A Romeo\'s Nemesis

Chapter 3

Playing Before Dress-Up

By the time Draco finally managed to open his eyes for fear of missing the no doubt emotionally fulfilling day that lay in front of him, his father had been up for an hour and had bid the elves to bring his breakfast on a tray after casting a two-hour heating
spell across the portions. Draco smiled greedily as the adolescent male-stomach bade him eat and cracked open three hard boiled eggs with deft precision from years of auspicious mastery at the breakfast table under matron Narcissa\'s scrupulous eye.

Draco could hardly wait for the day to begin and while chortling on a sliver of bacon in sheer anticipatory giggles, he nearly jumped out of his skin as he watched a gold emblazoned note slide in through the crack beneath the steadfast third- century door. He
could never get used to his Father\'s surreptitious yet all commanding modas opperandi in getting his attention; he did decide to put down his cutlery before sauntering over, still quite wary from the times when carrying a knife in one\'s pocket could be possibly devastating to more external organs, and reached down to grasp the still dancing parchment.

The hot flushing love that encompassed him in reading five terribly unromantic words would\'ve tarried some boys to return back to bed and pray that their fathers weren\'t too filled with enmity to beat them raw, but no, not with Lucius; choosing the best inspiration to thus imbue such a hasty reaction, Draco bolted down the stairs still clutching the pristine document between catsup-encrusted fingertips. Bestowing upon his son a genuine smile of both adulation and impatience, Lucius ushered the younger version of himself through the foyer down to the gates in a matter of minutes, Draco still struggling to shove the incredibly stiff article into his most mediocre robes. Lucius’ cheek twitched at the increasingly annoyed boy and drew his hands clasped from behind him back to rest them on his son\'s trembling digits. And with characteristic smirk firmly set began his introduction.

\"I hope my few words of encouragement aren\'t the main incendiary to your apparent skittishness, Draco,\" Lucius drawled dramatic
and slow as if hypnotizing his son\'s eyes to his mouth. Taking the card from out of Draco\'s thumb and middle finger, Lucius folded
it quite easily and rolled it up to fit the circumference of his cane/wand wrap-around niche perfectly. Draco\'s right hand raced to his
scalp and lacerated it\'s first layer with cruel ease.

\"No, father, I assure you, I\'m perfectly used to waking up each day to the awe-inspiring words of, \"Die now or sleep eternally,\"

Draco spat with sarcastic force and brevity any Slytherin would admire on a quip-scale of one to ten; Lucius was no exception.

Resting a black gloved hand beneath Draco\'s elbow, Lucius gently guided him along the path to their nearest apparation point
just to the west of the main wing and unto Narcissa\'s private gardens. Although Narcissa was becoming more and more less of a
guiding force in Draco\'s esteemed existence, Sunday morning visits were quintessential to an amicable coinhabitance on the
Malfoy estate.

\"Morning, mother,\" Draco mumbled and rubbed his arm tenderly from where Lucius had receded his wandering fingers.

\"Hello, Draco! Off to the alleys then?\" Narcissa was most contented whilst embedded with the orchids she cultivated; almost rearing them as children, after Draco was born and she couldn\'t bare to conceive any more after such a difficult labour. Gardening seemed
to be her only rampart in the dismal and emotionally detached environment of social and financial opulence. However irrevocably sad it was to most other wizards, Narcissa tried not to dwell on the increasingly dry and ultimately chaste reality of her position; the
reason why she was barren still irked at her mind as if an undeniable hex still plagued her. She met the removed charcoal gaze of her husband and nodded accordingly, the bastard. For a few moments all three contingencies of what may come of the day\'s
events ran through each Malfoys mind as water ripples down a rocky cliff, never to be thought of or felt until a new storm broke, momentarily and never again.

\"We\'ll return by tea, dear,\" Lucius stated and Narcissa averred like clockwork, attesting her wifely duty to relinquish all moral conduct and ethical standards she may\'ve once held dear to when she wasn\'t enrolled as a socially hypocritical slattern. No, now
she was supposed to remain oblivious and blissfully unawares of the inner workings of her beloved\'s mind and openly sensual demeanour; it would only be a matter of time before Draco responded as he should, the little shit.

As the two virile blondes strutted down their own courtyard and into the busy wandering cobblestones of Diagon Alley, it was blatantly clear how attached they were to one another\'s mannerisms and vocations in high society; almost like exact replicas, with
cloaks issuing second glances from every which way, the two ravaged their environment visually for as many minutes as decency would allow and stepped into Flourish and Blotts with... well, a flourish really.

Smiling devilishly, Draco swept to his favourite and completely unrelated-to-any-stationary-whatsoever section where he found an array of Quidditch statistics and boisterous commentary emanating from each photograph loud enough to make the salesperson look up accostingly and glance back down hurriedly once aware of just who was making such a ruckus. Lucius, always being the man of action and emphasis by example, grasped a few packets of thick, triple embossed parchment with the requisite silver
etchings from the shelf and returned behind his sons eager flippings.

\"Find anything remotely pedant-worthy, my boy?\" Lucius was still pressuring him to study prior to the new year in order to possibly
avoid the castigations of his fellow classmates if Granger bypassed him in Arithmancy again. Draco scowled at the reminder that
school was swiftly approaching and berating incumbent and closed the book with a soft \"pffft.\"

\"No -\" Draco met the cool gaze of his father, his beautiful father whose skin was like cliché porcelain and whose ephemeral smile
could warm his insides for hours after; he sighed adoringly and forgot the whine he was about to issue. Lucius narrowed his eyes
with pompous victory erupting beneath the veil of flesh and HCl in his stomach. Draco\'s face lit up with delight at Lucius’
threatening gesture and quickly countered with relish:

\"There\'s no need to worry, father - I\'ve taken certain precautions this year that you will no doubt approve of,\" Draco winked
suggestively at the last half with the slight hope that perhaps his father wouldn\'t refute one of his more naturally brilliant ideas.
Lucius’ mind ceased all articulate workings for a second and a half before resuming his arduous
task over and over in his head to make sure that his son understood the serious and rewarding undertaking that Shakespeare was.

\"Well,\" Lucius straightened from his slightly slumped position in attempting intimidation with his son (there were several other
more pleasing positions he could think of to accommodate and fructify his efforts) and pointed his cane toward the register (snaky
point facing forward of course).

\"Collect your thoughts and when I return, you will tell me your cabal without brevity,\" Lucius brightened at watching the inner-
workings of his son churn before his eyes as Draco ran over his mental dictionary.

\"Yeah!\" dawn broke with bright intensity, \"I will,\" and set with calm deciphering.

When Lucius managed to pry to seventeen year old brat away from the latest issue of \"Quidditch Qualms - a Monthly guide for
Team Strategists\" which is Lucius’ opinion was strictly useless and on several occasions having found copies beneath Draco\'s
carelessly forgotten schoolwork, had discovered their only adequate function - flint - he swayed against the boy\'s unusually frail
form and felt casually between his stomach and ribcage; it was concave.

\"Draco, what on earth has happened to you?\" Lucius poked and prodded a little more, each time receiving a tiny squeak from his
acquiesce son ready to belt one at any moment if it led to tickling of any kind.

\"I don\'t know,\" Draco said emphatically, dragging his hand through his hair with mutilating repercussions to be sure. Lucius
frowned further.

\"We\'ll talk about that later. What about this plan you have for school?\" Draco immediately beamed and clutched at his father\'s
hand beneath their commingled cloaks.

\"I\'ve found away to influence the limbic system through Snape\'s Potions AP final project I did last term,\" excitedly squeezing with
every second syllable, Lucius’ entire body seemed to shoot flames of ripe desire straight to his groin.

\"Oh really now,\" Lucius’ voice audibly trembled and Draco\'s grin broadened.

\"You remember what the limbic system is, don\'t you father?\" he asked imperiously and flounced his knowingly ethereal form down
on a not- so- soot- covered bench in comparison to the rest of the surrounding the streetlamps. Lucius shirked off the bard with
standard non-competitive ease; he\'d always found the idea preposterous anyway, measuring one up to another pointlessly,
regardless if it\'s one\'s own relation or not.

\"Of course I do, child, now tell me how one of Snape\'s infernal assignments somehow assuaged your growing interest for shortcuts
for studying,\" true, it had come out a bit more callous than anticipated and Draco did slightly wince at the barb, but recovered
momentarily nonetheless.

\"Well, it was a memory regaining potion that took me something horrid, like two weeks to brew-\" Lucius clucked at his son\'s
impatience but shut up promptly at Draco\'s heated glare, \"I managed to test about one sixth of my total amount out on Pansy
when she couldn\'t remember something in history that she\'d only read once - it worked wonders. So, I decided to reform a bit of
Snape\'s conjecture -\" Lucius gave a small approving nod at Draco\'s improved vocabulary to make sure his efforts did not go
unnoticed whilst he continued to listen in rapt silence, \"in order to produce a larger quantity within a smaller timeframe... with a
more concentrated outcome.\"

Lucius frowned with justification; he knew how unstable any potion, let alone an advanced memory one could become if the
ingredients weren\'t diluted properly. He\'d been at the top of his class and had graduated with specific honours in the field and treated each tarnished substance as a potential acid; Draco was being Draco.

\"Draco, you must be wise when contriving these wretched schemes - do you know how fickle such an unstable combination of elements can become such as those used in a memory potion - any bloody potion?!\" Lucius began to shout, warranting them
several astonished glances from a passers-by. Draco nearly shrunk down to the size of an ant at his father\'s raging elocution and decided that this expostulation wasn\'t meant to maim but to possibly help to protect. Draco sighed forlornly and rested his chin
against his father\'s shoulder after a few moments of amiably needed silence.

\"I only want to do well, father. I don\'t think I\'m that scholastically inclined on my own-\"

\"Nonsense, Draco.\"

\"It\'s bloody true and without you there at school, the closest I can get is writing you. You\'re the best resource I have and you can\'t very well blame me for trying to enhance my natural potion making abilities in order to aid my other more lacking areas of study.
Can you, father?\" Draco murmured suggestively into Lucius’ ear, making his entire left side twitch with effort not to pull him down to his knobbly knees in the middle of the street.

\"Mmmgh,\" Lucius gargled and decided with his usual fastidious spontaneity to move on to a nearby dress shop he thought Draco might be interested in for some intuitive, fairly estranged from his normal patterns of thought reason.

\"Where are we going now, father?\" Draco asked with hooded lids at being in such a close proximity at last without any interruptions from the elder\'s impenetrable work once Lucius began it or Narcissa or training or pre-school term studying. Lucius smiled
licentiously at his son who blushed and recoiled with muted pleasure away to stand rooted perilously to the spot in front of his father.

\"C-C\'s.\"