Chapter Text

Chapter One: The Fitting

Cassiopeia

The thing nobody told her about being measured for school robes was how long it took, and how dull the inside of Madam Malkin's was once you had already catalogued the entire shop in the first eleven seconds of standing on the footstool.

Cassiopeia Lucy Malfoy had been on the footstool for six minutes. She knew because she had counted the ticks of the little brass clock above the door until she lost interest in counting, which she suspected had happened somewhere around minute four, and after that she had simply been standing there with her arms held out from her sides like a scarecrow while a length of self-measuring tape crawled over her shoulders and down her spine and around her waist, pausing occasionally to make small satisfied noises to itself.

Her mother was across the alley at the apothecary, buying the ingredients that the school list said a first year required and the additional ingredients that Narcissa Malfoy had decided a Malfoy first year required, which was roughly three times the number. Her father was at Gringotts and had been at Gringotts for the better part of an hour, and when he came back he would look at her new robes and say something about the cut of the shoulder, and she would have to pretend she had an opinion about the cut of the shoulder.

She looked at herself in the long mirror. Pale hair, pale face, grey eyes that her mother called silver and her father called sharp. Chin up, because a Malfoy did not slouch, and because slouching made your neck look short. She practised a smile at her reflection, found it insufficiently superior, and adjusted it.

"Hogwarts, dear?" Madam Malkin had said when she came in, and Cassiopeia had said yes with the particular flatness that meant obviously, and Madam Malkin had been dealing with eleven year olds for forty years and had not been remotely bothered.

The bell over the door rang.

She did not turn around, because turning around to look at who came into a shop was the behaviour of somebody who found shops interesting. She watched in the mirror instead.

A boy came in. He was small, smaller than her by a little, and so thin that his wrists looked breakable, and his clothes were extraordinary in a way that took her a moment to properly understand. Not extraordinary in the sense of fine. Extraordinary in the sense that they belonged to someone roughly twice his size, rolled and bunched and pinned at the cuffs, a jumper the colour of old dishwater, trainers with the laces replaced by string. His hair stood up at the back like something had frightened it. His glasses had been mended with tape at the bridge.

Behind him, blocking out most of the light from the street, was an enormous man with a beard like a hedge, who said something cheerful through the glass and then went away.

"Hogwarts too, dear?" said Madam Malkin. "Got the lot here. Young lady's being fitted up just now."

And she put the boy on the footstool next to hers and dropped a long black robe over his head and began pinning it to the right length, and Cassiopeia found herself standing eight inches from a complete stranger with no obvious means of escape for the next several minutes.

She considered saying nothing. It was an option. It was, in fact, the option her father would have preferred, since Lucius Malfoy's view of strangers was that they were a category of person that existed in order to be ignored until they proved useful.

But she had been on that footstool for six minutes and the brass clock was still ticking and there was a boy next to her who had not so much as glanced in her direction.

That was the part she noticed. He had not glanced.

Everyone glanced. That was simply a fact of her existence, so established that she had stopped registering it the way you stop registering the sound of your own house settling at night. People looked at her hair first, because it was the colour of a Galleon that had been left in the sun, and then they looked at her robes, and then they worked out the name, and then their faces did a particular thing, and the particular thing was the point of being a Malfoy.

This boy was looking at the floor as though the floor had done something interesting.

"Hello," she said, in her very best drawl, which she had been working on for most of the summer and which she privately thought came out rather well. "Hogwarts as well?"

"Yes," he said.

She waited. He did not supply anything else. He stood there with his arms out and the pins going in around his hem and his taped glasses sliding slowly down his nose, and he looked at her with an expression of such blank, polite nothing that she felt something hot and indignant open up under her ribs.

"My father's next door buying my books and mother's up the street looking at wands," she said, which was mostly true, and she heard herself keep going without any clear instruction from her brain. "Then I'm going to drag them off to look at racing brooms. I don't see why first years can't have their own. I think I'll bully father into getting me one and I'll smuggle it in somehow."

That was not strictly the plan. The plan, as agreed at breakfast, was that she would ask once, be refused, and sulk for the remainder of the day, and her mother would soften by Christmas. But it sounded better the way she said it, and she watched his face for the reaction, and the reaction did not come.

"Have you got your own broom?" she asked.

"No," he said.

"Do you play Quidditch at all?"

"No," he said, and then, after a pause, as though he had considered the sentence and decided it needed a qualification, "I don't really know what it is."

She stared at him.

She had met people before who were bad at Quidditch. Pansy Parkinson was bad at Quidditch in a way that was almost impressive, since it required a sustained unwillingness to catch anything thrown at her. Cassiopeia had never in her life met a person who did not know what it was, and for a moment the world tilted slightly and she had the sensation of standing on a stair that was not where she had left it.

"You don't know what Quidditch is?" she said.

"No," he said, and he had gone a bit pink, and she realised with a jolt of something she chose at the time to call contempt that she had embarrassed him.

Her mother would have said that embarrassing people in shops was common. Her father would have said that it depended entirely on the people.

"Well," she said, and recovered, because she had been raised to recover. "I know I'll be in Slytherin, all our family have been. Imagine being in Hufflepuff, I think I'd leave, wouldn't you?"

"Mmm," he said.

Mmm. She turned the sound over and found absolutely nothing in it. It was not agreement and it was not disagreement and it was not even the sort of nervous laughter that people produced when they wanted her to like them. It was a noise made by somebody waiting for a bus.

And she kept talking. That was the part she would think about afterwards, lying in bed at the Manor that night with the window open and the summer coming in warm off the grounds. She kept talking. She told him about her father and the brooms and the house teams, she said something cutting about the people who came into the wizarding world from outside and had to be taught everything from scratch, she said it the way she had heard it said at her own dinner table a hundred times, in the voice of someone repeating a line they have been handed, and she watched him to see whether it landed, and it did not land, because he did not seem to know what she was talking about.

And still he looked at her with that mild, patient, entirely unimpressed face, and the hot indignant thing under her ribs got hotter.

She looked at him sideways while Madam Malkin was fussing at his sleeve. His hands were the thing she kept coming back to. They were nicked all over, knuckles and thumb pads, little white healed-over scars, and his nails were bitten down past where they should have stopped, and there was a thin red scratch across the back of his wrist that looked recent. His collarbones showed through the neck of the dreadful jumper. He stood very still on the footstool, stiller than she could manage, the way you stand still when you have had a lot of practice at not being noticed.

She had never in her life met somebody who had practised not being noticed. Everybody she knew had been practising the opposite since birth.

"What's your surname, anyway?" she said, because she had suddenly and urgently wanted to know, and the question came out ruder than she intended, which was already quite rude.

Madam Malkin said, "That's you done, my dear," and the boy got off the footstool so fast that he nearly went over sideways.

"Right," he said. "Thanks. See you at Hogwarts, I suppose."

And he was gone, out through the door with the bell jangling, and through the window she saw the enormous bearded man hand him two enormous ice creams, and the boy looked up at him and said something, and the man laughed so hard that the window shook slightly in its frame.

Cassiopeia stood on the footstool with her arms out and watched him go.

"Lovely manners on that one," said Madam Malkin, to nobody.

"He was rude," said Cassiopeia.

"He was shy, dear," said Madam Malkin. "Arms down, you'll strain something."

She put her arms down.

Outside, the alley was doing what the alley did in late August, which was heave. She could see the Quidditch supply shop with a crowd at the window and the ice cream parlour with a queue out the door, and somewhere past that the apothecary where her mother was buying powdered root of asphodel in a quantity that suggested she expected her daughter to poison somebody.

She was still thinking about his hands when she climbed down.

That was the first unacceptable thing.

The second unacceptable thing was that she had done all the talking and he had done none of it, and she had been the one left standing on a footstool afterwards with her face warm, and she went over the conversation in her head at least four times on the walk to the apothecary trying to work out which part of it had gone wrong, because some part of it had gone wrong, she was certain, and she could not find the seam.

"Darling," said Narcissa, when she arrived. "You look flushed. Was she slow with you?"

"There was a boy," said Cassiopeia.

"Was there?"

"He didn't know what Quidditch was."

Narcissa's eyebrows performed a very small and very expensive movement. "Muggle-born, perhaps."

"He didn't know who I was either."

"Ah," said Narcissa.

"I don't care," said Cassiopeia, with great dignity. "It was only an observation."

"Of course it was," said her mother, and paid for the asphodel.

Lucius found them outside Ollivander's with his cane tucked under his arm and his mouth already shaped for a complaint about the goblins, and he looked his daughter over the way he always did, from the top of her head to the hem of her new robes, and he said, "The shoulder is a touch narrow," and she said, "I thought so too," and he said, "Good girl," and that was the whole of her afternoon settled.

She did not get a racing broom. She had not expected to. She asked once, as planned, and was refused, as planned, and sulked beautifully from the apothecary to the bookshop, as planned, and her mother said something soothing about Christmas, and the whole performance went off without a single error.

The thing that went wrong went wrong much later.

That night she lay in the dark in her own room with the window open and the tall grass hissing out on the lawn, and she went through the shop again, and this time she got to the part where she had said the word Hufflepuff and he had said mmm, and she thought, with a lurch, that he had not been bored of her.

He had been braced.

She knew that face. She had seen that exact face on the house-elves when her father came into a room. It was the face of somebody standing very still and waiting to find out how bad it was going to be, and she had spent six minutes talking at him about brooms and bloodlines while he stood there waiting for her to turn nasty, and she had, in fact, turned slightly nasty about the people who came in from outside, and he had not reacted even then.

She sat up in bed.

"I don't care," she told the dark, out loud, in the Malfoy drawl, with the chin up.

The dark did not say anything.

She lay down again and thought about the thin red scratch on the back of his wrist and the string in his trainers and the way the enormous man had made him laugh out in the street, properly laugh, nothing like the face he had worn in the shop, and she thought that it was perfectly ridiculous to spend an evening thinking about a boy whose name she did not even know.

She would find out his name at school. She would find it out, and then she would know who he was, and then she would be able to stop.

That was the plan. It had the great advantage of sounding like a plan rather than what it actually was.

Three days later her father came into breakfast with the Prophet folded under his arm and dropped it onto the table in front of her mother, and said something sour about Dumbledore, and in the course of the sour thing he said a name, and said that the boy had been seen in Diagon Alley with Hagrid of all people, buying his school things, and would be starting at Hogwarts in September.

Cassiopeia put down her toast very carefully, so that it did not make any noise against the plate.

Small. Black hair that stood up. Glasses mended with tape.

She thought about everything she had said on that footstool. All of it. Every word.

"Something the matter?" said Lucius.

"No," she said. "Nothing at all."

She went upstairs afterwards and shut the door and stood with her back against it, and her face was hot in a way she could not account for, and she said out loud, to the room, in a voice she hoped sounded withering, "He could have said."

He could have said. He had been asked, directly, what his surname was, and the shop girl had interrupted, and he had bolted, and she had been left talking about her father's money to the most famous boy in Britain while he looked at the floor and waited for it to be over.

She picked up the nearest thing, which was a hairbrush, and threw it at the wardrobe, and then she picked it up again and put it back on the dresser, because throwing things was common.

By the time she came down for dinner she had it all arranged in her head in a shape she could live with, and the shape was this: he had made a fool of her, deliberately, by saying nothing, and he had stood there smirking inwardly at her the entire time, and that was the sort of thing that she would be revenging herself upon for a number of years.

It was not true. Some small flat quiet part of her knew it was not true even while she was building it.

She built it anyway, because the alternative was admitting she had spent six minutes trying extremely hard to be interesting to somebody who had looked at her like she was weather.

••●━━━ 𖤓 ━━━●••

Harry

Harry Potter had been magical for approximately four hours and was finding it a great deal more frightening than anybody had led him to believe.

It was not the dragons. Hagrid had mentioned dragons at the bank, and the goblins, and the vault with the mountain of gold in it that was apparently his, and all of that had gone past him in a kind of pleasant roaring blur, the way things do when you are too tired and too astonished to process them properly. It was not even the wands, which he had not got to yet.

It was the people.

Diagon Alley was full of people who knew things. That was the overwhelming impression. Everybody in it had grown up in it. They knew which shop to go into and what to ask for and how much it ought to cost and what the words meant, and Harry knew none of these things, and every thirty seconds somebody said a word to him that he had never heard in his life and expected him to nod.

He had got very good at nodding over the last four hours.

So when Hagrid pointed him at the robe shop and said he would pop next door for a pick-me-up, Harry went in alone with his stomach somewhere around his ankles and the back of his neck prickling, and the small sharp woman inside said Hogwarts, dear, and he said yes, and she took him through to the back where another child was already standing on a footstool.

A girl. His age, give or take. Fair hair so pale it looked white in the shop light, falling straight down her back without a single thing out of place in it, and a face that was all angles, cheekbones and chin and a small pointed nose, and grey eyes that came round to him in the mirror and stayed there.

He had a moment of pure animal panic.

She was, he thought, probably the most frightening person he had ever met who was not his cousin Dudley, and Dudley was frightening in a way Harry understood. Dudley was frightening the way a wall is frightening. This girl was frightening the way a test is frightening.

Also she was extremely pretty. That was simply a fact that arrived in his head and sat there being unhelpful. He had never really had cause to notice whether anybody was pretty before, because the girls at his primary school had either been part of Dudley's gang or had been careful to stay out of its way, and in neither case did you look at them for very long. This girl looked like somebody out of a painting, one of the ones in a frame in a house nobody lives in. She looked expensive.

He got on the footstool next to her and the woman dropped a robe over his head and he stood very still and concentrated hard on not moving.

"Hello," said the girl. "Hogwarts as well?"

"Yes," said Harry.

He meant to say more. There was more. There was quite a lot more, actually, because four hours ago he had been living in a cupboard under the stairs and now a bank had told him he was rich and a man the size of a shed was buying him an owl, and some small desperate part of him wanted very badly to say all of it to somebody his own age who might tell him whether any of it was normal.

What came out was yes.

Then she started talking.

He could not afterwards have reconstructed most of it. It came at him in one long polished stream, in an accent he had only ever heard on television, and it was full of the words again, the ones everybody kept using. Brooms. Houses. A game he had never heard of. Her father, who was buying something. Her mother, who was also buying something. Slytherin, as though it were obvious and also as though she were daring him to be impressed.

And underneath all of it, running along like a second voice, was a thing he recognised immediately and completely, because he had been listening to it his entire life.

She was telling him where she stood in relation to him.

Dudley did it with fists and Aunt Petunia did it with the length of silence before she answered a question and Uncle Vernon did it by talking about the company car, and this girl was doing it with brooms and a school she had not attended yet, but it was the same thing. It was somebody establishing, early, who was above whom. Harry had thirty seconds' experience of her and about ten years' experience of the general category, and his body did what it always did, which was go very still and very agreeable and wait for it to finish.

So he said yes and no and mmm, and he looked at the floor, and he thought, at one point, quite clearly: she is going to find out I don't know anything and then it will get worse.

That was the whole of his strategy. Give her nothing to work with. It was a strategy that had served him adequately through four years of Smeltings-bound cousins and it had the advantage of requiring no cleverness at all.

"Do you play Quidditch?" she said.

"No," he said, and then, because she was waiting, and because there did not seem to be any way out of it, "I don't really know what it is."

And he felt his face go hot, and he waited for the laugh.

She did not laugh. That was the strange part. She looked at him instead with her mouth slightly open and her eyebrows up, as though he had told her he did not know what the sun was, and for one second, before she got her face back under control, she looked about eight years old.

Then she recovered and said something about Hufflepuff and he said mmm.

Later, much later, when he knew a great deal more about her and about the school and about precisely how many things she was capable of saying in a single breath, he would think back to that second. The second where she forgot to be impressive. He had not thought anything of it at the time beyond relief that she had not laughed, and he had filed it away under the general heading of things that happened on the strangest day of his life, and that was where it stayed for a very long while.

"What's your surname, anyway?" she said.

And he opened his mouth, and he genuinely did not know what he was going to say, because the answer had become complicated in the last twenty-four hours in a way that he had not begun to work out. Yesterday his surname was a thing that got him shouted at. Today it was a thing that made grown men in pubs want to shake his hand and burst into tears on him. Neither version was any use standing on a footstool in front of a girl who had just told him her family had been in Slytherin since the beginning of time.

Then the woman said he was done, and he got off the stool so quickly that he nearly fell, and he said thanks and something about seeing her at school and got out into the street, where the air was warm and the noise was enormous and Hagrid was standing there holding two ice creams the size of his head.

"Harry," said Hagrid, "yeh look like yeh've seen a Grim."

"There was a girl," said Harry.

"Ar," said Hagrid, with deep sympathy and no comprehension whatsoever, and handed him the chocolate and raspberry one with nuts.

They walked up the alley eating ice cream and Hagrid told him about the four houses, and when he got to Slytherin his face did a thing, and Harry said, "Is Slytherin bad, then?"

"There's not a witch or wizard who went bad who wasn't in Slytherin," said Hagrid heavily. "Not one."

"Oh," said Harry.

He thought about the girl on the footstool saying I know I'll be in Slytherin, all our family have been, with her chin up and that little proud twist to her mouth, and he felt something that he could not identify and did not have the vocabulary for at eleven years old. It was not dislike. Dislike would have been simpler. It was closer to the feeling of watching somebody walk cheerfully towards a door with a sign on it that they could not read.

"I met a girl in the robe shop," he said. "She said she was going into Slytherin."

"Then yeh keep clear of her," said Hagrid. "Simple as that."

"Right," said Harry.

He did not say that she had been the first person his own age to speak to him since he found out he was a wizard. He did not say that she had asked him three questions about himself, which was three more than anybody at Privet Drive had asked in a decade, even if she had not waited for the answers. He did not say that she had gone red when he said he did not know what Quidditch was, as though it were her fault and not his.

He did not say any of it, because he did not have the words for any of it, and because Hagrid was already talking about owls.

That night he slept in a bed in the Leaky Cauldron with a snowy owl on the windowsill and a wand under his pillow and his trunk at the foot of the bed with his name on it, and the last thing he thought about before he went under was not the vault or the wand or the dragons.

It was that he had been asked a question, straight out, what's your surname, and he had run away rather than answer it.

He would have to answer it eventually. There was a train in a week, and a school at the end of it, and somewhere on that train or in that school there would be a girl with white blonde hair who had told him all about her family and received nothing back, and he was going to have to stand in front of her and say the name and watch her face change.

He was not looking forward to it. He did not entirely know why.

••●━━━ 𖤓 ━━━●••

Narcissa

Her daughter came out of the robe shop talking.

That in itself was unremarkable. Cassiopeia had been talking since she was fourteen months old and had shown no sign of tiring of it. What was remarkable was the shape of the talking. It came in short bursts with gaps in it, and the gaps were where she was listening to herself, and Narcissa Malfoy had spent eleven years learning to read her only child in exactly the places where the child went quiet.

"There was a boy," Cassiopeia said.

Not there was a boy in the shop. Not there was some child. There was a boy, as though he were a category of event.

"Was there?" said Narcissa.

"He didn't know what Quidditch was."

Her daughter's chin was up and her voice was flat and bored and she was standing with her weight all on one hip, which she did when she wanted to appear careless, and she had done it since she was six and had never once noticed that she did it.

"Muggle-born, perhaps," said Narcissa, and watched.

"He didn't know who I was either."

And there it was.

Narcissa paid for the asphodel and did not smile, because smiling would have been fatal, and because there was nothing particularly amusing in it anyway. Her daughter had been raised in a house where being a Malfoy was the first fact about her, laid down before her own name, and she had been out in the world for an hour and had met somebody for whom it was not a fact at all, and she had come out of that shop with her face pink and her chin up and a piece of grit in her shoe that she was going to be walking on for years.

"I don't care," said Cassiopeia. "It was only an observation."

"Of course it was," said Narcissa.

Later, after the bookshop and the sulking and the dignified failure to acquire a racing broom, she sat in the drawing room with her husband and the lamps low, and Lucius said, "She is not eating."

"She is eleven and she is going away in a week," said Narcissa. "She has not eaten properly since July."

"She asked about the broom twice."

"She asked about the broom once. She sulked twice."

Lucius made the small sound that in him constituted laughter.

Narcissa looked into the fire and thought about a boy her daughter had declined to name, and about the particular way Cassiopeia had held her shoulders walking up the alley afterwards, like somebody carrying a full cup and determined not to spill it.

There were things she could have said to her husband at that moment. She said none of them. It is an old and useful skill in certain families, knowing which observations to keep, and Narcissa had been practising it longer than her daughter had been alive.

"She will be in Slytherin," said Lucius, as though it were in doubt, which it was not, and as though saying it made him comfortable, which it did.

"She will," said Narcissa.

She thought: and something else will happen to her there, and you will not see it coming, and nor will she.

She picked up her glass and said nothing at all.