Chapter Eight: Flash Forward

~Draco~

Quidditch tryouts were almost fun, but sort of a nightmare at the same time. Harry and I tried out as a unit, flying circles around the baffled older players. At McGonagall's stern stare, Oliver Wood invited us to play Chasers on the House team. In our first match, Slytherin got the snitch, but by that point we'd scored so many goals that Gryffindor won regardless.

I took a bludger to the shoulder after the game was over, and Harry punched a boy twice his weight in the jaw. He scrubbed every trophy in the trophy room for it, but only smiled and ruffled my hair when I tried to insist that he stopped doing things like that.

~Harry~

"I just want to have a quick look in the restricted section. What kind of books would they keep in a school and not let us read them? I'm sure we won't be caught. How can old Filch watch the whole school at once?" I'd said, and Draco followed me.

But of course, Filch was watching the one part of the school we were headed to, and we ducked into an empty classroom to hide. "I told you," Draco murmured as we leaned against the wall and listened to Filch go past us.

"Wow. Look at this thing," I breathed, walking over to the tall mirror that was in the corner of the room. There were some nonsense words inscribed over the top. "Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi," I read aloud. "Is that Latin?" I asked Draco, who would know.

"No, it's not. I think this is the Mirror or Erised. I've read about it," he said quietly, going to stand in front of it. I stood beside him and looked at our reflections in the dusty glass. "What does it do?" I asked curiously.

"What do you see?" he asked without answering my question, his voice a little unsteady.

"Well it's just us. How do you turn it on? Oh. We're smiling in the mirror, and I think we might be older. Is that it? And this was important enough for someone to put in a book?" I asked.

Draco's voice was hollow and quiet when he answered. "I show not your face but your heart's desire. That's what the inscription says. It's backwards. Mirror language," he whispered, his eyes wide and unseeing.

"Ohhh," I said, realizing why he looked so shell-shocked. "Come on, Draco. Let's go back to the common room. That's enough mirror gazing for us," I decided, and guided him back to Gryffindor Tower. I hadn't seen the restricted section of the library, but the stunned joy in Draco's eyes that hardly waned over the following days was more than I could have hoped for.

~Draco~

I was amazed when I woke up on Christmas morning and found not only the somber package I had been expecting from Uncle Silas, but also a small pile of bright and messily wrapped presents from my friends. Harry sat on the bed across from me, smiling because he knew.

"Where are yours?" I asked.

"I'll open them in a minute. I want to watch you. Come on, this one is from Hermione," he said, picking up a package and handing it to me. I opened it slowly, and felt myself smile painfully when I saw that it was a box of peppermint toads. I had friends that knew my favorite sweets. It still felt crazy.

"Hagrid's next," Harry said, handing me a round tin. It had fudge in it, and Harry smiled. "We'll put it beside the fire and try some later." I nodded and set it aside. "I got you this," he said quietly, holding a small package wrapped in silver paper, switching it back and forth between his hands and smiling in a way that might have been shy if Harry was ever shy. Then he held it out to me. I unwrapped it carefully. It was a thin silver band that tightened to my wrist as soon as I'd slipped it over my hand.

"It's warm," I said quietly, so in awe I could barely speak.

"Yeah. It's a spell. For when we can't talk during the summer. Yours gets warm when I think about you, and mine gets warm when you think about me," he explained, showing me the one that he was already wearing.

I would never forget that smile.

~Harry~

"I forbid you to fraternize with that Malfoy boy. You're going to get yourself killed! Not to mention throwing away allies left and right! I thought you were smarter than this, Harry. I thought we had a plan," Mother said as soon as we were in the house after summer break. I had declined her demand that I come home during the other holidays, but there really hadn't been any choice now.

"It was your plan, never mine. And I don't need allies, I need friends," I said calmly, dragging my trunk towards my bedroom.

"And you think that boy is your friend? That he isn't going to lead you straight into the hands of You-Know-Who?" she cried. "You don't think he's been telling his uncle every little detail about you?"
"Mother," I murmured, my voice low and cold, trying desperately to hold onto the control on my anger. "You're not going to change my mind. And the only way you're going to stop me from being friends with Draco is if you transfer me to Durmstrang, where they're training the next generation of Death Eater. So go ahead and try to stop me."

And she did try.

~Draco~

"So I guess we have Dumbledore to thank for the fact that I'm back at all for my second," Harry informed me once we had settled in our car of the Hogwarts Express. "She wanted to homeschool me. What a nightmare. I was locked in my room all summer as it was, except for training and such."

Seeing Harry again felt like a dream, with all his loud colorfulness and animated talking. "I read a lot," I said after a moment.

"I figured," he said, and his voice was soft and quiet. "I missed you a lot," he added, and I blushed.

"I know," I replied, feeling warm and strange as I touched the bracelet that I never took off. "Missed you too," I whispered, and he smiled and ruffled my hair.

"I know," he said softly. I was so happy to be with Harry again that it hurt.

~Harry~

"I'm glad they found out that he was a fraud. I couldn't have stood another year of Defense Against the Dark Arts with Gilderoy Lockheart. What an idiot," I complained idly, slouching in my seat on the train.

Hermione sulked quietly, still put out that she had been wrong about Lockheart. "He attracted a lot of Nargles," Luna observed serenely, staring out of the window at the passing landscape.

"There's no such thing," Hermione couldn't resist muttering, but Luna acted as if she hadn't heard her. And maybe she really hadn't. One could never be completely sure with Luna.

"I just hope we have a better professor next year. The only thing I learned this year was…well, I can't think of anything," I said, and Draco laughed. Luna smiled out the window. Hermione sulked some more. I loved my friends.

~Draco~

Harry practically tackled me when he saw me on the platform. "It's Moony! Moony is going to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts!" he cried, shaking me a bit and then jugging me. "You're getting taller," he observed offhandedly, ruffling my hair.

"But I thought he had a…problem," I said, bewildered.

"Solved. Well, not exactly solved, but under control. Come on, come meet him. He brought me to the station. He's taking the train to school with us," Harry said excitedly, his words running together, he was speaking so quickly. And then he was dragging me off in the direction he'd come from, almost running into a tall man that grinned down at us.

"I'm guessing this is Draco, then?" he laughed, holding out his hand. His eyes were a not-quite-human golden color, and his tawny hair was streaked with gray. His clothes were worn and his expression was full of warmth and kindness. I liked him immediately.

"Yeah," I nodded, shaking his head. "And you are Professor…Moony?" I asked, and he laughed.

"Remus Lupin," he told me, smiling. "Shall we board the train, or would you like to fetch your other friends from the crowd first?" he asked Harry jokingly, and we went and claimed and empty compartment. Hermione and Luna joined us soon after, and we spent the majority of the train ride laughing at stories about Professor Lupin's school days with Harry's father and their friends.

~Harry~

"Maybe we could get Snape sacked," I suggested once we'd seated ourselves in our compartment. "I can't believe he did that. Bloody spiteful son of a—"

"Now Harry, that's no way to talk about a teacher," Hermione chided, but even she didn't mean it. Snape had sunk to a new low when he'd told his Slytherins that Moony was a werewolf. The slimy bastard.

"Moony was the best teacher we'd ever had!" I exclaimed. "And Snape is nothing but a slimy, greasy—"

"Harry, really. We know. We'll all miss Professor Lupin teaching us Defense Against the Dark Arts. But I'm sure Dumbledore will find someone just as good to teach us," she reassured me.

"I liked meeting the mermaids," Luna said in her vague, quiet way.

"I thought they were a bit horrible," Draco said, wrinkling his nose.

"Their music was beautiful," Luna murmured dreamily.

"Luna, their voices were horrible," Hermione said, rolling her eyes. She could never help arguing with the odd things that Luna would often say, but the blonde girl was no longer paying attention, smiling distractedly out the train window and humming to herself. "I can't wait for next year. I hate summer. I can't visit or even owl either one of you, there's nothing to do once I've read next year's books, and my parents love work so much that we almost never go on holiday," Hermione complained the same as she usually did.

"You could come visit us," Luna said without looking away from the window. "Me and Daddy. But you probably don't want to. It's okay."

Hermione smiled, and I was reminded that despite their strange arguments, the girls were friends. I remembered suddenly that it had been Hermione that had hexed Theodore Knott for harassing Luna back in our second year and Luna's first, bringing the strange girl into our happy band of outcasts. "That would be great, Luna. Thank you," Hermione said. Luna smiled.

I smiled at Draco, happy that at least the girls wouldn't be alone all summer. But then I thought of how much I would miss Draco all summer, all over again, exactly like I did every summer. So much time had passed since the afternoon in the robe shop before our first year, when we didn't even know each other's names.

One day I would cast every shadow out of Draco's eyes.

(AN: Thank you for the lovely reviews! I appreciated them so much, and they helped me get three years out. I tried this chapter a couple of different ways, and this was my favorite. I believe it gets everything important across. I hope so, anyway. Review to tell me what you think please! Alright, on to fourth year!)

(AN2: Forgot to mention that I don't have a beta reader. Not sure how to get one, either. So I apologize for the mistakes, since I'm sure there are plenty of them.)