Chapter Text
DRACO
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Today, Draco turned seven-years-old. And he was very proud of that, because it was the oldest he’d ever been.
And, now that he was seven, Draco’s father said that it was time for him to learn about the world. So, for his birthday, his father brought Draco along with him to work. He’d been to work with his father before—it was very boring. They just stayed in an office all day and there wasn’t even anything for Draco to play with. But, since he was seven now, Draco was being brought along for something interesting.
They were in London … the Muggle part of it.
Draco had never met a Muggle before, but he was very scared of them. His father had nothing nice to say about them; he hated Muggles, so Draco hated Muggles too. Apparently though, some of them were important—his father said that they had to be tolerated. And he was meeting with one this afternoon.
Before today, Draco imagined that the Muggles might have talons, or sharp teeth, or furry, pointed ears—something monstrous about them. But they looked just like he did, and just like his father. Their clothes were sort of funny … but none of them had horns or anything, and they didn’t smell like stinking sulfur.
But Draco’s father sneered at every one of them who passed, so Draco sneered too.
They crossed paths with a family of four: a mum, a dad, and two boys—one who was very fat, and another who was very small. Draco locked eyes with the littler boy, who looked nothing like the rest of the family; he was scrawny, with a mess of jet-black hair on his head, dressed in clothes that didn’t fit. They stared at each other, they even turned their heads over their shoulders after they passed so as not to break the gaze.
“Daddy? Who’s that boy?”
His father didn’t even glance behind them. “I don’t know, Draco. Just some Muggle.”
He tugged Draco along by the hand, but Draco wrenched himself from the tight grip and sprinted down the pavement, yelling, “Hey! You!”
The boy stopped, his family just kept walking on without him. Draco caught up to him and put out his hand for a shake, the way he saw his father do when he greeted someone.
“Hello, I’m—”
“Draco Lucius Malfoy!” his father interrupted, shouting and snagging him by the collar of his shirt.
Just before Draco’s father dragged him away, Draco managed to touch the boy’s hand.
They both gasped when their fingers grazed across each other; between their skin there was a humming spark.
Then they were yanked apart, and the strange, skinny boy was swallowed by a passing crowd, and he was gone.
When they returned home that evening, Draco was in terrible trouble. First, for running off down the street. And second, for the way he’d behaved during his father’s meeting with the important Muggle (who, much to Draco’s disappointment, was just a regular man).
Usually, Draco was very polite—he always liked to hear from his parents’ friends that he was so mature for his age. But Draco hadn’t been polite at all today—he’d whinged and moaned the whole meeting through about how he just wanted to go home, he’d stomped his feet and rolled on the floor, and then he’d played around with a model aeroplane he found, intricately crafted from sticks and rice-paper, and, just because he could—and because he was feeling rather frustrated—he’d crushed it in his little hands.
After dinner, Draco’s father lectured him. He said that Draco was too old to behave so foolishly. Then he put Draco over his knee, and swatted him firmly on the bum seven times—one for every year old he was.
Draco wished that he could be six again.
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Being seven was terrible. Draco was sad all the time. He always had a stomach-ache. And all he could think about was the little black-haired boy on the road that he’d wanted to meet so badly.
Every night, he dreamed about that boy and woke up crying; then he would crawl into his parents’ bed and snuggle up to his mother like a baby until he could find sleep again.
It wasn’t even any fun to play with his friends anymore—especially not Pansy. She was always talking about how she wanted to marry him; Draco thought that was gross. He didn’t want to get married. And definitely not to Pansy.
Sometimes now, when Draco was sad, it was a sort of different kind. It wasn’t his sad, rather someone else’s. He tried to tell his mother once, when he was crying because he was lonely—even though he’d just played with Blaise and Theo hours before—that it wasn’t his lonely. But she didn’t understand. And, really, neither did Draco.
Maybe that was just what it was like to be seven.
But the next year, Draco turned eight. And eight wasn’t any better.
Eight might have even been worse.
That strange, transplanted melancholy only grew with Draco, getting bigger as he got taller. He’d started to think of it as the other part of himself. Draco cried and cried all the time; he wouldn’t eat; he hardly slept; he had phantom pains and irrational fears.
And Draco knew that it was the other part. But no one else ever knew what he meant by that when he tried to explain why he was always feeling so poorly.
His parents even made Draco see a special healer; she didn’t do any magic and just asked him lots of stupid questions about the other part. He told her very clearly, over and over—there was another piece of him, somewhere else that was far away, and that piece was very sad. So Draco was sad too. And sometimes the piece was hungry, or lonely, or hurt, or afraid. So Draco was too.
After that Draco had to talk to the healer once a week, and every day they made him take disgusting, chalky potions that made him feel distracted and sleepy. So Draco stopped talking about the other part. And he pretended, even to himself, that it wasn’t there.
Eventually, Draco stopped thinking about that boy on the road.
Then he stopped dreaming about him.
When Draco turned nine, he didn’t remember the boy at all.