coreofaphoenix: (4)
Harry Potter ([personal profile] coreofaphoenix) wrote2021-02-06 05:09 pm

We're What? [Ministry Trainee's with Malfoi]

After the fall of Voldemort, Harry had spent the Summer helping out the rebuilding efforts at Hogwarts. Ensuring that the castle was in working order before the school year started that autumn. Although Ron was well ready (or so he insisted) to hop into the Auror's, Harry hadn't been nearly as sure. Was he ready to go back into fighting after everything they'd been through? It was after a particularly long conversation with Headmistress McGonagall who said that he would be bored stiff returning to classes that helped him in his decision. She only made him promise that he return and help teach a class (or two) on occasion for defense classes.

And maybe talk to someone about his "issues".

It was odd knowing he'd only see Ron daily during training and would only see Hermione on Hogsmeade weekends while she completed her seventh year. Ginny... was another subject all together. They'd talked after the War and although it hurt, they'd both agreed that now wasn't the proper time to resume a relationship.

So, after his meeting with McGonagall and returning to Grimmauld, he'd owled the Minister to accept the opportunity. Grimmauld was slowly but surely becoming less depressive (emphasis on slowly) but it was a place that he could call his own. He didn't have to return to the Dursley's or on the run.

Harry wasn't sure what to expect that first day walking into training. He briefly considered that he and Ron would likely be partnered up due to their history but otherwise, everything else was a toss-up. He'd been briefly surprised to see Draco Malfoy walk in and he could already hear Ron's impending rant about him being there. He nudged the other boy and gave Draco a little nod of acknowledgment. He wasn't exactly Draco's biggest fan by any stretch of the imagination however he appreciated Narcissa's assistance during the final battle with Voldemort.

"Well, now that we're all here," their trainer spoke up from the front of the room after a few other stragglers walked in. "We'll get started."
malfoi: (pic#14648398)

[personal profile] malfoi 2021-02-07 04:43 am (UTC)(link)
That nod from Potter just led to a blank look from Malfoy in return, nonplussed at finding each other here.

People were staring. At all three of them. Veterans and survivors of the Battle of Hogwarts, participants in history.

Draco probably should have waited another year, gone in with a later crop of trainees. Not thrown himself into this task immediately. His mother and father had been telling him to stay home, to lick his metaphorical wounds at Malfoy manor; they didn't need the money, he didn't need something so plebeian as a job. He could stay at home literally forever, a man of leisure resting on his laurels and independently wealthy. But the prospect of rattling around in the manor by himself, like loose change in an empty vault, was even more intolerable. Their manor had held prisoners. People had been murdered inside his childhood home. Whenever Draco sat at the breakfast table with his parents, he kept looking at that grand dining table that had played host to Death Eater meetings, imagining he still saw a smudge of blood on the wood no matter how well it had been cleaned.

On the list of available careers that he could heave himself into, the Ministry had a variety and was respectable enough, so why not?

He looked at the available seats. The only open ones were in an arc around Potter; everybody else was apparently too intimidated to sit beside the Boy Who Lived (and then died, and lived again). He didn't particularly want to, either.

But Draco took the seat, curtly, hands folded in front of him as he stared rigidly forward as the trainer started speaking, going over the basics of the months-long training program. His shoulders were stiff, his gaze riveted forwards. Wondering if he had been imagining the muttering from other trainees that had rippled through the room upon his entrance, and knowing that he hadn't.
malfoi: (pic#14648206)

[personal profile] malfoi 2021-02-28 04:31 am (UTC)(link)
The rest of the room was watching attentively, but they didn't give an audible response. After waiting a few moments, the instructor cleared his throat and repeated, "Understood?"

Having obtained the requisite murmuring yes from most of them, he continued. "We still prefer for Aurors to leave as little a trace of their activities as possible, but in the end, that's what your partner is for. Stopping your perpretators takes precedence. And for those Obliviator trainees without much experience with Muggles, you'll liaise with the Muggle-Worthy Excuse Committee to craft appropriate replacement memories for any witnesses."

That made Draco suddenly straighten in his seat, feeling a cold prickle at the nape of his neck. He did not have experience with Muggles. He could still feel others' gazes on him, too, his shoulderblades practically itching with people staring.

This was a terrible idea, he thought to himself. The Malfoys had fallen hard from grace, and were no longer in a position where Lucius' money could grease and buy his son's way through life. (Instead: testimonies and trials and handing over evidence in exchange for avoiding an Azkaban sentence. Something of a coward, in the end, saving his own tail.) So Draco would have to fight to earn everything himself, on his own merits. On some level, that felt unexpectedly freeing — an opportunity to prove himself, to know that he obtained something because he deserved it and not because of his name or his blood or his money.

On another level, that was fucking terrifying.

His fingers curled on the desk, distracted and lost in these thoughts, before he heard his name and suddenly snapped back to attention. "Pardon?" he asked.

The instructor sighed, rolled his eyes. "Malfoy, Potter. The two of you will be paired up. You know each other already from Hogwarts, no? And besides, that's just how the numbers worked out."

This had to be a joke. Draco's eyes narrowed, and then he shot an incredulous look at the young man beside him, and he mouthed: What?
malfoi: (pic#14648173)

[personal profile] malfoi 2021-03-20 12:19 am (UTC)(link)
It was a smart move on the instructor's part: dividing friends and forcing the trainees out of their comfort zones, making them grow and stretch and try something new. Work together with someone new. Not fall back on old crutches.

This, however, was a little extreme.

The rest of the briefing passed with a kind of distant roaring in Draco's ears. He hadn't even been in the same room with Potter since the end of the battle. He had slunk away to lick his wounds, both metaphorical and literal. Even the knowledge that his mother had saved this boy's life hadn't smoothed over the awkwardness; it had, in fact, made the shame sit even heavier beneath his sternum.

He swallowed that guilt at the end of the briefing, as they started gathering up their belongings and were told to go set up new desks in the office next to their partners. There was chatter in the room between all the new pairs, but there was dead silence between these two as they glanced at each other, even as Glasscock swept in and scooped up Weasley.

Which, again, left these two.

"So," Draco said.
malfoi: (pic#14648401)

[personal profile] malfoi 2021-07-18 12:42 am (UTC)(link)
"It seems our instructor has a certain sense of humour," he said in a withering tone, while he went for one of the two empty desks, dropped his satchel on one of them, and started unpacking.

It was entirely possible, actually, that the older man had absolutely no idea about the specific strained relationship between these two trainees — but Draco still innately struggled with accepting that the entire world didn't actually revolve around him, and that nobody was thinking about him half as much as he thought about himself. Old habits died hard.

He started meticulously laying out his belongings: paper and a fine-tipped peacock quill (ostentatious, and more expensive than it needed to be); his wand (new and unfamiliar, not the one Harry had once disarmed from him); a stack of Ministry intake paperwork, the new hire packet, rules and regulations for the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes.

Becoming an Obliviator wasn't, plainly put, as sexy as Aurors — so many wizarding children dreamed of growing up and becoming Aurors — and he was more than talented enough to have been in Harry's programme, but something about it hadn't sat right when he'd looked over the Ministry applications. He rather suspected that that faded tattoo on his forearm might disqualify him, just a little.

A slight pause, then he blurted out, before he could really rethink how this might sound like a slap in the face: "Do you think we can request transfers? Due to... extenuating circumstances."