Draco knew that he looked at the world differently than other people did; it had earned him strange looks from his mother and her rare visitors in the past, and his tutors were constantly trying to understand how he came up with some of the ideas he did. He'd finally stopped voicing them, because clearly they only caused trouble. He had been writing them down, and had kept them where they would be safe -






"Er...you're not going to fling yourself off the roof, are you?" she asked carefully. She was aware that she wasn't well-known for her tact, but tact, she felt, was highly overrated when one wasn't dealing with employers or foreign governments.
He snorted. "If I intended to kill myself I'd be much more efficient about it than this."
"Good to know, I suppose," she answered, sitting on the edge of the trap. He offered her a slice of the apple, and she accepted delicately. She waited; she found silence was usually as effective as active interrogation. It had worked on Severus when he was a student, anyway.




There, at the bottom of the list, in a scrawl that certainly wasn't his own, was a name not dissimilar to Hamg PoHer. Or, if one looked closely, Harry Potter.
"Malfoy," he muttered under his breath, recognising the handwriting