A/N: Okay, we need to have a bit of a chat about this next chapter. I generally hate reading stories with OCs; I suspect they're often a thinly veiled attempt for the writer to insert themselves into the world we all love and I find that kind of vanity off putting. And yet, I've done The Thing That I Myself Hate and created an OC for this fic. If this is a bridge too far for you, then I apologize and understand why you need to see yourself out. In my defense, I did desperately try to find a canonical character that would fit the demands of the plot and I just couldn't. If, after a few chapters, you come up with a canonical solution, I'll put in the work to revise the already posted chapters so no hint of filthy OC taint remains. If you're pro-OC and feeling heated about it, I'm willing to entertain a debate about it in my PMs.
Chapter 3: Draco through the looking glass
Draco Malfoy had never understood the muggle mania for 'morning affirmations' and instead preferred to start his day by contemplating who was most to blame for his current living situation.
Although yesterday he had settled on Blaise as his preferred target - the bastard had promised him, promised him that he'd stick it out in England, but he'd left for Italy and hadn't even had the decency to warn Draco in advance - but today he was feeling particularly vitriolic and so his thoughts landed on his father.
If his father hadn't chased glory instead of relaxing in the wealth and status that was already theirs…
If his father had learned from his mistakes in the first war and had navigated them away from disaster in the second as several of the other families had…
If his father's contacts at the Ministry hadn't scented his blood in the water and turned on him at the first sign of weakness, sending him to Azkaban (although, in fairness, this wasn't really Lucius's fault, more of a consequence of his otherwise unacceptable behavior)…
Well, if Lucius had made better choices, Draco wouldn't be sleeping on an Ikea mattress and trapped in a working model of chaos theory as demonstrated by his roommate's inability to wash a bloody plate or otherwise clean up after himself. By rights, Draco shouldn't even know what Ikea was.
His morning rage appropriately assigned and sorted, he moved on to the rest of his ablutions; the mornings were the best part of his day, partly because his roommate would be asleep until noon and partly because it provided him with a routine and Draco Malfoy had clung to such patterns over the past two years as a means of coping.
He found other ways to preserve his sanity as well. He found that he actually quite enjoyed muggle gym culture and had taken up running on the treadmill every morning. He also exercised a thousand petty revenges against his shitty landlord, such as refusing to wipe the condensation off the shower door or gleefully hounding him to do his duty any time a lightbulb so much as flickered.
Yes, it was the little things in life that kept one going, Draco thought to himself as he cheerfully and deliberately slammed his gym bag against Steve's bedroom door on his way out, humming as the sound of his roommate's muffled cursing followed him out.
1996 had been a bad year for Draco, but the years that followed taught him that there were many levels of 'bad' and that 1996 had been relatively tame, in hindsight.
Lucius's favors had run out in 1997 and while Narcissa and Draco had been spared an Azkaban sentence, the relentless stories in the news cycle and the vicious taunting in the streets (worse, the sneaky hexes intended to humiliate or harm them) had driven them into a self-imposed house arrest in Malfoy Manor.
Draco had gone to visit his father in prison, but confinement had gradually worn away at the elder Malfoy's sanity and by 2001 there was nothing recognizable in the dull-eyed wraith in his father's cell. Although Draco could admit now that there was nothing he could have gained for himself or Lucius by continuing to visit, he had grappled with guilt for years when he stopped going to Azkaban.
Of course, other things had distracted him from the lash of filial piety; Narcissa had gotten sick four years after the Dark Lord was killed. The most exorbitant sums had not been enough to convince any of the Healers from St. Mungo's to attend to his mother in the Manor, but Pansy had connected him with a Healer in Paris who was willing to treat Narcissa. His rage at St. Mungo's was not tempered even in the slightest when they discovered that an overexposure to the Dark Lord's horcruxes had poisoned Narcissa's magical core. There was nothing to be done, although he never stopped trying, and she eventually faded away in late 2002.
Draco remained cooped up in the Manor, unable to adjust to the world that celebrated their liberation from the Dark Lord by lording it over his fallen followers. Ironically, he understood the impulse because it was what he, himself, would have done; he didn't whine about it, but neither did he make himself an easy target by attempting to step foot in Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade. As his friends trickled out of England to try to start over elsewhere, Draco gathered dust as a permanent fixture of the Manor.
Draco didn't even remove his earbuds or pause his iPod when he got to the front of the line at the coffee shop; as a creature of routine, the barista knew what his order would be, although he graciously added a redeye to his order for Steve.
As if summoned by the thought, Draco's Blackberry buzzed with a text from Steve, 'where r u' followed immediately by a call.
"What, I would like to know, is the point of you pinging me first if you're not going to give me a chance to text back before you call?" Draco rarely answered the phone with a polite enquiry as to who might be calling - Steve was the only person who had his phone number and the tosser didn't deserve his Malfoy manners.
"Wipe that smirk off your face, Malfoy. Just because you aren't here doesn't mean I can't see it, you bastard." Steve's amused voice came out loud over the phone. "Look, do you have the pitch deck on a thumb drive, because my computer crashed last night and-"
"Relax, I have it AND I emailed it to both of our accounts just to be sure."
"Of course you did," Steve groused, managing to sound spiteful of Draco's organization even though that was what he had clearly been hoping for. "Where are you, anyway?"
"Cafe Milano. I ordered you a redeye and the undergrads haven't stolen all the tables yet. Get your ass down here with my laptop and let's get some work done since you're up early." Draco hung up on his roommate's groan, but he was confident that Steve would remember the scones at Cafe Milano and drag himself the three blocks to the coffee shop. For all their bickering, Steve was a good guy (for a muggle and an American). Sometimes. Well, he was a really good programmer and that was far more important.
"You're not serious," he had finally said after Theo drank three glasses of Draco's best Firewhiskey and then announced that he was decamping for Greece. It was a weak rejoinder, but Draco had never become accustomed to his friends abandoning him.
"As serious as you apparently are about staying," Theo sighed. "You had to know this was coming; we're the last of the old group left and I'll admit to being unenthused about staying in England with all of the ghosts and the hatred and the lack of prospects."
"Prospects?" Draco snorted. "What need have you or I for prospects? Our fortunes will weather this-" he broke off and waved a hand to sum up their temporarily negative circumstances "and sanctimonia vincet semper."
Unexpectedly, Theo snorted and then leaned forward with an intense look. "Draco, the family mottos aren't enough anymore. Haven't you seen that things are changing? It's not just that purity isn't in vogue anymore, the muggles are changing more and faster than ever before and if we don't pay attention to them it won't matter how pure we are."
The only reason Draco didn't argue with Theo was that the surreality of hearing his friend utter the word 'muggle' in his father's study had completely disrupted his brain.
"What in the hell are you talking about?" he finally got out. "Muggles? Are you serious? What the fuck do they have to do with anything?"
"Technology semper vincere, Draco," Theo modified the Malfoy motto with a smirk. "Have you ever heard of a computer?"
"Why would I know anything about muggles?"
Theo shook his head and the grim twist to his mouth made Draco sit up and pay attention. "Greece is having a very serious problem because of these computers and I think we need to take note because we'll have the same issues here before long. You know that muggles have their own version of cameras, but they now have the ability to hook them up to these computers, which are like mechanical brains that never sleep and record everything that they see. They're not alive, Draco, which means they can't be Obliviated and Disillusionment doesn't seem to work as well."
Draco's instinct to automatically dismiss anything muggle as beneath his notice warred with the curiosity native to an intelligent mind and his faith in his friend's word. Theo let him stew for a minute before steepling his fingers and continuing his lecture. "Greece has been having a hell of a time because their magical beings and creatures keep getting caught on these cameras and the muggles are using computers to share the images with other muggles who aren't even in the same city. Their Ministry is in danger of collapse and they're in desperate need of Oblivators in the short term and researchers in the long term who can figure out how to combat muggle technology."
"You've never struck me as a Ministry cog," Draco tried to make light of the staggering revelation, but Theo wouldn't let him.
"Use your fucking brain, Draco!" Theo finally lost his patience. "Do you really think I give a shit about Greece's Ministry or a bunch of muggles spying on bathing nymphs? Where there's turmoil there's opportunity! If I can get over there and get in early in the wave of wizards figuring out muggle technology and how to integrate with it, imagine how relevant that would make me to recreating those solutions in England."
"Enough to reverse the damage done to our family names, do you think?" Draco had finally caught up with Theo and his thoughts were spinning as he considered what that opportunity might mean for their ability to resume their pre-war life.
"Maybe. Or enough to start a new legacy somewhere else."
That was the beginning of Draco's interest in muggle computers. He didn't follow Theo to Greece, but he did reach out to the network of Slytherins who had scattered across the globe to determine where he would need to go to learn about "computer science."
They'd been at the cafe long enough for Steve to go through five scones, three redeyes, and two meltdowns.
"You may have another scone once you finish debugging the fight sequence in the second chapter."
"Slavedriver," Steve groaned, flopping dramatically against the back of his chair. "I don't know why I put up with this."
"Would you like to switch? I can do the programming if you want to finish the investor packet," Draco offered sweetly.
"Fuck that, do I seem like I know how to appeal to a bunch of rich old men?"
"Wouldn't hurt to pick up some polish for when you decide you want a sugar daddy if this startup doesn't work out."
"Ha fucking ha, you asshole. You'll be sucking old daddy dick right along with me, so you can shut the fuck up."
"Charming, as usual" Draco drawled, no longer scandalized by Steve's appalling language. "No dicks or scones for you until that code is working." He ignored Steve's grumbling as he went back to his own notes. Although Steve was unusually bitchy today, Draco knew it was fueled by nerves over their upcoming pitch for funding.
And when Steve finished his debugging and slouched up to the counter to buy a scone, he even brought a lemon bar for Draco, which Draco chose to interpret as an apology for piss poor behavior and a commitment to spend at least one more hour working on their video game before his next tantrum.
Draco's parents had ensured he had traveled all over the wizarding world, but nothing had prepared him for the sprawl or the chaos of the muggle world. Two of his father's lessons kept him afloat during the first few months. The first was the sense of duty that he owed to a millennium of Malfoy ancestors; the fact that he was the last surviving Malfoy made it imperative that he find a way to survive the family's reversal of fortunes. The pride he had as his father's son encouraged him to chase a greater success than mere survival. This sense of obligation prompted him to charm (magically and socially) into the university that more than a dozen muggles had assured him was the premier institution of computer science education.
The second lesson was one that he had been quick to memorize, but he was realizing that he might never truly master it. "The foundation of power is to be able to discern the patterns of the people in the environment you wish to inhabit,' his father had intoned. "Of course there is a subtlety and skill required as you decide how to best exert your influence - application of physical force might be the most effective in one scenario, while judicious use of funds might be more useful in another. However, no move is possible without first understanding how people, places, phenomena, or even memories are connected."
Draco didn't particularly want to inhabit the muggle environment or Berkeley, California (muggle or wizarding), but he recognized that temporary discomfort was a sacrifice worth making for his long-term goal. And so, following the instructions of his friends who had made forays into muggle life, he took up residence at a very mediocre hotel and spent a month watching. At first, he had approached the task almost like a Care of Magical Creatures class, taking notes on the odd things he witnessed (the morning ritual of queuing for coffee, the traffic and the reactions it caused in people both inside and outside of vehicles, the overwhelming presence of machinery and electricity). Cell phone dependency, in particular, had seemed bizarre to him until he realized it was similar to how wizards were attached to their wands.
From there, other things started to align: the university students were late and harried and apathetic about their studies just as his Hogwarts classmates had been. Muggles were just as passionate about their Sunday night sports as Marcus Flint had ever been about Quidditch. And the electricity was just like magic in a way - an invisible force that made everything just work more easily, something that people took for granted and couldn't even explain when he asked.
Coursework was very tricky, but Calculus was rather like Arithmancy and circuitry was kind of like combining runes, and when honest studying couldn't get him through a problem, he helped himself to the answers first by using his rudimentary Legilimency skills on his classmates and professors and later, by simply joining the study groups that his classmates were forming. Everyone was eager to welcome the foreign student and if he sometimes made an embarrassing gaffe or asked a strange question it was easy to pretend that it was a cultural difference due to his nationality, not his magic. A few semesters saw him decently integrated and when he no longer had to devote all of his attention to escaping detection, Steve caught his eye.
They'd been randomly assigned to the same group for a class project and while Draco had initially labeled Steve a crass, loud, slovenly peasant who was beneath him in every way, he soon realized that Steve was the most capable programmer in the class and that it would be wise to cultivate him.
It had been shocking to realize that the muggle had not been honored by Draco's attention and, worse, had considered Draco to be a nuisance. The Malfoy scion had been coddled by his mother, loyally followed by his friends, terrorized by the Dark Lord, and hated by the wizarding public, but never had he been so completely disregarded. Those were dark days when he stood at a crossroads between giving up and slinking back to wizarding England or digging in and finding a way to establish himself as someone who could be worth paying attention to. With no other leads, he spent the rest of the semester studying Steve with the same laser focus that he had applied to repairing the Vanishing Cabinet.
In the end, it had been sheer luck that had brought them together, which was somewhat galling after all the time he'd spent watching Steve for signs of weakness.
Blake's was the type of sticky, dark bar that Draco wouldn't even have sent a house elf to, but it was the only place to buy alcohol that wouldn't ask him for the ID that he did not have. He'd wandered in to meet up with some blokes in one of his electrical engineering classes, but he'd drifted away when he saw Steve heading downstairs to the basement level. He'd followed the other man down and watched the most awkward attempt at a courtship ritual he had ever seen - so awkward, in fact, that he couldn't even enjoy Steve's discomfort.
Steve's first mistake was that he put two beers dripping with condensation down on the green baize of the billiards table, making the man he was trying to chat up wince. The second mistake was that Steve was somehow simultaneously over- and under-dressed. Although Draco could applaud that the man owned a shirt with a collar, Blake's Sports Bar was not the right context for the shirt. As if Steve had been aware that this might be too posh, he'd compensated by not doing anything about the myriad wrinkles and even a brown stain on one sleeve.
Worst yet, Steve's body language was broadcasting anxiety and doom from twenty paces. With a totally stiffened spine, a frozen smile that looked more and more like a grimace, and arms that cycled from straight at his sides to folded tightly across his chest every fifteen seconds, the man looked like he was a prison fugitive trying to escape notice, not a man trying to be appealing. Draco paused for a moment when he realized Steve was trying to seduce a man and not a woman, but as he watched Steve bark out a laugh and drip beer out of the side of his mouth, he honestly didn't think Steve would ever be able to seduce anyone, man or woman.
Draco could have watched the disaster for a long time, but the unknown man ran out of patience far before Draco did and when Steve's shoulders slumped as the man walked away, Draco moved in.
"Fancy a game, Steve?" he said, picking up a cue and not giving Steve a chance to say no. He sometimes found that if he acted extra British, it opened doors that would otherwise remain closed.
"What the fuck are you doing here, Draco?" Steve sputtered, reddening.
"Solids or stripes?"
"I don't want to play with you, I'm leaving."
"Why? What else do you have going on?"
In polite, normal society, Draco never would have pushed so hard when someone clearly wasn't interested in spending time with him. However, Steve did not qualify as polite society and Draco was also running out of time before the semester would end and he might never have a class with Steve again.
The full frontal assault turned out to be effective and Steve took up his cue and allowed Draco to break. Draco counted off five minutes before he attacked again.
"So, bad date?" Draco thought Steve might throw down the cue and storm out of the bar, but after glaring for a few seconds, he just shrugged. This was a problem - if the man wasn't going to talk, there was nothing Draco could build on. The only thing in his favor was that Steve was still moving around the billiards table. They went back and forth for a bit as Draco tried to calculate his next move and then he decided fortune favored the bold.
"Steve, I have to be honest, I have never met someone who was so determined not to speak to me."
Steve's eyebrows rose, but he met Draco's eyes without any hint of embarrassment. "Why would I want to talk to you?" he asked evenly, but not meanly. He did snort when Draco's jaw dropped in a very non-Malfoy way, but he didn't mock him. "Look, I don't know you and no offense, but you're not really that great at programming. I don't see the value added."
"Value added?" Draco echoed in incomprehension. Was this another weird muggle phrase? Or an American thing?
"Yeah, you know, like the value you could theoretically add to my life?"
Understanding blazed like a meteor across Draco's awareness, followed closely by a flare of indignation.
"I add lots of value, I'll have you know," he protested. "Anyone would be dramatically improved by association with me!"
"Yeah, whatever, just because you say it doesn't make it true." Steve rolled his eyes and bent over the table again, giving Draco only a fraction of the attention that Draco was giving him. Draco was poleaxed with the epiphany that Steve was acting just like Draco always had when he felt that Insignificant People were encroaching. It was an uncomfortable pattern to have picked up on, but there was something else lurking beneath Steve's surface that Draco couldn't quite put his finger on. He was desperate to keep Steve talking, partially so he could force the tosser to acknowledge Draco's worth and partially so he could gather enough data to figure out who Steve reminded him of.
"So who do you think adds value to your life?" Draco asked.
"My mom's a good cook. Dad pays my rent as long as my grades are up."
"What about your peers? What do you look for in your friends?" Only the careful eye he had honed while growing up during a war alerted him to Steve's discomfort with the question. "Go on, tell me; you don't care about offending me anyway, so why hold back?" he encouraged when it looked like Steve might not answer.
"Okay, just remember that you asked." Steve finished his beer and leaned against the table, tone unapologetic. "I don't have peers because I haven't met someone who's as good as I am at what I do." He raised an eyebrow at Draco, but when the blond made no move to interrupt, Steve continued. "I don't care about how nice someone is or how fancy their car is or what they look like. I care about making a shit ton of money and contributing to paradigm shift, okay? That's why I'm here and I don't give a fuck about anything that's going to distract me."
Draco pondered this and again found it very similar to his own mindset. "That's not unreasonable."
"Damn. That's the first interesting thing you've said. Most people are pissed when I'm honest."
"Tell me how you're going to get rich," Draco said. "Isn't that what everyone wants?"
"Yeah, well, everyone isn't at this spatial-temporal point." To Draco's chagrin, Steve must have read the confusion on his face and he sighed heavily but condescended to explain himself. "Do you have any idea how lucky we are? We're at the epicenter of tech knowledge here and everyone knows it; this campus is constantly being circled by a bunch of investor sharks with deep pockets and hard ons for programmers and they have no fucking clue how to do what we do so it's a seller's market if you're an engineer. I guarantee you there are at least ten potential unicorns in this town and I want mine to be the one that makes it."
Draco really, really hoped that the violent start he gave at the word 'unicorn' hadn't violated the statute of secrecy, but he couldn't resist the risk of asking what Steve meant.
"Jesus, what the fuck are you even planning on doing with your EECS major if you don't know any of this? A unicorn is a startup that ends up being huge, like world-changing huge. Google. YouTube. Shit that makes a billion dollars and even your mom has heard of it."
This was it, every Malfoy instinct he had was screaming that this was the opportunity he'd been looking for, and if it wasn't precisely the same thing that Theo was doing, it was similar enough to warrant exploration. If he could figure out how to ride Steve's unicorn (it was an imperfect metaphor, but he'd work on it), then he might be able to figure out how that paradigm shift in the muggle world could translate to something similar in the wizarding world. At the very least, associating with Steve would certainly teach him more about how muggles used technology in their own lives and how that might be a threat to wizards.
"So what's your unicorn?" Draco asked.
"Fuck off," Steve retorted with a sardonic sneer. "I know you aren't good enough to steal it and implement it yourself, but I'm still not stupid enough to go spreading it around."
With a flash of insight, Draco suddenly realized who Steve reminded him of: Severus Snape. That sneer, that paranoia, that overwhelming disdain for anyone who couldn't meet his ridiculous standards. Steve would still be quite a challenge, but as Father had said, once the connection had been made the path forward might be revealed.
"It's true that your technical skills far outstrip mine," Draco conceded, as Snape would have expected him to admit when he didn't know how to brew a complicated potion he'd never seen before rather than attempting to bluster his way through. "However, surely there are other aspects to bringing your unicorn to fruition that you're less comfortable with. I can help you there."
"Oh yeah? How?"
Delicately, Draco described his knowledge of investment and social manipulation in a way that disclosed neither his magic nor his Malfoy legacy and all that entailed. By the end of the evening, Steve had grudgingly seen the value added that Draco might represent and while he wasn't shaking Draco's hand yet, he did agree to a coffee meeting to discuss what a partnership might look like.
Draco was certain that this was not the type of environment his father had envisioned for him, and he was even more certain that the Lucius-shaped husk sitting in Azkaban would have Very Strong Words to say about Draco's application of the Malfoy Lessons, but he sat at Cafe Milano and finished editing the final slide of their presentation for Yorke and Ramsey, he felt real optimism that their little unicorn stood an actual, nonzero chance of morphing from fantasy to reality, unlike Steve's attempt to struggle gluttonously through an (incredibly, disgustingly) tenth scone.
A/N: I've made a bold and dumb move and posted all my pre-written chapters at once. These are the three intro chapters for each of my three intended perspectives/storylines for this fic. This way you can tell if there's something that is offensive to you or might require too strenuous a suspension of disbelief. This also bullies me into writing to build my buffer back up; shame is my primary motivation to get anything done ever.
