Blood of Mud, Wing of Bat

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Blood of Mud, Wing of Bat
by whippy

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Chapter 1: Professional Know-it-All

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It was a bright sunny day, and Diagon Alley was bustling with shoppers and strollers.

Forty-year-old Hermione Weasley pushed her way through the crowd wearing a ridiculously happy grin on her face.

Before her holiday, she'd been seriously worried about both her marriage and her career. Ron was often off travelling in his capacity as Beater for the Chudley Cannons, and even when at home he spent most of his time tied up in practices and in the pub with his teammates. This last season, he'd decided not to try to make it back home on breaks, with the result that Hermione had been left alone with the kids for five solid months. She had missed him badly, and in his absence began to seriously wonder if they were growing apart from each other. As for work, she'd long ago abandoned her first career as a researcher at the Ministry library because (a counsellor had told her) it didn't provide enough adventure to satisfy her Gryffindor nature. Now she worked as a consultant, and though she'd been happy at that for a few years, recently it had seemed, again, as if something were… missing.

But after wrapping up her last assignment she'd taken the three months off, and now her perspective on life was wonderfully refreshed. The weather had been gorgeous, she felt rested and full of energy, and Ron was supposed to be back tonight, for at least a month! Hermione grinned even wider, causing a man walking the other way to smile reflexively back.

---

Swinging around a corner, Hermione stopped in front of a narrow glass door bearing the golden inscription Sibyll & Co. Know-it-all Consultants. Each "i" was dotted with a tiny crystal ball, rendering the otherwise distinguished script almost unbelievably cutesy-looking.

When she pulled the door open, sweet-smelling, lavender-tinted smoke poured out of the stairwell beyond, causing various other passers-by to start choking and coughing. She stepped inside and pulled the door shut with a jangle of camel-bells, then began coughing uncontrollably herself. The turbid air reeked like the back room of The Smoking Wand, the incense shop around the corner. Hermione was sure that Sibyll Trelawney accounted for at least five percent of the Wand's gross annual sales.

"Hermione, is that you dear?" a woman's voice called from upstairs.

"Uh… ye(wheeze) yes, I'll be right up (cough, arghh)." She drew her wand and pointed it at her own chest. "Nosmokius Sidestreamius!" she said, gabbling it out quickly between coughs so as to avoid a mishap.

A tingling spread through her, and then suddenly she could breathe perfectly. She sighed in relief and inhaled deeply. Many years ago, when she was a love stricken little Second Year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, she'd obsessively tried every spell mentioned in the handsome Professor Lockhart's books. That was the only one that ever actually did anything. She'd found it very handy since she began working for Trelawney. She had, however, prudently not tried it for deflaming a dragon, which is what Lockhart claimed to have used it for.

When she felt quite recovered, she slipped her wand into her sleeve and brushed herself off, then continued the rest of the way up the steep flights of stairs.

---

At the very top, in the cramped attic, were a series of tiny dormer offices joined by a narrow hallway. Incense swirled and eddied heavily in the sunlight from a window at the far end of the corridor. And everywhere else, of course. The floor of the hallway was lined around the edges with stacks of shabby-looking small boxes covered in sparkly runes and pictures of crystal balls, and proudly labelled "Now you too can KNOWITALL!". They were probably returns, rejects and defectives waiting to be processed. Sibyll & Co. was always badly short of storage space.

As Hermione went down the hall, she waved to a couple of her fellow consultants who were in their offices, then glanced quickly into her own office. Her desk had been shoved to one side and the room was packed from floor to ceiling with crates of spanking new Knowitalls. Obviously leaving the place alone for three months had been a mistake. Now she wouldn't be able to get any work done until she found a home for the back-stock. Shaking her head ruefully, she proceeded to her boss' office.

"Hermione! Darling!" screamed Trelawney in greeting. She rushed toward Hermione, all fluttering scarves, glittery trinkets, and masses of curling hair, and enveloped the younger witch in a hug. She smelled overpoweringly of some spicy perfume.

"Ms. Trelawney," Hermione managed to get out, though between struggling not to gag, being crushed in the hug, and getting kissed on alternating cheeks, it was a miracle she could speak at all.

Trelawney had been Professor of Divination at Hogwarts when Hermione was a student. They hadn't gotten along at all in those days; in fact, Trelawney had finally kicked Hermione out of her class and Hermione had been glad to leave. She'd taken Arithmancy for the rest of her stint at Hogwarts, even though her best friends had remained in Divination.

Hermione couldn't pretend that her own attitude against Divination had undergone a complete reversal since then -- she still thought at least half of it was a load of rubbish. However, since coming to work for Trelawney she'd come to realize that the other half of Divination -- a combination of intuition, logic, knowledge of human psychology, and amazing acting skill -- was real. And even, on occasion, rather impressive. It was just a pity that Trelawney was quite sincere in her practice of and belief in the other bit, the bit about actually receiving visions and reading futures and such. If all there was to Trelawney was a shrewd charlatan and the brilliant mind behind the Knowitall Ball, Hermione might not have found working for the woman quite so frustrating at times.

"My dear, you look absolutely wonderful," said Trelawney, finally releasing Hermione enough to hold her at arm's length and look at her.

"Thank you, I feel wonderful. It's amazing what three months of holiday will do. If I'd known, I would have done it long ago!"

"Tea? Witch's Brew?" Trelawney scurried around to the tea tray, which was sitting on top of the wizard-fridge and partially hidden under a falling-down "Wizard of Malta" theatre poster.

"Much as I enjoy a cold frosty one mid-morning, I think I'll go with the tea," laughed Hermione.

"Right," said Trelawney. She pointed her wand at a cup of water and it instantly began steaming.

"So how are sales?" asked Hermione, seating herself in one of the chairs in front of her boss' desk. She let her eyes rove around the crowded office; it hadn't changed much. The sloping walls were jammed with shelves, and the shelves themselves were stuffed indiscriminately with paperback romance novels, messy sheaves of office paper, brass trinkets from India, bundles of incense, censers and incense holders galore. And, of course, about a hundred Knowitalls in all three sizes, some still in boxes and others tucked loose between books and pushed behind knickknacks. Trelawney's floor was two feet deep in papers but her desk was perfectly clean save for a blotter, quill and ink, and a tea cup. Trelawney liked to say that a clean desk 'clears the aura'.

"Fabulous," said Trelawney. "I do believe we're finally breaking into the Far East market, and we're on the verge of coming to a settlement with Remembrall Ltd." She handed Hermione her tea, then settled back in her own chair.

---

If someone had told Hermione ten years ago that she'd be working for Trelawney now, she'd have told them they were completely bonkers.

But when it happened, it all seemed very natural. Hermione had been ready to quit the Ministry library for some time, and then she'd heard the rumours that a start-up company was seeking people who were bona fide "know-it-alls". Ron and nearly everyone else in her life had teased her mercilessly until she finally checked it out just to shut them up.

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While still an obscure, sneered-at Divination professor in quest of tools to improve the accuracy of her predictions, Trelawney had made an important theoretical discovery which led to her invention of the Knowitall Ball.

The Knowitall, which resembled an ordinary crystal ball, was charmed so that it could temporarily contain a subset of the knowledge and expertise of one person, to be viewed by another. Trelawney had originally used it in crystal-gazing, to suck up a copy of the life and troubles of her client so that she could more accurately "interpret visions" related to them. It wasn't long, though, before she grasped that this new ball had a lot of commercial potential. She sank her life savings into a small-scale manufacturing venture and the product exploded into a stunning commercial success. Needless to say, she didn't have to teach anymore.

But helping people one-on-one was what had interested Trelawney in Divination in the first place, and so dissatisfied with simply selling the balls, she'd started a second business on the side: the consultancy. By the time Hermione came along, Trelawney was looking for consultants who were veritable encyclopaedias of knowledge, both to work with clients in person and to fill up custom Knowitalls. Hermione "knew it all" about a lot of things, so Trelawney leaped at the chance to hire her. And at the time, it'd seemed just the thing to free Hermione of the never changing, never challenging peace of the library.

---

"Batwing," said Trelawney, shuffling through a shallow drawer full of Knowitalls. Hermione could hear them rolling around and clacking together. She shook herself out of her incense-induced reverie.

"Batwing Alchemical and Pharmaceutical?"

"The very one," said Trelawney. "Our new client. You'll be just perfect for them. Aha, here we are!" She handed a snitch-sized Knowitall to Hermione.

"I thought they went bankrupt," said Hermione. She slipped the Knowitall into a pocket for later perusal. Maybe. It was probably full of Divination and baseless conjecture. Trelawney was a good administrator, but she should leave the Know-it-all job to people who really knew it all.

"Almost," said Trelawney. "But there have been a number of new developments, all very hush-hush. There's definitely hope of pulling the company out of the water."

"Oh?" Hermione's interest was piqued. From what she'd seen in the financial papers in the last year or so, Batwing was in terrible shape. A hundred and forty years of successful operation had been followed by two decades of precipitous decline. Their internal workings were probably steeped in tradition, and completely out of date. If they hadn't been able, or willing, to change that on their own then it would be quite a challenge to change it now. And Hermione wanted a challenge. "Tell me more!"

"Well, you may have heard that the majority stockholder and direct descendent of the original owner, Mr. Batten, died without leaving any heirs. That was back in last spring and the will called for the sale of his shares."

Hermione nodded. She remembered seeing that in the news. Nobody had stepped forward to buy the shares, which were ludicrously overpriced.

"Well, what wasn't made public is that the will stated that if the shares did not sell within a year's time, that they would be redistributed equally among the minority stockholders."

"Who are…?" prompted Hermione.

"As it turns out, there was only one. Draco Malfoy."

Hermione's brow furrowed. Malfoy had been in the news a lot over the years, and not for anything good. He'd managed to get convicted on charges of monopoly-building, and the resultant corporate break-up had cost him a good chunk of his fortune. A series of increasingly disastrous marriages - and disastrously expensive divorces - had reliably made the papers too. And whenever rumblings about Death Eaters came up, Malfoy's name was inevitably raised. As a member of the Weasley family Hermione knew that Malfoy's home was regularly raided by the Ministry for dark artefacts and other evidence, sometimes fruitfully. That always ended up in the news too. Of course, Draco's actual job as a Ministry official got him involved in scandals regularly as well. She shook her head. If the guy had ever had anything go right for him, it certainly didn't get a lot of press. Then again, when you had that kind of fame and money, you could take a lot of punishment and still keep coming out on top.

"Malfoy owns part of Batwing? I thought he stayed away from manufacturers these days."

"He owns it completely now, as of last month. And believe me, he was as surprised as you. It seems his broker had forgotten all about it and Malfoy didn't realize he had any connection to it until he read about it in the newspaper."

Hermione had missed that particular newspaper, mostly because in aid of her holiday she hadn't read any in three months. "How odd," she said thoughtfully. "He should sell it for whatever it will bring and take the loss as a tax write-off. I'm sure he'll need it what with everything else that's happened."

"Hmm. Well, that might be best for him, but what's best for us is he seems to have got a bee in his bonnet to make it work as a company, and he's agreed to a two-year contract if we can show some kind of results within three months." Trelawney lifted a thick folder from a file door and thumped it down on the desk before Hermione. "There's everything I could find in writing on either Batwing or Malfoy. The ball has my thoughts on the matter. Go give it your best. I think you're just the witch for the job."

Hermione had her own opinion as to what Trelawney's 'thoughts on the matter' would be worth, but she was much more mature now than she'd been as a 13-year-old. She simply smiled and nodded. "Thanks. But he may throw a fit when he sees who I am," she cautioned. "I am Arthur Weasley's daughter-in-law."

"He won't care," said Trelawney. "Don't worry."

"You predict he won't care, or you told him and he didn't care?" Hermione had learned that it didn't pay to assume when Trelawney worded things vaguely. More often than not, the less-than-admirable-and-accurate side of Divination was involved.

Trelawney smiled wryly. "I told him, and he said you would be acceptable."

"Hmm," said Hermione, rather surprised at that. "Well, OK then."

---

After finishing up her visit and chatting a bit with the other consultants, Hermione left the cloying confines of Sibyll & Co. and emerged into the outside world carrying the folder under one arm. She smiled and inhaled a deep breath of fresh air. She had three months of holiday behind her, a tough assignment ahead of her, and it was a beautiful day. What more could anyone ask?

She walked to the end of the Alley, enjoying the late afternoon sun. When she'd pretty much seen all she wanted to see, she looked around to make sure nobody was looking and then changed into her Animagus form, a fat grey-and-black striped fly. She buzzed up and away toward the setting sun. If she pushed hard and didn't encounter any inconvenient predators, she could make it home by sundown. And if promises meant anything, Ron would be home tonight too.