September 24, 2017
Author's Notes: The Patented Daydream Charm description that Draco reads in the WWW catalogue is pulled from Half-Blood Prince. Reviews appreciated!
Malfoy's Patented Daydream Scheme
Chapter Two: Catalogues
Draco had forgotten Neville's invitation to Weasley until two weeks later when she showed up to the Potions classroom in the middle of a lesson.
The door opened, drawing the attention of the Gryffindor and Slytherin first year students and interrupting Draco's lecture on Hiccupping Potions. Weasley stood in the doorway with a beaming McGonagall until Slughorn jumped up from his desk where he was supervising the lesson and beckoned them in.
"Oh, Miss Weasley! How very long it's been since I've seen you last! Look, class, Miss Ginevra Weasley was one of the members of my Slug Club. She was an exceptional Potions student if I recall correctly—"
"He doesn't," Weasley said to the class with a good-natured smile.
"Well, nevertheless, I do remember your magnificent skill with Bat-Bogey Hexes, and, children, you see before you a veritable war hero!"
Gasps and oohs and ahs erupted around the classroom, and Draco made a scoffing sound that went unnoticed. These students had barely been six years old when the war ended. What did they even remember of it?
"Enough of that," Weasley said, rolling her eyes at the class as if sharing a good joke with them. "I'm a simple shopkeeper, that's all."
Slughorn's proud grin faltered. "A, er, what was that?"
"I run Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes in Hogsmeade. Here, I brought catalogues!" Weasley dug into a bag hanging off her shoulder and pulled out a stack of pamphlets, which she divided amongst the students to pass around. "We take orders by owl, you know!"
At this proclamation, McGonagall's smile also failed her, and Draco, who had just a moment ago been annoyed at being interrupted and ignored, smirked, relishing in the Headmistress's pain.
"A shopkeeper you say? I spoke specifically with Gwenog about your prospects as a Harpy."
Finished passing out catalogues, Weasley returned to Slughorn and McGonagall's sides at the front of the classroom. "Oh, I did try out, but I decided I wasn't passionate about playing Quidditch professionally. I'm really happy working with my brother in the family business."
Slughorn shook off his disappointed frown quickly enough. "Yes, well, I hear Mr. Weasley's shop is more popular than ever, so I, er, commend you on your achievements together."
Having worked closely with the Potions master every day for the last few months, Draco could tell Slughorn was not quite as impressed with Weasley's achievements as he wanted everyone in the room to believe, but Weasley hardly seemed to notice or care. Her indifference to Slughorn's opinion improved Draco's own opinion of her, but her inane decision to forego fame and glory in the form of a Quidditch career with a prestigious team made him question her executive function.
As the class's murmurs grew into excited chatter and the sound of pages turning, McGonagall cleared her throat. "Well, we should be going now, I think. There are still plenty of others to visit. Miss Weasley will be joining us for dinner this evening, so you will have plenty of time to catch up then."
Slughorn grunted and returned to his desk, where he had been marking essays before Weasley's arrival. He seemed to have no more interest in his former student now that he understood her lack of aspirations, and Draco was positively delighted in her abrupt exit from the exclusive club to which Draco himself had been denied entrance years ago. Unfortunately for Draco's glee, he doubted Weasley cared one whit for the honor—or the removal thereof.
The door closed behind the headmistress and her precious former student, and Slughorn waved his hand at Draco. "Continue, Mr. Malfoy."
His former delight withered away instantly when he realized Weasley had waltzed in and riled up his class before summarily departing once more. After two whole minutes of futile attempts to bring the students back to attention, he finally waved his wand and confiscated every last WWW catalogue from their grubby hands, which earned him a classroom full of "Awwwww!"s that did nothing to sway him.
"As I was saying before our guest arrived," he ground out, teeth clenched in impatience, "the main ingredient in the Hiccuping Potion requires special preparation in order for this cure to be effective…."
True to McGonagall's word, Draco was cursed with Weasley's presence at dinner. He noticed her as soon as he walked into the Great Hall, registering first the carroty color of her hair and second her location.
"This is my seat," he said as he loomed over her from behind, arms crossed in an uncanny impression of his previous mentor, Severus Snape.
"Is it?" Weasley didn't even turn away from her plate. What a cow. "Neville said you wouldn't mind."
"I can't believe Longbottom would ever say something so categorically untrue. I do mind. I mind everything."
"Yes, he might have touched on how uptight you are about certain things." She shredded the meat on her plate and mixed it with her vegetables before shoveling it all into her mouth as if Draco's presence was inconsequential to her.
His temper began to flare, heat rising in his cheeks and the tips of his ears.
With her mouth engaged in the process of mastication, she said over her shoulder, "If you're going to chat my ear off, why don't you sit down?" And then she winked at Neville, who fought to stifle his laughter with a mouthful of dinner roll.
Draco's stomach grumbled then, and that was the only reason he took a seat, using Neville as a buffer between him and Weasley. It wasn't because she'd told him to. It wasn't because he was fascinated by the shine of her hair, like a Niffler sniffing out gold. It wasn't that vexing smile she shared with Neville, one full of secrets and amusements and jokes of which Draco could not take part. There was absolutely nothing compelling about Ginny Weasley. He was simply hungry.
"Ginny and I were hoping you could settle a debate for us," Neville said, oblivious to Draco's foul mood.
Weasley nodded. "Yes, could you confirm whether or not the abdominal muscles heavily featured in the photographs that accompanied your Witch Weekly article are real or edited?"
Draco's mouth gaped open, the serving spoon in his hand forgotten and dripping onto the table.
Weasley continued as if she hadn't said anything outrageous at all. "Neville insists they're fake, but I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt. I do admit they look much too good to be true."
Heat blazed through his body, forging a path to every extremity until Draco wished he would just catch fire already and take the rest of the school with him.
Weasley had seen his photos. But of course she had. What woman in the United Kingdom hadn't seen those photos? Ever since the article had been published, Draco had been inundated with correspondence from women across the country. Even his own mother had seen that blasted story!
But the idea of Ginevra Weasley perusing a copy of Witch Weekly in a bored fashion, stumbling across a half-naked photo of Draco attempting to smolder at the reader, and stopping in interest did more than set him ablaze. It made his imagination run wild, which was an all too dangerous pastime.
How long had she stared at those photos? Had she read the article? How many times? What had been her initial thought upon reading his interview? Did she laugh at his highly edited photographs?
Neville bit his lip to repress his laughter. "I think his lack of an answer is an answer in itself, don't you?"
Weasley looked at Draco, her brown eyes assessing as she scanned him from his head to his waist, the only parts of him visible over the table. "Hm, I don't know about that."
A shiver shot down his spine under the weight of her gaze, and as if someone had tapped his knee to check his reflexes, his immediate response was to stand.
Bugger dinner. Draco fled.
The stack of Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes catalogues Draco had confiscated yesterday sat in an orderly stack on the corner of his desk, taunting him with their brightly colored and animated lettering.
In the middle of the room, three cauldrons sat bubbling on top of a workbench, multi-hued steam mingling in the air and giving the office a smoky, suffocating atmosphere. Compared to Slughorn's office, Draco's was basically a closet converted for his use to mark assignments and conduct the research necessary as an apprentice.
He was supposed to be marking Hiccuping Potion essays, and usually he enjoyed slashing his students' work to pieces with his favorite red ink of doom, but today he was distracted by the timers ticking the seconds away until he needed to complete the next stage of brewing three different potions and the catalogues enthusiastically urging him to peruse their contents.
He tapped his quill as he reread the same sentence three times without making any sense of it, and then finally tossed the quill down with a disgusted grunt. It was the incessant ticking that ruined his concentration, not his idle curiosity about WWW's wares. He hadn't been inside a Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes shop in years, though he had reluctantly enjoyed the creativity of the products he'd found inside (not that he ever would have admitted such a thing; he'd disparaged the store when around his friends so as not to give the Weasleys too much credit).
The cover of the catalogues featured cartoonish children, a boy and a girl, tossing sweets into their mouths. A moment later, the girl transformed into a giant, wide-eyed weasel while the boy laughed at her misfortune. Another moment later, the boy's tongue began to lengthen, growing until it exceeded the boundaries of the catalogue's edge.
He flipped through the pages, looking for he didn't know what, but stopped to watch the animated images to see how each product worked. Most of the featured items were inane and immature: hats and scarves that made heads disappear, fake hands that grabbed people who drew too close, sweets that turned their imbibers into animals and distorted body parts for laughs. Some of them were clever. Draco was all too familiar with Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder, and the accessories enchanted with Shield Charms were obviously quite useful if one expected to be assaulted at any moment.
As he turned pages, his eye stopped on a selection of explosively pink products that Draco remembered seeing before but had never paid much mind to. He sneered at the WonderWitch brand of love potions and makeup products, at the idea of lovelorn teenagers like Rebecca Toogood and her friends purchasing such items to woo the object of their affection. The amusement died away in an instant as he remembered he was the object of Toogood's affections. He frowned as he made a mental note to be more aware of his food and drink around that particular group of students.
His attention was next captured by an image of a, er, robust man with a swooning woman in his arms while roses bloomed around them.
Patented Daydream Charm
Romance at the tip of your wand!
One simple incantation and you will enter a top-quality, highly realistic, thirty-minute daydream, easy to fit into the average school lesson and virtually undetectable (side effects include vacant expression and minor drooling). Not for sale to under-sixteens.
Draco snickered to himself. What kind of lonely, pathetic person would buy such a thing?
A ringing startled Draco as the first of his timers went off, and he silenced it with a wave of his wand as he stood to attend to his potion. As he stirred, counting out the strokes of his stirring rod, half of his mind couldn't stop thinking about those daydream charms. Then he began to measure out Moondew for his next potion, the timer for which rang just as he'd completed the stirring step of the first potion. His thoughts drifted to the magic involved with the daydream charms, automatically turning to the puzzle of how to achieve the same effects with a potion instead. The third timer rang, and he attended to the last potion, adding six ice cubes to the concoction to bring it down to the correct precise temperature before the mixture boiled over.
Certainly he could make a daydream potion to rival Weasley's daydream charm? Perhaps he could extend the longevity of the magic to last for an hour? Or perhaps he could fashion a sleeping draught that would allow a person to dream for a whole night?
By the time he'd finished with the potions and set new timers for each of them, Draco was determined to try his hand at daydreams. The Weasleys couldn't be the only ones with a stake in the dream economy!
He returned to his desk and flipped to the back of the catalogue to fill out the order form for a variety pack of Patented Daydream Charms, giving a false name so Weasley would be none the wiser to Draco's sabotage. After he mailed the form off, he'd have a word with Filch that evening about letting his package through the screening process.
And with those distractions out of the way, Draco retreated to his desk and back to the task of marking essays.