𝐃𝐑𝐀𝐑𝐑𝐘 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐔𝐄 2008

Riptide

Title: Riptide
Author: annafugazzi
Team: Epilogue
Prompt: The Fool
Wordcount: 19,244
Rating: PG13-ish
Warnings: Infidelity, but hey, it's Team Epilogue, what do you expect?
Summary: (With apologies to George Lucas) "Who's the more foolish: the fool, or the fool who follows him?"

***

Draco knocked back another drink, beginning to wish he hadn't picked this particular pub to stop in after work. Granted, he needed a place to wind down before going home to Asteria and her latest charity project, but he hadn't realised that this particular establishment had become a karaoke bar since his last visit, years ago. Karaoke. A particularly heinous Muggle custom that he really wished hadn't come into the wizarding world.

Although the karaoke itself wasn't nearly as bad as he'd thought it would be. The three people who had gone up to sing since Draco had arrived had been passable, though the second one's voice was a shade too soft and kept getting lost in the accompaniment. Not that Draco cared; all he wanted was a nice, relatively quiet place to have a drink or two, maybe think over his day and work out his agenda for tomorrow. Take a bit of time for himself between the demands of work and home.

He flipped through today's report from the Leprechaun Committee, skimming it disinterestedly.

"All right, next up," the witch was saying, and Draco paused his reading and looked up at the stage.

Harry Potter was climbing onto the stage. What the hell?

Draco watched him curiously. Hadn't seen him in... how long? Potter was head of the Aurors, but although he and Draco both worked at the Ministry they didn't tend to run into each other much. When was the last time?

Draco thought for a moment. Probably last September, dropping their kids off at King's Cross. Not June; Asteria had picked up Scorpius a few weeks ago, when school had finished.

Potter got up on stage and took the microphone, looking at it with a slightly puzzled air, and then the music began. Lyrics floated in the air in front of him, and he started to sing.

Draco sat up, stunned. Potter was singing. He was singing. And it was... utterly breathtaking.

Breathtakingly bad.

Draco reminded himself to close his mouth as one by one the patrons of the pub hushed, all attention focusing on the man on the stage as he took them, note by excruciatingly wrongly-placed note, through A Cauldron Full of Hot, Strong Love. A hideous oldie that Draco had never thought he could ever feel nostalgic about, but right now the thought of Celestina Warbeck crooning its insipid words was bringing tears to his eyes as Potter thoroughly and absolutely slaughtered the song past redemption.

Draco was going to have to Obliviate himself. It was that bad.

He shook himself impatiently. No it wasn't. Draco was just over-reacting because this was Harry Potter up there making a complete and utter arse of himself. And Draco's feelings for him re-defined the word "ambivalence," so of course this kind of self-induced public humiliation pushed all of Draco's buttons, as his brain struggled to decide whether to be highly gleeful, or painfully sympathetic.

Right?

He looked around. Apparently not. From the half-open mouths around the pub, gaping in frozen horror, he was not alone in his opinion of Potter's talent. Or rather, his stunning lack thereof.

And... oh God. He was even singing the extra verse, the one that the radio hadn't normally played but was on Celestina's Love's Charming Potion album. That dreadful album that Pansy's mother played every single time the Malfoys visited the Parkinsons, probably in hopes of putting Draco in the mood to ask for Pansy's hand in marriage.