#xpadma

“Are you coming in?” Percy held the door open for the person behind him, but they were further than Percy had anticipated. He held the door open for an awkwardly long time. 

@xpadma​

The summons to the Ministry of Magic -- for routine questioning, of course -- following that unpleasant little article in the Daily Prophet wasn’t the surprise it once would have been, when the Malfoy name carried weight rather than baggage. The only surprising thing about it was that neither father nor mother had received summons of their own -- but perhaps those were still to come; perhaps the Ministry was working through their list of possible malcontents according to their level of threat assessment rather than alphabetically of geographically this time.

Perhaps Draco had actually done something -- or been framed for doing something -- that brought suspicion onto him. A terrifying thought, and one that he was doing his best to push out of his head as he sat on the hard bench waiting for whatever agent of the Magical Law Enforcement Patrol had been assigned to interview him this time. It wasn’t going well.

The intrusion of a pair of feet and the swish of a robe on his nervous contemplation of the floor forced him to look up from where he sat clasping and unclasping his hands over his knees in an effort to keep from picking at the embroidered cuffs of his sleeves. The face he saw looking back at him was familiar in a passing sense from years of Hogwarts hallways and classrooms and the occasional elbow-brushing that pure-blood children did in their years before school; he couldn’t say he knew the witch well, but well enough that he didn’t need to ask for a name -- or a job title.

Draco swallowed. “Patil,” he said, unable to restrain a jolt of fear at the arrival of a Ministry Hit Witch. He hoped he’d managed to keep it off his face, but these days the arrogant mask that had once been so easy to don wasn’t as reliable as it had once been -- not that Draco had ever been all that adept at hiding his feelings, not the way his father could anyway. He’d just liked to think he had, but that -- like so many of his illusions -- had crumbled now.