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The first time Draco Malfoy asked Mr. Ollivander to accept him as an apprentice, the old wizard laughed bitterly and threw him out, waving a misshapen hand.
The second time Draco asked, Mr. Ollivander didn’t laugh or wave, but his expression was as shuttered as the windows of his shop.
The third time, he looked almost sad as he shook his head.
The fourth time, the old wandmaker studied the young man with age-fogged eyes, reading his face, turning over Draco’s slight shifts of expression as though they were the leaves of a book. A few hours later, much to the mystification and horror of his parents, Draco informed them that their son and heir, the scion of the Malfoy line, was planning to enter a trade.
~~~~~~
Draco couldn’t have told you why exactly he’d sought Ollivander out. The loss of his own wand to Harry Potter during the War had been traumatic, of course — as was the knowledge that he had unknowingly had the loyalty of the most powerful wand in wizarding history. Perhaps that alone would have been enough, but there were two other things.
After all the trials were over, Potter returned Draco’s wand. Potter, being Potter, could have done nothing else. Draco was grateful to him, and resented that gratitude, and every time he used the wand he was reminded of it — but that was not the worst bit.
A wand willingly given owes its loyalty to its new owner, and Draco’s wand served him still. But where before it had been like an extension of his body, doing magic with it now was like dancing with a partner who was ever so slightly behind the beat. He felt a stiffness in his magic that wasn’t there before.
Draco figured if he was going to be thinking about bloody wands all the time anyway, he might as well be getting some use out of the obsession.
~~~~~~
It was three years into Draco’s apprenticeship when Hermione Granger first saw him at the shop, sitting in a dark alcove and making an inventory of cores by wandlight. He wasn’t surprised to see her; Mr. Ollivander didn’t talk much about his clients, but she had been in regularly for years now, and something like that will come up in conversation.
Granger lost her wand to the Snatchers just before the end of the war, and since then nothing really seemed to work for her. The wandmaker had even tried to reproduce the lost wand, vine wood precisely 10¾” long with a dragon heartstring core, but it was no good. She was a powerful witch and many wands responded well to her, but she still hadn’t found one that moved with her the way the lost one had.
Draco’s pity for her was mixed with smugness. He hadn’t even tried to replace his wand, and if the bookworm’s struggles were anything to judge by, he’d made the correct choice. Life just hands you a pile of broken pieces that will never fit together; you’d have to be a fool to try to make anything of it, and Draco Malfoy was no fool. The thought made him smile a bit as he looked up at her. He’d expected to see her there one day, so that was the extent of his reaction.
The same could not be said for Hermione.
“What in Merlin’s name is he doing here?” she gasped at Ollivander.
“He’s my apprentice,” the wandmaker replied. Draco knew him well enough by now to catch the humor in his tone. The old man was still bemused by the fact that he’d taken the young Malfoy in, even after all these years.
“Well, I don’t trust him,” Granger snapped. “I hope you’ve been keeping that Janus-faced ferret away from anything to do with me.” She laid the most recent wand down on the counter and shot him a look that made it clear its poor performance was now being laid at Draco’s doorstep.
“What’s a Janus?” asked Draco. He didn’t add anything else, but he managed to instill a fair amount of hauteur into those four syllables.
“Honestly, Malfoy, you’re an ignoramus,” she replied. “All that Latin for spells, and you never learned about the Roman gods?”
Turning back to Ollivander, she continued on. “I think I’d like to try that 9¾” alder wand, you know the one, I know I had it for a few weeks last year but maybe I didn’t really give it enough time...”
Draco turned back to his task. He had no desire to spar with Granger anymore, and he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of seeing him upset. They weren’t school children, and she was just going to have to accept that she was in the same boat as he: both of them stuck with wands that would never quite measure up to their memories; war veterans who were never going to return to wholeness and innocence again.
~~~~~
The Manor was empty when he stepped inside, the entry hall echoing. Where was all the furniture, where were the enchanted mirrors? Where were the carpets woven from a single, endless strand, which his mother had bought in Wizarding Baghdad on her honeymoon?
Draco looked around, confused, and then it came to him. Of course, he realized with a shock. All of that had been cleared away. How could he have forgotten? The Dark Lord didn’t like clutter, and the Dark Lord must be obeyed. Draco had walked into the hall, across the light puddled on the floor where the carpets should have been, when he took the fateful step. He always remembered just a moment too late, and by then the screaming had already started.
“Mother!” he cried, cursing himself. Why did he never stop before he took that step? He tried to break into a run toward the screams, knowing it was useless. The air held him; his feet stuck. It was like trying to run through glue. Had the Dark Lord placed another enchantment here? Was he going to be too late to even keep her from dying alone?
“You’re too late, Draco,” his aunt’s voice whispered. “You’ll never make it in time.” Turning to look he found her beside him, all mad eyes and tangled dark hair, her expression quite calm. Of course, she was right. He stopped fighting, looking back toward the staircase, listening to the fading screams.
Draco struggled awake, his muscles still remembering their futile struggle, his ears still filled with his aunt’s voice. It took him a moment to realize that he had been dreaming again, another moment to remember that his mother was alive and safe, and that Bella was dead dead dead.
~~~~~
“I found out who Janus is,” he greeted Granger the next time she came to the shop.
“The two-faced god,” she replied, squinting at him.
“The god of doors and gates,” he answered. “The god of past and future. Of beginnings and endings.”
Her squint shifted into something else — she looked at him speculatively, clearly a bit surprised.
“But you got it wrong, Granger. I have only one face, and it looks backward. All my doors are shut. I was lucky that Ollivander took me in, for all that my parents seem to think I’m doing something beneath me.”
“What?” said Ollivander, hearing his name. “Who is it?” He bustled up from the back of the shop. “Ah, Ms. Granger. The alder gave you some trouble, did he?” And Hermione pulled her eyes from Draco’s face, turning her attention to the old man.
~~~~~
The Manor was empty when he returned home, the entry hall echoing. Where was all the furniture? The carpets Mother had bought on her honeymoon?
Draco remembered with a shock. All of that had been cleared away. How could he have forgotten? The Dark Lord didn’t like clutter, and the Dark Lord must be obeyed. Draco walked into the hall, crossing the pooled window light, realizing just as he took the fateful step. The screaming started.
“Mother!” he screamed, horrified. Why did he never stop before he took that step? He tried to run, already knowing it was useless. The lethargy set in, his muscles froze. He was going to be too late to even be with her at the end.
“You’re too late, Draco,” Bella whispered. “You’ll never find her in time.”
“Mother!” he shouted again, ignoring her, straining for the stairs.
“Mother!” his aunt echoed, mocking. “You think that’s your mother?”
~~~~~
“Why did you come to me?” the wandmaker asked one evening as Draco was preparing to go back to the Manor. The two of them had closed up the shop, and the old man was sipping his customary cup of tea while Draco put the last few things in order.
“You know this story, sir,” Draco answered. “I already told you.”
“I know the story you told then,” Ollivander replied. “I want to hear the one you’ll tell now.”
Draco resisted the desire to roll his eyes, instead forcing himself to consider the question. He took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “It seemed natural,” he said. “I had once been the master of both wands wielded in the final battle between...,” he trailed off. That wasn’t it. That was an old story, Ollivander had heard it before.
“Because I was tired of being a tool,” he started again, feeling for the words like you’d feel for a step in the dark, “and I thought I’d rather make them instead.” He looked up at the old man, waiting for a reaction.
The wandmaker just nodded slowly, breathing in the steam from his tea, a slight smile on his lips.
~~~~~
Draco cursed under his breath. The old man had finally allowed him to begin cutting down the wood for a wand, which he’d been longing to do for literally years, and he was making an absolute cock-up of it. It would have been one thing if he’d been allowed to use magic, even with his bloody two-left-foot wand, but the wandmaker insisted that the shaping be done by hand.
Ollivander watched impassively as the young man struggled. It was a bit unnerving, how calm he was, and the stint in the Malfoy dungeons had done nothing to ameliorate his oddness. Draco had actually come to rather like it. The moon eyes seemed to see him without judging, a miraculous feat considering what the man had suffered at the hands of the Malfoy family.
Draco swore again as his attention, drawn to thoughts of that time, wandered away from the edge of the blade and he cut too deeply into the fir branch he was working.
“It’s this bloody stick you gave me to work with,” he said to the wandmaker. “It’s full of knots. Why couldn’t you just let me start with a straight branch?” He looked disdainfully at the wood in his hand. “This is never going to make a decent wand.”
Ollivander let out a breath that could have been a laugh.
“The tree that gave that branch lived high in the mountains, on the very edge of where its species can take root. It endured the winds, struggled in poor soil for enough water to survive. To make the branch you hold in your hands, which its lowland brothers could have grown in a season, took it many years.”
As he spoke Draco turned the branch over in his hands, picturing the pathetic little tree clinging on to life, the cold, the constant wind.
“That tree had no choice about where to grow. It did what it needed to survive where it was planted, and those knots you think are flaws I see as a sign of strength,” the old man continued, reaching out a bent and shaking finger and running it over the roughly-shaped branch.
Draco’s eyes snapped up to meet Ollivander’s, finding the wandmaker’s gaze already meeting his own. “We all must work with what we’re given,” he said deliberately, and Draco looked quickly back to the branch to hide his reaction to the words.
~~~~~
The Manor was empty when he returned home. Where was all the furniture, the carpets?
It came back with a shock. How could he have forgotten? The Dark Lord didn’t like clutter, and the Dark Lord must be obeyed. Draco walked into the hall, across the puddle of light, knowing something was wrong before he took the fateful step. The hall filled with the sound of screaming.
“Mother!” he screamed, his horror like a punch to the gut. Why did he never stop before he took that step? He tried to run, knowing it was futile. The pain in his stomach spread and he looked down, his hand coming away stained with blood. He was going to be too late to even be with her at the end.
“You’re too late, Draco,” a woman whispered, her voice sweet and clear, “You’ll never find her in time.”
“You’re wrong. I will save her,” he answered, turning to look at her. A beautiful young woman knelt next to him, a wand in her hand.
“You don’t even know whom you mean to save,” she answered, lowering the wand. Something about it looked very familiar.
“I do. My mother...” But as the words left his lips he knew he was wrong. Who was it, then? Screams he knew, a voice he’d heard before...
~~~~~
The next time Hermione came in to Ollivander’s shop, Draco was waiting for her. “I have something that belonged to you,” he said, “but I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea to give it back.”
“If it’s mine of course you should,” she replied tartly.
“That’s just the thing. It isn’t. It belonged to you, but it doesn’t anymore.”
“Malfoy, I’m not here to play games with you. We didn’t even play games as children, and I am certainly not going to start now. Where is Mr. Ollivander? I need to talk with him about this hawth...” And her words cut off as if they’d been Severed when she saw what Draco was holding out to her.
Her wand. The wand. She knew it instantly and she snatched it from him, breathless with shock. Watching her joy, Draco remembered his own the day Potter the Painfully Pure and Righteous had given his wand back to him. Once he would have taken the opportunity to rub it in, but instead he held out a warning hand to her.
“You can keep it if you want,” he said, “but it won’t be the same.” He gave a self-mocking little shrug and drew out his own. “It was taken from you, just like mine. I found it at the Manor but I don’t even know who took it, so there’s no way to get them to give it back to you. I’m not entirely sure it will even work.”
She turned from him and made a gesture, whispering an incantation to the wand like a mother to a colicky child, and a fragile white wisp emerged from the tip. When she looked back at Draco her eyes were glazed with tears.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it won’t be any comfort, but I do understand a bit how you feel.”
~~~~~
Draco returned home to the empty Manor, his feet echoing on the bare floor. Light streamed down from a high window and he stopped to look at it. Something ran along the edges of his mind like a mouse; there was something he should be remembering.
It came back with a shock. How could he have forgotten? The Dark Lord was coming, and the Dark Lord must be obeyed. Draco walked farther into the hall, the walls rushing away from him on either side, each step making the space feel larger, and suddenly the whole hall was filled with the sound of screaming.
“Mother,” he called, but the screams were coming from everywhere and none of them were hers, and suddenly he knew exactly where he was -- he’d eaten there daily for more than six years. It was just hard to recognize when it was full of swirling darkness and flashes of light, silver masks flaring in the spell-light, dying screams instead of classmates’ laughter.
“You’ll never get there in time,” a voice said to his right, and he turned to see Ginny Weasley standing next to him.
“You’re wrong,” a woman’s voice replied, and he knew that voice, knew it now and knew it as it was when she was a child, and knew it as it had been in wordless screams on his parents’ drawing room floor. “Expecto Patronum,” she continued, and a silver streak flew out of her wand and swirled past him like mercury in a bowl, its motion liquid and powerful.
An otter.
As it swam past him, the sounds of battle sank into silence, the light dimming and turning green. Draco took in a breath in surprise but the air was heavy in his chest and provided no relief. He turned his head and saw that the swirling shapes that he’d thought were Death Eaters and Dementors moved too slowly, weaving, like a forest in the wind. Finally he looked up, seeing far above his head the enchanted ceiling with its hovering candles. They blurred and wobbled and he tried to reach up to rub his eyes, but the wind-dancing shadows had wound themselves around his wrists and ankles and finally he understood. He was under water. He’d been drowning the whole time.
~~~~~
The next day Draco told Mr. Ollivander what he had done. The old man was not pleased.
“You should know better, Mr. Malfoy. Have I not taught you anything in these three years?”
“Yes, sir,” he answered. “I should have asked you before I showed it to her — but it was hers, you see, and I kept having these dreams...”
“What dreams?”
“It’s always been the same, since the War. The Dark Lo... Voldemort, in the Manor; my mother in danger, hurting because of something I’d done. You were there, sir, you know as well as anyone how it was.”
“That sounds like an understandable nightmare, Mr. Malfoy, given your experiences. Perhaps you should make the time to talk with a healer about it, though, if it’s still returning to you.”
“But it changed, sir. The last few times it wasn’t my mother, but Granger... and the woman in my dream was holding her wand, which made me think to look for it in the Manor. When I found it I just had to...” the words dried up in Draco’s mouth. “It wasn’t mine, you see. I couldn’t keep it.”
“I understand your impulse, boy, if not your impulsiveness. But then, you are still young. Like Hermione, all youth and fire... no wonder she was such a match for the dragon heartstring.” Ollivander drifted off, thinking about the wand no doubt. Draco was quiet for a moment too, but something made him speak.
“Fire, sir?”
“Yes, that’s the element associated with dragon heartstring. Not as strongly as phoenix feather, of course, but...”
“That’s odd,” Draco replied. “I wouldn’t have thought fire. Her Patronus takes the form of a water creature... an otter, I think.”
“Does it now,” the wandmaker demanded, his moon eyes flaring with sudden interest. “Are you quite sure?” Draco nodded and he continued. “Water, how fascinating. Then there’s a chance... it’s not been done in centuries. The vine is correct, that much is absolutely certain. But... my boy, have you ever heard of selkies?”
“Shapeshifters, aren’t they? Seal women...” And as soon as the words left his lips, Draco’s silver eyes flared up to match the glow in Ollivander’s golden ones.
~~~~~
It took longer than even Ollivander had expected to convince a selkie to part with a whisker. The old man went across the sea to Ireland, dropping his seven tears into the waves every day and waiting for the sleek, dark faces to appear beneath the water and gaze up at him with their intelligent eyes. Draco had just had word from him by owl, a letter full of complaints and pontifications about why selkie-whisker wands had fallen out of favor, the afternoon that Granger came back in.
“I’m sorry, Granger, are you here about your new wand? It’s not ready yet,” he said.
“No, I’m not” she said, then nothing else, the silence stretching like shadows on an evening street.
Draco stood facing her on that quiet road, and every shard of history behind him made it clear he had no reason to talk to her, none at all.
He started to turn away, but Granger’s brown eyes stopped him.
“You were right, you know,” she said. “And you were wrong.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You were right about ‘Janus-faced.’ I meant it as an insult, but he wasn’t just ‘two-faced,’” she said. “And you were wrong — you don’t look backward.”
“You’re too late,” the dream voice hissed in his mind, “you’ll never find her.” Draco flinched and closed his eyes.
“Stop it,” Hermione said. “You’ve always been a coward, but I can’t bear to see you running away from this. You think you’re looking backward, but you aren’t. You’re hiding. You haven’t looked back, not really, and that’s why you can’t see the way forward. You have to face the past to see the future.”
She reached out a finger and ran it over the back of his hand, gentle. And she was nothing like Ollivander, nothing, but the gesture reminded him so strongly of the old man that he held his breath.
“You’re not half bad, Draco Malfoy. And given where you grew up, that’s an achievement. Don’t think I’m blaming your parents, it’s far deeper and far older than that. None of us can help it, you know, where we’re born. You grew where you were planted, and did what was expected, and I have learned to understand that. We all have to work with what we’re given. But you have. Worked with it, I mean.”
Draco dared a glance at her eyes, then back down, to where her filthy finger still pressed against the back of his white hand. A wave of the old disgust at her dirtiness washed through him, followed by a rush of shame for thinking that way.
“You’re too late, you’ll never...”
“You’re wrong,” he thought. “I will.” Embracing the shame he felt, wielding the heat of it against the ancient cold revulsion, he almost laughed at the irony. What a feat, he thought, to be proud of being ashamed. His father could certainly never have done it.
When Draco looked up again, he was giving her a sad but genuine smile.
Hermione caught her breath a little at the sight of it. She could see it in his face, how long it had taken him to grow, what it had cost him to give to her.