Like Fine Wine

Chapter 3

Draco received a reply at midnight.

He was bothered not by an owl silently tapping on the window. No, this owl crashed through his window like a ninja and rolled over in his blankets until it landed to a shuddering stop in his lap.

He was startled out of his wits to see a bundle of feathers blinking down at him.

"Gah!" he shrieked and scuttered back into his bed. It took him a couple of minutes, a vague groping around his desk to find his gold-rimmed glasses to put them on and a great deal of squinting to realise that it was, in fact, an owl. A now impatient owl which was eyeing his glasses like a damn Niffler.

"Alright, alright, fine," he sneered at the black owl with streaks of snowy white. He petted it for a little while and untied the sealed letter from its leg. As soon as he was done, it took off, but not before knocking the lamp out of its stand in revenge for not letting it have his glasses.

The seal was neat, circular and entirely green with a dot of black in the middle, spreading out into a tiny star. He reached over to the bedside cabinet for the letter opener, and carefully prised it open.

There was a thick piece of parchment, not too big, with a simple reply unlike the one Draco was expecting. It had quite scraggly handwriting, too, which he seemed to have read somewhere but couldn't recall.

It read:

Look out for me at Scrivenshaft's Quill Shop, Hogsmeade, this Thursday at around five in the evening. I have to run some errands, but we can talk from there onwards.

-Manager, Pulchra

"That's it?" Draco yelled in exasperation, pulling at bunches of his own hair. He huffed like a child and crossed his arms. "I'll show this person who the boss is here. I won't go."

He ended up going anyway (much to his embarrassment).

He was impatiently tapping his foot, searching the heads of the customers to find someone dignified to even remotely looked like an expert perfumer. It was quite a hassle, and he felt like an idiot for not asking any method of identification. He too, had only signed his initials in the letter, and now he was left with nothing to rely on but guesswork.

Suddenly, a mop of raven hair came into his field of vision. A head he knew oh-so-well.

He quickly turned around a corner and stormed out of the quill suppliers.

Harry bloody Potter. Of course, he had to be there.

Why had he come there, of all places? Why did he have to violently intrude in his life? It had all become so awkward after the trial, and Draco was still feeling heavily indebted to the sod after he had spoken up for him and Narcissa all those years ago.

He still hated him. That 'Saviour'. He had been nothing but just a boy, as scared as him, just on the opposite side of the War. Draco's mind took him back to the feeling of the flames of the Fiendfyre licking at his shoes, moments before he was rescued by the Chosen One. When he had wrapped his arms around Potter's waist to keep himself from toppling to certain death, he had felt it. That tremble. That one instinctive action which had betrayed the fear and misery the boy had been carrying since he was one year old.

For that one brief moment, Draco had felt like a complete wanker. He was terribly ashamed of himself for relying on the very boy he had put to suffering his entire school life. In that one moment, he had realised that famous Harry Potter was just another human being, as vulnerable to hurt and as susceptible to death as he was. The difference? The stupid Gryffindor had guts. Guts that he, Draco, severely lacked to this day.