Chapter 10 : Trevor and the Malfoy Problem
Hogwarts Express — September 1, 1991, 1:47 PM
Whisper refused to leave Neville's lap.
This was, by any measurable standard, unusual. In two years of bonding, Matt had catalogued Whisper's behavioural patterns with veterinary precision. She tolerated Cork. She endured Tilly. She permitted Pip to exist in her general vicinity. She'd accepted Harry over months of careful introduction during his Manor visits, and even then, she maintained the detached dignity of a creature granting access to her presence rather than seeking company.
With Neville Longbottom, she'd climbed into his lap within thirty seconds of meeting him and was now purring with the volume of a small engine, amber eyes closed, every line of her body communicating something Matt had never seen from her before: complete trust.
Through the bond, Matt caught echoes of what Whisper was reading. Neville's emotional signature was — open was the wrong word. Raw. This was a boy whose defences had never properly formed because nobody had ever taught him he was worth defending. His anxiety ran like an underground river, constant and deep, but the surface was all kindness. Gentle hands. A soft voice asking permission before touching. The instinct to apologise for existing.
Whisper, who had spent the first year of her life being broken by rough hands, recognised that gentleness like a language she'd been waiting to hear.
"She's never done this," Matt said. "Not with anyone."
Neville's eyes were enormous. His hand had frozen mid-stroke, as though any sudden movement might shatter the miracle. "R-really? But I'm not — I mean, I'm not good with animals. I can't even keep Trevor from —"
"She disagrees." Matt nodded at the Kneazle. "And she's a better judge of character than anyone I've met."
A flush crept up Neville's neck. He resumed stroking, carefully, and Whisper's purr deepened another register.
Across the compartment, Hermione watched with the focused intensity of someone compiling a research paper in real time. Matt could practically see the mental filing system — Kneazle behaviour: atypical bonding response, possible empathic sensitivity, investigate further — and made a deliberate decision not to address it. Let her observe. Let her build her theories. The truth was so far outside her frame of reference that she'd exhaust every rational explanation before arriving anywhere dangerous.
Ron, oblivious to the undercurrents, was explaining the finer points of Quidditch scoring to Harry with the passionate incoherence of a true believer.
"— and if the Seeker catches it, you get a hundred and fifty, right, so it basically decides the match, which is mental if you think about it because one player shouldn't be more important than the whole team but that's just how it works and —"
"Ron." Harry held up a hand. "Breathe."
"— the Cannons just need one good Seeker and they'd be back in the running, I swear —"
The compartment door slid open.
The boy in the doorway had a pointed face, white-blond hair combed flat, and the posture of someone who'd been taught to enter rooms like he owned them. Two larger boys flanked him — thick-necked, dull-eyed, the kind of mass that served as punctuation to someone else's sentences.
Draco Malfoy looked exactly like his description. Matt had read it a hundred times across two lifetimes, but the reality carried a dimension the page couldn't — the boy was eleven. Under the practised sneer and the tailored robes and the affected drawl, he was a child mimicking the only authority he knew.
"Is it true?" Draco's gaze swept the compartment and landed on Harry. "They're saying Harry Potter is in this compartment. So it's you, is it?"
Harry's jaw tightened. "Yeah."
"This is Crabbe and Goyle." A lazy gesture at the flanking masses. "And I'm Malfoy. Draco Malfoy."
Ron made a small noise — not quite a laugh, not quite a cough. Draco's attention snapped to him.
"Think my name's funny, do you? No need to ask yours. Red hair, second-hand robes — you must be a Weasley."
The colour drained from Ron's face, then flooded back as crimson. His mouth opened.
"Malfoy," Matt said.
The word cut across the compartment like a scalpel — calm, conversational, pitched at exactly the register that made people stop and listen. Draco's head turned. His grey eyes found Matt and narrowed, running the same social calculus his father had probably taught him: clothing quality, bearing, confidence, threat assessment.
"Who are you?"
"Matt Summon." He kept his voice light. Friendly, even. The way you'd talk to a spooked horse — no aggression, no submission, just steady presence. "Your family's Abraxan stables are legendary. I've read your grandfather's breeding journals — the '67 bloodline cross was inspired."
Silence.
Draco's sneer faltered. The expression that replaced it was fascinating — a boy encountering a social script he hadn't rehearsed. Nobody was supposed to redirect with compliments. The options were cower, fight, or ignore. This wasn't any of them.
"You —" Draco blinked. "You know about the Abraxans?"
"The Summon family maintained one of the largest creature reserves in Britain. Before the war." Matt met Draco's eyes. "We're rebuilding."
The words landed with calculated weight. The Summon family. Draco's expression shifted again — he was placing the name, sorting through the pureblood genealogy his father would have drilled into him. The recognition arrived visibly: old family, old money, decimated by the war, but legitimate.
"I've heard the name," Draco said slowly. "My father mentioned —"
"The reserve near Inverness? Yes. That's ours." Matt smiled. "Perhaps we'll talk creatures sometime. I'd love to hear about the Abraxan training programme."
Crabbe and Goyle exchanged confused glances. This wasn't how compartment invasions were supposed to go. Draco stood in the doorway for a long moment, social apparatus recalibrating, and then did something Matt suspected he rarely did.
He left without an insult.
"I — right. Well." Draco straightened his robes. "I'll see you at school, then." His gaze flicked to Harry — a flash of the original hostility — but the momentum was gone. He turned and walked away, goons trailing.
The compartment exhaled.
"Bloody hell," Ron said. "What was that?"
"Diplomacy."
"You were nice to him." Ron said this as though Matt had committed a crime against nature. "He was being a prat and you were nice."
"His family breeds Abraxans. That's genuinely interesting." Matt shrugged. "Being rude to someone with resources and connections is a luxury. Being polite costs nothing and opens doors."
Ron stared at him with the expression of someone whose worldview had been challenged and wasn't sure how to file the result. Harry, though — Harry was watching Matt with a different look. Quiet. Thoughtful. The look of a boy who'd been handling bullies alone for ten years and had just seen someone use words instead of fists.
"That was clever," Harry said.
"That was weird," Ron corrected.
Whisper, who had opened one eye during the confrontation, now closed it again. Through the bond, Matt caught her assessment of where Draco had stood: cold-afraid-performing-young. Not a threat. Not yet. Just a child wearing his father's mask.
The countryside rushed past the windows. The light was shifting — afternoon bleeding into early evening, the hills gaining the purple tinge that meant they were heading deep into Scotland. Somewhere ahead, the castle was waiting.
Hermione, who had been uncharacteristically silent during the exchange, leaned forward.
"You handled that like you'd done it before," she said. "Like you already knew what he was going to say."
Matt looked at her. Those brown eyes were doing the thing — the analytical thing, the I'm-building-a-case thing.
"Some people are predictable," he said.
"No one's that predictable at eleven."
"Maybe I'm just observant."
"Maybe," Hermione said, in a tone that meant I don't believe you and I will find out why.
The train whistle screamed. Through the window, the sky had darkened to ink, and against it, lit by a thousand golden points of light, Hogwarts rose from the hills like something dreamt.
Nobody spoke. Even Ron went quiet.
Matt pressed his palm against the glass. The castle was enormous — vast and impossible and alive in a way no photograph or film or written description had ever captured. Towers pierced the clouds. Windows glowed like earthbound stars. The lake below reflected the whole structure in black water, doubling it, as though the castle existed in two worlds at once.
I made it. Five years of planning and preparing and waiting, and I'm here.
Twig stirred in his hair, tiny fingers gripping tight. Whisper's eyes opened on Neville's lap. Through both bonds, Matt caught the same sensation: home-not-home, ancient, vast, alive.
"Change into your robes," a voice called from the corridor. "We'll be arriving at Hogsmeade station shortly."
Matt reached for his trunk. His hands were steady.
His stomach, traitorously, growled. Lunch had been chocolate frogs and cauldron cakes, and his body — his eleven-year-old, perpetually hungry body — was reminding him that sugar was not a meal.
Harry caught the sound and grinned. "Hungry?"
"Starving," Matt admitted. "I've heard the feast is worth the wait."
The train began to slow, and the five of them scrambled into robes in the cramped compartment, elbowing and apologising and laughing in the particular chaos of children who'd decided, somewhere in the last few hours, that they belonged to each other.
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