Chapter 3: Textbook Tsundere (Patreon)

Harriet sat quietly in her seat, her eyes never once turning toward the hand held out to her.

Her gaze rested on Draco's haughty face for a moment, then shifted to Ron, seated diagonally across from her, who was still guarding her pockets with both hands and glaring furiously.

After weighing a friendship offer that so plainly worked by putting others down, Harriet didn't hesitate for even a moment.

"I think I can tell who the wrong choice is. Thank you for your kind offer."

With that frigid refusal, Harriet even raised her hand and slapped away the one Draco still held hovering in midair, in a motion that was anything but gentle.

The crisp smack sounded painfully loud in the cramped compartment.

Draco's hand jerked back, and she looked as though an invisible Stunning Spell had struck her. Her pale gray eyes went wide with disbelief.

If this had been the original, boy version of Malfoy, he might have flown into a rage and called on his two lackeys to bully the others with threats and abuse. But under the gender-swapped tinkering of this feminized universe, a certain fragility unique to girlhood had been magnified a hundredfold in Draco.

Within two short seconds, her pale, faintly spiteful face flushed bright red, the color creeping from her slender neck all the way up to both cheeks.

She bit down hard on her lip, and a film of tears welled up in her eyes.

"You… you'll regret this!"

Draco flung out the empty threat in a voice that was nearly cracking.

She didn't give anyone else in the compartment time to react. She spun around, shoved past the two wall-of-meat attendants behind her, scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand, and bolted out of the compartment in tears, practically routed.

Ron and Harriet, still in their seats, could only stare at each other, struck silent and helpless by the young lady's wildly dramatic entrance and exit.

Yuzo was still slumped in his seat, the scene replaying in his head.

From the perspective of a transmigrator, the sight of Miss Malfoy crumbling the instant she was rebuffed and running off with red-rimmed eyes, crying, hadn't made her hateful the way a villain in the novels would be. Strangely, it had struck some odd moe spot in him, a veteran otaku.

That classic tsundere contrast, fragility under the prickles, made it impossible to simply equate her with the insufferable smug boy from his previous life's memories.

So he stood up, brushed the nonexistent dust from the hem of his robe, and gave a light cough to Ron and Harriet in front of him.

"Ahem… I'm going to go take a look."

Yuzo offered no detailed explanation, just a plain statement of his intent.

He slid open the compartment door, stepped into the corridor, and chased after Draco in the direction she had fled.

Miss Malfoy was no slow runner. Yuzo had to push through most of a carriage filled with the clamor of younger students before he finally spotted a lonely figure at the far end of a relatively empty passage by the carriage coupling.

Draco was facing the window, her back to the corridor.

She had already dried her tears with a silk handkerchief embroidered in the Malfoy family's green, but her faintly heaving shoulders still betrayed emotions that hadn't fully settled.

"Enjoying the scenery in a place like this?"

Yuzo stopped about two steps away and greeted her in as gentle a tone as he could manage.

At the voice suddenly behind her, Draco's back visibly trembled, like a cat whose tail had been stepped on.

She didn't turn around right away, though. She rubbed hard at the corners of her eyes twice, drew a deep breath, and forcibly shoved those weak feelings, so unbecoming of her family's etiquette, back down inside.

When she finally turned around, her pale, pointed chin was lifted high once more.

Her eyes were still a little red, beyond her control, but that didn't stop her from slipping back into her well-practiced noble-young-lady pose and fixing Yuzo with a cold stare from those pale gray eyes.

"…If I were you, I'd go straight back to that shabby compartment this instant and keep the losers company."

Draco gave a cold laugh, a sneer on her lips. "I have nothing to say to an unknown Muggle Easterner like you. Your very existence drags down the standards of this train."

Yuzo showed no sign of being provoked by such aggressive venom. He just kept his slightly slouched, easygoing stance.

"Before you decide what I am, you might want to correct your sources."

Looking at her reddened eyes, Yuzo calmly laid down his trump card. "By blood and by history alike, I count as a member of an Eastern pure-blood family."

"My family's history only goes back a thousand years or so, and odds are I'm the only direct relative left, at least on paper. But that doesn't mean you get to call me a Muggle."

This background, handed to him wholesale by a certain goddess, clearly packed unexpected punch in a magical world that prized bloodlines, especially against a pure-blood supremacist like Draco, thoroughly brainwashed by her family's creed.

The venomous words Draco had been about to fire off jammed in her throat.

A flicker of astonishment crossed her pale gray eyes, quickly replaced by a look of reappraisal.

She still held her chin at that arrogant tilt, but Yuzo could clearly feel the pure contempt and rejection in her gaze receding by the second.

At the core of Draco's nature, which worshipped strength and prized pedigree, the heir of a pure-blood family with a thousand years of history had absolutely cleared the bar for being spoken to as an equal.

"…So that's how it is."

Draco crossed her arms over her chest and slowed her speech a little, as though digesting the information. "I thought the Ministry of Magic had really gone mad, shoving even Eastern weeds from the Muggle world into Hogwarts."

"If you're pure-blood too, why were you sharing a compartment with that Weasley?"

"It was the only seat left, that's all."

Yuzo shrugged. Seeing that Draco was still bristling, he cut straight to the point. "Honestly, I've been curious. Why did you approach Harriet so condescendingly just now? If you really wanted to make friends with the Girl Who Lived, that is."

Draco knitted her brows, clearly displeased that Yuzo dared question her social methods.

"If you hadn't deliberately put on that tone of looking down on everyone, you could've started a conversation with her in a plainer, more straightforward way."

Yuzo gave Draco no chance to retort and pressed on with his advice. "Cut out the part where you put others down to prop yourself up. Just say you'd like to get to know her, and it wouldn't have gone anywhere near as badly as it did."

In Yuzo's mind, this was nothing more than ordinary, common-sense guidance for a prickly little girl stuck on the question of face.

Miss Malfoy obviously didn't see it that way.

Hearing the lecturing tone in his words, Draco let out a short, haughty snort.

She turned her head to one side and looked past Yuzo's shoulder to the far end of the corridor, her tsundere quirk fully, unmistakably on display.

"That way of making friends is revoltingly vulgar."

Contempt saturated Draco's voice. "It's just the commoner stench that rubs off on people like Weasley after spending too long among Muggles."

"I'm not some mediocre nobody who grabs strangers at a station and starts calling them sisters."

"The only people qualified to be friends with me, Draco Malfoy, are those chosen by fate and blood."

She paused for a beat, and as if to lend her words more authority, hauled out that familiar shield everyone in the novels had mocked a thousand times.

"My father says that mixing with the lower classes only drags down your own standing."

"A pure-blood wizard ought to act like one. With a name as big as Harriet Potter's, she should learn to stand with people of equal rank instead of degrading herself."

Watching this thoroughly spoiled young noblewoman at work, Yuzo could only shake his head inwardly.

Such deep-rooted family beliefs obviously couldn't be turned around with a few lines of modern social common sense.

Still, after finishing her long discourse on friendship, Draco didn't seem as eager to chase Yuzo off as she had at first.

Perhaps a mysterious pure-blood listener of Eastern appearance had given her a small, tolerable cushion on a morning that had left her feeling so defeated.

Or perhaps it was purely because of the pedigree he'd just revealed, which made standing and talking with someone from a thousand-year family line feel like nothing to be ashamed of.

With her eyes on Yuzo's face once more, her pale features even took on a coaxing look, like someone recruiting a dependable subordinate.

"Since you come from an old pure-blood family," Draco said, raising her chin a notch higher, "once you get to Hogwarts you absolutely shouldn't mix with those hot-blooded, muddle-headed Gryffindors. Slytherin is the only sensible choice for a pure-blood wizard."

"If you get into Slytherin, I might consider introducing you to some friends who are actually worth having."

Faced with such a blatant attempt to recruit him, Yuzo found the girl's powers of self-justification rather comical.

He waved a hand, a sheepish smile on his face.

"Hard to say."

Yuzo dodged with an ambiguous tone. "I haven't decided which House I want yet… After all, that's up to the tattered old Sorting Hat in the end, not whatever I want."

"For all we know, it might decide someone with my personality is better suited to Hufflepuff."

At that, Draco looked at Yuzo as if he were an idiot.

She seemed utterly unable to fathom why a member of a pure-blood family would even consider a place like Hufflepuff.

Having thoroughly shut down any further wrangling over Houses, Yuzo wiped the careless look off his face and turned to her with rare sincerity.

His gaze met Draco's eyes, still faintly bloodshot from crying.

"But I'd still like to give you some advice, and I mean it."

Yuzo's voice turned very steady, carrying the soothing quality only an adult has. "If you're really the type who suffers in silence to save face, then I'd tell you to drop the unnecessary airs."

"If you want to be friends with Harriet, who beat Vol… You-Know-Who, come back to the compartment with me right now."

"Don't put anyone down. Introduce yourself to her again, in the most honest way you can."

"She'll think differently of you. I'm sure of it."

The instant she heard this, Draco's expression wavered briefly.

It was the instinctive reaction of a soul long steeped in family interests and a haughty shell, suddenly meeting plain advice with no calculation behind it.

Her lips pressed together slightly, and the arms crossed over her chest loosened, leaving a small gap.

A hesitation that any girl her age ought to feel flashed across that young face, a rare sight.

Yet half a second before she could part her lips to say something, two coarse, panting female voices rang out from the other end of the carriage coupling.

"…Draco! So this is where you ran off to!"

The two wall-of-meat attendants Draco had left behind, Crabbe and Goyle, had finally tracked her down, huffing and puffing.

The sound hit like a powerful Freezing Charm, shattering the flicker of hesitation that had just surfaced on Draco's face.

Her expression made a full one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn in under a second, and the prickly tsundere shell slammed back into place almost the instant her attendants appeared.

Draco squared her shoulders and crossed her arms tightly over her chest again.

The softness in her eyes was gone without a trace, leaving only sharper mockery and arrogance.

"Stop dreaming, Yuzo."

Draco let out a cold laugh, loud enough for the two attendants who had just arrived to hear every word. "I would never apologize in that commoner way only Muggles do. It would be an insult to the Malfoy name."

"If Potter insists on hanging around with that shabby Weasley, then she's doomed to be unworthy of being my friend, and I'll never beg for a friendship that cheap."

Watching her cling to her stubbornness to the bitter end, Yuzo felt no anger.

A girl wrapped in the aura of nobility could never show retreat or weakness in front of her so-called subordinates.

When it came to defending her dignity, she ran on a logic all her own, beyond saving.

"That really is a shame."

Yuzo nodded and didn't press the matter, simply turning around. "Then I'll head back."

"See you at Hogwarts, Malfoy."

To the faint scuff of soles on the carriage carpet, Yuzo took his leave of Draco and walked back the way he had come, toward his somewhat crowded compartment, intending to settle in with Ron and Harriet and spend the rest of the leisurely ride before the train reached the Scottish castle.

He never looked back during any of it.

Had he turned around at that moment, he would surely have seen the blonde girl standing between her two wall-of-meat attendants, the haughty look on her face developing a barely noticeable crack the instant he turned his back.

Draco's free hand, the one not holding the handkerchief, stretched out an inch. Her lips moved, beyond her control, as if she'd meant to call out and keep the only pure-blood boy willing to listen to her patiently, to bring him to her Slytherin-only compartment and spare him contamination by the lower classes.

But because of that damned pride and the curious stares of the two attendants beside her, those unspoken words, along with that tiny reaching gesture, were all swallowed back down in the end.

They became only a flash of loss and irritation in Draco's eyes as she turned her head toward the tree shadows racing backward outside the window…

The rest of the journey was much calmer.

After returning to the compartment, Yuzo whiled away a fairly pleasant stretch of idle chat with Harriet and Ron.

With a long, grating screech of brakes, the train finally pulled up at the dim, cramped platform of Hogsmeade Station.

The moment the doors opened, the cold night air rushed in, carrying the fresh scent of pine.

Yuzo, Harriet and Ron lugged their trunks along together and followed the jostling crowd off the train.

There were no bright lamps on the platform, only a few dim lanterns hanging from wooden posts and swaying in the night wind.

Just then, Harriet suddenly rose on tiptoe in excitement and waved her arm at an enormous dark shape at the front of the crowd.

"Hagrid! Hagrid!" she shouted at the top of her voice.

Yuzo instinctively looked in the direction Harriet was greeting.

One look, and he felt some nerve in his skull snap with a crisp crack.

The person standing beneath the lantern, in charge of guiding the first-years, was over three meters tall, with a body as broad as a wall of shaggy-furred flesh.

But this was not the rugged, thick-bearded half-giant of Yuzo's memory.

The one standing there was a bona fide, gigantic big-sister type.

She had a wild mane of long black hair, and a moleskin overcoat hugged her imposing frame.

Her face still kept the coarse lines of a giant, but the combination of features was unmistakably that of a mature, formidable woman.

She was lowering her head, shining her lantern down on Harriet and letting out a hearty, booming laugh.

Yuzo, thoroughly fried inside and out by the sight, instinctively swallowed dry.

It seemed that in this absurd all-girls parallel universe, the Hogwarts staff were all bound to appear in a whole string of even stranger, cold-sweat-inducing feminized forms…