Sometimes I write. Try not to have a heart attack.
I promise, this is starting to wind down. If y'all think it's totally dragging out, do let me know, but I swear it's reaching completion. *yawns*
He had heard Pansy was coming in early and acting strangely, but Draco Malfoy hadn’t seen the extent of his solicitor’s behavior with his own eyes until he decided to come in early himself one morning.
He wasn’t intending to work, really-it was only that the company was a good hideout, he thought. Bloody excellent hideout. And a bloody excellent hideout was what he needed when his wife, not an even-tempered woman even in the best of circumstances, was bent over in the loo, looking a bit green around the gills and telling him not to pretend he understood, telling him a bloody fucking hangover wasn’t the same, so quit that fucking sanctimonious staring.
There was a reason he hadn’t been a Gryffindor, he thought, slinking into the building with a glance over his shoulder to make certain she hadn’t followed him to work. He was a coward.
The breath was driven out of him when something hard and unforgiving jammed straightaway into his ribs, and he whipped his head around, wide-eyed, fearing the worst.
Instead of his wife, however, what he saw was his best friend, looking at him with an equally wide-eyed expression and holding a-
“What in the bloody hell are you doing with a broom, Parkinson?” He rubbed at the spot on his ribs and narrowed his eyes at her.
Women. They were all completely nutters.
Pansy shifted the broom, its tail still neatly bound and wrapped in brown paper, from one hand to the other and gave him a catlike grin. “Darling, I’ve mastered riding everything else,” she said, stroking the handle of the broom suggestively. Predictably, her salacious response made him completely unwilling to press the topic.
The poor darling really was a bit repressed, for all his supposed sexual prowess.
Draco rolled his eyes and looked at his watch. “You’re here early,” he said tersely. It was more than just knowing she was still coming in at unbelievably early hours and leaving late, it was the fact that she had caught him coming in early, and he wasn’t quite ready to admit he was hiding from his wife and the wee Malfoy that was already causing a fuss.
The thought of a tiny, fuss-causing Malfoy, though, was really a prideful one.
“Good heavens!” Pansy exclaimed, looking around. “You don’t say!” She wasn’t about to address her work hours… again… with this one. “And here I thought I had strayed into fashionable tardiness.” She smirked and ran a finger over his collar. “You’re early as well, love. And no tie, to boot. Going casual, are we?”
Draco raised a hand to his throat and groaned. A tie had been one of the last things on his mind as he’d fled.
His wife, the mother of his unborn child, had been levitating things at his head.
Ties were of secondary concern to a man whose survival was endangered.
“Being the boss has its occasional advantages,” Draco said loftily, unbuttoning the top collar of his shirt in deference to her implication that it was improper. “You, after all, hardly seem to adhere to a dress code, and I could fire you for it.”
Pansy kept her eyes trained on his, her gaze bland as she pointed her wand at herself, muttered, something, then pulled her bra out of her blouse, dangling it before him. “See?” she said, rather enjoying the shade of purple his face was turning. “I was at least making an effort.”
Draco swallowed, narrowed his eyes, and slapped her hand away from his face. “Remind to properly thank my mother for making certain we were thrust into one another’s company as children,” he said through clenched teeth. “You’re a joy.”
He glowered at her for a moment before stomping his way toward his office and Pansy sagged against the wall, holding the broom to her chest.
She’d never been so glad in her life that her friend, her boss, her old housemate, was one of those blokes who didn’t want to listen, didn’t care to press for questions when he was annoyed.
She had the broom spirited away in a corner of her supply closet by the time others started arriving to work.
~~~
“So, I ended up telling him that had nothing to do with how I played Quidditch, and walked out. You know, if it weren’t for this stupid scar, I’d just change my name and pretend to be someone else.”
“Hm,” Ron said, stirring his tea ceaselessly while Harry talked on about the new Keeper they’d drafted. His mind was, for once in his life, a million miles away from Quidditch, a million miles away from Keeping.
He was thinking about how his time at the conference was shortening, about how he would have to go home soon. He had a family at home and a business, things to take care of. The shop would likely be in shambles, his family would be in an uproar over the baby, and things would be oh-so-easy to fall back into, but for one thing.
Pansy was still there, and would always be connected to his family whether he liked it or not, and now that his ever-meddling brothers knew about her-well, Ron figured it was only a matter of time before the rest of his family knew.
And surprisingly, that didn’t bother him as much as it probably should have. What he felt more than anything was relief.
“Gin’s pregnant,” he heard himself saying, interrupting Harry’s story. “Did you know?” He envied her just a bit, that building of family. All their lives, it seemed as though each of the Weasleys had wished for just a little peace and quiet, time without a family, but now…
Well, now Ginny was showing them they make what their parents had taught them was integral, bind to the things they’d fought for their whole lives.
It was an enviable position.
Harry was staring at him, a bit of a biscuit crumbling between his fingers. “What?”
“She and Draco are starting a family.”
Harry set down the biscuit and his mouth firmed a bit. “You know, it’s not that I don’t believe her when she says she loves him, but he’s a Slytherin. D’you suppose he’s absolutely intolerable?”
The statement annoyed Ron unreasonably, but he couldn’t seem to find his ire. His annoyance was instead the weary sort he fancied he’d always seen on Hermione’s face, the sort that always said, “Yes, I know my friends are complete arseheads, but they’re all I’ve got, so be gentle with them, all right?”
“I shagged Pansy Parkinson,” Ron stated flatly, raising an eyebrow. “You’d be surprised at just how tolerable-and tolerant-they can be.”
It somehow felt very good to tell Harry Potter something he didn’t already know, or something he didn’t already think he knew.
“Pa-what? You shagged Parkinson?”
“Pansy. And yes.” It was an easy admission, but one that was making him feel more than a bit uneasy, as though he wasn’t telling the whole truth of the matter. It made him feel as though he was cheapening things, and he didn’t like that one damned bit.
“Holy Merlin’s mortar,” Harry said, leaning forward and setting one of his elbows directly in his forgotten biscuit. “When?”
Ron thought about answering him literally and attempting to name every single time. He wasn’t Hermione, though-his memory wasn’t big enough to remember all those occasions. “After the wedding,” he finally said. He thought about his admission and rubbed a hand over his face, embarrassed. “Look, it’s past. The only reason I said anything was because-”
You can’t stop thinking about her?
“-because Ginny’s with Draco, and she’s happy. We aren’t divided into houses anymore.” It had been Harry’s inability with the past, Ron thought, that had poisoned his relationship with Ginny.
Ron figured it could very well do the same to others.
He just didn’t know what that relationship was.
Harry watched his best friend carefully, equally fascinated and shocked. Once he’d gotten past his initial awkwardness-hell, Harry thought, once they’d all gotten past their awkwardness-Ron had never had bad luck with women, had never had to try.
So he’d never tried. In fact, Harry couldn’t remember a single time when Ron had bothered to talk about any of the women he’d sought out companionship with, no matter how brief or how extended.
He thought his old friend might have more to say than just “It’s past.”
“So what about you, mate? Are you happy?”
Ron took a drink of his tea and looked at Harry intently, the cheeks and lips that stayed chapped from wind blowing off well-kept Quidditch pitches, the satisfied look in his eyes that came from having someone he loved in his bed.
“Sure,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
~~~
“Gone?”
Octavia tapped her fingers on the desk and looked at Draco. “Yes, Mr. Malfoy, she’s gone. She was here before I was, sir, so it’s certain she logged her hours for the-”
Draco placed his palms flat on his secretary’s desk and glowered at her. “I don’t give a hang about her hours, Octavia, I want to know why she isn’t here when I need to speak with her.”
The whole bloody world was going mad.
“She… went… home,” Octavia said distinctly. She would have given anything to be a fly on the wall with pregnant Ginny and overanxious Draco. It undoubtedly made for good entertainment with frequent verbal maulings of the great and powerful Malfoy.
“Why is everyone acting so fucking odd?” Draco said, his voice dangerously close to a whine. “My wife is a horror-”
“She’s pregnant and you’re an insensitive prat,” Octavia said helpfully before adding, “Sir.”
He narrowed his eyes but continued. “And you, you’re absolutely insolent.”
“I feel a good assistant must be as an equal to he whom she assists,” Octavia said, smirking at him in a way that was eerily familiar.
“And Pansy!” he exclaimed, hating the truth behind her claim with acidic venom. “She’s been acting like a loon since we’ve been back!”
“She took a lover and split up with him when she didn’t want to,” the witch said with characteristic calmness, tapping a file back into place. “Were there any other unanswered questions you had?”
She watched the wheels turn in her head and barely resisted the urge to roll her eyes. But Pansy hadn’t bribed ‘Tavia, hadn’t sworn her to secrecy as she had the other employees. If she had, Octavia thought, she wouldn’t have folded as easily as the other Malfoy employees had.
But Pansy hadn’t given a second thought to her ex-lover’s loyalty. Not that it would have mattered, she thought as Draco narrowed his eyes and prepared to ask her a barrage of questions.
Because this, she knew, was real loyalty.
What Pansy needed was a little open honesty.