How to be a Death Eater in Five Easy Steps

How to be a Death Eater in Five Easy Steps

Step 2: You are what you wear (so dress appropriately)

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If one were to listen carefully to the gossip that often flew around the Gryffindor Common Room, one might gain the impression that Draco Malfoy was vain.

Quite the contrary.

Vanity pre-supposes self-respect. Draco...

Well, let's just say that he...frankly...didn't like himself very much.

He knew that deep, deep inside, in the very depths of him; he had a mean, selfish, self-interested, cruel and extremely nasty little soul. He didn´t let it bother him overmuch. In fact, he often congratulated himself on having no illusions whatsoever about what he was really like.

Illusion...

That was the crux of the matter. That was why, indeed, he paid very careful attention to what he wore and what he looked like. It was not vanity, it was...necessity. After all, he had a reputation to maintain - who was he to destroy everybody´s comfortable preconceptions about him? People saw what they wanted to see and rarely looked any deeper than that.

Very few people in his life had ever wanted to look deeper.

Very, very few people indeed had ever succeeded.

To be precise - only one.

And it was the very last person you could have imagined...

...but he wasn´t going to think about it now. Not when he was being confronted in his own bedchamber by a known Death Eater. A Death Eater, moreover, who was clad only in black silk underwear and brandishing a bottle of Baby Powder in front of his face.

Life was very strange.

"Um...Avery?"

"Yes?"

"Why exactly do you have Baby Powder?"

"Huh?"

Draco rolled his eyes in exasperation. He wasn´t quite sure what he had expected from Voldemort´s chosen followers, but he had anticipated a certain level of intelligence. His father for example - Lucius was a man of many parts and intelligence was definitely one of them. Avery didn´t so much have parts as...well...pieces. Little blobs of knowledge floating around in the cavern of his brain seemingly unconnected to anything else. It wasn´t that he didn´t know anything, he just couldn´t apply it and if there was a scale for such things, Draco would be forced to place the currently-semi-naked man somewhere between Peter Pettigrew and Goyle Senior.

Frankly, it didn´t augur well for the future of Dark Magic.

Life was a constant disappointment.

"The Baby Powder, Avery. The sweetly scented substance used on the posterior of infants. The substance, to wit, you are holding."

"What, this?"

Draco reluctantly lifted his head from its prone position on the bed and glared at the little pink and white bottle.

"Indeed."

Avery smiled, in what he probably imagined was a rather cunning way.

"This", he stated with emphasis, "is my little secret. The secret to a comfortable life." He winked, as though this explained everything.

"Is this the same `little secret´ as the black silk underwear, (which I have seen far too much of for my own sanity), or another one? Are they both part of a larger whole, perhaps? The Specific and General Theories of Relative Comfort?"

Avery looked momentarily confused, but decided that Draco, the youngest Death Eater on the block, could not possibly be exercising sarcasm at the expense of his chosen instructor. Such behaviour towards another Death Eater was, frankly, suicidal. He therefore completely and conveniently erased Draco´s words from his mind. This much did Draco see as he watched the procession of thoughts cross his colleague's face.

<Do you have any idea how much I despise you, Avery? >

"It´s good stuff!" retorted his unclad companion.

Draco sighed deeply and absently rubbed his sore arm.

"What do you use it for?" he asked in the blandest most uninterested monotone he could possible manage.

"Chafing!" came the enthusiastic reply.

Draco allowed incredulity to filter into his eyes.

"I´m sorry, I think the Cruciatus Curse has affected my eardrums. I thought you said `chafing´".

Avery rolled his eyes, as though Draco was the stupid one in the room.

"The mask, dear boy, the mask!" he said, waving one of his own Death Eater specials in his hand.

<Oh Salazaar, save me>

Since his face was now safely hidden behind his hands, Draco allowed a grimace to surface. If he didn't already suspect his own sanity, he would be convinced that the whole universe had gone ga-ga. A few clouds short of a nebula, if you will. But then again, perhaps it was the after effects of the Cruciatus curse which he could feel even several hours after his initiation, not helped by the fact that his own father had refused to supply him with the standard Dark Lord post-curse potion on the grounds that his pain was 'character building'.

<If that's the case, I've got more character than Dumbledore in a Hall of Mirrors armed with a Doppelganger charm. >

Not to mention, of course the fact that his new robes were in ruins, he'd exuded so much drool that he'd be dry-mouthed for a week and he'd had to clean up...well he wasn't going to think about that anytime soon. Oh, and of course, the shiny new Dark Mark currently decorating his right arm.

The ultimate accessory.

Strangely enough, the 'branding' hadn't hurt as much as he had expected, although the fact that he was still dazed and dribbling from the third Cruciatus in a row probably had something to do with it. What he hadn´t expected was how aware he was of the Mark. How it itched and writhed on his arm. How it tingled as though his bloodstream was full of ground glass. How he wanted to lose control and rip and tear at it with his own teeth.

<You wanted this> he tried to tell himself. <Suck it up, Malfoy>

And of course to top it all off, the real icing on the cake, was the fact that Avery had been chosen to instruct the new recruit in the esoterica of Death Eater life. Of which, in the first hour, had consisted of a fashion parade of the best (and most comfortable) underclothes to wear under the Death Eater robes and had now become a demonstration of patting Baby Powder on one's face to prevent the Terrible Mask of Doom from chafing.

<Is it my imagination, or are Death Eaters insufferably camp? >

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That was more like it.

In front of the mirror again and now fully robed in Evil Wizard regalia, Draco was forced to admit that the ensemble had a certain ominous je ne sais quoi. The comfortable underwear, the heavy, draping material of the robes, the madly-flaring sleeves, the death-like hood, the scare-the-living-daylights-out-of-you mask (he had eschewed the Baby Powder on the grounds of self-respect) all added up to a whole that you really wouldn't want to meet on a dark night. Or at any time.

With that realisation came another sensation that had been mysteriously lacking from the whole experience so far: A sense of power.

He felt ten-feet tall.

He felt that Avada Kedavra may not be quite as difficult to perform as he had feared.

He even felt the tiniest, tiniest bit sorry for Harry Potter.

He grinned. The effect was terrifying.

But...

Draco Malfoy was not unintelligent - in fact he had an impressive mind when he chose to use it. He knew the truth. He knew far more deeply and completely than anyone would suspect (including his father), that the sense of power was illusory. The power came from the façade.

It was a well-contrived, extremely well-marketed and deeply unsettling façade. But a façade nonetheless.

<Appearances are everything>

What he also knew, (and he suspected that one of the few others who knew this was Severus Snape), was that the trick in being truly intimidating was to project the façade without the props. Or to put it another way, he had to be a Death Eater even when he wasn't dressed like one.

It was very, very important.

Especially as the summer term at Hogwarts School started in two days time.

His final term - and, perhaps, the final showdown?

To be continued...