Muggle Studies, or
Where He So Longs To Tread
Chapter 9
Vienna had been a complete washout, as had Amsterdam and Berlin. To tell the truth, Dita had not actually expected to find Draco in any of those cities, but she still had to be thorough.
His journal told how every summer the Malfoys would go to Europe, spending each month in a different city, meeting all the "best" pure-bloods and, incidentally, sounding them out for possible Death-Eater allies. Draco had often been bored; Dita wondered if it was because he never allowed himself to actually make friends of any of the children his age. He expected them to be his followers, and even the ones who were well-connected enough to be equals were held at arm's length. They could be allies and teammates, perhaps, but never friends, not what Dita considered friends. Draco never bothered to hide that everyone at Hogwarts was beneath him. Crabbe and Goyle, the two boys he had known all his life, were his serfs; Pansy Parkinson, Daphne Greengrass, Blaise Zabini, and others were his courtiers. In Europe he didn't have time to form his coterie, and after a while even a boy trained to think of himself as a kind of prince would grow tired of stilted society parties and secret meetings where nothing was discussed but politics.
In Rome and Venice, however, before his fourth year at Hogwarts, he had discovered the joys of disappearing to do his own exploration into Italian wizarding life—and Italian Muggle life. He betrayed in his diary an odd fascination with the ways Muggles managed to get on in life without magic, though he was terrified both of ending up like someone called Arthur Weasley, for whom he had a great deal of scorn, and of his father's wrath, should he ever find out. (Dita wondered what he would say if he found out about his father's own, short-lived fascination with Muggles…)
At school he fled from his own dangerous activities by becoming colder and more disdainful of Muggles than ever. Now, though, Dita believed those two cities would have been among the first places he would go in an attempt to regain any happiness he had had as a boy. To Rome and Venice she would go.
She supposed Lucia had gotten to Hogwarts by now. She ought to receive either an owl or a phone call in the next few days telling her which House her daughter had been sorted into.