Parents like Lucius and Narcissa, who spoiled their son with a particular and unapologetic thoroughness, were not likely to overlook any occasion that warranted a significant gift — and a birthday was not a small occasion.
On the last morning of July, after breakfast, Lucius presented Draco with a Nimbus Two Thousand and One.
"It was originally scheduled for release in mid-August," Lucius said, with the faint air of a man who had arranged things satisfyingly. "I know someone. A finished model, delivered early. As for the team brooms — the ones being donated to Slytherin — I've already placed the order and will collect them from Diagon Alley shortly."
Draco took the broom and unwrapped it with a speed that was entirely undignified, running his hand along the handle with what he knew was visible delight and did not particularly try to hide.
"Draco." Lucius's tone carried a note of pointed amusement. "What have I said about emotional displays?"
Draco straightened, arranging himself into the appropriate expression, and glanced sideways at his mother.
Narcissa, who had been drinking her tea with the serene patience of someone watching a familiar play, set her cup down.
"Lucius," she said, "you were considerably more anxious than Draco when you were pulling strings to get that broom ordered ahead of time."
The carefully composed authority on Lucius's face evaporated. He took a long sip of tea and did not quite look at his son.
Draco remained perfectly still with his expression of mild, filial suffering, which he had found was the most effective available to him.
Lucius studied him briefly, then looked away with the air of a man who has realised he has been outmanoeuvred but cannot determine precisely when it happened. He occupied himself with refilling Narcissa's cup.
Draco smiled inwardly.
He had spent much of his previous life overlooking his mother's particular kind of power. She was gentle, composed, and meticulous about appearances — a proud noblewoman, first of House Black and then of House Malfoy — and he had read her, as a boy, as simply that. He had directed his admiration at his father's sharpness and tactical intelligence, without ever turning the same attention on the woman who managed Lucius Malfoy.
He had learned better.
After Lucius went to Azkaban, Narcissa had stepped into the gap left by his absence and held everything together by sheer will — the family name, the finances, the social connections, the appearance of stability — while privately working toward his release. She had made an Unbreakable Vow for Draco without hesitation. She had lied to Voldemort's face on the battlefield and done it successfully.
She was formidable. She had always been formidable. He simply hadn't been paying attention.
"Draco," Narcissa said, in her usual measured tone. "How has your practice been? Your father has spoken to Severus; the arrangement is in place for you to participate in the selection trials at the start of term."
"I'd rather make it on ability than on the donation," Draco said — meaning, specifically, Lucius's plan to replace the entire team's brooms.
Lucius made a sound that was not quite a laugh.
Narcissa dismissed this with the brisk practicality of someone who found sentimentality about money a minor character flaw. "Don't be foolish. Connection and ability are not opposites. The Crabbe family tried the same approach, and Severus has been put out about it for weeks — they don't have the resources to follow through credibly, which makes the whole thing embarrassing. Your father resolved it by committing to the Slytherin team brooms himself. The difference is that we can actually afford it, and the brooms genuinely needed replacing. Slytherin lost the Cup and the Quidditch match last year. This is practical, not sentimental."
"Slytherin's double defeat cost me considerably on the Board of Governors," Lucius said, with a slight grimace. "It won't happen again."
Draco nodded. He was confident in his own abilities and knew he would make Seeker regardless of the donated brooms. The donation was simply a fact about the Malfoy family, not a statement about his talent. He had wasted a good deal of his first Hogwarts years caring bitterly about the whispers behind his back, about whether his teammates respected him, about the distinction between what he'd earned and what he'd been given.
He was not doing that again.
"I'll make the team," he said simply. "Don't worry about it."
Narcissa looked satisfied. Lucius chose to interpret the statement as modest confidence rather than implicit criticism, which was probably the wisest available reading.
---
After the birthday breakfast, rather than going directly to the potions-making room, Draco went to his own quarters and retrieved several letters from the locked drawer of his antique mechanical desk.
He read through them again.
The first two were from Fred and George.
The first reported the development of a Punching Telescope — still in need of refinement, as George's eye was evidence of — and enclosed a sample of improved Skiving Snackboxes with instructions, noting that Fainting Fancies and Fever Fudge were still in development but that Nosebleed Nougat remained their most promising product. It also mentioned, with apparent satisfaction, that Ron had already served as an involuntary test subject.
The second noted that an initial owl-order campaign had produced more than a dozen responses, which they considered a good start. It also mentioned a proposal from "Joko" at an apothecary to consign the biscuits on a commission basis, and asked Draco's opinion on whether this was worth pursuing. The postscript — a cheerful warning to hide his valuables, as Arthur Weasley was currently conducting raids on wizarding households for Dark artefacts — was, Draco assumed, meant to be funny.
The third letter was from Hermione.
She had thanked him for recommending Powerful Potion-Making — which she had apparently consumed over the first fortnight of the holidays with predictable thoroughness — noted that several of the potions discussed were controversial, which hadn't stopped her from studying them, and lamented that she couldn't practise them because of the Ministry's Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery. Did children from wizarding families have the same restriction? She had asked this with genuine curiosity and no apparent expectation that the answer would be anything other than yes.
Then, at the end: she had written to Harry twice and not received a reply. She was probably being paranoid. She'd heard his aunt and uncle didn't much like wizards.
Draco set the letters down.
He had not replied to Hermione's question about Harry. He hadn't had anything useful to tell her at the time. He had been keeping a peripheral awareness on the situation — Harry's Muggle relatives, left entirely to their own instincts, could be relied upon to make Harry's summers unpleasant — but he hadn't known how bad it was this summer specifically.
He snapped his fingers.
Dobby appeared.
He was wearing, Draco noted, a small sundress printed with palm trees and coastal scenery, a sailor's hat, and one white and one blue sock.
"Did you spend your entire wage on clothing?" Draco asked.
"Only a few dozen items, little master!" Dobby said, with the gleeful expression of someone reporting excellent news. "Dobby only buys the pretty ones!"
Draco deliberately did not pursue this.
"I need you to go and observe Harry Potter," he said. "His home address is on file with the Ministry — Blaise's mother could find it if she needed to, which means you can. Go now, stay invisible, don't speak to anyone, don't cast spells, don't let yourself be seen. Just watch and report back to me."
Dobby's eyes had gone enormous with barely contained excitement. He was visibly vibrating.
"Go quietly," Draco said, with some emphasis.
Dobby vanished mid-nod.
Draco went to the potions-making room and set about the afternoon's work.
He was making progress, slowly, with the Mandrake Restorative Draught. The primary difficulty was the compound sensitivity of the preparation — the tolerances for ingredient quantity, mandrake maturity, and temperature were individually narrow and collectively unforgiving. Each batch taught him something. Each ruined batch was also a mature mandrake his mother would never know about.
He had been at it for approximately two hours when the potions-room door burst open.
"Little master! Harry Potter is being kept prisoner by Muggles!"
The shock of Dobby's sudden appearance sent Draco's hand sideways. An extra scraping of mandrake root went into the cauldron. The potion, which had been approaching a stable consistency, turned a deeply unpleasant shade of greenish-grey.
Draco looked at it. He looked at Dobby. He cleaned the cauldron with considerably more force than was strictly necessary.
"Speak clearly," he said, when he had controlled his expression. "Facts only, in order. No commentary."
Dobby pressed his slender fingers together and made a visible effort.
"They have locked away his books, his wand, his robes, his cauldron, his broomstick, and his owl. He has been confined to his room and made to do all the household work. His Muggle family are having guests for dinner tonight and he is not to appear." Dobby's voice, though restrained, was vibrating with outrage. "And today is Harry Potter's birthday, little master. Dobby heard him through the window. He was singing Happy Birthday to himself alone."
Draco was quiet for a moment.
He had known, in an abstract way, that Harry's summers at Privet Drive were difficult. He had known about the cupboard under the stairs, about the Dursleys' comprehensive rejection of anything magical, about the particular cruelty of raising a child as a deliberate afterthought in his own home. He had known it as a fact of Harry's history.
Knowing it as something happening right now, today, on Harry's birthday — that was different.
Potter. Arrogant, aggravating, golden Potter, who was the hero of a story he hadn't asked to be in, singing to himself in a locked room.
"You stayed invisible?" Draco asked.
"Dobby hid behind the hedge! Dobby does as his master says!" The little elf stood up straighter, chest puffed, tears now making their inevitable progress down his cheeks. "Dobby would never—"
"Good." Draco was already moving to the writing desk in the corner of the room. He pulled out a sheet of parchment, picked up his quill, and wrote quickly.
The letter was short. He checked it, folded it, and sealed it with the Malfoy stamp — not out of ceremony, but because an unsealed letter from a house-elf looked suspicious.
"Take this to Ron Weasley," he said, handing it to Dobby. "Find him at the Burrow — you know where it is, the Ministry files will have it. Give it to him directly. If he asks you about Harry, tell him what you saw. Don't speak to anyone else. Come back when you have a reply."
Dobby took the letter with both hands, holding it as though it were made of something precious. He looked up at Draco with an expression so full of feeling that Draco briefly averted his eyes.
"Go," Draco said. "Quickly."
Dobby vanished.
The potions-making room was quiet again. Draco looked at the clean cauldron, then at the diminishing pile of mandrakes on the shelf.
He started again.
---
Ron Weasley was having, by any measure, a poor evening.
It was midsummer, it was warm, his twin brothers' experiments had been producing intermittent banging sounds from the room above for three days running, and he was standing in the back garden of the Burrow at dusk, evicting gnomes for what felt like the fortieth time this week. The gnomes of the Burrow were tenacious and lacking in any apparent capacity to learn from experience.
He pitched the twelfth gnome of the hour over the fence and watched it disappear into the hedgerow.
There was a sharp crack behind him.
Ron turned.
A small creature was standing in the garden, wearing a sundress with palm trees on it, a small hat, and mismatched socks. It had enormous eyes and bat-like ears and was regarding him with keen curiosity.
"Harry Potter's friend," it said. "Ron Weasley?"
Ron took a step back. "I — yes. What are you?"
"I am Dobby. My master sent me with an urgent letter." The creature bowed so low its ears nearly touched the ground, and held out a sealed envelope with both hands.
Ron took it cautiously, turning it over. The seal was unfamiliar — a crest, stylised and formal. He held it up to the last of the evening light.
"Is this from Draco Malfoy?" he asked.
"Yes!" Dobby said, nodding vigorously. "My little master says it is an emergency."
Ron looked at the envelope. He looked at the gnome that was already climbing back over the fence. He tore open the seal.
The note inside was short.
"Harry's been locked up at home by the Muggles. Today's his birthday. We have to get him out. Ask Dobby — he saw everything. — Draco."
Ron read it twice. Then he stood very still for a moment while several things rearranged themselves in his understanding.
Harry hadn't been ignoring his letters. Harry had been locked up.
He thought about Harry singing Happy Birthday to himself in a room with a locked door, and felt his throat tighten.
"Tell me what you saw," he said to the house-elf. "Everything."
Dobby told him.
By the end of it, Ron's face was the colour of his hair.
He took the stub of pencil he kept in his pocket — much faster than quill and ink, he'd found, for anything urgent — and scrawled a reply. He folded it and held it out to Dobby, who received it with both hands as though it were a sacred object.
"Right," Ron said, and turned for the back door. "Fred! George!" He took the stairs two at a time and hammered on the twins' door. "I need your help. Right now."
There was a pause in the banging sounds from within.
"That depends," Fred said, through the door.
"On what it involves," George added.
"Rescuing Harry," Ron said. "He's been locked up all summer."
The door opened immediately.