First Year, or
Not So Much To Me Is Yonder Lane
Chapter 6
Dita sat on the train for Dover, perusing Draco's diary. She and Lucia had made it through the first several years in the last couple of weeks. (Narcissa had been furious that she wasn't immediately rushing off to do a great deal of running about and actively searching, but she had convinced her that she would be more effective learning about him and following him psychologically than just rushing out randomly.) As she had expected, the early years of the diary followed the Dancing Men cipher exactly with few innovations, and the writing/drawing was clumsy, the entries few and short. Later the handwriting became more fluid, the figures looking more like writing than drawing, and the entries were longer, though still not frequent until the last two years. Over time as well, the cipher became increasingly sophisticated and more difficult to figure out, less a one-to-one relationship between figures and letters and more of a shorthand, with some figures standing for complete sounds or even words. Occasionally an entirely new figure would appear, the replacement for a whole word that she would have to figure out from context; it was usually a new word, perhaps recently learned, of some significance.
It was no wonder at all that Draco Malfoy had turned to secret codes and journal-writing as a sort of outlet. The boy had an impossible life. His mother indulged him, but his father was harsh and demanded perfection. On the one hand he had an unhealthy sense of entitlement and superiority; on the other hand, a sense of uncertainty and even insecurity underlay everything he wrote. Dita had noted that the two often went together. When you had to constantly prove how much better you were than everyone else, you lived with a constant fear of failure. In Draco's case, failure meant failing his entire bloodline as well as dealing with his father's displeasure and, later, facing the cruel displeasure of the world's greatest and most fearsome wizard.
At the beginning, the entries were those of a petulant child, complaining about having to go to Hogwarts instead of something called Durmstrang. (Durmstrang? Dita wondered. Anything to do with that literary and musical movement, Strurm Und Drang, from the 18th Century?) It was the petulance of a spoilt child who, spoiling notwithstanding, did not dare to complain publically. There were complaints about a fellow student, a young Harry Potter, who thought he was better than everyone else (The pot calling the kettle black, Dita thought, amused) and who, apparently, reading between the lines, was a threat to Draco's self-importance. Draco was supposed to be the centre of attention at his school, not a part-Muggle, accidental hero who knew nothing about the wizarding world and cared nothing for Malfoy preeminence. Draco had, kindly, offered the young boy a place in his world, a chance to be with the best people and occupy a high society that would have normally been closed to him, and the ungrateful Potter refused. That made Draco very angry, but it also made him a little uneasy, wondering what his father would say about his inability to cultivate the acquaintance of one of the most famous young wizards of all time. But of course it was all Potter's fault that the Malfoys had gone through their time of trouble eleven years ago, when the Dark Lord disappeared.
After that, Potter became the scapegoat for all Draco's troubles at school. No matter what went wrong, Draco had someone else to blame it on, deflecting attention away from his own shortcomings, which he was hypersensitive about. And no wonder, when he had such appallingly idiotic parents, Dita thought, teaching him to hide from his failings and inflate his own ego. At what point did you stop blaming the parents for teaching their child to follow evil and start holding the child accountable for his own choices?
When Potter was chosen to be the youngest Seeker ever on a Hogwarts Quidditch team (What was that? Dita wondered) and Draco received his father's unreasonable ire for not receiving a similar (and entirely unlikely) honor, it was all Potter's fault. When he had detention because he snuck out after curfew (expecting to get a reward, of all things, for catching Potter doing the same thing), he blamed it on Potter. When he was forced for his detention to go into the Forbidden Forest and encountered horrors past his young imagination which had him fleeing in sobbing terror, he recounted it angrily and shamefully in his journal and managed somehow to make Potter and a big man named Hagrid seem responsible. Even as a child he had a way with words, and sometimes Dita caught herself actually believing him, caught up in a fleeting sense of the world being against him.
Author's note: "'Sturm Und Drang' is the name of a movement in German literature and music taking place from the late 1760s through the early 1780s, in which individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in reaction to the perceived constraints of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements." (http:/en . wikipedia . org/wiki/Sturm_und_Drang)
Sounds like something a place like Durmstrang would espouse, doesn't it?