Chapter 3 | Madam Malkin's
Warm green flames tickle Draco's cheek in a sudden burst, gone quick as they came—leaving a cool, damp, ashy darkness. He's irritated at having to travel by floo powder, but today they have no choice. He hears the droning voice of his father, muffled a few feet ahead. Quietly, Draco steps out of the hearth and onto the dusty, cracking floorboards of Borgin & Burke's.
It's only his second time in the black, musty shop. His father has never liked children, and he likes taking them along on important outings even less so. Draco wonders if this was a sign of his coming-of-age, being permitted to join today.
The first time he'd been brought along, he remembered feeling a distinct prickling on the back of his neck. The musty air was thick with magic. Draco had surprised himself by enjoying it, creeping behind cupboards and opening doors he shouldn't have while his father was in hushed conversation with Mr. Burke. That day, he had found a small, worn cardboard box on a mantle. He had lifted it, leaving a small clean mark on the dusty surface. A notecard was taped to the marbled top, with four words in delicate curved writing: at your own risk. It was too much to resist. Draco had lifted the flimsy lid and peered inside—and on a bed of yellowing cotton lay the severed head of a garden snake, with its forked tongue extended.
He knew better than to touch it, but had no intention of putting it back. No, his father had always collected dark items, and it was about time he allowed Draco to do the same. He pocketed the box.
It came to his surprise that Borgin & Burkes didn't have a set of charms to prevent him lifting the item from the shop, especially given that they had charmed it against apparition. He half expected to be thrown back from the door like he was on springs, but his toes had crossed the threshold with no spectacular event. He supposed that they expected any sticky-fingered thief would die by the hands of any item they were foolish enough to take.
That tiny box now sits on Draco's windowsill, open, displaying the snake's head proudly as his first act of thievery. He still doesn't know what it does. He's eager for the day he can creep into the library at Hogwarts and find a book that might tell him more about its dark magic.
But he's getting ahead of himself. Draco steps aside from the hearth, knowing his mother is following him. His robes are spotted with grey ash, and he whacks them unceremoniously with his palm to try and rid the soot. Unsuccessful. Of course, the one day Diagon Alley will be teeming with his future classmates is the day he looks like proletariat filth.
The fireplace bursts full of green flames, shocking him more than it should have—he jumps backwards into a glass cabinet that rattles dangerously.
"Draco!" Lucius hisses. He wears a look of such warning that it sends an icy wave down Draco's spine. "Watch yourself, for goodness sakes. We came here to sell, not to destroy the place."
Draco feels heat in his cheeks. This is not going how he had planned.
"Now Mr. Burke…" Lucius's voice is dripping in appeasement as he holds out the velvet necklace box, "…you were naming a price…"
Draco sulks, turning away from his father and scanning the dirty shelves for an item he can pocket today. He feels his mother's eyes on him.
"Come, Draco," she says silkily, touching his shoulder with a black lace-gloved hand and pulling him beside her. "Don't touch."
He wants nothing more than to squirm away from her. If she tries to baby him like this in Diagon Alley with other Hogwarts students around, he'll—well, he's not sure what he'll do. But she'd best stay back a distance.
He hears the slap of a firm handshake and knows his father and Mr. Burke have struck a deal. Lucius returns from the bowels of the shop with a sour smile.
"Narcissa, go." Lucius says, gesturing with the silvery snake head of his walking stick. "I want to speak with the boy."
Her hand tightens almost imperceptibly on Draco's shoulder before it lifts and she exits the shop, disappearing like a cloud of smoke into the dark alleyway. He's secretly pleased with his father shooing her away. She's altogether too clingy. He feels a modicum of guilt in thinking it, but wipes it from his mind. If he's ever going to be taken seriously by his father, he needs to prove he can exist without his mother coddling him at all times.
Lucius snatches Draco by his bicep, pulling him towards the exit. Inches from the door, Lucius swishes his walking stick and the door swings open for them to pass into the cobblestoned street.
Lucius directs him towards Diagon Alley, the bustling noise of hundreds of future Hogwarts students teeming ahead. Draco's arm throbs from his father's firm grip. Lucius stops short, lingering in a shadowy alcove of crumbling stonework that marks the exit from Knockturn Alley.
"Draco," he sneers, "As much as you think this day is a celebration, today is the start of more responsibilities than your little brain can contain. You're entering a wider world of wizards, and every action is an extension of our family. One – wrong – move –" Lucius seizes Draco's chin, tilting it roughly. "—and you can ruin our reputation. You're too soppy for your own good, boy."
Draco doesn't know whether to fight his father or stay compliant.
"I expect you to be the best," Lucius says, "there are no exceptions. The difference between a powerful wizard and a weak one is the ability to make others believe you have all the power. Rules are inconsequential. Impressions are not. I will not accept a son that cannot command his own presence."
Maybe he can squirm from his father's grasp into the obscurity of bustling crowds. Draco can hear the laughter, the chattering, can smell the sweet warmth of waffle cones being baked at Florean Fortescue's not two shops away. And yet, here he is: a small, cold, dark pile of robes pinned to the wall by his own father's commanding grip. He'd give anything to run away, if he could be guaranteed comfort and wealth.
"Draco." Lucius's voice is surprisingly level.
Draco reluctantly meets his eyes. They're uncomfortably like his own: silvery and clear, like shards of glass surrounding a pit of black ink.
"I am telling you this for your own good. One moment of weakness, and students will trample all over you, pure-blood or not. Be on guard. Always. Especially with that wretched Potter boy around." Lucius practically spits the last few words.
He can't truly mean it. Can he? Draco hasn't even considered that Harry Potter will be in his year. Yes, he knows who Potter is. But Harry Potter is like a creature you're told of, but never see. A legend, a fallacy, a hero who disappeared from the wizarding world as quickly as he became famous.
Draco has always been jealous of the fairy tale. Although he hates to admit it. Jealous of the fact that Harry Potter is the subject of every dinner table conversation. That kind of notoriety, before he could walk? Without even trying? Draco can just bet that Harry Potter will waltz through Hogwarts without any effort at all. An icy hatred floods his body. If the real, in-the-flesh Harry Potter is truly in his year, Draco's wonderful escape into a world where he'd be easily respected and revered is suddenly about to be extinguished into the shadow of a hero who hadn't even tried.
It's disgustingly unfair.
Lucius notices the change in Draco's eyes, slowly releasing his hand from Draco's chin and smoothing the robes across his chest.
"That Potter boy is a fluke," Lucius spits, his voice almost a growl. His nose is mere inches from Draco's. "The whole wizarding world may worship him, but he's the real reason aurors will never allow us to simply live. And I'll be damned if he excels my son. So do whatever it takes. But do not settle below him."
A ferocity boils to life within Draco. He's been second to his family's reputation his entire life. Second to their wealth. Second to everything. And he'll be damned if he's second to Harry Potter.
...
"Hogwarts, dear?"
Draco hears the insufferably bubbly voice of Madam Malkin in the front of the shop, welcoming a student in. Great. He hoped he'd be done with before another Hogwarts student came.
"Got the lot here—" Madam Malkin goes on.
Although Draco keeps his eyes drilled to his own reflection in the mirror, he can hear her smiling. It's beyond irritating.
"Another young man is just getting fitted up now, in fact," Madam Malkin says, motioning the boy to the footstool to Draco's left.
Draco nearly rolls his eyes. He wants nothing more than to be finished and move on to Ollivanders, but the incompetent witch guiding the needle across the hem is so slow that he could have taken a long nap and still had robes a foot too long. She must be a squib or something, to have to concentrate that hard.
He avoids looking at the other boy until his father's voice penetrates his thoughts: I expect you to be the best. No exceptions. Well, he's not going to get anywhere by sulking, will he? He's had enough of being afraid. Hogwarts is a chance for him to become someone else. Someone who is controlled by no one. He looks his pale reflection in the eyes. He suddenly knows what to do.
He needs to make it seem like he doesn't care a whit.
He glances towards the other boy, who's head emerges from a set of black robes that Madam Malkin has thrown over him. The boy's hair is thick and unruly, staticky from the robes and poking in all directions. Draco has an unexpected and overwhelming urge to plunge his fingers into it.
The boy hurriedly adjusts a pair of round wire glasses that were knocked askew by the robes. He's thin as Draco, perhaps a half foot shorter. Almost as if he can sense eyes on him, the boy turns. Draco knows he's been staring too long. He instantly pretends as if he has not a care in the world.
"Hullo," he drones, "Hogwarts too?"
"Yes," says the boy.
"My father's next door buying my books and my mother's up the street looking at wands," he lies. He's impressed with his own tale. Only a wizard with full confidence and no fear would be so indifferent about their preparations for Hogwarts. He must act like it's just another boring day. Except—he needs something else. Something to make it seem as if he's way beyond his years.
"Then I'm going to drag them off to look at racing brooms," Draco says. "I don't see why first years can't have their own. I think I'll bully my father into getting me one and I'll smuggle it in somehow." That last bit isn't all a lie. It's despicable that wizarding students aren't allowed brooms. It's the only time in his life he's felt a thrill for something, and he won't even be allowed. "Have you got your own broom?" he goes on.
"No," the boy says.
"Play Quidditch at all?"
"No," the boy says again.
"I do," Draco brags, seeing an opening. "Father says it's a crime if I'm not picked to play for my house, and I must say, I agree." It's another lie that he doesn't know he wishes was true until it's out of his mouth. It feels sour in the air.
He glances at the boy to distract his thoughts. There's a quality about the boy that's at once vulnerable and unrelenting. Draco catches a glimpse at his thin face in one of the mirrors angled around the footstool. There's a spark of insecurity in his bright green eyes that reminds Draco of himself. Afraid, yet dying to prove himself.
"Know what house you'll be in yet?" he asks curiously, oddly hoping he'll say Slytherin. He wonders what it would be like to spend late nights lounging in the common room, pretending their lives outside of Hogwarts don't exist…
"No," the boy says shortly.
Draco disguises his disappointment. "Well, no one really knows until they get there, do they, but I know I'll be in Slytherin, all our family have been—imagine being a Hufflepuff, I think I'd leave, wouldn't you?" He says, hoping the boy will share a little more about himself.
"Mmm," is his disengaged answer.
This conversation isn't going the way Draco envisioned. He feels his cheeks reddening again, and searches for something to distract from the matter of houses. He turns to gaze outside, searching for perhaps an owl or a broom to comment on, when a person nearly twice the height of a regular man crosses in front of the windows and bends down to reveal a thick face surrounded in disorderly whiskers so dense his eyes are barely visible from beneath the thicket.
"I say, look at that man!" Draco exclaims, both shocked and glad for the distraction.
The boy's face lights up for the first time since he entered the shop. "That's Hagrid," he says, "He works at Hogwarts."
"Oh," says Draco, remembering his father mentioning the name, "He's a sort of servant, isn't he?"
The boy bristles. "He's the gamekeeper."
Draco has the distinct feeling that this boy is liking him less and less. It makes him feel uncomfortably desperate to earn his favour. Perhaps humour?
"Yes, exactly," he starts eagerly, "I heard he's some sort of savage—lives in a hut on the school grounds and every now and then he gets drunk, tries to do magic and ends up setting fire to his bed."
That should at least get a laugh.
The boy looks at him, his green eyes turning to steel. "I think he's brilliant."
Draco feels a bubbling frustration. "Do you? Why is he with you? Where are your parents?"
"They're dead," the boy says shortly.
"Oh, sorry," Draco says flippantly, not fully believing him. "But they were our kind, weren't they?"
"They were a witch and wizard, if that's what you mean."
Draco's heart beats faster. Finally, something in common. He seizes it. "I really don't think they should let the other sort in, do you? They're just not the same, they've never been brought up to know our ways. Some of them have never even heard of Hogwarts until they get the letter, imagine. I think they should keep it to the old wizarding families." He hesitates, and realizes that if he's pure blood, it means his father may know the boy's family, or at least know of them. "What's your surname anyway?" he says curiously.
But before the boy can answer, Madam Malkin says "That's you done, my dear," and the boy, not wasting any time, hops down from the footstool.
Curse this damned slow witch. If she had been finished, Draco would have followed the boy out. "Well, I'll see you at Hogwarts, I suppose," he says sullenly.
Without so much as looking over his shoulder, the boy hands Madam Malkin a few galleons and skips out the door.
Draco lets out a sigh so violently that the sleepy witch gives a start, accidentally jerking her wand and sending the needle into his shin.
"Careless witch!" he jumps, pulling the robes over his head and lobbing them at her. "Haven't you figured out my height yet? You can do magic, can't you? Finish this rubbish and I'll send my father to collect it later."
Draco storms past the stunned witch and slams the shop door so hard that the glass in one pane shatters, followed by the voice of Madam Malkin tut-tutting, "Kids these days…reparo."