Tainted Love

The Lift

DRACO

Draco lived in an incredibly nice apartment. He supposed that was a lucky strike. When he had gotten it, he was just coming off his two years of house arrest. The wizarding world hated him as much as they did during his trials and the Daily Prophet was running a campaign to get him fired from the Department of Mysteries.

His landlord had turned a blind eye and had probably given him rent that was higher than normal. Draco didn't care. He had enough money to spare. The courts had taken part of the Malfoy fortune, but it was large enough that the dent didn't do much damage.

With his father in Azkaban and his mother voluntarily confining herself to the house, Draco was the only one who was really spending it.

Anyways. He had a nice place at the nice end of Diagon, a couple blocks down from Gringotts. Most of the other wizards who lived there were older or came from old money like he did. The apartments were spread out and nobody really seemed to care that he lived there.

It was mostly quiet.

But, for some reason, it was not quiet this morning. Someone was playing loud music. It was a song he had never heard before, but Draco didn't listen to that much music. He didn't really see the point of it. It distracted him and oftentimes annoyed him.

This song was slow and sad. He wondered whether one of his neighbors had forgotten to set a Silencing Charm and briefly considered beating on his wall to get them to be quiet. But he couldn't tell whether the sound was coming from the apartment next to him or the one beyond that.

So he left his apartment early. It was the middle of September now and the air was fresher. It wasn't quite cold, but it had a sharpness to it. He breathed it in and stood on the corner outside his building. The sky was heavy with clouds and threatened rain.

Draco decided he might as well walk to work early.

He ended up going through Diagon, which he didn't usually do because it was a longer route. But he had time this morning.

He passed the Leaky Cauldron, which always looked strange in the daytime. All the lights were off and there was nobody inside except for a silhouetted figure who was sweeping. Draco wondered why they didn't just use a Cleaning Charm, but some people preferred doing things the Muggle way. He had seen their testimonials in the papers, saying that they felt more connected to their environment when they didn't use magic.

Draco thought that sounded absurd.

He kept his eyes trained on the street in front of him as he passed the Leaky so that he wouldn't accidentally glance to his left and look into the alleyway.

It wasn't hard to remember exactly what it had looked like, though. There was a crumbling wall of bricks that matched the exterior of the bar. It didn't serve any function and he couldn't think of a reason why it ever would. There was odd piping, too, which was strange because he knew the Leaky ran on magic.

And there was Iris, taller than usual in black heels, the straps of her dress falling over her skin, her chest pressed against the wall, letting him have her.

It was odd, perhaps, the way he had behaved that night.

He hadn't meant to go to the Leaky. He had meant to go to the Siren, which was more high-class and had a private booth that he could recede to if he got tired of girls sitting next to him.

It seemed like all the people in the world either hated him or wanted him to fuck them.

He wasn't sure exactly why he had gone to the Leaky. He was walking by it and heard the bass escaping through the crack under the door and decided that he would. He might as well.