Scene Type: Join-In (Post in Thread to Play) / Finished
Characters: Draco Malfoy, Audrey Miller Location: Diagon Alley, London, UK
It was about 10:30 in the morning in Diagon Alley on Valentine's Day, and for being a major hub of wizarding bustle, the alley was rather sedate. Plenty of wizards and witches were still about, but there was no hustle, there was no haste, and a few magical couples were looking horribly lovey-dovey. The air above Diagon Alley was charmed to gently drift down heart-shaped pink, red, and white snow-flakes that melted gently away when they landed on surfaces.
However, those people who passed by Ollivander’s wand shop would give it a wide berth, for every so often, there were small explosions or shuddering shakes or bright lights or any number of unexpected bangs and smells issuing from within. This was, perhaps, a little more than what usually happened when young magical children came to be fitted for wands.
The reason? Draco Malfoy was inside, helping himself to trying out wands.
And where was Mr. Ollivander? He was hiding in the back, his ears charmed to not hear Draco, and a protective enchanted bubble around him and his working space as he made wands.
The man had had enough and refused to assist Draco Malfoy with finding yet another wand that would work with him. So, Draco simply plonked a heavy bag of gold galleons on the man’s desk, told him he didn’t need the help of the old man, and suggested the man wear some earmuffs.
While Mr. Ollivander grumbled to himself and concentrated on his work, Draco Malfoy was randomly pulling out boxes of wands, inspecting their labels, wrenching open the tops of those boxes, and pulling out wands. He waved, flicked, swished, whirled, and did all manner of motions with wands, finding every single one to be not .. the one. Draco had waved enough wands in his life to know what wrong and right felt like.
Sure, the letter from the Supreme Mugwump in the morning had given him an uplift in his mood, but being back in Ollivander's for the umpteenth time had brought it right back down.
After waving a maple wand that caused a horribly inappropriate noise and bang to burst forth from the wand tip, Draco flung the wand on the pile of discarded options, not even caring to put it back in its box. He then growled as he wrenched off a pair of black robes embroidered in patterned silver spirals, wadded it up, and threw it on the sole spindly chair in the front of the shop. Hand then ruffled angrily through his hair, as if he was trying to shake a burden out of those pale locks, and he stomped over to another shelf of wands, gathering them up in his arms by hand to put on the table near the spindly chair.
“I’m taking down more wands!” he called to the man in the back who couldn’t even hear him.
Draco kept his face bland as a response to the quippy return, and he said nothing to her as she departed. A minute after she left, he screwed up his face in question.
"Moll? Maude? Maaaauu-- er... Maude. Yeah... maybe that's it." He shrugged and filed away the girl under the name of Maude and turned back to the desk to proceed with his wand-waving attempt, completely disregarding Maude's advice.
/SCENE
Audrey grinned.
"It'll happen when you stop looking, then," she replied easily, and turned to ease her way out the door and back onto the street - the bell on the door jangling behind her departure.
Smirk died on his face at her threat.
Well, of course he wouldn’t leave the shop this way. He’d simply kick at Ollivander’s protective work bubble until he acknowledged the Slytherin, and then tell the man he was done. Ollivander would obviously clean it up, and with much faster results and more care than Draco Malfoy could afford at this point in time.
Draco shrugged off the threat, choosing not to take any consideration to the sincerity of her concern for Ollivander as he removed his hands from the desk and cross arms over his chest, head tilting slightly, and swept-back hair following the direction of the tilt to spill toward his left ear.
Smirk turned into a look of consideration at the Gryffindor witch’s question, and he rolled his eyes up to the ceiling as he thought about how to answer before looking back at her. “The right partner," he concluded aloud.
His question had her halting mid-path to the door. Audrey sighed, obvious frustration dancing in her eyes as she turned to face him again, shifting the box from under one arm to take residence beneath the other.
"Mr. Ollivander is quite capable of making his own decisions, and of looking after himself." There was a pause as she quested to leave it at that -- but failed miserably, adding suddenly "That said, if you fail to leave this shop in the order that you found it in - or if anything even remotely unpleasant happens to the man in that other room, I promise you'll be worse off for it."
Something darkened in her eyes as she offered that threat, something utterly sincere.
Audrey turned to start out of the shop again, pausing at the door. She turned back to face him again, slowly. "What is it that you're looking for, anyway?"
Draco did not see how the witch figured it was becoming more and more her business. Some kind of ‘Gryffindor Logic’ that wasn’t. Watching her face, the direction of her glances, he could tell she was piecing…. something together.
His head followed her as she hard-lined it to the back of the shop, but only as far as his neck would allow him, at which point, he strummed fingertips on the surface of the desk and allowed his ears to pick up the brief conversation the girl had with the wandmaker.
He smiled in a slightly satisfied way, hearing the light jangle of gold as Ollivander patted the hefty purse with his wizened hand. As the witch returned from the back, Draco watched her move from his periphery into his main sights, and his head turned to follow her once more.
“And yet, still not satisfied, with his answer, are you?” He blinked his own smirking satisfaction at her.
She narrowed those coppery eyes upon him then, shifting the weight of the box in her arms.
"It seems to be becoming more and more my business by the instant," she replied coolly, taking a moment to pry her gaze away from his - to assess the ridiculous mess he was making in Mr. Ollivander's shop. She noted the broken mirror, finding it difficult to believe it might have been that way before Draco had arrived and started doing -- whatever it was he was doing.
If Audrey was uncomfortable under the scrutinizing impression of his icy stare (spoiler: she was), she kept that fact expertly concealed for the moment. When she looked back to Draco, her instinct was to make an accusation - to announce with typical Gryffindor bravado that she had seen him the other day, walking away from the wreckage at Borgin and Burke's (even though she couldn't, of course, be 100% certain that had been the back of his head she'd seen). She didn't, however.
Just the same, something knowing and certain glimmered within her betraying gaze - as though to taunt him with a secret she was most-certainly privy to. Can that much truly be conveyed with a mere look? Perhaps it was simply imagined.
Suddenly, she had redistributed her attention to finding the wandmaker - who had been so tirelessly attentive to his work. There seemed something very peculiar about the situation Audrey had wandered into, to be sure, and she made a bee-line for the back of the shop, abandoning Draco (momentarily) for an older (and more-gentlemanly) gentleman.
"I have something for you, Mr. Ollivander -- from the Professor," she offered, crossing over to the old man and balancing the black box on her hip as she disappeared a gloved hand into the pocket of her navy overcoat.
The protective bubble around Mr. Ollivander evaporated.
"I'm sorry, dear, have you said something?"
Audrey withdrew a small, parchment envelope with neat scrawl on the front and set it down in front of Mr. Ollivander. He glanced up at her with a distracted (but familiar) smile.
"Are you alright?" Audrey asked him, allowing her concern to steep into her lowered tone of voice. She cast another wary glance over in Draco's direction.
"Oh yes, just fine," Ollivander replied, patting the little pile of galleons on his desk.
Audrey knitted her brow with concern. "Alright," she offered reluctantly. "I'll leave you to it, then."
She turned to make her way back out into the shop as the old man restored his protective charm and set back to work.
The sound of a voice behind Draco made him straighten up slightly from his hunched over position as he was pulling the open boxes to expose the wands inside. He thought it would probably be easier if he made an assembly line of this process. Eyes flicked up to look at a cracked mirror (his fault) on the wall behind the desk that he was standing in front of. Multiple fractured features of himself were reflected in the shards of mirror, held to frame by the glue behind them. And behind him… some witch about his age who very simply sounded… Gryffindor.
“Why do you think it is any business of yours?”
He did not recognize the witch, but her ease at calling him by his name intimated some sort of annoying familiarity, though clearly no real acquaintance.
Draco’s gaze dropped back down to the wands, hands continuing to quickly and deftly open the boxes of wands. He was only the barest bit neater this time about it. Once the last box in the line was open, he paused, realizing he did not want to wave these wands in front of this woman. He turned to face her, looking her over now, a calmer breath inhaled as he set hands on the edge of the table now pressed against his lower back.
Lips pursed briefly as he scrutinized her. The only thing he found interesting about her were perhaps her eyes. They seemed to hide a crafty personality behind what was very clearly a Gryffindor’s air of sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong.
"What you're doing, is being a prat."
The female voice that sounded from the doorway did little to mask its ire. In the midst of his deft and frenzied intent, perhaps he'd missed the sound of the bell on the door. Or, perhaps, he had chosen to ignore it in indifference. Just the same, Audrey stood there - hazel eyes narrowed at the pale-haired Slytherin alumni. She held a shiny black box under the crook of her arm, sized to indicate some sort of apparel inside, gloved hands gripping its edges (and abandoning post only long enough to reach up and tug the edge of her apple-green scarf back under her chin).
"Why are you mucking about with Mr. Ollivander's wands, Draco?"
The tone with which she spoke his name was almost as pointed as his features - (which, it occurred to her in that instance, had only gotten pointier with time). When exactly was the last time she'd seen or spoken to the Malfoy heir? It was impossible to say - but it couldn't be coincidence that Audrey had sworn she'd spotted a glint of silvery hair in his departure from the incident at Borgin and Burke's the day before, and now here he was tearing through Ollivander's stock like the wands were mere play-things (and not the finely-crafted instruments they were).