Archive of Our Own ^beta

What if Draco Malfoy had been the Chosen One? We only need to tweak the prophecy a little, still; move the birth month up a month or so, change the parents from those who thrice thwarted the Dark Lord to those who supported him. Certainly Voldemort would not have hesitated to kill Lucius and Narcissa, no matter how loyal they were, if their infant son was all that stood between him and immortality.

On Halloween night, the wizarding world stepped out of the darkness of war and into a brighter future, thanks to the newly-orphaned Boy Who Lived. By the next morning, the one-year-old with a lightning-bolt scar on his forehead was delivered to the doorstep of his estranged aunt and uncle (and his older cousin), because his mother had died to protect him, and the home of a blood relative to her would mean her love’s protection lasted long enough for him to grow up: this much is still true.

This much is also still true: Draco Malfoy grew up loved. Ted and Andromeda Tonks welcomed him into their home (and wasn’t it convenient that Narcissa had a living sister whom Dumbledore actually trusted to raise the Chosen One?), and their daughter took to being an older sister.

Draco Malfoy is also, still, a self-centred child, to whom “doing the right thing” does not come easily. Still, he has an aunt and an uncle and a cousin whom he loves, and who, he knows, love him, who give him disappointed looks and tell him they expected better of him, which he does not like one bit, when he does something that fails to meet their impossible standards of goodness, such as when he makes Neville Longbottom cry for the third time in as many weeks. (It isn’t fair, Draco thinks, at seven years old, it wasn’t his fault, Longbottom cries at everything, and besides, it had only been self-defense: Potter had started it, telling him, “My dad says your parents were bad people,” and it would have been Draco crying if he hadn’t passed the misery on by sniping at a soft target after he had responded by calling Potter’s dad an idiot, because Draco’s parents had been heroes, of course they were. It would be years and years before Draco learned that these factors did not justify cruelty as easily as he thought.)

In this world, Harry Potter has two living parents and Draco hates him for it. Aunt Andromeda keeps arranging playdates for Draco with other Order children his age, as if his big cousin weren’t playmate enough for him, and Longbottom is all right, when Draco isn’t making him cry, and at Weasley’s all the redheaded faces kind of blend together to him, but every other word out of Potter’s mouth is “My dad” this and “My dad says” that as if it hasn’t occurred to him that not everyone has the luxury of having a father and he needn’t rub Draco’s nose in it all the time. 

Draco does not know a lot about his parents; his aunt and uncle have kept it that way on purpose. They have told him, though, repeatedly, that his parents loved him very much, and Draco reasons that if they loved him, loved him so much that they died to save him, they must have been very good people indeed. When he presses for more details, Aunt ‘Dromeda (as he began calling her at three, conflating aunt with the start of her name, and never quite shook the habit, as it made her smile) will condescend to add that she loved her sister, too, and while she never really knew Draco’s father, she knew that his parents loved each other very much, too.

(Remember: in all versions of this story, love is magic. In all versions of this story, the three members of the Malfoy family loved one another, even if they had precious few other redeeming qualities between them. Andromeda is painting Draco a sparse picture using only brushstrokes that she knows are both true and pleasant, not because she is normally one to mince words, but because he is a child in her care - he is her nephew, and she loves him - and she does not want to be the one to break his heart.)

When Draco is eight and a half, his cousin Dora (she had all her friends and acquaintances calling her Tonks by the time she hit double digits, but to family, she will let Dora stand) tells him why it is that her parents are always a little vague when he asks for more information about his - tells him that his mother and father refused to come to her parents’ wedding because Uncle Ted was Muggleborn, had not acknowledged it at all except for a letter from his mother to hers, telling her not to go through with it or she was dead to the family, and the sisters had not spoken since; she tells him that his parents had been supporters of You-Know-Who (Draco did not ascribe to refusing to have fear of a name) until he killed them. She does not tell him this to be cruel; she tells him because he asked, and she knew the answer, and at thirteen years old she has not yet learned that sometimes her younger cousin does not really want to know the answers to his questions.

He screams at her that she’s wrong, that she’s lying, and then flees to his room, sobbing.

Andromeda reprimands her daughter for her well-intentioned tactlessness, and then she knocks on Draco’s door, sits on the bed with him when he allows her in, pulls him into her lap and holds him in the way he likes to imagine his mother would have done, had she been alive.

“It isn’t true, right?” he asks, tearfully. “She was making it up.”

Andromeda does not give an immediate response, and in that terrible silence, Draco knows, with a sick twisting feeling in his stomach, that his cousin was telling the truth. “But you said they loved me!” he railed, tears still wracking his small form.

Andromeda sighs, and does her best to explain to Draco that love and goodness do not always go hand in hand. “They did love you,” she promises. “They loved you so much that they gave up on something they believed in, said no to someone they feared and had never said no to before, all for you. But, Draco, baby, sometimes even loving people do things they aren’t proud of. Or do things they are proud of, but shouldn’t be. Loving someone good, or being loved by someone good, isn’t protection from making the wrong choices.”

“But it’s not fair!” he cried, a familiar refrain, and she stroked his hair. 

(“It’s not fair,” he had also exclaimed, at six, when he realized that his uncle and his cousin could both change their features at will but Draco’s face remained stubbornly his own. He liked his face, but he did not one bit like feeling left out, like the only member of the family who could not do something. He cried bitterly until his aunt pointed out that he was just like her - same snub nose, same noble Black bloodline, same inability to shapeshift - and he sheepishly acknowledged that he had always assumed that she could change her face like the others did, and just chose not to because she was too dignified.)

These were concepts that Draco would worry at, would turn over and over in his mind for the next several years; it was a paradox to be reconciled. He was not yet ready to give up his mental image of his parents as good, as heroes - they were his parents, so of course they had to be good. Whatever side they had been on must be the side of right. But, at the same time, he knew his aunt and uncle were good, and how could anyone who treated them cruelly be right, even if his aunt loved them anyway? (Wasn’t that what having sisters was all about, having someone to love and hate at the same time?) And besides, any side that had killed his parents, that had tried to kill him, was clearly the wrong side. He needed more time to puzzle it out.

When Draco got his Hogwarts letter, the four of them went together to Diagon Alley to do school shopping, the same as they had every year since Dora started school. 

Draco has grown up famous, though his aunt and uncle have tried to shield him from his fame as much as from his infamy. He is happy enough to puff out his chest and confirm that he is the Boy Who Lived - but people are perhaps a little less eager to shake him by the hand, to idolize him as a saviour, as the son of two erstwhile Death Eaters, than if he had been the orphan of beloved war heroes like Lily and James Potter. Some people introduce themselves; others eye him with suspicion. He is suitably impressed when Mr. Ollivander tells him how “Curious… very curious” it is that his wand (holly and phoenix feather, eleven and a half inches) should have chosen him, when its twin was the very one that gave him that scar. It feels good to be made to feel important, to be told that great things (or possibly terrible things) can be expected from him.

His aunt just laughs when Draco suggests that he should bring a broomstick with him to school despite the rules, but then his uncle gives himself Mr. Ollivander’s beady eyes and an enormous nose, and Draco giggles, distracted.

When they boarded the train, Draco thought long and hard about whether he wanted to sit with his cousin, or be independent. He thought so long that there weren’t any empty compartments left, though, and left to choose between several that were overcrowded, one that held Potter, and one that had Dora and her friends, he decided that independence was overrated, and anyway, it probably made him seem very cool that he was hanging out with older students.

Sometime after they left the station, a new girl marched into the compartment with Longbottom, who had somehow already lost his toad. She broke off, though, peering excitedly at Draco’s scar. “I know who you are! You’re Draco Malfoy! You’re the Boy Who Lived; you’re in books.” His chest puffed out with pride, until she went on, “It’s really very interesting, because it says your parents were actually supporters of–”

Dora, squeezing Draco’s hand as his beam was swiftly replaced by a scowl, crossed her eyes and made her nose grow so long it bumped into Longbottom’s arm, and he yelped. He and the new girl continued their search down the train, and Draco let out his held-in breath. Sitting with his cousin had clearly been the right move.

Draco has been looking forward to the Sorting, if only out of the vague hope that it will help him with the conundrum he has been working on for years, now, about which side he should be on and whether his parents were good people. Well, well, what have we here, a voice says in his head, after “Malfoy, Draco!” is called and he sits under the Hat with all eyes on him. Let’s see, there are a couple of ways I could Sort you…

Draco sits up taller. Hufflepuff wouldn’t be too bad, he thinks; his cousin is in Hufflepuff, and it would be nice to share a common room with her.

It almost sounds like the Hat is laughing, though not unkindly. I don’t think I’d call you ‘unafraid of toil.’ In that case, better be… “Slytherin!”

There is a smattering of applause as Draco goes to his new table. Dora claps hard, and several of her friends from the train follow her lead. Other than that mostly-Hufflepuff crowd, the other three tables are not interested in cheering someone not sorted to their house, not even for the Boy Who Lived (perhaps especially not for the Boy Who Lived, whose parents were Death Eaters, being Sorted Slytherin). And even at the Slytherin table, there are those who eye his scar and sneer, rather than clap, and Draco has to wonder if this is really where you’ll find your true friends. But it was his aunt’s House, and his mother’s and father’s, too, so it must be the best one.

Severus Snape was never a teacher at Hogwarts, in this world; without Lily’s life to bargain for, Lily’s death to leverage guilt for, Albus Dumbledore had no sway to leverage him into becoming a double agent. He oozed his way through the war, avoided Azkaban with the thinnest of plausible deniability and claims of Imperio (much like Lucius Malfoy might have, had he lived), opened up a small storefront in Knockturn Alley where he brewed potions and sold components for a less than savoury clientele. The Potions Master does not draw attention to Draco’s celebrity, and neither do any of the other teachers, though he rather wishes they would. Professor Binns calls him “Damien.”

It’s in Flying class that things start to go wrong. They are all standing around, bored, Madame Hooch having stepped away, and Potter begins blathering on about his father, the Quidditch player, his father, the expert flier, and Draco can feel the blood pounding in his ears, his exasperation with Potter’s inability to realize that more people than just his father know how to fly broomsticks - and Longbottom’s Remembrall is there. Longbottom’s Remembrall, that much was made of his mother having sent him (and not everyone has mothers, either, Longbottom!) - so Draco snatches it as something to front with, and hops on the broom to show Potter that actually one does not have to be or have a famous father to know how to fly. But somehow, Potter is the hero of the day in everyone else’s books: Potter gets put on his House’s Quidditch team and an exception made for his father to send him a fancy broom, while Draco gets docked House points and a short lecture on not being a bully.

Draco has never been a fan of Halloween, ever since he was old enough to know that that was the date he lost his parents. After that one, though, his first Halloween at Hogwarts seems to be shaping up to be a standout as one of the worst. When Professor Quirrell announces the presence of a troll in the dungeons, Draco’s first, irrational, self-centred thought is that it was sent from beyond the grave by He Who Must Not Be Named, to finish the job from ten years ago when he killed Draco’s parents. (One day, perhaps, he will learn about the secret that Quirrell was hiding behind his turban and will feel vindicated to know that this thought was not so irrational, after all.) His second thought, as the professors begin directing the students to return in an orderly manner to their dormitories, is, hang on, the Slytherin dormitories are in the dungeon, they could be walking directly into the troll’s path!

He dodges his Prefect and races across the Great Hall to the Hufflepuff table; thank Merlin his cousin Dora is there (and he doesn’t know what he’ll do next year, after she graduates). “Time to sneak you into the Hufflepuff Common Room, D?” she asks, with a grin that seems jolly, like she is making this into an adventure rather than a reason for dread and fear to coil in the pit of his stomach. 

After Halloween, Potter seems to have abruptly become best friends with Weasley and Granger, which Draco only knows because there is a brief, blessed reprieve when Potter is too busy putting his head together with those two to have time to blather on about his father, not because he’s paying attention to them. Draco has never had close friends like that, other than his cousin, who never pushes him away but tells him that she doesn’t count because they’re family, and anyway he deserves friends his own age - but everyone his own age eyes him with suspicion for one reason or another; for his parents’ allegiances, or for his scar, or for his tendency to lash out like a vicious little viper whenever he feels hurt or slighted. This is wildly unfair, Draco feels, as these are all circumstances entirely out of his control.

Draco challenges Potter to a duel before the first term is up; Draco and Potter have already challenged each other to a dozen duels by the time they were ten, though, and this is not particularly newsworthy except to Granger, who is new to wizard duels and does not think much of them.

Draco does not have an Invisibility Cloak, nor does he encounter the Mirror of Erised; if he had, he might have seen an image of himself with his parents, cousin, and aunt and uncle, all smiling at one another and preferably sporting incontrovertible and uncomplicated evidence that his parents were good people. Harry Potter does have an Invisibility Cloak (which Draco suspects but does not know for sure, due to the nature of such cloaks), because his famous father spoils him rotten, but this Harry Potter is missing very little that his heart desires. If he does find the Mirror, it holds no special fascination for him except as a curiosity. 

At the end of the year, Potter, Granger, and Weasley go after whoever is after the Stone, hidden in the third-floor corridor. Potter does not have the magic of a dead mother’s love to protect him, and neither does he have the Philosopher’s Stone in his pocket; it remains safely in the Mirror, and Potter is saved, ironically, because Draco tattled on him for going where he shouldn’t after hours, resulting in responsible adults hurrying onto the scene (it wasn’t that he was paying attention, it was just that he couldn’t sleep, and had thought that maybe he would stretch his legs or see if he could get into the Hufflepuff Common Room to find Dora, and he had just happened to stroll by Gryffindor Tower first and had just happened to see Potter’s and co’s legs peeking out under Potter’s Cloak and had just happened to follow them, skulking in the shadows, to see if they would do anything that he could finally see Potter face justice for).

It is terribly unfair at the year-end banquet, after Draco has worked quite hard to earn House points for Slytherin and is seeing the fruits of his labours in the form of his House poised to win the House Cup, that the Headmaster lavishes points on Potter, Granger, Weasley, and even Longbottom for their illicit activities and pursuit of something that Draco hadn’t even known was on offer, pulling Gryffindor up from dead last to take the lead. Draco is awarded a measly ten points for doing the responsible thing and telling an adult, resulting in a tie for the Cup and a horrible clash of colour schemes.

There is no altercation in the bookstore before Draco’s second year at Hogwarts, because Lucius Malfoy is dead and in the ground nearly eleven years. There is no villain to cause the Chamber of Secrets to open out of malice, but it happens anyway through unhappy accident, because some things are unavoidable: Mundungus Fletcher has been raiding the abandoned Malfoy Manor bit by bit for years, ever since the wards decayed enough from disuse that he could get in, scavenging likely-looking valuables and selling them off. He is heading back from Knockturn Alley to Diagon with his ill-gotten earnings plus whatever didn’t sell; the youngest Weasley looks so small and waifish, so desperate, in the shadow of six older siblings, to have something her own, that his shrivelled prune of a heart softens, a little - and in any case, the battered old diary he is left with from the Manor looks like it has seen better days and is of little to no resale value, so he slips it into her cauldron with a wink and a smile. (Later, when he learns what that little gift ended up wreaking, to the girl and to her school, he will take the lesson that no good deed goes unpunished, and will resolve to stop going around being charitable so often; someone could get hurt.)

At first, Draco finds all the talk of the Chamber of Secrets to be exciting. Duelling Club only helps; after he inadvertently speaks to a conjured snake, everyone is convinced that Draco is the Heir of Slytherin.

Draco quite likes the idea of being Heir of something, and his mother and father were both Slytherins. He should be this House’s rightful heir. Except people start getting petrified, and unease grows within him. Creevey was annoying, the way he always shoved that camera in Draco’s face, and Finch-Fletchley was always pompous, and nobody liked Mrs. Norris - but Draco had not done anything to any of them, and he is not sure he likes being credited with this. He doesn’t like the idea of going after people for being Muggleborns; his Uncle Ted is Muggleborn, and is perhaps the most magical person Draco knows. Surely a true Heir of Slytherin would respect the sort of power wielded by someone like Uncle Ted, the sort of ambition and cunning that must be held by someone like Granger, who is always the top of every class (current petrification notwithstanding).

It doesn’t help that Draco is hearing voices in the hallways now. He misses Dora terribly, because she would turn the voices into a big joke and would comfort Draco besides, but as it is, the constant refrain of bite… tear… kill… is doing nothing for his nerves.

Weasley Little Sister is growing paler and paler, which Draco might not have noticed, except he has learned his lesson from last year: he is not going to let Potter scoop up all the House Points by doing something that Draco didn’t even know was an allowed option, not again. He dogs Potter’s footsteps for a whole week before it pays off, and he resists the urge to report Potter and Weasley for going into a girls’ bathroom because he is sure, by now, that this will lead to something bigger. Potter and Weasley squint like idiots at the ornate snake-headed faucet, before Draco, impatient, asks, “Why don’t you just ask it to open?” Potter and Weasley jump; Draco rolls his eyes from the doorway, where they hadn’t bothered to check if they were being watched. He steps inside, letting the door swing shut behind him, nods a hello to the girl ghost, who had noticed him and kept silent with a big grin, and repeats the command to the snake. Mechanisms shift, a passage opens, and Professor Lockhart bursts into the room.

They dodge Professor Lockhart’s Memory Charm, but at the cost of it setting off a chain reaction on stonework that has seen better days. When the rubble clears, Draco is standing alone in the Chamber, Potter and Weasley on the other side of the fallen stone with the useless Professor.

Well - almost alone. He has never seen anyone as cold and still as Little Sister Weasley, and there is a shade of a boy, growing more solid and opaque by the second, a few years older than Draco, with a proud, arrogant cast to his face and a head of black hair that reminds him unpleasantly of Potter.

And then, of course, after Draco speaks with Tom, learns who he was (would become? had become?), argues - there is the basilisk.

Draco is no Heir to Godric Gryffindor, to pull his sword out of a Hat, but he has his anger, and his fear, and his name that means dragon, and a dragon, he decides, is much more powerful than some smelly old basilisk. He rather thinks, too, that he is a much more fitting Heir of Slytherin than this half-alive teenager who thinks power and ambition boil down to killing people and living forever.

Draco is self-centred and petulant and petty, but he is also cunning. He is also clever. (He is also brave. Dragons can be brave.) He is afraid, but channeling his own fear or hurt into clever ways to lash back out and shift the pain onto someone else is something of a speciality of his by now. One day he will unlearn these behaviours as harmful, but today, they will save his life. Tom did this to himself: he marked this boy as his equal. He gave Draco one last tool that was the missing piece he needed for this moment. If it hadn’t been for the curse that gave him his scar, after all, perhaps Draco would not have been able to speak Parseltongue.

He knows what to promise a giant basilisk living in the bowels of his school, to get it to switch allegiances. (More fool Tom, Draco thinks, because he forgot that a basilisk, like all of House Slytherin, is a snake: quick to strike at the heels of its own erstwhile allies, wholly untrustworthy, slippery and slithery and unreliable. Draco likes it that way; it reminds him of himself.)

When Tom is gone, the basilisk hissing its displeasure at the ink staining its tooth from rending apart the diary, Draco makes a mental note to tell an adult about the giant serpent living underneath the Castle and how to get to it. As appreciative as he is for the assist, he would rather turn on the basilisk, in true Slytherin style, before it turned on him.

He lifts up the form of Little Sister Weasley, who is only barely stirring, her breath coming shallowly, and lugs her toward what he hopes is still a viable way out, because he and the nearly-unconscious girl are the only ones there.

Draco does not become friends with Potter and Weasley from this experience, but there is a grudging sort of respect amongst them, despite some layers of dislike; Draco did, after all, save Weasley’s little sister, and they found the Chamber of Secrets together. (It helps, too, that Draco was ultimately the one to save the day - both because he prefers adventures where he gets to be recognized as the hero, and because the two Gryffindor boys heard quite a lot of what passed between Draco and Riddle in the Chamber, even if they couldn’t make it past the fallen rock enough to help, and they have got it into their heads now that he is a Good Person. Wonderful, Draco thinks, maybe they could vouch for him the next time he elicits a disappointed look from his aunt and uncle.)

In the summer before Draco’s third year, there is an escape from Azkaban. This is newsworthy because no one can ever escape from Azkaban, but also because the escapee is a relative of Draco’s.

Growing up in the Tonks household, it is easy to pretend, sometimes, that his aunt, uncle, and cousin are the only family Draco has, the only family he needs. But in fact he is aware that he has two of each: one good, one evil. He has his Aunt Dromeda and Uncle Ted, who raise him and love him and nag him to make good choices and live up to their expectations - and he has his Aunt Bella and Uncle Rodolphus, his mother’s other sister and her husband, who were apparently quite close with He Who Must Not Be Named and apparently had had no problem with their Dark Lord murdering her sister and brother-in-law and infant nephew for the greater good, and were still locked up in Azkaban. (When Draco asks Andromeda about his mother, she smiles sadly and says, “I loved my sister, even when I hated her choices.” When he asks, less frequently, about Aunt Bellatrix, Andromeda’s face goes flat and hard and she talks about their parents instead, how she swore she would not raise her children the way her parents had and perhaps it’s no wonder how her sister turned out. She, like Draco, knows what it is to wish one’s feelings could be less complicated.) So, too, he has Dora, his first cousin, who is the best person in the entire world - and he has another cousin (technically a first cousin once removed, the younger cousin of his mother and aunt), Sirius, who had been arrested for betraying one friend to the Death Eaters and killing another in front of a street full of witnesses. (This, Draco thinks, is at least uncomplicated; he will feel a tiny bit betrayed when he learns that it is not as simple as it seems.)

His aunt and uncle read the papers religiously, and speak in hushed tones about security, about contingency plans, and sometimes Dora, who is a trainee Auror by now, gets to join the conversations, while Draco practices his flying and stares at the ceiling and wonders what he would do, what he would choose, if his cousin Sirius found him: would he do the Right Thing and turn the dangerous criminal in to the authorities, or would he do the Right Thing and keep him hidden because he is family? (He does not ask his aunt for her thoughts on this, because he suspects she would tell him that he should do the Right Thing and run away instead. He concedes that this is at least a less morally complicated option.)

But moral conundrums are the least of Draco’s worries at the start of term, because apparently Black was heard muttering “He’s at Hogwarts” shortly before the escape, and the authorities don’t know if he was going after the Boy Who Lived or his ex-best-friend’s son or Dumbledore or someone else, but it is decided that it is an intelligent and reasonable safety precaution to send Dementors at the school to hope to catch him.

Dementors swarm onto the Hogwarts Express, and Draco’s world goes dark but for a green light, punctuated by his parents’ voices (“Narcissa, He’s coming, take Draco and get away–” “I’ll give you anything, my Lord, do anything, but not my son, you can’t have Draco–”) and high, cold laughter.

A few of his Housemates laugh at Draco fainting like a little girl, but in the split second it would take before he snapped back something cutting and vicious, a shabby-looking man with a briefcase steps into the compartment and hands Draco chocolate, gives him a thoughtful, searching look as he eats it.

Draco has gotten lectures from his aunt and uncle about not being a judgemental elitist, so he tries to keep an open mind about Professor Lupin, despite his shabbiness. Certainly he is kind, ready with chocolate in the face of Dementors, and in the first month of class it becomes apparent that he is far more competent than Professors Lockhart or Quirrell were. Still, Draco can’t shake the uneasy feeling that something is up with the professor.

He falls off his broom when the Dementors swarm the Quidditch game, and after having his broken arm patched up in the Hospital Wing, he writes to Dora, because enough is enough and maybe she knows something that can help. She writes back with jokes to cheer him up, and gossip about Auror training, and a thoughtful few suggestions of spells that might work with a note that he had best ask his Defense teacher, if it’s someone remotely competent, to show him how to do the spells, since they’re a little more advanced than third-year theory can support.

Draco scowls and scowls as he mulls this one over, because he doesn’t like asking for help from people (family doesn’t count), but eventually he decides that the momentary indignity is a fair trade to do away with the repeated indignity of passing out every time Dementors show up, and anyway, it’s the professor’s job to teach him things.

Professor Lupin is courteous, and thoughtful, about Draco’s request. He warns that the Patronus spell - the best bet he identifies from Dora’s list - is very difficult, advanced magic, and while he says he will teach Draco anyway, he asks for some time to work out how best to afford Draco practice without actually dragging a Dementor into the classroom, which obviously would not do.

But Potter offers his help, of a sort, in exchange on getting in on the lessons - he hadn’t been eavesdropping or following Draco, he explains, suspiciously defensive in Draco’s opinion, he had just been waiting outside the Defense office to pass on to Professor Lupin a message from his dad that had just come by owl, and couldn’t help overhearing. (Considering that the message was simply an invitation to tea next Sunday, Draco couldn’t help feeling that this excuse was a little thin.) Even without such awful memories to relive or any fainting problem, Potter’s worst fear is still fear itself, as they discovered in the class on Boggarts. (Draco’s worst fear had been a flash of green and high, cold laughter, and Professor Lupin had swiftly stepped between him and the Boggart, transforming it into a suspiciously harmless white orb.) So they hash out a plan between the three of them, of Patronus lessons for Potter and Draco, with a Boggart that Professor Lupin would catch and store, and Potter would step in front of, to give them a faux Dementor to practice on.

Draco is dimly aware of some drama playing out between Weasley and Granger, about her cat allegedly having eaten his pet rat - he doesn’t actually care. He only knows about it at all because it seems that Potter is using their Patronus lessons to avoid his friends’ fight and having to divide his time between the two of them.

Care of Magical Creatures class is another debacle in third year, just piling on with the Dementors. Draco has never particularly cared for Hagrid because the Gameskeeper has his clear favourites and Draco is not one of them, but this has never impacted his life until the giant oaf became a professor. Now Draco has new reasons to dislike “Professor” Hagrid: the parade of increasingly dangerous monsters liable to injure him each class.

The incident with the Hippogriff is not Draco’s fault. On that point he is quite firm. He was already frightened, and he was angry because he was frightened, and it was hard to focus when he was angry, so it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t hear every instruction perfectly, and being savaged by a vicious beast should not be the punishment for listening a little imperfectly. It is the same arm that broke when the Dementors intruded on his Quidditch game, and Draco is furious; he is all the more furious when his aunt and uncle write back to him with sympathy and concern but emphatic refusal to campaign to have the animal put down, or even the professor sacked.

It is, Draco thinks, deeply unfair.

It is a spring evening that Draco is skulking behind Hagrid’s hut while Potter and Granger (she and Weasley are presumably still not on speaking terms, so it had to be one or the other) are taking tea with Hagrid because he plays favourites like that. It’s not that Draco is interested in Potter’s comings and goings; he just has been trying to get a glimpse of what monstrous creature Hagrid will bring to their class next, so at least he’ll be forewarned. He is distracted from his reconnaissance by the sounds of a disturbance inside the hut - something about a rat inside a milk jug, and then Granger is grabbing for it, clutching it tight and racing out of the hut with Potter like she’s going to show it to a judge.

And then a giant black dog comes bounding out of the Forest and clamps its terrible jaws around Granger’s leg, starting to drag her toward the Whomping Willow.

Potter follows at a run. Draco dives after Potter. (He has learned his lesson from their first year, after all: if he sees Potter and co. heading somewhere forbidden near the end of term, he should join them rather than tattle in order to get in on the action of winning obscene and unfair amounts of House Points. Besides, if he did nothing and found out later that Granger and Potter had been mauled to death, he probably would feel a little bit guilty.)

They come up in a run-down room that they realize later must be the Shrieking Shack. The dog deposits Granger on the bed, where she lies, white-faced, with a broken leg, and then it transforms into a gaunt, threadbare man whose nose has the same aquiline curve as Draco’s own and who brandishes a wand at Granger.

They have seen this face on Wanted posters.

“Hello, Draco. I’m your cousin,” he greets, and nods at Harry, too. “You look just like your father, you know. Except–”

“My eyes, yeah. Expelliarmus!”

Potter Disarms Black while Draco stands silent, thinking back to the sleepless nights he’d spent at the end of the summer, asking himself what he would choose if this very eventuality ever occurred.

But then Professor Lupin steps in and Disarms them all, hands Black his wand back (Draco knew there was something off about him!) and asks, wand pointed at Granger but eyes on Draco’s cousin Sirius, “Is it really him?”

Explanations are demanded; but first things first. The two men retrieve the rat from Granger - Black giving a very incongruous apology for injuring her - and set it on the floor. They each point their wands at it with a muttered spell, and it transforms into a cowering, rat-faced man with thinning hair.

Only then, with Lupin’s and Black’s wands still pointed warningly at the man Potter recognizes from photo albums as Peter Pettigrew, does the full story come out, mostly in Draco’s cousin Sirius’s rasping voice.

It had been near the end of the war, though they didn’t know that yet - at the time, it felt like it might never end. They were all young and idealistic and fighting against fascism, fighting for the future of their world.

Albus Dumbledore had sent an odd and ominous note to Sirius Black, with a time and place for a one on one meeting; he’d added, in a postscript, Don’t tell James, because everyone knew that Sirius Black and James Potter were inseparable, back in those days, so it needed to be said.

Sirius didn’t bring James, because Dumbledore had said not to, and also because James was busy with his newborn and Lily might hex him irreparably if he interrupted. He didn’t, however, feel comfortable going to the meeting alone - he trusted Dumbledore implicitly, but something about that Don’t tell James gave him an uneasy feeling.

So he did the next best thing, sort of: he brought another friend. The Marauders’ unregistered Animagi forms were not known to Albus Dumbledore; that was a secret they were still keeping up their sleeves. He asked Peter to come along as backup, as a witness, as someone to tell Remus and James and Lily and baby Harry what had happened to him and that he loved them, if he was sent off on the mission that turned out to be his last, and Peter came, as an unobtrusive little rat.

He thought, at the time, that it was good he had.

Dumbledore had learned of a prophecy, months before, but now that he was confident he knew who it was about, it was time to act; he was the only one who had heard it, which was why he’d had the luxury of sitting on this knowledge until now. (We moved the birthdate of the prophecy a month up, after all; so let’s move the timing of it around, too: Severus Snape did not come to apply for a position on the same day as Trelawney’s interview. He did not overhear this prophecy, any more than Dumbledore had the spectre of Lily Evans’ death to hold over him and leverage for a double agent.)

While he did not give Sirius all the details, he shared this much: the prophecy was about a child being born who would be the only one with the power to defeat Voldemort. That was a could be - but if the child was raised to be loyal to the Dark Lord, or was killed before he could grow into this mysterious power, then it would all come to nothing.

And the prophecied child was the son of Sirius’ cousin.

“I know what I ask of you is not easy,” Albus Dumbledore had said gravely, but he asked it anyway - asked Sirius to go undercover, to pretend to betray his friends by courting the other side of the war, just long enough, he said, to convince Narcissa and Lucius to change sides back with him, bringing their baby.

“And if they don’t?” Sirius had asked, because he had known Lucius Malfoy a little, in school.

“Then stay close to them,” Dumbledore had said, “and protect their child. But I think Narcissa will listen to you. You are family, are you not?”

So Sirius began pretending to be everything he hated.

And, unbeknownst to him, Peter Pettigrew - his wingman, his friend, his confidante - reported on his mission to Voldemort. As the war had dragged on, Pettigrew had grown more frightened, had begun seeking more powerful friends to protect him, and he had found them.

(“If I kill him so soon, Dumbledore will simply send another spy, one perhaps you won’t rat out in time,” the Dark Lord had said. “No, you will keep him harmless, Wormtail. Keep him from warning them as long as you can, and if the time comes - you will take him out of play.”)

He hadn’t made it to the inner circle, nor did he want to. His goal was to be a hanger-on, a wannabe, doing stupid evil favours for Lucius Malfoy by smuggling his packages and passing his messages in order to stay close enough to rekindle a childhood friendship with his cousin Narcissa, while staying distant enough that he would not be faced with the choice of burning his mission’s cover or hurting his friends. (He would choose his friends, every time, even if a burnt cover meant his own certain death, but Dumbledore had impressed upon him the importance of this mission.)

Pettigrew’s attempts at running interference were perhaps less successful than he thought; but in the end, it made little difference, because while Narcissa’s face puckered with worry at the warnings her house’s prodigal son whispered in her ear, Lucius Malfoy was hesitant to take his wife’s cousin Sirius seriously.

It was Halloween night, and Pettigrew had sent a clandestine message to Sirius to meet with him to talk. They had been doing this periodically, with a spelled two-way mirror, so that Sirius could vent and Peter could give him the news on his friends and godson, so he thought nothing of it, made his excuses and found the appointed place.

He expected his friend to wait to speak until they were alone, off this street crowded with magical folk and Muggles alike, but Peter had surprised him.

“Frank Longbottom, how could you, Sirius?” he had screamed, and heads had turned. “How could you betray us like that? Who’s next? James and Lily, Remus? Your own cousin?!”

Sirius had blinked, reeling, shocked, trying to process. Peter, of all people, knew that Sirius had not betrayed his friends. Frank Longbottom… he wracked his brain, and called up a vague memory of an operation that should have been carried out the night before, planned before he was sent off as a double agent, involving Frank. He hadn’t known that Frank had been killed. (Later, as they were both shipped off to Azkaban, he would hear Bella laughing about it.)

That last dig hit him just as he put the pieces together, because the point of Sirius’ mission was the one thing he and Peter never discussed aloud, even the two of them. If Wormtail was noting in public that Narcissa was a target, then… it was already too late.

It was already too late. Sirius was still in shock, wand only just raised as he realized that his former friend was a credible threat, when Peter shifted and scurried off too fast to follow, his severed finger dropping to the ground where he had just stood with a half-dozen Muggles fallen dead behind him.

Sirius had sat on the curb and laughed until he cried, because he had brought this upon himself. He had sacrificed so much, pretended to turn his back on his friends, and it might have actually been worth something, if only he hadn’t thought himself so clever, if only he had followed Dumbledore’s instructions to the letter, if only he hadn’t brought Peter back into his confidence. (It was worth this: Draco Malfoy was alive. The Boy Who Lived had lived because his mother had given her life for him, because she was forewarned enough about the danger to try, rather than be taken by surprise.)

He was still laughing when the Aurors came to take him away.

They hadn’t bothered with a trial, but that wasn’t uncommon in those days, right at the end of the war. He couldn’t blame them: Dumbledore could hardly vouch for him as a spy, when there were multiple witnesses to his murder of Pettigrew; and James and Remus, the only ones who knew that Pettigrew could transform into a rat, would hardly vouch for him when he had publicly abandoned the Order and become a hanger-on to the Death Eaters. (They had thought back to a sixteen-year-old’s prank that almost turned deadly, and wondered if they should have known, back then. They mourned both their lost friends.)

Draco’s cousin Sirius finished the story with three pairs of children’s eyes fixated on him, mouths slightly agape. He concluded by explaining why he was there: to hunt down Pettigrew and commit the murder he had spent nearly thirteen years locked away for.

“We have to tell my dad,” said Potter, sounding stunned, and for once, Draco couldn’t even blame him. “We need– you can’t– He wouldn’t want his best friends to become killers.”

“I sent for him,” Professor Lupin said. “Dispatched a Prefect with a note to the Owlery on my way here. James should be a part of this, we all, he–” He broke off, like the story had just caught up with him, and embraced Sirius Black, clutching him tight, the image only marred by each man still keeping an eye and a wand pointed at the cowering Pettigrew.

The others debate the pros and cons of murder. Personally, Draco thinks it is entirely justified to kill the man who betrayed his parents and got them killed, but Granger does make a good point: “Won’t it be easier to clear your name with him alive?” she asks, her voice thready with pain.

The men agree to this (Pettigrew especially, and she reacts with disgust to his grovelling), but Lupin and Black are still holding each other. Even though Black is the one who just escaped from prison, Lupin is the one who is shaking more - he is shaking more, and more, and then a look of horror crosses his face as he practically shoves Black away. “The kids! Sirius, get the kids out! Now! ”

Severus Snape has never worked in Hogwarts, in this world; he has not come to interrupt and remind them that that night is the full moon. The quiet Potions professor left the cooling Wolfsbane potion on the desk in Lupin’s empty office and left, uncurious about the Map left open on the table. The moon is almost up.

Hastily, they conjure a stretcher for Granger, and ropes for Pettigrew; Draco and his cousin Sirius shoulder the stretcher between them, while Pettigrew is tied between Sirius and Potter, because Draco won’t go close to him, and Potter steps forward to volunteer. They hurry down the passage as fast as they can manage with the stretcher, but once they are in the open moonlight, everything goes wrong.

There was no Severus Snape to summon the Dementors, but they come swarming anyway; perhaps someone recognized Black’s human silhouette and called them, or perhaps they simply caught his scent, now that he is not a dog. They come, and Pettigrew takes advantage of Black’s distraction to turn to a rat and slip his bonds, disappear in the tall grasses. Black could evade the Dementors, too, with his Animagus form, but they are surrounded by them, and he stays, getting between the Dementors and Potter, Granger, and Draco who is quite proud of his own ability to stay on his feet, though it is a struggle.

This is only a temporary fix, though, because Draco’s cousin doesn’t look so well himself, and the Dementor leans in, in, in toward him.

His cousin Sirius’s body is limp - his cousin, whom he had only just met and only just started to want to know more of - and Granger is screaming, screaming with pain and screaming at them to do something, and Draco and Potter have learned Patronus theory, have never managed a fully corporeal Patronus yet even with their Boggart-Dementor, but they’re trying, they’re trying, only Draco keeps thinking of Black’s story, of Pettigrew betraying his cousin and getting his parents killed in one fell swoop, and thin, useless little wisps of white are all that emanate from their wands - 

And then two sinuous forms erupt at them from across the lake. It’s hard to make out in the darkness, but one has a hint of antlers, the other the suggestion of leathery wings, and they make the Dementor release cousin Sirius, scatter the hooded shapes around them so the darkness recedes from their minds just a little. In the brief flash of moonlight and Patronus light, Draco sees two figures on the far side of the lake. “Is that - your dad?” he asks Potter.

“Dunno,” Potter says. “It might be, but I don’t know how he could have gotten here this fast. And who would be beside him?”

Draco does not suggest it could be his own father; he knows that his father is dead. He just shrugs and closes his eyes, exhausted.

He does not get to rest long.

By the time he wakes in the Hospital Wing, he can hear raised voices. The Minister for Magic is there, and praising him for his role in catching a wanted criminal, and in any other situation Draco would be quite pleased with receiving a personal commendation from the Minister, but this is his cousin and he will absolutely not stand for his cousin to be executed.

Potter is already arguing hotly, and Draco pushes himself up to sitting to join in, but the Minister insists that they must be confused, that the word of three children probably victims of Confundus or Imperio is not going to be relied upon against the eyewitness testimony of a half-dozen adult wizards who saw Black slay Pettigrew twelve years before - that Professor Lupin cannot be found to vouch for them and that Black will be history by morning, as soon as he can put through the paperwork to either bring the Dementors to where he is being held, or have Black released from Hogwarts’ custody to his own.

At this point, Albus Dumbledore glides into the room and makes apologies for his confused students, asks the Minister to please leave them to their rest, as it has been quite a long night and they will have classes in the morning if Madam Pomfrey pronounces them well enough for them. He notes that Black will be held in the Astronomy Tower until released to the Ministry’s custody at exactly midnight, that he is locking them into the Hospital Wing now so that they can get rest and, perhaps most abstrusely, “three turns should do it.”

He leaves; the key turns in the lock. 

Draco turns to Potter and to Granger, because they are the only other ones there. “Do either of you have any idea of what he was talking about?” he asks.

“It almost sounds like he wants us to free Sirius,” Potter says, “but I don’t know how we can, if we’re locked in…”

Granger utters a soft “Oh!” and beckons them close. “I can’t– I think it’ll have to be you two,” she says, lifting a necklace with a tiny golden hourglass from beneath her robes. “Here, I’ll tell you what to do–”

Later, Draco will have time to rage incredulously at the flagrant favouritism, beyond favouritism, that is giving Granger a time travel device so that she can take more courses and come out top of their class. Right now, though, he has to focus on not making a misstep that breaks the flow of time and ends the entire world instead of saving his cousin. “I’m not sure it works like that,” Granger assures him, and bites her lip. “But Professor McGonagall did give me a very stern talk at the start of term about using it wisely, so - be careful.”

With the Time-Turner looped around his and Potter’s necks, they carefully flip it back three turns, and duck out of the Hospital Wing, which is not locked yet. They skulk out to retrieve first Potter’s (father’s) Cloak, then, more protected from encountering their past selves, their brooms - first Potter’s Firebolt, as they are already there, and then Draco’s Cleansweep - before heading out to the grounds. By the time they have gotten all they will need, their past selves have already headed into the Willow but have not emerged yet, so they wait, on the far side of the Lake; they can’t get cousin Sirius from the Astronomy Tower, after all, until he has already been put there.

They watch them leave the Willow, Potter and Draco and Granger on her stretcher, Black and Pettigrew, and they watch as the Dementors drift closer, as Pettigrew shifts and flees.

Draco did not even realize he was tensing to chase the rat until he feels Potter’s hand clamp tight around his arm. He has half-risen, the Cloak slipping off them in his tenseness. “We can’t,” Potter whispers. “We can’t change things.”

“We could bring him back to after,” Draco argues back, but it’s a moot point now; there is no way that they would be able to find the rat. Besides, they have bigger problems at this point: the Dementors have closed in around the circle that includes their past selves, and even though the Patronuses that saved them came from this end of the lake, they don’t see anyone - not Potter’s father, not anyone else - ready to cast them. And they can hear Granger screaming (they can hear Draco screaming, too, though he hadn’t realized at the time that he was).

When it becomes apparent that no one else is coming, he and Potter grimly draw their wands in the same motion, with a quick exchange of wordless looks that convey, I know we mustn’t change anything, but we’re going to die if we don’t do something now. They dredge up their happiest thoughts - Draco thinks of how he has just doubled his number of cousins, thinks of Dora and Uncle Ted making Cousin Sirius laugh until the shadows of Azkaban have fled him - and shout, “Expecto Patronum!”

They are not quite fully corporeal, but they are closer than they have ever been. Potter’s clearly has the antlers of a stag. Draco’s clearly moves like a dragon. The Dementors back off from his cousin, from Granger, from their past selves. They heave a sigh of relief.

They pull the Cloak back up around themselves, finally realizing that it has slipped. They watch across the Lake as first professors, then Ministry officials arrive, conjuring more stretchers and bringing them all up to the Hospital Wing except for cousin Sirius. They get on their brooms, finally, and lift up, up, toward the Astronomy Tower, watching until it has an inmate, until he is alone, and finally they fly up to the window to rescue Cousin Sirius.

Potter insists on giving Sirius his Firebolt - he has a spare broom at home, he says, that his parents will send him once he explains, the spoiled brat - and the Cloak, too, insisting that his father will agree with the choice once he hears, that Black needs it more than they do, at least for now. He makes Sirius promise to go to his parents as soon as he safely can. Draco makes his cousin promise to write, and to visit him at his aunt’s. They fly back down on Draco’s broom together, stash it in a cupboard in Hagrid’s hut at Potter’s insistence that he will bring it back to Draco the next day (he doesn’t like it, but he can’t exactly materialize a broomstick in the Hospital Wing, at least not without pointing the Ministry right at Black’s means of escape); and then they sneak back into the castle, race up to the Hospital Wing, just in time for Dumbledore to announce that he is locking them in. 

He turns, pulling his key from the lock, and smiles enigmatically at the two boys. “Well? A good night’s work, I think. But now you had best rest.”

Draco exchanges letters with his newest (oldest) cousin all summer, punctuated by the occasional joyous visit, though they are careful, still, for him not to be seen in human form out of doors. Draco’s aunt and uncle, Potter’s parents, Weasley, and Dumbledore are still the only ones who know and believe - aside from those of them who were there in the Shack that night - the whole story proving Cousin Sirius’s innocence. Before they left for the summer, Dumbledore promised that he was working on it, but Draco is skeptical.

At the start of Draco’s fourth year, the Triwizard Tournament is announced, and Draco’s name comes fourth out of the cup.

Nobody believes that Draco did not put his name in himself; but, then, Draco doesn’t really want them to. He likes being thought of as sneaky and brilliant and cunning, to have found a way around the age line, around the maximum of three participants - though it doesn’t entirely sit right with him to take credit for something he did not do.

Weasley’s brother works with dragons, and he tells Weasley, who tells Potter, who tells Draco, because he is labouring under the misapprehension that they are friends. They aren’t friends. They just have a godfather / cousin in common whom they each wanted to see quite a bit of over the summer.

Potter also tells Diggory, Draco finds out later, because he has a nauseating sense of fair play and apparently the other two Champions already knew. 

Draco is nervous, but he refuses to be cowed by a dragon; he, too, is a dragon, after all. It’s in his name. He tries to think of what he can do against a dragon, and Potter, Granger, and Weasley drop unsolicited into the seats around his in the Library. “Fourth year, represent,” Potter says cheerfully, Accio ing another book about dragons to add to the stack.

Draco tries to find out if dragons can speak Parseltongue - they are scaled, after all, like a lizard or a snake - because that at least is an advantage he likely has over the older, more experienced Champions. The books are inconclusive; one suggests that they can understand but not speak it, but another indicates that the dragons’ tongue is similar to but distinct from Parseltongue.

He has never regretted more having tattled to the Professors about the giant basilisk that was dwelling in the bowels of the castle their second year. He could really have used it now.

But there are enough other snakes, some of prodigious size, in the Forbidden Forest, so in the end, Draco focuses on practicing spells to throw and amplify his voice. He sweet-talks a massive python from the Forest to slither up on the far side of the pile of eggs, while he keeps the dragon distracted by standing nonthreateningly in front of it while he directs the python to bring him the golden egg.

He loses some points for the extreme lack of interesting action, but does gain some for style.

At the Yule Ball, Draco is told he must bring a date, so he asks Bullstrode - a girl who is respectably from his House, so she knows how to dance and doesn’t look at him like he’s aspiring to one-up the Dark Lord, and less likely than, say, Parkinson to sell the story to that awful Skeeter woman in a way that makes him look bad. He does not pay attention to who Potter takes, though she looks suspiciously like the identical twin to Weasley’s date; they both try to drag him into their shock at Granger going with Krum, which he ignores on the grounds of he doesn’t care.

Draco’s fourth year is also when Mad-Eye Moody arrives at Hogwarts as their Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher.

He has met Moody before, at dinners at his aunt’s and uncle’s house occasionally during Dora’s Auror training, but the old man seems different, as a professor. More distant, certainly; he acts like he doesn’t know Draco at all, just hisses at him in the hallway, once, that as far as he’s concerned, a child of dead Death Eaters is still a child of Death Eaters and someone to be watched.

Draco feels angry and small and hurt; perhaps this is how he always felt, and he simply waited to express it outside of the hospitality of Draco’s aunt and uncle.

He does not like Professor Moody’s lessons, either; the flash of green light, pointed at an enlarged spider, is the same flash of green that killed his parents, in the memories the Dementors dredged up to haunt his nightmares ever since. 

He writes to Dora, hesitant and not describing the worst of what the Professor has done or said because she has always spoken so highly of her mentor and Draco does not want to lose her good opinion, but he would quite like her advice on how to get out of his bad books.

Her suggestions seem to miss the mark, but he keeps trying; meanwhile, he is trying to figure out what a screaming egg hints about the second Task, to no avail, even with Potter’s, Granger’s, and Weasley’s unasked-for help.

But Diggory jogs up to him in the halls one afternoon, asks about his progress with the egg, and then says, “Listen, Harry told me how you wanted me to know about the dragons, so in the spirit of fair play… try taking a bath with it. You can use the Prefects’ bathroom, if you want privacy; the password’s ‘Pine-fresh.’”

“You told Diggory I wanted him to know about the dragons?!” Draco splutters, the next time he sees Potter, and Potter just smiles and shrugs.

“He gave you a hint about the egg in exchange, didn’t he?”

Draco is happy to live it up for once in the Prefects’ bathroom, and, as an added bonus, it gets him what he wants to know, when his ears slip below the water level in his soak and the egg opens up again.

He grudgingly shares with his uninvited allies in the library about the haunting song, and wonders what he’d sorely miss as they all search for spells that will be useful underwater. Some of their number are called away, others peel off, until Draco is left, his head pillowed on an open text, still not having solved the problem of how to breathe, when he wakes to the sudden sensation of someone leaning too close over him, and opens his eyes to Longbottom’s visage.

Longbottom whispers an urgent explanation about the hank of Gillyweed in his hand, and Draco narrows his eyebrows suspiciously. “Why are you helping me?”

“Well, we were kids together,” Longbottom says with a shrug. “You weren’t always awful, and I’d feel bad if you drowned. Besides, Harry says you’re all right, these days.”

Draco sighs, and even grits out a thank you for the slimy weeds that will prevent him from suffocating to death. ‘Harry says you’re all right.’ ‘Harry told me how you wanted me to know.’ This is what his life has come to, now: being vouched for right and left by Potter.

He is even more furious, the next day beneath the lake, when he finally makes his way past the hazards to where a few bodies are floating, and does some swift mental math, and realizes that according to the powers that be of the Tournament, Potter is what he’d sorely miss. Delacour has what has to be her sister; but presumably it was easier to second a minor than an adult Auror for abduction by merfolk, so instead of Draco’s actual beloved cousin, he has to rescue his childhood nemesis (one-sided, all in Draco’s mind) turned friend (one-sided, all in Potter’s mind). He leaves the Delacour girl, and hovers a little near Granger only because he knows Potter will deck him if he lets her drown, but then he sees Krum approaching, so he swims on up with Potter’s limp form, cursing that this is what his life has come to, to join Diggory and his girlfriend on shore.

Draco researches hard for the third task, builds up a repertoire of useful spells and does not turn his nose up at any help that is offered. Perhaps his hard work paid off: he does not experience that much trouble making it through the maze, and he reaches the centre - well. Almost first. Tied for first, one might say.

He could throw a hex at Diggory and leap forward to be the first to grab the Cup. But Draco has spent his whole life lamenting when things aren’t fair, and even if what he meant was that he should get preferential treatment, what he said, over and over, year after year, was that things ought to be more fair. Some things sink in, with repetition.

They step forward on a count, like gentlemen, fairly, and they grasp the Cup together.

“Kill the spare.” With a flash of green light that still makes him sick to the pit of his stomach, Draco is alone. He never stood a chance, not really, but it makes the resurrected Dark Lord smile to face his so-called nemesis like a man, wand in hand, and even though the first spell to leap to Draco’s mind (“Serpensortia!” - he has always liked snakes) is not particularly useful, it is enough, when two wands’ cores are linked and one has done so much more to create ghosts.

They spew out of the glow of the linked wands in reverse order, first Diggory, who asks him to bring his body back to his father; then a few people Draco does not know; then his mother. His father. He recognizes them from the few photographs his aunt had saved to share with him. He recognizes them from when he looks at himself in the mirror. His father’s shade looks around the circle, naming names - perhaps to appeal to long-dead friendships, perhaps for Draco to commit to memory and report to the authorities, perhaps simply to create the distraction they promise, the opening for him to get away, get to Diggory’s body, get to the Portkey.

He lands with a thump on the Quidditch field, Diggory’s limp hand gripped tightly in his own, and if he is crying, he doesn’t notice. He feels numb. He feels afraid.

Moody begins hustling him into the building, and Draco follows - but his cousin runs down from the stands to join them, begins questioning her former mentor’s protocol, and the words are dim and buzzing in his ears but Draco clutches at her because she is someone real, someone he trusts, and now sobs might be bubbling out of him, as he tries to tell her, “Dora! Dora, there was a graveyard, and a cauldron, and– he’s back, Dora, what do I do?”

They find the real Moody, conclude the tournament, bring Draco to the Hospital Wing - Draco is in a daze. He does not really process any of it, until he is handed a bag full of Galleons that he neither needs nor wants. 

He asks Potter to give it to Amos Diggory for him, because that’s who should have it, the next of kin of the boy who won the Tournament with Draco because he cared about fairness, and was killed for his troubles. (“Remember Cedric Diggory,” Dumbledore says at the end of year speech, and Draco slinks lower and lower in his seat, thinking of all the too-many-to-count times that he did what was easy.)

“Why don’t you give it to him yourself?” Potter suggests, and Draco laughs harshly.

“When he has every reason to believe I killed his son and want to give him blood money? I don’t think so.”

“But you didn’t, did you?”

“Obviously not,” Draco says, and rolls his eyes, and tries to pretend he takes it for granted that Potter and his friends believe him, rather than treating it like the precious gift it is.

Potter hesitates, but his hand closes around the bag, persuaded by Draco’s argument. “What do I do if he says no?”

Draco thinks it is absurd that anyone would say no to such an amount of gold - at least, anyone not already in possession of a ridiculously overstuffed vault like himself or Potter. “Then give it away,” Draco snaps. “I don’t want it. I’m sure between you, Granger, and Weasley, you can think of some worthy cause for it; maybe it can do some good, at least.”

Plagued by nightmares, Draco is eager to do some good that summer, if there is a chance it can clear out some of the dark corners in his mind. (He is selfish; he has always been selfish. There is nothing wrong with doing good for selfish reasons.) All year he has been ignoring Granger prate on about her campaign for house-elves’ welfare while she invited herself to help him prepare for the Tournament, and some of that sinks in, blends and recombines with his itch to dispel ghosts from the past and chase off the darkness that frightens him. That summer, he asks his aunt Andromeda about visiting his family’s home. His home, technically, though his true home will always be the rambling Tonks house.

She suggests they bring Dora along in case there are protections beyond blood wards, tactfully not stating outright that his parents may have guarded their home with Dark magic. The wards and protections (of which there are enough that it is good they waited for Dora to have the time off) are crumbling but plenty, but inside, the manor is in surprisingly good repair. Or perhaps not surprisingly - this was what he had suspected, after all, a big part of the reason why he had wanted to come.

He marches off in search of the kitchens, arms full of outgrown clothes, and finally finds it, met by a stir from a half-dozen house elves of “Master Draco! Master Draco has come home! Master Draco, you is looking just like your father did, if you will pardon my saying so.”

He offered the clothes to any of the house-elves who wanted, but only one of them took him up on the offer, accepting a well-worn tie and disappearing with a sharp crack. One of the others started to cry until Draco assured them that he wasn’t sacking anyone, they could keep working at Malfoy Manor and keeping it in good order so long as they liked. 

He trailed through the Manor’s cavernous passages and opulent rooms with his aunt and cousin, feeling like a tourist, feeling like a child. It did not seem like a ghost town or a murder site to him, not anymore, but neither did it feel like home.

Later that summer, though, when Dumbledore brings him to Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place and introduces him to the Order of the Phoenix, Draco looks around, and frowns. (His great-aunt’s portrait is railing at the riffraff allowed in her home, loudly, and no one can get it off the wall.) The Headmaster invites him to stay there the rest of the summer (to share a room with Potter and Weasley, who are already there with their parents, and Granger, and at least half Weasley’s siblings), invites his aunt and uncle to stay, too - but Aunt Dromeda gives a tight, polite smile, and says that while she’ll attend meetings of the Order as called upon, she left that house once, and does not intend to come back on any sort of long-term basis.

The set of his Cousin Sirius’s shoulders, the tension in his face, suggests that he feels the same. The way Potter’s father and Professor Lupin sigh, exaggeratedly, at his aunt’s words suggest that Cousin Sirius has said as much, too, and Draco has an idea.

He does not share it right away; he sits on it, chews it over while Potter and Weasley bicker with their parents to be allowed into the discussions. He asks his aunt to take him back to the Manor, because if he’s going to invite people into a home that someone’s living in, it’s just good manners to check with the residents first. Only then, when they return, does he go over to the other room; he waits for a break in the conversation. “Professor,” Draco says, using the best polite young wizard voice his aunt taught him, “not that I’m not, you know, grateful for the thought that’s gone into this, but if part of the reason for being here is protecting me, why don’t we put the headquarters in my house?”

Albus Dumbledore smiles like he’s humouring him, like his eyes are twinkling on purpose, and says, “Thank you, Draco, but I don’t think your aunt and uncle–”

“Not their house,” Draco interrupts, abandoning his play at politeness. “My house. Malfoy Manor. I should think it’s big enough to hold everybody comfortably, and it isn’t like it’s being used.”

“It is, ah - perhaps rather more difficult to clear it–”

“With the mess here?” Draco looks around. “I think it would be rather easier. The house-elves are already keeping it in good condition and they’d be glad for the company.” He turns a pointed look at Granger before she can voice an objection. “And they’ve all been offered freedom if they want it, and know where to find me if they change their minds about saying no, and they’re very well treated. We’d just have to renew the wards, and that’s it.”

“And we would need to put it under Fidelius, of course,” Dumbledore murmurs. “Have you thought about whom you would entrust with the location of your home, Mr. Malfoy?” 

“Weasley,” he says promptly, eliciting a shocked look from the classmate named. Draco has already put thought into this. “He’s less likely to be targeted for the location because few enough people would expect me to trust him with it, but he’s also obviously not going to sell me out.”

After, as they are packing up the things they need from Grimmauld Place to bring to the Manor, Potter nudges Draco. “So you picked Ron over me, huh? I’m wounded.”

“Shove off, Potter,” Draco responds, but he’s smiling. “People actually do think we’re friends, Merlin knows why.”

Professor Umbridge comes to Hogwarts that year, with her pink jumpers and her educational decrees and her nightmarish detentions.

Draco does not get assigned lines to write, because he is a coward, and he knows it: he knows when to keep his mouth shut and agree that he must have been hallucinating, forget the whole thing, don’t mention it - but Potter does, speaking up where Draco is silent because that is his kind of bravery.

Draco corners him in the hallway one day, furious without knowing exactly why. “Stop provoking her!” he demands. “I don’t want you to keep getting, getting tortured for me, do you think I like that–?”

“I’m just telling the truth,” Potter insists, and Draco is ready to scream, but fortunately Granger, she of the cooler heads, materializes, and drags them both into the library where she has apparently stashed Weasley already. 

“Draco’s right,” Granger says, which is enough of a shock itself. “Harry, you’re not going to achieve anything getting detention after detention with Umbridge, and it’s upsetting your friends, and I’ve half a mind to write your parents.”

“You wouldn’t,” he says.

“I might,” Weasley answers.

“Boys,” Granger says, clearly exasperated, and this is not fair, because Draco is not saying anything at all. “My point is, there are better ways to fight back against her. Ways that help everyone.”

She outlines her brainchild: a Defense Association, to learn the defensive spells that Umbridge is not teaching in her class; to spread the word to their classmates about He Who Must Not Be Named’s return where Umbridge cannot quash every whisper of the news; to unite and prepare for the war that they all know is coming.

Draco, who has shrouded his four-poster in Silencing Spells so that he won’t get grief from Crabbe or Nott or anyone about his nightmares, is very much onboard with any plan that involves learning more about how to defend himself, until Hermione adds, brightly, “And Draco will teach it!”

“Are you mad?” he asks. “Why me?”

“Of course it has to be you,” she says, and Weasley is nodding along, the prat. “You’re the Boy Who Lived.”

“Yeah, and the Heir of Slytherin,” Draco scoffs. “Put my face on something you’re calling the DA, and everyone will assume you mean straight-up Dark Arts.”

“You– you’ve faced Voldemort three times,” she points out, and Draco flinches at the name; he has never liked how Granger and Potter posture like that, acting like they’re not afraid of something which Draco finds frankly terrifying.

(It is true: there may be no prophecy about those who have thrice defied the Dark Lord, but Draco has thrice defied him already, and he has a sick premonition in his gut that he will be destined to face him a fourth time before his time runs out.)

“Once when I was a literal infant, Granger, I don’t remember anything that could be of use.”

“The other two times, then.”

“I don’t think sweet-talking a Basilisk is a transferrable skill, even if I were able to teach Parseltongue, which I’m fairly certain I can’t.”

She doesn’t ask about the last, which is some sort of mercy, some sort of kindness, because Draco can’t bear talking about the graveyard, not really; he recited all the names back to Dora, and maybe with her hair changing colour in counterpoint with his words as a distraction he could, but otherwise he can’t, he can't –

But she badgers him anyway, until he finally gets her to agree to the compromise of more time, “Just give me a couple of days to think about it, all right?”

The thing is, Draco does not want to say no to Granger’s overall plan. He also knows that he can’t do this. So he finds her the next day, tugs her away from Gryffindor Table at breakfast, and says, “Look, I’ll join your war club, Granger, I’ll even pitch in wherever I can help, answer questions or share knowledge or whatever, but get someone else to lead it. Ask Potter; he’s faced You-Know-Who and lived, too, so that’s something we’ve got in common.”

The DA is good. Draco is mildly surprised to see a few fellow Slytherins step into the room they find for it, but Bullstrode always did seem reasonable enough, and he hasn’t really known much of Zabini since she moved into the girls’ dorms in third year. Potter is charismatic and enthusiastic as an instructor, which makes Draco feel vindicated, and he barely even notices himself getting comfortable enough, over the weeks, that he finds himself correcting Hannah Abbott’s wand motions for the Patronus Charm, as Potter demonstrates at the front of the Room.

Draco dreams he is a snake, attacking Longbottom’s mother in the Department of Mysteries, a few floors down from where she works in the Aurors’ Office with Potter’s mother and Draco’s cousin. He has always liked snakes until now, but he does not like this. He bolts awake and runs out of class (his scar has been hurting more, and he hasn’t been sleeping nights, too scared of nightmares) because he has to tell someone. A professor perhaps. Longbottom maybe. He has a sick certainty that it happened but when he hears the confirmation it is still, somehow, worse, and Draco has spent a childhood making Longbottom cry, but now it is Draco crying, feeling a little wretched while Neville sits, body tensed and still, waiting to hear if he is an orphan or not.

Alice Longbottom lives, thanks to a stubborn nature and a timely intervention, and even though this had a good outcome, Dumbledore tells Draco that he would like him to start taking Occlumency lessons.

In this world, Severus Snape has never stood at Lily Potter’s grave and cried (she is not there; she has not died). He does not teach at Hogwarts, and in any case Dumbledore would not trust him or call upon him for something like this - neither, however, will Dumbledore open his mind to the degree necessary for these lessons with the sneering orphan boy in Slytherin colours, marked as Tom Riddle’s mirror and equal.

Instead, he asks Andromeda, a Black sister and thus an accomplished Occlumens in her own right, to teach more of the craft to her nephew. The lessons will have to be relegated to when he is home for the holidays; it will have to be enough.

So Draco has lessons over the winter holiday from his favourite aunt in how to shield his mind, and then he returns to the viper’s den that is Hogwarts under Umbridge. Draco keeps his head down, as much as he can, except when he holds it high in the Room of Requirement with the DA. He steers clear of Pansy Parkinson, who strides around, smirking, in her Inquisitorial Squad badge.

The year pokes along at a crawl, punctuated by pain in his forehead and the little triumphs and tribulations of their clandestine study group, and then Draco has another dream, and this time it is not an almost-friend’s parent who has fallen afoul of Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries.

It’s Dora.

Draco activates the DA coin he has, because he has no subtler way of getting the attention of Potter and Granger and Weasley in the middle of the night, not without a password to Gryffindor Tower, and in the static that is his mind, filled with the image of Dora writhing on the floor under Crucio, he is aware that if anyone has any ideas of how he can fix this, how he can save her, it’s them. (Hermione spelled them so that she would be able to activate them, but Draco is quite clever, remember, and cunning, and he watched so that he would be able to do it if he ever needed to.)

He paces the hallway, then paces inside the Room of Requirement, and he is surprised - shocked - stunned - when they come. When they stay, even when they see who has called them there.

Before he has finished even choking out what he saw, the Room has rearranged itself into a council of war. (They are at war; Hogwarts has always been at the heart of this war.) In response to some mumbled expression of disbelief from Draco - while the Weasley twins are conducting a whispered conference, wave over first Lee Jordan, then Potter, whispering intensely all the while - Weasley slings an arm around Draco’s shoulders, the slight pressure helping him to keep breathing evenly. “You’re a git, Malfoy,” he says, “but you’re our git.”

They are a well-oiled machine, this guerrilla study group, this student militia. The twins appoint themselves in charge of creating the distraction; Longbottom, whose mother is an Auror, an Order member, and likely to be at home because she’s still on bed rest from the snake attack, is in charge of getting help, first via contacting her. Several of their number volunteer to help him with this task - with breaking into a Professor’s office to use the Floo, and standing guard outside so he is able to call. A whole group go with Draco, and he tries not to be surprised, tries to pretend like that’s what he always thought it stood for, too, when Lovegood says, in that faraway manner of hers, “We are Draco’s Army, after all,” and suggests they take the Thestrals. The rest, of those assembled, promise to run interference and cover for their absence.

They fly to the Ministry, Draco and Potter and Granger, Weasley and Little Sister Weasley and Lovegood, but when they reach the Department of Mysteries, Dora is not there, nor is there any sign she has been. What they do find is an ambush.

So they fight. They fling desperate spells, these children who have been training each other for months, against these adults who were once friends of Draco’s parents and whom his father’s shade named by name last summer in a graveyard. They are outnumbered, until the Order arrived, Longbottom’s call to the rescue. Now the adults flank the children: Alice Longbottom, still pale but determined as she raises her wand, Potter’s mother, her red hair like a banner, and his father, looking exactly like Potter, but older. The Auror Draco will forever think of as “the Real Moody,” and Professor Lupin, and Dora, looking gloriously alive with vivid violet hair.

It is a more evenly matched fight now, spreading throughout the lower halls of the Ministry, but it is still a messy one. The Death Eaters are wearing masks, but some are recognizable anyway; his aunt Bellatrix is unmistakable, her hair and voice eerily similar to Aunt Dromeda’s, and he is fairly sure that several of his dormmates’ parents are here. 

Little Sister Weasley is laying waste with her Bat-Bogey Hex, but Draco is sticking to the basics; he lays Goyle’s father out cold with a “Stupefy!” that has Dora grinning.

“Nice one, D,” she commends, flinging another curse as she says it, and Draco has one brief moment to glow with her praise before her aunt hits Dora in the chest with a curse that knocks her a few steps back.

She falls backward, through a drifting, whispering veil and then she’s gone, and a cry rips out of Draco because she can’t, she can’t be– she’s right there on the other side, isn’t she, about to pop up grinning with a different-shaped nose, only she doesn’t, and her hair faded from violet to a dull, mousy brown just as she fell.

People are saying things, and the Death Eaters are retreating, now that the Ministry is, belatedly, waking up, and Potter’s parents drag Draco away from that room that Dora will never walk out of.

Draco has never been afraid to go home before. He has always welcomed the holidays, not dreaded them, welcomed being reunited with his aunt and uncle who loved him in their bright house full of joy and at the end of his fifth year at Hogwarts he does not want to go home.

He cannot bear the thought of it, of looking his aunt and uncle, who have given him nothing but love and kindness, in the eye and knowing that he got their daughter killed. Knowing that he ripped that brightness, that joy out of their home because he believed a bad dream and dragged others in after him, got in over his head and needed Dora to bail him out, and he got out and she didn’t.

He is sick with it. He almost asks Potter if he can go home with him, instead, of all places, but he turns the words over and over in his mouth for the whole silent train ride, and when he is finally on the platform, on the brink of speaking them aloud, he has the breath crushed out of him by his favourite aunt, looking just like her sisters in mourning black. Draco hugs her back just as tightly and they are both crying, and he doesn’t even care that people will see him, crying at the train station like a homesick first-year. He doesn’t know how to tell Aunt Dromeda and Uncle Ted how sorry he is, how sick he feels with it, but maybe he doesn’t need to, as they close ranks around their smaller family and still hold him close.

The next fall, two new professors come to Hogwarts. The mousy little Potions Professor is happy enough to resign and find less contentious work, paving the way for Dumbledore to bring back Horace Slughorn, courting him with the famous Draco Malfoy, the Heir of Slytherin, the Boy Who Lived.

Albus Dumbledore, who is already dying by inches from the cursed ring he wears on his hand, also needs Sirius Black as a professor at Hogwarts that year. He gives Draco’s cousin Sirius Transfiguration to teach, and shifts Professor McGonagall to the perennially empty position in Defense - she can teach anything, really, even if Transfiguration is her passion, and she certainly can teach these children who stand on the brink of war a thing or two about defending against the Dark Arts; but Sirius was only truly exemplary in Transfiguration, at least enough to be able to teach what he knows.

Draco thinks it is wonderful to have his (remaining) cousin as a professor, and Potter seems to feel the same; Cousin Sirius, however, knows better. 

(Severus Snape has never taught at Hogwarts, remember; he is off running his potion shop and perhaps is the better for it. He cannot be redeemed by his unrequited love for a dead woman, or by a heroic death as the keeper of Dumbledore’s secrets - but perhaps he can find redemption anyway. Perhaps time and distance from the location of so many of his worst memories is healthy for him, allows him to grow out of pettiness and truly reflect on whether the people he works with are kind, on friendships lost and what they meant, on what kind of world he wants to live in tomorrow.

In Slughorn’s class, someone will end up with a textbook with notes made by the Half-Blood Prince and they will never find out who wrote them, nor would it mean anything to them if they did, but their Potions classwork will improve.

And Dumbledore will still need a double agent to help him turn the tides of war.)

Draco’s sixth year is an odd one, and he still aches from the knowledge of Dora’s loss, but he can easily categorize the moments in his sixth year at Hogwarts as high, middle, and low.

He quite likes the Slug Club; that’s a high point. That’s something simple, like he’s always dreamed of: somewhere to feel special and appreciated for being famous, eat delicious hors d'oeuvres and hobnob with the others of Slughorn’s chosen. It is nice to feel chosen, without someone trying to twist it into a negative, for once.

Teenage relationship drama falls under mid. Weasley allows his girlfriend to make him look like a total idiot, and Granger sulks and dates athletes about it, frankly also making herself look ridiculous, and Potter tries to rope Draco into rolling eyes about them together or forcing the two to speak like rational human beings, but Draco stolidly, determinedly, does not care. These absurdities would not rank at all in his estimation of the year, except there were so many of them, so: mid.

The lows are when he is called to meet with Dumbledore, to hear the next instalment of the sordid saga that the Headmaster feels the Chosen One must know. (Dumbledore has thought long and hard about this, because he does not feel very much better about taking Draco Malfoy into his confidences than he did the year before. But if he gives up on his world’s saviour just because he doesn’t like the colour of his tie, then all their work will be for nothing, and, after all, some of his best Order members were Slytherin, too. If someone does not know about Horcruxes, to carry on the work when Dumbledore has met his end, which he knows is coming soon, they will stand no chance against Voldemort, and if Draco doesn’t know something of them, then he may never figure out the essential part he has to play. He may never play it.)

So as the year’s end nears, Dumbledore takes Draco on the worst field trip of his educational career, and they return to find Death Eaters breaching the sacred halls of Hogwarts. (Draco Malfoy was not a sixteen-year-old victim of peer pressure to serve the Dark Lord, in this world, but there are other noble pureblood Houses with Death Eater heads to host Voldemort and school-age children to repair a vanishing cabinet and be tasked with murder, after all.) Dumbledore renders Draco invisible and immobile for the confrontation that results, because the Chosen One’s moment is not yet, so all he can do is bear witness - witness as Theo Nott fails to commit murder, though his wand hand does not shake; as Dumbledore lifts his eyes to the one Hogwarts Professor standing in the midst of the enemy and begs, “Please, Sirius”; as Draco’s cousin strikes the Headmaster down.

Draco does not chase his cousin to the edge of the grounds, shouting “Coward”; Draco is a coward himself, but he has never seen cowardice in either of his cousins. Nor does Harry chase his godfather down; he just frowns, and frowns, and does not mention his father once.

(Draco is not that different from his cousin Sirius, he will reflect one day, years on: both were mistrusted in both camps, both with suspicion falling on them from such sources as a shared bloodline with evildoers and misleading circumstances making them appear guilty; both would only buy the full trust of one group or another with someone else’s death.)

Draco cannot go home, that summer; he has aged out of his aunt’s blood protection by the end of the term, and the Death Eaters would be waiting for him, would put his aunt and uncle in danger if he were to return. So he goes home, instead, to Malfoy Manor; in any case he has spent most of the last two summers there, and now more than ever, the Order has battle plans and strategies to draw up, tactics to argue out and roles to assign.

Draco cannot go to either of the homes he has truly known, over his seventeen years of life: Hogwarts is in enemy hands, now, and he is Public Enemy Number One. (Sirius Black bought Voldemort’s trust with Dumbledore’s death, but he did not get Hogwarts; Alecto Carrow is installed as Headmistress, and calls her brother Deputy Headmaster.) Granger cannot return to school either, as a Muggleborn, and Potter is a halfblood and a blood traitor, and a known friend (ugh) of Draco Malfoy’s.

Weasley, as a pureblood, is still invited for his last year of school. He almost doesn’t go, anyway, but Potter has a blazing row with his parents that echoes through the halls of the Manor about his plans for the year ahead, and perhaps he just feels it would be easier not to have the fight; perhaps it’s because Little Sister Weasley is going, and even though she doesn’t need looking after, he can still picture her crumpled and still, eleven years old on the Chamber floor (Draco can picture it, still, and she isn’t even his sister).

So Weasley goes back to Hogwarts, back to the Room of Requirement, and he runs the student resistance like a general, like a chessmaster, his sister and Longbottom close at his sides as lieutenants.

Granger and Potter go with Draco to hunt down the last of the Horcruxes.

When he died, Albus Dumbledore left a book of wizard fairy tales to Hermione Granger. He left a curious contraption, a Put-Outer, to Harry Potter. He left Draco a Snitch. (Draco didn’t know that Dumbledore had agonized over that one, too; but the Elder Wand was the rightful property of Theo Nott, who had disarmed Dumbledore at the last, and the Invisibility Cloak had passed from James to Harry Potter to Sirius Black, and even if he did not trust Draco as the master of the Deathly Hallows, Dumbledore was not going to send a child to die without at least giving him a fighting chance at coming back.) He left Ron Weasley nothing, but perhaps Ron had enough on his shoulders as the Secret-Keeper for the Boy Who Lived and the entire Order of the Phoenix; perhaps it was better not to draw attention to him as a close associate of the Chosen One. Perhaps he had known who would be returning to Hogwarts and who would not - but Dumbledore did not know everything, even if he had always smiled like he did.

As the months slog by, Draco wonders what he is doing with them. Potter and Granger are lions, always have been, but they don’t need Draco for this. (Draco is a dragon, and dragons are brave, too, in their own way.) He feels useless, restless, frustrated, and he leaves.

His restless feet take him, the useless replacement locket that that whole wasted trip with Dumbledore had gotten them clutched in his hands, to his family home - not the Tonks house, still full of light and love in his memory, and not the Order headquarters at Malfoy Manor, but to another house that is, sort of, his birthright, the Black townhouse at Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place. 

The initials in the note found with the locket felt familiar - from Aunt Dromeda’s neat notation in family photo albums, from his Cousin Sirius’ cramped handwriting over several years’ correspondence, from the family tree that had caught his eye the last time he was briefly in this house, before he moved the Order to wider pastures.

RAB: Regulus Arcturus Black. Draco wonders, wistfully, what it would have been like to have all the time in the world with all these cousins he knew and didn’t know and wanted more time with - with Dora, who is gone forever now; with his cousin Sirius, who has sent himself away; with Regulus Black, who died before Draco was even born but has reached out from the past to help the cause. He thinks, the note said he would hide the true locket, but he also didn’t have long to live once he was found out, and where better to keep something safe than at home?

(The Order did not stay long in Grimmauld Place, after all; there was no cleaning project to dump out all the Dark objects stored there, no Mundungus Fletcher going in and out and ferreting away items of value - and he has learned, from what happened with Ginny’s diary, to be a little more circumspect with the Darkest items he comes across.) Draco greets his Great-Aunt Walburga’s portrait cordially; she is family, after all, and though she sniffs at the unsightly scar on his forehead, she did always like her niece Narcissa, and she takes to him well enough, makes conversation about which room belonged to Regulus (her poor boy), and where he liked to spend his time.

Draco mounts the stairs slowly, thinking about what he has learned about Horcruxes, about what it felt like near that diary that had made Little Sister Weasley fade and fade, and he searches the house until he finds what has to be it, an ornate locket that gives him a deep sense of foreboding, tucked away beneath a floorboard in Regulus Black’s room.

He takes it with him and goes.

Draco feels accomplished, now, but he also feels exposed; he leaves London quickly, and he is lonely, regretful all of a sudden that he walked away from his friends. He would return, if he could (if only because he has no idea how to destroy this locket on his own) - but when Granger hides something, they stay hidden. Still, he keeps to areas they had vaguely discussed, tries to manage on his own, and if he cries about it, there is no one there to see.

His thoughts turn dark, with that locket weighing on his neck, and he knows he has to destroy it. He doesn’t know how. 

But then a Patronus in the shape of a large dog finds him, leads him to a half-frozen pond with the glimmer of a sword at the bottom… Desperate, Draco dives for it, but he cannot grasp the sword, and the locket is twisting, strangling around his neck, and this is it, he thinks, this is all his life amounts to–

Potter hauls Draco out of the pond while Granger, a true heir to Gryffindor in her own right, draws the sword from the ice and destroys the locket.

They explain, after, how they had been thinking of him (as he had been thinking of them), Potter idly clicking on the device that Dumbledore had left him, and then, some glimmer of his voice had caught their ears, and Granger had thrown their things into the bag and grabbed Potter’s hand, and when he clicked it again - it brought them to the water’s edge.

They trade stories to catch each other up on their time apart - they are already up to speed on Draco’s finding the locket, now, and Granger, though she traded a few scars for it, has a hair from Draco’s aunt Bellatrix that will assist them in searching her vault.

Draco and Potter make a quick trip into a pub in a Muggle town to get the DNA of a couple of anonymous strangers, and then Granger brews Polyjuice Potion in their hidden camp in the woods, just like she once brewed it in a girls’ bathroom when she was twelve years old.

They stride into Gringotts, Granger proud and frowning behind Bellatrix Lestrange’s face, Draco and Potter flanking her like lackeys. She demands to visit her vault, sneers away questions and imperiously orders their goblin guide to give her privacy once they are there; Granger has been learning, these years of spending time with Draco, how to look down one’s nose, how to sneer.

It takes time to search the piles of treasures in the Lestrange vault, however, and by the time they find Hufflepuff’s cup, the Polyjuice is wearing off. They will not be able to leave the same way they came in.

Draco is exhilarated to ride a dragon. He feels a kinship with it, this scaly creature that can breathe fire when it wants to.

(Later, Draco will hear that they got his uncle, and the day’s feeling of victory will flee as he bends double on an empty beach, sick with the loss of the only father he has ever known. His friends will crouch nearby, not knowing how to offer comfort, knowing that it is not safe, for him or for his aunt, to go to Andromeda and join her in her mourning. Draco will lament for his beloved aunt that she is the only Tonks left, the only one remaining in her family, but this is not true: she still has him.)

The diary is long gone; Dumbledore destroyed the ring, and gave his life for it. They have destroyed the locket, now, and they have their hands on the cup; the snake, Voldemort keeps by his side and will have to go last (or next to last). When they work out the likeliest last item, the likeliest location of the diadem, they bring the war to Hogwarts.

Between the DA’s coins and Lee Jordan’s radio show (“Dragonwatch”), their allies are ready to meet them when they arrive, the student resistance and the adult Order members coming together. Weasley has a dozen battle plans drawn up already, which he neatly delivers to Professor McGonagall; Draco and Potter retrieve what they can of basilisk fangs from the Chamber, Draco hissing the entryway open, while Granger and Weasley, the thinkers of their little crew, sweet-talk a ghost into giving up the location of Ravenclaw’s diadem. McGonagall and Flitwick raise the wards; the first years and other noncombatant students are herded to safety, the children of Death Eaters placed under guard. (It would be absurd to sideline all of Slytherin House, when their Chosen One himself is a Slytherin, but - they exercise caution.)

Weasley and Longbottom call orders to their student troops, able to keep their heads in a firefight; the battle is brutal, and chaotic, and the cost is high. (Voldemort had offered them amnesty, if they but handed over Draco Malfoy; when Pansy Parkinson opens her mouth to accede, Zabini and Bullstrode, both standing near her in the group of Slytherin seventh-years, hex her silent.)

There are too many faces of people Draco knows among the dead. There are too many faces of people Draco does not know among the dead.

The Weasley family is crowded around the body of a twin who died laughing at his older brother’s joke, a cluster of red hair and pale, shocked faces. 

Draco’s cousin Sirius is among the dead, too; he came in with the enemy, but is clearly one of the defender’s dead: he lies with his wand out, facing the corpses of a dozen other Death Eaters and Wormtail, his silver hand a gift from the Dark Lord. He finally did manage to earn the body count he spent a dozen years in Azkaban for, it seems, before he fell to a curse from the only group he had actually betrayed.

Draco does not have a final dose of someone else’s memories to tell him what he needs to do, but he has a year’s worth of stories about Horcruxes from Dumbledore; he has the words of a prophecy, Neither can live while the other survives; he has an aunt whose family is growing smaller and smaller around her and he cannot think about that now, about what this will do for her - because he has, also, an inkling of what he needs to do, the only way to end this. He has a Snitch in his pocket that he never caught but was willed to him anyway, and there are only so many things that can fit inside a Snitch.

He does not say goodbye to the living. It’s not as if they were friends, he tells himself; it’s not as if they would miss him. (When Voldemort had demanded the life of Draco Malfoy, that first time, every wand in the Great Hall, Pansy Parkinson notwithstanding, had risen to fight.)

He uses the Stone in the Forest, halfway to his destination. His father and his mother purse their lips, reach for his shoulder with hands that pass through him, tell him they love him so much, and always have. His uncle tells him that he is proud of him. “Give him hell, D,” Dora says, and she is grinning, despite everything, because she is always grinning, because she knows that it will give Draco strength, to see her grin. His cousin Sirius looks tired, but he tells Draco that he, too, could not be more proud.

Draco says his goodbyes, and he leaves the Stone rather than deliver it to his enemy. He continues on his way.

Draco raises his wand when he faces Voldemort. He suspects that he will need to die to win this war, but that doesn’t mean he can’t take a swathe of them out with him. He has time to spit a curse, and then there is a familiar flash of green light.

He opens his eyes in the eerily empty great hall of Malfoy Manor, his home that was never his home. Dora is there with him, except he knows that it isn’t really Dora, even though her hair changes colour when she smiles at him.

“Come on, D,” she chides him, when he points out that this isn’t real. “Since when does something happening in your head mean it can’t be real?” She makes her nose grow long at him, as if to underscore the point.

She tells him that he has a choice. That last Avada Kedavra, that killed something - but he can let that something be the bit of Voldemort’s soul that has been lodged in him since he was one year old, and return to those he still has among the living; or he can let it be him, and he can rest, find peace in a job well done.

Draco swallows and swallows and thinks this choice over like he’s looking for a loophole. This is the first time that someone has simply offered him something that is fair.

“D?” Dora prompts, eventually, toning her nose down to peer at him seriously. “The wards won’t stay open forever. You can walk through that door now, or you’ll miss your chance.”

“I’m going to go, then,” he says at that, straightening. Just at the door, though, he turns back. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“I’ll see you when I see you, D,” Dora promises him. “Take your time, all right?”

He walks through the door. He wakes up. He is still lying on the Forest floor.

Narcissa Malfoy has been dead and buried for seventeen years; it is another loyal minion that Voldemort sends to check that Draco Malfoy really is dead.

Severus Snape crouches over the boy’s form, notes the very shallow rise and fall of his chest, and thinks about friendships lost, and sacrifices made. He has not spoken to Lily Evans Potter in over twenty years, but sometimes he will still hear her voice in his mind, providing a counterpoint to his theories on improving Potioncraft, or thick with disappointment at his choice in associates. He was friends with Narcissa Black and Lucius Malfoy, too, once, and here is their child, whom he does not know at all. “He’s dead, my Lord,” he calls back, his tone as bland and disinterested as usual, and stalks back to his position as Draco’s body is lifted up. (Draco does not recognize the man who just lied for him, nor does he know why he did it; he will not tell Potter, later, how this oily-haired wizard took his life in his hands to preserve him, and it will not get back to Lily Potter that her once-friend Severus finally made the right choice - but that is all right. He didn’t do it for her, or for her forgiveness; he did it for himself, and for the world he wanted to live in. Severus Snape will sleep easy that night, feeling true to his choices, for perhaps the first time in twenty years. There are many paths one can take to redemption.)

Voldemort arrives in person to flaunt Draco’s corpse to Hogwarts’ defenders, and Potter draws Gryffindor’s sword from a hat and kills the snake. Draco lifts his head, and a half-dozen wands are raised to finish off the Dark Lord before he can get out an exclamation of surprise.

There is a great deal of cleaning up to do, before they go home; there will be a great deal of mourning to do, once they do return - but there will also be growth. There will also be joy, again.

If he has children, one day, Draco will name a son Ted, will name a son Sirius, after the bravest men he ever knew; if he has a daughter, he will name her Dora. He has no shortage of dead relatives to name children after - but he is not bereft of the living, either. Andromeda will be a doting grandmother for every one of Draco’s children; they will bring her joy, and she will threaten to spoil them rotten. Their shrinking family will grow, again.

Draco will realize, one day, with some amount of surprise, that he has friends - that Potter, Granger, Weasley (and the other variant Weasleys, to some degree or another), Longbottom, Lovegood - that they enjoy his company, trust his judgement, like him for himself.

His scar will not hurt. His losses still will, but he is applying himself, now, to building a fairer world with those he loves. All will be well.