Chapter Text
The thing about Muggles, Draconia had discovered, was that there were so many of them.
It sounded stupid, even in her own head.
Of course there were many of them. She had been told that all her life. Too many. Crawling over the world. Loud, graceless, ordinary, beneath notice unless they became inconvenient.
But knowing a number in theory and standing on a New York pavement at six in the evening were not the same thing.
They pressed around her in coats and shoes and perfume and sweat and cheap coffee, all movement, all noise. Phones chimed. Cars screamed. Someone laughed too loudly behind her. A man brushed her sleeve as he passed and Draconia’s fingers twitched so sharply toward her wand that her nails bit half-moons into her palm.
No wand.
Not here.
Not in the street.
Not unless she wanted a different kind of trial.
She kept walking.
Her heels clicked against the pavement with a steady, expensive rhythm. Black patent leather. Dragonhide, though no Muggle would know that. Her coat was pale grey wool, tailored to her waist, the collar sharp enough to make her look severe rather than frightened. Her hair was pinned back in a smooth, shining knot. Her lipstick was understated. Her gloves were soft black leather.
She looked, by all accounts, like exactly the kind of woman who belonged in an art gallery in Manhattan.
She did not feel like one.
She felt like a girl in the wrong country, in the wrong century, standing in a room where everyone knew the rules except her.
The gallery helped.
The gallery was quiet.
Not silent, of course. Muggles seemed constitutionally incapable of silence. But it had soft footsteps and white walls and deliberate lighting. It had glass and space and people who lowered their voices because someone had taught them that art deserved reverence. Draconia understood reverence. She understood old things, beautiful things, things preserved because someone powerful had once decided they mattered.
She had taken the job because she needed something to do that was not sitting alone in a rented townhouse with a Floo connection carefully disguised behind a false fireplace, reading newspapers from two worlds and trying not to become her mother.
Also, because the owner liked her accent.
“You sound terribly authentic,” Madeleine Voss had said during the interview, smiling over tortoiseshell glasses. “Old world. Elegant. Our clients respond to that.”
Draconia had not asked which old world.
It had taken three weeks to learn how to use the gallery’s computer system without wanting to hex it. It had taken five days to understand that “Can I help you with anything?” did not mean literally anything and that saying, “I sincerely doubt it,” was considered rude. It had taken one deeply humiliating afternoon to learn that Muggle credit cards were not “thin Gringotts tokens” and should not be inspected suspiciously under the light.
But she was improving.
Slowly.
Painfully.
Today, she was arranging catalogues beside the central exhibition hall when the bell above the door gave its discreet little chime.
Draconia looked up.
And immediately knew this was not a normal client.
Not because he was magical. He was not. She would have felt it.
But because he entered like someone who had never once wondered whether he was allowed anywhere.
Dark hair. Sharp beard. Sunglasses indoors, which Draconia had learned was either a sign of blindness, arrogance, or celebrity. Expensive suit, though worn as if he had forgotten it was expensive. A faint blue glow under his shirt that made her eyes narrow before she could stop herself.
Not magic.
Something else.
Behind him came two men in dark suits. Security, probably. They had the blank, watchful posture of wizards pretending not to hold wands.
The man removed his sunglasses.
His eyes swept the gallery once, quick and bright and deeply irritating.
Then they landed on her.
“Hi,” he said. “You look like you’re about to tell me not to touch anything.”
Draconia straightened. “I was considering it.”
His mouth twitched. “Good instinct.”
“I find it often is.”
He looked delighted by that, which was unfortunate.
Most people looked embarrassed when Draconia was rude to them. Or offended. Or politely confused.
This man looked as though she had just handed him a toy.
“Tony Stark,” he said, stepping closer and offering his hand.
Draconia looked at it.
A hand.
Bare. Muggle. Warm, presumably.
The old revulsion rose before she could stop it, ugly and trained into the bone. Not just revulsion, no. Fear tangled with it now. Memories she hated. Hands grabbing robes. Hands on her shoulder in the Manor. Bellatrix laughing. Potter’s wand at her throat. Her own wand shaking in her fingers while the world burned itself clean around her.
The pause lasted half a second too long.
Stark noticed.
Of course he did.
His expression did not change much, but something in his eyes sharpened.
Draconia forced herself to take his hand.
It was warm.
Dry.
Human.
Not dirty. Not contaminating. Not anything except a hand.
She shook it once and released him.
“Draconia Malfoy.”
“Draconia,” he repeated. “That’s a hell of a name.”
“Yes.”
“No nickname?”
“No.”
“Noted.”
“I should hope so.”
His smile widened.
Draconia decided, immediately and with great conviction, that Tony Stark was insufferable.
Unfortunately, he was also very rich.
Madeleine appeared from her office with the subtle speed of a woman who could smell commission through walls. “Mr. Stark. How lovely to see you.”
“Madeleine,” he said, kissing the air beside both her cheeks with the ease of a man who performed charm like breathing. “You said you had something that would make me forget the last aggressively beige installation I bought.”
“I said I had something provocative.”
“You say that a lot.”
“And yet you keep returning.”
“Because I’m an optimist.”
Draconia nearly snorted.
She covered it by adjusting the catalogues.
Stark glanced at her.
Damn.
Madeleine smiled. “Draconia has been assisting with the private collection. She has a remarkable eye for provenance.”
“I bet she does,” Stark said.
Draconia looked at him sharply.
There was nothing in his tone that said he knew anything. No accusation. No suspicion.
But there was curiosity.
A dangerous amount of it.
Madeleine gestured toward the rear hall. “Shall we?”
Stark moved, then paused beside Draconia. “You coming, no-nickname?”
“I work here.”
“Great. That’s a yes.”
Draconia looked at Madeleine.
Madeleine gave her a tiny, eager nod.
Traitor.
So Draconia followed them into the private viewing room, where three paintings had been placed under controlled lighting: one abstract, one grotesque, one old enough that Draconia instinctively trusted it more than the others.
Stark stopped in front of the abstract first.
It was a violent arrangement of red and black strokes, meant to evoke industrial collapse or rage or possibly someone losing a fight with a paintbrush.
He tilted his head.
“No.”
Madeleine’s smile did not falter. “No?”
“No.”
“It’s considered one of—”
“It looks like my lab after a bad Tuesday.”
Draconia said, before she could stop herself, “Then perhaps your lab requires better discipline.”
Silence.
Madeleine’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly.
One of Stark’s security men made a sound suspiciously like a cough.
Stark turned his head slowly toward Draconia.
For one moment she wondered if she had gone too far.
Then he laughed.
Not politely. Not because he was expected to. He actually laughed, quick and startled and warm.
“Oh, I like her.”
“I am not part of the collection,” Draconia said coolly.
“Shame. You’d sell.”
“I assure you, Mr. Stark, I would be prohibitively expensive.”
“Yeah,” he said, still smiling. “I got that.”
He moved to the second piece, the grotesque one. A distorted human figure with too many hands and no face.
Draconia hated it immediately.
Not because it was ugly. Ugly could be meaningful. Ugly could be true.
She hated it because the facelessness felt deliberate.
Because she had spent too much of her life watching people become categories instead of people.
Mudblood. Blood traitor. Death Eater. Victim. Criminal. Survivor.
Stark was quiet beside her.
“That one bothers you,” he said.
Draconia’s spine stiffened. “I didn’t say that.”
“No. Your face did.”
“My face did no such thing.”
“Your face is very loud for someone trying to be mysterious.”
She turned to him, icy. “And you are very observant for someone trying to be frivolous.”
His smile changed.
Only a little.
But it became less easy.
Madeleine, sensing either tension or opportunity, began speaking about the artist’s commentary on post-war identity, state violence, and collective guilt.
Draconia listened with her hands folded in front of her.
Post-war identity.
How quaint.
How very clean it sounded when Muggles said it in galleries under perfect white lights.
As though guilt could be mounted, framed, and sold.
As though violence became more civilized once someone wrote an artist’s statement about it.
Stark did not look at the painting anymore.
He looked at Draconia.
She hated that too.
Finally, he said, “You don’t like art that begs to be understood.”
Draconia looked at him despite herself.
He shrugged. “Just a guess.”
“I dislike art that confuses obscurity with depth.”
Madeleine made a faint noise of distress.
Stark looked delighted again. “See? That. That’s good. Put that in the catalogue.”
“I would rather resign.”
“Also good.”
Then he moved to the third painting.
This one was older. Seventeenth century. A woman in dark green standing beside a window, one hand resting on a closed book. Her face was pale and unsmiling. There was a pearl at her throat. Behind her, beyond the window, a storm gathered over a grey sea.
Draconia had liked it from the moment it arrived.
Not that she had said so.
Liking things was still difficult.
Stark stopped in front of it and went still.
A real stillness, not the theatrical pause of a man deciding what reaction suited him best.
Draconia noticed before she could help it.
Madeleine softened her voice. “A private collector in Vienna held it for nearly sixty years. The attribution is still debated, but the provenance is quite strong.”
Stark said nothing.
Draconia watched him watch the painting.
For the first time since he entered, he seemed less like a man filling a room and more like one standing at the edge of something.
“The book is closed,” Draconia said.
His eyes flicked to her. “Yeah?”
“She is posed as though she has been interrupted while reading, but the book is closed. Her hand is not marking a page. She is not returning to it.”
Stark looked back at the painting.
Draconia continued, quieter despite herself. “The storm is outside, but the light is inside. Everyone assumes the drama is the weather. It isn’t.”
“What is it?”
“She has already made her decision.”
Stark’s expression shifted.
Not much. But enough.
Madeleine glanced between them, sensing the sale forming in the air like weather pressure.
Stark asked, “And what decision is that?”
Draconia looked at the painted woman’s pale, composed face.
To stay.
To leave.
To survive.
To become something else before the world decided for her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “That is why it is good.”
For a moment, no one spoke.
Then Stark said, “I’ll take it.”
Madeleine beamed. “Excellent choice.”
Draconia looked away from the painting.
Ridiculous, really. To feel anything about a Muggle painting. To stand here in a Muggle room beside a Muggle man and feel, for one treacherous second, understood by oil and canvas.
Stark stepped back while Madeleine began discussing logistics with the security men.
He ended up beside Draconia again.
“You’re not from here,” he said.
“No.”
“England?”
“Yes.”
“Old money?”
Draconia gave him a cutting look. “That is an American question.”
“That means yes.”
“That means it was vulgar.”
“That also means yes.”
She should have disliked him more for that.
She did dislike him.
Mostly.
He leaned slightly closer, voice dropping. “So what’s an old-money English ice sculpture doing working in a Manhattan gallery?”
Draconia’s jaw tightened.
Ice sculpture.
She had been called worse.
Princess. Death Eater. Coward. Malfoy.
“I am expanding my horizons,” she said.
“Is that what we’re calling it?”
“That is what I am calling it.”
“And what are we not calling it?”
Her eyes snapped to his.
There it was again.
Too much intelligence under the performance.
A man like that was dangerous. Not because he knew things. Because he knew when there were things to know.
Draconia’s voice went very soft. “Mr. Stark, I do not believe we are acquainted enough for you to ask me personal questions.”
“No,” he said. “Probably not.”
A pause.
Then, unexpectedly, he stepped back.
Not far. Just enough to give her space.
Draconia noticed.
She wished she had not.
He put his sunglasses back on, though they were still indoors. “For the record, I wasn’t trying to be an ass.”
“Do you find that intent often alters outcome?”
His mouth curved.
“Less often than I’d like.”
That was almost honest.
How irritating.
Madeleine returned with paperwork, and the moment shifted back into transaction. Money, shipping, insurance. Safe topics. Muggle topics. Draconia stood by, composed and useful, answering when asked, translating provenance into palatable certainty, pretending she did not know three different charms that would preserve the painting better than any climate-controlled crate.
When Stark finally left, he paused at the door.
“Draconia Malfoy,” he said, as if testing the shape of it again.
“Yes?”
“I’m going to remember that name.”
A cold thread slid down her spine.
Names mattered.
Names followed.
Names condemned.
But his tone was not threatening. Only curious. Warm, even. As though being remembered by Tony Stark was a compliment.
Perhaps, in this world, it was.
“How unfortunate for us both,” she said.
He grinned.
Then he was gone, swallowed by the evening street and camera flashes and the strange, glittering machinery of Muggle fame.
Draconia stood very still after the door closed.
Madeleine sighed happily behind her. “Well done. He liked you.”
Draconia looked at the empty doorway.
Her palm still reme
mbered the warmth of his hand.
“That,” she said, “seems premature.”
But later, alone in her townhouse, after she had warded the windows and removed her gloves and lit the fireplace with a snap of her fingers, Draconia sat on the edge of her bed and thought of a man with too-clever eyes looking at a painted woman before a storm.
She thought of a closed book.
A decision already made.
Then she laughed once, bitter and quiet, into the empty room.
Exposure therapy, indeed.