𝐎𝐍𝐋𝐘 𝐀𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑 𝐁𝐄𝐆𝐈𝐍𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆

Chapter 1

Title: Only Another Beginning
Authors: leandralocke & narya86
Rating: mostly R with some NC-17 scenes
Pairing: Harry Potter/Draco Malfoy
Summary: Five years after Voldemort's defeat Harry runs into his former school nemesis who has been banned from the wizarding world, together with some other Death Eaters. Harry had known that life among muggles probably wouldn't be easy for them, but discovering that Malfoy works as street hustler was certainly not what he expected.

Only Another Beginning

Chapter 1

With a loud splashing noise a car drove through a muddy puddle, spraying brown water towards the sidewalk in a high arc and right on the young, black-haired man walking there. The cold water drenched his trouser legs and shoes, and he stood there for a moment, muttering something under his breath as the car sped off, its driver not even caring to apologise. The rain had stopped a while ago but still there were dozens of puddles on the pavement and the streets, cold-wet remainders of a stormy and chilly autumn day.

Looking over his shoulder to check if there were any other passers-by and finding that he was pretty much alone, the young man reached into his pocket and took out a wand, casting a quick drying and heating charm on his legs and feet before walking on.

It was past ten o’clock, and he was a bit sleepy after a hard day’s work. There had been new regulations to agree to as on how to proceed with magical incidents witnessed by Muggles, and that meant lots of paperwork for the Wizard Relations Department of the Home Office. Paperwork had hardly been the content of his dream job, but at least he got to work together with Hermione who was sitting at the other side, in Muggle Relations, and the job was much quieter than any other profession in the wizarding world could have been for Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived to Defeat Voldemort.

He didn’t even quite know why he was still out on the streets at this time of the night, but maybe it was for the reason that he had hardly left his office or his flat these past few days, always Apparating straight to the narrow alley across the street from the building his office was located in. And so, after having grabbed some dinner with two of his colleagues after work, he had decided to walk home instead of using that rather lazy form of transportation. He could always take his car – he had owned one for a few years now – but then again driving in London wasn’t all that quick either with all that traffic. Walking was nice, after all, despite the chilly air of the late October night. Harry had a warm coat to protect him from it – and a wand to take care of eventualities such as the one having taken place just now.

It was quite a walk from the Indian restaurant to his flat, but even though he had hardly finished half of the route he didn’t plan to chicken out by Apparating from here now, so he just walked on, enjoying the smell of rain that had cleansed the air.

He noticed that the houses he passed got shabbier, some of the shops missing a window, only loosely replaced by paperboard stapled to the frames. The walls were covered with graffiti and here and there the stench of an over-due garbage bin escaped from the narrow alleyways between the houses.

As Harry turned a corner, knowing which part of town he was just walking through, he wasn’t all that surprised to see a woman with long, dark-skinned legs and an extremely short skirt standing on the sidewalk, waving at cars passing by. Only when he walked a bit closer did he realise that those long, muscular legs were stuck in rather large platform shoes and that the long, black curls looked like a wig, and suddenly he realised that this was no woman at all.