Bruce is immediately surrounded by a softly rustling ocean of every color and texture of fabric he's ever seen or heard of, and several he hadn't. A matronly voice chirps brightly from the back, "Hogwarts, dear?"

Ooooh. He pets one of the softest-looking pieces of fabric and then remembers not to touch random things in a magic store and stops. 

"Yes ma'am."

The soft piece of fabric vibrates gently when touched, like a purring cat, then scurries away under a pile of tulle.

"Lovely! Up onto the stool then, dearie," encourages the seamswitch, bustling out from behind a mannequin in a cloud of measuring tapes.

He hops up on the stool and wonders if that's a lasting spell on the measuring tapes or if she's actively animating them right now or if that's even a meaningful question. Hagrid didn't want to talk about magic science but eventually he's going to get textbooks.

She does seem to be directing them, though the difference between a natural language interface with an enchanted item and the common human behavior of talking to objects while giving them explicit nonverbal instructions is probably opaque to Bruce at this time.

In any event, they set about measuring him!

Bruce is short and skinny and generally lacking in physical substance. Even his hair is super short, and looks suspiciously like it was cut with craft scissors by someone who didn't know what they were doing.

(Aunt Petunia had not approved. He would probably still have done it anyway if he had realised how much she wouldn't approve; it was touching his face and cutting it was more likely to work than asking to be taken to the barber.)

The measuring tapes do not judge him.

Madame Malkin, though, squints at him, with the air of someone who is trying to decide whether a Responsible Adult will spawn out of the nearest shrubbery fabric pile to be offended if she comments on the state of this child.

Before she can decide, another customer appears.

This one doesn't touch any of the fabric, or wait to be instructed; he strides right in and hops up onto the stool next to Bruce, completely ignores Madam Malkin, and says, "First year too?"

Oh gosh, social interaction. At least there's an obvious thing to talk about. "Yeah! I'm excited."

Nod, nod. "What House d'you think you'll be in?"

Aaaaaand zero to "looking like an idiot" in thirty seconds as usual. "I don't know what houses there are yet."

Draco's 'befriend classmate' script does not have a button for this answer. Mudbloods aren't supposed to just be allowed to wander around wherever, are they?

".............your family are wizards, right."

". . . my parents were but they're dead." Don't ask about it don't ask about it don't ask about it normal people don't ask why someone is dead right? 

Normal people often totally ask. Draco Malfoy, however, has never in his life been more interested in learning new facts than about talking about himself.

"Oh. Well good. They really oughtn't to let the other sort in, don't you think. Anyway, of course you never really know until you get there, do you, but I'm going to be in Slytherin, all our family have been. Imagine being in Hufflepuff, I think I'd leave." 

He's not sure who the "other sort" who shouldn't be let in is, unless it's magic kids with muggle parents which he hadn't been sure even happened. It would explain how he has a witch mother and a muggle aunt, though, if it's partially random. If there's anything wrong with those kids it's probably wrong with him too, it's not like he knows the first thing about magic, but he'd rather not find out right now. He can read about magic biology later.

"What's Hufflepuff like, besides awful? Or what's Slytherin like if you'd rather talk about that."

He's supposed to have a reason for this cached opinion? Yeah no he's going for item B. 

" ... well, Slytherin is the best, obviously. It's where all the best families usually end up. S'probably why we've won the Quidditch Cup for years. I'm going to be on the House team, of course, I don't see why first-years aren't supposed to have our own broomsticks... I'll probably drag Father off to look at racing brooms after this."

"Flying on broomsticks sounds really cool. I'm rubbish at sports, at least the kind where you're running around on the ground, but I'd like to fly."

Do the broomsticks have seats, he wonders to himself, or do you just kind of have all your weight on a stick via your crotch? Or maybe you're supposed to sit sidesaddle. Or stand on the broom like a skateboard, in which case he will be even worse at flying than at muggle phys ed.

The kind where what.

Is he from some kind of weird Welsh commune? Or... Australia?? He doesn't have an accent. 

(It's normal for wizard kids not to have flown for real before they go to Hogwarts, of course, Draco is special, but he cannot actually think of a sport that doesn't involve at least toy broomsticks...)

"Yeah, flying's great - what do you mean running around on the ground, where even are you from?"

Oh no, he didn't realize that "my parents are dead" plus "I don't know anything about Hogwarts" meant "I grew up with muggles who aren't my parents." So much for getting off the topic. 

He sighs. "I grew up with muggles. Their sports are awful." 

"Oh, eugh, how horrible."

He says this with a tone of voice that sounds kind of like it's trying to be sympathetic, if the speaker's only contact with the concept of sympathy had up to this point been that it is a kind of particularly rare pastry, and as a result lands somewhere around vaguely personally offended.

"How does that even happen. You ought to, to sue your grandparents' cousins or whoever -" 

"That's you done, my dear," says the seamswitch, tapping Draco on the elbow with her wand.

(Why Draco, who got here later than Bruce, is nevertheless done faster, is left as an exercise to the reader.)

He doesn't know how muggles sue people let alone how wizards do it and he isn't sure if "not having to live with the Dursleys anymore" is something you can sue for and the kid whose name he totally forgot to ask doesn't even know he dislikes them unless it was obvious from his face. 

Possibly he's taking longer than the other kid to get robes because he wasn't holding still enough. He'll pay more attention.

He hops down cheerfully, blissfully unaware that it is weird to get queue-jumped everywhere you go, and is confronted promptly with the sight of Hagrid looming outside the door, which interrupts his also finally realizing he, too, forgot the introductions step. "Anyway what's your - what's that?!"

"What's what?" asks Bruce, whose intuitive grasp of English grammar is massively better than his intuitive grasp of gaze tracking. He tries to peer past both the other kid and Hagrid to see what wild new magic phenomenon has appeared in the street.

It is quite difficult to peer past Hagrid, owing to his substantially outsizing the doorway despite not being yet quite within conversational distance. Draco sort of ... gesticulates wildly in the general direction of Hagrid's knees, and mutters something that might have been "too big to be allowed."