"Hufflepuff?" Lucius repeated blankly. "Draco, what—"

"There, you see?" Draco interrupted eagerly. "You're confused and angry, you don't understand how it could happen. That's what everyone will expect. It'll be a scandal, the talk of the town, what a disgrace the Malfoys' son is to his family, being sorted into Hufflepuff of all Houses. You and Mother can talk about how I never seemed like that kind and you're so terribly disappointed, maybe even send me a Howler about it. I'll be embarrassed and shamed in front of everyone." He leaned forward. "Or that's what they'll think is happening."

Catching on to what his son was insinuating, Lucius began to smile. "Go on."

"What's really happening is that I'm listening to everything. I'm watching everyone. And they'll all let me, because they'll be so sorry for the poor little Hufflepuff." Draco widened his eyes and let his lower lip tremble. "I wish I were a brave Gryffindor like you, Harry," he whimpered, hunching his shoulders as if he expected to be hit. "Maybe then Father and Mother would be proud of me..."

Lucius burst out laughing at the pose, and at the ease with which his son threw it off and straightened up in his chair, looking pleased and proud. "A worthy scheme," he said when he could speak again. "Something very like it has worked before. But what if you are not sorted into Hufflepuff?"

"Then I suppose I shall have to survive in Slytherin." Draco laid a hand over his heart. "A dreadful fate indeed, but for the sake of my name and family, I shall fight my way through."

Another laugh escaped Lucius, this time at the mock-sacrifical expression on Draco's face. "I fear your clever mind will doom you to that dreadful fate after all," he warned. "But if you could carry off such a scheme successfully, it might make a great difference for the Dark Lord when he does return."

Draco's eyes gleamed. "That's all I want, Father," he said with firm sincerity. "That's all I've ever wanted."

"As it should be," Lucius said, allowing a note of pardonable pride to creep into his voice. "Run away, now, and practice your wandwork. Hufflepuff or not, you must not be found lacking in the basic skills of a wizard."

"I never will be, sir." Draco slid from his chair and made his father an elegant bow, then was gone.

Sitting back in his chair, Lucius pondered the ways of fate. He had not wanted to take in his wife's disgraceful niece all those years ago, but Narcissa had convinced him that even their own society would frown on the abandonment of a half-blood child, and she would be no trouble to them as long as Dobby was properly instructed in her care. The words had been a prophecy; the girl had remained quietly in her own rooms for three years, learning from books what she needed to know, then departed for Hogwarts without mishap and there been Sorted into the same House as her Mudblood father.

And I have no doubt it is she who is tangentially behind my son's fine idea of today, for though they have never met, he knows of her existence. Where else could he have conceived of passing himself off as such a lowly creature as a Hufflepuff?

Mal shot through his own bedroom door, slammed it, and pressed his fingers against three darkened spots on the wood, murmuring "Sett" under his breath. This done, he leapt straight up into the air, yowling a savage victory yell, and performed a war-dance around his bed to the chant of "Did it, did it, did it—"

Step one of the Great Plan was complete.

Tonks was sprawled on her bed in the tiny, crowded flat she shared with three other Auror apprentices, trying to concentrate on her Fundamentals of Concealment homework, when a loud double crack sounded and a folded scrap of parchment fluttered down on top of her textbook. Eagerly, she snatched it up and flipped it open.

Wool successfully pulled over eyes.

It was unsigned, but both the handwriting and the method of delivery told her from whom it had come. She buried her face in her pillow and let out a whoop of delight, coming up with her cheeks as pink as her hair, and the textbook went unregarded for several minutes as she indulged in fantasies about Mal at Hogwarts and after.

"I'll've been qualified four years when he leaves school," she reckoned out loud. "That ought to be long enough to get started on buying a place for us. Wonder what he'll end up doing? Whatever it is, he'll go far." No one who had faced her in a duel would have believed the tenderness of the smile that touched her lips now. "Can't stop that boy with an Unforgivable."

And then, of course, there was Harry Potter to be reckoned with. He and Mal seemed to have hit it off, and there'd be trouble homing in on The Boy Who Lived or her name wasn't Nymphadora Tonks. "Which, thank you forever Mother dearest, it is." Some of the older Aurors didn't believe Everyone-Knew-Who was gone for good, and if he came back...

"Tight spot for my little Colin then," Tonks murmured. To one another, they sometimes used the names of the cousins from her beloved book. "Family going one way, and friends—and me—the other." She lowered her forehead onto the open pages of her textbook. "I didn't want that for him," she said fretfully, as if she'd been accused of it. "I didn't want him to have to pick. I just wanted him to know me, and maybe care about me."

But from caring about her, it had been a short step to accepting her principles, and before Tonks had known what was happening, she'd found herself saddled with a small and determined rebel against ten generations of pure magical blood. If being pureblood meant thinking his Mary was bad, Mal had declared with a stamp of his foot, then he wouldn't be pureblood any more, so there!

She'd left for Hogwarts only a few months after that day, but her efforts to teach Mal how to think for himself had already borne fruit. Dobby became the courier of letters from Malfoy Manor to a particular cellar dormitory, Apparating and Disapparating in the same moment so as never to be caught away from his rightful place, and Tonks wrote copious letters back by the school owls. In the holidays, after Dobby had collected her from the train and brought her in the back door so that her aunt and uncle wouldn't have to look at her, she knew she only had to wait a few minutes before a cheerful whistle in the hall announced the arrival of her very own boy.

"He won't have it easy, these next few years," she said quietly to herself. "But he wouldn't want it easy. He likes fighting for what he wants, and if it can be got, he'll get it."

And with the state of affairs satisfactorily put into words, Tonks went back to her book.

Mal's first letter arrived in the beak of an imposing eagle owl the day after Harry's trip to Diagon Alley. It was satisfactorily long and full of details about the magical world, though with a great many things in it Harry didn't quite understand. What, for example, were Hufflepuff and Slytherin, and why did Mal prefer the one so much over the other? As for Quidditch, Hagrid had mentioned it in passing, so Harry knew at least that it was a sport and not a new kind of pudding or robe-fastener, but the technical details that filled a good half of Mal's second page baffled him, and he had to write politely nonsensical answers to the questions the other boy had asked.

The second letter, brought back by Hedwig, was highly apologetic. "Tonks tore strips out of me for writing all that rot about Quidditch and the school houses," Mal scribbled in his half-legible handwriting. "Said it was like you asking me about football and bus timetables. Quidditch can wait until I see you on the train, it's easier to explain face to face, but the houses I can at least clear up now..."

Harry spent more than a few idle hours over the next days wondering what house he and Mal would be in. The brief summations Mal had provided had given him plenty of insight into why his friend felt he'd rather leave Hogwarts the same night he came than be sorted into Slytherin, though Harry wondered a bit if Hufflepuff were really the right choice for Mal either. To be going so firmly against his family's traditions seemed quite brave, which sounded like Gryffindor, and the way in which he'd figured out how to get around his parents' prohibitions against seeing Tonks argued for the intelligence needed for Ravenclaw.

A house for himself was an even knottier problem. All Harry could be sure of was that he didn't want Slytherin; "ambitious and clever" wasn't anything he'd ever been or wanted to be. Ravenclaw also seemed iffy, as his grades had always hovered around the upper end of average. Hard-working he was, but only because he didn't have a choice, and he'd never been in any situation he considered dangerous enough to know if he were brave or not...

These wonderings came to an abrupt end one morning with the arrival of a thick envelope addressed to Harry in an unfamiliar spiky handwriting. "Sorry for the delay," read the note on top of the bundle of parchments, "but because they were for personal use, I had to do the copying spells myself in my spare time. Don't lose them—I don't want to go through that again. Yours, N. Tonks."

They were the records of the cases on which Harry's father had worked as an Auror.

Textbooks were abandoned and Mal's letters received only cursory answers for a week and a half as Harry pored over the terse sentences, relishing every one. He'd learned from Hagrid that his father's name, like his own middle, had been James, so that references to "J.P." didn't baffle him as they once would have, but "S.B." was an unknown. All Harry could discover about this mysterious person was that he'd been James Potter's partner through their three years of apprenticeship and their one year as licensed Aurors, and that he and James had saved each other's lives on several occasions. Hagrid would know, Harry decided finally, and made a mental note to ask when he got to Hogwarts.

The real treasure of the records, though, were the few handwritten notes in the margins, obviously done by the people the records were about. One corner, to Harry's astonishment and delight, bore a sketch of a rampant lion with the words "Gryffindors rule" underneath in a handwriting with tall capitals, very like Harry's own. It was repeated in several other places through the parchments, while other notes were so badly smeared they could hardly be read, and slanted backwards to boot. Harry gave up on deciphering these after spending several minutes trying to read one word and coming up only with the unsatisfactory answer of "Elvendork".

But I can read that first writing, my dad's, and I know what he used to do for a living. Uncle Vernon can't ever say that he was good for nothing again. The knowledge gave Harry the same warmth of happiness in his chest he'd felt when Hagrid had told him he was a wizard. I know his name now, and Mum's, and that they were brave, and that I look like them both. I'm even going to their school in September.

And I already have a friend.

Maybe I'll make some more.