Chapter Text
It admittedly took until the second week of summer for Narcissa to finally notice.
She could excuse the lapse easily, of course, considering how much damage control she’d needed to handle in the past few months: a teacher murdered at Hogwarts, followed by the dead body of a basilisk being found in the depths of the dungeons; the Daily Prophet’s explosive articles concerning Peter Pettigrew being found alive and well as an Animagus, as well as the upcoming trials for both him and Sirius Black; and then of course her husband’s outrage and subsequent temper tantrum when he went to retrieve some artifact from his private, hidden collection, only to discover it missing.
Draco remaining scarce during the days of his father’s ill behavior hardly felt out of the ordinary, but even as Lucius calmed down, the boy didn’t make a strong reappearance. He attended shared meals, of course, and Narcissa occasionally glimpsed him about the Manor’s halls, but not until the second week of summer did she truly realize - she’d hardly seen Draco at all since his return from school.
Perhaps the ancient basilisk, discovered dead and decaying so near the Slytherin dormitories, had shaken him more than her boy wanted to admit. Concerned, Narcissa summoned the one creature that might give her a better understanding of the situation.
At her soft call, Dobby popped into place, eyes trained upon the ground and ears trembling faintly. “Yes, Mistress?”
“Do you know where Draco is, Dobby?”
To Narcissa’s shock and no little unease, the elf hesitated. “Little Master Draco be saying he is spending the day flying, Mistress.”
...considering they stood within the broom shed by their personal Quidditch Pitch, with no brooms missing and no twelve year old boy in sight, Narcissa found that rather difficult to believe. “I see. And do you know where he actually is?”
Dobby bit of a whimper, spindly fingers twisting the hem of his pillowcase shift. “He is- He is down at the old gardener’s cottage, Mistress.”
Narcissa blinked, momentarily nonplussed. The old cottage did, of course, sit upon Malfoy property, but a small piece cut off from the rest of their grounds by a public road. For practical reasons, it did not fall within the boundary of protective wards - in case of attack, if the wards ever failed or were replaced with spells to prevent her family from leaving, they could descend into an underground tunnel which led to the cottage. Enough money and other supplies were kept there for quick escapes, carefully maintained but hardly visited; doing so regularly could bring undue attention to the place.
Draco knew that. Narcissa taught him so herself.
Which stood to reason, something very important indeed must have drawn him out to the cottage, and she felt suddenly determined to find out what.
-Vs-
Dobby deposited her carefully by a small gate at the roadside, and Narcissa didn’t hesitate to stride through. A narrow path led past some trees, around a thick line of bushes, and right up to the cottage itself. She couldn’t see anything through the windows, but still marched up towards the door, ready to throw it open and announce herself to anyone inside.
A familiar shout instead drew her attention towards the garden behind the cottage.
“Stop laughing, I almost had it that time!”
“Sure, you almost made it wiggle out of my grip. Whatever you need to tell yourself, Draco.” Narcissa heard her son reply with some thoroughly inappropriate language, and felt so stunned she couldn’t move.
“I swear this is because you use it yourself so much,” Draco went on, “You’ve become resistant against the effects, or something. What? What’s that look for?”
“Do you know,” the other young voice said, in a contemplative tone, “I’ve just remembered how I first learned this spell.”
“Oh? Is that going to turn out to be a particularly helpful piece of information? Because otherwise we’ve got more practicing to do-”
“You remember that farce of a dueling club Lockhart tried to get going in our second year at school?”
Narcissa didn’t think she could’ve possibly heard that correctly.
“Yes, of course. Except the ponce couldn’t actually do anything, so he needed to rope Snape into helping. I seem to recall quite the dramatic ending, when you went and spoke to my spell construct, announcing to all and sundry you were a bloody Parselmouth.”
“Yeah, well, anyway - that was where I first picked up Expelliarmus. After Snape used it to send Lockhart flying in the demonstration.”
Silence reigned for a long moment.
Then Draco burst out laughing.
Narcissa, finally, forced her feet to move, edging around the ivy-covered walls to peer towards the garden. The little-used plot had actually undergone quite a transformation - the weeds removed, bare dirt smoothed over, stones laid out around the boundary. Her son stood at one end, bent forward slightly from the force of his cackles, sweaty and grimy from falls to the ground. Opposite him, another boy looked much the same, except wearing far dingier clothing. He bore dark hair, battered looking spectacles, and a pair of bright green eyes watching Narcissa’s boy with no little amount of amusement.
“-from Snape!” Draco eventually howled. “Your signature spell, the move you used to beat the Dark Lord for good and steal back the Elder Wand- and you learned it from Snape!”
“Definitely more useful than anything I learned in five awful years of Potions classes,” the other boy replied, his grin widening.
“Oh sod off, some of us actually paid attention in that course!”
“Sure, since you didn’t need to spend the whole time worrying about losing House points for breathing too loudly.” After a moment’s pause, they both began laughing hysterically once more.
Narcissa stepped out from the shelter of the cottage walls.
The other boy spotted her first, from his position at the other end of the former garden. Those green eyes widened with alarm, and his entire body froze in an all too familiar way - the same manner of prey, suddenly finding itself cornered by a predator. For once, Narcissa couldn’t say the reaction made her feel the slightest bit powerful.
“Mother,” Draco gasped, after he followed the other boy’s gaze. “We were- this is- I can explain! Please don’t tell Father!”
Don’t tell?
Hm.
“By all means,” she said slowly, looking back and forth between the pair of them. “Explain away.”
-Vs-
“...and when I whispered back ‘yes’, you stood up and told the others I really was dead,” Harry Potter told her. “After that, Voldemort got everyone up and headed back to the castle, so he could- show off. Force a surrender. Didn’t work, though.”
Narcissa couldn’t do anything but stare at him.
“Another fight started up,” the boy went on, small fingers picking at a loose thread emerging from his sleeve. “I managed to duck out of sight and pull on my invisibility cloak. Then, it- it just came down to the right moment. Cornering Voldemort, fighting him one last time, and- killing him. For good.”
Draco remained stock still, sitting at a halfway point between the two of them. In the cottage’s small fireplace, a few logs crackled away merrily, courtesy of Dobby. Three tea cups and a pot rested on the table between their chairs, only still warm due to the enchanted nature of the porcelain.
Narcissa still couldn’t do anything.
A second war. A second war, with her baby caught up in the middle of it, trapped by familial duty and familiar terror. Trapped beyond Narcissa’s ability to help, aside from a last-ditch effort to spare the life of the only one capable of saving them all - another child the same age, for Merlin’s sake.
So here they were, a pair of boys who’d barely just survived their nightmare, only to find themselves back at the start again. Determined to change it, so no other children endured the same horrors again. And Narcissa knew, it must have been exceptionally horrifying, for her son to so easily sign on to the risk.
In which case, what else could she do but help?
Taking a deep breath, Narcissa released it slowly, and finally reached for her tea. “I should be able to get into Bellatrix’s Gringotts vault for you. To retrieve the Hufflepuff cup.”
Draco and Potter both stared at her. Eventually, the latter spoke up. “Erm. Thanks?”
“We’ll need to suitably fortify this place first, however. In case anyone realizes you are not, in fact, still living with your Muggle relations; I refuse to invite the full Auror force down upon our heads with accusations of kidnapping.” Narcissa took a sip. “And, of course, we don’t want Lucius coming down here before I’ve managed to convince him of aiming towards a more suitable vision of the future.”
Her son finally relaxed, just enough for his shoulders to cease looking hunched. “You won’t- we don’t have to tell him the whole story, do we? Just- just in case he’d want to-”
“To pick and choose which parts of it he’d prefer to still take place,” Narcissa finished. “Which is something he’d certainly think himself clever enough to pull off. But, I believe your plan is greatly preferable - eliminate the immediate threats, then deal with secondary matters, and with careful maneuvering, none of it at all shall come to pass.”
Both boys slumped in their seats, visibly relieved. “Thank you, Mrs. Malfoy,” Potter said. He even sounded completely sincere.
Yes, Narcissa thought, a much better plan. Cement themselves as the young hero’s ideal allies, working in secret to prevent a second war, and then follow closely in his wake during the inevitable rise to greatness once the boys both graduated school. Their shared former timeline would ensure Potter trusted Draco for years to come, and Narcissa could build upon that as much as required to secure a better future for her son.
A far better future.
-Vs-
Within a week, she turned the old cottage into a proper little fortress, strong yet subtle layers of spellwork guaranteeing no tracking spells would be able to locate Potter on the property. He didn’t seem at all concerned about the confinement; apparently having the entire structure to himself as well as the surrounding acreage counted as the height of luxury for the muggle-raised boy.
Disturbing. But Narcissa certainly didn’t mind taking advantage of it.
Less concerned with sneaking around to visit their guest, Draco began spending more time with her once again - not as much as normal, of course, because he did still need to work with Potter (re-teaching their bodies to cast spells their minds already knew) but more than he’d managed before the secret came out. Even better, he requested outings every week, small shopping trips that swiftly became thinly veiled excuses to purchase a better assortment of bare necessities for Potter’s use.
“He still wears his cousin’s cast-offs, for Merlin’s sake,” he son disgustedly remarked at one point, when they dropped off measurements with Madam Malkin for a modest wardrobe. “Whom I think must be the size of a bloody whale, because Harry might be small but those clothes make him look positively waifish.”
Narcissa wondered if she should chastise Draco for swearing in front of her, mentally seventeen years old or not.
“We’ll see that he’s given better from here on out,” she said instead. “How in the world did you manage to convince him to stay in the gardener’s cottage in the first place?”
“Well, he’d already made up his mind not to go back to Muggles; I asked if he’d be staying with Weasley or Granger, then, and he told me neither, he planned to camp on his own through the whole summer! I don’t know if you realize it yet, Mother, but he’s an idiot who’s going to martyr himself for no good reason if I don’t cram some common sense down his throat.”
“I’m slowly coming to understand that, yes.”
-Vs-
Lucius never noticed. Narcissa would despair over his lack of awareness, but- she’d never seen anything amiss with Andromeda, either, in the months leading up to what was supposed to be her eldest sister’s marriage to a worthwhile pureblood scion. It came as a terrible, horrific shock when Andy instead eloped with a nameless muggleborn.
She would do what she could to lessen the shock of their son’s alliance with Harry Potter when the time came to inform Lucius. In the meanwhile, Narcissa held back on the temptation to smack him over the head with a newspaper.
But speaking of sisters...
Azkaban never treated any of its inmates well, but Bellatrix looked particularly haggard when the guards led her into a private meeting room. Narcissa resisted the urge to shudder at her ragged clothing and grimy skin; instead she went and embraced her sister.
Small talk never lasted long with Bellatrix, even before the erosion of her patience from Dark magic and Dementors. A quick update about Draco, and then on to business. “I know our Lord trusted you with something of great importance,” Narcissa whispered, leaning close under the pretext of resting their foreheads together. “He gave Lucius something similar. We’ve discovered- together, all these objects- they could bring Him back, Bella.”
His sister shuddered, almost rapturous. “I knew it, I knew He was not truly gone- I can get it to you, Cissy, I can write those wretched filthy goblins, you can fetch it from them and restore Him to greatness-!”
“I will do my best, Bella. I swear to you in the Dark Lord’s name.” An easy thing to say, when the Dark Lord meant nothing to her - protecting Draco came first. Protecting Draco would always come first. And for all that Narcissa still loved her sister (both her sisters), Bellatrix made her choice, and suffered the consequences for it.
Once, she could have easily seen through the lie - but Azkaban never treated its inmates well. Narcissa left with a blood-written note in hand, granting her permission to enter Bellatrix’s Gringotts vault, and ignored the pain in her heart.
-Vs-
“We already got Quirrell, but missed Voldemort’s shade, which is probably back in Albania by now.” Potter squinted down at the parchment chart unrolled before him, and Narcissa made the mental note to bring up the possibility of new eyeglasses. Something in silver, perhaps, striking but tasteful. “The cup and the diadem are dealt with, since we got the basilisk with Gryffindor's sword; once Sirius is set free we can visit Grimmauld Place to get the locket, and then the Gaunt shack for the ring. But after that is Nagini, and I haven’t the foggiest idea where she’s hidden.”
“Probably also in Albania,” Draco grumbled, slouching in his own seat. “And where exactly are we going to put your madcap godfather once he’s loose?”
Potter paused, and sneaked a not so subtle glance in Narcissa’s direction. She caught his gaze and smiled wryly. “If you think you could convince him to accept my assistance, Sirius is welcome to stay here as well.”
The boy positively beamed, and she found her smile growing reluctantly fonder.
It wasn’t as though he went about wearing his heart on his sleeve, precisely - young Potter could pull on a cold or blank expression quite well if he thought the situation called for it. But when gripped by strong emotion, he became so very expressive, in a genuine way Narcissa didn’t quite know how to handle. Or Draco, for that manner, who continued to turn remarkably red-faced when the other boy directed those expressions towards him.
She wasn’t certain if that boded well for the future or not.