Chapter Text
“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
𖥂
Draco Malfoy learned very quickly after the war that normal witches and wizards did not desire him.
Those who did could be lumped into two very abnormal groups, both of which he wished to avoid:
Group one, fetishists, who got off over the thought of fucking someone with a Dark Mark.
Or group two, blood supremacists, who were just polished arseholes frightened of change because pointing a stick and shouting in Latin to get your way was easier than doing independent research.
Draco used to be in group two of said abnormal witches and wizards, labouring under the delusion that he was a dying breed instead of an evolving one, that he was important, special.
Then he lived under a Dark purist regime for nine months and realised there were far better ways to preserve ancient traditions than licking your father’s boots, torturing children, or desecrating ancestral homes with abhorrent rituals for the sake of hosting a mad man.
Now that mad man was dead, and Draco’s father was in Azkaban, and the manor was poisoned from the foundations up, while the family estate had been drained to pay for post-war —plural— reparations, and Draco’s dating pool within the wizarding world was miserably nonexistent.
So he turned, reluctantly, to Muggle night clubs.
It was by complete accident that he actually wound up making friends with some of the patrons, or that through them he learned he was, in fact, bisexual — or rather, that there was a name for it, let alone a place for it to exist in his life where he didn’t have to think about heirs or bloodlines or “Ancient and Most Noble Houses” at all.
And yes, he had a type, particularly when it came to men.
Shorter than him. Dark hair. Glasses. Green eyes, the brighter the better. And if they had any South Asian heritage at all, he barely even asked their name before requesting to be taken back to their place — or failing that, a shadowed alley with just enough light for him to picture the right face over their own as they came down his throat usually did the trick.
Though, he stopped doing that before long.
Too many feelings caught, not enough commitment to hold them properly, because it turned out he wasn’t impervious to getting hurt just because they were Muggles, and worse… it turned out he didn’t enjoy hurting them, either.
So by the turn of the twenty-first century, he went celibate, voluntarily this time. It was easier. Safer.
The trouble started, as most things seemed to these days, at work.
Draco had not expected to enjoy the Muggle Liaisons Office. He’d taken the position out of necessity — something respectable, something visible, something that might keep the Malfoy name from rotting entirely, as well as earn him just enough of a living to avoid selling the manor; a perfect bureaucratic purgatory no pureblood heir would have touched before the war.
He had expected drudgery. Humiliation, perhaps. A necessary performance of reform. Instead, he found himself… good at it.
Not the technology. Merlin, no. He still refused to use a mobile telephone, and the fax machine remained a source of quiet resentment, but he liked the people.
Some of them, anyway.
He understood power. Understood presentation. Understood how to read a room and decide, within seconds, who was worth cultivating and who was better left to rot in their own self-importance.
Some Muggles reminded him of his father.
Those, he handled with cold efficiency.
Others —rarer but extant— were genuinely interested in helping people without expecting anything in return.
Those people, Draco found himself gravitating toward.
Which was a trait he found quite inconvenient sometimes, like with—
“I hear those machines work better if you pretend they aren’t as sentient as they look.”
Draco stilled, shoulders tensing.
That voice was among one of his “troubles at work” — always soft, always warm, with an unusual transatlantic accent that always made it sound a little amused; and lately, far too familiar.
Draco didn’t look up immediately. Instead, he finished fussing with the Ministry-approved Muggle printer whirring away under his hands after several minutes attempting to get it to function, which had involved a few experimental technomancy charms, several muttered curses, and one sharp bash of his fist against the side panel. Now, thankfully, it was reluctantly spitting out page after page of glossy leaflets for him — Fundraising Initiative for Urban Youth Outreach, the header read in cheerful blue font.
Only then did he turn his head, adjusting his cuffs as he turned around and leaned against the adjacent table, trying not to look as out of place as he felt.
Rolf Scamander stood in the staff room doorway, hands tucked loosely into the deep pockets of his layered robes, as if he hadn’t just crossed departmental lines for the third time that week.
He looked out of place here, too, in an entirely different way to how Draco felt: slightly windblown, like he’d stepped out of open air rather than a corridor. In all honesty, he might’ve, for all Draco knew.
His grandfather, Newton Scamander, was famous for being awarded an Order of Merlin, Second Class, for his contributions to Magizoology, and his grandson was following in his footsteps, having graduated from Ilvermorny in America four or five years ago and since then moving back to England to study Magizoology at MUG, the Magical University of Glastonbury, during which he worked part-time in the Beast Division — or at least that’s what Draco once read about him in a benign Daily Prophet column following the personal lives of the latest popular wizarding families.
Much like the creatures Scamander worked with, there was always something faintly untamed about him, even in Ministry-appropriate clothing.
Draco had to work hard to ignore the flutter in his chest, schooling his expression into cool indifference, inhaling the faint smell of printer ink and overbrewed tea before he spoke.
“Scamander,” he said. “Lost?”
Scamander leaned casually against the doorframe as if he belonged there.
He didn’t.
Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures was a floor down from Magical Accidents and Catastrophes, not to mention that if he was inside the Ministry at all it meant he should’ve been knee-deep in paperwork about mating seasons or containment charms or whatever it was they did on Level 4.
Instead, he was here.
Again.
“Not particularly,” Scamander said easily. “I was looking for you.”
Draco’s fingers twitched slightly against the tabletop.
“That’s unfortunate,” he said. “You’ve found me.”
Scamander just smiled.
That was the main problem.
He didn’t rise to it. Didn’t snap back or bristle or take offense. He just… absorbed Draco’s sharpness so it never landed the way it was meant to. It made it impossible to dismiss him.
“Are you avoiding me?” Scamander asked with a curious tilt of his head, very much resembling a creature hearing an odd sound.
“I am working.”
Scamander shrugged in a way that made him look more hunched than he really was — it would’ve looked like a lack of confidence, but Draco knew better by now, and had come to realise he likely only carried himself that way because of all the frightened creatures he dealt with, ones who benefited from thinking he was smaller, approachable.
There was a pause. In it, Scamander was still watching him hopefully.
Draco rolled his eyes, patience thinning. “Even if I were avoiding you, Scamander, I fail to see why it would concern you.”
“Well,” Scamander said thoughtfully, “it concerns me, because I’m still waiting for your answer.”
“About whether or not I’m avoiding you?”
“About dinner.”
Draco stared at him.
The audacity.
“I’m sorry,” he said dryly. “Did I not make myself clear enough?”
Scamander frowned and smiled at the same time. “All you did was ask me if I was mad and walk off.”
Draco watched him, searching for something in his face that would make some sense of this interaction, jaw tightening when he found none.
He couldn’t work Scamander out.
He wasn’t a fetishiser. There was nothing in the way he looked at Draco that suggested morbid curiosity or dark fascination. If anything, he noticed Draco noticing him, noticing the way his hands were vascular and gangly and faintly scarred by beasts, or the way his chest hair poked out from the undone top button of his robes sometimes, and oh, wouldn’t it be nice to lean in and— and then Draco would flush and lift his eyes because almost a year of celibacy was not an excuse to risk a written warning for sexual harassment at work, and Scamander would only smirk at the floor, fully aware, without saying a word.
He certainly wasn’t a blood supremacist, either. His family may have all been purebloods, but the Scamanders were never even listed in the Sacred Twenty-Eight for their pro-Muggle activism throughout history, his grandparents had been famously close with Dumbledore, and his parents had even funded and supported the Order during the First War — until their murder for it in the late ’70s.
Which elicited… well… complicated feelings for Draco.
None of it made sense.
He wasn’t even Draco’s type.
Too tall. Warm hazel eyes instead of green. Light brown hair instead of dark — though it was rather messy, which… was irrelevant, thank you.
Rolf Scamander was open everywhere Draco Malfoy was not.
And yet… he kept showing up.
Kept looking at Draco like he was something worth choosing.
Which… again…
Complicated feelings.
He turned away slightly, picking up the stack of freshly printed leaflets just to have something to do with his hands. He’d intended to make himself tea when he came in here, but chose instead to leave. Scamander pressed back into the doorframe to let him through.
“Ooh,” he said, peering down. “You’ve changed the layout.”
Draco paused, blinked, glanced down at the leaflets. “Yes. The previous version was… inefficient.”
“It’s better,” Scamander said simply.
Draco looked back at him, frowning despite himself. “You read these?”
“I read things you make,” Scamander replied.
Draco stared at him, still standing there in the narrow doorway, far too close, catching the scent of him now, earthy and sweet. Heat rose up his throat. He cleared it quickly and side-stepped into the corridor, hurrying along it.
Scamander pushed off the doorframe and followed him, footsteps unhurried.
“Look,” Draco said, “if you’re here to offer feedback on Muggle print materials, I assure you, I don’t require—”
“I’m here because I like talking to you.”
Draco’s breath hitched, just slightly. Irritatingly.
“That seems like a poor use of your time,” he said coolly.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Scamander answered cheerfully, not even faintly discouraged.
Draco hated it.
“Aren’t you seeing someone?” he asked over his shoulder, and saw the pleased smile flicker across Scamander’s expression.
“Have you been asking around about me?”
Draco scoffed, and did not dignify him with an answer. Least of all because the answer was—
“Yes,” Scamander said, “I am seeing someone.”
Shameless.
“Then why in the name of Morgana le Fay,” Draco asked, “are you trying to take me to dinner?”
“Because she told me not to give up on you yet.”
Draco almost tripped over his own feet. He turned and stared at him.
“She — did?”
He added that last word belatedly, startled, because he’d always assumed Scamander was a homosexual. Though, admittedly, the American-British hybrid accent might’ve been partially to blame for that, which he only had from being raised by an American grandmother and a British grandfather — somehow it made him seem even more gregarious and disarming than he already was; Draco had learned recently that the Muggle word for those traits in men was ‘camp’, while in the wizarding world, campness was a more typical baseline for masculinity.
“She did,” Scamander answered, but didn’t supply more information, so Draco, half-stunned, had no choice but to ask:
“Why?”
“Because you haven’t said no yet,” Scamander said softly.
That wasn’t what Draco meant.
He opened his mouth.
Closed it.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally, voice thinner than he intended, “this is mad. Excuse me.”
Scamander didn’t argue, just nodded and watched Draco disappear through the next door.