It all happened because Draco was a little distracted that day. Things had not been going well. Father had been very cutting about Draco’s plan to smuggle a racing broom into Hogwarts, Crabbe had sat on his lunch on the train and Harry Potter had turned out to be a rude, insufferable gitface. It was not how Draco had pictured his first day.
It also happened because Draco had a tendency to babble when he was nervous.
So he sat in complete blackness, a stupid threadbare hat covering his eyes and its stupid voice ringing in his ears, and started to talk.
“Malfoy—that’ll be Slytherin, then…”
“Yes, please,” Draco said. “Or Ravenclaw, you know, that wouldn’t be bad either. Not Hufflepuff though, because otherwise I shall instantly transfer to Durmstrang.”
“Ravenclaw.” The Hat paused. “Interesting. Haven’t heard a Malfoy ask for another house for decades.”
“Er,” Draco said. “Actually, on second thoughts, scratch that, Slytherin, please. Just Slytherin, no also-rans, no second guessing. Slytherin!”
“Perhaps it’s time for a little diversity. RAVENCLAW!”
“I changed my mind,” Draco hissed, and then felt hands tugging at the hat brim. “Just a minute!” he said indignantly to the old woman in green. “I need to get something cleared up, this incompetent piece of haberdashery has entirely misunderstood me—”
“Mr Malfoy, it is time to join your new house!”
Draco blinked in the light, glared and held onto the hat. All the people at a table decked in blue were clapping, this could not be happening. He glared at them and the clapping faltered, at which point Professor McGorgon glared at him.
“Mr Malfoy!”
Draco got off the stool with extreme reluctance. “My father will hear about this,” he informed her, and stomped to the stupid table in stupid blue.
“Hi,” said a boy in the seat next to him, blinking behind glasses that reminded him of The Boy Who Was A Real Letdown, Actually. “I’m Terry Boot, I—”
Draco glowered at him. “Don’t talk to me, this is all a horrible mistake. You wait till my father hears about this. You just wait.”
“Um,” said Terry Boot. “Okay. Do you want the pumpkin juice?”
“I told you not to talk to me!”
Draco saw the rest of the Sorting through narrowed eyes. The Sorting Hat took an awfully long time with Harry Potter—probably it was getting his autograph or something—and Draco vowed that if that prat got into Slytherin instead of Draco somehow Draco would find a way to end him.
The Hat eventually said “GRYFFINDOR!” Potter never knew what a lucky escape he’d had.
“Don’t look so unhappy, little boy,” a curly-haired girl with a Prefect badge whispered. “We’ll take care of you here.”
“I don’t belong here,” Draco sneered. “So you’re not the prefect of me. And I am only slightly below average height for an eleven year old!”
“Isn’t he a cheery little ray of sunshine,” the girl, whose name turned out to be Penelope, murmured to her friends.
“I can hear you,” Draco announced loudly. He considered staying put in the Great Hall until they were forced to make up a bed for him in Slytherin, but it was draughty in the hall and probably the house elves would come and clear him away and put him in a rubbish bin. It had been that kind of day.
So he stamped up to the stupid Tower on the west bit of the castle, away from everything. It was draughty there too, and they were put in a room that was all blue and Draco felt as if that stupid Squid had dragged him underwater and was holding him hostage in a place where he couldn’t breathe.
“Are you homesick?” asked a boy with an eerie amulet around his neck. “I’m Anthony Goldstein, the moving staircases made me feel wretched. I think I’ll ask my mum to write me a note excusing me from using them.”
“Of course I’m not homesick, you imbecile!” Draco snapped. “Don’t think you can talk to me just because you have a demon around your throat.”
Anthony Goldstein gave him a wary look. After a moment, he ventured: “D’you mean my inhaler?”
Draco was sick and tired of these fools. Crabbe and Goyle would never have kept bothering him like this, he was all alone in an icy blue tower and what his father would say when he heard of this didn’t bear thinking…
He sat at the window with his arms locked around his knees, trying to tell the world how very displeased he was through the medium of icy, disdainful silence.
Clearly his icy disdain needed work, because that speccy twit Terry Boot came and sat on the window ledge beside him, comfortably propping an arm against Draco’s drawn-up knees. Draco was in the middle of swallowing his rage and made a funny noise that the idiot utterly misinterpreted.
“You can cry if you want,” he whispered. “D’you miss your mum?”
Draco drew himself up. “Obviously, being practically twelve, I do not miss my mother, and even if I did I certainly would not weep like a woman about it. I am not upset. I am outraged! I have been placed in this house against my will and I feel that a case could be made for that hat kidnapping me. I shall inform my father, and he will sue.”
Terry blinked, which people often did when Draco launched into one of his tirades against injustice. Draco felt that the blinks signalled agreement, and regarded Terry with slightly less hauteur.
“You wanted to be in Slytherin?” Terry ventured. “Well, I mean—I don’t think Ravenclaw is so different.”
Draco wanted to demand how it was the same, when none of his friends were with him and he was stuck up in a tower and his father was going to be disappointed in him again, but Lucius would’ve called that snivelling, so he glared ferociously at Terry and hoped he would proceed.
Terry gazed at him earnestly, eyes wide behind his glasses. “Well, Slytherins are the ambitious ones, aren’t they? They like power. And knowledge is power, so…”
Knowledge is power. The words rattled around Draco’s head for a minute and then seemed to find somewhere to fit. His father would like that, he thought. Knowledge is power.
Besides, even if Terry did have stupid glasses and stupid hair like stupid Potter, he was clearly trying to be friends, and that helped. Draco felt a slight easing of that tense fear—born when he couldn’t even make friends with some boy in a robe shop and multiplied by about a thousand when said boy turned out to be Harry stupid Potter—that nobody but his old companions would want to be friends at all in this strange, enormous place.
“I suppose there is some merit in what you say,” he acknowledged grudgingly.
“D’you always talk like that?” asked Anthony Amulet Boy Goldstein. “Like a lawyer? I suppose it’s because all you purebloods are homeschooled.”
Good God, they let the Muggleborn into this benighted house! Draco tried to remain calm: he had no idea whether he was outnumbered or not, after all. He cast an intensely suspicious eye over Michael Corner and Kevin Entwistle, who were lurking on their own beds and looking, to Draco’s mind, rather shifty.
“I liked home school,” Terry said wistfully, confirming Draco’s favourable Terry Boot impression. “I miss my mum and my sisters, a bit.” He brightened slightly. “But I hear there’s a wicked library here.”
“Thrill me, why don’t you,” Draco drawled, and was a little bit pleased when Terry laughed.
Draco got his first real taste of Ravenclaw life when everyone adjourned to the library immediately after classes. He might’ve preferred to go exploring around the castle, but he thought Knowledge is power, and that his father might still be proud as long as Draco did well, and besides everyone was doing it and it wasn’t like Draco was going to be the only one left out.
Once in the library, he strolled casually about peeking at other people’s homework.
“Do you mind?” hissed Michael Corner indignantly.
“Not at all,” Draco replied, and decided that Corner was on his black list. He’d deal with him later, though—right now he was on a Ravenclaw mission.
He studied everyone’s homework with care—after initial protests he found everyone just submitted—and found a clear winner. To his surprise, she was a Gryffindor. She was also sitting quite alone, and Draco thought it was probably typical of Gryffindor to shun intelligence as if it was infectious.
He beamed winningly at her, a tactic that always worked with Mother’s friends. “Hello,” he said. “I’m Draco Malfoy. D’you want to be study partners?”
The girl also had hair like a nest of mad squirrels and unattractive teeth, especially when she was gaping like that.
“Yes!” she exclaimed after a moment, and began to assiduously clear the space next to her. “That would be lovely! Please sit down!”
This rabid anxiety for his company gratified Draco. Clearly she was a woman of superior taste. Or lonely, of course, but whatever it was, it meant she wouldn’t realise Draco was only interested in one thing.
Her flow charts.
“I’m Hermione Granger,” she whispered, beaming back at him. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you—” and your flow charts. “Working on Charms?”
He discovered that she had an encyclopaedic knowledge of all their text books already, and he congratulated himself on picking the best study partner with his usual brilliance. He was also happy to note that she didn’t know a few perfectly elementary things, and was grateful for help. He foresaw a beautiful symbiotic relationship, and having the most perfect flow charts in the land.
He went to dinner with Granger at his elbow, happily pouring information into his ear, and dropped her to her table like a gentleman.
Harry Potter and his pet Weasley glowered scruffily in their direction.
“Told you she was a nightmare,” Weasley mumbled.
“Can’t believe he’s not in Slytherin,” Potter said.
Just as Draco had thought. They were rude even to members of their own house, the barbarians. Poor little Granger, stuck with them all day. Rendered charitable by flow chart love, he gave her another smile before he left.
Ravenclaw was not turning out as badly as Draco had feared. Terry continued his winning streak as Draco’s favourite dorm mate, and he decided Anthony was quite harmless after Anthony laughed so hard at one of Draco’s impressions that he upset gravy over the whole table and got five house points taken from them. The worst of it was that they all refused to be called by their last names, though Draco explained at length that it was more decorous.
Michael Corner was a useless prettyboy and Kevin Entwistle never talked at all, which meant Draco’s dark suspicions of him evolved daily, but on the whole things were all right. Teachers combined to shower him and Granger with praise, except for that imbecile Madam Hooch who didn’t know good flying when she saw it. Draco would have torn a strip off the incompetent if everyone hadn’t been distracted by Anthony’s mum sending a letter excusing Anthony from Quidditch on account of his vertigo.
“It’s okay, Draco,” Terry said soothingly as Draco fumed. “It’s not like most people in Ravenclaw even take Quidditch all that seriously. The other houses are insane about it: they let it affect their marks.”
“We don’t play Quidditch?” Draco demanded.
“Oh, you can if you like, but it’d probably be better to concentrate on your studies.”
“I think Terry’s absolutely right,” Granger announced, slipping into the desk beside Draco’s. “Flying is ridiculous and requires no real cleverness. After all, Harry Potter was the best at it and he’d never done it before, he never even tries at anything.”
Draco sneered. “I bet he doesn’t. I bet he’s really stupid. Isn’t he stupid, Granger?”
“Don’t call me Granger, Draco.”
“Pah, Quidditch,” scoffed Draco, suppressing a pang. “He can keep it.” He paused. “Weasley wasn’t any good at it, was he? Hermione! Tell me Weasley wasn’t any good.”
“I’m sure I didn’t notice,” Hermione sniffed. “Ron Weasley is the most unpleasant boy I’ve ever met and I do not look at him more than I can help. You know, he’s from an old pureblood family. I think he must be one of those wizards who are prejudiced against the Muggleborn.”
“Are you Muggleborn?” Draco felt like he might faint. He sat beside her in the library every day! He’d actually touched her plenty of times, the whole school knew they were friends, his father was going to have a fit!
“Yes, my parents are dentists,” Hermione said, as if Draco could have any idea what unearthly Muggle thing a dentist was. She looked over at him, her face screwed up with sudden anxiety. “Does that—does that bother you?”
Draco looked at her stupid hair and thought about how long she’d spent with his flow chart, helping him make it perfect and not complaining when he’d bossed her around. And he hadn’t thanked her. Her stupid face was making him feel funny.
“Ahahahaha,” he said unconvincingly. “Why would you think that?”
He composed a letter to his father in his head, saying he was using a Muggleborn to get ahead in class. Surely Father would appreciate that.
Hermione looked uncertain but happier, and at that point all conversation had to cease because Professor McGonagall came in. Naturally, Potter and Weasley kept talking and got house points taken off.
Draco smirked.
Some days were considerably worse than others. The day Draco got his first Owl from his father, remarking that Draco would go for the soft option of Ravenclaw and discussing a move to Durmstrang next year already, was also the day they found out that Hogwarts was crawling with trolls.
“It’s only one troll, Draco,” Terry consoled him.
“This is a place of education, Terry! There shouldn’t be any rampaging trolls, we don’t have any classes in being agonisingly smushed to death!”
Draco’s vehement gesture connected with Padma Patil’s butterfly clasp and she gave him a cold look.
“Oh get over it, you look like a ninny anyway,” Draco snapped.
“I am so sorry,” Terry told her. “He gets all agitated, let me help you with—”
“I am not agitated! I am—no, wait, I am agitated, it’s a perfectly reasonable response to having trolls frolicking about our school. Maybe it’ll have babies. Maybe we’ll stay up here in the tower until we die, hearing the hopeless cries of the Hufflepuffs as the trolls crunch their bones…”
Draco noted with macabre satisfaction that most of his house had started paying attention to his dramatic rendition of their future woes. They might perish, but at least he would perish given the adulation that was clearly his due.
Once the troll was contained, another nasty surprise was on the way, because apparently Granger (who was his) had bonded with Weasley and Perfect Potter. The next time he saw her, she was chatting away to them as if they’d been civil to her the whole time.
Oh Draco, put not your faith in Mudbloods!
He gave her a betrayed look and stomped off, only marginally appeased when she immediately hurried after him.
“Draco, wait—”
“Traitress!” Draco flung over his shoulder. “Fickle, wayward woman! Potter, of all people!”
“He’s really quite nice,” Granger said, adding blasphemy to her list of crimes. “Sort of sweet.”
“I don’t have to stand here and listen to this filthy talk, you know.”
Granger poured a frenzied tale into his ears, becoming overexcited as Draco supposed women were wont to do. Eventually she wound down and stood facing him, frizzed hair aquiver.
Draco gave her a long look. “So those lackwits locked you in a room with a troll. For which they should be expelled. And then someone stuck their wand up the troll’s nose—what finesse you Gryffindors have, what grace under pressure—and then you lied to a teacher, Granger, for shame! For those two!”
Her eyes softened. “Ron was really brave.”
“Who is—oh my God, Weasley? I feel extremely unwell.”
“They explained to me, they just thought I was bossy—”
“Oh, why shouldn’t you be bossy?” Draco demanded. “You know better than they do.”
“Draco,” Hermione said. “Please. This is a big deal for me, having friends in my house.” She gave him an imploring look. “Be happy for me. We’re still study partners, right? I wouldn’t want anyone else.”
Draco’s eyes dropped from hers to the floor. “Don’t try to get around me,” he muttered. “With all your girl wiles. I’m not happy. I am horrified at your taste, I am shocked and appalled. That Potter’s so arrogant and spoiled, strutting about the school, he thinks he can just pick you up and drop you at any time—”
“Harry’s not going to drop me!”
“Little Hermione,” Draco said, shaking his head sorrowfully. “So sweet. So naïve. You can’t trust people like that, you know.”
“He thinks you’re arrogant as well,” Hermione told him.
“You see! You see how he prances about the school, passing judgement on all its hapless students, thinking he’s cock of the walk…”
Hermione shook her head. “You’re hopeless.”
“You misspoke,” Draco informed her kindly. “He’s hopeless. You’ll see that, in time. You’re a clever girl, Hermione, and I have every faith that he will not hoodwink you for long.”
Potter (damn his devilish wiles, Draco could see right through him) managed to keep her hoodwinked, just the same. She palled around with him and Weasley all the time, it was like a triumvirate of bad hair with Potter as its king. It was typical of Potter to go around coolly nicking other people’s friends, he had no shame.
She was still his study partner, though, if only because Potter was too thick to find his way to the library. And Draco had other friends.
Plenty of friends. He’d been leaving the library when he bumped into Crabbe, Goyle and Blaise Zabini. He’d known that Crabbe and Goyle liked having someone to follow, but really, Blaise Zabini? Draco’s mother said the way Mrs Zabini carried on was a scandal.
“Nose in a book like a good little Ravenclaw?” Zabini inquired.
“If I had a mother like yours,” Draco remarked sweetly, “I wouldn’t talk about where anyone put any of their body parts. Those in glass houses, you know…”
Both mean and pleasingly grown-up-sounding. Draco was proud.
“You two! Get him!” Zabini snapped.
Crabbe, Goyle and Draco all looked at him as if he was insane.
“You must be joking,” Crabbe said at last. “Malfoy’s been our friend for years.”
“Besides,” Goyle added with a glare, “I am very anti-violence. There is no excuse but self-defence—or the defence of your friends—for hurting another human being.”
“So there,” Draco put in.
“Expecting other people to do outrageous things like that!” Goyle said sternly. “You cannot be happy in yourself. You should have a long hard think about your personal issues. Malfoy may say a lot of stupid things—”
“I am standing right here!”
“—but he’d never ask us to do anything like that. Because he’s smart,” Goyle added, giving Draco a proud look. “That’s why they put him in the smart house.”
Draco mostly resisted the urge to preen.
“You two are hopeless dolts,” Zabini said. He strolled off, apparently able to maintain his calm without effort, which Draco rather admired.
Draco was left looking at Crabbe and Goyle, who looked a little hopeful. There had been so much to do in Ravenclaw, so much to get used to, he hadn’t had much time, and Draco hadn’t been sure if Crabbe and Goyle would want to be on terribly friendly terms with someone who hadn’t even managed to get into Slytherin.
“He’s wrong,” Draco announced. “You’re only mostly hopeless dolts. Behind on your homework already?” He waited for the guilty nods and grinned. “C’mon, let’s go back into the library. I know a girl you two should meet.”
As they were going back in some twerp called Longbottom knocked into him and Draco considered casting the Leg-Locker curse, but then he’d mastered it weeks ago and was a bit bored with it now. Besides, Terry and Hermione would give him hell.
“Psst!” said Potter.
Typical, thought Draco. Potter the star, always assuming he could get someone’s attention even if everyone was clearly trying to concentrate on Professor Snape’s homework. Like he’d even be in the library if it wasn’t for Hermione. Like anyone wanted him in the library. He just thought he owned the place, didn’t he? Draco’s hate was as deep as the ocean.
“Psst! Malfoy!”
“Psst, some of us actually do our homework!” Draco hissed. “I’m not helping you with it!”
Potter’s homely scarred face twisted. “Shut up, Malfoy. I can’t believe Hermione’s friends with you. I bet you’re just using her for her brains.”
“Potter, I’ll have you know that I, unlike you, have some brains of my own.”
Potter sighed as if Draco was the one bothering him, which Draco certainly was not. Draco had rules: he didn’t bother anyone but Hermione in the library. Potter was fair game at mealtimes and during classes.
“Fine,” he said. “I told her what would happen if I tried to talk to you.”
“Why did she tell you to talk to me? What! Is this a conspiracy?”
“She said you were OK underneath it all—”
“Underneath what all?” Draco asked dangerously.
“And I thought at least you weren’t in Slytherin, so—”
Draco’s eyes narrowed until Potter was the only thing in a dark, slitted world. “Because being in Slytherin is so terrible,” he spat. “Because being in Slytherin means you’re such a mean, horrible person.”
Potter blinked and Draco took it as agreement. He balled up a perfectly good piece of parchment covered with valuable notes, and threw it hard at Potter’s scar.
“OW!”
“As far as you’re concerned, Potter, I will always be mean.” He balled up another piece and threw it hard, but Potter was quicker than he expected and caught it, an inch from his face. “And horrible!”
Hateful staring was interrupted by Madam Pince bearing down on them with librarianly wrath. She threw them out of the library and informed Draco that she was surprised and ashamed.
“Look what you did!” Draco erupted as the library door shut. “A whole evening of study ruined by the Boy Who Wouldn’t Shut Up!”
“You’re mad,” Potter said flatly. “You threw things at me, you arrogant sod, how could you—”
“What’s going on here?” asked Professor Snape, and Draco spun around to face him.
He could not believe Professor Snape was here, and would know that Draco had been thrown out of the library. Professor Snape was the best teacher in school, and Potions was the coolest subject ever, and Draco’s mother said she’d mentioned Draco to Professor Snape personally. Was there no end to the torments Potter introduced to his life?
“Sir, I was doing my homework in the library and Potter got us thrown out because he wouldn’t stop pestering me. He called me names.”
“You little rat, I’m going to—”
Draco fixed Professor Snape with a limpid gaze. “Also,” he added earnestly, “he threatened me.”
“Well, well, well. That is serious,” Professor Snape remarked. Draco smiled wanly and appealingly up at him.
“That’s total rubbish,” Potter began in furious tones.
“Is it?” Professor Snape asked silkily. “As far as I’m aware, no Ravenclaw has ever been thrown out of the library before, whereas Gryffindors have a long and disturbing history of bullying students from other houses.”
Draco gave a vigorous nod. “I felt victimised, Professor. Honestly I did.”
“Ten points from Gryffindor,” Professor Snape said.
He was a Solomon come to judgement, yea, a Solomon!
Potter, such a dark red you couldn’t even see his disfiguring scar, opened his mouth.
“Rising another point with every syllable you utter in my presence, Potter.”
Snape raised an eyebrow and Potter made a noise like a dying fish. After a moment, Snape continued his progress down the hall.
“He is so cool,” Draco breathed. “I wish he was my head of house.”
“I hate you so much,” Potter told him devoutly.
“Oh snap,” said Draco.
As if studying all the hours God sent and trying to cope with living in the same castle as Potter and not exploding of hate was not enough, Draco made the discovery that those two-bit hooligans had lured Hermione into a life of crime.
“Don’t try to deny it, woman,” he said. “Terry, talk some sense into her. There was a dragon in that oafish servant’s vile little cottage, which looks combustible by the way, and is right beside the Forbidden Forest. There’s clearly going to be a forest fire. How jolly, perhaps we’ll all be killed!”
“I can’t believe you saw,” Hermione murmured unhappily. “Harry said he saw you looking in the window, but—”
“He certainly did not see me! I was sneaking about. Sneakily.”
Hermione looked anxious. “Please don’t tell anyone, Draco. Hagrid really loves his dragon, we’re going to get it out of the country—”
“Aha! Potter’s a smuggler, I knew it! That’s piracy, that is! Dragon piracy!”
Hermione and Terry stared at him as if he had gone crazy. “Don’t worry, Hermione,” Terry said. “You know how he gets. Once he’s calmer, I’ll talk him around.”
Draco gave a cry of righteous outrage.
“You sound like an enraged teakettle,” Terry told him. Draco should’ve known better than to get chummy with a speccy boy, they were all tarred with the same evil brush.
“Draco, if you tell you’ll get me into a lot of trouble,” Hermione said. Women were also a delusion and a snare. “D’you want to get me in trouble?”
“I wouldn’t mention your part in it at all,” Draco offered. “A little detention would be good for them, Hermione. Break their spirits. Then they could be your slaves.”
“They would be expelled!”
“Then they can go live with Oafy,” Draco soothed her. “And be your little squib slaves.”
“His name is Hagrid!” Hermione exclaimed, and ran off looking upset. Draco was sure eleven was too young to be having her time of the month already.
“I’m good to her, Terry. I offer her slaves. What more could a woman want?”
Terry coughed. “Maybe you could try to get on a little better with her other friends.”
“Get on with Potter?” Draco exclaimed. “Never!”
He was just evolving a cunning scheme which would mean he could catch Potter and Weasley in the act and have them disgraced and turned away like so many house elves who deserved clothes, when Hermione sent him an Owl telling him when and where they were planning to commit their heinous crime, and added that she trusted him.
He was on his way to tell a teacher when Terry wrested the Owl from him and read it.
“Draco! You don’t want to get Hermione expelled, do you?”
Draco took a deep breath. “No, no. Of course not, you’re right, I’m weak, it’s just that I want my revenge against Potter—”
“What’d he do?”
“It’s more the fact that he exists, if you know what I mean,” Draco said, not wanting to get into being humiliated on trains. “Look, Terry, you have to help me. Don’t let me leave this room tonight. No matter what I say. No matter how much money I offer you. Get Goldstein to help.”
“Don’t call me Goldstein,” Anthony said. “What’s going on?”
“I must be kept away from the outside world,” Draco informed him. “Invoke the power of your amulet to bar the doors!”
“It’s an inhaler, Draco, for the last time.”
Draco didn’t know why Anthony insisted on using fancy words for his demon of the air, but he had more important things on his mind. He clung to the arms of the chair and stared at the arms on their clock. Sweat was dripping down his face; he could taste Potter’s expulsion.
“I can’t help it, I have to tell!” he exploded at last. “I’ll bribe Hermione’s way into Beauxbatons or something, Terry, Terry, let me go, it’s for the best, it’s a sacrifice for the greater good, Hermione will understand—”
“Can’t let you,” Terry said between his teeth, pushing him into a bedpost. “You’ll hate yourself in the morning.”
“But I hate Potter now!” Draco howled. “So much! So much!” He grabbed Terry’s robes. “You have to stop me, Terry. I’m a man possessed. I can’t help myself. No, don’t listen to me, I’m raving. Let me go, and you can buy all your sisters pretty things.”
Terry looked consideringly at Draco. “It’s sweet you’re trying so hard to be loyal to your friend,” he said slowly. Draco stiffened in mortal offence at the word sweet, but Terry wasn’t done yet. “I think you were incorrectly placed, Draco. You should’ve been put in Hufflepuff.”
Draco roared and lunged for his throat. Terry’s glasses went flying as they hit the floor.
“I kill you, Boot!”
“Anthony, help me!” Terry shouted.
Anthony turned a page of his book. “Sorry. My mum told me I wasn’t to participate in strenuous physical activity of any sort.”
“Kill you dead!”
The next day, everyone had cast ‘Reparo‘ on Terry’s glasses and they were still hopelessly crooked, and Draco’s nose was still tender but not actually bleeding anymore. Hermione told him she was very, very proud, and Draco told her that the thought of seeing Potter for the next six years had drained away his will to live.
She went and poured out the tale of Draco’s nobility to her dim little matched set, and Draco felt obliged to stop by the Gryffindor table and set things straight.
“This changes nothing,” he announced. “I’m going to get you.”
Potter glared at him, hastily swallowed a mouthful of toast and mumbled, “Not if I get you first.”
Draco grinned at Terry and Anthony. “Hear that, boys? A Gryffindor is planning to get me. Oooh, I’m so scared. However will I outthink him?”
“You should definitely be in Slytherin,” Weasley said in his snotty Weasley way. Draco was pleased to see Hermione elbow him in the ribs.
Terry slung his arm around Draco’s shoulders and Anthony pushed into his side.
“Aw,” Terry said. “But we’d miss him.”
That day Draco wrote an Owl to his father to say he didn’t want to go to Durmstrang next year. He’d made friends in Hogwarts, he wrote. He liked it there.
It wasn’t long before Potter and Weasley had dragged Hermione into another of their illicit little schemes: Draco caught them talking furtively and going through books, they were the least subtle plotters in the world.
He had a plan to learn lots of really cool Dark Magic, challenge Potter to a duel and beat him so comprehensively that he moved to Bermuda in shame. He also had a plan to get Hermione transferred to Ravenclaw where she would not be lured away from the paths of virtue.
These plans all had to be put on hold when he realised that the end of year exams were mere months away and Hermione looked likely to beat him in every subject. Draco could not imagine what his father would say if his son the Ravenclaw came in second-best.
He stayed in the library, reading even when Madam Pince put the lights out. He lit his wand and read under the bedclothes until Terry took his books away and hid them. He perfected a system of walking and reading at once, which worked when he got Crabbe to walk in front of him to all his classes, but did not work when he was walking towards the library and an inconsiderate prat strode into him.
“McGonagall won’t listen and Snape knows how to get past Fluffy and—walk much, Malfoy?” Potter snarled.
Draco shut his book and wistfully contemplated hitting Potter sharply on the side of his fat head. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to,” he said coldly, and was gratified when Potter froze. “You’re planning to do something unlawful again, and you’re talking about it in cunning code!”
He was pleased to see by their very still faces that he had guessed exactly right, and then he got back to studying. He imagined that all this activity would distract Hermione from her studies, which was all to the good—not that he wanted Hermione to do badly, but nobody had the same expectations of her. Draco’s father was a politician and on the school board and managed the estate and he was one of the most respected wizards in England, whereas Hermione’s father was just a dentything.
When the summer exam finally came around, everyone in Ravenclaw was so tired they wandered around like studious tortoises. Draco switched all of Michael Corner’s book covers and it took Corner thirty minutes to realise and then thirty more minutes to tell Draco exactly what he thought of someone low enough to sabotage someone else’s study. Draco nodded, triumphantly counted off the minutes as Corner talked, and congratulated himself on the entire hour of study Corner would never get back.
“I’ve learned my lesson,” Draco promised, and left a window open near Kevin Entwistle’s notes.
Finishing the exams was a beautiful and triumphant moment that Draco probably would have appreciated more if he hadn’t been so exhausted he passed out on the lawn with his head in Goyle’s lap. He forbade anyone to talk about that ever again.
At the end of year feast, Draco looked blearily and bitterly over at the Slytherin table, and then at the hall draped with Slytherin colours. This should be his celebration, he thought, his moment of triumph at the end of the perfect school year that would make Father proud of him. That was what he’d planned for.
When Dumbledore announced he was arbitrarily giving the House Cup to Potter, Draco thought for a moment that he must have heard wrong and that the yellow and red flags dancing in front of his eyes were a hallucination caused by stress. Then Terry had to hold him down.
“Just because the man’s president of the Geriatrics’ Harry Potter Fan Club doesn’t mean he can dangle the House Cup in Slytherin’s face and then snatch it away!”
Hermione came over to him, flushed with victory. Draco had never been less happy to see her.
“Perhaps Dumbledore could have explained things more,” she said, cutting Draco off mid-tirade. “But I think—we really did something that helped the wizarding world.”
“Did you? Did you? Then you should get a shiny medal,” Draco snapped. “This is a school. People should get house points for classes, not for helping the world. Slytherin deserved that cup!”
Potter arrived to take Hermione away from their bad influence (ha!) and favour Draco with a glare. “You’re not in Slytherin. Get over it!”
“Have a good summer, Potter. Die a painful death,” Draco advised.
Once Potter was gone, he made a small piteous sound and let his head fall onto Terry’s shoulder.
“Take me away from this awful place,” he moaned. “My eyes hurt.”
“I’m afraid someone’s strained their eyes reading in the dark!”
Draco looked around with the hopeless hope that the healer was speaking about someone else, and met his mother’s raised eyebrows.
“That happens?” he yelped. “Nobody ever told me that could happen!”
“Well, Draco, to be fair, we never thought it was going to be an issue,” Mother remarked dryly. She glanced at the healer and added graciously, “Surprise Sorting into Ravenclaw” as if she was giving an actual reason for Draco’s horrible sickness, like: “Mice bit him in the eyes.”
The healer nodded. “Happens all the time.” Then because she was talking to Draco, she switched back to her air of manic happiness and disconnection from reality. “Someone’s going to need glasses!”
Draco’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly as he realised this devil woman was seriously proposing to disfigure his face with an unholy contraption.
He stared up into her merciless smile and croaked: “Can’t I get a seeing eye dog?”
“A seeing eye dog that reads for you?” Mother asked, sounding heartlessly amused.
Draco curled up sulkily in his chair. “It could be a magic dog. Can’t Father buy me a magic dog?”
“You’re a funny little man, aren’t you!” said the healer, and gave him a roguish wink. “Now, I think I know what kind of glasses you’d like. The Harry Potter frames are very popular this year!”
Draco’s glare made her back away, but it did not make her die slowly under the sheer power of his remorseless hate.
“I don’t want the Harry Potter glasses,” he said in a voice of ice. “I don’t want glasses at all. But if I must have them, you might want to show me something tasteful.”
The healer still looked shaken from Draco’s murderous gaze. “Isn’t he a dear little lad,” she said nervously.
Mother smiled serenely. “I like him.”
“By tasteful,” Draco said, “I mean expensive.”
On the third hour of their trip to buy school books, Draco had received four quelling stares, eight glimpses of Dark Objects concealed in his father’s robes, fifteen sharp lectures on what a disappointing Ravenclawy son Draco was and no actual school books.
“We shall go to the bookshop momentarily, Draco,” said Father. “Try to contain all of this Ravenclaw spirit. Quite frankly, it makes me nauseous.”
With that, he swung into Borgin and Burke’s. Draco trailed sullenly after him, and a horrible little shopkeeper leered at him and had the temerity to remark that Mr Malfoy must be proud of such a fine lad.
“Positively overcome,” Father said. “Sorted into Ravenclaw, and allows a Muggleborn to beat him in every examination. It gives me a warm glow.”
Draco thought of long, long hours of grinding work, and his back aching, and his current state of being disfigured around the eyes. He glared up at his father.
“I came second in my entire year,” he said coldly. “Most people would think that’s pretty good.”
“Pity you didn’t work just a little harder.”
“I did work hard!” Draco snapped. “I worked as hard as I could and she beat me because she’s—” The words smarter and better hung on the air between them, but Draco swallowed them unspoken. Admitting something like that would be… Father wouldn’t like it.
“Try to behave, Draco,” Father said at length. “Once we’re done here, I shall take you to your precious bookshop and then home.”
The fact Draco was being punished was unspoken, too. Father had said he might buy him a broom today.
Draco looked around the small, dingy shop full of creepy things, where even the light was dyed pale brown, and tried not to care. He’d deformed his eyes studying last year: if he wanted to beat Hermione this year, he would have no time for flying.
Knowledge is power, he could say to his father when he came first, and his father would be proud. Knowledge is power, Draco repeated to himself, and wandered over to something he recognised as Hand of Glory from library books. A Hand of Glory sounded pretty powerful to him. He could smite Potter with it, probably.
Oooh, or a shiny cursed necklace. He could send it to Potter, with the clever pretence that it was from one of his fans, and then—no, wait, Potter only thought he was a rock star, he probably wasn’t interested in bling.
His father’s icy disappointed-in-only-son silence left only the sound of a cabinet breathing.
Draco choked down a scream and reminded himself that it was probably just a Boggart, just a Boggart, nothing to worry about at all, not at all! He looked around to see if his father and the shopkeeper had noticed his panicked leap backwards, and they seemed occupied, so he went cautiously closer to examine the Boggart. It’d probably get him extra points in his Defence Against the Dark Arts essays if he’d seen one, they were third year material.
There were eyes gleaming in the slit of the cabinet. Eyes! His greatest fear had eyes!
Draco pulled himself together sharply right about the time he noted the familiar glint of glasses, and worked out that inside the cabinet there was probably a mirror, and Draco had been hearing his own breathing. Draco rolled his eyes, thankful that nobody had seen him making a twit of himself, and flung the cabinet door wide.
Instead of a mirror, there was Potter, looking guilty and grubby. Draco clung to the cabinet door as his only means of support.
“Are you stalking me?” he asked in an agitated whisper.
“No! Malfoy, don’t be such a freak!”
“Are you stalking Mr Borgin?” Draco pursued.
“No, I… why are you wearing glasses, Malfoy?”
“Why are you wearing what appears to the contents of the inside of a chimney? Do you roll in your own filth?”
Draco composed a newspaper article in his head about the way Potter dirtied himself up and then launched his befouled form on Knockturn Alley. Potter glared at him, glasses broken, and Draco would have sold his soul for a camera.
“I knew you’d be an ass about this! That’s why I got into this stupid cupboard!”
Potter was hiding from him! The campaign of terror was working brilliantly and he, Draco Malfoy, was the best there had ever been. He could feel a truly spectacular sneer coming on.
“Really? Because I’ve heard rumours about your home life, and I just assumed you moved from cupboard to cupboard as you made your way about the world.”
Potter went a little red under the grime. “Well, you’re pretty stupid. Even your dad thinks so.”
Draco was going for his wand when Father strolled over to them, and interrupting Draco’s plan of attack was a cruel deed that Draco was sure qualified as parent/child abuse.
“What is that?” asked Father, lip curling.
“I can’t tell you,” Draco said. “You told me never to talk about him in your presence ever again.”
“Ah, Harry Potter! Charmed,” said Father. Potter remained quiet because he was a sulky little cupboard-living gnome. “I am Lucius Malfoy.”
“I know who you are,” Potter said coldly. Father’s practised smile flickered and died on his face. Potter kept glaring. Nobody was paying any attention to Draco at all.
“I know who you are too, Father. Can we go to the bookshop now, or should we continue to mingle with the lower classes?”
Potter looked at him, but Father’s eyes stayed fixed on the precious Boy Who Lived’s filthy face.
“Do you wish to make purchases here, Mr Potter, or do you need an escort to the bookshop? Draco and I would be so pleased if you could accompany us: Draco has talked about nothing but you all summer long.”
Draco made a strangled sound of denial and rage. Father gestured for Potter to lead the way and Potter, very slowly and keeping a weather eye on Father, climbed out of the cupboard. Father gave Draco a small, unnecessary push and breathed in his ear, “Try to have a little dignity, Draco.”
The push left him walking beside Potter, who muttered: “What’s it like to be so rotten your own father doesn’t like you?”
Fury made Draco’s teeth hurt, but Father was watching and so he said in a pleasant tone, “I’m sure you would’ve found out if your father had lived. But he didn’t, did he?”
Potter went dark red under the dirt and Draco, cheered by this small victory, put the manuever he’d been practising into effect. He slid his glasses down to give Potter a withering look over them, and then pushed them up and looked away with elaborate indifference.
When he looked back Potter was glowering. “You got those glasses just to mock me, didn’t you.”
“You are so self-centred it makes my brain hurt,” Draco told him. He felt almost fond of his disfiguring ocular device for a change.
His and Potter’s charming tete-a-tete was interrupted at this point by a cloud of hair, which once Draco stopped being overwhelmed by its sheer volume turned out to be attached to Hermione. She flung herself in Potter’s direction.
“Harry, we’re all looking for you, Mr Weasley’s cornered my parents and he’s talking about plugs—where have you been? Your glasses are broken.”
“Letting him off his leash was a bad idea,” Draco sniffed. “See how he rolls in nasty things when you’re not there to tell him firmly to sit and play human?”
She turned to him, glowing, and he stepped back sharply, aware of his father’s eyes. “Not when you have Potter all over you, please.”
“It was nice of you to bring Harry back,” she said, looking mistily proud.
“He didn’t,” Potter yelped over Draco’s assertions that he had planned to drop Potter into the Thames.
“Draco,” Father said icily. “We need to get your books. I have no desire to stand here prattling about plugs. We and this young lady clearly move in widely different social circles: I am happy to say I have never seen a plug.”
Draco did get a chance to talk to Hermione when Father and Mr Weasley actually brawled in the bookshop. It would probably be in the papers, that father-of-fifteen would probably give Father rabies, but there was little Draco could do about it.
“Good summer?” he asked in a low tone. “These Lockhart books look like so much wastepaper.”
“Oh, no, Draco, I think they’ll be a terribly valuable class guide and a fascinating insight into the life of one of our most celebrated wizards,” Hermione told him. “Also he signed mine, look!”
“What is it with you and idiot celebrities?” Draco inquired, pitching his voice so Potter could hear the question.
Hermione rolled her eyes, Potter continued with his lifestyle choice of looking grumpy and unwashed, and a bit of redheaded fluff that looked Weasleyish in origin narrowed her eyes.
“Harry’s not an idiot,” she said in combative tones, and then returned to eyeing Potter hungrily. Draco couldn’t blame her: probably the Weasleys couldn’t afford to keep her fed.
Draco practised his new glasses manuever again, and was pleased when both Potter and the Weasley girl went red. He was planning to follow up on the look, of course, but at that point he had to go home with his father nursing a black eye, as if he was a Quidditch hooligan, and he only had time to tell Hermione he hoped she’d remember to hose her pet down.
They sat in the cold carriage and glared at each other all the way home.
His father said: “How many times have I told you it is not wise to appear less than fond of Harry Potter? And that consorting with Mudbloods is vulgar?”
Draco crossed his arms over his chest and said: “Wrestling with a Weasley? Try to have a little dignity, Father.”
His father did not speak to him from that point until Draco went back to school. Draco went back and forth between pretending not to care and being so angry that he almost didn’t.
Still, the whole incident left him reconciled to his glasses.
The year began well, it really did. Michael Corner snickered at Draco’s glasses and Draco cast Jellylegs on him, at which point Terry looked stern.
“Take that curse off, please. Though they suit you.”
Draco eyed Corner’s twitching form. “I think that suits him,” he said wistfully, but he let Terry have his way. Damn Terry and Draco’s own extreme weakness in the face of compliments!
Of course, the world was out to get Draco, and everything was downhill from there. Potter tried out for his Quidditch team and immediately everyone was wandering around raving about the best Seeker since Charleston Weasley or something, as if Quidditch was as vital and important as the breath in your lungs and the wind in your hair and he hated that stupid glory hound so much it interrupted his studies.
“Harry really loves Quidditch,” Hermione prattled. “I do hope it won’t interfere too much with his studies, but it’s nice to see him happy.”
Yes, fans and fame and the ability to pick and choose and reject friends all over the place, and on top of all that, Potter had Quidditch too. How nice that he got everything.
Draco stared at his book and thought hard about how much he disliked Lockhart in an attempt to distract himself from choking and dying on Potter hatred. This became more difficult every time he emerged from the library and almost tripped over some boy begging for Potter’s autograph, or the Weasley girl and autograph boy indulging in a competition to get his attention. Because Potter deserved for everyone to love him. Really.
The girl twit even got in the way stumbling around and looking pale when Ravenclaws were trying to see what all the commotion on Halloween night was about.
Draco solved this problem with a hard shove and an “Out of my way or die, Potter Fan 93!”
It turned out to be a silly frozen cat, which Draco did not think was as exciting as bodies, but then Terry made a soft, sharp noise of concern and Draco looked to see Anthony’s pale face.
“Ah,” he said, and then saw them looking and tried to smile. “I… think my mother would probably write a lot of letters if she thought I was going to be murdered by the Heir of Slytherin.”
“It could be a bad joke,” Terry said, his voice wavering.
Draco elbowed Anthony sharply. “Pull yourself together,” he said, his voice sounding harsh and odd in his own ears. “It might be the Mudbloods next, but it’s not going to be one of my friends.”
Terry looked aghast at the word, but Anthony gave a faint, reluctant smile. Draco adjusted his glasses and his blue scarf, crossed his arms over his chest and repressed the urge to kick the stupid frozen cat all the way to the lake where it would sink and everyone could forget and Anthony could stop looking like that.
He kept getting Owls from his father talking calmly about the Heir of Slytherin and telling Draco to just watch things unfold. He didn’t write back, because while purebloods were obviously superior and Hermione was probably an aberration or perhaps had been switched at birth, he still didn’t see why the bloody Heir had to come along and ruin everybody’s lives. His house didn’t have any stupid Heirs in it.
“If we did,” Anthony said, “they’d probably just wander about the place being really good-looking.”
Draco lowered his book interrogatively.
“Oh, yeah,” Anthony went on. “I’ve been looking at pictures of Rowena Ravenclaw, she was really fit. We’re the house of attractiveness.”
“How on earth did you get in?”
Anthony flipped him the bird. “I don’t know, but I know how you did. You’d be very attractive to any number of little female rodents.”
Draco thought being in the house of attractiveness and powerful knowledge was cooler than being in the house of being an animal-torturer and upsetting the already fragile balance of Hermione’s mind, anyway. She was darting about the place dragging her twits into ladies’ bathrooms (Potter and Weasley were utterly, utterly lost to decorum) and muttering dark things about Blaise Zabini. The only thing that cheered these winter days was Potter hurting himself at Quidditch. Oh, he must be utterly top notch, since he couldn’t keep his scrawny orphan frame intact. Draco had never hurt himself at Quidditch.
Autograph Hunter got frozen next, and Anthony got more and more tense and ate less and less, and hating Potter became almost a welcome distraction from shouting at Anthony when Anthony looked unhappy. (Draco was not exactly a nurturing person.)
Draco thought about stupid Potter and his stupid Quidditch now and then, off and on, until the moment where Professor Snape said Draco could have the pleasure of hexing Potter, and by the way, this snake spell he knew might be of interest to a dedicated student like Draco.
Professor Snape should be made first headmaster and then king, and it was not his fault that Potter turned it all around by suddenly (of course, because he was so super special) knowing snake language. That was Potter’s fault, warping the universe and spoiling Draco’s life, just to make himself look better.
Draco assumed it was also Potter’s fault that Hermione (on Christmas Day, no less) fetched up in the infirmary with fur on her. He was either a drug dealer or a heartless, cruel prankster, why wouldn’t Hermione petition for a removal to Ravenclaw?
“They’re my friends,” Hermione said from under her bedclothes, “and I love them.”
Draco made a truly terrible face that unfortunately she could not appreciate, and said, “I think you have Stockholm Syndrome.”
She didn’t get out until February. Draco was outraged at the incompetence of so-called magical healers whose only solutions were to slap glasses on innocent people’s faces and wait till the fur went away, but he did have a few thoughts about how Hermione’s absence was improving his chances of coming top.
A few very tiny, minor thoughts. Now and then.
Every time he thought them, he made sure to trip up Potter as a sign that he was Hermione’s friend and righteously enraged by Potter’s cavalier treatment of her, and then Valentine’s Day came and with it, his chance to avenge her properly.
From dawn to dusk of Valentine’s Day, Potter was hounded by singing dwarves, singing pixies, and singing First Years Draco had ordered to fill in the gaps. Through a method of careful observation, Draco noted how Potter’s face changed from bemusement to embarrassment to despair to weary annoyance, and cackled to himself as he went to and from class.
“Draco, I think you’re very disturbed,” Terry told him. Draco flapped a dismissive hand at him and dragged him closer to see the effect of the forty-ninth Valentine.
Oddly enough, Potter took one look at the advancing wave of Ravenclaws and went bright red. Draco’d thought he’d stopped being embarrassed in front of other students after Valentine Twenty-Five, but there Potter was, whispering urgently to the dwarf, all red and not meeting Draco’s eyes.
A very simple method of getting the attention that Draco required was to yell “I don’t think Potter liked your Valentine!” to Potter Fan 93.
“Draco!” Terry said reproachfully. “That poor girl was crying!”
Draco was almost crying with laughter himself, and the burden of feeling almost-glad about Hermione was gone.
Guilt was quickly replaced by horror and disgust at the most traumatic sight of Draco’s young life. All he was doing was walking along happily with Potter Fan 93, idly discussing how she’d probably named her dolls Harry and Ginny and conducted a wedding ceremony, watching her lip tremble, and Potter Fan 93 opened a door and then Draco’s eyes burned.
Inside the room Penelope Clearwater, one of his fine, upstanding, intelligent and attractive housemates, was canoodling with a Weasley!
The Weasley girl gave a thin shriek. “Oh my God, Percy, I’m so sorry!”
“Penelope!” Draco exclaimed. “How could you? You wanton trollop!”
“Draco, go away at once! It’s not what—he’s my boyfriend,” Penelope said, going red.
“I want to hear no more about your deviant pursuits,” Draco informed her severely. “I am off to inform the rest of our house about your spiral into madness.”
Penelope and the Weasley leaped after him with pleading naked on their faces, and Potter Fan 93 righteously informed Draco that nothing would make her tell on her brother while Draco negotiated for half of Penelope’s Charms and Transfigurations notes throughout her school years, for his own private consumption.
Potter Fan 93 paused, and then said: “Actually, if that git’s getting notes, I could use some Potions help.”
Draco laughed. “I like a girl who resorts to blackmail,” he said, and she half-smiled, and after that he thought of Potter Fan 93 as Ginny.
He still thought she had unfortunate taste in men and did not cease to mock it, however. Those poor, poor Gryffindors. The girls were all right and the boys were blights upon the earth, it was terrible to even contemplate. Draco distracted himself with thoughts about the horror Gryffindor girls faced every day and tried not to think about ghosts and Hufflepuffs being left frozen in the halls.
He laughed when Anthony looked to him. “God,” he drawled. “If I’d known he was set on eliminating Hufflepuffs and Gryffindor idiots, I’d have offered the Heir some help.”
Terry kept quiet, having worked out that it comforted Anthony when Draco talked like—well, Draco called it talking like a sensible person and claimed he meant every word.
Then the bloody Heir went and Petrified Hermione.
Potter was supposed to defeat evil. That was what they kept him around for! Surely someone would have killed him out of sheer annoyance if there hadn’t been any reason to keep him around, but now evil had Petrified Hermione and she’d been Draco’s study partner for almost two years and she was lying horribly, horribly still in an infirmary. She was one of the stupid Boy Who Lived’s best friends and he couldn’t keep her out of the infirmary for two freaking minutes?
Draco organised people to read class notes to her every day, and tried not to listen to any voices in his head murmuring that now his chances of coming top were very, very good.
Because she was his friend, and precious Potter would probably never have terrible thoughts like that, and Draco wasn’t going to either. Whenever the thoughts started to arise, he went to the infirmary and looked at her, and he was sure he would not have wished anything like this on her, no matter how proud he might make his father. There were more important things.
Then one day, he saw a piece of paper trapped between Hermione’s fingers. It looked random, and he was quite sure it wasn’t. He sat there staring at it, trying to make sense of it, and wondering what to do.
At that point, Potter showed up, Weasley lurking behind him with his freckled face twisted into an identical expression of hatred.
“What’re you doing here?”
“Catching her up on her studies,” Draco said. “The rest of her friends can’t do it: they’re all hopeless dullards.”
He crumpled the piece of paper from Hermione’s hand into a ball, and tossed it at Potter’s head. And with the bloody Seeker reflexes Draco had been counting on, Potter caught it, glanced at it and began to unfold it.
Draco got up and left, banging his shoulder hard into Potter’s as he went. The Boy Who Lived could figure things out from there and save her: that was what he was supposed to do. That was all he was good for.
Which begged the question of what Draco was good for.
Once Potter had done some mysterious thing and suddenly the Malfoys didn’t have a house elf, and Father was in a towering rage, the abrupt cessation of Father’s letters indicated he didn’t think Draco was good for much.
As if this wasn’t enough, Dumbledore decided to make an entire year of work worth nothing by announcing that the examinations were all off. Draco thought of his months and months in the library while stupid Potter played stupid Quidditch, and wanted to rip off Dumbledore’s head and spit down his neck. He tried phrasing that in more polite tones.
Not very much more polite ones.
“You remind me very much of a student I used to teach here at Hogwarts,” Dumbledore said, his mad eyes twinkling at something over Draco’s head. He’d probably taken a headmaster’s post to support his drug habit.
“Students used to be taught here?” Draco snapped, whirling away. “Lucky old them.”
It was all Potter’s fault somehow: he just knew it. But Hermione could move again, and Anthony didn’t look scared anymore, and Terry asked him to come stay that summer. They could go visit the Muggle world with his parents, Terry said, and since he and Hermione were supposed to take Muggle Studies together next year Draco agreed.
He thought next year looked promising.