A Draco Detour

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

This started as a response to the thread in sunnyskywalker’s last post, talking about the significance of “Draco’s tattling to Argus rather than to Severus.”  Talk about pennies dropping…

Canon does not ever state that Draco tattled to Argus (or to anyone) about the duel.  Canon says that Hermione accused Draco—behind his back—of doing so, and that Harry unquestioningly accepted that view of what had happened that night.  Which tells us more about THEM, and their rampant prejudice against Slytherins, than about Draco.

Let’s look a little more closely at canon Draco as an ickle first year.



First, he apparently entered Hogwarts honestly thinking the rules would apply to everyone.  Including him.  No doubt the fact that he failed to talk his Hogwarts-Board family into breaking the school rules and traditions on his behalf, that he was denied a racing broom and the chance to try out for Quidditch, had something to do with Draco’s assumption.

At any rate, it’s clear from Hooch’s first class that, although Draco was not prepared always to honor rules he found inconvenient, he fully expected to be punished if he broke them too flagrantly.  He jumped on a broom and stole Neville’s Remembrall in Hooch’s absence—and then streaked back to the ground before another teacher could arrive, leaving Harry alone to be caught airborne by McGonagall.  And he apparently both expected McGonagall to punish even her own, and that even famous Harry Potter would be punished by any fair teacher if caught actually in the act.

As Draco later expected Professor Flitwick to share his outrage that someone had sent POTTER a BROOM.  Obvious contraband!

Naïve kid.

Note that McGonagall allowed the kids, even Harry, to think that she was furious and hauling Harry off from Hooch’s lesson for summary execution.  Nor did she allow Patil or Weasley to explain to her the extenuating circumstance that Harry had followed Draco into the air in defense of Neville’s property.

(Which perhaps she had witnessed herself.)

Because she rewarded Harry instead of punishing him.  Entirely unexpectedly.

So Harry’s punishment, it seems, was those moments of suspense while he thought he was about to be expelled, until she “borrowed Wood” and told the boys that she was making Harry Seeker.  And Draco’s punishment was precisely his short-lived triumph.  Which turned to ashes when his rival turned up, not merely not-expelled, but new Seeker with his very own racing broom—bought with Hogwarts money, one assumes.  The exact thing that Draco had most craved for himself, handed to Harry on a platter.

HAD Lucius tried to pull strings, and had his influence fail?  If Albus and Minerva KNEW they were granting Harry, unasked, exactly what Lucius had tried and failed to get at his son’s urgent pleas….

Gods.  Minerva really IS a cat.  Playing with her victims, letting them run in blissful delusion, letting them think they’ve succeeded until one elegantly-clawed paw swipes down a final time....

Oh, ouch, that also explains Filius’s attitude to Harry’s broom.  If the staff knew that Malfoy, a board member (worse, probably the NEWEST board member) had tried to throw his weight around and get special privileges for his son… then not just refusing the privileges to the weight-thrower’s spoiled brat, but GRANTING the refused privileges to the brat’s chief rival, must be the sweetest of snubs.

Particularly if said rival was a “modest, likable, and reasonably talented” orphan—poor kid, not at all living up to his inflated billing.   Not at all precocious; really; not at all powerful or skilled in himself.  If he hadn’t even inherited any of his parents’ many talents but his dad’s flying prowess, the least we could do is give him the chance to develop that skill to its fullest….

But back to Draco.  Whose innocent appeal to Professor Flitwick to back him up that the rules specified that first years were NEVER allowed brooms, was snubbed.

But that came a bit later.  First came the Wizard’s Duel in the trophy room, after HARRY challenged DRACO that Draco must be afraid to take him on without Crabbe and Goyle as backup.  Draco answered he was happy to take Harry on one-on-one, only specifying, “wands only.”   (A most reasonable precaution with a Muggle-raised hooligan—who knew what dirty street-fighting tactics Harry might have picked up?)

But the duel of course never happened, because Filch was there instead of Malfoy and Crabbe.  Because Malfoy had “tattled” to Filch.  The whole duel proposal was a setup, a trap; Malfoy never meant to meet Harry honorably.  Draco just set Harry and Ron up to go to the trophy room, then betrayed his location to Filch to get the Gryffs into trouble.

Which we know MUST be exactly what had happened… on Hermione’s word.  Or rather, on her idle speculation when she’s seizing on anything she can to castigate Harry for accepting Draco’s challenge.

Yeah.  That’s right.  That Draco didn’t ever intend to duel Harry, that his game all along was to rat the other two boys out to Filch, was all Hermione’s invention.  When she was furious at all of them.

Remember oneandthetruth’s talk of spiritual levels?  To an eleven-year-old, betraying your peer group for the sake of an Authority’s rules is the worst thing one can possibly do.  Except for betraying them, turning them in, ratting them out, when you don’t even care about the adults’ rules.  That would be worse.  That’s what Hermione—still in rule-obeying phase, but dimly recognizing that Harry and Ron are probably in peer-paramount phase—accuses Malfoy of (and Harry of falling for).

What canon says, in contrast, is:

Malfoy and Crabbe weren’t there yet…. The minute crept by.

“He’s late… maybe he’s chickened out,” Ron whispered.

Then a noise in the next room made them jump.  Harry had only just raised his wand when a voice spoke—and it wasn’t Malfoy.

“Snuff around, my sweet, they might be lurking in a corner.”

It was Filch speaking to Mrs. Norris.  Horror-struck, Harry waved wildly at the other three to follow him as quickly as possible; they scurried silently to the door, away from Filch’s voice.  Neville’s robes had barely whipped around the corner when they heard Filch enter the trophy room.

“They’re in here somewhere,” they heard him muttering, “probably hiding.”

“This way!”  Harry mouthed to the others and, petrified, they began to creep down a long gallery….

“Malfoy tricked you,”  Hermione said to Harry.  “You realize that, don’t you?  He was never going to meet you—Filch knew someone was going to be in the trophy room, Malfoy must have tipped him off.”

Harry thought she was probably right, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. 

“Let’s go.”

Stop for a moment to observe the dog that isn’t barking in the night.  What do Purebloods Ron and Neville think of Hermione’s explanation?  They say nothing, and Harry isn’t watching them, so we’ll never know.

Except, had Draco really betrayed Harry and Ron to Filch hours earlier, Filch would have known the identities of the students he was expecting to catch out of bounds.  Not only does Filch never mention any names, but if he knew the names he would also know the House.  In which case the easiest and fastest way to have caught the miscreants was to wait outside their door.  No sense in letting them make it to the trophy room at all.  All Filch had to do was station himself near the Gryffindor portrait hole before he expected the kids to emerge.  Hidden where the kids couldn’t see him if they had the sense to check first if the coast was clear (they didn’t, nor did they have the sense to sneak; they were openly squabbling when they trooped out of the portrait hole).  Just let them take one step out of their common room into the corridor, and he’d have had them dead to rights without any tedious searching or chasing.  Argus wasn’t getting them on charges of dueling, after all, but on charges of being out of bed and out of bounds after curfew.

In fact, had Draco and Vince betrayed their counterparts’ identities at all, once Filch had lost the kids in the corridors his best bet would have been to head as fast as possible to Gryffindor Tower, and try to ambush them before they made it home.

So the more likely reason that Draco and Vince didn’t show for the duel is that THEY had been caught.  And the fact that Filch obviously never knew the House of the miscreants he was looking for might show that they honorably (schoolkid honor) kept their mouths shut about whom they were meeting.

If, that is, they were caught by Filch.  Remember how Ron said, “We’ve got to go, we’re going to be late,” because of Hermione and Neville?   So it’s possible that Draco and Vince were early, got caught by Filch in the trophy room, and Filch returned after hauling them off for punishment because he deduced they were meeting someone else there.  (If Draco had been carrying a copy of the Codex Duello, or if the trophy room is the traditional place for dueling, it would have been obvious Filch should expect another pair to turn up, even if the two Slytherins said nothing to betray their rivals.)

Another option is that the two Slytherins got caught by their Head of House before they made it out of the dungeons.  And that he either got the story out of them, deduced where they were going and why, or—read it in their eyes.

Please note:  what I’ve posited to be Dumbledore’s “real” rules insist that information learned by Legilimency cannot be used directly against a miscreant.  The miscreant must be led to implicate hirself,  by verbally confessing to the imputed (or rather, known—by Legilimency—) crime.

Or, of course, by being caught directly in the act.

If Snape caught Crabbe and Goyle sneaking out of the Slytherin dorms after curfew, and if he read in their eyes that they were meeting two other students at a certain location for a “duel,”  nothing in Albus’s implicit or explicit rules would keep Snape from summoning Filch and sending him to the trophy room to try to catch the other pair of duelist-and-second.  He wouldn’t even have to give Filch a hint as to which troublemakers might be in danger of being apprehended.  (Or maybe, by Albus’s rules, wouldn’t be allowed to.)

“’They’re’ in here,”  right.

And then Malfoy and Crabbe would be entirely innocent of violating schoolkid (their own) ideas of honor.  While still being the cause of Filch being on hand to apprehend Potter and Weasley.

(BTW, we need not speculate on why Harry failed to notice afterwards that Draco and Vince had been punished.    Filch apparently can’t deduct house points—he didn’t from Harry in CoS, when he’d caught Harry dead to rights “befouling the castle.”  Filch, it seems can only “suggest” punishments, presumably to the miscreant’s head of house or to the headmaster, and we’ve previously suggested that Snape assigns INTERNAL punishments to his own where he can—detentions and lines, not loss of house points.  So there would be nothing for Harry and Ron to notice the next morning, except perhaps Malfoy’s hangdog aspect.  Which they DID notice, but ascribed to chagrin that Harry and Ron had not been caught and punished.)


Now, there is actually one way Hermione’s slander could be reconciled with Argus’s ignorance of who he was trying to catch—if Draco had “tattled” by slipping the caretaker an anonymous note, just saying that some students planned to meet in the trophy room at midnight.  There is nothing in canon inconsistent with that scenario.

But, if Draco were willing to rat out Harry and Ron, why leave their names and house out of it?  It’s not as though by doing so he would escape their suspicion of being the traitor; the fact that he didn’t show up to be trapped with them would give away that he was the one who’d sent the note.

Plus, Draco’s name would be mud if it ever came out he did.  Or even if it ever came out that he’d challenged another kid to a wizard duel and then wimped out of meeting him.  In cultures that have formal dueling, it’s a major loss of face to back out once a challenge has been issued and accepted.  Backing out brands you as both a coward and an oath-breaker.  The only acceptable reason for failing to “meet” your opponent on the field is that you were forcibly prevented from doing so.

Hermione and Harry, of course, having been introduced to Wizarding culture only eleven days earlier, have no way of appreciating what a breach of etiquette they’re accusing Draco of committing. (On top of breaking the common kid-code of not tattling to adults.)  Ron and Neville would appreciate the enormity of what she’s suggesting.  Interestingly, neither of them comments on Hermione’s slanderous speculation.

Which is what you’d expect if they can’t agree with it but have no taste for defending the detested Draco. 

I suppose Draco could have sent an anonymous note to Filch, and then claimed that he and Vince had started to the trophy room but spotted Filch en route and returned to their beds before he spotted them.  Although we’ve never seen Draco outright lie (even when he was protecting Hermione and Harry at Malfoy Manor), and I’m not sure Vince was smart enough to lie convincingly.  Or they might have added verisimilitude to such a tale by starting off for the rendezvous and trusting that they could evade Filch’s ambush while Harry and Ron would not.

But that’s awfully convoluted, and paints an eleven-year-old as a plotter worthy of Machiavelli.  Simply in order to cling to the belief that he was, in fact, the utter rotter that Hermione had painted him.   

And even in that case, Harry and Ron were running late to the duel, and they waited for a while before Filch showed up.  Had Filch known all evening that there was a duel scheduled for midnight, but not known the houses of the participants, he could have set his ambush in the trophy room, not outside the Gryffindor portrait-hole.  He would then have caught them the moment they arrived, not showed up late to the party.

So really the only explanation that makes complete sense of Filch’s actions, is that Draco and Vince themselves were caught a bit before midnight.  If you insist on Slytherins all being without (kid) honor, you can have them knowingly betray Harry and Ron so the two Gryffs would be caught and punished as well as them.  But then you have to explain why Filch didn’t subsequently stake out the Gryffindor portrait hole against Harry’s and Ron’s (and Hermione’s and Neville’s) return.

Or, if you don’t insist on convoluted explanations just to make Slytherin kids look as bad as possible, Draco and Vince were caught, did NOT betray their dueling partners, but the circumstances of their capture allowed the adult authority(ies) to infer “what” was going on but not “with who.”  (Since at this point Harry’s irrational hatred of Draco wasn’t widely known, and Draco’s reciprocal jealousy of the special treatment always afforded to Famous Harry Potter had not yet kicked in.)

In fact, at the beginning of their first year, even though Harry had twice snubbed him, once as the anonymous boy in Madame Malkins and once as famous Potter on the train, Draco did not waste much time or emotion on Harry.

It escaped our notice that Draco began Hogwarts carrying on, apparently, his parents’ enmities.  The Malfoys and the Weasleys cordially loathe each other, and their sons enthusiastically carry on the grudge.  But the real target of Draco’s animosity (and that of some of the other Slytherins) was originally… Neville.  Fellow Pureblood.  Reputed near-Squib.  Aurors’ son.  Torture-victims’ son.  Torturers’ son.

Harry was always highly aware of Draco, whom he cast immediately (and unfairly) as Hogwarts’ Dudley.  But Draco ignored Harry at first after being rebuffed.  Who Draco and the Slytherins paid attention to, throughout most of the first book, was Neville.  Neville was teased about the Remembrall.  Teased again in Madam Hooch’s class.  His Remembrall was stolen in his absence.  He was hexed with a Leg-Locker.  Taunted at the second Quidditch match, which turned into a fistfight.

It’s Draco’s treatment of Neville that first brings Harry into direct conflict with him, and Draco doesn’t pay regular attention to Harry until… when and why?

Remember, when Draco proposed that duel, it was in response to Harry’s taunt.  Harry started it.

When did Draco turn his attention from Neville to Harry?

(This, by the way, shows that Draco is not simply a classic bully.  Neville, near-Squib, fat crybaby, forgetful, hopeless at sports, is a classic bully’s victim—a low social-status person with no close friends, easy to pick on.  But Draco stops picking on Neville once his attention is on the Trio.  He abandons easy prey to focus on his rivals—not usual bully behavior.  Instead, Neville is victimized in later years by his fellow Gryffindors, particularly by the Weasley twins.)

So when did Harry show up on Draco’s radar as someone to be taken seriously?

Alternatively, when was the last time Draco taunted or attacked Neville rather than a member of the Trio?

At the second Quidditch match.

Well, what happened at that match?

Harry, on his grossly-unfair broom, won.  Legitimately. In a spectacular dive. “No one could ever remember the Snitch being caught so quickly.”

The first match…  We haven’t considered the significance of the fact that, as far as we can tell, only Snape, Ron, and Hermione realized that Harry’s broom was being JINXED.  Everyone else saw that Harry was in trouble, but didn’t identify the trouble as Dark Magic.

So what did everyone else think was happening, then?

Well, what did happen to Neville in his flying lesson?  And later (earlier), in Snape’s memory of his?  The broom ran away with him and flung him off in midair, causing him severe injury (Neville).  The broom bucked him off violently, causing him severe embarrassment (Severus).   Brooms can be recalcitrant. Temperamental.  That jinx that Quirrel!mort used apparently mimicked what brooms will do of themselves to incompetent or frightened fliers.

So.  Most of the hundreds of people watching breathlessly during that first match while Harry struggled in midair simply thought that Potter was overmatched by his Nimbus.  His broom was fighting him, and Harry was losing.  That happens, with terrified and inexperienced fliers.  Clearly, the rules should never have been broken to thrust that ickle firstie into a competition, and onto a broom, he simply wasn’t ready for.

Even Harry’s catching the Snitch in the first match didn’t change that impression, because it was so obviously accidental.  Harry caught it in his mouth, damnit, while he was fleeing to the ground after being almost shaken off his broom!  He practically swallowed it!  That shouldn’t even count as catching it!

But from the second match on, and from that dive (clearly in full mastery of the Nimbus) Harry registered with Draco as he himself had already registered with Harry.  As a hated rival, someone in competition with oneself but given utterly unfair advantages.  As someone to be watched, always, and to be taken down a peg, wherever opportunity afforded.

That’s why Draco followed Harry to Hagrid’s hut, and why he sat on the information after witnessing the dragon-hatching.  Draco didn’t care squat about getting the groundskeeper in trouble; he was after Harry.

Note too that Draco was not the sort to attack Hagrid just because Hagrid was Harry’s friend, and his troubles would upset Harry.  If he’d told his dad right off what he had seen, Hagrid would have gone to Azkaban and Harry would have suffered grief at his loss—plus guilt, if Harry had realized that HIS carelessness had betrayed Hagrid to Draco and the authorities.  All with no risk whatsoever to Draco, in fact making Malfoy look lily-white.

But, no, Draco was hoping that Harry would end up by incriminating himself.  Draco wanted to take Harry out, but he wouldn’t attack Harry emotionally by picking off his friends instead.  Not even when they made themselves such easy targets….

One really wonders what conversations the elder Malfoys had with their son, the summer after first year.

Comments

[oryx_leucoryx]

Quidditch through the Ages uses the term 'racing broom' . There is no such term as 'Quidditch broom'. I wonder if brooms are designed differently in countries where other broom sports are played.