Chapter Text

Chapter One: The Fitting

There were, Electra Lucia Malfoy had decided somewhere around her fourth minute on the footstool, exactly three things wrong with Madam Malkin's Robes for All Occasions, and she intended to list them to her mother later in the order of their offensiveness.

The first was the footstool itself, which wobbled in a manner that no footstool in a reputable establishment had any business wobbling, and which forced her to maintain her balance with small undignified adjustments of the ankle that she was certain were visible to anybody looking.

The second was the enchanted measuring tape, which had begun its work in a perfectly professional fashion around her shoulders and had then gone wandering off down her spine making small satisfied noises to itself, as though it were a tourist and she were a cathedral.

The third was that absolutely nothing was happening, and nothing had been happening for an extremely long time, and Electra Lucia Malfoy had been raised in a household where the worst crime a person could commit against her was failing to be interesting in her presence.

She stood with her arms out at her sides in the manner of a scarecrow with excellent posture and watched herself in the long mirror. Pale hair that her mother called silver-gilt and that her father called an inheritance. Pale face. Grey eyes with a certain quality of challenge in them that she had been cultivating in front of her bedroom mirror all summer and which she believed was devastating. She tried the expression now. It was, she concluded, approximately eighty percent devastating, and the remaining twenty percent was her eyebrows, which refused to cooperate and kept trying to go up at the ends in a way that made her look surprised rather than superior.

"Chin down a fraction, dear," said Madam Malkin, through a mouthful of pins.

"My chin is correct," said Electra.

"Your chin is lovely, dear. It's the hem I'm after."

She lowered her chin by what she judged to be a tolerable amount, which was not very much, and went back to the mirror.

Her mother was across the alley at the apothecary buying the ingredients the school list said a first year required, plus the additional ingredients that Narcissa Malfoy had decided a Malfoy first year required, which was roughly three times the quantity and included at least two things Electra was fairly sure were illegal in France. Her father was at Gringotts and had been at Gringotts for the better part of an hour, and when he returned he would look at the robes, and he would say something about the line of the shoulder, and she would be required to have an opinion about the line of the shoulder, and she had been preparing one since Tuesday.

The brass clock above the door ticked.

"Is it normally this slow," said Electra, "or have I been singled out?"

"You've been singled out, dear," said Madam Malkin comfortably. "Everyone has. It's the service."

Electra opened her mouth to deliver a remark about standards that she had been constructing in her head for some minutes and that she privately considered rather good, and at that precise moment the bell over the door rang, and she did not deliver it, because a person who was talking when somebody walked in could be assumed to have been talking for their own entertainment, and a Malfoy was never doing anything for her own entertainment. A Malfoy was always doing things because they were correct.

She did not turn round, obviously. Turning round to see who had come into a shop was the behaviour of a person who found shops interesting. She watched in the mirror instead, which was the same thing but better.

A boy came in.

He was small, which she registered immediately and with satisfaction, because she was tall for her age and had every intention of continuing to be. He was thin in a way that looked less like fashion and more like neglect. And his clothes were, she decided after a long moment of genuine confusion, the single most remarkable garments she had ever seen on a human being, and remarkable in a direction she had not previously known clothing could go.

They did not fit him. They did not fit him in the way that a tent does not fit a chair. The jumper was the colour of dishwater that had been left out overnight, and the sleeves had been rolled so many times that his wrists emerged from what appeared to be two grey wheels, and his trainers were laced with string. His glasses had been mended at the bridge with a strip of tape that had gone grey and furry at the edges. His hair stood straight up at the back as though it had seen something and never recovered.

Behind him, blocking out most of the light from the street and a reasonable portion of the street itself, was an enormous man with a beard like a hedge in need of a gardener, who said something cheerful through the glass, waved a hand the size of a dustbin lid, and went away.

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

And then, before Electra could formulate any sort of position on the matter, the boy was being lifted onto the footstool directly beside hers, and a long black robe was coming down over his head, and she was standing eight inches from a complete stranger with pins going in around both their hems and no means of escape for the next several minutes.

She considered saying nothing.

It was an option. It was, in point of fact, her father's option, since Lucius Malfoy's view of strangers was that they constituted a category of person which existed in order to be ignored until they could be demonstrated to be useful, and her mother's option was more or less identical except that her mother was polite about it, which Electra had been informed was called breeding.

But the clock was ticking and the tape measure was doing something unspeakable around her knees, and she had been standing on a wobbling footstool for seven minutes, and now there was somebody here, and that somebody had not looked at her.

That was the part she noticed.

He had not looked. Not once. He had come into a shop containing precisely one other child, and that child had hair the colour of a Galleon left out in the sun, and he had not looked.

Everybody looked. That was simply a feature of her existence, as settled and unremarkable as the sound of the house creaking at night. They looked at the hair first. Then the robes. Then they worked out the name, and then their faces did the thing, and the thing their faces did was essentially the entire point of being a Malfoy, as far as Electra had been able to determine at the age of eleven.

This boy was looking at the floor as though the floor were the first genuinely absorbing thing he had encountered all week.

"Hello," said Electra, in her very best drawl.

She had been working on the drawl all summer. It had cost her considerable effort. There was a particular lift at the end of it that she had copied off her aunt and then refined, and she thought it came out rather beautifully, and she waited for it to do its work.

"Hello," said the boy.

Then nothing.

Electra waited. The pins went in. The tape measure made a noise like a small animal finding something.

"Hogwarts as well, I suppose," she said.

"Yes," he said.

She waited again. She had, in eleven years, never once had to wait twice.

"My father is at the bank," she said, rather faster than she had intended, "and my mother is up at the apothecary, and when they are finished I am going to drag them both off to look at racing brooms, because I do not see the faintest reason why first years cannot have their own, and I think I shall bully my father into getting me one and then smuggle it in somehow."

This was not, in the strictest sense, the plan. The plan, as established over breakfast with her mother's hand flat on the table in a way that meant the discussion was concluded, was that she would ask once, be refused, sulk magnificently for the remainder of the day, and be bought something else by Thursday. But it sounded enormously better the way she had just said it, and she watched his face sideways in the mirror for the reaction.

The reaction did not come.

"Have you got your own broom," she said.

"No," said the boy.

"Do you play Quidditch at all?"

"I don't know what that is," said the boy.

Electra Lucia Malfoy, who had been riding since she was four and who had a cousin on reserve for a professional team and who could recite the entire 1987 league table backwards as a party trick that nobody had ever asked her to perform twice, turned her head and looked directly at him for the first time.

He looked back. Mildly. Patiently. With an expression of such absolute and unoffended blankness that she felt something hot open up underneath her ribs and begin, slowly, to boil.

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

"No."

"Quidditch."

"Sorry," he said, and the appalling thing, the genuinely intolerable thing, was that he sounded as though he meant it. He was apologising to her for not knowing a thing, and he was doing it in a voice that suggested he had got rather used to apologising for not knowing things, and something about that made her face go hot in a manner she could not explain and did not wish to examine.

"Well," she said. "Well. That is. You will simply have to be told, then."

"All right," he said.

And then he waited.

He waited to be told. He stood there on the footstool with his arms out and his taped glasses sliding slowly down his nose and he actually waited, with his face turned a little towards her, as though she had said something that was going to be followed by something else, and Electra discovered that she had absolutely nothing prepared.

She had a great deal prepared. She had an entire summer of material prepared. She had rehearsed at least four separate first conversations in front of her mirror, and in every one of them the other person had been doing considerably more of the work.

"It is played on brooms," she said.

"Right."

"There are balls."

"How many?"

"Several," said Electra, with as much authority as she could muster, and then, in a sort of panic, "four," and then, because she could hear herself, "there are four and one of them is trying to kill you."

The boy's eyebrows went up over the top of his glasses.

"Why?"

"Because it is enchanted to."

"Right," he said again, and then, after a moment, "that sounds all right, actually."

And he smiled. Not at her particularly. More in the general direction of the idea of a ball that was enchanted to try to kill people, which he appeared to find genuinely and uncomplicatedly good news, and Electra stood on her wobbling footstool and felt the hot thing under her ribs turn over and change into something with an entirely different shape that she liked considerably less.

"It is not all right," she said. "It is extremely dangerous and people break their necks constantly."

"Oh," he said.

"Which is why it is the finest game there is," said Electra, and heard her own voice come out slightly too loud, and lifted her chin, and stared at the mirror.

Madam Malkin, moving between them with her mouth full of pins, made a small noise that might have been amusement and might have been pins.

Electra, recovering, tried a different approach. She had a repertoire. She had been studying her father across the dinner table for most of a decade and she knew what the approaches were, and the next one was the one where you established the territory.

"Do you know what House you'll be in," she said.

"No."

"I shall be in Slytherin," she said. "All my family have been. Every single one, all the way back, which is rather a long way back, and if they put me anywhere else I shall walk straight out of the castle and get on the train and go home and never return, and I mean that entirely."

She delivered this beautifully. She had practised that one too, and it had come out at full strength, and she permitted herself a small sideways glance to collect the result.

The boy was looking at her with what she could only describe as concern.

"Would they let you do that?" he said.

"What?"

"Walk out. If they put you in the wrong one." He pushed his glasses up his nose with one finger. "Only if the train's only once a year, you'd be stuck, wouldn't you."

Electra opened her mouth.

"I just mean you'd be stuck on the platform," he said, apparently troubled on her behalf. "In the dark. Is there anywhere to go?"

There was a silence of approximately four seconds, during which Electra Lucia Malfoy, heiress to one of the oldest names in magical Britain, experienced for the first time in her life the sensation of having a grand and terrible threat met with practical logistical sympathy.

"There is a village," she said weakly.

"Oh, that's all right then," said the boy, visibly relieved, and went back to looking at the floor.

She stared at him. She stared at the back of his dreadful hair and the taped bridge of his glasses, and she discovered that she was no longer entirely sure what the conversation was about or who was conducting it, and that she had somehow been made to feel reassured, and that the person who had reassured her did not know what Quidditch was.

Her eyes went down, because she had nowhere else to put them, and landed on his hands.

They were nicked all over. There were small white healed-over marks across the knuckles and the pads of the thumbs, and the nails were bitten down well past the point where nails ought to stop, and there was a thin red scratch across the back of one wrist that had not finished being a scratch yet. His collarbones showed through the neck of the terrible jumper. He stood on the footstool very still, stiller than she could manage for more than ten seconds at a time, in the specific way of somebody who had had a great deal of practice at not being noticed.

Electra had never in her life met a person who had practised not being noticed. Everybody she knew had been practising the exact opposite since the hour of their birth, including, in several cases, during it.

"What's your name?" she said.

It came out wrong. It came out rude and flat and far too quick, with none of the drawl and none of the lift, and she heard it leave her mouth and wanted immediately to reach out and take it back and reissue it correctly.

"That's you done, my dear," said Madam Malkin.

And the boy got off the footstool so fast that he very nearly went over sideways into a rack of dress robes.

"Right," he said. "Thanks. Thank you. I'll see you at Hogwarts, I expect."

And then the bell was jangling and the door was shutting and he was gone out into the heave and crush of Diagon Alley in late August, and through the window Electra watched the enormous bearded man hand him two enormous ice creams, one of which he appeared to be offering back, and the man said something, and the boy looked up at him and said something in return, and the man laughed so hard that the window shivered in its frame.

Electra stood on the footstool with her arms out and watched the whole thing.

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

"He was unspeakably rude," said Electra.

"He was shy, dear."

"He was rude. He did not tell me his name."

"You didn't tell him yours either, dear," said Madam Malkin. "Arms down, now, you'll do yourself an injury."

Electra put her arms down.

She walked up the alley to the apothecary at a speed that she maintained was perfectly ordinary and which caused a passing wizard to step smartly out of her way, and she went over the conversation in her head four times on the way, and then a fifth time, and she could not find the place where it had gone wrong. Something had gone wrong. She was entirely certain that something had gone wrong, because she had begun the conversation in command of it, as was correct and natural, and she had ended it standing on a stool watching a boy eat ice cream through a window with her face hot, and no process by which that could have happened was available to her.

Narcissa Malfoy was at the counter, inspecting a jar of something that had opinions.

"Darling," she said, without turning round. "You're flushed."

"It was warm in there."

"It was not."

"There was a boy," said Electra.

The jar was set down with great care. Narcissa Malfoy had spent eleven years learning to read her only daughter, and she had learned to read her almost entirely in the places where the child stopped talking rather than the places where she started, and the gaps in that sentence had been enormous.

"Was there?" she said.

"He didn't know what Quidditch was."

Electra said this in a voice of enormous boredom, with her weight entirely on one hip, which was the posture she adopted when she wished to convey carelessness and which she had been adopting since the age of six without ever once noticing that she did it.

"How unusual," said Narcissa.

"He had tape on his glasses."

"Did he."

"And his jumper was four sizes too large and the colour of a dead thing, and his shoes were tied up with string, and he did not know a single thing about anything at all, and he was perfectly happy about it." Electra inspected a shelf of beetle eyes with ferocious attention. "He was absolutely nobody."

"I see."

"He had never heard of Quidditch," said Electra. "Not the rules. The word."

Narcissa Malfoy paid for the asphodel, and did not smile, because smiling would have been catastrophic and because there was, in truth, very little in it that was amusing.

"And did you tell him about it," she said.

"I told him about the Bludgers."

"And what did he say?"

"He said it sounded all right," said Electra, with real and burning outrage, "and then he smiled, like an idiot, like somebody had given him a present, and I do not understand why anybody would, because it is simply a fact, and everybody knows it, and it is not a present, it is a fact."

"No," said Narcissa. "Of course not."

"He didn't know who I was either," said Electra.

And there it was.

Her daughter went off down the alley ahead of her with her chin up and her hair swinging and her shoulders set in the particular arrangement that meant she was conducting an internal argument with somebody who was not present and losing it, and Narcissa Malfoy followed at a distance of several feet with a bag of asphodel on her arm, and permitted herself, where it could not possibly be seen, the very smallest movement at one corner of her mouth.

They did go to look at racing brooms. Electra asked once. She was refused. She sulked for a full two hours, which was good value, and extracted a set of silver scales she did not want and an owl she did.

And at some point that evening, in the enormous quiet of her bedroom, with the owl asleep and the trunk packed and her new robes hanging on the wardrobe door looking exactly as a Malfoy's robes should look, Electra Lucia Malfoy sat on the end of her bed and conducted a review.

The review established three things.

The first was that the boy had been nobody, obviously, and that the entire encounter had been beneath her notice and would be forgotten by morning.

The second was that she had, in fact, asked him four questions and he had answered all of them in a combined total of eleven words, which she had counted, which was itself alarming.

The third thing was the one she did not care for at all, and it was this: that she had spent eleven years being looked at, and had assumed without ever examining it that being looked at was the thing she wanted, and that approximately nine minutes in a robe shop had introduced the possibility that what she actually wanted was to be looked at by somebody who had to be persuaded into it.

She did not like that third thing. She put it away in a box in the back of her head and shut the lid on it with considerable force.

"He was nobody," she said out loud, to the owl.

The owl, who was asleep, offered nothing.

"And I shall probably never see him again," said Electra Lucia Malfoy, who was going to see him at eleven o'clock the following Wednesday and every single day thereafter for seven years, and who was going to spend the first six of them making absolutely certain that he never forgot that she existed.

She lay down and pulled the covers up and stared at the ceiling.

After a while, in the dark, with nobody whatsoever to hear it, she said, "My father will hear about this," and felt a great deal better, and went to sleep.