The Merge: A Draco Malfoy SI

[Gravepine56]

Chapter 1 - Preparations

Malfoy Manor — Spring 1977

It was the silence of a house that had never needed to raise its voice.

Malfoy Manor stood on its hill the way old things stand — not because anyone willed it, but because nothing had yet found the authority to move it. With hands three centuries dead having cut and placed each stone, the walls possessed that specific chill of rooms designed for impressing, not for comfort, and the stones themselves were pale and precise. The dining room was the heart of this, or perhaps the opposite of a heart — a long, high-ceilinged chamber where candlelight reached upward and stopped, swallowed by the dark above the chandeliers. The table could seat twenty. Tonight, as every night, it seated two.

This was the first silence. The silence of stone and silver and empty chairs. The silence of portraits watching from gilt frames with the disinterested patience of the ancient. It was not a hostile silence — nothing so active as that. It was the silence of a place that had been grand for so long it had forgotten that grandeur was a choice. Tapestries hung along the east wall, their greens gone deep and strange with age. A fire burned in the fireplace at the far end of the room. It did not make the room warm.

Lucius Malfoy sat at the head of the table, his back to the tall, narrow windows that admitted no direct light. He ate the way he did most things — with an economy of motion that made elegance look inevitable. His knife never scraped the plate. His wine glass returned to the same spot each time he set it down, as though the table had a mark only he could see. There was, in fact, a faint silver inlay there — not decorative, but functional — one of several such markings worked into the table generations ago, invisible unless you knew to look for them. He did not look up, because there was nothing to look up at that he had not already measured and found in its proper place.

He was not unkind, as such. That was the thing one had to understand about Lucius Malfoy, and the thing most people got wrong. He was not withholding warmth to punish anyone. He simply had a certain amount of it, less than some men and more than others, and most of it went to the maintenance of things he considered important — the estate, the name, the careful architecture of influence he had spent years constructing. What remained was enough for the quiet respect he showed his wife, the glass of wine he poured her before his own, the fact that he always stood when she entered a room. If that was not love, it was at least its nearest available neighbour, and in the houses of old families, one learned not to be too precise about the difference.

This was the second silence. The silence between two people who had said everything that duty required and nothing that it didn't. Narcissa sat at her place — not at the far end of the table, which would have been theatrical, but four seats down, which was simply correct. She ate less than he did and with the same unconscious grace; her movements were so composed they barely displaced the surrounding air. Her hair was pale and drawn back from her face in a way that might have looked severe on another woman.

She did not try to fill the silence. She never had. Narcissa Black had not been raised to chatter, and Narcissa Malfoy saw no reason to begin. If there was something between them that a different kind of couple might have called loneliness, she would not have used that word. She had a husband who respected her, a home that bore a name as old as her own, and something else besides — something she carried with her even now, visible beneath the fall of dark fabric across her lap, present and unmentioned in how important things often were in this house.

She was six months along, or near enough. The pregnancy had changed nothing about the way they dined. Lucius had not moved his chair closer. Narcissa had not asked him to. A healer visited on Tuesdays, and the nursery was being prepared in the east wing, and these were simply facts — handled with the same quiet efficiency as every other matter of the household. They did not discuss the child at dinner. They discussed little at dinner.

Lucius set down his glass. "The east wing plasterwork," he said without looking up. "Fawley's men finished the cornice today. I've told them to begin the ceiling moulding tomorrow."

It wasn't, in the strict sense, about the nursery. The topic was the house and its upkeep, presented as routine estate matters. That the room was being prepared for their child was not the main point. Or at least, that's how he presented it.

Narcissa considered this. "The green," she said. "For the walls. I've chosen the Malfoy sage rather than the darker shade."

"A good choice," Lucius said. He picked up his wineglass again.

That was the whole of it. A room discussed in terms of plaster and paint. Two people circling the same unspoken thing — the child, the change it would bring, what kind of family they intended to be — and settling, by mutual instinct, for the safe language of logistics. If there was a moment when one of them might have said something more, it passed without either reaching for it.

The candles burned lower. An elf appeared and vanished, removing a dish. Narcissa set down her fork and placed her hands in her lap, one resting on the curve of her stomach. Lucius folded his napkin along its creases — the same creases, always — and reached for his wine.

And beneath these two silences, there was a third.

It was the silence of the chair that was not yet at this table. The nursery in the east wing, half-finished, was waiting. The name in the family ledger, written in ink that would not fade, was for someone who had not yet drawn breath. Narcissa's hand moved — the smallest motion, a thumb drawn across the curve of what she carried. Lucius did not see it, or if he did, he gave no sign.

The candles flickered. The portraits were watching. Vast and patient, the silence lingered.

Malfoy Manor — June 5, 1977

The first thing was light. Too much of it, and too close, and he could not close his eyes against it because he did not yet have control of his eyes. A white ceiling, high with decorations, candlelight reflecting off pale plaster. He could see it clearly. He simply could not look away.

Then cold. The air hit his skin, and every nerve fired at once, a full-surface shock that pulled a sound out of him before he knew he was making it. He was crying. The sound was thin and ragged and not his, not the sound his voice was supposed to make. He knew with a certainty he could not explain, because he could not remember what his voice was supposed to sound like.

Hands lifted him. Firm, professional hands in gloves that smelled of something sharp and herbal. A woman in pale blue robes held him against her forearm with the practised ease of someone who had done this many times. She was speaking, but not to him.

"Healthy. Good weight. Breathing is strong."

He understood every word. He understood the clinical tone, the implication that she was reporting to someone behind her. While unable to hold up his own head, he understood all of this.

His body was wrong. Not damaged, but wrong in how a house is wrong when you have lived in a different one your whole life and walked into the bathroom at three in the morning expecting the door to be on the left. He reached for his hands and they would not come. He tried to turn his head, and it lolled against the woman's arm. Everything he knew how to do with a body, this body could not do.

He had been older. He felt sure about that. He had been older. An adult—how old, he couldn't tell anymore, only that there had been work, responsibility, something that came after. That was all. He reached for his name and found nothing. He reached for a face, his own or anyone's, and found nothing. Everything personal had been stripped away, or it had never survived whatever brought him here. But he knew other things. He knew history and language, and how to reason.

She carried him across the room. It was large. Dark wood and heavy curtains filled it. Candles provided light instead of electricity. June sunlight streamed onto a canopied bed. He saw the robes and the candles. Nothing in the room felt modern.

The woman on the bed was pale and drawn and looking straight at him. Her face was focused and intent, exhaustion held back by something fiercer.

Something about her was familiar.

Not her specifically — he could not have said her name, could not have placed where he had seen her or whether he ever had. But something in the shape of the face, the sharp features, the pale hair darkened with sweat and pulled back, the grey eyes fixed on him with that fierce, exhausted focus — something about the whole of it tugged at a door in his mind that would not open. He had no memory to match it to. Only the feeling that he should.

He should not be able to see like this. The focus was too sharp. The edges too defined. Light resolved into detail instead of blur. His eyes did not drift or unfocus — they fixed.

Newborns did not do this. He knew that much. Vision came slowly. In brightness and shadow. In shapes without edges.

This was not that.

He saw her.

Not as warmth. Not as sound. Not as movement. He saw her face — the line of her cheek, the tension in her mouth, the grey of her eyes sharpened by the moment.

The thought tilted sideways in his mind. He did not understand why this was possible. If this was magic, he did not know what that meant. If this was something broken or altered or wrong in him, he had no language for that either.

All he understood was that he should not be able to focus.

And yet he could.

He let it go. He had no choice. Whatever the feeling was, it would not resolve into anything he could use, and his body was already pulling his attention elsewhere — to the cold, to the brightness, to the overwhelming fact of being alive and small and utterly helpless.

The healer placed him in her arms. Her hands differed from the Healer's, not firmer but more deliberate, adjusting him against her chest with a care that had nothing clinical in it. He could feel the warmth of her through the fabric of her gown, and something happened in his chest that he had not expected and could not control.

He was not deciding to feel this. It was his body responding to being held by its mother, and his mind, his adult, comprehending mind, could not override it. The crying stopped. The tension in his limbs softened. He felt safe, and he did not trust it. But the feeling was there in his body whether he wanted it or not.

She studied him the way he imagined she studied everything: completely, before deciding what to show. His eyes found hers and held. Not the unfocused drift of a newborn — something steadier. Something that lasted a beat too long. Her brow creased, barely, the faintest contraction of thought. Then her brow smoothed, and she folded away whatever she had noticed or imagined she had noticed into the same place she kept everything she was not yet ready to examine. Then she looked up, past him, toward the door.

He could not turn to see, but he heard the footsteps. Measured, precise, hard-soled shoes on stone. A figure moved into the edge of his vision and he caught enough: pale hair, dark robes, a rigid upright posture that looked like it had never once relaxed. The man stood at the foot of the bed and looked at his son with restrained approval.

"He's strong," the woman said. Low and steady and certain.

The man said nothing for a moment. He stepped closer — not to the woman but to the child, his gaze moving over the small face with the careful, evaluating attention he gave to anything that bore his name. His hand lifted, hesitated, and then one finger touched the boy's fist. The fingers were impossibly small, and they curled reflexively around nothing. He watched this happen with an expression that was not quite tenderness.

"A Malfoy," he said. Quietly, and to no one in particular.

The word landed somewhere deep and detonated.

Malfoy.

He knew that name. Not from a life he could remember, not from a face or a place or a person he had known. He knew it from a story.

The thought was absurd. He rejected it immediately, the way the mind rejects anything too large to process — not with argument but with reflex, the sheer animal no of a brain that has just been told something it cannot afford to believe. But the word was still there. Malfoy. And now he was looking at the man properly — the white-blond hair, the pale pointed face, the cane he had not noticed before, resting against the bedpost. The robes. The bearing. He looked like the actor. Not vaguely, not in the way people sometimes resembled celebrities if you squinted — he looked exactly like him, as though someone had cast the role from life. Which, he supposed, was the wrong way around.

Lucius Malfoy.

He looked back at the woman holding him. The sharp features. The grey eyes. The pale hair. She looked nothing like the actress — too young, too raw, her face stripped of all composure by what her body had just done. But there was something there. A resemblance, if you stripped away fifteen years and every small imperfection — the asymmetries, the blemishes, the minor irregularities that made a real face look real. As though magic had smoothed away everything a camera would have caught.

She must be. Narcissa Malfoy.

The name unlocked everything else. If she was Narcissa, then this was Malfoy Manor. The woman in pale blue robes was a healer. The candles, the robes, the absence of anything electric — not archaic, not foreign. Magical. The Harry Potter series was not fiction. It was real, and he had been born into it.

He had questions. So many questions. They piled into each other. They collapsed under their own weight.

Lucius straightened and pressed his lips to Narcissa's forehead — briefly, correctly, the way a man does when the gesture is expected and he has not yet decided whether he also means it.

"Good," he said. And turned to the healer to ask something about the next few hours.

Narcissa did not watch him go. She had already looked back down.

He did not know his name. He did not know his face. He did not know if he had been kind or cruel, loved or alone. Everything that had made him a specific person was gone, and in its place was a body the size of a loaf of bread and a children's book series that had turned out to be nonfiction.

Narcissa's thumb moved across his forehead. A small motion, almost absent, instinct rather than decision.

"Draco," she said.

He had known the name was coming. He had known it since the man said "Malfoy" and the world rearranged itself around him. But knowing did not prepare him for the sound of it in her voice, quiet and certain and meant entirely for him.

He could not respond. He could not nod or speak or do anything except lie in her arms.

He was warm and held, and he had a name. Everything else — and there was a lot of everything else — would have to wait. He knew what was coming. All of it. He knew the names and the years, and the order in which the worst things would happen. He knew that the war these people believed was over had only paused. Voldemort was not dead — bodiless, diminished, waiting somewhere without form or urgency, because he had nothing but time. Voldemort would return. He would stand in this house. He would ask the man who had just kissed his wife's forehead and called his son 'good' to kneel, and Lucius Malfoy would not know how to refuse.

Narcissa's thumb yet again traced another path over his forehead. Her warmth was authentic. What he understood as his name, given to him by her, was now his true name or the only one he had left. He wondered what he should do now, if anything could be done. There was no one for him to ask.

Author's Note: The Merge is my first published story. Feedback is genuinely valuable to me — it's how I improve. I'm Reshi35 on AO3 and Reshi48 on Webnovel, so there's no confusion about the source.

 

[Gravepine56]

Chapter 2 – Supply Run

Malfoy Manor — Early August, 1991

Narcissa's fingers found the collar of his robe and turned it flat. The fabric remained uncreased. She smoothed it anyway, her thumb running along the seam with the precision of someone who had been dressing a child — this child, specifically — for fourteen years and had not yet found a reason to stop.

Draco held still. Morning light filled the bedroom, warm through the east-facing window, catching the brass inkwell on his desk and turning it briefly gold. The room smelled of parchment and cut grass from the gardens below.

"You're slouching," she said. "And before you tell me you are standing perfectly well — you are. But your left shoulder drops when you're thinking about something, and you have been thinking about something since you woke up."

"I am standing," Draco replied, obliging her anyway. "And my shoulder does not drop."

"It does. You get it from your father, though he would deny it with considerably more conviction."

She adjusted the fall of his sleeve, then the other, movements economical and unhurried. Her hands were cool to the touch. They always were, no matter the season.

"You slept," she observed. Not a question — Narcissa gathered information through statements that invited responses. She could read the answer in his face already, but she was giving him the courtesy of confirming it aloud.

He met her eyes. "I did."

"Hm." A pause. "Long enough?"

"Long enough."

That earned him the faintest curve of her mouth — not quite a smile, but an acknowledgment that the answer was acceptable. Narcissa valued truth, even if uncomfortable, over false comfort.

"I don't know why I bother." She stepped back to assess her work, her eyes moving from collar to cuff to hem with the efficiency of a general reviewing a formation. "You've been dressing yourself properly since you were six. It was the most offensive thing you've ever done to me, and you have done several."

"Seven."

"Six. I remember distinctly. You told the house-elf you could manage, and you could. Stood there buttoning your shirt with those ridiculous small hands, perfectly calm, as though you'd been doing it for years." She paused, and something in her voice shifted — not softer, but closer. "I was furious. Not with you. With the fact that you didn't need me for something I had rather enjoyed being needed for."

He had, in fact, told the elf he could manage. He had been six, and the elf had looked so startled that Draco had felt compelled to show, buttoning his shirt with the careful concentration of someone performing a task for the first time and the absolute certainty of someone who had done it ten thousand times before. The memory sat in a strange place — half his, half someone else's.

"You left me nothing to correct," Narcissa said. She touched his cheek, briefly, the gesture stripped of any pretence that she had found something there. "It is remarkably inconvenient. Other mothers get to fuss. I get to inspect."

"I'll try to be messier."

"You will not. You are incapable of it, and we both know it." The faintest warmth at the corner of her mouth. She turned to the bedside table, and her gaze rested for a moment on the empty wand holster. It had sat there for years, waiting. Today, it would serve its purpose. She did not comment on it, and neither did he.

Narcissa moved to the window, adjusting nothing — simply placing herself in the light, the way she placed herself in every room she entered. Tall, precise, the sharp Black family features softened only by familiarity. She wore pale grey robes, her blonde hair pinned in the style she favoured for public outings: formal enough for Diagon Alley, effortless enough to suggest she had not thought about it.

"Your father will want a letter within the first week," she said. "Something he can read without having to interpret. He will want facts, dates, the names of your professors, and absolutely nothing about your personal impressions of any of them — though those are precisely the parts that would interest me." She turned from the window, her expression composed but her eyes carrying the faintest edge of conspiracy. "You will, of course, write two entirely different letters."

"Meaning I should leave out anything interesting from his."

"Meaning you should write to your father clearly, formally, and with the understanding that he may read certain passages aloud to colleagues if they reflect well on the family." She paused. She was looking out the window now, toward the formal gardens, and her voice was the same composed instrument it always was, but the pause was hers — not strategic. "And then you should write to me properly, Draco. Not the formal reports. Actual letters. Tell me what the castle smells like. Tell me which professors are worth listening to and which are merely performing. Tell me if the food is as dire as your father claims it is now." A beat. "Write to me as though I am someone who will miss you, because I am, and I would rather not have to guess how you are from between the lines of whatever you send your father."

Her voice had not changed. Nothing in her posture gave it away. But his throat tightened — briefly, involuntarily — the way it did when she said more than she meant to. He had understood this tendency for years: Narcissa asking for one thing while needing another. But this time she had said more than she usually permitted herself. The castle's smell. The food. These were not strategic requests. They were the questions of a woman whose son was leaving, and who wanted, when she read his letters, to be able to picture where he was.

"I will," he said, and heard how steady it came out. "The letters to Father will be exemplary. The letters to you will be better."

Something crossed her face — not the composed approval she usually offered but something less guarded, quickly recovered. She turned back from the window, and whatever had been there was simply gone.

"Viola and Pansy will meet us at the Alley. Vincent and Gregory are due at half nine."

A practical beat. The day assembling itself: Gringotts, then Ollivanders, then the other shops. Narcissa ran through the Floo arrangements — the boys arriving here, the group travelling together, the Parkinsons meeting them at the Leaky Cauldron entrance.

Then she adjusted his cuff, which did not need adjusting.

"Pansy has grown this past year. Viola tells me she has been preparing for today with a thoroughness that borders on the military — the curtsey alone has been rehearsed to the point where Viola threatened to confiscate the mirror." A pause, and the warmth in her voice sharpened to something more precise. "Be attentive to her today, Draco. Not because I am asking, though I am. Because she will notice everything you do, and she deserves to find that what she notices is worth the attention she's paying."

There it was. The circling back. She had placed the logistics first, handled the practical architecture, and then returned — with the precision of someone setting a table — to the piece that mattered to her.

He liked Pansy. She was sharp, she paid attention, and she had a way of cutting through pleasantries that he genuinely enjoyed. She would see the Hogwarts social field faster than anyone else in their year — he was already certain of that. The discomfort was not with her. It was with the shape of it — the way his mother placed her name into sentences with careful spacing, the path being drawn, a future already sketched in the margins of every family dinner and every carefully arranged outing. The Parkinson alliance was sound. The families were well-matched. Viola was sharp and Pansy would be sharper. It was all perfectly reasonable, and he could see the architecture of it with a clarity that should not have belonged to someone his age.

He said nothing, because he did not actually object. His thumbnail found the side of his index finger, pressed once, released. He simply noticed the drawing.

"I'll be attentive," he said. "I always am with Pansy. She doesn't leave much room for anything else."

Narcissa studied him for a moment, and whatever she found in his face appeared to satisfy her. "No," she said. "She does not. That is rather the point." She nodded once.

The west corridor was darker than the east wing. Fewer windows, and the wood panelling absorbed what light filtered through them. The flooring transformed from flagstone to parquet, and it groaned in spots Draco knew to bypass — the third plank from the left, then the section by the linen closet, and finally the seam where the old and new wood met. Lucius's study was at the corridor's end. Heavy oak door, always shut.

He paused. His chest expanded, held, released — the controlled rhythm Narcissa had trained into reflex. A small Occlumency surface-check, automatic now after years of practice — a brief inventory of what his face was doing, what his posture said. His weight settled evenly on both feet. The pause before knocking that he had performed a thousand times.

He knocked twice.

"Come."

The room was dim. The north-facing window's light, filtered through heavy curtains, became thin and grey. A low fire in the fireplace provided no warmth against the cold. Leather, old parchment, the ghost of pipe smoke from a previous Malfoy who had been dead for forty years. Behind the walnut desk, Lucius's quill moved with accuracy and calm on Ministry parchment. He did not look up.

Draco waited. Lucius finished the line he was writing, set the quill in its rest, and raised his eyes. The assessment was brief — Draco's robes, his posture, the presentation of the heir. A life's worth of these small inspections, and Draco had learned to hold still for them the way one holds still for a portrait sitting: not rigid, just composed.

"We're leaving for the Alley, Father."

"Your mother has the Gringotts arrangements in hand?"

"She does."

"Good."

A pause. Draco recognised the shape of it — the conversation's natural terminus. Lucius had acknowledged the departure, confirmed the logistics, rendered his verdict. This was where the exchange ended, where it had always ended. He was already turning toward the door.

"People will read your wand, Draco. Every family at that school will know what wood chose you and what core sits inside it before your first week is out. Be prepared for what it tells them."

He stopped. Lucius had risen from the desk. He stood beside it now, one hand resting on the walnut surface. He had closed the distance without hurrying — the way he crossed every room, as though the space had already been his.

Draco met his father's eyes. Lucius held the gaze — the full weight of his attention, freely given. Two sentences about a wand. Lucius did not offer counsel lightly; when he did, it meant the subject had been weighed and found worth addressing. From Lucius, that was the confirmation that mattered.

"I understand, Father." His tongue tried to form a second sentence and he stopped it. The fire shifted in the grate, settling.

Lucius held his gaze a moment longer. Then he returned to his chair, picked up his quill, and the audience was over.

The entrance hall opened around him as he came through the west corridor — high ceiling, pale flagstone, the chandelier dark in the daylight. Columns of grey Wiltshire light fell through the tall narrow windows and lay across the old Turkish carpet in faded green and silver. Narcissa's white lilies sat in the tall vase on the side table, the last of the season. The air was cooler here than his bedroom, warmer than the study. Somewhere between. His shoulders dropped a fraction as the hall's open light replaced the study's close air.

Narcissa stood near the Floo fireplace, one hand resting on the stone mantle. She looked up when she heard him.

"Your father?"

"Wished us well," Draco said, which was close enough to true. "In his way."

Something crossed her face — too brief to name. She understood. She had spent twenty years translating Lucius's silences and knew exactly what "in his way" meant.

"The boys will be here shortly," she said. "Come. Stand where I can see you."

He crossed the hall and stood beside her, and they waited together for the fire to turn green.

Malfoy Manor / The Leaky Cauldron — Early August, 1991

The fire turned green at half past nine exactly.

Crabbe came through first. He came through the way he did most things — with more force than the situation required. The Floo spat him onto the stone floor in a burst of emerald flame and grey ash, and he stumbled forward two steps before catching himself, broad shoulders squaring as he brushed soot off his robes with the flat efficiency of someone swatting a fly. Broad, heavy-set, already imposing at fourteen — thick neck, square jaw, dark hair cropped close. He looked around the entrance hall the way he always did: a brief scan, then settling — the brief tension of arrival dissolving into the ease of a familiar place. Crabbe in the Manor, where nothing needed handling.

"Vincent." Draco was already moving toward him, grinning. "You look like you've been dragged through a chimney."

"I have been dragged through a chimney." Crabbe brushed at his shoulder, inspected the result, and appeared satisfied despite the grey smear still visible on his collar. "Your fireplace spits. It always has."

"That's the Manor defending its dignity. You should feel honoured."

"I feel sooty."

The fire flared green again. Goyle stepped through — quieter, less ash, one hand already brushing his sleeve before his feet touched stone. Taller than Crabbe and less blocky, softer face, brown hair that fell where it wanted. He looked around the hall too, but differently — his gaze catching on the side table, the lilies, the light through the windows. Not wonder. Just attention.

"Your house always smells the same," Goyle said.

For a second Draco heard it as criticism — his attention sharpened, a half-blink. Then he looked at Goyle's face — flat, honest — and the sentence became what it was: an observation, offered without edge. The Manor did have a specific scent — stone and old wood and furniture polish and whatever the elves used on the floors — and the fact that Goyle noticed this and said it without context was entirely Goyle.

"I'll tell the elves you approve, Gregory."

Goyle considered this. "All right."

Draco clapped Crabbe on the shoulder and stood between them. The hall still smelled of ash and Floo powder, the Manor's composure slightly ruffled by the arrival of two teenage boys and their attendant soot. Crabbe was brushing at a grey smear on his sleeve. Goyle had already stopped trying.

"Pleasant summer?" Draco asked. He asked it to both, though his eyes went to Crabbe first.

"Fine," Crabbe said. "My father had me running drills. Shield positions."

"Physical drills? Before you've even got a wand?"

"Footwork. Stance. Where to put your weight when you're casting so you don't end up on your back." Crabbe shrugged — a motion that involved his entire upper body. "He says the wand's the last part. Everything before that is making sure you can stand your ground while you use it. I don't mind it. Beats sitting around reading theory."

"Does it work? The stance training?"

"Dunno yet. Haven't got anything to cast." A pause. "But I haven't fallen over in months, so there's that."

Draco turned to Goyle. "And you, Gregory? Your father have you running drills as well?"

Goyle was silent for a moment. He had stepped back slightly. He wasn't leaving the conversation. He was observing it from the edge. He watched the portraits in the entrance hall with his calm, unreadable look — the one that meant he was taking in the room.

"Read, mostly," Goyle said. "My father gave me his old Defence texts. Said I should know what things look like before I have to face them." He paused. "Some of the illustrations are… detailed."

"Detailed how?"

"There's a chapter on Kelpies with a diagram of what happens to the rider. It's very specific about the order."

Draco looked at him. Goyle's expression was perfectly neutral, which was how you knew something had lodged.

"Pleasant summer reading, then."

"Educational," Goyle said, and almost smiled.

Draco recognised this. Crabbe went still when the situation was settled. Goyle went quiet when there was too much to take in. The entrance hall was warm around them, Floo ash still settling on the stone. They had been doing this as long as he could remember. — Crabbe grounding, Goyle watching, both of them reliable as the floor underfoot. But every now and then, Goyle offered something — a dry observation, a detail that was funnier than he seemed to realise — and it was always worth catching.

Draco leaned back against the side table, folding his arms loosely.

"You realise this is the last morning anyone will expect us to behave like children." He heard how theatrical it sounded and decided not to fix it.

Crabbe frowned slightly. "We weren't."

"No," Draco allowed. "Your father had you drilling shield positions without a wand. I suspect that qualifies as preparation for something larger."

"If you fall over, you're finished," Crabbe said. "That's what he says."

"He's not wrong."

Goyle, still watching the portraits rather than either of them, said quietly, "They don't always sort where families expect."

Crabbe turned his head. "They will."

"Not always."

Draco considered that for a moment. "We're not 'always.'"

Crabbe's jaw tightened. "We're Slytherin."

"Almost certainly," Draco said lightly.

Crabbe looked at him.

Draco's mouth curved faintly. "And if we're not, I suppose we'll have to conquer wherever we end up. That would be inconvenient. Not fatal."

Crabbe seemed to weigh that. "Still Slytherin."

Goyle shifted his attention back to them. "The train will matter."

There was a brief pause. Not disagreement — calculation.

"We sit together," Draco said easily. "Front half of the train. Less traffic. Less noise."

Crabbe nodded once. "Good."

Draco added, almost as an afterthought, "And try not to stare if you see Potter."

Crabbe blinked. "I wasn't going to."

"You were."

Goyle's mouth moved, almost a smile. "Everyone will."

Narcissa stood near the fireplace. She had not moved during the arrivals — had stood with one hand on the stone mantle, watching. Draco caught her gaze now and saw the expression he knew well: composed, warm, satisfied. Whatever she saw in him when the boys were near, it pleased her. She had noticed all of it, as she always did.

"Gentlemen." Narcissa's voice cut the hall clean. She held the pot of Floo powder at the mantle's edge. "The Leaky Cauldron. One at a time and enunciate. I will not be fishing anyone out of the wrong grate, and I say this with the particular confidence of someone who has fished Vincent out of a wrong grate before and does not intend to repeat the experience."

Crabbe's ears went faintly pink. "That was once."

"Once was sufficient, Vincent. The Fosters were very understanding, all things considered."

Crabbe went first. He stepped into the fireplace, took a fistful of powder, and said "The Leaky Cauldron" with the flat clarity of someone who had previously received a lecture about enunciation and had no intention of repeating the experience. The green flames swallowed him.

Goyle followed. Quieter. The fire barely flared.

Draco stepped in beside his mother. Narcissa's hand found his shoulder — brief, automatic, the geometry of a thousand Floo trips. She spoke the destination. The Manor's entrance hall spun away.

The back parlour of the Leaky Cauldron was everything the Manor was not: small, dim, and smelling of stale beer and mutton stew. Sickly yellow light came through a single window of thick, warped glass. A scarred oak table sat between two benches, and the fireplace they'd arrived through was already spitting Crabbe's ash onto the worn floorboards.

Tom was behind the bar in the main room, visible through the open doorway — stooped, bald, gums showing when he smiled at a pair of witches nursing something green and steaming. A hag in the far corner tracked their group with milky eyes, one hand curled around a glass she hadn't touched. Somebody's owl sat on the coatrack, asleep.

Crabbe and Goyle were on their feet and moving. No pause, no looking around — they'd been through this room before many times. Crabbe shouldered past a wizard reading the Prophet who'd wandered too close to the back passage, and the man didn't even look up.

Narcissa walked through touching nothing.

The courtyard's cooler air cut through the pub smell the moment Crabbe pulled the rear door open. Brick walls, small, unremarkable. The enchanted wall at the far end.

Narcissa was already at the wall. Draco watched her hand — three up, two across, each tap precise and unhurried. He mapped the pattern without thinking about it. The kind of detail you filed away when everything around you was still new and you weren't sure yet what would matter.

The wall rippled. Diagon Alley opened before them.

Diagon Alley — Early August, 1991

The Alley hit like a wall.

One moment the courtyard — quiet brick, damp air, the faint smell of the pub behind them. The next, the bricks folded back and the world opened, pressing noise and warmth against his skin: narrow cobblestoned street packed shoulder to shoulder with families, the sound arriving before the sight. Owl screeches from Eeylops cutting through the chatter of a hundred conversations. A cauldron clanking somewhere ahead, brass on brass. Something hissing from the apothecary's open door, sharp and herbal, mixing with roasting chestnuts from a street vendor and the sweet, heavy pull of chocolate from Fortescue's. The lane was barely wide enough for the crowd it held, flanked by shopfronts that leaned inward at the upper storeys like old men sharing gossip.

Narcissa stepped through the archway and the crowd shifted. Not dramatically — not a parting of the sea — but people moved. A half-step to the side, a conversation pausing as she passed. She walked the way she always walked in public: unhurried, upright, as if the space ahead of her was already hers and the crowd was simply confirming what she already knew. Draco had walked behind that posture his entire life and still found it faintly remarkable. Without Lucius's height and cane beside her, she seemed if anything more visible — the crowd reading a woman alone with authority and yielding to it.

The boys fell in behind her. Crabbe to Draco's left, close enough that his shoulder nearly brushed Draco's. Goyle to the right, half a step back, watching the storefronts with his usual quiet attention. The cobblestones were uneven underfoot, worn smooth in the centre where centuries of feet had fallen.

Viola Parkinson was waiting outside Flourish and Blotts. She stood with the composed patience of someone who had arrived early and considered that a matter of principle, not inconvenience. Handsome rather than beautiful — strong features, dark hair pinned neatly, well-dressed without excess. She smiled when she saw Narcissa and it was the real thing, or something so close to the real thing that the distinction didn't matter.

"Narcissa. How well you look. And in this heat — I've been standing here ten minutes and I've already made peace with the fact that my hair is a lost cause."

"Viola." Narcissa's pace did not change, but something in her bearing eased — the faintest acknowledgment that she was in the company of someone she liked. "Your hair is fine. You are fishing for a compliment, and I am choosing not to catch it." Her gaze moved to the girl standing a step behind Viola, and her voice shifted — still composed, but carrying the particular weight she reserved for assessments that mattered. "And Pansy. You've grown. Quite remarkably, in fact."

Two words would have carried the weight of someone whose approval was currency. She had offered five, which was generous. Pansy received them with a small, composed incline of her head — not surprise, not gratitude, just the clean acceptance of something earned.

She had grown. Draco registered it the way he registered most things about Pansy — automatically, the way you register changes in someone you've known since you were five. Sharp features, her mother's dark hair cut in a precise line at her jaw. Alert eyes that tracked the social field the way Goyle tracked a room — instinctively, constantly. The slightly upturned nose that gave her face something other girls' faces didn't have: distinction, an asymmetry that made you look twice instead of once. He knew she was self-conscious about it. To him, it was interesting, not flawed.

Pansy turned to him. Her posture straightened — a shift so slight most people would have missed it. She was performing, and performing well, the way someone does when every word is being weighed.

"Heir Malfoy." A small curtsey, practised and clean. Her voice was steady and precise.

"Pansy," He inclined his head. First name, not title.

Something moved behind her eyes. Brief, quickly folded away — not relief exactly, but a loosening, as if a question she hadn't asked had found its answer. She had come prepared for formality, and he had given her warmth instead. The curtsey had been perfect. Narcissa's instruction, or Viola's coaching, or simply Pansy being Pansy — precise, prepared, unwilling to be caught off-guard.

Pansy acknowledged Crabbe and Goyle with a nod. "Vincent. Gregory. You both look well. Vincent, you look like you've grown two inches since Easter."

"Might have," Crabbe said. "Hard to tell."

Goyle said nothing, but his eyes moved briefly to Viola — a glance so slight that only someone watching for it would catch it. Draco caught it. Goyle had noticed something — perhaps how Viola's hand had moved to Pansy's shoulder and back again, a touch so quick it was almost not there. Goyle filed things. Draco filed Goyle filed things. Neither of them spoke about it.

The group reformed. It happened the way these things always happened — not arranged, just gravitational. Narcissa and Viola fell into step at the front, their conversation dropping to a murmur that carried the cadence of women who knew each other well and had much to discuss. Draco and Pansy walked behind them. Crabbe and Goyle trailed at the rear, Crabbe's broad shoulders occupying space that the crowd gave willingly, Goyle moving in his wake like a quieter shadow.

Viola's voice carried back, warm and candid: "She's been practising that curtsey all week. I told her it was already perfect. She disagreed. I found her in the drawing room at half six this morning, curtsying to a chair."

"To a chair," Narcissa repeated.

"The dining chair. She said it was approximately your height."

"Good," Narcissa said. There was genuine approval in her voice, not amusement. "If she thought it was perfect after a week, I would be concerned. That she was still refining it tells me she understands the difference between adequate and correct." A pause. "You've raised her well, Viola."

"I've raised her carefully. Whether that's the same thing, I suppose we'll find out."

Pansy's jaw tightened. A fraction. She avoided looking at her mother. Without altering her stride or gaze, she moved forward, and Draco grasped she had absorbed every word, and determined the only acceptable response was to give no response at all. She had been curtsying to a chair at half six in the morning. The image settled somewhere in his chest and stayed there — a warmth below the sternum, quiet and persistent. He catalogued it as useful context — the kind of detail that told you how seriously someone prepared, how little they left to chance. Worth remembering. He respected Pansy's high personal standards.

"Your robes are new," Pansy said. Her voice was pitched low, for him. She was looking at his cuffs, not his face. "The stitching on the collar — that's not Malkin's work. Twilfitt and Tatting's, unless I'm very much mistaken, which I'm not."

"You're not. My mother prefers them for day robes. She thinks Malkin's cuts for comfort rather than line."

"She's right — the shoulder sits differently. You can always tell Twilfitt's work by the way the fabric falls at the arm." Pansy adjusted the strap of her bag, a gesture that drew no attention to itself. "My mother uses them too, when the occasion calls for it. She plans those occasions rather carefully — Twilfitt's prices being what they are." She said it cleanly, without flinching. The gap between their families, named and set aside in a single breath. No self-pity, no apology, no pretence that it wasn't there. "I suspect they'll fit me there before the Sorting. She's already mentioned it twice, which means she's been thinking about it since June."

"Your mother plans ahead."

"My mother plans everything. She'd plan the weather if the charms existed." The faintest edge of a smile — not performed, not quite private either. Something she was allowing him to see. "I come by it honestly, is what I'm saying."

"I had noticed."

"Good. I would feel disappointed if you hadn't.

Pansy adjusted her pace, her attention still on his cuffs. "The front of the train tends to fill first," she said lightly. "Families who arrive early prefer it. Less chaos."

Draco glanced at her. "You plan to arrive early."

"Mom does not believe in rushing," she replied. "It looks disorganised."

The cobblestones shifted underfoot. "Greengrass usually arrives early as well," Pansy added, almost as an afterthought.

"We'll take the front," he said. "Before anyone needs to look for us."

Pansy's expression did not change. "That would be simplest."

They walked a few more steps. The crowd pressed around them; Viola's voice carried faintly from ahead.

The thought seemed to occur to him slightly late. "Will you sit with us?"

Pansy glanced at him, one brow lifting a fraction. "I had planned to sit with Millicent Bulstrode," she said evenly. A small pause. "But I suppose we could all sit together."

Draco inclined his head. "Then we'll have a full compartment. Good."

They walked. The crowd moved around them in a current of robes and shopping bags and children tugging at parents' sleeves. Owl feathers drifted from the direction of Eeylops. The smell shifted as they passed the apothecary — acid, herbal, the tang of something being brewed in a back room — and then gave way to fresh parchment and binding glue outside Flourish and Blotts. Ahead, the lane curved, and beyond the curve the white marble of Gringotts rose above the rooftops.

The morning was working. The thought arrived without preamble — the particular satisfaction of a plan whose components were performing as intended. His mother composed and commanding at the front. Pansy sharp and honest beside him. Crabbe and Goyle solid at his back. The group moved well together. Each of them carrying their own burdens, their own blind spots, their own flawed convictions he could not correct and did not try to. He wanted this to hold. The cobblestones were warm underfoot, the sun on the back of his neck. The thought carried a weight he didn't expect — not the satisfaction of things going well, but something underneath it, something that had to do with the specific people walking beside him and the specific morning they were sharing. He knew that everything he was enjoying could be taken, and that the warmth of this specific morning was not guaranteed to last.

The weight eased. He let it go — exhaled once, and the crowd's noise filled the space the thought had left. He stayed in the day.

"Gringotts first," Narcissa said, already adjusting course. The group fell into step behind her.

Gringotts Wizarding Bank — Early August, 1991

The steps were white marble, broad enough for ten men abreast, and the building rose above them with the blunt authority of something that had been here before any of them and would be here after. White stone against the wood and brick of the Alley, standing plumb and correct while every other building on the street leaned and listed. Burnished bronze doors flanked by goblin guards in scarlet and gold — armed, still, watching every face that climbed toward them with the patient contempt of a species that measured time in centuries and found the results unimpressive.

Draco read the inscription carved into the stone above the doors. A warning dressed as verse — enter, stranger, but take heed. He had read these words before, in another life, on a page. They had carried no weight then. Standing beneath them now — the marble cold through his shoes, the stone's chill pressing against his face — they landed differently. The bank meant what it said. It was, he suspected, the only institution in the wizarding world that did.

Narcissa did not pause at the inscription. She climbed the steps without adjusting her pace, passed between the goblin guards without acknowledgment — not rudeness, simply the habit of a woman who had entered these doors a hundred times and understood that the guards' attention was institutional, not personal. The bronze doors swung inward at her approach. A second set, silver, opened beyond them.

The great hall opened around them as they passed through — vast, cold, designed to diminish. A long chamber of polished marble lit by crystal chandeliers and whatever cold enchantment Gringotts used instead of windows. The ceiling rose so high it vanished into shadow. Along both walls, a continuous counter of dark wood ran the full length of the chamber, and behind it — on high stools, in rows that seemed endless — hundreds of goblins worked. They wrote in ledgers. They weighed coins on scales so delicate the weights were smaller than Draco's thumbnail. They examined gemstones through jewellers' loupes with fingers longer than any human's, and they ignored every human in the hall with a uniformity that felt like policy.

The air smelled of metal and parchment and the dry mineral scent of deep earth. Every footstep cracked against the pale grey marble and the hall held the echo and released it slowly, as though it were listening.

Narcissa approached the counter without waiting. The goblin — sharp-featured, long-fingered, dressed in a black suit that fit with bespoke precision — raised his eyes from a ledger with the unhurried regard of someone whose time was worth more than hers.

"Narcissa Malfoy. Access to the Malfoy family vault." She laid a key on the counter — gold, heavy, old enough that the teeth had been filed and re-cut at least once. "I will also require the Crabbe and Goyle family vaults. The arrangement is standing, filed under the Malfoy trust protocols. You will find it dates to the vaults' original registration." Two smaller keys followed the first, set down with the same unhurried precision. She did not explain further. The information was complete and she knew it.

The goblin examined each key in turn, holding them at an angle that caught the cold light. He made a notation in his ledger — a single line, written without looking up. Then a second notation. Then he produced a sheaf of parchment and laid it before her with the careful neutrality of someone who granted no one the courtesy of haste.

"The Crabbe account has been drawn upon twice since the last quarter. The Goyle account, once. Both within the agreed parameters." He did not phrase it as a question. He was informing her that he had checked, and that he had found no irregularities — and that he would have mentioned it differently if he had.

"Thank you." Narcissa did not look at the parchment. "The withdrawals were authorised. I trust the balances are in order."

"They are." The goblin's pen had not stopped moving. "The cart will be ready presently."

Two old institutions transacting. Neither warm, neither cold. Precise.

Draco watched the transaction and so did Pansy. He caught her at the edge of his vision — standing a step behind Viola, her eyes tracking Narcissa's hands, her posture, the angle of her chin as she spoke to the goblin. Pansy was studying. This was a woman managing three family vaults with the ease of someone ordering tea, and Pansy was absorbing every detail of how it was done. She would know this process by heart before they left the building.

They waited. The hall's murmur closed around them — transactions, ledger pages, the clink of scales. Crabbe shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Goyle was watching a goblin three stations down weigh something very small on a scale that looked like it was made of spider silk.

Pansy stood beside Draco, her eyes still on the counter where Narcissa's keys had been. When she spoke, her voice was pitched for him alone — the hall's acoustics were not forgiving, and Pansy had the instincts to know it.

"Potter will have been here," she said. "Or he will be soon. He'll have a vault — his parents would have seen to that. The whole bank probably already knows when he's coming. I expect the goblins have opinions about it, though I doubt they'd share them with us."

"The goblins have opinions about everything. They just charge you for the privilege of hearing them."

Pansy's mouth curved. "My mother has been talking about it since June. Not constantly — she's too careful for that — but she drops it into conversation the way you'd drop a stone into a pond. 'I wonder what the Potter boy will be like.' 'I wonder if anyone has spoken to him.' 'I wonder where he's been all these years.' Always wondering. Never asking directly."

"Does she have answers to any of the wondering?"

"Some. He's been with the mother's family — the Muggle sister, apparently. That's been circulating for years, though nobody seems to know much beyond it." She paused, and her voice dropped a fraction. "Thirteen years with Muggles, Draco. The Boy Who Lived, raised in a Muggle household. Can you imagine what people are going to say about that?"

"I can imagine exactly what they're going to say about it." A scale chimed somewhere behind them — a single clear note, then nothing.

"My mother has already said most of it, and she's one of the measured ones." Pansy's eyes tracked a goblin stamping something with a seal the size of a Knut. "Think about it — does he know our customs? Does he know what the houses mean, what the families are? Has anyone even explained to him why people will be staring?" She shook her head slightly. "He might turn up and not even understand why the Sorting matters. He might sit down at the wrong table and not realise what he's said by sitting there."

"He'll have been told the basics by now. Dumbledore wouldn't send a Hogwarts letter without some kind of introduction."

"The basics, yes. But basics and understanding are not the same thing. You can tell someone the houses exist without explaining what it means to be Sorted into one of them — what it signals, who notices, how it follows you." She adjusted the clasp of her bag. "And that's just the Sorting. What about the rest of it? Does he eat with his hands? Does he know what a house-elf is? Will he show up in Muggle clothes?"

Draco almost smiled. "You sound like your mother."

"I sound like everyone's mother. There isn't a family in our circle that hasn't been having this exact conversation over dinner for the last six months. The Boy Who Lived, hero of the wizarding world, and he might not know how to hold a quill properly." She said it without cruelty — it was the genuine bewilderment of someone raised in a world where these things were as natural as breathing, confronting the idea that the most famous person her age might not share any of it. "I don't mean it unkindly. I just find it — strange. That nobody thought to raise him in the world he saved."

"Someone thought it was safer," Draco said. He kept his voice careful. He knew rather more about why Harry Potter had been placed with the Dursleys than he could explain, and the reasons had nothing to do with safety and everything to do with a kind of strategy he was not prepared to discuss in the great hall of Gringotts. "Whether they were right is another question."

"My mother thinks they were wrong. She thinks he'll arrive at Hogwarts completely unprepared and that it will be obvious within the first week." A pause. "I think she might be right, but I also think everyone is so busy imagining what he'll be like that the actual person is going to surprise them regardless."

"That's probably true."

"Do you think he'll look like the photographs?" The question was lighter — Pansy shifting registers, the curiosity of a fourteen-year-old surfacing beneath the analysis. "The Chocolate Frog card is ancient — it's the same baby photograph they've been using since it happened. He'll be fourteen now. People change."

"He'll have the scar."

A brief silence. The scar was the thing nobody joked about, even in private. It was where the gossip stopped and the history started.

"Yes," Pansy said quietly. "And the scar." She was quiet for a moment. "Half the carriage will pretend they're not looking for it. The other half won't bother pretending. Either way, he'll know exactly what people are staring at before anyone's said a word to him."

"Which is why we don't stare."

Pansy glanced at him. There was something in the way he'd said it — not a suggestion but a position, already decided. She caught it. "You've been thinking about this."

"I've been thinking about it the way everyone's been thinking about it. The difference is I'd rather not be part of the crowd when he arrives."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning let him come. Let everyone else fall over themselves to be noticed. We don't need to be in that queue."

Pansy studied him for a moment. Whatever she found in that answer told her more than the words contained — or perhaps exactly as much as the words contained, and the interesting part was that he'd said it at all. She filed it and let the conversation settle.

"My mother will ask me what I thought of him within an hour of arriving home from the platform," she said. "I intend to have something worth reporting. But I take your point — there's a difference between observing and performing."

"That's the Pansy I know."

"That's the only Pansy there is." The faintest edge of a smile, gone before it fully formed. "I simply let you see her more often than most."

The goblin returned before Draco could respond to that. Pansy's timing could not have been better if she'd arranged it.

Viola touched Pansy's elbow — a brief, proprietary gesture that said come along without saying it aloud. "We shall see to our own arrangements. I expect Pansy would like to see the vault herself this year — she is old enough to understand how accounts are managed, and I would rather she learned from practice than from lectures she will forget by Christmas." She smiled. "Shall we meet in the hall when you have finished? I should not think we will be long. The Parkinson vault is not so deep as yours — the goblins see to it that we do not forget the distinction."

Narcissa inclined her head. "We should not be long either. The withdrawal is a simple matter." A pause, the faintest warmth entering her voice. "And you are right to bring Pansy. The vault teaches things that drawing rooms cannot — scale, for one. Let her see the numbers. It concentrates the mind wonderfully."

"I shall remind her you said so the next time she complains about arithmetic." Viola's hand returned to Pansy's shoulder, and they departed with their own goblin, their own cart, their own vault somewhere in the mountain's interior. Allied but not merged. The distinction was visible in the separation, and neither family pretended otherwise.

A goblin led them through a door behind the counter and into a stone corridor that dropped steeply. The air changed at once — colder, damper, carrying the deep-earth smell of rock that had never seen sunlight. The corridor opened onto a narrow track: iron rails set into stone, disappearing into blackness in both directions. A small cart waited. Iron, riveted, no visible concession to comfort.

They climbed in. Narcissa first, settling with her hands in her lap as though this were a drawing-room chair. Crabbe followed, his bulk making the cart shift on its rails. Goyle, then Draco.

Narcissa leaned toward him as they waited for the goblin to release the brake. Her voice was low, pitched beneath the ambient clank of distant carts — not secret, exactly, but chosen. The kind of volume that said this is between us.

"The Black vault has been sealed since your cousin's imprisonment." She did not say the name. She never did, in places where stone carried echoes and goblins had long memories. "Thirteen years. That is a great deal of interest, compounding. Gold accumulating in a vault no one can open, under a name no one is prepared to claim." She adjusted her gloves, the gesture unhurried. "It will not remain sealed forever. These things have a way of resolving themselves, given sufficient patience and the correct application of law."

The word cousin carried something. Sirius Black — technically Draco's first cousin once removed through Narcissa's blood. Family and disgrace in the same breath. Her tone was not warm, not simply contemptuous. There was a layer underneath that she did not examine, and Draco did not press.

"The gold is incidental," he said.

Narcissa regarded him. The pause was brief but present — a mother reading her son's face for what sat beneath the words. "Yes," she said. The faintest approval, placed carefully, like a coin on a scale. "The gold is always incidental. The name is not. And a seat on the Wizengamot attached to that name is not incidental either." She turned to face forward again. "But you know that. You have known that for some time, I think."

He had. He said nothing. Narcissa did not require him to.

The brake was released by the goblin. With a lurch, the cart sped up and then plunged.

Speed, darkness, the scream of iron on iron. The track twisted through tunnels of wet stone, torchlight flashing in brief orange bursts against the walls before the cart hurtled past and the darkness closed again. The air grew colder as they descended. Vast caverns opened to either side — other tracks crossing in the dark, other carts rattling on other errands, the scale of the tunnel network visible for a moment before the cart plunged deeper. Crabbe gripped the cart's edge with both hands, braced, his body doing what it always did — meeting the situation physically, holding fast. Goyle watched the walls rushing past. The stone was changing colour as they went deeper — lighter grey near the surface giving way to something darker, older. He noticed. He said nothing. Narcissa sat with her hands folded, composed, as though being hurled through the earth at speed were simply another part of her morning.

The depth pressed in around them. Cold, and the weight of stone above, and the sense of descending into something very old. The Malfoy vault was deep — the older and wealthier the family, the deeper the vault — and the depth itself was a statement the goblins had been making for a thousand years.

The cart stopped on a narrow stone platform. With one long finger, the goblin traced a rune sequence on the iron door. Grinding as it opened inward, the door's sound echoed down the tunnel behind them.

Gold. Galleons in columns and drifts, filling the vault to a depth that made counting irrelevant. Goblin-wrought armour on stands along the far wall. Jewellery in glass cases. Artefacts under enchanted glass — old, some of them, old enough that their purpose was unclear. The air was sealed-tomb cold.

Narcissa entered, filled the money pouch without counting, and turned back. That was all. The vault was not a place to linger.

Behind them, the door closed with a loud noise. As they climbed uphill, the cart ride back was slower, and the cold air gradually warmed. The torchlight became more frequent. The stone grew lighter. And then, like surfacing from deep water — daylight.

Sirius Black in Azkaban, twelve years into a sentence for a crime he did not commit. A lock that someone could open. Not yet.

He had practised the thought, making it familiar and worn smooth, much like a phrase one repeats to stop themselves from acting. The cart's vibration still hummed in his palms. He was a fourteen-year-old. He was on his way to school. His jaw had tightened; he released it. He placed the door shut, as he always did, instead of slamming it, and allowed the daylight to take it.

The great hall was as they had left it. The Parkinsons were already waiting near the bronze doors — Viola adjusting Pansy's collar, Pansy tolerating it with the composed patience of someone who had learned that mothers' hands were not worth fighting.

"Ollivanders next," Narcissa said. She drew her gloves smooth and surveyed the group with the brief, encompassing attention of a woman confirming that everyone was present and none the worse for the descent. "The wand is the day's most important purchase. Everything else can be exchanged or returned. A wand cannot."

They stepped out of the bank and into the Alley's noise and warmth, and the day continued.

Ollivanders, Diagon Alley — Early August, 1991

The shop did not compete for attention. In a street of noise and colour and display, Ollivanders offered a narrow front, a faded sign repainted over itself until the letters were thick and blurred, and a single wand on a purple cushion in the window. Nothing else. The door was plain wood. Narcissa held it open.

Inside, the air changed. Cool, still, carrying the smell of old wood shavings and something else — something electrical, faintly alive, the ambient charge of thousands of wand cores resting in their boxes on shelves that reached the ceiling and continued into a back room whose depth could not be judged from the entrance. The shop was narrow and deep and dim, the light a grey-brown haze of dust suspended in air that had not been disturbed in a long time. The counter was bare wood, scarred smooth by centuries of hands, holding nothing but a measuring tape coiled on its surface.

Crabbe edged through the door and stood near the wall, trying not to take up space he was clearly going to take up anyway. Goyle followed, his eyes tracking the shelves — the boxes, the faded labels, the sheer depth of accumulated inventory.

"Narcissa Black — no. Narcissa Malfoy, now."

The voice came from the shelves. Ollivander stepped into view without sound — pale, silver-eyed, his gaze settling on Narcissa with an attention that had nothing to do with greeting and everything to do with catalogue. "Cedar and dragon heartstring, if I recall. Eleven inches. Quite rigid." He turned his hands over as though feeling the ghost of the wand in his own grip. "A wand with very firm loyalties. Cedar does not tolerate disloyalty in its bearer — it will not perform to its best for anyone who lacks the strength of character the wood demands. I sold it to you in this room, September of — well. Some years ago now."

"You recall correctly," Narcissa said. "It has served me well."

"I should expect so. I do not make wands that serve poorly." There was no arrogance in it. He stated it the way one states the boiling point of water. "And your husband — elm and dragon heartstring. Eighteen inches. Unyielding." A flicker of something passed behind his silver eyes — professional memory, not sentiment. "A considerable wand. I remember every wand I have sold, Mrs Malfoy. Every one." His pale eyes moved past her, past Viola and Pansy, and found Draco. The attention locked. "But you are not here for yourself today."

Draco met his gaze. Ollivander's eyes were wide and unblinking and carried the focused quality of someone who had spent a lifetime attending to a single subject with total devotion. There was no warmth in it, and no coldness. Just precision.

"Which is your wand arm?"

"Right."

The measuring tape rose from the counter and went to work. It moved with impersonal thoroughness — wrist to elbow, shoulder to fingertip, the distance between his eyes, the span of his hand. Draco held still. He had been measured his entire life — by tutors, by his parents, by every pureblood family who assessed the Malfoy heir across a dinner table. This measurement was looking for something none of those had tried to find.

Ollivander watched the tape, murmured something to himself, and disappeared into the shelves.

He returned with a narrow box. "Try this one. Give it a wave — from the wrist, not the shoulder."

Draco took the wand. It lay in his hand like a piece of wood — inert, dead, carrying nothing. He gave it a wave. Nothing happened. Ollivander took it back without expression and was already reaching for another.

The second wand was worse. Something flinched when Draco closed his fingers — not in him, in the wand. A sharp, unpleasant jolt that ran from his palm to his elbow. He set it down quickly.

"No," Ollivander said, taking it back. He held the wand up to the dim light and studied it for a moment, as though the wand had told him something about Draco that the tape had not. "No, clearly not. The core is resistant — it recognised something in you it was not suited for. That is useful information." He set the box aside. "Interesting."

He did not explain what was interesting. He retreated further into the shelves, past the front room, into the deeper stacks where the boxes were older and the dust thicker.

A third wand. This one was closer — warmth gathered in Draco's fingers when he gripped it, a faint hum of something responding. But the warmth faded before it reached his wrist, like a conversation that started well and trailed into silence. Ollivander watched the fade happen, nodded once, and took the wand back with something that might have been satisfaction. He was narrowing.

When he returned, he placed the box on the counter with more deliberation than the others. He opened it himself, laying the lid aside.

"Hawthorn and dragon heartstring. Twelve inches. Reasonably supple." He set the box down and stepped back — a small movement, but deliberate, giving the wand and its potential owner space that the previous attempts had not required. "Hawthorn is not a wood I pair lightly. It is complex in its allegiances and exacting in what it requires. Try it."

The wand was clean-lined, elegant without ornament — the wood's natural grain visible, the proportions precise. The beauty of good craftsmanship, not decoration.

Draco picked it up.

The match was immediate. Warmth spread from his fingers through his hand and up his arm, not heat but recognition — the physical certainty of something fitting exactly where it was meant to be. The wand hummed in his grip, alive, resonant, and when he raised it the tip threw a shower of sparks that scattered green and silver across the dusty air and faded.

"Yes," Ollivander said. He was watching with the quiet satisfaction of a correct diagnosis. "That is the one."

Dragon heartstring. Not unicorn hair. He knew what that meant — powerful, temperamental, quick to learn. A core that bonded strongly and could be turned to the Dark Arts, though it would not lean that way on its own.

Then the physical sensation caught up to the analysis, and the analysis stopped mattering. The warmth in his hand, the hum of the wood against his palm, the quiet rightness of holding something that had chosen him — not his name, not his performance, not his secrets, but whatever was underneath all of it. He had not expected to feel this much.

He closed his fingers around the box. Breathed once. Let his shoulders settle into place.

"Hawthorn," Ollivander said. He had not moved from where he stood, his pale eyes fixed on the space between Draco and the wand as though reading a sentence written in the air. "A curious wood. It does not choose simple people. Hawthorn wands are at their most comfortable with a nature in some conflict — they are adept at both healing magic and curses, which is a combination the wood finds natural even if the bearer does not." He paused. "The dragon heartstring will amplify that range considerably. You will find this wand capable of a great deal. What you do with that capability is, of course, your own concern."

He said this without weight, without portent. He was describing the instrument. What the instrument meant was not his department.

Narcissa's hand found Draco's shoulder. Brief, warm, her fingers pressing once before releasing. She had watched the match the way she watched everything — composed, attentive, her hand still warm where it had rested on his shoulder. She did not comment on the wand's specifics. She did not need to.

"Thank you, Mr Ollivander," Draco said. He placed the wand back in its box, and the absence of it in his hand was noticeable.

Ollivander's attention had already moved. His pale eyes swept the shop — Crabbe against the wall, Goyle by the shelves, Pansy beside Viola — and something in his expression shifted. Not surprise. Inventory. Four customers in one morning. His gaze settled on Crabbe.

"You, I think, next. Step forward."

Crabbe pushed off from the wall. He crossed the narrow shop in two strides and stood at the counter the way he stood everywhere — square, solid, taking up the space his body required without apology. The measuring tape rose and went to work. Crabbe watched it circle his wrist with the flat patience of someone enduring a process he did not understand and did not need to.

"Which is your wand arm?"

"Right."

Ollivander studied him for a long moment. His head tilted, his silver eyes narrowing — not with difficulty but with focus, as though Crabbe's hand had told him something that the measuring tape confirmed. He disappeared into the shelves and came back quickly. One box.

"Try this."

Crabbe took the wand. His hand closed around it the way his hand closed around everything — fully, without hesitation. Nothing happened. The wood sat dead in his grip. He set it down and looked at Ollivander with the expression of someone waiting to be told what went wrong.

"Nothing went wrong," Ollivander said, reading the look. "The wand simply declined. They are not always polite about it." He took the wand back and was already pulling a second box from a lower shelf. "This one. Larch and dragon heartstring. Eleven inches. Sturdy."

Crabbe picked it up.

The match was not subtle. Where Draco's wand had hummed, Crabbe's answered — a pulse of warmth that ran straight up his arm and settled in his shoulder, solid as a handshake. Sparks burst from the tip, bright and brief, scattering orange across the dust before dying. Crabbe's hand tightened on the grip. Not surprise. Recognition of a different kind — the recognition of something that fit the way good boots fit, or a well-balanced weight. His body knew before his mind caught up.

"Yes," Ollivander said. "I thought as much. Larch is not a wood that deliberates. It knows what it wants, and it wanted you rather quickly." He regarded Crabbe with the faint interest of a craftsman watching his work find its purpose. "A wand of considerable courage. It will not let you down if you do not let it down. That is the bargain larch makes."

Crabbe looked at the wand in his hand. He turned it once, feeling the weight, the balance. Then he nodded — a single, decisive motion — and set it back in its box with a care that Draco had never seen him apply to any object in his life.

Ollivander's eyes found Goyle.

"And you. Come."

Goyle stepped forward. Where Crabbe had crossed the shop in two strides, Goyle took his time — moving around a shelf that Crabbe had simply moved past, placing himself at the counter with the unhurried quality of someone who arrived at things when he arrived at them. The measuring tape rose. Goyle watched it with quiet interest, his eyes tracking the tape's movements the way they had tracked the shelves and the goblins and the changing stone in the Gringotts tunnels. He was reading the room, even this room.

"Which is your wand arm?"

"Right."

Ollivander paused. He looked at Goyle longer than he had looked at Crabbe — longer, in fact, than he had looked at anyone except Draco. His silver eyes moved across Goyle's face with the unhurried attention of someone reading small print. Then he disappeared into the shelves without a word.

He was gone longer this time. Draco could hear him moving in the back — boxes shifting, a murmur that might have been counting or might have been conversation with himself. When he returned, he carried two boxes.

"The first."

Goyle took the wand. A moment of stillness. Then he set it down gently, almost apologetically. "No," he said. Quiet, certain. He had felt whatever Ollivander was testing for, and it was not there.

Ollivander's eyebrows rose a fraction. He took the wand back and opened the second box with more care than the first.

"Cypress and unicorn hair. Eleven and three-quarter inches. Slightly yielding."

Goyle picked it up.

The match was quiet. No burst, no pulse — a warmth that arrived slowly and stayed, settling into Goyle's hand the way afternoon light settles into a room. The sparks that drifted from the tip were pale, almost white, and they floated rather than scattered — hanging in the dusty air for a moment before fading. Goyle's expression did not change. But his hand stilled on the wand, and he held it the way someone holds a thing they have been waiting for without knowing they were waiting.

"Cypress," Ollivander said. His voice was quieter than it had been for the others. "A noble wood. It chooses the bold and the self-sacrificing — those who are not afraid to look at what is difficult." He paused, studying Goyle's face. "The unicorn hair will be loyal to you. Utterly, unwaveringly loyal. It is the most faithful of the three cores. Treat it well and it will not falter."

Goyle looked at the wand for a long moment. Then he looked at Ollivander. "Thank you," he said. Two words, carrying the weight of someone who understood he had been given something that mattered.

Ollivander inclined his head — a gesture Draco had not seen him offer anyone else that morning.

Three wands sold. Ollivander stood behind his counter, pale eyes moving between the three boys — Draco with his hawthorn, Crabbe with his larch, Goyle with his cypress. His expression carried the focused interest of a man who had been fitting wands for decades and still, occasionally, found a morning that gave him something to think about.

His gaze settled on Pansy. "Ah. Step forward, please."

Pansy stepped to the counter. Her composure was immaculate — back straight, chin level, hands still at her sides. The measuring tape rose and went to work. She endured it with the controlled patience of someone who understood evaluation and would not flinch from it.

Ollivander brought boxes. The first wand produced nothing. Pansy set it down with the neat precision of someone returning a borrowed object. The second wand sparked — wrong, aggressive — and she placed it on the counter without changing expression. Draco watched her handle the rejections. She had come prepared to be tested, and she was passing by refusing to react. It was well done.

The third wand found her. Ollivander placed it in her hand and the shift was visible — a softening in her fingers, a breath she did not mean to take. The composure cracked for a moment, something genuine and unperformed rising through the surface, and then she sealed it again. But it had been there. Sparks drifted from the wand tip, warm-toned, and faded.

"Elm and dragon heartstring," Ollivander said. "Ten and three-quarter inches. Slightly springy." He tilted his head, considering her. "Elm is a dignified wood. It prefers owners with presence and a certain native composure — it produces the fewest accidents of any wood I work with, and the most elegant spellwork. You will be precise with this wand, I think. It will expect no less."

He straightened, and something shifted in his expression — not warmth, but the mild professional interest of a pattern noticed. "Three dragon heartstrings in one morning. That does not happen often." He said it to himself as much as to anyone.

Narcissa paid seven Galleons each for the boys' wands. Viola paid the same for Pansy's. The price had not changed in decades — the shop had no interest in negotiation or prestige. Ollivander had already turned back to his shelves before the coins left the counter.

The bell rang as they stepped out. Daylight and noise hit — the Alley's crowd, the heat of August, the smells of commerce and food and active magic. After the charged stillness of Ollivander's shop, the world felt louder than it had an hour ago.

Draco's wand box sat in his hand, and inside it, something that had chosen him was waiting. His fingers had not loosened on the box since Ollivander placed it there. He did not think they were going to.

Madam Malkin's was first. Purple-fronted, chiming door, the smell of new cloth and charmed pins. Draco stood on the fitting platform with his arms out while enchanted measuring tapes darted and coiled. Pansy stood on the adjacent platform, holding still with practised patience while Malkin's assistant pinned her hem. In a few weeks, this platform would hold other students — some of them carrying names that would matter and secrets they did not yet know they were keeping. He let the thought pass and held still for the tapes.

Narcissa approved the fabric. The robes would be ready in an hour. The group moved on.

Flourish and Blotts was the most efficient stop of the day. Narcissa had sent the owl in June. The pre-ordered packages sat waiting at the counter — the Malfoy list and the Crabbe and Goyle lists, wrapped, labelled, stacked. Draco collected them without browsing. In June, he had an hour to himself in the shop's theory section. With just his mother for company and the shop and upper book gallery devoid of people, he had the freedom to browse.

Today was not that day.

Pansy watched Narcissa collect three families' book orders in under a minute. "She sent that owl in July?"

"June," Draco said.

"June." Pansy considered this. There was something in her expression — not surprise, exactly, but the look of someone who has just had a standard she thought was high quietly exceeded. "My mother started our list in July and considered herself early. She was quite pleased about it."

"Your mother is organised."

"My mother is organised the way most people are organised. Your mother is organised the way a military campaign is organised. There is a difference and I am taking notes." She said it lightly, but she meant it.

The stationery shop smelled of fresh paper and sealing wax. The cauldron shop had pewter hung on hooks outside, the owner's voice carrying into the street as he argued thickness gauges with a red-faced customer. They passed Eeylops without entering — the Malfoys kept their own owlery.

Then back to Malkin's. The robes were ready, wrapped in brown paper, handed over with brisk efficiency. The packages accumulated — books, potions supplies, parchment, cauldrons, robes — the physical weight of a day's shopping distributed across arms and shoulders. Crabbe carried the heaviest stack without being asked, his arms full, his expression settled into the patient endurance of someone who had been at this for five hours and would be at it for five more if required.

The enchanted wall folded shut behind them. The courtyard's cool air, the damp brick, and then the back parlour of the Leaky Cauldron — the same scarred oak table, the same worn benches. The morning's outward energy reversed: the Alley sealed behind the wall, the pub quiet around them, the day collapsing toward its end.

Viola touched Narcissa's arm. "Thank you for a well-spent day. The children are equipped, the vaults are lighter, and the crowd did not lose anyone, nor did a goblin drop anyone into a mineshaft. I count that as a success."

"It was," Narcissa said. The warmth in her voice was quiet and genuine — not the social warmth of a public farewell, but the private kind that surfaced between two women who understood each other and did not need to perform the understanding. "Give my regards to Edmund. And tell Pansy —" She paused, as though deciding how much to say in front of the children. "Tell her she conducted herself very well today. That is not a small thing, on a day with this much to manage."

"I will tell her. She will pretend it does not matter and think about it for a week." Viola smiled. "I know my daughter."

Pansy turned to Draco. Her composure was intact — it had been intact all day, held through greetings and fittings and wand selections and five hours of shops — but there was something underneath it now that had not been there that morning. Not warmth, exactly. Recognition.

"I'll see you on the platform," she said. She held his gaze for a beat longer than the words required. "September first. Try not to arrive late — it would ruin the impression you've spent all summer building."

"September first," Draco said. "I'll manage."

"I know you will. That was not actually in question." The faintest edge of a smile — sharp, warm, Pansy at her most characteristic. She then stood up straight, her smile disappearing into a composed expression as she turned towards the Floo.

She stepped into the Floo with her mother. The green flames took her, and in the half-second before she vanished, her face changed — the composure dropping clean away, replaced by something unguarded and startled, as if the day had meant more than she had been prepared for and she had only now, at the last possible moment, allowed herself to feel it. Draco caught it. Too late to respond. The fire closed, and she was gone.

He stood looking at the empty fireplace. He had been reading her all day — the curtsey, the observations, the economic gap named without flinching — and he had read all of it correctly. Controlled, precise, immaculate Pansy. What he had not accounted for was the cost of that control — that the composure he admired was also a weight she had been carrying since half six this morning. He had read the performance perfectly and missed the performer. The fireplace was empty now, the green light fading from the stone. He was still turning that over when Crabbe spoke.

Crabbe went next. He shifted the last of the packages to one arm and paused at the fireplace. "Good day," he said. Not to anyone in particular. A conclusion, delivered with the flat certainty of someone who had reached his verdict and saw no reason to elaborate.

"It was," Draco said. "Thank you, Vincent."

Crabbe nodded. The green flames took him.

Then Goyle, who paused at the fireplace and looked back at Draco with his quiet, unreadable expression. He stood there for a moment, as though deciding whether what he had to say was worth the effort of saying it. It was.

"That wand was a good fit for you," he remarked. "I knew the moment you lifted it. "

Draco had not known Goyle was watching his hand. Something loosened in his chest — brief, quiet. He should have known. Goyle was always watching.

"Thank you, Gregory."

Green flames. The parlour emptied.

Narcissa stood at the mantle, Floo powder in hand. She watched Draco, not to assess or arrange, but simply to watch — the way she sometimes did when the day was finished and the two of them were the only ones left.

"A good day," she said. She held his gaze, and for a moment the sentence seemed like the beginning of something longer — a reflection, perhaps, or one of those rare observations she saved for the two of them alone. But she let the silence stand. The day had said what it needed to say. Adding to it would only diminish it.

Draco stepped into the fireplace beside her. The wand box sat in his pocket, the weight of it constant and specific — not heavy, not light, just present. Hawthorn and dragon heartstring. Twelve inches. Reasonably supple. The first object in this world that had chosen him.

Hogwarts was still three weeks out. The supplies were purchased, the wand was chosen, and the people he needed beside him had been beside him all day. After fourteen years, the preparation was finished. What came next would require everything he had built and everyone he had. His hand found the wand box through his pocket, fingers closing around it. Narcissa spoke the destination. The green flames rose, and the Leaky Cauldron spun away.

 

[Gravepine56]

Chapter 3 - The Train

Platform Nine and Three-Quarters — September 1, 1991

One step through the barrier and the harsh fluorescent lights of King's Cross vanished, replaced by the swirl of steam, the shouts and chatter of a crowd, and the deep, steady chuff of a waiting train. Owls hooted from cages piled on trolleys. Trolley wheels rattled over the stone floor. Somewhere to the left, a man called out a name—maybe "Cedric"—but the noise swallowed it before the second syllable could land.

Draco had been here before. Multiple times — accompanying his mother when she saw off the children of family friends, standing through platform farewells that felt like performances more than partings. He was familiar with the space, its heat-radiating bright red engine, the distinct smell of coal, and how the steam diffused the morning light, blurring all outlines. He'd always watched from the side that stayed. Today, the trunk was his, and he'd be the one leaving.

Narcissa walked beside him, unhurried. She had dressed with her usual precision — robes that signalled wealth without announcing it, her hair exact. She carried nothing. Lucius walked two paces behind, his cane marking a steady rhythm against the stone, his presence clearing a subtle corridor through the crowd.

They stopped near the forward carriages, where the platform was widest. Narcissa turned to face him. Her hands found the clasp of his travelling cloak — not crooked, not loose, perfectly fine — and she adjusted it anyway. Her fingers lingered on the fabric for a moment, pressing the clasp flat against his chest. A small, specific gesture. The kind of thing you do when your hands need a reason to touch someone.

"Write to me when you are settled," she said. Not a request. A quiet instruction that lay underneath everything she was not going to say on a public platform. Her eyes held his, steady and composed. "Not the first night — you will be tired, and there will be nothing useful to say. The second evening. Tell me what you have noticed. The things that surprised you, and the things that did not."

"I will," Draco said. "The second evening. Though I suspect the things that do not surprise me will make a longer letter."

"Then write a long letter." Her hand dropped from the clasp. The smallest pause. "I find I have the time for them."

The adjustment was complete. Narcissa stepped back.

Lucius stepped forward. He looked at Draco the way he looked at anything that bore the family name — with expectation.

"Conduct yourself well."

"Yes, Father."

Lucius inclined his head. One motion, measured, and then he was still again. It was exactly what Draco had expected, and he received it with the exact correctness it required. Performed warmth, the kind Lucius could accept as real because its formality kept it at a manageable distance.

Draco turned toward the train. He did not look back.

Behind him, on the platform, Narcissa watched him go. Her hand, the one that had pressed the clasp flat, had not moved to her side. It stayed where it was — hovering at the level of her chest, fingers slightly curled, as though the shape of the clasp was still between them.

The corridor was narrow, warm, and smelled of coal smoke and old carpet. Students filled it in clusters — upper-years moving with the bored efficiency of routine, younger students navigating trunks that were too large for the space. Draco stepped into the flow. Crabbe materialised on his left, having been waiting near the second carriage door. Goyle appeared from somewhere behind, already carrying his own trunk and managing Draco's as well, apparently having intercepted it from the porter without being asked. They fell into step. Crabbe slightly ahead, Goyle slightly behind. Habitual.

Draco moved toward the rear of the train. The compartments here were quieter, further from the boarding crush, less trafficked by the restless wandering of students who hadn't yet found their people. He chose one on the right side — platform-facing, the window wide and catching the grey-white light from outside. The glass was thick, faintly scratched from years of use, and it framed the platform in a rectangle of activity: parents and children and trunks, farewells happening in every direction.

Goyle stowed the trunks on the overhead rack with methodical patience. Crabbe took the seat nearest the door. Draco sat by the window. The upholstery was worn burgundy velvet beneath him — not threadbare, but softened by generations of students who had sat exactly here, waiting for the train to move. The seat held a shallow impression that was no one's in particular.

The door slid open.

Pansy stepped in, her travelling cloak already unfastened at the collar, her eyes taking in the compartment — the seating arrangement, the stowed trunks, the window — in one efficient sweep. Behind her, Millicent Bulstrode followed, carrying her own trunk under one arm with the uncomplicated strength of someone who did not see the point of porters. She stowed it on the rack beside the others without waiting for help, took the seat next to Crabbe, and settled with the quiet efficiency of someone who did not need to announce her arrival.

"Half the families on this platform," Pansy said, settling into the seat opposite Draco, "look like they are sending their children off to war. The Macmillan woman was actually dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief — and not discreetly, mind you, with the full theatrical commitment of someone who wants the adjacent families to see how much she cares." She arranged her cloak across the seat beside her, managing the small space with the precise economy of someone who had been taught well. "They are going to school. There are owls. They can write."

"Perhaps she is going to miss the quiet," Draco said ironically.

"With Ernie Macmillan? I doubt it was ever quiet. I sat next to him at the Longbottom garden party two summers ago and he told me the history of the Macmillan greenhouses in a single breath. He's thorough." She smoothed a crease from her cloak. "You look settled. How long have you been here — ten minutes?"

"Five."

"Of course. You would have timed it." The faintest curve at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile. Acknowledgement. "I saw your mother on the platform. She looked exactly as composed as a person can look while watching someone walk away from her."

Pansy's eyes stayed on his for a moment — holding the silence — and then moved on, her attention turning to the compartment window.

Goyle pulled the compartment door shut. The noise of the corridor dropped to a muffled register — voices, footsteps, the distant calling of names, all of it softened by the closed door and the glass. Inside, the compartment was theirs. Small, enclosed, the five of them arranged in the configuration that would hold for the hours ahead.

Somewhere ahead, the engine note shifted — deeper, more deliberate, the sound of something preparing to move. Draco's wand box sat in his pocket. He could feel the edge of it against his thigh — specific, constant, present. The platform light caught the compartment window. In the glass, a faint reflection: five students in a compartment, settled.

Hogwarts Express — September 1, 1991

The countryside was sliding past the window at a steady pace — fields, hedgerows, the occasional farmhouse, all of it moving with the train's percussion underneath. The compartment had been theirs for less than an hour and already it felt established. Crabbe had produced a bag of Bertie Bott's from somewhere in his trunk and was working through them with the methodical focus of someone conducting a survey. Goyle sat by the opposite window, watching the landscape pass with the comfortable blankness of a person who did not need to fill silence with speech. Millicent had claimed her corner early and was reading — a thick, battered book with no visible title on the spine, held open with one hand while the other rested on the armrest. She had not spoken since boarding and did not appear to find this a problem. Pansy had her legs folded beneath her, shoes off, her stockinged feet tucked under the edge of her cloak.

"Potter's on this train," Pansy said.

She said it the way she said most things that mattered — as a fact placed into the room for someone else to pick up. Her eyes were on the corridor side of the compartment, as though she could see through the door and down the length of the train to wherever Harry Potter was sitting.

Draco didn't look up from the window. "He is."

"Everyone will want a look at him. Half the train's probably already tried — I saw two girls , probably second years, walking very deliberately toward the back carriages, and neither of them had any business going down there." She turned a Chocolate Frog card between her fingers — she'd taken one from Crabbe's supply without asking, which Crabbe had not objected to. "What do you think he'll be like? Raised by Muggles — he won't know anything, will he? The etiquette, the families, any of it. He's been out of the wizarding world since he was a baby."

"Probably not. A Muggle household wouldn't have prepared him for any of this — even if they'd wanted to. He'll arrive knowing his name is famous and nothing about why it matters to the people around him."

"So he'll be walking into Hogwarts blind. Famous and clueless — which is a combination that either makes people charming or makes them insufferable, and there's no middle ground." The card turned once more. "We should introduce ourselves."

The suggestion sat between them for a beat. Draco let it sit — not to manufacture drama, but because she'd arrived at the thing he'd already been thinking about from a different angle.

"Why?"

"Because it's normal," Pansy said. "Because ignoring the most famous person our age on a train we're all sharing for seven hours looks stranger than saying hello. And because everyone else will — every family with a name and an opinion has told their child to shake Harry Potter's hand before the Sorting. Being the ones who didn't is a choice that people will notice, and they'll notice it in the wrong direction. They'll think we're hostile, or they'll think we're frightened, and I don't care for either reading."

"Everyone else will," Draco agreed. "That's the problem."

She looked at him properly.

"There will be a queue," he said. "Not a literal one. But every family on this train with any ambition at all has told their child to make a good impression on Harry Potter. The Macmillans, the Finch-Fletchleys — half of them probably rehearsed. He's going to spend this entire journey being approached by people who want something from him, and every single one of them will think they're being original about it."

Pansy's expression shifted. She was listening — not agreeing yet, but listening.

"Everyone will queue. Not literally, but— they'll hover. Knock. Linger." He glanced at her. "A Malfoy doesn't queue. We don't approach someone because the whole train is doing it. We don't walk down the corridor and introduce ourselves as though we're hoping he'll like us. Everything about that approach says we need him to notice us." He paused. Outside, a river appeared and vanished beneath a bridge. "He'll have seven years at Hogwarts. There's no rush."

"There's a difference between patience and avoidance," Pansy said. "You're describing what you won't do. I'm asking what you will. Because 'we don't queue' is a principle, not a plan — and he's not going to wander into the Slytherin common room on his own looking for conversation."

"He might. He might not. But the boy who walks past Harry Potter's compartment and doesn't stop is the one Potter remembers three weeks from now, when he's forgotten the names of everyone who shook his hand today."

"That's a lovely theory." Her voice had an edge to it — not hostile, but precise, the way it got when she thought he was being too clever by half. "It assumes he notices us not stopping. It assumes he's paying attention to who walks past. A boy raised by Muggles, on his first day in the wizarding world — he's not cataloguing the corridor, Draco. He's trying not to drown."

"Which is exactly why approaching him now is wasted effort. He can't process us properly. He doesn't know what a Malfoy is — or a Parkinson, or any of it. To him we're just names he's never heard before. We'd be introducing ourselves to someone who has no frame to put us in." He let that settle. "He'll learn what our names mean soon enough. I'd rather we're not the ones begging for space in his memory on day one."

Pansy was quiet for a moment. She set the Chocolate Frog card down on the seat beside her — Merlin, Draco noticed, though the detail didn't matter.

"Fine," she said. "But 'patience' only works if he eventually hears from us at all. You can't be interesting from a distance forever. At some point the distance just looks like indifference, and Indifference is the one thing nobody finds compelling. Trust me."

"I don't intend to let it get that far."

"Good." She said it in a way that closed the topic without closing her opinion on it. The word left room to reopen the topic later. Draco didn't mind. Pansy was allowed to disagree; she was also sensible enough to see the logic. The matter was settled.

"What house do you think he'll be?" Pansy asked, the pivot natural, the previous conversation set aside with the ease of someone who knew when to move on.

"Gryffindor. The entire country expects it."

"Does the Hat sort on expectation?"

"It sorts on what it finds. But a boy raised on his parents' legend, surrounded by people telling him he's brave and special — what do you think it finds?"

"Narcissism," Pansy said, and the corner of Draco's mouth twitched.

"That goes to Slytherin."

"Not always. The Lockhart family were Ravenclaws for three generations, and I've never met a more narcissistic group of people." She glanced toward the corridor — a pair of older students passed, visible through the glass for a moment, robes already on. "What about the Bones girl? Susan. Her aunt runs the DMLE."

"Hufflepuff, probably. The family's been there for generations. But the aunt's interesting — Amelia Bones doesn't think like a Hufflepuff. She's run the Department for six years and nobody's managed to remove her so far."

"The Abbott girl will be with her. They're always together — I don't think I've ever seen Hannah Abbott at a function without Susan Bones within arm's reach." Pansy watched the corridor. A younger student hurried past, dragging a trunk that was clearly too heavy. "I think we should walk the train."

Draco looked at her.

"Not to Potter's door," she added. "Just — see who's here. Say hello to people. It's a seven-hour journey and we've spoken to no one but each other, and as much as I enjoy your company, that's not a strategy. It's just sitting."

She was right. And the walkabout served the same purpose he'd just argued against approaching Potter — it showed them without showing effort. Two soon-to-be Slytherins walking the corridor, pleasant and available, not chasing anyone.

"Crabbe. Goyle. Millicent. We'll be back."

Crabbe glanced up from a green bean with what might have been relief or might have been disappointment — he'd been building to something. Goyle nodded without turning from the window. Millicent turned a page.

The corridor was a different country. Someone coming the other way clipped Draco's shoulder and muttered something that might have been apology or irritation. Draco didn't look back. The passage changed shape, adapting to their presence. The compartment door slid open and the noise came in — voices layered over the train's rhythm, the distant chime of what could only be the sweets trolley, laughter from somewhere ahead. Here, the lighting was subdued, with a warm hue cast by brass sconces that created gentle glows on the wood-paneled walls. Students moved in both directions, most of them older.

An upper-year Slytherin — Marcus Flint, Draco recognised the set of his jaw — passed coming the other way and gave them a nod without slowing. Acknowledgement between years. The corridor's geometry was efficient: two people could walk abreast if they tucked their elbows, which meant Pansy was close enough that their conversation was private even in the busier stretches.

They found Neville Longbottom three compartments forward, alone except for a toad that was trying to climb the window. The door was half-open. Draco saw him before he saw them — round-faced, uncertain in the way of someone who hadn't decided whether to read or just sit, a Herbology textbook open on his lap but clearly unread.

Draco's stomach tightened — fast, involuntary. Longbottom. St Mungo's. A familiar absence at Malfoy dinners, a subject Narcissa never permitted to exist for long.

"Longbottom." Draco stopped at the half-open door. Correct register. Polite.

Neville looked up. The flash of surprise was brief — controlled quickly into something watchful and civil. "Malfoy."

"Looking forward to the Sorting?"

"I suppose." Neville's hand went to the toad, steadying it on the windowsill with practised gentleness. "Gran says it's straightforward. You just sit there and it sorts itself out. She made it sound simple, but I think that might be her way of telling me not to worry about it."

"Sounds like your grandmother."

"You've met her?" A flicker of something — not quite surprise, more like a readjustment.

"Once. At a Ministry function. She was very direct." It was a truthful and charitable description of a woman whose look at his father could have been used to tan hides.

"Pansy Parkinson," Pansy said, stepping into the space Draco's greeting had opened. Her voice shifted — warmer, a half-register softer. "Is that a toad? I haven't seen one in ages. Most people have owls now — my mother says toads used to be far more common, but they've fallen out of fashion, which is ridiculous because owls are just as much trouble and twice as loud."

"Trevor." Neville's voice warmed a fraction. People rarely asked about Trevor in a way that sounded interested rather than politely baffled. "He's been trying to get through the window for the last twenty minutes. I'm not sure if he wants to escape or if he just doesn't understand glass."

"Ambitious either way." Pansy smiled. Actual warmth — her eyes involved, not just her mouth. "Good luck with the Sorting. I'm sure it'll be fine — and if your grandmother says it's simple, I'd trust her over anyone else's opinion."

Neville nodded. His shoulders had dropped a fraction. "Thanks. You too. Both of you." He hesitated. "I mean — yes. You'll be fine. I expect."

They moved on. The corridor stretched ahead, compartment doors passing in sequence — glass panels showing clusters of students in various arrangements. Two girls sharing a textbook. A group of boys playing Exploding Snap, the cards detonating in small contained bursts.

Two compartments ahead, Susan Bones and Hannah Abbott could be seen through the glass; Susan's distinctive red hair stood out, and Hannah was absently braiding and unbraiding her own hair, a sign of hands needing occupation.

Pansy knocked. Susan looked up, assessed them through the glass for a beat, and then opened the door. Not unwelcoming — but not the immediate wave-in of someone who'd been expecting company.

"Pansy Parkinson. And Draco Malfoy." Pansy's hand extended. Susan took it. Hannah followed, a half-step slower.

"We're just walking the train," Pansy said. "Saying hello to people before we arrive. Are you two settled?"

"We're all right here," Susan said. She had an easy directness — the Bones manner, Draco supposed. Her aunt's niece. "Have either of you been to Hogwarts before? To visit, I mean. My aunt took me once, to see the grounds — but only the grounds, she said the castle would spoil the first night."

"No, but my mother's described it so often I feel like I could draw a map from memory," Pansy said. "The lake, apparently, is something else entirely. She says it looks different every time depending on the weather and the time of year. She actually cried at my fitting appointment — three separate times. Once when the robes were finished, once when I put them on, and once when she saw the Hogwarts crest on the chest. She said it made it real." A pause — something genuine in it. "I didn't mind, actually. It was rather sweet."

Hannah's expression softened. "My mum cried at the supply list," she offered. Quieter than before — offered to Pansy specifically, one daughter to another.

"Did your aunt tell you about the boats?" Pansy asked Susan.

Susan laughed. "She said we'd be terrified and it would be the best five minutes of our lives. She's dramatic about boats specifically — I think something happened on her crossing that she won't tell me about, because she gets this look whenever it comes up."

"I hope they live up to the build-up," Draco said. "Seven years of my mother's commentary will be difficult to match."

Susan smiled — polite, contained. The kind of smile that acknowledged a pleasant exchange without committing to anything beyond it, still slightly guarded.

They stayed for another minute. Susan mentioned a cousin in Ravenclaw, third year. Pansy asked a follow-up question. Hannah listened more than she spoke. The conversation moved easily enough, touched lightly, and ended with the natural momentum of people who had made a decent first impression and knew not to overstay it.

"Nice to meet you both," Susan said. Civil. Genuine enough.

"See you at the Sorting," Pansy said.

They kept walking. The corridor stretched ahead, thinning out — most students had settled into the journey's middle hours, the initial restlessness of departure giving way to closed doors and quieter stretches.

One compartment drew more glances than the rest — she could see it in the way students slowed as they passed, the way heads turned with studied casualness. Pansy's gaze flicked once toward the glass. Draco didn't slow.

They turned back toward their compartment. Somewhere behind them, the trolley chimed again, closer now.

Pansy's eyes remained fixed on the corridor and compartment they had passed and disregarded. Her mouth thinned. She looked at the back of Draco's head the way you look at someone who has just walked past an open door in a burning building — a way out, right there, and he did not know. Then she caught up, smoothed her expression, and said nothing.

The compartment door slid shut behind them. The noise dropped. Crabbe was exactly where they'd left him, the Bertie Bott's bag somewhat depleted. Goyle had shifted his gaze from the window to the door when they entered, registered them, and returned to the window. Millicent had not moved. The book was thirty pages further along.

"The Bones girl is pleasant," Pansy said, sitting. "Straightforward — she didn't perform at all, which is refreshing. And the aunt is Amelia Bones, so that connection is worth having regardless of what house Susan ends up in."

Draco sat by the window. "Longbottom was fine. Polite. Quiet."

"He was sweet. Genuinely sweet, not the kind where someone's trying. The toad is attempting to escape through a closed window and he finds that endearing rather than concerning, which tells you something about his temperament." She tucked her feet back under her cloak. "Hannah Abbott's mother cried at the supply list. I respect that level of commitment. Did you see anyone else interesting?"

"Flint. He nodded."

"Flint nods at everything. It's his whole conversational range — nod, grunt, and occasionally a sentence if you catch him on a good day." She adjusted her cloak. "I suppose that's how you captain a Quidditch team. You just nod until people do what you want."

The sweets trolley arrived before Draco could respond — a knock on the compartment door, and then the sliding panel revealed a witch with a cart stacked in bright, precarious towers of sugar. Crabbe sat up with an alertness that had been entirely absent during the political discussion.

"A selection, please," Draco said. "Pumpkin Pasties, Cauldron Cakes, and Chocolate Frogs. Enough for five."

The witch counted out the order. Draco paid.

Crabbe received his share with the uncomplicated gratitude of someone for whom this moment was the train journey's clear peak. He ate with focus and enthusiasm. The Chocolate Frogs went first — three in rapid succession, the cards discarded after a glance — then the Pumpkin Pasties, then a Cauldron Cake, then another Chocolate Frog that Draco suspected had been concealed during the first round. Then a pause. A considering look. Then a second Cauldron Cake.

Goyle watched this progression with the calm attention of someone who could see the ending.

Crabbe's chewing slowed. He set down the remainder of the Cauldron Cake. His expression shifted from contentment to something more internal and evaluative. He stood, carefully, and stepped into the corridor without comment. The door slid shut behind him.

Goyle looked at the closed door. Then he looked at Pansy.

"He'll be fine," Pansy said. "He just needs a minute. And possibly a window that opens."

Goyle's expression did not change, but something in it settled. He turned back to his own window.

The compartment was quiet. The train moved. The light outside had shifted — later afternoon, the shadows longer across the fields. Draco sat with a Pumpkin Pasty he hadn't started and let the walkabout's encounters settle into place.

One thing, though. He'd walked nearly the length of the train, passed dozens of compartments, seen students in every configuration of first-day nervousness and excitement. And at no point had that particular kind of intensity arrived in the form of one Hermione Granger at their door — toad, introductions, unparalleled belief in her certainty. He'd half-expected it. But this year ran older. Different inputs, different outputs.

He filed it. Interesting, not actionable. The first of what he suspected would be many adjustments to his foreknowledge — although not too quickly, he hoped, before he could take advantage.

Crabbe returned, looking somewhat paler but composed. He took his seat by the door, where Goyle silently offered him a Pumpkin Pasty, and declined it with a small shake of his head that carried the weight of hard-won wisdom. Goyle ate it himself without comment.

The compartment settled. The window showed the light beginning to change — the later afternoon, lower and warmer across the fields.

Hogwarts Express — September 1, 1991

The knock was three quick raps — cheerful, familiar, the kind of knock that assumed it would be welcome.

"Open up, you lot — it's only us." Tracey Davis's voice carried through the compartment door with the easy warmth of someone who had never considered she might be turned away.

Pansy reached for the door and slid it open.

Tracey filled the doorway. She was already smiling — not at anyone in particular, at the situation, at arriving, at the compartment generally. Her eyes moved across the group the way they always did: everyone, no one left out.

"Pansy, you look very settled — like you've been here for hours and the rest of us are just catching up. Crabbe — are those Pumpkin Pasties? Brilliant, save me one next time. Greg, hello. Millie — oh good, you're here, I was going to come find you but you've saved me the trip. And Draco." She stepped in, or rather leaned in, one hand on the doorframe. "I just saw a first-year try to get his trunk through the corridor by levitating it. Which — ambitious. The aim, less so. It went sideways about three seconds in and took out a stack of Cauldron Cakes. It was tragic. I think he's still apologising to the prefect."

Crabbe looked up. "Did it hit someone?"

"It hit the trolley. The sweets witch was very understanding about it — she said it happens every year, which I thought was generous of her. The prefect less so. He looked like he was personally offended on behalf of the Cauldron Cakes." Tracey's laugh was short and genuine, and Crabbe almost smiled, which for Crabbe was the equivalent of joining in.

"That's nothing," Millicent said from her corner. "I saw a girl try to shut her trunk on a cat. Not hers. Someone else's cat. It had climbed in while she wasn't looking and she just — sat on the lid."

"Was the cat all right?" Tracey asked, delighted.

"The cat was fine. The trunk latch wasn't. The girl was crying." Millicent delivered this with the flat precision of someone who found the world's incompetence quietly fascinating.

Behind Tracey, Daphne Greengrass stepped into the frame of the open door.

The afternoon light from the sconces caught the edge of Daphne's features, and Draco's attention stayed there a half-second longer than it should have. Her hair fell across her shoulder in a golden curtain, framing the pale symmetry of her face — the clean line of her cheekbones, the precise heart-shaped arrangement of her features that looked like something a painter would have spent too long on. Her skin had that quality some girls had where everything was flawless and untouched and slightly unreal, and for a moment Draco could not look away from it. Then he reset.

"Greengrass. Davis. Passing through, or have you come to inspect?"

Smooth, hopefully. The voice you use with people you've known since you were nine.

To his left, Pansy's gaze moved from Daphne to Draco. A quick, lateral glance — the kind that measured the distance between where someone was looking and where they should have been. Her expression didn't change. But something behind her eyes sharpened, briefly, like a door closing in a room you weren't supposed to see into. His attention was already on the conversation, the reset complete, the mask in place.

"Passing through," Daphne said. "Tracey wanted to say hello to everyone on the train. I think she's working her way through the entire Hogwarts intake, and I've been drafted as company." Her voice was warm, unhurried, pleasant in the way of someone who had no agenda beyond being where she was.

"Not the entire intake," Tracey said. "Just the people I like. Which is most people, admittedly, so the distinction may not matter as much as I'd like it to."

"Where are you two sitting?" Pansy asked. Her voice was exactly right — warm, interested, perfectly pitched. If something had shifted behind her eyes a moment ago, it had been packed away with the efficiency of someone who had been learning to manage rooms since she could talk. She sat straighter, her attention moving to Tracey with focused interest. "Just the two of you, or have you collected others along the way? Tracey, knowing you, you've probably assembled half the train by now."

"Just us so far," Tracey said. "Two compartments up. We've got space — too much, honestly. It's just the two of us rattling around in there like peas in a very quiet tin."

"You should come sit with us for a bit," Pansy said. "We've got sweets, we've got us, so the conversational standard is already quite high." She smiled sweetly.

Daphne's mouth curved — that quiet, contained amusement that never quite became a full smile but was somehow warmer for the restraint.

"We should keep moving, actually," Tracey said, straightening from the doorframe. "I want to find the Patil twins before we arrive. Padma said she'd save me a certain Chocolate Frog card, and I don't trust her to remember if I don't remind her in person. She's a collector — once something's in her hand, the promise gets renegotiated." She looked at the group again — all of them, the full sweep. "See you at the Sorting. Save us seats if you get there first."

"We'll manage something," Draco said.

"Greengrass. Davis." Pansy's goodbye carried the same register as her greeting — warm, precise, equal. Not a note out of place. "Don't let Tracey talk to everyone — you'll never make it to Hogsmeade."

"Too late," Daphne said. A small smile — inclusive, easy, aimed at the group and no one in particular — and then she turned, and Tracey was already moving, and the corridor noise rose and fell as they passed out of the doorway and down the corridor.

Pansy slid the door shut.

The compartment settled. The corridor noise dropped to its muffled register. Crabbe ate the last Pumpkin Pasty.

"The Patil twins are in Ravenclaw, calling it now," Pansy said. "Both of them. The mother's a Shafiq — they're not going to Hufflepuff, and I don't see them in Gryffindor. Too composed."

Her voice was brisk. Efficient. She had moved into analysis with the speed of someone changing subjects on purpose, and if her comments covered Tracey and the Patils and the Sorting and everything else on the train, they did not, at any point, cover Daphne Greengrass. The omission sat in the room like a chair no one was using.

"Gryffindor for one," Draco said. "They won't want to be in the same house."

"You think fourteen-year-old twins want to be separated?" She tilted her head. "Is that what you'd want?"

"I think fourteen-year-old twins are tired of being treated as a unit. They've spent their whole lives being 'the Patil twins.' The Hat might give one of them the chance to be just Patil, and I think she'd take it."

Pansy considered this. "Fair. Though I'd bet it's the louder one who goes — Parvati. Padma would stay where the books are." She tucked her feet back under her cloak. "Tracey's going to know everyone by name before the Sorting Hat's even been brought out. She's probably already on first-name terms with half the train."

"She usually is."

The train moved. The light was shifting outside — the fields giving way to something hillier, the sky deepening. Goyle had returned to the window. Crabbe had closed his eyes, not sleeping but resting, the afternoon's sugar crash arriving on schedule. Millicent had produced another book from somewhere — thick, battered, no title visible on the spine — and was reading with the concentrated stillness of someone who preferred pages to people. The compartment was theirs again, small and enclosed, the door shut, the register private.

Hogsmeade Station / The Black Lake — September 1, 1991

The light had been changing for the last hour — so gradually that the countryside outside the window had gone from green to grey to the deep blue-black of a Scottish evening without anyone commenting on it. But when the train began to slow, the compartment noticed. The rhythm underfoot shifted, the pitch of the engine dropped, and the landscape outside stopped sliding and started crawling, and then the trees became individual trees rather than a continuous wall, and somewhere ahead a platform appeared in the gathering dark.

"Robes," Draco said.

Nobody argued. Pansy glanced at Millicent. "Out," she said to the boys — not unkindly, but without room for discussion. Draco stepped into the corridor with Crabbe and Goyle. The passage was already crowded — other boys displaced from their own compartments, leaning against windows or standing in awkward clusters while they waited. Crabbe and Goyle changed with efficient indifference, Goyle holding his cloak between his teeth while he pulled his robes straight. Draco managed the process with the minimum possible contact with the corridor wall, which was cold and faintly damp.

Pansy knocked from inside — two raps, quick — and they filed back in. The girls were already finished. Millicent had closed her book without marking the page — either she'd remember where she was or she wouldn't care — and stood. Pansy's shoes were on, her cloak straight, her collar precise.

The corridor erupted. Doors slid open in sequence — a cascade of noise, movement, students spilling from compartments with the urgency of people who had been sitting for seven hours. Draco stepped into the current. His group fell into formation: Crabbe ahead, Goyle behind, Pansy beside him, Millicent moving at her own pace a step behind.

The air hit first — cold, clean, sharp with pine and something mineral that was probably the lake. After the compartment's closed warmth, the platform felt enormous and exposed. Lanterns hung at intervals, throwing warm circles onto rough stone. Students streamed in both directions — the older ones moving with the loose certainty of people who knew exactly where they were going, shouldering between first-years without apology.

A voice cut across the platform noise. Deep, carrying, impossible to miss.

"First-years! First-years, this way!"

Hagrid. Draco did not look at him directly. He followed the flow of students sorting themselves into two rivers — upper years leftward toward what must be the carriages, first-years right, down a narrow path that dropped toward the waterline.

He saw Harry Potter in the gap between the two streams.

Small. That was the first thing. Small for fourteen — wiry, thin-faced, sharp-featured in a way that came from not enough rather than from design. His hair was dark and disordered. His glasses were slightly too large for the face beneath them. His robes were new but everything else about him wasn't — the way he held himself, the secondhand alertness of someone who had learned to watch rooms before entering them. The scar wasn't visible at this distance.

The boy who had survived the Killing Curse looked like a boy who had not been properly fed. Draco noted it — an unwelcome detail that refused to become a plan — and let his pace carry him past.

The path to the boats was steep and damp. The lantern light didn't reach far and the trees on either side pressed close, their canopy cutting out what remained of the sky. The noise of the platform fell away behind them as first-years descended in an uneven column, the braver ones talking, the nervous ones quiet.

The boats were at the water's edge. Small, wooden, their paint dark and old. Four to a boat — the natural arrangement. Draco stepped in first. Pansy followed, taking the seat beside him. Crabbe lowered himself into the stern with the careful deliberation of someone who did not trust the structural integrity of the vessel. The boat rocked. Crabbe's hand found the gunwale and did not leave it. Goyle sat last, his weight settling the boat deeper into the water, and then they were still. Behind them, Millicent climbed into the next boat with Tracey, Daphne, and a girl Draco didn't recognise.

The boats moved without oars or visible propulsion — a steady, smooth glide that left the shore behind. The lake opened around them. Black water, flat and depthless, close enough beneath the hull that Draco could have reached down and touched it. The cold came off the surface in a slow, steady breath.

And then it was quiet.

After hours of the train's constant rhythm, the silence was a physical thing. The water made small sounds against the boat's hull — not lapping, just the faint compression of surface against wood as they moved. Voices carried from other boats — murmurs, a nervous laugh — but they were muted by the distance and the dark and the vast open space of the lake. The sky was deep overhead. Stars were beginning to come out.

The castle appeared.

Not all at once. The shape was too uniform, too upright, and too intentionally outlined against the dimming sky to be a natural slope of land. Then the windows, hundreds of them, lit from within, throwing gold across the water in long distorted columns. Towers. Battlements. The silhouette of something enormous built on rock above the lake, stone rising from stone, the whole mass of it catching the last light of the sky along its western edge while the windows blazed from inside.

From a boat ahead, someone whispered something that carried across the water.

It was the size of it. Not the beauty, though the beauty was there too — the lit windows, the towers against the stars, the reflection broken on the water. But the size. He had read about it, carried a version of it in his mind for years, and the version in his mind had been wrong. Not wrong in its details but wrong in its scale. The castle was vast and it was real and it was right there, growing across the sky as the boats drew closer, and for one unguarded moment Draco was not a strategist or an heir or a boy with a war to prepare for. He sat in his boat, staring at something impossibly large with a flicker of disbelief.

"Merlin," Pansy said. Quiet. Not to anyone. Then, after a moment: "The boats were worth it."

The moment held. Then the knowledge settled back into place. Somewhere inside that castle, behind one of those lit windows, a man was teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts with something ancient and parasitic living on the back of his skull. The beauty was real. What it contained was also real. Both true. He breathed in the cold lake air and let the walls in his mind do what they had been trained to do. His mother's voice, distant and precise, echoed in his mind: "Occlumency is not a shield, Draco. It is architecture. Breathe first. Then build." The walls settled, and Draco sent a silent thanks to his mother.

Crabbe's knuckles were white on the gunwale. Goyle was watching the castle with his characteristic unreadable attention — taking it in the way he took in everything, silently, completely, without needing to say what he saw. The boat moved forward. The castle grew. The water was black and still and cold beneath them, and the lit windows threw their reflections down into it, and the reflections reached all the way to the hull.

The shore was close now. Stone steps rose from the waterline into darkness. Above them, the castle waited.

 

[Hyperionthetitan]

Is the prologue in the summary?

 

[Gravepine56]

Is the prologue in the summary?

Click to shrink...

I only have Chapter 1 (Preparations), Chapter 2 (Supply Run), and now Chapter 3 (The Train).
Honestly, I'm still very new to Threadmarks and how they work, so I'm not entirely sure if I'm posting this correctly.
Edit: I understand the mistake. I've fixed it and moved Chapter 1 to the correct threadmark.

 

[Hyperionthetitan]

I only have Chapter 1 (Preparations), Chapter 2 (Supply Run), and now Chapter 3 (The Train).
Honestly, I'm still very new to Threadmarks and how they work, so I'm not entirely sure if I'm posting this correctly.
Edit: I understand the mistake. I've fixed it and moved Chapter 1 to the correct threadmark.

Click to shrink...

Everyone do the oopsie sometimes, the format aint mulitpost-in-quick succession friendly that much imo

 

[Ahtu]

The MC has yet to show ANY personality of his own to speak of. I hope to see some of it now that the story is about to truly start.

 

[Gravepine56]

The MC has yet to show ANY personality of his own to speak of. I hope to see some of it now that the story is about to truly start.

Click to shrink...

Fair point. He's been deliberately restrained so far, but I think some of his actual personality has gotten lost in the process.
Edit: Currently revisiting the early chapters right now to strengthen that. He's meant to be restrained at the start, but I agree more of his personality should come through.
His emotional lag, misreads on the people around him and fixation on foreknowledge are intentional flaws — but if that's translating as flat, then that's on me to adjust.

 

[Gravepine56]

Chapter 4 - Breathing

Author's Note (Feb 14, 2026): Chapters 1–3 have been revised for clarity and voice. No plot changes — if you've already read them, you can jump straight to Chapter 4.

Hogwarts, Entrance Hall / Great Hall — September 1, 1991, evening
The warmth hit his face before his eyes adjusted. Stone underfoot instead of slick steps, torchlight instead of sky, and the wind simply gone — cut off by the massive doors that closed behind the last students with a sound like a full stop. The entrance hall was vast, vaulted, the ceiling lost somewhere above the reach of the flames. Sixty-odd first-years in damp robes, shuffling on cold stone, and the smell of all of them at once — wet wool, torchsmoke, the mineral edge of the lake still clinging to hair and hems.

Draco counted the torches on the left wall. Fourteen. The doors at the far end were closed. The ceiling was too high to see. He catalogued these facts because cataloguing was something his mind could do while the rest of it was occupied with the thing his mind could not do, which was stop.

Two things waited on the other side of those doors. A Hat — the Hat, a thousand-year-old artefact whose sorting function was the polite description of a mind-reading capability that predated the Ministry. And quite possibly a master Legilimens as well. Both waiting. Both capable of ending him.

The Hat he had prepared for. His mother had spent three years helping him build the architecture in his head — the layered walls, the curated surface, the false floor of appropriate thoughts that sat over the real ones. His Occlumency was good. She had said so. Good for his age. Good for someone who had not yet cast a formal spell. "Good" was her term for a situation where success wasn't assured, but anxiety would be counterproductive. She had tested his defenses — probed them with the care of a teacher, not the intent of an invader — but she had never truly attempted to break through. Not because she suspected anything wrong, but because she had chosen, deliberately, not to enter her son's mind. His walls were his. She had given him the tools to build them and the privacy to fill them, and if the choice left gaps in her assessment, she had accepted that trade without hesitation.

The Hat was the procedural threat — the thing with a schedule, the thing that would sit on his head at a knowable time and do a knowable thing. What it did afterward was less knowable. A thousand-year-old artefact that lived in the Headmaster's office. If it found something it did not expect — something older than fourteen, more structured than a child's mind should be — did it keep that information? Did it file a report? Did it mention, over whatever passed for conversation between a sentient hat and the most powerful wizard in Britain, that one of tonight's first-years had something in his mind that shouldn't exist?

He did not know. One could not investigate the Hat's discretion because its internal mechanisms were not publicly known, and the man in possession of it had not held three concurrent political offices by being unconcerned with irregularities.

His jaw ached. He had been clenching it since the boats, possibly since the train, and the ache had settled into the bone.

Quirrell he had not prepared for, because there was no preparation for Quirrell. You weren't ready for someone who might be able to read your mind from a distance. You did not study for that examination. You sat very still and kept your walls as high as they would go and hoped — with the kind of hope that felt more like nausea — that a fourteen-year-old's Occlumency was beneath his notice. That the most accomplished Legilimens probably in history had better things to think about than sift through the surface thoughts of first-years about to be sorted. The presence of one of history's most formidable wizards in the hall likely made the risks seem unacceptably high, hopefully.

The distance between Draco and those doors was perhaps forty feet. He had no idea if that mattered. He had no idea if stone walls mattered, if closed doors mattered, if any of the physical facts he was cataloguing — fourteen torches, forty feet, two inches of oak — constituted any kind of barrier.

From a door at the hall's end, a tall witch emerged. Emerald robes, pointed hat, a face that had been stern so long the expression had fossilised. She assessed them the way a sergeant assesses recruits — not with hostility, but with the calm expectation that most of them would disappoint her.

"Welcome to Hogwarts," she said. Her voice carried without effort — trained, pitched to fill stone. "The start-of-term banquet will begin shortly, but before you take your seats in the Great Hall, you will be Sorted into your Houses. The Sorting is a very important ceremony because, while you are here, your House will be something like your family within Hogwarts."

She paused. Not for effect — for compliance. She was checking that every pair of eyes was on her before she continued.

"Your Houses will compete for the House Cup, a year-long competition decided by the accumulation of house points. As always, who wins he House Cup carries expanded privileges for the next year."

She listed them with the brisk efficiency of someone who had delivered this address before and expected it to be remembered. Library access tiers — the leading house each term gained access to selected restricted materials for sixth and seven years without requiring individual teacher permission. Facility scheduling priority — Quidditch-pitch bookings, study rooms, practice spaces. Summer Hogwarts access for the winning house: two to three designated weeks via Floo network, supervised, staggered by year group.

Around him, the first-years had sharpened — spines straightening, attention gathering. The room's collective focus shifted when real stakes were mentioned, the shuffle of damp robes stilling into something more alert. Draco filed that with the part of his brain that was still capable of filing. The House Cup in his knowledge had been a trophy and a banner. This version had some teeth to it. Library restrictions lifted for NEWT students. Summer access to school facilities — practice rooms, the grounds, three weeks of unsupervised revision time and access to a few professors. Interesting. Also the first concrete evidence that the world inside his head and the world outside it did not perfectly overlap besides the timeline so far being slightly skewed by three years, which was the kind of thought he could not afford to follow to its conclusion — because if the school rules were different, other things might be different too.

Something like the fact that the most dangerous Legilimens alive was sitting in the hall McGonagall was about to march them into. Absolutely terrifying and yet here he was listening to library access.

"Individual point contributions are tracked and displayed publicly throughout the year," McGonagall continued. "Your individual records factor into prefect selection, teacher recommendations, and post-Hogwarts placement — Ministry positions, guild apprenticeships, and academic appointments."

So the points mattered individually too. Not just house pride — career infrastructure. In a wizarding population this small, public recognition of contribution would carry real social weight. It was, objectively, a well-designed system. Incentive alignment at the institutional and individual level. If he had been a different person in a different corridor without a possible Dark Lord on the other side of the doors, he might have found it genuinely compelling.

He was not a different person. His jaw was locked. His walls were up. The system was filed under things that matter if I survive the evening.

McGonagall was still talking. There are two opportunities to visit Hogsmeade for all grade levels, one prior to Christmas break and another following it.

That was new too. Hogsmeade from first year. In his knowledge, that was a third-year privilege. Another difference. Another thing he hadn't known about this version of the world, which he was discovering at the rate of approximately one per sentence while trying to keep his Occlumency walls from buckling under the weight of two simultaneous fears: that there was a mass murderer thirty feet away, and that the preparations he had spent three years building might have been calibrated for a world that no longer existed in quite the form he'd thought. If there were any changes in the real wizarding world he had not known or noticed them compared to the books.

"First-year students are not eligible for house Quidditch teams," she said. Somewhere in the crowd, someone made a noise that was not quite a groan but wanted to be. "Your competitive outlet in your first year will be the Academic Decathlon — a structured competition in magical theory, practical problem-solving, and applied skills. Details and team composition will be provided by your Head of House during your first week."

No Quidditch until second year, then. The Decathlon was open to everyone, but for first-years it would be the only competitive stage. Fine. Noted. Also noted: the forty feet between this corridor and the Great Hall might as well be forty inches for all the protection it likely offered.

McGonagall seemed to have finished. "I shall return when we are ready for you. Please wait quietly."

She left. The hallway fell into the tense quiet characteristic of sixty teenagers, likely thinking about how their next seven years hinged on a hat. Or maybe not, who can say what teenage hormones were causing them to do? There was no doubt about it; they were being noisy.

Pansy was beside him. She had been beside him since the boats, a fact that required no arrangement because she simply was, the way Crabbe was behind him and Goyle was to his left. She was watching the crowd — eyes moving, cataloguing, filing. He could feel her attention shift toward him, a peripheral fact he registered without turning.

Her fingers found his left cuff. Not his hand — his cuff. She smoothed out the fabric that had wrinkled during the boat trip, flattening the crease with her thumb. She tidied things when she was thinking. Other people. Their collars, their cuffs, the angles of their presentation.

The touch broke something. Not the fear — the spiral. The part of his brain that had been calculating whether his Occlumency walls meant anything to the inevitable outcome, caught on the physical fact of her thumb against his wrist through the clothes, and for a half-second there was only the entrance hall and the torchlight and Pansy beside him straightening his sleeve. "The Decathlon's the interesting one," he murmured, his lips barely moving. "They've replaced Quidditch with something that rewards preparation. That's not an accident."

Pansy's thumb paused on his cuff. "Structured competition favouring discipline over talent," she breathed. "Slytherin-shaped. The doors are about to open."

His jaw was still locked. His walls were still up. But the spiral had broken, and in the gap Pansy had made, there was enough room to breathe.

The doors opened.

The Great Hall hit like a change in altitude. The torchlight in the entrance hall opened into a space that appeared boundless, with only the vast, star-studded night sky above. Below this celestial canopy, hundreds of candles flickered openly at diverse elevations. The lowest floated just above the tables, casting warm gold on faces and wood. The highest drifted near the enchanted ceiling itself. Wax dripped from them and vanished before it landed. The air smelled of burnt sugar and something older — the enchantment baked into the stone after centuries.

Four long tables stretched the length of the hall toward a raised stone dais at the far end. A staff table. Professors in a row. Draco's eyes went to the staff table and he found the turban immediately.

Third from the right. Purple. Oversized. The man beneath it was thin, pale, and the hand that held his goblet trembled in a way that could have been nerves and was not. Draco checked: the turban was there. The man was there. The stutter was visible in the way Quirrell's mouth moved as he spoke to the professor beside him — a fractured rhythm.

Dumbledore was at the centre of the staff table. The face was familiar from photographs — the long silver beard, the half-moon spectacles, the expression that managed to be simultaneously warm and evaluating. A man who had held arguably some of the three most significant positions in wizarding Britain for decades and whose public warmth was the least interesting thing about him. Draco did not look at him longer than he looked at anyone else.

Breath first. Then build. His mother's instruction, arriving with the precision of long practice. He breathed. The walls in his mind thickened — not a conscious construction but a settling, the Occlumency finding its full depth, surface thoughts smoothing into the appropriate texture: a first-year student, nervous, awed, looking at the Great Hall for the first time. Correct thoughts. Safe thoughts. Underneath, in the architecture he had built under Narcissa's guidance, the knowledge sat: that turban contained Voldemort — parasitic, disembodied, sharing Quirrell's skull. And no one at the staff table knew.

Draco stopped looking. The not-looking was the discipline — not the checking, which was instinct, but the turning away, which was craft. His eyes moved to the stool and the Hat at the front of the hall, and his stomach dropped for an entirely different reason, and for a strange half-second the turban and the Hat competed for which was the more immediate threat, and the Hat won, because the Hat was next.

The stool was three-legged, old, placed at the front of the hall where every eye could see it. The Hat sat on top of it — battered, patched, wide-brimmed. An artefact. A reader of minds. In six or seven minutes it was going to sit on his head and either find an adult consciousness, fourteen years of strategic knowledge, and the identity of the Dark Lord's current host, or it was not.

Snape was at the far right of the staff table, nearest the Slytherin table. Draco noted his position — a fixed point, a man whose Legilimency meant Draco had never been fully at ease in his presence and frankly had avoided for most of his early childhood whenever he visited the manor. A problem for later. The Hat was a problem for now.

The Hat sang. Draco did not hear it. He was aware that it happened — a seam opened near the brim and the thing produced something with a melody and a rhyme scheme — but the content washed over him because his mind was occupied with breathing patterns and the feel of his Occlumency walls, which were holding, which were fine.

McGonagall stepped forward with a scroll. "When I call your name, you will put on the Hat and sit on the stool to be Sorted." She unrolled the parchment. "Abbott, Hannah."

Draco placed her from the train — cheerful, bright golden hair and freckled. She walked to the stool breathless and determined, ready to enjoy this specific moment. The Hat sat on her head for perhaps four seconds.

"HUFFLEPUFF!"

The table second from the left erupted. Abbott's face split into a grin so wide. She half-ran to the Hufflepuff table, and the hall settled, and McGonagall looked at her scroll again.

Names he did not know passed in quick succession. Then:

"Bones, Susan."

Squared shoulders. A direct walk to the stool, unhurried. The Hat barely touched her hair before it called Hufflepuff. She walked to her table with the same measured stride.

The names continued. Each Sorting was a data point — where the Hat hesitated, where it decided instantly, which tables cheered loudest — and the rhythm of it was almost soothing, a pattern his mind could ride while the fear ran underneath.

Bulstrode went to Slytherin without fuss. She sat down at the far-right table and looked as though she found the applause mildly unnecessary.

"Crabbe, Vincent."

Draco's attention sharpened. Crabbe's shoulders were locked — the same rigid set from the boat, the combat-trained posture his father had bred into him. He walked to the stool with the deliberation of someone crossing a room that might contain a threat. He sat. The Hat settled on his head. Two seconds. Three.

"SLYTHERIN!"

The tension left Crabbe's body in a visible wave — shoulders dropping, jaw unlocking, the held breath releasing in a way that was almost audible. He rose from the stool and the walk to the Slytherin table was a different walk entirely — looser, the weight in his stride settling rather than bracing. He sat beside Millicent and his hands went flat on the table, palms down, fingers spread. Solid ground.

Tracey Davis. Slytherin. Already smiling before the Hat reached her head — she made a small sound closer to a laugh than a gasp and walked to the table with her grin preceding her.

More names. His jaw ached. The distance between himself and the stool was shrinking one name at a time and the shrinking was not something he could stop or slow and each name called was a name closer to his.

"Goyle, Gregory."

Goyle walked to the stool the way he watched things: steadily, completely, without hurry. He sat. The Hat settled on his head and stayed there. One second. Two. Three. Four. Five. An extra beat — longer than Crabbe, long enough that the silence acquired weight. Goyle's hands were still in his lap. His face showed nothing, which was itself a kind of expression — the particular blankness of someone who was holding very still and waiting for something to finish happening inside his head.

"SLYTHERIN!"

Goyle rose without expression and walked to the Slytherin table and sat beside Crabbe, and that was all. The absence of reaction was the reaction. Draco watched Goyle settle, watched Crabbe's posture ease a fraction further with his friend beside him.

Granger went to Gryffindor after a long deliberation — seven seconds, the Hat visibly shifting, her hands white on the stool's edge. Gryffindor, not Ravenclaw — the theory about her never truly being a Ravenclaw candidate might hold some truth.

"Greengrass, Daphne."

Daphne walked to the stool the way other people walked into rooms they owned. Not arrogance — that would have required effort. Golden hair, composed expression, the unhurried grace that made Pansy's sharpness feel like a different species of the same skill. The Hat barely paused.

"SLYTHERIN!"

Tracey's grin widened as Daphne sat beside her, and neither of them looked surprised.

The alphabet was closing on him. Longbottom was next, or near — no, two or three names away still. His name was coming. The fact of it sat in his chest like a stone he'd swallowed. The Hat was there, on the stool, where Daphne had just been, and in a matter of minutes it would be on his head, and his Occlumency would hold or it would not, and the distance between those outcomes was everything.

His jaw had locked again. He breathed. His mother's voice: architecture, not a shield. He breathed.

"Longbottom, Neville."

The boy walked to the stool with the careful gait of someone expecting the floor to betray him. Draco felt a tightening in his chest, a not that he thought should not be his forming again, just like on the train, whenever Longbottom was brought up, perhaps ingrained from his mother refusing to talk about the topic. The family history — the Longbottoms, Bellatrix, the Cruciatus, the ward at St Mungo's where two people existed in the space where parents should have been, parents to a boy living with a grandmother probably even damaged beyond repair by the horrific events themselves happening to her own son and daughter in-law. The Hat sat on Longbottom's head and stayed there. It considered. The boy's hands gripped the stool tightly. The hall waited suddenly in almost near silence.

"GRYFFINDOR!"

Relief visible in the slope of the boy's shoulders. He nearly forgot to take the Hat off. Now Draco's own name would be the next.

"Malfoy, Draco."

His legs moved. He was not entirely certain he had told them to. The walk to the stool was twelve steps — he counted them without deciding to — and the hall was very large and very quiet and his shoes made a sound on the flagstone that seemed to belong to someone else. His face was correct. His posture was correct. The expression he wore — politely attentive, mildly curious, the face of a well-bred boy approaching a school ceremony — was the most sustained performance he had produced since arriving, and his jaw ached from holding it.

He sat on the stool. The wood was hard and worn smooth and he could feel the grain through his robes. The hall stretched below him — four tables, hundreds of faces, the candles at their varying heights, and at the staff table Quirrell's turban was a point of colour in his peripheral vision that he did not look at.

McGonagall placed the Hat on his head.

Something settled against his mind.

Not a voice. Not exactly. A pressure that had shape and weight and something almost like intent — the sense of being observed from inside, of a presence that was thorough the way a hand passing over a table is thorough. His Occlumency was there. The walls were there. Surface thoughts, appropriate and correct: a student, fourteen, nervous, the house he expected. He held them the way his mother had taught him — not rigid, because rigidity was visible, but smooth. A surface with nothing to catch on.

The presence moved. It did not press against his walls. It did not probe. It moved the way something large moves through water — with weight, with patience, and with the particular care of a thing that has encountered something it did not expect.

A pause. Half a second. Perhaps a full one. Something shifted in the quality of the pressure — a change in attention, the way a reader's focus changes when a sentence surprises them. The presence had found something. He did not feel any probe.

It stopped. The pressure receded. And then —

"SLYTHERIN!"

The word rang through the hall and his hands were steady. His hands were steady because his elbows were locked and he did not unlock them yet. McGonagall lifted the Hat from his head and the absence of the pressure was like stepping out of deep water — a mind that was only his again. He stood. The hall was cheering.

He walked to the Slytherin table. Twelve steps in the other direction. Halfway there, he unlocked his elbows, and the ache of it reached him — how long had he been holding them locked? The muscles released and his hands acquired weight, the specific heaviness of fists opening after sustained contraction. The cheering was closer now. Faces at the Slytherin table turning toward him — Crabbe, solid, something like relief in his posture. Millicent, impassive. Tracey, grinning. And Pansy, still in the first-year queue, whose face he found without looking for it, because his eyes always went there first.

He sat. The bench was hard oak, the grain risen, and he could feel every ridge through his robes. The table was real beneath his palms. The candles were close above him, warm, the burnt-sugar smell settling around him like an atmosphere he'd been admitted to.
He breathed. The Hall assembled itself around him — sounds returning, textures sharpening, the warmth of four hundred bodies and a thousand candles in an enclosed stone space. His heartbeat was in his ears, which meant it had been there for a while and he was only now able to hear it. The Hat had been on his head and it had said Slytherin and his Occlumency had held.

He did not think about the pause. He did not think about the office where the Hat spent its remaining three hundred and sixty-four days, or the man who sat behind the desk. The walls had been there, the surface thoughts correct, and the Hat had not probed. His mother's training had worked. He allowed himself the private satisfaction of a test passed. The outcome was correct. The rest was noise.

The catalogue continued, and from the Slytherin table it was a different experience entirely. His hands were folded atop the heavy oak table. The absence of fear allowed for the enjoyment of observing patterns form. Each name McGonagall called was another data point; each Sorting was a line drawn on a map he was building in real time.

The names between his and the ones that mattered passed in quick succession — a MacDougal, others whose families he would cross-reference later. Then:

"Nott, Theodore."

Thin, angular, dark-haired. Nott walked to the stool with the rigid posture of absolute certainty — not composure, because composure permitted doubt, but conviction, the body held tight by a mind that had never encountered a reason to question itself. He sat. The Hat barely touched his head.

"SLYTHERIN!"

Nott walked to the Slytherin table with the same rigid stride and sat at the end of the bench, leaving a deliberate gap between himself and the nearest person. Not rejected — positioned. The separateness was chosen, not imposed. Draco's fork was in his hand — he could not remember picking it up — and he set it down without looking at it.

"Parkinson, Pansy."

She stepped forward from the line with her back straight and her hands at her sides — dark hair cut in a precise bob that moved as a single piece, sharp features, alert dark eyes that had already read the hall twice before her name was called. The upturned nose that made her face impossible to confuse with anyone else's — a feature, not a flaw, though he suspected she hadn't reached that conclusion yet. Not Daphne's effortless grace but something harder-won and therefore more interesting. The Hat touched her hair.

"SLYTHERIN!"

Quick. Decisive. She rose and walked to the table and sat beside him and the configuration was complete. She did not comment on the Sorting. She did not need to. Her presence at the table was the comment.

The Patil twins split — one to Ravenclaw, one to Gryffindor. Draco registered this with the detached interest of someone filing a piece of information that was not yet useful but might be.

"Perks, Sally-Anne."

Hufflepuff. The catalogue was approaching the name the room was waiting for, and Draco could feel the anticipation in the hall — a shift in attention, a tightening of the ambient noise, four hundred people trying not to look expectant.

"Potter, Harry."

The hall reacted. Not with sound, exactly — with the sudden organised attention of a large group of people simultaneously deciding to pay attention. Heads turning. Whispers igniting. The name moving through the room like a lit fuse, table to table, the sibilants audible even from where Draco sat. The Boy Who Lived. The famous scar. The orphan. The story.

Draco watched the room, not the boy. Dumbledore's expression — attentive, benign, unreadable. Snape's face a closed door.

Potter sat on the stool. Small for fourteen — the same wiry frame from the platform, the dark hair, the glasses. The Hat settled on his head and stayed there. The hall held its breath. Five seconds. Ten. Potter's hands gripped the edges of the stool.

"GRYFFINDOR!"

The Gryffindor table exploded. Red and gold, students standing, the Weasley twins audible above everything else. Potter walked to his table looking stunned, relieved — a boy who had not expected to belong anywhere and had just been told he did. Something in his chest loosened a fraction. Potter in Gryffindor, the main story holding its shape for now — it was more meaningful than it ought to have been, a small confirmation that some of his knowledge still mapped to the world outside his head.

Across the table, Nott was clapping. The motion was correct — hands meeting at the appropriate interval, the social minimum — but it arrived a fraction too late, a half-beat behind the rest of the table. His face was carefully neutral in a way that had the quality of rehearsal. And his eyes had not been on Potter at all. They had been on the staff table.

Nott during Potter's Sorting had been watching the teachers, not the boy. The observation settled without conclusion. The shape would emerge later, or it would not.

The catalogue resumed. A certain Dean Thomas went to Gryffindor. Turpin to Ravenclaw. Weasley — red-haired, tall, the tension of a boy whose entire family had precedent — to Gryffindor, where Potter was already seated.

"Zabini, Blaise."

The last name on the list. The boy who stood was tall for fourteen, dark-skinned, with high cheekbones and a sharp jaw that gave his face a finished quality most fourteen-year-olds hadn't grown into yet. He moved to the stool without hurry, as though alphabetical order were a mild inconvenience he had decided not to resent. The Hat considered.

"SLYTHERIN!"

Zabini rose with the same languid composure and sat at the far end of the bench, near Nott but not with him. The posture was genuine indifference — not performance. Very few things had yet warranted his full attention, and nothing here had changed that.

McGonagall rolled up her scroll. The Sorting was over.

Draco sat at the Slytherin table with Pansy beside him and Crabbe across and Goyle next to Crabbe. Tracey was leaning toward Daphne, saying something that softened Daphne's composure by a fraction. Millicent was studying the empty plates with more interest than she'd shown the ceremony. Nott was at the end of the bench. Zabini beyond him. The first-year Slytherin cohort was assembled, and the landscape was mapped.

The enchanted ceiling showed stars. The candles floated. The room was tilting from ceremony toward feast — Draco could feel it in the noise level, the posture of the older students, the way the hall's attention diffused from the stool to the tables where food would shortly appear.

Draco did not look at the staff table. He looked at the plates instead, and at Pansy, who was surveying the Slytherin table with the sharp focus of someone already calculating the social geometry of the year ahead. He breathed, and the breath came even more easily, the year could begin.

Hogwarts, Great Hall — September 1, 1991, evening
The food appeared without warning. One moment the plates were empty, bronze-looking and expectant under the candlelight, and the next they were full — roast beef, roast chicken, potatoes in three preparations, gravy boats that refilled themselves, and bread still steaming. The smell hit before the sight registered: salt, fat, rosemary, something sweet underneath it all — caramel, or cinnamon, or both, mingling with the burnt-sugar enchantment of the candles until the air itself felt edible.

The Hall exhaled. Four hundred teenagers and young adults reaching for serving spoons at once, the formal silence of the Sorting breaking into the communal noise of a meal. Cutlery on china. Laughter from the Gryffindor table, where the Weasley twins appeared to be constructing something out of bread rolls. The Great Hall's acoustics turned all of it into a wall of sound — warm, thick, the kind of noise that made the two feet between your mouth and your neighbour's ear feel private.

At the staff dais, Dumbledore had risen. The welcome address lasted perhaps ninety seconds and Draco processed it as performance rather than content — the warm cadence, the practised grandfatherly ease, a few words about the Forbidden Forest. He particularly noted the canonical mention of the third-floor corridor, but it was understated because Dumbledore know how to make a warning sound inviting. He was good at this. The public warmth, the twinkling authority, the studied impression of a man who cared deeply and presided gently. Draco watched the way you watch someone whose craft you respect and whose priorities you don't trust. A man who held three concurrent seats of power and maintained a school that currently housed a Defence professor with Voldemort attached to his skull. The welcome address did not mention this. It did not mention many things, and the omissions were as practised as the warmth.

His eyes went to the staff table. Found the turban — third from the right, purple, the man beneath it holding a goblet with a hand that trembled. Confirmed. His Occlumency settled a degree thicker, the walls adjusting from crisis to maintenance. Not the white-knuckle alertness of the Sorting — just the steady, habitual thickness he would have to carry all year in rooms where the turban was visible. He looked back at his plate. Found the beef, the potatoes. Put food on his plate because food was what people did at feasts, and the doing of it was a relief.

Pansy leaned toward him during a swell of noise from the Hufflepuff table. "Farquhar acknowledged the first-years," she said. "Full eye contact, nodded at each of us as we sat down. Counted us, I think — his lips moved. Hawkins didn't look up from her plate. Not once, not even when the Sorting finished."

Draco placed the names. Fifth-year prefects — the badges had been visible during the Sorting. He'd noted the faces without filing the implications. Pansy had filed both.

He reached for his goblet. "Hawkins has enough connections not to bother."

"Or Hawkins resents first-year management and Farquhar is positioning for Head Boy." Pansy cut a piece of chicken with the precision of someone who found the act of eating less interesting than the act of observing. "Two years ahead of the appointment and he's already building the case. The eye contact was good — practised, but not offensively so. He'll have every first-year convinced he cares about them by the end of the week." She set down her knife. "The second-years are sitting closer to the upper-years than I'd expected. Not at the centre — but not at the periphery either. Look at the gap between their end of the table and ours."

He looked. She was right. The second-year students had claimed the middle ground — not challenging the fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-years who occupied the table's gravitational centre, but not ceding space to the new intake either. A year of established territory, visible in the two feet of bench they'd won.

"Nott's interesting," Pansy said, and her voice dropped half a register, not for secrecy but for precision — the tone she used when an observation carried weight. "He's not sitting with us. He's at the far end, next to Rowle's younger brother and the Flint girl. Dark-aligned adjacency. First night, and he's already declared." She paused, her gaze tracking the far end of the bench without turning her head. "He walked to that end of the bench while the rest of you, Vincent and Goyle were sitting down. Before the food appeared. Before anyone else had chosen a seat. That's not instinct — that's a decision he made before the Sorting was finished."

Draco found Nott without turning his head. End of the bench. The gap between Nott and the nearest first-year in the inner circle was four seats and deliberate. Rowle's son was a second-year with his father's broad jaw — Thorfinn Rowle, who had spent most of the war on a wanted poster and had never been caught or charged with anything. The Flint girl was slight, dark-haired, eating with the practised indifference of someone whose family predated the International Statute of Secrecy. The three of them were not in conversation. They did not need to be. The positioning was the statement. His fork had stopped moving. He set it down.

"He chose that seat," Draco said.

"He chose that audience." Pansy's fork paused midway to her mouth. "Old dark-aligned families. He wants them to see where he landed on the first night." She returned the fork to her plate, the food untouched on it, an afterthought. "People will take note."

She'd caught the second-year positioning before he had, and her read on Nott's timing was better than his.

"The upper-years didn't react to him," Draco said. He kept his voice in the same low register. "Nott sat at the dark-aligned end and not one of them looked. Either they expected it, or they don't think he matters yet."

Pansy's fork stilled for a half-second. "I was watching Nott. I wasn't watching them watching Nott." The admission was small, precise, offered without discomfort — a gap in her coverage acknowledged the way a cartographer marks the edge of a map.

He watched her gaze move across the table's middle distance — the upper-year configuration, who sat next to whom, which seventh-years commanded the most space.

"The one who looks like a sixth or seven-year at the centre," Pansy continued, her gaze steady. "The one with the signet ring. Everyone else adjusted when he sat down — the two beside him shifted to make room before he reached the bench. That's the person to watch."

"Agreed." He took a piece of bread from the basket between them. Warm, soft, the kind of bread that existed because magic could make flour do things that physics could not. The fire cracked behind them and the warmth of it reached the back of his neck, a brief reminder that the room existed beyond the table's social geometry. "Tracey's already talking to one of the third-years," he said. "Third sentence in and the girl's laughing. She's fast — I don't think she even had to think about who to approach."

Pansy's mouth twitched — not a smile, closer to acknowledgement. "Tracey doesn't need to map a room. She just walks into it and the room rearranges somehow." The twitch settled into something more considered. "It's a genuine talent. She's not performing — she's just… warm, and people respond to warmth before they respond to strategy. By the end of the week she'll know every second-year's name and they'll think they made friends with her, not the other way around."

Across the table, Crabbe was eating with focused, steady attention, his shoulders dropped, his jaw easy. Goyle beside him ate more slowly, his gaze moving over the table.

Crabbe looked up from his plate. "The beef's better than home," he said, with the flat satisfaction of someone who had reached a conclusion and found it sufficient. He returned to eating. Goyle set down his fork. "The candles don't drip," he said. He was looking upward, his face still, his tone observational rather than impressed. The wax fell and vanished before it reached the table. Goyle watched this happen twice, then picked up his fork again.

Draco looked up.

His hands went still on the table.

The ceiling held a September night — deep, clear, the stars convincing enough that you had to remind yourself they were enchanted. The candles floated between the tables and the sky in their hundreds, warm points of light against the dark. He looked longer than he needed to. The whole of it — the stars, the candles, the hall below them — was genuinely extraordinary.

He looked down. Found his fork and plate. The food was good and the bread was warm and Pansy was beside him and the feast was continuing and he did not look up again.

"Zabini hasn't spoken to anyone," Pansy observed, her attention having completed its circuit of the table and returned to the near distance. "He's been eating for ten minutes and not a word, seems like he's decided nothing here requires his participation yet."

"Or he's genuinely not interested," Draco said. "Some people don't perform indifference — they just have it. I'm not sure Zabini's decided anything. I think this is what he's like."

Pansy considered this for a moment, her gaze still on the far end of the table. "Possible. I'll want a second evening before I commit to that read." She reached for her goblet, and the observation was filed — not agreed upon, not discarded, held between them in the space where their readings hadn't yet converged.

Down the table, Daphne was seated beside Tracey, her composure unruffled by the noise and heat of the hall. Draco noted her position — the straight back, the unhurried way she reached for her goblet.

Millicent had produced a book from somewhere again — how she had managed this between the Sorting and the feast was quite unclear — and was reading it propped against a water jug while eating a bread roll with her free hand. Nobody commented on this. It was, Draco suspected, exactly the response Millicent preferred. The hall's collective murmur cycling between conversation and eating.

He thought about the letter. Mother expected one by the second evening — not demanded, expected, which with Narcissa was the same thing. He would write about the Great Hall. The ceiling — she would want to hear about the ceiling. Extraordinary, he would write, or perhaps he would find a better word, one that captured the candles and the stars and the way the enchantment made the room feel as though it had no roof. He would write about the food, because she would definitely ask otherwise. About Slytherin, because she already knew but would want the confirmation in his handwriting. About Pansy, because Narcissa liked Pansy and would want to know she was well.

The bread was good. He reached for another piece. Crabbe had moved on to pudding — treacle tart, consumed with the same steady focus — and Pansy had turned to answer something Tracey had said, her voice lighter in the group register, the analytical edge tucked away where it lived when she wasn't talking to him.

The Hall was warm and loud and full of food and he was where he was supposed to be, at the table he was supposed to be at, and the evening was good, and the letter would be easy to write.

Hogwarts, Slytherin Dungeons — September 1, 1991, late evening
The stone changed underfoot on the second flight down. Warmer flagstone gave way to something darker, older, and the temperature came with it — a degree at a time, arriving through the soles of his shoes and the skin of his wrists where his sleeves didn't quite reach. Behind him, the Great Hall's four-hundred-voice roar was draining away step by step, thinning through the stairwell until it was not a sound but a memory of a sound, and then not even that.

The prefect — Farquhar, the ambitious one Pansy had flagged — led the group down wide steps that were dished in the centre from centuries of feet taking this exact route. The wear was apparent even by the torchlight: shallow indentations in the stone where the tread was most worn, the stone bearing the marks of every student who had walked there before. Draco's weight found the grooves naturally. Beside him, Pansy walked with her hands at her sides and her chin lifted, taking in the stairwell the way she took in every new space — systematically, the eyes moving before the head turned.

Crabbe was a half-step behind, close enough that Draco could hear his breathing — steady, unhurried, the sound of someone whose body had decided the day was nearly over and was already preparing for sleep. Goyle was on Draco's other side, slightly further back, his gaze tracking the walls rather than the stairs. The carvings were old — names, dates, symbols scratched into stone by students whose descendants now sat in the Wizengamot or lay in the ground or both. Goyle noticed them. Draco noted that Goyle noticed them.

The torches were different by the second flight. The entrance hall's warm, bright light had vanished, supplanted by greenish flames in iron sconces. These enchanted, smokeless lights cast green-tinged shadows on the stone walls, which felt so close they could be touched on either side. The corridor at the bottom was narrow, uneven, damp in stretches where the lake seeped through hairline cracks in the stone. The air had acquired a mineral quality — cold stone and lake water and centuries of damp. Draco breathed it in and his shoulders dropped another quarter-inch since the feast and he did not notice the dropping because the tension had been there so long it had stopped registering as tension.

Quirrell was somewhere above them, floors and stone and distance away. The distance was doing something to the tension he hadn't known he was still carrying throughout the feast — easing it, degree by degree, the way a fist unclenches when the thing it was gripping is no longer there. The world had edges again — not the sharp-focus edges of threat assessment but the ordinary kind, the cold on his face, the distance between one torch and the next, a person walking through a corridor and feeling the walk.

The group was close. Not strategically — organically. The inner circle had gravitated together during the descent without discussion: Pansy at his shoulder, Crabbe and Goyle flanking, Tracey somewhere behind them talking quietly to a second-year who had attached himself to their group with the easy confidence of someone who recognised useful people. Daphne was further back, composed, unhurried. Pansy, Vincet and Goyle however, his people, near him, in the dark, heading home.

Farquhar stopped at a stretch of bare wall.

"Password changes the first of every month," he said, addressing the group with the measured clarity of someone who had rehearsed this and wanted it known that he hadn't. "Current password is ashwinder. Curfew is ten o'clock for first- through fourth-years — I suggest you treat that as nine forty-five until you know the corridors well enough to run them in the dark. Don't wander at night. The Baron patrols, and he does not explain himself twice." A pause, deliberate, the beat of a boy who had watched older prefects deliver this speech and noted which pauses worked. "The common room is yours. The upper-year study alcoves are not. You'll work out which is which — but if you'd prefer to work it out without embarrassing yourselves, watch where the fifth-years sit and stay clear until you're invited."

He said the password to the wall, and the wall opened.

A stone slab, heavy enough that the sound of its movement was geological, grinding back into the wall with a deliberate, unhurried weight that made the entrance a thing. Not a portrait. Not a charm. Stone moving because a word had told it to, and the stone taking its time about it.

The lake hit Draco first when he stepped through it.

Windows — thick glass, slightly warped, set in iron frames gone green with oxidation — and behind the glass, the lake. Not the surface of it. The inside. Deep green-black, dense with the pressure of water that had been pressing against this glass for a thousand years, and shapes moving behind it — slow, enormous, half-visible, drifting through the dark with the slow indifference of things that lived in pressure and cold.

His breath caught. Not visibly — the catch was interior, the adult mind surfacing because he had known what this room would look like and he had been wrong. Not wrong. Incomplete. He had known green light and underwater and the words had built a room in his mind and the room in his mind had been a sketch. This was the painting. The difference between knowing a room existed and standing in it with the green light moving across his hands.

The fireplace was broad and old, the flames burning with an enchantment that had been layered so many times the original charm was probably archaeological. The hearth mantel was carved with serpents whose scales had been worn smooth by centuries of elbows — the carved ridges reduced to soft undulations under generations of arms that had rested there while their owners watched the fire or the lake or the room. The two lights met in the middle of the space and made something neither could produce alone: the cool green wash from the torches next to the windows and the warm gold from the hearth, each moving against the other, the room lit by both and belonging to neither.

He let his gaze continue. High-backed leather chairs — cracked along the armrests where generations of fingers had gripped, soft at the seat, split at the edges. Dark green sofas. Study alcoves carved into the walls, shallow recesses with built-in benches. The Slytherin crest above the mantel, silver on green, catching both lights.

The best chairs were taken. Four seventh-years occupied the seats nearest the fire with the ease of people who had sat there every evening for three years and would sit there every evening until they left. The geography was the explanation: centre belonged to seniority, periphery to the new, and the lesson was delivered by the room itself — by the warmth gradient that made the chairs by the fire the only truly comfortable seats, and by the fact that every other chair was slightly colder, slightly further from the light, the hierarchy measured in degrees and distance.

First-years found the edges. Draco noted the pattern without directing it — fourteen-year-olds in an unfamiliar room, finding whatever was unclaimed and near whoever they recognised. Tracey stopped three steps past the threshold, her face lit green and gold. "It's underwater," she said, and her voice carried the particular delight of someone whose expectations had just been met by the real thing. "We live under the lake. That's actually — that's extraordinary." She pressed her palm flat against the nearest window, the glass thick and cold, and laughed once — a bright, involuntary sound that made two upper-years glance over and decide to be charmed by it. Crabbe, passing the fireplace, stopped and held his hands toward the flames — briefly, unhurried, as though the common room were already his. Two fourth-years glanced at him, visibly uncertain whether he was actually a first-year. He moved on, dropped into the nearest chair beside Draco with the finality of someone who had found what he needed, and said, "Warm in here." A girl Draco didn't know — slight, dark-haired, probably one of the non-aligned first-years — murmured something to the boy beside her about the carved serpents on the mantel, her fingers tracing the stone where centuries of elbows had worn the scales smooth. Millicent had located a chair — not the best chair, not the worst, simply one that happened to be near a lamp and far from conversation — and produced a book from somewhere. Whether it was the same book from the feast or the train or a different one altogether, Draco was no longer entirely certain. Blaise stood watching the lake, not watching the room.

Pansy was beside him. She had been looking at the lake windows since they entered — not the room's social geography, not the chairs, not the hierarchy. The windows. The light moving on the ceiling.

"The light changes," she said. Her voice was quiet, not for secrecy — for the quality of the observation. The register she used when something she noticed was real and she was saying it because it was real and not because it was useful. "When the things move behind the glass. It dims and then it comes back slightly different." She was still watching the ceiling, her face tipped upward, the green light moving across her features in slow bands. "The whole room breathes. I don't think anyone designed it — I think it just happens, because the lake is alive and the glass is old and the light doesn't know how to be still."

He looked at the ceiling. She was right. The green-black light from the lake shifted as shapes passed behind the windows — a slow pulse, almost imperceptible, the room's illumination rising and falling with the movement of whatever lived in the water. Breathing was the right word. He wouldn't have chosen it, but it was the right word.

"Yes," he said. He watched the light shift across the arm of the nearest chair. "The way it moves on the stone. It doesn't look like how light would move."

Pansy looked at him but didn't say anything. She looked back up at the ceiling. The green light illuminated them, and in the ensuing silence, no words were necessary.

The common room settled around them. People stopped looking at the room and started using it.

Snape did not come.

A Head of House who did not welcome his new students on the first evening had made a choice. The choice said: I am not the person who coddles.

Down the spiral staircase from the common room's back corner. Boys left, girls right. The staircase was tight, cold, rough stone, and the descent was brief — a single turn before the corridor levelled and a door appeared.

The dormitory was dark. Five four-poster beds, heavy green velvet hangings gone soft with age, dark wood, thick quilts. The stone floor was cold through his socks the moment his shoes came off — the chill pressing up through wool. The room was smaller than the common room, lower-ceilinged, and the lake was closer here — the groan of water pressing against stone was louder, more intimate, transmitted through walls that were the last barrier between the dormitory and the lake bed.

At the room's far end, a window. Not the broad panels of the common room — a single rectangle of thick glass, deep green-black, and as Draco watched, something luminous drifted past behind it like a slow lantern and was gone.

He selected the second bed, counting from the door. The pillow offers a clear view of the door, the window, and the room's spatial arrangement. He did not explain the choice. Crabbe took the bed nearest the door without discussion, dropping onto the mattress with the unselfconscious heaviness of someone whose body had been carrying the day's weight in its muscles and was now, finally, permitted to set it down. His shoes came off. His robes came off. He was under the quilt in the time it took Draco to open his trunk.

Goyle took the bed across the room. He sat on the edge of the mattress and looked at the lake window for a moment before pulling his curtains half-shut — enough for privacy, open enough to see the room.

Nott drew his curtains.

No word. No eye contact. He had walked to his bed — the one furthest from Draco's cluster, nearest the wall — and drawn the green velvet hangings shut with a single, unhurried motion that was not rude and not challengeable. Simply closed. The curtains said what Nott had said all evening without speaking: I am here and I am not with you. The fabric settled. The bed became a sealed space. Whatever Nott did behind those curtains — slept, read, stared at the canopy — was his, and the curtains were the border.

Draco's own quilt was heavy across his chest, the linen cool where it touched his collarbones.

The dormitory quieted. Crabbe's breathing settled within minutes — audible, steady, uncomplicated. The rhythm was so regular it became part of the room's ambient noise, joining the lake's groan and the distant creak of stone cooling in the September night.

The stone wall beside his bed was close enough to touch from the pillow, and he could feel the cold radiating from it without touching it — a steady mineral chill that would be there in December and in June and on every night between. Generations of students had scratched things into that stone. He could not read them in the dark. He did not try.

The lake light moved on the ceiling.

He watched it.

The dormitory was quiet. Green light moved across the ceiling the way water holds a reflection — imperfectly, always moving — and Draco watched it from his pillow and did not count the minutes because counting would have meant admitting he was waiting for sleep and sleep was not something that was coming.

Crabbe had been asleep for hours. The breathing was so regular it had become a part of the room. The quilt was heavy on his chest. The linen had warmed to his body's temperature hours ago and the warmth existed in a narrow envelope between the cold above the quilt and the cold of the stone wall beside his bed.

The day sat behind his eyes.

Quirrell had been at the staff table, Voldemort. The Dark Lord who had unmade the Potters and would likely unmake Draco and his own family if just simply by his demands of servitude alone. Quirrell would be there tomorrow and the day after and every day until whatever happened happened, and Draco could do nothing about it except endure the proximity and keep the walls in place and not think too carefully about what was watching from behind the performance of a frightened man.

Crabbe's breathing. Steady. The sound of a boy who had no secrets. Draco let his own breathing match it — not consciously, not deliberately, just the body finding the steadier rhythm and settling into it the way a hand finds a banister in the dark. Another shape had drifted past the window.

The mind moved.

Not deliberately. Not strategically — not yet. His eyes had opened wider in the dark, the pupils adjusting, and his body had gone quiet in a different way — not the held stillness of what he'd been carrying but the focused stillness of something beginning. The alignment changing before the hand holding the compass understood why.

Potter was in Gryffindor.

The fact had been unremarkable and satisfying at the same time. Draco had watched the reactions, not the boy. Who cheered, who didn't, who watched Potter with assessment rather than celebration. Nott's face had been particularly instructive — neutral in a way that was not neutral at all.

And that was the problem. Not Potter. Potter was a variable — Muggle-raised, famous name, an empty frame that thirteen years of wizarding celebrity had built around a boy who did not know the first thing about the world that worshipped him. Potter could be managed.

The problem was Slytherin.

He was a Malfoy. His father had stood trial and walked free on an Imperius defence that half the wizarding world considered a polite fiction. The families in this dormitory — the Crabbes, the Goyles, the Notts — were bound to Draco's orbit not by affection but by alignment. Dark-aligned. War-adjacent. The children of people who had chosen a side, or been chosen by one, and who now carried that inheritance into a school that remembered, into a house whose reputation was an old scar that still pulled when the weather changed.

What reached Crabbe's father reached Goyle's father by the same post. What reached Goyle's father reached Lucius Malfoy by the weekend, because the dark families did not communicate through friendship — they communicated through proximity and paranoia and the mutual understanding that information was the only currency that never devalued. The reporting network was not conspiracy. It was furniture. Old, inherited, so familiar that nobody examined it, no more than they examined the floor they had walked on since childhood.

Nott was watching. Even with the curtains shut and Nott likely asleep, the observation persisted because Nott's watching was a constant condition, not just a behavior. His father would hear. His father would interpret. And the interpretation would reach Lucius.

If Draco spent the year building bridges to Gryffindor and Hufflepuff without first establishing himself as what his house recognised and respected, the narrative would write itself before Christmas. Malfoy's boy spends his time with half-bloods and Bones's niece. The dark families did not need evidence. They needed pattern. And friendliness toward the wrong houses, from the Malfoy heir, in the first term — that was a pattern that wrote its own headline.

His jaw had tightened again. He found it clenched and eased it, and the easing was an effort.

He needed to be Slytherin before he could be anything else. The name had to mean what people expected it to mean — sharp, principled, aligned — before he could show them it might also mean more. The sequence mattered. The sequence was everything.

But Slytherin credibility bought with quiet competence was not enough. Competence in Slytherin was baseline. Every student in this house could cite blood status hierarchies, navigate a formal dinner, and compose a letter to a great-aunt that said one thing and meant three others. Ambition-fueled competence remained competence. There's a lot one could say about the house of snakes. However, in Slytherin, being competent was merely the starting point, not the final achievement.

A way out was what he desperately sought.

Crabbe breathing, steady as a tide.

Indifference is the one thing nobody finds compelling.

Pansy's voice. Clear as though she were sitting on the edge of his bed, the register she used when an observation was real and she was saying it because it was real and not because it was useful. Her voice carrying the weight of a person who had thought about something carefully and was delivering the conclusion with an edge that was not anger but precision.

She had said it on the train. She had been arguing that Draco's strategy of waiting — of not approaching Potter, of letting the Hogwarts Express pass without contact — was a mistake. He had won the argument. She had conceded gracefully. And she had been right.

Not about approaching Potter on the train — the logistics were still wrong, the queue would have swallowed them. But the principle underneath, the tactic, the thing she had seen that he had dismissed as impatience because it came wrapped in impatience: patience only works if he eventually hears from us at all. Clarity he'd mistaken for emotion because it came from Pansy.

The argument turned a lock.

He lay still and his breathing changed — shallower, held — and the solution was not arriving so much as assembling, each piece finding its position.

Potter was the lever.

His hands had gone still on his chest, fingers laced, the knuckles white in the green dark.

Not a confrontation. Not the sneering match his father's generation would have staged, the pureblood theatre of contempt that had accomplished exactly nothing for thirty years. Something precise. Public. Intellectual. Undeniable.

Potter knew nothing. He had been raised by Muggles who had not even told him he was a wizard until Hagrid broke down the door — foreknowledge gave Draco this with the confidence of a man reading a page he'd already memorised, though the evening's discoveries — Hogsmeade from first year, the House Cup rebuilt, the new Decathlon this year where Quidditch should have been — sat underneath that confidence like cracks in a pavement, visible if you looked, easy to walk over if you chose not to.

He chose not to. The plan was the best he had. If his knowledge was wrong about Potter too, he would discover that in the classroom, not lying in the dark. He proceeded.

A clever pureblood could have deduced most of it from watching the Sorting. Potter would arrive in class tomorrow with a famous name and an empty frame, and every assumption he carried would be Muggle-shaped: their logic, their values, their certainties about how a world they'd never seen was supposed to work. He would answer a question wrong. He would misunderstand a convention. He would reach for a Muggle reference in a room full of students who had been raised on different stories.

The quilt's weight on his chest. The cold radiating from the stone wall. His own breathing, shallower than Crabbe's, faster, the body responding to the mind's acceleration before the mind noticed.

One well-placed correction. One argument Potter could not answer because he had never been taught the question. Not cruelty — cruelty was noise, and noise was what another Draco would attempt in another time. No – a demonstration. The Malfoy heir in a classroom, precise and substantive, showing that he could handle Potter without raising his voice, without the theatre, without the sneer. This demonstrated that it wasn't a repeat of the old war with children playing, but rather a display of competence, visible to the public, allowing for observation, reporting, and accurate interpretation of its true nature.

Crabbe's breathing had not changed. Steady as a clock, steady as the lake.

The common room would hear about it before lunch. The common room heard about everything before lunch.

Crabbe's breathing. The lake pressing. His thumbnail against his index finger — when had he started doing that? He stilled the hand.

The message would carry in the social fact of it: Malfoy's heir can handle Potter. He's one of ours. And that was not a reputation that could be argued with, because it was not an argument it was a demonstrations. You could question the method. You could not question the result. And then — only then — the cross-house work could begin.

Because a boy who had publicly held his own against Harry Potter could afford to be polite to Susan Bones. A boy who had demonstrated Slytherin competence in front of witnesses could sit with Neville Longbottom in a corridor and the sitting would be read as noblesse oblige, not treason. The dark families would not like it. But they would tolerate it from a Malfoy heir who had already proven his alignment — you might question the method, but a boy who could handle Potter did not need permission to be civil.

The logic chain pulled taut. He blinked. Pansy had seen this. Not the specifics — she had not mapped the Slytherin positioning, had not calculated the Nott risk, had not traced the reporting network from dormitory to dining table to Manor. But she had seen the shape of the problem: distance just looks like indifference. She had given him the answer wrapped in an argument he'd won.

Her voice in the dark, solving what he could not solve alone. He lay still and the fact of it settled —the way the right piece finds the right place.

He watched the new pattern for a moment and let the strategy settle into the shape it would hold.

The cost.

His chest should have been lighter. The strategy was complete, the architecture sound, and his breathing should have eased the way it eased after the Sorting. It had not eased. The quilt pressed down and the weight was the same.

He knew it was there because the strategy, complete and locked, should have brought relief and instead brought the moment after a structure goes up and you look at what was cleared to build it.

The train walkabout. Neville Longbottom's shoulders, relaxing by degrees when Draco spoke to him gently, the physical evidence of a boy who had been handled roughly and was recalibrating his expectations in real time. Susan Bones's directness — her hand offered in a corridor, the frank assessment of a girl raised in a political household who recognised political behaviour and chose to engage with it anyway. Hannah Abbott's openness, her face doing what her words did — welcoming without calculation, the rarest thing.

These were the seeds the train had planted. Cross-house, early, genuine in their warmth even if the warmth was strategic in origin. And the anti-Potter strategy would damage them. Not destroy — the seeds were in the ground, the introductions made, the handshakes exchanged. But the public demonstration that bought Slytherin credibility would cost cross-house goodwill, because a boy who corrected Harry Potter in front of witnesses was not the same boy who had spoken gently to Neville Longbottom in a corridor, and the distance between the two would be visible to everyone who had been in both rooms.

Seeds could be replanted later, from a secure base. The phrase formed with the clean certainty of arithmetic — the numbers added, the answer checked, the sum correct. The green light shifted on the wall beside him, a slow crawl that arrived and departed without repeating, and he watched it for a beat before the mind continued. First the demonstration. First the credibility. Then, from a position the dark families could not challenge, the slower work of reaching across house lines. The early seeds were early and probably would be lost if he was unlucky. They could be resown from stronger ground.

The maintenance. This was not a single action. The anti-Potter positioning would need to be sustained — not a performance but a posture, held for as long as the dark families were watching, which was as long as the dark families existed, which was years. Every public interaction with Potter would be observed and interpreted. Every deviation from the established pattern would generate questions. The strategy was not a door he could walk through and close behind him — it was a corridor he was choosing to walk down, and the corridor had a length measured in school years, and the walking would be the work.

He accepted this. The strategy was sound. The quilt shifted as he exhaled — a long, deliberate breath that left his chest lighter. He would execute.

He would tell Pansy tomorrow. Not the full reasoning — she would work it out herself once she saw him in action. She would need one demonstration, maybe two, and the logic chain would assemble in her mind the way it had assembled in his, and her expression would shift from surprise to satisfaction to the particular look she got when she was already three moves ahead of the conversation. She might, however, feel a quiet disappointment that he hadn't reached further --- toward the grey families, or even some of the more approachable light-aligned houses. Pansy thought the war was over. Everyone did, except him. And in a peacetime world, her instinct to broaden rather than consolidate was the smarter play --- more alliances, wider reach, the Malfoy name reframed as a bridge rather than a wall. She didn't know what was coming. The distance between her strategy and his was the distance between the world as it appeared and the world as it would be.

He would tell her she had been right about the principle. He would watch her hear it.

She was good at this. The best resource he had, when it came to seeing the shape of a problem before the problem announced itself. He would not overlook that again.

Crabbe breathing, steady, the rhythm unchanged since the first hour.

His body was heavy. The weight was not unpleasant. It was the body's answer to the mind's expenditure — everything the mind had assembled, the body now carried, and the carrying was physical, the weight settled into muscles and joints and the specific heaviness of a body that has been still while the mind worked.

Somewhere above him, through stone and water and the castle's architecture, Quirrell was sleeping or not sleeping or doing whatever a man did when he shared his skull with the thing that had killed the Potters. The year was barely begun. Tomorrow there would be classes and corridors and the careful, public work of being a Malfoy among people who watched Malfoys, and the strategy would move from thought to action and the action would have consequences he could not yet see, and the cost was real and seven years was a long time and tonight was the first night and he was awake and the ceiling was green and the water was pressing and the stone was cold and his people were sleeping and the light moved.

He closed his eyes. Sleep did not come quickly. Crabbe breathing again, and sleep came eventually.

 

[Wivk]

What's with the crazy amount of — emdash? Internet once told me real people don't use those much and AI love to use them constantly. Seems to imply this is at the very least AI assisted if not completely AI slop.

 

[Gravepine56]

What's with the crazy amount of — emdash? Internet once told me real people don't use those much and AI love to use them constantly. Seems to imply this is at the very least AI assisted if not completely AI slop.

Click to shrink...

The em dashes are on me — I like how they control pacing in prose so I keep them and use it myself also. As for AI: yes, I use it as a tool for worldbuilding to chapter outline to drafting to revision. English isn't my first language and I'm not a natural writer, but I love stories and have a ton in my head for a long time. Without AI the gap between what I can imagine and what I can put on paper would be too wide to cross for me. Every line has been through my hands. If the use of AI puts you off, I get it.

 

[Ahtu]

Format issues I'm guessing. All the paragraphs got jammed together.

It's literally a chapter of 2 paragraph's pretty unreadable. I tried to slog through it, but lost interest after losing track of where I was twice in a row at one point.

 

[Gravepine56]

Format issues I'm guessing. All the paragraphs got jammed together.

It's literally a chapter of 2 paragraph's pretty unreadable. I tried to slog through it, but lost interest after losing track of where I was twice in a row at one point.

Click to shrink...

Oh no, thank you for pointing that out. I hadn't noticed the formatting broke. It should have proper paragraph breaks throughout. I'll get it fixed. Formatting is the bane of my existence.
Edit: It's fixed now. Thank you again for pointing it out. Fair warning though, every time I try copy it in, the formatting does something stupid. I tried 4 times and had to do it manually. Maybe it was the word-file or I don't know anymore.