Title: How Hermione Granger Got Her Ring
Chapter Title: Outtake
Characters: Draco Malfoy, Blaise Zabini, Gregory Goyle, Vincent Crabbe
Genres: Humour
Rating: R
Warnings: Sexual References
Summary: An outtake from the story about how Draco and his some of his former Slytherin classmates managed to infiltrate Hogwarts and write graffiti on the wall.

"Vincent get your ass in here before someone sees you," Draco hissed through the open window of the Shrieking Shack.

The three men on the inside of the shack heard some grunting and groaning and saw Vincent Crabbe's head bobbing up outside the window and his hands desperately clenching at the sill, but he did not enter the room.

"Fuck. Greg, help him out," Draco ordered one of the men in the shack.

"This better get me off your fucking list, Malfoy," Blaise Zabini complained, as he wiped dirt off his grey cashmere jumper.

Draco narrowed his eyes. What kind of poof wears cashmere when planning on breaking-and-entering a highly-warded educational facility? "Whether or not you get off the list depends on the outcome of the mission."

"He's stuck," Gregory Goyle commented. When Draco and Blaise looked over at the window, they saw that Crabbe's arms, head, and chest were now through the window, but his rather bulky mid-section was wedged in tightly. Blaise flicked his wand toward the opening, which magically became larger. With a hard yank, Greg pulled Vincent into the shack sending him crashing loudly down on the ground.

Looking away from the Vincent's attempt to get off the floor, Blaise turned back toward Draco. "What do you mean, it depends on the outcome?"

"If we succeed and you end up maimed or dead, I'll remove your name from my list."

"What if we succeed and I don't end up maimed or dead?" Blaise inquired, briefly considering whether it would be worth it to come out of this situation maimed but no longer obligated to be at Draco's beck-and-call.

"If we succeed and you are unharmed, I'll consider taking you out of the top ten," Draco informed him. Blaise rolled his eyes.

Draco's list of Men and Women to Bully, Torture, or Maim rarely got shorter. The names on it, however, did shift around frequently. Only those names in the top ten magically felt compelled to appear when Draco called. The parchment his Torture list was written on had been a gift from Lucius when Draco made the Slytherin Quidditch team. It probably was full of dark magic, but since no one had ever asked about it, Draco had never volunteered it for ministry inspection.

"How come Greg and I have never gotten out of the top ten?" Vincent asked.

Draco glared back at him. "I think you both remember the incident from second year that landed you on the list."

Greg got a pained expression on his face as he tried to remember back to second year. Vincent, however, had the grace to blush. During second year, Draco had gotten Vincent and Greg to serve as look-outs for him as he snuck into in Marcus Flint's room to release a Doxy into the git's trunk. The idiots had not bothered to warn Draco before Flint's roommates entered the chamber. The Slytherin seventh years had blackmailed Draco for the rest of the term into doing their Muggle studies' essays.

"Enough reminiscing about what complete fuck-ups you all were in school," Blaise drawled, always happy to point out how he had sailed safely through the corridors of Hogwarts without getting hexed, slapped, bitten, or blackmailed. "I would like to get this 'mission' over with before the sun rises."

"And you have to return to your coffin?" Draco inquired sarcastically, causing Greg and Vincent to laugh.

"You are so fucking hilarious, Malfoy. Thanks for reminding me why we don't hang out together more often," Blaise sneered back at Draco.

Draco smirked. If there had been one person in Slytherin, who had as favorable an impression about himself as Draco had, it was Blaise Zabini. "I think we both know you don't hang around me more because you'd hate the poor comparisons you'd receive."

"You really do live in your own fantasy world, don't you?" Blaise replied to the blond, blandly.

"That is what all the ladies call it," Draco said suggestively, waggling his eyebrows.

Zabini rolled his eyes, while Greg and Vincent elbowed each other and cackled.

"Where do we go from here?" Zabini sighed, determined to just finish this stupid 'mission' and return home to a nice warm bed.

"There should be a trapdoor located around here somewhere," Draco replied offhandedly, waving his arm in no specific direction.

Vincent and Greg grumbled and began to shuffle around the room looking for the door. Zabini just narrowed his eyes and starred intently at Draco. "Exactly how did you learn about this entrance into Hogwarts, Malfoy?"

"The Malfoy family still has a number of influential contacts and sources," Draco started to explain.

Before he could get any further, however, Vincent interrupted him. "Granger told him."

"He fucked it out of her," Greg grunted. He had found the trapdoor and pulled it open.

"Goyle you are so uncouth," Draco grimaced, before lighting his wand and peering into the passageway below the Shrieking Shack. It looked positively dank and dirty. "Er… Zabini, why don't you lead the way?"

Blaise stared into the tunnel and grimaced. This was so typical of the type of plan Malfoy thought up. Never could he do anything the simple straight-forward way. Instead his ideas always involved complex steps, hard to accomplish objectives, and unnecessary stealth. Blaise shuddered slightly remembering the preparation and effort Malfoy had put into asking Pansy Parkinson to the Yule Ball in their fourth year. It had left the Slytherin Common Room smelling like dung bombs for the entire month of December.

Taking a deep breath, Blaise stepped into the passage and immediately his Italian leather loafers sank into mud two inches deep. "Malfoy, I swear to Merlin, you are going to get a bill for having ruined my wardrobe," Blaise whined.

"Stop acting like a priss and get moving," Draco replied, shoving the dark-skinned wizard in the back. Looking down at his own footwear, he wondered how difficult it would be to transfigure them into something more suitable for tromping in filth. Trust Granger not to fill him in on the most relevant details, like proper attire, when informing him about this secret entrance.

Unfortunately, before Draco could remember the Latin term for 'work boots' Greg and Vincent had pushed by, shoving him into the muck.

As the four pure-blooded, highly-cultured, and, frankly, molly-coddled wizards trudged through the bleak tunnel toward Hogwarts, Draco wondered if Muggle men had to go to such extremes to please their women. He didn't remember reading anything in People about Brad Pitt going all out to woo Angelina Jolie – and that girl had abs of steel. The more he thought about it, the more disgusted, Draco became. By the time, he had reached the school grounds at the base of the Whomping Willow, the unnaturally pale man had decided to add 'How easy life is for them' to his Big List of Reasons to Dislike Muggles.

"We're here. Now how do we get in the castle?" Blaise inquired.

Draco shrugged. "I got us this far. It is only fair that one of you blokes figure out how to get us inside."

Blaise began to turn purple with rage. "Merlin's balls, Malfoy! This is your asinine plan. How in Circe's sweet name, do you expect one of us to know how to get inside Hogwarts? I swear you are the biggest fuck-up I've ever had the displeasure of scheming alongside!"

"You know, Zabini, for someone who was once Head Boy, you are completely worthless in clutch situations," Draco informed his compatriot.

"I loathe you, Malfoy."

"Less talking, Zabini, more thinking," Draco replied, tapping the side of his head with his finger for emphasis.

Vincent got ready to step in front of Draco, because he really did think that Zabini was about to physically launch himself at the blond. However, before violence broke out, Goyle spoke up. "I can get us in Hogwarts."

"How?"

"My father got me a magical key after that one summer I spent living in the carriage house," Greg explained.

At Zabini's look of confusion, Vincent described how Goyle had kept forgetting the password for his estate's wards. Since Greg didn't have his apparition license and his parents had been vacationing in the Greek Isles, he'd been forced to live in the servants' quarters for three months.

"This key gets you in anywhere?" Draco inquired speculatively.

"So far," Greg nodded.

Draco grinned widely, slapped Greg heartily on the back, and marched him to the front entrance of the school. Vincent trailed behind them, while Blaise muttered rudely about how unfair it was when everything seemed to fall in place for fucking pricks.

When the Slytherin quartet finally reached the second floor corridor where Draco planned to scrawl his message of devotion to Hermione, all four men were in a better frame of mind. They had not run into any human or ghostly impediments to their undertaking and it looked like they might actually return home in time to get a few hours sleep before the sun rose.

"So," Vincent asked, staring at the wall and scratching the back of his head, "what exactly are you going to use to write your message?"

"Blood would be kind of cool," Goyle suggested.

"Too easy to wash off," Draco informed him. "Same with bile, excrement, and urine," the blond informed Goyle before he could make another suggestion.

Blaise raised an eyebrow. "Done some experimenting, Malfoy?"

Draco smirked at him. "Of course I have. Didn't you ever wonder why your coverlet at Hogwarts smelled funny?"

"You are such a dick," Blaise growled.

Ignoring the seething wizard, Draco pulled a metal cylinder out of his robe.

"What's that?" Vincent asked.

"Spray paint. Muggles use it all the time to write things on walls. It doesn't wash off with water and, even better, a cleaning charm doesn't disturb it."

Vincent looked suitable impressed, but Goyle grunted, "Sandblasting."

"What?"

"Sandblasting removes Muggle paint," Greg clarified, as if he was a bloody physics professor and they were his freshmen class of liberal arts students.

Draco really wanted to ask what the hell was sandblasting and just how the fuck Goyle knew about it, but he didn't want to look dense in front of Blaise. Especially when he would have bet his mother's half of the Malfoy fortune that Zabini had no clue what sandblasting was either.

Far from being concerned about looking ignorant, however, Blaise just wanted to get the hell out of Hogwarts and as far away from the Malfoy and the dunderheaded duo as possible. "Is there really that much of a possibility that Filch has access to this sandblasting thing?" he asked in his 'Can we please get on with it' tone.

His three companions gave him condescending looks. They, after all, had been a part of Umbridge's Inquisitorial Squad and worked along side Filch during fifth year. Crabbe, Goyle, and Malfoy all knew that the squib could be stubbornly single-minded about accomplishing certain tasks – like removing graffiti – if he put his mind to it.

"Why not just cast a concealing spell over the spray paint and have it wear off around the time of the banquet?" Vincent suggested.

Draco grimaced. "Filch will just blast it off 24 hours later. Since I'm putting so much time and effort into this proposal, I would like it to be around longer than a couple of days."

"Personally I wouldn't want a written record of declaring anything to Granger," Greg groused. "If you give her supporting documentation, you know she'll just throw it back in your face some day with footnotes and a bibliography."

Vincent let forth something that sounded like a cough-choking-laugh, while Draco merely raised an eyebrow at the implication that his future fiancée was anything but a tender and pliable woman.

Blaise was certain that he'd be inflicted with a migraine before the evening ended. The only way to end this horror was to take charge of the situation. "I know something that will work," he said quietly.

"What?"

"My family developed a method generations ago back in Italy to mark a dwelling of someone we were unhappy with," Blaise explained.

Both of Draco's eyebrows shot up this time. There had been rumors, of course, that Zabini's family was connected to the Sicilian Black Hand Mafia, but nothing had ever been proven. In fact, Draco had dismissed most of the gossip since Zabini didn't appear to be a vindictive bloke. "How long do these 'marks' last?" the blond wizard inquired.

Zabini shrugged. "They are structural: to get rid of them you have to take down the building."

Draco gave a satisfied smirk. "And you know how to do this? You can make it so anything I write can't be removed except by tearing down the castle?"

"Well," Blaise smirked back, because there really was no feeling like accomplishing something sneaky and underhanded, even if it did mean spending time with Malfoy. "No one will be able to remove it without taking down at least part of the castle."

Fifteen minutes later, Draco had scrawled his message to Hermione on the wall and Blaise had cast some dark magic on it turning it into an essential part of the building. As the former Slytherins stepped back to revel in their handy-work, Draco couldn't help but express his satisfaction. "Zabini, you are a genius. I'm taking you out of the top ten on my torture list AND I'm going to make you my best man."

"Good gods, Malfoy. I don't want to be your best man. I hate you and Granger annoys the shit out of me," Blaise exasperatedly informed the pale blond.

Draco arched an eyebrow and wondered, not for the first time, how someone as completely tactless as Zabini ever got sorted into Slytherin. "Fine. You are back in the top ten AND you are still my best man."

"You fucker!" Blaise hissed over the laughter of Vincent and Greg.

The End

Author's Notes: All the characters and settings belong to JK Rowlings. A big thanks goes out to Kazfeist for being the beta for this chapter!