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Pardon My French

By Violet Beck

Arc I :: Quelle Chance!

Chapter One :: And This Is Why I Love Mornings

 

Blaise woke me up, and by the feeble light in the sky coming through the window at the top of our lavish little subterranean quarters, it was around five-thirty in the morning.

"Mmph?" I protested as he kissed me into reality, and I shoved him off to the side. "Wha time ish it?" I yawned rather pointlessly.

"Five-thirty," he muttered into my ear. Aha, so I was right. As always.

Yawning again, I pushed myself into a sitting position and kissed him again.

"Draco, you've got dragon breath," he complained half-heartedly, breaking the kiss to settle himself over my lap. I grumbled, rummaging in the crack between the bed and the wall for my little box of Mint Explosions. Blaise found them first, and handed them to me. I popped one of the little green sweets between my lips. There was a small detonation inside my mouth, and my vision turned momentarily emerald as my mouth was washed with the "Fresh, Clean Feeling" the box advertised.

"Mmm." Blaise kissed me again. "Much better." He attempted to push us back to the pillows, but I didn't move.

"Why so early?" I whined. "Have you been up all night again?"

"Yes," Blaise said with a shrug. "It's Wednesday."

"Oh," I said, and slumped us both back to the pillows. I let him kiss me as I tried to figure out why the hell Wednesday had any significance to my lover being up all night. Blaise made himself very distracting, so it took me a while.

He was tugging off my nightshirt by the time I realized that today being Wednesday meant last night was Tuesday. Deep thoughts here, I know, but that made it the night that Blaise's own personal Eternal Detention always took place. Which was, as everything that ever goes wrong in Slytherin House usually is, entirely my fault.

But who can blame me? It was bloody hysterical, just leaving him in the middle of that corridor with Mrs. Norris tied to the chandelier to fend off Filch for himself.

At this point, the distractions Blaise was creating for me became all too tempting, so I decided to leave rational thought behind.

<<<>>>

An hour later, he was lying stark naked in my arms, his lips pressed to my throat, and my fingers weaving soothing patterns through his hair. I'd put up a Quietus around our bed; not only to keep our noise in, but to keep Crabbe and Goyle's hideous snores out.

Blaise is truly beautiful. Now don't get me wrong, I'm no queer. I just happen1 to sleep wi1th this one guy a whole lot. He's got shoulder-length black hair like you've never seen, and the most perfect skin in the world. I'd always tell him I was going to make a shirt out of him, and since he loves Muggle horror "cinema" (its his hobby, of sorts) he'd get the joke and throw things at me and tell me to go find some fava beans.

I don't even know what fava beans are.

"How was detention?" I asked him lazily, having a sudden hankering for conversation.

"Eh?" he must have been dozing. "Oh, that. Boring, as usual. That bush-headed Gryffindor who slugged your pretty nose two years back had it, too. Wazzername? Gravelly?"

"Granger," I snorted. "What did you have to do?"

"Prefects' bathroom."

"Yurg. Well, better than the common room bathroom, at least."

"No one even uses that anymore after Goyle set off the bomb the Weasleys sold him."

"And with good reason. Half the bleeding' wall is gone and it stinks like really old mashed potatoes. Now get off me, I want to go wash in the bathroom you just cleaned."

Blaise sighed, and rolled to the side. "Mind if I catch a few more winks?" he asked.

"I couldn't care less," I told him, and stepped out of the emerald-curtained bed in my full naked glory. Admit it, baby, I'm fine. My dressing robe was hung over one of the bedposts so I grabbed it and whipped it on. Digging through my trunk, I uncovered a set of clean robes and my comb.

"See you at breakfast," I said. About two steps later I was out of our Quietus Charm and my ears were being assaulted by the sonorous rumblings of Crabbe's respiratory system. Goyle wasn't too peaceful either. Slipping into my shoes, I stepped out the door and shut it quickly behind myself to quell the noise.

A chill ran up my legs, and I got goose pimples. Argh, it's so damn cold in the dungeons in the morning. I sometimes think my balls are going to freeze. Or something. Dammit.

As fast as I could I skipped up a few floors and found myself at the prefects' bathroom door. "Pine fresh!" I muttered at it, my teeth chattering and my feet prancing up and down. It swung open and I pushed through into the blissfully warm, humid air.

"Morning, Malfoy," a rather bookish Ravenclaw named Simon called to me from where he was scrubbing himself off in the somewhat purple water. "You're early."

"Zabini's fault," I said, making it sound like a bad thing. As I said before, I'm not queer, and Blaise doesn't want the whole world knowing, so we try to keep our relationship semi-quiet. As quiet as anything with me ever is.

"It's a bad morning," Simon commented, turning respectfully so I could undress and step into the water.

"Why's that?" I said after briefly submerging myself and starting to give my hair a good scrub.

"Why else? Bottlegreen the Philistine is giving us her exam. The tedium will kill me one of these days."

He climbed out of the bath and bade me farewell, leaving my muddled morning mind to ponder what a Philistine was and how this applied to our Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. Well...her exams were rumored to be painfully long, with a question for every single fact we'd learned all year. But Philistine? I ducked underwater again. God, I may as well get it over with and try some Muggle literature. Can't have half-breeds like Simon outdoing me at ever turn. Father would turn me into something malodorous if he knew that Granger's beating my ass in everything but Potions.

At the bottom of the bath, my foot scraped something hard and heavy, which was a bit of a surprise seeing as my love and a bunch of other poor shmucks had just cleaned it last night. I hooked it with my little toe and brought it to the surface for inspection.

It was a ring. Lead from its weight, probably with a Separation Charm on it to keep anyone from getting poisoned. Or perhaps not--people are weird that way. Anyway, I hefted it in my hand a couple of times, and then slipped it onto my left pointer finger before I finished washing.

Finders keepers, losers weepers. It was a pretty little piece of jewelry, though I'd never seen a lead ring before. Rarity naturally made it all the more nice.

Climbing out of the bath, I toweled myself off with one of the fluffy white linens provided for us prefects and dressed myself. In honor of my being made a prefect, Dad got me the next price up of robes from Madame Malkin's--velour. They're quite stylish, and they made all the poor poverty-stricken idiots attending Hogwarts with me gawk. And I just love to make people gawk. Makes them look like big stupid parrots or something.

I stared in the mirror as I combed my hair, and heard a high-pitched giggling somewhere behind me: Adelaide the Obnoxious Mermaid must have woken up.

"Hi, Addy," I called politely without turning.

"Hello, gorgeous." She calls us all that; she claims she'd been in that bathroom far too long to remember any of our actual names. I just hope I age like her: she's as hot and topless as ever at ninety.

"Your hair's sticking up in the back," she tittered, and I quickly smoothed it out.

"That better?"

"Lovely."

"Good-bye, Adelaide," I said, and gathering my things, I left the bathroom. She waved coquettishly after me, chortling behind her lavender cockle-shell fan. Silly thing. Paintings can be such twits.

I stepped out the door and practically got mowed down by Potter, rushing in to wash his grimy little head. If I were a nine-year-old girl I'd say he had cooties.

"Watch where you're going, Malfoy!" he exclaimed, brushing past me.

"Not a morning person, eh?" I snapped back, but by then the door was shut again. Damn Potter, always putting on airs. Can't stand him. You'd think he was me, or something.

I made my way back to the Slytherin common room rather quickly. The halls were slowly starting to fill up; more bleary-eyed students and teachers were shuffling off to the toilet or the washroom or even to the library to retrieve one of their friends who'd fallen asleep over the books.

The common room had been lit--as lit as it gets, that is--and people were congregating around the hearth, chatting and munching on the basket of croissants a well-paid and heavily corrupted house elf named Gimpy always brought to us. I settled on the arm of Pansy's chair and she gave me one, along with an annoyed pinch to my butt.

"Move over, you," she said, taking a large bite out of her own breakfast roll and propping up her smooth, well-formed legs on the table. She was in her horrid pink dressing robe yet, and her hair fell in limp, sleepy curls about her ears.

"You're the one taking up the entire chair," I grunted, not budging, and received another pinch for the comment. Only Pansy is allowed to push me around that way--it's sort of a parting privilege I gave her for putting up with me as the Unappeasable Boyfriend all of fourth year. She's not half bad; well yes, she's squeamish about bugs and giggles more than Adelaide the Obnoxious Mermaid, but she's a Parkinson and they're plenty evil and all that jazz. Which is my only basic qualification not to hate someone.

"You should go get changed," I said, making another gamble for her chair.

"Should I? What time is it?" she muttered through a mouthful as someone's cat jumped into her lap. She shooed it off.

"It's late, but you know I don't wear a watch. For godsakes, woman, the clock's on the other side of this chair."

Throwing me a disgruntled glare, she slid further back into the chair, and the cat jumped simultaneously back into her lap. I recognized it then; it was a slinky, ill-tempered gray tabby that belonged to a slinky, ill-tempered sixth year girl. Pansy shoved it off her lap this time--she's allergic to cats, and hates them passionately besides.

Suddenly, all occurring in a moment I wasn't really paying attention to, there was a whirl of fur and claws and Pansy was screaming about the big scratch across her cheek. The cat was tossed across the room, and the angry owner came charging down the girls' stairs at its cry, bellowing something awful.

"Keep that fucking awful thing in it's place, you horrid hag!" Pansy yelled shrilly back at the owner, and a fight started to erupt. Slightly perplexed by the cat's behavior, I took a spectator's position on the growing din. I had plenty of time to waste until breakfast, and an...erm, cat fight was an interesting way to waste it.

And look here, Pansy's seat had been vacated! I grinned and slipped down off the chair arm and into it.

Toying with the lead ring around my finger, I came to a conclusion that Simon the Ravenclaw's washroom edict about the impending day's foul disposition was decidedly incorrect. I mean, it wasn't yet breakfast and I'd already had great sex, told off Potter, secured my favorite seat in the common room, and liberated an interesting piece of jewelry.

Now if I could just squeeze in a few dead Mudbloods before lunch, I'd die a happy man.

Chapter Two


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