Chapter Text
Ron had never been more comfortable in his life. If he could ignore the growing pang of hunger – which, let’s face it, he couldn’t – he would stay in this bed forever.
He sat up with a start, only just realizing the space next to him was cold. No warm and slightly ruffled sheets that he was used to waking up to. He wanted to feel relieved by this, he had been wanting to sleep alone for months now. But he couldn’t shake the wrongness of the bed. In fact, the sheets were entirely different. Velvet or silk or something equally soft. He couldn’t say for certain.
Ron ran his hand across the material, stunned to see a too pale hand, long elegant fingers, and… was he wearing Slytherin pyjamas?
With a strangled yelp, he lurched from the bed, which he knew now definitely wasn’t his, and stumbled about the room.
“Bloody hell,” he murmured. Even his voice wasn’t the same. Ron breathed through his growing anxiety. It was unclear if it was his decade as an auror or his years of friendship with Harry Potter – but a too fast heart rate never made a situation better. Ron made his way across the immaculate room, tripping on the corner of the king sized bed.
There were two armchairs set up by a fireplace and a bookshelf that stretched across an entire wall. Rows of books were lined neatly (and completely dust free) on the shelves. A far cry from the stacks Hermione kept in their flat.
Ron opened the door next to the shelf leading into what seemed to be the suspect’s closet. Rows of pressed robes hung organized by color.
“Prick,” he murmured in the strange new voice.
At least Ron could be sure he was in a wizard’s apartment. One time Johnson had woken up two towns over in a muggle’s townhouse after a particularly rowdy evening at the pub.
But Ron hadn’t been to the pub last night. Hadn’t done anything but clean himself up and trudge to bed cursing the Malfoy name. A regular Friday evening by his typical standards.
He swallowed, his nervousness renewed despite the deep breaths. Ron left the closet and entered through the second door in the room. Instead of leading to the rest of the home, he found himself in the bathroom. His eyes widened – the marble tile, the thick bath mat, the shower with at least five spray nozzles. And the mirror, which held a very impressed looking Draco Malfoy.
As quickly as Ron saw him, Draco’s face became a mixture of disbelief and utter terror. Ron looked down at his stupid pyjamas, his manicured nails. He leaned as close to the mirror as he could, his nose brushing up against Malfoy’s. He combed his fingers through the platinum hair. Squinting his eyes, sticking out his tongue, patting his cheeks.
Ron shouted and hurled himself away from the mirror, “What the fuck?”
He was in Draco Malfoy’s body. That much was clear. What wasn’t clear was how and why and what the fuck?
He heard the telltale burst of a floo from outside the bedroom.
“Draco?” A woman’s voice called through the flat.
The panic finally set in. No auror training could prepare him for this.
“Draco, darling?”
Bloody hell. Did Malfoy have a girlfriend? He’d never said. In fact, Ron knew literally nothing about the prick’s life. Except that, apparently, he kept a very clutter free home. With plush towels and soft linens. Helpful information if Ron ran a laundry service in need of elite clientele.
“Draco, I thought you were coming to Blaise’s for breakfast,” Pansy Parkinson stared at him from the bathroom entryway. Ron straightened under her intense scrutiny. “You’re not even dressed. Did you just wake up?”
Pansy’s hair was chopped short in an even line at her chin. There was not a single strand out of place. Her eyes were lined black and her lips were deep red. It was all a dramatic change from the ugly, mean-spirited witch he’d grown up with.
“Have you swallowed your fucking tongue? It’s nearly eleven and we had plans today,” she put her hands on her hips.
Maybe a bit mean spirited still.
Ron cleared his throat, “Apologies…er, Pansy.” He was startled by the grumbly baritone of his own voice.
What would Malfoy do? What was Malfoy doing, had just occurred to him and was probably the actual question he should be asking. It stood to reason that if Ron was in Malfoy’s body - someone was in Ron’s body. Presumably, and maybe hopefully, it was Malfoy.
Pansy stared at him expectantly.
“Unfortunately, I am, er, predisposed. I’ve got to get off to The Shoppe.” Did he sound like Malfoy? Having only spent an afternoon with the man in the last ten years, Ron had little to go by. Grunt-like noises seemed to be his best bet for communication style.
Pansy furrowed her brow and looked about a second away from stomping her foot. “But it’s a Saturday. Surely, you can take a day’s break.” She stepped closer to him, laying her palm on his chest. Pansy looked up at him with sultry eyes. Eyes that said —
Ron laughed nervously then coughed to cover it up. “I’m sorry da-darling,” he stuttered. “But the, well, you know, lacewing flies, er… won’t stir themselves.”
He slipped from her grasp hurrying out of the bathroom, through the bedroom and into the flat beyond.
“Draco? You aren’t even –”
Whatever Pansy ‘sex eyes’ Parkinson had to say was cut off by the floo as Ron hurtled off to the shop.
—-
Yesterday, nearly 3pm, just outside Darlington, England
The crime scene was like any other: morose, bloody, and a little smelly. Ron was used to it by now – the slurry of uniformed professionals scurrying around a dead body. Chairs scraped across the floor all by themselves, even though there were at least twenty people who could’ve used their own two hands. Tape unfurled itself around the pale man slumped across a small bistro table. A blueberry muffin, untouched, on a frilly little plate next to him.
The body was found at a coffee house outside Darlington. By ‘found,’ Ron presumed they meant the overtired barista didn’t notice the unmoving man in the early morning rush of nine-to-fivers until well past any true witnesses could provide information. Convenient for the murderer, inconvenient for Ron, who was already stretching his wrist to prepare for the inordinate amount of murder-paperwork he’d have to do this evening. An hour ago, Harry had locked down the cafe to any dangerous outside influence (in this case, hungry, uncaffeinated muggles) and called Ron in for the investigation.
Now, Ron moved closer to the dead man for a better view of the unfortunate source of his future hand cramp. His stomach growled loudly at the sight of the uneaten muffin next to the body. If he ignored the corpse, the scene was practically mouthwatering.
“I didn’t get a chance to eat breakfast, okay?” He responded to Harry’s overt side-eye.
“This is a crime scene,” Harry said, levitating the man’s chest from the table. Ron rolled his eyes. Not only had he partaken in hundreds of cases in his tenure with the ministry, but the glassy-eyed, cold body made it abundantly clear this was a crime scene. “And it’s 3pm – we had lunch together barely two hours ago.”
“Right…but I didn’t have breakfast,” Ron shook his head at Harry’s abysmal appetite. Three meals a day was a rule to live by and Ron did so fastidiously.
Neville cleared his throat, “Geoffrey Manlon, aged 45. He was a local butcher in Darlington. No close relatives.”
Ron stepped closer to inspect two holes leaking blood in the man’s neck, dodging a harried Angelina Johnson as she worked to capture images of the scene. “Muggle, I presume?”
Neville cleared his throat again, “Y…Yes. Sorry. I forgot to say that.”
“Neville, grab the aurors some tea, would you?” Harry said from his side of the corpse.
“Course, yeah, on it.” Neville stumbled towards the white-faced barista behind the counter.
“Remind me why he’s here, again,” Ron grumbled under his breath.
Harry flicked his overgrown hair from his eyes, “Neville is a good auror – he’s an asset to this team in herbology knowledge alone.”
The crash and splatter of take-away cups drew their attention from the cold body in front of them.
Ron couldn’t help his snort, “You were saying?”
Harry ignored him, focusing instead on the blood slowly leaking from Geoffrey Manlon’s neck. “This follows the pattern,” he said with a sigh.
“Male, forties, no connection to the wizarding world,” Ron said, rattling off the details of the two other murders they’d investigated in the last six months. “Dumped in a public place with a confunded eye witness. Blood drained from his neck with no other signs of injury or struggle.”
Ron pictured the other victims – a balding man on his knees in the pews of the Sheffield Cathedral and a skinny man on a park bench somewhere in Gloucester. Hardly an ounce of blood left in their bodies. Ron considered himself a generally happy gent, always ready to find the laughter in the room, but even he could admit this was becoming more sinister by the minute.
“Well, Ron, looks like we have a serial killer on our hands,” Harry sniffed as he straightened. “Don’t look so excited.”
Ron schooled his face as best he could, “I am a regular amount of interested in this case.”
“Convincing,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. “Some of us do have lives outside of work.”
Ron opened his mouth to object, but Harry beat him to it, “Lives that we are interested in. Girlfriends that we love and don’t lead on to avoid conflict.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ron huffed, wishing Harry knew him a little less.
“I’m telling you to stop hiding behind serial killers and break up with your girlfriend.”
“Is it considered a serial killer if it’s a Vampyre?”
Ron and Harry stared at the young trainee whose robes looked double his size.
He cleared his throat, “I mean… Vampyres are always — you know — killing people…”
Ron straightened and crossed his arms, leaning closer to Harry, “What do you think, should we sic Mione on him?”
“Eh, she’s probably busy at the Hospital. Wouldn’t want to waste her time with a creature’s rights speech.”
Ron nodded, turning his attention to the bakery at large. He was sure there was some evidence that could lead them back to the Vampyre culprit. He scanned the room and caught snippets of Harry’s ethics lecture to the poor trainee.
“Vampyres, while predisposed to feed on and kill humans, are not inherently evil. Especially in recent years, Vampyres have —”
Ron tuned out his speech, looking closer at the coffee mug, out in the open now that the man’s body had been lifted off it. “Harry, do you see what I see?”
Harry looked at Ron over his shoulder before stepping closer to see what Ron was pointing at. They locked eyes, Ron’s eyebrows furrowing.
“Well, that settles it,” Harry said, clapping Ron on the back once in finality. “I’ll stay here while you pay our friend a visit.”
Ron groaned, “Why me? You’re the one who made amends. I still hate the prick.”
“I have to stay here and obliviate all these muggles, clean up a crime scene, and do approximately two tonnes of paperwork. Trust me, you’ve got the easy option.”
Ron didn’t think so. In fact it was very clear to him that Draco Bloody Malfoy was never the easy option.