fic: That's The Way The Cookie Crumbles - Part One

Written for jamie2109's AWDT.

Title: That's The Way The Cookie Crumbles – Part One
Author: Stray
Word count: ~1300
Beta: Vaughn
Rating: PG
Warnings: completely pointless.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter is © J. K. Rowling, Warner Brothers, Scholastic Books, Bloomsbury Books, and neither of those is yours truly.

Prompt: "Old people can't drive very well." Bonus points if you can work in "Penguins are pretty."

Draco put down his quill and sighed, trying to massage the ache out of his temples with the tips of his fingers, while reclining in his chair. Another whiff of that blasted incense, he thought, and he was in a serious danger of throwing up. He waved his wand absently, with the ease of years of practice to banish the little half-burned stick, and then he cast an Air-Freshening Charm to rid his office of the stink.

He hated the stuff. The smell seeped into the wallpaper, the textile of the furniture, and if that weren’t enough, into his clothes, hair and even his pores. He was never able to get rid of it properly, and that fact even seriously impeded his love life. But, unfortunately, he couldn’t do away with it, since he needed the substance in it for his work. It was the bane of every seer to have to use it to 'open their Inner Eyes'. Well, perhaps not every one of them, but Draco had never been able to get a vision without it.

He glanced at the parchment before him. It was full of the numbered one-liners he had come up with today. Of course, they were only the raw contents of what he was able to catch from his flashes of insight into the future. Most of them he would have to reword, making them sound more obscure and poetic, even. For example, one of them read: "Old people can't drive very well." If that wasn’t a universal truth, Draco didn’t know what was. Even if he had only the vaguest ideas of what 'driving' meant. He had already decided on rewriting it into: "Age is sometimes a boon, sometimes a hindrance." That would come off pretty good. Unfortunately, he had no idea what to make out of lines such as "Penguins are pretty".

He looked at the clock on the wall. It read four p.m. He could already see that this would be another long night. Why did he always leave work for the last moment? Sure, he liked his free time much more than writing stupid strips of parchment to be stuffed into 'authentic Chinese' fortune cookies, but where was his ambition? Hadn't he been a Slytherin, for Merlin's sake? Sadly, the fact that he had only managed to sit for one of his N.E.W.T.s before having been dragged out of Durmstrang by Aurors, and that that one N.E.W.T. happened to be Divination, seriously impeded his prospect of finding a lucrative job. As the result, now, almost ten years later, he was stuck in his house as the main supplicant of Chinese restaurants, with a diploma hanging on his wall declaring him a certified loon.

The only thing he liked in his job was the creative part: rearranging the words around the truths to suit his artistic taste. He certainly didn’t lack the necessary inspiration and he liked writing. He had tried his quill several times in the past, even going so far as to sending his work to a Muggle publishing agency -- only to get the answer that they didn’t tolerate plagiarism of a certain renowned authoress, and he would do better if he brought his stories about wizards and wars to the 'fan forums', whatever that was supposed to mean. He didn’t really understand what that was about, but the serious sounding threat of a legal procedure had scared him away from mingling with Muggles for good.

He buried his face in his hand and inhaled deeply, trying to subdue the memories of disappointment that the remembrance had dredged up again, only to get a whiff of the thick incense smoke clinging to his hand. The nausea was instantly on him, and if that hadn’t been enough, another vision elbowed itself out of the depths of his subconscious: the image of the Daily Prophet laying on his table and something about an article on the bottom page. If he had caught the date correctly, it was the paper from two days in the future. He didn’t have time to ponder about it though; he was too busy with making a run for the bathroom so as to not soil his lovely carpets with vomit.

He had as good as forgotten about that last vision until two days later, when he found himself sitting before his bowl of cereal and the post owl dropped the paper in front of him. The Prophet landed face down, and Draco's eyes, as if guided by a higher being, drifted to the bottom of the page. There! There was it, his big opportunity!

In a span of mere seconds, he got so excited that he had completely forgotten about paying the owl and earned a nasty peck on his arm as a result. He quickly searched his pockets for change and dropped a fistful of money into the owl's pouch, not even caring if he had given too much, because there it was! Finally!

The Wizarding Wireless Network is looking for a capable seer with experience to fill the weather forecasting position. Literary skills and performing expertise are an advantage.

This job description read as if it had been devised with Draco in mind. Seer with experience: check. Literary skills: check. Performing expertise: who else if not him?

He sent his application letter that morning and got the job by lunchtime, making his striking debut in the evening news, right before the broadcast of Celestina Warbeck's live concert. He would have liked to think that there wasn’t a single witch or wizard in Britain who hadn’t heard him.

Draco Malfoy was finally back, with fanfare!

---

A few days later, somewhere on the other side of the island, in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, in the Headmistress' office, there was a young man listening to the WWN with a perplexed expression written on his face. It was the habitual time for his weekly meetings with the Headmistress over a pot of tea and pastries. But tea and pastries went unnoticed because of that familiar voice, crackling lightly through the ether. The young man couldn’t stop blinking at his host owlishly.

"Was this what you wanted to show me?" he asked finally.

The Headmistress nodded; her usual sombre expression was slightly broken by a glint of mischief in her eyes.

"You wanted to know what he had been up to lately, didn’t you?" she asked, pouring the tea into two cups.

The young man in front of her nodded hesitantly and hoped that in the faint candlelight, she wasn’t able to see the blossoming blush on his face. Unfortunately, she knew him too well.

"Have a biscuit, Potter," she said then, and Harry grabbed one from the plate closest to him. It looked like it had been delivered from that new Chinese restaurant, which had recently opened in Hogsmeade. It had a tiny slip of paper inside, and Harry read it aloud, curiously.

"'Penguins are pretty, but dragons are prettier.' What do you reckon this means?"

"Perhaps that your time has come now. You haven't even spoken to him since you got him out of Azkaban. I bet he doesn’t even know it is you he has to thank for his freedom. I think it is high time for him to learn about that," McGonagall said with a small secretive smile on her face, which in turn rendered Harry's cheeks tinge with red anew.

"Perhaps," he said, but he couldn’t fool her, because she could see the mirror of her smile tugging on his lips and the glint of determination in his eyes.

That was almost enough to make her forget about the rude fortune she had previously read in her own cookie, reminding her that she wasn’t getting any younger either.

End Part One

Part two