Dennis Creevey toned down the intensity of his smile once more, transforming his face again into the more neutral expression he had come in and fooled Draco with. He took a short drink from his stein, and gestured with two fingers for an idling waitress to attend to them.
She sauntered up to the table, pencil and pad in hand. "What'll you have, loveys?"
"Fish and chips for me, thanks," Dennis said.
The waitress wrote down his order and turned to Draco expectantly.
"Nothing," Draco said.
"You really ought to," Dennis said, before the waitress could leave. "We might be here a while. The fish and chips here's right cracking, if you need a recommendation."
"Fine, I'll have the same, then," Draco said, still rather nonplussed.
Once the waitress left to put their orders in, Dennis leaned forward, looking slightly apologetic. "Look, would it make you feel better if I kept up the patented cheerful Creevey act? I mean, it's natural for people to feel more comfortable among familiar things."
"No," Draco said with some vehemence. "Just tell me what the hell you asked me here for."
"Didn't they tell you? I've been assigned to do your training."
"What trai-- You mean -- You're joking, right?"
"No, I'm afraid not," Dennis said, shrugging. "Word is, Upstairs thought you'd be better off training with someone you already knew, on account of all the trust issues you appear to have. I don't know that I entirely agree; you have to have trust issues to be good at this job, so I don't exactly see the point, not to mention you and I are really nothing more than two people who attended school in the same building and whose paths only very occasionally crossed. But what Upstairs says goes, so here we are."
Still stuck on the personality change, Draco asked, "What was the point of all that ...mucking about with your camera and 'gosh, haven't seen you in ages' bit yesterday, then?"
"I had to find some way to plant the message on you, didn't I? Besides, I do have a day job and it is with the Prophet, so why not kill two birds with one stone? I didn't submit the picture of you, by the way; it was awful. Anyway, suppose I were just to walk up to you and say, 'Hi, it's me, Dennis Creevey, one of the kids you used to purposely trip in the hallway; by the way, I'm a spy now,' you'd not take it so seriously, I'd imagine. Plus, the big reveal works wonders for getting people to realise I'm a little more formidable than I look, and that I'm not actually the impressionable little boy with floppy hair who runs around grinning like it's going out of style. Worked on you, didn't it? I think I've done quite a nice job of it," he said, still managing to sound modest.
"Yeah, I remember you as a kid; I couldn't stand how you laughed at bloody everything, even that time I did trip you. But you can't have been that good at playacting when you were twelve and affecting that exuberance all the time," Draco insisted.
Dennis looked at him as though he could see right through Draco's head, his features folding into an easy smile again, but otherwise appearing infinitely sad. "No. I was quite a happy child. But losing your big brother and best friend at fifteen does have its effects. My family was quite worried about me for years after that, said I wasn't the same. It was easier to start acting happy so they wouldn't try to talk at me and hug me all the time," he said, his soft-spoken tone drifting like a wisp of cloud. His eyes focused again on Draco and his smile became more grounded. "But we're not here to hear me prattle on about my life story, of course."
"Doesn't it get tiring? Pretending?" Draco asked, interested in spite of himself, remembering clearly his own troubles at projecting a casual front his final few years of school while dealing with internal turmoil.
"Not after a while. Sometimes it's like slipping into a second skin. In our line of work, it does come in handy. In some missions you're just a shadow, moving in and out without a trace; in others, it's imperative that you leave an impression. It helps with my job at the Prophet, too -- I'm very non-threatening and, therefore, trustworthy," he admitted without any hint of sardonicism. He let a beat pass before adding, "When it comes right down to it, when you take off all the bells and whistles, all you have is you. And frankly, I think being ordinary is often the best defence in this game."
The waitress returned with two plates of fish and chips, and Dennis dashed liberal amounts of malt vinegar all over his food. "Lovely," he said, chewing happily.
Slightly less enthused about the pile of fried things in front of him, Draco pushed his plate aside for the time being and leaned forward, steepling his hands over the table. "If I may be more conceited than usual for a moment," he began.
Dennis extended a palm, as if to say, 'Go on.'
"I don't tend to pass for ordinary. Look what happened in Diagon Alley yesterday."
"True, but that's Draco Malfoy speaking. As Draco Malfoy the intelligence agent, I think you'll find it a bit easier. See, it's just like how you were in prison -- it was difficult at first, wasn't it? Everyone knew who you were and why you were there, and lots of them were rather pissed off, weren't they? And then you learned to adapt and blend in, and it was like you weren't there at all," Dennis explained, waving a chip around. "As for the general public, frankly speaking, you're something of a novelty to them at the moment, and it'll wear off in time. It always does. Something shinier or someone more damaged will come along to catch their attention, and you'll be old news soon enough. Until then, though, we're keeping your intelligence work in the Muggle world, which is just as well, I think, since you obviously have so little experience with it. That's the other reason, actually, that I'm training you -- I'm Muggleborn, so I'm used to both sides, and I work both worlds, as well. Some Unit agents are assigned only to one or the other, but a few of us are a special breed who can traverse both." The corners of his lips quirked up in a conspiratorial fashion, and he lobbed a piece of fish into his mouth.
Although not very like the overly excitable boy he remembered, Draco noticed that in spite of his great loss Dennis still smiled a lot. He couldn't quite tell whether that, too, was an act, but he found himself hoping it wasn't. Constantly cheerful people usually irked him, and in his baser moments, he considered a slug to the gut a completely appropriate response to an excessively chipper attitude, but Draco didn't quite like the thought of giving them a reason to stop being happy altogether either. He picked up a chip and chewed thoughtfully, letting the white noise of the pub's activities settle over them, until his mind retreaded through the past few minutes and lit on what had initially appeared to be a throwaway line of Dennis'.
"I obviously have so little experience with the Muggle world?" Draco repeated softly, frowning. "You wouldn't have happened to have been following me today?"
"I have," Dennis said as a matter of fact. "Most wizards, unless they're very familiar with travel to and from each world, will go through the Leaky. You passed me by, actually, and I trailed you from there. Didn't pick up on it at the time, I suppose?"
Draco shook his head, trying to remember. He was usually quite good at noticing these things. After all, he and Harry Potter, along with their respective cronies, had spent many a school term glaring daggers at the back of each other's heads -- and the fronts, if they could get away with it, and years of having people trying to kill you with a look tended to make you a little more sensitive to being watched. He supposed that being in an entirely new and foreign place as he'd been -- and still was, come to think of it -- dulled that skill in favour of bringing to the fore more immediately important abilities like determining what point in space he occupied and not getting run over by the lemming-like stream of bodies moving with purpose through the streets in every which direction.
Dennis nodded in understanding, and clearly had not been expecting differently. "Well, there you are. That's your first lesson: always assume you're being followed. We all have some threshold of paranoia, and to work this job successfully, that dial has to be cranked up all the way to eleven. All the time."
The pronouncement was given in Dennis' low, calm tone, and the reference was rather lost on Draco, but it sounded somewhat ominous to his ears anyway. Letting the words linger in the air and sink in, Dennis continued working away at his dinner.
"Eat up," he said, gesturing to Draco's meal. "We have things to do after this." He gave Draco a meaningful look.
"Like what?" Draco asked, one step away from retracting his earlier charitable thoughts about the boy who would probably never really seem grown up to him and wondering if he should be afraid.
"Er, training," said Dennis, looking at him like he wasn't sure Upstairs had done such a good job after all with this latest round of recruitment. "I didn't ask you to come all the way here just because you're a delightful dining companion, you know."
He ignored the jibe. "What, now? Here?"
"It's always best done in the real world. No simulation is ever a perfect replacement for the real thing, of course, but we have to make do with the best conditions we've got, and what we've got here," he said, indicating with a tip of his head the street outside, "are busy roads full of busy people on a busy weekend, the perfect place to blend in, whether you're following or being followed. So if you're intent on letting that perfectly good meal go to waste anyway, we might as well start now."
"Well, you know, I ate two chips, and I think the grease is slowly obliterating my insides," Draco said, and drained his glass.
Dennis thought on this for a second. "Second lesson," he said, as they got up out of the booth. "Train your insides to be a little less delicate. There will be missions where you won't get much of a choice in food, so you can't afford to be fussy and expect to eat -- What do you rich people eat anyway? Endangered breeds of things?"
Shooting him an arch look, Draco said, "No, we keep those as pets and have betting pools on whose animal will go extinct first."
Nodding in a way that made Draco think he might have actually believed the sarcastic little remark, Dennis wended his way towards the bar and carefully placed a couple of folded bills on the countertop. "My treat," Dennis said with a smile, and led the way out of the pub.
As soon as they were outside, he produced a small map from his back pocket and gave it to Draco. "See where I've highlighted in blue? Follow that route and we'll meet again at the end, see, where that X is -- that's going to be right next to a fountain; you can't miss it. In the meantime, I'm going to cast a glamour on myself -- we don't use glamours for our real work, by the way; too unreliable -- and I'm going to tail you. See if you can spot the person following you, yeah?"
By the time Draco had gotten home, he was sure that no less than fourteen people had been secretly watching him, all the way from the fountain where he and Dennis had parted ways, through the blasted underground again and finally to the door of Blaise's penthouse. It was all Creevey's fault. Draco hadn't understood quite what he'd meant about paranoia thresholds when it had been mentioned at the time, but he knew now.
In the span of the ten minutes it had taken Draco to finish the length of the route Dennis had prescribed for him, the cat and mouse game the young agent had devised had nearly driven Draco over the edge -- almost everybody he passed in the street seemed suspicious to him, whether it was the man standing on the street corner smoking, or the backpacker with guidebook in hand trying to locate some must-see destination. In the end, he had been able to finger Dennis, who'd glamoured himself over as a plain, middle-aged woman, as his shadow, which was mollifying, but then he also had fingered about five other people as possible suspects.
Although the actual exercise had only taken less than a quarter of an hour, Draco found it exhausting, and he was all the more knackered when he'd finally reached home, as, at Dennis' behest, he hadn't turned off the switch that made him extra sensitive to the goings-on around him. It was like a Pandora's box, learning this single skill; once he knew he had to be on all the time, it was more difficult than he'd expected to just stop thinking about it and let the world wave facelessly and soundlessly past him as it had once been able to do.
The empty feeling inside his stomach no longer contented to be repressed and ignored, Draco headed straight for the kitchen as soon as he walked in, but not before taking a moment to lift an eyebrow at the ladies' jacket and scarf draped over the coat rack by the door. He instructed Elba to fix him a quick meal, and, uncorking a butterbeer, stood around in the kitchen trying to tune out the rhythmic pounding coming from Blaise's bedroom.
A thoroughly satisfied shriek rang out suddenly, startling Draco into spilling half his drink on the floor. Perhaps tomorrow he would start looking for a new place to live.
She sauntered up to the table, pencil and pad in hand. "What'll you have, loveys?"
"Fish and chips for me, thanks," Dennis said.
The waitress wrote down his order and turned to Draco expectantly.
"Nothing," Draco said.
"You really ought to," Dennis said, before the waitress could leave. "We might be here a while. The fish and chips here's right cracking, if you need a recommendation."
"Fine, I'll have the same, then," Draco said, still rather nonplussed.
Once the waitress left to put their orders in, Dennis leaned forward, looking slightly apologetic. "Look, would it make you feel better if I kept up the patented cheerful Creevey act? I mean, it's natural for people to feel more comfortable among familiar things."
"No," Draco said with some vehemence. "Just tell me what the hell you asked me here for."
"Didn't they tell you? I've been assigned to do your training."
"What trai-- You mean -- You're joking, right?"
"No, I'm afraid not," Dennis said, shrugging. "Word is, Upstairs thought you'd be better off training with someone you already knew, on account of all the trust issues you appear to have. I don't know that I entirely agree; you have to have trust issues to be good at this job, so I don't exactly see the point, not to mention you and I are really nothing more than two people who attended school in the same building and whose paths only very occasionally crossed. But what Upstairs says goes, so here we are."
Still stuck on the personality change, Draco asked, "What was the point of all that ...mucking about with your camera and 'gosh, haven't seen you in ages' bit yesterday, then?"
"I had to find some way to plant the message on you, didn't I? Besides, I do have a day job and it is with the Prophet, so why not kill two birds with one stone? I didn't submit the picture of you, by the way; it was awful. Anyway, suppose I were just to walk up to you and say, 'Hi, it's me, Dennis Creevey, one of the kids you used to purposely trip in the hallway; by the way, I'm a spy now,' you'd not take it so seriously, I'd imagine. Plus, the big reveal works wonders for getting people to realise I'm a little more formidable than I look, and that I'm not actually the impressionable little boy with floppy hair who runs around grinning like it's going out of style. Worked on you, didn't it? I think I've done quite a nice job of it," he said, still managing to sound modest.
"Yeah, I remember you as a kid; I couldn't stand how you laughed at bloody everything, even that time I did trip you. But you can't have been that good at playacting when you were twelve and affecting that exuberance all the time," Draco insisted.
Dennis looked at him as though he could see right through Draco's head, his features folding into an easy smile again, but otherwise appearing infinitely sad. "No. I was quite a happy child. But losing your big brother and best friend at fifteen does have its effects. My family was quite worried about me for years after that, said I wasn't the same. It was easier to start acting happy so they wouldn't try to talk at me and hug me all the time," he said, his soft-spoken tone drifting like a wisp of cloud. His eyes focused again on Draco and his smile became more grounded. "But we're not here to hear me prattle on about my life story, of course."
"Doesn't it get tiring? Pretending?" Draco asked, interested in spite of himself, remembering clearly his own troubles at projecting a casual front his final few years of school while dealing with internal turmoil.
"Not after a while. Sometimes it's like slipping into a second skin. In our line of work, it does come in handy. In some missions you're just a shadow, moving in and out without a trace; in others, it's imperative that you leave an impression. It helps with my job at the Prophet, too -- I'm very non-threatening and, therefore, trustworthy," he admitted without any hint of sardonicism. He let a beat pass before adding, "When it comes right down to it, when you take off all the bells and whistles, all you have is you. And frankly, I think being ordinary is often the best defence in this game."
The waitress returned with two plates of fish and chips, and Dennis dashed liberal amounts of malt vinegar all over his food. "Lovely," he said, chewing happily.
Slightly less enthused about the pile of fried things in front of him, Draco pushed his plate aside for the time being and leaned forward, steepling his hands over the table. "If I may be more conceited than usual for a moment," he began.
Dennis extended a palm, as if to say, 'Go on.'
"I don't tend to pass for ordinary. Look what happened in Diagon Alley yesterday."
"True, but that's Draco Malfoy speaking. As Draco Malfoy the intelligence agent, I think you'll find it a bit easier. See, it's just like how you were in prison -- it was difficult at first, wasn't it? Everyone knew who you were and why you were there, and lots of them were rather pissed off, weren't they? And then you learned to adapt and blend in, and it was like you weren't there at all," Dennis explained, waving a chip around. "As for the general public, frankly speaking, you're something of a novelty to them at the moment, and it'll wear off in time. It always does. Something shinier or someone more damaged will come along to catch their attention, and you'll be old news soon enough. Until then, though, we're keeping your intelligence work in the Muggle world, which is just as well, I think, since you obviously have so little experience with it. That's the other reason, actually, that I'm training you -- I'm Muggleborn, so I'm used to both sides, and I work both worlds, as well. Some Unit agents are assigned only to one or the other, but a few of us are a special breed who can traverse both." The corners of his lips quirked up in a conspiratorial fashion, and he lobbed a piece of fish into his mouth.
Although not very like the overly excitable boy he remembered, Draco noticed that in spite of his great loss Dennis still smiled a lot. He couldn't quite tell whether that, too, was an act, but he found himself hoping it wasn't. Constantly cheerful people usually irked him, and in his baser moments, he considered a slug to the gut a completely appropriate response to an excessively chipper attitude, but Draco didn't quite like the thought of giving them a reason to stop being happy altogether either. He picked up a chip and chewed thoughtfully, letting the white noise of the pub's activities settle over them, until his mind retreaded through the past few minutes and lit on what had initially appeared to be a throwaway line of Dennis'.
"I obviously have so little experience with the Muggle world?" Draco repeated softly, frowning. "You wouldn't have happened to have been following me today?"
"I have," Dennis said as a matter of fact. "Most wizards, unless they're very familiar with travel to and from each world, will go through the Leaky. You passed me by, actually, and I trailed you from there. Didn't pick up on it at the time, I suppose?"
Draco shook his head, trying to remember. He was usually quite good at noticing these things. After all, he and Harry Potter, along with their respective cronies, had spent many a school term glaring daggers at the back of each other's heads -- and the fronts, if they could get away with it, and years of having people trying to kill you with a look tended to make you a little more sensitive to being watched. He supposed that being in an entirely new and foreign place as he'd been -- and still was, come to think of it -- dulled that skill in favour of bringing to the fore more immediately important abilities like determining what point in space he occupied and not getting run over by the lemming-like stream of bodies moving with purpose through the streets in every which direction.
Dennis nodded in understanding, and clearly had not been expecting differently. "Well, there you are. That's your first lesson: always assume you're being followed. We all have some threshold of paranoia, and to work this job successfully, that dial has to be cranked up all the way to eleven. All the time."
The pronouncement was given in Dennis' low, calm tone, and the reference was rather lost on Draco, but it sounded somewhat ominous to his ears anyway. Letting the words linger in the air and sink in, Dennis continued working away at his dinner.
"Eat up," he said, gesturing to Draco's meal. "We have things to do after this." He gave Draco a meaningful look.
"Like what?" Draco asked, one step away from retracting his earlier charitable thoughts about the boy who would probably never really seem grown up to him and wondering if he should be afraid.
"Er, training," said Dennis, looking at him like he wasn't sure Upstairs had done such a good job after all with this latest round of recruitment. "I didn't ask you to come all the way here just because you're a delightful dining companion, you know."
He ignored the jibe. "What, now? Here?"
"It's always best done in the real world. No simulation is ever a perfect replacement for the real thing, of course, but we have to make do with the best conditions we've got, and what we've got here," he said, indicating with a tip of his head the street outside, "are busy roads full of busy people on a busy weekend, the perfect place to blend in, whether you're following or being followed. So if you're intent on letting that perfectly good meal go to waste anyway, we might as well start now."
"Well, you know, I ate two chips, and I think the grease is slowly obliterating my insides," Draco said, and drained his glass.
Dennis thought on this for a second. "Second lesson," he said, as they got up out of the booth. "Train your insides to be a little less delicate. There will be missions where you won't get much of a choice in food, so you can't afford to be fussy and expect to eat -- What do you rich people eat anyway? Endangered breeds of things?"
Shooting him an arch look, Draco said, "No, we keep those as pets and have betting pools on whose animal will go extinct first."
Nodding in a way that made Draco think he might have actually believed the sarcastic little remark, Dennis wended his way towards the bar and carefully placed a couple of folded bills on the countertop. "My treat," Dennis said with a smile, and led the way out of the pub.
As soon as they were outside, he produced a small map from his back pocket and gave it to Draco. "See where I've highlighted in blue? Follow that route and we'll meet again at the end, see, where that X is -- that's going to be right next to a fountain; you can't miss it. In the meantime, I'm going to cast a glamour on myself -- we don't use glamours for our real work, by the way; too unreliable -- and I'm going to tail you. See if you can spot the person following you, yeah?"
By the time Draco had gotten home, he was sure that no less than fourteen people had been secretly watching him, all the way from the fountain where he and Dennis had parted ways, through the blasted underground again and finally to the door of Blaise's penthouse. It was all Creevey's fault. Draco hadn't understood quite what he'd meant about paranoia thresholds when it had been mentioned at the time, but he knew now.
In the span of the ten minutes it had taken Draco to finish the length of the route Dennis had prescribed for him, the cat and mouse game the young agent had devised had nearly driven Draco over the edge -- almost everybody he passed in the street seemed suspicious to him, whether it was the man standing on the street corner smoking, or the backpacker with guidebook in hand trying to locate some must-see destination. In the end, he had been able to finger Dennis, who'd glamoured himself over as a plain, middle-aged woman, as his shadow, which was mollifying, but then he also had fingered about five other people as possible suspects.
Although the actual exercise had only taken less than a quarter of an hour, Draco found it exhausting, and he was all the more knackered when he'd finally reached home, as, at Dennis' behest, he hadn't turned off the switch that made him extra sensitive to the goings-on around him. It was like a Pandora's box, learning this single skill; once he knew he had to be on all the time, it was more difficult than he'd expected to just stop thinking about it and let the world wave facelessly and soundlessly past him as it had once been able to do.
The empty feeling inside his stomach no longer contented to be repressed and ignored, Draco headed straight for the kitchen as soon as he walked in, but not before taking a moment to lift an eyebrow at the ladies' jacket and scarf draped over the coat rack by the door. He instructed Elba to fix him a quick meal, and, uncorking a butterbeer, stood around in the kitchen trying to tune out the rhythmic pounding coming from Blaise's bedroom.
A thoroughly satisfied shriek rang out suddenly, startling Draco into spilling half his drink on the floor. Perhaps tomorrow he would start looking for a new place to live.
Author notes: The reference to turning the dial up to eleven is, of course, from the classic movie This is Spinal Tap.
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