“Unhand me, Potter,” Draco ordered. “You utter, utter pratly prat. Release me from your frankly suspicious tight grasp. I wish to go to Hermione. She likes me. She’ll let me watch my soaps and listen to my music and she won’t poison me.”
Harry Potter, the hero who conquered the Dark Lord and yet who could not obey simple instructions, kept a tight hold on Draco.
“I don’t trust you,” he whispered. “But I’ll do what Ron wants.”
“Potter, your slavery to the Weasley wiles does no credit to your taste. And what’s the matter with you, you mad paranoid bastard? You don’t trust me? I’m an itty, bitty rat. What are the chances that one of Weasley’s pets is going to turn evil?”
Just for that, he was peeing in Potter’s underwear drawer.
Oh no, he hadn’t just had that thought. He was going totally rodent. No matter how pathetic Voldemort’s plans for vengeance on Harry Potter were, that had never even been on the list. Malfoys had far too much dignity to ever think about using their enemies’ chest of drawers as toilets.
Oh, yes, fine, always excepting Uncle Ethelfride.
Draco tried to crush the image of Voldemort perching on Potter’s chest of drawers and having a pee into the Boy Who Lived’s boxer shorts.
While he was occupied with that, Hermione came flying down from the stands.
“Is he all right?” she demanded.
“Oh, y—” began Harry.
“He looks all right,” Hermione said. “Oh, diddums, did you get hurt? Speak to your Aunty Hermione. I was so scared when you fell.”
“Are you talking to me, woman?” Draco inquired, scandalised.
“Are you talking to the rat, Hermione?” Potter demanded, equally scandalised.
Hermione flushed. “He’s the sweetest thing,” she said defensively.
“I am not,” Draco replied grumpily. “I just have amazing sexual allure. Or, well, in my current state—animal magnetism.”
“I’ll take him,” Hermione proposed. “Parvati and Lavender adore him anyway. I’d love to have him. He’ll like catching up on his soaps.”
“No, no,” Potter the prat said. “Ron told me to look after him and I will.”
Hermione looked crestfallen. “But, Harry… I don’t think Fluffy likes you.”
“You are a woman of great perception and intelligence,” Draco informed her. “Your keen wit drives me to frenzied heights of admiration. Now hit this idiot with a Bludger, hide him behind the Hufflepuff stands and make off with me to your tower.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Harry exclaimed. “Has everyone but me gone mad? It’s not like this rat is a person!”
With that, he stormed off.
Draco was carried away, protesting violently.
Oh, would the indignities never end?
As Potter entered the Gryffindor common room, that Gina Weasley girl lifted her head. Nothing new there, of course, the Weasleys’ youngest hope was like a shark. She could detect a trace of Potter at fifty paces.
“Hi Harry!” she said brightly, bobbing up and down in his path.
“Hi Ginny,” responded Potter, with the boyish I’m-such-a-good-guy-join-my-fan-club smile Draco loathed.
Hang on a second, Gina’s name was Ginny? Bugger it. Next someone’d be telling him that the Weasley twins weren’t called Fred and Greg.
“How’s Ron?” she asked in a whisper.
“Oh, like you care,” said Draco. “You just want to snuggle up and whisper with Potter. And you’re not doing it right. You’re attractive enough, if the guy’s into redheads, but everybody likes a challenge. Talk about Seamus Finnigan.”
Ginny put her head to one side, as if she was considering something.
“Ron will be fine,” said Harry, with his equally detestable I’m-so-decent-are-you-in-distress-damsel? smile. Ginny Weasley gave him an innocent and charming smile.
“I’m so glad Ron has a friend like you, Harry. You’re so… reliable.” The dismissive tone of her voice was clear. “Say, have you seen Seamus? Now, he played a great game. A Chaser’s such a dynamic thing to be, don’t you think?”
She flitted away. Draco looked after her with approval.
Bright girl. Good instincts. Pity they were all so clueless up here in Gryffindor, they had a lot of potential. It had to be the height of the tower, he reflected. High altitude—a high standard of morals.
Morals got in the way of successful sexual expeditions. Still, Draco was amazed that all the Gryffindors were this innocent. Blaise Zabini had been cutting a swathe through the school, boys round the clock and girls during that week around full moon.
Potter was gaping after the Ginny girl.
“Don’t worry, Potter,” Draco said. “I think Finnigan’s seeing Lavender Brown. And if he’s not, whoops, too bad… Heh heh heh.”
Ooooh, this might be fun.
“I always knew you’d be insufferably boring,” Draco informed Potter. “Sitting and brooding beside the window for five whole hours, why, you must be a smash hit at parties. You madly dull bastard.”
Potter was sitting beside the window with a big book in his lap. He had not opened it, he was just staring into the spectacularly uninteresting greyness.
Draco was investigating Potter’s stuff.
He had already done a stint hiding under the Invisibility Cloak, running around with it flying behind him, shrieking, “I am SuperDraco!” He had disarranged Potter’s socks and looked at the few pictures on Potter’s desk.
“Mother was a redhead, eh? Ginny Weasley’s in luck if you have an Oedipus complex,” he had prattled idly to himself. “That’s a nice picture of Hermione. Bloody awful one of Ron, his eyes match his hair. Why on earth do you have a picture of a dog, it looks like a Grim, I’d have nightmares. Not that you probably don’t have nightmares anyway, all that frightening stuff happening to you—You Know Who after you, Death Eaters cursing your name, Millicent Bulstrode having the hots for you…”
Now Draco was gingerly investigating under Potter’s bed. The boy was a secret slob—wrinkled bits of parchment, screwed-up copies of that most hilariously excellent paper, the Daily Prophet, odd socks and fluff galore lurked there. There was also a picture lying in the fluff, in a cheap frame. Draco wondered if it was a secret love.
He went and took a peek, screamed on a very high note and hit Potter’s lap at a run.
“Agh oh my God it’s horrible horrible I tell you! Some pink, bloated, dreadful THING, staring at me with awful piggy eyes, yes, it was like a pig in a wig FROM HELL, it wasn’t human surely it wasn’t human it’s too disgusting I feel sick!”
Potter petted him (oh the shame!), seeming slightly amused.
“There there Fluffy. Did the picture of Dudley frighten you?”
“What’s a Dudley?” Draco asked suspiciously. “Potter, that isn’t a secret lover, is it? Because if it is, and this is the last time I will EVER say this to you, you could do better! Hagrid could do better!”
“I bet all of your relatives look handsomer than that,” Harry continued absently.
“That’s a relative?” Draco choked. “Oh, Potter, I’m so magically magnifying that and hanging it over the Gryffindor table.”
Mind you, Potter was right. All of Draco’s relatives were a lot handsomer than that. Narcissa Malfoy, of course, as your token trophy wife, was gorgeous and it ran in her family. His father was good-looking in a cold bastard way—and you knew it ran in his family.
Even Uncle Ethelfride had been handsome, apart from the manic look in his eyes and aside from the purple clown pants.
“I have better looking relatives, though,” Harry continued, and opened his book.
Inside were more pictures of his dead parents. Blah, blah, blah. Quit brooding about it, Potter, what are you, Mr Billowing Robe o’Pain™?
Draco, supremely uninterested, was about to scurry off and continue his quest for Potter’s secret steroids stash when something wet plopped onto his fur.
Draco stared.
Harry Potter was crying.
Oh, no. Look, whoever was in charge of the world, they were getting it wrong. Harry Potter wasn’t supposed to cry, he was supposed to smile that trademark well-flossed and heroic and nauseating smile, or at least frown that I-must-battle-the-forces-of-evil-and-Malfoy-that-means-you frown. He wasn’t supposed to actually feel for his parents, he was supposed to secretly glory in his own celebrity and smugly wallow in everyone’s adulation. He was supposed to love this.
He was still crying.
And Draco, to his horror, felt some kind of… disgusting… sick-making… squishy and distinctly unnatural feeling stir inside him.
It was almost as if… oh God no… he felt sorry for Potter.
Whoever was in charge of the world, he was clearly taking the day off.
Potter had to stop crying. Then, he’d stop feeling sorry for him, and the world could get back to being less like a bad trip.
“Come on now, it’s not that bad,” Draco said briskly. “Chin up. Buck up. Shut up.”
Potter did not seem noticeably comforted, and Draco, not quite believing he was doing this, rubbed his head against Potter’s sleeve.
“Think cheery thoughts,” he offered. “You’re rich and famous. You’re a total teachers’ pet. Ahhh… A nubile redhead wants to shag you?”
Potter sniffed, and petted Draco.
“Thought that’d do the trick.”
“Oh, hey,” said Harry. “You’re actually kind of nice, aren’t you?”
“No! And don’t think you’re getting around me that way.”
Harry stood up. “Let’s go and get you some coffee.”
Oh damn it, now Potter knew his secret weakness. How was he supposed to resist?
“You sneaky bastard!”
God, was he supposed to like Potter now? Feck it, next he was going to be filled with admiring respect for Longbottom.
Still, while the going was caffeinated…
“Triple espresso, please.”
Ron got out of the infirmary quite soon this time, and he was delighted to discover Harry’s new attitude to his pet.
“I guess he feels bad about Cho,” he whispered to Draco.
“Don’t be absurd, Weasley,” Draco said grumpily. “He simply fell prey to my irresistible charms. It was bound to happen. It had nothing to do with you or your girlfriend.”
Ron and Cho kept eyeing each other from a distance. It was all quite painfully absurd. Draco had gotten quite a bit more action in his time without a quarter of the bother.
But if you were silly enough to go around getting emotionally attached to women, that was the kind of thing you had to put up with. Draco had decided at age three not to get over-fond of anyone, and it had served him well.
Draco’s broomstick of thought was blown off the Quidditch course by the sight of Hermione and Harry, racing towards him.
The jolt of pleasure he felt surprised him.
Then Hermione’s progress was halted by a small boy barrelling into her and knocking all the breath out of her.
Actually, Draco recognised him. It was Edmund Baddock, wasn’t it, Malcolm’s little brother.
He was in first year, and he was currently looking mutinous and generally unpleasant as Hermione gasped,
“Do you mind apologising?”
His black eyes narrowed.
“Do you mind watching where you’re going—Mudblood?”
Uh-oh, Draco thought. Hermione had once slapped him. Edmund Baddock was small enough for her to kick around like a Muggle ball. She had a wicked temper on her sometimes. Who knew what she was going to do?
She burst into tears.
Ron and Harry had taken charge of the situation, seized Hermione’s elbows and marched her up to the Gryffindor common room. Then they had sat her down, fetched her hankies and tea, put Draco in her lap and were looking at her appealingly.
“I’ll kill him if you like,” Ron offered desperately.
“Someone do something,” Draco urged. “She’s leaking again… and urgh, I’m getting all soggy.”
“Why are you even upset?” Harry burst out. “He’s nothing, he doesn’t count, he’s just a stinking Slytherin…”
Hermione actually sobbed.
“Stop it!” she shouted. “You can’t say that!”
Harry, Ron and Draco sat stunned and silent.
“Oh God,” said Hermione. “It’s just that… It’s just that, don’t you see, there it is. There’s the cycle of hatred. It ends in things like the Ku Klux Klan—”
“The what?” chorused Draco and Ron.
“And Voldemort,” she continued. “And it starts here, with people like us, in a school. Among contemporaries. Children spout what adults tell them, they say “Mudblood” or “stinking Slytherin” and then they hate each other, and then they grow up and kill each other, and nobody ever thinks!”
Ron waved a hanky, in the same way as a mother might wave a spoon loaded with food in front of a baby and go, “Here comes the choo-choo!”
“That kid won’t listen to me,” Hermione said. “And I bet his yearmates hate him, and hit him, and he hates and hits them back, just like we always hated Malfoy and his crowd, just like all Gryffindors do.”
“Steady on now,” Draco protested. “Half the Gryffindors seem to be lusting after me, remember? I doubt they want me chained up and punished—unless they’re more kinky than I ever gave them credit for.”
“But Malfoy’s Bubotuber pus,” Ron objected.
“Oh, thank you very much.”
“You see?” said Hermione. “We all hate each other, and that’s where it leads to. You start out with ignorant kids spouting what they’ve been taught and we never show them they’re wrong, and we all hate each other, and it ends in blood. Harry, you told me Hagrid said Slytherins were worse than the other houses, you heard him say that all the Malfoys were rotten.”
“You know, he’s been biased since that tiny incident with Uncle Ethelfride and his dog. Oh, and since my father had him thrown in Azkaban.”
Hermione just looked pale and rather sick now.
“We never corrected him, did we? We got angry about other people’s prejudices, we never worried about our own, and… we’re all almost as bad as each other.”
“We never started with Malfoy the way he started with us!” Harry exclaimed.
“We never stopped either!” Hermione yelled. “And no, I don’t like any of the Slytherins, I think they’re ignorant gits, but how are we supposed to let this continue? Isn’t there someone, anyone, we could have proved to that… that…”
Her head was in her hands now.
“That I don’t believe all of them are supposed to be evil,” she whispered. “Then maybe there are some of them who would have rethought the belief that Muggleborn are scum. Oh, isn’t there some way to challenge all this endless hatred?”
There were so few people who would have cried over this, Draco thought. But Hermione was smart, and Hermione saw things that other people did not and tried to make things right, and… made some very good points.
“We don’t even see each other as people anymore,” she said in a low voice. “Is there a single Slytherin in Hogwarts who would care if they saw me crying?”
“I care,” said Draco.
Oh, bugger me! He was in even more trouble than he had thought.