peculiar prompt (if the spirit moves you):
Draco's been cursed — whenever he talks, it just sounds like *incoherent kazoo noises*
enter Harry Potter — secret kazoo interpreter, who also gets off to the sound of unpleasant instruments
(this is canon, btw. it just wasn't mentioned in the books bc it wasn't relevant to the plot)
Draco slumped in his hospital bed and sighed, but it sounded like a pile of rubber chickens being sat on.
Hermione reviewed his chart and tried to ignore her mediwitch mentor looking over her shoulder. If she couldn’t figure it out soon, she was going to have to admit defeat, and doing so would hurt her next evaluation.
Nurse Racket harrumphed. “Gawain said it happened during training,” she said crisply. “So we can rule out dark magic. But certainly rule in stupidity.”
Hermione tried to ignore that her mentor was on a first name basis with the director of the DMLE.
Draco pointed at Nurse Racket and honked a single discordant syllable.
“Robards?” Hermione asked. “Should we contact him?”
Draco shook his head to the tune of, “HROO HROO HROO,” then held a hand level and lowered it.
“Not Robards,” Hermione said. “Someone lower down.”
Draco nodded silently, then made circles with his thumbs and forefingers and held them over his eyes like glasses.
“Oh,” Hermione said with finality. “Harry?”
Draco crossed his arms and let out a disdainful, “Hwoo.”
It took an hour and a half for Harry to show up at St Mungo’s, and his hair was a little on fire when he did. The Auror unit smelled like a hair dryer from 1988 after he'd walked down the hall to Draco’s room.
Draco waved a flippant hand at Harry’s smoldering look and said, “Hroo-hoo-hoo, ha-hoo.”
Harry rolled his eyes and patted his still-smoking hair. “Sorry. The tourney brackets got lop-sided, and I filled in.”
Draco let loose in a barrage of honks and hoots that sounded like a flock of geese stuck in a pipe organ. Hermione backed away in horror.
Harry held his hands up in self-defense. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know it wouldn’t wear off.”
Draco grumbled a “HOO-hoo” that sounded suspiciously like “tosser.”
“Wait,” Hermione said. “You can understand him?”
Harry blinked at her for a long moment. He still reeked of burning hair. “Yeah,” he said, and the duh was implied. “Parseltongue.” He pointed at himself. “Remember?”
Hermione and Nurse Racket exhanged baffled glances, then looked at Draco. He somehow honked, “Duh,” rather clearly.
Nurse Racket shook her head and turned around and muttered something about having a word with Gawain on the way out of the room. Hermione suspected that word would be short, curt, and start with an F.
“But how would Parseltongue-”
Draco hooted softly under his breath and held two cupped hands out lewdly.
Harry frowned at him and shook his head. “That’s not very nice.”
Draco honked something high and flutey as he groped an imaginary bum.
Draco rolled his eyes and let out a warbling, sarcastic squawk, hands on his hips, sneering at Nurse Racket’s arse the whole time.
Harry turned pink while Hermione watched. “What’s he saying?”
Harry shook his head and turned even pinker. “Doesn’t matter.”
Draco’s polyphonic clatter sounded suspiciously like Baby Got Back, and if Hermione didn’t know better, Harry snort-laughed somewhere around the anaconda line.
“I’m gonna-” Harry struggled to hold back another laugh. “I’m just gonna take him home until this wears off.”
Draco winked and let out a low, crooning honk, like a gangly aquatic bird during mating season. Harry cleared his throat, then glared at him. Draco did it again. Harry adjusted his trousers.
She closed his chart and decided she didn’t care if this case counted against her record or not. It wasn’t worth the marks to watch her best friend flirt with a kazoo-voiced lover. A brief, unwelcome thought as to what the sex would sound like made her shudder.
Draco squeaked and winked at Harry.
“Yeah…” Hermione said slowly. “He’s all yours.”
