Draco Malfoy's legs were shaking as he followed the other Gryffindors up the stairs toward their new common room. He couldn't believe it. This was so wrong! He'd known there would be trouble as soon as the hat said "Hmm," instead of saying "Slytherin," but if he'd had any idea how much trouble it would be, he might have shouted "Slytherin" himself and hoped nobody noticed.
Instead, he'd tried to reason with the thing, telling it that everyone in the Malfoy family had always been in Slytherin and obviously it was where he belonged. It had kept hemming and hawing instead, though, and it had eventually ordered him to shut up and stop thinking so loudly about Slytherin so that it could really hear the truth.
And then he'd shut up, or at least tried to, which had been his second mistake, because a few minutes later, it had announced in his ear that Slytherin might be where his family had always sorted, but it wasn't the best option for him. And then it had shouted "Gryffindor" to the whole room without telling Draco first and it had been too late to do anything about how terribly, horribly, drastically wrong this was.
He'd had to go to the Gryffindor table and sit with them instead of with the friends he'd grown up with, and everyone had been talking about him at all the tables, he was pretty sure, and it had been a completely horrendous ordeal. And he'd been so looking forward to the feast and everything! But of course, being sorted into Gryffindor had ruined it. Just like it was going to ruin everything else.
He'd been followed into Gryffindor by Harry Potter, which wasn't so bad, and then by Dean Thomas (a muggle-born, he'd said at the table later! Draco was about to be rooming with a muggle-born!) and Ronald Weasley, both of whom he hated already. And then it had become clear at the table that Harry was already friends with Ron, talking to his older brothers like they'd known each other forever. Not that Harry hadn't been clear enough on the train when he picked Ron and Hermione over Draco, but still. He'd been hoping that now that they were in the same house through some fluke, Harry might reconsider.
Now, as he trailed behind the others, watching them, he thought about his situation. Harry didn't seem to want anything to do with him, Weasley was a filthy blood traitor and Draco would never be able to live down a friendship with him, Dean and the other unfamiliar boy, Seamus Finnigan, seemed to be hitting it off (in part because Seamus was halfblood, and therefore not someone Draco much wanted to associate with, either), and the only one left was Neville Longbottom. Whose parents had been tortured to insanity by Draco's aunt and uncle. Which Draco suspected might be a bit of a problem.
Neville's parents had been part of the opposition to the Dark Lord during the war when they were all babies, but now they were gone and it was just him and his grandmother. Draco was sure Neville's grandmother had said bad things about the Death Eaters and about his own family, but it would probably still be easier to make Neville see sense about the whole thing than it would to get Ron Weasley, with all those brothers around all the time, to come over to his way of thinking. And anyway, the war notwithstanding, the Longbottom family was more prestigious than the Weasleys, if only a little.
Neville got his foot stuck in a disappearing step the prefect – Percy Weasley, who made Malfoy feel sick with the way he took charge like he deserved the power – had told them to hop over, and Draco was there helping him faster than anyone else, because he'd made his decision. Neville was the best he could hope for as a friend, because he'd seen the way Crabbe and Goyle had looked at him from the Slytherin table as he walked over to sit with the Gryffindors.
For a moment, they'd sat there shell-shocked, mouths gaping open like they were trying to catch flies, which was about all he would have expected, really. Crabbe and Goyle were a special kind of idiot, and he'd known that much for years. As the people around them began to talk, he'd seen their faces go from dumbstruck to sinister, the brutal cruelness they usually turned on people like the Weasleys aimed at him instead. Draco tried to tell himself that he was better off with a chance at real friends than he was with a couple of idiots like that toadying to him, but having toadies still sounded like more fun than this. Neville looked surprised, but he accepted the help. "Thanks! I slipped!"
Draco had to fight not to say something sarcastic in reply. "It's ok. Accidents happen, right?" Like the one that put me in Gryffindor, his brain continued, but he stopped the words from coming out of his mouth because he didn't think they were wise right now. Neville smiled at him, as if relieved that someone was being nice to him. He probably was relieved.
Neville had been talking at the table about how his family had thought he might be a squib, and he seemed sort of awkward and a little pathetic. He might be smarter than Crabbe and Goyle (it would be hard not to be) but he had none of the confidence or purpose they had to make up for it. Draco felt sort of bad for him, really. But it was also going to be useful, he supposed. He could probably get Neville to like him if he was nice enough. And he could do nice. Couldn't he? And maybe there was more to Neville than met the eye. Maybe.
By age 14, Draco Malfoy was a very different person than when he'd started school, and he almost hadn't noticed it happening. He and Ron were probably never going to get along, of course, and any hope he'd had of getting along with Harry Potter had gone away the moment they became teammates second year. Draco had tried out for seeker and failed to take the position, but he was still the Quidditch team's hero as their best chaser, even if he wasn't much better than Angelina and Katie, and his dad's gift of brand new Nimbus 2001 brooms for the team had rubbed Harry the wrong way, even though it was meant to make them all like him.
Harry had even refused his broomstick, sticking with the Nimbus 2000 that everyone knew McGonagall had bought for him herself. The worst part was, he'd done it politely, going on about sentimental value and supersition and it being his first ever broom, so Lucius hadn't picked up on how awful Harry could be. But even if Ron and Harry were basically a wash, he'd gotten to be almost shockingly close to Neville, finding a lot in common in unexpected places even though they were quite different on the surface and bonding over the fact that both of them felt like outsiders in Gryffindor, like they might not belong.
He'd even gotten to like Dean and Seamus, though they were sometimes a little rowdy for his tastes. He wasn't really one for following muggle sports or kicking rolled socks around the dorm room or trying to throw wadded tissues neatly into Neville's trunk from across the room. But they were decent enough, and they'd stuck by both him and Harry when the whole Chamber of Secrets mess had happened and they'd been the school's two top suspects, Harry because he was a parseltongue and Draco because everyone knew he'd wanted to be a Slytherin and figured he might be trying to prove he ought to be. He owed them, a little, for their faith in him, and he did like them, now that he was used to the idea of being friends with them.
As far as the girls in his house went, Lavender and Parvati were a perpetual irritation, shallow and silly and giggly, and sometimes it was hard not to manipulate them just because he could. They weren't bad people, though, and if they didn't trust him it was less due to his parentage then it was to the fact that he couldn't resist tricking them now and again.
Particularly memorable was the time he'd convinced them that tying a chain of puffapod flowers around their necks would keep away the bees they were both so desperately afraid of. He'd said it was a trick his grandmother had told him, and since they always believed him when he told them about "old wizarding family secrets," they'd done it, at least until Padma, who was a Ravenclaw and considerably less gullible than her sister, had informed them that it wouldn't do anything but dye the skin around their necks red so that they looked like they'd been strangled.
Even Harry and Ron had seemed to appreciate that one, though they'd pretended not to on principle, because they still refused to like Draco. Hermione, who Draco thought he might get along rather well with, these days, if she weren't so close with Harry and Ron, hadn't even bothered to hide her glee. Lavender and Parvati had been on a particularly intense Divination kick at the time and they'd been driving her crazy trying to read tea leaves in their dorm room.
He and Hermione had been fighting for years to see who could get the best marks, and usually it was Hermione, though he did beat her on the occasional test or essay, just often enough to make the fight worth fighting. Both of them drove the Ravenclaws batty, because they usually took the top two slots in everything, and they weren't even in the house meant for scholars.
Usually, they stuck together a bit, in the face of Ravenclaw irritation, though there had been a particularly horrible month-and-a-half of no one talking to him when he called her a "mudblood" their second year, infuriated that she'd beaten him so badly on a practical for their potions class, which was usually his best subject. It had been the worst few weeks of his life, completely cut out of society, and it was only when Hermione had deigned to forgive him after what felt like his millionth apology that they'd let him back in again. Now, that was well in the past, though he could still see in her eyes sometimes that she hadn't forgotten.
They were as close to friends as they could be, given that she was so close to the "wonder twins," who were the closest things to enemies he'd ever had. At least, they were the closest if you didn't count the Slytherins who took occasional shots at him for the sake of a little glory in their own house, and he didn't count them, because the Slytherins were scattered and tended to trade off, rather than being the same people over and over.
The thing was, he'd never thought of any of them as his friends. Not until today. They were just . . . housemates. They were the people he lived with, had class with, ate lunch with. They populated his life, and he'd realized several times that he got along with them better than he ever would have thought he would. But today? Today, he had to face the truth. They were more than just people he hung out with. They were his friends. And, even more surprisingly, he was their friend.
It was a strange feeling, now that he was sitting outside under one of the trees near the lake, beside Neville and surrounded by the rest of their house and, inexplicably, Padma Patil, who he was seriously considering asking to the Yule Ball his father said would be coming in December. Everyone was trying to comfort Neville and reassure Draco and it felt, for the first time, like he was really part of it all, completely part of it all, with his whole heart. He felt warm inside surrounded by these people, something he'd certainly never have expected when he first started school with them.
He still felt a little shell-shocked, both by what had happened in DADA earlier and by the fact that Neville was still sitting beside him, not mad at him at all. He hadn't been able to stop himself as the spider writhed on the desk under Professor Moody's wand and Neville grew whiter and whiter and whiter in the seat beside him. He'd found himself on his feet, shouting at a professor for the first time in his life. He could still hear his own voice echoing through the room, saying something he had no right to say.
"What's wrong with you?" he'd demanded, dropping all the usual honorifics in his anger, "Can't you see you're upsetting Neville? How dare you do that spell in here when you know what happened to the Longbottoms! You were the auror who caught my aunt torturing them, and now he's got no parents and you're doing the spell in front of him? Are you some kind of an idiot? Or are you just as sadistic as Aunt Bellatrix?" And then he'd realized what he'd said. He'd told Neville's parents' story, and it wasn't his to tell, because Neville never, ever mentioned that his parents were stuck in St. Mungo's, completely insane.
The silence in the classroom had been deafening, drowned out only by the loud sound of his heart beating in his ears, and he'd suddenly felt completely drained, the hot anger freezing into icy fear that ran up and down his spine as he turned to Neville. "Oh no! Neville, I . . . I didn't mean to . . ."
And Neville Longbottom, because he was his best friend, had stood up, too, and looked him in the eye, and straightened his spine, and said "It's ok, Draco. I . . . I was going to have to tell them eventually. I just . . . didn't think anyone knew." Draco had blushed so hard that his pale skin turned nearly purple as the rest of the classroom exploded into noise around them and the Gryffindors, in mass, moved to surround Neville, glaring at the professor at the front.
Moody, apparently aware that he'd gone too far, dismissed class early and they'd all come out here together with Draco and Neville in the middle of the pack, side by side, even though they were usually on the edges of everything. He hadn't even been able to talk to Neville over the rush of words from the others, telling Neville they were sorry about his parents and congratulating Draco for having taken such a spectacular stand and asking for details neither of the boys wanted to give, but it had been ok that he couldn't get a word in, because he'd had no idea what to say.
They'd picked up Padma somewhere along the way, her twin explaining the situation in a hushed whisper that still carried, and he'd felt bad again, hearing it laid out like that. "Draco's aunt tortured Neville's parents until they went crazy and then Moody caught her and sent her to Azkaban, but he showed us the spell she used in class and then Draco yelled at him 'cause obviously Neville's really upset." Draco's aunt. Could Padma see past that?
Neville had told him it was alright, but now that it was a little quieter, now that everyone was a little more settled in their clump under the tree, Draco realized he had to know for sure. He had to double check, because while at the beginning, he'd chosen to befriend Neville for completely selfish reasons, like status and power and a desire to have someone around who was easy to control, Neville had somehow turned into a real friend, and the thought of losing him over something like this was hard to bear. "Nev', is it . . . is it really ok? I . . . I mean, I only know because that's how my mom's sister wound up in Azkaban and I know you don't like to talk about it . . ."
Neville cut him off. "It's really ok, Draco. I mean it. 'Cause, you know, you're not your aunt. It's . . . I thought about that when we started, how you were related to all those Death Eaters who hurt my parents, but then I figured, you're in Gryffindor, right, and they were in Slytherin, so you're not them. And, I mean, I'm not brave or anything like my family, or good at magic, so why would you have to be just like your parents? You could be different too. And you are! You're . . . you're my best friend. And . . . and I think if your family doesn't like you the way you are, or if they don't like you siding with me instead of your aunt, you'd better come live with me and Gran. We'll look after you."
For the first time since they started together at Hogwarts, Draco found himself admiring Neville Longbottom. He'd been jealous, on occasion, of Neville's natural affinity for plants and high marks in Herbology, and he'd been jealous of the way everyone seemed to like him (or everyone that counted anyway) and he'd thought it would be nice to be able to stay that cheerful and positive. But he'd never seen Neville this way, back straight, voice confident between the stops and starts, speaking from the heart and making everyone else follow along.
Neville had a weird kind of power around him, as the other Gryffindors echoed the sentiment, murmuring that of course Draco wasn't like his aunt and of course he shouldn't worry and of course they'd look after him too, and Draco was suddenly very aware that he'd stumbled into one of the best choices he might ever make when he decided to help poor little bumbling Longbottom on the stairs that first night. Grinning back at Neville, he answered, "If it ever comes to it, I'll take you up on that." And, one day, he would.