Breath Mints / Battle Scars

Chapter 51: Epilogue

September 1st, 2001

Michael,

Congratulations, I've been assigned to you. You should consider yourself lucky. I'm not going to make you write any ridiculous fucking prompts, I'm not going to tell you to watch your language, and I'm probably not going to judge you for your exceptionally poor life choices unless you do something really fucking ridiculous. When I had to do this myself, no one on the other end of it had to respond to me, so just know you're getting a much better deal.

First and foremost, your mother sounds like a cunt-

She flips the top half of the page down so she can see his face.

"No."

"No, what?"

"No, you can't send this."

"Why not? What's wrong with it?" He's leaning against the sink, aggressively drying a teacup with a dishrag, and he sounds genuinely confused.

She raises an eyebrow. "Would you like a list?"

"What?" He waves the rag at her. "It's honest. It's straightforward. Poor, pathetic Michael What-So-Fuck probably just needs someone to tell it like it is for once."

She leaves that eyebrow where it is. "If you want this program to last longer than a week, you'll have to refrain from calling the subject's mother a cunt." She glances back at the letter. "And you'll have to tone down the arrogance significantly."

He raises an eyebrow back at her, lip curving up on one side. "What arrogance?"

She huffs a laugh and tosses it onto the kitchen table. "Fix it. Before Kingsley changes his mind."

Draco rolls his eyes. "It was Kingsley's fucking idea."

That's not entirely true. Kingsley signed off on it, of course, but really the concept came from Draco. One of his 'only good ideas,' she often tells him - because she likes the way it makes his face screw up.

In truth, it's brilliant. Not only a public service, but also a purpose for him. A link to the world he chose to leave behind in peace.

He still can't go back. His wand will remain locked up in a Ministry vault; perhaps one day it might be returned to the Malfoy Estate, when enough time has passed, but never to him.

But there was something impossibly wrong about it, when she found him. Something utterly unfair in watching him work a menial Muggle job - the only sort he could manage with such limited knowledge of Muggle life. He, with all his talents. All his brilliance left behind in the Wizarding World.

So she'd returned to the Ministry. Risked arrest admitting she'd sought him out. Kingsley had been stern about it until she insisted she was entirely to blame. After all, Draco never asked her to find him. Perhaps didn't want her to find him.

She tries not to think on that. Can't help it sometimes - even admitted it to Draco once, in the middle of the night, tangled up in the dark. His response was brief. Uncompromising.

"Don't be an idiot, Granger."

The first time she met with Kingsley, she tried to argue for a reversal of the entire arrangement - against Draco's wishes, and at the expense of every dish in that small Wales kitchen. He smashed them all to bits when he found out, shouting about his 'own fucking choices' as he launched bowls at walls.

They went several rounds over that one, screaming at each other well into the early hours of the morning across a floor covered in shattered glass.

By sunrise, they reached a compromise. He has a bad habit of slamming his lips to hers in the middle of a sentence, almost always when she's got an important point to make. But it's difficult to form coherent thoughts with his mouth tracing intricate shapes down the length of her throat.