It was, hands down, the worst summer of Draco’s life.
He wanted his father to be there when he got home but failing that, he expected peace and quiet. He did not expect the manor to be filled with people who Draco vaguely felt must have used the tradesman’s entrance.
There was a short, creepy man with an alarmingly shiny hand who giggled at Draco and ran away, and a strange sad man with a look of resigned despair on his face. He was sitting next to a woman who looked too Gothic to be quite sane.
An alarmingly large man in tight robes and in dire need of a manicure was the first to speak to Draco.
He was also the first to touch Draco in unwanted ways, since he apparently felt that trailing sharp yellow nails down the side of a total stranger’s face was acceptable behaviour. “Hello there, little boy,” he rasped. “How old are you?”
“Almost seventeen,” said Draco, who had been sixteen for weeks now.
The man grimaced in what looked like disappointment, showing pointed teeth. “Ah well,” he said, giving Draco’s cheek a final stroke. “I’m sure you were stunning in your day.”
Draco went backwards so fast he knocked into his mother, and then he gripped her arm to keep his balance and held on because he needed an anchor in a world gone mad.
“Mother,” he said in a small, tight voice. “Who are these awful people?”
“Bad news, Draco,” she whispered. “They’re family. That is your Aunt Bellatrix.”
The woman who looked like a Gothic banshee stretched on their sofa and gave Draco a little wave. Draco saw that she had the Black bone structure, though she clearly did not keep to the Black skin care regime.
“Please tell me that man isn’t a relative!”
The grey-haired man with the sharpened teeth grinned. “Not technically. But I’d be delighted if you called me Uncle Fenrir.”
Mother spoke softly into Draco’s ear. “Do not go anywhere alone with that man.”
“Don’t worry,” Draco said.
Aunt Bellatrix waved a hand in the direction of the sad-looking man. “This is your Uncle Rodolphus, worse luck,” she said in much the same tone as Mother spoke of house elves these days. “I had to get married, you see,” she went on. “In case there were Dark, lordly, glorious children.”
“Yes, dear,” said Rodolphus, in the tones of one lost to all hope.
Fenrir started ordering around a pack (Draco tried without success to think of a different word) of rather feral-looking men and women, and in the mill Draco went over to the sofa and sat as far away as he could from Aunt Bellatrix. Mother began to talk to this new aunt in a low voice, adjuring her not to say such things in front of the children.
“Come now, Narcissa,” said Uncle Oh Please God No Fenrir. “Draco’s not a child. More’s the pity.”
Draco looked at Uncle Rodolphus because he preferred this to looking anywhere else, and met a look of bleak understanding. “I liked forceful women,” Uncle Rodolphus explained in an undertone. “That didn’t work out very well for me.”
“Shut up, Rodolphus,” said Aunt Bellatrix.
“Yes, dear.”
“I might prefer boys,” volunteered Draco.
Uncle Rodolphus looked mistily approving. “I never tried that,” he said. “Life without women sounds lovely and peaceful.”
Later in Mother’s private rooms, Mother explained that providing a base for some of the Dark Lord’s followers was the only thing she’d been able to think of.
“I am not…” she said, and stopped unhappily, Draco’s beautiful poised mother, sitting at her mirror trying to fit broken words together. “I always thought it was wiser to observe from the sidelines, to provide support and information, but it has not worked out that way. I passed on what information that house elf gave me, and it ended with Lucius in prison and Sirius dead.”
“Potter’s godfather the blood traitor dead,” Aunt Bellatrix corrected, her voice rasping in a way that reminded Draco of Fenrir Greyback and upset him badly.
“Sirius,” Mother said sharply, and then looked at her own reflection. Her reflection looked back, paler than Mother and trapped under ice, and Mother’s face smoothed as if she was imitating it. “Still, that had to be done, and with some luck it will lower the Order’s morale.”
“Wait,” Draco said. “I don’t—I don’t understand. Why should—Potter—”
Bellatrix looked at him, her eyes black as ink in the low light. “Oh yes,” she said. “You go to school with him, don’t you? What do you think of him?” She did not wait for him to respond. “I was a little disappointed, myself. I killed his godfather before his eyes and he couldn’t hold a Cruciatus on me for more than a few minutes. Good for his age, of course, but it hardly makes him a being of preternatural power.”
Normally Draco could sit and listen to the music of Potter being disparaged all day long, and in fact he was starting to warm up to Aunt Bellatrix, but there were more important things than that right now.
“What side,” he said, very quietly, “was Sirius Black on? What happened?”
So his mother told him, quietly too, while Bellatrix sat in the dark and laughed at them. She told him about his cousin, and the information she had passed on, and what had happened next, and Draco sat near her in the low light, listening to her low voice, and thought, that’s it, then. Not that he hadn’t been sure before, because he had been, but this made things even clearer. No matter how close Potter had been to crying on the train, how much it had almost seemed like he had meant it when he said You’ll never get the chance to know him now.
He would never have abandoned his father or taken Potter’s pity, so he was glad that Potter would never forgive Mother for sending Sirius Black to his death.
“It’s perfectly all right, Mother,” he said, trying to sound like Father at his most calm, which made him miss Father so much he wanted to hurt someone. “You did absolutely the right thing, and you shouldn’t have to do anything but observe. I can—”
“Draco,” Mother said, sounding not at all reassured.
“Of course you can,” said Aunt Bellatrix.
When she started to move towards them Draco almost scooted away, as he would have if a wild animal had approached him, but she was Mother’s sister and Mother had talked about her and Andromeda (the one who died) and it hardly seemed polite. So he stayed still, and Mother’s hand pressing painfully tight around his thanked him for that, and Aunt Bellatrix came over to them and knelt by their chair, and Mother and Draco bent their heads towards the shadow of Aunt Bellatrix’s dark hair.
“He deserved to die,” Aunt Bellatrix murmured. “He walked out the door and never thought about any of us again, his family, we’ve been dead to him for years.”
People like the Weasleys were blood traitors and hardly minded the name because they were all in it together. They didn’t understand that blood meant family, and that no matter what excuses Sirius Black might have thought he had, a traitor was a traitor.
“I’m glad to have met you properly, Draco,” said Aunt Bellatrix, her face softening.
Up close she looked tired, and he could trace his mother’s features in her face. More than his mother she reminded him of Grandma Black, who had not really been his grandmother but had that title by grace of being the Black matriarch. Father used to say she was a shrill virago, but Draco’s only memories of her was when he was three, and Mother used to put him on Grandma’s lap. She was very old by then and she never spoke loudly to Draco. She held him in her lap and rocked him, and she smelled like mothballs but she held him so carefully and he would sit with her quietly, as he hardly ever liked to sit with anyone, because she knew that he was special.
When Draco was three, Grandma Black died.
It wasn’t until later that he learned he was special because of Sirius and Bellatrix who were gone, and Andromeda and Regulus who were dead. Everything had seemed assured, and then disaster had struck so quickly and his mother had been the only daughter left of the ancient House of Black. Grandma Black was the matriarch of that great pureblood fear, a dying line.
It was not until Draco was eight that he understood he was special because he was all that was left.
He looked at Bellatrix’s dark, intense eyes and strong jaw, and he closed his eyes and pretended he could smell mothballs. She would help them. They were family.
“You’ll want to see the Dark Lord, of course,” Bellatrix whispered in his ear.
Draco swallowed and said, “Yes.”
Draco walked carefully in the Manor that summer, with the werewolves crawling over his father’s land. They scared him and that made him resent them, and resentment did not help with his lingering, persistent fear every time they moved oddly. Draco was not sure how much they were naturally different from humans and not bothering to conceal it, how much they were trying to be like animals or how much they were trying to be like Fenrir, but he was sure that every time he found himself in a room with the pack, he felt like prey.
He was trying to sidle by a couple of them and not meet their eyes when his eyes found someone new.
“Professor Lupin!” he exclaimed, absolutely scandalised.
Professor Lupin, dressed even worse than usual and moving with the fluid, rolling grace of the animals. He looked at Draco and was suddenly different, his head on one side as if he was nothing but a kindly professor anxious to answer Draco’s questions.
“Dumbledore fired me,” he said, just a trace of Fenrir’s rasp in the voice Draco remembered as soft. “What did you expect me to do?”
Draco stared at him and answered: “You could have become a librarian.”
Professor Lupin looked amused for a moment, but then he saw Draco’s face change and his own went grave a second before Fenrir’s arm landed about his thin shoulders.
“Catching up, are we?” Fenrir asked. “You must have taught him in school. Perhaps I should’ve been bookish like you, Remus. I think I’d have loved being a schoolteacher. How old was Draco when you saw him last—sweet thirteen and never been mauled?”
“I follow your lead, Fenrir,” Professor Lupin said quietly. “Doesn’t mean I’ll laugh at your bad jokes.”
Fenrir leered. “Who was joking? Tell me, was little Draco here your favourite student?”
“No,” Draco answered at once, remembering who had been.
Professor Lupin caught his eye as he was turning away and smiled, like the Professor Lupin who Mandy and Padma and Lisa had made fools of themselves over years ago.
“He might have been my favourite Ravenclaw,” he said, and then tiredly knocked away Fenrir’s arm.
Clearly Professor Lupin had superior taste Draco had never noticed, on account of his extremely poor taste in clothing. Draco smiled back a tiny bit before getting hurriedly out of Fenrir’s way, and after that he was able to tolerate Professor Lupin better than the rest of the gaunt ragged things who wandered like strays under the high marble ceilings of his father’s house.
Aunt Bellatrix brought him to see the Dark Lord after a week in the manor, and he was almost glad to go. It was the first step to getting his life back.
The Dark Lord was living in a tumbledown old house that under normal circumstances, Draco would have scorned, but that day he scarcely noticed it. He tried to feel awed by the great destiny his father had said fate would have in store for him one day, when he was worthy of it, but mostly he was sweating and hoping the Dark Lord would not notice, feeling the bite of Aunt Bellatrix’s fingernails in his shoulder and feeling the pit of his stomach shift sickly.
When they reached their goal, the pit of his stomach flipped and tipped him over into a different world.
Forget the werewolves, that did not look human, but it was sitting on a carved chair and the centre of the room. Aunt Bellatrix was looking at it and did not seem to be breathing anymore, the giggling oddball with the shiny hand was scurrying to do its bidding, and there was no way this was anyone but the Dark Lord.
He had a high voice that left cold echoes around your head. “This is the Malfoy boy? Do you know how much your father has disappointed me?”
Draco wanted to defend his father but actually he didn’t know anything, except that the Dark Lord had red eyes.
There was an enormous snake winding through the carvings of his chair, and the Dark Lord stroked its massive coils with one long white hand. He spoke slowly, in the way Draco knew his father talked to business associates, and perhaps Draco would have been impressed by all this showmanship if his father had kept impressing him with it, or if Anthony and Terry’s great common sense had not rubbed off on him enough that it was hard for him to concentrate on anything but red eyes.
“He wants to make up for it, my Lord,” Bellatrix said, shoving him forward and onto his knees.
The floor was cold and his knees ached, and Draco swallowed and tried to force words into his dry mouth. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do. Uh, my Lord.”
He wondered whether ‘Your Darkness, Sir’ would be appropriate, and then wished his mind would not scatter into a dozen panicked fleeing pieces when he was scared. He wanted out of here, and away from this, but the other side had taken his father and the Dark Lord was the only way to get him back.
Besides, Father had always said the Dark Lord was the most powerful wizard in the world and that he would change the world. And the world did need changing.
When Draco looked at the floor, it wasn’t so bad.
“Well,” said the Dark Lord. “A student in Hogwarts. Dumbledore’s always been so very… soft about his students.”
Draco felt that Dumbledore assigning murderers to teach them was an interesting definition of soft but the Dark Lord sounded like he thought Draco was going to be useful—which he was, of course the Dark Lord was going to recognise it, was going to appreciate him and Father was going to be proud…
“Look at me, Draco Malfoy,” said Voldemort, and he leaned forward as Draco looked up. The Dark Lord licked his thin lips and whispered: “I can read minds, you know.”
Draco tried hard not to recoil and not to think about red eyes anymore.
“You want your father back,” the Dark Lord went on, his voice a promise Draco’s father had followed before him. “You want his failure to serve me pardoned, and the Malfoys restore to a high place in the world, and for you to be acclaimed as the greatest of them all.”
Yes, and yes, and yes. “Yes,” Draco breathed.
The Dark Lord looked mildly puzzled. “And you’re in Ravenclaw, apparently. How odd. We don’t get many of your kind here.”
Perhaps because you have red eyes! thought Draco, and then hastily tried to think about something else.
“I could use someone with some intelligence,” said the Dark Lord, sneering towards Shiny Hand. “I think perhaps I could be persuaded to make a bargain.”
“A bargain,” Draco echoed helplessly, feeling as if he had very little on the table.
“Respect. Glory. Your father and your family honour restored. All the rewards that my most loyal followers will receive.”
“Yes,” Draco said.
The Dark Lord leaned back in his chair, his eyes glittering.
“Do you think you could kill Albus Dumbledore, Draco? He might let one of his students get close enough to try.”
Draco did not think about Professor Dumbledore’s power. He thought about his father instead, thought that if Voldemort was ready to give him this important a job he must see something in Draco, and once Father saw that, once Father was free because of Draco…
He hated Dumbledore anyway, Dumbledore who never protected any of them for anything, who was meant to watch over a whole school but only had eyes for Harry Potter. He hated Dumbledore, and it would be worth it to trade him for his father. Draco thought those words, thought trade, exchange, bargain, and refused to think about the word kill.
“Yes,” he said, very low.
“How very satisfactory,” Voldemort told him, his voice just as low. “You understand that the penalty for those who fail the Dark Lord is death. Since you would be the second of your family to disappoint me, I believe I might count the entire Malfoy clan as… a dead loss.”
Mother, thought Draco, and looked up into a pitiless red gaze.
“Exactly,” the Dark Lord murmured. “Think of it as an incentive. I do not tolerate failure. And I will have absolute loyalty. Tell me, Draco, are you willing to take my Mark?”
Draco thought of being very young and seeing his parents get ready for parties, and seeing Father’s sleeve slip to show something Draco had not recognised.
What’s that?
The mark of something that should have been.
Father would want him to have it. Draco wanted to have it: it would mean there was no going back, save him from any backsliding and failing Father, make his choice final and mark him as valued, and chosen.
Draco opened his mouth to tell the Dark Lord yes one more time.
“I do not want you to have it,” the Dark Lord told him. “It would be far too likely to get spotted in school. I wanted to know that you would take it.” He leaned back, the snake crawling up his thin chest to curl around his neck, and added: “I want you to earn it.”
Father. Fame. Glory. And in the balance, his life and his parents’ lives.
Draco got up, and then bowed. He tried not to tremble. He was going to do this, going to be the man of his house, the man his father would have wanted. Voldemort had chosen him. It was an honour.
He lifted his chin and met the Dark Lord’s eyes for the last time. “I will.”
The next day, Aunt Bellatrix started Draco’s Occlumency lessons.
She started them in typical Aunt Bellatrix fashion, which was to say insanely and with a lack of regard for others. She came striding into Draco’s bedroom when he was sleeping, and it was only thanks to his enormous terror of Fenrir Greyback that he was fully clothed when she stripped off the bedclothes.
“You didn’t handle your first meeting with Our Lord too badly,” she told him as a light conversational opener, “but do you think that Dumbledore won’t take one look at you, read your mind and kill you where you stand?”
Draco blinked and thought fuzzily that if Dumbledore could in fact read minds, which seemed to be a far more popular spectator sport than Draco had ever dreamed, then he had been reading Draco’s mind for years and would know Draco wanting him dead was par for the course.
“Very amusing, Draco,” Bellatrix said, and when he stared at her she bared her teeth. “You start off by casting Legilimens, but in the end… it’s a mindset. You hardly need to be able to master wandless magic to read a mind.”
“Master wandless magic?” Draco heard himself bleat.
“First you must learn how to block your mind,” Bellatrix told him, and suddenly she was not just glancing, he could feel her in there, rifling through his memories, feel the edges of her savage smile at the insides of his mind as she rifled through everything he had never wanted seen. Outrage well and truly woke Draco as his aunt went over the feeling of Cho’s smooth thighs, the taste of the back of Terry’s neck, and then panic took a running leap and knocked outrage down because in a moment she was going to see Potter.
Which had of course been nothing, a moment or three of insanity because Potter had gone mad from his lack of skills with the ladies and Draco had hit his head, but she’d want to talk about it and she wasn’t seeing it and it was private.
“Occlumens, Draco. Empty your mind,” whispered Aunt Bellatrix. “And mean it.”
Draco thought fast. Nobody could empty their mind, nobody could, but you could shut off bits of it enough to seem empty, lock away thoughts from yourself because you didn’t want to see them, that was easy, he did it all the time, oh God, he could feel her getting close, he could feel her feeling Potter’s hair knotted around his fingers—
“Occlumens!” Draco shouted, and Bellatrix actually, physically, fell back.
She smiled when she looked at him, bright and triumphant, and came to sit on his bed, putting her hand on his shoulder. She always gripped too tight. “Draco, on your first try,” she breathed. “That’s very good. Our Master will be so pleased—” she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his forehead. “We’ll all be proud of you.”
Draco closed his eyes and thought about putting his arm around her neck. She was frightening and familiar at the same time, she was family, and he wanted her to go away forever but perhaps to love him, as well.
His train of thought was cut off by his mother’s voice.
“Our Master?” said Mother, and he opened his eyes to see her standing on his threshold, thin and golden and almost wavering like a candle flame as she spoke. “Proud? Bella, what have you done?”
Aunt Bellatrix let go of Draco, her eyes glowing with missionary zeal. “Cissy, wait until you hear—”
“I don’t want to talk about things like—like the Dark Lord in front of Draco,” Mother said, swallowing. “I want to speak with you alone—and I warn you, if you have endangered my son—”
“Mother, I’m not a child,” Draco interrupted. “I can help you, I want to help you—”
Mother did not look at him, but repeated in an imperious voice: “Bella!”
Aunt Bellatrix looked at Mother’s cold face and reluctantly got off the bed and went towards her. She and Mother left the room, and Draco was tempted to go after them and demand to be included in the conference, but his head hurt and his heart was still beating fast. Aunt Bellatrix could read his mind any time she liked, he would not be safe for a moment, that had been a very close thing, and he didn’t want her to know. He was going to have to get good at Occlumency in a hurry.
He sat in bed with his arms locked around his knees for a long time, and when he ventured outside Professor Lupin saw him, and immediately offered to make him a cup of tea. Draco noticed almost absently that he looked ill, and had a feeling that while Lupin said he only took two sugars, he would have preferred more. He hoped Professor Lupin wasn’t coming down with anything.
It was almost evening when Mother called Draco to her room.
He stood uncertainly in the middle of the floor as she sat by her dresser, her reflection paler than ever in the mirror. Her wand lay thrumming with energy on the dresser, and one of her hands was clasped tight around it, the knuckles white, but when she spoke her voice was icy calm.
Mother always had an air of distance about her, all her acts like tableaux instead of like Father, who seemed really warm sometimes, who seemed able to mean it and feel it. Draco stood watching her watch him in her mirror and thought with insane detachment that this might be why he never tried so hard for Mother, even though he never doubted that she loved him, and he doubted Father all the time.
“Draco,” said Mother. “I forbid you to do this. We can—I have offered the Dark Lord the manor, Bella is a favourite of his. Or we can find some other way. I am trying to use your father’s contacts in the Ministry.”
All of whom are not going to help, as Draco can tell by his mother’s pinched mouth when she receives her Owls in the morning. Father had such pride in his contacts, in the way the Malfoy name had become currency, and now the currency is worthless, like that of a conquered country. All his life Draco heard about the power of his name, and now that they need power, it has failed him. He did not realise so many things would be lost along with Father.
“Mother, don’t do this. I’m not a child, the Dark Lord chose me—”
Mother still looked at the mirror, a silent spell arranging her hair, lifting up long light swathes of pale gold. Her eyes in the mirror looked cold and desperate.
“He chose you so he would have an excuse for getting rid of us, so Bellatrix would not see it was all spite, spite because Lucius failed him. He is not giving you a chance.”
She was just saying this because she did not think he could do it, as Father would have thought he couldn’t, because everyone thought he wasn’t quite good enough. She didn’t see that he could, that he was going to save her.
“He is!” Draco insisted. “Mother, think about what he’s offering. He’ll give it all back—he’ll give Father back. You want Father back, don’t you?”
He threw that appeal at her because he knew it was too powerful to meet with anything but a positive response, and he felt cold when her mirrored eyes met his. Her hair was still lazily arranging itself, drifting on the air, catching the candlelight, and her voice was still cold.
She gazed at him in the mirror and said: “I would rather have you.”
For a moment, Draco was confused and pleased, and then he realised what she was saying. That she would leave Father to rot in Azkaban, that she didn’t really care about him, that she was abandoning Father like everyone else in the world was and Draco was the only one left.
Mother got up suddenly, stowing her wand away, breaking the spell so her hair fell loose around her shoulders. “I need to go out,” she said. “I need to—I need to find…” She walked about her room in a few swift steps, taking up her cloak, putting the hood up over her gleaming hair. She stopped beside him for a moment, her face in shadow, and put her hand up to his cheek. “Everything will be all right, Draco.”
“Yes, I know,” Draco said obstinately, not wanting to look at her for very long.
She Disapparated without another word, going somewhere else as she liked to do, when she left the room when Draco had childish tantrums, when he suspected she was glad he was going to Hogwarts so she could write him letters and send him parcels with all her love from a distance and under wraps.
Aunt Bellatrix came storming in almost as soon as Mother had gone, and looked around the room with a sort of expectant demanding, as if Mother was hiding under her bed and Aunt Bellatrix could force her to get out.
“Where has she—oh, no she hasn’t,” Aunt Bellatrix said through her teeth. “I won’t have it. I won’t have her interfering with my Master, or with you, and I certainly won’t have one of my family beholden to a miserable half-blood of doubtful loyalties!”
While Draco appreciated Aunt Bellatrix’s support, he hoped she knew she was raving like a loon.
Before he could tell her that, she had Disapparated as well. Possibly they had nowhere to go, possibly they were just taunting Draco with the fact that because of idiot laws he couldn’t legally Apparate quite yet, even though he was all but seventeen.
Draco left his mother’s room and slammed the door, walking along the corridors to his room in the gathering dark, and saw Professor Lupin looking even sicker than usual. The man needed vitamins.
“Mr Malfoy,” he said hoarsely. “Where’s your mother?”
Draco scowled. “She went out. So did Aunt Bellatrix.”
“And left you alone?”
“I do not actually require a nursemaid,” Draco informed him. “Besides, I think Mother quite likes you.”
Professor Lupin appeared to be getting all worked up, his hackles rising, his voice rasping, and Draco was forcibly and horribly reminded afresh of Fenrir. “Do none of you think?” he snarled. “Do none of you realise? Tonight is the full moon!”
Draco felt abruptly as if he was going to faint, and forbade himself to do so very sternly indeed.
“You’re alone,” Lupin said softly, “in a house full of werewolves.”
Draco felt that rubbing it in was very insensitive. Teachers were supposed to make children feel reassured, damn it.
Lupin’s face in the gathering dark was suddenly very sinister. All the hairs on Draco’s arm were standing up as if they wanted to run away up to his neck, and in this light Lupin’s greying hair didn’t look like age and illness, it looked like the brindled, silvery fur of a wolf. Draco remembered the way he had moved that first day, before he knew someone who would expect to see Professor Lupin was watching.
Draco stumbled backwards.
“Fenrir will be able to smell it. Smell you, and that there’s nobody else to protect you,” Lupin continued. “Look… There’s a potion I take, the Dark Lord arranges for me to have it, and it lets me keep my mind when I transform. You need to go to your room and barricade yourself in there.”
“I’m way ahead of you,” Draco told him, going back another step.
“Draco,” said Lupin. “Listen. I don’t want to put myself between you and Fenrir overtly. Challenging his authority is no part of my plan. Putting myself at your door to guard you would be an offensive move, but if you would allow me in the room with you—”
Draco tried not to tremble. “Don’t like sharing your food, is that it? Fat chance.”
“I’m safe with the Potion,” Lupin snarled at him, looking very dangerous indeed. He paused and then said: “I promise you. Professor Snape makes it.”
“Oh,” Draco said uncertainly. “Why—Aunt Bellatrix told me about the things werewolves do for the Dark Lord, for the cause… why would you want to be conscious through it?”
“Because,” Lupin said evenly, “it means that I will only do exactly as much as I have to, to stay with Fenrir, and nothing more.”
Draco thought about that: about being aware, about feeling human, when the Dark Lord tossed Amelia Bones to the… He stopped thinking about it at once.
He crossed his arms protectively over his chest, and said: “Why should I trust you?”
Lupin’s voice stayed even, with just a whisper of a snarl behind it. “Because you have no other choice.”
Potter’d liked him, Draco thought suddenly, but then Potter had liked Professor Madly Abusing Other Students Moody. Potter was a complete idiot.
“I…” Draco said, and cursed himself for sounding feeble-minded. “Yes. All right.”
They went into Draco’s room as his knees tried not to knock and his throat tried not to seize up and his brain utterly let him down by picturing the way his room would look once a werewolf ate him and scattered the bones and gristly bits on the floor.
Lupin helped him push his chest of drawers in front of his door. It was heavy, but Lupin was apparently much stronger than he looked. Draco did not find this even a little bit soothing.
“Sure you had that Potion?” Draco inquired tensely. “It doesn’t wear off, does it? Wouldn’t you fancy another nice cup of it?”
“It’s all right, Draco,” Professor Lupin told him wearily, and then doubled up and screamed.
Draco screamed too, going backwards so fast he’d hit the wall before he realised, and his back was aching, but he kept working his shoulderblades as if he could dig his way out of brick with his back, his harsh breathing was tearing the world ragged around him, he couldn’t see for panic, only he could see too much. Lupin was screaming, his head thrown back now, and his face and chest were moving, bones crunching and shifting, into a monster.
Draco took a deep breath and a flying leap at his wardrobe, scrambling on top of it, and then knocked his head against the ceiling craning to get a better view of the werewolf.
There was howling from outside the door, almost human voices mimicking werewolf howls with Fenrir’s mad laugh topping them, and then the howls were turning animal, and mingled with screams, and this was his home and the animals had overrun it. Draco’s furious resentment was going to take over as soon as he stopped shaking.
The werewolf was at the foot of the wardrobe, staring up at Draco with empty wolf eyes. If Professor Lupin was in there, the eyes were not the windows to the soul and everyone had lied, because Lupin looked just like a wolf, an enormous wolf with sharp teeth and animal eyes.
He was not leaping. He just sat at the foot of the wardrobe, unblinking gaze fixed on Draco, and Draco slid his hand into the chest pocket of his robes and curled his hand hard around his wand. He tried to get his breathing under control because it was hurting his throat, and his eyes felt dry because he could not look away from the werewolf. He lay curled on top of the wardrobe, his stomach twisting with terror, and listened to the wolves baying through his house, through his Father’s house, and he knew things had to change.
A body hurled itself against the door and when Draco screamed it growled, a sound that sent the door and Draco shuddering, and then the werewolf at the foot of Draco’s wardrobe growled too. There was an almost considering pause from behind the door, and then silence.
Draco held hard onto his wand and scrubbed at his wet face. Someone had to control the werewolves, Fenrir had been on the loose for years, but he was the Dark Lord’s now. The Dark Lord had power over him, he could solve the problem the Ministry could not.
This nightmare would be over soon, and everything would be better.
Mother came home that morning, and they were both so tired that they curled up on a sofa together, Draco’s bones aching from finally moving out of the huddled shape on top of the wardrobe. She stroked his hair, being wildly demonstrative for Mother, and when he turned to look at her he saw her face. It must have been a trick of his tear-smudged glasses, but she almost looked as if she had been crying too.
“Everything will be all right,” she whispered to him again, her voice like steel.
“I know,” said Draco. Everything was becoming clearer and clearer. Something needed to be done.
That was when he remembered hearing the Inquisitorial Squad talking about what the Sociopath Twins had done to Montague, and remembered that cabinet. His mother was sleeping by then and he did not move, he did not want to disturb her, all he did was clench a triumphant fist against his leg, and then start stroking her hair.
When Professor Lupin came limping painfully down the stairs, his face white as a sheet, Mother took a long look at him and Draco knew she was schooling her face not to betray her distaste.
Then she said, “Thank you.”
Lupin gave her an even more exhausted smile than usual. “It was my pleasure.”
Then they all went downstairs to the kitchen because the manor was in such a state Mother did not want to sit in any of her good rooms and see what werewolves had done to her carpet. Draco made tea for everyone, but really mostly for Professor Lupin. He was starting to think Professor Lupin had a disturbing tea fetish.
Lupin might have a tea fetish, but Draco had an intact jugular and a plan. Mother seemed happier, too, and the light was streaming through the windows and everything was going to be all right.
“Tell me,” Draco said, because he was quite sure these people would not instantly dob him in, “why does the Dark Lord’s face look like that?”
Lupin’s face went completely blank but Mother answered casually: “I believe it’s to do with living forever.”
“He did it to himself?” Draco demanded, and at Mother’s nod he smirked at them over the teapot. “You know, with no nose and red eyes, I bet he hasn’t had any love in a long time,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe it just seems like he’s living forever.”
Lupin smiled, forgetting to be so tired for a moment, and Mother looked perfectly horrified.
“Do not let Bella hear you talk like that!” She smiled her hostess’ smile as Draco poured the tea. “Professor Lupin has been telling me how good your essays were in third year.”
“I tell you my essays are brilliant every year,” Draco protested. “Specially that one, remember, I did a dramatic reading—”
“It’s nice to hear it from the teachers,” Mother said. “I wish that frightful man would arrange some kind of interaction between parents and teachers, I hear the Montagues’ poor child was missing for days before they were contacted—”
“I could run the school better than he could,” Draco suggested. “I think I would be a brilliant Headmaster. I would have a staff made of gold and be called Headmaster Malfoy and rule with justice and wisdom and cane all the people who were stupid at me. How many sugars, Professor Lupin?”
“I’d like two,” said Professor Lupin, who would clearly have loved four.
“My friend Anthony says they have teacher and student meetings in the Muggle world,” Draco said without thinking, and then when his mother stared he said hastily, “Very keen on Muggle Studies, Anthony.”
It was not exactly a lie.
Professor Lupin, who Draco imagined knew perfectly well that Anthony Goldstein was Muggleborn, said thoughtfully: “Yes, I remember.”
Draco put six sugars in Professor Lupin’s tea and then gave it to him.
“Anthony,” Mother said, delicately interrogating.
“Mother, no,” Draco exclaimed. “No, really, I won’t have you talking about my love life. Parents can’t know anything about their children’s love lives: it is a law. If you did know things my head would explode like a teakettle with a firecracker in it.”
“I merely asked,” said Mother.
At that point Draco seized the teakettle and began to fly it around, making screeching and popping sounds as he imagined a firecracker would. Mother and Lupin were laughing at him a bit, and then he was surprised by a bark of laughter from the door.
He spun around, thinking it was Fenrir, but the rusty disused sound belonged to his Aunt Bellatrix. She came in and poured herself a cup of tea. “What are we talking about?”
“Me being headmaster,” Draco replied promptly, feeling Aunt Bellatrix already knew far too much about his love life.
Aunt Bellatrix tilted her head to one side, and smiled a wild but very charming smile. “You can be. Once we’re through with you, Draco, you can be anything you like.”
“I think if I were headmaster, I would have to grow my hair,” Draco said thoughtfully. “That looks wise.”
He had a tea towel on his head and was doing a Professor Dumbledore impression when Fenrir walked in and he whisked it off and wished he really was a million trillion years old like horrible Dumbledore.
“Aw, how sweet, a family tea party,” Fenrir cooed. “Mummy, auntie, baby and their pet dog. Shame you didn’t come out to play last night, Draco. We could’ve had… fun.”
Draco felt himself blanch, and heard the low, rising growl from Lupin. Mother’s eyes had narrowed.
“You know,” Aunt Bellatrix said, drawing her wand with a flourish, “I’m getting very tired of seeing you victimise my nephew.”
Mother rose and Aunt Bellatrix rose with her, and for a moment they stood with their lids lowered and their wands drawn, like a a matched set, a photograph and its negative just poised to move. They looked like the Black sisters in that moment, like they were meant to stand together, and Draco suddenly knew how much Mother must have missed that.
“Meant no offence,” Fenrir said, backing up a step.
Lupin growled again, deeper, and when Fenrir glared he innocently sipped his tea. Werewolf with a cuppa, nothing to see here.
“Cissy, will an Unforgivable spoil your kitchen?” Bellatrix inquired considerately.
Fenrir retreated and Draco beamed around at all of them. This was what the Dark Lord was about: stronger people banding together to make the world better and control everything that was going wild. Nobody had ever stood up to Moody for him.
Draco knew he’d made the right choice.
Occlumency lessons kept going brilliantly, because Draco was obviously a very great genius. He was able to block his mind completely from Aunt Bellatrix’s by the third lesson, and on the fourth lesson he was able to throw Legilimens hard enough to crash into her mind for a moment.
All he saw was a dark handsome man who was obviously not his Uncle Rodolphus, and the fat face of some woman who looked a little like Neville Longbottom.
“Oh, the brat’s your age, is he?” Aunt Bellatrix asked. “What do you think of him?”
Draco shrugged. “He’s an idiot.”
Bellatrix smiled. “His parents were blood traitors, and they deserved everything they got.”
He had no idea Longbottom’s parents had received anything, and he did not want to know about anything Aunt Bellatrix had done. He heard her screaming in her sleep some nights, heard his mother hurry into her room to wake her from dreams of Azkaban.
Only the knowledge that the Dementors had left Azkaban—because the Dark Lord was more in control than the Ministry, just as Draco had thought—stopped Draco from leaving the house and somehow finding a way to Hogwarts to kill Dumbledore at once, to get his father out of that place.
“Where’s Uncle Rodolphus staying?” he asked, to check his aunt was not involved in any scandalous love affairs beside the one in her head with the Dark Lord.
“How should I know?” Aunt Bellatrix responded, looking irritable. “I was married to him for four years of war, and then had to listen to him dribble and moan for fourteen years more. I’m back with my family now—I don’t need a keepsake from Azkaban.”
She looked at Draco and Draco wondered why Aunt Bellatrix always looked starved, even though Mother made sure she ate. She leaned forward and pushed the hair from Draco’s brow.
“You’re doing remarkably,” she said. “I wish I had a son like you, to give into the service of my Lord.”
Draco put a cautious arm around her, because he thought her crazy talk meant love. She was right, after all: they were family. In comparison, nothing else mattered.
“You let some things slip, those first few times,” Aunt Bellatrix said in his ear, and he thought of Potter and almost had a panic attack. “That girl Hermione,” she went on. “She looked familiar—and she’s a Mudblood, isn’t she?”
Draco went cold.
“Don’t think I blame you for a moment,” murmured Aunt Bellatrix, sounding almost like his mother, but warmer. “You were placed in that atrocious school, surrounded by the wrong sort when you were an impressionable child. They’re tricky, those Mudbloods, sometimes they do seem just like us, that’s why they’re even more dangerous than the Muggles. You’re a little too soft, Draco, you became fond of a couple of them, that’s all. Your breeding won out. You made the right choice.”
The worry he was going to be asked to cut off Hermione’s head the next time he saw her relieved, Draco relaxed a little further against Aunt Bellatrix.
“We’re not going to kill them all, you know,” Aunt Bellatrix murmured. He looked at her quickly and she said: “Of course not, there are billions of them. It would be a waste. We just need to set our rules and weed out the rebels, put Our Master on the throne to change the world. And which Mudbloods more likely to be shown mercy than the favourites of the Dark Lord’s favourite, the one who removed a significant obstacle from his path?”
She sounded lazy and indulgent, as if she was promising him a treat, and not the lives of his friends. Draco closed his eyes and leaned against her, thought of Hermione’s face just before she hit him. He could save her too, as well as Father.
He’d known he made the right choice.
“Did you know Sirius Black?” he asked Lupin the next time they had tea.
Lupin put down his cup. “He was a friend at school,” he said quietly.
“You know he’s…”
“Yes,” said Lupin. “Yes, I know that.”
Draco rattled around with the teacups and the sugar basin instead of continuing with this stupid conversation, but Lupin carried it on all by his stubborn werewolf self.
“Why do you ask?”
Draco looked at the kitchen surfaces. “Potter mentioned him,” he mumbled.
Lupin clearly cheated by using super wolf powers to hear him. “Harry? Harry mentioned him to you?”
If Lupin persisted with this cruel interrogation, Draco was only going to put one spoon of sugar in his tea. “Yes,” he said into the cups. “He said—on the train home this year, he said I’d never get the chance to know him now.”
He thought of the rattling train and Potter’s eyes gleaming with tears, without the haze of rage he had experienced the first few dozen times around.
“He said that,” Lupin said, giving Draco an odd look. “You two are getting on better these days, then?”
Draco had an extremely ill-timed and vivid flashback to the incident of insanity. He banged the sugar basin and spoon about some more and felt his ears burn. He hoped to God Lupin did not notice, damn Potter anyway. He thought everyone else were such little unimportant people, clearly boys were to be used as a sort of practice kit until he was ready for girls.
“He hates me,” Draco answered. “He always hated me, remember?”
Lupin’s mouth twisted. “He didn’t mention it so often after the mudfight incident. Apparently you—didn’t turn him in to Snape, or something?”
“Hermione would’ve had my head,” Draco muttered, and compromised by maliciously only adding three spoonfuls of sugar to Lupin’s tea. He handed it over and hoped sugar-light tea added sorrow to Lupin’s wretched werewolf life.
Once he was sitting across the table from Lupin, he thought an adroit segue from things that were very much his own business was appropriate.
“You liked Potter,” he said. “I remember that. In a shocking turn of events in this world where everyone is obsessed with his mop-headed loathsomeness, he was teacher’s pet. Doesn’t it bother you that—?”
Draco stopped and had some tea.
Lupin laced his fingers around his cup. “It does bother me,” he agreed. “I liked Harry very much. I would have loved him, if—his parents had lived, if things had worked out. Only it bothered me to be around him. In the end, he was too painful a reminder of a world I lost, and then I had no job, I knew I would have no job under the Ministry’s rule, and a lifetime going hungrier than I have already gone did not seem worth it, just for the sake of some old memories that hurt.”
“Besides, he’d probably hate you if he knew everything you’d done,” Draco said, thinking of how judgemental Potter always was, how they had both gone too far already, and then he saw the look on Lupin’s face and he realised Terry would not have considered that a sensitive comment.
“He would have every right,” Professor Lupin said, and he sounded so tired.
Draco made a restless movement, unsure of what to do, and knocked over his teacup. Tea went everywhere and Lupin started to laugh. “Sometimes,” he added, “you remind me very much of your first cousin.”
Draco looked up from his efforts to salvage his mother’s tablecloth from death-by-tea. “You must be thinking of someone else,” he said, blinking. “I don’t have a first cousin.”
Lupin leaned forward. “Draco,” he said in a low voice, “It’s very easy for Harry to dismiss evil as inhuman, and to view people he has no sympathy with as evil. That is why I was pleased he seemed—less inclined to dismiss you in third year, since you have a very different—”
The word dismiss stung enough for Draco to interrupt with a short, bitter laugh. “Well, you were wrong. He’s always dismissed me.”
“Your situation,” Lupin said softly, “is quite different. Evil is almost always human. You can live with evil, laugh with evil, undiluted evil is very hard to find, but irredeemable evil is not. Listen to me, Draco—”
“Draco,” Aunt Bellatrix said from the door, “it’s time for your Occlumency lesson.”
Draco grinned an apology and left Lupin with the rest of the mess. Professor Lupin wasn’t so bad, Draco thought: he didn’t deserve to be starved to death. They should not let him be a teacher or anything, what if he got too complacent and forgot his Potion, but Draco thought they should let him be a librarian if he would promise to lock himself up in a cellar every full moon and not chew on the books.
Sensible people like Lupin and Professor Snape were Death Eaters. It was the only choice.
Draco rubbed nervously at his left wrist and Aunt Bellatrix caught him at it. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” he said guiltily.
“We’d best get on with Occlumency, then. I mentioned how talented you are at a meeting the other day,” she added. As Draco subtly, coolly preened himself on being a complete genius, she said: “I’d watch out for Severus Snape, if I were you. He likes you, but he was a little miffed—he’s used to being the Occlumens prodigy, and he’s jealous that you have been trusted with such an important job, at your age. He might want to steal some of your glory.”
Prodigy, Draco repeated to himself, and tried to keep his smirk to acceptable levels. Then he said, “Wait—what? I like Professor Snape!”
Aunt Bellatrix lifted one shoulder. “Perhaps I am wrong.”
Later that day, Draco sat on Mother’s bed and watched her do her hair. “Do you like Professor Snape?” he blurted, and saw her raise her eyebrows in the glass.
“Yes, I do. Very much. Why do you ask?”
“Nothing,” Draco muttered. “No reason. That’s what I thought.”
His mother continued to watch him in the mirror. He saw his own reflection in the mirror, and he looked smaller and unhappier than he imagined himself.
“If Professor Snape gives you any advice,” Mother said suddenly, “Take it. He wants to help you, he know you’re still very young—”
Draco curled in tighter on himself. “I’m not a child.”
She thought he was weak, and that he could not be trusted, but he wasn’t. He had made his decision, he was going to save his father, and she would see then, and she would be so happy.
She’d be proud of him, then.
Aunt Bellatrix had told him about Regulus, as well. Draco knew what happened to people who were weak enough to lose their nerve when they had chosen the right path and found it difficult. It was the same thing that happened to people who betrayed their family and lived cut off from them in order to win the love of people like Harry Potter.
They died.
Draco was going to be stronger than that.
With the summer days growing shorter, the time when Draco was going to have to effect his plans came closer. It was perfectly normal to be nervous, he was sure even Father was a little nervous before every great political victory.
He did what he knew, and studied. The books available at home did not have as wide a range as Hogwarts library, but there were a few volumes that would have been in the Restricted Section at school. Draco found a few things on the Come and Go Room.
For instance, if you took an object which belonged to the room outside the room, you could control what happened inside it to an extent. If Potter or someone came sneaking around, Draco thought it would be extremely amusing to present him with an empty room, and then perhaps remove the door for a bit.
Aunt Bellatrix got restless when he spent too long reading, and asked him if he wanted to learn some terrible Dark curses. Draco gave her a look over his glasses for being unappreciative of serious research, but agreed after a while that terrible Dark curses might come in handy.
“I can’t believe you don’t play Quidditch,” Aunt Bellatrix said after Draco successfully turned a frog upside down in the air and left it hanging.
“Yes, Harry Potter, but why do you look so alarmingly like my aunt?” Draco asked.
Aunt Bellatrix looked at him as if he was crazy, which was a little bit like the frog looking at him as if he was green.
“I liked Quidditch in school,” she said suddenly, as if she had just remembered. “I was a Beater.”
“I’ll bet you were.”
“Of course, I was in Slytherin,” Aunt Bellatrix added.
Draco could not imagine the Sorting Hat placing her anywhere else. Everything else aside, he imagined that if Aunt Bellatrix had thought the outcome was in doubt she would have held down the brim in two tight fists and growled, ‘Don’t make me choke a bitch.’
He smiled at the thought, and at Aunt Bellatrix.
“Levicorpus is very useful when you already have the rope around their neck,” Aunt Bellatrix said thoughtfully, her eyes caught by the frog, and she put an absent arm around Draco’s shoulders.
Draco thought suddenly of Lupin saying, Undiluted evil is very hard to find, but irredeemable evil is not.
Draco turned his face into his aunt’s shoulder. Lupin had obviously meant to warn him against Fenrir Greyback.
He was in the bookroom again when Mother came in and proposed that they go to Diagon Alley and pick up his things. Mother had not gone to Diagon Alley with him since first year, because she said the place was always crammed with vulgar shopkeepers and low company. Father had always gone with him, and neither Draco nor Mother mentioned that at all. They looked at each other and knew it.
The continuing ache of Father’s absence was not the only problem. Draco had been rather counting on shopping by himself, so he could pick up a few needful things in Knockturn Alley.
“You’ll hate it, Mother. I’ll be fine by myself, I’m practically seventeen, you know.”
“I want to go,” Mother lied. “I am sure rubbing shoulders with bargain hunters will be tremendous fun.”
“The sociopathic Weasley twins quit school in the middle of the year and started up their own business in Diagon Alley,” Draco informed her rebelliously.
Mother smiled at him. “Draco, tell me. Why are you talking about the behaviour of ill-disciplined rabble as if it has any relevance to our lives?”
That was apparently that, and they were set to go to Diagon Alley together.
Diagon Alley was very different, with purple Wanted posters of his aunt plastered on every surface. Draco felt as if this would not be happening if Father was there with him.
He conceded that even Father would not have been able to stop this woman who called herself a tailor from mistaking him for a pincushion and ruining his dark-blue dress robes. Draco had chosen the colour to show support for his house, and he was starting to have dire doubts about them bringing out shadows under his eyes.
He ignored this important and pressing concern while he tried very hard to get Mother to go and have a refreshing lemon ice while he did the rest of his shopping by himself.
“The ice-cream shop is closed, Draco, didn’t you notice?” Mother asked.
“They say the Death Eaters got Florian Fortescue,” the shop-busybody said in tones of sepulchral satisfaction.
Mother and Draco both gave her a quelling look. Mother had more experience, but Draco had his glasses. The woman subsided, overcome on all fronts.
Draco resumed persuasion. “Look, I’m a Ravenclaw, I can buy my own books. I’m not a child, in case you hadn’t noticed, Mother.”
The woman clearly did not learn, because she started a homily on how none of them were safe wandering alone. Draco thought about how safe it was in his own home, and he shivered and the woman stabbed him again.
“Watch where you’re sticking that pin, will you!”
If she practised voodoo, she should have set up shop in Knockturn Alley, Draco thought crossly, pulling himself away from her pins and her evil reaching hands. Freed from the toils of her voodoo tailoring, he went over to a mirror and checked carefully to see if his dark suspicions about the shadows under his eyes were true.
After a few moments, he realised that Potter, Hermione and Weasley were standing behind him. Him and Potter in the robe shop again, he thought with a nasty little shock. To complete this moment, he even had Oafy stationed outside. Nothing over the years had changed, except now Potter had collected himself a minion and Draco’s Hermione, and Draco was not going to make any effort at polite conversation.
He and Potter stared at each other for another moment, and then he called out: “You were quite right about meeting low company in Diagon Alley, Mother. A Weasley just walked in.”
Potter frowned and Weasley went for his wand, and Hermione, who had been slightly behind them, reached out to stop Weasley. Which was when Draco saw her face.
He was across the room in a second, his hand under her chin. “Who blacked your eye?” he demanded. “I’ll kill them.”
Hermione looked up at him, and he saw the set expression on her face soften.
Weasley shoved him. “Don’t you touch her!”
For a horrifying instant, Draco was grateful to Weasley. He couldn’t afford to be distracted, Hermione was too clever, she might suspect and she would not understand. She would see one day that it had helped to save her life, and until then—Weasley would protect her, he wouldn’t get distracted by heroics like Potter might be. He supposed he could be grateful to Weasley for keeping her safe for him.
“Ah, I see how it is,” he said. “You two had a little fight. Opened her smart mouth one too many times, did she? Getting a bit of violence in before the domestic part?”
Hermione and Weasley both went red, and Weasley went for his wand again. Potter grabbed Draco’s arm.
“Stop it,” he said softly—he thought he could command anyone, like he thought he could grab anyone, apparently. “That’s not funny.”
Mother stepped out from behind the clothes rack, and Draco saw her look at them, and saw the fear that had been haunting her all summer pass swiftly over her face, leaving it blank and tight-lipped.
“I suggest that you put your wand away and that you take your hands off Draco,” she said icily. ” If you attack my son, I shall ensure that it is the last thing you ever do.”
Potter glared at her, and Draco saw it was just as he had thought. Potter knew Mother had handed over Sirius Black, and Mother—she was only worried about him…
“Want to Owl one of your Death Eater friends and tell them where to find me?” Potter asked. “That’s your usual style, isn’t it?”
Madam Maladroit Behaviour was squawking like a distressed chicken, but all Draco was really aware of was Mother’s pale face and Potter’s low, dangerous voice.
“I wouldn’t need any friends to—dispose of you,” Mother said, her lips still thin and her eyes still on Draco. “Let go of him.”
“Try it,” Potter invited her. “I’m sure you’ll really enjoy Azkaban.”
That clear reference to Father made Draco step forward, sense taking a short vacation as blood rang in his ears, to wipe that smug look off Potter’s face somehow.
Because no good ever came of incidents in Draco’s life that involved robe shops and Potter, he actually tripped over his overlong robes. For a moment he wanted to stumble right off a cliff and away from the shameful pain of life.
Potter’s grip on his arm went hard, automatically steadying him, which made the humiliation even worse.
“You heard my mother,” Draco spat. “Let go of me, you can’t keep my arm as a trophy.”
Potter looked at Draco’s left arm, and some emotion turned his green eyes very dark indeed. Draco was suddenly and terribly aware of the place on his arm where the Dark Mark could have been, just cloth between the leering snake and Potter’s fingers. He flinched and Potter’s hand, not relaxing its grip at all, slid down to his wrist. His fingers were callused, rough on the inside of Draco’s wrist, and his intent was clear: he was going to look for—
Draco yanked his arm savagely away.
“Mother,” he said, trying to force his voice not to shake with fury, “I don’t think I want these any more—”
He made to yank the stupid blue robes over his head.
“Malfoy, you’re wearing something under that, aren’t you?” Potter asked, going dark red.
Draco stared at him in amazement. “You’re extremely weird and creepy,” he informed him, and pulled the robes off. Naturally, he was wearing black robes underneath: as if he would let a shopkeeper see him in the altogether, let alone (and God forbid) Weasley.
He threw the robes at Potter’s feet and pulled his disarranged collar together, feeling obscurely uncomfortable, and drew tight against his mother’s side. She put her hand in his and held on so hard he knew she had been actually afraid for him.
“I think we will do better in Twilfitt and Tatting’s,” Mother announced with decision, as the tradeswoman twittered indignantly. She raised her eyebrow at Potter. “What very unfortunate hair you have, dear,” she said smoothly. “It’s a wonder your mother lets you out looking like that. Oh, wait, I forgot—”
She lifted a hand in mock dismay to her mouth. Draco did not have to look to know that Potter was looking murderous. He thought suddenly of the Dark Lord saying, I might count the entire Malfoy clan as a dead loss… and shuddered, holding her hand tighter as they left the shop.
Mother let herself tremble once, when she was sure they were out of sight. “That brat should have died when he was a year old,” she said coldly. “Then we would not be in this mess, then Lucius would be at home and you would be safe—”
Her face smoothed at once when she caught sight of Mrs Zabini, a particular friend of hers, who she greeted with an air kiss on each cheek and told her summer had been tolerable. Mrs Zabini launched into a frankly embarrassing story about her fifth summer of sexual discovery to date.
After ten minutes, Draco judged his mother was sufficiently involved in the story, and his slow backing away became an outright run, out of sight, past the Sociopath Twins’ Super Sadism shop, and towards his goal of Knockturn Alley.
He had made his choice—the right choice—and made a plan. Now was the time to carry it out.