Chapter 14: The Importance of Draco Malfoy
Chapter 14: The Importance of Draco Malfoy
1. "Well, I--I--" He thought some more. "Truthfully, I've left home. I live in Surrey, and--"
"Surrey! That's a good one!" the golfer responded. "Lad, you're as Scottish as I am! With that accent? Now, you sound like an inlander, mind ye, that’s not Doric as we speak round here, but yer not from Surrey, or I'm the queen!"
This comes up again later, but I enjoyed having Harry not even notice that he grew up with a different accent than in his other life! In a way, it also made the conversation between the two Harrys (in a few chapters) easier, because there I wrote out this different speech pattern, to differentiate his words from "original" Harry's dialogue.
2. "But I don’t have any money now--I was robbed, and they took my coat, too--and I'm trying to get--" he wracked his brain some more. "--to Huntly!" he finally said, remembering Ron's testimony and the newspaper Crouch had shown him, The Huntly Express. "I have some other relatives near Huntly." Suddenly, he was no longer angry with Ron for having testified against him; he wouldn’t have known where he was going otherwise.
Ron's testimony served more than one purpose (which is to say, it wasn't just to make him look like a terrible person who stabbed Harry in the back, egged on by Dumbledore).
3. ...he tensed up again when he heard the report coming from the radio in the caravan:
"And residents along the northern and eastern coast should be on the lookout for Harry Potter, an escapee from a juvenile detention centre who is considered to be very dangerous."
Shades of when Sirius escaped from Azkaban. It would have been way too easy for Harry if he didn't have to worry about Muggles also recognizing him or knowing his name.
4. "Potter has a distinctive tattoo on his left forearm: a skull with a tongue resembling a snake..."
So in the other universe, Harry would have been easily spotted because of his lightning bolt scar, which was from Voldemort, and here he is identifiable (though less easily spotted, unless he pushes his sleeves up) by a mark that also comes from Voldemort. Harry is really screwed by that guy no matter what.
5. Harry was suddenly aware of an envy such as he had never felt well up in him. Oh, to be normal. To be unextraordinary. To be an oblivious Muggle, never suspecting the existence of the wizarding world, nor the horrors it contained. He had often longed to be an ordinary wizard in his old life, like Ron, rather than the famous Harry Potter. And in this life, he had had that for a while. But now--now he was infamous.
A little foreshadowing for the end of the next fic.
6. Davies hadn’t seen him. Brilliant, Harry thought. I have to worry about the Ministry, Dumbledore's operatives and Death Eaters. And the ones that worry me the most are the Death Eaters, so naturally, the first person I see is Roger Davies...
Isn't that always the way? However, when Harry next encounters the Longbottoms, he'll be wishing they were Davies.
7. She pulled out a very official-looking card. "D.I. Longbottom."
Her husband also pulled out a card. "And D.C.I. Longbottom. We have just a few questions for you."
Hmm. She's pretending to be a Detective Inspector, and he's pretending to be a Detective Chief Inspector. That's rather a high rank, Harry knew. Not very bright. It wouldn't be hard to check with the local constabulary to find out who all of the D.C.I.s were. But, as offended as Menzies was at being stopped, he also didn't seem to be the sort to check later on whether he'd been accosted by real police, rather than impostors.
I would assume that Aurors would occasionally need to impersonate Muggle police in the course of their work and would come prepared with counterfeit IDs.
8. He tried to imagine Draco traveling as a Muggle, hiding and sneaking around. He'll be grousing in no time. Harry sighed and leaned back as the bus hurtled into the night, wishing it were Ron who was going to be his traveling companion. The Ron from his old life. Even though they'd landed in hot water, it had been great fun flying the Ford Anglia to school at the beginning of their second year. He missed Ron so much.
I just realized that in DH, Harry was traveling around with his best friends along with a Horcrux, something imbued with the essence of Voldemort, which was adversely affecting them but which they needed to ultimately defeat Voldemort (in part by destroying it). This is eerily close to Harry and Draco, best friends, traveling around with the diary, in which they were writing, with the result that Voldemort's essence was influencing them, but they needed to do this in order to accomplish their goal of defeating Voldemort...
9. The pain was growing more intense. Finally, a pain both sharp and burning attacked his arm, and he cried out, holding his forearm cradled against him, sweat dripping off his nose.
Menzies was startled and swerved to the right momentarily. Harry looked up in alarm, seeing headlights coming right at them, and behind the headlights, a large white lorry. Menzies hurriedly swung the wheel over and had them back on the left side of the road before the lorry passed them, a strong breeze whistling past the car windows as it sped by, and the driver leaned on his horn in anger.
Almost as bad as Harry having the scar in his other life is his having a Dark Mark in this one. But having Harry die in a traffic accident wasn't part of my plan. ;)
10. Looking like Davy White, but wearing old, worn-out Muggle clothes, Albus Dumbledore sat at the end of the bar, listening to a young man speaking earnestly to him about an investment program. A large brown mastiff lounged on the floor under their feet, his head on his paws, a sleepy expression in his eyes. Harry turned on his heel, hoping Dumbledore hadn't seen him, and bolted out again.
Harry's had a lot of breaks during this day, but he's had a few close calls, too.
11. Dementors. Dementors were everywhere. In the flaring torches on the stone walls he could see that they surrounded the castle. They lined the edge of the forest. He could see their outlines behind the parapets, eerily backlit by more torches. That meant they were even in the castle, something Dumbledore had never allowed when he was headmaster.
And yet another shock for Harry. Death Eaters, Aurors, dementors and Dumbledore.
12. "That's how you did everything," he said suddenly.
"What?"
"From your other life. You said you won the Triwizard Tournament when you were a fourth-year. You learned to be an Animagus. You knew all those Muggle-borns in your other life, didn't you? The spells, the people-all this time, whenever Jamie and Ginny and I were saying, 'How do you know?' and you said, 'I can't tell you,' it was because of the other time, wasn't it? Wasn't it?"
Fifty house points for Draco! Plus, Draco is inclined to believe Harry because a) he believes in magic, and he knows some people can manipulate time through magic (and that Harry did this both to save Ginny and to wreak havoc at the initiation); and b) there were so many weird, inexplicable things Harry had done over the previous seven months that only something as wacky as Harry having lived another life could adequately explain all of it.
13. "I'll do it. I'll write in the diary. Don't feel guilty over me, Harry."
"But--but I don't want to put you through that. You're my best friend."
"Harry!" Draco cried, angry now. "Listen to me. I'm no friend. I did something horrible, something unforgivable. And because I did it, all of this mess has happened. It's all my fault, all of it."
The speculation on what Draco had done was pretty extensive, but a few people did guess correctly (even before Draco's guilt-ridden outburst).
14. He stared at the space next to the dog. The air was shimmering strangely, and when it stopped, Albus Dumbledore was standing there, looking like Davy White.
I believe that this is the sort of thing Dumbledore did in Harry's first year, when he said that he didn't need a cloak to be invisible. I called it the Chameleon Charm in my universe, but in OotP JKR called it a Disillusionment Charm. I kept using my own name for it for consistency, but I haven't had anyone tell me I was giving the wrong name to the Disillusionment Charm. (Unlike the people who try to tell me that James was a Seeker, because of the MOVIES, argh.)
15. "You've changed, Harry. You've grown."
"Yeah, that'll happen when you get sent to Azkaban when you're sixteen," he said bitterly, unwilling to give the old man the respect he'd previously enjoyed. "That'll happen when the one person you trust above all else stabs you in the back."
I gave Harry the chance to be shirty to Dumbledore for his manipulation, something he didn't really do in canon. He was mainly hacked off about Sirius dying in OotP, when he wrecked the head's office. And when he spoke to Dumbledore at Kings Cross, after he died, he was much calmer than he'd been at the end of OotP.
16. "You realize, of course, that he has discovered that he no longer has his proper wand, and that it was not Barty Crouch, Jr. who took it, don't you?"
Harry swallowed. "Oh. He does?"
Dumbledore nodded. "Why do you think Death Eaters are after you?"
Harry shook. Oh dear. Will I be able to get to the wand? Or will Death Eaters be all over the place at Dover?
Because there weren't enough challenges for Harry already. I was such a mean person, all of the crap I put Harry through!