Ron and Harry came to a skidding halt outside the room where Draco had Colin cornered.
“Draco!” Harry panted. “Think. Consider. Pause. Reflect.”
Draco thought this was rich, coming from a Gryffindor.
Nevertheless, he took a deep calming breath.
Then four more.
“You’re right, Harry,” he conceded. “I will.”
Harry and Ron breathed sighs of relief.
“After I kill him,” Draco resumed.
“Nonono! You mustn’t!” Ron seized his arm. “What makes you think that Colin did it anyway?”
At this point, Colin Creevey’s reedy little voice piped up.
“Because I did!”
Harry blinked. “Oh. Well—that seems conclusive, yeah.”
“I am about to conclude his life!” Draco shouted. “Push off, Weasley. Go take your morals where they’re wanted, I happen to be allergic. Now, where was I? Oh yes—Prepare your last words, Creevey!”
“Eeep!”
Harry seized Draco’s other arm.
“Now I’m sure Colin has an explanation,” he said soothingly.
“For trying to kill me?!”
“We all have our off days.”
“I don’t have homicidal lunatic days!” Draco paused to mull this one over. “Or if I do, it’s not the point in question.”
“I am not a lunatic!”
Creevey claimed this, and yet he kept talking back to an evidently enraged Slytherin.
It just didn’t seem convincing.
“I am merely choosing the side of the greatest strength,” Colin proceeded. “The Dark side is clearly the most powerful.”
“Would that be because he was beaten by a baby, or that children successfully foil him at every turn?” Harry mused. “Wait, sorry. You were saying?”
“All my life I’ve been fascinated by—power,” Colin said. “I worshipped yours for a time, Harry Potter.”
Draco rolled his eyes. “We know, your creepy crush was the talk of the school.”
“But even Valentines failed to win your attention—”
“That was you?” Harry said. “Ew!”
“Can I kill him now?” Draco demanded.
“No!” said Ron.
“Maybe,” said Harry.
Colin continued with his rant. Evil people were always just dying to tell people their nefarious plans.
Draco didn’t get it. They were never getting a confession out of him unless they brought back the rack.
“So I moved on to bigger game…”
“Please not Dumbledore,” Ron breathed. “Don’t tell me you sent Valentines to Dumbledore!”
“No, the Dark Lord,” Colin snapped. “Have you been not paying attention at all? This is my wicked plot here.”
“Sorry. Right. It’s just the girls are having aerobics right outside that window. There’s a lot of lycra and—no. Go on. Really. I’m listening.”
“Well, the Dark Lord was pleased to accept my offers of devotion,” Colin said.
“And your Valentines?” Draco asked, lifting an eyebrow. “‘Roses are red, your eyes are too, Death we eat and—?’”
“Could you people please stop interrupting?” Colin complained. “This is serious, you know!”
“Hm. Oh, yes. I agree with you completely,” said Harry, who was looking out the window.
“I wished to gain access to the innermost Circle, and thus to be nearer my Lord. So I decided to barter for favours with the son of one of his most influential Death Eaters.”
“Hang on, kidnapping someone’s child means you get put into a position of trust and power?” Harry asked.
Draco shrugged. “Pretty standard, really.”
“And people wonder why Evil Empires fall…”
“Since the son tends to be a little violent and unstable in his natural form, I decided to transform him into a more natural shape.”
“Violent and unstable? Violent and—I’ll give you violent and unstable, you little pipsqueak, I’ll give you violent and unstable right up the—”
“Come on, Draco,” Ron said. “You have to admit he has a point.”
Draco subsided. “Well, yes. But I’m still insulted, dammit! I have feelings.” He got blank, incredulous stares from all sides. “I could have feelings,” he added peevishly. “If I wanted to, I could.”
“It was difficult,” Colin told them all loudly. “I had to use great cunning. I had to seduce Blaise Zabini.”
Draco rolled his eyes again. “Boldly going where many men, women and household pets have gone before.”
“I had to find out her Potions knowledge, and convince her to slip the Potion into your beaker. Little did she know that I had altered it, so the time limit on it was indefinite. She thought it was a mere joke!”
Colin went off into a peal of wicked, theatrical laughter.
Everyone stood and looked at him until he stopped.
“It was a very cunning plan,” he said defensively. “Except then he bit me. And then Ron picked him up, and then all my devilish ploys to get him back, like setting Crabbe and Goyle on Ron and—”
“Maybe you can kill him after all,” Ron mused.
“Er, well, they didn’t work,” Colin finished hastily. “I sneaked into the sixth year dormitory once, but he was sleeping with Hermione that night. So I merely paused to get a few photos of Harry slumbering, and left.”
“Oh, this is nasty,” wailed Harry.
“Why didn’t you just go into the girls’ dorms and nick me?” Draco inquired.
“Malfoy,” Colin said reproachfully. “I realise that I am a minion of darkness, but sneaking into the girls’ dorms at night is just plain wrong.”
Harry and Ron nodded, looking shocked.
Draco was never going to understand Gryffindors.
“And then Ron performed the reversal of the charm, in the Sleeping Beauty style—”
“Please skip ahead,” Ron said.
“Well, I knew I had to dispose of Malfoy before he found out that it was me. I could not risk discovery, so I decided to kill him. But that plot was foiled too.”
Harry looked mildly puzzled. “If escaping discovery was so important, why have you just told us everything?”
Colin blinked.
“Oh yeah. Bugger.”
“Okay,” Draco said briskly. “Now that that’s settled, and everyone is convinced of his guilt, I shall just painfully torture Creevey to an agonising death and it’s all over, no hard feelings, no harm done.”
“No, you can’t!” Ron cried. “Harry, back me up here! It would be wrong.”
“Yeah… wrong,” Harry repeated, looking a bit wistful.
“I happen to know he took photos of you that Millicent Bulstrode bought and keeps in a special collection,” Draco tempted him.
“No, no,” Harry said, getting a grip on his heroic self. “We have to take him to Dumbledore.”
“And he’ll what, give him a detention?” Draco yelped. “No! I want to kill him! I want revenge! I’m a Malfoy, I want blood! Give me… blood… damn you, Gryffindors… blood… blood…”
“Is he always like this?” Colin asked apprehensively.
“Worse in the mornings, when he hasn’t had coffee,” Harry said. “But don’t worry, little evil minion. We won’t let him hurt you.”
Draco struggled and tried to bite. It was quite an effort to restrain him.
As Seamus trailed home disconsolately from the infirmary, he was presented with the spectacle of a biting sweaty Draco being pinioned by two struggling boys, and Colin Creevey trailing after them like a whipped slave child.
He spent the rest of the day with his head under the blankets.
Dumbledore was quite startled when Ron and Harry came barrelling into his office, frogmarching Draco like a prisoner of war between them.
“What has Mr Malfoy done?” he inquired mildly.
“Nothing!” Draco howled in disgust.
Dumbledore looked at Harry inquiringly.
“He’s telling the truth, sir,” Harry said.
“Really? How… unexpected.”
Draco yanked his arms out of the Gryffindor grip.
“It was Colin Creevey!” he declared passionately. “He tried to kill me! He tried to poison my coffee, he put fur on my beautiful beautiful face! I demand that he be expelled, I demand that he be punished, I demand that he be killed until he is sorry!”
Dumbledore put down his quill and looked past the irate blond.
“Where is Mr Creevey?”
Harry and Ron cast a frantic look behind them.
“Er,” Harry said. “He was here just a minute ago…”
“To tell you the truth, sir,” Ron put in, “we were a bit occupied with Draco…”
“You let him get away?” Draco howled. “You total, utter, complete wankers! You—you bloody Gryffindors!”
“Don’t listen to him, sir,” Harry said.
“Yeah,” Ron agreed, “yeah, he’s overwrought…”
“I am not overwrought! I am completely on top of wrought!” Draco snapped. “You two should have been drowned at birth! And you—you—why don’t you get the Aurors, there’s a murderer on the loose, you senile old… mphmphmph…”
Harry, with great presence of mind, had leaped on Draco’s back and clapped a hand over his mouth.
“He’s just feeling a bit delicate today,” he explained hastily, as Draco foamed at the mouth and tried to strangle him. “When you get to know him, he’s really quite—Ron, help me!”
Ron jumped into the fray. The boys wrestled down the viciously struggling Slytherin. Mumbled words about blood were escaping between Harry’s fingers and at one point Draco almost heaved himself up and they fell in a jumble of limbs and virulent curses.
Dumbledore quietly cleaned his glasses.
“Draco!” Ron yelped. “Be calm and we can stop Colin escaping!”
Draco wasn’t listening. He seemed to be trying to rip Ron’s arm off instead.
“Draco!” Harry pleaded. “You’re messing up your hair!”
Draco went still.
”…Really?” he asked in a small voice.
“No,” Harry said, softening. “I just said it to hurt you.”
”…My hair’s okay?”
“Er—yeah. Will you be good now?”
“Ha! You wish.”
“What Harry meant was, will you try not to rip off our limbs?”
“I can’t promise anything…” Draco mumbled mutinously.
“For the next five minutes?”
“Ah—yeah, all right. Get off me, both of you.”
Everybody stood up.
Draco crossed his arms and looked distinctly sulky.
“Now begone, incompetent buffoons,” he commanded. “You have failed me and I am most seriously displeased.”
“Sorry about him, sir,” Harry said. “He forgets people aren’t house elves.”
“Don’t talk back!” Draco snapped. “Letting Creevey go, you imbeciles, leave this room at once or it’s your ears in the oven door! Go on, I mean it. Out of my sight!”
Dumbledore tactfully motioned them out.
When the door closed, Draco turned his gaze on his headmaster. He narrowed his eyes and pretended that he was a disobedient house elf with an unusual growth of beard.
“It’s nice to see that you’re getting on well with the Gryffindors,” Dumbledore told him amicably.
“Oh yes, let’s please talk about my social life rather than pursuing the criminal,” Draco said sourly.
“I just like to see that you’re making friends,” Dumbledore said placidly.
“And probably getting disinherited in the process,” Draco added morosely. On balance, he would rather have been tortured a bit. “Why all this concern for me? Trust me, you’d be better off keeping Harry as your golden boy. I’m not even a gold-plated boy.”
Dumbledore smiled.
“Well, we’re practically family. Or hadn’t you heard? My brother Aberforth and your uncle Ethelfride have set up house together. I believe the wedding will be in the summer.”
Few things could make Malfoys forget about murderous rage.
This was one of them.
“A-Aberforth Dumbledore?” Draco’s voice was low. “The one who was in the papers because of that—thing with the goats?”
Dumbledore nodded. “Indeed. I hear Ethelfride’s bridal gown is quite beautiful.”
Draco remained very still for a moment.
Then, in a slow, reproachful voice, he said: “I am going to go now. Try not to inflict any psychological damage on me as I leave.”
Harry and Ron were extremely startled to see Draco burst from the headmaster’s office screaming.
“What did he say?” Harry asked as the wild shouts echoed in the corridors.
“Er—‘God damn progressive education’?” Ron said doubtfully.
“Huh.” Harry blinked. “He worries me sometimes.”
“He might end up going the same way as that uncle of his.”
“Oh, Ethelfride Malfoy?”
“You know about him?” Ron looked mildly surprised. “You never know about anything.”
“Everyone knows about Ethelfride.”
Harry and Ron caught up with Draco, who was still looking white and shaken.
“Let go!” he said. “I wish to be alone, dammit. Or if you won’t go away, hand me a mirror, I wish to check my hair.”
Harry and Ron seized his elbows.
“Not this again,” Draco moaned. “I happen to be a student here, not a criminal.”
None of the Malfoys were criminals.
Technically, you weren’t a criminal until you were caught.
“No, no, you’ll like this,” Harry promised. “Look out the window at the lake… see? Colin’s making a break for it!”
They all watched the mousy-haired little figure as he seized a boat and began to paddle across the lake.
They all saw the almost lazy swipe of the giant squid towards the boat, and Colin’s terrified squeal as he was seized by a tentacle and waggled around.
Then Draco leaned out of the window, stretched delicately and indulged in a mildly evil laugh.
Repent, repent, all ye who mess with the Malfoys, for they are vicious pitiless little bastards.
“I think I’ll go take a stroll by the lake,” he said innocently. “You know. To enjoy the view.”
“Please stop chuckling with fiendish glee, Draco.”
“I’m sorry, Hermione, do you have a headache?”
“No, I just find it extremely disturbing…”
Draco, curled up by the fire in the Gryffindor common room, was examining photographs taken this afternoon by the lake. He had watched Colin Creevey’s desperate swim for the shore quite a few times.
For some reason, he never got tired of it.
But he put them aside to look over as a sweet bedtime visual of fear and terror, and turned to Hermione.
“Tell me about the spell that made it possible for your TV to work,” he requested with his most fascinating smile.
Hermione could never resist an appeal for knowledge, and she turned and began to talk quietly. Draco listened carefully.
Ginny, Harry and Dean Thomas exchanged satisfied smiles as her curly head bent over Draco’s smooth blond locks, both of them engaged in an utterly incomprehensible conversation.
Awww, said their exchange of glances. Aren’t the academic freaks cute?
Ron the Oblivious said loudly, “It’s a good thing you rescued Colin’s camera, Draco. I want pictures of me and Cho at the Yule Ball.”
Ginny stifled a groan behind her hand.
“Hey, Draco,” said Ron, “who are you taking to the b—Harry, why are you beating your head against a table?”
“Was I?” Harry asked. “Didn’t notice.”
Draco gave Ron his Glare o’Death TM (patented to the Malfoy family 1783).
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said lazily. “Not a Slytherin, that’s for sure. They have many sterling qualities, but Pansy Parkinson couldn’t take no for an answer back in fourth year. Despite the fact that I was practically dressed as a priest… a fairly drastic procedure for someone who’s taken vows of non-poverty and non-chastity.”
He cast an elaborately disinterested look around the room.
“Of course, if someone here is in need of an escort I would be delighted—drop dead, Patil, I didn’t mean you. And come out from behind the sofa Finnigan, honestly, I have standards.”
“I suggest you save yourself and your vows of non-chastity for some Hufflepuff who might appreciate them,” Hermione said in a neutral voice.
Draco pouted.
Parvati Patil had to go for a nice quiet lie-down.
“Wait, Hermione doesn’t have a date either,” Ron said brightly. “… Ginny, why are you gnawing your pencil?”
Ginny bit the pencil in half.
“Ah—nervous habit.”
“Say, Harry,” Ron said in conversational tones. “Could I borrow the Marauder’s Map in case—ah, Cho and I want to go someplace private?”
“Of course,” Harry said readily. “I won’t be using it.”
Ginny snatched it back.
“The hell you won’t!”
A mumble of “Vixen” came from the direction of Draco Malfoy. Then he glanced over at the Map.
He looked vaguely apprehensive.
“You have a Map which, ah, shows everything going on in the school?”
“Yes, I’ve had it ever since third year…”
“Oh.” Draco blushed very much. “Well. Well, on the, er, few nights you might have seen my dot in the Astronomy Tower with those three girls, I’ll have you know it was a perfectly legitimate study group.”
“Oh yeah?” Ron said. “What planet were you studying, Ur—”
“Shut up, Weasley!”
Harry was looking extremely guilty, Hermione thought. As if he had crept into the girls’ dormitory on a mission to seduce the masses, when in actual fact he had been invited in.
He glanced over at Parvati’s stocking on the floor as if it was a symbol of flagrant indecency.
“You wanted to talk to me, Harry?” Hermione prompted him.
“We did,” Ginny agreed, taking over for Harry since he was busy eyeing the beds apprehensively, as if he suspected that dancing girls were hidden under them.
Harry snapped out of it.
“Draco’s a nice guy,” he said suddenly and warmly.
“Apart from his regular outbursts of homicidal rage, immoral mentality and the way he spent five and a half years sadistically tormenting us, you mean?”
Harry blinked.
“Well. Yes. There’s that.”
Ginny coughed. “Overlooking those small issues, Draco has many good points.”
Harry nodded. “He’s smart.”
“He sings well.”
“He plays chess well.”
“He likes books.”
“He’s funny.”
“He’s got those jeans.”
“Yeah, he’s kind of pretty. Er, so I hear from Parvati.”
Hermione stared.
“You people do realise that you’re trying to set me up with someone from Slytherin. Slytherin, the house that drinks virgin blood.”
“Oh, but Draco’s different.”
“Yes, he is their leader! He probably overdoses on the virgin blood! And if you think he’s so great, you take him to the ball.”
“I’m taking Harry.”
“I’m taking Ginny.”
“Harry, I wasn’t talking to you.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t want to arrive home this summer and tell Mum and Dad that my boyfriend will be along in a second, he’s just torturing a helpless puppy he found by the road.”
“I’m sure Draco wouldn’t hurt a dumb animal,” Ginny said at last, after a whispered conference on whether Neville Longbottom counted.
Hermione dropped her book with a thud.
“Have you all gone quite mad? Am I the only person who retains her senses on the subject of Draco ‘I Am the Evil One! Bwha!’ Malfoy? Just because he thinks he can strut in here with his hair and his jeans and his singing and his jokes and his jeans and—where was I?”
“His jeans,” Ginny and Harry chorused.
“I was nowhere of the sort. I mean, I’m perfectly happy being single and untormented. So you people can all trot off to the Yule Ball, and pair off, and I shall be alone and yet fulfilled while you have Harry, and Ron has Cho, and Draco Malfoy has his—”
“Exciting assortment of love slaves?”
The entirely unexpected lazy drawl made a girlish scream echo around the room.
Afterwards, Harry looked quite embarrassed.
Hermione stared at Draco’s face framed by her window.
“What are you doing?”
“Ah.” Draco smiled winningly. “I’ve climbed a trellis to your window. It’s very romantic and dashing of me, I feel. I’d have asked to climb your hair, but, well, it still has those bushy issues, and there’d be an unpleasant static factor…”
“Draco. I have no trellis.”
Draco carefully turned his smile up the few notches from Winning to Irresistibly Adorable.
“You do now.”
Hermione ran over to the window.
“You grew a plant?”
Over her head, Harry and Ginny were giving him a frantic thumbs-up.
“But that must have taken hours… you must have missed classes…”
“Oh, no,” Draco said casually. “I just bullied Neville Longbottom into doing it.”
As the window snapped shut on his fingers, he got the uncanny impression that he was still doing something wrong.
The next morning at breakfast, Draco gazed morosely into his coffee and mused over his current situation.
Evil had been defeated. Which, surprisingly, was a good thing, because he—for once—hadn’t been the evil.
Score. Malfoy—one. Murphy (take that, you bastard!)—zero.
But now…
He was having problems with his love life. He was having trouble getting a girl.
It just seemed so—wrong.
And the Boy Who Lived But, You Know, Didn’t Actually Have Any Sort of Life, was trying to set him up with his friend. Ha! Harry Potter, who wouldn’t have known hot action if it had turned up naked in his dorm.
If only he had some sort of clue as to what was going wrong.
He frowned. He was still wealthy, right? Oh yes, he was so wealthy. Mmm-hmm. Just like that, secret Swiss branch of Gringotts account, yes please, enrich me harder.
He was still charming, witty and a sexy bitch. Blaise Zabini and Pansy were composing a poem to that effect further down the Slytherin table.
And he was still gorgeous. Wasn’t he? Wasn’t he?
Come to think of it, it had been fifteen minutes since he’d checked his hair.
He angled a spoon to his face.
No—still gorgeous. Oh, yes. Could his features be more classically defined? Not unless they were described by Homer.
So what could possibly be the problem?
Draco sighed. It was clearly time for drastic measures.
He fixed the Smouldering Gaze on Hermione. He had great hopes for this gaze. He had practised it on Pansy last night and she had screamed faintly, staggered and dived for his clothing.
It had taken several cries of “Bad touches!” until someone had come to his rescue.
He focused the Smouldering Gaze. Once she looked up, he was planning to give her the I’m So Molestable smirk.
She didn’t look up! She just kept reading the paper.
She was a creature of chilled steel.
Draco cuddled his coffee to his chest. Ahh, sweet faithful caffeinated lover. You will never leave me.
When his owl came winging its way over to him, nerves made him spill it on his shirt.
After all, Lucius had written the other day sternly instructing him not to invite Ron Weasley to the ball. He couldn’t take much more.
Crabbe picked up the envelope beside Draco’s plate.
“What’s that?” he rumbled.
“Looks like… a wedding invitation,” Goyle said. “Er. Draco. Why are you stabbing yourself with a butter knife?”
“Kill me,” Draco said. “It’s kinder this way.”
Rejected by a woman. About to read the most traumatic document of his young life.
And oh God, Edmund that-rude-little-prat Baddock had just collided with Hermione. Again.
Plus, coffee on his shirt!
“Et tu, Brute!” he murmured wildly.
Draco—one. Murphy—17,842.
Draco wondered if he could steal some of Seamus’ Prozac.