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 chilling 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 was." 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."
He understood what she did not say. He had understood it for years: Narcissa's tendency to ask for one thing while needing another. She strategically placed her important request after the practical one, allowing for its potential rejection without causing awkwardness. 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. "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. 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. 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. A breath. A small Occlumency surface-check, automatic now after years of practice — a brief inventory of what his face was doing, what his posture said. Not fear. Habit. 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, the globe on its brass stand turning slowly between them. 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 — not warmth, but the full weight of his attention, freely given. Two sentences about a wand. From Lucius, not a small thing at all.
"I understand, Father."
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.
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, too small to perform. 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, assessing nothing in particular, then settling into the comfortable blankness of someone who had concluded there was nothing here that 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.
It was not a complaint. It was not a compliment. It was so plainly observational that Draco needed a beat to register it as anything at all. 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 recognized this. Crabbe went blank when there was nothing to notice. Goyle went quiet when there was too much to process. They had been doing this since they were nine. 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."
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. His voice had changed when the boys arrived — easier, quicker. His posture had shifted. He was standing closer to them than he stood to anyone except her. She had noticed all of it.
"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: 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: with the automatic familiarity of someone who had known her since they were nine and the quiet awareness that familiarity was not the same as attention. 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 he might have imagined it, except that he didn't imagine things about Pansy. 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 did not look back at her mother. Her eyes stayed forward, her pace unchanged, and Draco understood — she had heard every word, and the only acceptable response was to give no response at all. She had been curtsying to a chair at half six. He filed that away too, though he wasn't sure yet what to do with it.
"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.
Draco was enjoying himself. The idea just popped into his head and felt weirdly heavy in his chest. He was walking through Diagon Alley with people he liked — his mother composed and commanding at the front, Pansy sharp and honest beside him, Crabbe and Goyle solid at his back. All of them carrying their own burdens, their own blind spots, their own flawed convictions he could not correct and did not try to. He liked them anyway. Each of them. And this liking opened something in him that felt, for a moment, like standing at an edge. He knew that everything he was enjoying could be taken, and that the warmth of this specific morning was not guaranteed to last.
The feeling passed. He let it pass. He put it down and 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, feeling the cold the marble threw even in August, 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.
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."
"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 — which was, he suspected, exactly the timing Pansy would have chosen if she'd had any say in the matter.
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.
Draco felt the depth. The cold pressing in and the weight of stone above them contributed to 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. He was a fourteen-year-old. He was on his way to school. 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. Powerful, temperamental, quick to learn. Bonds strongly. The easiest core to turn to the Dark Arts, though it would not incline 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 composed himself.
"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 — with composed attention and deep feeling underneath. 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 with something that was not quite admiration. She had come prepared to be tested, and she was passing by refusing to react.
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 will hold other students. 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. She filed it away.
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 the patient blankness of someone who had been enduring shops for five hours and would endure them 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 as performance. Controlled, strategic, immaculate Pansy. It had not occurred to him that the performance might have been covering something less composed. He had missed it. 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. 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 observe, a habit she had when the day's structure was complete and her private self momentarily appeared below her public persona.
"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. We had purchased all the supplies, gathered allies, and selected the right wand. After fourteen years of meticulous preparation, the tools were finally within reach. Narcissa spoke the destination. The green flames rose, and the Leaky Cauldron spun away.
Author's Note:
Thanks for reading this far. Two chapters and many words but nobody has cast a spell yet — I promise wands do get used eventually. At least you would think so. This is purely a passion project and I'm genuinely trying, and pretty nervous putting it out there. If you enjoyed it, a comment means more than you'd think. If you have criticism, I'll take it — just remember this is a first-time writer's first draft of a first story, so maybe don't go for the throat.