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In the aftermath of everything, Harry’s magic had been a bit… odd. It was inconsistent, sometimes almost fighting him and making it difficult to cast even the most basic of spells, and other times acting on his slightest thoughts without him even realizing it, summoning things he vaguely considered getting and conjuring tissues before he had finished sneezing. He’d gone to a few specialists, done some therapeutic magic rehabilitation sessions, and made decent progress on getting back to normal. The overall consensus was that his magic was stronger now that it had been before, and he wasn’t used to the new power running through him, and so his body was alternating attempting to suppress it and just letting it flow freely. Harry was getting better, but sometimes, especially when his friends dragged him out of bed to go to a brunch so early it should still have been called breakfast, he still slipped up.
Draco had hardly finished saying, “Pass the salt,” before the salt cellar had zoomed into his hand, while sugar added itself to Harry’s tea and butter spread itself on his toast. Pansy and Blaise were laughing uproariously, delighted as always by the chance to tease, and Ron seemed to be fighting back laughter too at the maelstrom of breakfast foods and cutlery surrounding his best friend. Hermione and Draco were disposed to be slightly more sympathetic, although they also betrayed him when a dollop of whipped cream from a stack of waffles overshot Harry’s plate and ended up on his nose.
Scowling at all of them, Harry scrubbed his napkin across his face.
“Oh, cheer up,” Pansy said, her face the very picture of cheerful spite, “I’m sure the Fairy Queen will leave you a nice present under your pillow.”
Immediately, all the breakfast chaos surrounding Harry ceased. Ron, Blaise, and Draco continued to laugh, but Hermione seemed just as confused as Harry was.
“What?”
“You’re a bit old for it, but I’m sure the Fairy Queen will still give you a sickle, especially for a display of magic as impressive as that,” Pansy said, and then cut herself off with another peal of laughter.
Harry glanced over at Hermione, and when she didn’t provide him with a reading list, bibliography, and thorough explanation of who the Fairy Queen was and why she would be coming to visit Harry all of a sudden, he turned to Draco.
“Who’s the Fairy Queen?”
Pulling himself together, Draco turned towards Harry.
“You don’t know who the Fairy Queen is?”
Both Harry and Hermione shook their heads. The others’ laughter was fading.
“I guess we’d all grown out of it, by the time we made it to school,” Ron said, with the tone of someone trying to apologize and soften a blow. “But it’s something all wizarding kids know about, I would have assumed that you would have picked it up from somewhere.”
Again, Harry and Hermione shook their heads.
“It’s something that parents do for their children when they’re coming into their magic, they pretend to be the Fairy Queen,” Draco began, before being cut off by Blaise.
“What?!” he cried in faux-scandalized tones. “What do you mean, pretend? The Fairy Queen is real, Draco Malfoy, and if you don’t believe in her she won’t come!”
Blaise and Pansy burst into renewed giggles, while Draco rolled his eyes and continued.
“As I was saying, the Fairy Queen is a being made up by wizarding parents to reward their children when they first show signs of magic. It’s something to be celebrated, of course, and so the story goes that the Fairy Queen, who sprinkles fairy dust on every child at birth, returns to celebrate the blooming of magic in another young wizard. She comes while the child is sleeping, so that no one will see her and capture her, but she always leaves behind a gift of some sort. For some families it’s coins, for some it’s sweets, and for some it’s toys. The present is usually left beside their pillow, or beside the bed for them to find when they wake up.”
Harry had a few memories of Dudley receiving similar treatment for lost teeth in his childhood, but it was Hermione who voiced the comparison.
“Oh! Like the Tooth Fairy!”
The pure bloods at the table looked horrified.
“The what?” Pansy asked.
“The Tooth Fairy,” Hermione explained. “When a muggle child loses a tooth, they put it under their pillow so that the Tooth Fairy will come and take the tooth, leaving money behind.”
Blaise had gently pushed his plate away. “That’s disgusting.”
“What does the Tooth Fairy want with a bunch of kid’s teeth?” Ron asked.
Hermione paused for a moment, considering. “I’m not sure it’s the same in every family, but my parents always told me that she used them to build her palace.”
Draco and Pansy now had looks of disgust to match the one on Blasie’s face.
“Potter,” Draco said seriously, turning to give Harry his full attention, “I know it’s probably still too soon in the relationship to discuss hypothetical future children and parenting techniques, but please promise me that if we have children together you will not build a palace out of their baby teeth.”
“The parents don’t actually build anything out of them, Draco, that’s just what they tell them.”
“Oh, I feel so reassured about how normal and sane this practice is now,” Draco drawled, rolling his eyes again. “What do they do with them then, if they don’t build the supposed tooth castles?”
Harry looked at Hermione for help; he had never seen what Aunt Petunia did with Dudley’s baby teeth, he just remembered Dudley bragging about the money he got the next morning.
“Some parents save them, and some throw them away,” Hermione said, although clearly the idea of keeping a box of baby teeth still didn’t sit well with most of their friends.
“I would like to ban the further discussion of body part collection from this and all future brunches,” Pansy said, taking a delicate sip of her tea. “Let’s go back to making fun of Potter.”
Harry made a face at her, but he was starting to see her point. He’d never thought much about the Tooth Fairy before, but he was certainly glad he hadn’t ever come across a box of teeth while cleaning the house on Privet Drive.
“Going back to an earlier subject,” Blaise suggested, “What was everyone’s first accidental magic? Do you remember?”
Pansy beamed, and Draco groaned.
“I remember Pansy’s, I was there for it. She was a little terror even then, and a spoiled brat to boot.”
Pansy’s smile grew even more smug. “I was a precocious child, there’s no denying that. Draco here is just jealous because my magic manifested before his.”
“By one week!”
“Nine whole days, Draco.”
Ron quickly interrupted their bickering. “What happened?”
“Imagine, if you will, a beautiful day in late May,” Pansy said, spreading her hands in a dramatic fashion. “The air was fresh with potential, and the flowers had come into bloom not long before, in clear anticipation of my prowess.”
“She thought she saw a diamond and the bottom of the Manor’s koi pond and threw all the water and the fish into the air and onto the lawn, only to discover it was a piece of quartz.”
Pansy glared at Draco, who simply raised his eyebrows in return. There was a beat of silence, and then Ron laughed.
“Really?”
“Oh, believe it, Weasley. The house elves were running around like mad, trying to get the fish back into the pond and fill it with water again. My mother complained all summer that her hydrangeas never flourished properly that year.”
“And Draco cried because one of the fish landed on his head,” Pansy added, smiling nastily.
“I hate you,” Draco said, and Pansy cackled.
“Hermione, you’ll like mine,” Ron said, clearly eager to avoid a repeat of the Brunch Incident from three months ago.
“Oh?”
“Yeah, I should have told you ages ago, it’s proof we were meant to be together from the start, I could have saved a lot of time at school if I’d just told you about how my magic manifested. You would have been begging me to go out with you.”
Hermione pursed her lips. “Go on, then.”
“See, mum used to read us stories at naptime, to help us fall to sleep, and dad would read to us before bed. It worked pretty well, since we all had staggered bedtimes, but in the week before Charlie went off to school things got a little chaotic. Mum had helped me clean my teeth and put on my pajamas, but dad never came in to read to me, so I pulled a book off the shelf and my magic charmed it to read out loud to me. When dad finally remembered that he’d forgotten to say goodnight to me, he panicked halfway up the stairs because heard a stranger’s voice coming from my room and thought I was in danger. He burst in with his wand drawn, only to find me curled up in bed, following along as the book read itself to me.”
Hermione stared at him for a moment, then leaned in and kissed him soundly.
“No kissing at the brunch table!” Draco cried. Harry felt a streak of savage joy too, Hermione was usually the one chastening the two of them for getting a little too close, it was nice to see it turned back on her for a change.
She pulled back from Ron, slightly pink cheeked, but looking very pleased.
“What was your first accidental magic?” Ron asked her.
“Oh! Well, it actually does go along with yours quite nicely,” Hermione said, but then Pansy interrupted.
“Wait, how did your parents handle it? I mean, you didn’t find out about magic until you were eleven, right? What do muggles do when their kids start shooting off spells when they’re still too young to know about Hogwarts?”
“They were certainly confused,” Hermione said with a bit of a wry grin. “Someone had given me this little book lamp, the type that clips onto the book you’re reading so you can read in bed, and I would use it to read books under the covers after my parents had put me to bed. I was fairly young, maybe four years old, and so I wasn’t that great at being quiet or hiding what I was doing. My parents were pleased that I liked to read, of course, but they couldn’t have me staying up all night, and so they started taking the batteries out of the lamp each night.”
“What are batteries?” Blaise asked.
“Oh, I know this one!” Draco said. “They’re things that muggles put into ec-lec-trik-al devices that give them energy!”
Harry kissed him on the cheek and whispered, “Good job, love,” in his ear, and Draco preened.
“Yes, exactly,” Hermione said, returning to her story. “So, the light shouldn’t have worked without them, but they kept finding me reading with it each night anyway. Then, they tried taking the lamp itself away from me, but it kept appearing back in my bed by the next morning anyway. They assumed it was faulty wiring and were quite scared that it might be dangerous, so eventually they just put me to bed half an hour earlier each night and let me read with the light on so I’d at least be safe.”
Harry grinned. “It’s nice to know that you’ve always been yourself, Hermione. And I see how you managed to read the entire course list by the time you got on the train, too!”
Draco turned to Harry then and asked gently, “What about you? Your aunt must have known about magic, growing up with your mother - did she tell your uncle? What sort of accidental magic did you do?”
Everyone was looking at him, and Harry didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t had happy, exciting celebrations of his magic, or his cleverness, or anything else even close to that as a child. He hadn’t even had a visit from the Tooth Fairy. But his friends were there, waiting to hear what he would say, and Ron and Hermione looked so ready to be supportive no matter what he said, and Draco’s thumb was stroking Harry’s knee almost absentmindedly, and so Harry said, “Er, I mostly got into and out of trouble.”
Ron chuckled at that, and Draco gave him a small smile.
“Well, no surprises there, Potter. What havoc did you wreak?”
“I’m not really sure what my first bout of accidental magic was,” Harry began slowly, “but I remember shrinking a sweater that my aunt was trying to make me wear. It was horrible, and I made it so she couldn’t even get it over my head. She was so mad, but said that it must have shrunk in the wash.”
“Are you telling us you actually had fashion sense at one point in your life?” Pansy said, and Harry cracked a smile.
“I have fashion sense now,” Harry responded.
“No, you have me, and I tell you what to wear,” Draco said, which was unfortunately too true to dispute.
“Anyway, I think that was some of the first magic I did, but a year later I grew back all of my hair overnight. My aunt cut off everything except for my bangs, to hide my scar, because she was sick of how unruly it was and didn’t want people at school to see. I was so worried the other kids would make fun of me, but it had all grown back perfectly the next morning.”
Draco gave a theatrical groan and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, “So I’ve been wasting my conditioner on you for nothing!”
“After that, a bunch of strange things happened at school. Stuff would spill on Dudley and his friends when they tried to bully people, and one time I was running away from them and suddenly ended up on the roof of the school kitchens. Oh, and I accidentally set a boa constrictor free from the zoo once.”
“I don’t believe it,” Draco said. His tone was exasperatedly fond, and everyone else was nodding in agreement. “You’ve really been like this since birth, haven’t you?”
“Like what?” Harry asked, perplexed.
“‘Like what?’ he says, as if he doesn’t know. Like you! Stubborn, reckless, incredibly powerful, and determined to protect others. You’re ridiculous, it beggars belief.” Draco’s tone was scoffing, but his smile was soft on his face, and Harry leaned into him as he put his arm over the back of his chair.
“He blew up his aunt once, too,” Ron added, to the clear amazement of everyone else present. “Sent her right into the sky like a balloon, they had to send the magic reversal squad and the obliviators to sort it all out.”
“Of course, that was after he had started at Hogwarts,” Hermione pointed out, “so Harry himself didn’t have to be obliviated.”
“Oh my goodness,” said Blaise, shock and awe written clear across his face. “I don’t think I’ve ever given our professors enough credit for how brave they were, facing down your teenage angst every day. Snape was lucky you didn’t do him in on a weekly basis, if you were really that powerful.”
Ron’s face lit up. “He came close though once, do you remember? In sixth year?”
“Yes! The whole school was talking about it! I only wish I could have seen it myself,” Draco said wistfully. “‘There’s no need to call me sir, professor’, honestly, that might have been the highlight of that entire year.”
Even Hermione started laughing at Draco’s impression of Harry’s moody teenager voice, and as Harry squeezed Draco’s hand and laughed along with them, he thought how glad he was to live in a world with magic.