it had been activated.
“Come on, B,” she mumbled to herself, as she listened to the phone ringing. “You are so gonna wanna hear this.”
~+[]+~
As sure as Hermione had been, before, that she would get no sleep in light of the Hellmouth issue, when she rose from her pillow - later - she couldn’t remember having lain her head upon it.
Oddly, she did remember why Draco had been lying on the bed next to her. So when she turned - to find the right side of the mattress warm from having been slept on, the sheets slightly ruffled - she wasn’t startled.
However, she was surprised that Draco was up and out of bed.
And then she heard him.
He was on the telephone. And laughing. It was not a pleasant laugh. It was more the type of chuckle Malfoy gave people to emphasize how not funny they were being.
“Oh, really. And are you going to tell her that?”
Draco was standing with his back to the bed, so he hadn’t seen that Hermione was awake yet. For that matter, Hermione had just seen him. He must have been in the middle of dressing when the call had come - assuming he hadn’t figured out how to place a call on his own. Hermione wondered how the phone’s ringing hadn’t woken her up.
Then she wondered if she had woken up. Seeing Malfoy shirtless in the morning was not an experience she associated with the waking world.
And she hadn’t known that Malfoy had a tattoo like that. During The War, the Order had begun memorizing the Death Eater’s descriptions and distinguishing features - fearing Voldemort had developed a way to hide the Dark Mark. Hermione herself had contributed in creating a spell that could cut through glamours, using non-Magical identifying marks alone.
Hermione realized she was staring at Draco’s shoulder blades when he turned and saw that she was no longer sleeping.
She would have said something, or expected Draco to hand her the phone, but she had no idea what to say. And, after a moment, Draco seemed to decide on something, and went back to his conversation.
“Fine. But you tell the Director he owes me a bloody big raise for this.” Draco hung up the phone.
“And what was that about?” Hermione asked with a dry mouth, finding her voice at last. She kept her eyes resolutely on Draco’s face.
Draco had one brow raised, and was pulling on another button-up shirt.
“Looks like we’ll be taking a little detour to Los Angeles.”
Hermione kicked back the covers she’d been snuggled under, and stood - only momentarily distracted by the discovery that she’d gotten out of her robes and boots, before getting into bed, without realizing it.
“What are we to do in Los Angeles?” she asked.
Hermione couldn’t read Draco’s expression.
“Play house, apparently,” he said. And then, before she could comment on that: “Smith says he thinks they may have found out who’s been shielding us from picking up on the fluctuations in mystical energy that have been taking place over here.”
The way Draco said that didn’t bode well with Hermione.
“And?”
“I don’t suppose your Muggle Studies course covered a firm called Wolfram and Hart,” Draco replied, in way of an answer.
~+[]+~
Meanwhile…
The perception of Muggle Britain as being mired in tradition and old-world sentiment had long been prevalent by the time the current Minister of Magic had taken office.
Not that anyone on the non-Muggle side of London could have said anything about it, one way or the other. There weren’t a lot of wizards in the Ministry who knew enough about Muggle pop culture to have formed such an opinion. And the Ministry, itself, had been about as “old-world” as any Magical institution in existence.
But after Phineas McGurren became Minister of Magic…
“Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Auror’s Division 315, how may I direct your talk?”
Akilina Kirke leaned back in her chair, at the receptionist’s desk of 315, twirling her quill where it levitated above a stack of steno pads and parchment rolls.
She hardly glanced at the wizard whose face appeared in the flames of the miniature fireplace mounted in the corner of her cubicle.
“Yes, I need to speak to Auror Davies, on the f-”
“Fourth floor, office 26B,” Akilina recited the room number mechanically. She paused in her twirling, and set down her issue of The Enquisitor, long enough to study the gyrating spheres resting atop the fireplace’s narrow mantle. Each of them were silent. The one on the left glowed a mellow gold - the other two shifted from purple to green and back again. The twirling resumed.
“Please hold.” Akilina reached into one of the jars sitting in a rack by her desk, and drew out a pinch of bright pink powder to throw into the fireplace. The wizard’s face disappeared, replaced almost immediately by another.
“Department of Magical Law Enforcement-”
One of the spheres shrilled. Akilina looked up at it sharply, lowering her tabloid. All of the spheres were glowing an angry orange, with streaks of brown and blue. Akilina blinked and turned to the wizard in the fireplace.
She smiled, widely. “Auror’s Division 315,” she cooed. The wizard was oblivious to the aura-reading apparatus’ response. “How may I direct your talk?”
Akilina screwed off the top of the black jar resting on her powder rack, and reached for the dark red powder inside.
The wizard smiled pleasantly. “Auror Ambrose, please. Second floor, office 13C.”
“Right away,” Akilina replied, drawing out a pinch of the red powder. It crackled between her fingers…
Then fell back into the jar, as a man’s hand wrapped around Akilina’s wrist and she let the powder fall.
Akilina turned, ready to hex whoever had dared lay a hand on her, on work-hours or off - then stopped when she saw Harry Potter standing in front of her desk, one brow raised and with his arms now crossed over his chest.
“If you fry another of those,” he said smoothly. “We’ll never get the smell out of the lobby.”
Akilina, for the moment, was placated.
She crossed her arms, in a mimicry of the auror, and shrugged.
“I don’t mind the smell of burnt Death Eater. Do you?”
Potter simply looked at her.
“Oh, alright. Don’t get your knickers in a twist.”
She turned back to the wizard waiting to be connected to Auror Ambrose’s office, and threw a pinch of gold powder into the fireplace, rather than the dark red. “It’ll be just a moment, sir. Please hold.”
The wizard’s face disappeared from Akilina’s flames, but the spheres on her fireplace’s mantle blinked in confirmation that the silent alarm had been tripped. The wizard would shortly be getting a surprise visit, and it wouldn’t be from Amanda Ambrose.
Akilina spun in her chair and plucked her quill out of the air.
“So. Potter. Did you need something? Or did you come down here just to stop me from reaching this month’s quota?”
Akilina’s smile was overly warm, and showed a lot of teeth, and caused Potter to roll his eyes as he seated himself on one corner of Akilina’s desk.
“The Ministry doesn’t pay us to blow people up, Kirke,” Potter replied, rifling through the memos in Akilina’s outbox. Many of the missives had been waiting for days for her signature, and a distribution spell, so they jittered within the box restlessly. Potter fished out three memos addressed to himself, receiving a nasty paper cut as one purchase order - anxious to make it’s way down to filing - tried latching onto his index finger and failed. Potter frowned at Akilina in irritation, as Akilina ignored him and he sucked on his wounded digit.
“Well, they should. Would liven things up a bit around here. Besides, who foiled that assassination attempt on the HDIMC last month?”
Potter didn’t blink. He gathered his memos in one hand, and the diet soda he’d put down (to stop Akilina from sautéing that wizard) with the other.
“Neville and Padma did. After they finished scraping enough Death Eater out of their eyes to chase down the two who sneaked in through the back.”
Akilina narrowed her eyes, but returned to her Enquisitor and let the rebuttal go. “Way to flatter a girl’s ego, Potter. Keep that up and you’ll never get into my pants.”
Potter ignored the vulgarity. He headed for the lobby’s bay of elevators shaking his head at the Slytherin.
“Oi. And, Potter?”
Potter turned just as Akilina sent another message sailing his way. This one was written on a post-it note, rather than parchment, so it not so much “sailed” as somersaulted towards him - in that lazy way that post-it notes liked to somersault. The message had to be from one of the witches operating the department’s phone lines.
Potter plucked it out of the air when it neared him, and he read it, his expression darkening as he did.
Akilina smiled. “You’ve got a call from the States,” she said sweetly, as the face of an elderly witch appeared in her fireplace.
“Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Auror’s Division 315. Just a moment, Mrs. Perks, and I’ll connect you.”
Potter entered the first elevator to arrive at the lobby, forcing his way through the small crowd of people coming off it, and quickly pushed in the number to take him to his office.
~+[]+~
The next day, Wolfram & Hart’s doors opened bright and early, just as they always did. The lobby was filled with the usual hustle and bustle of a demonically owned law firm/multi-billion dollar cooperation.
The executive boardroom was filled with the firm’s most important department heads.
Plus one newly recorporealized, soulled vampire.
“I’m just not sure we can trust him,” Angel was saying.
“I’m certain we can’t,” Wesley told him. “But I’m not certain how long we can hold him if we don’t give him a reason to work with us.”
“And why do we want him working with us, again?” Gunn asked. Fred smiled at the sentiment, but Lorne responded with a “Here, here.”
Spike paused in tapping out a rendition of Heaven Beside Me, on the top of the conference table with Angel’s executive pen, long enough to put in his two-cents’ worth.
“Well you don’t think ‘ol Tattoo Boy’s stayed alive this long by being stupid, do ya? Seems to me you could make good use of a chap with his knack for pissing off higher powers. Seeing as you lot’ve got even more mortal enemies than he has.”
Angel snatched the pen out of Spike’s hand before he could start tapping with it again. Spike stuck his tongue out at him.
The others either pretended not to see, or not to be amused.
Angel indulged in one of his why-is-he-still-here sighs, and leaned back in his chair.
“Okay. Fine. Can we at least remove the tattoos, so it will be easier to keep him here?”
It was Wes, Fred, and Gunn’s turn to shift in their seats and sigh. They’d already been over this issue. Twice.
“Not unless we want the Senior Partners to find him and send him to Hell…” Wes replied, in a patient voice which - coming from Wes - wasn’t really patient at all. It was cautionary.
Angel snorted. He threw up his hands in mock horror. “Oh, no! Not that,” he quipped. Fred giggled.
Wes gave Angel a stern look. “…which would make it impossible for him to help us take them down. And would completely defeat the purpose of our having kept him here, rather than let him leave LA again.”
“To cause who knows how much more trouble,” Angel muttered. He didn’t notice, but Wes and Fred looked up, and Lorne turned, as the conference room door opened and Harmony slipped in, with an apologetic wave.
“He’d be working strictly in an advisory capacity,” Gunn was saying. “Contract employee. He wouldn’t, technically, even be part of the firm. He’d answer to you.”
“Excuse me,” Lorne said - cutting off Harmony, who had just opened her mouth to speak.
“Uh, Boss-”
“But isn’t this the guy who wants to kill you? So badly he got himself all painted up just to come back here and unleash some big nasty in the basement?”
Wes and Gunn exchanged a glance.
“He won’t like it,” Wes admitted.
“But if the choice is between working for you and Hell…” Gunn began.
“I’d chose Hell,” Spike said, cheerily, earning him another of Angel’s glares.
Gunn coughed to hide a snicker.
“Um… Boss?”
Angel didn’t look up, assuming Harmony had brought him the mug of blood he’d ordered.
“Just set it on the table, Harmony,” he said, shuffling through some of his papers.
He set them back down again. “I’m tired of talking about this. Where are we with the Haklaar case?”
Fred piped up, as Harmony lingered in the background, looking uncertainly at Angel, and then through the doorway behind her.
“I’ve, uh, finished testing those sonar-resistant tracking devices you wanted. They’re good to go. We can have them in place in a day.”
Angel nodded, glad for once that something seemed to be going right.
Angel looked at Wes and Wes also nodded.
“Do it,” Angel said. Fred scribbled a little note on her palm pilot.
“Boss…”
“Those trade negotiations with the Ga’Rod are going to take a while, though,” Gunn reported. “I’m supposed to meet their Shaide this evening. Would help if I had a little something to bring with me to sweeten the deal.”
“We aren’t going to give them anyone’s firstborn, Gunn.”
“That goes without saying. But real estate’s got some empty property up in the Hills. The Ga’Rod have been looking for a new breeding ground for a while, so-”
“Boss.”
Angel and the others looked up at Harmony’s uncharacteristic outburst.
Harmony looked startled by it, too. “Oh. Sorry,” she said. Then stood there.
“Harmony,” Angel finally asked. “What is it?”
“Your ten a.m. is here,” Harmony told him, “and he’s-”
“Rather anxious to get started,” an unfamiliar voice spoke, as a young man walked into the room.
He was well-groomed and dressed in a dark, expensive suit. He had light eyes and white-blonde hair, and something about him made Angel sit up straight in his seat. Beside him, Spike had tensed, as well.
“I hear you buy babies,” the man said, with a smile.
[ tbc… ]
by pari
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimers: Draco and Hermione and all their lot belong to J.K. The Sunnyville crew belong to Joss. I’ve got nothing. This is simply for fun, not profit.
Feedback: please.
~+[]+~
Hermione took the news of their assignment even better than Draco had expected.
Which is to say, she spit orange juice all over him, as they sat in the horrifyingly Muggle diner where they were forced to breakfast before heading on to LA.
“Charming,” he drolled, grimacing, as he wiped at his face with a napkin.
Hermione was too preoccupied to apologize, as - certainly? - she would have done had he not just informed her that their employers were absolutely daft.
“What?”
“The spitting, Granger. I appreciate a good aim as well as the next wizard, but-”
“No.” Hermione looked like she was going to start stuttering. Draco put a protective hand over the top of her juice glass and slowly drew it away from her. Despite her momentary panic, Hermione noticed the gesture, and a corner of her lip quirked. She took a deep breath, and then another.
“I’m sorry,” she said, reaching out suddenly, and wiping away the drop of orange juice Draco had missed on his cheek. Draco blinked at the urge to lean into her touch.
“Why do they want us to do this?”
Draco poked at the bacon left on his plate. Eating hadn’t been such a chore that morning. He’d been tired enough and hungry enough not to care what he ate. Plus, he’d spent quite a few summers in the Orient. The Wizarding food over there tasted just the same as the Muggle. Not that some Californian, 24-hour buffet could match the culinary offerings of the restaurants he’d frequented, but…
Nevertheless, eating was an entirely different experience with a few hours of sleep behind him. And the food sitting in front of Draco was not only undeniably Muggle, it was American. And probably not a shining example of that, either.
“Last night,” Draco explained, “a clerk from the Department of Fiscal Grievances contacted the Aurory. Gringotts’s filed a suit against a sect of demons who’ve fallen behind on repaying a loan they took out with the bank in London.”
Hermione nodded her head, listening.
“The sect has relocated in Los Angeles,” Draco continued. “The loan furnished the lavish preparations the sect has made for a human child.”
Here Draco was getting to the good part. Hermione blinked.
“The demon sect wants to raise a human child?” she asked.
Draco raised a brow. “They want to ritually sacrifice a human child. But they have to raise it first. The ritual requires thirteen years of precise preparation.”
Hermione’s face contorted cutely. “Ew. My God, the Ministry isn’t going to let them, are they?”
“No. Not that the Fell Brethren know this.“ On Hermione’s lack of recognition at the name, Draco supplied: “That’s what the sect members call themselves.” Draco shook his head. He would never understand the compulsion of evil organizations to give themselves names - even after having belonged to one. To Draco’s way of thinking, if you were truly evil, you shouldn’t care what the newspapers called you when they reported the atrocities you’d committed. “The Ministry’s intercepted the suit,” he went on. “They want more information on the firm that will be providing the Fell Brethren their sacrifice, before they move on the Brethren themselves.”
“Wolfram and Hart,” Hermione guessed.
Draco smiled mirthlessly. “Yes. And when the Ministry looked into who’s running the firm these days, guess what they found.”
Hermione leaned back in her seat. Her expression was becoming less anxious, and more grim.
“He or she has a connection to Sunnydale,” she guessed right again.
Draco slid Hermione’s juice glass back beside her plate. She looked like she might need a drink very soon, and that was the only drink available.
“He lived there for a time. Tried to end the world there once. And he has a…personal…connection to the Slayer Mr. Giles is responsible for.” Draco shrugged. “Or at least he had. Smith said he’d need more time to get anything more current on him.” Draco rolled his eyes. As Hermione seemed to consider the prat a friend, Draco would refrain from commenting on what he thought about Smith’s “needs”.
Hermione was frowning, her mind no doubt taking the same turns Draco’s had as Smith had given him this news - although Hermione’s seemed to be taking them faster.
“A personal connection to the Slayer, Buffy Summers. And Rupert Giles…”
“Her Watcher,” Draco finished the sentence for her. “Who is, reportedly, in charge of the new Watcher’s Council, knew all about it.”
Hermione looked pale. Draco cast a glance around the diner. There was only one other customer - a sleepy-looking truck driver, who was very nearly lying in the bowl of oatmeal sitting in front of him at the counter. And a bored-looking waitress, chewing gum and reading a magazine. The cook Draco had seen working in the kitchen wasn’t in view from Draco and Hermione’s table. Still, Draco thought he’d better wait until he and Hermione were alone before he told her the worst of what he had to say. The second-worst, perhaps she could handle.
“And-”
“And?” Hermione repeated, unhappily.
Draco pulled a Muggle bill out of his pocket, trying and failing - again - to remember whether the amount was appropriate in this instance. But not caring. Hermione, likewise, paid the bill no mind.
“Wolfram and Heart has an ex-Watcher working for them,” Draco said. “Their CEO knew him before either of them were offered positions. Seems he was involved in the incident that lost the man his job with the Council. Need I prompt you to guess where the Watcher was stationed at the time?”
Hermione sighed, standing when Draco stood, and following him out of the diner. Neither glanced in the waitress’s direction when she called out a goodbye.
“Sunnydale,” Hermione answered. “And why do I get the feelings there’s more?”
Draco steered Hermione towards the rental car still in their possession. They’d patched it up with enough magic to get them to the motel after their accident, and to get them to the bus station now. After that, they’d leave the car in a parking lot and let the Ministry send someone to deal with it, and their hastily Reparo-ed motel room.
As no one seemed to be standing around to see, Draco opened Hermione’s door for her, but simply slipped into the driver’s seat himself. Rather than taking the time to conjure another driver’s side door, Hermione had just cast a glamour on the car to make it look as though it had one. And so that it didn’t look as though it had spent some time, recently, sitting in a ditch.
Draco put the car’s key in its ignition, hoping he could fake having more experience with driving than he actually had. That Hermione was sitting in the passenger’s seat right now, having let Draco take the Volvo’s keys from her without objection, was a testament to her state of mind. Draco didn’t want her driving, and he didn’t want his driving to upset her any further.
“Did Wood ever tell you which vampire Quirrell used to make his students write a parchment on as part of their DADA finals?” Draco asked, figuring that was as good a way to start the second half of this bad-news-breaking as any.
~+[]+~
Even after the “why” of what they’d been asked to do had been settled, there was still the “what” to consider.
Half way to Los Angeles, Hermione had begun to calm down about the fact that the single most evil institution with ties in both the human and the demon worlds seemed to have some connection to the new Watcher’s Council - and, possibly, to the destruction of the old. And that the single most evil vampire in history was now, apparently, running said evil institution.
Then Draco had had to address, again, how they were supposed to infiltrate the firm, to confirm all of this for themselves.
Luckily there had been no bus passengers or bus drivers around to witness the ensuing debacle. Draco had taken one look at the bus they were to board that morning, and had refused to set one foot on it. Riding in an airplane had been bad enough, for all that Draco was impressed with the Muggles for having found a way to get themselves off the ground. Draco absolutely drew the line at submitting himself to the indignities of public transport.
Draco had driven himself and Hermione to the nearest car dealership, instead, and purchased the most expensive vehicle on the lot. Which, seeing as Sunnydale didn’t seem to be attracting the rich and powerful like magnets, meant something only slightly more stylish than the Volvo they’d gotten from the car rental. Draco decided it would do, and decided also that he was going to upgrade just as soon as they got to Los Angeles. When he’d told Smith that the Director would owe him for this jaunt, he’d meant it.
Hermione hadn’t seemed to mind. At the car dealership, she hadn’t tried to talk Draco out of his purchase. Not because she was too dazed to think clearly, as she had been when she and Draco had left the diner, but - presumably - because she was as willing to drown her sorrows in a shopping spree as he. Hermione didn’t much strike Draco as the shopping kind, but as she couldn’t fit enough books into the interior of a car to research her cares away, Draco’d figured she was making do.
“I don’t think we can do this,” Hermione said, after Draco had brought up some of the technical details of the plan the Ministry had given them.
Draco shrugged, aiming at appearing more casual than he actually felt. “Of course we can. New car; new wardrobe. Smith said he’d be sending a little care package to a Magic shop that’s on our way. We’ll pick it up; purchase a few other necessities while we’re at it, and get a decent room to stay in this time. Then we’ll do our jobs.”
Because, of course, it would be that simple.
“It’s not like we’ll be meeting another Dark Lord, Granger,” Draco told her.
No, they’d just be scheduling an appointment to see the former Scourge of Europe. Then they’d risk their lives on Hermione’s ability to lie in a vampire’s face, and Draco’s ability to keep the both of them from getting drained (or worse) should the ruse fall through. All so they could snoop around one of the most secure buildings, according to Smith, in America, to see if the vampire had any connection to what was going on with the Council and the Hellmouth. If there was a connection, then what Draco and Hermione found to report might very well start another war. If there wasn’t, then the both of them would be back at square one. With no leads as to what was going on across the Atlantic, or what they could do about it.
Hermione was sighing, deeply.
“Okay. So we’re going to pretend to be a couple of potential clients. If we’re going to hire an evil law firm for some purpose, then we must be evil ourselves. Are we going to-”
Draco went from smiling, slightly, at Hermione’s tone of voice - as she recovered her equilibrium at last and went into “Hermione-mode” (as Draco had heard Weasley refer to it several times) - to trying not to glance in the same direction as Hermione had, for the second the glance had lasted before Hermione had caught herself giving it.
“Keep this as true-to-life as possible? Yes,” Draco said, sparing a look at Hermione’s face when she’d finished fidgeting and being unnecessarily contrite. He drummed the fingers of his left hand against the steering wheel, then stopped as he took the exit they needed.
“Never say my family’s reputation never did anything for you, Granger. There are advantages to be had in ruling by fear and mistrust.” The way that Draco’s father had done - if one could call Lucius’s position in the various dealings he’d done on the side of his job with the Ministry “ruling”. Regardless, Draco knew Lucius had built quite a name for himself in the Dark - both within the Wizarding world and without. His dealings with demons had been kept as secret as all his crimes, save his involvement with Voldemort, but Draco knew he’d had them. For the most part, Draco didn’t think of them. Not even when he’d gotten in from Jerusalem and found a ticket to Sunnydale sitting on his desk. The sorts of demons Lucius had dealt with weren’t the kind legitimate Magical entities took interest in. They were the kind Aurors and Warlocks and Watchers tended to kill on sight. Wolfram & Hart no doubt kept a slew of them either on their payroll, or on a watch list related to their demonic clients.
So Draco should be able to call on the Malfoy infamy in playing off the (only partially) doctored identification documentations Smith had arranged for himself and Hermione.
“And we have to pretend to be married to do that?” Hermione asked. Her tone had more to do with uncertainty and awkwardness, than with that aspect of the plan itself. Draco thought.
“It gives us a reason to be seeking the firm’s services together,” Draco reasoned. And he tried not to take too much relish in adding: “And I suppose we don’t have to be married, to be pursuing the contract negotiations we’re going to be pursuing. But after the potion, I thought you might appreciate it if I made you an honest woman.”
Hermione’s eyes narrowed.
“What potion?” she asked, slowly.
Draco lost his reservations and misgivings, for a moment, in a grin.
“The Fell Brethren want a baby,” he said. “So we’re going to let them think we’re giving them one. Ours.”
~+[]+~
“Pregnant. You had to get me pregnant.”
Draco sighed, crossing his arms as he leaned back against the bathroom door. At least here in LA, Hermione had found them a hotel room, in which there was a bathroom door. Even if Hermione had locked herself on the other side of it about as soon as they’d come in.
They’d been having this conversation since before they’d reached Mazonn’s Magicks.
“Pregnant! You want to get me pregnant?” Hermione had shrieked.
Actually, the Director had wanted Draco to get Hermione pregnant. Albeit not pregnant. As Draco had been trying to explain for some time. And Draco doubted the man so much “wanted” this, as considered it a most clever and convenient method of getting them into Wolfram and Hart’s offices.
“You aren’t actually pregnant, Granger. You’ll only appear to be pregnant to anyone who hasn’t charmed themselves to see through the potion’s magics.”
Assuming the potion worked correctly. Draco was confident of his abilities as a potions maker, but he doubted Hermione’s having locked herself in a room before taking this potion had anything to do with her faith in his skills.
Hermione didn’t say anything.
“Granger?”
Draco knew of all the things that could go wrong when introducing a rarely used potion to a new test subject. What was worse - Hermione knew them, too. Which made her having locked herself in a room, alone, all the more frustrating. Not that a simple locked door could keep Draco away, should Hermione develop the need for assistance.
The frustration came in waiting to see if Hermione needed assisting. And not hexing the bathroom door down the second time Hermione ignored Draco’s calling her name.
“I am not going out there like this,” Hermione said, at last, just as Draco was becoming edgy.
Draco released the breath he realized, with some discomfort, he’d been holding.
If Hermione could speak, she hadn’t lost her tongue. And her esophagus hadn’t swelled terribly. There were two concerns Draco could cross off his list.
“Obviously you are. Even if we had enough ingredients to mix a second batch of the faux conceptus, I could hardly play the part of the expectant mother.”
Draco didn’t have to hear Hermione taking a breath in plans of responding to that to know she was about to say something he wouldn’t like, so:
“I did say that we don’t have enough ingredients for a second batch, Hermione. So don’t get any clever ideas.”
“If this is your idea of clever, I should think not,” Hermione said, her voice sounding muffled through the bathroom door.
And then the door opened.
Draco lost the words he’d been about to speak. Hermione was wrapped in the maternity robes Smith had helpfully included with the other items he’d had sent over for them. The robes swallowed most of Hermione’s figure, but couldn’t hide the more-than-noticeable swell of her now seemingly pregnant stomach.
Hermione had lain both hands, gently, on her distended middle. She looked up at Draco with a decidedly un-motherly look in her eyes.
“This has got to be some sick prank, Malfoy. I knew I should have taken that callback myself! Not actually pregnant… Am I not actually pregnant with twins, then? This is ridiculous!”
Draco blinked.
Hermione looked back down at her magically altered body. She turned again to the bathroom mirror she’d most likely been staring into since she’d gulped down Draco’s potion.
“I suppose I would have to be some months along into the pregnancy. We don’t want to make a career out of this, but honestly.”
There was obviously nothing wrong with Hermione, or the effects the potion had had on her.
Draco did, however, wonder if there was something wrong with him, as he watched the awkward way Hermione moved; the hesitant way she touched her rounded stomach.
When he looked up at Hermione’s face in the bathroom mirror, he caught sight of himself standing behind her, and quickly looked away again.
He’d missed whatever Hermione had been saying. And, judging by the disapproving glare he was getting, Draco figured Hermione had been saying quite a lot.
Draco caught just the tail end of it.
“-who we are? They might already be expecting us. Do you think I can duel my way out of there like this? I’m as big as a tree trunk.”
“You won’t have to,” Draco said without thinking, although it was no less what he’d already planned. “I’m going to go in tomorrow alone, and see what happens. Tonight we’ll get you something a bit more Muggle to wear, and if all goes well, I’ll schedule a time for the two of us to meet with Wolfram and Hart’s people together.”
And then, partly because he was curious, partly because he’d known Hermione would object to this, he asked: “Besides, we’re going to have to pretend to be Muggles to meet the Fell Brethren’s criterion for potential donors. Don’t Muggle women have to spend a lot of time off their feet while they’re pregnant? Wouldn’t want the mother of our little sacrifice overtaxing herself by trying to keep up with the men.”
Draco knew it was a very good thing that Hermione wasn’t really pregnant. Pregnant witches sometimes lost control of their powers, the way that young wizards and witches do, and Draco doubted he had enough restorative potion left in his potions kit to heal the damage a pregnant Hermione might have done to him at that moment.
---
“Excuse me?”
The next day found Draco making an early morning call to confirm his ten o’clock appointment to speak with Wolfram and Hart’s CEO.
Of course, Draco didn’t have a ten o’clock appointment with the CEO before he called to confirm it. Then the receptionist who answered the phone politely informed Draco of this. Seeing as this was an evil receptionist Draco was talking to, “politely” meant that she laughed at him, without laughing, then attempted to send him on his way.
How easy some old skills came back to Draco. Making “little people” rue not showing him the reverence he rightly deserved was one of them. Draco slipped into a Malfoy-voice that would have done his father proud, and informed the receptionist as to just why he didn’t need to have an appointment with her CEO to come in and see him whenever Draco damn well pleased. This involved tossing about a few of the credentials Smith had fabricated for him, and a couple he hadn’t needed to, and sounding alternately pissed-off and dispassionately disdaining.
The next person Draco talked to was the CEO’s personal secretary, and she just wanted to ask if there were any special arrangements that needed to be made before Draco’s arrival.
There were some aspects of being evil that Draco, frankly, rather missed.
Draco arrived at Wolfram and Hart at 9:55. On one hand, he wouldn’t have minded being fashionably late. On the other, if the firm really was onto them - as Hermione had suggested - Draco decided he’d rather not put off finding out.
Draco had dressed in one of the designer suits he’d picked up as he and Hermione had shopped the night before, and had beat down all of his instincts as he’d left his wand, his potions, and every other magical item in his possession in the hotel room with Hermione. Then he’d slipped into the dark coat he’d also purchased the night before, and had headed out to see what the day held in store for him.
So far as Draco could tell, once he was actually in the executive conference room, having announced his intentions when it didn’t seem as though the CEO’s secretary was going to announce them for him, the day had started out like shite.
There were Muggles who’d paid less on their homes than Draco had on the ensemble he was wearing. And still he felt underdressed. He was bloody well meeting with the former Scourge of Europe to discuss the sale of an unborn child. He’d never so much as gone on a study date before, without donning some of Madam Malkin’s finest. He hadn’t gotten to eat breakfast, as the serum he’d taken to protect himself from Legilimancy always made him nauseous. And as soon as Draco walked into the conference room, he realized there were other things he should probably be nauseous about, besides that serum.
The broad-shouldered, dark-haired man at the end of the table had to be Angelus. Or Angel, or whatever they called him now. The vampire Wolfram and Hart had hired as their CEO. Besides the fact that he was sitting at the head of the conference table, he was also one of the youngest-looking executives in the room. Two-hundred and fifty years old and counting, Hermione had said as she and Draco had researched early that morning, and he didn’t look a day over twenty-four.
On Angel’s left sat a dark-skinned man in a suit that just screamed “lawyer”. Next to him sat a thin young woman with long, brown hair, wearing a lab coat. She looked a bit like Luna Lovegood, actually, Draco found himself thinking, and that’s when Draco knew he was getting upset.
Next to the Lovegood knockoff sat a green-skinned demon Draco couldn’t identify, wearing the most garish purple outfit Draco could imagine. And at Angel’s right hand, sat a human who tugged at Draco’s sensitivity towards Dark things a lot more than a human really should have. He was most likely the ex-Watcher then, Draco supposed.
Between the Watcher and Angel, sat a slender man with pale hair that might have matched Draco’s own, if it had been natural. The man wore a black trench coat over black clothing.
Draco knew who he was. He just hadn’t known he would be here.
Draco had read a little something about him, as he and Hermione had searched her texts for more on Angel.
This was Spike. The vampire once known as “William the Bloody” - sired by the vampire Drusilla, whom Angelus had, likewise, sired.
As soon as Draco had walked into the room he had sensed him, as he had sensed Angel. The Darkness in them both, combined with the Dark in the ex-Watcher - on top of the Dark that was all around them, in this building - was sending all of Draco’s senses into a state of alarmed paranoia. It took everything in Draco’s willpower not to give in to it - to control the jitters of his nerves even more than usual; to keep his breathing even and his heartbeat from speeding up. His experiences as a Death Eater had taught Draco, long before his training as an Auror, that the invisible signs of nervousness and fear in humans were more than just visible to those beings capable of detecting them.
Draco did not let the smirk he’d carried into the room with him falter.
He smoothly took the seat at the opposite end of the table from Angelus - slow enough that his pace seemed relaxed and not contrived; quick enough that he didn’t appear uncertain of his actions. He leaned back in his seat as if making himself perfectly comfortable, and hid his hands in his pants pockets.
“I’ve a mutual acquaintance of one of your clients,” he said, just as he’d rehearsed. Speaking gave him a focus, and that focus gave Draco back a sense of himself. His cocky front was less of a front than before as he continued, “I hear they’re looking to buy a baby. And that your firm has agreed to broker the deal. As it just so happens, I have exactly what you’re looking for.”
A number of thoughts and faces went through Draco’s head as he awaited Angelus’ response, and he wondered - for not the first time - how in the bloody fucking hell he’d ever figured that being a good guy was going to save him from an ugly fate.
[ tbc… ]
by pari
Disclaimers: Draco and Hermione and all their lot belong to J.K. The Sunnyville crew belong to Joss. I’ve got nothing. This is simply for fun, not profit.
Feedback: please.
Archive: ask and you shall receive.
Thanks: to Methaya for letting me know I was being naughty in Chapter 6 without knowing it.
Apologies: to any German-speaking readers who read the last chapter and probably now think I am a great, big pervert :D I might sorta be one. But I like my perversion to be the result of a conscious effort, usually, so… Yeah.
~+[]+~
Hermione wasn’t vain when it came to her intellectual prowess, regardless of what some of her past acquaintances might say. She did, however, maintain certain expectations where her performance as an Auror and as a researcher for the Ministry of Magic were concerned.
That is to say, when Hermione made a decision, she expected it to be the right one. Always. She never acted upon her decisions rashly, and was always careful to keep an open mind when making important choices, so this should not have been a difficult goal to achieve. And yet, every now and then, Hermione chose wrong.
“Wrong” as in ‘That Gilderoy Lockhart is such a great professor!’ Wrong as in ‘I’m sure Ernie’s much less a prat outside of school. I’ll date him.’
The kind of wrong that ended with Hermione sitting atop a bound Slayer and looking like she’d just battled a Troll. Malfoy sat nearby, on the floor with his back to the motel room’s door. The motel manager had been yelling from the other side of it before Malfoy had cast an obliviate at him through the room’s now broken window.
Malfoy sported a nasty looking bump over one temple and a bloody nose. Hermione could hardly understand him when he spoke - the Break-Away Broken Nose Balm he‘d just applied not quite having gone into effect.
“O, dob be silly, Mowfoy. Wha’s se goin to do? Ruh away? We’b warded te door,” Malfoy grumbled from beneath the scrap of ruined curtain he was using to staunch the bloodflow from his nose. “Se din ruh away, Grager. I gib you dat.”
No, the Slayer most certainly had not run away. And, to be honest, Hermione hadn’t even considered the possibility that they’d face an alternative problem with her once they’d removed her from her body bind. Hermione had only agreed to putting her in one in the first place to simplify the process of getting her back to their motel room. Hermione knew all about Slayers, of course - she realized that they could be very aggressive and didn’t trust easily. But surely a woman who had been fighting demons and vampires since she was a teenager, sans magic, would have to be patient and rational, as well? Hermione hadn’t thought the woman would attack the second she’d regained the power to blink, much less knock Hermione across the room and pin Malfoy to the wall.
Malfoy had insisted that she would. “It’s what I would do,” he’d rationalized at the time.
Hermione hadn’t listened. And she got the feeling she’d be hearing about it now for the rest of her days.
“Nope, I’m still here,” the Slayer said, glaring up at Hermione from the floor. Hermione had put another bind on her, this time casting just at her shoulders and below, so that they could talk with her. Granted, that might take a little work. All Hermione had heard coming out of the Slayer’s mouth thus far had been a variety of colorful curses and threats so imaginative they had piqued Draco’s interest. “And you’re cute and all…” Faith continued. “But if I’d wanted a lap dance, I probably would have let Blond and Sniffly over there do the honors.”
Hermione - already flushed from their unexpected confrontation - turned an even brighter pink at the Slayer’s comment and unstraddled her slowly. She half expected the bind she’d cast to miraculously fail, and for the woman to jump up and try to thrash them again.
Malfoy had still been muttering under his breath, his words more clear now when they were loud enough to make out. Hermione made a mental note to ask what he’d added to the Balm he used to make it work so quickly.
“You know, under other circumstances I might have enjoyed that,” Malfoy was saying as he stood, tossing the bloodied bit of curtain in his hand in the wastebasket by the bureau. Ironically, it was perhaps the only bit of furniture left standing as it had been before Hermione had unleashed the Slayer upon everything around them. “But now I’m thinking…”
Malfoy withdrew his wand, his eyes locked with those of the Slayer. With a swish and flick a vial had removed itself from the potions chest he’d left sitting open on the now lopsided table in the corner. The vial flew into Malfoy’s hand, and he wiggled it at the Slayer.
“…let’s get this over with, so we can pay a little visit to that Watcher’s Council of yours and see what they have to say about the situation.”
Hermione threw him a measuring look. Draco might be bluffing, but then again - despite their orders - he might not. The Slayer had broken his nose. Getting bested by a girl had never sat well with Malfoy - Hermione should know. She’d bested him in their classes at Hogwarts for years, and she’d even slapped him in the face in their fourth year. Two years later, Malfoy had still been angry enough about it to hex the joints out of Hermione fingers. Ron had retaliated by giving Malfoy a concussion, and both boys had gotten their prefects’ status temporarily revoked a week later - for busting one another’s kneecaps in the midst of an after-hours duel.
“The Watcher’s Council, huh?” the Slayer said from her spot on the floor. She looked unperturbed by the wand in Malfoy’s right hand, although she’d seen what it could do, and the Veritaserum in his left; for all she knew, they could be about to feed her poison. If anything, the Slayer just looked angrier than she had when their little skirmish had begun - a fact which made Hermione’s hair stand on end. And she obviously found Malfoy’s mention of the Watcher’s Council darkly amusing, although Hermione wasn’t to know why until she said: “Figures. If you’re talking WC, the new and improved, I’m thinking the G-man’ll back me up. If it’s old school Watching you’re looking for, you’re sorta out of luck. That Watcher’s Council went boom about a year ago.”
Hermione blinked.
“Pardon me?” Draco asked.
“Boom,” said the Slayer, patronizingly. “As in their sneaky, British asses needed kicking, and someone gave it to them good. The new crew set up shop in Cleveland after B shut down the Hellmouth.”
She could very well have been speaking a different language, but Hermione and Malfoy got the gist of what she’d said.
Malfoy hesitated, and then threw up his hands.
“Well. You wouldn’t happen to have a manual that tells us what to do about that, do you, Granger?”
Dazed, Hermione glanced around them at the piles of disheveled books that littered the room. Her Goblin psyche text, sadly, had not survived the Slayer’s wrath so well as Malfoy and Hermione herself. It was now a smoldering stain on a patch of carpet in the corner.
“Bloody hell,” Hermione whispered.
She couldn’t think of anything else to say.
~+[]+~
“Well, it isn’t like we’ve misplaced them, Justin…”
The second time they needed to use the telephone, Hermione made the call.
Actually, she made two of them. One to the dispatch in their department, to leave a message, and one on the Emergency Communications line. The latter was going about as well as Draco might have expected.
“No, I don’t see how that… Of course! But…No! I can‘t wa…”
Hermione was pacing about their side of the room - opposite the one that held a partially-bound Slayer sitting in the corner, glaring darkly at the wall. She was having another of those frantic moments that had led her, before, to make strange gestures out the car window, and plow their Volvo into a road-side ditch.
Hermione sighed as she was put on hold, the sound containing much less anger than something else for Draco’s comfort.
Draco didn’t even think as he did it - clutched Hermione’s wrist on her seventh pass by him. His thumb lightly brushed over the pulse point there, bringing Hermione as effectively to a halt as if he’d grabbed her and ordered her to stop. It was just something Draco had done when he was younger, whenever Lucius was away on “business”. Draco’s mother would work herself into (what constituted, for her) an outright panic, waiting for news of Draco’s father, and Draco would calm her down with a touch - to her shoulder, her hand. He’d never been good with the sort of words that would have served the same purpose, so he’d stopped trying to give them.
Now he wasn’t sure what had sparked such a reaction from him. Draco had never felt the need to console someone outside his mother and the small circle of friends he considered family.
And Hermione was obviously as shocked by Draco’s behavior as he felt. She stopped in front of him, where he sat on the corner of the motel room’s dresser, eyes wide, and just blinked at him. Draco heard Finch-Fletchley talking on the other end of the telephone line before she did.
Then Hermione snapped to, with an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Draco half expected her to snatch her hand away, and wasn’t sure what to do when she didn’t. He waited until she was involved in conversation again to withdraw his own hand and make the issue a moot point.
“Yes? Oh, yes, I’m still here,” Hermione was saying. “What?” She began to pace again. “But… Yes, yes, I do realize that…” There was a pause, and then a displeased sigh that Draco would not want to have been the recipient of. “Fine! Yes, we’ll wait for the call back!”
Hermione slammed down the phone receiver with much more force than was necessary.
“They’re taking the news that well, are they?” Draco innocently asked.
“You’d think we’d bloody well been trying to make the Ministry look bad. Honestly! As if they can blame us for making a Hellmouth and the Watcher’s Council disappear!”
Actually, the Ministry couldn’t blame the two of them for this - or, more to the point, they couldn’t blame Draco. Draco seriously doubted Hermione would have found herself faced with any pointed fingers, even if the Ministry could have pointed one at her.
But, unfortunately, the Ministry could - and most likely would - try and blame the Aurory for all of this. Nevermind that the Aurors weren’t responsible for keeping track of Hellmouths - nor that they’d all been a bit busy, the past nine years, battling Death Eaters and dark lords, to be taking on extracurriculars. Cornelius Fudge was no longer Minister of Magic as he had been when Draco and Hermione were children, but the Ministry hadn’t changed so much since Fudge’s day that they were above passing the buck and letting others pay the price. And who better to take the fall, for the sake of PR, than the one department in all of Magical Britain that openly hired former Death Eaters and Slytherins as more than mail boys and secretaries?
“Hmm. Beaurocracy’s a bitch all over. There’s a shocker.” Hermione looked almost surprised at the reminder that the Slayer was in the room with them. She and Draco looked over at the woman as she cocked an eyebrow at them. “And fun as it’s been, sitting here on my ass, listening to you two get all angry and British… If you’re gonna keep me here much longer, you could at least make with some of that grub you got ‘round here somewhere. Girl’s gotta eat.”
Draco and Hermione exchanged a look. The Chinese Hermione had brought in with them earlier was not in plain sight - and was most likely unsalvageable, wherever it had ended up in the wreckage of their motel room.
“Right. I’ll just grab my cloak.”
Hermione grabbed her cloak and her coin purse, half-conscious of her own movements. Her mind was still obviously on her conversation with Finch-Fletchley. She cast a wary glance in the Slayer’s direction, and a questioning one at Draco, but Draco waved her on with a look of his own.
When Hermione had gone, silence settled over the room anew.
“So…” Draco began, shifting into a more comfortable position on top of the dresser. He decided conversation was as good a way to pass the time til Hermione returned as any. “Inhumanly strong and charming, as well. How’s that working out for you?”
The Slayer gave him a look that made the use of her fingers unnecessary.
Draco shrugged.
“Or we could just sit here and glare at each other some more. That’s good, too.”
The Slayer snorted and rolled her eyes.
[ tbc ]
by pari
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimers: Draco and Hermione and all their lot belong to J.K. The Sunnyville crew belong to Joss. I’ve got nothing. This is simply for fun, not profit.
Feedback: please.
A/N: Still no real bunnies :p Forgive me.
~+[]+~
“Okay, okay, okay… Let’s just pretend you didn’t lose me back at the sweet and sour chicken.”
Hermione, Draco, and the Slayer - Faith, she said her name was, making Hermione wish, for not the first time, that she’d studied current events in the Watcher’s Council before she and Draco had first gone out - were sitting around the motel room’s lopsided table. Faith had been relatively behaved (i.e. nonviolent) so Draco had removed her partial bodybind. This arrangement worked for all of them, as Faith didn’t seem the type to sit there and be fed, and Hermione would have been awkward helping feed her, after the straddling incident of earlier.
Malfoy, no doubt, would not have been awkward at all. But Hermione was strangely reluctant to watch Malfoy help the Slayer with the Chinese Hermione had bought to replace their first order.
This order was more than twice as big as the last one. Hermione hadn’t known what the Slayer might eat, and she’d been too flustered and preoccupied, at the time, to give it much thought - so she’d ordered a little bit of everything on the Chinese restaurant’s menu.
Still, the Slayer had already made her way through two helpings of chicken, much of the mushu pork, and half of the noodles. She was now working on the rice and egg rolls, while Hermione watched in fascination, and Draco fought Faith for the last of the shrimp and dumplings.
“I mean, what’s the big deal. So you didn’t know the Hellmouth went bye-bye. Now you do. What are you gonna do? Track down everybody who doesn‘t know how to pick up a phone and tell their mommies?”
Faith spoke around a mouthful of rice and then slurped down a couple of long noodles.
Hermione tried to stay focused on their conversation. She’d only ever seen Seamus Finnigan eat like that.
Draco scoffed at the mention of a telephone, still sore at his failures in using the ECS.
“It isn’t really about the Hellmouth. It’s politics, partly. The Ministry’s been hoping to strengthen its relations with the other Magical communities for some time now. And this doesn’t make our chances for doing that look good.”
Not good at all. Hermione knew that Minister McGurren had been planning on a series of good-will gestures towards the Conference, in a show of appreciation for their limited support throughout The War with Voldemort. And in an attempt at forging ties that would ensure more than limited support from Magical America in the future. Having his similar intentions towards the Council nullified by the Council’s silence on the matter of the closed Hellmouth (or, if what Faith said was true, by the destruction of the Council) would no doubt discourage the Minister personally. But if the Conference knew about what had happened with the Council, and had chosen not to alert the Ministry… Or if, worse, the Conference hadn’t known about it either…
“Then there’s the little issue of a Hellmouth having closed without anyone at the Ministry having noticed,” Draco contributed. While Faith attacked her meal with gusto, and Hermione picked at hers, Draco ate in proper-sized portions, holding his chopsticks with perfect ease and poise. Faith had tossed hers aside when Hermione had handed them to her. “It isn’t like the Ministry should have to be told these sorts of things. Closing a Hellmouth is no small feat. There should have been buzz about it all the way across the Atlantic. But there was nothing.”
This was the first time Hermione had ever seen Draco speak so openly with someone about which he knew so little. Actually, until recently, Hermione had rarely seen Draco speak openly. As they had been giving Faith the explanations she’d asked for, Draco’s sudden loquaciousness had begun to nettle Hermione, although she wasn’t sure why.
Then she’d realized. Draco was as nervous about the recent developments as she was. She’d seen it before - how casual Draco behaved under pressure. He didn’t flitter around the room, as Hermione sometimes did, or become so lost in thought he nearly ended up buying an entire buffet bar. He strutted, and snarked, and showed off just as he always did. But if you watched him closely, he held himself unusually still; his eyes never mimicked his mouth when he smirked. And he spoke with the straightforwardness of someone aware that something “bad” was coming, and that soon it might not matter what anyone said in the meantime.
“We need to know as much about what happened as possible,” Hermione explained, taking up where Draco left off. “So that, if there are…outside forces…affecting our communications with the other communities, they can be dealt with before something unfortunate happens.”
Such as an entire Watcher’s Council getting itself blown up, without (supposedly) anyone to come to their survivors’ aide. Hermione was just beginning to think of what Faith had told them in terms of what it meant for the Council members, and she balked at her own short-sightedness, not having thought of it sooner. All those lives lost, that - perhaps? - could have been prevented. And the families of the Watchers that had died…
…the men and women who’d lost their spouses; their lovers. The children who’d lost their parents…
“Cool. So make a trip to Cleveland. I’m sure Giles can give you the 411. Me, I was just there for the slayage. Not the person to talk to about politics.”
Hermione nodded. She’d told Justin everything Faith had told them - about the closing of the Hellmouth, and about where Mr. Giles and his Slayer could be located. As it turns out, Faith was not the Slayer Hermione and Draco had come to America to find. Hermione still thought of her as the Slayer, although - really - a Buffy Summers was reported to be the Council’s Chosen One. Faith, and a number of younger girls, as well, had all been activated through a series of strange events - the retelling of which had given Hermione just one more reason to stir the soup in her hands without actually sipping much of it.
“No hard feelings, then?” Draco asked.
Faith shrugged. She and Draco seemed to have come to some sort of understanding while Hermione was out at the restaurant. Hermione could not imagine how.
“Eh. I made you bleed, you fed me. Gave me boots.” Faith grinned, wiggling her feet, which were propped up on the sloping side of their table. Draco had given her a pair of vintage army boots to replace the Doc Martens Hermione’s book had damaged. “We’re cool,” Faith said.
“Excellent. Because I’m exhausted,” Draco said, dropping his chopsticks into one of the empty paper containers littering the tabletop.
Hermione silently agreed. But wondered if she would get any sleep tonight. Or - technically - this morning. They were supposed to get a final call back at eight a.m., telling them what they were to do next, or if they were simply to return to the Ministry.
The Slayer stood and stretched, arms held high above her head and back arched like a cat’s.
“Well. Am I good to go, or what? ‘Coz I get kinda cranky when I have to sleep in a chair.” She cast a meaningful glance at the chair Hermione and Draco had put her in while she’d been in her bodybind.
“Yes. Yes, of course,” Hermione agreed, standing, as well. It wasn’t as though she could do anything to stop her, if Faith decided at that moment that she wanted to leave. She had made Hermione and Draco place their wands on the opposite side of the room before unbinding her, to prove that they meant her no harm.
“You’re playing us, aren’t you?” Draco had said.
Faith had just smiled. “Depends. Are you gonna let me?”
Neither of them had mentioned that Draco could cast a summoning spell wandless. Or that Hermione carried a spare wand. The spare wasn’t very accessible, and so wouldn’t pose a threat to the Slayer if she tried to flee, anyway.
“Then it’s been real. But I’ve gotta catch some zees. You crazy kids have fun in Cleveland. Give B my best.”
Hermione and Draco took Faith’s last words to them with as much aplomb as they had her first, at least knowing this time what - or rather, who - the B referred to.
When Faith left, Hermione felt a number of conflicting emotions. Uncertainty, as perhaps they shouldn’t have let the Slayer out of their sight so quickly - they couldn’t even verify any of her stories; disappointment because Hermione had been in the presence of a Slayer. And the experience had not been as educational as Hermione might have hoped, except in the most surprising ways.
And, finally, Hermione felt relief. She’d been on edge with the Slayer there. When it was just she and Draco again (and didn’t that seem strange, to think of it that way) Hermione felt as though she could let down a bit of her guard, and speak more freely.
Then she turned to see what had captured Draco’s attention about as soon as they had said their goodbyes to Faith.
He was looking at one of the motel room’s beds. The motel room’s bed, as the broken frame and ruined mattress nearly blocking the entrance to the bathroom resembled a proper bed no longer.
Hermione couldn’t dredge up a response to Draco’s querying gaze.
This was just the perfect end to her eveni-… To her early morning.
“Flip you for it?” Draco offered.
Hermione sighed.
“Get some sleep, Malfoy,” she said, and lay down on the left side of the bed.
~+[]+~
As soon as Faith left the motel room, she found a payphone. She dialled in a number she’d only used once since it had been activated.
“Come on, B,” she mumbled to herself, as she listened to the phone ringing. “You are so gonna wanna hear this.”
~+[]+~
As sure as Hermione had been, before, that she would get no sleep in light of the Hellmouth issue, when she rose from her pillow - later - she couldn’t remember having lain her head upon it.
Oddly, she did remember why Draco had been lying on the bed next to her. So when she turned - to find the right side of the mattress warm from having been slept on, the sheets slightly ruffled - she wasn’t startled.
However, she was surprised that Draco was up and out of bed.
And then she heard him.
He was on the telephone. And laughing. It was not a pleasant laugh. It was more the type of chuckle Malfoy gave people to emphasize how not funny they were being.
“Oh, really. And are you going to tell her that?”
Draco was standing with his back to the bed, so he hadn’t seen that Hermione was awake yet. For that matter, Hermione had just seen him. He must have been in the middle of dressing when the call had come - assuming he hadn’t figured out how to place a call on his own. Hermione wondered how the phone’s ringing hadn’t woken her up.
Then she wondered if she had woken up. Seeing Malfoy shirtless in the morning was not an experience she associated with the waking world.
And she hadn’t known that Malfoy had a tattoo like that. During The War, the Order had begun memorizing the Death Eater’s descriptions and distinguishing features - fearing Voldemort had developed a way to hide the Dark Mark. Hermione herself had contributed in creating a spell that could cut through glamours, using non-Magical identifying marks alone.
Hermione realized she was staring at Draco’s shoulder blades when he turned and saw that she was no longer sleeping.
She would have said something, or expected Draco to hand her the phone, but she had no idea what to say. And, after a moment, Draco seemed to decide on something, and went back to his conversation.
“Fine. But you tell the Director he owes me a bloody big raise for this.” Draco hung up the phone.
“And what was that about?” Hermione asked with a dry mouth, finding her voice at last. She kept her eyes resolutely on Draco’s face.
Draco had one brow raised, and was pulling on another button-up shirt.
“Looks like we’ll be taking a little detour to Los Angeles.”
Hermione kicked back the covers she’d been snuggled under, and stood - only momentarily distracted by the discovery that she’d gotten out of her robes and boots, before getting into bed, without realizing it.
“What are we to do in Los Angeles?” she asked.
Hermione couldn’t read Draco’s expression.
“Play house, apparently,” he said. And then, before she could comment on that: “Smith says he thinks they may have found out who’s been shielding us from picking up on the fluctuations in mystical energy that have been taking place over here.”
The way Draco said that didn’t bode well with Hermione.
“And?”
“I don’t suppose your Muggle Studies course covered a firm called Wolfram and Hart,” Draco replied, in way of an answer.
~+[]+~
Meanwhile…
The perception of Muggle Britain as being mired in tradition and old-world sentiment had long been prevalent by the time the current Minister of Magic had taken office.
Not that anyone on the non-Muggle side of London could have said anything about it, one way or the other. There weren’t a lot of wizards in the Ministry who knew enough about Muggle pop culture to have formed such an opinion. And the Ministry, itself, had been about as “old-world” as any Magical institution in existence.
But after Phineas McGurren became Minister of Magic…
“Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Auror’s Division 315, how may I direct your talk?”
Akilina Kirke leaned back in her chair, at the receptionist’s desk of 315, twirling her quill where it levitated above a stack of steno pads and parchment rolls.
She hardly glanced at the wizard whose face appeared in the flames of the miniature fireplace mounted in the corner of her cubicle.
“Yes, I need to speak to Auror Davies, on the f-”
“Fourth floor, office 26B,” Akilina recited the room number mechanically. She paused in her twirling, and set down her issue of The Enquisitor, long enough to study the gyrating spheres resting atop the fireplace’s narrow mantle. Each of them were silent. The one on the left glowed a mellow gold - the other two shifted from purple to green and back again. The twirling resumed.
“Please hold.” Akilina reached into one of the jars sitting in a rack by her desk, and drew out a pinch of bright pink powder to throw into the fireplace. The wizard’s face disappeared, replaced almost immediately by another.
“Department of Magical Law Enforcement-”
One of the spheres shrilled. Akilina looked up at it sharply, lowering her tabloid. All of the spheres were glowing an angry orange, with streaks of brown and blue. Akilina blinked and turned to the wizard in the fireplace.
She smiled, widely. “Auror’s Division 315,” she cooed. The wizard was oblivious to the aura-reading apparatus’ response. “How may I direct your talk?”
Akilina screwed off the top of the black jar resting on her powder rack, and reached for the dark red powder inside.
The wizard smiled pleasantly. “Auror Ambrose, please. Second floor, office 13C.”
“Right away,” Akilina replied, drawing out a pinch of the red powder. It crackled between her fingers…
Then fell back into the jar, as a man’s hand wrapped around Akilina’s wrist and she let the powder fall.
Akilina turned, ready to hex whoever had dared lay a hand on her, on work-hours or off - then stopped when she saw Harry Potter standing in front of her desk, one brow raised and with his arms now crossed over his chest.
“If you fry another of those,” he said smoothly. “We’ll never get the smell out of the lobby.”
Akilina, for the moment, was placated.
She crossed her arms, in a mimicry of the auror, and shrugged.
“I don’t mind the smell of burnt Death Eater. Do you?”
Potter simply looked at her.
“Oh, alright. Don’t get your knickers in a twist.”
She turned back to the wizard waiting to be connected to Auror Ambrose’s office, and threw a pinch of gold powder into the fireplace, rather than the dark red. “It’ll be just a moment, sir. Please hold.”
The wizard’s face disappeared from Akilina’s flames, but the spheres on her fireplace’s mantle blinked in confirmation that the silent alarm had been tripped. The wizard would shortly be getting a surprise visit, and it wouldn’t be from Amanda Ambrose.
Akilina spun in her chair and plucked her quill out of the air.
“So. Potter. Did you need something? Or did you come down here just to stop me from reaching this month’s quota?”
Akilina’s smile was overly warm, and showed a lot of teeth, and caused Potter to roll his eyes as he seated himself on one corner of Akilina’s desk.
“The Ministry doesn’t pay us to blow people up, Kirke,” Potter replied, rifling through the memos in Akilina’s outbox. Many of the missives had been waiting for days for her signature, and a distribution spell, so they jittered within the box restlessly. Potter fished out three memos addressed to himself, receiving a nasty paper cut as one purchase order - anxious to make it’s way down to filing - tried latching onto his index finger and failed. Potter frowned at Akilina in irritation, as Akilina ignored him and he sucked on his wounded digit.
“Well, they should. Would liven things up a bit around here. Besides, who foiled that assassination attempt on the HDIMC last month?”
Potter didn’t blink. He gathered his memos in one hand, and the diet soda he’d put down (to stop Akilina from sautéing that wizard) with the other.
“Neville and Padma did. After they finished scraping enough Death Eater out of their eyes to chase down the two who sneaked in through the back.”
Akilina narrowed her eyes, but returned to her Enquisitor and let the rebuttal go. “Way to flatter a girl’s ego, Potter. Keep that up and you’ll never get into my pants.”
Potter ignored the vulgarity. He headed for the lobby’s bay of elevators shaking his head at the Slytherin.
“Oi. And, Potter?”
Potter turned just as Akilina sent another message sailing his way. This one was written on a post-it note, rather than parchment, so it not so much “sailed” as somersaulted towards him - in that lazy way that post-it notes liked to somersault. The message had to be from one of the witches operating the department’s phone lines.
Potter plucked it out of the air when it neared him, and he read it, his expression darkening as he did.
Akilina smiled. “You’ve got a call from the States,” she said sweetly, as the face of an elderly witch appeared in her fireplace.
“Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Auror’s Division 315. Just a moment, Mrs. Perks, and I’ll connect you.”
Potter entered the first elevator to arrive at the lobby, forcing his way through the small crowd of people coming off it, and quickly pushed in the number to take him to his office.
~+[]+~
The next day, Wolfram & Hart’s doors opened bright and early, just as they always did. The lobby was filled with the usual hustle and bustle of a demonically owned law firm/multi-billion dollar cooperation.
The executive boardroom was filled with the firm’s most important department heads.
Plus one newly recorporealized, soulled vampire.
“I’m just not sure we can trust him,” Angel was saying.
“I’m certain we can’t,” Wesley told him. “But I’m not certain how long we can hold him if we don’t give him a reason to work with us.”
“And why do we want him working with us, again?” Gunn asked. Fred smiled at the sentiment, but Lorne responded with a “Here, here.”
Spike paused in tapping out a rendition of Heaven Beside Me, on the top of the conference table with Angel’s executive pen, long enough to put in his two-cents’ worth.
“Well you don’t think ‘ol Tattoo Boy’s stayed alive this long by being stupid, do ya? Seems to me you could make good use of a chap with his knack for pissing off higher powers. Seeing as you lot’ve got even more mortal enemies than he has.”
Angel snatched the pen out of Spike’s hand before he could start tapping with it again. Spike stuck his tongue out at him.
The others either pretended not to see, or not to be amused.
Angel indulged in one of his why-is-he-still-here sighs, and leaned back in his chair.
“Okay. Fine. Can we at least remove the tattoos, so it will be easier to keep him here?”
It was Wes, Fred, and Gunn’s turn to shift in their seats and sigh. They’d already been over this issue. Twice.
“Not unless we want the Senior Partners to find him and send him to Hell…” Wes replied, in a patient voice which - coming from Wes - wasn’t really patient at all. It was cautionary.
Angel snorted. He threw up his hands in mock horror. “Oh, no! Not that,” he quipped. Fred giggled.
Wes gave Angel a stern look. “…which would make it impossible for him to help us take them down. And would completely defeat the purpose of our having kept him here, rather than let him leave LA again.”
“To cause who knows how much more trouble,” Angel muttered. He didn’t notice, but Wes and Fred looked up, and Lorne turned, as the conference room door opened and Harmony slipped in, with an apologetic wave.
“He’d be working strictly in an advisory capacity,” Gunn was saying. “Contract employee. He wouldn’t, technically, even be part of the firm. He’d answer to you.”
“Excuse me,” Lorne said - cutting off Harmony, who had just opened her mouth to speak.
“Uh, Boss-”
“But isn’t this the guy who wants to kill you? So badly he got himself all painted up just to come back here and unleash some big nasty in the basement?”
Wes and Gunn exchanged a glance.
“He won’t like it,” Wes admitted.
“But if the choice is between working for you and Hell…” Gunn began.
“I’d chose Hell,” Spike said, cheerily, earning him another of Angel’s glares.
Gunn coughed to hide a snicker.
“Um… Boss?”
Angel didn’t look up, assuming Harmony had brought him the mug of blood he’d ordered.
“Just set it on the table, Harmony,” he said, shuffling through some of his papers.
He set them back down again. “I’m tired of talking about this. Where are we with the Haklaar case?”
Fred piped up, as Harmony lingered in the background, looking uncertainly at Angel, and then through the doorway behind her.
“I’ve, uh, finished testing those sonar-resistant tracking devices you wanted. They’re good to go. We can have them in place in a day.”
Angel nodded, glad for once that something seemed to be going right.
Angel looked at Wes and Wes also nodded.
“Do it,” Angel said. Fred scribbled a little note on her palm pilot.
“Boss…”
“Those trade negotiations with the Ga’Rod are going to take a while, though,” Gunn reported. “I’m supposed to meet their Shaide this evening. Would help if I had a little something to bring with me to sweeten the deal.”
“We aren’t going to give them anyone’s firstborn, Gunn.”
“That goes without saying. But real estate’s got some empty property up in the Hills. The Ga’Rod have been looking for a new breeding ground for a while, so-”
“Boss.”
Angel and the others looked up at Harmony’s uncharacteristic outburst.
Harmony looked startled by it, too. “Oh. Sorry,” she said. Then stood there.
“Harmony,” Angel finally asked. “What is it?”
“Your ten a.m. is here,” Harmony told him, “and he’s-”
“Rather anxious to get started,” an unfamiliar voice spoke, as a young man walked into the room.
He was well-groomed and dressed in a dark, expensive suit. He had light eyes and white-blonde hair, and something about him made Angel sit up straight in his seat. Beside him, Spike had tensed, as well.
“I hear you buy babies,” the man said, with a smile.
[ tbc… ]
by pari
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimers: Draco and Hermione and all their lot belong to J.K. The Sunnyville crew belong to Joss. I’ve got nothing. This is simply for fun, not profit.
Feedback: please.
~+[]+~
Hermione took the news of their assignment even better than Draco had expected.
Which is to say, she spit orange juice all over him, as they sat in the horrifyingly Muggle diner where they were forced to breakfast before heading on to LA.
“Charming,” he drolled, grimacing, as he wiped at his face with a napkin.
Hermione was too preoccupied to apologize, as - certainly? - she would have done had he not just informed her that their employers were absolutely daft.
“What?”
“The spitting, Granger. I appreciate a good aim as well as the next wizard, but-”
“No.” Hermione looked like she was going to start stuttering. Draco put a protective hand over the top of her juice glass and slowly drew it away from her. Despite her momentary panic, Hermione noticed the gesture, and a corner of her lip quirked. She took a deep breath, and then another.
“I’m sorry,” she said, reaching out suddenly, and wiping away the drop of orange juice Draco had missed on his cheek. Draco blinked at the urge to lean into her touch.
“Why do they want us to do this?”
Draco poked at the bacon left on his plate. Eating hadn’t been such a chore that morning. He’d been tired enough and hungry enough not to care what he ate. Plus, he’d spent quite a few summers in the Orient. The Wizarding food over there tasted just the same as the Muggle. Not that some Californian, 24-hour buffet could match the culinary offerings of the restaurants he’d frequented, but…
Nevertheless, eating was an entirely different experience with a few hours of sleep behind him. And the food sitting in front of Draco was not only undeniably Muggle, it was American. And probably not a shining example of that, either.
“Last night,” Draco explained, “a clerk from the Department of Fiscal Grievances contacted the Aurory. Gringotts’s filed a suit against a sect of demons who’ve fallen behind on repaying a loan they took out with the bank in London.”
Hermione nodded her head, listening.
“The sect has relocated in Los Angeles,” Draco continued. “The loan furnished the lavish preparations the sect has made for a human child.”
Here Draco was getting to the good part. Hermione blinked.
“The demon sect wants to raise a human child?” she asked.
Draco raised a brow. “They want to ritually sacrifice a human child. But they have to raise it first. The ritual requires thirteen years of precise preparation.”
Hermione’s face contorted cutely. “Ew. My God, the Ministry isn’t going to let them, are they?”
“No. Not that the Fell Brethren know this.“ On Hermione’s lack of recognition at the name, Draco supplied: “That’s what the sect members call themselves.” Draco shook his head. He would never understand the compulsion of evil organizations to give themselves names - even after having belonged to one. To Draco’s way of thinking, if you were truly evil, you shouldn’t care what the newspapers called you when they reported the atrocities you’d committed. “The Ministry’s intercepted the suit,” he went on. “They want more information on the firm that will be providing the Fell Brethren their sacrifice, before they move on the Brethren themselves.”
“Wolfram and Hart,” Hermione guessed.
Draco smiled mirthlessly. “Yes. And when the Ministry looked into who’s running the firm these days, guess what they found.”
Hermione leaned back in her seat. Her expression was becoming less anxious, and more grim.
“He or she has a connection to Sunnydale,” she guessed right again.
Draco slid Hermione’s juice glass back beside her plate. She looked like she might need a drink very soon, and that was the only drink available.
“He lived there for a time. Tried to end the world there once. And he has a…personal…connection to the Slayer Mr. Giles is responsible for.” Draco shrugged. “Or at least he had. Smith said he’d need more time to get anything more current on him.” Draco rolled his eyes. As Hermione seemed to consider the prat a friend, Draco would refrain from commenting on what he thought about Smith’s “needs”.
Hermione was frowning, her mind no doubt taking the same turns Draco’s had as Smith had given him this news - although Hermione’s seemed to be taking them faster.
“A personal connection to the Slayer, Buffy Summers. And Rupert Giles…”
“Her Watcher,” Draco finished the sentence for her. “Who is, reportedly, in charge of the new Watcher’s Council, knew all about it.”
Hermione looked pale. Draco cast a glance around the diner. There was only one other customer - a sleepy-looking truck driver, who was very nearly lying in the bowl of oatmeal sitting in front of him at the counter. And a bored-looking waitress, chewing gum and reading a magazine. The cook Draco had seen working in the kitchen wasn’t in view from Draco and Hermione’s table. Still, Draco thought he’d better wait until he and Hermione were alone before he told her the worst of what he had to say. The second-worst, perhaps she could handle.
“And-”
“And?” Hermione repeated, unhappily.
Draco pulled a Muggle bill out of his pocket, trying and failing - again - to remember whether the amount was appropriate in this instance. But not caring. Hermione, likewise, paid the bill no mind.
“Wolfram and Heart has an ex-Watcher working for them,” Draco said. “Their CEO knew him before either of them were offered positions. Seems he was involved in the incident that lost the man his job with the Council. Need I prompt you to guess where the Watcher was stationed at the time?”
Hermione sighed, standing when Draco stood, and following him out of the diner. Neither glanced in the waitress’s direction when she called out a goodbye.
“Sunnydale,” Hermione answered. “And why do I get the feelings there’s more?”
Draco steered Hermione towards the rental car still in their possession. They’d patched it up with enough magic to get them to the motel after their accident, and to get them to the bus station now. After that, they’d leave the car in a parking lot and let the Ministry send someone to deal with it, and their hastily Reparo-ed motel room.
As no one seemed to be standing around to see, Draco opened Hermione’s door for her, but simply slipped into the driver’s seat himself. Rather than taking the time to conjure another driver’s side door, Hermione had just cast a glamour on the car to make it look as though it had one. And so that it didn’t look as though it had spent some time, recently, sitting in a ditch.
Draco put the car’s key in its ignition, hoping he could fake having more experience with driving than he actually had. That Hermione was sitting in the passenger’s seat right now, having let Draco take the Volvo’s keys from her without objection, was a testament to her state of mind. Draco didn’t want her driving, and he didn’t want his driving to upset her any further.
“Did Wood ever tell you which vampire Quirrell used to make his students write a parchment on as part of their DADA finals?” Draco asked, figuring that was as good a way to start the second half of this bad-news-breaking as any.
~+[]+~
Even after the “why” of what they’d been asked to do had been settled, there was still the “what” to consider.
Half way to Los Angeles, Hermione had begun to calm down about the fact that the single most evil institution with ties in both the human and the demon worlds seemed to have some connection to the new Watcher’s Council - and, possibly, to the destruction of the old. And that the single most evil vampire in history was now, apparently, running said evil institution.
Then Draco had had to address, again, how they were supposed to infiltrate the firm, to confirm all of this for themselves.
Luckily there had been no bus passengers or bus drivers around to witness the ensuing debacle. Draco had taken one look at the bus they were to board that morning, and had refused to set one foot on it. Riding in an airplane had been bad enough, for all that Draco was impressed with the Muggles for having found a way to get themselves off the ground. Draco absolutely drew the line at submitting himself to the indignities of public transport.
Draco had driven himself and Hermione to the nearest car dealership, instead, and purchased the most expensive vehicle on the lot. Which, seeing as Sunnydale didn’t seem to be attracting the rich and powerful like magnets, meant something only slightly more stylish than the Volvo they’d gotten from the car rental. Draco decided it would do, and decided also that he was going to upgrade just as soon as they got to Los Angeles. When he’d told Smith that the Director would owe him for this jaunt, he’d meant it.
Hermione hadn’t seemed to mind. At the car dealership, she hadn’t tried to talk Draco out of his purchase. Not because she was too dazed to think clearly, as she had been when she and Draco had left the diner, but - presumably - because she was as willing to drown her sorrows in a shopping spree as he. Hermione didn’t much strike Draco as the shopping kind, but as she couldn’t fit enough books into the interior of a car to research her cares away, Draco’d figured she was making do.
“I don’t think we can do this,” Hermione said, after Draco had brought up some of the technical details of the plan the Ministry had given them.
Draco shrugged, aiming at appearing more casual than he actually felt. “Of course we can. New car; new wardrobe. Smith said he’d be sending a little care package to a Magic shop that’s on our way. We’ll pick it up; purchase a few other necessities while we’re at it, and get a decent room to stay in this time. Then we’ll do our jobs.”
Because, of course, it would be that simple.
“It’s not like we’ll be meeting another Dark Lord, Granger,” Draco told her.
No, they’d just be scheduling an appointment to see the former Scourge of Europe. Then they’d risk their lives on Hermione’s ability to lie in a vampire’s face, and Draco’s ability to keep the both of them from getting drained (or worse) should the ruse fall through. All so they could snoop around one of the most secure buildings, according to Smith, in America, to see if the vampire had any connection to what was going on with the Council and the Hellmouth. If there was a connection, then what Draco and Hermione found to report might very well start another war. If there wasn’t, then the both of them would be back at square one. With no leads as to what was going on across the Atlantic, or what they could do about it.
Hermione was sighing, deeply.
“Okay. So we’re going to pretend to be a couple of potential clients. If we’re going to hire an evil law firm for some purpose, then we must be evil ourselves. Are we going to-”
Draco went from smiling, slightly, at Hermione’s tone of voice - as she recovered her equilibrium at last and went into “Hermione-mode” (as Draco had heard Weasley refer to it several times) - to trying not to glance in the same direction as Hermione had, for the second the glance had lasted before Hermione had caught herself giving it.
“Keep this as true-to-life as possible? Yes,” Draco said, sparing a look at Hermione’s face when she’d finished fidgeting and being unnecessarily contrite. He drummed the fingers of his left hand against the steering wheel, then stopped as he took the exit they needed.
“Never say my family’s reputation never did anything for you, Granger. There are advantages to be had in ruling by fear and mistrust.” The way that Draco’s father had done - if one could call Lucius’s position in the various dealings he’d done on the side of his job with the Ministry “ruling”. Regardless, Draco knew Lucius had built quite a name for himself in the Dark - both within the Wizarding world and without. His dealings with demons had been kept as secret as all his crimes, save his involvement with Voldemort, but Draco knew he’d had them. For the most part, Draco didn’t think of them. Not even when he’d gotten in from Jerusalem and found a ticket to Sunnydale sitting on his desk. The sorts of demons Lucius had dealt with weren’t the kind legitimate Magical entities took interest in. They were the kind Aurors and Warlocks and Watchers tended to kill on sight. Wolfram & Hart no doubt kept a slew of them either on their payroll, or on a watch list related to their demonic clients.
So Draco should be able to call on the Malfoy infamy in playing off the (only partially) doctored identification documentations Smith had arranged for himself and Hermione.
“And we have to pretend to be married to do that?” Hermione asked. Her tone had more to do with uncertainty and awkwardness, than with that aspect of the plan itself. Draco thought.
“It gives us a reason to be seeking the firm’s services together,” Draco reasoned. And he tried not to take too much relish in adding: “And I suppose we don’t have to be married, to be pursuing the contract negotiations we’re going to be pursuing. But after the potion, I thought you might appreciate it if I made you an honest woman.”
Hermione’s eyes narrowed.
“What potion?” she asked, slowly.
Draco lost his reservations and misgivings, for a moment, in a grin.
“The Fell Brethren want a baby,” he said. “So we’re going to let them think we’re giving them one. Ours.”
~+[]+~
“Pregnant. You had to get me pregnant.”
Draco sighed, crossing his arms as he leaned back against the bathroom door. At least here in LA, Hermione had found them a hotel room, in which there was a bathroom door. Even if Hermione had locked herself on the other side of it about as soon as they’d come in.
They’d been having this conversation since before they’d reached Mazonn’s Magicks.
“Pregnant! You want to get me pregnant?” Hermione had shrieked.
Actually, the Director had wanted Draco to get Hermione pregnant. Albeit not pregnant. As Draco had been trying to explain for some time. And Draco doubted the man so much “wanted” this, as considered it a most clever and convenient method of getting them into Wolfram and Hart’s offices.
“You aren’t actually pregnant, Granger. You’ll only appear to be pregnant to anyone who hasn’t charmed themselves to see through the potion’s magics.”
Assuming the potion worked correctly. Draco was confident of his abilities as a potions maker, but he doubted Hermione’s having locked herself in a room before taking this potion had anything to do with her faith in his skills.
Hermione didn’t say anything.
“Granger?”
Draco knew of all the things that could go wrong when introducing a rarely used potion to a new test subject. What was worse - Hermione knew them, too. Which made her having locked herself in a room, alone, all the more frustrating. Not that a simple locked door could keep Draco away, should Hermione develop the need for assistance.
The frustration came in waiting to see if Hermione needed assisting. And not hexing the bathroom door down the second time Hermione ignored Draco’s calling her name.
“I am not going out there like this,” Hermione said, at last, just as Draco was becoming edgy.
Draco released the breath he realized, with some discomfort, he’d been holding.
If Hermione could speak, she hadn’t lost her tongue. And her esophagus hadn’t swelled terribly. There were two concerns Draco could cross off his list.
“Obviously you are. Even if we had enough ingredients to mix a second batch of the faux conceptus, I could hardly play the part of the expectant mother.”
Draco didn’t have to hear Hermione taking a breath in plans of responding to that to know she was about to say something he wouldn’t like, so:
“I did say that we don’t have enough ingredients for a second batch, Hermione. So don’t get any clever ideas.”
“If this is your idea of clever, I should think not,” Hermione said, her voice sounding muffled through the bathroom door.
And then the door opened.
Draco lost the words he’d been about to speak. Hermione was wrapped in the maternity robes Smith had helpfully included with the other items he’d had sent over for them. The robes swallowed most of Hermione’s figure, but couldn’t hide the more-than-noticeable swell of her now seemingly pregnant stomach.
Hermione had lain both hands, gently, on her distended middle. She looked up at Draco with a decidedly un-motherly look in her eyes.
“This has got to be some sick prank, Malfoy. I knew I should have taken that callback myself! Not actually pregnant… Am I not actually pregnant with twins, then? This is ridiculous!”
Draco blinked.
Hermione looked back down at her magically altered body. She turned again to the bathroom mirror she’d most likely been staring into since she’d gulped down Draco’s potion.
“I suppose I would have to be some months along into the pregnancy. We don’t want to make a career out of this, but honestly.”
There was obviously nothing wrong with Hermione, or the effects the potion had had on her.
Draco did, however, wonder if there was something wrong with him, as he watched the awkward way Hermione moved; the hesitant way she touched her rounded stomach.
When he looked up at Hermione’s face in the bathroom mirror, he caught sight of himself standing behind her, and quickly looked away again.
He’d missed whatever Hermione had been saying. And, judging by the disapproving glare he was getting, Draco figured Hermione had been saying quite a lot.
Draco caught just the tail end of it.
“-who we are? They might already be expecting us. Do you think I can duel my way out of there like this? I’m as big as a tree trunk.”
“You won’t have to,” Draco said without thinking, although it was no less what he’d already planned. “I’m going to go in tomorrow alone, and see what happens. Tonight we’ll get you something a bit more Muggle to wear, and if all goes well, I’ll schedule a time for the two of us to meet with Wolfram and Hart’s people together.”
And then, partly because he was curious, partly because he’d known Hermione would object to this, he asked: “Besides, we’re going to have to pretend to be Muggles to meet the Fell Brethren’s criterion for potential donors. Don’t Muggle women have to spend a lot of time off their feet while they’re pregnant? Wouldn’t want the mother of our little sacrifice overtaxing herself by trying to keep up with the men.”
Draco knew it was a very good thing that Hermione wasn’t really pregnant. Pregnant witches sometimes lost control of their powers, the way that young wizards and witches do, and Draco doubted he had enough restorative potion left in his potions kit to heal the damage a pregnant Hermione might have done to him at that moment.
---
“Excuse me?”
The next day found Draco making an early morning call to confirm his ten o’clock appointment to speak with Wolfram and Hart’s CEO.
Of course, Draco didn’t have a ten o’clock appointment with the CEO before he called to confirm it. Then the receptionist who answered the phone politely informed Draco of this. Seeing as this was an evil receptionist Draco was talking to, “politely” meant that she laughed at him, without laughing, then attempted to send him on his way.
How easy some old skills came back to Draco. Making “little people” rue not showing him the reverence he rightly deserved was one of them. Draco slipped into a Malfoy-voice that would have done his father proud, and informed the receptionist as to just why he didn’t need to have an appointment with her CEO to come in and see him whenever Draco damn well pleased. This involved tossing about a few of the credentials Smith had fabricated for him, and a couple he hadn’t needed to, and sounding alternately pissed-off and dispassionately disdaining.
The next person Draco talked to was the CEO’s personal secretary, and she just wanted to ask if there were any special arrangements that needed to be made before Draco’s arrival.
There were some aspects of being evil that Draco, frankly, rather missed.
Draco arrived at Wolfram and Hart at 9:55. On one hand, he wouldn’t have minded being fashionably late. On the other, if the firm really was onto them - as Hermione had suggested - Draco decided he’d rather not put off finding out.
Draco had dressed in one of the designer suits he’d picked up as he and Hermione had shopped the night before, and had beat down all of his instincts as he’d left his wand, his potions, and every other magical item in his possession in the hotel room with Hermione. Then he’d slipped into the dark coat he’d also purchased the night before, and had headed out to see what the day held in store for him.
So far as Draco could tell, once he was actually in the executive conference room, having announced his intentions when it didn’t seem as though the CEO’s secretary was going to announce them for him, the day had started out like shite.
There were Muggles who’d paid less on their homes than Draco had on the ensemble he was wearing. And still he felt underdressed. He was bloody well meeting with the former Scourge of Europe to discuss the sale of an unborn child. He’d never so much as gone on a study date before, without donning some of Madam Malkin’s finest. He hadn’t gotten to eat breakfast, as the serum he’d taken to protect himself from Legilimancy always made him nauseous. And as soon as Draco walked into the conference room, he realized there were other things he should probably be nauseous about, besides that serum.
The broad-shouldered, dark-haired man at the end of the table had to be Angelus. Or Angel, or whatever they called him now. The vampire Wolfram and Hart had hired as their CEO. Besides the fact that he was sitting at the head of the conference table, he was also one of the youngest-looking executives in the room. Two-hundred and fifty years old and counting, Hermione had said as she and Draco had researched early that morning, and he didn’t look a day over twenty-four.
On Angel’s left sat a dark-skinned man in a suit that just screamed “lawyer”. Next to him sat a thin young woman with long, brown hair, wearing a lab coat. She looked a bit like Luna Lovegood, actually, Draco found himself thinking, and that’s when Draco knew he was getting upset.
Next to the Lovegood knockoff sat a green-skinned demon Draco couldn’t identify, wearing the most garish purple outfit Draco could imagine. And at Angel’s right hand, sat a human who tugged at Draco’s sensitivity towards Dark things a lot more than a human really should have. He was most likely the ex-Watcher then, Draco supposed.
Between the Watcher and Angel, sat a slender man with pale hair that might have matched Draco’s own, if it had been natural. The man wore a black trench coat over black clothing.
Draco knew who he was. He just hadn’t known he would be here.
Draco had read a little something about him, as he and Hermione had searched her texts for more on Angel.
This was Spike. The vampire once known as “William the Bloody” - sired by the vampire Drusilla, whom Angelus had, likewise, sired.
As soon as Draco had walked into the room he had sensed him, as he had sensed Angel. The Darkness in them both, combined with the Dark in the ex-Watcher - on top of the Dark that was all around them, in this building - was sending all of Draco’s senses into a state of alarmed paranoia. It took everything in Draco’s willpower not to give in to it - to control the jitters of his nerves even more than usual; to keep his breathing even and his heartbeat from speeding up. His experiences as a Death Eater had taught Draco, long before his training as an Auror, that the invisible signs of nervousness and fear in humans were more than just visible to those beings capable of detecting them.
Draco did not let the smirk he’d carried into the room with him falter.
He smoothly took the seat at the opposite end of the table from Angelus - slow enough that his pace seemed relaxed and not contrived; quick enough that he didn’t appear uncertain of his actions. He leaned back in his seat as if making himself perfectly comfortable, and hid his hands in his pants pockets.
“I’ve a mutual acquaintance of one of your clients,” he said, just as he’d rehearsed. Speaking gave him a focus, and that focus gave Draco back a sense of himself. His cocky front was less of a front than before as he continued, “I hear they’re looking to buy a baby. And that your firm has agreed to broker the deal. As it just so happens, I have exactly what you’re looking for.”
A number of thoughts and faces went through Draco’s head as he awaited Angelus’ response, and he wondered - for not the first time - how in the bloody fucking hell he’d ever figured that being a good guy was going to save him from an ugly fate.
[ tbc… ]