Diagon Alley—a long, winding cobblestone street lined with some of the most enticing wizarding shops in the world.
What noise. What bustle. What life.
In the past, Draco had mostly disdained environments like this. Even now, crowds still made him frown on instinct. To the Malfoy way of thinking, noise meant disorder, and disorder was neither elegant nor respectable.
Yet having lived through the oppressive silence of the Dark Lord's rule, he had quietly learned to value what he once dismissed. This chaotic, ordinary prosperity was something he had not realised he missed until it had been taken from him.
Groups of black-robed witches and wizards moved noisily along the street, silly smiles on their faces, ducking in and out of shops. Young wizards barely past their Hogwarts years pressed their noses to spotless windows displaying everything imaginable—flying broomsticks, robes, telescopes, silverware, Potions ingredients, spellbooks, quills and parchment, moon globes, owls, toads, and cauldrons of every allowable thickness.
Draco observed it all in silence, a strange sense of unreality settling over him.
This was not the Diagon Alley of his memories.
That image was seared into him, vivid as something that had happened yesterday: Ministry of Magic notices plastered across shop windows, obscuring the goods with photographs of wanted Death Eaters—grinning, distorted faces that sent a chill through every witch and wizard who passed by. His aunt Bellatrix had been among them, her wild eyes staring out from every corner.
The streets, once neat and well-kept, had become filthy under the Death Eaters' occupation. Shops ransacked and left derelict. Even Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlour—a place he had loved as a child—had been shuttered. The work of the Death Eaters, for reasons he had never been able to fathom.
Florean Fortescue had been kind to every young wizard who visited him. Pure-blood, Muggle-born, half-blood—it made no difference. He'd even been kind to Death Eater children, which, Draco supposed, said something about the man's character that his customers' parents entirely lacked.
When Lucius had been in Azkaban, when Draco's life had reached its lowest point, Fortescue had handed him an ice cream without a word—no contempt, no hesitation—while other shopkeepers turned away or muttered slurs under their breath.
What happened to Fortescue later was something Draco had tried not to think about.
He had last seen him in the dungeons of Malfoy Manor, driven to the edge of sanity by repeated applications of the Cruciatus Curse. Draco had once slipped him food in secret, and in return had heard the old man mutter fragments through cracked lips: "The Elder Wand... Ravenclaw's diadem..."
That was worth examining carefully. Draco turned it over in his mind.
The Elder Wand. The Dark Lord had grown increasingly fixated on finding a new wand—his own had formed that strange resonance with Potter's, and after the graveyard encounter he had never fully trusted it again. He had eventually taken Lucius's wand, used it once, and had it destroyed. And later, Dumbledore's wand had come into his possession, and the smug satisfaction on the Dark Lord's face when he received it had been something Draco was not likely to forget.
The Dark Lord didn't waste effort on useless people. He didn't torture someone without reason. If he had kept Fortescue alive and in agony for as long as he had, it was because Fortescue knew something the Dark Lord needed.
Most of the wizarding world knew Florean Fortescue only as an ice cream shop owner. Rather fewer remembered that he was a descendant of Dexter Fortescue, a former Headmaster of Hogwarts. It was not impossible that such a lineage came with certain exclusive knowledge.
This is worth remembering, Draco noted to himself, filing it carefully away.
Beside him, his mother's hand was warm and unhurried, guiding him along the cobblestones. He let himself be guided, maintaining the blank, pleasant expression of an eleven-year-old with no particular thoughts, while behind his eyes everything turned.
The Malfoy family stood out from the simply dressed crowds as they always did—effortlessly, almost offensively elegant. The bright sunshine caught their platinum hair. Their bearing was unmistakable: straight-backed, eyes forward, the particular gait of people accustomed to being observed and who considered it beneath them to acknowledge it.
Draco had been taught from the time he could walk that "attracting attention" meant maintaining dignity, not gaping at shop windows like a tourist.
As if to test him, he caught several boys near one of the windows saying in awed voices, "That's the new Nimbus 2000—the fastest broom ever made—"
Eyes forward. He kept walking.
In his past life, he had made the mistake of staring, and Lucius had called him unambitious in front of a crowd of strangers. That particular humiliation would not be repeated.
Besides, Potter was getting a Nimbus 2000 this year—a special allowance from Dumbledore for the youngest Seeker in a century. The last thing Draco intended was to match himself to the Saviour. The Nimbus 2001 would be out next year. He could make do with the family's Comet 260 in the meantime. Hogwarts didn't permit first-years to bring their own brooms anyway.
By the time he had finished this line of thinking, they had already passed through Gringotts' great bronze doors.
The bank rose above every other building on the Alley—snow-white, towering, aggressively impressive. Two sets of doors led into the marble hall, and beyond the silver inner doors, their goblin escort bowed with immaculate formality and led them through the gleaming interior to the cart that would take them down.
In Gringotts, a vault's location and the enchantments on its door say everything about its owner's standing. High-security vaults occupied the deepest levels, their doors warded with magic no ordinary key could touch. As one of the oldest wizarding families in England, the Malfoys stored their wealth miles beneath London—and the cart made no concessions to comfort on its way down, plummeting through the network of tunnels at a pace that made the stalactites blur.
The cart slowed as it passed the vast fire dragon chained to its stake in the darkness below.
Draco had once considered this dragon one of the few reasons worth enduring the dizzying ride. He had loved dragons since childhood. But looking at this one now, he found he couldn't summon any of that old feeling.
It wasn't majestic. Its face was ridged with terrible scars. Its scales were pale and dull, its eyes—which ought to have been a deep, vivid red—were a murky, clouded pink. Its hind legs were shackled with heavy chains. Its wings were folded flat against its sides.
When the sound of the cart disturbed it, the dragon turned its head and let out a roar that shook loose chips of stone from the ceiling—but it hesitated at the sharp clink of the Probity Probe in the goblin's hand, recoiling in spite of itself. Conditioned. Diminished.
A truly majestic dragon should be fearless, Draco thought. The goblins had tamed every last ounce of pride out of it.
He let out a quiet sigh.
The cart came to its final stop. A goblin tapped the vault door with a long-fingered hand, and the ancient, ornate door slowly dissolved into the wall.
Inside: coins, goldware, silverware, uncut gems, rare furs, Potions ingredients—the accumulated wealth of ten centuries of Malfoys, piled high in the torchlight. The Galleons were probably the least valuable things in the room.
Lucius surveyed his vault with proprietary satisfaction, brushed imaginary dust from his sleeve with the back of one hand, and swept the other in a casual arc that sent a generous pile of Galleons streaming neatly into several small dragonhide pouches. He held one out.
"Draco. Spend wisely." He pressed the pouch into his son's hands. "A Malfoy must learn to invest and to spend where spending counts. You'll find soon enough that most friends in this world can be acquired with gold."
"Yes, Father."
It was a philosophy that had served the family well over decades—a carefully maintained network of Ministry contacts, all kept warm with a steady flow of Malfoy generosity. Ironically, the moment Lucius's usefulness had come into question and he found himself behind the walls of Azkaban, every one of those contacts had vanished. Some had even taken the opportunity to kick him on the way down. Relationships maintained by gold alone, it turned out, were only as loyal as the next higher bidder.
The Malfoy family motto held that there were no permanent friends and no permanent enemies—only permanent interests. Draco had no intention of abandoning the principle entirely. Gold was a tool, and a useful one. But this time, he would remember what it could and couldn't buy.
He was still thinking this when he felt a warm hand on his head.
"My little dragon," Narcissa said, smoothing his platinum hair with a fond smile. "I've had a little extra put into your private vault. Don't tell your father."
Draco looked up at her. Her eyes were bright with genuine warmth—the uncomplicated, constant kind that had always been there whenever he had thought to look for it, even when he was too caught up in his own miseries to notice.
His private vault had existed since birth. His grandfather Abraxas had contributed to it yearly. His maternal grandfather Cygnus Black, who had a pronounced weakness for Narcissa, had done the same. And Narcissa herself, one of the wealthiest witchwomen in the wizarding world, had always ensured her son would never want for anything.
In his past life, he had squandered it—not on anything useful, but on pride and posturing. And then, by the time he had actually needed resources, the Malfoy family had already fallen so far that even their wealth became a liability, something the Dark Lord helped himself to like a guest who has long since outstayed his welcome.
Not this time. He closed his fingers around the pouch. It felt like closing his fingers around something more important.
"Thank you, Mother," he said, and gave her a genuine smile.
She patted his cheek and moved away, and Draco turned back to the tunnel as the cart began its return journey, winding through the underground labyrinth.
It stopped briefly before the Lestrange vault.
Lucius's expression went carefully neutral in the particular way that meant he was displeased and had decided not to say so—for now. He did not want Narcissa associated with convicted prisoners. He had spent considerable effort distancing the Malfoy name from anything that might be described as a stain, and visiting the vault of two of Azkaban's most notorious residents was not, in his view, a dignified errand.
Narcissa understood all of this perfectly, and it made no difference. She could not abandon her own blood, not even Bellatrix. It had been at her father's insistence—someone had to manage things while the family remained imprisoned, and Narcissa was the only one left.
She had her own way of managing Lucius. While Draco turned to the attending goblin and asked, with what he hoped sounded like genuine curiosity, whether the chained dragon was a Ukrainian Ironbelly, Narcissa rose on her toes and pressed a light kiss to her husband's cheek.
"I'll be quick, Lucius."
The effect was immediate. His expression softened. He gave a small, resigned shake of his head, and watched her follow the goblin—Pull Ring, the nameplate read—into the vault without another word.
Draco noted this with the same quiet satisfaction he'd felt at breakfast.
Narcissa returned shortly, carrying a small package wrapped neatly under one arm. As the vault door swung shut behind her, Draco caught a brief glimpse through the narrowing gap: shelves upon shelves from floor to ceiling, gold coins, silver goblets, the furs of various beasts—some winged, some horned—enchanted vases, and at least one skull fitted with a jewelled crown.
The Lestranges had never been poor. Bellatrix, if she'd had any interest in comfort, could have lived extraordinarily well.
Pity her tastes ran in other directions, Draco thought, with a grimace.
He did not share his father's reluctance about Narcissa's visits for any political reason. He shared it for a simpler one: Bellatrix was genuinely dangerous, and any thread connecting his mother to her was a thread connecting his mother to danger.
He could acknowledge, grudgingly, that Bellatrix was gifted. As a practitioner of the Dark Arts she was formidable—and her Occlumency was exceptional. She had even taught Draco herself, at Narcissa's request.
But gifted and ruthless were not the same as trustworthy. Bellatrix would sacrifice anything for a word of praise from the Dark Lord. She had killed her own cousin—had laughed while doing it. There was no floor to her. No line she recognised as a line.
Most wizarding families, whatever their allegiances, maintained one basic understanding: magic was Merlin's gift, and the wizarding bloodline was not something to be carelessly extinguished. Even families riven by opposing beliefs understood that killing your own was a different order of transgression. It was the most severe punishment possible, and one that was never undertaken lightly.
Bellatrix had crossed that boundary without a moment's hesitation. Without a trace of psychological burden. Laughing.
She had also tortured Granger.
Draco shut that memory down quickly, the way a person shuts a door before looking too closely at what's inside.
That memory competed for the top of his personal list of nightmares, ranked alongside the Astronomy Tower, and he had no intention of examining either before he had a wand in his hand.
The cart lurched back into motion. Draco held the dragonhide pouch tightly and watched the tunnel walls blur past in the dark.
First things first, he told himself. Get the wand. Then see about putting certain memories somewhere they can't reach you uninvited.