SPOILERS: For my Checkmate series

CONTENT: Harry/Ron slash (background)

RATING: R for subject matter

CLASSIFICATION: AU, Gen, Roncentric

WARNING(S): Kinky, and not much plot.

SUMMARY: Ron has trouble finding a job and ends up working at a notorious Diagon Alley nightclub.

DISCLAIMER: The Harry Potter series and all the characters associated with it are the property solely of J. K. Rowling, her agents and publishers.  No infringement of any rights is intended from the creation of this story.  Nor is any money being made from it.  This story is written solely for the entertainment of the author and her friends; please do not redistribute without permission.

NOTES: This is a shortie (it's too long to be called a cookie) taken from my upcoming story in the Checkmate series; it follows Checkmate, Keeper's Snitch, Natural Magic, Earthy Pleasures and The Kissing Bough.  This was originally going to be part of the new story, as it grew out of a vague idea I had as I was writing it, but it would have taken things too far off course for too long, so I've written it as something separate.  It's mostly plotless, just a little window into Ron's life, although there's a detail that may have some relevance to the main story in due course.

Comments would be welcome, as always.

Handyman

by Mad Martha

Ron wondered if spending part of Christmas with Harry had somehow lowered his tolerance for the twins.  Or maybe it was just everything in his life, combined with being expected to go back to work the day after Boxing Day only to spend all day minding the shop practically alone while the twins flitted in and out, each pretending to be the other and swearing that neither of them had left the shop at all.

Ron wondered how stupid they thought he was.  They couldn't really believe that he was fooled by the role-swapping trick - that one hadn't worked on anyone but Percy in years - but he was confident in assuming they had a pretty low opinion of him generally and of his intelligence in particular.  This wasn't the biggest problem he had with them, though.  He didn't really care what they thought of him.

Really, his biggest problem with them was the fact that they couldn't keep their opinion of him to themselves.  They particularly liked to pick at him about his sexual preferences and his relationship with Harry, and while he was prepared to tolerate this in private - he told himself he didn't care, so long as they kept paying him for the work he did - he was less prepared to put up with it when they did it in front of other people.  The twins liked their little jokes at his expense and they didn't mind cracking them for the amusement of their friends and customers.  According to Fred, this was all friendly "sales patter" and Ron was being entirely too sensitive and serious for his own good.  He needed to lighten up a bit.

Ron didn't feel like lightening up.  He'd put up with this sort of crap all through Christmas Day and Boxing Day and he hadn't seen his boyfriend since Christmas Eve.  He wasn't going to see Harry any time soon, in fact, as an owl had arrived only that morning to let him know that Harry and his father and uncles were all off on their travels again a little earlier than expected.  As usual, there was no fixed forwarding address for Ron to write to.  And the shop was gearing up for the post-Christmas sales and the rush of kids stocking up on jokes before they went back to Hogwarts, with most of the work being done by Ron because, of course, the twins weren't actually in the shop much, despite their pious assertions to the contrary.

So when Lee Jordan swaggered in halfway through the morning on New Year's Eve, accompanied by a couple of Fred and George's other cronies, and greeted Ron with the sarcastic words Hey flower, go tell the bosses we're here and show us a wiggle while you're at it, Ron felt he could be forgiven for inviting Lee to show the other customers in the shop his party trick - the one involving a broomstick handle, a tub of wand wax and some advanced physical contortions.  He even offered to lend him a broom especially for the purpose.

Apparently Fred and George didn't feel the same way, although Ron supposed that could have been because he hadn't exactly used the word lend when he'd presented Lee with the broom.  And, okay, maybe he had been a bit too forceful in the way he presented it.

Whichever way you looked at it, the upshot was that half an hour later Ron had hung up his apron in the storeroom for the last time and was perusing the jobs section of the Daily Prophet in Flourish & Blotts, with one eye on the listings and the other on the staff in case they caught him and demanded that he pay for the newspaper.  He was damned if he'd pay for this old rag unless there was at least one advert worthy of the Knuts.

Most of the jobs listed were either far beyond his range of experience or were lowly enough to cause him some serious heartburnings.  Not that there was anything fundamentally wrong with being a cleaner of any sort, but he suspected that being employed on the evening clean-up crew of any wizard pub would involve getting up close and personal with the (former) contents of other people's stomachs.  He wasn't ready for that level of menial labour yet.  The Pink Kneazle Wizards' Club wanted someone to perform basic maintenance on the club's fixtures and fittings, though, which might actually be interesting given what Ron had heard about the place.  The only problem was that what he'd heard about the club also made him suspicious of their management's ideas of "fixtures and fittings" and he'd want a clearer definition of what "basic maintenance" meant too.  Apart from that, most of the jobs listed involved more of what he'd been doing for the twins on similar sorts of money.  The only advantage to be had, so far as Ron could see, was that it meant not working for the twins.

Reluctantly, he forked out the required five Knuts for the newspaper and decided to blow another five on a cup of tea in the Sticky Bun Café while he weighed up the respective merits of the jobs on offer.

It made depressing reading and long after Ron had drained his cup of tea he finally came to the conclusion that his choices were pretty narrow.  If he tried to get a job similar to the one he had been doing, they would want references from the twins - well, any job would want that, but Ron had a gut instinct that the kind of references Fred and George would give him would not incline many shops to take him on.  Still - it had to be tried, so he circled a couple of relevant advertisements.

The alternative was some sort of cleaning job.  He ruled out four adverts on the grounds that they were clearly for house cleaners and anyone who wanted and could afford human servants had to be at the highest level of pureblood society.  Which meant that he had almost certainly shared a common room with someone in the family at some point over the past seven years, and he was not about to sweep floors for any of them.  That left an apothecary's shop in Knockturn Alley and two children's nurseries.  Ron thought it unlikely that the nurseries would be interested in a young male cleaner but he would try them anyway.  And he didn't particularly want to work for any apothecary, let alone one of the dodgy establishments of Knockturn Alley, but he supposed there were worse employers.

That left the maintenance position at the Pink Kneazle Club.  Ron stared at this for a while, the corner of his mouth twitching wryly, before finally drawing a question mark next to it.  It was tempting to apply just to find out what the work really involved, but he would be in a difficult position if they offered him the job and he didn't want to take it after all.  No, that one would be a last resort.

Given the state of his fortunes since leaving school, Ron later wondered why he hadn't just done himself a favour and applied for that one in the first place.

~~~

The job was, much to his surprise, just as the Club's owner described it in the advertisement.  He wanted someone to perform handyman duties, repairs, maintenance and so on, with little or no involvement in the business of the club.  The hours were a little odd, being from six pm to three am, but Ron didn't mind that as the money wasn't bad.  He was told there might also occasionally be the opportunity for extra hours subbing for one of the bouncers, which he immediately agreed to.  He reflected that it was odd that this was actually the best job offer he had received since he left school.

"Odd" then became his word of the week as he was handed over to the manager, a man called Petronius ("Call me Petro, love"), and shown what they considered to be 'maintenance'.  Petro was a man of  youthful appearance whom Ron suspected of being older than he looked; he was lightly built, in smart casual clothes that hugged his figure rather more than Ron himself would have been comfortable with, and had a hairstyle that probably took more than an hour and half a dozen charms to construct.  He was affable, however, and immediately took Ron on a tour of the premises to get an idea of what would be expected of him.

The Pink Kneazle Wizards' Club was not, despite its reputation, a brothel.  They held a licence from the Ministry for the provision of adult entertainment and to Ron's interest and amusement the definition of this was fairly broad, as Petro took some pains to explain.  Apparently, as long as there was no actual sexual intercourse taking place between the staff and patrons, a licence to provide "sexual services" wasn't required.  The Ministry's definition of 'sexual intercourse' was over four hundred years old and very narrow indeed, and to Ron's amazement it did not exclude an extraordinary range of other sexual services up to and including the patrons having sex with each other on the premises; it was this that made the Pink Kneazle Club the most whispered about establishment in wizarding Britain.

That and the fact that the Club only served men, of course.  None of the staff or patrons were female.

It was also highly exclusive.  Ron had got the impression from somewhere that it was a fair-sized business, but the very nature of the club - catering only for wizards of a certain persuasion - coupled with it being membership only, meant that the number of staff was fairly small.  In addition to the manager and Petro, there was a cook, a bartender, a waiter, two bouncers who worked alternate evenings, and two house-elves who did the cleaning.  Then there were the four 'hosts', individuals Ron was unlikely to have much contact with unless the club had, in Petro's words, "a particularly lively night".

All of this made Ron wonder why the club needed a full-time handyman.  It wasn't such a big place that they could need their drains unblocking or chandeliers fixing every day.  Then Petro showed him what the management meant by fixtures and fittings and Ron's education took a sudden leap in a new direction.

Yes, he would be expected to do all the usual handyman jobs - the drains, the lighting, ordinary basic maintenance work.  But he was also expected to effect repairs on the club's equipment, and while some of this was interesting in a more commonplace way - there was an entertainment area with a stage, stage furniture, special lighting and a sound system, for instance, all of which had to be in full working order at all times - there were also smaller rooms intended for private entertainment, and the fixtures in these were altogether more exotic.

There were plenty of people, including some of Ron's own family, who thought he had no sense of humour.  They were wrong; Ron had an excellent sense of humour, but the things he found funny didn't necessarily amuse everyone.  Once he realised the general shape of the things he was looking at, he found the club's "fixtures" very amusing indeed.  Especially the dungeon.

At one point during the tour he became aware that Petro was watching him very closely as he examined a set of complicated leather restraints.

"Bothered by any of this, love?" he wanted to know.

Ron shrugged.  "Nah.  It takes all sorts."

Petro's delicately plucked eyebrows arched upwards.  "If you don't mind me asking, what house were you in at Hogwarts?"

"Slytherin."

"Ah.  That explains a lot."

Ron wasn't sure what assumptions Petro was making about him, but he let it go.  Being judged on account of his school house always annoyed him, but he needed this job more than he needed to correct any misapprehensions his new employers might have.  Besides, he wanted to find out what some of the equipment was for and Petro seemed like his only source of information.

"You get many people wanting to be strapped up like this?" he asked, eyeing a device that he could only call, in the privacy of his own mind at least, a chastity belt.  Presumably it was meant for much the same purpose as the female kind, one of which he'd seen in a book once.  The one in the book hadn't included a set of chains that suspended the wearer three feet off the floor though.

"All of them," Petro said, and he looked amused when Ron turned wide eyes on him.  "Oh, some of them prefer soft restraints rather than these, but I don't think we have a single member at the moment who doesn't like to be restrained in some way, even if his more usual preference is for doing the restraining himself.  Genital restraint can be very stimulating if it's done properly.  Don't you think so?"

"Me?"  Ron shook his head and snorted.  "Not likely!  Nobody's tying me up and they'd better not try it on my tackle either."

"Well," Petro drawled, "you're quite young yet.  I don't suppose you know much about it."

"I know this kind of thing wouldn't do anything for me," Ron retorted.

"Just as well," Petro said, with a delicate shrug.  "The management has a very strict rule - no hanky-panky between the staff and the hosts.  Remember that, love.  That's why our last handyman got sacked."

"I've got a boyfriend," Ron told him rather gruffly, "and we don't share."

"How sweet for you.  All the same, be very careful around the hosts.  One of them's half-veela - you know about veelas I suppose?"

Ron was intrigued.  "Yeah, my brother had a girlfriend once who was part veela."

"Fuchsia's very friendly, if you take my meaning.  A nice boy like you could get himself into trouble."

"Fuchsia?"  He tried not to laugh.

"His professional name," Petro said primly.  "They all have them.  It makes it easier for them to have a normal life off-duty."

Ron wondered what a 'normal' life was for someone who provided kinky sexual services to rich gay wizards, but that was none of his business and he didn't dwell upon it.  They finished the little tour of the premises in the kitchen where he met the cook, a wizard in late middle age called Philip.  He was very fat and seemed friendly enough, telling Ron that he could always be sure of a cup of tea and biscuit in between jobs, but Ron wasn't stupid.  Philip had a career alcoholic's watery eyes and red nose, and Ron could tell by the glint in the man's eye that he would probably have to keep a sharp lookout around him.  Well, he'd had to learn how to deal with that kind of thing from Marcus Flint and others in Slytherin, so he was hardly going to make a fuss about it here.

"Watch your arse around him," Petro said casually, as he escorted Ron back to the manager's office to collect his cloak.  "He's grabby, especially when he's had a few."

"Yeah, I got that.  Will he leave off if I tell him to, or will I have to hex him?"

His equally casual tone surprised a laugh out of Petro.  "Smack his hands and tell him what a bad boy he is!  He loves that."

"Great," Ron said wryly.

~~~

Upon reflection, Ron decided not to tell anyone precisely where he was working.  When asked by his mother about the nature of his new job, he told her quite truthfully that he was doing maintenance work but he worded it generally enough that she was left with the impression that he was working for an ordinary nightclub, hence the odd hours.  He would tell Harry everything when he next saw him, he told himself, and they could have a good laugh together about it.  But no one else needed to know.

And for the first few evenings he might as well have been working at the Leaky Cauldron.  The jobs were all basic maintenance, including some emergency repairs to the gutters which had become blocked during bad weather and the replacement of squeaking hinges on three doors.  He had to rebuff Philip twice - once verbally and once more forcefully when the words weren't enough - but he told himself philosophically that this could have happened to him anywhere; Philip's sort turned up in all kinds of places.

On his fifth evening Ron finally met two of the hosts, Fuchsia and Achilles.

He was working on the charmed mechanism supporting a section of backdrop for the stage - a large two dimensional edifice painted to look like the banks of a lily-pond - when there was a tiny flutter of sound and he looked up.  And froze.

For a moment he felt sure it had to be a woman.  She was tiny and delicate and dressed in an elaborate gauzy costume designed to make her look like a dragonfly, but more than that she had obvious breasts - obvious because she was completely naked from throat to navel apart from a few sequins and some glittering body paint that seemed designed to draw attention to her bosom.  Her nipples, Ron couldn't help noticing, had been painted a deep metallic blue.

And she exuded sex like a thick cloud of perfume in a way that no ordinary woman could.  Just in time Ron remembered his first encounter with Bill's girlfriend Fleur and managed not to let this exotic creature capture his gaze with her dark oriental eyes, but it took a real effort.  He had known even at fourteen that he was gay and Fleur had still given him an embarrassing erection; he had more control of himself now, but even so he could feel himself blushing like a adolescent and breaking out into an uncomfortable sweat.

Then he got the second shock of his evening.

"Well hellooo," she purred, and the rich baritone voice revealed that this was no woman after all.

Ron had enough control that his gaze managed to skitter anywhere but over her - his - face, but he had to look; he couldn't help it.  Everything about the person in front of him screamed female - not least those perky breasts - but the voice was indisputably male.  Which of course he had to be, for there were no women at the Pink Kneazle Club.  Which meant that this had to be Fuchsia the half-veela host, Ron realised.  Petro's earlier warning suddenly seemed horribly inadequate.

"Er …"  Ron swallowed.  "Hi," he said weakly.  He made himself stand up and then wished he hadn't.  He was at least a foot taller than her.  Him.

"That's a very big … tool … you have there," Fuchsia crooned teasingly.

Ron started and realised that he was wringing a screwdriver between his hands nervously.  He put it down quickly.

"So who are you, handsome?"

It took two attempts to make his voice work and he was horrified to hear how hoarse it sounded.  "I'm, er, Ron.  The new handyman."

"I'll bet you are," Fuchsia said, and there was a hint of a laugh in that rich, almost absurdly deep voice.  "You look very handy to me, lovely.  Do you like them?"

"What?" Ron said, startled.

"My tits.  I saw you looking."  He cupped them in his hands - Ron saw that he had long fingernails painted the same colour as his nipples - and thrust them out a little.  "They're new!  I had a pair before but they were teeny tiny little things, so I got them plumped up yesterday.  My gentlemen like a pair of tits on a boy, it lets them tell themselves they're not really queer."  He looked expectantly at Ron, tilting his head a little, his dark eyes mischievous.  "Well?  What do you think?"

"Very nice," Ron managed.

Fuchsia pouted.  "Only 'nice'?  What's 'nice'?  Nice is a cream cake, lovely, not a pair of tits!  Come on - what do you think of them?  Take a good look," he coaxed wickedly.  When Ron found himself helpless to answer, he laughed throatily.  "Oh, aren't girl parts your thing?  Prefer a nice cock and balls, do you?  I've got those too if you fancy a look."

"Fuchsia, poppet, leave him alone," Petro said, bustling onto the stage with an armful of lacy green curtains.  "He has work to do, we open in half an hour, and if you want your set in working order you'll have to find someone else to play with."

Fuchsia pouted at Petro's retreating back.  Then he reached out and tickled under Ron's chin with a finger.  The long painted nail was very slightly scratchy.  "Come and see me after we close tonight if you want a look at the goods," he said in a confiding tone.  He winked one eye encrusted with sequinned false lashes and fluttered away.

Ron had to take a couple of deep breaths to restore his calm.  Then he turned around and nearly collided with a tall man.  He was muscular, bleach-blond and had a chiselled jawline that was set in a grim glare as he stared at Ron nose to nose.  It was fairly intimidating.  It would have been more intimidating if he hadn't been wearing a bright green grasshopper costume.

"You go near Fuchsia and I'll break every bone in your body," he said, planting a finger in the middle of Ron's chest.  The final absurdity from Ron's point of view was that he had a high, breathy voice like a teenaged girl's.

There was no point in getting into a quarrel with him though.  He still had more muscles than Ron did.

"I won't go near Fuchsia," Ron agreed.

"See that you don't.  Or you won't be so handy, man."

"Okay."

"Good."  The glare didn't go away, but its owner did; he stalked across the stage in Fuchsia's wake, still glowering over his shoulder at Ron all the way.

"That's Achilles," Petro said, pausing at Ron's shoulder with another armful of curtains.  "He and Fuchsia are our most popular double act.  Don't upset him, love - he's not too bright but he's very handy with his fists."  He gave Ron a knowing smile.  "I know Fuchsia hath charms to soothe many a masculine breast, but that's how your predecessor came a-cropper.  Fuchsia's too valuable to dismiss.  You're not."

"I'm not going near Fuchsia, don't worry," Ron said dryly.  Now that the dainty little host was out of sight he could breathe more easily.  "He's not my type."

"Ron, love, when he puts on the veela charm, he's everyone's type," Petro said frankly.  "Do yourself a favour and keep well out of his way.  Now help me hang these curtains, will you?  Tibby's waiting above the stage to catch them."

As he worked Ron reflected on how Harry could be more intriguing putting his clothes on than when he was shedding them.  Although either was equally enjoyable.  Without the veela's magical allure Fuchsia wouldn't have been remotely interesting to him.  It wasn't just the assumed femininity, but something more fundamental - every move made by the host was calculated, deliberate and affected, with the sole aim of capturing male attention, and not for his own gratification unless it was to satisfying some underlying vanity.  By contrast there was never any calculation or falsity in Harry; his sexual allure - which he had plenty of - lay in something that was simply and naturally him.  When he set out to seduce Ron he was doing it for their mutual pleasure.

But that, Ron supposed, was the difference between what was, after all, presumably just a business transaction for the host and a genuine relationship between two people.  He wondered if that line was so clear to the patrons of the Pink Kneazle.  Did they see it as straightforward payment for sexual services or were they in some way fooling themselves?  The trouble with someone like Fuchsia, he thought, was that the line between the two might easily become blurred, but perhaps under these circumstances that might not matter.

What little he had seen of the patrons so far did not incline Ron - still somewhat ignorant and youthfully intolerant - to view them with generosity.  They were old (older than him) and a bit desperate (closeted/married/disinclined to waste their time on a type of relationship they had little or no interest in) and probably more than a bit kinky (which was true), and consequently he thought that if Fuchsia and the others were playing them for fools, they only had themselves to blame.  In this he was largely mistaken, but he wasn't really in a position to realise it.

The Pink Kneazle had a routine.  On the three weekday nights that they were open, the first of the clientele would arrive between eight and nine o'clock when they would partake of drinks and, if desired, a light meal while a couple of the hosts entertained them with witty conversation.  Afterwards a variety of other entertainments were provided, involving the use of the dungeon and other themed rooms.  Throughout the evening other clients might arrive, some for short sessions while others stayed until well after midnight.  The club closed at two-thirty, giving Ron half an hour to make note of anything that would need repairing the following evening.  Saturdays and Sundays were "extravaganza" nights, when the hosts - notably Fuchsia and his swain Achilles - would put on a performance in the theatre room that often involved the clients themselves as participants.  Weekends were also 'party nights' when the clients might, if they wished, arrange for special entertainment for groups of their friends.  Said entertainment, as far as Ron could tell, involved a lot of semi-nudity and/or dressing up on everyone's part. 

It made him grateful that he worked behind the scenes.  Much of the time he would find a quiet corner and busy himself by giving his reparo charms a thorough workout on the vast array of equipment that got broken every evening.  Whips, chains, paddles, harnesses, collars, belts, masks, restraints of every conceivable type, and an unbelievable array of sex toys ... Ron found himself becoming jaded very quickly and contented himself with being grateful that everything was thoroughly cleaned before it was brought to him by one of the house-elves.

This had to be the only place in wizarding Britain where the house-elves wore discarded brass-studded leather masks as loin-cloths though.

"You're not very friendly, you know," Philip told him rather petulantly one Sunday evening. 

Ron was hiding in the kitchen for a change, mostly to get away from the noise (that night's extravaganza seemed to be based on a Muggle 'Wild West' idea, and it involved a lot of whooping and cheering, not to mention leather garments) but also to escape the image of a naked Achilles in a piebald body-paint job, four fake hooves and a tail.  Fuchsia, needless to say, had been dressed in skimpy pastel leather fringes, boots and a stetson - presumably as a cowgirl.  Ron didn't want to think too closely about what this implied.

"Yeah, I know," he replied calmly, although he was keeping a wary eye on the cook.  Philip was imbibing a little heavily already but it seemed to make him weepy rather than aggressive.  Weepy Ron could deal with and besides, he'd discovered that a little verbal brutality went a long way with Philip; the bloke really did get off on being told what a sad old pervert he was.  "Why should I bother being friendly with an old sot like you?"

"There's a lot of fun to be had around here if you're friendly," Philip retorted, but the gleam in his reddened eyeballs said that he liked Ron's cool tone.

"I'm not here for fun, am I?  I'm here to earn a few Galleons, that's all."  Ron held up a piece of equipment which seemed to be a gordian knot of fine twisted chains attached to five pieces of polished wood, each with a number of different sized holes in it.  He could tell which host this belonged to - Horus, the one with the beaky nose and enormous appendage.  He spent most of his working hours naked and trussed up in some way, and only the previous evening one of the locks securing his chain-mail corset to the wall had become jammed, necessitating Ron's assistance to release him.  This looked like more of the same and Ron sighed as he began to apply a detangling spell.

"Life isn't all about money," Philip said, sniffling dismally into his vodka-spiked coffee even as he eyed Ron greedily over the rim of the mug.

"Merlin!  Don't tell me again about that bloke who tied you up and left you."  That had been disturbing, although not as disturbing as the cook's offer to re-enact the incident.  "Come off it, Philip!  In your dreams, mate, in your dreams!"

"I can show you how he did it - "

"Forget it.  I'm not pathetic enough to need tying up to get my jollies, let alone the rest of it, you pervy old freak.  You'll just have to imagine it.  And don't start wanking again!  I've told you twice already; no wanking while I'm around.  You'll just have to hold it in until I'm finished here."

Philip whimpered and Ron rolled his eyes.  The chain was slowly unravelling itself, but revealing a lot of damage in the process.  He applied a strong reparo to it, link by link, then smoothed over some rough edges on the wood.  That done, he moved on to the next item - a dildo the size of a beater's bat made of a pale hardwood, highly polished, with a handle at one end shaped into finger-grooves.  Although the rest of the dildo was carved quite realistically to resemble the shaft of a penis, the head was shaped like a clenched fist, though not quite life-sized; stretching his imagination a little, Ron guessed that it was intended to give the visual impression of another sex act entirely.  As this was far from the strangest of the dildos he'd been expected to repair, his only thought was to wonder how it had been split from the tip down the base of the handle in the first place.  He applied more reparos and smoothing charms.

"That one can be fun," Philip said wistfully, watching him, "if the person holding it knows what he's doing ..."

"Not likely, I've seen you using a rolling pin," Ron said dismissively.  "Give it up, Philip, I'm not interested."

"You've got a lovely arse, young Ron."

"How would you know?  You've never seen it - it could have big hairy warts on it for all you know."  Philip groaned ecstatically.  "Merlin, you're a sick old bastard - "

One of the toys in the pile Ron had already mended - a string of horn beads charmed to jump and vibrate - suddenly broke free of the bag they were stored in and leapt across the kitchen.  Ron leapt after them, scrabbling on the floor as they twitched just out of reach of his fingers, and Philip finally lost the battle with his self-control.  He tried to pounce - it was more of a drunken lurch - and Ron, who'd been expecting something like this for the last twenty minutes, dodged him easily.  He smacked the cook's knuckles with the wooden dildo.

"Cut it out!  No grabbing!"

Philip yelped and retreated behind the kitchen table again, rubbing his hand.

"Ron, we need you upstairs," Petro said, appearing in the doorway.  He was wearing close-fitting black trousers, a white shirt, black waistcoat and dickie-bow, and a well-fitted black frock coat; his usual weekend 'uniform'.  "One of the customers is stuck in a belt."

"Great," Ron said dryly.

"Come along, dearie, we don't want his tackle dropping off.  This particular gentleman needs his balls where they are, because I'm sure his wife has a clause in their Pre-Nup giving her first chop at them."

Ron grinned.  Petro had a biting sense of humour and no illusions about the clientele.

"He's in the tank too," he added.  "Wouldn't want him to drown, would we?"

Ron sighed and began to roll up his sleeves.  The "tank" was a speciality of the fourth host known as Triton.  He provided water-sports for his clients.

In the background Philip moaned in a rather moist way and Petro shot him a sharp look.   "Not in the kitchen, Philip!"

~~~

In some ways Triton disturbed Ron more than Fuchsia did.  He was tall and slender, with pale blue eyes, and he used a depilating charm of some kind to remove all of his body hair, including his eyebrows and the hair on his head.  He was also tattooed all over (which Ron thought might be faked with a charm) to make it look as though he was covered in fish-scales.  Ron didn't think the overall effect was at all pleasing to look at, but there were several regular customers who apparently felt differently.  Triton and his games were quite popular.

He used a room on the upper floor that was fitted out with sand several inches deep on the floor, silvery draperies hanging from the ceiling and murals of stylised marine scenes on the walls.  There were long glass tubes in the corners, brightly lit and filled with water, gauzy weed fronds and tiny colourful fish, and the lighting in the room was very subtle, carefully arranged to produce an odd underwater effect that was magnified by small but cleverly placed mirrors about the room.

There was also a large clear glass tub - more of a tank, which was how most of the staff referred to it - that took up a good half of the room.  The rim was chest height on Ron and when the bubble charms were operating (the tank could function as both a hot and cold tub) anyone within three feet of it got an impromptu shower.

This did not bother Ron.  What bothered him were the contraptions attached to the tank and hanging above it, most of which he still hadn't worked out the exact purpose of.  There were a lot of chains and things cushioned with rubber.  The prevalence of manual restraints in a wizard sex club perplexed Ron at the best of times; he had come to the conclusion that people must like the feel and sound effects of them, since charms would surely be more efficient.

Triton's client was suspended from the ceiling above the tub at roughly a 45 degree angle by his wrists and ankles, although he was wearing a wide, stiff leather 'belt' attached to a chain on a pulley above that supported most of his weight, avoiding injuries and excessive discomfort.  He also wore what Ron had come to consider the "usual" range of little clamps and other devices designed to stimulate him plus an elaborate cock-ring of a type Ron didn't know the name for but which looked eye-wateringly painful. 

Triton, ever the professional, continued to chastise his customer as Ron and Petro slipped into the room, hissing insults and applying the little three-pronged implement he was named for to the man's buttocks, making him yelp and sob.  Petro had explained the exact nature of the problem to Ron before they entered the room and he scooted around the side of the tub to get a look at the jammed pulley on the ceiling.  The customer was blindfolded with a half-face mask and probably unaware of his presence under the circumstances.

It looked to Ron as though something - perhaps a shred of rubber - had become stuck in the pulley.  Fortunately he was just over six feet tall and the side of the tub had a wide, flat ledge that he could stand on.  He took his shoes and socks off and pulled himself up there, standing gingerly on the wet ledge.  He did not want to end up in the tub with the customer.

There was definitely something stuck in the pulley.  Ron took his wand out and pantomimed to Triton and Petro that he needed them to lift the client on charms to take the weight off the contraption while he freed it, and in the process he happened to glance down.

Only seven years of conditioning in Slytherin prevented him losing his poise - and his footing - in that moment.

The customer had long, white-blond hair which Ron had failed to notice until then because of the odd lighting in the room.  He also had translucently pale skin and a tattoo of a family crest on one toned shoulder that Ron had seen before; the tattoo he had seen on someone else, but in any case he would have known this man's hair for he'd once met him.

Well well!  Wasn't this interesting?  Of all the places Ron had never expected to find Draco Malfoy's father, this - and this scenario in particular - had to be close to the top of the list.  Mr. Ministry-Man-and-all-round-politically-savvy-Lucius-Malfoy in wizarding Britain's most notorious gay club, chained up with his tackle tied into knots and begging a tattooed bruiser to jerk him off …

A poisonous little thought intruded as he blanked his face and concentrated on working the fragment of rubber free of the pulley: Dad would love to hear about this.

Lucius Malfoy was the bane of Arthur Weasley's life and probably the cause of him being sidelined into a nonentity post like the Office for Misuse of Muggle Artefacts instead of him still being a respected official in the Department of Magical and Muggle Relations.  When Ron had been very young Malfoy had been head of the department over Arthur Weasley; he'd since moved on and even now was lobbying to become the next Minister of Magic, but at the time he'd clashed constantly with Arthur over policy, resulting in Arthur's demotion.

Malfoy took his anti-Muggle position on a policy line that emphasised the differences between the two communities and the need to maintain distance between them, ostensibly to protect both cultures.  There was also a strong thread of morality running through everything he said, subtly pointing up the perceived laxness of Muggles in this area and playing to wizard fears of "Muggle morals" infecting their own society.

Only a few short years ago Ron would not have questioned this line of thinking, for it was a popular one among the pureblood members of Slytherin and Malfoy's particular way of voicing it to the public put it in an attractive and logical way.  It was only when Harry had started pointing up the flaws in the arguments - Harry, who was half Muggleborn and had been brought up by a part of the wizard community that bore less than zero resemblance to the society Malfoy painted for his listeners - that Ron had started to realise what was really going on.

Not that he had ever held any kind of brief for Lucius Malfoy and his manifesto.  He could have been postulating an ideal future for their community by anyone's standards and Ron would not have supported him.  Unlike many Slytherins, his loyalty to his family outweighed other considerations.

So here was Lucius Malfoy, the great moralist and married family man, availing himself of sexual services that he happily condemned in the press as the kind of perversion only Muggles could conceive of.

Even if Ron told him, Arthur Weasley would never make use of this information though.  His own moral standards - far more stringent and genuine than Malfoy's - would never permit it.  He would be angry and disapproving, and he would bottle up those feelings until they choked him.  Thinking about it, Ron suspected that Bill, Charlie and certainly Percy would all be opposed to blatantly exposing the man too.  Aside from anything else, there was the question of how it would be done; Ron was a witness, of course, but evidence would be needed and it would bring an unpleasant and possibly counter-productive attention to bear on the club, not to mention Ron himself and his family. 

Perhaps public exposure wasn't the way to go.  The two members of Ron's family that he knew would be quite willing to make use of the information about Malfoy would employ far more insidious means, and that attracted him if for no other reason that it would make Malfoy suffer in the process.

The bit of rubber finally freed itself and the pulley was working again.  Ron climbed down from the tub and pulled his shoes and socks on, Triton got back to business and Petro hustled Ron outside quickly.

"Did you recognise that client?" he asked, and his eyes were very sharp on Ron's face as they skirted around the theatre room.  Inside, Fuchsia was riding Achilles in a way that real cowboys probably wouldn't approve of.

Ron gave Petro a studiously indifferent look.  "Didn't look - it was just another idiot with his balls in a clamp.  I'd rather not recognise the customers if I run into them in Diagon Alley when I'm out with my mum, thanks very much."

"Really?  Just as well, love, there's a clause in your contract about client anonymity."

Ron knew there was.  He wasn't sure how good a form of protection for the club that would be if a member of staff decided to out politicians to the press though.

"Like I said, I didn't look," he said, and he went back to the kitchen to finish his other repairs.

~~~

The following day was Monday and one of Ron's nights off so he had dinner at home with his parents.  It was now three weeks since he'd started work at the Pink Kneazle and he'd had a few tricky moments when either his mother or father asked questions about his job that he wasn't sure how to answer, but that night was the most difficult.  No one asked awkward questions, no one asked flat-out which club he was working at (which hadn't happened yet, but he lived in anxiety that they would), but the Lucius Malfoy episode was now on his mind constantly and Ron hadn't decided what to do.

Watching his father that evening, listening to him talk and laugh about his work, was a tortuous experience.  It was very much Ron's nature to brood upon injustices; being sacked by the twins for example, especially after the way they'd treated him, still rankled.  This was different, however.  This was something that had been done to his father, someone Ron loved and respected, which had impacted upon their whole family and was still impacting upon it in some ways.  That he now possessed a piece of knowledge which could potentially right the wrongs done to his family, and - even more potentially - enact an epic revenge upon their wrongdoer, was heady stuff for a nineteen year old.

And Ron was human enough to admit to himself that it was a terrifying position to be in.  He was what he was, after all, and revenge was a deeply attractive prospect.  But he wasn't interested if in the process his family suffered for it.  Perhaps this had been the difference between him and his siblings that made it possible for him to be Sorted into Slytherin when they had all been Gryffindors.  He didn't believe there was one of them who wouldn't want revenge upon Lucius Malfoy.  The twins would even do it, he knew, regardless of the consequences.  But Ron hadn't been the Hogwarts Chess Champion for five years in a row by failing to look three or four moves ahead in every game, and he knew that if he used the information against Lucius Malfoy in any way, he couldn't be sure of controlling the outcome sufficiently.  There wasn't a 'safe' strategy for doing so.  Even allowing Malfoy to know that he, Ron Weasley, knew his dirty little secret wasn't safe.  It could rebound upon Ron all too easily.

Perhaps it was just as well that the twins hadn't come to dinner that evening.  The temptation to simply 'give' them the information and wash his hands of the matter would have been irresistible.

"All right, old son?" his father asked him kindly.  "You're quiet tonight.  Everything all right at work?"

Ron made an effort to pull himself together, to relax and smile at his father.  "Yeah, it's not too bad, thanks, Dad."

"Not working you too hard, are they?  Treating you all right?"

"They're fine, really."  And that was true; he had no complaints about his employers at all.

"Ah well, so long as you're happy."  Arthur smiled and