Chapter Text
November 1981...
It was some of the final and the saddest business in settling the end of the war, the redistribution of the children. The previous evening, Albus Dumbledore had gone into Muggle Surrey, to leave Lily and James Potter’s newly orphaned son in the care of the boy's Aunt Petunia. It had been a grave visit with poor Petunia in heavy mourning for her sister, whether she understood it as that or not. In the end, Dumbledore was successful, and left the Boy Who Lived with her, assuring the little one’s safety at least until -- well, it didn't bear worrying over it too much for now.
Tonight, Dumbledore was on an errand of a different kind, with a child of a different kind, in a place of a different kind. He was not in the city but the countryside, walking up the lane to a sprawling old house. Like little Potter, the boy sleeping in Dumbledore's arms was not yet two years old. He slumped against his shoulder, his breath a little noisy but warm and sweet.
The dark iron gates of the manor house grated and groaned, shifting, turning their bars out of the way, unlocking so Dumbledore and the child could pass through. Inside the house, fires were lit in hearths and lanterns, leading them down a corridor to a warm but not at all cozy drawing room.
The little boy yawned and blinked in the orange light, sleepy but eagerly accepting the shortbread he was offered.
A woman stepped out of the shadows and onto the carpet beneath the chandelier. In the fire’s glow, her hair looked as orange as the child’s, but Dumbledore was her old headmaster, and he knew it to be gleaming blond.
“This is him?” she said, her voice low, almost reverent.
“It is,” Dumbledore said. “They call him Ronald. He will be two years old early this spring.”
She had come close enough to burrow her hands into the hand-knitted blanket in which he’d been wrapped. She pulled him free of it and brought him to the settee before the fireplace, cradling him in her lap, smoothing his fine ginger hair, tracing the line of his long nose, caressing his silky cheeks with her knuckles, clearing the cookie crumbs away. She uttered a soft laugh as he smiled up at her, his eyes sparkling with the flickering firelight.
“Aren’t you a darling little one? Lucius, come and see him. He’s precious.”
Lucius Malfoy obeyed, stepping further into the room, the angles of his face dark with shadows.
“Blue eyes?” Naricssa asked.
Dumbledore nodded. “Yes, like his father." He raised his head to nod at Lucius. "Both of you know Arthur and Molly?”
Narcissa shook her head. “Only by reputation. They were in Lucius’s year in school, well above me.”
“Of course,” Dumbledore nodded. “Lucius, perhaps you will find, as most of us do, that this boy is more like his mother than his father.”
This was no idle observation. That the boy did not look quite so much like his father would make all of this easier.
Lucius sneered all the same. “What is he, the Weasleys' ninth-born son? Or a nice round tenth-born?”
“Sixth,” Dumbledore said. “Not that their surplus was much of a comfort to poor Molly tonight. She was quite beside herself when she finally let me bring him to you.”
Narcissa tutted. “Good thing she has her noble do-gooder senses to comfort her. And it’s not as if she’s dead to him. She can visit with him from time to time, and he’ll be told his background, eventually, mostly.” She lifted the boy slightly off her lap. “He’s a few months older than our Draco, and I'm sure they’ll be a matched set before long, but he’s a fair bit larger right now -- “
“This is the only possibility the Wizengamot will accept?" Lucius interrupted in a voice close to a snarl. "We raise this Weasley child as our own or it's prison for me?"
Dumbledore sighed. "Well, we can't very well ask something so difficult of a Muggle family. They know nothing of our world, or our urgent need to heal the rift in our society, or your own personal court-ordered penance, Lucius. It’s one thing for the court to say you must raise a child from the other side of the conflict as your own, but quite another to work out the details. We have done our best."
Lucius Malfoy paced in front of the fire, scratching at his forearm, still not looking at the child, sneering, "Our best. Yes, and the stars know we can't be trusted to raise the orphaned Boy Who Lived, naturally."
"None of us can,” Dumbledore said, rather gently. “He is protected by particular magic that requires him to make his home with his Muggle family. And yes, Lucius, even if it weren’t so, after raising a defense of being so easily bewitched into Voldemort's service, well -- questions about fitness could arise."
It was a criticism Lucius could not argue without giving up his entire defense. His pacing became quicker, more like stomping.
"You may find," Dumbledore said, "that there are certain other affinities."
Narcissa interrupted, crooned soothingly at her husband. "Lucius darling, come sit with us."
"Us?" He stopped pacing, covering his face with his hands. "Excuse me, Professor. I'd like a private word with my wife."
"Certainly," he said, and his head was suddenly enfolded in a sphere that cut off the sight and sound of the drawing room. The Malfoys could hear music playing faintly from inside, an oompa band.
"Cissa, really," Lucius began, "you're acting like it's already settled that he'll be staying."
"Well, isn't it?" she said. Ronald's fingers closed over her forefinger while he sat unfazed watching Lucius, as if he was accustomed to animated shouting in people much larger than himself. "The Wizengamot requires us to show our good faith by raising a blood traitor's child as our own, and it makes sense that the child should be little Ronald -- "
"But why are the Weasleys willing?” he said, eliciting a laugh from little Ronald as he rounded on them, his white hair flying. “Molly and Arthur are not friends of mine but they are not strangers either. I've always known they'd connive and make enormous sacrifices in the name of their high and righteous principles. But giving us a child -- it's too much. This child isn't penance, he's surveillance -- a spy."
"He is whatever we raise him to be," she said, standing and bringing the boy toward her husband. "Once he’s ours, your son and mine, it won't matter what anyone intended when they sent him here as an infant. And the fact is, Lucius, we either accept the court's ruling and keep the boy, or we send you to Azkaban and our family as we know it is destroyed."
She wedged little Ronald between them. He raised a pudgy pink hand to pat Lucius’s lean cheek, grinning up at him as if this was a marvelous joke. The boy did look like Molly, not so much in how he was made but in how he used his face and eyes to look into Lucius’s own. This close, there was something of his father about him too. Lucius closed his eyes.
He didn't see that Narcissa’s eyes were glistening as she bowed her head and pressed her lips to little Ronald’s forehead. "Lucius," she called him back, "since you and I can't have any more children, this is our last chance at a second one -- at a brighter, richer future. And he is Draco's one chance at a sibling. It might be good for our boy to not grow up an only child. It will change his life, and something tells me -- a strong feeling, almost like divination -- that it will be for the better."
Lucius scoffed. "You want our Draco to have siblings? Siblings like yours?"
"No," she said, placing her hand over Ronald’s as he patted Lucius’s cheek. "A sibling like this."
-----------------------------------------
Much Later...
No one was sure what went on at Malfoy Manor over the summer between Draco and Ronald’s second and third years at Hogwarts, but something definitely changed. The boys came back to school tall as grown men, deep voiced, and instead of wearing their hair slicked back, they both wore it loose, almost flowing. No one doubted anymore whether Draco had properly earned his spot as Slytherin seeker. Clearly he had. And Ronald, with his confidence, natural talent, the benefit of flying lessons since he was in primary school, and the top equipment Lucius provided every season, easily won the position of keeper for Gryffindor in that year’s quidditch tryouts.
Everyone at school had noticed all of this, and the Malfoy brothers became something of a personality indicator among students who fancied boys: are you a Draco or a Ronald fan?
That was two years ago. Now at the beginning of fifth year, the shock of the Malfoy brothers’ transformation was over but the line they carved through their year was solid, almost uncrossable.
They were first divided when they were eleven, waiting in Kings Cross to board the Hogwarts Express for the first time.
“Do not sit in the same compartment,” Lucius Malfoy instructed his boys through the clouds of steam on the platform. “Harry Potter is somewhere on the train. His friendship would be a great asset to us and we’re more likely to get it if we spread ourselves out.”
“Yes, Father,” they said in unison, punching each other afterward, each accusing the other of being a copycat.
Narcissa separated them, drawing Ronald away. “Have you noticed them, darling? They’re standing not far from here, all in a big clump.”
His eyes grew large. “The Weasleys?”
She nodded. “Yes, of course. They’re here seeing off their twins, and that older one. Looks like he might be a prefect.”
There they were, noisy and laughing, all of them in their shabby homemade clothes except for Percy who was already in his school robes. This was Ronald’s birth family, his flesh and blood, even the little girl tagging along with them, the daughter they had to replace him after they gave him away to his real family to settle some hard feelings at the end of the war.
“The twins,” Ronald echoed.
If this pair of boys, just two years older than him, the ones who were still toddlers when he was born -- if they weren’t such a rowdy handful, maybe she would have kept him. That's what Ronald was thinking as he looked across the platform at Molly Prewett Weasley, his birth mother, his real mother’s cousin of some sort. She was small like Narcissa, but robust and ruddy where Narcissa was waifish and fair. She was pleasant to look at anyway, like something good to eat.
Ronald had not failed to notice that whenever they were near Molly Weasley, it was Father who stared most.
“Would you like to go say hello?” Narcissa asked him. “You haven't seen them since Christmas, and the older boys will be your schoolmates now. Might be best to get used to them sooner rather than later.”
Ronald sighed and followed his mother down the platform toward the Weasleys for another of their stiff, pained greetings.
Draco and Lucius did not follow them, though Lucius continued to stare. “You will find, Draco,” he began, “ that some families are better than others. See that your brother remembers it too.”
“Yes, Father.”
After a childhood of rough and ready closeness, school sped the boys away from each other. As Lucius hoped and as Narcissa had feared, Ronald was sorted into Gryffindor, with Potter and his older blood brothers. That first evening, the Malfoy boys stood at the back of the Great Hall after the sorting, as the rest of their houses filed past them, Ronald’s making for the stairs, into the tower, Draco’s heading down, below the lake.
The boys weren’t like the Patil twins -- the pretty, dark-haired girls sharing a weepy goodbye -- but they were uncomfortable, unmoored, shrugging at each other, helpless, not sure how they’d sleep in separate rooms for the first time in either of their memories.
“Oh, go on,” a bushy-haired first-year Gryffindor girl said as she shouldered between them. “Honestly, you’re holding up the entire line.”
At first, Ronald sought out Harry Potter mostly to please his father, but their friendship soon became motivated by genuine affection which grew stronger with each one of their misadventures. The last of Potter’s infamous exploits, though the apex of it hadn’t involved Ronald directly, was the most outlandish of all. He was claiming that the Dark Lord had returned at the end of the Tri-wizard Tournament.
The Malfoy boys’ parents scoffed at the claim, but while Lucius continued to encourage Ronald to stay close to Potter, Narcissa had had enough and spent the summer touring Russia, taking Ronald to meet the great wizard’s chess masters to learn what he could from them.
“Potter’s wild stories aren’t all Ronald needs to leave behind in Britain,” Draco had confided in Lucius. “There’s also the business of Hermione Granger.”
Lucius had winced. “Potter’s Mudblood?”
“The same,” Draco had said, relating the very public spat between the girl and Ronald during the Yule Ball. On Boxing Day, Draco had called Ronald out as jealous that Granger had gone to the ball with Viktor Krum.
“Of course I was jealous,” Ronald had snapped back. “When she came down that staircase, all cleaned up, when she danced in his arms, smiling and laughing and bright as an angel -- bloody hell, Draco, every bloke at school was jealous. Don’t tell me you weren’t.”
Draco didn’t. He had eyes and -- other body parts, not the least of which was a heart.
But he did tell their father that Ronald needed some time away. That time was over now, and they were heading back to school for their fifth year. They were late to the train station, leaving their parents behind the barrier as they sprinted ahead with their trunks, scrambling on board as the coaches began to move.
Leaning, panting against the walls of the narrow train corridor, Draco used his wand to dry the sweat and steam from Ronald’s face. “You’re a sight, Ronald. What will your fans say?”
“Cheers, mate,” Ronald replied, flicking Draco’s hair into place, doing a bad job of it on purpose. “Or rather, благодарю вас.”
Draco smirked, batting Ronald’s hand away. “You did manage to pick up some Russian then.”
“Yeah.”
“But just to impress Granger.”
“Yeah.”
He punched Ronald’s arm, snickering, “Pathetic.”
“Definitely, yeah. Going to be worth it though.” They started making their way toward the front of the train, where the prefects would be meeting.
“You’re lucky Dad's first priority is for you to stay near Potter,” Draco said, “or they’d have shipped you right off to Durmstrang as soon as they found out you fancied a Muggle-born girl.”
It was Ronald doing the punching now, and with substantially more vigor. “They know about Hermione? You told them? How could you tell them? There isn’t even anything to tell yet.”
Draco rubbed his arm, his voice rising. “What? It was for your own protection. I did it out of love for you.”
Ronald sneered at his sarcasm. “Just keep your bleeding mouth shut, alright?”
“Well, we can safely predict that’s not going to happen.” It was Hermione Granger, sliding the door to the prefects’ compartment open, standing in the opening in a perfectly ordinary, un-provocative posture but causing the boys to stagger back all the same.
Caught off guard, they both called her name at once, their voices sounding over each other as, “Gr-erm-rion-ger-y.”
She rolled her eyes. “Look sharp, Malfoys. Get in here before you disrupt our meeting any further.”
The meeting was a dull slog of patrol schedules, the rereading of regulations, a warning that Fred and George Weasley had begun selling magical joke and prank products out of a suitcase in the Gryffindor common room, some of them quite potent and not to be taken lightly.
“Don’t look at me,” was all Ronald had to say about that.
Effective immediately, the train needed to be patrolled, and it was agreed that, to make up for being late, the Malfoy brothers should take the first shift.
“Yeah? But what if we can’t BEHAVE by ourselves?” Ronald said, shoving Draco sideways, sending him careening into Pansy Parkinson.
“Yeah, you wouldn’t want to send us out there as bad EXAMPLES,” Draco answered back with a shove of his own, pushing Ronald backward so he was lying in Hermione’s lap, blinking up at her.
“Honestly!” she shouted, pushing him upward with both hands. “I have no idea what your heads of house were thinking, nominating the pair of you as prefects. Right. Stand up, Ronald. You can come with me.”
Draco frowned. “Why is she acting like she can order everyone around like she’s Head Girl?”
Ronald spun around, turning his back to Hermione, mouthing the words, “Shut it,” to his brother before following her out the door.
With a huff, Hermione led the way through their patrol.
“It’s nice to see you again, Hermione,” Ronald began in a sweet voice that sounded almost sorry for the bother he’d already been. “Did you enjoy your summer? You aren’t quite as tanned as you usually are after the holidays. Did you have to spend all your time indoors?”
She stopped her arms folded across her chest. “Ronald, you sound like an ominous Malfoy spy when you question me like this.”
He raised both his hands. “What am I supposed to say to that?”
She turned and kept walking. “Well, how did you spend the summer? You’re paler and less freckled than usual yourself.”
He pounced at the chance to boast. “Right you are. I was off playing chess in Russia. I even -- “
“And Draco,” she said. “Did he come along to Russia?”
Ronald smirked. “Now Hermione, you know you’re the only one of my personal acquaintances with the patience to watch me play chess.”
“That is not true.”
“Sure it is,” he said. “You get quite enthralled. Which makes it odd that you’re interrupting the tales of my chess-capades to ask about Draco.”
She huffed again. “It’s called making small talk. It’s what polite people do.”
He yelled a laugh. “Picking away at the finer points of social etiquette with a Malfoy is probably not a battle you want to start.“
“May I tell you something, Ronald?” she asked, batting her eyelids, her imitation of a well-mannered pure-blooded girl. “There is a word in Muggle parlance for people like you and your brother. A dirty word I won’t even say to you. But you should know that’s what you are.”
He stepped closer, towering over her. “A word for us?”
“Yes.”
“But you won’t say it?”
“No, I won't.”
“Come on, Hermione. You can’t leave us hanging like that. At least give us a hint.”
She tapped her foot, considering. “It’s a compound word. The last part is ‘boys’ and the first part is the dirty part and it starts with the letter F. I have never said it in my life and am not about to break that streak over the likes of the Malfoy brothers.”
Ronald muttered to himself. “F boys. Fit boys? Fine boys?”
She rolled her eyes. “You think I have never said the words fit or fine?”
He threw up his hands. “I have no idea. What is the last letter in the word?”
“You have got to be joking.”
“No, sincerely.“
She stamped her foot. “K, Ronald. The last letter is K.”
He was muttering to himself again. “Fak-boys, fake-boys, feek-boys, feck-boys…” He stopped, his eyes wide. “Hermione!”
She was walking backwards, laughing at his outrage. “I’m sorry, but it describes the pair of you perfectly, especially you.”
“It does not. Draco and I,” he puffed out his chest, “we were raised as gentlemen, virtuous, chivalrous, we love women, would lay down our very -- “
“Oh, give over.”
“Both of you give over.” It was Harry, opening the door of the compartment where he’d been sitting alone until he heard them shouting.
Hermione squealed his name and threw her arms around his neck.
“She greeted me exactly the same way,” Ronald told Harry over her shoulder.
“I might have, if he wasn’t such an F-boy. Not like you, Harry. Lovely to see you.”
Harry was frowning as she freed him from her embrace. “What are you on about?”
“Leave it,” they said at once.
Back in the prefects’ carriage, Pansy Parkinson slumped over, her head falling into Draco’s lap with the burnt out intimacy that exists between people who have tried dating and given it up. “Did you see him, Draco? Same as always. He didn’t even look at me.”
Draco patted her hair. “Sorry, Pansy. But it’s still early in the year. You’ve lots of time to win Ronald over -- or to come to your senses. ”
She waved her arm at the ceiling. “What does he see in that awful, fussy, bossy Granger?”
Draco settled into his seat. “That’s complicated. Our mother is a sweet person -- when it comes to us, at any rate. She bosses so gently it hardly registers. And Ronald adores her, of course. But have you ever noticed his birth mother? She’s got this way of overbearing that he must have acquired a taste for before they gave him up. He’s desperate to get himself lovingly bossed again.”
Pansy sat up. “You’re saying Ronald is trying to date Granger in place of his birth mother? That’s disgusting.”
Draco shrugged. “Well, not literally. It’s a Muggle concept, taken from the Greeks by an unsavoury Austrian doctor a century ago. Makes a bit of sense though. Why else would someone like Ronald have an interest in Granger? Now don’t fret, Pansy,” he said, patting her knee. “They’ll never make a go of it. Granger needs someone more disciplined, more serious, who knows how to suffer, who is capable of reaching her on an intellectual level that’s more about books and less about monkeying around Russia with a chess board.”
It was Pansy’s turn to pat his knee. “It didn’t go away this summer, did it Draco? Your crush on your brother’s girl -- it’s still in full swing.”
“By the stars, Pansy, what are you talking about?" he said, brushing her hand away. "And, as Hermione Granger will be the first to tell you, she is not Ronald Weasley Malfoy’s girl.”
"You are actually the first person to tell me that, Draco. And on more than one occasion. Which makes you," she said, leaning in to whisper into his ear, "the perfect man to help me with a little plan."
Draco frowned. "No. No plotting this year. We're prefects, about to write our OWLs. This year there will be no dueling Potter, no non-committal snogging, no sneaking around pranking my brother. Nothing untoward."
"Please, Draco," she said. "There's only one boy at school interesting enough to distract a girl from a Malfoy brother -- "
He scoffed. "You'll never get Granger to fancy Potter. They’re like siblings who aren’t related.”
Pansy made a frightening purring sound. “You and Ronald are also siblings who aren’t related -- "
Draco faked a retch. “Let me out. I’m about to be sick.”
“Will you sit down?” Pansy laughed. “I don't mean for you to help me distract Granger with Potter. I mean the only boy at school interesting enough to throw a girl off a Malfoy brother is ANOTHER Malfoy brother."
Draco's gaze drifted out the window. "You're saying…"
She gave three slow nods, the tips of her sleek bobbed hair moving across her cheeks. "Yes, Draco. I need you to get Ronald to move on from Granger, by distracting her with you."