Chapter 26: The Wizengamot Whiskey
The air in the Wizengamot chambers was stale, thick with the dust of centuries and the hot air of current prejudice. Hermione sat stiff-backed, her quill poised over a notepad scribbled with furious annotations. The debate on werewolf integration was circling the drain of familiar arguments: safety, prejudice, cost.
“The bite,” an elderly wizard from the Traditionalist Bloc was droning, “is a moral failing as much as a physical ailment. To offer them unrestricted access to public spaces—”
Hermione’s gaze, wandering in sheer frustration, caught a flash of platinum blond across the aisle. He wasn’t supposed to be here. The Malfoy seat had been empty all session.
Draco leaned back in the high-backed bench, one ankle crossed over his knee, looking profoundly bored. As if sensing her attention, his grey eyes slid from the speaker to her. He didn’t smile. He simply raised one eyebrow, a millimeter. Then his gaze flickered meaningfully to the wizard now opining on lycanthropic hygiene, and back to her.
The earplugs. And the whiskey.
Her own traitorous lips twitched. She had to look down, pretending to make a note. Moral failing, my arse, she wrote, the letters jagged with suppressed laughter. When she glanced up again, he was examining his own perfectly manicured nails, but the corner of his mouth had a definite, unyielding curve.
The session grinded to its inconclusive end two hours later. Hermione packed her bag with sharp, efficient movements, her shoulders aching from tension. The crowd of robed figures shuffled toward the exits, a river of murmuring wool and parchment.
He was there, leaning against the marble wall beside the bank of golden lifts, looking utterly out of place in sleek black robes that were too modern, too severe for this old hall. He held a silver flask loosely in one hand.
“Deputy Head,” he said, his voice cutting through the ministerial chatter. It was low, for her ears only, yet it carried.
“Malfoy. Slumming it?”
“Stocktaking. The boredom is exactly as advertised.” He pushed off the wall, falling into step beside her as the crowd parted for them with a combination deference and distaste. “I believe I owe you a drink. The on-site version, however, is inferior.”
He offered the flask. Hermione hesitated for only a second before taking it. The metal was warm from his hand. She unscrewed the cap and took a measured sip. Firewhiskey, smooth and expensive, bloomed heat in her chest. She handed it back, their fingers not touching. “Your recommendation was sound. The hearing was marginally more tolerable with the mental image of you, bored out of your skull, listening to it all.”
A real smile, brief and sharp, touched his mouth. “Only marginally?”
“The subject matter is inherently intolerable.”
The lift arrived, empty. They stepped in. The grille closed, sealing them in sudden, silent intimacy. The enchantments whirred, descending.
“Your point about calibration,” she said, staring at the descending floor numbers. “It’s the brewing. You’re right. The standardisation strips out necessary variables. It’s political brewing, not precision work.”
“Politics usually is the art of dilution,” he replied. He was watching her profile. “You could mandate individualised assessments. Tie licence renewals for brewers to patient outcome reports, not just batch purity charts.”
She turned her head. “That would require a level of Ministry oversight they’d call authoritarian.”
“Then call it that. Call it rigour. Call it not settling for a placebo that lets everyone sleep at night except the wolf.” His gaze was unflinching. “You’ve never settled for less before.”
The lift doors opened on an unfamiliar atrium level, not the DMLE. “Where are we?”
“A shortcut. Unless you’d prefer to walk through the entire Ministry with me.”
She followed him out, down a narrow side corridor lined with unused offices, to a plain, unmarked door. He touched his wand to the handle; it clicked open to reveal a small, circular rooftop terrace, hidden behind the towering spires of the Ministry. London sprawled below them, a twilight tapestry of muggle lights and magical glows, the distant rumble of traffic a steady hum.
The wind was cooler here, cutting through the chamber’s stuffiness. He leaned on the parapet, flask between them.
“This is illicit,” Hermione said, joining him. The view was breathtaking.
“Terribly. I could be plotting all manner of skulduggery.”
“You usually are.” She took the flask when he offered it again. This time, the shared warmth felt more deliberate. “Why were you really there today?”
He stared out at the city. “The vote impacts estate regulations near designated werewolf zones. Financial interest.”
“Liar.”
He was quiet for a long moment. The bond between them was not a noise, but a presence, like a shared current of air. “I read your incident report. The screaming cabinet.” He finally said. “I wanted to see the circus for myself.”
“And?”
“It was worse than I imagined.” He looked at her. “You sit through that every week.”
“Someone has to.”
“Why you?”
The old defiance rose. “Because no one else will do it right.”
“Exactly.” He said it simply, as if acknowledging a fundamental law. He shifted, his shoulder brushing hers. A jolt, clean and electric, went through her. Neither moved away. The scent of him—crisp linen, cold mist, alpha—wrapped around her, distinct from the city smog.
“This thing,” she said quietly, her eyes fixed on the blinking light of a distant aeroplane. “This bond. It’s… inconvenient.”
“Astoundingly.”
“I hate that I can’t control it. That it… wants.”
“What does it want?” His voice was stripped of all mockery.
She dared a glance at him. His features were etched by the low light, all hard lines and guarded shadows. “It wants the whiskey to be yours. It wants the argument about Wolfsbane. It wanted to laugh in that bloody chamber.” She took a shaky breath. “It doesn’t want a stereotype. It just wants… you. And I resent that.”
He turned fully toward her, crowding her space without touching. The air crackled. “The feeling,” he said, each word precise, “is mutual. I spent years believing my... instincts were a linear path. Claim. Protect. Possess. It’s not.” He reached out, not for her, but to take the flask from her nerveless fingers. His hand grazed hers. “It’s infinitely more vexing. It wants your mind arguing with mine. It wants your laughter smothered behind a scroll in a room full of fools. It wants the woman who sends back a book because the binding is wrong for a library that doesn’t exist yet.”
Hermione’s breath caught. The city sounds faded. There was only the precipice of the parapet at her back and the gravity of him before her.
“That’s not in any of the texts,” she whispered.
“No,” he agreed, his grey eyes holding hers. “We seem to be writing a rather problematic revision.”
He didn’t kiss her. The tension wasn’t that simple, that easily resolved. It was a live wire strung between them, humming with potential and a deep, shared fear of what touching it might unleash.
Instead, he pushed off the parapet, breaking the spell. “Your Floo connection is a security risk, by the way. The wards on your living room flue have a latency of nearly three seconds. Any competent intruder could slip through.”
The sudden shift was jarring, so perfectly him that she almost laughed. “Are you offering to fix my wards, Malfoy?”
“I’m stating a fact. The offer would imply I care about your domestic safety.”
“Which you don’t.”
“Obviously not.” He drained the last of the whiskey and tucked the flask away. “Come on. I’ll walk you to the Ministry exit. This rooftop is draughty, and you’re shivering.”
She hadn’t even noticed. But she was. He guided her back inside, his hand a ghost at the small of her back, a brand through her robes. The touch was gone as soon as they were through the door, but the memory of it, and the confessions offered in the wind, lingered hotter than any flame.