"Mum, how do I become friends with Harry Potter?"
In his past life, a young Draco had set down The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts and looked up at his mother with the full expectation of someone who had never yet been told the world might not comply.
"Oh, little dragon—no one can refuse a Malfoy's outstretched hand," Narcissa had said, with a gentle smile. "Go and invite him to be your friend, just as you have with the other children."
"I thought he might need special treatment," eleven-year-old Draco had pressed. "He's a hero, after all."
"We don't grovel to anyone," Narcissa had replied, with easy pride. "My little dragon is such a wonderful child. Just be yourself—natural and generous. That's how you earn friends who actually deserve you."
In those earliest memories, Draco hadn't disliked Potter at all. He'd been curious about him, even excited—what wizarding child hadn't grown up on the story of the Boy Who Lived? His father Lucius had been curious too, though for considerably less wholesome reasons.
"A boy who could defeat the Dark Lord is likely a formidable dark wizard in his own right," Lucius had told his son. "Keep a close eye on him. Show him goodwill when the moment is right, and bring him round to our side."
Draco, too busy being thrilled about meeting the famous Harry Potter to really listen, had nodded eagerly.
The problem, in retrospect, was simple: Narcissa had always applied a generous filter to her son. She overlooked—consistently, tenderly, and entirely—the way Draco's pride occasionally expressed itself as something rather close to contempt. When he extended his hand to Potter aboard the Hogwarts Express, he had done so in precisely the manner he extended his hand to Crabbe: evaluating, performing, and utterly certain the response was a foregone conclusion.
He hadn't considered that there was more than one way to make a friend. He hadn't needed to, until that moment. Most of the boys around him tolerated his manner because they'd always known him, or because it was easier. Potter, who had been surviving on sheer determination in a household that gave him nothing, had taken one look at what Draco was offering and quietly declined it.
I can tell who's worth associating with. The words had stung more than Draco had ever admitted to anyone.
He clicked his tongue softly, walking along the cobblestones.
He understood it now—all of it. He had been spoiled in some ways and starved in others, and he had never quite realised that the manner of speaking his world had taught him was not universally welcome. His pride had mistaken the wound for an insult and spent six years hitting back. He had been, in every way that mattered, an idiot.
Well. He was not that boy any more.
Today had gone well. He reviewed the conversation in Madam Malkin's one final time as he pushed open the door to Ollivanders, satisfying himself that he hadn't put a foot wrong.
Then he stepped inside.
Ollivander's was probably the oldest shop in Diagon Alley, its sign faded and its narrow front easily overlooked between its more ostentatious neighbours. The date 382 BC was worn into the lintel. Inside, it smelled of wood shavings and something older—cedar, perhaps, or the particular dusty warmth of things that have been carefully preserved for a very long time.
Thousands of narrow boxes were stacked almost to the ceiling in long rows.
Narcissa was already inside, wearing the particular expression that meant she had been waiting longer than she considered appropriate.
"Draco, quickly," she said.
He glanced around. Near the back of the shop, a slender adult witch was bent over a girl on the bench, whispering something. The girl's back was to him—brown-haired, slight, apparently browsing the shop's contents with considerable interest while she waited.
Click.
Garrick Ollivander materialised from somewhere among the shelves with the unhurried immediacy that had always made Draco slightly uneasy—a white-haired old man with pale, luminous eyes that gave the impression of measuring you for something other than a wand.
"Good afternoon," Ollivander said softly.
This was a person Draco was careful not to underestimate. The Dark Lord had valued him highly enough to keep him, which said something. And Draco had a sense—half memory, half instinct—that Ollivander knew considerably more about certain extraordinary wands than he let on to casual customers.
But with his mother present and the old wandmaker meeting him for the first time, this was not the moment to ask extraordinary questions. He filed the thought away.
"Another Malfoy." Ollivander drifted closer, his pale gaze travelling over Draco with unnerving thoroughness. "Draco Malfoy. Platinum-blonde hair, like your father's. Grey eyes, yes..." He murmured to himself, as though completing a calculation. "Your father's wand—elm, dragon heartstring, eighteen inches. A fine wand for a wizard of strong conviction." The light in his eyes shifted slightly, noting something. "He also had a silver serpent-head fitted to it, I believe?"
Draco nodded once.
There was a flicker in Ollivander's expression—not disapproval exactly, but a certain reservation. It vanished quickly.
"And Lady Malfoy." He turned briefly toward Narcissa. "Twelve and three-quarter inches, fine redwood, unicorn hair. A wand suited to a witch of great composure. Such redwood is rare these days." He clicked his tongue in wistful admiration.
"Rare indeed," Narcissa said, with a smile that was equal parts graciousness and challenge. "Which is why I came to you personally. I want the finest wand available for my son. Cost is of no concern."
"Mrs. Malfoy, I always say that a wizard chooses a wand—but that's not quite right either," Ollivander replied pleasantly. "More precisely: the wand chooses the wizard. Every wand I make has its own nature, its own affinities. The finest-looking wand in the shop is of no use to a wizard it has not chosen." He drifted closer to Draco—uncomfortably close, his nose nearly level with Draco's face. "We must find the right one."
Behind him, Draco heard Narcissa exhale in a way that conveyed a great deal without saying anything at all.
"Now then, Mr. Malfoy. Which hand?"
"Right."
The measuring tape moved of its own accord—measuring his arm, his span, the distance from elbow to fingertip—while Ollivander disappeared into the shelves with an agility that seemed to belong to someone several decades younger.
He returned with a long box. "Blackthorn, dragon heartstring, nine inches."
Draco took it and waved. Nothing.
"Rowan, dragon heartstring, eleven inches."
Nothing.
Maple. Spruce. Grapevine. Each wand in turn, each producing nothing more than silence. Ollivander's excitement, strangely, seemed to increase with each failure. He moved back and forth in front of his shelves, talking softly to himself, pulling boxes with increasing relish.
"Very challenging," he kept muttering. "Very interesting indeed."
Draco waited, patient as he could manage. He knew what was coming. He simply had to let it arrive.
Narcissa, after a certain point, quietly excused herself—just as she had in his past life, mildly put out by Ollivander's refusal to take direction, slipping out to collect the Potions ingredients from the list.
"Forgive me—I think I've been approaching this incorrectly." Ollivander stopped, reconsidered, and turned to a particular shelf with renewed certainty. He drew out a box and carried it over with both hands. "Try this. Hawthorn, unicorn hair, ten inches. Rather springy." He brought his face very close to Draco's, studying him with the focused intensity of a man reading very small print. "Yes. I think so."
Draco took the wand.
A pale golden warmth spread up through his fingers the instant they made contact.
There it is.
It was a beautiful thing—unpretentious by Malfoy standards, nothing like his father's elaborately adorned elm, or his mother's carved redwood. The body was a deep brown graduating to near-black at the handle, with two clean raised ridges where the fingers naturally settled. Elegant in its simplicity. Balanced, in a way that felt less like holding a tool and more like extending one's own arm.
"Curious," Ollivander said softly, watching the faint light emanating from its tip. "A loyal wand—fiercely so. Suited to a talented wizard, and demanding of one. The unicorn hair is a symbol of purity and constancy." He paused, holding Draco's gaze. "It does make casting certain... darker applications... considerably more difficult."
He glanced up. There was something searching in his expression.
"A Malfoy," he murmured—to himself, it seemed—then blinked and appeared to set it aside. "The same core as your mother's, at any rate. Not entirely surprising."
Draco was no longer listening. He was looking at his wand.
He had missed it—missed it properly, the way you miss something that is genuinely part of you. After Potter had taken it from the Manor, he had gone through wand after wand and none of them had been right. He had waited in the Room of Requirement in part because he'd hoped Potter might return it.
He paid generously and said goodbye to Ollivander with impeccable courtesy, then turned and made his way slowly toward the door, turning the hawthorn wand over in his fingers, allowing himself a quiet moment of relief.
He did not notice, as he passed the bench, that the girl with the brown hair was on her feet now, being handed a wand—grapevine, he thought he caught Ollivander saying—
And then he heard it.
A sound unlike anything the shop had produced in the past hour. A radiance that came not from the hawthorn in his own hand but from behind him, unmistakeable, filling the narrow room.
"Merlin's beard." Ollivander's voice had lost its professional composure entirely. "In over two thousand years of Ollivander's—this has only happened once before. Only once—"
Draco paused.
"Miss Granger," the old wandmaker was saying, in a tone of barely contained wonder. "What vision. What potential. A truly extraordinary witch—"
Granger.
Hermione Granger.
Draco stood perfectly still for a moment, one hand on the door.
She was here. She had been here the whole time.
He thought back—tried to locate this moment in his memories of that first Diagon Alley visit. He couldn't. He had been too absorbed in his parents, in his own excitement, in Potter, in the wand. A girl on a bench had meant nothing to him.
He had walked straight past her.
And apparently, directly in front of her, his grapevine trial had produced some response he hadn't noticed, and hadn't thought to wonder about.
He stood at the door with a complicated feeling he couldn't quite name, and the impulse to look back was stronger than he expected.
He made himself think clearly.
Outside, Lucius was already visible through the glass—arms full of books from Flourish and Blotts, an eagle owl perched on top of the stack, watching the street with offended dignity. He was scanning for Draco with the measured impatience of a man who would not wait much longer.
His father. Pure-blood to the marrow. The worst possible person to be present at an introduction to a Muggle-born witch.
Draco let the impulse go.
Lucius's prejudices were his father's problem, not something Draco intended to make hers. If getting close to her today meant exposing her to that, then today was not the day.
Hogwarts, he told himself. September.
He exhaled—barely perceptibly—and pushed the door open into the afternoon sunlight.