CHAPTER THREE: DRACO MALFOY
Draco didn't actually dislike Ravenclaw Tower. Their common room was a wide, circular room, airier than any other he had yet come across at Hogwarts. Graceful arched windows punctuated the walls, which were hung with blue-and-bronze silks. By day, they had a spectacular view of the surrounding mountains. The ceiling was domed and painted with stars, which were echoed in the midnight blue carpet. There were tables, chairs, and bookcases, and in a niche opposite the door a tall statue of white marble showing their House's founder, Rowena Ravenclaw. The statue stood beside a door that led to the dormitories above.
The first year boys' room was one flight up, their stairs branching off to the left while the girls went to the right. The dormitories were curved rooms and their outer wall was lined with windows. Each student had a plush canopied bed and a nightstand carved of bright cedar wood. Heavy drapes could shut-out the light from the tall windows, although Draco and his new roommates had been rudely awakened by dawn streaming in at them on their first morning at Hogwarts; they had all of them been too tired to think to close the curtains the night before. They were careful to remember to shut them after that; dawn was far too early an hour to wake up, even in order to go learn magic.
Draco had found that wake-up call especially obnoxious because he had been expecting dim, greenish light in a snug underwater common room. His parents had told him quite a lot about the dungeons that all three of them had been expecting him to live in during his time at Hogwarts. Those dungeons, he was sure, would have been soothing and comfortable, insulated from the elements by tons of dirt, stone, and water. Not so Ravenclaw Tower, which was the second tallest of the whole castle, and was thus exposed to every gust of wind, spurt of rain, and ray of sun. Whenever the wind got going hard enough to wake him in the middle of the night, Draco cursed the Sorting Hat, wishing himself snug in the depths of the school's dungeons. When the weather was nice and the sun was shining or the stars were out, he didn't mind as much—although of course Slytherin would have been better than Ravenclaw.
He knew his parents felt the same way, despite what they'd said in the reassuring letters his owl had brought him in the first round of post from home.
"Darling, you can't possibly be upset to be recognized for your intellect," his mother had written him, "nor very surprised by it, not when you've always been so astonishingly brilliant. Truly we should have expected it if we'd taken a minute to think instead of just falling back on tired old presumptions, and I'm sure that Ravenclaw House is delighted to have merited such a coup as you. They certainly ought to be, and I've no doubt your housemates will recognize your superior wits, breeding, and skills in short order. I've sent along all of your favorite treats to help you feel more at home, and if you need anything at all, darling, just write to us and I'll put it in the post for you straightaway…."
"Really it's only to be expected," his father had written him, "because what would be the point of telling you to focus on your ambitions when you're already starting so far ahead of everyone else? There's nothing you need from Slytherin that you can't get elsewhere, or that the family doesn't have already, so you might as well be in Ravenclaw where you can develop your other talents instead of wasting your time retreading old ground. Besides, standards for Slytherin House have been falling ever since Dumbledore took up the post of headmaster; if they're going to admit Weasleys you're clearly better off elsewhere, away from riff-raff like that! Of course it would have come in handy having an old family friend for your head of house, but I have no doubt that Professor Snape will keep an eye out for you on our behalf anyway, so it's not as if you've really lost out on anything much there either…."
Draco did feel like he had lost something, though. Malfoys—and especially Blacks—belonged in Slytherin and always had. Regardless of his parents' assurances to the contrary he knew he was bucking tradition, and it bothered him. He had always wanted to be the perfect son, the perfect Malfoy, and being in Ravenclaw—while not exactly a bad thing, certainly it was nothing to be embarrassed by the way one would be over being sorted into Gryffindor or Hufflepuff—was something other than perfect. It was a deviation from expectations, a divergence from the parental footsteps he had planned to follow, an unanticipated change in the plans for his life that had always seemed so certain.
He wasn't used to having to think about the future. Not as something that contained options or choices or decisions to be made. It was unnerving.
So he did his best to put such thoughts out of his mind and focus on other things instead. Fortunately learning his way around the multitude of ever-changing staircases and corridors took a lot of concentration, and then there was the Riddle to be answered every time he returned to his common room. The strangest part of that wasn't that someone—or rather, something—was standing in his way and stopping him from doing exactly as he pleased (although that was strange), but rather that so many of his housemates liked to attempt it as a team. Draco didn't have a lot of experience working together with other people, and he wasn't sure he liked it. The answer was often ambiguous too, and he wasn't sure he liked that either.
"Just be open-minded," one of the prefects had encouraged the first years when they had balked at the idea of having to think their way inside. "There really aren't a lot of wrong answers, not if you can explain how they make sense to you, anyway. It's all about thinking, not—not learning things by rote." He had snickered derisively, and a bushy-haired girl standing in the back of the group had gasped as though insulted, and Draco had relaxed a little. He was good at explanations, at least those that involved talking other people into seeing things his way; he thought he could probably have the eagle-knocker eating out of his hand in five minutes flat no matter what answer he gave it.
It wasn't quite as easy as that, he soon learned, but after he'd gotten over the shock of being refused entry it actually hadn't been an awful experience. Having to prove that he was clever in order to pass—that made him feel proud, or at least it did when he succeeded on his own. When other students got in the way and messed-up his attempt at an answer, or put forth one he didn't like, that was of course a different matter. He tried not to let his annoyance show on his face when they interfered, not wanting to make any enemies until he knew his housemates better and could decide who was worth befriending, who wasn't, and who was so far beneath him they deserved only scorn. That was something he knew he couldn't judge on first glance, much as it would have made life easier if he could; but just because someone looked like "the right sort" didn't mean they were—and occasionally people who looked utterly useless were worth more than expected.
Draco liked to think that he looked exactly like what he was. A skinny, pallid boy with thin ash-blonde hair, he wasn't unattractive, but he also wasn't as handsome as he thought he was. His demeanor tended to alternate between smug and sullen with very little deviation. He was a shade taller than average for his age, although at just three months past eleven that meant that he was much shorter than most of the inhabitants of Hogwarts—a fact that he never let interfere with his habit of looking at other people down the length of his sharp nose. That was a skill he had learned from mimicking his father, who was the source for most of Draco's mannerisms both physical and verbal. The drawling, snide voice; the half-lidded, scornful eyes; the sharply quirked brow; the derisive half-smirk; the dismissive, fluttering fingers; even the pointedly false yawn of indolent disinterest was a gesture he had copied directly from his father's repertoire. From his mother Draco had inherited the thin, pointed nose and sharp, narrow chin that defined so many members of the Black family, and it was also from her that he had gotten his early mastery of the sneer in all its myriad of forms, from the curled lip to the wrinkled nose—but it was his father whom Draco aped deliberately, striving to turn himself into a perfect copy of Lucius Malfoy down to the very last inch, from the arrogant tilt of his chin to the icy chill of his cold gray eyes.
Draco knew exactly what he wanted to be when he grew up: his father. That was the biggest problem with being sorted into Ravenclaw. Lucius Malfoy had been sorted into Slytherin, just like the vast majority of relatives on both sides of Draco's family tree, and so being sent to any other house meant he couldn't follow in Lucius's footsteps as exactingly as he had planned. The fact that he was stuck wearing plain, ordinary uniform robes for most of his time at Hogwarts grated on him too, although not as painfully; he shared little of his father's genuine interest in fashion but he dutifully copied Lucius's elegant style of dress as faithfully as every other trait or habit he could mimic. It was all part of his goal to forge himself into the perfect son and heir.
Right now though Draco wasn't thinking about his ambitions but rather about the Riddle, wondering absently what kind of question the eagle-head knocker would pose to him as he climbed up Ravenclaw Tower's spiral stairs. At least he wasn't likely to find anyone else trying to enter at this time of the day who would get in his way by interjecting their own opinions or ideas—or so he'd assumed, since he was coming here in between classes when most other students were enjoying a brief break in the early autumn sunlight of the courtyard. However, a shrill voice coming from the landing above him proved that Draco wasn't the only one who had chosen to forgo the chance to bask:
"Wait, wait, I wasn't done—I don't think that was quite the right answer—are you still listening? Hello? Oh, bother it all!"
Draco turned the corner just in time to see Hermione Granger—that annoying, bushy-haired girl who was always raising her hand in classes before he could—stomp her foot hard on the stone floor and glare at the knocker embedded in the open door. The eagle was still and silent now, as it always was once the door swung open; Draco hadn't seen anyone try and argue with it after it had accepted an answer before, only when it was refusing one.
"What are you doing?" he asked her, completely dumbfounded.
Hermione Granger turned around sharply, looking startled. Her cheeks flushed a bright pink. "Oh," she said, "I didn't realize anyone was—that is, I thought I was the only one who—I mean—I was just, er, trying to solve the riddle…."
"Yes," Draco said, "but you've clearly solved it and yet you're still talking to the eagle. Why?"
Granger squirmed as though she'd been caught cheating on her classwork, twisting her hands together and hunching her shoulders in miserably. "Well, I just…wasn't quite happy with my answer," she admitted awkwardly. "I just think there might be a better one. It didn't really seem exactly correct."
"So?" Draco asked, nonplussed. "Who cares, if the door accepted it?"
"I care," Granger muttered mutinously, then blushed harder. "I mean, if I'm going to be right about something, I want to be properly right, you know?" she explained, her voice earnest. "I wouldn't want to do the thing only halfway. And can an answer really be correct if there's another answer that's more correct? Doesn't that mean the first answer is basically wrong?"
Draco shrugged. "I don't know," he drawled, "isn't that up to the eagle?"
"I suppose," said Granger, sighing heavily. "It just…doesn't seem like it ought to work that way. There ought to be one answer and it ought to be the right answer, and I just don't like the idea that we can just—just talk our way around giving a wrong one!"
Her voice grated on Draco's nerves. She also had the ugliest hair he had ever seen—but she was smart, she'd proved that in classes often enough. He thought about what his father had said, about cultivating other talents. He supposed that included cultivating other connections too, aside from the usual ones that he'd have been sure to strengthen by time in Slytherin. Granger was bossy and off-putting and unattractive, with her untidy mane of coarse brown hair and her big buck teeth and her thick, shapeless eyebrows…but she was no idiot, and intellect could be valuable when put to good use.
Draco decided to be generous, with the expectation of future reward. "Maybe that's part of it, though," he suggested, trying hard not to sound condescending. "Good answers require support, don't they? So really the eagle is just teaching us how to support our reasoning, regardless of whether the answer itself would merit an O or an A."
Granger frowned, then brightened. "Oh I do hope you're right," she said, suddenly sounding happy, "that would actually be a worthwhile lesson. And I'm sure it tailors the difficulty of its questions depending on the age of the student it's asking, so probably after a while it will be a lot less generous in the precision of the answers it accepts, don't you think?"
"Could be," Draco demurred. He gestured indolently toward the still-open door. "So are you going inside or not?" he asked, before she could try and argue her point further. "I want to check something in my Charms book before our next class and you're in the way."
"You mean because of that thing Professor Quirrell said this morning, about how the underlying root of many Defense Against the Dark Arts spells can be found in basic charmswork?" Granger asked brightly. "Yes, I found that an intriguing idea as well," she went on without giving him a chance to reply. "I hadn't realized that our classes might actually build from and compound off of one another. I'd thought that the disciplines of magic were more strictly separated, myself, from the reading I did before school started. It's a very interesting idea, being able to draw from one aspect of magic to enhance another, and I expect it's probably not something that will actually be addressed in our lessons until the higher levels, so I'd wanted to look into it on my own, just out of curiosity you know…."
Feeling a little surprised that someone besides himself had paid enough attention to Quirrell's off-hand comment to draw such a conclusion, Draco shrugged and followed the bushy-haired girl into the tower. For the first time he didn't ignore her chatter, which he'd up until now been assuming was inane nonsense. The shrillness of her voice was still annoying, but—he realized with a little start of surprise—an unpleasant voice didn't mean that a person's words wasn't worth listening to.
Look at that father, he thought smugly to himself, you were right. There are valuable things to cultivate in Ravenclaw after all—or at least worthwhile lessons that probably wouldn't be learned in Slytherin House. Who would have ever thought that somebody who sounded like—and looked like—Hermione Granger might have something useful to say?
Draco smirked, shook his head ruefully, and mounted the dormitory stairs. Granger's strident voice was still ringing in his ears as she blathered on, now all but shouting to be heard across the stairwell. This time, Draco ignored his instincts and made an effort to listen.
*All bolded text has been taken from the book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (American hardcover edition) written by J. K. Rowling and is quoted here with all due respect and acknowledgement to the author. I apologize for the aesthetically cumbersome bolding; given FFnet's limited formatting options it was the most unobtrusive way that I could think of to mark the quoted text. Suggestions for alternative, less intrusive indicators are more than welcome.