A/N:The first chapter is a bit short. This is a fanfic, so some things will differ from the original canon. If you're looking for exact lore and details, I highly recommend reading the original books.
This story probably won't be everyone's cup of tea, and that's completely fine. If it's not for you, feel free to move on to something else. There will also be plot holes here and there—I'm not a professional writer, just someone writing for fun.
The romance is a very slow burn. Honestly, much slower than I originally intended, and I may have dragged it out a little too much… but it is what it is.
That said, if you do enjoy the fanfic, comments, reviews, and power stones would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for reading!
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Draco Malfoy, the sole heir of the Malfoy family, has been reborn.
One second ago, he was still struggling to climb atop that damned pile of junk amid the raging flames of the Room of Requirement, awkwardly reaching out his hand to the foolish Potter—yes, he had grabbed Potter's hand, flipped himself onto the flying broom, and been saved.
The next second, he awoke, still giddy from the thrill and elation of his near-death escape, to find himself lying peacefully on the familiar, magnificent, comfortable carved four-poster bed at Malfoy Manor.
All around was quiet, with only the soft chirping of insects in the grounds outside.
Draco realised at once that it was the dawn of a midsummer day, heavy with the scent of roses—not the midnight of late spring, with its desolate and bleak atmosphere, that he had just dreamt of.
The timing is wrong, the season is wrong! He leapt out of bed, but almost lost his balance.
He raised his hand in surprise, then stared at everything on his body: the child's feet, the child's legs, the child's hands and arms.
Shock. Yet he forced himself to stay calm—a skill honed through countless terrifying experiences in reality. Taking a breath, he strode towards the full-length antique carved mirror standing to one side of the room—and discovered that he had completely transformed into a little boy.
A boy who vaguely resembled the way he had looked at eleven years old.
Merlin's stinky socks!
For a moment, he couldn't tell whether everything he had experienced before waking up was a dream, an illusion, or reality.
However, the memories of the seven years he had spent at Hogwarts remained vivid and lifelike, flowing through his mind... The details of his pain, fear, despair, and struggle were so sharp that they pierced his heart again and again.
This couldn't possibly be just a long, drawn-out dream.
What exactly was going on? Could this boy's body be the one he had seen in the dream?
The first faint light appeared in the sky outside the window. In that light, Draco looked at himself in the full-length mirror, his eyes filled with doubt and unease.
He watched the platinum-haired boy frown with an air of maturity, pinching his cheeks hard with his little hands until a blush rose on his pale face.
The pain made him realise that the world around him was real, and confirmed that he was indeed a real little boy at that moment.
Merlin! He looked away from that damned mirror; he had no wish to see the little boy's expression again.
Draco paced back and forth in the dim light of dawn, trying to calm his shocked and turbulent emotions.
Wake up. You must have run into some kind of Dark artefact, or a nightmare is at work.
Wake up! He rubbed his throbbing temples, forcing himself to wake.
Memories of dreams often fade and blur as a person awakens. But what terrified him was that as time ticked by and his mind fully woke, the torrent of terrifying memories showed no sign of dissipating. Instead, it seemed to gush out of a broken faucet, turning his carefully ordered mind palace into a vast, chaotic mess.
The torrent surged endlessly, and every drop of memory floated, hazy, through his mind.
Furthermore, as the memories surged, a vast amount of magical knowledge appeared in his head—powerful proof that he had studied at Hogwarts for seven years.
There was absolutely no way that a Dark artefact or a nightmare could so easily imprint so many complex spells, potion recipes, and so much of the long history of magic into his head overnight.
He even remembered some Ancient Runes research and alchemy—in his dream, he had used that knowledge to repair a Vanishing Cabinet that even Borgin had struggled with.
It was so real. The knowledge was so specific and detailed that the memories seemed flawless—and utterly real.
Draco's thoughts were in turmoil, and he was momentarily at a loss for how to react.
Could those things be true? But then why had he turned back into an eleven-year-old?
The boy turned towards the window, where the manor courtyard lay bathed in dim light.
The grounds were a picture of prosperity. The roses planted by his mother, Narcissa—white, red, yellow, and even pink—were all in full bloom. Peaceful and beautiful, they gave off a captivating fragrance.
It was so beautiful that it brought tears to his eyes.
This scene was a far cry from the Malfoy Manor he had known at seventeen. Back then, the Dark Lord's filthy henchmen had shamelessly occupied his home, turning it into a squalid, chaotic place.
That was the most humiliating memory for a proud Malfoy.
No noble pure-blood wizarding family should be treated like this!
A surge of anger suddenly welled up within him. Those disgusting creatures must never again set foot in Malfoy Manor, trampling on the pride, dignity, and honour of the Malfoy family!
No way!
His hand, gripping the window frame, trembled as he thought of the unbearable things his father and mother had gone through.
His father, Lucius, had had his wand—which a wizard cherishes as his life—taken away by the Dark Lord. Like an eagle with broken wings, he was left unarmed, a target for slaughter. Any damned Death Eater, or even an ordinary Ministry officer, could curse and humiliate him at any time.
Narcissa, his mother, should have been the most pampered of noblewomen, but in her own manor she had been reduced to something like a servant. She had lost her elegant, composed demeanour, and her once proud and calm face was now filled with distress and unease. The Dark Lord could cast spells to torment her at any moment when he was displeased...
As for the Dark Lord—he was a usurper! He had taken over the place, turning the Malfoy estate into a prison like Azkaban, even a murder scene. He let lowly, brutal werewolves swagger around and enjoy themselves on an estate that prided itself on its bloodline—it was a slap in the face to the Malfoys!
Thinking of this, Draco's face turned deathly pale.
Father must never be deprived of his wand again, nor sent to that terrible place, Azkaban. And he must never again let his noble mother suffer such humiliation, grovelling before lowly people in the manor she was so proud of.
He didn't want to be forced to kill Dumbledore again. Draco slowly squatted down, his hands unconsciously gripping his platinum-blond hair tightly.
Sixteen years old—a devastating year.
At sixteen, he had resented the world as keenly as any boy that age.
That should have been the best age for a boy, a time filled with light, flowers, applause, and even a romance, but he had been forced to plot the murder of the most powerful wizard of the century—Albus Dumbledore!
A suicidal attack. If they failed to kill Dumbledore, the Malfoy family would be destroyed; if they managed to kill him, his own soul would die along with him—if a pathetic Death Eater could still be said to have a "soul."
He never wanted to be a murderer, never! How could a proud Malfoy have blood on his noble hands? He should have roamed freely in the sunlight, clean and untainted.
But when his father was sent to Azkaban, the Dark Lord blackmailed him with his mother's safety and the future of the Malfoy family.
It was ridiculous—the Dark Lord had no compassion at all, blackmailing a sixteen-year-old boy who was in a panic after his family's sudden fall.
Such was the work of the cruel, evil, and ruthless Dark Lord.
Draco had had nowhere to go and no one to turn to for help.
The Malfoy family's "old friends" began to bare their fangs: with the death of his grandfather Abraxas, their old connections crumbled; money could buy no help, only attract greedy covetousness. While outwardly expressing feigned sympathy, their eyes betrayed undisguised expectation, all of them vying for a share of the Malfoy family's downfall.
As for their "enemies," the Malfoys had long stood opposed to Dumbledore, so what hope could they have of help from that side?
Should he bow down to "Saint Potter"? Seek help from Dumbledore, his assassination target? They were people he had been taught to hate since childhood, and they were too busy mocking him to help him.
The Malfoys had always clung to this mindset and were deeply wary of Dumbledore and his ilk.
Draco never imagined, nor dared to imagine, that Dumbledore, at the end of his life, would still try to redeem Draco's pitiful soul, just as he never imagined that the foolish Potter would turn back on the brink of death and come to his aid on a flying broomstick.
It was a kindness he hadn't encountered in a long time, a kind of care he had never felt from the Dark Lord or the Death Eaters. The feeling stirred a tangle of emotions, and his eyes grew faintly damp.
A feeling of regret gradually crept over him.
Draco had to admit one fact: he should ask them for help. Ask Potter, ask Dumbledore.
They might help him. They had different ideologies and beliefs and belonged to different interest groups, but they shared a common enemy—the Dark Lord. That alone made cooperation possible.
The Dark Lord was no longer the figure Draco respected. During the year the Dark Lord had settled in Malfoy Manor, Draco had gradually discovered that he was not the elegant, noble, powerful leader of his father's stories, the man who had hoped to restore the glory of pure-blood wizards.
He was capricious, hideous, violent, and cruel, and he slaughtered all wizards, even pure-bloods. This often caused Draco a sorrow for his own kind that no one else knew about—although his father Lucius claimed that this sorrow was shameful, an emotion only cowards had.
Perhaps Draco Malfoy had always been a coward; perhaps Lucius Malfoy was simply too fanatical about the Dark Lord. He was too deeply involved, too invested, obsessed with the inevitability of the Dark Lord's success and unable to accept the possibility of failure.
Draco had woken from his feverish delusion. Stepping out of that trap and looking at the Dark Lord calmly, he even thought him a heartless madman.
He remembered the way the Death Eaters looked at the Dark Lord: there was no worship in it—and without worship, how could there be any love?
Most Death Eaters—except Bellatrix—were afraid.
Many of them had already realised that something was wrong, but they could no longer bear the consequences of having gone down the wrong path. So they pressed on to the end, either to die or to gamble on a future.
Draco didn't want to go down the wrong path again, only to face utter ruin. Siding with Dumbledore and Potter was the only chance the Malfoys had to escape the Dark Lord's oppression and even turn their lives around.
Potter... though foolish, at this moment Draco desperately hoped that he was the legendary saviour who would achieve final victory and defeat the Dark Lord.
After all, Potter had escaped the Dark Lord's pursuit several times.
The first time was when he was born, still an infant in swaddling clothes. The second time was when he fought the Dark Lord in the graveyard and the Dark Lord still couldn't kill him—his father had said that their wands had formed a strange link, which made the spell ineffective. The third time was when the Dark Lord took his father's wand and fought him in mid-air, but only his father's wand was damaged, while Potter remained unharmed.
If there was a fourth time, would the Dark Lord succeed so easily?
Potter seemed to possess some mysterious and extraordinary ability to resist the Dark Lord—though Draco had never quite seen what made him so unique.
In his view, the foolish and arrogant Potter, though a prominent figure in their year, had shown no talent or ambition that could rival, let alone surpass, the Dark Lord's.
No one knew Potter better than he did. He had observed him carefully, as his father had instructed, and found him disappointingly mediocre. Apart from the scar on his forehead, he was no different from any other ordinary boy.
Objectively speaking, he was neither particularly hopeless nor particularly outstanding.
He would live a decent life in times of peace and prosperity, but he would never have the talent and qualities to rival the Dark Lord.
This was why the Malfoys had almost immediately sided with the returned Dark Lord: they had seen no chance of Potter winning.
If they had known then that the seemingly ordinary Potter possessed the extraordinary power of being unkillable by the Dark Lord, they would have been more cautious in their decision.
Draco looked up at the fading moon in the sky with a troubled expression. He had to admit that their judgment had been seriously flawed; they had chosen the wrong path and stood on the wrong side.
Joining forces with the Dark Lord had not brought them any more benefits. Instead, they had lost their dignity, status, and wealth, and lived like homeless dogs, constantly fearful and without hope.
Once the Malfoys were no longer of any use, the Avada Kedavra curse would be nothing more than a flick of the Dark Lord's finger. He wouldn't even bat an eye at the Malfoys' demise; the Dark Lord cared only about himself.
Draco sighed. Racing thoughts, regret, and a disillusionment born of crumbling faith left him utterly powerless. He slumped onto the Persian carpet at his feet, his fingers unconsciously clutching and tearing at the fine, soft wool, as though mirroring the tearing apart of his own heart.
He had cried alone, regretted, and fallen into despair more than once.
He never wanted to be a pathetic Death Eater, filled with shame and living a precarious existence.
Suddenly, he remembered something and, with trembling hands, lifted the sleeve of his light grey silk nightgown—as expected, his wrist was clean and new.
The menacing Dark Mark seemed never to have existed. Draco exhaled, a delighted smile spreading across his face.
He stroked his wrist again and again, muttering to himself, "That's great."
He could feel his soul easing. The pain, suffocation, and mounting pressure he had felt from being tormented by the Dark Mark in his memories had now vanished.
That's great—he hadn't been branded with that disgusting mark.
Great—Father hadn't gone to steal the prophecy before being arrested and thrown into Azkaban.
Excellent! Malfoy Manor remained peaceful and beautiful, a symbol of glory.
Draco stood up abruptly, feeling dizzy from the sudden movement. He steadied himself by holding onto the antique carved table.
Those memories—were they dreams or reality? It had all happened so suddenly and so strangely.
He still couldn't believe it, and once again fell into a vortex of repetitive, chaotic thoughts.
Then he saw, on the table, his Hogwarts acceptance letter—a thick envelope of yellow parchment with his name written in emerald-green ink.
The other letter was from Durmstrang.
It felt like going back to the beginning.
The morning after receiving the two letters, the Malfoys would discuss his choice of school over breakfast.
As far as he remembered, they had chosen Hogwarts.
Here was a chance for Draco Malfoy to prove whether his memories were real.
If, a few hours later, his parents' discussion was largely consistent with his memory, he could be certain that he was reliving the days he had once lived and walking the paths he had once walked.
And so perhaps he truly had spent those seven years at Hogwarts, and it hadn't been just a nightmare.
Waiting. Waiting for breakfast. Let's see how things go first.
Draco steadied himself. He slowly walked back to his bed and lay down again. The emotional rollercoaster had exhausted the already limited energy of an eleven-year-old boy. He looked up at the layers upon layers of intricately patterned bed curtains, at the shimmering silver dragon decorations moving among them, and his eyelids grew heavy. He drifted off to sleep once more.