The Houses Competition Round Two

House: Gryffindor (stand-in)

Class: Potions

Standard

Prompt: Draco Malfoy and Luna Lovegood

Betas: charlotteredmond99 and Ash Juillet

Word Count: 2,094 (wordcounter .net)

There was a stand on his street.

That was new.

Draco had seen stands before, of course. Just never set up on his rich, upper-town, manor-lined street.

Stands were in things like movies, where little kids sold brightly coloured lemonade to save their school, or something, or at the festivals he'd gone to, where they cluttered the closed-off roads of downtown, crowds thronging around them to buy crafts and stay out of the sun until the next even began.

They were not on his street.

There wasn't a sign, he realised as he got closer. Just a star-patterned canopy and matching tablecloth that was possibly homemade, a few clear plastic compartment boxes and wooden display cases, a girl with braided hair and a witch hat, and a lawn flamingo leaned up against a table leg.

He was going to just walk past, but ultimately, curiosity was the closest thing he had to a flaw. That or possibly his general disconnect with animals. Either way, he didn't have many, so it didn't matter if he occasionally indulged in them.

So he stopped to look closer.

The girl watched him with a happy expression, her lips painted a pale purple which he supposed flattered her pale complexion and curly hair enough. Her witch hat looked felted, and it was smudged with colours and dotted with white embroidery, obviously meant to match the galaxy print of her tablecloth. A little glow in the dark star had a hole punched in one point and was threaded like a charm onto the tip of the hat, which curled around like a cartoon horn. She was wearing a fuzzy pink top with no sleeves and over that, a pair of pinstripe overalls, and tiny silver dachshunds hung from her ears.

… he wanted to say she was selling jewelry, but then again, he realised he wasn't quite sure.

Most of the compartments were filled with earrings as similarly bizarre as her own, some matching and some evidently made to be randomly paired. Just looking, he saw bottle caps, popsicle sticks, tiny teacups and saucers, shells, false flowers, strings of beads, charms, and tiny bottles of bubbles which he was pretty sure probably worked. A few others had necklaces, some chains hung with store-bought charms, others ribbons were woven into chokers, some rocks and shells and buttons glued carefully onto lace in aesthetic arrangements. A few looked antique and legitimately valuable, which made it strange to see them mixed in with all the other handicrafts.

Colourful wire and button rings, likely homemade.

Puzzle pieces glued together and made into brooches.

Beaded bracelets, some with letter beads and others without. One just said "table," another, "chicken girl."

Then, he would look into the next compartment, and there wouldn't be jewelry, but instead a polished rock.

A tiny wooden salt and pepper shaker set that was shaped like bears holding painted fish.

A bird's nest made of what looked like hair.

A round, glittery ring box with iridescent beads around the lid.

… a taxidermy mouse, possibly, with a tiny embroidery floss bow around what he thought was a neck.

"Her name is Clarisse," a soft, feminine voice said, and he stopped squinting at the ball of grey fuzz to look up at the girl.

She smiled. "I found her at a yard sale. Stunning, isn't she? Free, if you'd like her. To a good home."

Draco most certainly did not want Clarisse, so he shook his head. "I think not?" he said, tone a bit questioning, wondering why anyone would want a taxidermy mouse, free or otherwise. "She wouldn't fit in with the decor. We're not really going for dead animals in the new guest room."

"Oh. Shame. What are you going for?"

Draco ignored the question, and picked up a necklace instead, tuning out the girl as she continued to chatter. Good lord, were these real diamonds? He was pretty sure it was real gold. And it looked like the sort of antique-ish heirloom piece his mother enjoyed…. well, once he'd had it checked to see if it was real and cleaned up, of course.

"What price for this?" he asked, blowing lightly on the possibly real diamonds to see if they would fog up.

They didn't.

"That?" the girl said. She had previously been saying something about frogs, he thought. "Well, what do you have?"

An annoying question, he thought, but fair. If it was real diamonds and gold, it would obviously be expensive. Of course, she'd want to know what his price range was. Didn't stop him from rolling his eyes though.

"Whatever it is, I can pay it." he said. He had a credit card, and his father never asked about his spending habits unless they were over five hundred. Even then he would probably let it go if he said it was a gift for mother. And he highly doubted that this necklace was worth that much, even if it did look old and in a rather nice condition.

"Yeah, but what do you have in your pockets?"

He frowned. In cash, then. That would be about….

"Fifty dollars?"

"That's all? No string or rocks or anything?"

He looked up and smiled at her in disbelief. "String?"

"Yeah! Or something else. Just something you think could be of equal value."

Well, string certainly would not be the same value as diamonds and gold, but if she wanted to use the barter system for some reason… well, his sunglasses were pretty expensive.

Draco walked away with the necklace and what looked to be a hand-drawn business card. The little card had a black cat drawn napping in one corner and an arrangement of flowers and stars on the other. Pandora's Moth: Crafting and Finding, it said in slightly sloppy print, accompanied by a number and a few social media addresses. It also listed the owner of the business, Luna Lovegood. Draco assumed that was the girl.

She wasn't on his street the next day, and Draco assumed it had been a one-off instance. But then she was back the next day.

"I missed you!" Luna greeted him as he stopped once again. "You're my first customer, you know. I would have been here yesterday, but my dad needed my help handing out magazines."

Again, he ignored her, in favour of sifting through a tray of bracelets. Most of them were beaded, likely made by her, but again, he noticed the shimmer of real precious metals mixed in. He pulled out what looked like silver lined by flecks of some white crystal. The breath test said not diamond, but still, they looked too clear to just be plastic or glass.

"You like the sparkly things, don't you?" Luna asked, and he laughed, and looked up at her. She was still wearing her witch hat, but today his sunglasses were tucked into the neck of her acorn patterned tank top. A tiny teacup and saucer hung from her ears, and she had little hearts dotted like freckles across her cheeks.

"My mother does," he said.

"But you do too."

He thought for a moment and nodded. "I appreciate beautiful, high-quality things."

"No wonder you're my first customer then. Everything here is very beautiful."

Draco wasn't sure he agreed with her, after all, Clarisse was still sitting in one of the little cubbies, her bow a ribbon today. But he nodded anyway.

"Barter again?" he asked, holding up the silver bracelet.

"I'll take your shoelaces," Luna said. "I like the colour."

After that, he nearly always found himself stopping by Luna to talk with her on the way home. Even on the days he didn't take anything, he still used the time to look through her cluttered, disorganised displays. Or maybe they were just organised in a way only she understood.

He grew used to taking trinkets with him. Pencil sharpeners or an extra pair of shoelaces or a silk flower. Luna wore the latter two in her hair, and she made the pencil sharpener into an earring that she paired with another, a tiny one-inch stub of a pencil. Then one day, he bought two drinks at the Starbucks instead of one on the way home and gave her that instead. He started to do that sometimes too. On the occasion that she isn't there that day, he just went home, and she told him where she went the next time she was there. Sometimes it was helping her dad. Some days her friends needed her. Some days she just felt like setting up elsewhere. Others, she said it was a secret.

He brought Blaise and Pansy, once. Blaise scoffed as Draco and Pansy sorted through mismatched pairs of earrings.

"You're gonna get an infection," he told them, eyeing an embroidered baseball cap with mild curiosity. "Your ears will fall off."

"But she has icicles!" Pansy said excitedly, holding up what looked like a pair of earrings featuring the kind of plastic icicles one might find on Christmas trees. "And tiny bubbles! And mermaids! And these ones are Polly Pockets!" She held the pair up to her ears and looked utterly ridiculous, but Draco was pretty sure that was her goal.

"Perfect." He told her, and Pansy grinned.

Draco had told his friends about Luna's peculiar way of business long ago, so Pansy handed over her sparkly phone case no questions asked, and the next day she wore a tiny rubber duck in one ear and a vial of bubbles in the other.

"Like a bubble bath!" She told him.

He took Crabbe and Goyle with once too, but he doesn't think they're smart enough to appreciate the favour.

"Where do you even get this stuff?" he asked one day, picking out a pair of what he knows at this point are probably real emerald studs.

"I make it!" Luna answered immediately, in the process of making long, tiny braids in her hair. She was wearing a shirt with a rainbow on the pocket and painted jeans, and Draco wondered, fondly, who taught her it was okay to dress like that.

"Well, yeah, some of it, I can tell." He pointed to a necklace of acorn caps. "And it's really cool. But what about the other stuff?"

When they first met, he probably would have just called it "the nice stuff." But Luna insisted everything she sold was nice, and Draco was starting to agree with her. Even Clarisse wasn't so bad.

"They're my mother's," Luna said.

"Huh. Okay. Well, she has good taste. She doesn't mind you selling them for Starbucks?"

"She can't. She's dead." Her voice is still her usual dreamy sing-song. Draco blinked, and looked down at the studs again.

"Oh. I didn't know," he said softly. He suddenly realised how even though Luna would mention her father all the time, she'd never told him about a mother. And Luna told him everything, even if he tuned out lots of it. He felt like he knew her better than himself. "Why don't you keep this stuff then, though?"

Wouldn't it make more sense to keep such precious items? His mother had hated his grandmother, but she still kept every piece she'd gotten after her death.

"It makes you happier. And besides, it's good to let her go. It helps my dad, too. He can't let her go yet. So I'm trying to do it first."

He hums, unsure of what to say. Glancing down at the table, he spotted a pair of shining opal earrings. The iridescent colours appear as if they were swirling around in the sun.

Luna sees him gazing at them. "Those went lovely with her wedding dress, if the pictures are to be believed. They'll cost you something really special."

He nodded, wondering what of equal value he could give. Finally, he decided. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a card. He handed it over carefully, waiting for her reaction.

She looked down, and smiled, "This is a great swap. I hope your mother likes the earrings."

He shook his head. "Not my mother. They're for me. I've been thinking I might get my ears repierced again," he told her, watching carefully.

Her eyes shone brightly, almost like the opals. If she looked anything like her mother, he knew she hadn't been lying earlier. Her mother must have been stunning too.

"You'll look lovely in them, too." She said, tucking the card carefully into the butterfly covered pocket of her jeans.

It turned out his phone number was a perfect barter, too.