A/N:Well, hello there. How are you all doing?
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Diagon Alley: a long, winding cobblestone street lined with some of the most
enticing wizarding shops in the world.
How noisy, bustling, and alive it was.
In the past, Draco had mostly scoffed at noisy, chaotic environments like this.
Even now, he still frowned at crowds.
In his view, noise meant disorder—neither elegant nor respectable.
And yet, having lived through the Dark Lord's oppressive rule in his memory, he had
learned to appreciate and cherish this long-lost sense of prosperity.
Groups of black-robed witches and wizards moved noisily down the street with wide,
happy smiles, ducking in and out of shops. Those younger ones barely had to crane
their necks to read the signs. Through the spotless windows, a dazzling array of
magical wares gleamed: flying broomsticks, robes, telescopes, silverware, potions,
potion ingredients, spellbooks, quills, parchment, glass vials, owls, Lunascopes...
Draco observed the bustling scene in silence. A sudden sense of unreality struck him.
This was not the Diagon Alley of his memories.
That image was so vivid, so sharp, it might have happened yesterday:
Large notices posted by the Ministry of Magic had blotted out the colourful shop
windows, plastered with moving photographs of wanted Death Eaters—their distorted
faces grinning and leering, sending a chill through every wizard who passed. His
aunt Bellatrix had been among them.
The streets, once neat and orderly, had been fouled by Death Eater raids and left
filthy. Shops had been ransacked and left to rot. Even Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream
Parlour, which he had loved to visit as a child, had been shuttered—another casualty
of the Death Eaters.
For reasons Draco had never fully understood, the Dark Lord had not spared even a
peaceful ice cream shop owner.
Fortescue had been kind to every young witch and wizard who visited his parlour,
regardless of their background—Muggle-born, pure-blood, even the children of Death
Eaters. When Lucius was imprisoned in Azkaban and Draco's world had crumbled,
Fortescue had still smiled and handed him a cone, when other shopkeepers turned their
backs or spat at the Malfoy name.
Before his death, Fortescue had been seen in the dungeons of Malfoy Manor, driven
half-mad by prolonged exposure to the Cruciatus Curse. Draco had once secretly
brought him food, and had heard him muttering in fragmented, feverish bursts:
"The Elder Wand... Ravenclaw's Diadem..."
That was worth thinking about. Draco turned it over in his mind.
The Dark Lord was searching for the Elder Wand? What was it?
The Dark Lord never wasted effort on useless people. He would not torture someone
without reason—not unless that person held information of the highest importance to
him. Most wizards knew Fortescue only as an ice cream seller. But certain pure-blood
families might have remembered that the man behind the counter was a descendant of
Dexter Fortescue, a former headmaster of Hogwarts. It was not impossible that he
carried secrets others did not.
The Elder Wand was not mere legend—it was real, and the Dark Lord was hunting it. He
recalled how frequently the Dark Lord had changed wands in the later years. After his
original wand proved useless against Potter, he had seized the wand Lucius held as
dear as his own life—only to have it destroyed in the next encounter.
The Dark Lord had called the shattered wand "a supreme glory, a great sacrifice."
Draco had considered that a complete bluff: the sacrifice had been meaningless, and
only his father had paid the price for it. Though Lucius had never spoken of it to
his son, Draco had seen the slight pause before he handed it over—that moment of
hesitation. And when the news of its destruction came, Lucius's face had remained
composed while his hand gripped the hollowed snake-head cane so tightly that Draco
had felt the ache of it across the room.
The Dark Lord had not cared. He was already moving on to a new wand.
Dumbledore's wand had eventually ended up in his hands. Draco remembered the smug
satisfaction on the Dark Lord's face the day it arrived.
It seemed necessary to seek out Fortescue before that ever happened—to find a way to
draw out whatever he knew. Draco, walking hand-in-hand with his mother past the ice
cream parlour, allowed himself one small, private gleam of calculation.
The Malfoys moved along the winding cobblestone street as they always did: set apart
from the crowd of more plainly dressed witches and wizards by something that went
beyond their platinum-blonde hair and immaculate robes. Their bearing alone announced
them—chin up, gait measured, unhurried and precise, the walk of people who had never
needed to hurry for anyone.
Proper presence, his father had always maintained, meant holding your gaze forward
and your posture straight—never craning your neck or rubbernecking like a Muggle
tourist. You allowed others to notice you; you did not scramble for their attention.
For instance: even now, as Draco caught the words of a small cluster of boys pressed
against a shop window—"That's the new Nimbus 2000, the fastest one out"—he kept
his eyes ahead and his expression mild, rather than pressing his nose to the glass
alongside them.
He had been reprimanded by his father in front of that very shop window in his past
life for showing exactly that kind of eagerness. It would not happen a second time.
Besides, Potter already had a Nimbus 2000 this year, and Draco had no intention of
copying the Saviour.
Patience. When the Nimbus 2001 was released next year, the 2000 would be yesterday's
model. He pressed his lips together, reconciling himself to the family's Comet 260
for now. Hogwarts didn't allow first-years to bring brooms, in any case.
As for Potter's exception—that had been a special privilege granted by Dumbledore to
the Boy Who Lived and his favoured Gryffindor Seeker. Draco had never expected to be
on the receiving end of special treatment.
While still occupied with these thoughts, he had already stepped into Gringotts with
his parents.
The bank was a towering, snow-white building that stood head and shoulders above the
surrounding shops. Two sets of doors separated the street from the gleaming marble
hall within—first the burnished bronze outer doors, then a second set of silver,
engraved with a carved warning to all would-be thieves. Beyond them, dark-faced
goblins with long arms, pointed fingers, and sweeping beards bowed low in greeting
and led the Malfoy party through to their vault.
In Gringotts, a vault's location and the method required to open it told a goblin
everything about the standing of its owner. The most heavily protected vaults lay
deepest underground, their doors sealed with ancient magic that no ordinary key could
touch.
As one of the oldest wizarding families in England, the Malfoys kept their wealth at
the lowest level—miles beneath London. The cart had barely left the platform before
it began its plunge, hurtling through a labyrinthine network of tunnels, threading
past massive stalactites and stalagmites, the frigid air whipping past in the
darkness.
The cart slowed as it passed a vast fire-breathing dragon chained to a great iron
stake. Draco caught a glimpse of the creature—once, in another life, the main
attraction that had made the dizzying cart ride almost worthwhile.
He had loved dragons since childhood. But looking at this one now, he found no
grandeur in it.
The animal was far from majestic. Its face was covered in old scars; its scales, once
a shining silver-grey, had gone a wan, papery white. Its eyes were not deep red but a
watery pink. Its hind legs were shackled with heavy chains, its spiked wings folded
flat against its body.
The rumble of the cart seemed to agitate it. The dragon turned its ruined head toward
them and let out a roar that sent loose stones skittering from the ceiling—then
flinched back at the sharp tinkling of the goblins' clankers, those small metal
instruments whose jangling ring it had long since been conditioned to fear.
A truly majestic dragon would be fearless. This one had clearly had its pride broken
by violent taming. Draco watched it a moment longer, then looked away with a quiet
exhale.
The cart came to a stop at the deepest point. A goblin rapped twice on the great
ornate door, and the door dissolved away.
Inside, coins, goldware, silverware, rare gems, exotic furs, and potion ingredients
lay piled in drifts. Of all the wealth the Malfoy family had accumulated over ten
centuries, the Galleons were perhaps the least valuable. The things that could not
simply be bought or replaced were another matter.
Lucius brushed invisible dust from his robes with studied nonchalance, then swept his
snake-headed cane in a casual arc, sending a cascade of Galleons sweeping into
several palm-sized dragonhide pouches.
"Draco, take these—and spend them wisely," he said, handing the pouches to his son.
He cast an idle glance at the vault's interior. "A proper Malfoy must learn to invest,
and to spend where spending is warranted. You will find soon enough that most of the
friends in this world can be secured with gold."
"Yes, Father," Draco replied, as he had in his previous life.
The philosophy was not entirely without merit. For more than a decade, it had helped
the Malfoy family maintain a considerable network of allies inside the Ministry.
The irony, of course, was that when Lucius was taken to Azkaban, every single one of
those allies had recoiled as though burned—and some had even joined in kicking while
he was down. Friendships purchased with gold were inherently unstable. Any higher
bidder could undo them overnight.
The Malfoy family's own motto held that there were no permanent friends, no permanent
enemies—only permanent interests. And interests, of course, were not limited to gold.
Draco pressed his lips together in thought. He had no intention of abandoning the
strategy of winning allies through material means—wielding the power of others was
efficient, and he had no objection to efficiency. But he reminded himself to keep
things in proportion: relationships built on gold were brittle. And those hearts that
gold could not buy were more unpredictable still.
"My dear little dragon—I've already transferred a sum to your private vault." Narcissa
smiled and patted Draco's platinum-blonde head with a warmth she never wore in
company. She leaned in conspiratorially. "Don't tell your father."
Beyond the family treasury, which only the head of the household could access, every
member of the Malfoy family maintained a private vault. Draco's had been opened at
his birth and had been quietly filling ever since.
His grandfather Abraxas had contributed an education fund each year. His maternal
grandfather Cygnus Black—devoted to Narcissa beyond all reason—had added a sum of
Galleons annually as well. And Narcissa herself, one of the wealthiest noblewomen in
the wizarding world, had never once let her son risk going without. She would have
given him an ocean if she thought he needed it.
Draco looked up at her. Her eyes were bright with undisguised love.
She might not have been the person who understood him best. But she had always been
the one who loved him most—who had stood beside him through every dark and anxious
day, and never once stepped back.
Looking back now, Draco saw clearly what he had been too young to see before: his
apparently gentle, easily underestimated mother had become the foundation that held
the family together when everything else was crumbling. Without her, he could not
imagine what would have become of him and his father.
Even after Potter had disarmed him in the final battle, she had slipped her own wand
into his hand without hesitation.
A wand was a wizard's life. In giving him hers, she had given him everything—and
left herself exposed to every danger with nothing to fight back with. Like his
father before her, she had stood unarmed before the hostile Death Eaters who had
occupied Malfoy Manor, facing them down with nothing but composure. They had both
been lambs to the slaughter, and she had never let him see the fear she must have
carried.
This time, let me protect you. He would not see her tired and fearful again. Not
this time.
In his past life, through naivety and vanity and the particular blindness of
boyhood, he had squandered his resources. When the moment finally came that he
wanted to act, that same wealth had already been leveraged by the Dark Lord as a
tool to buy loyalty—and the Malfoys themselves had been reduced from benefactors to
collateral. By then the family had already fallen, and the three of them had become
the Dark Lord's lackeys and money-bags, trembling servants to be drained of their
last drop of use before being discarded.
It was a disgrace.
It would not happen again. He closed his fingers around the pouch, as though
gripping something more than leather and coin.
Draco looked up and gave Narcissa an innocent smile. "Thank you, Mother."
"I'll be prepared," he told himself quietly, "for whatever lies ahead."
The party rode back through the twisting underground passages, and then slowed to a
stop before the Lestrange family vault.
Lucius's expression darkened.
He had no wish for his wife to maintain ties with prisoners rotting in Azkaban. To
the outside world, it was a stain. He had spent years carefully managing the
family's public reputation, and Narcissa's visits to the Lestrange vault undid some
of that work with every trip.
But Narcissa could not abandon her blood, and her ailing father had made her promise
to keep things in order—at the very least, to prevent Bellatrix and her worthless
husband from dying in there through sheer neglect.
She had, as always, found a way to soften him. While Draco turned to address the
goblin—"Is that the Ukrainian Ironbelly, the one chained over there?"—she pressed a
light kiss to Lucius's cheek.
"I won't be long, Lucius," she said with a smile.
That did it. Lucius's tight expression softened despite himself. He shook his head,
watching as Narcissa followed a goblin into the vault.
Not long after, she walked out carrying a small wrapped package with her usual easy
grace.
Draco caught a glimpse through the narrowing gap as the door swung shut: the vault
was not as lavish as the Malfoy family's, but it was no less full. Gold coins, golden
goblets, silver armour, the hides and furs of strange creatures with spines and
drooping wings, potion vials, and skulls set with stones stacked from floor to
ceiling.
The Lestranges had not been poor, then. Bellatrix held the key and could have lived
extremely well. Draco felt a grim, weary kind of regret.
What a waste of a life, he thought. All that and she chose to dress like a madwoman
and follow a madman.
He had no illusions about her. She was ruthless in a way that went beyond fanaticism—
a cold-blooded cruelty that had nothing to do with loyalty and everything to do with
appetite.
Unlike her sisters, Bellatrix had been a genuinely gifted witch—a true master of the
Dark Arts, and one of the most skilled Occlumency practitioners alive. She had even
taught Draco at Narcissa's request. That much he could acknowledge.
But she was also a woman who would sacrifice anything, anyone, for no more than a
word of praise from the Dark Lord. She had killed her own cousin, Sirius Black,
without a second thought—and laughed about it after, as if the shared surname meant
nothing.
Different loyalties did not justify an absence of all limits.
Every wizard held a basic understanding: the wizarding bloodline was Merlin's gift, and
it was not to be discarded. For the great families, expulsion from the family tree was
the harshest punishment; even among houses divided by blood traitors or opposing
beliefs, killing one's own was a line that was simply not crossed.
Bellatrix had crossed it without breaking stride.
Draco glanced at his mother's back as she walked ahead.
She had also tormented Granger.
Merlin. That memory was almost unbearable to sit with. Even as a bystander, he had
barely been able to breathe through it. It occupied a permanent first place among
his worst nightmares, alongside Dumbledore's death on the Astronomy Tower—two
memories he could not visit without the walls closing in.
He was desperate to get his wand.
The first thing he would do with it was turn his Occlumency inward—seal those
suffocating memories behind walls where they could no longer reach him uninvited.