A Very Bad Idea

The Slytherin Quidditch team has lost (again) to Gryffindor thus causing Draco to go to the Hogs' Head with the intent of getting very, very, very drunk indeed. It wasn't enough that they have lost in their final Quidditch game of the 7th year, Blaise also had to break up with him.

They all got off their broomsticks and started to trudge miserably to the showers, the mixed Hufflepuff/Ravenclaw/Gryffindor crowd's cheers and chants of victory following them until they closed the showers' doors behind them. Conveniently enough, those doors had silencing charms on them. Blaise came up to Draco, bitch-slapped him, exclaimed "You are not my boyfriend anymore, Draco Salazar Malfoy!" and stomped off in a huff.

In the showers, Draco noticed that every time he tried to drown in the shower either Crabbe or Goyle would come to him and pull him out from under the stream and start rubbing his back in what they thought was a very calming manner, but which irritated Draco because he didn't like it when other people touched his back like that.

So Draco toweled himself dry. Being as distraught as he was, he took no notice of what he was wearing and so he put on his shirt backwards, wore trousers that have been charmed pink with green polka dots by one of the Hufflepuffs and a cloak made entirely of fake-Hippogriff feathers. Then, Draco made his barefooted way to the pub.

On his way to the Hog's Head, he ran smack into Potter and his partying friends, who were on their way back from the Three Broomsticks accompanied by several large crates of Absolut!Butterbeer.

"I'b goig to kill you, Bodder! Thlowly ad baidfully!" Draco said. What he actually meant to do was to snarl out "I'm going to kill you, Potter! Slowly and painfully" but his stuffed nose prevented him from snarling out anything coherent. The group's sniggers echoed in his head for a while afterwards.

When he got to the pub, he sat on one of the stools, not even noticing the pretty (and scantily clad) Veela that was doing very naughty things to a pole on the small stage slightly to the left of the bar. He asked the bartender a double Fire Whiskey.

The bartender, not one to meddle with other people's business, handed Draco a glass with the requested liquid. Draco stared at it desolately, thinking that this was all Potter's fault, and downed it all in one go. Draco shuddered as the liquid burned its way down his throat and asked for another one.

An hour and a half later, Draco was surrounded by empty Fire Whiskey glasses, empty vodka-shots, and thought that the bartender cared at all when he slurred that "my Blaisey broke up with me. My life is meaningless now".

At one point, Draco got kicked out of the bar, because he was, as the bartender said, "causing a disturbance". "Causing a disturbance" at the Hog's Head meant that the person has slumped down to the floor, causing those who were brawling and kicking tables around to stumble on the unconscious person mumbling about his mummy. So he went back to Hogwarts, only this time in a much giddier mood. Indeed, it seemed that Draco has completely forgotten about the disastrous game, and was now singing "I've got two legs".

Draco's father has captured a Muggle for torturing purposes at the start of the summer holidays and kept him in the Malfoy Manor's dungeons until Christmas. One of the things that Draco had to do was guard the Muggle. In Malfoyspeak it meant informing the prisoner of his short stature, shortness of other aspects of his anatomy, insult the Muggle's intelligence (of which he had none to begin with, Hah!) and make vulgar comments about the Muggle's mother. As time went by, Draco started to run out of new insults and the old ones were getting boring. So Draco started to talk to the Muggle, who, in turn, taught Draco things about the Muggle world. One of the things that the Muggle taught Draco was the "I've Got Two Legs" song which Draco was currently slurring drunkenly.

So Draco decided to go back to Hogwarts. By now he was starting to recall the reason why he was so miserable, and he vowed to himself that he would go to Gryffindor Tower and kill Harry.

Draco walked around the castle, all the while singing "I'm a lumberjack and I'm ok, I sleep all night and I work all day." His singing woke up the residents of the tower (the Gryffindors have gone to sleep barely an hour earlier, due to wild partying and celebrating their final and crushing victory over Slytherin).

Being woken up in the middle of the night by a drunk singing horribly off-key isn't a very pleasant experience, and so, some of them seriously considered overturning a bucket of ice-cold water on top of Draco to sober him up and let them sleep, but as he went on, undaunted, they began to see that the merits of seeing Draco humiliating himself were greater than their need to sleep.

And Colin had a camera, which would be perfect to provide vast amounts of blackmail material for years to come.

Meanwhile, a very disgruntled Harry Potter, who didn't care at all to be "entertained" by Draco's loud singing, woke up. He trudged to the window, rubbing the sleep off his eyes and yawning.

"Bloody hell, Malfoy! Will you shut up already?"

At this, Draco looked up and smiled. "Harry, darling, how absolutely spiffing to see you."

@-@-@-@-@

At first, Harry thought that he had misheard, but then Ron came to the window and asked, "Did I just hear Malfoy calling you 'darling'?"

Harry wished the floor would open up beneath him and he would end up in the Chamber of Secrets. Dying by either the Basilisk's stare or by his poison was better than this.

But then he remembered that he has killed the Basilisk five years ago.

Bugger! Harry mentally whacked himself over his head.

"Oi, Malfoy! What happened to you wanting to kill Harry?" Ron called out, smirking.

Neville, Dean and Seamus, who woke up to see what all the noise was about, sniggered loudly.

Slowly the rest of the Gryffindor Tower's inhabitants trickled into the 7th year boy's dormitory, half blinded by the nonstop flash of Colin's camera. It was a Polaroid camera.

"We love each other, really, Weasley. Didn't you know that?" Draco's voice filtered up.

Later, he could be heard singing "Gryffindor boy! He's been living in his Gryffindor world.. I bet he never had a Slytherin guy! I bet his parents never told him why before they died!"

"Malfoy's gone crackers!" Dean exclaimed in awe.

Meanwhile, Hermione returned to the room carrying a rather large and heavy leather-bound book. "I took this book from the library for a bit of light reading."

The room rolled its collective eyes. Ron secretly thought that Hermione was having a secret affair with one of the new librarian-assistants who were working at Hogwarts to pay for their university tuition. They were after all, young, sexy, and good looking. He couldn't blame her.

"- if this says something about off-key singing jinxes..." Hermione's voice filtered through Ron's fantasies involving the assistants and several explicit books from the Restricted Section which he had thoroughly studied while he was supposed to study for his History of Magic NEWT.

Meanwhile, Draco has moved on to a mournful ballad. He slumped against the wall, picking grass with his hands. He could occasionally be heard blowing his nose.

Colin continued taking pictures. "Just in case..." he kept muttering.

"I've got it!" Hermione exclaimed suddenly with an odd glint in her eye. She shoved Harry and Ron aside in her haste to get to the window.

"Ouch! What'd you do that for, Hermione?"

"Shush, now, Ron. I think I know what the problem is."

"Care to share your epiphany with the rest of us mere mortals?"

"Yes, if I... no, but ... oh, I've got it." She finished most enigmatically, pointed her wand downwards and swish-and-flicked it while intoning a rather complicated incantation.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then, the universe blew up.

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Draco, in the meantime, was counting grass-blades and singing Last Week by the Knewts. That and the fact that he was pissed beyond belief caused him to be slightly less aware of the attention given to him than usually a Blast-Ended Skrewt was of its surroundings.

Because Draco was so blissfully ignorant of the bright light's true meaning, the thought that crossed his mind while the world was at its death throes was "Ooh, shiny!"

~TBC~