The Better Part of Valor 1/9 (R/D, PG-13)
Title: The Better Part of Valor
Author: Mad Maudlin
Rating: high PG-13
Pairing: Ron/Draco
Summary: Discretion is the better part of valor. But for Ron Weasley, a rash of Muggle poisonings coupled with the abrupt and disturbing return of Draco Malfoy to his life threaten to blow the lid off his best-kept secret.
A/N: Written for the Reversathon in 2006. Previously posted to miss_clink.
The Better Part of Valor
by Mad Maudlin
1.
At six-fifteen on my twenty-fifth birthday I was ready to either kill someone or run away from home, so when I say that things went downhill from there, you have to realize, I mean they went bloody subterranean.
At six-fifteen on my twenty-fifth birthday, I was doing paperwork in my cubicle relating to the detention of a known purveyor of controlled substances. In English, that meant I had caught a wizard, who turned out to be about a thousand years old, selling naughty things out of his back garden without a proper license. I don't think even he knew half of what was sprouting back there (either that, or he'd discovered new magical properties of marijuana) and most of it was so blighted it’s a miracle anyone was stupid enough to buy it. Hell, I don’t even know why the case was referred to the Auror's department, except maybe possibly there might've been Dark poisons involved, but that's it, and yet there I was, writing up about ten stone of forms and reports so I could file them in triplicate with "all the proper authorities." I don't actually know who is considered a proper authority, but I know that almost everything eventually ends up in Central Records, and I reckon they use them to make birdhouses
out of paper bloody mache. The arrest had gone smoothly, too, and that only annoyed me more, because if I was going to have to fill out that much paperwork I wanted to earn it.
The clock on my desk had one hand on Quitting Time and the other on Take a Vacation, and I was ready to force-feed all ten stone of paper to the receptionist at Central Records, when Harry knocked on the edge my cube and leaned against the doorway. Harry has unnatural paperwork-finishing abilities, on top of everything else, and I was actually surprised to find him hanging about so late. "Hey," he called out to me. "Fancy a pint?"
"Can't," I said. I squinted at the name I'd just printed on the bottom of a very important form: it looked like Roonil Wazlib, and I wasn't even using one of the Twin's quills. The quill I was using, I chucked across the cube so hard it punched straight through the wall and stuck there.
Harry's eyebrows went up. "Bad day?"
"Bad life," I muttered. "Go on and get your pint, I'll be back at the flat before I die."
"C'mon," Harry said. "A birthday present. I'm buying."
I debated it for about five seconds, which mostly consisted of the little voice in the back of my head telling me how much I'd regret putting off all this paperwork until morning. I don't know about other people, but my little voice sounds an awful lot like Hermione. Somehow that makes it really, really easy to ignore. "All right," I said as I started stuffing paperwork into my rucksack. "Just one. I'll finish this at home or something."
"Excellent," Harry said. "I know just the place, you probably haven't heard of it..."
Of course I hadn't heard of it. Harry had been on a five-year mission to find a place in the wizarding world where he could get a pint without being mobbed by screeching fan-types. There was no sign of success on the horizon, but in the process I think he'd visited just about every place in Britain with a liquor license. I tipped heaps of parchment into my bag as I listened to Harry ramble on about how great this new pub was, and how lucky he'd been to find it, and all the things that made it so interesting and different from the other thousand pubs he'd visited before it. I wrestled a couple of stray memos in a desk drawer to bother with in the morning, and we walked to the lift together, with Harry still raving about wherever it was he was taking me.
I'm pretty sure he noticed I wasn't listening before we got out of the building, but he didn't call me on it until we were walking through Diagon Alley in the dark. "Knut for your thoughts?"
"You'd be overpaying."
"C'mon, mate, what's really the matter?"
I thought about lying or blowing him off, but my inner Hermione clicked her tongue at me, so I sighed and said, "Went to the Burrow for lunch today."
"That doesn't sound so bad."
"I argued with Mum."
Harry cringed. "That sounds bad."
"You don't know the half of it."
"Dare I ask what you argued about?"
I kicked a chunk of snow across the street and watched it explode against a rain barrel. "You know Mrs. Twill? From the quilting circle?"
"I remember your mum mentioning her, yeah."
"Mrs. Twill has a niece."
Harry exhaled through his teeth. "Does she."
"Yes."
"How old?"
"Just turned nineteen."
"Bit young."
"Mum promised I'd take her out this weekend anyway."
The great thing about Harrywell, one of the great things about himis that we've known each other so long, we don't have to ask too many stupid questions. All I had to tell him was that Mum had set me up and he could just extrapolate out that I had protested it since I might have to work, she had scolded me for working too much and made a couple of dire predictions about my loveless future, I had asserted my ability to control my own bloody future, and she had cried a bit about grandbabies before I walked out. We both knew it without my having to say it, because it had happened too damn many times before, and by now he knew the routine as well as I did. He whistled, the way you do when you've just seen something really impressively gross, and I nodded. That's all we had to say.
After a couple of minutes, though, Harry said, "You know, mate, there is one way you can get her to lay off."
(That's the bad thing about Harry: we've known each other for too damn long.)
"Not happening, mate," I told him.
"I'm just saying."
"Yeah, well, I'm not listening."
See, I'm pretty shit at keeping secrets. Most of the time, anyway. There's one secret, though, that I've been keeping for a long time, and I've kept it from my family and my coworkers and most of my friends, and kept it pretty damn well. But Harry and Hermionethe real one, I mean, not the one in my headthey've known me too well and for too long for me to keep anything from them. So when I broke up with Hermione a couple years ago, I didn't tell her we had grown apart or that I wasn't good enough for her or anything. I told her I was a great big nancing poofter.
She told Harry about it, because that's the kind of friends we are. When we were all on speaking terms again, they told me it wasn't a big deal and it didn't affect our friendship. Hermione even gave me pamphlets about it. And, you know, it's not like I'm not grateful for that. I like them both, really, and I think I might've gone a bit mad by now without them. I definitely wouldn't have any place to live without Harry splitting the rent.
The problem is that neither of themHermione in particular, but Harry toothey didn't quite get the part about my queerness being a secret. As in, I wasn't going to tell anyone but them. Ever. Hermione switched off between telling that there wasn't any stigma attached to it anymore, and that there would never be any progress if people didn't start opening up about it. Harry just sprung the subject on me now and again, usually after I'd just rowed with Mum or somebody about my personal life. Neither of them really got that I stood to lose more than I could gain, that honesty wasn't worth being rejected by everyone I'd ever met. They didn't seem to get that I was happy keeping this secret.
Well, mostly happy.
Not unhappy.
I mean, it wasn't going to kill me.
But they didn't seem to get that, and by that point I was tired of arguing with them. So when Harry said, "I'm just looking out for you, okay?" I nodded without responding. I had pretty much given up on trying to make him understand that discretion is the better part of valor.
Instead I asked, "Where is this great pub of yours, anyway? We've been walking for hours."
"Right here," he said, and pointed to a bright doorway just ahead. The sign above it was two polka-dotted abominations against nature that, if I squinted, looked a little like hippogryffs. "It looks a lot better on the inside," he promised.
I shrugged. "Don't care about the décor, mateit's not like we're staying."
"Right," Harry said, and cleared his throat. "You sure you're only in for one drink?"
"I'm sure," I said. "Work in the morning, right?"
"Hasn't always stopped you before," Harry said, and cleared his throat again.
I shook my head. "Not in the mood for it, I told you."
"You're positive?"
"Harry," I said, as I opened the door of the Spotted Hippogryffs, "right now all I want to do is have a pint, finish this bloody paperwork and get some sleep."
As I stepped across the threshold, every person I had ever met jumped out at me shouting "SURPRISE!"
It was a good thing Harry was standing just behind me, because you just don't do that kind of a thing to an Aurorhe stopped me before I got halfway through a curse. I blinked at everyone standing in front of me and smiling, and then I blinked at Harry, who let go of my wand arm with a sort of sheepish smile, and as they all start singing "Happy Birthday," I vowed I was going to murder every single one of them.
Well, all right. Maybe not that bad. But I wasn't at all happy about it.
Fred and Georgeof course, the natural ringleaders for this sort of thingcame out and shook my hand up and down, grinning through the rain of confetti and undulating streamers. "Happy birthday, little brother," Fred said. "Like it?"
"It took us ages to plan it," George added.
"I'm thrilled," I said, and I really, really wanted it to come out sarcastic, but with that Hermione-like voice in the back of my head hissing at me to be polite I couldn't quite muster it. "It looks really, um. It's great."
George grinned wider. "Weren't sure you were even going to show up for a whilePotter, what kept you so long?"
"Just work," I said. "Look, I reallyer"
They looked at me with their eyebrows up. Harry looked at me and mimed drinking a pint. The Hermione-voice in my head told me to thank everyone politely and have one drink to be social and then go home and finish my work like I had planned.
Like I said, that voice is really, really easy to ignore.
"would like a drink."
Fred cackled and threw an arm around my shoulder. "Never fear," he said. "We've got just the thing to get you caught up to the rest of us..."
They steered me towards a table in the back piled high with badly-wrapped gifts, but along the way I had to stop and say hello to everyone in the pubit looked like they'd rented out the whole place for the night, and it was packed. I guessed from the decorationswhich included posters of winking witches who'd lost parts of their bikinis, and some truly obscene streamersthat our parents weren't within ten miles of the place, but Bill and Ginny were around to wish me well. So were a surprisingly large number of pretty girls, and though I was positive I'd never met most of them, they all seemed extremely, er, friendly. "Did Mum put you up to this?" I asked George after the third pretty girl in short robes winked at me.
"Whatever do you mean?" George asked.
"We're just looking out for your welfare," Fred added, with his own wink.
"You shouldn't have," I mumbled.
We eventually got to the back table, and I was parked into a large ugly chair dead center, right in front of a large, decrepit grand piano. There was even a pianist to play it, a short thin bloke who sat with his head hunched so far down it looked like it had fallen off entirely; the song sounded a bit like an attempt to cover the Weird Sisters, but not a very good one. I mean, he was playing it all right, it just wasn't that good of a song to play. Fred plopped himself down at my left and shoved the first package into my lap, while George sat on my right and pushed a tall glass of purple liquid under my nose. "Bottoms up," he said.
I frowned at the glass. "You sure this is safe?"
"What makes you think it isn't?"
"Well, it's smoking."
Fred snorted. "It's perfectly fine. We test everything on ourselves, remember?"
The Hermione-voice by this point appeared to have given up on voicing an opinion. I shrugged, and tipped the glass back into my mouth.
Things start to get kind of fuzzy beyond that point.
It wasn't like I actually wanted to be at the party. It was loud and obnoxious and the twins were pushing strange girls on me every fifteen minutes, in between drinks. Harry and Ginny lost themselves almost immediately, and that got me wondering why Mum wasn't harassing them about marriage and grandbabies yet, and that plus the girls plus...well, you know, my life...I think I had a pretty good excuse for getting pissed. So my one pint with Harry turned into a purple drink with the twins, plus or minus a couple of pints, plus or minus some other drinks that I don't really remember that specifically.
The problem is, when I get pissed, I get sloppy about certain things. Things like not spitting when I talk, or standing up straight, or not flirting with blokes in front of everyone I've ever met in my life. Not the people who'd come to the party, thankfully, I wasn't that drunk. But there was that pianist. When he actually sat up straight, he had brown hair and a mean little beard, but he was fit in a sort of skinny and angular way, and like an idiot I stumbled up to the piano once or twice to offer him a drink or try to say something nice about the music.
The first time, he just ignored me, and somebody else got my attention before I did something ridiculous. The second time, he had just finished a song, and he snorted with his eyebrows up the way Hermione sometimes did when she didn't think I was funny. "Don't you have someone else to bother?" he asked, without even looking up at me. "One of your lady friends, for example?"
"Not my type, you could say," I said. I was practically falling all over his piano, but only because the room was moving. I leaned in closer. "Ladies aren't my type."
One side of his mouth went up in a little sort of smirk, and for a minute I thought he looked a bit familiar, but, you know, when you're that deep in the drink everybody starts to look like your long lost cousin or something. "That's a pity," he said. "They're all seem quite willing, from what I can see."
I leaned in and gave him was I reckoned was an alluring look. "What about you, eh? You willing?"
He didn't even glance at me, he just said, "Not with you. And please, get off the piano before it collapses."
And, you know, if I had been a smarter manor at least a more sober onethat would've been the end of the thing. I'd have gone home and finished my paperwork and things would have all fallen out very differently. As it was, I was a drunken moron. When last call came around, the pianist wrapped up the song he'd been playing and slipped into the back of the pub, near the loo. And I shrugged off the girl trying to flirt with me and followed him.
This is how drunk I was: I followed the pianist into the corridor, which was dark as sin, and grabbed the first warm body I could find. I sort of assumed it was going to be the one I wanted; I was lucky it wasn't one of my brothers. I sort of hugged him from behind, so I could feel the contours of his chest and shoulders and arse. He felt thin, but fit, and I whispered into his ear, "Hello there. Don't I know you?"
"Perhaps," he said, in a voice that was also familiar, but only a little bit. He didn't sound at all annoyed to be groped by a drunken stranger in the dark, either, so that was encouraging. "I know a lot of people."
"Think I do know you," I said, and I could feel his stomach through his shirt, his warm skin. He smelled good, too. "Think I'd like to know you better."
"I don't know," he said, grabbing my hand in his. "Are you still this friendly when you're sober?"
"Oh, yeah, I'm the friendliest bloke in the world."
I slid my hands down his hips, and he caught them and held them there, squeezing a bit. "And do you know how to keep a secret?"
I spun him around and leaned against the wallokay, more like slumpedeither way I pinned him there, good and tight. There was so little light in the corridor I could just barely see it shine off his eyes. "I know a thing or two about it," I said, and kissed him on the mouth.
The next couple of minutes were...good. Very good, even, although I was really too drunk for them to be excellent. My bloke didn't seem to mind a bit: he had his hands inside my robes and tucked into the back pockets of my trousers almost immediately. He certainly didn't have any problems with having my tongue in his mouth, believe me. It all felt very good indeed, because it had been a long time since I'd pulled anyonesince I'd had time to even look, really. I was ready and more than willing for just about anything I could get.
That, more than anything, probably explains my subsequent actions over the next few days. That, and also the fact that I'm a really stupid bastard.
I snogged the hell out of the bloke I assumed to be my pianist in the back corridor of this pub, and we both came up for air at just about the same time. We were nose-to-nose, or, well, nose-to-chin; I could feel his breath on my neck, and I could smell my own breath bouncing off his face. (It actually smelled pretty bad.) And then somebody opened the door of the loo, and in the angled bar of light that came out of the door I recognized that I was not, in fact, snogging the pianist from the bar.
The bloke I was pinning to the wall had light blonde hair, almost white, really. In the brief moment of light, he looked up, and I recognized gray eyes and a sharp, clean chin. I blinked at him. He blinked at me.
"Merlin's fucking bollocks," he said.
"Huh?" I said.
The bloke I had been snogging shoved me against the opposite wall, and I stumbled and went down flat on my arse. By the time I got my legs under me again, I was totally alone in the corridor. I stuck my head in the alleyway that the corridor led onto, but it was empty and it smelled bad. I checked the loo itself, but it was empty and smelled worse than the alley. I went back into the pub and looked around, but the last stragglers from the party were making their way out, and Fred was haggling with the proprietor about whose job it was to clean up the confetti and streamers still crawling through the air. George saw me, and grabbed my arm. "Ron? All right, mate?"
"Nyeh. Yeah," I said.
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
"Something happen when you went to the loo?"
I shook my head again, because there was no way on earth I could explain that I just accidentally snogged the hell out of Draco bloody Malfoy.
Chapter Two
Author: Mad Maudlin
Rating: high PG-13
Pairing: Ron/Draco
Summary: Discretion is the better part of valor. But for Ron Weasley, a rash of Muggle poisonings coupled with the abrupt and disturbing return of Draco Malfoy to his life threaten to blow the lid off his best-kept secret.
A/N: Written for the Reversathon in 2006. Previously posted to miss_clink.
The Better Part of Valor
by Mad Maudlin
1.
At six-fifteen on my twenty-fifth birthday I was ready to either kill someone or run away from home, so when I say that things went downhill from there, you have to realize, I mean they went bloody subterranean.
At six-fifteen on my twenty-fifth birthday, I was doing paperwork in my cubicle relating to the detention of a known purveyor of controlled substances. In English, that meant I had caught a wizard, who turned out to be about a thousand years old, selling naughty things out of his back garden without a proper license. I don't think even he knew half of what was sprouting back there (either that, or he'd discovered new magical properties of marijuana) and most of it was so blighted it’s a miracle anyone was stupid enough to buy it. Hell, I don’t even know why the case was referred to the Auror's department, except maybe possibly there might've been Dark poisons involved, but that's it, and yet there I was, writing up about ten stone of forms and reports so I could file them in triplicate with "all the proper authorities." I don't actually know who is considered a proper authority, but I know that almost everything eventually ends up in Central Records, and I reckon they use them to make birdhouses
out of paper bloody mache. The arrest had gone smoothly, too, and that only annoyed me more, because if I was going to have to fill out that much paperwork I wanted to earn it.
The clock on my desk had one hand on Quitting Time and the other on Take a Vacation, and I was ready to force-feed all ten stone of paper to the receptionist at Central Records, when Harry knocked on the edge my cube and leaned against the doorway. Harry has unnatural paperwork-finishing abilities, on top of everything else, and I was actually surprised to find him hanging about so late. "Hey," he called out to me. "Fancy a pint?"
"Can't," I said. I squinted at the name I'd just printed on the bottom of a very important form: it looked like Roonil Wazlib, and I wasn't even using one of the Twin's quills. The quill I was using, I chucked across the cube so hard it punched straight through the wall and stuck there.
Harry's eyebrows went up. "Bad day?"
"Bad life," I muttered. "Go on and get your pint, I'll be back at the flat before I die."
"C'mon," Harry said. "A birthday present. I'm buying."
I debated it for about five seconds, which mostly consisted of the little voice in the back of my head telling me how much I'd regret putting off all this paperwork until morning. I don't know about other people, but my little voice sounds an awful lot like Hermione. Somehow that makes it really, really easy to ignore. "All right," I said as I started stuffing paperwork into my rucksack. "Just one. I'll finish this at home or something."
"Excellent," Harry said. "I know just the place, you probably haven't heard of it..."
Of course I hadn't heard of it. Harry had been on a five-year mission to find a place in the wizarding world where he could get a pint without being mobbed by screeching fan-types. There was no sign of success on the horizon, but in the process I think he'd visited just about every place in Britain with a liquor license. I tipped heaps of parchment into my bag as I listened to Harry ramble on about how great this new pub was, and how lucky he'd been to find it, and all the things that made it so interesting and different from the other thousand pubs he'd visited before it. I wrestled a couple of stray memos in a desk drawer to bother with in the morning, and we walked to the lift together, with Harry still raving about wherever it was he was taking me.
I'm pretty sure he noticed I wasn't listening before we got out of the building, but he didn't call me on it until we were walking through Diagon Alley in the dark. "Knut for your thoughts?"
"You'd be overpaying."
"C'mon, mate, what's really the matter?"
I thought about lying or blowing him off, but my inner Hermione clicked her tongue at me, so I sighed and said, "Went to the Burrow for lunch today."
"That doesn't sound so bad."
"I argued with Mum."
Harry cringed. "That sounds bad."
"You don't know the half of it."
"Dare I ask what you argued about?"
I kicked a chunk of snow across the street and watched it explode against a rain barrel. "You know Mrs. Twill? From the quilting circle?"
"I remember your mum mentioning her, yeah."
"Mrs. Twill has a niece."
Harry exhaled through his teeth. "Does she."
"Yes."
"How old?"
"Just turned nineteen."
"Bit young."
"Mum promised I'd take her out this weekend anyway."
The great thing about Harrywell, one of the great things about himis that we've known each other so long, we don't have to ask too many stupid questions. All I had to tell him was that Mum had set me up and he could just extrapolate out that I had protested it since I might have to work, she had scolded me for working too much and made a couple of dire predictions about my loveless future, I had asserted my ability to control my own bloody future, and she had cried a bit about grandbabies before I walked out. We both knew it without my having to say it, because it had happened too damn many times before, and by now he knew the routine as well as I did. He whistled, the way you do when you've just seen something really impressively gross, and I nodded. That's all we had to say.
After a couple of minutes, though, Harry said, "You know, mate, there is one way you can get her to lay off."
(That's the bad thing about Harry: we've known each other for too damn long.)
"Not happening, mate," I told him.
"I'm just saying."
"Yeah, well, I'm not listening."
See, I'm pretty shit at keeping secrets. Most of the time, anyway. There's one secret, though, that I've been keeping for a long time, and I've kept it from my family and my coworkers and most of my friends, and kept it pretty damn well. But Harry and Hermionethe real one, I mean, not the one in my headthey've known me too well and for too long for me to keep anything from them. So when I broke up with Hermione a couple years ago, I didn't tell her we had grown apart or that I wasn't good enough for her or anything. I told her I was a great big nancing poofter.
She told Harry about it, because that's the kind of friends we are. When we were all on speaking terms again, they told me it wasn't a big deal and it didn't affect our friendship. Hermione even gave me pamphlets about it. And, you know, it's not like I'm not grateful for that. I like them both, really, and I think I might've gone a bit mad by now without them. I definitely wouldn't have any place to live without Harry splitting the rent.
The problem is that neither of themHermione in particular, but Harry toothey didn't quite get the part about my queerness being a secret. As in, I wasn't going to tell anyone but them. Ever. Hermione switched off between telling that there wasn't any stigma attached to it anymore, and that there would never be any progress if people didn't start opening up about it. Harry just sprung the subject on me now and again, usually after I'd just rowed with Mum or somebody about my personal life. Neither of them really got that I stood to lose more than I could gain, that honesty wasn't worth being rejected by everyone I'd ever met. They didn't seem to get that I was happy keeping this secret.
Well, mostly happy.
Not unhappy.
I mean, it wasn't going to kill me.
But they didn't seem to get that, and by that point I was tired of arguing with them. So when Harry said, "I'm just looking out for you, okay?" I nodded without responding. I had pretty much given up on trying to make him understand that discretion is the better part of valor.
Instead I asked, "Where is this great pub of yours, anyway? We've been walking for hours."
"Right here," he said, and pointed to a bright doorway just ahead. The sign above it was two polka-dotted abominations against nature that, if I squinted, looked a little like hippogryffs. "It looks a lot better on the inside," he promised.
I shrugged. "Don't care about the décor, mateit's not like we're staying."
"Right," Harry said, and cleared his throat. "You sure you're only in for one drink?"
"I'm sure," I said. "Work in the morning, right?"
"Hasn't always stopped you before," Harry said, and cleared his throat again.
I shook my head. "Not in the mood for it, I told you."
"You're positive?"
"Harry," I said, as I opened the door of the Spotted Hippogryffs, "right now all I want to do is have a pint, finish this bloody paperwork and get some sleep."
As I stepped across the threshold, every person I had ever met jumped out at me shouting "SURPRISE!"
It was a good thing Harry was standing just behind me, because you just don't do that kind of a thing to an Aurorhe stopped me before I got halfway through a curse. I blinked at everyone standing in front of me and smiling, and then I blinked at Harry, who let go of my wand arm with a sort of sheepish smile, and as they all start singing "Happy Birthday," I vowed I was going to murder every single one of them.
Well, all right. Maybe not that bad. But I wasn't at all happy about it.
Fred and Georgeof course, the natural ringleaders for this sort of thingcame out and shook my hand up and down, grinning through the rain of confetti and undulating streamers. "Happy birthday, little brother," Fred said. "Like it?"
"It took us ages to plan it," George added.
"I'm thrilled," I said, and I really, really wanted it to come out sarcastic, but with that Hermione-like voice in the back of my head hissing at me to be polite I couldn't quite muster it. "It looks really, um. It's great."
George grinned wider. "Weren't sure you were even going to show up for a whilePotter, what kept you so long?"
"Just work," I said. "Look, I reallyer"
They looked at me with their eyebrows up. Harry looked at me and mimed drinking a pint. The Hermione-voice in my head told me to thank everyone politely and have one drink to be social and then go home and finish my work like I had planned.
Like I said, that voice is really, really easy to ignore.
"would like a drink."
Fred cackled and threw an arm around my shoulder. "Never fear," he said. "We've got just the thing to get you caught up to the rest of us..."
They steered me towards a table in the back piled high with badly-wrapped gifts, but along the way I had to stop and say hello to everyone in the pubit looked like they'd rented out the whole place for the night, and it was packed. I guessed from the decorationswhich included posters of winking witches who'd lost parts of their bikinis, and some truly obscene streamersthat our parents weren't within ten miles of the place, but Bill and Ginny were around to wish me well. So were a surprisingly large number of pretty girls, and though I was positive I'd never met most of them, they all seemed extremely, er, friendly. "Did Mum put you up to this?" I asked George after the third pretty girl in short robes winked at me.
"Whatever do you mean?" George asked.
"We're just looking out for your welfare," Fred added, with his own wink.
"You shouldn't have," I mumbled.
We eventually got to the back table, and I was parked into a large ugly chair dead center, right in front of a large, decrepit grand piano. There was even a pianist to play it, a short thin bloke who sat with his head hunched so far down it looked like it had fallen off entirely; the song sounded a bit like an attempt to cover the Weird Sisters, but not a very good one. I mean, he was playing it all right, it just wasn't that good of a song to play. Fred plopped himself down at my left and shoved the first package into my lap, while George sat on my right and pushed a tall glass of purple liquid under my nose. "Bottoms up," he said.
I frowned at the glass. "You sure this is safe?"
"What makes you think it isn't?"
"Well, it's smoking."
Fred snorted. "It's perfectly fine. We test everything on ourselves, remember?"
The Hermione-voice by this point appeared to have given up on voicing an opinion. I shrugged, and tipped the glass back into my mouth.
Things start to get kind of fuzzy beyond that point.
It wasn't like I actually wanted to be at the party. It was loud and obnoxious and the twins were pushing strange girls on me every fifteen minutes, in between drinks. Harry and Ginny lost themselves almost immediately, and that got me wondering why Mum wasn't harassing them about marriage and grandbabies yet, and that plus the girls plus...well, you know, my life...I think I had a pretty good excuse for getting pissed. So my one pint with Harry turned into a purple drink with the twins, plus or minus a couple of pints, plus or minus some other drinks that I don't really remember that specifically.
The problem is, when I get pissed, I get sloppy about certain things. Things like not spitting when I talk, or standing up straight, or not flirting with blokes in front of everyone I've ever met in my life. Not the people who'd come to the party, thankfully, I wasn't that drunk. But there was that pianist. When he actually sat up straight, he had brown hair and a mean little beard, but he was fit in a sort of skinny and angular way, and like an idiot I stumbled up to the piano once or twice to offer him a drink or try to say something nice about the music.
The first time, he just ignored me, and somebody else got my attention before I did something ridiculous. The second time, he had just finished a song, and he snorted with his eyebrows up the way Hermione sometimes did when she didn't think I was funny. "Don't you have someone else to bother?" he asked, without even looking up at me. "One of your lady friends, for example?"
"Not my type, you could say," I said. I was practically falling all over his piano, but only because the room was moving. I leaned in closer. "Ladies aren't my type."
One side of his mouth went up in a little sort of smirk, and for a minute I thought he looked a bit familiar, but, you know, when you're that deep in the drink everybody starts to look like your long lost cousin or something. "That's a pity," he said. "They're all seem quite willing, from what I can see."
I leaned in and gave him was I reckoned was an alluring look. "What about you, eh? You willing?"
He didn't even glance at me, he just said, "Not with you. And please, get off the piano before it collapses."
And, you know, if I had been a smarter manor at least a more sober onethat would've been the end of the thing. I'd have gone home and finished my paperwork and things would have all fallen out very differently. As it was, I was a drunken moron. When last call came around, the pianist wrapped up the song he'd been playing and slipped into the back of the pub, near the loo. And I shrugged off the girl trying to flirt with me and followed him.
This is how drunk I was: I followed the pianist into the corridor, which was dark as sin, and grabbed the first warm body I could find. I sort of assumed it was going to be the one I wanted; I was lucky it wasn't one of my brothers. I sort of hugged him from behind, so I could feel the contours of his chest and shoulders and arse. He felt thin, but fit, and I whispered into his ear, "Hello there. Don't I know you?"
"Perhaps," he said, in a voice that was also familiar, but only a little bit. He didn't sound at all annoyed to be groped by a drunken stranger in the dark, either, so that was encouraging. "I know a lot of people."
"Think I do know you," I said, and I could feel his stomach through his shirt, his warm skin. He smelled good, too. "Think I'd like to know you better."
"I don't know," he said, grabbing my hand in his. "Are you still this friendly when you're sober?"
"Oh, yeah, I'm the friendliest bloke in the world."
I slid my hands down his hips, and he caught them and held them there, squeezing a bit. "And do you know how to keep a secret?"
I spun him around and leaned against the wallokay, more like slumpedeither way I pinned him there, good and tight. There was so little light in the corridor I could just barely see it shine off his eyes. "I know a thing or two about it," I said, and kissed him on the mouth.
The next couple of minutes were...good. Very good, even, although I was really too drunk for them to be excellent. My bloke didn't seem to mind a bit: he had his hands inside my robes and tucked into the back pockets of my trousers almost immediately. He certainly didn't have any problems with having my tongue in his mouth, believe me. It all felt very good indeed, because it had been a long time since I'd pulled anyonesince I'd had time to even look, really. I was ready and more than willing for just about anything I could get.
That, more than anything, probably explains my subsequent actions over the next few days. That, and also the fact that I'm a really stupid bastard.
I snogged the hell out of the bloke I assumed to be my pianist in the back corridor of this pub, and we both came up for air at just about the same time. We were nose-to-nose, or, well, nose-to-chin; I could feel his breath on my neck, and I could smell my own breath bouncing off his face. (It actually smelled pretty bad.) And then somebody opened the door of the loo, and in the angled bar of light that came out of the door I recognized that I was not, in fact, snogging the pianist from the bar.
The bloke I was pinning to the wall had light blonde hair, almost white, really. In the brief moment of light, he looked up, and I recognized gray eyes and a sharp, clean chin. I blinked at him. He blinked at me.
"Merlin's fucking bollocks," he said.
"Huh?" I said.
The bloke I had been snogging shoved me against the opposite wall, and I stumbled and went down flat on my arse. By the time I got my legs under me again, I was totally alone in the corridor. I stuck my head in the alleyway that the corridor led onto, but it was empty and it smelled bad. I checked the loo itself, but it was empty and smelled worse than the alley. I went back into the pub and looked around, but the last stragglers from the party were making their way out, and Fred was haggling with the proprietor about whose job it was to clean up the confetti and streamers still crawling through the air. George saw me, and grabbed my arm. "Ron? All right, mate?"
"Nyeh. Yeah," I said.
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
"Something happen when you went to the loo?"
I shook my head again, because there was no way on earth I could explain that I just accidentally snogged the hell out of Draco bloody Malfoy.
Chapter Two