Chapter Text
For the first eleven years of his life, Harry Potter did not know he was supposed to be extraordinary.
He knew he was supposed to be small, quiet, and grateful. He knew the cupboard under the stairs at Number Four, Privet Drive was his bedroom, and that the spider webs in the corners were, according to Aunt Petunia, "character building." Dudley got two bedrooms' worth of toys. Harry got the broken ones. Asking about his parents got him nothing but a full week of no dinner.
Strange things happened around him sometimes. Glass vanished from the zoo enclosure. His hair grew back overnight after a disastrous haircut. A flight of stairs seemed to lengthen under Dudley's feet when Dudley was chasing him with malicious intent. He noticed. He didn't have a word for any of it yet.
The letters started on his eleventh birthday. Uncle Vernon burned the first one. Then there were two. Then a dozen, then thirty, spat down the chimney like a flock of trapped birds, until Uncle Vernon packed the family off to a storm-battered shack on a rock in the middle of the sea, apparently under the impression that letters couldn't follow them there.
They could. At midnight, in a thunderstorm, a giant of a man named Rubeus Hagrid knocked the door clean off its hinges, handed Harry a birthday cake with Happee Birthdae, Harry” iced messily across the top, and told him, bluntly, like it was already obvious, that he was a wizard.
"A what?" Harry said.
"A wizard, o' course," said Hagrid. "An' a thumpin' good'un, I'd say, once yeh've been trained up a bit. With a mum and dad like yours, what else would yeh be?"
That was how Harry learned his parents hadn't died in a car crash. They'd been murdered, by a dark wizard so feared people still flinched at his name, a wizard who'd tried to kill baby Harry too and somehow failed, leaving nothing behind but a lightning-shaped scar and a story that made him famous in a world he'd never heard of.
Diagon Alley nearly undid him the next day.
It was a crooked cobbled street hidden behind a pub called the Leaky Cauldron, and it was the most alive place Harry had ever seen. Cauldrons stacked outside one shop. Owls hooting in every color outside another.
A window full of what looked like human skulls, glowing green, over a shop selling rare and curious antiquities. Robes that adjusted themselves to fit. A girl testing a broomstick that hovered three feet off the ground on its own, whooping.
Hagrid noticed Harry’s wandering eyes, but promptly dragged him to the Madam Malkin's Robes for All Occasions.
A woman swept in, pale and elegant, robes moving like water, and the girl hopped down off her stool at once, half-pinned, her chin turned up.
"Mother, look, I've nearly finished."
"We haven't got all day, darling," she said, already turning, and the girl went, throwing one last glance back at Harry before the door shut behind them.
Harry never got her name. He didn't think about it again, not for three weeks, until a girl with the same white-blond hair and the same grey eyes told him to budge up, he was blocking the way.
II.The Girl in the Manor
Malfoy Manor didn't have cupboards under the stairs. It had a guest wing nobody had used in a decade, a ballroom nobody danced in anymore, and a gallery of ancestors who watched you pass and murmured about your posture. Dracona grew up under the weight of all of it.
Her father, Lucius, didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. He went quiet and still when he was displeased, and that was worse than shouting. Dracona learned early that the way around it was to be exactly what was wanted, exactly the right shape, exactly on time. Sharp-tongued. Superior. No cracks.
She'd been mostly alone as a child. Other pure-blood families brought their children round for stiff, supervised playdates that felt more like diplomatic summits than anything else. a boy named Theodore who never spoke unless spoken to, a girl named Pansy who always spoke her mind.
What she had instead was the glass.
It lived in a locked case in her father's study. An antique pendant on a fine silver chain, shaped like a narrow hourglass no bigger than her thumb, sand the color of moonlight that never seemed to run out. Family legend called it the Glass of Fates, passed down six generations, though as far as anyone could tell it had never done anything but sit in its case and, once in a great while, shimmer for no reason.
"It answers to blood and to want," her father told her once, brandy in hand, firelight on his face. "Your great grandfather is said to have seen the face of his future wife in it, a year before he met her. Whether that's true or just a story we tell to keep the thing interesting, I couldn't say. It hasn't worked in my lifetime. Maybe it only wakes someone worth waking for."
Dracona was nine. She wanted, badly, to be worth something.
She took it, she told herself, borrowed, it’s not stealing if it’s a family heirloom, and the difference mattered enormously to an eleven-year-old and hid it in a carved box under a loose floorboard, and some nights she held it and stared at the slow unmoving sand and wished it would show her anything at all. Proof there was more to her future than the marriage contract she'd overheard her parents discussing when they thought she was asleep.
She packed it at the bottom of her trunk on the first of September, wrapped in a stocking so it wouldn't rattle. It was hers. The only thing in that whole echoing house that felt like it belonged to her and not to six generations of somebody else's expectations. She hoped maybe someday, she’d see her true love…
III. Hogwarts
The first weeks blurred the way the first weeks did. Moving staircases that changed their minds mid-climb. A Potions professor named Snape who looked at Harry like Harry had personally wronged him. A troll loose in the dungeons on Halloween, after which Harry and Ron became fast, unshakeable friends with a girl named Hermione Granger, mostly by luck rather than skill.
Dracona heard about it secondhand from Pansy, typical Gryffindor recklessness, they could have died, and now everyone's calling them heroes for it. She and Harry passed each other in corridors sometimes. Traded insults, or jabs, mostly from her. Sometimes a glare. She was still hurt, because Harry had outright rejected her, and chose Wealsey over her! Who could ever choose those blood traitors? Apparently Harry Potter and his heart of gold.
There were other small collisions throughout October. In the library, both reaching for the same battered copy of ‘Quidditch Through the Ages’, Dracona got there first, checked it out just to watch his face fall, then left it on the table outside Gryffindor tower the next morning with no note, which she'd have died before admitting to. In Charms, paired with him by accident for a levitation exercise, she spent the whole lesson correcting his wand movement in her clipped, superior voice–swish, don't jab, you'll take someone's eye out, and didn't mention his feather was floating steadier than anyone else's in the room by the second try. Hers included.
"You're doing that on purpose," Ron said to Harry afterward, appalled. "Malfoy hovering round you like that. She's up to something."
"She's not up to anything," Harry said, not entirely sure that was true, and finding he didn't mind either way.
Hermione, joining them with an armful of Transfiguration books, looked up. "It's strange, though. She's horrible to everyone else. Pansy Parkinson included." She considered Harry over the top of her book. "Maybe she just likes having someone to be horrible at."
"Cheers, Hermione."
"I'm only saying." She smiled and went back to her book, and Harry didn't think much more about it that week.
That changed in November.
IV. The Remembrall
It began, like most of these things do, with something that wasn't hers.
Flying lessons were twice a week on the lawn below the West Tower, Gryffindor and Slytherin together, a scheduling decision somebody had either not thought through at all or thought through entirely too well. Madam Hooch ran them like a hawk. It was during the third lesson, while she was bent over Neville Longbottom's broom trying to work out why it wouldn't rise, that Dracona spotted a small glass ball rolling loose from Neville's robes onto the grass.
A Remembrall. Glowed red when its owner forgot something. Dracona picked it up anyway. Neville looked so wretched about dropping it, and something that had been getting more reckless around Gryffindor table for weeks without her quite noticing decided that wretchedness was an invitation.
"Look at this," she said, holding it up, turning to Pansy with a bright, cruel smile that felt, even as she wore it, a little bit like a costume. "Longbottom's grandmother sent him a Remembrall. Worried he'll forget his own head one of these days."
"Give it back, Malfoy," Neville said, blotchy red, hand shaking as he reached.
"I don't think I will, actually." She swung up onto her broom, flawless, the one thing all year she'd actually been allowed to be good at in front of an audience and hovered ten feet up, the Remembrall glinting in her fist. "Perhaps I'll leave it somewhere for him to find. On a rooftop. In a tree."
"Give it back."
Harry was off the ground before he'd decided to be, ignoring Madam Hooch's shout. He'd never sat properly on a broom before that week. The second his feet left the grass, something in him settled that hadn't settled once since he'd arrived at Privet Drive eleven years ago.
Dracona watched him come and something flared in her chest, not fear exactly, closer to the thrill of a dare finally getting taken. "Come and get it, then, Potter," she called, and threw the Remembrall hard and high, a long arc meant to clear his head and land on the greenhouse roof, out of reach for good.
She hadn't accounted for how fast he was.
Harry went after it in a flat-out dive, faster than anyone had ever seen a first year fly, the wind screaming past his ears, the ground rushing up in a way that should have scared him and didn't. He caught the ball an arm's length from the grass, hauled the handle up hard enough to nearly black out, and skidded to a stop with the Remembrall in one fist and his heart going so fast he could feel it in his teeth.
The whole lawn went dead silent.
"Mr. Potter!"
McGonagall came striding across the grass at a pace that made half the first year flinch. Harry's stomach dropped straight through the earth. He was going to be expelled. Two months in and he was going to be expelled, sent back to Privet Drive, the whole impossible world taken away as fast as it had arrived.
"Follow me," was all she said.
Dracona landed hard, forgotten in the chaos of it, the Remembrall already receding into irrelevance beside the far more dramatic spectacle of a boy apparently being marched off to his doom. She watched him go, white-faced, trailing McGonagall's black robes toward the castle, and felt something under the satisfaction she was supposed to be feeling. Guilt.
He wasn't expelled. He wasn't even given detention. McGonagall had marched him not to the headmaster's office but two floors up, borrowed a boy named Oliver Wood out of a fifth-year lesson, and introduced Harry, still faintly nauseous from the dive, as Gryffindor's new Seeker. Youngest in a century. First-year broom rule waived, just like that.
V. The Seeker
The notice went up on the Gryffindor board the next morning: Harry Potter, the youngest Seeker, Gryffindor Quidditch Team. By lunchtime it had gone the length of the castle and picked up embellishments along the way. By the time it reached the Slytherin table, Harry Potter had been personally hand-picked by McGonagall herself, a prodigy, practically holding the Cup already. Nobody mentioned a stolen Remembrall or a girl on a broom who'd started the whole thing on a dare that got out of hand.
She heard it from three people before she'd finished her toast, and something ugly curled tight in her chest with each telling. Envy. Pure unadulterated envy, jealousy took root in her heart. It wasn't that she cared about Quidditch, she told herself. Except she did. She'd flown before she could properly talk, her father said so himself, telling the story so many times it had worn smooth as a river stone, Dracona, barely 6, flying around on her mother’s old broom, squealing happily. She was lectured, but her father had later been sitting with her in the office. Letting her play with one of his brooches, explaining the family legacy. He paused for a moment. “You did exceptionally well in flying, I hope you keep that spirit in Hogwarts, maybe you’ll even be the youngest seeker”, he said proudly.
She'd spent the whole autumn watching the older Slytherins try out and thinking, with a private burning certainty, I could do better.
First years weren't allowed brooms. Everyone knew the rule. It was practically the first thing anyone told you, right after don't wander the corridors after dark and don't provoke Peeves.
Except, apparently, if you were Harry Potter.
"It's not fair," she said to Pansy at lunch, low and vicious, not touching her food. "There's a rule. An actual written rule, and they just waived it? For him?"
"Everyone's saying he caught a Remembrall out of the air on a dive from fifty feet," Pansy said, delighted by the drama and missing the point of Dracona's fury entirely. "McGonagall saw the whole thing and marched him off on the spot."
"How thrilling for him," Dracona said, in a voice like a closing door, and didn't say another word for the rest of the meal.
She found him three days later, alone on a bench outside the greenhouses, failing to make sense of a Herbology essay.
"Seeker," she said, dropping onto the bench across from him uninvited. "Congratulations."
Harry looked up, wary. He'd learned by now that Dracona Malfoy opening with a compliment rarely ended as one. "Thanks."
"Do you know how many first years in the history of Hogwarts have made a house team?"
"No."
"Neither do I, precisely, but I know it's not many, and I know the rule against first-years-and-brooms has stood a long time, and I know it got waived for you inside an afternoon because you happen to be famous." Sharper than she’d wanted. "You didn't even try out. You didn't earn it. It just landed on you. Like everything does."
Harry set his quill down. Careful, not flustered, which surprised her. "I didn't ask for any of it. Not the rule getting bent, not any of it. I didn't even know I could fly until three days ago."
"That's rather the point, isn't it. You didn't have to ask." Her voice rose and she didn't stop it. "Some of us have flown since before we could walk. Some of us would still have to try out, and compete, and earn a spot the ordinary way. You dove for a ball once and got handed a place on the team like it was nothing."
"D'you want to fight me about it, or?"
"I want to know if you're actually good," Dracona said, before she'd fully decided to say it, "or if you got lucky once in front of the right teacher."
Harry's jaw set. "Fine. How am I supposed to prove that to you?"
That was when Dracona reached into the collar of her robes and drew out the glass, without entirely deciding to, without understanding her own reasons even as her hand moved.
"What is that?" Harry asked, distracted despite himself.
"A family heirloom. It's called the Glass of Fates." She turned it once between her fingers. "Legend says it wakes for someone worth waking for, and shows them something true about who they're meant to become. My father says it hasn't worked in his lifetime. Hasn't worked in mine either." A small, humorless smile.
She held it over him, a familiar bubbling of jealousy. “I heard it can even show you what you desire the most, your family, perhaps, Potter." she spat out.
“You’re lying, Malfoy” Harry grumbled, his brows furrowed.
"If you're lucky, yes. That would at least be consistent." She held it out by the chain, letting it spin once. "Go on, then. Let's see if you can get it. Unless you’re frightened". She said, holding it over him. Dracona was a few inches taller, standing around 5’1, Harry was smaller than her mostly because he was malnourished from being with the Dursley’s.
"I'm not frightened."
"Prove it, then."
He took it. Or rather, snatched it, annoyed by the height difference and by her callous nature. Dracona, watching with a hint of pity and amusement. “So desperate, like always, Potter.”, she rolled her eyes. Long enough that Dracona's mouth had already started curving into something satisfying. So he wasn’t as special as she thought he was, relieved her, she was about to take it back…
Then the sand moved.
Not the way sand moves in an ordinary hourglass, slow and orderly. It surged, all at once, violent, like something woken too fast from sleep. The glass went warm in Harry's palm. Then hot. Then blazing, and light spilled out between his fingers that had no business coming from something so small, silver-white, cold as starlight, twice as bright.
The satisfied look dropped straight off Dracona's face.
"Harry." She was on her feet, alarm cracking her voice for the first time since he'd met her. "Harry, put it down, something's wrong, that's not what it's supposed to–"
She grabbed for his wrist, meaning to pry his fingers open, and the second her hand closed around him the light didn't just spill anymore. It was swallowed. The grey afternoon, the sound of her own voice mid-sentence, all of it went white and then went nowhere, and the ground dropped out from under both of them at once, the strange sick lurch of falling upward, sideways, in every direction there wasn't a word for. She was scared, and in a moment of fear, held him, her arms around his neck, Harry was surprised, but he understood, holding her back.
Then they were standing in the kitchen.
It took a moment to understand that. The light didn't fade so much as resolve, the way eyes adjust after a dark room, until Harry was looking at sun coming through a window over a sink, a coat slung over the back of a chair, a mug abandoned half-full on the counter, gone cold. Real. Solid enough that when Dracona's hand found his arm again, gripping hard, he could feel her shaking.
"Where–" she started, and stopped, because there was a laugh coming from the next room, low and easy, a man's laugh, and neither of them could make their feet move.
“Harry, I think,” She looked around, trying to figure out where they were, and then she realized she was holding him, moving away and fixing her robes, crossing her arms.
“My father will hear about this” she muttered under her breath, eliciting a chuckle from Harry.
The two adults came through the doorway a second later, and Harry's stomach did something complicated and enormous, because one of them was unmistakably, impossibly, himself. He was way older, hair no less of a disaster than it had ever been and a stubble under his chin, but he moved like someone who'd stopped flinching a long time ago, tie loosened, sleeves shoved up past his elbows, one arm slung easy around the waist of the person beside him, laughing at something the boy had shouted from the next room.
The person beside him was Dracona.
Not the girl standing rigid next to Harry with her hand still locked around his arm, all sharp angles and careful ice. This Dracona had her hair loose, longer, catching the light the same way it did now but softer somehow, a fussing bundle of blankets balanced against one shoulder, patting a small back with the automatic rhythm of someone who'd done it a thousand times before, and would do it a thousand times again without thinking about it.
"He's going to break something," older-Dracona said, tipping her head toward the boy who'd just gone tearing back the other way, not sounding remotely bothered by the prospect.
"He's going to break several somethings," older-Harry agreed. "It's Tuesday. It's practically tradition with James. A man like his father."
“A fool?” Older-Dracona countered, chuckling, as Older-Harry nuzzled his face into her neck, planting kisses from her neck to her shoulders.
“You’re the one who married this fool,” He winked up at her.
"You're meant to be the responsible one. You're literally paid to enforce rules for a living." Older-Dracona, sighed, rolling her eyes, but not stopping him.
"Head Auror doesn't mean I enforce rules at home, love, it means I fill out considerably more paperwork about the rules that other people break." He caught her, and pressed a kiss to her temple like it cost him nothing at all. "How's the little terror settling?"
"Finally down." Older-Dracona shifted the bundle against her shoulder, and for the first time Harry could see a fringe of white-blond hair poking out from under the blanket, one small fist working its way loose to knock, gently, against her collarbone. "Scorpius fought his bottle for twenty minutes and then decided sleeping was actually the superior plan all along. Very sudden change of heart. Very Malfoy of him."
"Very you, you mean."
"I said Malfoy on purpose, thank you very much."
A second boy wandered in behind them, younger than the first, quieter, dragging a battered stuffed dragon by one wing and climbing straight up into a chair at the kitchen table without a word to anyone, the particular unhurried self-possession of a middle child who had learned early that nobody minded if he simply arrived somewhere and started existing there. He set the dragon carefully upright against the sugar bowl like it was standing guard.
"Albus, love, elbows," older-Dracona said, without even glancing over, and Albus..
Then, the proud little boy with the cat, came back through a moment later, the cat clutched triumphant in both fists, looking thoroughly unrepentant. "Mum, look, he let me catch him!"
"He did not let you catch him, James, he's simply slower than he used to be. Put him down before he takes your face off, and mind your sister, she's just behind you"
A small girl trailed in last, no older than four, one sock on and one sock resolutely, defiantly absent, dragging a toy broomstick half her own height across the floor with the grim determination of someone completing a very important job. "Dad. Dad. Daddy. I'm going to fly it."
"You are not going to fly it, Lily, we've discussed this."
"I'm going to fly it later," she amended, with the stubbornness of a four-year-old who had already won the argument in her own head, just like a clever mother, and older-Harry laughed, and scooped her straight up onto his hip without breaking stride.
Four of them, Harry realized, watching from somewhere just outside his own body. Four whole children, filling up a kitchen that smelled like something on the stove and looked lived-in down to the crayon marks on the wall by the door, and at the center of it, entirely unbothered, entirely at ease, older versions of two eleven-year-olds who currently could not stand to be in the same corridor without one of them saying something cutting.
The younger Dracona standing beside Harry made a sound. Small. Involuntary. Not quite a word.
Harry turned to look at her, the eleven-year-old one, still gripping his arm hard enough to bruise and found her staring at the scene with an expression he'd never once seen on her face in two months of knowing her. She looked like she was watching something she wanted so badly it frightened her.
"Dracona."
"Don't," she said, not looking away from the kitchen, from the woman with loose hair and a baby on her shoulder who answered to her own name twenty years from now like it had never once felt like a cage. "Don't say anything."
The light came for them without warning, the same white flood swallowing the kitchen whole, the last thing Harry caught, right before it took him, was older-Dracona pressing her mouth to the crown of the baby's head and murmuring something too quiet to hear, and older-Harry watching her do it with an expression Harry didn't have a name for yet, not at eleven.
This time the falling went the other direction, down and down and down, until Harry hit the wet grass hard enough to knock the breath out of him and Dracona landed half beside him, half on top of him, both of them gasping like they'd been drowning.
The glass lay dark and cold and ordinary in the grass between them.
"Harry." She got the word out first, breathless, scrambling upright, wet grass staining both knees of her robes. "What was that. What did we just–"
"I don't know." His voice came out wrecked, barely a rasp. "That was, we were there. We were actually there."
"We weren't there. We can't have been there, that's, that's twenty years from now, that's not possible, nothing does that, nothing" She stopped. Pressed both hands flat against her own face for a second, like she could push the whole afternoon back out through her palms. "There were four of them. Four children, Harry. I had a baby."
"We had four," Harry said, and watched her flinch at the word ‘we’, and didn't take it back.
Dracona was on her feet fast, snatching the glass out of the grass, closing her fist around it like she could squeeze the whole afternoon out of existence. "That doesn't mean anything."
"You saw it too. You can't stand there and tell me you saw yourself with a, with my, and it doesn't mean anything."
"It means the glass is old and unreliable and probably half-broken, exactly like I said before you decided to make a whole production out of holding it." Her voice was climbing, stumbling over her word in a panic. "It's not a prophecy, Potter, it's a trinket that hasn't worked properly in sixty years, and the one time it decides to malfunction, it malfunctions like that"
"You're the one who dared me to hold it. You taunted me!"
"I'm well aware of what I did." She said it through her teeth. "You can't tell anyone. Not Weasley, not Granger, no one. If my father knew this thing had actually worked, he'd have it apart on his desk by morning, and I won't have him picking through whatever it decided to show us like it's something to be arranged."
"I won't tell anyone," Harry said, and meant it, though he still couldn't get the sound of that laugh out of his head, the life he saw, a family. A real family.
"Good." She turned to go, the chain already disappearing back under her collar, then stopped, without turning round. "It doesn't have to mean anything. Whatever it was."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it's true," she said, and walked off across the wet grass before he could see whether she believed it any more than he did.