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i.
The hall falls silent as Malfoy rises from the stool, sets the hat down, and moves to the Gryffindor table. Even the first years - even the muggle-borns - sense that something in this picture is wrong.
Malfoy tucks himself at the end of the table, not in amongst everyone else. Across the Hall Crabbe and Goyle look half-lost without him.
The sorting continues.
ii.
“You can’t trust him!” hisses Weasley as Harry turns and offers Malfoy his hand, and Harry shrugs.
“Guessing by the train, he’d say the same of you,” Harry says. “But we’re all here, now, aren’t we?”
He thrusts his hand out at Malfoy who - tentatively - takes it.
“Why’d you end up here then?” he asks Malfoy. “You must have taken the Hat almost as long as me!”
iii.
The next day Malfoy is met at breakfast by two letters. One is delivered by an Eagle Owl, vast and looming, golden-orange eyes seeming to burn with imposing fury as it drops off a large letter of stiff parchment. The owl looks firmly around, before taking off to wing again. The other is delivered by a slender, elegant Barn Owl, wings softly flecked, and the parchment is flecked with lavender buds.
Malfoy’s hands shake.
“C’mon,” says Ron, nudging Malfoy’s shoulder. “Neither of ‘em are Howlers, so you must have done something right?”
Malfoy doesn’t entirely know how to explain to a child of a family of strident Gryffindors that a Howler is not how a Slytherin shows their anger.
Instead he takes the letters, tucks them into his pocket, and resolves to respond to them later.
iv.
Snape is tall and imposing and hateful as ever, sending interrogative questions out. Granger and Malfoy stick their hands in the air to answer, Malfoy even whispers half an answer to Harry before being pinned to his chair by Snape’s coal-dark glare.
“I do not,” he says, half a hiss, “Appreciate cheats in my classroom.”
Malfoy seems to fold away even more at that, hiding half in the shadows of Ron and Harry. Across the classroom Finnegan frowns, beside him Dean Thomas frowns as well. Neville’s face has no expression, but he holds his hands to hide his trembling as Snape begins to pace again.
v.
They are... not exactly friends. Draco is too abrasive for Ron and Ron too abrasive for Draco, but Harry, it seems has chosen both of them for friends, so they flank him in the corridors and ward off attacks. Ron is no coward when someone sends a hex their way, and Draco, though a Gryffindor, was raised a Slytherin and understands the ploys their green-and-silver classmates try.
“Ignore them,” he says, joining Ron in half-dragging Harry away from Pansy and Theo casting insults at Harry’s late mother. “They want a response. Don’t let them get one.”
“But they-”
“You can hex them later,” Ron says. “But Percy would have reported all of you to McGonagall if you’d attacked them.”
vi.
Halloween rolls around and Harry’s two friends seem torn between happiness at the feast to come and some odd sorrow Harry doesn’t entirely grasp.
“Mate,” Ron says, when Harry finally asks at lunch. “Today is when...” He glances to Draco who sighs and sets down his cutlery.
“Today,” Draco says, “Is when your parents died.”
It hits Harry, then, that he’d never actually known the specific date he’d lost his parents. Just that they were lost to him.
vii.
At dinner Quirrell comes screaming in, and the odd half-contemplation the three had been sitting in turns nearly to panic. As they file out the doors of the hall, start to follow Percy up to the tower Harry’s hands tug on his friend’s robes.
“Hermione,” he says. “She wasn’t-”
“She’s a Mud-” Draco starts before cutting himself off at Ron’s glare. “Muggle-born. Anyway, she’s probably in the library!”
“She doesn’t know,” insists Harry and Ron sighs and follows their friend’s retreating back and it’s all Draco can do but turn exasperatedly on the spot, run his hands through his hair, and follow.
viii.
There is a troll. They fight it. Draco half-pulls and is half-pulled out of the wreckage of the toilet stalls by Hermione, while Ron throws pipe and Harry clambers up the troll, and under Hermione’s guidance Ron casts a perfect levitation and Draco sends out a shield and Harry sticks his wand right up the troll’s nose.
“Is it... dead?” asks Hermione, glancing at the three boys once the Troll has thunked firmly onto the floor.
“That? Kill a troll?” Draco scoffs.
“I think it’s unconscious,” says Harry, retrieving his wand and wiping the bogies off on his robe.
They get scolded by the teachers, points deducted in a great cavalcade, but they all four of them are too glad at having survived to be sad. When they get back to the tower Draco finds a blanket to wrap around a shaken Hermione’s shoulders, Ron finds some fudge his Mum sent, and Harry finds seats for them by the fire.
Some things, they think, looking around their small circle, force friendship.
ix.
They sit together in a bundle. The next time the imperious Eagle Owl and elegant Barn Owl come to deposit letters before Draco, the others are sat around him. He doesn’t tuck these into his pockets and answer them in secrecy. Instead, he opens them with them there.
“Father’s upset,” says Draco softly. “Angry, really. He thinks it was reckless-”
“It was reckless,” says Hermione, sat to his left. “But I’m glad you did it anyway.”
Draco’s smile is nervous and awkward both, before he continues. “And he thinks I let the family down by losing so many points and he’s expecting me back at Christmas so he can remind me what it is to be a Proper Malfoy and then, then, he says he’s glad I survived.”
Ron frowns, bites into his toast. “Sounds cold.”
Draco shrugs. “He does care. He missed three meetings at the Ministry when I was sick with the Black Cat Flu. He’s just...”
“Really really bad at showing it,” says Hermione. “What does your Mum’s letter say?”
Draco’s mother’s letter is much longer, and much kinder, and is splattered with tears half from Narcissa and half from Draco when they’re done reading it.
“Wow,” says Ron when they’re done.
“Is she... serious?” asks Harry.
“They do know-” Hermione starts.
“Mother invited all of you,” says Draco. “Father can grin and bear it if he doesn’t like it. No one refuses Mum’s invitations.”
x.
And so it is, a week before the end of term, Ron is begging Hermione to teach him the spells she uses to make all her robes look so neat.
“Seriously! You know all the spells!”
Hermione half huffs, turns on the stairs. “They’re simple,” she says. “They’re in our textbooks!”
Ron scratches his head, sighs, shrugs, and Hermione’s shoulders relax. “I’ll show you,” she says. “But we still have to think of what to get Draco’s parents as presents.”
xi.
The carriage ride to the station is quiet. Ron and Harry are half-asleep, still full of food from the feast, and the soft rocking motion, the dark outside, have soothed them off quite easily. Hermione and Draco, however, are sat bolt upright, awake and wary.
“Your father was a-”
“I know,” says Draco, soft and half-ashamed.
“Ron says that-”
“I did,” says Draco, shrinking smaller.
Hermione purses her lips and looks at him closely. “Why did you go to Gryffindor?” she asks.
Draco looks so shocked at the question, his eyes are as wide and silver as the sickles in her pocket.
xii.
He explains on the train ride down. The train is going much slower than it does during the day. Hermione supposes this is to ensure everyone gets a good night’s rest, to make full use of the night, and once Ron and Harry have clambered into their bunks and started snoring, Draco sits in his nightgown opposite Hermione in hers and explains.
“Harry was going to be in Gryffindor,” he says. “And... I tried to convince him to go to Slytherin, with me, but I think I only convinced him not to, but Mother says his parents were Gryffindors, and I know that all the Weasleys are, so I thought, well, he’ll go there then, so when it was my turn I asked the hat-”
“You asked?” Hermione says. “I had to argue.”
Draco snorts a laugh at that. “Yes,” he says. “But you’re you.” Somehow, it doesn’t sound like an insult.
“Why, though?” she says, once they’re tucked under covers. Draco’s eyes across the compartment are as silver-shining as before, and her hair is like a dark halo around her face. “That’s how you knew Harry would be in Gryffindor, and how you got into Gryffindor but-”
“Because Harry’s won,” Draco says. “And a Malfoy should always endeavour to be on the winning side.”
There’s something sad about how he says this soft admission - the truth that he did not chose it for anything like ideals or ideology, but because he did not want to lose.
Hermione looks at him, and does not flinch. She half frowns, purses her lips, nods.
“G’night, Draco,” she says, and turns over to sleep.
xiii.
They spend two days at the Malfoys, then two days with the Grangers. Ron and Harry head back to Hogwarts for the rest of the holidays, after that, presents from Draco’s parents and Hermione’s carried in their half-full trunks.
On Christmas morning, when they open presents, one of Harry’s reveals a silvery fall of fabric.
xiv.
“There’s a mirror,” says Harry. “It shows you...”
“What you want,” says Ron, “But like...”
“Not what you want to see,” Harry tries to explain. “But what you really want.”
Draco frowns. “That sounds like the Mirror of Erised.”
“I thought it was lost?” says Hermione.
“It is,” says Draco.
“So there’s a giant three headed dog,” says Harry.
“Kerberid,” says Draco. “That’s the breed name, anyway.”
“And a lost mirror.”
They look at each other, their odd circle of four. Two purebloods, one who embraced it and one who shunned it, and two muggle-raised, one who embraced it, and one who wanted nothing more than to leap whole cloth into the magical world.
“Told you,” says Ron. “Dumbledore’s bonkers. Brilliant! But bonkers.”
xv.
At the end of the year....
Draco snatches the flute from Harry’s hands, and plays a tune while walking backwards to the pit behind his friends.
“How did you-”
“Lessons,” says Draco with the most ridiculous look of disgust on his face. “Mother insisted.”
They almost don’t notice the vines coiling around them until Hermione says, “Boys-”
xvi.
They slip through the vines one by one by one and then-
“Stay calm!” shouts Hermione.
“Imagine it’s Pansy!” shouts Draco.
“That’s disgusting!” shouts back Ron, but he’s stopped struggling long enough that the vines let go and let him slip through. “I hate you,” he says to Draco, dusting himself off, but there’s something warm in his tone, and the way he bumps shoulders with him that takes the bite out of it. “Come on.”
xvii.
“Keys,” Harry says, holding one of the brooms leaning by the door.
“I hate flying,” mutters Hermione, but grabs one.
“The lock is silver,” says Draco, taking one as well.
“And worn,” adds Hermione, as Ron kicks off to hover by Harry.
“And if he’s come through already,” Draco says, still doubtful, “then it might be damaged. The only thing Snape is gentle with is potions.”
They find the key, and almost wish they hadn’t.
xviii.
“Chess!” says Ron.
“Yes, yes, Weasley, we know, you love Chess.”
They try walking across and find their path blocked by stone blades. Ron throws a triumphant grin at Draco.
xix.
“Weasley,” Draco says. “If you sacrifice yourself-”
“Its the only option!”
“Not if you cheat!”
“You don’t cheat at chess!”
“Stop!” says Hermione. “Do you honestly think this is going to kill us? Even Devil’s Snare tends to cause unconsciousness. And Fluffy was trained by Hagrid, do you think he’d let him kill us?”
The others glance around.
“Wait,” says Draco. “Do you think... that this is meant to delay him?”
“Or trap him,” Hermione says. “Who’s the one wizard You-Know-Who always feared? Dumbledore. What if this is just-”
“A ploy to delay him long enough for Dumbledore to get here and stop him.”
“And if it’s about You-Know-Who, he hasn’t died once,” Hermione says. “So why would killing him again work?”
The other’s eyes widen at the realisation.
“Right,” says Ron, and marches towards the Queen.
xx.
“Well shit,” says Draco.
“Unconscious,” says Hermione. “Not dead.”
Draco nods. “I’ll stay,” he says, “See if I can find a way out. Warn the Professors. You two-”
Harry nods. “We’ll stop him,” he promises.
xxi.
The troll is unconscious. Hermione shudders to see it but continues through the room with enviable focus. The riddle she solves with cold calm logic, and then-
“There’s only enough for one,” Hermione says. “You have to-”
“I know,” Harry says, and steels his spine.
xxii.
When Hermione makes her way out, she follows the sounds of a very angry Malfoy to find her friends.
“Harry-” asks Draco, when he spots her.
“In the last chamber,” Hermione says. She looks at the professor Draco was railing at. “Professor-”
Professor Dumbledore smiles down at all of them, blue eyes twinkling. “I shall handle this,” he promises. “Why don’t you get Mr. Weasley to the Hospital Wing, hm?”
xxiii.
Harry wakes to a room full of light. It’s comfortable. He can’t feel the burning any more. He half wonders if- but no, he can’t be dead. He can feel someone’s hand holding his so hard his bones feel about to turn to powder.
“Uh,” he says, twitching his hand.
“Harry!” three voices cry in unison.
xxiv.
Later, they will tell him:
“Father is furious - and worried. If You-Know-Who is back-” and Harry will grasp his friend’s hand tight and tell him that no matter what, Draco is still his friend.
Later they will tell him:
“McGonagall! The chess set was McGonagall! She set up the entire match, it was based on her playing patterns!” Harry will laugh, and comment that it’s a good thing they didn’t cheat.
Later they will tell him:
“Dumbledore knows,” and Hermione’s face is drawn with worry in a way no eleven-year-old’s ever should be. “He knows what’s going on, Harry, you should-” And Harry promises to ask.
In the moment, though, he’s simply glad to have them around him.