The weeks settled into a comfortable rhythm.
The Malfoys visited several more times over the following months, and Narcissa always brought Draco. It had become something of an unspoken arrangement — the adults would find their way to the sitting room or the study, and Draco would find his way to wherever Aria happened to be.
Every time, without fail. Like a small, well-dressed compass with one fixed point.
Aria had gradually stopped being surprised by it.
She didn't particularly mind his company, most of the time. He was, for a toddler, reasonably tolerable. He liked to grab her hair and tug at her sleeve and seize her hand without asking, and she permitted this up to a point — the point being when he forgot himself and grabbed too hard.
The first time that happened, she slapped him back without thinking twice.
The wailing that followed was impressive. Draco could produce tears with extraordinary speed when the occasion called for it.
Narcissa came to comfort him. Freya came to check Aria's arm.
"Bit of a disagreement?" Freya asked, with the carefully neutral tone of someone finding this quite funny.
"He grabbed too hard," Aria said.
"He doesn't know his own strength," Narcissa said, looking rather embarrassed. "Draco, apologise."
Aria watched Draco sniffle and offer a waterlogged sorry, and thought privately: You're going to be such a handful. Your poor mother has no idea yet.
Time moved steadily forward. In the way that early childhood did, the days seemed slow but the years were sudden — and then Aria was five, and Draco was five, and he was still showing up at Selwyn Manor on a near-weekly basis as though it were his second home.
"Aria, look at this."
Draco held the object aloft with both hands, his entire face arranged into an expression of maximum smugness. It was a miniature Golden Snitch — a perfect replica, sealed in a glass case, the wings fluttering with restless, mechanical life.
"Father got it for me. It's a limited edition. Genuine limited edition." He paused for emphasis. "It actually flies."
Aria glanced up from her book. "Oh."
Draco's expression collapsed immediately. "What do you mean, oh?"
"I mean oh." She looked back down. Elementary Magic Theory, Chapter Seven: Foundational Principles of Transfiguration. She was on her second read-through.
"That's — there are only fifty of these in existence, Aria!"
"I know."
"Then why are you just saying oh?"
She didn't answer. Draco made a frustrated sound and dropped onto the cushion beside her, the Snitch replica clutched to his chest. He peered at her book with poorly concealed curiosity.
"Why are you reading that? You can't even understand it."
"I understand it perfectly well."
"You're five."
Aria turned a page.
Draco watched her for a moment, then settled into a sulk, the Snitch balanced on his knee. There was a stretch of quiet — the comfortable kind, the kind they had fallen into over months of each other's company.
Then, in a different sort of voice: "Aria."
She didn't look up. "Mm."
"My father said your family is a pure-blood family."
"It is."
"But my mother said your mother was in Gryffindor." A pause. "Gryffindor is... it's not really considered very—" He stopped. Started again. "My father says Slytherin is the noblest house. And Gryffindors are..." He seemed to be selecting between options Lucius had apparently provided. "All brash and reckless. And they mix with Muggles too freely. And that means—"
Aria closed her book.
The sound of it was quiet. The quality of the silence that followed was not.
Draco looked at her. "What I'm saying is — you're pure-blood on your father's side, which is good. But your mother being a Gryffindor means half your blood is—"
"Say that again," Aria said softly.
Draco swallowed. "I'm just repeating what my father—"
"Say it again."
"—Gryffindors aren't as good as Slytherins!" His voice jumped up, the way it did when he was nervous and was compensating with volume. "It's true! My father explained the whole thing! Pure-blood families should maintain their lineage and Gryffindors have always been too friendly with Muggles and that's bad—"
Aria stood up.
Draco scrambled to his feet on instinct, taking one step back. "What are you — what are you doing?"
"My mother," Aria said, in the same calm, even voice, "could beat three of your fathers in a duel. On a bad day."
Draco's eyes went wide. "That's impossible. My father is—"
"The best? Yes, you said." Aria took a step toward him. "So let me ask you something. Do you think I could beat three of you?"
The calculation played out visibly across Draco's face — and then he turned and ran.
He made it approximately two steps before Aria caught him by the back of his collar.
She pulled him back, turned him around, and hit him in the stomach. Not hard — she was five years old; the structural capacity for genuine damage was limited — but it landed, and it was entirely deliberate, and Draco let out a genuinely offended yelp.
"You hit me!"
"I did." Aria let go of his collar. "Say something like that about my mother again and I'll do it again."
"My father said—"
She hit him again.
"Ow—"
"Your father," Aria said calmly, "is wrong. And if he keeps teaching you things like that, I'll come to Malfoy Manor and demonstrate exactly how wrong he is. Directly. In person."
She stepped back. Draco stood very still, one hand pressed to his middle, eyes red, jaw set. He was clearly deciding whether to cry. After a long moment, he appeared to decide against it — too undignified, perhaps, given that he had been soundly bested by a girl a full head shorter than he thought of himself as.
He glared at her for a good ten seconds. Then he turned and walked out.
Aria sat back down, retrieved her book, and found her page.
Draco reappeared in the doorway twenty minutes later.
He stood there, not crossing the threshold, looking like someone who had received instructions he resented but was going to carry out anyway.
"What is it?" Aria asked, without looking up.
Silence. Then, very quietly: "My father told me to come and apologise."
She looked up.
He was a sight. His blonde hair had gone sideways, his robes were wrinkled, and his eyes were still red at the corners — but his chin was up, and he was clearly making a genuine effort at dignity.
"I'm sorry," he said, in the smallest voice she'd ever heard from him. "I shouldn't have said that about your mother."
Aria looked at him for a moment.
Draco Malfoy at five years old, standing in a doorway with messy hair and sorry eyes, trying very hard to mean it.
She sighed. "Come in, then."
He came in slowly and sat down — not right next to her, but a careful two feet away, close enough to be present, far enough to suggest he was not taking any liberties.
Aria reached over, smoothed down the worst of his hair, and straightened the collar of his robe.
"Does it still hurt?" she asked.
He shook his head. Then, honestly: "...A bit."
"Good." She pulled the book back between them and nudged it toward him. "Do you want to read?"
The relief on his face was almost comical. He shuffled closer immediately and bent over the book, and Aria walked him through the chapter she'd been on, and that was that.
After that day, something shifted.
Draco still came to Selwyn Manor constantly. He still followed Aria around like a well-dressed shadow, still talked too much and too loudly about things his father had told him, still tried to pull her braid when he thought she wasn't paying attention.
But he never said another word against her mother.
Occasionally — you could see it, if you were watching — he would start to say something, catch himself, and find Aria's gaze already on him, patient and level. His mouth would close. He'd redirect.
He was learning, in his own way. Slowly, and under some duress, but he was learning.
Narcissa mentioned it to Freya once, over tea, with a look of genuine bewilderment. "He listens to Aria more than he listens to either of us at this point. I don't know what she said to him, but it stuck."
Freya smiled into her cup. "That's just how children work. They find their own level."
Outside the window of the sitting room, the garden of Selwyn Manor was going gold with late afternoon light. Pobby moved between the hedgerows at the far end, trimming them with neat, precise little snips, humming something too quietly to hear.
Aria watched him for a moment, chin in hand.
Draco had gone home an hour ago, leaving behind a trail of toys and approximately four thousand opinions about Quidditch. He would be back next week. He was always back next week.
She thought about what was coming. The timeline she half-remembered, the events she could only approximate, the names she knew and the ones she'd forgotten. She thought about Draco, at eleven, on a train, picking a fight with a boy he hadn't met yet. She thought about where all of this was going.
There were eleven years before Hogwarts. A lot of time, and somehow not nearly enough.
But I'm five, she reminded herself. Right now, I'm five.
Pobby finished the last hedge and looked up, spotted her through the window, and gave a small wave with his clippers.
Aria waved back.
Future things can wait for the future. For now — just grow up.
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