Just Like Me

Usual disclaimer/dedication applies.

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"An Opaleye? I thought you had better taste than that," was Lucius' only comment upon his son's return.

"And I managed to get a chimera as well," Draco said pompously.

"If it breaks anything, it goes," Narcissa warned.

"I'll keep it outside," Draco said, shrugging.

"All right, then," Narcissa said, and returned to The Hobbit.

The chimera was delivered three days later. It immediately took a liking to Narcissa, but refused to let Draco anywhere near it, much to the amusement of everyone but Draco.

The rest of the holiday was taken up with attempts to hatch the Opaleye, while containing both the chimera and Draco, who was very annoyed that his new pet wanted to gut him.

"I'm likeable! Why doesn't it like me?" he complained loudly to anyone who would listen.

"Hush, dear. Your father and I are trying to read," Narcissa said, sending a pointed glare at her husband, who innocently retreated from his position at her back. "It's a good book," he protested.

"It's a Muggle book. You don't like Muggle books," Narcissa said.

Lucius wrinkled his nose at the book. "I'm going to go read something suitable, then." He swept off and returned a few minutes later, clutching a huge, dusty tome.

"Looks interesting," Narcissa commented archly.

"It is. Much more so than your Muggle filth," Lucius said, seating himself in a chair opposite Narcissa's.

Pansy was always greatly amused by Draco's parents. She overheard many Gryffindors wondering loudly about how Draco had become such a nasty little bastard; evidently, these Gryffindors had not met Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy.

When it came time to return to Hogwarts, Draco was endlessly disgusted by Pansy's long and sappy goodbye scene with Perdita.

"I'll miss you," Pansy said mournfully, rubbing behind Perdita's ears.

Perdita whined, her eyes sad. Draco moved forward to hurry Pansy up, and was confronted by sixty pounds of glaring dog.

"Does nothing like me?" he complained half-heartedly as they left for the train station.

"It's not like you've been very nice to her, you know," Pansy observed.

"Shut up, Parkinson," Draco said, glaring.

"As you wish," Pansy said, smiling angelically.

Draco muttered something under his breath about Parkinson conspiracies with his dog and chimera conspiracies with his mother. Pansy ignored him and boarded the train.

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The train was occupied mainly by Slytherin students, who took a great deal of pleasure in hanging around the compartments of younger Hufflepuffs and tormenting them.

The seventh-year Slytherins, for once, were not among those who were tossing Hufflepuff luggage out the windows. They were mostly crowded into one small compartment, whispering quietly among themselves and gaping at the Dark Mark on Blaise Zabini's arm.

"Does it hurt much?" Millicent said in a stage whisper.

Blaise shrugged. "Sometimes," he said. "Not very much, and only when he summons us."

Crabbe stared in open-mouthed, idiotic awe, and Blaise rolled his sleeve down. "Anyway, when are you all getting yours?" he asked, leaning forward and looking especially at Draco.

"Father hasn't mentioned it to me," Draco said, frowning.

"That's funny, because I heard him talking to your father about you," Blaise said. "Maybe he's keeping it as a surprise."

"Father doesn't like surprises." Draco looked deep in thought for a moment. Pansy sat, silently, wondering what her parents had in store for her.

"I'm sure you'll be getting yours soon. The Dark Lord doesn't like to be kept waiting, and he'll probably want you to join up. You, too," Blaise added, looking at Pansy.

"Join up with what?" said a suspicious-sounding voice from the door. Draco looked over, and his eyes narrowed. "Nothing, Finnigan. Now scram. We don't need the likes of you around here."

Seamus looked at all of them, mistrust written clearly on his face. From behind him, they could hear Dean Thomas' voice. "Come on, Seamus, don't mind them."

Draco stretched out a leg and, with his foot, shut the compartment door in Seamus' face. Seamus turned away and left, talking to Dean in a low voice.

Pansy unwrapped a Chocolate Frog absentmindedly, and looked at it. It had always seemed sort of barbaric to eat something that was still moving, even if it was only a spell. The frog glared up at her, as if daring her to bite one of its limbs off.

Draco plucked it out of her palm and bit its head off. Pansy raised an eyebrow and looked at the wizard card that came with it.

"Any good?" asked Blaise.

"Dumbledore," Pansy said. The whole compartment groaned.

"Can we set it on fire?" Goyle asked eagerly.

"Why not?" Draco responded, smiling in an altogether disturbing fashion. Dumbledore glared reprovingly at them. Draco set him on fire, and watched, satisfied, as Dumbledore's beard burned.

Millicent woke up. "What're you doing?" she asked sleepily.

"Burning things," Crabbe replied. Millicent went back to sleep.

Pansy sighed, and leaned her head against the window. Behind her, the fire fizzled out, and Draco nudged the ashes with the toe of his boot.

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During the winter, Hogwarts was almost as beautiful as Malfoy Manor. The lake was frozen over, and snow had gathered on the surface of the ice. On the morning of the first Saturday back, a large number of students attempted to go skating on it, but the teachers immediately kicked them off, saying that there was no way of knowing whether or not the ice was thick enough to support them.

"No way of knowing, my arse," Seamus muttered as he trudged back to the school. "We're wizards. Of course there's a way of knowing."

Hermione began to lecture Seamus on the uses of magic and how there wasn't a spell for everything. Draco, who was sitting on a rock some ten feet away, threw a snowball at her head. Hermione shrieked as the cold snow went down the back of her robes.

Draco sniggered, and looked back toward the lake. "I wonder how the squid survives the winter every year," he mused.

"Same way as the Merpeople do, I suppose," Pansy replied. She ran her hand through the snow, and had an idea.

Ten minutes later, most of the sixth and seventh year Slytherins were gathered outside. Pansy gathered them all, and explained how the other houses always made snowmen, but the Slytherins never did, so they would for once. Draco immediately voted himself to be the designer.

"We can't sculpt axes through the head, Draco," Pansy reminded him. Draco pouted. "How about headless people? Can you do headless people?"

"Yes, I think."

"What about headless people with arrows through their torsos?"

"I don't think so."

Draco pouted again, but pulled out a piece of parchment from his robes and started scribbling away. The rest of the Slytherins started rolling large balls of snow with a convenient spell that Blaise's father had taught him. That way, nobody would actually get wet or have to do any work. It was ideal.

Draco was smiling while he scribbled. That was a bad sign. "How well can you do likenesses?" he asked, his eyes glinting dangerously.

There was a pause. The Slytherins looked at each other and shrugged. "Well enough, I guess. Pansy, you're an okay artist, aren't you?" a sixth-year queried.

"I suppose," Pansy said slowly, wondering what Draco had in mind.

Draco cackled. A second-year Gryffindor nearby shrieked and ran away. Pansy removed the parchment from Draco's hands and raised an eyebrow. "Don't you think we'd get in trouble for this?" She handed it to Blaise, who raised both eyebrows. Draco's brilliant idea was a sculpture of a large squid that was in the midst of eating Dumbledore.

"Well, maybe. But we can demolish it after we're done," Draco said.

None of the Slytherins could find fault with this logic, so they began to pile snow.

An hour and a half later, Pansy put the finishing touches on the sculpture, which was mostly held up with magic, since the squid was waving its tentacles around. She had tried to tell Draco that it wasn't squid that had tentacles and that he had drawn an octopus, but he refused to listen to her, and had resorted to covering his ears and singing "I can't hear you". Crabbe and Goyle thought this was endlessly funny and rolled around in laughter until Crabbe knocked himself out on a rock, at which point Goyle had laughed even harder and Millicent Bulstrode had joined in.

All in all, it was a smashing success.

"I don't want to destroy it," Draco said, patting the top of the octopus' head. "We'll just leave it here and if anyone asks, it was those three that made it." He jerked his head toward Crabbe, Goyle and Millicent.

The rest of the Slytherins thought this was a good plan, so they all trooped inside to complain about the cold in their heated dungeon. Being of significantly lower intelligence than the rest, Goyle and Millicent stayed outside wondering why Crabbe wasn't moving.

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The school quickly got back into the regular schedule – classes, meals, Quidditch, homework, more classes – and ran smoothly for about a week and a half. Blaise showed up less and less frequently at breakfast, and when he did, he looked as though he would keel over from exhaustion.

Three weeks into the new year, Snape took Blaise aside after class. After that, he was not gone as often at night, although Blaise confided in Pansy that Voldemort was not happy about his skipping meetings.

Pansy didn't ask what Voldemort did to show his disapproval. She had a feeling that she didn't want to know.

The routine of school was disrupted in early February, when the parents of Laura Madley, a fourth-year Hufflepuff, were killed during a Ministry raid on a Death Eater meeting. Blaise skipped breakfast that morning.

The school mourned for her, but Laura's parents were only the beginning. Students who mourned for Laura's parents were soon buying black clothes for funerals of their own family members. The death toll mounted, and more Slytherin students joined the ranks of the Death Eaters.

Tracey Davis, a witch in Pansy's year, once swore that she saw Terry Boot at a meeting. This caused minor confusion among the students, since all the Slytherins were quite suddenly civil towards him, and the Ravenclaws suspected something evil was afoot.

Draco was not happy about all of this. In third year, he had sworn that he would be the first in their year to join the Death Eaters, and three people had already beaten him to this, if the rumors about Boot were true.

"I can't think of any reason why Father would not want me to join," he said one afternoon as he flopped down on the couch beside Pansy.

"Mm," said Pansy, knowing that he would continue talking no matter what she said.

"I mean, he's one himself. He's been telling me for years that I would follow in his footsteps. He knows I want to," Draco said, rubbing his forehead with his hand and looking tired.

"Why do you want to?" Pansy asked, curious.

"Because I believe in what he says, just like Potter and his lot believe in what Dumbledore says," Draco said with a shrug. "Wizards have been persecuted for millennia, and he's just willing to turn a blind eye to it all."

Pansy listened. She nodded, indicating that he should go on.

"We're the more powerful race. We should at least be living equally with them, if not acknowledged as superior! But we're not. And to make matters worse, we're diluting our blood. Look at the wizards of thousands of years ago; they were so much more powerful than the wizards of today." Draco leaned forward, staring into the fireplace of the Slytherin common room.

"There are still pureblooded families," Pansy offered.

"No, there aren't. What passes as pureblood today isn't completely pure. There are always some Muggles included in the chain, even if it's only one. I'm not completely pureblooded; my great-great-grandmother was a half-blood." He tore up little strips of a page from his Charms textbook and tossed them into the fire, watching them burn.

Pansy didn't quite know what to say. "I thought you were completely pureblood."

"Yes, everybody thinks that, because it's what we tell them. Nobody so far has had the sense to look up our family tree and point out the Mudbloods in it, and I'm certainly not going to tell them about the black sheep of the family." He snorted.

"Still, one half-blood a long way back won't affect you that much, right?"

"What if all the people who married into the Malfoy family had half-bloods in their ancestry? Let's say that, beginning with great-great-grandmother, my ancestors married people with great-great-grandmothers who were half-bloods. What does that make me?" Draco asked.

"Give me a piece of paper," Pansy said. "I can't work that all out on my own."

Draco handed her a sheet of parchment and stole a quill from a nearby second-year. Pansy started writing. After about five minutes, she looked up. "If what you said is what happened, you're ten percent non-wizarding blood."

"See?" Draco said. "Now imagine what it would be like if a few more of my ancestors were Muggle-born, or had half-blood parents. My family, which is one of the most pureblooded families alive today, would technically only be three-quarters wizarding blood. We're one quarter less powerful than our ancestors were. Now what about families who have much more diluted blood?"

Pansy nodded, taking all of this in with a frown on her face.

"Take Potter, for example," Draco said, sitting back and ripping another page out of his textbook. "He's not a terrible wizard. He is, however, a half-blood. How powerful would he have been if his father had married a pure-blood?"

"Much more, I suppose," Pansy said, watching the fire.

"We're slowly making ourselves into Muggles, Parkinson," Draco said moodily. He crumpled up the page and tossed it into the flames, watching it burn. "Sooner or later we'll be so diluted that the simplest charms will take months to learn."

"I see what you mean," Pansy said slowly. "So Dumbledore doesn't know any of this?"

"Oh, he's been told. He refuses to believe it, even though the evidence is all around us." He threw out his arms. "Look at this place! The amount of magic it must have taken to build it, and it was all done by four wizards! Do you see any contemporary Salazar Slytherins building secret chambers that haven't been found even after a millennium? No, because nobody has the power to do it anymore!" He got up and started pacing around. "Now do you see why I want to be a Death Eater?"

Pansy nodded. She looked up at the high arches of the Slytherin common room, and wondered which ancestors of hers were Mudbloods.

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In late February, Draco decided to take matters into his own hands, and wrote to his father. He waited impatiently for a reply, and spent most of the next morning's breakfast watching the owls fly overhead. When there was none, he sulked for the rest of the day and stayed up late into the night, scowling at anyone who came into the common room.

Pansy came to breakfast the next morning and found Blaise and Draco talking quietly with each other. She sat down across the table from them, and took an apple from a bowl.

When the mail arrived, one of the Malfoy owls dropped a letter in front of Draco. Pansy thought he would open it in a frenzy of haste, but he had recovered his usual languid manner, and opened it slowly and deliberately. Crabbe and Goyle immediately converged upon him, wanting to know who had written to him and what was in it. He shooed them away and read the letter.

A smile spread over his face, and he handed it to Blaise. Blaise skimmed it, grinned, and handed it back. Draco held it out to Pansy, who took it uncertainly.

Draco,

I have discussed this matter with the Dark Lord, and he agrees that it is nearly time. You will need to learn a few things before you are ready, but you are intelligent and have Zabini to help you. I am confident that you will be ready before the end of the school year; indeed, I hope that you are adept enough to be ready within a month, however that may be unduly optimistic of me.

Zabini will tell you what you need to know. Write to me when you are ready, and try to be fast; I would not have my only son be the last of his year to join.

Your father,

Lucius Malfoy

Pansy looked up, and smiled at Draco. He grinned back. "Congratulations," she said, handing the letter to him. Draco folded it up carefully and placed it on top of his plate. He drew out his wand and burnt it, sweeping the ashes onto the ground. "Zabini tells me that Crabbe and Goyle were rejected by the Dark Lord," he said quietly, leaning forward in a conspiratorial manner. "He wants people who are intelligent enough to know why they are following his orders, not idiots who will blindly do everything he says and trip themselves up."

"Not surprised," Pansy said, taking a sip from her pumpkin juice.

"Those two would probably forget to wear their masks and robes to the meetings," Blaise said, looking at the two in question. "I bet you anything they'd even be stupid enough to wear their Slytherin robes on missions."

"Oh, they'd lose their masks the minute they received them," Draco said. "What did their fathers say about it?"

"They haven't been told," Blaise said, shrugging. "If they do request that their sons be initiated, he would probably tell them that they are too young. Something like that. They're not intelligent enough to figure out that others of our age have already joined."

"Has my father mentioned anything about me joining?" Pansy asked hesitantly.

Blaise thought for a moment, and shook his head. "Nothing so far."

Pansy nodded, staring into her cup.

"Why?" Blaise asked. "Do you want to join soon?"

Pansy looked back up at him. "I don't know," she said. "I suppose not just yet. I'd like to graduate with good marks, and I can't do that if I'm out all night."

Blaise inclined his head. "A valid reason," he pronounced. "Just as long as you're not on his side." He looked at Dumbledore, who sat placidly at the head table, watching over his charges.

Pansy shook her head. "No, not after what Draco told me."

"What'd you tell her?" Blaise asked.

"Dilution of blood," Draco said, helping himself to toast and marmalade. "Loss of power in contemporary wizarding society."

"It's a bit disturbing," Pansy said, and accepted a piece of toast that Draco handed to her with the command, "Eat".

"I know," Blaise said. "I'm going to look up my ancestry and see how pureblooded I am, first chance I get. Want to come with me?"

"Yes," Pansy said. "Yes, I would."

"Eighty-nine point one percent," Draco said. "But don't tell anyone."

Blaise shook his head. "Wouldn't dream of it."

Pansy palmed her toast and skipped breakfast for the third day in a row. It fell to the floor, landing marmalade-side down.

"Good girl," Draco said. "You need to eat more."

Pansy nodded silently.