Draco Malfoy and the House of Black

The Rat and the Dragon

"What was your Boggart again?" Draco asked weakly, and her cheeks went pink.

"Professor McGonagall," she informed him stiffly, "Telling me I'd gotten a fail grade in every class. Which you ought to remember, given how much you laughed the first time I told you, so you're just stalling." Draco made a face at her and flicked at the H charm on her bracelet.

"Okay, fine, you're right," said Draco. "So I went back on Christmas and I managed it-"

"Christmas?" Hermione said, dismayed. "I thought you spent Christmas with your family."

Draco smiled at her grimly. "I went back to Grimmauld every day after that before term started, and they didn't notice me leaving once. As long as I'm at meals, I could be off selling my body between them, and they'd be none the wiser." He laughed at the face she made at his colorful example. "Sorry, sorry, but you catch my drift. Anyway, I'd blasted the name off the tapestry, and when I looked up, there was my Uncle Sirius, looking just like on all his wanted posters. And-"

Draco looked her in the eye and instantly lost his nerve to be completely forthcoming. "And then we went down to the living room, and sat down together," he went on, which wasn't objectively untrue if you just left off a lot of intervening events. "And he told me that it wasn't him who turned in the Potters, but Peter Pettigrew. If you've heard the name, it's because that's who he was supposed to have killed along with all of those Muggles- the one where they could only find his finger? Well, that's because Pettigrew cut off his own finger, to fake his death and frame Uncle Sirius. Pettigrew was the Secret Keeper, not Uncle Sirius..."

Hermione listened to his rendition of Black's incredible tale with a patience Draco knew Ron and Potter would never have shown, though he could see in her eyes the one question that was the hardest to explain, without being able to admit he had future knowledge: And you believe all this why? Her credulity only seemed to crack when she asked why Black had chosen now, to get out and try and find the living Pettigrew, and Draco drawled, "Well, guess who made the paper with a lottery they won to finance a trip to Egypt? And guess whose rat happens to be missing a finger?"

"Wait," Hermione said slowly, holding up a hand. "You mean the Weasleys? Scabbers?"

"If it's any consolation," Draco said, "I think this is proof that Crookshanks is not only a good cat, but smarter than the rest of us." Her face looked like she'd reached the moment she could no longer continue indulging his lunacy, and he reached hurriedly into his pocket, for the Polaroid he had been carrying in anticipation of this moment sometime coming. "Wait, before you think I've been Confunded. Look at this picture, they're all Animagi- well, except for Lupin, it's like you said, he's a werewolf- he's Moony, Hermione, look at him, there he is, like on the map, that's the four of them who made it, Moony..." He forced her to look and tapped each face on the picture in turn. "Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs. See, that's Lupin, Pettigrew, Uncle Sirius, and Potter's father..."

Hermione thought he was a lunatic after that. That much seemed beyond dispute, as she was ashen-faced and quiet for the next week, even around the only one of her friends currently speaking to her. And it was a very bleak week for Draco in turn, responding to Black's attempts to contact him on their two-way mirror with dark hisses of Later and I'm working on it, until she sidled up at the end of their snowy Saturday scrimmage with Thomas, after scoring enough goals on Keeper Finnigan to make him look liable to give up the sport, and whispered, "I want to meet him."

Draco dropped Thomas's West Ham football in a muddy snowbank, prompting great Gryffindor jeering at his failure in juggling. He made half-hearted excuses before following her behind a pillar in the courtyard. "I want to meet him," she repeated, "So I can judge his story for myself, it's the only way I can think of to figure out any better whether it's true. All the research I've been doing, it just proves they were all friends, and all members of the Order of the Phoenix. It doesn't prove whether it was him or Pettigrew to have really been the Secret Keeper, so..." Draco pulled out the mirror and she swatted him. "Draco, now is not the time to fix your hair-"