Disclaimer: The devil made me do it.
Seven Years
-----
When Draco was nine, he had wanted a dog. He asked his father, but was forbidden to get one because he was allergic to dog hair. Actually, he was allergic to a lot of animal hair in general. This was discovered when he was forced to play with a visiting fourth cousin from a branch in the family often called 'the Nice Malfoys', also called 'the Poor Malfoys'. The Poor Malfoys took in abandoned animals, so when Draco met him, he couldn't stop sneezing. Eyes watering, Draco dimly saw the Poor Malfoy getting pushed back into the Floo Network. As an afterthought, some Floo powder was thrown in. The Poor Malfoy wasn't too badly burned.
*
::October 15, 1990::
Since Draco had insisted on getting a dog despite his allergy, Lucius decided to buy him a hairless pet. The hairless dogs looked downright weak and disgusting, shivering in their thin, vein-y skin. Not a suitable pet for a strong, proud Malfoy. His eyes lighted on a snake, scales glistening as it slithered smoothly in its glass box. Sleek. Reptilian grace. Perfect.
::October 30, 1990::
Draco was shut up in his room. All day, he'd been bustled around to get ready to meet and greet the guests for the Halloween Feast his parents were throwing. He complained that it wasn't even Halloween yet, but he was forced to dress up nice anyway. After meeting the guests, he'd been put in his room to stay out of the way.
His parents had told him to go to sleep. Draco glanced out the window. The sun was still up. He scowled.
Draco's snake slithered next to his right foot. He glared down at it. Draco had thought having a snake would be cool, but he'd been sorely disappointed. It couldn't do any tricks. It refused to bite the house-elf on command or at all. It never did what he told it to do. Instead, it stared at him unnervingly all day, flicking its tongue out at him as if it was surveying a tasty meal. It didn't even have any venom in its fangs. Father refused to trade it in for a different animal. Draco defiantly named the snake Dog.
"I hate you, Dog."
Dog stared at him.
"Stop looking at me," Draco ordered it sternly.
Dog stared at him.
"And don't flick your tongue out at me!"
Dog flicked its tongue.
Draco glowered. "Just die then!" he yelled at it, picking it up around its body and flinging it across the room. Dog hit the mirror over his dresser with a loud thudding noise and slid down. The mirror now had a jagged crack in it.
Dog slithered around on the dresser and turned to stare at Draco. It couldn't even die properly.
"I hate you, Dog."
*
Draco had an uncle named Derek, which was a strange name for a member of a family as traditional as the Malfoys. The reason he had a strange name was because he had married into the family rather than being born into it. As a result, Derek was a lot funner than his other uncles and liked to tell him stories.
Once, Uncle Derek had told Draco about the time he had broken a mirror. He'd broken it on purpose, just to show that it was a silly superstition that you get seven years bad luck. Shortly afterwards, Derek got into an accident that cost a fortune in hospital bills. He lost all his money on operations. When he got out of the hospital, he found his family's business had been bought out and all they money they'd gotten out of the deal was gone. They'd been forced to sell his house to cover other costs. He was poor without a place to stay.
"You must regret breaking that mirror!" Draco said scornfully.
Derek shook his head and said that after seven years of living in destitution and despair, he'd met Draco's aunt. They'd met when he got a job with the Malfoys, right when his seven years of bad luck ended. They'd fallen in love and gotten married, despite the wishes of her family.
Draco thought the story sounded stupid. His uncle had once been a poor man? No wonder he was here hanging out with Draco instead of inside with the adults. He was an outcast. In Draco's opinion, this guy's bad luck wasn't over yet.
*
While Draco certainly did not get into a near-fatal accident and go bankrupt and lose his house, he did have his fair share of sticky situations. Nothing ever seemed to go right anymore at home or in school. Especially in school! Draco had to do a lot of smoothing over with the Slytherins. Some of them were starting to doubt that it wasn't his fault his schemes always fell through. Draco counted the days until his bad luck ran out. He fully expected to meet the love of his life on the day it all ended. If he didn't, Draco was going to abandon Uncle Derek to the sharks.
*
::October 30, 1997::
It was double-potions with the Gryffindors. If only the Halloween feast was taking place today, they would've been excused from class early and Draco wouldn't have had to tolerate being in the same room with Harry Potter and his enormous ego. He seemed awfully smiley today. Draco was impatient for his seventh year of bad luck to end. With any luck, it would herald the beginning of the end of Potter's stupid smile.
The new Potions teacher that year had started to institute a new method for pairing the students up: picking names randomly out of her hat. This way, she'd said, no one would feel left out and no one's feelings would get hurt. In a vindictive twist of fate, the hat had paired Draco with Potter.
Potter moved all his stuff to sit next to Draco, glaring as if this was all Draco's fault. Draco opened his mouth to say something scathing, but instead, he sneezed. And sneezed. And sneezed. And sneezed. And sneezed.
Draco scrambled backward, away from Potter. Pinching his nose, Draco demanded in a nasal voice, "Do you have a dog?!"
Potter nodded, looking between amusement and confusion.
With Draco's next sneeze, his seventh year of bad luck ended.
Harry laughed at him. Draco gritted his teeth.
-----
End
-----
Notes: Uh...right. I wasn't quite sure what the years should be. I was pretty sure that Harry was born in 1981, though I'm not sure where I got that from. The whole purpose of this fic was to to use the line 'I hate you, Dog' somewhere. The idea sounded a lot better yesterday, when I wrote most of it out. I think I was just itching to write a fanfic. ...I felt a little bad about burning the Poor Malfoy. I felt guilty and sadistic about it. Poor Poor Malfoy.